Page:New England and the Bavarian Illuminati.djvu/94

 ages; and that the light of wisdom had just begun to dawn upon the human race. All the science, all the information, which had been acquired before the commencement of the last thirty or forty years, stood in their view for nothing. . . . Religion they discovered on the one hand to be a vision of dotards and nurses, and on the other a system of fraud and trick, imposed by priestcraft for base purposes upon the ignorant multitude. Revelation they found was without authority, or evidence; and moral obligation a cobweb, which might indeed entangle flies, but by which creatures of a stronger wing nobly disdained to be Confined. 1

This somewhat theoretical view of the case was not unsupported by tangible evidence. The students of Yale were sceptical. 2 In the religious discussions of the lecture- rooms the cause of infidelity stood high in student favor. 3 Of seventy-six members of the class that graduated in 1802 only one was a professed Christian at the time of matriculation. 4 At the time President Dwight entered upon the leadership of the college, the college church was practically extinct. 6 Altogether the situation was highly alarming to the friends of Christianity. 6

The condition of affairs at Harvard showed little if any improvement. When William Ellery Channing matriculated in that institution in 1794 he found the thought and


 * 1 Dwight, Travels, vol. iv, p. 362.


 * 2 Beecher, Autobiography, Correspondence, etc., vol. i, p. 30.


 * 3 Baldwin, Annals of Yale College . . . From Its Foundation to the Year 1831, New Haven, 1831, p. 146.


 * 4 Field, Brief Memoirs of the Members of the Class Graduated at Yale College in September, 1802. (Printed for private distribution), p. 9.


 * 5 Beecher, Autobiography, Correspondence, etc., vol. i, p. 30.


 * 6 Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit, vol. ii, pp. 164, 165. Cf. Sketches of Yale College., with Numerous Anecdotes . . . New York, 1843, p. 136.