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CHRISTIANITY IN THE COLLEGE.

BACCALAUREATE SERMON, JUNE 20, 1886.

Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom. - PROVERBS 4:7.

HE book of Proverbs is a body of maxims for the

THE

conduct of life, and is addressed in substance and frequently in form to the young. It is a profound and practical treatise for the training of youth. Foremost among this matchless collection of maxims the writer himself lays down this foundation principle, "Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom." He elsewhere explains himself when he declares that "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." With him wisdom is piety and folly is sin. And his thought repeated often with extraordinary emphasis is that such wisdom, true religion, must preside over all training, thought, and culture. Wisdom is the principal thing; religion is to crown and complete true education. Among the questions now thrust upon the public attention by the agitation of the times. is one topic of momentous magnitude, concerning the whole method and principle of youthful training for life's responsibilities. Adopting the standard of the sacred writer, I propose to maintain that

THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION SHOULD HOLD A PROMINENT PLACE AND EXERT A CONTROLLING INFLUENCE IN THE AMERICAN COLlege.

I now confine my discussion to the college because here the question can be kept clear of the embarrass

ments and entanglements that might attend it in some other cases. Thus it is held by many good and intelligent men that institutions supported by the state, or maintained by general taxation, cannot legitimately introduce religious instruction of any definite character, and hence any religious instruction at all. I need not enter on that question. The college generally, and certainly this college in particular, is clear of such complications. It is not managed by the state or supported by taxation, but governed by a body of independent corporators, having been founded for benevolent and religious purposes, and maintained by individual gifts bestowed in view of this very constitution and purpose. It is not a civil organ or a political machine, but, as was once shown with power concerning our own college, an eleemosynary institution. Exceptions like Girard College do not invalidate the general rule. It is of such institutions as I have described that I now speak. The claim of the Christian religion to a prominent place and controlling influence in such an institution rests:

I. In the first place, on moral grounds. As the religious instinct is the central and ineradicable element of human nature, so it has always legitimately held the foremost place in human activity. The vote of the human race has put it there. In all lands the ceremonies of religion have presided over affairs civil and military, public, social, and private. Not alone the child and the youth but the man through his whole life has been held under its steady influence. It has

been a religious training from the cradle to the grave. Mill mentions Greece as the only country in which religion did not distinctly form the basis of education, and his exception is by his own showing more formal than real.

If the profound convictions of the race in its darkness thus enthroned religion over the life of man, what should be the decision of those who hold the true religion, with the power and the right to apply it to the molding of youth for the duties of life? They know that religion to be of paramount and supreme importance not only worth much but worth all. They know by abundant and indubitable proofs that education of the intellect without culture of the moral nature may be no boon but only a bane to the individual and to society. "Knowledge is power," but it is neither wisdom nor virtue. It may but make the acuter villain the more fatal force. They can recall conditions of society brilliant in culture and ruinous in influence; and men of the finest endowments and highest learning, who have gone through life not only as wrecks but as wreckers. The skill for a lawmaker may pass into a lawbreaker. Medal scholars have proved as proficient in crime as in scholarship. long ago there stood before a New York court a man who was an adept in science and a master of many languages, but he stood there as one of the most desperate and dangerous of criminals. Remember Aaron Burr. The illiterate villain is a novice and a bungler, tethered with a short rope that easily becomes a halter. The educated villain is accomplished, dexterous, and

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plausible the marksman in the riflepit with a long range and disastrous aim. It is the difference between a Caliban and an Abdiel. The dangerous classes become dangerous chiefly as they are handled by men of intellect, destitute of principle. Socialism, communism, nihilism, pessimism are truly terrible only as they are led and marshaled by men of trained abilities. It is not the peasant but the student who not only endangers the throne but undermines the foundations of all things in Russia. Out of such material, unprincipled training and acuteness, are formed the demagogues and agitators that threaten the stability of all our institutions. Spies, the leader of the Chicago anarchists and dynamiters, was the editor of The Arbeiter Zeitung, and his associate, Parsons, of The Alarm. Our whole social and civil fabric stands on the divine law of equity. And if, years ago, a British statesman in Parliament could solemnly warn his countrymen of the danger of educating the intellect without the conscience, much more must the citizens. of a republic whose whole hope rests upon the character of its citizens take the solemn warning. A democracy without righteousness is as much more formidable than a royal despotism as a million tyrants are more terrible than one. When virtue vanishes from our voters then let us find refuge, if not elsewhere, under the sultan or the czar. How much did the Reign of Reason and of Terror in France fall short of pandemonium? No doubt we want education much, but we want character more.

It is the grand mistake of a distinguished southern novelist and philanthropist to think that illiteracy is the one thing to overcome among the poor whites and freedmen; and he strangely signalizes his fatal error when, in his plea for the South, he inserts in a picture of a spelling-book In hoc signo vinces-the famous motto which Constantine saw around the cross. No, no! Loud as is the call for the teacher there, still louder is the call for the preacher. Beneficent as is the working of the Peabody Fund, the work of the American Missionary Association is beyond comparison more deep and effective. For it is not to be forgotten that the southern rebellion itself, with its breach of faith and with all its horrors, was officered and led by a company of brilliant men, Lee, the Johnstons, the Hills, Jackson, Beauregard, Early, Ewell, every one of whom had been educated by the charity of the nation in her military school at West Point. There is a lesson for the world in that fact.

Is it said, this calls for morals in education and not for religion? Yes; but have we not been warned by our wisest men, from Washington to Webster, to beware of the thought that morality will long exist without religion? Was not President Eliot constrained to agree with Dr. McCosh that ethics cannot be taught without religion? And is not the true religion, the Christian religion, the only sure standard and the mother and nurse of a high and pure morality? Huxley even, while declaring himself strongly in favor of secular education," that is, education "without

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