Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 57:227 (Jul 1900)
Article: Oberlin’s Contribution To Ethics
Author: Walter E. C. Wright

BSac 57:227 (July 1900) p. 429

Oberlin’s Contribution To Ethics

Prof. Walter E. C. Wright

History has been making its record for two-thirds of a century since two men 1 with no resources but their own moral earnestness chose the spot where Oberlin now stands for the location of a great enterprise of Christian education. The forest about them was savage in its trackless growth, and still more forbidding in its undrained clay soil. In what contrast to-day are the substantial business blocks of Oberlin, the streets of tasteful homes, the many beautiful college buildings! These things suggest how great a contribution those pioneers were making to the material development of their country. They would have said their aim was wholly religious. They thought of material things only as means for helping reach higher ends. In carrying out their spiritual aims how powerfully did they also contribute to material transformations! The hiding of their power was in their intense ethical spirit. The ceremonies of religion were of little interest to them compared with its duties. They were positive and aggressive in their ideas of right and wrong; as far as possible removed from the flabby morals of those who can find no stronger objection to profanity than that it is “bad form.” They led the early community in signing a covenant that looked toward a strenuous regulation of life’s minutest acts by moral precepts. Food, dress, even the color of the houses, were to be regulated not by taste, but by duty.

BSac 57:227 (July 1900) p. 430

Earnest men were they, such as the world has not seen in too great number. If they were open to the charge of narrowness, if they were in danger of refusing sentiment a place in human life and a share in determining human duty, nevertheless they laid a solid ethical foundation on which has been built a far richer and more varied structure than they had vision of.

They had little conscious interest in aesthetics. Indeed they were not without fears that the beautiful would prove an enemy of the useful and a temptation from a consecrated life. There were phrases in their covenant about “observing plainness and durability in the construction of houses and furniture,” that came near to a formal declaration of war on beauty. Nevertheless these men could not do their work, inspired by high spiritual ideals, without giving an impulse to all ennobling ideals. With their own hands they built “Slab Hall,” which met a primary need of the school at that time, but was not a thing of beauty. The later college buildings, so beautiful without sacrifice of utility, had been impossible without that rude “Slab Hall.” That was the homely cradle in which was nurtured an unrecognized spirit of culture that ...