H. Norman Gardiner

Harry Norman Gardiner was professor of philosophy at Smith College from 1884 until he retired as professor emeritus in 1924. A man of great personal charm and an earnest teacher he impressed his mind on his students, won the great respect of his colleagues, and reached the distinction of being president for one year, 1907, of the American Philosophical Association. He joined the Century Club as a non-resident member in 1916 and found in its associations one of his greatest comforts. His fine sense of dignity and his love of intellectual things, added to geniality and courtesy of manner, gave him the faculty of adding to the pleasure of any company in which he found himself.

Professor Gardiner’s deep interest in that strangely picturesque figure of Eighteenth Century theology, Jonathan Edwards, may have been intensified by the fact that Edwards preached and wrote for twenty-eight years in the Massachusetts town where Gardiner himself taught, nearly two centuries later. He did not accept outright the metaphysical dialectics which, in the treatises on Original Sin and Freedom of the Will, bewilder the brain of Twentieth Century readers, and which Gardiner summed up as contending that “Adam had no more freedom of the will than we have, but had a special endowment, a supernatural gift of grace, which by rebellion against God was lost, and that his gift was withdrawn from his descendants, not because of any fictitious imputation of guilt but because of their real participation in his guilt by actual identity with him in his transgression.” But he classed Jonathan Edwards nevertheless with Hamilton and Franklin, as “one of the three American thinkers of the Eighteenth Century of more than provincial importance.”

Alexander Dana Noyes
1928 Century Association Yearbook