universal. The truth of man is as universal as the truth of matter, and, under present conditions of communication, must in the end draw the nations together. The recent advance of the backward nations is hardly realized by us. They have made more speed in progress relatively than ourselves. We have progressed in knowledge of the nature of matter and in the mechanic artsthings easily communicated and to be quickly appropriated. In certain matters, it is to be remembered, some of the backward nations have a greater past than ourselves, in art and in thought, for example. I myself regard America as a backward nation in her own group. We have had but one original thinker in the last generation, William James, and I had to go to Europe to find it out; they do not seem to know it yet in Boston. A brief contact with Continental thought and affairs is sufficient to reveal, not only the finer quality, variety, and potency of civilizing power there, but the great gap by which we fail of their realized advance in ideas, measures, and anticipations; there one feels the pulses of the world. I cannot overstate my sense of the degree in which we lag behind in all that concerns the world except trade. I feel the more regret, therefore, when I observe the weakening of our hold on the one great principle that has distinguished us as a nation—our sense of political justice, in which we have stood at least equally with France and England in the van. America's title to glory among the nations is her service to human liberty. I can bear that we should fail, relatively, in art and letters, have little sense of beauty or skill in man's highest wisdom, philanthropic thought, or in his highest faculty, imagination; but I cannot bear that we should fail in justice. I cannot bear that we should tear the Declaration across, revoke our welcome to the poor of all the earth, tyrannize over weaker states, conduct our diplomacy on a basis of trade instead of right, or abate by a hair's breadth our standard of human respect for all mankind. I lament the acquiescence of the times in a general recreancy to our fathers' principles. "The feet of the avenging hours are shod with wool," said the old Greeks. In the end God takes his price. But I pray that America may yet long maintain at home and abroad that Declaration which at our birth lit the hopes of all the world. I have wearied you with long talking; but my heart is in my words. It has become plain as I have been speaking that I have set forth some elements of the American ideal, and that at the heart of that ideal is a faith. Phillips embodied it. We all need a faith, however we may strive to be rationalistic, agnostic, and to move only on the sure ground of ascertained truth. Without faith we are without horizons, a line of march, something ahead. All great rallying cries are in the future. Faith is beyond us our better part; it is the complement of the American ideal, its atmosphere and heavenly sustenance. The faith of one age is the fact of the next; and then how differently it looks! The fact seems as if it had always been. When the victor is crowned, his path to the goal looks as plain and straight as the king's highway. Who could miss that road? How simple was Phillips's career! It was a case of the hour for the man as well as the man for the hour, from his first sally when the unknown youth of twenty-four climbed the platform of Faneuil Hall and at the first blow threw his already triumphing opponent dead and forever dishonored on the field. How prac tical he was! Defeat and victory alike were weapons in his hands. He had been preaching disunion for a quarter of a century, when he stepped forth as the chief orator of the Union cause. He was capable of that great reversal. He welcomed all instruments - yes, welcomed "dynamite and the dagger" in their place, while Harvard sat spell-bound at the rapt and daring defense of the world-proscribed cause by the lonely truth-teller. Do you wonder that the people loved their great tribune at the last? Boston to-day has seen from dawn to midnight such a commemoration as the city has not witnessed in my time - the people's tribute. Other recent centennials have been rather conventional affairs; but to-day the Boston pavements that he loved, as he said, from when his mother's hands held up his toddling steps, have waked their music, and every footfall has been a note in the thanksgiving psalm of the city for a son worthy of his birthplace. our causes are How simple it seems now! but we doubtful; "we are but one or two," we say. Did crowds go with him? "We shall be discredited." Did he move amid applause? "And then, the risks," we add. Did he run none? You need not fear that your shoulder to the wheel will greatly accelerate anything in this old world; a thousand elements of power must conjoin in any great forward and revolutionary change; the fate of the world speeds only when the horses of the god draw the car. It is impossible to lead life without taking risks. I know that much that I have said to-night is heavy with risk. The willingness to take risks is our grasp of faith. Risk is a part of God's game, alike for men and nations. You must look down the mouth of a revolver to learn how often it misses the mark. Pol troonery steadies the aim of the foe. Death is not the worst of life. Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure. Above all, do not draw back because everything is not plain, and you may, perhaps, be mistaken; obscurity is always the air of the present hour; "at the evening time," please God, "there shall be light." No great career opens before us; for us if in our daily lives we make one person a little happier every day — and that is not hard to do if one attends to it. - it is enough; but should the hour come to any one of us, and that rallying cry be heard from out the dim future, his place is in the ranks, though mere food for powder. I am speaking of the battlefields and heroes of peace, and of what may easily happen. For that soul which is one and the same in the rich and the poor, the wise and the ignorant, the good and the bad, a moral power, may answer to the divine prompting in one as in another. Men differ in place, honor, and influence, but there is one seamless garment of life for all. There is one lesson that blazes from Phillips's memory- the principle of sacrifice as an integral element in normal life. He gave all-fortune, fame, friends. I am not thinking of that initial step. I am thinking of his home. That plain New England house, that almost ascetic home, scantily furnished for simple needs, a rich man's home, as wealth was then accounted in that community, foregoing enjoyments, refinements, luxuries, natural to his birth and tastes, in order that the unfortunate might be less miserable, is the monument by which in my mind I remember him: a life of daily sacrifice. This is, as it were, our baptismal night. I wish I might dip you in these spiritual waters. It is nothing that we are humble; the |