The Life and Work of John Williamson Nevin

By Theodore Appel

This biography needs no apology. It is the history of a noble life and an exalted character. In whatever light he may be viewed, Dr. Nevin occupies high rank among the distinguished men of his age. An eminent scholar, a profound theologian, an independent thinker, a vigorous writer and an earnest Christian, he exerted a powerful influence, which will not cease to be felt for many generations to come. It is only right, therefore, that the life and labors of one who touched the higher spiritual interests of humanity at so many points should be recorded, that the world may know what manner of man he was, what truths he taught, what conflicts he waged, and what measure of success he achieved.

Dr. Nevin was a man of broad and thorough scholarship. With a strong and richly endowed mind well disciplined by years of hard study, he accumulated vast treasures of learning, which were ever at his command. There are few departments of knowledge in which he was not at home. When he entered on the study of theology and philosophy, in which he rose to such great eminence, he had already laid a solid foundation in the Classics, mathematics and history. Equipped with a thorough knowledge of Hebrew and Greek, he was well fitted, both by his attainments and his tastes, for the pursuit of Biblical science, to which his earliest official labors were devoted; and it is not improbable that, if he had continued to make this branch of theology his specialty, he would have come to stand among the foremost Biblical scholars of America.

But when called to Mercersburg, it became his duty to teach dogmatic theology in the Seminary, and, after the death of Dr. Rauch, philosophy in Marshall College. His brief contact with that able and genial scholar afforded him a deeper insight into the immense wealth of German thought, of which he had only had a passing and unsatisfactory glimpse before. He had already acquired a good working knowledge of the language, and he now devoted himself to the arduous task of mastering the whole field of German philosophy and theology. It was at a time when, in this country at least, all German systems alike were regarded with suspicion; but in his unwearied search for truth, he determined to make their acquaintance, and was rewarded by having a new intellectual world opened up to his view.

His learning, though broad and varied, was especially marked by thoroughness. He had no ambition to be an encyclopedia of knowledge. To have full mastery of one subject was infinitely more to him than to have a superficial acquaintance with many. He was not a man who kept himself constantly surrounded by a great multitude of books. It was a surprise to his friends, at least during the latter period of his life, to find how few books he had at hand. You entered his study, but saw no library. On his writing-table lay his Hebrew Old Testament and his Greek New Testament, which were never absent from his side, and besides these a very few works connected with the study on which his mind was then engaged. These he read and re-read and inwardly digested, till their contents became part of his very self. Any subject which claimed his attention completely absorbed him, and for the time filled his conversation as well as his thoughts. He kept it constantly before his mind until he saw it in all its length and breadth, its height and depth.

It was this that made him the profound thinker he was. His mind was constitutionally of a philosophic cast. Imbued with a strong love of truth he was impelled to search for it as for hidden treasure. Traditional opinions and inherited beliefs had little value for him until he had examined them, tested them and proved them correct. A questioning attitude was natural to him. He readily detected the weakness and defects of any system and mercilessly exposed them to view. His mind was in fact severely critical, even toward conclusions he had himself reached by much st

• Language: English
• Publisher: CrossReach Publications
• Release date: Sep 23, 2018

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I—THE NEVIN FAMILY

CHAPTER I

NEVIN, or its equivalent MacNevin, is an historical name in the annals of Scotland and Ireland. Two of the race came to New York from the north of Ireland about the middle of the last century. One of them settled in the state of New York, along the Hudson, where his descendants at the present time are numerous and respectable. Daniel, his younger brother, continued his journey into Pennsylvania, and cast in his lot with what are sometimes called the Scotch-Irish settlers, in the Cumberland Valley, a religious and intelligent class of people, who, like himself, had fled from oppression in the same part of Ireland.

Here in the course of time he married a widow, who had been the wife of Mr. Reynolds, from whom descended a family of children that reflected honor on their parents. Her maiden name was Margaret Williamson, a lady of superior natural intelligence, and of decided force of character. She was a sister of Hugh Williamson, M.D., LL.D., who was on the medical staff during the Revolution, a member of the Continental Congress, one of the framers of the Constitution of the United States, and otherwise distinguished, both during and after the war, as a patriot and an eminent American citizen. He was a writer of some distinction, the author of a History of North Carolina and other publications. The Williamsons were of English origin, although the family had a tradition, whether true or not, based on its coat of arms, and other considerations, that they were in the line of descent from the celebrated Scottish chieftain, William Wallace, whose daughter, or near relative, married a Williamson. They came, however, from England, where one of the family was an Episcopal clergyman, and is said to be honorably represented at the present day by his descendants in the third and fourth generation.

Daniel and Margaret Nevin lived on a farm near the present village of Orrstown, in Franklin county, Pa., in full view of the North Mountain. They were blessed with three daughters and two sons; and through them, with numerous descendants who have reflected credit on their name as ministers, lawyers, doctors, editors, authors, or as successful business men. The daughters of Daniel Nevin were married into families of good standing: Sarah to Daniel Henderson; Elizabeth to John Pomeroy; Mary to —— Cook and —— McClay. Their sons were John and David, the former a farmer, the latter a merchant. Their children and children’s children came to be much esteemed in their respective communities. Major David Nevin established himself at Shippensburg as a successful merchant and business man. Clear-headed and progressive in his tendencies, he added farm to farm during his lifetime, and being pleasant in his manners and on the popular side in politics, he was always elected to posts of honor when he received the nomination. The immense crowd which attended his funeral showed the high estimation in which he was held by the community. He had six sons and five daughters, two of the latter having died at an early age: Caroline, married to Wm. Rankin, M.D.; Jane M., to Charles M. Reynolds, merchant; Mary, to —— Tustin; Joseph P. and Samuel W., merchants; William Wallace, M.D.; David Robert Bruce, lawyer; and Edwin Henry and Alfred, the remaining sons, who became eloquent divines in the Presbyterian Church, well-known doctors of divinity, popular writers, and the authors of a number of meritorious books or pamphlets on moral and religious subjects.

