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CHAPTER 2

Infrastructure: Teaching, Textbooks,

Primary Sources, and Libraries

What professors actually told students, what students heard professors say (rarely the same thing!), what purposes professors believed their courses served, what methods they used to achieve these goals—the data bearing on such questions remain as pristine as if the archives were in Albania.

—James Turner (1982)

Teaching Church Historyin Nineteenth-Century America

Before exploring the professors’ theoretical approaches to and assumptions about history, I examine the (woefully inadequate) academic “infrastructure”—the material conditions of knowledge production and transmission—that attended the teaching of church history in early and mid-nineteenth-century America. Suitable textbooks seemed nonexistent, let alone anthologies of primary sources in translation. Libraries, conceived as book depositories for (shockingly) small collections, were open only a few hours a week. As the century progressed, new methods of teaching placed greater demands on professors: they could no longer simply listen to students recite from textbooks, but must prepare lectures and guide advanced students in seminars that required independent investigation.¹ The challenges facing professors of church history in nineteenth-century America were daunting. In this chapter, I first examine assumptions about and practices of teaching, then turn to examine the textbooks the professors chose, the accessibility of primary sources, and the development of institutional and personal libraries.

Samuel Miller: The Theological Seminary at Princeton

Samuel Miller, coming of age before the development of theological seminaries in America, received one year of post-collegiate training via private study with an accomplished minister. When he assumed his professorship of church history at the newly established Theological Seminary at Princeton in 1813–1814, he had had no seminary experience. With no advanced education or access to textbooks he thought appropriate for Presbyterian students,² Miller was responsible for developing the curriculum in church history at the new Presbyterian Seminary at Princeton.

At the Seminary’s inception, church history was taught only in the second year;³ later, in the first and third years as well. Some two decades after he began his Princeton career, Miller described his teaching regime: he met the senior class three times a week; middlers, twice; and juniors, once, on Saturday afternoons, each class running about 75 minutes.⁴ Miller’s teaching notes, even late in his career, give little attention to European scholarship. They also reveal that he never changed his method of teaching or approach to church history in his 36 years as professor. Miller, in any case, deemed church history of less importance than biblical studies and “didactic and polemick [sic] theology.”⁵

In 1813, the recitation method of instruction was still commonly used, supplemented by professors’ comments. Miller’s class notes, preserved in the Princeton Seminary archives, suggest that he examined his class on a few points at the beginning of the session, then turned to lecture.⁶ Relying on the lecture method alone, Miller thought, assumes that students are “an ear”; they hear the lecture only once and have no chance to review it. But recitation alone, on the other hand, does not “awaken and excite the mind.” A combination of both methods works best.⁷ Miller’s son reports that his father, who claimed that lectures alone make students too dependent on the professor, combined the two methods throughout his teaching career.⁸

The professor’s duty, Miller believed, was “to excite [students] to think,” to examine opinions on their own, and “to state leading facts, rather than the minuter items of history.”⁹ Thinking, to be sure, existed within a Presbyterian framework: it should not lead students to be “corrupted” by “philosophical unbelievers” such as Hobbes, Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Byron. In Miller’s view, “a rage for novelty, an ardent love of originality” are among the “most unhappy symptoms” that could afflict a prospective minister.¹⁰

A goodly sample of Miller’s lecture notes, running from 1814 to 1843, for his courses in ecclesiastical history and church government are extant. Dates on some notes indicate that Miller gave the same lecture up to six times. Miller responded to students’ questions in the following class session, allowing himself time to consult his books for appropriate answers:¹¹ this practice suggests both his relative lack of expertise in church history and an admirable honesty in admitting this lack to his students.

During recitations, Miller asked questions, the correct answers to which he had written out in his notes. For example:

Question: “Whence did this superstition [of celibacy] arise?”

Answer: “From the Gnostic notions of the malignity of matter, and the best means of counteracting its influence.”¹²

Miller’s recommendation that students take notes on their reading and make abstracts of important points suggests that notetaking was not then a customary practice in colleges. Above all, he opposed “mere speculative and unsanctified learning”: remember that you must die, he warned his students.¹³

Henry Smith: Union Theological Seminary

Before Henry Smith arrived at Union in 1850 to teach church history, the subject was (minimally) covered by a local pastor, Samuel Cox. Cox lectured once a week on church history—while Hebrew grammar received five hours, and “Harmony of the Gospels,” three. In the 1840s, Edward Robinson, Union’s famous professor of biblical studies, also offered some lectures on church history in the first three (or perhaps five) centuries.¹⁴

From a letter Cox addressed to Smith before the latter joined the Union faculty, we get a taste of his style and approach. Cox sees himself as preparing the way for Smith, “by outline and generality, not ambiguity, respecting the grand vertebral column of history, its osteology and loca majora.” He continues:

They [the students] have been very attentive, and I have endeavored to affect them with a sense of the sine-qua-non importance to ministers of its thorough and scientific acquisition.… I go on the principle that premises must be before inductions, and hence that without knowing facts, dates, places, men, relations, and some circumstances, they are not prepared for philosophizing as historians. Hence, I teach them the elements, the what, where, when, who, why, how, and the connections, consequences, antecedents, and motives, as well as we can know them, in order [sic] to their masterly use of them in their subsequent lucubrations. But I prefer the grand to the minor relations and matters of history; suppose Church History to be in re so connected with secular history, since the Church and the world mutually affect and modify each other, that the former cannot be understood without the latter; and so endeavor to fix in consecutive order, in their minds, those great events, which, when well understood are seen to regulate the others, and at once to stimulate the student, and direct him, in his later researches.

Despite his grandiose tone and condescending assurance to Smith that he will counsel the Union community to make allowance for Smith’s inadequate preparation and greenness as a teacher, Cox himself (judging from student lecture notes) did not have a strong grasp of the subject.¹⁵

Smith served as Professor of Church History only until 1855, when he transferred to the Professorship of Theology. In his first half-year at Union, Smith lectured to the seniors four hours a week, covering the ecclesiastical and doctrinal history of the first six centuries, and gave fifteen lectures on “theological encyclopedia,”¹⁶ an introduction to the theological curriculum derived from German university practice.

Still under discussion in Smith’s era was the question of the best means of preparation for would-be ministers: private instruction or theological seminary? Private instruction for the ministry is peculiar to America, Smith told his class; in Europe, schools of theology date back for centuries—think of Iona, founded around 521. Jumping to the eighteenth century, Smith described ministerial training in colonial America. After college the student would spend about a year with a minister of note who provided practical training and whose small salary was supplemented by student fees. Some distinguished northeastern clergymen in the course of their careers trained up to 60 ministerial students apiece. A half century ago, Smith mused, ministers were usually more cultivated than their congregations, but with the rise in the general level of lay education, that situation no longer always obtains.¹⁷ Students must prepare well to keep up.

Seminary education, however, was better than private instruction. Although critics charge that seminaries do not prepare men for the pastoral life, are “injurious to piety,” and easily spread doctrinal corruption, Smith countered that in a group setting, students learn to critique each other’s views and are less likely to become “tinctured” by one person’s peculiarities. Moreover, seminaries provide a complete course of instruction that individual ministers cannot replicate. The greatest works in all branches of theology have been produced by scholars at seminaries, Smith claimed.¹⁸

Despite Smith’s reputation as a progressive, his approach to church history often seems both adversarial and apologetic. On the progressive side, Smith advocated “a broader theological culture,” in part because students who are to be ministers need to understand the sects and controversies of America. To this “broader culture,” church history contributes by making ministers more careful in their choice of language and more averse “to the petty and easy art of the unscrupulous polemic.” It teaches them not to stress minor points of difference.¹⁹

This broader view, however, was still circumscribed. Ministerial students, in Smith’s view, needed to be fortified to defend and advance their Presbyterian beliefs and polity against the claims of other Christian groups, not just those of “infidels.” Progress in theology, he claimed, consists in “giving the truth a new form adapted to the new warfare it is called to meet.” Students must learn how to refute the views and practices of others (for example, Roman Catholic approaches to Scripture) and to adjudicate competing theories about the consequences of the Fall for the human race.²⁰ Although intra-Protestant controversies, in Smith’s view, pale beside those between Protestants and Catholics, only by studying history can Rome’s claims be understood.²¹ Striking what he imagined as a sound mean, Smith recommended that theological education should be “conservative without bigotry and progressive without lawlessness.”²²

In his class on “Theological Encyclopedia,” Smith advised students on their course of study. First, they should pursue a broad program, with philology as a foundation. Historical studies come second. Natural science is important for addressing questions of biblical interpretation on such topics as “controversies concerning the races of men” and the resurrection of the body. Philosophy teaches students to analyze, construct arguments, and answer objections. “Master Plato, or some of the works of Aristotle,” Smith urged; learn both the history of philosophy and modern philosophy. Psychology and ethics also should not be neglected; for “mental philosophy,” “Reid’s as good as any.”²³

Smith recommended that once every six or eight weeks, students should put “all [their] strength into some sermon or essay,” a recommendation implying that students were not accustomed to writing papers. “Have some independent definite investigation,” Smith counseled. Every student should have two or three theological “hobbies,” so that he can be a “terror” to his friends on these points. Students should stay abreast of contemporary history by reading newspapers; when perusing foreign ones, they should keep a map in hand.²⁴ Smith also tried to stimulate his students by organizing an essay competition, offering a first prize of $50 and a second of $25—but only one senior opted to enter.²⁵

Archival materials provide a warm portrait of Smith as a teacher. The professor, he thought, should expound points according to students’ needs. If the relation between teacher and student does not remain open, the teacher will become dogmatic and the student will copy his dogmatism. Each student should be encouraged and “brought out through the medium of a free discussion.” New School Presbyterian teachers and ministers, Smith asserted—implying a contrast with the Old School Presbyterians of Princeton—enjoy freedom of explanation; they understand that modern philosophy and theology should work together, rather than in opposition. Intellectual stumbling blocks should not be deemed irreconcilable.²⁶ Smith’s (Hegelian-inspired) vision of the harmonious unity of knowledge is here in evidence. The unity, nevertheless, is constructed around Christian confession.

