William Miller

“ Let us arouse ourselves, one and all, to the battle, not of blood, but of truth. Let us not mix with the divisions of the day in setting up men or measures, nor stop to contend who shall be greatest; but let our conversation be in heaven, from whence we look for the Savior. Let us be like servants who wait for their Lord. If we believe we shall soon stand before the judgment seat of Christ, will it not prompt us to have our work done and well done? so that we be not ashamed before him at his coming. If we believe the prophets, shall not our faith be manifested by our works? ”

“ And when any should see a man's bone, they were to set up a sign by it, until the buriers should bury it in the valley of Hamon-gog. Who can but see, that the relics of Papacy are to be found in almost every church in our land? The love and practice of slavery is a bone of the old mother; the love and practice of war is another bone; sectarian prejudices, and a tyrannical display of physical force to put down principles not harmonizing with our views, is a great bone. Taking to ourselves titles that belong to God, or calling men Rabbis, which belong only to Christ, are men's bones. ”

“ Bosnia had entered upon her four centuries of submission to the Turks. Her King was dead, his consort and his step-mother, Queen Catherine, in exile, and his people at the mercy of the conqueror. Many of them were enlisted in the Turkish corps of Janissaries; many more fled to Croatia, Istria and the Dalmatian towns; a few took to the mountains, like the more or less mythical hero Toma, the Robin Hood of the Bosnian ballads, and lived as brigands and outlaws; most of the Bogomiles embraced the faith of Islâm, and became in the course of generations more fanatical than the Turks themselves. ”

“ You, who have chosen it as your noble function to study, to preserve, and, when need be, to cure the dwelling with which man's spirit is endued:—you who are to have it as your high vocation to subdue the stubborn forces round us to our common use, and to render this earth an increasingly commodious residence for mankind,—you must be ever watchful of what is new and ever labouring to extend the limits of your knowledge, if you would even arrive at or maintain proficiency in your special callings. ”

“ Every living thing on earth is described as taking part in this awful conflict. The heavens and earth shake in this mighty war; voices and thunders, lightnings and earthquakes, fish and fowl, beast and birds, men and worms, blood and fire, plague and pestilence, rain and hail, all commingle in this last great throe of expiring nature. How awful is the scene described by these two prophets! ”

“ During the second period, from the Turkish re-conquest of the Morea down to the close of the War of Independence, Turkey was declining, slowly but surely, in all save the one art which she has never lost even in her political dotage, the art of fighting. For, like the Roman and the Briton, the Turk has ever been a good soldier, but, unlike those two great unintellectual peoples, many of whose qualities he shares, he has never been a good administrator; even when his arrangements have been excellent in theory, as they often are, they have frequently proved to be miserable in practice. ”

“ Christ unites them into one fold, Ezekiel into one stick; Christ calls them sheep, Ezekiel calls them the whole house of Israel. Christ plainly means Jews and Gentiles; then as plainly do we infer Jews and Gentiles in Ezekiel. Christ will, in process of time, unite all his sheep into the gospel kingdom, whether they be Jew or Gentile, bond or free. Then, as Paul tells us, Eph. iv. 4-6, “There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.” ”

“ From the calm heights of study and of thought, descend into the arena of the world, there to live and strive as the sons of learning ought, and so to take an effectual and an honoured part in irradiating with the light of knowledge an ancient and a famous land. ”

“ Captured and carried as a prisoner to the Nicene Court, he so greatly impressed the Emperor by his courage and manly beauty that the latter ordered his release, and gave him one of the princesses of the imperial house in marriage. In short, his career was that of a typical Venetian adventurer, brave, hard-headed, selfish, and unscrupulous; in fact, just the sort of man to found a dynasty in a part of the world where cleverness counts for more than heroic simplicity of character. ”

“ There is religion for you, it is free as the mountain brook, it is plenteous as the dew on mount Hermon, it is as rich as the fruits in autumn, there is “enough and to spare,” it is ever green as the foliage in the spring. Why then perish? What reasons can you give for your rejection of Christ? He is the one whose day our fathers desired to see, and kings waited for. Prophets foretold his birth, and declared his work from times of old. And will you not believe? Will you not hear Moses and the prophets, nor Christ and his disciples? ”

