AN ARGUMENT FOR CHRISTIAN COLLEGES.

DELIVERED IN BOSTON, MASS., MAY, 1857,

IN BEHALF OF THE

AND REPEATED

AT THE FOURTEENTH ANNIVERSARY, IN NEW YORK CITY,

OCTOBER 27, 1857.

NEW YORK:

JOHN F. TROW, PRINTER, 377 & 379 BROADWAY,

CORNER OF WHITE STREET.

1857.

The text of this and other superb works are available on-line from:

The Willison Politics and Philosophy Resource Center

http://willisoncenter.com/

Reprint and digital file September 1, 2005.

Henry Boynton Smith, ( 1815-1877) Professor, Church History and Theology, Union Theological Seminary, 1850- 1874.

"The controversy in our country between the respective claims of the Common School and of the College hinges, in part, as some discuss it, upon the major controversy between infidelity and Christianity. There are many who would not only banish all religion from the school and academy, but who would also be glad to undermine our whole collegiate system, because it is for the most part under Christian auspices. Not only is the Bible to be excluded from the common school to conciliate those who at any rate will hardly send their children thither; not only would they have sacred learning banished from the high school; but instead of the college, they would have other institutions in which the veriest minimum of classics, religion and philosophy is to be the maximum in these branches. Further, to aid this warfare against the colleges they are said to be aristocratic, to educate the sons of the rich in useless accomplishments ; forgetting that, as a general rule, while the rich have endowed, the poor have used these institutions."

"The real question, in point of fact, about our colleges, is a simple one: Shall the highest institutions in our land be the means of transmitting the highest fruits of human thought, and the blessed powers of the Christian faith? Or, shall our whole educational system be given over to those whose view of human destiny is limited by man’s temporal welfare ? The question is not so much whether the classics shall be taught ; the real question is, shall the Christian faith be handed down as an essential element and necessity of our future civilization. And Providence has so ordered it, that in this country, only through our collegiate institutions can Christianity be thus transmitted as the light and warmth of our highest culture.

The very idea of education, as a transmitting and transforming influence, demands then, we say, the institution and support of Christian Colleges; for thus only can our best culture be made the ally of the Church; thus alone can the Church he perpetuated as a part of our highest civilization."

"And this Society commends itself to our sympathies, our prayers and our benevolence, because this is the work it is helping on, establishing in our new states, under Christian auspices, such institutions of learning as they need in the hour of their formation, in the peril and temptation of their youth. It appeals to the largest Christian intelligence and the highest human philanthropy, for a work whose importance will be felt in proportion to our grasp of the needs and destiny of our beloved land. It appeals to the churches, and its appeals have not been in vain. It asks our rich men to build monuments while they are still living, that they may rejoice in their own work. It asks for names to be named with that of John Harvard, who died at the age of thirty, but who wrote an inscription more lasting than brass; with that of Yale, who, though he died in a foreign land, yet neither forgot the New Haven where he was born, nor will ever be forgotten by it; with that of Bartlett, whose liberal benefactions assured the prosperity—may it long continue—of the best appointed theological seminary in our land; with that of Williston, who still sees the annual fruit of his husbandry in spiritual things ; with that of Peter Cooper, erecting, with princely munificence, halls dedicated to science and art ; with that of Lawrence, who knew so well the way through the hand to the heart, through so many hands to so many hearts. Christian merchants, can you do better than add your names to this list; can your money buy a better fame? Thus may you purchase for yourselves a good degree in the annals of a wise Christian beneficence."

Page numbers in the original publication are shown in brackets as such: [ 3 ]

The following begins the original text:

[ 2 ]

" Voted—That the thanks of the Board be presented to Professor HENRY B. SMITH, D. D., for his Address delivered before the Society last evening, and that a copy be requested for publication."

An extract from the Minutes of the Proceedings of the Directors of the Society for the Promotion of Collegiate and Theological Education at the West, at their Annual Meeting, in New York City, October 28, l857.

[ 3 ]

AN ARGUMENT FOR CHRISTIAN COLLEGES.

IF asked what nations have exerted the widest historical influence, every scholar would reply,——the Hebrew, the Greek, and the Roman. These three have been universal teachers. Jerusalem, Athens and Rome have moulded the culture of the human race. From Jerusalem came the elements of our faith ; from Athens the seeds of philosophy and the ideal in art; while Roman law, the Roman language and Roman municipal institutions are at the root of a large part of modern legislation. Judea still speaks to us in the name of religion, Athens yet inspires our classic culture, while Rome is the enduring type of the state and its laws.

And thus are these three ancient cities the abiding symbols of the three vital interests of every people that is either great, or aspiring after greatness,—that is, of religion, of civil government, and of education. The Church, the State and the School are the three permanent institutions of human society; for they represent respectively our eternal welfare, our temporal wellbeing, and our training for both time and eternity. There is a Divine Kingdom; there is a human society; and there is the education of the successive generations for both. And no other institution can be ranked with these three,—omne trimum perfectum: for the useful arts help to build them up, while the aesthetic arts clothe them with beauty. The Church, the State and the School are paramount in value, dignity and necessity.

[ 4 ]

And the relation of these three to each other is at once apparent; and in this relation we may see the true position and functions of Education. For education in its inmost sense and scope is but the process by which the successive generations of the race are trained in, and by, and for the State and the Church. Its function is like that of the sap in the tree. It carries the living and shaping forces through trunk, branch, twig, leaf and blossom to the ripened fruit ; it fits each new atom into its appointed place, as a living part of the growing whole. Society would die out, the state would die out, religion would die out, if it were not for this renovating sap. Education shapes the growing life of both State and Church.

Each nation, too, if it have a life of its own, has its own special work to do in education, in the way best befitting its character and destiny. As is its government, as is its faith, so must be its education. If it is a colony, it may imitate the parent state if it is an independent people, then must its system of general culture be very much of and for itself. The Grecian education made Greeks ; Rome disciplined her citizens into Romans; Prussia trains its children for a monarch who crowns himself; the Czar of all the Russias makes, by education, his subjects faithful to the Greek Church and to himself, their and its head ; the present French university system fosters the love of a real imperialism and a nominal democracy; the institutions of England are at work in making Englishmen; and if America be not a province but a commonwealth, with its own part to play in the van of future history, then must American education be such as to prepare its youth for the highest and best destiny of the American people.

