ciety, church, and state.
The purpose of a college education should be twofold--_professional_
and _humanitarian_--to prepare for one's vocation in life, and to
cultivate humanitarian sympathies for the largest service. A person
possessed of the humanitarian spirit realizes that the individual life
is rooted in God, and consequently has a broader and deeper sense of
human brotherhood, which enables him to keep in vital and sympathetic
relation with human activity and experience. When these two aims
blend, the best results are obtained, both for the individual and the
community.
Aside from the scientific passion for knowledge, there is a view of
culture, as Matthew Arnold puts it, "in which all the love of our
neighbor, the impulses toward action, help, and beneficence, the
desire for removing human error, clearing human confusion, and
diminishing human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world
better and happier than we found it--motives eminently such as are
called social--come in as a part of the grounds of culture, and the
main and pre-eminent part."
It is to be feared that in some colleges the ideals and spirit are
such as to lead the student to place power on wealth above culture,
and social position above usefulness. Professor J. M. Hart estimates
that nearly one-half of the students who attend Cambridge and Oxford
Universities, in England, do so not for the sake of study, but in
order to form good social connections. Liberal culture should not be
sacrificed to preparing men for idle social life and paying places.
Colleges do not exist to train the students' powers for personal
benefits, but to promote culture, to the end that a larger service may
be rendered to human progress. "An education," says President Hill,
"that fails in producing lofty character, sustained and nourished by a
pure faith, may, indeed, fill the world with capable and masterly men
in their vocation; but, unless it can soften the heart of success and
open the palm of power, it only strengthens the grasp of greed, and
misses the making of noble men."
The true conception of man and his duties leaves but little room for
individualism or insolent self-assertion. No one can divorce himself
from his fellow-men and their interests without lowering and debasing
his own vocation in life, and becoming enfeebled and stunted in his
own development. "The supreme object of the college," says President
M. E. Gates, "is _to give an education fo
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