John W. McGarvey taught in the College of the Bible from its founding in 1865 until his death in 1911--a period of forty-six years. After 1895 he served as president. For nearly half a century his name and fame were intimately linked with this institution. To say "J. W. McGarvey" was to elicit an image of the College of the Bible; and to say "The College of the Bible" was to call up the image of J. W. McGarvey. He was, in short, the College of the Bible idea in the flesh.

      Few men wrote more for publication than McGarvey, but he never published an autobiography. Until W. C. Morro's Brother McGarvey came from the Bethany press in 1940 (as part of the 75th anniversary of the seminary), no book-length biography was in existence.

      But McGarvey had contemplated a biography to be prepared by his son John, Junior. To this end he wrote sixty-six pages of manuscript in a composition book. Evidently, he did this at his son's request; for John returned the composition book to him with some questions and requests penciled on the back fly-leaf. "Tell more about college days: fellow students, interesting little things, pranks, fun, etc. . . . Also more about A. Campbell, as everything that can be said about him will be read with great interest." There were other requests for amplification. As a result, the older McGarvey went on to fill the composition book by writing a number of short essays with instructions for inserting them at certain points into the previous sixty-six pages. He also added two clippings from magazines, a page from his scrapbook, and a permit issued to him by the military during the Civil War. He provided for still other enlargements of his own original manuscript by instructing his son to include excerpts from various other sources. For example he wanted his tribute to Robert Milligan to be copied from the latter's posthumous Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews. And, to give another example, he suggested that his son include some excerpts from I. B. Grubbs' report of the McGarvey-Hendrick debate at Paducah, Kentucky, in 1859. Thus was McGarvey's manuscript composed. It is clearly [3] in an unfinished state; it points beyond itself to other sources; and it was meant as raw material for the biography which John W. McGarvey, Junior, planned to prepare. The manuscript as we have it--and as we here reproduce it--exclusive of the clippings and the page from the scrapbook--filled the composition book. It is 121 pages long, in handwriting so precise and closely written that a page of script equals a page of typing.

      At the back of the composition book, penciled on the final page and fly leaf, there appears a most interesting dialogue between father and son, giving final proof that the manuscript was raw material to be used by the son in producing the biography which they both projected. The son asked, "How work in experiences such as those on pp. 67-69?" The father answered, "Some one way, and some the other as you think best. When quoting say I left the writing among my papers, or that I prepared them for your use." This makes the origin and special character of the Notes for Memoirs fairly clear to us. They were raw material for a biography to be written by his son and published after the subject had died.

      There are two features of the manuscript which are at first puzzling to the reader. One is the use of the third person singular in some of the material. It seems unnatural for the subject to be writing about himself as "J. W. McGarvey" or as "he" when we would have expected him to use "I" uniformly. As we see the matter, there are two explanations: (1) McGarvey began the manuscript very much aware that his son would write the biography to be seen by the public; he therefore put himself in his son's place and started to make the writing as easy as possible for him by referring to himself, as the son would have to do, in the third person. But this was an unnatural stance; he was not able to hold it for long. He frequently forgot it entirely and lapsed into the more familiar and more natural use of "I" and "me." In fact he used the first person most of the time. (2) A second explanation for the use of the third person derives from the nature of some of the remarks themselves. At those points where McGarvey is writing about himself in somewhat complimentary terms his natural modesty seemed to forbid that he do so in the first person; he therefore shifted into the third person. (What would appear objective when said of him by another might appear to be boasting if he said it on his own behalf. The use of the third person singular was a happy way of escaping that embarrassment.) The handwriting is that of John W. McGarvey, Sr. The [4] passages which use the third person singular belong to him as surely as those that are written in the first person singular. This fact is at once obvious to anyone who consults the original manuscript.

      A second feature of the manuscript which may at first puzzle the reader is the title page. But the explanation is simple. He wrote it as it appears for the same reason that he began to write the manuscript in the third person. He was looking through and beyond his own Notes for Memoirs to the final biography to be prepared by his son. "The Estimate of the Man" by Mrs. Anna R. Bourne, to which this title page refers, does not appear in the manuscript. In the Notes themselves McGarvey refers several times to Mrs. Bourne. She had taught in Kentucky University and she knew McGarvey well. She had even lived in the McGarvey home for a while. (Mrs. Bourne finished a long and brilliant career as teacher of English Literature at Bethany College; she was born in Mayslick, Kentucky, in 1855.)

      Minor features of the manuscript not duplicated in the printed transcript should be mentioned. With only two or three exceptions, McGarvey never crossed a t. Neither did he use the word and; instead he had recourse to the & sign. This is such a constant feature of the manuscript and is so obviously an abbreviation device not intended for publication that we have not sought to duplicate it. Where McGarvey wrote & we transcribe and. In referring to a city and a state he abbreviated the name of the state but did not punctuate with period and comma. Viz. Fayette, Missouri, appears in his manuscript as Fayette Mo and this practice is fairly consistent for all place names. We have standardized the usage. Likewise we have corrected the spelling of about a dozen words which were almost surely mistakes of penmanship rather than mistakes of spelling. (Our reason for reaching this conclusion is that most of the misspelled words are correctly spelled in other parts of the manuscript. For example, agreeable appears sometimes as agreable, but at other times with the correct spelling.)

      Professor McGarvey's manuscript is highly legible. There is little deletion and little rewriting. Page 50 is an exception. This entire page was written, crossed out, and then rewritten between the lines. Since the deleted page is as legible as the rewritten one, we have transcribed both versions.

      We present the Notes for Memoirs as McGarvey left them, and in the same order. At first we thought we might rearrange the material following McGarvey's instructions, so that the insertions [5] would appear in the context that he planned for them. When we discovered that several of the insertions which he planned are not in the Notes, but were to have been gathered by John, Junior, from outside sources, we abandoned the contemplated rearrangement. McGarvey's grandson, Davis McGarvey, told us that he at one time had attempted to follow his grandfather's written instructions in rearranging and enlarging the manuscript but had encountered so many frustrations and difficulties that he had given up the project. After a time we became convinced that the real picture of the Notes lies in their present arrangement. Rearrangement would cause them to lose some of their charm, especially for the research historian. We therefore present the Notes as nearly like their original as possible. They will be clear to any reader who follows the instructions in the various parentheses. Comments set off in parentheses belong to McGarvey; those appearing in brackets are clarifications which we as editors deemed necessary.

      Dates appearing on pages 118 and 119 make it evident that McGarvey's Notes for Memoirs was completed some time in 1906 though we feel that most of the writing was done in 1905. McGarvey died in October of 1911. But the son who was to have written his biography died in April, six months earlier. Thus the projected biography was never completed and the Notes have remained unpublished until now.

      Meantime the manuscript has come down in the McGarvey family. It is now in the possession of a grandson, Davis McGarvey, son of James Thomson McGarvey, and Clerk of the U. S. District Court in Lexington, Kentucky. It is by the courtesy of Davis McGarvey that it is now given to the public.

      To make the Notes easier for the research scholar to use we have prepared a Table of Contents and an Index. Page numbers in the margin refer to the pages in the original manuscript. Numerals in the index follow the marginal numbering, i. e. the page numbering of the original composition book.

      To bring you this hitherto unpublished work of a towering personality is a distinct honor.

[AJWM 3-6]