UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA.
Received
Accession No.
, 189$.
. Class No.
PAPERS PRESENTED
AT THE
EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION
OF THE
Congregational Churches
OF
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
HELD AT
Los Angeles, April 13-14, 1892.
The Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees of Pomona
College called an Educational Convention of the Congregational
Churches of Southern California to meet in Los Angeles, April 13
and 14, 1892. Representatives of the Churches were present from
Santa Barbara, Ventura, Santa Paula, Saticoy, National City, San
Diego, Santa Ana, Orange, Riverside, Redlands, San Bernardino,
Mentone, Highlands, Rialto, Ontario, Pomona, Claremont, Mon-
rovia, Sierra Madre, Pasadena, South Riverside, Eagle Rock, Long
Beach, Vernondale, Oceanside, Escondido, Hyde Park, and the
nine Churches of Los Angeles. There were thirty papers upon
the program, which opened Wednesday evening, April i3th, at
7:30. Four were absent, and their papers were not read. There
were sessions during ten hours, and there was no time for
discussion.
The object of the Convention was to confer together thus
early in the history of the College, that the best ideas of the con-
stituency might reach the ears of the Board of Trustees who were
nearly all present at this meeting. Each speaker had been asked
what one idea he would like to emphasize before the Convention
and from the themes thus chosep, the following program was then
constructed by the Committee, and by vote of the Convention the
papers have been edited by the Committee and are printed
herewith:
jVu'tr
7. 77/<? Christian College.
PAGE
REV. W. C. MERRILL, San Diego The Psychological Neces-
sity for the Christian College 7
REV. J. K. MCLEAN, D. D., Oakland The Building of a
Christian College 15
REV. C. G. BALDWIN, President of Pomona College The
Christian College We are Undertaking to Build 26
//. The Christian Element in Education.
REV. II. T. STAATS, Pasadena Why a Distinctively Christian
Education 30
REV. E. R. BRAINERD, San Bernardino The Imperative Need
of Christian Schools 33
REV. E. D. WEAGE, National City Christian Education and
Character Building 39
///. The Student Constituency of a Christian College.
PROF. E. C. NORTON, Pomona College, Claremont The
Student Material for College Building 42
REV. L. H. FRARY, Pomona Duty of the Church to the Intel-
lectual Life of Her Children 46
REV. C. T. WEITZEL, Santa Barbara The Personal Factor in
Education 50
IV. The Bible and Christian Education.
REV. F. N. MERRIAM, Ventura The Bible in the Curriculum
of the Christian College. ... 57
PROF. C. B. SUMNER, Pomona College, Claremont The
Revival of Bible Study 62
V. The Financiering of a Christian College.
REV. A. E. TRACY, Ontario The Necessity of Promoting
Christian Education by Private Benevolence Not a Dis-
advantage 69
VI. Our Community, Our Churches, and Our College.
REV. J. H. HARWOOD, D. D., Orange The Relation of
Christian Education to the Church (manuscript not
furnished).
REV. T. C. HUNT, Riverside Peculiar Conditions in Southern
California which make Special Demands upon Pomona
College 73
VII. Single Thoughts on Christian Education.
REV. THOMAS HENDRY, Los Angeles, Park Church A Plea
for Education Practical and Christian 79
REV. J. H. COLLINS, Los Angeles, Third Church The Curse
of an Education which is not Practical 83
REV. O. D. CRAWFORD, Oceanside Our Stewardship of the
Mind 85
PROF. F. W. PHELPS, Washburn College, Kansas College
Extension 88
REV. GEO. A. RAWSON, Vernondale Importance of a Relig-
ious Atmosphere 93
REV. Henry W. JONES, Escondido The Workman His Own
Best Tool 96
REV. STEPHEN BOWERS, Ventura Christian Education 105
PROF. A. D. BISSELL, formerly Professor of Music in Oahu
College, H. I. Christian Education and Music. no
REV. FRANCIS M. PRICE, Los Angeles, Bethlehem The
Transforming Power of College Life 114
VIII. The Open Hour.
Voluntary Addresses. Opportunity for the widest variety of
suggestion, each speaker limited to five minutes.
IX. Christian Education and the Worlds Work.
PROF. C. S. NASH, Pacific Theological Seminary, Oakland
The Kind of Men Demanded by God from the Christian
College 118
REV. ROBERT G. HUTCHINS, Los Angeles, First Church The
Christian College and Our National Perils (manuscript
not furnished).
X. Platform of th Educational Convention.
A Series of Resolutions, embodying the practical recommen-
dations of the Convention, prepared by Rev. J. T. Ford
and Rev. C. G. Baldwin ... ,. 126
PAPKRS
AT THE
EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION
OF THE
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES
OF
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA.
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL NEED OF A CHRIS-
TIAN EDUCATION.
REV. W. C. MERRILL, SAN DIEGO.
It is a fact worthy of note that ignorance is not the
parent of a vast sum of the crime that disgraces our land
today. Our criminals, thousands of them, are educated
criminals. There is a great want somewhere that
has not been met in the making of citizens. Men are not
seeking legitimate means to attain their ends. They are
trying to make stones into bread, forgetting that it was
Satan who first offered the bright suggestion. The hus-
bandman who sells small, green, berries by a few fine
ones at the top ; the grocer who palms off white dirt for
sugar and forgets that grit always tells in the end; the
dairyman who thinks his "artesian cow" is a great
saving of shorts and alfalfa ; the merchant who imagines
that marking American goods French is the best way to
8 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
solve the tariff problem and diminish the surplus ; the
manufacturer who trusts that ground rags and cotton will
not tell tales farther on what shall I say of these men ?
Pessimism aside, this is a very considerable product
of the education of today. If education do not produce
it, it does not prevent it. It does not seem to have any
considerable tendency to prevent it. In opening this
convention and with the topic in hand, it seems to me that
my words should be general in their bearing. Psycho-
logically, all that pertains to the Christian College and
Academy is generic to a Christian education, through and
through. Education should be a projective force. It
becomes the educator then to determine the end to be
aimed at. If I grind knives keen as razors and throw
them out to a crowd of children, the prospective good of
my occupation depends on the use the youngsters make of
the knives I sharpen. We have a splendid system of educa-
tion in America, and we have been grinding intellects
regardless of the use that is made of them, until they are
keen as razors. Moreover we are sending them out into
the world with the hint that we are not responsible for the
use that shall be made of them, and men may keep a
bull-dog or a six-shooter, as they choose, for their pro-
tection.
What is the object of public education? Clearly,
the making of good citizens. The State does not educate
to confer a favor on the father of a family, but to protect
itself from the dangers of illiteracy ; not because illiteracy
is in itself a menace to the Republic, but because ignor-
ance is the parent of vice. The dangers, then, against
which our public education is calculated to provide, are
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 9
the evils of a vicious proletariat. How far reaching to
this end is our public school system ?
I am not inclined to place undue reliance on statistics
in ordinary hands, but Mr. Geo. H. Stetson, in a promi-
nent periodical not long ago, made some very significant
statements concerning my native State of Massachusetts.
No State has carried the public school system to greater
perfection, perhaps, but the census of 1850 to 1880 shows
a most alarming increase in crime in that cultured State.
It very evidently did not result from the influx of the
vicious foreign element as we sometimes think. Of the
total number of prison population in Massachusetts from
1850 to 1880 two-thirds were native born, and the growth
of the crime, surprising, as it may seem, was double the
growth of population. The report of the Massachusetts
prison commission for one year showed 65,000 arrests for
crime. That means one arrest for every twenty-nine
inhabitants ; and counting five to the family, every six
families furnished one criminal. Admitting that a greater
portion of the crimes are punished as the years go by, this
will hardly leave room for the benefits our system of
education is supposed to insure.
As a system of mere intellectual drill this institution is
encouragingly strong ; as a process in the evolution of
upright citizens it is alarmingly weak. As a mere system
of intellectual drill I have my doubts as to the right of the
State to tax me for the education of the children of my
neighbor. If it is just that I teach them, at my expense,
grammar and logic, it is apparently just that I teach them
the piano and guitar. I think that it is admitted that the
justice of the scheme is in the argument that education is
IO EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
the safeguard against vice, and assures us citizens of
higher moral endowment. So Herbert Spencer, when he
says, "To prepare us for complete living is the function
which education Ijas to discharge ; and the only rational
mode of judging of any educational course is to judge in
what degree it discharges such functions." For "com-
plete living" we must have character. Indeed anyone
who listens to the demand for universal education will
have his ears so filled with "the dangers of illiteracy"
that the inference will be inevitable that the ultimate end
of all education is, very clearly, character.
If the needs of our Republic demand in our citizen
character, the highest education will be that which evolves
the highest character. We are slowly approaching the
recognition of this fact. Now it is easy, by a simple illus-
tration from psychology, to show that the mere sharpening
of the intellect only serves to make an already good man
more helpful and a native rascal the keener and shrewder
villain.
We live in a time of great scientific activity so far as
physics are concerned, but we have been slow to carry the
scientific method into educational processes. This may
not be without reason. It is only a little more than a
hundred years since the human mind was first understood.
The greatest philosophers the world has seen lived
and died and could never show psychologically why they
got up in the morning or went in when it rained. Plato
and Aristotle lived and died and never discovered the road
traveled by the intellect to reach the will. Aristotle and
all the world's philosophers, until a little more than a
hundred years ago, divided the human mind into intellect
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. II
and will cognizing power and willing power. Under will,
they placed the feelings, appetences, and they never under-
stood how the thought arising in the intellect was conveyed
to the will and moved the man to action. And yet with-
out that knowledge the intellect is a polar sea, the will an
unbridled steed. Others had thought deeply on the theme
but Kant was the first to see the gap which the emotions
must fill. On one side of the arch he had the intellect
the knowing powers ; on the other side he had the will
the volitions, the acting powers ; and into the arch between
he dropped the key stone, the emotions, the motive power.
Ask any tyro in college to-day the fundamental structure
of the human mind and he will answer, " Why, of course,
the intellect, the emotions and the will." The intellect
strikes out the thought, the emotions take it up into the
light of experience and move, through desire, the will to
act upon it. However brilliant the thought, it is impotent
until it has passed through the medium of the emotions
and been carried to the will. Yet we educate the intellect
and think we are developing human minds. We have de-
veloped distortions and intellectual monstrosities too often,
instead. One might think forever, but the idea would be
barren did not the emotions create pleasure or aversion
and carry on the idea to a corresponding issue. If the
great object of education be character men then it is
the utmost folly to train the intellect alone. I think Sir
Wm. Hamilton speaks of the emotions as a bridge over
which knowledge marches to volition. They are the me-
dium through which knowledge passes. They are, in a
figure, a family of Titans and when thought passes into
their workshop, it will not go forth until transformed.
13 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
They are the real educators. They send forth their pupils
with the impress of their own powerful nature. They
stamp them with the lofty smile of the sage or the hideous
grin of the fool and clothe them with the fantastic garb of
the jester or robe them in the purple of a king. "Keep
thy heart with all diligence," said the wise man, " for
out of it are the issues of life." " Let me make the bal-
lads of a nation, and I care not who make her laws," said
an ancient. He knew that however lofty the knowledge
wrapped up in reason and wrought into laws, the proper
education of the emotions alone would lead to their
execution.
Is it not a marvel that knowing the human mind as
we do we are so unscientific in its development? We
speak of the good hearted man ; but we mean a man of
warm emotions productive of good motives. All this is a
part of the mind. We shall never be scientific in our
education until we train the mind with psychological com-
pleteness. ^Our fathers u builded better than they knew,"
we know better than we build.} We profess to train and
unfold the human mind. But we know that the home of
right motives is the emotions and that the emotions are a
fundamental part of the mind. We know they are the
only elements of the mind that make our knowledge avail-
able or useful. We know that they color all our thought
and send it out on errands of love and mercy, or missions
of hate and vengeance. We know that all education that
educates the intellect alone is one sided and so incomplete
as to be shameful. We train intellectual animals and
profess nothing more. The result is that every immoral
man trained at the expense of the state is thereby made
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 13
doubly dangerous as a foe to the state. What other does
Emerson mean when he says "Napoleon was trial of in-
tellect without conscience?" Lacking moral education
his Titanic intellect made him a moral monster.
The educational world is just beginning to catch the
spirit of the age, and in certain quarters we hear talk
about psychological ethics. Let us not disparage the
idea, for no one can teach ethics so as to fully develope a
human mind and send the man out a pure, loving,
patriotic, helpful, charitable citizen of a Republic without
teaching a good generous part of the Christian religion,
" What does the Lord thy God require of thee but to do
justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God?"
That is good religion, and "psychological ethics" will
not be able to omit it. You cannot teach ethics without
teaching justice and mercy, and Kant, stoic though he was,
declared that it would be forever impossible to get a
ground work for even law and order without a practical
faith in God. You- will find Aristotle teaching ethics on
the same basis. "Pure religion before God and the
father is this, to visit the widow and the fatherless in their
affliction and to keep oneself unspotted from the world."
Ethics will sit very close to the gospel there ; and Jesus
himself summed up the whole divine law in the few
words, God the first place, the second you and your neigh-
bor. If the German emperor thinks the world is not
ready for such ethics let him ride down " Unter den
Linden" in the next Demonstration with his motto, "sic
volo, sic jubeo," and see what comes of it. I will not
say that you cannot teach such "psychological ethics"
without teaching first of all love to God ; but Janet's
14 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
works are standard, and he says that you cannot give
" any sufficient motive for the performance of duty without
a belief in God." Because the unmoral intellect will
say: "If it is possible that God is, an illusion, why should
not virtue be an illusion also?" When some one admitted
to President Seely, of Amherst, not long since, that we
must soon introduce ethics into our school system, he said:
" If you take the best will you not have to introduce the
gospel of Jesus?" Daniel Webster could see no valid
reason why a few great religious truths could not be taught
in our public schools. He affirmed, with reason, that a
belief in God, immortality and accountability of man to
his Creator, the relation of life in the next world to
character in this, could be taught without the least danger
of sectarian strife. Since the safety of the Republic
depends upon the education of its citizens, the State will
not refuse to educate because a few Anarchists would
oppose it in the support of the total destruction of govern-
ment. And if the ultimate end of education is character,
virtue and integrity, the evolution of upright citizens, the
State should not swerve from its duty, because a few
unbelievers are opposed to all religious teachings. The
State has sharpened the human intellect until it is as likely
to be deadly as a foe as to be potent as an ally. All the
scientific skill of the day should be brought to bear upon
this problem. When it is, the fact will appear that only
a psychological development of the mind will give us the
mental poise and balanced character necessary that a
government of the people by the people shall not perish
from the earth. The growth will be slow. I believe that
the next century will see developed the necessity for
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 15
persistent public training in the fundamental principles of
religious life. Then the minds of the young will be more
receptive to the more individual instruction in distinctively
Christian truths. Meanwhile, that we may insert as
widely as possible the true leaven, the Christian world
must pour out money for Christian Academies and
Colleges where our young can be trained not merely in
intellectual gymnastics, but where the intellect, the emo-
tions and the will may have symmetrical enlargement.
Wherever there is a felt want, there is either existent or
potential, the answer to it throughout all nature. The
world has long felt the need of an answer to the great
social problems of this century. The Christian Church is
our answer. Education psychologically applied, fitting
the mind in its fundamental principles for the higher
application of positive Christian truth, will alone solve
the problem. We are to see this, ere long, more clearly.
Then, for the sake of a sentiment, the State will not
prefer the ethics of Aristotle to those of Jesus of Nazareth.
THE BUILDING OF A CHRISTIAN COLLEGE.
REV. DR. J. K. McLEAN, OAKLAND.
For the sake of turning our discussion to its most
fruitful issue, allow me to place upon the broad subject
assigned me such modifying limits as shall entitle it
"The Building of the Congregational Christian College
Today in California."
l6 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
/. The Great Incentive to the Undertaking.
That is to be found in the close relation which exists
between such an enterprise and the coming of Christ's
Kingdom. Institutions of Christian education have been,
from the earliest days, prime factors in Christian conquest
and advancement. Christian institutions of learning have
stood to the Christian Church both as armory and arena.
Prime agencies for providing material of conquest and
supplying the discipline requisite to its handling.
Thorough Christian men, thoroughly trained in Christian
ways, for thoroughly Christian ends the kingdom of God
on earth can never do without them.
1. The Christian college has existed and must exist,
as a standing appeal for such men and as a standing pre-
paratory of them. Purely secular institutions of learning,
particularly those maintained by the state and held under
its control, cannot, in the nature of the case, either incite
men to the Christian ministry, qualify them for it, or back
them in it. They are disabled from doing so by their very
constitution. Experience already shows their tendency to
be powerfully in the opposite direction. The Christian
institution of education is the reservoir upon the hill-top to
which the pulpit is hydrant in the valley. To any effective
system for Christian advancement both are essential. The
one can be of little avail without the other.
2. The Christian college is demanded not only as
auxiliary to Christian faith and a power for Christian
progress, but as well for the conservation of true civiliza-
tion. It is to be, for that purpose, even more necessary in
the future, if that were possible, than 1 it has been in the
past. This is evident in view :
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 1 7
() Of the visible tendency in our age, country, and
especially in our State, to materialism, secularism and to
the inevitable consequences of these depraved moral
standards and progressive moral degeneracy.
(3) Of the demoralizing tendency of unsanctified
scholarship already apparent in these last few years of
secularized higher education.
(c) These tendencies have by no means reached
their full swing. Left without counteractant from the
Christian college and university, they furnish the most
serious menace for the future of our country.
II. The Great Inspiration for the Undertaking.
In that striking narrative in the life of our Lord, the
interview with the woman of Samaria, it is incidentally
recorded, "Now Jacob's well was there." Have you ever
pondered that most suggestive circumstance? The well
was there, though Jacob who dug it was gone and had
been for seventeen hundred years. The man had ceased,
his work survived. And not in mere monumental form,
as only keeping his memory green ; but in vital form, as
keeping the earth green. It stood a perennial ministry to
daily human life and comfort. Through it, to how many
thirsty souls had the dead patriarch ministered cups of
cold water. From first to last what a record of benefi-
cence. Jacob himself drank of the well, and Rachel, their
children, servants and flocks; then Canaanites, Judeans
and strangers ; kings of Israel, Saul, David, Solomon ;
prophets of Israel, Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah; generals with
their armies ; caravans with their companies. Especially
as situated on the great high-way between Northern and
1 8 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
Southern Palestine in the line of the annual pilgrimages
forth and back to the Jewish festivals at Jerusalemn, it had
been a land-mark, a resting 1 place and welcome fountain
of refreshment. Until at last the day came when our
blessed Lord himself was fain to rest his weary limbs upon
its brink and beg for a draught of its cool waters. To fifty
generations of thirst had it ministered relief.
And, brethren, just outside the walls of Samaria,
Jacob's well remains today. Through these ages since
Jesus drank of it, does it continue its blessed ministry just
as for so long before? Every day of every year for
almost four thousand years has one man's thought and
one man's deed been a blessing to his fellow-man.
What more fitting symbol to represent the wide
reaching and long enduring influence of the Christian
College ! What inspiration in the suggestion ! A well of
water, not for man's mere physical need and the world's
material want, but for man's religious nature and the
world's spiritual want what enterprise more inspiring!
What undertaking so sublime !
Such an undertaking is not altogether a vision of the
possible, it has been already realized in fact. There are
educational institutions, for their time Christian, which
have existed almost as long as had the well of Samaria at
our Lord's time. The University of Bologna was founded
A. D. 425, fifteen hundred years ago. The great schools
of Palermo were in existence and famous in 1300. The
University of Prague was established in 1348. Vienna,
Heidelburg and Leipzig came soon after. Oxford and
Cambridge have sent forth twenty-one generations of
Christian graduates. Scotland has four universities of
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 19
four centuries standing; one of these had, not long since,
a force of four hundred and twenty-two professors and
three thousand four hundred and forty students. What
wells !
