USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > The story of Essex County, Volume II > Part 11
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At the semi-centennial of the seminary Leonard Bacon said of Dr. Stuart: "It was his teaching and influence that gave celebrity to Andover as a seat of sacred learning." Continuing from Rowe:
"It was because of this that he became recognized as the prince of Biblical learning in America. It was he who set the standards and fixed the methods of Biblical study for the next generation, for he remained at his post in Andover for thirty-eight years until 1848. Men who sat at his feet went to imitate him in their teaching at other seminaries, not only in the Bible, but in the classics as well, for his sound philologi- cal methods gained general approval."
Dr. Stuart's influence was felt on the mission fields, too :
"Miron Winslow, class of 1818, translated the Bible into the Tamil tongue of India and compiled a Tamil-English lexicon, and Samuel A. Worcester, class of 1823, translated parts of the Bible into the language of the Cherokees in America, setting an example to other missionaries."
Dr. Ebenezer Porter, a graduate of Dartmouth, was appointed in 1812 to succeed Dr. Griffin as professor of sacred rhetoric. He had a very pleasing personality, which attracted his students, was very methodical, and so industrious in his studies that his health was impaired. He refused the presidencies of the University of Vermont and the University of Georgia, and was considered for the presidency by Hamilton, Middlebury, and Dartmouth. Perhaps these calls sug-
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gested to the trustees that the office of the president of the seminary should be created. Dr. Porter was elected to this office in 1827. He resigned his professorship in 1831, but remained president until his death in 1834.
It is no wonder that a school which had such a group as Stuart, Woods, and Porter as members of its faculty in its early years should have attained such a reputation. It would have been remarkable if it had not.
The early curriculum of the seminary is interesting and I shall quote from Mr. Rowe's book :
"It remained an accepted principle of the Seminary instruc- tion that the main consideration of the first year should be the study of Biblical languages and literature, that the second year should provide training in homiletics [the art of preach- ing]. This arrangement gave to each professor an oppor- tunity to monopolize the attention of the student during his allotted time. During the reign of the triumvirate, Woods, Stuart, and Porter, this general scheme was modified slightly, but as late as 1839 the curriculum of the Junior class was : Stuart's Hebrew Grammar; Christomathy [ the study of choice passages ] written exercises, including translations from Eng- lish into Hebrew; study of the Hebrew Bible; the principles of hermeneutics [the interpretation of Scripture ], New Testa- ment Greek and exegesis of the Four Gospels; lectures pre- paratory to the study of theology; natural theology; evidences of Revelation; inspiration of the Scriptures; Hebrew Exe- gesis; Greek; Pauline epistles twice a week; criticism and exegetical compositions.
"The Middle class met five days a week for instruction in Christian theology. Compositions on the principal topics of theology were examined in private. Exegesis of the New Testament was continued once a week, to keep the student in training, and there was instruction on special topics in sacred literature. It was natural enough that so much atten- tion should be given to theology. The Congregational and Presbyterian churches were indoctrinated in Calvinism to such a degree that a minister needed to be a master. He was expected to preach doctrinal sermons, and he must be ready
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to defend the faith against all comers. Always there was danger that the emphasis on sound doctrine in the Seminary should divert chief attention from religion itself to the science of religion. This was counteracted by the religious influence of the professors and particularly by the Wednesday evening conferences, by Sunday worship, and by the mutual fellowship of the students.
"Thus the Senior class had as the major part of the curricu- lum lectures on the philosophy of rhetoric, sermons, and the preparation of their own, with criticism from the professor of sacred rhetoric both in public and in private. But lectures on the history of Christian doctrine kept up the study of theology, and critical and exegetical lectures on the Hebrew and Greek Testaments still had a place. For all classes there was public declamation once a week, and private lessons in elocution. Lectures on the Apocalypse were given every three years, that each generation of Seminary students might know how to interpret that puzzling Scripture.