Smith’s former student Thomas S. Hastings, later President of Union, recalled his impression of Smith’s teaching. His approach to church history, Hastings testified, “was so different from anything we had known before—so much more scientific and thorough, that he awakened our enthusiasm and stimulated us to the uttermost.” Students tried to take down Smith’s every word: indeed, the extant student notes on Smith’s lectures often seem verbatim. “We wrote with intense effort,” Hastings confessed, “but always, in our weariness at the close of the lecture-hour, we felt we had lost much because we had not secured all that he had said.” Students deemed remarkable Smith’s ability to answer their questions on the spot—suggesting that most professors (pace Samuel Miller) were not able to do so. Hastings added:

No question surprised him; his answers dissected the subject so thoroughly that it seemed as if he had specially prepared himself for each question. He made us work harder than we had ever done before. He marked out courses of reading sufficient to occupy us for years, and seemed quietly to take it for granted that we would accomplish it all in a few weeks.²⁷

Smith mainly lectured to his classes, as the many student course notebooks housed in the Union Seminary archives show. Abandoning the stillcustomary recitation method of teaching, Smith proposed topics for student investigation.²⁸ Clearly he was a pedagogical pioneer.

Roswell Hitchcock: Union Theological Seminary

Roswell Hitchcock was likewise widely respected for his excellent teaching. He held the Washburn Professorship of Church History at Union from 1855 (when Smith transferred to Theology) until his death in 1887; by then, 1400 living former students could count him as their professor. Hitchcock’s list of courses included Biblical and Apostolic History; General Church History; Sacred History; Old Testament History; The Life of Christ and Apostolic History; General Church History from the Second Century; The History of the World Before Christ; and History of Doctrines.²⁹ This list shows the prominence of “biblical history.” There remain three sets of student notes for each of Hitchcock’s courses on “Church History, 100–323 [or 325],” “Church History, 323 [or 325] to 800,”³⁰ and “The Apostolic Church”; two sets on “The Life of Christ”; and one set each for “The History of the World Before Christ,” “Church History, 800–1294,” and “Church History, 1517–1884.” Hitchcock largely taught by the lecture method. Since Hitchcock never published a Church History, as Philip Schaff had urged,³¹ his approach to the subject must be gleaned largely from these fourteen extant sets of class notes taken by his students, supplemented by his articles and sermons.

Hitchcock’s lectures on ancient church history follow a pattern. First comes a lengthy “Introduction,” in which Hitchcock describes, inter alia, church history, its “uses,” sources, and the auxiliary studies needed for its pursuit. Turning to the “First Period” (ante-Nicene), Hitchcock gives a general overview and describes its “external history” (Judaism and the Roman Empire) and Christianity’s interactions with this larger world (historical, intellectual, philosophical, moral). Next comes “polity” (including the rise of “sacerdotalism”); then councils; schisms; the life and worship of the church (including its piety; asceticism; domestic, social, and public life, with considerable attention to the subjects of marriage, family, and slavery); and sacred days and services (including discussion of the sacraments). A next heading is “doctrine,” under which rubric Hitchcock expounds his notion of dogmatic development, and describes various authors, writings, and “heresies” (including Gnosticism and Manicheanism). He then takes up apologetics, the Rule of Faith, the canon, and inspiration of the Bible (and lack thereof in post-biblical writings). The last major topic, theology, includes discussion of the Trinity, “anthropology,” Christology, soteriology, ecclesiology, the sacraments (again), and eschatology. This schema is also largely followed in Hitchcock’s discussion of the Nicene and post-Nicene periods, with appropriate modifications for the changed historical situation. Although Hitchcock lists no category of “social history,” one former student described how he wove contemporary issues pertaining to war, law, medicine, and science into his lectures on church history.³² Judging from class notes and incidental writings, Hitchcock gave more than usual attention to what today we would call “history of religions” and “theory” in religious studies. Both Hitchcock and Smith, it may be noted, showed more interest in the political events and social movements of their time in America than did Schaff, whose life was devoted to more strictly Christian causes.

Hitchcock declared that although it was “a luxury to learn,” that of teaching was even greater. The teacher must himself keep on learning, “have something fresh to communicate”—and when he does not, it is time to resign. Antiquarianism, Hitchcock claimed, should be relegated to the museum.³³ Former students confirmed the “careful research” that went into Hitchcock’s teaching: “he did not weary of fresh investigations, even on familiar topics.”³⁴ A friend claimed, “Who that ever heard him lecture in his class-room on Ecclesiastical History can forget his masterly picture of the past; how he made the great figures of the Apostolic age to live again…. He believed in the Holy Catholic Church and in the Communion of Saints.”³⁵ Students testified that Hitchcock never gave the same lecture in two different classes, but always updated his presentations with the latest research.³⁶ Student notes from his courses over the years cast doubt on the strict accuracy of this claim, although Hitchcock clearly continued to read and report on new works.

Shortly after Hitchcock’s sudden death in 1887, Philip Schaff described him as “a brilliant scholar and lecturer, with an absolute command of language”—but one whose publication record was scanty, since he considered authorship “intolerable drudgery.” In his own inaugural lecture later that year, Schaff claimed that his predecessor “always spoke like a book,” thus sparing himself the trouble of writing them.³⁷ Another memorialist claimed that Hitchcock’s students took down what he said, “word for word,” helped by the fact that he spoke slowly and precisely—and some very detailed student notes suggest that this was not an overly extravagant claim. “He was,” the memorialist asserts, “the master of the terse, crisp, epigrammatic, condensed speech.”³⁸

As noted above, Hitchcock left money in his will to establish a prize for excellence in church history, to be given to a member of the senior class at Union.³⁹ This prize was sometimes used by the recipient to continue studies abroad. The Hitchcock Prize in Church History is still awarded at Union Seminary.

George Fisher: Yale Theological Departmentand Yale University

In his history of Yale Divinity School, Roland Bainton comments that from George Fisher’s published historical writings (which he praises as “impartial”), readers would never guess that he was a witty and vivacious conversationalist and teacher. So engaging was his manner of speech that some might receive the misimpression that he had fallen prey to “secularization.”⁴⁰ Upon Fisher’s death, one memorialist commented, “So delightful was Professor Fisher’s personality, so nimble his wit, so genial his spirit, that it was not always easy to remember that he was one of the foremost scholars of his time.”⁴¹

From class notes taken by undergraduate Bernadotte Perrin, later a professor of Greek at Yale, it appears that Fisher largely taught by the lecture method. Perrin’s notes, however, do not convey the witty, vivacious spirit here suggested. Indeed, Fisher’s genial classroom style apparently suffered in his later years. By then, students complained that he simply repeated the contents of his textbooks. One student allegedly sat with the textbook open, occasionally adding a note should Fisher ever offer anything new.⁴²

Bainton praises Fisher for his attempt to modernize the study of theology in the broader sense, working scientific advances into both apologetics and older theories of design.⁴³ In general, Fisher thought that historical studies needed more emphasis on “modern” (i.e., post-476) history. Books on “universal history,” he advised, should devote more attention to history since the Roman Empire’s “fall”—an event he nevertheless deemed the most “stupendous” change in history from that time to the present. In his own Brief History of the Nations, he sought to give more space to medieval and modern history than was then customary, ancient history still dominating history textbooks.⁴⁴ Fisher’s complaint suggests that as late as the 1890s, ancient history received disproportionate attention—and that covering “universal history” was deemed viable.

To acquire a vivid picture of church history, Fisher insisted, the student must know sources—not only written sources such as letters and monastic Rules, but also the evidence derived from coins, art, and other artifacts. He needs the “ipsissima verba” of the actors to get a sure grip on truth.⁴⁵ The one set of lecture notes on Fisher’s course that remains does not reveal how he introduced students to primary sources or aspects of material culture, if in fact he did so.

Despite Fisher’s alleged attempt to modernize the study of Christian history, his treatment remained largely conservative as well as derivative. Many of his scholarly essays, we shall see, were devoted to warding off the assaults of more radical German scholarship.

Philip Schaff: Mercersburg and Union Theological Seminaries

Philip Schaff in his youth had served as a Privatdozent at the University of Berlin, offering lectures on the Catholic Epistles, the Gospel of John, the theology of Schleiermacher, and the doctrinal history of Protestantism.⁴⁶ During his years at Mercersburg, Schaff taught courses on early, medieval, and Reformation church history, and on dogmatics—indeed, historian George Shriver reports, for one period, he taught the entire seminary curriculum. On the basis of remaining lecture notes, Shriver infers that Schaff used his class preparation as an opportunity to develop material that he would incorporate into his multivolume History of the Christian Church.⁴⁷

Joining the Union Seminary faculty in 1870, Schaff was granted the Professorship of Church History only after Roswell Hitchcock’s sudden death in June 1887. In his “Autobiographical Reminiscences for My Children,” Schaff confessed, “I naturally shrank from the drudgery of preparing several courses of new lectures, and from the difficulty of filling the chair of so brilliant a lecturer as Dr. Hitchcock.” But he “had to obey,” and was inaugurated on September 22, 1887. He hoped that his move to the historical chair would enable him to finish his History of the Christian Church.⁴⁸

Schaff faulted the dry and lifeless way in which church history was taught in seminaries, often approached as if it were merely a “curiosity shop.”⁴⁹ “Intellectual education alone may be a curse,” he warned, as the examples of Voltaire, Rousseau, and D. F. Strauss show.⁵⁰ Explaining the German educational system to American audiences, Schaff praised the “seminary” method (i.e., the seminar) as one of the most important innovations at Berlin and other German universities; he planned to introduce the method at Union.⁵¹

Schaff frequently wrote about the teaching of church history. In the last years of his life, he composed a Theological Propaedeutic, designed for beginning-level theology students, which illuminates his approach to the various subdisciplines of theological studies. The book, he claimed, is “the first original work on Propaedeutic in America,” aimed to serve for American students the same purpose as K. R. Hagenbach’s Encyclopädie und Methodologie in Germany. Although many seminaries treat church history as a mere “appendix” to other subjects, Schaff argued that it, like biblical studies, should run through all three years of coursework. Schaff advised beginners to acquire “some knowledge of the primary sources”—advice again suggesting that primary source reading was not usually the focus of regular coursework. Yet so vast are the sources, Schaff conceded, that even the greatest historians must depend on the collections, digests, and specialized monographs produced by others.⁵² In this concession, Schaff surely included himself, for his lengthy volumes on the history of Christianity are not always grounded in primary source investigation.

