Father, we want to thank you that we can meet together in your name. We pray you'll be with us in this class. We pray that your teachers, that we won't be lifting up a human person's name, even one whom you've used very greatly, but we will be exulting your name together. And that we may be taught by his example. Father, teach us, we pray, and be with us in this hour together in Jesus' name, Amen. You should have begun, I hope, to read some of the material, maybe the debris story or the tapestry. I know some of you have, so you'll be beginning to find more out about Francis need his shape for his persons. Let me just recap where we were at the end of our time in the first class. We began, point one, with Francis' shape as origins. We went on, secondly, to look at his childhood and growing up. Thirdly, at his conversion, and then fourth, at that turning point in his life, where he heard Antoniziole preaching in that tent meeting. And the difficult time he had after that, beginning to struggle about his own future. At the end, we started to talk about the fifth section in his life here, what I've called the fifth section, and that will be the period between high school and college. And let me recap on just where we finished and then move on as we get started today. So, fifthly then, the period between high school and college. In September 1930, Francis' shape was started to study at the Drexel Institute. He went to night school to do mechanical engineering, as his parents wished. In the daytime, he was working first of all at RCA Victor as a busboy, carrying things for the assembly line, 32 cents an hour. He wouldn't do very well on that today. I'm sure he didn't do very well then, either, on 32 cents an hour. After a strike at the factory, he worked delivering groceries. But he was studying in night school, and all through this period, and increasingly as time went by, he began to consider the possibility of doing academic studies at Hampton Sydney College, which was suggested to him by one of the pastors, at the church he was attending, and another friend of his as well. And this created an internal struggle within him, because he had a longing to do academic studies, and yet his parents were opposed to it. So, it was the question of whether he should please his parents or whether he should study at university. By December of 1930, he was considering the pastorate very seriously. His parents were actively hostile to this idea. They considered ministers to be drones and to be parasites on society, and were completely opposed to college study. He, in spite of the hostility of his parents, really committed himself to trying to find what God's will was for him. He had this growing burden to study for the ministry, and yet his parents were opposed, but he began to pray very seriously about changing his direction. And on January the 30th, the next year, on his 19th birthday, January the 30th, 1931, he started going to evening school at the local high school to prepare for college. He studied Latin in German, and this was just in the evenings, because he carried on working in a grocery store during the daytime. He was hoping to go to Hampton Sydney College in Virginia. His preparations for college were basically ignored by his parents. He had no idea of how he was going to pay the first 600, the first year's tuition, which would be $600. As he began to pack when the time came, he was accepted for the college. His mother helped him not at all in terms of clothes or anything else they wouldn't discuss. He was going to college with him, so he was left completely to himself to get himself ready to go. In September, on the night before his leaving for college, his father said, get up in time to see me before I go to work at 5.30, and of course by that time he was all packed and ready to go. When he got up the next morning, and this was a very important moment in his life, and I heard him speak about this on several occasions when he was sharing with his personally. When he got up the next morning, his father was standing by the door ready to leave, and said to him, just quite simply, I don't want a son who is a minister, and I don't want you to go. We can be thankful that the kind of chain of command teaching that is so popular today wasn't around so much in his day. Otherwise, he might have been convinced just to obey his father on the spot. But he had such a burden in his heart that he ought to go to college, prepare for the ministry, but after a painful silence, he said, pop, give me a few minutes to go down to the cellar to pray. And he went downstairs, and you can read about this. Edith gives a complete account of this in the tapestry on page 62. He went down to the cellar, and he prayed in real agony, oh God, please show me now what I must do. And he tossed a coin and said, Lord, please let it be heads. Nobody ever told him that that's how you should find out God's guidance, but that's what he did on the spot, and it came up heads that he should go. And so he said, Lord, show me again, let it be tails. And so he tossed the coin his second time, and it came up tails. And he said, Lord, show me again, and he let it be heads this time, and it was. And he went upstairs and said to his father, Dad, I've got to go. I've got to go. His father just looked at him, walked out and slammed the door, but just as the door was shutting, he heard him say, I'll pay for the first half year. He's always felt, he always felt that, though his father didn't become a Christian until many years later, that that moment there of seeing