Edwards Bela Bates, Dd

Edwards Bela Bates, D.D., was born in Southampton, Massachusetts, July 4, 1802, and graduated at Amherst College in 1824, and at Andover Theological Seminary in 1830. He served as a tutor in Amherst College during the years 1827-28, and as assistant secretary of the American Education Society during the years 1828-33. In 1837 he was ordained as a minister of the Gospel, and was also appointed professor of Hebrew in Andover Theological Seminary; and in 1848 he was elected associate professor of sacred literature, as successor of Professor Moses Stuart, in the same institution. From 1828 to 1842 he edited the American Quarterly Register. He established in 1833 the American Quarterly Observer. After publishing two volumes of it, he united it with the Biblical Repository, and was sole editor of the combined periodicals from January 1835, to January 1838. From 1844 to 1852 he was the senior editor of the Bibliotheca Sacra. For twenty-three years he was employed in superintending periodical literature, and, with the assistance of several associates, has left thirty-one octavo volumes as the monuments of his enterprise and industry in this department of labor. He also edited several duodecimo volumes, among which are the Eclectic Reader, the Biography of Self-taught Men, the Memoir of Henry Martyn, to which he prefixed an Introductory Essay. He published many articles in the religious newspapers, various pamphlets, and important parts of several volumes, such as the German Selections, by professors Edwards and Park; Classical Studies, by professors Edwards, Sears, and Felton. He injured his constitution by his unremitting toils, and was compelled to make the tour of Europe for his health, and to spend two winters in the South. He died at Athens, Georgia, April 20, 1852, in the fiftieth year of his age. He was distinguished not only for his poetic sentiment, large erudition, soundness of judgment, skill as an instructor, and eloquence as a preacher, but also for his delicacy of taste, his tender sensibilities, and, above all, his deep, earnest, and uniform piety. Some of his discourses and essays, with a memoir of his life by E.A. Park, were published in Boston in 1853 in two duodecimo volumes. (E.A.P.)