It was thought that John, the older brother of David, and father of John Williamson, as he was of a quiet and studious disposition, should receive a collegiate education, and perhaps enter one of the learned professions. Accordingly he was sent to Dickinson College at Carlisle, Pa., then under the presidency of Dr. Nisbet, a distinguished Scotch divine, where he graduated in 1795.

One of his class-mates was Roger B. Taney, afterwards Chief Justice of the United States, who was his successful competitor at graduation in carrying off the highest prize for scholarship, in a class of twenty-four members. As this nice point of honor was decided by a majority of the class, and perhaps, at times, by their preferences, his mere selection, as one out of two competitors, was an evidence of his high standing as a scholar among his fellow students. Young Nevin took as the theme of his graduating speech the Sin of Slavery, with which his successful rival, Mr. Taney, may not have altogether sympathized at the time. After his graduation he was somewhat at a loss to know what his proper calling in life was to be; but at length, either from natural timidity or love of rural pursuit, he chose the noble profession of farming; married Martha McCracken, a woman of decided character, adorned with many virtues; and settled in a home of his own, on Herron’s Branch, near Shippensburg, and subsequently on Keasey’s Run, not far from the neighboring village of Strasburg. Thus he became what is sometimes called a Latin Farmer, one who could teach his sons Latin, Greek, or other branches of a higher education in his own family. Private life was preferred to a public one, but he stood in such high estimation among his fellow citizens for his intelligence and sterling integrity, that they concluded to send him to Congress as their representative, which, it was said, was frustrated only by his death in 1829. He became a Trustee of Dickinson College, his Alma Mater, in 1827, which was probably the only public office he ever filled.

He seemed to be naturally unaggressive, apparently too timid to make a prayer of his own in public; but it was his highest ambition that his sons should be trained for posts of honor and usefulness in their day—perhaps to supplement, as it were, his own backwardness in the noisy, busy world. As for himself, with his love for nature, he chose to pursue his course along life’s sequestered vale, apart from its contentions, in congenial rural pursuits. He was a diligent reader of the best authors, and an attractive conversationalist. His meagre supply of books was considerably enlarged when his uncle, Dr. Williamson, left him his library at his death in 1819. It was a compliment to him as one who was most likely to appreciate such a gift. Occasionally his quiet life in the country was relieved of its monotony by summer visits from his uncles, Dr. Hugh Williamson of New York, or Captain John Williamson, a wealthy merchant of Charleston, South Carolina. Both were gentlemen of the old school in dress and manners, and arrested considerable attention among the country people during their visits. Much more of a sensation, however, was produced on such occasions among the nephews and nieces of the Nevin family, who usually received handsome gifts or keepsakes from their uncles, especially from the wealthy merchant from the South. The latter at his decease bequeathed to the Nevins in Pennsylvania a large tract of land in the West, and John, with one of his nephews, went out to look after it and secure it for the family. The trip, which was successful, was one of the few that took him any distance from his home. At Nashville he called to pay his compliments to General Andrew Jackson, the idol of the people in those days, and was entertained by him in generous style at The Hermitage; no doubt because he came from Pennsylvania and was a good representative of its patriotic people.

John Nevin and his wife, Martha, had six sons and three daughters: Margaret, married to John K. Finley, M.D., Professor of Natural Science in Dickinson College whilst under Presbyterian control; Elizabeth, married to Rev. Dr. A. Blaine Brown, son of the distinguished Rev. Dr. Matthew Brown, and his successor as President of Washington College, Washington, Pa.; Martha Mary, deceased, married to John Irvin, Esq., merchant, and honored Elder in the Presbyterian Congregation at Sewickly, Pa.; Theodore, a prominent banker and prosperous business man of Pittsburgh, and also Elder in the Sewickly Congregation, lately deceased; Robert, editor and author of ability at Pittsburgh, still living; Daniel E., clergyman, teacher, author, and an Israelite without guile, now deceased; William M., Professor in Marshall, and in Franklin and Marshall College, from 1840 to the present year 1889, poet and humorous writer, honored by Dickinson College, his Alma Mater, with the title of LL.D.; and John Williamson, the eldest in the family, whose life and spirit it is the object of this volume to portray.

II—EARLY YOUTH FROM 1803–1817

Æt. 1–14

CHAPTER II

AS DR. NEVIN advanced in years and fame, he was requested, from time to time, to furnish the necessary material for a sketch of his life, to be given to the world in some permanent form. In the year 1870, therefore, he concluded to write out his biography in a series of articles, which were published in the Messenger, the organ of the Reformed Church, commencing in the month of March and ending in July, under the title of My Own Life. They give a full account of his inner and outer life, with self-criticisms, until his removal from Allegheny City, Pa., to Mercersburg, Pa., in the spring of the year 1840. It was his intention at some future time to resume the thread of his history onward to the period when he wrote, but for various reasons the task, unfortunately, was never resumed, and it has devolved upon the writer to supply the public with the record of the remainder of his long and stirring career as best he can, from the material on hand. It has been deemed best, on the whole, to reproduce the autobiography, quoting from it when deemed necessary, and at other times making a liberal use of its language, without always informing the reader.

John Williamson Nevin was born on Herron’s Branch, near Shippensburg, Franklin county, Pa., on Sunday, February 20, 1803.

He always regarded it as an important part of his youthful training and worthy of note, that he spent his early days on a farm, in the midst of a people of plain and simple manners; that he thus became familiar with the scenes and employments of country life; and that he was put to all sorts of farm work, just as soon and as far as it was found that he could render himself useful in that way.

