Ministerial training throughout the nineteenth century was dogged by persistent uncertainties about what Dissenters wanted ministers to do: were they to be preachers or scholars, settled pastors or roving missionaries? Sects and denominations such as the Baptists and Congregationalists invested heavily in the professionalization of ministry, founding, building, and expanding ministerial training colleges whose pompous architecture often expressed their cultural ambitions. That was especially true for the Methodists who had often been wary of a learned ministry, while Presbyterians who had always nursed such a status built an impressive international network of colleges, centred on Princeton Seminary. Among both Methodists and Presbyterians, such institution building could be both bedevilled and eventually stimulated by secessions. Colleges were heavily implicated not just in the supply of domestic ministers but also in foreign mission. Even exceptions to this pattern such as the Quakers who claimed not to have dedicated ministers were tacitly professionalizing training by the end of the century. However, the investment in institutions did not prevent protracted disputes over how academic their training should be. Many very successful Dissenting entrepreneurs, such as Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Thomas Champness, William Booth, and Adoniram Judson Gordon, offered unpretentious vocational training, while in colonies such as Australia there were complaints from Congregationalists and others that the colleges were too high-flying for their requirements. The need to offer a liberal education, which came to include science, as well as systematic theological instruction put strain on the resources of the colleges, a strain that many resolved by farming out the former to secular universities. Many of the controversies generated by theological change among Dissenters centred on colleges because they were disputes about the teaching of biblical criticism and how to resolve the tension between free inquiry and the responsibilities of tutors and students to the wider denomination. Colleges were ill-equipped to accommodate theological change because their heads insisted that theology was a static discipline, central to which was the simple exegesis of Scripture. That generated tensions with their students and caused numerous teachers to be edged out of colleges for heresy, most notoriously Samuel Davidson from Lancashire Independent College and William Robertson Smith from the Aberdeen Free Church College. Nevertheless, even conservatives such as Moses Stuart at Andover had emphasized the importance of keeping one’s exegetical tools up to date, and it became progressively easier in most denominations for college teachers to enjoy intellectual liberty, much as Unitarians had always done. Yet the victory of free inquiry was never complete and pyrrhic in any event as from the end of the century the colleges could not arrest a slow decline in the morale and prospects of Dissenting ministers.
Spurgeon, Byron, and the Contingencies of Mediation