Otto Von Pack

Otto Von Pack

the noted chancellor of duke George of Saxony, deserves our attention as the discoverer of a plot made in 1527 to eradicate all traces of Protestantism in Germany by a united effort of the Romish princes of the country. A careful investigation failed to reveal the necessary proof of such a plot, and Pack was obliged to leave his native country, and .while seeking an asylum in Belgium is said to have suffered imprisonment and decapitation. At the time Pack was generally believed to have had no evidence. for his revelations, but the subsequent favorable compacts of king Philip with the episcopal princes betray a more intimate alliance than was claimed. Probably the attack on Protestantism had been intended, but the revelation came before the plot was fully matured. See Keim, Schwab. Refornsationsgesch.; Hortleben, Von den Ursachen des ddeutschen Krieges, vol. 1; Neudecker, Urkunden aus derReformationszeit; Ranke, Deutsche Gesch. vol. 3. (J. H.W.) Packard, Prederick Adolphus, LL.D., a prominent American educational writer and philanthropist, was born in Marlborough, Middlesex County, Mass., Sept. 25, 1794. He graduated at Harvard-College in 1814; read law at Northampton, Mass.; then practiced law at Springfield, Mass., from 1817 to 1829, where he also edited the Hampden Federalist for ten years. He was besides a member of the state legislature from 1828 to 1829. He removed to Philadelphia in 1829, and assumed the editorial charge of the publications of the American Sunday- School Union, which position he retained until his death, Nov. 11, 1867.

For nearly forty years he was engaged almost exclusively in Sunday-school work in its various branches. Between 1829 and June, 1867, Dr. Packard edited more than two thousand different works issued by the American Sunday-School Union in their regular series, more than forty of which he himself wrote or compiled; edited the Sunday-School Magazine, the Sunday-School Journal, and the Youth's Penny Gazette; prepared from 1829 to 1835 inclusive, and from 1838 to 1867, most of the society's annual reports; published tracts and occasional papers on Sunday-school subjects, and pamphlets on educational and other subjects, including a Letter on Christian Union (1850) to bishop Potter, of Pennsylvania. He also published, in 1850, A Reply to an Article in Forbes's Psychological Journal (London) on Diseases of the Mind. He edited eleven of the thirteen volumes of the Philadelphia Journal of Prison Discipline, and contributed to the other two volumes; issued several pamphlets on. the same subject; and wrote for the Princeton Review, the New-Englander, and other periodicals. In July, 1849, he was elected president of Girard College in Philadelphia, but declined the appointment. Packard was a man of untiring zeal and ‘ energy, estimable in all the relations of life, and in the highest sense of the phrase a national benefactor. Among the most important of his publications, all of which lack his own name, are, The Union Bible Dictionary (Phila. 1837): — The Teacher Taught (1839), reprinted in London under the title of The Sunday-School Teacher's Handbook: — An Inquiry into the Alleged Tendency of the Separation of Convicts one from the other to Produce Disease and Derangement, by a Citizen of Pennsylvania (1849): — The Teacher Teaching (1861): — The Rock (1861; Lond. 1862): — Life of Robert Owen (Phila. 1866): — The Daily Public School of the United States (1866), a vigorous protest against the inefficiency of the system. See Allibone, Dict. of Brit. and Amer. Authors, s.v.; Drake, Dict. of Amer. Biog. s.v.; Index to the Princeton Review, vol. 2, s.v.