American Divines.—In his “Annals of the American Pulpit”—“from the Early Settlement of this Country to the Close of the Year 1855”—the Reverend William B. Sprague (1795–1875) collected the biographies of thirteen hundred or more divines who had earned as he thought a lasting memorial.[22] “From the commencement of this work,” he observes, “I have been quite aware that nothing pertaining to it involves more delicacy than the selection of its subjects, and that no degree of care and impartiality can be a full security against mistakes.” Far more difficult is the matter of selection, when in a sketch of barely a dozen pages we try to include the names of those who, during the nineteenth century, have most deeply wrought upon the private life of our citizens. The separation of church and state in America renders all the wider the ordinary cleft between public and private life, and the multiplicity of religious sects still further tends to keep the eloquence and motive force of great spiritual leaders from becoming generally known. Even among those whose power and fame have overleaped the confines of their own parish or denomination, our choice is necessarily limited to a scanty few.
Clergymen as Educators.—The influence of notable preachers—not to speak of the clergy as a whole—in American life is incalculable. Outside of the church and the home, it has been most evident in higher education; until a short time since, educational leadership was vested, as it should be, in the ministers of religion. As significant as the important colleges more or less directly founded for the training of pastors is the long line of college presidents taken from the ranks of that profession. At Princeton, Jonathan Edwards, head of that institution (1758) during the last month of his life, was succeeded ten years later by John Witherspoon (1722–1794), a lineal descendant of John Knox, and a signer of the American Declaration of Independence. The philosopher, James McCosh (1811–1894), was eleventh president in the same illustrious succession. At Yale we have such men as the poet, Timothy Dwight (1752–1817), and his grandson of the same name (born in 1828); Jeremiah Day (1773–1867), mathematician and commentator on Edwards; Theodore Dwight Woolsey (1801–1889), classical scholar and authority on international law, under whose presidency was trained a generation of organisers to guide the affairs of newer universities; and Noah Porter (1811–1892), whose treatise on “The Human Intellect” became a general text-book. At Union College was Eliphalet Nott (1773–1866), who, during an administration of sixty-two years, manifested consummate wisdom in the management of students. On the death of Hamilton at the hands of Aaron Burr, Nott eloquently attacked the barbarous practice of duelling. In his “Lectures on Temperance” (1823), he assisted the vigorous movement of Lyman Beecher and others against “even the common use of ardent spirits.” At Harvard was the versatile Edward Everett (1794–1865), to mention none of his predecessors. At Brown was Francis Wayland (1796–1865), the metaphysician; at Williams, Mark Hopkins, in his teaching a veritable Gamaliel. Aside from presidents, the peaceful army of college instructors chosen from the ministry is beyond reckoning—men like Frederick Henry Hedge (1805–1890), a Unitarian, professor of the German language and literature at Harvard, author of “Ways of the Spirit, and Other Essays,” “Prose Writers of Germany,” “Atheism in Philosophy,” etc.; or Edwards Amasa Park (1808–1900), descended, as his first name suggests, from a celebrated stock. Park was professor of philosophy at Amherst College, and afterward professor at Andover Theological Seminary. He was a hymnologist as well as a theologian, a biographer, as in his “Life of Nathanael Emmons,” and a contributor to the Bibliotheca Sacra. He had an individual, curiously periphrastic, way of putting things.
