The Life Story of C. I. Scofield

SMALL BOY lay flat on his stomach before an open fireplace. He was not watching the fire; he was poring over a book. It was not a boys’ book, either; there were few such then, and they were not in the small library of a frontier home. He was reading Shakespeare. If you had come upon him at another time, in the same position and place, you would have found it was history. The home library held nothing frivolous, and he devoured all he found.

The youngster had a genuine passion for knowledge. When he reached the age of twelve he began to make a chart of universal history! His sisters laughed at him for it; but he kept

right on. It was not finished in a day or a week, that chart; he had to remake it every now and then, as he discovered that he had left out a whole country or an entire historical epoch! But he kept at it until it was finished, down to the American Revolution, which was his terminus.

This boy was a great hunter — a hunter through the pages of books. When he found mention of a certain person in his reading, he would hunt through all other volumes that he could lay hold of until he had found out more about that person. For example, he would come across a reference to one Alexander, son of Philip of Macedon. Philip — who was he? And where was Macedonia? ‘There were two things he must run down. He kept after Philip and Macedonia until he knew something about both.

The reading of Greek history led to the reading of Greek literature, — in translation, of course. Neighbors of his family learned of his interest and desire, and loaned him anything from their libraries that was grist to his mill.

The family were Episcopalians; rectors were pretty well-educated men, even in those days. The rector of the family of this boy was a cultured Englishman,:a graduate of Rugby and Oxford; and he gladly helped the boy to all the good reading that he had. And so, with eager mind, the boy kept on digging in books to get learning. His unusual habit of hunting out and running down information concerning whatever he came across trained him in thoroughness. He felt that he must get things at first hand.

The boy’s father and mother were true Christians, old-fashioned believers. His father read the Bible to him and encouraged him to read it for himself. The father was not “instructed” in the full range of Biblical truth, but he lived very much in the Book of Psalms, and loved David greatly. And the boy read his Bible lessons, like any other boy in a respectable Christian family; but he did not dream that the Bible was a book to be studied like other books, and he gave it little attention. Yet what a preparation he was getting, all unconsciously, in mental habits of thoroughness and of verification and of first-hand study, all of which make for scholarship, for the producing, years later, of the Reference Bible for which hundreds of thousands now love and honor his name!

Was the mother an influence in the life of this boy and man? She died soon after his birth: died as a result of bringing him into the world.

Perhaps some might think that that answers the question in the negative. But as the mother lay dying, the new-born baby boy by her side, she prayed for him, and asked God that he might be a minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. When the boy grew up he was not told this; the father, with a strict sense of honor, told the sisters that young Cyrus must not be told of his mother’s prayer lest he be unduly influenced by it, and enter upon a life-calling simply because of sentiment and from a sense of obligation to a dying mother’s wish. Only after that boy had accepted the call to the ministry and had become, indeed, an ambassador of Christ was he told of his mother’s prayer. Yes, God hears and answers prayer.

It was amid the chivalry, the bravery, the honor, the old-school standards of gentleman and gentlewoman of the South before the Civil War that the boy was doing his omnivorous reading and forming his study habits. His family then were living in Tennessee. He had been born in the woods of Michigan, in Lenawee County. Pure American Colonial ancestry was his. One of the earliest sounds he can remember is that of the crash of falling trees in the forest. There in that open-air, pioneer life he came to love the woods, and the birds, and animal life of every sort. He has never lost that love. He has it to-day with an intensity that might surprise some.

In spite of his prodigious love for study, the youngster was a real boy, doing the things other real boys do. He had four sisters, but was the only surviving son in the family, two others having died before his birth. One day, when a little chap six or eight years old, he felt that his many sisters were shamefully neglecting him; so “Bub”’ — as his sisters called him — and a little friend decided to run away from home.

They traveled all day, and at nightfall they encountered some wood-choppers who hospitably asked them to spend the night before their great log fire. The following morning, somehow, the youngsters did not go farther, but retraced their steps, dirty-faced and homesick. Their stomachs had a sense of need, too; so they decided to stop at a farm-house and ask for something to eat. This they did at several farmhouses, but could not get up courage to ask for more than a drink of water, hoping each time that there might be an accompanying cookie. Nothing but water came their way.

Finally the two little runaways reached home.

6 The Ltfe Story of C. I. Scofield

No special welcome awaited them, for the sisters had decided that they would act as though nothing unusual had happened. The son of the family was quite nonplussed, having expected an enthusiastic welcome.

The biographer is glad to record, however, that the boy’s father took him on his lap and gave him an extra tight hug, much to the boy’s delight. And years afterward the father told him that he had not slept a wink that night when his “wandering boy” was not under the home roof with him.

It was August 19, 1843, that Cyrus Ingerson Scofield was born. Part of the family moved to Tennessee while he was a young boy, and that Southern State was his home until he was seventeen. The slavery of that region was of a mild, kindly, patriarchal form. Like so many others in the South, masters and mistresses and slaves loved one another. When, after the war, some of these Southern families returned to their homes, and found not only no homes, but the farms and the very fences burned down by the armies, with nothing left but the land itself, the old slaves were sometimes found still living there, free, but desperately poor. And more than one

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