The New International Encyclopædia/Hedge, Frederic Henry

HEDGE, Frederic Henry (1805-90). An American clergyman, critic, and philosopher, born at Cambridge, Mass. He was a son of Levi Hedge, professor of logic and metaphysics in Harvard College. He studied in Germany under the care of George Bancroft from 1818 to 1823, and graduated at Harvard (1825), and from the Divinity School at Cambridge in 1828. He was a Unitarian pastor successively at West Cambridge (1829), Bangor, Maine (1835), Providence, R. I. (1850), Brookline, Mass. (1856), and in 1857 was made professor of ecclesiastical history in the Harvard Divinity School, and editor of the Christian Examiner (1857-60). From 1872 to 1881 he was professor of German at Harvard. To literary criticism he contributed Prose Writers of Germany (1848), and Hours with German Classics (1886); to religious and philosophical criticism: Reason in Religion (1865); The Primeval World of Hebrew Tradition (1870); Martin Luther and Other Essays (1888). He wrote also several hymns and translations from the German poets, and prepared a liturgy for the Unitarian Church (1856). His chief significance to American thought was his introduction of German scholarship and literature.