HOPKINS, SAMUEL (1721-1803), American theologian, from whom the Hopkinsian theology takes its name, was born at Waterbury, Connecticut, on the 17th of September 1721. He graduated at Yale College in 1741; studied divinity at Northampton, Massachusetts, with Jonathan Edwards; was licensed to preach in 1742, and in December 1743 was ordained pastor of the church in the North Parish of Sheffield, or Housatonick (now Great Barrington), Massachusetts, at that time a small settlement of only thirty families. There he laboured—preaching, studying and writing—until 1769, for part of the time (1751-1758) in intimate association with his old teacher, Edwards, whose call to Stockbridge he had been instrumental in procuring. His theological views having met with much opposition, however, he was finally dismissed from the pastorate on the pretext of want of funds for his support. From April 1770 until his death on the 20th of December 1803, he was the pastor of the First Church in Newport, Rhode Island, though during 1776-1780, while Newport was occupied by the British, he preached at Newburyport, Mass., and at Canterbury and Stamford, Conn. In 1799 he had an attack of paralysis, from which he never wholly recovered. Hopkins’s theological views have had a powerful influence in America. Personally he was remarkable for force and energy of character, and for the utter fearlessness with which he followed premises to their conclusions. In vigour of intellect and in strength and purity of moral tone he was hardly inferior to Edwards himself. Though he was originally a slave-holder, to him belongs the honour of having been the first among the Congregational ministers of New England to denounce slavery both by voice and pen; and to his persistent though bitterly opposed efforts are probably chiefly to be attributed the law of 1774, which forbade the importation of negro slaves into Rhode Island, as also that of 1784, which declared that all children of slaves born in Rhode Island after the following March should be free. His training school for negro missionaries to Africa was broken up by the confusion of the American War of Independence. Among his publications are a valuable Life and Character of Jonathan Edwards (1799), and numerous pamphlets, addresses and sermons, including A Dialogue concerning the Slavery of the Africans, showing it to be the Duty and Interest of the American States to emancipate all their African Slaves (1776), and A Discourse upon the Slave Trade and the History of the Africans (1793). His distinctive theological tenets are to be found in his important work, A System of Doctrines Contained in Divine Revelation, Explained and Defended (1793), which has had an influence hardly inferior to that exercised by the writings of Edwards himself. They may be summed up as follows: God so rules the universe as to produce its highest happiness, considered as a whole. Since God’s sovereignty is absolute, sin must be, by divine permission, a means by which this happiness of the whole is secured, though that this is its consequence, renders it no less heinous in the sinner. Virtue consists in preference for the good of the whole to any private advantage; hence the really virtuous man must willingly accept any disposition of himself that God may deem wise—a doctrine often called “willingness to be damned.” All have natural power to choose the right, and are therefore responsible for their acts; but all men lack inclination to choose the right unless the existing “bias” of their wills is transformed by the power of God from self-seeking into an effective inclination towards virtue. Hence preaching should demand instant submission to God and disinterested goodwill, and should teach the worthlessness of all religious acts or dispositions which are less than these, while recognizing that God can grant or withhold the regenerative change at his pleasure.
The best edition of Hopkins’s Works is that published in three volumes at Boston in 1852, containing an excellent biographical sketch by Professor Edwards A. Park. In 1854 was published separately Hopkins’s Treatise on the Millennium, which originally appeared in his System of Doctrines and in which he deduced from prophecies in Daniel and Revelation that the millennium would come “not far from the end of the twentieth century.” See also Stephen West’s Sketches of the Life of the Late Reverend Samuel Hopkins (Hartford, Conn., 1805), Franklin B. Dexter’s Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College and Williston Walker’s Ten New England Leaders (New York, 1901).
(W. Wr.)
