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

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before his turn came, and every one declined. XVhen he was called and actually stood up to speak, small as he was. there was a silence which was appalling to so young a speaker. The question was whether the world would not have been better off if Napoleon had never lived. He had prepared no speech, but was determined to do his best, and so said: I think Bonaparte was a very bad man! and took his seat. He remarks that he was never scared afterwards. His capacity for stage fright seems to have been exhausted on that occasion. It scared all the scare out of him. Such was his success in speaking that he was chosen to repre- sent his class at commencement, and at his graduation delivered a flrst honor oration. Feeling assured that he was called to preach the gospel, after teaching two sessions at Milton, N. C., he attended Cnion Theological Seminary, and after finishing his course, and perhaps before, served as assistant instructor in Hebrew. He afterwards attended the Theological Department of the University of Halle, Germany, where among his teachers was the celebrated Tholuc, to whom he seems to have been much attached. After his return to America, he became pastor of the Presbyterian Church of Danville, Yirginia, and afterwards, of Tinkling Spring and XVaynesboro. VVhile in the latter pastorate he was married .to Miss Mary Morrison, daughter of the Rev. blames Morrison. pastor of New Providence Clmrch. She still survives at the good old age of eighty-one. Later, he was called to the pastorate of the church in Staunton, which he served until he was chosen Secretary of Publication, and went to Philadelphia to take charge of this great work. In April, 1854. he was elected professor of Oriental Literature in Union Theological Seminary, Yirginia, and returned to his native State to enter upon that which was to be the great work of his life, training young men for the ministry. It is said that, first and last, during the thirty-seven years in which he taught in the Seminary. nearly seven hundred men received the impress of his moulding hands. As a teacher, Dr. Smith was eminently practical and straightforward. There have been few instructors who have excelled him in impressing on their students a feeling of deep reverence for the Bible as the XVord of God, and in applying plain, common-sense principles of interpretation in expounding it. He combined critical and exegetical methods in a most happy way. His sojourn in Germany had on him an effect the very opposite of that which it has had on many American students. Instead of being carried away with the neological theories so prevalent there, he seems only to have been impressed with the extreme danger of rational- istic principles, and thereby the better prepared for warning others against them. His robust understanding and firm faith stood steadfast amid the currents of tendencies that have swept so many feebler men from the moorings of faith into 20

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his constitutional walk with measured step, in somewhat the same exact and care- ful way as that in which he led his students along the paths of Church History and Polity. But there was no form more familiar to the eye than that of Dr. Smith, who never seemed to walk for recreation, exercise, or any such frivolities. but always because he had to go somewhere to do something or to see that some- thing was done. He was one of the busiest of men-busy in the lecture-room, in his study, on the road. and wherever he happened to be his hands seemed always full. His course of instruction was by no means lightg yet in addition to this, the affairs of the Seminary of many kinds fell largely to his charge: while the duties of his copastorate of College Church, a wide correspondence, and the care of a little farm and his family imposed an additional burden. It is not strange then, that, whether you saw him with his portfolio under his arm, going to his classes, or on horseback. going out to visit his congregation, or on foot, starting out to look after his farming operations. you always said to yourself, Here is a man who has much to do, and he is doing it with his might. In the hard times just after the war when the resources of the Seminary were destroyed or unproductive, and there was little or no salary, especially during the summer of 1865, Dr. Smith, like Dr. Dabney, could be seen daily going forth to. or returning from, the fields in which, with his own hands he tilled the land to secure food for his household. His busiest time of all was probably that during which he was writing his commentary on the Psalms and the Proverbs, as his part of the work now known as The Bible Commentary of Jamieson, Fausset, and Brown. The Hebrew students of that time will ever bear a vivid remembrance of the recitations in that language before breakfast on dark winter mornings to which the sleepy procession went down, each with lamp in hand, to find a professor who was himself quite wide-awake and very quick to catch the dilatory student napping. Dr. Smith was born at Montrose, Powhatan County, Virginia, June goth. 1811. His mother, who was widowed in his early childhood, had the sole responsibility of directing his conduct and shaping his character, and such was her character, that to his dying day, her memory was cherished by him with the tenderest reverence and filial affection. He was graduated at Hampden-Sidney College in 1829, and though only eighteen years old, divided the first honor with tl1e late Chancellor Garland of Vanderbilt University. He has left interesting and humorous accounts of his first experiences at college, when as a boy of fourteen in roundabouts he began his course. He had declaimed at school, but delivering a speech of his own he found quite another matter. He tells of his first debate in the hall of the Union Society soon after he entered college. His name beginning with S., many were called on T9

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the swirling gulfs of skepticism, while his knowledge of them enabled him to station warning signals for those who came under his instruction in after years. It would be impossible to say to what extent the tirm stand of the Southern Presbyterian Church on vital questions to-day is due to Dr. Smith's teaching and intiuence. All felt that he-unlike so many professors of Theology and writers on Theological themes, who with the word reverence continually used, yet remorselessly trample under foot the most sacred verities of Scripture-could say with Paul, XYe it 1sE1.112v13, and therefore speak. Une of the greatest services which Dr. Smith rendered to the cause of minis- terial education, for which he did so much in many ways, was his energetic work in securing a linancial basis for the continuance of the work of Union Theological Seminary just after the Civil XVar when its resources were so seriously affected by the general wreck and havoc of that unhappy era. Few 111611 knew more people or had more intiuence over them. Knowing of many in the North who would, in all likelihood, be glad to extend a helping hand to the prostrate institution, he did what few Southern men, in their sore-heartedness and humiliation, could have done. He went to these friends and made known to them the facts of the case. A generous response was the result. His old friend, Cyrus H. McCormick, gave 330,000 for endowing one professorship, and Mrs. S. P. Lees, Hr. Henry Young, Mr, H. K. Corning, besides many others, gave generously for the rehabilitation of the Seminary. Among these donations should be mentioned that of Mrs. lirown, of Baltimore, for the erection of the new library building, an enterprise to which Dr. Smith's energies were earnestly directed for several years. lt is thus referred to by Dr. XV. XV. Moore in a historical sketch of Union Seminary: It has already been noted that the Brown Library Hall was erected in ISSO. The writer, who was then a student in the Seminary, remembers well the laying of the corner-stone with Masonic ceremonies and an address by Dr. Smith. That was a glad day for all the friends of the Seminary, but especially so for the man who had done so much to reestablish the institution after the warg who had watched and promoted the growth of the library with almost parental solicitude, and who had secured the liberal donation by means of which the books were now to be suitably housed and conveniently arranged for future generations of pro- fessors and students. Before the erection of the commodious building with room for 30,000 volumes or more, the 11,000 books already gathered were crowded into bursting shelves in the galleries of the Seminary chapel. XYhen moved into the new building, they were, of course, rearranged and catalogued, a laborious task which had twice before been performed by Dr. Smith, viz., in 1834 and in 1869. In his report as librarian in 1869, after stating that he had again entered all the books in a manuscript catalogue, and also in a well-bound printed and double DI