CHAPTER XVIII.
ADMINISTRATION OF PRESIDENT SMITH.
Rev. Asa D. Smith, D.D., of New York city, of the class of 1830, was elected the seventh president of the college. His thorough understanding of the field upon which he was to enter is indicated by the following extracts from his inaugural address:
"There are four chief organic forces, by which, under the providence of God, humanity has its normal development. These, generalizing broadly, are the family, the school, the State, and the Church. Wherever you find, even in its lowest measure, a true civilization, these exist; and as it rises they rise, sustaining to it the relation both of cause and effect. Concerning, as they do, one and the same complex nature, they have, in different degrees and combinations, the same underlying elements of power. In the family, we have, in its rudimental form, both teaching and government. It is a patriarchate—a little commonwealth; and to its head—a priest as well as a patriarch—that Scripture should ever be relevant, 'the church that is in thy house.' In the school, the simplest offshoot, perhaps, from a congeries of families, we have, or ought to have, the parental element; we have magistracy also, and a certain statehood; we have, or should have, worship. The state, properly apprehended, is not only governmental but didactic—it is a teaching power; and though not, at this age of the world, theocratic, it should be, in a large view, religious. In the church, having specially and predominantly the last-named characteristic,—being of divine appointment, and as ministering to our imperative needs, the foster-mother of devotion,—we have, also, as essential to its purpose, both rule and instruction. And in the influence they wield, these great moulding agencies are perpetually interpenetrating and modifying each other.
"It is of the second of these, the school, that we are now called to speak. The service we essay is connected with an educational institution, using the term in the specific sense; a fact, it may be said at the outset, which of itself dignifies the occasion. Not to insist on those affinities and mutual influences just adverted to, and of which there will be further occasion to speak, there is a view of education, a large and comprehensive one, which gives to it the very grandest elevation. It is the end, next to that which the good old Catechism makes chief, and subordinate to that, of all the divine provisions and arrangements. God is the great Educator of the universe. More glorious in his didactic offices is He than even in creation; nay, creation was for these. Earth is our training place—time is our curriculum; eternity will but furnish to the true pupil the higher forms of his limitless advancement. We have our lessons in all providence, in all beings and things, God teaching us in and through all. No mean vocation, then, is that of the earthly educator; no unimportant theme that now in hand. Yet even of the school in the more technical sense of the term, we cannot speak at large, except as in touching on any one department we more or less affect every other. Our thought may be fitly limited to that class of institutions which these ancient halls of learning and these inauguration solemnities naturally bring before us. The college is my subject, considered in its proper functions and characteristics.
"I use the term college in the American sense. This, not for the poor purpose of ministering to national vanity, but because we must needs take things as they are; and for the further reason that there is much to commend in the shape the institution here assumes. It has hardly its prototype either in the Fatherland or on the Continent. It has but a partial resemblance either to the German Gymnasia or to the English preparatory schools, as of Eton and Rugby. As preliminary to professional study, it is in some respects far in advance of these. It differs materially, at once from the German and English University, and from the college as embraced in the latter. University education in Europe was once somewhat rigidly divided into two portions; the one designed to form the mind for whatever sphere of life; the other, the Brodstudium, as the Germans significantly term it, a course of training for some particular profession. Long ago, however, this division became mainly obsolete. 'On the continent,' said an eminent English scholar, some years since, 'the preparatory education has been dropped; among ourselves, the professional.' He speaks, of course, comparatively. So far as England is concerned, the same testimony is borne by a well-informed recent observer. This ancient and wise division is by us still maintained; with this peculiarity, that the 'preparatory' education, so-called,—by which is meant the highest form of it,—is the sole work of the colleges. Professional culture is remitted to other and often separate schools. The undergraduate course is for general training; it lays the foundation for whatever superstructure. It has no particular reference to any one pursuit; but, like the first part of the old University course, aims to fit the whole man for a man's work in any specific line either of study or of action.
"In this conception of the college, there are, it is believed, important advantages. It is better for preparatory education; it is better for professional. It felicitously discriminates. It keeps things in their place. It defines and duly magnifies each of the two great departments of the educational process. It is likelier to dig deep, and build on broad and solid rock; it tends to symmetry and finish in the superincumbent fabric.
"The college should be marked by a completeness. Rejecting the fragmentary and the unfinished, the well constituted mind ever craves this. Modern thought, especially, is passing from an excessive nominalism to a more realistic habit; by many a broad induction, from mere details to a rounded whole: And nowhere more persistently than in relation to institutions. The college should be complete as to its objective scheme. There may be onesidedness here. There may be, for example, an excessive or ill-directed pressing of utilities, as in the speculations of Mr. Herbert Spencer; or there may be an undue exaltation of what he calls 'the decorative element.' The theoretic maybe too exclusively pursued; or there may be a practicalness which has too little of theory, like a cone required to stand firm on its apex. There should be completeness, also, as touching the subjective aim. It should embrace, in a word, the whole man, and that not in his Edenic aspects alone, but as a fallen being. You may not overlook even the physical; the casket not merely, holding all the mental and moral treasures—the frame-work rather, to which by subtile ties the invisible machinery is linked, and which upholds it as it works. The world has yet to learn fully how dependent is the inner upon the outer man, and how greatly the highest achievements of scholarship are facilitated by proper hygienic conditions. As you pass to the intellectual, it matters little what classification you adopt, whether with the author of the 'Novum Organum,' in his 'Advancement of Learning,' you resolve all the powers into those of memory, imagination, and reason, or whether the minuter divisions of a more recent philosophy are preferred; only be sure that not a single faculty is overlooked or disparaged. Be it presentative, conservative, reproductive, representative, elaborative, regulative, or whatever the fine Hamiltonian analysis may suggest, give it its proper place and its proper scope.