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Face your deficiencies and acknowledge them; but do not let them master you. Let them teach you patience, sweetness, insight. True education combines intellect, beauty, goodness, and the greatest of these is goodness. When we do the best that we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another.

To go to college is like going to a strange town to live. Your fellow-students are of all sorts and classes, and often seem to have nothing in common with each other, except the desire for approbation, sympathy, and love. If you understand the complex diversity of a college community, you will be spared many disappointments in your freshman year. When you find yourselves forlorn and homesick for a time, you will not feel bitterly toward the other girls because they do not follow you about the campus, or stop you on the stairs to offer you their undying friendship.

The freshman is often painfully aware of qualities of mind and heart which should place her high in the council of her class, and she is surprised that others are so slow to recognize them. But you will find your place in college as surely as water seeks its level. Only you must not sit and mope, or stand outside your class and criticise its officers, athletics, and clubs. You must throw yourselves into the midst of its activities and discover where you can be useful. To be a leader in your class requires the same qualities that are required to be a leader anywhere. It is not so much genius that availeth as energy, industry, and willingness to personal sacrifices.

Learn from your books not only the day's lesson, but the life lesson. In all knowledge, in the classics, in science, in history and literature, and in mathematics you will see the struggle of man to get nearer to God. Resolve,( then, as you stand on the threshold of your student days, with an enlightened optimism to consecrate your education to the service of others. When your thoughts become pessimistic, when it seems as if all men were deafened by the tumult of trade, blinded by self-interest and greed turn the pages of your history of England, and you will find that the ideas which shaped the Anglo-Saxon race were not mean or sordid.

American history, too, is filled with heroes and martyrs who joyfully pushed aside ambition and gave their lives to the common weal.

"Are men blind?" they cried. "We will open their eyes. Are they deaf? We will unstop their ears. Are they hungry? They shall be fed. Are they cast down and oppressed? As God liveth, they shall be free!"

The world needs more of this spirit of service. There is still many a desert place where the sun of love and the light of truth have not shone. The occasion waits for every college graduate, in the joyous erectness of youth, and vigour, to answer, "Lord, here am I; send me."