“There is much that is discouraging in the aspect of Brazil, even for
those who hope and believe as I do that she has before her an honorable
and powerful career.
“There is much also that is very cheering, that leads me to believe
that her life as a nation will not belie her great gifts as a country.
Should her moral and intellectual endowments grow into harmony with
her wonderful natural beauty and wealth the world will not have seen a
fairer land.
“Every friend of Brazil must wish to see its present priesthood
replaced by a more vigorous, intelligent, and laborious clergy.”--PROF.
LOUIS AGASSIZ, 1864.
Eleven years of self-government and a disestablishment of the Church
have brought the Brazilian nation out of an imperialism politically
and a greater imperialism religiously. Within two years part of the
priesthood has been “replaced by a more vigorous, intelligent and
laborious clergy” in the State of São Paulo. A. R. H.
JOHN T. MACKENZIE.
JOHN THERON MACKENZIE, the founder of Mackenzie College at S. Paulo,
Brazil, was born in the town of Phelps, Oswego County, N. Y., July 27,
1818.
He traveled extensively in the Old World and his attention was
constantly attracted to the ignorance, superstition and poverty of
the masses in Italy, and the lack of Christian culture in what should
have been the most Christian of all countries. This spectacle of a
lapsed Christianity affected him deeply, and he determined to honor
his father’s memory and satisfy his own convictions by establishing,
somewhere, a College where the Bible should be the foundation of
education. After at least one unsuccessful attempt to carry out his
idea in Europe, he heard of the work that was being done by the
Protestant College at S. Paulo, Brazil, shortly after the fall of
the Empire; a staunch American, his heart went out to the youngest
of American Republics, and he saw, at once, the value to the nascent
Republic of having its youth grounded in a knowledge of God’s Word.
Without special solicitations on the part of the College, he offered
spontaneously to the Trustees of the Protestant College the sum of
$50,000 with which to erect a building “to be known as Mackenzie
College,” and to be maintained as an institution of “learning based
on the Protestant Bible, where in each department shall be daily and
properly taught the teachings of Jesus Christ and his Apostles as
recorded in said Bible.” Of this sum only $42,000 was received. While
the College was in course of construction, its founder was stricken by
apoplexy and died September 17, 1892.
Transcriber's Notes:
Italics are shown thus: _sloping_.
Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.
Perceived typographical errors have been changed.