In Brief: September 01, 2000

Princeton in the Nation’s Service: Religious Ideals and Educational Practice, 1868-1928 by P.C. Kemeny Oxford Univ. Press 353 pp.; $45

Do Christians make the best citizens? This question, which has prompted a variety of responses from ethicists, philosophers, and political scientists, has rarely in formed the work of historians writing on American higher education. But as P.C. Kemeny shows, the civic functions of Christianity were as much responsible as the growing prestige of the natural sciences for the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century transfer of academic authority from Christian liberal arts colleges to secular research universities.

Kemeny’s narrative covers Princeton University (until 1896 the College of New Jersey) during the 60-year period (1868-1928) in which James McCosh, Francis Landey Patton, Woodrow Wilson, and John G. Hibben presided over the school—a period during which, de pending on one’s perspective, Princeton suffered or benefitted from the way that Anglo-American Protestants had appropriated the Enlightenment. The Presbyterians who sponsored Princeton came to believe that they could have it all: maintain orthodox Christianity, advance the cause of scientific discovery, and contribute to the creation and preservation of a Christian republic.

What brought the curtain down on this juggling act, Kemeny concludes, was not the imperial claims of science, as many historians of higher education have argued. (In fact, as Princeton’s president from 1868-88, McCosh kept the pieces of Protestant educational philosophy together in the face of Darwinism and higher criticism’s challenges to the synthesis of Christianity and science.) Rather, it became increasingly difficult for Protestant educators to reconcile their responsibility to serve a religiously diverse nation with their traditional conception of a curriculum leavened by the distinctives of Protestant Christianity. Gradually the imperatives of civic duty led administrators to scuttle the university’s explicitly Christian mission, although a liberal Protestant faith reassured Princeton’s leaders that the school was still a Christian place, furthering Christian civilization in the United States.

Kemeny’s book fleshes out for one institution many of the themes that George Marsden develops at large in The Soul of the American University, especially reinforcing Marsden’s point that American higher education did not so much secularize as the Protestant theology undergirding it liberalized. But Kemeny’s emphasis on the public mission of universities and how it affected the Christian character of higher education makes this book particularly valuable, if also troubling, for believers who desire a greater Christian presence not only in the academy but also in American public life more generally. Princeton in the Nation’s Service shows at the very least that the way Protestants in the United States have mixed religious and national ideals has been entirely unsatisfactory, while suggesting that such a mixture is inherently unstable.

D.G. Hart is academic dean and professor of church history at Westminster Seminary in California. He is the author most recently of The University Gets Religion: Religious Studies in American Higher Education (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press), soon to be reviewed in these pages.

Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought by Philip C. Almond Cambridge Univ. Press 240 pp.; $54.95

It’s hard for those of us living on this side of the Enlightenment and the Darwinian revolution to understand the almost unquestioning allegiance that leading theologians in seventeenth-century Britain had to literal interpretations of the Genesis creation account. But we need to remember that the seventeenth century was a time when there was widespread agreement, even among scientists, that the world was created approximately 4000 B.C., and in six literal days. However much they disagreed about the location of the Garden of Eden or the exact meaning of the image of God, these men believed they were living only a few thousand years after Creation.

In Adam and Eve, Australian theologian Philip Almond weaves a rich tapestry of seventeenth-century British discussion about the first chapters of Genesis. Almond’s book reveals a culture in which a tremendous amount of intellectual energy was expended in hopes of better understanding the opening chapters of Genesis. Some of the questions seem familiar: How old were Adam and Eve when they were created? Why did Satan speak to Eve? Others are less familiar or even quaint: What was the language used in Eden? In which season did creation take place?

In the course of Almond’s excellent discussion of the views of seventeenth-century English theologians, there is sadly little reference to the concurrent English contributions to philosophy and science. Locke and Bacon are mentioned only in connection with certain interpretations of the Genesis account, and Newton is passed over entirely. In an epilogue, Almond does point out the “progressive marginalisation of the [Genesis] story in English intellectual life” throughout the seventeenth century, but without a substantive discussion of Bacon, Locke, and Newton—all of whom flourished during the seventeenth century—his argument seems much weaker than it could otherwise be.

Matt Donnelly (mdonnelly@truthmail.com) is a writer living in California.

Perfect Sowing: Reflections of a Bookman by Henry Regnery ISI Books 394 pp., $24.95

Henry Regnery set up shop as a publisher in 1947 and toiled in the book trade for 35 years. Believing the postwar settlements unduly disadvantageous to the victorious West, Regnery sought out contrarian books, books opposed to Hitler and Stalin in equal measure, “books which didn’t necessarily fit the liberal ideology which so dominated publishing as to constitute a particularly effective form of censorship.” Regnery’s reputation as a conservative publisher—which is not quite what he initially intended—started with the release in the early 1950s of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s God and Man at Yale and especially Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. Modern conservatism’s rise to a position of prominence in America’s society and politics, though not in its academy, owes much to Regnery’s midwifery. His paperback line made Western classics inexpensively available: Plato, Aquinas, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche.

In the 23 essays gathered herein, Regnery fondly reminisces about cultural life in Chicago and, at greater length, shrewdly characterizes personal acquaintances: Russell Kirk, Wyndham Lewis, Roy Campbell, Whittaker Chambers, Freda Utley, Robert M. Hutchins, others—a veritable gallery of colorful eccentrics. The closing few essays go furthest in revealing the author’s own mind. “Publishing at Its Creative Best and Destructive Worst” hopscotches through the history of publishing from Gutenberg down to our “era of the dirty book.” A “tale of two manuscripts” tells of worthy undertakings that financial considerations required even a mission-driven publisher regretfully to reject. An essay on “Religion and Philosophy” shows this reflective man to have had surprisingly little of either. What he did have, always, was hope—hope that an individual’s actions could make a difference for the good.

The volume’s final sentences summarize the motivation of a life that ended in 1996: “To do what is needed to halt the disintegration of our society requires purpose and intelligence. There won’t be any money or glory in it, but we have inherited a great and noble tradition, and it is worth fighting for.” The Regnery imprint survives, trailing still (if I may modify his final sentence slightly) some clouds of its former glory. Against the pressures of conglomeration, a few old houses and even some upstarts, including the outlet presenting this volume, join in marching to an antique drum.

Edward E. Ericson, Jr., is professor of English at Calvin College.