Leonidas Polk Family Papers

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of technical schools, whether military, medical, legal or theological, each by itself, tends to foster a narrow spirit of professional conceit which would be less likely to exist if the professors and students of the different faculties were in daily contact with each other. When he went abroad, he saw in the great English and Continental universities a fairly adequate approximation to the vague ideal he had already conceived. But he saw more than that; for he saw that great universities educate not merely individual men but nations; and that they inspire the noblest impulses of national activity, treasuring the riches of the past, stimulating and informing the energies of the present, and in the best sense laying the foundation of the future. Comparing one part of his country with another, he saw that, poor as the North was in literature and in institutions of learning, the South was poorer still. These considerations, not long after his return from Europe, began to inspire in him a passionate desire to devote his energies to the founding of a great American university somewhere in the southern States.

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So he set about to plan and prepare for a home of all the arts and sciences and of literary culture in the southern States. July 1st of this year will mark the centennial of Bishop Polk's letter to his fellow bishops in the southern dioceses outlining his grand scheme. Nothing strictly comparable to his design for a Christian university to be created at once, "like the birth of Minerva, full panoplied from the head of Jupiter", is to be found in the entire previous history of higher education. Of his generalship in the campaign to clothe his idea with substance Bishop John Henry Hopkins of Vermont wrote to Mrs. Polk: "He brought with him to Sewanee at that time (1859) a large box entirely filled with the result of correspondence with the leading men in Europe, and the scholastic institutions of the Old World, as well as laborious and thoroughly digested projects for a southern university which, when completed, was to be the noblest and best-endowed in Christendom.... I was amazed and delighted at the combination of original genius, lofty enterprise, and Christian hope with the utmost