INTRODUCTION

            "We revolt against the slavery in which women are held by the customs of society - the broken health, the aimless lives, the subordinate position, the helpless dependence, the dishonesties and shams of so-called education. The High Education of Women is one of the great world battle-cries for freedom; for right against might. It is the cry of the oppressed slave. It is the assertion of absolute equality."¹

            The views of ultra feminist, a  worshipper of The Goddess? Hardly. The views expressed were delivered in a sermon on September 23, 1877, by a prominent and wealthy Boston lawyer, philanthropist, churchman and devout born-again Christian.

            For a leader in the women's movement of the last century Henry Fowle Durant (1822 - 1881) is little recognized and under researched. He is given token appreciation by the institution he initiated and endowed, but Wellesley College - one suspects² - would be slightly embarrassed by the full disclosure of its founder's religious principles. Durant was the subject of a two volume biography that was to have appeared five years after his death. The first volume (1822 - 1863)  reached the galley proof stage and then was stopped - either by its subject's anxious widow or the incapacity of the author to complete the task³. We have only an outline of what was intended for the second, projected to cover the period from 1863 to 1881. Subsequently a popular - and one could say polemic - biography of Durant appeared at the time of the fiftieth anniversary of Wellesley College in 1925.. This work by Florence Morse Kingsley displays considerable defensiveness as she defends the religious convictions of the man.

            It was precisely those religious convictions that were the well-spring out of which his commitment to the liberation and education of women sprang. The Christian impulse was never far from Durant's thinking as he laid the foundation of Wellesley College. And it is because of - not in spite of - the faith of Henry Fowle Durant that made him such a powerful voice for women's rights. His life illustrates the fact that one cannot understand the movement to improve the status of women in the second half of the Nineteenth Century without recognizing that most, if not all, of the pioneering work that so vastly altered their position was done by evangelical Christians. This paper sets out to demonstrate that assertion through a study of the religious principles that motivated Henry Fowle Durant and that led to the establishment of Wellesley College.

I. SUMMARY OF HIS LIFE

A La Vita Vecchia, 1822 - 1863

            Henry Welles Smith - he was to change his name at the age of 30 because there were too many lawyers named "Henry Smith" registered among Boston barristers -   was born in Hanover, New Hampshire in 1822. He came from what would later be described as "unpretentious ... traditionally sturdy, self-respecting Anglo-American stock"⁴. While still in infancy, Henry's family to Dracut, Massachusetts. and then, after what could have been a disastrous fire, moved to Lowell where they remained. He learned his ABC's from an aunt, Martha Smith, a pupil of Mary Lyon, an early exponent of women's education. At the age of 12 he went on to be trained by Rev. and Mrs. Ripley, minister and minister's wife of the Unitarian Church in Waltham. Mrs. Ripley not only educated him in Greek, history, mathematics, philosophy and literature: she was his early confidant and example. "I have seen her", he remarked in tribute to her influence on his life, "holding the baby, shelling peas, and listening to a recitation in Greek, all at the same moment, without dropping an accent, or particle, or boy, or pea-pod, or the baby."⁵ There were up to 12 or 14 boys at the home, in addition to her own 7 children. A remarkable woman.

            At 15 Henry went on to Harvard, dallying between poetry and the law, and eventually under family pressure, opting for law. He graduated in the Class of 1842 and immediately entered his father's law office in Lowell. A year and a half later he was admitted - at the age of 21 - to the Middlesex Bar. His career - which only spanned twenty years of practice - was meteoric in its rise. Five years after he began as a lawyer he became a partner of his fathers, and also a partner of Joseph Bell whose brother-in-law, the famous Rufus Choate, used him often as junior counsel.

            When 18 and a third year student at Harvard, Henry met his eight year old first cousin Pauline Cazenove, daughter of an army major and a French Huguenot. Brought up in a profoundly religious home, Pauline's parents had gone to Fort Dearborn in 1833 and immediately on their first Sunday were instrumental in founding the First Presbyterian Church of Chicago. She was sent to boarding school in the East and on August 23, 1847 when "15 years, 2 months and 10 days of age" - as she stated at the time  - "I now resolve  ... with God's help most solemnly to dedicate myself to Him." Forty-seven years later she would write to Katherine Lee Bates: "I gave myself to the Lord August 23, 1847 and have ever tried to consecrate to him all He has given me since this dedication of myself was a distinct act and when God gave me the love of Henry F. Durant's soul I gave that to Him also."

