S. B.H. Carroll - An Appreciation

1. B. H. CARROLL-AN APPRECIATION By His Son, REV. CHARLES C. CARROLL, D.D. Mr. President, Members of The Faculty, Fellow Students, and Visiting Friends: In expressing the usual salutations of a speaker upon this occasion I would like to have your indulgence in mentioning an unusual appreciation upon my part due to the relationship borne to the Founder of this Seminary in whose memory this day is annually observed. Because your first president was my father in the flesh, and because also, according to Paul’s exegesis in 1 Corinthians 4:1-21, he had in Christ begotten me through the Gospel through spiritual travail, I would stifle every impulse of natural and spiritual affection if what I try to say here today should be in any way impersonal or should fail in any particular that last full measure of devotion due him from a doubly filial heart. But from that realm of personal and loving relationship I would jealously banish any insensate thought of saying anything transgressing the extreme bounds of delicacy and good taste, or of unworthily slipping from the decorum of biography into auto-biography. And most sincerely would I avoid the projection of any personal relationship to him as a special privilege except love into the relationships established in either the foundation of this Seminary or its progress both before and after he ceased from his labors. And above all else, while recognizing this institution and the spread of its continued activities to be in a certain sense a cenotaph to its human founder, God forbid that any impious word of mine should ever disturb his own subordination to the institution itself and its real Founder, or blur his devoted expectation that in HIM it might become an eventual part in that city with foundations whose builder and whose maker is God. It was for that cause he wanted to make here on Seminary Hill a citadel of orthodoxy. And being come as your guest, and left at liberty in the courtesy of your invitation to speak, to choose what I might say, and freely accepting all the knightly strictures of that courtesy, I still shall not hesitate to place first the co-operation of all, from the least to the most, who helped to rear this structure. In doing so I am sure I but add my willingness to his. So, if, after this restriction, under the exigencies of the hour he is most my theme, it is due to that temporary exaltation to which you yourselves have raised him. He least of all would have contended for your momentary promotion, but with its advancement his greatest wish would be for this hour to burn with some added fire to warm the iron of your resolution to carry on for Christ. And I, who all my life have coveted his approval, would like to think, if not presumptuous, that “I sat in my musing until the fire burned, and then I spake.” Were I to take a text today I think it would be the Messianic summons in the fifty-first chapter of Isaiah combined with the Messianic progress in the forty-sixth Psalm: “Hearken to me, ye that follow after righteousness, ye that seek the Lord: look unto the rock whence ye are hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence ye are: digged. Look unto Abraham your father, and to Sarah that bare you; for I called him alone, and blessed him and increased him.” “There is a River, the streams whereof shall make glad the City of God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the Most High.” I would not want the Rock less magnified than Daniel’s prophecy of a stone mountain, less vibrant than God’s voice at Sinai, less luminous than the scene of the transfiguration, less basic than Peter’s exegesis of the foundation stone, less prospective than Pisgah, nor less triumphant than Paul’s explanation to the Hebrews of Matthew Zion. Nor would I narrow the River to lessen the proportions of Ezekiel’s vision nor dull its clarification in John’s apocalypse. Both Rock and River are part of the imagery of prophecy depicting the character and mission of Jesus Christ. It is in the relationship to Jesus that a man’s life is a success or a failure. Especially is this true of a preacher’s life. The summation of his life lies in his laying hold of all for which Jesus Christ laid hold of him. The mark of his success is his constant approach to that apprehension. It is hardly necessary to say that an appreciation and seizure of such a mission and purpose demands self-abnegation. It is only when we are dead and our lives are hid in Christ Jesus that we are most alive as preachers. And because I would like to think my being here today is a part of preaching and because I do think a part of preaching is to point to Jesus, as lifted up, drawing all men unto Him, I would like to preach Jesus unto all the nations of men today, seething and striving as they are, as their real desire. National strifes are peculiarly an exhibition of, not so much racial differences, as a common racial covetousness. The essential facts of their warrings are not new. The incitation to their mutual enmity is still the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, and to some of us at least, there still remains the fixed belief in the existence of that Satan under whose methodizations the principalities and powers of world wickedness are arrayed against the testimony of the Son of God and His messengers of Divine love; that Serpent of old, the Slanderer, who is king over all the sons of pride and whose deceptions not only carry the peoples away under the political guidance of idol shepherds, but seduce ecclesiasticisms to a harlotry whose path leads down to death and whose feet take hold on hell; that the accentuation against the Jews has been recently more acute in particular nations and more general