I began to put before you something of
the revivals that took place in the 120
years between 1740 and the year 1860 here
in the United States.
And we spent the latter part of our
time yesterday morning considering the awakening which began
in Virginia in 1787 and 88 at Hampden,
Sydney and then spreading as we saw and
leading on ultimately to the Great Revival in
1800 and that continuing to 1804, 1805 and
spreading into almost all parts of the southern
states.
Now simultaneously, or almost simultaneously, a new period
of revival began in the north in the
year 1791.
And as I mentioned yesterday, these revivals were
to go on with scarcely intermission for a
period of 50 years.
And I just want this morning to give
you a little more information on these revivals
in the north before hopefully I can return
to another subject at which I had intended
to commence this morning.
Well in 1791 in the north, 40 years
of course had passed since the Great Awakening.
The churches had gone on laboring and there
had been of course conversions but there had
been no great outpourings of the spirit.
But in the last decade of the 18th
century such effusions of the spirit began again.
And I want to give you some figures.
In the four or five years commencing with
the year 1798 not less than 150 churches
in New England were favoured with special effusions
of the Holy Spirit.
And thousands of souls in the judgment of
charity were translated from the kingdom of Satan
into the kingdom of God's dear Son.
One of these awakenings was at Yale College
in New Haven in 1802.
Prior to the revival at Yale there had
only been four church members amongst the undergraduates.
For a period of time for many years
after the revival there were more than 200
church members at Yale.
The revival of 1802 brought a third of
the college student body which was then 230
students, brought a third of these students into
the church.
Now just a few more figures.
One of the historians of the period has
estimated that between 1815 and 1840 now moving
on a little, the spirit was poured out
upon four to five hundred congregations on an
average annually.
And that during some particular years, and that
during some particular years 40,000 to 50
,000 people were added to the churches every
12 months.
Now in the case of the Presbyterian churches
there are exact figures and I give you
these with a reminder that I suppose the
Presbyterians were the most cautious of all the
denominations in receiving members at this time so
these are not inflated figures.
In the North and the South the number
of Presbyterian churches in the ten years from
1816 to 1826, the number rose from 920
to over 2,000.
So there was an increase of church membership
of over 300%.
At the General Assembly of 1823 30 Presbyteries
reported revivals within their bounds.
In 1824 the number was smaller but in
1825 more than 20 Presbyteries gave testimony to
their being visited by outpourings of the Spirit
of God.
Between 1825 and 1835 the increase in church
membership in the Presbyterian church was still more
than 50%.
From 1826 to 1830 the average increase being
about 10,000 people a year.
Now I don't want to give you any
more figures but these figures do speak.
What I want to do now is to
give you just a little indication of the
quality of the preaching and of the caliber
of the men who were used to reap
in these great harvests.
And I think there are three names in
particular that stand out.
There were of course scores of ministers who
were greatly used at this time.
But if we must pick out three, I
think the three would certainly be these.
In the first place, Edward Daw Griffin who
was born in the year that Whitfield died,
the year 1770.
Edward Griffin.
The other two names would be Asahau Nettleton
and Edward Pace who were both born in
the same year, the year 1783.
And these three men became three of the
most remarkably used preachers in the whole of
church history.
Now I cannot really do much this morning
beyond encourage you to study them for yourselves.
In each case there is a biography of
these leaders.
I suppose they are all forgotten today and
one I suspect is totally forgotten.
But just a few facts about them.
Nettleton was a student at Yale after the
revival of 1802.
He was licensed to the Congregational Ministry in
New England in the year 1811.
And from the year 1811 he labored without
ceasing in revival scenes until the year 1822
at which time his health was completely broken.
And for two years he was scarcely able
to preach at all.
Then he resumed his labors as an assistant
in revivals, encouraging pastors and advising.
And he continued in that work practically down
till his death in 1844.
Asahau Nettleton.
The second man, Edward Payson.
Now those of you who have read the
life of Robert Murray M'Chayne will have
seen there M'Chayne's testimony to the influence
that Payson's life had upon him.
Unhappily Payson's life is a very rare book
today.
It was written by Asa Cummings and if
you can get the unabridged version of Cummings'
life of Payson well you have a great
treasure.
It was said of Payson that his love
for preaching was as invincible as that of
a miser for gold.
His ministry was spent in Portland in New
England, commencing in the second Congregational Church there
in the year 1807 and continuing until his
death in the same church in 1827.