The Society for the Promotion of Collegiate and Theological Education at the West, the only institution of the kind in our country, has for its object to furnish such an education as we most need, especially in our Western States, where the demand so far outruns the supply. In pleading in its behalf, allow me, so far as the limits of the hour will permit, to attempt the elucidation of three connected propositions, which embody the main argument for the high plan this Society has in view.

1. That

[ 5 ]

the very Idea of Education among a Christian people demands the institution of Christian Colleges:

2. That the History of Education enforces the same demand:

3. That the Position and Necessities of the American people make the demand imperative.

1. Our first proposition is, That the very Idea of Education among a Christian people demands the institution of Christian Colleges.

Man alone, of all animals, can be educated; and hence man alone has the instinct of immortality. The end of a plant is to bear seed after its kind; it can do no more. Animals provide for the future, but it is by a blind impulse, not seeing before and after; when they seem to reason, it is rather by instinct and association than by logic ; we know not that they have either a moral or rational nature; and it is quite certain that they cannot be trained in letters or ethics. But man, as a spiritual being, can ever grow in knowledge and in virtue. He has the idea of a moral law and order; he knows that there is a God: and thus he has at once the possibility of culture and the aspiration for immortality. Because he is moral, he is not all mortal ; his very immorality gives him the fear, when not the hope, of immortality. His destiny is not to be estimated by a calculation of leverage and blind forces, but by the possibilities of that which is moral and spiritual. He is not merely a means to an end; in his own soul the highest of all ends can be realized, since he can live for holiness, and not for happiness alone ; since he can find the metes and bounds of his own being only in glorifying God. and enjoying him forever. Even Aristotle teaches us "that man’s chief good is an energy of the soul with respect to virtue ;" and Christian ethics makes love to all that is according to its real value to be the supreme law,—a love which has ultimate respect to holiness and not to happiness. To fit man for that end, to make each human being thus harmonious with the whole, is the paramount object and problem of education. Its necessity springs from the fact, that the human race is a succession of generations ; nature prompts to it by the instincts of parental love and filial reverence; society must care for it, if society is to grow.

[ 6 ]

Society is bound to take each helpless child, and make him part and parcel of the mighty whole; incorporate him into the State, through a knowledge of its functions, and train him for the Church as the realm of redemption.

Or, in other words, education is that process by which each mature generation fits its children to be its successors in the grand development of human life and destiny. It is the process of transmitting what the past has garnered and what the present possesses, so that it may fertilize and make the future. The soil must be enriched by the debris of the past, and be cultivated by the patient husbandry of to-day, if it is to bear an abundant harvest.

On whose support, harmoniously conjoined,

Each new human being is to be worked into the advancing destiny of humanity, as the skilful loom weaves the woof into the warp ; if the warp be the lines of destiny, the woof is made up of the threads of our lives; and education is the loom. Education is the giving to a new and rising generation whatever the old has got of value and of power; its arts and art ; its literature and philosophy; its whole culture, and above all, its morality and its religion, transmitting these, like a sacred torch, from sire to son. Each generation is here both a creditor and a debtor; a creditor to the past, for what it has received, a debtor to the future for what that is to be and become; it can square the account with the past only by educating for the future ; and alas, for that generation which does not carry a larger balance to its sons than it received from its fathers; for then it has lived in vain as to its highest functions and duties. Each human generation, because it is a living growth, and not a dead machine, because the law of growth is its vital law, owes to its youth the highest and best culture it can possibly confer. It must educate its children for the State and the Church, if it is to be honored by the State, or blessed of the Church.

This matter of education, then, has a wide scope. It begins

[ 7 ]

in the domestic circle, prompted by that parental instinct which is stronger than reason, guided by that maternal love which is stronger than death, which gives tone to each word, and where every look teaches unconsciously; and they who would abolish the family, cut off the very roots of a healthful culture of the race. Boys and girls, too, are teaching each other at home and abroad, in the school and in the street. The social circle educates by its manners, its fashions, its discourse. The pulpit is a teacher from Sunday to Sunday; the lecture diffuses knowledge; the morning or evening journal helps on this business of education so consciously, that it has even been gravely proposed that we should cease to buy Milton and Shakespeare, and take instead a daily newspaper, just as if the nil would not dry up when the fountains are neglected. The State, too, by its institutions of all grades, from the public school to the university, is bound to educate its children for itself; nor can it exist as a. permanent power unless it does this liberally. Whenever the general education of its youth can be taken from the State, and engrossed by other instrumentalities, then the State is becoming secondary, and these other institutions primary and predominant. To say that the State may not, must not, educate, and educate all, is to say that the State is succumbing before some other power. For, that which educates the young holds the future in its grasp; it has got the germ, and how shall it not have the ripened fruit! And the Church, too, must be an educational, as well as a missionary institute, if the Church is to be perpetuated. If its lively oracles are to be handed down as a living blessing, if its truths are to make the future glorious as they have made the past luminous, if it is to redeem mankind, according to its mighty promise and power, this can only be through a thorough Christian culture, so applied and enlarged as to meet our present wants, and call forth all the hidden, reserved energies of the faith for its largest, loftiest triumphs. When our Saviour’s touching appeal, "Suffer little children to come unto me," is thoroughly applied, then may his Church look forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners. Christianity demands

[ 8 ]

intelligence; faith itself is a clear vision ; and without the open eye there were no wisdom to the open heart and the open head.