in many; that governments have made repudiation of the Bible a way of governmental insistences as to the direction of the lives of their citizenry; that religious intolerance and even persecution begin to find expression in the general political unrest; that the surrender of individualism, the unconditional surrender of individualism, has been demanded everywhere as the foundation of new orders of national existence  all combine to make a world condition that becomes a huger interrogation for the future than the late world war. Everywhere there are voices until the earth has become a tower of Babel, and all clamorous in a world colluctation of sound. The issues are not new but they are more vocal, more multitudinously vociferous. Nor is the answer new. Jesus sat on the Mount of Olives and outlined in prophecy the world condition projected till the end of time, and in His anastrophe at Jerusalem in the Person of the Holy Spirit proclaimed with tongues of fire Himself the gospel for every man’s soul. And Pentecost still pleads, and will until God closes the door to eternal life, that every man hear in his own tongue in which he was born, God speaking to him through His Son. And because, as a young man, my father, already embittered, disillusioned, impoverished and on crutches, from an unhealed wound, received at the battle of Mansfield, La., found, after the Civil War, at a Methodist camp meeting, faith to receive Jesus Christ as a personal Lord and Redeemer, he accepted with the gift of God, the Bible as a revelation from God, of God, worded to and by men officially set apart by the Holy Spirit and under His direction into a completed book, the Scriptures of which cannot be broken, as an expression of His wisdom, will, purpose and plan for man and the universe. Because he had found it a living word, able to make him personally wise unto salvation, and because with his sense of redemption and regeneration there had come a conviction that God had chosen him to be a preacher, he dedicated himself to the study and promulgation of the Scriptures. His regeneration not only bound him irrevocably into the household of God in a sonship that was his increasing delight to explore and magnify, but it established his own individual place and purpose in the kingdom of God as a child of the King. There was a joyousness about his preaching. His regeneration carried with it a revitalization of his interest in people that grew until he died. He was eager to receive from and impart to all men. He loved to preach, and as a “preacher sought to find out words of delight: and that which was written was upright, even words of truth. The words of the wise are as goads, and as nails fastened by the masters of assemblies, which are given from one shepherd.” His impulsion to preach, coming as he increasingly believed, as a direct commitment from Jesus Christ, was a constant command to an active life in the ministry. In order to preach a preacher should have a vocabulary. The place to find it was in, the Bible, first, as he saw it. He never doubted but that words have a power of impact on the soul. He never questioned the words of the Bible as the messengers of the Almighty. A sermon to perform its mission must be a chariot of Christ. He believed thoroughly that God has given preaching a positive and distinct place in the affairs of men until the end of time. He saw a continuity of its office work from living men to living men in the laying on of hands by the presbytery. But the presbytery must consist of ordained preachers and the laying on of hands must be officially done by vote of the church after satisfactory examination into the candidate’s personal experience of grace, his assurance of his call to preach as from God and this corroborated by the faith of his brethren that he had been so called, and finally as to his soundness in the faith once for all delivered unto the saints. And since this examination must be doubly satisfactory, or rather triply satisfactory, for lest the candidate himself find himself by the examination unsatisfied as to his fitness or faith, or the presbytery so find him, or the church, he held the examination should take place before the whole church duly assembled, as being the sole authority on earth to defer, refuse or confirm the credentials that would send him forth as a duly authorized minister of the Gospel. And because he held the church to be an assembly of regenerated people, baptized, organized in conformity to New Testament teaching and practice, and that only, and covenanting together to hold in sacred stewardship the manifold grace of God as displayed in all the commitments from Jesus Christ to the assembly as such, and to forward them as so committed so long and so far as He commanded, he held the preaching of a minister authorized by the assembly and faithful to his trust, to be authoritative preaching. He believed it because he held to the New Testament doctrine that such an assembly was baptized by the Holy Spirit and endued with witnessing power, and so he believed in successful preaching. He believed that God in Christ through the Holy Spirit brings the individual man into a participation in the nature of Jesus enabling Jesus to tell His disciples: “Because I live ye shall live also. At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you.” And just as he believed the assembly of Jesus Christ to be the temple of the Holy Spirit, the Alter Ego of Jesus, so he believed the Holy Spirit accompanies and empowers the preached word of God and by His concomitant work makes the preached word a savor of life unto life or death unto death. The association of heaven and earth appealed to him as an essential of true preaching. The action of God in the