Founding the Fathers. Elizabeth A. Clark
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Smith’s teaching of church history characteristically infused the subject with a substantial dose of doctrinal history and philosophy.179
From 1866 to 1870, Smith was Chair of the Executive Committee of the American branch of the Evangelical Alliance, an international Protestant organization formed in London in 1846. In 1867, his “Report on the State of Religion in the United States of America” to the Alliance’s Conference in Amsterdam argued (among other points) that slavery, although now abolished, had been the one great hindrance to the realization of America’s ideal.180 A decade earlier, Smith had written the “Resolution on Slavery” adopted by the Presbytery of New York, denouncing slavery as “a system which is essentially opposed to the rights of man, to the welfare of the Republic, to the clear position of our Church, and to the principles of the Christian religion.”181
At Union, Smith became active in the (New School) Presbyterian Church USA. He served as Moderator of its General Assembly in 1863 and was hailed as mediator in reuniting Old and New School Presbyterians in 1870.182 His address as retiring moderator to the General Assembly in 1864 (“Christian Union and Ecclesiastical Reunion”) warned against the “infidelity” of recent social philosophy and historical criticism, including the British Essays and Reviews, Bishop John Colenso’s books on the Old Testament, Renan’s Life of Jesus, and Strauss’s new version of his Life of Jesus; these works, Smith posited, mark the mere beginnings of a contest long foreseen, with Christianity at stake.183 Smith’s critiques of these topics I shall detail below.
In addition to these activities and his teaching, from 1859 to 1874 Smith edited the American Theological Review, a journal that changed names several times during its history.184 He was awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Vermont in 1850 and by Princeton in 1869. As librarian at Union Seminary, he presided over the Van Ess collection, brought from Europe to form the core of the Seminary’s library.185 (The library’s growth will be charted in Chapter 2.) Always in poor health, Smith resigned his chaired professorship in 1874 (although he continued teaching) and died in 1877 at the age of 62.186 At the time of his death, he was preparing lectures for a course on evolution.187 His interest in politics may also be noted: he wrote searing essays against the Confederacy and against Great Britain’s sympathy (which he attributed to financial interests) for the southern cause.188
Although Smith wrote frequently for journals, he did not publish many books during his lifetime. His most notable work, History of the Church of Christ in Chronological Tables (1859), however, displays his (by then) considerable knowledge of church history.189 He also translated Gieseler’s Church History and Hagenbach’s Textbook of the History of Doctrine.190 Smith’s posthumous volume of speeches and essays, Faith and Philosophy, edited by his colleague George Prentiss, contains much of interest pertaining to church history. Former student William S. Karr of Hartford Theological Seminary also prepared three volumes for publication after Smith’s death, based largely on his lectures: Apologetics (1882), Introduction to Christian Theology (1883), and System of Christian Theology (1884).191 Reviewing Elizabeth Smith’s biography, one commentator wrote, “His [Smith’s] industry was not as marvelous as that of Origen, who is said by Jerome to have written more than any other man could read; but it was almost as incessant.” Origen, however, had composed many more lines that the reviewer deemed ripe for erasure.192
After Smith’s death, his nephew, Munroe Smith—later a professor of law at Georgetown and Columbia Universities—wrote to his aunt, Elizabeth Smith, commenting on details of his uncle’s life that he had gleaned from her biography. Never before, the young man wrote, had he ever comprehended “the utter and absurd inadequacy of the material reward” which those of “rare intellectual power” receive. Smith was at the head of his profession, a great success, yet the recompense he received for his work was “to put it bluntly—not enough to live on! I never understood before that the extra work under which Uncle Henry broke down was largely mere bread-and-butter work, to which he was forced by the inadequacy of his professional salary.” It is a “crying shame,” the nephew exclaimed, that in America a man who devotes himself to professional pursuits is not “freed from the sordid anxiety in the struggle for physical existence. The scholar must have skolê.”193 Indeed, we know that Smith and other early professors at Union were very poorly paid—sometimes payday brought “no pay”194—and that he spent many Sundays preaching to supplement his income. Three boxes of Smith’s sermons (some quite erudite, on a par with his classroom lectures) are extant in Union’s archives; his marginal notes indicate that many were delivered multiple times. His active Sunday mornings doubtless testify to the state of his finances as well as to his piety.195
Some two decades after Smith’s death, Yale historian George Park Fisher declared that no thinker in the “New England School” since the time of the elder Edwards had surpassed Smith in learning and philosophical ability.196 Years later, those who had known Smith wished fervently that another like him could be appointed at Union after the retirement of the hard-line (and rather unsympathetic) Calvinist theologian W. G. T. Shedd in 1890.197
Roswell Dwight Hitchcock (1817–1887)
With Smith’s transfer to the chair in theology at Union, the way was open to appoint a new church historian. This post fell to Roswell D. Hitchcock. Born in Maine in 1817, Hitchcock graduated from Amherst College in 1836 and Andover Theological Seminary in 1841, meanwhile serving as a tutor at Amherst. The next years he spent as a Congregationalist minister. In 1847–1848, Hitchcock studied at Halle and Berlin.198 Of his student days, no records are extant.
After his stint as a pastor and three years as Collins Professor of Natural and Revealed Religion at Bowdoin College (1852–1855), Hitchcock assumed the Washburn Professorship of Church History at Union, a position that he held until his death.199 At the time of his appointment, an anonymous referee wrote that Hitchcock had a “decided historical tendency,—much beyond what is usual in these days,” and that he possessed a “familiar and accurate acquaintance with the facts, the doctrines, and the great teachers, both of the earlier periods of the Christian Church and of the times of the Reformation.”200 When some members of the Board and faculty opposed his appointment, Hitchcock withdrew his candidacy, but in the end, all came around and Hitchcock assumed the position.201 Indeed, Hitchcock became President of Union Seminary in 1880, a position that he occupied until his unexpected death in 1887.
Hitchcock became a life trustee of Amherst in 1869, and was elected President of the Palestine Exploration Society in 1871, a post he held for several years.202 He received D.D. degrees from Bowdoin (1855) and the University of Edinburgh (1855), and L.L.D. degrees from Williams College (1873) and Harvard University (1886).203 He served as editor of the American Theological Review from 1863 to 1870, overlapping a few years with Henry Smith. During his time at Union, he made three return trips to Europe and the Middle East.204
Hitchcock was widely respected for his excellent teaching, as will be detailed below. He also had wide interests in social movements, advocating civil service reform205 and attacking the “Tweed ring.”206 During the Civil War, he used his “forcible and living oratory” in support of the Union cause.207 According to one memorialist, he had great influence on “some of the wealthiest and most beneficent Christian gentlemen of New York”—including, apparently, ex-governor Edwin D. Morgan, who during Hitchcock’s presidency contributed $100,000 toward the purchase of a new site for the Seminary on Park Avenue.208 On his death, Hitchcock left money to establish a prize to be awarded to a member of the senior class at Union for excellence in church history.209
The anonymous editor of Hitchcock’s sermons reports that Hitchcock destroyed the greater part of his manuscripts. Attempting to explain Hitchcock’s low scholarly production given his acknowledged brilliance, the editor wrote,
his mind was always so active, and he was so constantly giving out fresh thoughts to stimulate others,