Beloit College - Codex Yearbook (Beloit, WI)

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19 1Rev. Baron itucius Gibapin, BD. EJ., ll. EJ. To a life devotedthroughout its whole extent to promoting human welfare, it should be a care with every one to build a monument in his own grateful remembrance. The best of all monuments, it is true, which can be reared to the work of men, is that book of remembrance in which, in the archives of the Divine Kingdom, the loyalty of citizenship therein is eternally recorded. 'But if, apart from the memorial human character leaves of itself in the enlarging of the empire of the Lord, the generation which succeeds to the inheritance of a good man's beneficence ought gratefully to cherish the tradition of it, how much more does this devolve upon that generation on whom that beneficence has especially been exerted, and who live in its scenes and in the very midst of the harvests it has planted. VVe desire to enter in our volume our respectful and affectionate tribute to the memory of the first President of Beloit College. Aaron L. Chapin was born, out of an absolutely respectable ancestry, in Hartford, Connecticut, February 6th, 1817. His parents were Laertes and Laura Colton Chapin 3 the father, in industry, a carpenter, in official service, an active member, as he was the son and grandson of deacons, all of them held in honor everywhere, in the old North Church of Hartford. Reared thus, a modest and gentle boy, in an intelligent Christian home, entering, after prepar- atory study in the Hartford Grammar School-our well remembered fellow- citizen, Theodore L. lVright, Esq., having been for a time his teacher there-Yale College, he graduated from that institution in due course, of goodhrank among distinguished classmates also of national reputation, in 1837. The immediately following years were occupied in teaching, one year in Baltimore, Maryland, in a private school, and several thereafter in a school for deaf mutes in the City of New York. He was thoroughly instructed for the Christian ministry in Union Theo- logical Seminary, and became the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Mil- waukee, Wisconsin, in 1844. It was in that remarkable period when the divinely inwrought impulse, fabled for all time in the story of the wandering Io, was in one ofits most productive stages, and was carrying out of the western East the sons and daughters of Pilgrim New England into favored regions, where the heart of the nation was to beat out its mighty achievement of mature national life until, touching with its circulation the ancient East across the Pacific sea, East and West would at length become one in the unity ofa com- mon Christian civilization. His pastorate here continued six years, conserva-

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M2594 I F CUT YN 0 I PH

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20 tive of the principles in which he had been bred, strenuous as would be expected, after thoroughly evangelical methods and prOdL1CtiVCHCSS, 1'G1atCd in important service not only to his own immediate people, but to the wider field of the infant church of the state. Surviving members of his parish in Milwau- kee cherish the respectful friendship formed with him in those years of his first and only pastorate. ' .Already,i1'1 pursuance of counsels in which he had eminent share, the College at Beloit had been founded while his ministry in Milwaukee was in progress. To Rev. Stephen Peet, if any one can be mentioned as the cause of a movement which is, beyond all doubt, out of a wide procedure of Divine Provi- idence, morethan to any one else, the institution owes its beginning. It is only another of the instances where a vital soul, of commanding energy, takes up, out of whatever avenue of divine communication, an impelling intimation from Heaven, and into the strong current of his aggressive purpose draws persons and circumstances as tributary forces, to the result that what was a problem in the Heavens has become a beautiful reality on earth, and, lo, the tabernacle of God is with men. But Dr. Chapin was intimately associated in sympathy and co-operation with Mr. Peet. It is pleasant to think of the young, brave pastor, with hopes instructed by the splendid traditions in which he had been reared and educated, going to and fro among 'his people and else- where, and working, in the partnership of such older men as Peet and Kent and Clary, for the new institution which, as they foresaw, was to do for the new regions what the older colleges had done for New England, Pennsylvania, Virginia and New York. His name continually appears upon committees in the records of the conventions which planned and started the College, and in 18 50 he was called to its presidency, entering thus, at the age of thirty-three and in the prime of his young manhood, upon what was to be his remarkable life-work of nearly forty years. , It will be remembered that the institution into whose life the life of Dr. Chapin was thus organized as its leader, neither was exotic to the soil in which it was planted nor was without a root reaching down into the fertile soil of a great purpose of the Christian church of the eastern portion of the nation in behalf of education. Beloit and its neighboring region was full of the best of New England men and women. Especially, as early as in the May of 1843, at a meeting in the Bible House in New York, convened on the suggestion of the presidents of three Western colleges, Marietta, Wabash, jacksonville, and of Lane Seminary, the question had been favorably considered of organizing an associa- will l 1 Of gil win deli' PM i. filth f M. nfgll. v IM ' 'lihfi . l. Clif. - Q ill. thc? ,Ti C... Hit: Wir it? ua Tv LL' UCF!! t Sllilll Ckl .. Illlf' mari dc -' ax. thcg him. with Thr brain whit ' in 1 L' of S mill of V ada, n i