Tag Archives: New York Baptist Theological Seminary

p. 43 – Teaching and learning, 1820-1833

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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.

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p. 29 – Administration, setting, and staff, 1820-1833

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Mrs. Samuel Payne, A0999-3, p29

Deacon Payne seems to have acquired a moderate amount of wealth in agriculture. He took a rather active part in the political life of the county and twice sat in the State Assembly. He belonged to the conservative wing of the Democratic-Republican party and, his solid figure and dignified presence must have been well known at caucuses and conventions. For many years he ‘was a Justice of the Peace and in 1832 a Presidential Elector. Mrs. Payne, a kind and pious woman, who made her home a place where the young men of the Institution could find understanding and cheer, was known as “the Students’ Mother.” In the early years before rooms were available in the “building on the plain,” students lived with the Paynes. Without children of their own, they gave to the school the love and affection they would normally have bestowed on a family.

The choice of a site for the new building, now to be on the Payne farm, the Executive Committee referred to a committee of six. Hascall, whose plan for the structure they had already approved, served as a member. He had represented the Institution at a meeting of the Board of the now auxiliary New York Baptist Theological Seminary in New York City whose members raised $2,000 by their own efforts for the building and later, when additional funds were needed, borrowed $1,000 more at 7 percent interest.

A gift of $1,000 from Nicholas Brown proved another important addition to the building fund. Brown’s pastor, the Rev. Stephen Gano of the First Baptist Church of Providence, Rhode Island, returned from a visit to Hamilton in 1825 enthusiastic about the Seminary and

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p. 22 – Administration, Setting, and Staff, 1820-1833

Posted on March 28, 2012 by | Leave a comment

country, especially for “young men from the interior, bro’t up to hard labour; without the advantages of a common school education” and unaccustomed to city ways and often desperately poor. The opportunities at Hamilton for them to supply “destitute churches” on Sundays he stressed as valuable in providing preaching experience and a small financial return. He tactfully called attention to arrangements for cooperation already worked out with the Vermont education society and stated, “If you deem this method calculated to promote the general interest of our common cause … you will accept the assurances of a firm disposition on our part, to enter cordially into such a connection [with you] and be fellow helpers in the same good work.”*

Negotiations dragged on till March 24, 1823, when the Trustees of the New York Baptist Theological Seminary, giving up the idea of maintaining their own school, voted that it was “expedient to send to the Seminary at Hamilton such an annual sum as may be conveniently Spared and such students as may to this board appear Expedient.” Within a month they turned over to agent Joel W. Clark $350 and soon after shipped $100 worth of books to Hamilton. Their first student, William G. Miller, “a member in good standing of the Abyssinian Church,” joined the Class of 1826. Henceforth, the New York Baptist Theological Seminary was a paper organization only, its sole purpose being to assist the Hamilton institution. The Board justified abandoning their own school on the ground of inadequate funds, but the unfailing help which they and other Baptists in New York City, now released from supporting a strictly local enterprise, were to give to the up-state seminary was many times to save it from ruin.** When the Education Society had been chartered in 1819 the New Yorkers had regarded it as a rival The Rev. John Stanford had said, “‘I wonder if the people away off in the woods, a hundred miles west of Albany, are so silly as to suppose that young men licensed [to preach] in the city of New York would think of going away there to obtain an education.” ***But four years later he had changed his opinion.

William Colgate, a wealthy soapmaker and philanthropist, had been

* Baptist Education Society, Executive Committee, to New York Baptist Theo-
logical Seminary, Board, July 29, 1820.

** New York Baptist Theological Seminary, Record Book, 1813-48, passim.

*** New York Baptist Register, July 27, 1848.

 

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p. 21 – Administration, Setting, and Staff, 1820-1833

Posted on March 28, 2012 by | Leave a comment

became the policy of the Society its resources were opened up for the Institution and Clark Kendrick was made its chief agent in Vermont. His efforts in collecting funds and selecting students made his death in 1824 a severe blow to the struggling Board and Executive Committee. Assistance from the Baptists of the Green Mountain State continued until 1830 when they formed themselves into a branch of the Northern Baptist Education Society (originally the Massachusetts Baptist Education Society) because many of their young men were under its patronage. What interest in education remained was diverted into founding denominational academies within the state.

The Baptists of Connecticut, too, participated in the movement to provide an educated ministry and in 1818 founded an education society. Noting the possibilities of tapping resources in this quarter as they had done in Vermont, the New York society sent Joel W. Clark and Jonathan Olmstead to Connecticut in 1822. They bore a diplomatic letter of introduction and were authorized to broach the question of a union of forces behind the Hamilton institution. A few months later the Connecticut society by a unanimous vote agreed to cooperate. The relationship lasted until 1827 or 1828 when “with friendly dispositions and from local considerations of convenience” the Connecticut society decided to send no more students or funds to Hamilton. Henceforth their energies were devoted to establishing their own academy and assisting the Northern Baptist Education Society.

Since the Executive Committee had come to believe by 1831 that New York State alone was large and prosperous enough to maintain the Seminary, they agreed not to interfere with the plan of the Northern Baptist Education Society to extend her auxiliaries in New England. The support which the Institution had found among Baptists of the Empire State, especially those of New York City, made it possible for the Committee to come to this decision.

The earliest contact between officers of the Institution and metropolitan Baptists seems to have been in 1820 when Joel W. Clark and Elon Galusha went to New York to solicit books for the library. Their visit prepared the ground for discussing the possibility of consolidating the New York Baptist .Theological Seminary, which was not proving a success, with the school at Hamilton. After their return to Hamilton, Kendrick took up the question in a letter to the Board of the New York Institution. He pointed out the superior benefits of a seminary in the

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p. 3 – Origin

Posted on March 15, 2012 by | Comments Off on p. 3 – Origin

who were educating their ministers and the presence of a few well-trained men in American Baptist pulpits also helped to silence the opposers. The best minds in the denomination generally realized that if the Baptists were to keep pace with other religious groups they must have a trained leadership for their rapidly growing church and organizations.

Since any education program adequate for the needs was too vast for one or a few churches to undertake, the Baptists had turned to the formation of voluntary societies as a means of consolidating their resources. The first, the Baptist Education Society of the Middle States, was founded in 1812 under the auspices of the Philadelphia Association. Its young men were sent to study with William Staughton, the active and popular pastor of the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia. An Englishman educated at the Baptist college at Bristol, he had trained students in his home and pulpit as early as 1807. Instruction on an “apprenticeship” basis had long been employed in the ministry as well as in medicine and law.

To send funds and men to Staughton’s “school,” an auxiliary organization was formed in New York City in 1813. Prominent among the members was the Reverend John Stanford, also an Englishman who for several years had taught divinity students at his home and in his private “academy.” In 1817 the New York group was incorporated as the New York Baptist Theological Seminary and the next year established a school of their own.

These educational endeavors in Philadelphia and New York were known to the founders of the institution which eventually became Colgate University, but their chief inspiration seems to have come from New England. Particularly important was the Corresponding Letter of the Boston Association for 1816. This was an annual communication among associations and Jeremiah Chaplin, Baptist pastor of Danvers, Massachusetts, used it for presenting a persuasive plea for improved facilities for educating young men for the ministry. He, like Staughton and Stanford, had trained some in his own home and was well aware of the need for “raising up” more preachers and urged associations, churches and ministers to exert themselves to this end. Refuting the old arguments against an educated clergy he built up a strong case for including secular subjects, such as history, geography, rhetoric, logic, mathematics, philosophy and astronomy, as a part of theological training as well as divinity and the “sacred languages,”

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