A Significant Biography

THE only justification of an autobiography is truthfulness. But the chances against this are so many that the discreet reader hesitates until he finds if he has fact or fiction before him. The Confessions of Rousseau comes near to an exception. It is disagreeable to the last degree, but so exact in its details that it has a certain interest as a theory of society; but the too plainly told story of his miserable life offsets both its truth and its charm. Nature no longer delights us when a lie is written upon her fair face.

I need not say that the autobiography of Mr. White bears no relation to this book. It escapes the usual fate of such a history by its self-evident truth, and the unimpeachable value of the story from title-page to colophon. Its interest is due not to any novelty of fact, for the entire book is an open page of history, but to an instinct or habit of truthfulness that pervades its pages like an atmosphere. There are two kinds of truth: accuracy and spirit. He might err in the former, but by no possibility in the latter. One closes these open-paged volumes feeling that one has stayed a while in a world where “no part is dark, the whole full of light.”

The first seven years of Mr. White’s life were spent in his birthplace, — Homer, one of those towns in central New York, the names of which seem drawn at hazard from Lemprière’s Dictionary, unlike the rivers, whose Indian names were as musical as their waters. Mr. White tells us that Bismarck once said to him: “Since you were born in Homer and resided in Syracuse and presided over a University in Ithaca, I infer that you belong in a classical region.” A clerk in the Land Office in Albany, a hundred and more years ago, is responsible for the Chancellor’s humor.

The generation of Mr. White was the second after that which broke into the forests a little before the beginning of the century, not as stragglers from the frontier, but as solid ranks of emigrants from the best sections in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Almost the first houses that followed log cabins were as ample and well finished as those left behind. They brought New England with them: its institutions, its church, schools, habits, civil instincts, respectability, industry, and resistless energy, — all so inwoven with conscience that they not only lost nothing, but grew stronger and keener as the years went on. Hence Dr. Bushnell’s great sermon on Barbarism the first Danger of Emigration had no application here. They brought a salt from New England that did not lose its savor in transportation. After twenty years of vigorous growth, the fellow factor of Puritan society — the Academy — came along, and soon students were flocking thither from all over the “military tract,” where they were prepared for Yale and Hamilton, coming back as ministers and lawyers and physicians, for they would have whatever had been in the old home.

Thus the unbroken tradition of New England was preserved, — Church and School side by side in a wide square of six acres, that they might have the honor and endowment at least of space. As heretofore, Church and Academy played into each other, and together they held the people to what was best in each. An undenominational board of trustees diffused a tolerant and generous spirit throughout the community. The teachers, carefully selected, gave the tone to society. In a very real sense and degree, learning was counted as essential to respectability. It even created a genuine and salutary aristocracy, based on church-going and school attendance.

It was in such a soil as this that Mr. White found root, and lived until he was seven years of age; a short time, but long enough to receive strongest influences in the development of character. In nearly all superior minds early religious impressions are deep and persistent. “The master light of all our seeing” seldom fades away as a trailing cloud.

Our purpose in part, in this article, is to call attention to the ethical and religious conditions that surrounded him in his early years, — peculiar in their intensity, and from the personality of two men who largely created them. We refer to Henry Gregory, and to John Keep, pastor of the First Church in Homer, who in the latter half of his life was closely and even vitally connected with Oberlin.

Mr. White was too young to come under the direct influence of Dr. Keep, except as it literally saturated the entire community. But I refer to him because when Mr. White was planning to introduce coeducation into Cornell University he examined it at Oberlin, where Dr. Keep had introduced it, having first established it in Homer. Madam White received her education there, and prompted her son to adopt it at Cornell.

