Following up on our post from Wednesday, with the opening statement on the value of funeral literature, what follows is another interesting example of the value of reading eulogies and funeral sermons. These are a literature often overlooked, though they are also works which can provide some of the very best pastoral wisdom and insight. The example at hand is drawn from In Memoriam: Rev. John B. Spotswood, D.D., a eulogy delivered by the Rev. William P. Patterson, upon the death of Rev. Spotswood in 1885. John Boswell Spotswood, the subject of the memorial, was born Feb. 8th, 1808, in Dinwiddie Co., Va., being the son of Robert and Louisa (Bott) Spotswood.

Yet, while we might, the truths spoken here give us opportunity to reflect on some foundational considerations concerning the value of pulpit ministry and how the Lord has always been faithful in providing for the needs of the Church:—

A Fitting Pause

One of the most significant facts regarding the founding and extension of Christ’s Kingdom, in the world, is the use, on the part of God, of human instrumentalities. Infinitely wise, He never errs in the selection of His laborers. In the call of men to the ministry, and in the sanctification of marked and peculiar gifts, we may, very frequently, behold a wonderful exhibition of divine providence. Through the different periods and exigencies, in the history of the Church, God has never left Himself without faithful witnesses. In each successive period the Saviour has remembered His promise, made to the first disciples, and has been indeed ever present with His Church, raising up and commissioning those qualified, both by nature and by grace, to contend with difficulty, and to triumph in all their efforts to be valiant for the truth. And after the good fight has been entirely fought, and the victory won; when these devoted servants of Christ come to the time when it is the Lord’s will that they shall depart out of this world to enter upon the full enjoyment of their reward in glory, it is altogether fitting that the Church should pause a moment to take, at least, a brief glance at their lives and labors, and to place on record her heartfelt appreciation of, and gratitude for, what they have been permitted to accomplish in the service of the Master.

Hence there is laid upon us the performance of a duty which we can not but meet gladly and gratefully, though our hearts yearn after the departed, and are filled with sincere sorrow because of our bereavement.

Meditations of David Brainerd
by Rev. David T. Myers

We turn to the thoughts and words of missionary statesman David Brainerd who wrote in his diary on this day, February 7, the following devotional words.  He said in 1744 that he “was much engaged in some sweet meditations on the powers and affections of the godly soul in their pursuit of their beloved object: wrote something of the native language of spiritual sensation, in its soft and tender whispers; declaring, that it now feels and tastes that the Lord is gracious; that he is the supreme good, the only soul-satisfying happiness: that he is a complete, sufficient, and almighty portion: saying,

‘Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire besides this blessed portion.  O, I feel it is heaven to please him, and to be just what he would have me to be!  O that my soul were holy, as he is holy! O that it were pure, even as Christ is pure; and perfect, as my Father in heaven is perfect!  These, I feel, are the sweetest commands in God’s book, comprising all others.  And shall I break them!  must I break them! am I under a necessity of it as long as I live in the world!  O my soul, woe, woe is me that I am a sinner, because I now necessarily grieve and offend this blessed God, who is infinite in goodness and grace! Oh, methinks, if he would punish me for my sins, it would not wound my heart so deep to offend him: but though I sin continually, yet he continually repeats his kindness to me!  Oh, methinks I could bear any sufferings; but how can I bear to grieve and dishonour this blessed God!  How shall I yield ten thousand times more  honour to him?  What shall I do to glorify and worship this best of beings?  O that I could consecrate myself, soul and body, to his service for ever!  O that I could give up myself to him, so as never more to attempt to be my own, or to have any will or affections that are not perfectly conformed to him!  But, alas, alas!  I find I cannot be thus entirely devoted to God; I cannot live, and not sin.  O ye angels, do ye glorify him incessantly; and if possible, prostrate yourselves lower before the blessed King of heaven?  I long to bear a part with you; and, if it were possible, to help you. Of, when we have done all that we can, to all eternity, we shall not be able to offer the ten thousandth part of the homage that the glorious God deserves!’

David Brainerd concludes this diary portion with the statement, “Blessed be God, that he enables me to love him for himself.”

Words to Live By:
Oh to make this our prayer language and our life reality, that my soul is holy, as he is holy! that it is pure, even as Christ is pure; and perfect, as my Father in heaven is perfect.

“The righteous perisheth, and no man layeth it to heart.”

