I was born in 1857 and my father moved from Hanover County, Virginia, to Alexandria Virginia, to be pastor of the First Baptist there in 1859 or 1860. I was, therefore, a very small boy when the war broke out. Some things, however, were vividly impressed upon my mind and remain to this day clear. Many other things I shall write I have heard my father and mother tell about repeatedly. As I was a little over eight years old when the war closed in 1865, I can remember easily some of the events.
My father was born in the city of Philadelphia. After finishing his education at Madison University, now Colgate University in New York, he went to Murfreesboro, Tennessee, to teach in a school for young women. Then he went to Virginia and was pastor to two large country churches in Hanover and Louisa County adjoining. He was a States Rights Democrat, and therefore sympathized with the Southern Confederacy, not on its position on the slavery question, but because of his Jeffersonian political view. He believed in the emancipation of the slave and urged the slave owners in his country churches in Virginia to practice manumission, the personal emancipation of their slaves. On the political aspects of the times he was silent in his public utterances.
Soon after his removal to Alexandria, Virginia, the first place in Virginia captured by the Federal Army, all the citizens were required to take “The Ironclad Oath”, an oath of allegiance to the Federal Government. My father refused to take this oath, saying that as an appeal had been made to war, he would wait until the issues involved had been decided by war. There were a number of other prominent citizens in Alexandria who took the same position, among them Father Peter Kroes, a Roman Catholic priest. Of course, most of the citizens obeyed the military authorities in this respect, and all, including the Father, obeyed the military authorities in all respects.
I cannot give the chronological sequence of the events which I am about to relate, but each event itself will stand out as its own separate story.
My father continued his ministry as pastor of the First Baptist Church in Alexandria, preaching on Sundays and officiating at funerals and weddings, as occasion might require. He also was faithful in visiting the sick and those who needed the services of a minister. When wounded soldiers were brought to Alexandria, he was as faithful in his services to the soldiers of the Federal Army as to those of the Confederate Army. My mother would, out of their poverty, make little delicacies to eat and these my father would take to the soldiers and the sick.
Of course, business was disarranged, and my father received only a pittance from the church, but this made no difference in his enthusiasm in his work, which was constant and faithful to the last degree. Among other things he did was to say to the public that since the schools were all closed and teachers could not be had, it was not right that boys and girls should grow up without any opportunity for an education. He, therefore, announced that he would open a school in his own home. The only house I remember in which we lived in Alexandria, Virginia, was on the Northwest corner of King and Alford Streets. I remember very vividly that home. In this altruistic educational enterprise Miss Fannie Gwinn, a very talented young woman who years after the war married the Rev. Pike Powers and moved to Kentucky, joined with him. She was a member of my father’s church. No scholar was charged anything for tuition, but anything that anybody could pay was thankfully received. All sorts of text books were used. Any that were available were accepted. In this school most of the work, except that of reading, was done by oral instruction. It was here that I first went to school. Though only a little fellow, I can still remember my mother, as she had a moment or two, trying to teach me my alphabet, and I can remember very dimly the patience of Miss Gwinn, as she had a spare moment or two, trying to introduce the little tot to a knowledge of the queer looking things that we call letters and afterward making me acquainted with those crocked marks that we call figures. The reader of this will have to imagine what sort of a school it was without equipment, held in a private house, ministered to by my father and Miss Gwinn, the services of my father being interrupted almost daily by his ministerial duties. At the same time it was the only opportunity for those who attended this school.
Very vividly do I remember one morning breakfast. There sat down to the table my father and mother and myself and, I think, my two younger brothers who were children hardly able to walk or talk. Our breakfast that morning consisted of crusts of bread left over from the meager repasts of the day before, and a tumbler half full of black molasses. My father and mother did not eat because there was not enough for them and my hungry self. What my younger brothers ate I do not know. After breakfast we had family prayers. I very vividly remember my father taking me in his arms as we knelt down, and my mother taking my two brothers in her arms. I do not remember the words of his prayer, but I remember that he told the Lord about his need and poverty and lack of food, and asked that in some way he should be able to obtain something for his family. That day some man came in to be married and left a wedding fee of a five dollar gold piece. This relieved our immediate needs for the time. I have often heard my father refer to this experience in his simple faith as a direct answer to prayer.
