Page:A History of the University of Chicago by Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed.djvu/419

 SOME IMPORTANT DEPARTMENTS 365 versity fostered the work of the Divinity School with great liberality. The income of the School from invested funds and students' fees rarely exceeded forty thousand dollars a year, but its expenditures were always above sixty thousand dollars. The excess expenditures were regularly made a part of the University Budget, and the current expenses were thus fully provided for every year. At the end of the first quarter-century, in February, 1916, a lecture hall and library building, long earnestly desired, was assured by a gift of two hundred thousand dollars for its erection. The site chosen for it was just north of Haskell, facing Kent across the central quadrangle. There was a period, lasting several years, during which the Divinity School was the object of widespread criticism. Its pro- fessors were modern scholars. Their minds were open to receive the truth, and what they believed to be true they did not hesitate to teach. The higher criticism was, at the time in question, misunderstood and distrusted by conservative Christians, par- ticularly by conservative clergymen. In the Divinity School the higher criticism being understood to be what it is simply a method of historical study, approved by the modern scholarly world was generally approved and used. The destructive results arrived at by some German critics were never received. The professors were constructive critics and did a great service to religion in leading the churches to a more enlightened under- standing of the Bible. Suspicion gradually passed away and was succeeded by renewed confidence. This was evidenced by the in- creasing attendance of missionaries at home on furloughs. It was shown in the choice of President Judson during two successive years as the president of the Northern Baptist Convention. It was emphasized by the election of Dean Mathews in 1914 to the presi- dency of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ of America, and in 1915 to that of the Northern Baptist Convention. And it was made particularly evident in the great attendance of pastors and teachers at the sessions of the Summer Quarter, when about eighty per cent of the large enrolment of the Divinity School was made up of pastors of churches and teachers in colleges, universities, and other divinity schools.