Purity, Power, and Pentecostal Light: The Revivalist Doctrine and Means of Aaron Merritt Hills

By Christopher Jon Branstetter

Around the turn of the twentieth century, revivalist Protestantism in America splintered into multiple pieces. Few persons of that era knew as many of the central figures of the splinter groups as Aaron Merritt Hills. Originally a Congregationalist who studied under Finney at Oberlin, Hills was a dyed-in-the-wool postmillennial revivalist until his death in 1935. While a Congregationalist, he befriended Reuben A. Torrey and made an enemy of Washington Gladden. In 1895 he joined the Holiness Movement after his experience of Spirit baptism. For the next forty years he founded colleges, held holiness revivals in both America and Britain, and wrote voluminously.

While Hills himself is a lesser-known figure in the story of American Christianity, because of the many embroilments of his life, his story offers a unique window into the relationship between the Holiness Movement, Fundamentalism, Pentecostalism, American liberalism, and the Social Gospel Movement.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Mar 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781621896159

Christopher Jon Branstetter

C. J. Branstetter is Research Director of the Public Theology Institute of Daybreak: Asia in Beijing, China.

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Acknowledgments

The research for this project surprised me several times through the years, requiring more archeology than I first imagined. For this reason, there are many persons to thank.

I am grateful to Marilyn at the Public Library in Vista, California and Judy at the Genealogical Library in Carlsbad, California for helping track down 150 year-old newspapers with forgotten A. M. Hills’ sermons in them.

Thank you to Marion Snowbarger at the Southern Nazarene University and Sue Whitehead at Biola University for offering their help and advice every time I called.

Thank you Stan Ingersol, Meri Jannsen, and Kara Lyons at the Nazarene Archives in Kansas City. Thanks for stacks of great A. M. Hills’ sermons and for very pleasant company.

I am grateful to Tina Simmons at Olivet Nazarene University Library Archives, for digging around boxes in the archives to find several of my best sources.

Thank you, Little Rock First Church of the Nazarene, for an office.

Thank you, Roger Hahn, Kevin, Adam, Neil, and Richard for encouragement on the hardest days.

I would like to express special thanks to my Drew University dissertation committee: Donald Dayton, Chuck Yrigoyen, and Harold Raser. Thank you for your patience, your years of hard work on this project, and your commitments to making the original dissertation the best it could be.

Finally, thank you, Julie, for your hard work and patience, without which this dream never would have been realized.

1

Introduction

In 1994, Paramount Pictures and Robert Zemeckis presented an academy award-winning movie entitled Forrest Gump,¹ the adventure of a mildly handicapped, soft-spoken Alabaman who makes regular, significant contributions to history without once being noticed by the history-makers around him. As the story unfolds, the main character, Forrest Gump, meets, interacts with, and even influences persons like Elvis Presley, Paul Bear Bryant, John Lennon, Rosa Parks, and three U.S. presidents. He inadvertently contributes to pop culture in at least three different ways, even helping Elvis Presley develop one of his signature dance moves.

An intriguing symbol, Gump can be thought of as a kind of interstitial figure of history, who influences the persons and culture around him without receiving any credit or even notice from the historians. Thus, the movie’s central protagonist is an icon representing the little guy, whose contributions are great, but whose name is overshadowed by the larger figures of history.

²

It is very likely that American history is full of Forrest Gumps, figures who are typically not in the history books, but whose stories, when discovered, offer insights into the worlds around them often previously overlooked. The same can be said about American Christian history.

Mostly overlooked by historians and historical theologians thus far, Aaron Merritt Hills is one such Forrest Gump of American Christian history. Like Gump, Hills was often in key places in American Christian history, surrounded by key individuals, and he frequently made significant contributions. Also like Gump, however, Hills for the most part has been overlooked by historians, who are often focused more on the giants of American Christianity than on the interstitial characters whose single or collective accomplishments are of equal or greater significance in the storyline.