I well remember being sent by my mother with a small basket of onions and apples to a camp ground on a vacant lot not far away from our home where Union soldiers were quartered and was told by my mother just to walk through the camp and that if the soldiers took the onions and the apples not to be afraid, that she wanted them to have these things. It was her kind thought that they needed these things to prevent them from having sickness or disease of some kind.
Later on in the war I have heard my mother tell about how she was in the kitchen baking something for the home and, as the kitchen window fronted on Alford Street, a dilapidated looking Union soldier poked his face in the window, not knowing where he was, and shouted that he wanted something to eat. Then he was startled and said, “Why, Carrie, is this you?” Carrie was my mother’s Christian name. She was startled at the appearance of the soldier and to hear her name called, and looked again at him, and he told her who he was. He was one of my father’s brothers who was in the Union Army. She gave him what she had and he had to hurry away to join his Company.
Father was not undisturbed. A series of distressing persecutions followed him. These I will relate, though I do not know the order in which they occurred. Since most of the population of Alexandria remained inwardly loyal to the Southern Confederacy, although forced by military conquest to take the “Ironclad Oath”, the city wide influence of my father’s life was very great. In addition to his own congregation, citizens without regard to any religious connection called upon him for ministerial services in visiting the sick and conducting funerals and in all other ways. His following in the city was perfectly enormous and for that reason the military authorities were determined to break down the spirit of my father and compel him to take the “Ironclad Oath”. They resorted to all kinds of persecutions.
On one occasion he was sent for to visit a lady who was reported as being dying. He went out into the night, reached the home, and found the lady perfectly well. It was simply a device to get him out of his own home. That night as he crossed alleys on the way home, he was shot at in the dark. This method was used several times. For many years mother preserved the old plug hat with a bullet hole in it, and also the long tail Prince Albert broadcloth coat with a bullet hole through the coat tail. These were at first mere matters of curiosity, but as I began to know my father and appreciated him, I looked upon them after the war was over with reverence for his devotion to his duty and his fearlessness in the attempt to discharge it.
Here read 3 1/2. [does anyone have any idea what this reference might be? wcb2]
One morning at eight o’clock there came an order from the military authorities for the whole family to be on board of a steamer at certain dock on the Potomac River by twelve o’clock. One hundred pounds of baggage were allowed for the whole family, my father, mother, my two brothers and myself, and my little baby sister Carrie, who was still an infant in arms and who died in Alexandria and whose remains were put in a vault and kept there until the death of my youngest brother, when I removed those remains from Alexandria to Philadelphia. I well remember that morning when mother dressed all three of us little boys as heavily as she could. She put two pairs of trousers on us. In the pocket of my inside pair of trousers I remember that father put some money, not much but all that the poor man had. We got down to the dock at twelve o’clock. All the baggage was examined. Even the sandwiches that mother had prepared for lunch were opened. This was the search for compromising papers by the military authorities. I have often heard father say that he found that the boat did not have fuel enough on board to carry us five miles down the river. There was nothing to do but to wait. At length there came a messenger, countermanding the order for deportation, and we were ordered back home. When we reached the house, we found that there was not a piece of furniture in it or carpet, nor lump of coal or a chip of wood. It was as bare as the carpenters had left it when it was built, so I have often heard my father and mother say. I do not think this experience occurred in connection with the house at King and Alford Streets, but I am not sure. At any rate, there were my parents with four children and no comforts of any kind within bare walls and floors of an empty house. At that time Mrs. George S. Bayne, a widow whose husband my father had buried, took all of us into her home. She afterwards became Mrs. Childs by a subsequent marriage, and was for many years the lady principal of Highlands Institute, Virginia, where my beloved wife spent four years at school. Annie knew her very well. Her daughter, Miss Marian Bayne, is now at Hollins College. She has never married. My friendship with her began at that early date.
