Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/472

454 Cornell University (1886), declares that the university "must always be on the side of Christianity as opposed to infidelity or unbelief." President Seelye, of Amherst College, declares in his inaugural (1877) that the college must be solicitous, "first of all, to continue Christian." "It will seek for Christian teachers and only these." On these principles, "it will order all its studies and its discipline." It is, then, idle to say that such institutions will teach science or truth, except as science and truth are in accord with "evangelical" Christian theology. Everything else is necessarily untruth, unreason, error. Said President Witherspoon, of Princeton: "Cursed be all that learning that is contrary to the cross of Christ; cursed be all that learning that is not coincident with the cross of Christ; cursed be all that learning that is not subservient to the cross of Christ!"

While there must be liberty to establish denominational and sectarian colleges to "promote" religion; and if, while there are such, it is the best public policy to have as great a variety of beliefs represented as may be possible, in order to insure healthful counteraction, this condition of things does not fulfill the demands of a scientific educational system. When we send our young men and women to learn geometry or natural philosophy, it is geometry and natural philosophy as sciences, as matters of knowledge, truth, that we wish them taught; not Presbyterian or Episcopalian or Methodist geometry or physics. There are church schools where church creeds are inculcated, and in these the youth can learn the things that belong to their particular sect. Or, if it be desirable to have such teaching in the same school which teaches geometry, there is no serious objection to a professor-ship of the soundest kind of the special orthodoxy desired, so long as the opposite kind of orthodoxy is not denied similar privileges. By keeping the professorship of geometry or biology unfettered by any complications with the professorship of Presbyterian theology, both biology and Presbyterianism might be learned in the same college. Then the qualification for a teacher of biology would be that he knows biology, and his religious belief would be irrelevant. As it is, whenever we examine college catalogues we discover the title "Reverend" prefixed to the names of most of the professors, even of languages and science. This creates a suspicion which is confirmed absolutely when we find, as we do in many colleges, that no one who is not a professing Christian is eligible to the position of teacher! Charles Darwin would not have been "fit" to teach biology; nor would Huxley be fit to teach natural history, nor Tyndall to give instruction in physics! Institutions like these may be provisionally endurable; but they do not satisfy the highest ideals either of truth or morality. Unless the policy of the fagot should return and become successful once more, they must be superseded by something better.

The effort ought to be made, therefore, to establish and maintain a larger number of colleges and universities which shall be absolutely