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Editorial note: Our guest writer today is Zachary Groff, Director of Advancement & Admissions at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and Pastor of Antioch Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Woodruff, SC.

From 1804 to 1807, The Virginia Religious Magazine enjoyed the editorial labors of then-President of Hampden-Sydney College Archibald Alexander and “a few of his ministerial colleagues” (perhaps including Samuel Houston, Matthew Lyle, George A. Baxter, Samuel Brown, Daniel Blain, Samuel L. Campbell, Conrad Speece, and John Holt Rice) “under the auspices of the Presbyterian Synod of Virginia.”

This short-lived Presbyterian periodical ran through three volumes comprised of six issues each. Despite its short tenure and relative obscurity, The Virginia Religious Magazine deserves celebration as one of the earliest religious periodicals in the United States of America, preceded by the Connecticut Evangelical Magazine (published by the congregational Missionary Society of Connecticut). Barring the discovery of evidence to the contrary, The Virginia Religious Magazine was the first such publication in the American South.

Though the authorship of individual articles included in the Magazine is difficult to determine, readers will benefit from a careful examination and consideration of the contents. William H. Foote attributes four (unspecified) articles to the pre-Princetonian Archibald Alexander, though the principal contributors seem to have been Conrad Speece and John Holt Rice.

Readers may choose to read the contents of the Magazine from beginning to end to catch a glimpse of an important historical moment in the development of American Presbyterianism. Reflections on practical religion, church history, theological topics, and contemporary revivals provide a window into the religious life of American Christians as they pressed westward into the frontier. Alternatively, a more selective approach to the contents of the Magazine will yield great spiritual benefit to interested readers. For example, the cautionary tale of Jack Vincent (The History of Jack Vincent, as found in Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 212-222), which is authored under the pseudonym Philo and attributed by William H. Foote to John Holt Rice, is a moving apocryphal – or at least embellished – account of the sad life and death of a certain Jack Vincent. Such tales powerfully warned readers away from carelessness in religion and child-rearing. In these stories we recognize one of the perennial concerns of ministers and parents: the diligent nurture and admonition of the rising generation.

To access The Virginia Religious Magazine in its entirety, please refer to the Archibald Alexander page. To pursue your own research into this fascinating periodical, be sure to consult the biographies of John Holt Rice, one by Philip B. Price and the other by William Maxwell, both available on the Log College Press website. Tolle Lege!

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There is a wonderful web of ties between godly men and women outlined in just a few paragraphs from a memoir of the famous Southern Presbyterian missionary to the African Congo, Samuel Norvell Lapsley (1866-1892). His father, James Woods Lapsley, in Life and Letters of Samuel Norvell Lapsley, Missionary to the Congo Valley, West Africa, 1866-1892 (1893), wrote:

SAMUEL NORVELL LAPSLEY

was born in Selma, Alabama, April 14th, 1866. He came into life with the inestimable advantage of pious parentage and a godly ancestry. He was the third son of James Woods Lapsley and Sara E. Pratt, his wife: he an elder in the church, and both of them children of Presbyterian ministers. On his father's side the blood was that of the Scotch-Irish and Scotch, who came to the Valley of Virginia over one hundred and fifty years ago; he being descended from Michael Woods, of Albemarle, an Irish immigrant, who came up the Valley in 1734; his son-in-law, Joseph Lapsley, coming by way of Pennsylvania a little later, and also from Andrew Woods, of Botetourt, and Mary Poage, his wife, and counting among his ancestors in the last century the Moores, Rayburns, and Armstrongs, who came into the Valley country when it was a wilderness.
His father's father was the Rev. Robert Armstrong Lapsley, D.D., of Nashville, Tenn., a name still greatly revered through Tennessee and Kentucky. And in the old cemetery at Nashville, over the grave of his father's mother, Catherine Rutherford Lapsley, is an inscription telling of her pious life and triumphant death, and of her descent from Samuel Rutherford, of the Westminster Assembly'. Her father was John Moore Walker, son of Joseph Walker, for thirty years a trustee and treasurer of Washington College, now the Washington and Lee University. Joseph Walker's wife was Jane Moore, an aunt of Mary Moore, the heroine of the little book in our Sunday-school libraries, The Captives of Abb’s Valley.1 How the name and character of the brave old Covenanter, Samuel Rutherford, has been held in reverence, is observable from the constant recurrence of his name and that of his wife, Catherine, in the families of his descendants. An instance is that of Samuel Rutherford Lapsley, an uncle of the subject of this Memoir (and for whom he was named), his father's youngest brother, who, in his twentieth year, got his death wound in the front of the battle at Shiloh, April, 1862, struck down with the colors of his regiment in his hands.
On the mother's side the lineage was drawn from New England and the Georgia low-country. His mother's father, the Rev. Horace Southworth Pratt, was from Connecticut, but spent his life in Georgia and Alabama, dying while professor of Belles-lettres in the University of Alabama, in which office he was succeeded by his son. Rev. John W. Pratt, D. D., afterwards pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Lexington, Va., and of the Second Church in Louisville, Ky. His mother's mother, Isabel Drysdale, was of an old loyalist Episcopal family of the low-country, to which the late Bishop Drysdale, of Louisiana, belonged. Rather than rebel against King George, they fled to the Bahamas, where Mrs. Pratt was born. She was equally eminent for piety, literary taste, and business capacity. For many years a widow, she managed well her children's education and property, and also found time to write and publish a number of books for children.
These brief references to an honored and faithful ancestry are worthy of record, showing the value of family religion, coming down from generation to generation, and testifying to the faithfulness of a covenant-keeping God.
1 Mrs. Kay, our venerable aunt, says: "The book, Captives of Abbs Valley [by James Moore Brown], omits one thing that my mother used to tell. She said, as the Indians were taking Cousin Mary away, that she caught up her Bible and carried it with her through her long captivity, and when she was at last released and came back to live at Grandma Walker's she still had that Bible. Grandma was quite a match-maker, and thought very highly of preachers. She married Cousin Mary Moore to the Rev. Samuel Brown, and among their children were five preachers, one of whom was the Rev. Dr. William Brown, of Richmond. She married her daughter, my Aunt Peggy, to Rev. Samuel Houston. Their son, Rev. Samuel Rutherford Houston, was missionary to Greece, and his daughter, Janet, is now a missionary m Mexico."

A testimony to “the faithfulness of a covenant-keeping God,” indeed.

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