Introduction, Address of Prof. A. E. Dolbear, 186 Remarks of Gov. W. McKinley, 213 BY PRESIDENT BASHFORD. In The Ohio Wesleyan University is a child of faith. 1841, Charles Elliott, J. M. Trimble and W. P. Strickland drove from Urbana to Delaware to look at the grounds and hotel building which the citizens of the latter place had offered to the Methodist Church for college purposes. When the three preachers returned to the seat of the Conference, only one of them had money enough with him to pay for the carriage in which they made the journey; and Dr. Trimble made the first contribution to the college by meeting the expenses of that historic visit. Dr. Elliott's speech portraying the possibilities of a college for Ohio Methodism awakened great enthusiasm, and led the Conference to accept the gift of the citizens of Delaware and to undertake to launch a University upon faith. But in his wildest dreams no member of that Conference supposed that within fifty years the college would secure a larger endowment than Yale secured during the first one hundred and fifty years of her existence; that during the life-time of the first teachers the college would send out 2,200 graduates and 15,000 students with their lives touched to nobler issues by the refining influence of Christian culture; that in addition to enriching every department of life, the college would send forth thousands of teachers, and hundreds of ministers, and more missionaries than the Methodist Church had commissioned down to the day when the college was founded. The past at least is secure, as the solid achievements recounted in the following pages amply demonstrate. The incipient University is still a child of faith. With the need of a new library and a large endowment to sustain it; with the need of ten more professorships in the college, and the cry for special departments, and the demand for |