Gentlemen, it is impossible to overstate the importance of religious culture in the work of education. Every interest of time and eternity urges it upon your attention. Your children are accountable and immortal creatures. "Give them divine truth," says Channing, "and you give them more than gems and gold; give them Christian principles, and you give them more than thrones and diadems; imbue their hearts with a love of virtue, and you enrich them more than by laying worlds at their feet." Your doctrine may distil as the dew upon the grass, and as the small rain upon the tender herb; but in some future emergency of life, the silent influence shall assert itself in a might more irresistible than the stormy elements when they go forth to the battles of God. If the work be faithfully done, the impression produced shall not be that of the sea-fowl on the sand, effaced by the first wave of the rising tide; but the enduring grooves cut by the chariot-wheels of the King of Trembling as he rides through the mountain ranges, and the footprints of his fiery steeds left deep in the everlasting rocks. Forward, then, with your noble endeavor! You are building for eternity. You are rearing temples of living stones which shall survive all the changes and chances of earth and time, and look sublimely down upon the world's catastrophe. Up! up with your immortal campanile! It is compacted of imperishable gems, cemented with gold from the mines of God. No marble sculpture may adorn its niches and cornices; but angel forms shall walk its battlements in robes of living glory. No hollow metal may swing in its vaulted _loggie_, sending sweet echoes over the distant hills, and charming the song-birds to silence along the flowery Val d'Arno; but richer and holier melodies, ringing out from its heavenly altitudes, shall mingle with the music of the spheres, and swell the many-voiced harmony of the City of God! [1] Preached at the opening of a new college edifice, 1859. IX. WAIL OF BEREAVEMENT.[1] Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends; for the hand of God hath touched me.--Job xix. 21.