Last evening Dr. McPherson conducted the last of his series of services in Appleton Chapel. The attendance was unusually large. Dr. McPherson chose his text from Matthew v, 7: "I came not to destroy but to fulfil." He spoke, in effect, as follows:

Human character may be classed in two main phases; it is at once an effect and a cause. Looking to the past and to the future, character moulds itself partly into conservatism and partly into progress. As Emerson says, each of the two makes a good half but a poor whole. On the one hand excessive conservatism is a mere negation; on the other, excessive radicalism recklessly destroys the virtue of healthly discipline and blots out the good of the past with its bad. The one maintains established evil; the other destroys established good.

True conservatism, however, in just proportion, makes memory possible; preserves faithfulness, and with reverend hand upholds to us noble examples of the heroes and the saints who are gone. It stores up for succeeding generations the knowledge and the moral worth of the past. Thus also wise radicalism is a power for good because it is truly progressive, creative, affirmative.

It is in Christ that we see the two forces, perfectly combined. By His whole life we are taught respect for the past, firmness to adapt the old truth to the search for new truth. Yet His radicalism is living; not passive, but active. The old testament "Thou shalt not do evil" becomes the new testament "Thou shalt do good."

Christ teaches mankind the broadminded faculty, the freedom from gross materialism, which in art we call imagination, in philosophy idealism, in religion, faith. This is the gift which the world of today especially needs. The age is a cyclops with the keen but narrow vision of its single eye for materialism. In America, where the child nation's body is scarcely grown and its sould but beginning to develop, sordid prosperity, even more than elsewhere, deadens man's higher senses and encourages his skepticism for everything except selfish gain.

Let both memory and hope therefore unite in us to raise our manhood. Men like Milton and Lincoln, above all Christ Himself, teach us that love and faith can and must survive from the past, must and can be won from the future, by man's earnest struggling away from selfishness, and towards lofty ideals.