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Biographical Sketch of Samuel Davies
Samuel Davies
The great British preacher, Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones once said to an audience of students at Westminister Theological Seminary in 1967, that “Samuel Davies is the greatest preacher you have ever produced in this country.’ Unfortunately, we Americans still do not know one of our greatest preachers. It is true that graduates of some of the finest seminaries in our country have not so much as heard of the name of Samuel Davies. I hope to introduce you to this great man of God today, so that we might learn some enduring lessons from his own life.
An Outline of the Life of Samuel Davies
Samuel Davies was born in Pennsylvania on November 3, 1723. He was the only son of a godly mother. Davies would later say,
“I am a son of prayer, like my namesake, Samuel the prophet, and my mother called me Samuel, because, she said, ‘I have asked him of the Lord.’”
He was raised originally in a Baptist church, and then when he was 11 years old, his mother became attached to the Presbyterian church.
We have very little biographical information of his early life, but we do know that by the time he was 15 years old, he had assurance that he had passed from death to life and was already committed to the gospel ministry.
About the year 1740, when Davies was 17, he began his religious studies in earnest at Fagg’s Manor, where the Reverend Samuel Blair was the professor.
At that time in Virginia, there was only one authorized church, The Church of England. All Virginians paid tithes to the clergy, and could be fined if they did not attend a local congregation of the Church of England. In 1739 George Whitefield made an evangelistic tour through the colonies and preached in Williamsburg, Virginia. Four years later a volume of Whitefield’s sermons reached Hanover County, about fifty miles from Williamsburg. In Hanover County there was a small group of people who came to know the gospel by reading books. They read Martin Luther’s commentary on Galatians. Another man was awakened by reading a book by the Puritan Thomas Boston, “Man in His Four-Fold State.” Because the evangelical truths that they had discovered in these books were not preached in the authorized churches, they began to meet themselves on the Lord’s Day. None of them had the gift of preaching, so they read sermons instead. A man by the name of Samuel Morris was appointed the reader. By the reading of the sermons of Whitefield or one of the older Puritans there was the beginning of a revival in Hanover County. People heard of conversions and they asked Samuel Morris if he would come and read these sermons to them. Within a few years there were four meeting houses established in that area. The one in Hanover County was known as “Samuel Morris’ Reading Room.” These Christians did not know of any denomination other than the Church of England. At first they called themselves ‘Lutherans’ simply because they thought so highly of Luther’s commentary on Galatians. However, when they learned a little more about the Lutherans in their own day, they quickly dropped the name ‘Lutheran!’ The Governor of Virginia summoned this small group of Christians to Williamsburg to give an account of their separation from the Church of England. On the way to Williamsburg, they met a violent storm, so that they took shelter in a nearby home. While they were there, one of them took down an old dusty volume from the bookshelf, and was astonished to find in it the very truths that they had come to believe but had been set out in it in a way that was so clear and beautiful that they felt there was no better confession of their faith in the world. The owner of the house didn’t want the book, so they took it with them to Williamsburg. When the Governor demanded of them what denomination they were of, they handed the book to him as their confession of faith. Well, it turned out that this was a very good book indeed – the Westminister Confession of Faith. The Governor had some knowledge of the faith of Presbyterians, and immediately dubbed them as Presbyterians.
Well, in the year 1743, William Robinson came through Hanover County, and preached for four days. Samuel Morris writes,
“Tis hard for the liveliest imagination to form an image of the condition of the assembly on these glorious days of the Son of Man. Many that came through curiosity were pricked to the heart and but few in the numerous assemblies on these four days appeared unaffected. They returned alarmed with apprehensions of their dangerous condition, convinced of their former entire ignorance of religion, and anxiously inquiring what they should do to be saved. And there is reason to believe there was as much good done by these four sermons as by all the sermons preached in these parts before or since.”
Before Robinson left Hanover they people tried to give him a generous financial gift. He sought to refuse the gift, but when he was about to leave, he found the gift hidden in his saddle bags. Mr. Robinson then told them that he would accept the gift by telling them,
“There is a young man of my acquaintance, of promising talents and piety, who is now studying with a view to the ministry; but his circumstances are embarrassing; he has not funds to support and carry him on without much difficulty; this money will relieve him.”
The ‘young man’ Robinson was speaking about was the young Samuel Davies. In 1747 Davies was ordained by the Presbyterians as an evangelist, and was directed to go to Virginia. That is how Samuel Davies found himself at the Reading Room in Hanover County. However, because there were no other Presbyterian churches in the area, Davies preached throughout the entire county, spread over 60 miles. This evangelistic trip lasted six months. At the end of it, he returned home to his pregnant wife just in time to witness her death. Davies, at this time was very weak in health, and now he was overcome with grief. He wrote later,
“After I returned from Virginia I spent near a year under melancholy and consumptive languishments, expecting death.”
