Founding the Fathers. Elizabeth A. Clark
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33 years until his death, the last seven serving as President.117 Only in 1870 was a distinguished church historian—Philip Schaff—appointed to the Union faculty, but Schaff assumed the Professorship of Church History only in 1887, after Hitchcock’s death.118 Upon Schaff’s retirement and subsequent death in 1893, he was succeeded by his former student, Arthur Cushman McGiffert.119 By the early twentieth century, the historical method reigned in all fields at Union.120
Graduate education at Union developed as slowly, and with as much complication, as at other institutions. Catalogs from the 1860s list “resident licentiates,” later called “graduate students.”121 Yet no courses were instituted especially for them. By 1879, some Union graduates were remaining for another year of study.122 These students were to take five hours of “exercises” (classes) every week; in 1889–1890, the requirement was added to “carry on special research in some branch of theological science, under the direction of the faculty.” Five years later, the number of required courses was raised to eight, three of which (if students so desired) could be taken at area universities.123 (By 1892, Union had made arrangements with Columbia and the University of the City of New York [NYU] that allowed “superior” Union students to enroll in certain courses, without fees, at those institutions.124) A Union circular from 1905, announcing graduate offerings for that year, listed three options: the History of Christian Thought; a Historical Training Class; and a Historical Seminar.125
Union, like other institutions, had a rather confused history of conferring degrees. For most of the century, until 1890, no official degrees were offered. On April 1, 1890, an agreement between the University of the City of New York and Union stipulated that NYU would award a B.D. to Union students who were recommended by the Union faculty—a provision that would enable the nonsectarian NYU to offer this degree without having to mount a theology school.126 The arrangement lasted only six years, during which time not one B.D. degree was awarded. The President of Union, Thomas S. Hastings, in 1896 informed Henry MacCracken, Chancellor of NYU, that the present arrangement should end: either the New York State Regents would grant the B.D. or Union itself would ask for the power to confer it.127 In 1917–1918, the D.D. (then an earned degree at Union) was changed to a Th.D., requiring at least three years of residency, rigorous language study, and “publication of a substantial book.” During the 1920s, when both Columbia University and Union Seminary were well established on Morningside Heights, arrangements were made whereby Columbia would grant the M.A. in “the literature and religion of the Bible, the comparative study of Christianity and other religions, and (by 1930) Christian education.”128 Columbia instituted a Ph.D. program in religion in 1946.129 At Union, the Th.D. was changed to a Ph.D. in 1974.130
Such were the beginnings of church history and the degrees offered at the four institutions here studied. I turn now to the six major professors who developed the subject at their respective institutions.
The Professors: A Sketch
The six professors who are the focus of my study, and around whom the subsequent chapters of this book are organized, need to be introduced. Celebrated in their day not only as professors of church history but also as public figures, they shaped the study of their subject for much of the nineteenth century. The surviving information on these men, however, is unequal: about some, a great deal is known, while about others, much less.
Biographies of three of the six (Samuel Miller of Princeton, Henry Smith of Union, and Philip Schaff of Mercersburg and Union), written by well-informed—if partial—family members, incorporate letters, journal entries, and other documents highly useful to the historian. Since no such biographies exist for Roswell Hitchcock of Union, George Fisher of Yale, or Ephraim Emerton of Harvard, their lives are less fully documented. Moreover, the lengthy tenures of Miller at Princeton and Fisher at Yale place disproportionate attention on one professor’s shaping of early church history at his institution—in contrast with the three church history professors at Union during that period (Henry Smith, Roswell Hitchcock, and Philip Schaff).
Class notes and other archival materials, as well as print sources, however, remain for all six. Yet even here, there is an unavoidable disproportion: the course notes given by three of the professors (Samuel Miller, Henry Smith, and Roswell Hitchcock) are far more abundant than those of George Fisher and Ephraim Emerton. As for Philip Schaff, although class notes remain in the archives at both Lancaster and Union Seminaries, he wrote so constantly and used his class preparations so extensively as aids to his published works that the extant material threatens to drown the historian. The coverage I give the six is, then, admittedly unequal.
The professors present disparate careers in other respects as well, as the following chapters will detail. Samuel Miller at Princeton and Ephraim Emerton at Harvard are in a sense outliers, with experiences and concerns different from the four professors at Union and Yale. Miller, whose long tenure at Princeton Seminary ended just as that of some of the other professors was beginning, remained untouched by German education, philosophy, and theology. He represents a distinctive Princeton approach to theological studies, inflected by Scottish Common Sense philosophy. By an accident of professional longevity, Miller kept the teaching of church history at Princeton Seminary in an older style than might otherwise have been the case.
The Unitarian Ephraim Emerton of Harvard, on the other end—the only one of the six to earn a German Ph.D. in history entirely apart from seminary training—evinced little interest in theology or biblical studies per se, unlike the Union and Yale professors. His occupation of the Winn Professorship meant that a man with quite different historical interests from those of his Union and Yale counterparts would train students at Harvard.
The rapid growth of Union in particular from mid-century onward, however, ensured that a newer understanding of church history—evangelically pious, yet colored by German historiographical and philosophical assumptions—was offered to hundreds of prospective ministers and (even) a few scholars. By the time of Philip Schaff’s death in 1893, Union was well on the way to forging a theological persona that would mark American liberal Protestantism in the early twentieth century.
Samuel Miller (1769–1850)
Born in Delaware, Miller was educated at home in Greek and Latin by his father and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania at nineteen as salutatorian. He then studied theology privately in 1791–1792 with Charles Nisbet, the first Principal of Dickinson College.131 From 1793 to 1813, Miller served as minister at the Presbyterian Church in Wall Street (New York), during which time he wrote his most famous work, A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century.132 Miller’s placement in New York afforded him frequent opportunity for criticizing Episcopalians’ “immense wealth,” “arrogant claims and high-church principles.”133 As a professor of church history, his assaults on Episcopalians took the form of battles over the “original” church polity. Miller’s polemicizing against all groups except his own brand of Presbyterianism was not modified by any seeming acquaintance with German theology or philosophy.134
Although Miller’s training in church history was nearly nonexistent, during his years in New York he had been active in the New-York Historical Society, for which organization he collected information on the early history of New York State and its environs. His questions to correspondents manifest his interest in social, cultural, and technological developments. To one correspondent, Miller explained that although his questions seemed “trifling,” they might help to uncover information from documents “indirectly gathered … which they were not designed originally to convey.”135 His “nose” for historical investigation was perhaps better than his later deployment of patristic texts to rail against Episcopalians and other groups would suggest.
Miller agonized over leaving the active ministry to become a professor. At the time of his call to Princeton, he had already rejected the presidency of three colleges.136 He confessed to his New York congregation that the constant exertion of a New York City pastorate made him fear for his health: apparently he imagined that a professorship would be less demanding.137 His salary at Princeton was to be $1800 a year plus the use of a house.138