And there were several powerful revivals through that
ministry.
I gave you a quotation from him on
Monday morning.
In the very year of his death, and
I suppose it hastened his death, there was
a great outpouring of the Spirit.
In the last year of his ministry there
were something like 79 persons added to the
church.
And in the midst of this great revival,
as I say, Payson died.
Let me give you a few of his
words.
Writing to a friend at this time, at
the very end of his life, he says,
but in the midst of it, that's in
the midst of this outpouring of the Spirit,
I am laid aside.
My lungs have been failing for several weeks
and I can preach no longer.
The revival among the people increases.
You see it wasn't dependent upon Payson as
a preacher.
As death drew near, Payson rejoiced in triumph
and assurance.
The celestial city, he said, is full in
my view.
Its glories beam upon me.
Nothing separates me from it but the river
of death, which now appears but an insignificant
rill that may be crossed at a single
step whenever God shall give permission.
The sun of righteousness has been gradually drawing
nearer and nearer, appearing larger and brighter as
he approached.
And now he fills the whole hemisphere, pouring
forth a flood of glory in which I
seem to float like an insect in the
beams of the sun.
My poor eyes, he says, are blinded with
excessive brightness and all I want is to
be a mirror to reflect some of those
rays to those around me.
Such was something of Edward Payson.
I encourage you then to read his life
and his sermons.
The third name is the name that I
suspect is the totally forgotten one, the name
of Edward Griffin.
Some years ago I first noticed Griffin's name
in a footnote in Sneaton's volume on the
doctrine of the Holy Spirit.
And being alerted to it, I then began
to seek and I had to seek for
many years until in a second-hand bookshop
in Wales I discovered these two precious volumes,
The Memoir and Sermons of Griffin, published in
New York in 1839.
Somehow a copy had got to Wales.
The memoir is outstandingly good.
It is written by W.B. Sprague.
I don't think you say Sprague, but we
say Sprague.
Do you say Sprague or Sprague?
Well, you know who I mean.
Well, I better not try and change my
pronunciation this morning.
This is what Sprague says about Griffin in
beginning his memoir.
It was in revivals of religion that Dr.
Griffin appeared with surpassing advantage.
The history of his life seems little less
than the history of one unbroken revival.
And it would perhaps be difficult to name
the individual in our country since the days
of Whitefield who has been instrumental of an
equal number of hopeful conversions.
But then Sprague goes on to point out
that this was not due to Griffin's preaching
gifts.
He says, Had he lived at an earlier
period, his commanding energies might have been exhausted
in prophesying to bones upon which the breath
of heaven had not begun to fall, even
to the time of his going down to
the grave.
But he came upon the stage at the
very time when the preparation in Providence seemed
to have been completed for the introduction of
a new order of things.
The fields were white around him and what
he had to do was to take his
sickle and to go forth to the harvest.
Well, Griffin began his ministry in Connecticut, he
was a native of Connecticut, in 1792.
And at the very outset of his work
he had a tremendous encouragement in his own
family.
The family in which he was brought up
included ten persons.
And as a youth he was the only
Christian in the family.
But about that year, 1791-92, the work
of conversion began in his own family until
within a few years there were only two
that remained outside the kingdom of God.
Griffin began preaching near his home in a
village where there was no church.
Then he was called to New Hartford in
Connecticut.
Then he became minister of Newark in New
Jersey.
Then of Park Street, Boston.
And he concluded his ministry as the president
of Williams College in New England.
And throughout these several ministries there were remarkable
outpourings of the Spirit.
At Newark in 1807, for example, 200 persons
were added to the church in the one
year.
The appearance, says Griffin, the appearance was as
if a collection of waters long suspended over
the town had fallen at once and deluged
the whole place.
Ored by the majesty of a present God,
many could say with Moses, I exceedingly fear
and quake.
Let me, as I leave Griffin, give you
one quotation from a hearer of Griffin.
When Griffin was becoming an aged minister of
the gospel in the year 1829, this person
went to hear him one Lord's day.
They heard him preach in the morning.
The day was excessively hot, but in the
evening they walked back to the church to
hear Griffin again.
Griffin, by the way, was a gigantic kind
of man.
He was six foot three, he weighed something
over 300 pounds and he was a huge
figure, perhaps the largest preacher that ever preached
the Orthodox faith.
But I tell you that because it has
a bearing on this evening sermon really.