Young Davies was overcome with grief, and his physical constitution weakened even further. One of his friends wrote,
“Finding himself upon the borders of the grave, and without any hopes of a recovery, he determined to spend the little remains of an almost exhausted life, as he apprehended it, in endeavoring to advance his Master’s glory in the good of souls; and as he told me – he preached in the day, and had his hectic by night and to such a degree as to be sometimes delirious.”
In 1748, the people of Hanover sought to retain Davies as their pastor, and he was finally constrained to settle among them by the urgent necessity and importunity of the people. He wrote,
“I put my life in my hand and determined to accept their call, hoping I might live to prepare the way for some more useful successor, and willing to expire under the fatigue of duty rather than in voluntary negligence.”
150 heads of households signed Davies’ call to Hanover. A meeting house was built. It was a plain, unpretending, wooden building, capable of containing about 500 people. Soon Davies was traveling and preaching at 8 different preaching houses. Sometimes he would travel 500 miles in 2 months, preaching 40 different times. In the first three years beginning in 1748, over 300 people united with the church and were admitted to the Lord’s Table, while many others would not come even though Davies says there was reason to believe that many more were savingly impressed with the truth.
A frequent visitor to Hanover at this time observed,
“when I go amongst Mr. Davies’ people, religion seems to flourish; it is like the suburbs of heaven’.
In a letter to a friend in 1749, Jonathan Edwards wrote,
“I heard lately a credible account of a remarkable work of conviction and conversion, among whites and Negroes, at Hanover, Virginia, under the ministry of Mr. Davies, who is lately settled there and has the character of a very ingenious and pious young man.”
Davies was remarried to a woman named Jane Holt, who assisted him in all his labors.
At that time, any church that was not of the Church of England was called a Dissenting Church, which had to gain a license to meet by the Governor of Williamsburg. Samuel Davies’ wife, Jane Holt, was the daughter of the former Mayor of Williamsburg. This helped immensely in Davies obtaining licenses in several places in Virginia in order to preach.
The Anglican Commissary of Virginia wrote to the Bishop of London,
“Since Mr. Davies has been allowed to officiate in so many places, there has been a great defection from our Religious Assemblies. The generality of his followers, I believe, were born and bred in our Communion.”
Samuel’s wife’s brother, John Holt, was a publisher of the Virginia Gazette. This gave Samuel a way to get his sermons and poems into public print, which helped immensely to spread the evangelical faith in Virginia.
One of the distinguishing traits of Davies’ preaching success was that he was popular not only with the slave-owners, but also with their slaves
From 1753 to 1754 Samuel Davies accompanied Gilbert Tennent to England on a fund-raising trip to obtain funds to develop the College of New Jersey, which would later be known as Princeton College. This college was to raise up preachers of the gospel. Well, their trip was extremely successful, having gathered 4,000 pounds for the funding of this infant college. It appears that their strongest supports were Whitefield and John and Charles Wesley, and the churches they ministered to.
Davies’ preached very frequently on this trip to England. Eventually, news reached King George II that a dissenting minister from the colony of Virginia was preaching and attracting very large congregations. When the king expressed a strong desire to him, his chaplain invited Davies to preach in the royal chapel. Davies did preach before the King and many of his nobility. But as Davies was preaching, the King was seen to be talking to people around him. When the young Davies saw this, he paused and became silent. Then he looked toward the King and said
“When the lion roars, the beasts of the forest all tremble; and when King Jesus speaks, the princes of the earth should keep silence.”
Afterwards the King explained that he was so impressed by Davies’ solemnity and eloquence that he felt constrained to express his astonishment and approval to those sitting around him.
Davies returned from this trip to England, and again labored among his various churches, until he became poor in health
In 1759, after the death of Jonathan Edwards, who was the President of the College of New Jersey for only 6 weeks, Davies was requested to become its new President. He declined the offer twice, much preferring to remain on as Pastor among his people in the Virginia backwoods. After the trustees of the college requested him to come a third time, Davies committed this matter to the advice of the highest court of the Presbyterian church. The Synod of New York decided he should take the vacant post at the College. A few years after Davies returned from England, he was called to become the President of the college which he reluctantly accepted in 1759.
