Improvements in the Curriculum.

715 much temptation to engaging in labours entirely foreign to those with which the college course is occupied. Additional provision has thus necessarily to be made for the student's wants; but, proceeding on the supposition that what is done there might be done here, any awakened interest on the part of the churches in their divinity schools would be a fitting occasion for considering whether the whole course of study in the latter might not be remodelled with advantage. It may be worth while to consider one or two of the points upon which some change seems desirable.

First of all, the period of preparation for the ministry from the time when the student enters the arts classes is too long. Seven years, often eight, is a longer probation than many are either able or willing to submit to. They are impatient to enter upon the business of the world. They are under the necessity of providing wholly for themselves. They see that in other walks of life a fair annual income is obtained, while the church probationer is struggling on a small pittance utterly insufficient to maintain him; and, without any deliberate worldliness, they make up their minds to follow the same course, and abandon thoughts of that clerical profession which they would perhaps have on many other grounds preferred. One remedy for this is to shorten the period of preparatory study.

There is indeed an extreme form of this remedy now occupying the minds of many-to permit the arts course at our universities to be altogether dispensed with, and to rest satisfied with testing the knowledge of the student at his entrance into the divinity hall by examination alone. Whether such an expedient may some day be necessary, we know not. In the meantime, we can imagine nothing more likely to prove disastrous. It has been often thought of before, but only to be dismissed. The Presbyterian Churches of Scotland have rightly felt that no private training can replace that of the university. They have regarded the mingling of young men destined for all professions in the arts classes as the best security against a narrow and one-sided culture. They have, therefore, stood by the universities in all their times of difficulty, have filled their benches when, but for them, they would have been empty, and have been the great means of keeping alive that interest in them which has been the chief

element in their prosperity. The benefits thus conferred have been repaid; and to the fact that their ministers have been invariably university men, the churches owe in no small degree the standing which these ministers have been able to maintain in the general intelligence of the country. Surely they are not ready to abandon this position? Others are at this moment becoming more alive to its importance. There is a growing feeling that the attendance for two or three years at college of those intending to be schoolmasters, would be a valuable substitute even for the education obtained at our excellent normal schools; and shall the churches allow, at such a time, that the opinion they have done so much to form is false, that the practice they have done so much to foster is to be abandoned? The success of any such proposal would simply bring with it the destruction of the universities and the debasement of the church.

It is another question whether the university course may not be shortened. Shortened we believe it must be, either by the introduction of summer sessions from the first, or by not insisting on university tickets over the great range of subjects on which the student must at present study there, or by the combination of both these measures. Were the curriculum thus reduced in arts to two or two-and-a-half years, and in divinity to the same, the unreasonable burden now laid upon the student would be lightened, and the disadvantage at which he is placed in comparison with students destined for any other profession would be removed.

Secondly, the summer recess of the divinity professors is too long, and might be made more use of.

Thirdly, additional, or rather we should say, more varied teaching power is wanted in our divinity schools. We have seen that this is gained in the seminaries of the United States by the introduction of lecturers who deliver special courses of lectures on subjects in which they are particularly interested, and which are akin to the ordinary course of study in the seminary. The advantages of such a system are considerable. It offers the student an opportunity of listening to the prelections of able men upon topics to which it may be supposed they have devoted peculiar care; while at the same time it widens his range of thought, and impresses him with a juster idea of the vast and varied extent of the field he

intends to cultivate. But a no less important advantage would be gained by the church at large in the inducement which would thus be offered to ministers to keep up their studies in one department or another, even after they have entered upon the active duties of the ministry. As things are now, there is almost no inducement to this. Chairs of theology in any church are necessarily few; and there are in the churches in Scotland no rewards for study of any other kind whatever. The hope of the honourable position of one day lecturing, with the consent of the university or the church, upon some favourite topic, would help to counterbalance this defect. If these lectureships could even take a more permanent form, making an approach to the work of the privatim docentes in the universities of Germany, still greater gains would follow. The range of teaching would be larger than it is, and freer scope be thus given for the indulgence of special tastes. Single departments of great subjects would be fixed on, and be wrought out with that minuteness and care which are so important, but which it is almost impossible for one who must travel over the whole subject to bestow on them. There would be more life, more activity of mind. Thought would be more stirred. A spirit of inquiry would be more excited. Our students would be more formed to vigour and independence; and, lastly, a class of men would be brought into existence to whom the patrons of vacant professorships might look as the worthy recipients of their patronage, instead of being guided, as they often must be now, by the pressure of interested friendship, by political considerations, or by ecclesiastical intrigue.

