an doctor it employs the dialectic
and metaphysics of Aristotle. And the true father of the inductive
philosophy, who anticipated the Organon and the very Idola of his
great namesake, is Roger Bacon, the Franciscan brother. It was to this
wonderful and unique power of Christianity to assimilate and employ
all the triumphs of the human intellect, that the Western World is
indebted for the universities by which, most of all, learning was
increased and transmitted from generation to generation. Bologna and
Naples, the school of Egbert at York, the schools of Charlemagne in
the New Christian Empire, with Alcuin as minister of education; the
later universities, with their tens of thousands of eager
students--Paris, Cologne, and Oxford--sprang into being obedient,
indeed, to a thirst for knowledge, but a thirst for knowledge which,
in turn, owed its existence and intensity to the unique fact that
Christianity alone among religions can assimilate and employ all the
truths of human philosophy, of science, and of literature."

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