BOARD OF EDUCATION.

(RECAP)

THE Board of Education, in presenting to the General Assembly its Forty-seventh Annual Report, renders most fervent thanksgiving to God for the extraordinary mercy and goodness to the country and to the Church, which have crowned the year that is past; and for the expanded prospects of usefulness and favor that now lie open before the Church in the department of Education.

1. Ministerial Education.

The year in which we present you this Report is one so truly extraordinary in itself, and one so extraordinary as the termination of a series past and as the initiation of a series manifestly coming, that it would be guilty blindness to the sublime movements of the arm of the Almighty, to the light of the sword that has been flashing and the inscriptions upon it, and to the expanding fingers of the hand that is now dispersing sovereign gifts, were we to pass it by without some consideration of its lessons, as they bear upon the work of an education by God's Church of a competent ministry of his glorious gospel.

The country last year was quaking with the convulsions, and dark with the sulphurous clouds, of the most stupendous and important of modern wars. To-day it is finally, and for ever as to the former causes of trouble, at peace. The first statesman of the South, Mr. Stephens, has admitted before Congress that the most inimical portions of the South now regard the restoration of the Constitution and Government of the United States as the "only hope of their liberties." And the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ is beginning to behold the Divine meaning in these late awful judgments. Revivals of religion are quickening the masses of our people North and South, East and West; the beginnings of a mighty exertion of Divine energy which is to advance religion to a new and higher plane of honor and influence.

Such appears to be God's general motive in the permission of the hellish exhibitions of war. At least this may be discerned in the wars of greater or less extent that have hitherto occupied the track of his Church. And we may infer the more confidently that it will be so in the case of a war so extended geographically, so furiously contested, within regions where his Church must be so powerfully influenced by its course and end, and where principles were to be decided affecting so immensely the future of the New World, and

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the position of large portions of the human family in the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World.

It was an element in the eternal covenant as to the royal priesthood of Christ that his sceptre should be "of iron," and that in the successive stages of his victorious career the raging heathen, the tumultuous and deluded people, and the conspiring powers of earthly governments, should be "dashed in pieces like a potter's vessel.' The inspired history of the Church before Christ reveals plainly that the several eras of her great spiritual advancement have been eras of great wrath and judgment upon our sinful race.

And if we transfer our examination to the history of religion upon our own continent, we find it controlled by the same principle.

Passing over the period of the colonization of the various States, which was largely produced by the most unreasoning and savage persecutions in the old countries, how wonderfully may the hand of God be seen in the wars of the past hundred or more years. How important their results in awaking the Church, in gathering converts from the young, in raising up a fervent zealous ministry, and in diffusing the influence of the gospel far and wide.

The BEGINNING and middle of THE LAST CENTURY was a period of continued anxiety and actual conflicts. From the borders of Canada to Florida, there were wars of England and the colonists against the Spaniards, against the French, and above all, in the distresses they created, against the everywhere-present, wily and cruel savage tribes of the country. The whole population was kept in a fever of anxiety and apprehension. Yet it was just then that the Spirit of the Lord brooded upon the troubled waters, and wrought wonders of salvation. It was the age of Jonathan Edwards, and the Tennants, and Samuel Davies; and of the successes of George Whitefield in his blasts of "the trumpet of the everlasting gospel," from Massachusetts to Georgia; and of the revivals among even the heathen inhabitants of the wilderness under the preaching of David and John Brainerd; and of the Moravians, Rauch and Zeisberger and Spanzenberg. Even the massacres of the Christian Indians at Mahony and elsewhere, but sent a more effectual cry into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth, and brought down richer gifts of mercy and favor upon their "Tents of grace" (Gnadenhütten), and "Tents of peace" (Friedenhütten). The few literary institutions of the country were at times powerfully awakened. It was almost amidst the awful gloom that succeeded the disastrous defeat and massacre of Braddock's troops, in their advance upon the French and Indians at Fort Duquesne, that William Tennant wrote, in regard to "a memorable display of God's power and grace in the conversion of sinners," which he witnessed at Nassau Hall:* "I conversed with all the present members of the college, excepting one, who generally inquired with solicitude what they should do to

* Log College; pp.367, 368.

be saved; nor did I ever see any in that case, who had more clear views of God and themselves, or more genuine sorrow for sin and longing for Jesus. This blessed work of the Most High so far exceeded my expectations, that I was lost in surprise, and constrained to say, Is it so? can it be so? Nor was my being eye and ear witness, from Monday till Friday, able to recover me from my astonishment. I felt as the apostles when it was told them the Lord had risen. They could not believe, through fear and great joy. “My reverend brethren and myself were as those that dream.' There was little or nothing of the passions in the preachers during their public performances, nor any public discourses during the hours allotted for study; only, at morning and evening prayers, some plain and brief directions suitable for persons under spiritual trouble were delivered. Before I came away, several persons received something like the spirit of adoption, being tenderly affected with a sense of redeeming love, and thereby determined to endeavor after universal holiness.

"I cannot fully represent this glorious work. It will bear your most enlarged apprehensions of a day of grace. Let God have all the glory! It was indeed a tree of life to my soul. Yea, it is still to me as if I had seen the face of God."

The histories of that period tell us that scores of the converts of the various colleges, then existing, became zealous preachers of the gospel, many of them laboring with apostolic zeal to bear it to the new settlements scattered over the dark vast wildernesses of that early day.