We’re not following the calendar today, but digress a bit for some interesting observations. Funeral sermons often offer great insights, yet are some of the most overlooked reading around. Today’s post comes in the context of the history of the Reformed Presbyterian Church, General Synod, a small denomination that eventually merged with another and whose churches still later came into the PCA in 1982. The words here are drawn from the opening words of the Rev. Gilbert McMaster’s discourse, The Upright Man in Life and Death: A Discourse delivered, Sabbath evening, November 7, 1852, on the occasion of the decease of the Rev. Samuel Brown Wylie, D.D., pastor of the First Reformed Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia; Vice-Provost and Emeritus Professor of Ancient Languages in the University of Pennsylvania. There you have a brief description of Dr. Wylie [1773-1852], while Gilbert McMaster [1778-1854] was an Irish immigrant who had been headed toward a career in medicine, when Samuel B. Wylie and Alexander McLeod convinced him of his call to the ministry. Pursuing that call, upon ordination he was installed in what used to be termed a yoked pastorate, over the Reformed Presbyterian congregations of Galway and Duanesburgh, in New York. He died not seventeen months after delivering the funeral sermon for Dr. Wylie.

[Note: I regret not being able to provide a link for online viewing of this funeral sermon, as it has not been digitized. The PCA Historical Center, thankfully, does hold an original copy. Fifteen other institutions also hold copies, including Geneva College and RTS/Jackson.]

DISCOURSE.

Isaiah LVII. 2.

“He shall enter into peace; they shall rest in their beds, each one walking in his uprightness.”

“Righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.” [Proverbs 14:34] States usually calculate their strength by their numbers and their resources; too often neglecting to take moral rectitude into the account. And yet the strength of the Governors of Judah is in the inhabitants of Jerusalem, as those inhabitants are in the Lord of Hosts, their God. [Zech. 12:5]

It will be found that as is the righteousness of a people, so will their States be strong; an as the Church is holy, so will she be powerful in doing good. These are the strong rods of the social state. [Ezekiel 19:12]

Their counsels give wisdom, character, and influence, to the Church with which they are connected, and power to the Commonwealth to which they belong. And not only their counsels, but their warnings against evil and against danger, and the example of their lives confer benefits upon all with whom they are related. The influence in the social state that attaches to the friends of God is mighty. Their prayer of faith, sustained by the divine promise, brings down from heaven the almightiness of God, in behalf of that in which it I presented, before the throne of mercy. It was not without reason, that an impious occupant of a throne feared the prayers of a distinguished man of God, more than an army of ten thousand men. When God in his administrations, comes and removes such, either from His Church or from the Commonwealth, it may often be understood as a frowning providence, carrying with it His rebuke; but if not a frowning rebuke, it is a most serious admonition, tendered to those who remain. The latter is the light in which the mournful occasion of our present meeting is contemplated.

“The righteous perisheth, and no man layeth it to heart.” [Isaiah 57:1] No man layeth it to heart as he ought to do; “none considering,”—few considering duly—“that the righteous is taken away from the evil to come,”—taken away from present evil, and taken away from coming evil. It has often been remarked, that good and distinguished men, in the providence of God, were taken away before great calamities were inflicted upon their countries, or upon those with whom they were associated.

But though the righteous man may be taken away—from present and coming evil—he does not cease to be; his distinct conscious existence does not cease, nor does he cease to occupy in the moral empire of Jehovah a distinguished place. “He shall go in peace,” as promised to Abraham. After informing him of those calamities that for ages would befall his offspring, the Almighty declared unto him: “Thou shalt go to thy fathers in peace; thou shalt be buried in a good old age.” [Genesis 15:15] Thus our text—“He shall go in peace; he shall rest upon his bed, the perfect one—the man who walked in his uprighteousness.”

Words to Live By: 
“The righteous perisheth, and no man layeth it to heart.” There is a doctrine here—which as Rev. McMaster notes, few duly consider—namely “that the righteous is taken away from the evil to come,” which is both to say that death in every instance take us away from present evil, and that in some particular instances, the deceased are taken away from coming evil. In the text above, Abraham serves as his example, while others could be added to the list. McMaster goes on to note that “It has often been remarked, that good and distinguished men, in the providence of God, were taken away before great calamities were inflicted upon their countries, or upon those with whom they were associated.” That last point particularly is what has to be handled carefully, but yet there is a truth in what he says. It is a truth spoken of elsewhere by others, but time does not permit putting additional examples before you just now. Something to ponder perhaps, as we continue to study God’s providence.

