Chapter XII · FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. (continued 2)

And here it should not be unrecorded, that, while the vast majority of the supporters of the measure were laymen, most efficient service was rendered by a clergyman, the Rev. Dr. Amos Brown, born in New Hampshire, but at that time an instructor in a little village of New York. His ideas were embodied in the bill, and his efforts did much for its passage.

Thus was established, in every State of the American Union, at least one institution in which scientific and technical studies were given equal rank with classical, and promoted by laboratories for research in physical and natural science. Of these institutions there are now nearly fifty: all have proved valuable, and some of them, by the addition of splendid gifts from individuals and from the States in which they are situated, have been developed into great universities.

Nor was this all. Many of the older universities and colleges thus received a powerful stimulus in the new direction. The great physical and chemical laboratories founded by gifts from public-spirited individuals, as at Harvard, Yale, and Chicago, or by enlightened State legislators, as in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, California, Kansas, and Nebraska, have also become centres from which radiate influences favouring the unfettered search for truth as truth.

This system has been long enough in operation to enable us to note in some degree its effects on religion, and these are certainly such as to relieve those who have feared that religion was necessarily bound up with the older instruction controlled by theology. While in Europe, by a natural reaction, the colleges under strict ecclesiastical control have sent forth the most powerful foes the Christian Church has ever known, of whom Voltaire and Diderot and Volney and Sainte-Beuve and Renan are types, no such effects have been noted in these newer institutions. While the theological way of looking at the universe has steadily yielded, there has been no sign of any tendency toward irreligion. On the contrary, it is the testimony of those best acquainted with the American colleges and universities during the last forty-five years that there has been in them a great gain, not only as regards morals, but as regards religion in its highest and best sense. The reason is not far to seek. Under the old American system the whole body of students at a university were confined to a single course, for which the majority cared little and very many cared nothing, and, as a result, widespread idleness and dissipation were inevitable. Under the new system, presenting various courses, and especially courses in various sciences, appealing to different tastes and aims, the great majority of students are interested, and consequently indolence and dissipation have steadily diminished. Moreover, in the majority of American institutions of learning down to the middle of the century, the main reliance for the religious culture of students was in the perfunctory presentation of sectarian theology, and the occasional stirring up of what were called "revivals," which, after a period of unhealthy stimulus, inevitably left the main body of students in a state of religious and moral reaction and collapse. This method is now discredited, and in the more important American universities it has become impossible. Religious truth, to secure the attention of the modern race of students in the better American institutions, is presented, not by "sensation preachers," but by thoughtful, sober-minded scholars. Less and less avail sectarian arguments; more and more impressive becomes the presentation of fundamental religious truths. The result is, that while young men care less and less for the great mass of petty, cut-and-dried sectarian formulas, they approach the deeper questions of religion with increasing reverence.

While striking differences exist between the European universities and those of the United States, this at least may be said, that on both sides of the Atlantic the great majority of the leading institutions of learning are under the sway of enlightened public opinion as voiced mainly by laymen, and that, this being the case, the physical and natural sciences are henceforth likely to be developed normally, and without fear of being sterilized by theology or oppressed by ecclesiasticism.