AN UNSECTARIAN PULPIT- 1871 -1904 403 



Sage, the eldest son of him who had given us the women's 

 college and the chapel, proposed to add an endowment for 

 a chaplaincy, and suggested that a clergyman of the Prot- 

 estant Episcopal Church be appointed to that office. This 

 would have been personally pleasing to me; for, though 

 my churchmanship was "exceeding broad, " I was still 

 attracted to the church in which I was brought up, and felt 

 nowhere else so much at home. But it seemed to me that 

 we had no right, under our charter, to give such prominence 

 to any single religious organization ; and I therefore pro- 

 posed to the donor that the endowment be applied to a 

 preachership to be filled by leading divines of all denomi- 

 nations. In making this proposal I had in view, not only 

 the unsectarian feature embodied in our charter, but my 

 observation of university chaplaincies generally. I had 

 noticed that, at various institutions, excellent clergymen, 

 good preachers, thorough scholars, charming men, when 

 settled as chaplains, had, as a rule, been unable to retain 

 their hold upon the great body of the students. The 

 reason was not far to seek. The average parish clergy- 

 man, even though he be not a strong preacher or profound 

 scholar or brilliant talker, if he be at all fit for his po- 

 sition, gradually wins the hearts of his congregation. He 

 has baptized their children, married their young men and 

 maidens, buried their dead, rejoiced with those who have 

 rejoiced, and wept with those who have wept. A strong- 

 tie has thus grown up. But such a tie between a chaplain 

 and bodies of students shifting from year to year, is, in 

 the vast majority of cases, impossible. Hence it is that 

 even the most brilliant preachers settled in universities 

 have rapidly lost their prestige among the students. I 

 remembered well how, at Geneva and at Yale, my college- 

 mates joked at the peculiarities of clergymen connected 

 with the college, who, before I entered it, had been objects 

 of my veneration. I remembered that at Yale one of my 

 class was wont to arouse shouts of laughter by his droll 

 imitations of the prayers of the leading professors imi- 

 tations in which their gestures, intonations, and bits of 