Then there are Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Amherst,
Williams, in our own country. Of which institutions
President Carter has lately written, " The colleges of New
England have been the most potent auxiliaries of the
Christian faith." What have these institutions already
done, and what more are they not yet to do for the Chris-
tian civilization of the world ! What incalculable things
may not a similar institution accomplish for the nascent
civilization of this Pacific Coast !
///. Some Essentials to the Christian College for
Tomorrow.
i. It must be thoroughly a college. Else it cannot
so much as get a clientage. Our problem is to build
today for tomorrow in California a Christian College,
of the Congregational sort. Now, whatever else it may
do without, a college must have a constituency. But the
problem of college-furnishing has materially changed since
the year 1700, when ten Connecticut pastors brought each
a half dozen books and laid them down as the foundation
of Yale, and Jacob Hemingway, conning those books,
constituted for two years its solitary student. That
method of college building, the only one possible then,
can no longer be successfully pursued. The conditions
have changed, particularly in California. The Christian
College built here today and built for tomorrow must be
prepared to stand strong competition from other institu-
20 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
tions. To be successful, it must have more to offer than
the mere fact that it is Christian. Otherwise even our
Christian young men will pass it by. For it is coming to
be understood, that among the imperative conditions of
success in professional life, thoroughness of equipment
stands among the very first. Poorly trained men, handi-
capped today, are going to be handicapped more and
more tomorrow. At all events, we shall not be able to
persuade our young men to the contrary. Where the
educational carcass is, there the educational eaglets are
going to be gathered together. That we may regard as
settled.
We, as Congregationalists, lack even the questionable
advantage in this regard which some other denominations
enjoy. We have, for example, lately heard of the man
who wants his Baptist College not only equipped with
Baptist professors and furnished with Baptist text books,
but taught Baptist mathematics and trained in Baptist
gymnastics ; if he could get them, he would even want
Baptist chalk and blackboards and Baptist soap and
towels. Unfortunately or fortunately, as the case may be,
we are lacking in such denominational spirit. With us
even parents can be slightly influenced by denominational
considerations in selecting a college, still less our boys.
In laying today in California, plans for the Christian
College of tomorrow, we cannot wisely disregard two
facts: (i) That the great body of candidates for the
higher education in our State are to be prepared in secular
institutions. (2) That our great State University and the
greater institution now planting at Palo Alto are going to
offer educational advantages of the very highest type.
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 21
One of the facts suggested to us is that the minds of our
preparatory students at large are not going to be particu-
larly prepossessed toward the Christian College as such ;
the other, that if we are going to enter the educational
field with any hope at all, we must be prepared, as regards
at least the quality of our equipment, to stand comparison
with those other institutions. In quantity we cannot, I
think need not, compete ; in quality we must or be fore-
doomed to fail.
Or if upon any ground of conscience, or of denomina-
tional preference, a poorly equipped institution could
obtain a limited attendance from young men in training
for ministers and missionaries and from young women in
training to be their wives, it could not do for these young
people what needs doing and must be done. The train-
ing which is to place the pulpit abreast of the require-
ments of tomorrow must be thorough and comprehensive.
The church is suffering even today for lack of a sufficiency
of sufficiently trained men ; the requirement for such is
steadily, urgently, increasing. The new aspects of social
life, already appearing upon the horizon of the future, the
new questions, theoretical and practical, which already
oppress society but which are to vex it more and more r
demand for the pulpit of tomorrow men of widest
information, broadest understanding, alertest perception,
profoundest sagacity, and most comprehensive sympathy ;
in a word, men completely equipped every way. They
must be men of utmost faculty, full peers with those who
are to lead in the other departments of life. And just
here comes in the responsibility of the college ; as having
in training the religious leaders of tomorrow, the Christian
22 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
College must be prepared to do most thorough work.
There is some truth, and much which is not truth, in the
remark attributed to President Garfield, that a pine log
with Mark Hopkins at one end and an earnest minded
young man at the other is for all practical purposes,
college enough. That were possibly true if the younger
man were such as Garfield and the older such as Hopkins.
But Hopkinses are always rare, and Garfields never too
common. Moreover, the conditions which gave to Gar-
field's utterance its measure of truth are rapidly changing.
The vast deal which even President Hopkins could
accomplish for the intellectual and moral quickening of
young men like Garfield already needs supplementing,
and shall need it more and more in the exigent days
which are before us.
The Christian College for tomorrow must be
thoroughly a college. No half equipped educational
apology has a call to be. It would not be for the further-
ance but the hinderance of Christ's kingdom. It could
furnish only incompetence, where incompetency were
worse than naught.
2. So too our Christian College for tomorrow must
be thoroughly Christian. More Christian than that
of yesterday.
() In order to conserve such Christian life as may
be carried to it. No light task today, that task is going to
be weightier tomorrow. Out of a Christian home, out of
the warm atmosphere of Christian Church, Sabbath School,
Christian Endeavor Society, fares forth the immature
Christian, boy or girl, into the wider world of college.
Not one of us who has passed through the experience, but
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 23
knows the peril of it. The new atmosphere, more dense
in respect to other things than this youth has ever breathed,
must be made and kept more dense also as respects this
chief thing. The Christian College which is not prepared
to be a Christian conservatory, will have no functions to-
morrow in California.
(6) It must be able, further, to develope that in-
cipient Christian life, in a full length way, along the lines
of intellectual and spiritual enlightenment. Not mere good
scholarship in a Christian does the world need, but good
scholarship which is Christian. The two are by no means
identical. The various forms of scepticism and unbelief
which in these days are settling upon Christian faith, like
the white and black scale upon your orange groves, need
to be antidoted at their very beginning. The student
needs, if ever, a helping hand in the outset of his intellec-
tual conflicts. In language lately uttered by Dr. Parker,
of London, "We want human words delivered with divine
accent and realities spoken of with human sympathy.
I believe in scholarship, I believe in the larger scholar-
ship that goes beyond mere letters and gerund-grinding
and all sorts of finessing the scholarship that knows the
thought and spirit as well as the letter; beyond the letter
there is an influence or effluence which the mere gram-
marian can never understand or appropriate/' Such
scholarship must be bred into experience out of experience,
absorbed out of an atmosphere suffused with it,
(c) Our college must be equipped also with reference
to making in large and loving ways Christian young men
and women of those who come there without Christian
faith and Christian life. My remarks so far have gone
24 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
upon the ground that the Christian College is designed
chiefly with reference to the Christian ministry. But the
church and world tomorrow, are to need as church and
world do today, religiously trained men in all departments
of life. There is, and is to be, crying need for Christian
lawyers, Christian physicians, Christian teachers, Christian
farmers and Christian business men. Inasmuch as our
Christian College finds its sole reason for existence in this
great fact, it will not answer for it to be Christian to only
the ordinary measure of the so-called Christian College of
yesterday and today. Its equipments must be more
thorough than the mere perf unction of morning prayers,
Sunday school, bible class, occasional prayer meeting, with
some hasty and apologetic glance at biblical literature. It
must have in its boards of instruction great-souled Chris-
tian men and women, who, by force of personal character
and high spiritual attainment can infuse and enthuse those
who come to them for intellectual training with spirit like
their own. We are educated by our admirations. We
become like those we look up to. I know no provision
for a college more essential than Christian instructors who
are admirable and are endowed with character and aim
intellectually and spiritually inspiring.
IV. The Denominational Basis of the Christian
College for Tomorrow.
It should be co-operative, not competitive. Inter-
denominational, not denominational. It is today the
standing scandal of Christianity that, in view of the neces-
sity for the existence of the Christian College and in face
of the difficulties attending its building and maintenance,
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 25
all purely denominational considerations cannot be sub-
ordinated to the common end. That scandal of today
shall appear all the greater in the light of tomorrow. I,
for one, can see no good reason why, denominational lines
being retained as now, an interdenominational co-
operation could not be had which, in every State of our
country, should replace a starveling brood of collegettes
with one strong, well-equipped, real college, in which the
denominational preference of no student need be attacked
or wounded.
But if such co-operation be as yet unattainable and
the persistent experience on the part of us Congrega-
tionalists, in vainly trying to secure it seems to indicate
that it is unattainable then the next best thing to try for
is a college which is Congregational. That is to say, an
institution which, while thoroughly Christian in spirit,
shall be in its working essentially undenominational. It
is to our everlasting credit as institution builders that there
exists a noble cordon of colleges, from Bowdoin on the
Atlantic to Pomona by the Pacific, in which any student
may pass through the whole curriculum without feeling
one finger's weight in influence toward changing his
denominational predilections. Can as much be said of
any other colleges than ours? If not, then ours is the
college to build for tomorrow in California today.
26 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE WE ARE UN-
DERTAKING TO BUILD.
PRESIDENT C. G. BALDWIN, CLAREMONT.
Pomona College is, by force of circumstances, a Chris-
tian Academy and Christian College combined. It is not
intended to cover more than seven years from the begin-
ning of Latin. It does not propose to make university
provision, through advanced electives, for those who wish
to begin in part their graduate courses at the close of the
Sophmore year, but to give a full general course of under-
graduate study in Literature, Philosophy and Science. It
believes that these seven years of general work constitute
a worthy preparation for special studies in professional lines
at the universities. We propose to conduct the school in
such a way that our pupils shall have every advantage in
materials, apparatus, and teaching force necessary to
make the most thorough preparation possible for more
advanced and technical work. We propose to employ
such teachers, and have such regulations, and establish
such traditions as shall make these years of study, from
fourteen to twenty-one, years of thorough establishment of
scholarly habits and Christian character; and shall also
hope to aid each student to discover within that period the
character and natural limits of his native endowment, and
to have clearly presented to him the various forms of
useful and needed work, so that if possible his choice of
work shall be fitting and worthy. We shall also, and
always, present to the students the highest ideal of fitness
for lifework and cultivate an ambition to take a full
course of special graduate study in the best universities ;
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 27
and to this end it will be our aim to bring before the
students from time to time the highest specialists for the
purpose of enlisting the greatest interest, taking care
always that these specialists magnify with us the impor-
tance of the general preparatory work of the college
courses.
This simple program of Pomona College seems to us
to meet the demands of our times in a way to harmonize
all important interests. It is a plan which utilizes to the
full the magnificent endowments of our great universities,
not distinctively Christian, by sending to them the best
trained material ready to appreciate and use the men and
the equipment of the university. It meets in the best
possible way the demand for Christian Education, because
it takes the immature years for thorough establishment in
Christian principles under most favorable conditions. If
we have done our duty we can then, if ever, safely trust
the graduate of our College to meet the temptations of the
more mixed University life, which might easily have
wrecked the undergraduate student.
There seems to be no other effective way of meeting
both these requirements for university life good intel-
lectual education and well established character. This is
not an ambitious ideal. The college is always in danger
of trying to become a university. This must not be. It
is folly to attempt such work without large equipment.
It defrauds the student because other schools can serve
him better in the special technical courses. It is the
business of the Christian College to have such an equip-
ment and such men as will enable it to say to any young
man: "You cannot do essentially better in these under-
28 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
graduate courses than you can do with us." This we
must insist upon. We cannot rob our children. There
is great misconception as to how much is required to con-
duct such an undergraduate school. This has arisen from
the fact that most of our colleges as they have received
more means have advanced into special graduate fields of
work, and have undertaken thus a vastly wider field than
the undergraduate field. A scheme of education is like
a circle, you increase the radius but a little and you
double the area and the expense.
Confining ourselves strictly to college work we need
in chemistry a working laboratory, which I am informed
by high authority in graduate work will require as a max-
imum, less than $10,000 in equipment. We need in
Physics enough apparatus to set up a dozen first-class
experiments which will require, according to a very high
authority in graduate work, but $10,000 in apparatus.
For the museum for actual work not for display we
need place in the hands of the teachers but a few thous-
ands of dollars. The teachers of Literature, History and
Political Science must have a few thousands of dollars for
books. We are not to have the library of the specialist in
all, or even in any lines. The student who does the work
before him can wisely confine his attention to the books
which are properly collateral to his studies. The special-
ist and the university courses need the complete library.
The professors in college must be teachers, middlemen,
men who give up their ambition to become original investi-
gators ; men who keep up with the latest but who give
themselves unreservedly to their pupils rather than to the
private laboratory. This has been done by the greatest
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 29
teachers of the world. They have written few books,
they have made few original discoveries, but they have
given themselves to their pupils ; have multiplied them-
selves in a thousand lives, awakened and stimulated by
them. We must have a large force of teachers but we
can find three noble and true teachers who will give their
lives for their pupils for the salary which the rich uni-
versities in self-respect must pay for one original investi-
gator. Our pay roll must give us one teacher for every
ten pupils ; and if we do the best possible work for each
pupil we must have more than that. The nearest possible
approach to individual attention is highly desirable and
here is where money should be used freely. The labor-
atory method must be used in all lines and this requires
many men.
The typical product of such a College is a student
trained in mind to do good work with an enthusiasm
born of high Christian purpose to serve the world
where it needs him most; safe as regards temptations
and ready to respond most quickly to the enlarged
life of the well equipped special and advanced courses of
the University. I do not hesitate to say that such a man
will get a greater uplift from the change from the College
to the University th;in the undergraduate ever gets by
partial and incomplete electives which precede his proper
graduate work. The system is better as an ideal ; and
within a few years it will be found that a defined line
between the College and the University must be drawn.
Mongrels will not be tolerated. Their methods tend to
pull away the brightest men from a thorough general
preparation just as the Business Course will "side
3O EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
track " the brightest men of the Academy. The Business
Course has no place in the Academy. The University
Course has no place in the College. To define our limits
is to aid in our work.
Are our Christian people of California willing to
undertake to build such a Christian School as I have out-
lined ? Are they convinced that in education this is the
best and the most desirable thing to do? That is the
first question, "Is it desirable?" and this convention
should help to answer that question. If the answer is
yea, and there is no uncertain sound as we voice that
word, then I say it is feasible. For what ought to be,
can be. God will help us as we go forward with courage
and it shall be. If this is a right plan commensurate with
our possibilities, surely we must put forth the effort to
overcome all obstacles which may oppose it.
WHY A DISTINCTIVELY CHRISTIAN
EDUCATION.
REV. H. A. STAATS, PASADENA.
The one supreme test of the proper education of man
is the realization of the Divine ideal in him. What is that
ideal? A perfect manhood. We may infer this from
Nature. Everywhere in the lower material realm, im-
perfect development points to richest development ; im-
maturity foreshadows maturity. The Scriptures clearly
set forth this ideal. I read, "And He (Christ) gave some
apostles, and some prophets, and some evangelists, and
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 3!
some pastors, and teachers, for the perfecting of the
Saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the
body of Christ ; till we all come in the unity of the faith
and of the knowledge of the Son of God unto a
perfect man." That is, all ordinances, all the variety of
instruments employed in the Church by its Great Head
have this for their grand end a perfect man. What is
man in his essential nature and present state, and what is
perfect manhood, and how may its royal crown be secured?
Man is a compound being. Dissimilar elements combine
in his structure. Each has its place and rightly developed
bears a designed part in his Divine constitution. There
is nothing superfluous in man. Every appetite, every
passion, every faculty that belongs to his organic nature is
useful ; yea more, is sacred. He is a physical being and
as such is fearfully and wonderfully made. The body is
good. Not one function of it is common or to be
despised. To assert the contrary is a reflection upon the
All-wise Creator. Man is also an intellectual being. His
mental powers are so varied and grand that his capacity
for progress seems boundless.
He is a social being, with affections which in their
kind and degree ally him to the Divine heart ; and crown-
ing all he is a religious being, he worships, has a sense
of a higher, a Divine, power to which he owes allegiance
and before which he reverently bows. This distinguishes
him from all forms and kinds of animal life, not simply
as higher in degree, but as separate in kind. Such is
man as we find him. It is evident that a perfect man-
hood is the proper, harmonious, development in him of all
these elements. Each has its sphere in the life, each may
32 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
bring a blessing or a curse. Each needs guidance,
control. Even the religious faculty cannot be trusted, for
though the highest it is liable to the greatest perversions.
Take then man with these elements of his being capable
of a development the rich blossom of which may be a
perfect manhood, and we ask, where is the power or
influence which will secure it? We naturally suppose
that an all-wise and loving father would make some
provision for it. Where is it found? A distinctively
Christian education furnishes the answer. It is the great
necessity. Christ was the ideal man ; and the principles
He taught and embodied in His life have in them the
essence and promise and power of a perfect manhood.
They touch the whole man body, mind, heart, spirit.
They say all you are is sacred ; regard each element of
your being as such and use, develop, regulate in accord-
ance with Heaven's royal law of love. A Christian
education is the only all-comprehensive education of the
whole man, and therefore has the strongest claim upon
our sympathy and support. It dignifies human nature as
it leaves no part of manhood unrecognized, unprovided
for. It says to every man, however imperfect and
degraded, you have a royal birthright, you are a son of
God ; and while it points him amid his weakness and
sinfulness upward to his possible strength and righteous-
ness, it brings near God as the all-helpful, all-loving
Friend. Who shall say that the inspiration of such a
vision is not needed for the development of perfect man-
hood ? Who will deny that any education which has not
this broad scope is so far defective ! The men whom a
Christian education naturally builds up must be the
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 33
noblest men, the strongest men, the freest men, the largest
men in other words, the most perfect men. For they
are the men whose every faculty comes under the inspira-
tion and rule of that principle, which is the essence of
God Himself, " God is love." The world in its suffering
and degradation demands such ; for, if character is useful-
ness, they are the most useful ; if character brings
happiness, they are the happiest ; and from their hearts as
from some rich instrument in perfect tune, sweetest notes
sound forth to cheer the weary and sorrowing. A Chris-
tian character, the fruit of a Christian education, is thus
the world's benediction.
THE IMPERATIVE DEMAND FOR CHRIS-
TIAN SCHOOLS.
REV. E. R. BRAINERD, MENTONE.
The topic assigned to me is "The Imperative
Demand for Christian Schools." However many things
may be said on this important topic, there are but five
minutes in which to make four points. So I remark:
First. There is an imperative demand for Christian
schools, because of the secularizing influences of Califor-
nia life. Vast in territory, rich in worldly goods,
thorough in school systems and boundless in resources,
yet the golden state has but a small minority of Christians.
Taken through its whole extent, California is rife in
infidelity, reeking in rum, low in morals. Her brilliant
34 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
future is threatened with inevitable decay. No Sabbath,
no sound temperance principles. Greed and Godlessness
dominate. The influences on the young are unmistakably
harmful. Our otherwise excellent school system is abso-
lutely void of moral or religious teaching. Owing to the
make-up of our Educational Boards as the representatives
of the people, our teachers are not largely individuals of
marked Christian devotion, and those who are, are for-
bidden, by precedent if not by law, any religious or
Christian teaching. No prayer, no Bible ; with ideas of
God and Christianity studiously avoided, the result can
but be bad and only bad. A recent discussion showed
that almost no student from our institutions of learning
have entered the ministry in the whole history of the
State. In California, religious influences are at a mini-
mum ; the demand therefore for Christian schools is at a
maximum. No one can doubt that we must have Chris-
tian schools in California if we would attain a Christian
civilization.
But consider secondly, character is grander than
education. It is fundamental to the welfare of the in-
dividual and the State. Education is the foundation of
civilization. Progress and prosperity, science and inven-
tion ; the refinements of literature and of art ; commerce
and the assimilation of races into our national life are all
due to our splendid system cf public education, and along
the lines of practical utility our country has produced
citizens of remarkable genius. Liberal education has
made our people sharp in wits, shrewd in intellectual
prowess and of wide spread mental activity. Though
young in history, America is prodigious in the results of her
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 35
educational facilities, and promises yet mightier attain-
ments for the future. But there is one thing that our con-
stitutional government has failed to comprehend. It is
this: That though learning, education, skill and power
to apply are a great boon to our citizens, yet grander than
intellectual attainments, grander than mortal genius, is
character. That element of citizenship, that alone, can
make us dominant, and without this, genius is but a
flash in the darkness, quickly extinguished in the gloom of
eternal night. Character alone can establish and main-
tain manhood and preserve and perpetuate the liberties of
the people and the privileges of our free institutions. We
are already feeling the strain on this, the weak spot in our
body politic. Mere mental greatness and a dazzling
civilization must inevitably go down before the destroy-
ing power of a neglected and weakened moral life.
