I cannot be unwilling to avail myself of any opportunity to turn the
attention of the Christian public to the Christian College. It is a
noble public and an equally noble object. I can conceive of no
worthier or more Christian thing than the caretaking of one generation
that the next one which must necessarily lie so long under its
influence and for which it is therefore so thoroughly responsible,
should receive a Christian education.
To put Christ at the center and make Him felt to the circumference (as
Bungener said in speaking of Calvin's school policy), is exceedingly
difficult. But it is exceedingly important. It is, indeed, vital and
pivotal.
The dangers about it are great and ever greater. They come from the
general worldliness of all things and everybody in this age of
unprecedentedly rapid and splendid material development. They are
increased by the growth of speculative infidelity whether of the
philosophical or scientific phase. They spring out of everything which
lowers the Bible from that supreme and sovereign consideration by
which alone it can hold the place in education which the Old Testament
economy gave it, and which all the books of all the other
book-religions of the world most unquestioningly possess. They are
born of all that false theorizing about the limits of government and
the liberty of conscience which issues in the demands for utter
secularization of every institution of the State, while at the same
time the necessities of popular government are demonstrating that
education must be by the State. They are intensified by the divided
opinion of the church universal, of which the Catholic and Greek
sections hold that education must be religious and under the care of
the Church; while the State-Church Protestant section holds that it
may be religious under certain conditions, and the extreme
secularistic protestant wing holds that it cannot be religious because
conducted by the State, and a rather diminishing protestant section in
free-church nations holds that the higher education should be
Christian, while the secondary and primary may safely be left to the
secular State.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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