THE

METHODIST QUARTERLY REVIEW.

JULY, 1864.

ART. I.-JOHN DEMPSTER, D.D.

CHARACTERS of exalted Christian and intellectual worth, possessing withal distinctive and original traits, constitute an impressive heritage of the Church and the world. The order of events with which they have been connected, and which under divine guidance they have assisted to modify, is of historic value chiefly in proportion as the personal instruments it involves are brought into public view. This is a sufficient reason for putting into permanent record every. important reminiscence of men who have made themselves noble examples of public usefulness. They have lived to a good-often to a grand-purpose; and whatever excellence in their spirit and method of life can stimulate and energize others, is the rightful property of those who come later on the stage. It is true of all men that "no man liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself;" and in certain distinctive cases this may be asserted with great emphasis.

The character of him who is the subject of the present memoir had a rare native basis, and was formed by a unique discipline. From the features natural to it, it would have been a marked character whatever impulses had given it direction. It would have given forth a torrent of evil influences had it been formed and swayed by motives wholly worldly and wicked. But early yielding to divine grace, it saved the world from such a disaster; and the heritage we possess in it from the FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XVI.-23

strikingly useful course it did take in its career of indefatigable service for the cause of God, is that for which the Church will have cause for gratitude during years and ages to come.

We could not, even in the fullest biographical outline, do the character of our subject perfect justice. Its depth, intensity, and richness were doubtless not realizable nor open even to his own view. For this reason, and for want of materials, save such as by much painstaking are gathered from acquaintances and personal friends in recollected events respecting him, we can present but an outline the most meager. No private journal nor correspondence is possible to be drawn upon; printed documents or references touching his career are few; family friends, from whom to obtain interesting minutiæ, are scattered far and wide; and we are left to a large dependence on our own professional acquaintance and observations, continued through more than seven years of brotherly fellowship and labor, to work out as just an exhibit, as is possible under such circumstances, of a mind which, under most unpropitious early privileges, wrought for itself acquisitions and an available mental force scarcely to be hoped for by ordinary men in this mortal world of ours. He also conceived and executed for the Methodist Episcopal Church a plan of ministerial education which, though some time held at bay, has now from its fruits the general sanction of nearly all classes of men in the Church. A better and fuller record of such a man, it is hoped, will in due time be forthcoming.

John Dempster was born in Florida, Montgomery (since divided and now Fulton) County, New York, on the second day of January, 1794, and thus was at his death but a few weeks less than seventy years of age. His father, the Rev. James Dempster, was a Scotchman, educated at the University of Edinburgh, and, though bred a Presbyterian, was received by Mr. Wesley as one of his colaborers, and sent by him as a missionary to America. He preached for a season in the city of New York, but for some reason became disconnected from Mr. Wesley's service, and was thereafter a pastor of a Presbyterian Church in the town of Florida till his death, in 1803. He was a man of learning, talents, and piety, and was very much revered by his flock and in all circles in whic he moved. He was twice married. By the first marriage he had

no surviving children; by the second he had four, of which the subject of this notice was the second son. The father's faith

ful training in books was bestowed on his children as long as he was permitted to live; but John was too young to have received much attention in this respect, and after his father's death he was too restless and romantic to have interest in learning either at home or at school. He grew up ignorant of books, barely eking out a sufficiency of penmanship and arithmetic to serve him at the tin-trading business, in which he early engaged. The details of the manner of his childhood and early youth have no interest other than that they show him eccentric and thoughtless at that period; these traits foreboding for him anything but a hopeful future. All experiments on him failed to bring out any appearance of a steady, unwavering purpose of life till, as a venture, he was sent on a peddling excursion for his elder brother, who was engaged in tin-ware manufacture. He continued in these excursions till the period of his conversion to God, at a camp-meeting, when he was eighteen years of age.

The revolution in him was wonderfully complete. Purposes, tastes, plans, all assumed the rarest change of character. To repair his sadly neglected education he sought such aids as he could command; but chiefly by himself alone he undertook this work on a system of husbanding time and other resources, which system he kept all his after life with strenuous invariableness. For over fifty years it was his habit to retire at nine at night and to rise at four in the morning. The hours of the day were sacredly assigned to specific duties, the most of these duties consisting of intense study. He began with elementary English study, embracing English grammar and arithmetic, and a range of useful reading.

