In the correspondence in the Charles A. Blanchard papers there is an 1883 Christmas Eve letter from Ellen Milligan Blanchard, Charles’ first wife, to her mother-in-law, Mary Bent Blanchard. In it Ellen writes that Charles had brought Jennie Smith, evangelist of the Railroad men to visit and speak in the college chapel. As noted in a prior blog entry, it was rather unusual for women to be involved in direct public ministry, particularly as pastors or evangelists. Charles Blanchard clearly resisted this trend and endorsed the ministry of numerous women in ministry.

The life and ministry of Jennie Smith is revealed well within the holdings of the Evangelism and Missions Collection. In 1876 Smith wrote Valley of Baca, wherein she recorded her birth, youth, sufferings and triumphs. Smith was the first child born to James and Eliza Smith on August 18, 1842 in Vienna, Ohio, west of Warren and north of Youngstown, a few miles from the Pennsylvania border. Smith came to faith as a child through Christian literature, coupled with the death of a brother and local Sabbath schools. According to her memory her childhood was one of plenty–a situation that changed after her father’s passing. It was prior to this loss that Smith succumbed to typhoid fever that resulted in a spinal disease. Her illness resulted in isolation and a broken engagement. Though she would regain her strength and health from this bout a deeper illness and fever fell upon Smith in early 1862, resulting in a paralysis. An inventor created a portable cot for Smith so that she could travel. In illness or health Smith took advantage of opportunities to speak about God’s mercies to her doctors and visitors. In her first memoir she noted that Christian people were not as charitable to “railroad hands, street-car drivers and conductors, livery men, firemen, policemen and others, including domestic servants” who often, due to work schedules, lack the liberty to attend worship services. Smith was keenly aware that her illness put great strains on her family and others.

In 1880 Smith published From Baca to Beulah as she continued to tell the story of God’s work in her life. She recounted how in 1877 she felt the call as an Evangelist while speaking to a Friends (Quaker) group in Woodbury, Ohio. This spurred Smith on to ministry and began her travels–all in her portable cot. During her work she would seek medical attention as needed and consult with panels of physicians seeking restoration. In late March 1878 Smith sensed a strengthening of her faith and asked her physician to pray with her for God’s help. Smith recounted that it was during this prayer that she felt “the instant cessation of all pain.” She exclaimed how she “praised the Lord many times for a praying physician.” In less than a month Smith was able to stand and walk. She welcomed the opportunity to sit to dinner with family, something she had not done “since February 23, 1862.”

During her time bed-bound Smith and her family relied upon the generosity of others. In those days there was no large governmental or private social service structure that serves so many today. Smith noted that the only funds she had was in her “bank of trust” in her heavenly Father.

As noted above, Jennie Smith was known for her work with “Railroad men.” She was drawn to working with these workers when she was paralized and had relied on rail staff to carry her helpless body when she traveled by train, in the baggage cars, for treatment. Smith was struck by their noble and generous work, yet they were often spiritually neglected. After her healing she chose as her work to minister among “railroad people” and was made the National Superintendent of the Railroad Department of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. So touched were the workers on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad by Smith’s tireless ministry and efforts to obtain for them a “mansion in the skies” that they sought to raise funds sufficient to purchase her an earthly home. This fund drive was limited to B&O Railroad employees and was not to exceed $1 per person.

Smith felt her particular mission was to travel on the railroads and give meetings and her testimony along the routes. She took efforts to inform others of her work and along with the two volumes mentioned above she went on to write books Ramblings in Beulah Land, volumes 1 and 2, published in 1881 and 1882 and Incidents and Experiences of a Railroad Evangelist (1920). Despite so many years physically impaired Smith continued her ministry for many years until her death on September 3, 1924 at the age of 82.

