GENTLEMEN OF THE PHI BETA KAPPA SOCIETY, -How unlike the circumstances in which we have assembled to-day to those of your other recent anniversaries! Four years ago, but what an age that seems to look back through! what a vista of hopes and fears, joys and sorrows, levies and disbandings, successes and defeats, massacres and deliverances, crimes and penalties, sacrifices and rewards, while Freedom points to each saddest, bloodiest scene, as essential to her ultimate triumph!— four years ago, after your morning meeting, you listened, with other alumni of the college, to words of glowing patriotism from one whose college course was in part synchronous with my own; words uttered and heard with the deeper earnestness from the change which had just come of the hopes and first reports of a great victory the Sunday previous at Bull Run, to the certainty of a terrible defeat, an› ignominious rout. It was an hour of gloom; but, none the less, of unbroken resolution to battle for the right. A thicker gloom hung over your next anniversary, for more confident expectations had now been blasted. There

was no lack of brave and inspiriting words, for any theme not relating to our country would still have seemed out of place; but, as we lisened, we could not forget that the grand army of the Potomac, having forced its way up the Peninsula to the very suburbs of Richmond, had been hurled back in a seven-days' battle, and was at Harrison's Landing awaiting transports for its safe removal. The next anniversary was cheered by happier auspices. The national conscience, and trust in God, had been upheld by the proclamation of universal emancipation; the colored man had been invited to make common cause with his white brother; and the very month in which you met had given us the great victory of Gettysburg, with the entire repulse or capture of the rebel invaders of the free States, and the reduction of Vicksburg and Port Hudson, with the opening of the entire Mississippi to our commerce, and the division of the rebel territory into two disconnected portions. I do not wonder that the scholar who then addressed you deemed that the strain of attention to national affairs might properly be relieved by a purely literary subject.

"The bow unbent recruits its force."

In the address to which you listened last year with other alumni, the demands of both literature and patriotism were met. But while you were quietly holding your annual meeting, Sherman was commencing those battles before Atlanta, which admitted him within the "hollow shell of the Confederacy;" " and Grant, having fought his way from the "Wilderness" by those Titanic encounters which some even in New England persisted in calling defeats, his whole course forsooth a retreat forward, was patiently laying siege to Petersburg, and, through this, to the capital of the Confederacy.

But to-day, how changed is all! The war is over! Richmond is ours! The whole country is ours! The four rebel armies surrendered themselves in about as many weeks; and now, to Cape Sable and the Rio Grande, there is no resistance to the United-States authority. Our own armies are fast disbanding, as now useless.

"Thou art beautiful, O Peace!
Thou com'st like summer-beams,
Like the glad golden horn
Of Plenty in our dreams.
Lift up thy holy voice,

It may not be in vain:

The earth's bright page, the golden age,
May glad the world again.

Let us love, love on!"

THE GREAT PROBLEM.

But peace has its duties and its dangers no less than war. And, in a crisis like the pres ent, when the great and peculiar problem of national reconstruction is set before us, and questions entirely new in human history are presented for solution, there is an especial demand upon educated men, men trained to the discussion of principles and methods, to address themselves to the most earnest consideration of this problem and its attendant questions. There is a Sphinx in the land, like that which. in monstrous form, and of demoniac ingenuity, desolated old Boeotia. She propounds enig mas, and on the same conditions as her prototype. If we can solve her riddles aright, she perishes; if we cannot, our country is lost. And these questions are no such insignificant puzzles as that proposed of old to Edipus, but some of the deepest problems of national right, duty, and destiny. Here is one of them:, "Where has the war left the seceded States Are they in the Union, or out of the Union?