thousands of lives and millions in property were saved. Would you say those who fell there, were not successful, as soldiers? What of the martyrs who have died for Christianity? Will you say that their lives were not successful ? They were poor, most of them, they had little of what we call pleasure; they were little honored by the world at the time and in the end they died horrible deaths. But to whose efforts shall we ascribe the success of Christianity? Would it not be largely to these men, who, by sacrificing their welfare aided, the cause which became successful in the end? You know of many great inventors and discoverers who have died poor, neglected, and almost forgotten; but to whom belongs the honor of the success which their efforts finally produced? A man must accommodate himself to the cir cumstances in which he is placed; and if he is in the right to bravely stand, no matter what the odds are against him; for by so doing he increas es the general good. Never try to avoid that which it is your duty to do. A man may not be successful in all of his under takings, but the measure of his success will be ex pressed in the units of usefulness that he has ac complished, and not in units of the gold, the hon or, or the pleasure his efforts may bring him. These may come, and are desirable indeed; but they do not measure success in life, although some blindly look on them as the standards of success. I have spoken mainly of man’s material welfare, but his spiritual welfare is of far greater importance; and in conlcusion of the whole mat ter, it is not necessary to add, that if a man’s life has been such that he has failed to realize the great object for which he should have lived, and has failed to regard the laws which he should fol low to reach that end, no matter what his career has been, his life has been a complete failure. There are many views of the student in college today, and each is more or less seen as he contin ues his course. Students, because of this fact, THE FREE LANCE. cannot be classified except in a very general way. The attitude of the college man towards daily oc currences propably receives the greatest criticism. We are prone to judge men’s actions as the expres sion of their thought,—to look upon them as the wilful conceptions of the real self, when too often they are not merely sarcastic, but even assumed exteriors. Those who enter college today are on the whole quite ordinary men, ordinary as re gards special talents or peculiar endowments. As such we see them coming from the city, the vil lage and the country, each with some peculiar ex perience, each to become acquainted with new forms, new faces, in fact a new life. His sur roundings previous to entering college, may or may not have been for his good. Many times the boy is sent to college to remove him from existing home surroundings—not often of the family, but of the community. The greatquestion of gaining freedom by flight is here truly a mistake, as many men’s lives at college show. A man’s general character will largely determine his course on en tering college, for he finds in every institution similar men to those he left at his own home— some ready lor fun at any cost—others, good, moral men, while still others are active, Christian men. It is the unlooked for reality of college life, the disregard of many cherished principles, by the socalled “Godly” men, and the lack of anything radical in spiritual living, that have ef fectually dulled the conscience of the average student in our colleges today. We might say that the conscience of the average student is not unlike the ultimate molecule of matter—invisible. Only is this realized as the course draws to a close; when the life of the world in receiving a college graduate does not look so tempting, as during the first three years of college life. Dull the con science in the Freshman year and there is every reason to beleive the student will grow more and mute unconcerned, with little or no regard for those things before cherished and longed for, tin til he is almost ready to leave the institution. Every man sees clearly what is herein meant.
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers