NOAH PORTER. 443 



exchanged for a tutorship in College, at the same time entering the 

 Divinity School. He resigned the tutorship in 1835, and on complet- 

 ing his theological course was ordained, April 27, 1836, as pastor of 

 the Conjjreffational Church in New Milford, Conn. On the 13th of 

 the same month he married Mary Taylor, the eldest daughter of his 

 predecessor, and the sister of Rev. Dr. Taylor, — well known in his 

 time as the advocate of the more liberal type of Calvinism in the 

 Taylor-and-Tyler controversy, — who, as Professor of Divinity, had 

 been his favorite teacher, and may have borne no small part in deter- 

 mining the trend of his pupil's opinions. 



Mr. Porter was regarded from the first as a man of superior abil- 

 ity, and his success in a long established church pointed to him as 

 eminently fitted to take charge of a church that had yet to create its 

 own future. He accordingly was invited to the pastorate of the then 

 new (South) Congregational Church of Springfield, Mass., over which 

 he was installed, January 12, 1843. But the friends of the College 

 were undoubtedly right in believing that his special fitnesses were for 

 academic service. He had been devoted to philosophical studies from 

 his college days, and had shown his teaching power and administrative 

 ability in his tutorship ; and when a new Professorship of Moral Phi- 

 losophy and Metaphysics was established, he was at once sought as its 

 incumbent. He was elected to this office in 1846, and filled it with 

 distinction, honor, aud growing influence till his death. Still retain- 

 ing it, though of course delegating much of its work to other hands, 

 he accepted the Presidency of the College on President "Woolsey's 

 resignation in 1871, fulfilled the difficult task of maintaining the 

 prestige given it by his predecessor, and retired from the chair while, 

 with unimpaired vigor of mind, his advanced years seemed the only 

 reason for so doing. He, however, was probably conscious of de- 

 clining bodily strength, and his last years were a period of gradual 

 enfeeblement, followed by an illness of several weeks, which had its 

 fatal issue on the 4th of March, 1892. 



President Porter was a voluminous writer. Among his published 

 volumes are "The Human Intellect" (1868); "The American Col- 

 leges and the American Public" (1870); "Books and Reading" 

 (1871); "Elements of Intellectual Science" (1872); " Elements of 

 Moral Science" (1885); "Kant's Ethics" (1886); and "Fifteen 

 Years in the Chapel of Yale College" (1887). He also published a 

 large number of sermons, addresses, and articles in periodicals, espe- 

 cially in the New Englander, and was editor in chief of the successive 

 editions of Webster's Dictionary from 1860. 



