The Seminary Years of the Missionaries Horace G

Korea Presbyterian Journal of Theology Vol. 47 No. 3

The Seminary Years of the Missionaries Horace G. Underwood and Henry G. Appenzeller

John W. Coakley, Th.D. Feakes Professor, Church History New Brunswick Theological Seminary, U.S.A.

I. Introduction II. The “Crisis of Missions” III. Appenzeller at Drew IV. Underwood at New Brunswick V. The Inter-Seminary Missionary Alliance VI. The Call to Korea VII. Conclusion

Korea Presbyterian Journal of Theology Vol. 47 No. 3 (2015. 9), 59-82 60 Korea Presbyterian Journal of Theology Vol. 47 No. 3

Abstract

This article discusses the seminary preparation, inA merica, of the missionaries Horace Underwood (1859-1916) and Henry Appenzeller (1858-1902), both of whom spent most of their adult lives in Korea after their arrival there in 1885. It presents them, in their documented actions and relationships in their seminary years at, respectively, New Brunswick Theological Seminary and Drew Theological Seminary (as it was then called) as being both influenced by, and exemplifying, a spirit of renewed urgency about world mission—a spirit that had begun to manifest itself in American evangelical circles in the early 1880s, and was epitomized in the notion of a “crisis of missions” popularized by the pastor and theologian A. T. Pierson. Both Underwood and Ap- penzeller had direct contact with the broader missionary movement that embodied this renewed spirit of mission, through the then-young organization called the Inter-Seminary Missionary Alliance, the annual meeting of which they both attended in October of 1883, at around the time when they were coming to their decisions to respond to the call to serve in Korea.

Keywords

Appenzeller, Underwood, Crisis of Missions, Inter-Seminary Missionary Alliance, Pierson The Seminary Years of the Missionaries Horace G. Underwood and Henry G. Appenzeller 61

I. Introduction1

The missionariesH enry Gerhard Appenzeller and Horace Grant Underwood sailed together into Chemulpo harbor in April of 1885. Both spent much of the remainder of their lives in Korea, where the stories of their place in Korean Christianity are well known. Less well known, perhaps, are the stories of their preparation in America as missionaries, in the early 1880s when they were seminary students. Those are the stories I propose to tell here. A conspicuous trait of both these men in their seminary years, as in fact earlier, was their zealous commitment to evangelism. Indeed both of them were intellectually able, and in Korea both would distinguish themselves as teachers and biblical translators. But by disposition, their first love was always the active life of preaching and witness—a vigor- ous life of visible accomplishment for the Christian cause in the world. This passion for evangelism and for tangible achievement in build- ing the church, though of course a trait unsurprising in missionaries, was also peculiarly matched with the particular spirit of the foreign mission movement in America during the time they were in seminary, when they were coming to their decisions to serve as missionaries in Korea—a time characterized by a new sense of urgency about the call to mission and new organizational efforts to stimulate response to that call.

II. The “Crisis of Missions”

The new urgency about foreign mission that was being expressed in the 1880s had to do, in part anyway, with global geopolitical changes at the time. It was these that the pastor and theologian A. T. Pierson

1 This essay originated as a public lecture presented at the International Sympo- sium on Appenzeller and Underwood in Commemoration of 130 Years of Korean Mis- sion, held in Seoul May 30-31, 2105 and co-sponsored by the Saemoonan Presbyterian Church, the Chungdong First Methodist Church, Drew Theological School and New Brunswick Theological Seminary. I thank the organizers of the symposium for their in- vitation, hospitality and support. 62 Korea Presbyterian Journal of Theology Vol. 47 No. 3 famously spoke of as creating a “crisis of missions.” Indeed, the foreign mission movement in America was itself not new; we usually think of the founding of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1810—that is, two generations earlier—as its beginning- point, and the movement had deep roots in American Protestant culture.2 All the evangelical churches had been sending and supporting missionaries to foreign fields through most of the century already. But Pierson and others were pointing out that by the 1880s, largely because of Western nations’ expansion of their commerce by treaty and also (let it be said) by coercion, countries that had previously excluded missionaries were now allowing them. The world, they argued, was suddenly becoming considerably more open to the Gospel than it had been in the earlier part of the century. Doors formerly closed to the Gospel were now thrown wide. What made this situation a “crisis,” as Pierson explained it, was a looming awareness that the doors might soon shut again. Thus it was imperative for the Church to bring the gospel where it might be heard while there was still time. Moreover, evils from the West, that is, from the cultures of the missionaries’ own countries, were also entering those doors—evils like materialism and unbelief—and the Church must hurry to preempt them.3 By the middle of the decade, the slogan, “The Evangelization of the World in this Generation”–a phrase, dubbed the “watchword,” which admirably conveyed the sense of haste shared by mission leaders at that point—was to be coined, and it became the great rallying cry of the American foreign mission movement, which grew remarkably, from not quite a thousand missionaries in overseas fields in 1894 to 5400 in 1900 to 9000 by 1915.4 And it was in the early 1880s that the impetus behind this great growth in missions

2 William R. Hutchison, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 43-61. 3 arthur T. Pierson, The Crisis of Missions (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1886); Dana Robert, Occupy until I Come: A.T. Pierson and the Evangelization of the World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), esp. 140-46, 150-56 4 Michael Parker, The Kingdom of Character: The Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions 1886-1926 (Lanham, Maryland: American Society of Missiology and University Press of America, 1998), ix. See also William R. Hutchison, Errand to the World, 91-124. The Seminary Years of the Missionaries Horace G. Underwood and Henry G. Appenzeller 63 was beginning to be felt in earnest.

