I want to impress upon you this evening the importance of continued growth. I very much wish that each one of you might imagine, this evening, your father and your mother to be looking at you and examining into every act of your life while here. I wish that you might feel, as it were, their very heart throbs. I wish that you might realize, perhaps as you have never realized before, how anxious they are that you should succeed here. I wish that you could know how many prayers they send up, day after day, that your school life may be more and more successful as one day succeeds another, that you may grow to be successful, studious, strong men and women, who will reflect credit upon yourselves and honour upon your families.  
Each one of you must have had some thoughts about those who are anxious about you, some thought for those persons whose hearts are very often bowed down in anxiety because they fear your school life here will not be successful. Not[Pg 278] only for your own sake, but for the sake of those who are near and dear to you, those who have done more for you than anybody else, I want you to make up your minds that this year is going to be the best one of your lives.
 
I want you to resolve that you are going to put into this year the hardest and the most earnest work that you have ever done in your life, to resolve that this is going to be the greatest, the most courageous and the most sinless year of life that you have ever lived; I want you to make up your minds to do this; to decide that you are going to continually grow—and grow more to-morrow than to-day. There are but two directions in this life in which you can grow; backward or forward. You can grow stronger, or you can grow weaker; you can grow greater, or smaller; but it will be impossible for you to stand still.
 
Now in regard to your studies; your lessons. I want you to make up your minds that you are going to be more and more thorough in your lessons each day you remain here; that you are going to so discipline yourselves that each morning will find you in the recitation rooms with your lessons more thoroughly and more conscientiously [Pg 279]prepared for the day's work than they were for the work of the day before. I want you to make up your minds that you are going to be more nearly perfect, are going to put more manly and womanly strength into the preparation of your lessons each day, that you may be more useful. Then you will find yourselves wanting to grow, I hope; will find yourselves learning the dignity of labour, and that no class of people can get up and stay up, can be strong and useful and respected, until they learn that there is no disgrace in any form of labour.
 
I hope you are learning that labour with the hand, in any form whatever, is not disgraceful. I hope that you are learning, day by day, that all kinds of labour—whether with the mind or with the hand—are honourable, and that people only disgrace themselves by being and keeping in idleness.
 
I want you to go forward by thoroughness in your work; by being more conscientious in your work; by loving your work more to-day than you did yesterday. If you are not growing in these respects—that is, if you are not going forward—you are going backward, and are not answering the purpose for which this institution[Pg 280] was establishe............