Giving Help to All: Samuel Wolcott
A GOOD missionary is likely to be a many-sided man. This truth has been already emphasized; and it is worth reemphasizing. If one has the ability to adapt himself to the pressing demands of a foreign field, he almost necessarily has the ability to adapt himself to the demands of other fields at home or elsewhere. Therefore it is that many a missionary who has shown himself efficient and successful in a field among a people of another race, speaking a different language and having different ways and customs from his own, has found it comparatively easy to meet the less exacting conditions in his native land. One who has given good help to the heathen abroad has often also given good help to Christians at home. Dr. Samuel Wolcott is a fine illustration of the man who can fill different fields successfully at home and elsewhere.
Samuel Wolcott was of the family in Connecticut that furnished a colonial governor, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a Secretary of the Treasury, and members of which have held prominent positions in state and nation in the first century of our independence. He was born in 1813, was graduated from Yale in 1833 and from Andover Theological
Seminary in 1837. He was inclined to the foreign missionary cause and work from the beginning of his active Christian life. For two years after leaving Andover he was an assistant to the Secretaries of the American Board in Boston. Then he was ordained, and in January, 1840, sailed as a missionary to Syria.
In the field he was the associate of Eli Smith, C. V. A. Van Dyck, William M. Thomson, George B. Whiting, E. R. Beadle, and other noble men in that superior band. With them he performed efficient service in the line of preaching, teaching, translating, and organizing churches and schools. When, after a few years, “on the breaking up of the Palestine mission” in its then formation, through the transfer of a portion of its field and work of the Church Missionary Society of England, he returned to the United States.
At once he entered on active Christian work in city and in country, wherever God summoned him to labor. He was called to important pastorates in Long Meadow and Belchertown, Massachusetts, in Providence, Rhode Island, and in Chicago, Illinois. In each case he adapted himself admirably to his field and work, whether it were a staid and quiet New England country parish or a busy and progressive city of the great West. In Providence he was a neighbor of Dr. Thomas Laurie, the returned missionary from the Assyrian Mission in Persia. It was there that I first came to know and prize him personally. He was indeed a noble and winsome man of God. Again he was superintendent in Ohio of the work of the American Home Missionary Society.
Perhaps as important and helpful work for the
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many, alike for the careful scholar and for the ordinary Bible reader, as any which was done by Dr. Wolcott was that which he did on the admirable American edition of Smith’s Dictionary of the Bible, as edited by Professor H. B. Hackett and published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Dr. Wolcott’ s work was in full and important additions to a large number of articles with the initials “S. W.,” as indicating their source. His wide experience and his varied and accurate knowledge were there shown at the best. I found these of such practical and valuable service to me in my studies and researches that they caused me to be peculiarly grateful to him. Having them at hand before I had visited the East or had pursued my Oriental studies, they threw new light for me as for others on the Bible pages.
Dr. Wolcott closed his earthly career in 1886 at his former parish, in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, leaving one son in the ministry, and another son who was a United States Senator from Colorado, who was chairman of the Republican National Convention in 1898, which nominated McKinley for president and Roosevelt for vice-president. Two of his grandsons were prominent as students and athletes in Yale. He was of good stock and of good spirit. He began well; he continued well; his memory is blessed and his works do follow him.
During the later years of his active and useful life, Dr. Wolcott did much to express and emphasize God’s truth in sacred song and in hymns calculated to reach for good the popular Christian mind. His hymns of that kind actually number more than two hundred. This is not primarily an illustration of his poetic taste and his musical nature, but it is a consequence of his overflowing spirit of Christian love that ever prompted him to praise God, and to incite others to such praise. Sacred song has most power for good when it is a result rather than a cause of Christ’s love. Thus it was in the case of Charles Wesley’s hymns, which are favorites in the world of Christians of all denominations. Many of these, including some of the choicer ones, were written in order to be sung at the close of sermons on the theme on which their writer was preaching, and by which he was aroused to deep feeling. And the world-famous hymn of the missionary. Bishop Heber,
“From Greenland’s icy mountains,”
was written on a Saturday afternoon for singing on the following day at the close of a missionary sermon, to be preached by his good father-in-law. It was after attending a Young Men’s Christian Convention one day in 1869, where a displayed motto was, “Christ for the World,” that Samuel Wolcott’s full heart responded to it, and on his way home from the convention he wrote the now well-known hymn which voices the heart of the Christian world, beginning,
“Christ for the world we sing,
The world to Christ we bring.”
In fact. Dr. Samuel Wolcott’s character and career well illustrate the many-sidedness and the overflowing Christ-lovingness and the abounding love for precious souls, in the heart of the true and effective foreign missionary wherever he is in his Master’s service.