Unsurprisingly, Schaff retained a pietistic orientation in his teaching, attempting to inculcate faith as well as to provide information. He opened his lectures with a prayer: “Sanctify us by the truth; Thy Word is Truth. Amen.”⁵³ The first hour of the day, he counseled students, before they commence their academic work, should be given over to prayer and devotion. Students are being trained as theologians, not as philosophers: they should not be encouraged to doubt everything. A special danger lies in the “pseudo-theology of rationalism—the chief tempter of the student of the present day,” meeting him at “every step in exegesis” from Genesis to Revelation. The spiritual, for Schaff, takes precedence over the purely intellectual.⁵⁴ Schaff’s pious approach to academic study emulated that of evangelical German professors Neander and Tholuck.⁵⁵

Which areas of concentration are most important for seminary students? Schaff advised that after the Bible, students should study Reformation history, followed by the history of their own denomination. They should choose one particular period or aspect for more exhaustive work. Note that Schaff does not here identify the patristic era as worthy of this concentrated study: it is “of far more consequence to know the exact teaching of Christ and the Apostles than that of the Fathers, Reformers and Councils,” he wrote.⁵⁶

Schaff also offered practical advice to American seminarians, who were often scarcely twenty years old and still unsettled in their habits. Study systematically, Schaff urged, since time cannot be replaced. Leave light reading, such as newspapers, for the afternoon or evening. Don’t sleep more than is necessary for your health. Take exercise. Keep your body clean and vigorous; does not sound Christianity teach that “cleanliness is next to godliness”? Our model, Christ, manifested no trait of “ascetic austerity and self-mortification,” but rather was “healthy, serene, and hopeful.”⁵⁷

On the academic side, Schaff urged the student to acquire a good library. He should read the Bible daily in Hebrew and Greek, making use of commentaries by Chrysostom, Augustine, and Protestants from the Reformation era to the present. Master ancient and modern philosophy, the orators, the classical poets, Schaff counseled. But don’t be a bookworm: study also the book of Nature and “the book of society.” Students should cultivate their hearts as well as their heads, and keep guard over their morals.⁵⁸

Schaff’s generous spirit is revealed in the financial support he offered promising students in church history. In the 1880s, he gave copies of his books to Mercersburg Seminary (then relocated at Lancaster) to serve as prizes for student essays on church history. In 1889, he endowed a Teaching Fellowship at Union.⁵⁹ Soon thereafter, he contributed half the funds for a prize essay in church history offered by the American Society of Church History.⁶⁰ Late in life, he employed a junior colleague, Francis Brown, soon to be a noted scholar of the Hebrew Bible and later President of Union, to act as his assistant, paying him $1500 out of his own salary.⁶¹ And when Schaff’s favorite student, Arthur Cushman McGiffert, who succeeded him as Washburn Professor, encountered financial difficulties while studying in Germany, Schaff sent him money and encouragement.⁶² As noted earlier, he contributed $5000 to rescue the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers Series from collapse.⁶³ After Schaff’s death, 1800 of his books went to the Union Seminary library.⁶⁴

That Schaff was a beloved teacher seems clear from the tributes of former students. During his time at Mercersburg, Schaff—on the model of German professors—invited students to his home one evening a week, encouraging them to ask questions and join in free discussion.⁶⁵ One former student, U. H. Heilman, reminisced that such evenings “reminded one of Socrates gathering around him some of the young men of Athens, asking and answering questions.”⁶⁶ Joseph Henry Dubbs (later Professor of History at Franklin and Marshall College) recalled both pleasant evenings at the Schaffs’ home and his trips accompanying Schaff when he preached in surrounding communities. Teacher-student relations, Dubbs observed, then were “more free and unconventional” than in later times. Schaff’s students largely continued to follow the lines of thought that they had learned from him.⁶⁷

Frederick A. Gast, who later taught Hebrew at Lancaster, testified that Schaff gave him his first lessons in that language, “when it seemed to me a wild dream that I should myself be called to teach others, however imperfectly, the principles of the language of Moses and the prophets.” But his obligation to Schaff preceded his seminary days: even before he had met Schaff, Gast reported, Schaff’s Principle of Protestantism showed him “a new standpoint from which to survey the whole realm of truth,” namely, that Christ is the principle of the entire cosmos, not only of Christianity. Moreover, the book convinced Gast that he could maintain an unshaken faith while adjusting to new truths: “I came to know what life and history might mean.”⁶⁸

All three Union professors here surveyed, it is clear, made indelible impressions on their students. In student notes and tributes, as well as in their published writings, they stand out as lively characters.

Ephraim Emerton and Predecessors: Harvard DivinitySchool and Harvard University

Before Ephraim Emerton assumed the Winn Professorship of Ecclesiastical History at Harvard in 1882, various instructors connected with the theological faculty taught the subject.⁶⁹ At least two of them, although not specialists in church history, had studied in Germany: Charles Follen and Frederic Hedge.⁷⁰ Emerton’s immediate predecessor in a temporary appointment was Joseph Henry Allen (the grandson of Henry Ware), a firm Unitarian who had strongly desired the chaired professorship that Emerton received.⁷¹

In his inaugural speech as Lecturer in Ecclesiastical History in 1878, Joseph Allen expressed hope for the day when there would be an entire department of church history at Harvard enjoying equal rank with other departments. While a full staff at Harvard pursues the study of ancient Greece and Rome, one man—namely, himself—is expected to cover the entire 2000 years of Christianity. Allen outlined his proposed teaching method. He will look to the original sources when possible, “listen to the voice of the man himself.” He will combine weekly lectures with student reports on special topics and with recitation. Among the textbooks he will use are Philip Smith’s (with first-year students),⁷² Gieseler’s and Neander’s Histories, Henry Milman’s Latin Christianity, and Thomas Greenwood’s Cathedra Petri (with second-and third-year students).⁷³

As he began teaching, Allen described his academic routine to a correspondent. He spent two hours a week with each class, he reported, striving to keep up “the tone of the study.” The juniors (i.e., the first-year class) cover to 800; the middlers, to 1500; and the seniors, to the present. Allen listed twenty-seven lectures he was preparing, extending from “Christ” down to “German Theology,” “Unitarians,” and “Present Prospects.”⁷⁴

To another correspondent, Allen complained that the History Department at Harvard did not encourage appeals to the imagination, sympathy, or moral judgment, approaches that he favored. He intends to introduce a new teaching method: to pair off the students in the first-year class (all ten of them), asking one to prepare a presentation based on the writings of an Apostolic Father, and the other to present material about the same Father derived from other sources. This procedure will be experimental, as “most men know very little how to go to work.” He hoped to engage the students with the primary sources rather than have them rely exclusively on “patchwork” compilations and digests.⁷⁵ Although Allen’s approach may strike the modern reader as an advance beyond recitation and lecture, his “nonscientific” notions of history, lack of German education, and strong Unitarian commitments probably ruled him out of Charles Eliot’s consideration for the new Winn professorship.⁷⁶

Ephraim Emerton was hired from his Ph.D. work at Leipzig to be an Instructor in History and German at Harvard College before Eliot selected him for the Professorship in Ecclesiastical History.⁷⁷ He confessed that at the time he began teaching in the Divinity School, he had “only a very loose connection with a religious organization” and had made no special study of the history of doctrines or of ecclesiastical institutions.⁷⁸

Both in student notes from Emerton’s class and in his own later reflections on the teaching of history, his less confessional approach is apparent. A chief satisfaction of teaching, he thought, was to see students “lose their childish faith in the printed word” and develop “a fair critical temper.” Since the (German) method of learning by research was still new in America, professors who adopt it must struggle against “the mental apathy” that other methods of teaching history have induced. Although advocating the German approach, Emerton, like an older generation of American professors, also believed that the study of history should train the mind and encourage better citizenship.⁷⁹

Emerton was quick to decry the earlier neglect of historical study in America. Writing circa 1920, he cited the example of Henry Adams who, although lacking academic training in history, was appointed to an Assistant Professorship of History at Harvard in 1871. When Adams protested that he knew little history, especially of the period he was expected to teach, President Eliot rejoined that if he were aware of anyone who knew more, he would appoint him. There were then no specially trained historians in America, Emerton claimed, but that situation, he is glad to report, had now changed.⁸⁰ Indeed, writing in 1883 on “The Historical Seminary in American Teaching,” Emerton had painted a picture nearly as bleak as that facing Henry Adams—but even then he was filled with enthusiasm for raising the status of history to that of a “science,” of turning at least a few of “our boys” into “manly” historians.⁸¹

Assuming the Winn Chair in 1882, Emerton titled his inaugural address “The Study of Church History.” In the past, he noted, the history of most academic subjects was sadly neglected. Even today, there are only a halfdozen colleges in America at which “any adequate provision for an independent department of history has been made.” But a new era of study based on source criticism and archival research has begun, in which men search for the truth of their subject, not touting their own biases, as do those who assume they have “missions.” America, Emerton ruefully admitted, remains very backward in this respect.⁸²

Of various branches of history, that of the church is even farther behind in its methods and approaches. In this field, Emerton charged, scholars who readily applied new methods of research to the Ancient Near East, “shrank from the unpopular task of submitting the Christian record to similar tests”—and the scanty sources for earliest Christianity left abundant room for “devout imagination” to do its work. The farther back in time historians probe, the more they tend to adduce supernatural causes for events. Here, theology has been greatly to blame. But now, Emerton approvingly noted, historical criticism “has laid an unsparing hand upon the early records of Christianity.”⁸³

Catalogues from the Harvard Divinity School reveal that after Emerton became Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History in 1882 he regularly taught courses (or ones similarly titled) on “The Conflict of Christianity with Paganism to about a.d. 800,” “History of the Protestant Reformation and the Roman Catholic Reaction,” “History of Christian Doctrine,” “Medieval Church,” and “General Church History,” as well as an advanced seminar on medieval “Church-State Relations.” As noted above, in 1896 he acquired a Union-trained colleague, John Winthrop Platner, who had greater expertise in patristic literature.⁸⁴ Platner, however, stayed at Harvard only a short time before moving to Andover Seminary.⁸⁵