The evening text, says the eyewitness, the evening
text was the harvest is past, the summer
is ended and we are not saved.
I have heard many sermons from these words,
all I think impressive.
But this one from Dr. Griffin was beyond
almost any sermon I ever heard.
One felt as if he must cry out
in amazement that any soul unprepared to die
could be quiet and unconcerned.
During most of the sermon his face was
wet with tears.
And for nearly an hour he spoke to
us with such tender and appealing sentences that
it seemed as if his hearers must cry
out in an agony of fear and trembling.
But what a climax the ending was.
It was a wonder how he had endured
the strain so long and that he had
not given up physically exhausted.
The mental agony, the heart-breaking sympathy were
enough to break an angel down.
Then, at last, he fell upon his knees
as if he had been knocked on the
head with an axe.
And without stretched arms and tears coursing down
his face he cried out, all my dying
fellow sinners, I beseech you to give your
hearts to the Savior now.
Give your life to Jesus Christ.
Do not put it off.
Do not leave this house without dedicating yourselves
to His service.
Lest you be left at last to cry,
the harvest is past, the summer is ended,
and I am not saved.
Three men then, Hazer Hal Nettleton, Edward Payson,
and Edward Griffin.
And all have outstandingly good biographies and I
hope that it may be one day they
can all be reprinted.
I don't know how long that may be.
Now, before we leave this period, let me
just say a word or two on the
third, the last period of revival before the
Civil War.
In the North, beginning in New York and
simultaneously it appears in Hamilton, Ontario, and spreading
until millions of people both in North and
South were brought into the kingdom of God.
One thing that stands out in the revival
of that period, the late 1850s, is that
God was gathering souls into His kingdom before
the great tempest broke in 1861.
You know that God has different purposes in
revival.
Sometimes the purpose is to raise up a
great multitude of young Christians who will become
workers and preachers and missionaries for years to
come.
But there have been revivals.
I think, for example, of the revival in
Korea in 1907 before the Japanese War and
of other revivals in other places.
There have been revivals when thousands have been
brought into the kingdom in order that they
might be transplanted to heaven within a very
few years.
And that certainly was the case in the
late 1850s.
Many of you have been to the battlefield
of Gettysburg, and you have seen in the
museum there Bibles that were carried by troops,
by Confederate troops coming up from the South.
Bibles which undoubtedly in several cases had been
used in great scenes of revival.
And these young men both from North and
South that were cut down prematurely by death
by God's grace had been in many instances
brought in in the years preceding the Civil
War.
I quote you only, I think, from James
Waddell Alexander.
You may not know his name, but we
have twice this week been singing his words,
O sacred head sore wounded.
That hymn is the work of James Waddell
Alexander.
Of course, it's a translation from Gerhardt and
before that from Bernard, possibly of Claveau.
But J.
W.
Alexander was the outstanding translator of that hymn
and its words owe so much to him.
He was the son of Archibald Alexander of
Princeton and his concluding years were spent in
New York.
And once more in his case also, the
revival, I believe, hastened his death.
There was more work to do than he
had strength to perform.
Let me give you one quotation from a
letter from J.
W.
Alexander written in April 1858.
And he's speaking in the midst of the
awakening in New York.
He says, in connection with all that he's
filling his hands, study, he says, study I
cannot, being run down by persons many of
whom I never knew in search of counsel,
in search of help.
The uptown prayer meetings are very sober and
edifying.
I am told that the general tendency in
all is to increased order.
The openness of thousands to doctrine, to reproof
is undeniable.
Our weekly lecture is crowded unendurably, many going
away.
The publisher of Spurgeon's sermons says he has
sold a hundred thousand.
All booksellers agree that while the general trade
is down they never sold so many religious
books.
You may rest assured that there is a
great awakening going on among us of which
not one word has yet got into the
papers.
And there are meetings of great size as
free from irreverence as any you ever saw.
I have never seen sacramental seasons more tender
and still than some meetings held daily in
churches in parts of our town.
And he goes on to describe the awakening.
Well, I don't want to spend longer on
that.
But I wonder if we could take a
short break and perhaps sing a hymn because
I have a complete break of subject.
Would it be suitable for us to do
that?
To pause and to sing God's praise at
this time?
Now what I had planned to do this
morning was having given you, as I hope,
a general survey was to come down to
a particular person and a more particular study
within those 120 years.
