Page:A History of the University of Chicago by Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed.djvu/132

 104 A HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO instructor in the Divinity School. According to Dr. Frank K. Sanders, writing in the Biblical World, March, 1906, He threw himself with stirring enthusiasm into his work, making himself almost at a bound the center of a group of earnest students .... infusing within a few days an enthusiasm for the subject All his methods and his ambitions were a revelation and his leadership was so inspiring that the hours of study which he demanded were given as a matter of course and with great heartiness. He was teaching Hebrew, Assyrian, Arabic, Aramaic, and Syriac. He had taken the American Institute of Hebrew with him to New Haven with his summer schools, journals, and corre- spondence school, his assistants, and printing office. Dr. Sanders relates that in his second year in Yale at least two-thirds of the theological men were giving a large proportion of their time and energy to his courses. Soon he made a new departure. He had begun as a linguist. He now became an interpreter. He had hitherto confined himself to the classroom, thinking himself no speaker. During his first years at Yale he discovered that he had a talent for public address. He began to give courses of lectures on the Bible to popular audi- ences and proved as attractive and inspiring on the lecture plat- form as in the classroom. The value placed on Dr. Harper's work at Yale may be measured by the establishment in 1889, especially for him, of the Woolsey prof essorship of biblical literature in the undergraduate department, the consummation of a movement begun the year before. On August n, 1889, President Dwight wrote to him as follows : I have secured the promise of the fifty thousand dollars for the English Bible professorship, and thus in establishing your foundation .... I con- gratulate you, and myself also, most heartily on this result. Thus within three years he came to occupy three separate chairs of instruction, in the College, the Graduate Department, and the Divinity School. After so short a time he was already filling a great place at Yale, and not at Yale only. He had developed such gifts for public address that his services as a lecturer on the Bible were sought far and wide, hi universities,