Meanwhile, the spirit of antagonism to my father increased and it was determined to destroy his influence in the city. I personally remember what I am about to relate. One Sunday morning in the church my father was preaching. I was a little boy, sitting beside my mother. Without any warning, there marched down the aisle of the church a group of soldiers. The officer in charge ordered my father to stop preaching. There was nothing for him to do but to stop. This part I remember very vividly and was greatly distressed by it. I noticed that he was taken over to one corner of the church, and the officer in command spoke to the congregation that crowded around, saying something I could not hear. Many times I have heard my father say that he made a brief talk, reciting the fact that my father had refused to take the “Ironclad Oath”, and closed his address by handing the pulpit Bible to one of the deacons of the church with the remark, “I now and hereby depose your pastor from the ministry.”
I well remember that the church for a long time had been engaged in buying a small pipe organ and that the pipes for this were in a box in the gallery. I had often looked with wonder upon those tubes of metal and wondered how they could ever make a noise. The members of the church were given until six o’clock that Sunday to remove all that they could from the church building. I remember very well that mother could not leave her four little children to help the others, but we stayed home and, as usual on Sunday afternoons, she would gather us about her and tell us a story and read to us and sing to us. She always had a little bit of candy or a cooky or a piece of fruit of some kind for us. That day the people took out of the church all that they could. The upstairs part of the building was afterwards used as a hospital for negro troops, so I have heard my father say, and the downstairs part and the Sunday school room as a stable. Such were the hygienic ideas of those who had charge at that particular time.
After the church was taken away from father, he preached in the old Liberty Theater. It was the only building open to him. The population did not have much use for the ministers who had taken the “Ironclad Oath”, but they did make heroes of father and of the Catholic priest, who had the courage of their convictions. Mother’ health was not good at that time. Worry and overwork and the care of a young family and necessary privations and anxieties about father naturally told upon her health. I very well remember one Sunday morning as we were coming home from the Liberty Theater. I was walking with a gentleman immediately behind father and Mrs. Bayne. I remember distinctly that Mrs. Bayne had hold of father’s arm. On the way, across the street, was gathered a guard of Union soldiers. The officer in charge walked across the street, lifted his hat because father was walking with a lady, and told father that he was under arrest and insisted on taking him along. Mrs. Bayne and the gentleman walking with me, whose name I have forgotten, went home and told my mother about father’s arrest. There was no charge made against him. Of course, this was a severe blow to mother, who was recovering from one of her sick spells and had intended to surprise father that day by coming down to dinner. Of course, the shock was severe. For two weeks, he and about a dozen other citizens, who had refused to take the “Ironclad Oath”, were kept in an improvised jail, which was a dwelling confiscated for that purpose. You can imagine the situation, with mother ill and three little boys to care for and a baby sister. These men, confined in jail, were treated with more or less indignities. The number was divided into halves, and every other day one half was ridden on a railroad train on what was then the Orange, Alexandria and Manassas Railroad. The effort was to transport Union troops on that train, and these men were taken along to prevent Colonel Mosby’s famous gorillas from wrecking the train or firing into it. It seems that Mosby needed the road for certain military purposes. I have heard father say that the man walking with me behind Mrs. Bayne and himself that Sunday was a spy sent by Mosby to find out what was going on, and that he reported to Mosby the arrest of my father and the other men and the purposes in view, and that Mosby was well informed. The last three trips on which they compelled father to go, they made him ride all day long on the cowcatcher of the locomotive. The locomotives were the old wood-burning type of engines, and he sat on the flat place just below the smokestack. Of course, the speed was not great, but the road bed was not smooth.