            "The love of Henry F. Durant's soul": the phrasing is significant. When Pauline and Henry were married in Brooklyn on May 23, 1854, Henry was not a believer. As one writer reflects, with puzzlement: "He was reverent, moral an attendant at church services, but he had not been 'saved,' in the evangelical sense."⁶ A son, named Harry, was born to the couple the following year, and a daughter, Pauline, in 1861. The baby died after two months, bringing sorry to a home where professional and financial success seemed uninterrupted. But it was the death of eight-year old Harry from diphtheria that for ever altered the family's values and outlook.

B. La Vita Nuova, 1863 - 1881

            In his unfinished biography, Rev. E. P. Tenney divides Durant's life into two sections, with Harry's death being the point at which his life divided. Tenney calls them "La Vita Vecchia, 1822 - 1863" and "La Vita Nuova, 1863 - 1881". His explanation of the difference between these two part is titled "Mr. Durant's Purpose To Life Primarily for Himself, is Changed to a Life-Plan of Self-Devotement to God in the Unselfish Service of Man".

            The death of his eight-year old son affected Henry Durant dramatically. As he watched his son in the final stage of his illness he declared, as he watched him in his bed: "I have made up my mind that whether our boy lives or dies I will henceforth live for God!"⁷ The child's death, on July 3, 1863, marked a radical transformation in Henry Fowle Durant's life. As one of an early alumna and Trustee of Wellesley College, Louise McCoy North⁸, would say at Alumna Day 1900: "... a little child, noble-browed, gentle and tender, the passing of whose sweet, young life opened the way for the coming of Christ into a father's heart, and the writing of Christ's name upon the cornerstone of a Wellesley ... It is to us a cherished and meaningful tradition that we thus received our charter from the hands of a little child."⁹

           As a result of his conversion, Henry Durant gave up the Bar, never to return to the practice of law. One of his legal companions stated: "He was said to have been 'converted'; and later I heard that he had become a preacher. I never saw him again."¹⁰ He also took some of his books - "the depraved drama of the Restoration" - down to the furnace in the basement and burned them. He and his wife then moved to New York City, where he had business interests. At the time he was manufacturing marine engines and locomotives for the Union government. He was also a partner in the new York Steam Engine Co. on the East River near his home. He attended the Fourth Avenue Presbyterian Church. And he spent the winter following his conversation studying commentaries and translations, deeply engaged in the study of the Bible. His Biblical knowledge and theology were essentially self-taught. It is noted that "To certain of his ministerial friends, who appeared loath to give up the idea of the stereotyped theological course, he said, with a touch of his old cynical humor, that he must cast his lot among those who 'climbed up some other way.'"¹¹ It was said of him, in a religious magazine of the time, "There is no doubt that he reaches a large class who would shun a service conducted by a clergyman."¹²

            On return to Boston he became a lay evangelist, and for the next nine years he followed a career closely analogous  to that of another layman, his friend Dwight L. Moody, though confined to small town New England rather than being national. We do not know when the two became acquainted, but it might well have been through their mutual regard for Moody's pastor at the Mount Vernon Congregational Church of Boston, Edward N. Kirk. The story is told by one present at the time that, at a tea at the Durants' home, Moody and Durant were talking of the crucifixion. As they made their way to church, settling into their carriage, "Mr. Moody brought his hand down upon Mr. Durant's knee and said. 'I tell you, Mr. Durant, where would we have been if He hadn't died for us?' Mr. Durant answered, 'Moody, I should have been a selfish man of the world.'"¹³ Moody joined the Board of Trustees of Wellesley College in 1878, presumably at Durant's invitation, and remained active until his untimely death in 1899.

