from being familiar, from his childhood, with the walls and with the trees that speak of the past no less than of the present, and make both full of images of greatness; this, in an inferior degree, belongs to every member of an ancient and celebrated place of education. In this respect, every one has a responsibility imposed upon him, which I wish that we more considered. We know how school traditions are handed down from one school generation to another; and what is it, if in all these there shall be nothing great, nothing distinguished, nothing but a record, to say the best of it, of mere boyish amusements, when it is not a record of boyish follies? Every generation, in which a low and foolish spirit prevails, does its best to pollute the local influences of the place; to degrade its associations, to deprive the thought of belonging to it of any thing that may enkindle and ennoble the minds of those who come after it. And if these foolish, or tame associations, continue, they make the evil worse : persons who appreciate highly the elevating effect of a great and ancient foundation, will no longer send their sons to a place which has forfeited one of its most valuable powers; whose antiquity has nothing of the dignity, nothing of the romance

of antiquity, but is either a blank, or worse than a blank. So the spirit gets lower and lower; and instead of finding a help and an encouragement in the associations of its place of education, the ingenuous mind feels them all no more than a weight upon its efforts; they only tend to thwart it, and to keep it down. This is the tendency, not only of a vicious tone, prevailing in a great place of education, but even of a foolish and childish one; of a tone that tolerates ignorance, and an indifference about all, save the amusements of the day. On the other hand, whatever is done here well and honourably, outlives its own generation. In smaller schools, one cannot look forward to posterity; when our children are of an age to commence their education, a total change may have taken place in the spot, and all its associations may have vanished for ever. But here it is not so; the size, the scale, the wealth of a great institution like this ensures its permanency, so far as any thing on earth is permanent. The good and the evil, the nobleness or the vileness, which may exist on this ground now, will live and breathe here in the days of our children; they will form the atmosphere in which they will live hereafter, either wholesome and invigorating, or numbing and deadly. This roof, under which we are now assembled, will hold, it is probable, our children and our children's children: may they be enabled to think, when they shall kneel, perhaps, over the bones of some of us now here assembled, that they are praying where their fathers prayed; and let them not, if they mock in their day the means of grace here offered, encourage themselves with the thought that the place had long ago been profaned with equal guilt, that they are but infected with the spirit of our ungodliness !

SERMON XVII.

CHRISTIAN PROFESSIONS-OFFERING CHRIST OUR BEST.

MATTHEW II. 11.

And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense, and myrrh.

THE story from which these words are taken, considered historically, is capable of supplying very little information. Who these wise men were, from what country they came, to what degree their notions regarding Christ were correct, or fully made out to their own minds, and whether any results followed from their journey when they were arrived in their own country again, are questions which it would be vain to try to answer. Because so much has been left untold, much has been added in after times to complete the story; and from the importance which it then assumed, it was fixed upon to stand as the symbol in the church's celebration, of the great mystery of the gospel, the admission of the Gentiles into the church of God. In this respect, historically speaking, the conversion of Cornelius had no doubt been far more properly chosen; because it cannot be said that the wise men, so far as we know, were acquainted with the peculiar truths of the gospel at all; but taken symbolically, in the mere general notion of the wise men of the Gentile world bowing down before the Christ of God, and it may well pass as a representation of that great event, the bringing in of the Gentiles, in which all the churches of the Gentiles have so deep an interest.

In proportion, however, to the obscurity which hangs about it as a fact, is its clearness and usefulness when considered as a symbol. And that, not only as a symbol of the coming in of the Gentiles, the light in which the church regards it, but in another way resembling the instruction conveyed in parables ; that is, as giving in the form of a story a general and perpetual lesson. Then, in so applying it, we lose sight at once of all circumstances of time, and place, and individual persons; it is no longer the wise men or