Diary of Charles Francis Adams, volume 5
1834-07-09
The perfect calm which prevailed until eleven o’clock seemed to me the most forcible example of the torrid zone I had ever perceived. I concluded not to go to town and tried to get some shade and air in 340the grove by the pond. But this was worse and worse. I retreated into the House and at the hour above mentioned a breeze arose which took off all oppression, leaving the atmosphere still very warm.
Read the Ghost Seer in which I made considerable progress and an article in the Christian Examiner upon the application of the Old Testament prophecies to the coming of Jesus. Liberal beyond all liberality and in my mind very abominable.1 Mrs. Frothingham spent the day here and so did George M. Dexter who brought her out and dined here. Afternoon, Whately’s Rhetoric.2 Ovid. Evening, fine southerly breeze, but I could not read.
The essay-review [by George Rapall Noyes] in the Christian Examiner, 16:321–364 (July 1834), of Prof. E. W. Hengstenberg’s Christology of the Old Testament, and Commentary upon the Prophecies relating to the Messiah so inflamed feeling in the community that the charge of blasphemy was raised, and the institution of possible legal action discussed. See Boston Courier [semiweekly], 10 July 1834, p. 2, col. 2. On Noyes, Harvard 1818, Divinity School 1822, see
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Richard Whately, Elements of Rhetoric, Cambridge, 1832, borrowed from the Athenaeum.