We take exception to this greatly applauded statement on several accounts. Bishop Harris recommends a course of collegiate study, and rejoices in its popularity at the Michigan University, in which not a single one of the natural sciences is included. He assumes that the scientific progress of three centuries goes for nothing in the higher education; and he admits no improvement upon the mediæval scheme of culture. The most developed form of knowledge, that which has created modern civilization, and opened up a new world of truth to the human mind, he passes by as if it had no existence. He advocates the theory of college education of which Princeton has recently illustrated the practice—the theory to which students are immolated. It is an insult to the intelligence of the age. Any college, supported by forced exactions upon the people, which omits the sciences from its curriculum, is an outrage upon the community; and, if it can not be reformed, deserves to be suppressed as a public nuisance.
Again, we object to the Bishop's disingenuous attempt to bring useful knowledge into reproach by talking of "mammon," "worldliness," and "money-making," in connection with it. It is not true that the advocates of educational reform put the educational claims of modern knowledge on mercenary grounds. Does Bishop Harris need to be reminded that there are other uses of scientific knowledge than sordid uses? Does he need to be told that it subserves the highest ends to which knowledge is applicable? Would students be chargeable with a venal purpose if they neglected their Latin and Greek, and took up the study of sewage to protect themselves from fatal college epidemics? The Bishop reprobates in his address the "false and superficial habit of object-teaching"; but if students should take up college buildings as an object-lesson, and thereby gain some knowledge that might not only be of immediate utility, but have a vital value for them through life, who but an infatuated classicist would accuse them of being animated by low and degrading motives? And supposing they should systematically extend this practice and look into the water-supply of Ann Arbor and the sewage of the town, and then examine the hygienic conditions of the public schools, and afterward proceed to the jail and the poor-house, and get up a series of object lessons on these also, would they be liable to the imputation of being actuated by motives of mere vulgar and debasing utility? This disparaging assault upon the kinds of knowledge which lead to self-preservation, to the maintenance of health, to the promotion of personal and public welfare, and to an understanding of the laws of the human constitution,' the natural laws of society, and the principles on which the surrounding world is ordered, was wholly unworthy of the orator, of the occasion, and the university that he represented.
And we can not refrain from saying that his insinuation about making education subservient to business comes with an ill grace from the Eight Reverend Bishop, whose education was a direct preparation for his trade. He says, "Latin and Greek, and the higher mathematics, rhetoric and logic, and mental and moral philosophy, these are the useful studies in education." Undoubtedly! but useful to whom? They are the staple studies of the clerical