He, however, thought that it was a matter of still greater account, that he was so fortunate as to receive a healthy religious training from his earliest years. He was by birth and blood a Presbyterian; and as his parents were both conscientious and exemplary professors of religion, he was brought up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, according to the ancient Presbyterian faith and practice, which at the time had not undergone any material change from that of the forefathers in Scotland and Ireland. The Presbyterianism prevalent in the Cumberland Valley at the beginning of the present century, was based throughout on the idea of covenant family religion, of church membership by a holy act of God in baptism; and, following this as a logical sequence, there was regular catechetical training of the young, with direct reference to their coming to the Lord’s Table. In a word, it proceeded on the theory of a sacramental, educational religion, that belonged properly to all the national branches of the Reformed Church in Europe from the beginning. In this respect the Reformed Churches of Switzerland, France, Germany, Holland, England and Scotland were, when properly understood, all of one mind; and at the time to which we here refer, this mind ruled the Presbyterianism of this country. It is true, no use was made of confirmation in admitting catechumens to full communion with the Church; but there was that which was considered to be substantially the same thing in the way they were solemnly admitted to the communion by the Church Session. The system was churchly, as holding the Church, in her visible character, to be the medium of salvation for her baptized children, in the sense of that memorable declaration of Calvin, where, speaking of her as the Mother of believers, in the fourth book of his Institutes, he says: There is no other entrance into life, save as she may receive us in her womb, give us birth, nourish us from her breasts, and embrace us in her loving care to the end.

This was the system of educational religion under which it was the good fortune of Williamson Nevin to spend the first years of his life, in connection with the best kind of parental care at home, in the Presbyterian Church at Middle Spring, a few miles north of Shippensburg. He was baptized by the Rev. Dr. Robert Cooper, just about the time the vacant charge passed over into the hands of the Rev. Dr. John Moody, who served it for half a century with fidelity, success, and in primitive simplicity. The latter made many happy impressions on the mind of young Nevin, watched his career with paternal interest as he rose from one post of honor to another, and, with no unfriendly criticism, rejoiced, as he once told the writer, to see him so high above him in the Church of Christ. He became a venerable patriarch in Israel, honored by all who knew him; and Dr. Nevin, his spiritual son, who had learned so many wholesome lessons from him, had the pleasure of obtaining for him the doctorate whilst he was President of Marshall College. It was an honor well bestowed, and well deserved towards the close of a long and faithful ministry.

In the course of time, however, a change came over the Presbyterian Church at large, which in the end brought with it corresponding changes also in the character of the old country congregation at Middle Spring. But during Dr. Nevin’s childhood and early youth the spirit and life of the congregation continued to be what they were from the beginning. Pastoral visitation was a business as much as preaching. The schoolmaster stood by the side of the pastor as the servant of the Church; the school was regarded as its necessary auxiliary; and the catechism stood in honor and use everywhere, as the great organ or ruling power, which was to promote a sound religious education for all classes in the congregation. Every Sunday evening, especially, was devoted to more or less catechization in the family. Children were put on simple Bible questions as soon as they could speak. Then came the Mother’s Catechism, as it was called; and following this, the Assembly’s Shorter Catechism, hard to be understood, but wholesome for future use. The same instruction met the young in the parochial school, where it was usual for the master, in those days, to examine his scholars once a week in the catechism. All this was a part of the established church system; but it was only preparatory, intended simply to make room for its full operation in a higher form, when the work fell into the hands of the pastor, who regarded it as forming the main portion of his proper pastoral work.

There were two modes in which such salutary church instruction was carried forward, the practice varying from one to another in different years. In one year it was by the pastor visiting family after family and catechizing each household separately; while, in another year, it would be done by bringing together whole neighborhoods before him, at some central place, in a school-house or some private dwelling, where, in the presence of the elder, an examination was held in a public and solemn way. On these occasions, the children were examined first; but after them the grown people, all in some portion of the Larger Westminster Catechism previously assigned for the purpose.

All this was in harmony with the general church life of those days. It was staid, systematic, grave and somewhat sombre, making much account of sound doctrine; wonderfully bound to old established forms, and not without a large sense of the objective side of religion as embodied in the means of grace. There was much of this manifested, more particularly in the use of the holy sacraments. The children of church-members were all baptized with few or no exceptions, and received into the Christian covenant at an early day as a matter that allowed of the least possible delay. Each communion season was a four-days-meeting, very solemn throughout, where all revolved around the central service of the Lord’s Table on the Lord’s Day; with a real, and not simply nominal, humiliation and fast, going before on Friday, in the way of special preparation for such a near approach into the presence of God.

Seventy years ago, this was the general order of religious life in all the Presbyterian churches in the Cumberland Valley, which, however, in a great measure has passed away, with much of its solemnity and depth of feeling. In the year 1810, Dr. Nevin, contemplating the great revolution which had come to pass in a gentle and noiseless way, thus wrote:

Wonderful to think of it! Not only Rouse’s Psalms—to which I seem to listen still as a fond echo borne in upon my soul from the old stone church at Middle Spring—have passed away with the entire generation which sung them; but the old catechetical system also is gone, and along with it, to a large extent, the general scheme of religion to which it belonged, and which served to hold it together, something which it is difficult for the present generation to understand, or to make any proper account of whatever.

That the statements here made in regard to the old Presbyterian faith are not overdrawn may be readily seen by a careful perusal of a work entitled, "A Book of Common Prayer, compiled from the authorized Formularies of Worship of the Presbyterian Church as prepared by Calvin, Knox, Bucer and others," published by Charles Scribner, N. Y., 1857. It is a curious fact that it made its appearance—pari passu—in the same year with the Provisional Liturgy in the German Reformed Church. The one was probably the echo of the other—as deep calleth unto deep.

According to tradition, Williamson Nevin when a child could scarcely pronounce the English language intelligibly until he was five or six years old. But with the development of his mind there was a corresponding development in the use of words accurately to express his thoughts. An elderly German lady—the grandmother of Rev. John M. Titzel, D.D.—saw him as a child twelve years old, when he came to see his grandmother near Orrstown, and there heard him talk. With other women she listened to him with surprise, and wondered where he had obtained all this knowledge.