During the time of his imprisonment, I so well remember dear mother would prepare food for him that she knew he liked, so far as she was able to get it, would pack it nicely in a little tin bucket, and would send me with it to the jail. I soon learned about the time that he would be back from his trips on the train. Even during the days when he did not take the trips, I would carry him his meals. I shall never forget the afternoon when, as a little toddler about seven years old or thereabouts, I was going down the street with my bucket, happy in the thought of seeing my Daddy. Across the street I looked up and saw my father going into Entwistle’s Drug Store. It did not take me long to get over there. I thought very little of my bucket, but a great deal of seeing my father. He had stopped at the drug store to get something to take home to mother. I never saw my father alone at any time I visited him while he was in jail. There were always guards present. Afterward I learned from father that they stayed there to see if I brought my father any papers of any kind, or if my mother sent him any papers, and also to hear the conversation and whatever messages I brought from mother or received from father. Of course, there was great rejoicing when father came home with me late that afternoon.
Matters moved along with the same annoyances. I remember that somehow or other there came into my possession just the toy that a boy would like. It was a little wheelbarrow. It had its high sides which could be taken out and put back. It was painted green and had some red stripes on the sides, and I used to amuse myself in admiring the green color and stripes and in taking out and putting in the removable sides of the wheelbarrow. I suppose that altogether it would hold not over half bushel of stuff. It was small.
One morning father decided to go to market. Mother was sick and in bed. As I remember it, she was very ill. As we went out the front door about nine o’clock in the morning, I noticed a great big black rag hanging to the door knob, and I called father’s attention to it. It was new to me. I can see him now as he did not wait to untie the rag, but regardless of the door knob, caught hold of it and gave a strong jerk and tore it off. It had been raining the night before, and he walked to the middle of the street, threw the rag in a little puddle of water and tramped on it. It was crepe which everybody believed had been tied on the door during the night to show the public the next day that mother had died. The villainy of this thing so incensed my father that his anger is to be excused. Evidently the crepe had been tied on the door very early in the evening, because it was wet from the rain. The Alexandria Gazette, the only paper published in the city, whose editor was a close friend of father’s, contained that morning when it appeared a long account of mother’s death and her obituary. This paper had evidently not been read that morning by my father, if it had been left at the house, which I doubt. The crepe had been tied on the door knob by a Union soldier.
We went down to market, I trundling my little wheelbarrow, but father did not get home that day until eleven o’clock. He was stopped almost every foot of the way by citizens who wanted to sympathize with him. They had seen the account of mother’s death published in the morning paper. I trundled my little wheelbarrow back with such scanty grub as father’s more scanty purse would allow him to buy, but mother knew nothing of what had happened until she had entirely recovered from illness. That clipping from the Alexandria Gazette containing mother’s obituary was preserved for many years. Where it is now, I do not know.
During the time that father was in jail, mother’s illness was so severe that her life was despaired of. Mother prepared his meals so long as she could, but then kind neighbors came in and filled my little bucket and sent me off, for it was a help and relief to mother to know that I had seen father and be able to send her love to him and to hear directly from him. So severe was this illness of mother that it was decided by the friends we had that an effort should be made to get father released from jail to see mother. I shall never forget the day when I was dressed up in the best rags that I had and made presentable, and then taken by Miss Fannie Gwinn down town to the office of the provost marshal of the city, who was in charge of its affairs under military rule. Miss Gwinn stated my mother’s illness to the magistrate, and then I fell on my knees before that man and begged him with a child’s heart and earnestness to let my father come home and see my mother die. Of course, I did not then appreciate all that it meant as I have since becoming a man, but I did have a dim idea of the seriousness of my visit.
The provost marshal consented to give father two hours from jail to come home to see mother, provided a guard accompanied him and was stationed at the door of the room in which my mother was so ill. He came. Of course, I was not old enough to appreciate or realize what it all meant. Nevertheless, I remember that when the two hours was up, the guard opened the door and called out, “Time is up”, and then went and took hold of my father, who was upon his knees by my sick mother. He was taken back to jail. This dreadful incident, together with all that they had experienced, will throw some light on the kind of joy mother and father must have felt when they were together the night of his release from prison, which I have described.
It takes imagination and not language to picture what must have been the situation in those dark days when without salary, with a wife and four children dependent upon him and valiantly trying to minister to the sorrows and needs of others, he had responsibilities of his own. One needs to dwell on all these incidents in the light of the surroundings to realize how my mother and father felt in those dark days.
