@barroshouse.com - 11567 Days - 1 Iyar 5782 - May 2, 2022
Boudinot, Bible Society Founder
Do you know all of the presidents of the United States? Does Elias Boudinot ring a bell? He was chosen President of the United States "in Congress assembled" on November 4, 1782. It was in his capacity as president that he signed the peace treaty with England that brought an end to the Revolutionary War. But his importance to Christian history lies in another direction.
Elias Boudinot was born on this day, May 2, 1740 in Philadelphia. One of his ancestors was a French Protestant who had fled from France when King Louis XIV took protection away from these Huguenots.
Boudinot studied law and became a respected lawyer in New Jersey and made a fortune, much of which he gave away to charity. Because he was an energetic Patriot, his neighbors elected him as their delegate to the Continental Congress. After the Revolutionary war, they elected him as their representative to the new Federal Congress. He served three terms.
But Boudinot's real interests were not political as much as religious. An Episcopalian, he served on the board of directors of the College of New Jersey (Princeton). This school had been founded to train clergymen. Boudinot helped establish and pay for its Department of Natural Sciences, but he was even more concerned that the resurrection of Christ be taught.
Widely read in Bible literature and a lifelong student of the scriptures, Boudinot wrote a reply to Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason. His response was called The Age of Revelation. He also wrote a life of William Tennent, the man who started a "log college" to train preachers.
Boudinot thought the American Indians were the ten lost tribes of Israel (DNA studies have since proven him wrong). He wrote a book about that, too, titled A Star in the West. His concern for the Indians (he is not to be confused with the Elias Boudinot who sold out the Cherokee Nation) led him to find ways to educate them.
Given his interests, it is hardly surprising that Boudinot was all for Bible societies, whose purpose was to get the Bible into the hands of as many people as possible. In 1816, he pushed others to join him in forming the American Bible Society. He served as its first president and gave it $10,000 in a day when an annual salary of $400 was considered good money.
We've pretty much forgotten Boudinot's service as president. But his work with the Bible Society will never die. The American Bible Society is still with us to this day, and sponsors the work of Bible translation and distribution around the world.
Bibliography:
1. Boudinot, Elias. A Star in the West, or, a humble attempt to discover the long lost ten tribes of Israel, preparatory to their return to their beloved city, Jerusalem. Trenton, New Jersey: Published by D. Fenton, S. Hutchinson and J. Dunham,1816.
2. "Boudinot, Elias." Encyclopedia Americana. Chicago: Americana Corp, 1956.
3. Boyd, George Adams. Elias Boudinot, Patriot and Statesman, 1740-1821. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952.
4. Klos, Stanley L., editor "Elias Boudinot, 4th American President." Virtual American Biographies. http://www.famousamericans.net/eliasboudinot/
Colorful William Taylor
William Taylor was born in Virginia on this day, May 2, 1821. He would make his mark as a Methodist circuit rider and missionary. The mark he made as a child, however, was probably not much different than that of other boys of his day.
There was the time, for instance, when three-year-old William saw a large cluster of bees hanging down from the front of his grandfather's hive. "I said, 'Ah, my sweeties, I'll fix you.' So I got an empty horn of a cow and filled it with water and dashed it on the bees. They resented it and speared me most unmercifully. The lesson I learned was to attend to my own business and not meddle with the affairs of other folks."
Before William was ten, his Grandmother taught him the Lord's prayer and explained that he could be a son of God. He longed for this relationship but did not know how to get it. Overhearing the story of a poor black man who had gotten salvation, he wondered why he could not himself. "But soon after, as I sat one night by the kitchen fire, the Spirit of the Lord came on me and I found myself suddenly weeping aloud and confessing my sins to God in detail, as I could recall them, and begged him for Jesus's sake to forgive them, with all I could not remember; and I found myself trusting in Jesus that it would all be so, and in a few minutes my heart was filled with peace and love, not the shadow of a doubt remaining."
After his conversion, William backslid. Satan (as he later perceived) told him he was beyond forgiveness. For years he lived in dread and misery. But when, as a teen, he was restored to Christ, he was so joyful he had to tell others. It was the beginning of a long life of evangelization. "Satan took advantage of my very sensitive and over-scrupulous conscience and gave me a great deal of trouble, but the Lord was very patient with me and often defeated him." His greatest torment was to go up to perfect strangers and speak to them cold turkey about their souls, but he did it until he learned better methods. One was to join the people at their work--log-rolling, maybe--win their confidence with his muscles and then invite the workers to hear him preach.