After he had studied the elementary branches in the parochial school—learned whatever was to be learned there—his father took him in hand to prepare him for college. He knew the value of a classical education himself, and was honored for his superior intelligence. Observing the budding of a strong intellect in his first-born, he so superintended his country training, as to give it direction from the beginning towards a full course of college study. At an early day, accordingly, a Latin Grammar was placed in his hands, and the father himself became the tutor. The lessons were studied irregularly, it is true, sometimes in the house and sometimes in the field, and there was no fixed hour or place for the sub-freshman’s recitations; but the course was full and complete, first in Latin and afterwards in Greek, and the drilling was thorough. In after years he was wont to say that it was worth more to him than all that he learned of these languages subsequently in passing through college. In this kind of a preparatory school, on a farm, under the eye and auspices of his honored sire, and with no proctor to enforce obedience to fixed rules, Williamson made rapid progress in his studies—like Cyrus in the Cyropedia, who, according to Xenophon, studied because he loved to study. He was prepared to enter college when he was only a little over fourteen years of age.

But before we follow him on his way to the classic halls of his Alma Mater, we here supply the reader with a few reminiscences of the old Middle Spring Meeting House, in which he received his best religious impression during his early years. They are selected from a quaint poem, composed by his brother, Professor William M. Nevin, after a pilgrimage to the sacred spot during the year 1847.

Welcome to me once more this lone church-yard,

To which this June’s bright morn have strolled my feet!

Ah! from the village left still hitherward

Outdrawn am I that good old church to greet;

And these sad graves, to pay them homage meet,

What times I come back to this neighborhood,

Long whiles between, where erst my boyhood sweet

Was sped; here o’er its joys despoiled to brood.

But, though it bringeth dole the while, it doth me good.

That old stone church! Hid in these oaks apart

I hoped Improvement ne’er would it invade;

But only Time, with his slow, hallowing art,

Would touch it, year by year, with softer shade,

And crack its walls no more, but, interlaid,

Mend them with moss. Its ancient sombre cast

To me is dearer than all art displayed

In modern churches, which, by their contrast,

Make this to stand forlorn, held in the solemn past.

For me of reverence is that church possessed,

For in my childhood’s dawn was I conveyed

Within its dome, when was high Heaven addressed,

Me to renew, and solemn vows were made,

And lymph was sprent, and holy hands were laid,

And on me was imposed a Christian’s name;

And when through youth’s gay wildering paths I strayed,

What wholesome truths, what heavenly counsels came!

The birthright there enfeoffed, oh, may I never shame!

Its pews of pine obdurate, upright, tall,

Its gallery mounted high, three sides around,

Its pulpit goblet-formed, far up the wall,

The sounding-board above with acorn crowned,

And Rouse’s Psalms which erst therein did sound

To old fugue tunes, to some the thoughts might raise

Of folk forlorn that certes there were found.

Ah, no! I wot in those enchanting days

There beauty beamed, there swelled the richest notes of praise.

Out from that pulpit’s hight, deep browed and grave,

The man of God ensconced, half-bust, was shown.

Weighty and wise he did ne thump nor rave,

Nor lead his folk upwrought to smile nor moan.

By him slow-cast the seeds of truth were sown,

Which, falling on good soil, took lasting hold,

Not springing eftsoons, then to wilt ere grown,

But in long time their fruits increased were told;

Some thirty, sixty some, and some a hundred fold.

* * *

Here were they gathered every good Lord’s Day

From town, from hamlet, and from farm afar.

Their worldly cares at home now left to stay,

Was nothing here their pious thoughts to mar;

The time, the place all follies did debar;

The Church their only care; yet, sooth the State

Did some mislead, who, nothing loth to spar,

Ev’n here brought in untimeous debate

Their party’s cause to uphold, and speed their candidate.

* * *

Now, by this locust bowing down the knee

As would he wish here laid, thus let me pray;

Kind Saviour, with Thy spirit strengthen me,

And play-feres strown, help us to walk the way

Our fathers trode, and never from it stray;

And when at length Thou com’st, to take Thine own,

Grant that with them we gathered be that day.

All saved and blessed, forever round Thy throne,

With them to live, and love, and worship Thee alone.

III—AT SCHENECTADY FROM 1817–1821

Æt. 14–18

CHAPTER III

AFTER Williamson Nevin had fairly mastered the rudiments of the ancient languages with corresponding English branches, it was supposed that, young as he was, the time had arrived for him to go to college. His uncle, Captain John Williamson, after whom he was named, assumed the charge of his education, and by the advice of his brother, who was still living at New York, in the fall of the year 1817 he was sent to Union College, Schenectady, N. Y., which was then at the zenith of its prosperity under the presidency of the celebrated Dr. Eliphalet Nott. The place seemed to be far away at that time; and although the first steamboats were running on the North River, it took in fact as much time to reach it as it now requires for an overland trip to California. On his way he met for the last time his patriarchal kinsman, Dr. Hugh Williamson, of revolutionary fame, and was sufficiently overpowered by his venerable and commanding presence. His only word of counsel to him was: Take care, my boy, that you do not learn to smoke; for smoking will lead you to drinking, and that is the end of all that is good. It is scarcely necessary to say that his namesake remembered his advice, and kept himself aloof from smoking, and all use of tobacco or liquor. But this required no special effort on his part, as he no doubt believed with King James in his famous Counterblast to tobacco, that there was no use in men’s making chimneys of their mouths.

