Page:Princeton Theological Review, Volume 2, Number 1 (1904).djvu/80

 coverings that protect the mysteries of God. I need not stay to speak with particularity of the more rarely occurring stated services, such as the monthly concert of prayer for missions and the like. Enough has been said to suggest the richness of provision made in the Seminary for public worship: and assuredly amid such abounding opportunities for the quickening of the religious life it ought to be a comparatively easy thing to cultivate devoutness of spirit.

You will doubtless observe that I have said nothing, so far, of additional opportunities for social worship afforded by public services open to the attendance of the students outside the boundaries of the Seminary, or by voluntary associations for religious culture among the students themselves: These also are abundant, and have their parts to play in your edification. They may be justly accounted supplementary means of grace, useful to you, each in its own place and order. But what I am insisting on now is something which no such services, whether without or within the Seminary walls, can supply: something which by the grace of God can go much deeper into the bases of your religious nature and lay much broader foundations for the building up of a firm and consistent and abiding Christian character. I am exhorting you to give great diligence to the cultivation of the stated means of grace provided by the Seminary, to live in them and make them the full and rich expression of the organic religious life of the institution. I am touching on something here that seems to me to be of the utmost importance and which does not seem to me to have received the attention from the students which it deserves. Every body of men bound together in as close and intimate association as we are, must have an organic life: and if the bonds that bind them together are fundamentally of a religious character, this organic life must be fundamentally a religious one. We do not live on the top of our privileges in such circumstances unless we succeed in giving this organic religious life full power in our own lives and full expression in the stated means provided for its expression. No richness of private religious life, no abundance of voluntary religious services on the part of members of the organism, can take the place of or supersede the necessity for the fullest, richest and most fervent expression of this organic religious life through its appropriate channels. I exhort you, therefore, brethren, with the utmost seriousness, to utilize the public means of grace afforded by the Seminary, and to make them instruments for the cultivation and expression of the organic religious life of