A summer journey to Brazil

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.