Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 32:126 (Apr 1875)
Article: Professor Albert Hopkins
Author: John Bascom

BSac 32:126 (April 1875) p. 350

Professor Albert Hopkins

John Bascom

Professor Albert Hopkins, for forty years and more, was, in a very unusual way, the centre of the religious life of Williams College. Many in that period received from him the most efficient and controlling spiritual impulses of their lives; and many are ready to testify that when in search of a perfect and upright man their thoughts most immediately revert to him. This real excellence of character, this glory of a Christian manhood, this extended and benign influence, exerted with no peculiar vantage-ground of position, entitle him to our remembrance, and make every tribute a blessing to him whose soul prompts him to render it. I am confident that the graduates of Williams College for these many years gladly unite in every word of honest recognition, and find them all too few to express their obligations or measure their esteem. It was on a throne of goodness that he sat, and ruled by a sense of righteousness those who came near him.

Albert Hopkins was born in Stockbridge, Mass., July 14, 1807. He was graduated at Williams College in 1826; became a tutor in the college in 1827; and a professor, in 1829, of mathematics and natural philosophy. This position he held till his death, May 24, 1872. In 1838, his professorship was changed to that of natural philosophy and astronomy. The events of his life were of a wholly ordinary grade, and leave no record behind them. His character only was extraordinary. This made his years excellent, as the perfume of flowers the days of spring.

If we understand by faith the mind’s hold of invisible things, the vigor with which it realizes them, the constancy

BSac 32:126 (April 1875) p. 351

with which it spreads them before its inner vision, the steadiness and clearness with which it shapes daily action under them and for them, then faith was the pre-eminent characteristic of Professor Hopkins. His changes of religious life seemed to be but the modified expression of one absorbing conviction — expression suited to the changing sympathies and external conditions which he found about him. When the revival came, it did not appear to be to him so much a revival, as the breathing in of fresh hopes to an anxious and waiting spirit — the giving air to fires that had been suppressed, but not smothered, by the heavy, sluggish atmosphere about them. In 1832, he established in college a noon prayer-meeting, of a half hour, held on four days of the week. This was maintained by him for about forty years. It was the most firm, persistent, and steadily influential means of religious life that I have ever had occasion to observe. Its conception and execution were possible only to a spiritual temper and light that never burned dim. Upheld by sheer strength of w...