Chapter 5
Man is a unit, but inasmuch as God has endowed him with various capacities, his highest glory should be to develop them. The only limit to the college student is his native abilities and aptitudes, modified by the parental training, various social influences, and the preliminary discipline in the public schools. The college that receives the students, with their different aims and predilections and acquirements, and leads them to appreciate the greater possibilities of their natures, and arouses and encourages them to strive for their fullest development, is worthy of confidence and support.
A symmetrically developed manhood or womanhood implies _the training of the mind to think accurately and systematically_. The tried and historic conception of education is expressed in the Latin word, _educare_: to lead out. It is to draw out of the living soul, by the aid of books, appliances, and instructors, all its latent capacities, to help in the formation of correct intellectual habits, and pre-eminently to form character, and thus to enrich and broaden the whole range of life. The purpose of a liberal education is not to cram the mind with facts and principles, but "to build up and build out the mind" by the natural process of growth, so that all knowledge from without will be assimilated by a living mental organism. The important work of the college is to develop intellectual power. It is to aid in giving such a directive power of mind as will enable the student, by a fixed determination, to recall facts, apply principles, and perform acts as if they were spontaneous. It is so to train the judgment and reasoning faculties of the student that in the end he will have acquired power to do earnest intellectual work.
The direct aim of the instruction in college is to give the student access to vital and formative knowledge by studying man and his works, and nature and her works. He is thus led to know himself and to know the world, and the laws which govern nature, and man as a part of nature. He comes to see things as they are and to understand the laws of things, and thus he thinks and acts on more perfect knowledge. If the student is to be trained to independent thought and action, he must have a sounder basis of knowledge than the teachings of those whose ideas and opinions are shaped by current, ephemeral literature. The majority of men act on too imperfect knowledge, because they will not take the time and exercise the patience to study the facts and principles relating to any given subject, and to do their own thinking. Goethe says: "To act is easy, to think is hard." The remedy is found in the college courses of study which involve the study of ourselves through psychology, logic, and mental, moral, political and social philosophy, and the study of nature through the sciences and the laws of the world about us.
Another method, aside from the nature and scope of the studies pursued, to attain the end, is through the strong personality of the college professor. Alexander the Great said: "Philip gave me life, Aristotle taught me how to live well," and Emerson's judgment was that "it is little matter what you learn; the question is, with whom you learn." It is within the power of the college professor to help enlighten the understanding, strengthen and guide the intuitions and reasoning faculties, and to awaken within the student a consciousness of his new powers and capacities, and incite him to mental activity. The highest scholastic training demands that the professor studiously avoid all those methods of instruction which tend to mechanical habits of thought, and which check the mind's spontaneity of growth and repress the individuality so essential to true scholarship.
Incidental to intellectual culture in college is the ability to find promptly the information we want. "Next to knowing a thing," says Dr. Johnson, "is to know where to find it." No student can become a walking encyclopædia, but he should learn while in college how to avail himself advantageously of reference books, libraries and other sources of information.
A college education likewise implies the ability to express one's ideas in a clear, appropriate style. The student should be able to tell what he knows. This clearness of thought and precision of expression is best acquired in the class room, in the literary societies, and in the classes devoted especially to the study of expression.
The intellectual aim of a college should be not only to awaken and develop independent thinking power as an abiding impulse which will prompt to effective intellectual work, but withal the will, the imagination, and emotive nature should be so trained that the student will have a mental taste and moral appreciation for the best and noblest thought. Mental discipline and the dull routine of study will become cold and insipid unless the student is inducted into those fields of science and literature where he will find the richest sources of refined and elevating pleasures, and through them be incited to noble action. It is on these lines of study that the student acquires that spirit of study which becomes spontaneous, attractive, and joyous. He loves culture for culture's sake, and does not abandon its acquisition on leaving college.
A symmetrically developed manhood or womanhood involves _physical culture_. The ascetic idea of college life no longer prevails. The body, as well as the mind, is trained. The value to a student of good health and an alert and vigorous body cannot be overestimated. Educators are coming to realize more fully than in the past that the physical and psychical factors of life are inseparable. The body and mind are mutually related and affected. Systematic exercise stimulates quickness of mental processes and promotes brain power.
