Founding the Fathers. Elizabeth A. Clark
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the Library of the Fathers, which had focused on Christian writers of the fourth through sixth centuries.
Coxe deemed the Edinburgh editors of the Ante-Nicene Fathers guilty on several points: overly literal as translators,200 they failed to correct possible Romanizing interpretations,201 incautiously ascribed schismatic or heretical views to various Church Fathers,202 organized and printed their source materials in volumes inappropriate in terms of date and subjectmatter,203 and were tone-deaf to liturgical usage.204 Their lack requires a supplement, which Coxe was happy to provide.
His additions, Coxe wrote, aim “to note such corruptions or distortions of Patristic testimony as has been circulated, in the spirit of the forged Decretals, by those who carry on the old imposture by means essentially equivalent. Too long have they been allowed to speak to the popular mind as if the Fathers were their own.”205 Elsewhere he claimed that “garblings of patristic authorities” recently appearing in America render “an accurate and intelligent study of the Ante-Nicene Fathers a necessity for the American theologian.”206 Indeed, “the aggressions of an alien element” (i.e., Roman Catholics) now force scholars of Christianity to renew their study of “that virgin antiquity which is so fatal to its pretensions.”207 In the eight volumes to be published, Coxe was sure that the student would find “all that is needful to disarm Romanism,” to refute those “pretensions,” and to direct “honest and truth-loving spirits in the Roman Obedience” to a reformed Catholicism such as was represented by J. J. I. Döllinger and the “Old Catholics.”208 Coxe believed that the Apostolic Fathers and Scripture, taken together, supply “a succinct autobiography of the Spouse of Christ for the first two centuries.” Volume I was to provide the “supplement” (to the Scriptures) that should be “indispensable” to every scholar and all libraries.209
Coxe imagined the day when in the vast and still-unnamed regions of America, beautiful critical editions of the Ante-Nicene Fathers would be available—unlike the careless, inaccurate, and inelegant volumes of the Patrologia Migne.210 His series, Coxe believed, would simultaneously enlighten Episcopalians about their origins and provide a bulwark against the evils of Roman Catholicism, past and present: for him, the ante-Nicene Fathers remain the standard by which all subsequent Christian history is to be judged.
Coxe’s introductions, notes, and “Elucidations” provide a fascinating window onto American social and intellectual life in the mid- to late nineteenth century. To name just some of his favorite topics: home, family, children, motherhood and women’s roles211 (often in opposition to Roman Catholic praise of celibacy212); immigrants to America213 (“vast and mongrel”214); and the evils of German scholarship that lead to unbelief.215 Whatever the deficiency of Coxe’s series, at least it provided numerous primary source texts for American students.
Libraries
If such were the difficulties that the lack of textbooks and primary source collections posed for teaching early Christian history, the libraries at various American seminaries proved similarly problematic. Several of the professors here studied served as their institution’s “librarian,” gathering statistics on their collections for annual reports—and making heartfelt pleas to trustees for more library funds. Trustees, who had been enthusiastic to found a seminary or “theological department,” often seemed oblivious to the sums required annually to maintain and increase a collection.
The American professors frequently expressed the disheartening contrast between their access to books and that of their European counterparts. In their publications, personal correspondence, and travel diaries, they often noted the size of European university and national libraries, as well as of professors’ personal collections.216 They recorded their efforts to buy books for themselves and their seminaries during their trips abroad. To American professors who had seen European libraries, the conditions in their own country appeared discouraging.
For example, George Fisher, studying in Germany in 1852–1853, registered amazement that Tholuck owned around 5000 books. (Apparently the library’s size deterred Tholuck from retiring to Switzerland: how to transport the collection over the Alps?)217 In 1860, Henry Smith reported that Alexander von Humboldt by the end of his life had amassed about 10,000 volumes for his personal library.218
The size of major European libraries was a source of wonder and envy to the American professors. In 1862, Henry Smith noted that the Imperial Library in Paris [the Bibliothe`que Nationale] had 1,800,000 volumes and seventeen miles of shelves to house them. Two years later, he reported that the British Museum in London had just spent 75,000 pounds ($477,500, he calculated), adding 107,784 items to the library alone. Even in Spain—not known by Protestant professors as a center of distinguished recent scholarship—the government contributed about six and a half million dollars in gold for its national libraries annually.219 America was clearly lacking.
American Professors’ Personal Libraries
Given the small number of library books available to the American professors and students when seminaries first opened, professors accrued as many books as they could for their personal collections, which they sometimes shared with students. For two of the professors, Samuel Miller and Roswell Hitchcock, interesting data remain regarding their personal libraries.
Princeton Theological Seminary Archives has an undated “Catalogue of Dr. Miller’s Library” (consisting of around 2400 items) found at his death.220 The list, organized by title, sometimes preceded by the author’s name, reveals that among the patristic sources he possessed were William Wake’s translation of The Genuine Epistles of the Apostolical Fathers in its 1810 edition; the Epistles of Ignatius; the collected works of Irenaeus, Tertullian, Cyprian, Athanasius, and Augustine; Chrysostom’s On the Priesthood; Eusebius’ Ecclesiastica Historia; Gregory Nazianzus’ Querela;221 and Origen’s Contra Celsum. Of secondary works, Miller owned a number of Church Histories by Baxter, Campbell, Dupin, Gedder, Haweis, Milner, Mosheim (in two different translations, by McLaine and by Murdock); Histories of Christianity by Benson and several by Neander in translation; Clarkson’s Primitive Episcopacy; two unspecified volumes on Arianism; a book on the Apostolic Church; Bower’s History of the Popes; Ludovici’s History of the Council of Nicaea (in Latin); Jowett’s Christian Researches; Cave’s Lives of the Apostles; the Magdeburg Ecclesiastical History;222 Jansen’s Augustinus, plus Bibles, biblical reference works, and a few books on ancient Judaism.
Miller’s library is notable in several respects. First, students marveled at its size, considered extraordinary by those who had never seen a larger private collection.223 Second, the catalog shows that German scholarship—such as Neander’s writings—had migrated to Miller’s study only in English translation: the day of German-language scholarship was yet to come. Third, the catalog also suggests that many of the patristic writings that Miller cited in his polemics against Episcopalians and others were derived not from first-hand knowledge of the primary sources, but from secondary accounts.
Roswell Hitchcock, more fortunate in his personal library collection than most seminary teachers in America, owned the entire Acta Sanctorum (of which there were then only three or four sets in America), 34 volumes of the Baronius-Raynaldi Ecclesiastical Annals, and 22 volumes of Herzog’s Encyclopedia, in addition to 7000 or so other books.224 At his death, he left between 3000 and 4000 volumes to Union, including an edition of Du Cange’s seventeenth-century glossary of medieval and late Latin. His set of Lange’s 25-volume Commentary on the Bible and twenty-two volumes of Herzog’s Encyclopedia went to Bangor Theological Seminary; and a complete set of 40 volumes of Bibliotheca Sacra was shipped to the Syrian College at Beirut. Some books were also left to his son-in-law, Professor Samuel Emerson, who taught Greek, modern languages, and history at the University of Vermont.225
As noted above, 1800 volumes from Philip Schaff’s personal library went to the Union Seminary library upon his death.226 In 1873, a