Divines as Special Students.—Although the large denominations of the Methodists and Baptists have not insisted on the possession of learning by their ministers, in their own province of scholarship American clergymen, while rarely independent of foreign, especially German investigators, have undertaken many researches of much value. Edward Robinson (1794–1863), a professor at Andover and then at Union Seminary, made a harmony of the Gospels in Greek, and another in English, compiled a lexicon to the New Testament, and wrote on the topography of the Holy Land. In this he assisted the sagacious missionary, Eli Smith (1801–1857), whose long residence in the Orient gave him peculiar advantages as a Biblical geographer. Similar advantages were enjoyed by William McClune Thomson (1806–1894), and bore good fruit in “The Land and the Book” (illustrations of the Bible from customs and scenery in the East) and “The Land of Promise, or Travels in Modern Palestine.” Nor should the translation of the Scriptures into Burmese by that great apostle, Adoniram Judson (1788–1850), go unmentioned. At home, George Rapall Noyes (1798–1868), professor of Hebrew at Harvard Divinity School, translated the New Testament into English. Leonard Bacon (1802–1881), pastor of the Centre Church in New Haven, takes rank with the ecclesiastical historians for his “Genesis of the New England Churches.” Thomas Jefferson Conant (1802–1891), of the same generation, a Baptist, was a Hebrew scholar of repute, in the main devoting himself to studies on the Old Testament, and editing critical texts of the Book of Job, of Proverbs, of Genesis, and of the Psalms. Thomas F. Curtis (1815–1872), President of Lewisburg University, Pennsylvania, compiled a history of the Baptist Church, publishing it in the year, 1857, when Sprague began to issue his monumental “Annals of the American Pulpit,” already referred to. Still another Baptist, Horatio Balch Hackett (1808–1875), for thirty-one years professor at Newton Seminary, and for five at Rochester, made himself an authority on Christian antiquities. Henry Boynton Smith (1815–1877) from 1854 to 1874 taught the subject of systematic theology at Union Seminary; he is important among the church historians—not so important, of course, as the indefatigable Philip Schaff (1819–1893). Born in Switzerland, educated in Germany, and recommended by the most distinguished German theologians, Schaff in 1844 accepted a call from this country to the Seminary at Mercersburg, Pennsylvania; here he quickly established his reputation as an encyclopedist of religious knowledge. His greatest work was an edition, thoroughly revised, of Lange’s “Commentary on the Bible.” Professor William Greenough Thayer Shedd (1820–1894), who taught English literature in the University of Vermont, from there migrated to the chair of Biblical literature in Union Seminary (1863–1890). Besides a “History of Christian Doctrine,” and other theological works, he published an edition, which has not yet been improved upon, of the works of Coleridge. William Henry Green (1825–1900), of the Theological Seminary at Princeton, an Orientalist, was a frequent writer for The Princeton Review. Crawford Howell Toy (born in 1836), since 1890 professor of Hebrew and related languages in the Harvard Divinity School, is the author of meritorious published researches, including a work on “The Religion of Israel” (1892) and a commentary on the Book of Proverbs. If Charles Augustus Briggs (born in 1841) had preserved all the objectivity of a scientific historian, and not turned controversialist, he probably would not have been subjected to trial by the Presbyterians on the charge of heresy. To his studies in Biblical history and the growth of dogma has often been attached the badly chosen term, “Higher Criticism,” that misnomer for the historical interpretation of the Scriptures. A severe loss to American scholarship has recently come through the death of Alexander Viets Griswold Allen (1841–1908), biographer of Jonathan Edwards and Phillips Brooks, and author of “The Continuity of Christian Thought” (1884) and “Christian Institutions” (1897). In him the scholar became the constructive artist.
Writers of Hymns.—Between the publication of “The Bay Psalm Book” (1640) and the revision of Watts’ version of the Psalms by Joel Barlow and by the elder Dwight at the end of the eighteenth century, sacred poetry in America underwent much refinement. From Dwight and his generation down, the writers of hymns have been many and able. Henry Ustick Onderdonk (1789–1858), William Augustus Muhlenberg (1796–1877), George Washington Doane (1799–1859), Protestant Episcopal Bishop of New Jersey at the age of thirty-three, Leonard Bacon (1802–1881), George W. Bethune (1805–1862), Samuel Francis Smith (1808–1895), George Duffield (1818–1888), Samuel Longfellow (1819–1892), above all, Ray Palmer (1808–1887), are a few of the most eminent.
Miscellaneous Preachers.—Samuel Hopkins.—A disciple of Jonathan Edwards, the institutor of the Hopkinsian form of divinity (1721–1803) sought, according to Hildreth, “to add to the five points of Calvinism the rather heterogeneous ingredient that holiness consists in pure, disinterested benevolence, and that all regard for self is necessarily sinful.” He inculcated the doctrine of the free agency of sinners. A forerunner of the Garrisons, Whittiers, and Sumners, he was an early and persistent foe of negro slavery.
