THE UNIVERSITY RECORD.

VOL. II.-AUGUST, 1900.-NO. 3.

BACCALAUREATE SERMON.

Sunday, June 17, 1900..

REV. LYMAN ABBOTT,

Of Brooklyn, N. Y.

Matthew, 20th chapter, 26th to 28th verses:

soever will be great among you, let him be your minister; and whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant: even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many."

At the time when these words were uttered by Jesus Christ, Palestine, in which he lived and taught, was a province of the Roman Empire. This empire was based on autocratic authority; its power was centered in an imperial Cæsar, who held the property, the lives and all the interests of his subjects in his hands. All authority emanated from him, and was diffused through governors and subgovernors down to the remotest officers. All the wealth was concentrated in the hands of a comparatively small number of people, the greater part of whom lived in the Roman capital. The great majority of the world were slaves or in a state bordering upon elavery. Education was centered in the few; there was absolutely no system for the education of the common people except such as was in Palestine, and that was Hebraic and not Roman in origin and character; moreover, there were no schools except for the study of rhetoric and athletics-that is, for the training of the tongue and the fist. To a people under such a government as this the words of the text were uttered. Christ did not declare that there

was to be no great, no small; no rich, no poor; no wise, no ignorant; no strong, no weak. Christ did not undertake to bring all men to one level; his teaching was both more radical and more conservative, and what he said was this: The rich must serve the poor; the strong must serve the weak; the wise must serve the ignorant; the great must serve the small. The Roman of that day would have been utterly unable to understand these words. He could not have understood them better than Pilate understood those other words: "My kingdom is founded on truth," to which he contemptuously replied, you recollect, "What is truth?" and, as Bacon says, went out without waiting for an answer. Eighteen centuries of Christion civilization have gone by since those words were uttered, and we have learned something of that lesson, but we have yet much to learn.

If we wish to understand the words of Christ we should look at his life, for he practiced as he preached, and we can always interpret his words by his actions. There is one simple yet dramatic incident in his life that throws a clear light on this declaration. He was about to die, and he knew it. He desired before his death to sit down at a last supper with his disciples. In that hot and dusty climate men wore no stockings, but only sandals on the feet, and the washing of the feet before a meal was then as necessary to cleanliness as the washing of the hands is with us. The preparation had been made; there stood in the corner the basin ready with the water for the washing of the feet. These were simple men, and they had no servants to wash their feet, yet it never occurred to them to wash the feet of one another or even the feet of the Master; instead, they got into a heated controversy as to where each should sit at the table, one claiming place before another.

We can easily imagine the controversy: Judas said, "The first place is mine, for I am the treasurer"; John said, "It belongs to me, for I am his beloved disciple"; Peter said, "It belongs to me, for I am the rock on which he will build his church." So they wrangled, forgetting the presence of the Master, who had been looking on without interposing a word. At last they took their places at the table. Then Christ turned, and girding himself with a towel and taking the basin of water, began, without a word, to wash their feet, and when they started back in amazement and undertook

to resent this action of the Saviour, he said, "Ye call me Lord and Master, and ye say well, for so I am. But I have made you an example; as I have washed your feet, so you ought to wash one another's feet." This declaration of Christ then, that if any of you would be great let him be servant, was not to teach that there was to be no great and small, no top and bottom, no master and follower; but that while they might call him Lord and Master, yet when the time came, even if it were as ignoble as washing feet, he would render a necessary service. Christ did not level down and he did not level up. He recognizes that there will be the top, the wise, the rich; but these are to serve the bottom, the ignorant, the poor. We were not put into this life to see how much greatness, how much wealth, how much learning, we could get out of it for ourselves, our families, our friends; but to see how much by our effort we can add to the world. And the stronger, the wiser, the better equipped we are, the more this obligation of service rests upon us. This is Christ's law of life, absolutely, without exception. It was to speak to you, the students of this University, that I came here, and this simple law of life is what I wish to put before you. You will soon be going out from here into the world; you have about finished your academic courses; some of you have already decided into which profession you will enter; some of you are yet uncertain what you will do. You are ambitious; that is right. A young man who is not ambitious is not a young man; he has grown old before his time, or he is not a man. But what shall be your ambition? What will you do with your equipment? What will you make of your profession? We may divide the vocations into three. great categories: first, those that deal with the material world; second, those that have to do with the social order; third, those that have to do with the individual character. Apply to these three in turn this law of service.

First, there are those callings that have to do with the material world: the farmer, the miner, the manufacturer, the engineer, the merchant, the banker. These men deal with things and with men in their relation to things. The farmer and the miner draw from the earth the raw material, and the whole of the nation is dependent upon the mining and agricultural classes; for we draw our nutriment in the last analysis from the bosom of "mother earth." But it is use

less for men to gather the juices from the earth or to bring the minerals from the mines unless we know how to modify them by manufacture. The manufacturer is a kind of creator. He takes the raw material, modifies it, makes it useful to man. The man who turns the juices of the earth into wheat, barley, corn, cotton, and the man who grinds the corn and spins the cotton are doing God's work for him, for they are doing God's work with him. Next to the manufacturer is the engineer, the practical scientist, who lays hold of the natural forces and makes them do our work for us. These forces are the muscles and sinews of nature, and as the laws of nature are the laws of God, so the muscles of nature are the muscles of God himself. Nature is God, and God himself says to us, I will put my muscles at your service, I will grind your corn in the mills, I will run your trolley cars for you. The scientist interprets God's works; he lays hold on the immutable and invisible powers of nature, that is, of God, to do our work for us. Thus, it is the business of the farmer to make the earth feed humanity, of the miner to make the earth furnish material for man's service, of the engineer to understand the great forces of nature and set them to do our drudgery for us, and it is the work of the merchant-though some may not so understand it-to take this gathered wealth and scatter it everywhere. There is a great prejudice against railroads, but do you know why they have famine in India? Because there is no food? No; because there are no railroads. There cannot be a famine that will threaten the lives of Americans, because there are railroads to take the grain where it is needed. This is the function of the merchant to distribute wealth and to serve by distribution. And the banker furnishes the currency with which to carry on the business and make exchange of products easy and simple. Thus we see that the whole of that which is called the industrial system is dependent one part upon another. The manufacturer upon the miner and farmer, the merchant upon the manufacturer, the banker upon the merchant. The miner and farmer dispose of the product of their toil to the manufacturer and the manufacturer turns over to the merchant the results of his labor and the merchant distributes them to the public by aid of the banker, and thus we live. There is no such thing as independence. For the coffee that you drank this morning at breakfast the berries were probably picked in Mexico or