The other direct influence upon the growing boy was that of Dr. Gregory, rector of the Episcopal church that had suddenly sprung up under the shadow of the powerful ministry of Dr. Keep. It embraced the family of Mr. White, for reasons perhaps wider than those realized by themselves. The Catholic and the Protestant each has his natural credo; one because he feels, the other because he thinks. When one is summoned or tempted to think in cruel and abnormal ways, one turns away from the hard and rough of the common faith and finds the creed of feeling of easier acceptance. It is beyond question that Calvinism, as it clothed itself in the revivalism of the earlier part of the last century, opened a wide door to Episcopacy, that would have been wider still if that church had possessed a clearer idea of what is meant by breadth. There are flourishing dioceses in New York where Finney and Burchard once possessed the ground. As they passed over it, casting lurid flames of eternal misery fed by a logic that defied reason, the region came to be called “the burnt-over tract,” — referring to its cause and its condition. This period left behind quarrels over what were called “measures,” — sober and wise men resisting and standing by, but always a minority, while weaker ones fell in with the whirling storm. The pastor was often the helpless victim. Mr. Burchard for six weeks was in full authority, — “presbyter writ large,” — but the “measures” remained with fatal mischief. So far as we can find out, for there are few records and no living memory to tell us to-day, Dr. Keep strove to guide the storm in his parish, for he was not a strict Edwardsian, and he had already written a treatise of which tradition says it covered nearly the entire ground of Dr. Bushnell’s Christian Nurture, a book that substantially quenched the revival system in the Congregational Churches of New England, and put the nurture of religion closer to that of the Episcopal Church. It is improbable that Dr. Keep turned his back on his pre-Bushnell views and yielded the heart of them to “measures” in utter conflict with anything akin to an approach to Christian Nurture. But whatever his action may have been, there was enough to lead the White family to choose whether to remain amid the storm of “measures,” or to retreat to the quiet of Episcopacy, for which a chance reading of the Prayer Book had prepared the way.

Side by side with Dr. Keep was Dr. Gregory, rector of the Episcopal Church; they offered the strongest possible contrast in all respects. Dr. Gregory, far inferior to Dr. Keep intellectually, was yet a man strong in graces of character and points of belief. It was the period of Pusey and Newman at Oxford, and it was by a strange casting of lots that these two New World ministers fell into the same place. They finely illustrated their two schools of thought and faith. Pusey and Newman represented so closely the Mother Church of Rome that one of them fell into her arms, curbing his splendid intellect into obedience to her hard rein, winning well-nigh half the church, and with them this far-away follower in Central New York. The Puritan Church of New England, at a point when it was at the very height of its intellectual greatness and religious fervor, sent to the same place one of its most representative leaders, an idealist, and forerunner of what it is still pursuing. Yet the two men were not unlike in some points. Each was intense, almost fanatical over his methods. Dr. Keep continually haunted the schoolhouses throughout the town “at early candle-light,” while Dr. Gregory held early morning services whenever the rubric required them. Dr. Gregory, a gentle, mediæval saint, was given to continuous prayer and care of his flock, while Dr. Keep reminds one of Dr. Arnold in the intensity of his nature, and the strenuousness of his labors. The entire region was his parish, every schoolhouse became a chapel, and every dwelling was literally made a confessional down to the finest point of pastoral duty. Dr. Keep’s parish and that of a faithful Roman Catholic priest were strikingly alike in leading points. Each made himself responsible for the religious condition of every soul in his care, and by watchful oversight, and even confession, brought all into obedience to the Church. If one is to be sneered at or praised, so is the other. For myself I would neither sneer nor withhold praise so long as the results were such as those that followed “Father Keep,” for so the people by instinct called him. If there were some things that would seem behind the present in faith and practice, there were others in which we lag behind. Some of these things Mr. White, coming later to a knowledge of them, adopted as leading purposes in his life.