The WAR OF THE REVOLUTION was a mighty instrument in the hands of God. It broke in pieces here the temporal power of the corrupt Georges; but it established the dominion of Him who "shall spare the poor and the needy, and shall save the souls of the needy." At first, the example of popular freedom which it set before the oppressed and half-heathen masses of the European capitals awoke the frenzied butchery and blasphemies of the French Revolution; and our national sympathies and gratitude for a time gave a fearful prevalence to the infidelity, of France. But God forsook not the seed of so faithful believers, nor the heritage of so many prayers. During the war itself revivals began; and revival after revival followed during thirty years; the tide of the water of life swelling to the brim of the nation's boundaries, and, during the wondrous scenes of 1798 to 1805, filling the whole land with power such as had nowhere else been exhibited since the apostolic days. It is not needful to depict again those scenes. And then was kindled that wondrous flame of zeal for the extension of the glory of God, which soon blazed forth in the organization of numerous societies for the support of foreign missions, for the diffusion of the Bible and religious books, and for the education of young men for the ministry of the gospel, which so characterized that period,

and has filled the world with blessings. We may truly say that all denominations of Christians, and all lands upon the globe, have profited by the labors and influence of Alexander, and Spring, and Rice, and Mason, and Green, and McMillan, and Griffin, and Mills, and Judson, and Hall, and Bingham.

The WAR OF 1812 to '15 was a dark period in our national history; a new and final act of resistance to British oppression and wrongs. But the God of mercy again takes advantage of human sorrows, and calamities, and commotions, and fears, to pour down the blessed influences of his grace upon the souls of men. These were the days of the widely extended and wonderfully successful labors of Asahel Nettleton in the Atlantic States, and of Gideon Blackburn in the West; days when scores were converted under the ordinary labors of pastors in numberless quiet villages and country congregations. A historian of the revivals of that period, (Rev. Dr. Humphrey,) says: "About 1814 the clouds, laden with their rich refreshings, began again to gather over more of the churches. Those who kept near the throne in prayer, and had wisdom to discern the signs of the times, began to expect great things, and they were not disappointed. It was as if the Saviour had said, 'Ye shall see greater things than these.' Not greater displays of Divine power than they had witnessed a few years before at the opening of the century, but in their longer continuance, if not in their wider extent."

The results of this great religious movement were as conspicuous as those after the Revolutionary period. This was the era of great national organizations. The American Bible Society, the American Colonization Society, the Sunday-School Societies which were consolidated into the American Sunday School Union, the General Missionary Societies of the Baptist Church and the Methodist Church, and in due time the American Tract Society, were but the crystalization into regular, enduring and brilliant forms, of the salts of zeal and love and self-denial with which the Church universal upon this continent was saturated.

It needed the pressure of general calamity to give form also to the prevalent sense of the lack of heralds to proclaim the knowledge of salvation in this and other lands, and the want of more thorough and systematic training for the labors of the ministry of the gospel. It was during the same month of 1811 in which the naval fight occurred between the President and the Little Belt, that the General Assembly at Philadelphia appointed trustees to fix a theological seminary for the Presbyterian Church at Princeton, New Jersey, and elected Archibald Alexander its first professor. Andover Theological Seminary had been established in 1807; and the American Education Society took its permanent shape before the war ended. Other educational and theological institutions soon followed.

No language can more vigorously describe the grand interest of this period of American Church history, than the following extract from a sermon in 1826, by the Rev. Dr. Griffin.

"It is fourteen years since New England broke her slumbers, and now the mass of her population seems drenched in the missionary spirit. I saw the day cover the plains of Europe. I saw the westward-travelling light spread itself over these eastern States. Nine years ago I saw the rays of the morning tip our Presbyterian horizon. I saw the dawn blush deeper and deeper. I knew it would not return again to midnight. I knew the sun would rise. At length I saw his golden limb above the eastern woods, and from the course of day I knew that soon the heavenly flood would cover all the plains of Arkansas and the Pacific. Already the influence of heaven has dropt upon the wilderness, and the yell of the war-whoop is changed to notes of praise. We must not stop till every Indian tongue has joined the general song. We must not stop till our influence has cheered the whole extent of South America. And then we must go forth to the islands, and hold on our way till we meet our brethren in other fields, and unite with them in completing the harvest of the world.

"We owe the sincerest gratitude to God for giving us our existance in such a day as this. Many prophets and kings desired to see this day, and saw it not. One spirit has seized the Christian world to send the gospel, with a great company of its publishers, to all the nations of the earth. Missionary and Bible Societies, those stupendous monuments of Christian charity, have risen so rapidly and in so great numbers throughout Europe and America, that in contemplating them we are like them that dream.' These Societies have already accomplished wonders, and are constantly stretching forward to future achievements beyond the reach of imagination. On the burning sands of Africa, where Christian feet never before trod, there is the holy band of missionaries, struggling amid dangers and deaths, to lead the sable tribes of Ethiopia to stretch forth their hands to God. On the plains of Hindostan, a 'consecrated host' are translating the Scriptures into more than thirty different languages, spoken by a population greater than that of all Europe. On the borders of China they have produced a version which will give the oracles of God to one quarter of the population of the globe. In the northern islands a nation is born in a day. From the hills of Zion, from the top of Calvary, they are freighting every caravan of pilgrims with Bibles for all the countries of the East. Certainly the angel has begun his flight through the midst of heaven, 'having the everlasting gospel to preach to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people.

We cannot consider in this place the apparent Divine purposes in our several minor and local wars. The object at present is to find out the main LESSONS OF THE GREAT CIVIL WAR which has just