“Be of Good Courage, and Let Us Play the Man for Our People”
In 1754 George Washington, then a young Lieutenant Colonel in charge of a regiment of troops from Virginia, attacked a small French force at Jumonville Glen, in what is today southwest Pennsylvania. The French contingent was nearly wiped out, being caught unawares by the combined Virginian and Iroquois force. Though tensions between England and France had been increasing for some time, many historians mark this battle as the beginning of the French and Indian War (Seven Years War). Washington was initially blamed for an unjust massacre of French troops, and for igniting the war, but his reputation had improved dramatically by the next year, largely on account of his skill and bravery in the subsequent battles at Fort Necessity and Fort Monongahela. On hearing of Washington’s bravery, Samuel Davies, a Presbyterian minister and fellow Virginian, remarked, in what proved to be an amazingly prescient intuition: “I cannot but hope Providence has hitherto preserved [him] in so signal a manner for some important service to his country.”1
Davies, born in Delaware in 1723, would go on to serve for many years as a minister, and eventually as the fourth president of The College of New Jersey (later renamed Princeton), following the death of Jonathan Edwards, the third president of the college. As a pastor and theological college administrator, Davies was one of the primary influences on early American Presbyterianism, the College of New Jersey being the only training institution for colonial American Presbyterian ministers at that time.2
The details of Davies’ storied life are all worth recounting, but I want to draw attention to one specific aspect, the way in which he combined a robust form of early American patriotism (one might even say nationalism) with an equally robust pastoral ministry, focused with passionate intensity on the centrality of Christ’s saving work, and a heavenly-minded piety centered on the excellencies of the Savior. American Presbyterians of previous generations, along with members of many other denominations, did not find it nearly as difficult to hold these two things together as have many of their more recent theological heirs.
Davies ministered to multiple congregations on the northwestern border of colonial Virginia, preaching as many as five times every Lord’s Day to widely scattered churches. This area was under constant threat from French and Indian attack. What message did Davies think his congregations needed to hear? The answer might surprise many. In a “war sermon” preached in Hanover, VA on July 25th, 1755 Davies urged his flock:
Let me earnestly recommend to you to furnish yourselves with arms and put yourselves into a position of defense. What is that religion good for that leaves men cowards on the appearance of danger? And permit me to say that I am particularly solicitous that you, my brothers of the dissenters [from the established Anglican church] should act with honor and spirit in this juncture, as it becomes loyal subjects, lovers of your country, and courageous Christians.
One could imagine a form of counsel that would simply urge his flock to trust the Lord and not fear for the future, but Davies is not in the least interested in opposing piety and action in the world. He finds, as he says in his sermon, such an opposition, in the face of grave earthly danger, to amount to cowardice, not heavenly-mindedness. For Davies, loyalty to one’s country, as well as the bravery that should follow from one’s trust in Christ for eternal life, compelled the men of his congregation to take up arms to defend their land.
Davies chose to remain in the dangerous borderlands of Western Virginia throughout the war, writing at one point:
If I consulted either my safety or my temporal interests, I should soon remove my family to Great Britain or the northern colonies…. And yet I must declare that after the most calm and impartial deliberation, I am determined not to leave my country while there is any prospect of defending it. Certainly, he does not deserve a place in any country who is ready to run from it upon every appearance of danger. The event of the war is yet uncertain but let us determine that if the cause should require it, we will courageously leave house and home and take the field.
Davies believed that one’s indispensable duty as a citizen was to, if necessary, “take the field” in defense of his nation. He was not speaking metaphorically, nor was he understood as such: “a company of colonists with rifles at the ready enlisted” on hearing Davies’ exhortation.3 Soon after Davies preached a sermon on the phrase “Be of good courage, and let us play the man for our people” from 2 Samuel 10:12 in order to encourage the men from his congregation to follow through with their duty.4
As the war raged on, a need for additional soldiers became pressing. In another sermon to his main congregation Davies asked:
May I not reasonably insist upon it that the company of soldiers be made up this very day before we leave this place. Methinks your king, your country, nay, your own interest command me: and, therefore, I insist upon it…. Oh! For the influence of the Lord of armies, the God of battles, the Author of true courage and every heroic virtue, to fire you into patriotic and true soldiers this moment, young and hardy men, whose very faces seem to speak that God and nature formed you as soldiers…. Ye that love your country, enlist, for honor will follow you in life or death in such a cause. Ye that love your religion, enlist, for your religion is in danger. Can Protestant Christianity expect quarter from heathen savages and French papists? Sure in such an alliance the powers of hell make a third party. Ye that love your friends and relations, enlist, lest ye see them enslaved and butchered before your eyes.
That is quite the sermon application: urging enlistment in the army in order to defend the Virginians’ families, neighbors, country, Protestantism, and honor itself.
Davies was a Presbyterian dissenter in Virginia, where Anglicanism was established by the state. To even preach in the state required a special license, granting him an exception from the law. Davies was an advocate for greater toleration of Presbyterianism in the colony, and his success in helping raise forces to defend the colony led to a lessening of restrictions on Presbyterians and other Nonconformist Protestants in Virginia. Davies’ plea for greater toleration of varying Christian churches, however, did not entail the modern, secularist, absolutist tolerationism, the notion that if anything is to be tolerated, everything must be tolerated. His position was hardly unusual in early American history. It is a sign of how thoroughly modern secularism has warped our discourse that this restricted form of toleration seems controversial today.
If sentiments like those from Davies’ sermons quoted above were preached in a contemporary pulpit, I imagine many evangelical Christians would insist that Davies had, among other things, “made an idol out of politics.” No one felt that way about Davies at the time. He was well known throughout the colonies as a preacher whose chief desire was “to preach the gospel ‘of Jesus in its life and power.’”5 His congregants spoke of how his preaching took them into the very “suburbs of heaven”6 His renown for gospel-saturated, spiritually-enlivening preaching was such that he was once invited to preach before King George II of England, who was moved by Davies’ preaching to contribute from his own wealth to the founding of the College of New Jersey. As Joel Beeke and Douglas Bond put it:
Samuel Davies was a preacher par excellence. With divine unction, he preached biblically, doctrinally, experientially, and practically. He excelled at preaching about the heinousness of sin and the depravity of man, the glories of Christ and his substitutionary atonement, and the Spirit’s saving work in the soul of sinners. He preached the marks of grace clearly and extolled God’s mercy to penitents. . . . Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones believed that Davies was the greatest preacher America ever produced.7
In the end, the life and ministry of Samuel Davies provide a compelling portrait of a pastor and preacher who was able to hold together without tension a vigorous commitment to Christ, to the well-being, prosperity, and safety of his country, and to the protection and promotion of the Protestant churches. He did not advocate a return to magisterial Protestant politics, but neither did he contend for radical secularism or unlimited toleration. His ability to hold all of these notions together so seamlessly shows us that, perhaps, it is not he that is the anomaly in thinking through how Christians should relate to the world around them, but we today, controlled as we so often are by what Joe Rigney calls the “progressive gaze.”
Thanks so much, Ben. This is so helpful. Davies is my hero. I am serving a PCA church in Williamsburg, Va at the moment as an interim pastor, and thinking about Davies often. Your words are a needed correction to what I hear all the time about Christians not thinking carefully about the implications of political issues.