Background
Huidekoper was born in Meadville, Pa. in 1817. He was the fourth son of Harm Jan Huidekoper and Rebecca Colhoon, his wife.
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Huidekoper was born in Meadville, Pa. in 1817. He was the fourth son of Harm Jan Huidekoper and Rebecca Colhoon, his wife.
His impressionable and happy boyhood was fully responsive to the high aims cherished in his father's household and to the intensive instruction given in the family school by a succession of gifted young graduates of Harvard College. Despite serious limitation of eyesight, he was able to join the sophomore class of Harvard at the age of seventeen and there his intimate relations with Andrews Norton and Charles Follen had permanent effect on his life. During his junior year the malady of his eyes compelled him to leave college, and for four ensuing years, while healthfully active in farm life at home, his reading was restricted to half an hour or less a day. Nevertheless, his accurate acquisition and retentive memory made him already a learned man when, at the age of twenty-two, he went to Europe for travel and study. In the universities of Geneva, Leipzig, and Berlin he was occupied with history, literature, and Biblical studies, and he enjoyed personal intercourse with Cousin, Picot of Geneva, Neander, and DeWette. His letters from Europe show that he was specially observant of the social care of the poor and the sick and of the treatment of prisoners. As he debated the question how to live most usefully for others, this humanitarian interest made him decide for the vocation of a minister-at-large--a minister engaged in social service. He returned to America in 1841, completed his theological study at Harvard, and October 14, 1843, was ordained as an evangelist in the Unitarian Church in Meadville, intending to work in rural centers of the neighborhood without a parish settlement.
He was diverted to the career of a scholar and teacher. His father had advocated provision for the theological training of the itinerant preachers of the Christian Connection, and others had discussed plans for a Unitarian school west of New England. Accordingly, at his ordination he was urged by his brother-in-law, Rev. James Freeman Clarke, and Dr. George Hosmer of Buffalo to receive as pupils aspirants for the preacher's vocation. This project was rapidly broadened and the result was the foundation in 1844 of the Meadville Theological School. As a professor in this school he taught with conspicuous intellectual power until, in 1877, he was checked by complete blindness. He served without monetary reward, contributing from his private means to the maintenance of the institution and sharing with it the use of his extensive library.
He taught in the fields of the New Testament and church history, but later of church history alone, concerned more with precision of detail than with large construction of the process of historical development. His publications began in 1854 with a monograph on The Belief of the First Three Centuries Concerning Christ's Mission to the Underworld. In this he argued that the absence from the Gospels of a belief common in the second century disproved certain efforts to establish very late dates for the Gospels. In 1876 he produced an extensive treatise on Judaism at Rome, a work of pioneer research in a subject since then thoroughly investigated by others. In 1879 he published The Indirect Testimony of History to the Genuineness of the Gospels, opposing the claim that the present form of the Gospels is due to late editors using early materials in the interests of second-century controversies. These works show an astonishing acquaintance with the texts of Greek and Roman authors and the Church Fathers, though they lack clear construction in the argument and popular effectiveness of style.
At his death in Meadville, he was survived by two of his four children.
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
He was a conservative Unitarian, little affected by the Transcendentalist movement, convinced by a survey of history that faith in a Moral Ruler of the Universe found security only in revelation, but he stressed and practised independence of thought. Before critical views were acceptable in America, he rejected the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch and in 1857 published a demonstration of the analysis of Genesis into Jahvist and Elohist sources.
He was a man of stately form, of courtly dignity, always urbane in collisions of opinion, and given to deeds of generosity where there was need.
On November 10, 1853, he married in New York Harriet Nancy, fifth daughter of Henry Sturges Thorp and Julia Ann (Parker) Thorp.