Hopkins, SAMUEL, D.D., born at Waterbury, September 17, 1721, graduated at Yale College in 1741, studied theology with Jonathan Edwards, and from 1743 to 1769 was settled as pastor of Housatonnuc (now Great Barrington), Massachusetts. He then removed to Newport, where he died December 20, 1803. His writings include a life of President Edwards, sermons, addresses, a treatise on the millennium, and his System of Doctrines (1793); these were republished with a memoir by Dr E. A. Park at Boston (3 vols. 1854); and an earlier edition (1805) contains some autobiographical notes. Hopkins, who is said to be the hero of Mrs Beecher Stowe's Minister's
Wooing, was remarkable for his simplicity, devoutness, and unselfishness. Those who adopt the Hopkinsian theology are not a distinct sect, but are pretty numerous in America, in some of the Christian bodies of which the tenets are generally Calvinistic. They hold most of the Calvinistic doctrines, and even in their most extreme form, but they entirely reject the doctrine of imputation, both the imputation of Adam's sin and of Christ's righteousness. The divine efficiency extends to all acts whatsoever, and sin itself under the guidance of divine providence is merely a necessary means of the greatest good. The fundamental doctrine of the Hopkinsian system, however, is that all virtue and true holiness consist in disinterested benevolence (involving unconditional submission), and that all sin is selfishness—the self-love which leads a man to give his first regard even to his own eternal interests being condemned as sinful.