truths:  “Suffer little children to come unto me.”  And that injunction is of perpetual obligation.  It addresses itself to-day with the same earnestness and the same authority which attended its first utterance to the Christian world.  It is of force everywhere, and at all times.  It extends to the ends of the earth, it will reach to the end of time, always and everywhere sounding in the ears of men, with an emphasis which no repetition can weaken, and with an authority which nothing can supersede:  “Suffer little children to come unto me.”

And not only my heart and my judgment, my belief and my conscience, instruct me that this great precept should be obeyed, but the idea is so sacred, the solemn thoughts connected with it so crowd upon me, it is so utterly at variance with this system of philosophical morality which we have heard advocated, that I stand and speak here in fear of being influenced by my feelings to exceed the proper line of my professional duty.  Go thy way at this time, is the language of philosophical morality, and I will send for thee at a more convenient season.  This is the language of Mr. Girard in his will.  In this there is neither religion nor reason.

The earliest and the most urgent intellectual want of human nature is the knowledge of its origin, its duty, and its destiny.  “Whence am I, what am I, and what is before me?” This is the cry of the human soul, so soon as it raises its contemplation above visible, material things.

When an intellectual being finds himself on this earth, as soon as the faculties of reason operate, one of the first inquiries of his mind is, “Shall I be here always?” “Shall I live here for ever?” And reasoning from what he sees daily occurring to others, he learns to a certainty that his state of being must one day be changed.  I do not mean to deny, that it may be true that he is created with this consciousness; but whether it be consciousness, or the result of his reasoning faculties, man soon learns that he must die.  And of all sentient beings, he alone, so far as we can judge, attains to this knowledge.  His Maker has made him capable of learning this.  Before he knows his origin and destiny, he knows that he is to die.  Then comes that most urgent and solemn demand for light that ever proceeded, or can proceed, from the profound and anxious broodings of the human soul.  It is stated, with wonderful force and beauty, in that incomparable composition, the book of Job:  “For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease; that, through the scent of water, it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant. But if a man die, shall he live again?” And that question nothing but God, and the religion of God, can solve.  Religion does solve it, and teaches every man that he is to live again, and that the duties of this life have reference to the life which is to come.  And hence, since the introduction of Christianity, it has been the duty, as it has been the effort, of the great and the good, to sanctify human knowledge, to bring it to the fount, and to baptize learning into Christianity; to gather up all its productions, its earliest and its latest, its blossoms and its fruits, and lay them all upon the altar of religion and virtue.