THE MUTUAL RELATION OF HOME MISSIONS AND THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGES.

THE inspired commission, "Go, preach the gospel," enfolds also the germ of Christian institutions. Go, preach; and in order to the raising up of preachers, and a succession of them, plant these germs. Pray ye, therefore, the Lord of the harvest that He will send forth laborers into His harvest. Missions abroad thus find it essential to set up schools for training. these laborers; missions at home learn the same necessity. Home missionaries go forth and preach, and organize churches, and found Christian colleges; and these, in turn, bring forward more men to join in the holy propaganda The West owes to the East a debt of gratitude for its unstinted gift of cultured and self-denying men, who have made the West what it is; but the East is not able to keep up with the demand. Moreover our churches, for their own good, need to feel the responsibility of keeping up the true apostolic line; their piety needs to be brought to such a state of culture as will produce these rarest fruits, consecrated preachers of the Word. Under a sense of the burden of obligation to give the gospel to the heathen world, it is a great relief for us to have learned that all the missionaries are not to be supplied from Christian lands, but that those who go are to train up a series of native pastors, who will carry the Word of Life to the homes of the people. In raising up native preachers for the home work, we have the same satisfaction. In both fields we seek to impart to the new society a self-sustaining power, one permanently operating. Men die, but institutions live. Ancient kings were wont, from captive people, to make choice of young men to be trained to service in their realm, as in the case of Joseph and of Daniel, who came to be prime ministers. Our King, Emanuel, also, entering new fields of conquest, appropriates the service of select young men as ministers of His kingdom.

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By the middle of the second century the primitive evangelism that had struck out into Egypt had developed at Alexandria its theological school, which was long the nursery of learning and of piety. In 1585, Sir Walter Mildmay,

founding his Emanuel College at Cambridge, said to Queen Elizabeth, "I have set an acorn, which, when it becomes an oak, God alone knows what will be the fruit thereof." Indeed, God alone did know, for some of that fruit, while the oak was yet young, dropped on this side the Atlantic. "That was the Puritan college," as say the Chronicles of Massachusetts, "at which more of our first ministers and magistrates were educated than any other." The Puritans, bringing the gospel to this country, made haste to found their Harvard, "dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present ministers shall lie in the dust." This was while one in two hundred or two hundred and fifty of the people was a graduate of that Emanuel College or of some of the English universities, and while the Colonies, in ten years after the landing at Plymouth, were able to count up among their own number seventy-seven ministers who had been pastors in the Church of England, and who were, many of them, men of learning, genius, and power. Sixty years later, in the Colony of Connecticut, ten new-country ministers originated Yale, in their "sincere regard to and zeal for upholding the Protestant religion by a succession of learned and orthodox men." So, Dartmouth and Bowdoin and Princeton.

The gospel, after the Puritan way, coming towards the West has imparted this same divine impulse. Dr. Baldwin, speaking of the five institutions which the College Society had at first taken up, says, "Their origin in every case is traceable to the increased interest in the Great West, which gave birth to the American Home Missionary Society and other kindred organizations. These colleges were all projected by religious men, most of whom were home missionaries." And later, he says, The colleges which it (the Society) aids are formed almost exclusively by home missionaries. They are the natural offspring of the great home missionary movement at the West." A convention of these same workers in Wisconsin said, "We believe that the work of home missions runs naturally and necessarily into the planting and sustaining of those institutions which aim at a higher Christian education."

The oldest of these institutions, the Western Reserve College, formed in 1826, is, together with the American Home

Missionary Society associating its Jubilee with the National Centennial. Here was the "New Connecticut," receiving her people, her ideas, her church-life, her ministers, from the old State, and the Missionary Society of Connecticut had been mothering them for a quarter of a century. The new National Society, in its first report, sets forth a whole synod of Presbyterian Churches, eighty-seven of them already gathered on the Western Reserve and served by forty-two so-called Presbyterian ministers, almost all of whom had been Congregationalists and were missionaies of the old Connecticut Society. All this under the working of "the plan of union."

Now, these home missionaries are the movers for the college. The first one from Connecticut, Rev. Joseph Badger, in 1801, in a four-horse wagon, emigrating with his wife and six children, brings along the college idea. In 1803 he and a dozen laymen, among them David Hudson, with the purpose of " establishing an institution adequate to the preparation of young men for the ministry," are incorporated as the "trustees of the Erie Literary Society." The school is a long time in getting under way, and still it languishes until, in 1822, other home missionaries take hold of it, change the name, and push it through. The chief workers are Revs. Caleb Pitkin, John Seward, Harvey Coe, Giles H. Cowles, D.D., Simeon Woodruff, Benjamin Fenn, and Stephen J. Bradstreet, of the First Presbyterian Church of Cleveland, and all of these were home missionaries. Their model is the New England college; their aim," to raise up a learned and godly ministry."

