We pause to look back upon our past today, not as an old man grown reminiscent, but as a prudent man still in his youth and lusty prime and at the threshold of new tasks, who would remind himself of his origin and lineage, re call the pledges of his youth, assess as at a turning in his life the duties of his station.
We look back only a little way to our birth; but the brief space is quick with movement and incident enough to crowd a great tract of time. Turn back only one hundred and fifty years, and you are deep within quiet colony times, before the French and Indian war or thought of separation from England. But a great war is at hand. Forces long pent up and local presently spread themselves at large upon the continent, and the whole scene is altered. The brief plot runs with a strange force a nd haste:--First a quiet group of peaceful colonies, very placid and commonplace and dull, to all seeming, in their patient working out of a slow development; Then, of a sudden, a hot fire of revolution, a quick release of power, as if of forces long pent up, but set free at last in the generous heat of the new day; the mighty processes of a great migration, the vast spaces of a waiting continent filled almost suddenly with hosts bred to the spirit of conquest; a constant making and renewing of governm ents, a stupendous growth, a perilous expansion. Such days of youth and nation-making must surely count double the slower days of maturity and calculated change, as the Spring counts double the sober fruitage of the Summer.
Princeton was founded upon the very eve of the stirring changes which put the revolutionary drama on the stage, --not to breed politicians, but to give young men such training as, it might be hoped, would fit them handsomely for t he pulpit and for the grave duties of citizens and neighbours. A small group of Presbyterian ministers took the initiative in its foundation. They acted without ecclesiastical authority, as if under obligation to society rather than to the church. They ha d no more vision of what was to come upon the country than their fellow colonists had; they knew only that the pulpits of the middle and southern colonies lacked properly equipped men and all the youth in those parts ready means of access to the higher so rt of schooling. They thought the discipline at Yale a little less than liberal and the training offered as a substitute in some quarters a good deal less than thorough. They wanted "a seminary of true religion and good literature" which should be after t heir own model and among their own people.
It was not a sectarian school they wished. They were acting as citizens, not as clergymen, and the charter they obtained said never a word about creed or doctrine; but they gave religion the first place in their programe, which belong ed to it of right, and confided the formation of their college to the Rev. Jonathan Dickinson, one of their own number, a man of such mastery as they could trust. Their school was first of all merely a little group of students gathered about Mr. Dickin son in Elizabethtown. Its master died the very year his labours began; and it was necessary to induce the Rev. Aaron Burr, one of the trustees, to take the college under his own charge at Newark. It was the charm and power of that memorable young pastor a nd teacher which carried it forward to a final establishment. Within ten years many friends had been made, substantial sums of money secured, a new and more liberal charter obtained, and a permanent home found at Princeton. And then its second president d ied, while still in his prime, and the succession was handed on to other leader's of like quality.
It was the men, rather than their measures, as usual, that had made the college vital from the first and put it in a sure way to succeed. The charter was liberal and very broad ideas determined the policy of the young school. There we re laymen upon its board of trustees as well as clergymen, -not all Presbyterians, but all lovers of progress and men known in the colony: no one was more thoroughly the friend of the new venture than Governor Belcher the representative of the crown. But the life of the college was in the men who administered it and spoke in its class rooms, a notable line of thinkers and orators. There had not been many men more to be regarded in debate or in counsel in that day than Jonathan Dickinson; and Aaron Burr wa s such a man as others turn to and follow with an admiration and trust they might be at a loss to explain, so instinctive is it, and inevitable -a man with a touch of sweet majesty in his presence, and a grace and spirit in his manner which more than made amends for his small and slender figure; the unmistakable fire of eloquence in him when he spoke and the fine quality of sincerity. Piety seemed with him only a crowning grace.