The leading American colleges are conducted on better physiological and hygienic principles than in the past. The student, on entering college, is subject to a careful physical examination by a competent physician, and a course of systematic physical training is prescribed. Any organic defect or incipient disease is discovered, and, if possible, corrected. Physical training has become an integral part of a good college course. Exercise is largely compulsory, because studious and ambitious students are likely to sacrifice physical for intellectual training.
A well-equipped gymnasium is essential for the most thorough physical culture. Bath-rooms, with facilities for plunge and shower baths, are an important adjunct in promoting that healthy condition of the skin which follows from frequent bathing. An athletic field for outdoor sports is, likewise, a valuable accessory to develop a lithe and active body.
The master of the gymnasium is generally a vigorous and enthusiastic instructor, who is able to conduct skillfully daily gymnastic class work, and relieve monotony and evoke interest by introducing a variety of exercises for the different college classes. He is also the hygienic adviser in all matters relating to study and recreation. The students are taught that regular exercise, sufficient sleep, personal cleanliness, and proper diet will correct most of the so-called pernicious effects of over-study.
Outdoor sports, under proper restrictions, promote health and foster mental qualities. Foot-ball and base-ball have gained an undue prominence in some colleges. It is questionable whether they are the most desirable forms of exercise for physical development, since only a very small portion of the students at any one time can engage in them.
The evil features of inter-collegiate games, especially as practiced, offset their advantages. The undue excitement and spirit of rivalry fostered is foreign to the true idea of an earnest student life. The college is no monastery to make the student a recluse, but it should be a place of solitude, a modern cloister, where the student may be kept in partial isolation and away from the turbulent stream of public life and distracting social influences. The student may keep in the midst of the current of actual modern thought and life without sacrificing the quiet seclusion which is an essential requirement for the best scholarship.
These inter-collegiate games have been attended with temptations perilous to character. Abundant testimony is not wanting to show that their tendency has been toward rowdyism, gambling, debauchery, and other disgraceful conduct. Some of the games scarcely rise above the brutality of the prize fight. They have no elevating tendency, and no apology can be made for their roughness and bad moral effects.
The fine natural instincts of the majority of American people are repelled at such physical prowess. It is not necessary to introduce the element of pugilism in order to give vent to the superabundance of youthful animal spirits.
The abuse of these outdoor sports should not make us blind to the fact that they have a legitimate use. It is wiser to control and direct them than to curb the exuberance of good feeling which they call forth, and which might find expression in less appropriate channels. It should be borne in mind that all physical training is a failure unless the aim is to maintain and develop health, to make the student symmetrical, strong, graceful and better fitted for the duties of living.
A symmetrical development involves, likewise, _the cultivation of the moral and spiritual nature_.
The Christian religion affords the broadest educational basis, because it presents the most exalted notion of personality and its development. It takes account of the deepest facts of our nature, and teaches philosophical principles that are true for all created intelligences. Hence it is that Christianity is essential to the best educational system. It precedes and governs true education. A narrow and false conception of man leads to building only one side of his nature. The will, the conscience, the emotional and spiritual natures demand a share in the broadest culture. We cannot divide these essential elements against themselves. The religious sentiment is so interwoven with our being that it cannot be eliminated or dethroned. It takes no subordinate place, because it is supreme. There is no true theory of life without the spiritual element. All theories of education and principles of action that do not recognize the relations of the human soul to the supernatural are out of harmony with the laws governing human life.
These truths have been impressed on the noblest minds. "The greatest thought," said Daniel Webster, "that ever entered my mind, is the thought of my personal accountability to God." And Channing says that "man's relation to God is the great quickening truth, throwing all other truths into insignificance, and a truth which, however obscured and paralyzed by the many errors which ignorance and fraud have hitherto linked with it, has ever been a chief spring of human improvement. We look to it as the true life of the intellect. No man can be just to himself, can comprehend his own existence, can put forth all his powers with an heroic confidence, can deserve to be the guide and inspirer of other minds, till he has risen to communion with the Supreme Mind; till he feels his filial connection with the Universal Parent; till he regards himself as the recipient and minister of the Infinite Spirit; till he feels his consecration to the ends which religion unfolds; till he rises above human opinion, and is moved by a higher impulse than fame."