III. Appenzeller at Drew

Henry Gerhard Appenzeller, by the time he enrolled in seminary, was well poised to absorb this spirit of urgency about the evangelization of the world. He was a Methodist by choice, and for him the choice had intimately involved a commitment to evangelism. Born in 1858, he grew up in rural Pennsylvania in a family of German background and attended his family’s church, which belonged to the denomination known as the German Reformed Church. At that time, an important theological movement was finding expression within that denomination, a movement known as the Mercersburg Theology, whose leaders understood the Christian faith as a corporate reality that had developed organically over time, and accordingly criticized as shallow and indi- vidualistic the emphasis on revivals and personal conversion experiences typical of other American Protestants. At the German Reformed Church’s Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where Appenzeller pursued his undergraduate studies, he was exposed to the Mercersburg theology, and he respected its intellectual depth. But by the time he became a student at the college he himself had had a personal conversion experience in a revival meeting, which had deeply affected him, and served to distance him from the Mercersburg theology; he found himself more comfortable in Methodist churches- -with their frank emphasis on revivals and personal evangelism--than in German Reformed ones. And so in 1879 as a twenty-one year old college student, he left the German Reformed denomination to become a Methodist, joining the First Methodist Church in Lancaster. He was soon serving as a preacher at one of its local mission churches. Then, in the fall of 1882, having received his college degree, he enrolled in what was then called the Drew Theological Seminary to prepare for the Methodist ministry.5

5 Daniel M. Davies, The Life and Thought of Henry Gerhard Appenzeller(1858-1902), 64 Korea Presbyterian Journal of Theology Vol. 47 No. 3

Drew itself made evangelizing a priority. When Appenzeller became a student there the seminary was only fifteen years old. Even so, it was among the first Methodist theological seminaries in America, though Methodists at that moment were one of the largest denomina- tions in the country. Methodists had had a slow start in theological education in large part because of their very success, as a movement committed to evangelistic preaching accessible to common people, and thus distrustful of what they saw as academic pretensions. Drew’s founding, in 1867, itself signaled the waning of that distrust, at least in some precincts of Methodism; already at its beginning the school had a solid academic program and by Appenzeller’s time it had, by any- one’s reckoning, a distinguished faculty. Nonetheless, Drew reflected its firm Methodist roots in not allowing academic work itself to become the be-all and end-all of seminary study; instead the practical matter of preaching, and by implication evangelistic preaching, was a central focus. The constitution of the school identified its purpose precisely as the preparation of preachers;6 the catalog in Appenzeller’s time declared that “while theology in all its branches is carefully taught, the art of preaching is assiduously cultivated”;7 its students were already licensed to preach, that is, to practice their craft, by the time they enrolled. And it was understood that if the church needed them to ful- fill their ministry before they finished the full seminary course, the church’s need would take first priority and their course would remain unfinished.8 Indeed Appenzeller himself left for Korea before his final semester of study at Drew, although in his case the faculty made special arrangement to allow him to take his final examinations and so that he graduated with his class in absentia.9

Missionary to Korea (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1988), 5-33. On Appenzeller see also Edward W. Poitras, “The Legacy of Henry G Appenzeller,” International Bulletin Of Missionary Research 18-4 (October 1994), 177-80. 6 ezra S. Tipple, “Today and Tomorrow,” in Drew Theological Seminary 1867-1917: A Review of the First Half Century, ed. Ezra S. Tipple (New York and Cincinnati: The Methodist Book Concern, 1917), 256. 7 Daniel M. Davies, The Life and Thought of Henry Gerhard Appenzeller, 48. 8 John A. Faulkner, “The Early Years,” in Drew Theological Seminary 1867-1917, ed. Ezra S. Tipple (New York/ Cincinati: The Methodist Book Concern, 1917), 36. 9 Drew Theological Seminary Minutes, vol. 2, Dec. 30, 1884 (“Agreed… that…in The Seminary Years of the Missionaries Horace G. Underwood and Henry G. Appenzeller 65

Appenzeller appears to have thrived at Drew. His biographer Dan- iel Davies has shown him to be in cordial correspondence throughout his later life with almost all his professors, and with several of his class- mates, sharing positive memories of his student years. Davies has also been able to compare Appenzeller’s writings with those of the Drew faculty at the time, to suggest his teachers’ influences on him, and has noted in particular the Arminianism and cautious openness to the scientific age that Appenzeller absorbed from his theology professor John Miley.10 Meanwhile, by assignment he was preaching regularly in, successively, the churches of Green Village and Montville, New Jersey. These were apparently solid and flourishing congregations, though in keeping with his own sense of calling, Appenzeller expressed disap- pointment that in one of them (Green Village), he saw no “revival spirit” during the time of his ministry.11

