In every period of her history the college has been a true person, a very alma mater to her children. The vividness of such personification must be great in proportion to the prominence and distinctness of human life in the institution which thus assumes personality. Not the railroad or the factory, things of machinery, but the church or the college, things of men, stand forth like great human beings and accept their titles when we call them he or she. And just because she has human life within her in its most vivid, and eager, and critical time and shape, does a college most readily and thoroughly become the subject of the mysterious and beautiful process by which out of the confused and tumultuous experiences of countless men, there issues as sure as we gaze upon their one great image which is strangely at once the aggregate of embodiment of them and also something greater than them all, their protector and muse, their teacher, friend and mother. It is out of the infinite human experience and pathos of this place; it is out of this, in which these buildings and these grounds have been the scenes of so much human life for these 250 years of struggles and hopes and fears and aspirations, of doubts and dreads, of men's conflicts with themselves, of men's coming to the knowledge of themselves, of solitudes and of associations, of gains, of faith, and of losings of faith, of triumphs and of despair, or temptations and of ecstacies; and it is out of all this hovering like a great crowd rising like a great exhalation from over the long history of Harvard College and its generations of men, that slowly, mysteriously, but at last very clearly there shapes itself as we look, as the great outcome of the whole, a majestic being which we call the college, with human features and capacities, with eyes to smile or frown on us, with a heart to love us, with a will to rule us and to fix standards for our life.

It is that embodiment of the college as a gigantic, gracious personality, that is most present with her children who have come up to her festival, she sits like Jerusalem upon her hills, "the mother of us all." It is that personal presence, which is with us here tonight. What I want to do in the time which I may occupy with this sermon is to remind myself and you that this great being whom we reverence and love, must stand in some concise relation and obedience to universal being, must feel her life included in some larger life, or else she fails; of her best growth and good, and to see how that large life in which hers must be inclosed and out of which it is to be fed, is expressed in these words of the Old Epistles of the Hebrews: "Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, and to-day, and forever." The necessity of which I speak is universal. There is no life which fulfils itself entirely and worthily, except as it is inclosed within the grasp of a life larger than its own. Such enclosure may be represented, as an obedience, to which the life is bound, a service which it is compelled to render, or more truly as the existence within an element which is its natural supply and good. Just think how numerous the institutions are. Each man must feel about him the grasp of the total humanity to which he belongs. If he does not, he becomes inhuman. Each truth must be aware of the great whole of truth which it utters; if it does not it becomes untrue. Each star must quiver with the movement of the system, or it is a mere waif and stray of brilliance, living at random in the sky. Each article of faith must feel the creed around it. Each class in the community must live in the larger life of the community which is above all classes and embraces all. Each notion must be a part of the federation of the world. Each age in history must be conscious of all human history in whose embrace it is held, and of the vast eternity in which all the history of this world is all the time living, as a cloud swims in the limitless sky. The christian in the church, the citizen in the State, the institution in the Commonwealth. Everywhere you have the principle of elemental life, the principle that every life, except the greatest lives in its element, the particle in the universal, the eternal in the eternal, that whether they be actually conscious of it or not, all things which really live are feeding themselves out of a great atmosphere of larger life which surrounds them and to which they must forever keep themselves open. The part which knows itself and lives in obedience and receptively to its great whole is strong. The part which calls itself a whole and shuts itself up against the inflow of that universal which is "evergreen," grows dry and barren and desolate and dies. Of how many lives of men and institutions is the secret here? All false partisanship, all barren specialism and spiritual selfishness is but the effort of a part to take itself out of the embrace of the whole. The healthy partisanship is always reacting out towards the universal interests and methods. The healthy specialism is always healthy itself in the absolute and universal truth. And now it is the privilege of festival times like those which our college is to keep to-morrow, that in them the past friends feel anew its deep relations to the whole of things. That which the clash and clamor of detail, the necessary absorption of busy life in its own operations has shut out, and silence presses in and makes itself heard. The universal claims, the special, the infinite and eternal, makes itself known to the temporary and the finite. The planet stops one second to wonder at its own mysterious life, and then the thrill of the suns comes pouring in upon it. The one enthusiastic study pauses for an instant, and for that quiet moment it feels the grasp of all knowledge warm around it. In its great anniversary days the city bathes itself in the higher loyalty, the broader patriotism of the state. On his birthday, when he stops his work to gather up his life, the man knows himself more than the individual: the whole humanity to which he belongs grows clear to him. Nor is this something which belongs only to the day of anniversary observance. It comes with the lapse of history itself. Every institution which healthily lives is always in the very process of its life, freeing itself more and more from slavery to its partial and temporary connections and entering into broader relations with the true element of its existence. All healthy action and movement tend to more and more liberated and enlarged relation to the intended conditions and elemental supply of the thing which acts and moves. There is no true sign of the divine presence in the divine care of the world than that. The Church of Christ begins almost as a Jewish institution. It is wrapt around with Jewish prejudices It treads at every step on the lines of Jewish exclusiveness. But it lives; it moves; it does its work, and by and by it has found out for itself and it is asserting before the world, that its field is universal human nature; that the true element of its existence is a sympathy as broad as human kind. A man begins in some limited occupation. His care and interests are shut into the little thing that he is doing. He thinks himself only as the shoemaker or tailor. It is not good - it is not beautiful to see how, as he faithfully does his one thing, year after year, his relations to other things which other men are doing, but which he will never do, and to the whole of life in which his thing and all those other things are included, opens around him and becomes real to him, and he becomes more and more to be not only the shoemaker and tailor, but also the man. If that broadening is not always going on he is not working faithfully. So every time, action in any sphere makes real the larger sphere in which we live. Long service of any master makes us feel the higher masteries and sets us free to serve them. The longer we live truly, in time the more we breathe the breath of eternity. The more largely we work in our speciality the more we enter into a sense of the divineness of all work, the more we are the brothers of all workers everywhere.

