of the Lord be on you. To the younger: take heed, regard not iniquity; take heed that no man deceive you. To the elder take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones; take heed what thou doest. To the abler and more advanced: take heed that the light in you be not darkness; take heed of an evil heart of unbelief. To all—to every one of you: take heed how ye hear; take heed of the things you have heard, lest perchance you drift away from them. September 4, 1874. SERMON XXIV. THE HISTORY AND HOPES OF A PUBLIC SCHOOL. Ps. cxxii. 8. "For my brethren and companions' sake, I will wish thee prosperity. Yea, because of the house of the Lord our God, I will seek to do thee good." LAST Sunday I spoke to you of the temple of God in a Christian school, and tried to show you that it must be built on the broad foundation of truth, and that we, if we would be builders therein, must be true to ourselves, true to one another, true to God. It seems no unnatural sequel to such a subject if to-day I speak to you about our school itself. You will pardon me if, in the inadequate attempt to say even a little of what might be said on such a theme, I unwillingly detain you a moment longer than usual. I am persuaded you will not think the topic useless. Anything that raises us to the full consciousness that we are not our own, but members one of another-anything that deepens in us the conviction that God has placed us in this His world not to seek our own pleasure, or think our own thoughts, or speak our own words, but to do His work in our own hearts, and for our fellow-men-this must be good for us. Many a sin and many a baseness will be destroyed or weakened if we can thus kill within us the perverted love of self. Since, then, on Tuesday next we keep by a religious service that commemoration day which reminds us that Marlborough College has now, for thirty-one years, taken its plate among the Public Schools of England, let us to-day look backwards and forwards-backward to its past history, forward to its future hopes-in order that we may love our school still better, and the more heartily feel, and more vigorously follow our path of duty in its present circumstances. I. I need not do more than remind you of the associations which surround us in the place where our College stands,-yet even they have their deep significance. That Druidic mound which faces our chapel door is but one of the links which associate us with the past. Strange but humbling fact, that the most permanent memorial which man can rear is just a heap of the soil on which he treads! In that mound we have the most ancient monument in the possession of any English school. Once the tumulus of some great British priest or chieftain, it is the relic of a worship of which the very deities are forgotten, At Rome the stupendous ruins of the Colosseum strike us with wonder; but that mound was reared before one stone of the Colosseum had been laid-before the herald angels sang from the midnight sky-before, over the fields of Palestine walked those blessed feet, which "Eighteen hundred years ago were nailed For our salvation to the bitter cross.' it stood, in all probability as now it stands. And thus for two millenniums has it been the silent witness of that sacred light by which God "shows all things in the slow history of their ripening." When it was reared England was a country of waste and morass and moor, like Labrador; wolves howled in her forests, wild boars wallowed in her fens. Then came the "drums and tramplings" of successive conquests. Roman discipline subjugated barbarous disunion; Saxon, and Dane, and Norman each triumphed in turn over the enervation of their predecessors. Then our mound became the keep of a Norman castle. In the days of the Plantagenets English princes lived on it, and English kings have dated their charters from it. Through the long lines of Lancaster, and York, and Tudor, and Stuart, it continued. In the civil wars its castle was dismantled Then these grounds became the home of a noble English family, and in the reign of Charles II. our old house was built by the most famous architect of his age. How in those days it became familiar to poets, nobles, and statesmen-how then it became one of the most famous inns in England, and, as a resting-place between London and the West, was visited by many of England's greatest worthies, and among others by the most splendid and powerful of her Prime Ministers-you may read elsewhere. Then came that change which makes it so memorable to us. Thirty-one years ago, on August 25, 1843, the first Marlburians walked with considering footsteps about the place which was to be the new home of their boyhood, and to which, as time passed on, some of their sons were to follow them. Some of you who sit on these benches to-day are sons of some of those 200 who, thirty-one years ago, first entered this place as Marlborough boys; and of their traditions, of their influences, of their characters, of the motives brought to bear upon them, of the manner in which they yielded to those motives-so far-reaching are the pulsations of our moral life-all of you are the heirs. The sound of their boyish laughter, the echo of their appy voices has died away, and many of them have passed away from the life of earth. In a body so large as this many die as the years pass on. I remember the first boy who ever entered my room as a pupil here nearly twenty years ago. He lies now under the deep sea-wave. I remember the first head of my form here -that memorial window records his character. Yes, we die; but not the effect of our deeds. All other sounds "Die in yon rich sky, They faint in hill and field or river; If you be living weak, miserable, effeminate lives, then let it be a warning and an awful thought; if you are living true, manly, righteous lives, let it be an ennobling, an inspiring thought, that your lives too will live, in their moral echoes, for coming generations of Marlborough boys. II. And another fact reminds us that these thirty-one years, which are a generation of human life, have passed over this young school. It is that our first founders, our first benefactors, those who first worked, and toiled, and thought for us, are fast passing away. A wise impulse in this age, as in the days of Elizabeth, led to the foundation of many new schools. After the long and dreary slumber of a corrupt and atheist century, waked by the trumpet voices of Wesley and Whitfield, the clergy were beginning to shake off their apathy, and in every parish of England to practise those lives of stern self-denial and honoured poverty of which they now set so happy an example. There was a widespread desire to help them in furnishing their sons with an education as good as that of the proudest noble in the land. It was while that thought was in many minds |