ing to leave the institution, offering reasons of ill health which appeared to be fabricated, laying himself under an oath to quit the institution, whether the Com. would consent or not. . . .” This case embarrassed the Executive Committee because he was under the special patronage of the New York Baptist Theological Seminary Board whose financial and moral support they leaned on heavily. Nonetheless, they refused to change their decision or to remove the public censure they had put upon him.
The exploits of the second, who was a “gay young blade” of the Institution in the 1820’s, seem to have leaked through students to the Executive Committee. The Committee’s investigations revealed “that he had paid his addresses to a number of young Ladies and more than one at the same time, had gained the affections of some and excited … and disappointed them, that he had proposed marriage to one and violated his promise and is now negotiating marriage with another.” They dismissed him at the risk of stirring up ill feeling toward the Institution in Vermont, his home state, because the case put in circulation there damaging rumors about the Seminary. From a modern perspective it appears that he was a naive, confused and indiscreet young man, against whom some of his associates vented their spite. After time had erased memories of his youthful improprieties and he had become a successful pastor, his Alma Mater gave him a master of arts degree, and, at the semi-centennial, in 1869, a D.D.
More serious to the Institution’s reputation than rumors of student misbehavior was the pall of Unitarianism which hung over it in 1830 and 1831. Kendrick’s senior class in Divinity, after thorough investigation, came to the conclusion that «the Lord Jesus Christ was not a divine personage, that though evidently superior to man, he was still less than God.” Such a defection from the trinitarian position stunned their fellows and the faculty. Kendrick, Hascall, Whitman, and Sears in a series of lectures vainly sought to dissuade them from such an alarming view, but the only result was to prevent the disease from contaminating the rest of the students. When a neighboring Baptist preacher also failed in his attempt to win the seniors back to “sound” doctrine, Kendrick advised them to cease investigating or discussing the issue for three weeks. Meanwhile, a revival in the Students’ Association fired the campus and spread to the village and nearby towns. When the seniors renewed their study of the question it turned