How the Training Began
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
Southern family mortgaged its land in order to continue to take care of its free but needy slaves.
The men of the Southland with whom young Scofield was brought up, while not religious as a rule, had a profound respect for anything called religion; they cherished a very high sense of honor; they were truthful, and they were brave. This led sometimes to the foolish practice of dueling; but the standards back of it all made a deep impression on the boy.
Going on with his studies at the family home near Lebanon, Wilson County, Tennessee, he was making his plans to pass the examinations for entrance to the university. But just at this time the Civil War came on and all Southern schools were closed. Enlisting at once, though only seventeen, he had a four years’ course in another kind of college than that which he had anticipated. He set to work as soon as the war was over; and thus it was that he never had a formal collegiate or academic education. But how much greater an education had he acquired, both before and after those years when he had expected to be within college walls, than many a college graduate! And from that day to this he has never lost his love for study and his desire for knowledge.
Young Scofield had gone into the Confederate Army, as a matter of course, with his boyhood friends and associates. Though not seventeen, he was a big fellow, tall, strong, though slender, and practically never sick in his life. “Raised on a horse,” he was a perfect horseman, and naturally enough he was often called upon for orderly work. Learning how to carry vital messages, scrawled on a scrap of paper with the pommel of a saddle as a writing-desk, while shells and bullets were falling, gave him a disciplinary training in carrying through difficultcommissions. His position as orderly, while he continued as only an enlisted man throughout the war, threw him constantly with the officers and others constituting the staff, with all the influences and associations that this would mean to an impressionable boy.
Before he was nineteen young Scofield had been under fire in eighteen battles and minor engagements. The Cross of Honor was awarded to him for bravery at Antietam. He was twelve miles from Appomattox when Lee surrendered to Grant. Dr. Scofield to-day enjoys telling the incident of Lee’s having said to Grant, after the surrender, that inasmuch as Grant’s armies had cut the Confederates off from their supplies, their men were in need of food; and he asked if the Northern commander would be so kind as to issue an order permitting the bringing of food from the Southern supply trains to the men. Grant replied that he did not know where Lee’s supplies were, but he did know where the Union supplies were, and he would at once issue an order that the Confederate soldiers be cared for from the Union supplies — as he promptly did. And young Private Scofield was careful to get his share of those Union “eats,” as he says with emphasis.
His life was not destined to be ended in that conflict. He was not twenty-two when the war was over; and he went to live in St. Louis, the home of his eldest sister. She had married into one of the best Creole or French families of the South; and there the young fellow was plunged into the French society of that great city.
St. Louis was then the great fur market of the world for original, uncured fur. And the rapid growth of the city was making millionaires of some of the French people there. Scofield read and studied French, which was freely used as the language of Creole society in St. Louis in those days; he still uses the language in his reading. The influences of the European, extremely formal social life of that day were entering into his impressionable years also.
His sister’s husband, a man of wealth and high social standing and leadership, told young Scofield that he would back him in any line of profession or life-work he might choose to take up. They talked over different professions together, and it came out that the practice of law seemed the most attractive. Having settled this, the question arose as to how the young man would prepare for his coveted life-work. The brother-in-law had told him to call upon him for whatever assistance he needed. It was a time of test and of real struggle. But the younger man met it by telling his brother that, while he thanked him ten thousand times for his generous offer to help, he believed it was best for him to work things out for himself and provide for his own education and support. He wanted to fight his own way; and he did so.
In order to get together money for his legal education, he started in at once as a clerk in an office for the examination of land titles — a line closely related to the law. This was a still further training of his mind for searching out things, and had its place in God’s later plans for his life.
After less than two years’ work in this office, his devotion to this technical branch resulted in his appointment as chief clerk, being chosen from among the considerable number of young men in the office. This gave him a good salary. Now he made his plans to enter upon the actual study of law in one of the best law offices in St. Louis. That city had then, as for many years, a remarkably strong bar. It was a treat for the young law student to go into court and hear the able, brainy men of that day.
While still pursuing his law studies, and before being admitted to the bar, a very extensive and involved lawsuit in connection with the landholdings in Kansas of his brother-in-law’s family was begun; and the family asked young Scofield to let them put the matter into his hands for his personal charge and direction. He protested, saying that he had not the experience or ability to undertake this. They would not accept his declination, but insisted upon his assuming the responsibility in their behalf, telling him to retain the best lawyers he pleased to insure the necessary legal skill. Yielding to their urgent request, he went at the task in his old way of studying things out and making sure of bringing all the facts together. Then he put this material into the hands of his lawyers, — and among the brilliant lawyers retained by him for this great case was John J. Ingalls. Scofield’s lawyers won the case.