Sequel to "Our liberal movement..."

Contents

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I. The Old School and its Work .... 1

II. German Influence . . . ; 22

I. The Old School And Its Woek. 1

ONE year ago William Henry Furness, then in his ninety-fourth year, — the widest known, the most venerated, and the best beloved name among us, — was appointed the speaker of this occasion. It was an act of confiding trust in his perpetual youth ; for of him that may be said more literally than of any other whom we have known, which Homer says of Nestor, that " from his tongue flowed speech more sweet than honey, yet already two generations of mortal men were passed away, while he stood as a prince among the third." And, when some of us heard him at the conference in Washington, four months later, we listened to a voice as resonant and firm, if not quite so mellow, as when he spoke to us in his earlier prime.

It is, as you will easily understand, with much diffidence 1 and reluctantly that I have consented to occupy the hour which that voice should have filled ;

1 An address before the Alumni of the Harvard Divinity School, June 23, 1896.

1 1

A THE OLD SCHOOL AND ITS WORK.

and I did not promise to undertake the task until it proved impossible to be undertaken by some one at once more nearly contemporary with Dr. Furness and more closely associated with his earlier life-work. Besides, it was thought fitting that this should be an occasion not only or chiefly of personal commemoration, but for bringing into a single view the work of an entire period, which the passing away of that one life seems suddenly to have thrown back in the perspective, and to have made a scene in history by itself.

Two circumstances, which I will not dwell on, set this view of our topic in special relief to-day, — the recent passing away of so many of the " Old Guard " among our ministers, making a death-list in the last eighteen months of ten, whose average age was considerably over eighty, and the average length of their ordained service nearly sixty years ; 1 and, second, the completion of seventy years since the building and consecration of this Divinity Hall in which we are now met. And I may add that the reason of my speaking is that what I shall offer is in the way of personal testimony rather than an historical survey simply or a general essay, since every name I shall have to recall in these memories is that of one toward whom I have stood in some direct personal

1 Their names in the order of seniority are : Thomas T. Stone (1801-95); W. H. Furness (1802-96); J. H. Morison (1S08-96) ; H. A. Miles (1809-95) ; G. W. Briggs (1810-95) ; F. W. Holland (1811-95) ; E. B. Willson (1820-95) ; J. F. Moors (1821-95) ; O. B. Frothingham (1822-95); Augustus Woodbury (1825-95). Dr. Stone had been associated with our body since 1846. The otbers were all members of the Harvard Divinity School.

ANDREWS NORTON". 3

relation of respect, gratitude, affection, kindred, or mutual help.

The history of this School properly begins with the time when a regular post-graduate course of theology was established here under the presidency of Dr. Kirkland. The class of 1811, I believe, was the first to which this course was open. But the Divinity School apart from the College was not formally organized till 1819, with the appointment of Andrews Norton as Professor of Sacred Literature. It will be proper, therefore, to begin our survey by considering briefly what that first appointment signified in the teachings and character of the School.

The date here given was, as you may remember, just twenty years before Professor Norton led the way in vehement protest against the newer liberalism heralded in Emerson's Divinity School address, which he denounced as " the latest form of infidelity." Here it is difficult for us of a younger generation to do justice to his position, or perhaps even to understand it. It is one of the tragedies of the intellectual life when a sincere and able leader of opinion finds his maturest work already outgrown before it has reached its final shape by the advance of general thought, and outlives, as Mr. Norton did for fifteen years, his own cordial sympathy with that advance. Till he gave up his professorship in 1830, his was unquestionably the dominating mind in this school, which was largely guided by his influence till the new tide of opinion had well set in. Even then his sharpest opponents spoke — Theodore Parker, for example, spoke to me — with a singular

4 THE OLD SCHOOL AND ITS WOKK.

deference of his unchallenged scholarship and rare mental ability. We are apt to think of him as merely a defender of Unitarian opinion on its negative side, in " a statement of reasons for not believing " certain articles of the popular creed, or else as holding an advocate's brief for " the genuineness of the Gospels," which he maintained, with laborious erudition, in an argument whose sense has grown obsolete and even unintelligible in the light of later criticism, — nay, was already clearly seen by many to be so before the argument appeared in a printed book. I remember a conversation with him in 1850, in which this topic (it is true) was not touched upon, but which left on my mind the impression of a certain intellectual loneliness, if not despondency, which one grieves to find in a spirit so brave, clear, and widely accomplished as his. He was then sixty-four years old. But we should think rather of the work he did at twenty-six : the strenuous and tonic quality he gave then to the earlier liberalism in the " General Eepository ; " his great service as the pioneer of a wider literature and a higher criticism among us in the " Select Journal" conducted by him and that accomplished scholar, his friend, Charles Folsom ; the welcome he gave to some of the purest and tenderest voices of the modern muse ; and the share he has contributed, as a true religious poet, to our own treasuries of devotion, in a few hymns that are among the very finest of their class. And we should remember, too, the filial respect and gratitude with which his pupils in theology owned their debt to his grave and