gift of His Son was meant to operate in the human life on earth and in heaven in time, and to continue in a new heaven and a new earth in eternity. So nothing employed by Divine Love, Wisdom and Power as a means of conveying the truth, showing the way, or revealing the life, should be confused in significance. When Jesus said “I am the way, the truth and the life,” He revealed the mission of every means, every person, every organization, every agency, every memorial, every ordinance, sent forth, authenticated and established for testimony to Him. To discern the broken body of the Lord and His shed blood for the remission of sins in the memorial of the Lord’s Supper does not require a transubstantiation of the body, soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ from the ground and cooked wheat and the crushed out fruit of the vine. Both memorial and prophecy unite in the significance of baptism as they do in the Lord’s Supper and in the Sabbath-keeping that remains to the children of God. Jesus alone is the great High Priest in that He as the Lamb of God is the propitiation for sin; He as the true mercy seat is the propitiatory or altar upon whom the blood of the eternal Covenant could be offered, and He is the Priest who passed through the heavens into the Holy of Holies of God’s presence once as Priest, to offer once and forever, the one offering for sin, that can and does cleanse forever all who believe on His Name. It is not the translation of bread and wine into Deity but the translation by the birth from above in regeneration, of the redeemed and cleansed soul by the precious blood of Christ, into the kingdom of the Son of God’s love, and the imputation of His righteousness because of being begotten of God of an incorruptible seed, that provides the atonement. It is only after our hearts have been sprinkled with the blood by Him of an evil conscience and we have been born into the Kingdom that we should have our bodies washed in the baptism which is the figure of His burial and resurrection from the dead, He who was offered for our offenses and raised again for our justification. For if we are planted in the likeness of His death we are raised up in the likeness of His resurrection when we are baptized for the dead. My father unhesitatingly believed that baptism originated in the peculiar mission of John as the herald of the Messiah and that the act and its significance, together with his authority to administer it and the revelation of the subjects of its recipience had the direct definition of the Holy Spirit. When Jesus assumed the authority of the act and committed its perpetuity to the assembly of His own institution, John recognized both the innate and official right of Jesus in the procedure and completed the office work of his own testimony to Jesus by the recognition of the assembly as the bride of Christ and expressed his joy as fulled in the presence of Jesus as the proper. Bridegroom. And as the office of baptism is to reveal Jesus and the content of His relationship to God and man, first to the Jews by John and then to the whole race of man by the Church, neither the act, nor its significance, nor its recipiency, is subject to change. Equally so God’s order in the Gospel of His Son leaves the Lord’s Supper and the stewardship of its commission not subject to change. Baptism, Church organization, and the Lord’s. Supper antedate the cross, the passage of the Great High Priest through the veil of His flesh and on through the heavens to the completion of His offering of blood, and His coming back, to enter the body prepared for Him in His resurrection from the dead, and neither the figure nor the memorial of His sacrificial office, nor the agency established and sent forth by Him to proclaim the power and glory of its consummation could take the place of what He did as the Savior of men. My father believed that what was done to Jesus at Golgotha by men, by angels, by God Himself, and what He did in connection therewith, and the result of all the action involved, constitutes the supreme expression of God’s love of the world an expression that was necessary if the world through Him should be saved. I realize this hour has been more particularly set apart to a contemplation of the closing years of my father’s ministry, which might best be studied in the light of this city set like Jerusalem of old, upon a hill, and in the practical completion of the Interpretation of the English Bible for which he expressed in his last will and testament his intention of their formulation into a text book for the course in the English Bible. I know he had accepted the task of these two things as a personal direction of Jesus Christ of his labor in the ministry toward the completion of what Jesus wanted him to do as a preacher. One afternoon when his lecture for the day was over and I had listened to him for an hour in a deliverance of what I knew he had spent six hours that day preparing, he took me in his buggy with him and drove over and around Seminary Hill while he told me of the growth of his conviction that God wanted him to finish his ministry with the Seminary and his Interpretation of the Bible. The idea of such a work was of long standing. He felt that it should be done and wrote to Dr. John A. Broadus suggesting that he, being so eminently fitted to write such an Interpretation, should do so and incorporate it in the body of the instruction a Louisville. In reply Dr. Broadus placed the burden upon him as an expression of his own conviction. He finally came to believe that it was God’s will for him to find in actual teaching the development of the Interpretation of the Bible. And he wanted a Bible Department in Baylor University to be the channel of his