ry instruction only; that not
more than 35 in 1,000 attend school after they are fourteen years of
age; that 25 of these drop out during the next four years of their
life; that less than 10 in 1,000 pass on to enjoy the superior
instruction of a college or some equivalent grade of work, we begin
to see the unlimited field before an Institution like this. Thousands
upon thousands of those who have left school quite early in life,
either because they did not appreciate the advantages of a liberal
education, or because the stress of circumstances compelled them to
assist in the maintenance of home, awake a few years later to the
realization that a good education is more than one-half the struggle
for existence and position. Their time through the day is fully
occupied; their evenings are free. At once they turn to the evening
college, and grasping the opportunities for instruction, convert those
hours which to many are the pathway to vice and ruin, into stepping
stones to a higher and more useful career ... An illustration of the
wide-reaching influence of the College work is the significant fact
that during one year there were personally known to the president,
no less than ninety-three persons pursuing their studies in various
universities of our country, who received their first impulses toward
a higher education and a wider usefulness in Temple College."

In 1893, in an address on the Institutional church, delivered before
the Baptist Ministers' Conference in Philadelphia, Dr. Conwell said:

"At the present time there are in this city hundreds of thousands--to
speak conservatively, (I should say at least five hundred thousand
people) who have not the education they certainly wish they had
obtained before leaving school. There are at least one hundred
thousand people in this city willing to sacrifice their evenings and
some of their sleep to get an education, if they can get it without
the humiliation of being put into classes with boys and girls six
years old. They are in every city. There is a large class of young
people who have reached that age where they find they have made a
mistake in not getting a better education. If they could obtain one
now, in a proper way, they would. The university does not furnish such
an opportunity. The public school does not.

"The churches must institute schools for those whom the public does
not educate, and must educate them along the lines they cannot reach
in the public schools