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much self-denial he can obtain for his children the highest and best education, while Hon. Mr. Tupman of Fiskville gets fifty thousand dollars for his services in a lawsuit, therefore Mr. Tupman is a man of first-rate ability, and Mr. Pickering is a man of second-rate, or perhaps of fourth-rate ability. I am sorry for the graduate whose alma mater has not succeeded in teaching him a more enlightened and liberal method of measuring the relative "ability" of men employed in liberal professions.

I will even say, for the benefit of the self-styled "Young Yale," that the profession which they ignorantly disparage is preeminently-as compared with other professions which require hoth general and special culture-the learned profession. And inasmuch as their flings are at Congregational ministers in particular, and more distinctly at "Congregational ministers of the State of Connecticut," I too may speak of those ministers particularly, without implying that they are, or that they are not, superior to ministers of other churches in learn. ing and culture, or in mental vigor. Take the average of talent and of learning and culture among the lawyers in Connecticut or in the State of New York, or among members of the medical profession in either State (not counting the irregular practitioners,) or among the journalists, or among the mixed multitude of literateurs who make authorship a profession: and there need be no hesitation in affirming that the average both of talent and of learning and culture among the Congregational ministers of Connecticut is higher. There is no profession in which the ratio of college graduates to the whole number is so great, or which demands so rigorously of those who would become members of it a college education or its equivalent. A man may be admitted into a Law school or Medical school not only with less of the character which gives promise of diligence in study, but with less of general knowledge and culture, than would be requisite for his admission into any Congregational Divinity school in New England or elsewhere. Nor is there any other profession which requires of aspirants, in addition to that general culture, so long a term of special study. In a Law school, or a Medical school, the course of study for one who is already B. A., runs through two years,

while the course in a Divinity school is planned for three years. And what are the special studies introductory to these several professions? I will not say a word in disparagement of legal or medical studies as related to learning in general. Rightly conducted under broad-minded teachers-especially if the student has already been trained by academic discipline--they liberalize the mind and lead it forth into broad views of truth, while they sharpen the faculties for special service. But no professional studies are in their nature so fit to train the mind and to give it enlargement and elevation, as those which make up the curriculum of preparation for the ministry. Other professional students drop-shall I say forget?--their linguistic studies as soon as they hear with inward self-application the formula Admitto te ad primum in artibus gradum. The theological student begins his course by forming an acquaintance with the most venerable of extant languages-a language so different in its grammatical forms, in its syntax, in its idioms, in all its lights and shades, from every variety of Aryan speech, that he finds himself entering a new world of thought. At the same time he renews and extends his study of the Greek language-not for the mere sake of study, as when he was in college, but with an immediately practical aim; watching to detect the nicest turns of thought implied in mode, and tense or in prepositions and particles; and learning at once the science and the art of interpretation by learning to interpret that unique body of literature, the documents of the Christian religion. His study of the questions concerning the origin and transmission of those documents revives and enlarges his study of all ancient history. Meanwhile he has entered another field of inquiry-the relation of nature to its author and its end; or in other words the relation of all physical science to the knowledge of God. The study of God in nature and in the instincts and moral cognitions of the human soul, introduces him to the study of God in human history-the revealed God whom the monotheistic Hebrews worshipped of old, and whom the Christ of Hebrew expectation has revealed to the world. As he studies that revelation of God which centers in the mysterious person and history of Jesus of Nazareth and in his relations to the fact of sin and to redemption from sin—as he stud

ihs the nature and history of the spiritual community which recognizes Christ as its unity and its life, the kingdom in which Christ in king, and which is subduing the world to God by forces which are not of this world--he finds himself confronted not only with questions that reach through all the sciences of matter, but also with questions that bring the science of mind and the science of duty and all the departments of social science into an intimate relation with the government of God and with the hope of redemption. With all these studies he combines another sort of culture. From first to last he is learning to use his faculty of utterance. He studies not merely that he may know how to think, but not less that he may know how to make others think. The art which he is to practice in life is, the art of teaching and persuading, not only by the methods of public discourse, but in all the ways of intercourse with individual minds-the art of awakening thought, of guiding inquiry, of comforting sorrow, of touching the deepest sensibilities, and of bringing Divine realities into effectual contact with human consciousness; and all this must be in his doing of it, not art, but the purest spontaneity. Let me say to those who think they are Young Yale, that the profession which they contemptuously disparage is and always must be, in a Christian commonwealth, the learned profession. Old Yale knows this, and whoever calls himself Young Yale and does not know it, is "inefficient in thought, narrow-minded, and in the true sense of the word, uncultivated."