“ The history of mediæval Athens is full of surprises. A Burgundian nobleman founding a dynasty in the ancient home of heroes and philosophers; a roving band of mercenaries from the westernmost peninsula of Europe destroying in a single day the brilliant French civilisation of a century; a Florentine upstart, armed with the modern weapons of finance, receiving the keys of the Akropolis from a gallant and chivalrous soldier of Spain—such are the tableaux which inaugurate the three epochs of her Frankish annals. ”

“ If God sent his Son into the world, it was partly to give the world a code of laws, by the which man might be reconciled to God, and worship him in spirit and in truth. And if that code was ever given to the world, it must be the Bible. Therefore, I would solemnly inquire, have you that religion? Are you prepared for eternity? Have you done the work which you have often promised God and your own soul you would do, before death or judgment should come upon you? ”

“ It is the latter completeness, not the former, that can be affirmed of your education. Complete in the widest sense it certainly is not; but we trust that you have within yourselves all that is essential for enabling it to become so. The years you have spent under the care of this University have left in you, as we hope, not only a certain small stock of information, but a certain love of knowledge for its own sake, a certain receptivity to truth, and above all the aptitude to grasp and to make your own whatever may become the subject of your thoughts hereafter. ”

“ While he had been engaged in the west of the Balkan peninsula there had grown up in the east under the mighty auspices of Stephen Dushan the great Serbian Empire, which threatened at one moment to swallow up Constantinople itself. Dushan is the greatest name in the whole history of the peninsula, a name cherished to this day by every patriotic Serb. But just as the restoration of Dushan’s Empire, the daydream of Serbian enthusiasts, jeopardised the existence of Austrian Bosnia, so the conquests of the great Serbian Tsar alarmed the Bosnian ruler of that day. ”

“ Let us manifest our love for souls, by our plain dealing in truth, and faithfully warning the wicked and impenitent of their danger. Let us take the Bible for our guide, and teach others the way of life. Then, if Christ come, we shall be found ready; and if he does not come at the time which I believe is specified in the Bible, still there can be no harm done; for to watch for his coming is duty now, and it can be no less a duty then. A few words to the dear brethren scattered over the land, in every church, and among all sects, who believe in the near approach of the Lord Jesus. ”

“ Not for itself but for every being that drinks in life and beauty from its beams, does the light return each morning on the earth. Not to rejoice in their own array do the lily and the rose deck themselves in splendour. Not to be an end unto themselves do the fruits of the valley spring. Not for its own sake does the patient ox labour in the furrow. Service and subordination are the life of the universe ”

“ When, in the spring of 1388, Nerio Acciajuoli found himself master of “the Castle of Setines,” as the Franks called the Akropolis, his first care was to conciliate the Greeks, who formed by far the largest part of his subjects, and who may have aided him to conquer the Athenian duchy. For the first time since the day, nearly two centuries before, when Akominatos had fled from his beloved cathedral to exile at Keos, a Greek Metropolitan of Athens was allowed to reside in his see, not, indeed, on the sacred rock itself, but beneath the shadow of the Areopagos. ”

“ And though my theme at present be mainly that intellectual character, the growth of which a University must always make its first concern, I may be permitted to point out before passing on, one noble result of a different kind which will have a tendency to flow from your faithfully pursuing wisdom and knowledge in whatever department of human thought. He that gives himself to this pursuit is raised above the power of some at least of the allurements with which the world is crowded. ”

“ Despite the vandalism of mere archæologists, who can see nothing of interest in an age when Greeks were shaky in their declensions, and of bigoted purists among the Greeks themselves, who strive to erase every evidence of foreign rule alike from their language and their land, the feudal castles of the Morea, of continental Greece, and of the islands, still remind us of the days when classic Hellas, as Pope Honorius III said, was “New France,” when armoured knights and fair Burgundian damsels attended Mass in St Mary’s Minster on the Akropolis, and jousts were held on the Isthmus of Corinth. ”

“ As the seed is cast into the bosom of nature in order that its energies may be called forth and its destinies accomplished, so do you cast yourselves into active life, determined in it to exercise, and by exercise to increase those mental powers that the training of the past has given you—determined that by continual accessions to your knowledge, the stream of thought shall be kept flowing constantly within you and bearing health, activity and growth into the very recesses of your being. ”