IV. Underwood at New Brunswick

If Henry Appenzeller showed a commitment to evangelism already in his seminary years, so too did Horace Underwood. But though like Appenzeller he was from a pious family, the early formation that pre- ceded his time in seminary was somewhat different. Born in London in 1859, he spent his early childhood there and then was sent to school in France for two years before emigrating with his family to the United States in 1872: thus he had a more cosmopolitan background than the rural Appenzeller. Moreover, the account given by his wife Lillias Un- derwood of Horace’s early life, in her biography of her husband—our

view of his early departure to Corea, for Missionary work, [Appenzeller] be allowed an examination at his own convenience”) and March 25, 1885 (in which he is listed among the graduates to be approved by the Board of Trustees). Theological School Records, University Archives, Drew University Library, Madison, New Jersey. I thank Dr. Matthew Beland of the Drew University Archives, for locating these references and Dean Javier Viera of the Drew Theological School for calling my attention to them. 10 Daniel M. Davies, The Life and Thought of Henry Gerhard Appenzeller, 49-62, 393. 11 ibid., 67-70. 66 Korea Presbyterian Journal of Theology Vol. 47 No. 3 only such account—strikingly lacks any reference to obvious disconti- nuity in his religious development on the order of the decisive conversion experience and change of denomination we saw in Appenzeller; rather she pictures Horace as, in effect anyway, a man continuously pious from childhood.12 If we do not know of a conspicuous conversion experience in Un- derwood’s life, we do however know of an influence on him from outside his family that was probably quite important. This was the influence of his mentor the Rev. William Augustus Van Vranken Mabon, the Un- derwood family’s pastor in the Grove Reformed Church in New Dur- ham, New Jersey. This was a congregation is the denomination called the Reformed Church in America (which until 1867 had been known as the Reformed Dutch Church), Lillias Underwood refers to Mabon as Horace’s “beloved pastor,” and relates that he tutored the bright young Underwood to prepare him for his college entrance examinations at New York University which would have been in 1877. Later, in 1881, shortly after Horace enrolled at New Brunswick Seminary—which was the regional seminary of the Reformed Church in America—Mabon himself was elected Professor of Didactic and Polemic Theology at the seminary; and the young man would then have spent a full two years in Mabon’s theology classes before his graduation.13 Then a few months after his graduation, it was Mabon whom Underwood chose to deliver the sermon at his ordination, in the First Reformed Church of New Brunswick. This was in November 11, 1884, shortly before his depar-

12 underwood’s father–a chemist and inventor who founded a manufacturing business producing inks and carbon papers, the forerunner of the Underwood Typewriter Company later headed by Horace’s brother John Thomas Underwood, was the grandson of a famous Scottish minister and a close friend of the evangelist George Müller. Lillias H. Underwood, Underwood of Korea (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1918), 15-19. The premillennialist Müller was to be an important influence on A. T. Pierson. See Dana Robert, Occupy Until I Come, 95-103. 13 Board of Superintendents Minutes, vol. 3, 160-61, New Brunswick Theologi- cal Seminary Archives, Sage Library, New Brunswick, NJ; Catalogue of the Officers and Students of the Theological Seminary of the Reformed (Dutch) Church in America, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1882-83 (New Brunswick: Terhune, 1882), 10-11 (showing that students were to take Didactic and Polemic Theology in their Middle and Senior years). The Seminary Years of the Missionaries Horace G. Underwood and Henry G. Appenzeller 67 ture for Korea.14 It seems likely that Mabon served as a model for Underwood, in his role as a minister of practical, evangelistic bent. We have, it is true, no surviving word from Underwood himself about Mabon’s influence, nor any correspondence between them. Nor indeed have any other documents survived from Underwood’s own pen that would date from his student years. Thus we are unable to make inferences as to what theology the student absorbed from this or any other of his teachers, i.e., inferences of the kind Davies has been able to make about Ap- penzeller. (Nor, for the same reason, can we make a direct comparison between the two students’ approach to theological questions, which would otherwise be very helpful in the present context.) But, in addition to the fact that Underwood chose Mabon to preach his ordination sermon, there are remarkable parallels between the teacher’s activism and that of the student, and similarities in their respective characters and dispositions, that at least suggest the strong possibility of an influence on Mabon’s part. Mabon’s surviving writings, which cover a range pastoral and public issues of the day, reveal an eclecticism that is consistent with what we otherwise know of his ministry at New Dur- ham: that he was at heart an active pastor with broad interests.15 An editorial in the Reformed Church’s newspaper after his death spoke of

