In the last analysis the work of statesmen and soldiers, the work of the public men, shall go for nothing if it is not based upon the spirit of Christianity working in the millions of homes throughout this country, so that there may be that social, that spiritual, that moral foundation without which no country can ever rise to permanent greatness. For material well-being, material prosperity, success in arts, in letters, great industrial triumphs, all of them and all of the structures raised thereon will be as evanescent as a dream if they do not rest on “the righteousness that exalteth a nation.” Let me congratulate you and congratulate all of us that we live in a land and at a time when we accept it as natural that there should be an interdenominational service of thanksgiving, such a ceremony as is to take place this afternoon, in which the pastors of other churches join to congratulate themselves and you upon the rebuilding of this church. One of the constant problems of life is to try to cultivate breadth without shallowness, just as we want to try to cultivate depth without narrowness. It seems to me that thanksgiving with the combined earnestness, the liberty, of the great body of the pastors who, for our good fortune, are in the various churches of this country can be accepted as in a peculiar measure typifying the American spirit in religious thought; that for our good fortune those men have been able to combine fervor in doing the Lord’s work with charity toward their brethren who do it with certain differences in the non-essentials. The forces of evil are strong and mighty in this century and in this country as they are in other countries, as they have been in all the past centuries; and the people who sincerely wish to do the Lord’s work will find ample opportunity for all their labor in fighting the common enemy and in assuming toward their fellows of a different confession an attitude of generous rivalry in the effort to see how the most good can be done to our people as a whole. I thank you for having given me the chance to speak to you this morning, to say a word of greeting to you and to wish you Godspeed with all my heart. ADDRESS TO THE GRADUATING CLASS OF THE NAVAL ACADEMY AT ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND, JAN. 30, 1905 _Captain Brownson, Members of the Graduating Class, Governor Warfield, and to the other Midshipmen and their friends and kinsmen here gathered together_: