Notes on Current Literature [pp. 533-540]

1874.1 SCOTCH AND AMERICAN THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES.
self-support, unless they can be aided by some fund like that provided by
our Board of Education to sustain a more continuous prosecution of their
studies. The professors also receive so small a stipend-sixteen to twenty
hundred dollars a year-that they need the long recess to eke out their
support in other ways. In regard to the principle of beneficiary aid to
indigent candidates for the ministry, it is no novelty in Scotland. "The
old Session Records of the Church of Scotland are full of grants given
from the Session funds to candidates for the ministry.... What is
wanted is not the introduction of a new principle, but the extension, the
consolidation, and the better application of one already long in existence."
We commend all this to the candid consideration of those who do not
believe in organized boards to aid ministerial education, while we
quite agree with Prof. Milligan, on the other hand, that a merely eleemosynary ministry will never command the confidence of the country. "We
need men from all ranks of society, and from those ranks, therefore,
among others, in whose case it would be absurd to speak of'giving assistance from without. The real way, too, to get good men for all professions is to see that the profession itself, shall afford, in the situations of
life which it opens up, sufficient encouragement to make men think of it.
Let this be the case, and it is amazing what difficulties will be surmounted,
what trials endured, what unexpected help discovered by those who would
fain pass into its ranks." We rejoice that the high places, and the hard
places, in our church, are nobly filled, alike by the sons of rank and
affluence, and by the sons of poverty who were aided by the Church so to
qualify themselves for their office as would otherwise have been impossible.
Closely connected with, and partly resulting from, the foregoing condition of the Scottish Divinity Schools, Prof. MI. alleges that there is a failure on the part of their professors to make contributions to theological
literature, or to lift their students to a plane of knowledge and thinking
commensurate with the wants of the times. They have, as he claims,
made some creditable contributions to exegesis and preparation for expository preaching; little to theology, apologetic or systematic, at its points
of contact with forms of skeptical antagonism which are ingrained into
modern thought, especially in the minds of the young. One cause of
this failure is the necessity of working for their bread at what will pay better than treatises on divinity. Hence, the ministry, not merely as to substance of doctrine, but as to the forms of its presentation, run too much in
mere traditional ruts, or modes of handling great doctrines formed by the
controversies, and in adaptation to the skeptical antagonisms, of a former
age, instead of those which now possess and often master the youthful
mind. He holds, that from the theological seminaries as fountains, and
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