Discourses and addresses at the ordination of the Rev. Theodore Dwight Woolsey, to the ministry of the gospel, and his inauguration as president of Yale College, October 21, 1846

O'

/ /

'A i

Digitized by tine Internet Arciiive

in 2008 witii funding from

IVIicrosoft Corporation

littp://www.arcliive.org/details/discoursesaddresOOyale

DISCOUESBS

ADDRESSES

AT THE ORDINATION OF THE

REV. THEODORE DWIGHT WOOLSEY, LL. D.

MINISTRY OF THE GOSPEL,

AND HIS INAUGURATION AS

PRESIDENT OF YALE COLLEGE

October 21, 184G.

DISCOURSES

ADDRESSES

AT THE ORDINATION OF THE

REV. THEODORE DWIGHT WOOLSEY, LL. D.

MINISTRY OF THE GOSPEL,

AND HIS INAUGURATION AS

PRESIDENT OF YALE COLLEGE,
October 21, 1846.

PUBLISHED BY ORDER OF THE CORPORATION*' ' • . ' -

NEW HAVEN:

PRINTED BY B. L. H A M L E N ,
Printer to Yale College.

1846.

}
)

THE NEW YORK
PUBLIC LIBRARY

49505H A

A3TOR, LENOX AND

TJLDEN FOUNDATIONS

R 1930 L

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year ]845,

by B. L. Hamlen,
in the Clerk's office, of the District Court of Connecticut.

At the Annual Meeting of the President and Fellows of
Yale College, August 18, 1846, the Rev. Pres. Day, resigned
his office, in a communication, by the terms of which, his
resignation was to take effect whenever his successor should
be ready to be inaugurated.

On the following day, the Fellows made choice of Theo-
dore D. WooLSEY, LL. D., Professor of the Greek Language
and Literature, to be the President, and requested him, in
the event of his acceptance of the office, to unite with the
Prudential Committee in making the necessary arrangements
for his ordination to the Christian Ministry, and for his inau-
guration to the Presidency of the College.

The views of the President elect were entirely coincident
with those of the Corporation as to the religious and ecclesi-
astical nature of the office to which he was elected. Accord-
ingly he regarded his election as a call to the work of min-
istering in the word of God ; and when after due deliberation,
he had accepted the call, he united with the Prudential Com-
mittee in requesting the ministers of the Gospel in the Board
of Fellows, to act as a council of ministers for his ordination.

The Corporation having been convened on the 20th of
October, this arrangement was reported by the Committee,
and accepted; and the ordaining council was constituted
accordingly. Dr. Woolsey was then presented to the coun-
cil as a candidate for the ministry of the Gospel ; and having
been examined by them, respecting his belief and doctrine
and his personal fitness for the work, according to the usages
of the Congregational Churches and pastors of Connecticut,
he was unanimously approved.

On the following day, at ten o'clock, a. m., the public
solemnities of the ordination were performed in the house of
worship belonging to the First Church of New Haven. Af-

ter singing the Psalm, " I love thy kingdom, Lord," (Ps. 137,
3d version,) prayer was offered by the Rev. Abel McEwen,
D. D. After singing the Hymn, "Go, preach my Gospel,
saith the Lord," (Hy, 557,) the sermon was preached by the
Rev. Leonard Bacon, D. D. The act of ordination, by the
laying on of hands, was performed, while prayer was offered
by the Rev. David Smith, D. D. The charge was given
by the Rev. Noah Porter, D. D., and the right hand of fel-
lowship by the Rev. Theophilus Smith. Prayer was offer-
ed by the Rev. Samuel R. Andrew. Then after singing the
Psalm, "The harvest dawn is near," (Ps. 126, 3d version,)
the assembly was dismissed, with the benediction by the
President elect.

At two o'clock, p. M., a procession was formed, from the
College buildings to the same Church, in the usual academic
order. At the Church, after the singing of an anthem, prayer
was offered by the Rev. Nathaniel W. Taylor, D, D., D wight
Professor of Didactic Theology. The ceremony of induction
was then performed by the Rev. Jeremiah Day, LL. D., D. D.,
late President, acting as Senior Fellow in behalf of the Cor-
poration ,- and the inaugurating address to the President was
followed with a discourse to the audience. A congratulatory
address in Latin was delivered by James L. Kingsley, LL. D.,
Professor of the Latin Language and Literature. An anthem
was then sung ; after which the President pronounced his
inaugural discourse. At the close, the vast assembly, having
united in singing the Christian doxology, was dismissed with
the benediction by the President.

In the evening, at the request of the students, and by the
permission of the Corporation, the College buildings were
illuminated in honor of the occasion.

SERMON

ORDINATION

Rev. LEONARD BACON, D.D.,

Pastor of the First Church in New Haven.

SERMON.

Acts xvii, 18. — Then certain philosopliers of the Epicureans and of the
Stoics encountered him. And some said, He seemeth to be a setter forth
of strange gods ; because he preached to them Jesus and the resurrection.

Luke's picturesque record of Paul's travels shows us that
Apostle in all sorts of places, and in all sorts of company.
The special character of every community in which the
Apostle labored, seems to be portrayed incidentally, with
remarkable correctness, as well as with the most striking ef-
fect. Ephesus, Philippi, Corinth, pass before us, each with
its peculiarities, as in a moving panorama. And the classi-
cal and studious reader can hardly fail to perceive that as the
narrative, turning from the more Oriental regions in which
its earlier scenes are laid, passes over towards the original
seats of the Greek race, around the Egean sea, the author
seems to be more at home, and these descriptions are more
full and striking. Most of all do we observe this, if I mis-
take not, when the story reaches Athens.

In the context Paul is represented as visiting that wonder-
ful city, and apparently for the first time in his life. The
historian, however, if we may make such an inference from
the manner in which he names one locality and another, and
the familiarity with which he sketches the habits of the peo-
ple, knew Athens well — perhaps had lived and studied there.
The chief characteristic of that city was that it was a grand
emporium of art, of letters, and of philosophy. There the
concourse and discussions of learned men — the resort of

8

students from all the countries of the civilized world — and
the magnificence of the arrangements which were made for
the encouragement of teachers whose celebrity might attract
the greatest possible number of learners — were more like
what we now call a university, than any thing else which
then existed in the world. The city itself, shorn of its an-
cient political importance, and favored with no special ad-
vantages for commerce or the acquisition of wealth — seated
in a picturesque but naturally unproductive plain, Avith its
fortress-rock towering in the midst, with its distant harbor in
front, with mountains rising as if to guard it in the rear, and
with its bright shallow rivers on the east and west — depend-
ed more on its distinction as an emporium of the arts and of
universal learning, and on its attractiveness as a place of edu-
cation, than on any thing else, for its commerce, its wealth,
its influence, and its living renown.

Though Paul was a stranger there, he was not ignorant of
the language, the history, or the philosophy of Athens.
Jew as he was by descent, and learned as he was in the
learning of his nation, by having studied at Jerusalem under
Gamaliel, the language of Athens, as spoken on the oppo-
site side of the Egean in his native city of Tarsus, was his
mother tongue not less than was the holy Hebrew ; and in
the schools of Tarsus, which almost rivaled in renown the
schools of Athens itself, he had become acquainted with the
literature and the boasted wisdom of the Greeks. He knew
what Athens was ; and though he could not but have some-
thing of a scholar's feeling there, he does not seem to have
considered it a very eligible place for the prosecution of his
work. Brought thither accidentally, as it were, while mak-
ing his escape from the malice of the Thessalonian Jews,
he was waiting for his associates, Silas and Timothy, to
overtake him, having sent them word to come to him with
all speed, apparently with the design of proceeding forth-
with to some other place. But while he waited for them,

"his spirit was stirred within him." I seem to see him
moving along those streets with an impatient step. I see
the restless spirit gleaming from his eye, as he looks on tem-
ples and statnes the wonder of the world. I see the expres-
sive working of his countenance, as he pauses in his walks,
from time to time, to read the inscription on some old monu-
mental altar — here one to Zeus — there one to Athene — and
there another -to a god unknown.' I see him going up by
those long flights of marble steps that lead to the Acropolis ;
he stands before the Propylsea ; he walks around the Parthe-
non ; he looks down on the unrivaled beauty of the city and
the plain ; but it is not the outward and visible alone that
fills his thoughts. He thinks to what gods these glorious
structures are devoted. He thinks what worship is offer-
ed at those altars by souls created for the knowledge and
the service of a holy God. He remembers that in the cen-
turies that have passed since Socrates here argued and died
for common sense, philosophy, in all its schools, and with all
its wranglings, has done nothing to dethrone these idols,
nothing to make the myriads of Attica acquainted with that
invisible and holy One whose eternal power and godhead
shine through all the frame of the created world. He
thinks of the mission in the performance of which he has
been brought to Athens ; and as the great ideas and facts
that are every where the burden of his preaching, rise to his
mind amid the exciting associations of the place — as he re-
members him in whom "God is manifest in the flesh ;" him
" in whom we have redemption through his blood, the for-
giveness of sins according to the riches of his grace ;" Christ
" raised from the dead," and exalted ''far above principality,
and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that
is named not only in this world, but also in that which is
to come" — as he muses on " the heavenly vision" that sum-
moned him to be Christ's "minister and witness," and the
voice that said to him " I send thee to the people and to the

2

10

Gentiles, to open their eyes, and to turn them from dark-
ness to hght, and from the power of Satan to God, that they
may receive forgiveness of sins and inheritance among them
who are sanctified, by faith that is in me," — the fire burns
within him ; and he says to himself, " I am under obligation
(ucpediTij; slid) both to the Greeks and to the Barbarians, both
to the wise and to the unwise ;" " I am not ashamed of the
gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation to
every one that believeth, to the Jew first and also to the
Greek." No! Christ himself hath brought him hither;
here he is under Christ's commission ; and here, amid the
pride and atheism of this vain philosophy, here amid the
splendor of this inveterate and bigoted idolatry, he will
preach Christ's gospel.

Accordingly he enters into the synagogue, as he was wont
to do in other cities ; and there he raises discussions with
his Jewish brethren. There too, as in the synagogues of
other cities, he meets those inquiring Israelites who, renoun-
cing the idolatry of their fathers and acknowledging the God
of Israel, had not yet put themselves within the pale of
Judaism — those "devout" yet unproselyted men, whose ex-
istence as a class indicated the influence of Moses and the
prophets already difi"using itself throughout the Gentile
world. But these efibrts in the synagogue are not enough
to satisfy the activity of his spirit. At Athens, he attempts
what he does not appear to have attempted any where be-
fore. He goes directly into the Forum, where all sorts of
people met for all sorts of business, and which was naturally
the resort of all who were inquiring after something new ;
and there addressing himself to the Gentiles who knew
nothing of the Jewish Scriptures, he begins to teach by
entering into free discussion with such as gathered around
him to hear, or to dispute, — just as Socrates had taught upon
the same spot four hundred years before. The garden of
Epicurus, and the picture gallery of the Stoics were near the

11

Forum ; and as the report went abroad in the crowd that a
new philosopher — a stranger with something of a foreign
accent in his elocution, but with great vehemence and sub-
hmity in his discourse — was teaching there, the followers of
those opposite systems of philosophy most naturally encoun-
tered him; the Epicureans with characteristic gibes, — the
Stoics, with more gravity, taking up the argument against
him, that he was introducing foreign gods in opposition to
the established religion of the state.

In the course of such debates, the curiosity of Paul's
hearers was so excited, and the number of those who were
inquiring about this new philosophy was so great, that for
the sake of giving him a better opportunity to expound his
views in the hearing of the multitude who were disposed to
listen, they withdrew by common consent, from the noise
and disturbances of the Forum, to the comparative stillness
of the Areopagus. And there they invited him to address
them. '•' May we know," said they, " what this new doc-
trine which thou speakest is ? — for thou bringest some strange
things to our ears ; we desire therefore to know what these
things mean." New indeed was that doctrine at Athens.
Never, in all the discussions of philosophy, had those ideas,
so simple, so sublime, so central to the universe of thought,
been uttered there. Strange — strange to every school — were
the things which the Apostle proceeded to set forth in a dis-
course which even now, though we read it only in an out-
line, charms the mind with its rhetorical beauty, while it di-
lates the soul with the grandeur of its argument.

What then were the new ideas — the '' strange things" —
the ' things not dreamed of in the philosophy' of Athens —
which Paul announced there as the apostle of Jesus Christ ?
And what are the legitimate relations of those things to sci-
ence ? In other words, our general subject is the bearing

or THE CHRISTIAN REVELATION ON THE INTELLECTUAL PR0->
GRESS OF MANKIND.

12

Bsfore attempting to answer directly the first of these in-
quiries, let me say that, if I do not entirely misapprehend the
facts, it is difficult for us adequately to conceive to what ex-
tent even the most gifted and cultivated minds, in that most
cultivated city of the world, were ignorant respecting God,
and the relations of the universe, and especially of man, to
God and to eternity. Our minds, even from earliest child-
hood, are illuminated with the great truths of the Christian
revelation ; and when we study the writings of Grecian or
Roman philosophy, something of the light which we have
thus received is reflected from our minds upon the pages be-
fore us. As we read the imaginative metaphysics of Plato,
the dialectic subtleties of Aristotle, or the graceful argument-
ation of TuUy, we unconsciously forget that all this specu-
lation had in it no particle of substantial knowledge ; and
that, after all, the world by wisdom knew not God. To us,
the great ideas of Paul's discourse at Athens seem like the
most familiar and unquestionable axioms ; and we can hardly
realize, without some deliberate effort, that to that auditory
it was far otherwise. It is not unimportant then to inquire
distinctly, what are the things which Christianity announces
as first principles, but which were "strange things" to those
philosophers ? And in pursuing the inquiry we need not refer
to any topic which is not included, either expressly or by
some strong implication, in the outline which we have of
Paul's discourse.

1. First among the "strange things" which Christianity
announced to the scholars of Athens, is the existence of o)ie
God, the Creator of the Universe. " God that made the
world and all things therein," was .to them "a God un-
known," as unknown to the speculations of the learned as he
was to the superstition of the multitude. That simple his-
toric statement given in the first sentence of the Bible, " In
the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" — that
truth which the primeval record preserved by Moses brings

13

within the category of historical facts, and which is the one
grand lesson of the cosmogony in the first chapter of Gen-
esis— was beyond the reach of all the schools of ancient
wisdom. All the speculations of philosophy, in whatever
school, took it for granted that the substance of the universe
was eternal, and rejected the idea of creation as a mere ab-
surdity. They admitted the existence of ' the gods,' and
speculated about the nature of those superior and unknown
beings and their agency in the construction of the material
world ; they admitted that something divine, some primary
source of intelligence and power, must have existed from
eternity ; but of the one, eternal, living God, creating all
things material and spiritual by his power and according to
an intelligent purpose and plan, they did not even dream.
It was a "strange thing" to the ears of the philosophers of
every school, when Paul began to speak among them about
the God, the one God, the historic God, " who made the
world and all things therein."

2. Another of those "strange things," was the doctrine
of the universal presence and perpetual providence of God,
caring for the happiness of men. "God" — said Paul, point-
ing to the temples of the Acropolis, and using almost the
very words which he had heard from the lips of Stephen
in reference to the holier temple that glittered with marble
and with gold on the acropolis of Jerusalem, — " God the
Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made
with hands, neither is he served (OeonneveTai) with men's
hands as if he needed any thing ; he it is that giveth to
all men life and breath and all things." Philosophy, as
then taught, had no acquaintance with such a providence
as this. It admitted indeed — though in some sects it denied
— that the gods, the invisible powers superior to men, were
actively concerned in the affairs of this world, and that
therefore it was well to propitiate their favor by offerings and
acts of worship ; it reasoned sometimes with great eloquence

14

to show that some divine principle of intelligence and benefi-
cence must be concerned in maintaining the regularity with
which the world holds on its course ; but of such a provi-
dence as that which Christianity reveals — the care and the
unresting power of one Omnipresent God whose tender
mercies are over all his works, and who is continually doing
good to all men from the fullness of his love — of such a
providence, universal and yet one, comprehending the vast
and yet not overlooking the minute — the Academic and the
Stoic had almost as little knowledge as the Epicurean.*
The one intelligent, personal God, filling the universe with
his presence, and watching over all men every moment, to
uphold them and to bless them, was to all those schools "a
God unknown."

3. Involved in the statement of this perpetual and uni-
versal providence of a beneficent God, there is another of
those Christian truths so strange to the ancient philosophy,
namely, the unity of the human race. The genius of all
the polytheistic religions, was exclusively local and national,
with no sentiment or aspiration of universality. Each coun-
try, each people, had its own gods, and its own origin from
its parental and guardian divinities. As the Athenians boast-
ed that they were indigenous to the soil of their own Attica
and had no common ancestry with those whom they despi-
sed as barbarians ; and as they proudly identified their city
and their republic with Minerva, their special tutelary god-
dess ; so it was with every people and every state. The
unity of the human race, which the Bible presents as a his-
toric fact, was every where forgotten. Every religion of
the world rejected the thought ; and philosophy could do
nothing towards restoring it. In those eras and epochs of
time, which mark the ebb and flow of empire and the
growth and decay of national life, philosophy could trace no

* The Stoic interlocutor in Cicero's dialogues " de Natura Deorum," says
expressly (II, 66) " Magna Dii curant, parva negligunt."