His moral and spiritual life also took at once most interesting phases. Ilis zeal was of the intensest kind; his love for impenitent souls was a burning fire within him; and he stopped at no obstacles nor sacrifices to exhort men, far and near, to "flee from the wrath to come." He began early to show unusual power as a speaker, and marked natural acuteness as a thinker. His early career was at a period when religion, in the form in which he and the Church to which he had attached himself professed it, was scornfully reviled, and the doctrines

underlying it caricatured. All around him it was taught in the rankest manner, on the one hand, that all men were to be unconditionally saved, and, on the other, that none but the unconditionally elect could be saved. And he was forced, in selfdefense, and in defense of what he deemed most sacred truth, to be a combatant. He advanced at once most easily into the habit of a practical logician. He was compelled to study intently the relations of thought as they existed in those subjects which he was shut up to in his early preaching, and as they were revealed to him in the light of a glowing imagination, which was a distinguishing feature in his mental composition. Without rules, without instruction in the art, except what came from his own self-drill, he became a dialectrician. His habits of study, stern, simple, and narrow, kept him all his life in this one groove; he thought and spoke in syllogisms, the major premise being perhaps suppressed, though this was scarcely ever out of view.

To the aid of these processes he made all his studies bend. After the first elements in English came the philosophy of Stuart and Brown, and the ethics of Butler; then the ancient languages; next, calculations in algebra; after these things, or along with these, biblical science and natural science, and every thing kindred to a theological curriculum. Outstripping the most of his peers in these things, he became an oracle to them and to those of younger years immediately succeeding, until the days of broader, deeper, and more critical learning came from the establishment of schools and colleges: Even then, and to his last day, he could bow to no superior among

them in dialectic skill.

These were the main characteristics of his inner intellectual life at this period. In 1816, four years from the period of his conversion, his regular conference ministry commenced, and this. date was perhaps the beginning of the more systematic severity of his self-imposed tasks in study, which were not remitted till the day that he submitted to the fatal surgical operation. The result of such habits was a conscious intellectual growth as long as he lived. The result declared itself early in his continually rising power in the pulpit. Tradition says, that from early time his sermons were commenced with their propo sitions clearly laid out, then proceeded in calm, often stately,

logic till the peroration was reached, when the conclusion would be clinched on the conscience, and the refuge of lies would be swept away, guilt would be uncovered, and appeals of startling unction and fearful power would close the scene, to the utter dismay of the daring disbeliever. An affluent imagination flashed light and a rich glow over his sermons in those years, and gave great attractiveness to him as a preacher. In later times his performances became more sobered, more polished, and retrenched of words, more compactly logical; but then even the fire would for a moment at a time occasionally stream out at the joints.

We have sought by correspondence, but have failed to obtain any important incidents connected with his early ministry which could give special interest to a chronological notice. We are compelled therefore to present less of details of his life and labors than is desirable, and to confine ourselves to general views of his character and of the work which he has done for the Church. But such incidents and such references to records and minutes as have transpired show him to have begun to preach three months after his conversion, and to have continued to preach, more or less, under the presiding elder, the Rev. Charles Giles, now surviving, till his admission into the Genesee Conference, in 1816. Owing to very doubtful health, he was continued a probationer in conference four years. His first field of labor was the St. Lawrence Circuit, Lower Canada District. The Rev. George Peck, D.D., who is now the only surviving member of the class of thirteen with which Dempster was admitted, says of him that "his first circuit was a vast field, most of it a wilderness. During the cold season his horse broke down, and he went to his appointments on foot. His boots gave out, but he went on still, his feet constantly wet with snow-water; nothing daunted, he must meet his appointments. His soul blazed, while his poor body shivered and withered under hardships too terrible for humanity to endure. It is not surprising that the next conference found him in a broken down condition. His next appointment was to Paris, an important station, though one which required little but Sabbath labor. The appointment was regarded by some of "the old preachers as a doubtful experiment, but it was a decided success."