The White family changed its residence to Syracuse, thirty miles north, where rapidly a large fortune was amassed, that passed to Andrew, and of which he has been a wise and worthy steward, reminding us of Sir Henry Taylor, — wisest of men, — who said that “if we take account of all the virtues with which money is mixed up and of their correlative vices, it is a knowledge which goes near to cover the length and breadth of humanity.” It was fortunate that the inevitable reaction from the orthodoxy of his early years was undergone in the Episcopal Church and in his youth; it was a gentler way out. Had he remained in the Calvinistic world, that vast body of doctrine beginning with the fall of Adam and all its sequent impossibilities would have overwhelmed his keen and truth-loving nature, and left him in a chaos of unbelief from which recovery would have been slow and hard. The very absence of emphasison doctrine in the Episcopal Church saved him from the strain of rejecting his faith. Happily he was led into the fold, — for this church has long sheltered the storm-caught lambs of hard orthodoxy. The strength of Calvinism has been held to be in its thought, — unanswerable because logical, — but the evidences and the material of its thought were fast passing away, and belief was slipping into doubt and protest. The great world of nature was coming face to face with it, and smiting it with irresistible blows. Let it not be supposed that we deny thought to the Episcopal Church, for of all vain things is a religion that strives to be strong without it, but this church begins its training with a lullaby, and not with a thesis.

Mr. White tells us it was the dream of his mother that he might follow the footsteps of the revered Dr. Gregory. She little saw what weighty obstacles would spring up in the way. As the boy grew man-ward in Syracuse, where the rector had followed them, he began to take in the sense of the sermons he had heard as a child, and the slumbering nature in him rose in protest against the mediæval rector who contended that “the promises were made to the Church alone,” and that those outside were probably lost, and worse still, that “unbaptized infants” shared the same fate. Then the fountain of doubt and denial began to flow deeper and stronger, — from entanglement in the two genealogies of Jesus to “Apostolic Succession,” and “replies” to Hume and Gibbon that left the argument on the wrong side, until the natural end came in reading Butler’s Analogy, which he found to be “equally valuable for any religion which had once got itself established” By the way, something might be said in behalf of the great Bishop’s argument to-day, but nothing then. As the outcome, he describes himself as a “religious rebel,” It is not an uncommon nor a bad dénoûment, if there are about and within one the stout guards of nature and of circumstance. White might stay awhile in a tangle of doubts, but he could not long remain without a religion, though false logic and inhuman ethics are heavy burdens for a warm-hearted young man to carry. He describes the process and effect in his last chapter: “The old dogma of ‘the fall of man’ had soon fully disappeared, and in its place there rose more and more into view the idea of the rise of man. But while my view was thus broadened, no hostility to religion found lodgment in my mind; of all the books which I read at that time, Stanley’s Life of Arnold exercised the greatest influence upon me. It showed that a man might cast aside much which churches regard as essential, and might strive for breadth and comprehension in Christianity, while remaining in healthful relations with the church. ” Already, the great bases of religion were outlined in his nature, where they finally became the warp and woof of his career. His inwrought humanity and sense of justice, his quick vision of truth, and honesty of nature, furnished the chief elements of religion. Undoubtedly, in his case, the church where he was reared was upon the whole best fitted to await the development of these generic graces. There is in this worshiping church a world of sentiment and commanding beauty that softens the blows with which logic belabors one, and even wins one into something like faith, even as the stars suggest heaven.

Mr. White has frankly spoken of his “religious development;” he does not name it as experience, — for in his case, at least, the former word is the truer. A religious experience is a varied, uncertain thing, of which a wise man will not often speak with confidence. But a development of what is within one, wrought out by influences accepted, by a life lived, and by the sum total of one’s knowledge, — of this, one may speak with confidence, and as the best thing in one’s life. As he says in his final chapter: “The general effect of all these experiences, as I now think, was to aid in a healthful evolution of my religious ideas.”

