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“Down from the Mountain”: Secularization and the Higher Learning in America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Henry C. Johnson Jr.
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At the turn of the century, American higher educational institutions were rapidly divesting themselves of their religious content and functions. The conscious attempt of the University of Illinois to separate itself from its fifty years of vaguely Protestant Christianity was representative of this process, which was, in fact, the final chapter in the gradual secularization of the higher learning that had prevailed in the Western European tradition for some eight hundred years. Fully to understand these developments entails a historical analysis of the complex and dialectical cultural and political changes that brought them about, including a critical definition of secularization as a way of thinking and as a social-political program. The practical problem, it is argued, is located in the post-Reformation tendency to confuse an institution of higher learning with a local church, the Yale experience furnishing an instructive example of this confusion. The result was a religious demand the university could not meet and a corresponding withdrawal of religion to a merely pastoral and psychological strategy in place of its former substantive intellectual role. Thanks to the “Kantian defense,” neither orthodoxy nor the new liberal Christianity (which might have been seen as a candidate to replace it in academe) any longer needed the university, both having retired to a safer autonomy. The resulting dilemma, that to be religious hampers learning, and that to be learned entails at least religious neutrality if not its complete abandonment, persists in present day conflicts over the role of religion in our educational institutions at all levels.

Type
Research Article
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The Review of Politics , Volume 54 , Issue 4: SPECIAL SESQUICENTENNIAL ISSUE , Fall 1992 , pp. 551 - 588
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Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1992

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References

I wish to express my appreciation to Winton U. Solberg of the University of Illinois who, as colleague and friend, has encouraged the lengthy study underlying this essay and whose work has enriched it. Earlier versions were presented at Rice University's Fiftieth Anniversary Lecture Series and an annual meeting of the American Society for Church History, whence a number of helpful criticisms and suggestions came. Closer to home, my debts are more than numerous, but chiefly to Joseph Kockelmans and James Martin, for years of conversations.

1. For the conference, see University of Illinois: Installation of Edmund Janes James, Ph.D., LL.D. as President of the University (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois, 1906)Google Scholar, henceforth: James Installation. There is also a manuscript version in the university's archives that contains some unpublished material: University of Ilinois Record Series 2/5/18–Bxl. All primary documents cited from Illinois are held in the archives of the University in Urbana. In the text that follows, all sources will be indicated by first author or editor’s name, and/or short title, if necessary.

2. [Princeton Latin Professor] West, Andrew Fleming, “The American College,” in Butler, Nicholas Murray (ed.) Monographs on Education in the United States, 2 vols. (Albany: J. B. Lyon Co., 1900), pp. 22, 23.Google Scholar These essays were prepared for the Paris Exposition of 1900.

3. James Installation, manuscript, p. 6.

4. James Installation, manuscript, p. 2.

5. The Rev. Anderson, William F., in James Installation, manuscript, p. 19.Google Scholar Anderson claims 62.5% of Illinois’s students belonged to “some branch of Christianity”; 800 were Methodists. See p. 14.

6. The Rev. Jones, Jenkins L., D.d., , Pastor of All Souls Church, Chicago, and Editor of Unity.Google Scholar Two representatives (“Reverend Dean Duffy” of St. Patrick’s Church, Danville, Illinois, and “Prof. J. Bergin” of St. Viateur’s College in Illinois) of the Roman Catholic Church, whose rapidly multiplying schools and colleges were now enrolling significant numbers, contributed little beyond strong encouragement of a broad, essentially classical higher education, necessarily inclusive of religion. Perhaps the official problem was not yet urgent in their case. (The remarks of a third, a Chicago Jesuit, were not printed.) For both see James Installation, pp. 21–23 and 54–56. Note that one of the by then very vocal spokesmen for Catholic education did not participate—Bishop John Lancaster Spalding of nearby Peoria, Illinois.

