to supplement his income. Three boxes of Smith’s sermons (some quite erudite, on a par with his classroom lectures) are extant in Union’s archives; his marginal notes indicate that many were delivered multiple times. His active Sunday mornings doubtless testify to the state of his finances as well as to his piety.195
Some two decades after Smith’s death, Yale historian George Park Fisher declared that no thinker in the “New England School” since the time of the elder Edwards had surpassed Smith in learning and philosophical ability.196 Years later, those who had known Smith wished fervently that another like him could be appointed at Union after the retirement of the hard-line (and rather unsympathetic) Calvinist theologian W. G. T. Shedd in 1890.197
Roswell Dwight Hitchcock (1817–1887)
With Smith’s transfer to the chair in theology at Union, the way was open to appoint a new church historian. This post fell to Roswell D. Hitchcock. Born in Maine in 1817, Hitchcock graduated from Amherst College in 1836 and Andover Theological Seminary in 1841, meanwhile serving as a tutor at Amherst. The next years he spent as a Congregationalist minister. In 1847–1848, Hitchcock studied at Halle and Berlin.198 Of his student days, no records are extant.
After his stint as a pastor and three years as Collins Professor of Natural and Revealed Religion at Bowdoin College (1852–1855), Hitchcock assumed the Washburn Professorship of Church History at Union, a position that he held until his death.199 At the time of his appointment, an anonymous referee wrote that Hitchcock had a “decided historical tendency,—much beyond what is usual in these days,” and that he possessed a “familiar and accurate acquaintance with the facts, the doctrines, and the great teachers, both of the earlier periods of the Christian Church and of the times of the Reformation.”200 When some members of the Board and faculty opposed his appointment, Hitchcock withdrew his candidacy, but in the end, all came around and Hitchcock assumed the position.201 Indeed, Hitchcock became President of Union Seminary in 1880, a position that he occupied until his unexpected death in 1887.
Hitchcock became a life trustee of Amherst in 1869, and was elected President of the Palestine Exploration Society in 1871, a post he held for several years.202 He received D.D. degrees from Bowdoin (1855) and the University of Edinburgh (1855), and L.L.D. degrees from Williams College (1873) and Harvard University (1886).203 He served as editor of the American Theological Review from 1863 to 1870, overlapping a few years with Henry Smith. During his time at Union, he made three return trips to Europe and the Middle East.204
Hitchcock was widely respected for his excellent teaching, as will be detailed below. He also had wide interests in social movements, advocating civil service reform205 and attacking the “Tweed ring.”206 During the Civil War, he used his “forcible and living oratory” in support of the Union cause.207 According to one memorialist, he had great influence on “some of the wealthiest and most beneficent Christian gentlemen of New York”—including, apparently, ex-governor Edwin D. Morgan, who during Hitchcock’s presidency contributed $100,000 toward the purchase of a new site for the Seminary on Park Avenue.208 On his death, Hitchcock left money to establish a prize to be awarded to a member of the senior class at Union for excellence in church history.209
The anonymous editor of Hitchcock’s sermons reports that Hitchcock destroyed the greater part of his manuscripts. Attempting to explain Hitchcock’s low scholarly production given his acknowledged brilliance, the editor wrote,
his mind was always so active, and he was so constantly giving out fresh thoughts to stimulate others, that he left himself little space to revise and elaborate for the press.… His intellect was so original and powerful that it could not be confined; and the store of knowledge which it absorbed, instead of being so much dead learning, only fed and stimulated its activity. He was always making new acquisitions.210
Hitchcock was dedicated to Union. On the 48th anniversary of the Seminary, recalling some moments in its history, he expressed his pride in this “School of the Prophets.” Union had “began in poverty and weakness, praying almost day by day for its daily bread. The planting of it in this whirling metropolis of commerce, was against all our American traditions.”211 Yet the Seminary had not merely survived, but grown preeminent.
Apart from some articles on the patristic era, Hitchcock left no books on that topic except the edition and translation (with introduction and notes) of the Didache that he produced with his Union colleague Francis Brown.212 Among his other publications are book reviews of works on Zoroastrianism and Confucianism;213 a book, Socialism; an “anthropological” treatment of race theory entitled Laws of Civilization; a Complete Analysis of the Holy Bible, or the Whole of the Old and New Testaments Arranged According to Subjects in Twenty-Seven Books; and a memorial volume he wrote with Henry Smith, The Life, Writings and Character of Edward Robinson.214 In addition, a volume of his often scholarly sermons, Eternal Atonement, was published after his death.
Philip Schaff (1819–1893)
As nineteenth-century America’s most famous church historian and “public theologian,” Philip Schaff has been the subject of several biographies. The first, written by his son David and published in 1897,215 has been joined in the twentieth century by those by George Shriver,216 Gary K. Pranger,217 and Stephen R. Graham.218 In addition, Klaus Penzel has contributed a long biographical essay219 and a monograph on the intellectual and religious climate of Schaff’s early years in Switzerland and Germany.220
Philip Schaff—founder of the American Society of Church History, founding member of the Society of Biblical Literature, editor of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series, head of the American Committee for the Authorized Revision of the Bible, leader of the American branch of the Evangelical Alliance—was Union Theological Seminary’s most distinguished nineteenth-century professor of church history. As a reviewer of the sixth volume of Schaff’s monumental History of the Christian Church noted, if he had lived in the Middle Ages, he would have been called “Philip the Indefatigable.”221 After Schaff’s death, a colleague claimed, “Work was his element, out of which he was as ill at ease as a fish out of water.”222
Schaff’s self-assessment was modest: “I am no genius, no investigator, no great scholar, and all the distinction I can aspire to is that of a faithful and, I trust, useful worker in biblical and historical theology.”223 He appropriated the title “pontifex,” “bridge-builder,” to suggest his role in bringing together German and more generally, European, scholarship with America’s fledgling endeavors in the field.224 Later in life, Schaff reflected that if he had stayed in Europe, he might have had “a more comfortable literary life and perhaps accomplished more in the line of mere scholarship”—but now he had become “an American by the call of Providence and by free choice.” America, he believed, “the land of freedom and the land of promise,” awaits the “brightest future.”225
Born in Switzerland in 1819 and educated at Tübingen, Halle, and Berlin, Schaff was called to America in 1844 to serve as professor at the Theological Seminary of the German Reformed Church in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania.226 On the way to America, he spent six weeks in England, improving his English.227 In Pennsylvania, he soon found himself charged with heresy by his co-religionists for his alleged Romanizing tendencies, but emerged unscathed from these investigations. During the Civil War, the Mercersburg Seminary, near the Gettysburg battlefield, was transformed into a hospital for captured Confederate soldiers and temporarily suspended operations.228 Schaff and his family moved to New York, where he first worked as secretary for a committee attempting to enforce stricter Sabbath observance,229 before being invited to join the faculty of Union
