This service is expressed with singular point and remarkable breadth on the foundation document of the Seminary, the “Plan,” which the General Assembly adopted in 1811 as the basis of the new venture it was making in providing for the training of ministers. Briefly, the Assembly desired the Seminary “to provide for the Church an adequate supply and succession of able and faithful ministers of the New Testament”; “to furnish the congregation with enlightened, humble, zealous, laborious pastors”; “to form men for the Gospel ministry, who shall truly believe and cordially live, and therefore endeavor to propagate and defend, in its genuineness, simplicity and fulness the faith of the Church, whether against unbelievers or misbelievers”; and “to found a nursery for missionaries to the heathen and to such as are destitute of the stated preaching of the Gospel.”

The following is transcribed from, The New York Observer, Thursday, May 10, 1906, 591-92.

THE PRINCETON SEMINARY OF THE FUTURE

By an Interested Observcr.

ONE of the striking things about an institution with a continuous life is that it does not grow old. It may look back upon a long past, but every year is a new beginning. Upon each year lies the dew of youth, and from it the prospect broadens into the future. Princeton Seminary has completed almost a century of life, and this century has been filled with achievement. But its friends, as they look upon it, find themselves thinking less of the past than of the future. It does not present itself to their view as an old institution rounding out its hundred years of accomplished work. It presents itself as a young institution girding itself for a great work lying at its hand.

What lies in the remote future would be idle to speculate. But what lies immediately at our doors rightly attracts our thought. And there are some things which, it is safe to say, lie immediately in the future of Princeton Seminary, and these it may be not only pleasing but profitable to call to mind.

For one thing it is safe to say that Princeton Seminary will continue in the future, as in the past, with faithfulness and devotion to perform the service for which it was established, and in the performance of which it has prospered. This service is expressed with singular point and remarkable breadth on the foundation document of the Seminary, the “Plan,” which the General Assembly adopted in 1811 as the basis of the new venture it was making in providing for the training of ministers. Briefly, the Assembly desired the Seminary “to provide for the Church an adequate supply and succession of able and faithful ministers of the New Testament”; “to furnish the congregation with enlightened, humble, zealous, laborious pastors”; “to form men for the Gospel ministry, who shall truly believe and cordially live, and therefore endeavor to propagate and defend, in its genuineness, simplicity and fulness the faith of the Church, whether against unbelievers or misbelievers”; and “to found a nursery for missionaries to the heathen and to such as are destitute of the stated preaching of the Gospel.”

How Princeton Seminary has performed this service in the past its roll of 5,420 students, of whom 358 have devoted themselves to work in the foreign field, will testify. What encourages its friends most, as they look forward to the future of the Seminary, is that it is the spirit of these requirements which characterizes the whole life of the Seminary now. A foreign review of a recent publication emanating from the Seminary felt it enough to say of it, meaning it perhaps not altogether to its praise, “Princeton Seminary is excessively zealous for the Gospel.” The Gospel is a good thing to be “excessively zealous” for. An incident which occurred at the “Commencement” just past well attested the missionary interest which is diffused among the student body. The sad death of a young missionary [John Rogers Peale] in China, who had left the Seminary only last spring, has naturally deeply moved the Seminary during the past year; and the students of their own motion conceived and executed the plan to erect a bronze tablet in the building devoted to the classroom work of the institution, bearing the following inscription:

If the example of the devotion here commemorated presides over all the classroom exercises of the Seminary of the future, it is a bright future which is in store for it.

Another thing which it is safe to predict for the near future of Princeton Seminary is increased service to Christian culture and theological learning. This, too, will be merely a fuller realization of the design of the Assembly in founding the institution. Among the purposes to be subserved by the new institution, there are enumerated in the basal document or “Plan” these: “To unite in those who sustain the ministerial office, religion and literature”; “piety of the heart with solid learning”; “to afford more advantages than have hitherto been usually possessed”; to cultivate both piety and literature”; and “to provide for the Church men who shall be able to defend the faith.”

Among the instrumentalities which are now more fully to be utilized in the Seminary for the stimulation of study and the acquisition of sacred learning. the establishment of a number of additional fellowships is to be counted. Princeton Seminary has for a number of years had a single fellowship, conferred by competition, paying the successful candidate the sum of $600, and requiring of him an additional year’s devotion to a specified branch of theological learning. More lately two others have been established, and now three others still have been added.

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