15

law of unity, no slowly unfolding plan of an eternal provi-
dence. Those natural divisions of the habitable earth into
distinct lands, by mountains, or by intervening waters, which
distribute manknid into separate commiuiities with varieties
of language and of hereditary character, — presented to the
eye of philosophy, no arrangement of Almighty providence,
measuring the earth, and sundering the nations, for its own
purposes in reference to the welfare of the universal family
of man. There was in the world no inward feeling, and
not even a speculative recognition of universal humanity.
While the unity of the tribe, of the state, of the nation per-
haps, was felt with the force of a passion, the unity of the
entire human race was not dreamed of. Thus in a meaning
more literal and more intense than the Christian poet could
easily have conceived,

" Lancis inteiseclcd by a narrow frith
Abhorred each other ; — mountains interposed
Made enemies of nations that liad else,
Like kindred drops, been mingled into one."

It was a •' strange thing" then to philosophy as well as to
superstition, when Paul as the apostle of Christianity an-
nounced at Athens, not some speculative conclusion touch-
ing the natural history of the genus honio, but the matter of
fact that God who created the world and who rules it in his
beneficent and universal providence, " hath made of otie
blood all nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth,
having defined both their predestined periods and the bound-
aries of their dwelling places."

4. And here is introduced another great truth which phi-
losophy had not grasped. Christianity first announced to sci-
ence the true dignity of Juiman nature as made in God's im-
age for intelligent communion with God. The providence of
God towards men, in all ages and in all lands, is conducted
with reference to one end — " that they may seek the Lord,
if only they would feel-^take hold as with their hands — and

16

find him ; though indeed he is net far from every one of us,
for we hve and move and have our being in a most intimate
relation with him,* — as certain, even of your own poets,
with some dim consciousness of this great truth, have said,
•'For we are also his offspring.' " And so the Apostle goes
on to rebuke the anthropomorphism of the Greeks who made
the creations of art the objects of their worship, and to bid
them learn what God is by tracing the image of his being
not in their forms but in their souls. This then is the true
dignity of man, that by the constitution of his nature he
stands in a relation to God, so peculiar, so august. The
end for which man was created, and for which an Almighty
and loving providence is every where and ever watching
over him, is that he may be led to an intelligent, obedient
and blessed communion with God. At the flash of this
great truth into the sphere of human thought, the misty
speculations of philosophy about the summum bonum — the
chief end of man — vanish in a moment,

5. Next, in the sketch which Luke has given us of Paul's
discourse, we find the announcement of God's interposition,
to recover men from the degradation and misery of their
universal apostasy. The apostasy of all nations of men —
including their extreme ignorance of God and their conse-
quent moral degradation — is involved and assumed in the
whole discourse, as something which, in the light of the
facts and principles brought forward, must needs be too plain
to require a distinct assertion. Nor was there any thing in
that — though there might have been much in the full defi-
nition and illustration of it — that could be counted strange
to Athenian philosophy. But the matter of fact that God,
having long endured the ages of ignorance, had now at last
interposed by the manifestation of himself in human nature
for the world's recovery, and was commanding all men

*'jEv auTM— compare the phrase i v Xji'trrtp. See also Kuinoel, in loc, and Ne-
ander, Planting and Training of the Church, p. 117. Pliilad., ISli.

17

every where to repent, was something new ; the announce-
ment presented to the mind of every hearer, not a God merely
poetical or fabulous, framed by the creative power of the
imagination to meet the mind's instinctive yearning after an
object of worship — not a God merely abstract and metaphys-
ical, propounded as a hypothesis by the reasoning faculty —
but a God brought into the category of historical realities,
— a known, living, present, personal God.

6. The announcement of God's interposition for the re-
covery of men from their universal apostasy, involves an-
other great fact which philosophy had never truly received,
but which lies at the foundation of Christianity, and which,
while it illustrates all the doctrines of the Christian revela-
tion, is itself illustrated by every one of them in return. I
mean the fact of God''s moral government over the world.
" God now commandeth all men every where to repent, be-
cause he hath appointed a day in which he will judge the
world in righteousness by the man whom he has designated,
having given evidence of it to all, in that he hath raised him
from the dead." The fact of God's moral government — the
fact that he rules the universe of intelligent beings by moral
laws addressed to their voluntary nature, and sustained, as
the very idea of a law requires, by penalties to be dispensed
in righteousness, — ought indeed to be known and recognized
of all men ; for God has no where left men without evidence
that it is so. Yet philosophy did not apprehend that fact ;
for the world by wisdom knew not God, and knew him least
of all in the glory of his moral government, that is, in the
glory of his holiness as the upholder of purity and love
throughout the universe, and the dread punisher of sin.
Philosophy had its speculations, as guilt had its instinctive
fears, about the justice of the gods ; but all was unsubstan-
tial— all too weak, too confused, too shadowy, to restore the
ruin of man's moral nature. Oh ! how unlike the clear,
sharp, definite lines, in which that great foundation-fact of

3

18

the universe stands out before the mind, in the announce-
ment that God hath fixed a day for which all other days
were made — a day to which, in the progress of slow cen-
turies, all the lines of universal providence are steadily con-
verging— a day when he will judge in righteousness a world
which he created in wisdom, and which he redeemed in
mercy — a day in which those who have despised his sum-
mons to repentance, and hav^e rejected that Redeemer whose
resurrection from the dead was the crowning proof of his
authority as Lord of life, shall see that Redeemer on the
throne of universal judgment !

Such were the " strange things" which the Christian
Apostle declared in the hearing of men assembled from the
schools of Epicurus and of Zeno, from the Academy and
from the Lyceum. Little did that unprepared and unrecep-
tive audience apprehend the vast reach of what was thus
announced to them. Little did they imagine that in the
statements which that stranger so earnestly asserted, there
was truth that was to triumph over all their systems, and
was to illuminate the Avorld with a brighter, purer light than
ever shone in the halls of their philosophy. Had they been
prepared, by the discipline of their schools, or by some
" prevenient grace," to receive that which they heard and to
acknowledge it as truth, what a revelation would it have
been to them ! How would it have filled their whole range
of intellectual vision with its radiance ! In their confused
chaotic minds, it would have been, if I may borrow the
strong phrase of another, " like a sun shot into chaos."*

We proceed then to inquire more distinctly into the rela-
tions of these truths to science, that thus we may see the
bearing of the Christian revelation on the intellectual pro-
gress of mankind.

* Hawes, Religion in the East, p. 61.

19

1. Putting ourselves to this inquiry, as believers in the
gospel, we find our minds immediately occupied with the
great thought that by the disclosures of Christianity, the
unseen becomes substantial, in a sense and with an impress-
iveness before unknown ; — the invisible, instead of being to
us mere speculation spun out of our own thoughts, becomes
an objective reality. The existence of God, and his rela-
tions to the universe, to the material and the spiritual, to the
physical and the moral — are brought into the region of
known and established verities. They take their place as
matters of fact, and become the central facts of all knowl-
edge. Before these central facts were established and re-
ceived as facts, there was no science worthy to be so called ;
science was in a sense impossible. There was art, consisting
of empirical rules or a:sthetical judgments, in rhetoric, in logic,
and in morals. There was geometry, — for the reason that
science purely mathematical is purely speculative, drawn out
of the mind itself; but with all the progress that geometry
had made, there was no recognition of God's geometry in
the heavens and on the earth. That science which is not
merely speculative and hypothetical — that science which
sees principles as revealed in facts, and which therefore
really knows something — had no existence. But now there
is a basis for science ; the universe is one ; and all knowl-
edge, into whatever department of thought or of existence it
may extend itself, is related to the knowledge of the one
infinite whole. The universe — the created and the uncrea-
ted— is one system, in which God is the center of illumina-
tion, of support, of motion, and of life ; and throughout that
boundless system there is a subordination of matter to spirit,
of the present to the future, of the finite to the infinite.
The visible is every where related to the invisible. Time
is embosomed in eternity.

2. As we think of the special relations of Christianity to
particular departments of human knowledge, the most ob-

20

vious is its relation to the science of duty. Strike out of
existence that knowledge which the Christian revelation
gives us respecting God, and respecting man as created in
God's image, and respecting God's moral government as
reaching into eternity with its awards, and as spreadmg its
jurisdiction over all worlds ; and what science of duty will
remain to us ? There may be indeed the instinctive feelings
of the mind pronouncing upon the pulchrum and the ho-
nestiim in specific instances of moral action ; and the equally
instinctive tendency of the understanding to classify and
generalize all that the mind perceives, may form these per-
ceptions of the moral sense into rules of action ; and besides
all this, there may be the endless jangling of words about
the contingency of volition, the essence of virtue, and the
reasons why a man is under obligation to do right ; — but
what substantial knowledge will there be of those relations
of man to his Maker, and to eternity, and to the universe,
which constitute the grandeur of his nature as a moral being ?
True, the first great principle of mutual duty among men —
the law of doing to men whatsoever we would that they
should do to us — is inscribed ineffaceably upon the consci-
ence, and ought to be read and obeyed of all men even
though God had given no other revelation. But yet that
law of love — who does not know it ? — is never seen in its
grandeur, as eternal law, till it is seen enthroned over the
universe in the moral government of God. The science of
duty, with no knowledge of God as he has made himself
known in the person of his Son, and with no impulse or
illumination from eternity upon the mind of the inquirer,
is a science, if we may call it such, the very subject-matter
of which cannot be adequately conceived of

3. The relations of Christianity to the science of govern-
ment and civil polity are, perhaps, equally obvious. How
can the state be adequately conceived of, if God is un-
known ? If the powers and duties of the state are not of

21

God, they have no foundation but force. That they are of
God and have some divine warrant, may be inferred in a
speculative way from their necessity to the welfare and even
the existence of man, and from the very nature of man as a
being whose constitution is not complete in the individual
and cannot be developed save vmder the protection and power
of the state. But how uncertain is such speculation — how
unstable the basis of political science — till that light appears,
in which God is known, not as a hypothesis, but as a reality,
and in which earth and time are seen in their relations to
eternity. How is the majesty of the state ennobled — in
how serene and holy a light do all the great topics of civil
polity present themselves to view — when the unity which
constitutes the state, is regarded not as a mere aggregation of
individuals seeking to protect themselves against each other's
violence and fraud by their united strength, but rather as
God's arrangement, planned in his creating wisdom and car-
ried out in his beneficent providence ; his arrangement for
the welfare of those whom he has made in his own image,
and over whom he watches with a father's care, that he
may train them to the knowledge of himself and to the
resemblance of his holiness.

4. The time would fail us if I should attempt to trace out
particularly the relations of Christian truth to all those vari-
ous studies, the subject-matter of which is derived from the
constitution of man. I might speak of the science of
thought and of the human mind — of the science of lan-
guage the vesture and the wings of thought — of the sci-
ence of hmnan industry and commerce, as embodied in those
laws, deep-seated in the constitution of the human race,
which, within the limits of external nature, control the pro-
duction, distribution, and consumption of wealth ; and in
respect to each of these departments of universal science, I
might show how peculiar a light is thrown upon the whole
field of vision, when the mind of the inquirer has received,

22

as matters of fact, the grand realities of the Christian revela-
tion. The mind that has become acquainted with God, and
has learned to see all things as related to his wisdom and
his will, sees in all the principles which it traces out in re-
lation to any of these subjects of inquiry, the wise ordinances
of him who made the world and all things therein ; in whom,
men, made in his image live, and move, and have their being ;
who gives to all, life and breath and all things ; who distri-
butes the one race of man into kindreds and nations, and
plants them over all the earth, assigning to each its era and
the boundaries of its habitation ; and who now rules the
world in his providence of care and mercy, calling men
every where to repentance, that in the end he may judge the
world in righteousness. But we may not dwell upon these
illustrations of our subject, for there are others more impor-
tant and more striking.

5. Shall we speak then of the science of history ? But
is there such a science ? How can there be a science of his-
tory ? There was indeed no possibility of such a thing in
the old times when that philosophy flourished, which knew
nothing because it knew not God. Then history was the
art of telling a story well — the art of portraying characters
and events, and sending down to coming times some re-
membrance of the men and the achievements of the past —
the art, perhaps we should say, of drawing some rude moral
from the story, as the moral is appended to a fable. But now
" God is in history ;" and all history has a unity, because God
is in it. God hath made of one blood all nations of men ;
and he it is who allots to the nations their eras and their
boundaries. He is conducting the scheme of his eternal
providence, with steady reference to his grand design of restor-
ing that ruin which the world has suffered by apostasy from
him. Thus, as " the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of
prophecy," so the kingdom of Christ, the progress of God's
great redeeming work from age to age through all the vicissi-

23

tudes of empire and of civilization, is the one supreme fact
of history — that which blends all history into unity— that, the
discovery of which, in the changes of time, makes history a
science. It has been well said by one of the most distin-
guished of living historians, speaking of universal history,
that " the first conception of its office" was in the mind of
our own Edwards, when he conceived of "the sum of all
God's providences" as comprehended in the history of re-
demption.=^ In such a history, says Edwards, " we begin at
the head of the stream of Divine providence, and trace it
through its various windings, till we come to the end where
it issues. As it began in God, so it ends in him. God is
the infinite ocean into which it empties itself Providence is
like a mighty wheel whose circumference is so high that it
is dreadful, with the glory of the God of Israel above upon
it ; as it is represented in Ezekiel's vision. We have seen
the revolution of this wheel, and how, as it was from God,
its return has been to God again. All the events of Divine
providence are like the links of a chain ; the first link is
from God, and the last is to him." " If we behold events-
in any other view [than in comiection with God's redeeming
work,] all will look like confusion, like the tossing of waves ;
things will look as though one confused revolution came to
pass after another merely by blind chance, without any reg-
ular or certain end. But if we consider the events of provi-
dence in this light," they are " all wisely directed in excellent
harmony and consistence, tending all to one end. The
wheels of providence are not turned round by blind chance,
but are full of eyes round about, as Ezekiel's vision repre-
sents them, and are guided by the Spirit of God ; where the
Spirit goes, they go. All God's works of providence,
through all ages, meet at last as so many lines meeting in
one center. God's work of providence, like that of crea-

* Bancroft, iii, 399.

24

tion, is but one."* Thus it is that in the hght of the Chris-
tian revelation, and in that light only, history becomes a
science.

6. But we must not fail to notice the bearing of Christian-
ity on the science, or. as we commonly speak, the sciences,
of material nature. The material universe of God's creation
is made up of facts — facts that have their first cause in God's
power, and their final cause in his designs. Those facts, ob-
served, analyzed, traced out in their relations to each other,
lead us to principles, laws, forces, which proceed directly
from the mind of God, and the knowledge of which is sci-
ence. But the observation and analysis of facts in order to
science seems not to have been distinctly thought of,f till
God, and creation, and providence, and the divine moral
government, and the resemblance of the human mind to the

* Edwards, Works, iii, 428, 9. Kevv York, 1829.

t 1 do not mean that there was no observation of facts in the ancient
world, and no knowledge acquired by observation. There are facts in na-
ture which force themselves upon the attention of mankind. No race of
men is so barbarous as not to have observed something of the phenomena of
nature, — such as the rising and setting of the sun, the changes of the moon,
the seasons of the year, and the obvious characteristics of familiar objects
and classes of objects. And wherever facts even so obvious as these have
been observed, the human mind, moved by some irresistible impulse, at-
tempts the construction of some theory by which the facts may be accounted
for. Such beginnings of philosophy are every where, — more or less advan-
ced, according to the intellectual constitution of the people. Among a peo-
ple so shrewd and quick-witted as the ancient Greeks, there could not but be
much of this spontaneous observation. The ancient Physical philosophy
theorized — and often theorized with great ingenuity, upon the facts which
spontaneous observation had discovered, or vvhicli accident had ascertained.
Indeed there is no philosophy, however transcendental or " absolute," which
does not start from some recognition of facts. But the grand error of the
ancient philosophy was, that it did not apply itself steadily, patiently, and by
system, to the observation and analysis of facts m order to science. Its gen-
eralizations were therefore hasty and unsound ; and its spirit, while it at-
tempted to apply its hasty and erroneous generalizations as infallible criteria
of truth, became essentially dogmatical, disputatious, unteachable, and there-
fore incapable of progress. Lord Bacon has well described it in the 19th
Aphorism of the First Book of his Novum Organum. — " Duae via sunt at-

25

Divine, had been manifested and established as matters of
fact, in the hght of the Christian revelation. The old blind
philosophy which Paul enconntered at Athens, and which,
within a century from that time, had begun to entrench it-
self even within the church, drowning with its noisy jargon
the voice of God's own oracles, and piling up those masses
of speculative dogmatism and of dry and empty metaphy-
sics under which the simple verities of revelation were so
long buried, — assumed, in its pride, that the mind must evolve
all knowledge from itself; and therefore that philosophy
knew nothing. It was ever learning and never able to come
to the knowledge of truth. As it was ignorant of the great
fact of creation, it presumed that the mind of man, instead
of being created and placed amid the magnificence of these
material worlds for the end that it may seek after God and
learn his thoughts and ways, is itself a spark or effluence of
the divine ; and therefore that philosophy, instead of putting
the inquirer to the diligent and reverent observation of facts
in which all science lies enveloped, put him to the Tartarean
toil of trying to find out all truth by speculation — as if one
should grow old and gray in the folly of attempting to re-
member what he never knew. The Apostles wisely warn-
ed the church against " the profane babblings and controver-
sies of science falsely so called ;" and, for a while, the warn-
ing was not utterly forgotten.* But gradually, as Christian-

que esse possunt, ad inquirendam et inveniendam veritatem. Altera a sensu
et particularibus advolat ad axiomata maxime gcneralia, atque ex iiis princip-
iis, eoruinqiie immota vei'itale judical et inveiiit axiomata media. AtquG
haec via in usii est. Altera a sensu et particularibus excilat axiomata, ascen-
dendo continenter et gradatim ut ultimo loco pervcniatur ad maxime genera-
lia ; qufE via vera est, sed intcntata."

