THE COLLEGE 131 



gives to the church ministers who can do more than turn the cranks 

 of ecclesiastical machinery and repeat ritualized tradition prophets 

 who gain first-hand contact with the purposes of God. It prepares 

 men who will bring to the study and practice of law ability to apply 

 eternal principles and ancient precedents to the latest phases of our 

 complex civilization. It trains its graduates who practice medicine 

 to give every patient the benefit of whatever science is developing 

 of healing efficacy for his particular case. It trains men who are to 

 be engineers, bankers, manufacturers, merchants, to put the solidity 

 and integrity of natural law into the structures that they rear, the 

 institutions they control, the fabrics they produce, and the transac- 

 tions they direct. It trains men and women who will give to do- 

 mestic and social life that unselfishness and geniality which comes 

 of having the mind lifted above the selfish, the artificial, the petty, 

 into sincere and simple intercourse with the good, the true, and the 

 beautiful. 



The function of the college, then, is not mental training on the 

 one hand nor specialized knowledge on the other. Incidentally it 

 may do these things at the beginning and at the end of the course, 

 as a completion of the unfinished work of the school, and a prepara- 

 tion for the future pursuits of the university. The function of the 

 college is liberal education; the opening of the mind to the great 

 departments of human interest; the opening of the heart to the 

 great spiritual motives of unselfishness and social service; the open- 

 ing of the will to opportunity for wise and righteous self-control. 

 Having a different task from either school or university, it has de- 

 veloped a method and spirit, a life and leisure of its own. Judged 

 by school standards it appears weak, indulgent, superficial. Judged 

 by university standards it appears vague, general, indefinite. 

 Judged by its true standard as an agency of liberal education; 

 judged by its function to make men and women who have wide 

 interests, generous aims, and high ideals, it will vindicate itself 

 as the most efficient, the most precise means yet devised to take 

 well-trained boys and girls from the school and send them either on 

 to the university or out into life with a breadth of intellectual view 

 no subsequent specialization can ever take away; a strength of 

 moral purpose the forces of materialistic selfishness can never break 

 down; a passion for social service neither popular superstition nor 

 political corruption can deflect from its chosen path. 



I cannot sum up the function of the college better than in words 

 formerly used in reply to the question of a popular journal, " Does 

 a College Education Pay? ' : 



To be at home in all lands and all ages; to count nature a familiar 

 acquaintance, and art an intimate friend; to gain a standard for the 

 appreciation of other men's work and the criticism of one's own; to 