Union College had at this time a better reputation than it deserved. Dr. Nott himself took only a small part in its actual work of instruction, and this never amounted to much more than an empty form. The institution lived largely on the outside credit of his name. It was a mistake that young Nevin was sent to college at such an early age. He was the youngest and the smallest student in his class, and a mere unfledged boy, it might be said, to the end of his college course. With the natural timidity, inherited from his father, he could hardly connect two thoughts together when he arose to speak in the Literary Society, and was surprised at the flow of words and ideas that came from William Henry Seward, several classes in advance of him, who did not seem to know when it was time for him to take his scat. Little did Williamson imagine at this time that probably as many winged words should go forth from his tongue and pen to the world as from the embryo statesman of Utica, N. Y. Although a retiring, diffident youth, he formed some valuable friendships with fellow-students which continued during his life time. Among others he met with Taylor Lewis, who in his day came to occupy a deservedly high position in the walks of American literature. They were differently constituted, but both possessed a deep reverence for what was profound and spiritual, and became congenial friends, whom no difference of opinion could separate as the years rolled around.

The young student from Pennsylvania entered the Freshman Class, studied hard, maintained a respectable standing, and although his studies were at times interrupted by ill health, he graduated with honor in the year 1821. But his health broke down, and when he returned to his home he became a burden to himself and to all around, as he says, through a long course of dyspeptic suffering, on which he afterwards was accustomed to look back as a sort of horrible nightmare, covering with gloom the best season of his youth.

His life at college was not uneventful. The religious experience through which he then passed was to him instructive, and indirectly, at least, exerted a salutary influence on his entire subsequent career. But favorable, as it may have been in some respects, yet in others, as he affirmed when his judgment was matured, it was decidedly unfavorable. Union College was organized on the principle of representing the collective Christianity of the so-called evangelical denominations, and as a consequence, it proceeded, throughout, practically, on the idea that the relation of religious to secular education is something abstract and outward only—the two spheres having nothing to do with each other in fact, except as mutual complemental sides, in the end, of what should be considered a right kind of general human culture. This is a common delusion, by which it is imagined so widely, that the school should be divorced from the Church, and that faith is of no account for learning and science. There was religion in the college so far as morning and evening prayers went, and the students were required to attend the different churches in town on Sunday. But there was no real church life, as such, in the institution. It seemed to be only for the purpose of apprenticing its pupils in the different departments of a common academical knowledge, and not at all in any comprehensive sense for bringing them forward in the discipline of a true Christian life. This was something that was left to outside appliances altogether, more or less sporadic and irregular, and was in no way brought into the educational economy of the college itself, as its all pervading spirit and soul.

All this involved serious consequences, as a matter of course, although not clearly understood at the time by an ingenuous youth, trained in the old Reformed faith under its Presbyterian form, into which he had been baptized at Middle Spring. It was his first contact with the genius of New England Puritanism as a new phasis of religion. This was something very plausible, and with his limited experience he was not in a condition to withstand the shock. For him it amounted to a serious disturbance of his whole previous life, if not a complete breaking up of its order. He had come to college as a boy of strongly pious dispositions and exemplary religious habits, pious without exactly knowing it, never doubting that he was in some way a Christian, although, unfortunately as he says, he had not as yet made a public profession of religion. But now one of the first lessons inculcated on him by this unchurchly system was that all this must pass for nothing, and that he must learn to look upon himself as an outcast from the family and kingdom of God—in the gall of bitterness and the bonds of iniquity—before he could get into either in the right way.

Such, he says, especially, was the instruction he received from others around him, when a revival of religion, as it was called, broke out among the students, and brought the instruction which he had received to a practical application. It took place in close connection with an extended system of religious excitement, which the celebrated Mr. Nettleton was then carrying on in that region of country. To the minds of many, and to that of the student from Pennsylvania, he was the impersonation of the Apostle Paul. The system appeared under its best character, it will be freely admitted, under his direction, and was altogether different from what it afterwards became in the hands of such men as Finney and Gallagher, when Mr. Nettleton himself withdrew from it his countenance. The awakening in the college was no part of its proper order. Dr. Nott had nothing to do with it; it formed in fact a sort of temporary outside episode, conducted by the Professor of Mathematics, an adroit manager, and certain pious students previously Christianized by the working of the machine, who now, after such drilling and manipulation, were supposed to be competent to assist him in bringing souls to their new birth.

Along with others Williamson Nevin came into their hands in the anxious meetings and underwent the torture of their mechanical counsel and talks, as he expresses it in his autobiography. One after another, however, of the anxious obtained hope, each new case, as it were, stimulating another, and finally, among the last, he struggled into something of the sort himself, with a feeble, trembling sense of comfort, which his spiritual advisers then had no difficulty in accepting as all that the case required. In this way he was converted, as he imagined, and brought into the church as if he had been altogether out of it before, about the close of the seventeenth year of his age. His conversion he thought was not fully up to his own idea at the time of what such a change ought to be; but it was as earnest and thorough, no doubt, as that of any of his fellow-students—certainly more solid and fruitful than that of the professional conductor of this revival, who subsequently showed, sad to say, how deficient his own, unfortunately, was.

Such a grave and thoughtful Christian as Dr. Nevin was the last person in his riper years to undervalue the significance of this momentous crisis in his life, or to deny altogether the benefit he derived from it. It was to him a true awakening and a real decision in the great concern of personal, experimental religion, which carried him, because he was a good subject, a growing young Christian, beyond all that he had known or experienced before. As such it entered deeply into his subsequent history, where, however, in the end, the truth was separated from the dross and made available for a higher purpose. But he was too honest and truthful in subsequent years not to utter his testimony and to speak freely of the vast amount of error that was involved in the movement from beginning to end. Thus he expressed himself in regard to it in his mature years:

"It was based throughout on the principle that regeneration and conversion lay outside of the Church, had nothing to do with baptism and Christian education, required rather a looking away from all this as more of a bar than a help to the process, and were to be sought only in the way of magical illapse or stroke from the Spirit of God—denominated by Dr. Bushnell as the ictic experience—as something precedent and preliminary to entering the true fold of the Shepherd and Bishop of souls! To realize this, then, became the inward strain and effort of the anxious soul; and what was held to be saving faith in the end, consisted largely in a belief that the reality was reached. And so afterwards also, all was made to turn, in the life of religion, on alternating frames and states, and introverted self-inspection, more or less—under the guidance of some such work as Edwards on the Affections. An intense subjectivity, in one word, which is always something impotent and poor, took the place of a proper contemplation of the grand and glorious objectivities of the Christian life, in which all the true power of the Gospel lies.

