AN OXFORD LECTURE.

Thames Star, Volume VIII, Issue 2903, 5 June 1878, Page 4

AN OXFORD LECTURE.

First cultivate all your personal powers, I - tot competitively, but patiently and use-] fully. You hare no business to read in j • the long -vacation. Gome here to make scholars of yourselves, and go to the mountains of to the- sea to make men of yourselves. Give at least a month in each" year to rough sailor's work and sea fishing. ' Don't lounge and flirt on .the beach, but make yourselves good seamen. Then, on the mountains, go and help the shepherd at his work, the woodmen at theirs, and

learn to know the hills by,night and day. If you are staying in level country, learn to plough and whatever else ' you can that is useful. Then, here in Oxford, read to the utmost of^ your power, and practice siuging, fencing, wrestling, and riding. No rifle practice, and no racing—boat or other. Leave the river quiefc for the naturalist, the angler, and the weary student like me, You may think all these-matters, of no.consequence to your studies of art and divinity ; and that I am merely crochetty and absurd. Well, that is the way the devil deceives you. it is not the sins which we feel sinful by which he catches • us, but apparently healthy ones—those which^ nevertheless, waste the time, harden the heart, concentrate the passions on mean objects, and prevent tho course of gentle and fruitful thought. Having thuSvCultivatecl, in the time of your studentship, your powers truly to the utmost, tiien, in your manhood, be resolved the,y shall be spent in the true service of men—not in being ministered unto but in ministering. Begin with the simplest of , all ministries—breaking of bread to the poor. Think first of that, not of your own pride, learning, comfort, prospects in life ; nay, not now, once come to manhood, may even the obedience to parents check your own conscience to your Master's work. "Whoso loveth father and mother more than Me is not worthy of Me." Take the perfectly simple words of :tlie Judgment, "Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least of these, ye did it unto Me;" but you must do it, not preach it. And you must not be resolved tliat it shall j. be done, only in a gentlemanly manner. Your pride must be' laid down, as your avarice, and your fear. Whether as fishermen on the sea, ploughmen on the earth, labourers at the forge, or merchants at. the shopcounter, yog must brcuk and distribute bread to the poor, set down in companies—for that also is literally told you—upon the green grass, not rushed in heaps under the pavement of cities. Take Christ at His literal word, and, so sure as His word is true, He will bo known of you in breaking of bread, liefuse that servant's duty because it is plain—seek either to serve God, or know Him, in any Other way-—your service will become mockery'of Him, and your knowledge darkness. Every day your virtues will J be used by the evil spirits to conceal, or j to .make respectable, national crime; every day your felicities will become baits for the iniquities of-others; your heroisms, wreckers' beacons, betraying them to destruction; and before your own de-

ceived eyes and wnudering hearts every false meteor of knowledge will flash, and every perishing pleasure glow, to hire you into the gulf of your grave. —Euskin, in Nineteenth Century.