Cedarville College Bulletin, October 1922

RELIGIOUS LEADERS The Colonial colleges contributed to the church Increase and Cotton Mather, athaniel Emmons, Timothy Dwight, Joseph Bellamy and Lyman Beecher. I The early colleges were very largely devoted to the task of preparing men for the ministry. One-half of all the graduates of the first ~O classes of Harvard entered the ministry. Of the members of the first 50 classes of Dartmouth, 70% were ministers; of the first 10 classes from Yale 73.2%; from Princeton 51.8%. These ratios were not unusual for the time. The proportion of the ministry among college graduates reached its low point in 1800. During the following generation it increased until in 1836 it stood at 32.3%. "Of the 800 graduates of Middlebury college and the 960 of Amherst college, nearly one-half have devoted themselves to the sacred office. Of the first 113 graduates of Marietta college, 65 have become ministers. Of the first 65 graduates of Wabash college, 45 have chosen the same good work. At Illinois college,-45 out of the first 94 alumni have given themselves to the ministry. Of the 25,000 graduates from American colleges previous to 1846, as many a eight or nine thousand were preachers of the gospel." -Dr. W. S. Tyler in "Prayer for Colleges." In the "hay-stack prayermeeting'' on the campus of Williams college, a little group of consecrated college boys started the whole tremendous movement of foreign missions from this country. During the first 28 years of the history of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 201 men were sent out to the various fields. Of these, 159 were college graduates. A study of the "Professional Distribution of College and Uni– versity Graduates" by the U.S. Bureau of Education in 1912 showed that the ratio of ministers among college graduates had steadily declined from 32% in 1840 to 5.9% in 1900. This study was based on 37 institutions but a large number of these were independent rather than church colleges so that the decline was somewhat ex- aggerated. A study in 1920 based on the lnterchurch survey returns from 66 institutions, mainly church colleges, shows that almost one in five (18.5%) college graduates entered on a distinctly religious life work altho the proportion since 1880 is a third less than for the preceding period. Out of 99,066 graduates covered in this report 18.5% entered religious work, 41.4% other professions, and 40.1% -17-