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THE
ALEXANDER MEMORIAL.
1879
Anson D. F. Randolph & Company,
900 Broadzuay, New York.
THE ALEXANDER TABLET, ERECTED BY THE
ALUMNI IN THE CHAPEL OF THE THEOLOGICAL
SEMINARY, AT PRINCETON, N. J., WAS UNVEILED
ON THE 29TH OF APRIL, 1879, WHEN THE FOL-
LOWING ADDRESSES WERE DELIVERED.
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2011 with funding from
Microsoft Corporation
http://www.archive.org/details/alexandermemoriaOOnewy
ARCHIBALD ALEXANDER, D.D.
ADDRESS
BY WILLIAM M. PAXTON, D.D.
THESE tablets, as I understand them,
put honor not only upon the names
which they bear, but also upon the
Alumni of Princeton Seminary.
They tell to the world how much we loved
these men, and simply to love such men is our
highest praise.
Archibald Alexander needs no tablet to
perpetuate his name. There is his monument.
Princeton Seminary is the record of his fame.
He projected it, cradled it, nurtured it. He
chose and gathered around him the honored
associates who helped him to make it what it
is. He watched over it for forty years. He
commenced with three students, and lived to
see the Seminary in its full-grown maturity, its
class-rooms crowded with one hundred and
sixty candidates for the ministry. As long as
the fame of Princeton Seminary endures, the
name of Archibald Alexander will not be for-
gotten.
He lives also in his children. Monumental
sons rose up at his side, bright and polished
shafts, that cast their radiance afar, sons who
have inscribed their names side by side with
that of their father upon this entablature of
honor and worth.
He lives also in his writings. The books
of a few men live, but there are some men
who live in their books. In that book on
" Religious Experience " Dr. Alexander lives.
The book itself is a breath of life. A front-
ispiece gives us his picture, but the book is
himself. The one shows us his face, the other
makes us feel the pulsations of his heart.
There was only one man who could have writ-
ten the " Pilgrim's Progress," so there was but
one who could have written this book on re-
ligious experience. The name of John Bun-
9
yan will live as long as there is a pilgrim Zion-
bound; so Dr. Alexander will live in this book
as long as religious experience lasts.
But Archibald Alexander still lives in the
whole Presbyterian Church. John Wesley
lived to impress his image and superscription
upon, and to breathe his spirit into, a whole
denomination, so that wherever in the wide
world you see Methodism, there you see John
Wesley. Dr. Alexander did not live in an
age in which this could be done ; but in his
measure and to an extent which can not now
at this distance of time be readily understood,
he impressed himself upon, and breathed his
spirit into, the whole Presbyterian Church.
It is true, indeed, that Dr. Alexander lived be-
fore the Union ; but it is true also that he
lived before the Division. I speak, therefore,
of his influence as a power in the whole Pres-
byterian Church for two reasons : first, because
it is wicked now for any one to have memory
enough to recollect that there ever was any-
IO
thing but one happy, undivided Presbyterian
Church ; and, secondly, because it is a remark-
able fact connected with the singular power of
this extraordinary man, that his influence was as
potent in one branch of the Church as in the oth-
er. His students were in all the Synods, and
wherever they scattered, no matter on which
side of the fence they stood, they called him
Father. When the news of his death arrived
at the meeting of the New School Synod
in Bloomfleld, New Jersey, the announcement
sent a tide of sorrow through the whole as-
sembly. They hung his portrait up on the
wall of the church, and gathered around it
like mourning, weeping children, and then
passed a series of resolutions, the last clause
of which is, " We crave the privilege to mingle
our tears at the grave of a father."
When I look back through a period of
thirty years to the time when I entered the
ministry, I remember well that there was no
man in all the Church whose simple opinion
II
was so all-powerful and all-controlling as that
of Dr. Alexander. Using the word " Pope "
in its best sense, as a spiritual father, I may say
that if the Presbyterian Church ever had a
Pope it was Archibald Alexander. I do not
know that any Council ever pronounced him
infallible, but when I was a boy there was a
strong belief among Presbyterians, and I do
not believe that it has grown weaker since,
that he came nearer to being infallibly right
than any Pope. He spoke because he knew,
and he seemed to know because he had seen.
Paul was caught up to the third heaven, but
was not permitted to tell about it ; but I have
heard Dr. Alexander talk of heaven as if he
had been there and knew all the angels. The
people who read his " Religious Experience "
had an indefinite impression that he was half
inspired, that somehow or other he was the
last of the Prophets, that he was born a little
late, and for that reason did not get in before
the Canon of the Scriptures closed.
