left school quite early in life, either because they did not appreciate the advantages of a liberal education, or because the stress of circumstances compelled them to assist in the maintenance of home, awake a few years later to the realization that a good education is more than one-half the struggle for existence and position.  Their time through the day is fully occupied; their evenings are free.  At once they turn to the evening college, and grasping the opportunities for instruction, convert those hours which to many are the pathway to vice and ruin, into stepping stones to a higher and more useful career ...  An illustration of the wide-reaching influence of the College work is the significant fact that during one year there were personally known to the president, no less than ninety-three persons pursuing their studies in various universities of our country, who received their first impulses toward a higher education and a wider usefulness in Temple College.”

In 1893, in an address on the Institutional church, delivered before the Baptist Ministers’ Conference in Philadelphia, Dr. Conwell said: 

“At the present time there are in this city hundreds of thousands—­to speak conservatively, (I should say at least five hundred thousand people) who have not the education they certainly wish they had obtained before leaving school.  There are at least one hundred thousand people in this city willing to sacrifice their evenings and some of their sleep to get an education, if they can get it without the humiliation of being put into classes with boys and girls six years old.  They are in every city.  There is a large class of young people who have reached that age where they find they have made a mistake in not getting a better education.  If they could obtain one now, in a proper way, they would.  The university does not furnish such an opportunity.  The public school does not.

“The churches must institute schools for those whom the public does not educate, and must educate them along the lines they cannot reach in the public schools.

“We are not to withdraw our support from, nor to antagonize, the public schools; they are the foundations of liberty in the nation.  But the public schools do not teach many things which young men and young women need.  I believe every church should institute classes for the education of such people, and I believe the Institutional church will require it.  I believe every evening in the week should be given to some particular kind of intellectual training along some educational line; that this training should begin with the more evident needs of the young people in each congregation, and then be adjusted as the matter grows, to the wants of each.”

So, because one poor boy struggled so bitterly for an education, because a man, keen-eyed, saw others’ needs, reading the signs by the light of his own bitter experience, a great College for busy men and women has grown, to give them freely the education which is very bread and meat to their minds.