“Colgate Academy” from 1873 until it was discontinued in 1912. The “theological department” was designated the “Theological Seminary” in 1853, the name it retained until its removal to Rochester in 1928 to become part of the Colgate Rochester Divinity School. Madison University was renamed Colgate in 1890.
Sometimes “College” and “University” were used interchangeably, the latter being the more formal term and prior to 1928 it included both “Seminary” and “College.”
In founding the Education Society, Robert Powell and his twelve associates were joining the great movement for the spread of Christian faith and ideals which American and British Protestants advanced with great vigor in the nineteenth century. Organized activity was necessary to achieve their ends and they proceeded to set up various missionary societies on a voluntary basis. The Americans at first turned their attention to the Indians and settlers on the frontier and the English to the Far East. New England Congregationalists, however, sent five young men to India in 1812. When two of them, Adoniram Judson and Luther Rice, on becoming Baptists could no longer claim the support of their original sponsors, Judson went to Burma to inaugurate what became the first American Baptist foreign mission and Rice returned home to enlist support for his colleague. Since the Baptists had no organizations beyond local associations of churches new measures were called for and in 1814 they formed at Philadelphia the General Missionary Convention of the Baptist Denomination in the United States for Foreign Missions, or as it was generally called, the Triennial Convention. To fulfill the obligations for carrying the Gospel to the Far East and the rapidly expanding American frontier, which the Baptists were now assuming, they recognized that trained men were necessary. The “Colgate Immortals,”
aware of the needs, were, in founding their society, making their contribution toward meeting them.
Many Baptists opposed ministerial education because of its lack of “Scriptural sanction”
and the fact that uneducated preachers had been very successful in making converts. The gift for preaching, they held, came from God and could not be acquired through human efforts. Furthermore, educated ministers were often thought to “put on airs”
The improving economic and social status of Baptists and the rising educational level of the country made many churches dissatisfied with the preaching of unlettered men. The example of English Baptists