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The Morison Myth Concerning the Founding of Harvard College

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Winthrop S. Hudson
Affiliation:
Chicago, Ill.

Extract

In his Preface to the study entitled, Puritan Pronaos, Samuel Eliot Morison writes: “I have trod warily for fear of the Indians that are always lying in wait to scalp that unpopular wayfarer, the New England historian.” The Indians have no quarrel with Professor Morison, and presumably are not interested in securing his scalp, but were the ancient Puritan divines of New England alive today, they would at least desire to question some of his conclusions.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1939

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References

1 Morison, Samuel Eliot, The Puritan Pronaos (New York, 1936).Google Scholar

2 Morison, Samuel Eliot, Three Centuries of Harvard, 16361936 (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), 22.Google Scholar

3 Puritan Pronaos, 27.Google Scholar

4 Lyttle, Charles, “A Sketch of the Theological Development of Harvard University, 1636–1805,” Church History, V, (1936), 306n.Google Scholar

5 Three Centuries of Harvard, 24.

7 Morison, Samuel Eliot, The Founding of Harvard College (Cambridge, Mass., 1935), 250.Google Scholar

8 Ibid., 100.

9 Like Emmanuel, Harvard was called the “School of the Prophets.”

10 Of the university men in early New England, thirty-five were from Emmanuel. The next greatest number, thirteen, were from Trinity. John Cotton is included in both lists, having left Trinity to go to Emmanuel, Ibid., 362.

11 Dyer, G., History of the University and Colleges of Cambridge … (London, 1814), II, 347Google Scholar. Shuckburgh, E. S., Emmanuel College (London, 1904), 6Google Scholar, leaves out the word “posuit.”

12 For a discussion of this point see Shuekburgh, , Emmanuel College, 1826Google Scholar and chapter on John Harvard and Emmanuel College in The Founding of Harvard College.

13 Shuekburgh, , Emmanuel College, 23.Google Scholar

14 Ibid., 25.

15 The Founding of Harvard College, 107.Google Scholar

16 The Founding of Harvard College, 432.Google Scholar

17 The Puritan Pronaos, 29.Google Scholar

18 In 1663, Jonathan Mitchell placed the need of an educated clergy as the primary purpose for the college in a tract entitled: “Modell For the Maintaining of students and fellows of choise Abilities at the Colledge in Cambridge, Tending to advance learning among us, and to supply the publike with fit Instruments, principally for the work of the Ministry.” Quoted in The Founding of Harvard College, 249.Google Scholar

19 For a discussion of this point see Lyttle, Charles, “A Sketch of the Theological Development of Harvard University, 1636–1805,” Church History, v, (1936), 301329.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 Lyttle, Charles H., “Was Fair Harvard's Father a Red?”, The Christian Century, LIII, (1936), 1225.Google Scholar

21 The Founding of Harvard College, 247n.Google Scholar

22 Three Centuries of Harvard, 23.Google Scholar

23 Emmanuel College, 24.Google Scholar

25 The Founding of Harvard College, 434.Google Scholar

26 Small, W. H., Early New England Schools (Boston, 1914), 9091.Google Scholar

27 The Founding of Harvard College, 248.Google Scholar

28 Ibid., 8.

29 Ibid., 50.

30 Ibid., 60n. Even the study of law in the English universities was a strictly ecclesiastical pursuit. The layman, interested in the common law, studied at the Inns.

31 Ibid., 62.

32 Ibid., 65.

33 Three Centuries of Harvard, 25.Google Scholar

34 At all the colleges, all students were supposed to be clerics and to behave as such. The Founding of Harvard College, 54.Google Scholar

36 Shuckburgh, E. S., Emmanuel College, 1826.Google Scholar

37 The Founding of Harvard College, 250.Google Scholar

38 Ibid., 249.

39 The law of 1647 gives as the purpose for the establishment of schools: “It being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures,… and that Learning may not be buried in the graves of our fore-fathers in Church and Commonwealth.” Ibid., 158. The statement giving the purpose as to enable the children to “read and understand the principles of religion and the capital lawes of the country,” has often been interpreted to give a secular motivation to the founding of these elementary schools. Yet no Puritan would conceive of the “capital lawes” as being secular. To the Puritan mind, as to the medieval mind, all positive laws were merely declaratory of the divine law as revealed in nature, reason and the Scriptures. The “principles of religion” and the “capital lawes” were practically synonomous.

40 Many of the school teachers either had been ministers, were ministers, or later became ministers. Small states: “Many Harvard graduates taught for a year or two, but most of them were destined for the ministry.” Small, W. H., op. cit., 87Google Scholar. Ezekiel Cheever and Daniel Maud, the two pioneer New England school teachers, were both ministers and graduates of Emmanuel College. Like Harvard, Emmanuel had many graduates who followed professions other than the ministry, but that fact made it no less a school for the training of ministers. The Founding of Harvard College, 93.Google Scholar

41 Ibid., 249.

42 The Puritan Pronaos, 39.Google Scholar