A Gifted Mind And Still Greater Heart

A Gifted Mind And Still Greater Heart

He was the nineteenth century’s greatest seminary professor.

CHARLES HODGE was born in Philadelphia on December 27, 1797, and raised by his mother because his father died six months after Charles’s birth. A gifted student, Charles entered the College of New Jersey, later Princeton University, in 1812 at that age of fourteen. As a senior he publicly confessed his faith in Christ during a campus revival, where over half of the student body gave their allegiance to Jesus. After entering Princeton Seminary in 1816, he excelled in his studies and graduated at age twenty-two. A year later he became professor of biblical languages at the school and the seminary’s third professor.

Hodge taught at Princeton Seminary for over fifty years and became America’s leading Reformed theologian of the nineteenth century. His three-volume Systematic Theology remains in print today.

On April 24, 1872, a unique celebration took place in Princeton to honor Charles Hodge for his fifty years of teaching. On that day all the shops in town closed, and people from near and far gathered in the First Presbyterian Church to honor the town’s most distinguished citizen. Present were Charles’s wife, Mary, their eight children, and a large number of grandchildren. Also in attendance were four hundred graduates of the seminary, almost 15 percent of the total alumni of the school. There were presidents and faculty representatives from many other colleges and seminaries as well as officials from virtually every denomination.

That day Henry Boardman spoke on behalf of the seminary trustees. He pointed out that celebrations for national heroes were not uncommon, but here was “the spontaneous homage paid to a simple teacher of God’s Word and defender of its truth.” Then addressing Dr. Hodge he said:

What honor, beloved Brother, has God put upon you! For fifty years you have been training men to preach the glorious gospel of the grace of God to their fellow-sinners. The teacher of teachers, your pupils have become professors in numerous Colleges and Seminaries at home and abroad. Not to speak of one or two thousand pastors, who are exerting an ameliorating influence upon this nation more potent than that of an equal number of men belonging to any other calling, you are helping, through your students, to educate a great body of Christian ministers, not a few of whom are to be employed in laying the foundations of Christianity on pagan lands.

At that time Charles Hodge had personally taught twenty-seven hundred students—no other seminary in the country had even enrolled that many. In his address Boardman pointed out that there were men scattered around the world who honored Hodge for the gifted mind God had given him and who “love him for his still greater heart.”

During the program the seventy-five-year-old Hodge sat on a sofa off to the side of the platform, out of sight of the audience. Almost overcome by emotion after fifteen men had spoken their words of tribute, he came to the lectern to respond: “When I say thank you for all your respect, confidence and love, I am nothing, I am powerless. I can only bow down before you with tearful gratitude, and call on God to bless you, and to reward you a hundred-fold for all your goodness.”

That night before retiring, the tired but grateful Hodge summed up the day by writing in his journal: “April 24th. The apex of my life . . . altogether affording an imposing and most affecting testimony of the unity of the faith, and of common love to the same gospel, and to our common God and Saviour Jesus Christ.”

Reflection

Most of us are not gifted scholars or teachers like Charles Hodge, but God intends for us to impact the lives of those around us. God placed thousands of students in Hodge’s life. He may place only one or two people in your life to disciple. It isn’t the number that matters; it is the faithfulness with which you invest yourself.

We are telling you about what we ourselves have actually seen and heard, so that you may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.

1 John 1:3