To this, witness the overthrow of the world's great
nations. Greece and Rome, in the brilliancy of their
attainments, literary, artistic and political, far surpassed
our own. Their famous schools trained in intellect, but
could not control the will. Their orators kindled to
enthusiastic patriotism the listening throng, but could
never awaken the divine energies of a dead conscience.
The eloquence of a Demosthenes was but the death
song of a nation's greatness, and in the height of its glory
the nation went down powerless to endure. Its citizens
had lost the true nobility of the soul. Their experiment
of education without character should be our warning.
Already on this continent are heard the distant rumblings
of threatened dissolution, and without Christian education
and Christian character our nation must utterly perish
36 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
long before we reach their glory and fame. Our only
hope is in Christian education. The salt of the gospel
alone can preserve our secular life. Paul's ideas and
ideals must be our standards of citizenship ; the mere
knowledge of self and secular forces can never sustain
man ; the ethics and wisdom of the gospel must conserve.
The Greeks reared their glorious temple to Wisdom, and
over its wondrous archway was carven in letters of gold,
the motto of this philosphy, " Know Thyself!'' Her
citizens paid tribute at its many shrines ; but went forth
to glorify lust and exalt their own greatness. But Paul,
standing on Mars Hill and lifting his voice above the
tumultuous acclaims of the Parthenon unrolled the scroll
of the Heavens and over the archway of that vast temple,
whose dome is the sky, in letters of living light, he
inscribed the supreme command, '''Know Thy God" the
profoundest learning, the only standard of enduring
power. It is plain that there can be no education without
character, and for this reason the imparting of character
should be the first aim in any system of education.
Consider now thirdly, Christian schools alone can give
us Christian education, and insure in our students a healthy
manhood and a strong Christian character. Why ? From
those we receive our education, we receive our character;
the stamp of life is impressed by the hand of the teacher.
Countless lives and many famous schools testify to this
axiom in educational truth. Hence education and charac-
ter forming must go hand and hand, they are inseparable.
To say that the day school should train the mind and
the Sunday school the character is, to say, that we must
depend upon the lesser influence to counteract the greater.
CONGREGATIONAL, CHURCHES. 37
To say that the public school should deal with mental
growth, and the home develop the soul is to require us to
nullify home training by thirty hours a week of contact
with the subtle tendencies of secular education and secular
educators which, in rare exceptions, must prove disastrous.
Education without character forming is suicidal. The
discussion about parochial teaching, the Bible in the
schools, the separation of church and state, and the found-
ing of Christian institutions of learning may go on till the
crack of doom ; but you can never divorce character
forming from any system of true education. Character
is the imperative demand of the day, in civil, in
religious and in political life. Now, if it be true that
character is formed and the bent of life imparted by
our educators, then it must follow that the imperative
demand of the day is for the foundation and maintenance
of distinctively Christian schools.
Now, fourthly, this is just what we have in Pomona
College. If you will study the history of our great men,
the men who have acheived grand moral victories in
statesmanship, in the judiciary, in the pulpit and in the
lesser walks of life, you will find that their feet keep step
with the tread of that vast army that have come forth
from the portals of our Christian Colleges. Follow the
march of history through Yale, Amherst, Williams,
Middlebury, Dartmouth, Oberlin, nearly all of which, in
their geographical situation, could be set down within the
limits of our great State and tell me what untold
influences have gone forth, and shall perpetually go forth
to build for truth and right by a Christian education.
These all were founded on the gifts and prayers of those
38 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
who saw their country's peril and sought the nation's
good. Can any one doubt their need and power?
What would our land, our citizens, be today without
the conserving influences of these institutions? What
these have been in the East we must build on the shores
of the Pacific. For ours is to be a colossal civilization ;
colossal in commerce and civil power ; colossal in culture
and artistic attainments. A new Greece and a new
Athens, a golden age of brilliancy and power. Let us
build here a new Antioch and a new Jerusalem, colossal
in Godliness and in spiritual grandeur a golden age of
true liberty and celestial power. Let us not be afraid
that we shall have too many Christian schools and colleges,
but establish and maintain them in the conviction that
they are necessary to true education and enduring national
life. And let us be especially loyal to Pomona College,
the child of our prayers and earnest desires and worthy of
our fondest hopes. Let us make her the Yale of the
West, sending forth her great men to dominate the land.
Aye, let her rival the schools of ancient renown, in learn-
ing and spiritual power, surpassing the Alexandrian age
and the wisdom of Gamaliel, taking for her standard the
breadth of culture, the depth of spiritual discernment and
loftiness of moral grandeur revealed in the Perfect Man
and putting the stamp of character on countless heroic
souls that shall go forth like Paul to make our Palestine a
Holy Land.
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 39
CHRISTIAN EDUCATION AND CHARACTER
BUILDING.
REV. E. D. WE AGE, NATIONAL CITY.
Every one must be educated. It is not a matter of
choice. One might better talk of breathing, digestion or
thinking being a matter of choice. There are things we
must have whether we will or not. Education is one of
them. Education is development of character ; character
in its mental r moral and physical sides. Everything
educates. We have no control over the process. A man
may take food or let it alone. Having taken it the result
is beyond his power of choice. In that realm God acts,
not man. We put the seed in the soil ; having put it there
we have nothing to do with the result. We may water it.
Having watered it we have nothing to do with the effect
of the water. God and men are partners. God has His
work, we have ours. Every act in life educates. Every-
thing we come in contact with educates ; just as every
thought changes the structure of the brain so does every
experience change character. We cannot avoid it ; we
cannot alter the fact. Most of our education is uncon-
scious. The young man goes to school to get an educa-
tion. He gets it. The smallest part of it comes from
books. Most of it comes unbidden and unknown through
fingers, ears and eyes. A man may listen to good music
till he loves it, but he does not realize the process of
development. It is not in anything he can see or touch.
A man may study pictures till he becomes an artist in
soul but he never sees the development in progress. The
young man on play-ground, in society, in class-room,
4O EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
forms his character and determines his intellectual success
or failure more by what he does not think of than by what
he does think of. Physical exercise is good for physical
development ; but that development is conditioned not so
much on the exercise as on the air and sunlight in which
the exercise is taken. Exercise in a foul cellar would be
of small profit. A man walking in an African forest may
take in malaria enough to kill him and not know of the
harm till after it is done. The moral and intellectual
atmosphere that surrounds college life is far more power-
ful than all the instruction in text books. We should take
special pains to see that these unconscious educational in-
fluences are right. We can't hinder the working of such
influences. We can put ourselves under right ones. A
man who, without the best of reasons, puts himself under
the influences of some colleges and expects to come away
unharmed tempts God. He might as well swing Indian
clubs in a small-pox hospital. Don't jump from the
pinnacle of the temple and expect God to catch you. He
has better work on hands. A man may study and pray
and work for God, and yet treat his nerves so that they
shall be allies of the Devil. That is poor policy. It is
good policy compared with that which, in his most critical
period, when he is striving to build a broad and firm intel-
lectual character, puts a man under influences which, with
all their insidious and terrible power, work for ruin.
Give us pure air and clear sunlight.
But it is not alone on the moral side of character
building that the Christian part of an education is
well nigh indispensible. Look at the intellectual part
of it. A man, who soaks his body with wine or beer,
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 4!
cauterizes his nerves with tobacco and enervates his
muscles with neglect, isn't good for much in a prize
fight. What is he good for in the vastly harder contest
of brains? Give a man such influences as shall tend
to make him care thoroughly and conscientiously for
his body as the Temple of God, and you greatly increase
his chance of success in brain work. Here is one place
where even our Christian colleges are not up to mark.
There ought to be no Christian college where special and
detailed instruction on the hygiene of brain and nerves is
not given. We would have far less poor work and
failures and collapses and suicides. Many a man works
on after God has written his coming ruin in letters of
languor and restlessness and pain that sets all his nerves
athrill, and never a Daniel rises to interpret to him the
handwriting of the Almighty. Then comes one of what
we call mysterious Providences with nothing mysterious
about it, unless it be the indifference of those who ought
to have furnished an interpretation to the warning and did
not. But, as much behind the times as our Christian
colleges are on this point, others are still more so. Not
only does the student in a Christian college stand a better
chance of building a strong intellectual character, because
he is under influences that tend to help him save and use
his forces to the best advantage, but because he is likely
to get really broader and more thorough instruction. All
facts are connected. Things are seen rightly only as they
are seen in their relationship. Our fathers saw steam.
It did not amount to much. They did not see it in its
relation to practical life. They saw lightning. It did not
profit them. They did not see it in relation to common
42 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
affairs. Men see the facts of science and history. These
facts are intimately related to the soul and God. What if
the teacher is blinded by materialism or agnosticism so
that he does not see these relationships ? His perception
of the character and meaning of the facts is by so much
dull. Given a man whose vision is clear, and his view of
the facts will be broader, fairer and more inspiring. You
see a man working with a microscope. It is a costly
instrument. The object he is examining seems dim. He
adjusts the instrument; still dim. Rubs the lenses; still
dim. He takes the instrument apart and with a few drop.
of alcohol thoroughly cleans the lenses. Ah ! he sees
now. The dirt of materialism and the smoke of agnos-
ticism make bad work in examining the facts of the worlds
Give us an institution where they keep the lenses clean.
THE STUDENT MATERIAL FOR COLLEGE
BUILDING.
PROFESSOR E. C. NORTON, CLAREMONT.
You have listened to the President, as he has given
for the Trustees and Faculty the main characteristics of
the institution, which, in Pomona College, it is proposed
to build up; and I think you have all said, " Amen, go
ahead, brethren, and when the work proves that it
possesses such qualities ws will joyfully own it and give it
to the world as our tribute to Christian civilization.*'
But, however high the ideal which Trustees and
Faculty set before themselves in this building of a Chris-
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 43
tian College, however wise their plans and true their
hearts, they cannot place it on the level they desire either
in respect of mental or of moral life. After they have
done their best the tone of intellectual and spiritual
activity of the institution will be the average tone of
the body of students ; and in these days of beginnings,
you, pastors, are largely responsible for the students we
receive or fail to receive. The real life of the College is
in its students ; in greatest degree they hold in their
power its good name, its prosperity, its influence.
The modern college is neither a monarchy nor an aris-
tocracy ; it is a democracy, and the students are the demos
in reality the governing body.
What one of us did not feel and recognize in our
student days that indefinable something that may be called
the "spirit of the institution" an intangible but real
thing that had uplifting and restraining power saying to
each successive class, this is the way ; walk ye in it. And
so the Freshman, without thought of resistance and
almost perforce did certain things and did not do
certain things because why, because it's a way we had
at old Amherst, or Yale, or Dartmouth, or Oberlin, or
wherever else we came under the sway of this ghost of the
past. The traditions of institutions long founded are
mighty powers, and so far as they make for honorable
living and righteousness, mighty powers for good. The
Freshman, the Sophmore, the Junior, the Senior, drops
into his round of duties, of pleasures, of recreation, yes,
even of vices, at what is considered the proper time,
because, don't you know, its " the thing" at his college.
There can be no change of the internal spirit and life of
44 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
an institution. It may be developed it can not be revo-
lutionized. The quality of our student body is then of the
utmost importance during these formative days, when
there are no traditions of the elders, no way in which
things have always been done, no spirit that walks abroad
and lays a restraining hand on every brother that walketh
disorderly.
The old and very sensible receipt for cooking a rabbit
was: "First catch your rabbit." For building up a
Christian College the first essential is to capture live
Christian students not simply Christians but students.
There is a grave danger for a young college which carries
with it the name of Christian, especially just at that time
when it begins to gain some little reputation as a good and
safe institution, and more especially where all the influ-
ence of the great institutions is given to endow us with
such a character in the eyes of the people. Here is a very
bright student in some brother's church a boy coming
out into earnest Christian life. The pastor perhaps agrees
with the parents that it is safe for him to go to some insti-
tution carrying a larger name than Christian College.
Perhaps neither pastors nor parents always stop to con-
sider that if Christian Education is necessary at all there
are duties as well as privileges regarding it, and so, un-
wittingly, they may help to make Christian Education
what not a few would like to see it, a thing of the past.
But here is a boy who "never did hanker very much
after being a Christian " and his moral character is get-
ting a little shaky, he has had trouble with his teacher in
the High School, and his parents don't quite know what
to do with him. The danger is that some friend of the
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 45
College suggest that he be sent to Pomona College, where
they make so much of religion and the influences are so
good. Give us enough such friends and we are undone.
I know we cannot expect to receive the best students
if we cannot do the best work, nor, on the other hand,
can we be expected to do the best work if we do not have
the best students you can send us. The Christian College
is not, and must not be made, a home for the feeble-
minded, nor a rival of the institution at Whittier. More
than any other institution of learning must it refuse to
accept those who cannot bring clean papers and refuse to
retain those who do not maintain a clean and helpful
character, and this is especially to be emphasized during
its critical years when traditions are being established and
customs formed not easily broken. " This does not have
to be a large school," said Dr. Arnold, " but it must be
a school of Christian gentlemen." This should be our
ideal not quantity but quality. There is indeed a work
we can do and ought to do for the weak, but for the doing
of this work we must first have strength and momentum.
Green wood is all right if you first have fire enough. But
in the present crisis one of your brightest and best is worth
to the building up of the college a dozen indifferent stu-
dents. The first one to go to Pomona College from your
community \\ 7 ill in general be the type of all succeeding
pupils, and will fix for your people their estimate of the
character of life and attainment at the college. If this is
true, are we not justified in asking for your best bright
students, sound students and such as sleep o'nights.
46 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
THE DUTY OF THE CHURCH TO THE
INTELLECTUAL LIFE OF
HER CHILDREN.
REV. LUCIEN H. FRARY, POMONA.
Matthew Arnold, a few years ago, in his lecture on
Numbers, took the ground that the great defect of our
Republic is disobedience, want of respect, and exaggera-
tion, but that there is power in the large remnant
amongst our millions to save the nation. The remedy
lies in unceasingly multiplying the numbers and efficiency
of the remnant. Precisely this, I understand to be the
question before us this A. M.
How to increase the remnant of liberally educated
Christian minds in America is the problem that inspired the
calling of this assembly. We stand in the gate-way of the
twentieth century. We do business by telegraph and
telephone. We travel by steam and electricity. We
tunnel mountains and heave ocean beds with dynamite and
rock-rend. We light our streets and warm our dwellings
with fires kindled by the force of mountain streams. We
have ceased to be surprised by the wonders of mechanical
invention, since the civilization in the midst of which we
daily act, is itself the wonder of the ages.
At times we are tempted to regard ourselves as only
an element of this amazing movement going on before
our eyes. Power of every kind is concentrated. Time is
wealth. The world does not wait for men leisurely to
muse upon its calls to service. Opportunities unaccepted
are quickly withdrawn. We listen to men who think
straight and see clearly. Definite ideas, strongly held and
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 47
concisely spoken, are in demand. The untrained mind
labors under disadvantages that grow more irksome every
hour. Even obscure communities require for their higher
needs, the man of broad views and distinctive convictions ;
while in the great centers of thought and action, the
poorly equipped workman finds his burden well nigh
crushing. There has always been a pressing need for
skilled, solid, Christian men. But never was that need so
imperative as at this moment, and in our land. The
necessity of popular intelligence and public virtue as a
safeguard to the nation has become a commonplace upon
all our lips. With democracy made sovereign, and the
line between liberty and license delicately narrow ; with
the growing effrontery of crafty and thieving demagogues ;
with the multiplied wants and healthy discontent 'of man-
kind, brought about by the social and material advances
of the past, there comes a loud and urgent call to
vastly increase the company of men and women who, by
the exercise of mental discipline and moral integrity in
the various callings of life, shall help to make America,
not only in name, but in very deed, the enlightener of the
^nations, the pioneer in the vanguard of the hopes of the
world. Thoughtless mobs, wreaking their fury upon real
or fancied enemies, cannot do this work. Neither is mere
goodness equal to the task. The political, social or moral
questions of our day will not be solved by selfish schemes
or ignorant philanthrophists. The times call for the com-
bination of intellectual and moral power, for faithful men
able to teach others, also men of trained mind and
educated conscience. No others can do the work that
waits our hands. The struggle for material gain grows
48 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
more intense. In their heat, men cast aside moral
scruples as a runner throws off his garments in a race.
And yet society can stand only upon the solid rock of
rectitude. To tamper with the sanctities of God's law, to
consent that anything rather than religious integrity shall
rule in human affairs, is to tear off the planks from the
bottom of the ship in which we sail with all our goods.
Progress in the conquest over matter bids us learn
anew, and continually, the truth that in the world, "there
is nothing great but man ; in man there is nothing great
but mind/' A man in one aspect may be a mist, a
withering flower. In another he is gigantic, immeasurable,
immortal ; and he is never so great as when disciplined in
all his powers and uplifted by the aspirations of an intel-
ligent Christian faith. " Governments, religion, property,
books," said Humboldt, "are nothing but the scaffolding
to build a man. Earth holds up to her maker no fruit but
the finished man." "Mankind," said Kossuth, "has
but one single object mankind itself ; and that object
has but one single instrument mankind again." "Men,"
said Pericles, "are a city, and not walls." The prayer
of every Christian American should continually be,
"O God, give us men."
Consider, too, this idea of liberty. What need that
millions in this land learn the real meaning of that word.
Blessed shall be the men who teach the precious lore that
liberty is the office of righteousness, that liberty is self-
reverence, self-knowledge and self-control. Blessed, too,
shall be the men who, by plain living and high thinking,
show the community how simple are the real needs of life
and pour silent contempt on the regency of gold. " For
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 49
departed kings,'* says one, " there are appointed honors,
and the wealthy have their gorgeous obsequies ; but it
shall be the nobler lot of these to clothe nations in
spontaneous mourning, and to go to the grave among the
benedictions of the poor."
Our country needs leaders and commanders of the
people. And for these, to the Christian College she must
continually resort. But how shall the Christian College
honor the draft without perennial supply from the Christian
church and the Christian home ? In the Christian church
and the Christian home is set the center of hope for the
saving of the world. The very atmosphere of the Chris-
tian College inspires to the broadest manhood. The value
of clean, strong lives, is there constantly and everywhere
felt, and young men are fortified with every noble purpose.
Thus, as Christian ministers, lawyers, physicians, business
men ; as presidents and instructors in colleges ; as scien-
tists, statesmen and authors ; as guardians of asylums,
reformatories and hospitals ; as missionaries at home and
abroad, the alumni of our colleges are doing a work so
vast, so beneficent that no man can take the measure of it.
Educated men who walk with God and invoke his aid in
the issues of the hour are clothed upon with a power that
shall bring victory to the truth and safety to the Republic.
They go forth under the leadership of one who hath on
his vesture and on his thigh a name written King of
Kings and Lord of Lords.
In view of these hints I venture to hope that you will
assent to the timeliness of my theme : The Duty of the
Church to the Intellectual Life of Her Children.
50 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
THE PERSONAL FACTOR IN EDUCATION.
REV. C. T. WEITZEL, SANTA BARBARA.
My subject is the educational force of the personality
and companionship of the teacher. The teacher is some-
thing more than a live text book on arithmetic, grammar,
history. He certainly ought to be. His personality
educates as truly as do the facts, laws, or principles he
teaches. Is he a mere hireling, doing his work for so
much money? He will not give his life blood to his
scholars. What lesson will he teach of service ? This
it is a matter of money. He must have the dollars.
