136 
BULLETIN OF DENISON UNIVERSITY. 
When a teacher finds that he has passed a year marking less of 
hard study and fresh attainment than any year of his student life, let 
him reflect that his successor has already been nominated. In the 
economy of nature after a body is dead, the time is not far distant, wherr 
it shall be written “Behold he stinketh.” 
Time was when the greatest difficulty under which the inland or 
(as Dr. Holmes would no longer say) fresh-water colleges in America 
labored was the lack of the perspective and stimulus afforded by a 
cultivated constituency. There were often enthusiasm and self-sacrifice, 
but too often there was but a very vague notion of what the ideals of 
college work should be. This is no longer in the same degree true, and 
the press has, as usual, been a prime mover in uplifting the plane of ed- 
ucational endeavor. 
It is needless, then, to disguise the surprise which is felt when 
one sees in the editorial column of an inland Baptist paper — the Journal 
and Messenger, of Cincinnati — such a paragraph as the following ; 
“A pastor, in the families of whose church are a large number of 
college graduates, told us that there was hardly one of them that was 
good for anything as a church member.” 
To Christian men of ordinary intelligence, the statement that col- 
lege graduates are undesirable church members is susceptible of but 
one inference, namely, that a church in which such men can find no 
place or welcome is a strong-hold of narrow bigotry and ignorant 
egotism. The statement is a libel on the cultured church of America. 
All educators are interested in the problem of university educa- 
tion in America. But there is much diversity of opinion as to the 
normal development and ultimate object of the university. A few 
points we, think, are settled in advance by the conditions existing in 
America. First, the continental university system cannot be grafted 
upon the American preparatory system. Our colleges undertake vast- 
ly more than the gymnasia of Europe, and turn out students at once 
better and worse prepared for the higher educational work. The 
Americans who enter German universities habitually take a high place 
among the ranks of original workers, though they may have cause to 