* A passage in Laclantius (I)iv. Inst. iii,6, Oxford, 1634,) is referred to by
Prof. Miltnan, (History of Christianity, p. 502, American edition,) who takes
the reference from Brucker (Hist. Phil, iii, p. 357) to show that the Christian
fathers were hostile to the study of nature, an<i that the Bible misunderstood
was an obstacle to the progress of physical science. But it seems to me that
Lactantius, in tiiat passage, instead of discouraging the study of nature, main-

26

ity was diffused and handed down among men, that very
philosophy enthroned itself beside the altar of God, and gave
laws even to Christianity. Thus the legitimate effect of rev-
elation upon science in general, and upon the sciences of ma-
terial nature in particular, was defeated for ages. In all
those ages there was no lack of intellectual activity — no lack
of philosophy such as it was, a philosophy which scorning
the observation of God's facts, and attempting to know all

tains, against the skepticism of the later Academy, that there may be a sci-
ence of nature ; and even indicates unconsciously, as if under some prophetic
impulse of the Christian spirit, the true method of investigation. Some ex-
pressions in that part of his argument which is aimed against the hasty gen-
eralizations and arrogant hypotheses of the ancient Physical philosophers,
seem almost like a glimmering of the true philosophy before its time. "Sunt
enim mulla, quae natura ipsa nos scire, et usus fiequens, et vitae neccssitas
cogit. * * Nam solis et luna; varii cursus, et meatus siderum, et ratio tem-
porum deprehensa est ; et natura corporum, a medicis, herbarumqiie vires ;
et ab agricolis natura terrarum, necnon imbrium futurorum, ac tetnpestatum
signa collecta sunt. Nulla denique ars est, qua; non scientia constet. Debuit
ergo Arcesilas, si quid saperet, distinguere quae sciri possent, quajve nesciri.
Sed si id fecisset ; ipse se in populum redegisset. Nam vulgus interdum
plus sapit ; quia tantum, quantum opus est, sapit. A quo si quseras utrum
sciat aliquid, an niliii, dicet se scire quae sciat; fatebitur se nescire qiias ne-
sciat." * * " Acadnmici contra Physicos ex rebus obscuris argumentali
sunt, nuUam esse scientiam ; et exemplis paucarum rerum incompreiiensi-
bilium contenii, amplexi sunt ignorantiam, quasi scientiam totam sustulis-
sent, quia in parte sustulerant. Physici contra, ex iis quae aperta sunt, ar-
gumentum trahebant omnia sciri posse, contentique perspicuis, retinebant
scientiam ; tanquam totam defendissent, quia ex parte defenderant." And
in the sentences quoted by Prof. Milman, he says of Arcesilas, the founder
of the Academic " non phiiosophandi philosophia," as he sarcastically calls
it, " Q.uanio faceret sapientius, ac verius, si exceptinne facta, dicerel causas
rationesque duntaxat rerum caelestium, seu naturalium, quia sunt abditae,
nesciri posse, quia nuUus doceal ; nee quasri oportere, quia inveniri quaerendo
non possunt. Qua exceptione interposita, et Physicos admonuisset, ne quas-
rerent ea qusB niodum excederent cogitalionis humanas," etc. He who re-
members by what methods, and by what sort of evidence, the Physical phi-
losophers of old undertook to know "causas rationesque rerum," and to
what results they came, will hardly blame Lactantius for thinking that it
would be wiser for them to stick to the observation o? things as more within
the " modus cogitatioais humanas."

27

things by the force of logic, knew nothing. Thus there
must needs be a reformation of Christianity as a prerequisite
to the reformation of science. There must needs be an "m-
stauratio magna'''' of revelation by the ministry of Zuingle
and Luther, before there could be an " instaiiratio magma'^
in the science of nature. It was not till the reformation had
given not only a new impulse, but a new direction to the
human mind — it was not till religion, renouncing, in part at
least, the usurped dominion of metaphysics, had fallen back
on God's facts in the Bible for the knowledge of God and
things divine ; that the great revolution began, in the forms
and aims of scientific inquiry ; and the facts of nature began
to be sought for, as the only revelation of the ideas and prin-
ciples of nature. It was not till the voice of Paul had been
heard once more, as at Athens, along the streets and in the
forum, compelling a pause in the noisy conflicts of the
schools, and bidding the man of God avoid the babblings
and disputations of science falsely so called ; that Coperni-
cus, throwing off the yoke of authority and applying him-
self to facts, learned the earth's motion and bade the sun
stand still* It was not till the spell cast upon the human
mind by that vain and false philosophy had been broken by
the reformers ; that Galileo turning his tube into the sky,
brought down intelligence from the stars ; and Kepler, tra-
cing and ' thinking out the thoughts of God,' revealed the
laws of planetary motion ; and cotemporary with them both,
the great prophet and legislator of science went up into his
mount of vision, and thence as from Sinai gave forth the
law, and as from Pisgah surveyed the beauty and the riches
of the land of promise.

Christianity is a religion of reverent inquiry and of faith,
— inquiry after the facts of revelation, and faith in Him who
can be known only as facts reveal him to the soul. This is

* The monument to Copernicus in the Churcii of St. Anne, Cracow, has
the inscription, from Joshua x, 12, " Sta sol ! nc nioveare."

28

the very spirit of true science that finds truth in facts, —
God's truth in God's facts. That old philosophy against
which Christianity proclaims perpetual war, and with which
it can make no alliance but at its peril, is a philosophy es-
sentially dogmatizing, speculative, dreamy — not less so when
it denies than when it affirms — not less so in the school of
Epicurus or of Pyrrho, than in that of Plato or of the Porch.
Its trust is not in God nor in God's facts, but in itself, and in
its own power to command the truth • without the revelation
which is made of it in the facts which God gives forth in
nature. It is as if a man should attempt to lift himself up
into the skies by pulling at his own ears. But the true sci-
ence is that which seeks after God in nature, if haply, by
feeling and handling the phenomena of nature, it may find
him. It is the only philosophy of faith and dependence ;
and, so far, its genius, when it is rightly conceived and fol-
lowed, is identical with the genius of Christianity. Who
does not see this when he reads those sublime words in the
opening of the Novum Organ um? "Man, the minister and
interpreter of nature, performs and understands so much as
he has observed of the order, operation and mind of nature ;
and more than this he neither knows nor can perform. Nor
is it possible for any power to loose or burst the chain of
causes ; nor is natm-e to be overcome except by submission."
" All depends upon our fixing the mind's eye steadily upon
things themselves in order to receive their shapes plainly as
they are. And may God never permit us to give out the
dream of our fancy as a model of the world, but rather in
his kindness grant that we may write a revelation and a true
vision of the traces and signatures of the Creator on his crea-
tures."* Who does not see the connection between the res-

* " Homo cniin naturoe minister et interprest antum facit et inteiligit,'quan-
tum de naturas ordine, opere vel menle, observaverit; nee amplius scit aut
potest. Neqiie enim ullae vires causarum catenam solvere aut perfringere
possint; neque natura aliter quam parendo vincitur." " Atque in eo sunt

29

toration of true Christianity and the new era of science,
when he beholds the inquisition and the Vatican hurhng
against Copernicus and GaUleo the same thunders that had
fallen innocuous at the feet of Luther ? Who does not feel
that the genius of true Christianity is one with the genius of
true science, when he reads the lofty yet lowly exultation of
Kepler, "1 may well wait a century for a reader if God has
waited six thousand years for an observer of his works ;"*
— or that seraphic praise, '^ I give thee thanks, Lord and Cre-
ator, that thou hast given me delight in thy creation, and I
have exulted in the work of thy hands. I have revealed to
mankind the glory of thy works, as far as my limited mind
could take in that infinite glory." "If I have given forth
any thing that is unworthy of thee, or if I have sought my
own fame, wilt thou, gracious and merciful, forgive me."t
Who does not feel it when, more than a century later, he
hears Linnaeus in his researches among plants and mosses,

omnia, siquis oculos mentis a rebus ipsis nunqnam dejiciens, earum imagines
plane ul sunt excipiat. Neque enim iioc siverit Deus, ut pliantr.siae nostrae
somnium pro exemplari mundi edamus ; sed potius benigne faveat, ut apoca-
lypsim ac veram visioneni vesligiorum et sigiliorum Creatoris super creatu-
ras, scribamus." Bacon's Worl<s, i, p. 19; ed. London, 1730.

* " Jacio en aleam, librumque scribo, seu presentibus, scu posteris legen-
dum, nihil interest: expectet iile suum lectorem per annos centum ; si Deus
ipse per annorum sena millia contemplatorem praestolatus est." Kepleri
Harmonices Mundi, p. 179.

t " Gratias ago libi Creator Domine, quia delectasti me in factura tua, et in
operibus manuum tuaruni exultavi. En nunc opus consummavi professionis
mese, tantis usus ingenii viribus quantas milii dedisii ; manifestavi gloriain
operum tuoruin iiominibus, istas demonstrationes lecluris, quantum de illius
infinitate capere potuerunt angustiae mentis mea^ ; promptus inihi fuit animus
ad emendalissime philosopliandum. Si quid indignum tnis consiliis prola-
tuin a me, vermiculo, in volutabro peccatorum nalo et innutrito, quod scire
velis liomines, id quoque inspires ut emendcm. Si tuorum operum admira-
bill pnlcbritudine in temerilatcm prolectus sum, aul si gloriam propriam
apud homines amavi, dum progredior in opere tuce glori^E destinato ; mitis et
misericors condona. Denique ut demonstrationes istae tuee gloriaj et ani-
ntiarum saluti cedant, nee ei ullatenus obsint, propitius efficere digneris." —
Ibid. p. 243.

30

crying out as if in response to Kepler's exultations shouted
from among the spheres, '• Deum iSempiternum, Oinnisciiim,
Omnipotentem, a tergo tj^aiiseunteni vidi, et obstit/pui.'^'^

7. There is one more illustration of the relations between
Christianity and science, which may not pass altogether un-
noticed. Christianity teaches men to judge aright concern-
ing the value of science and the honor to be put upon it, and
thus it giv^es to science a right direction in respect to results.
It teaches that God has created the world for the residence
of man ; that he has filled it with riches for the use of man ;
that he giveth to all life and breath and all things ; that
his glory in the highest welfare of his creatures, is the end
for which the world is maintained and governed. The im-
mediate aim of Christianity — the end for which it was given
— is the recovery of lost degraded men to the knowledge and
service of their Maker, and thus to that high happiness in God
and in God's works, for which they were created. And in so
doing, it seeks to bless not the few but the many — not the
great and the mighty and the noble of this world, but the
poor, the debased, and the neglected. Its genius is benefi-
cence. Its spirit and tendency may be seen in the person of
Jesus Christ who went about doing good, and whose miracles
were wrought, not to astonish or amuse, but to heal disease,
to wipe away the tears of sorrow, to multiply loaves for the
hungry, and even to brighten the countenance of gladness.
Christianity then, if it has influence on science, will teach it
to seek the welfare of mankind. It will demand that science,
in every department, be pursued not for the sake of showy
and empty speculation, not for the sake of barren strifes and
wordy disquisitions, ever renewed and never ending, but for
the sake of "fruit" by which mankind, tbrough successive
ages, shall be more and more enriched to the glory of the
Giver of all good.f The philosophy that sneers at utility,

* Linnasus, Systema Naturae, i, p. 10. See Quinet, Roman Church, p. 78.
t See Macaulay, Miscellaneous Writings, ii, p. 441.

31

and frowns in ofiended dignity, and sometimes rises into
un philosophical anger, at the question aii bono, — is a philos-
ophy which Christianity repudiates, for it has no communion
with him who doeth good continually and whose tender
mercies are over all his works. But it is not so with that
science which has come into being since the period of the
reformation. The genius of that science is like the genius
of Christianity itself, universally beneficent. Its labor is to
explore and possess the utilities of the creation. Its faith is
that as God has made all things well, there is nothing which
God has made, the knowledge of which, if attainable by
man, will not augment the means and facilities of human
welfare. And thus, as it proceeds from age to age, and from
one great achievement to another, it brings the treasures of
the creation more and more into the possession of man for
whose use God made them. Whence was it that science
learned this lesson of homely and universal utility — a lesson
never dreamed of by the old philosophy ? In what school
was it that the author of the Novum Organum learned to say,
" We admonish all that they think of the true ends of science ;
and that they seek it not for gratification of the mind, nor
for contention, nor to look down on others, nor for emolu-
ment, nor for fame, nor for power, nor for any such low ends,
but for its worth and the uses of life ; and that they perfect
it and direct it in charity."* Where learned he that prayer
in which, at the opening of his work, he commits it to God ?
" Thou therefore, Father, who gavest the visible light as the
first fruits of creation, and, at the completion of thy works,
didst inspire the countenance of man with intellectual light,
guard and direct this work, which proceeding from thy

* " Postremo omnes in iiniversum monitos volunius, ut scientiae veros fines
cogitent; ncc earn aut animi causa petant, aut ad conlentionein, aut iit alios
despiciant, aut ad commodum, aut ad famam, aut ad potetiliiini, aut liujus-
modi inferiora, sed ad merilum et usus vitae ; eamque in cliaritatc pcrficianl
et rcgant." Bacon's Works, i, p. 11.

32

bounty, seeks in return thy glory. When thou turnedst to
behold the works of thy hands, thou sawest that all were
very good, and restedst. But man, when he turned towards
the works of his hands, [the achievements of his creative
philosophy,] saw that all were vanity and vexation of spirit,
and he had no rest. Wherefore if we labor in thy works,
thou wilt make us partakers of thy vision and of thy sab-
bath. We pray that this mind may abide in us ; and that by
our hands, and the hands of others to whom thou shalt im-
part the same mind, thou wilt be pleased to endow with new
gifts the family of man !"* How plain is it that this new
and true science that is filling the world with its beneficence,
is the influence of Christianity triumphing at last over a
blind and blinding philosophy, and producing its legitimate
effects upon the intellectual progress of mankind.

With one inference from all that has been said, I will bring
the discourse to a conclusion. I trust I have led you to see
what is the legitimate place of Christianity in seats of learn-
ing and of public education. The university should be,
visibly and effectively, in form and in spirit, a religious
institution. Christianity should be enthroned there, high
above the chairs of human learning and philosophy. All
the sciences should pay their homage to her beauty, her
majesty, and her light from heaven ; and they should do this
not for her sake only, but also for their own.

* " Itaque lu Pater, qui lucem visibilem primitias creaturae dedisti, et lu-
men iritellectualem ad fastigium operum tuorum in faciem hominis inspi-
rasti ; opus hoc quod a tua bonitate profectum tuam gloriam repetit, tuere
et rege. Tu, postquam conversus es ad spectandum opera qtias fecerunt ma-
nus tuse, vidisti quod omnia essent bona valde ; et requievisti. At liomo
conversus ad opera quae fecerunt manus suae, vidit quod omnia essent vani-
tas et vexatio spiritus ; nee ullo modo requievit. Q,uare si in operibus tuis
sudabimus, facies nos visionis tuec, et sabbati tuas participes. Supplices pe-
limus, ut liKC mens nobis constet ; iitque novis eleemosynis per manus nos-
tras, et aliorum quibus eandem mentem largieris, famiiiam humanam dota-
tam velis." Bacon's Works, i, p. 19.

33

Wherever science, whether as taught to pupils in the class
room, or as extended into new discoveries by its professors
and votaries, refuses to rest upon the verities of revelation, it
is liable to either of two contrary tendencies in respect to
God and nature ; and it is sure to fall, sooner or later, into one
or the other, according to the circumstances, employments,
or idiosyncrasies of the minds that cultivate it. On the one
hand, it becomes gross materialism and atheism. On the
other side, it runs off into pantheistic views ; and is sublimated
at last into the transcendentalism which makes every thing
subjective, and which regards God and the universe as a
mere phantasmagoria produced in its own addled brain.

In like manner, the science which disconnects itself from
Christianity, is liable to either of two opposite tendencies in
relation to utility and the welfare of society. On the one
hand it is in danger of shutting its eyes against all that is
moral and spiritual in the universe, all that concerns man's
highest and most substantial interests ; and so it degenerates
into a coarse, sensual, Epicurean utilitarianism. Or if it falls
under the opposite influence, it withdraws from sympathy
and friendly connection with mankind at large ; it grows
ashamed of ministering to the homely wants of human na-
ture ; it seeks its own elegant amusement and intellectual
enjoyments ; it discusses trifles with a languid and gentle-
manly air ; and it sinks into contempt in its proud seclusion.

These tendencies Christianity, enthroned in the university,
and thus exerting its proper influence throughout the sphere
of knowledge, will effectually counteract. Do you ask,
How ? I answer. Not by forbidding inquiry or examination.
Christianity — true Christianity which is spirit and life — has
nothing to do with such prohibitions. Its vital element is
thought, inquiry, intellectual freedom. Its challenge to the
world is, "Prove all things" — "believe not every spirit, but
try the spirits whether they are of God." Do you ask. How
then ? I answer again, Not by undertaking to settle ques-

5

34

tions without evidence, putting the ipse dixit of the teacher,
or the confused echo of tradition, or the commandment of
the church, in the place of argument. The rehgion that
makes faith essential to salvation, and at the same time bids
us call no man master, resorts to no such expedients. No ;
it is in altogether another method that Christianity, enthroned
in the university, directs the tendencies and guards the des-
tinies of science. It brings into the sphere of knowledge its
own prime facts, supported and substantiated to the mind by
their own legitimate proofs. It holds up its own light, high
over every region of human thought ; and by a force as silent
yet resistless as that which binds the rolling worlds to their
appointed orbits, it compels all the sciences to know their
places in the universal system, and to fulfill their duties of
reverence to God and of charity to man.

