"At my door I found a man dressed in costly fashion, who had waited for me outside, as he had been told that I would come soon, and the family had retired. He said his dying father had sent for me. So I left the basket in a side yard and went with the messenger. The house was a mansion on Spring Garden Street. The house was inelegantly overloaded with luxurious furniture, money wasted by some inartistic purchasers. The paintings were rare and rich. The owners were shoddy. The family of seven or eight gathered by the bedside when I prayed for the dying old man. They were grief-stricken and begged me to stay until his soul departed. It was daylight before I left the bedside, and as the dying still showed that the soul was delaying his journey, I went into the spacious, handsome library. Seeing a rare book in costly binding among the volumes on a lower shelf, I opened the door and took it out My hands were black with dust. I glanced then along the rows and rows of valuable books, and noticed the dust of months or years. The family were not students or readers. One son was in the Albany Penitentiary; another a fugitive in Canada. At the funeral, afterwards, the wife and daughter from Newport were present, and their tears made furrows through the paint. Those rich people were strangely poor, and a book on a side table on the 'Abolition of Poverty' seemed to be in the right place. "That night was conceived the Temple College idea. It was no new truth, no original invention, but merely a simpler combination of old ideas. There was but one general remedy for all these ills of poor and rich, and that could only be found in a more useful education. Poverty seemed to me to be wholly that of the mind. Want of food, or clothing, or home, or friends, or morals, or religion, seemed to be the lack of the right instruction and proper discipline. The truly wise man need not lack the necessities of life, the wisely educated man or woman will get out of the dirty alley and will not get drunk or go to jail. It seemed to me then that the only great charity was in giving instruction. "The first class to be considered was the destitute poor. Not one in a thousand of those living in rags on crusts would remain in poverty if he had education enough of the right kind to earn a better living by making himself more useful. He is poor because he does not know any better. Knowledge is both wealth and power. "The next class who stand in need of the assistance love wishes to give is the great mass of industrious people of all grades, who are earning something, who are not cold or hungry, but who should earn more in order to secure the greater necessities of life in order to be happy. They could be so much more useful if they knew how. To learn how to do more work in the same time, or how to do much better work, is the only true road to riches which the owner can enjoy.