USA > Virginia > City of Staunton > City of Staunton > The First Presbyterian Church, Staunton, Virginia > Part 25
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There is a fountain filled with blood Drawn from Immanuel's veins, And sinners plunged beneath that flood Lose all their guilty stains.
Is it not reasonable we should serve God whose mercy is so great?
We argue again that this is a reasonable service, because only in this way can we reach our highest happiness in this life and in the life to come. Many have the idea that religion shuts us off from most of the pleasure of this life, though it offers pleasures forever- more in a world to come; that it hems us in and is ever saying "thou shalt not do this"; that it sternly points to a narrow way and relent- lessly punishes all who wander from it. We do not want to lose the life to come, therefore, we will take religion as a penance we pay for what we shall receive hereafter. Blot out the woes of the life to come and we would be happier without religion. It was with this lie
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the devil seduced Eve. She would be a happier and higher being if she cast off God's claims to her love and obedience. Alas! by bitter, bitter experience she found her mistake and sin.
God is the "Happy God." He delights in mercy. He is love. Could He demand of us what would make us unhappy? Are not all His commands wise and holy and good? Every preacher here to-day has talked with those standing near eternity; have you ever heard one regret that he had tried to serve God? You have talked with aged Christians who for a lifetime had served the Lord; have you ever heard one say, "Had I but served the world as I have served my God, I would not be left desolate now?" Have you ever heard one regret the great mistake made in serving Christ with heart and mind and body?
Many have we heard deplore that they had not served Him better; that they had not presented themselves as living sacrifices; that they had not begun earlier in life; that their zeal had flagged and their love grown cold; but never one whose joy was not that he had served the Lord.
Now, I ask is it not a reasonable service we are called to render to such a God? Is it not a reasonable service to give under such mercies? Is it not reasonable to give it when only thus can we reach our highest happiness and well-being? Can any service we render be too great? If He says to you fathers and mothers give me your child to labor for me in China, in Africa can you say, "It is too much for me to give?" If He will that you be a child of pain and by your submission and cheerful patience glorify Him, shall you not do it? If He tells thee to deny thyself that you may the more freely give to the need of His poor, is that too much to ask when He made Himself poor that He might make thee rich?
See what courage and sacrifice the soldiers of Japan are showing for love of their emperor. After one of Napoleon's fearful battles a member of the Old Guard was laid on the table that the surgeon might cut out a bullet buried in his breast. The surgeon hesitated lest the knife was going too deep-"Cut deeper and you will find the emperor" said the brave soldier. Shall not the soldiers of Christ have His name deeper in their hearts than any other? Shall they not be willing to say in all humility but in truth, "Let us die if need be for our King."
Yes, they have done so. God has specially called the Presbyterian family to suffer great things for Him. With the blood of her children has been written the names of most of the noble army of martyrs. Along the dykes of Holland; in the fertile plains of France; or on the mountain slopes of Switzerland; on England's green fields; amid the
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mountains and valleys of Scotland, have they contended for liberty and for God, and made the world their debtors. It is an honor to belong to the number of those who have written one of the most glorious pages in the history of the Kingdom of Christ. It is an honor, too, to be the descendants of the men and women who labored and suffered for the inheritance you have in this Church, and the call to love and service is loud and strong.
By all the memories of these one hundred years; by this memorial stone we, to-day, set up; by the saintly lives of the fathers and mothers who here finished their work; by all that the cross of our Lord tells us of His love and sacrifice; by all the mercies of God are we called to present ourselves as living sacrifices, to hold fast to the faith delivered to us and to count all we can do for the Church and Christ as our "reasonable service."
For her my tears shall fall; For her my prayers ascend; To her my cares and toils be given, Till toils and cares shall end.
PRESBYTERIAN BEGINNINGS IN VIRGINIA, BY REV. JAMES P. SMITH Fathers and Brethren:
A year or two ago, in an old Virginia home, surrounded by portraits and relics of one of the most honored families of Colonial Virginia, I was seeking with great interest the story and traditions of a great name, when a descendant bearing that name asked with a grave simplicity, "You have to be an old man do you not, to take interest in such things?" I suppose it is true in good degree, the old for the past and the young for the future. But it is because we are deeply interested in the future and what our young people will make of it that we gather the facts of the past. We would give security, strength and guidance to the young who reach out so earnestly into the coming years. The gun which is to have a steady aim must have a strong shoulder back of it.