And through such education, applied by all these instrumentalities, what marvels are wrought! so great, that many thoughtful minds have even said, that culture, and not nature, makes all the diversities of capacity and character. This opinion, though false to what is innate, is a homage to civilization. A heathen sage tells us, that the difference between the cultivated and the unlearned, is as that between the living and the dead. Man comes into being the most helpless of animals, and acquires dominion over all others; he subjugates and transforms the outward world; be brings to the light of day the secrets hidden in the womb of nature, extorting them by the exorcism of science; the powers of the earth and the air and the deep are summoned at his bidding; the winds and the lightning oft do his behest; from the shapeless marble and coarse pigments he creates the ideals of form and grace, and causes the rude air to vibrate with delight in melodies such as nature never uttered; he reconstructs the fair order of the Kosmos; he maps out the stars by name, foretelling their coming and their going ; he builds cities, and guides the destinies of states ; his own life he knows as a part of the biography of an undying race; he abides not with the limits of microscopic or of telescopic vision, but reaches forth to the unseen and the eternal, knowing that immensity is the reality of space, and that all time is embosomed in a boundless eternity; and that above all space and beyond all time, there is One enthroned who alone is great, alone is perfect; and that the measure of his own being is completed only in living for Him, and for His eternal kingdom, begun here, and to end—never, never! And to give to man such power and dominion, to transform the infant of a day into the perfected manhood of the scholar, the artist, the statesman and the Christian, this belongs to the instrumentality of education. Compare the Sacae of Bokhara in the first century with the Englishmen of England in the nineteenth, a Hengist and Horsa of the fifth century (if these be indeed the names of men, and not rather of the horses painted on the invading ensigns of the hosts that then

[ 9 ]

ravaged Britain,) with a Wycliffe, Newton, Bacon, Shakespeare, Cromwell, Jeremy Taylor, and Arkwright—all of strict Anglican descent ; the rude Celt with the polished Frenchman ; the children of the nomadic Arab with the bright assemblage in a Sabbath-school, singing their hymns of sweet accord ; or even the vagrants of our streets and lanes with the intelligent, ardent classes in the public schools of Boston, St. Louis, or New York! What has wrought this magical change in those of like lineage, and, it may well be, of like native capacities ; what but the power of education! And how has it wrought such marvels? What have been its means? The modern, well-appointed school-house, seats, tables, carefully prepared text-books, the blackboard, and what have been called the two main implements of education, chalk and kindness, have doubtless done much these have given the form and methods. But in what is the substance of this education, the reality and promise of this change ? It is in the character formed ; the principles inculcated ; the preparation of these children not only for action, but for right action, not merely to live for themselves, but for others, even for the highest welfare of society, to be aids and helpers in carrying on the race toward its best end and issue. And if the education has not done this, it has failed in its paramount and vital object.

We have thus spoken of education as a transmitting, and also as a transforming power, for it is both. According to its true idea, then, it is to transmit the best and highest culture, and thus to transform the child into the man fitted for right action. Accordingly, all education must have two main ends in view as to each youth: the one having respect to his individual development or culture ; and the other having respect to the society, for and by which the education is conducted; and these ends are correlative and mutually necessary. Education. is indeed the training of the individual; but—for what ? It is the development of the individual capacities ; but—by what ? It is for the future welfare of society, it is by all that is best and valuable in society. Hence all those theories which seem to restrict education to the bare discipline of the faculties, just let

[ 10 ]

slip the main inquiry, and test in a true theory. Some will have it, for example, that it is little matter what is learned, provided the powers of the mind are duly exercised. But these very powers cannot be exercised except by words, by thoughts, by books, by principles. Even in pure logic we cannot reason without having our premises. A boy cannot remember without remembering some fact or truth. It is utter thoughtlessness to pretend that the discipline of the powers is the main end. It is like the vague theories about progress, and development, which conveniently ignore the simple questions,—progress of what and to what?—development in what and for what? The soul of progress is in that which is made to progress ; the essence of education is in that by which and for which the education is given. The real issue in the educational theories of the day is altogether outside of the inquiry,—whether education is, and is to be, a discipline of the powers : that, no one can deny; but to be content with that is just not to tell us whether our education is to be infidel or Christian.

Before pressing the question to this issue, however, what has been already said may aid us in estimating the comparative value of what is sometimes called self-education, in distinction from instruction in the regular schools of discipline. Gibbon has well said, "that every man who rises above the common level has received two educations; the first from his teacher, the second and more important from himself." Every man, no matter what his opportunities, must be also self-educated. And many, to their praise be it spoken, have made good the lack of early advantages to their own honor, and the benefit of mankind. But still, they must have had teachers ; no nation, no person, ever yet spun its knowledge out of its own bowels. The teacher may have been only a dumb book, but it spoke to an eager eye. Schools and colleges simply aid, direct, give the best facilities, the incitamenta animi, save labor and blunders, do not make but guide the mind. Those who inveigh against colleges, because they have got along without them, would simply exalt their own limitations into a standard. The only possible apology for a man who talks against classical study is that he has never known its benefits.

[ 11 ]

Two or three scholars out of two or three hundred in our colleges may, perchance, be over nice in Greek and Latin prosody and accent; but, surely, we have not yet, as a people, any too much of that culture, of that critical sagacity in using terms and epithets, of that measured diction, not monotonous but shapely, which the study of the classics is adapted to impart. There may not be enough of French and German, of physiology and aesthetics; but we have not yet any remarkable surplus of that scholarship which makes the historian, the statesman, the poet, the philosopher, and the divine. Niebuhr, in one of his letters, exclaims: "Oh! how men would hug philology, if they did but know that it was to revel in the choicest haunts of by-gone times, weaving the warp and woof of life."

But to return to the central inquiry as to the theory of education, we say, that from the very nature of the case, as is a man’s theory about human nature and human destiny, so must be his theory about education, that is, if he is consistent. The chief conflicts about education, and the best education, centre just here. In the transforming process, what shall be transmitted? By what and for what shall the discipline be guided and measured? Education is a development; by what and for what? The answer to this inquiry must give the tone, spirit and aim to our institutions for education.

A man, for example, who believes that the highest functions of the race, its real divine image, are to be found in the subjugation of nature, the propagation of the kind, and social well-being will and must hold, that the acme of education is to be found in the study of the natural sciences, in the so-called positive philosophy which denies whatever is supernatural, and in preparation for the useful arts of life, All religious or theological teaching, and the higher spiritual philosophy, will not enter into his programme, but be left outside as an affair for the learned leisure or historical curiosity of anybody who has a fancy that way. Hence he would like to supplant the Greek language by conchology, the Latin by instruction in farming, and mental philosophy by anatomy. He would inculcate temperance, honor, honesty and good-will; would have a text-book on the rights and duties of men in the

[ 12 ]

State ; but he would like to exclude religious instruction, particularly in all the specific facts and doctrines of Christianity. In morals and religion he would have only that taught in which everybody agrees. He would rather have young men study a good treatise on physiology than Butler’s Analogy, Story on the Constitution than Paley’s Evidences, and Combe’s Phrenology than the New Testament. And in all this, he is only consistent with his radical theory about human nature and destiny.