7. James Installation, manuscript, pp. 83, 85. Emphasis supplied.

8. James Installation, pp. 180, 81. Emphasis supplied.

9. James Installation. For Thompson, see p. 131; for Gray, pp. 175–76.

10. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion, (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), p. 112.Google Scholar

11. For Islam, see various works by Nasr, S. H., esp. his Knowledge and the Sacred [1981 Gifford Lectures] (New York: Crossroad, 1981).Google Scholar

12. See Holyoake, G.j. [1817–1906], The Origin and Nature of Secularism (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1886), at p. 51.Google Scholar Prolific and popular (one of his works, The Logic of Death, had its 101st edition by 1902), Holyoake, first an evangelical, became a liberal on encountering “Owenite principles” (as the Dictionary of National Biography put it). Having discovered “the insufficiency of theology for the guidance of man” and turning instead to Comte and Mill, Holyoake proposed as the first principles of Secularism “the improvement of life by material means” and science as the “available Providence of man” (Origin, pp. 40,41). Fora recent study, see Grugel, Lee E., George Jacob Holyoake: A Study in the Evolution of a Victorian Radical (Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, 1976).Google Scholar

13. James Installation, pp. 186ff. The University of North Dakota was encouraging a ring of denominational “colleges” (reportedly patterned after the University of Toronto, but resembling a late application of Jefferson’s Virginia plan). At Illinois, and elsewhere, the new denominational “colleges,” sometimes called “foundations” and with an instructional role at first, began to spring up. See Baker, James C. (founder, at Urbana, of) The First Wesley Foundation: An Adventure in Christian Higher Education (New York: Parthenon, 1960).Google Scholar Baker claims the churches opposed these new agencies as giving too much attention to state schools (p. 18). At Illinois, however, strong opposition to the credit the courses carried also arose from university faculties, especially some years later from philosophy.

14. For the Illinois background prior to James, see Solberg, Winton U., The University of Illinois, 1867–1894: An Intellectual and Cultural History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968).Google Scholar See also Johnson, Henry C. Jr. and Johanningmeier, Erwin V., Teachers for the Prairie: The University of Illinois and the Schools 1868–1945 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972).Google Scholar For religious conflict, see Solberg, , Illinois, pp. 62, 177–81, et passim.Google Scholar Traditional regalia and degrees were eschewed, until the students protested that the latter practice handicapped their quest for employment (pp. 81, 164).

15. Material in this and the following paragraphs is taken from the Illinois “student” newspaper, issued under various titles but cited throughout as Illini, with volume number, and, as available, issue, page, and (year). For the egregious (always mindless and frequently vicious) anti-Roman Catholicism and ethnic prejudice that largely persisted into the 20th century, see the following: For the Irish, , “The Hibernian in America” 1:3,19 (1871)Google Scholar; for the Spanish, 2:5,51 (1872); for the French, 2:8,96 (1872); for the Italians, 3:1,59 (1874). Wrote one student, “I know a number of good, faithful Catholics, but everyday I learn something more of the inside workings—some new fact, which repels me more” (3:3,103 [1874]). For a similiar racism, see a poem, “Deys a Swell Coon in Town,” 28:4,54 (1898). Lyman Abbott proposed a more “enlightened” attitude in his “Star Course [universitywide] Lecture”: The white man has brought the negro here and, as “the superior race” must care for him. See 33 (no issue number), p. 85 (Jan. 28,1904).

16. Illini, 1:1, 7 (1871).Google Scholar

17. Illini, 1:7, 49 (1871).Google Scholar

18. Illini, 1:7, 50 (1871).Google Scholar

19. Illini, 2:4, 37 (1873).Google Scholar

20. Illini, 2:5, 52 (1873).Google Scholar

21. Illini, 2:5, 57 (1873).Google Scholar By 1897 religious language largely disappears.

22. For Foster North, see Solberg, , Illinois, pp. 304–308Google Scholar; and “The Conflict of Religion and Secularism at the University of Illinois, 1867–1894” in American Quarterly vol. 18 (Summer, 1966), pp. 183–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a late example of North’s unrelenting mission to extend his crusade nationwide, see his “The Unconstitutionality of Religious Exercises in State Universites,” Liberty 34, no. 4 (1939): 21–23.Google Scholar

23. lllini, 2:6, 70 (1873).Google Scholar

24. lllini, 2:7, 87 (1873)Google Scholar; 5:8, 200 (1876); 25:6 (1895) p. 94.

25. lllini, 26:15, 1062 (1897); 27:33, 583 (1898).

26. Draper to R. H. Jesse, 15 January 1904, in Draper Letter Book, 2/4/3 - Bx9, p. 173. Jesse later complimented Draper on his 1896 Baccalaureate Sermon: “Here my personal wickedness is so well known that they would not dream of letting me make a Baccalaureate Address. They always secure a clergyman eminent for his personal piety as a sort of final antidote for the evil deeds of the President.” In Jesse to Draper, 21 July 1896, Draper General Correspondence, R.H. Jesse File 1895–1901, Record Series 2/4/1–Bx9.

