fered, and neither pupil nor parent can properly complain that the student is required to give attention to the whole of the prescribed course, including the religious as well as the literary and scientific parts of that course.

On this plan, too, each religious denomination will have a guarantee that the children of their own Church will have a sound religious training according to their views of truth. For such colleges must to a great extent depend for their patronage and support upon that religious denomination with which the trustees and teachers are connected; and thus indirectly the Church, or the particular branch of it under whose auspices a college has been established, will have a voice in its management, and that too without being subjected to any of those inconveniences and troubles to which a more direct control might readily and naturally give rise, introducing jealousies and collisions into the ecclesiastical bodies themselves. Happily for the College of New Jersey, it is not and never has been a State or a Church college; yet through the whole period of its existence it has merited and received the countenance and favor of that branch of the Church most interested in its establishment, and also the confidence and protection of the State authorities which gave and confirmed its charter. Yea, more, such from the beginning has been its catholic spirit, that not a few of its warmest friends have been found in other denominations than the Presbyterian; and it has had the honor to educate for other branches of the Church some of their brightest intellects, who have not failed to acknowledge their indebtedness to their Alma Mater.

While, therefore, the friends of this College are not called upon to speak disparagingly of colleges directly under either State or Church control, they may be thankful that the College of their affections was intrusted to the exclusive care of a few wise and select men, who, in the fear of God, laid deep its foundations, and upon them erected an institution for the advancement of piety and learning, and had a special reference to the supplying of their own branch of the Church of Christ with a godly and well-trained ministry.

CHAPTER III.

THE CHARTERS OF 1746 AND 1748.

THE first charter of the College passed the great seal of the Province on the 22d of October, 1746, and it was attested by John Hamilton, Esq., President of his Majesty's Council, and Commander-in-Chief of the Province of New Jersey, as appears from a memorandum made in Book C of Commissions and Charters, etc., page 137, in the office of the Secretary of State for New Jersey.

The charter itself is not given in these records. By the parties to whom it was granted it is spoken of as "a charter with full and ample privileges," and one by which "equal liberties and privileges are secured to every denomination of Christians, any different religious sentiments notwithstanding."

In an advertisement in the "New York Gazette and Weekly Post Boy" of February 2, 1746-47, it is mentioned that this charter was granted to Jonathan Dickinson, John Pierson, Ebenezer Pemberton, Aaron Burr, ministers of the gospel, and some other gentlemen, as Trustees of said College.

According to a memorandum made by Mr. Nathaniel Fitz Randolph, of Princeton, the gentleman who gave to the College the land upon which Nassau Hall is erected, the whole number of Trustees under the first charter was twelve.

This comprises all that is now positively known respecting this charter, of which neither the original nor any copy is to be found.

In his biographical sketches of Presbyterian ministers in this country, the late Rev. Richard Webster mentions that the Rev. Thomas Arthur was one of the original Trustees of the College. This is by no means improbable; but on what authority, or with what understanding of its import, this statement is made,

is not known. Mr. Arthur was the pastor of the Presbyterian church in New Brunswick, and a member not of the Presbytery of New Brunswick, but of the Presbytery of New York, of which body Messrs. Dickinson, Pierson, Pemberton, and Burr were all members. Mr. Arthur is named in the second charter as one of the Trustees under that grant.

The second charter was given two years after the first, by Jonathan Belcher, Esq., his Majesty's Governor of New Jersey, and it passed the great seal of the Province on the 14th of September, 1748. Under this second charter the number of clerical and lay Trustees, exclusive of the President of the College, was equal. It is, therefore, most probable that one-half of the Trustees under the first charter were laymen. And as all the ministers who are known to have been Trustees under the first charter, and alive at the date of the second charter, are named as Trustees in this second instrument, so it is probable that most, if not all, of the lay members of the Board under the first charter, who were living at the date of the second, continued to be Trustees under the second.

The ministers of the gospel known to have been Trustees under the first charter all resided either in East Jersey or in New York City; and this renders it highly probable that the lay Trustees associated with them were also residents in the same districts.