In a short hour, I am to condense a history, about which many good volumes have been written, and about which many more will yet be gathered on our library shelves. But I must not forget that I am not writing a history, but I am to make a brief address, bringing to a popular assembly something to interest, as well as inform, about the earlier days of the people of the Presbyterian faith in the Old Dominion.
FRANCIS MAKEMIE. In the library of Union Theological Semi- nary, at Richmond, is the very curious old desk of Francis Makemie, the first ordained Presbyterian minister in Virginia, and probably in
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America, of whom we have any knowledge. It is the oldest and most interesting relic of American Presbyterianism in existence to-day. It is a striking fact that there should be left to us, not the chair as that of John Wesley, which is in London, or the pulpit as that of George Whitefield, which is in Philadelphia, but the desk of Makemie, for he was a man of the pen, and of papers, and cared for the affairs of many people, as well as his own.
Francis Makemie, a native of Donegal, Ireland, educated at a Scotch University, was ordained by the Presbytery of Laggan, Ire- land, in 1680, that he might be sent to America as an evangelist, in response to the petition of Judge Stevens, of Lord Baltimore's Council in Maryland. After a sojourn in Barbadoes, Makemie came, in 1684, to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and at Snow Hill found a group of Presbyterians, Irish and Scotch-Irish. He was an educated and able minister of the Gospel; a man "of energy, activity and courage. He is described as a minister of eminent piety and strong intellectual power, with a fascinating address, conspicuous for natural endow- ments and for his dignity and for his fitness as a Christian minister." He entered upon an active ministry, and preached with power and effect in the peninsula of Maryland and Virginia, and was heard in many places from Boston and New York to Charleston, S. C.
He crossed the ocean twice to seek other ministers for the Amer- ican colonies. He organized the first Presbytery in America, at Phil- adelphia, in 1706. He was arrested in Accomac for preaching and carried to Williamsburg, where before the Governor and Council he bore himself with such dignity, and spoke with such force, that he was granted license to preach anywhere in the Colony of Virginia. He was arrested in New York, 1707, and by Lord Cornbery angrily sent to prison. For two months he lay in jail in Manhattan, until at a hearing in court he so convinced the court of his right, under the English Act of Toleration, that he was again set free, with an unjust infliction of fees and charges of more than $400. Before the Colonial Assembly of New York the case of Makemie secured the adoption of the Tolera- tion Act. His was one of the first voices raised in America for religious liberty and the freedom of the Gospel. His sermon in New York on the text, "We ought to obey God rather than man," was printed in Boston, and largely helped to educate public sentiment. He founded churches, after the Presbyterian order on the Eastern Shore and else- where, which abide to-day. Francis Makemie was the father of the American Presbyterian Church. For twenty-five years he fought the battle of the rights of conscience, and broke down the barriers of intolerance and proscription. He laid the foundation of Presbytery,
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on which have been built all English speaking Presbyterian Churches of this country. He died in Accomac, in 1708, and his grave at Snow Hill, Maryland, has been marked by a fitting monument.
Mr. Makemie, in 1684, a year after he came to the Eastern Shore, crossed from Cape Charles, and found at Lynn Haven, on the south side of Hampton Roads, a congregation of dissenting Christians, mourning greatly over the death of their pastor, Rev. James Porter. Whether they were English Puritans or Scotch Presbyterians, we do not know. He made them repeated visits, and, in 1692, secured for them a pastor in the Presbyterian, Rev. Josias Mackie. Mr. Mackie had four preaching places on Elizabeth River, in what is now Norfolk County, and this was the origin of the Presbyterian Church of Norfolk. It claims to be the first regularly organized Presbyterian Church, not only in Virginia, but in America.
NONCONFORMISTS ON THE SOUTH SIDE. English Puritans came to this country with the first Protestant settlements, under the Stuarts in England, who had war and not peace for those who would not con- form in everything to the Church of Henry VIII. The best of English Puritans came in colonies and settled along the Atlantic coast. They had not separated from the English Church nor divided themselves into Presbyterian Puritans (Barrowites) or Congregational Puritans (Brownites) but gathering in the new settlements, they were Cal- vinists in faith, and believed in the government of the congregation by elders.