And now comes a different kind of a story. One night about one o’clock in the morning, while father was sleeping by mother’s side, very lightly because of his impaired nervous system after all these experiences and because of anxieties, he heard a horse with muffled hoofs come up the street and stop right under his window. He heard his name called that time of night. Of course, in the light of experiences which he had been suffering, he did not know what it all meant. He went to the window and answered, and was told to come down to the door. Not knowing whether it meant arrest or assassination, he kissed mother and went down to the front door. There were two doors, one on the street and another inside. Father opened the door and in came a man with an army overcoat over him and a scarf hiding all his features. He shut the door behind him and struck a match and lighted the lamp in the vestibule. Then he closed the inner door, and the two were there together. He talked through his scarf. He said to my father, “Are you a Mason?” Father replied, “I am”. He was at that time Chaplain of the Lodge of Masons in Alexandria of which George Washington had at one time been the Master. They then proved to each other’s satisfaction that they were Masons. Then, in the dim twilight in the narrow space, the man said, “I heard at six o’clock last night that you are a Mason. I have galloped all the way from Washington here to find out whether this was true. You have never preached a sermon since the war begun, nor officiated at a funeral, nor made a public address when we have not had a spy present. We have been looking for some sentence of yours in an address or in a prayer to reveal publicly your interest in the success of the Southern Confederacy during this war. We have had a cell in the old Capitol prison Washington waiting for you. If you had publicly revealed your sympathy with the Rebel cause, you would have been imprisoned at once there.”
Then, as the man unbuttoned his overcoat, he said to my father, “Now go back to bed and sleep in peace, and if this war lasts twenty years longer and you and I are alive and I am in my present position, you will never be annoyed or molested again.” By this time the overcoat was open and thrown aside, and there stood a man in the uniform of a General in the Federal Army. Father said, “Please, sir, tell me you name.” The man said, “No sir.” Father then asked him, “Please let me see your face.” He refused to unmuffle his face from the scarf. Father then said, “Please give me some clew by which I can find out who you are.” The man refused, saying that it was enough for each of them to know that the other was a Mason. Then he vanished out into the darkness and rode away, and from that time until the day of his death father was never disturbed in any way whatsoever. I have often heard my father tell this story, not only to our family, but to friends in talking about old days of war, and after I became a Mason, I heard him tell it in a meeting of a Mason Lodge. I have often repeated it as I have here written it, a number of times in Masonic Lodges. I have hoped that somehow the story would spread and that I could in some way address the person to whom we were so indebted. I have never yet been able to succeed. I have no idea who it was, and now that the war closed sixty years ago, I do not think that there will ever be any opportunity of discovering the identity of the person. It has always been a delightful thing for me to think about. Father was not a belligerent sympathizer with the Southern Confederacy. With him it was a matter of principle to which he would not be untrue. He pursued the great ideal of the ministry, caring not who the person was, Protestant or Catholic or member of no church, sympathizing with the Union or with the Confederacy, white or black. Wherever there was an opportunity for him to be helpful, with joy he seized it and rendered his service.
Another very vivid personal recollection was that of seeing a man tack crepe over the front door of our home. As I recall the home, it was on King Street, but not on the corner of King and Alford. I can remember standing on the sidewalk and watching them drape the top and sides of the door with long black material. I did not then fully understand what it meant, but I knew that something had happened. It was the decoration of the house of mourning on account of the assassination of President Lincoln. This occurred in 1865. I was a little over eight years old at that time. I am not sure whether father had this decoration done, or whether it was done by the military authorities in the city, but I think he had it done himself. At any rate, it is a very vivid memory. I think I could go right to the spot now and, if the house is still standing, could again put myself in the very tracks in which I then stood. This was sixty years ago.
How much longer the war lasted after the visit of the Masonic General from Washington, I do not know, but it was at least a year. In that time there was no annoyance of any sort, no arrests, no ambuscades. The General told father not only that if the war lasted twenty years and the General was in the same position he would not be troubled, but also that if father was as discreet as he had been, he would not be annoyed. The whole incident throws light upon the evident care father took to avoid allusion to the war in any public function.