In order to this, a theological department is instituted. When Rev. C. B. Storrs, in 1828, left his pastorate at Ravenna, it was that he might become Professor of Theology as well as president of the college. His educational career was short, but he had made a profound impression upon his stuents; and a local history says, "His name will ever be associated with the interests of religion, benevolence, and learning in the West."

In 1829 Illinois College follows under the same missionary inspiration. Since 1816 Salmon Giddings has been at St. Louis, under the Connecticut Society. In 1825 he brings on from Andover, John M. Ellis and locates him at Kaskaskia.

Ellis, at his ordination in the Old South Church, Boston, had received from Elias Cornelius the charge, "Build up an institution of learning which shall bless the West for all time." He comes out with that purpose in mind. He and Lippincott, in 1828, make exploration and locate a Seminary at Jacksonville, to which place he removes to help on the institution and to take charge of the new church there. He gets his first subscription for the school from Dea. William Collins, of Collinsville, to whom, on leaving Litchfield, Conn., in 1818, his pastor, Lyman Beecher, had said, "You are going on a wildgoose chase." In his first report from this field to the Society Mr. Ellis announces thirty-six persons received to the church, divulges his plan for a seminary, and calls for help and for more missionaries.

Now, as God would have it, just as that report comes to hand in the Home Missionary, a divine ferment is going on in the Divinity School of Yale College in behalf of evangelizing the West. Ellis's report quickens the leaven. Seven young men sign their names in solemn pledge as the "Illinois Association," to go out and take up that enterprise. Ellis goes on East and helps them to raise money. And so Illinois College comes to be. "Great assistance," says the president, "was derived from the co-operation of the Home Missionary Society, especially from their able and efficient secretaries, Rev. Drs. Absalom Peters and Charles Hall. In the Fall of 1829 Messrs. Sturtevant and Baldwin came on to set up the college, designated in their commission, "to the State of Illinois." The names of the others were Mason Grosvenor, William Kirby, John F. Brooks, Elisha Jenney, and Asa Turner. To this list there were added those of William Carter, Albert Hale, Romulus Barnes, Lucien Farnham, and Flavel Bascom. All of these, except Grosvenor, soon come to Illinois, under commission of the Society, take up their missionary work and plant for the College its constituency of churches. Seven of them become its trustees. One, as professor and then as president, identifies his life-work with the institution.

Out of this movement comes Monticello Seminary, which has educated two thousand young ladies, and the Jacksonville Female Academy, a fountain of life, and also the College

Society itself, born of the brain of Theron Baldwin, and served by him until the day of his death, in planting and nourishing the newer colleges of the opening West. Dr. Absalom Peters, who had commissioned the Illinois Band, years afterward, in his sermon before this College Society, claimed the Society as "a child of home missions."

Next, in 1832, comes Wabash College, at Crawfordsville, Indiana. Rev. James H. Johnston, many years a pastor at that place, in a sermon upon "A Forty Years' Ministry in Indiana," previous to 1865, says, "This college owes its origin to the counsels and efforts of five home missionaries, who early selected the Upper Wabash Valley as their field of labor." These were Revs. James Thomson, James A. Carnabron, John S. Thomson, Edmund O. Hovey, and John M. Ellis. The last-named was the same who had pioneered Illinois College, and who then, as agent of the American Education Society, was moved to strike for a college in Indiana as a missionary necessity. After three days of consultation and prayer by these "almost penniless home missionaries, with a few elders," as one describes them, they went out in a body to the spot selected in the midst of the primeval forest, and there, kneeling in the snow and joining with Ellis in prayer, they dedicated the ground to God for a Christian college.

One of those young missionaries, Mr. Hovey, having become a professor, yet abides in that position at a green old age, still saying, as he said at first, that if the college had taken him out of his evangelistic work, he would not have gone into it.

Pres. Tuttle, kindly favoring me with documents, writes, "From these you will see how largely is Wabash College. indebted to the American Home Missionary Society. I am sure, as you look at this fruit of the tree planted by its agency, you will not be ashamed of its work, as we certainly are not ashamed of our royal origin. If you think of us as we are, you will be glad of this portion of the Society's work in the early part of its first half century." At the Quarter-Centennial of the College Society, the president also said, "Wabash College is not the child of strife, but of home missions."

The next was Marietta, 1835. The college grew out of a local seminary. At the Quarter-Centennial, just referred to,