instruction associated with all that the education of preachers might require, and the department itself in due articulation an co-ordination with the rest of the University departments. It is not my province today to discuss the final eclosion of this Seminary by tracing its history through all its pupa stage, but I do want to recall so long as I live his exposition that afternoon of what he believed to be the Holy Spirit’s office work in the production and exhibition of the Scriptures together with His residence in the individual Christian and each particular assembly and His co-ordination of their martyrdom into the co-operation which under His guidance and power would in the appointed times and seasons accomplish the purpose of God in Christ Jesus. Counting one phase of the Spirit’s work as being the illumination of the Scriptures in an enablement of a preacher to rightly divide the word of truth and in the comparison of spiritual things with spiritual things to find the interpretation of that Holy Book for a presentment of Jesus Christ to lost men as a Savior and to redeemed men as the expansion and extension of their lives into eternal glory, my father told me that afternoon as I watched his face with the evening sun upon it, “I believe God has given me a gift of interpretation.” There is a rough ashlar over a grave in a cemetery at Baltimore under which rest the ashes of Sidney Lanier and on the stone a metal marker on which is the sun displayed and the words, “I Am Lit With The Sun.” And to me the very granite seems to glow with the vision and burn with the warmth of Lanier’s memory of sunrise over the Marshes of Glynn, as dying he wrote his last poem in the mountains of North Carolina. And once at eventide I saw from a street in Interlaken, the Yungfrau mountain in majesty of stone and snow clothed with the golden beauty of sunset, and I can understand how the face of Jesus Christ on the Mount of Transfiguration transcended the glory of created light. To preach of Christ and the church when viewed in the light of God’s revelation in the face of Jesus becomes the most important thing on earth, especially when coupled with the realization that the message of preaching has the right of eminent domain on earth until the end of time. Speech and the power of words were a constant rapture to my father. It seemed a reasonable thing to him that God in the mystery of His unity and the companionship of His Person should have planned and decreed a universe and brought it into existence by fiat establishing space in immensity and time in eternity. And if in that space veiled in the ordained darkness of genesis the waters should have gushed forth as from the womb of time and over them the Spirit of God in obedience to the Word of God Who had voiced the will of God, should have quivered until the waters became a saturate solution of the atomic dust of the world and instinct with the energy in which was the residence of God’s laws of their formation and motion, and if in further continuance of His will the Voice should have called light into existence and the Spirit should have irradiated darkness to the extent of space with the diffusion of created light until the waters in the globed world became a sea mingled with fire, and if the division of the light from the darkness under the nomenclature of God became day and night, and God enumerated the progress of Deity up to that point in the creation as day one, and afterward revealed the matter to the scribes ordained to write the Scriptures, Moses, as the first scribe so ordained, could authoritatively declare that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and John as the last scribe of revelation could tell how in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and in Him were made all things that were made, and without Him there was not made one thing that was made. And the Spirit, Who in co-operation with the Son as voicing the will of the Father, completed Wisdom’s house of creation with its seven pillars, and completed the Tabernacle of Redemption in raising the Lord Jesus Christ from the dead, and Who witnesses with the blood and the water and regeneration can irradiate the last shadow of spiritual darkness down to the last descendant of Adam to be born into the Kingdom, and following “the roar of final fire” complete the testimony of the redeemed in the glorification of their bodies. The power of words! Man was made by the Word of God, man was redeemed by the Word of God, and the hour cometh when all that are in their graves shall hear His voice and come forth to acknowledge the justice of His words of judgment. The power of preaching! Because he believed the Scriptures cannot be broken and are assured in their heavenly mission by the judicious exercise of the Holy Spirit, ever present in their proclamation, of their content and power, “I preach,” my father declared, “believing that men shall be saved by the preaching, and not merely to bear witness.” He believed the entering in of God’s Word gives light to the sinful heart and mind and for all who will receive the light and walk in the light while they have the light, God will take away the hearts of stone and give hearts of flesh upon which the tables of His law may be written that with the hearts they may believe unto salvation. The progress in the preached Word of God was inexpressibly beautiful to him in its irradiation of spiritual darkness. I heard him once, thirty-nine years ago, portray in preaching the spread of the gospel from Pentecost to Patmos in that period of evangelism during which the New Testament was written and with its completion the completion of the canon. I had been ordained that day, and had insisted that he preach that night