It would be too terrible if it were not so. It is terrible that it is not so to hosts of workers in their drudgeries. Alas for the man who is not growing into broader sympathy with men the longer that he does his special work. Alas for the institution that does not feel all life clamorous and profuse about it the longer that it goes on building its little corner or laying its bit of the foundation of the great structure. Each has missed the best result of living, which in that life enlarges itself by its own healthy action - Solvitur ambulando - and grows more conscious and more receptive of the true element of its existence, the larger and more fully it does its work.

I have dwelt long on these first principles, because in them I find the key of all the meaning of the college festival. All thankfulness for the past, all hope for the great future depends, I think, in this; on whether the university which we profoundly love has grown towards, and shall continually grow more and more into a full obedience to the great masteries, a full acceptance of the great elemental influences and supplies on which all life must feed, into the fuller and fuller relation to God, and universal human life which can alone make her and keep her what she ought to be. Let us see, with a hurried glance at some points in her history, whether there is any light upon the question which must rest heavily on many of her children's minds.

First, then, it is hard to realize, although history clearly tells of it, how definite, and limited, and special, was the foundation of Harvard College. It lay like a weird ball of light in the intention of its founders. It had no relations with any region of human life except its own. To make ministers of a certain faith and of a certain order, that faith conceived of as the final expression of the truth of God; that order accepted as the appointed means for men's salvation to create certain types of experience, to protect an acknowledged system of church discipline - this was the end for which the college was established. Learning was valued, but it was valued for this end. Never was there a system more clearly conceived, more definitely limited, than that New England Puritanism. The great world of humanity lay around it unfelt, unregarded. The secular world was absorbed, was ignored or denounced. Like a rock in a great sea, rising upon its own foundations, beaten upon by waves of which it took no manner of account. So stands the Puritanism of the seventeenth century; so Harvard College which it built in the midst of the multifarious and restless history of man.

