The History of Dartmouth CollegeSmith, Baxter Perry
History
The History of Dartmouth College
Smith, Baxter Perry
Dartmouth College -- History
necessities of a fallen state; too much as they may be in the ultimate
development of God's moral providence, and too little as they are in
its administrative course. Hence, but for the greatest care which, in
the main, he exercised, he would have been likely to crowd into his
definitions and postulates more than they naturally admitted, or to
make them less than they naturally required; to mistake, for the basis
of his fulcrum, a speculative subtlety instead of a practical reality;
and, consequently, to make his inexorable logic draw too much, or to
little, for legitimate practical effect. If, occasionally tempted by
the excitement of our present types of speculative and conjectural
science, he seemed to overstep the limits which God has prescribed to
us in our present probationary state, and to make the human a measure
of the Divine, it was done not presumptuously, from a spirit of
conceited and ambitious intermeddling with things forbidden, but
unconsciously, from an honest desire for knowledge. When he perceived,
as he was not slow to perceive, that many of the objects which now so
much allure the learned men of the world, who are falsely so called,
were not real, but ideal and conceptional only, not actual knowledge
verifiable by a day-light test, but shadows and chimeras chasing one
another over the moonlit sky, then he retreated. He chose to stop,
reverentially, as taught by Scripture, when he must, rather than to be
driven back by the cherubim and the flaming sword. Not even Kant, or
Coleridge, or any of their living imitators, however congenial their
respective tastes for speculative subtleties, could tempt him so to
disregard the boundary between reason and faith as to lose sight of
Calvary, or mistake an _ignis fatuus_ for the Sun of Righteousness.
His college experience, and, I have sometimes thought the _genius
collegii_, with a father's and mother's teachings and prayers, all
favored by the Spirit who only searcheth the deep things of God, kept
him near and true to the everlasting Word.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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