s true,
that the head of Yale College voted to install a minister whose opinions
upon the vital, pivotal, fundamental doctrine of eternal damnation are
unsound. [Laughter.] Then, again, I look at the annual reports of the
Bureau of Education on this department at Washington, and I read there
for some years that Harvard College was unsectarian; and I knew that it
was right, because I made the return myself. [Laughter.] I read also
that Yale College was a Congregationalist College; and I had no doubt
that that was right, because I supposed Dr. Porter had made the report.
But now we read in that same report that Yale College is unsectarian.
That is a great progress. The fact is, both these universities have
found out that in a country which has no established church and no
dominant sect you cannot build a university on a sect at all--you must
build it upon the nation. [Applause.]

But, gentlemen, there are some other points, I think, of national
education on which we shall find these two early founded universities to
agree. For example, we have lately read, in the Message of the Chief
Magistrate, that a national university would be a good thing.
[Applause.] Harvard and Yale are of one mind upon that subject, but they
want to have a national university defined. [Laughter.] If it means a
university of national resort, we say amen. If it means a university
where the youth of this land are taught to love their country and to
serve her, we say amen [applause]; and we point, both of us, to our past
in proof that we are national in that sense. [Applause.] But if it means
that the national university is to be a university administered and
managed by the wise Congress of the United States, then we should agree
in taking some slight exceptions. [Laughter.] We should not question for
a moment the capacity of Congress to pick out and appoint the
professors of Latin and Greek, and the ancient languages, because we
find that there is an astonishing number of classical orators in
Congress, and there is manifested there a singular acquaintance with the
legislation of all the Latin races. [Laughter.] But when it should come
to some other humbler professorships we might perhaps entertain a doubt.
For example, we have not entire faith in the trust that Congress has in
the unchangeableness of the laws of arithmetic. [Laughter.] We might
think that their competency to select a professor of history might be
doubted. They seem to have an impress