The Christian religion is in harmony with intellectual activity, because it favors application to study, and enjoins the duty of seeking truth, as well as awakens and intensifies the love of the good and beautiful. In fact, the human intellect owes its greatest triumphs to Christianity. From the beginning, the Christian religion has assimilated and employed human learning, and has become a great formative force in modern intellectual movements. It favors a broad catholic spirit, and is the counterpoise and remedy of a narrow range of intellectual activity. History teaches that it has been a strong incentive in the search after truth, and the chief factor in training the race to a higher civilized life. The changes in the progress in modern civilization are stimulated and guided by Christian knowledge. The whole trend of modern thought and instruction in the higher intellectual circles is to apply Christian principles to the problems of life. In every age it has stimulated and invigorated the human mind. It has introduced nobler and better ideas of life, given impetus to self-development, and has produced the highest types of manhood and of womanhood. The inspiration and encouragement in advancing general intelligence and founding the higher institutions of learning is principally due to the Christian religion.
"From the days of the Apologists onwards," says Prof. John De Witt, "learning has always advanced under the fostering care of our religion. In the schools of Antioch and of Alexandria, in Carthage and Hippo, in the old Rome on the Tiber, and in the new Rome on the Bosphorus, throughout the period of the ancient church, religion is the great inspiration of intellectual labor. How true this is of the Middle Age I need not stop to say. Religion in Anselm assimilates the philosophy of Plato. In the Anglican doctor it employs the dialectic and metaphysics of Aristotle. And the true father of the inductive philosophy, who anticipated the Organon and the very Idola of his great namesake, is Roger Bacon, the Franciscan brother. It was to this wonderful and unique power of Christianity to assimilate and employ all the triumphs of the human intellect, that the Western World is indebted for the universities by which, most of all, learning was increased and transmitted from generation to generation. Bologna and Naples, the school of Egbert at York, the schools of Charlemagne in the New Christian Empire, with Alcuin as minister of education; the later universities, with their tens of thousands of eager students--Paris, Cologne, and Oxford--sprang into being obedient, indeed, to a thirst for knowledge, but a thirst for knowledge which, in turn, owed its existence and intensity to the unique fact that Christianity alone among religions can assimilate and employ all the truths of human philosophy, of science, and of literature."
The importance of promoting religious culture in our colleges cannot be overestimated. Dr. Thomas Arnold has spoken words that should be preserved in letters of gold. "Consider," he says, "what a religious education, in the true sense of the word, is: It is no other than a training our children to life eternal; no other than the making them know and love God, know and abhor evil; no other than the fashioning all the parts of our nature for the very ends which God designed for them; the teaching our understandings to know the highest truth; the teaching our affections to _love_ the highest good!" One of the greatest teachers, Mark Hopkins, on the fiftieth anniversary of his connection with Williams College, said: "Christianity is the greatest civilizing, molding, uplifting power on this globe, and it is a sad defect in any institution of higher learning if it does not bring those under its care into the closest possible relation to it." The profound French philosopher, Victor Cousin, declares that "any system of school training which sharpens and strengthens the intellectual powers without supplying moral culture and religious principle is a curse rather than a blessing." And President M. E. Gates says: "In place of the fermenting despair of nihilism, the reckless immoralities of atheism, and the suicidal negations of agnosticism which have cursed liberally-educated Europe, if we are to have here in America an influence strong, binding and beneficient in our social system, as the result of collegiate education, it must be, it can be only by retaining in that system a clear faith in God, and by making prominent, as the highest aim of life, the service of God in serving the best interests of one's fellow-men."
The goal of all education is fulness of stature of men and women in Christ. Art and science are a vain show without this aim. A man may have a brain as keen as a Damascus scimiter, and yet he is wanting without piety. This moral and religious equipment is necessary for right conduct which, Matthew Arnold says, is three-fourths of life. Other things being equal, the student that is touched and saturated with the religious life will be under the strongest motives and attain the highest culture and efficiency in life. A pure heart and a clear brain are closely related. "Our education will never be perfect unless, like the ancient temples, it is lighted from above." Martin Luther said: "To have prayed well is to have studied well," which accords with the idea of the best scholars in former days at Cambridge: _Bene orasse est bene studisse_.
The Christian spirit is eminently favorable to culture and to the promotion of literary productivity. It helps to make brilliant and earnest teachers, and lends zest to professional ambition. "Other things being equal," says Noah Porter, "that institution of learning which is earnestly religious is certain to make the largest and most valuable achievements in science and learning, as well as in literary tastes and capacities."