Emerton geared his class lectures in early Christianity around what he knew best: over a three-week period, he gave students 27 pages of notes on the barbarian groups, their “invasions,” and settlements (29 pages, if we count a lecture on Ulfila and his Gothic Bible)—while making one brief reference to Athanasius and skipping lightly over doctrinal developments. The Church Fathers in general, he told students, form a “curious and not uninteresting” subject—a rather cool recommendation for early church history! For Emerton, unlike the more evangelical professors, the life of Jesus did not form part of church history.⁸⁶

Although he clearly lacked interest in doctrine,⁸⁷ Emerton showed considerable concern for the teaching of history. He wrote little pertaining to late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, but in 1888 published an Introduction to the Study of the Middle Ages (375–814). He also contributed to a volume on Methods of Teaching History, and published several essays of methodological interest in his collection, Learning and Living (1921). As noted in Chapter 1, he published much more on the High and Late Middle Ages and early modernity in his mature years.⁸⁸

Emerton was determined that under his tutelage at Harvard, ecclesiastical history would be viewed as “a department of historical rather than of theological science.” In his inaugural address, he declared that students would learn to do independent historical work, seeking to find ideas under the bare “facts.” They will, he claimed, study the church as “a great human institution”; any approach that strays beyond the realm of the human flirts with “philosophic speculation.” He will teach the history of church doctrines without regard to their truth or falsity, their orthodoxy or heterodoxy. He intends to offer a seminar in which students will learn “by practical experience something of the rules and limitations of independent historical research and criticism.” In brief, the study of church history should employ the same methods and rules of evidence that have now become the accepted norm in all other branches of historical research.⁸⁹ Elsewhere, Emerton wrote that historians need “not miracles nor inspirations, nor revelations, nor the dictations of any authority whatsoever, but more documents and better authenticated ones.”⁹⁰ More than the other professors here surveyed, Emerton moved the study of church history away from its confessional orientation.

Among the documents in the Harvard Divinity School archives is a list compiled by Emerton, dating to the late 1880s, of forty-six topics from which students in “History of the Early Church” might choose to write papers. The topics range from “The Roman State-religion at the time of Christ” through the Apostolic Fathers, Apologists, Montanism, Gnosticism, the persecutions, issues of canon, episcopate, and “the legend of the ‘Petrine Supremacy’,” to Constantine, Julian, and Theodosius, with around a dozen options regarding “barbarians” (Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Huns, Franks, Lombards; their migrations, religion, and settlements). Despite Emerton’s avowed lack of interest in doctrine, he offers a few options on “The Arian Controversy to the close of the Council of Nicaea,” “The Council of Chalcedon,” and “The Augustinian-pelagian controversy.”⁹¹

Also among the paper topics were “The Origin and Development of the Monastic Principle,” and “The Life and Work of Ulfilas, the Visigoth.” On these, there remain papers (43 and 45 pages, respectively) written by the student who took the one set of extant notes from Emerton’s ecclesiastical history class, Earl Morse Wilbur.⁹² These and other papers (“theses”) Wilbur wrote for Emerton⁹³ show that Emerton instructed the students to preface their papers with a bibliography of relevant books and articles in several modern languages. (Wilbur included a second list of “more easily accessible” works he consulted, including a few in German.) Even though Wilbur listed many primary sources in his bibliography, most of his references to patristic authors are taken from such secondary works as Schaff’s Histories, a point suggesting that Emerton relegated work in the primary sources to higher-level seminars.⁹⁴

In his paper on “The Life and Work of Ulfilas, the Visigoth,” Wilbur noted the paucity of sources for his topic. His bibliography cited Georg Waitz’s Über das Leben and die Lehre des Ulfilas (1840) and the later (and better, so he observed) study by W. Bessel, Über das Leben des Ulfilas (1860). Most of Wilbur’s actual references, however, were taken from works in English. Wilbur the Unitarian was not disturbed by scholars’ charge that Ulfilas’ Bible was “tainted with Arianism.” He placed Ulfilas’ contribution in the context of Germanic philology: just as scholars now study Sanskrit to probe the background of Indo-European languages, so the Gothic Bible remains a monument of Germanic literature, whose birth lay seven centuries before the Scandinavian Eddas, five centuries before the Niebelungen Lied, and three centuries before the “Paraphrase” of Caedmon.⁹⁵

Despite Wilbur’s inattention to primary sources, his papers are of high quality for a first-year student in church history. It does not surprise that Wilbur later studied in Berlin (where he confessed disappointment that that the lectures were “only a review of what I had already had at Harvard”), taught courses at Meadville Seminary, and was the organizer of a new divinity school (the Pacific Unitarian School for the Ministry) at Berkeley, of which he later served as President.⁹⁶ There he wrote his pamphlet, “The First Century of the Liberal Movement in American Religion.”⁹⁷

From Samuel Miller’s recitation method to Emerton’s assignment of term papers, the teaching of church history in America evolved considerably in seventy-five years. The change in pedagogy reflects both the professors’ greater expertise and the availability of books. Here, as we shall shortly see, the growth of seminary library collections was key. Students by century’s end were no longer tied to one textbook, as was largely the case with Miller’s students at Princeton. In addition, the diminution of denominational polemic meant that various topics pertaining to early Christianity might be explored for their own historical interest, not primarily as weapons drawn from a textual arsenal with which to batter those whose doctrine and polity might differ.

Introducing Seminar Teaching in Church History

By the 1870s, the “seminary method” (i.e., the seminar) had been adopted in a few university history departments. As noted above, the seminar was introduced to American education by historian Charles Kendall Adams at the University of Michigan in 1869, was taken up by Henry Adams at Harvard in 1871,⁹⁸ and in the later nineteenth century became especially associated with Johns Hopkins.⁹⁹ Henry Adams later reflected that, ignorant of medieval history, he had introduced the seminar so that he and his students should learn together about Anglo-Saxon and medieval law; the boys, he reminisced, “worked like rabbits, and dug holes all over the field of archaic society.”¹⁰⁰ That this method should be utilized in courses on church history was a recommendation frequently advanced by seminary professors from the 1880s onward.

For example, a handbook by Frank Hugh Foster, Professor of Church History at the Theological Seminary in Oberlin, published in 1888, illustrated how the seminar could be used in the study of church history. Foster admitted that students would need guidance in this new method, since they were accustomed to “dependent study.”¹⁰¹ They should learn that the study of history involves explanation, the analysis of causes and effects—not merely knowing facts. Although Foster praised Neander’s and Schaff’s volumes on ancient church history as the best of their kind, he argued that such manuals would not give students any sense of how to do history for themselves. They must work with original sources, such as are found in the volumes of Migne and Mansi, and the Ante-Nicene Fathers series.¹⁰² Although, Foster admitted, America lacks the archives necessary for original research in (for example) medieval history, the historian of Christian antiquity is in a better position since the Greek and Latin sources are available in print. Foster reported that at Oberlin, one seminar was organized around various topics pertaining to Augustine, such as “Augustine’s View of the Constitution of the Human Mind.” Other subjects Foster suggested for a “practice” seminar in early church history include “The Council of Nice” and “Hippolytus and his Conflict with the Bishops of Rome.” Foster advised professors to propose a large project, then divide the work among the students in a team effort.¹⁰³

At the schools here surveyed, seminars were offered at Harvard and probably at Union. Schaff in 1886 praised the “seminary” method (i.e., seminar) as one of the most important innovations at Berlin and other German universities. German seminars, Schaff reported, cover topics in exegesis, history, and theology. Neander in his seminar would select a particular patristic work to be read and explained, for example, Origen’s Against Celsus, Tertullian’s Apology, or Augustine’s Confessions. One Privatdozent had chosen the (newly discovered) Didache. Schaff urged American theological institutions to introduce the seminar, adding that he expected to do so at Union the following winter.¹⁰⁴ (Whether or not Schaff himself did, there is evidence for seminars offered by his successor, Arthur Cushman McGiffert.¹⁰⁵) Schaff’s comments once more suggest that close attention to primary sources in the classroom had not been a central feature of church history courses in mid-nineteenth-century America.

Ephraim Emerton developed the seminar method for “higher instruction” in church history at Harvard. He gave due credit to Ranke, the elder and younger Droysen, and various French historians for their work in instituting the “practice-seminar.”¹⁰⁶ German historical scholarship, Emerton remarked, broke the eighteenth-century approach to history, with its “partisan purpose” and “rhetorical elaboration.” He had nothing but scorn for the older recitation method used in American colleges: for “an educated man to listen to such repetition is an actual loss to science,” he exclaimed. Relying on a textbook does not deepen students’ mental capacities. Although the lecture method has its purposes if artfully organized, often a student can get the same information much faster from a book.¹⁰⁷ Genuine historical scholarship requires “independent, individual effort,” and this is what seminar work teaches. The point of the seminar, Emerton asserted, is to lead students back from a completed work to the primary sources. In America, professors face a challenge in combating the “mental apathy” engendered by older methods of studying history. Students must read the primary sources in order to “rise out of the state of blind receptivity into that of vigorous and independent action.”¹⁰⁸

In a seminar, Emerton claimed, the student should learn to take nothing on faith or authority, but rather look for “evidence of probability,” even if “proof” is lacking. The professor’s role is to assist students in developing a “critical temper” and in judging evidence.¹⁰⁹ He is an “overseer guiding the action of intelligent workers.” For those engaged in seminar work, the library becomes a laboratory, not a mere storehouse for books.¹¹⁰

Emerton conceded that history had been so neglected in students’ precollegiate education that they would arrive as freshmen with “colossal ignorance” of the subject—yet documents lie at hand all over America on which students could go to work. Emerton was pleased that he had made some progress in introducing the seminar method at Harvard.¹¹¹ Indeed, the Harvard Divinity School catalogues show that Emerton often taught such a “practice-course” on “Church and State in the Age of Hildebrand” (variously, “in the Eleventh Century”).¹¹² As noted above, Herbert Baxter Adams of Johns Hopkins praised Emerton’s seminars (including those offered at the “Harvard Annex,” i.e., what became Radcliffe) on “the Papacy and the German Empire, the origin of mediaeval institutions, the rise of French communes, etc.” Baxter Adams praised Emerton for incorporating “the most modern views of mediaeval history and the relations of church and state,” views he had learned from his study in Germany with J. G. Droysen.¹¹³

