THE TRUE SPIRIT OF THE STUDENT.

BY PRES. WHITE, D. D., WABASH COLLEGE, IND.

THE student will never think of keeping on his present intellectual costume. His growing stature should burst out of those garments, that fitted his early intellect and his incipient scholarship. He should never be found, like deer-herds, forever upon the same old stamping-ground. Overleaping all familiar enclosures, he will push, if he have the true spirit within him, into untraveled pathways, into uncultivated regions.

I desire to suggest a few explicit words to such as aspire to an education, in order to their best success in mental attainment; they shall be few, and I trust practical. I begin by exhorting you to study with a spirit of self-dependence.

cal opinions, by which all the accomplishments of life are effected.

Receive nothing among your dogmas with a mask on, nothing in gold leaf and varnish. Tear off all disguises, tap heart-currents, and learn what constitutes the real nature and hidden life of what is offered to you. Hear all opinions, but construct your own faith; know the skill of all mental artists, but give temper and edge to your own armor. Admit no man's nostrum certificates. Throw all compounds that are hawked abroad into the crucible; subject them to the most searching analyses. This independent studying is altogether essential to your intellectual progress. Unless you strike ahead, and, self-depending, push your own pathway, you will spend half of life in threading out the by-ways and crossways, and backways, and crooked ways, and hedged ways of other intellects. Project, survey, grub, grade, rail-lay your own road! and then move away despite all obstructions.

The treasures of wisdom already accumulated are surpassingly rich-they are immense. Drink deep out of them, but forget not that new sources are open to you. Draw out of these. Besides picking up the coin floating upon the thoroughfares of literature, go down to the gold-beds underlaying large territories. Bring up the virgin

Independence of mind does not forbid the reception from past generations, and from the present time, of all existing knowledge. It forbids receiving it passively as a hollow in a rock receiveth the rains, itself just as hard and sterile as before. It requires it to be received as the warm, mellow soil receives the showers of heaven, to be made itself more prurient of a rich vegetation. It requires it to be received as the physical frame receives the air, to imbibe from it a vital element for its whole circulation, just as the same frame receives nutritious food into its canals, to be elaborated, absorbed, assimilated into solid accretions for itself. You need not ride in every man's vehicle. But in one of your own, you may combine and use every improvement which human invention has suggested. So far as is practicable, let into your mind every light that has shone out from all previous generations. But be not content, like the insensate moon, to send back from a cold surface the same unchang-oply of the old Roman soldier would crush him.

ed rays, which you had before received. Let them shine into and through your own spirit, and then emerge, collected, warmed, colored by the medium through which they have passed, and all ready to blaze in a focus at any chosen point. In your struggles after intellectual advancement, make no attempts at balloon ascensions, by means of borrowed gas; you will be quickly down again to the point from whence you went up. Go up, like the eagle, on your own wings.

Independent-mindedness is specially important in the settlement of those permanent and practi

ore!

Study intensely. Feeble efforts of mind construct a habit of debilities, of faint, nerveless exertions, which eventually render spirit and power impracticable. A man may accustom himself to slight and gentle muscular action until the pan

So a man may softly, untaskingly read, and think, and compose, until, under intense and powerful intellections, his mind would hopelessly sink. Gird up the loins to bold stretches of thought, to strong invention: make ponderous strokes: utter deep under-tones, that shall shake earth and air! Count no ocean too deep to sound, no literary country too remote to penetrate ! Intensely think, intensely read, intensely write. Let every plea at the Bar, every argument before the people, every sermon to a congregation, every human malady, task all your powers, receive the

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lime and illustrious forms and great riches. To your researches she will freely unravel deep intricacies, open full treasures of practical wisdom, reveal profound and momentous doctrines! Let this fact, that truth, however undervalued and neglected, is still a precious pearl, and has surpassing beauty and importance, infuse into all your inquiries after knowledge a warm and irrepressible interest. It is in enchanted regions that you walk, while making your intellectual explorations. The facts, philosophies, divinities, humanities, duties, interests, destinies, revealed there, provide matter of excitement and gratification sufficient for all the finite and infinite, created and uncreated mind existing.