We continued to live in Alexandria, Virginia, until 1867. Meanwhile, my oldest sister had died. From Alexandria we went to Greenville, South Carolina, where for two years father was the Secretary of the Sunday School and Bible Board of the Southern Baptist Convention. He then went to Lynchburg, Virginia, for a pastorate there. It was there that I joined the church when about twelve years old. In Lynchburg, I attended the first-class Preparatory School of which Professor Charles L. C. Minor was principal. In 1871 he went to Richmond, Virginia, as pastor. I was fourteen years old. There father stayed until 1876, when he moved to Baltimore, Maryland, as pastor. I remained at college six years continuously, getting my diplomas in every one of the nine different schools in the college, and taking my Master’s Degree (M.A.) in June, 1877. I was too young, but there was nothing else to do, but to go ahead or else loaf. I was only four months over twenty years old when I took this degree and carried off the medal in philosophy and some few other college honors. I entered Crozer Theological Seminary the following September and was graduated there in June, 1880. This paragraph had nothing to do with war times, but it is appended only to allow that all the disadvantages of my father’s poverty and my youth were not allowed to interfere with the steady pursuit on educational purposes.
I have in my library a book the like of which I do not know exists anywhere else. I consists of all the catalogs of all the schools I attended in my life, and also the catalogs of Hollins Institute during the time that my dear wife was a student there. It is now known as Hollins College. I have the catalogs of the Lynchburg Classical and Commercial School, which was the Preparatory School, for the sessions of 1868-69, and 1869-70, and all the catalogs of Richmond College, now the University of Richmond, beginning with the session 1871-72 running all the way through continuously and complete to the sessions of 1876-77. Also [a] pamphlet containing the roll of Alumni 1882-84, and also list of graduates receiving degrees from 1849-1888. And the same complete catalogs of the sessions of Crozer Theological Seminary. Also the same complete catalogs of sessions of Hollins Institute, covering the period of my dear wife’s studies there.
Soon after I went to New York, Howard College at Birmingham, Alabama, conferred upon me the degree of D.D. A few years afterwards, my Alma Mater, the University of Richmond, conferred upon me the degree of D.D. After I came to St. Louis, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, conferred upon me the degree of D.D. In 1916, on the 6th of June, the University of Chicago conferred upon me the degree of S.T.D. (Doctor of Sacred Theology). This honor was exceptional, since it was at the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of this great University, and the degree has never been conferred upon anyone by that University since. Previously it had been given only to John Watson, “Ian MacLaren”, the famous Scotch preacher and author of many books; and a little later upon William Newton Clarke, the famous theologian of Colgate University, New York; and with me likewise was honored President Henry Churchill King, for many years the President of Oberlin College. This is an unusual recognition by that great institution, since such degrees to ministers have been granted only to the four persons named. These degrees are of value to me only and because they express recognition of these institutions of learning.
In April, 1907, at the organization of the Northern Baptist Convention, I was elected Corresponding Secretary and have served continuously to this date. This position has given me large opportunity for wide service and has made my name known throughout the Christian world.
Upon my graduation from Crozer Theological Seminary, I went to Baltimore, Maryland, to supply the pulpit of the Lee Street Baptist Church. I had been away from the family for four years, one at Richmond and three at Crozer Seminary. Father was then pastor of the Franklin Square Baptist Church in Baltimore. He left that church to become an officer of the American Baptist Publication Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I went to the Lee Street Church with the express understanding that I should be only a supply and should not be considered in any sense a candidate for the pulpit. Nevertheless, the church voted to call the green, young man, who was twenty-three years old, at a salary of $2,500. The church had 500 members. Of course, I would not let them extend the call to me, and reminded them of the condition upon which I agreed to be their permanent supply. On February 5th, my twenty-fourth birthday anniversary, I preached my first sermon as pastor of the church in Luray, Virginia. I was likewise pastor of the Baptist Church at Front Royal, Virginia, thirty miles away. I alternated between these churches and preached every other Sunday in each one. On May 15, 1881, I was ordained in Luray, my father preaching the ordination sermon. Twenty-four years old is very young to begin such a pastoral work. I resigned the church at Front Royal after a year, and March 26th I was called to the pastorate of the Baptist Church at Riverton, Virginia, for one Sunday in the month. They gave me a salary of $125 a year. The other three Sundays I gave to Luray and they increased my salary from $300 a year to $400. The fifth Sunday in every month I gave to Riverton. There I built the church which still stands. I begged trees from the farmers. I begged hauling to the saw mill. I begged all kinds of materials for construction. I begged money. As much as I could I worked with my hands on that building. I was very proud of it and am today.
