The Last Sermon

This week I’ve been working on the family history of a friend and neighbor.  As always, the thing that I find the most fascinating about doing genealogy is the discovery of interesting stories of those whose lives history has forgotten.   We learn history from books in school but those accounts touch on the basics, the outline of facts for a time period.  If we delve into personal stories, it is the stories of the famous, the important, the powerful.  But, each one of us has ancestors whose stories are equally compelling.

This story is about my friend’s 6th great grandfather, Rev. Hugh Conn.  Unless you are a student of the history of the Presbyterian Church in America, you will likely never have run across his name.  He was one of the earliest Presbyterian ministers in the colonies, being initially called to a congregation in Baltimore in 1715.  He was born in Ireland but was of Scotch heritage.  Well educated, he earned a Master of Arts degree from the University of Glasgow.   After earning this degree he stayed on at the university to study philosophy and theology.  

This is the story of Rev. Conn’s last sermon.  On the 28th of June 1752, he was preaching at the funeral of a person who had died suddenly. The subject of his sermon was the certainty of death, the uncertainty of the time when it might happen and the absolute necessity of being continually prepared for its arrival.  He spoke of the danger of delay in this preparation and the risk of trusting deathbed repentance.   “Although we may possibly live some years, yet we may be called away in a month or a week, or, for aught that we can tell, death might surprise us the next moment.”   This part of his sermon was apparently delivered with some elevation of voice, but just as he had uttered the word "moment," he put one hand to his head and one to his side.  He then fell backward and lay dead.  He was about 67 years old at the time of his death.  

This event is one that I’m sure had quite an impact on those present.  And although it is probably not a story we have heard it was surely one passed from community to community back in those colonial days. Rev. Samuel Davies, called one of the great public orators of his time, referred to the story of Conn’s last sermon in several of his own famous sermons.  Davies, a young preacher himself at the time of Conn’s death, was obviously struck and inspired by the story.  Rev. Davies, later became the President of Princeton University and his own sermons were published and became some of the most widely read volumes in the English language in the late 1700’s.

We often have no idea how our lives have impacted the lives of others.  If only we had a guardian angel like Clarence Odbody to show us the importance of all we’ve done.  And as for Rev. Conn, well maybe the story of his last sermon will inspire one of my readers today, over 250 years after his death.

-Mary