One Man's Faith

W. Carl Ketcherside

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     The influence of a single consecrated individual is often undervalued. In Savannah, Georgia, in the first part of the nineteenth century, lived a singular man, S. C. Dunning. He was born in Connecticut, and reared in the Episcopal faith. Even as a youth he became an avid reader of the Bible. As a result he became dissatisfied with his religious upbringing, and convinced that he had not been baptized as the Lord required. There was not an immersed believer in Savannah, but he singled out a person of holy life and prevailed upon him to immerse him in the ever blessed Name. Then, with a large New Testament under his arm he "went everywhere preaching the Word." In his own counting house, on the streets, in the stores of his business associates, "he ceased not to teach and to preach Jesus Christ." For a long time he labored alone.

     Thirty miles north of Savannah, was the community of Ebenezer, made up of a colony of Salzburger immigrants, all German Lutherans. Among these was Christian Dasher, an independent thinker who read the Bible for himself. He, too became convinced that he had not been baptized according to the divine requirement Repeatedly he besought his pastor to immerse him, only to meet with stubborn and steadfast refusal. Having heard of the odd Mr. Dunning, he rode his horse to Savannah, located him and asked to be immersed. An elderly colored woman had also heeded the gospel call, and these three met every Lord's Day in the parlor of the Dunning home. The table of the Lord was spread, and they, with any others who chose to join them, sat about it and sang praises, studied the scriptures, exhorting and edifying one another in all soberness and solemnity.

     It is interesting that the two men, eagerly searching for truth, and earnestly desiring to please God, would become fearful and disturbed as to the validity of their immersion each time they discovered another design. When they found that baptism was for the remission of sins, they questioned if they had fully understood this purpose, and lest they fail of God's grace, Dunning immersed Dasher, then Dasher immersed Dunning. When they found that baptism was to fulfill all righteousness, it required another trip to the canal, as it did when they observed that it was to "return the answer of a good conscience unto God." They had not learned that an inductive act, transferring a proper subject from one state into another, introduces such a person into all of the blessings, rights and privileges of that state, whether he had knowledge of them at the time, or not.

     Christian Dasher returned to Ebenezer, and in the homes of his Lutheran neighbors, "taught them the way of the Lord more perfectly." "The word of the Lord

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grew mightily and prevailed." He led a colony of more than thirty to the fertile wiregrass lands in Lowndes County, where they constituted a congregation of saints at Valdosta. The Salzburger brethren, left behind at Ebenezer, made their way to Guyton, a nearby town on the railroad, planted the gospel flag, and began to spread the good tidings there. It is true that "large oaks from little acorns grow.

     (The editor has relied for the historical facts above on records kept by J. S. Lamar, who was born in Gwinnett County, Georgia, May 18, 1829. He was admitted to the bar in 1850, but three years later, having been immersed into our Lord by a Baptist preacher, he entered Bethany College, from which he graduated in 1854, thereupon returning to Augusta. Bro. Lamar was author of "The Organon of Scripture, or, The Inductive Method of Biblical Interpretation.")