the ideal to which Union Seminary hopes to render unexampled service by all the unrivaled equipment in which we rejoice as she enters upon her new era with this day?

The representative of the most famous of the isolated seminaries said to me only a few years ago: " But think how much it will cost us to move." I could only reply: "But did you ever think how much it will cost you not to move? You will have to multiply your faculty by five to give to the men what they rightfully demand. And if you do not give it to them, they will go elsewhere." They did go elsewhere. That institution has since moved. And now men are seeking it again. I believe that the contention was right. I believe that the movement is irresistible. For not even if the isolated seminary should multiply its resource by five could it do the work so well as by passing over that work to the university to be done by standing shoulder to shoulder with the university. It is a matter of atmosphere. It is a spirit and life. Men are to be educated for the ministry not merely as other men are educated, but they are to be educated with other men, as part of the world of educated men. They are to look into the eyes of other educated men with understanding, and not across a great gulf fixed. They are not merely to live and work for other men, but they are to live and work with them. The dual standard of life and interpretation of the Gospel, which was the curse of the Middle Age, still lingers. It is the secret of the alienation of many from the church and the ministry. It must be done away.

Oh, and let me make an even greater appeal than that and one not so often made. It is not merely that the theological student needs the university. It is also that the university needs the student of religion-so only that the latter be a person of the genuine quality which anybody can need. I have spoken of the contribution which the university makes to him. But is there nothing which he can contribute to the life of all the other members of the university? Truly nothing and less than nothing, if his religion is of the artificial sort. Truly nothing, if he bring reproach upon his cause. But he has an inestimable boon to confer if he be the right sort of a man, a pure youth among the tempted, unconquerable idealist among many who are sordid, generous among many who are selfish, Christianlike among those who have found Christ, and, as well, among those who have not, a minister by life, example, saintliness of spirit, even before he came to the ministry in the word of the Gospel upon which his heart is set. I have charge

of a university chapel. I have no more faithful supporters in my work than the Divinity School men. It would indeed be disgraceful if it were not so. But the university is indefinitely richer by the fact that it is so. Or, from this matter of character to recur for a moment to that other matter of learning of which I spoke. Why should the other members of a university be deprived of the study of religious subjects altogether or else condemned to study them in an unlearned and an unscientific way? Why should not the circulation of the free life of learning be just as good for one set of men as it is for the other? I stand here to plead for this side of the question, and that most ardently. It is a great opportunity which the old endowed universities have in this regard. For, apparently, it is a problem which the universities under state control find much more difficult to solve. I know a school of which it would be true to say, that hardly a man has taken his degree there for twenty years who has not taken one or more courses in every year of his residence from a professor who was not a member of the theological faculty. But the parallel fact seems to be even more interesting. In that same interval there have been few years when there have not been from three to five hundred men from other departments of the university taking instruction under members of the theological faculty. You understand, these were men who were not going into the ministry. They were men who were going into the law, or medicine, or business. One result of all this has been that the old barrier, which used to be thought to separate theological education from any other, has been done away. I can remember a time when I myself thought of a theological professor as a man of altogether different sort from any other, a theological student as a being of an inferior sort, his studies far less rigorous and his standards far more exacting than other standards. Now one standard obtains for all. Fees are equalized. The mendicancy of the profession is done away. The standing of theological learning in the world of youth, who after all are soon to be the laymen in our churches, is redeemed in a manner which, for the future of the church, as it seems to me, is important in the highest degree.

We speak often in our times of the naturalization of Christianity within the life of the different races to whom the Gospel has been preached. We mean with that phrase to describe that contribution which the various peoples have made and are now making to the interpretation of Christianity. We mean that modification of the understanding and application

of Christianity which has taken place through the assimilation of it to the life of different nations. One of the subjects at this morning's session in connection with this dedication was that of the adaptation of the Gospel in the work of missions. The Gospel is one thing to the children of Arabia, it is another to the Hindoos or the Chinese or the Japanese. The Gospel lives for all of these peoples in terms of their own culture.