Another, one it may be of the illuminati of the transcendental philosophy with pantheistic imaginings, will concede the need of a more spiritual culture, of some knowledge of the interior temple as well as of its five gateways, and of what the race has been doing for six thousand years, as well as of our own doings this year; and he would add history, speculation, aesthetics, and other branches, provided all these can be so presented as to confound nature and spirit, divinity and humanity, ethics and physiology.

The controversy in our country between the respective claims of the Common School and of the College hinges, in part, as some discuss it, upon the major controversy between infidelity and Christianity. There are many who would not only banish all religion from the school and academy, but who would also be glad to undermine our whole collegiate system, because it is for the most part under Christian auspices. Not only is the Bible to be excluded from the common school to conciliate those who at any rate will hardly send their children thither; not only would they have sacred learning banished from the high school; but instead of the college, they would have other institutions in which the veriest minimum of classics, religion and philosophy is to be the maximum in these branches. Further, to aid this warfare against the colleges they are said to be aristocratic, to educate the sons of the rich in useless accomplishments ; forgetting that, as a general rule, while the rich have endowed, the poor have used these institutions. An American college is no more aristocratic than the light is aristocratic, or than the flower and fruit of a tree are aristocratic. But this popular complaint has a deeper ground than the fear of an aristocracy. For most of our colleges are conservative without bigotry, and not progressive at the

[ 13 ]

expense of undervaluing all past example and wisdom; they also give such learning in the higher spheres of thought as enables the student to detect the sophistry and shallowness of many a scheme for reform which were only the road to the ruin of all that is venerable in Church or State; and, further, through God’s blessing they have proved themselves able guardians and nurseries of the Christian faith, in opposition to that materializing or pantheistic infidelity, which would fain bring our higher learning under its own influence.

The real question, in point of fact, about our colleges, is a simple one: Shall the highest institutions in our land be the means of transmitting the highest fruits of human thought, and the blessed powers of the Christian faith? Or, shall our whole educational system be given over to those whose view of human destiny is limited by man’s temporal welfare ? The question is not so much whether the classics shall be taught ; the real question is, shall the Christian faith be handed down as an essential element and necessity of our future civilization. And Providence has so ordered it, that in this country, only through our collegiate institutions can Christianity be thus transmitted as the light and warmth of our highest culture.

The very idea of education, as a transmitting and transforming influence, demands then, we say, the institution and support of Christian Colleges; for thus only can our best culture be made the ally of the Church; thus alone can the Church he perpetuated as a part of our highest civilization.

2. Thus we are prepared to consider, more briefly, our second proposition, which was : That the History of Education, wherein are given the lessons of experience, enforces the same demand. The history of education has, in fact, been but a development of the idea of education : as is the idea, so has been the historic law.

Education through its whole history has been, in part, a series of attempts to master the best means of discipline ; but it has also ever had in view the main object of education, the transmission of the highest culture. Every people that has had an historical character and destiny has had institutions for education

[ 14 ]

commensurate with its influence, and adapted to its own needs. Every such people has made its highest truths and faith the very core of its instruction. And every Christian nation has not only made the Christian faith the crown of its education, but has been compelled to resort to colleges and universities to strengthen and perpetuate that faith. Such is the teaching of history, as we will try to exemplify in a rapid outline of the course and progress of education.

Not now to speak of the hoary Oriental systems, which have had no abiding influence, because neither of the three luminous ideas of Truth, Goodness or Beauty presided over their literature, look at Athens, the teacher of the nations, itself, as has been well said, "not so much a city as university."* From this small city, planted on the blue Aegean, went forth a power which subdued the East more completely than did the Macedonian phalanx, making the Greek tongue the language of culture through Asia Minor, Egypt, and even in the Imperial City; which brought the whole Roman Empire under its sway; which shaped the theology of Christian Alexandria, and which became anew a living influence at the epoch of the revival of letters, and is still essential to liberal learning all over the world, What has given this city such power and honor? Not its geography, not its republicanism, not its worship of the Beautiful, nor yet its philosophy alone; but, more than these, the shaping power of its, education, thoroughly Greek, while all human; so symmetrical that they called it music, and so free that it was open to all comers from Scythia or Libya, from Rome or Syria. The student in the age of Pericles came thither, and lived in a beggarly way in its narrow streets and narrower houses; but as he passes through the city, his eye is arrested by the architecture of Callicrates and the symmetry of the Parthenon ; he enters the stately edifice, and is entranced by the forms of immortal grace sculptured by a Phidias or Praxiteles ; he may hear recited the dramas of the lofty Sophocles, and the tragical Euripides, or the histories of an Herodotus and a Thucydides; he learns the force of human

* See J. H. Newman. The Office and Work of the University. London. 1856.

[ 15 ]

speech in the flowing eloquence of Isocrates and the thunder of Demosthenes; at the Academy he may listen to Plato discoursing of the divine archetypes, and in the Lyceum to Aristotle dissecting the forms of logic, disclosing the organon of thought or unveiling the secrets of nature. And thus does Athens become to him the ideal of intellectual power, fashioning his own soul.

In Rome, from the nature of its government, education became more systematic ; the state provided for the teaching of the ancient totum scibile, the Trivium and Quadrivium ,* in schools established in all the main provinces of the Empire though the substance of the learning was chiefly taken from the Greeks. In Rome itself was the beginning of a formal system, to be completed by the pupil at the age of twenty ; there were ten chairs for Latin grammar, as many for Greek; three for Latin rhetoric, and five for Greek; one for philosophy and two (or four) for Roman law. The system of education culminated in the study of jurisprudence; for the State was to the Roman what Beauty was to the Greek.