Remarkably, it could be said that Davies preached his own funeral sermon. On New Year’s Day, 1761 Samuel Davis preached at Princeton College in the chapel service. His text was Jeremiah 28:16, “This year thou shalt die.’ In that sermon Davies said, “Therefore, let each of us (for we know not on whom the lot may fall) realize this possibility, this alarming probability, “This year I may die.” Little die he know that he spoke of himself. He died one month later on February 4, 1761. Davies was weak and sickly most of his life. He literally wore his body out with his incessant labors, travels, and preaching. He died in February, 1761 after serving as the President of Princeton College for only 19 months. The only words that were recorded at his death are those of his mother who wrote,
“There is the son of my prayers and my hopes – my only son, my only earthly supporter; but there is the will of God and I am satisfied.”
Davies had three sons and two daughters, and sadly, only one of his children embraced his faith in Jesus Christ as an adult.
Davies during his life had longed to be useful to the Church of Christ, but instead he found himself ministering to just a few people in the rural woods of Virginia. However, after he died, his sermons were printed, and for 100 years his sermons were read widely both in England and America.
Lessons from Samuel Davies’ Life
1. Davies Possessed A Burning Zeal for the Salvation of Souls
Some suggested that Davies was primarily interested in building dissent from the Church of England in Virginia. Davies wrote to the Bishop of London these words:
For my further vindications, my lord, I beg leave to declare that in all the sermons I have preached in Virginia, I have not wasted one minute in exclaiming or reasoning against the peculiarities of the established church; nor so much assigned the reasons of my own non-conformity. I have not exhausted my zeal in railing against the established clergy, in exposing their imperfections, or in depreciating their characters. No, my lord, I have matters of infinitely greater importance to exert my zeal and spend my time and strength upon; – To preach repentance towards God, and faith towards our Lord Jesus Christ – to alarm secure impenitents; to reform the profligate; to undeceive the hypocrite; to raise up the hands that hang down… These are the ends I pursue and if ever I divert from these to ceremonial trifles, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth… I made no effort to win over any true Christian from the Church of England, and I would rather that men were made members of the church triumphant in the regions of bliss by the preaching of a minister of the Church of England, than that they should remain unconverted in a Presbyterian church. But it is my distress that the clergy of Virginia did nothing to prepare men for eternity. I find that the generality of them as far as can be discovered by their common conduct and public ministrations, are stupidly serene and unconcerned, as though their hearers were crowding to heaven and there is little or not danger, that they address themselves to perishing multitudes in cold blood, and do not represent their miserable condition in all its horrors, do not alarm them with solemn, pathetic affectionate warnings, and expostulate with them with all the authority, tenderness, and pungency of the ambassadors of Christ to a dying world. I find that their common conversation has little or no savor of living religion, that instead of intense application to study, or teaching their parishioners from house to house, they waste their time in idle visits, trifling conversations, and slothful ease. The plain truth is, a general reformation must be promoted in this colony by some means or other or multitudes are eternally undone, and I see alas, what little ground to hope for it from the generality of the clergy here til they be happily changed themselves. This is not owing to their being of the Church of England as I observed before, for were they in the Presbyterian church or any other, I should have no more hopes of their success. But it is owing to their manner of preaching and behavior. This thought, my lord, is so far from being agreeable to me, that at times it racks me with agonies of compassion and zeal intermingled. And could I entertain that unlimited charity which lulls so many of my neighbors to their serene stupidity, it would secure me from many a melancholy hour and make my life below a kind of anticipation of heaven. I can boast of no high attainments, my lord. I am as mean and insignificant a creature as your lordship can well conceive me to be. But I dare profess that I can not be an unconcerned spectator, the ruin of my dear fellow mortals. I dare avow, my heart is sometimes set upon nothing more than to snatch the brands out of the burning before they catch fire and burn unquenchably. Hence my lord it is, that I consume my strength and life in such great fatigues in this jangling, ungrateful colony.
In one of his sermons Davies says,
Yes, sinners, God forbid that I should cease to pray for you and pity you. While my tongue is capable of pronouncing a word, and you think it worth your while to hear me, I will send the calls of the gospel after you, and if you perish after all, you shall drop into hell with the offers of heaven in your ears. Fain would I dear myself and say, “Your blood be upon your own heads: I am dean.” But alas! my heart recoils and fails. I have no doubt at all, but the gospel I have preached to you is indeed the gospel of Christ, and I cheerfully venture my own soul upon it. But in dispensing it among you, I am conscious of so much weakness, coldness, and unskillful- ness, that I am at times shocked at myself, lest I should be accessory to your ruin. However, this is certain, great guilt will fall somewhere. I desire to take my own share of shame and guilt upon myself, and to humble myself for it before God. And I pray you do the same. 0 humble yourselves before God, for your past conduct; and prepare, prepare to meet him, in the midst of a burning world.
