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Another noteworthy point of difference is, that New College has a preliminary two years' course in arts, while at Nottingham all that is done in that way is also compressed into the same two years with theology. The New College course in arts has in excess of the other, mathematics, classics, German (or French), Logic, Botany, Zoology, and as much moral philosophy as is required for the B.A. degree in the University of London. The Nottingham course, on the other hand, has more of English literature on its collegiate side, with the study of words and language (Marsh, Müller, Angus, and Trench for text-books), more of composition, with political and physical geography in excess of the other, and also English history - its great epochs; Oriental and European history; the history of civilization, and that of Nonconformity. It is claimed that the Nottingham course, though obviously so crowded, - they are all crowded compared with those of American theological seminaries, - " cannot be made an easy by-way into the ministry; for the severity of the literary and theological and practical training is not surpassed elsewhere. It is a special rather than a partial course. It is intended to be thorough as far as it goes.

It is evident from the facts now brought forward that the superiority of dissenting preachers to those of the establishment is largely due to their better professional training. Some months since a number of members of the House of Commons declared in debate that the only religious instruction at the universities is in certain books of the Bible and Paley's Evidences. The declaration is hardly questionable. At one of the Oxford colleges the students were required by the Founder's Statute to speak Latin and Greek; it was enjoined on the fellows of another to speak Hebrew; but it is as true to-day as it was ten years ago, that "theology is not studied as a science "1 in any of them. Pulpit eloquence is an unknown art. The university sing-song and drawl which are heard from the lips of "dons" and eminent place-men everywhere, show how an expressive and forcible utterance of their mother tongue is despised. But the great want of the English pulpit, even in the chief of the dissenting bodies, is a larger infusion of sinewy and profound theology. American preaching, taken generally," says Dr. Vaughan, "there is a good measure of intelligence, the enunciation of sound doctrine and of right principle, with a grave sort of earnestness, but it is sadly wanting in emotion, embracing little of the persuasive. In this deficiency we perhaps see an effect of climate.1 But why should secular oratory in America be impassioned, and religious oratory so much wanting in that element?" An acquaintance with the metaphysical profundity and force of the early American pulpit might have suggested to our venerable critic an intellectual cause, instead of a physical one." Perhaps an acquaintance with our fervid Methodist divines and the preachers of the more southern states would have made the climatic suggestion inadmissible. On the other hand a healthy infusion of metaphysics into English preaching might impart the same grave earnestness, and deepen, but nowise lessen, its effectiveness and power. Another great want of the dissenting pulpit is a mastery of the relations of science to religion. In thirty years but four Congregationalists have taken the degree of Bachelor of Science at London University. It used to be the complaint, says the Vice Chancellor, that British universities did not recognize anything scientific out of the pale of the old existing learned professions. In consequence many Englishmen degraded themselves with "spurious German doctorates of philosophy." But "the degrees of Bachelor and Doctor of Science recently established by the University of London, obviate the objection. The distinction is free to all who present themselves as candidates, and obtainable on the one sufficient and necessary condition of competent acquirements." And it is now appropriately urged upon the dissenting ministry that the battle-ground with the unbelief of the age is largely scientific. Possibly more attention cannot well be given to scientific subjects in the curriculum of the English colleges until there is more mathematics taught in the preparatory schools. At present "comparatively few enter college who could solve a simple algebraic equation." Still it is not a little singular that an American divine, a Western divine - the lecturer on the connection of science and religion in Chicago Theological Seminary, and author of the Philosophy of the Plan of Salvation - should be needed in England to lecture on such subjects; crossing the ocean once and again for the purpose.

1 Bibliotheca Sacra, Vol. iv. p. 788.

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1 It is not a little amusing to find him also ascribing to our weather at once the mediocrity and limitations of American scholarship, the lack of bloom and endurance in American women, and the absence of pleasantry in American social intercourse!

2 It was our fortune to inform this worthy divine, in his own land, before he was deputed to the Boston Council, of the nature of the contents of the Memoirs of Hopkins and Emmons published by our Congregational Board of Publication.