Church History Textbooksin Nineteenth-Century America

American Professors and German Textbooks

An ongoing problem for the American professors was the lack of appropriate textbooks. The texts in translation they most frequently used were Johann L. Mosheim’s eighteenth-century Ecclesiastical History; Johann Gieseler’s Text-Book of Ecclesiastical [Church] History, written and revised several times in the 1820s and 1830s; Karl von Hase’s History of the Christian Church; and (sometimes) Augustus Neander’s volumes on the history of early Christianity.¹¹⁴

It is noteworthy that the American professors did not select books written by British or Scots authors. George Fisher, for example, faulted Milman’s History of Latin Christianity for the author’s lack of sympathy with figures whose piety exceeded the “limit of Anglican moderation,” especially any form of devotion that displayed extravagant “austerities.” This lack, Fisher charged, constitutes an “involuntary disrespect” and colors Milman’s entire portrait.¹¹⁵ Even Samuel Miller, who had not studied in Germany, chose a text (admittedly by default, we shall see) by a German author, Mosheim. For all of them, Germany represented the gold standard of scholarship.¹¹⁶

JOHANN MOSHEIM’S TEXTBOOK

Johann Mosheim’s ecclesiastical history, composed in Latin in the 1750s, was available in English translation by the early nineteenth century. Despite Mosheim’s general popularity in America—a “Von Mosheim Society” was founded in 1789 to perpetuate German language and culture¹¹⁷—his text was not favored by Protestant professors of a warmly evangelical stripe.

When Samuel Miller began teaching at the Theological Seminary at Princeton in 1813, only Mosheim’s Church History was available in translation. Miller was aware that students would prefer something smaller and of a “different character,” but he judged no other book to be “equally eligible.” Works that might be preferable were not available, whereas Miller could obtain copies of Mosheim for his students. Mosheim, he conceded, provides the “best skeleton of a course of Ecclesiastical History that is anywhere within our reach.” As for other historians who wrote church history books, “Dupin, Fleury, Baronius were all Catholics!” Miller exclaimed—apparently feeling no need to explain what would be wrong with consulting works by these authors. Miller confessed that he had not discovered any textbook of ecclesiastical history suitable for Calvinist and Presbyterian students.¹¹⁸

Miller, who used Mosheim throughout his teaching career,¹¹⁹ informed his “young gentlemen” that he would be stressing Mosheim’s faults: Mosheim entertains unsatisfactory notions of the true church, devotes too much time to politics, and is defective in “portrait painting.” Miller deemed Mosheim “a coldblooded low Arminian—an enemy to vital piety.”¹²⁰ Mosheim’s history was not “religious,”¹²¹ exhibiting “very inadequate ideas of the true church” and concentrating on its “secular and political” manifestations. Moreover, Mosheim finds truth even among heretics, while scarcely noting the “pouring out of the spirit” in religious revivals. He gives too much attention to “the Romish church,” dwelling “unnecessarily and tediously on the Popes.” As a Lutheran, Mosheim was not friendly to Calvinism, the reigning theology at Princeton. The students can supplement the defects of Mosheim (whom Miller nevertheless considered a “learned German”) by comparing his work with that of other writers.¹²² Yet this was the textbook available for use.

Nor was Mosheim in good favor with the Union and Yale professors. Henry Smith, attempting to liven up the subject of church history, abandoned the use of Mosheim “and all that lumber.”¹²³ Roswell Hitchcock faulted Mosheim’s division by “centuries” as untrue to the messier flow of events.¹²⁴ George Fisher, while claiming that Mosheim had initiated a new “scientific spirit” in ecclesiastical historiography, criticized that author’s commonplace style, lack of “philosophical insight,” arrangement of material by “centuries,” and “sabbath school tone”—an interesting critique, given that others faulted Mosheim’s alleged rationalism. Mosheim’s text, in Fisher’s view, had been rendered obsolete by Neander, Gieseler, and Baur.¹²⁵

Schaff too abandoned Mosheim’s Ecclesiastical History (“dry and undigestable”) in favor of English translations of Neander’s and Gieseler’s books.¹²⁶ Mosheim’s “freedom from passion,” in Schaff’s view, almost borders on “cool indifferentism.”¹²⁷ At mid-century, he decried the fact that theological schools in England and America, including Princeton, had for a hundred years been content to use Mosheim,¹²⁸ whose text had been “shelved” at least fifty years ago in Germany.¹²⁹ Schaff imagined that the long-dead Mosheim would himself be displeased if he could know that in English and American seminaries, the study of church history had not gone a step beyond him in the whole intervening century, students still mechanically memorizing his textbook.¹³⁰

Schaff believed that a good church history textbook, unlike Mosheim’s, “should unite in proper harmony a thorough use of original sources, clear apprehension, organic development, lively and interesting delineation, strong but liberal and universal church feeling, and fruitfulness in the way of practical edification.”¹³¹ The work must not be overly long: what student can get through the forty volumes of Baronius, Schaff asked, or even Henry Smith’s History of the Church of Christ in Chronological Tables, the pages of which are “too large for convenient use”?¹³² By Schaff’s time, English translations of other German Church Histories made better textbook options available.

JOHANN GIESELER’S TEXTBOOK

An alternative to Mosheim’s Ecclesiastical History was Johann Gieseler’s Lehrbuch der Kirchengeschichte (1824ff.), the first English translation of which was published in 1836.¹³³ In the mid-1850s, Henry Smith of Union Seminary, desiring an updated version,¹³⁴ undertook a new translation based on the fourth German edition (1844–1857).¹³⁵ That Smith, always in precarious health and overworked, judged it a good use of his time to translate this multivolume work suggests the desperate need for adequate textbooks.

The great virtue of Gieseler’s Text-Book was its inclusion of copious extracts from the primary sources. Moses Stuart of Andover Seminary, among others, praised the book for placing the reader “in a better condition to judge for himself,”¹³⁶ while George Fisher styled it a “library of authorities.”¹³⁷ Philip Schaff also praised the Text-Book’s inclusion of primary source extracts,¹³⁸ and Roswell Hitchcock assigned it as “collateral reading.”¹³⁹ In the absence of anthologies of primary sources, Gieseler’s work was highly valued.

Yet much was wrong with Gieseler’s text in the eyes of the American professors. Too synoptic, “history, it is not,” one reviewer complained.¹⁴⁰ Even Henry Smith found it unsatisfactory and extremely “dry.”¹⁴¹ Smith praised Gieseler’s spirit of charity in assessing which groups might count as “Christian”¹⁴² and his copious citation of original sources “such as can nowhere else be found.” Yet he found the book “cold, but cautious … more rational than sympathetic; it has not the warmth of Neander’s incomparable work” nor “the vividness of Hase’s delineations.” Particularly to be faulted, in Smith’s view, was Gieseler’s sketchy and biased treatment of the first century; nevertheless, this omission can easily be remedied by students, since “the source for correcting [Gieseler’s] opinions is near at hand”¹⁴³—namely, the New Testament. Moreover, Gieseler emphasized (to Smith’s discomfort) patristic writers’ distortion of truth through ignorance, credulity, party-spirit, or “even intentional dishonesty.”¹⁴⁴

Philip Schaff likewise criticized Gieseler’s Text-Book for failing to “reach the inward life and spiritual marrow of the church of Christ,” scarcely rising above “jejeune rationalism”; Gieseler writes with the “indifference of an outside spectator.” Yet, in Schaff’s view, Gieseler had a better appreciation of history than did his Rationalistic predecessors. In the last year of his life, and with his own Histories behind him, Schaff generously claimed that Giesler and Neander had not yet been superseded.¹⁴⁵

KARL VON HASE’S TEXTBOOK

A third text sometimes used in church history classes was Karl von Hase’s History of the Christian Church, originally published in 1834 and translated into English in 1856.¹⁴⁶ The great virtues of Hase’s text for class use were that the section on early Christianity was manageably short, under 200 pages—a virtue noted by Henry Smith¹⁴⁷—and that Hase provided colorful depictions of the era’s leading figures.¹⁴⁸

Hase aimed to present the “living freshness” of the original documents, even as he condensed their contexts. He confessed his regret that in his coverage of the patristic era, he had failed to prune unnecessary description of minor points, thus obscuring the “freshness” of the sources.¹⁴⁹ Elsewhere, avoiding “useless verbiage,” he had endeavored to “let the facts of the narrative speak for themselves.” Conceiving his volume as a workable textbook, he encouraged instructors to enlarge on whichever points they chose.¹⁵⁰

In his early teaching career at Mercersburg Seminary, Schaff claimed that of the available textbooks, Hase’s, with its fine “graphic miniature sketches,” was the best for American seminary students. Despite being “not altogether sound,” Hase’s text avoids Rationalism.¹⁵¹ In default of anything better, Hase’s text was at least short and comprehensible to students.¹⁵² Too sketchy to warrant much praise from the scholarly perspective, Hase’s Church History was admittedly useful in the classroom.

AUGUST NEANDER’S HISTORIES

A fourth possibility: the various histories by Augustus Neander. Neander, a Jew who converted to evangelical Protestantism in young adulthood,¹⁵³ was acclaimed as the most distinguished German church historian of the midnineteenth century.¹⁵⁴ Indeed, British historian Lord Acton called Neander “probably the best-read man living towards 1830.”¹⁵⁵ Neander held the Professorship of Church History at Berlin during the period when Henry Smith, Roswell Hitchcock, and Philip Schaff were students in Germany. At the time of Neander’s death in 1850, memorial notices proclaimed him a “Father of the Church for the church of the nineteenth century” who combined exhaustive learning with “sound and sober criticism.”¹⁵⁶

Neander’s historical perspective well suited the American Protestant professors, although they sometimes (as we shall see) disagreed on specific points and deemed his books too large and dense to serve as useful textbooks.¹⁵⁷ In the early 1860s, Smith told students that he considered Neander’s “the greatest theological discussion of this century.”¹⁵⁸ The American Theological Review, edited by Smith and others, remarked on Neander’s almost incredible (to them) achievement: he allegedly had read “every page of the ante-Nicene Fathers.”¹⁵⁹

Although Hitchcock critiqued Neander’s failure to provide sufficient extra-ecclesial context, he nevertheless in 1858 assigned the senior class at Union “collateral reading” in Neander’s Church History—but complained that the students were unable to complete the assignment because they were so burdened with work outside of school to support themselves.¹⁶⁰ An earnest student in Hitchcock’s class at Union in 1876–1877, Samuel Jackson, struggled for several months to read his copy—now in the Union library—of the first volume of Neander’s General History. He penned in at the end, “A great work. But on the whole very like the Sahara desert—mostly very dry, although here and there an oasis of interest.”¹⁶¹ That Jackson owned a copy of Neander shows that at least one student managed to do the “collateral reading” for Hitchcock’s courses.