Or, if you continue obstinately impenitent still, prepare to make your defense against your poor minister there, when he will be obliged to appear as a swift witness against you, and say, “Lord, I can appeal to thyself, that I warned them to prepare for this day, though with so many guilty infirmities, as nothing but thy mercy can forgive. But they would not regard my warnings, though given in thine awful Name, and sometimes enforced with my own compassionate tears.” There, sirs, at the supreme tribunal, prepare to meet me; and thither I dare appeal for the truth and importance of the things I have inculcated upon you.
- Davies Possessed A Heightened Sense of Personal Unworthiness
. In 1757 he wrote to a friend,
“Formerly I have wished to live longer, that I might be better prepared for heaven; but this consideration had very very little weight with me, and that for a very unusual reason, which was this: – after long trial I found this world a place so unfriendly to the growth of every thing divine and heavenly, that I was afraid if I should live any longer, I should be no better fitted for heaven than I am. Indeed I have hardly any hopes of ever making any great attainments in holiness while in this world, though I should be doomed to stay in it as long as Methuselah. I see other Christians indeed around me make some progress, though they go on with but a snail-like motion. But when I consider that I set out about 12 years old, and what sanguine hopes I then had of my future progress, and yet that I have been almost at a stand ever since, I am quite discouraged. O, my good Master, if I may dare call thee so, I am afraid I shall never serve thee much better on this side the regions of perfection. The thought grieves me; it breaks my heart, but I can hardly hope better. But if I have the least spark of true piety in my breast, I shall not always labour under this complaint. No, my Lord, I shall yet serve thee; serve thee through an immortal duration; with the activity, the fervour, the perfection of ‘the rapt seraph that adores and burns.’
In his sermon on Galatians 4:19-20, he laments,
“You seldom hear a sermon from me but what fills me with shame and confusion in the review; and I almost cease to wonder that the gospel has so little success among you, while managed by so unskillful a hand.”
Again, another letter he says this,
“As for myself, am just striving not to live in vain. I entered the ministry with such a sense of my unfitness for it, that I had no sanguine expectations of success. And a condescending God (O, how condescending!) has made me much more serviceable than I could hope. But, alas ! my brother, I have but little, very little true religion. My advancements in holiness are extremely small: I feel what I con fess, and am sure it is true, and not the rant of excessive or affect ed humility. It is an easy thing to make a noise m the world, to flourish and harangue, to dazzle the crowd, and set them all agape; but deeply to imbibe the spirit of Christianity, to maintain a secret walk with God, to be holy as he is holy, this is the labor, this the work. I beg the assistance of your prayers in so grand and important an enterprise. The difficulty of the ministerial work seems to grow upon my hands. Perhaps once in three or four months, I preach in some measure as I could wish; that is, I preach as in the sight of God, and as if I were to step from the pulpit to the supreme tribunal. I feel my subject. I melt into tears, or I shudder with horror, when I denounce the terrors of the Lord. I glow, I soar in sacred ecstasies, when the love of Jesus is my theme, and, as Mr. Baxter was wont to ex press it, in lines more striking to me than all the fine poetry in the world,
‘ I preach as if I ne’er should preach again; And as a dying man to dying men.’
But, alas ! my spirits soon flag, my devotions languish, and my zeal cools. It is really an afflictive thought, that I serve so good a Master with so much inconstancy; but so it is, and my soul mourns upon that account.”
3. Davies Kept Eternity Always In His View
This fact is clear simply by looking at the titles and texts of his sermons. And, brothers and sisters, I urge you to download his sermons, and begin to read them. They are extremely precious and edifying! Here are some of the Titles of his sermons:
- A Sermon on the New Year, Jer. 28:16 “This year thou shalt die.”
- The Doom of the Incorrigible Sinner, Prov. 29:1 “He that being often reproved hardeneth his neck, shall suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy.”
- The Vessels of Mercy and the Vessels of Wrath Delineated, Rom. 9:22-23 “the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction, and the vessels of mercy which He had afore prepared unto glory.”
- The Rejection of Gospel Light the Condemnation of Men, John 3:19 “And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.”
- Life and Immortality Revealed in the Gospel, 2 Tim. 1:10 “And hath brought life and immortality to light by the gospel.”
- The Nature and Danger of Making Light of Christ and Salvation, Mt. 22:5 “but they made light of it.”
