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I return you my sincere and grateful thanks for the honor conferred, and for the distinguished position in which your consideration and kindness have, this day, placed me: and, incompetent as I am to meet the expectations conceived and the request made, I will proceed, to the best of my abilities, to discharge the pleasing duty imposed upon me.

In the present momentous and startling condition of the world, when universal society is fearfully ominous of great and varied revolution and change—rapidly conceiving and rapidly approximating to some mighty consummation, the outlines of whose form and dimensions the eye cannot yet discern through the dim twilight that intervenes: at a time when all the elements of social, political and religious life—held by man, in his fancy and his pride, to be as perpetual and immutable as thy elements of nature—are undergoing a process of decomposition as sudden and rapid as unexpected, to reorganize themselves again in higher, fairer and nobler forms of social, political and religious life and being: at such a time and under such circumstances, well calculated to fit the heart of every patriot, philanthropist and christian with anxiety and apprehension; in looking over the field of literature, science and ethics for a subject suited to the time and occasion, I can conceive of none more worthy of your attention than the one selected,

This subject, vast as it is, and important as it is vast, derives its most essential and prominent features from a variety of other subjects connected with it, and which indeed have created the very subject on which we propose to address you.

And in order, young gentlemen, to set before you the magnitude and importance of the responsibilities of the youth of our country—the length and breadth, the depth and height of those