Samuel Miller on Religious Conversation

(Receive our blog posts in your email by clicking here. If the author links in this post are broken, please visit our Free PDF Library and click on the author’s page directly.)

Let your speech be alway with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man. (Col. 4:6)

Samuel Miller had a concern for how ministers of the gospel, as ambassadors of Christ, represented him in public, as well as in private. The impressions left on others after interaction with a minister have a bearing on his witness for Christ. In his 1827 volume Letters on Clerical Manners and Habits, Miller has much wisdom and counsel to offer his fellow co-laborers in the work of the kingdom in this regard.

One bit of wisdom, in particular, though directed to ministers, is very much applicable to all Christians.

Never retire from any company, then, without asking yourself, “What have I said for the honour of my Master, and for promoting the everlasting welfare of those with whom I conversed? What was the tenour of my conversation? What opportunity of recommending religion have I neglected to improve? From what motives did I speak, or keep silence? In what manner did I converse? With gentleness, modesty, humility, and yet with with affectionate fidelity; or with harshness, with formality, with ostentation, with vanity, and from a desire to avoid censure, or to court popular applause?” Few things, I believe, would have a more powerful tendency to promote watchfulness, diligence, and unremitting perseverance in this important duty, than the constant inspection and trial of ourselves here recommended.

This counsel speaks not only to the aim which we all ought to have to be faithful witnesses to Christ in all of our interactions, but also to our duty to examine ourselves regularly as to whether we have aimed at God’s glory in our dealings with others. In this way, ministers, and indeed all believers, ought to strive to speak with right motives and with wisdom according to the situation so that we may give a good account before our Lord.

Ministers and others do well to consult the full work by Miller on Clerical Manners for much wisdom on how to rightly represent Jesus Christ in our various conversations with others, which is available to read here. According to our place and calling, may we all seek to glorify God in our conversations.

William Marshall on an age-old question: "Should I stay or should I go?"

(Receive our blog posts in your email by clicking here. If the author links in this post are broken, please visit our Free PDF Library and click on the author’s page directly.)

In recent weeks, we have written of pastoral responses to epidemics centuries ago, including examples by men such as Ashbel Green, George Dodd Armstrong, Benjamin Morgan Palmer, E.D. McMaster, and Francis J. Grimké. In today’s post, we look at William Marshall, an Associate Presbyterian minister, who, like Ashbel Green, faced the question of what to do in response to the yellow fever which raged in Philadelphia during the late 18th century.

James B. Scouller, in his Manual of the United Presbyterian Church of North America, p. 486, writes of Marshall:

When the yellow fever was in Philadelphia he wrote a “Theological Tract on the Propriety of removing from places where the yellow fever prevails.” As he was leaving the city at this time, because of the yellow fever, a friend on the other side of the street accosted him, saying: “The wicked flee when no man pursueth, but the righteous are as bold as a lion.” He immediately replied: “A prudent man foreseeth the evil and hideth himself, but the simple pass on and are punished.”

The tract spoken of here is available to be read at Log College Press. In it, Marshall begins by stating what the question is not:

  • it is not “Whether we can fly from God?” - God is omnipresent;

  • it is not “Whether the pestilential fever be a judgment from God?” - Scripture declares large-scale pestilence to be a scourge or judgment of the Lord; and

  • it is not “What is the duty of every individual, where the pestilence rages?” - acknowledging the general normal duty to assemble for public worship, Marshall says, quoting Thomas Boston, “That what God forbids is at no time to be done; what he commands is always duty, and yet every particular duty is not to be done at all times.”

The question Marshall aims to answer is this: “What is the duty of those who live in a place where the pestilence is spreading? Should they not remove to a more healthy situation if it is in their power?” This Marshall answers in the affirmative, for several reasons, particularly on the basis of the Sixth Commandment, which requires that we engage in “all lawful endeavours to preserve our own life, and the life of others.”

After providing his reasons in favor of people “removing” from a city afflicted by the plague for safety reasons — the title page of Marshall’s treatise cites Jeremiah 38:2: “He that remaineth in the city shall die — by the pestilence: but he that goeth forth — shall live” — he responds to five objections to this position.

Marshall concludes his essay with an encouragement to trust in the Lord but not to run rashly with presumption into danger. Read the full work — titled A Theological Dissertation, on the Propriety of Removing From the Seat of the Pestilence: Presented to the Perusal of the Serious Inhabitants of Philadelphia and New-York (1799) — here and consider how one leading 18th century Presbyterian in response to a yellow fever epidemic answered the question, “Should I stay or should I go?”