And I hope then that in 20 minutes,
25 minutes we can, at any rate, give
you an outline of the matter which was
upon my heart to deliver at this time.
I begin with trying to depict to you
a scene which took place in the summer
of 1843 in the town of Lexington in
Virginia.
It was an extremely hot day and there
was a crowded congregation listening to an old
man speaking.
Bent over a manuscript, grey hair falling on
his shoulders and in the midst of his
address he paused, turned pale and sat down
suddenly in the chair behind him.
And then when everyone thought that he must
have finished he began speaking again not able
to rise but speaking from his seat.
And he continued despite exhortations from those that
were sitting near him to stop he continued
to the end of what he had to
say.
And at length with an assembly that were
deeply moved and with many in tears he
spoke these final words.
Having now finished what I wish to communicate
at this time I must, my beloved friends
take a solemn and last farewell of you
all expecting never again to see the faces
of most of you in the flesh.
May heaven's richest blessings attend you.
The old man speaking was an old Virginian
Archibald Alexander of Princeton of whom we have
spoken already often this week.
And it seemed to me that thinking as
we were of revivals here in the United
States it was particularly important that we should
give some time to the biography and if
possible to something of the thought of Archibald
Alexander.
He had been born very near to this
place where he was speaking in Lexington.
He was born on an upper tributary of
the James River in the year 1772.
His father was an elder in the small
Presbyterian church there.
His grandfather had been converted in the Great
Awakening.
His grandfather was one of the first settlers
to move down to that part of the
interior of Virginia.
It was pretty wild.
There were still wolves there.
When Alexander was a boy he was given
a rifle.
On his 11th birthday everybody had to shoot
and to swim and to hunt.
And it was in that environment that Archibald
Alexander spent his early years.
His schooling was rather remarkable.
His father purchased an Irish convict.
He was called a redemptioner.
But this man was apparently useful for no
manual labor like other Irishmen.
I don't know if we have Irish friends
here.
So you don't know what I'm going to
say yet.
Like other Irishmen he could talk well.
But he wasn't very good at hard work.
So he was made the teacher in a
local school for children.
And this convict used to take Archibald Alexander
when Archibald Alexander was about 3 or 4
years old.
He used to carry him in his arms
about a mile through the woods to this
school where he would teach them.
And Archibald Alexander said the only good the
teaching did was for his lungs because they
had to shout their memory lessons at such
a volume that it certainly expanded their lungs
but he learnt nothing.
A little later, I suppose when he was
10 years of age he became the pupil
in the school of William Graham.
That reminds me, I never told you what
he was speaking on as an old man
in Lexington in that summer of 1843.
Graham was the subject of that address.
He wasn't preaching a sermon but he was
speaking about the life of William Graham.
So Graham comes in a good deal to
what we have to say in this section.
Well, he went to Graham's school when he
was 10.
Graham was the local Presbyterian minister the minister
of the church where his father was an
elder.
He was also a farmer.
He was also a school teacher.
Not surprisingly, therefore, the school pupils didn't receive
a great deal of attention from Mr. Graham.
But in that school Alexander remained and he
was able to make some progress until he
was 17.
Now, of Graham's ministry and of his preaching
Alexander says this It is remarkable that I
never paid any attention to what our own
preacher said in the pulpit.
His voice was very low and much interrupted
by continual hemming and clearing of the throat.
I thought him the worst preacher of all
that I'd ever heard.
Well, he had a Presbyterian upbringing of a
kind.
He was taught the catechism but there was
no experimental religion at all.
His father did not inherit and could not
inherit the earnest piety of the grandfather.
His father seems to have been orthodox and
upright but there was nothing apparently beyond that.
There seemed to be very few conversions.
The new birth was not a subject that
was of any common conversation amongst the people
and so church life was, as you may
suppose, at a rather low ebb.
And Archibald Alexander was an unconverted youth of
17 when he was sent away to the
house of a man called General Posey who
lived in the wilderness of Virginia about 140
miles down in the valley Valley, Virginia.
General Posey had an old lady living with
him.
Now, at some point in this week I
had to speak about Baptists, didn't I?
And this good lady will help me to
bring that in.
She had been brought up in the Church
of England and was converted through the witness
of Baptists and had become a member of
a Baptist church in that part of Virginia,
a small, earnest church.
And it seems that the true believers in
that area were almost entirely Baptists.