Shortly after the death of seven-month old Jonathan Edwards Blanchard in Cincinnati another child was conceived by Jonathan and Mary Blanchard. Born on January 7, 1841, Mary Avery Blanchard entered life on her mother’s birthday and was so named for her. The eldest of the Blanchard children, Jonathan and Mary sought to provide the best educational opportunities for Mary Avery. For a summer she lived with the John Payson Willistons and enrolled in school in Northampton, Massachusetts. While in school Jonathan wrote his daughter encouraging her to not worry about her grade level but whether she was thorough in her work. When she wrote back in one letter about the handsome men Jonathan wrote back and said she was there to study. Displaying his beliefs about the education of women Jonathan had Mary Avery studying Greek, so that she may read the New Testament, Latin and Mathematics. He told her that “Latin was a glorious language of a glorious people….Love it.” When Mary Avery returned to Galesburg she finished her studies at Knox Female Seminary and became a school teacher in Prospect City, Illinois for a time. When she was seventeen she enrolled at Mount Holyoke College. Jonathan expected much of his eldest child. She had the same impetuous spirit as her father. Engaged for a time to a Mr. Caldwell, someone that Jonathan believed to be less than pious, Mary Avery snapped back that she would marry him and they would go to hell together. However, before they could wed Mary Avery contracted consumption, known today as tuberculosis. Though she was able to make the move to Wheaton with the family when Jonathan assumed the presidency of Wheaton College, Mary Avery died on December 6, 1860, a month before her twentieth birthday. This was the fourth child that Jonathan and Mary Blanchard had lost before reaching full adulthood. Enamored with the work of John G. Fee, Mary Avery bequeathed what little worldly goods she had to his work at Berea College in Kentucky.

Upon Mary Avery’s death M. F. Bigney, editor of the the New Orleans paper, The Daily City Item, wrote
Give Me The Harp. She was known as a pious girl and these words were based upon her final earthly words, “Give me the harp I hear.” The poem appeared in Bigney’s The Forest Pilgrims, and other poems published in 1867.

Give me the harp with the sounding strings,
The harp whose tones I hear–
It seems upborne by an angel’s wings,
And unto my bursting heart it brings
The sounds of hope and cheer–
A melody all divine, that springs
From a higher and purer sphere.
Give me the harp, and this trembling hand
Released from the ills of earth,
Shall learn the lays of the better land,
Shall touch the strings with a high command,
And the joy of a spirit-birth
Shall thrill my soul with a rapture grand,
With a fond and holy mirth.
Give me the harp, and I’ll bid farewell
To the fleeting scenes of time ;
With the loved ones gone before I’d dwell,
My harp with theirs should the echoes swell
Of a high immortal rhyme ;
Give me the harp, for I fain would tell
Of release from this world of crime.

Dr. Iain Murray, biographer of Dr. D.M. Lloyd-Jones, pastor of Westminster Chapel in London, writes of the famed Reformed theologian’s visit to the campus of Wheaton College:

On Monday, August 11, the Lloyd-Joneses left Toronto for Wheaton College (near Chicago) where Carl F.H. Henry had asked ML-J to give the first series of Jonathan Blanchard Lectures on a subject related to apologetics. The result was five addresses subsequently published as Truth Unchanged, Unchanging. In essence they were an explanation of his whole approach to evangelism: the modern secular scene requires no new apologetic because man’s condition in sin is the same as it always has been; only the Bible can explain that condition and only the gospel provides a remedy radical enough for the problem. One relaxation in the heat wave which overtook them at Wheaton was an outing to the farm of some Welsh relatives in Illinois. After writing to his mother with news of the relatives, ML-J had to add something on his special interest: “They certainly have some wonderful ponies. Unfortunately it was too hot for us to see any of them in motion.”

Lloyd-Jones’ five Blanchard lectures, collectively titled “Sin: Its Diagnosis and Treatment,” eventually comprised Truth Unchanged, Unchanging (1951), which was his first post-war book to be printed. The ongoing lecture series, sponsored by the Alumni Association, was intended to be primarily apologetic and academic in emphasis rather than devotional. The conservative Welsh preacher was the successor to G. Campbell Morgan, the “Prince of Expositors,” at Westminster Chapel. Lloyd-Jones died in 1981.

Wheaton College has issued several honorary degrees throughout the years. Seldom, perhaps, has it offered the tempting potentiality of receiving one, as in the case of Henry W. Frost, Home Director for North America of the China Inland Mission (now called Overseas Missionary Fellowship), founded by Hudson Taylor. In the following exchange, Frost gently prods a somewhat distracted Dr. Charles A. Blanchard, second president of Wheaton College, toward remembering a past communication.