ANDREWS NORTON. 5

scrupulous criticism, while they might seem — as Dr. Furness did — to be giving it a turn that would cost him many a pang. Surely, it was no ill augury for the work of this School that for eleven of its first years this veteran scholar and critic guided its teachings by his master mind.

Though devoted from his youth to the study of theology and the service of the higher intellectual life, and though himself a man of strong religious conviction, Mr. Norton was the only professor in this school, down to the appointment of Ezra Abbot, who had not actually occupied a pulpit. Possibly, this may have been from distaste of natural temperament, or reluctance to sacrifice that "quiet and still air of delightful studies " in which his lot was cast. It was, at any rate, a mark of his sensitive independence, perhaps of a certain proud humility, that he always refused the academic title which is conventionally held proper for a theological professor : he was never "Doctor" or "Keverend," to the end of his days. These titles he held the due only of ordained workers in the ministry. A keen critic he always was, as we have heard, of the pulpit exercises of other men, younger men, his pupils here; and if they were sometimes more daunted than helped, as I fear they were, by the severe standard he judged them by, no doubt they would feel the value of it afterward. It was a man of his own training, we must remember, George Eipley, who stood out against him boldest and longest on a question touching the foundations of religious belief ; and, whatever else his students learned or failed to learn, I am sure he taught them respect for perfect integrity and honest candor of the spoken word.

The next influence comparable with Professor Norton's in amount and depth for its effect on the life nurtured here was, I suppose, that of Henry Ware, Junior, a man of radically different mental temper, but absolutely harmonious in conviction and aim. More than any other, I should say, he was during his twelve years' service the pastor and apostle in his calling, — in a very special sense, what Matthew Arnold so finely says of Emerson, " the friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit." He was put and sustained in the place of service for which he was felt to be singularly fit, by the special contributions of friends who created that place expressly for him. He was a modest but excellent scholar, a man of very precious and tender pastoral experience, of poetic gift, also, who would (his brother said of him) have desired more than anything the vocation of a poet, shy of native temperament, and often slow of utterance, yet capable of fervent, ready, direct, and incisive speech, of sympathies warm, wide, quick, generous, and helpful, and, as much as any man we have ever had among us, having what we may call the very genius of piety, — a choice gift which he shared with a few such men as Channing, Furness, Gannett, Dr. Hosmer, and Ephraim Peabody. It is impossible not to associate with his influence one very noble phase of the life that has gone forth from this School : I mean a certain devoted and heroic consecration to a ministry of holiness, which I might illustrate by

HENEY WARE, JUNIOR. 7

many examples, but will here mention only two, — our own " Apostle Eliot " of St. Louis, and that beloved and valiant " saint of all the humanities," Samuel Joseph May, — men alike in their clear insight and great moral courage, though ever so wide apart in the lines of service they were severally true to. This quality in its teaching we associate as distinctly with the name of Ware as we connect its order of intellectual service with those of Norton, Palfrey, and Noyes. I wish there were time to speak fitly of them all. But here I must deal with currents of influence, not with names of men ; and there will be some now present who, with a certain filial gratitude, will always associate the particular influence I speak of with him who is recalled oftener than any other I can remember by an epithet unusual among us, and very precise in its application, as "the sainted Ware."