            The Durants remained active members of the Union Congregational Church on Essex St. in Boston where his pastor was the Rev. Nehemiah Adams. There he taught a class of young women for twelve years in his own Sunday School¹⁴. Out of that experience he wrote anonymously a twenty page booklet titled Words To A Sunday School Teacher.¹⁵. He also joined with his wife in a wide range of activities among the churches of Boston Pauline was particularly concerned with charities for distressed and the indigent women. He was a popular and eloquent speaker, treating each audience as he had earlier influenced juries, persuasive and compelling.

            A newspaper clipping, copied from the Dover, New Hampshire, Enquirer, for February 18, 1869, speaks of "Religious interest awakened by the labors of H. F. Durant continues to increase. The churches have been unable to hold the people who flocked to be told of their need of personal religion."¹⁶ It was said of him by a contemporary "Once launched upon his labors as an evangelist we quickly came to recognize in Mr. Durant a type of speaker not met with since the days of Finney. This new evangelist follows the gleam with all the ardor of a Finney, plus his own peculiar and poignant convictions, presented in his own peculiar and poignant way."¹⁷ Among those who were converted under his preaching was Senator Henry Wilson who was later Republican Vice President from 1873-5.

            In the brief times of respite from his strenuous evangelistic efforts, and the maintenance of his business interests, Henry Durant would go out to his country home in what had been called West Needham but - in honor of the Welles family who had originally given Henry his middle name - had recently been named Wellesley. Originally intended as an estate for his son, the acreage that they had bought for him was initially thought to be a suitable site for a boys' school in his memory. The project then became a school for girls with an orphanage. Finally, around 1869, they began to make plans for a school similar to Mount Holyoke Seminary in South Hadley.

            An organizational meeting for the new institution was called for April 16, 1870, at the Durants' new home at  30 Marlborough St., Boston. The call was signed by the Governor, the Hon. William Claflin, and the Rev. Edward N. Kirk, and a local businessman, Abner Kingman. Edward Kirk was chosen as the first Chair of the Trustee Board. As incorporated by the Legislature of the commonwealth of Massachusetts that year was called "the Wellesley Female Seminary". In 1873 it became simply "Wellesley College".

            For the next five years, until the first class was gathered, Henry worked ceaselessly both on the construction of the huge college building, the organization of the faculty, and the registration of students. "I shall be there, every day and all day. It will be built right."¹⁸          By 1874 these labors were beginning to take their toll. In a letter to his wife, temporarily absent, Durant wrote:

"The work is very hard and I get very tired. I do feel thankful for the privilege of trying to do something in the cause of Christ. I feel daily that I am not worthy of such a privilege, and I do wish to be a  faithful servant to my Master. Yet this does not prevent me from being very weary and sorely discouraged at times. Tonight I am so tired I can hardly sit up to write."¹⁹

            It took four years to erect College Hall. Built in the shape of a double Latin cross, it was 480 feet long and 166 feet wide at the wings and 80 feet high. It was designed to meet all the educational and residential needs of the school. A chapel seated 750 and there was space for 120,000 books in the Library. It stood above Lake Waban in regal, Victorian splendor.

            The opening class gathered in September of 1875.  314 women arrived, of whom only 30 were regarded as educationally of sufficient standard enough  to enter the freshman class. Preparatory classes were held for the others. Standards were kept high by Henry Durant. "Elaborate wardrobes",  hampers of home food, were discouraged. The willingness to do domestic work was insisted as a qualification. Each entrant was treated with equality.

            Commitment to the life of the new college proved to be enormously draining for Henry Durant. As the President of the first class, the Class of 1879, stated: "Mr. Durant rules the college, from the amount of Latin we shall read to the kind of meat we shall have for dinner."²⁰ By 1880 the College had 375 students and 34 faculty members and such detailed management was proving more and more taxing, indeed impossible. At the same time Henry Durant's business interests were causing concern, necessitating frequent trips to New York City.

            In 1881 he was diagnosed as having Bright's disease by the college doctor, Emily Jones. Hearing the news his wife recalls that his first comment to her was "We have both trusted Christ too long, not to trust Him now." After the diagnosis had been given he said to her; "I intended to say to the doctor, he need not fear or hesitate to tell me the exact truth. It does not agitate me to talk about parting; it is just getting ready to go home. It would be dreadful to think of leaving you if you had not Christ. He will take care of you, we will only be parted a little while ... There are things unfinished, but He knows best. He will give the wisdom to take care of it all."²¹ On another occasion his wife turned to him and asked "Do you feel the presence of the Lord?" and he replied: "It is not a question of feeling; I know it." On September 30, 1881 he left final messages to faculty and students. To faculty he advised: "Have faith, work and pray, and be co-laborers with God." And to the students: "Work for one another, and try to lead souls to God. Christ first in all things and always."

