Professor Wendell goes on trenchantly to compare this reigning modern faith with that in the mediæval church. He calls attention to the fact that whereas the dominant architectural monuments of the Old World are great cathedrals and religious houses, implying the faith that salvation could be assured by unstinted gifts to the church, in our modern times the most stately and impressive structures are our schools, colleges, and public libraries, many of them, like the cathedrals, erected by sinners of wealth in the pursuit of individual atonement and social salvation. “Ask any American what we shall do to be saved, and if he speak his mind he will probably bid us educate our fellow-men.” He might have extended his comparison to the personal hierarchy of the two institutions, for at the time of his article the President of Harvard spoke to the people of the United States with the voice of Innocent III, surrounded by his advisers among university presidents and superintendents gathered like Cardinal Archbishops, in the conclave of the National Education Association, of which the Committee of Ten was a sort of papal curia. Although the educational papacy has fallen into schism, the cities are still ruled by superintendents like bishops, the colleges by president and deans, like abbots and priors, and the whole structure rests on a vast population of teachers holding their precarious livings like the parish priests at the will of their superiors, tempered by public opinion. Indeed, Professor Wendell is struck by the probability that as European society was encumbered by the itinerant friars, so America will have “its mendicant orders of scholars--the male and female doctors of philosophy.” But it is his main theme which concerns us here, that “the present mood of our country concerning education is neither more nor less than a mood of blind, mediæval superstition.”