The history of the college since that time of its foundation has been the story of a constant opening of this intense and limited and narrow life to the great human world by which it was surrounded. The years have brought perpetual enlargement. That narrowness and specialness of the 17th century Puritanism, has shown how healthy it was, even in its separation, by the capacity which it has developed to bind once more with larger human life, and make itself more and more truly human.

At the beginning of the 18th century came the struggle about church discipline. There was a bursting open of the tight compact body of technical sainthood. Increase Mather, the great exponent of the genius and nature out of which the college sprang, published on the 1st of March, 1700, his "Order of the Gospel Justified." "Sundry ministers of the Gospel in New England" answered him. The question was who should be counted true subjects of the Christian sacraments. When Increase Mather, with his son Cotton was defeated, it was a sign that the earnestness which existed in human life at-large had made itself felt within the church, and that the hard, close envelope of church discipline had been broken open.

Fifty years later came another contest resulting in a new enlargement. In 1736 there was a "great awakening" in Northampton, where Johnathan Edwards was preaching. In 1740 George Whitfield came like a great wind of God across the land. The college life was stirred. The sober souls grew fearful of enthusiasm. President Holyoke preached against Pharisaism. And Dr. Wigglesworth, the Hollis professor, wrote a strong letter to the great evangelist, protesting against his aspersions on the college piety. It is not necessary to take sides in the old dear dispute. Certainly it is not necessary for us to praise in full what we doubt was a very lukewarm condition of religious zeal; but we may well rejoice in the occurrence as a breaking open of what had been a very hard and tight idea of religious experience. It was a protest in behalf of the variety and spontaneity of spiritual life. It was a claiming of its rights for the soul of man. So it was in the region of experience, a true enlargement of the deep life of the college.

The 19th century began with a more serious convulsion. In 1805 Henry Ware was chosen, after a long struggle, to the Hollis professorship of divinity. Once more we need not commit ourselves to his theology, nor to that which for many years after, remained the ruling theology of the university, in order to recognize that in that act and all which was connected with it, there was a true breaking open of the shell of dogma and a participation by the college thought in the more universal currents which were sweeping through the world. It was an opening of the truth to the more general influence of truth. It was as if a skin full of water which had been floating in the ocean had burst, and the water in it had flowed out and the water of the mighty ocean had flowed in.

All these enlargements were within the sphere of what is technically called theology. Need I remind you of how in these more recent days, in the third and fourth quarters of this 19th century, technical theology itself was broken open and mingled itself with life? New sciences have claimed that they, too, have revelations to give us of the will and ways of God. The actual life of men, the problems of the personal soul, the perplexities of social life; these, as well as the abstractions of the intellect, have proved their power to awaken doubt and to inspire faith. You cannot separate theology any longer by sharp lines from psychology and sociology. The open doors of the college chapel, into which no man is henceforth driven, out of which no man is excluded, in and out of which men pass spontaneously and freely, give a true symbol of the way in which theology and life - what men have loved to call the sacred and what men have dared to call the profane - flow freely in and out of one another.

These, very hurriedly suggested, are the four: The enlargement of discipline, the enlargement of experience, the enlargement of dogma, the enlargement of life; these are the successive openings of the envelopes which have enclosed the thought and action of the college until at last it stands free to draw its inspiration from, and to exercise its influence upon the whole activity of man.

