Born: Zanesville, Ohio, 1815.Died: Illinois,.1895
Born: Zanesville, Ohio, 1815.
Died: Illinois,.1895
Mr. Miller was of German-Scotch blood. His grandfather, John Miller, held the rank of major in the Revolutionary Army. In 1798 he colonized Millersburg, Kentucky. His father, Adam Miller, was a high Calvinist and an old-school Baptist who farmed and preached. The boy, David, could not believe that God was a respecter of persons; so he ran away from home to attend a Methodist camp-meeting. This did not help him. His father moved his family to a four-hundred acre farm in Cass County, Michigan, in 1854. There he worked on his farm, went to school, learned the trade of carpenter and read the Bible earnestly.
In 1859 he returned to Ohio. Here he became a Christian in 1841 at the Brushy Creek Church, which was twenty miles from his home. Through the influence of Elder Baker, who was the ablest attorney in Licking County and a great bishop of the congregation, Mr. Miller entered the ministry. His first work was that of a missionary, or evangelist, in four counties of central Ohio, under the direction of the Elizabethtown Church. His salary was to be $200 a year, which he was to collect himself. Mr. Miller says: "Then I thought of the dying Irishman, who willed $200 each to his several sons. When the boys inquired where the money was to come from, the father replied: ‘You must look after that yourselves.'"
He said further: "Much of my best work was done outside of the pulpit. I would sometimes form classes of young people in a neighborhood and explain the Scriptures to them." In his autobiography he gives this incident also:
At the Yearly Meeting at Austentown Valley, the birthplace of the Restoration movement in the Western Reserve, fifty ministers were present and eight thousand people assembled. All the churches and schoolhouses for ten miles around were used for overflow meetings. William Hayden preached the anniversary sermon, opening with these words:
"A quarter of a century ago to-day we met on this ground as a Baptist Association. We resolved to throw away everything but the gospel, and there was not a man among us that knew what the gospel was; but we have found out what it is, thank God." He paused, wiped the tears from his face, stretched his hands toward the vast throng, and said: "See here; what have we done in twenty-five years? We've set hell afire, made the devil mad and astonished the natives."
Then, Isaac Everritt, who sat beside Mr. Miller, whispered in his ear: "That's Billy Hayden; he says what he pleases." In that meeting Mr. Miller was an active participant. He followed his inclination for evangelistic work, for which he was well fitted. Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri and Kansas are all indebted to his self-sacrificing toil.
During the forty-one years of his ministry he baptized about four thousand people, engaged in eight public discussions and did an immense amount of hard gospel work. He was a man cast in an iron mould, but with a tender heart and cheerful disposition. For his faith in God he would have as willingly have gone to the stake as he did to breakfast. His temperament was poetic, and patience the woof of his soul. In politics, he was an Abolitionist--by heredity and environment. He lived and died in the fear of the Lord and the love of man.