AND COLLEGE REVIEW. Published Monthly. EDITOR: ABSALOM PETERS, D. D. ASSOCIATE EDITORS: HON. SAMUEL S. RANDALL, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS FOR THE CITY OF NEW YORK. ALEXANDER WILDER, M.D., WITH CORRESPONDING EDITORS IN THE SEVERAL STATES. VOL. II.-FROM JULY TO DECEMBER, 1856. NEW YORK: CALKINS AND STILES, PUBLISHERS, BOSTON: JAMES ROBINSON AND CO., 119 WASHINGTON STREET. THE American Journal of Educatio AND COLLEGE REVIEW. No. VII.-JULY, 1856. I. MAN AND HIS INSTITUTIONS.* BY HENRY WARD BEECHER, Pastor of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, N. Y. MAN is born, by God's ordaining power, with a separate nat with special personal powers, which he can not alienate, and wh none can take from him. His reason is his own; his affections his his moral nature is his own. own; Into that individuality is born, upon it he lives, on account of it God holds him acco ible. He dies in his own personality, and goes alone, by hims to the judgment. God respects and maintains the individuality man, and will not let society rub it out. He can not, like a ch ical agent, go out of one nature, by combination, into another. I a thread, he may go to the composition of a fabric, but comes of the loom of society a single, continuous, perfect thread, retain its own nature and color through all the figures of the pattern. Man combines in himself harmoniously two apparently incom ible elements, perfect independence and perfect cohesion others. He is at the same time sharply individual, and thoroug composite. He is at once solitary and social; a perfect si being, and yet organized as an element into a community beings. It is the individuality of man that is the source of his power; the strength and power of the individual is the secret of the stre of society itself. A state of society which finds it necessary to press the individual, to prevent his development, to curtail * This article was prepared as an Address on behalf of the "Society for the Promoti Collegiate and Theological Education at the West," and delivered at the annual meet that Society in Boston, May 28, 1856. VOL. II. NO. VII.-1 |