Smith, WILLIAM ROBERTSON

Smith, WILLIAM ROBERTSON, theologian and orientalist, was born at Keig, Aberdeenshire, on 8th November 1846. He received all his early training from his father, the Rev. William Pirie Smith, D.D., minister of the Free Church at Keig. He entered the university of Aberdeen in 1861, and graduated after an exceptionally brilliant career in 1865. He afterwards studied theology at the Free Church College, Edinburgh, at Bonn, and at Göttingen; while in Edinburgh he was also assistant to the professor of Physics (Professor P. G. Tait) in the university there. Immediately on the conclusion of his theological studies he was elected by the Free Church Assembly of 1870 to the vacant chair of Hebrew and Old Testament Exegesis in the Free Church College, Aberdeen; his suggestive inaugural address being What History teaches us to seek in the Bible (1870). At an early stage in the preparation of the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica he was invited to contribute articles upon Biblical subjects. The first of these ('Angel') appeared in 1875. That on 'Bible' (1875), a brief objective account of the now well-known historical and scientific facts of the subject, was almost immediately assailed on the ground of its heterodoxy—especially for its acceptance of the non-Mosaic authorship of Deuteronomy. (The question of the date of the Priestly writing—see PENTATEUCH—with Nöldeke on one side and Graf and Kuenen on the other, was at that early stage of the discussion left open in the encyclopædia article.) In consequence of the excitement that had been aroused, the Assembly of 1876 referred all Mr Smith's articles then published to a committee, which reported in 1877 that there was no ground for a heresy prosecution, but added that a majority of the members of the committee had found cause for 'alarm' and 'anxiety' in the article 'Bible' on account of its 'dangerous and unsettling tendency.' In these circumstances a prosecution for heresy was instituted before the Free Presbytery of Aberdeen. A long process ensued, in the course of which Mr Smith displayed remarkable debating talents, and in the end, after many vicissitudes in the various courts of the church, the trial resulted in the acquittal of the accused at the Assembly of 1880 by a majority of 7 in a house of nearly 600 members. In consequence, however, of the article on 'Hebrew Language and Literature,' which appeared in the Ency. Brit. in June 1880, Mr Smith was not allowed to resume his teaching duties during the following winter; and although no new heresy was alleged to have been broached in that article, he was removed from his chair without a trial by a considerable majority at the Assembly of 1881. Mr Smith, who, besides contributing largely to successive volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica, had written several important pamphlets in connection with his trial, delivered at the request of a number of laymen in Edinburgh and Glasgow in 1880-81-82 two series of lectures substantially republished in the two well-known volumes entitled The Old Testament in the Jewish Church (1881) and The Prophets of Israel (1882). In 1881 Mr Smith transferred his residence to Edinburgh, and became actively associated with Professor Baynes in the editorship of the Ency. Brit.; on the death of his colleague he had the undivided responsibility of editor-in-chief. In the beginning of 1883 he was appointed Lord Almoner's professor of Arabic in the university of Cambridge, where shortly afterwards he was elected to a fellowship at Christ's College. His work on Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia was published in 1885. In 1886 he was elected by the Cambridge senate to the university librarianship, which office he exchanged for the Adams professorship of Arabic in 1889. As Burnett lecturer he delivered at Aberdeen in 1889-91 three courses of lectures on the religion of the Semites; the first series was published as the Religion of the Semites (1889). After several years of greatly impaired health, he died 31st March 1894. Mr Smith received in 1890 the degree of D.D. from the university of Strasburg; the published éloge (understood to be from the pen of Professor Reuss) particularises with justice and discrimination his conspicuous acumen, unsurpassed learning, indefatigability and success as a historical investigator, and sedulous and pious promotion of untrammelled criticism.