AN

ADDRESS

DELIVERED TO THE GRADUATES OF

BROWN UNIVERSITY,

AT THE COMMENCEMENT,

SEPTEMBER 5th, 1810.

BY ASA MESSER, D. D.

THE PRESIDENT.

AN ADDRESS.

THOUGH YOU, young gentlemen, are now finishing your collegiate course, you are not, I hope, yet finishing your literary course. Notwithstanding the respectable progress you have already made, there is still, you must be sensible, a long way between you and the top of the hill of science. Should you stop where you now are, you would resemble those who put the hand to the plow and look back. Should you never make any farther progress, the progress you have already made would engender reproach rather than applause. Reproach, you very well know, is apt enough to follow those who reach not the general expectation; and it is the general expectation that those who have had liberal advantages should also have liberal attainments. But liberal attainments always suggest persevering exertion. If you possess them now, you cannot, without this, possess them long. Like the water in Tantalus' cup, your treasures of knowledge, unless often replenished, will soon waste away. In an entire neglect of study, no man can long remain even in statu quo. A NEWTON, a LOCKE, а BURKE, a LA PLACE must, in this case, soon begin to fall from their envied elevation. Whether affected, therefore, by the hope of rising high, or by the fear of sinking low in the estimation of the world, you should, at any rate,

devote much of your future time to the completion of the literary course you have now begun.

A moral character, however, stands high above a literary. Knowledge, indeed, combined with guilt, will always give to guilt itself a blacker hue. To the very worst imaginable image of man, to the one exhibiting him as similar as possible to the very Prince of the dungeon below, a head the most informed is as essential as a heart the most malignant. Let your other attainments be ever so respectable, they can never become a substitute for moral principle: they can never give you the rank which this will give you in the eye of the world. Wholly destitute of moral principle, you would, indeed, be wholly unworthy the esteem, the confidence and friendship of every man on earth; and, without these, what on earth can you possibly discover, which is worthy a single exertion?-Were you to fix your attention exclusively on the objects of the earth; were you, without any regard to another world, to strive to secure the greatest possible treasure in this; were you to feel, what God forbid you ever should feel, responsible only to yourselves and to your fellow-men, the voice of reason would still direct you to follow the path of truth, of justice and benevolence; to cherish, indeed, that moral character, which is fair, unsullied, irreproachable.

Though this would evidently be the voice of reason, I must still remind you that, in such a case, men would not be apt to follow it. DAVID HUMES are seldom found in the ranks of infidelity. Infidels in principle are ready to become profligates in practice. Affected neither by the fear or the love of God, nor by the hopes or fears of a future retribution, men are ready to think that "the end will sanctify the means;" and to say, "let us eat, and drink ;" let us curse, and swear; let us lie, and steal; let us, at all events, gratify our passions and our appetites. -Religion, young gentlemen, religion is the great support of morality; and this consideration alone should induce you ever to revere and to follow the principles of religion. Can you, indeed, once suspect the correctness of the principles which are essential to the preservation among men of truth, of peace, of order, of justice, of sobriety, of beneficence; of principles as essential to the welfare of nations, of families and individuals,

as light and heat and rain are to the progress of vegetation? -But the correctness of these principles does not depend solely on this consideration. Can you even imagine that a watch can exist without a maker, or a ship without a builder? Can you in any case allow that a man has made himself, or that a world has sprung out of nothing? Yet these are the very absurdities and contradictions, which all must virtually adopt, who deny the being, the power and the wisdom of God. You must therefore, accept the most important principles, the very groundwork of all religion; or you must reject the most important principles, the very ground-work of all reasoning. You must acknowledge either that there is a GOD, or that nothing and something, reason and madness, black and white, ten and one are the very same.

Can you make yourselves believe that the tongue of man can change the very laws of nature? can cure the lame, the blind, the deaf, the dumb? can stop the wind, the plague, the storm, the flood? can you raise the dead? Can you make yourselves believe that the eye of man can look through the veil which separates the present and the future time, and discern with accuracy the production of thousands and millions of events, depending, perhaps a thousand years to come, on the voluntary exercises of the soul of man? Can you make yourselves believe that it was in the power of any man, at the time of HOMER, or VIRGIL, or even of MILTON, to specify the events which are this day occurring in Europe, or America; or which are this moment occurring in this town, in this house, on that stage, in this pulpit? Yet such is only a part of the absurd things virtually adopted by all who reject the religion generally received in this country, the religion of the blessed IMMANUEL. Never give any countenance, then, to the insinuation that this religion befits only the weak, the vulgar, the credulous, the ignorant!

It would not be less difficult to reconcile such an insinuation with a statement of facts, than with the deductions of reason. For a number of centuries, have not the talents, the genius, the learning of the civilized world stood principally on the side of this religion? Has not this been the case with the most celebrated philosophers, astronomers, poets, orators, historians, mathe