Archbishop Whately, in early youth, threatened to become a calculating prodigy; and you may have read that many an intellectual prodigy has been imbecile in every direction but the one in which excellence was manifested. Well, Whately’s parents, instead of being gratified at their son’s passion for numbers, very wisely took alarm. They sought competent advice, and means were taken to prevent his mind taking an abnormal development in one direction, at the expense of its efficiency in others. The result very probably was, that we lost another Colburn or Bidder, but gained an Archbishop Whately. The conclusion to be drawn from the foregoing account is evident. It is your duty, if you would be well informed, average scholars and thinkers, to acquire more kinds of knowledge than one, and thereby to cultivate all the intellectual faculties of your mind; remembering that the greater the variety which the unity contains, the higher is its position in the scale of created being. Up to a certain point, therefore, we must all try to be universal scholars. After this point has been reached, what makes division of labour necessary is the vast extent to which knowledge has now attained, making it impossible for universal scholars like Leibnitz and the admirable Crichton to exist in these days; to which we must add the limitations, and the variety of bent existing in the mind of men, not forgetting the shortness of time. But then what individuals fail to accomplish the race can; and we have to consider, in the perfection of unselfishness, that we are members of that one body, the universal man; and that what is done by each is done for all. If individuals, therefore, are compelled by stern necessity to study a few branches, and live in faith as regards the rest, yet the race, man, becomes thereby the universal scholar, a source of strength and happiness which makes itself felt even down to the remotest member of the social body.