instead of the newly ordained minister. As he explained how the number of witnesses increased and the churches and pastors were multiplied under the power of preaching, he was caught in the narration of it for an inexpressible moment by the splendor of God, and then told us as he spread wide his arms in awed confidence, “It was like the bursting out of stars.” I had been teaching English literature and had but recently called attention of my class to the influence of Chapman’s Homer on the mind of John Keats, who first looking into it had “felt like some lone watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken,” but never before had I seen imperishable flame so float forth in speech and cluster in galaxies of fire. It is a logical thing that the works of God in creation should corroborate the law of the Spirit of life in redemption and the whole creation should travail together in Christ, while the travail of regeneration continues, awaiting the manifestation of the sons of God. And there is a spiritual correspondence between the fire stuff of music, art, architecture and poetry and the flaming tongues of Pentecost. I saw the grave of John Keats at Rome and in spite of the pathos of his epitaph still believe that “A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” and that he wrote more than upon water. My father believed genius to be a gift of grace, the recipient of which is due acknowledgment to the Giver. He wrote me once, “I am no great admirer of Walt Whitman. It is a poor return to the Father of Lights and the Giver of human faculties and powers to use these free gifts of grace against the homage due to the Giver. The infidelity which hurts is not so much the outright, blatant assaults of men like Voltaire and Paine, but it is the infidelity that surreptitiously creeps into literary works of genius, and will poison while it beguiles by beauty of expression and thought.” It was just a month later he enclosed me a typewritten copy of “The Man with the Hoe,” with this inscription on the right hand side of the page, written in his own hand: “Prof. Edwin Markham’s poem on Millet’s painting: The Man with the Hoe. Quoted by B. H. Carroll in a Sermon on Christ’s Compassion for the Multitude, preached before First Baptist Church, Waco, Sunday, 11 a.m., April 9, 1899,” and underneath the poem: “This, my son, is a masterpiece. A gem of richer lustre than has sparkled in literature for 100 years. - B. H. C.” Twenty-one years later at the seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of Baylor University, when in the long lists of names associated with the memorabilia of the school, no single word of reference appeared to recognize forty years of devoted service, not even the initials of my father’s name, I met Prof. Markham and told him of the letter and the sermon preached a fifth of a century before. “I have been hearing about that sermon all over Texas ever since I came into the state,” he replied. It was not only in the worded expressions of life, but in the movements of a people in building a city, or the marts of trade, that life expands in the individual. I venture to quote from still another letter out of some seventy I received from my father during the years. This is from one between the two cited above. “Your stay in Chicago, if you thoroughly brace yourself against the evil influences there, will be of incalculable benefit in broadening your views of men and things, and the contacts with large currents of life will necessarily enlarge your own conceptions and perceptions. It was principally with this end in view that I urged you to go to Chicago. There is an education that comes from association and contact with immense vital forces and with various orders of men that, while not exactly definable, or susceptible of being reduced to exact proportions, yet counts much in the life of one who receives it; even more than any learning from text books. After your sojourn in Chicago, you will find it impossible to ever come back down to the plane of thought once occupied. The horizon will have widened, and mere localities and local things will have diminished in size and relative importance.” Incidentally I may add very soon after my sojourn in Chicago, he wrote me that it would take me a little while to get down off of my stilts. He knew that in vital relationships Bethlehem can easily be greater than the world metropolis and a nearer approach to the Holy City. Without discussion as to how he came to address the Southern Baptist Convention at Chattanooga when Home Board Evangelism struggled for birth, I well recall his statement that while he did not hear the discussions the day before, he had felt the vibrations of a great movement, and when in pleading to “deny not fins to things that swim, nor feet to things that run, nor wings to things that fly,” I knew he had found God’s pathway through the seas for His Gospel until the sea gives up the dead; that he had heard the echoing of beautiful feet upon the mountains of the ones bringing glad tidings of great joy, and there had come to him from Patmos the “noise of wings” of an angel flying and carrying the everlasting Gospel. Not a great while before he had written me at Ocala, Florida: “I am also desirous that you cultivate the habit of having on hand always some special, profound study of some great topic or of some book of the Bible, apart from any apparent present need of that study. One who neglects this duty finds himself at last deep and proficient on nothing, the life merely diffused, over the multitudinous things of one’s environment. “All my life, I have had under special study either some great theme or some Bible book, even when there seemed no call for it in the round of present