- The Connection Between Present Holiness and Future Felicity, Heb. 12:14 “follow holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord”
- Things Unseen to be Preferred to Things Seen, 2 Cor. 4:18 “While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.”
- The General Resurrection, John 5:28-29 “The hour is coming in the which all that are in the graves shall hear His voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation.”
- The Universal Judgment, Acts 17:30-31 “And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent, because He hath appointed a day in the which He will judge the world in righteousness by that Man whom He hath ordained; whereof He hath given assurance unto all men, in that He hath raised Him from the dead.”
- Saints Saved with Difficulty, and the Certain Perdition of Sinners, 1 Pet. 4:18 “And if the righteous scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear?”
- Indifference to Life Urged from Its Shortness and Vanity, 1 Cor. 7:29-31 “But this I say, brethren, that the time is short: it remaineth that both they that have wives be as though they had none; and they that weep, as though they wept not; and they that rejoice, as though they rejoiced not; and they that buy, as though they possessed not; and they that use this world, as not abusing it; for the fashion of this world passeth away”
And these titles are just a sampling. There were many more. It seems clear, that Davies was meditating on and living for eternity, not time. We should learn a lesson from this godly man!
In one of his sermons he says,
“A creature treading every moment upon the slippery brink of the grave, and ready every moment to shoot the gulf of eternity, and launch away to some unknown coast ought always to stand in the posture of serious expectation; ought every day to be in his own mind taking leave of this world, breaking off the connections of his heart from it, and preparing for his last remove into that world in which he must reside, not for a few months or years as in this, but through a boundless everlasting duration… Yes, if eternity be a dream, and heaven and hell but majestic chimeras, or fairy lands; if we were always to live in this world, and had no concern with any thing beyond it; if the joys of earth were the highest we could hope for, or its miseries the most terrible we could fear, then indeed we might take this world for our all, and regard its affairs as the most important that our nature is capable of… In this present state, our good and evil are blended; our happiness has some bitter ingredients, and our miseries have some agreeable mitigations: but in the eternal world good and evil shall be entirely and for ever separated; all will be pure, unmingled, happiness, or pure unmingled misery.”
Often Davies would open his sermons with a reference to the reality of death, like this sermon on Jeremiah 5:3, “My fellow mortals! So I call you, because mortality is the certain doom of us all.”
4. Davies Loved and Labored for the Negroes
Davies loved and was loved by the Negro population in Virginia. He could number over 300 regular Negro hearers in the Virginia backwoods, and over 150 who were admitted to the Lord’s Table. He would teach these poor slaves to read and give them good books. He gave them A Body of Divinity, by Thomas Watson, Human Nature in its Four-Fold State, by Thomas Boston, Galatians by Martin Luther, The Works of John Flavel, An Alarm to the Unconverted, by Joseph Alleine, A Call To The Unconverted, and The Saint’s Everlasting Rest, by Richard Baxter, and Psalms by Isaac Watts.
Davies wrote in a letter to a friend that the slaves,
“wherever they could get an hour’s leisure from their masters, would hurry away to my house.”
The Negros were especially gifted at turning the truth Davies taught them into songs. Davies writes of them,
“Sundry of them have lodged all night in my kitchen and sometimes when I waked about two or three o’clock in the morning, a torrent of sacred harmony poured into my chamber, and carried my mind away to heaven. In this seraphic exercise some of them spend almost the whole night.”
In a letter of 1755 he wrote of the Negroes who attended his sermons,
“The number of those who attend my ministry at particular times is uncertain, but generally about 300 who give a stated attendance, and never have I been so struck with the appearance of an assembly, as when I have glanced my eye to that part of the meeting house where they usually sit, adorned for so it has appeared to me, with so many black countenances eagerly attentive to every word they hear, and frequently bathed in tears. A considerable number, (about 100) have been baptized, after a proper time for instruction, and having given credible evidence, not only of their acquaintance with the important doctrines of the Christian religion, but also a deep sense of them upon their minds, attested by a life of strict piety and holiness.”
Brothers and sisters, let’s repeat those great four lessons that Davies’ life teaches us:
- A burning zeal for the salvation of souls – Oh, how we need to pray for that in our own lives!
- A deep sense of personal unworthiness – If we only knew the truth of ourselves, we would say “We are only unworthy servants. We have done only what we ought to have done!”
- A keeping of eternity always in our view – Is this true of us? Let’s pray God would impress eternity on our hearts more and more!
- A love and labor for the poor and downtrodden – Do we love and care for the poor, the oppressed, the downtrodden, or do we ignore their sufferings? Let’s pray God would help us to love and serve them in their need.
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