8. College Days

When the Nineteenth Century was at halfway mark or thereabouts, a baker’s dozen of small colleges, fostered by as many Protestant denominations and engaged primarily in the education of young men for the ministry, began a serious struggle for survival in Ohio.

Not long afterward, in the more prosperous areas of all the midwestern states, many more colleges than could be adequately supported, entered upon their perilous existence.

It was not that the elder statesmen of the churches hadn’t realized what they were getting into; but the need for institutions of higher learning was urgent. Self-anointed prophets roamed the country, holding camp meetings in summer and “big meetings” in winter. These men had no education and didn’t want any. The Lord’s Apostles, they said, hadn’t gone to college: they had simply opened their mouths and the Holy Ghost had told them what to say. One itinerant custodian of a mouth that had been filled in this manner boasted that he was not an alma mater of any institution, a statement nobody bothered to dispute.

Had the responsible officials of the denominations pooled their interests in higher learning; had the churches in Ohio, for example, thrown all their available men and money into three rather than thirteen colleges, these projects might have had a little better chance to succeed; but sectarian loyalties and rivalries were—to quote an idiom of the hinterland—”horse-high and hog-tight.” Once the Congregationalists had organized a college at Oberlin, the Presbyterians felt challenged to throw their weight into a little college at Wooster and the Methodists got busy at Delaware and the Episcopalians had laid a couple of Kenyon’s cornerstones at Gambier.

But it sounds much easier than it is for a religious denomination to surrender its identity by making common cause with others. Here you have the same problem faced by a nation forced to sacrifice its sovereignty in the interest of a united front: same problem you have in cutting down our national taxation for domestic expenditures. We are unanimous in our belief that heavy cuts must be made in our domestic taxes, so long as the cut isn’t made where it affects me and mine. I must have that irrigation dam; Uncle Alex is desperate for flood control. In like manner most people believe there are far too many churches. Let us merge them—all but ours.

Of course this Federal Taxation problem seems simple enough; it’s a matter of sheer selfishness and lack of patriotism, provided you don’t stand in dire need of an irrigation ditch which had been promised you to redeem desert land you wouldn’t have bought had you known it was to remain worthless.

And as for the amalgamation of the Protestant churches, this could be easily accomplished, in the opinion of all Protestants who never go to church except to attend weddings and funerals. It is generally conceded by Protestants, I think, that the primary attraction of Roman Catholicism is its history. This institution, unlike movie stars, isn’t quite as old as it says it is, and as for “Apostolic Succession,” there was one period when for seventy-five years the question, “Pontiff! Pontiff! Who’s Got the Pontiff?” raged throughout France and Italy with all the vim, vigor and vituperation of a modern Presidential election in the United States of America.

But, admitting a few (typographical?) errors in its claim to an unbroken history from the days of Christ’s Apostles, the Roman Catholic Church is far the oldest institution on earth; and if I were a Catholic that fact would mean a great deal more to me than the recent hierarchical proclamation of the “Dogma of the Assumption.” To my way of thinking, the whole package of Catholic dogmas is acceptable mostly, if not solely, because of its proved antiquity. As a Protestant, I find that the “Apostles’ Creed,” which is the inheritance of all Christians, is much easier to say in Latin. Let the Catholics hang on to their cherishable possessions: it is their most valuable property. They’re better off without the discovery of any more Saints or Bones or Dogmas.

But let us mind our own business and get back to the Protestants and their feeble little colleges in Ohio. At first their faculties were composed almost exclusively of scholarly clergymen, a few of whom had had the benefit of higher education in the older eastern colleges.

It must have been largely a labor of love when a young professor with a diploma from Princeton consented to bury himself at Wooster, Ohio. It must have been even more difficult to entice college-trained teachers to these little schools after the christening festivities were over and the second summer colic had set in. It was then that the frail little colleges had to plow back their own harvest into the soil. The top half-dozen in the graduating class would join the Academy Faculty so that six Academy Professors could become College Professors. The subject in which I would have been most interested and industrious was English Literature and Composition. It was taught in our college by one of our alumni freshly promoted to that position from his former post as administrative officer of the Academy. He was an intelligent, personable gentleman whom everyone liked, but he had no preparation for evaluating, much less for creating, English. All that I know about “Creative English” I learned the hard way, by trial and error, after college days were over.

* * * * *