William Tennent's Log College

Remembering today the Log College Celebration held in Warminster, September 5, 1889...

Extracted from the Address of Pennsylvania Governor Beaver…”The building itself has little significance.  You have heard of its plan and physical features.  They were not different from many buildings used for other purposes in that day.  The primitive building of logs with its exterior chimney and rude accompaniments is not what we magnify and celebrate on this occasion.  Its physical features, except as they are indicative of the times, have little interest for us.  Our celebration to-day has to do rather with the thoughts, the aspirations, the aims, the purposes and the acts of the men who wrought through this humble institution and used it for the glory of God and the welfare of their fellow-men, than with grounds or buildings or surroundings or mere outward circumstances.  Metonymy uses the container for the thing contained, the sign for the thing signified; and so our purposes should be, it seems to me, as we meet on this occasion, to determine, as far as possible, what the Log College stood for.  Of what is it the symbol?  As we look back upon it how does it interpret the thought and the life and the hope of the men who founded it?  Let us forget the thing, and recall and vivify and magnify the thought.  What does the little log building, diminutive in size, rude in exterior, contemptible in appearance and perishable in material, symbolize?...

…it signified an advance in civilization.  Not only was the ministry to be trained, but men were to be educated for other pursuits.  The times demanded knowledge and mental culture outside the pulpit.  It was not wholly a struggle for bread and physical existence in this new land.  So it was natural in one of the three counties into which Penn’s province was originally divided, the one in which he had his residence, and before a single new county had been formed, this college should have been established--an evidence, on the one hand, of the determination of the fathers to perpetuate the learning of the ministry, and a desire on the part of the community and the youth, on the other, to secure a liberal education…

…Count the institutions which are its legitimate offspring.  Count, if you can, the men whose characters have been moulded in them, and who, because of that moulding influence, have been a blessing in their day and a help to their fellows.  Measure, if you can, the weighty influences which have been felt as the result of them in Church and State.  Compute, if you are able to do so, the number and value of the contributions to literature, to science, to living thought in every department of intellectual activity which their devoted sons have made.  Take the census of the men and the women who, through the efforts of men who were trained in the old Log College and in the institutions which have grown out of it, have lived noble lives, died triumphant deaths and are enjoying a blissful immortality; and tell me, is not the old Log College which we celebrate a success?...”

Extracted from the Address of R. M. Patterson, D.D., LL.D., of Philadelphia…”The same heavens are over us to-day that were one hundred and sixty-five years ago.  The same green pasture-fields (Naioth) where the sons of the prophets abode are around us.  The old beautiful scenes of Nature are still here.  But the little rustic log building, eighteen by twenty feet, has disappeared.  From it, however, were developed not merely Princeton College and Seminary, Lafayette and Hampden-Sidney, which are to be heard from to-day, but all the colleges and theological seminaries which are training the young men of the Church for its ministry.  It still lives in each and all of them.  And its site is still here. Verily it is sacred.  The place whereon we stand is holy ground.”

For much more on this day, read The Presbytery of the Log College; or, The Cradle of the Presbyterian Church in America, by Thomas Murphy, D.D., Appendix, Celebration of the Founding of the Log College, Sept. 5, 1889, pages 497 - 532, which can be found at no cost on Google books.