| The Life of Dr. J.R. Miller |
Chapter 5 |
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He completed his course in the spring of 1867. During the summer he accepted a call from the First United Presbyterian Church of New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, the seat of Westminster College, from which he had graduated five years earlier. His ordination and installation took place September 11, 1867, and he at once devoted himself heartily to the work of pulpit and pastorate. Being a college centre, the field gave inspiration for the most careful sermon preparation, and men who sat under his preaching in their student days – ministers, doctors, lawyers, and others – tell of the uplift which it brought to them. A number of men testified in later years that they were led by his strong personality and the spirit of his work to the determination to devote their lives to the gospel ministry.
Nor was it only the students who were helped by his preaching at New Wilmington. From the first there was a persuasiveness in tone and message, and an earnestness in utterance which made his preaching – to use the words of an admirer – “peculiarly his own.” There was nothing stilted in his pulpit work, no straining after rhetorical or dramatic effect, but there was a simplicity, a directness, an elegance and richness in diction and illustration, combined with evident sincerity and earnestness that carried his messages directly to the heart.
It was evident to all who watched his work that he was winning a strong hold upon the hearts of children, because they always had a warm place in his heart’s love. A mother still living in New Wilmington tells of the interest manifested in her only son by the young pastor, and of the affection which the child soon began to manifest in return. One of the ways in which he showed his interest in children and young people was in the encouragement he gave them to cultivate missionary gardens, or rows of corn or potatoes in their fathers’ fields. Wherever there were children in the home there was a well cared for garden bed, or rows of corn or potatoes, or a tree in the orchard, the products of which were given to God. At Thanksgiving there would be a general ingathering of the fruits of the consecrated ground.
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