The importance of promoting religious culture in our colleges cannot
be overestimated. Dr. Thomas Arnold has spoken words that should be
preserved in letters of gold. "Consider," he says, "what a religious
education, in the true sense of the word, is: It is no other than a
training our children to life eternal; no other than the making them
know and love God, know and abhor evil; no other than the fashioning
all the parts of our nature for the very ends which God designed for
them; the teaching our understandings to know the highest truth; the
teaching our affections to _love_ the highest good!" One of the
greatest teachers, Mark Hopkins, on the fiftieth anniversary of his
connection with Williams College, said: "Christianity is the greatest
civilizing, molding, uplifting power on this globe, and it is a sad
defect in any institution of higher learning if it does not bring
those under its care into the closest possible relation to it." The
profound French philosopher, Victor Cousin, declares that "any system
of school training which sharpens and strengthens the intellectual
powers without supplying moral culture and religious principle is a
curse rather than a blessing." And President M. E. Gates says: "In
place of the fermenting despair of nihilism, the reckless immoralities
of atheism, and the suicidal negations of agnosticism which have
cursed liberally-educated Europe, if we are to have here in America an
influence strong, binding and beneficient in our social system, as the
result of collegiate education, it must be, it can be only by
retaining in that system a clear faith in God, and by making
prominent, as the highest aim of life, the service of God in serving
the best interests of one's fellow-men."
The goal of all education is fulness of stature of men and women in
Christ. Art and science are a vain show without this aim. A man may
have a brain as keen as a Damascus scimiter, and yet he is wanting
without piety. This moral and religious equipment is necessary for
right conduct which, Matthew Arnold says, is three-fourths of life.
Other things being equal, the student that is touched and saturated
with the religious life will be under the strongest motives and attain
the highest culture and efficiency in life. A pure heart and a clear
brain are closely related. "Our education will never be perfect
unless, like the ancient temples, it is lighted from above." Martin
Luther said: "To have prayed well is to have studied well," which
accords with the idea of the best scholars in former days at
Cambridge: _Bene orasse est bene studisse_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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