James E. Quaw
James E. Quaw [1]
a minister of the Reformed (Dutch) Church. He graduated at the New Brunswici Theological Seminary in 1828, and was engaged during his ministerial life chiefly in missionary work among feeble churches in New York and Michigan. He was the author of two remarkable books — The Cold Water Man, a powerful plea for total abstinence, and Bible Baptism, or the Immerser Instructed from Various Sources. T'he latter has passed through a number of editions. and is a real thesaurus of information, and of learned, acute, andl valuable discussion of the mode of baptism. The object is to place before its readers the results of learned investigation, and to prove that immersioul is not the only scriptural mode of baptism; that sprinkling is scriptural, and that infants are proper subjects of that ordinance. The individuality of the author's character, life, and ministry, and his independence of thought and treatment of his subject, may be gathered from his prefatory statement: "Many of the materials for the following work were collected while the author was travelling in primitive apostolic style in different parts of the great American valley. In these, his ministerial journeyings, he usually preached six or eight times a week, while he often travelled on foot without purse or scrip or two coats, sometimes with scarcely one, often for day's without bread and occasionally without water. But the mighty God of Jacob was always with him... This book was written in a Western log-cabin, in a room which at one and the same time answered for a study, a parlor, a sitting-room, a dining-hall, bedroom, and kitchen. The hours which for six or eight months the author could spare from the discharge of the duties of a New- Testament bishop, he has, in this rather romantic study, devoted to this work." Mr. Quaw was lost on Lake Erie in the dreadful wreck of the steamer Erie in 1845. He was a godly and self-denying man, peculiar in appearance and manner, a faithful missionary to the needy, and an able writer. (W. J. R. T.)
