innovation contrary to the purpose of the Education Society. After the University charter had been granted in 1846, some of the Society’s trustees, fearful that secularization would go farther, even suggested the document be returned to the Legislature. Since both Boards at first were unable to adjust their relations to each other in such a way as to establish what were considered proper safeguards for ministerial education, they had tabled that troublesome question for a year.
In June and August, 1847, both Boards, the faculty, and the Education Society eventually worked out an arrangement, known as the First Compact, which became effective on the first of September. It provided that the Society should grant the University the use of its property and that the University should maintain a suitable course for “candidates for the Christian ministry” and allow beneficiaries to have rooms rent-free. The faculty was to be considered a single unit responsible to the University Trustees. As a means of retaining control of ministerial education the Society required the University Board to appoint and dismiss such theological professors as it should designate.
It was the question of faculty appointments which first produced serious friction. The professors in the collegiate department had been formally appointed under the new charter as a matter of course in June 1846. The University Board took no action on the theological professors, however, until a year later when they were then made members of the University faculty, but on a temporary basis until their duties and titles should be determined.
Meanwhile, some of the Baptists in Hamilton, among them Jacob Knapp, the evangelist, came to see in the formal appointment of the theological faculty an opportunity to remove Professor Maginnis from the chair of Biblical Theology. This aristocratic, tall, bent, and ailing man had aroused their enmity by his intellectual approach to religion and his uncompromising Calvinism. Knapp, of course, had not forgotten that Maginnis had been his chief opponent in the village church quarrel a few years before. When information on the Education Society Board’s meeting on August 19, 1847, leaked out, the strategy of Maginnis’s enemies was apparent. The Board had convened, with only 13 out of 31 members present, probably most of them resident Trustees, to nominate theological professors for final appointment by the University Board in accordance with the First Compact. Conant and Eaton were chosen unanimously but only four votes were cast for