At Marksville, Page County, Virginia, I likewise put up a building.
Now comes a romance. During the war there was a surgeon connected with a regiment of the Union Troops, who lived in New York City, Dr. T. Franklin Smith. He had been in Alexandria with his regiment part of the time during the war. He was a member of the Mount Morris Baptist Church in New York City. While I was a little boy, he had often held me on his lap and talked to me when he visited my father’s home. Mount Morris Church had called my father to the pastorate, but he had declined. While he was preaching at the Mount Morris Church one Sunday, Dr. Smith asked him about me and expressed the desire to see me. Dr. Smith secured from the church an invitation to me to preach two Sundays in the New York church. On a salary of $525 a year, which was my total income from both the Luray and the Riverton churches, I could not afford to take many railroad trips. Here was a chance to go to New York, a city which I had never seen, and to visit my father and mother and sisters who were all living in Philadelphia. When the invitation came, the country parson accepted it, and October 21st and 28th I preached morning and evening in New York City at the Mount Morris Baptist Church. I spent the intervening week days of both weeks with my father in Philadelphia, and was back in my Luray pulpit again November 3rd. The Mount Morris Church extended me a call, which I accepted November 22, 1883. Within two hours after the telegram announcing the call had come, a few days previously, I received a call to St. Joseph, Missouri, offering me $2,800 a year and a parsonage. I chose the call to New York at $2,000 a year. In January, 1884, I began my pastorate in New York City. It ended October 31, 1905. It was within two months of twenty-two years of continuous service. November 1, 1905, I arrived in St. Louis and began my pastorate of the Second Baptist Church. I built the church building for the Mount Morris Church which now stands. The church building of the Second Baptist Church in St. Louis, Missouri, was begun about two years after my pastorate here.
I have record books in which I have kept the record of every public address I have ever made, with the exception of a few before August 5, 1877. This record shows the date, the time of day and, if it was a sermon, the text, and certain other interesting details. It has taken me only a minute a day to keep this record. My first sermon was preached August 5, 1877, in the Academy of Music, Baltimore, Maryland, in the morning, for the First Baptist Church, which was then holding its meetings in that place during the construction of an edifice. These records show that the last address delivered in Seattle, Washington, August 30, 1923, in the evening is numbered 10,591. That is entirely too much talking for any man to do. If these addresses were printed in the usual form of volumes containing such sermons and addresses, allowing ten pages to an address and 400 pages to a volume, they would amount to 264 volumes containing about 106,000 pages of printed matter and about 40,000,000 words. I tremble when I think of this much speaking during my life. These things will be of value only to my wife and sons. The comments in the margins contain confidential matter and much private record of interest only to my immediate family and myself.
In addition to these school catalogs and records of my addresses, I have five or six scrap books filled with clippings from newspapers concerning my work and with articles which I have contributed to newspapers. There are also several books published by institutions or persons to which I have contributed chapters or sections, and I have published three volumes, “Earthly Blooms from Heavenly Stems”, a short compilation which I made for the Mount Morris Church for sale at a fair; also “Foundation Truths” a series of Sunday school lessons for adult classes, based upon the four Gospels. This passed through two editions. There is a lesson for every Sunday in the year. It cost me an enormous amount of work. The methods, however, have changed, and the book is now out of print, although I have two or three copies. Also my volume entitled “The Teaching Pastor”, a series of lectures delivered at Crozer Theological Seminar two or three years ago. I have been so busy with pastoral work, with the affairs of the Northern Baptist Convention through eighteen years, and with serving on Boards and Committees that I have not had the time to give to literature.