What meaning shall we see in all of this? No doubt it is possible enough to see no meaning, or to see low meanings in it. Possible enough to see no meaning, to think of it all as a long dynasty of accidents, chance killing chance and taking possession of the vacant throne. If that is all, then nobody can guess at the future from the past. On into utter recklessness or back into a darker and severer superstition than any from which she has escaped. Either way this chance-governed, ungoverned world of ours may go. Possible to give it all a low meaning. Possible enough to see in it nothing but the casting of restraint after restraint, in order that at last all traces of connection with the supernatural shall disappear and the slavery and degradation of pure secularism shall be complete, until at last religion and the mystery of life shall be forever dissipated, and the thin, hard and colorless relic which is left shall be staring upon us in the glare of the electric light which men choose to call by the great name of science. Either of these ways of looking at it all is possible. But there is yet another and a higher possibility. There may be in all this progress of enlargement which we have traced, a richer and more gracious meaning. It may signify, we believe that it does signify, the partial gradually reconciling itself to the universal; the temporary little by little fulfilling itself with the eternal. There was a discipline of the Christian Church larger than the discipline of the Puritans, in which the discipline of the Puritans had floated as the part floats in the whole. The discipline of the Puritans felt that which was pressed on was tempted by it, and at last broke open in the attempt to find it. Experience was larger than Whitfield. Dogma was larger than Henry Calvin; life was larger than theology, and so, one after another, in these which are the concentric spheres within which human nature lives, the successive opening of the partial into the universal and the temporary with the eternal, came. Not less, but more mysterious, and religious, is the little floating part when it bears the vast whole on every side, calling with deep voice, and opens its small existence, and is first filled and then absorbed by the complete, which is greater than the partialness. I know that you have felt how I have been circling about my text and just upon the point of touching it. What is this whole after which all the partial life of our great college has been reached, toward which she has been enlarging herself all these 250 years? What is this universal and eternal power within which these and all the temporary struggles of mankind are enriched? We open the sacred book. We turn to the majestic letter written centuries ago to members of the great sacred nation, and there we find our answer: "Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today and forever." And what and who is Jesus Christ? In reverence and humility, let us give our answer. He is the meeting of the divine and the human. The presence of God in humanity, the perfection of humanity in God. The divine made human, the human proves to be capable of union with the divine. The utterances, therefore, of the nearness and the love of God, and of the possibility of man. Once in the ages came the wondrous life, but what life made manifest had been forever there. The love of God, the possibility of man. These two which made the Christhood - these two - not two but one - had been the elements in which all life was lived, all knowledge known, all growth attained. Oh! how little men have made it, and how great it is. Around all life which ever has been lived there has been found forever the life of the loving Deity and the ideal humanity. All partial excellence, all learning, all brotherhood, all hope, has been bosomed on this changeless, this unchanging being, which has stretched from the forgotten beginning to the end. It is because God has been always good; because man has been always the son of God, capable in the very substance of his nation of likeness to and union with his father; it is because of this that nobleness has never died, that truth has been attainable, that struggle and hope have always sprung anew, and that the life of man has always reached to larger and to larger things. This is the Christian truth of Christ, "In him was life, and the life was the light of men."

This the truth of man's redemption. As any man or any institution feels and claims around the life, as the element n which it is to live - the sympathy of God and the perfectability of man, that man or institution is redeemed, its fetters and restraints give way and it goes forward to whatever growth and glory it is in the line of its being to attain.

It is the duty of an anniversary to test and recognize the relation in which a man or a venerable college stands to this element of the Christhood, to the goodness of God and the greatness of man as making together the atmosphere of life. Think, then, about the history of our college as we hurriedly traced it. Is its true explanation here? Has all this constant enlargement of its life been moving toward the great truths of the goodness of God and the sublime capacity of man. It must be so. Our progress of these two centuries and a half would be a terrible mockery if it was not so; if, whether we are conscious of it or not, we had not been always advancing towards a deeper, warmer, truer certainty of the divine love summoning us and a profounder assurance of the unexhausted capacity of man whose faculties were finding training here. Whether we are conscious of it or not, I say - for one of the assurances which comes to us most clearly at a time and festival like this, is that our history has been under diviner guidance, and has moved toward nobler ends than we have understood. The college has been in greater, holier, hands than she has known. Alas for the college, if these 250 years have meant for it no more than she has been able to see that they were meaning. In many ways it seems as if she had been strangely and specially unable to read the deeper meanings of her history. Our college is not quick to believe the highest things about herself. Our Harvard way is, as a whole, to read life on its negative side more than on its positive. We think of such enlargements as I have depicted rather as escapes from bigotry and superstition than as possible entrances into deeper faith. We dwell more on the exposure of error than on the discovery of truth in spiritual things. We are more afraid of believing something which we ought not to believe than of not believing something which we ought to believe. We distrust the enthusiasm of faith. As we loose our ship from any mooring of the past, to sail into any great uncertain ocean of the future, we are more ready to listen to the malarial voices which cry to us from the shore "Begone! Begone!" than to hear the great deep, with its unbounded inspirations bidding us "Come on! Come on!" Who of us does not know this temper of our good mother, and of how sedulously she instills it in her children?

