The Dedication (Andover: 1808)

C H A P T E R V I

The Dedication

[ Andover: 1808 ]

DONIRAM reined his horse at the house in Plymouth on

September 22, 1808. His journey had lasted only a little more than five weeks, but in that five weeks what had begun as the throwing off of parental control, a natural preliminary to manhood, had turned into a soul-shaking inner convulsion. He was in mortal fear for his own soul.

On his return his parents at last became fully aware of the gravity of their son’s inner crisis but they were unable to help him. His intuitions and feelings — all those deep unconscious conceptions instilled in infancy—urged him to accept his father’s creed. But his mind, that keen instrument sharpened by careful training from childhood through college, would not be satisfied. It said that until incontrovertible evidence provided the facts, and logic came forth with the reasoning, Adoniram Judson could not be a wholehearted Christian.

His father had already shot his bolt. Since he could not even imagine how anyone could question the underlying premises of Christianity, he knew he was not equipped to deal with Adoniram’s dilemma. Adoniram’s mother and sister had the same weapons of tears and prayers they had used before—but using them only intensified Adoniram’s agony. For Adoniram, faith must depend on more.

For a few days everyone in the parsonage was involved in one way or another with Adoniram’s ordeal, except, perhaps Elnathan. At fourteen, he dutifully did the chores, but for the rest he must have been out of it. One suspects it was hard for him to see why the others were so upset. Quietly, perhaps observing with something like distaste. he may now have begun to form the resolutions that

T H E D E D I C A T I O N

eventually took him into an unusual channel for a Judson—medicine, and the Navy.

At this juncture, two visitors came to call on Adoniram’s father. They were Dr. Moses Smart and Dr. Edward Dorr Griffin, both leading figures among the conservative faction of Congregationalism. Dr. Stuart, not yet thirty, was already pastor of the important First Church of New Haven. Dr. Griffin, about ten years older, held the equally important pastorate of the First Presbyterian Church of Newark, New Jersey. Like the Reverend Mr. Judson, both were Yale graduates, and both had studied theology at New Haven.

The subject they came to discuss was a new theological seminary in which they had agreed to be professors. With Harvard in the hands of the liberals, the orthodox needed their own divinity school. Such a school had been incorporated a year ago. Now it was ready to open. It was to be located on the premises of Phillips Academy in Andover, some twenty-five miles northwest of Boston. Three wealthy merchants—John Norris of Salem, and William Bartlet and Moses Brown of Newburyport—had given forty thousand dollars toward it. Samuel Abbot of Andover had donated twenty thousand dollars for a professorship of Christian Theology. The Phillips family of Andover, founders of the Academy, had erected a suitable building.

The Reverend Mr. Judson had been intensely interested in the progress of the new seminary since its conception, but just now he had a more Mediate motive for welcoming the visitors with open arms. Perhaps men of their eminence could help his son, as he could not.

Adoniram made an inStant impression on these two divines. His personality was ingratiating, yet without false humility. His mind was of the finest order. He already knew more theology than many theological students. He was open to conviction. He understood that he must undergo inner regeneration before he could look forward to faith and personal salvation. But clearly this was not to be accomplished in a few hours of argument. The very qualities that made the boy so worth saving made him hard to save. Yet the visitors felt almost at once that if he could find conviction he could become a minister such as had not been seen since the days of Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards.

After some discussion, they suggested that Adoniram enroll in the new seminary, where he would have the materials he needed to study to make up his own mind, and the counsel of some of the best theologians in the country. Adoniram resisted without actually declining, and they went away without learning his decision.

Within a day or so Adoniram received an offer to become an assistant teacher in a private academy in Boston. He accepted, and left for Boston only a week after having returned to Plymouth. But he carried his torment with him.

Hardly had he begun his new duties when he came across an old theological work, The Fourfold State, by Thomas Boston. At an- 0ther time it might not have made much impression on him, but now only this little push was necessary. Almost at once he decided to enter the seminary as Dr. Stuart and Dr. Griflin had advised, in order to look there for the inner certainty he felt he needed so desperately.

