New York, and repeated annually for several years; he had given public lectures on chemistry for some years before at the Hamilton Academy. The students, with faculty permission, but again at their own expense, hired a lecturer in astronomy. This makeshift arrangement lasted only until 1833 when Joel S. Bacon joined the faculty as Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy. It was several years, however, before the necessary equipment was obtained.
It is impossible to gauge with much accuracy the content and quality of instruction but a comparison of the theological work offered from 1829 to 1833 with that available at Andover and Newton reflects credit on the Hamilton enterprise. It must be remembered that at Hamilton both liberal arts and theological studies had been combined into a four-year course, while the New England seminaries expected their students on entering to have had a college education or its equivalent; and hence they could put more emphasis on theological work. They could set up and maintain these standards because the tradition of a well-educated clergy was, of course, older and stronger in New England than in New York.
A comparison of the non-vocational part of the curriculum with similar work given at Brown and Amherst indicates that most of the subjects taught at those colleges were offered at the Seminary. They must have been handled somewhat superficially at the Institution, however, because of being combined with the theological studies in a four-year course. A fairer comparison can be made in the period after 1833, when the real college course was in operation. The minimum essentials, at least, were available and even those took more time than some students, eager to begin preaching, wanted to spend. One of them, Jabez Swan, Class of 1827, a noted evangelist, recalling his student days, wrote, “The great question with me was to learn God’s method of bringing back a revolted world to himself.”*
The Board of the New York Baptist Theological Seminary had declared in 1822: “The formation of a good LIBRARY is deemed of vital importance to the successful progress of any literary institution, but especially of a Theological Seminary,” a sentiment shared by the officers of the school at Hamilton. Liberal donations of books by friends in Boston, New York, Albany, and Philadelphia formed the nucleus of the collection they solicited with almost as much avidity as
*Frederick Denison, The Evangelist… Rev. Jabez Swan (Waterford, 1873),
64-67.