The university proper had not yet come into being. The Museum of Alexandria, endowed by the munificence of the Ptolemies, was the first large attempt of a more comprehensive scope ; the impulse being given by Alexander, the friend of Aristotle the lover of music and the arts. This Museum was regularly endowed ; it had large libraries, which, as Pliny says, first made man’s genius into a republic, † one of 300,000 and another of 400,000 volumes; the largest remained, answering to the Egyptian motto, "a hospital for sick souls," until the Saracen declared it fit only for the flames. Here taught Euclid the

* These designations were current through the Middle Ages, which reckoned seven subjects as belonging to the liberal arts: the first three, viz: grammar, arithmetic, and geometry, were taught in the elementary schools, and were termed the Trivium, and were hence sometimes called the trivial studies; the other four, the Quadrivium, comprised music, astronomy, dialectics and rhetoric. These seven subjects of education ale described in the well-known lines:

[ 16 ]

mathematician, Hippocrates the astronomer, Aristarchus the critic. Here, too, as was fitting, was the first great school of Christian theology, animated by the influence of Hebrew learning, yet chiefly zealous for a union between philosophy and faith; struggling to overcome the heathen Gnosticism by a pure Christian insight ; contending against the Greek philosophy and Jewish prejudice, and seeking to make Christianity paramount in speculation as well as in faith. This was the far-famed Catechetical school, founded by Pantaenus, but made illustrious by the adamantine Origen, the living personification of Oriental learning, eagerness and speculation. So many flocked to hear him here and at Caesarea, that he says he had hardly time to breathe. Here first Christianity conquered in the realm of thought; here first philosophy learned to say that the cross of Christ is the marrow of wisdom. Here Greek and Roman learning was made to serve the Nazarene. And thus was the first stadium of Christianity, in its first great conflict with the Greek and Roman culture, safely passed through, and in part by means of a fitting education. Cathedral schools were also early formed for the training of priests; that of Iona, one of the Hebrides, on a simple model, has an imperishable fame in the annals of Christian culture and zeal.

The second stadium of Christian history is also made illustrious by its schools, those founded by the imperial Charlemagne. This period of man’s history was introduced by the devastations of the vast barbarian irruptions, disintegrating the mighty Roman Empire. Hun, Goth, Vandal and Lombard passed, like a flood, from Asia over Europe, as if the very fountains of the race had been opened afresh, a human deluge, in which only the Roman bishop stood erect. Pagan Rome was whelmed. What power can shape this moral chaos into a moral kosmos ? Charlemagne, in union with the Pope who crowned him, established throughout the new Western Empire schools of Christian learning on a wider scale than had hitherto been attempted. The Englishman, Alcuin, a disciple of the venerable Bede, was his counsellor. A seminary of theology was made obligatory in every diocese grammar and public schools were inaugurated in each province. At

[ 17 ]

Paris, Pavia and Bologna were institutions of a higher order, open to all, for which in every land the best teachers were sought out. And thus was Charlemagne the regenerator of learning; and thus was Christianity made triumphant over the barbaric hordes.

Charlemagne also meditated the plan of a university; but the development of the university system was reserved for the third stage and conflict of Christianity, in the Mediaeval Era. The Middle Ages are characterized by the power of their institutions, no less than by their corruptions in the simplicity of the faith. The contest between the Imperial and Papal powers is the heart of their history ; and through the universities the Papal power, with its usual sagacity, held the cultivated intellect. It was not so much the inherent power of Peter’s chair, as the inherent power of great educational institutions, which made the Papacy so mighty with the thinkers of those times. The leading University was that of Paris, to which was given the whole south bank of the Seine, which at one time had its 30,000 pupils, for whom it did not even provide dormitories. There taught the brilliant Abelard, that knight-errant of theology, whom none but Eloise could subdue; there Peter the Lombard dictated his Sentences, Albertus Magnus his dialectics, and Aquinas, the angelic doctor, for a time read his Gothic system of theology. Thither came teachers from all quarters,—thirty-two Oxford professors also read at Paris; and thither followed them pupils from all quarters. The university, says Newman, did not make the man; the man made the university. There, too, was the Sorbonne, whose opinions determined the policy of states. There, likewise, was perfected that union of Aristotelian logic with ecclesiastical tradition, which makes the essence and strength of the scholastic divinity.

But Paris was only one of many. Oxford stood next; at Salerno medicine was taught; Bologna in the thirteenth century had 10,000 students of law. In the thirteenth century, 8 large universities were founded; in the fourteenth, 21 ; in the fifteenth, 27. Wittenberg came in 1502, a harbinger of the Reformation.

The rude beginnings of Oxford and Cambridge date back to

[ 18 ]

the first part of the tenth century. These two universities, which have shaped the mind of England and helped in the fashion of our own faith and philosophy, began with the humblest provisions. At Cambridge a common barn was the first school of the sciences; but soon, we are told, the biggest church could not hold the scholars. Alfred’s name and Oxford are indissolubly blended ; in the thirteenth century it was the second university of Europe: Scotch, Irish, Welsh, French, Spaniards, Germans, Hungarians and Poles flocked thither to hear Scotus the subtle, Bacon the admirable, Hales the invincible, and Bradwardine the profound. Both at Cambridge and Oxford the colleges, which have almost superseded the regular university, were the fruit chiefly of private endowments.* And what power these institutions have had I ‘What memories are invoked in their halls The mind of England looks up to them with reverence. Their contests have been an epitome of the contests of the realm. † With

* On the history of this change, see Sir William Hamilton on English Universities (Edinburgh Review, June, 1831, reprinted), in his Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, Education and University Reform, 1853, pp. 383, sq. "Piety thus concurred with benevolence in supplying houses in which poor scholars might be harbored without cost, and youth, removed from perilous temptation, be placed under the control of an overseer." "Free board was soon added to free lodging; and a small bursary or stipend generally completed the endowment." p. 400. In a subsequent article (June, 1834), in the Discussions, p. 458, sq., he investigates the original sense of the term university, which signifies, "not a school teaching, or privileged to teach, and grant degrees, in all the faculties," but the whole community or society, united together for general study.

† Oxford in its early history was the centre of reform in England ; its political disturbances were widely felt

Chronica si penses cum pugnacit Oxonienses,

Post paucos annos, volat ira per Angligenses.

