1654 REroRT of Farmers' Institutes 



man who is not at heart a gentleman, and I say here with feeling 

 and sincerity that in this state and other states, the men whom I 

 admire; the men whose friendship I covet and the men whom I 

 wonld tnrn to in time of trouble, belong largely to the brotherhood 

 of instituters. 



And thirdly — the message. " Behold the voice of one crving in 

 the wilderness." I presume that in all the world there is nothing 

 that thrills onr heart or quickens our imagination as does the 

 figure of a man with a message — a man in whose heart there is 

 some ideal in which he believes so earnestly and sincerely he can 

 never be content until he has passed it on to others. And I fear 

 all of us have come far short of this ideal. I am afraid we have 

 imagined we were delivering a message when after all we were 

 merely making a talk and waiting for the closing hour, but I want 

 to remind you that the man with a message is quite as likely to 

 be found out in the hill-country as in the town. He may do his 

 work quite as well in — say Barnes Corners — as in Ithaca. The 

 finest figure as a preacher in all history is not the High Priest 

 celebrating the stately service of his faith in the temple at Jeru- 

 salem, but it is John with his mantle of camel's hair and leathern 

 girdle about his loins crying in the desert country beyond Jordan. 

 It is not the great Bishop of the Church entoning in the dim choir 

 of his cathedral, but it is the circuit rider with his saddle bags 

 behind him — Zion's weather beaten scout on the pioneer fringe 

 of civilization. 



Last winter iip in one of the narrow mountain valleys of my own 

 Schoharie County, I heard an old time Baptist elder opening the 

 institute with pra^'er, who struck the keynote of this whole work 

 when he said, " Oh Lord, thou knowest that we all ought to be 

 better men and farmers." If all of us could come to believe that 

 most mightily, we might come nearer to being real agricultural 

 preachers than we are. 



And then another truth is this — that with the years, the mes- 

 sage of the institute is constantly a broader one. Twenty-five 

 years ago I was a student in this College of Agriculture, then 

 domiciled on one side of one corridor in ^lorrill Hall. Some of 

 you very recent graduates may not believe it, but even then there 