William rode circuits in Virginia and Maryland. In 1849 he accepted an appointment to California, with Annie Kimberlie, his wife, and their two children. For a fortnight they lived in the open air before taken in. William cut trees and built a home. He ministered to California's gamblers, gold-diggers and sick. Annie was four and a half years younger than her husband, but looked younger still. People mistook them for father and daughter. Although deeply in love, they were often separated for years while he led revival meetings and mission work around the world. He reasoned with himself that if whalers could leave their families for three years to gather blubber, should he be willing to do less for the greater treasure of souls?
William Taylor's labors took him to every continent; he preached in Canada, Australia, Africa, India, Britain and South America. Wherever he went, hundreds turned to Christ. He was made bishop of Africa. With wry humor, he remarked that if he disposed to lay a scheme for killing bishops decently, he would advise that by all means they avoid the highlands of Liberia and remain on the deadly malaria-infested coast. William Taylor urged that missions be self-supporting. By his hard work, he showed how they might. Taylor University in Upland, Indiana, is named for him.
Bibliography:
1. Moreau, A. Scott. "Taylor, William." Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions. (Grand Rapids, Mich. : Baker Books, 2000).
2. Taylor, William. William Taylor of California, Bishop of Africa : an autobiography; revised with a preface by the Rev. C.G. Moore. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1897).
3. "Taylor, William." Anderson, Gerald H. Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions. (New York : Macmillan Reference USA; London : Simon & Schuster and Prentice Hall International, 1998).
Sheldon Jackson Accommodated the Newspapers
Three times during his active life, newspapers reported Sheldon Jackson's death. Once they even printed his obituary. The heroic missionary finally accommodated the newspapers on this day, May 2, 1909, when he did actually die after an operation.
Sheldon became a missionary in United States territory because his Presbyterian mission board turned him down when he asked to go overseas. He was lacking in physique, they said. And it is true that he had weak eyes and was frequently sick.
The young man proved them wrong. Although barely five feet tall, Sheldon was a dynamo of energy. No other missionary could top his achievement in the Americas. Beginning his work as a teacher with Choctaw Indians in Oklahoma, he planted over 100 Presbyterian churches in ten states or territories--Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, Utah, Wisconsin and Wyoming. As if that were not enough, he set up schools in Arizona and New Mexico.
But the work for which he is best remembered began on another frontier: Alaska. After organizing churches and schools for his mission in this northern territory, the hard-working missionary accepted a government position as General Agent of Education in Alaska.
At that time, the U. S. government sought to assimilate Native Americans. It saw education as the best way to do this. In many areas, Indian children were taken from their families and placed in boarding schools. Although Sheldon agreed that assimilation was needed, he refused to break up families, certain it would do irreversible harm. Instead, he opened schools in Eskimo villages. The government realized it did not have enough money to build all the necessary schools. And so, with full legal authority, Sheldon contracted with mission agencies to do the work. In turn, the missions provided more than half the funding for the schools. However, missionaries were not allowed to evangelize in classrooms.
Nonetheless, Sheldon urged moral instruction. "The training of the schools should be extended to the heart as well as the mind and hand," he wrote. "The teacher who would be true to his mission and accomplish the most good, must give prominence to moral as well as intellectual instruction."
Sheldon appealed to major Protestant denominations for help. Many pitched in. Sheldon also lobbied continually for admission of Alaska as a state to the union and laid the foundations for that to happen. He educated Americans about the territory and helped establish a nature society.
Concerned that the Aleuts lacked food resources, Sheldon made what was probably his greatest contribution to the people he loved. He introduced domesticated reindeer from Siberia into Alaska. This move was bitterly contested by those who opposed helping the Aleuts. But his eventual success is credited with saving the Aleuts from extinction as well as creating a major meat industry.
Bibliography:
1. Haycox, Stephen W. "Sheldon Jackson in Historical Perspective: Alaska Native Schools and Mission Contracts, 1885-1894." The Pacific Historian, Volume XXVIII, Number 1, pages 18-28. http://www.alaskool.org/native_ed/articles/ s_haycox/sheldon_jackson.htm.
2. "Jackson, Sheldon." Dictionary of American Biography.
3. "Jackson, Sheldon." Encyclopedia Britannica. Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc, 1968.
4. "Sheldon Jackson." http://www.netstate.com/states/peop/people/ak_sj.htm
5. Tower, Elizabeth A. "Reading, Religion, and Reindeer: Sheldon Jackson's Legacy to Alaska." Anchorage, AK, 1988. http://www.yukonpresbytery.com/histories/ sheldonjackson.html
