Beneficiary Education [pp. 236-264]

~ 242 BENEFICIARY EDUCATION. [April,
-the eminence of an academy, qualified to teach the requisite
~hilosophy and science. In the four cities named, the Christian schools were real colleges, not chartered and fostered, but
crushed and persecuted, by the civil powers. Thus the church
of God, during the first three hundred years of the Christian
era, wrote the history of her literature and the charter of her colleges in her own blood. Nor was it until after the light of her
science and the blood of her martyrs had enlightened the
baleful fires of Pagan persecution, and the tottering throne of
C~sars had felt its need of support from a purer religion, that
the Christian schools of Alexandria and Rome, of Constantinople and Berytus, of C~sarea and Antioch, of Ephesus and
Smyrna, were patronized by the government. The schools,
academies, and colleges, be it noted, which the Pagan emperors
~ersecuted and the Christian emperors patronized existed
long before the battle of Rubra Saxa and the Edict of Constantine, A.D. 325, which declared Christianity the religion of
the empire. It was not the civil government that created the
schools. It was the church that, in the face of persecution,
reared aloft those beacon lights to guide the nations through
the darkness of time. And so hath it been ever since."
Traces of a plan like the primitive and divine one, for preserving and propagating the knowledge and service of God, are
found widely scattered among the nations and tribes of the
earth. Some hold, with a good deal of evidence in its favor,
that these are the remains of the primitive revelation, made
under the Patriarchial Dispensation, continued, modified, and
adapted to the times and people under the Mosaic and afterward. If this is not so, it must be referred to that instinct
and reason that God has placed in the nature of every living
species-that which causes them to bring forth abundantly after
their kind, and choose the best means of nourishment and
growth. At any rate, this provision, that we now call eleemosy.
nary, or charitable, for the support of the ministers of religion,
is found generally among the various systems of natural religion, or heathenism, a:id false religion, with which the world has
abounded. The priests of heathenism and idolatry organize
schools, such as they are, and make the support of them meritorious on the part of their followers. Into these schools they
-teceive gratuitously, and train the children they can obtain for