Well, this woman had been left a widow
and she had been taken into the home
of General Posey.
And before Archibald Alexander had been there very
long, tutoring the children of the family, he
heard this woman's testimony.
And it was something that he had never
heard before.
And then he met one of the local
Millwrights who was also a Baptist.
And this man after speaking to Alexander and
engaging in conversation on other matters, one day
said to him whether he believed that a
man could enter the Kingdom of Heaven without
being born again.
Could he do so?
I knew not, says Alexander, what to say,
for I had for some time been puzzled
about the new birth.
However, I answered in the affirmative.
He thought he needed to be born again
to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
He then asked me whether I had any
experience of the new birth.
But what proof he had of it, I
hesitated and said, not that I know of.
Ah, said he, if you would ever experience
this change, you would know something about it.
Now the good lady who I've already spoken
of, a woman by the name of Mrs.
Taylor, was evidently as wise as she was
earnest.
She saw that this young man was a
Presbyterian, as she'd commenced, Presbyterian.
And she had in her possession a volume
by John Flavel.
And she thought, being able to tell Alexander
that Flavel was of this persuasion, that he
would read Flavel.
Not only that, her eyesight was very poor.
I don't know if it was perhaps as
bad as she sometimes represented it, but she
wanted Alexander to read Flavel aloud to her.
And this is what happened.
Young Alexander was brought in to read John
Flavel aloud.
And this went on for some weeks.
And after a few weeks, not only was
Mrs. Taylor present, but the family also were
gathered.
This is what Alexander says happened one Sunday
night.
My services as a reader were frequently required.
Not only to save the eyes of old
Mrs. Taylor, but on Sundays for the benefit
of the whole family.
On one of these Sunday evenings, I was
requested to read again out of Flavel.
The part on which I had been regularly
reading was the method of grace.
But now by some means I was led
to select one of the sermons on Revelation
3.20. Behold I stand at the door
and knock.
The discourse was upon the patience, forbearance and
kindness of the Lord Jesus Christ to impenitent
and obstinate sinners.
As I proceeded to read aloud, the truth
took hold on my feelings.
And every word I read seemed applicable to
my own case.
Before I finished the discourse, these emotions became
too strong for restraint and my voice began
to falter.
I laid down the book, rose hastily, and
went out with a full heart and hastened
to my place of retirement, a place for
prayer that he had found in the woods.
No sooner had I reached the spot than
I dropped upon my knees and attempted to
pour out my feelings in prayer.
But I had not continued many minutes in
this exercise before I was overwhelmed with a
flood of joy.
This was the beginning of Alexander's spiritual experiences.
I cannot give you the full account of
his conversion.
It's very interesting, but I cannot give it
you this morning.
I want to pass on to his next
visit home when he went back to church
and to his parents and to hear Mr.
Graham preaching.
The first Sunday he got home, it was
a sort of holiday visit.
He says, Graham was preaching on the text,
but all our righteousness is our filthy rags.
He says he drank in the doctrine that
Graham was preaching.
But, he says, when I looked around upon
the people, I had the impression that they
were generally in the same state of darkness
and legality in which I had lived so
long.
Before he went to General Posey's, he writes,
my only notion of religion was that it
consisted in becoming better.
Among the Presbyterians, I had never heard of
anyone who had experienced the new birth, nor
could I recollect ever to have heard it
mentioned.
Now this was in the year 1788.
William Graham, the minister, was a student of
Princeton and one of his colleagues at Princeton
had been John Blair Smith of whom we
spoke yesterday, the President of Hampden-Sydney.
It seems unhappily that after they left Princeton,
there was some kind of estrangement between them.
And they had lost touch.
Of course, they were separated by over a
hundred miles.
But when the Greek revival had begun in
Hampden-Sydney, John Blair Smith wrote to William
Graham and suggested he might come over and
visit them.
God was blessing them with the outpouring of
his spirit and he invited him to come.
William Graham was willing to come.
But not only did he go, but he
took Archibald Alexander with him.
And you have in Archibald Alexander's biography a
beautiful account of the visit that they made
to Charlotte County and Prince Edward, to Hampden
-Sydney, to the scenes of revival which were
there taking place.
They got there on a Saturday night.
They were amazed as they were almost there
to be overtaken by about 50 young people
on horseback solemnly, joyfully singing hymns they had
never seen or heard of such a thing
before.
