A large audience welcomed the return of Rev. Lyman Abbott in Appleton Chapel last evening.

The address was based chiefly upon Christ's invitation to "drink of the water of life freely." What makes a man is his will power - power which he must exercise over himself. If a man is offered an education and goes to college, yet does not improve the opportunity offered him, it is surely his fault; and so it is with us; if God offers us eternal life and we choose an evil one, the blame rests upon us. God never violates a man's free will; he can only stir up his soul to action and if that action is not for virtue, he alone and not God is to blame.

When the children of Israel were asked whether they would serve God or Baal he let them choose of their own accord and when they choose idolatry he punished them by thrusting their forty year's wandering upon them. And so with us; if we are given our choice between good and evil and accept the evil, we cannot expect other than our deserved punishment.

Dr. Abbott then said that he wanted to speak to each one as though he were addressing him personally. I see before me, he said, the self-satisfied man, and to him I want to speak. If men like Phillips Brooks, Professor Drummond and Mr. Donald fail to make the self-satisfied man feel his mistakes, if their arguments do not make him repent of his self satisfaction, then he certainly is beyond all hope of recovery. The man who is ashamed of his past misdeeds and repents, is more sure of forgiveness than the self-satisfied man.

Dreaming is not doing. The man who ran to Christ to ask what he could do for his repentance, and who, when he was told that he must give up his worldly riches, decided he could not part with them, is a fair representative of the self satisfied type. We may talk of loving this or that but when the time for action comes we invariably back down.

The one condition to obtain character is to say that you will have it. A man may not believe in Church, or in God or have any religious views, nevertheless, if he says: "I'll be a man," and strives for manly character, he most certainly will get it. Such a man cannot be upbraided for not associating himself with views that are not strictly religious, for he certainly cannot be more of a christian in so doing than he is in his determination to live a noble life. If a man says he will walk in the good path, God too says he will. The vital question is: Do you want to be better than you are? God says if you do you can.