ADDRESS.

BY CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT, LL.D.,

President of Harvard University.

It seems to me that we should speak of this church to-day as something more than an historical monument. To many of us it has been a living and a working church. I will say a few words to you, simply as a son of this church.

This place is full of touching memories for me, and I doubt not for many others here present who were brought up in this church, but who have been separated from it in after life because their homes. or their occupations were at a distance. When we children of the church return, we can hardly see the people that are actually before us, so distinct is our vision of the young men and maidens, the old men and children, who sat in these pews when we were young. We can hardly hear the choir of to-day for listening to familiar voices of other days, hushed long ago. From this desk there speaks to us a deep, solemn monotone which thrilled the listener's ear forty years since. Up this aisle there come processions very plain to memory's sight, some joyous and some mournful, coming to wedding, to christening, or to funeral; and in these companies of kindred and friends we look with a kind of compassionate interest upon our former selves. We stand aside as it were for a moment and witness the passing by of the generation to which we be

long, the extinction of the former generation, and the oncoming of the succeeding.

We think very tenderly of these consecrated walls, as if they had some tender benediction to shed upon the baptisms, betrothals, marriages, burials, which have marked here for us the chief events in our family lives. And then we remember that seven generations have had these same precious associations with this ancient church, and find our imaginations unable to picture the smiles and tears, the happiness and grief, its two houses on this spot have witnessed.

There are more public grounds for cherishing kindly thoughts of the families who in the earlier generations worshipped God in this place. As has been called to our attention this afternoon, they were largely loyalists as well as devoted members of the Anglican Church. Now, the total loss of any cause which men and women have served with passionate loyalty is always pathetic. The loyalists got hard measure in the Revolution. Many of them suffered exile and the confiscation of their property, only to find the coldest of welcomes in the mothercountry or in the still loyal provinces. On this consecrated ground, after the lapse of a century, we Republicans cannot help sympathizing with the distress and personal sorrow which the longcontinued peril and final overthrow of the royalist cause brought to many a King's Chapel family. Moreover, we perceive that our modern Republican loyalty to that personified ideal which we call our