There is wisdom in numbering our days - Amzi Armstrong

(Receive our blog posts in your email by clicking here. If the author links in this post are broken, please visit our Free PDF Library and click on the author’s page directly.)

Amzi Armstrong (1771-1827), father of George Dodd Armstrong (1813-1899), published two sermons in The New Jersey Preacher (1813). One of these sermons was based on the text from Psalm 90:12: “So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” Titled “Wisdom Resulting From Numbering Days,” the elder Armstrong speaks to the importance of time well-spent, and warns about the folly of acting as though our time on this earth will last forever. There is a timelessness about such a message that makes it valuable to 21st century Christians as it was to his hearers in the early 19th century. We all have need of such reminders.

NONE of us expect to continue here forever. By unquestionable evidences we have been convinced, even from our early childhood, that the time will come when we must leave these earthly scenes, and, the number of our days being run out, we must lie down in death. Nor do any of us ever indulge the expectation that the period of our earthly cares and enjoyments will be lengthened out to an hundred years to come. Yet how little influence does this sure conviction usually have upon our thoughts and purposes.

It is an observation of an ancient sage, daily verified, that "though all men expect to die, and are looking for a state of existence beyond the grave; yet they are busy in providing for this life as though it were never to have an end, and for the life to come as though it were never to have its beginning."

How we ought to consider the importance of eternal concerns in priority over temporal concerns!

Whatever satisfaction and support the mind may derive from philosophical knowledge, in the present state of things; yet in the comparison of the present and the future, God has put such an immense difference between them, that all the best attainments of mere philosophy are but as the small dust of the balance against the weighty and all-important concerns of that which is to come. Would they bend the energies of their minds to knowledge with a view of applying it to the great concerns of that change, which must take place at death, and make it serve the purpose of preparing themselves, and helping to prepare others, for these vast and eternal concerns, their study and labor would then be turned to some good account. And if they were daily growing in the knowledge of God and of Christ, this would make life worth possessing. Let them once begin to number their days, and consider seriously the shortness and uncertainty of life, and the certainty and the solemnity of that great change that will take place at death, and they will soon perceive the vanity and unprofitableness of all that [knowledge], that helps not to prepare for these great events, and the necessity of applying their hearts to a truer wisdom, and more enduring knowledge.

Armstrong closes with an exhortation to those who do seek the Lord, and yet need such a reminder as this.

Let me now address an exhortation to such, as have obeyed the voice of wisdom, and have given themselves to seek and to serve the Lord. If you have done this in truth and sincerity, it is thus far well. But remember, you too have your appointed time, and God hath set bounds also to your days. If it behoves you to shew your love to God in the world, and to labor for the prosperity of religion, and for the salvation of your fellow men; if you would be well prepared for death, and fitted to enter on the joys on high; you have no time to lose — no days or hours to waste in trifling or unimportant purposes. The day is spending, and with some of you is already far spent. The night approaches. And your Saviour himself said, concerning his work on earth, "I must work the work of him that sent me while it is day; the night cometh, wherein no man can work." If you have any thing yet to accomplish, set about it without delay; and do that which thy hand findeth to do, with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave whither thou goest.

"So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom." — AMEN.

Time is a precious gift. Read the full sermon here.

The difference between wisdom and knowledge, according to A.A. Hodge

(If the author links in this post are broken, please visit our Free PDF Library and click on the author’s page directly.)

In his Outlines of Theology, Archibald Alexander Hodge asks the question:

36. How does wisdom differ from knowledge, and wherein does the wisdom of God consist?

His answer to the first part of the question is of great benefit to those for whom it might appear that wisdom and knowledge are but synonyms.

Knowledge is a simple act of the understanding, apprehending that a thing is, and comprehending its nature and relations, or how it is.

Wisdom presupposes knowledge, and is the practical use which the understanding, determined by the will, makes of the material of knowledge.

It may be recalled that the great-great-grandfather of A.A. Hodge, on his mother’s side, was the remarkable founding father Benjamin Franklin, a man filled with great knowledge, but — despite the bits of wisdom to be gleaned from Poor Richard’s Almanack — sorely lacking in Biblical wisdom. Hodge, on the other hand, understood that the Christ of the Scriptures is the source of true wisdom. Another quote attributed to A.A. Hodge is this: “He is wise who knows the sources of knowledge — who knows who has written, and where it is to be found.” May the Lord grant to us not only sound knowledge, but the practical application of it — that is, wisdom — which we may employ in all things to the glory of God!