May 12, 1921

Dear Dr. Blanchard,

You will recall the fact that I was corresponding with you about a year ago about the possibility of my receiving from the college a B.A. degree. I have hoped to hear from you in regard to the matter but have not done so. Thinking you may have written and that your letter has gone astray, I beg to enquire whether or not the faculty reached any conclusion in the matter. I am sorry to trouble you about what concerns myself, rather than the interests of the college, but I shall be grateful for a few lines giving your decision. May I add, if you can grant me the degree, that it will have real value in the Lord’s service, especially now that I am living in Princeton, where such an honor is held in much esteem. It has been a pleasure to get better acquainted with you of late…

With warm regards, I am, yours faithfully,

Henry W. Frost

Though this is a somewhat pressing matter for Frost’s late-life phase of ministry, Blanchard seems to have relegated it to a lower priority:

May 18, 1921

My dear brother,

In this busy life, with so many things crowding upon me, I am sorry to say I forgot many things I wish I could remember. I had entirely lost sight of the matter about which you wrote me. I am afraid you sent me some information about your educational history which I have mislaid and forgotten. Supposing you tell me again. I know of your relations to the China Inland Mission and I approve of them thoroughly. I need, however, in stating the case to my fellow workers, to know all the facts that I may answer the questions which they are certain to ask.

With best regards, and wishing you every blessing, I am faithfully yours,

Charles A. Blanchard

Frost patiently reiterates his predicament:

May 23, 1921

Dear Dr. Blanchard,

Your most kind letter of the 18th was duly received upon the 21st. I beg to thank you for it and for the generous sympathy which it expresses. In answer to your question about our past correspondence, allow me to reply as follows: About a year ago I asked you if I could pursue with you an extra muros course of study which would lead to my securing a B.A. degree. You answered that Wheaton had no such arrangement, but you said, if I would give you the facts of the case, that the faculty might grant me an honorary degree. I then explained that I had been a student at Princeton, in the class of ’80; that I had taken and passed my examinations for the first two years; that I had continued in spite of poor health, through the third year, taking some examinations but not all; and that sickness had prevented my continuing through the fourth year; that I had could not make up what was lacking in Princeton in view of the fact that a regular attendance of classes was required and my busy life forbade my attempting this; and finally, that I desired a degree for two reasons, first, that I might be more in touch with University men, and second and particularly, that being more closely connected with them I might be the more used of the Lord in their behalf. Following this, you asked for the names of two individuals to whom you might write concerning me and whose letters you might present to the faculty. I then gave you the names of the Rev. Charles R. Erdman, D.D., professor in the seminary here and Rev. T.R. O’Meara, D.D., Principal of Wycliffe College, Toronto. As Dr. O’Meara recently asked me if I had heard from you, I know that you wrote to him and that he replied, and I presume the same is true in respect to Dr. Erdman. I should have refrained from writing again to you about so personal and apparently selfish a matter had it not been for the fact that settling at Princeton, where college degrees are so much valued, has emphasized my need of being in rapport with those about me. I am anxious to be used of God here as largely as possible and I am assured that having a degree will much increase my usefulness. Thanking you for anything you may do in my behalf and assuring you of my warm regards,

I am, yours very faithfully,

Henry W. Frost

Blanchard at last dedicates attention to the Frost affair and it appears that resolution is near:

May 26, 1921

My dear brother: I have just returned after an absence of some days and have been in my office very little for quite a while. This must be my partial apology for tardiness in writing. I hope to be at home now for some days and I will try to take up the matter concerning which you have written to me, at once.

With best regards, I am, sincerely yours,

Charles A. Blanchard

The remainder of the exchange is not extant. Evidently, Frost seems to have been denied his request, as he is not cited among Wheaton College’s honorary degree recipients. This responsibility fell to another institution. According to his biography, “By Faith”: Henry W. Frost and the China Inland Mission by Dr. and Mrs. Howard Taylor, he was in 1929 conferred an honorary Doctor of Divinity by Westminster College, representing the United Presbyterian denomination, “…in recognition of his contribution to Christian life and literature…”