Tag Archives: Barnas Sears

p. 155 – Recovery and expansion, 1850-1869

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of Biblical Criticism and Interpretation in the Seminary and Professor of Evidences of Revealed Religion in the College met a cordial reception from President Taylor and the entire faculty. Son of a daring, impetuous Salem clipper-ship captain and a gentle, pious mother, he graduated at the age of twenty-one from Brown where President Wayland had grounded him in religion and logical, practical reasoning. During his student days at Newton, President Barnas Sears developed in him a genuine allegiance to intellectual freedom. His fiery temper and firm will he usually concealed, but both were constant. After four years of teaching he went to Germany to work under the theologians, Tholuck and Dorner; none of his colleagues had been able to enjoy the advantages of foreign study and travel. Members of his classes found, on his return, that his theology was somewhat misty, a characteristic which they laid to the German influences. In 1861 he followed Professor Spear as Librarian and served until 1868. The most valuable and significant period of his career both as teacher and administrator unfolded after he became President.

Phillip P. Brown, on his graduation in 1855, succeeded Professor Osborn as Principal of the. Grammar School. Prior to entering the sophomore class he had been in charge of a Choctaw mission school in the Indian Territory and later of the preparatory department of Shurtleff College, Alton, Illinois, where he was also enrolled as a student. He left the Madison campus in 1862 to become colonel of the 157th Regiment of New York Infantry, which he commanded with bravery at Gettysburg.

The Trustees appointed Hezekiah Harvey as Professor of Ecclesiastical History and Pastoral Theology in the Seminary and Civil History in the College in 1857. He had graduated from the College in 1845 and the Seminary two years later and had served as village pastor. A saintly man, often in ill-health, he was an effective teacher for students preparing for the ministry. In 1861 he became Professor of Biblical Criticism and Pastoral Theology. On Harvey’s return to the pastorate three years later, Dr. Albert N. Arnold, a contemporary of Dodge’s at Brown and Newton, and a New Testament Greek scholar, succeeded him and remained on the faculty until 1869.

Perhaps the most brilliant faculty member of the ’60’s was William Ireland Knapp who, upon graduation in 1860, was given a one-year appointment as the first Professor of Modern Languages. Since his

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p. 77 – The expanded program, 1833-1846

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pointed out that the book collection was entirely inadequate to the needs and that where similar institutions had thousands of volumes, the Seminary had only a few hundred. To overcome this grave deficiency he announced that he and a few others had opened a subscription of $1,000 to be spent by the faculty for books and that $700 already had been pledged. In response to his appeal, the assembly subscribed the remaining $300 in a few minutes. Part of the money realized was sent to Professor Sears, who was then in Germany, for the purchase of theological tomes rarely on the market in the United States.

Encouraged by the results of the subscription campaign in 1833, the Trustees opened a second one three years later. Five thousand dollars was to be raised one hundred shares of $50.00 each, payable in five annual $10.00 installments would thus insure an income of $1,000 for five years for buying books. All members of the faculty, except Professor A. C. Kendrick, who was then on a trip in the South, were subscribers. Their high hopes were blasted by the Panic of 1837, but not before a $1,000 order had been placed with the German bookseller at Halle. After some items arrived the Executive Committee was forced to cancel the order for those not already shipped and Dr. Kendrick was obliged to appeal to William Colgate for a loan of $700 to cover the consignment which had already been received.

Nearly every Annual Report of the Education Society carried an appeal for the library, especially for volumes in English on theology, history, and literature. At the urgent request of the faculty, the Executive Committee in 1842 sent $500 to’ Professor Conant, then studying in Germany, to buy books, including the “principal writings of the Fathers.” Professor Raymond who apparently resented the purchasing of so many works in theology, especially those in foreign languages, complained that the library was “shamefully deficient” in standard titles in English literature. By 1846 the collection probably contained about 5,000 volumes, estimated as being worth around $3,500.