27. The Universtiy claimed (as did others) the “largest” Christian Association in the nation. See Illini 34:6, p. 1 (1904). Cf. C. Hopkins, Howard, History of the Y.M.C.A. in North America (New York: Association Press, 1951).Google Scholar For the new religious programs and services, see Illini 22:1 (1899); 31: p. 58 (1902). Regarding failure to draw, see Illini 34: p. 127 (1905). For YMCA as a service organiztion, see Illini 35: p. 102 (1906). It is worth noting that the university had been troubled for some time over whether it ought to furnish universty space to such groups and associations. See, for example, Nelson W. Graham (President of the Board of Trustees) to A. S. Draper, 15 February 1895. Draper General Correspondence, University Record Series 2/4/1–Bx 6, Nelson W. Graham File. Graham calls it a “delicate matter” and bids Draper “always keep in mind that we are a State Institution for the whole people Jews, Catholics, Agnostics or whatnot—.” Note also that careful inspection of all the issues of the Mini shows a discernable decline in religious news and similar matters. For James's remarks, see James's letter, dated 15 January 1917, Presidential Correspondence 1916–17 (filed under “Smith"). Hisconclusion was perhaps less than remarkable; he had delivered substantially similiar opinions as president of Northwestern to the National Education Association. See its journal of Proceedings and Addresses (Winona, MN: By the Association,1904) pp. 68–83Google Scholar, “The Relation of the Church to Higher Education in the United States.” “The churches should create and support their own schools,” James insists, for their own benefit (e.g, “freeing religion from its superstitions") and to supplement the state institutions, where even “objective study of the scriptures, be it sympathetic or antagonistic, is barred …. ” In fact, he argues, even such"sciences” as are “subsidiary” to “Bible study,” such as “Egyptology and Assyriology” may have to be “excluded.” See esp. pp. 82, 76.

28. See, for example—the literature is vast—Merle, Curti and Carstensen, Vernon, The University of Wisconsin; A History, 1848–1925, 2 vols (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1949), vol 1, pp. 407–412.Google Scholar Wisconsin discontinued chapel in 1885 and by the late seventies the “voluntary societies” were the chief vehicle for religion. There were facutly-led prayer meetings (p. 190). By about 1900, however, the university was enjoying an irreligious reputation (pp. 670–71). Kuhn, Madison, Michigan State—The First Hundred Years (East Lansing, Ml: Michigan State University Press, 1955)Google Scholar. The then Michigan Agricultural College had begun with faculty-led 5:30 A.M. prayers in the chemistry laboratory (p. 33). The university, however, soon “surrendered most of its responsibility for the religious welfare for the campus.” But, morning chapel continued until 1911. Sunday services had been discontinued in 1897 after street car lines allowed access to town churches (p. 248). The Illini reported, through its “Exchange” column, similiar religious developments at Michigan (27:30), p. 488 [1898] and Cornell (26:15), p. 775 (1897]). See also Hewett, Waterman Thomas, Cornell University, A History, 4 vols. (New York: The University Publishing Society, 1905).Google Scholar Harvard abolished required attendance in 1886., For President Eliot’s, analysis of such matters, see his University Administration (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1908), pp. 61–62, 81, 84.Google Scholar A very useful current account is Marsden, George M. and Longfield, Bradley J. (eds), The Secularization of the Academy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).Google Scholar An excellent guide to recently available primary and secondary sources, it also indicates recent interest in the issue and should help to scotch some popular misconceptions.

29. Yale dropped compulsory chapel in 1926, “long after its religious purpose had disappeared.” For this and the important question of Yale’s contribution to the argument being developed, see Kelley’s, Brooks Mather excellent Yale: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974).Google Scholar The quotation is at p. 387. William and Mary, virtually moribund for seventy-five years, was resuscitated after the Civil War, substantially secularized. See Adams, Herbert Baxter “The College of William and Mary,” U.S Bureau of Education Circular of Information, No. 1 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1887).Google Scholar There is a multitude of college histories, most of which tell the same story. For an overview see Rudolph, Frederick, The American College and University, A History (New York: Vintage Books, 1967).Google Scholar Rudolph is, however, virtually worthless in following the history of Catholic higher education. He devotes a scant fifteen or twenty sentences to an enterprise that, even by 1915, claimed some 91 colleges and universitites (not to mention 1.5 million elementary pupils) according to the U.S. Commissioner of Education. The best general treatment of Catholic schools (though it wants detail and scope on higher education) is Buetow, Harold A., Of Singular Benefit. The Story of Catholic Education in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1970).Google Scholar For higher education, see Power, Edward J., Catholic Education in America (New York’ Appleton Century-Crofts, 1972)Google Scholar and Hassenger, Robert (ed), The Shape of Catholic Higher Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).Google Scholar My own investigations have been limited to The Catholic University of America and Georgetown University, but more are underway.

