Leo Tolstoy once asked, "What then must we do?" (based on the question asked on Luke 3:10). The Westminster Assembly asks us: "What is the chief end of man?" (Shorter Catechism Q. 1) Today's highlighted writer at Log College Press is James Beverlin Ramsey (1814-1871), who asked a similar question: "How Shall I Live?" He answers on the basis of the Apostle Paul's statement in Phil. 1:17: "To me to live in Christ."
It is a question of eternal importance: How should we live? What is the most important reason for living, and what should we be doing about it? Read this short tract by Pastor Ramsey to see what he had to say about this most important question which every man should both ask and answer.
Are you looking for 19th century commentaries on the book of Revelation? Here are three.
Our Presbyterian forefathers were not afraid to tackle one of the hardest books in the New Testament: the Book of Revelation. We've uploaded three commentaries on the book to the Log College Press website:
1. Alexander McLeod, Lectures Upon the Principal Prophecies of Revelation (1814)
2. Thomas Murphy, The Message to the Seven Churches of Asia (1895)
3. James Beverlin Ramsey, The Spiritual Kingdom: An Exposition of Revelation 1-11 (1873)
Though not full commentaries as we know them today, these books will give you a taste for how the 19th century viewed the book of Revelation. Happy historical hermeneutical treasure hunting!
"Global missions is the powerhouse of local missions" - 1st General Assembly of the PCUS (1861)
In 1861, the Committee on Foreign Missions at the 1st General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States (the Southern Assembly, at that time known as the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America), gave their report to the delegates present. The Committee's members included John Leighton Wilson (a former missionary to Gabon, Africa, and from 1861 till 1884 the Executive Secretary of the PCUS Committee on Foreign Missions) and James Beverlin Ramsey (a former missionary to the Indian tribes in America and author of a commentary on the first 11 chapters of Revelation). As a part of their report, the Committee composed one of the most stirring statements on the power and necessity of global missions ever written:
"[T]he General Assembly desires distinctly and deliberately to inscribe on our church’s banner, as she now first unfurls it to the world, in immediate connection with the headship of our Lord, his last command: ‘Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature;’ regarding this as the great end of her organization, and obedience to it as the indispensable condition of her Lord’s promised presence, and as one great comprehensive object, a proper conception of whose vast magnitude and grandeur is the only thing which, in connection with the love of Christ, can ever sufficiently arouse her energies and develop her resources so as to cause her to carry on, with the vigor and efficiency which true fealty to her Lord demands, those other agencies necessary to her internal growth and home prosperity. The claims of this cause ought therefore to be kept constantly before the minds of the people and pressed upon their consciences. The ministers and ruling elders and deacons and Sabbath-school teachers, and especially the parents, ought, and are enjoined by the Assembly, to give particular attention to all those for whose religious teaching they are responsible, in training them to feel a deep interest in this work, to form habits of systematic benevolence, and to feel and respond to the claims of Jesus upon them for personal service in the field." (Minutes of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the Confederates States of America (1861), page 17 - one day, Lord willing, we'll have these Minutes uploaded to this site!)