I need not show from history, nor from the nature of the
case, that a true Christianity must and will have its own
schools, its institutions of universal learning, presided over
by its own ministers duly inaugurated to the holy work of
expounding and vindicating the oracles of God. Nor need
I argue that a Christian people will prefer such institutions,
above all others of whatever pretensions, for the training of
their youth to the high offices of science, of the state, and
of the commonwealth of Christ. Facts, too notorious to
need a repetition here, have superseded the necessity of any
argument to prove that in these United States, if in no other
land beneath the sun, the institution of learning in which
the Christian religion in its doctrine, in its discipline, and in
all its influences, moral, intellectual, and spiritual, is most
effectually enthroned, is the only institution that can long
command, or that can widely command, the siiifrages of the
people.

By such considerations as these, would I illustrate the
theory and the working of the constitution which our fathers
gave to Yale College, and which it has maintained through

all its eras to this hour. This College has always been
essentially a religious — yes, essentially an ecclesiastical insti-
tution. Christianity was enthroned here at the beginning,
and has never been cast down from its eminence. These
halls have never yet been — and, God helping us, they never
shall be — ashamed of the Gospel of Christ. By all the
prayers and hopes with which holy men have laid the foun-
dations, or have toiled to rear the massy structure, this insti-
tution is consecrated to Christianity. Nor do we use the
word in that vague sense in which Christianity has no form,
no body, no spirit other than some volatile quintessence, and
therefore no power. The Christianity enthroned here, is
Christianity in a definite appreciable shape and system — the
Christianity not of tradition, but of the Bible — the Christi-
anity not of a hierarchy, but of freedom and of " light and
truth"* — the Christianity not of forms and ceremonious
pomp, but of the spirit penitent, believing, praying, and of
love communing with God.

The transaction then, to Avhich we are now proceeding, is
not an empty ceremony, nor an mmieaning compliance with
local precedents and prejudices. No ! ye who sustain the
responsibility of guardianship and legislation over this insti-
tution of our fathers — ye who in the various faculties of the
University are entrusted with the high function of training
youth for the service of God and their generation, " both in
church and civil state"f — ye too, young men, brought hither

*Lux ET Veritas, — the motto of the College Seal.

t The petitioners fur the charter oftiie College, who were "a large num-
ber cf ministers and other principal characters in the colony," represented
lo the legislature in their petition, " that from a sincere regard to, and zeal
for, upholding the Protestant religion, by a succession of learned and ortho-
dox men, they had proposed that a Collegiate School should be erected in
this Colony, wherein youth should be instructed in all parts of learning,
to qualify them for public employments in Church or civil State; and that
they had nominated ten ministers to be trustees, partners, or undertakers for
the FOUNDING, endowing and ordering the said school." The preamble to
the original charter, granted in October, 1701, rehearses this representation,
and makes it tiie basis upon which the charter rests.

36

as learners, from all the regions of this wide union — ye all,
as ye behold the transaction now to be performed, are wit-
nesses of its significancy. It signifies to you — it signifies to
all the concourse of the people here — that this is none other
than a Christian University ; and that he who is to preside
over all these studies and teachings, may not enter into that
high place till he has given to Christ and to the Church those
pledges, and taken upon his soul those vows, which are in-
volved in his being set apart, in the apostolic form, to the
ministry of Christian truth, and the defense of the Gospel.

To you, my brother, faithful and beloved — yes, I will
say it in your name to all here present — to you this ordina-
tion is no empty ceremony. That voice which in your
youth you seemed to hear, and in obedience to which you
made so thorough a preparation of yourself in all the branches
of sacred learning, has now called more distinctly ; and in
answer to the call, you offer yourself to a work, from the
grandeur and holiness of which you still shrink with a sense
of insufficiency. Your ordination is not to be for nothing.
As a minister of the word of God, you are to be charged
with the constant oversight of all the religious interests
which are involved in this institution. As a minister of
Christ, the Redeemer, you are to be charged with the moral
education and the spiritual welfare, as well as with the in-
tellectual culture, of the young men who come to enjoy
these privileges. Not only in your public preaching, but
also in your teaching — and not only there, but in all your
intercourse with your pupils or with your colleagues, with
the church or with the world, you are to be the minister of
Christ. Upon the minds of these young men, as they pre-
sent themselves before you, class after class, through the
long succession of years in which we hope that you will
exercise your office, you are to stamp impressions for eternity.
Wonderfully — more wonderfully, doubtless, than you have
ever thought — has God been training you, from your child-

37

hood, for that special service, as a minister of Christ, to
which you are designated. If in the grammar school where
I first met you three and thirty years ago, it had been told
by some prophetic voice that one of the scholars would be
President of Yale College, the master and the pupils would
have thought of none other than that bright-eyed modest boy
whose Ullage is in my mind's eye now. And if in that hour
when we and our college classmates went forth together
from this house as graduates, it had been announced that
one of that class of 1820 would be President, all eyes
would have turned to the one — -facile princeps — whose voice
had just spoken our farewell to each other, and to our Alma
Mater. From your earliest years, you had every advantage
for the acquisition of that universal knowledge after which
your nature thirsted, and for the culture of those fine powers
with which the predestinating God had endowed you. And
in later years, when others were compelled to grapple with
the rude labors of life, your lot has been so ordered that all
the while, by unceasing and most various study, by expe-
rience in the instruction and government of the College, by
foreign travel, by personal inspection of the great seats of
learning in the old world, by opportunities of intercourse
with learned men of various languages and nations, you have
been unconsciously accomplishing yourself for this calling.
Nay, those inward conflicts — that torture of a depressed and
struggling mind — that hidden anguish — which compelled
you to give up your early aspirations toward the ministry of
Redemption — -have had their value through the grace of him
who leads us by paths which we know not. For now, at
last, when your academic duties, in their steady round, so long
pursued, together with the cares, affections and joys — aye,
and the sacred sorrows — of your home, have slowly formed
your mind to healthier and more natural habits of religious
feeling, and have made you better acquainted with yourself
and more conscious of your trust in Christ, you come at

38

God's call ; and with that deep experience which has cost
you so dear, you take upon yourself the care of souls — souls
to be trained for the highest services on earth, and for yet
higher ministries in heaven.

And yet you feel, I know — and I will not deny that we
who have placed you here, feel, too — that there are particu-
lars in which your preparation for the work might have
seemed more perfect. But perhaps that which you have not.
could not have been gained without involving some positive
disqualification. Had your boyhood known the harsh disci-
pline of poverty, forcing the stronger and sterner elements of
character into a premature development — had you, by the
voice of inexorable duty, been called away from academic
leisure, and placed, while yet a stripling, in some high post
of militant service for the church — had you been found, as in
such a case you would surely have been foinid, doing your
part, and quitting yourself like a man, in the moral conflicts
upon which our age has fallen — had you thus taught the in-
fidel, the drunkard, the profane to hate you, and to mingle
your name with their ribaldries — had ultraists and radicals of
one sort and another, dreading your influence, spit out their
venom against you — had the apostles of godless and destruc-
tive dogmas that would demoralize society and undermine
the state, honored you with their maledictions — had the
guardians of lifeless traditions in theology, the money-
changers in the temple courts, and the setters up of images
and hollow impositions in the church, learned to fear you as
the scourge of God — then, though doubtless you would have
had some qualifications which as yet you have not, you
would have gained those qualifications at the expense of
something of that accurate and thorough scholarship ; and
not only so, but you might have been, perhaps, in some
respects, too much of a man for us ; we might have feared,
and wisely feared, to put you in this place ; we might even
have thought, and you might have thought with us, that

39

your influence had grown too high to be transplanted, and
that you had shaped for yourself a sphere of light and power
from which you could not well be spared.

You have already been admonished by the feeble but em-
poisoned shafts which sectarian jealousy has pointed at you,
that it is one thing to be an inoffensive professor of Greek,
and quite another thing to be, even in prospect, a Puritan
minister of the Gospel. Yes, brother, it is so. You cannot
be faithful as a minister of Christ in that high post where
we are placing you, without being a mark at which the ene-
mies of the great moral and rehgious interests for which this
College has its being, will hurl their missiles. No ! such an
exemption from the ordinary lot of conspicuous fidelity to
Christ and truth, cannot be accorded to more than one man
in a century. Your ministry for Christ, instead of being
like that of your immediate predecessor, whose venerable
presence, still in the flesh, adds so peculiar a dignity to this
occasion, — may be expected (such is the crisis to which we
are coming) to resemble more the ministry of his predeces-
sor, your own illustrious kinsman, and of every other one in
that bright series of the dead, whose unseen presence we
seem to feel mingling with these glad solemnities. Yes,
Woolsey ! be a man — a man of God — in that post of duty;
and you will not be long in learning what it is to "endure
hardness as a good soldier of Christ." You shall partake of
the same experience, of which others, once your youth's
compeers, have already partaken. You too shall know how
hard it is, to have men fear you and hate you because you
stand the sworn servant and champion of obnoxious truth.
You too shall groan in your night watches, with something
of a prophet's agony when he feels the burthen of God's word
upon his soul, " Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast born
me a man of strifes !" And yet in all that " hardness" you
shall have joys which, in services less arduous, you have not
tasted. There is a high exulting joy, in being thus identified

40

with those immortal and emancipating truths in which Hes
all the promise of the soul's salvation and of the world's de-
liverance from the curse. There is a joy, like that of war-
rior angels, in contending earnestly for the faith, — a joy, all
sympathy with heaven, in ministering for Christ to instruct
and guide and protect them that shall be heirs of salvation,
knowing the while that the eternal strength of truth and of
God surrounds us. This pays for the smart of wounds in
" the good fight," and turns the defacmg scar into a glorious
record. "In the world," saith the Savior — and it is a word
for all his true apostles to the end of time — " in the world
ye shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have over-
come the world." We thank thee, Savior^ for that cheering
word. Thine, O Lord, is the victory ; and thou wilt make
us conquerors in thy conquests. " He that goeth forth
weeping, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again
with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves."

CHARGE

ORDINATION.

Rev. NOAH PORTER, D. D.,

Pastor of the First Church in Farmington.

CHARGE.

As ministers of Christ, we are divinely admonished to as-
sume no authority over each other. " One is our Master,
even Christ, and all we are brethren." Yet custom and fit-
ness suggest the giving of a charge as one part of the form
of induction into office. The charge, however, which
Christ's ministers give to the brother whom they recognize
and set apart as called of Christ to partake with them in their
ministry, is only the recognition of that charge which he
who is the " Head of all principality and power," and who
has appointed the ministry itself, gives to those whom he
calls to serve him in the work of the Gospel.

As you then, my beloved brother, receive the office to
which you have now been consecrated by the ministers of
Christ assembled in council for this purpose, not from them,
but from Christ, who has called you ; so also the suggestions
which it is devolved on me to address to you in their behalf,
will be authoritative to you only by virtue of their accord-
ance with his instructions. We who give you this charge
are only his servants, acting under the same responsibilities
with you. Your peculiar relations may differ from ours ;
but our ministry is the same with yours. As the ancient
prophets received tlicir charge from God to go and teach
and warn men in his name ; as the Apostles went forth
preaching the Gospel, charged by Him of whom the Eternal
Father had said, " This is my beloved Son, hear ye him ;"
and as Timothy received it in charge from Paul as an

44

inspked Apostle " to preach the word ;" so you, called by
the grace of God to the same office with them, will
consider yourself as having received your charge from the
same authority, and will often recur to it in the instructions
which our Lord gave to his more immediate disciples when
he. addressed them as his witnesses to mankind, and in their
corresponding instructions to their associates and successors ;
— and while it is only to a very small part of these that the
present occasion will permit me particularly to refer you, you
will consider yourself charged no less Avith those of which
I make no express mention, than with those which I may
distinctly present to you.

It has been already said that it is with particular reference
to the office to which you are called in this College, that you
are ordained a minister of Christ; and it is in prospect of your
induction into that office and your discharge of its high func-
tions that the present solemnities have their peculiar interest,
and as we believe a special pertinency and impressiveness.

It is not to be forgotten that this institution was founded
by the churches of Connecticut, and preeminently for the
service of the churches, and with the primary design of its
furnishing them with a succession of thoroughly educated
Christian ministers ; and that it was therefore put under the
instruction and direction of Christian ministers, as its Presi-
dent and Fellows. And although in the assumed relations
of the College to the civil state, and its wider bearing upon
the interests of our country and the world, this design has
not the same proportionate share in the economy of the Col-
lege, it has yet never lost any measure of its importance ;
nor is it less dear to the churches ; and were it now to be
abandoned, or to be merged in objects merely secular, the
institution would lose its peculiar hold upon their affections,
and, at no distant period find itself no longer the alma mater
of their sons. It will then belong to ^^-ou, brother, as a Chris-
tian minister, presiding over this venerable seat of learning,

to be true to the design of its founders, — to preserve its puri-
ty as "a school of the prophets" in connection with its va-
ried learning and comprehensive scope as a University.

Nor do we deem it less important for the other ends of a
liberal education, than for the Christian ministry, that this
institution be under a decidedly Christian influence. The
relation of our great literary institutions to all the important
interests of our country and the world cannot be unknown
to any one Avho is at all acquainted with them, though it is
duly appreciated by few and can be fully comprehended by
none. Forming as they do the educated mind, they also
form, through the mind which they educate, the mass of
the common mind ; and so their influence, like the air of
heaven, is all pervading and carries life or death with the
healthful or noxious principles that impregnate it. But it is
the Gospel alone that can make or preserve these fountains
pure. The Gospel is the wisdom of God in its adaptation
to the social and intellectual renovation and improvement of
man, as well as his spiritual emancipation and perfection ;
and to his civil relations and all his useful enterprises, as well
as his eternal salvation. With these views we consider our-
selves bound, as guardians of this mstitution, to secure, as far
as we are able, to all who may resort to it, a Christian edu-
cation ; to provide that Christian principles and a Christian
spirit may imbue its instructions and discipline, and by that
means to diff"use the healing power of the Gospel into all
the relations and departments of society as fnv as the influ-
ence of the institution may reach. We therefore charge
you, our beloved President, in whose agreement with our
views in this respect, and in whose wisdom and integrity
to carry out the design we entirely confide, to be faith-
ful to this trust. Depending on the cooperation of your
respected associates, the most of them long tried, we
charge you to preserve this institution of learning, in the
character of its instructions, in the direction of its studies,

46

in the administration of its discipline, in its religious faith
and worship, in its entire influence, a Christian institu-
tion. This obligation would be incumbent on its Presi-
dent were he only a Christian layman. But we give it
in charge to you distinctly and especially as being ordain-
ed, with reference to this high trust, a Christian minister.
And if, in this view you feel the responsibilities of the office
to be surpassingly great, so also will be the honor and the
everlasting blessedness of a faithful discharge of it. For my
own part, I can hardly conceive of a station more to be de-
sired, by man or angel, with grace sufficient for it, than that
of presiding over some hundreds of gifted minds, in a com-se
of liberal and Christian education, to go forth year by year
into all quarters of the world, and to exert upon its mil-
lions, destined to immortality, the power which such an edu-
cation imparts. Here, brother, you will find scope for all
the endowments that God has given you, and, leaning on
his grace, will rejoice in your increased advantages for hold-
ing up to the world, the instructive contrast which reformed
Christianity is presenting between a truly liberal education
and one fettered by superstition or perverted by Infidelity : —
between the education which gives to learning all its rights
— full freedom and independence to minister light and aid
to our spiritual nature, and that education which holds
learning in subjection to the purposes of an ambitious priest-
hood, or that which robs it of its noblest bearings and
mightiest incentives under the inffuence of an unbelieving
rationalism. Such an employment with such an object,
surely is not incompatible with the sacred calling to which
you are now ordained. If tent making did not interfere
with the sacred work of the great Apostle to the Gentiles,
" working with his hands," surely the work of educating
the youth of our country, if it be rightly performed, will
not at all interfere with your sacred calling as a minister of
the Lord Jesus Christ. " Thou therefore — be strong in the
grace that is in Christ Jesus."

47

As the head of the College, you will be a spiritual guide
to the students. Though not formally the pastor of the
Church, you will yet, from the nature of your office, share with
the pastor in his responsibilities. From their instructors gen-
erally, and from you as the head of the College especially,
they will borrow their religious character much in the pro-
portion of your hold upon their confidence and affection.
With what peculiar impressiveness, will they be led by your
ministrations to the throne of divine mercy and receive from
your hands the emblems of the great sacrifice for sin ! Who
that witnessed similar ministrations by Dwight, or by your
immediate predecessor, does not recall them with grateful re-
collections of theii' sacredness and utility ? Who is ignorant
of the peculiar facilities which your predecessors have had as
Christian ministers, for impressing the Gospel upon the minds
of the students ? What friend of religion can consent that in
your administration, these facilities shall be lost ? How nat-
urally will the students listen to the Gospel from your lips, as
from a common father, on whatever occasions you may address
it to them ! In the hours of thoughtfulness and inquiry, how
naturally will they seek the spiritual guidance of those whom
they are accustomed to meet and to venerate as their guides
in the paths of science ! And must it not be an interesting
office to afford them that guidance, removed as they are from
paternal care, in the spring time of life, and as the years pass
along that are blessed above all others with the influences of
divine grace ? Oh yes — their guardians and teachers — more
especially those of them who have been set apart to the Chris-
tian ministry — have a responsibility in this matter which eter-
nity alone will fully reveal. That you, as the head of the
institution, may the more distinctly recognize that responsi-
bility, and that your responsibility may be more distinctly
recognized by others, and especially by those committed to
your paternal care, you have now been ordained to this office ;
and we do accordingly charge you to fulfil it with all tender-

48

ness and faithfulness. "Feed my lambs:" "Feed my
sheep :" is the charge of the Great Shepherd, when he asks
the proof of your love.