"The climax of the scholastic year came at the Anniver- saries, when every class was examined publicly before the assembled Trustees, Visitors, and the public, both lay and clerical, who packed the available space in Bartlet Chapel. Many persons stood throughout the exercises; some could not get into the chapel at all. The crowds were so large that the sheriff and the constable were requested to aid in preserving order. The Junior class was examined in Hebrew and Old Testament and New Testament criticism, the Middle class exhibited essays on theological subjects, the Seniors exhibited similar essays and were examined in sacred rhetoric. The examinations were thorough. Professor Park's examination in theology is known to have lasted all day. But they did not include all the subjects that had been discussed during the year. A student had a chance to distinguish himself before an appreciative audience, or he might get a reputation that injured him for years to come. The exercises closed with an address from a member of the Senior class. The written papers that were submitted were considered worth preserving in the Library."
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This curriculum is interesting because it shows the emphasis that was placed on the fundamentals. A graduate of the Seminary would be well grounded in his facts and have the ability to express these facts. He would be equipped to defend his beliefs and doctrines against disbelievers. He would be a powerful champion of the church. This genuineness cannot escape anyone who searches for the reason why this seminary attained such a high place in religious circles or why added prestige was his who was a graduate of this seminary.
As one studies the history of the Seminary he is impressed with the ability of its professors. I have dwelled at some length on four of them, but the limitations of space do not allow treatment of such men as Dr. Edward D. Griffin, Dr. James Murdock, Dr. Justin Edwards, Bela B. Edwards, Austin Phelps, Calvin E. Stowe, W. G. T. Shedd, and Elijah Barrows.
During the Civil War the seminary, of course, gave its support to the North. A society for the abolition of slavery had been formed some fifteen years before the war broke out. Students enlisted in the army and graduates joined as chaplains or soldiers until the seminary was represented by sixty-five men.
As time went on abundant financial aid was given to allow the seminary to acquire more professors and increase the salaries, to build a library, Brechin Hall, which was completed in 1866, to pro- vide scholarship funds, and to build a new stone chapel, which was dedicated in 1875. By 1877 eight professors were on the roll. The curriculum remained much as it had been. To use the words of Mr. Rowe: "Exegesis was still the normal grist of the first year, dog- matic theology of the second, and homiletics or history of the third."
When the migration toward the West began, the students at the seminary were quick to respond to the challenge "To lay out the streets and plant the foundations of literature and religion and to give shape to the institutions of society." Rowe continues :
"It was this sense of responsibility that led three Andover students to discuss the plan of a national home missionary society, as they were riding in a stagecoach to a funeral at Newburyport, and that evening to talk it over at the house of Professor Porter. Nathaniel Bouton, who originated the idea, Aaron Foster, and Hiram Chamberlain were the stu-
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dents. Not long afterward Foster discussed the matter before the Porter Rhetorical Society, advocating the settlement of local pastors as well as the itineracy of evangelists. His appeals were seconded by John Maltby at a special meeting of the Society. He urged 'planting in every little community that is raising up men of learning and influence, to impress their characters upon those communities-a system that shall gather the resources of philanthropy, patriotism and Christian sym- pathy throughout our country into one vast reservoir from which a stream shall flow to Georgia and to Louisiana, to Missouri and to Maine.' The result was the application of six seniors for ordination as home missionaries. This resulted in the organization of the American Home Missionary Society in 1826."
Andover men founded churches in Chicago and St. Louis, and established missions in the districts of Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, and Ohio. A testimony to the hardships that were endured and to the help that was rendered is given in a letter that was written by Ferris Fitch, who had founded a settlement at Lower Sandusky, Ohio :
"During the summer the water is stagnant, and the land through which the river passes in its passage to the lake is prairie. When the vegetation begins to decay and the north wind to blow in the fall of the year, it rolls up the very quintes- sence of swamp miasma. In a village of one thousand people I have counted rising of five hundred at once. I have spent three months in visiting the sick without asking till Sabbath morning what I should preach. My hearers, of course, at such a time are few. I have had eighty die within the bounds of my parish in one year. I have lived one month without taking off my clothes save for washing, or without lying down on a bed but once, then only for a few hours. I would get a little rest at night on a sofa in a sick room. I was often abroad at midnight, out at all hours. My family were sick, but amidst it all I enjoyed good health, and hardly knew what it was to be weary."
