Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/53

 contributed to carry out any great work begun by one who was loved and lamented like Lord Elphinstone, a work which was foreseen and hoped for by his great namesake and predecessor, and for your purpose in connecting my name with theirs I heartily thank you. But whatever we may attribute to individual agency or may hope for from individual exertion, there is ever present to our minds in this and in every other great work in this country a prevailing sense of an over-ruling power in comparison with whose agency the mightiest works of man are dwarfed to insignificance. Philosophers tell us of the evidence which is afforded by the shores of. some of the fairest regions of the earth that some great subterranean force is already at work gradually upheaving or submerging the whole continent. It has always seemed to me that this afforded no unfitting image of our work in this country. We may terrace and adorn the hill sides, we may trim the vine slopes and plant the olive and orange; but there is a power which, though unseen and often unobserved by us, is ever working with a silent energy of which we can have no conception to raise or depress whole nations. That that great power may bless and prosper the great work that you have in hand and make it fruitful in good results, of which we can have now no clear conception is my fervent hope, and in that hope I now bid you Sir, and this Convocation, farewell.

 Mr. Vice-Chancellor, and Gentlemen of the Senate,—To all of us, I think, who have listened to the very complete and clear report just read by the Registrar, the account that he has given us of the progress and of the prospect of this University must be highly satisfactory; and to most of you, gentlemen, who have attended previous Convocations, it must be a source of gratification to find that the progress established in former years has not only not been lost, but that the University continues in the same onward and steady march of success that has called for congratulation hitherto.

For myself, gentlemen, a devoted son of one of our ancient Universities—who look back to her still at a great distance of time, and in this distant country, with an affection and attachment that as many of you as are University men can well understand, and to 