            He died on October 3, 1881, and his will was soon probated, including the words: "I do therefore positively and solemnly leave it in charge to the Christian men and women who will in the years to come be the trustees of Wellesley College ...".²²

II. HENRY FOWL DURANT'S VISION OF WELLESLEY COLLEGE

A. Mount Holyoke Seminary, the Model

            Mount Holyoke Seminary in South Hadley, Massachusetts, a pioneer in women's post-secondary education in America, became a kind of model for the kind of school the Durants intended for Wellesley. They knew of the school from friend and long-time Trustee and unofficial Chaplain, Rev. Edward Norman Kirk . Kirk led a religious revival at Mount Holyoke during the academic year 1863-4²³. As he explained²⁴: "The self-sacrificing love for Christ ... make(s) the school a nursery for rearing the self-sacrificing, laborious, praying efficient women of the church, - this is the glory and strength of Mount Holyoke Seminary,"

            Kirk's enthusiasm for the Mount Holyoke was contagious: Henry Durant became a Trustee in 1867. The following year Pauline Durant gave ten thousand dollars for the Library building.  Moody and Durant visited the school together²⁵ As plans for the Wellesley school developed Durant explained  "There cannot be too many Mt. Holyokes." As early as 1867 he stated:

"The great object we both have in view is the appropriation and consecration of our country place and other property to the service of the Lord Jesus Christ, by creating a Seminary on the plan (modified by circumstance) of South Hadley."²⁶

B. Original Stated Purpose

            The original Statutes of Wellesley College, Article One, Section Two, states:

"The College was founded for the glory of God and the service of the Lord Jesus Christ, in and by the education and culture of women.

In order to the attainment of these ends, it is required that every Trustee, Teacher, and Officer, shall be a member of an Evangelical Church, and that the study of the Holy Scriptures shall be pursued by every student throughout the entire college course under the direction of the Faculty."

            In later eyars it would be remembered that Henry Durant would tell every visitor to the new school, "God must be first in everything in Wellesley College."²⁷

C. Rationale For Construction of College Hall

            In the Bible originally placed by Mrs. Durant on September 14, 1871, at the laying of the corner stone the following inscription:

"This building is humbly dedicated to our heavenly Father with the hope and prayer that He may always be faithfully taught here; and that He will use it as a means of leading precious souls to the Lord Jesus Christ."

In her handwriting were also added David's prayer at the dedication of the gifts for the Temple²⁸ and Psalm 127:1.

            In March of 1914 College Hall burned to the ground. In the ashes the stone containing a box with that Bible and other remains were uncovered. On a wintry day later the same year, at a public ceremony, President Ellen Fitz Pendleton, took the box and attempted to open it. After ten minutes of effort, with help, she managed to pry the carefully soldered box open. The reaction of the gathered assembly as she read out this quotation from the Durants is not recorded. Mrs. Durant herself was unable to attend, due to painful arthritis. For some who knew the Durants it must have seemed like a voice from the grave. Wellesley College had come a long way from the original intention of its founder.

D. Concern For The Teaching Staff

            Mr. Durant was fastidious in his selection of the teaching staff. On September 11, 1875, he met with the faculty for the first time. Methodist minister William Warren, President of Boston University, and a Trustee, described the occasion, which began with an informal speech by the Founder. He continues:

"The charges he laid upon their hearts and consciences no one who was present can ever forget. Then he closed with prayer. And such a prayer! It was as if the pent-up aspirations and hopes of all his Christian years had suddenly found a voice. It was as if we and all heaven were present witnesses of the initial consecration of a new and immortal Sisterhood for Holy Service, whose ever-living and ever-present head should be none other than that Lord Christ who, born of woman, through His incarnation and redemption brought saving light and life to women and to men, world without end. In that prayer I discovered why the opening of the College was without demonstration before the public eye. 'Lord, we cannot dedicate it to Thee,' he said. 'Thine it has been from the beginning; Thine these beautiful woods; Thine the lovely lake; Thine all that has entered into the house we have builded.' I saw, as never before, how completely everything had been dedicated and rededicated through all those silent years he had spent in planning and preparing for that day."²⁹