12
The hold which he had upon the confidence
of all good men and his influence in the
Church, sprang from his wisdom and goodness.
He was as humble as a child, so simple and
single-hearted that no one who knew him ever
suspected that he had a grain of self-interest
in any project. He never aimed at position
or grasped at power ; they simply came to
him — he had power just as a magnet has, not
by effort, but by a law of nature. He had
greatness within, and the circumstances of
power and influence gathered around him by
the law of attraction.
His power over men arose from a strange
combination of faculties. He had genius in
its best sense, a power to create, invent, and
combined both in the department of thought
and action. With these he combined that ex-
traordinary power which we call sagacity. He
had a clear insight into things, a quick percep-
tion of connections and adjustments, an intui-
tive judgment of means and ends. This, add-
13
ed to energy and prompt decision, made him
an effective man. He was not a man whom
circumstances made ; he made the circum-
stances. Nature made him to be a ringleader.
If he had been a bandit, he would have been
the head of the band. If he had been a sol-
dier, he would have been the Commander of
the Army ; but as he was a Christian, he was
the Captain of the Lord's Host. He had a
rich experience of the Grace of God, and this
gave balance and impulse to all his powers.
He had no goodness by nature. He had as
much sin in him as usually falls to the lot of
man, but those who knew him constantly saw
the Lion held in the chains of Grace.
As a teacher the impression made upon the
students was his power to penetrate a subject.
The class to which I belonged heard his lect-
ures upon Didactic Theology as well as those
of Dr. Hodge. Dr. Hodge gave us a subject
with massive learning, in its logical develop-
ment, in its beautiful balance and connection
H
with the whole system. Dr. Alexander would
take the same subject, and strike it with a
javelin, and let the light through it. His aim
was to make one point, and nail it fast.
I always came from his lecture with these
words running through my mind, "A nail
driven in a sure place." He carried the spear
of Ithuriel, and how often have we seen him
touch with it a specious theory, when lo, it
changed into a startling heresy ; as when from
the whispering toad Satan sprang forth, full-
armed and terrible.
But time would fail to finish this hurried
photograph of one whose life was written in
letters of light.
The stranger who in aftertime comes to
read this tablet, like the traveler who now,
in the Cathedral of St. Paul in London, reads
the name of Christopher Wren, has only to
look around him to see his monument.
There are monuments in the world which
express nothing but a sublime egotism. Great
*5
kings in Egypt spent long lives in erecting
those majestic Pyramids to be either a mau-
soleum, or monument to themselves ; a monu-
ment to names that have perished in the sand-
drifts of time ; but here is one who never
thought of self, whose whole life was spent for
others, whose one motive was the glory of
God ; and yet by the ordering of Providence
the very work that grew around him is his
monument, his own life is his eulogy, and his
own works are his mausoleum. He was a
workman who built for God, and God built
this monument for him.
Napoleon erected for himself an Arch of
Triumph, in such a line that from the windows
of the Palace of the Tuilleries he could see
the setting sun behind it, and lighting up the
v/hole Arch with the full radiance of its set-
ting glory. This was his idea of apotheosis,
to make everything in the world and even the
splendor of the setting sun tributary to his
own glory. But here is one who sought noth-
16
ing for himself; he hid himself in the shadow
of the Cross. He sought not that its light
might cast its splendor upon his fame, but that
the light of his life might be reflected upon
the Cross ; so that while he was nothing, Christ
might be all in all. The result is better than
an apotheosis, a position of everlasting re-
membrance in the hearts of God's people, and
a promise that " He shall shine as the bright-
ness of the firmament, as the stars for ever and
ever."
JAMES WADDELL ALEXANDER, D.D.
ADDRESS
BY THEODORE L. CUYLER, D.D.
THE name that has been assigned to me
on yonder marble tablet represents three
generations of devout pulpit eloquence ;
for the blood of the Blind Preacher of
Virginia mingled with the blood of the pa-
triarch of this Seminary in the veins of
James Waddell Alexander. He came into
the world through Virginia, and the last scenes
on which his closing eyes rested were the pict-
uresque peaks of his beloved Blue Ridge.
Through all his life he tethered to his native
State ; and it was a sovereign mercy to his
heart that he was called home to heaven just
before that region of Virginia rang with the
clash of resounding arms.
James W. Alexander lived on earth fifty-five
years — every one of them busy to the brim.
20
To condense them into ten minutes is like an
attempt to cut Westminster Abbey on a cameo.