"My own experience in this way, at the time here under consideration, was not wholesome, but rather very morbid and weak. Alas, where was my mother, the Church, at the very time I most needed her fostering arms? Where was she, I mean, with her true sacramental sympathy and care? How much better had it been for me, if I had only been drawn from myself, by some right soul communication with the mysteries of the old Christian Creed! As it was, I could not repeat the Creed, and as yet knew it only as one of the questionable relics of Popery. I had never heard it, even at Middle Spring; and it was entirely foreign to the religious life of Union College.

So I went on with my spiritual life to the close of my college course in 1821, when I returned home a complete bankrupt for the time in bodily health. My whole constitution, indeed, was, I may say, in an invalid state. I was dyspeptic both in body and mind.

Had he been, after his awakening, under the care of a judicious pastor, or catechist, who would have taught him the meaning of the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments; had he then with others been asked to kneel before the altar in the presence of the congregation, where the minister could pray for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit; and had he thus, according to the Presbyterian Liturgy, been received into the Church, he would have been very much strengthened and confirmed in his faith. It would have been a true confirmation, even though the minister’s hands were not imposed on him at the time. And the probability, moreover, is, that he would have returned from Schenectady a better Christian, in better health, and in a more cheerful, happy state of mind.

IV—AT HOME FROM 1821–1823

Æt. 18–20

CHAPTER IV

DR. NEVIN having graduated when he was still in his nineteenth year, the case seemed to require, that he should wait a few years before entering upon his professional studies. His mind would become more mature, he would be better acquainted with the world, and be better prepared to profit by the new studies that might engage his attention. But as our times are in the hands of the Lord, so here in his case, the question as it regards what he was to do next after his graduation, was decided for him by divine Providence itself. His health was such as to require him to stay at home in the country, and, as it seemed to him, to do nothing. His disease, dyspepsia, was of the worst kind and caused him much discomfort and suffering. It had a fashion of its own, and it was something more serious a good deal than what goes by that name generally in our day. It appeared in the character of a new disease, which fell as a scourge on sedentary people, particularly of the younger class. We give a description of his sad condition at this time in his own plaintive language:

I had the complaint in its worst character, and it hung on to me with a sort of death-like grip, which for a time seemed to mock all hope of recovery or relief. I experienced all sorts of painful and unpleasant symptoms, was continually miserable and weak, had an intense consciousness all the time of the morbid workings of my physical system, lived in a perpetual casuistry of dietetic rules and questions, and ran through all imaginable helps and cures, only to find that in my case, at least, they signified nothing. At the same time, of course, the disease lay as a cloud upon my mind, entered as a secret poison into all my feelings, and undermined the strength of my will. Emphatically might it have been called, in every view, a thorn in the flesh, and a very messenger of Satan sent to buffet me with sore and heavy blows. If he could have read German at this time and sung Luther’s great psalm, beginning with the sad but appropriate words, Aus tiefer Noth schrei ich zu Dir, they might have been a comfort to him, perhaps medicine both to his soul and body.

"And the strength of Christ, it must be sorrowfully confessed, was not made perfect in my weakness, for there was no proper room offered it to become so, in the reigning character of my religious life as it stood at this time. As I have said before, this was also of a most sickly dyspeptic habit and I was poorly qualified, therefore, to show the power of grace, over against the weakness of nature. No doubt my physical condition had itself much to do with the morbid character of my religion, since, when the whole nervous system has come thus to be disordered and deranged, it is not possible that the higher life of the soul, in any case, should not become involved, more or less seriously, in the general wreck. But apart from this, my piety in its own nature was not of the sort required for such an emergency as that by which it was now tried as by fire. It was of the sort rather to aggravate and increase the trial; for, as I have already said, it was intensely subjective and introspective. Instead of looking to the outward redeeming facts and powers of Christianity, it was too much a habit of looking into its own constitution, as if to be satisfied with the goodness of this first of all were the only way to true religious satisfaction in any other form. And as all was sure to be found largely unsatisfactory here, what would the result of such painful autopsy be—this everlasting studying of symptoms, this perpetual feeling of the pulse—other than the weakening of faith, and the darkening of hope, and the souring of that most excellent grace of charity itself, which is the bond of perfectness and of all virtue—in one word, a hopeless valetudinarian state of the soul, answering in all respects to the broken condition of its outward tenement, the body.

"This was the order of piety I brought home with me from college. It was not after the pattern which had been set before me in my early youth in the Middle Spring Church. But the Presbyterian churches of the Valley generally, and Middle Spring itself, were not true to their old position. The change of which I have spoken before, had already begun to make itself felt. The catechetical system was passing away. What had once been the living power of the old style of religion was, in fact, dying out; and the motion of a new sort of religious life, heard of from other parts of the country, or exemplified irregularly among outside sects, was silently at work in the minds of many; causing it be felt, more or less, that the modes of thought, handed down from the fathers, had become a good deal prosy and formal, and needed at least to have infused into them a more modern spirit. There was a slow process of Puritanizing going forward throughout the Presbytery of Carlisle, which, however, was still met with no small amount of both theoretical and practical resistance from different quarters, giving the case the character of a continuous drawing in opposite directions, such as all could feel, without being able to make it plain in words.

"All this only helped, of course, to promote the confusion, which was already at work in my own religious experience. As a consequence, I was, in some measure, divided between the conservative and the would-be progressive tendencies, having a sort of constitutional inborn regard for the true underlying sense of the first, but being drawn, also, toward the second by emotional sensibilities, which were not to be repressed. I held on outwardly to the regularities of the old Presbyterian life, as they were kept up in the Middle Spring Church; but in thought and feeling I went far, at the same time, in justifying different Methodistical modes of piety, as being on the whole, perhaps, of more account for the salvation of the world. I was of that awakened young class in the congregation, who saw for the most part only a state of dead formality in its church services, and found it somewhat difficult to believe that the older sort of people generally had any kind of religion at all.