things claiming attention. The opportunity for using the results of such study always comes and gives such student great advantage over those who must meet the emergency or seize the opportunity handicapped by only cursory information and impromptu preparation.” He told me once that no matter how carefully he prepared an address he always left room for that part of his message which comes in the delivery of the message itself, and that when it came he gave it place regardless of anything else, and if at such time he could catch an answering gleam in the eyes of just one of his hearers, he knew he had his audience with him. And that was his reason for preaching, to win his hearers. Skyrockets and sheet lightning had no attraction for him in his oratory. He focused his fire believing the lightning flash that found a single heart struck in some way the whole congregation. I am sure his great metaphors were fused largely in such moments. One of his brethren asked me once if his theological concepts were not more the satisfaction of an intellectual desire than anything else. I assured him on the contrary they were the result of humble and reverent research and spiritual approaches for the definite purpose of lovingly knowing and faithfully presenting the being, person, character, nature and mission of our Lord. He wanted to know Him and the power of His resurrection in the fellowship of His suffering and conformity to His death. But he did delight in mental exercise and intellectual explorations. Once he very gravely asked me to name the presidents of the United States in three separate orders giving dates in each instance. First, in the order of their births, second, in the order of their inaugurations and third, in the order of their deaths. I didn’t do it. But he did and generously threw in the vice-presidents. It was more than a mere memory test, however. It was principally an expression of knowledge due to his analysis of men in their relationship to times and events. Repeatedly he advised me to read biographies, memoirs, auto-biographies, in connection with a study of history. I have the copy he gave me of the Life and Letters of John A. Broadus, who, as was my mother, was a descendant of Edward Broadus of Caroline County, Va. “Presented to Rev. C. C. Carroll by his father May 10, 1901 - Read - mark - study - follow - ” Under this I find a citation of my own as of August 6, 1935, as having marked the greatest name in the book. Among the something more than a thousand volumes which I eventually received from him are the fifty-four with the list written in his own hand which he sent me about two months before I was ordained: Volumes Comprehensive Commentary - Very good and rare 5 Fuller’s Works - Very good and rare 3 Notes on Pentateuch - McIntosh - Rich in Spirituality 6 Inspiration - By Manly of S. B. T. Sem. 1 Grounds of Theistic Belief - Fisher (Seminary text book) 1 Philosophy of Plan of Salvation - Walker 1 Light of Nations - Deems - (Deems a Methodist - Good Book) 1 The Argument for Christianity - Lorimer 1 Messages of Today to Men of Tomorrow - Lorimer 1 Needham’s Spurgeon 1 Moody and Sankey 1 Life of Reuben Ross 1 Salvation by Christ - Wayland 1 Baptist Principles - Wayland 1 Sermons by B. H. C. 1 Sermons by McNeil 1 Sermons South Church Lectures 1 Sermons Methodist Pulpit South 1 Sermons Ministry of Healing - Gordon 1 Sermons Grace and Glory - Gordon 1 Sermons Bible Difficulties - McArthur 1 Sermons Triumphant Certainties - Maclaren 1 Harmony of Gospels - Broadus 1 Jesus The Nazarene - Bagby 1 Three Reasons - Pendleton 1 Bible Hand - Book - Chambliss 1 Layman’s Hand-Book - Venable 1 Baptist Pamphlets 2 N. T. Baptisms - Belcher 1 Immersion - J. T. Christian 1 Pedobaptism - Frost 1 Pencilly & Booth 1 Lord’s Supper - Williams 1 How Christ Came to Chruch - Gordon 1 Orthodoxy - Joseph Cook 1 In His Steps - Sheldon 1 Volumes 49 Have ordered to you from Dallas - Systematic Theology by Strong 1 Christian Doctrines - Pendleton 1 Revised O. T. 1 Revised N. T. 1 Harmony of The Acts 1 Total 54 In his accompanying letter he notes: “In box of books is January number Current Literature. Have ordered the other numbers to you direct.” The letter is dated January 11, 1900. As my ordination was the first Sunday in the following April, I met him in Shreveport for a conference on the examination which I had already been told he would conduct. Every time I suggested the conference, which was my appointment, not his, he merely said, “We will discuss that later,” and we did, but not until I sat before the Presbytery in the presence of the church. Noting one by Dr. Christian in the list above, I am minded of an incident connected with our later association. We were going to Hattiesburg, Miss., where we were both to preach but at different churches, and enroute I told him how my father asked me one day if I had ever preached on 1 Chronicles 1:1, and added, “I know you haven’t because you don’t even remember what it says ‘Adam, Sheth, Enosh,’” and how I had persuaded him to give me the outline of his own sermon on the text. That night I finished first and went around to hear the close of Dr. Christian’s sermon, and as I went in and sat down, he looked at me and said, “I will now repeat my text, Adam, Sheth, Enosh.” There is another sermon I treasure particularly, one on the Millennium and the final advent of our Lord, preached by my father at Owensboro, Ky., Dec. 12, 1909, which he gave to me as I had it stenographically reported and afterward published in the Green River Baptist. It is possibly the most lucid and triumphant utterance by him on the relationship of these events. There is still another which I heard him preach, on The Love of the Spirit, Romans 15:30, in which he showed