Page:A History of the University of Chicago by Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed.djvu/67

THE PREPARING OF THE WAY 41 Baptist education. At the same meeting of the Society, he had secured the adoption of resolutions appointing a committee to consider the advisability of an organization to be known as the American Baptist Education Society. This committee, meeting in New York on February 24, 1888, decided it wise to form the proposed Society, to issue a call for a convention for the purpose of organizing it, to make due arrangements for the convention, and to draft and present a constitution. The call for the conven- tion to meet at Washington, D.C., May 16, 1888, was duly issued. The convention assembled at the appointed time and place, four hundred and twenty-seven delegates, representing thirty-six states, being enrolled. After extended discussion, in which opposition to present action developed from influential sources, on motion of Mr. Goodspeed of Chicago it was resolved to proceed with the organization of the Society by a vote of 188 to 34. With the adoption of the constitution and the election of officers and the Executive Board the Society was duly organized. The large part it played in the founding of the University will appear in the course of this narrative. One of the first acts of the Executive Board of the new Society was also, far and away, the most important, in its relation to the founding and history of the University of Chicago, that the Board was destined ever to take. It appointed the Rev. Frederick T. Gates, then of Minneapolis, Minnesota, corresponding secretary of the Society. Mr. Gates was born in 1853, was a graduate of the University of Rochester, 1877, and of the Rochester Theological Seminary, 1880. Called to the pastorate of the Central Baptist Church, Minneapolis, he closed a successful service in 1888 to undertake to raise an endowment for Pillsbury Academy, a Baptist school in Minnesota. Having secured this in an astonishingly short time, Mr. Gates was offered, but had not accepted, the prin- cipalship of the Academy. When a student in Rochester, Mr. Gates had been a member of Dr. Morehouse's congregation in the East Avenue Baptist Church and had consulted the pastor on the question of entering the ministry. Subsequently, Mr. Gates had been in active sympathy with the work of the American Baptist Home Mission Society under Dr. Morehouse's leadership, had