He entered Andover Theological Seminary on the twelfth of October. He made no profession of religious belief, and was enrolled as a special student—not as a candidate for the ministry. As at Brown, he was admitted into the studies of the second year, thanks to his excellent academic background.

The village in which Adoniram now found himself was so isolated, in spite of its comparative nearness to Boston, that it could almost be called cloiStered. The mail came three times a week. The recipient of a letter paid twenty-five cents for it. A newspaper was seldom seen unless someone brought one from Boston., It was a pious place. A Sunday traveler, no matter what his reason for being on the road, could expect arrest and a fine. All work in the village ended at sunset on Saturday. From then until sunrise Monday the normal routine of life stopped. The only sounds were the sound of the church bells; the only traffic that of going to church and returning; the only preparation of meals, the placing of cold dishes on the table; the only reading, the Scriptures, or printed sermons, or the Shorter Catechism.

There was a low hill or ridge on the Academy grounds, a few hundred yards to the east of the main road into Andover, which the Students dubbed “Pisgah,” or “Zion.” At the foot of it the seminary’s main building, Phillips Hall, had been erected just before Adoniram arrived, and here he was assigned a room. Like the college building at Brown, it was without ornament, spare, of red brick with a slate roof. One room was set aside as a chapel, another for a reading room, and thirty rooms were used for dormitory purposes. The Hall stood on the border of a huckleberry lot which flooded in heavy rains so that students and professors had to cross on Stepping stones. At these times, the fields and meadows looked like shallow lakes.

Life at the seminary had a Spartan simplicity. The students heated their rooms with firewood they chopped themselves and drew water in pitchers from nearby wells. But this was no hardship for Adoniram. He was used to it. And living was cheap. There was no tuition. Rent was two to four dollars a year. The only other major expense was food, which was supplied by Mrs. Silence Smith, who had been licensed by the trustees’ “Committee of Exigencies” to keep boarders in a low, brown, two story cottage nearby.

The members of the faculty lived like country ministers anywhere in New England, hoeing their own gardens, milking their own cows, and cutting their own hay. When Adoniram arrived, however, there were only two professors—Eliphalet Pearson, Professor of Sacred Literature; and Leonard Woods, Abbot Professor of Christian Theology. Dr. Pearson, who was about the age of Adoniram’s father, was to serve for only a year before being succeeded by Moses Stuart, whom Adoniram already had met in Plymouth. Pearson had been at Andover earlier, as the first principal of Phillips Academy; but for the twenty years from 1786 to 1806 he had been Professor of Hebrew and Oriental Languages at Harvard. Woods was much younger, in his middle thirties, and before he came to Andover had been pastor for ten years at West Newbury, 3 dozen miles or so to the east of Andover.

So far as Adoniram was concerned, however, the two-man faculty served as well as a score. Languages had always interested him. Besides Greek and Latin he already knew some Hebrew. Now, under Dr. Pearson, he began to read sacred literature in the original. At the same time he began to thrash out his theological doubts with Professor Woods, who turned out to be fully his match as a dialectician.

Soon he was completely engrossed in his new life of plain living and high thinking. Part of the day he spent in his room translating and working on theological problems. Part he Spent with the two professors. Another part he spent alone, walking in a wooded grove behind the seminary building, reflecting on the meaning of what he was learning.

November came. The grove was a less pleasant place, perhaps, than it had been in October. The ground was wet with fall rain, the weather raw; only a few lonely leaves lingered on the bare boughs. But with the trees bare, he could see farther. And as he walked thoughtfully through the grove, he found that he could see farther into his problems, too. He began to suspect he had not seen the forest for the trees, nor the trees. for the leaves. That month his doubts began to leave, little by little. He underwent no sudden conversion, felt no blinding flash of insight. But he was able to note that he “began to entertain a hope of having received the regenerating influences of the Holy Spirit.”

On the second day of December—a day he never forgot—he “made a solemn dedication of himself to God.”

With the issue settled and himself at peace, he devoted himself with a single mind to his studies. The next summer he joined the church at Plymouth, to the unrelieved joy of his father, mother, and Abby. From this time on he was literally a new man. “He banished forever those dreams of literary and political ambition in which he had formerly indulged, and simply asked himself, How shall I so order my future being as best to please God?”