the Holy Spirit loving us should be the object of our personal devotion. For thirty-nine years in the ministry I have heard no other sermon on that text. I may be wrong but there may be two reasons for this. One, we preachers lose sight of the Holy Spirit as a Person in the Godhead, and the other that He so lovingly manifests the Son and the Father through the Son to us that their love is shown in the beauty of His own subordination to the Son, as the Son in His kenosis subordinated Himself to the Father and the Spirit. Desiring now to turn for a little while to recalling those earlier associations with my father when in my boyhood days he was, as now, the tallest figure of a man on my horizon, I ask your indulgence to do so through an inscription in a book given to my father by my elder brother, who told me before he died in a confidence which I do not betray now that he is dead, that the most treasured thing that he received as Consul at Venice in the World War was the statement by the Commander of an Italian Brigade which my brother addressed just before they went into battle, “I feel that we have been in the presence of some great evangelist.” The book in reference was the inaugural dissertation in German my brother wrote for his degree at Frederick William University, Berlin, of Philosophiae Doctoris Et Artium Liberalium Magistri, with this inscription in his own hand: “With best love to the Greatest and Best Beloved of all my teachers To my Father” As he had one degree from Baylor, another from the State University of Texas, had been a Fellow in Hebrew at Chicago under Dr. Harper, and had both Theological degrees from Louisville Seminary, I would call it the great tribute. My father gave much personal companionship to his children when we were boys. I remember swimming on his shoulders in the Bosque River, riding behind him horseback to visit Baptist Associational Meetings, hunting with him in forest and field, sitting on a magic carpet of the imagination as in the evenings he told us stories. And once when I carried home a cadet sword he took it in his hand and stretched it forth as though it were a living thing, then turned to me and smiled, saying it was the custom of the Irish Nobles to knight their sons, and struck me on the shoulders and said: “Arise, Sir Charles.” And once when he and my mother were telling us of the Civil War and her seven brothers who saw service, one dying with wounds from Shiloh, he showed us the scar he wore from Mansfield and told us to remember the Confederacy in such terms. And those ties of home where love was law are “dear as remembered kisses after death.” And after he was nearly to the journey’s end, I have the memories of night after night, when insomnia kept him awake, of hearing him expand the great themes he had studied. And when through no volition of my own I became less active in my cherished calling, I have spent some hours in the fascinating study of genealogy, finding in the tracery of ancient records the remnants of the woven threads that held the patterns of family successions. I know genealogy is confessedly inferior in every way to regeneration, but even then it has some place in the magnalia of the saints. In the democracy of the children of God all genealogies are subject to the adjustments of grace. But genealogy is perhaps a privilege of age, and it may be found useful in an appeal to Caesar, or satisfactory in dealing with the insolence of the Sanhedrin. It may find place in rebuking the cheatery of snobbishness, rebelling against the robberies of special privilege and repudiating the viciousness of bureaucracy behind which mediocrity is wont to sit. And moreover it has ever been accounted a meritorious thing that a man should find in the valorous deed or worth of another, and especially one of his own blood, an example that may become a fax valoris, a torch of some Promethean fire, to augment the glow of his own life’s purpose. “For, of illustrious men,” says Pericles, “the whole earth is the sepulchre; and not only does the inscription upon columns in their own land point it out, but in that also which is not their own there dwells with every one an unwritten memorial of the heart, rather than of a material monument.” Was it not Carlyle who said history is the distillation of biography? And it may be added the incentives to biography are stemmed in genealogy. Of course whoever enters into the research of its records for personal information must remember the discipline of family pride is the realization of the universality of those elements which make for what the world counts greatness and that there is an enforced humility in the comparison of the character and deeds of valiant men and women regardless of tribal, national or geographical distribution. Due to fire, war, migrations, frontier conditions, loss of place and wealth, the ravages of moths and mice, the crumbling of monuments and the decomposition of paper and parchment, and that slow decay in cemeteries “because the lichens of forgetfulness love the stones of remembrance,” there are detours in all genealogical research and all too frequently the trail is lost, but the subject is of intense interest. My father’s name like so many others as a family name was taken from a surname. Family names in England came into use largely because of the Norman Conquest in 1066, and in Ireland under Brian Boru earlier by nearly three quarters of a century. The apotheosis of all surnames is contained in the prophecy, “Thou shalt call His name Jesus because He will save His people from their sins.” All human achievement and resultant pride bow before the cross. The name Carroll, very variously spelled down the years, is an Anglicized old Irish word meaning