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INTRODUCTION.

I cannot be unwilling to avail myself of any opportunity to turn the attention of the Christian public to the Christian College. It is a noble public and an equally noble object. I can conceive of no worthier or more Christian thing than the caretaking of one generation that the next one which must necessarily lie so long under its influence and for which it is therefore so thoroughly responsible, should receive a Christian education.

To put Christ at the center and make Him felt to the circumference , is exceedingly difficult. But it is exceedingly important. It is, indeed, vital and pivotal.

The dangers about it are great and ever greater. They come from the general worldliness of all things and everybody in this age of unprecedentedly rapid and splendid material development. They are increased by the growth of speculative infidelity whether of the philosophical or scientific phase. They spring out of everything which lowers the Bible from that supreme and sovereign consideration by which alone it can hold the place in education which the Old Testament economy gave it, and which all the books of all the other book-religions of the world most unquestioningly possess. They are born of all that false theorizing about the limits of government and the liberty of conscience which issues in the demands for utter secularization of every institution of the State, while at the same time the necessities of popular government are demonstrating that education must be by the State. They are intensified by the divided opinion of the church universal, of which the Catholic and Greek sections hold that education must be religious and under the care of the Church; while the State-Church Protestant section holds that it may be religious under certain conditions, and the extreme secularistic protestant wing holds that it cannot be religious because conducted by the State, and a rather diminishing protestant section in free-church nations holds that the higher education should be Christian, while the secondary and primary may safely be left to the secular State.

These dangers are not only imminent but actual. The whole effort to support a Christian education in the public schools is sometimes called a "bootless wrangle." One section is thrown over towards secularism, pure and simple, in recoiling from Church-education exclusive and reactionary. The leading of the little child, the favorite indication of the millennium's arrival, is frustrated amid the clamor of the free thinkers and the uncertainty of the Church and the necessities of the State. We are slowly but surely, if we go on in this way, taking our children out of Christ's arms and our youth from beside His footsteps. And that is at once the most fearful sin against Him, and the most terrible injustice to them, we could possibly commit. Who can do anything to stay this destructive tendency? "God bless him," I would say in Livingstone's spirit, "whoever he may be," that will help to heal this open wound of the world.

I think Mr. Barker's little book will help. It supplies much information carefully collected from scattered sources, given in brief and explicit statements. Its range of themes is wide and upon them all some standard thoughts are given. It is addressed to all readers and should find them among parents , among those who have hearts to pray and those who have hands to help. It will prove to be of rare interest to all whose duty it is to teach, and it has much wise counsel for those who are to study.

The treatment of the function of the College for the cultivation of the moral and spiritual nature deserves special attention. Its declarations are firm, its ideals high and its selected opinions apt and forcible. It ought to end the reign of any institution in which religion is not put at the center and kept as efficient as human instrumentalities can make it. The demand for professors of pronounced Christian character and convictions is timely and is fearlessly made.

The discussion of the currents and counter-currents of influences in college life cannot but be useful, with a possibly increased emphasis against the secret societies and a caution against organizations of undergraduates for active partisan work in politics. The time for these fruits is "not yet."

Admirably the author shows that we have the best College material in the world and that it behaves itself best. And there can be no lack of agreement as to the arousing arguments and the closing chapters concerning the usefulness of colleges to the individual and the community. May it serve to kindle and to extend when kindled the wholesome enthusiasm its respected author manifests both by word and work.

SYLVESTER F. SCOVEL.

The University of Wooster, July 9, 1894.

COLLEGES IN AMERICA.

THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES IN THE OLD WORLD.

The American college system is deeply rooted in the past. It will be better understood if we trace briefly its historic connection with the ancient and European seats of learning. Higher education has been promoted among all great nations. Flourishing colleges were founded among ancient people. In the kingdoms of Judah and Israel, schools of the Prophets were located at Bethel, Gibeah, Gilgal, Jericho and Naioth. The Academy of Athens, the Museum of Alexandria, the Athenaeum of Rome were once centers of intellectual activity and spread their influence over the civilized world.

