American educationist, great-nephew of the theologian Samuel Hopkins, born in Stockbridge, MA, on the 4th of February 1802. He graduated in 1824 at Williams College, where he was a tutor in 1825–1827, and where in 1830, after having graduated in the previous year at the Berkshire Medical College at Pittsfield, he became professor of Moral Philosophy and Rhetoric. In 1833 he was licensed to preach in Congregational churches. He was president of Williams College from 1836 until 1872. He was one of the ablest and most successful of the old type of college president. His volume of lectures on Evidences of Christianity (1846) was long a favourite textbook. Of his other writings, the chief were Lectures on Moral Science (1862), The Law of Love and Love as a Law (1869), An Outline Study of Man (1873), The Scriptural Idea of Man (1883), and Teachings and Counsels (1884). Dr. Hopkins took a lifelong interest in Christian missions, and from 1857 until his death was president of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (the American Congregational Mission Board). He died at Williamstown, on the 17th of June 1887. His son, Henry Hopkins (1837–1908), was also from 1903 till his death president of Williams College.

1

  See Franklin Carter’s Mark Hopkins (Boston, 1892), in the “American Religious Leaders” series, and Leverett W. Spring’s Mark Hopkins, Teacher (New York, 1888), being No. 4, vol. i., of the “Monographs of the Industrial Educational Association.” See also Cambridge History; Literary Criticism.

2