His name reminds us, again, that this has never, as its proper title, been called a school of Theology, but a school of Divinity. It may be well, just here, to say a word of what this designation seems to imply. I will do it by dwelling a moment on an aspect of this School, or of the life sheltered and trained in it, which we see perhaps most distinctly when we look back to those years among the " thirties," or a little earlier, and recall the men whose life-work was inspired and shaped here then, who make our best illustration of the characteristic thing here done. Kepresentative names are those of Ephraim and Andrew Peabody, George Ripley, Samuel Atkins Eliot, James Freeman Clarke, William Henry Charming, Henry Whitney Bellows, and Theodore Parker. I choose these from a long list, not merely for their eminence, but for the variety of gifts they showed. Certainly it would not be easy to devise any one type or descriptive name that would fairly include them all. But they seem to me to illustrate very well a feature in this School, which may possibly distinguish it favorably among some other schools more famous and more richly endowed. The complaint always made of it in its earlier years, was its poverty of endowment. Two men, it was said by way of reproach, were made to do the work of five or six : the first thing wanted, we were incessantly told, was a wealthier endowment. But to such complaint I should always reply that we must not " think that the gift of God can be purchased with money." The essentials of the higher education are a consecrated will, intellectual opportunity, a wide, buoyant, and elastic atmosphere of thought, sufficient guidance — but not too much — in the wide wilderness of learning, and, above all, great mental leisure and freedom, with great joy and wealth of spiritual companionship. And it may be fairly questioned whether all these may not be had at their best in the inverse ratio of that elaborated equipment which is often more a burden than a help to the nobler intellectual life. Even if we suppose poverty in such things to have its difficulties, yet it is through difficulties, not facilities, that men win the temper fittest for their work in life.

But I am not speaking here of difficulties, — here,

A SCHOOL OF DIVINITY. 9

where university life is overburdened with its wealth of opportunity. I speak only of the two essential things, — large freedom of choice and large leisure of companionship, — these, with the motive and the guidance that are just enough for the best uses of that freedom and that leisure. It has never seemed to me that we suffered any serious loss in that our teachers were only two, when those two were Henry Ware and Dr. Noyes. I am not speaking here of the theological department in a university, — which needs (no doubt) a wide variety of special learning, — but of a Divinity School such as this was sixty years ago, where the first need is personal influence and inspiration, restrained but not dominated by critical erudition. And I am not saying that this is a better thing than the other, but only that it was a good thing in its way to have, while we were waiting for the other.

Nay, for the time we have in view it may even be contended that it was better than the other would have been if we could have had the other then. The liberal movement, which in a way it has been the business of this School to guide and help, is a movement even less of thought than it is of life, a movement even less of theology than of practical conduct. And at that time its aim and method were far less precise than now. The questions that were coming up had more to do with the vague idealism which we term " Transcendental" than they had with the very precise and tangible scientific problems of the present day. Nobody knew, for one thing, or could possibly suspect, how far the advance of criticism would affect our interpretation of the Bible, or how far the advance of natural science would invade and alter our very conception of human duty and destiny. At such a time, with an astounding amount of shallow and restless radicalism, with appalling questions of society and politics looming, too, in the horizon, it was of far more account to the student that his mental atmosphere should be elastic and wide than that his mental training should be carried on within rigid lines. At such a time there is an inconvenience in being committed to too sharply defined opinions. Opinion, to be worth anything, must be long held in solution in a medium (so far as may be) transparent and colorless, and must crystallize very slowly about some nucleus of positive conviction, which is the gift not of logic, but of life. No opinion that was ever held, I should think, was more sincerely held, more wholesome, more manly, conducive whether to a purer piety or a more devoted humanity than the form of supernaturalism in which Norton and Ware and their whole generation were trained ; yet in the next generation it was destined to be completely outgrown, while they, as honest men as ever lived, could never learn or endure to see it so. That was in one way a great pity, causing as it did painful misunderstandings and great loss of moral force. But it would have been a far greater pity if, in the temper of that day, there had been here an equipment of learning that should compact that half-way view into a fullgrown system and an intellectual creed.

From that worse evil, it may be, the very poverty

ITS METHODS OF STUDY. 11

of this School protected us. At least, there was not a corps of teachers numerous enough, or well enough armed with modern appliances of learning, to tie us down by exactions of routine-work to the mastery of an elaborated method in theology, which we should see now to be painfully inadequate. I think that, on the whole, a healthier growth has come of it than if there had been. I do not easily associate such wealth, vigor, variety, and independence in the religious life as we recall in the names I recited a little while ago, — take only what is signified to us in the last two, Bellows and Parker, names that belong to the period next before my own, — with the stricter training appropriate to a purely scientific theology that is up to the present standard. That would mean a longer time of pupilage than is good for the average man, — at any rate, longer than would have been possible to us then. I give my testimony for what it is worth ; but I know that, for one, the best piece of work I did while here was entirely outside all school courses, actual or conceivable : it was an attempt to master the principles of the modern scientific method, with such guidance as could be had then, in the seven thick volumes of Whewell and John Stuart Mill, aided by some light in pure mathematics from my near friend of those days, Thomas Hill, and brightened by a good deal of talk with President Walker, who was so generous of his shrewd, wise, kindly, and helpful companionship to us younger men. This may serve as, if not a brilliant yet a useful example of what I suppose was very common, — the accidental and incidental

12 THE OLD SCHOOL AND ITS WOKK.

benefit that befell from the less formal methods of a Divinity School in that earlier day.

