Article August 27, 1904 Issue

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This is a doctrine that needs to be emplasized again and again with increasing energy in these days when many things that are purely material and worldly in their sources and tendencies are absorbing the attention of young men and women to the exclusion of the more important and vital things that make for high and worthy character and for helpful and beneficent life. Not only college students, laying aside their books and taking up the activities of more mature life, but men and women everywhere need to be remained, as President Wilson said to the Princeton men last Sunday, that "God is abroad, not shut up behind conventicle walls, and the college man ought to be the best man among men of God, because of his training and enlightenment. It is no doubt ordained that the world shall be saved not only by the 'foolishness of preaching,' but also by the courage of action and the satisfying nobility of unimpeachable conduct, and colleges cannot make serviceable men unless they make men of brains and also the men of principle. This can best be done where the little commonwealth of their life breeds honorable character and gives influence to men who purpose the good of those whom they lead; for there are made manifest the foundations of knowledge."

The Christian Advocate.

There never was a time when religion was more needed in our schools than it is to-day, but it must be the religion of to-day, not the religion of a century or ten centuries ago,—the religion of social service, not the religion of scholasticism,—a religion that can gaze undisturbed upon scientific research, even when applied to the Bible, and not a religion that has been so long in the cloisters that it blinks at the sunlight—a religion that concerns itself more with life than with death, with inspiration more than with consolation. Such a religion will keep our colleges and universities from becoming mere training-schools whose aim is to teach how to amass wealth. It will help them to train students to make a living indeed, but to make a life as well, to use wealth as well as to amass it. Not knowledge for the sake of knowledge, nor knowledge for the sake of wealth, but knowledge and wealth for the sake of service,—that is an ideal that will yet bring the Bible, the book of logarithms, and the commercial directory into all co-ordination, and make it no longer necessary for men to build their lives as they build ocean steamships,—in bulk-head compartments.

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