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Clarence Edward Noble Macartney (1879-1957) was an American Presbyterian clergyman and author who played an important role in the PCUSA’s “fundamentalist-modernist” controversy of the 1920s and 1930s. Macartney is known, for example, for his famous 1922 sermon “Shall Unbelief Win?” — a response to Harry Emerson Fosdick’s "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” Both of these significant sermons have recently been added to Log College Press.
From his posthumously-published The Making of a Minster: The Autobiography of Clarence E. Macartney (1961), pp. 63-64, we glean some insight into the background of this staunch defender of the faith. What is particularly interesting is the place that family worship held in his home as he grew up in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. His family was members of the RPCNA congregation pastored by Robert James George (whose address on family religion is available to read on Log College Press). In this extract, Macartney speaks of his first religious impressions.
I received my earliest and most abiding religious impressions where they are always first received, in the home. Family worship was universal in the homes of our neighborhood, and we had “worship” every morning before breakfast and at night before going to bed. Father would say to one of the children, “Bring the books,” whereupon the black-bound Bibles were brought from the shelf in the dumbwaiter which now serves as a closet. After we had sung a Psalm we then read around the circle the verses of the chapter for the day, after which we knelt for prayer, by Father when he was at home, or, if he was away, by Mother. My first lessons in religion and in reading I had on those mornings at family worship, sitting on my father’s knee as he, with his long forefinger, pointed out the words to me. The 121st Psalm was a favorite. We always sang that great “Traveler’s Psalm” when any of the family was starting off to college, or on a journey. The benediction of that family altar has, I am sure, followed all of us through life thus far, and will, I hope, follow us up to the gate of heaven. Father was wont to conclude his petitions at the family altar with the prayer, “May we all get home at last!” Still on life’s pilgrimage, the children who remain can hear the music of that grand 121st Psalm as we sang it in the Scottish metrical version:
“I too the hills will lift mine eyes,
From whence doth come mine aid
My safety cometh from the Lord,
Who heaven and earth hath made.”The most treasured recollection of my mother’s religious training is that of singing by our bedside at night in her clear, sweet voice the words of the hymn,
“There is a happy land,
Far, far away.”On Sabbath afternoons in the springtime and summer mother took us down to a moss-covered rock under the sassafras trees on the hillside and told us the deathless tales of the Bible. She had a little red-bound hymn book out of which we sang with her some of the hymns. Covenanters were not supposed to sing the hymns; only the Psalms of David, and those Psalms are, indeed, the sweetest music this side of heaven. Yet Mother was always free in her religious life, and did not hesitate, on occasions, to sing the hymns. I am sure that the singing of those hymns on the summer afternoons on that moss-covered rock on the hillside in the long ago did much to introduce us to the warmth and tenderness of personal religion.
Family worship as boy left a deep impression on the man who later devoted his life to the ministry of the gospel, and as a witness to Old School, Biblical religion. Seeds planted early may, in the providence and mercy of God, bear much good fruit.