It may seem strange that the strongest influences felt by White all through the formative period of his life are to be ascribed to clergymen, or to professors wearing the cloth. Dr. Wayland, in a speech of ten minutes, determined White’s purpose to take a position in a Western college; “The best field of work for graduates is now in the West.” A few words followed, that required only the forecasting brain of White to measure their truth, and he was soon on his way to the University of Michigan, where he remained six years as professor of history. Among others who influenced him were President Porter, a keen and broad-minded critic, the most necessary teacher of all in a university, if the aim is to find and develop strong men instead of valedictorians; Professor Fisher, a scholar who gave charm to even the dullest pages of history by good companionship, and not only softened the rigors of orthodoxy, but gave it a reasonable cast; and President Woolsey, whom White might well remember with gratitude, for to the present day he recalls a sermon heard while in college, on “Religious Anger.” Even in reading these volumes one can see the practical value of such a sermon, well digested and set down in memory, for perhaps no man in public service is more tempted to anger than an ambassador, and more imperatively requires that it must be righteous. No one of Mr. White’s calibre and responsiveness to high traits of character could have been insensible to such a man as President Woolsey. He felt the vast bulk of his character, and recognized a debt of lasting gratitude, to which we refer later on. If his scholastic robes were rather closely worn, when they were drawn aside there were revelations of thought and political forecast, for those who had ears to hear. White, yet in college, was thoroughly saturated with abolition sentiments, due in a measure to Gerrit Smith and Samuel J. May, but most of all to his own soul, for in those days and times political sentiments sprang from such a source; and in his address at the Junior Exhibition upon “John Quincy Adams on the Floor,” there was, for the first time in the century at Yale, an anti-slavery speech of the true ring. President Woolsey did not shake his head nor look askance.

In tracing Mr. White’s own recapitulation of the things he engaged in, we believe he needlessly deprecates the possible charge that he attempted too many; it depends upon what things are, and how they come about, whether self-chosen and through a vagrant will, or whether they are laid upon one in matters where choice is little and conscience everything. The dative case may have its fascination and requirements, but the world may have other claims. A straighter line of work seldom falls to one than fell to Mr. White, yet from nearly everything he had chosen he was called away to something different. Still it happened that, whatever the thing was, it accorded with his ruling passion; for such he had. All he did was subdued to that complexion. A broad man, — as a student of history is apt to become, — his dominant characteristic was humanity. The good rector had failed to sow its seed in his young heart. That sacred growth found better nurture under Rev. Samuel J. May, — a name which Mr. White never fails to speak with profound and tender respect . No better thing can be said of him than that Mr. May was the most congenial mind in the list of his friends, for he was a saint of the highest order; no à Kempis, or Edwards, or Bunyan, but a simpler and profounder nature, who every day planted his feet in the very footsteps of the Master, and caught the breath of his charity. In reading an autobiography, it is well to follow the whim or wisdom of the writer. One can only be grateful to Mr. White for enshrining Samuel J. May in his pages.

If Providence moves by correlation, it was illustrated in certain things that greatly needed to be done in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and here at least was one man well fitted to do some of them. Mr. White was a foreordained humanist, by which we mean one in whom there is a special coördination of natural gifts, circumstances, and spiritual movements, fitted to work out certain decreed events, merciful in their nature. There was no lack of such men at that time to do such work, but they were chiefly looked for among the clergy. The service grew broader and more varied than could be filled by this class. The clergyman renders all important service at the fountain head of human needs where principles are to be laid down, and motives are to be stirred into action, but he is prone to blunder when he undertakes the practical thing. This is apt to happen so long as one is governed by formal rules and precedents, instead of a living spirit which is ever working freely in a growing world. Thus the best of clergymen, when they get immeshed in some doctrinal notion from which they cannot escape, lose their way into the new order ordained to come.

Such was the state of things in which Mr. White found himself when he entered upon the organization of Cornell University. In this greatest work of his life, he fulfilled the saying of President Eliot: “the surest pledge of long remembrance among men is to build one’s self into a university.” Harvard and Yale were founded by clergymen, — following the example of the Old World. They are to be accorded success, and even crowned with glory, but their early histories are often grotesque in their leading features, and are almost blotted out with change. Yale rewrote her charter after a hundred years, in order to catch the breath of the New World, and has recently given over the necessity of making the president a cleric, and has broken into the ranks of the governing board of “ten Colonial ministers of Connecticut,” by placing among them a layman from New York. Mr. White in founding Cornell had no trouble with clergymen from within, but no end of it from without. There is always a two-handed force that brings about so great a result as a real university, Emerson humorously describes the case and speed with which Americans turn out a college: “a meeting of a few rich men after business hours, a board of trustees before the winter evening is over, a president elected and placed in his chair within a week, a charter secured, professors appointed, buildings erected, and before green pease are ready, the University is opened and in full action.” We would not repeat Mr. Emerson’s badinage if it were not a literal history, and — greatest wonder of all — the university is highly prosperous to this day. But Cornell did not so rise in air. Two things were needed, — the will of the people, and the brain of a man fit for the work. Land grants from the nation were to be secured, and great necessities were to be provided, — all possible only through arduous work and long waiting. Mr. White entered into the enterprise not as a novice, for, save a few sessions in the state senate of New York, he had never been out of sight of a university. But he had a better preparation than experience; he had seen a vision and heard a call. His life in the senate had proved his skill in business, but he had not yet shown that he was gifted with the special power of steadily working under an ideal when confronted by great difficulties.

