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THE

Congregational Quarterly.

WHOLE NO. LXXVI.

OCTOBER, 1877. VOL. XIX, No. 4.

WILLIAM AUGUSTUS STEARNS.

THE presidents of our American colleges have had a character and a history of their own. While differing widely from each other as individuals, they have had so much in commoncommon antecedents, characteristics, and qualifications — that they may well be considered, not exactly as a calling or profession, not quite a genus or species, but a class or order in society, and that as unique as American society itself. With few exceptions, and those so marked as only to prove the rule, they have themselves been graduates, the earlier presidents of each college of necessity alumni of other colleges and universities either in our own land or in the mother country, but the later ones, almost as a matter of course, graduates of the institutions over which they were called to preside. A large proportion of them were tutors, and a scarcely less percentage professors and heads of departments, before they were elected to the presidency. Almost all of them have been clergymen, and for the most part pastors of the college church, preachers to the faculty and students, perhaps also professors of theology in their respective institutions. Not a few of them were previously, for a short time at least, pastors of other churches, some invited first to a professorship and thence to the presidency, others called from the pastorate directly to the president's chair; now and then one, like Pres. Woolsey, on passing from the professorship to the presidency, was ordained to the ministry as an indispensable prerequisite to the presidential office.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1877, by CHRISTOPHER CUSHING, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

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That the tutorship and the professorship are good schools of preparation for the presidency will not be disputed. The prevailing usage of seeking a president among the alumni of the college and in the faculty is equally natural and attended with advantages too obvious to require mention. Nor can it have. been without sufficient reason that our colleges have, for so long a period and with so few exceptions, chosen clergymen for their presidents. Our oldest and the larger part of all our colleges were founded by the churches, or rather by the Christian people of the several States, for the threefold purpose of educating pastors for the churches, rulers for the States, and teachers for the schools; and of these three objects. (if they would not have repudiated any distinction or comparison among them), the first was that which lay nearest their hearts. These clerical presidents were the chosen representatives of an idea which was sacred in the estimation of the founders, and rooted in the affections of the people the idea of a natural and inseparable connection between the schools. and the churches, between learning and religion. They were the fit agents for the Christian education of the leading and ruling minds of a Christian people. Indeed, the clergy always have been, in fact, and are by the very nature of their office, not only a ruling order, but a teaching profession. The work of the pulpit and the pastorate is largely educational; "the priest's lips should keep knowledge, and the people should seek the law at his mouth." He is ex officio a teacher and trainer. His tastes, his habits, his aptitudes, his aims and ends are, far beyond any of the other learned professions, those of an educator. The higher education falls under the eye and into the hands of the minister, almost as naturally as that of the family and of the primary school is the sphere of woman. And if the New England clergy of the olden time were a kind of untitled nobility, the nobility of learning and moral worth, and social as well as spiritual influence, the presidents of our colleges have been the elite of that aristocracy. At the same time, these presidents have been, for the most part, shrewd, practical, business men, capable not only of educating and governing, but of well and wisely administering the finances, and managing all the concerns of the institutions

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committed to their care. To a very great extent they have been the leading men of their times, guides of public opinion, organizers of societies and institutions, ruling minds in the church and the State.

In proof of what we have said of the antecedents of our presidents, we have carefully examined the triennials of all our older colleges, and find, as we have already said, the exceptions to be only sufficient to prove the rule. The statistics, if we had time to give them, would fully justify our assertions, and the details would only deepen the impression. In demonstration of the character and influence which we have claimed for them, we have only to mention the names of Chauncy and Mather, of the Old Academy, Webber and Kirkland and Quincy, of the Middle, and Everett and Sparks and Felton, of the New at Cambridge; of Daggett and Stiles and Dwight and Day and Woolsey, at Yale; of Edwards and Davies and Witherspoon and Green, at Princeton; of Wheelock and Dana and Tyler and Lord, at Dartmouth; of Fitch and Griffin and Hopkins, at Williams, and of many others scarcely inferior to these stars of the first magnitude, — stars not only in the educational and literary firmament, but in the moral, social, and religious sphere; not only presidents of colleges, but angels of the seven churches; the representative men, not only of the institutions over which they presided, but of the age and country in which they lived. If we had time to glance at the presidents of Columbia College, we should find them sustaining much the same relation to the Episcopal Church as those of Harvard and Yale to the Congregational Church, and those of the college of New Jersey to the Presbyterian Church, and exerting a like commanding influence in the social, civil, and religious affairs of the State and the nation. And if we were to follow out in like manner the history of the younger colleges, we should find that their presidents generally have been not mere men of the cloister and the school, but men who have made their mark directly or indirectly as the leaders of thought, opinion, and action in the church also, and in the community. Indeed, the history of the country, especially of New England and the Middle States, might be written in a book of the lives and

times of our college presidents, quite as properly, quite as truly, quite as fully as in the lives of Presidents of the United States and candidates for the presidency.

Amherst College has had four presidents, exclusive of him who has just entered upon the office, Moore, Humphrey, Hitchcock, and Stearns, all honored names, and known in the history not of the college only, but of the churches, of the commonwealth, and of the country-Moore, who launched the good ship with sails all set, and entered on the voyage with a brave and faithful crew, as an experienced, loved, and trusted captain, but had scarcely left the harbor when his life was sacrificed to the hardships, dangers, and difficulties of the enter prise; Humphrey, who took the helm amid storms and counter currents and carried the ship safely, bravely out to sea, till at length, adverse winds and favoring gales both failing, it lay becalmed, and almost perished for lack of supplies; Hitchcock, who raised the wind, put on board new rigging, and furnished it with needful supplies, and then resigned the command to another, still standing by the ship, however, in the place of a subordinate; and Stearns, who made the ship over again, putting in new timber and plank, and working over and polishing up the old hulk till, like the sacred vessel which went annually from Athens to Delos, it became a question among outsiders whether or not it was the same vessel, though neither captain nor crew ever doubted its identity: Moore, who by his personal magnetism, attracted students, allayed popular prejudice, and conciliated favor for " The Charitable and Collegiate Institu tion at Amherst"; Humphrey, who wrested from a reluctant legislature the charter of "Amherst College," and impressed upon the college in its forming period his own practical, sensible, vigorous, manly, and lofty Christian character; Hitchcock who, without relaxing in the least the religious influence which ruled and shaped it from the first, gave it a national and worldwide reputation as a museum and school of science; and Stearns, who broadened and deepened the foundations, enlarged, adorned, and enriched the superstructure, and wrote all over it the largest, broadest, and highest education, and all for Christ. Amherst has been fortunate, let me rather say happy-in its presidents, so different one from another, yet each so fitted to

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