Nearly one-half of his professional career was
passed in this historic town. I first saw him
in yonder college, when he was my Professor
of Latin and English Literature. At that time,
the Faculty of Nassau Hall was resplendent
with the names of Torrey the chemist, Stephen
Alexander the star-gazer, Albert B. Dod the
brilliant mathematician and metaphysician, and
Joseph Henry the king of American science.
In this splendid Faculty Professor Alexander
shone as a peer. He was a master of old La-
tinitv, and the modern Humanities. We, his
pupils, recall him now as, scrupulously dressed,
he used to mount the steps to his lecture- room
in the old " Whig Hall." We recall the pre-
cise tones in which he used to quote Quintil-
lian and Cicero, and would say to us students,
" Sir ! please to say something about Pericles."
While he was teaching us through the week,
he loved to preach the Gospel of Jesus gratu-
21
itously — down in Witherspoon Street negro
chapel — to the children of God carved in eb-
ony.
His connection with this Theological Semi-
nary was very brief — extending from 1849 to
1 85 1 — and it was the most uneventful episode
of his noble life. He had been for five years
a much-loved pastor in New York ; and he
hungered to get back to the pulpit which was
his throne, and to his empire in the people's
hearts. He wrote to his friend Hall, " I long
to be back to my pastoral rounds, my sick folk,
and my good old women." The pulpit of
New York has had more thrilling orators, and
more brilliant pyrotechnists ; but it never held
a more symmetric, scholarly, spiritual, and
satisfying minister of Jesus Christ than James
W. Alexander. The word to describe him is
— satisfying. He satisfied the intellect ; he
satisfied the purest taste ; he satisfied the con-
science ; he fed the innermost soul of the devout
believer ; and it is no ordinary achievement to
22
have equally satisfied the culture of Fifth Av-
enue, and the company of humble negroes
who clung to him in the Witherspoon Street
Chapel. If to-day both those surviving con-
gregations could come to pay their homage
before this tablet, I am sure that my departed
friend would value more the " two mites" of
poor old " Aunt Flora," the negro woman,
than all the costlier tributes of Murray Hill
millionaires.
Dr. Alexander was not only an accomplish-
ed Professor, and a most affluent preacher of
the Word ; he was also a voluminous author.
He put more thoughts into type than any man
who has ever lived in Princeton. He was a
most prolific writer for the daily and weekly
press ; and he prepared an article for every
number of old " Princeton Repertory." God
be thanked for that grand old Repertory !
Presbyterian ministers who not only studied
it, but steered by it, were certain never to run
on the rocks. Dr. Alexander wrote thirty-five
Sunday-school books for children, and left
several volumes of Discourses which are as full
of savor and sweetness as a pressed honey-
comb. His rich and suggestive " Thoughts on
Preaching" contain really the cream of all the
series of lectures on Homiletics that have been
delivered by various celebrated men at Yale.
That book is marrow and fatness for every
young minister. Of all the many productions
of my beloved friend, I am inclined, however,
to rate most highly his "Charles Quill" letters
to workingmen — which have the simplicity
and pith of Benjamin Franklin — and his cele-
brated " Forty Years' Letters " to his friend
Dr. Hall, of Trenton. James Hamilton, of
London, once said to me that a perusal of them
was the next best thing to a visit to America.
The most brilliant Bishop in the Methodist
Church also said to me that he regarded it as
one of the dozen most remarkable works yet
produced in this country ! To the future his-
torian it will be as valuable a picture of the
24
times as Pepys' Diary and Burnet's Memoirs
were to Lord Macaulay. That must have
been a rich mental gold mine whose careless
" washings " could yield such an auriferous pro-
duct as the " Forty Years' Letters."
But let me not forget to pay honest tribute
to Dr. Alexander's beauty and nobleness as a
personal friend. He often honored me with
hours of intimate converse. Many of you
remember how he varied in his moods, and
sometimes suffered from fits of physical depres-
sion. When the clouds of depression ran low
along the steeps of his mind, he was quite un-
approachable. But when the sunshine of
cheerfulness burst forth, he was as sweet as
summer. Most grave and devout in the pul-
pit, he often relaxed by the fireside into a
sportive humor, which had the delicate flavor
of Charles Lamb's. Never shall I forget a
most fertilizing afternoon talk I enjoyed with
him in yonder parlor of his father's house.
His flow of merriment was wonderful. As he
25
was then studying hymnology, I showed him
a queer old Methodist camp-meeting hymn-
book which contained this remarkable coup-
let —
"When I was blind, and could not see,
The Calvinists deceived me ! "
Dr. Alexander laughed till the tears ran down
his face, and he begged the loan of the book,
which proved to be permanent. But he more
than repaid the loss by sending to me Charles
Lamb's original copy of Vinny Bourne's Po-
ems, with the autograph of Lamb's Latin epi-
gram (the only one he ever wrote) on the fly-
leaf of the precious volume.
