"The Making of a Missionary"
—Levi Spaulding, 1815
IN THE ANNALS of American foreign missions the Williamstown haystack has always occupied a conspicuous place, but Hanover, it appears, has monuments far more enduring than haystacks which assure our College at least a footnote in the early missionary story. The religious history of Dartmouth in the early years of the nineteenth century seems more marked with factional bickerings than spiritual manifestations, and an arrangement by which the Trustees of the College were to assume responsibility for damages to the west gallery of the church, which was reserved for undergraduates, might be taken to indicate that the student body was not completely under conviction of sin and necessity of repentance. In fact the Dartmouth community seems at first to have turned a deaf ear to the cry from Macedonia as it emanated from Williamstown.
There, in the summer of 1807, Samuel J. Mills had led his two friends, Gordon Hall and James Richards, to the side of a large haystack, in a meadow by the Hoosack River, to uhburden to them his strong desire to start a foreign missionary movement. They "devoted the day to prayer and fasting, and familiar conversation on this new and interesting theme," and in the spring of 1808 they organized a missionary society. Though they succeeded in interesting students in some neighboring colleges their efforts at Union and Dartmouth appear to have been unsuccessful.
"HAND IN HAND IN SIN"
But Dartmouth did not long remain in this unregenerate state. Within a few years there arrived in Hanover from Jaffrey, New Hampshire, a freshman named Levi Spaulding who heard the call to the foreign field and carried the name of the College half way round the world to where
.... the spicy breezesBlow soft o'er Ceylon's isle.
This boy from Jaffrey at first seemed to share the religious indifference current at Dartmouth. One college-mate records that in the early years of his undergraduate career "an ambition for literary distinction dominated his life." Another refers to him as one with whom he had been joined "hand in hand in sin."
Then came one of the recurring quickening of spiritual life in Hanover. Something of the spirit of those days is suggested in (he manuscript autobiography of Henry Woodward, a classmate of Spaulding and a grandson of Eleazar Wheelock, who records that as he looked about in Hanover "on every tree, every stone, indeed on everything I saw there seemed to be the inscription 'Holiness unto the Lord.' " In the life of William Goodell, Dartmouth 1817, we read of a student who ran about Hanover until completely exhausted, attempting to outrun his wicked thoughts. Young Spaulding was caught up in this movement. He was called on the carpet by the Theological Society; which had succeeded the old Religious Society, and taunted with the charge that while he might be expert in solving mathematical problems he had never -been able to answer the greatest question of all, "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?"
ACCOUNT OF THE CONVERSION
Then it was that Spaulding "wrestled with the Saviour" and was converted. Associated with that conversion, which was the first step toward a distinguished missionary career, there remains in Hanover one monument in its original form, and at least a living replica of another—a pine by the Connecticut.
A classmate, writing some years later, gave an account of the conversion. "I wellrecollect the morning—l can never forgetit, when, having been oppressed with theload of his guilt for many days, his countenance cast down, and his flesh wasted bythe agony of his spirit, this interestingyouth invited me to a solitary walk for thepurpose of conversation. We wandered thedistance of a mile until we had reached thebank of the Connecticut River. Every moment had been occupied on the great subject of the soul's salvation. S was agitated beyond expression. He knew he wasa sinner. He was convinced that it wouldbe right in God to cast him off forever, andit would seem to him that God's law required it; and yet his proud spirit wouldnot submit to be saved by Christ Then I said to him, 'Brother S , therenever was a happier spot to hold communion with God than this, where we are nowstanding, and there can never be a bettertime to begin than the present. Here in thisgrove we are secluded from human view,and there is nothing about us but the worksof God, and no eye upon us but that of ourMaker. What hinders that you should stophere, where you now are, and before yougo another step, kneel dozen by the side ofthis pine, and give yourself to Christ, andplead for mercy?" The classmate concludes his account, "He did, and always regardedit as the place of his conversion."
Spaulding himself once wrote, "That little line will be remembered in Heaven." While the Williamstown haystack stood for only a summer there may be some slight chance that this very pine, now old and weathered, still stands by the Connecticut. And if it has disappeared, others at least have grown to take its place—silent memorials to that significant event.
After completing his course at Andover Theological Seminary in 1818 he was ordained in an impressive service in Salem, Massachusetts, on November 4 of the same year, and the following June sailed from Boston on the brig Indus, bound for Calcutta, but engaged provisionally to touch at Ceylon. With the exception of a single two-year furlough home (1845-47) he was continually in the service of the American Board of Foreign Missions at Manepy, Tillipally and Oodooville until his death in 1873.
A LABOR OF LOVE
The College in general reflected a quickened interest in missions. The Theological Society fixed one evening a month for prayer for missionary work, members were taxed each month at least one cent for foreign missions, and in 1819 it was voted to support at school in Ceylon a native boy "who shall be named Francis Brown." Among the members who gave their lives to the new movement were Daniel Poor and John Nichols who went to the Far East, and William Goodell and Daniel Temple to the Near East. On the same ship with Spaulding sailed his classmate Woodward who labored in Ceylon until his death.
Spaulding bore testimony to the fact that during his long sojourn on the other side of the world his thoughts often ran back to the friends of his Hanover days and to the joyous experience of his conversion. His ways are not our ways, and his faith that the Christian gospel was what was most needed to redeem man's vileness in Ceylon has been weakened in our time, but in the spirit and courage of the man there is everything to admire. Sometime when you are making a pilgrimage to the grave of Eleazar Wheelock stop a moment by the marble monument which meant so much to this missionary friend and colleague of his grandson. Sometime when you stand by the Ledyard boulder on the banks of the Connecticut look to some towering pine and remember Levi Spaulding. He too heard a voice crying in a wilderness of need—a voice that Dartmouth should never let die.