The central Presbyterian. [volume] (Richmond, Va.) 1856-1908, 1880-06-09
HAMPDEN SYDNEY coLLEGE

A new country does not foster rever-
entail spirit towards the works of men.
True, its old forests and hills, its old
rivers and mountains, fill one with awe
as he contemplates these works of God.
But wigwams and primitive log cabins,
"shingle palaces" in shining paint and
stately piles of new brick, or structures
OF stone, over which the moss and the
IVY have not crept, are not suggestive of
old races whose persisted generations have
long lived amid these new surroundings,
and for whom the natural awe and rev.
erence for the unseen spontaneously arises
in the reflective mind Age is an indis-
pensable quality to secure reverence for
the works of art and the institutions of
men. What age? The shrewdest of
Latin critics, in determining the age that
made poet old, wrote,
" Est Uet''s atque probus centum gu perfect
By this rule, Hampden Sidney is old,
and, on this ground, entitled to venera-
ton.
On other grounds, she is not undeserv-
ing of reverence. Born in 1776, amid
the throes of the first year of our revolu-
tionary struggle, she is the daughter of
courageous parentage whose hopes and
enterprise were dauntless. Nothing in
the history of American colleges is more
interesting and inspiring than her steady
infant steps through those years of I'M
Hinching struggle for independence. Her
first nurse was the gifted Samuel STAN
hope Smith, afterwards the distinguished
President of the College of New Jersey.
After three years tutelage, he left the
bantling in the hands of his brave brother
who, like the President of to-day, led his
students, organized as a military COM
pany, to meet the invaders of his coun-
try. AS might be expected, the man
who could do this, was made of such stuff
as would not desert the college in the
struggle through the pecuniary difficult
ties of those years Immediately following
the close of that war, while the country
was rallying from its apparent ruin, and
developing a national organization UNI
paralleled in history.
The war of the revolution thoroughly
impoverished the people, and the pecu-
mary distress was so great and so gen
eral, that but few students could attend
college during the fifteen years following
the close of the war, while the financial
condition of the country was settling and
securing permanent basis in the estab-
lishment of the first National Bank, and
the establishment of commerce de !.
stroyed by the war,-a commerce then to
be emancipated from the restrictive and
embarrassing control of "the mother
country" 1t required the tenacity of
John Blair Smith, and the patience and
hopefulness of a Drury Lacy to "hold
the fort while the number of students
was constantly dwindling, as bankruptcy
crushed the patrons of the college for
years after the war. A like dwindling.
for the same cause has been endured since
the late war. But the tenacity that chung
to the college in those dark days, and the
energy that inspired its friends to revive
and strengthen it, characterize heroic
people and awaken our reverence for
those old worthless Shall the descend
ants of such sires be less pertinacious and
patient? Has hundred years dwarfed
the race sprung from such an ancestry
Is there no survival of the courage and
perseverance Of those trying days? Try
it,
When, in 1797, the people once more
found themselves on their feet, and sons
to be educated, and means with which to
support these sons at college began to
accumulate, new impulse was given the
college-an impulse felt more or less per-
sistently for the next fifteen years, and
until the effects Of the war Of 1912 began
to be felt. From 1914 to 1920, another
crisis in the financial condition of the
people seems to have disorganized the
college 50 that few or no graduates we're
turned out from its humble and unpre-