how seriously he was taking his relationship with God, and despite his good relationship with his father, he was prepared to go against his will, that that was really the foundation, the first crack in the door, so to speak, of his father himself being open to the gospel and beginning to seriously consider the Christian faith. He went upstairs to his bedroom and felt tremendously confirmed as his eyes fell on a text he'd put up on the wall sometime before. As for me and my husband, we will serve the Lord, that he was really doing what God wanted him to do. Now, Shaker said repeatedly when I heard him tell this story, he would say, I don't go around recommending other people to toss up coins to find out what is the will of God. He would never have suggested that anybody else should do that. This was how God showed him at that moment. One should never generalize some of another person's experience, but for him it was a very powerful moment in his life in terms of God showing him very clearly what he should do. He was a very young Christian, he just didn't have any idea what to do and he felt quite desperate. And God showed him in this way, and as you look down through the succeeding years, this was both an important moment in his life and a real foundation to him in terms of the fact that he really could bring the decisions that he had to make, the needs that were in his life, the questions that he faced to God for direction and for his guidance. Now, before we go on to the next point here, his period of life at college, let me suggest some things which I feel Francis Schaeffer learned from his background. I want to make just a few points here. What did he receive from this background? Which, remember, wasn't Christian. What did he receive from it? First, he had lived and worked alongside ordinary people. He, throughout his life, had an ease of conversation with the man in the street. Now, that may sound strange to people who think of Schaeffer as the person who preached and wrote for intellectuals, but that isn't who he was fundamentally. He was able to preach and write to people who were intellectual and struggling with intellectual questions, but he was perfectly at ease with speaking to and living alongside the ordinary person in the street. That was always part of who he was. It was his background. Secondly, in a related to that, he had a very strong sense of the dignity of ordinary working people. For him, there were no little people. That was the title of one of his books many, many years later. That neither before God nor before one another should we have big and little people. As if some people in society are more important to God than others, or should be more important to us than others. For him, there were no little people. When you got to know him as a person, that was something that was very obvious. He gave as much time and as much respect and as much concern to some important people in the world's eyes and in the eyes of the Christian world who came to see him later on his life, he gave just as much time to the ordinary person, to the little person as he gave to people who were considered to be important. For him, it really didn't matter. It was a question of really seeking to be faithful to those whom God bought into his path. So he had a very strong sense of the dignity of the ordinary working man and woman. There were no little people to him. And that became a really important part of his whole ministry. Thirdly, he'd grown up with a father who worked very hard and who expected him to work very hard. And throughout his life, he had a commitment to hard work in whatever he was doing. In his ministry later on, teaching, but whatever work he said his hand to either mental or physical, he really gave himself to it. Along with that, a readiness to pitch in with whatever needed to be done or with help wherever it was needed. Fourthly, an obstinacy of character. Like all of our characteristics, this obstinacy had a good and a bad side. A stubbornness can be very good in a sense of really sticking with things and working at them no matter how difficult they are, but it can have some difficult sides to it. And all of us alike that in terms of the aspects of our personality that are strongest. With any of us, you look at the good side of a person's character and you just turn it over slightly and it can cause problems. And you all know that about yourselves, I hope, but that is true. We may add a fifth thing in addition, though it's not really from his background and that is, he was just beginning to be awakened to a love for music, for literature, for philosophy and for art. And of course, this would blossom very much later or very much in his life later on. Now, as we think about this too, what he received from his background, it might be helpful to summarize at this point as well. Where was he as a Christian at this point? He was just a very young Christian, but where was he as a Christian? First of all, he had a strong conviction that Christianity is true and that it makes sense to those who are prepared to take it seriously. And of course, that was something that was always part of his ministry, that Christianity is the truth. It's not something religious. For Sunday, it really is the truth about the whole of life. It makes sense. The Bible is a book that speaks about reality, about the real world. Secondly, he had a sense of the obligation of Christians to live a radically different lifestyle. His prayer during the period he worked in the factory was that he would make a difference