Therefore he must do the service. Service a hard
necessity, nothing higher ; that is the lesson he teaches of
service. Is he more than a mere hireling a friend ; a lover
of his neighbor? His whole manner shows it. What a
new conception of service he gives by the way he throws
himself into his work. Still, a necessity it may be. But
something vastly better, higher, giving a thought, teaching
a law, impressing a truth. There is a joy in it. To serve is
a privilege. There is something in true service for which
money cannot pay. He truly serves who gives himself
that is the lesson he teaches of service. Is the teacher a
literalist? Is he bound by the mere letter? Or is he one
who habitually catches at the spirit of a fact or principle ?
The one teaches history as a collection of dead facts and
dates. The other as an illustration of eternal living prin-
ciples, a prophecy of what shall be, as well as a record of
what has been. Is our teacher scornful or reverent ? His
scholars will learn of him the disrespect that lowers the
great to our own level, or the humility that exalts us
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 51
toward the great. Does our teacher hold fast the tradi-
tions of the past, or eagerly welcome the new light ever
breaking forth ? His scholars will learn of him the narrow-
ness which would have us receive spiritual truth through
one window only the Bible; or while recognizing the
preeminence of the revelation of the Holy Writ, they will
learn to think God's thought after him in the marvelous
world of his making, and recognize the voice of God in all
human history and in the human reason and the human
conscience. Is our teacher's life in thought, aspiration,
act bounded by time, or does it reach out into eternal
years ? He need say nothing about it. To the impressi-
ble minds and hearts influenced by him it is soon made
known, and they are either left at the low level of those
who live by the day to have a good time, and to whom
human standards of success and failure are final, or they
are taught to ask, not what is pleasant but what is right ;
not how does this serve my life but how does it serve all
life? In a word, the teacher cannot ask a question, ex-
plain a problem, administer a reproof, correct an error,
without revealing and impressing himself on the scholar.
This factor in education, the personality of the teacher
impressed by familiar intercourse with the taught, is not
sufficiently recognized in our schools and colleges, though
I bear witness that it is to a very large extent recognized
in Pomona College. In this respect, on the whole, we
have not only made no advance on the methods of the
ancients ; we have positively lost ground. The Greek
philosophers, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, impressed their
personality indellibly on their disciples, by familiar walks
and talks with them, singly, as well as in groups. So did
52 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
the Hebrew Rabbis on their disciples. It is said of
Prof. Tholuck, of the University of Halle, that some of
the most illustrious German writers of the century were
led into the Christian life by him ; that in the pulpits and
professorial chairs of Germany, there are at present hun-
dreds who are preaching and teaching a gospel they first
received from him. Among his papers were found hun-
dreds of letters from students and ministers owning him as
their spiritual father. What was the secret of Prof. Tho-
luck's great success? This: From the beginning of his
work as a University Professor, on through the busiest
portion of his world renowned public lecturing, he regu-
larly spent four hours a day walking with students, besides
having one student at his table for dinner and another for
supper. At such times he sought in every way to get at
the inner life of his guest or companion. In this familiar
intercourse, we are told, " he was full of geniality and
overflowed with humor; he tried the students' wits with
the oddest questions, and those who enjoyed the privilege
of walking with him would retail for weeks afterwards the
quips and sallies in which he had indulged. He knew
how to draw every man out on the subjects with which he
was acquainted. He endeavored to rouse and stimulate
the mind from every side, and many owed to him their
mental as well as their spiritual awakening."
What, after all, must have been the part of the train-
ing of the twelve disciples of Jesus Christ which was most
essential, profound, lasting? Shall we not say that just
to be with the Divine teacher was the most important
factor in their training? Can we not imagine how virtue
must have gone forth continually from Him to them in
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 53
those long walks by the lake and over the mountain pass,
during those night vigils, in those familiar talks in the
house explaining what was so mysterious in his public
teachings ? The daily silent influence of that life of perfect
piety, sympathy, unselfishness, devotion, heroism, must
have worked infinitely in moulding and transforming
those fishermen into the leaders of a movement which
should fill and conquor the world. We see that the most
successful teachers have followed this method of educating
by familiar companionship. The best educated nation in
the world the German follows this method. Let me
add a few of the reasons which make this a factor on which
we should lay great stress.
We learn largely by unconscious imitation. Some
time ago it was a notorious fact in regard to one of our
Eastern colleges that its students could easily be recognized
by a peculiar gesture which they unconsciously copied
from their honored President. A child's walk, his speech,
the very expression of his face, reproduces the pattern set
by the parent or teacher. He will speak, not the grammar
which he has been taught by rule, but the grammar which
he hears in the speech of his companions. In recent years
there has been a marked tendency toward teaching by
objects, illustrations. Abstract truths or facts have been
given a body. Pictures fill our current literature so
that everything, our magazines and even our daily news-
papers, are illustrated. Pictures adorn the bare walls of
all the school-houses in our land. Even the stories of
Scripture are taught in the pulpits of our land by aid of
pictures and the magic lantern. Of much that he teaches
the teacher himself is, or should be, the truth in its con-
:s\
fi 1
54 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
crete. He is the live embodiment of it before the scholar,
the picture held up before him. We often hear it said
that the class companionships of college life are as valuable
a training as the instruction of the class-room. If this is
so, is there not in the lack of companionship between
teacher and scholar the neglect of a force of great possible
value ?
Another reason for laying stress on the personal factor
in education is this : We gain force from contact with a
person. A legend tells of a saint of long ago to whom
was given power to cure disease, soothe pain, and
comfort sorrow without being conscious of doing so.
" When the saint went along, his shadow, thrown on the
ground on either side or behind him, made arid paths
green, caused withered plants to bloom, gave clear water to
the dried up brooks, fresh color to the pale children and
joy to unhappy mothers."
There is more real truth than we might think in the
legend. A bright face, a ringing voice, a firm step we
all know their power to cheer, to rouse. And these are but
the outward expression of an inner force, which is ready to
communicate itself to us. The enthusiasm of another is
infectious. I shall always remember the intense interest
in Greek history which was occasioned in our college class
by a lecturer who threw himself into the telling of the
story.
A sermon is one thing when read in cold blood in
your home. It is a very different thing when it comes hot
from the lips of a preacher whose soul is on fire with its
truths and who summons all his forces of voice, of eye, of
personal magnetism to drive the truth home to the con-
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 55
science. After all, what the world needs most of all is
power. Mere knowledge is not power. We want to give
force to the thought, the affections, the choice of our
youth. It is the teacher's personality more than what he
teaches that will inspire. Let the teacher be intellectual,
warm-hearted, strong willed, and you cannot give the
scholar too much of personal contact with him. Keep the
scholar and teacher at arms length the one on his plat-
form, the other at his school desk and you sacrifice the
greater part of the teacher's power to inspire.
Still another reason for laying stress on the personal
contact of the teacher and scholar is one suggested by an
admirable paper by President Hyde on "Our Ethical
Resources." Speaking of personal influence as one of
the resources, he says: " There is a time in the develop-
ment of every boy when the mind is as sensitive and true
to what is best to do and be as the magnetic needle to the
pole. Secure his confidence then ; find out what form of
life's problem he is wrestling with then; show what steps
he must take to win the ideal of manhood that is then
struggling for recognition ; put his feet on the right track
then, and he will go right ever afterward and acknowl-
edge his lasting obligation to your friendship and advice."
This time of ripeness and mellowness in a child is
often as brief as the same stage in a pear. Approach
him too early with moral counsel, and his heart is as hard
as a stone. Approach him after the period of mellow
ripeness is passed, and you find not hardness and indif-
ference any more, but what is worse, the rot of conceit, and
the affectation of hypocrisy. The tact and discernment to
see just when the child is ripe for a particular line of
56 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
moral impression is the fine art of moral education and
influence.
Now is it not clear that to discern the critical time of
peculiar ripeness for an impulse in the ways of wisdom
and life the teacher must be near to the boy, must know
him outside of the recitation room, must be in familiar
contact with him ? Surely at such a time the personality
of a teacher and the degree to which he brings it to bear
on a child makes all the difference in the world as to what
the after life of that child will be. The highest ideal of the
teacher's work is not reached without this personal contact.
I think we shall all agree with the assertion that no
teacher comprehends his work ; no educator rises to the
height of his mission who does not perceive, who does not
feel, that his first and most sacred duty is to promote good
character. Into this undertaking he is to throw his very
life. He is to make it impossible for any soul to go out
from his charge, without knowing that goodness is truest
greatness. Not only to know truth, but to be true, to be
genuine, to be of use in the world that is, the high
ultimate object of all education.
The teacher, who would inspire his scholars, must be
able to say in some measure what only He has been able
to say in its fulness: "I am the truth." If, as Mrs.
Browning says, " it takes a soul to move a body," it must
surely take a soul to move a soul, and the two souls must
touch.
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 57
THE BIBLE IN THE CURRICULUM OF THE
CHRISTIAN COLLEGE.
REV. F. N. MERRIAM, VENTURA.
In the ten minutes allowed me to emphasize this
topic, I shall make two propositions. First, the Christian
College demands the Bible ; and second, the Bible
demands the College.
The first cannot mean that the institutions known as
Christian Colleges are calling for the Book to be placed
in their course of study, for such is not the case ; but,
that the Christian College by virtue of its title, ought to
demand the Bible as a text book that its name does
demand it. When we speak of institutions like Yale and
Williams as ''Christian," we mean a great deal. Such
Colleges are Christian because founded and conducted
under Christian auspices, and because possessing, to a
large degree, a religious atmosphere and Christian charac-
ter. But in the courses of study prescribed by these
institutions with much admirable equipment for work in
language and literature, history and philosophy, mathe-
matics and the various sciences, there has not been equip-
ment sufficiently admirable for distinctively Christian
Education.
The name "Christian" when applied to a college
should characterize its class-room. The instruction of a
Christian College is bound to differ in some way from
that of a purely secular institution. We are met here now
to compose a convention of Christian Education. In order
to be true to the name of Christ, we are bound to take a
Christian point of view in education. If chemists and
58 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
physicists and mathematicians, we believe that God has
weighed the hills and measured the waters ; if geologists
and astronomers, we believe that God created the heavens
and the earth and wrought out the host of stars by number
and set them in array ; if historians, we believe in the
great providence of God and the periods of history
designated as " Before Christ" and "In the year of our
Lord " are colored throughout by the thought of the great
historic figure of Jesus Christ. If we are philosophers, we
must be clothed with an intellectual humility because of
human limitations and liability to error. In a purely
intellectual, as well as moral sense, God's thoughts are
higher than our thoughts, as heaven is higher than earth.
The earth is God's foot-stool, and all the schools and
school men of the world should study at the feet of God.
Now if we be Christians in education, it should need no
argument to show that we must give prominence to the
Bible. When we are reminded of the vital relation
between this book and Christianity, we ought to blush for
the College man's ignorance of the word of God. Every
graduate of a Christian College and man of liberal Chris-
tian education, ought to know the general contents of the
Bible, and be filled with a profound respect for it. The
great Bible idea ought to seem vast in his eyes according
to its true proportions. In the name of young men and
young women, I appeal for the Bible's place in the
curriculum of a Christian College. The church must
answer, for the secular institution gives no response. I
appeal to Christian schoolmen, not even asking advice of
the special scientists, religiously skeptical, however
efficient. The unspiritual mathematician, the material-
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 59
istic chemist, the rationalistic philosopher, however capa-
ble, cannot advise us, and however influential must not
influence us. They shall not voice our decision. Chris-
tians, Christian scholars, must answer and without fear of
opposing majorities and shame for minorities, tell us if a
College to be thoroughly Christian shall not give high
recognition to the Bible in its course of study.
My second proposition is that the Bible demands
the College. It is a book so rich and varied in its con-
tents, so large in its scope, so dignified in its nature and
so closely allied to the wellfare of men as to demand the
scholarly treatment which the College can give it.
Sunday schools, Bible training classes, correspond-
ence and Summer Institutes, all such movements, are
excellent, but they express a prevalent need which our
College should recognize and endeavor to supply. In the
terrific revulsion from Book worship there has been the
awful tendency of closing the Book forever, and the
church today is wrestling with these two extremes. This
wrestling is made on College ground. To give the Bible
prominent scholarly treatment in the curriculum, will
prove a skillful move on the part of the Christian College
in its contest with either foe. On the one hand it would
command the intellectual respect ot the students for the
Bible, and on the other remove the false idea of mere
devotion, pietistic charm, and cant that is apt to be asso-
ciated with the morocco-covered, silk-sewed, sacred Book.
It would remove this false idea and at the same time make
them reverence and love the Word of God.
This move should be made. The college should give
the Bible the time and attention that is due. The time
60 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
will necessarily be limited because of the claim of the
various branches of other work by no means to be
neglected. But as much time as possible should be
allowed for the purpose of teaching the general contents of
the Bible that the students may possess as many Biblical
facts as possible. The study would be varied according
as Scriptural contents vary, and the time allotted would
therefore be distributed through the course. Here portions
of the Book should be studied as history ; there as litera-
ture ; here again in the department of linguistics, and
there again for Ethics and Religion.
Herbert Spencer ("Education") has ridiculed the
false notion of education that is shown in taking up studies
without a view to their utility. He never dreamed of
being quoted in support of placing the Bible in the
curriculum of a Christian College, but his idea does
argue for what this paper has to say. There is a practical
use to be made of one's knowledge of the Bible and the
more complete that knowledge, the greater its utility. A
moment ago I suggested that the Book should be studied
in five ways in the regular course, side by side with other
subjects. The rich literature of the Old and New Testa-
ments will repay careful study. No lover of literature
should miss such songs as the Hebrew sang, or such a
classic as that sent in a letter to Corinth upon the high
theme called by Paul then and Drummond now, " The
Greatest Thing in the World."
Considerable is made in College of Linguistics and
rightly so. In this department more could be profitably
made of the Hebrew and New Testament Greek than at
present. Beyond the philological value, there inheres the
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 6 1
additional value of their being the chosen tongues that
have spoken to the world the oracles of God. Hebrew
should be more than "optional," designed for men
headed for theological training. It can afford discipline of
mind just as well as other languages and in a Christian's
view of linguistics, Hebrew is the important language
because the speech of Moses and Samuel and Isaiah.
Here I might raise the question of a loved and honored
teacher, " Why should not college boys read Christian
authors, Greek and Latin, as well as pagan ones. Not to
the exclusion of the latter, but to a balance between the
two?" Is there any good answer? There would result
indirect Christian influences from the reading of Christian
authors that are not to be disregarded. While assisting
the librarian in Hartford Seminary, carrying old volumes
from one place to another, I was led to look into one book,
because it was so torn and old. The examination was
over in a moment, and the little volume was on the shelf
again, but in that moment I had caught the opening of a
Latin prayer: "O Domine Jesu quamvis indignus."
Through all the week that followed and to this day I seem
to see that page and to hear a voice from the ages past,
praying to my Lord and confessing the same unworthiness
that I feel today. The incident does not argue much, but
I know that it did me more good than all the "O Jupiters"
and addresses to pagan divinities that I have read in
classic Latin. It does seem that our Christian Colleges
could utilize Christian authors as well as pagan ones.
But think of Bible history. From the Christian point
of view, or from any point of view, what phase of the
world's history is more important than the grand move-
62 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
ment of the Jewish people from Sinai to Calvary? What
more suggestive than a familiar knowledge of Jewish
history? Here, under the power of Egypt, a thousand
years later under the power of Babylon, and at the begin-
ing of our era, under the Roman dominion, the Jewish
people under the hand of God were ever touching the
nations of the orient so that the student of Biblical history
has a rich field ever widening for research.
And there are the great subjects of Religion and
Ethics. I have not time to more than mention them now ;
but if our education is to deal with the heart and conduct
of men, as well as the head, the Ethics of the Bible should
be taught. Biblical Ethics apply to all men. And if
the Christian College is to be loyal to truth and consist-
ent to its name, the religion of the Bible should be taught.
It is the true religion for all men.
In conclusion this is my thought, that we must always
and everywhere be religious and spiritual ; spiritual in
living, spiritual in thinking, spiritual in teaching. It is
this spiritual motive that will give large place to the
Bible in the curriculum of the Christian College.
THE REVIVAL OF BIBLE STUDY.
PROF. C. B. SUMNER, CLAREMONT.
Why introduce the Bible as a text-book into the day
school ? Why turn the college into a Sunday school ? Not
many years ago these questions would instantly have
flashed upon our minds, on seeing the subject of Bible
study on the program of an educational convention. The
movement in this direction in educational centers, how-
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 63
ever apparent twenty years since, has been gathering
momentum, until it begins to be felt to the extremeties of
the body politic. Unwonted as has been the quicken-
ing of thought in all scientific lines, without a doubt, this
quickening has been out of all proportion, in the number
of trained minds, and the high order of talent that has
been engaged, in the science of textual criticism and in-
terpretation, in the history of the Jews and nations in con-
tact with them, in the study of the Semitic languages, in
the interpretation of hieroglyphics, cuneiform inscriptions,
and other monuments of the past, in the study of ancient
geography, and the exploration of very early cities and
temples, all centering in the Bible. The results of these
labors have been little short of the marvelous, attracting
and fixing the attention of the reading world. So many
commanding minds busied with such high and kindred
themes, so prolific in revelations, and publishing so abund-
antly, and in so interesting and fascinating a manner,
could not fail to awaken deep interest on the part of
students. This interest has become intelligent enough to
discover a new meaning in Bible study. It is found that
even for the best effect devotionally, the study must be
carried on, not in fragmentary portions, primarily for
spiritual lessons, but as an intellectual exercise, thor-
oughly, linguistically, historically, scientifically, with all
the side-lights, and last, but not least, as the one wonderful
blessed revelation of God.
Under this flood of light from so many directions,
and such severe tests of knowledge, we are pushed to the
study of the Bible by the almost irresistible momentum of
the times. One of the facts disclosed, pressing us to
64 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
provide for this study in our colleges, is the ignorance
of the Bible among educated people. It is a recog-
nized fact, that the average graduate is profundly
ignorant of the Bible, its books, their authors, their
setting in history, the light which modern discovery
is throwing upon it, its geography, its remarkable litera-
ture, its record of human progress, and of a progressive
revelation. They have studied it, if at all, only piece-
meal, for spiritual profit, and have no conception of its
many intellectual lessons, and its inspiration and uplift,
when taken by sections and books, and periods, and by its
whole, so varied and multiform in its authorship, so diver-
gent in the immediate purposes served, covering so vast a
period of time, and yet so single and so mighty in its im-
pression. This anomaly is not easily explained, unless
the responsibility rests on our educational institutions,
that the Book of books, more widely circulated and read,
honored and felt by all classes of society, of more value
as a source of history, literature, political, social and
moral science, and philosophy, than any other book in the
world, as well as the record of God's revelation, and his
salvation, is less intelligently and thoroughly understood
by educated men and women than the prominent literary
works in either the living or the dead languages. Profes-
sor Burroughs, of Amherst, does not hesitate to say, speak-
ing of the graduate who has been thus educated in other
literature but not in the Bible, " Indeed it is often quite
true that his Bible would be worth more to him if he were
not educated." This recalls Luther's declaration, "I
fear that the universities will prove a great gateway to hell
unless the professors therein labor faithfully in the word
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 65
of God." President Wm. R. Harper, than whom no
man knows more of student life, says, " The ignorance of
the Bible among intelligent young men would be amusing
were it not most shameful."
The study of the Bible presses upon us also, because
the average student, ignorant of it as he is, must study it,
if at all, in college. Amazing as it seems, this is an
accepted truth, even with Christian students, by those who
have given the matter their attention. When, think you,
will he study it? How often does one, in the rush and
worry of professional or business life, with all the claims
of church, society, general literature and politics, take up
any intellectual study to which he has before given no
study? It goes for the saying, that to this same average
student, Christian though he be, the Bible is to be, as
Professor Burroughs has put it, " throughout his future a
sealed book intellectually, and very largely a sealed book
devotionally." Can a college afford to send men and
women out into the world with such a future ? The study
of the Bible is further pressed upon us because it is not
only fitting that the Bible be used as a text-book, but it is
unreasonable and anomalous that it is not so used. u The
study of the Bible," writes Ex-President Seeley, " is the
most interesting of all studies, and the most important.
