[2] Charles Hodge's father, Hugh, was the son of a Scotsman who emigrated from Northern Ireland early in the eighteenth century.

She, with the help of the family's minister Ashbel Green, also provided the customary Presbyterian religious education using the Westminster Shorter Catechism.

[3] At Princeton, the first president of the new seminary, Archibald Alexander, took a special interest in Hodge, assisting him in Greek and taking him with him on itinerant preaching trips.

In 1815, during a time of intense religious fervor among the students encouraged by Green and Alexander, Hodge joined the local Presbyterian church and decided to enter the ministry.

The course of study was very rigorous, requiring students to recite scripture in the original languages and to use the dogmatics written in Latin in the 17th century by Reformed scholastic Francis Turretin as a theological textbook.

[5][citation needed] In 1820 he accepted a one-year appointment as assistant professor at Princeton Seminary to teach biblical languages.

In October of that year he traveled throughout New England to speak with professors and ministers including Moses Stuart at Andover Seminary and Nathaniel W. Taylor at Yale Divinity School.

In 1821 he was ordained a minister by the Presbytery of New Brunswick, and in 1822 he published his first pamphlet, which allowed Alexander to convince the General Assembly to appoint him full Professor of Oriental and Biblical Literature.

He admired the deep scholarship he witnessed in Germany, but thought that the attention given to idealist philosophy clouded common sense, and led to speculative and subjective theology.

Unlike other American theologians who spent time in Europe, Hodge's experience did not cause any change in his commitment to the principles of the faith he had learned from childhood.

[citation needed] Hodge's wife died in 1849, shortly followed by Samuel Miller and Archibald Alexander, leaving him the senior professor of the seminary.

Although considered to be his greatest exegetical work, Hodge revised this commentary in 1864, in the midst of the American Civil War, and after a debate with James Henley Thornwell about state secession from the Union.

3,000 ministers of the Gospel passed under his instruction, and that to him was accorded the rare privilege, during the course of a long life, of achieving distinction as a teacher, exegete, preacher, controversialist, ecclesiastic, and systematic theologian.

As a teacher he had few equals; and if he did not display popular gifts in the pulpit, he revealed homiletic powers of a high order in the "conferences" on Sabbath afternoons, where he spoke with his accustomed clearness and logical precision, but with great spontaneity and amazing tenderness and unction.

But the questions in debate among American theologians during the period covered by Hodge's life belonged, for the most part, to the departments of anthropology and soteriology; and it was upon these, accordingly, that his polemic powers were mainly applied.

But he earned a higher title to fame in that he was the champion of his Church's faith during a long and active life, her trusted leader in time of trial, and for more than half a century the most conspicuous teacher of her ministry.

[11] The Presbyterian General Assembly of 1818 had affirmed a similar position, that slavery within the United States, while not necessarily sinful, was a regrettable institution that ought to eventually be changed.

[11] Like the church, Hodge himself had sympathies with both the abolitionists in the North and the pro-slavery advocates in the South, and he used his considerable influence in an attempt to restore order and find common ground between the two factions, with the eventual hope of abolishing slavery altogether.

John Williamson Nevin, a conservative, evangelical Reformed scholar and seminary professor, denounced slavery as 'a vast moral evil.

James Henley Thornwell responded in the January 1861 Southern Presbyterian Review, holding that the election of 1860 had installed a new government, one which the South did not agree with, thus making secession lawful.

When the General Assembly convened in Philadelphia in May 1861, one month after the Civil War began, the resolution stipulated pledging support for the federal government over objections based on concerns about the scope of church jurisdiction and disagreements about its interpretation of the Constitution.

Meanwhile, at Princeton University, a totally separate institution, President John Maclean also rejected Darwin's theory of evolution.

Insisting on the principle of design in nature, McCosh interpreted the Darwinian discoveries as more evidence of the prearrangement, skill, and purpose in the universe.

The Seminary held to Hodge's position until his supporters were ousted in 1929, and the college (Princeton University) became a world class center of the new science of evolutionary biology.