Who Was James W. Alexander? Princeton Pastor and Hymn Translator

Biography Sermons Preaching Family

James Waddel Alexander was an American Presbyterian minister who lived from 1804 to 1859. He was the eldest son of Archibald Alexander, the first professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, and he spent his life between the pulpit and the classroom: pastor in Virginia, Trenton and New York City, and professor at both Princeton College and Princeton Seminary. Today he's best known for two things. He wrote Thoughts on Family Worship, still one of the best short books on leading your household in prayer, and he gave English-speaking churches the hymn "O Sacred Head, Now Wounded."

Here's a fuller look at his life, what he taught, and where to start reading him.

A son of the Princeton Alexanders

Alexander was born in 1804 in Louisa County, Virginia, at the home of his mother's father, James Waddel, a blind Presbyterian preacher he was named after. At the time his father, Archibald Alexander, was president of Hampden-Sydney College. The family moved to Philadelphia when James was small, and then in 1812 to Princeton, New Jersey, when his father became the first professor of the new theological seminary there.

So James grew up at the center of American Presbyterian learning. His younger brother Joseph Addison Alexander became a noted Bible scholar, and another brother, William, went into law and public life. James entered the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) at thirteen, graduated in 1820, and then studied at the seminary.

Pastor and professor

He was licensed to preach in 1824. His first church was in Charlotte County, Virginia, from 1826 to 1828. He then served the First Presbyterian Church of Trenton, New Jersey, from 1829 to 1832. In 1830 he married Elizabeth Cabell of Virginia. They had seven children, and four of them died young, a sorrow that runs quietly under his books of comfort.

In 1833 he became professor of rhetoric and belles-lettres at the College of New Jersey, where he taught for eleven years. In 1844 he went back to the pulpit at the Duane Street Presbyterian Church in New York City. After two years as professor of church history at Princeton Seminary, from 1849 to 1851, he returned to the same New York congregation. It moved uptown and became the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, and he stayed as its pastor until his death.

Alexander was a gifted scholar and a lover of books, but he never stopped thinking of himself as a pastor. He wrote much for ordinary people, including Sunday-school books for children and a series of papers for workingmen under the pen name "Charles Quill."

O Sacred Head, Now Wounded

Alexander loved the hymns of the German church. He translated Paul Gerhardt's passion hymn, itself based on an old Latin poem, into English as "O Sacred Head, Now Wounded." His version became the one most widely sung in English hymnals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and many churches still sing it every Good Friday.

The hymn fits the man. His communion sermons, printed after his death as Sacramental Discourses, circle the cross again and again:

Look simply and directly and instantly at one object — at Christ bearing your sin in his own body.
Sacramental Discourses, Christ Bearing Our Sins

What he taught

Alexander was a Princeton man in his theology: Reformed, careful and warm. His sermons on Faith, preached in 1856 and 1857, teach justification by faith alone and the believer's union with Christ. He wanted his hearers to stop looking at their own faith and look at Christ:

Learn the true excellency of faith, and it is enough, it receives Christ, it makes Christ thine.
Faith, Treated in a Series of Discourses, Faith Considered as Justifying

He was also a pastor to the hurting. His Consolation is a whole book of sermons for suffering Christians, drawing comfort from God's mercy and providence, the sympathy of Christ, and the hope of heaven. One line sums up its message:

It is only in the Word of God that we learn to consider affliction as a blessing.
Consolation, Consolation Derived from the Uses of Chastisement

Religion at home

Alexander's most loved book, Thoughts on Family Worship, came out in 1847. It urges every Christian head of a household to gather the family each day to read Scripture, pray and sing. He traces the good it does to parents, to children, to servants, to a home in trouble, to the church and to the nation, and then gives plain advice on how to do it.

He knew that children learn the faith by watching:

The children look more deeply into the parents' heart by the medium of family-prayer.
Thoughts on Family Worship, Influence of Family-Worship on Children

And he had little patience with the excuse that there isn't time:

Unless men will lose their own souls, and jeopard the souls of their children, they must take time for God.
Thoughts on Family Worship, Difficulties and Objections; Conclusion

On preaching

Alexander long hoped to write a book on preaching. He filled his journals with notes for it but died before he could finish. Friends gathered those notes and his essays as Thoughts on Preaching. It argues for careful study, for expository preaching through whole passages, and above all for a preacher's own walk with God. His charge to young ministers was simple:

Forget yourselves so as to behold nothing but the glory of God, and the salvation of your hearers.
Thoughts on Preaching, On Extemporaneous Preaching, Concluded

His father's biographer

After Archibald Alexander died in 1851, James wrote The Life of Archibald Alexander. It draws on his father's own memories of his conversion during the Virginia revivals, his years as a preacher and college president, and his forty years teaching at Princeton. The son admits in the preface that he shrank from the task. It's a detailed and loving portrait, and a good window on early American Presbyterian life.

His death

Alexander's health was never strong. In the summer of 1859 he went to the Red Sweet Springs in the Virginia mountains to rest, and he died there on July 31, 1859, at fifty-five. He was buried in the family plot at Princeton. Several of his books, including Thoughts on Preaching, Faith and Sacramental Discourses, were printed in the few years after his death, and a large collection of his letters, Forty Years' Familiar Letters, appeared in 1860.

Why he's still read

Alexander joins clear Reformed doctrine to a pastor's tenderness. He is plain about sin and grace, and he never writes about the cross coldly. Parents still give Thoughts on Family Worship to one another, and pastors still read Thoughts on Preaching for its honest counsel.

Where to start

TheWay Library has eleven of his books, all free to read. Start with Thoughts on Family Worship, especially if you have a family. If you're going through a hard time, read Consolation. For his teaching on the gospel, read Faith or Sacramental Discourses. If you preach, Thoughts on Preaching is for you.

Our guide to James W. Alexander's books describes each one, and our collection of James W. Alexander quotes gathers his best lines. All his books are on the James W. Alexander author page.