This College, founded by immediate descendants of our
Puritan fathers, cherishes their faith, and their mode of wor-
ship and of Church Government and discipline. Yet does it
not less cherish the spirit of Catholicism, as opposed alike to
spiritual intolerance and sectarian favoritism. It would hold
sacred the universal right of private judgment ; it would
welcome to its privileges, all, with no distinction of faith ;
and would allow them the free enjoyment of the modes of
worship and of Church Government which they judge most
agreeable to the word of God. The known liberality of the
College, in these respects, Ave have no occasion to urge you,
in the discharge of your apj^ropriate functions, as a minister
of the Gospel, to maintain. Nor, on the other hand, will
you give countenance to that mis-named liberality, which
makes nothing of Christianity, more than what belongs to
the religion of nature. Especially, in preaching to the stu-
dents, (for you will not fail to consider yourself bound, as you
may be able and occasion shall be offered, to preach to the
students, ) you will preach the true Gospel of the grace of
God ; will preach it fully and plainly ; will preach it in the
adaptation of its glorious truths and high demands to the
character and circumstances of your charge ; — thoughtfully
but not abstrusely ; — with great dignity and yet with great
simplicity ; not to man in general, nor to the busy world, nor
yet to the world of philosophers, statesmen or divines ; but
to the world of students, — the most peculiar, in some respects,
of all worlds — intellectual and yet impulsive — emancipated,
in great measure, from the restraints of the family, and not
yet owning the restraints of society — encompassed with mul-
tiplied dangers, and moving forward to the stage of active
life with some of the highest hopes that belong to man.

49

Yet as a minister of the Gospel, you will not lose sight of
the extensive object of your commission. While the principal
scene of your labors must of course be here, you will feel that
you sustain a new and important relation to the religious
world ; and that you have been set apart, by these solemnities,
to such public duties indicated by that relation, and you may
be able, amidst your many official cares and labors, to perform.
Especially will you consider yourself as sustaining a new and
important relation to those churches of this state and of sister
states, with their pastors, to which this beloved seat of learning
has so long been a bond of union, and a fountain of light and
life ; and you will be drawn into an intercourse and sympathy
with them, which, as it will be to them most welcome, to
you, we trust, will be encouraging and enlivening. In view
of all these things, you will perceive that we do not make
you a minister, that you may be the President of the College,
but that as President of the College, you may do the work
which belongs to a minister of Christ.

I know, brother, the oppressive sense of responsibility
which these suggestions may tend to produce ; but I also
know who hath said, " As thy days so shall thy strength be ;"
and I doubt not that in the experience of his promised strength,
renewed day by day, you will find your new sphere as full
of happy and healthful excitement, as it will be of responsi-
bility and care.

And now I have only to add the words of Paul to his son
Timothy : — ■' Be thou an example of the believers, in word,
in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity.
Give attendance to reading, to exhortation, to doctrine.
Take heed unto thyself and unto the doctrine ; continue in
them, for in so doing thou shalt both save thyself and them
that hear thee."

ADDRESS

AT GIVING THE

RIGHT HAND OF FELLOWSHIP,

Eby. theophilus smith,

Pastor of the Church in New Canaan.

ADDRESS.

My dear Brotheb :

You have been already fully ordained to the work of the
Gospel ministry. That ordination, of itself, makes you one
of our number, and entitles you to all the rights and priv-
ileges of a minister in our connection. But it is our custom,
and it accords well with Apostolic usage, publicly to greet
those whom we introduce into the sacred office, and bid them
welcome to our society. This pleasing duty has been as-
signed to me. In behalf, therefore, of this ecclesiastical
council, and of all the ministers of this State, in our con-
nection, I give you the right hand of our fellowship. Re-
ceive it, dear brother, as a token of our strong confidence in
your piety, your soundness in the faith, your ability and
aptness to teach, and your fidelity in respect to the great
spiritual trust now conmiitted to your charge. We cor-
dially welcome you to the work of watching for the souls
of men, and preaching to them the unsearchable riches of
Christ.

Receive, also, this right hand as a pledge that we will be
faithful to you. We will give you our best counsel and as-
sistance. We will be faithful to your good name. We will
interpret your words and actions, in the spirit of Christian
charity. We will hope well respecting your success. And,
remembering the important relation which you are to sustain
to our youth, our churches, and our common country, we
will pray for you, that God may preserve your life and health,

54

that he may illuminate your imderstanding, that he may
strengthen you with might, by his Spirit, in the inner man,
that he may help you to open your mouth boldly and speak
as you ought to speak ; and finally, that he may accept your
ministry, and crown it with success in the salvation of the
young men committed to your charge.

THE

INAUGUEATINa ADDRESS

Rev. JEREMIAH DAY, D.D.,LL.D.,

Senior Fellow and late President.

ADDRESS

TO THE PRESIDENT ELECT.

Rev. and Dear Sir, — As you have been duly elected
President of Yale College, and have signified your accept-
ance of the appointment ; the Board of Trust have authoriz-
ed me to perform, at this time, the ceremony of your induc-
tion into office. In their name, therefore, I put into your
hands, and commit to your charge, the charter, the laws, and
the seal of the College, and I declare you to be invested with
authority to preside over, to instruct, and to govern the Col-
lege ; and confer on you the powers, the responsibilities, and
the privileges which, by tlie charter, and the laws of the in-
stitution, belong to the Presidency.

Permit me to congratulate you. Sir, not that you are in-
troduced to a situation of literary ease, for you will find an
ample field for the employment of your intellectual powers,
and stores of learning, and physical ability ; — not that you
have received an appointment of dignity and distinction, for
the honor of the place belongs not to the mere possession of
it, but to a faithful and successful performance of its du-
ties ; — not that the act of the Trustees invests you with qual-
ifications not previously possessed : But I congratulate you,
that you have now an opportunity of bringing all your pow-
ers, and treasures of literature, to bear upon the single pur-
pose of doing good; of enlarging and influencing the minds
of hundreds of youth, gathered from all parts of our widely
extended country, to be expanded and moulded, under your

58

superintendence and guidance. I congratulate you, that
you have the advantage of long experience, in the govern-
ment and instruction of the College : that in encountering
obstacles Avhich will undoubtedly be thrown across your
path, you may rely on the firm support of a wise and un-
wavering Board of Trust, and the efficient cooperation of an
harmonious band of Instructors. I especially congratulate
you, that you Avill be engaged in a cause in which, with
humble dependence on aid from above, you may expect the
sustaining power of Him who is every where present, and
the rewards which he alone can bestow.

TO THE AUDIENCE.

I have now to ask the indulgence of the audience, while
I make a plain statement of the appropriate duties of the
President of a college. He is to have a general supervision
of all the interests and literary pursuits of the institution ;
and to take such part in its instruction and government, as is
not allotted to the other officers associated with him. To
do this successfully, he must have a distinct apprehension
of the nature and object of an American college ; of such a
college as this is intended to be.

What then is a college ? It is not, or ought not to be, a
mere academy or high-school, with the trifling appendage of
a legal authority to confer degrees. It is a wide departure
from the appropriate design of a college, to make its course
of instruction practically the same as that of a thousand
schools of learning in our land : to undertake to compete
with them in teaching, with rail-road expedition, a little of
every thing.

On the other hand, a college is not, in the proper sense, a
university. Each of the universities of Oxford and Cam-
bridge in England is a collection of numerous colleges. In
Germany, a univ^ersity consists of instructors and students in
the three professions of theology, medicine, and law, togeth-

59

er with a fourth class, prosecuting advanced studies in the
higher departments of science and hterature. The branch-
es taught in our colleges are requisite for admission to the
German universities. The institution which, in that coun-
try, most nearly corresponds to an American college is the
gymnasium, in whicli are taught the elements of literature
and science, pre];aratory to the higlier studies of the univer-
sity. We have, in New Haven, the professional institutions
of Medicine, Law, and Theology. If to these were added,
under the same Board of Trust, a philosophy class, consist-
ing of students far advanced in the higher departments of
learning ; we should then have, even without the College,
the form of a German University. But in this country, we
are too readj^ to be satisfied with the name, without even
the form, certainly without the substance of a university.
Some which are chartered with this high sounding title, are
inferior, in point of literary attainment, even to the gymnasia
or grammar schools of Europe. Was there ever a people
more under the influence of unmeaning sounds? The
Chancellor of one of our chartered universities, who, so far
as appears, is its only instructor, states that as the institution
has no public buildings, he has taught the students in an
apartment in his own dwelling house.

The arrangements in some of the seminaries of learning
in this country have been most absurdly copied from institu-
tions in Europe, to which ours have scarcely any resem-
blance, except in name. But whether we have, or have not,
in New Haven, a claim to the title of a university, the la-
bors and responsibilities of the President are almost wholly
confined to the College proper. This is his appropriate sphere
of action, though as a member of the Board of Trustees, he
may have a nominal relation to the professional departments.

What then is the specific object at which the President of
a college, not the Chancellor of a university, should aim, in
the discharge of the duties of his office. It is not to be^in

60

the education of the students. That has previously been
done, in the preparatory schools. I should rejoice to be able
to say, that the preparation for admission into College is com-
monly made as it ought to be. But here is the radical de-
fect, in the course of a liberal education in this country. It
is idle to think of elevating the character of our colleges, as
long as the students are admitted into them, with hurried
and superficial preparation. The fault is not to be charged
to the instructors of the preparatory schools. They would
do their duty well, if not prevented by the preposterous de-
mands of parents, who are ready to forfeit the privilege of
a thorough education for their children, for the sake of gain-
ing a few months of time. In this country, speed is every
thing ; superior excellence, a secondary consideration.

It is not, however, the proper design of a collegiate course,
to finish a liberal education. It is impossible to teach every
thing in four years. It should be the aim of a college to
lay a solid foimdation, upon which an elevated superstructure
can be afterwards reared ; not such a foundation as can be
laid by every school in the country ; not the basis of such
an education as every individual throughout the community
can obtain ; but a foundation deep and broad, capable of sus-
taining the highest standard of literary eminence which can
any where be found.

A collegiate couree is not intended to embrace, but design-
edly excludes those particular branches which belong re-
spectively to the different professions, occupations, and prac-
tical arts. It comprises those only which ought to be well
understood by evenj man of liberal education. It should be
the aim of the instructors to send forth their pupils well fur-
nished with the elements of literature and science.

But to store their minds richly with the materials of knowl"
edge, is not the only, nor even the principal object of the
undergraduate course. Intellectual discipline is a higher at-
tainment than acquiring learning by instruction. The stu-

01

dies and literary exercises of a college should be adapted to
call into fall play the inventive powers of the students ; to
task their capacity of controlling and invigorating their own
habits of thought ; to develop and regulate the imagination,
to strengthen the reasoning faculties, to form the judgment
to the exercise of nice and correct discrimination.

A still more imperative demand of a public course of in-
struction, is the bringing of the whole, as far as practicable,
under the guidance of moral and religious principle ; render-
ing the students familiar with inspired truth ; giving vigor
to the regulating influence of conscience ; cultivating benev-
olent and spiritual affections ; presenting the motiv^cs which
are drawn from divine and eternal realities ; training the soul
for heaven, and the blissful rewards of immortality.

Moral and religious principles are not cultivated, as many
suppose, at the expense of intellectual improvement. Though
there are instances of students of good talents, who have a
perverse ambition to show the possibility of uniting superior
scliolarship with habits of dissipation ; and on the other
hand, some who arc pious are too remiss in their eff"orts to
extend the influence of their piety, by rapid advances in
knowledge ; yet these are exceptions to the general rule.
Long observation has shown, that the poorest scholars are
commonly found among the idle and vicious ; and that close
application to study is one of the most eflTectual guards
against the temptations to which students are exposed.

The geographical position of a college is not to be disre-
garded by those to whom its interests are intrusted. The
President and his associates have occasion to look well to
their latitude and longitude, to enable them to adapt their
measures to the region from which their pupils are to be
drawn, and the field of action upon which their graduates
are to enter. Yale College is not a German University or
Gymnasium, filled with young men who must either be suc-
cessful in their studies or starve ; accustomed to be gov-

62

erned, not by the influence of their instructors, but by civil
authority, enforced by military sanctions : looking for future
promotion, not from the patronage of fellow citizens of a
free repubhc, but from the favor of an absolute monarch.

It is, and ought to be, very different from a college in a
large commercial city, where most of the students remain in
the families of their parents, and under their immediate in-
spection ; and where the plan of education is accommodated
to the peculiar tastes, and pursuits, and interests of a mer-
cantile population. It is not situated in the interior of New-
England, where the students in the colleges belong mostly
to the neighboring agricultural region ; and where, from the
similarity of their condition in early life, a good degree of
uniformity in their character may be expected. But it is on
the coast, in a place of easy access from all parts of the Uni-
ted States ; bringing together young men of great diversity
of character, early education, and habits of life. It has its
location in the rural city of New Haven ; a place distinguish-
ed for its quiet, and good order, and moral and religious
character ; but still containing numerous haunts of dissipa-
tion, ready to allure to perdition the youth who dares to en-
ter their fatal inclosures. .

A subject which requires much of the attention and soli-
citude of a President of this College, is that of providing and
applying the pecuniary means which are necessary for sus-
taining the institution. We are not in the vicinity of an
opulent city, abounding in men of ample fortunes and liber-
al views, who may be relied upon to contribute bountifully
all that is wanted, not only for the necessary support of a
college, but for its splendid endowment. What we can ex-
pect to receive from the generosity of individuals, must be
in moderate sums, and on the condition that it be expended
with very strict economy. If we can be supplied with the
essentials of a literary establishment, we must be willing to
dispense with some of its elegancies and luxuries. Unceas-

63

ing vigilance over the financial department is necessary, to
prevent the annual expenditure from overbalancing the in-
come. It is extremely hazardous to rely upon charitable
contributions, for the payment of old debts.

The main dependence of the College for its pecuniary sup-
port, must be the term bills of the students. It would be
unwise to throw upon them the ichole expense of their edu-
cation. The public have provided for them buildings, phi-
losophical and chemical apparatus, a library, and a cabinet
of minerals. But the expense of instruction is to be defray-
ed principally from the charges for tuition. If these are not
kept at a moderate rate, the privileges of the College will be
mainly confined to the rich. Young men in moderate cir-
cumstances will resort to cheaper colleges for their education.
But in literary institutions, the rich and the poor should meet
together. While the one class aid in defraying the expen-
ses of a college, the other render it more important service,
by elevating its moral and religious character. The best
materials for a seminary of learning, are the youth who are
dependent on their education for professional success, and el-
evation in society. The point in which a college situated
as ours is, is in most danger of failing, is in the preservation
of good order, sobriety, industry, and economy. Success
in maintaining these must depend very much upon the char-
acter of those who are admitted here. As the government
is one of injluence, not of restraint and terror, it is essential
to its preservation, that there be a majority of the students
on the side of good order, and assiduous application. It is
the wise policy of our Northern colleges, to give special en-
couragement to those who arc in moderate or indigent cir-
cumstances. These, by their salutary influence, induce
others to resort to the same institutions. We have a line of
colleges in the interior of New England, mainly supplied
with students of this character. It is a point of great mo-
ment to the interests of Yale, to adhere to a course of meas-

64

iircs which will secure a fair proportion of this class. The
sons of the opulent too frequently bring discredit on the Col-
lege, by setting examples of extravagant expenditure and
dissipation. To this general remark; however, there are ma-
ny honorable exceptions.

There are two very diverse methods of filling a college
with students. One is adapted to immediate effect. The
other has sl permanent operation. The former accomplishes
its purpose, by making it easy for the student to gain access
to the college, and even to any stage of advanced standing ;
by not making the examinations of the classes so strict as to
rule out any who have once gained admittance ; by rarely
cutting off any for disorderly conduct ; by making its course
of instruction popular and dazzling, rather than solid and
useful ; by conferring degrees on all who can be kept in the
institution, till the appointed time of receiving these testimo-
nials of literary merit. This system of measures has its in-
tended effect for a time. Who would not enter a college in
which the terms of admission and continuance and gradua-
tion are so accommodating ?

But there is another side to the account. The graduate
who has been hurried into and over his collegiate course,
when he enters a professional seminary, or goes abroad
among men of solid attainments, has occasion to measure
himself with those who have been more substantially taught,
and discovers that there is a difference between a partial and
a thorough education ; that as he has conferred no great hon-
or on his diploma, it has conferred little on him ; that dis-
tinguished scholarship is not the result of hasty and superfi-
cial study. Parents also who have sons to be educated be-
gin to inquire, whether there is not a difference between one
seminary of learning and another ; whether all diplomas are
of equal credit, in public estimation ; whether labor-saving col-
leges, like many patented machines, do not turn out an arti-
cle of secondary value ; whether that which costs little, of ei-
ther money or study, is not cheap, in more senses than one.

65

The youth who aspires to any thing above mediocrity will
pass by the college in which he can obtain little more than
the name of an education ; and will go on, till he finds one
which actually teaches what it professes to teach. Novel
projects of hasty and partial courses of instruction, in our
literary institutions, are received with special favor, when
first proposed. The colleges or academies which adopt them
increase in rmmbers, for a short time ; and as rapidly decline,
when the merits of the new measures are tested by their
results.

The way, then, for a college to secure an adequate and
permanent supply of students, is to place its reliance for
numbers wholly on its literary, and moral, and religious
character ; not to receive any who have not the requisite
qualifications for admission ; not to retain an unworthy mem-
ber, for the sake of swelling the number on the catalogue ;
not to confer degrees on any who are undeserving of this tes-
timony of merit. The way to render a diploma an object
of ambition, is to make it a voucher for real scholarship. It
is hazardous for a college to act upon the plan of acquiring
numbers first, and character afterwards. If its character is
well established, the numbers will come. It is neither prob-
able nor desirable, that a college without character should be
permanently supplied with students.

