struggles for existence, their infancy, their impotence, and even their disorganization, they have higher hopes and nobler passions. Out of the suffering comes the serious mind; out of the salvation, the grateful heart; out of the endurance, the fortitude; out of the deliverance, the faith. But when the violent and external sources of suffering cease, worse evils seem arising out of their rest-evils that vex less, but mortify morethat suck the blood, though they do not shed it, and ossify the heart, though they do not torture it." Yes, in every prosperous institution there is danger that "enervation may succed to rest, apathy to patience, and the noise of jesting words, and the foulness of dark thoughts, to the earnest purity of the girded loin and the burning lamp. About the river of human life there is a wintry wind, though a heavenly sunshine: the iris colours its agitation—the frost fixes on its repose. Let us beware that our rest becomes not the rest of stones, which, so long as they are torrent-tost and thunder-riven, maintain their majesty, but when the stream is silent and the storm passed, suffer the grass to cover and the lichen to feed on them, and are ploughed down into the dust." To sum up, then, in one last word-it was the duty of others to found, it is ours to build on their foundation; of others to rescue Marlborough from adversity, it is ours to preserve and to ennoble her prosperity; of others to mould our institutions, it is ours to see that those institutions, year by year, train every grace and virtue of boyhood into the strength of Christian manhood, and send forth, in the high service of God and man, Christian scholars and Christian gentlemen to be the hope and glory of our land. Love your school with an unselfish and loyal devotion. Feel how disgraceful it would be to wound, by worthlessness or wickedness, the breast of that mother who thus nurses your early years. If you work for yourselves, feel it a yet higher thing to work for her honour; covet for Marlborough College a high career and a more and more distinguished name; covet for her yet more earnestly the best gifts of a pure and manly tradition, a vigorous and happy life. To her, and not to another, is your faithful allegiance, your chivalrous devotion due. Spartam nactus es, hanc exorna. You are not at a tutor's to be crammed, as isolated units, for some purely selfish competition: from the necessarily vulgarising influences of such an absorption in a merely personal end you are saved by the vigorous and varied life of an English public school, which, if a boy's heart be not quite eaten out by selfishness, is enough, one would think, to ennoble the meanest nature with the thought that his life does not affect himself alone. Throw a stone into a still lake, and you will see the rings of its ruffled surface widen and widen till they die away upon the farther shore: even so, in the concentric circles of their ever-widening influences, do the lives of every one of you leave their trace in the common life of your companions. From this school many an old Marlburian has gone forth, year by year, not only with well-earned laurels, which they have won for us by manly self-denial and diligent resolve; but-what is better still-carrying with them into the world's life high lessons which they have learnt in this place-lessons of earnest purpose, of unresting diligence, of childlike and gentlest modesty. It is these who, by the grace of God, have created for Marlborough a not ignoble past. Marlborough boys of to-day-you whom God has placed here for the most intellectually difficult, the most morally important years of all your livessons of Marlborough College, all of you, and, most of all, M.S. R you who will kneel with us in Holy Communion at the Supper of our Lord-determine, in God's name, that you too will heedfully follow the very best and truest of those who have gone before you in the footsteps of our Master Christ; vow that, like them, as the worthy sons of a common mother, you will strive here to be profitable members of the Church and Commonwealth, that with them you may partake hereafter of the immortal glories of the Resurrection. September 27, 1874. IN MEMORIAM M. M. WILKINSON, D.D. Aye, they are o'er-his pain and his endeavour, He sowed the seed with sorrow and with weeping, And yet of him nor word nor line remaineth, Picture nor bust, his work and worth to tell; So-since ye will it here be unrecorded The work he fashioned and the path he trod; F. W. F SERMON XXV THE NEED OF CONSTANT CLEANSING FROM JOHN xiii. 10. "He that is washed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit: and ye are clean, but not all." I. IT was at the Last Supper of the Lord. Jesus and His apostles had taken, for the last time, the familiar walk from Bethany to Jerusalem, and had entered the upper chamber for their final gathering on earth. Even at that supreme moment the petty jealousies of life had not been exorcised, and the twelve had had an unseemly dispute which of them should be greatest. Jesus listened in pained silence, and wishing to teach them a lesson infinitely more significant and more touching than any rebuke, knowing that His hour was come to depart out of this world unto the Father, having loved His own, He loved them unto the end. They had walked along the hot and dusty road over the shoulder of Olivet; on entering the chamber they had indeed taken off their sandals and left them at the door; but still the dust of their journey was on their unsandalled feet. To have their feet bathed before the meal was cooling, cleanly, and refreshing; but in their little mutual jealousies, no one had offered to perform the menial office. And therefore, when supper was ready for so the words ought to be rendered,-Jesus, as the scene in all its minute details had impressed itself on the memory of the Evangelist of love, rose in perfect silence, stripped off His upper garment and tunic, took a towel, girt it round His waist, poured water into a bason, and began to wash the disciples' feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith He was girded. The example of so infinite a humility kept them dumb with deep shame, until Jesus came to Peter; but the warmhearted, eager apostle starts back with almost indignant surprise. "Lord," he exclaims with his usual irrepressible emotion, "Dost Thou mean to wash my feet?" Thou the Son of God, the King of Israel,-Thou that hast the words of eternal life,-Thou who camest forth from God, and goest to God, perform a slave's office for Peter's feet? It is the old strange mixture of selfconceit and self-disgust,—the self-conceit of old, which under the shadow of Hermon had called upon him so stern a rebuke when he had said "That be far from Thee, Lord; this shall not be unto Thee;" the self-disgust which of old, on the Lake of Galilee, had flung him to his knees with that great cry wrung from his yearning heart, "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, oh Lord." "What I do," said Jesus--and His words apply to all our mortal life, in which the lamp of faith can alone fling a little ring of illumination amid the encircling gloom-"What I do thou knowest not now, but thou shalt know hereafter." Unconvinced, he impetuously cries out, "Never, never, till the end of time shalt Thou wash my feet." "If I wash thee not," said Jesus gently, revealing to him the profound significance of the act, "thou hast no part in Me." "Little as thou mayest understand it, yet it is I, even I, who must wash thy feet, and no other. Thou canst not do it thyself. I |