Cambridge and Her Schools.

Cambridge, July 21, 1902.

The Cathedral route from London to Edinburgh takes one through an interesting stretch of eastern England, part of which is as flat as Holland, with fens and canals and windmills, yielding, however, in the north to a more rolling country, vestibule, as it were, to the hills of Scotland. As its name indicates, this route affords the opportunity of seeing in rapid succession the great cathedrals at Ely, Lincoln, York, and Durham, not to speak of others. But nothing on this side of England equals in interest the university town of Cambridge, with its twenty colleges and three thousand students, its venerable collegiate buildings, its far-famed "backs" (that is, the lovely lawns and stately avenues behind the colleges), its clear and placid little river, and its memories of great men and great causes. It is an exceptionally clean town, of some forty-five thousand inhabitants.

Oxford, farther west, is a somewhat larger city (about fifty-three thousand), with twenty-three colleges and about three thousand students, contains an unparalleled collection of picturesque academic buildings, and has some single features which are not surpassed anywhere, such as Magdalen (pronounced Maudlen) College, "the loveliest of all the homes of learning," Addison's Walk, The Broad Walk, and the "streamlike windings of that glorious street," to which Wordsworth devoted a sonnet. But Cambridge, too, has some features which cannot be paralleled, even in Oxford. For instance, Cambridge has, in Trinity, the largest college in England. It has, in the chapel of King's College, a building of marvellous beauty; Oxford cannot match it, nor can it be matched anywhere in England save by that "miracle of the world," the Chapel of Henry VII., in Westminster Abbey. The roll of Cambridge's alumni is illustrious to a degree, having such names as Bacon, Erasmus, Newton, Milton, Cromwell, Macaulay, Byron, Thackeray, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Harvey (discoverer of the circulation of the blood), Darwin, and many, many others equally well known.

But the chief difference between Cambridge and Oxford is in the spirit and influence of the two upon the nation and the world, and here the glory of Cambridge excelleth. It used to be said in the fourteenth century, "What Oxford thinks to-day, England thinks to-morrow." But, as a matter of fact, it is Cambridge which has represented the true progress of England and her modern political and intellectual development, in such men as Milton and Cromwell, Isaac Newton and William Pitt, Darwin and Tennyson. Oxford has stood chiefly for the reactionary ideas of the High Church Anglicans.

The difference was sharply marked in the great testing time of the seventeenth century, when the East supported the Parliament, and the West supported the king. London and Cambridge were the centres of the Puritan strength, Oxford was the capital of Charles I. Cromwell's home was but a short distance from Cambridge, and he was a student at Sidney-Sussex College, where we had the pleasure of seeing his rooms, and the celebrated crayon portrait of him in the college hall. Roughly, we might say, Cambridge has stood for the Parliament and the people, Oxford for the king and the priests. At least, there has been more of the spirit of freedom, democracy and progress at the eastern university town than at the western.

That the same difference still exists was indicated to us by a simple fact. When we inquired at Oxford for a Presbyterian church, the maid-servant said, "That is Protestant, isn't it?" She was evidently a Romanist, but it is likely that most of the Church of England people resident in Oxford never heard of Presbyterians, though our denomination is so much larger than theirs. Oxford is the head centre of Anglicanism, and there is no Presbyterian church there, though the Congregationalists and Wesleyans are represented. But at Cambridge we found a flourishing, though not yet a very large, church of our faith and order, under the pastoral care of a gifted and earnest man, the Rev. G. Johnston Ross, whose addresses at the Winona Conference, in Indiana, this summer, gave so much satisfaction. We had the pleasure of meeting him, and many of his people, at a pleasant garden party, to which all the Presbyterians of Cambridge were invited.

By the way, we saw a thing in that church which we had never seen before. When the minister read the Scripture lesson from the Old Testament, in the English Version, the two ladies in whose pew we were sitting opened the Hebrew Bible, and followed the reading in that, and, in like manner, when the New Testament lesson was read, they followed in the Greek text. To these two ladies whose learning has been recognized by the Universities of St. Andrews and Heidelberg, in the bestowment upon them of the degree of LL. D., and whose services to the cause of biblical learning, in the discovery and editing of the old Sinaitic Syriac manuscripts of the New Testament, have made them famous throughout the world of scholars, [1] we had a letter of introduction from a relative of theirs in Virginia, who is a kind friend of ours. And thus we had the pleasure of meeting at their table some of the choice spirits of the University, including the professors in Westminster College, which is the theological seminary of the Presbyterian Church in England.

It was largely through the munificence of Mrs. Lewis and Mrs. Gibson, the two elect ladies referred to above, that this institution was transplanted from its former undesirable location, and established in the city of Cambridge, thus bringing the Puritan theology back to its original home in England. The financial agent who canvassed the English Presbyterian Churches for the supplementing of the donation of these two large-minded and large-hearted ladies was the Rev. Dr. John Watson, of Liverpool, better known to the general reader as "Ian Maclaren," author of Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush, and other popular works; and for special reasons it was with no ordinary interest that I examined the result of his toils in the outfit with which the institution has been provided. It is admirable. The location, indeed, is not so good or so beautiful as that of Union Seminary, in Richmond, with its breezy sweeps of green campus, and the building, which is of red brick like ours, is not nearly so imposing as the handsome group at Richmond. Everything, in fact, is on a much smaller scale, naturally so, as the English Presbyterian Church is a much smaller body than our Southern Church. But, on the other hand, there are some features that are superior, e. g., the stairways are of stone, not of wood as with us.

The dining-hall is spacious, comely, cool, inviting, with ornamental windows, and walls hung with portraits of Presbyterian worthies, and the tables are heavy and handsome, of hard wood. No seminary in our Southern Church, or in the Northern, has a sufficiently attractive refectory. The one at Union Seminary is better than most of them, but it, too, is below the mark. Some benevolent person can do a great work for our future ministry by presenting that institution with a properly equipped refectory building.

The rooms occupied by the students at Westminster are much smaller than ours at Union, and seem in some cases cramped, but there is a bath-room for every four students. I fear this will seem almost a sinful degree of cleanliness to those brethren who a few years ago were so much opposed to the introduction of any bath-rooms and other modern conveniences into our seminary.

There are three professors at Westminster College, Cambridge: Principal Dykes, Dr. Gibb, and Professor Skinner; and twenty-three students, a slightly smaller number than last year.

The churches here are facing the same problem that confronts those in America as to an adequate supply of ministers. The number of candidates is decreasing rapidly in Scotland. Some attribute this decline to the stagnant spiritual condition of the churches throughout Europe and America, and connect it with the spread of devitalizing critical theories concerning the Scriptures. But the zeal and activity of the churches do not seem to be deficient in other particulars. It is not a question to discuss here, but it is one for Christian people to think about and pray over.

The identity of our difficulties in America and Britain may be seen again in the fact that here also the theological schools are complaining that the universities are graduating men with the degree of A. B. who have never studied Greek. How can a man without Greek master the New Testament in the original? Is it not clear that no man can be a thoroughly furnished minister who has not studied Greek? Yet some of our own colleges in America, conducted under Presbyterian auspices, are encouraging this crippling omission by offering an A. B. course without Greek.