There is one expedient for gaining favor and patronage
for a college, which may be considered a measure of very
questionable policy : — that of being liberal in the distribu-
tion of doctorates. Where one individual is gratified, by re-
ceiving this mark of distinction, ten others may be disap-
pointed that they themselves are overlooked. Besides, these
academic honors are so plentifully bestowed, by our hundred
colleges, that the commodity is very much cheapened in the
market.

Among the various interests which come under the super-
intendence of the President of a college, that which will

9

66

probably giv^e him the least anxiety is the instruction. If
none but able, jadicious, and faithful men are appointed to
office in the institution ; if there is a systematic division and
allotment of the subjects to be taught, so as to preclude the
interference of one with another : and if these are so distri-
buted, that each instructor may know distinctly the part
which he has to perform, and will feel the responsibility
which belongs to it ; there is little danger that the instruc-
tion will not be carried on with ability, and ardor, and suc-
cess. Under these conditions, the motives presented are suf-
ficient to secure intense and assiduous application of the
powers and literary resources of those to whom the several
departments are assigned.

The most difficult problem by far, in the management of
a college, is its discipline. Were there no necessity for this,
the business of the instructors might justly be ranked among
the most eligible of all employments. But the discipline
which they are called to maintain requires so much skill, and
such incessant and self-denying vigilance, that in some insti-
tutions of learning, particularly in Europe, it seems to be
nearly abandoned as impracticable. It would be far better
to abolish our colleges at once, than to attempt to carry for-
ward intellectual education, at a sacrifice of the moral char-
acter of the students. If at the age when they are com-
monly admitted, they are left to corrupt each other, and to
plunge into dissipation and vice ; they will be prepared,
when they go forth into the world, to spread a moral pesti-
lence, wherever their literary superiority will give them a
commanding influence. There was good reason for the
deep solicitude of that most distinguished instructor and
guardian of youth, President D wight, on this subject. When,
in his last hours, he was inquired of, whether he had any
directions to give respecting the College, he merely express-
ed his desire that its discipline might be preserved. Parents
will not send their sons, at this critical age, to an institution

67

in which no effectual provision is made for their moral and
religious interests.

All will agree that order and morality must be maintained
in a college. But it is not so easy to determine Jiow this is
to be etfected. It is not by relying solely or mainly upon
the law of the laud, as is the case in the German universi-
ties, where, according to the report of travelers, even the
theological students are in the practice of fighting duels on
the Sabbath. The statutes of a state or a city might as well
be relied on, for the regulation of a family of children, as
for the discipline of a college.

The early age of our students, which renders college gov-
ernment necessary, determiues what should be the nature of
that government. The imminent dangers to which they are
exposed are to be ascribed, in a great measure, to the fact,
that at this most critical period of life, they are withdrawn
from the immediate superintendence and influence of their
parents. The government in a college, which becomes a
substitute for government in the family, should resemble it,
as much as possible, in its peculiar character. What then
is the nature of the discipline, in a well regulated family ?
It is not mainly a government of restraint and terror, but of
mild and persuasive influence. It maintains its authority,
not by commands and threatenings, but by that winning and
all-pervading kindness which touches, more povv^erfuUy than
law and penalty, the springs of voluntary action. That re-
spect and aflection for teachers which are essential to the
best administration of college govcrmiient are mostly secur-
ed by daily intercourse with the students, in the way of giv-
ing them instruction. For this reason, it is a practical prin-
ciple in Yale College, that no one is to have any share in the
government who is not also an instructor.

Although moral and persuasive influence should be the
chief agency, in the police of a college ; yet this is not to
be relied on. as superseding entirely the necessity of punish-

68

ment. In seminaries of learning, as well as in political
communities, there are refractory spirits, which nothing but
the penalties of law will restrain. In a state, a family, or a
college, that must be a defective government if it deserves
the name of government, which admits of no punishment.
On the other hand, where punishments are frequent, there
must be a great deficiency of that moral influence upon which
the prevention of crimes principally depends. It has been
said, by an eminent philosopher and statesman, with a near
approximation to the truth, that the great art of government
consists in 7iot governing too much. It would be more cor-
rect to say, that it consists in governing j//s^ enough ; neither
too much, nor too little : and still more exactly true, that it
consists in conducting the government in such a way, that
it shall be as little felt as possible, except in its successful re-
sults. This by no means implies, that a governm.ent thus
administered requires less mental labor, than any other, less
constant vigilance, less application of wisely concerted meas-
ures. On the contrary, it calls for all the resources of wis-
dom and benevolent efl'ort, so to adapt the means to the end,
as to secure the desired results, with the least possible inter-
ference with the interests and feelings of the governed. It
requires incessant supervision, but not incessant action. It
imitates the example of a distinguished member of our rev-
olutionary Congress, who was a silent observer in his seat,
as long as he saw that the proceedings were taking a right
direction. His voice v/as heard only when he observed that
something was going wrong. A faithful and discreet officer
of the college has his eye upon the minutest deviations from
correct deportment. But he may sufler them to pass Vvdth-
out censure, if he sees no danger that they will grow into
evils of formidable magnitude. He distinguishes between
the harmless light of the glowworm, and the spark which
is falling on a magazine of powder.

The best college government is that which occasions the
least observation, except by its success. Public punishment

69

may be sometimes necessary. But the benign influence
which is continually moulding the character, and regulating
the deportment of students, is like the silent dew, which
manifests itself only by the charm which it spreads over the
verdure of the morning. All display of authority, all dis-
cipline proceeding from the love of jjower, is to be scrupu-
lously avoided.

It is not suflicient that this College be maintained in its
present position. It must not only be preserved from de-
clension, but must bo continually advancing. This is no
time for giving it the monotonous stability of a monkish in-
stitution. The world around us is in motion : While other
colleges are pushing forward, with ardor and energy, in the
career of improvement, Yale must not be stationary. Sci-
ences, and departments of literature, unknown to a former age,
are claiming a rank among long established courses of study.
There is an unprecedented demand for the application of
scientific principles to the practical arts of life. The rapidi-
ty with which mechanical operations are performed, and the
social and commercial intercourse of the world are effected
by steam, seems to call for some corresponding power wheel,
in our plans of education.

But improvements in the course of study in a college are
among the most difficult and perplexing subjects presented
to the consideration of its guardians and officers. Of the
endless variety of projects proposed, probably net one in ten
will be adopted, without essential modifications, by an expe-
rienced and judicious board of instructors. A man of sound
judgment who looks attentively at the subject, in its various
relations, will soon come to the conclusion, that by no com-
bination of modes of instruction, can every thing be taught
in four years ; that innovation is not of course improvement ;
that every change is not •&. forward movement ; that many
proposed methods of teaching are adapted to academies,
rather than colleges ; that others belong to the professional
departments, or to the period in which the student is to

70

finish his own education, after having laid a soKd foundation
in the college ; that some new and valuable branches of
study cannot be introduced, without crowding out others of
far greater value ; and that many of the changes which we
so frequently hear proposed are better fitted for other states
of society, other national characteristics, other forms of gov-
ernment, than for ours. Stability as well as progress, is
wanted in colleges. When changes are, from time to time,
made, we must beware of losing wliat we have already gain-
ed ; of substituting untried measures, for those which, for
many centuries, have had the united voice of the literary
world in their favor. If useful and ornamental branches are
annexed to the regular collegiate course, let it be done in
such a way, as not to impair its solidity and beauty. While
the tree is, from year to year, spreading wider and wider its
towering branches, great care must be taken, that the trunk
be preserved sound and healthy. It is preposterous to think
of advancing the higher orders of studies, while such as con-
stitute the necessary preparation for these have not been
thoroughly mastered. The battlements and decorations of
the tower are not to be put on, before the foundation is laid.

It would require much more time than can now be allow-
ed me, to specify the numerous improvements which have
been proposed for our literary institutions. I will mention
only one, as a specimen. It has been recommended that the
instructors in our colleges should obtain their support, not
from stated salaries, but from/ees, to be paid by the students
who choose to attend on their instructions. It is urged that,
in no other way, will the necessary stimulants be presented
to professional industry. This is one of Adam Smith's ap-
plications of his principles of political economy to semhiaries
of learning. It supposes that in literature, as well as in
trade, the supply is proportioned to the pecuniary demand.

Is it then true, that those are the ablest and best instruct-
ors who are most under the influence of mercenary motives ?
— that the love of gain is the most powerful stimulus to

71

activity in tlie discharge of official duties ? — that it secures
most effectually the fidelity of Professors and Tutors ? — that
without this, neither moral and religious principle, nor the
obligations of office, nor enthusiastic pursuit of knowledge,
and love of communicating it. will be found sufficient to call
forth the highest efforts of lecturers and teachers ?

Consider how greatly the course of studies in a college
will be modified, by leaving it to the option of the students
to decide, to Avhat branches of learning they shall apply
themselves ; on Avhose instructions they sliall attend. Ac-
cording to the present arrangements in most of our colleges,
the subjects taught are determined by those who have not
only learned their value, by studying them themselves, but
have had opportunity of witnessing their practical applica-
tions to the business of life. They are well qualified to
judge of the comparative importance of dificrent branches
of study. But according to the innovation proposed, the
student is to make his selection of subjects, hefor^e he knows
their nature, from his own investigations. Those which are
really the most important, those which constitute the most
essential portion of a thorough education, are not those which
will most jirobably attract his attention, and engage his pref-
erence. He will be inclined to select the easy, the enter-
taining, the showy ; rather than the solid and practically im-
portant.

The character of the instniciions will also be determined
by the fancies and tastes of the pupils. If the primary ob-
ject of the teacher is to enlarge his income, by increasing
the number of his hearers, he will, like an itinerant lecturer,
aim to make his communications popular rather than solid
and useful. He will bring forward novel and brilliant theo-
ries, rather than weighty and well established truths. It
will be his object to dazzle by the splendor of his diction
and imagery, rather than instruct by a clear and convincing
array of facts and arguments ; to captivate the imagination,
rather than enrich and invigorate the understanding.

72

All discipline in our colleges must be at an end, when the
pecuniary support of the instructors is made immediately de-
pendent on tiie option of the students. If any government
remains, it will be a government exercised by the pupils
over their teachers. The proper police of a college requires
united and harmonious action of all the members of the Fac-
ulty. But what can more effectually kindle jealousy and
discord among them, than to render them rival candidates
for the pecuniary patronage of the students ?

On this point, as well as on many others, we may see the
importance of the distinction between the college proper, and
the professional departments of a university. When young
men have arrived at the age at which they commonly re-
ceive the Bachelor's degree, when they have become well
versed in the elementary principles of science and literature,
and when they understand that their success in the business
of life must depend on the manner in which they prosecute
their professional studies ; they may then be qualified to se-
lect for themselves the subjects which they are to investi-
gate, and the instructions on which they are to attend. In
this stage of education, there is also comparatively little oc-
casion for the exercise of discipline.

Able and faithful instructors in our colleges, are entitled to
an honorable support. But far distant be the day, when the
love of gain shall be, with them, the highest stimulus to
effort. We are stigmatized abroad, as being a money-seek-
ing nation. If there are just grounds for this reproach ; if a
passion for gain pervades all the common departments of in-
dustry and enterprise ; if it spreads corruption through our
political institutions ; if even offices of honor and trust are
sought for, because they are thought to be lucrative ; let
there be at least one field of public labor which the baleful
influence of avarice will not reach. Let it net pollute the
fountains of our literature. Let it not invade the hallowed
precincts of our seminaries of learning.

THE

INAUGUEAL DISCOURSE

Rev. THEODORE DWIGHT WOOLSEY, LL. D.,

President of Yale College.

10

\

DISCOURSE.*

When an individual, who has served his college half a
generation, is simply transferred from one post to another,
it seems hardly necessary that he should set forth his views
of college education, or explain the principles according to
which his own conduct is to be shaped. As for him, he has
been known and read of all men acquainted with the insti-
tution where he is placed : as for college education, it is
to be presumed that he will merely carry out, according to
his ability, principles already established. If revolutionary
changes in discipline or teaching were demanded, the guard-
ians of the college would call in from abroad some stranger,
whose views had not been formed in the institution itself.
To select an important officer within the bosom of the col-
lege, and from the number of the faculty, is a proof that
persons best acquainted with the seat of learning expect no
radical changes, — no improvements, even, but such as result
from tlie system already received. And certainly, if such
were not the case, it would be necessary to seek for an en-
tirely new faculty. I speak in the name of the corps of
teachers, when I say that, while we are sensible of imper-
fections adhering to us as individual teachers, and of other
imperfections arising from want of means to carry out our
system to its legitimate results, and of other imperfections
still, derived from the newness of our country and tlie small

* In justice to himself, the author of this address ought to say tliat it was
composed in the leisure of about a fortnight, at the busiest period of the Col-
lege year, and under the first influence of tlie responsibility of a new office,
in wearying mind and body. Nor has he hud time, since it was delivered, to
read it over. — Dec. 11, 1846.

76

demand here for the most finished education ; we are also
well convinced that the principles of oiu" system, are sound ;
and that its results, small as they are, are enough to encourage
perseverance, and to discourage experiments in an opposite
course. Yale College is from of old at once a conservative
and an enterprising institution, — conservative of great princi-
ples, and of a system which long reflection and experience
have approved ; and enterprising in carrying forward that
system towards its perfection as fast as its means and powers
will allow. And so well convinced have its officers been of
the general correctness and success of the scheme, that any
thing like want of harmony, or important difference of opin-
ion upon leading measures is almost unknown ; we are all of
the same college politics ; — if I may so express myself, progres-
sive conservatives, aiming at carrying out and carrying forward
the principles understood and put in practice during the two
administrations which have lasted for more than fifty years.

But although the circumstances under which I enter into
this new office may not render it necessary to explain my
views of the best practicable college system ; it may yet be
not unsuited to this occasion to enquire what the leading
features of such a system will be, as contemplated from the
highest point of view. In other words, what does Christian-
ity say respecting the training of youth at the time of life,
and in that state of their progress, when they become mem-
bers of our higher institutions ? To what conclusions must
a Christian teacher come with respect to the effect on the
minds of the young to be reached by him as a teacher, when
he looks in the light of Christianity at science, at man, and
at the ends of living here below ? And I wish it to be ob-
served that I speak of such a teacher in his vocation as a
teacher simply : as a man and a Christian man, he may have
important relations to his pupils, which arise from the fact
that he is among them and in contact with them as a teacher.
These relations I have nothing to do with now, and will
leave them out of sight. They belong to a wider division

77

of Christian morality ; and are so far dependent upon the
peculiarities of the individual, that they cannot altogether be
brought under general rules. What I aim at is a matter
which, if it can be ascertained at all, must have an applica-
tion to all teachers, notwithstanding their special traits of
character; to all colleges, notwithstanding special differ-
ences of organization ; to training every where, notwith-
standing the peculiarities of national institutions and manners.
It is to find out, if possible, what a mind thoroughly trained
itself, and taught by experience, would say respecting educa-
tion in colleges, when it looked at them from a Christian
sphere, and contemplated them in their bearings on the best
interests of man.

And in the very terms of this enquiry, I fear that there is
something contained, which shows that I am not the fittest
person to pursue it. If the subject fell to your part. Sir,*
after the experience of nearly fifty years, and in the evening
of what we all believe to be a truly Christian life, we should
receive what you said as a legacy suitable to your character
as a Christian instructor. It would indeed still be an ideal ;
— for who feels that in education we have reached the just
measure of things, even so far as the theory is concerned ?
But it would be an ideal shaped by much thought, harmo-
nizing with long experience, and sketched at an age when
the false gloss of life and the tide of popular opinion have
lost their sway over the mind of the mature Christian. I feel,
Sir, that the best thing I can do is to climb with difficulty to
a position, where I may have that view of my subject, which
is an easy and a natural one for you.

The result aimed at by Christianity will be differently re-
garded, according as the passiv^e or the active element pre-
dominates in the nation or the individual. To some it will
appear as the purification of a vitiated nature, — the effort to
reach perfection. And where this way of thinking pre-

* President Day, who was sitting by tlie side of the author of the address.

78

vails, there will be comparatively little inclination in the
Christian to go out of himself in efforts to benefit his race.
His virtues will be those of self-government, self-denial, and
inward communion with God. His tarn of mind will lead
him to retirement, meditation and tranquil repose. To others,
again, it will appear that to do good to mankind is the end
which Christianity seeks to effect. Those who embrace this
view of goodness, will spend their strength out of themselv^es.
Their virtues will be benevolence and self-sacrifice. Their
propensity will be to live in restless activity, to be urged
forward by hope, to despise whatever is merely theoretical,
and to look away from themselves. When this tendency
becomes extreme, the principles by which the life of the
soul is nourished, dry up ; and the character becomes bustling
and superficial, full of zeal, but deficient in true earnestness.
The man of well balanced mind will not, on the one hand,
be too exclusively dazzled by a beautiful idea of perfection,
nor, on the other, hurried forward by fervent longings for
the accomplishment of good out of himself; but will unite
both these views of character, and attempt to realize both in
his own case. In him neither the passive nor the active ele-
ment will predominate. He will feel that passive virtue is
not the whole of virtue : that contemplation and solitude,
not being the state for which man is made, will prevent
rather than further his perfection ; that truth itself needs the
contact of society to be tested and rendered impressive.
And yet, on the other side, he will feel that self-purification
in itself considered, is a most important thing ; that deep
principles, and frequent meditation upon them, are necessary
even to sustain active habits of an elevated range ; and that
perhaps the worst state into which a man or a nation can be
brought, is to become exclusively practical ; since without
constant recurrence to fundamental truths, the good pursued
becomes earthly instead of heavenly, and the mind loses its
faith and its power.