Of course, to say that Hills has been mostly overlooked in present scholarship is not to say that he has been completely overlooked. In fact, his story and certain aspects of his theology have appeared in a few works of holiness scholarship. Two scholars in the Church of the Nazarene have studied the last few years of Hills’ life for his significance in understanding the history of the doctrine of holiness.³ Likewise, Hills is briefly mentioned in four different works on the interrelationship between the holiness and fundamentalist movements.⁴ Two biographies have been penned, outlining his life and accomplishments, although only one is published.⁵ While his life and parts of his theology have been considered in each of these, however, the present scholarship on Hills is still lacking.

There are three particular oversights in the present literature on A. M. Hills. The first is that research into his thought has relied much too heavily upon his systematic work, Fundamental Christian Theology. This is not surprising, of course. Indeed, in his autobiography, Hills states that he hopes the work will be remembered as his greatest. Likewise, it hardly requires apology to cite a theologian’s systematic theology as if it were the distillation of her or his whole life’s work and doctrine. The problem is that a concentration on Hills’ systematic treatise neglects a very large percentage of his works. His corpus includes hundreds of articles, thirty-five published and unpublished books, and dozens of manuscript sermons that, when studied, offer a significantly different angle on Hills than is possible when looking only at Fundamental Christian Theology. As we will see, fixation upon his systematic treatise, published in 1931 when he was eighty-three, has unnecessarily brought about too quick an interpretation of Hills as a fundamentalist, a caricature that is difficult to allow when reading this work in continuity with the first sixty years of his writings.

A second major oversight is that Hills has rarely been considered outside of his contributions to the Holiness Movement. Indeed, other than a single-page reference to him by George Marsden in Fundamentalism and American Culture, neither Hills’ story nor his theology have ever been considered by anyone outside of Holiness and Methodist scholarship. Ironically, even though he lived nearly fifty years prior to his experience of sanctification, Hills is remembered as only a Holiness thinker; and although he was retirement age before he joined the Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene, George Marsden is the only scholar outside of Holiness and Methodists circles to have noticed Hills.

⁶

A third major oversight is the non-comprehensive way in which Hills’ thought has been treated. To put it simply, not only are the majority of his works neglected when studying Hills, but so also are the majority of his organically interrelated doctrines.⁷ Often, a doctrine is excised from his larger system of thought and treated as an island; and more often than not, it is his doctrine of holiness that is the subject being treated out of context.

There are two major consequences to these oversights. The first consequence is that Hills is either misrepresented or only partially understood. As one might expect, these misrepresentations and partial pictures differ greatly, sometimes even offering caricatures that are mutually exclusive.

⁸

A consequence of reading Hills as only a holiness figure is that his significance as a complex interstitial figure between various movements in larger American Christianity has been overlooked. If, as we will see, Hills’ identity, doctrine, and means⁹ are more complex than those of a simple early twentieth-century Holiness figure, then his broader significance becomes more obvious. Because, even as a Holiness figure, Hills drew from so many sources at once, study of his thought begins to unravel the complex interrelationships between the movements that burgeoned and warred with each other at the turn of the twentieth century.

This book seeks to remedy these oversights by considering A. M. Hills’ doctrine and means comprehensively. From the perspective of the whole of his corpus, we will see that all of the present categories used to describe Hills either misrepresent him entirely or are not sufficiently broad. As we will see throughout the book, Hills is best summed up under the broad heading of revivalist. He was a revivalist all of his life. As a youth, he embraced the Finneyite religion of his family; as a student at post-bellum Oberlin College and Yale Seminary, he systematized a revivalist way of thinking and practiced revivalist means; as a man, he purposefully chose a revivalistic identity for his ministerial paradigm. Indeed, his conviction that revivalism is the truest representation of Christianity was so strong that he forged for himself a tight canon of revivalist doctrines and means against which he contrasted all else.

Because Hills is not a well-known figure, chapter 2 will consider his life, accomplishments, and personal relationships. Since L. Paul Gresham has provided a commendable biography of him, chapter 2 will be as brief as possible. It will particularly highlight those events and relationships that are the most central in understanding Hills’ revivalist identity and his significance in American Christian history.

