the American Peace Society, that has done so much towards beating swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning-hooks; the American Temperance Society, which stemmed the tide which was undermining the strength of the nation; the Prison Discipline Society, which looked upon the criminal and the outcast, and brought them within the sphere of Christian sympathy; the American Bible Society, whose field is the world; the American Education Society, whose aim has been to improve the churches by improving their ministers; the American Tract Society, which aimed to express in catholic words the doctrines and practice of the Christian church, — these were the organized forms into which the moral and religious activity of this period resolved itself, and which have made their influence felt throughout the Christian world. While these great enterprises were springing into life, there were men at work on a still more catholic basis, men, some of whom had sat at the feet of the best teachers of Europe, and all of whom had drank largely of their spirit, men who were posessed as with a kind of inspiration, with the idea that America must be educated. Had you visited Harvard College in 1819 or 1820, you might have seen two undergraduates, of riper age and more thoughtful aspect than the great majority of their fellow-students, sitting sometimes in earnest discussion for hours, and sometimes strolling away in quiet communion, with their minds still bent upon great subjects. Their classmates thought they were discussing metaphysics, and this may have sometimes been the case; at any rate you may be sure they were not debating, nor betting upon the chances of the next base-ball match, nor of the Worcester regatta. These young men had fought their way through poverty to college, and were much more anxious for the culture of their minds than for the development of their muscle. They were under the instruction, in part, of a college tutor who still lives to participate with us in the exercises of this anniversary. These students, with their tutor as companion and guide, were destined in a large measure to lay the foundations of American education. I scarcely need say that the names of these students were Warren Colburn and James Gorham Carter, and that the name of their tutor was George Barrell Emerson. On leaving Cambridge, this triumvirate all went to teaching; Mr. Emerson, as the first master, became the founder of the English High School in Boston; Mr. Carter returned to teach at his home in Lancaster; and Mr. Colburn engaged in the same work in Boston. The following year appeared that little book which has justly been termed the greatest educational work of the century, Colburn's First Lessons in Arithmetic. It was in some sense the joint product of the three men just mentioned, but not in any sense which deprives Mr. Colburn of his proper claim to the authorship. It was taught in manuscript, and freely discussed by these pioneers in educational reform, and it is doubtless for this reason that, at the distance of nearly half a century, it is still unrivalled as the elementary work in a course of mathematical instruction. The paths of these three men diverged in subsequent years. Mr. Emerson gave himself to the work of teaching, showing both by theory and practice how perfect a school may be made, and, as a citizen, urging on successfully those larger measures of reform and legislation which the country so much needed. Mr. Colburn continued his labors as an author; and Mr. Carter did more perhaps than any other man at that period to stir the public mind to the importance of public schools; and afterwards, in the State legislation, originated and carried through some of our most important enactments on this subject. There were three other men graduated at Harvard College about this time, who claim our notice at this point. These were the Rev. Charles Brooks, the Rev. Samuel Joseph May, and Walter Rogers Johnson. (Be careful to notice the Rogers of this name ; it represents John Rogers, of saintly memory, who suffered at the stake in Smithfield, of whom Mr. Johnson was a lineal descendant.) Mr. Brooks has been a life-long advocate of educational improvement, and manifests no disposition to put off the harness. Mr. May has labored with equal zeal, and was for a time at the head of one of our normal schools. Mr. Johnson early removed to Pennsylvania, and was largely instrumental in doing for that State what Mr. Carter and his coadjutors did for Massachusetts. In the labors of these men we find, I think, the main source of those influences which resulted in the establishment of the American Institute of Instruction. The academic life of Harvard College had been greatly quickened at this period by the return from Europe of a young Christian scholar, four years of whose studious youth had been passed in the schools and universities of the Old World, and in deep reflection amid the scenes and upon the fields consecrated by the struggles and triumphs of our race. He had sat among the ruins of the Acropolis, had walked beneath the crumbling arches that span the Sacred Way, and had thought down hours to moments upon the plain of Marathon and in the pass of Thermopyla; he had seen the rejoicings that followed the downfall of the first Napoleon; had been admitted to the society of the great literary celebrities of that period; had been welcomed to Abbotsford in the days of its glory, and won the admiration of Lord Byron; he had sat at the feet of the first scholars of Germany, and indeed had drawn inspiration and instruction from all the old abodes of civilization. The influence of the poor Greek scholars, from the downfall of Constantinople, was hardly more marked upon the schools of Western Europe than that of Edward Everett, when he returned to lay upon the altar of his alma mater the precious mental wealth which he had been commissioned to gather, and to take his place in her corps of instruction. With gifts and susceptibilities allotted to but the smallest portion of men, and at a period of life when these susceptibilities are most active, he had gazed upon all the pomp and pageantry that wait upon kings and courts, and, like Milton, had maintained his loyalty to the free principles in which he had been educated. "He had listened to the song of the sirens, but he had not been enchanted." With the liveliest appreciation of the beauties of Homer and Plato, and of the sterner teachings of Demosthenes and Aristotle, nor yet forgetful of that higher wisdom which comes from Moses and David, Isaiah and St. Paul, he had come to clothe the plain facts of American history with an eloquence which all antiquity had not surpassed; to show that the colonial history of America exhibits models of the same spirit and character which gave to Greece and Rome |