Life is before you,—a long and happy one, I trust. May it increase in goodness and usefulness as it does in years! Your power is great, and will be greater. Already the minds of thousands are deeply and permanently influenced by you. I know that MAN, and not institutions or dogmas, is the object of your devotion; that the all-controlling, ever present sentiment of your life is, _the supremacy of man over his incidents_. I know that you reverence man, not his incidents. You feel, and in your life seek to embody the truth, that _man is eternal_, his institutions transient and ever-changing. Man is the great _fact_; his religious, social, governmental, ecclesiastical, literary, monetary and commercial surroundings are merely passing incidents of his existence, to be changed or cast away as suits his growth and convenience. Man is the substance, all else the shadow. The appendages will be laid aside, but man will live, deathless as God. You would never sacrifice man to his incidents; the head to the hat, or the body to the coat,—the enduring substance to the passing shadow. You see and worship God in man, not in his incidents. In those relations which bear most directly and powerfully on the development, purity and nobility of your manhood, and on your character and destiny, you recognize the most perfect manifestation of the Divine presence and power. In them, the great thinking intellect and pulsating heart of the universe,—the God-element of Nature,—speak to you as in nothing else. Of all your relations, which is most potent to develop your manhood, to unfold to yourself, and to all, the hidden wealth and depths of your being; to vitalize and call into manly activity all the powers of your physical and intellectual nature? Your soul promptly answers, “That of the HUSBAND and the FATHER.” No man who has lived in those relations can doubt the truth of your answer. God speaks to you through your wife and child, as through no other being of the past or present. Through those loved ones, He, as it were, renders himself visible, audible, tangible to you, and you meet him and talk with him face to face. They are his natural prophets and messiahs to you—the media through which the God-element of the universe flows into you, quickening and vitalizing, and arousing to energetic activity, all the powers of your manhood. Through them, an influence is thrown upon and around you, which silently, but surely, defines and shapes your plans of life, and quickens, expands, and ennobles your affections. In them, a PRESENCE is ever before you, whose beauty and brightness illuminate your pathway, and which is ever beckoning you onward and upward, and breathing into your soul a desire and a daring to reach the sublimest height of purity and nobleness. In truth, you may say, in your wife and child are the hidings of God’s power, to form your character and shape your destiny.