Chapter 3 will review the revivalist context of the nineteenth century from which Hills drew. Specifically, it will outline several of the doctrines of post-bellum Oberlin College and Yale Seminary, the two schools Hills attended from 1867–71 and 1871–74, respectively. The works of Charles Finney, Asa Mahan, Henry Cowles, and James Fairchild of Oberlin and Noah Porter of Yale will be given special treatment.

Chapter 4 will outline the revivalist theology and means of Hills’ early ministry. Between the years 1874 and 1895, he pastored four Congregational churches and served as an itinerant evangelist twice. Chapter 4 will be built upon hundreds of pages of manuscripts sermons that lie mostly un-mined in the archives of several institutions and in the newspapers of the cities in which Hills ministered.

Chapter 5 will begin with the story of Hills’ experience of Spirit baptism and the theological shifts necessary for him to come into this experience. Next, the chapter will address the changes in his soteriology, epistemology, ecclesiology, and eschatology after his sanctification and the development of his mature holiness soteriology. The chapter will conclude with the narrowing of his holiness theology into a Holiness-eradicationist position.

Having outlined Hills’ revivalist doctrine and means in chapters 4 and 5, we will next apply the study to explain Hills’ complex relationship with several movements of the early twentieth century. Specifically, chapter 6 will address the relationship, the similarities, and the differences Hills had with the Keswick-holiness, Pentecostal, and Fundamentalist movements and his own church, the Congregational Churches of America.

Drawing from the comprehensive study of A. M. Hills’ life and accomplishments, his revivalist doctrine and means, and his complex relationship with several movements, we will, in chapter 7, make some brief concluding remarks concerning the interrelationship of movements at the turn of the twentieth century. We will see that a study of Hills in fact serves a greater purpose than simply understanding the man himself better. Apprehending the revivalist vision, doctrine, and means of this Forrest Gump of American religious history also illumines at least one of the key issues that caused the splintering of American Protestantism at the turn of the twentieth century.

1. Forrest Gump, dir. Zemeckis,

1994

.

2. It is for this reason that Gump can be considered a great American icon. He represents the democratization of greatness—the possibility that the little guy can make a significant mark on history. He is the great, influential no-name of history.

3. Bassett, Study in Theology; Quanstrom, Century of Holiness Theology.

4. Bassett, Fundamentalist Leavening; Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture,

95

; Lodahl, All Things Necessary; and Ingersol, Strange Bedfellows,

124

–

27

. While Hills is recognized in each of these works, it should be noted clearly that he is always only one of several theologians being considered.

5. McWilliams, Hills: A Life Sketch; Gresham, Waves Against Gibraltar.

6. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture,

95

.

7. Paul M. Bassett and Michael Lodahl begin to transcend this. Cf. Bassett, Christology and Ecclesiology and Lodahl, All Things Necessary.

8. For instance, he has been characterized as the backbone of the Wesleyan-holiness tradition and as a non-Wesleyan-Calvinist, by Nazarene General Superintendent J. B. Chapman and Paul M. Bassett, respectively. He has also been called a fundamentalist, a liberal, and a non-fundamentalist by Bassett, some who knew Hills personally, and Lodahl and Ingersol, respectively.

9. The revivalists’ word means is similar to the word methods. A comprehensive definition of means will be provided in chapter

3

.

2

Hills’ Life and Accomplishments

While some of the accomplishments of A. M. Hills are familiar to many in the Holiness Movement, most of the details of his life remain largely unknown in broader scholarship. For this reason, this chapter will consider the life and accomplishments of A. M. Hills and provide the historical context in which to interpret the development of his revivalist theology and means.

Fortunately, Hills penned an autobiography. An unpublished work completed in the ninth decade of his life, Autobiography will provide the basis for much of this chapter.