HOPKINS, WILLIAM (1793-1866), English mathematician and geologist, was born at Kingston-on-Soar, in Nottinghamshire, on the 2nd of February 1793. In his youth he learned practical agriculture in Norfolk and afterwards took an extensive farm in Suffolk. In this he was unsuccessful. At the age of thirty he entered St Peter’s College, Cambridge, taking his degree of B.A. in 1827 as seventh wrangler and M.A. in 1830. In 1833 he published Elements of Trigonometry. He was distinguished for his mathematical knowledge, and became eminently successful as a private tutor, many of his pupils attaining high distinction. About 1833, through meeting Sedgwick at Barmouth and joining him in several excursions, he became intensely interested in geology. Thereafter, in papers published by the Cambridge Philosophical Society and the Geological Society of London, he entered largely into mathematical inquiries connected with geology, dealing with the effects which an elevatory force acting from below would produce on a portion of the earth’s crust, in fissures, faults, &c. In this way he discussed the elevation and denudation of the Lake district, the Wealden area, and the Bas Boulonnais. He wrote also on the motion of glaciers and the transport of erratic blocks. So ably had he grappled with many difficult problems that in 1850 the Wollaston medal was awarded to him by the Geological Society of London; and in the following year he was elected president. In his second address (1853) he criticized Élie de Beaumont’s theory of the elevation of mountain-chains and showed the imperfect evidence on which it rested. He brought before the Geological Society in 1851 an important paper On the Causes which may have produced changes in the Earth’s superficial Temperature. He was president of the British Association for 1853. His later researches included observations on the conductivity of various substances for heat, and on the effect of pressure on the temperature of fusion of different bodies. He died at Cambridge on the 13th of October 1866.
Obituary by W. W. Smyth, in Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. (1867), p. xxix.
HOPKINSON, FRANCIS (1737-1791), American author and statesman, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on the 2nd of October 1737. He was a son of Thomas Hopkinson (1709-1751), a prominent lawyer of Philadelphia, one of the first trustees of the College of Philadelphia, now the University of Pennsylvania, and first president of the American Philosophical Society. Francis was the first student to enter the College of Philadelphia. from which he received his bachelor’s degree in 1757 and his master’s degree in 1760. He then studied law in the office in Philadelphia of Benjamin Chew, and was admitted to the bar in 1761. Removing after 1768 to Bordentown, New Jersey, he became a member of the council of that colony in 1774. On the approach of the War of Independence he identified himself with the patriot or whig element in the colony, and in 1776 and 1777 he was a delegate to the Continental Congress. He served on the committee appointed to frame the Articles of Confederation, executed, with John Nixon (1733-1808) and John Wharton, the “business of the navy” under the direction of the marine committee, and acted for a time as treasurer of the Continental loan office. From 1779 to 1789 he was judge of the court of admiralty in Pennsylvania, and from 1790 until his death was United States district judge for that state. He was famous for his versatility, and besides being a distinguished lawyer, jurist and political leader, was “a mathematician, a chemist, a physicist, a mechanician, an inventor, a musician and a composer of music, a man of literary knowledge and practice, a writer of airy and dainty songs, a clever artist with pencil and brush and a humorist of unmistakeable power” (Tyler, Literary History of the American Revolution). It is as a writer, however, that he will be remembered. He ranks as one of the three leading satirists on the patriot side during the War of Independence. His ballad, The Battle of the Kegs (1778), was long exceedingly popular. To alarm the British force at Philadelphia the Americans floated kegs charged with gunpowder down the Delaware river towards that city, and the British, alarmed for the safety of their shipping, fired with cannon and small arms at everything they saw floating in the river. Hopkinson’s ballad is an imaginative expansion of the actual facts. To the cause of the revolution this ballad, says Professor Tyler, “was perhaps worth as much just then as the winning of a considerable battle.” Hopkinson’s principal writings are The Pretty Story (1774), A Prophecy (1776) and The Political Catechism (1777). Among his songs may be mentioned The Treaty and The New Roof, a Song for Federal Mechanics; and the best known of his satirical pieces are Typographical Method of conducting a Quarrel, Essay on White Washing and Modern Learning. His Miscellaneous Essays and Occasional Writings were published at Philadelphia in 3 vols., 1792.
His son, Joseph Hopkinson (1770-1842), graduated at the University of Pennsylvania in 1786, studied law, and was a Federalist member of the national House of Representatives in 1815-1819, Federal judge of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania from 1828 until his death, and a member of the state constitutional convention of 1837. He is better known, however, as the author of the patriotic anthem “Hail Columbia” (1798).