            The selection of the original faculty was meticulously planned by Mr. Durant, who anxious ensured that all teachers would be in agreement with his stated goals for Wellesley College. After the first year there was a mass resignation which trouble him greatly. Even after his death Pauline, in her capacity as Secretary of the Board, sought to ensure that those who were appointed to faculty were committed "members of an Evangelical church." Durant would often state that as the instructional staff went, so would the institution he had founded.

III. PRINCIPLES THAT SHAPED HENRY FOWL DURANT'S PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION

            Henry Fowl Durant did not leave much in the way of written work. Several summations to juries of court cases were published and addresses on rural life delivered before the Norfolk Agricultural Society in Dedham, along with a patriotic piece on James Otis (one of the early patriots of the War for American  Independence) are extant. All predate his 1863 religious experience. After that time there are some "Notes of Mr. Durant's Sermon on 'The Spirit of the College'" published, one assumes by his widow in 1890. Few of his letters survive, and his handwriting is almost indecipherable. Katherine Lee Bates was given permission to have Wellesley College students transcribe some letters before their destruction in 1915 by Mrs. Durant, immediately prior to her death. All personal letters, particularly during their courtship, were subsequently destroyed. Henry Durant did not leave a large written corpus from which to mine the ideals which shaped his thinking as he set about to establish Wellesley College. But a few can be deduced.

A. Christ As The Foundation Of All Education

            Five years after his death a close friend would reflect on Henry Durant³⁰ "The love of Christ was his favorite theme, and seemed to be the key note to his life, himself a living illustration of the power and blessedness of that love, which enabled him in meridian of life to consecrate the strength of his manhood, his life to the Master's service." 

            As he would state in a sermon delivered on September 23, 1877, "....there is one central truth which is our only hope ... Justification through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ ... this is the religion of Wellesley College ... the religion that teaches 'The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin.'"³¹ In a letter to the first President, Ada L. Howard, Durant wrote of his vision: "I could see the College in ashes, but I could not endure to see it send out only intellectual women, without the radiance and the vitalizing power of the Spirit of Christ!"⁰.

B. Education and A Life Of Service and Witness

            The first stationery of Wellesley College, dating from the 1870's. featured a picture of College Hall and a circular seal in which were centered the first two Greek letters of the name of "Christ" (the familiar chi and rho of early Christian iconography) and surrounding them the word from Mark 10:45 "Non ministrari sed ministrare", "not to be served but to serve". The Greek letters have long since disappeared but the Latin inscription is a reminder of the commitment of Henry Fowle Durant to a life of service and his commitment that Wellesley College should advance those ends.

            The life of service for others was came for Durant as a dramatic change of direction following his conversion in 1863. As his first unpublished biographer notes, prior to that time "He took little interest in his Creator as a personal God with whom he had to do, or in man as man; but he took a great deal of interest in himself."³³ On July 3, 1863 all that dramatically altered. Again to cite Mr. Tenney: "Mr. Durant's Purpose To Life Primarily for Himself, is Changed to a Life-Plan of Self-Devotement to God in the Unselfish Service of Man".

            A letter from a cousin of Mrs. Durant's who arrived  in Wellesley from Virginia in 1873 and was shown the property and College Hall as it was being built³⁴:

"I was utterly giddy & bewildered to see so much - New York Harbor by night - The Central Park - Stewarts & other wonderful buildings - didn't at all affect me like Mr. Durant's College. The others were an unmixed pleasure but this College overpowered me. - I don';t only mean the size the beauty & all its wonderful completeness - nor the lake & all its exquisite surrounding - but the feeling Mr. Durant has for it. Before I saw & heard him - I thought it was philanthropy - a desire to benefit the young - but it seems to be pure love to God - & as direct an offering to him as Solomon's Temple or any Cathedral could be. And there is such an absence of self-seeking."