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There was no task that most of these missionaries would not or could not do.
Every Andover class between the years 1826 and 1858, except one, sent at least one representative to the missionary work in the West. These men went into thirty-three states from Maine to Texas. To show that the enthusiasm for such work did not lessen during the last part of the nineteenth century, we note that sixty-five men went from Andover between the years 1873 and 1900.
Rowe tells the story of the founding of the Iowa Band:
"In the class of 1843 at Andover twelve men fell into the custom of meeting in the Library by moonlight for prayer. The need of the frontier people for spiritual help weighed upon their hearts. One of the number, Horace Hutchinson, had spoken a suggestion that was bearing fruit. 'If we and some others,' he said to two of his classmates, 'could only go out together and take possession of some field, where we could have the ground and work together, what a grand thing it would be.' The prayer group in the darkness was seeking for light on the future. After considering the possibilities of dif- ferent sections, they decided to plan for a cooperative enter- prise in Iowa."
This Iowa Band retained their Congregationalism and changed the course of denominational history. Before this time many who had gone out West as Congregationalists became Presbyterians, and thus the former denomination was weakened by the very movement which should have made it stronger.
In 1866 there was organized the Kansas Band. One of the men, Sylvester D. Storrs, organized more than one hundred Congrega- tional churches in twelve years. Another, Grosvenor C. Morse, established a State Normal College. In 1892 the Maine Band was founded by five members of that class.
About two hundred and fifty men belong to the Andover Roll of Honor as home missionaries. Rowe pays them the following tribute : "They helped to build that interior empire which has become the heart of America, saved to Christianity and a cultured civilization by the churches and schools that they established."
No words can better express Andover's part in foreign mission- ary work than those of Mr. Rowe:
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"It is Andover's pride that her sons were pioneers in the foreign mission enterprise of the American churches. It was they who challenged the Congregational ministers of Massa- chusetts to find a way to send them as their representatives to the pagan people on the other side of the world. Out of Andover Theological Seminary went some of her firstborn to plant Christianity in Burma and peninsula India. A few years later others were making Palestine and Syria their goal, planting the banner of the Cross where the Crescent held the right of way. Soon still others were sailing to the heart of
the Pacific and wresting Hawaii from grossness and idolatry. So splendid was Andover's contribution that the history of the missions of the American Board for the first quarter of a century is the story of Andover men and their sacrificial serv- ice. Repeatedly that service was the surrender of life itself, but as soon as one in the front line fell another was ready to step into his place. No more compelling is the call of the South to the waterfowl when the summer wanes, than was the Macedonian call from heathendom to the dormitories and classrooms on Andover Hill. They became preachers and teachers, writers and translators, advisors and administrators. They entered Asia from the west and from the east and dared the hostility of the Turks and Chinese in the hinterland. They risked fevers on the tropical west coast of Africa and cholera in India and Persia. They created civilization in the Sand- wich Islands, and they saw paganism crumble slowly in Ceylon. They planted schools for Greeks and Bulgarians, and healed the wounds of Armenian refugees. They threaded ways that are dark in China, and tried to penetrate behind the polite exterior of Japan. They were all things to all men if by any means they might gain some."
The Society of Inquiry on the Subject of Missions was organized at Andover on January 8, 1811, with the expressed purpose
"to inquire into the state of the heathen; the duty and impor- tance of missionary labors; the best manner of conducting missions and the most eligible place for their establishment; also to disseminate information relative to these subjects ; and to incite the attention of Christians to the importance and duty of missions."
