- He Chooses Smooth Stones

It is significant as well as amusing to see how many Biblical prophets kept sheep before assuming their prophetic office, and how many modern prophets taught school. The schoolhouse has been the vestibule to the church house for a multitude of successful ministers. And it was so with Albert Simpson. He knew he needed the money and God knew he needed the experience, so when only sixteen and looking much younger, he sat with boyish dignity and drilled into a room full of over-age students from the Canadian prairies the fundamentals of education. Some of these students were nearly twice his age, and yet they obeyed him like lambs. He wondered why, and with characteristic modesty fails to see that they are but paying tribute to his inherent gift of leadership. They felt something—and none of them could have told what it was—that made them want to follow that intelligent, self-assured youngster. Their instinct was sound; he was a born leader, and with his ability to influence the masses he could have been a dangerous man if he had fallen into other ways than the ways of God.
During these days of teaching and study his spiritual life grew like grass by the water courses. His testimony at this time abounds with phrases that show how the stripling was thriving in his new life of faith: “The promises of God burst upon my soul with a new and marvelous light. The glowing promises of Isaiah and Jeremiah were clothed with a glory that no tongue can express.” He must have literally devoured the Scriptures, and with what he calls “unspeakable ecstasy” he marked his favorite passages. No giant has appeared as yet, but with one spiritual intuition he is choosing smooth stones from the brook. He will need them later on.
At seventeen he decides—as a result of reading again his father’s old favorite, Doddridge—to confirm his spiritual experience by a solemn covenant, God, as the party of the first part, and himself, as party of the second part, being the high contracting parties. The dead seriousness of the boy is apparent here. He sets aside a whole day for fasting and prayer, and then at the close of the day draws up and signs and seals the covenant.
This covenant is one of the most remarkable things produced by any boy—Christian in any period of the Church’s history. Artificial and stilted in language it admittedly is, but back of the old-fashioned language and borrowed mode of speech a great soul is discoverable. The covenant itself runs into about nine-hundred words, and follows an unconscious parallel with a Sunday morning service in the Presbyterian Church in Chatham or any other town of that day.
It begins with the Sunday morning prayer, “O Thou everlasting and almighty God, Ruler of the universe, Thou who madest this world and me Thy creature upon it, Thou who art in every place beholding the evil and the good, Thou seest me at this time and knowest all my thoughts.” A little later comes the hymn, where he says he would,
“Come before Thee as a sinner
Lost and ruined by the fall.”
From there he launches into a Calvinistic sermon that would have warmed the heart of any Scotch Covenanter, but that no boy would ever have thought of by himself: “Thou, O Lord, didst make Adam holy and happy, and gavest him ability to maintain his state:’ (From a boy of seventeen!) “The penalty of his disobedience was death, but he disobeyed Thy holy law and incurred that penalty, and I, as a descendent from him, have inherited this depravity and this penalty. I acknowledge the justness of Thy sentence, O Lord, and would bow in submission before Thee.” Several “points” are developed in the same vein, and then he announces the closing hymn.
“I am now a soldier of the cross,
A follower of the lamb.”
After that comes the benediction, “Now give me Thy Spirit and Thy protection in my heart at all times, and then I shall drink of the rivers of salvation, lie down by still waters, and be infinitely happy in the favor of God.”
This “covenant” is done, of course, in ordinary prose, but the music is in the background plain enough to be heard by any keen ear. The whole thing is an astonishing piece of work, revealing a remarkable familiarity with the Scriptures for a boy of seventeen, and evidencing a psychology entirely dominated by the Church. It is a solemn and beautiful song in the creation of which Paul and Calvin collaborated on the words, and King David wrote the music.
In all this—his school teaching, his eager study, his religious vows and spiritual adventures—there is seen a dual purpose leading him on. There was the over-all purpose of God, of which the boy was but dimly conscious, weaving in every thread of providential circumstance to make a mantle for this prophet; and there was the firm conscious purpose of the boy himself. For there was something sweetly deceptive about this smiling gentle youth. Underneath his mild exterior there lay a will like an iron beam. He had a purpose in his heart that completely controlled him. Once he had settled his call to the ministry this mighty purpose took over and drove him like a benignant master for the rest of his days. If ever there was a man who knew why he was alive that man was A. B. Simpson. He is preparing to answer the old question, ‘“What is the chief end of man?” in deeds as well as in words. No other kind of answer would do for that kind of man.