In the past term (I think I can answer for some of you) a much deeper meaning has entered into your lives. Especially you, the young freshmen (happily I have had the control of many, the teaching of some), I know that life has become fuller for you. That half-hour a week to which you pay so little heed will mean much in later years. You have come to me in batches for half-an-hour a week, and each of you has thus enjoyed collectively the beginning of that private control and moulding of the character which is the object of all our efforts here in Oxford. And can you not, as you look back, see what a great change has passed over you in the short few months? I do not mean the corporeal change involved by our climate or our prandial habits; neither do I allude to the change in your dress and outward appearance. I refer to the mental transformation. You arrived sure of a number of things which you had learnt at school or at your mother’s knee. Of what are you certain now? Of nothing! It is necessary in the mysterious scheme of education that this blind faith or certitude should be laid as a foundation in early youth. But it is imperative that a man--if he is to be a man and not a monster--should lose it at the outset of his career. My young friends, I have given you the pearl of great price. You have begun to doubt. Half-an-hour a week--four hours in all the term ... could any positive, empirical, or dogmatic teaching have been conveyed in that time, or with so much fullness as the great scheme of negation can be? I trow not. So much for knowledge and tutorship. What of morals? It is a delicate subject, but I will treat of it boldly. You all remember how, shortly after the month of October, the College celebrated Guy Fawkes’ day: the elders, by a dinner in honour of their founder, the juniors by lighting a bonfire in the quadrangle. You all know what followed. I do not wish to refer again--certainly not with bitterness--to the excesses of that evening; but the loss of eyesight is a serious thing, and one that the victim may forgive, but hardly can forget. I hope the lesson will suffice, and that in future no fellow of this College will have to regret so serious a disfigurement at the hands of a student. To pass to lighter things. The Smoking Concert on All Souls’ Day was a great success. I had hoped to organise some similar jollity on Good Friday, but I find that it falls in the Easter vacation. It is, however, an excellent precedent, and we will not fail to have one on some other festal occasion. To the action of one of our least responsible members I will not refer. But surely there is neither good breeding nor decency in dressing up as an old lady, in assuming the name of one of our Greatest Families, and in so taking advantage of the chivalry, and perhaps the devotion, of one’s superiors. The offence is one that can not lightly be passed over, and the culprit will surely be discovered.