Beloved Students:—I am more than satisfied with your work: its grandeur almost surprises me. Let your watch-word always be,—Great, not like Cæsar, but only great as good. You are not setting up to be great; you are here for the purpose of grasping and defining the demonstrable, the eternal. Spiritual heroes and prophets are they whose new-old birthright is to put an end to falsities in a wise way, and to proclaim Truth so winningly that an honest, fervid affection for the race is found adequate for its emancipation.
You are the needful and the inevitable sponsors for the twentieth century, reaching deep down into the universal, and rising above theorems into the transcendental, the infinite—yea, the reality of God, man, nature—the universe. No fatal circumstance of idolatry can fold or falter your wings, no Fetishism with a symbol can fetter your flight. You soar only as uplifted by God's power, or you fall for lack of it. You know that to conceive God aright, you must be good. The Christ mode of understanding Life,—exterminating sin and suffering, and their penalty, death,—I have largely committed to you, my twelve faithful witnesses. You go forth to face the foe with loving look, and, with the religion and philosophy of labor, duty, liberty, and love, to challenge universal indifference, chance, and creeds. Your highest inspiration is that nearest the Divine Principle, and nearest the scientific expression of Truth. You may condemn evil in the abstract without harming any one, or your own moral sense; but persons seldom, if ever. Improve every opportunity to correct sin through your own perfectness. When error strives to be heard above truth, let the "still small voice" produce God's phenomena. Meet the raging element of individual hate dispassionately, and counteract its most gigantic falsities.
The moral abandon of hating even one's enemies excludes goodness: hate is a moral idiocy let loose for one's own destruction. Unless withstood, the heat of hate burns the wheat, spares the tares, and sends forth a mental miasma fatal to health, happiness, and the morals of mankind: and all this only to satiate its loathing of love, and its revenge on the patience, silence, and lives of saints. The marvel is, that at this enlightened period a respectable newspaper should countenance such evil tendencies.
