Again, history bears
very clear testimony that Calvinism and education have been intimately
associated. Wherever Calvinism has gone it has carried the school with it and
has given a powerful impulse to popular education. It is a system which
demands intellectual manhood. In fact, we may say that its very existence is
tied up with the education of the people. Mental training is required to
master the system and to trace out all that it involves. It makes the
strongest possible appeal to the human reason and insists that man must love
God not only with his whole heart but also with his whole mind. Calvin held
that "a true faith must be an intelligent faith"; and experience has shown
that piety without learning is in the long run about as dangerous as learning
without piety. He saw clearly that the acceptance and diffusion of his scheme
of doctrine was dependent not only upon the training of the men who were to
expound it, but also upon the intelligence of the great masses of humanity who
were to accept it. Calvin crowned his work in Geneva in the establishment of
the Academy. Thousands of pilgrim pupils from Continental Europe and from the
British Isles sat at his feet and then carried his doctrines into every corner
of Christendom. Knox returned from Geneva fully convinced that the education
of the masses was the strongest bulwark of Protestantism and the surest
foundation of the State. "With Romanism goes the priest; with Calvinism goes
the teacher," is an old saying, the truthfulness of which will not be denied
by anyone who has examined the facts.
This Calvinistic love
for learning, putting mind above money, has inspired countless numbers of
Calvinistic families in Scotland, in England, in Holland, and in America, to
pinch themselves to the bone in order to educate their children. The famous
dictum of Carlyle, "That any being with capacity for knowledge should die
ignorant, this I call a tragedy," expresses an idea which is
Calvinistic to the core. Wherever Calvinism has gone, there knowledge and
learning have been encouraged and there a sturdy race of thinkers has been
trained. Calvinists have not been the builders of great cathedrals, but they
have been the builders of schools, colleges, and universities. When the
Puritans from England, the Covenanters from Scotland, and the Reformed from
Holland and Germany, came to America they brought with them not only the Bible
and the Westminster Confession but also the school. And that is why our
American Calvinism never
"Dreads the
skeptic's puny hands,
While near her school the church spire stands,
Nor fears the blinded bigot's rule,
While near her church spire stands a school."
Our three American
universities of greatest historical importance, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton,
were originally founded by Calvinists, as strong Calvinistic schools, designed
to give students a sound basis in theology as well as in other branches of
learning. Harvard, established in 1636, was intended primarily to be a
training school for ministers, and more than half of its first graduating
classes went into the ministry. Yale, sometimes referred to as "the mother of
Colleges," was for a considerable period a rigid Puritan institution. And
Princeton, founded by the Scotch Presbyterians, had a thoroughly Calvinistic
foundation.
"We boast," says
Bancroft, "of our common schools; Calvin was the father of popular education —
the inventor of the system of free schools."1 "Wherever Calvinism
gained dominion," he says again, "it invoked intelligence for the people and
in every parish planted the common school."2
"Our boasted
common-school system," says Smith, "is indebted for its existence to that
stream of influences which followed from the Geneva of Calvin, through
Scotland and Holland to America; and, for the first two hundred years of our
history almost every college and seminary of learning and almost every academy
and common school was built and sustained by Calvinists."3
The relationship
which Calvinism bears to education has been well stated in the two following
paragraphs by Prof. H. H. Meeter, of Calvin College: "Science and art were the
gifts of God's common grace, and were to be used and developed as such. Nature
was looked upon as God's handiwork, the embodiment of His ideas, in its pure
form the reflection of His virtues. God was the unifying thought of all
science, since all was the unfolding of His plan. But along with such
theoretical reasons there are very practical reasons why the Calvinist has
always been intense1y interested in education, and why grade schools for
children as well as schools of higher learning sprang up side by side with
Calvinistic churches, and why Calvinists were in so large measure the vanguard
of the modern universal education movement. These practical reasons are
closely associated with their religion. The Roman Catholics might conveniently
do without the education of the masses. For them the clergy — in distinction
from the laity — were the ones who were to decide upon matters of church
government and doctrine. Hence these interests did not require the training of
the masses. For salvation, all that the layman needed was an implied faith in
what the church believed. It was not necessary to be able to give an
intelligent account of the tenets of his faith. At the services not the sermon
but the sacrament was the important conveyor of the blessings of salvation,
the sermon was less needed. And this sacrament again did not require
intelligence, since it operated ex opere operato.
"For the Calvinist
matters were just reversed. The government of the church was placed in the
hands of the elders, laymen, and these had to decide upon the matters of
church policy and the weighty matters of doctrine. Furthermore, the layman
himself had the grave duty, without the intermediation of a sacerdotal order,
to work out his own salvation, and could not suffice with an implied faith in
what the church believed. He must read his Bible. He must know his creed. And
it was a highly intellectual erred at that. Even for the Lutheran, education
of the masses was not as urgent as for the Calvinist. It is true, the Lutheran
also placed every man before the personal responsibility to work out his own
salvation. But the laity were in the Lutheran circles excluded from the office
of church government and hence also from the duty of deciding upon matters of
doctrine. From these considerations it is evident why the Calvinist must be a
staunch advocate of education. If on the one hand God was to be owned as
sovereign in the field of science, and if the Calvinist's very
religious system required the education of the masses for its existence, it
need not surprise us that the Calvinist pressed learning to the limit.
Education is a question of to be or not to be for the Calvinist."4
The traditionally
high standards of the Presbyterian and Reformed Churches for ministerial
training are worthy of notice. While many other churches ordain men as
ministers and missionaries and allow them to preach with very little
education, the Presbyterian and Reformed Churches insist that the candidate
for the ministry shall be a college graduate and that he shall have studied
for at least two years under some approved professor of theology. (See Form of
Government, Ch. XIV, sec. III & VI). As a result a larger proportion of these
ministers have been capable of managing the affairs of the influential city
churches. This may mean fewer ministers but it also means a better prepared
and a better paid ministry.
Footnotes:
1Miscellanies,
p. 406.
2Hist. of U.S., II., p. 463.
3The Creed of Presbyterians, p. 148.
4The Fundamental Principles of Calvinism, p. 96-99