there, that in the way he lived, in the way he did his work, he would make a difference to the people he was working alongside. Thirdly, from the very earliest part of his Christian life, he was very committed to evangelism, to reaching out to people around him. Fourthly, he had a growing prayer life with a passionate commitment to serve God, and that was already tested by fire in that little encounter with his father. That was a very profound moment in his life, because he would come back to that again and again. Fifthly, and this is related to point one, he had a love for the Bible as God's true and faithful word, which helps us both in answering our big questions, but also in our daily lives, in the little choices and struggles that we face and provides direction for us. Let's move on to point number six here, major point number six, and that is college, his time at college. He went to Hampton Sydney College in September of 1931. The first person on the faculty he met, who assigned him a room in dorm, was his Greek professor, a man named Wilson, who was immediately antagonistic to him as a pre-ministerial student. And so he assigned him the dorm where he thought he would have the hardest time. He was put in a corridor where everybody else in the corridor on the passage were sophisticated southern aristocrats, who would see him as an outsider. He was the only northerner, they called him the Yankee, they were all Sabinus. He came from a working class family, they were all from very wealthy aristocratic families with long tradition of being leading families, ruling families in the South. He was a Christian, they were all unbelievers, he was preparing to be a minister. And I'm sure they looked down on that, he was completely unsophisticated, whereas they were really sophisticated men of the world. They all had their fancy clothes and he just had one suit for special occasions, and his tweed knickers that he'd worn in high school. You may wonder if people have often commented about shape as knickers that these trousers he wore to the knee and assumed that he found or grew attached to such dress in Switzerland, because mountain climbers in Austria and Switzerland wear those things, but in fact he'd worn them ever since high school. That was what boys wore in those days. But they gave him a very difficult time. The dorm was a place where these guys would shoot their rifles in the evenings at mice, all the lights in the halls were shot out, so it was completely dark. Nobody from the faculty ever went into the building, that was an unwritten rule that was kept, so it was just free range, free range situation for the students. He was committed to making it there with God's help, and that's what he prayed as he began that the Lord would enable him to be able to handle the situation, and that by the time he would leave there in four years time that he would have gained some respect as a Christian there. At first he was regularly beaten by his roommate, who was an older student, and that was at that time part of a freshman's life in that kind of college, to be beaten and to have to put up with it. He finally got fed up with it, he was a very small man, five foot six, his roommate was six foot two, very strong, he finally got fed up with it and fought him back. And one of the upper classmen who was watching, as he managed to get on top of this guy at the end of the fight, said, you're the biggest little man I've ever seen, Philly, and that was what they called him Philly because he was from near Philadelphia. So he was called Philly all through his college years. One of the really striking things about his time there in college, and I give that little bit of background to, before I go on to speak about his influence spiritually in that passage, was his courage in that situation. He started a prayer meeting right away, there'd never been one on his corridor. It was short, he would lead it himself, he would read a short passage of scripture, make a few comments on it, ask if anybody else would like to pray, and then he would close in prayer. He was always asking people to come to it. He recalls one occasion where a fellow who was nicknamed Chisel, who was a big guy, got really angry being asked so frequently to come to this prayer meeting that he threw a can at him and cut his face open with it. And shape it just carried on asking him, and he says, well, I'll come if you'll carry me. So he put this great big guy over his shoulder in a fireman's lift and took him along up the next floor, or down to the next floor, to the prayer meeting. These were the days of prohibition when he was in college, but despite that there was lots of drink, lots of liquor flowing around the college, and particularly in that passage, given its occupants, and a great deal of drunkenness. And very frequently, especially on Saturday nights, many of the men in that passage would come home drunk, and because the halls were all dark, because of the lights being shut out, they couldn't find their way to their rooms. So he would always stay up every Saturday night, especially, and drag these guys in, undress them, put them under a cold shower, and put them to bed. But he always made a bargain with them, that if he did that, they had to come to church with him the next morning. That was one of the ways he found of communicating the gospel in that situation. And so it soon came about, and this happened last year for his whole time there, that he would just stay up studying on Saturday night till everybody was in, and as each of them would crawl in