OPENING CHAPEL SERVICES.

The opening services of the year in Appleton Chapel were held at 7.30 last night. After anthems by the choir and an opening prayer, Dr. Francis G. Peabody read the scripture lesson from the seventeenth chapter of St. Matthew. This was followed by a third anthem, and Professor George F. Moore then delivered the sermon.

Professor Moore chose as his text the twelfth verse of the second chapter of St. James' Epistle: "So speak ye, and so do, as men that are to be judged by the law of liberty." At the outset of university life, the speaker said, a man comes into a new freedom of thought and action. The restrictions and guiding influences which have surrounded the boy are gone, and the man is at liberty to think and do as he chooses. It is not unnatural that he is tempted to eat of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, and to dabble in sin in the sudden reaction from enforced virtue. The absence of responsibility seems the essence of freedom. Yet freedom is in truth quite different--it is complete responsibility for self-government. The boy acted under orders; the free man acts for himself, and is completely and alone responsible for his motives and aims as well as for his acts. What he thinks and purposes works out in his conduct, and his conduct reacts upon his character, while on account of his independence he is alone responsible for the results of his thoughts and acts. The child's wrong-doing is punished by outward penalties, inflicted by others; but the punishment of the man's sin is the inward and silent corruption of his own power of doing right. It is because the man is free to do what he pleases that he is responsible for the effect of his choice upon himself.

Again, in intellectual things freedom brings new responsibility. No one exact theory or any branch of knowledge is recognized throughout a university, and on all subjects a man is encouraged to question, to form his own opinions. Because he is free to form his own opinion of truth, he is responsible for seeking more diligently after truth.

Absolute freedom in religious matters, also, is given to the university man. There is no one creed, no universal pressure of opinion for any one. Old forms of worship begin to seem childish, and men wonder if all religion is a thing equally as childish as those forms. The free man is bound to investigate fairly religious truths, and if any will do the will of the Father, "he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God."

Freedom is no ultimate thing. Freedom in act and thought is merely the opportunity to become free in spirit. Nor is any man free until his perception of truth becomes unerring and his response to it instinctive.

Dr. Endicott Peabody, following Professor Moore, spoke briefly on the words of St. Paul, "Forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth to those things which are before, I press forward to the mark of the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus." St. Paul bids men forget and cast away old sins, and, not content with mere resistance of temptation, press forward from height to height to the goal of ultimate perfection.

Rev. Paul Revere Frothingham followed Dr. Peabody. No history goes back far enough, he said, to a time when men were not worshipping some God or higher power outside themselves. There has been the religion ot outward mysticism, that worshipped the woods and sky and stars and sea, because they were vast and awful and unknown, and there has been the religion of introspection, of brooding over the mysteries of men's own souls; and lastly there has been the religion of work. This is the religion of which Jesus spoke when he said: "My Father worketh hitherto and I work," it is the religion that teaches the doing of ordinary work with extraordinary and spiritual power. This is the religion of today, and pre-eminently the religion for young men. But the best inspiration for work comes through occasional services of meditation and musing, and that is the reason why the Sunday services and the morning prayers in the Chapel will help a man to live more truly and effectively every day.

The services closed with a hymn, and a benediction.