Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/579

Rh times of wholesale piracy of the valuable works of foreign authors, that Mr. Spencer will continue to be paid by the publishers on this cheap edition of his "Education" just as he has been paid by them from the beginning on all his other publications.

Rev. Caleb Mills, a graduate of Dartmouth College and of Andover Theological Seminary, was for forty years Professor of Greek at Wabash College, Indiana. He became the first Superintendent of Schools in that State, and so impressed his views upon its people as to earn the flattering title of "Father" of the Indiana common-school system. He died last October, and left this essay on the higher education as a last message to scholars and the people, and his friend Henry B. Carrington has seen it through the press in a very careless way.

The paper is mainly an argument on college methods with reference to alleged modern improvements in the studies and the management of these institutions. Mr. Mills clings tenaciously to the traditions, and strenuously resists all the new-fangled notions about optional studies and the introduction of modern languages, scientific branches, and practical knowledge into the collegiate curriculum. Only classics and the dead languages, he maintains, can give a liberal education, or that mental discipline which is the real object to be gained in all higher study.

Mr. Mills appears to think that it is the duty of colleges to go on to the end of time threshing the old Latin and Greek straw, although it has long since ceased to yield the grain that is commonly supposed to be the object of threshing. He seems, in fact, to think it a great point gained that the old dead straw no longer furnishes anything that can be utilized. Grain and bread and nourishment are sordid and vulgar things, which the thresher should no longer think of, and so the more empty and useless the husks the better. The real thing is the muscular exercise in the use of the flail, the noble discipline of his arms; for, when he has vigorously pounded the Greek and Latin litter for some years, he will get wonderful vigor for other forms of exercise.

Mr. Mills has various animated passages in denunciation of college reforms, but we can not see that he contributes anything important to the argument. The coolness with which he throws aside all modern knowledge, as of little or no account in higher education, is something surprising, and shows the havoc that forty years of Greek may make with a man's common sense.

Mr. Mills is greatly concerned about the use of the Bible as a college text-book; and the question of its more general employment in this way he declares to be "a live issue," which involves little less than the destinies of the nation. One of the bad signs of collegiate degeneracy is a neglect to use the Bible as a text-book. He informs us that reliable statistics show that "of forty-six colleges reporting, eighteen use it in a proper sense as a text-book and twenty-eight do not. Of twelve New England colleges, three use it and nine do not. Of twenty-two Western institutions, nine use it and thirteen do not give it a place in their curriculum."

Among the reasons for making the Bible a text-book in our colleges, Mr. Mills thinks that it would raise us in the estimation of the pagans, whose example in this respect he thinks it scandalous that we have failed to follow. He says: "Were an American Christian to go into the Mohammedan university at Cairo, with its ten thousand students, nothing there witnessed would impress him so deeply as the fact that so much time is occupied and so much attention given to the study of the Koran; and a like impression would be created were he to make a similar visit to a corresponding institution in the sacred city of Benares, and witness the exercises of that Brahmanical college, and listen to the lectures of its learned pundits on the Shasta literature and religion; if, then, returning to his native shores, he should make a corresponding exploration of some of our colleges, proud of their number of students and the spread of their curricula, and ask the venerable presidents thereof, Why has not the Bible place, if not a prominent one, at least a position, in your course of study? what reply would he receive?"