The History of Dartmouth CollegeSmith, Baxter Perry
History
The History of Dartmouth College
Smith, Baxter Perry
Dartmouth College -- History
"Were it needful to argue this point, we might put it on the most
absolute grounds. All things are Christ's; all dominions, dignities,
potences; it is especially meet that we say, to-day, all institutions.
It is the grossest wrong practically to hold otherwise. It is loss,
too, and nowhere more palpably than in the educational sphere. It is
no cant saying to affirm, and that in a more than merely spiritual
sense, that in Christ are hid all the treasures of wisdom and
knowledge.' At his throne the lines of all science terminate; above
all, the science that has man for its subject. Of all history, for
example, rightly read, how is He the burden and the glory! Otherwise
taken, it is a more than Cretan labyrinth. The Christian spirit,
besides, raising the soul to the loftiest planes of thought, giving it
the highest communions, bringing before it the grandest objects, and
securing to all its machinery the most harmonious action, is eminently
conducive to intellectual achievement. We have already said something
like this as touching moral culture; but that, be it ever remembered,
takes its proper form and direction only as it is vitally linked with
Christianity. What God has joined together let not man put asunder.
Let the studies which we call moral, have all a Christian baptism;
and, with all our getting, let us not stop short of the cardinal
points of our most holy faith. Let the Will be still investigated, not
as a brute force, or in a merely intellectual light, but in those high
spiritual aspects in which our great New England metaphysician
delighted to present it. Let Butler, with his curious trestle-work of
analogy, bridge, to the forming mind, the chasm between natural and
revealed religion. Let the Christian Evidences be fully unfolded. We
can hardly dispense with them in an age, when by means of 'Westminster
Reviews,' and other subtle organs of infidelity, the old mode of
assault being abandoned, a sapping and mining process is continually
going forward. Let Ethical Science,--embracing in its wide sweep the
Economy of Private Life, the Philosophy of Government, and Law, which
'hath its seat in the bosom of God,'--be all bathed in the light of
Calvary. That light is its life. 'Let us with caution indulge the
supposition,' said the Father of our country, 'that morality can be
maintained without religion.' Let the Bible be included among our
text-books as the sun is included in the solar system; and let all the
rest revolve in planetary subjection about it. Let it be studied, not
in a professional, much less in a partisan way; but with the
conviction that it is indispensable to the broadest culture; that
without theology we have but a straitened anthropology; that we see
not nature aright, but as we look up through it to Nature's God. Be
ours, in its largest significance, the sentiment so devoutly uttered
by the old Hebrew bard: 'In Thy light shall we see light.' And let the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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