But that which we thus conceive as to differences of race and place must be true also as to differences of time. There is a constant need of the adaptation of the Gospel in the spirit of a new time, a naturalization of it within the culture of each succeeding age. The Gospel was one thing in the first century, it was quite a different thing in the third. It was one thing in the seventeenth century. It must be quite a different thing in the twentieth. The Puritan did his work in the world because he was profoundly convinced that his statement of religion was true. But not only that. He easily convinced his hearers that that statement was true. He did that because the statement really was germain to the whole intellectual life of the time. It was an integral, a vital, a congruous element of the culture of the age. The trouble with us in our time is that too often we seek to bring religion to men in a statement and interpretation which is incongruous with the cultivation of the age. It may be dear and familiar to us. But it is alien to many men. It has no power over them. It speaks a language which they do not know. It needs naturalization within the vivid and vigorous life of our own time. We shall then first stand firmly upon our feet and speak the Gospel again with courage and with power, when we speak it in words that men understand and in its vital relation to all the other things which they understand. Then and then only will men feel Christianity to be a part of life, and all life to be interpreted and crowned in religion. There is no problem whose solution is more vital to the church. And for the solution of this task Seminary and University will need to work, not in hostility the one to the other, nor even independently the one of the other. Together, working hand in hand, they are to be the instrumentalities for the accomplishment of this aim, which is so much to be desired.

MR. OGDEN:

Our next speaker, as announced on the program, is the Reverend Professor Henry Van Dyke, whom we honor alike

for his literary abilities and for his capacity as a great preacher, but he is sick and not able to be here.

He writes an interesting note to Dr. Brown, the closing words of which are these: "I could only croak with a voice like a raven, but croaking will be out of place at the banquet, so I will be present in the spirit and wish health, a long life and vital powers to Union Seminary with all my heart. Faithfully yours, Henry Van Dyke."

We have no one to fill his place.

I have been very much comforted from my lapse of memory a little while ago apropos of Dr. Alexander, by remembering that Dr. Butler was to-day the delegate appointed by the Manchester University in England, but it slipped off his memory and into his "forgettery," and he left his gorgeous raiment hanging in its closet and came simply in the ordinary academic garb of the President of Columbia University. That had a nearer relation to the whole proceeding to-day because we have with us an honored friend. We should love to welcome him as the Right Reverend William Lawrence, we should love to welcome him as the Bishop of Massachusetts, but he is not himself to-day at all. He is the representative on this occasion of the University of Durham, the most ancient university in England, and so in our academic procession to-day he had the glory of the splendid red gown, the glory that would have been divided with the President of Columbia if the President of Columbia's memory had been a little better.

So I have the pleasure of presenting to you, Bishop Lawrence, who will speak to you about "Our Friends Across the Sea."

THE RIGHT REVEREND WILLIAM LAWRENCE:

Mr. Chairman:

For two or three minutes I am going to speak for myself. I am not from across the sea. I am from the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, where Calvinism in all its points is honored, and where, with the rising of the sun each morning we arise still and say the Westminster Creed. I came here not from across the sea but as a friend, and I came, not because I was invited, but because I wanted to.

As Dean of a college or the Theological School rather that thirty years ago in its infancy tried to plant itself close to the greatest university in the country, a university then supposed to be under the cloud of Unitarianism, I come to tell

you that from our experience to be in the neighborhood of a university is good.

Now I come to my more formal words. Through the chance that I hold an office for a while I have been honored by two universities, that of Durham and that of Cambridge, and I may say honestly that I figured for Durham in a Cambridge gown to-day. But it was all honest, because Durham knew it, and they told me to. By chance, I say, of holding that office and through no merits of my own I have been honored by those two universities, and therefore may speak for a moment for those two, or perhaps for one or two other English universities.

My first words, therefore, as representative of an English university are in the form of a question. We in old England remember Presbyterianism of three or more centuries ago, and some of us suffered under it; and now here we are and we see these exercises, and we witness this dinner, and we note the presence of the representative of Harvard University, and of the President of Kings College of New York, and of the Bishop of New York, and other representatives of the Anglican Church, and we ask the question, is this Presbyterianism when it has come to its full fruition?

My next remark is one of wonderment. Do we of the ancient Universities of England hear that in this school there are five representatives of different denominations, and among the students studying theology to-day are representatives of twenty denominations? Do we understand that? Are we dreaming? Is it possible that in the new country the churches have come to that, and the Christians have come to that, and that young men and old men can study theology together in the spirit of the love of truth, and in the fullness of charity, and that without yielding to one or another their faith or holdings? If that be so, God be praised, for our traditions in England are such that we have been unable to do that; but God be praised that a land has risen where that can be done.

And a word of congratulation and of God-speed. Now we begin to see how America has worked out the problem of Christian thought and love and of spiritual freedom. You by the separation of Church and State, with all your laws, avoid questions of which you still don't know the nature. With freedom of Church, liberty of thought, with the readiness on the part of the Church to let every man seek his own way in the seeking of the truth, we have such confidence in Christ, the truth, that we believe that in that freedom there will be