The college is the child of the church. The first college in America was named for a minister of the gospel, who gave half of his property for its endowment and his books for its library. On a large pillar at one of its gates may still be read this inscription: "After God had carried us safe to New England, and we had builded our houses, provided necessaries for our livelihood, reared convenient places for God's worship and settled our civil government, one of the next things we longed for and looked after was to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present ministers shall lie in the dust."

      One of the "rules" of this first college well expresses its object: "Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to consider that the chief [112] end of his life is to know God and Jesus Christ, which is eternal life, and therefore to lay Christ as the only foundation of sound learning." This purpose is still more tersely expressed in the legend on its seal: "Christo et ecclesia."

      For nearly two hundred years from the founding of Harvard College in 1636 there were no other institutions of higher learning but church colleges. At the opening of the Northwest Territory in 1787 an ordinance passed by the Continental Congress contained this statement: "Religion, morality and knowledge being necessary for good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged."

      It may thus be seen that the church college is the original American college and that its encouragement was guaranteed by the national government, for the ordinance just quoted is in the nature of a compact between the government and the States to be established. While our Revolutionary fathers were opposed to the union of church and state, they had no thought that religion should be excluded from the colleges, but rather that it was a large and fundamental part of education.

      It was largely due to the lethargy and weakness of the church, by reason of its divided condition, that the State finally undertook to establish colleges without its direction or support, and, owing to the generally accepted doctrine of absolute separation of church and state, religion was not admitted to the State college. Its promoters confused Christianity with sectarianism. They could not see how to teach religion without being accused of teaching the tenets of some particular sect, and so they did the easy thing--left it entirely out of consideration.

      The first church colleges established in the East were so well supported that to the present day the State has seen no need of trying to supplement them. But in the West, by reason of the division of its forces into many denominations, many small and inadequately endowed institutions have been established, some of them not deserving the name of college.

      Education is more than the training of the intellect. Herbert Spencer's definition has, in my opinion, never been improved upon: "Preparation for complete living." A complete education is one that develops all of a man's powers, and these are, popularly speaking, threefold--of body, mind and spirit. Modern

F. O. NORTON.

psychologists divide the mind as to its functions into the intellect and the will, the latter including the source of action good or bad--of doing righteousness or iniquity. The charter of Harvard was psychologically correct and in accord with common sense, when it stated that the college stood for the education of the youth of our land "in knowledge and godliness." Pres. Woodrow Wilson has well said: "The argument for efficacy in education can have no permanent validity if the efficacy sought be not moral as well as intellectual." No man has secured a complete education the higher part of whose nature has been left to chance for its development. A man may be honest without any knowledge of political economy; he may be a skilled economist and a rogue. He may be a good and useful citizen without any knowledge of logarithms or of chemistry; he may be a skilled mathematician or an expert chemist and a private scoundrel or a public vampire.

      This truly liberal or Christian education is admirably defined by President Hyde, of Bowdoin College: "To be at home in all lands and ages; to count nature a familiar acquaintance, and art an intimate friend; to gain a standard for the appreciation of other men's work and the criticism of one's own; to carry the keys of the world's library in one's pocket, and feel its resources behind one in whatever task he undertakes; to make hosts of friends among the men of one's own age who are to be leaders in all walks of life; to lose one's self in generous enthusiasms and co-operate with others for common [113] ends; to learn manners from students who are gentlemen, and form character under professors who are Christians--these are the returns of a college for the best four years of one's life. Are they not abundantly adequate?"

      A debt which the college owes to the church is to supply religious leaders for church and state--men of liberal or Christian education for professional and business life. It is inadequacy of preparation more than anything else that has caused the much-deplored inefficiency in the ministry; which has led a well-known student of educational conditions to say recently that, "meager as are the salaries paid (to ministers), they are in many cases equal to the services rendered."

      It has been the custom of those who would decry the value of a college education for preachers of the gospel to assert that the first preachers--those who established Christianity and gave it the momentum which sent it on its conquering career through the ages--were uneducated peasants and fishermen of Galilee. But these unlettered fishermen were trained in the field of active service. They were taught daily for three years by Him who "spoke as never man spoke;" by one who at the age of twelve years was in the temple listening to the doctors of the law and asking them questions, and who in the twenty years from that time until his public ministry certainly did not neglect to prepare for his "Father's business." Another fact often overlooked is that only three of these unlettered fishermen are ever heard of after the crucifixion, and these are within a few years completely overshadowed by a man who had the best education his country could afford; a man who was schooled in the literature and history of his people from the age of five years; who was sent by his parents away to college a distance of over five hundred miles; to sit at the feet of the greatest scholar of his nation. Saul of Tarsus studied with the view of becoming a rabbi, a Jewish doctor of the law, corresponding to the most highly educated university man at the present day. His course extended over many years and was most thorough and searching. This is the man who has influenced Christianity far more than all the other disciples of Jesus. It is his writings that form much the larger part of the New Testament, and that have engaged the earnest and devoted study of learned and pious men for centuries.

      It must be remembered that the preacher is to teach men--men who have graduated, it may be, from school and college and university--the physician, the lawyer, the politician--the teacher will sit at his feet. Surely the best preparation is none too good for such a work! This is an age of freedom of thought and speech. The scientific spirit is abroad in the land, the spirit of investigation. The preacher of the gospel must as a teacher of truth reckon with this spirit. He must get his knowledge first-hand.

      A large majority of those who enter the Freshman classes of all colleges have not decided upon their life-work. The church college should make religion so attractive and the call of the church so urgent and persistent as to secure many of these for the Christian ministry.

      And it should not for one moment be supposed that the college has discharged its full debt to the church when it has done all that lies in its power in the way of supplying it with educated ministers, important as is this service. What is perhaps of even greater importance is to send forth men and women trained for complete living in every walk of life; men to become the bone and sinew of the churches; men to become church officers, women to be their wives; men and women for Sunday-school teachers; men to become leaders in the city and the county and the State government; men to become, as true lawyers, defenders and advocates of righteousness; men as true physicians following in the footsteps of the great Physician who went about doing good; men to become great merchants who scorn dishonest gain.

      We may now ask, What is the duty of the church to the church college? This is well put in our Centennial aims: "The college for the church, and the church for the college--both for Christ." I think it will be generally admitted that while the college during all of its history has realized to a [114] greater or lesser extent that it has existed for the church, the church has frequently forgotten or ignored its obligation to the college. There are many churches all over our land in which it is never mentioned. The members are as well acquainted with the State university as with their own college, and when they come to send their sons or daughters to college it is often a question of finance whether they will send them to their own church college or to an institution where Jesus Christ and his place in history is ignored.

[CCR 112-115]