Westminster Shorter Catechism:

Attempts to found democracies, or rather, true lawful liberty, are doomed to failure unless they are built on a proper foundation. What follows is another article discovered today during my foray into an old dusty volume :

THE FOUNDATION OF TRUE LIBERTY.

Some time since an interesting Sabbath School celebration was held in a town in the interior of this State. On one of the banners borne in the procession, there was a beautiful tree, spreading its tall and stately branches in every direction, and beneath it was a volume, in which its roots were deeply fixed, and from which it derived all its nourishment and strength.—The tree was Liberty, that volume the Bible. The idea was not only beautiful, but true. The Bible is the great protector and guardian of the liberties of man. There never has been on earth true liberty, apart from the Scriptures and the principles of the Bible. This remark is fully sustained by the history of the world. Go to the plains of Babylon, and the entire history of that Empire, until its destruction by Cyrus, is a history of the most absolute despotism. Egypt and Persia were equally strangers to civil liberty. The same was true, with some slight modifications, of Greece and Rome. Facts spread on every page of the world’s history, point to the Bible as the only basis of the temple of freedom.

Where the Bible forms public opinion, a nation must be free. “Christianity,” says Montesquieu, “is a stranger to despotic power.” De Tocqueville, “it is the companion of liberty in all its battles and all its conflicts—the cradle of its infancy, the divine source of its claims.” The Abbe de la Mennais, whom the late writer distinguishes as one of the most powerful minds in Europe, speaks eloquently of the Divine author of Christianity, “the great republican of his age.” Everywhere the men whose minds have been imbued with the light and spirit of the Bible, have been the devoted friends of civil liberty. Such were the Lollards in England, the adherents of Luther in Germany, and of Knox in Scotland. Such were the Huguenots of France, who fled their country, or sealed their testimony with their blood on the fatal revocation of the edict of Nantes. Such were the Puritans, who, with the courage of heroes and the zeal of martyrs, struggled for and obtained the charter of liberty which England now enjoys. Hume, with all his hostility to the Bible, says, “the precious spark of liberty had been kindled and was preserved by the Puritans alone, and it was to this sect the English owe the whole freedom of their Constitution.

Pass we to the period of the American revolution! Who were the signers of the Declaration of Independence? Who were the men, whose wisdom in council, and whose daring in the field, delivered us from foreign oppression, and made us a free and independent nation? Who was Washington? His character is settled beyond all dispute—his sentiments are known and recorded. The infidel can never refer to him for authority. The Atheist can never enroll him among those who believe the universe is without a Father and a God. His examples and his opinions are to travel down with the richest influence to future ages, and his purity of life in the cabinet and the camp, his reverence for the Bible and the institutions of religion, are to be spoken of with the profoundest regard by millions yet unborn.

Who was Patrick Henry, the man who struck the notes of freedom to which this nation responded, and were changed from subjects of a British king to independent freemen? He has not left his religious sentiments in doubt. In his will is found the following passage : “I have now disposed of all my property to my family—there is one thing more I wish I could give them, and that is the religion of the Bible. If they had that, and I had not given them one shilling, they would be rich; and if they had not that, and I had given them all the world, they would be poor.”

Who was Samuel Adams, on of the brightest stars in the constellation of great names, that adorned that era? “Adams,” says his biographer, “was a Christian. That last production of his pen was in defence of Christian truth, and he died in the faith of the gospel.”

And who was Roger Sherman? His biographer says, “few men had a higher reverence for the Bible; few men studied it with deeper attention, and a few were more intimately acquainted with its doctrines?” And who does not know that Livingston, and Stockton, and Witherspoon, and Benjamin Rush, bowed with profound reverence to the teaching of the Bible, and drew from its precepts their strongest incentives in their self-sacrificing labors? The Bible, then we say it without the fear of successful contradiction—the Bible, in its influence more than any thing else, has made us what we are—a free and independent nation. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupt public conscience, is incompatible with freedom.

[excerpted from The Evangelical Guardian, 4.10 (February 1847): 442-443.]

