Error in educating a young man

It was a clear case of error in educating a young man out of his station in life. But the philosophers who rebuke such proceedings omit to suggest how a young man is to rise out of a submerged mass if when he has risen he may not find himself above the station in life wherein he was born. I counselled the uncle to have patience, put small jobs of clerk’s work in the way of the young man, and then, after a few months, the uncle met me one day smiling. His nephew had got a position as assistant superintendent of a mine somewhere in the interior of Asia Minor.

And the young man? Look at him to-day—a man trusted by the mining company, handling accounts with accuracy, and correspondence without limitation of language, looked up to by the whole district as a living personification of manly, clean living. You must agree that when a school can take an individual from a mass of Asiatic villagers and make a true man of him in seven years, the men who have taught that boy have done a work of which to be proud, for they see the fruit of their self-denying labour to a degree seldom permitted to those who work for the good of others. This is not a single case.

Professor Ramsey of St. Andrews, Scotland, who has travelled much in Asia Minor says: * “I have come in contact with men educated in Robert College in widely separated parts of the country, men of divers races and different forms of religion—Greek, Armenian and Protest-ant—and have everywhere been struck with the marvellous way in which a certain uniform type, direct, simple, honest in tone, has been impressed upon them. Some had more of it, some had less, but all had it in a certain degree, and it is diametrically opposite to the type produced by growth under the ordinary conditions of Turkish life.”

Woman’s Board of Missions of Boston

The American College for Girls at Scutari is connected with the Woman’s Board of Missions of Boston. It does for young women what Robert College is doing for young men. One of those truths which the American missions in Turkey set out to prove is the thesis that woman has a mind and can use it for the good of her race if men do not thrust her into marriage when she is still a baby. Proof of this thesis is worked out in the Girls’ College in a way that once seen can never be forgotten. Many a woman of Constantinople looking at the intelligent, mature, and Impressions of Turkey.

Capable young women who graduate at this College, at once to become centres of power in the community, sighs over her own lost opportunity, for she is a grandmother at thirty-two. To have begun to teach the people that there is such a thing as respect for woman because of intellectual power, is to have secured an advance in the Christianity of the country which amply justifies all that it has cost private tours balkan.

In emphasizing the importance of the moral training given in these colleges we would not obscure the fact that the permanent fruitfulness and usefulness of graduates must depend upon the degree to which they have changed the centre of gravity of their lives—upon the change of nature wrought by the spirit of God. Where the teachers are themselves full of the Holy Ghost, and where they are able to distinguish between the work of training men to live in Jesus Christ and the work of training adherents to a sect, they impress the spiritual nature of their pupils of whatever sect.

The pupils of such teachers become in some degree centres of spiritual reformation wherever they may be. To have found a means, while imparting the highest scientific training, of making the tree good that its fruit may be good, is the discovery which makes these colleges and others like them in other parts of Turkey centres of hope for the future.