Philip Schaff deemed Neander the most accomplished German church historian of the nineteenth century.¹⁶² He preferred texts by Neander and Gieseler for advanced students, but conceded that the best shorter manuals (presumably for less advanced students) were those by Hase and Kurtz. As the “father of modern church history,” Neander, in Schaff’s view, had rescued that subject “from the icy grasp of rationalism, infused into it the warm love of Christ.” Before Neander, church history “had been degraded by German Rationalism into a godless history of human errors and follies,” but Neander made the “dreary desert” of church history into “a garden of God.”¹⁶³ The patristic period was the area of his greatest scholarly competence. His vision of church history as “a continuous revelation of Christ’s presence and power in humanity” suited Schaff well. Schaff liked to repeat Neander’s pietistic motto: “Pecus est quod theologum facit”: “It is the heart that makes a theologian.”¹⁶⁴

Yet Union and Yale professors had many criticisms of Neander’s histories. Hitchcock, Schaff, and Fisher all charged Neander with indifference to the secular and political setting of church history (i.e., with failure to contextualize).¹⁶⁵ Moreover, they criticized Neander’s writing for lack of dramatic power, as stylistically “diffuse and monotonous,” “colorless.”¹⁶⁶ Although Hitchcock urged Americans to emulate Neander’s historical sympathy—he could bind himself to future Christian ages “because he joined himself so genially to all the Christian past”—he came to think that Neander exhibited too great a “catholicity,” verging on Latitudinarianism. More of a Christian than a Protestant, Neander, in Hitchcock’s view, found sainthood “wherever it was.”¹⁶⁷ Yet compared to both Gibbon and “Ultra polemical Protestants,” Neander appeared to Hitchcock as an historian who “struck [a] medium.”¹⁶⁸

For Schaff’s tastes, Neander was often too lenient toward “heretical aberrations.”¹⁶⁹ Schaff also faulted Neander for conceding too much to modern biblical criticism, for doubting points of Gospel history and the “genuineness” of certain canonical books.¹⁷⁰ Fisher, similarly, abhorred Neander’s tendency to treat the Gospels as books “to be criticized like any other histories.”¹⁷¹ In addition, Schaff faulted Neander’s somewhat antinomian, “spiritualized” view of Christianity as implying that the “church” must inhabit some realm different from, and almost opposing, “Christianity.” Schaff’s critique reveals his own more “churchly” orientation: there is no Christianity apart from the church. Although Schaff in 1889 conceded that Harnack—then only 38 years old—was the leading German scholar of early Christianity, with a fresh and bold approach, he confessed his preference for the older (and more piously evangelical) generation of Neander and Tholuck.¹⁷²

At Yale, Fisher toward the end of his teaching career replaced Germanauthored textbooks by one that he himself had written. Schaff liked features of Fisher’s “manual” of church history (Fisher’s History of the Christian Church). In 1889, Schaff reviewed the book, claiming that up to now, Americans had been dependent on German works that were poorly translated and not improved as new editions appeared in German. Fisher’s book, he believed, met a need for coverage of English and American church history that the German-authored books failed adequately to provide. Schaff’s praise appears a bit muted—perhaps because Fisher had borrowed so much from Schaff’s own work?¹⁷³

At Harvard, before a chaired professorship was established, Mosheim’s and, later, Gieseler’s texts were used by instructors of church history.¹⁷⁴ A list of readings for church history at Harvard dating to the 1860s reveals that in addition to Gieseler, an instructor used (among other works) Neander’s Church Histories, Milman’s Latin Christianity,¹⁷⁵ Mosheim’s Commentaries, Joseph Bingham’s Antiquities of the Christian Church [Origines Ecclesiasticae], Hagenbach’s History of Christian Doctrines, Julius Müller’s Christian Doctrine of Sin, and Isaak Dorner’s History of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ.¹⁷⁶ The authors listed are for the most part those being read in more evangelically oriented theological institutions of the period, suggesting that Unitarian professors, like colleagues elsewhere, considered these the best works for their courses.

Ephraim Emerton, however, the first Professor of Ecclesiastical History, in the late 1880s made no mention of Neander in his class lectures.¹⁷⁷ He rather recommended that students use Philip Smith’s Student’s Church History (as noted above, a work largely dependent on Schaff¹⁷⁸), Schaff’s History of the Christian Church, and Fisher’s recently published History of the Christian Church. Emerton mentioned several times in his lectures that for the Roman Catholic viewpoint, students might consult “Blane’s Church History,” a work I have not been able to locate.¹⁷⁹ Emerton’s approach on this point contrasts with that of Samuel Miller earlier in the century, who assumed it unnecessary even to explain why books by Roman Catholic authors would be inappropriate.

The professors here discussed found problematic the German historians’ lack of familiarity with Christianity in America.¹⁸⁰ Henry Smith complained that “German divines are far better acquainted with the obscurest heresy of remote antiquity, than with the teeming life of America.”¹⁸¹ Smith especially faulted Gieseler for dwelling on the (to him) bizarre behavior displayed at “camp meetings” as if it characterized all American Protestantism.¹⁸² Moreover, Gieseler stressed the poor opportunities for theological education in America, mentioning only the German Lutheran and German Reformed seminaries,¹⁸³ with nary a word for Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Andover—or Union.

Philip Schaff agreed with Smith that at present there existed no adequate history of the American church. German works, he thought, were “well-nigh worthless” on the topic,¹⁸⁴ their authors either ignorant of American church history or distorting it so as to be unrecognizable. Gieseler, Schaff charged, leaves European readers with many misconceptions, for example, that “love of money, cold selfishness, hypocritical piety, overweening conceit, and contempt for everything European” were the chief attributes of the American character, especially of Yankees, New Yorkers, and Pennsylvanians! His biased view was common thirty or forty years ago on the Continent, Schaff added.¹⁸⁵ At that time, to most German historians, “America was a terra incognita, or known only from vague and conflicting reports of travelers.” “American church history,” Schaff concluded, “remains to be written.” Is not America “the land of freedom and of the future,” where church-state separation flourishes?¹⁸⁶

As the above summary makes evident, the professors deemed no textbook fully adequate for American Protestant students’ use. Some texts by German authors were lacking in evangelical piety; almost all were too long for beginning students. The problem of textbooks was compounded by the lack of student access to primary sources.

Primary Sources

One feature obvious to readers today is the relative lack of primary source study in nineteenth-century American classrooms. Although the professors frequently urged their students to read various early Christian writings, the class presentation did not revolve around study and discussion of the sources. When, for example, Samuel Miller wished to impress upon his students the “decline” that soon infected the early church, he exhorted them, “Read Cyprian! Read Origen! Read Eusebius!”¹⁸⁷—but there is no suggestion that these authors were required reading for the class, nor, for that matter, that students had access to these texts.

Roswell Hitchcock taught his Union students the distinction between monumental sources and written sources.¹⁸⁸ He offered suggestions on where to find the primary written sources—civil laws, councils, papal bulls, the monastic Rules, liturgies, hymns, catechisms and confessions, in addition to theological writings. Among secondary sources, Hitchcock listed church histories from the second century onward, biographies of and monographs on famous figures in church history, including the Acta Sanctorum, of which he owned an entire set.¹⁸⁹ Many “auxiliary studies” should also be consulted.¹⁹⁰ One wonders if Hitchcock’s students were discouraged by his rather comprehensive list—if they were, they give no sign of it in their notes. As Hitchcock’s recommendations show, by his time contextualization had come to be a desideratum for the student of the early church.

Despite his admonition to students to consult the sources so they might judge the impartiality of historians, Hitchcock nevertheless conceded that the use of primary sources is “absolutely indispensable” only for those who teach and write church history. Yet even these do not always ground their works in the primary sources; in Germany, as well as in (admittedly deficient) England and America, many write on the basis of secondary accounts, using “the labor of others.” Even the best writers (Mosheim, Neander, Gieseler, Baur, and Niedner) sometimes quote ancient authors without verifying the citations. No one, Hitchcock added, can feel certain, relying only on secondary sources. With the materials now available, students can at least make a beginning in primary-source study.¹⁹¹

Philip Schaff, for his part, urged beginning students to acquire “some knowledge of the primary sources”—an admonition that once more suggests that such study was not the task of regular coursework. He noted the Edinburgh edition by Roberts and Donaldson of the Ante-Nicene Christian Library, and its American reprint. (Schaff in the 1880s instigated the publication of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series, as discussed in Chapter 1.) Yet he conceded that the sources are so vast that even the greatest historians must depend on the work of others, using collections, digests, and specialized monographs.¹⁹² One reviewer of Schaff’s History of the Christian Church, Volume 1, declared that Schaff himself “makes no pretension to an exclusive or even primary dependence upon the original sources,” although [in a concession startling to historians today] he uses them “whenever he deems it necessary.”¹⁹³

By the early 1890s, the patristic works that Schaff especially recommended to divinity students were largely available in either the Ante-Nicene Fathers series or the first volumes of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: namely, the Didache, I Clement, Polycarp’s Epistle, Ignatius’ Epistles, the Epistle to Diognetus,¹⁹⁴ Justin Martyr’s Apologies, Tertullian’s Apology, Cyprian’s Unity of the Church, Origen’s Against Celsus, Eusebius’ Church History, Augustine’s Confessions and City of God, and some of John Chrysostom’s Homilies.¹⁹⁵ The list makes evident that the ante-Nicene Fathers were considered more essential reading for divinity students than the post-Nicene: the former were closer to the inspired source, the New Testament, and were written before the church became immersed in intricate doctrinal tangles and elaborate ritual, beholden to ecclesiastical hierarchy. Characteristically, the Protestant professors devoted little or no time to the Cappadocian Fathers, perhaps because their writings were not readily available in translation, but also because their theology and rhetoric represented a “decline” from primitive simplicity.

