But having shown the way to university men everywhere, he sounded a warning against the dangers which threatened men: "I am much mistaken if the scientific spirit of the age is not doing us a great disservice, working in us a certain great degeneracy. Science has transformed the world and owes little debt of obligation to any past age. It has driven mystery out of the universe. Science teaches us to believe in the present and in the future more than in the past, to deem the newest theory of society the likeliest. It has given us agnosticism in the realm of philosophy and scientific anarchy in the field of politics." Although he recognized that these by-products of science were perhaps not the intended results of scientific investigation, they did set the world agog and they made it the duty of teachers and leaders everywhere to beware the dangers of a final break with the past, to guard young men against abandoning the "old drill, the old memory of times gone by, the old schooling in precedent and tradition, the old keeping of the faith as a preparation for leadership in days of social change. We must make the humanities human again; we must recall what manner of men we are.”

"It has been Princeton's work, in all ordinary seasons, not to change but to strengthen society, to give not yeast but bread for the raising; the business of the world is not individual success, but its own betterment, strengthening, and growth in spiritual insight. There is laid upon us the compulsion of the national life. We dare not keep aloof and closet ourselves while a nation comes to its maturity." It was surely a remarkable appeal to educators everywhere which Wilson made that day, and its publication a little later extended its range to all the universities. From that time he was regarded at Princeton as the most suitable man for the next presidency.

All the logic of events as well as the growing fame of Wilson

pointed to him as the one man whom the trustees must select in due time to lead the University. Students and professors alike favoured the change. And in 1899 when Yale, which had always influenced Princeton, abandoned its policy of a clergyman for president and chose Professor Hadley as its leader, the pressure became stronger. In 1902, President Patton quietly laid down the baton of office, retaining his professorship in the Theological Seminary, and Woodrow Wilson took up the work of president of Princeton University. He was a little less than forty-four years old; he was well-known as a historian and the leader of the new profession of political science; and he was an orator of unusual grace and eloquence, a layman come first to the successorship of a long line of clergyman presidents of the University. The query of all was: “What will this layman do in his new and important rôle?" It was not long before the country knew what the President of Princeton was doing and Princeton itself could not be kept off the front pages of the secular press everywhere. Men sought to put new wine in old bottles and there was much difficulty to keep the vessels whole.

CHAPTER III

NEW WINE IN OLD BOTTLES

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY is one of the oldest institutions of learning in the United States. It was founded in 1746 by radical democrats calling themselves evangelical Presbyterians of whom William Tennent and his three remarkable preacher sons were the pioneers. These earnest men were very much like the early Franciscan monks who carried the Gospel to the poor and the rich without money and without price. They preached a doctrine of freedom, emotionalism, and faith in the ancient classics that had a profound influence upon the Middle colonies and the old South. They travelled, like the Methodists, everywhere; they invaded the precincts of older and more conservative ministers; and they set up log schools wherever young men interested in learning could be brought together. The College of New Jersey, as the institution was called in its early history, was the chief of all these schools; it was the "headquarters" of the travelling preachers as well as all those of the so-called New Light persuasion.1

For more than a hundred years it did its marvellous work on an endowment ranging from nothing to two hundred thousand dollars and with a teaching corps of five or six devoted men. Latin, Greek, a little mathematics, and a wealth of Scotch theology composed their stock in trade.

1Alexander, A., "Biographical Sketches of the Founders and Principal Alumni of the Log College," Princeton, 1845.

Aaron Burr, senior, Samuel Davies, and the beloved Doctor John Witherspoon were their leaders and models of character. The students, numbering from a score to a hundred and fifty, were in the main poor fellows from the Middle States and the South who intended to become preachers, teachers or, in the Revolutionary years, public men. The atmosphere of the place was that of a monastery. All day long students and professors were busy with their classics and their theology or arranging the necessaries of a frugal life, chopping their wood in winter or cultivating their gardens in summer. While this appears unusual and primitive to us, it was but a miniature of the life of the people of the United States before 1860.1 .

But this stern, simple ideal was not to continue. The Civil War which worked so great a change in other ways revolutionized the College of New Jersey. Soon after the close of the war Doctor James McCosh, an eminent Scotch divine, somewhat inclined to accept the fatal Darwinian L theory of evolution, became the president of the old school. He found the alumni of Princeton growing rich everywhere in the North. They gave of their wealth to erect new buildings and to equip new laboratories. Their sons went to the college in increasing numbers. They were not theologs, but merely young men seeking an education. Science gradually won a place in this school of the prophets, due perhaps to the great influence of Professor Henry, the physicist. Slowly the old austerity gave place to an easier piety. A rich people, like those of the United States were coming to be, could not have their sons attend prayers in cold winter weather at five o'clock in the morning. In the twenty years following the advent of Doctor McCosh, in 1868, the college changed its character perceptibly.

'Collins, Varnum L., "Princeton." This is a valuable brief history of Princeton University.

But after 1888, when President Patton occupied "the place of Witherspoon," the change took on an amazing pace. Beautiful buildings adorned the campus. The professors increased in number and assumed the manners of men of the world, even if their salaries did remain meagre. The students, instead of chopping their own firewood and bringing water from the nearest wells, united in clubs, built themselves luxurious clubhouses, employed the best of servants, and dined in the manner of gentlemen who knew the good things of life. Instead of the dog-eared Greek and Latin texts of their primitive predecessors handed down from generation to generation, they found excellent tutors who could, for a consideration, drill enough of the wicked classics into their easygoing heads to enable them to pass examinations and take the coveted degree at the ends of their stipulated periods of study. As a certain lady patron of the University was wont to say, "Princeton was a delightfully aristocratic place."

At this turn in the history of the University Woodrow Wilson, the son of one of those poor, austere students of the older days, became president. As we already know, he believed in work both for its own sake and for the sake of students who needed to fight the devil with busy brains. He believed not only in setting the Princeton youth to work; he thought the students of all the colleges of the East needed to have their attention called to the purposes for which men go to college. Harvard, Yale, and the rest were in like plight with Princeton. Fraternities, clubs, and athletic sports had everywhere usurped, as he said, the functions of the "main tent." Men went to college to have a good time, to learn a little from their fellows, and return home finished gentlemen, farther removed than ever from the workaday world in which all men should have a personal part.

If Princeton was to be set again upon the hard and thorny