"A leaven of something decidedly akin to Protestantism was at work among the northern clerks and Realists, from whom Wychiffe himself ultimately proceeded. The opinions of the Waldenses are known to have found decided sympathy at Oxford." "So deeply seated was this reformatory tendency in Oxford, and so radically interwoven with the very principle of its existence, that the final suppression of the Wychiffe party in the middle of the fourteenth century, gave at once the death-blow to its ancient prosperity."

E. Kirkpatrick, The historically received Conception of the University, &c. London, 1856.

[ 19 ]

all their defects, they have been the glory of the United Kingdom ; they have held England fast to the faith of the church.

In the fourth stadium of Christian history, and in the fourth series of Christian conflicts, the like necessity and power of a thorough Christian education were deeply felt. The Christian church burst the fetters which had so long bound it; and it was Christian learning, as well as Christian faith, which undermined the Papacy, and became the bulwark of Protestantism. Oxford and Cambridge were reformed; Peter Martyr taught in the former, Bucer in the latter; Luther and Melancthon were at Wittenberg; John Knox was at St. Andrew’s. Early Christian and classical learning were revived, and proved allies of the faith. Seventeen universities were founded in the sixteenth century, chiefly under Protestant auspices, and the great British schools of Eton, Rugby and Harrow were begun. The Dutch universities at Leyden and Utrecht were established, where Scaliger, Spanheim, Vitringa, Witsius, Vossius, and Lampe taught. Under John Calvin’s influence the Academy of Geneva was founded, in which he gave instruction at times to 1,000 pupils, though never with the title of professor (Beza being the first who bore that name), with the Turretines as his successors. In France from 1578 to the revocation of the edict of Nantes, 1685, the Protestants established one or more colleges in every province of the kingdom, excepting Provence, thirty-two in all, with a course of instruction of seven years; and also at least one parochial school for every church.* The revocation of the edict of Nantes destroyed these dangerous seminaries. And nearly all these colleges were the fruit of the private zeal and benevolence of that noble French church, now, alas! so widely scattered.

This rapid outline of the history of institutions for learning,

—not yet alluding to those in our own land, while it shows the

* An interesting account of the Academy of Geneva is published in the Bulletin de la Sociêtê de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Francais, Quatrême Annêe, 1856, by Prof. J. E. Cellerier, from 1559 to 1798, in three articles, pp. 13—26, 200—205, 253—373. The history of primary schools and colleges among French Protestants before the revocation of the edict of Nantes is given in the same Bulletin, by Michel Nicolas, in the same volume, pp. 497— 511, and 582—595.

[ 20 ]

necessity of education and of progress in education, also proves the main positions we are attempting to enforce, that Christianity must ever be in the van of learning, and that the form and pressure of each new nation or era call for a new unfolding of all the reserved energies of the church, adapting the supply to the demand.

Four times—so history tells us—has Christianity passed through the struggle of life or death, and in each of these it cast up its bulwarks, towers and citadels, its institutions of sacred learning. Four times, through God’s grace, the Captain of our Salvation has bound anew the crown of victory upon the brow of his contesting bride. In the first ordeal it was the struggle with the Greek culture and the might of Pagan Rome, around the shores of the Mediterranean; and Christian love and faith won the victory, yet not without the Christian schools. In the second, the battle-field was the centre of Europe, and in the Carlovingian academies the descendants of the Goth learned the faith of the Gospel. Through the dark abyss of the middle ages a veiled Providence guided the faith; and from many of its universities, founded to support imperial and papal despotism, came the battle-cry of a Wycliffe, a Huss, a Luther and a Knox, calling for a reform in the church, which laid the basis for all other reforms. And thus was brought about the fourth crisis, the fourth conflict, and in it, chiefly under the patronage of states in union with the church, the present institutions of Protestant Europe have made the Christian faith a part and parcel of the highest civilization to which the race has as yet attained. And now, if history be not a lying oracle, if the voice of prophecy utters any abiding truth, the same faith is preparing for its widest achievement, in which the prize is to be not one nation, not one race, but the whole earth, and in which the price is to be proportioned to the prize.

3. And in this contest our own land is to bear no inferior part. That demand, which comes to us, as we have shown, from the very idea of education, and which is enforced, as we have seen, by the whole experience of the race, is made imperative by our own position and exigencies. The question whether

[ 21 ]

Christianity is to be paramount in our land, is the question at the heart of all our enterprises for collegiate and theological education, especially at the West. Louis Napoleon, in his "Ideas," says: "That the history of England proclaims in a high voice to kings, march at the head of the ideas of your age, and these ideas follow and sustain you; march in their train and they drag you along; march against them and they overthrow you." The history of the world may be condensed in the same exhortation to the Christian people of our land. All our circumstances unite in demanding of the church to put itself in the van of our national culture.

That education with us must be universal, it needs no argument to show. The state must educate all ; the church, also, must educate directly all the children it can gather in its schools. Universal education is not a matter of choice; it is a necessity laid upon us. The work began with the pilgrims ; it is going on all over the land. By some means, under some auspices, all will be educated; if not under moral and Christian auspices, then under materializing and infidel. It is in the very instinct of a republic, with universal suffrage as its irreversible law, that this should be so. Where all are sovereigns, all will and must be trained for their sovereignty, whether of weal or woe.

Hence our system of education must be adapted to our new condition ; it cannot be a mere imitation of any foreign model. It must also be fitted to the needs of a republic, in which the state is divorced from the church: No foreign system can cope with our dangers, nor be mated with our advantages.

It is with us, in respect to education, precisely as in respect to the other coordinate powers of the church and the state ; the church, even in the most traditional communions, cannot here thrive on traditions alone; the state can never live by mere precedents.

