Education in these colonies in the eighteenth century was bent toward theology. All but the lower schools, if, indeed, they could be excepted, were contrived to find and to train the pastor, the minister to the people. For him those studies that influence opinion--history, ethics--were chiefly taught. For his purposes, the languages of the classics were chiefly studied. It was the pastor that emerged as prime product of academies and colleges. And therefore theology, that arduous intellectual exercise for which he prepared, set its mark upon all intellects down to the humblest. We wonder at the obsession with religious thinking that the letters and diaries of farmers, merchants, and lawyers of our eighteenth century display to the amazement of their very untheological descendants. We should rather wonder at the intellectual energy expended in wrestling with a difficult and abstract subject. They entered, as we of the twentieth-century bourgeois do not, into the field of scholarship; they partook of disputes that were as international as Christendom; and shared with the chosen ones for whom all this education was made, Jonathan Edwards and his co-professionals, an interest in problems far broader than their strip of Atlantic clearings. That the experience, whatever we may think of the value of the theology, was good for them does not, I think, permit of argument. There have never been abler Americans than at the end of the eighteenth century. But nineteenth-century America was a different world. Interest in theology abated for reasons that need not here be discussed. More and more the United States diverged intellectually from our colonial unity with Europe; our own problems engrossed us; and these were problems of material development, of local statecraft, of that elementary education which a democracy must necessarily take as its chief concern. What had been a professional training by which God’s ministers were to be selected became relatively unprofessional, a so-called “liberal education,” the object of which was to illumine and make pliable and broad the minds of laymen. The high purpose of the teacher was not now to choose the leaders of the spirit. It was rather to preserve in a new world of crude physical endeavor the arts and sciences that civilize the mind. American life in the nineteenth century had many of the characteristics that we are accustomed to associate with heroic barbarism. It had the same insecurity--insecurity of life on the border, insecurity of fortune where life was safe. It had the same frequency of hazardous toil against wild nature; the same accompaniments of cold and privation; the same vast and shadowy enterprises, usually collapsing; the same intensity of physical sensation; the same ardor of emotional experience in the spiritual realm. And always education mitigated extravagance, restrained excess, directed effort. Through education our ancestral Europe restrained and guided us. Education kept us white.