30. Animosity grew on both sides with the flourishing of state (and at least religously neutral) colleges and universities. The latter sometimes openly criticized the small, especially denominational, colleges as obstructions to educational progress. Theologically committed institutions faulted the state-controlled ones for failing to meet the religious needs of the people. See, for example, the discussions in the Higher Education Department of the National Educational Association, Journal of Proceedings and Addresses (Topeka: Published by the Association, 1888).Google Scholar Full appreciation of the situation requires close examination of the general religious and denominational press of the time—e.g. The Living Church (Episcopalian), Northwestern Christian Advocate (Methodist), Religious Education, The Biblical World, The Congregationalist„ etc. not to mention Harpers, Atlantic, North American Review, and even Good Housekeekping. At Illinois, Draper had a long exchange with E. C. Ray, Secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Aid for Colleges and Academies, beginning when Draper objected to one of their pamphlets, “The Small College Great.” See Official Letter Book, Draper to Ray, 13 January 1903, Record Series 2/4/3-Bx8. Later (19 January 1903), Ray insists that the state schools have made “concerted, continuous, and strong attacks upon the small and Christian colleges,” attacks which Presbyterians had been fighting off since 1883.

31. For triumphal intellectual history, see, for example, Curti, Merle, The Crowth of American Thought,, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1964)Google Scholar, Parts I, II. In educational history, see Butts, R. Freeman, A Cultural History of American Education, 2nd ed. (New York: McCraw Hill Book Co., 1955).Google ScholarHofstadter’s, RichardAcademic Freedom in the Age of the College (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961)Google Scholar is somewhat more balanced and probes more deeply the religious tradition, but the vocabulary is frequently celebratory. Veysey’s, Laurence R.The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965)Google Scholar provides an enormous store of evidence, but does little to examine the “other” side (e.g., the section dealing with “Discipline and Piety”) and, as is common, the use of military metaphor is frequent. Butts proclaims that the “battle over evolution [as, he thinks, the key issue in secularization] symbolized the onrush of secular forces that were weakening the intellectual hold of the churches on the minds of people” and he refers to “the gradual substitution of secular for religious authority in the political, social, and intellectual activities of life” (p. 443, emphasis supplied).

32. Careful inspection of “house” histories of small denominational colleges that were scattered across the land, and the contemporary literature surrounding and supporting them, strongly suggests that Yale was widely taken as the model to be imitated. One element was the fact that Yale graduated large numbers of clergy, many of whom became leaders in education at all levels. Kelley points to the declining proportion of ministerial graduates, but the numbers were still significant and the degree prestigious (Yale, p. 123; cf. pp. 199–200). In addition, Yale’s role in various “revivals,” its impact through groups such as the “Yale” or “Illinois” “Band,” and the YMCA, was very considerable, (p. 304). Finally, Yale was simply widely admired as what a college should be—as Santayana declared in 1892 (p. 308).

33. For a comprehensive review of classical Protestant views respecting what the “church” is, in the context of more recent thought and scholarship, see Nelson, J. Robert, The Realm of Redemption, Studies in the Doctrine of the Nature of the Church in Contemporary Protestant Theology, 4th ed. (London: Epworth Press, 1957), esp. chapters 4–6.Google Scholar Peter Berger, who defines secularization as “the process by which sectors of society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols” (The Sacred Canopy, p. 107), finds all the “ingredients” of secularization clearly revealed in classical Protestantism in general, with roots running back to the “Old Testament” itself. Only the “Word”—in its full “biblical” sense—remains. (See esp. pp. 109–25). From the Lutheran perspective, Gerrish, B. A., Grace and Reason: A Study of the Theology of Luther (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962)Google Scholar is also useful. Gerrish argues that Luther’s supposed radical disjunction between religious and other knowledge has been overstated, but that it is there in an important sense. That the act of “conversion” is central for the Puritans is strongly demonstrated in Simpson’s, Alan brilliant Puritanism in Old and New England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961).Google Scholar Simpson quotes Cromwell as calling religious experience—the new birth— as “‘the root of the matter”’ (p. 2). Simpson, however, disagrees with my claim (see below) that Harvard was less doctrinaire. He would find me guilty, as he does Morison, of trying to “redeem” Harvard from accusations of Puritanism! (pp. 28–29).