79

If our remarks are just, the Christiau teacher will try
to avoid both of these extremes — that of overvaluing the-
ory and the improvement of the individual ; and that of
ascribing value only to the practical results of education
in society. The pursuits of a teacher give him naturally
the first of these tendencies. He cannot help regarding sci-
ence as of value in itself, and the communication of it, for its
own sake, as a noble employment. Into the other of these
tendencies, however, he may be led by the pressure of men
without the walls of his seclusion ; if he live in a practical
age, and among a people of an active, energetic character,
he may be led to believe that the exclusive aim in education
is to fit young men for useful and respectable stations in life.
Now Christianity comes in to correct the deficiences of both
of these views. It says to the teacher, "the means which
you employ have immense poAver upon the character which
you form. Those means are truth in the form of science.
If you mistake your means and teach science falsely so called,
instead of the true, your end cannot be attained, for your
means are corrupt at the core. But your end is of immense
importance also. If, you aim at qualifying young men to
get a living merely, or to shine before others, to persuade
and to govern them, you have an unworthy, groveling object
in view ; you degrade education ; and your end must react
upon your means, which will necessarily be divorced from
truth and allied with sophistry. Your true end is to store
the minds of your pupils with true principles, and fit them to
discern, arrange and retain truth, in order to be useful in the
highest sense of that word, in order that they may themselves
be and may make others truly good."

For let it not be imagined that Christianity, in its highest
manifestations, despises the useful. Even the philosophy of
Plato did not go as far as that. The useful, properly under-
stood, is the very point at which Christianity aims. The
truly useful is the good^ or the means to attain to the good.
The utilitariaUj so called, is not faulty in the direction which

80

he takes ; he goes towards the right point of the compass,
but keeps on a dead level, while the progress of the man
who seeks the truly useful is always upwards.

These remarks furnish the basis of several principles
touching the office of the Christian teacher, which, for the
sake of impressing them upon the memory, we will enumerate
under several heads, offering upon each the appropriate con-
siderations.

In the first place, the Christian instructor will value tram-
ing more than knoivledge. For every use which we can
make of our minds, a principle is worth far more than the
knowledge of a thousand applications of the principle ; a
habit of thinking far more than a thousand thoughts to which
the habit might lead ; the increase of a power far more than
a multitude of things accomplished by the power. For the
principle, the habit, and the power, once possessed, are a part
of the mind and go with it in its never ending progress,
while the knowledge and the attainments may be soon for-
gotten or become useless. So it is in this world, and so it
may be in the next. He who enters into another life with
a great stock of knowledge only, may find it all superseded
by higher forms of knowledge which he has no power to ac-
quire ; while he who should begin a new existence with his
mind a mere blank leaf, but with perfectly disciplined pow-
ers, would soon be grappling with the philosophy of heaven.
Just as the principle of goodness is more desirable than a
million good acts without it, if you could suppose such a
thing, — and that because the principle is eternal and the acts
mere passing events, — ;iust so the principles of sound think-
ing are more desu'able than the greatest attainments of the
most knowing among mankind. The mind is not to be
thought of in education as a reservoir, as something merely
receptive, but as a living spring, capable, under proper man-
agement, of throwing out larger and better streams.

The mind too, as trained, is fitted to explore higher truths
with safety, while mere knowledge puffs up, leads to nothing

81

better and indeed in the early periods of life tends to ex-
clude better things. The highly disciplined man never
thinks that he knows every tJmig, never thinks that every
thing can be known, and is therefore modest, teachable and
believing. The man who has stores of knowledge without
a well trained mind can hardly escape from self conceit, and
is liable to credulity or skepticism. It is needless to say,
which of these habits is most allied to the truly philosophi-
cal spirit or most favorable to Christian faith, — to the recep-
tion of the gospel as a little child.

There are views of education current in a part of society
which go quite wide of the mark we have set up. Some,
and among them, " quicquid est ho^nhmm elegantiorum^'^
think the value of a college life to consist in a certain pol-
ish of mind derived chiefly from familiarity with the ancient
classics. If a man can know so much of them as to be sup-
plied with apt quotations in public speaking or in the compa-
ny of men of taste, if the graceful epicureanism of Horace
for instance, or the antique simplicity of Homer, is so per-
manent in his mind, that his memory can furnish him with
allusions or with passages suited to ev^ery circumstance and
character,* the end of education is thought to be accomplish-
ed. He is now qualified to move in a certain refined sphere
for which no perennial fountain of principles would ever fit
him. Such a view of education may be borne in lands
where the minds of the upper classes are stagnant, where
principles are established by law, and the liberty of thinking
like that of " prophesying" is dreaded as the source of revo-
lutions by the rulers ; but it is intolerable in this country,
where some more serious use must be made of our minds,
if we would not have strong-minded but undisciplined men
ride over us, and laugh at the little reach and application of
our knowledge.

* ille profecto

Reddcre persona; scit convenientia cuique. — Hor.
11

82

There are others, and not a few in this country, who would
lay aside the old plans of education, and study, chiefly or ex-
clusively, the natural sciences on account of the stores of
knowledge which they contain. I am by no means willing
to underv^alue these branches of knowledge, and I shall pres-
ently point out one noble use to which they may be turned.
But in the early traiiung of the mind they are fitted to per-
form no great part : being built on observation and experi-
ment, rather than on primary truths discerned by the reason,
and assuming the form of systems chiefly according to the
principle of resemblance and not through the exercise of the
higher logical power, they do not tend to discipline our most
important faculties. Hence very properly they are deferred to
the later period of college life, where the training is nearly
completed. I congratulate our College on the accession
which we have lately received to our corps of instructors in
these sciences ; and I hope to see the time when a school in
all these branches of knowledge shall induce many to reside
here after finishing their college course. But it would be
an injurious thing, if the option were left to students to devote
themselves to such studies extensively at an earlier period.
It would be to substitute knowledge for training, and by
the kind of pursuit to prevent the greatest good for which
colleges exist.

I cannot forbear, here, to mention another defective view
of a collegiate education, referable to the same head, which
however exists rather among students themselves, than
among any of the various sectaries, who discuss the question
how colleges should be managed. It is that the four years
life within these walls is one of elegant leisure, in which the
reading of works of genius, rather than study, is to be the
occupation of each passing day. This heresy in education
finds believers almost only among those, who indolently dread
the conquest of difficulties which lie in the student's path,
and are yet ambitious of shining before their fellows, as hav-
ing extensive acquaintance with polite modern writers. Our

83

large libraries, to which all have free access, promote the
growth oi" this heresy ; and it is therefore our especial duty
to counteract it by urgent warnings and motives. This is
not the occasion to utter those warnings. It is enough to
say that such persons are most imperfectly trained, and will
find out that they are so, when they see themselves falling
behind their sound-minded competitors who have taken an-
other course. Nor is this strange, for they bear blossoms
when they ought to be gathering internal strength. They
not only do not grow, but positively weaken their minds and
their moral powers. If they could understand what hard
labor must be presupposed before a work of genius can be
written, what earnestness of thinking it involves, what plan-
ning, what balancing, what alterations, if not on paper yet
in the mind ; how beauty and nature and sound thought in
the arts require years of pain for their ripeness ; they would
see that it is not so easy a thing after £dl to comprehend crit-
ically a work of genius.

In fact, the hard study requisite to understand principles,
does good to our characters as well as our minds. He who
by close attention has mastered one branch of exact sci-
ence, or who balancing probabilities decides at length how a
written document is to be interpreted, becomes better fitted
for the duties of self-government. Patient of labor, cau-
tious, sagacious, exact, he can look with new eyes upon
character, and is less prone than others to weariness in con-
tending with his faults. He on the contrary who merely
devours knowledge, leaves his moral powers at the end of
his course as he found them, if he do not even vitiate them
by overloading his mind.

In the second place, the Christian teacher will study to
improve all the paris of the mind. No one can doubt that
a wise man will feel the necessity of this : it may be less
evident that it must be a result of Christianity. Yet a little
reflection will make this obvious. Christianity is the great
harmony in this world of God. It causes a harmony be-

84

tween the soul and him : it causes a harmony in the soul,
between the reason and the desires. Can it be doubted
then that it calls us to polish this " bright jewel of the mind"
on all sides. It is the grand, beautifying principle ; and as
in the moral system, it aims at making a beautiful whole
out of rightly arranged members, so in the microcosm of a
single mind, must it aim at the production of beauty, — at a
union and unity of proportionately developed parts. Further-
more, if God has formed all the powers and capacities of the
soul, Christianity must evidently recognize it as his will, that
they should all be cultivated so as to go on towards perfec-
tion together. He who thinks otherwise, who from wrong
religious views, for instance, would neglect the mind for the
heart, or repress some powers of the mind because they are
dangerous, will be revenged upon by that same neglected or
distorted intellect. It will attack him like a savage, in
whom force has grown without reason. It will run into by-
paths of monstrous error or folly, because when it cried
for improvement in a particular power, its voice was un-
heeded.

Perhaps there never was an age \vhen men were so much
exposed to the mischiefs of onesidedness in religion, politics,
and taste, as this. It is an age of cliques and parties, each
of which commands its own press, and throws out reading
matter enough to take up the leisure of its members. How
can a man with his sectarian magazines, his party papers,
his poetry of a particular school, in this publishing age,
help being onesided in some thing or other ; and as religious
ideas, political views, and art, have sympathies or antipa-
thies to another, it follows that onesidedness, if admitted,
must run through the man. What we call ultraism in this
country — where the abundance of the thing seems to have
given birth to the name, — is but the onesided tendency of
minds not fully educated in all their parts, in which truths
have not 3^et found their order and due proportion. One
dwells only on human rights, and democracy or philanthropy

85

takes an extravagant form. Another recoils from such ex-
treme views, and because he thinks they flow from the the-
ory, receives another more baseless, tlius becoming a conser-
vative of the English school, that is to say, a destructive at
home. One is an ultra Calvinist, because he looks at a part
of human nature ; another an ultra Arminian because he
looks at the opposite. How rarely do we see a man who
adheres to that ueaoTt^; which Aristotle regards as the finish
of character. Such a one, when he is to be found, may
have indeed no prominent points to strike the eye, no great
originality, it may be, to interest us ; but by his balance of
mmd and moral powers he towers above us in calm majesty,
like some pyramidal peak reaching up into the clouds.

And so if we confine our attention to the powers of the
mind, we shall find that to train some to the neglect of oth-
ers, is fraught with evil of the worst description. This evil
is twofold. First, the person who is thus unimproved is
felt to be deficient somewhere, and even if men cannot tell
what the precise deficiency is, his power over his fellows is
abridged. Next, the power thus unimproved thirsts for em-
ployment, and being ungratified, raises, so to speak, a rebel-
lion in the mind, — a commotion of feelings which burst
away from the restraints of education, and if strong enough,
subdue the mind to that one power. He, for instance, who
has some imagination, and whose taste in his early training
has been neglected, will be apt to disgust one part of society
and fail of influencing another part by his want of polish,
or, if held down exclusively to studies of the logical sort,
will feel an insuperable aversion to his pursuits, and when he
can, wiU wholly neglect them. We do not indeed suppose
that all minds are alike, or can be equally improved in all
their powers. Sometimes a power is imperfectly developed
but capable under good training of a moderate expansion ;
sometimes, again, a power is developed more than all the
rest, as in the case of those who have a genius for the fine
arts, and then there is need of a particular training suited to

86

the individual ; a college for such a one is an unfortunate
place. But for the mass of minds an education nearly uni-
form may be adopted with success. And the obstacles to
that success arise from the moral rather than the intellectual
nature.

The evil of onesidedness in education never appears so
great, as when you take one kind of studies by itself, and
think what must be the tendencies of a mind trained by their
exclusive influence. The most important single department
in our course is the mathematics, pure and applied. It just-
ly claims this superior place, and far be the day, when the
officers of this seat of learning shall think otherwise. I
would sooner enlarge its sphere and increase its weight in
determining college honors, than rob it of any of its present
importance. But who does not see that if education were
pursued only in a mathematical direction from the earliest
years, the mind would fail to perceive the force of moral
reasoning, and be liable to skepticism on the most momen-
tous subjects ; and that the judgment, which is strengthened
now by another branch of study, would be left weak and
unfit for the purposes of life. In the same manner the ex-
chisive study of moral truth, might train the mind to search
chiefly after final causes, and feel as Socrates* did, that there
is no science but that of the end and design of things. The
natural sciences, occupying all the attention, would improve
the inductive, but not the deductive powers. The cultiva-
tion of the taste alone, by the study of art, would spoil a
mind for usefulness and enjoyment. The entire devotion of
the mind to historical pursuits would lead it away from prin-
ciples to mere events, and might even incapacitate it to see
the principles of the historical science itself

I cannot leave this topic without noticing a defect in our
system of education, which does not at present admit of a
complete remedy, and which must be felt in order that a

* Plato's PliiEdo.

87

remedy may be provided. I refer to our imperfect training
of the feeling for the beautiful, to our neglect of the impor-
tant field of literary criticism. What we do is to open the
fountains of elegant writing in prose and verse which the
ancients have left us ; to accustom the student to a correct
style, by pointing out his faults in composition ; and to
teach the art of rhetoric, both in the theory and in the exam-
ination of one of the masterpieces of antiquity. But our
teaching in the classics does little else but call into use those
faculties which are concerned in discovering the sense of an
author ; and leaves the taste to imbibe that insensible and
unconscious improvement, which grows out of familiarity
with the beautiful ; our exercises in composition can be only
the exemplification of the rules of grammar and rhetoric ;
while our rhetoric itself, having a practical end — persuasion
— in view, concerns itself rather with the most effective ar-
rangement of words, thoughts, and arguments, than with the
laws of perfection in art. And indeed we are able to do
but little more ; for strange as it is, there is a woful defi-
ciency of works in the science of the beautiful in our lan-
guage. The French school of taste and its English imita-
tors are now exploded ; the last century and its philosophy
produced no works on taste, which at this time satisfy our
minds ; while the few specimens of just criticism with
which the present age has supplied us, are chiefly oracular
fragments of writers, who either judge intuitively and have
no theory, or who have never published their theory to the
world. And then even in the lower department of the his-
tory of literature, there are, I believe, no text-books acces-
sible, which meet all our wants. As for the laws of the
beautiful in music, architecture, sculpture, and painting, they
are quite out of our view ; we have scarcely contemplated
them as having any thing to do with the training of that
" divincB particula aurcB,^' which might in this world be ed-
ucated to behold, both here and hereafter, the wondrously
beautiful and grand forms which fill the creation of God.

88

The result of all this is that the logical faculty has too much
preeminence in our education ; we train up those who will
reason correctly, and it may be forcibly, at the bar and in
the pulpit ; but they become hard dry men, men who will
neither receive nor give pleasure from their elegance of taste,
and refined appreciation of art. This evil is not likely to
be soon corrected, as is made probable by its universality,
and by the fact that the still reigning philosophy has another
end — the useful — almost exclusively in view. But we can
still make some resistance, even if it be an imperfect one,
to the evil. We can teach the classics more with reference
to elegance of style and artistic arrangement. We can
bring the fine arts within the range of education. We can
make use of sound works on the laws of taste as they arise,
and thus oppose the influence of that unhealthy and unre-
flecting school, which decides every thing by feeling only,
without being aware of a single law. And when we
have a system in this neglected department which will bring
it to the level of the others, we may expect the happiest re-
sults. There will then be a class of educated men, whose
minds, through the study of the beautiful in art, will be
brought into unison with the beautiful in conduct and mo-
rals, who will be alive to impressions derived from the har-
mony of a perfect nature, and averse to those discords which
oppose the Christian spirit of love. What the ancients
meant to do by the element of music in their system, will
then be accomplished. We cannot doubt, if a number of
men of a delicate ear for musical sounds, were suddenly, in
the midst of an altercation, to hear some noble harmony,
that it would compose, subdue, pacify, and tend to unite
them. And in the same way, a body of men, of tastes at
once delicate and healthy, would mitigate the fierceness of
political and theological strife in our country, and by their
elevated standard would tend to make us feel that kind of
cultivation to be necessary in which we are now most de-
ficient. That the taste must be more and more cultivated

89

in this country is apparent. But the danger now is that the
vocation will fall into bad hands ; that either a taste will be
promoted which has only to do with externals, — with sen-
sual and not with spiritual beauty ; or that an erratic wild-
fire, miscalled taste, without laws or a rationale, will seat
itself in the throne of criticism.

In the third place, we wish to speak more at length of a
subject which we have already touched upon in passing, that
the Christian teacher in a college, will estimate education
not so much by its relation to immediate ends of a practical
sort, as by its relation to higher ends, far more important
than success in a profession, and the power of acquiring
wealth and honor. He will value science to some extent
for its own sake. He will value it also as a necessary means
for the formation of a perfect mind, and of an individual fit-
ted for high usefulness. As for such results as success and
reputation, he will by no means despise them, but regarding
other ends as nobler and more important, he will believe that
according to the system of God in this world, the attain-
ment of the better, will involve that of the less worthy.
Just as we most secure our happiness when we arc most
willing to sacrifice it, while he who saveth his life shall lose
it, just so do we make most certain the lower purposes of
education when we aim at the higher. And if we fail of
the lower, there is still remaining after all the priceless mind,
— all ready for usefulness, strong in its love of truth, imbued
with the knowledge of principles, unwilling to stoop to what
is low, and containing within itself a fountain of happiness.

