Colleges in America

I cannot be unwilling to avail myself of any opportunity to turn the attention of the Christian public to the Christian College. It is a noble public and an equally noble object. I can conceive of no worthier or more Christian thing than the caretaking of one generation that the next one which must necessarily lie so long under its influence and for which it is therefore so thoroughly responsible, should receive a Christian education.

To put Christ at the center and make Him felt to the circumference (as Bungener said in speaking of Calvin's school policy), is exceedingly difficult. But it is exceedingly important. It is, indeed, vital and pivotal.

The dangers about it are great and ever greater. They come from the general worldliness of all things and everybody in this age of unprecedentedly rapid and splendid material development. They are increased by the growth of speculative infidelity whether of the philosophical or scientific phase. They spring out of everything which lowers the Bible from that supreme and sovereign consideration by which alone it can hold the place in education which the Old Testament economy gave it, and which all the books of all the other book-religions of the world most unquestioningly possess. They are born of all that false theorizing about the limits of government and the liberty of conscience which issues in the demands for utter secularization of every institution of the State, while at the same time the necessities of popular government are demonstrating that education must be by the State. They are intensified by the divided opinion of the church universal, of which the Catholic and Greek sections hold that education must be religious and under the care of the Church; while the State-Church Protestant section holds that it may be religious under certain conditions, and the extreme secularistic protestant wing holds that it cannot be religious because conducted by the State, and a rather diminishing protestant section in free-church nations holds that the higher education should be Christian, while the secondary and primary may safely be left to the secular State.

These dangers are not only imminent but actual. The whole effort to support a Christian education in the public schools is sometimes called a "bootless wrangle." One section is thrown over towards secularism, pure and simple, in recoiling from Church-education exclusive and reactionary. The leading of the little child, the favorite indication of the millennium's arrival, is frustrated amid the clamor of the free thinkers and the uncertainty of the Church and the necessities of the State. We are slowly but surely, if we go on in this way, taking our children out of Christ's arms and our youth from beside His footsteps. And that is at once the most fearful sin against Him, and the most terrible injustice to them, we could possibly commit. Who can do anything to stay this destructive tendency? "God bless him," I would say in Livingstone's spirit, "whoever he may be," that will help to heal this open wound of the world.

I think Mr. Barker's little book will help. It supplies much information carefully collected from scattered sources, given in brief and explicit statements. Its range of themes is wide and upon them all some standard thoughts are given. It is addressed to all readers and should find them among parents (whom it should make patrons), among those who have hearts to pray and those who have hands to help. It will prove to be of rare interest to all whose duty it is to teach, and it has much wise counsel for those who are to study.