34. For this (and the following matters at Yale) see, of course, Kellcy, Yale. For the founding, see pp. 3ff. Kelley quotes Bainton’s, Roland perceptive remark: “Yale was conservative before she was born” (p. 4).Google Scholar The older sources are still enormously useful: Oviatt, Edwin, The Beginnings of Yale, 1701–1726 (New Haven: Yale University Press 1916 [Reprinted New York: Arno Press, 1969])Google Scholar; Dexter, Franklin Bowditch, “The Founding of Yale College,” in A Selection from the Miscellaneous Historical Papers of Fifty Years (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1918)Google Scholar; and (ed.) Documentary History of Yale University under the Original Charter of the Collegiate School of Connecticut (New Haven, 1916).Google Scholar See also Warch, Richard, School of the Prophets: Yale College, 1701–1740 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973).Google Scholar There is also Gabriel, Ralph Henry, Religion and Learning at Yale: The Church of Christ in the College and University 1757–1957 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958)Google Scholar, though I find his account insufficiently penetrating.

35. Morison, Samuel Eliot, The Founding of Harvard College (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935), esp pp. 92–107.Google Scholar He notes that no less than thirtyfive of the Massachusetts Bay Colony “immigrants” were from Cambridge, including such towering figures as John Cotton, Samuel Stone, and Thomas Shepard. See also Morison’s, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, The Tercentenary History of Harvard College and University, 1636–1936, Part I (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936).Google Scholar

36. See Rashdall, Hastings, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, New Edition in 3 vols, Powicke, F. M. and Emden, Alfred B. (eds), Vol III, English Universities and Student Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951).Google Scholar For Cambridge and Wyclifism, see p. 316; Christ’s College or Godshouse (1439), p. 312. Regarding Oxford, pp. 114–139; discussion of the “Aularian Statutes” (c. 1430–1490) and daily mass as eventually required in some, but not early in any, universities, pp. 374,400; and esp. p. 451 for the link with reforming tendencies. See also p. 393 on the vagueness of the term “clerical,” and p. 445 on the fact that religious life was less defined in the universities than in the local schools, which were under more direct ecclesiastical/parochial-diocesan auspices. For Oxford, see also Mallett, Charles Edward, A History of the University of Oxford, Vol. II, The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Methuen 1924)Google Scholar, esp. Chapters XVI and XVII. A new multi-volume history of Oxford is being issued. Aston, T. H., General Editor, The History of the University of Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984—.Google Scholar See esp. Vol. 1, The Early Oxford Schools,}. 1. Catto, ed. Ralph Evans, asst. ed. (1984) and Vol III The Collegiate University [through the Tudors] James McConica, ed. (1986). Although an enormous repository of information, the volumes pay little attention to daily life, particularly in respect of religious practice. Their interest in theology is also primarily political and administrative—perhaps itself an index of secularization.

37. Morison, , Founding, pp. 99–100Google Scholar; for Cotton’s complaint, p. 101. The Reformers were concerned not only with the potential impact of Laudian political power but the University’s hospitality to Anglo-Catholic thought in general.

38. Browne, Thomas, Religio Medici and Other Works. Martin, L. C., ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964).Google Scholar The quotation is in Religio Medici at i. 13. Note also the poem that follows: “let thy reason goe / to ransome truth even to the Abysse below” because “It is thy Maker’s will....”

39. See Emden, Alfred B., An Oxford Hall in Medieval Times, Being the Early History of St. Edmund Hall (Oxford, 1968).Google Scholar Note esp. the practice of St. Edmund himself, p. 72. For a somewhat quaint but interesting Victorian Roman Catholic perspective on the general question of the relation between religious thought and practice and the life of learning, see Drane, A. F.Christian Schools and Scholars, Vol. II (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1867).Google Scholar He is esp. useful on the religious regimen of the lower schools. Drane even suggests that at Colet’s St. Paul’s work was more important than prayer. S. L. Greenslade notes that “Before the Reformation, college worship, university sermons and daily contact with clergy perhaps sufficed...” as a religious regimen. See “The Faculty of Theology” in Mcconica, Collegiate University, pp. 295–334.Google Scholar The quotation is at p. 326.

