A A :so U n JTHE 1 HNRE 2 8 2 4 2 7 ilONAL -IBRARY FAC II 5 1 ^^^^B^ .ri-® •Ot/(&ifiing of wisdom." The chair of Moral Science is the highest demand of the modern college ; its work should begin with the preparatory school, and continue through every term in the entire course — a system of ethics based on personal obligation to God, embracing the doctrine of sin and grace; for without personal obligation to a Personal Being there can be no true ethical system. That which is built on utility or poetic aspiration is with- out authority, and absurd. Morals can only be taught from a Christian standpoint, and our colleges must cease to apologize for religious instruction. God is the center, circumference and native stimulus to % ^ THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE. all healthy thought. Religion and its sublime problems have ever absorbed the attention of the best minds of the race. Man must feed on the great truths of religion in order to reach the highest intellectual attainment. The surrender of self to the demands of one's own spirit is the genesis of all pure, exalted thinking; the birth-throe of profoundest thought. It gives energy, tone and sublimity to the sensibilities; it widens the base of the understanding, increases the mental range, equips the imagination, so that all height and depth, the past and present, the future and the infinite, are brought within the field of human exploration. Were it possible to subtract from the field of thought all questions of duty and destiny, there would not remain enough of mental stimulus to make an average man, out of the best brain, with all the books, buildings and appliances the age could furnish. Religious problems cannot be banished from the college curriculum. They cannot be excluded. They must be solved. They are interwoven with the daily recitations, the experiments in the laboratory, and the lectures from the rostrum. The Scientific Theory proposes to deal only with facts and phenomena. Well, is Christ not a fact ? is Christianity not a phenomenon ? What must the college do with them ? It is compelled to give some intelligent solution ; some satisfactory classification of the problems of Christianity, or close its doors. Mind was never more wide-awake ; it is pushing its inquiries to the very verge of thought. The soul, once awakened, must have help. The thought of God, duty and destiny once entertained, the sound mind will never cease to vibrate between Christianity and skepticism till it has found rest in some satisfactory solution. It will attempt to explore heaven and fathom hell without license from church or state ; hence, it is impossible to teach anything in the modern college without teaching some theory about God and human duty. THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE. Every professor in every chair in the colleges of this age is a professor of theology. Every professor preaches, with or with- out license or ordination. More theological problems are dis- cussed in the college than in the average pulpit, and every student receives a religious bias. Every college that proclaims that it does not meddle with questions of religion is a fraud — a species of cowardice and dishonesty that ought to be exposed. The professor of science may endeavor to limit all discus- sion to what a])pears in the field of the telescope, or the focus of the microscope, or the residuum of the evaporating dish. He may talk of atoms and molecules, protoplasm and transmuta- tion, forces and affinities; but the awakened soul is not satisfied to feed on dictionaries. It asks: Can matter be endowed with living force? or does Christ uphold all things by the word of his power? The question must be answered, and the answer depends on the man in the chair. 'i'he professor of literature has a gallery of gods, a pantheon of geniuses, heroes, and demi-gods, and divine men; but has no place for the greatest phenomenon in the history of the race — no place for him who is "the fullness of the Godhead bodily." The college of the incoming century must classify Jesus, and find some place and satisfactory exposition for the great facts and phenomena of Christianity, or cease to talk of scien- tific methods, or surrender its charter. Conscience, under the restraint and culture of Christian ethics, is the great want of the age and the race ; it is the great want of the age. We must not attempt to put brakes on the business spirit of the age; the commerce of to-day is the growth of all the centuries, and the legitimate outgrowth of the dis- coveries of this age. It cannot be crushed; it must not be dis- couraged. We must rather bring up the slow, depraved side of humanity; religion must give direction to our culture, and con- science guide the affairs of commerce. Morals must be the THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE. great factor in the education of the people. This is the Amer- ican idea of the citizen. Virtue is more important than mere intelligence. We need science to create more bread, cheaj)er and better clothes, and more convenient and beautiful homes; we need machinery and corporations to save labor and time, that the race may be lifted up. But morality must balance the spirit of the age, or depravity, like dynamite, may blow the nation to atoms. It is the power back of intellect that stimu; lates thought, checks the passions, corrects the judgment, modi- fies the sensibilities, governs the will, and tips the scales in the emergencies of life, and gives character to the citizen. It is the great want of the race. It is the highest fountain of energy. The clock clogs by the accumulations of dust ; it must be cleaned and oiled, in order to keep time. The heart not under the control of conscience, like the California Geysers, sends forth streams hot and sulphurous, that poison the atmos- phere and kill the grass, and fade the flowers on the hillsides. Under the power of a healthy conscience the soul moves for- ward and upward with a sublime energy. The movement is spontaneous, heaven-born. As the eagle is not fettered by his ignorance of the analysis of the laws of aerial navigation, but makes his mathematical curves and attains his highest altitude by a fresh-born instinct, so consecrated genius has never de- pended on scholastic gamuts for its highest notes. The highest attainments made in the history of the race have been made by mind under the supreme control of conscience. The grandest discoveries, the most useful inventions, the most exalted crea- tions, the tumultuous rapture that has thrilled the ages, the souls that have poured forth their treasures in richest rhythm, are those who have moved under the power of a cultivated con- science. True science is the product of the love of knowledge. Im- mortal literature must be born out of a supreme love of the beautiful. The beautiful in the forms of sense must have a Si THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE. higher origin than human imagination. It must not only be "the splendor of the true" — the ideal of Plato— but the splendor of the Truth. If there is nothing back of beauty — no personal, eternal ideal; if there is no morality in art, then is there no real inspira- tion. The great world-poets belong