I have especially enjoyed my ministry at institutions of learning where I have been honored with invitations to preach on Sundays, to spend days in lecturing, and also in meeting the students for personal conferences on religious matters. Among the institutions I have thus visited have been Harvard University, Brown University, Colgate University, Rochester Theological Seminary, Vassar College (three times), Oberlin College, Cornell University (three times), the University of Chicago (about twenty times), University of Illinois, Vanderbilt University, the University of Missouri, Washington University (about twenty-five times), Stanford University in California, and many others which I do not recall.
This memorandum contains only personal experiences and is not intended to be exhaustive. It is written only that my sons and their children and my sisters may have the merest sketch in outline of what has been a busy life, but an exceedingly happy one. I cannot be grateful enough to God for these countless opportunities for service. If I were a young man twenty years old and endowed with all that I have accumulated in experience and knowledge during the nearly half century it has been my blessed privilege to serve and work, which endowment of course would be an impossibility and could be obtained only by experience and personal work, I would again choose the ministry as my life work, only I would try to make it thoroughly adapted to the growing, unfolding, developing human life all around me and would not try to crush an evergrowing world with its ever increasing knowledge, with its changing viewpoint into any outgrown, obsolete or obsolescent moulds of the past. This would be as absurd as trying to crowd a soaring eagle back into the egg shell out of which it was hatched. Years ago I came to see that the processes of evolution are God’s methods. I am thoroughly, unreservedly devoted to what this method reveals, and utterly believe that it is God’s method with the human soul and with the knowledge of himself as it is in the physical universe. It was my belief in this method, which could not be withheld in the face of overwhelming evidence, that led me, after a great crisis in 1885, to give to it my thorough allegiance, and ever since then I have been regarded by my more conservative brethren as being off color. Their characterizations have varied according to their own degree of conservatism. To some I have been a liberal, to others a modernist, to others a rank heretic, and have been publicly called an infidel. Nevertheless, I have quietly gone on in my own way, conscious that I am only one of innumerable hundreds of thousands of others who share the very life intellectually that I have been leading and which I honestly believe is destined, within a generation or two at most, to master the thinking and processes of the world religiously, intellectually and socially. To me God is revealing himself today through all processes of life, physical, intellectual, social, religious, moral, as truly as he ever revealed himself in any age of the history of the world: Revelation comes through life and not through literature. Literature is only the interpretation or the record of revelation, and thus the literature becomes supremely precious because it enables [us] to trace the whole process and progress of the revelation which is continuous and which has its germinal stages, its crude, unripe stages, and possibly in some realms its mature, finished stage. The open mind is the greatest blessing, and the willingness to change one’s views when forced to do so by facts which cannot be disputed, and the loyalty at any given stage of progress to what have been received up to that time, and the spirit of tolerance and free inquiry and unrestrained investigation are the assets on which the whole world will move forward to continuously larger and better things.
I have learned to love human beings and to believe that the possibilities of life are unlimited for anyone, unless a person deliberately petrifies the natural powers inherent in every human being.
I believe God loves all human beings even more than my dear wife and I love our precious sons and their children, and that the whole of Christianity - not a part of it, but the whole of it - consists in living on this supreme fact of God’s love for every man, revealed in Jesus Christ, and therefore in a personal, filial companionship with the heavenly Father and hence in a fraternal relation with all other human beings, without regard to the accidents of life or race. All this is the sum total of the precipitant which has come to me that Christianity is the religion revealed by Jesus Christ in his own life which tells the world that the heavenly Father is more interested in his earthly children than an earthly parent can be in his own offspring. Indeed, marriage and the parental relation are used by Jesus Christ as the supreme vehicle for telling humanity of this love of God and of this consequent normal life we ought to live both with him and with our fellow human beings.
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to Bitting Family Lore - KHB, 1967
Wm C. Bitting II, St. Louis, MO
wbitting@yahoo.com Revised 6/19/05 (prior 6/20/98, 10/15/00).