"To help a man to help himself is the wisest effort of human love. To have wealth and to have honestly earned it all, by labor, skill or wisdom, is an object of ambition worthy of the highest and best. Hence, to do the most good to the great classes, rich or poor, we must labor industriously. The lover of his kind must furnish them with the means of gaining knowledge while they work.
"Then there was a third class of mankind, starving, with their tables breaking with luscious foods, cold in warehouses of ready-made clothing of the most costly fabrics; seeing not in the moon-light, and restless to distraction on beds of eiderdown. They do not know the use or value of things. They are harassed with plenty they cannot appropriate. They are doubly poor. They need education. The library is a care, an expense and a disgrace to the owner who cannot read. To give education to those in the possession of property which they might use for the help of humanity and which they might enjoy, is as clear a duty and charity as it is to help the beggar. And, indeed, indirectly the education of the unwise wealthy to become useful may be the most practical way of raising the poor. There is a need for every dollar of the nation's property, and it should be invested by men whose minds and hearts have been trained to see the human need and to love to satisfy it.
"The thought that in education of the best quality was to be found the remedy for hunger, loneliness, crime and weakness was most clearly emphasized to my mind by the coming of two young men who had felt the need from the under side. They had received but little instruction; they were over twenty years of age, and they wished to enter the ministry. Was there any way open for a poor, industrious laborer to get the highest education while he supported his mother, sister and himself? I urged them to try it for the good of many who would follow them if they made it a clear success. I was elated almost to uncontrollable enthusiasm the night they came to my study to begin their course. They brought five with them, and all proved themselves noble men. One is not, for God took him. But the others are moulding and inspiring their world."
Thus was conceived the idea of the institution that is now educating annually three thousand men and women. The need for it has been plainly proven. Rev. Forest Dager, at one time Dean of Temple College, said in regard to the people who in later life crave opportunities for study:
"That the Temple College idea of educating working men and working women, at an expense just sufficient to give them an appreciation of the work of the Institution, covers a wide and long-neglected field of educational effort, is at once apparent to a thoughtful mind. Remembering that out of a total enrollment in the schools of our land of all grades, public and private, of 14,512,778 pupils, 96-1/2 per cent are reported as receiving elementary 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.
"We are not to withdraw our support from, nor to antagonize, the public schools; they are the foundations of liberty in the nation. But the public schools do not teach many things which young men and young women need. I believe every church should institute classes for the education of such people, and I believe the Institutional church will require it. I believe every evening in the week should be given to some particular kind of intellectual training along some educational line; that this training should begin with the more evident needs of the young people in each congregation, and then be adjusted as the matter grows, to the wants of each."
So, because one poor boy struggled so bitterly for an education, because a man, keen-eyed, saw others' needs, reading the signs by the light of his own bitter experience, a great College for busy men and women has grown, to give them freely the education which is very bread and meat to their minds.