Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - History of the University (Powell) [PAGE 267]

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Struggle for Location 1865-1867

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sciences, have been translated into plain English, and are hawked about at our very doors, and when all offices and all professions in life are thrown broadly open to all men, and when such multitudes of uneducated men as they are called, are constantly outstripping, in every sphere of life, our so called educated men, is simply ridiculous. What President, even of a college on this continent, has ever met with greater practical success than the uneducated but world-renowned Dr. Nott, of New York. While Abe Lincoln, in this country, and John Bright, of England, are alone (to say nothing of thousands of others of the same stamp) worth all the graduates that have come out of old Oxford and Cambridge for the last half century, for any use which either God or man has to make of humanity here on earth. I am perfectly willing still to let Latin and Greek do all they can in the world; but I would really like to leave a chance for God and nature to do some little, too. It seems to me that they have a right to do this, whether they talk Latin or English, or whether they have taken the degree of 'Bachelor of A r t s / or -Doctor of Divinity' or not. " I t is not therefore, of this course of study, in itself considered, that I complain; but of its assumed exclusiveness, and of the supercilious insolence of stigmatizing in this age of the world, all men as uneducated and boorish, from Abe Lincoln up through Washington, even to Christ and his Apostles themselves, who do not happen to have been ground through that particular mill. [The Divine Providence has manifold ways of educating men on earth, and doing it in the best possible manner, too, wholly outside of any conventional curriculums which men ever did, or ever will devise. And the more various, and free, and open we make all our modes of public culture, the more shall we elevate the race of man and conform to His eternal kingdom and law; and, though such ideas may strike some as 'Pagan and Atheistic,' they seem to me most eminently true and humane, and Christian and devout—sanctioned by every law of God and every present need of man. I confess I know little about this great enterprise of properly founding a State University for all the teeming and oncoming millions of this great industrial State of Illinois, worthy of herself and worthy of the empire and the age to which she belongs. I expect to have but very little more to do about it;