And on the next day, the Sunday, Alexander
says how he heard preaching such as he
had never heard.
He gives, or one of his friends gives
this description of the preaching of John Blair
Smith.
A more solemn appearance, he says, I have
never seen.
Every feature and muscle of his face, every
word and action as well as the lightning
of his eyes seemed to bespeak a soul
on fire.
And another surprise that Alexander had was that
his own minister, Mr. Graham, was asked to
preach on that Sunday.
He said people had expected from the visiting
minister from Lexington a very cold and dry
discourse.
Instead, he said, Graham preached from the words
Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, and he
preached with an eloquence and a pathos which
was to be spoken of for years to
come.
And the remarkable fact is that from this
very month, Graham became an entirely changed preacher.
He was orthodox before.
He had preached in Lexington for 15 years.
But now when Graham went back to Lexington,
the grace and the unction of the spirit
went with him.
Alexander says how when they got back home,
Graham called the church together and he spoke
to them of the things which they had
seen in Prince Edward.
He gave a narrative of all that they
had seen and heard and then addressed the
congregation in the most penetrating and pathetic manner,
the tears meanwhile streaming from his eyes.
The assembly were deeply and solemnly moved.
Multitudes went weeping from the house.
Another meeting was appointed in the evening in
the town in a larger room and here
the solemnity was greater if possible than at
the church.
Many remained to converse with the ministers and
the person of most sedate habits and moral
life cried out in an agony, what must
I do to be saved?
Alexander goes on to speak of the conversions
and the revival that spread in this part
now of Virginia.
Well shortly after this, Alexander himself felt called
to the ministry.
He was authorized to speak as an exhorter
when he was 18 and when he was
19 he was licensed to preach the gospel.
Licensed I might say despite his own protests
because he felt painfully aware that he was
too young.
Presbytery don't seem to have sympathized with his
scruples and the fact is that when he
was licensed he was given a sermon to
preach from the text in Jeremiah say not
I am a child.
That was the text that the Presbytery gave
him.
And in the course of his sermon Alexander
made no reference whatsoever to his own youth.
But the fact is that such was the
revival that was now spreading in Virginia that
Alexander instead of being able to proceed with
further study as he had hoped, he had
done some theological study with William Graham.
Instead of being able to proceed with it
he was immediately called to help ministers who
were literally being broken down with the labor
of their work.
I suppose there were not many in the
whole of the state who could preach the
gospel and those that could were doing it
night and day.
So Alexander was immediately plunged into the work
of preaching and he became minister of the
churches at Cub Creek and Breary where John
Blair Smith himself had been minister.
Let me just give you one instance of
many in these early days of his ministry.
After one service in which the presence of
God was markedly felt an old man asked
Alexander if he could speak with him.
He led me as far from the house
as he could without crossing a high fence
and then bursting into tears he said, I
am a poor sinner.
His weeping was so profuse that he could
say no more except to request me to
visit his house later.
This Alexander says he did the next day
and he found this old man who was
practically illiterate desperately attempting to read the New
Testament and his wife spinning flax beside him.
After speaking further with the man Alexander turned
to the woman and said and what does
your wife think of these things?
She had once ceased her work and without
speaking a word she also began to shed
tears.
Here says Alexander was a family of which
the heads had grown grey without having ever
attended public worship and who until now knew
no more of a saviour than the heathen.
But they were now like persons come into
a new world.
Salvation had come to their house.
Well Alexander continued in Virginia to the end
of the century.
Indeed to a little beyond that he was
called to Church in Philadelphia in 1807 and
then in the year 1812 he became the
first professor at Princeton Seminary.
His biography is a huge book.
I must say I started to read it
about 15 years ago and gave up.
But these last few months I've read every
page and enjoyed it immensely but it's a
very large volume.
I just want to give you if I
can put my hand on it a few
words on the formation of Princeton.
You know as we said yesterday that Princeton
College was established in 1756 but the college
was not purely for the raising of men
for the pulpit.
The seminary in 1812 was raised specifically for
that purpose.
Alexander says our seminaries of learning although increasing
in literature and numbers do not furnish us
with preachers.
And the purpose of Princeton was preachers.
And in the constitution that was drawn up
by the assembly they have these words which
are well worth hearing.
As filling the church with a learned and
able ministry without a corresponding portion of real
piety would be a curse to the world
and an offense to God and to his
people, so the general assembly think it their
duty to state that in establishing a seminary
for training up ministers, it is their earnest
desire to guard as far as possible against
so great an evil.