            In one of the letters Mrs. Durant received following her husband's death the pastor of the Union Church reflected³⁵: "... what can I say about Mr. Durant. I never yet have loved a man as I did him .. In forty years experience in Boston, I have known and loved many men of God, but among them all he is the exception. One reason is, that I knew his heart and I had a most profound respect for him because of his integrity of soul and burning determination to be true to his Redeemer."

            The ideal he held for Wellesley College students was that, as a result of their education they would go from the institution as those committed to a life of service. As he stated in his sermon "The Spirit of the College": "Your interest will be sought for the causes of temperance, of missions, of moral reform, in vital harmony with the great advance of the age in Christian methods."³⁶

            Missions were an integral part of the life of the College. The first president of the newly formed Missionary Society of Wellesley College, Elizabeth Stillwell, seems to have had an unusually close relationship with Mr. Durant and with his help established the nucleus of a complete missionary library for Wellesley College. Professor Kendrick in noting this³⁷  went on to say that not only missionary books but "as many large maps as I wish to order" could be purchased for the Library as well. Henry Durant had a strong missionary impulse and saw the college as a place where, like Mount Holyoke, missionaries could be trained for overseas. The early decades of Wellesley graduates lived up to this vision, though with an increasingly liberal persuasion³⁸.

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            Durant's final words to the students of the College, four days before his death,  reflect both his own aspirations and those he attempted to inculcate into the life of his College: "Work for one another, and try to lead souls to God. Christ first in all things and always."³⁹

C. The Education of Women

            Henry Fowle Durant's social conscience was particularly exercised over the place of women. As a friend reflected following his death: "He appeared fully to appreciate female character and influence and often spoke of their great possibilities for good at this time of educational advantages; of his interest he has given substantial proof in his magnificent gift for their higher education. He said that every Christian lady had a work to do for Christ in her own appropriate sphjere, that the influence of wife, mother and teacher was incomparable, and that those not cumbered with needful domestic cares should seek out the poor and suffering around them with no rregard to one's social position - 'Our Saviour, while on earth, kept very low company.'"⁴⁰

            Originally intending his Wellesley estate to be used for schools for young men and women, Durant felt increasingly that priority should be given to women. As his biographer notes: "It did not take long for the astute lawyer of former days to make up his mind that girls were not getting a square deal in the present scheme of things."⁴¹ Women had been excluded from most schools of higher education in the United States. But with the Civil War decimating the male population, increasingly teachers were found among women, many privately tutored, and most without proper academic qualifications. As he asked: "...there are three hundred thousand women teachers in the United States. Who is to govern the country? Give me the teachers."⁴²

            The several schools who did allow women to enroll in the 1860's were all Christian institutions, reflecting revival movements. They included Finney's Oberlin College in Ohio and Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts. The Wellesley Female Seminary, as its was named by the Massachusetts legislature, would respond to a similar felt need.

            In his 1877 sermon "The Spirit of the College" Durant explained his "fifth great essential" in the following words:

"The one great, true ideal of higher education which the noblest womanhood demands; viz., the supreme development and unfolding of every power and faculty; of the kingly reason - the beautiful imagination - the sensitive emotional nature - the religious aspirations. The ideal of the highest learning ... feminine purity and delicacy and refinement giving their lustre and their power to the most absoluyte science; woman learned without infidelity, wide without conceit; the crowned queen of the world by right of that knowledge which is power, and beauty which is truth."

            As he would state emphatically: "The Higher Education of Women is one of the great world battle-cries for freedom. It is the assertion of absolute equality. The war is sacred, because it is the war of Christ ... ".

D. The Place of the Bible In Education

            Henry Fowle Durant, even before his 1863 religious experience, had profound respect for the Bible. In a legal case in 1859 he defended the Eliot School of Boston from an attempt by the local Roman Catholic parish and the diocese of Boston to eliminate from the daily schedule school children reciting the Lord's Prayer and a reading from the King James version ( "the Saxon Bible" as he called it). "Banish the vain delusion forever that our Saxon Bible can be taken away; neither foreign tyrants or foreign priests will ever have that power ... it will remain as the rule and guide of our faith, the Great Charter of our liberties."⁴³

