Proverbs 29:1 Whoever remains stiff-necked after many rebukes
will suddenly be destroyed—without remedy.
Theodore Ledyard Cuyler (January 10, 1822 — February 26, 1909) was a leading Presbyterian minister and religious writer in the United States.
Born at Aurora, New York, Cuyler’s father died before Cuyler was five years old.[1] Cuyler graduated from Princeton University in 1841 and from the Princeton Theological Seminary in 1846, then became a pastor in Burlingham, New Jersey. He was successful in reviving the flagging institution under his pastorship, and in 1853 he realized similar success as pastor of the Market Street Dutch Reformed Church in New York City. These successes led to Cuyler’s installation in 1860 as the pastor of the Park Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn, from which he oversaw the construction of the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian church a block away, completed in 1862. The newly constructed church, under Cuyler’s leadership, became the largest Presbyterian Church in the United States. His circle of acquaintances included other noted preachers of the day, including Horatius Bonar, Charles Spurgeon, D. L. Moody, and Charles G. Finney.
Cuyler was an outspoken supporter of the temperance movement, and an opponent of women’s suffrage in the United States. He was a leader of “The New York Anti-Suffrage Association”, deriding women who “snatch after the ballot, the juryman’s seat, and the police baton of civil authority”, and contending that women would no longer be pure when they finished the job of “‘purifying’ the primaries, the caucus, and the conventions”.
Cuyler Gore, a park in Brooklyn, was named for him prior to 1901. Cuyler demurred from having a monument erected in his favor there, instead instructing the donors to simply keep the park with beautiful flowers and trees.
Hebrews 2:9 But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, for the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor, that He, by the grace of God, might taste death for everyone. 10 For it was fitting for Him, for whom are all things and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons to glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings. 11 For both He who sanctifies and those who are being sanctified are all of one, for which reason He is not ashamed to call them brethren
Aiden Wilson Tozer was born April 21, 1897, on a small farm among the spiny ridges of Western Pennsylvania.
Tozer’s forte was his prayer life which often found him walking the aisles of a sanctuary or lying face down on the floor. He noted, “As a man prays, so is he.” To him the worship of God was paramount in his life and ministry. “His preaching as well as his writings were but extensions of his prayer life,” comments Tozer biographer James L. Snyder. An earlier biographer noted, “He spent more time on his knees than at his desk.”
Tozer’s love for words also pervaded his family life. He quizzed his children on what they read and made up bedtime stories for them. “The thing I remember most about my father,” reflects his daughter Rebecca, “was those marvelous stories he would tell.”
Son Wendell, one of six boys born before the arrival of Rebecca, remembers that, “We all would rather be treated to the lilac switch by our mother than to have a talking-to by our dad.”
Tozer’s final years of ministry were spent at Avenue Road Church in Toronto, Canada. On May 12, 1963, his earthly pursuit of God ended when he died of a heart attack at age 66. In a small cemetery in Akron, Ohio, his tombstone bears this simple epitaph: “A Man of God.”
Some wonder why Tozer’s writings are as fresh today as when he was alive. It is because, as one friend commented, “He left the superficial, the obvious and the trivial for others to toss around. . . . [His] books reach deep into the heart.”
His humor, written and spoken, has been compared to that of Will Rogers–honest and homespun. Congregations could one moment be swept by gales of laughter and the next sit in a holy hush.
For almost 50 years, Tozer walked with God. Even though he is gone, he continues to speak, ministering to those who are eager to experience God. As someone put it, “This man makes you want to know and feel God.”
John Bunyan (1628-1688), Puritan author, had very little schooling. He followed his father in the tinker’s trade, and he served in the parliamentary army from1644 to 1647. Bunyan married in 1649 and lived in Elstow until 1655, when his wife died. He then moved to Bedford, and married again in 1659. John Bunyan was received into the Baptist church in Bedford by immersion in 1653.
In 1655, he became a deacon and began preaching, with marked success from the start. In 1658 he was indicted for preaching without a license. The authorities were fairly tolerant of him for a while, and he did not suffer imprisonment until November of 1660, when he was taken to the county jail in Silver Street, Bedford, and there confined (with the exception of a few weeks in 1666) for 12 years until January 1672. He afterward became pastor of the Bedford church. In March of 1675 he was again imprisoned for preaching publicly without a license, this time being held in the Bedford town jail. In just six months this time he was freed, (no doubt the authorities were growing weary of providing Bunyan with free shelter and food) and he was not bothered again by the authorities.
He wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress in two parts, of which the first appeared at London in 1678,which he had begun during his imprisonment in 1676. The second part appeared in 1684. The earliest edition in which the two parts were combined in one volume came out in 1728. A third part falsely attributed to Bunyan appeared in 1693. The Pilgrim’s Progress is the most successful allegory ever written, and like the Bible has been extensively translated into other languages.
He wrote many other books, including one which discussed his inner life and reveals his preparation for his appointed work is Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666). He became a popular preacher as well as a very voluminous author, though most of his works consist of expanded sermons. In theology he was a Puritan, but not a partisan. He was no scholar, except of the English Bible, but that he knew thoroughly. He also drew much influence from Martin Luther’s Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians.
