In reviewing the occurrences of the past summer & in giving out the rewards promised at its commencement many subjects of reflection present themselves to you. Another season for improvement has elapsed & its influence on your future fate has already been stamped & cannot be erased. Standing as you now do at the threshold of the [school?] & about to bid it adieu forever—pause for a few moments and ask yourselves the question—What have been its uses, its profit, its bearing on your happiness in this world and its effects on your eternal condition—Young persons as they stand in life are too apt to suppose that they have almost an eternity of years before them and that the misimprovement of one term or one year will be of little value—But how idle is such an opinion, how destructive to improvement and deadening to the mind—Even granting that ideas fail’d of being obtained in one year may be accumulated the next—yet the progress in the path of science must be stopped by this unreasonable indolence—Besides the habits of mind given, the power of indolent habits will be sufficient to exhibit the incorrectness of such positions—The mind formed as it is for activity must be constantly exercised in the years of growth—otherwise it will move in a sluggish and indolent course and finally stagnate in its channel—There is no moment when the mind is stationary if not moving onward in its orbit it will retrograde—Hence a continual culture is necessary until the habits of intellectual industry are formed, and the mind can go on in its progress from the momentum of its first impulse—Those of you then who have watched the summer and have calmed your consciences with the notion that after industry will enable you to atone for this neglect—have reasoned from false premises and have perhaps originated those habits of indolence, whose cold and palsying touch will freeze the current of your soul & chain its every future effort—This question then, should be heard with attention and reflection—“Have I this summer by the constant improvement of each hour, accumulated those treasures of science which are so necessary to usefulness & acquired those habits of intellectual perseverance that will render my future progress in science easy”—To those who have not I will repeat that they themselves are the cause of the weakness of mind & want of genius of which they complained & as they have “sown to the wind so they must reap to the whirlwind”—My young friends hear my advice whether you continue with us or employ your hours at some other seminary or under the parents guidance—be advised by me to stop the deadly influence of indolence, the disease is now young & can be checked—allow it for a few years & no power on earth can control its lethargy—it will benumb one faculty after another until your understanding “sleep the sleep of