constancy, your considerateness, your loyalty will be an enduring memory.

And so you go out to do men's work in the world. You will find your work, and you will accomplish it. May all that is best in the manhood of the College's half-century live in your arm, your brain, your heart. Some of you may come back fifty years hence, to rejoice in the College's rounded century, and to talk of these ancient days of '97. Then, and so long as the world stands, may there center in Beloit College and go forth from it clear-visioned, resolute and dedicated manhood, to be the strength, the life, the salvation of the world.

BELOIT'S ENTHUSIASM FOR HUMANITY;

ITS SOURCE AND AIM.

Address Before the Christian Associations.

REV. JAMES D. EATON, '69, CHIHUAHUA, MEXICO.

DURING these anniversary days there will be many to speak of the early conditions and events, the individual and social influences, which have made the college what it is, and have produced certain traits of character in the body of its students and alumni. For the past explains the present; and with this lesson learned, we can more safely venture upon a forecast of what the world may reasonably expect to gain, in high impulse and fruitful service, from the young lives still to be nurtured here.

While it is not possible to make a thorough and complete analysis of the formative influences which have been at work here for fifty years, we may distinguish and describe some prominent features of the life of the college, which have been reproduced in the lives of its graduates as a whole, thus creating what might be termed a family likeness amongst those who, while working out widely different problems and dealing with very diverse materials, have yet been moved by kindred sympathies and impulses, and have recognized the authority of the same guiding principles.

It is left to others to speak of what has developed the intellectual life of the graduates; what has created a thirst for knowledge, has quickened a spirit of investigation, and al

lowed it to do its work with fearless honesty, saying "Let what will, fall; the truth of God will stand in perfect selfconsistency;" what rich fruits have been gathered through calm reflection, as well as by means of wide acquaintance with the stimulating thoughts of master minds.

But before these Christian Associations it falls to me, as representing particularly one group of the alumni, to refer to those influences in the college which have nurtured the missionary spirit amongst its graduates.

You will please observe that this study need not limit our view to those individuals who, under the impulse of this spirit, have been led to undertake a work in foreign lands. For it is a joy to recognize the close kinship uniting them who think of the world as one, just as God is one, and his truth is one, and who know that the basal needs of men, and the remedy for their errors and sins, are everywhere the

same.

Our concern then is to know the influences which have not merely produced the men now at work in China and Japan, in India, Turkey and Mexico, but which have further nurtured the missionary spirit amongst the graduates of the college as a whole.

We might have reversed the order of the members in this sentence, and proposed to contemplate that missionary spirit which gave birth to, and nurtured the life of the college.

The oft-told story of how devout, far-seeing men--and women too-prayed and gave and toiled, in order that the college might be, need not be repeated now; but this brief reminder may enable us the better to understand whence came the spirit which has been transmitted from class to class, widely permeating the body of the alumni.

To one who gains acquaintance with the various movements of those earlier days, who scans the written records of this institution, and who comes into touch with the life which has animated successive generations of students, and

is pulsing strongly through the scholarly body of to-day, there is clearly discernible the effectual operation of certain master principles or passions, that are worthy of mention. (1) First may be named a spirit of Enterprise.

*

Those first ministers and founders and instructors were men of push and daring, of courage and endurance, of consecrated enterprise; and it was wholly natural that they should stamp this characteristic of theirs upon the life of the college, the choicest offspring of their prayers and sacrifices.

(2) Closely allied to this quality is that of Faith. So near is the resemblance, that in the business world enterprise often passes for faith. * *

The faith of Jesus was a principle,-vital, persistent, productive, working in all those to whom has come his word; so that the college which at one time, as Prof. Emerson has said, "was just a prayer," but from the first was "rich in faith," born rich, and richly nourished by faithfilled prayer, has been grandly productive of men in all walks of life who have believed, and therefore have spoken and wrought, have loved, suffered and triumphed.

Enterprise through faith; faith working out in forms of Christian enterprise; the same heavenly partnership which was suggested in the noble words of a leader in the first uprising of missionary enthusiasm in the last century, William Carey, who said: "Expect great things from God (that is faith); attempt great things for God," (that is enterprise).

(3) Any one who has learned to say that, from his heart, has within himself the making of a hero. For what is heroism? Is it not simply the doing of one's duty with calm resoluteness in the face of whatever difficulties or dangers? This spirit of devotion has been a characteristic of the influential men of the college from the first, manifested in founders, instructors, and the graduates most truly representative of the institution.

(4) But the enlightened Christian knows that he most surely promotes the glory of God, who most signally advances the good of man. And it has been the endeavor of the college to teach us, her children, that the extent of our personal endowments and acquisitions should be regarded as the measure of our debt and devotion to the welfare of mankind.

What has been the response to such instruction, by the young lives nurtured here?

When the college was but fourteen years of age came the call to save the country from disunion. Up to that time there had been under instruction here, including the preparatory department, some 750 young men, of whom scarcely 500 could be said to be liable to military duty. Yet 400 went into the army, 46 of these laying down their lives in the nation's defense. When peace had been restored, and the ranks of the classes filled up again with old soldiers and with newer students, then was heard more distinctly the continuing call to save the world; and within the next ten years the college sent into the foreign field, under commission from our own American Board, more men than did any other college under Congregational auspices, with but two exceptions, Yale and Amherst. With Yale, it was tied; by Amherst alone was it surpassed.

During those ten years it was the same college it had been during the preceding four, from 1861-65. The same spiritual life was pulsing, in professors and students, throughout both periods; but as it was confronted with different conditions, so it manifested its vitality in diverse ways.

If the inquiry proposed at the beginning were to be put to those of us who heard the inspiring address in the college chapel on Memorial Day, that magnificent setting forth of the master motives which swayed certain of our brothers in their bearing of witness to truth and right, undoubtedly the confident reply would be, "a marked influence in the college