of being useful.  The actuating spirit of your Board will be a spirit of scrupulous fidelity to every trust reposed in you, and of untiring zeal in promoting the welfare of the University and the advancement of learning.  Judged by its disinterestedness, its beneficence and its permanence, your function is as pure and high as any that the world knows, or in all time has known.  May the work which you do in the discharge of your sacred trust be regarded with sympathetic and expectant forbearance by the present generation, and with admiration and gratitude by posterity.

“The University which is to take its rise in the splendid benefaction of Johns Hopkins must be unsectarian.  None other could as appropriately be established in the city named for the Catholic founder of a colony to which all Christian sects were welcomed, or in the State in which religious toleration was expressly declared in the name of the Government for the first time in the history of the Christian world.  There is a too common opinion that a college or university which is not denominational must therefore be irreligious; but the absence of sectarian control should not be confounded with lack of piety.  A university whose officers and students are divided among many sects need no more be irreverent and irreligious than the community which in respect to diversity of creeds it resembles.  It would be a fearful portent if thorough study of nature and of man in all his attributes and works, such as befits a university, led scholars to impiety.  But it does not; on the contrary, such study fills men with humility and awe, by bringing them on every hand face to face with inscrutable mystery and infinite power.  The whole work of a university is uplifting, refining and spiritualizing:  it embraces

          whatsoever touches life
    With upward impulse; be He nowhere else,
    God is in all that liberates and lifts;
    In all that humbles, sweetens and consoles.

“A university cannot be built upon a sect, unless, indeed, it be a sect which includes the whole of the educated portion of the nation.  This University will not demand of its officers and students the creed, or press upon them the doctrine of any particular religious organization; but none the less—­I should better say, all the more—­it can exert through high-minded teachers a strong moral and religious influence.  It can implant in the young breasts of its students exalted sentiments and a worthy ambition; it can infuse into their hearts the sense of honor, of duty, and of responsibility.

“I congratulate the city of Baltimore, Mr. Mayor, that in a few generations she will be the seat of a rich and powerful university.  To her citizens its grounds and buildings will in time become objects of interest and pride.  The libraries and other collections of a university are storehouses of the knowledge already acquired by mankind, from which further invention and improvement proceed.  They