Getting up a Revival

We all remember the events which made up the first great awakening in the colonies.  Men like Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, Gilbert Tennent, and New Side Presbyterians took the gospel up the length and breadth of the new land, bringing many to Christ and reviving Christians and churches.  While clearly there were some excesses in emotional outbursts by the people, the essential key in this divine awakening was a stress on total dependence on God’s sovereignty in bringing His elect to Christ.

Fast forward in your thinking to the late seventeen hundreds and early eighteen hundreds. There was a change going on in the country.  Westward expansion had taken place as hundreds of settlers moved to Kentucky and Tennessee.  Specifically, in what is known as the Cumberland Valley of those latter two and later states, Scot-Irish  filled in the population of the area.  What didn’t increase was the number of trained ministers in the Presbyterian church who were able to travel with these westward church members.  All the ingredients of difficulty were present immediately.

First, there were extensive revivals taking place in SW Kentucky and Cane Ridge, Kentucky.  These were continuous meetings, often preached by 7 and 8 ministers of all denominations, with emotionalism running high and seemingly out of control.   It is not that people were not being converted.  They were, but eastern Presbyterians felt that such emotionalism was too man-centered instead of God-centered.

Then, with converts joining the few churches available and starting  others, the issue of educated men to pastor them became the issue.  The College of New Jersey (later called Princeton) was a long way off from these frontier settlements.   The formal practice of their faith failed to comfort the hardships experienced by the early pioneers.  So the local Presbytery of Cumberland proceeded to ordain large numbers of men without education.  Further, these men were allowed to express dissent from the Westminster Standards, especially chapter 3 which dealt with God’s eternal decrees, or predestination.

The Synod of Kentucky, as the next higher church court, demanded that they be allowed to re-examine all of the ordained men of the Cumberland Presbytery, whom they deemed to be without sufficient training for the pastorate.  When the Presbytery refused their request, the Synod dissolved the Presbytery of Cumberland.  Their action dismissing the Presbytery was affirmed by the General Assembly.

» “The Fathers who formed the first Cumberland Presbytery : Ewing, McAdow & King »

On February 4, 1810, four ministers gathered together near present day Burn, Tennessee, and after a night of prayer, these four former ministers of the PCUSA Cumberland Presbytery, reorganized the Cumberland Presbytery as a separate body outside the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A.  Their names were Samuel McAdow, Ephraim McLean, Finis Ewing, and Samuel King.  They were joined by six licentiates and seven candidates for the ministry.  As they drew others into their fold, this Presbytery became the Cumberland Synod in 1813, which in turn became the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in 1829.

The issue of education became muted along the way, as the denomination began to sponsor various colleges, and later established the Memphis Theological Seminary. But the issue of Calvinism has been taken out of the picture altogether in this new church, in that the first four points of the “five points” of Calvinism, namely, total depravity, unconditional election, particular redemption, and efficacious grace is denied by this denomination.  They still hold  to the perseverance of the saints.

A portion of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church re-joined the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. in the early nineteen hundreds, but not all joined, so that there is in existence today a Cumberland Presbyterian Church.

« The last General Assembly of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, meeting in Decatur, Illinois, May 17-25, 1906, as they prepared to merge with the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A..

Also on this day :
Robert Dick Wilson was born this day, February 4, 1856, in Indiana, Pennsylvania.
The Robert Dick Wilson Manuscript Collection is preserved at the PCA Historical Center in St. Louis, Missouri.

Words to Live By: Doctrinal shallowness leads to doctrinal denial.  The whole counsel of God must be proclaimed, letting God’s Spirit  bring people to Himself and training them in doctrine, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness.

Comment:
Apart from the fact that four of the five points of Calvinism ARE (were) denied by the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, it can hardly be said that the denomination maintains the fifth point since the CPC has become one of the more liberal protestant denominations in America. Furthermore, there is a second Cumberland Presbyterian Church that was formerly known as the Colored Cumberland Presbyterian Church, which was formed in the 1870s. Today, it is known as the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in America and remain separate from the original Cumberland Presbyterian Church. The two denominations considered merging in the 1980s but the plan fell through when the primarily white Cumberland Presbyterian Church refused to approve the plan of union because it provided for equal representation of members of both denominations on boards and agencies of the potential merged church.

I find it interesting that the Church of Christ/Disciples of Christ (Campbellites) originated in the same general area of Kentucky and Tennessee about the same time and for the same reasons as did the Cumberland Church.