years were ones of grave financial difficulty; in 1839–1840 the professors had for the most part gone unpaid. Financial agents were employed to drum up monies from various constituencies.105 New York ministers who favored the Union experiment (such as George Prentiss, later to join Union’s faculty) exhorted their congregations to give to Union—perhaps even to mortgage their church buildings.106 Prentiss sensed that potential patrons might deem the subjects studied at Union arcane: some, he rhetorically declaimed, will doubtless scoff, “What is the use of Hebrew roots, of Greek and Latin erudition … of the history of obsolete dogmas, and dead heresies, and extinct or corrupt churches, in our new and busy world of the Future? … ‘Let the dead bury their dead!’” Prentiss vigorously argued the necessity of these studies for fostering a strong pastorate. He compared nostalgia for a time before there were professors of “Sacred Philology and Ecclesiastical History and Exegesis” to that for an era before the invention of railroads and steamboats.107
The first three professorial appointments at Union were in theology, biblical literature, and pastoral theology and church government.108 There was no permanent professor in church history until 1850,109 when Henry Smith joined the faculty. Earlier, Samuel Cox, a prominent local pastor and father of Arthur Cleveland Coxe, covered the subject (badly, judging from student notes).110
In November 1849, Albert Barnes, who chaired a committee on faculty appointments, reported to Union’s Board of Directors that a permanent position in church history was much needed. Barnes conceded that often the subject was taught in a “repulsive” fashion. But this need not be the case if the professor included “the history of doctrine, the development of the Christian spirit and the religious life of the church.” The chair, in Barnes’s view, should be filled by a man with “ample learning, a philosophical mind, and a knowledge of German.”111
Henry Smith, selected for the new position, took up his post in the winter of 1850. He had not been especially trained in church history, although he had achieved some national renown in what we would today call philosophy of religion and philosophy of history.112 Having studied in Germany, Smith brought to Union the German organization of church history that incorporated historical theology and history of doctrine.113 Some worried that Smith’s German training might lead him astray; rumors circulated that he had “publicly testified his reverence for the name of Schleiermacher.” Indeed, he had: in a lecture delivered in 1849, before joining the Union faculty, Smith praised Schleiermacher for leading the return of German theology from cold rationalism to “the fervent and almost mystic love to Christ.”114 Although Union had waited fourteen years after its inception to establish a Professorship in Church History (albeit not endowed until 1855), Yale waited longer—and Harvard, over a quarter of a century longer.
Smith, however, held the Professorship in Church History for less than four years before assuming the Roosevelt Professorship of Theology.115 Upon Smith’s transfer, Roswell Hitchcock was awarded the post in church history, now endowed as the Washburn Professorship.116 Hitchcock remained at Union for 33 years until his death, the last seven serving as President.117 Only in 1870 was a distinguished church historian—Philip Schaff—appointed to the Union faculty, but Schaff assumed the Professorship of Church History only in 1887, after Hitchcock’s death.118 Upon Schaff’s retirement and subsequent death in 1893, he was succeeded by his former student, Arthur Cushman McGiffert.119 By the early twentieth century, the historical method reigned in all fields at Union.120
Graduate education at Union developed as slowly, and with as much complication, as at other institutions. Catalogs from the 1860s list “resident licentiates,” later called “graduate students.”121 Yet no courses were instituted especially for them. By 1879, some Union graduates were remaining for another year of study.122 These students were to take five hours of “exercises” (classes) every week; in 1889–1890, the requirement was added to “carry on special research in some branch of theological science, under the direction of the faculty.” Five years later, the number of required courses was raised to eight, three of which (if students so desired) could be taken at area universities.123 (By 1892, Union had made arrangements with Columbia and the University of the City of New York [NYU] that allowed “superior” Union students to enroll in certain courses, without fees, at those institutions.124) A Union circular from 1905, announcing graduate offerings for that year, listed three options: the History of Christian Thought; a Historical Training Class; and a Historical Seminar.125
Union, like other institutions, had a rather confused history of conferring degrees. For most of the century, until 1890, no official degrees were offered. On April 1, 1890, an agreement between the University of the City of New York and Union stipulated that NYU would award a B.D. to Union students who were recommended by the Union faculty—a provision that would enable the nonsectarian NYU to offer this degree without having to mount a theology school.126 The arrangement lasted only six years, during which time not one B.D. degree was awarded. The President of Union, Thomas S. Hastings, in 1896 informed Henry MacCracken, Chancellor of NYU, that the present arrangement should end: either the New York State Regents would grant the B.D. or Union itself would ask for the power to confer it.127 In 1917–1918, the D.D. (then an earned degree at Union) was changed to a Th.D., requiring at least three years of residency, rigorous language study, and “publication of a substantial book.” During the 1920s, when both Columbia University and Union Seminary were well established on Morningside Heights, arrangements were made whereby Columbia would grant the M.A. in “the literature and religion of the Bible, the comparative study of Christianity and other religions, and (by 1930) Christian education.”128 Columbia instituted a Ph.D. program in religion in 1946.129 At Union, the Th.D. was changed to a Ph.D. in 1974.130
Such were the beginnings of church history and the degrees offered at the four institutions here studied. I turn now to the six major professors who developed the subject at their respective institutions.
The Professors: A Sketch
The six professors who are the focus of my study, and around whom the subsequent chapters of this book are organized, need to be introduced. Celebrated in their day not only as professors of church history but also as public figures, they shaped the study of their subject for much of the nineteenth century. The surviving information on these men, however, is unequal: about some, a great deal is known, while about others, much less.
Biographies of three of the six (Samuel Miller of Princeton, Henry Smith of Union, and Philip Schaff of Mercersburg and Union), written by well-informed—if partial—family members, incorporate letters, journal entries, and other documents highly useful to the historian. Since no such biographies exist for Roswell Hitchcock of Union, George Fisher of Yale, or Ephraim Emerton of Harvard, their lives are less fully documented. Moreover, the lengthy tenures of Miller at Princeton and Fisher at Yale place disproportionate attention on one professor’s shaping of early church history at his institution—in contrast with the three church history professors at Union during that period (Henry Smith, Roswell Hitchcock, and Philip Schaff).
Class notes and other archival materials, as well as print sources, however, remain for all six. Yet even here, there is an unavoidable disproportion: the course notes given by three of the professors (Samuel Miller, Henry Smith, and Roswell Hitchcock) are far more abundant than those of George Fisher and Ephraim Emerton. As for Philip Schaff, although class notes remain in the archives at both Lancaster and Union Seminaries, he wrote so constantly and used his class preparations so extensively as aids to his published works that the extant material threatens to drown the historian. The coverage I give the six is, then, admittedly unequal.
The professors present disparate careers in other respects as well, as the following chapters will detail. Samuel Miller at Princeton and Ephraim Emerton at Harvard are in a sense outliers, with experiences and concerns different from the four