Rev. Alexander Whitaker came to Virginia, with Sir Thomas Dale, in 1611. He was "the self-denying Apostle of Virginia." He was an earnest and evangelical Christian minister. When he wrote back to England for young, godly, earnest ministers for Virginia, he said: "Young men are fittest for this country, and we have no need of ceremonies or livers." His successor, in 1618, was Rev. George Keith, a Scotch Nonconformist, settled at Elizabeth City. At Barba- does he was associated with Rev. Lewis Hughes, who writes home: "Ceremonies are in no request, nor the Book of Common Prayer. I use it not at all. I have, by the help of God, begun a church govern- ment of ministers and elders."
A body of such English Puritans settled on the south side of James River in Nansemond and Suffolk. They were of the reformed faith, and a local Presbyterian organization, and refused to conform to the English Church. Among them were men of property and the highest standing in the Colony. General Richard Bennett, a wealthy planter of Nansemond, soldier, statesman, Christian gentleman and Governor of the Colony of Virginia, was an elder of this nonconform- ing church. Daniel Gookins, Sr., founder of Newport News and a
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proprietor in Nansemond, and his son Daniel Gookins, Jr., were leaders among these people, and of high standing in the Colony. In the midst of these English nonconforming people, in 1632, the old church near Smithfield was erected, and has lately been restored. Was it built by these nonconforming people? It would be a strange thing if it were not so. In 1641, nine years later, this dissenting people asked from New England for three ministers. There were three charges, in 1641, on the southside of the James, and certainly two dis- senting ministers came. Under the persecution of Governor Berkeley these Puritan people of the Southside were driven away, and found welcome and toleration in Maryland. Berkeley wanted neither public schools nor printing nor Presbyterians in his Colony, and we are in- debted to the intolerant old Tory for grouping Presbyterians with printing and public schools. He was correct in his grouping.
HUGUENOTS IN VIRGINIA. French Protestant refugees began coming to America as early as 1623. They were the founders of New Amsterdam, now the great metropolis, New York. They spoke French, they professed the faith of their countryman, John Calvin, and they organized Presbyterian Churches. As severities increased in France, the immigration increased, and the French Protestants, or Huguenots, settled in many places from Massachusetts to South Carolina. An im- measurable loss to France, they were of great value to Holland and to England, and especially to the new Colonies on the American shores. Industrious and thrifty, they were never a burden wherever they went, but an immediate addition to production and wealth. They were a people brought into a strong, individual manhood, by their Calvinistic faith. The influence of this exiled people in moulding the character of the American people has been great, far beyond the pro- portion of their numbers. Their names are on the roll of American patriots, statesmen, soldiers, philanthropists, and ministers of religion. They have furnished men of note in every calling. William of Orange was greatly indebted to the Huguenot exiles. They built factories and began the vast manufacturing development of England. In the wars with Louis XIV there were about 700 French officers in the English regiments, and three full regiments of French Protestants. When, therefore, they came to Virginia, about 1700, they were received with favor. A reservation of 10,000 acres was laid off for them on the south side of the James, twenty miles above the falls, or Richmond, at Manikin, where had been the tribe of Mohican Indians.
Under Pastor de Richbourg, this reservation was made a parish called "King William," in Henrico County, and exempted for seven years both from general and local taxation. There were, perhaps, seven or eight hundred in the settlement at Manikin town, but they
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soon scattered and made their homes in many counties of Eastern Virginia. They were disciples of John Calvin, and Presbyterians. They did not come to perish. They were a vigorous and active people, of pure morals and religious intelligence. They multiplied until they almost occupied the land. It would scarcely be possible to name the families, whose names are familiar, and some of them on the roll of Virginia's most famous men-Fontaines and Flournoys, Maryes and Maurys, Dabneys and Dupuys, Cockes and Chandlers, Legrand, Fourqurean, Bondurant, Micheaux, Lacy, Bernard, Watkins, Moncure, Micou, Latane. They have furnished a large and valuable element of the people who were gathered into Presbyterian Churches by Samuel Davies, in all the Southside of Virginia-in Cumberland, Buckingham, Powhatan, Prince Edward, Charlotte, Halifax, Amelia and Nottoway. Their children have gone throughout the land.
