 |
|||||
|
|  |
Additional Information
• Biographical Sketch
| Biographical Sketch |
|
Dr. David Nelson, a distinguished American physician, was born at Jonesborough, Tennessee, in 1793. He began practicing medicine at the age of nineteen. During his early years as a scientist, he was a skeptic. Unbelievers, such as, Voltaire, Volney and Thomas Paine, had led Dr. Nelson to become "an honest unreflecting deist." In his medical practice, Dr. Nelson noticed how peaceful believers were as they approached death and how agitated unbelievers were. He reflected on the differences in attitudes toward death among the believers and unbelievers and concluded that those who have hope for the life to come approach death, in the words of William Cullen Bryant, "like one who wraps the drapery of his couch about him and lies down to pleasant dreams." Such faith on the part of those who had committed their lives to Christ led Dr. Nelson to reevaluate his life and begin a thorough investigation of the foundation of his infidelity. The more he studied Voltaire, Volney and Paine, the more he realized their arguments were grounded in falsehood, much of which they had to know to be false.
Upon his conversion to Christ, he soon left the medical profession to study and serve in the Church of Jesus Christ. He began his ministry in Danville, KY, and later removed to Illinois, and, in the neighborhood of Quincy, established a seminary for the education of young men designed for missionaries. Here, having exhausted his means, and being worn out with labors, and especially being prostrated by epilepsy, he died, saying, "All is well," on the 17th of October, 1844, aged fifty-one years.
The most enduring monument to his memory is his remarkable book on "Infidelity," which he wrote in a few weeks, in the summer of 1836, sitting under a clump of trees at Oakland, near Quincy, IL. Once devoted in heart and life to the pleasures of the world, once a sensualist and an enemy to the religion of Christ, he was converted to such an entire renunciation of the world and to such love and devotion to his Redeemer, and the salvation of his fellowmen by the gospel, as to exemplify, in a most remarkable manner, the noble resolution of the apostle, "to know nothing but Jesus Christ and Him crucified;" and this not only in his preaching, but in his common conversation and daily intercourse with men. No conversation, pursuits, or pleasures seemed to interest him, which were not closely connected with Christ and the progress of his religion. "There was nothing more remarkable about him," says Dr. Breckenridge, "than his fervent and overpowering love for Christ. He seemed to be consumed with a tender ardent and unquenchable love for the Redeemer Himself. Nothing was hard for him by which he could please and honor the Savior."