One of the most revealing passages in Dr. White’s pages is that in chapter seventeen, where he describes the dream of a university first pictured in his fancy on the shores of Seneca Lake, and realized later as president of one on Cayuga. He writes: “As I read in this new-found book (Heber and Newman on the English universities) of the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, and pored over the engraved views of quadrangles, halls, libraries, chapels, — of all the noble and dignified belongings of a great seat of learning, — my heart sank within me. Every feature of the little American college seemed all the more sordid. But gradually I began consoling myself by building air-castles. These took the form of structures suited to a great university: with distinguished professors in every field, with libraries as rich as the Bodleian, halls as lordly as that of Christ Church or of Trinity, chapels as inspiring as that of King’s, towers as dignified as those of Magdalen and Merton, quadrangles as beautiful as those of Jesus and St. John’s. In the midst of all other occupations I was constantly rearing these structures on that queenly site above the finest of the New York lakes, and dreaming of a university worthy of the commonwealth and of the nation. This dream became a sort of obsession. It came upon me during my working hours, in the classrooms, in rambles along the lake shore, in the evenings, when I paced up and down the walks in front of the college buildings, and saw rising in their place and extending to the pretty knoll behind them, the worthy home of a great university. ... I made provision for other studies beside classics and mathematics. There should be professors in the great modern literatures — above all, in our own; there should also be a professor of modern history and a lecturer on architecture. And next, my university should be under control of no single religious organization; it should be free from all sectarian or party trammels; in electing its trustees and professors no questions should be asked as to their belief or their attachment to this or that sect or party. So far, at least, I went in those days along the road toward the founding of Cornell.”

While a dream, it was not such as plays about the youth when he awakes to the beauty of the world, but such as attends that more stable thing that comes over him later, — a sense of the reality of life. White saw the charm of things, and he never failed to realize it. Whatever was beautiful he strove to make real, in music and art and architecture, — but the dream did not become more than a dream until it found shape in humanity. While Cornell is the most enduring and substantial achievement of his career, the most spiritual and ideal is the part played in the formation of the Hague Tribunal. He heard in it Milton’s Hymn of the Nativity. “No war or battle’s sound” would he listen to if he could quell it. Here he struck the keynote of highest human need, and he followed the law of his life as he had heard it framed by Dr. Wayland: “I go for humanity,” not in mere protests against bloodshed, but using the special way open to him in the service of diplomacy. He had learned how to win the hearts of those in power, and to weave together the growing threads of good will to men into strands of mercy and reason until the law of peace seems at last about to become a reality.

Few men ever more closely hit the mark aimed at in youth, but one must note that it was not the outgrowth of ambition, but sprang from the logic of his nature and his circumstances. The time had come when the New World needed a new university. The faint reflections of the great schools of learning — largely made up of Aristotle and “gerund-grinding” — clearly had passed their day, at least here. Mr. White, grasping the situation later on, saw that the dons of Oxford no longer furnished the models of education for a democracy. There is a great deal in his life that grew, by some necessity of his nature, out of this absolute sense of the American democracy, and the way he would deal with it. I name it as a sign and measure of not only his far-sighted outlook, but his humanity and the fineness of his nature. He saw that aristocracy and humanity, though long coexisting, are not compatible in their nature. Few Americans have been more deeply immersed in the higher ranks of European society, but though often a relentless critic of his countrymen, never was there a touch of pessimism or contempt, except for infidelity to the nation.