Professor A. C. Kendrick, who was chosen librarian by his colleagues in 1834, was intensely concerned about the responsibilities of his position. He observed that “Other institutions are making up the necessity of having an ample library &if we are not on the alert on this point they will draw the students.” Under faculty supervision he and

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p. 59 – The expanded program 1833-1846

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been separated from the Institution a little more than nine years,” he
lamented in 1845,

but I have not forgotten it nor is my attachment lessened by time and distance. I seem to myself like one buried alive. I hear some distinct reports concerning those I love but hold no direct communication with them…When connected with the institution its joys & sorrows, hopes & fears were mine. And they remain so still with the additional circumstance that I can do nothing for its benefit.*

Within three years, however, he was once more to share actively in “its joys & sorrows” as he heroically and successfully fought the attempt to remove it to Rochester.

John Fram Richardson, a native of Vernon, New York, and a member of the senior class, seems to have taken over some of Hascall’s work a few months before graduating in 1835. He acted as a “tutor” until 1838 when he was made Professor of the Latin Language and Literature. He was the first graduate to become a member of the faculty. He was also Secretary of the Faculty and the clear, neatly-written minutes attest his competence in that sphere. His friends remembered him as a refined, gentle and unobtrusive man and a fine teacher and scholar.

When Barnas Sears vacated the important chair of Biblical Theology in 1835, the Board, after several fruitless attempts to get a Baptist of equal eminence and ability, appointed John Sharp Maginnis in 1838. Born in Pennsylvania, of staunch Scotch-Irish immigrants, he spent his childhood in Ohio. When in his ‘teens he joined the Baptist denomination and for a short time assisted the indefatigable preacher and friend of the Institution, Joshua Bradley, in his church in Pittsburgh. To train for the ministry he studied at Waterville, Brown, and Newton. Prior to his appointment to the faculty he held pastorates at Providence, Rhode Island, and Portland, Maine. Maginnis’s ardent piety and logical thinking had commended him to the Board as likely to be the kind of professor they sought and his career on the Hill justified their selection. Spare, dignified, high-strung, and dyspeptic, he tempered the austerity of his harsh Calvinism with a gentle simplicity and friendliness and a keen wit which endeared him to students and colleagues. He delighted to detect errors in reasoning and his skillful use of the Socratic method, combined with his lucid theological lectures,

*Daniel Hascall, West Rutland, Vt., to George W. Eaton, July 8, 1845.

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p. 51 – Teaching and learning, 1820-1833

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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

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p. 37 – Administration, setting and staff, 1820-1833

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measured speech until his subject roused him to excitement. He had a cautious, involved style in writing which appears in his chief publications, the Annual Reports of the Education Society. He had slight regard for “elegant literature” which he probably regarded as frivolous. Religion was his chief interest and “his library was the common resort for the solution of doubtful theological questions. . . .”

Although Kendrick was fully occupied with his duties as professor and President and as Secretary of the Education Society, he found time to support some of the reforms of the day. He and Hascall were both members of the Madison County Colonization Society, Kendrick the first president. He also belonged to the county temperance society, was one of the Board of Curators of the New York Lyceum, and a  Trustee of Hamilton College. The University of Vermont granted him  an A.M. and Brown University both an A.M. and D.D.

Zenas Morse, A.B., Hamilton College, 1821, an instructor in the Hamilton Academy, assisted Hascall with Latin and Greek when the classes grew too large for him to handle alone in the fall of 1821. This arrangement lasted four years, after which Morse became principal of the Academy, a position he filled capably for many years.

Seth Spencer Whitman, Professor of Languages and Biblical Literature, 1828-1835, had been one of the most promising students of the Seminary. A member of the Class of 1823, he left before graduation at the suggestion of the Executive Committee to complete his studies at Hamilton College. The Committee even agreed to aid in defraying his expenses on condition that he refund them by his services as teacher in  the Seminary. After taking his degree at Hamilton he went to Newton Theological Seminary for three years. On his return, the Executive  Committee expressed their high regard for him by asking him to sit with them and by providing that Hascall should introduce him to the assembled students and that Kendrick should make the prayer after Whitman had delivered his inaugural address.

Whitman’s classmate at Newton, Barnas Sears, who came to the faculty in 1829 as Professor of Languages, was later to achieve a greater national reputation than any other member of the teaching staff in this period. Young, popular, and brilliant, he had a brief pastorate at Hartford, Connecticut, between his graduation from Brown and his professorship at the Institution. In addition to

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