I will now attempt to recall one or two aspects of the field where onr life-work lay, for which we had been preparing under such influences as I have described. The date I have here in mind is 1840, which marks the end of the period spoken of hitherto and the beginning of that in which I became a sharer in its tasks. Our life-work was to be found in that part of the Lord's vineyard for which we were in training, to dress it and to keep it, every man according to his several ability.

The soil of that vineyard was just then remarkably fertile in " isms," which grew in it like weeds. These I would define as so many off-hand creeds, of one article aniece, which the believer in it accepted with a certain romantic faith, and spent his life in thrusting upon the consciences of his fellow-men. All these more or less abortive creeds had, I think, an aim more mundane than the curious other-worldliness which has come into being since the famous " Chardon Street Conference," where they swarmed preparatory to taking flight, — where I witnessed a great twinkling and sputtering of new lights, some of them set rather awkwardly in their candlesticks, and not nearly so neatly trimmed as hotly burning. This took place, we must remember, while Brook Farm was an enterprise just set on foot, and five years before the first advent of modern spiritism. Some of those embryo schemes were of a certain vague but high idealism, and were the precursors of the

FORMS OF RADICALISM. 13

Theosophy and Christian Science of our day. Some met the social problems of the time in a generous, devoted, and heroic temper, testified in brave campaigns of conscience, such as Christian socialism, the temperance reform, and (most chivalrous of all) the " old-school " antislavery crusade. Some were not much more than the whim of a few eccentrics, — the no-Sabbath, no-property, no-government, no-resistance leaguers. But, in general, they were " sports," or offshoots, of that growth of modern liberalism, suddenly become conscious of itself, and without the experience of that twofold discipline which has so sternly held them in check during the half -century which has elapsed since, — the discipline of fact, painfully learned through the struggle that came to a crisis in our Civil War, with that rather chaotic chapter which describes our political performance since ; the discipline of science, — for the time I speak of was twenty years before Darwin had brought home to the common mind the fact of evolution in natural things, or Spencer had expounded the general law which has greatly chastened and chilled the revolutionary temper so vagrant and rampant then.

And, it must be remembered, all these escapades of moral knight-errantry took a shape in this community, with its Puritan antecedents, at once serious, sternly practical, and even, in a sense, intensely religious. Each, in its fashion,, set itself about taking the kingdom of heaven by violence ; each, no doubt sincerely, deemed itself the one indispensable gateway to the New Jerusalem, the earthly paradise. It may be easily seen, then, what a warp must have been given to the minds in training for their life-work here. Those minds had chosen their vocation because it represented to them the ideal side of life. They were for that very reason susceptible to this chaotic clamor of many tongues, and fascinated by some one or another phase of that ethical ideal, which glances in facets as multitudinous as a cut and polished gem. How would the sober tradition of their religious culture be invaded, how would the grave lessons of their theological or philosophic training be beguiled, by these so many voices from the world about, when not one of those voices, as their own Scripture itself assured them, was without its proper signification ? Who knew whether it might not be the one voice to show you or me the particular path it was ordained for us to follow, forsaking every other ?

In looking through the catalogue of these years, we see how large a proportion of those educated here have found their real vocation in some other thing than what they seemed to have chosen. Life is so different from our theories and plans of life ! The liberal ministry, as we have sought it or accepted it, has been often said to be like certain localities, which are good to grow up in, but particularly good to emigrate away from. This may be a drawback in a profession, or in the education that prepares one for a profession ; but it need not be a disaster or a reproach. It is a special glory of the life educated here that it has turned so easily

JOHN GORHAM PALFEEY. 15

to so large a variety of outside work. Among its ministers of the Word there have been a fair proportion better known to the public as teachers, historians, artists, or poets ; some as agents of public charities, literary editors and critics, or correctors of the press ; some few as soldiers valiant in the field, or men of high authority in public station. All this was in answer to the demand of a restless time, a great national crisis, an immature civilization, a fast-growing, ever-hopeful community. It was a part of the work this School had to do, — a gift to the world not inferior, perhaps, to ever so imposing a record of ecclesiastics, scholiasts, and devotees.