When Mr. White was trying to do what he believed to be the best possible thing, he encountered the severest trial a wellmeaning man is ever called on to undergo, — namely, the criticism of good men as to Ins personal religion. To endure the contradiction of sinners is counted grievous, but it is bliss compared with enduring that of saints. Mr. White encountered it in full measure, but he was saved from the sting by having attained a clear view of evolution as the order of the moral as well as the material world, for it was on the former that the new university was held to have denied the faith, and its young president to be the arch-heretic. It would have been useless to laugh at or to curse those who in the name of religion had set their faces against him. He said to me at the time, that their criticism and its methods were enough to have made him a howling atheist, had he yielded to them. Jonathan Edwards was a gentleman, even while lie scuttled the ship of humanity, but the common courtesies of good society were withheld by his critics from Mr. White. As I recall the gentleness of his comments upon those of every profession, church, and calling, and of newspapers, from the worst to the best, — if the best were not the worst, — all alike tearing his soul and body asunder, and undermining the foundations of his university, laid in the name of humanity, I am amazed at the patience and quietness with which he endured, indignant only when his colaborers were maligned along with himself. My suspicion is, that in all this bitter stress of undeserved fortune, the memory of Samuel J. May stayed by him as a spirit of consummate wisdom and goodness, for so had he endured, and opened not his mouth.

The larger part of his critics were not hypocrites, nor evil-doers. They kept the commandments, except that on bearing false witness against their neighbor, and offered their prayers in all sincerity, but were simply terror-stricken over something, they knew not what, called evolution. Mr. White, fed by a gift of inexhaustible good nature, that has carried him beyond threescore and ten without a known enemy, and also having a keen insight into human nature, waited for the universities throughout the country to come to him through the sure-moving wheels of evolution. For, in the early sixties, not a university in the country had recognized the great Law, except in some chance lecture room, nor taken a step to free itself from that vast burden of superstition and enthroned blunder found in every science, from theology to physics. Of course but few of these universities openly opposed Mr. White, but they did a thousand times worse. Is there any criticism so exquisite in its sting, so deadly in its effect, as silence ? There was one exception. Mr. White says, “ An eminent and justly respected president of one of the oldest Eastern universities published a treatise, which was widely circulated, to prove that the main ideas on which the new university was based were utterly impracticable; and especially that the presentation of various courses of instruction suited to young men of various aims and tastes, with liberty of choice between them, was preposterous. It is interesting to note that the same eminent gentleman was afterward led to adopt this same ‘impracticable ’ policy at his own university.” Another exception of a different kind came from one whose weight of opinion was worth the entire mass of frightened criti - cism and crazed abuse. Mr. White wa s asked to lecture in New Haven, for Yal e never ceased to love him, however muc h she bewailed his “wild and erratic views, ” — very like her own at present, — when he wrought into his address the entire substance of his future book, The Warfare of Science with Theology. President Woolsey presided over a large audience, and at the close of the address thoroughly supported his position and bade him “God-speed.” What others thought is not told, but it is not necessary to know; Plato had spoken. In due time, the entire company, according to their vision and their prudence, followed, though in a manner somewhat like the attendance of the Oxford dons on the decennial meetings of the Royal Academy of Science: at the first, they stayed away; ten years after, they went but remained silent; at the third, they took the floor. By steps so graded does the wise and prudent world move on in the path of human progress.