Oh ! at how many points my honored friend
touched human life ! Touched its rich and
varied scholarship — touched the sympathies of
sorrow's home — touched the highest reach of
society and its lowliest — and touched every
key of devout emotion ! All his splendid at-
tainments, all his many-sided and multiform
26
life-work, he laid as an humble offering before
the Throne.
I well remember meeting him, at the hour
of sunset, in the valley of Interlaken. We
stood together in an open field, and watched
the icy diadem of the Jungfrau just as it was
blossoming into ruddy gold. Dr. Alexander
stood silent, gazing upward, and then turning
to me with a reverent awe, he exclaimed, " The
Almighty made that to show what He could
do!"
The last time I ever met him was a month
before his death ; we met in the presence
of Church's painting of " The Heart of the An-
des." I observed that his hands were very trem-
ulous, and the ashen hue of approaching death
was already overshadowing his countenance.
A few days afterward he set his face south-
ward. He went back to the home of his in-
fancy ; back to the crystal airs of his Virginia
mountains ; back to the sincere gospel-milk he
had been fed with at his mother's knee ; back
27
to the cross of his adorable and beloved Re-
deemer ; and there he laid him down to die.
He used often to say, " On my dying bed I
want the Gospel to be self-evidencing" This
joy was vouchsafed to him. For almost the
last words which fell from his dying lips were,
"/ know whom I have believed!' 1 It was beau-
tiful to see how this great, erudite scholar just
put the soft pillow of this sweet little text un-
der his weary brain and calmly fell asleep in
Jesus. And so our earth lost, and heaven
welcomed, James Waddell Alexander.
^£*_.
JOSEPH ADDISON ALEXANDER, D.D.
ADDRESS
BY WILLIAM C. CATTELL, D.D., LL.D.
]N the career of this eminent scholar we find
that in a large and truthful sense the boy
was father to the man. In his youth he was
a marvel of genius and learning, and when he
ceased from his labors in the full maturity of
his powers, all Israel mourned his loss ; for his
fame was in all the churches as a brilliant wri-
ter, as an accurate, varied, and profound scholar,
as a luminous and sagacious commentator, and
as a preacher of marvelous power. His inti-
mate friends and associates knew also that
there was in him a vast reserve of power that
never appeared to the public, and which seem-
ed to them equal to far greater things than he
accomplished, even in a career so brilliant.
" Taking him all in all," said his life-long col-
league — that great master upon whose memo-
32
rial tablet, in our recent sorrow, we look with
moistened eyes to-day, and who knew what
greatness was — " taking him all in all," said
Dr. Charles Hodge, " he was certainly the
most gifted man with whom I have ever been
personally acquainted."
But we are gathered here to-day as his old
pupils, and this brief address is expected to re-
call mainly his honored memory as an in-
structor. Although, as an author and as a
preacher, he was a Prince in Israel ; yet his
great service to the Church was undoubtedly
in training her sons for the Gospel ministry.
To this exalted work and in this honored
school of the Prophets, for a quarter of a cent-
ury, he gave the whole force of his command-
ing genius and the opulent resources of his
varied and profound scholarship. For the
most of the time he was engaged in the exe-
getical criticism of the sacred volume, at first
with the Hebrew, and in the latter part of his
life with the Greek ; during the interval (from
33
1852 to 1859) ne occupied the Chair of Ec-
clesiastical History in deference to the urgent
wishes of others, but the duties were never to
his taste. In one of his familiar letters refer-
ring to the change, he expressed his dislike at
" leaving the terra firma of inspired truth for
the mud and sand of patristic learning," and
he returned with undisguised joy to the more
congenial duties of the critical interpretation
of the inspired text. For this work he was
admirably qualified by his wonderful knowl-
edge of languages, for which, as I have inti-
mated, he was distinguished from his youth.
He began Latin at an age when most boys
are still wrestling with their primers. At the
age of ten he was pursuing the systematic
study of Hebrew and other Oriental languages ;
before he was twenty, as we gather from the
cautious and modest statements in his private
journal, he read easily and for the sake of then-
literature, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Greek,
Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, and German,
34
and in the prime of his life he was a thorough
master of all languages worth knowing. To
these stores of linguistic learning was added a
rare critical sagacity and a noble fidelity to the
truth that wrought unweariedly to ascertain
the exact meaning of the text. His crowning
gift as an exegetical instructor was a devout
and reverent love for the Bible, that influenced
his whole life as a Christian and as a teacher.
