The field of church history, aside from local and sectarian histories, was late in being invaded by American theologians. For many generations the theology of America was distinctly unhistorical, speculative, and provincial. But a change in this respect was inevitably sure to come. The strong propensity of the national mind toward historical studies is illustrated by the large proportion of historical works among the masterpieces of our literature, whether in prose or in verse. It would seem as if our conscious poverty in historical monuments and traditions had engendered an eager hunger for history. No travelers in ancient lands are such enthusiasts in seeking the monuments of remote ages as those whose homes are in regions not two generations removed from the prehistoric wilderness. It was certain that as soon as theology should begin to be taught to American students in its relation to the history of the kingdom of Christ, the charm of this method would be keenly felt.
We may assume the date of 1853 as an epoch from which to date this new era of theological study. It was in that year that the gifted, learned, and inspiring teacher, Henry Boynton Smith, was transferred from the chair of history in Union Theological Seminary, New York, to the chair of systematic theology. Through his premature and most lamented death the church has failed of receiving that system of doctrine which had been hoped for at his hands. But the historic spirit which characterized him has ever since been characteristic of that seminary. It is illustrative of the changed tone of theologizing that after the death of Professor Smith, in the reorganization of the faculty of that important institution, it was manned in the three chief departments, exegetical, dogmatic, and practical, by men whose eminent distinction was in the line of church history. The names of Hitchcock, Schaff, and Shedd cannot be mentioned without bringing to mind some of the most valuable gifts that America has made to the literature of the universal church. If to these we add the names of George Park Fisher, of Yale, and Bishop Hurst, and Alexander V. G. Allen, of Cambridge, author of "The Continuity of Christian Thought," and Henry Charles Lea, of Philadelphia, we have already vindicated for American scholarship a high place in this department of Christian literature.
In practical theology the productiveness of the American church in the matter of sermons has been so copious that even for the briefest mention some narrow rule of exclusion must be followed. There is no doubt that in a multitude of cases the noblest utterances of the American pulpit, being unwritten, have never come into literature, but have survived for a time as a glowing memory, and then a fading tradition. The statement applies to many of the most famous revival preachers; and in consequence of a prevalent prejudice against the writing of sermons, it applies especially to the great Methodist and Baptist preachers, whose representation on the shelves of libraries is most disproportionate to their influence on the course of the kingdom of Christ. Of other sermons,—and good sermons,—printed and published, many have had an influence almost as restricted and as evanescent as the utterances of the pulpit improvisator. If we confine ourselves to those sermons that have survived their generation or won attention beyond the limits of local interest or of sectarian fellowship, the list will not be unmanageably long.
In the early years of the nineteenth century the Unitarian pulpits of Boston were adorned with every literary grace known to the rhetoric of that period. The luster of Channing's fame has outshone and outlasted that of his associates; and yet these were stars of hardly less magnitude. The two Wares, father and son, the younger Buckminster, whose singular power as a preacher was known not only to wondering hearers, but to readers on both sides of the ocean, Gannett and Dewey—these were among them; and, in the next generation, Henry W. Bellows, Thomas Starr King, and James Freeman Clarke. No body of clergy of like size was ever so resplendent with talents and accomplishments. The names alone of those who left the Unitarian pulpit for a literary or political career—Sparks, Everett, Bancroft, Emerson, Ripley, Palfrey, Upham, among them—are a constellation by themselves.
To the merely literary critic those earnest preachers, such as Lyman and Edward Beecher, Griffin, Sereno Dwight, Wayland, and Kirk, who felt called of God to withstand, in Boston, this splendid array of not less earnest men, were clearly inferior to their antagonists. But they were successful.
A few years later, the preëminent American writer of sermons to be read and pondered in every part of the world was Horace Bushnell; as the great popular preacher, whose words, caught burning from his lips, rolled around the world in a perpetual stream, was Henry Ward Beecher. Widely different from either of these, and yet in an honorable sense successor to the fame of both, was Phillips Brooks, of all American preachers most widely beloved and honored in all parts of the church.
Of living preachers whose sermons have already attained a place of honor in libraries at home and abroad, the name of Bishop F. D. Huntington stands among the foremost; and those who have been charmed by the brilliant rhetoric and instructed from the copious learning of his college classmate, Dr. Richard S. Storrs, must feel it a wrong done to our national literature that these gifts should be chiefly known to the reading public only by occasional discourses and by two valuable studies in religious history instead of by volumes of sermons. Perhaps no American pulpits have to-day a wider hearing beyond the sea than two that stand within hearing distance of each other on New Haven Green, occupied by Theodore T. Munger and Newman Smyth. The pulpit of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, has not ceased, since the accession of Lyman Abbott, to wield a wide and weighty influence,—less wide, but in some respects more weighty, than in the days of his famous predecessor,—by reason of a well-deserved reputation for biblical learning and insight, and for candor and wisdom in applying Scriptural principles to the solution of current questions.
The early American theology was, as we have seen, a rhetorical and not a merely scholastic theology—a theology to be preached.[384:1] In like manner, the American pulpit in those days was distinctly theological, like a professor's chair. One who studies with care the pulpit of to-day, in those volumes that seem to command the widest and most enduring attention, will find that it is to a large extent apologetic, addressing itself to the abating of doubts and objections to the Christian system, or, recognizing the existing doubts, urging the religious duties that are nevertheless incumbent on the doubting mind. It has ceased to assume the substantial soundness of the hearer in the main principles of orthodox opinion, and regards him as one to be held to the church by attraction, persuasion, or argument. The result of this attitude of the preacher is to make the pulpit studiously, and even eagerly, attractive and interesting. This virtue has its corresponding fault. The American preacher of to-day is little in danger of being dull; his peril lies at the other extreme. His temptation is rather to the feebleness of extravagant statement, and to an overstrained and theatric rhetoric such as some persons find so attractive in the discourses of Dr. Talmage, and others find repulsive and intolerable.
A direction in which the literature of practical theology in America is sure to expand itself in the immediate future is indicated in the title of a recent work of that versatile and useful writer, Dr. Washington Gladden, "Applied Christianity." The salutary conviction that political economy cannot be relied on by itself to adjust all the intricate relations of men under modern conditions of life, that the ethical questions that arise are not going to solve themselves automatically by the law of demand and supply, that the gospel and the church and the Spirit of Christ have somewhat to do in the matter, has been settling itself deeply into the minds of Christian believers. The impression that the questions between labor and capital, between sordid poverty and overgrown wealth, were old-world questions, of which we of the New World are relieved, is effectually dispelled. Thus far there is not much of history to be written under this head, but somewhat of prophecy. It is now understood, and felt in the conscience, that these questions are for every Christian to consider, and for those undertaking the cure of souls to make the subject of their faithful, laborious professional study. The founding of professorships of social ethics in the theological seminaries must lead to important and speedy results in the efficiency of churches and pastors in dealing with this difficult class of problems.[386:1] But whatever advances shall be made in the future, no small part of the impulse toward them will be recognized as coming from, or rather through, the inspiring and most Christian humanitarian writings and the personal influence and example of Edward Everett Hale.