If I have succeeded in my most anxious desire to impress upon your minds the thorough conviction that the principles of morality and religion, indissolubly united, _must_ form the beginning, the middle and the end of all that deserves the name of education, your first, your constant and supreme effort will be _to acquire them_. Then indeed, you may pursue the usual course of your scholastic studies, not only without danger of mistaking the means for the end, but with incalculable advantages both present and prospective; for all will be made conducive to the great, the eternal purposes for which you were created. Your knowledge of foreign languages and histories will contribute to convince you that there have been and still are nations, kindred and people like yourselves,--with similar wants, passions and capabilities, deserving your sympathy, your regard, your brotherly love,--that national antipathies should have no place in a human bosom--that national wars, except for defence, are national crimes; and that man should consider man his brother, in whatever condition or on whatever spot of the habitable globe he may be found. Your mathematics will lead you to the conviction, strong and irresistible as the demonstrative principles and reasonings upon which the whole of this noble science depends, that nothing but a God of all perfect wisdom and love could have endowed you with faculties and powers capable of deriving not only the highest mental gratifications from such a source, but of applying the discoveries which produce these gratifications to an infinite series of the most beneficial purposes. Your chemistry will aid in teaching you that none but a Being infinitely wise and of boundless power and goodness, could possibly have contrived and arranged such a vast multitude of substances, in all their endless variety of combinations and affinities, such an immense world of multiform matter--all as it would seem conducive in some way or other to human comfort, gratification, or high enjoyment.