The sacred volume was to this erudite scholar
far more than a venerable classic or an inter-
esting subject for linguistic and critical studies.
He read it constantly and prayerfully as a
means of private devotion, often completing
whole books at one reading, in the various
languages with which he was familiar, and at
other times dwelling long and lovingly upon
each verse and line, as he says in his diary with
reference to the Psalms, " drinking them in
drop by drop." Highly favored indeed were
we, preparing for the ministry of the Word,
to sit at the feet of an exeeetical teacher
35
whose acute, learned, and exhaustive criticisms
of the ipsissmia verba were in keeping with
so great and so sacred a love for the inspired
records. He taught us by precept and by ex-
ample that every resource of learning and all
the strength of the most cultured powers
should be employed to ascertain simply the
meaning of the inspired text, and then what
those words taught should be received as the
truth of God, toward which the attitude of
scholar and theologian should be that of the
believing child — Speak, Lord, for Thy servant
heareth !
The manner and methods of such a man in
the class-room, and his influence over his stu-
dents generally, is something that may be im-
agined, but which it is impossible to describe.
It was unlike that of other men. We loved
and revered all our teachers here, but there
was a strange charm about Dr. Addison Alex-
ander, this cloistered student, who was such
an habitual recluse from society, and at the
36
same time the most accurate and discriminat-
ing observer of men and things, and as famil-
iar with all the current events in the Church
and with the social life around him as he was
with latest scholia of the German critics and
with the voluminous and learned commenta-
ries of the Rabbins upon the Talmud. We
looked with something like awe upon the
great scholar whose apparently exhaustless
learning was poured forth hour after hour in
the lecture-room, and who loved and sought
the society of little children, and, with a heart
as guileless and pure as theirs, would spend
with them many happy, gleeful hours. Then
he was oddly impatient of routine ; he would
go at a bound from one extreme to another —
leaving the quiet seclusion of his Princeton
study he would seek a room on the ground-
floor of a New York hotel, fronting upon the
very noisiest street, where, through the sum-
mer vacation, he wrote at the open window
and amid all the din and confusion, eight or
37
ten hours a day upon his most learned com-
mentaries, with no book at hand but the
Bible ! A man of such apparent opposites, it
must be confessed that he would now and
then give a turn to affairs in the class-room
that would throw us all into what would mild-
ly be called a state of confusion. I need not
harrow up the feelings of any of his old pu-
pils here present by remarking that upon suit-
able provocation he could sting like a nettle,
or that a visit of ceremony, or of compliment
to his room, or even a personal interview after
class, unless the student had some good hon-
est business in hand, was not altogether the
most cheerful reminiscence of Seminary life ;
or that upon a regular field day in Hebrew,
horresco referens, he could produce an amount
of consternation and dismay throughout the
class that was frightful ! But upon these
memorabilia I may not dwell this morning.
It is enough to say that there was nothing in
all these things that hid him for a moment
from our sight as the great-souled teacher
whose very presence was an inspiration. I lis
genius and learning and piety combined with
his personal magnetism — something, I know
not what, in the eye or voice or in the very
presence, that makes the true teacher greater
than his book — all this never failed to quicken
with strange delight and enthusiasm the pulse
of every student who had in him any blood at
all. Nor were we discouraged by the vast dis-
tance between the resources and power of
such a man and our own. It was his greatest
triumph as a teacher to make the Bible so glo-
rious to us that even the humblest felt that his
future ministry of such Oracles need not be
without honor and praise to their Divine
Author.
And there were, among his students, some
who were drawn nearer to him than the some-
what formal associations of the class-room al-
lowed — members of the private classes whom
he invited to pursue with him advanced studies
39
—and these knew what a gentle, tender, loving
heart this great scholar had, and their personal
attachment to him rose to an enthusiasm. I
dare not trust myself to speak of the hours
I passed alone with Dr. Alexander in his study,
during my Post Graduate year, when at his in-
vitation I pursued with him his favorite Ori-
ental studies, but they are among the most
precious and cherished memories of my stu-
dent life. And when the great scholar and
teacher died, and men everywhere spoke of
the irreparable loss that this Seminary and
the Church had sustained, many of us mourn-
ed as in the deep shadow of a personal be-
reavement ; for a deep and grateful love had
been wrought into our reverent memories of
the teacher to whom we owed so much, and
as often as we have revisited these familiar
Halls it has been to us a great and sacred sor-
row that we should " see his face no more."
j>&;-i;.'ii.
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