How could I better illustrate this feature of its history than by the name of that noble friend of my earlier studies and my after ministry, — John Gorham Palfrey, eight years professor in this School? As the successor of Buckminster and Everett, he had dignified a pulpit not second in lustre to any of that time with laborious and accomplished service. As instructor here, he, among other tasks, prepared a text-book of several Oriental dialects, and was a pioneer in our first attempts at a scientific criticism of the Old Testament. As a member of Congress, later on, he sacrificed popularity to honest independence, becoming one of the original founders of the Free Soil party. As postmaster of Boston, he was a reformer of official methods, and set an example, which some would deem fantastic, of scrupulous integrity in his accounts. Always a laborious student, the well-known classic historian of New England, and able among the ablest editors of the " North American Keview," he was, as a gentleman, cultivated and courteous, with abounding vivacity and wit. As a man of conscience, he set the high example of liberating nineteen slaves whom he had selected as his share in a family inheritance, and generously aiding them afterwards, as if dependent members of his own household. Such was the versatile and brilliant intellectual life he brought to this high service. By so much was the theologian ennobled in the man !

I have spoken of Dr. Palfrey as a pioneer among us in the scientific criticism of the Old Testament. This is better seen in his attempt, published in 1840, at a constructive theory of the book of Genesis, — which he regarded as a compilation from earlier sources by the hand of Moses, — than in his defence of the Mosaic authority of the Pentateuch throughout, which is quite on the lines of the conventional apologists. These lines were broken into, four years later, with a much bolder hand, by Mr. Norton in his " Note on the Old Testament," which is as radical in 'tone as anything we have had since, but for its very characteristic reserve touching Moses and Elijah. Dr. Noyes's argument on Messianic prophecy, in the " Christian Examiner" of 1834, — which brought out the famous hint of prosecution under the old Massachusetts law of blasphemy, — we may take to have been (however heretical it looked) a piece of legitimate textual criticism ; and it is not, perhaps, to be counted as a conscious departure from the tradi-

THE LATER CRITICISM. 17

tional point of view. His eminent service to this School by his intellectual candor, honesty, and courage, in guiding it through a critical period of transition, by which he earned a debt of gratitude from his immediate students such as was never quite due to any other, belongs to a time considerably later than that I have here in view. But these three, taken together, show how completely the later method of thinking that prevails among us, both literary and historical, which in the last half-century has almost wholly blotted out the older view, was an outgrowth of the training of this School. Dr. Furness's tender and sympathetic treatment of the gospel story, which ingenuously attempts to identify natural and supernatural, while keeping close to the letter of the record, claims to follow out legitimately the lessons he had learned under Norton's teaching, since what it holds to have been natural in Jesus would be supernatural in anybody else. And it was only one easy step in advance when Theodore Parker, with temper and motive widely different from theirs, threw wide open to public gaze the gateway of the course that has been followed since. Emerson's address in this very chapel in 1838, — the controversy between Norton and Eipley that followed the next year, — the group of later eloquent expounders, including John Weiss, Samuel Johnson, Octavius Frothingham, Samuel Longfellow, and William Potter, not to speak of work done by their associates still living, — are so many dates that connect every phase of the advancing liberalism in

18 THE OLD SCHOOL AND ITS WOKK.

theology with names, influences, and traditions belonging to this School. Not one of them betrays a motive merely academic, speculative, critical, or scientific. Every one made a step forward into a new and wider intellectual life. No matter how frank the negation, it always sought, not a narrower or feebler, but a larger and a robuster faith.

In this sketch I have had in view a definite period in the history of this School, — a period which ended fifty-six years ago, and had most to do with shaping out that life whose general features we have been trying to retrace. For this reason I have said nothing as yet, and can say but a few words now in closing, of two men to whom I am personally indebted very much, whose best work in life was too closely related with our present topic to be quite left out in our survey, — Convers Francis and Frederic Henry Hedge.

Professor Francis was somewhat on in years, not far from fifty, at his coming here ; and it may be that his most fruitful work in life, his most kindling influence, and the singular esteem yielded him by the men of his own time, belong rather to the date of his more than twenty years' ministry in Watertown than to the somewhat hampered and (I fear) disappointed toils of his later service. His earlier manhood fell in with the sudden widening of the intellectual field by what was, to all intents and purposes, the discovery of a new literature, a new philosophy, a new way of thinking among us. I do not dare to say whether the enthusiasm that