President Gates forcibly expresses the thought in these words: "Man is not, and was not meant to be, pure disembodied intellect. True philosophy, as well as common sense, teaches that the heart and the will have their rightful domain in every man's life. If the understanding becomes arrogant and spurns the aid of the other powers of the mind, not only does the man become an incomplete man, but his intellect itself inevitably loses poise and clearness. The man ceases to be a man, and becomes a calculating machine, and his intellect becomes subject to those sudden reversals of legitimate processes and results which the law of construction for calculating machines renders inevitable in them, but from which _life_ saves the living man, the feeling, worshiping soul."
There is nothing more important to equip the complete scholar and gentleman than the Christian religion. Tennyson's poetic interpretation of this truth is thus beautifully expressed:
"Let knowledge grow from more to more, But more of reverence in us dwell, That mind and soul, according well, May make one music, as before, But vaster."
The _methods of promoting religious life in college_ are widely varied. One of the most effective means is the positive Christian faith and the personal religious influence of the college professors. The student enters college at a vital and perilous period of life. The judgment is often immature and the life principles unsettled. In this speculative period the student may be blindly endeavoring to adjust his faith to his reason. Especially at this time he needs professors of superior reason, strength of faith and spiritual discernment to unveil the divine mysteries and aid in dispelling doubt. Ex-President Seelye, of Amherst, once said: "We should no more think of appointing to a post of instruction here an irreligious man than we should an immoral man, or one ignorant of the topics he would have to teach." It is certainly no narrow bigotry that leads the Christian public to demand that the colleges select professors loyal to the truth and the Christian Church. United with their scientific culture and professional ability as teachers they should embody Christian earnestness and purity of life, and aim to send out students with a positive and rational faith.
The parent who realizes that the moral character of his children will be fixed, in a large measure, while in college, believes that it would be moral suicide to permit them to come under the influence of a professor whose religious indifference, or unfavorable remarks about Christianity, might infuse the poison of skepticism, doubt, or indifference, and perhaps unsettle their early religious convictions, and "send them forth confused and adrift on the endless sea of conflicting notions."
The courses of study in college should be arranged so as to favor the study of the essential facts and truths of the Christian religion, and through them promote practical piety. There is no valid reason why the Christian religion, which is the chief energy and force in all intellectual culture, should not be distinctly and permanently recognized in the college curriculum. The well-established and accepted facts of the Christian religion should be gathered and studied with as much painstaking care, freedom of spirit, and loyalty to truth as the scientist studies his facts and constructs his theories. This method implies that the teacher and pupil hold in abeyance all those probable theories, speculations, and conjectures which are not established, as irrelevant to the work in hand. When this scientific spirit is more effectively introduced into the study of the Christian religion in our colleges, it will prepare the way for the restatement of doctrine so as to commend it with increasing force to every intelligent student. Christian truth is capable of being built up into a system as scientific as any other. The professor, in leading the earnest student in search of spiritual truth, will exercise tolerance and tact, so that he will not awaken suspicions of being actuated by a narrow bigotry, or appear as a lover of dogmatic teachings.
Again, it is better to select text-books that have been written by capable men who are in sympathy with the Christian religion. The student with an immature mind, who seeks to build his faith and theories of life on the teachings of those whose predilections are away from Christianity, will find it fatal to his lofty ideals and aspirations, while instruction based on Christian theism tends to lift the mind upward, and to foster a hopeful and earnest moral and intellectual life.
We grant that Christian character can only be incidentally produced through the subjects studied. The same study may be taught in different ways, and with entirely different results. The intellectual processes involved in study do not necessarily exert a spiritual influence. The aim and spirit of the professor and student will determine whether the study pursued shall contribute to the cultivation of greater reverence and exaltation of the soul. The charm of scientific study may so occupy the student's attention as to exclude all thoughts of the spiritual and eternal, or he may "look through nature up to nature's God." The student may be so absorbed with the human events and material conditions of history as to overlook the light of God's presence and guiding hand in it all.
To be liberally educated in Christian America, one should have a knowledge of the English Bible. It is the fountain and conservator of pure English and the storehouse of the most inspiring thought. Its classic beauty and lofty speculations and sublime morality are essential to a liberal education. "Froude calls the Bible the best of all literatures. Daniel Webster read the Bible through every year for its effect upon his mind. Charles Sumner kept the Bible at his elbow on his desk, and could find any passage without a concordance. Great men have found the Bible a great inspiration. But not this alone--as a great and inspiring literature,--but as a source of spiritual life and power, the Bible is the basis of true collegiate growth."