40. Miller, Perry, Errand Into the Wilderness (New York: Harper and Row, 1964 [originally published Cambridge,1956]), pp. 48–49.Google Scholar

41. Clap, Thomas, The Religious Constitution of Colleges, Especially of Yale-College in New Haven in the Colony of Connecticut (New London, 1754).Google Scholar Sec also Tucker, Louis Leonard, Puritan Protagonist: President Thomas Clap of Yale College (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962).Google Scholar

42. Kelley, , Yale, pp. 49–72.Google Scholar For “corruptions,” see p. 61. Clap, , Yale-College, p. 7.Google Scholar “Some...,” says Clap, “have supposed that the only design of Colleges, was to teach the arts, and sciences; and the Religion, is no part, of a College Education.” p. 12. The founders, he insists, saw it otherwise: “Their End and Design in it; is to propagate, the Blessed, Reformed, Protestant Religion, in the Purity, of its Order, and Worship.” p. 9.

43. Clap, ,Yale-College, p. 13.Google Scholar

44. In 1757, a group of undergraduates and tutors successfully petitioned the Yale Corporation for permission to become, as Kelley puts it, “a real church and administer communion” (Yale, p. 65). Kelley also notes, interestingly, that Harvard had no college church until almost a century after its first appointment of a professor of divinity (Ibid.., p. 64). See also Morison, , Founding, pp. 66–67,201–02).Google Scholar Note also that the Connecticut Congregationalist clergy bitterly disputed the College’s right to create itself a parish.

45. Porter, Noah, The American Colleges and the American Public (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1878), pp. 206–207.Google Scholar See also The Christian College (Boston: Frank Wood, Printer, 1880).Google ScholarAs Yale had its Clap, Princeton had its John Witherspoon. Witherspoon, who assumed the presidency in 1768, was quoted (apparently approvingly) as follows: “Cursed be all that learning which is contrary to the cross of Christ: cursed be all that learning which is not subservient to the cross of Christ.” See the Rev.Roberts, William C., D.D. (of New York City), “The American Colleges” in the Minutes and Procedings of the Third General Council of the Alliance of the Reformed Churches Holding the Presbyterian System (Belfast, 1884), p. 473.Google Scholar What indeed hath Athens to do with Jerusalem? And for Yale’s Porter, there was Mccosh, Princeton’s James: See his American Universities: What Should They Be? (San Francisco, 1869)Google Scholar; “The Place of Religion in Colleges” in the Minutes and Procedings of the Third General Council of the Alliance of the Reformed Churches Holding the Presbyterian System (Belfast, 1884), 465–72Google Scholar; and his address, “Religion in a College” (a reply to Eliot), delivered at the Nineteenth Century Club of New York, 3 February 1886, and published by the Club. McCosh enjoyed a status similar to Porter’s, but was, I believe, somewhat more defensive and less “generous.”

46. Porter, , American Colleges, p. 209.Google Scholar

47. Ibid., p. 235.

48. Ibid., p. 212. The passage is, of course, from Milton’s Of Education. Porter might have welcomed Milton in spite of recent accusations of Socinianism; Clap and Witherspoon would not.

49. Ibid., pp. 214, 218.

50. For the “crucible” metaphor, see Porter, , Christian College, p. 12.Google Scholar This address, given at Wellesley, drew on the same principles but was less optimistic in tone—it was ten years later.

51. Porter, , American Colleges, p. 234.Google Scholar

52. Blumenberg, Hans, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Wallace, Robert M. (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1983)Google Scholar and Work on Myth, trans. Wallace, Robert M. (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1985).Google Scholar “The Greek looked round at the whole world and up to the whole sky, and said, “The One is God’—and came to an impasse. But the Jew looked back through history and said, ‘God is one, and in the beginning God created the Heaven and earth’—and found that he could go forward from that in a Divine plan.” Dix, Dom Gregory, Jew and Greek—A Study in the Primitive Church (WestminsterDacre Press, 1953), p. 112.Google Scholar See also the historical accounts of the nature and rise of science by Jaki, Stanley, esp. The Road to Science and the Ways to God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).Google Scholar For the tendency to disparage the religious and the biblical in favor of a hellenized theology, see Poole, Reginald Lane, Illustrations of the History of Medieval Thought and Learning (New York: Dover Publications, 1960Google Scholar [a re-issue of the second edition, London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1920]).

