METHODIST REVIEW.

JANUARY, 1904.

ART. I.-BISHOP RANDOLPH S. FOSTER.

In the list of men admitted on trial in the Ohio Annual Conference of 1837 we find the name of Randolph S. Foster. Tradition says that he had already distinguished himself, while a sophomore in Augusta College, as a young preacher of remarkable power. He was full of zeal, very popular in the region round about, extolled by admiring friends, and quite too easily persuaded to leave the college and seek admission into the Annual Conference. Fifty-eight years later, in the sublime and solemn hour of relinquishing his effective ministry, he referred to his first Annual Conference, and said of the first bishop he had ever seen: "I thought of him as a sort of demigod. I felt the impression, when he walked into the room, as if some great being had come from another sphere; and there are a great many people who think of bishops that way now. If they knew them as well as I do they would change their minds. When my name was called-a stripling of seventeen years-I had an inexperienced presiding elder to represent me, and he made this remarkably stupid representation: 'Mr. Bishop, this is a splendid young man.' But David Young, one of the old stagers of the West, arose. He had been presiding elder a long time, and he stretched out his finger and said: 'Mr. Bishop, you have never been in the West before; we call potatoes splendid out here!" Little did any in that Conference then foresee the truly splendid career of that young man for sixty years thereafter, or imagine that his light would shine

more and more until it eclipsed the radiance of many a brilliant eastern star.

EARLY MINISTRY.

The territory of the Ohio Conference in 1837 extended far into Virginia, and young Foster's first appointment was that of junior preacher on the Charleston Circuit, with John G. Bruce as preacher in charge, and Elijah H. Field as his presiding elder. He was changed the next year and sent as junior preacher to the Chester Circuit. In September, 1839, he was admitted into full connection in the Conference, ordained deacon, and appointed to the West Union Circuit, in the Chillicothe District, in Ohio, with John W. Clark as preacher in charge. In the following July he was married to Miss Sarah A. Miley, of Cincinnati, the ceremony being performed by the Rev. W. H. Raper, one of the Methodist pastors of that city. At the next Conference he was stationed at Hillsboro, with William Ellsworth as his senior. It was not until he had traveled four years, and had been ordained elder, that he was made sole preacher in charge, at Portsmouth. Here, however, he remained but one year, when he was changed again to the Hillsboro station, and at the next Conference removed to the Ninth Street Church in Cincinnati. In 1844 he was sent to Lancaster, on the Columbus District, the first appointment in his ministry at which he continued two years in succession. The next two years he was at Springfield, on the Urbana District, and in 1848 and 1849 at Wesley Chapel, Cincinnati, his last appointment in the Ohio Conference.

These thirteen years of his early ministry were a most important period in the life of this young servant of God. They were the preparation and apprenticeship of a great lifework. His power as a preacher grew and strengthened, and his reading and study went far to make up whatever loss he sustained by the ill-advised interruption of his college course. We know not what a full course at Augusta College, Kentucky, might have done for this young man of exceptional capabilities. Perhaps certain qualities of his later voluminous writings which have met adverse criticism would never have appeared had he been more perfectly trained during the plastic years that come before one reaches his twentieth birth

day. One thing, however, we do know, that, in his later life, he lost no opportunity to condemn the error of dissuading young men from the early scholastic discipline which no subsequent labor can ever fully supply. His colleague in office and his lifelong friend, Bishop Merrill, writes on this matter as follows: "While no one can know the extra labor which his early advent into the ministry caused him, it may be fairly assumed, from experiences of others, that he felt he was handicapped for years through the unwisdom of devoted friends who urged him into the Conference while yet immature in years as well as limited in scholastic training. Through similar influences," he adds, "my own early ministry was hampered, and needless burdens, both of work and anxiety, were borne for many years. Little do our presiding elders realize the full significance of their mistake, when they insist upon taking a young man out of school to fill some temporary vacancy, which would better go unsupplied than to mar the lifetime work of one whom God has called to make the best possible use of his ministry."