One asks, when this storm of bigotry was raging so near, why Harvard and Yale did not offer a helping hand, or at least a word of sympathy ? For it cannot be denied that Mr. White was fighting a single-handed battle, not for himself and his half-born university, but for all, and for the churches as well, as time will show. Only a partial answer can be given. None of us care to question the early stages of our own souls or our universities; it is pleasanter to forget, than to put on sackcloth. Perhaps the simplest answer would be the truest; few men in the country believed in evolution. Mr. White was regarded as simply a student of history, wandering in a foreign field and putting out vagaries in a radical magazine. It must also be said that while there was enough thought in Boston, it confined itself to its peculiar questions and fads. It was too well satisfied with its own prophets of reconstructed theology to ask if there were another. But evolution spares no old or new creeds unless reorganized on the central law of creation, when it becomes eternal law. Harvard was feeling still the castigations of Emerson, and Wendell Phillips, and Theodore Parker, and had too much at home to look after, to concern itself with a university grounded on an hypothesis; for so it regarded what was going on in central New York. The spokes of Dr. Holmes’s wheel did not in that day radiate far beyond Boston. As for Yale, she was busy grinding away the roughness of her Calvinism, and squaring Scotch metaphysics with German mysticism. Evolution she might tolerate in part, but would have none of it as a whole. Besides, when was it ever true that a prophet had honor in his own country? Years earlier, Mr. White was not considered by Yale for a professorship of history because of his “views.” The fact is, Mr. White, while building his university on the shores of Cayuga, was for ten years the most solitary thinker in the country. Others were thinking, but none with a university on his shoulders, and all the churches at his heels.

Some of his critics were fellow state senators, and worthy coadjutors on public education, but, strange to say, fell in with the cry of the churches. While evolution is a wide-sweeping tide, there are some people who are left behind — caught by projecting rocks or sand-bars, or by whirling eddies held in perpetual motion which is thought to be progress — until some high title of melting snow or heavendropping rain sweeps them into deeper waters. Sometimes, indeed, one gets landlocked and never escapes, as when caught in the meshes of a binding creed. Such are the exceptions, and sometimes they puzzle one as to a raison d’être. But the power not ourselves that makes for righteousness treats humanity as it does the rest of nature, as an endless diversity. It is a fact that makes one tolerant and patient with others, and bids one to look out for his own motion, rather than jeer at those who lag behind. The profoundest words perhaps set down by the divine Shakespeare are,—

It is the first lesson in evolution, and time seems to lengthen in order to leave men space to consider the second line of the inspired couplet,—

There is something more important than exactness of opinion over newly discovered truths, whether held under denial or acceptance. We are all in the vast human swim, moving along the current of constant change, nothing true but for the hour, some greater reality swinging into view for its moment. Nothing remains fixed but charity for our neighbor. When that goes, the shifting drama of humanity dissolves, leaving nothing with reason or purpose. If it remains, and “men observingly distil it out,” there comes a certain repose that one feels, as when watching Dante’s wheels, — so swiftly moving that they seem to sleep on their axles.

Our friend Mr. White, whom we left chafing a little under the roughness of his theological neighbors, did not forget the lesson he had learned in his studies of history, that the churchman has always been the laggard in human progress, while by a strange contradiction he is its best friend. The church carries a large amount of impedimenta in this war of human life; much of it is more than useless, but a little is absolutely necessary. The balance of general opinion is that the two factors are essential to each other. However it might be in the churches, Mr. White, after long consideration how to secure the best religious service for his students, decided to cast out the sectarian element, and make the pulpit as open and broad as the audience, presuming only on the simplest form of Christian worship. It was a flank movement against all the churches in the region. If their best preachers were captured there could no longer be complaints of infidelity in the pulpit.

Here again Mr. White proved himself a reformer, by first leading the way out of the perplexing problem of the university pulpit. Harvard held to its one preacher, and while he was Andrew Peabody none could be diviner, but it was still within a sectarian wall. When Mr. White was at Yale, Dr. Fitch, a genius of the pulpit, was preaching a creation of six days’ duration, five thousand years ago, while Professor Silliman, on Monday morning, declared it to be a development of infinite duration; but as one who took notes in those days, I can bear witness that no notice was taken of the flat contradiction between pulpit and lecture room, beyond naming it as due to idiosyncrasy on the part of the professor. Mr. White could only regard such contradiction as fostering infidelity on one side or the other. He saw no way to overcome this dilemma but to open the field, — the refuge of all thought in all ages, though with many half-won battles to gain the ground that belongs to neither, but to both as one.