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It was necessary for the would-be foreign missionaries to interest the ministers in their enterprise. After a discussion with Dr. Stuart four of the six Andover students went before the General Associa- tion of Massachusetts, which was meeting at Bradford, and told the association their plan. The association was quick to accept this plan, and by unanimous action organized the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. This board was originally composed of nine men, all from Massachusetts, but the next year four of the nine representatives were from Connecticut, and in two years the Presbyterians joined in the enterprise. Thus Andover Hill had been the home of the origin of missionary work both at home and abroad.
The first group of missionaries who sailed in 1811 for India included Adoniram Judson, who became a Baptist and accomplished much in Burma. In 1819 a mission was sent to the Sandwich Islands, when Bingham and Thurston, Andover, 1819, sailed in the fall of that year. Bingham stayed thirty-five years before he returned, and Thurston stayed forty-eight. For several years Daniel C. Greene was professor of New Testament exegesis in Doshisha College, in Japan. Doshisha is one of the monuments that American education and religious fervor have built. Its founder was Joseph Neesima, who had studied at Andover.
Elias Riggs left the seminary in 1832, first saw service in Greece, and then he worked among the Greeks in Smyrna. The Armenians next claimed his interest and then the Bulgarians. In Constantinople he translated the whole Bible into Bulgarian. Here in his work- shop he turned out all types of religious literature in Armenian, Turkish, Bulgarian, and Chaldee.
Daniel Bliss went out from Andover and founded the Syrian Protestant College at Beirut. In thirty-six years he saw it grow from sixteen to six hundred students.
The story of Andover's missionary enterprise would not be com- plete without mentioning Robert H. Hume. He was born in Bom- bay, the son of a missionary. He completed his theological prepara- tion at Andover after two years at the Yale Theological School, and then went to India. I shall again quote from Rowe :
"Locating at Ahmednagar, he made that city his future home and there he established and built up a theological semi-
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nary. His constructive labors in that school and the variety of his active leadership made Hume the outstanding mis- sionary in India. Besides his care of the seminary he had the superintendency of the Parner district west of the city for forty years. He sent out more than two hundred person- ally trained evangelists and teachers, and many churches and schools and one thousand conversions were the result. He was at one time or another principal of boys' and girls' schools, and editor of an Anglo-Marathi periodical. In addi- tion to his service of his own denominational mission he sus- tained the common cause of Christianity, serving on commit- tees of various organizations, and frequently as an officer. He was district secretary of the British and Foreign Bible Society, president of the All-India Christian Endeavor Union, and the first moderator of the United Church of Northern India, of which the Congregationalists were a constituent member. For his service in his administration of funds for famine relief in the closing years of the century he received the Kaiser-i-Hind medal from the British Government. Alto- gether Hume saw fifty-two years of service. He was one of the far-sighted leaders who helped the missionaries make the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century."
Much more might be said about the missionary work originating in Essex County, but I have tried to give enough examples to por- tray something of the work that was done and to list the contribu- tions of some of the missionary activity. Henry C. Haskell, who had been a missionary in Bulgaria for twenty-five years, wrote to the Society of Inquiry at Andover that though the Bulgarians had had a nominal Christian background for over a thousand years, their moral and spiritual condition showed that their form of religion was utterly incapable of bringing the people into fellowship with God. The American Congregationalists interpreted that as a justification of all their efforts. These workers attempted to teach the people to live their lives more fully, to educate them, and to help them to come in closer, more meaningful contact with their Creator. Among the Indians in this country the task of the missionaries was to teach them to do useful things with their hands, to educate them as well as to teach them the truth about religion. It was not necessary for the
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missionaries to teach or preach religion if they practiced it and showed the people that it would work and that they could not get along without it.
At the one hundredth anniversary of the American Board in Bos- ton a visit was made to Andover and the following inscription was placed on a boulder as a memorial to those missionaries who had carried Andover's message around the world :
"In the 'Missionary Woods' once extending to this spot the first missionary Students of Andover Seminary walked and talked one hundred years ago, and on this secluded knoll met to pray. In memory of these men
Adoniram Judson Samuel Nott Samuel J. Mills
Samuel Newell Gordon Hall James Richards Luther Rice
whose consecrated purpose to carry the Gospel to the heathen world led to the formation of the first American Society for Foreign Missions.
