name, “Henry,” Smith plaintively wrote to his parents.160
Smith’s letters from Germany also describe August Neander’s lectures on the “History of Christian Doctrines.”161 He styles the erudite Neander (exhibiting a “decidedly Jewish” face) a living source of Christianity, “the father of a new era in church history.” Neander, he reports, is considered “the best exegetical lecturer in Germany”; more auditors flock to him than to any other German theologian.162 In Berlin, Smith heard Leopold von Ranke’s lectures on the Calvinist Reformation and studied Hegel with Friedrich Trendelenberg.163 Later in his life, Smith made three return trips to Europe. On the last, he spent a year and a half in Germany, Italy, and “the lands of the Bible.”164
The German university experience shaped Smith’s life and work. He, like other American students, was warmly welcomed by several German professors.165 In Berlin, Smith was invited to dine with Neander and to meet with Hegel’s widow. At Halle, Tholuck explicated Hegel to him during their customary walks and took him along on a vacation trip.166 Professor of Philosophy Hermann Ulrici, in whose home Smith lived for a time, also developed a warm relationship with Smith.167 When Smith returned to America, he kept in touch with both Tholuck168 and Ulrici.169 Professor Isaak Dorner also praised Smith: “einen der ersten, wenn nicht als ersten Amerikanischen Theologen der Gegenwart angesehen; festgegründet … in philosophischen Geistes und für systematische Theologie ungewöhnlich begabt.”170 Smith had, it is clear, made a deep impression on German professors and their wives.
His German education in place, Smith returned to America but had difficulty finding a permanent post. He was turned down for a chair in literature at Bowdoin; at Dartmouth for a professorship of divinity; and even at a girls’ school—and so he became a pastor by default.171 Yet even then, Smith pursued German scholarship, translating ten German articles for Bibliotheca Sacra during these years.172 In 1847, Smith became Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy at Amherst College, where he taught Mill, Hume, Scottish and English philosophy, logic, and the Baconian method.173 The philosophy he had imbibed in Germany, it appears, had not yet secured a place in American college curricula.
In 1850, Smith was offered the Professorship of Church History at Union. He doubted the wisdom of accepting the appointment: he was not a historian by training, considered himself unsuited for a “theological institution,” and worried about Union’s viability. Pondering the offer, he wrote to a friend, “the literary character of the seminary is slight, its zeal in theological science is little, the need of a comprehensive range of theological studies and of books thereto has got to be created.”174 He accepted Union’s offer, but a few years later (1854/1855) transferred to the Chair in Theology.
Despite Smith’s preference for theology and philosophy over history, George Bancroft—then considered America’s premier historian—praised Smith’s “Oration on the Problem of Philosophy of History” (presumably his Phi Beta Kappa address at Yale College in 1853175). This excellent speech, Bancroft claimed, shows how the scholarly study of history can help uncover “the unity and harmony of all truth,” in which God is “always and everywhere” seen as present.176 After Smith’s death, Bancroft wrote to Elizabeth Smith, praising her late husband as “the best teacher we ever had of the philosophy of history.”177 Indeed, Bancroft earlier had lauded Smith: “In Church history, you have no rival on this hemisphere, and you know I am bound to think history includes dogmatics and philosophy and theology.”178 Smith’s teaching of church history characteristically infused the subject with a substantial dose of doctrinal history and philosophy.179
From 1866 to 1870, Smith was Chair of the Executive Committee of the American branch of the Evangelical Alliance, an international Protestant organization formed in London in 1846. In 1867, his “Report on the State of Religion in the United States of America” to the Alliance’s Conference in Amsterdam argued (among other points) that slavery, although now abolished, had been the one great hindrance to the realization of America’s ideal.180 A decade earlier, Smith had written the “Resolution on Slavery” adopted by the Presbytery of New York, denouncing slavery as “a system which is essentially opposed to the rights of man, to the welfare of the Republic, to the clear position of our Church, and to the principles of the Christian religion.”181
At Union, Smith became active in the (New School) Presbyterian Church USA. He served as Moderator of its General Assembly in 1863 and was hailed as mediator in reuniting Old and New School Presbyterians in 1870.182 His address as retiring moderator to the General Assembly in 1864 (“Christian Union and Ecclesiastical Reunion”) warned against the “infidelity” of recent social philosophy and historical criticism, including the British Essays and Reviews, Bishop John Colenso’s books on the Old Testament, Renan’s Life of Jesus, and Strauss’s new version of his Life of Jesus; these works, Smith posited, mark the mere beginnings of a contest long foreseen, with Christianity at stake.183 Smith’s critiques of these topics I shall detail below.
In addition to these activities and his teaching, from 1859 to 1874 Smith edited the American Theological Review, a journal that changed names several times during its history.184 He was awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Vermont in 1850 and by Princeton in 1869. As librarian at Union Seminary, he presided over the Van Ess collection, brought from Europe to form the core of the Seminary’s library.185 (The library’s growth will be charted in Chapter 2.) Always in poor health, Smith resigned his chaired professorship in 1874 (although he continued teaching) and died in 1877 at the age of 62.186 At the time of his death, he was preparing lectures for a course on evolution.187 His interest in politics may also be noted: he wrote searing essays against the Confederacy and against Great Britain’s sympathy (which he attributed to financial interests) for the southern cause.188
Although Smith wrote frequently for journals, he did not publish many books during his lifetime. His most notable work, History of the Church of Christ in Chronological Tables (1859), however, displays his (by then) considerable knowledge of church history.189 He also translated Gieseler’s Church History and Hagenbach’s Textbook of the History of Doctrine.190 Smith’s posthumous volume of speeches and essays, Faith and Philosophy, edited by his colleague George Prentiss, contains much of interest pertaining to church history. Former student William S. Karr of Hartford Theological Seminary also prepared three volumes for publication after Smith’s death, based largely on his lectures: Apologetics (1882), Introduction to Christian Theology (1883), and System of Christian Theology (1884).191 Reviewing Elizabeth Smith’s biography, one commentator wrote, “His [Smith’s] industry was not as marvelous as that of Origen, who is said by Jerome to have written more than any other man could read; but it was almost as incessant.” Origen, however, had composed many more lines that the reviewer deemed ripe for erasure.192
After Smith’s death, his nephew, Munroe Smith—later a professor of law at Georgetown and Columbia Universities—wrote to his aunt, Elizabeth Smith, commenting on details of his uncle’s life that he had gleaned from her biography. Never before, the young man wrote, had he ever comprehended “the utter and absurd inadequacy of the material reward” which those of “rare intellectual power” receive. Smith was at the head of his profession, a great success, yet the recompense he received for his work was “to put it bluntly—not enough to live on! I never understood before that the extra work under which Uncle Henry broke down was largely mere bread-and-butter work, to which he was forced by the inadequacy of his professional salary.” It is a “crying shame,” the nephew exclaimed, that in America a man who devotes himself to professional pursuits is not “freed from the sordid anxiety in the struggle for physical existence. The scholar must have skolê.”193 Indeed, we know that Smith and other early
