could be stricken out? What page what sentence? Just enough, not more than enough! The thought has grown, has asserted its entirety; and when that entirety has been reached, it has stopped, delighted with its own perfection. A splendid ideal, an ideal which never can fail, I am sure, to interest man so long as he remains intelligent!

And yet this beautiful Greek work shows only one aspect of the world. It omitted something, it omitted formative life. Joy in birth, delight in beginnings, interest in origins, - these things did not belong to the Greek; they came in with Christianity. It is Jesus Christ who turns our attention toward growth, and so teaches us to delight in the imperfect rather than in the perfect. It is he who, wishing to give to his disciples a model of what they should be, does not select the completed man, but takes the little child and sets him before them and to the supercilious says, "Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones." He teaches us to reverence the beginning of things. And at first thought it might well seem that this reverence for the imperfect was a retrogression. What! is not a consummate man more admirable than a child? "No," Jesus answered; and because he answered so, pity was born. Before the coming of Jesus Christ, I think we may say that the sick, the afflicted, the child-shall I not say the woman? were but slightly understood. It is be

cause God has come down from heaven, manifesting even himself in forms of imperfection, it is on this account that our intellectual horizon has been enlarged. We may now delight in the lowly, we may stoop and gather imperfect things and rejoice in them, — rejoice beyond the old Greek rejoicing.

Yet it is easy to mistake the nature of this change of standard, and in doing so to run into grave moral danger. If we content ourselves with the imperfect rather than with the perfect, we are barbarians. We are not Christians nor are we Greeks, we are barbarians. But that is not the spirit of Jesus. He teaches us to catch the future in the instant, to see the infinite in the finite, to watch the growth of the perfect out of the imperfect. And he teaches us that this delight in progress, in growth, in aspiration, in completing, may rightly be greater than our exultation in completeness. In his view the joy of perfecting is beyond the joy of perfection.

Now I want to be sure that you young women, who are preparing yourselves here for larger life and are soon to emerge into the perplexing world, go forth with clear and Christian purpose. For though what I have been discussing may appear dry and abstract, it is an extremely practical matter. Consider a moment in which direction you are to seek the interests of your life. Will you demand that the things about you shall already possess their perfec

tion? Will you ask from life that it be completed, finished, beautiful? If so, you are doomed to dreary days. Or are you to get your intellectual eyes open, see beauty in the making, and come to rejoice in it there rather than after it is made? That is the question I wish to present to-day; and I shall ask you to examine several provinces of life and see how different they appear when surveyed from one point of view or from the other.

Undoubtedly all of you on leaving here will go into some home, either the home of your parents or - less fortunate some stranger's home. And when you come there, I think I can foretell one thing: it will be a tolerably imperfect place in which you find yourself. You will notice a great many points in which it is improvable; that is to say, a great many respects in which you might properly wish it otherwise. It will seem to you, I dare say, a little plain, a little commonplace, compared with your beautiful college and the college life here. I doubt whether will find all the members of your family dear you though they may be so wise, so gentle-mannered, so able to contribute to your intellectual life as are your companions here. Will you feel then, "Ah! home is a dull place; I wish I were back in college again! I think I was made for college life. Possibly enough I was made for a wealthy life. I am sure I was made for a comfortable life. But I do not find

these things here. I will sit and wish I had them. Of course I ought not to enjoy a home that is short of perfection; and I recognize that this is a good way from complete." Is this to be your attitude? Or are you going to say, "How interesting this home! What a brave struggle the dear people are making with the resources at their command! What kindness is shown by my tired mother; how swift she is in finding out the many small wants of the household! How diligent my father! Should I, if I had had only their narrow opportunities, be so intelligent, so kind, so self-sacrificing as they? What can I do to show them my gratitude? What can I contribute toward the furtherance, the enlargement, the perfecting, of this home?" That is the wise course. Enter this home not merely as a matter of loving duty, but find in it also your own strong interests, and learn to say, "This home is not a perfect home, happily not a perfect home. I have something here to do. It is far more interesting than if it were already complete."

And again, you will not always live in a place so attractive as Cleveland. There are cities which have not your beautiful lake, your distant views, your charming houses excellently shaded with trees. These things are exceptional and cannot always be yours. You may be obliged to live in an American town which appears to you highly unfinished, a town which constantly suggests that much still remains to be

done. And then are you going to say, “This place is not beautiful, and I of course am a lover of the beautiful. How could one so superior as I rest in such surroundings? I could not respect myself were I not discontented." Is that to be your attitude? It is, I am sorry to think, the attitude of many who go from our colleges. They have been taught to reverence perfection, to honor excellence; and instead of making it their work to carry this excellence forth, and to be interested in spreading it far and wide in the world, they sit down and mourn that it has not yet come. How dull the world would be had it come! Perfection, beauty? It constitutes a restingplace for us; it does not constitute our workingplace.

I maintain, therefore, in regard to our land as a whole that there is no other so interesting on the face of the earth; and I am led to this conviction by the very reasoning which brought Mr. Arnold to a contrary opinion. I accept his judgment of the beauty of America. His premise is correct, but it should have conducted him to the opposite conclusion. In America we still are in the making. We are not yet beautiful and distinguished; and that is why America, beyond every other country, awakens a noble interest. The beauty which is in the old lands, and which refreshes for a season, is after all a species of death. Those who dwell among such scenes are appeased,