If any man doubted that most of our colleges and universities are hotbeds of infidelity, he would only have to read the articles by Harold Bolce in recent issues of the Cosmopolitan. In the article entitled "Christianity in the Crucible," Mr. Bolce sums up the teachings of our prominent schoolmen and collates the actual utterances of some of them. It would open your eyes. The future of the country depends on its youth, its educated youth especially; and if the devil succeeds in poisoning the spring of national and social life by corrupting the faith of the youth, he is making a master stroke.

      "They assert," says Mr. Bolce, "that the last slavery from which a man must be freed is the slavery to sacred myth"--by which, of course, among other things, they mean the Bible. "The college men say that they criticize the God of the Christian's conception, because such a God is not big enough for the demands of this enlightened century." He is, indeed, not big enough for them. He is holy. He is the God of the Narrow Way. He will not put up with selfishness and lust, the indulgence of which seems to be some men's idea of liberty. They have no use for God "terrible in anger, though moved at times to compassion." They got that latter item wrong; for the Christian's God is slow to anger, full of compassion, long-suffering, abundant in loving-kindness; but when judging sin in the time of his anger, terrible indeed. "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God." (Heb. 10:31.)

      Whither this spirit tends, how it militates against common morality and undermines the foundations of society, may be seen from the following:

      "To pave the way for an understanding of the philosophy of spiritual liberty, the professors take up its [238] preliminary phases. Thus, some say that marriage is not a sacrament; that there are and can be holier alliances outside the marriage bond than within it; and even that it is contrary to the higher laws of the spirit to set up a legal relationship as superior to the spontaneous preference of a man and woman who find in their love a security more sacred than anything the church can create.

      "If marriage is a sacrament, the professors do not hesitate to say, divorce is similarly sacred. In fact, divorce is one of the conveniences through which the spirit is finding liberty."

      This is only "preliminary phases," remember. What is going to come later the Lord only knows.

      The occurrences in the case of Howard Chandler Christie, who, being "enlightened" by a Christian Science healer, as the papers stated it, that marriage is not binding, left his faithful wife, is yet fresh in the public mind. It is enough to make the whole nation rise up in righteous wrath against that vicious cult. But Mr. Bolce (continuing without a break from above quotation) calls attention to the affinity that thing has with our college infidelity:

      "It is interesting in this connection to note that the Christian Science Church makes no provisions for marriage. It, like the breaking of bonds, is in keeping with the spiritual prophecy that in God's Arcady, there will be no marrying. Such is the most advanced and daring university thought. It is, therefore, easy to understand why Prof. George Elliott Howard, of the University of Nebraska, teaches that the temporary increase of divorce is a 'mighty process of spiritual liberation.'"

      "Liberty," "liberation"--yes, it is the specious promise of the false teachers and prophets of which God forewarned us, who, uttering great swelling words of vanity, entice in the lusts of the flesh, by lasciviousness, those [239] who are just escaping from them that live in error; promising them liberty, while they themselves are bond servants of corruption." (2 Pet. 2:18, 19.)

      But let us hear a little more:

      "Religion, in its assumption of a right over marriage, is regarded by many professors as a form of superstitious ritual. As it is taught in Yale, religion 'blesses' marriage, or secures the favor of the higher powers who distribute good and bad fortune. As there is no way to guarantee the happiness of either party, save in reliance on the character of the other, marriage is a most uncertain lottery, and, therefore, Professor Sumner teaches that at all stages of civilization devices to determine luck have been connected with weddings. Divination has frequently been employed. But, he says, the notion that a religious ceremony makes a marriage and defines it had no currency until the sixteenth Christian century. It is held that marriage in the church to-day is purely a matter of taste, sentiment, and popular judgment, and that the tendency to march in the bridal procession away from the magistrate's court to the religious altar has been somewhat due to the ideas of women in regard to suitable pomp and glory.

      "On this important question of marriage I recently talked with Prof. Franklin H. Giddings, the celebrated sociologist of Columbia University. Professor Giddings has taught that it is not right to set up a technical legal relationship, an economic convenience, or a circumstance of social conventionality as morally superior to the spontaneous preference of a man and a woman who know, and whose friends know, that they love each other.

      "It may surprise many people to learn that I believe in marriage; but as I am not an ecclesiastic, I do not believe in sacramental marriage, he said. Marriage is not a religious rite, but purely a civil contract. [240]

      "Thus the execution of a deed or a will or a legal contract drawn up between two copartners for the purpose of carrying on a sale in dry goods or groceries is just as sacred, from a sociological sense, as a marriage. Marriage is not divine. Men and women are not joined together by the decrees of any God. . . .

      "The consensus of college teaching is that marriage is purely a civil contract which should be terminable at the will of either party, and that the church should have no more to do with it than with the conveyance of real estate; that religion should be no more permitted to intervene against divorce than to say that a man should not have the right to withdraw money deposited in a bank; and that when humanity realizes the true meaning of marriage the home will cease to be the domain of tyranny and fear. Therefore, they teach to American young men and women that marriage is not decreed by God and that no commandments against divorce are divine."

      Here, then, is the unmistakable print of the cloven foot. Now if a crank of some sort, or a set of them would fulminate such sentiments around in the world, it would be tolerable in comparison to the thought of the systematic instilling of them into the minds and hearts of our children in the institutions of learning.

      Now hear what they say of the word of God. Says Jacob Gould Schurman, president of Cornell University:

      "Astronomy has set the earth spinning, dislocated heaven and hell, and whirled man from the center of the spatial universe. Biology and geology have revolutionized our views of the origin of our race and of the cosmos. History and criticism have made the Bible a new book, or rather a new collection of books, written, for the most part, we know not by what authors or at what dates, and put together, as a Bible, we know not on what principle. All the old landmarks--Moses, Solomon, Job--are [241] gone, and a restless sea of criticism threatens to engulf religion with the records it adored. This is the so-called warfare of science and religion. For him who has eyes to see, the religion of dogma lies exhausted on the field!"

      Mr. Bolce continues:

      "The Bible, many of the professors say, has outlived its usefulness as an infallible authority. The world to-day does not need, nor will it much longer tolerate, the belief that any book on earth was written by God."

      And so forth unto utter weariness., Among the men quoted are President Hadley, of Yale; Ex-President Eliot, of Harvard; Frank S. Hoffman, of Union College; Borden B. Bowne, president Boston University; W. H. Lough, of New York University. The array is formidable; not for the Bible, for it has nothing to fear--such talk as the above has been carried on from the days of Porphyry and Celsus; but for us, for our children, for it shows how far things have gone, how terrible is the pestilence of unbelief in the seats of learning, so that few who go there fail to be infected by it. And these large colleges and universities strike the note in most instances for the preparatory schools, high schools, and even public schools. Let Christ be taken from our children, let them be defrauded of the Bible, then woe to them, to the next generation, to the world! They will have "liberty" then, such as will make the blood run cold when we contemplate it--a carnival of unbridled passions, a reign of terror, with the thundercloud of the wrath and righteous retribution of God rising in the background. Rather let my child go ignorant of all this "education" in heathen lore and all branches of academic knowledge, than return to me full of the incurable leprosy of such unbelief.

      And let us have schools taught by Christians where the word of God will be honored and upheld. In the line of good works, nothing will be more important now than the [242] support and upbuilding of Bible schools, and everywhere, at home and in school, the endeavor to keep the young in the fear and the knowledge of the word of God.

      Dec. 16, 1909.

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