Alongside this work, two other biographies also exist. In 1936, just one year after Hills’ death, H. E. McWilliams wrote Rev. A. M. Hills, D.D. LL.D.: A Life Sketch. Then, in 1992, L. Paul Gresham contributed what could be considered the definitive biography of this figure, Waves against Gibraltar.

The Family Heritage of A. M. Hills

The story of the development of A. M. Hills’ revivalist identity begins before he was born with the shaping of the spirituality of his extended family. L. Paul Gresham begins his biography of Hills with Henry Ford’s words, ‘Blood is the strongest thing in the world.’ What [Ford] implied about the importance of heredity in determining human character and achievement is true in the case of Aaron Merritt Hills. Judging from the evidence, A. M. Hills’ ancestors possessed the same combination of piety, dependability, and intellect that characterized him.

¹

Hills provides a clear picture into this combination of Christian virtues in his unpublished autobiography. Offering many examples from his family history, Hills recalls as far back as 1632 when William Hills immigrated to Massachusetts from Kent, England.

For the purposes of this study, we will not consider everyone that Hills includes in his account. One of the most important parts of the prequel of A. M. Hills’ theological development, however, is the story of his grandfather, Hezekiah Hills. His grandson writes, My grandfather was a godly old Congregational deacon who lived a beautiful and useful life.² Of this man, Gresham states that he was a typical Puritan colonial . . . a devout Congregational deacon.

³

Born in Windsor Locks, Connecticut, in 1794, Hezekiah would have been a boy when in 1801 the Plan of Union was forged between the Congregationalists and the Presbyterians. Thus, for the larger percentage of his life Hezekiah knew only Congregationalism under the Plan.

In 1812, Hezekiah moved to Bristol, New York, where he met Olive Warren and married her two years later. Bristol remained the home of Hezekiah and his new bride for a short time before they moved east. Hezekiah and Olive had seven children, all of whom lived to adulthood.

What is most significant about Hezekiah Hills’ establishment in Bristol is the time period. As Congregationalists living within twenty miles of Rochester, New York, in the decades of the 1810s and 20s, the Hills were in the right place at the right time to be influenced by the revivals of Charles G. Finney. The Rochester revivals, as with all of Finney’s meetings, reached far beyond the boundaries of the city. Of the breadth of the Finney revivals in western New York, historian Robert S. Fletcher writes, Developments at Rochester had attracted so much attention by this time [February 1831] that hundreds came from a considerable distance and the church buildings were taxed to capacity.

⁴

While it is only indirectly related in Autobiography, it would appear that the Hills family was swept up into the revival. Evidence to this fact is seen in that three of Hezekiah’s children, two daughters and a son, went to Oberlin College to study for missionary service. Unfortunately, both girls died before reaching the mission field. The third, however, Amos B. Hills "spent years as a missionary on the field until his health broke. Then he settled in Minnesota, and helped to build up Christian institutions in that New [sic] state."

⁵

It was another of Hezekiah’s sons, Henry Cleveland Hills, who became the father of the subject of this study. Born in 1816, Henry was as deeply stamped by revivalism as the rest of his family. Henry was a lifelong supporter of the Congregational Church, especially in its revivalist form.

At some point in his young adulthood, Hezekiah moved the family east to Pekin, New York, approximately thirty miles northwest of Rome. In Pekin, Hezekiah served the community as the chairman of the school board. It was in this town that a young Methodist woman, Julie Ann Chesbrough, came to work for the school. She lived with the Hills for a while and was thus introduced to the man who would later become her husband, Henry.

Julie was an intelligent young woman from a family that had been in America since 1630. Of his mother’s family, Hills writes, From a human standpoint . . . the Chesbrough family was more intellectual and socially prominent than the Hills family.⁶ A family of shrewd business minds, the Chesbroughs were often among the most wealthy and influential members of the various cities in which they lived.

Somewhere around the turn of the nineteenth century, the Chesbrough family became Methodists and remained so for at least four generations. Julie’s father Abram and his two brothers, Isaac and Jacob, were prominent leaders in the church. Jacob and one of Isaac’s sons became Free Methodist ministers. Isaac also apparently shared deeply in the Methodist vision, for he used some of his wealth to send his niece, Julie, to a Methodist academy.⁷ There she studied languages and art and, as her son puts it, got the Methodist stamp upon her inmost soul.

