The History of Dartmouth CollegeSmith, Baxter Perry
History
The History of Dartmouth College
Smith, Baxter Perry
Dartmouth College -- History
"When I entered the college, I found him dignified, yet affable and
fatherly in his bearing. His preaching then, as we often heard him in
the village church, was marked by the same simplicity, clearness, and
logical force, the same scripturalness, fullness of doctrine, and
evangelical earnestness, that characterized his subsequent
ministrations. He preached not to the fancy, but to the conscience and
the heart. He confined not himself to hortatory appeals, nor did he,
in any wise, skim over the surface of things; but, as both my notes
and recollections of his college sermons assure me, he was apt to
handle, and that vigorously, the high topics of theology. He gave us
not milk alone, but strong meat. Yet have I seldom known a man so
remarkable for making an abstruse subject plain to every hearer."
* * * * *
Rev. George Punchard, of Boston, and Rev. Nathaniel Folsom, D.D.,
professor in Meadville College, Pa., have furnished their
recollections respecting the revival in Dartmouth College, in the year
1826, to which allusion is made by Dr. Smith.
The former says:
"Boston, February 16, 1859.
"Rev. John E. Tyler,--
"My dear Sir: Your venerable father was president of Dartmouth College
during my whole collegiate course--from 1822 to 1826. My earliest
recollections of him are those only which a thoughtless boy of sixteen
would be likely to have of a grave and reverend divine, and are of
little value.
"It was not until near the close of my college life that I began
really to know him. At that time the college was visited by a revival
of religion of uncommon power, and my reverend president suddenly
awoke (at least to my view) in an entirely new character.
"He came to the students with a power and unction which were quite
irresistible, and manifested a depth of religious feeling for us which
made us at once love him and admire him. He seemed to have found his
appropriate sphere of labor; to have got into an atmosphere which
filled his soul and body with life and energy; to have work to do
which was congenial, which he loved, and which he knew how to do as
few men did. He was at once a son of thunder and a son of consolation.
His discourses, which had always been able and instructive, and
characterized by simplicity of arrangement and neatness and purity of
style, had now the additional attraction of an animated and energetic
delivery.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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