- A Child Is Born

The world’s great men usually enter incognito. Emerson was wont to put his hand reverently upon the head of any urchin that might come his way. “Who knows,” said he, “but I may be patting the head of a future president.” The tough youngsters who gathered in Jesse’s back yard of a summer afternoon to play the ancient equivalent of piggy-move-up would not have shoved Jesse’s youngest boy around quite so freely if they had had a touch of second sight to let them see that they were taking liberties with the greatest king Israel was ever to know. But their blindness made possible many a glorious day of fun for the boys in the neighborhood, and it also guaranteed to David an uninhibited and normal childhood. Such are the ways of God when He prepares His saints and heroes: He leaves them unrecognized by the world until the day of their “showing unto Israel.”
About all we know of the circumstances of the birth of little Albert Simpson is who his parents were, and that it was a bitter cold day the day that he was born. For he was born in Bayview, Prince Edward Island. Canada, December 15, 1843, and any day in December is cold on Prince Edward Island.
The plain, stove-heated room where was heard his first baby cry—that strange frightening sound, like nothing else in nature, and having no human quality about it—was made snug against the outside chill by the honest toil of the baby’s father, hard-working James Simpson, the merchant, miller, and ship builder.
Jane Simpson, the mother heard that cry and smiled, and when they told her the child was a boy she may have wept a little, too, but her tears were tears of happiness, and not of sorrow. Her first baby had been a boy, and when he was just old enough to toddle over the floor and to say “mama” and “papa,” he had died, and the light had gone out of her heart, and not even the presence of her other children. William Howard and Louisa, could bring it back again. So she had prayed that God might send her another son to take the place of the one who had gone, and her faith would have nothing less than that he become a minister or a missionary, though with good Scotch caution she had made her prayer plenty broad, “if the Lord so wills, and he lives to grow up, and is so inclined.” It would not do to be too specific with the sovereign God, but, after all, He might listen to a suggestion.
And now what should the new boy be called? Well, plain James Simpson looked over his glasses and, with singular lack of imagination, announced quietly that he should be called Albert. James Albert had been the name of the lad who had died, but Albert was a good name, and it saved a lot of thinking, so Albert it was. And the dutiful little wife agreed, and then timidly suggested that a second name be added, maybe a good Bible name such as Benjamin, if the father think it well. Perhaps she could not tell her husband why—that quiet, good man who worked every day, read heavy books on Calvinism, and had a reputation for great evenness of temper—but she remembered Jacob, and she treasured in her heart the hope that this boy should be her Benjamin, the son of her right hand. So it was settled, Albert Benjamin Simpson should be his name.
And when the neighbors gathered in to see the new lad, they must have remarked—with that friendly liberty we allow ourselves on such occasions—that the big noble-sounding name was pretty heavy for such a sweet wee mite to carry, and that if he lives a month with such a great fine name as that, he is as good as reared! And the mother’s face shines with joy, and even the father allows himself a considered smile. Right here we may as well see what history has been at long pains to teach us, that if you get a good mother it will not do to be too particular about your father; you cannot have everything. Give the boy a superior mother, and he will make the grade somehow. The women know this well enough, though they are not saying so in front of the men. Hannah looks down at the floor modestly and says nothing, but she searches for her own features in Samuel—and finds them there. And Manoah’s wife, and the mother of Zebedee’s children, and Monica, and Suzanna Wesley; what do all these teach us but the same thing every scientist knows, that greatness follows the maternal line? The men have impressive voices, they look knowing, and claim credit for every sign of intelligence in their offspring, but their masculine pride takes a terrible beating from biology.
There can be no doubt about it, Dr. A. B. Simpson, boy and man, can never be explained apart from his mother, Jane Clark Simpson. She gave him wings. Of a fine Scotch line she came, a line that could trace its history back to the old heroic days of Scotia’s grandeur, of the persecutions, and the Covenanters and the fight to keep alive the faith once delivered. High strung and temperamental, with more than a dash of high romance, she had a soul too large for her small body. Straight from mother to son, following the laws of life, went this great soul, sensitive, poetic, beauty-loving, lofty. By the miracle of inheritance there appears again in him her ambitions, her aspirations, her soaring imagination. She had been accustomed to the refinements of the best society, and she never accepted the drab life of a Canadian farm wife as her own. A “guid wife” and mother she undoubtedly was to her unpoetic husband and her brood of boys and girls, but there were times when the dullness and monotony of her existence drove her almost to distraction. Then it was that her children, when she thought them fast asleep, would hear her sobbing out her disappointment and frustration long into the night. But these times were not many, and they seldom lasted long, for she had a mounting fancy, and she had her friends, and they would come to her even there in the ice-locked farm house. The poets, they were her friends, and she entertained them all (except those wicked geniuses, which no nice women would read). But there were many good ones, Milton and Scott and Cowper and Dryden and Pope and Thompson; these and scores of others she loved, and to them she went for comfort when her heart was overwhelmed within her. Then she could dream her dreams, and live in fancy the life she had hoped to live, and be what she had wanted to be.
Not that James Simpson, the father, was not a good man. He most certainly was that. “Clean, capable, and industrious” they said he was, and religious, too. He probably had more religion than his temperamental little wife. Did he not pray every morning? And whip his children for laughing on the Sabbath? And believe in the shorter catechism and the five-point star of Calvinism? But imagination he had not. And poetry? Well, it was to be tolerated, and especially the metrical psalter was good, but he was busy, and after his daily portion of Baxter’s Saint’s Rest and Doddridge’s Rise and Progress, he had little time left for poetry. But he was a kindly man and only looked mildly amused when he came in of an evening and found his wife nursing the baby with Milton’s Complete Works propped up in front of her. He lived a quiet life and did well by his family, and was an elder in the Presbyterian Church for half a lifetime. Louise Simpson, writing at a very advanced age, recalls that there was “sunshine” in her father’s life, but Albert apparently saw little of it, and the picture he presents of his father is certainly not marked by sunshine. Albert remembers something else much more vividly; severe discipline, those endless Sunday afternoon drills in the catechism which began with the philosophical poser, “What is the chief end of man?” and concluded twenty-four pages and 105 questions later with, “What doth the conclusion of the Lord’s Prayer teach us?” That was the shorter catechism, but not a boy or girl standing in line in the dimly lighted parlor of the Simpson farmhouse while the sun shone soft on the flowers outside would believe there was anything “shorter” about it.