It is also clear that the Congregationalists of England are going at once in two different directions in respect to ministerial education, which are parallel with, or supplemental to, each other. They are improving zealously their method of preparing a learned and their method of preparing an unlearned ministry. By the latter they hope to reach the poor and industrial classes, substantially composing the Wesleyan membership of six hundred thousand, and regarded heretofore as accessible only to the Wesleyans. They mean also to reach those whom other Christians do not - an immense proportion of the English people. They are confident of raising the whole ministry to a higher educational level by raising the lower grade. They expect to make every grade practically more effective. In respect to more learning in the pulpit they are manifestly tending towards theological seminaries of the American pattern. But they have anticipated us all in special courses, in which Chicago Seminary led our way, and Andover now receives a most noble, timely, and wise endowment.1 Long since the plan of making sound, hearty, plain preachers in their mother tongue, men mighty in the scriptures and familiar with the people, was familiar

1 Thirty thousand dollars have been recently given, by Miss Sophia Smith, for supporting an abridged system of theological education at Andover. VOL. XXIV. No. 95.

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to them, as long ago as Mr. Frost's scheme of 1845. While even a course of lectures on missions by our patriarchial exsecretary our seminaries have now for the first time, they have a special institution for missionaries. They maintain similar courses of instruction and drill for home missionaries, for whom we have not yet even lectures by well-furnished and experienced men. On the other hand, the subdivision of departments, accomplished at Yale and talked of in other quarters, is to them impossible; and the idea of auxiliary lecturers, inaugurated first in the West, seems never to have occurred to them. More varieties of sacred training exist among them than among us, many more; they tend to more still; and stubbornly slow as Englishmen generally are to vary from prescription, they have not hesitated to advance where we have halted, lest the thorough education which we made the chief end of theological seminaries should suffer abatement. Accepting an American biblical journal as the first of its class in the English tongue, we may expect that they will yet build in Old England - with their characteristic, wide-reaching munificence - a "school of the prophets" to rival the oldest and best endowed in New England. In their twofold movement which is here traced, every friend of sacred learning and of the ascendancy of truth over the great English-speaking race must fervently wish them success. Something like it, in other circumstances and with other details, is going on in American Congregationalism; and our several experiences and results may be mutually instructive. We are all, unquestionably, on the way to the solution of some difficult problems. May the great Head of the Church give us foresight, energy, and promptness, along with enlarged and pliant views, and the best understanding of our time and of his work.

Do we not need at once to diversify our American theological education? It seems to be admitted on all hands that we do. Does the pulpit need to be brought down to the people, that the masses may listen, believe, and be saved? Not as it does in England, not at all; for the question whether the pulpit anywhere should be made level with the people depends upon the question what the level of the people happens to be. There is no such popular ignorance here as there; no such chasm between the intelligence of hearer and preacher. In view of the tendencies of science, philosophy, and all educated thought, the crying necessity of even higher culture for most ministers in our land need not be stated. But in a land of common schools their grade of learning may be constantly elevated and the scope and adaptiveness of sanctuary instruction not be lessened, or the sympathies of pulpit and pew removed from each other. On the other hand, in view of the flood-tide of European ignorance and dense, seething, irreligion that empties itself upon our shores and spreads over our prairies, and climbs our mountain slopes, in view too of our limitless southern work, must we not have an army of heralds of the cross, with hearts aflame and lips touched with sacred fire, who can have access to and power with every grade of intelligence, and lack of intelligence, among our swelling and heterogeneous millions? Can mortal tongue or pen tell how much we need them? The question whether the Congregational faith and order shall extend among freedmen and ex-slaveholders and non-slaveholders of the south, it will presently be seen, is just the question whether we can produce such men, and enough of them. We are compelled to multiply and diversify our appliances for their education.

But let this be done, it is said, by way of caution and pleading, only within existing institutions of the usual, not to say almost invariable, type. Add special courses rather than institute special schools; found new professorships for a particular class of pupils in an old seminary, rather than found a new seminary for that particular class. "It is far more consonant," urges a late anniversary Address,1 "with the spirit of all good learning." It is more ecomomical; it is more wise. We need "not only a more finished culture, (for) one order of mind, but also an adequate culture (for) more orders of mind." It is best for the humbler and more

Prof. Parks Address before the Am. Ed. Soc., May 30, 1865.

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