Notes on Current Literature [pp. 533-540]

NOTES ON CURRENT TOPICS.
ART. VII.-NOTES ON CURRENT TOPICS.
SCOTCH AND AMERICAN THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES.
A LATE number of the British and Foreign Evangelical Review coniains an elaborate article on this subject, by Professor Milligan, D. D.,
one of the accomplished delegates from the Established Church of
Scotland to our General Assembly at Detroit, in 1872. He had before
contributed a valuable article to the same periodical, on our American
Colleges. These are the result of the investigations which he pursued
with great assiduity and success, on these matters, during his visit to
this country. In the present article he first gives the leading features
and statistics of our American Theological Seminaries. He passes
from these to the Divinity Halls of Scotland, and to those suggestions
concerning their defects, and the needful remedies, which such a survey
of the training schools for the ministry in both countries naturally
opens up to his broad and penetrating mind. Some of his statements
and proposals for improving ministerial education there, may be pondered with profit on this side of the water.
He speaks of the religious care of the students in our principal colleges not only as if it were in salutary contrast with the academic institutions of the Old World, but as deserving special notice in its bearings on
the Christian life and culture of the students in our theological seminaries.
"In that singularly diversified continent-a continent, too, without any
established church, so often regarded on this side of the Atlantic as the
sheet-anchor of all religious stability-there is no point on which
public opinion is more at one than on the necessity of
imbuing college training with the spirit of the Christian faith.
This feeling might be expected to prevail still more in regard to the
theological seminaries, and it does so. In them the religious life of the
students is encouraged with the utmost care." We have observed that
nothing more excites the wonder of European visitors, religious and
irreligious, than this feature of the great mass of our American colleges.
The delegates to the late Evangelical Alliance, both from Britain and
the continent, were alike amazed and delighted as they found that large
numbers of the students in the colleges they visited were in the habit of
frequent voluntary attendance on prayer meetings. And the historian,
Froude, skeptic that he is, on his visit to Pr:nceton College, declared
that of all objects of interest pointed out to him in that seat of learning,
none so much interested him as the "Philadelphia room," and the con 34
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