A French maiden, Susannah Rochette, called by her sisters "The Little Night-Cap," was sent in a hogshead on board a ship from a French port to England. She married one Abraham Michaux, of her own people, and after some years in Holland, they came to this country. They landed in Stafford, on the Potomac, and thence went to Manikin town, and made a home on the Southside. Their children married Woodson and Venable and Morton and Watkins and Carring- ton. The descendants of "The Little Night-Cap " are as numerous as the sands of the seashore. They are largely the Presbyterian ele- ment of Eastern Virginia and Southside Virginia, and are found in Briery, Cub Creek, Charlotte C. H., and many other churches.
A NEW LIFE COMING. When Makemie died in 1708, quite remote from the Eastern Shore, and unknown to the Presbyterians of Acco- mac and Elizabeth River, there was coming a stream of new life into Virginia. There were Presbyterians at "Potomoke," somewhere in the lower Valley of the Shenandoah who petitioned the Synod of New York, in 1720, that a minister be sent to them. When four years before that, in 1716, Governor Spotswood and his company of gentle- men rode from Germanna, on the Rapidan, and peeped over the Blue Ridge, at Swift Run Gap, they saw a goodly land, a gleaming river, a great forest and a long mountain wall beyond. They camped by the beautiful river ; they drank of their many liquors; they toasted the king ; they buried a bottle, with a written memorial of their trans- montane expedition; and they went home thinking that in all the great wilderness there was no white settler. But down near Shep- herdstown, south of the Potomac, in an old graveyard, is one stone to the memory of a German woman who died in 1707.
About three years before Spotswood's famous expedition, in 1713, the immigration to America had begun from the north of Ireland.
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They were Scotch Presbyterians who had come to Ireland in "the planting of Ulster," and later were somewhat mingled with English Puritans and the Huguenot migration. But the people who had saved the day for their king at the gates of Derry, and made Ulster a pros- perous and orderly land, were not permitted to dwell in peace. Under the Test Act these Presbyterian people were made exceedingly un- comfortable. They could hold no office; they could not be married by their own ministers; lands were leased by bishops and landlords, with clauses forbidding the erection of meeting houses. The Schism Act of 1714 would have swept the Presbyterian Church out of existence in Ireland, had not Queen Anne died before it came into operation. The Presbyterian people of Ulster, estranged and wearied by the long pro- scriptions and exactions, began to leave the country by thousands. For nearly forty years, without intermission, the stream flowed to the American shores. There, in the wilderness of a new country, they hoped to enjoy, with the blessing of God, that ease and quiet of con- science, that freedom to serve God in their own way, and that happiness of home which was denied them in their native land. But the hand of God was in that great migration. To the new and unexplored Con- tinent, a land of large proportions, with great forests, great rivers and great mountains, sparsely occupied with wandering tribes of Indians, it sent a hardy race, with indomitable courage and unfailing fortitude, untrammeled by love of ease or habits of luxury. Physically and morally they were the people to conquer the wilderness, to resist the ravages of American Indians, to slay the wild beasts of the forest, to climb the mountain passes and ford the great rivers, and press on, to make their homes, and find their freedom and build a noble civiliza- tion. The Scotch-Irish came into Eastern Pennsylvania, and not cor- dially received by those who were there before them, passed on into the country west of the Alleghanies and made the strong population of Western Pennsylvania in many counties, filled to this day with Presby- terian churches. Then a stream turned south and crossed the Potomac into the great Virginia Valley, and passed on and on up the Valley in- to and through Augusta and Rockbridge, and dividing again, went into the splendid Southwest of Virginia, to spread themselves in Ken- tucky and Tennessee, or turned East over the Blue Ridge to find homes in the Southside, and extend farther down through the Pied- mont of the Carolinas. There were many "Macs," whose fathers came from the Highlands of Scotland, and many English names, and some French Huguenots. And all of them, Calvinist and Presbyterian, welded together by a common faith and witness for the truth, and by a common experience of persecution and exile, in the new continent
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bravely began their indomitable exertions for freedom and religion, for the right and privilege of free men to make their bread and to build their altars. Along the western valley, from the Potomac to the Holston, they settled.