⁸

It was immediately after her training that Julie moved to Pekin. She and Henry married in 1840 and wanted to move west. Chicago was too far for Hezekiah’s blessing, so Henry and his new bride chose Dowagiac, Michigan, instead. A settlement of only four log cabins, Dowagiac increased considerably in population when the Hills arrived in 1842 and started a family. The Hills lived in Dowagiac for the next twenty years and were instrumental in its development into a more established community. Henry assisted in the erection of the first church building in the city, a Baptist church. Later, he helped build the second, a Congregationalist church that the family subsequently joined.

A. M. Hills’ Early Years

It was in Dowagiac, in 1848, that Aaron Merritt Hills was born. He was the second son and the fourth out of five children born to Henry and Julie Hills. The settlement of Dowagiac was being transformed into a town in the year of his arrival. Hills writes, The day I was six weeks old my father drove through the first street of Dowagiac, the day it was opened, with the baby lying in his lap.

⁹

Hills’ childhood was filled with the realities of frontier life. His son, James, recalls stories of what had already become a vanishing frontier by the 1870s and 80s. James recalls:

We never tired of Father telling of his pioneer boyhood days. Many times he came down from his attic bedroom in the log cabin to find Indians sitting about the fireplace warming themselves. Grandfather was friendly toward them and they often made his cabin their stopping place. When Father and his brother worked in the hay meadows, they bound hay around their legs to keep the rattle snakes [sic] from biting them, and often snakes ran down their pitchfork handles as they loaded hay on the wagon. The skies were often darkened by flights of wild pigeons, they often roosted around their farm in such numbers as to break off the limbs from the trees.

¹⁰

Frontier life was, of course, much less romantic than James Hills could have understood as a child at his father’s feet. It was in A. M. Hills’ fourth year of life that the harsh realities of sickness hit the family twice. While no one in the family was ever bitten by a rattlesnake, the diseases of the area had almost as deadly a bite; Julie contracted malaria. Hills recalls that his mother was in bed for six months and that there was a period of six weeks when the family assumed she would die.

His mother in bed and his father busy in the fields, the three-year-old Aaron was left with a young girl who took very poor care of him. Of his first major illness, Hills writes, It was soon found that from lack of proper care and diet my system was cankered through and through. The glottis was eaten out of my throat, and it was feared I never could talk plain again. My digestive organs were greatly injured. My bowels came out, and they would hold me up by my feet, head-downward, for my bowels to go back into my poor little body.

¹¹

Nearly dead from malaria and assuming that she would not live to see her son grow into a man, Julie wrote a letter for Aaron to read at age ten. She sealed it and placed it in her Bible. In it she wrote that she had given her son to Jesus Christ to be a preacher of his gospel. She also added a prayer to the letter that he would accept the calling. To everyone’s surprise, however, the matriarch of the family recovered and even lived to see the son of her dedication and prayer serve as a minister for sixteen years before she died at seventy-eight.

While this illness stunted Hills’ growth for more than a decade, his spiritual and intellectual development came so early as to earn him the label precocious. At ten, he experienced conversion. From Congregationalist and Methodist stock, Hills’ family frequented revival meetings whenever and wherever they were held. This particular time it was held at the Baptist church that Henry Hills had helped erect. Over seventy years later, Hills recalls that a good gospel was preached and three of us children were converted. Young Aaron was moved to go down to the front pew for prayer. God did the talking. He told the little fellow . . . to just believe that as he did his part, God did His part. The boy believed and, praise God! in a moment, the burden was gone!