drunk, they would shout filly from the hall at the bottom of the stairs, and he would come and fetch them and get them all to bed. And they made follow along like a herd of sheep to church the next morning with him. Mrs. Schaefer writes about this in the tapestry. She says this. If anyone asks you what Francis Schaefer's apologetics were in college, I'd say the reply should be that he had such a sense of the lostness of people, that he did what he felt would help them to be shaken or startled to the point of listening, and then he would give them the truth in some manner. Carrying for the boys who needed this care on Saturday nights was first of all the kind of thing that Frank considered being a Christian was all about. Second, he felt it was to be the best kind of apologetics for the people with whom he was face to face at that moment of their needs. So that was how he tried to communicate the gospel to his students as well as obviously trying to live very faithfully as a believer before them. In addition, he taught a Sunday school every Sunday afternoon at a small black church across the fields, some distance from the college. He taught children from 8 to 13 years old at this little black congregation all through his years there, starting just a few months after he arrived in January 32 until he graduated three and a half years later. As well as teaching that Sunday school class every week, he went regularly to visit those children and their parents in their homes around the fields in the little shacks that they lived in. He got to know the families very well, he would always visit when people were sick and when one of the caretakers or cleaners at the college named Johnny, who was an older black man, became ill, he went to visit him very, very frequently. Amador always read the Bible and pray with him and in fact he visited him very regularly until he died during his time there. So he taught that class all the way through his time in college. Also during this period he had a constantly growing commitment to serve God. In the tapestry Mrs. Schaefer has included some examples of prayers that she found in his diary from this period because he had the habit of writing down little prayers in the form of sort of rough verse. And every day as he prayed he would write a few down and she on page 124 and 125 in the book has given you some examples of some of those prayers. I just read two or three of them but you can look at them and to get an idea here. Oh God not only for a time but for eternity may I serve thee. Oh God I thank you that you use me to win souls for thee, give me strength to speak the words that would have me speak to them. Fill my heart oh God with true love for thee and the people you have made may I serve but first I want to learn to keep my eyes on thee. Or may I be four square but the cornerstone must be my love for thee. His diary was filled with these little prayers that he would scribble down as he struggled with his life there at the college. That brings us to point number seven or section number seven and that is Francis Schaefer's meeting with Edith. This took place at a church meeting on June the 26th 1932 when he was home from college. He was attending the young people's meeting at that church which was the Presbyterian church there in Germantown. And the man who gave the talk that evening had been a leader of that youth group for some time and had at some point rather become a unitarian. You can tell how liberal the church was because he carried on leading the young people's group even though he was a unitarian. And that particular Sunday evening during the 26th 1932 he gave a talk on how I know that Jesus is not the son of God and how I know that the Bible is not the Word of God. That was the title of his talk at the young people's group that evening. It happened that Edith was at that meeting as well. She was 17 at the time just coming just at the end of high school. She was ready to get up. She was a very fiery young person and she was just she was very upset with what was being taught and she was about to bans up and say something. Again I've heard them both describe this evening many times. She was about to bans up and say something when she saw this young man get up on the other side of the room. This was this was Francis and he said I don't know how to answer all the issues that you've raised yet. Though I have a Bible teacher at college who who doesn't agree with these views and who feels there's plenty of reason not to. But I do know that the Bible is the Word of God. I believe that. I don't agree with what this man is saying. And I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God and I know that he's changed my own life. And he sat down again after saying some other things. And so Edith whispered to the girl who was next to her. Who's that young man? I didn't know there was anybody in this church who believed anything like that. And so the girl sitting next to her said oh that's Fran Schaeffer and his parents have been really mean to him. He wants to become a minister. And she resolved at that time that she wanted to help this poor young man. But as soon as he'd finished she jumped up and said her piece and attacked very vigorously the person, the guy who'd been giving the talk. And she quoted Machen and Robert Dick Wilson, who her father knew very well and later on worked alongside them. And tried to tear down what he'd said and really gave an apologetic for the Bible. The Bible is true. You can believe it and there are these reasons from history and from archaeology