New England Theology By FRANK HUGH FOSTER Etc. 囚 CHICAGO THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 1907 277.4 COPYRIGHT 1907 BY Printed February 1907 242141 Composed and Printed By PREFACE The following work-suggested by the professional obligations of a professor of church history; continued and at last completed under a sense of pious duty toward the great men who toiled to hand down to their posterity an undiminished and perfected system of doctrinal truth; necessarily the fruit of long labors, interrupted by other engagements, but resumed and completed when opportunity has offered is now presented to the public. It has been written directly from the sources. The selection of material has been determined by the purpose to write a genetic history, and not a mere record of opinions, however interesting they might be in themselves. By the aid of great libraries, above all that of Harvard University, from which I have received hundreds of tracts for examination, but also of that in the Congregational House, of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Athenaeum, the Boston Public Library, and the libraries in Union Theological Seminary, New York, in Oberlin and Olivet Colleges, and in Andover and Pacific Theological Seminaries, it has been possible to examine all the important sources. Acknowledgments are hereby made to the publishers of the American Journal of Theology and of the Bibliotheca Sacra for permission to use matter which had already appeared in their pages. There have been no predecessors in this particular line of study of our theology from whom I could draw; but I take the_opportunity to acknowledge my indebtedness to the late Professors Gottfried Thomasius, of Erlangen, for my conception of historical method, and Edwards A. Park, of Andover, for much help of a historical character, both personal and through his historical writings, as well as for V the dogmatic point of view of the whole period. Professor George P. Fisher has afforded a splendid example of scientific treatment of our theology in his historical articles, by which he became the pioneer and unsurpassed chief of American dogmatic history. And to ease and success in discovering and handling the vast apparatus which has passed under my eye, the marvelous bibliography of the great historian of Congregational polity, Dr. Henry M. Dexter, has contributed indispensable aid. Some considerable additions to Dr. Dexter's lists will be found in the notes to the following text. Descendant of Puritan and Pilgrim as I am, born and baptized in one of our most ancient Massachusetts churches, trained at our oldest university, and taught my profession at the center of intensest interest in "the New England theology," it would be strange if I had not begun this history with a feeling of the warmest appreciation of our New England Fathers and a conviction that they had originated a school destined, under whatever changes, to the exercise of a long-extended influence. These sentiments are reflected upon the earlier pages of the book in many a phrase which I have left standing. With the progress of the work my point of view and my feeling have changed together. The final historical review of the whole period has made me a critic of the school and its work, and led me to the perception of a fact that was long hidden from me that it was not without reason that a strong reaction set in against this theology about the year 1880. I find myself no longer reckonable to its adherents. But all the more does it seem to me important to learn from this great movement the lessons it has to teach the present time and all the future, to appropriate its good and to avoid its evil. And, certainly, no American theological scholar can claim to understand the course of religious thought among us, who has not |