Some time before his final release from prison he became involved in a controversy with two theologians of his day: Kiffin and Paul. In 1673 he published his Differences in Judgement about Water-Baptism no Bar to Communion, in which he took the ground that “the Church of Christ hath not warrant to keep out of the communion the Christian that is discovered to be a visible saint of the word, the Christian that walketh according to his own light with God.” While he agreed as a Baptist that water baptism was God’s ordinance, he refused to make “an idol of it,” and he disagreed with those who would dis-fellowship from Christians who did not adhere to water baptism
Kiffin and Paul published a rejoinder in Serious Reflections (London, 1673), in which they set forth the argument in favor of the restriction of the Lord’s Supper to baptized believers. The controversy resulted in the Particular (Calvinistic) Baptists leaving the question of communion with the unbaptized open. Bunyan’s church permitted pedobaptists (those who baptize children, such as the Calvinistic Presbyterian Church) to fellowship and eventually, Bunyans church even became a pedobaptist church.
On a trip to London, he caught a severe cold, and he died at the house of a friend at Snow Hill on August 31, 1688. His grave lies in the cemetery at Bunhill Fields in London.
“Have you noticed how much praying for revival has been going on of late – and how little revival has resulted? I believe the problem is that we have been trying to substitute praying for obeying, and it simply will not work.”
“True faith is not an end; it is a means to an end. It is not a destination, it is a journey, and the initial act of believing in Christ is a gate leading into the long lane we are to travel with Christ for the rest of our earthly days. That journey is hard and tiring, but it is wonderful also, and no one ever regretted the weariness when he came to the end of the road.”
“When a tear is wept by you, think not your Father does not behold; for, “Like as a father pities his children so the Lord pities them that fear Him.” Your sigh is able to move the heart of Jehovah; your whisper can incline His ear unto you; your prayer can stay His hands; your faith can move His arm. Oh! think not that God sits on high in an eternal slumber, taking no account of you.”
Ecclesiastes 12:14 For God will bring every work into judgment,
Including every secret thing,
Whether good or evil.
Acts 17:31 because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead.
William Plumer (June 25, 1759 — December 22, 1850) was an American lawyer and Baptist lay preacher from Epping, New Hampshire. Born in 1759 in Newburyport, Massachusetts, he represented New Hampshire as a Federalist in the United States Senate from June 17, 1802 to March 4, 1807. Plumer later became a Democratic-Republican and serve as a Governor of New Hampshire, 1812–1813 and 1816–1819.
In the 1820 presidential election, he cast the only dissenting vote in the Electoral College against incumbent President James Monroe, voting instead for John Quincy Adams. While some accounts say that this was to ensure that George Washington remained the only American president unanimously chosen by the Electoral College, others assert that he was instead calling attention to his friend Adams as a potential future presidential candidate, or protesting against the “wasteful extravagance” of the Monroe Administration.[1] Plumer also eschewed voting for Daniel D. Tompkins for Vice President as “grossly intemperate” and having “not that weight of character which his office requires,” and also “because he grossly neglected his duty” in his “only” official role as president of the Senate by being “absent nearly three-fourths of the time.” Plumer instead voted for Richard Rush.
In 1803, Plumer was one of several New England Federalists who proposed secession from the United States due to lack of support for Federalists, rising influence of Jeffersonian Democrats and the diminished influence of the North due to the Louisiana Purchase.
Plumer was a founder and the first president of the New Hampshire Historical Society. He died in 1850, aged 91, at Epping, New Hampshire.
Ecclesiastes 12:14 For God will bring every work into judgment,
Including every secret thing,
Whether good or evil.
Acts 17:31 because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead.
William Plumer (June 25, 1759 — December 22, 1850) was an American lawyer and Baptist lay preacher from Epping, New Hampshire. Born in 1759 in Newburyport, Massachusetts, he represented New Hampshire as a Federalist in the United States Senate from June 17, 1802 to March 4, 1807. Plumer later became a Democratic-Republican and serve as a Governor of New Hampshire, 1812–1813 and 1816–1819.
In the 1820 presidential election, he cast the only dissenting vote in the Electoral College against incumbent President James Monroe, voting instead for John Quincy Adams. While some accounts say that this was to ensure that George Washington remained the only American president unanimously chosen by the Electoral College, others assert that he was instead calling attention to his friend Adams as a potential future presidential candidate, or protesting against the “wasteful extravagance” of the Monroe Administration.[1] Plumer also eschewed voting for Daniel D. Tompkins for Vice President as “grossly intemperate” and having “not that weight of character which his office requires,” and also “because he grossly neglected his duty” in his “only” official role as president of the Senate by being “absent nearly three-fourths of the time.” Plumer instead voted for Richard Rush.
In 1803, Plumer was one of several New England Federalists who proposed secession from the United States due to lack of support for Federalists, rising influence of Jeffersonian Democrats and the diminished influence of the North due to the Louisiana Purchase.
Plumer was a founder and the first president of the New Hampshire Historical Society. He died in 1850, aged 91, at Epping, New Hampshire.
Carl R. Trueman, Professor of Historical Theology and Church History and
Paul Woolley Chair of Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary.
Education
MA, St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge, 1988
PhD, University of Aberdeen, 1991
Teaching
Tutorial Assistant in Church History, University of Aberdeen, 1991–1993
Lecturer in Theology, University of Nottingham, 1993–1998
Senior Lecturer in Church History, University of Aberdeen, 1998–2001
Westminster, 2001–
“I am no longer anxious about anything, as I realize the Lord is able to carry out His will, and His will is mine. It makes no matter where He places me, or how. That is rather for Him to consider than for me; for in the easiest positions He must give me His grace, and in the most difficult, His grace is sufficient.”
“Unbelief is the most active thing on earth; it is a fretful, worrying, questioning, annoying, self-centred spirit. To believe is to stop all this and let God work.”
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