14 Classis of New Brunswick Minutes, 3 Nov., 1883, Reformed Church in America Archives, Sage Library, New Brunswick NJ. 15 in his writings, the only glimpse we have of Mabon as an academic theologian is his inaugural discourse as professor at New Brunswick, in which he identifies himself with the so-called mediating school of German theology that attempted to bring together the romantic Christ-centered emphasis on religious feeling with the rational exercise of historical criticism of scripture: William A. V. V. Mabon, “The Christ in Theology,” in Inauguration of the Rev. William Van Vranken Mabon, D. D. (New York: Board of Publica- tion of the Reformed Church in America, 1882), 45-78. His other surviving writings are all practical or pastoral in focus and their topics make for an eclectic list: the proper task of public education, the raising of children in “home and church,” the life of a revered member his congregation at New Durham, the resemblance between RCA polity and the American constitution, the best strategy for union with the German Reformed Church. For a list of these publications (copies of all of which are preserved in the Mabon file in the Reformed Church in America Archives), see Edward T. Corwin, Manual of the Reformed Church in America, 4th ed. (New York: Board of Publication of the R.C.A., 1902), 590. 68 Korea Presbyterian Journal of Theology Vol. 47 No. 3 his “rare business tact … which in any calling would have given him success,” and pointed to his achievements in the planting of churches- -his congregation at New Durham having spawned no fewer than thir- teen daughter-churches during his pastorate there—as well as his active seeking out of young men to mentor, including, of course, the young Underwood, as well another man who would become an important missionary, James Ballagh of Japan.16 David Demarest, his faculty col- league at New Brunswick, observed in a eulogy that “his life was … filled with practical work,” that as a pastor he had been deeply involved in the affairs of his local community, serving for instance “for several years” as Superintendent of the public schools there; and that even as a professor at New Brunswick, he devoted his energies to helping or- ganize two congregations in neighborhoods near the seminary.17 All of this cannot but remind us of Underwood, who not only began his evangelistic work as a teenager visiting the saloons of New Durham (in that case no doubt under Mabon’s direct influence), but of course also famously worked to plant churches in Korea with singular dedication and results, all the while founding or nurturing a wide range of institutions and bringing a businessman’s acumen to bear on his work.18 Already as a seminary student at New Brunswick, Underwood was doing evangelistic work. Indeed Lillias Underwood in her biography makes a particular point of his devotion to such work, and thus not just to academic study, in his seminary years. She famously quotes a “classmate” (possibly John Gillespie, who would later teach both New Testament and Missions at New Brunswick) saying that “you could see Horace with his coat-tails flying around some NewB runswick street on some religious work almost any day in the week, during his three years’ stay in the seminary.”19 She gives some examples, which our other

16 editorial in Christian Intelligencer (November 1892), 1. 17 David D. Demarest, “The Rev. William Augustus Van Vranken Mabon,” Chris- tian Intelligencer (November 1892), 10. 18 l. Underwood, Underwood of Korea, 23-24 (on his evangelizing in saloons); 114, 263, 297 (on his business sense). 19 gillespie was a year behind Underwood at New Brunswick, having been admit- ted during the academic year 1882-83 (Board of Superintendents Minutes, vol. 3, 172) and so had not been a witness of “all three” of Underwood’s seminary years. But he is The Seminary Years of the Missionaries Horace G. Underwood and Henry G. Appenzeller 69 sources confirm.S he says that he enthusiastically volunteered with the Salvation Army, which was just then setting up a station in New Bruns- wick; and the minutes of the Society of Inquiry (which was the student mission society at the seminary), for February 13, 1883 (in Horace’s second year), do record a “general discussion on the Work of the Salva- tion Army, opened by Mr. Underwood.”20 Lillias also mentions Hor- ace’s work as an unofficial “assistant pastor” to Thomas C. Easton, the Scottish-born minister at First Reformed Church in New Brunswick, which is located about a half-mile from the seminary, who was a “man after [Horace’s] own heart” who fostered “continual revivals” and “won- derful conversions” in his congregation.21 It was this Easton whom Un- derwood asked to give him his “charge” at his ordination service before he left for Korea (the service in which his other mentor Mabon was the preacher); and though the church’s consistory minutes do not mention Underwood, it is clear that Easton did make a great splash in the church during the time Underwood was in New Brunswick, consistent with what Lillias Underwood tells us: on March 3, 1883, most spectacularly, First Reformed took in 140 new members, 119 of them by profession of faith, and the number of communicant members increased overall in that year of 1882-83 by about 30%.22 Lillias Underwood also tells of a summer pastorate that Horace held in 1883 in Pompton, New Jersey. There, under his influence, the congregation “very greatly increased (I believe quadrupled)” its giv- the only one of the informants Lillias Underwood names in her Preface (Underwood of Korea, 8-9) whose time at the seminary would have overlapped with Underwood’s, and at any rate she may be quoting him only approximately. 20 society of Inquiry Minutes, vol. 1, 466, New Brunswick Theological Seminary Archives. 21 l. Underwood, Underwood of Korea, 27. Lillias Underwood also mentions that she and Horace encountered Easton later in California, during their stay in the US in 1890 (Ibid., 106), and in addition acknowledges him in her preface (Ibid., 8) as having supplied information to her for the biography. 22 Consistory Minutes, 3 March, 1883, First Reformed Church Archives, New Brunswick, N.J. The total of communicant members of the church in 1881-82 was 533 (Acts and Proceedings of the General Synod of the Reformed Church in America, vol. 15 [New York: Board of Publication of the R.C.A., 1885], minutes of 1882, 91) and in 1882- 83 (as reported following the addition of members in March) was 720 (Ibid., minutes of 1883, 27). 70 Korea Presbyterian Journal of Theology Vol. 47 No. 3 ing for missions; there also he conducted an effective revival among some people who lived in a “somewhat remote country district in the hills.”23 The records of the Pompton Reformed Church confirm that the consistory engaged “Mr. Underwood, a student in the seminary at New Brunswick,” to preach in the summer months of 1883 while the congregation was without a called pastor, and they also show a very large, if temporary, increase in mission giving for the fiscal year that included Underwood’s stay there.24 I have not yet been able to find cor- roborating evidence of the revival in the hills, which may have involved a group of people sometimes called the “Ramapo Mountain People,” who are still present in the area.25 The Pompton records do, however, add one new detail to our picture of his ministry there: during his brief stay that summer, the church added twenty-four new members, which increased the size of this small-town congregation by about 13%.26 The evangelistic Underwood must have had in mind what he had witnessed in the New Brunswick church under Easton just a few months earlier. So far I have been stressing the parallels between Underwood at New Brunswick and Appenzeller at Drew: here were two evangelistical- ly inclined young men, engaged already in the practical work of ministry. But on this score, one evident difference between their respective seminaries strikes me as I read the sources. It is well to remember that New Brunswick was an older seminary than Drew–it was to celebrate its 100th anniversary in 1884, the year of Underwood’s graduation–and