Few will question, I think, that these views are in ac-
cordance with the spirit of Christianity. Whether we re-
gard the end of living here below, which it proposes, as be-
ing benevolent action or the perfection of the individual,
these views are equally demanded by a religion which post-
pones our material to our spiritual interests, and teaches that
both usefulness and character are dependent on a healthy

12

90

discipline of the mind. It is certainly against the genius of
Christianity to make the speedy or the easy result of a thing
the measure of its value, or to think the mind itself of
less importance than its condition in life. If a truly good
training made a man poor instead of rich, despised instead
of honored, Christianity would not hesitate to say that it
must be preferred. She is indeed far from fighting against
the practical, after the fashion of some natures, Avho dread
the thought of any thing to be done, and admire the un-
attainable as they do the absolute. No ! She is much more
humble in her pretensions, and mightier in her results, than
if she encouraged this manner of thinking. But then on
the other hand, she is hostile, and by her very nature hostile
to the practical, so understood as to refer only to time,
worldly interests, and professional success. She is hostile
also to that habit of making the common mind the measure
and judge of usefulness and truth, which reacts upon educa-
tion to lower its sphere. Just as experience opposes miracles
and the understanding mysteries, — two things which Chris-
tianity will not part with unless she is robbed of them, — ^just
so a worldly mind, burning to act its chosen part in life, op-
poses a reference to any higher end ; and a common imder-
standing, perceiving how little science has to do with ordi-
nary affairs, disbelieves in science and sees in it no dignity
or worth. In all these four cases, Christianity corrects mis-
impressions by raising the soul above its wonted earthly
level. To experience she says, that there is a higher world,
and if so, that it is not strange that communications from it
to this world of ours should be needed and should be made.
To the understanding she says, that it was not nitended to
be the measure of all things ; and that if there are mys-
teries, they need to be known that we may recognize our
position as finite creatures. And in the same way she says
to the worldly mind, that there are higher things with which
it ought to be brought into communication ; and to the prac-
tical understanding, that science, which is of God, is of in-

91

finite use, and is needed by our nature if we would not fall
into credulity or skepticism.

This consideration that the highest end in the training of
the inind involves the lower — that an education which com-
mon minds would not call practical, is the most practical
after all, is one of no small importance. If it be true, it
tends to reconcile all the views of education and all the ends
of living, which can be called, with any justice, conformable
to our nature. If it be not true, there must be a clashhig of
our higher and lower natures on so momentous a point as the
moulding of an immortal mind ; and either two kinds of edu-
cation must be provided — one for those who have success in
a profession before their eyes, and the other for those who
seek the improvement of their powers as something good
and great ; — or if there be but one mode of education, the
youth will have a discord of feelings within him, which
nothing can allay. I can think but of two objections to it,
both of which are shown to be without foundation. The
one is of a general nature ; that great scientific attainments,
and great cultivation of mind unlit men for the duties of the
world, both by disinclining them to the society of their fel-
low men, and by shaping their habits of thought and style
of expression into something estranged from unlettered life.
You form, it will be said, a caste, whose sympathies, whose
very language is removed from communion with mankind.
This would be true, if education continued, in the sense in
which we have used it, throughout life ; if habits of asso-
ciation with others — formed under the influence of duty or
self-interest. — did not correct whatever tendency to the pas-
sive, the shrinking and the incommunicative, a cloistral dis-
cipline may have produced. We all know that a literary
man is not usually the person to act immediately upon the
mass of men ; and that when he originates something good,
his thoughts need to be translated into other language for the
use of the world. But we are not aiming to give a decidedly
scientific tendency to the mind, nor to overcultivate the

92

taste : — that would fall under the condemnation of onesided-
ness, of which we have just spoken. We aim rather at this
— to fit young men for what is truly useful in practical life,
at the same time that Ave keep a higher end in view. The
other objection to the principle laid down is one of di partic-
ular kind, and partly involved in the former. It is said, or
at least felt, that attainments in scholarship, philosophical
training, the love of truth, are rather obstacles in the course
of political advancement. He who has attained to power
over the multitude, and the young man who learns from the
anxieties of political parties that such power is a great good,
must feel that thoroughness and soundness in any thing, even
in moral principles, do not aid in that kind of promotion so
much as power of expression, unblushing confidence, knowl-
edge of mankind, and a certain self-command. Armed with
these powers, and nothing else, he can outrun anj^ philosopher
or man of taste or learning, who is without them. To this
objection, we answer by a confession of its justice. We
much doubt whether a college training is at all necessary for
political success, and whether the name of an education is
not more advantageous than the thing itself A little knowl-
edge, gathered at small expense of toil, a kind of philosophy
about human rights, if we must call it so, which the most
simple can understand, a seeming readiness to submit to the
popular voice, united with a dexterity in leadiug it, — these
are not intentionally fostered, I take it upon me to say, in
any respectable institution in our country. And far be from
us such a tendency in education. Rather than train so, I
would — to use Plato's words — whisper to two or three young
men in a corner, or even walk through empty halls. I should
not like to die with this weight on my soul, that I had taken
into my hands a block of the finest marble, and cut it into
the form of a demagogue.

If we needed to see the evils of the lower practical views
of education, when pursued to the neglect of the higher, we
might find them in the history of a class of men, who played

no small part in their times, and turned a name, before held
in honor, into a by-word. Tho sophists of Greece, as a body,
were by no means wanting in talents, and their great influ-
ence is shown by the important posts in their respective
states which several of them were called to fill. They
almost monopolized the knowledge of the time, especially in
the infant sciences relating to nature. They cultivated style
and external grace to such a degree as to fill their country-
men with admiration, so that while Socrates subsisted poorly
upon a few oboli a day, contributed by his friends, they
sometimes received a talent for a single lecture. It is won-
derful that such great men would condescend to be teachers of
youth, but condescend they did, because their practical spirit
told them that a rich young Athenian, of high descent, or a
Thessalian noble, was not to be taught for nothing. Now
with what aims did they approach these young men, and
what attractions did they hold out ? They began with de-
nying the existence of science and the possibility of a scien-
tific training. "There is no truth," they said, or "man is
the measure of all things, and whatever seems true to him,
that is true," or "science is the same as sensation." Next
they discarded the study of philosophy, as unfitting its stu-
dents for political life. There was no motive for pursuing
trutii, because the true was less fitted to persuade than the
probable. To this would naturally succeed the choice of
such studies as were likely to make men persuade, dazzle and
govern. Rhetoric, tho use of the poets, a smattering of
knowledge of various sorts, — these were the means, and a
place of influence, the power to control the people, the su-
premacy in the courts, the ends. And we must do them the
justice to say that they understood their calling. But then
they educated in such a way, that the young lost all moral
principle under their instructions, and became frivolous,
shallow and skeptical ; that ancient reverence and fidelity
disappeared ; that chicanery increased ; that the creative
branches of literature died out. And had not a reaction, be-

94

gun by one remarkable man of nobler aims, stayed in part
the mischief, it is not unlikely that the sophists would hav^e
taken from the Greeks the power to excel in philosophy and
the plastic arts.

A result of the lower views of education, naturally sug-
gested by this example of the sophists, is seen in the undue
estimate which is attached by many to ready and fluent
speaking and writing. I fear that there is something in our
form of government to encourage this view, and that oiu:
seats of learning, if they do not favor, cannot eifectually
oppose it. But it appears to me to be disastrous in its efiects,
both on the mind and the character of a young person. Let
us suppose him to possess this readiness in an extreme de-
gree : that he has become dextrous enough to take either
side of a question, and, without preparation, manage it so as
to astonish men by his rapidity and cleverness ; and that,
standing before an audience, he will not be terrified, but go
through to the end in the full possession of his intellect.
Let us suppose that his teachers or his fellow-students regard
it as an important end of a college life to acquire this skill.
Now must not the effect on him be to give him an instrument,
before he is thoroughly trained or stored with knowledge, by
which he can set off to the best advantage the smallest quan-
tity of thought ? Will not this accomphshment, if it may
be called so, if acquired thus early, lead him to undervalue
truth, of which, as yet, he knows but little, and overvalue
the instrument by which he may shine at once, and, as it
were, enter into life while yet on its threshold ? And with
his rev^erence for truth, must he not lose his modesty, seeing
that he has an instrument which he can wave about and
make glitter in every body's eyes ? And with the two, must
he not lose his solidity of mind and character, his patience of
labor, his faith in the far-reaching value of a thorough edu-
cation ?

The same undue estimate of the value of a practical disci-
pline inclines many to introduce into the college course,

95

studies which belong to the professional hie. This pressure
must be resisted ahogether, if an instructor wishes to adhere
to the idea of a sohd education, or to see any fruit of his la-
bors. It is one of the most obvions and serious evils in our
country, that men rush into the ultimate jmrsuit for which
they design themselves, long before they are ready. In this
way immaturity, the habit of grappling with subjects beyond
one's reach, want of caution, self-conceit, and a superficial ac-
quaintance with the principles of the profession are produced ;
and the professions are crowded with men who feel, when it
is too late, that they have built without a foundation, that
they have neither compass nor accuracy of thought. The
course which is at once most for the advantage of a young
man and for the interests of learning, is to make him feel
that his education needs rather to be prolonged than con-
tracted ; and that it will be greatly for his usefulness to con-
tinue improving himself by studies extraneous to his profes-
sion, both while he is acquiring it and after he has entered
upon his career. I know it is said that a man who would
succeed in his pursuit, must be "wholly given to it," but no
maxim could be more false, if it be intended to exclude the
acquisition, as a subordinate thing, of knowledge in which
all well educated men may partake. Under proper regula-
tions it consumes no time, for it is a relaxation of the mind
from the monotony of one pursuit : it does not interfere with
progress, by cultivating other habits of mind, for every power
of mind is needed in every profession for the highest useful-
ness : it does not injure professional thoroughness by acquaint-
ance with other branches of knowledge, for as all the sci-
ences have relations to one another, these unprofessional ac-
complishments will be an important help in understanding
the studies to which one has given himself. An instructor,
therefore, will inculcate on his pupils, not that they can
mingle the pursuits of the college and of after life together,
in the years of pre])aration ; but, on the contrary, tliat edu-
cation never ends, and that, when they Eire their own mas-

96

ters, they should carry out, in some direction or other, a
course of training as long as they live. In the higher sense
of the word education, it never ought to end ; the only dif-
ference in the various stages of it depends on the maturity
of judgment of the individual, and his necessary employ-
ments. At first it goes forward without his option, and
when no motives drawn from the immediate results of his
studies disturb his mind. Next, he submits to the law of di-
vision of labor, which governs all employments, but needs
not to confine his mind to the narrowness of one pursuit.
Afterwards he can and ought so to govern his time, that the
injury to his mind from the belittling cares of a single em-
ployment shall be prevented, and its growth promoted in what-
ever is good. He who feels that his education is at an end
when he leaves college, or even when he enters into his pro-
fession, is in the condition of one who thinks he has reached
moral perfection. The mistake in the latter case arises from
self-ignorance, or from ignorance of the exceeding broadness
of the moral rule. Ignorance is equally the cause of the
former mistake, but it is more venial, because we all use
language upon this subject which overlooks the future and
higher results of education.

In the fourth and last place, a Christian instructor will, as
far as lies within the range of his department, lead the minds
of his pupils up to God. I speak now, it will be observed,
not of what he may do as a benevolent individual, aside from
his teachings in the sphere where he moves, to amend or es-
tablish those over whom he has an influence, but of the gen-
eral spirit of his teachings, which will connect science or
learning wherever it has a connection with the author of sci-
ence and of our minds. That Christianity demands as much
as this, will not be doubted. There are indeed some de-
partments where this can be done but in a small degree or
not at all. Thus instruction in heathen literature, seldom
finds good opportunities of raising the thoughts to God ;
and the same is true in a much greater degree of the pure

97

mathematics, which have to do with abstract and necessary
truth, such as does not even involve the divine existence. But
mixed mathematics, and especially astronomy, all the natural
sciences, psychology and morals, furnish a noble field for a
devout mind to enforce the relations of the highest truth
to truths of the lower order. When they are not thus en-
forced, when nature is treated by the philosophical man as
a dead carcase, when he teaches that he has nothing to do
with final causes, or marks of grandeur of conception in the
universe, he not only fails of doing a great good, but he pos-
itively allies himself with a spirit which would banish God
from the creation. If philosophy aim only at practical results
in relation to material interests, or onl]/" at the mere develop-
ment of science, her mission is fulfilled much in the same
way as some parents fulfil theirs, by teaching no religious
principles to their children, and leaving them to form their
own faith when they grow up. Philosophy necessarily allies
itself in the mind of the man of science with some view con-
cerning a creation and a providence, either one which runs
into atheism and materialism, or one which finds in God the
source and end of all things. Neutrality here, it appears to
me, is impossible. The Christian teacher of a science where
contrivance and final causes can be traced, will feel some-
what as the great Architect himself must have felt in the
arrangement of things; that the end is the thing of most
importance, and where it can be traced, he will listen de-
voutly to its voice as a revelation concerning the great De-
.signer. I know that some discard the search after final
causes, on the ground that every new discovery in science
tends to carry us back to some higher law unknown before,
from which the final cause, as it is called, must necessarily
arise. I know, too, that what wo call final is not in reality
so, and that we must allow that there are infinite dcjjths in
the divine mind which we cannot explore. But is it any
the less a proof of a divine intelhgence at work, that what
13

98

we have called a contrivance is the evolution of a law ? Or
must we refrain from wondering at the divine counsels until
we have explored them all, — that is, until we become infinite
ourselves. Or rather does it not present to us a higher idea
of God, that his wisdom manifests itself through laws which
rise in their generality until they span round the creation,
and that his purposes ascend, as we behold them, one behind
another, until to our eye they are lost in the clouds. We
need not fear, then, that any new form of science will take
away from the teacher his privilege of conducting his pupils
up to God, any more than we need fear that some new light,
or rather new darkness, will show that this great temple of
nature is without a divinity, this immense body without a
soul.

And to what most estimable habits of mind ought not
this mode of contemplating nature and man to open the way.
No blind and unconscious dynamics — no "mechanique ce-
leste"— but celestial law, emanating from the highest intel-
lect, controls the world ; and being understood, awes the mind
into reverence and harmony. The laws of nature introduce
the mind to the laws of the moral world, and the two sys-
tems are seen to assume each other's existence, and to be
from one author. Nothing now appears fortuitous or arbi-
trary or irrational. The perception of great designs in the
universe, makes the mind unwilHng to act without a plan
worthy of its capacities. It is unable any longer to feel as-
tonishment at the puny efforts of man ; and instead of that
hero-worship, that stupid gaze at men of genius which is so
common and so much fostered at this day, it worships the
almighty architect, the author of beauty, the law-giver of
the creation.

It might be asked here, whether a corps of Christian
teachers having thus guided their pupils in the study of
divine wisdom, as displayed in the universe, ought not to
go beyond the vestibule, and enter in procession into the
inner temple, which is full of the presence of Christ. Or

99

must they, as profane, stop without, and leave it to other
guides, wliose calling it is, to show the wonders within? Is
it a fruit of the lamentable jealousies among Christian sects,
that instruction ex professo in the Christian religion cannot
be given in colleges unless we seem to make them sectarian,
and thus increase distinctions, which are great enough already.
These are grave questions, which it comports not with this
time to answer fully. At present, the science of sciences lies
neglected by almost all except ministers of the Gospel. It
forms, properly speaking, no branch of education : even the
Scriptures themselves are little studied out of voluntary
classes. Meanwhile, causes are at work to undermine the
religious faith with which young men have been imbued by
their fathers, causes, too, which must have the more influ-
ence, as the literary cultivation of our young men increases.
The tendency to materialism on one side, and to pantheism
on another, the literature of atheistic despair and sensualism,
and the historic engines battering the walls of fact, must
cause a multitude of minds in the next age to be assailed by
religious doubts : and snares seem to be set for faith in rev-
elation on every side. How desirable, if all this be not mere
alarm, if the fears of many portending some crisis, in which
the old shapes of things shall be broken up, be not entirely
idle ; how desirable, I say, that our educated young men
should be taught a theology so liberal — if that might bj —
as not to pertain to the party, but to universal Christianity,
and so majestic in its outlines as to recommend itself to the
consciousness, and make it own the presence of God.

How elevated, then, is the post of a Christian teacher in
one of the most frequented and influential places of learning
in this great country. For my part, I must avow the con-
viction that all executive functions and names of authority
by which one college officer is severed from the rest, sink
into insignificance before this oflice of teacher, which is com-
mon to all. And this equality has led, in this Collego, and
ought to lead, to a theory of government which precludes

eSOB"^ A

100

every thing arbitrary on the part of one man. and divides the
labors and the responsibihties of administration among a
whole facuUy. To have carried out this theory in ahnost
perfect harmony, is the boast of this College : is a secret of
its success, and a pledge of what it may accomplish hereafter.
Such harmony implies a harmonizing principle, — that same
tone of moral feeling which is necessary to qualify a man for
the office of teacher in the highest sense. Let us keep this
in view, Gentlemen of the Faculty, that our true success,
nay, even that our outward success depends much upon the
purity of our aims. If a man is a truer philosopher, he is
also a better teacher and disciplinarian for being governed by
Christian principles. As for myself, in taking upon me this
undesired office, it is an unspeakable strength to feel that I
am among men whose prmciples, after long acquaintance, I
can trust. And something of that same trust you extend
towards me, or 3^ou must, for the first time, have deceived
me. We have, then, a source of union in common views
and mutual confidence. We have united together in lament-
ing that the time had come, when our beloved Head felt it too
much for his strength to be one of us longer, and gladly, as
in the case of King Hezekiah, would we have seen fifteen
years of vigorous health added to the days of his Presidency.
We ivill iinite, I doubt not, in carrying forward and improv-
ing our system, as fast as the means within our reach will
allow. It is wonderful what progress this institution has
made within the last nine and twenty years. It will not
be wonderful, but rather an easy result of past success, if,
in the years now to come, we make even a greater progress.
If God help us, and if our graduates stand by us with the
same cordiality which they have shown hitherto, it will be
our fault and our shame, if we stay still or go backwards.
Let us, with the highest ends of education in view, and with
a fervent desire to have Yale College a light and a blessing
to our land, act faithfully our appointed parts, and I doubt
not that God will be with us.

RUG 2 1 t930