Excerpt from Theological Study Today: Addresses Delivered at the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of the Meadville Theological School, June 1-3, 1920

The addresses which follow were given at the seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Meadville Theological School, June 1, 2, and 3, 1920. They are now put into permanent form both as a record of this anniversary and as a landmark in the history of theological science and theological teaching. The School was founded in 1844 to train ministers for the Unitarian churches of the West. During its early years it was also used as a ministerial training-school by the churches of the Christian connection. It has played a not insignificant part in the teaching of theology in America, in spite of obstacles which might now be considered insurmountable. It was for years without endowment and without a library worthy of the name. Only one of the two young professors who constituted its first faculty had been settled over a church. It was located in a small village of strong Calvinistic tendencies, many miles from any important cultural or educational center. The nearest Unitarian church was one hundred and forty miles away. The minister of this church, who served the School as a non-resident professor of pass toral care, was compelled to make a journey of forty miles by stage at the end of a hundred-mile journey by water. Access to Meadville from the south meaht a stage journey of one hundred miles from the Ohio River.

The School was founded in an era of theological controversy, and the members of its faculty were debarred from the fellowship of the theological world, with the single exception of the Divinity School of Harvard University. They were eligible to mem bership in no theological society. The standard of admission was at first necessarily low. Applicants were expected to know something about English gram mar, geography, arithmetic, and the elementary principles of natural philosophy; but even this mod est requirement was not insisted on from men already in the ministry.

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