¹²

After his conversion, Hills did not have to wait long to experience various challenges to his Christian identity. He recollects, The boys discovered that I was a Christian and they began to call me ‘Little Jesus.’¹³ This was, of course, earned to some extent. Taking his mother’s tutelage very seriously, he began to live a life that would be recognized as different from the other children. He writes: I do not pretend . . . that I lived as much like Jesus as I ought to have done. I wish now I had lived more like Him; but I did live at least so that they could see a difference between their conduct and mine. I was carefully taught by my mother not to play marbles or even pins for keeps, as that led to gambling; to keep the Sabbath day holy; to abstain from vulgarity and profanity; to speak the truth and be scrupulously honest.

¹⁴

As already stated, Hills was a precocious child. While still very young, he was pleased to earn a dollar from his mother for reading the entire Bible through before his eighth birthday. Of course, later in life, he was more pleased that he had filled his mind at an early age with moral ideas and principles of righteousness and the great fundamentals and essentials of our Divine religion.

¹⁵

Hills, of course, excelled at more than just reading. By age twelve, he was studying Latin, higher arithmetic, and algebra. Referring to himself in the third person, he writes, The stunted little runt pushed right on . . . At the age of fourteen he weighed 90 lbs. and was reciting geometry with men that were twenty years old. He had a college course in sight as the goal of his ambition, while his schoolmates were sneering at piety and industriously cultivating evil habits that would make scholarship forever impossible.

¹⁶

As mentioned above, Hills’ mother came from a family of gifted businessmen. Her brothers exemplify the fact that it had not skipped their generation. It was in Hills’ teenage years that talk of apprenticeships in business began. Two of Julie’s brothers were A. M. Hills’ namesakes. One brother, Aaron Chesbrough, was a wholesaler on Wall Street and had no children of his own. He talked of adopting his nephew and making him his heir. Consumption, however, ended his career and life in his thirties.

A. M. Hills’ other namesake, Merritt Chesbrough, also had no children. A generous man and a committed Free Methodist, Merritt endowed a college in Chili, New York, that as a result of the endowment bore his name, A. M. Chesbrough Seminary.

¹⁷

Hills went to work for this uncle the next two summers. His aunt, however, was never pleased when her husband talked of adopting heirs. She made it very difficult on any apprentice that came to live with them. Near the end of the second summer with Merritt, Julie visited Niagara Falls. When she found her sister-in-law so hard, unloving, unmotherly, chilling, [and] repelling she took her son back to Michigan. Probably not leaving under the best of terms, Hills recalls that the parting left Merritt hurt and disappointed. Julie told her brother that the Hills family was not so poor that they would allow their son to be snubbed and crushed. She also stated that somehow they would get him educated for the ministry.

¹⁸

At sixteen, Hills was still very small for his age, a meager one hundred pounds.¹⁹ It was the summer after he turned sixteen, however, that this finally began to change. His father traded the farm for a house in Mount Vernon, Ohio, three plots of land, and $6,000. Henry Hills managed a store for Julie’s third brother, Alonzo, reportedly the richest man in Toledo. The Hills left their son in Dowagiac for the rest of the summer to help bring in the harvest and plow for the next season before joining them in Ohio. After a summer of raking, binding, plowing, milking, and playing baseball every evening for exercise, Hills finally overcame the physical retardation he received from his sickness at three.

The move to Ohio opened the door for Hills to go to college in two ways. First, his father’s new job provided the financial means.²⁰ Secondly, the pastor of the Congregational Church in Mount Vernon, T. E. Monroe, provided a positive role model.

Hills writes that Monroe and his wife were both graduates of Oberlin College and had the Finney revival stamp upon them. We could scarcely have fallen into a more helpful church.²¹ Already deeply influenced by revivalism from both sides of the extended family, the Hills fit right in with a pastor who as much expected to have a revival every year as he expected to preach. Of Monroe, Hills continues, I doubt if that good man ever failed to have an outpouring of Spirit annually during his entire ministerial life.²² Thus, Monroe seems to have provided a good example for Hills of how an evangelistic, Oberlin pastor conducted religion.

Of course, Monroe provided more than just a positive role model. He also wrote Hills a commendation for application to Oberlin College when he graduated high school.

