From notes of his own lectures, I have gained, since he died, a larger conception than otherwise would have been possible of the breadth of his intended treatment of history. As he held the religious idea to be the chief force, so he held the theanthropic life of Christ to be the centre and pivot around which all history groups itself. "The whole career of mankind"-these are his words-"the whole career of mankind, considered in its relation to that theanthropic life, is sacred history; the whole life of the world, treated without reference to that, is secular history." The history of the church is the history of the unfolding of this new divine life which, entering the world in Christ, is ever communicating itself, not without conflict and temporary hindrance through human perversity, to ever-widening circles of humanity. Every phase and step of this history is to be examined and tested and judged, according as the church therein is faithful to the laws laid down in the New Testament for its development. I know of no sublimer conception of Church History than this. It is Neander's, with the test of subjective consciousness left out, and the test of Scripture alone retained. Such was his idea of his work, as to its importance and its nature. But conception is one thing, execution quite another. To execute a task like that to which he set himself, there goes the power of original and exhaustive investigation. Generalizations must be based upon wide induction of facts, and the gathering of these facts from languages ancient and modern, and from sources as common as the daily newspaper, and as recondite as the stray minutes of ecclesiastical bodies that met in obscure towns of England two hundred years ago, involves a linguistic training, an untiring industry, a generous comprehensiveness of spirit, a critical acumen in selecting and in rejecting material, which are rarely combined. Dr. Buckland had these, all in some degree, some in large degree. I have spoken of his industry. The comprehensiveness of his inquiries was as remarkable as his industry. Nothing was too great, nothing too small, that bore upon his theme. The life of Christ seemed to him to be the beginning of church history, as indeed it was, he embraced that in his treatment. The heathen religions seemed to him a preparation for Christ,- he made them the subject of preliminary lectures. He wished to extend his course by embracing the history of Israel from the beginning to the coming of Christ. He brought down the history of the church to the present time. It is my judgment that as a whole, his treatment of the history of modern denominations was more thorough and exhaustive than that of any teacher of our day; of certain of them he has given a fuller and better account than can be found in the works of their own writers. With his omnivorous avidity for facts, we used to say to him in pleasantry that he never would be satisfied till he had in his lectures carefully traced Church History back all the way from twelve o'clock to-day to the formation of the solar system according to the nebular hypothesis. And what he learned he remembered, whether it was matter of history, or of the natural science and civil law which he had looked into for purposes of recreation or illustration. An admiring friend, not given to random judgments, a member at once of the legal profession and of a club of gentlemen of scientific tastes to which Dr. Buckland belonged, said upon a certain occasion, that whatever subject might be treated by members of the club, whether it were politics, science, law, or religion, Dr. Buckland always

seemed to know more about the subject than the man who had specially investigated it. There was perhaps something of designed hyperbole in the utterance, but it expresses in some degree the estimate formed by competent judges with regard to the extent and range of his learning.

The proper execution of a historian's task requires a philosophical mind. I have said that Dr. Buckland set out at the very beginning of his work with a correct idea of the nature of history. He gathered an immense mass of material of the most valuable kind. He felt that the organizing of this material, with the insight into principles that seizes upon salient facts and avoids superabundance of detail, was a work, not of days or months, but of long and laborious years. He had given his life to this work,- with physical vigor such as few possess, he expected a lifetime to do it in. His full set of written lectures would fill two thousand printed octavo pages. He had already done much in the way of condensing and systematizing this material. The syllabus of his lectures which he printed for the use of students, shows a consistent plan, a grasp of materials, a grouping and unifying mind, which gave high promise of what our friend might have done had God lengthened out his life. As it is, he had one thread running through all his lectures. No student who sat under his instruction will ever forget his idea of the church and of its development. His friends, in no small number, had looked upon him as the future writer of that history of the Church of Christ from a Baptist point of view, which has so long been a desideratum in our denomination, and which we might reasonably hope would be of value to Christians of other names. But a Providence wiser than ours has ordered that the work shall be left incomplete. Much is fragmentary, which unquestionably would have been filled out and brought into vital relation to the rest, had time and strength served him. He thought he could not die until that work was done. Ah, how small is our best work, and how unessential our life, to the purposes of him whose life-time is eternity and whose resources are infinite! But God, we doubt not, took the will for the deed, and as for us-why, the torso is noble, though much is lacking to the perfect form. From what he has done, we may conjecture how much there would have been of true philosophy in his matured and finished work.

Through the

There is a true sense in which his work is not yet done. many students whom he had helped to train for the ministry, his life perpetuates itself. And this is the last and crucial test of an instructor in Church History; does he impress himself upon his classes? does he make true ideas of history a part of them forever? I think we cannot doubt that this was so with regard to Dr. Buckland. He had a natural ardor of mind and a gentle dignity, an unfailing flow of speech and a readiness to further in every possible way the inquiries of his pupils, which together made him impressive and popular, in spite of that severest trial of patience and attention, the manual labor of long copying from dictation. The student loved the man and his work,—and it is the man, in large part, that makes the teacher. Subjects for public essays, where the student had his option, have been taken from Church History as frequently, if not more frequently, than from any other department of theological knowledge. He has left behind him no printed and published work, but he has written many "living epistles" that have gone forth, as we trust, to teach and to bless the church

and the world. And now that he has gone from us to pursue the themes he loved with a clearer insight and a wider knowledge than that of earth, now that he watches the progress of the kingdom of God, not as one who is himself in the din and smoke of the battle, but from a point above the strife where the complicated movements of the combatants are seen in their true meaning and the chariots of God are discerned filling the mountains round about his people, shall we doubt in our loss and sorrow, that he who gave him to us will choose and point out one to take his mantle and complete his work? Let us pray God that out of the number of those he taught, there may be found one who shall accept the truth and be filled with a double portion of his spirit. When devout men carried Stephen to his burial, and made great lamentation over him, they little knew that Stephen's words had already gone to the heart of one named Saul, and that those words would never leave him, until Saul had become Paul, and the great teacher of the Gentiles had appeared to carry on the work which Stephen left so incomplete. But whatever may befall, this we know, that parting and death, disappointment and disaster, all changes and all times, all we do and all we leave undone, is made to further the historic progress and the ultimate triumph of the kingdom of our God.