Whatever we may think of its origin, or its contents, no
other book has had such wide relations to the history of
mankind, and, judging from its effects alone, no other
book has such power to stimulate thought, and to dis-
cipline thought." We wisely study Heroditus, the father
of history, and Tacitus and Livy ; have we not as much
reason to study the books of the Bible, the fountain heads
66 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
of history? Where, too, is the philosophy of history so
admirably drawn out as in the Old Testament prophets,
the gospels and epistles of the New Testament? Every
good lawyer studies English common law and old Roman
law; will he pass by God's law as handed down through
Moses, whence the most valuable principles of English
common law and Roman law were derived? Daniel
Webster said, " I have read the Bible through many
times. It is the book of all others for lawyers." Every
scholar becomes familiar with Caesar's Commentaries. Is
there nothing of interest and inspiration in Joshua ? Shall
we read Homer, Virgil, Milton, and not read Job, David,
Isaiah?" "There are no songs," said Milton, "compara-
ble to the songs of Zion, no orations equal to those of the
prophets." " Simply for its literature," wrote Henry M.
Field, " apart from its moral teachings it (the Bible) is
immeasurably superior to any other book antiquity has
left us." "As a classic," wrote another able editor,
" the Bible is wholly unapproachable by another." * * *
"I hold it to be impossible for a writer or speaker to
attain his best, or even any considerable eminence without
it." We insist on our students pondering over the history
of modern and ancient nations in the interest of political
science. Is there nothing to be learned from the Hebrew
theocracy? Dr. Abbott says, "It seems to me an absurd
anomaly that a man should come out of college, sup-
posed to have a liberal education, and know about Greek
and Latin history, whose relations to American life and
institutions is measurably remote, and know nothing about
Hebrew history, whose relation to American life and
thought is very direct." Will any one question whence
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 67
Savonarola, Luther, Calvin, William Prince of Orange,
John Knox, John Robinson, Abraham Lincoln, drew their
wisdom, their inspiration!
Sociological questions command increasing attention.
Are we not forced to the Bible for the data on which to
study this science for the first four thousand years of the
world's progress? But apart from the sources of informa-
tion, where can we find such perfect idyls, such expressive
bits of family life, such revelations of the individual soul,
by which we may study the springs of human society, with
reference to prosperity and adversity, happiness and
misery, as well as the great principles of right and wrong ?
Is not President Carter correct? "The people from whose
moral and religious reservoir all the world has drawn the
tonic of daily social life, is worthy in its origin and history,
in its ritual and its literature, of study in the college
course.''
It is essential that the student should be acquainted
with the teachings of Plato, Aristole, Cicero, Sir Wm.
Hamilton, John Stuart Mill. Is there not philosophy
equally profound in Solomon, Isaiah, Micah, John, Paul,
and most of all in Jesus, the Christ? "We count the
Scriptures of God," declared Newton, "to be the most
sublime philosophy." On listening to the reading of the
fourth chapter of the first Epistle of John, Ex-President
Mark Hopkins exclaimed, " There is more in that chapter
than in all the philosophy of the ancient world."
The grand distinguishing character of the Bible, as
the record of God's revelation, redemption from sin, and
restoration to the favor and fellowship of himself, urging
us to Bible study, is yet untouched. Will an unprejudiced
68 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
man hesitate to give a large place to its claim in this
respect ? Surely in this land where one-third of the voters
are church members, and enough of the others, according
to Joseph Cook, sympathize with them to insure their vote
on great moral questions, the Bible does not count for less
than Confucius to the Chinese, the Zendavesta to the
Parsee, the Vedas to the Hindoo, and the Koran to the
Mohammedan.
These and like reasons have pressed so strongly that
at length we recognize a widespread demand, which is fast
becoming irresistible, to make the Bible a text-book with
its allotment of time and hard work in our colleges. What
means this body of students, numbering into the thousands
drawn from nearly every college in our land, with many
more from the oldest institutions in other lands, voluntarily
associated for Bible study? The character, as well as the
number of these students gives strength to the movement.
Through its influence, the request has come from the
students themselves that thorough study of the Bible be
provided for in the curriculum. The Amherst Literary
Magazine says, editorily, " We believe we voice the senti-
ment of the student body in directing attention to this
need. We claim that every well educated man should be
acquainted with the facts and proofs of Christianity."
Truly the students and our leading educators are at one.
Hear President Bartlett, "It is a book too centrally and
vitally related to history, literature and civilization to be
omitted from a course of liberal education." And Presi-
dent Knox, " Surely in this day, when as never before,
the public mind is concerned with the history and contents
of the Bible, no one can be considered educated who has
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 69
not a somewhat full knowledge of the subjects directly
and indirectly suggested by the sacred volume.'* Some
of our foremost Eastern colleges have yielded to the
demand and provided for this study in their curriculum,
and in their libraries. Pomona College has felt the
demand and has begun systematic work in the line of Bible
study with all its pupils and is already placing valuable
books of reference in this department upon its library
shelves. Far more work must be done in the near future,
if we make Pomona College a worthy tribute to Christian
civilization upon the Pacific Coast.
THE NECESSITY OF PROMOTING CHRIS-
TIAN EDUCATION BY PRIVATE BE-
NEVOLENCE NOT A DISADVANTAGE.
REV. A. E. TRACY, ONTARIO.
It is conceded by all that the State cannot give us a
Christian education. Why it cannot, we need not now
consider. We are met with the fact. If then we are to
have Christian education, it must be by means of schools
established and sustained by private benevolence. The
subject, as worded on our program, indicates that there
are disadvantages, or at least seeming disadvantages, in
this fact. I am to attempt to show that this seeming is not
real. I have time to name and reply to only four of these
apparent disadvantages.
70 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
i st. " There are so many and so loud demands ior
the money of Christian people that it is a pity to have so
much of it turned into these educational channels. If the
millions of dollars expended in Christian education could
be put into evangelistic and missionary work, the Kingdom
of God could be hastened more rapidly." It would at
first seem a real gain if the State would give us what now
is had by the generosity of individuals, thus releasing great
sums of money for gospel work. But there is a com-
pensation. Gifts to our colleges, especially small gifts,
mean sympathy, prayer, interest in their success. An
atmosphere of Christian devotion, sacrifice and service, is
created in which the noblest, truest manhood is likely to
develop. The difference in the influence of a school
cared for by a legislature, or even a single great donor,
and one held in loving remembrance by a multitude of
true, praying ones can scarcely be less than that on a child
cared for by a hired nurse, and one to whom a devoted,
wise mother gives the fullness of her love, wisdom and
prayers. Note the atmosphere of Amherst, Williams,
Beloit and Grinnell, and superlatively Oberlin. It can
largely be accounted for by the lives built into these
colleges, lives of donors, as well as teachers.
2nd. " As a rule, colleges dependent on private
benevolence, lack complete equipment, cannot have the
fine buildings, apparatus, and all things needful to the
best work and broadest culture.'* We are in danger of
setting too high an estimate on externals as essential to a
full education. The tendency is to try to draw students
by the appliances helpful in education, rather than by the
personality and educating power of the teachers. I think
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 71
an unbiased investigation would show that Christian
Colleges have had a larger proportion of teachers who
were fitted to mold characters, who counted it a large part
of their work to do this, than State Institutions. These
Colleges have been really better equipped for work than
some great institutions with large sums of money to ex-
pend for apparatus. There is a reason for this superiority
in the personnel of the faculty in a Christian college. They
have accepted positions in them because of the opportu-
nity for doing an important work ; the pay, the chance for
original work, has not attracted them, but the possibilities
of usefulness. Such characters mold others to a like
spirit of devotion to high ends.
3rd. " To depend on charity fosters a pauper spirit.
The student is continually reminded that he is receiving
something for which he does not pay ; his education is
made possible by the gift of those upon whom he has no
claim/'
A sufficient reply to this objection is an appeal to
facts. Where can you find men of more manly, independ-
ent spirit, than among the graduates of Christian Colleges ?
The spirit of self-help and reliance on their own powers is
marked. Because they have received something so prec-
ious that many have gladly sacrificed to give it them, they
feel the obligation to make their education of greatest use
to the world. Personal honor is appealed to more strongly
than where the State has educated.
4th. " A college dependent on private benevolence
must keep its president or financial agent in the field, and
so the college is viewed in the light of a beggar."
This may be a disadvantage to the man, but not to
72 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
the public. We must get above the thought that it is a
necessity to be regretted that the needs of the world must
be kept continually before the people. A good college
agent or president is an educational force. He gives the
people a better understanding of the possibilities open to
the church through her educated youth. I do not believe
there is a church in Southern California where the Presi-
dent of our College has spoken, that has not been bene-
fitted by it. The minds of the people are drawn toward
the college, and they begin to talk of the possibility of
sending their sons and daughters. Thus the influence and
good of the college endures. As well count it a disadvan-
tage that our Missionary Societies keep representatives
from the field among the churches to inform and inspire
them as to the work doing, and to be done. The more
closely the homes, the churches and the college are
.linked together the better. The college must be taken
into our closets, remembered at our family altars, in the
public worship. The churches are to be its feeders, both
with students and money; in return it will lift the standard
of true manhood before the youth in our congregations,
and become an inspiration to the intellectual and spiritual
life of all our communities.
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 73
PECULIAR CONDITIONS IN SOUTHERN
CALIFORNIA WHICH MAKE SPECIAL
DEMANDS UPON POMONA COLLEGE.
REV. T. C. HUNT, RIVERSIDE.
The time was when, if a man desired to come to
California, the thing to do was to get a good team of oxen
or mules, a strong wagon, load it with provisions and join
a caravan, creeping over plains and mountain fastnesses
till the welcome breakers of the proud Pacific should
greet his weary eyes.
You and I did not come in that way ; and considering
the time when we did come, and our purpose in coming,
we should not have been counted wise if we had. If I
know the^ difference between success and failure in indivi-
dual life, or in that of any corporate body, it depends on
hardly more than two principles ; adaptation and applica-
tion. Adaptation comes first ; for, figuratively speaking,
men often show a deal of energy in butting their heads
against a wall, but their effort is never attended with any
worthy success. We are striving to build a college, what
are the peculiar conditions to which we must adapt our-
selves, if we would have our effort issue in worthy success ?
i st. We live in a region where population is to be
grouped in dense settlements ; holdings for those engaged
in agriculture are to be small ; all the people are to enjoy
most of the privileges usually enjoyed only by those in
cities or large towns in the East. Our system of water
supply and kinds of produce we raise, render this state-
ment self-evident.
74 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
2d. We live in an age when no father can render a
just account for his charge, who does not provide for each
of his children, at least so much education as may be
gotten in a good high school. Great misfortune or
extreme sickness alone can excuse a father for allowing a
child to enter any calling of life without so much of
opportunity ; he cannot render his account as a good
citizen of this Republic, nor can he command the respect
of his children, in this day and age of the world, if he
does not provide them with so much of opportunity. If
children are reared with this thought held constantly before
them, that till they have so much of study they can hardly
tell what they are good for ; if this expectation on the part
of the parent is impressed from early life ; it will be
hardly more difficult to keep the great body of children at
school so long, than to keep them there till they have
learned the rule of " Three."
It follows then that every settlement in Southern Cali-
fornia must have its good high school ; it follows then that
every good and worthy citizen will support that school and
do all he can to make it what it should be. What educa-
tion we count necessary for all, we must do all we can to
place within the easy reach of all.
To my mind there are four distinct reasons why our
college must, in no sense, conflict with, or even compete
with the high school system in this part of the country.
i st. If we take our children from these high schools
and place them where we imagine they will do better and
are safer, we do about all it is in our power to do to
weaken the schools and discourage those who have not too
much encouragement at home. Let a class graduating
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 75
from the grammar school find many of its members going
off, and those who cannot go will be sorely tempted to
drop out. Let the class try to go on bodily, and parents
and pupils will make great sacrifices to keep the class
together, and make it the best the school has ever sent out.
Many, having completed the high school course, will then
have found the educational instinct and ambition, and
cannot be prevented from going farther. Every man who
has ever taught will feel that the weight of this argument
in favor of supporting the high school cannot be
exaggerated.
2d. If we take our children from these schools we
lose all the influence we might have to mould the schools.
There is no more forceful argument with a teacher or with
a school board than "my child is here, and nothing but
the most refined morals and most profound respect for
religion can be tolerated." But take your child out, and
your influence is largely gone, and rightly so. This loss
the ministers and laymen of our churches cannot afford,
unless some great and manifest advantage can be found,
to more than counterbalance. Here is most certainly an
obligation to Christian civilization, which it will require
the largest personal advantage to overbalance.
3rd. If a college is to fill the place it ought to fill,
the teachers of our public schools must be its friends.
They have it in their power to do us immense good or
harm. I had almost said that they have our success or
defeat in their hands, and in a sense, even this is true.
We cannot expect them to be our friends if our influence
is to weaken and deplete their schools. It is not to be
supposed that any one will work in a school that he does
76 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
not believe in ; not anyone who regards his life of worth.
Such an one will not favor an institution whose influence is
to harm a system of schools, trying to reach the great
body of the children of our Commonwealth with some
measure of higher education.
4th. If the High School can do this work, we will not
say as well, but with a fair degree of efficiency, and reach
a far larger number than could be reached by "academies,
or fitting schools, our plain duty is to the High School ; if
for no other reason to save benevolent money, for distinc-
tive Christian work which the State can never do. We,
who are a part of the State, supporting it and deeply in-
terested in it, should not only allow the State to do all it
can, but should encourge the State in every way to do
this.
You have seen the words of Prof. Northrop to this
effect. He was asked how we are to keep up the supply
of an efficient and educated ministry, and in substance he
replied : We must not run in and do the work that the
State can do equally well, but reserve our means and
energies for that work which is our peculiar charge. I
firmly believe that it is high time that this word was passed
along through the length and breadth of our land. Be-
cause academies were once the thing when communities
were poorer, and the population more scattered, it does
not follow that they are now the thing. But I must pause,
I am speaking particularly of Southern California. A few
objections to the position I have taken are worthy of note.
i st. " The moral tone of these schools is likely to be
so low that we cannot afford to risk our children." Suppose
the moral tone is not the best, the high school has come to
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 77
stay ; shall we give it over to those who care little for morals,
and such as are obliged to patronize them, if any higher
school ? A little study would show that this would be a
very short sighted policy, and finally put the Protestant
church about where the Roman church now stands, in
relation to High schools, at least. I need not pause to
show how short sighted this policy would be, endangering
the morals of the community at large, and finally reacting
on us. We are in the world, it is wise to stay with it
with all our forces, doing what we may to mould it. But
is the danger so great after all? Our children still under
our roofs and in the shadows of our churches? Who has
not met the body of our public school teachers, and felt
that a nobler body of men and women could not be found
in any calling or profession. Bad ones there are, no doubt
bad, but who has never heard of a bad minister, who, in
someway held his ground. How careful these teachers
commonly are how little chance for evil communication,
if parents are equally careful. The greatest danger comes
before the children reach the High school rather than after.
Most of us are hardly willing to allow our children away
from home till they are old enough to be through the
High school. We deserve so much of their lives, and
when they go away to school, the rule is that the home
life is at an end.
2nd. The standard of scholarship is too low, we can
not build the college we would, and have it begin where
the High school ends. That may be. I would have a
fitting school at the college as a supplement to these High
schools, at least for the present. But I would so arrange
the course of study that it would fit on to the best High
78 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
schools. Some may say, such would not be the best
college course ; but we are not working for that, as a first
requisite. Solon, after ten years of search for laws for the
Commonwealth he loved, is said to have returned to present
them for adoption. When asked in surprise, if these
were the best laws he could produce, he replied: " No T
but these are the best laws the people can receive/' So I
take it that we are not building the best college that can
be built, but that one which at this stage, will be of great-
est service to the civilization which it is supposed to serve.
Thus, and thus only, can we prepare for the college we
would build, if the people are not now prepared for it. I
would make the curriculum of both the preparatory
department and of the college, with an eye to the best
High schools of our part of the State.
Perhaps you know that the building of a Christian
college in Southern California is no less a grave under-
taking than it has been in the past. Two universities we
have, with practically unlimited resources, men from each
of them, several times a year looking over our High
schools. They are able to present inducements to students
to go with them, and they are not slow to do it. They are
men too, of practical standing and ability ; they understand
perfectly the importance of making the step easy from the
High school to the University. They are anxious to raise
the standard, but careful not to sever the connection. The
teachers of our public schools are their friends, and under-
stand the advantages they present. Who of our pastors in
Southern California has not seen students go to those
Universities this last year who, they felt, would have been
better off at Pomona College. We may educate the
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 79
children of a few of our ministers and the most pious of
our deacons, we may educate them away from the world,
so that when they begin life they will find it impossible to
make the connection, and benefit themselves or the world,
but if we compete with these other schools and make
toward the mark we have set for ourselves, just now we
must understand it, and act up to our knowledge. We
must have the wisdom of the serpent, with the harmless-
ness of the dove. Without adaptation there is but one
end, with it there is but one: They are the antipodes of
each other: Failure! Success!
EDUCATION PRACTICAL AND CHRISTIAN.
REV. THOMAS HENDRY, PARK CHURCH, Los ANGELES.
"What we are fixes the limit of what we do."
Grant this and how important is education ! To do some-
thing in this world of needs and possibilities is the aim of
every true man or woman ; yet what we do is limited by
what we are, and this again by heredity and education.
The plea that is made for education is that it extends
the limit of possibility. As the fishing limit from our
shores is three miles, and beyond that, as a nation, we
have no jurisdiction and all may catch in deep waters, so
there is a natural limit to our powers as strong as this
national law ; but education comes to the youth as the
craft which shall carry him or her beyond the three-mile
limit and open the treasures of a great deep.
"No life is unmusical," it is said. "It is supplied
80 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
with strings and reeds, but there is no hand to touch the
vibrating strings, there is no breath to move upon the
reeds."
How many lives unmusical, unresponsive, have been
stirred from the lethargy, which is the common heritage of
all by the voice of the "Alma Mater!" How we look
back on the halls where we first broke the silence of our
own lives and awakened to the fact that there were strings
in our nature, capable of wonderful harmony, which had
never been touched as yet that there were reeds in the
God-given organ that as yet had never known of this
breath from above! You remember the story of Mozart's
first experience with the organ, in the monastery of a little
town on the Danube, at six years of age ; how he left his
home in Salzburg and with his father started on a course
of travel. All day long they had been sailing down the
majestic river, past crumbling ruins, frowning castles,
cloisters hidden away among the crags, towering cliffs,
quiet villages beyond the trees. The little company of
monks were at supper in the refectory of the cloister, the
father and Wolfgang went into the little chapel to see the
organ. The boy gazed with awe upon the great instru-
ment looming up in the shadows of the empty church, his
face lit up with satisfaction ; with wondering reverence he
moved about it. "Father, explain to me the pedals at
the organ's feet," said the lad, and the father did so.
Then pushing aside the stool he stood upon the pedals and
awoke the solemn gloom behind him. He heard nothing,
he saw nothing, his face lighted up with impassioned joy.
Louder and fuller rose the harmonies streaming forth till
at last they seemed to reach the sunny shore on which they
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 8 1
broke, then a riple of faintest melody lingered in the air
and all was still. What the organ was to young Mozart
the College and University has been to many a youth.
But alas! the idol is found to be of clay, " the once fine
gold has become dim." Education will not save. An
intellectual people may be an unrighteous people. Greece
was first in arts and letters. College and University may
but fit a man to be a greater villain, to be a more eloquent
seducer, may increase his power to destroy. We need
more than education ; we need Christian education ; we
need such a college as Pomona College that the youth of
our churches may be under wholesome Christian influence
while they are laying the foundations for a business train-
ing ; we need a full stream of youthful life, vigorous in
Christian thought and action, believing in God, strong in
their loyalty to Jesus Christ and the Bible, to flow out
into the Godless life of California. We need young men
in our colleges who can impress their fellows with the idea
that active Christianity, ardent love for Christ and the
souls of men, is not incompatible with high scholarship; we
must save our youth from the leprous touch of infidelity
and skepticism by contact with those glowing with a Chris-
tian experience, their own, yet able to compete with those
whom they would influence. Such men must come from
our Christian Colleges.