[ 22 ]

And for our encouragement it may be said, that no people ever began its institutions under better auspices or with ampler promise. This we owe, under God, to the pious zeal of our Pilgrim Fathers, many of them eminent in learning as well as faith. John Cotton, of Boston, had been the Head Lecturer and Dean of Immanuel College in Cambridge, England. John Newton, of Ipswich, afterwards of Boston, was offered a fellowship in the same college. John Davenport, of New Haven, was termed a " universal scholar." Thomas Hooker, of Hartford, was a Fellow of Cambridge, and was here called the "light of the Western churches." Thomas Thacher, of Weymouth, composed a Hebrew Lexicon. Charles Chauncey, President of Harvard, had been professor of Greek in Cambridge, England. Cotton Mather was the author of 382 publications, including the Magnalia.

Established under such auspices, it is no wonder that all of our earlier colleges, and, following in their train, most of the later, have been animated by the conviction, that institutions of learning are needed by Christianity, and should have this faith at the basis of all their instructions. The earliest were not so much colleges as schools for the training of a ministry. The Pilgrims, when they numbered only 5,000 families, founded the University of Cambridge, in 1636, with its perennial motto: Christo et Ecclesiae ; and Cotton Mather says that this University was "the best thing they ever thought of." Cotton Mather himself wrote a book, "The Student and Preacher: Manuductio ad Ministerium; or, The Angels preparing to Sound the Trumpet," which Dr. Ryland, of Northampton, in England, republished in 1781, for its valuable directions. In 1696, there were 116 pastors in the 129 churches, and 109 of these were from Harvard. Harvard has educated 1673 ministers; 351 are still living. Yale College dates from 1700; and in its earlier years the Assembly’s Catechism in Greek was read by the Fresh-men; the Sophomores studied Hebrew; the Juniors, Syriac; and the Seniors both at Harvard and Yale were thoroughly instructed in divinity in the admirable compend of Wollebius.

Yale has given to our churches 1661 ministers; of whom

[ 23 ]

741 are still living. In the state of Connecticut, down to 1842, out of 947 ministers, only 33 were not graduates. Princeton was started in 1741, one of the fruits of the great revival, and by the New Side of that day. Dartmouth was a missionary school from its inception in 1769 ; and its catalogue gives the names of more than 700 ministers, a quarter part of all its graduates. And almost all of our later colleges are the fruit of Christian beneficence, and their foundations have been laid with the prayers of our churches; and He who heareth prayer has breathed upon them his divine blessing, and through their influence, sanctified our youth for the service of Christ and his church. They have aspired to realize that ideal of education which Milton had in vision when he said: "The end of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which, being united to the heavenly grace of faith, makes up the highest perfection."

And it is also among our benefits, that, though our system of education is less definitely wrought out in some of its parts than in the older countries, yet nowhere is the spontaneous impulse to general culture so widely diffused. With us alone, academies, colleges and universities are founded by private beneficence on a wide scale. In 1800 we had 25 colleges; now we number 144; in the last fifteen years we have added on the average three colleges a year to our total list. In 1800 we had no theological seminary, now we number 46; and in medicine and law the growth of schools has been equally rapid. The elemental forces are at work; it needs only their wise direction to produce an unequalled consummation. We have not yet a complete university—the universitas doctorum et studiosorum; and we need fresh impulse in the highest msthetic culture. Our scholars must still prepare for professorships in foreign lands. No American Neander has yet spent twenty-five years, nor Gieseler twenty-eight upon a Church history ; no Mitford here has given forty years, nor Grote thirty, to Greece ; no American Wolf has passed twenty—two years in editing Demosthenes,

[ 24 ]

nor Wyttenbach thirty—eight on Plutarch ; no Schelling with us has kept a system of philosophy forty years in reserve, perfecting its details; and very few of our authors would say, with Foster, that his own essay had 5,000 faults, and that he had corrected between 2 and 3,000 of them. We have no fellowships for learned leisure like England ; nor that competition in getting professorships, and keeping auditors, which is the life of a German university. Our diamond has a flaw ; but still it is better than a pebble; and for no diamond in a regal diadem would we make the exchange. Better is this universal zeal for education than all the patronage of states. Academies and colleges spring up as our population advances. In Minnesota there is already a university at St. Anthony’s, and a college eight miles off at St. Paul. Our system is immature, but it is the immaturity of a giant. The foundation is good, and it is our own. And all our progress must be on the present basis ; its legitimate growth must be adapted to the character and needs of a people, that is advancing at the rate of a thousand men a day, and a hundred miles a year, planting towns and states in the wilderness. No spectacle so sublime was ever before seen in human history. It demands a new version of the art of education, as much as Alexander’s tactics demanded of the Persians, or Napoleon’s strategy of the Germans, a change in the theory of campaigns. When we have fully mastered the idea of a Christian commonwealth, growing nearly as rapidly by foreign immigration as by native increase, then we shall be prepared to consider, and perhaps to answer the question : What is the education we need?

For, if we, as a people, are to carry on the course of human history yet another stadium toward its consummation ; if we are not an outlying island in a silent sea, but a continent between two mighty oceans, already vexed by our restless ships, whose tonnage is rapidly advancing to an equality with that of all other nations; if we are in the very van of the advancing hosts of empire in that unfaltering march from East to West, following the apparent motion of the sun, from which the race has never swerved, from which it cannot swerve, if the kingdom of redemption is to become the glittering girdle of our apostate earth

[ 25 ]

if we are receiving all tribes, tongues and races in such a confluence as that of all rivers to the ocean; and if we are to be the means of transmitting to generations yet unborn the wisdom and faith that alone have blessed the world ; then, too, according to all the analogy of the past, must we have channels and institutions adapted to our unexampled exigencies and commensurate with our unfolding destiny. We must have such wisdom in forming our plans, and such benevolence in their prosecution, as to prove ourselves equal to our task. The prophets of our destiny must not merely have a vision as large, but a charity as wise as that of Bishop Berkely, who first said, "Westward the course of empire takes its way," but also gave a farm to Yale College.