The Greek race especially commands our attention for its activity in matters relating to higher education. The Academy of Plato flourished for nine hundred years. The schools of Athens are noted for their great and permanent influence in awakening thought and shedding the light of their teaching among the nations of the world. "So charged," says Cardinal Newman, "is the moral atmosphere of the East with Greek civilization, that down to this day those tribes are said to show to most advantage which can claim relation of place and kin with Greek colonies established two thousand years ago." The influences of the scholastic halls of Plato and Aristotle span the centuries with their light and power.

Here truths were taught that have found universal acceptance. Down to the second century, Athens was a favorite resort for students. The college at Alexandria, where so many of the Fathers of the Church were educated, was founded and carefully organized by Ptolemy two centuries before the Christian era. For six hundred years it exerted a great influence on the youth who gathered from all parts of the civilized world to receive instruction from its eminent professors.

Roman colleges likewise exerted a wholesome influence in their day. They began during the life-time of Quintilian, in the second century, and it continued to be the deliberate policy of Augustus, Vespasian and Hadrian to multiply and extend the influence of endowed schools in Rome and provincial towns. Their object, says Merivale, was to "restore the tone of society and infuse into the national mind healthier sentiments." These Romano-Hellenic schools were so tenacious of life that they continued to flourish down to the fifth century. Owing to the decline of personal morality and the low conceptions of the ends of human life, and other general influences which led to the downfall of the empire, these schools finally degenerated and could no longer survive.

"Some great new spiritual force," says Professor Laurie, "was needed to reform society and the education of the young. That force was at hand in Christianity; and if it very early assumed a negative, if not a prohibitory, attitude to the old learning, it may be conceded that this was an inevitable step in the development of a new ethical idea."

The Christian system of education gradually superseded the pagan system. Christianity fortified the sense of personality and introduced the idea of a broader and deeper sentiment of human brotherhood, which helped to diffuse the spirit of education among the people and awaken in the human mind a sense of its native dignity and power.

The monastic schools arose in the fifth century to supplant the Romano-Hellenic schools. Chief among the founders in the West was Benedict, who in 428 A. D. founded a monastery on Monte Cassino, near Naples. "He had educational as well as religious aims from the first, and it is to the monks of this rapidly extending order, or to the influence which their 'rule' exercised on other conventual orders, such as the Columban, that we owe the diffusion of schools in the early part of the Middle Ages and the preservation of ancient learning. The Benedictine monks not only taught in their own monasteries, but were everywhere in demand as heads of Episcopal or Cathedral schools."

Laurie.

The monastic schools multiplied rapidly throughout Europe and took the lead in education and gained more influence than the episcopal schools. These schools, sheltered by the church, existed from the fourth to the twelfth century for the benefit of the ecclesiastical body. The majority of them did not admit lay instruction until the middle of the ninth century. Education during this period, with few exceptional centers, was crude and unenlightened. The power of the mediaeval machinery was such that these schools gave to the clergy only the mere rudiments of learning. The conception of education at first did not embrace the culture of the whole man. It was commonly thought that the religious life opposed the life of the world, and that the temporal life should be one of abnegation and asceticism. It was the belief that human reason could not be trusted to have independent activity, and so dogma was substituted for its free movement. The mind was cribbed and confined by rules, for fear that speculations in philosophy and free investigations would disturb and rationalize theology. Thought was so fettered that philosophy, literature and science were almost forgotten. Everything was done to subserve the faith and suppress heresy. The Latin and Greek classics were denounced as the offspring of the pagan world. It required several centuries for the Christian world to conceive that there was no antagonism between reason and authority, and between Greek and Roman culture and the Christian religion. These schools, however, did a valuable service to the cause of education by transcribing manuscripts and becoming repositories of ancient learning.

The intellectual lead which belonged to France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries passed to Italy in the fourteenth century. Some of the universities in Italy ranked among the best in Europe. They were chiefly distinguished for their studies in law and medicine. In the early part of the thirteenth century, the University of Bologna was famous throughout the world, having at one time 12,000 students from all parts of Europe. These universities continued to exert a powerful influence until Catholicism triumphed over the abortive attempts at religious reform, and there settled down over the brilliant Italy of the Renaissance an unprogressive and anti-intellectual influence from which she has never fully recovered.

