Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/686

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652
HEN—HEN
castle, he sent for Henderson, and discussed with him the two systems of church government in a number of papers. Meanwhile Henderson was failing in health. He sailed to Scotland, and eight days after his arrival died on the 19th of August 1646. He was buried in Greyfriars Churchyard, Edinburgh ; and his death was the occasion of national mourning in Scotland. An absurd story was at once invented to the effect that, after recanting to the king s views, he had died of remorse. A document was forged, purporting to be a " Declaration of Mr Alexander Henderson ;" and, although this paper was disowned, denounced, and shown to be false in the General Assembly of August 1648, the fiction was used by Clarendon, and still finds a place in professedly historical compilations. Henderson is one of the greatest men in the history of Scotland, and, next to Knox, is certainly the most famous of Scottish ecclesiastics. He had great political genius ; and his statesmanship was so influential that "he was," as Professor Masson well observes, "a cabinet minister without office." He has made a deep mark on the history, not only of Scotland, but of England; and the existing Presbyterian Churches in Scotland are largely indebted to him for the forms of their dogmas and their ecclesiastical organization. He is thus justly considered the second founder of the Reformed Church in Scotland.


For further information about Henderson reference may be made to M Crie s Life of Alexander Henderson, 1846; Alton s Life and Times of Alexander Henderson, 1836 ; The Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie, 1841-2 (an exceedingly valuable work, from an historical point of view); Burton s History of Scotland; Masson s Life of Drummond of Haivthornden; and, above all, Masson s Life of Milton.

(t. gi.)

HENDERSON, Ebenezer, Scottish dissenting minister and theological and miscellaneous writer, was born at the Linn near Dunfermline, November 17, 1784, and died at Mortlake, May 17, 1858. He was the youngest son of an agricultural labourer, and after three years schooling spent some time at watchmaking and as a shoemaker s apprentice. In 1803 he joined Mr Robert Haldane s theological semi nary, and in 1805 was selected to accompany the Rev. John (afterwards Dr) Paterson to India; but as the East India Company would not allow British vessels to convey mis sionaries to India, Henderson and his colleague went to Denmark to await the chance of a passage to Serampore. Being unexpectedly delayed, they ultimately decided to settle in Denmark, and in 1806 Henderson was fixed at Elsinore. From this time till about 1817 he was engaged in encouraging the distribution of Bibles in the Scandi navian countries, and in the course of his labours he visited Sweden and Lapland (1807-8), Iceland (1814-15), and the mainland of Denmark and part of Germany (1816). During most of this time he was an agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society. In 1818, after a visit to England, he travelled in company with Dr Paterson through Russia as far south as Tiflis, but, instead of settling as was pro posed at Astrakhan, he had to retrace his steps, having re signed his connexion with the Bible Society. In 1822 he was invited by Prince Alexander Galitztn to assist the Russian Bible Society in translating the Scriptures into various languages spoken in the Russian empire. After twenty years of foreign labour Henderson returned to England, and in 1825 was appointed tutor of the Mission College, Gosport. In 1830 he succeeded Dr William Harrison as theological lecturer and professor of Oriental languages in Highbury Congregational College, and though in 1850, on the amalgamation of the colleges of Homerton, Coward, and Highbury, he was excluded from office through age, he was pastor in 1852-53 of a chapel at Mortlake. His last work was a transla tion of the book of Ezekiel. Henderson was a man of great linguistic attainment : in the course of his labours he made himself more or less acquainted, not only with the ordinary languages of scholarly accom plishment and the various members of the Scandinavian group, but also with Hebrew, Syriac, Ethiopic, Russian, Arabic, Tatar, Persic, Turkish, Armenian, Manchoo, Mongolian, and Coptic. He organized the first Bible Society in Denmark (1814), and paved the way for several others. In 1817 he was nominated by the Scandinavian Literary Society a corresponding member; and in 1840 he was made D.D. by the university of Copenhagen. He was honorary secretary for life of the Religious Tract Society, and one of the first promoters of the British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel among the Jews. The records of his travels in Iceland (1818) were valuable con tributions to our knowledge of that island. His other principal works are Biblical Researches and Travels in Russia (1826), Divine Inspiration (1836), and annotated translations of Isaiah (1840, 1857), the twelve minor prophets (1845), and Jeremiah (1851).


See Memoirs of Ebcnezer Henderson, by Thulia S. Henderson (his daughter), London, 1859.

HENGSTENBERG, Ernst Wilhelm (1802–1869), for more than forty years one of the most conspicuous and able champions of the strictest Lutheran orthodoxy, was born at Frondenberg, a Westphalian village near Hamm and not far from the Ruhr, on October 20, 1802 ; received his entire school education under the roof of his lather, who was a minister of the Reformed Church, and head of the Frondenberg Frauleinstift ; and entered the university of Bonn in 1819, shortly before the completion of his seven teenth year. There he attended the lectures of Freytag and Gieseler on Old Testament exegesis and church history, but his energies were principally devoted to philosophy and philology, and his earliest publication was an edition of the Moatlakah of Amru 1 Kais (Amrulkeisi Moallakah cum scholiis Zuzenii edidit, latine vertit, et illustravit E. G. //., 1823), which gained for him the prize at his graduation in the philosophical faculty, and the public commendation of Sytvestre de Sacy. This was followed in 1824 by a German translation of Aristotle s Metaphysica,, On quitting Bonn it had been Hengstenberg s wish to complete his theological studies under Neander and Tholuck in Berlin ; but finding himself without the means of doing so, he accepted for a year a situation at Basel as tutor in Oriental languages to J. J. Stahelin. Then it was that, suffering much from ill- health and deeply mourning the loss of his mother, he began to direct his attention, with an ardour formerly unknown to him, to the spiritual truths of the Bible. His studies and experiences at this crisis resulted in a conviction, never afterwards shaken, not only of the divine character of evangelical religion, but also of the unapproachable adequacy of its expression in the Augsburg Confession. Taking as his motto Psalm cxviii. 17, he resolved thenceforward to devote himself to the uncompromising defence of that creed. In the autumn of 1824 he joined the philosophical faculty of Berlin as a privat-docent, and in the following year he became a licentiate in theology, his theses even then being remarkable for their evangelical fervour and for their emphatic protest against every form of " rationalism," especially in questions of Old Testament criticism. In 1826 he became professor extraordinarius in theology; and in July 1827 appeared under Hengstenberg s editorship the first number of the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung, a " reac tionary "journal which in his hands was destined to acquire an almost unique reputation as an organ of religious, theo logical, and ecclesiastical controversy. It did not, however, attain to great notoriety until in 1830 an anonymous article (by E. L. von Gerlach) appeared, which openly charged Professors Gesenius and Wegscheider with infidelity and profanity, and on the ground of these accusations advo-