Allan Appel Photo
The president of Yale College, Timothy Dwight, both educator and minister, delivered an impassioned sermon on the folly, guilt, and mischief of the notorious gentlemans’ practice of dueling in September 1804 — two months late for Alexander Hamilton, who had died that July in his famous duel with Aaron Burr.
That is one of the fascinating tidbits that emerge from the latest exhibition at the Yale Divinity School Library, “The Promotion of True Piety and Virtue: Celebrating the History and Special Collections of Andover Newton Theolgoical School at Yale”.
The title is long but the show is compact — five vitrines distributed on two floors of the Yale Divinity School Library. The library and its special collections are being augmented (this is the reason for the exhibition) by the collections of Andover Newton Theological School, headquartered in Newton, Mass.
That school merged with Yale this summer, and the partnership brought with it a trove of fascinating materials that cover the history of the school and feature many New Haveners of historical significance who attended Andover or Newton after Yale College.
In the early 1800s Yale College had a number of students hoping to enter the ministry, but the college had no formal graduate theological program for them. Instead, the young reverends-to-be were apprenticed to serving ministers and learned their pastoral and theological skills through on-the-job training.
Enter first Andover Theological Seminary, founded in 1807, whose Congregationalist founders were the first to offer graduate coursework for prospective clergy.
In 1825 Newtown Theological was founded in Massachusetts, this time by the Baptists. Newton followed Andover’s model. In 1965 Andover and Newton merged, forming the charmingly acronymed ANTS — Andover Newton Theological Seminary.
Along the more historical documents are relatively recent student publications, like a 2002 ANTS Underground, in which the young ministers very politely but firmly question why ANTS is selling off 40-some acres of forested campus to developers. (I guess the reason, in part, is explained by the eventual merging with Yale Divinity School).
For me the most enticing documents are the older ones: books and other paper ephemera by known figures like Dwight and Jedidiah Morse, the father of Yale’s Samuel F.B. Morse, inventor of the single-wire telegraph.
The elder Morse also pioneered the teaching of American geography in part because it helped the waves of new ministers go on missions across America and far as Hawaii. In the same way that new inventions have followed the ingenuity required by war, so breakthroughs in geography, language study, and other fields seem to have followed campaigns to find new converts for Christianity.
I also loved learning what was on the weekly menu for theological students in the early 19th century. The young men might have been godly, but they were certainly not vegetarians. Steak or beef or corned beef in various forms was served for dinner three or four times a week, and steak was also on the menu for breakfast.
The Congregationalists and Baptists were also sending out their young men to defend Puritan doctrines and practices, like keeping the sabbath. They combatted perceived threats from wishy-washy Unitarians and pesky Episcopalians, and worked hard to keep their young theological students from being seduced by the “infidel philosophy” being imported from those dangerous French revolutionaries.
Surely the young men needed all the beef they could get.
“The Promotion of True Piety and Virtue” runs through April 30, 2018 during the regular hours of the Yale Divinity School Library, 409 Prospect St.
Too late for Hamilton and Burr, but not for Joyner and Goldson!