"So much then for my general religious state, as far as I can call it to mind, in this darkly remembered, and, by no means, pleasant interval in my life. It was confused and dark; I might also say, without form and void, a sort of tumultuating chaos, in which conflicting elements and forces vainly sought for reconciliation, and which it was plain only some new power from heaven could reduce to order and peace. As for theology, my great vade mecum and thesaurus, in those days, was Scott’s heavy Commentary on the Old and New Testament."

Under these circumstances, it could hardly be expected that the valetudinarian should make much progress in his knowledge of books, or in severe intellectual study of any kind. It was not desirable that he should. Evidently he already knew more than he could digest, and it was enough if he could retain the small amount of learning that he had brought with him from college, so as to keep it from gliding away from his possession. His power of intellectual assimilation was not much better than that which was physical, and he was already under the weight of a double dyspepsia. Study, or even reading, for whole weeks and months, was a weariness to the flesh, during which the grasshopper was a burden, and desire failed, by reason of physical prostration.

But Providence itself had sent him into this retreat in the desert for a good and wise purpose—that he might rest and rally his energies for the busy life that was to follow. He was in the right place, in the bosom of nature, which was doing for him more perhaps than he was aware of. During these two years, however, he was by no means in the condition of a hybernating animal. His condition resembled rather that of the fields covered with snow, where the growing wheat only waits for the April sun that it may spring up in all its native luxuriousness. Unquestionably he must have made some progress in strength and knowledge, whether he observed it or not in his autopsies. There was a useful discipline in the experience through which he was called to pass; and his outward relations and employments became, in various ways, a profitable school, whose practical lessons in the end inured to the benefit of others no less than to his own.

Sometimes when a rich dinner was served for the family, whether its very odor was grateful or repugnant to him, in order to protect his health, to the dismay of father and mother, he would deny himself of rich viands, mount his horse and ride four or five miles off into the country. Nature was to him the best nutriment. In his out-door exercises he became interested in the science of Botany, and during the summer he prosecuted this cheerful study with much diligence and zeal, scouring the country for miles around on foot or horseback in search of plants and flowers. Another slight exercise he found in improving his knowledge of the French language. It did not occur to him at that time to pay any attention to the study of the German. He was surrounded by those who spoke the language, but it was to him, then, nothing more than common, useless Pennsylvania Dutch, and it was one of the last things dreamed of, that in after life he would turn to it with avidity to possess himself of its treasures. That was a discovery which he made only in the fulness of time.

Another diversion, from which he derived an important educational advantage, was a debating club in the ancient borough of Shippensburg, nearer to which his father had come to reside. This it was his privilege to attend regularly every week through the winter months. It was in its way a most honorable literary senate, an institution like many others in the Cumberland Valley, where the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians trained themselves for public speaking. His physical ailment naturally led him at this time to dabble considerably in medical reading, which probably did him more harm than good; but he found a more healthy diversion in writing for the public press, something that he had learned from his father, which disclosed an editorial tendency that exhibited itself subsequently likewise in other members of the Nevin family. A number of his poetical productions, based on David’s Psalms or the Odes of Horace, appeared in a religious periodical newly started at Carlisle, in whose columns Dr. Bethune, a student at the time in Dickinson College, was then exercising his maiden muse, in the same way. This was a useful literary exercise, but the author naively remarks in his review of himself, that whatever talent he may have had for the composition of poetry in his youth, it must have left him afterwards—except, we may add, only on one or two occasions. With this spirit of poetry, may have been connected the military spirit, which led him into a crack military company at Shippensburg, and filled his imagination with pleasant dreams, more or less romantic, in the high and mighty office of Orderly Sergeant, with which he had the honor of being unanimously invested in the company.

His regular business, however, so far as he could engage in business at all, was working on his father’s farm. At first, as we may suppose, he was not able to accomplish much in this direction on account of his general physical weakness. But, as time went on, he gradually gained a certain amount of strength, and in the end could put himself to all kinds of agricultural labor. This indeed seemed to be the only chance he had for regaining anything like tolerable health; but he came, as he informs us, to look upon it more and more as his only proper avocation for life. In fact, the idea of going on to prepare himself for a learned profession was now pretty effectively crushed out of his mind. I had no heart or spirit, he says, for anything of the sort and was disposed to look upon my existence as a kind of general failure. He, therefore, continued to plough and harrow his father’s aeres; but in due course of time God called him from the plough, as He did Elisha of old, in order that he might be a prophet in Israel.

Although a broken reed, he was not allowed, after all, to rest quietly in his own morbid conclusions. With some improvement in his health, whilst nearing the age of twenty-one, he felt himself urged towards a resumption of study through inward as well as outward pressure in a way which became more and more difficult to withstand. There was, indeed, but one direction in which the force of this constraint made itself felt. If he was to prepare himself for any one profession, it seemed to be admitted all around that it must be the Christian ministry. He was considered to have a born determination to that office from the beginning. That was looked at, he says, "in my being sent to college, and neighbors and friends held it to be my proper destination afterwards, pretty much as a matter of course. And then I was shut up to it also quite as decidedly, in my own mind, so far at least, that I had no power to think seriously of any other profession. I could not devote myself to medicine or law. But just here came in my chief difficulty. Could I then devote myself with free conscience to divinity? The negative side of the call was clear enough—this profession, or else no profession; but how about the positive side? Was that also clear? Not by any means to my own mind, for my whole life, as already shown, was in a fog. This it was especially that caused me to hesitate and pause, when all around me appeared to think I should be going to the Theological Seminary.

