424 AS UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT -VIII 



carved for the university grounds the words, &quot; Above all 

 nations is humanity, &quot; there came an outburst. Sundry 

 pastors, in their anxiety for the souls of the students, could 

 not tell whether this inscription savored more of atheism 

 or of pantheism. Its simple significance that the claims 

 of humanity are above those of nationality entirely es 

 caped them. Pulpit cushions were beaten in all parts of 

 the State against us, and solemn warnings were renewed 

 to students by their pastors to go anywhere for their edu 

 cation rather than to Cornell. Curiously, this fact became 

 not only a gratuitous, but an effective, advertisement: 

 many of the brightest men who came to us in those days 

 confessed to me that these attacks first directed their atten 

 tion to us. 



We also owed some munificent gifts to this same cause. 

 In two cases gentlemen came forward and made large ad 

 ditions to our endowment as their way of showing disbe 

 lief in these attacks or contempt for them. 



Still, the attacks were vexatious even when impotent. 

 Ingenious was the scheme carried out by a zealous young 

 clergyman settled for a short time in Ithaca. Coming 

 one day into my private library, he told me that he was 

 very anxious to borrow some works showing the more 

 recent tendencies of liberal thought. I took him to one 

 of my book-cases, in which, by the side of the works of 

 Bossuet and Fenelon and Thomas Arnold and Robertson 

 of Brighton, he found those of Channing, Parker, Renan, 

 Strauss, and the men who, in the middle years of the last 

 century, were held to represent advanced thought. He 

 looked them over for some time, made some excuse for not 

 borrowing any of them just then, and I heard nothing 

 more from him until there came, in a denominational 

 newspaper, his eloquent denunciation of me for possessing 

 such books. Impressive, too, must have been the utter 

 ances of an eminent &quot;revivalist&quot; who, in various West 

 ern cities, loudly asserted that Mr. Cornell had died la 

 menting his inability to base his university on atheism, 

 and that I had fled to Europe declaring that in America 

 an infidel university was, as yet, an impossibility. 



