INTERIOR OF THE KIRKPATRICK CHAPEL SHOWING THE NEW CHANCEL, THE HARDENBERGH MEMORIAL WINDOW, AND THE BUCKHAM MEMORIAL ORGAN "When through the deep waters I call thee to go "When through fiery trials thy pathway shall lie, "The soul that on Jesus hath leaned for repose R. Keene (1) 1787. ANNIVERSARY SERMON THE REV. ANDREW V. V. RAYMOND, D.D., LL.D. Pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, Buffalo, N. Y. Theme: The Relation of Christianity to Education There are personal reasons which make me especially grateful to have a share in this great and worthy celebration. My father, after graduating from Yale, came here in 1825 for his theological training. Fifty years later I entered the Seminary, coming from Union College; and thirty years after my graduation from the Seminary, my son entered. Moreover the best of the many friends with whom God has blessed me is now the honored President of the Seminary. It will be seen that my associations are with the Seminary rather than with the College and this doubtless, in connection with the fact that I was for many years the official head of Union College, led President Demarest to ask me to speak upon the special theme that is to have our thought this morning-The Relation of Christianity to Education. Before I speak upon this theme may I call your attention to the fact that Union shares with Rutgers the honor of educating most of the ministers of the Reformed Church; for Union, no less than Rutgers, is the child of the Reformed Church, her founders being the Hollanders and descendants of Hollanders living in the Upper Hudson and Mohawk valleys-chief among them for zeal and persistent effort, the Rev. Dirck Romeyn, pastor of the Dutch Church in Schenectady, and General Philip Schuyler, of Albany. It is a matter of record that for many years after the founding of Union College, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, fully as many of the students in New Brunswick Seminary were from Union as from Rutgers College. There were times, I believe, when the Union students were in the majority. All this serves to account for my presence here today to speak upon this special theme. Now, when they saw the boldness of Peter and John and perceived that they were unlearned and ignorant men, they marvelled; and they took knowledge of them that they had been with Jesus. Acts IV: 13. No well informed and fair minded man today questions the intimate relation between Christianity and education, as Christianity is represented by the Church and education by the school; and yet, as our text shows, Christianity began among the unlettered. Its original appeal was not to the schoolmen, but largely to men of untrained faculties and undeveloped minds. This was enough to condemn it in the judgment of the learned. "Have any of the scribes and pharisees believed?" Had the implication that Christianity was unable to win intelligent assent been true, it would of course have proved fatal to its permanent influence, for no teaching that is rejected by developed and unprejudiced minds can retain its power indefinitely; at least it must depend upon ignorance and self-interest for any currency that it may obtain. In reality, however, the original opposition to the teachings of Jesus Christ did not represent the intelligent judgment of unfettered minds, but the unreasoning intolerance of minds enslaved by tradition and the fear of personal loss. The leaders of Judaism, the supposed intellectual class, saw in these teachings an influence subverting their authority and destroying their privileges. That was enough; whether the teachings were true or not they must be suppressed. It was not the human mind but human nature, perverse in its selfishness, that first rejected Christianity. As a matter of fact there was little real intellectual life among these champions of the Jewish faith. There was learning of a sort, but not of the sort that quickens thought. The distinction should always be made between a certain kind of scholastic attainment and intellectual vigor. The mind may be filled to overflowing with facts and accepted ideas without acquiring any ability to project a new thought or showing any capacity for independent judgment. There is a method of supposed culture that seems to sap the vitality of the mind, leaving it barren and unfruitful. Wherever education is little or nothing more than the training of memory and the accumulation of stereotyped ideas, the most learned become the most unprogressive, incapable of original thought. We all know that this method of education has been followed in the Orient from the distant past. The Jews of Christ's time were characteristically Oriental. The rejection of Christianity, therefore, by their rulers, their educated class, was not a serious indictment of the reasonableness of the Christian truth. All that it meant was that Christ's teachings were new, either in their substance or in their form. When we say that the first disciples of Christ were unlearned, we do not mean that they were unintellectual, incapable of vigorous thought; we mean only that they were unlettered, without the training of the schools. That training, as we have seen, would probably have stifled rather than quickened the true life of the intellect. Whenever this has been the influence of the schools, intellectual vigor, receptivity to new ideas, capacity for original thought, if found at all, have been found among the untrained, the so-called uneducated. How often have |