| The Life of Dr. J.R. Miller |
Chapter 8 |
Page 4 |
“Presbyterianism has always been supposed to be distinguished for system and intellectual quality, and to be peculiarly hospitable to the arts of literature; but until the year 1880 the critical were wont to deplore a painful lack of all this in our official publications addressed to youth. That in 1912 this status has been reversed is largely due, under God, to the wisdom, piety, skill and persistence of Dr. Miller. To have developed either The Westminster Teacher, or Forward, would of itself have been enough to mark an era. To have developed the one and created the other, to have transformed The Visitor into The Comrade and to have developed the complete and close jointed series of high grade quarterlies which culminate in The Teacher, was to bring our denomination well abreast of the times thus far, as related to the unfolding needs of our Sunday school work; to justify anew its reputation for weight and momentum; and thus to attach its tentacles firmly and diversely to remarkable providential opportunity as related to the training of the young in a day of growing laxity and appalling change.
“To meet the disheartening conditions due to widespread decay of family worship, home training, and catechetical instruction, to rapid absorption of unschooled masses by the Church, and to bewildering changes in forms of thought and in educational methods, was a task to call for more of delicacy, tact, force, industry, varied knowledge, practical wisdom and executive skill than any one man could be expected to compass; yet under the leadership of Dr. Miller this has a notable degree been effected within the bounds of our body; and it has been so effected as to organize effort for smoothly and rapidly developing the large enterprise as occasion may require in the future. Dr. Miller, in the spirit and to a remarkable degree with the skill of the Master, so shaped his labour and so impressed on it the stamp of his personality, as to pave the way for its increasing efficiency at the hands of his successors amid the unfolding conditions of the generations to come.
Page 4