53. A more extensive description of the natural history of secularization would have to include such further characteristics as its frequent tendency to monism (both substantive and methodological) and reductionism, perhaps owed ultimately—or most powerfully—to the epistemological formalism and atomism stemming from the Cartesian project. Cf. Bernstein, Richard J., Beyond Objectivism and Relativism—Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983).Google Scholar It is also possible that these incompatible if not contrary tendencies have produced both “evolutionary religion” and its contemporary mirror image: “creation science,” each depending upon which of the two terms is presumed able to subsume the other.

54. As the honorific suggests, Darwinism was often assimilated under more familiar mechanistic categories, and it became, as Henry Adams alleged, simply a new, more up-to-date creed, as little understood as its theological predecessors. For Darwin’s implications for human nature, see Jaki, Stanley, Angels, Apes, and Men (La Salle, IL: Sherwood Sugden & Co., 1983).Google Scholar For a balanced account of Darwinism and religion, see Durant, John, ed., Darwinism and Divinity: Essays on Evolution and Religious Belief (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985).Google Scholar Note also that Darwinism was especially attractive to the “new” education, providing (esp. when viewed mechanistically) a vital link with pedagogical “efficiency” and the attempt to free the schools from what was often referred to as their “monastic” heritage. See, for example, Johnson, Henry C. Jr., “The Quest for the Competent Teacher” in Short, Edmund (ed.), Competence; Inquiries into Its Meaning and Acquisition in Educational Settings, (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), pp. 41–69.Google Scholar

55. President James McCosh at Princeton saw the difficulties posed by the Kantian Defense as well as the problems of evolutionary thought. See Hoeveler, J. David, fames McCosh and the Scottish Intellectual Tradition, From Glasgow to Princeton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), esp. chap. 5Google Scholar, “Protestant Scholasticism.” Indeed, Princeton held to a theological commitment longer than any other prominent Protestant institution.

56. For the “Bible colleges” and their link to biblical literalism and what he calls “academic fundamentalism,” see Veysey, , American University, p 55.Google Scholar

57. In my study of American religious liberalism, I have been very productively guided by the important work of Hutchison, William R., esp. The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976)Google Scholar and The Transcendentalist Ministers: Church Reform in the New England Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959).Google Scholar I am also grateful for his helpful comments as respondent on an earlier presentation at the American Society of Church History. Basil Willey guided me into the English contributors by his extremely insightful More Nineteenth Century Studies—A Group of Honest Doubters (New York: Harper [Torchbook Edition 1, 1966).Google Scholar [original edition, 1956], I was also much indebted in the early stages of this study to Conrad Wright’s illuminating “Introduction” to his Three Prophets of Religious Liberalism: Channing, Emerson, Parker (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961).Google Scholar

58. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflexion [1825] and The Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit [1840]—To which are added his Essay on Faith and Notes on the Book of Common Prayer [1838–1839] (London: George Bell and Sons, 1904], p.272.Google Scholar For Coleridge on Paley, see pp. 232, 273–75.

59. Newman, Francis W., Phases of Faith (London, J. Chapman,1850).Google Scholar The quotation is from The Soul, Its Sorrows and Aspirations: An Essay toward the Soul as the True Basis of Theology (London: John Chapman, 1849), p. 324.Google Scholar See also Theism, , Doctrinal and Practical, (London: J. Chapman, 1858).Google Scholar

60. Newman, , The Soul, pp. 332–35.Google Scholar

61. Abbott, Evelyn and Campbell, Lewis, The Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett, M.A., LL.D. Two vols. (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1897).Google ScholarEssays and Reviews (London: Longman, 1860).Google Scholar The “seven” were Frederick Temple, Mark Pattison, Rowland Williams, Baden Powell, Henry Bristow Wilson, C. W. Goodwin, and Jowett, all from Oxford.

