fields, while they fought for the lives of the colonists against untamed Indians. And their progress was hindered, sometimes blocked, by their tongue, a mere dialect, without a literature and forbidden utterance in school or worship. But in these two hundred years their blood has proved stronger than that of those they lived among. They have preserved their identity and their peculiarity and now their language is dying out and they are merging into this great American people, which owes so much to other elements than the Anglo-Saxon, though it claims to include them all. You brought your pastors along; you came into a country with larger opportunities; you arrived on the crest of a great immigration; and you had leaders who united with a deep piety towards the faith and country of your fathers a clear insight, a wide outlook, and a skilful mastery of the future. So, I say, in a halfcentury you have arrived at the stage which it took us two hundred years to attain.

One thing has marked you and us alike; we never have been content to cast aside that which was our own-our inherited character, —the traditions and faith of our fathers. Our whole past history, yours and ours alike, has been devoted to the consolidation of our people, to the recovery of our own treasures, to the cultivation of and fidelity to that which makes us to differ from other people.

The stage which our educational work has reached betokens the conception of this preparation and our emergence into the national life of the American people as a distinct and responsible element. It is signalized by the erection and dedication of this great library. It is noteworthy that at our own principal school of theology we have recently dedicated a great library, which already has begun to revolutionize our method of training. A library is a storehouse of the thought of all times, and a clearinghouse for the thought of our own time. Before this our method was the use of approved textbooks. We dictated to our students a system of belief. In the library our students will become independent investigators. When we add these libraries to our schools, and make them central in them, we put our thinkers into touch with the entire intellectual life of our time, and we bid them fearlessly examine it, to use it, to criticise it, to resist it, to direct, to control it. The tone of the

intellectual life of our time is not in harmony with the traditional character of our people or our Church. The intellectual life of our time is very like that of the Renaissance, from which the Reformation saved the peoples of Europe. It is influenced by heathen philosophy and what is called the scientific spirit, which measures and limits everything by experiment. It aims at the kingdom of Man over against the Kingdom of God. The burden of modern university teaching and modern literature is Naturalism. It is fearless in inquiry, and no reverence hinders it from uttering its whole thought.

The spirit of Lutherans is devoutly conservative. It is historical. It reveres that which has come down to us from the past. Our beliefs, usages, ideals are more precious because they were our fathers' and because they received them at the hand of their fathers from the earliest ages of the Church. Our spirit is positive. The peculiarities of our church life were developed under monarchical government. Our spirit is biblical. But happily it is not Judaic. We hold the beliefs and principles of Christianity as they were recognized by Teutonic men. In an essential particular we differ from that conception of religion which has had so great a part in shaping the earlier periods of American history, but seems to have yielded completely to the tendencies of the present age; and it is a great advantage to us, as we come into the arena, that Christianity, the gospel, never has been conceived by Lutherans as Law.

The main problems we shall have to meet are exegetical and practical, the estimation and interpretation of the Word of God in the light of the present day; and the application of the Word of God to new pressing needs in the life of men. We are compelled to examine our system of belief in the light of modern discovery and with improved methods of illustration and proof. Our Bible may not be a dictionary of prooftexts. We must find in it a revelation. Beyond the formulas and definitions by which our old masters anatomized the truth we must hear and bear witness to the living Christ who speaks in the gospel, that we may make men hear that voice and live.

Lutheran teachers have not been unfruitful in the field of Ethics. But, doubtless, they have been in large measure conserva

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tive apologists for the social arrangements of Germany. We have to meet not only those processes of social dissolution which are peculiar to a new country, but those forces, which, under the impulse of "the new learning," are sweeping over the whole world. Old forms do not avail to hold the effervescence of the new spirit. Religion is decried as Hebraism. Men spread out their arms in the air of a new freedom, and bask in the indulgence of eye and ear and sense. Conscience is confused. The family was the unit of the former ethics; but the family seems to be doomed. Socialism is proclaimed as the new gospel, and promises an earthly happiness, and claims to say the final word in the development of society. Are we able to stand against the tide ?

Our faith is more than a theology. It has been described as the theologia crucis. Paul preached a crucified Christ; and so have we learned him. The atonement, more than the incarnation, has been the focus of our religion; the Saviour giving himself for the sins of the world even more than the king seated at the right hand of God. And as ours is the theology of the Cross, may we not have an answer to all the questions of the time in the Ethics of the Cross, the mind that was in Christ Jesus? There we find the sanction of Righteousness, the supremacy of obedience, the unity of man, the grace of God. In the conflict of labor and capital, of wealth and persons, the angry debate of those who clamour for an equal division, for an average of happiness, for a general level of condition and opportunity, may we not teach how to bear one another's burdens and to fulfil the Law of Christ?

It is in the hope that our faith is real enough and deep enough to bear the strain, with a sense of the responsibility that is upon. us, with ardent confidence in the calling of the American people, and with entire dependence on Christ with us, that I congratulate you that you and we have taken up the battle.