American Agriculturist 
FARM—DAIRY—MARKET—GARDEN—HOME 
“Agriculture is the Most Healthful, Most Useful and Most Noble Employment of Man ”—Washington 
Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. Established 1842 
Volume 111 For the Week Ending January 13, 1923 Number 2 
Where Have Men Like This Gone? 
A Fireside Reflection on a Preacher of Righteousness.—Jared VanWagenen,Jr. 
I N the year 1828 there was called to the 
service of the Lutheran churches of New 
Rhinebeck and Sharon in Schoharie 
County, N. Y., a young minister Philip 
Weiting. He had been born twenty-eight 
years before in the Mohawk Valley just a 
few miles from the locality where his life’s 
work was to be wrought. His father was 
Rev. John Christopher Weiting, a one time 
Hessian soldier who either voluntarily or 
otherwise had failed of repatriation by the 
British Government at the close of the Rev¬ 
olutionary war. John Christopher must 
have lived a somewhat noteworthy and 
strenuous life. Once a student in a Ger¬ 
man University, he be¬ 
came a soldier of fortune 
against the Colonies and 
later in his new home, a 
preacher of the Lutheran 
Church. His ministry was 
surely not without a cer¬ 
tain measure of honor and 
success, for he preached 
for nearly a quarter of a 
century in one charge and 
was buried in the church¬ 
yard, leaving behind him 
no heritage of wordly 
goods, but only a widow 
and fourteen children to 
buffet the world. It can 
be mathematically demon¬ 
strated from a study of 
biography or from a tabu¬ 
lation of “Who’s Who” 
that in the race for suc¬ 
cess and fame the greatest 
possible advantage that 
can come to a boy is to be 
born in a parsonage, and 
this opportunity Philip 
enjoyed, even under such 
untoward circumstances. 
Young Weiting was educated for the 
ministry at Hartwick Theological Sem¬ 
inary—an institution hidden away among 
the hills at the headwaters of the Susque¬ 
hanna, in the heart of the Leatherstocking 
Country, which the magic of Fennimore 
Cooper’s pen has made romantic forever. 
Hartwick Seminary has had a long and 
honorable, but never conspicuous history, 
and comparatively unknown as it is, it prob¬ 
ably represents the oldest School of Theology 
in America. In Weiting’s time it was not 
only a general academy and Theological 
school, but it was quite as much a mission to 
the Indians, who still lingered in consider¬ 
able numbers in central New York, and in its 
primitive class rooms the sons of the pioneer 
and the sons of the Red Man plodded through 
the prescribed courses of study and on its 
Green there was doubtless the horseplay and 
bandiage and laughter and song that is the 
eternal heritage of student youth. 
Here Weiting spent some seven years from 
1818 to 1825, acquiring all the education that 
he ever received, and this included some 
theology and at least a little Greek. Probably 
he was a well-trained man according to the 
standards of his church and time, and yet 
it must have been singularly narrow and in¬ 
complete in -comparison with our ideals. 
Perhaps it was a good place for him to 
pass those seven years.. It was a country es¬ 
pecially rich in historical adventure and 
romance. Just to the north was Coopers- 
town and the beautiful lake—Cooper’s Glim- 
merglass. Over the hills a few miles was 
Cherry Valley with its memories of the In¬ 
dian Massacre and its more than forty set¬ 
tlers buried in one common grave. Almost 
in front of the door ran the little Susque¬ 
hanna, down which in the summer of 1779 
General Clinton’s army floated in a fleet of 
208 flat boats borne on the crest of an arti¬ 
ficial flood made by damming the lake and 
later releasing the impounded waters—per¬ 
haps one of the strangest and most original 
maneuvers in all the long chronicles of war. 
Graduating from the Seminary, he was 
licensed to preach and had a brief pastorate 
of three years in Lowville, N. Y.—a period 
that suflflced for him to marry a daughter of 
the land. Then wisely concluding, it is said, 
that it was not well for a man to continue 
to minister in the church from which he has 
selected a bride, he chose a new field of labor 
lying something more than a hundred miles 
to the south. 
Thus was uneventfully begun a pastorate 
which was destined to employ all the ener¬ 
gies of his subsequent life and to continue 
for forty full, unbroken and fruitful years. 
I never saw him, for he died two years 
before I was born, but my father’s house was 
within easy earshot of the church where he 
did many of his mighty works and in my boy¬ 
hood his shadow still lay long over the land. 
As I have heard old men tell of him and as I 
have gathered some of the stories concern¬ 
ing him that have come down across the 
years, I have come to think of him as a great 
looming figure of a man and before he is for¬ 
gotten I would like to set down some of these 
things. 
The mere fact of having been a pastor in 
the same field for forty years is in itself a 
certain claim to distinction. So far as we 
can know for all that span he enjoyed to a 
most unusual degree the love and confidence 
and enthusiastic loyalty of a great and scat¬ 
tered parish. According to our custom we 
named him “Dominie”—a title of respect 
that we give to preachers who are worthy 
of it—and by that title he lived and died 
and was the most widely known figure and 
foremost citizen of three 
townships. 
Of course, his career is 
rapidly passing into the 
shadow-land of myth and 
tradition. Only a little 
handful of folks is left 
who were old enough to 
retain clear cut impres¬ 
sions of his work. I have 
asked old men what was 
the secret of his power, 
only to be answered by 
returning the same ques¬ 
tion. 
One thing is sure; he 
was no pale, cloistered 
ascetic, but a great, ath¬ 
letic lion of a man who 
laughed often and heartily 
—who found life full of 
very pleasant things— 
who looked upon the world 
and called it good. I like 
to think that there was a 
sort of Martin Luther 
quality in his mirthful¬ 
ness. His picture shows a 
strong, pleasant face with 
kindly eyes framed in a great ruff of beard— 
the face of a man not easily discouraged or 
made afraid. He mingled easily with all sorts 
and conditions of men. In the days when 
feats of strength and wrestling bouts were 
more common than now, it is said that “no 
man ever downed the Dominie.” There is a 
story of him that has a very Jean Valjean 
flavor. Once he was aroused at night by the 
sound of confusion in his hen roost. He 
shook himself from sleep, went out unarmed 
into the night, seized the thief, who squirmed 
helplessly in that mighty grasp, brought him 
in the house and set him before the candle,^ 
recognized the man, called him by name—* 
and then bade him go and sin no more. There 
are other stories concerning him that empha¬ 
size the abounding physical vigor of the 
man. He said himself that for the greater 
part of his ministry he never knew the mean¬ 
ing of illness and scarcely of fatigue. 
We can have little definite knowledge of 
just how he preached or what he said. Of 
all his thousands of sermons he preserved 
nothing except his valedictory, which he 
carefully prepared and wrote out in full, 
{Continued on page 26) 
The church of our fathers -was the most dominant interest in their lives. To-day other thing's 
dominate. Why? Read Mr. Van Wagenen’s fine story on this page and the editorial on 
page 24, and let us give thought to the grave problem of the Country Church. 