deepest attention of your minds, the application of their utmost capacity. Whatever is worth your intellectual effort at all, is worth the very best possible exertion. The rains wear away a stone, by drop after drop, through centuries and cycles of centuries. But you have not time for such a dull, slow, almost unending operation. Send your drill by daring, vigorous blows through the granite, lime rock, graywacke: explode it to fragments: lay it up into the noble temple. The meek, diffident stars may hide themselves and sleep, the moment the sun comes forth into the sky; radiate you a light intense enough to shine in the very face of the sovereign orb! By vast struggles constantly made by high accomplishments constantly attained, not only is immense power gained, immense work done, but man's inherent efficiencies are learned so as to augment achievement ever afterward. Away with these All truth lies enfolded in a system; is a grand cold, feeble, divergent intellectualities. Conver-scheme of affiliations; instead of being a congeries

gent, concentrated intensities are the demand of the times, the duty of all the professions and spheres of life. Dissociated, dispersed, imbecile mental exertions in the great scene of life before you, are but as the fine rain to turn round the pondrous wheel.

If in other periods desultory and faint mental exertions availed for the purposes of society, now the tide of human things is too high and overpowering to be governed, guided, or assisted by any but the most condensed and determined action of educated minds.

Let me also suggest, in order to your best literary advancement, that your inquiries be pursued with great interest and vivacity.

There is another charm attending the progress in search of knowledge, which ought to excite a great enthusiasm.

of isolations, is a vast complexure and whole, constituted of innumerable integrals attracted, arranged, bound together. Every part is involved inseparably with every other part. Whatever truth you have reached in any portion of your researches, is within the immense series. It was not a few pebbles which Newton had picked up on the shore of knowledge dropped, as that remark was, by the great Philosopher himself. Not a few pebbles was it which he had gathered! He had broken within the immense circumference, where, like the material universe, all knowledge is found in the form of systematized systems, and had traversed a few of its contiguous segments. He had followed truth through a few of her affinities and associations, and struck and partially illustrated some of the great permeating principles which create those affinities and associations.

Some men inertly dream instead of studying; sit and endure a book instead of communing joyously with its thoughts; coldly speculate on truth instead of drinking it in like thirsty men, as if they could never drink enough; to a logical, luminous argument and a glorious strain of eloquence, respond with a formal phlegmatic respect,volved, harmonized, dependent, influenced, in

Human knowledge, being thus regarded as an immense complication of truths correllated, in

instead of being carried captive, instead of an fluential, no one department of inquiry, no one enthusiasm, sparkling and thrilling through the item of knowledge on which you may fall, should whole being. Truth, in and of itself, is too beaube deemed insignificant. Its connections and detiful and brilliant; its various manifestations in pendencies may give it importance unmeasuraliterature, art, science, and religion too elevated ble! That thought, which seemed to you so inand valuable to be thus frigidly regarded. In all cidental, so trivial, is to all other thoughts allied. its characters and aspects, it has not only great It may be but a few steps distant from one of loveliness, lustre, and importance, but these qualithose splendid conceptions, which discover new ties are unchanging and unwaning. If it ever worlds, mark eras, awake the civilization of ages appear shorn, and veiled, and unimportant, it is and hemispheres. There is many an every-day only appearance. The eye of the observer is at truth, which so runs through philosophies, and fault: he looks through hazy obstructions, or disreligions, and governments, and human entercolored lenses. Provided you have a perception prises, as eventually to change the face of all huclear, piercing, strong, and a heart of sensibility man society. Thus linked, related, telegraphic, truly appreciative, truth will unfold to you sub- || great is truth, the matter of your study, the il

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