Of the lay Trustees named in the second charter, William Smith and P. V. B. Livingston were members of the First Presbyterian Church in the city of New York, of which church the Rev. Ebenezer Pemberton was the pastor; and it is certain that Mr. Pemberton was a Trustee under both charters. Wm. Peartree Smith, who was a Trustee from 1748 to 1793, forty-five years, also resided in the city of New York, at the respective dates of the first and of the second charter. Subsequently he was a prominent citizen of Elizabethtown, New Jersey, and a Trustee of the Presbyterian church there. James Hude, a member of his Majesty's Council for New Jersey, was connected with the Presbyterian church in New Brunswick, under the pastoral care of the Rev. Thomas Arthur. Andrew Johnston, who was not only a Trustee, but also the first person chosen Treasurer of the

College under the second charter, was a member of his Majesty's Council for New Jersey, and a resident of Perth Amboy, the residence of President Hamilton, and the seat of government for East Jersey. Messrs. Hude and Johnston were members of the Council when President Hamilton, with the consent of the Council, granted the first charter. The five civilians here named as included among the Trustees under the second charter were all gentlemen of high standing, and for the reasons suggested above we deem it morally certain that some if not all of them were Trustees of the College under the first charter as well as under the second; and that Samuel Smith, the earliest historian of New Jersey, was substantially correct in saying that "the College was first founded by a charter from President Hamilton, and enlarged by Governor Belcher." (See Smith's "History of New Jersey," page 490.) Mr. Smith was a personal friend of Governor Belcher, and for some years a townsman.

It is true, indeed, that in the second charter there is no reference made to the one previously granted by President Hamilton of his Majesty's Council; and there appears to have been a disposition upon the part of some of the friends of the College to lose sight of the first charter, and to regard the College under the second charter as a new and distinct institution. Thus, in an account of the College prepared by Mr. Samuel Blair, then a Tutor in the College, under the direction of President Finley, and published in 1766, we meet with the following statement upon page 7:

"Yet even in this dark period there were not wanting several gentlemen, both of the civil and of the sacred character, who, forming a just estimate of the importance of learning, exerted their utmost efforts to plant and cherish it in the Province of New Jersey. After some disappointments and fruitless attempts, application was at length made to his Excellency Jonathan Belcher, Esq., at that time Governor of the Province; and in the year 1748 he was pleased, with the approbation of his Majesty's Council, to grant a charter incorporating sundry gentlemen of the clergy and laity, to the number of twenty-three, as Trustees, investing them with such powers as were requisite to carry the design into execution, and constituting his Majesty's Governor, for the time being, ex officio their President."

The writer of No. XL. of the "Watch-Tower" uses the following language (see pages 50 and 51, ante):

"The present constitution of New Jersey College has no dependence upon the charter obtained from Governor Hamilton, nor indeed any relation to it; as that by which it is now established is in sundry respects different, the majority of the Trustees being also different persons. Whether the charter obtained from Governor Hamilton in his declining state was a valid one I am not able to determine. The contrary, however, has always appeared to me most probable, and that it was therefore wisely resigned; though, indeed, the Episcopal church in Newark is established by a charter obtained of the same gentleman and in the same circumstances, the validity of which I have not heard called in question."

The writers of the "Watch-Tower" were opposed to the founding of a college in New York by charter from a Governor, and insisted it should be by an act of the Assembly, of course with the concurrence of the Governor and Council; and they were therefore, in all probability, the more predisposed to question the validity of a charter granted not even by the regularly commissioned Governor, but by one for the time being administering the government; and they were not unwilling to throw doubt upon the right of Lieutenant-Governor De Lancey, then at the head of affairs in New York, to grant a charter for a college to be established in that Province, by giving utterance to any doubt they may have had respecting the validity of the charter granted by the acting Governor of New Jersey.

As to the fact that a majority of the Trustees under the second charter were different persons from those under the first, it has nothing to do in deciding the matter in question, viz., whether the College under the second charter was the same with that under the first charter. Under the first the number of Trustees was twelve, and under the second twenty-three. Of the former, one at least had died; and this itself would make the new Trustees a majority of the whole number under the second charter.

It is true that the first charter ceased to be of any force upon the acceptance of the second; and inasmuch as the first was never recorded, and as all persons who could claim any rights or privileges under it had transferred their interests to a new corporation, no formal surrender of it was tendered to the granting power; nor was any such surrender required. This view of the matter accords with what, in a letter of the date of July 4, 1748, Governor Belcher said to the Rev. Gilbert Ten

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