"I spoke as I saw.

I report, as man may, of God's work-all's Love, yet all's Law.

Now I lay down the judgeship he sent me. Each faculty tasked,

To perceive Him, has gained an abyss where a dewdrop was asked."

And is it not always so? We ask for a dewdrop; He gives an abyss of wonder and beauty. We ask for a ray of hope; into life's sky He flashes Love's unfading rainbow. We ask for dear human friendships; He gives the society of angels, of the noble living and the noble dead-yea, the very life of God Himself.

Thus, because the Pharisees carped when the Son of God proved Himself the true Son of Man in mingling with publicans and sinners, He said: "Your education in the great things is inadequate. I am not after the whole, but the sick. You have not learned the a b c of the larger education. God desires mercy, not sacrifice. I came not to call the righeous, but sinners. But go ye and learn what this meaneth."

Our subject, then, is "The Larger Education" -our School-house, our Teacher, our Diploma.

I

The first factor in the larger education is this world in which we live and love and work and weep and laugh and die. For in no mere figurative sense,

the world is our school-house. Nothing short of this vast, mystic, wondrous world justifies the institutions of learning throughout our own land, throughout all lands. The little red school-house on the hillside, the log cabin at the country crossroads, the pile of buildings emphasizing the importance of the modern college and university, the dream of a Brooklyn University which is to come true, and gloriously true-all exist for the purpose of showing students how to find their way, physically, mentally, socially, and morally, about this great school-house named the world.

Emerson had this truth in mind when he said: "He who knows the most, he who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments, is the rich and royal man." Ah! the world is packed with enchantments, and education is the magician whose golden hammer breaks down the four walls of the class room, sending the scholar forth to behold the limitless horizons of the world, and all that is within them. Education naturalizes us as citizens of the universe. Shame on the man who is so local as to be purely national or international, when God wants him to be universal! As the mystic expressed it: "The universe, vast and deep and broad and high, is a handful of dust which God enchants." Ours is an enchanted universe, and oh, what unspeakable splendours lie hidden within this handful of dust!

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Let me use an illustration with which the twentieth century student is familar. Standing here in this teeming world, the imagination flashes back to the time when our globe was a fiery mass of nebulous matter. The next stage consists of countless myriads of similar atoms, roughly outlined in a ragged cloud-ball, glowing with heat, and rotating in space with inconceivable velocity." Then we behold the transformation of this cloudmass into a solid earth. But how? Well, the Divine Artificer, through mutual attraction and chemical affinity, caused two of the myriads of atoms to fall in love with each other. And sober science assures us that with that atomic romance-the very moment those two atoms were married-the victory of our earth's evolution was won. As you see, all the human romances through all the human years, owe their origin to that first pair of romantic atoms, indissolubly joined in wedlock by the priestly hand of Infinite Love and All-Wise Intelligence!

If the cornerstone of our school-house was laid in that far-off dawn of time, evidently Someone has been at considerable patience and pains to equip our Alma Mater. But the simple truth is, we never could have known the varied magnificence of our school-house, had not the Angel of Education come and said: "Follow me, and I will show you the grandeurs of your world-home." The furniture was all here, but no man to admire it, no woman to adorn it. Stars sparkled in the blue roof above;

flowers bloomed in the green carpet below; fires burned in the deep craters within; oceans washed the untrodden shores around. But there were no human eyes which

. . . Overleapt the horizon's edge,
Searched with Apollo's privilege;

Through man and woman and sea and star,

Saw the dance of nature forward far;

Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times,
Saw musical order and pairing rhymes."

No: there was no seeing eye, no trained human brain to appreciate all this. For millions of years, the stars waited for a man to say: "I shall outlast thy brilliance." For millions of years, the animal creation waited for a man to declare: "I am thy lord." For millions of years, the physical forces waited for a man to proclaim: "I am thy master." Why, the gulf between the untutored Fiji Islander and the cultured Heights' citizen is bridged by education. Does not the savage have all the materials of astronomy, law, literature, medicine, religion, electricity, aeroplanes, automobiles? Having the materials, what does he lack? Why, the mental power which organizes them into the arts and sciences of civilization.

Properly speaking, our school-house—the great world is just a delicious intellectual feast, and education is the acquired taste for enjoying it. It was Ruskin's deliberate conclusion "that the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is

to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way." In other words, our school-house is waiting for eyes to look in upon and appropriate its beauties. An American woman was leaving an art gallery in Florence. As she took nothing in, of course she brought nothing out. Still, she ventured to ask the venerable caretaker: "Are these all the pictures you have to show?" His soul soaked in beauty for fifty years, the indignant old picture-lover replied: Madam, these paintings are not on trial. It is the visitors who are on trial."

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And each one of us is greatly on trial as we go up and down our world-school-house. Why, if we had eyes to see, we should agree with Whitman that "a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels." Or is it just because of its eery miraculousness that some of us are so heartily afraid of the little creature? If we had eyes to see, we should confound the real estate dealer by saying: “The land is yours, the landscape is mine.” If we had eyes to see, we should talk less of Italian sunsets, and be often enraptured by those which hang over New York Bay. For it is forever true that "though we travel the world over in search of the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not."

One night my boy asked me how much gold there was away up in the golden stars. Trying to make make him understand, I said: "Put your shoe