and so on. And we have every reason to know that it's the word of God. And just as now, Ben, she was quite a fiery person and not tempered in quite the same way perhaps as she is now or mellowed by God's work in her life. And as she stood up and came out with all this really vigorously, he said to the fellow sitting next to him, who's that girl? I haven't seen her around here before. I didn't know there was anybody here like that. And they said to him, that's Edith Seville. Her parents just moved here not long ago from Toronto and they were missionaries in China. So that was how they met each other. So he, when they were introduced to each other in those days, you had to be introduced to each other, they were introduced to each other afterwards. And he said, can I drive you home? And she said, no, I've got a date and he said, break it. So she did, and she broke it. And that was the beginning of their relationship together. And so he took her home that evening and their relationship grew very rapidly from that point. It's quite striking really, I think, reflecting on this, they met on the battlefield, if you like. And so he did expresses that they met on the battlefield, both standing up for the truth of God's word and for the truth of the gospel. They met in the context of a serious discussion about the nature of God's word and about the nature of the Christian gospel. And really one can say, all through their life together, they carried on fighting shoulder by shoulder on that same battlefield, fighting for some of the same issues for a biblical gospel. So that was his first meeting with Edith. They got to know each other very rapidly. She invited him home to meet her parents. She introduced him to some apologetics, to Machen, to Machen's writings. And during that summer, just a few weeks after he'd met her, she lent him a copy of Christianity and liberalism. Which is still a classic setting out the difference between biblical Christianity and the liberal gospel. So he got to meet her parents, they had long discussions, he and her father and Edith together. That was in the evenings, of course, he was working selling stockings from door to door during the daytime. Perhaps at this point I'll say a bit about Edith's background. That'll bring us to main point number eight. What about Edith's background? One half of her ancestors came from England to the states in around 1800. The other half came from Ireland to the states in the 1840s. Her father was George Seville, SCVI, double LE, George Seville, born in 1876 and he lived right through till 1977. He died at the age of 101 and right up until a few weeks before his death. He was still writing little commentaries for a daily Bible reading. I've forgotten which one it was, I must have a note of that somewhere. But she had a very different background from Francis Schafer's. Her parents were very committed Christians. George Seville himself came from a Christian family. He was a fun loving, very artistic man. He was fond of acting, he was musical. All the kinds of things that weren't there in Francis Schafer's background were there in Edith's. He was a linguist. He had studied Latin in Greek and German in high school and college and then Hebrew in seminary. He went to the Allegheny Theological Seminary in order to prepare to go as a missionary to China. In fact, he went with the CIM, the China inland mission, to win Chao on the coast of China. Not far north of Taiwan, but on the east coast of China. The China inland mission, which had been founded by Hudson Taylor, was a mission committed to really living among the people. So he had to go and wear a Chinese dress and was frequently mistaken as Chinese. He really settled himself into that culture. It was the mission policy to dress like the Chinese and to live simply. Bear in China, he married a young widow who with her husband had studied and worked and planned to go to China with the China inland mission. He died of TB not long before they were to go and shortly after their baby had died, just a few weeks shortly after birth. But she had gone alone, despite the fact that she was now a widow. She was completely committed to serving as a missionary. Must have been quite difficult at that time in the late 1890s for a young woman to be able to go off to China like that by herself. But she did. She had had quite a difficult life, both with losing her first husband, losing a baby, and she narrowly escaped death in the boxer uprising. If you've read anything about that in China, this was a rebellion against all foreign influence. And why you don't usually read much about the effect it had on the church, it was partly directed against the church. 58 of the missionaries were put to death, 21 of their children, and thousands of Chinese Christians were killed in the boxer rebellion. And Edith's mother very narrowly escaped being killed. People were killed right outside the room in which she was hiding. Before they were smuggled out of China and had to spend a few months in Japan until the trouble died down. But they're out in China, George Seville met Edith's mother and they were married in China. And Edith was the third child, third girl, born on November 3rd, 1914. She was born in China and grew up there as a child in the China inland mission. Again, Edith's background is very different. She has a chapter in the tapestry called Missing Birth Records. And this was something she often talked about. And what she means by that is that she has no recollection of any point at which she became a Christian. She remembers