            At the time of his conversion in 1863 Henry Durant became an avid and mostly self-taught Bible student. As one who knew him well wrote: "He was a Bible student, who loved and revered its sacred contents, and employed his cultured, logical mind, his implicit faith and trust in explanation of its doctrines and precepts".⁴⁴

            It is not surprising then that one of the professed aims for Wellesley College was that it be a place where the Bible was taught. In her words to Dr. Caroline Hazard at her inauguration as the fourth president of Wellesley College in 1899, Pauline Durant echoed her husband's commitment as she stated as Secretary of the Board of Trustees: "In the foundation stone of Wellesley College it is written, 'This building is humbly dedicated to our Heavenly Father ... that His Word will be faithfully taught here; and that He will use it as a means of leading precious souls to the Lord Jesus Christ."

            The earliest prospectus for the College states that "The systematic study of the Scriptures will be continued throughout the course, to which will be added the study of Church History."⁴⁵  The course, which was subsequently refined, took the Wellesley College student systematically through the Bible during the four years of her course. The first year featured gospel stories and ethics. The second, the Old Testament ("The History of the Jewish Church"), the junior year the prophecies and life of Christ, and the senior year the apostolic age and the epistles. It was a thorough grounding in the Scriptures.

            Knowledge of the Bible was, in itself, adequate. Durant told the students on one cassion about the reason for his commitment to Biblical instruction⁴⁶:

 "When we take up this holy record, therefore, we should always do it with profound reverence, and never without a select, heartfelt prayer that our heavenly Father would give us help and strength from above, that we might read aright, and receive its lessons in simplicity and truth, remembering always whose words we are studying, and that we, the creatures of a day, are, in humility and holy fear, study, with his assistance, to enter into the counsels of the Most High God, and to learn his will and his commands to us."

            Henry Durant's Biblical scholarship was informed, though limited. His library, which formed the nucleus of the College Library. Those 2500 volumes expanded by 1884 to 25,000 books. The Library, contained - according to Professor Kendrick "old and standard commentaries and histories of that day ... Complete Works of many divines whose names are now to us only names ... the works of some German scholars who were laying the foundations of Biblical criticism, works in the original German ... little used ... Hebrew and Greek texts, grammars and lexicons, ponderous volumes of general Bible Studies .. only one Bible dictionary"⁴⁷

            References to "books of German higher critical study " had an ominous sound to some. The year after Durant's death Wellhausen's Prolegomena appeared. In 1893 Charles Augustus Briggs of Union Theological Seminary was found guilty of heresy by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U. S. A.) for his adoption of Wellhausen's radical reconstruction of the Pentateuch.. Heresy trials were in the air. Those teaching Bible at Wellesley College were profoundly impacted by the new so-called Higher Critical Biblical studies.

            In 1896 a worried parent wrote to Dwight L. Moody as a Trustee of the College: "The whole tendency of the way the Bible is handled [at Wellesley College] is to break down the reverence of the girls for the Bible, and take away their faith in it. Of course they [the faculty] profess to be the most loyal students of the Word, and claim that they are only sweeping away misconceptions, and preparing the minds of the young women for a true and intelligent faith, but the result is, as the influence of the Higher Criticism always is, as you know better than I do, to take away faith altogether. My daughters who left there two years ago came away with less faith than they had when they went, and such I fear is going to be the result in the case of the one who is there now, if I cannot succeed in getting her out from under the influence. Can't something be done to put a stop to that wicked business? I wrote to Mrs. Durant about it and she laments the fact very much but sees no way to prevent it."⁴⁸.

F. Credal Subscription and Academic Freedom

            In 1859 Henry Durant defended the Boston Board of Education in a suit brought against Eliot School for its rule that classes for children should be started with a reading from the Authorized version of the Bible followed by the Lord's Prayer. The local Roman Catholic had agistated, it was claimed, children in his parish to desist from such religious exercises. His concern that religious freedom not impinge on the full exercise of the religious responsibility would be a part of his subsequent thinking as he attempted to shape Wellesley College.

