Page:A History of the University of Chicago by Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed.djvu/127

 THE FIRST PRESIDENT 99 merely a bookworm, who knew none of the joys of youth. He early developed a love of music which greatly enriched his life. He was a member of a band and played the cornet, and playing on this instrument was one of his recreations when President of a great University. In 1877 he became an attendant at the students' prayer meet- ings in Denison, and in them first expressed his desire and purpose to become a Christian. It was at this time that he became a Baptist, though his father's family was Presbyterian. While teaching the classics he had never given up his Hebrew studies, and with the new religious purpose dominant in his life, he began to cherish a desire to teach the Hebrew Scriptures. President Andrews soon came to see that the principal of his Academy was an altogether unusual man that he could not be confined to academy work and ought not to be. Much, therefore, as he disliked to lose Dr. Harper, he put selfish considerations aside and recommended him to the Theological Seminary at Morgan Park for its vacant chair of Hebrew. The writer of these pages first met Dr. Harper in the study of Dr. Northrup, president of the Seminary at Morgan Park. The two representatives of the Semi- nary were members of a committee appointed with power to engage him as instructor in Hebrew. Dr. Harper was stockily built, five feet seven inches tall, smooth-faced and spectacled, and looked very young. He was twenty-two younger than the men he would be called upon to teach. He was too young to be made a professor, but, with some misgiving, was made an instructor, with a salary of one thousand dollars, and began work January i, 1879. The next year he was made a full professor, and the degree of Bachelor of Divinity was conferred on him. The April, 1881, minutes of the Board of Trustees contain the following highly significant record: "The use of the Seminary building was granted to Professor Harper for a summer school for the study of Hebrew." This was the first of Dr. Harper's Hebrew summer schools. When Dr. Harper left the Theological Seminary in 1886 after seven years' service, he was appointed "lecturer, with the control of the Hebrew Department for three years." In this control of the Department he spent January of the years 1887 and 1888 in