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Return to Home PageALEXANDER CAMPBELL’S STUDY OBSERVES 170TH ANNIVERSARY
Students of Restoration history are well-acquainted with the brick hexagonal study built by Alexander Campbell in 1832. It stands in the southwest corner of the yard, a short walk from the mansion in which the noted preacher lived 55 years. It is located in Bethany, West Virginia.
The six-sided structure had windows only in the cupola, signifying the builder’s belief that all light, physical and spiritual, comes down from above. Heat was provided by an air-tight wood burner. Though Campbell customarily stood while studying, there was a chair, according to his wife, Selina, “fashioned with a circular table attached to it for writing.” For five summers following his death, she kept the chair sitting beside his grave.
In his study, Alexander Campbell wrote many of his 59 volumes, edited for over 30 years the Millennial Harbinger, and prepared for his five major debates. His schedule called for some sixteen hours of work daily, going to the study at 4:00 a.m. and returning to the mansion at 10:00 p.m. With such unbridled commitment to learning, it is no wonder President James Madison called him “the greatest expositor of the scripture I have ever heard.” The Head of the Department of Church History at Yale University recently declared Campbell to be by all standards “one of the greatest theologians ever produced in America, second to Jonathon Edwards.”
The church today must once again call for excellence in study habits. Our ministers must be proclaimers, not promoters, superior students of the Word of God, “able to convict and convince the gainsayers.” Modern-day congregations which experience great difficulty in getting their own people to a one-hour Sunday morning Bible class would do well to pause at the door of Brother Campbell’s study on this 170th anniversary. The men who first called for a return to the “ancient order of things” were devoted to an intense study of the scripture. May God grant a fresh anointing of that spirit upon His church today!
Paul Rogers