Biography of Clark Braden

Mr. Braden graduated from Farmers College, Cincinnati, O., in 1860. No one aided him by a dollar after he left the country district school. For ten years he labored, taught and attended school as he could. Aiding his younger brothers and sisters, in their struggles for an education, delayed the completion of his own course. His father and mother were pioneer Abolitionists and active teetotaler--temperance advocates from 1835 to 1855. Mr. Braden was himself in line with the enemies of slavery from his youth. He cast his first vote for Freesoil in 1852. He stumped and voted for Fremont in 1856, and for Lincoln in 1860. In this work his life was twice in peril from friends of the saloons and thrice by Mormons. He made war speeches and carried a gun as a soldier in the 127th Illinois Volunteer Infantry.

Many years of his life have been given to educational work. In this field he filled many positions, from the teacher of a "deestrick skule and board round" to the presidency of three colleges.

He has served in the Christian ministry for fifty-seven years and has been pastor of thirty-five churches. He has been a voluminous writer and has edited one political and one religious paper. He has delivered more than six thousand lectures. He has conducted 133 public discussions, on nearly all topics agitating the public mind. Twenty-six of these discussions were in Illinois. He was endorsed for more than one hundred other debates at which his opponents failed to appear, including "Seventh-dayists," infidels and Mormons. For more than twenty years it was a standing formula with these errorists, when they challenged for a debate, to condition, "any one except Braden." Some of his opponents, when hard pressed by Mr. Braden, unceremoniously fled from the halls where the discussions were in progress, amid the jeers and hisses of audiences. His debates and lectures have reached through many States and Provinces of Canada. In April, 1872, Mr. Braden sent a challenge to the great agnostic, Robert G. Ingersoll, to debate in Peoria. When asked by Colonel Wright, "Why do you not accept?" he replied, "I am not such a fool as to debate. He would wear me out." Mr. Braden's last public discussion was successfully conducted in his seventy-eighth year. A prominent minister declared in a church paper that Mr. Braden, by his assaults upon errors and his earnest advocacy of the truth, had saved the Pacific Coast from a tidal wave of infidelity. Mr. Braden was sometimes criticized for his neglect or disregard of the social amenities of life. However, he was always a companionable man, when he had time. A fine physique has enabled him to do the work of two or three men. He has been "a crank all his life and grows no better," for he is now an active advocate of Christian socialism. The storms of eighty years have not cooled the ardor of his love for "the truth as it is in Jesus." For more than sixty years he has studied, investigated, written, taught and debated, and through these six eventful decades his master aim has been, "Accept the Christ's teachings, live the Christ life, realize the Christ character."