It is obvious that the arrangements of which we have spoken go together. A shortened curriculum, summer sessions, diminishing the number of compulsory classes, the introduction of additional lecturers, can hardly be separated from one another. They culminate in one main point-more freedom for the student than he at present has. This, and it is very different from license, is what we want. We want more choice, more play for individual taste, more scope for individual talent than we have on our present system. We cement all our men so thoroughly together, like well-made bricks in a brick wall, that when one portion falls the whole goes down. A little more irregularity here and there might save a

part, and be a guide to the builder when he would rebuild the ruins.

Of course all that has now been spoken of involves much sacrifice, especially on the part of the divinity professors; but had these professors any clear conviction that the churches cared for them and for their work, there seems no reason to doubt that they would make it.

We have now entered at as great length as our space will permit upon what appear to be some of the deficiencies of the existing state of our divinity schools in Scotland. Others which would require separate and lengthy treatment, and which are connected, not with these schools alone, but with the condition of the church at large, might no doubt be mentioned. But we have said enough for the present. It will appear from the earlier part of this article, how deep an object of interest their different theological seminaries are to the different branches of the Christian church in the United States of America. Our desire is to see the same spirit awakened in Scotland. There is no more urgent demand made by the times in which we live than that our divinity schools should be of the highest character. In ability, in learning, in acquired knowledge of every kind, in Christian spirit, in gentlemanly tone, their students ought to take precedence of all others. Christianity is either the salt of the earth and the light of the world, or it is a salt that should be cast out, a candle that should be extinguished; and the ministry, while this dispensation lasts, must always be the chief representative of what Christianity is. On this ground alone, whatever else engages the attention of the membership of our Christian churches, the provision made for the training of the ministry has one of the first claims on their regard. Let this claim be listened to, and there probably never was a time when professors and students did more than they would do now to reward their well-wishers. Many perplexing questions no doubt still wait solution. Suspicions may be roused, prejudices stirred, offence given and taken before the solution is arrived at. But the heart of our divinity schools is sound. Let them be trusted and encouraged, and, though it may be by paths that we do not altogether see, we shall yet burst into the brighter day."

WM. MILLIGAN.

Sir James Simpson.

ART. V.-Sir James Simpson.

719

Memoir of Sir James Y. Simpson, Bart., M.D., D.C.L., Oxon, &c. By JOHN DUNS, D.D., F.R.S.E., Professor of Natural Science, New College, Edinburgh. Edinburgh: Edmonston & Douglas.

THE story of the rise from the baker's bench to these titles does not now concern us. The perusal of Dr Duns' most interesting volume suggests some general reflections on the relations of medicine to religion, and how far Simpson's later years betokened the beau-ideal of the Christian physician.

The influence of medical science on humanity, as Mr Gladstone has remarked, yearly obtains an accelerating ratio. The increased study of hygiene and sanitation in reference to our crowded populations, the demand for legislation based on such knowledge, as well as the cry for popular physiology, shew the new face medicine has assumed since Simpson's student days. We do not claim him as the prophet of this new era; but unless we admit with the positivists that science is naught but a nexus of systematised law, the Christian testimony of the discoverer of chloroform warns the church against jealousy of science in their joint mission to a world of pain and sorrow. "Science," said John Goodsir, "was impossible before the advent of Christianity;" and lives of healers may now be given us to shew us how truly Christian science alone is for the glory of God and the good of man's estate.

In Simpson's boyhood there was no Medical Act, so routine and empiricism predominated. It was a time of unlimited bloodletting and mercurial doses, in country districts. The mother of the Bathgate doctor in his youth could not understand why Simpson spent years at classes, when her John had "passed" in nine months. The city physician still walked in small clothes, ruffles, cocked hat, and gold cane, bound up in professional hauteur, precision, and precedent. The profession had been entered by apprenticeship; so veneration for past authority rather than science held sway. Even in Simpson's day resurrectioning, with its intermingled Burke and Hare atrocities, prevailed. But the great Edinburgh extra-mural medical school had arisen to promulgate the new Parisian biological ideas, whilst the eloquence of Knox stirred enthusiastic response