AN

ADDRESS

DELIVERED BEFORE THE

AMERICAN EDUCATION SOCIETY,

IN BOSTON,

MAY 23, 1825.

BY EDWARD D. GRIFFIN, D. D.
President of Williams College.

BOSTON:

PRINTED BY EZRA LINCOLN.

1825.

ADDRESS.

MR. PRESIDENT,

I rise with some embarrassment to submit a resolution which was to have been offered by another. It is in the following words: Resolved that the encouragements to persevere in the benevolent enterprise in which the American Education Socie is engaged are ample, and that the friends of religion should give it their united, vigorous, and continued support. I regret, Sir, the absence of the gentleman who was to have made this motion and to have spoken to the first part of the resolution; but it is from the bottom of my heart that I urge it upon the friends of religion to give to this benevolent enterprise their united, vigorous, and continued support. For full thirty years I have regarded the charitable education of pious and promising youth for the Gospel ministry at home and for missionary labours abroad, as quite the most important way in which Christian benevolence can apply its funds. Educate them and they will exert an incalculable influence upon the world even if charity

proceeds no further; without them, or men like them, missions must cease, tracts must be silenced, and even the Bible cannot be carried to the world. Had I a fortune to bestow, (it is my deliberate judgment,) I could not select another object so well entitled to receive it all. It is doing good in the most wholesale way. Here is a pious youth doomed by poverty to plod in one of the mechanic arts. He sheds the gleam of a holy example on a small neighbourhood, but with a mind uncultivated he can do no more. Raise that youth by education to the sacred functions of the Gospel ministry, and besides exerting a wide and benign influence upon society for thirty years, he will be the means of converting many souls who but for him would have perished. These converts will exercise a still greater influence upon the next generation, and these a still greater upon the next; and thus that youth whom you rescued from obscurity will exert an influence from generation to generation, increasing beyond all calculation, to the end of the world. This is upon the supposition that he is only an ordinary minister. But suppose him a Whitefield, a Brainerd, or a Samuel John Mills, and how far beyond the reach of finite thought does the good arise. I knew that last named youth. I knew him from a child till he ascended to glory. The meadows in which he and his companions prayed into existence the embryo of American missions, lie spread out before my door. Often have I traced them with unspeakable interest and felt that I was treading on holy ground. "You and I," said he

to a companion, "are little men, but before we die our influence must be felt on the other side of the world." It was felt through the earth; it will be felt by unnumbered millions when the last shock shall crumble this earth to atoms. And what if your charity should raise up another Samuel John Mills?

Let a man create a fund which shall constantly support one pious youth, and to what an amazing degree will his influence be felt on earth in a single century. Now cast your eyes forward a thousand ages. Let me come at that blessed group,-that nation of happy spirits, who have been studying the ways by which God led them to glory, and looking down upon their wretched companions in hell, and stretching their eyes forward to ages of interminable and increasing blessedness. "We have seen," say they, "that our escape from that infinite misery and our arrival at this unbounded good, are to be traced to the charity of the blessed man who founded that scholarship. There stands our benefactor, whom, next to God and the Redeemer, all our millions hail." What now are the sensations of that blessed man? Would the wealth of the Indies squandered upon his pleasures have produced transports like these?

If such are the consequences of founding a single scholarship, how far beyond all expression is the amount of good done for our world by a Phillips, an Abbot, and a Norris. What wonderful changes will they have made on earth in the course of a thousand years. What amazing impressions will they make on