They felled the giant trees and built their cabins, and cleared their fields." They lived on game and fish until they made their bread from Virginia soil. They contended with beasts and fought the red Indians. They made a wall of defence of manly breasts, which was the protection of all the English settlements on the eastern rivers of Virginia. They were the people of West Augusta, to which Washington declared he would look for defense in the last resort.
SETTLEMENTS 'IN THE VALLEY. It is an old tradition that the first white man to make his home in the Valley was a Welshman. Morgan Morgan was his name and he lived at Bunker Hill, between Winchester and Martinsburg. That was in 1726. And Joist Hite, with sixteen families, in 1732, came south of Winchester about six miles. Dr. Foote says "it was the first regular settlement west of the Blue Ridge in Virginia."
Three years later another settlement of Scotch-Irish was made yet farther up on the Opequon River, and now the migration set in in a steady stream. At Opequon the name of William Hoge appears, "an exile for Christ's sake from Scotland in the days of persecution," the American ancestor of the family which for four or five genera- tions has given men of power and eloquence to the Presbyterian pulpit. With him were Vances and Glasses and Whites, whose descendants are with us to this day, true to the faith of their fathers. Dr. Foote in his invaluable Sketches says that Opequon was the first church in which was gathered the first Presbyterian congregation west of the Blue Ridge. The old Stone Church has been rebuilt in late years, and with its green lawns about it, and its well-cared-for church yard, where the first comers rest in their tombs, it is perhaps the most interesting of the old Presbyterian Churches in Virginia. Howe's Historical Collection says that "the spot where Tuscarora Church now stands is the first place where the gospel was publicly preached and divine worship performed west of the Blue Ridge." And Dr. James R. Graham, of Winchester, in his book, now in press, The Planting of the Presbyterian Church in Northern Virginia, has with great care and research developed the fact that still earlier there was a church and a settlement of Presbyterians on the south side of the Potomac, near Shepherdstown. As early as 1719, in the records of the old Synod of Philadelphia, there was a petition from the people of Potomoke, in Virginia, that an able gospel minister be sent to
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settle among them, and the Rev. Daniel McGill reported, in 1720, that he had visited their people and "put the people into church order." He had organized a Presbyterian Church.
It was in 1739 that a petition came to the Presbytery of Philadel- phia from "the back part of Virginia," i. e., from Augusta County, and five years later, in 1744, the Rev. John Thompson came and made his home in the upper Valley. In 1741 the Rev. Samuel Caven, supplying the churches in the lower Valley, went over to the south branch of the Potomac, in answer to earnest supplication from the land of the Van Meters. It was in 1738 that the Synod of New York petitioned the Governor of Virginia that the Presbyterians of Virginia might have "the free enjoyment of their civil and religious liberties." The author of the petition was the Rev. John Caldwell, who himself presented the petition, and then settled a number of Presbyterian families in the counties of Prince Edward, Charlotte and Campbell. He was the grandfather of John C. Calhoun, the statesman and jurist of South Carolina. In 1738, the Rev. James Anderson preached to the settlers of Augusta County, in the house of John Lewis, the first sermon between the Blue Ridge and North Mountains. And in 1740 the Rev. John Blair, at one time the Presi- dent of Princeton College, and father of Rev. John D. Blair, after- wards in Richmond, visited the people of the upper Valley and organized four churches-Forks of James (Halls, New Monmouth, now Lexington) Timber Ridge, New Providence and North Mountain (Brown and Hebron)-and from these have grown the numerous constellation we know as Lexington Presbytery.
THE GORDONS OF LANCASTER. At the time, 1738, when Mr. Anderson preached in the home of John Lewis in Augusta, there came two Scotch gentlemen of wealth and standing, James and John Gordon, who settled in Lancaster County, on the Rappahannock River. About these pious and cultivated gentlemen gathered churches, and from them descended families, widely known and honored in Virginia to-day. James Waddell, the blind preacher, was their minister for some years.
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