IN the most ancient College of the seat of learning between which and the University of Manchester my feelings of academic—and not only academic—piety and affection are consciously divided, it had become my annual duty to take part in a service commemorating our Founders and Benefactors, and giving hearty thanks to God for the nourishment imparted to us through them for the purposes of our collegiate life. In the last two years of high endeavour and grievous suffering, we, and doubtless other bodies in the same position as our own, have preferred that these annual gatherings for remembrance and praise should merge in the religious services held by our University as a whole in memory of those of her sons who, in what we believe to be the righteous war Great Britain is waging, have proved the greatness of their love by laying down their lives for the land that bore them. It was, therefore, in no ordinary sense of the word, gratifying to me to learn that a similar thought had suggested itself to those in authority within these walls, and that they would be glad if, as long and at one time intimately connected with this place of education and learning, I could take part in a memorial solemnity of twofold significance. Twofold—but not bipartite; for in a chartered College, and how much more in a national University, the functions of learning to work and learning to live are not separate; rather, the one comprehends the other: we serve our generation, our country, and the better future of a better world, by what our lives and this training have made us—of which our knowledge, our skill, our very aspirations are only part. And when, as in the present days of direct and personal appeal, the supreme test is both applied and satisfied within our own academic body, those members of it whose duty is but to witness and record, may bow their heads in thankfulness. It is on such occasions that the lessons of life and the thoughts of the responsibility laid upon us all—of the account which both young and old must give, if only to their own consciences, of the use they have made of life—clothe themselves most readily in the form of one or more of the parables by which the Divine Teacher chose to convey some of His profoundest lessons. The associations which these parables present with different sides or aspects of human nature or human life are many and various; but their inmost significance, from the very nature of this form of speech, reaches far beyond, and soars high above, its immediate purport. Thus, what parable could come home more naturally to the business and bosoms of a population strenuously engaged in the accumulation of wealth and management of its uses, than that of the talents; and which other could, at the same time, be more fittingly applied to that educational life to whose results our attention is necessarily directed to-day? For education can assuredly not be better defined than as the drawing out, and bringing to a beneficent growth and increase, what has been implanted by nature, aided by circumstance. It is not merely the accumulation of knowledge, or the perfecting of technical ability; but the improvement and development of all the powers of a human being—moral as well as mental and physical—by the application of those powers to life, its claims and its duties—till (to use the figure of the other parable which in commilitium