Therefore it is that more than most institutions our university has lived under greater forces and for greater ends than she has habitually acknowledged to herself. Therefore, it is that in her commemorative season, our university is specially bound to look deep into her own life, to look broadly across her own history, and to see with unhesitating eyes what diviner significance than she has known has been in her. If when she only said to herself that she was training boys to make their living, giving them good habits, showing them how to study, now and then, by the way, discovering a bit of truth which had not been known before, now and then, by the way, casting out a bit of error which had been proved untrue, if all the time when she has been seeming to herself to be doing only this, God has been bearing testimony in her to the nearness of his love and to the divineness of manhood as his child, now, at her festival, when she gathers all history up into her consciousness and stands in awe before herself, now is the time for her to boldly recognize her own profounder meaning, to own the Christhood within which she has lived, and to give her whole future up to it for government, and help, and blessing. Let us demand of her to do that for herself to-day. My friends, brethren in the love and care of our great mother, let us do that for her.

What does it mean to do that, she asks? Let her remember, let her know that Christ is law as well as truth; Christ is righteousness as well as revelation. The Christhood which is yesterday, to-day and forever is the perpetual utterance of the unchanging ordinance of God, that only through the doing of the right does man come to the knowledge of the true. Let, then, the college which seeks the highest truth in Christ accept the necessity of righteousness as the sole doorway and avenue to it. We miss the great conviction in too much of our university history. In the multitude of our police regulations, in the thoroughly economical view of conduct which a great community begets, we feel too rarely the grand inspiration of righteousness as opening the way to truth; of character as the medium by which light can flow. "Blessed are the pure in thought for they shall see God." Are those words too lofty - too transcendant, to write on the new portal of the college yard? Would they be but a mockery of the baser thoughts of life, the lower ideas of learning which the wood contains. Alas for the college if that be so; for only when a great university cultivates character and insists on righteousness because so only can she know the real truth concerning the divine and human, concerning God and man, only then has she claimed her place within that power which bridges the eternities, only then has she really given herself to Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, to-day and forever.

To such a university cultivating righteousness as the medium of faith must come great privileges. We love to think that she must become a great home of reconciliations. In her calm and lofty air, the friends of whom the world would make, foes must meet and own their friendship, science and religion, faith and reason, individuality and society, conservatism and radicalism, poverty and wealth, the past and the future - these must join hands and walk in peace with one another in a city of scholars where not in the base spirit of compromise, but in the higher atmosphere of universal and eternal truth and duty, the essential unity of all good things shall be made manifest and clear. How can we better close than with these words out of the same epistle to the Hebrews: "We are made partakers of Christ if we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast into the end." There is no break in such a history as ours. To ever larger duty, to ever larger truth, the old college goes forth under the perpetual inspirations of faith in God and faith in man. Those two together make the faith of Christ. May He who has been our Master from the far off beginning, be our Master, ever more and more acknowledged, ever more and more obeyed on even to the distant end.

Hymn 215 was then sung in unison by the congregation, after which the benediction was delivered by Dr. Brooks.