If, thus vindicating my own profession, I seem to have “become a fool in glorying," I say to the assailants, "Ye have compelled me;" and to others, let it be my apology that sometimes it is right and necessary to answer a fool according to his folly. I do not imply that Mr. Phelps is a fool; but only the scantiest courtesy is due to his backers in the Nation. The bearing of what I have said on the issue raised by them, about the intellectual competence of clergymen to be Fellows of Yale College, is sufficiently evident.

II. If anything may be safely inferred from the details suggested by Mr. Phelps in his fault finding, the management of Yale College would not be greatly improved by the change which he proposes. The existing and ancient management,

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under the constitution which the "Young Yale " represented by Mr. Phelps and his friends would subvert, has gained for the institution its present standing and reputation; has placed in the chairs of instruction men worthy of the eulogy lavished upon them by their grateful pupil in his speech at the commencement dinner; has so carefully husbanded the gifts of benefactors that, in one hundred and seventy years, nothing has been lost by carelessness or lack of judgment; has developed out of the mere college, with its four undergraduate classes and its unorganized handful of resident graduates, a university of five distinct faculties; and, in its Sheffield Scientific School, is giving to the country a better and more successful illustration of what may be done in the methods and for the ends of "the new education" than is given by any other institution, by whomsoever managed. What is it that the self-styled "Young Yale" would have that is better than this? I look to what Mr. Phelps has so gently and courteously told us; and I find that he wants something less "saintly," more "worldly," more worldly-wise "—or, in an expressive word of student-slang, more splurgy. Let there be a virtual confiscation of the endowments by the making the alumni a corporation who shall elect a board of managers, and what shall we see? Looking to Mr. Phelps who favored us with his ideas on the subject, and who will doubtless have a controling influence in the new corporation, I find that we shall see a new style of elections to professorships-the chairs of instruction offered not to young scholars who have had some experience in teaching, and who are invited and expected to make teaching their life-work, and to win their reputation by their skill and success in that business, but to men who have already achieved their celebrity in some other business, and whose impulses and aspirations are in a different direction. The old saintly policy which employs teachers to do the honest work of teaching-just as saintly people gifted with common sense employ physicians to do medical work and lawyers to manage a case in the courtsis to be exploded, and the new worldly-wise policy will offer the professorships to illustrious historians and world-famous poets, who will revolt as readily as Mr. Phelps himself from the hard and irksome work of teaching college-students. Whether the

expectation is that Pegasus will condescend to become a patient and slow-moving drayhorse, or that the scanty funds devoted to the payment of teachers will be expended in purchasing ribbons for the decoration of his mane and wings, we are not informed; but, be that as it may, the proposal does not convince me that this Young Yale (so-called) would manage the university any better than it has been managed hitherto by Old Yale, with ten Connecticut ministers of the gospel in its corporation.

But is there in the scheme no suggestion more worthy of serious consideration? Is this the great change of policy for which the governing power must be transferred from the existing corporation to the mass-meeting of alumni? Methinks I hear in reply an indignant No! What else, then, does Mr. Phelps propose? Two things only. First, more pains-taking to decorate the the commencement platform with tho presence of notable and betitled strangers-some spread eagle senator from a pioneer state-some tomroddy of an English lord who, having come over by the last steamer for the sublime purpose of of shooting prairie hens in Illinois, can be induced to wait a few days for the sublimer purpose of exhibiting his florid complexion and muscular limbs to the alumni-five hundred of whom (we are expressly assured) will rush to commencement for the gratification which the sight of so illustrious a stranger will give them. Secondly, more pains-taking to waylay the sons of distinguished fathers in the preparatory schools or under private tutors, and, when one has been secured for Yale College, to communicate the fact incontinently to the Associated Press and have it telegraphed to all parts of the United States, so that thousands of families who never before heard of Yale, shall inquire what it is and where it is, and shall be induced to send their sons also to an institution so distinguished. These two expedients are, in principle, one. Neither of them rises above the dignity of an "advertising dodge," though their ingenuity might be pronounced worthy of Barnum.

"I had a dream which was not all a dream." The desired change had been effected. Our venerable college had obtained "a living connection with the outer world."

alumni from Maine to California" had "become Yale Col

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