Nathanael Emmons.—A typical predecessor of the nineteenth century, whose great age brought him far into it, was Nathanael Emmons (1745–1840), of Connecticut, and of Wrentham, Massachusetts. He wished to be “a consistent Calvinist,” yet to harmonise a difficult creed with the truths of common experience. He was an excellent reasoner on the evidences of moral government, establishing unexpected chains of inference, and from gladly accepted premises leading his hearers to less pleasant but unavoidable conclusions. “He was skilled,” says Park, “in disentangling a theory from its adscititious matter, and scanning it alone.” “He made but few gestures; his voice was not powerful; but men listened to him with intense curiosity, and often with awe.” Emmons had his own conception of eloquence: “I read deep, well-written tragedies for the sake of real improvement in the art of preaching. They appeared to me the very best books to teach true eloquence.” Again: “Style is only the frame to hold our thoughts. It is like the sash of a window: a heavy sash will obscure the light.” And once more: “First, have something to say; second, say it.” His writings—essays, sermons at ordinations, sermons at installations, funeral sermons, thanksgiving sermons, “A Sermon on Sacred Music” (1806)—are numberless.
Henry Ernst Muhlenberg.—Of a different but well-known type was the son (1753–1815) of the German-American Henry Melchior Muhlenberg (1742–1787). Henry Ernst was sent abroad while a boy, studied at Halle, returned, became a pastor among the Germans of Pennsylvania, and finally died at Lancaster in that State. He was endowed with an exceptional physique, walking with ease from Lancaster to Philadelphia, a distance of sixty miles. Discursive in his studies—he was an Oriental scholar and a botanist—he was tolerant in his belief, clinging to the fundamental truths of Christianity. In his discourses, he took the familiar attitude of a parent addressing his children.
Alexander Campbell.—The founder (1788–1866) of the sect known to the rest of the world as the Campbellites, a man of prodigious energy, was without question one of the remarkable spirits of his time. His writings, over fifty volumes, represent but a moiety of his labours: he built printing-presses in the interests of his movement for religious reform; he debated in public with all comers—for example, in 1829 with the infidel, Robert Owen. Self-possessed on the platform, he indulged in little action, and he spared his voice. But his distinct and beautiful enunciation expected and received attention, his audience listening, as to a master, in perfect silence.
William Ellery Channing.—Although “he lacks critical acumen,” “lacks also the sentiment of great originality,” “lacks that which America has so far lacked—high intellectual culture, critical knowledge,” “does not know the general result of what is known to his age,” still Channing (1780–1842), in the words of Renan, “has been unquestionably the most complete representative of that exclusively American experiment—of religion without mystery, of rationalism without criticism, of intellectual culture without elevated poetry—which seems to be the ideal to which the religion of the United States aspires.” An exemplary student at school and college (Harvard), Channing went to the South as a private tutor. His path being deflected into the ministry, he returned to New England, and was installed (1803) in the Federal Street Church at Boston. In this church he was active for twenty years, and he was at least the nominal head of it for forty. His health was delicate, and his capacity for continued exertion limited. Channing’s religion might be described as a form of ethics, allied to the political doctrines of Rousseau, too simple and theoretical for common life, and in the main salutary so far as it was a generous reaction against the harsher tenets of Calvin. The severity of Calvinism, that “vulgar and frightful theology,” in his eyes inevitably led to gloomy superstition. “God is good,” he kept repeating, and human nature in its origin also good. “He ... fell in with those who consider the human race to be actually degenerated by the abuse of free will. In Jesus Christ he recognised a sublime being, who had wrought a crisis in the condition of humanity, had renewed the moral sense, and touched with saving power the fountains of good that were hidden in the depths of the human heart.” Channing wrote no books; his literary remains consist of essays, sermons, and addresses. His “Discourse on the Fall of Bonaparte” (1814), his lecture on “Self-Culture,” and his “Address on West India Emancipation” (1842) display various aspects of a beautiful and courageous personality.
Horace Bushnell.—“I have never been a great agitator, never pulled a wire to get the will of men, never did a politic thing,” said Bushnell (1802–1876). He graduated at Yale in 1827; from 1833 until 1859, when he retired on account of ill-health, he had charge of the North Church in Hartford, Connecticut. Thereafter he devoted his time to the preparation of special sermons and addresses and to researches in American history and the history of his own State. He took a vital interest in political questions. Bushnell was a clear and independent thinker, without bias, not given to controversy, none the less eloquent and persuasive. His sermons were collected and widely circulated. The problems of religious experience, of suffering and evil, and of education he attempted to solve in “Nature and the Supernatural,” “The Vicarious Sacrifice,” and “Christian Nurture.” In the last-named work he objected to the doctrine of natural depravity, contending for a gradual development in the child of the religious sentiment and the higher imagination, as against a sudden and crucial “conversion.” Among Congregationalists the supposed latitude of his theological opinions involved him in the charge of a leaning toward Unitarianism.