More Primary Sources: The Ante-Nicene Fathers Series

The publication of the American edition of the Ante-Nicene Fathers series was such a welcome event for American seminary professors and students that it deserves mention here, even though its editor, Arthur Cleveland Coxe, was not a professor but a cleric.¹⁹⁶ Coxe’s series was largely a reprint from the Edinburgh edition of the Ante-Nicene Christian Library,¹⁹⁷ with a different ordering of the texts.¹⁹⁸ As Richard Pfaff notes, the neutral quality of the Edinburgh edition was “completely submerged” by Coxe’s strong theological [i.e., anti-Catholic] views,¹⁹⁹ which he expressed in his additional footnotes and “Elucidations.” It also differed from the patristic series edited by the Tractarians, the Library of the Fathers, which had focused on Christian writers of the fourth through sixth centuries.

Coxe deemed the Edinburgh editors of the Ante-Nicene Fathers guilty on several points: overly literal as translators,²⁰⁰ they failed to correct possible Romanizing interpretations,²⁰¹ incautiously ascribed schismatic or heretical views to various Church Fathers,²⁰² organized and printed their source materials in volumes inappropriate in terms of date and subjectmatter,²⁰³ and were tone-deaf to liturgical usage.²⁰⁴ Their lack requires a supplement, which Coxe was happy to provide.

His additions, Coxe wrote, aim “to note such corruptions or distortions of Patristic testimony as has been circulated, in the spirit of the forged Decretals, by those who carry on the old imposture by means essentially equivalent. Too long have they been allowed to speak to the popular mind as if the Fathers were their own.”²⁰⁵ Elsewhere he claimed that “garblings of patristic authorities” recently appearing in America render “an accurate and intelligent study of the Ante-Nicene Fathers a necessity for the American theologian.”²⁰⁶ Indeed, “the aggressions of an alien element” (i.e., Roman Catholics) now force scholars of Christianity to renew their study of “that virgin antiquity which is so fatal to its pretensions.”²⁰⁷ In the eight volumes to be published, Coxe was sure that the student would find “all that is needful to disarm Romanism,” to refute those “pretensions,” and to direct “honest and truth-loving spirits in the Roman Obedience” to a reformed Catholicism such as was represented by J. J. I. Döllinger and the “Old Catholics.”²⁰⁸ Coxe believed that the Apostolic Fathers and Scripture, taken together, supply “a succinct autobiography of the Spouse of Christ for the first two centuries.” Volume I was to provide the “supplement” (to the Scriptures) that should be “indispensable” to every scholar and all libraries.²⁰⁹

Coxe imagined the day when in the vast and still-unnamed regions of America, beautiful critical editions of the Ante-Nicene Fathers would be available—unlike the careless, inaccurate, and inelegant volumes of the Patrologia Migne.²¹⁰ His series, Coxe believed, would simultaneously enlighten Episcopalians about their origins and provide a bulwark against the evils of Roman Catholicism, past and present: for him, the ante-Nicene Fathers remain the standard by which all subsequent Christian history is to be judged.

Coxe’s introductions, notes, and “Elucidations” provide a fascinating window onto American social and intellectual life in the mid- to late nineteenth century. To name just some of his favorite topics: home, family, children, motherhood and women’s roles²¹¹ (often in opposition to Roman Catholic praise of celibacy²¹²); immigrants to America²¹³ (“vast and mongrel”²¹⁴); and the evils of German scholarship that lead to unbelief.²¹⁵ Whatever the deficiency of Coxe’s series, at least it provided numerous primary source texts for American students.

Libraries

If such were the difficulties that the lack of textbooks and primary source collections posed for teaching early Christian history, the libraries at various American seminaries proved similarly problematic. Several of the professors here studied served as their institution’s “librarian,” gathering statistics on their collections for annual reports—and making heartfelt pleas to trustees for more library funds. Trustees, who had been enthusiastic to found a seminary or “theological department,” often seemed oblivious to the sums required annually to maintain and increase a collection.

The American professors frequently expressed the disheartening contrast between their access to books and that of their European counterparts. In their publications, personal correspondence, and travel diaries, they often noted the size of European university and national libraries, as well as of professors’ personal collections.²¹⁶ They recorded their efforts to buy books for themselves and their seminaries during their trips abroad. To American professors who had seen European libraries, the conditions in their own country appeared discouraging.

For example, George Fisher, studying in Germany in 1852–1853, registered amazement that Tholuck owned around 5000 books. (Apparently the library’s size deterred Tholuck from retiring to Switzerland: how to transport the collection over the Alps?)²¹⁷ In 1860, Henry Smith reported that Alexander von Humboldt by the end of his life had amassed about 10,000 volumes for his personal library.²¹⁸

The size of major European libraries was a source of wonder and envy to the American professors. In 1862, Henry Smith noted that the Imperial Library in Paris [the Bibliothe`que Nationale] had 1,800,000 volumes and seventeen miles of shelves to house them. Two years later, he reported that the British Museum in London had just spent 75,000 pounds ($477,500, he calculated), adding 107,784 items to the library alone. Even in Spain—not known by Protestant professors as a center of distinguished recent scholarship—the government contributed about six and a half million dollars in gold for its national libraries annually.²¹⁹ America was clearly lacking.

American Professors’ Personal Libraries

Given the small number of library books available to the American professors and students when seminaries first opened, professors accrued as many books as they could for their personal collections, which they sometimes shared with students. For two of the professors, Samuel Miller and Roswell Hitchcock, interesting data remain regarding their personal libraries.

Princeton Theological Seminary Archives has an undated “Catalogue of Dr. Miller’s Library” (consisting of around 2400 items) found at his death.²²⁰ The list, organized by title, sometimes preceded by the author’s name, reveals that among the patristic sources he possessed were William Wake’s translation of The Genuine Epistles of the Apostolical Fathers in its 1810 edition; the Epistles of Ignatius; the collected works of Irenaeus, Tertullian, Cyprian, Athanasius, and Augustine; Chrysostom’s On the Priesthood; Eusebius’ Ecclesiastica Historia; Gregory Nazianzus’ Querela;²²¹ and Origen’s Contra Celsum. Of secondary works, Miller owned a number of Church Histories by Baxter, Campbell, Dupin, Gedder, Haweis, Milner, Mosheim (in two different translations, by McLaine and by Murdock); Histories of Christianity by Benson and several by Neander in translation; Clarkson’s Primitive Episcopacy; two unspecified volumes on Arianism; a book on the Apostolic Church; Bower’s History of the Popes; Ludovici’s History of the Council of Nicaea (in Latin); Jowett’s Christian Researches; Cave’s Lives of the Apostles; the Magdeburg Ecclesiastical History;²²² Jansen’s Augustinus, plus Bibles, biblical reference works, and a few books on ancient Judaism.

Miller’s library is notable in several respects. First, students marveled at its size, considered extraordinary by those who had never seen a larger private collection.²²³ Second, the catalog shows that German scholarship—such as Neander’s writings—had migrated to Miller’s study only in English translation: the day of German-language scholarship was yet to come. Third, the catalog also suggests that many of the patristic writings that Miller cited in his polemics against Episcopalians and others were derived not from first-hand knowledge of the primary sources, but from secondary accounts.

Roswell Hitchcock, more fortunate in his personal library collection than most seminary teachers in America, owned the entire Acta Sanctorum (of which there were then only three or four sets in America), 34 volumes of the Baronius-Raynaldi Ecclesiastical Annals, and 22 volumes of Herzog’s Encyclopedia, in addition to 7000 or so other books.²²⁴ At his death, he left between 3000 and 4000 volumes to Union, including an edition of Du Cange’s seventeenth-century glossary of medieval and late Latin. His set of Lange’s 25-volume Commentary on the Bible and twenty-two volumes of Herzog’s Encyclopedia went to Bangor Theological Seminary; and a complete set of 40 volumes of Bibliotheca Sacra was shipped to the Syrian College at Beirut. Some books were also left to his son-in-law, Professor Samuel Emerson, who taught Greek, modern languages, and history at the University of Vermont.²²⁵

As noted above, 1800 volumes from Philip Schaff’s personal library went to the Union Seminary library upon his death.²²⁶ In 1873, a few years after he began teaching at Union, Schaff bought for his own library a set of Migne’s Patrologia from (a not otherwise identified) Mrs. French in New Haven.²²⁷ Some professors, it appears, were able to compensate for their institution’s lack of books with their personal collections.

Seminary Libraries

Various seminaries built their collections by buying the libraries of retired or deceased European—largely German—professors. In 1856, Harvard Divinity School acquired 4000 volumes from the library of Professor Friedrich Lücke of Göttingen.²²⁸ By the early 1880s (so Hitchcock told his students), Thilo’s library had gone to New Haven, that is, to Yale; Niedner’s, to Andover Seminary; and Hengstenberg’s, to the Baptist seminary in Chicago. Neander’s library, secured by the Baptist Theological Seminary in Rochester,²²⁹ was disappointingly small, but Hitchcock explained that Neander did not need to own many books himself because he had access to the excellent libraries in Berlin.²³⁰ The collection that grounded Union’s library will be discussed below.

