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CAMBRIDGE PRESS:

METCALF, TORRY, AND BALLOU.

SERMO N.

2 KINGS, IV. 13.

SAY NOW UNTO HER; BEHOLD, THOU HAST BEEN CAREFUL FOR US WITH ALL THIS CARE; WHAT IS TO BE DONE FOR THEE?

YOUR thoughts, my friends, anticipate me, in the use which I am about to make of this text. The question proposed, in the application I have in view, while it may be supposed to address itself, at this moment, with a special interest to the minds of those, who are taking part for the last time in our Sabbath solemnities, yet demands, on essentially the same grounds of obligation, to be as seriously weighed by others of my hearers as by them. To some of us, in other times, has been already extended by this college that care, which more recently these, our young friends, have been experiencing; and some, in one or another stage of the course now completing by their associates, are accumulating the debt to which our present inquiry relates. This college has been careful with great care for many more, now scattered to all the borders of the country, and to all the quarters of the world. What is to be done by all and by each of us, in requital of the benefit so conferred?

Am I met, however, on the threshold of the inquiry, by the remark, that, when I speak of a college, I am speaking only of an abstraction, am only using a name; that a college is a thing incapable of an intelligent purpose to do a service, and incapable of being the object of gratitude for a service done? If it be necessary to advert to such a thought, it cannot be necessary to do more than say, that to speak of an institution of this nature as conferring benefits and entitled to gratitude, is to employ, if a not entirely accurate, a brief and convenient way of expressing a very substantial and unquestionable fact. That a good has been done, when the minds of many, or of few, under suitable discipline, have been endowed with great resources and satisfactions within themselves, and with a great power to serve others, is an argument which I suppose needs not to be labored here. If the good has been done, by what means has it been done? Of course, by means of the apparatus here provided and maintained; by the communications of the living teacher, by access to books, and to other like instruments for the acquisition of knowledge, and by the mutually quickening influence of association among those, whom the existence of such advantages here has brought together to enjoy them. How then came these advantages here, for they are not the spontaneous products of the soil? They have been collected by successive endowments of public and private bounty. The Commonwealth, with a signal -munificence, has done

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her part, through all the period of her history, giving from a treasury furnished by contributions of all her citizens, the rich and the poor. vate benefactors have with a generous public spirit done theirs, bringing hither, from generation to generation, the tribute of their hard earnings, and the tokens of their liberal and enlightened views; the opulent giving in the measure of their abundance, and they who were rich only in the wealth of a noble spirit, bestowing in the largest proportion of their narrower ability. They make all of us, who have studied here, the objects of their gratuitous bounty, the recipients of their intelligent charity. They suffer no one to defray the charge of the education which he receives within their walls. However affluent, my friends, any of us or of our parents may be, we have none of us been living here at our own or our parents' cost. For a great part of the means of improvement, which here we have been enjoying, we are suffered to render no pecuniary equivalent. What view had they who have so served us, in putting themselves to such an expense? Certainly not a view to the indulgence of any whim or convenience of their own, or of ours; but a view to the promotion of certain great objects, which when we have considered, we shall be guided to repay the debt of gratitude we owe to them, or, in other words, as I first stated it, to the college through which we have received their benefactions. The debt of gratitude, I say; for never was a more incontestable claim of justice. Their college has

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