The great business of the universities from the twelfth to the seventeenth century was that of scholastic philosophy, which largely governed their teaching.

The scholastic philosophy was "the legitimate development of the philosophy of Aristotle and his successors, and was the only philosophy possible in its day. Nay, it was an integral essential element in human progress. It taught men to distinguish and define, and has left its impress upon the language and thought of all civilized peoples, 'in lines manifold, deep-graven and ineffaceable.' Out of it has grown our modern civilization."

The schoolmen would freely canvass the deep problems of the mind and soul, but would blindly exclude the new influences at work in society. They had to meet the opposition of the humanists, who made the study of Latin and Greek the basis of culture. The humanists were great writers and artists, who worked for more modern ideas and a newer civilization. They introduced the Renaissance, which was a literary movement that began in Italy in the fourteenth century. It was believed that vital knowledge was gained by knowing oneself, and that the best way to attain this was to study poetry, philosophy, history and all knowledge that was created by the spirit of man. Unfortunately, the knowledge of letters in Italy tended to paganize its adherents. Infidelity spread and immorality abounded in all ranks of society.

The great movement of the Renaissance secured a stronghold in Germany, where its power was extended to the established systems of instruction and utilized in the interests of a purer Christianity. Melancthon and Erasmus and all the chief reformers except Luther, were eminent humanists and friends of classical learning. They were outside the established schools, and were the leading spirits in intellectual culture, so that the Renaissance triumphed with the Reformation. These two forces united and gave spirit and power to the humanists. The influence of the new learning in Germany was marked by comparative freedom from frivolities, skepticism and immoralities. There was a critical and enlightened study of classical literature and a reverent and rational study of the Bible. The literary treasures of antiquity were made to minister to religion. The Reformation also gave fresh impulses to all the schools and institutions of learning. The school teacher and preacher of the gospel joined hands in the common work of education.

The universities, however, under the control of the schoolmen, retrograded and decayed because they chose to remain mediaeval. They refused to become the educational agencies of the times, and so failed to be at the head of a great intellectual movement. They could not be induced to assimilate the new studies and make themselves the organ of the Renaissance and the Reformation. The rapid growth of positive and experimental science, however, was fatal to scholasticism. The narrow scholastic spirit was exemplified by Cremonini, who is called the last of the schoolmen, and who was professor at Padua in 1631.

This countryman of Galileo, after the discovery of Jupiter's satellites, judging that this discovery contradicted Aristotle, would never consent to look through a telescope again. One could not have a better incident to end the career of the scholastic philosophy.

The Jesuits adopted a more liberal spirit and method. They established and controlled a large number of universities and schools, and made them the great channels of the movement of the counter-Reformation. Their educational activity gained for them a great reputation for teaching and a large patronage. In 1710, they had 612 colleges, 157 normal schools, 24 universities and 200 missions. They were inspired not so much by the value they placed on culture for its own sake, as to promote the authority of the old religion and prevent heresy.

The powerful initial impulse given to the cause of education by means of the humanists and the reformers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries began to flag in the seventeenth century, when the Protestant Church, like the Catholic, became cold and petrified. The universities were regarded as appendages of the church, and classical training largely lost its hold in Europe.

The condition of contemporary institutions for superior instruction in the old world is full of promise. The importance of building up great universities is conceded by nearly all nations. In the judgment of Mr. L. D. Wishard, the Foreign Secretary of the College Y. M. C. A., there are 500,000 young men in Asia in the high-class institutions.

The government of Japan, that has lately joined the Western nations in the onward march of civilization, gives enlightened direction to higher education. There are, besides the Imperial College of Tokio, five great secondary schools located in different centers throughout the empire, which serve as feeders to the university. There are 5,000 youth in Christian colleges and schools in the kingdom. In the Christian university at Kioto there are 600 youth pursuing a college education under Christian teaching.

China has always encouraged colleges for the education of her magistrates. "The literary class consisting of the graduates, and those who attend the examinations for degrees, numbering some two and a half millions, are the rulers of China."

