NOTE 10
(Chapter VII, page [189])
From the many who wrought devotedly and mightily and lovingly among the plantation Negroes, there stand out a few men whom their contemporaries would have singled out for peculiar honors. And it surely is a peculiar honor to merit note among the able spirits who formed the staff of missionaries; for the Church entrusted the spiritual care of the Negro to her ablest and best. Among them all, the Rev. Alexander Glennie, rector of All Saints, Waccamaw, 1832-1866, must hold a place all his own in the annals of time. For thirty-four years he was the shepherd of the negro folds of the Waccamaw area. During those years the needs of his flock; the wise way to provide them; their capacity, intellectual and spiritual; the food needful for soul sustenance; the social cravings, and how to provide wholesome gratifications—all these, and more, were Mr. Glennie’s life study, and that of his life-long friend and co-worker, Mr. Plowden Weston, of Hagley Plantation, the seat of the largest single mission in the field.
Gaining completely and very early the confidence of planters and servants, Mr. Glennie labored in a vast field, restricted only by his powers of endurance, which were enormous. As plantations, one after another, came under his care, chapels were built and filled with well-instructed members and catechumens. By about 1845, in addition to teachers and catechists in large numbers, an Assistant Minister was employed, and, two years later, two. His sermons to the Negroes, published with an introduction by himself, are marvels of beautiful simplicity, the high art of the perfect teacher. In reading his Good Friday sermon, the wonder is how so great and so marvelous a mystery could be so truly and beautifully unfolded in a wealth of one and two-syllable words. And the blessed story loses absolutely nothing from the simplicity of the telling.
In him were combined the art of the teacher and the tending care of the shepherd. “My habit is,” he writes, “after concluding the Service, to question the people assembled upon the sermon they have just heard, which enables me to dwell more at large upon matters briefly touched upon in the sermon. This practice, and the frequent use of our Church Catechism, is, I need scarcely say, the most important part of the duty of those engaged in the instruction of Negroes.” We might add, in the better instruction of anybody.