The professors were also delegated to buy books for their institution’s library on trips abroad. Letters and notes in their travel diaries detail how much they spent—often more than they had been allotted—and sometimes, what they had been able to buy. In 1826, for example, the young Charles Hodge in Europe was delegated by Seminary officials at Princeton to deal with European booksellers.²³¹ In 1866, on a European trip, Smith purchased $600 worth of books for the Union library.²³² Philip Schaff on his many trips abroad bought books in London, Rome, and Germany for the libraries at Mercersburg and later at Union.²³³ In June 1890, the president of Union wrote to Schaff in Europe to restrain his book-buying: “I hope you will not be tempted to run us into debt.”²³⁴

In 1832, of seminary libraries in America, Andover had the largest collection (10,000 volumes), followed by Princeton (6000 volumes).²³⁵ In 1844, The Society of Clergymen noted that all seminary libraries in the United States held collectively about 130,000 volumes; how much better (they argued) it would be if there were fewer seminaries with more books for each. They contrasted the paltry state of American libraries with those in Berlin (over 500,000 volumes), Göttingen (nearly 300,000), Munich and Paris (nearly 800,000 each). As noted earlier, the combined collections of the nine most important theological libraries in America, the clergymen reported, contain fewer than one-quarter of the volumes available at Munich or Paris.²³⁶

Henry Smith, who served as the librarian at Union Seminary for much of his career, was keenly interested in the size of collections. As the editor of the “Theological Intelligence” column of the American Theological Review,²³⁷ he garnered information on libraries from various journals to report in his column. In the mid-nineteenth century, university libraries and public libraries vied with each other in terms of their holdings. For example, in 1860 Smith noted that the Astor Library in New York—the largest public library in the country, which provided the foundation for the New York Public Library—housed 80,000 books, topping Harvard University’s 74,000 volumes.²³⁸ At Columbia in 1876, by contrast, the library contained only about 25,000 volumes, and was open for one and a half hours a day for books to be checked out.²³⁹ Smith’s statistics also suggest that the 1860s, despite the nation’s massive problems during and after the Civil War, were years of library expansion.

THE SEMINARY LIBRARY AT PRINCETON

Although the founders of the Theological Seminary at Princeton in 1812 hoped to establish a large theological library, they faced the same difficulties that other seminaries soon would. The first professor at the Seminary, Archibald Alexander, served as librarian and kept the Seminary’s books in his house. By 1817, however, the collection had received its own new building and acquired a deputy librarian.²⁴⁰ As Samuel Miller complained to his students, we lack books, and public libraries are few.²⁴¹ Miller expressed regrets to his students that many books he would recommend were not obtainable, so we must “grope our way as well as we can.” Americans (he told students at some unspecified date) are hindered from securing many useful books from abroad, due to “the state of our foreign relations”—perhaps the aftermath of the War of 1812?²⁴²

A report by an unidentified author in 1822 regarding the Seminary at Princeton remarks that the present library was “very small and imperfect.” It then contained “comparatively few of the books which are most indispensable to Theological Students,” and even the ones it did own were in single copies, thus not adequate for student needs.²⁴³ A fireproof building was a chief desideratum: the writer reminded his audience that the greater part of the Princeton College library had been destroyed by fire in 1802.²⁴⁴ By 1823, eleven years after the Seminary’s founding, the library had amassed about 4000 volumes.²⁴⁵ This number grew in the years to come: by 1830, to over 6000 volumes;²⁴⁶ by 1850, to 9000; by 1879, to over 31,000 books and 8500 pamphlets; and by 1900, to 64,544 books and nearly 27,000 pamphlets.²⁴⁷

In the early days of American seminaries, it was not imagined that libraries were places where students would work; rather, libraries were repositories from which students might retrieve books for use in their own rooms. This situation is reflected in the hours during which seminary libraries were available to professors and students. As late as the 1850s, the library at Princeton Seminary opened its doors just twice a week for the borrowing of books; after 1868, it was open two hours every weekday.²⁴⁸ In the 1870s, Cornell University’s decision to keep its library open from 8 a.m. till 6 p.m. was considered a major innovation.²⁴⁹ Given these conditions, it is not surprising that writers commenting on German seminars often marvel that students have their own work-spaces in rooms where books and journals are readily available for their use.

THE LIBRARIES AT HARVARD

In 1816, George Ticknor, one of the first American scholars to study in Germany, complained to the steward of Harvard College’s meager library that the 20,000 volumes at Harvard paled before the 200,000 at Göttingen. Libraries are what make a university, he indignantly asserted.²⁵⁰ In the decades to come, Harvard’s libraries would become the envy of many theological institutions.

In the mid-1820s, as work was started on Divinity Hall at Harvard, the Trustees of the Theological Education Society and the Corporation of the College appropriated $2000 to acquire books for the Theological Institution: this marked the beginning of the Harvard Divinity School library.²⁵¹ By mid-century, the theological library at Harvard had grown, despite the dwindling student population. By 1870, it had 16,000 volumes,²⁵² and was declared by Edward Everett Hale to be “the best and largest theological library in the country.”²⁵³ (Apparently Hale did not know that by then, Union Seminary’s library topped Harvard Divinity School’s.) Yet the library was cramped, not fireproofed, and open only two hours a day for dispensing books. Although a permanent librarian was hired, when he died in 1876, the faculty was forced to resume the librarian’s duties.²⁵⁴ For seminar work in history to be developed, libraries had to be reconceived as “laboratories” (as Ephraim Emerton put it), not merely as storehouses for books—and hence be open for students to consult many books at a time.²⁵⁵ In the early twentieth century, the Andover Seminary library, which had been the envy of other developing seminaries a century previous, was merged with the library of the Harvard Divinity School.²⁵⁶

THE LIBRARY AT UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY

When in 1837 Edward Robinson accepted the appointment in biblical studies at the newly founded Union Seminary, he argued that the fledgling Seminary’s library should have “a complete series of the work of the Fathers, so called, in the best editions, and with the proper apparatus,” as well as the best editions of Greek and Roman writers.²⁵⁷ Some years passed before this desideratum was filled.

The development of the Union Seminary library benefited from the secularization of the religious houses in Germany, most notably, the Benedictine Monastery of St. Mary at Paderborn. In response to political turmoil and anticipating the dissolution of their monastery during the Napoleonic Wars, the monks divided the library collection among themselves. About 13,000 volumes²⁵⁸ were placed in the safekeeping of a monk whose family name was Leander Van Ess. Van Ess took the volumes with him when he became a professor at the University of Marburg in 1812, and upon retirement, offered his library for sale. Apprised of this opportunity, Edward Robinson, on a trip to Europe and Palestine, was commissioned by the Directors of Union to buy the Van Ess collection, which became the nucleus of the Union library. The total cost upon the books’ arrival in New York was $5070.08.²⁵⁹ Some years later, Roswell Hitchcock suggested to his students that the Van Ess Library at Union—so much richer than the “disappointing” collection of Neander’s library at Rochester—had ushered in a new era in scholarship.²⁶⁰

In May 1866, the librarian at Union reported that the library now had about 25,000 books.²⁶¹ A few years later, the library received about 4000 volumes of British history and theology from David H. McAlpin, which became a new collection of its own.²⁶² From an unidentified and undated clipping in Schaff’s scrapbooks at Union, we learn that the Seminary had received a gift of nearly 7000 volumes from Dr. Edwin Hatfield’s library and around 250 books on philology (especially Indo-European linguistics) from Professor Benjamin W. Dwight.²⁶³ In May 1875, librarian Henry Smith reported that the library had now amassed about 33,500 volumes and was “the most valuable in the country.”²⁶⁴ In 1877–1878, just after Smith’s death, Union tried to raise $5000 by subscription to acquire his personal library. This attempt appears not entirely successful, for the Board finally purchased Smith’s collection—but paid only $2500.²⁶⁵

The professor in charge of the library—Edward Robinson from 1841 to 1850, Henry Smith from 1850/1851 to 1876, and Charles Briggs from 1876 to 1883²⁶⁶—had to solicit the Board every year for funds, apparently not a standard budget item. In October 1851, for example, the library committee asked for $150 to buy “German works on Church History.” Board members hesitated due to the Seminary’s impoverished condition, but “Professor Smith forced [their] hand.” In May 1853, the Board voted to compensate Smith $500 “for general and special services as librarian during the present year.”²⁶⁷

Professors at Union often complained that it was easier to convince the Board of Directors to establish a new professorship than it was to secure adequate funds for books. Throughout the 1850s, the professors decried the state of the library, despite the installation of gas lights in 1853.²⁶⁸ Along the way, New York ministers who favored the Union experiment delivered heart-rending pleas to their congregations to give until it hurt: the man who could give $100,000 for “a theological library worthy of New-York” would build an enduring monument for himself, Reverend George Prentiss claimed.²⁶⁹

Throughout the 1860s, faculty constantly pressed for more library funds. The librarian in his report of May 1863 requested an endowment for the library equal to a professorship, asking the Board to find a benefactor.²⁷⁰ Over the years, Smith besieged Union officials to build a fireproof library, claiming that some parts of the collection could not be replaced at all, and other parts only at great expense.²⁷¹ Finally, in 1880 ex-Governor Edwin D. Morgan gave $100,000, part of which was designated for a fireproof building.²⁷²

THE LIBRARY AT THE YALE THEOLOGICAL DEPARTMENT

In 1829 the theological library at Yale was open once a week for one hour (Thursday afternoons from 2 to 3, except during vacations). Students were allowed to take out two books once every two weeks.²⁷³ In 1830, the theological division had increased its holdings to more than 6000 volumes;²⁷⁴ by 1861 to 67,000 volumes plus around 7000 pamphlets, with 1800 more books and pamphlets at the American Oriental Society, headquartered at Yale. Moreover, the library had by 1861 been allotted around $1500 per year for books, then considered a princely sum, and $25,000 has been set up as a permanent fund to increase the college library.²⁷⁵ That George Fisher’s assumption of the Chair of Ecclesiastical History had made an impact is shown by the increase in books by German church historians—Hagenbach, Neander, Mosheim, Gieseler—that students now checked out of the library.²⁷⁶

A new building planned for the Theology Department in 1868–1869 was to have a “large library and reading room,” the latter of which was to be kept open at all hours for the use of seminary students. In 1870 a “Reference Library” was established, modeled after the British Museum reading room, open three hours in the afternoons. A newspaper article announcing the Reference Library exclaimed that it would be almost as if “each [student] had such a library in his own room.”²⁷⁷

Thus from small beginnings, “infrastructural” resources grew along with the seminaries. Nevertheless, it is sobering to recall the scanty resources with which the professors in America worked as they aimed to create theological education for a new age and a new country. The inadequacy of the material conditions under which they taught students and wrote their books and articles renders poignant Henry Adams’s claim in the frontispiece of his book: that Americans of the year 2000 might wonder how their counterparts of the nineteenth century, as childlike, ignorant, and weak in force as men of the fourth, should have done so much.²⁷⁸ How they did, and the intellectual, theological, and philosophical problems they faced, are the subjects of the next chapters.