There is a growing tendency to universal education in India. "It is computed," says Bishop Hurst, "that in the small area of Calcutta and suburbs there are 28,000 alumni who have completed the curriculum in the five Christian colleges. There are about 2,000 who are alumni or students of the Calcutta University, and there are 1,000 youths besides who are studying up to the matriculation examinations of the university." The English language is the medium of instruction in all these institutions. It may not be wide of the mark to suppose that in all India there are not less than 40,000 natives who have graduated at some school of high grade, and that ten per cent. of the number have passed the university degrees. The number is now more probably 50,000. These men enjoy the highest respect and are the recognized leaders of native thought. Already many are, and many more are to be judges, lawyers, magistrates, professors, teachers, orators, physicians, engineers, merchants, authors and journalists of the country.

The University of Fez, in Morocco, established in the eighth century, is one of the oldest universities outside of Asia. The Mohammedan University at Cairo, in Egypt, has more than 200 instructors and 10,000 students assembled from Europe, Asia and Africa to be instructed in the Moslem faith.

If we turn to Europe, we find that the planting and enlarging of the institutions for superior instruction has the most hopeful outlook. In Great Britain and Ireland there are 11 universities with 834 professors and 18,400 students. Besides, there are the old established and excellent schools at Eaton, Harrow, Winchester and Rugby.

A new era for the classical schools of Germany began in 1783, when Baron Sedlitz, encouraged by Frederic the Great, was able to revive "the dormant sparks planted in them by the Renaissance and they awoke to a new life, which since the beginning of this century has drawn the eyes of all students of intellectual progress upon them." Germany had in 1890, 250 gymnasia and 22 universities. The latter are manned by 2,431 instructors and have 31,803 students, or one student to every 151 of the population.

France has 19,152 students in her professional and technical schools. There are fifteen institutions of higher learning in the University of France, with 180 professors and 12,695 students. These are under the control and patronage of the State. The government appropriated in 1889-90, 12,000,000 francs for university purposes. Besides, there were expended in the same year 99,000,000 francs for new buildings for the advancement of higher education. In 1890, there were 598 professional chairs in the several universities, in which were taught 17,630 students, or one student to every 217 of the population.

The Austria-Hungary Empire had in 1891 eleven universities, eight of which were in Austria, with 1,112 professors and 14,272 students. The remaining three were in Hungary and had 322 professors and 4,098 students. There were for the same year in Switzerland nine universities, with 434 professors and 2,619 students.

The Catholic Church in Italy continued for years to exert an unprogressive and anti-intellectual influence. The present government of Italy, however, is fully awake to the importance of a university education for the people, and now maintains several universities at a large annual outlay.

This brief outline reveals the facts that all civilized nations are encouraging and maintaining schools for the higher education of the people, and suggests that a comparative study of them is both helpful and fruitful.

Many of the universities in the Old World lack the stimulus of the strong Protestant denominational influence and the marked religious character of the American colleges. They consequently fail to attain the highest results for the general good, but they are inaugurating an intellectual movement which will eventuate in a more glorious future.

THE PLANTING OF COLLEGES IN THE NEW WORLD.

Our national existence came into full bloom under the light of a Christian civilization. The political, social and religious institutions were sufficiently well organized in the Old World to be advantageously introduced, with some modifications, into a young nation in the New World.

The early colonists first founded a church, then a school, and then a college. They felt that the colonial organization was incomplete without a college to inculcate such piety, virtue and intelligence as would preserve and perfect the highest social order and secure the blessings of liberty. These colleges, modelled at first after the universities of Europe, soon mapped out a pathway for themselves, and have now come to occupy a unique place in our national life.

The Pilgrim Fathers sought to establish in the New World three great principles: civil and religious liberty, and to make education their corner-stone. The scholarly impulses were so dominant at this early day that when the entire population of New England did not exceed four thousand, the people determined to establish a college, which Cotton Mather says "was the best thing they ever thought of." It is estimated that this meager population contained as many as one hundred men who had received the training of Oxford and Cambridge. Sixty of them were from the University of Cambridge; twenty were from Oxford, and others, apparently, from the Scotch universities. The colleges they founded show traces of all these institutions. These intelligent and refined men, with breadth of culture and political foresight and public spirit, constituted the chief source of greatness in the early days of New England.