XXXIII.

LEARNING IN THE PROFESSOR'S CHAIR.*

I have been asked to say a few words with regard to Dr. Hotchkiss as a teacher, and with regard to his former connection with the Rochester Theological Seminary. I little thought twenty-five years ago when, as a student of the Institution, I first came under his instruction, that the day would ever come that I, as a representative of the Seminary, should officiate at his funeral. Even now the old associations come over me, and it seems unfit that I, the scholar, should speak of him the teacher. But there is a debt of gratitude I owe him, and though I can but poorly repay it by any spoken words, yet such as I have I gladly give, by way of tribute to an old instructor, whom each successive year has only taught me the more to revere and to love.

man.

I shall be obliged to say over again some things which the honored President of the University has said before me, because what Dr. Hotchkiss was as a teacher grew out of what he was as a scholar, as a preacher, and as a Technical learning alone can never make a successful instructor of the young. There must be with it, and behind it, a certain mass of manhood, or the learning will never win respect, much less communicate itself, as by contagion, to the pupils. There was much in the mental make-up of our friend, which qualified him for success in the professor's chair, and especially for success in his chosen department -- the teaching of the Bible in the original languages. He was an ardent lover of the Bible, and a profound believer that its every line and syllable were written by holy men of old as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. In those days, we who were students wondered whether he did not press too strongly and exclusively the divine aspect of the doctrine of inspiration, and whether he made sufficient allowance for the human moulds into which the molten gold of truth has been poured. But it was a most valuable and never to be forgotten lesson which we learned from his intense and unflinching maintenance of the divinity of the Bible. To him each and every part of it was instinct with life. There was meaning enough in every word, to spend an hour upon. And every word had its practical value, because it was a part of the largerword of God.

I think that all his learning grew out of this reverence for the Scriptures. His studies were not secular studies. He did not give himself to Syriac and Arabic merely because he loved them, but because he could make them helps to the interpretation of the Bible. He was an illustration of the intellectual stimulus and achievement which come directly and indirectly from the gos

* Remarks at the Funeral of the Rev. V. R. Hotchkiss, D. D., in the First Baptist Church, Rochester, January 7, 1882.

pel of Christ. He loved the old doctrines, and he held them in their old forms. The fall and total depravity of man, the substitutionary atonement of a divine Savior, the sovereign grace of God in regeneration, the eternal doom of those who reject Christ-these were to him indubitable truths, because the Bible taught them. And though his mind did not run predominantly to Systematic Theology, yet a clearly conceived, and at times a sharply stated, theology gave coherence to all his thinking, and strength to all his utterances as a teacher.

Because he recognized the Bible as the only infallible and sufficient source of truth with regard to God and heaven, sin and redemption, he set himself from the beginning of his ministry to draw water out of these wells of salvation. He knew that the well was deep, and so he availed himself of all grammatical, lexical and exegetical helps. He became a genuine man of learning. I doubt whether any man in the pastorate of any denomination in the land pursued a more continuous and thorough course of Biblical study than he. And in our own denomination, I can safely say that, though some may have surpassed him in their knowledge of history, of philosophy, or of theology proper, we have had no man in the pastorate who was a more profound student of the Scriptures. I do not speak simply of his knowledge of the Greek, of the Hebrew with its cognate languages, of oriental archæology and customs, geography and history. I mean that knowledge which is the result of painstaking and minute investigation of every verse and chapter and book of the sacred record- such investigation as is necessary to correct and effective exposition of the Bible in public.

In teaching his classes, therefore, he was always felt to be a full man. He would bring out meanings which we students had never imagined before, but the truth of which, when once suggested, was self-evidencing. Truly I can say, that the hours spent in his lecture-room were pleasant hours. He formed in us the habit of searching the Scriptures; showed us what mines of unsuspected wealth were in them; and withal taught us, after all our grammatical and textual studies, how to take forth the precious from the vile, and to turn every real acquisition to practical use. In this respect I must speak of his Sabbath sermons, as an unintended but most helpful means of influence over his students. He had a rare way of gathering up the results of a week's study of a miracle or of a parable, of a connected passage of prophecy or of a penitential Psalm of David, into a compact, well-organized and intensely interesting expository discourse. I doubt whether this country has seen a better expository preacher than he was at his best. I remember going out from the meeting-house after his sermon on the Transfiguration, almost carried beyond myself by the variety of new knowledge, the grandeur of description, and the wealth of practical application he had given us from that well-worn narrative. Many an earnest effort to study the Scriptures with thoroughness, and many an attempt, however imperfect, to follow in his line of expository preaching, were, in my own case and in the case of others, the result of his example.

He had doubtless his limitations. He was not no man can be — equally conversant with all departments of knowledge. But Dr. Hotchkiss came as near knowing something about everything, and everything about something, as any man I have met. He was not preeminently a philosopher,—but he