The Young Men's Christian Association recognizes
this when they have in their gymnasium class a few
earnest, Godly, thorough going young men, who jump
high, and box well, to give the young men who have an idea
that Christianity is rather effeminate and connected with
dim cathedral light a new idea, viz : that Christianity is now
82 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
thing of every day life, that he must be alert, or this Chris-
tian young man, who will not swear and prays in meetings,
will out-jump him ; that this man who will not visit the
billiard halls or dance houses because of his religious con-
victions will, unless he is on " his taps," give him a sound
trouncing with the boxing gloves. He learns to respect
those who can beat him at his games, and with respect for
the man goes unconsciously a respect for the Christianity
which has made the man.
But there is one other rock on which we may founder.
There is danger that our education shall withdraw us from
" touch" with our fellow-men. Nicodemus said of
Christ, "Thou art a teacher come from God." He
taught men, especially twelve men; and how thoroughly
they were equipped for their life work ! Yet he was no
"recluse," a man among men was he. "John came,
neither eating nor drinking," " but Jesus was one who sat
at meat with them," "a friend of the publicans and
sinners."
The education which leaves us high and dry on the
bank is a failure ; we must be in the stream with men, we
need our " horse sense " after we have gotten through the
College and University, and the education which takes this
from any is a "mis-nomer."
Our prayer is that this educational institution in whose
interests we are met today may be an educational institu-
tion of high order, fitting young men and women for
university life, business life, mechanical life, yet withal a
Christian institution in the truest sense and a practical
school.
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 83
THE CURSE OF AN EDUCATION WHICH
IS NOT PRACTICAL.
REV. J. H. COLLINS, THIRD CHURCH, Los ANGELES.
I would be the last one to attempt to discourage a
boy or girl from acquiring an education. Indeed I would
be sorry if any one word or act of mine here today, or else-
where at any time, should leave the impression that I would
place a low value upon education. I regard an education
as capital on hand or stock in trade, and if not properly
used becomes a curse.
An education that tends to take a man away from the
world and the work of helping humanity, is certainly a
curse, and should be discouraged. There is no doubt in
my mind that it would have been a blessing to the world
had all the principals in both sides in the now famous
Andover controversy been left uneducated. I have
often thought what a pity that their opportunities for
acquiring an education had not been given to persons
of more practical common sense ; and I say this, though
one of the foremost men in the affair has proven a
very dear friend to me. But when an education comes to
the nicety of neglecting the world and its need of work to
indulge in hair splitting controversies of non-essentials, it
may safely be labeled a curse.
Next I think an education which is all one-sided,
however thorough, is a curse. I take it for granted that
the great use of an education is to enable us to teach. We
may not do so in the pulpit or schoolroom, for there are
various other channels through which we may teach.
84 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
Now suppose that we become very familiar with the thing
we wish to teach, and in doing so we have alienated our-
selves from the people whom we wish to teach, we do not
know their ways, and we are not familiar with the mould
of their minds, we can teach them but little, if any,
although we may know a great deal which we would like
to teach.
That men and women have been rendered useless,
yea, worse than useless, by the overdosing and cramming
of purely book-knowledge is a fact, and a lamentable fact,
to which there is altogether too much evidence all about
us. We may be in touch with great men through study
of their works, but the current of knowledge gained
thereby cannot be transmitted to humanity, unless we are
also in touch with humanity, and the best education possi-
ble will not make a man useful if he is not thus in touch.
I am glad that I know enough of the workings of
Pomona College to be able to assure you that it does not
propose to educate young men and women after such a
fashion. From personal acquaintance and contact with its
teachers I am sure they are helping boys and girls to
acquire a practical education. It has been my privilege to
send to the College a young man and a youn?r woman,
and no one but teachers fully in touch with poor, needy
humanity, could do for a boy or girl what the teachers of
Pomona College have done for them, and had I the money
to give, I would send a score or more of my young people
there to be educated after a fashion, which would not
prove a curse, but a blessing to the world and its work.
CONGREGATIONAL, CHURCHES. 85
OUR STEWARDSHIP OF THE MIND.
REV. O. D. CRAWFORD, MONROVIA.
A certain man in Connecticut dreamed a dream in
which he passed through a trial for murder. Many wit-
nesses were examined, and eloquent pleas, hours long,
were delivered. At the end of three weeks, he was con-
victed and sentenced. While on the scaffold, protesting
his innocence to the last, the trap was sprung. The rope
broke, and he ran away. He was pursued by the people
and the police, but eluded them until nightfall. Then he
ventured to his home ; found a gang of ruffians in posses-
sion ; killed one of them and drove the rest away. Then
he awoke and found that he had passed through these
protracted sufferings, and the three weeks' trial while
sleeping three minutes.
This dream affords us a glance at the superiority of
the mind to time, space and matter. By so much is the
mind entitled to leadership in all activities, and precedence
among all objects of culture. The intellectual faculty
pioneers our movements. The moral judgments keep
even wing with the flight of thought.
The immediate objects in view in the process of sym-
metrical training are the increase of the power of clear
thinking ; the accumulation of stores of knowledge ; and
the utmost facility in the use of our powers and posses-
sions. The ultimate aim is either self-glorification, or the
pleasure of the King.
Stewardship of the mind recognizes the ownership
and prerogatives of the Creator. Emerson says that no-
86 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
one but Jesus Christ has ever appreciated the value of a
man. That value consists in moral and intellectual
worthiness. Mind-work on the field of matter has at last
secured, in the present century, a recognized place among
the industrial and producing forces. It enhances the value
of manual toil, and creates a market for its products in the
refinements of civilized society. Its work on the field of
ideas ranges the depths and heights of science, art and
poetry ; of music and sentiment, in which man finds the
choicest experiences of life, the glory of his being. The
voices of nature and Scripture credit these powers to the
Supreme Intelligence. To give up the false claim to the
ownership of one's mind, is to yield one's self to the
ruling purpose of a sustained act of perfect loyalty to
God, which says "whose I am and whom I serve."
Stewardship disclaims the right of even a renter. One
who rents a piece of land or a house, can use it for him-
self, but a steward is managing the business for another.
A renter keeps to himself a share of his earnings, but the
steward turns over all gains to his employer. The ideal
education trains every faculty as the property of God and
adds all the increase to the original stock.
The faithful steward is governed by the wishes of his
employer. He asks for instructions and receives them
cheerfully ; he enters upon no plans of his own without
approval ; he executes orders exactly ; he transmits help to
others who are dependent upon his master. Here stands
Pomona College in the midst of the churches, asking for
instructions. Her title to our support lies in her spirit
and practice of inciting our youth to enquire after God's
wishes, and to will His will ; in her efforts to make the
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 87
mind the master of the body and of nature, according to
the law of the Kingdom.
Stewardship lays emphasis on responsibility. The
superior man freely moves toward the post of Judgment
Day with every mental sail filled with the steady gale of
love. The average man needs to feel the pull of duty's
cord whose other end is the windlass of the Judgment
ordeal. If we can get the mind of the youth saturated
with the conviction that they are to give account to God
for their use of themselves, we shall have reason to expect
a smaller generation of ne'er-do-wells and bummers ;
that fewer business men will be boomers and stock
gamblers, and that more professional men will be incarna-
tions of conscience.
Therefore stewardship also signifies carefulness.
Painstaking, so annoying to the flesh, and fatal to the love
of ease, is the track of progress. The careful steward
looks to each interest and overlooks none. In State
Schools the moral law may be impressed by prudential
motives ; but its claims are never adequately presented,
and never met, except where its roots are shown to be
imbedded in the will of God, and watered from the foun-
tain of his open word, and fruited in the life and words of
the ineffable Christ.
The faithful steward also studies for the honor of his
master. Not content with carrying himself as a servitor,
he sounds the praises of fcis Lord. He has escaped the
snares of the flesh and ambition with a joyous heart and a
clear mind. A ready witness in an Irish court was
" unwilling" on the cross-examination. His excuse was
that the counsellor's questions put him in a doldrum. The
!!-<
00 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
Judge repeated the word "a doldrum. What is that?"
" I can tell your lordship,'' said the witty counsellor, " a
doldrum is a confusion of the head arising from a cor-
ruption of the heart." The doldrum disappears as fast as
men give up all their faculties, as trusts, and to the service
of God, saying with the poet Bailey: " We live in deeds,
not years ; in thoughts, not breaths ; in feelings, not in
figures on a dial. We should count time by heart
throbs." Thus can we love God with all the mind.
COLLEGE EXTENSION.
PROF. FREDERICK WILLIAM PHELPS, EAGLE ROCK.
Whether it be viewed from the standpoint of the
College and University, or from that of the general public,
the modern improvement, commonly known as University
or College extension, is equally to be admired. The only
wonder is that it did not long ago become a power. It is
impossible at this time to sketch historically the growth of
the extension movement. I can only attempt to describe
its leading features and to show its adaptability to our
College and people, here in Southern California and noiu
in this year of grace 1892.
The Church believes in education, mental training,
stimulation to lofty thinking, cultivation of a passion for
knowing the truth about things as an essential weapon in
the armament of aggressive Christianity ; and the tokens
of this faith are found in our Christian Colleges and
Academies. We urge the higher education not only upon
those preparing for the ministry but upon all alike. In the
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 89
case of the vast majority, circumstances render College
residence a thing impracticable. What is to be done?
Shall the College be content with reaching the few ? Or
is it impossible in some way to utilize the resources and
equipment of the College for the immediate benefit of a
much larger constituency? Experience answers. If the
mountain cannot come to Mahomet, it is both advisable
and feasible for Mahomet to go to the mountain.
It is unlikely that any will deny the existence of a
widespread desire for intellectual food, for mental acquisi-
tion and progress. The Chautauqua movement is evidence
enough of this if evidence be called for. Nor can we
doubt that many whose cravings for recreative occupation
are now satisfied by the lightest of frivolities and the most
unsubstantial of literary pabulum, may, by the right kind
of effort, be stimulated to a higher intellectual life. These
conditions are found widespread. Do they not exist
among us today? The people then need leaders those
who shall tell them how to attain what they seek. Where
shall they more fittingly look for such leaders than among
the faculties of our Colleges and Universities ?
The leading feature of the extension movement is the
Extension Lecture Course. In any community where
there is a sufficient number of persons desiring to take up
the study of any subject, a suitable organization is formed
to perfect and carry out the necessary arrangements. A
capable instructor is secured. Tickets are sold at the
lowest possible rate, for it is the aim to bring the oppor-
tunities of the course within the reach of the largest num-
ber. The lectures will occur at such intervals and be of
such number as may suit each particular case. Among
90 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
the ticket holders will be some who are content with
simply listening to the lecturers, doing little or no supple-
mentary studying. Others will wish to do somewhat
thorough work upon the subject taken up. For the
especial help of this latter class, a printed syllabus of the
course is prepared and put into the hands of each person.
This syllabus, besides giving an outline of the lectures,
contains a list of books desirable for reference, and minute
directions for study. Either before or after each lecture,
the instructor meets those who wish to be considered as
students, for an hour of recitation and discussion upon the
lecture of the preceding week. At each such meeting,
special work is assigned to individuals, to be written out
and submitted to the instructor for criticism. Finally,
after the completion of the course, an examination is
offered to all who choose to take it, and certificates are
given to those who reach a designated standard.
The general plan thus is very simple. Details will
be modified to suit the circumstances of the lecturer or
community. Extension Libraries of reference books may
be provided and rendered accessible to students under
proper regulations, with little individual expense. The
syllabus, the private class, the special work submitted to
lecturer for criticism, and the examination at the close of
the course, are essential features of the extension lecture
system. These are adapted to secure definite and perma-
nent results, such as the mere listening to lectures cannot
produce.
The beneficial effects of all this upon any community
are seen at once. The Chautauqua Circles are doing
much in the same line. But University Extension reaches
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 9!
|
out to a far larger number and brings with it the immense
stimulus of personal contact with one who should be him-
self full of zeal and enthusiasm for that which he repre-
sents. From the standpoint of the College the advantage
is equal. The personal mingling of the individual mem-
bers of the faculty with the larger constituency of the insti-
tution, secures among the public a better and more general
acquaintance with the institution; and if they be men
worthy of respect and confidence, their influence will be
very great. The institution will gain also in the number
of those who come within its walls, through the awakening
of dormant faculties which will call for larger oppor-
tunities. The instructor himself will be stimulated by the
necessity of approving himself to the popular audience,
and will in almost every case gain in clearness of thought,
in ability to present his theme and to rouse absorbing
interest in it. There is a danger to be guarded against
the temptation to make this popular work superficial and
" catchy " rather than to rely on the intrinsic merits of the
subject thoroughly treated, yet this danger being foreseen
may be avoided.
A few practical suggestions : The value to a College
of having its instructors appear before the public upon the
lecture platform, take part in associations and conventions,
has been pretty generally recognized. Such engagements
however, as a rule, have been in addition to the regular
and full work of the class-room, and have been merely
private arrangements on the part of the instructors. Let
this be changed. Let the Extension Department become
an integral part of the college. Let the fees for the
various courses conducted be paid into the college treas-
92 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
ury. Let the class-room work required of the instructor
be so diminished in amount, that he will be able, without
additional expenditure of effort, to carry the Extension
work. This change will make necessary an increase of
college faculty, and in connection with this increase will
naturally follow the advantage of increased specialization
of work by the individual members of the faculty. The
additional fees received will furnish at least a large part of
the funds for carrying out the plan. Should they fail to
suffice, I imagine that there are few departments* oif college
work for which an adequate endowment will be more
readily obtained.
No college can inaugurate such an undertaking with-
out the very best of thoughtful and systematic effort. The
co-operation of leading men in different localities must be
secured. Especially must the pastors be brought to
realize the value to their own work of the proposed plans.
The beginnings will probably be small. There will un-
doubtedly be many disappointments and discouragements.
But if energy and wisdom be used, what reasons are there
why great results may not be reached? And perhaps
sooner and more easily than anticipated. And why should
not the College Extension Department become a bureau
of information and assistance for all the college's con-
stituency, aiding in arrangements for lectures other than
those of regular Extension Courses, and for various enter-
tainments of a character associated with the College work ;
advising Chautauqua Circles, Young People's Societies,
and Literary Clubs in matters where such advice may be
a help, and rinding in the course of time many unforeseen
methods of useful activity? Why may not the College
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 93
often times prove a valuable helper to academies and
schools with which it is intimately connected by allowing
them the temporary service of its instructors in branches
which especially demand to be taught by specialists ?
Why may not the College be the center of various clubs
of cultured men and women, students in Biblical Litera-
ture, Science, Sociology and other lines of thought?
Why, in a word, may not the College go out far more
than it has done heretofore, among the people of the com-
munity, to stimulate them and help them amid the routine
of daily tasks and duties, into a higher intellectual and
spiritual life ? Is not this possible ?
THE IMPORTANCE OF A RELIGIOUS AT-
MOSPHERE IN OUR INSTITU-
TIONS OF LEARNING.
REV. GEO. A. RAWSON, VERNONDALE.
In order to fulfill their true mission, our Educational
Institutions should seek to reach, develop and direct the
whole circle of powers found in those who come under
their influence and training.
The end aimed at should be a well-rounded manhood.
They have to deal, very largely, with the raw material of
human character. They take our young people at the
formative, and so the most critical, period in their develop-
ment ; the period when they are the most open and the
most sensitive to surrounding influences ; and when they
are eagerly and anxiously looking to their teachers and
94 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION
leaders to give them the key note, and to furnish them the
pattern after which they shall fashion their own thought,
and purpose and life.
If the only object of an education was to fit a man or
woman for business proficiency, or for material advantage
and success, then the moral and religious considerations
might be left for others to look after, and our Institutions
be given up wholly to the intellectual and secular training
of our young people. This neglect, however, would be
fatal to the highest good, and the noblest interests of those
who are seeking to equip themselves for life's work.
In a world where the forces of evil are so manifold
and so great, it is essential to the safety and true success
of those who are preparing themselves to meet these
powers, and to accomplish the highest service, that they
be securely anchored by an intelligent faith in Almighty
God, and carry within them a pervading sense of their
responsibility to Him.
An Institution is defective in its most vital point,
and neglectful of its highest duty to God, to its students,
and to society in general, when it ignores the moral and
spiritual training of those who are to go out from its walls
to become leaders of men in the various professions and
walks of life. A collegiate course of training, un-
doubtedly, adds to a man's powers ; he becomes more
efficient as a worker for good, or as a worker for evil.
The religious atmosphere of an Institution has more
influence upon the development of character, than we, at
first thought, may suppose. There are churches and com-
munities where the atmosphere is so charged with spiritual
influences as to be consciously and quickly felt by those
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 95
who come within their circle. The same is true of
certain* Institutions of learning may this become pre-
eminently true of our Pomona College. In these Institu-
tions it seems almost impossible for a young man or woman
to remain very long without becoming deeply impressed,
and being drawn into the current of its religious life.
We know how powerfully the intangible thing called
air, or atmosphere affects us ; how it may carry upon its
invisible wings, depression, weakness, disease and death ;
or it may become a minister of life, imparting health,
vigor and tonic to all our vital forces. There is such a
thing as an intangible religious, or spiritual atmosphere
an atmosphere that penetrates the innermost life of the
man, bringing wonderful quickening, health, vigor, to the
moral and spiritual forces within. It is the breath of God ;
it comes to us from the pure mountain tops, where rests
the sunlight of heaven. How is it to be brought down
into this lower sphere, brought down and made to pervade
the halls of our Institutions, where our young people are
congregated, and where they are awakening to a con-
sciousness of life, and the vital powers within them are
being stirred into unwonted activity. Not by the mere
perfunctory teaching of religious truth, nor the mere
mechanical grinding out of religious exercises. The
atmosphere of such cold, religious formalism, is charged
with double skepticism and spiritual death.
These young people are full of life ; a religion to have
influence with them must have life in it. That life is
born of a vital faith in God, of a reverent regard for His
word, and of a pervading love for the souls of the young,
on the part of those who fill the chairs, and are the
96 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
appointed leaders in these Institutions. Men thus
embraced with the love of God and the spirit of Christ,
will create an atmosphere around them, saturated with
moral and religious life.
Let these Colleges and Schools be enthroned in the
prayers of the churches, and in the prayers of the homes
from which the young are gathered, and we shall see a
stalwart, manly procession of young men coming forth
from them to do a grand work for God and humanity.
THE WORKMAN HIS OWN BEST TOOL.
REV. HENRY W. JONES, PASADENA.
I am to show up an error which it is the mission of
the Christian College to correct, an error which has
invaded our American civilization, must we not confess
temporarily mastered it? It is respecting the true place
and power of money.
A turning away from other modes of securing ones
ends to the use of money in attaining them.
The end in view is power, that ability to do anything
and everything which money is supposed to possess. I
will not deny that it has a large degree of the efficiency
that is attributed to it. In the present state of society the
general estimate is at least somewhere near the truth.
But let us know what this error is doing for us in certain
directions.
Trace its effects in trades, manufacture and even
professions. It says whatever adaptabilities I may have
for this business I will disregard, except as they indicate
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 97
somewhat how I can get rich the fastest. The particular
calling I follow will be for the sake of the money I can
make in it. With that I am to make my impression on
the world. Thus one's calling becomes incidental, transi-
tional, to be abandoned for anything else that pays better.
Will he now be likely to chose it as carefully or learn it as
thoroughly? Take the medical profession. Certainly
here the mischief of the commercial spirit is evident.
They, to whom we so intrust our lives as to physicians,
ought to be as thoroughly prepared for the great responsi-
bility as study and entire devotion to their calling can
make them. But there are many who enter it merely to
make money, to leave it for something else, if it should
disappoint this expectation. What incentive is there to
thoroughness in preparation for a career so uncertain?