What is significant in each of these examples from Hills’ childhood and adolescence is the degree to which he was influenced by revivalism, especially the revivalism of Charles G. Finney and of Oberlin College. His family’s commitment to revivalistic religion kept them in churches and circles where their values could be instilled in their children. Of course, revivalism was not hard to find in the 1850s. Indeed, Perry Miller, when speaking of the terrific universality of the Revival writes, The dominant theme in America from 1800 to 1860 is the invincible persistence of the revival technique.

²³

At the heart of this religious revivalism was Charles Finney. In Miller’s estimation, the force and breadth of Finney’s ministry was exemplified in his book, Lectures on Religion. Overnight it sold 12,000 copies in America . . . No religious leader in America since Edwards had commanded such attention; no one was to do it again until Dwight Moody. Hence Finney’s book stands . . . as the key exposition of the movement, and so a major work in the history of the mind in America.

²⁴

Given the heritage and context of Hills’ early life, it is of little surprise that he chose Oberlin College for his intellectual preparation. Indeed, if he even considered any other college he offers no evidence of it in Autobiography. He simply states, Oberlin was born great. It had so many things that insured its future, it almost might be called finished before it started.

²⁵

Oberlin College

While for his first years at Oberlin, Hills was ambivalent about his mother’s wishes for his career, he nevertheless received his first formal theological training there. He arrived at Oberlin just two years after the close of the Civil War, entering as a student in the preparatory school. By his second year he was ready to join the college as a sophomore.²⁶ Concerning the theological department at Oberlin the year Hills arrived, Robert Fletcher writes that it had declined again almost to the point of extinction in 1867 when it contained only eleven students.

²⁷

If such statistics bothered Hills, he never mentioned it. There were many reasons he chose the college, not the least of which was the faculty. Indeed, it probably thrilled him to have such a low teacher to student ratio. While Asa Mahan had already been gone seventeen years, the halls were still graced by Charles Finney, John Morgan, and President James Fairchild.

Hills writes of other figures as well, each outstanding in his estimation. "The all around genius of the faculty was Professor Charles Henry Churchill whom every body [sic] loved . . . Dr. Dascomb taught Botany and Chemistry . . . My favorite professor was Judson Smith the finished scholar who required the most of his Latin pupils . . . John M. Ellis taught us Evidences of Christianity, Logic, [and] Mental Philosophy. Professor Penfield taught us Greek."²⁸ While already retired from Oberlin, Henry Cowles was still often on campus.

By 1867, a large percentage of Finney’s duties at the school had already been dropped. Nevertheless, he still taught Pastoral Theology, and it thrilled Hills to take it under him. As well, Finney continued as pastor of the college’s church until 1872, the year after Hills graduated.

²⁹

Right up until his last year of service Finney remained the primary reason students chose Oberlin over others colleges. Hills was no exception to this general rule. Over twenty-five years after he left Oberlin, Hills still stood in awe of Finney. In 1898 Hills wrote of him as the mighty Finney, ‘full of faith and of the Holy Ghost,’ by far the mightiest preacher I ever saw stand before an audience.³⁰ Finney’s preaching left an indelible stamp upon both Hills’ memory and his personal style of delivery.

Besides its key icon, Finney, Hills also recollects fondly the extraordinary spiritual and prayerful atmosphere of the school. There was an abundance of daily and weekly times when the students and faculty of Oberlin joined together in corporate prayer. Hills remembers that the largest prayer room was capable of seating one hundred and was often overflowing.

³¹

Scholastically, it did not take long for Hills’ abilities to become apparent. Indeed, he perhaps distinguished himself a little too much his first year. Hills writes that he had been working on a written oration in hopes of presenting it to an 800-member forum, chaired by Professor John Ellis. Ellis would read the submissions and choose a monthly speaker for this particular forum. Apparently, Ellis considered Hills’ written oration too fine in quality to be the original work of a freshman. When he was consulted, Judson Smith agreed. They insisted that Hills write another oration, which