The three leading colonial colleges, Harvard, Yale, and William and Mary, were planted and permeated with the spirit of republican liberty and primitive Christianity. They began in a very modest way.

Harvard, the oldest of American colleges, was founded in the beginning of the colonial days, only eighteen years after the Pilgrim Fathers landed on Plymouth Rock, and when Boston was a village of twenty-five or thirty houses, and when only twenty-five towns had begun to be settled in the colony. In 1636, six years after the settlement of Boston, the colonial legislature voted the sum of four hundred pounds towards the founding of Harvard College, with the avowed purpose of training young men for the ministry. This sum was increased in 1637 by the munificence of John Harvard, who was a graduate of Cambridge, and a finished scholar and clergyman from England. He gave eight hundred pounds and his library, consisting of three hundred volumes, towards the endowment, whereupon the college took his name. "The colony caught his spirit," says Boone. "Among the magistrates themselves, two hundred pounds was subscribed, a part in books. All did something, even the indigent; one subscribed a number of sheep; another, nine shillings' worth of cloth; one, a ten-shilling pewter flagon; others, a fruit dish, a sugar spoon, a silver-tipped jug, one great salt, one small trencher salt, etc. From such small beginnings did the institution take its start. No rank, no class of men, is unrepresented. The school was of the people." There is nothing in history to parallel the heroic spirit and boldness of these early settlers in attempting to found a college, surrounded as the people were with poverty, scanty subsistence, and savage enemies. They did not realize the wisdom of their liberality and sacrifice and its influence upon the future civilization of the Western World. Harvard College was located at Cambridge, with a single building, on less than three acres of land. It was supported by government appropriations and private philanthropy. For years the college was financially embarrassed. The salaries were small, and for nearly one hundred years were paid out of the colonial treasury. The President received a salary of 0. The total grants made to the college by the colony during the first century amounted to about ,000. The total annual income from all sources at the close of the first century of its history was but ?750. Down to 1780 the total amount contributed out of the public treasury was ,675 and 3,793 acres of land. Individuals in England and America had likewise given ,412.

No one at this period would have dared to predict that Harvard College would have in 1892 an endowment of ,000,000 and an annual revenue of more than ,000,000, with seventeen departments of instruction, three hundred teachers, and three thousand students. But such has been the phenomenal growth of some of our American institutions.

Among the colonial colleges, that of William and Mary is one of the most important. As early as 1617, an attempt was made in England to raise money to found a college among the Virginia settlers. In 1619, fifteen hundred pounds were in the hands of the treasurer, and ten thousand acres of land were granted by the Virginia Company. A preparatory school was founded two years later, but owing to the Indian massacre of 340 settlers which followed, the enterprise was suspended. The effort to found a college was subsequently revived in 1660. The Virginia Assembly enacted that "for the advancement of learning, education of youth, supply of the ministry, and promotion of piety, there be land taken for a college and free school." Nothing came of this until 1688, when a subscription was taken from wealthy planters for twenty-five hundred pounds for the college. Five years later the first royal educational charter in America was granted. The college was established at Williamsburg, Virginia, and was given ?2,000 and 20,000 acres of land, a tax of a penny a pound on all tobacco exported from Virginia and Maryland, and the duty on furs, skins, and liquors imported, besides other fees and privileges of the Surveyor General's office. "In its royal foundation, its generous endowment, and liberal patronage," says R. C. Boone, "it stands in sharp contrast to the early years of Harvard. This was established by the Puritans, and stood for the severest of ultra-orthodox though dissenting Protestantism; that was founded to be and was an exponent of the most formal ceremonialism of the Church of England. The one was nursed by democracy; the other befriended by cavalier and courtier. Endowment for the one came from the purses of an infant and needy settlement; the other was drawn from the royal treasury. The one was environed and shaken for a hundred years by the schisms of a controversial people; the roots of the other were deep in the great English ecclesiastical system." This college has been called a school of statesmen. It was here that Jefferson, Randolph, Tyler, Monroe, Blair, Marshall, and other prominent statesmen received their training.

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