1896.]
Christianity and Our Colleges.
my own knowledge and experience to-day) a number of the men,
some of them still living, who founded these great schools. I
remember, for example, one old man who now, at eighty-five
years of age, and blind, is still at work for Christ, with his
daughter writing out for him what he dictates, and who did
more perhaps than any other of all the men working with him for
these State colleges. They were Christian ,men and it was for
Christian purposes that they struggled to secure this land grant.
Abraham Lincoln, in the year 1862, while the war was carrying
its scourge over the land, signed the law that made possible this
State institution with a score or more of others in the land.
They, too, are gifts of Christian thought and feeling, and they
have been built and sustained not without great sacrifice.
There is no chapter that I have ever read or heard, in the his
tory of humanity on this earth, fuller of heroism, of self-sacrific
ing heroism, than the chapter that tells the history of the es
tablishment of these institutions of learning in our country.
Take to-day, if you will, Harvard and Yale and Brown and the
other institutions that were established first in the old thirteen
States, and who founded them ? Why, when Boston was only
six years old, her people still living in the cabins which they had
erected as they landed upon these desolate shores—when Boston
was only six years old, her pilgrim people, scarcely yet safe from
starvation, laid upon the altar of Christian learning the gifts out
of which Harvard grew. It takes its name from one John
Harvard, the Christian preacher who gave his whole library to
establish the institution. I have seen some of the old subscrip
tion lists, and remember one subscription of a woman who gave a
peck of corn out of her penury and another who knit a certain
amount of stockings in her hard industry to help the college.
Others gave, some a shilling and others ten shillings to build up
—not a house to live in, not a mill to give them their wealth
again, but to lay the corner-stones and to build the wallS of an
institution of higher learning that the country should not suffer,
that there might be learned men to teach the higher learning of
the world to their young men and young women.
I have in mind the old Alma Haler among whose sons I hope
to gather in a few days. When it celebrated its fiftieth anniversary
I was an undergraduate within its halls, and I marched in the streets
where fifty classes marched before me, led by a gray-headed old man,
the last survivor of its first graduating class, each class bear-