more clearly perceived, not here alone, but in other lands, that the State must see to the well-being and equipment of its Universities if it is to be furnished with the best quality in its citizens and in its servants. The veriest materialist cannot but be impressed when he looks around and sees the increasing part which science plays year by year in the struggle of the nations for supremacy. It is true that mere knowledge is not action; but it must not be forgotten that the transition to successful action is nowadays from knowledge, and not from ignorance. Things are in our time too difficult and complicated to be practicable without the best equipment, and this is as much true of public affairs as it is the case in private life.

And now let us pass to yet deeper-going conclusions. If it be the ideal work of the Universities to produce men of the widest minds-men who are fit to lead as well as merely to organize what must such men set before themselves? The actual is not merely infinite any more than it is merely finite. The merely infinite were perfect, but the eye of man could not behold it. Only in the daily striving to reach them, imperfect as that striving may seem, are life and freedom accomplished facts. The particular and the universal are not separate existences. Each is real only through the other. It is not in Nature, but as immanent in the self, finite as consciousness discloses that self to be, that we find God; and so it is that this great truth pervades every relation of life. He who would accomplish anything must limit himself.' The man who would lead others must himself be capable of renouncing. Not in some world apart, but here and now, in the duty, however humble, that lies nearest us, is the realization of the higher selfthe self that tends Godward-to be sought. And this carries with it something more. To succeed is to throw one's whole strength into work; and if the work must always and everywhere involve the passage through the portal of

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renunciation, be special and even contracted, then the only life that for us human beings can be perfect is the life that is dedicated. I mean by the expression a dedicated life' one that is with all its strength concentrated on a high purpose. Such a life may not seem to him who looks on only from outside to comprise every good. The purpose, though high, may be restricted. The end may never be attained. Yet the man is great, for the quality of his striving is great. 'Lofty designs must close in like effects.'

The first duty of life is to seek to comprehend clearly what our strength will let us accomplish, and then to do it with all our might. This may not, regarded from outside, appear to the spectator to be the greatest of possible careers, but the ideal career is the one in which we can be greatest according to the limits of our capacity. A life into which our whole strength is thrown, in which we look neither to the right nor to the left, if to do so is to lose sight of duty ---such a life is a dedicated life. The forms may be manifold. The lives of all great men have been dedicated; singleness of purpose has dominated them throughout. Thus it was with the life of a Socrates, a Spinoza, or a Newton; thus with the lives of men of action such as Cæsar and Cromwell and Napoleon. We may well see their limits; theirs was the sphere of what is human, the finite. But they concentrated on the accomplishment of a clearly conceived purpose, and worked with their whole strength, and the greatest of them threw that strength into the striving after what was noblest. They may have perished before their end appeared accomplished in time, and yet they have succeeded. The quality of their work lay in the very striving itself. The end, a profound modern thinker tells us in a great passage, does not wait to be accomplished; it is always accomplishing itself. In our finite human life we never realize or see that the end has in truth been reached. The completion of the infinite purpose is thus only the process of removing the

illusion that it is not accomplished. The good, the absolutely good, is eternally working itself out in the world, and the result is that it is already there in its perfection, and does not need to wait for us.'

The noblest of souls can find full satisfaction for his best aspirations in the sustained effort to do his duty in the work that lies at hand to the utmost that is in him. It is the function of education in the highest sense to teach him that there are latent in him possibilities beyond what he has dreamed of, and to develop in him capacities of which, without contact with the highest learning, he had never become aware. And so the University becomes, at its best, the place where the higher ends of life are made possible of attainment, where the finite and the infinite are found to come together. The wider our outlook, the more we have assimilated the spirit of the teachers of other nations and other ages than our own, the more will the possibilities of action open to us, and the more real may become the choice of that high aim of man, the dedicated life. We learn so to avoid the unconscious devotion of our energies to that for which we are not fit, and the peril of falling unconsciously into insincerity and unreality of purpose. We learn so to choose the work that is most congenial to us, because we find in it what makes us most keenly conscious that we are bringing into actual existence the best that lies latent in us. The wider outlook, the deeper sympathy, the keener insight, which this kind of culture gives, do not paralyze. They save him who has won them from numberless pitfalls. They may teach him his own limits, and the more he has learned his lesson the more he will realize these limits. But they do not dishearten him, for he has become familiar with the truth that the very essence of consciousness and of life is to be aware of limits and to strive to overcome them. He knows that without limits there can be no life, and that to have comprehended these limits is to have

transcended them. As for what lies beyond him he has realized that it is but as the height in front, which is gained only to disclose another height beyond. He is content with his lot if, and so far as he feels that in him too, as he seeks with all his strength to bring forth the best that is in him, and at the same time to be helpful to others, God is realizing Himself.

Such, to my mind, is the lesson which it were the noblest function of the ideal University to set forth, and in this fashion does such a University help to give to the world leaders of men, in thought and in action alike. The spirit which it inspires brings with it the calm outlook which does not paralyze human energy because it teaches that it is quality and not quantity that counts, and that the eternal lies not far away in some other world, but is present here and now. For the man who has learned in this school the common picture of the future life becomes an image that has been raised to correct the supposed inadequate and contingent character of this one; and, as his insight into the deeper meaning of reality in this world grows, so he realizes that his true immortality begins on this side of the grave. To feel himself infinite in his finitude, to learn to accept his closelybounded life and task as the process in which the side of him that is touched by infinity becomes real, to be aware of the immanence of the Divine in the humblest and saddest consciousness-this is the lesson which each of us may learn, the secret which the teaching of a true University may unlock for us; the teaching of a University, but not in the commonplace and restricted sense. In such a school we are instructed in the theoretical meaning of life as we can hardly be elsewhere. But this is not the only discipline by which we obtain deliverance from the burden of our ignorance, and are led to dedicate ourselves to noble ends. There is a lesson which ought never to be overlooked, and that is the necessity of suppressing the will to live. Before we can

command we must learn to obey, and this also a true University life has to teach.

There is innate in the great mass of men and women an instinct of obedience to the Nature that is higher than their own. In the days in which we live mere rank does not awaken this instinct; in the Anglo-Saxon race the belief in the Divine right of kings has passed away. But even in this forgotten faith we have the spectacle of something that was symbolical of a deeper truth. Belief in God and submission to His will is the foundation of religion. Belief in the State as real equally with the individual citizens in whom it is realized and whom it controls, this is the foundation of orderly government. It is not a king as individual, it is a king as the symbol of what is highest in national life that to-day commands loyalty. The instinct of obedience shows itself here, but its real foundation resembles the foundation of that other obedience which is made manifest in the religious life. It is the tendency to bow before the truth, to recognise the rational as the real and the real as the rational. In the main, what is highest will assert its authority with the majority of mankind, and assert it in the end successfully. What is necessary, and what alone is necessary, is that what is highest should be made manifest, and that for this purpose the mists of ignorance should be dispelled. The more the leader embodies the quality that is great, the wider and more complete will be his ultimate sway. Time may be required, the time that gives birth to opportunity, but the truth will prevail. History, and the history of religion in particular, furnishes us with an unbroken succession of witnesses to this conclusion. A leader may apparently fail, his doctrine may be superseded. But if in his period he has. represented the best teaching which the Time Spirit could bring forth, his appeal has never been in vain. His victory may not have been complete until after his death. self may have been narrow and even fanatical. He may

He him