to the school of conscience of necessity. They live in the realm of broader thought and higher sentiment ; have greater powers of intuition, more subtile- ness, keener analysis, more spirituality. The most exalted genius has ever lingered about the great problems of being, duty, and destiny. Here, in this realm of angels and personal presence, they must ever remain. The college and the church can never be di- vorced, but at the expense of the forward movement of the race. The college halls are next in importance to our church altars. All beyond the conversion of the soul and its spiritual growth that man needs is education — complete, symmetrical devel- opment. The work contemplated in the elevation of the race is the renewal of a depraved nature and the development of fallen, fee- ble faculties. Any system that makes no provision for the doc- trines of sin and grace can never succeed in meeting the wants of men. The Christian College is as old as the church, and essen- tial to its existence and growth. The colleges at Jerusalem, Tarsus, Alexandria, Antioch, Rome and Caesarea were the out- growth and helpmeets of the church. The reformation began in the college, and here our Methodism found both a birth-place and a cradle. The college of the future needs a new text-book and a new chair. Christianity is both a science and a literature as well as a religion. Its history is full of facts, wonderful phenomena, and most remarkable achievements. It has exerted the greatest influence on civilization, moral reforms, and the speculative thought of the centuries. Jesus is the greatest fact in the his- THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE. tory of the race. This scientific age must find a place for these facts and phenomena, or confess its impotency. We have authority for teaching Christianity in the great commission. Go preach and teach, is the divine plan in the divine order. Physical science should have a large space in the college curriculum. It should be studied not less, but more; but studied from a new standpoint, and from a higher motive. Analysis and classification is the chief aim of modern science; secular advantage the great motive. But nature, like its Author, lies beyond the realm of pure reason; beyond the limits of the purely scientific^ secular soul. It shrinks from the gaze of the microscope, and can only be seen through a glass darkly. It rebels at being .pounded in a mortar; it escapes from the fires of the crucible unseen, like the angel of Manoah, without utter- ing a word or revealing its great secrets. Nature has no free school, no complimentary tickets; heaven confers no honors till fairly won. He that would hear the concerts of the woods, drink in the beauties of the landscape, and feed on flowers, must live like Prospero in the enchanted Isle of Harmony; must hunger and thirst; hear with the heart and see with the soul. Nature is not mere material atoms bound together by molecular attraction; it has its ethical side. Its great secrets are revealed only to the highest motive and by the most subtile laws of spirit. The highest knowledge comes through contemplation, rather than reflection. There is a logic of the soul that must find a place in the college of the future centuries. The sacred literature of Christianity contains the grandest truths, the most matchless forms of expression, and the only true philosophy of language. Truth is transcendent, ineffable. It cannot be defined nor expressed in propositions or by diagrams. The highest truth must be incarnated to be understood by mortals ; must be real- 293485 THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE. ized by the human soul. Next to the study of Jesus' life — which is a living drama, a moral epic — is the study of his language. His language is the perfect expression of a perfect mind. It consists of words and their correlation or arrangement. His words are physical pictures of thought. His rhythm is the expression of the emotion of his soul. He takes his vocabulary, paradigms, and metaphors from nature — the original te.xt-book on rhetoric, containing the sum of all language, the complete grammar of God, the key to all human expression. Proverb and paradox, parable and poem, are the divine forms of expression. Jesus found Palestine full of ethics and theology. It was the the transcript of his own mind — a stereotyped edition for all time. A chair of sacred rhetoric, where Moses, and the prophets, and the Psalms, and the methods of Jesus are taught, and the the philosophy of language is studied from these old text-books, is essential to the highest literary and Christian culture — essen- tial to a profound and correct interpretation of the Holy Scriptures. Christianity has a sacred literature unecjualed in its wealth of thought and models of expression. If the highest culture demands the study of the models of the Greek and Latin mas- ters and the philosophic methods of Plato and Aristotle, how can we neglect the manner and methods of Jesus, or the style and charming rhetoric of the prophets and evangelists ? We need a text-book on the methods of thought and the style of expression of Jesus, who is the prince of philosophers and rhetoricians — a text-book that will classify the facts of Christian- ity, bring to the front the sublimest literature and a true anthro- pology; the doctrines of depravity and sin; grace and salvation, and the helps of the Holy Spirit — the only basis upon which a correct and symmetrical culture is possible. The college of the coming century must be broader, more scientific, more religious, and more closely wedded to the 2?, THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE. church. The stabiHty of the state, the purity and power of the church, and the elevation of the race, will depend more on the Christian College in the future than ever before. It must be endowed, and ought to be made as free as the church. The church has the wealth, and the tendency is in this direction. Sixty-one million five hundred thousand dollars, the free-will offerings of Christian men to Christian schools in the last ten years, are both prophecy and prelude that a system of Christian education shall be established in California that shall be a monument to the Christian men of this age and a rich inherit- ance to the unborn generations. Christian men of California: You live in a commercial age; its spirit is developing your latent energies. Let it not absorb your noblest powers, or color your highest life. Let your beneficence be on the same scale with your secular suc- cess. Put the church and the Christian College on the same plane, at least, with the hotels and warehouses, railroad palaces and princely homes of the money kings. Heaven has provided only for the divine renewal of the human soul; the work of providing for the complete culture of the race is left to be done by the renewed man. May Heaven not be disappointed in the Christian men of California ! \ UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY This book is DUE on the last date stamped below r 11 B 20 3 1978 Form L-n 20m-l, •■12(8518) I oWIVERSITY OF oiiLiruhmj* AT LOS ANCSI£S 383 Nelson - N33c The Christian hLlege. L 009 572 - \ . 0\s.c-c'->|vSl1- ■ U ! ,t i-^-4^ >"• 'mmm