And they do hereby solemnly pledge themselves to
the churches under their care that in forming
and carrying into execution the plan of the
proposed seminary, it will be their endeavor to
make it under the blessing of God a
nursery of vital piety as well as of
sound theological learning and to train up persons
for the ministry who shall be lovers as
well as defenders of the truth, friends of
revivals of religion and a blessing to the
church of God.
Well, Alexander was 40 when he went to
Princeton and in his 81st year he was
still doing the work of a professor at
Princeton.
Indeed until the last few weeks of his
life he seemed to possess the strength of
a man very much younger, but he died
at last in the year 1851.
When he died, let me just give you
this and I think it's time we were
closing.
When he died the news of his death
reached Virginia at a time when the Synod
was meeting.
Of course it was too far for them
to travel to Princeton and they were in
the course of debating the college and its
work at Hampden-Sydney and this was evidently
a lengthy debate.
There were various difficulties and problems and one
of the speakers after the Synod had begun
one day, the next day, one of the
speakers on this subject was William Henry Foote
whose name I gave you yesterday and he
told the Synod that the previous night he
had had a dream and this is what
he dreamt.
He said in his imagination the night before
he had seen the whole Synod rise up
and go to the graveyard at Princeton and
they had got to Princeton just as it
were in time for the funeral of their
beloved friend Archibald Alexander and he says the
moderator of the Synod leading them, they knocked
at the gate and they demanded of those
assembling for the funeral some of the precious
dust that was lying there.
First of all they claimed the body of
Samuel Davis then that of another Virginian, the
brother of John Blair Smith who was buried
also at Princeton and finally of Alexander himself
we must have him, said the moderator in
this dream of Foote's we must have him
for he is ours we loaned him to
you but we never yielded him they resisted,
said Foote they resisted but you took him
Foote said to the moderator then what goes
on in this dream that he had to
describe the homecoming back to Virginia what a
procession it was with these bygone spiritual leaders
accompanying them back the idea was I should
have told you that they would be buried
at Hampton Sydney, that they would give to
the future students a reminder of the ministry
that they had exercised that's why they wanted
their remains.
As we entered your native county moderator you
told the excited citizens that you had got
the giants of the last generation and at
Old Cumberland you said we must pause for
the night and there we talked over the
revivals after revivals through the last hundred years
and it seemed that the spirits of the
dead mingled with us and the eternal world
brooded over us but then, Foote said in
his dream the procession passed away and all
we, he said, all we also passed from
the earth and he said I saw something
new coming into view a procession of men
that would be in the future and a
future, he said to the synod who were
listening a future full of brightness and glory
and gospel success.
There came upon the stage some like Samuel
Davies laying the foundations of churches whose lips
were touched with a live coal from God's
altar and some like John Blair Smith wonderful
in revivals and raising up ministers of the
gospel and some like Archibald Alexander fit to
mold a host of ministers for the gospel
well if these men dreamed like that my
friends does it not show us something of
the truth so entwined in their hearts and
their affections and their dreams were also their
prayers and I believe that we are living
to see the fulfillment of prayers that were
offered by bygone generations.
We are seeing the fulfillment of prayers even
in our present time.
Let us pray O Lord our gracious God
thou who art the habitation of thy people
in all generations we thank thee that as
thou didst lead our fathers through this pilgrimage
so thou hast also promised to lead us
in this day.
We bless thy name that thou art all
sufficient in thy grace for us in our
needs O Lord do thou reveal to us
more deeply our poverty and the extent of
the need which is ours but we thank
thee also that with that knowledge we have
the assurance of the promises of thy word
that great though our need is, great though
our deadness is, yet thine arm of grace
and power is sufficient to raise and to
quicken even the dead.
We pray then that thou wouldst breathe upon
us and that thy Holy Spirit would descend
to scatter the darkness of our minds and
to quicken our hearts in love and devotion
and prayer and do thou O Lord continue
to accompany us this day bless to us
the preaching of thy word further this morning
and this evening and grant that we may
know thy presence in our midst that thy
will may be done upon earth that thy
kingdom may come that thy name may be
hallowed and that the gospel of Jesus Christ
might triumph in the earth.
Do thou hear our crying and pardon all
our sins as we ask it in the
name of our Lord and Saviour even Jesus
Christ Amen