Similarly, the education of the ministry gained vastly by utilizing universities and theological seminaries maintained by others. Before 1909 there was already a beaten trail from some of the colleges to Yale Divinity School, and the numbers who traveled it later ran into the hundreds. Many went to Union Theological Seminary in New York, and others to Harvard, Princeton, Hartford, or Vanderbilt. The University of Chicago, which opened its doors in 1892, furnished a seat of learning in the Middle West and therefore nearer to the geographical center of the Disciples. Though its divinity school was at first nominally Baptist, it appealed definitely to students of all denominations and successfully sought ways of evading the restriction of its faculty to Baptists. The Disciples Divinity House was established, 1894, in affiliation with the university and its divinity school, and at once a large number of students came, many of whom were mature men already in the ministry but eager for graduate study. Through all these means, by the end of the period here under consideration, the educational average of ministers among the Disciples had been greatly raised and their intellectual horizons vastly widened. The improvement of the colleges was one of the causes and also one of the consequences of this.
The old differences of opinion about the organ and the missionary society continued, but there was no longer any interest in controversy about them. The opposing element ceased to cooperate with the "progressives" and was moving toward separation, which had become an accomplished fact, for all practical purposes, years before it was registered by the separate listing of the statistics of the "Churches of Christ" in the religious census of 1906.
New issues arose which afforded topics for lively debate in the papers, at preachers' meetings, and at the Congresses which met annually after 1899. Chief among these were higher criticism, the reception of the unimmersed, and federation. Since federation was the only one of these that called for collective action, and since it had very strong support as soon as it was proposed, it had full and frank discussion in the conventions also, as the other two questions did not.