In recognition of the two hundred and forty-eight missionaries trained in Andover Seminary and in gratitude to Almighty God, this stone is set up in the centennial year of the American Board. 1910"
Professor Edwards A. Park has been called the champion of orthodoxy, of Calvinism with its theory of original sin, atonement through Christ, and reconciliation. Men of his stamp believed that certain truths abide in the very nature of things and these truths do not change. Hence a doctrine founded on those truths cannot change. Park was the "last of the old guard" of this system of theology. He was not interested in Biblical criticism or scientific theory, because he saw no place for them. An arrangement was made by the trustees that Professor Park should publish his theological ideas. He would be relieved of active teaching, receive a salary of twenty-five hun- dred dollars a year, and retain his residence as long as he lived. Thus he retired in 1881.
This was just the time when the "new theology," a desire to make religious doctrine more social and more human, was making
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itself manifest. So it was natural that difficulties of a theological nature would arise when a successor to Dr. Park was sought. It would be practically impossible to find a man with the same convic- tions and with the same ability to state those convictions, one who would be a champion of the faith for which Andover had stood. The trend in theology was changing. The faculty recognized this change and suggested to the trustees the name of Newman Smyth, but the trustees would not agree to his appointment because, as Rowe says :
"Smyth had criticised the New England theology as essen- tially rationalistic and mechanical, and preferred a philosophy which should find room for 'the relation of the whole man through the person of Christ to the whole .God.' Theology should be christocentric and its spirit less static. Experience rather than reason, a theology resting on Biblical criticism rather than anybody's logical interpretation, an ethical rather than a dogmatic emphasis-these were the dynamic principles of his art."
Others had been saying the same thing.
Of the new professors at Andover at this time William Jowett Tucker "was among the first to see the social implications of the Christian religion." I am quoting from Rowe :
"His pastoral experience had made him understand and sympathize with the aspirations of the working folk. He faced the new period that was dawning with a realization that theological concepts and formulas must be changed. He was an interpreter of a dynamic Christian thought, as Park was of a static theology. But it was his moral leadership which made him a power in pulpit and classroom. In his department of homiletics he taught what he exemplified, that it is the con- secrated personality of the preacher which makes his sermons effective. He joined heartily in the modernizing process through which the Seminary was passing, and his courage and strength, with his ability to make the Congregational constitu- ency see the reasonableness of the Faculty, were a bulwark to his colleagues in a time of stress."
In 1883 five new professors were added to the faculty. Some of them, like Professor Harris, represented the new type of theology.
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Soon after, this five of the faculty became a board to edit the "Andover Review" for the purpose of explaining the new philosophy, the "pro- gressive orthodoxy." The new spirit manifested in this term is explained by Rowe :
"The Andover Faculty would put life into the dry bones of orthodoxy, not destroy it. They found inspiration in a Bible that was a progressive revelation of God's dealing with men, in a Spirit patiently wooing humankind to allegiance to the highest ideals, in a hope that God's purpose for the world would not be defeated by paganism, but that in His good way and time He would get His appeal to them and win their response. They were not skeptics or Unitarians, but it was difficult for those who held the old points of view to see any- thing but heresy in the new."
The whole doctrinal controversy was brought to a head by charges of heresy that were brought against the five editors of the "Andover Review" in 1886. Professor Egbert C. Smyth was singled out for judgment because of his unorthodox theological ideas. The charges against the four other professors, Hincks, Tucker, Harris, and Churchill, were not sustained, since the secretary of the Board of Visitors declined to vote except in the case of Professor Smyth. The trustees found the charges against Smyth ill founded and they, there- fore, supported him with legal counsel. The case was brought before the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts in 1890 and again in 1892, but was dismissed because the Visitors did not see fit to carry it further.
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