" For men who take the first rank, or even the second, in
the professions," as another truly says, "there may and
ought to be large pecuniary rewards. But these emolu-
ments are never legitimately more than incidents of the
calling. If money is set up as the highest ideal and aim,
the chances are that the individual will become a mere
grubber, or one of hopeless professional mediocrity."
This commercial spirit appears in our politics. It is
not an accident that the Uuited States Senate is gradually
becoming a body of millionaires. Is it true that to secure
a fortune is the way to obtain the highest offices in state
and nation? Is it true on the other hand that to secure
office is the shortest way to a- fortune? What does the
fact prophesy for the future of our Republic that year by
year a larger number of votes are purchasable, and that
business men prefer to contribute money for political pur-
98 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
poses rather than to give personal attention to political
duties even so much as to vote? A leading business man
of New York confessed for himself and his class, "We
have thought this thing over, and we find that it pays
better to neglect our city affairs than to attend to them ;
that we can make more money in the time required for the
full discharge of our political duties than the politicians
can steal from us on account of our not discharging them."
It is needless to ask what sort of government will result
from that style of citizenship.
See what this spirit is doing in the sphere of jour-
nalism. The function of the newspaper is to give the
news, reports of actual occurrences from day to day, with
due regard to their intrinsic importance, to the public
morality and to personal rights. Whether the actual
newspaper fulfills this ideal I need not ask. If not, com-
plaint is silenced, and that satisfactorily to most minds,
when it is said for the publisher that he runs his press to
make money. What else does he do it for? In the
editorial columns, the editor is supposed to be giving his
own opinions, and to be contending for his own principles.
Is he doing this today ? Hear what he is reported to have
said in a speech at a press dinner in New York lately :
"I am paid $150 per week for keeping honest opinions
out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you
are paid similar salaries for doing similar things. If I
should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of
my paper, like Othello, my occupation would be gone.
The business of a leading journalist is to distort the truth,
to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his
country and his race for daily bread, or for what is about
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 99
the same, his salary. You know this, and I know it, and
what foolery to be toasting an independent press. We
are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes.
We are jumping jacks. They pull the string and we
dance. Our time, our talent, our possibilities are all the
property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."
Let us call this an exaggeration ; there is truth enough in
it to show that this profession has not escaped the con-
tagion of the commercial spirit.
Again. This error would revolutionize our system of
education. The true object of what we call education is
not to fit one out with trade or profession. When it has
done its work it has made a man or woman, not a joiner,
or a doctor, or a merchant, or a school teacher. At a
particular time he will begin to learn his trade or profes-
sion, but that is not in any true sense his education. One
might almost say that his education leaves off at the point
where his trade training or profession training begins.
Now this false idea respecting money makes the chief
question in education. "What studies will pay best?"
And it goes on to ask, "Latin? Who ever saw a bank
check written in Latin? Greek? The idea that a man
can't secure a lucrative practice as a physician unless he
can read Thucydides. Do a tailor's suits bring any higher
prices, or does he get any more to make for his familiarity
with Aristotle or Dugald Stuart?" Yet how many
parents make a fatal mistake here! Said President Gates,
of Amherst College, lately, " What right has any father
whose circumstances are such as to make it possible to
give his son a liberal education what right has any such
father to shut his son forever out from those broad horizons
IOO EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
of life which belong to the liberally educated man?
When the son, who is to you as the apple of your eye,
stands before you in his early teens, let the arch enemy of
all goodness offer you any prize he will on condition that
you will bind forever to his side that son's right arm.
Suppose that by thus maiming and disfiguring God's like-
ness in his body you could start him in life with more
money at thirty years than he could hope to attain in any
other way. Would the prospect for a moment tempt you ?
And is it a less serious matter to dwarf the soul and
cripple the divine energies of the mind and heart? You
would reject with indignant scorn the offer of a fortune
won by allowing him to be physically maimed; and can
we who are able to send our sons on into the larger life
which only prolonged education can procure for them, for
a moment tamper with the question whether some added
keenness in money getting, and the somewhat earlier
attainment of the means of self-support, should be held a
good and sufficient reason for the eternal dwarfing of the
mind and soul of the sons whom God has intrusted to our
care?"
This error turns aside many a young man fitted for
a high position in the ranks of usefulness, where he is
greatly needed. " There are more ways than one of doing
good," he says. What is so powerful an influence as
money? Once I get fairly at work with my talents, and I
can support half a dozen missionaries." But the half a
dozen embryo missionaries that he would be willing to
support hear his reasoning about money, follow his
example, and each of them sets about raising money
enough to support half a dozen missionaries. Many a
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. IOI
man of those best fitted for personal work in the spheres
of religion and benevolence excuses himself. "I can't
spare time and thought for such things," he says. A man
to succeed in business must devote his whole energies to it.
Accordingly this one thing I do. I will earn and others
will do the personal work. Let the ministers do it. Hire
some one from the Young Men's Christian Association.
It is not in my line. Every man to his trade." And
unless his principles are wrong he is right. A gentleman,
trained to business, said to another, who was in need of
a partner, " I have been long intimate with the business
men of this city; can I not meet your want?" "You'll
excuse me, but you have the reputation of being interested
in matters outside of business." " Yes, and I trust I shall
always deserve that reputation." " Oh, but you know
that business, as it is now conducted, is a bit of rope with
a man at each end, toe to toe, and if either slacks up, ever
so little, the other jerks it away." "Yes, I know it; it is
a true picture drawn to life." " You see? You'll excuse
me." And he bowed him out. I need not ask whether
these promises of financial aid to philanthropical enter-
prises are generally fulfilled, which men make to their bet-
ter nature when they thus substitute their earnings for their
personal service. If they are, then the treasuries of
churches, colleges, benevolent societies, hospitals, etc.,
are full. "Yet," as another says, "the truest and best
help anyone can give to others is not in material things,
but in ways that can make them stronger and better.
Money is good alms when money is really needed ; but in
the divine gift of hope, friendship, courage, sympathy,
and love, it is paltry and poor. Usually the help people
IO2 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
need is not so much the lightening of their burdens as
fresh strength to enable them to bear their burden and
stand up under it. The best thing we can do for another,
some one has said, is not to make some things easy for
him, but to make something of him."
How unfavorable to personal culture is this com-
mercial atmosphere. How many drop music, standard
literature, art study and practice, elocution, debate, one
thing or another in which they might have excelled, to the
delighting and instructing of the circle of near friends and
often of a wider public. It blights the shoots of originality
and tends to reduce society to monotony, as well as
mediocrity.
Under this regime the comfort of life languishes.
These whom we are contemplating are Mammon's mar-
tyrs. Talk of the privations of missionaries. Here are
multitudes of people enduring worse privations in the
sight of plenty, with no consciousness of nobleness to
sustain them, no outlook on ripening fields of usefulness
around them which their own hands have sown, no smile
beaming on them of admiring angels, watching them with
the earnest sympathy of colaborers. And they never will
enjoy life, these martyrs who have turned their crowns into
money. To extract pleasure from money is an art,
requires study, practice, like any art. When their set time
comes to turn their money into pleasure they will have no
idea how to do it, any more than the boy who spent his
first $5 for honey and sat down before it for the best good
time he ever had in his life.
Have you heard of the discovery of the philosophers'
stone ? If not, what is it then that is turning everything
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 103
into gold ? The toilful search for it, of which we have
read, was always with the pleasantest anticipations of
what was to be done with the gold into which everything
would be turned. Was there then no anxious inquiry
what was to be done without the things which were to be
thus transmuted. Alas, there is none. It is easy, in
picturing what things money can do, to forget what good
things it can undo. It is an enemy not to be surrendered
to without debasement.
Thou shalt lower to his level day by day,
What is fine within thee growing coarse to sympathize with clay.
****** Thou art mated to a clown,
And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee
down."
Money is not that one tool of our earthly calling, to
buy which we can afford to sell all our other faculties and
endowments. The Christian College stands as a living
protest against this error, teaching that our one great
implement is ourselves ; our one great work, usefulness.
As the united testimony of its various departments, to its
students, and through them in the world it says :
Life should mean, first, self-development. We ought
to find our greatest self-satisfaction in seeing our own
faculties grow and expand. The skill that can make an
invisible joint in a piece of furniture, or a smoothly work-
ing piece of delicate machinery in brass or iron ; the
ability to draw a graceful outline, to lay forms and colors
together so as to rival nature's landscapes, to write or
execute music that can make the very soul march or halt ;
these are the possibilities which God has planted in us.
Shall they be suffered to die out? Shall the hills and
IO4 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
valleys of our varying individualities be graded off by this
money-making propensity and society reduced to a dead
level that has no outlook beyond dollars and cents ? Of
two things which a man can do well he ought to choose
for his calling the nobler. If we can bless the world
directly with voice, pen or skillful hand-labor as much as
by turning our labor into money, the former is the nobler
life, the life for us.
For, life should mean, secondly, usefulness. Our-
selves, our sympathy, our voices, the deeds of our hands,
work that has personality in it, are immeasurably more
potent for good than the money into which we are too
glad to transmute these. To make something and sell it,
and with the proceeds hire some one to go and visit a sick
family, is a very roundabout way of relieving their wants.
For some unfortunate people, to be sure, it is the only
method available. Alas, that any should prefer that way.
Always our study should be, how can myself be most
useful ? By no proper use of terms can I call my money
myself! When an opportunity is offered to serve man-
kind directly with my hands, my feet, my voice, my loving
sympathy, my prayers, I make a sad bargain, if I sell
myself and hand over the price.
** Not what we give but what we share,
Foir the gift without the giver is bare ;
Wjho gives himself with his alms, feeds three,
Himself, his hungering neighbor, and Me."
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 105
CHRISTIAN EDUCATION.
STEPHEN BOWERS, A. M., PH. D.
Herbert Spencer says that the function that education
has to discharge is to prepare us for complete living.
Under this beautiful mask, however, is hidden the most
complete agnosticism. Mr. Spencer nowhere, in defining
education, gives us the remotest hint that man has a
religious nature to be educated. Follow him through his
definitions and the thirsty soul will find no place of refuge,
no resting place. Someone has said: " His complete
living appears in the light of all history exceedingly in-
complete." The fact is, his theories of education have
the qualities of but half truths. They do not reach Chris-
tian consciousness. The Christian theory of education is
implied in the Christian conception of human life, and
we must learn from Christ what complete living is.
I cannot do better in this connection than to quote a
brief paragraph from a recent writer: " Education, says
he, should be in the largest sense liberal. It should make
the man self-supporting, acquainting him with practical
measures for comfortable and beautiful living. It should
prepare him for citizenship. It should make him, it may
be, a man of letters, or a scientist, or an artist. But it
should go further. It should strengthen and broaden his
faith in God. It should sharpen his appreciation for
spiritual realities. It should furnish him with a just con-
ception of human life ; its needs, possibilities and obliga-
tions. It should deepen in his mind the distinction
between right and wrong. It should strengthen his con-
106 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
vitcion of those truths which surround right with Its most
impressive sanctions."
Now I submit that any system of education that does
not accomplish this is a failure. It will leave the student
but half educated. If he is in some sense fitted for living
here, he is not for the great hereafter. The theory that
banishes all religious instruction from the public school is
narrow and incomplete. It is a concession to skepticism,
and is as irrational as to concede the demands of the
drunkard-maker who would banish all books on the evils
of intemperance.
Christianity is the great underlying principle upon
which this government is founded. It is the corner stone,
the foundation rock, upon which the national fabric is con-
structed. Remove this and the building will fall into
decay. In order to instill patriotism into the heart of the
child, the State displays the national banner over the
school house and recommends text-books that tell of the
heroic deec^s of our fathers. This should also apply to
Christian principle if we expect our children to become
Christians, patriots, and law abiding citizens.
A dozen years ago the public schools in my town
were closed on the occasion of horse races, that teachers
and children might witness the elevating pastime.
One might as well look for the healthy growth of a
tree after its roots have decayed, as to expect vigorous
moral growth from schools where moral precepts and
principles are ignored. And what will the end be? I
will let Jules Simon, in an article on public education in
France in the Contemporary Review, answer the question.
He says: " In the olden time we used to have in the
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. IC>7
school those little books of sacred history which opened
with the words : 'In the beginning God created the
heaven and the earth.' We have done away with these
little books now. The children will hear no more talk of
creation or of God, or even of a beginning. In one word,
the school they will have to learn in will be strictly
neutral. This is what they tell us by way of consolation.
They forget that it is not God we are afraid of, it is
Nihilism."
It would be well for us in America to take the hint.
This unrest and tendency to Nihilism is cause for alarm.
Left to themselves, men tend to anarchism, nihilism and
other baneful isms. Christian education is the antidote.
Let us be less afraid of the great and loving God, and
more afraid of violating his divine laws.
When a generation is raised up in this country with-
out faith and without respect for Christianity, our
decadence as a nation begins. Let not the era predicted
by Carlyle come to this land, "when he that is least
educated will chiefly have it to say, he is least perverted."
Our most enlightened people see the necessity of
Christian education and the thorough Christianizing of our
secular colleges and universities.
I contend that one of the chief requisites of college
education is thorough and systematic Christian education.
I do not wish to be understood as desiring our Colleges
and Universities to be turned into Theological schools. Far
from it. But were I a teacher, instead of an editor, I think
I would make a specialty of the history of Christianity,
and endeavor to show what impression it has made upon
the opinions of mankind ; how it has affected civilization,
IO8 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
and the countries of the world. This, with its phenome-
nal extension makes up one of the most interesting, and at
the same time the most important chapter in the world's
history. I would endeavor to show that :
" In all our way through life it sheds
Its bright and healing beams
O'er all our woes.
And when our days are done
It lights the path to brighter
Happier scenes.
And it will live and shine when
All beside has perished
In the wreck of earthly things."
I would endeavor to remove doubts from the minds
of the people. The struggle with doubt often begins in
college days. There seems to come a time in the life of
every boy when, in his imagination, he has advanced
beyond the knowledge of parent and teacher. That is the
hour frought with greatest danger, and one that appeals to
the wise teacher for assistance.
Let the science of Christianity be taught ; its rules, its
principles, its ethics. This in a sense implies that inner
experience, so essential on the part of the minister and
teacher personal contact and communion with God
through his Son. The student must be taught to realize
that the highest Christian knowledge is not attainable in
the study of books, but by Christian living ; and that the
best ritualism is in doing the just and the generous, the
merciful and the Christ-like.
Now, brethren, the practical question for us to con-
sider is the importance of planning liberal things for the
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. I Op
endowment of the schools in our midst, and especially that
one known as Pomona College.
While other speakers will doubtless have suggestions
to make concerning this matter, I may be allowed to say
that in my humble opinion its success lies within the reach
of the pastors of Southern California. I base this upon
experience in other places, and observation as to other
churches. In a letter from the President I was impressed
with the words: " We must aim high and determine that
no student shall suffer intellectually by taking his course
of study in a Christian College-" I do not wish to lay on
ministers of Christ additional burdens, or emphasize those
already upon them, but in their hands rest possibilities
for its endowment that will lift this noble young institu-
tion above want. What class OL men is so well prepared
to grapple with a problem like this ? They themselves
are educators and moulders of public sentiment.
This may be done by educational sermons in which
the wants of the school, its aims, its purposes, its possi-
bilities for good for the upbuilding of young men and
young women, and shaping their course into lives of use-
fulness may be made prominent. It may also be done by
seeking bequests, donations and subscriptions from men
and women whom God has blest with wealth. Let every
pastor study its needs, and the grand and far-reaching
possibilities in Christian propagandism and soul saving
until his heart is thrilled and set on fire, and he will be
prepared to present them to others. This cannot be done
in a perfunctory or half-hearted way. It must be done
with an earnestness begotten of love to God and love to
man. This generation is laying the foundation for still
iH.3
tt
HO EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
greater things in the next. If the wheels of Christianity
and civilization continue to move forward, education a
century hence will be far in advance of what it is now.
Then let the foundation be laid wide and deep, and let us
build for all time.
I would have our Colleges and Universities manned
with Christian teachers teachers who fear God and work
righteousness ; for I can think of few more responsible
places in which one can be placed than that ot instructor
of youth. To shape the destiny of minds that are to live
when this world's entire history will be but a leaf in the
book of eternity.
" We should be wary, then, who go before
A myriad yet to be; and we should take
Our bearings carefully, where breakers roar,
And fearful tempests gather, for one mistake
May wreck unnumbered barks that follow in our wake."
CHRISTIAN EDUCATION AND MUSIC.
PROFESSOR A. D. BISSELL, SATICOY.
The place accorded to music in Christian education
will depend on the place we allow it in Christian life. I
feel under obligations to the first speaker before this Con-
vention for the admirable analysis of mental activity he
presented, making it easy to show what place music may
have in Christian life. In the arch of mental activity, the
emotions, said the speaker, constitute the keystone. The
case may be more strongly stated by saying with Lotze
that the emotions are the root out of which grow the twin
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. Ill
trunks of knowledge and will. There are deep recesses
of the soul into which the scalpel of consciousness cannot
penetrate for dissection. But, though closed to analysis,
inmost souls have wide avenues of approach for the recep-
tion of impressions from various sources ; and here chiefly
is the sphere of art as a power in life, whether literary,
plastic or musical. There are these three forms of art,
and the greatest of these is music. That is, music is
capable of influencing a larger number more forcibly than
either of the others. The province of music in Christian
life is then :
Firstly, to beget and strengthen Christian emotion,
and out of Christian emotion and impulse grows Christian
action and character. Men who have no special interest
in Christian ideas and worship will attend public service
and even sing in choirs out of love for music, and many are
the cases of men who got their first vital contact with
Christian ideas through the service of song.
Secondly, to serve as a vehicle or medium for the
expression of Christian emotion, and more especially the
emotions that pass like electric shocks from man to man in
an audience. We are undemonstrative and often feel the
need of a vent for overfull hearts. To refer to my own
experience ; I listened not long ago to a sermon that
moved me deeply, but how deeply I did not realize until
in singing the closing hymn, "Bethany," the feelings that
had been stirred within me came to a head and burst forth
in song, while I longed as never before in my life to be
brought nearer to God even by my woes. And no sermon
ever gave me such a might of conviction, fortified by
emotion, as that wonderful chorus in Handel's immortal
112 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
Oratorio of the Messiah, where orchestra, organ and chorus
join in crashing chords, "His name shall be called
Wonderful ! Counselor ! The Mighty God ! The Ever-
lasting Father! The Prince of Peace! "
My plea is for more attention to the cultivation of the
voice in singing. The tendency is now toward instru-
mental music, and development of technical dexterity is
far more in demand than soulful expression of deep feel-
ing. There is a great neglect of singing ; witness the
congregational singing in our churches. On all sides I
hear the complaint, " We have a large number of nice
young people, but they don't know how to sing." But
neglect of singing means decline of music as a fine art.
For the inward appreciation and love of music is the
essence of the art, and nothing gives such an appreciation
and sense of the power and beauty of music as the ability
to share in producing it. A man may arrive at an intel-
lectual understanding of a Bethoven Symphomy by a care-
ful study of the score ; but give the same man a violin or
other instrument and put him in the orchestra, and the
same composition has a new meaning and beauty. The
mere pleasurable admiration of mechanical dexterity or en-
joyment of sweet sensations of sound have little or no value
for the inner life, and are of use only as a lever to lift the
student to a higher plane. But the ability to sing, to feel
oneself borne up in common with others on pinions of
song, can be a mighty instrument for good in Christian
and church life. Can we secure good singing?
Some teachers go so far as to say that any one who can
talk can be taught to sing. I would prefer to put it this
way ; any one who has ear enough to distinguish between
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 113
the falling inflection of a positive assertion and the rising
inflection of a question has ear enough to learn to sing.
If you don't believe it, come and try me. I might find
considerable difficulty with some hard cases, but if children
are taken sufficiently early the hard cases would be
reduced to a minimum.