It will occur to careful readers of this apologia pro vita sua, that while Mr. White does not pose as a philosopher, but is a teacher of history, he has led the only way in which a university can show the harmony of science and theology. To leave them in contradiction is as intolerable as it would be to assert a flat and a round globe. This absurdity lingered in every university in the country, until Mr. White, like Columbus, stood the egg on end. The doctors of theology begged the question, when they claimed that science was atheistic, because it denied the “faith held semper, ubique et ab omnibus,” and clinched their argument by saying that it was opposed to Scripture. Mr. White said: “Come into the open field, and let us see.” And indeed we have seen. All mankind believe in the rotundity of the earth, and most intelligent people are slowly yielding to the suspicion that theology and science are not antagonists.

One does not perceive the full import of Mr. White’s creation of Cornell, until one has in mind the history of education as it sprang from the Renaissance in Italy, and spread throughout Europe,—passing through phases of loss and gain as it fared under the Roman Church and the Reformation, now at the hands of the people and then of the aristocracy. Thus one learns that Mr. White was not a mere critic and crude innovator, but instead, was carrying out a normal process correlated to the progress of human development. Education, as brought hither, was under the lead of the aristocracy and the church, and in them had elements of great value and power, which, however, were sure also to weaken and pass away. It is true that Sturm taught better Latin in the sixteenth century than Harvard and Yale taught a half century ago, but little else did he teach. These universities were indeed humanistic, but with heavy limitations, especially under the method of rigid drill in a narrow range of studies. The real life of the Renaissance lost in part its meaning and life as it moved northward.

Mr. White’s mind instinctively shaped itself to the bettering of whatever he encountered or undertook. He was first sent to a small and ineffective college, but left it without parental permission, and forced his way to Yale as a better one. Finding it such, he at once began to conceive one still better, though Yale at the time was the foremost of American colleges. He was the most brilliant graduate of his day, and no one has won brighter honors since. The fault of method that White encountered was lack of inspiration, growing in part out of the predominance of classical studies, and a consequent lack of general knowledge, as found in history and science. It was the system on which Carlyle poured out his wrath as “endless gerund-grinding,” which had for a theory a discipline of the mind by a certain balance of studies on a narrow range of subjects. To awaken the mind by interesting it was incidental, and, if we remember, it was carefully avoided, and the more pain involved in the process the completer the education was regarded. It was an ancient method, the secret of which is still to be read in Latin on the walls of old Winchester as wise advice to her students: “Aut Disce: Aut Discede: Manet Sors Tertia Caedi.” (The translation may be found in the notebook of an American tourist, with absolute correctness, but national freedom in its vocabulary: “Learn your lesson or take a licking.”)

We have directed our readers chiefly to the part played by Mr. White in what may be called the drama of education so far as it has gone on in the University of Cornell. Valuable as were his public services at home and abroad, the year that ushered Cornell into existence was worth all the other years of his life, for all else might have been done by others. Yet not simply to create a university, which is often done, but to create that special type of a university needed in the nation, with its soul of democracy, its religious freedom, its assertion of science as coequal with letters, as coördinated to universal utility, as a full place for woman in all intellectual labor and culture, its endowments in all the fields of human service, the three professions broadened and made honorable unto as many as deserve honor;—this university, so won into existence with dreams that led him through labors heavy and sad, and built up into unquestioned greatness, is an achievement that will not be measured until its fuller proportions are carried out as they have been conceived in the mind of its builder.

Mr. White did not come to his place at Cornell with a few criticisms of defects, sure to be corrected in time, but to plant his university upon the fundamental principles and uses of education, having come to a full realization of what Hegel had said, that “the history of humanity is a progress in the consciousness of freedom; ” and of what Professor Seth indicates in his profound analysis: “It is not in knowledge as such, but in feeling and action that reality is given.” Mr. White had felt his way into the heart of these truths, and made himself a “Bahnbrecher,”— a breaker out of paths, into the humanity that had become to him the sole reality of existence, as it must to every man who has gained a clear vision of it.

Mr. White is a great educator, under the conception that education is the final stage in the evolutionary process, — the purpose of evolution being the realization of free, moral personalities. Educators are completing consciously the world’s unconscious processes.