23 l. Underwood, Underwood of Korea, 31-32. She states that he also served in Pompton for “part of” the academic year that followed (Ibid., 31), the Pompton consistory minutes (see the note to follow) show no evidence of this. 24 Pompton Reformed Church Consistory Minutes, 3 March 1884, Pompton Re- formed Church Archives. The minutes are almost illegible at this point, but appear to register benevolence giving of $2,600 in the year 1983-84, which would have been not merely a four-fold, but a twelve-fold, increase, the previous year’s figure being $206.74 (Ibid., 21 March 1883). The next year’s figure dipped again, to $292.51. I thank Sandra Sheppard for her research to obtain these figures. 25 There have been several studies of these people, with differing accounts of their origins. See David S. Cohen, The Ramapo Mountain People (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1974); Edward J. Lenik, Ramapo Mountain Indians: People, Places and Cultural Traditions (Ringwood, NJ: North Jersey Highlands Historical Society, 2011). 26 The figure for total communicants at Pompton, reported for the year 1982-83 was 148. Acts and Proceedings, minutes of 1883, 28. The Seminary Years of the Missionaries Horace G. Underwood and Henry G. Appenzeller 71 it had its origins in circumstances rather different from those of Drew. Drew’s founders had sought to establish a new tradition of academic preparation for ministry that risked running against the grain of the appeal to common folk that accounted for the Methodists’ very success within the established democratic society of mid-nineteenth-century America, and accordingly it treated its students as preachers already while they were students . New Brunswick’s founders, by contrast and several decades earlier, had sought to retain an old tradition of a learned ministry that was inherited from the institutions of European Christen- dom, and was felt to account for their church’s continuing value and strength, in the uncertain conditions of the American democracy that was then new. Accordingly from its earliest days and then throughout the nineteenth century, New Brunswick Seminary’s superintendents and the General Synod of the Reformed Church had repeatedly forbid- den students to engage actively in preaching during their student years, in part out of concern to protect their study-time, but more fundamen- tally on the conviction that a student’s seminary years should be a time apart from the active ministry for which they were preparing–a time of immersion in the academic work on which their later preaching careers would rely.27 Thus while Drew encouraged, even required, students to preach while they were students, New Brunswick discouraged them from doing so. New Brunswick to be sure, was as committed as Drew to preparing preachers. Also the Reformed Church’s proscriptions of student preaching had softened somewhat over time–to permit the kind of summer assignment Underwood had at Pompton, for example–yet the superintendents’ minutes show that the Superintendents at New Brunswick continued to express their concerns about such preaching, at least during academic terms, during Underwood’s very years at the seminary.28

27 on the issue of student preaching, see John W. Coakley, New Brunswick Theo- logical Seminary: An Illustrated History (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 16-18, 60-61. 28 in May of 1883 the Board of Superintendents had criticized the faculty for allowing “the young men …. to occupy pulpits, and to preach almost as freely as if they were actually licentiates who had completed their prescribed Seminary course” (Board of Superintendents Minutes, vol. 3, 180-81, New Brunswick TheologicalS eminary Archives, Sage Library, New Brunswick, NJ); and the faculty replied in exasperation in its report the 72 Korea Presbyterian Journal of Theology Vol. 47 No. 3

The Reformed Church’s concern about student preaching probably had a bearing on Underwood’s experience at New Brunswick. After quoting his classmate’s comment about Horace’s “flying coattails” in pursuit of “religious work” at New Brunswick, Lillias Underwood comments that “this was much to the distaste of the faculty, who believed it could not but be to the disadvantage of his studies,” and adds with a defiant tone that “they tried in vain to interfere,” for “they had come in contact with a personality not easily controlled.”29 Though there is no evidence that Underwood violated the letter of the rules about student preaching, which technically forbade only the occupying of pulpits in term-time, some of the faculty may well have frowned on his activities. I hasten to add, though, that there is no trace of any negative comment about him in any of the seminary records; and that at the seminary’s centennial celebration just a few months after Underwood’s graduation, Professor David Demarest spoke proudly of “the young brother, Horace G. Underwood… who has just been ordained and given to the Presbyterian Church, to be its pioneer missionary to Corea, the Hermit nation,” as the latest in a long line of New Brunswick graduates serving in foreign fields.30

V. The Inter-Seminary Missionary Alliance

I began this essay by describing the new disposition that was beginning to characterize the American foreign mission movement at the time that Underwood and Appenzeller were in seminary–the new sense of hurry about the task of mission worldwide, explained by following year, noting that in spite of what the Superintendents said, the General Synod had become lax on the matter and the churches themselves gave the students so many opportunities to preach that the faculty are put in a position “of such embarrassment and difficulty, that we feel that we are entitled to sympathy and support rather than deserving of censure.” Ibid., 191. 29 l. Underwood, Underwood of Korea, 27. 30 David D. Demarest, “Historical Discourse,” in Centennial of the Theological Semi- nary of the Reformed Church in America, ed. David D. Demarest, Paul D. Van Cleef, and Edward T. Corwin (New York: Board of Publication, RCA, 1885), 117. The Seminary Years of the Missionaries Horace G. Underwood and Henry G. Appenzeller 73

