THE PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 
439 
is not less truly the principle of all other learning. Order and 
method are the very initial conditions of study, and they are the 
guides of its highest achievements. Eut order and method neces- 
sarily imply the bringing of the will into accord with law — the 
surrender of much in order to attain more. 
The student must he an ascetic. He must submit voluntarily 
to hardship for the purpose of gaining control over the lower part 
of his nature — over the passions of the body and the desires of 
the mind. Schola cruets, schola lucis — this is the true motto of 
all mental as well as moral effort, the promise of its reward. 
Eut all this, simple and indisputable as I think it is, seems to me 
wholly contrary to the popular doctrine of intellectual liberty — 
" Absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects, prac- 
tical or speculative, scientific, moral, or theological. " And what 
appears to me, therefore, to be the great practical harm of the 
popular notion of liberty is this — that it tends to discourage quiet 
and patient study under rule and method, and to provoke and 
attach an utterly unreal importance and value to intellectual 
eccentricities and vagaries. And it does this at a time when all 
the predominant mental and moral faults are such as require dis- 
cipline and obedience for their correction. It is a time of much in- 
tellectual activity without high intellectual power, of much mental 
excitement without much mental stability — a time in which there 
is little of the " calmness and confidence'' that give true mental 
as well as moral strength. I believe that our devotion to comfort 
is destructive of all high aims and great achievements in science, 
art, literature, and religion. Eut however this may be, it will 
hardly be denied that self-indulgence and ostentation, excitement 
and distraction, self-will and disregard of law, are prominent faults 
of our time, and sources of much mental and moral weakness. 
Yet at such a time, and in the presence of such faults as these, a 
liberty which consists in the all but entire absence of restraint — 
a liberty most nearly akin to licence — is proclaimed and accepted 
as the great social and intellectual gospel; while hints are not 
wanting that its principles may be applied ere long to the field of 
morals, which they are certainly wide enough to cover. Of course 
such a system discards and despises anything like asceticism. 
From its point of view the ascetic is a "narrow theory of life," 
patronising a " pinched and hide-bound type of human character." 
Asceticism in its extreme has been generally a revolt against 