While it is indeed true, as a great statesman has said, "that the life of humanity is so long, and the lives of individuals so short, that what we see is often only the ebb of the advancing wave ;" yet the wave itself when it becomes a billow, cannot be mistaken for an eddy on the coast. With us the brook has indeed become a river, and the river an ocean. There was a handful of corn upon the top of the mountains, and the fruit thereof shakes like Lebanon. Our territory is nearly double the extent of that of Rome in its palmiest days. Our peaceful institutions have attracted as great a diversity of tongues as those which the imperial eagle subjugated. Immigration flocks hither, not alone from the calculations of prudence, but also borne by such a providential impulse as always defies and enlightens the sagacity of man; and that same impulse carries to the heart of the continent the largest diversity and vigor. Our very continent, as an intelligent foreigner has said, is shaped like the inside of a bowl, so that all runs to the centre, while Europe is shaped like the outside, so that all runs off. And, as is the increase of our population, so is the development of our material resources, stimulating most liberally what even a heathen could call the

"Imperiosa fames, et habendi saeva cupido."—LUCAN.

Space and time themselves, those inevitable conditions of all finite being, are contracting under the influence of steam and

[ 26 ]

electricity, applied by human skill ; but this same influence tends to scatter the population far and wide in distant valleys, moving them from the old moorings. The reverence for law is widely felt and the rights of suffrage generally kept inviolate ; but the law of man is sometimes enforced as if it were the higher law, and an armed mob has more than once put its iron heel on the neck of freedom. In the heat of party strife there is often great danger that living right and law expire in the arms of the dead forms of law. The rational and national principles of freedom and the sectional and selfish instincts of slavery are coming to bolder issues. Among our leading evangelical bodies, a strong feeling of essential unity still prevails, and not of Christ is the word that would sever these blessed bonds. But there are also innumerable sects, gross fanaticism, puerile spiritualists there is also the organized power of the Roman hierarchy, and the subtle influence of a pantheistic infidelity,—the one nullifying and the other deifying human rights and reason, both fed most largely by immigration, the one from Celtic, the other from Teutonic sources, and both earnest in education.

And thus the problem we have to solve is one which no other nation has yet solved, in the way in which we must meet it. Can and shall these conflicting materials be inspired with one spirit, even with the spirit of Christ ? Shall their highest culture be Roman or Reformed ; be infidel or Christian ? Shall our highest institutions of learning be also institutions of Christian learning ?

All other nations have answered these questions mainly through, and by the authority and resources of the state. We have got to answer them chiefly through and by the liberality of private Christians, and the zeal of our churches in the cause of education. For as the church is here divorced from the state, so do our highest institutions of learning follow the same law in proportion as they are penetrated by the best evangelical influence. Thus the question reduces itself to this: How can we, on the basis (if a general education given by our state governments, superadd, in a voluntary way, the highest human, philosophical, scientific and Christian culture ? In the past, such

[ 27 ]

culture has been given to a few by the state, while the same state often left the masses ignorant. With us, the order is reversed; the state will and must educate the whole ; but it cannot be depended upon, especially in our new republics, to give the highest Christian culture. Under God, it depends upon our churches to say, whether the best intellect of the land shall be on the side of materialism or a spiritual philosophy, of mere human culture or of divine wisdom, of mere national aggrandizement or of the victorious progress of the kingdom of Immanuel. Here is the voice of the Spirit to our churches,—a voice that comes from the heart and tells the deepest wants of our land. Yes, from the centre to the verge of our wide-spread country, from the Atlantic swept by its storms to the shores of the Peaceful sea, from the Spanish main to our Northern lakes; from our Sons and daughters all along the fruitful banks of the Western rivers, bearing the freighted barks of commerce; and above all, from our new states now laying their foundations west of the Mississippi, there comes up this voice, this appeal, which neither our national nor state governments, which no mere human philanthropy can hear or heed; a voice which only the Church of Christ can know and answer. That we be saved from the perils of a bold and subtle infidelity, that we become not the victims of superstition, priest-craft and delusion; that society be not abandoned to rudeness or given over to materialism, nor yet to slavery or polygamy; and that our new states may be established in the faith and justice that have adorned and blessed our older confederacies, making them the social wonder of the world; that we may become a truly Christian people throughout all our borders ; this is the burden of the voice, this its supplication ; for this it pleads in the name of the whole land, in the name of unborn generations, in the name of humanity, in the name of culture, in the very name and spirit of Jesus.

And this Society commends itself to our sympathies, our prayers and our benevolence, because this is the work it is helping on, establishing in our new states, under Christian auspices, such institutions of learning as they need in the hour of their formation, in the peril and temptation of their youth. It appeals

[ 28 ]

to the largest Christian intelligence and the highest human philanthropy, for a work whose importance will be felt in proportion to our grasp of the needs and destiny of our beloved land. It appeals to the churches, and its appeals have not been in vain. It asks our rich men to build monuments while they are still living, that they may rejoice in their own work. It asks for names to be named with that of John Harvard, who died at the age of thirty, but who wrote an inscription more lasting than brass; with that of Yale, who, though he died in a foreign land, yet neither forgot the New Haven where he was born, nor will ever be forgotten by it; with that of Bartlett, whose liberal benefactions assured the prosperity—may it long continue—of the best appointed theological seminary in our land; with that of Williston, who still sees the annual fruit of his husbandry in spiritual things ; with that of Peter Cooper, erecting, with princely munificence, halls dedicated to science and art ; with that of Lawrence, who knew so well the way through the hand to the heart, through so many hands to so many hearts. Christian merchants, can you do better than add your names to this list; can your money buy a better fame? Thus may you purchase for yourselves a good degree in the annals of a wise Christian beneficence.

Aid, then, liberally this noble Society, under its efficient and wise administration. Fourteen institutions have been helped by it in the time of their greatest need. Four have been made independent. Let it have its $75,000 for the states east of the Mississippi, that it may confine its labors to the West, following, or rather leading, the onward march of the nation. Let it go on doing its high work in its unsectarian spirit. Let it carry learning and the faith, hand in hand, to Kansas and Nebraska, to Minnesota and Utah, as it has already done to Oregon and California. Let it bring the Gospel to bear upon the ardent intellect of our Western youth, gathering in a rich harvest of those who are to be laborers in the harvest of the Lord. Then shall the root of error become as rottenness, and its blossom go up as the dust, while the wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for

[ 29 ]

them; and the desert shall rejoice and blossom a& the rose. It shall blossom abundantly and rejoice even with joy and singing; the glory of Lebanon shall be given unto it, the excellency of Carmel and Sharon; they shall see the glory of the Lord, and the excellency of our God.