Pierson as the “crisis of missions,” and soon to be epitomized in the slogan “TheE vangelization of the World in ThisG eneration.” I return to that broader context now, to place the students Appenzeller and Underwood within it. For in October of 1883, they both attended the annual convention of one of the first ecumenical organizations to give expression to the new spirit of world mission. This was the so-called “Inter-Seminary Missionary Alliance.” The Inter-Seminary Missionary Alliance had been founded three years earlier, in April 1880, by a group of students from twelve seminaries. The organization’s first meeting had been in New Brunswick itself, in October of that year. The Alliance was to meet annually for nineteen years, until 1898, when it became the Theological Committee of the Student Division of the American YMCA.31 As an ecumenical body that cultivated and encouraged young people’s vocations for missionary work, it was a precursor to the organization that was to be most closely associated with the Watchword and the mission work it inspired, namely the Student Volunteer Movement that began in 1886, encouraged by Dwight L. Moody and led by, among others, Robert Wilder and John R. Mott.32 The records of that first meeting of the Inter-Seminary Missionary Alliance in 1880 convey a sense of the excitement it generated. A. T. Pierson himself gave one of the major addresses at the meeting. He began by saying that in his own busy life the only thing that could have prompted him to take the speaking engagement, which had necessi- tated his traveling a thousand miles, was the prospect of this “gathering of theological students.” He added: “I do not hesitate to say that, in all the history of this great missionary century, no event has happened that enfolds within itself more possible significance and dignity than” such a gathering. Then he proceeded to explain the urgency of the moment in world missions, in passionate terms that anticipated his later writings on the subject, on the conviction that the young seminarians seated

31 Clarence Shedd, Two Centuries of Student Christian Movements (New York: Aso- ciation Press, 1934), 214-26. 32 The Inter-Seminary Alliance held one of the three seats on the Student Volun- teer Movement’s coordinating committee in its early years. Michael Parker, Kingdom of Character, 12-13. 74 Korea Presbyterian Journal of Theology Vol. 47 No. 3 in front of him would become the cutting edge of the response to the crisis in missions, if they would only “resign all worldly ambition, … crucify your desire for worldly emolument and worldly honors and … take that position of humility before the Lord, which is the grand condition of power.”33 Particularly important, for Pierson and others, was the interdenominational character of the meeting, and by implication the promise of an overarching unity that must characterize the new missionary spirit. As the editor of the Christian Intelligencer put it in his description of the event, “the missionary work was consid- ered as a whole, and individual [i.e., denominational] missions were only alluded to as illustrations. It may be gravely doubted whether the young men themselves were quite aware how the barriers had sunk out of sight, and how much such a Convention did for the promotion of Christian unity.”34 It was the fourth meeting of this Alliance, held in Hartford, Con- necticut, that Underwood and Appenzeller attended in October of 1883. Appenzeller was in his second year of seminary, Underwood in his third. Three hundred and forty-five seminary students–young men from thirty-one different seminaries–gathered for the event. Twelve were from New Brunswick, five from Drew. Appenzeller preached in a local Methodist church while he was in Hartford, and he and some of the others from Drew stayed with a prominent Methodist family there, the Latimers.35 Underwood and the other New Brunswick students stayed with the Hartford pastor Graham Taylor, a New Bruns- wick alumnus who was later to become a leader in the Social Gospel movement.36 The published proceedings of the meeting actually give us a glimpse, if not of Appenzeller’s participation, at least of Underwood’s. For these

33 arthur T. Pierson, “The Individual Appeal, and the Individual Answer,” in Report of the First Convention of the Inter-Seminary Missionary Alliance Held in New Brunswick, N.J., October 21-24, 1880 (New York: Eugene R. Smith, 1880), 36-37, 43. 34 Quoted in Ibid., 62. 35 William E. Griffis, A Modern Pioneer in Korea: The Life Story of Henry G. Ap- penzeller (New York: Revell, 1912), 86. 36 W. J. R. Taylor, “Inter-seminary Missionary Convention,” Christian Intelligencer (Nov. 1883), 12. The Seminary Years of the Missionaries Horace G. Underwood and Henry G. Appenzeller 75 include reports of discussions that followed the various papers presented by seminary students themselves, in two of which we find comments by Underwood. Thus in response to a paper on the missionary movement of the Moravian denomination, which extolled the Moravians for their ecumenical spirit, and their desire not to “make Moravians” but rather to “make Christians,” Underwood, in the spirit of Pierson as well as that of the Salvation Army, exhorted his fellows at the conference to follow the Moravian example and “respond to the call of God voiced in the overwhelming wretchedness of the world.”37 And then after hear- ing a paper on “how to arouse and maintain missionary interest in the churches,” Underwood volunteered his own three-point advice on the subject, no doubt the reflection of his experience in Pompton the previous summer: “1. Show people their duty as Christians towards their fellow men, 2. Bring to bear the eloquence of statistics. 3. Show how little has been done and how much yet lies waiting.”38 At the Hartford meeting the students also heard addresses from distinguished senior ministers, two of which stand out particularly for their impressive presentation of the call of the mission field. One of these speakers was the famous Princeton Seminary professor Alex- ander A. Hodge. In a closely reasoned argument, Hodge pressed the young men to consider the importance of “the choice to be made during your Seminary life, as to the general sphere and method of your future professional work,” a choice “which, for good or evil, will control your whole future service and be practically irrevocable.” He told them they must “take responsibility” for the choice, and not simply “drift” into it; he impressed on them that the call to mission is a matter of “consecration,” in which “God’s sovereignty over us” is “absolute.” And then he called up reasons why many of them should come to the conclusion that they themselves were called to the mission field–including the now familiar point that “until recently” many “nations were sealed, commercial relations undeveloped, the Church asleep,” but that things