In the rough hill-country of western Virginia our young itinerant met his full share of the hardships of a Methodist preacher of that early time. There were long and hard rides, continuous preaching in private houses, barns, public halls, and in the open grove, poor accommodations and frequent perilous exposure. But these vigorous exercises and extensive travel had their various compensations. There was large opportunity for communion with nature in her varied forms of beauty, and for minute acquaintance with men and things. And manifold were the blessings of the young itinerant who enjoyed the confidence and sympathy of an experienced senior colleague. The first four years of his ministry Foster was junior preacher, and he was wont to speak in all his later years with the greatest affection of those elder men of God who counseled and directed him in his first circuits. The old itinerant system afforded fine opportunities for a gifted preacher to magnify his office. On some circuits he could repeat the same sermon a dozen times in succession without much probability of its being twice heard by any one person.

Foster's love of nature was absorbing, and his eye and ear were open to the visions of grandeur and beauty, and to the un

written music of the world. These were continually speaking to him of the unseen and eternal. He saw God in all, through all, over all. He had his hours of mystic reverie, when "outward forms and inward thoughts teemed with assurances of immortality." In 1878, in one of his Chautauqua lectures on things "beyond the grave," he made a touching allusion to his early days as the memory of them had been awakened one morning by the cooing of a dove: "It came borne on the morning air, and as I listened to its swell it choked me, almost broke my heart; and in a moment I saw a dove on a broken limb of a walnut tree standing by an old crooked lane, down. by a worm fence; and I saw its bosom heaving as if its heart would break. I gazed at it. I was a little boy, standing on the yard-fence of my father's house. More than fifty years, kad elapsed since that event, but it stood out before me that morning as if it had been but yesterday. I lived life over again. I went in and saw my mother, beautiful as she was in her young womanhood. She put her hands on my head, kissed me, and soothed my childish sorrow. I bowed at her knee and recited my infant prayers again. Then came early school days, and old playmates gathered about me, and old loves and joys were lived over. Creeks, hills, roads, lanes, fields, and woods familiar to childhood looked at me with their old familiar look, each alive and palpitating with precious memories. My cheeks were bedewed with tears, as the thrilling pictures with such strange vividness passed before me. Voices of the long since dead sounded on that still morning air; I seemed to hear them calling over the gulf of half a hundred years, as they greeted me in that long ago. Then I was a young man. My college days were past. The wide world was before me. With anxious and trembling expectation I was looking into the future, all uncertain of what might be its sorrows or successes. My horse was at the gate, my father's blessing sounded in my ears afresh, my mother's tearful farewell was repeated. I hastily mounted my horse and rode away."

In spite of his constant travel and preaching this young itinerant found time for extensive reading, and for continuous and accurate study of what he read. His first published work, written before he was twenty-nine, shows his familiarity with such solid

standards as Calvin's Institutes, Dwight's Theology, Dick's Theology, Ridgley's Body of Divinity, and the writings of Jonathan Edwards, to say nothing of the standard works of Arminian authors, and the books required to be studied and read in the Conference course. He began early to collect, and held in high esteem through life, such series of works as the Bridgewater Treatises, the Bampton Lectures, the Hulsean Lectures, and the leading theological reviews. He seems never to have acquired much taste or proficiency in philological and exegetical research, but inclined rather to metaphysical and philosophical discussions, and in his early ministry gave courses of lectures on questions of cosmology, geology, and the origin of life.

PASTOR IN NEW YORK.

During the two years of his work at Wesley Chapel, Cincinnati, he became widely famous as a controversialist in defending the doctrines of Arminian Methodism against the attack of a Presbyterian clergyman of that city. He had already acquired an enviable reputation as a preacher; his letters on Calvinism proved him to be also an accomplished theologian. At the New York Conference of 1850 the Mulberry Street Church, New York city, was left to be supplied, and in September of that year R. S. Foster, then thirty years of age, was transferred to fill the vacancy. Excepting the three years he served as president of the Northwestern University, he continued as a pastor in and about New York until 1868, when he was elected professor of systematic theology in the Drew Theological Seminary. It is interesting to note that he spent two years at Mulberry Street, two at Greene Street, two at Pacific Street in Brooklyn, in the New York East Conference, then again in the New York Conference one year at Trinity, two at Washington Square, one at Sing Sing, three at Eighteenth Street, and two again at Washington Square. During these fifteen years as a pastor in the great metropolis he rose more and more into prominence as a leader among his brethren. He was everywhere recognized as a commanding personality, a man of rich and ripe experience and of many warm and notable friendships. His praise was in all the churches. In the homes of his people he