Northwestern Bible School - Scroll Yearbook (Minneapolis, MN)

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whereas I had known but eight months in a normal school and the somewhat desultory work of an ungraded school. President Fisher proposed to let me attempt the freshman class, on condition that I would graciously go back into the preparatory department if I proved insufficient for this more advanced work. Suffice it to say that by hard study, often lasting till twelve or even one or two in the morning, I so far mastered the lessons as to make the freshman year in fair form, and from that time the work grew easier and my pleasure in the same increased accordingly. While, owing to the generosity of my backer, I was never financially embarrassed during these four years, yet no lack of economy characterized my conduct I boarded in the country, at a farmhouse, a mile away from the col¬ lege in order to keep expenses down. The annual outlay of these four years never exceeded $250.00 per annum. Even that amount might have been shaved a bit, but for the fact that I had brought my horse and buggy with me from Kentucky. This increased both my outlay and income, as I used the same to fill a preaching appointment at North Madison and other near-by points. My Greek letter fraternity, Iota chapter of the Beta Theta Phi, was not a mere social organization, as is now too sadly true, but a most serious and helpful fraternity. We had our feeds, of course, and our frolics; but the main business of our sessions was to inspire and assist one another in the compe¬ titions usual to college honors; and the history of the college, at that time, will prove that we greatly profited thereby, carrying off honors in numbers equaling the trophies of our several competitors. It is a sad confession to have to make to the present generation, but since it is solemnly true, let us say it; in spite of my splendid physical frame, I was not a famous athlete. At football I was a failure; even at baseball I was never a winner; and at tennis, only passable. There were only two respects in which I excelled—wrestling and debating; in other words, in physical and mental tussles I took the college honors. Home from Hanover College for the holidays. New Liberty, Kentucky 1882 . My father and four brothers . Reading from left to right: Back row — Orlando Branson , William Bell, Tkeophiltts Joel , Fletcher Tivis; Front row—My father , Bran¬ son Radish Riley , and Walter Levi.

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Left alone in the room we had occupied together, I was fortunate enough to secure a man to share the room with me who had recovered from home¬ sickness, and the rest of the school year moved more satisfactorily. However, it was not a year of financial flourishing; my board cost me $L45 a week, my room considerably less. I had gone to school with a two- dollar trunk, and a $13.00 suit. It was dark blue with a brown stripe in it and I wore it all the week; borrowed an iron of my landlady and pressed it Satur¬ day nights for Sunday wear. Before the year closed, the seat of the trousers gave away; but with the suit there came, according to custom, some pieces of goods off the same bolt, and so I patched, carefully striving to keep the patch above the coat-tail line. More than once I had to be careful about letter writing, lest I should not be able to scare up an additional three-cent stamp with which to make a further appeal to my father to send me a few dollars more of my tobacco crop balance. The lessons were extremely difficult. I had had only the advantages of country schools and my attendance there was not regular, owing to the farm work which often kept me at home for days together. The Latin I had never seen until that year and the dead language seemed to me to be worse than dead; it was “rotten.” The main event of the year lent assistance and inspiration beyond the conception of those who participated in it. My first Sunday in Valparaiso I went to the Baptist Church and learned to my delight that the pastor’s name was Rev. Edward S. Riley. His audience was not large and he spotted me as a stranger, came down to the pew where I sat, shook hands cordially, and asked me where I came from. When he found out who I was, he invited me home with him and taught his children to claim me as a kinsman. I suspect that that single fact saved me from surrendering the attempt at education and returning with my homesick roommate to old Kentucky. By the spring of 1880 I had accomplished sufficient to secure a teacher’s certificate, and later, in the summer, secured my school on Possum Ridge. However, when the season for school opening approached in 1880, the serious illness of my brother Theophilus, twenty-one months my junior, and the young man to whom the leadership of the farm would naturally fall, pre¬ vented my teaching. His attack was that of typhoid fever; it lasted many weeks and left him unfitted for work that autumn; hence the delay of further schooling for a year. By this time the profit of the tobacco sales was used up and how to get to school became a problem. When discouragement was complete, and I had decided to secure another school and teach, a kindly providence opened a better way. In the autumn of ' 81 a big-hearted, well-to-do farmer in Boone County, Kentucky, James T. Mason, who had known me from my birth, offered to lend me money to complete my college without respite, and also to provide that money without interest. The college selected for my training was Hanover, Indiana. It was one of the oldest of the western Presbyterian colleges and was located five miles out of Madison, in the little village of Hanover, on the crest of a hill by the Ohio river, one of the most beautiful and picturesque spots ever selected for a college. It was near “the Clifty” and other falls made famous by the author of Hoosier School Master. Here I put in four strenuous but delightful years. All my fellow students had enjoyed the advantage of high school training, [ 18] 2

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On June 3, 1885, I graduated from that college with the degree of A.B., holding the fourth place in my class in grade, and the first in debate. Education and Life Calling My education and my life calling were inextricably interwoven. It was in the early autumn of 78 that I made a public profession of my faith in Christ, and during the year at the normal school I was equipping myself to teach my way through college, expecting to adopt the law as my permanent profession. But there was a Divine voice, not audible to the ears of others, but louder than thunder in my secret soul, telling me that my choice was wrong, and that the ministry was the Divine will instead. I hated the suggestion. I had loved the dance! I delighted in horses and hounds! The spirit of the sport was in me, and the ministry looked tame and uninviting. My country pastor had had only a salary of $400 per annum, and slaved in a store all the week to eke out a family living ; and the largest salary paid in the country at that time was $1,000. I had brilliant law acquaintances, at nearby county seats, who were earning handsome sums. Beside, I delighted in debate! To contend for the things that appealed to me was positive pleasure. I told the Lord more than once that if He ever intended to make a minister out of me, He had started wrong. He should have made my nature different. But my arguments with Him availed me nothing. Days of ill-content about my choice followed in what seemed interminable succession, and in spite of the physical weariness with which I fell into bed night after night, sleep refused to come. The fight was on! After some months of turmoil, I at last reluctantly said, “I will; I will preach. A thousand times I have thanked God for calling and compelling, for that is what it meant to me; and since the day when my roughly clothed knees were driven into the black loam of the Kentucky hillside, as I knelt between two rows of tobacco to surrender, I have never had a regret; neither have I had one doubt of the Divine will concerning my work. Into this decision two factors entered with profound influence; first, the dogged determination and the inflexible purpose of my mother that her children should be educated. She herself had come out of a cultured family, but with the whim of a child, had refused to enter the Quaker school that had been opened by her very uncles, that in it their children, nephews and nieces, might be trained. In running away from school to Cincinnati, where her tubercular father had just moved in a vain search for health, she terminated all school possibilities by marrying my father when she was but fifteen, and he three years her senior. But the appreciation of education was in her blood, and she burned it into the very brain of boy and girl alike, that we should go to school and equip ourselves for the largest possible life. On the other side, my father, converted at thirty-three, immediately felt the call to preach. But being without scholastic training, and with five children already, he believed himself unequipped for the same and went his way as a farmer, bearing an ever-conscious grief that he was out of God ' s will, That these two factors were an influence there can be no question; and when, in the first year of my college life, I announced to my father my de¬ termination to preach, and straightway entered upon the same, he hailed it with delight. But very shortly he went to he with the Lord. l 20 ]