always being a Christian, always loving God, always believing the gospel, always wanting to pray, wanting to serve God. She was really truly a child of the covenant, we might say. Her family had to return to the States in 1919, and her father became a pastor, and then became editor of the China inland missions magazine, China's Millions, which was first edited in Toronto, and then German tan in Pennsylvania. And that's why they moved there. When the magazine was moved to there, he moved there as editor in her junior year in high school. It wasn't long after that that she met Francis Schaeffer, that Sunday evening. After high school, she went to the Beaver College for Women and studied a home economics course, which included chemistry and biology and philosophy and literature, but also lots of very practical courses on cooking and dressmaking, and so on. So she went there as a day student. Her parents couldn't afford for her to stay at the college. Now what did Edith bring to their meeting? What did Edith bring to their life together when they met there in 1932? And she bought some very distinctive qualities as a young Christian to their relationship, which again have been part of their whole life together. The first was a strong commitment to prayer, to really praying for God's provision, to praying for God's direction. This came from her parents background in the China inland mission, which was a face mission, started by Hudson Taylor, where they really prayed for their needs rather than trying to have them funded in any obvious or direct kind of way. They prayed for their needs, and there were groups of people all over England, other parts of Europe, Canada, and the United States who prayed for that work, and who prayed for its needs. Hudson Taylor and his life had tremendous influence on the Schaeffer's. Again, Edith would often talk about him and Francis too, because she of course introduced him to Hudson Taylor's writings and the biography of his life. But particularly the commitment to prayer in his life to dependence upon God, for daily needs and dependence upon God, for sending the workers that he wanted to the mission field. So there was that one, that was one aspect, or one quality as a Christian that Edith brought to their life together. Secondly, was a deep compassion for those in affliction, which has stayed with her throughout her life. She remembers still very, very vividly, the way when she was 14 years old, her mother shared with her about her first husband's death and the loss of her baby. She hadn't known until that point that her mother had ever been married before. She met George Seville. But she remembers her mother describing to her the tremendous sorrow that she went through at that time as a young widow, having just lost a child, and also describing to her the boxer rebellion and the fear of that time and the tremendous suffering of the Christians in it. So she had a deep compassion for people who were suffering, for people who were going through difficulties. She learned from very early age that there were no easy answers to give to people who were suffering. You couldn't just pat them on the shoulder and say it will be all right, or some spiritual words of similar import, but that you really had to weep with people and allow them to have their sorrow and their grief. Before you could give them any words of hope, and that the hope and the sorrow stand together, the hope doesn't just wash the sorrow away, they stand together. Thirdly, something that had a very profound impression on her as a little girl was in China at that time, it was a fairly common practice to throw away baby girls who were not wanted. Because it wasn't so popular to have a girl as a boy. And she remembers as a little girl walking along the canal, towpath, in the city of Wen Chao, and hearing little cries from a pagoda on the river. And when she asked what it was, she was told it was little girls who had been thrown away, and this boat was full of skeletons and then dying baby girls. And that made a very deep impression on her, which was with her throughout her life, and which she recalled again and again as she and Francis got involved in the battle against abortion in this country. But just the devaluation of human life, the devaluation of the human person, that discarding of little girls meant. A fourth thing which Edith brought to their relationship was a commitment to the unity of all true believers. Her father came from a Presbyterian background, her mother from a Baptist background, the China Inland Mission was a non-denominational work, which had a very solid commitment to believers from whatever background who really believed in Christ as their Savior and Lord, and who had totally committed to the full authority of Scripture. And she grew up in that context, a context in which there was a glad recognition of the genuine faith of all people who truly believed in Christ and who respected the authority of His Word. So a commitment to the unity of all true believers, rather than a sectarianism, which regards our own group, our own denomination, our own church as the only true church in the whole world, which is too often sadly been a way that some Christians have felt. Fifthly, she brought a passion for truth over against modernism, which came from her background. Her father worked alongside, was friends with, people like Machen, Robert Dick Wilson, and so on, who were deeply involved in the battle against liberalism, called modernism at that time, and she brought that passionate conviction with her.