37 inter-Seminary Missionary Alliance, Report of the Fourth Annual Convention of the American Inter-Seminary Missionary Alliance, Hartford, Connecticut, October 25, 26, 27, and 28, 1883 (Hartford: The Case, Lockwood and Brainard Co, 1883). 48. 38 ibid., 62 76 Korea Presbyterian Journal of Theology Vol. 47 No. 3 have changed radically and “the whole world is open.” And then, specifically—the moment being less than a year and a half after the Shufeldt treaty—he mentioned Korea: “Corea, the last of the hermit nations, has opened her doors.” At the end of his speech, he declared that the world mission movement had two basic needs, namely “money and recruits,” and he added to his young hearers: “The old men of the church are ready with their money. Shall the work fail because the young men of the Church hesitate?”39 The other major speech at Hartford was by A. T. Pierson’s close friend, the great Baptist preacher A. J. Gordon of Boston. In (perhaps deliberate) contrast to Hodge, Gordon pictured the young men’s response to the call to mission as a matter not of rational decision but rather of the action of the Holy Spirit within them, and he advised them not to hurry to decide, but rather to wait for the Spirit to convict them, affectively invoking the example of Christ himself.A s a minister who was present put it, Gordon “tenderly narrated some of his own deep personal experiences of the subject of his address,” afterwards calling the young men to prayer “for the blessings of the Holy Ghost upon themselves and their studies and prospective ministry of the Word.”40 Gordon’s speech, which came at the end of the meeting and was followed by a “consecration service” led by the preacher himself, was probably the meeting’s great emotional tour de force. But Gordon and Hodge illustrate the two poles, so to speak, which together produced the electric power of the appeal of the mission field at that moment in America. For it derived its strength both from reasoned evaluation of the needs of the world and from deep and emotional religious conviction. And all of this would not have been lost on the two young men from Drew and New Brunswick who were soon to go to Korea.

39 ibid., 26. 40 ibid., 37-41; W. J. R. Taylor, “Inter-seminary Missionary Convention,” 12. The Seminary Years of the Missionaries Horace G. Underwood and Henry G. Appenzeller 77

VI. The Call to Korea

What about Korea, then? When exactly did Appenzeller and Un- derwood make their commitments to go? It is not clear that at the time of the Hartford meeting either of them had firmly decided specifically for Korea, although they both almost surely were already resolved to become missionaries on some foreign field. We do not know specifically how the Hartford meeting influenced them. But it seems to have been either at around the time of the meeting or shortly thereafter that both men made their firm decisions. In the case of Appenzeller: his first biographer William Griffis, writing in 1912, presented Appenzeller as having expressed a commitment to foreign missions as early as February of 1881, when he was a junior in college, but the evidence for this is inferential at best. Griffis also wrote as though Appenzeller and his Drew roommate Julian Wadsworth both had had intentions to become missionaries from early in their time at Drew, and that Appenzeller intended to go to Japan and Wadsworth to Korea, but that by the time of the Hartford meeting, Wadsworth had decided not to go and Appenzeller had decided to take his place.41 But Griffis was vague about dates, and about his sources; and Daniel Davies has now shown that almost a year later, in September 1884, Appenzeller still had an application pending with the Methodist mission board to go to Japan, and that it was only then that the possibility of a transfer of his appointment to Korea was spoken of. His actual appointment for Korea came in a letter from the board dated December 20, 1884, a few weeks before his departure.42 As for dating Underwood’s call to Korea: in this matter, unusually, we have more specific evidence of the course of Underwood’s thinking than we do for Appenzeller, though the exact chronology of events re- mains uncertain. Lillias Underwood tells us that her husband’s resolve to become a missionary in some foreign field dated back to his early childhood, when at age four he heard a talk by a missionary from India,

