Life & Letters: A Revival Began

Friday, January 11, 2008

A Revival Began

From the pen of Isaac Backus to Rev. Benjamin Wallin of London, November 16, 1764:

In the town of Providence, which is very populous, and which has been a place of much profaneness and irreligion, a revival began about the middle of last winter, and increased through the spring, and has affected all sorts of people. Some deists, leaders in gaming, and many profane persons, as well as others more civil, have been hopefully converted. I have been among them sundry times, and the joy of seeing such a marvelous change in the town, is better felt than expressed. To hear the profane praising Jesus, to see the irreligious thronging to a place of divine worship, and to discover such a heavenly temper in many, was surely enough to fill a cold heart with love and praise.

A Memoir of the Life and Times of the Rev. Isaac Backus, A.M., by Alvah Hovey, 1858, republished by Gano Books, 1991, p. 142.

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Why Life & Letters?

Before e-mails, telephones and text-messaging, people wrote letters to one another. Letters are personal and thoughtful. We can be thankful that biographers have letters to and from the people they write about from generations gone by, for modern forms of commu-nication leave us in want. Letters have a quality about them not found in e-mails. Historian and biographer, David McCullough, says, “I think often of how little we will leave about ourselves and our time in our own words. Maybe some of the e-mail will survive, but I doubt it. How will future gen-erations ever come to know us? Historians and biographers a hundred or three hundred years hence will have almost nothing of a personal kind to work with. Our story, consequently, will be a lot less interesting, less human, per-haps even impossible to write.”

It is a shame that few of us today craft letters to our children and friends. Letter writing is a lost art. I hope this blog will inspire others to write letters. Letters are valuable. C. H. Spurgeon said, “A man’s private letters often let you into the secrets of the heart.

Most of what appears here are selections taken from letters of Evangelical Christians. There will also be occasional reviews of books of letters.

Articulate, Thoughtful, and Well-Composed Letters

"In the nineteenth century, many biographers wrote books titled The Life and Letters of So-and-So. While this was not always an eloquent way of writing history, it speaks volumes about our cultural distance; if restricted to composing a narrative of someone’s life around his written correspondence today, we wouldn’t be able to write biographies, because people write too few letters to constitute the substance of a book. Further, if you read those nineteenth-century letters, you cannot fail to notice how articulate, thoughtful, and well composed they commonly are. A culture that was accustomed to thoughtful, well-composed letters produced remarkable significant letters, even among fairly common people. Today, we have become a culture of telephone babblers, unskilled at the most basic questions of composition…"

Why Johnny Can’t Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers, by T. David Gordon, Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 2009, pp. 66-67.

A Wonderful Book of Letters: "The Marvelous Riches of Savoring Christ: The Letters of Ruth Bryan"

Friday, January 11, 2008

A Revival Began

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Why Life & Letters?

Articulate, Thoughtful, and Well-Composed Letters

A Wonderful Book of Letters: "The Marvelous Riches of Savoring Christ: The Letters of Ruth Bryan"

A Sample Letter

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