"The pressure, however, could not be escaped, and so, finally, through no small tribulation of spirit, I was brought to a decision. I would at all events go to Princeton and study theology, that much at least was settled. Whether I would enter the ministry afterwards or not, was another question. A course of three years in the Seminary might solve the doubt in different ways. One way thought of was that of my own death, for I was still in the merciless hold of what I felt to be an incurable chronic disease, and had a general imagination that my life, in any case, was destined to be short. When I went to college, it had been with great misgivings in regard to my boyish scholarship. Such was my high ideal at the time of the reigning standard of college education. In proposing to enter the Theological Seminary I had like imaginings now in regard to my piety, which I felt to be of a very poor sort again, over against my similar idealization of the reigning piety of this venerable institution. Princeton divinity students, as far as they appeared among us at Shippensburg or Middle Spring, had a certain air of conscious sanctimony about them, which seemed to be rebuking all the time the common worldlinesss of these old congregations, especially on Sundays; and gave the notion of a young Presbyterianism, which was in a fair way soon to turn their existing religious life into old fogyism. I was duly impressed with all this, in the case of three or four excellent young men, now in heaven, whom I well remember; and it was not, therefore, without a certain degree of fear and trembling, that I left my home in the fall of 1823 and became matriculated, as a student, in the school of the prophets at Princeton."

V—AT PRINCETON FROM 1823–1828

Æt. 20–25

CHAPTER V

THUS for a second time young Mr. Nevin left his home in Franklin County, beneath the shadow of the Kittatinnies, to pursue his studies elsewhere. He knew whither he was going, and the prospect of allaying his thirst at the fountain of Presbyterian theology and orthodoxy was not without its charms. He was not entirely disappointed. Theological science was not without its intricacies, and had its difficult problems to solve, but they were congenial to his mind, and he was now prepared to confront them; and as strength permitted, to wrestle with them. He must be allowed here to give his own impressions, when, over fifty years afterwards, he took a retrospective view of his life at Princeton.

I look back, he says, "upon my days spent at Princeton, as, in some respects, the most pleasant part of my life. My entrance into the Theological Seminary brought with it, of itself, a certain feeling of repose, by putting to an end much of what had been painfully undetermined before, in regard to my life, and by offering me the prospect of a quiet harbor for three years, at least (should I live that long), from further outside cares and fears; whilst I was met here, at the same time, with all the opportunities and helps I needed for prosecuting with energy the new work in which I had embarked, and I was in no hurry to get through the Seminary as many seemed to be. Looking beyond it to me was only looking into the dark. I cared not how long I might rest in it as my home.

So I gave myself up steadily to its engagements and pursuits; and I did so, by general acknowledgment, with the best success. The institution itself was at the time, I may say, in the height of its prosperity and reputation. Dr. Miller and Dr. Alexander were in the full vigor of their spiritual powers, the two men best qualified in the whole Presbyterian Church, unquestionably, for the high position in which they were placed; while Professor Hodge, still young, and only recently invested with the distinction of being their colleague, gave ample promise also, even then, of what he has since become for the Christian world. It was a privilege to sit at the feet of those excellent men. So I felt it to be at the time; and so I have never ceased to regard it as having been, through all the years since. On the best terms with my revered instructors, in most pleasant relations throughout with my fellow-students, in the midst of an old academic retreat, where the very air seemed to be redolent of literature and science, with no necessity’ and no wish to pass beyond it, is it any wonder that I came to look on Princeton as a second home, or that memory should still turn back to what it then was for my spirit, as an abode only of pleasantness?

This happiness and peace, however, were only relative, not absolute, not what the Italians, in their fair country, call a dolce far niente. Thus it is always with believers in their pilgrimage through this vale of tears. The burden that he had brought along with him to the Seminary did not fall from his shoulders when he crossed the Delaware. His bodily ailments showed some promise of improvement, but he was in poor health all the while. This finally took the form of a settled affection of the liver; a heavy burden at first, which, however, in the course of years, grew gradually more tolerable, although as late as the year 1870 he said that there had not been a day of his life up to that time, in which he had not felt more or less pain from this additional malady."

He had also brought with him the dualism in his religious life to which we have already referred. Embarrassments, fears and doubts, with regard to his own personal religion, the result of reading many casuistical books, still attended him, as it seems, all the time, as they have many other earnest believers, who have not always been content to receive the kingdom of heaven as a little child; or as many pagans do, when they first hear of the glad tidings of salvation.

Cælum, non animum, mutant,

Qui trans mare currunt.

The question of his call to the ministry hung with him always in painful suspense, creating within him doubt and uncertainty whether he should ever be able to enter it at all. There was much in the institution to promote earnest concern of this kind. Dr. Alexander’s searching and awakening casuistry, especially in the Sunday afternoon conferences, was of a character not easy to be forgotten. It was by no means uncommon, we are told, for students, and these of the most serious and earnest class, to go away from these meetings in a state of spiritual discouragement bordering on despair, rather than in the spirit that called them in energetic tones to watch and fight and pray. Here again, Dr. Nevin says, he had his own experiences, at times exceedingly deep and solemn, often with strong crying and tears, going in the way of a soul-crisis quite beyond the crisis of what was called his conversion at Union College; and yet never coming up to his own idea of what the new birth ought to be.

"The two different theories or schemes of piety refused to coalesce, and there seemed to be no one at hand to proclaim a broader and a better one, which would embrace what was good in each, and yet stand above them in a higher life of the soul. The Puritan theory, coming in from New England, pervaded the revival system of the times, and assumed to be the only true sense of the Gospel all over the country. Over against it stood the old proper Presbyterian theory of the seventeenth century, which was also the general non-conformist theory of that time, as represented by Baxter, Owen, Howe and other like teachers of the same age. There was a difference between the two systems, which could be felt better than explained. The old system was not perfect, nor, by any means, all that the true idea of the Church required; but it stood much nearer to it than the more modern one, whose great characteristic it was on principle to supplant it, and to be unchurchly and