When Boston was but six years old, plans were laid for America’s first college. “Among the early educational leaders,” says Boone, “were such men as the Rev. Thomas Shepherd, John Cotton, and John Wilson, Jr.; all clergymen and all college-bred; Stoughton; Dudley, the deputy-governor, and, above all, ‘Winthrop, the governor, the guide and good genius of the colony.’ Such were the men ... of the infant colony.... Here were learning and character; world-wisdom and refinements of heart; breadth and wholeness of culture, such as could alone justify the boldness of their attempt.”[160] The institution was started in poverty, four hundred pounds being voted by the people. The high motive which prompted the enterprise was “an unbounded zeal for an education, that to them seemed not so much desirable as necessary, _that ‘the light of learning might not go out, nor the study of God’s Word perish_.’” [Sidenote: Object of Harvard to train ministers] The object of the school, as held by the founders, is well described by a Boston citizen, who writes thus in 1643 to some of his friends: “After we had builded our houses, provided necessaries for our livelihood, reared convenient places for worship, and settled the civil government, one of the next things we longed for and looked after was to advance learning and to perpetuate it to posterity, dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present ministers shall lie in the dust. And as we were thinking and consulting how to effect this great work, it pleased God to stir up the heart of one Mr. Howard (a godly gentleman and a lover of learning, then living among us) to give the one half of his estate ... toward the erecting of a College, and all his library.” In the contemplation of a college by those noble men, the uppermost thought was _how to gain an educated ministry_. This object was lost sight of. “It must be remembered,” writes Boone, “that for sixty years the institution was little more than a _training-school for ministers_, managed as a theological seminary, having religion, of a more or less well-defined type, as its basis and chief object. Yet, as Professor Emerson has put it, ‘It is one of the most remarkable things in the history of Harvard, that, in all the constitutions of the college there is _nothing illiberal or sectarian_; _nothing to check the freest pursuit of truth in theological opinions, and in everything else_; and this, too, while the founders of the college were severely and strictly orthodox, often exclusive in their own opinions, and while their object was unquestionably to provide for the thorough education of ministers of the gospel in like views with themselves.’” “The very foundation idea of the college,” says Boone, in another paragraph, “was the theological want.”