literally, massacre, which was applied to Tagdh, the grandson of Olliol Ollum, King of Munster, and his wife Sawe, daughter of Conn of the Hundred Battles, because of a battle brightness in his eyes at the battle of Crienna Chin Chumair, about 226 A.D. The first of his descendants to take Cearbhal as a family name under Brian Boru, was slain at the battle of Clontarf, 1014 A.D., when the might of the Danes was broken in Ireland. His son Maonigh called himself ea Cearbhail, and his territory as head of his sept was called Eile from his ancestor Eile Righ Deargh, the red king. The successive tanists of the ea Cearbhals were entitled Princes of Eile until their final dispossession of territory in the plantations following the irruptions of the forces of Cromwell. Many of the name fought in the American Revolution, among whom was Jesse, who obtained land grants along the Six Runs in what is now Sampson County, N. C. He is given in the first U. S. Census as having in 1790, five slaves. He accumulated by grant and purchase some 2,000 acres of land. His wife was Mary Gavin who was the great granddaughter of Charles Gavin who came from Ireland to North Carolina about 1712 and whose descendants were extensive land owners in Duplin and Sampson Counties. Jesse’s oldest son, John, married two sisters Elizabeth and Ann Hollingsworth who were great great granddaughters of Valentine Hollingsworth who came to Pennsylvania in 1682 and was a signer of Penn’s great charter. John Carroll’s second son by his second wife was Benajah who married Mary Eliza Mallard, great grand daughter of George Mallard, and Comfort Woodstock, both of Hugenot French descent. Benajah Carroll had eight sons and four daughters. He was my father’s father. So far as I have been able to find he was the first preacher among the descendants of Jesse Carroll. Whether Jesse Carroll changed from the Episcopal to the Baptist faith as a result of the missionary labors of Lemuel Burkett and his “big book,” Commentaries on the New Testament, which prevailed along both sides of Six Runs, and David Thompson of New Jersey whose sermons, prepared largely from Burkett’s Commentaries, played such a dominant part from 1737 until his will probated in 1793, left the “big book” to his son, I do not know, but I do know the descendants of him and his wife, a daughter of a vestryman, have their names on record for over a century in the Old Eastern Association of North Carolina; that both Thompson and Burkett had loving namesakes among them, and that from his direct descendants at least ten Baptist preachers have carried the gospel throughout the realms of the Southern Baptist Convention. Benajah Carroll, before leaving North Carolina for Mississippi, organized two Baptist churches, one of which at Magnolia, N. C., celebrated, its centennial in 1935 and the other at Kenansville, in 1937, and though he had died without seeing the conversion of my father, the church at Caldwell, Texas, where he had been pastor, ordained my father to preach. No man knows his eventual audience, or the final scope of his influence, but in the dispersion and intermarriages of families God lays, hereditary foundations for preachers of His Word. That family traits may be changed, corrected, or developed under Grace and energized into action by the personal power of the Holy Spirit for the proclamation of the Gospel has been demonstrated too frequently to be denied or set aside. I met an English preacher in New Orleans who told me he had heard while chaplain in Australia the commander of an American battleship tell his fellow officers he had been baptized by B. H. Carroll of Texas. And how he loved the word, Texas, is of record in all his preaching. Somehow he wanted this mightiest state from the loins of freedom to have this Seminary as a pulpit for the dissemination of civil and religious liberty to the world. He believed beyond measure in the evangelization of the world and through the proclamation of the Gospel. He held that the martyrdom of the followers of Jesus Christ would bring in the millennium, expand the power of voluntary co-operation of the saints among all peoples into the full harvesting of souls in that chiliad of peace and individual development, and by the stamina of their testimony the post-millennial pastors and churches would remain on earth to bear witness against the Man of Sin and witness his destruction by fire at the advent of our Lord. He had the “passion of patience” in looking unto Jesus the Author and Finisher of our faith, who for the joy set before Him, endured the cross treading down its shame, and is seated upon the right hand of the Majesty on high, in the great expectancy of His reign. I can see my father now as I saw him that day at Hot Springs, Arkansas, after declaring that Texas as was Judah is a lion’s whelp, go on to analyze the place of this nation in the progress of the Gospel: “It was the struggle for civil and religious liberty that brought about that voluntary Baptist co-operation, which today enables our independent churches to elicit, combine and direct their resources in behalf of missions, education and fraternity. When they learned to co-operate voluntarily, without an autocratic pope, without a hierarchy, without a cast-iron organization, they settled the question of the ages. They took the Divine precept, Love the Brotherhood, and made it the centripetal force of church independence and the tangential force of individual liberty so as to bring about that circular motion which makes the orbits and preserves the harmony of the heavenly bodies.” And as it is in accordance with Divine precept and example that the son should honor the father, I thank you, his co-laborers, for permitting me the freedom of this hour.