So every day of the past year represents a page in the history of your lives: for every life, even the plainest and most humble, has its own peculiar history. Your lives here are uneventful; no very startling things occur to break the monotony of school life, but each day has its own duties and makes its own record. Three hundred and sixty-five pages of the book of the history of every young life here were duly filled by the records of all the things done or neglected, of the words spoken or unspoken, of the thoughts indulged or stifled; these pages with their records, sad or joyful, glad or shameful, were turned over, and are now numbered with the things that are past and gone. When an accountant or book-keeper discovers, after the books of the year are closed and the balances struck, that errors had crept in which have disturbed the accuracy of his work, he cannot go back with a knife and erase the errors and write in the correct figures; neither can he blot them out, nor rub them out as you do examples from a slate or from the blackboard; he must correct his mistakes; he must counteract his blunders by new entries on a new page. It is somewhat so with us, with you. Last night at midnight the last page of the leaves of the book of the old year was filled with its record, whatever it was, and this morning “the leaf is turned over.” What do we see? What does every one of you see? A fair, white page. And each one of you holds a pen in his hand and the inkstand is within reach; you dip your pen in the ink, you bend over the page, the thoughts come thick and fast, much faster indeed than any pen, even that of the quickest shorthand writer can put them on the page. There are stenographers who can take the language of the most rapid speakers, but no stenographer has ever yet appeared who can put his own thoughts on paper as rapidly as they come into his mind. But while there is but one mind in all the universe that can have knowledge of what is passing in your mind and retain it all――THE INFINITE MIND; and while no one page of any book, however large, even if it be what book-makers call elephant folio, can possibly hold the record of what any boy here says and thinks in a single day, you may, and you do, all of you, write words good or bad on the page before you. Let me take one of these boys not far from the desk, a boy of sixteen or seventeen years of age, who is now waiting, pen in hand, to write the thoughts now passing in his mind. What are these thoughts? No one knows but himself. Shall I tell you what I think he ought to write? It is something like this: