CONTENTS OF VOLUME IV.-NO. III.-THIRD SERIES. By Rev. President WHITE, D. D., Wabash College, Indiana. By Rev. ROBERT W. HILL, East Bloomfield, New York. THE BIBLICAL REPOSITORY AND CLASSICAL REVIEW. THIRD SERIES, NO. XV.-WHOLE NUMBER, LXXI. JULY, 1848. ARTICLE I. INFLUENCE OF COLLEGES, ESPECIALLY ON WESTERN EDUCATION AND CIVILIZATION. By Rev. CHARLES WHITE, D.D., President of Wabash College, Indiana. ALL who have become acquainted with American society, have observed that its most marked feature, is restless activity. Enterprise is more characteristic of us than a high civilization; a passion for the glitter and parade of wealth, more than a tendency to substantial, unostentatious investments and solid comforts. It has now become a universal statement and opinion, that a spirit of adventure and advancement, as also an actual forward and ascending movement, are no where in the country more apparent than in the Valley of the Mississippi. This ardor and progress, as is always the fact in new countries, respect the physical more than the intellectual; fortunes and honors more than facilities of knowledge and achievements of mind. All education is in a depressed condition. A large proportion of the population remains far below the highest and best forms of civilization. There is, however, at the present time, a very general and a very determined purpose on the part of the West to emerge, intellectually and morally, and place itself, at least on a level with the best educated and best ordered communities. It will be the object of this discussion, to exhibit the capable influence of Western Colleges in assisting the existing auspicious movement in behalf of education and a superior civilization. I. These Literary Institutions are peculiarly fitted and responsible for the introduction into the country, of a sound and thorough scholarship. In accomplishing this object, much time, labor and patience are to be employed in removing several formidable obstacles to the creation and diffusion of a high intelligence. The first is, a deep and general prejudice against all literary training in Colleges. These seats of learning, as is supposed, produce and continue those invidious distinctions in society already too wide and too numer ous. The working classes, confessedly a large part of the sinew and worth of the community, are often heard to allege, that Colleges, besides elevating a few, made by Heaven their equals, to lord it over them, encourage lazy idleness and ill habits. They regard them like packages of goods and boxes at store-doors, as great lounging-places made respectable, as popular lures to beguile away precious time, that ought to be employed in the sober duties of life. Others, looking at them in a religious light, believe them formed to nourish sectarianism, bigotry, exclusiveness; to stereotype irresistibly their own peculiarities of faith and morals upon all the unpractised, unwary youth committed to their Jesuitical mint. This prejudice, standing directly opposed to almost the only means of a liberal education existing in nascent communities, is deep-rooted and widely diffused.-Another obstacle is a settled impression, that instruction in the higher parts of an intellectual course, is unnecessary and perhaps prejudicial. Great numbers urgently insist, that Common Schools are the best and only needed Colleges for republicans. After graduating in these, energetic, independent minds, and none others are worth cultivating at all, will, as they believe, school themselves, and school themselves well and largely for any sphere which they may be called to move in. The learned professions, they freely admit, as well as the higher fields of science, require mental acquisitions and mental discipline far beyond what can be furnished by these elementary seminaries. But the men, say they, who cannot obtain both these by selfguided inquiries and self-imposed intellectual exercises, should infer that Heaven designs them for some other sphere of action. Franklin, they allege, was never drilled in a recitation-room, nor initiated into philosophy by blackboard, diagram and lecture, to teach him how to put the lightning into a bottle, to play with thunderbolts as with rush-lights. Bowditch, they add, was never driven through Euclid and Conic Sections and Calculus, whether he would or not, at the point of College authority; nor Washington, Patrick Henry and Clay, called by a College bell from chapel to recitation, from recitation to chapel, from the Professor of Mathematics, to the Professor of Languages, from the Professor of Languages to the Professor of Rhetoric, and so successsively through a formidable line of installed dignitaries. Yet, in profound scholarship, in a pure, classical, splendid eloquence, these self-constructed men are unrivalled and unequalled. Cease, they |