41 William E. Griffis, A Modern Pioneer in Korea, 85-86. 42 Daniel M. Davies, The Life and Thought of Henry Gerhard Appenzeller, 85-87, 96n.49 78 Korea Presbyterian Journal of Theology Vol. 47 No. 3 and that “this became his settled decision when he began to study for the ministry,” at New Brunswick. And Underwood himself, in a public reminiscence in Pyong Yang in 1909, at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Presbyterian mission, recalled that in the “winter of ’82-83” Mr. Albert Oltmans, a student at New Brunswick Seminary who would later become a missionary in Japan, gave a paper on the opening of Korea and the need for missionaries, in the wake of the Shufeldt treaty. Underwood recalled being impressed by the paper and, though himself still resolved to go to India, spending a “year” seeking someone else to go to Korea, before, finally, an inner voice asked him, “Why not go yourself?”43 Being from the mouth of Underwood, this account obviously carries weight. The only problem is with the dates, the main difficulty being that Oltmans was not a student at New Brunswick in 1882-83; he only arrived the following year; and dating the paper a year later would not allow for Underwood’s year-long project of looking for other volunteers. So it is hard to plot the course of his decision precisely on a calendar. We do know at least for sure, from the records of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Reformed Church, that Underwood wrote the Board at the very end of January or beginning of February 1884 asking to be appointed to Korea: he had clearly made the decision by that moment, if not much earlier.44 And then, after being turned down twice, once in February and once late in the spring, because of the Board’s lack of resources for opening a new field, he applied to the Presbyterian Board, and was eventually accepted. In October of 1884, as a seminary graduate now and no longer a student, he once again attended the annual Inter-Seminary Missionary Alliance meeting, this time in Princeton, and was introduced to the assembled body, by Albert

43 Horace G. Underwood, “Reminiscences,” in Quarto Centennial Papers Read before the Korea Mission of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. at the Annual Meeting in Pyeng Yang, August 27, 1909 (Printed privately: no date), 97-110. The name Oltmans reads mistakenly as “Altmans,” but he clearly has Oltmans in mind, identifying him cor- rectly as “now of the Meiji Gakuin [theological seminary] of Tokyo.” Ibid., 98. 44 board of Foreign Missions Executive Committee Minutes, 6 February, 1884, 70- 71; 7 May, 1884, 74-75, Reformed Church in America Archives. In the latter instance it was registered that Underwood had proposed “that this Board and the Presbyterian Board should unite in sending a missionary to Corea” and that the “matter was referred to the [full] Board,” which subsequently declined the proposal. The Seminary Years of the Missionaries Horace G. Underwood and Henry G. Appenzeller 79

Oltmans of New Brunswick (!), as “Horace G. Underwood, Missionary for Corea.”45 A postscript: Henry Appenzeller too attended that 1884 meeting of the Inter-Seminary Missionary Alliance. His appointment to Korea was pending by that point, and surely if the two men had not officially met before, they did so then.46

VII. Conclusion

In human terms, the formation of Underwood for their calling as missionaries–the “means,” that is, by which the call of God found expression in their lives–was partly a matter of the realization of their own gifts and dispositions, partly an outcome of the traditions of education that they encountered at their seminaries, and also partly an expression of the missionary spirit of their times, the spirit embodied in the notion of a “crisis of missions” and the vision of an evangelized world within a generation. This was a spirit that by the 1920s, in the aftermath of the First World War, had come under criticism in America and else- where–for instance for allying itself too easily with American culture, on the one hand, or, on the other hand, for not adapting its theology adequately to the modern world. Yet that late-nineteenth-century missionary spirit, glimpsed in its own context, and as expressed in young people of the time like those two men about to set out for Korea in 1885, still merits a large place in our Christian story, both Korean and American. And those missionaries still stand not only as our forebears but also, potentially, as our interlocutors and our conversation partners as we try in our own times, as they did in theirs, to discern and respond to the call of Jesus Christ to mission in the world.

45 inter-Seminary Missionary Alliance, Report of the Fifth Annual Convention of the American Inter-Seminary Missionary Alliance, Princeton New Jersey, Oct. 24th, 25th, and 26th, 1884 (Trenton, NJ: MacCrellish and Quigley, 1884), 5. 46 ibid., 127. 80 Korea Presbyterian Journal of Theology Vol. 47 No. 3

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한글 초록

선교사 언더우드와 아펜젤러의 신학교 시절

존 W. 코클리 뉴브런즈윅신학교 교수, 교회사

이 논문은 1885년 한국에 도착한 이후 그들의 삶의 대부분을 한국에서 보낸 언더 우드(Horace Grant Underwood, 1859-1916) 선교사와 아펜젤러(Henry Gerhard Ap- penzeller, 1858-1902) 선교사의 미국 신학대학 시절의 선교사 준비과정에 대해 논하 는 것이다. 목사이자 신학자였던 피어슨(A. T. Pierson)에 의해 널리 알려지기 시작했 던 ‘선교의 위기’라는 개념의 모형이자 1880년대 초의 미국 복음주의 진영에서 나타나 기 시작했던 세계 선교의 새로운 위기감의 영성에 크게 영향을 받은 뉴브런즈윅신학 교(New Brunswick Theological Seminary)와 드류신학교(Drew Theological Seminary) 에서 각각 공부한 두 선교사의 신학교 시절에 기록된 문서는 두 선교사의 활동과 관 계를 보여준다. 언더우드와 아펜젤러 모두 1883년 10월에 그 당시 신생 단체였던 신 학교간 선교사 연맹(Inter-Seminary Missionary Alliance)의 총회에 참석함을 통해 이 새로운 영성을 기반으로 한 보다 넓은 선교사 운동에 직접적인 접촉을 가지게 되었 다. 그리고 그 즈음에 그들은 한국을 섬기라는 부르심에 반응하겠다는 결정에 이르게 되었다.

주제어

아펜젤러, 언더우드, 선교의 위기, 신학교간 선교사연맹, 피어슨

Date submitted: June 30, 2015; date evaluated: July 26, 2015; date confirmed: July 28, 2015