Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/547



Which breathes of nations saved, not worlds undone, and of others whose careers though less brilliant were no less noble a Hampden and a Wilberforce, names that will be held in grateful remembrance by a hundred generations. All this and much more you have learned, and under the personal influance and guidance of your professors you will have been able to draw from it the lessons therein taught. These will have elevated you morally as well as intellectually, stirred up within you new and loftier aspirations, a stronger longing after truth and goodness, a desire to follow after right because it is right and loathing of every thing that savours of the nature of mere selfishness.

Such being the lessons you have learned and the principles by which you are to be guided, it will be for you to walk up to them and demonstrate them in your lives. Never have you been regarded with a more critical eye than now. Never perhaps with more suspicion. Prove by your unspotted lives, by your devotion to duty, by your unimpeachable integrity, your unquestioned honesty and your unflinching truthfulness, that the training and culture you have received have elevated and ennobled your natures, made you better men and better citizens, and thus your Alma Mater is doing the great work for which she was called into existence, a work that as time goes on will be seen more and more to be for the highest good of this great and historic land.

Students you have been, some of you perhaps at first with the sole object of being in the laudable position you occupy to-day. But your studies will have been of little avail, if they have not awakened within you a desire to pursue your search after knowledge and truth for its own sake, to learn and understand the thoughts and modes of action of the great of past ages, to make yourselves familiar with the current speculation of your own day, and to gather from them what your well-trained minds will readily turn to advantage for yourselves and your countrymen. Those of you who have selected Medicine or Engineering* as your professions will have to remain students for life. Science advances with rapid strides. It will only be by continuous and steady application you will be able to keep pace with it. Not to keep pace with it is to fall behind, to become inefficient practitioners in the professions you have adopted. You will, therefore, make yourselves acquainted with what the giants in your profession