62. Abbott, , Jowett, 1:150, 08 17, 1846.Google Scholar

63. Ibid., p. 153, August [n.d.], 1846.

64. Channing, William Ellery, “The Evidences of Revealed Religion” in Robinson, David, ed., William Ellery Channing—Selected Writings (New York: Paulist Press, 1985), p. 129.Google ScholarFor additional evidence in support of the thesis that the “liberal” religious sympathies of English literary figures, frequently tinged with Romanticism, were deep and pervasive in America, see Miller, passim, but esp. chap. IX “Nature and the National Ego,” (pp. 208–11) and chap. Vm “From Ed wards to Emerson. In his comments on the latter, Miller even speculates that the seeds of notions such as those held by Emerson and others could already be found in Edwards.

65. “Remarks on Education” in The Works of William E. Channing, D.D. With an Introduction, New and Complete Edition, Rearranged, To which is added The Perfect Life (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1887).Google Scholar The quotations are at p. 123.

66. “Extract from a Letter on Creeds,” in Channing, , Works. The quotation is at p. 487.Google Scholar For Channing’s bitter and seemingly uninformed anti-Catholicism, see “Letter on Catholicism,” pp. 468–78.

67. “The [Harvard] Divinity School Address” (1838) in Wright, , Three Prophets, pp. 90–112.Google Scholar The quotation is at p. 94.

68. Wright, pp. 101,108. In an 1829 sermon on Proverbs 16:32, Emerson had called his preferred locus for the religious sentiment “the nearer connexion.” See The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson, In Four Volumes, Von Frank, Albert J., chiefeditor. The quotation is in Vol. 2, Toulouse, Teresa and Delbanco, Andrew, eds. (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1990), p. 45.Google Scholar

69. Theodore Parker, “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity,” in Wright, , Three Prophets, pp. 113–49.Google Scholar The quotation is at p. 117.

70. Harrison, Frederick, in an editorial comment entitled “Neo-Christianity” in Westminster Foreign Quarterly Review, 10 1, 1860.Google Scholar The article was a revie of Essays and Reviews that in effect hooted down the volume as insufficiently radical. Harrison’s appelation was not appreciated. See Abbott, , Jowett, I:292.Google Scholar See also Willey’s perceptive and amusing account of the resulting tumult, More Nineteenth Century Studies, Chapter 4.

71. In Memoriam, Section 124 in Shatto, Susan and Shaw, Marian, eds., Tennyson In Memoriam (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 137.Google Scholar Cf Section 96, p. 115: “There lives more faith in honest doubt,/ Believe me, than in half the creeds.” Jowett was, incidentally, very close to the Tennyson family.

72. See Faber, Geoffrey,Jowett: A Portrait with Background. Two vols. (London: Faber and Faber, 1957).Google Scholar The quotation is at p. 135.

73. Jowett to B.C. Brodie,23 Dec 1844, in Abbott, , Jowett, 1:114–15.Google Scholar As one reads Jowett’s letters, one is struck, of course, by the possibility that he, as well as other liberal religionists, wanted to save a Victorian world and a British Empire and social system quite as much as they desired to save “God.” Jowett, for example, wanted to see more lower class academic talent make it to the Universities, but he showed little interest in the Church’s increasing social conscience—often AngloCatholic in tone.

74. Veblen, Thorstein, The Higher Learning in America, A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men, With an Introduction by Hacker, Louis M. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957 [Originally published in 1918]).Google Scholar Veblen pronounced his own valedictory on the death of religion, and humanism as well, in academia: “The church, the court, the camp, the drawing-room, where these elder and perhaps nobler virtues—that is, the ‘spiritual virtues’ as opposed to the ‘intellectual’—had their laboratory and playground, have grown weedy and gone to seed. Much of the apparatus of the old order, with the good old way, still stands over in a decent state of repair, and the sentimentally reminiscent endeavors of certain spiritual ‘hold-overs’ still lend this apparatus of archaism something of a galvanic life. But that power of aspiration that once surged full and hot on cults of faith, fashion, sentiment, exploit, and honor, now at its best curves to such a head as it may in the concerted adulation of matter of fact” (p. 6–7).

75. See an interesting historical account of the fate of “religious studies” in Hart, D. C., “American Learning and Religious Studies” in Marsden, , pp. 195–233.Google Scholar

76. The American College—A Criticism (New York: The Century Co., 1908).Google Scholar The quotation is at p. 38. For Flexner, the shift is not only away from religion but also away from “humanistic culture” that is inescapably “aristocratic” and “aesthetic” in favor of an “intelligence” which is socially useful. See p. 35.

77. Chadwick, Owen, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century [The 1973–1974 Gifford Lectures] Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).Google Scholar