The Christian religion is in harmony with intellectual activity, because it favors application to study, and enjoins the duty of seeking truth, as well as awakens and intensifies the love of the good and beautiful. In fact, the human intellect owes its greatest triumphs to Christianity. From the beginning, the Christian religion has assimilated and employed human learning, and has become a great formative force in modern intellectual movements. It favors a broad catholic spirit, and is the counterpoise and remedy of a narrow range of intellectual activity. History teaches that it has been a strong incentive in the search after truth, and the chief factor in training the race to a higher civilized life. The changes in the progress in modern civilization are stimulated and guided by Christian knowledge. The whole trend of modern thought and instruction in the higher intellectual circles is to apply Christian principles to the problems of life. In every age it has stimulated and invigorated the human mind. It has introduced nobler and better ideas of life, given impetus to self-development, and has produced the highest types of manhood and of womanhood. The inspiration and encouragement in advancing general intelligence and founding the higher institutions of learning is principally due to the Christian religion. "From the days of the Apologists onwards," says Prof. John De Witt, "learning has always advanced under the fostering care of our religion. In the schools of Antioch and of Alexandria, in Carthage and Hippo, in the old Rome on the Tiber, and in the new Rome on the Bosphorus, throughout the period of the ancient church, religion is the great inspiration of intellectual labor. How true this is of the Middle Age I need not stop to say. Religion in Anselm assimilates the philosophy of Plato. In the Anglican doctor it employs the dialectic and metaphysics of Aristotle. And the true father of the inductive philosophy, who anticipated the Organon and the very Idola of his great namesake, is Roger Bacon, the Franciscan brother. It was to this wonderful and unique power of Christianity to assimilate and employ all the triumphs of the human intellect, that the Western World is indebted for the universities by which, most of all, learning was increased and transmitted from generation to generation. Bologna and Naples, the school of Egbert at York, the schools of Charlemagne in the New Christian Empire, with Alcuin as minister of education; the later universities, with their tens of thousands of eager students--Paris, Cologne, and Oxford--sprang into being obedient, indeed, to a thirst for knowledge, but a thirst for knowledge which, in turn, owed its existence and intensity to the unique fact that Christianity alone among religions can assimilate and employ all the truths of human philosophy, of science, and of literature."