            Still very much the lawyer, eighteen years later he posed the same question to an audience at the College. "Does freedom of conscience mean that the teacher must be dumb about religious truth?" Answering his own rhetorical question he replied directly andn unapologetically: "Let us take one step onward, then. Religious truth is to be taught. Let us be fearlessly radical. What is religious truth?" And then, having advanced several answers which he quickly discarded - heathenism,. Mormonism, Romanism, sectarianism, theology he responds: "What answer can there be but the great Protestant faith!"

            Even as early as a decade after Henry Durant's death would be raised  about Wellesley's adherence to his original, Christian if not specifically Protestant, vision for the school. As Secretary of the Board of Trustees, his widow wrote pointedly to Marion Pelton Guild, class of 1880, as she was elected as the first alumna trustee in 1889. "I send you a copy of what Mr. Durant had prepared, though not yet presented (not yet perfected to his satisfaction) as 'Constitution and Articles of Faith' for Wellesley College. I believe you will accept these views and act loyally in sustaining them. I do not think we can safely remove the Evangelical Church membership clause, not without danger of the coming of those not accepting and teaching what we regard as vital truth."⁴⁹

            The Constitution to which she refers and which she includes is as follows:

"This College is builded to the mighty God and it is our wish that it should be kept sacred to the cause of Christian education. This cannot be unless the Trustees and Teachers are of the like Christian faith; and to secure this end the following Articles of Faith taken from God's Holy Word are adopted. Those who are chosen to be Trustees or Teachers must sign them before entering upon their duties.

            He continues "We do this not to lay any burden upon the consciences of others, but because we believe this .. to be essential to the salvation of men, and while we leave others to hold and teach their own religious opinions, we claim for ourselves the same liberty of conscience."

            The Articles of Faith then follow: "I believe in mighty God our Heavenly Father and in His only begotten Son Jesus Christ our Saviour as the only name under heaven given among men whereby whosoever believeth in Him must be saved. I believe in the Holy Spirit the Comforter. I believe in the Holy Scripture, apart from all human interpretation, as alone inspired by God to be the only infallible rule of faith and practice, and I believe that this authority is not transferable to the church or to any of its officers."

            And finally the subscription: "I do solemnly pledge myself not to teach nor directly or indirectly consent to the teaching in the Wellesley College of any doctrine contrary to any part of these Articles of Faith, and should I at any time change my religious belief from any part thereof I pledge my honor to resign my office in the College immediately and cease to be connected with it in any way."

            One can only speculate as to whether these controls would have been enforceable, and what difference they would have made to the future direction of Wellesley College had they been instituted. As Professor Kendrick notes⁵⁰ Mrs. Durant was left for thirty-six years following the death of her husband to see the gradual transformation -if not erosion - of his ideals. While his education commitment to excellence made Wellesley College one of the premier women's higher educational institutions in the country, and contributed directly to the advancement of women in the Twentieth Century, the religious ideals for which he gave his life and his fortune in the foundation of Wellesley College were not honored.

            In spite of "trying times for her, as she saw one and another of the methods which seemed to her essential and the emphases which to her had been vital abandoned for others which she could not quite approve ... she never failed in her loyalty"⁵¹. What would her husband have done had he seen the cataclysmic change in direction of Wellesley College? Would he have been so restrained?

            These are questions about which one can only speculate - the "what if's" of history. Henry Durant's final legacy is perhaps best summarized one of the early students of the College:

"Above all the opportunities for culture which he provided, above all the ardent ambitions which he nobly stimulated, above every phase of friendship and fellowship, dear in college days, he wrote the sacred sentence which gave them purpose, 'Not to be ministered unto, but to minister.'"

            That is the final legacy of the religious ideals of Henry Fowle Durant.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Secondary sources:

Hackett, Alice Payne; Wellesley: Part of the American Story; New York (E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., Publishers), 1949.

Kendrick, Eliza Hall; History of Bible Teaching at Wellesley College, 1875-1950;  (Afterword by Paul L. Lehmann); published privately, 1950

Kingsley, Florence Morse; The Life of Henry Fowle Durant Founder of Wellesley College; New York (The Century Co.), 1924.

Murphy, Dolores Aveileyra, Compiler;  In Red Hats, Beads, & Bags: 1908     Graduates Sharing Their Lives Through Letters; Morrison, CO (Cassiopeia Press, Inc.), 1990.  

NOTES