Logic on Fire: Recovering Samuel Davies' Sermons for a New Generation
From his death on February 4, 1761, to the American Civil War (1861-65), the sermons of Samuel Davies were the most widely sold and most eagerly read sermons on both sides of the Atlantic. Things changed when the Polegreen Church building where Davies once preached was burned to the ground during the hostilities between the North and the South. Sadly, Davies and his sermons seemed to disappear from the American consciousness after that war, even as the building where he once preached had all but vanished.
I happily paid the $30 they cost with little idea how those sermons would affect my own life.
While a student at Reformed Theological Seminary, I learned about Samuel Davies from my beloved professor, Dr. Morton H. Smith. After graduation, I found three volumes of a 4-volume set of Davies’s sermons at a used bookstore in South Carolina, Noah’s Ark Book Attic. I happily paid the $30 they cost with little idea how those sermons would affect my own life. I soon became convinced that they were the most impressive sermons that I had ever read and the finest example of preaching the gospel of which I was aware.
One always seems to feel that they were written by a man who never looked far off from the value of a soul and the importance of eternity
William Jay, the nineteenth-century Non-conformist minister in London, commented on Davies’s sermons that “no discourses ever appeared to me so adapted to awaken the conscience and impress the heart. In reading them, one always seems to feel that they were written by a man who never looked far off from the value of a soul and the importance of eternity; or sought for anything but to bring his hearers under ‘the powers of the world to come.’”[1] Another British minister, Thomas Gibbons, was a contemporary of Davies and wrote the preface to the first London edition of Davies’s sermons. Gibbons assessed that in those sermons, Davies manifested “an impartial regard to the cases of all his hearers, like a good steward distributing to all their portion of meat in due season; animated and pathetic application, in which the author collects and concentrates what he has been proving in his discourses, and urges it with all the powers of forcible address and melting persuasion to the heart.”[2]
Davies’s sermons are both instructive in enlightening the mind and hortatory in appealing to the heart.
The sermons of Davies combine the Scriptural emphases on doctrine, application, and vigorous appeals to the lost. Davies is doctrinal in his evangelism and evangelistic in his doctrine. Davies’s sermons are both instructive in enlightening the mind and hortatory in appealing to the heart. Most ministers err in one direction or another, but Davies maintained the balance in both areas. He seems to have captured the sentiments of the ancient prophets, particularly Jeremiah and Amos, in their laments over Israel and Judah, or, more especially, our Savior’s tears over Jerusalem recorded in Luke 19:41-44.
A letter signed by Samuel Davies dating to August 13, 1751. In this letter contains one of Davies’s most famous quotes: “I have a peaceful study, as a refuge from the Hurries & Noise of the World around me; the venerable Dead are waiting in my Library to entertain me, & relieve me from the Nonsense of Surviving Mortals”
His sermons were not loose harangues but logic on fire.
The great Princeton theologian, Charles Hodge, wrote an article in 1842 for the Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review, “The Theological Opinions of President Davies,” in which he reviewed a new edition of Davies’s sermons. His purpose was to show that the doctrinal views of Davies were decidedly Scriptural and confessional. His sermons were not loose harangues but logic on fire. Yet, it was not the wisdom of the world that formed the basis for his logic, but it was the divinely inspired Scripture that shaped his thoughts and words. A sermon Davies preached before the Presbytery of New Castle on October 11, 1752, gives us his views on preaching, which are then wonderfully modeled for us in the sermons in this new volume. The advice which Augustine perceived is still the best advice for us concerning these volumes: Tolle Lege (‘take up and read’).
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