[Image]  [Hi-Res Image]

Page 372

forts of a number of Presbyterian ministers and laymen interested in providing an adequately educated ministry in and for the West. Its original endowment consisted of several thousand dollars donated by Ebenezer Lane and his brother, who were Baptists, and of sixty acres of land on Walnut Hills, given by members of the Kemper family. It was at first proposed to establish an academic as well as a theological institution, and a preparatory school was opened in Nov., 1829; but, after an experiment of five years, this department finally closed. The theological institution was established in Dec., 1832, when Drs. Lyman Beecher (q.v.) and T. J. Biggs were formally inducted into office. Dr. Calvin E. Stowe (q.v.) entered its service in the following July; and Baxter Dickinson in Oct., 1835, retiring in 1839. Dr. Beecher resigned in 1850, and Professor Stowe shortly after. Among those who have served the seminary since its organization the most distinguished, next to Beecher, was D. Howe Allen, and others of note have been George E. Day, J. B. Condit, Llewelyn J. Evans (q.v.), E. Ballantine, Henry A. Nelson (q.v.), Thomas E. Thomas, Henry Preserved Smith (q.v.), Z. M. Humphrey, James Eells, John De Witt (q.v.), A. C. McGiffert (q.v.), H. M. Hulbert, D. Schley Schaff (q.v.), Henry Goodwin Smith (q.v.), J. A. Craig (q.v.), Kemper Fullerton, William Henry Roberts (q.v.), D. P. Putnam, and Edward D. Morris (q.v.).

Lane has always been, in a broad and free sense, Presbyterian, and its charter provides that all professors, tutors, teachers, and instructors qhall be members of the Presbyterian Church in good standing. After 1837 it sided with the New-School branch, but entered heartily into the union of 1869. It has a spacious campus, commodious buildings, a fair though inadequate endowment, considerable scholarship and library funds, and an excellent library of nearly 20,000 volumes, and is well equipped for useful service to the Church. Its present faculty consists of William MeKibbin (q.v.; president and professor of systematic theology), Alexander B. Riggs (q.v.; New-Testament exegesis and introduction), Edward Mack (Hebrew and Old-Testament literature), and Selby Frame Vance (church history). The Theological Seminary of the South (Cumberland), having lost its location in Lebanon, Tenn., through an adverse legal decision, is by advice of the General Assembly (1910) transferred to Lane for the present, two of its professors, J. V. Stephens and F. H. Farr, being added to the faculty. About fifty students are enrolled.

E. D. Morris.

4. Lincoln: This theological seminary, the first to be founded in the United Staten for the higher Christian education of negroes, is located at Lincoln University, Chester Co., Pa. Its germ thought was an ordination service in 1849, in New London, Pa., when Rev. John Miller Dickey, while assisting in the ordination of James L. Mackey, a white man, as a missionary to Africa, determined to establish an institution where negroes could be trained for a like purpose. Four years later the New Castle Presbytery requested and secured the approval of the General Assembly for the establishment of such a school, which took legal form in a charter from the State of

Pennsylvania in 1854 as Ashmun Institute. On Jan. 1, 1857, a small three-story building opened its doors to four students, and from 1857 to 1865 Rev. John Pym Garter, and, following him, Rev. John Wynn Martin, combined president and faculty each in his own person, while during this time the Board of Foreign Missions established a presbytery in Liberia with three missionaries from the school. In 1865 Dr. Martin resigned, and was succeeded by Rev. Isaac N. Rendall, who presided over the institution until 1906, when Rev. John B. Rendall was elected president. In 1866 the legislature approved the petition of the trustees, amended the charter, and changed the name to Lincoln University. From 1865 both a college and seminary course have been in operation, and in 1871 the charter was again amended, placing the seminary under the oversight of the General Assembly. During its existence the institution has graduated 674 ministers of all denominations, twenty-seven of whom have been missionaries to Africa.

Among the earliest instructors were Drs. Isaac N. Rendall, Ezra E. Adams, Edwin R. Bower, Lorenzo Wescott, Gilbert T. Woodhull, Aspinwall Hodge, and Benjamin T. Jones. In 1910 there were nine professors, twenty-one trustees, and sixty-two students, chiefly from North and South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland, together with eight from the West Indies and three from South America, while in 1909 three South Africans and in 1908 three Zulus were graduated and returned as missionaries to their native lands. The students in 1910 are chiefly Presbyterians (28), Baptists (14), and Methodists (11), with nine of various other denominations. The property and endowment of the seminary amount to $419,783, and the institution also shares in the use of some of the public buildings of the university, while the library of 18,000 volumes is used likewise jointly by both university and seminary. J. B. RENDALL.

8. >gcCormick: This theological seminary, now located at Chicago, Ill., was founded in 1829 through the efforts of Rev. John Finley Crowe, at Hanover, Ind. Partly as a result of the revival of 1827-28, Hanover Academy, on its own initiative, was adopted as a synodical school by the Synod of Indiana on condition that a theological department be connected therewith. Agreeably to this provision, Rev. John Matthews was called to the chair of theology, and with him Rev. John W. Cunningham, Rev. George Bishop, and Rev. James Wood served at different times as professors. The institution was then called the Indiana Theological Seminaiy, but in 1840 it was moved to New Albany, Ind., and renamed the New Albany Theological Seminary, with the hope that it would thereby have an increased constituency, while in addition Mr. Elias Ayers offered for endowment what was then considered a large sum of money. Its success in this location was not great, and it became manifest that removal was essential to its growth. In 1857 the last class at New Albany was graduated, and for the next two years the question of its future home was actively discussed, until the General Assembly received a proposition from the board of directors by which the seminary was to be transferred from synodical to