How many ministers find their work hampered, them-
selves fettered, because they cannot lead their congrega-
tions in giving vent to their feelings in a song of penitence,
of confession, gratitude, praise, communion with Christ,
and consecration to his service ! But when a man goes
into a Christian College he may be already so fixed in the
habit of not singing that he cannot be trained, except at
disproportionate expense and trouble. The time and
place to begin cultivating the voice and musical taste is in
childhood and in the home or graded school. Then as
students come to the College the finishing touches can be
added, independence acquired, and each student equipped
with a powerful instrument. Training to high technical
development, to intelligent appreciation of the highest
forms of art, is not a necessary part of Christian education,
much as I would like to see such work more widely spread
than it now is. But training to participate with others in
the various possible functions of music in Christian life, to
distinguish between good music and trash, this can be
well-nigh universal, and ought to have a large place in
any scheme of education that claims to be liberal and
Christian.
114 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
THE TRANSFORMING POWER OF
COLLEGE LIFE.
REV. FRANCIS M. PRICE, BETHLEHEM, Los ANGELES.
In the City of Tai-ku, China, standing amid the many
haunts of idolatry, is a grand old Confucian temple,
which, with its various out-buildings, covers an area of
about five acres ; and although having suffered much from
the dilapidations of time it is still the admiration and pride
of the city. It is a temple devoted to learning. Over the
great gateway, through which all who enter its hallowed
precincts must pass, is a motto in four, large, gilded
Chinese characters, with this sentiment: "Doctrine
Crowns the Ages," the meaning of which is that the teach-
ing of the great Confucius is the glory of the past and
present. For China, no words could be truer. They
express the sentiment ot every Chinaman. His system is
best studied in his " Great Learning," which is a brief
essay of 205 words, claims to be the " gateway of virtue,"
and has no less an object than the u pacification of the
whole world. "
In this he says: "The ancients" and with the
Chinese all good things come from the ancients "wishing
to make virtue illustrious, first governed well their own
kingdoms ; wishing to govern their own kingdoms well,
they first ruled well their own families ; wishing to rule
well their own families, they first regulated their own
bodies ; wishing to regulate their own bodies, they first
rectified their hearts ; wishing to rectify their own hearts,
they first purified their motives ; wishing to purify their
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 115
motives they first perfected their knowledge and the per-
fection of knowledge is found in a' study of the nature of
things."
Thus by adjusting individual lives according to the
nature of things, he hoped to reach the grand object of
pacifying the whole world. No heathen ethical system
approaches it in grandeur and simplicity, and yet, noble
and comprehensive as it is, it fails to take in the true
nature and destiny of men ; and however elaborately the
details of his system may be worked out, it can never be
complete ; it offends at a crucial point.
His was the great arch with every stone highly
polished and fitted in with great exactness, but it lacked
the key-stone. Later in the development of this system a
wise commentator saw this defect and expressed the
belief that a great teacher would come from the West to
"complete the system." We, of the West, believe that
we have found the keystone to this arch, and we express
our convictions by prefixing to our educational systems the
noble word "Christian." A Christian education, a
Christian College, is the crowning glory of the present
age, the fairest flower that grows in the soil of the church,
promising the richest fruit. The object of the Confucian
system was exhaustively to cultivate ; the object of the
Christian system is to cultivate and transform not simply
scholarship, but scholarship controlled and glorified by
Christian character.
But wherein lies the power to secure this crowning
excellence? In what part of the curriculum or college
life shall we find it? I answer, it lies largely in the esprit
de corps of the institution, and this must lie first of all in
Il6 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
the College faculty. The motto of the teacher soon
becomes the motto of the pupil. Let us have no heathen
or worldly-wise mottoes written over our college gateways
such as: "Learning crowns the ages/' " Know thyself,"
" Knowledge is power," " Success crowns the diligent,"
or " There is room at the top." But let us write in letters
of gold over our gateways, in our halls and recitation
rooms, the motto of the " Great-heart of our Congrega-
tional Churches" the sainted Dr. Goodell who lived as
truly as he said: "There is nothing worth living for
save the glory of Christ." It is not simply the principles
of morality and good character that we want but
enthusiasm for our glorious and glorified Master.
Nothing less than this will suffice ; nothing less than
this is worthy of our Christian College. It is not
minds well trained, but minds set on fire with enthusiasm
for our Redeemer's cause. Enthusiasm in an untrained
mind often runs into fanaticism ; but true enthusiasm, born
of the Spirit of God, held in control by a trained head and
heart, is the greatest power in this world.
Count von Zinzendorf , the founder of the sect of the
Moravian Brethren, a people whose devotion to the Master
is known in every part of the world, imparted such enthu-
siasm to the brethren of that sect as to make them well-
nigh invincible in every undertaking. The secret of his
success lay in the motto of his life " Ich habe eine pas-
sion, est ist er nur er;" I have one passion, it is He only
He."
The Christian Church began in a white heat of enthus-
iasm for the Master an impulse from the mighty Spirit of
God. Then men rejoiced that they were counted worthy to
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 117
suffer for His name and sold their farms and gave the
money to the church ; now many who confess Christ count
it a great cross to suffer for his sake and rob the church of
its dues to buy a farm. Our church life must be rilled and
thrilled with enthusiasm for our Master before it can hope
to conquer this money-seeking, pleasure-loving world.
We must look to our Colleges and Seminaries to give the
church leaders, whose enthusiasm will be contagious, last
from January ist to December 3ist, from taking up of the
cross, until the time when they shall receive their crown.
There is one scene of my college life that I shall never
forget. It was near the close of the senior year, and the
class had gathered for a special meeting before graduation.
The president, some of the professors, and the pastors of
the two churches were present. Brief, incisive, and im-
pressive addresses were made in which the Master's claims
were set forth with great simplicity, and the quiet though
powerful spiritual influence was well nigh irresistible. It
was the culmination of the spiritual influences that had
been thrown around that class for four years. At last it
was proposed that President Fairchild close with prayer
for all who desired to be especially remembered. One
after another presented brief requests and among others
a man who had resisted every influence through his
course of study, and was going out from the College an
infidel, arose and requested prayers. A wave of deep
emotion passed over the assembly. Every head was
bowed and almost every eye was filled with tears, for I
believe he was the only unconverted man in his class.
Oh, it is a great thing to bring young men and
women face to face with God and duty when they are
Il8 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
deciding the question of a life work, for only thus can the
right decision be made.
Young men and women carry with them through life
the spirit of the institution in which they receive their
higher education. It is something that they cannot escape
even if they will, and ordinarily the brighter the student
the more thoroughly he is possessed of this spirit. The
subtle, potent esprit de corps of the College life speaks
persuasively to the young people under its influence, and
with cumulative power as the years pass. "Be ye trans-
formed into my image/' and if Christ be the sum and
substance of this College enthusiasm, then the image into
which they are transformed is the image of Christ.
THE KIND OF MEN DEMANDED OF THE
CHRISTIAN COLLEGE.
PROF. C. S. NASH, PACIFIC THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY,
OAKLAND.
The Christian College is responsible to Him whose
na,me it bears. Subordinately and practically it must
answer to His representatives on earth. The Christian
Church, or any true portion of it, not only may but must
hold the Christian College to account for its stewardship.
If that stewardship has been faultily discharged, it maybe
partly because they who represent the Lord have not made
His claims authoritative and irresistible. This paper
would, therefore, be glad to engage attention both within
and without College walls, hoping to serve humbly the
discussion of our common dutv.
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 119
i. In the first place, then, men of the best education
are demanded of the Christian College. There must be
excellence of result here. Failure cannot be excused.
The Christian College must give its students as good a
College training as they could find anywhere. It must
send them out able to keep abreast of other College
graduates. Or, better still, it must be able to give each
man his utmost development. To this the College is held
by various forces.
Competition is one of them. As for the Colleges
which appear to be beyond the reach of this, the fact that
they have the fields to themselves and the students in their
power should make them even more solicitous to furnish
the very best wares in the market. A Christian school is
expected to avoid the unrighteousness of a railroad
monopoly. Yet competition is at work even in such
isolated regions. The world is small and open. The
young man who discovers that the article offered at his
door is second-rate will swing off tomorrow in search of
the best until he find it. This compulsion is felt by a
College through various channels. It comes through the
students often. No institution can shake itself free from
the intelligent judgment of its pupils. Whether appear-
ing in criticism or in attempted revolution or in departure,
that judgment is worthy of heed as the mouthpiece of
maturer voices caught from a distance by alert ears.
Again, parents and friends and the wider public wield the
force of College competition. The practical and selfish
world cares little to apply the righteous principle, "To
each one according to his needs." It prefers the other
righteous principle, which has a business look, " To him
120 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
that hath shall be given." The ducats and the pupils go-
mainly to the Colleges that have the most of both.
In a higher way also the same call sounds in the ears
of every institution. Above the din and strife of competi-
tion our schools meet as friends and helpers, imparting to
one another, stimulating one another. Every high quality
anywhere visible is a ringing challenge to the whole sister-
hood. Each one that is alive feels the pull of this
influence, just as a true man in the presence of another
true man is kindled toward higher manhood. Again, there
are Christian souls at large who, without a business threat,
announce the divine desire to the College, cheering it on
with courageous words, with gifts, with prayer. Its
leaders also know how to draw near and catch the
heavenly voice for themselves, as Elijah did at Sinai.
In the precise point, then, of its graduates, for which
alone the College exists, we find the demand of God to be
that they be made men of the best education. If they fall
below this, God will use them according to their ability;
but the missing portions of their development will He
require at the hands of the College.
2. Again, men of Christian faith and character are
demanded of the Christian College.
The whole attention of the College should not be
absorbed in the educational line. Its name and assumed
character bring forward the spiritual side of life. We
believe it right to press the appeal that it send out Chris-
tian men. It is not enough that the College authorities
rejoice, if by unusual and occasional methods God secure
the conversion of students independently of their effort.
Let the College that calls itself Christian legislate this
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 121
element into its corporate life and its yearly plans. Then
let the working force of the College carry out this design
as zealously and faithfully as the curriculum of study.
Let it no more strive to send out men of knowledge, of
thinking habits, of speaking power, than it strives to send
out men of Christian faith, hope, love, prayer and spiritual
activity.
This demand is emphasized by important considera-
tions. In the first place, College students are impressible.
They are like clay in the hands of the potter. Few are
quite mature and fixed. The great majority are present
for the express purpose of being moulded and stamped.
The character of many is determined forever in College.
That of many others might be settled, probably that of
nearly all. Our educators have the determination of
immortal characters in the crisis of life, and too many of
them forget the grandeur and gravity of their responsi-
bility. College men can be won to Christ. There is no
need of receiving so many back from the hands of the
College spiritually unformed and deformed. College
revivals have proven how grandly God can claim His own
among these purposeful young lives. Again, conversions
among College students are of the very best quality. Let
no man say that the College course is no place for such
matters. Results prove it to be the place of places.
Prof. Henry Drummond declares, regarding Christians,
that what is wanted is " not more of us, but a better brand
of us." Now in the Colleges can the best brands be
made. Conversions there are usually free from unbalanced
emotion. The deep significance of the matter is appre-
ciated, the elements of it are weighed, action is clear-
122 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
sighted, deliberate, thorough. Christian character of the
highest type and Christian activity of the noblest efficiency
result from such conversions. Once more, Christian faith
and character are the critical things of Christian education.
Presumably there are many even Christian educators in
our land who would claim that religion lies outside the
schools. We are here today, however, to stand with those
who maintain that the object of College training is nothing
less than character. We do not want graduates with
bodies and brains simply. We want purified hearts and
renewed wills. We want all the pure, strong things of
character, above all, the incomparable things found no-
where apart from personal experience of the power of
Christ. Let our schools prepare us these. Let the Chris-
tian College at least acknowledge the demand and answer
it according to its name. A College must bring forth men.
A Christian College must bring forth Christian men.
3. In the third place, the demand on the Christian
College is that the men and women of the best education
and those of Christian faith and character be the same
men and women. We cannot be satisfied that some should
be trained intellectually and others spiritually. In that
case we should be no whit in advance of the present condi-
tions. The institutions that claim the greatest educational
power often excuse themselves from spiritual responsi-
bility. And they are apt to have poor respect for the
sister schools which include the religious elements. We
would challenge the implication that the highest scholar-
ship and the best spirituality cannot thrive in the same
College halls. They can live together even in one profes-
sorial chair, and can be built into young life synchronously
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 123
to their mutual advantage. We dare to say that a C hris-
tian civilization should build up an educational system, in
which each separate school should bear the double
character and do the double work ; whose declared aim
should be to graduate each pupil thoroughly educated and
personally Christianized. If this be called intolerable
coercion on the spiritual side, let it also be called so on
the intellectual side, where it is being enforced stringently
every day.
Now, to indicate practically for what such men and
women are wanted, the following is offered. First, there
is need of Christian scholars for the leading places in the
educational world. The word Christian is here empha-
sized. Christian specialists are called for in every line of
research, publication and instruction. Should the progress
of a Christian civilization be led by ungodly men? Should
the church act only when driven to it by foes, or when
frightened into it by the direction of irreligious leaders ?
Should the advanced work of the age in language, in
philosophy, in archaeology, in natural science, in art, in
political science, in sociology, in ethics even, be left to
men whose enthusiasm and aim are purely of the earth?
The church is under Divine commission to lead mankind,
to do the foremost work, to uncover every item of hidden
knowledge, to make it accessible to all men, to administer
it for the present and eternal good of the race and for the
glory of God. But in this matter the competitive law of
life cannot be defied. The mighty men shall be they who
are mighty. The field will belong to the unchristian just
so far as the church fails to possess it by the sheer power
of masterful ability. I conceive, then, that the Christian
124 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
Colleges are set to the momentous task of raising up
Christian specialists of all sorts for the advanced posts of
the world's activity and progress. They should be on the
lookout constantly for most capable and promising youth,
whom they can guide into a scholar's life ; youth whose
qualifications for such a life include a glowing personal
Christianity.
Once more, there is need of educated Christians for
all the walks of life. Here the word educated is empha-
sized. All through the social, business and professional
world there is a lack of Christian men and women who
were trained according to the best educational standards of
the age, who can therefore hold their own and more along-
side educated non-Christians. The practice of personal
Christianity must be carried into the highest places.
Christian scholarship and Christian effort must show that
in Christ and His Gospel lies the only solution of the
burning questions of human weal. Everywhere will
superior men wield the power ; therefore let superior men
be made Christians and Christian men be made superior,
which is the very genius and proposal of Christianity.
Particularly in the ministry are men of education
sorely needed just now. It was shown recently that of the
580 students in our seven Congregational Theological
Seminaries last year (^o-'pi) over 220 had never been
to College at all, while over fifty had pursued only a par-
tial course. What are the professedly Christian Colleges
doing? They can provide men for the ministry and God
will hold them to account for it. There must be an
educated ministry in our home churches, if educated lay
Christians are to be led and educated non-Christians are
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 125
to be won. And it has been demonstrated to our heart's
content that the Christian kingdom cannot prevail in
heathen lands in the hands of any but the mightiest men
of war in Christendom. May God soon rouse the Chris-
tian Colleges to the duty of furnishing the full tale of
educated clergymen and Christian specialists, and of send-
ing forth the rest of its pupils as Christians, and as trained
Christians, into the world's thought and action. What
higher mission has God entrusted to any of the sons of
men?
In closing let me state briefly two or three suggested
points, deserving fuller treatment.
(a). The importance of the College pastor problem.
The ministrations which are theorized into the office of
College pastor should certainly be provided for in some
way.
(3). The need of Christian scholars in the professor-
ships of Christian Colleges. Such workers are indispens-
able to such work as above described.
(c). The necessity of the most generous financial
equipment for the Christian College. Dr. McLean
remarked the other day: "You can't make 90 cent men
in a 10 cent Institution.'' Friends of the churches, this
whole matter tumbles back upon you considerably. You
call in vain for the best work from the Christian Colleges,
because you do not make them the best appointed institu-
tions. Too often, as compared with the policy of the
world, the church expects its servants to make "bricks
without straw." The Christian College will become all
that its constituents enable it to become. When these say
so, it can have the first scholars of the age in its chairs.
126 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
When the church declares that the educators of the young
must be Christian men and women, such will presently be
furnished, superlatively equipped ; and then the Christian
Colleges will neither venture nor desire to ask non-Chris-
tians to their faculties. When the church insists that its
sons and daughters with all their getting shall get Chris-
tian faith and character, as the prime elements of Christian
education, the Christian Colleges will put forth graduates
who answer the demand. The power of God is with the
Christian church. When she, having listened heaven-
ward, speaks out on this subject of education, the schools
will hear, the State will also hear; for " Vox populi Dei,
vox Dei," " The voice of God's people is the voice of
God."
PLATFORM OF THE EDUCATIONAL
CONVENTION.
Adopted Thursday Evening, April ij-th, 1892.
RESOLUTIONS.
Resolved, That we recognize in the constitution of
the human mind the necessity of distinctively Christian
education, and believe it our duty to build a Christian
College in California as our tribute to Christian civiliza-
tion.
Resolved, That we would for the present devote our
efforts to the development of a College, properly so called,
rather than a University ; that we would provide instruc-
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 127
tors, material, equipment and courses of study for such
grades oi work, as good as can be offered anywhere ; that
we would insure a pervasive Christian influence through
a moral and spiritual atmosphere created by Christian
teachers and Christian pupils and that we therefore com-
mend the policy which prefers quality to numbers, and
excludes unworthy pupils.
Resolved, That as representatives of the Congrega-
tional churches of Southern California we approve the
faith of the Board of Trustees of Pomona College in going
forward in the face of financial depression to carry out the
plan of a College of the highest grade, because we believe
that every right plan is feasible, and that God himself will
be with those who go forward in strong confidence in
Him.
Resolved, That we heartily approve the sentiment
that the personal character of the teacher is of the highest
importance in education, and that we need for the Chris-
tian College men who will give their lives to their pupils,
rather than to the private laboratory or to the dative case.
Resolved, That we approve of the demand for large
room for the study of the Scriptures of the Old and New
Testaments, and would hail with special pleasure an
endowment which would give the whole time of one man
to the Department of Biblical Literature.
Resolved, That our hearts unite in the prayer that
out of Pomona College may come men whose work shall
be as powerful as that of the College men who led the
Reformation men who will ally themselves with the
righteous cause, however unpopular, and with the indomi-
table courage which knows no failure.
128 EDUCATIONAL CONVENTION,
Resolved, That the Preparatory School of Pomona
College should be made to be the best of its kind, but
that no movement should be made to withdraw the
children of Christian parents from the State High Schools,
unless the influence of the teachers is known to be person-
ally harmful.
Resolved, That the College Extension as presented
to this Convention suggests to benefactors a most promis-
ing field for the use of funds, and we heartily commend it
to the attention of Christian men and women of means as
the best way to bring to all the churches the best influences
of the College.
Resolved, That we heartily appreciate the offered aid
of the American College and Education Society to pay
toward the current expenses $4 to each $7 received upon
the home field up to the sum of $4,000, and we respond
to it by the recommendation that the Committee on Educa-
tion appointed by our General Association prepare suitable
blanks for a widespread subscription with the hope that
the number of donors in sums ranging from 25 cents to
$100 each may amount to 2,000, and that the average
gift shall be $3.50, thus making up the grand total of
$7,000, to which the College and Education Society will
add $4,000. And that our children be invited to add
their names thus to the roll of the builders of Pomona
College.
Resolved, That the papers of this Convention be
edited for early publication, and that a sufficient number of
copies be placed for circulation in the hands of every
pastor, to enable him to communicate to every family
under his charge the force of their uplifting influence.
THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE
STAMPED BELOW
AN INITIAL FINE OF 25 CENTS
WILL BE ASSESSED FOR FAILURE TO RETURN
THIS BOOK ON THE DATE DUE. THE PENALTY
WILL INCREASE TO SO CENTS ON THE FOURTH
DAY AND TO $1.OO ON THE SEVENTH DAY
OVERDUE.
vT3 30
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