BACCALAUREATE SERMON.

Despite the heavy rain yesterday afternoon, Appleton Chapel was crowded when Rev. Lyman Abbott, D. D., delivered the Baccalaureate sermon. Taking for his text the twentieth chapter of Matthew, twenty-sixth, twenty-seventh, and twenty-eighth verses, Dr. Abbott spoke as follows:

This expression of the life of service is Christ's test of character, his conception of life. The greatest man is he who does his fellow-man the greatest good. Christ did not measure men by their ceremonial observances. He never once told a man to offer a sacrifice. He simply said "Go and sin no more." His one measure of character was service. He who helped are apostate was in Christ's eyes greater than he who offered the most elaborate sacrifice. Service was the touchstone which Christ applied even to His own life. He lived simply that He might serve.

This Christlike conception can most fifly be applied to the life of today. All those professions are religious which are spent in the service of man, and those are secular which are spent in the service of self. Nothing is more irreligious than idleness wherever it exists. While a selfish poor man may be sometimes excused, there is nothing to be said for the idlerich man, who, knowing right, does nothing for the world. The world furnishes us the foundation of all life, which it is our duty to build upon. He who handles the pick or shovel is most truly serving humanity in making Nature's treasures available for all men.

But not only does Nature furnish us the foundation on which to build; she also gives us the forces wherewith the hard work of the world shall be done. Men are studying and mastering the forces of Nature to make them do their drudgery. God grinds our grist for us if we will but let Him.

The food on the prairie, the wood in the forest, all have to be made serviceable through commerce. The function of the merchant should be, not to make money, but to serve his fellows by furnishing them the necessaries of life. Every transaction is to be measured by this test. The only way in which a self-respecting man can acquire property is through his brain or his brawn. The desire to get something for nothing is in itself dishonest.

In this community of ours men stand in moral relations to one another which should be founded on justice. The lawyer is properly the minister of justice. Law is the will of a superior imposed on an inferior in general terms. But in our community of democracy the people determine what they wish and the legislature embodies these wishes in law. The lawyer in the legislature, then, is merely the servitor of the community.

The newspaper of today is unsparingly condemned for revealing to us so many of the horrors and unpleasant things of life. We forget that the press is a mirror which should reflect the community just as it is. But the American press is not today actuated by the purpose to tell men the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The mirror is warped and shows us wrong in an utterly distorted form. The journalist's life is one of splendid opportunity, for the press today is sorely in need of men who will deny their pocketbook to maintain their manhood. The true greatness of a journal is not to be measured by its circulation, but by the truth it tells and the influence it wields.

And so in all things the function of man is to serve his fellows. The function of the poet and the writer is to give humanity ideals worth the having. The realism which simply tells us what life is not a worthy, because not a serving form of literature. The true preacher is he who has the right spirit and the power to impart it to others.

Dr. Abbott closed with an earnest appeal to his hearers to enter the broad life of action with the burning desire to be rich only in the meaning given by Christ to the word, and to stir the souls of men to nobler, higher service.