There is a lot we don’t know about prayer and other things
by Keith Bassham
One hundred and fifty years ago, in the summer of 1862, our nation was in the throes of civil war. Whether considered to be The Great Rebellion (this was the sentiment in the North) or The War Between The States (in the South), it was the most significant time for the United States since the Revolution, and in many ways it defined the political, psychological, sociological, and religious future of the nation.
As President Abraham Lincoln would state so poetically in 1863, the nation was a mere “four score and seven years” old, very young as empires and nations go. The Capitol was still unfinished and dome-less, the transcontinental railroad was still mostly just “proposed” (Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Act July 1, 1862), and the income tax was still a bit in the future (just barely, though … in 1863 the president and Congress created the office of Commissioner of Internal Revenue, the forerunner to the modern IRS, and enacted a temporary wartime tax. It was allowed to expire in 1872, but the income tax was resurrected and made constitutional by the 16th Amendment in 1913 … excuse the digression, but the recent Roberts decision on the health care issue made me look at some old notes on the history of income taxation).
On the other hand, the Civil War was not that long ago in terms of real history. Consider that my earliest memory of an American president was Dwight Eisenhower, who I saw on television in my preschool years. His vice president was Richard Nixon (who was president during my college years), and his name will always be linked with Alger Hiss, who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Holmes, as a young lieutenant colonel, in an action at Fort Stevens near the Capitol in July 1864, is supposed to have yelled to President Lincoln, “Get down, you fool,” when the tall man in his top hat became an easy Confederate target. And in fact, to make the last few links to the Revolution, you can note that Holmes had been mentored by John Quincy Adams, the son of Founding Father, John Adams. We are probably much closer to our nation’s history than we often think, and it makes our ignorance of that history more the pity.
I believed it necessary to at least acknowledge the war at some point during the sesquicentennial, but I decided I will allow those much better equipped to discuss the causes, results, battles, or what have you about the war. Besides, I tend to take the side of the South (it’s complicated), and you can only hide what is in your baggage so long.
And so, I want to write about Edward McKendree Bounds, or as he is known to most of us, E. M. Bounds, whose books on prayer are well known among all Christian readers. What most people do not know is that he served as a chaplain during the Civil War.
Mr. Bounds was born in Shelby County in northeastern Missouri in 1835. As so many future preachers did in those days, he prepared himself to practice law at first, but not before giving in to a little gold fever in California. Alas, he and his brother found no riches, and so he returned to Missouri where he was admitted to the bar as one of the youngest lawyers in the state.
The Great Awakening of 1857-1858 had reached the Midwest, and Edward responded to God’s call. He was ordained in the Methodist Episcopal Church South and began riding an evangelistic circuit.
As a border state, the lines between the Federals and the Confederates in Missouri shifted often, and civilians were caught in the crossfire. In 1861, while pastoring in Brunswick, MO, Edward was suspected of southern sympathy (this would have been assumed, given that his denomination had split from Northern Methodists in 1845, roughly the same time as the Baptists). Biographers differ on the exact order of events over the next several months. One believes Bounds protested the Union occupation of a church building. Others say he believed the Union’s demands to sign an oath of allegiance to be unwarranted, and so he refused to sign. Whatever the reason, along with 249 others, he was arrested and imprisoned. A year and half later, he was ordered out of the state and taken to Arkansas to a prisoner exchange camp. In February 1863, he joined the Confederate Army and served the remainder of the war as a chaplain.
Bounds served bravely alongside his men, even suffering a head injury from a saber in a bloody battle at Franklin, TN, in November 1864. Captured by Union troops on the field, he once again found himself a prisoner of war. He ministered to the wounded and dying in the prison as best he could, and in June 1865, he pledged allegiance once again to the United States of America.
After his release, he was drawn back to Franklin, where he had preached during the war. He became pastor of the Methodist Church, which he found “in a wretched state,” and after taking to himself a number of men who joined in extended times of prayer, the church experienced a revival and an outpouring of the Spirit of God as large numbers of people were saved.
He went on to pastor other churches and to do evangelistic work, and even ventured into writing. He assisted in editing The St. Louis Advocate in 1883, and later the denomination-wide Christian Advocate with offices in Nashville. However, when the AME Church South discouraged churches from using evangelists, he felt he had to resign the denominational position.
He moved to Georgia, where he gave himself to prayer and to books about prayer, only two of which had been published by the time of his death in 1913 at the age of 77. He spoke rarely of his war experiences, but those times and the personal tragedies he experienced afterward (I have no room for details here) must have shaped his activities the last 15 years or so of his life.
We can forgive ourselves if we have used and referred to Mr. Bounds’s materials without full knowledge of his experience. Sometimes, though, just as we are ignorant of important pieces of our history, we sometimes leave legacies we know nothing of this side of the grave. Baptist journalist Art Toalston reports the effect Bounds had on another Methodist leader, probably unknown to Bounds himself.
“When I was only a lad,” the former president of Kentucky’s Asbury College, B.F. Haynes, wrote some 45 years later, “there came to Franklin, Tennessee, where we lived, as pastor of our church, the Reverend E.M. Bounds whose preaching and life did more to mold and settle my character and experience than any pastor I ever had. His preaching profoundly impressed me, his prayers linger until today, as one of the holiest and sweetest memories of my life, his reading of hymns was simply inimitable. Nothing was sweeter, tenderer, or more enrapturing to my young heart and mind than the impressive, unctuous reading of the old Wesleyan hymns by this young pastor … in a spirit, tone and manner that simply poured life, hope, peace and holy longings into my boyish heart.”
After his death, friends and admirers of the old prayer warrior gathered his documents and published six more volumes on prayer based on those manuscripts. Hardly a preacher I know teaches or preaches on the subject without quoting E. M. Bounds, a great Civil War chaplain.