Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/441

address to the newly admitted graduates, inviting them to con- duct themselves suitably to the position they have attained. It is the pleasure of His Excellency the Chancellor to depute that duty on this occasion to me. Seeing that you have served faithfully an apprenticeship to this guild of learning, and now present yourselves for a public recognition of your merits, it may appear incongruous that you should not be allowed to depart without words of advice or warning, The incongruity disappears when you call to mind it is a condition of admission to member- ship in this guild, that the candidate should not only produce proof of his diligence in the past, but undertake obligations as to his conduct in the future. You have pledged yourselves in your life and conversation to conduct as becomes members of the University : to the utmost of your opportunity and ability to support the cause of morality and sound learning : to uphold and advance social order and the well-being of your fellow-men. These obligations are not the less binding on your consciences, because they are ratified by no oath, nor will their infraction be devoid of consequences to you. A University degree is not to be regarded as a mere certificate that the graduate has under- gone a certain course of instruction, or has acquired a certain amount of knowledge; it is an assurance he has undertaken responsibilities to society which will accord or refuse him dis- tinction in proportion to the fidelity with which his obligations have been observed ; not even a barren honor will any one of you derive from the ceremony of to-day, if his life is undistin- guished by the conscientious performance of those duties which the education imparted under the auspices of this University was designed at once to inculcate and enable him to discharge. In an address recently delivered to the University of Calcutta, the Vice- Chancellor, Mr. Justice Wilson, has disposed of the erroneous notion that a system of education is to be valued only in proportion to its peonniary results. "The true value of education," said he, "consists not in the wordly profit it may enable you to make, but in this, that it awakens the love of truth as a motive of action, that it stimulates and gratifies the desire for knowledge : that it calls into activity the dormant powers of the mind ; trains and strengthens them by exercise ; teaches you to know the relative strength and value of your several faculties, and to subordinate all to the control of your judgment ; that it accustoms you to observe and to reason, and so to know good from evil, the true from the false, and thus leaves you stronger, wiser and better men than it fonnd you." In the Southern as in the Northern Presidency, the