Hampden Sydney College - Kaleidoscope Yearbook (Hampden Sydney, VA)

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much, but Grace had done most of all. He preached from a true and profound experience of the mercy and power of God. He knew the deadly evil of sin. He knew the saving grace of Christ. He knew the brooding sorrows of the human heart, He knew the comfort of communion with God. He knew that the Gospel was God's supreme answer to man's supreme need. And the crowning glory of this pulpit is that, from the first day of its occupancy to the last. it rang true to that evangel: Behold the lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world. There was never a day in all these fifty-four years when men could not have pointed to him as the original of Cowper's immortal portrait: .4 There stands the messenger of truth: there stands The legate of the skies! His theme divine, His office sacred, his credentials clear. By him the violated law speaks out, Its thunders: and by him, in strains as sweet As angels used. the Gospel whispers peace. He stablishes the strong. restores the weak, Reelaims the wanderer, binds the broken heart, And, arm'd himself in panoply complete Of heavenly temper, furnishes with arms Bright as his own. and trains, by every rule Of holy discipline, to glorious war, The sacramental host- of God's elect! 23

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also in point of force he ranks with the masters of the modern pulpit. It is true that many of his later discourses were somewhat discursive in treatment, neces- sarily so because of the innumerable demands upon his time, but he never failed to bring beaten oil to the sanctuary when it was possible, and he never for a moment relinquished or lowered his conception of the teaching function of the ministry. His people were not only interested and entertained, they were also instructed and nourished with truth. The lecture which he delivered at the University of Yirginia forty-nine years ago on The Success of Christianity, An Evidence of its Divine Origin. and known to some of you from its publication in the portly volume entitled Evidences of Christianity, is a striking specimen of the kind of work he was capable of when he was at his best. I venture the asser- tion, though it seems a sweeping one. that in the whole realm of apologetic literature, there is not a more polished or more powerful vindication of the truth of the Christian religion. I have often wished that it might be published sepa- rately and thus given a wider circulation. His substantial attainments, then. were no less remarkable than his graces of speech. But here we have sighted a subject too large for the limits of this address. A small island, to use Dr. Breeds figure, can be explored in a few hours, but not a wide continent. The one may be characterized in a word, but not the other. This island is a bank of sand, that one a smiling pasture, a third a mass of cliffs, a fourth a mountain peak. Hut the continent is a vast com- bination of all of these features indefinitely multiplied. So the gifts of some men are insular and may be summed up in a few words, but the gifts of the man in whose memory we are assembled to-day were continental. Every one that has heard him even once saw that there were here peaceful valleys where the grass grew green and the sweet liowers bloomed and streams ran rippling. But those who sailed farther alongshore found that there were also mighty cliffs where his conviction defied the waves of passing opinion. And when they pushed their explorations into the interior, they came upon great uplands of philosophy, where the granite of a strong theology protruded and where the snows of doctrine lay deep. But the thoughtful explorer knew well that the granite was essential to the solidity of those towering heights and that without those snows upon the peaks there would have been no streams in the valleys, no broad reaches of meadow, no blooming tiowers. He was indeed a superb rhetorician, with a marvelous wealth of diction, a phenomenal power of description, and a rare felicity of illustrationg but rhetoric in the pulpit has no abiding charm apart from truth. Strong men and thoughtful women do not sit for fifty-four years in ever increasing numbers under a ministry which has not in it the strength of divine truth, deeply studied, sincerely believed, and earnestly proclaimed. We have now seen something of what he was in his preaching as a man, and something of what he was as a scholar, but after all the hiding of his power lay in what he was as a saint. Nature had done much for him, cultivation had done 22

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:fr . 1 - i if 1 fi' Q if 3 'Ii I XX X . Y I ii . , Nik. 'ff A 4, - ' V, X I I Y lj' I .., ,max I sbp! .5 , - I i ' 'I i v ' ' ' is -' - f'-fi' eip, Q i ,H e' o , e -- ' ' -4-:ini lf' . fe, V 2: f f o , f vlf' A-f-sirens 2 t xf ififaf' H f 1' ' 'V '- Y ' f i ' 'Rf Xp r 3 fi' 1, ij 4 ,sg testis' W 1 f , a t . A if llbbilip . !IDc1kimieQ. CBOVCIIIIOII of Ulrglllia, 18902159-I. BY Trionxs J. G.xRIniN. IXCIQ the death of Dr. Hoge thcre was left perhaps no citizen of Virginia whose death could have produced a more profound impression upon thc people than that of ex-Governor Philip XYatkins McKinney. That he was deeply beloved and highly honored throughout the length and breadth of the Commonwealth and beyond its confines is attested by the great number of editorials and contributions to the public press, deploring his loss, and setting forth his life and character as a model for imitation. To say that he was born May Ist, 1832, and died March lst, 1890, is all that he would wish to be said about him. such was his aversion to praise, and so retiring was he in the sweetness of his nature that he shrank from any demonstrations of display made in his honor. llut there is a duty the living owe to the generations to come. As the subject of this sketch was inspired by the noble examples of great men who had gone before him, so the children of the present age and of future ages should be taught to emulate the example of one, who, though dead, speaketh through his life-both public and private-of devotion to duty, of the love of right, of temperance, of morality, of love for his fellow man, of genuine true politeness, the beauty of his domestic life and the consecration of his heart to his God. It is not often that a child born in a community grows up to eminence in the neighborhood in which he has been reared. and long after he attains the age of 24