“WHO ARE THE AARON BURRS NOW LIVING IN CHRISTIAN HOUSEHOLDS?”
By Austin Phelps
Of the eminent men in American history, no one has come to the close of life under a darker cloud of reprobation from God and man than Aaron Burr. He was the son of parents eminent for piety. His father was the venerable president of a Christian college. His mother was the daughter of the Rev. President Edwards, a most godly man, and herself also a woman renowned for her rare Christian culture. The family extended far back in a luminous pathway of Christian faith and prayer. What an accumulation of holy forces concentrated upon Aaron Burr’s boyhood and early manhood! They surrounded him in no hard, repellent forms, but in the genial graces and beautiful adornments of educated Christian society. The piety of his father was lighted up by a mirthful humor. No happier men ever lived than the clergy of that age. The best education of the times, too, was his. Thus directed, so far as home and inheritance and circumstances could do it, toward Heaven, he entered on his active manhood. When approaching his twentieth year, he became interested in the salvation of his soul. The Spirit of God then clearly set before him the great alternative, and pressed his decision on the side of virtue and religion. He retired some weeks to a rural town in Connecticut, for the sake of settling once for all the question of his religious character. Nobody knows what was the history of those critical weeks; through what conflicts he passed; how near he may have approached to the God of his fathers; nor what fatal influences turned him back. But he came home resolved, as he said, “never again to trouble himself about his soul’s salvation.” To all appearances he kept that resolution to the last. The die was cast, as he meant it should, be “once for all.” It is not known that he was ever again seriously disturbed by religious convictions. He entered on what promised to be a brilliant public career, without God and without hope. He passed through it a godless man. He ended it, disappointed in his ambitions and soured against all the world. He died in obscurity, abandoned by old friends for years before, unsaluted by them as they passed him in the street, with the guilt of murder on his soul and the brand of Cain on his brow. So far as man can know, he went speechless to eternity, with a seared conscience and a hardened heart. God suffered him—as he generally does such men—to die as he had lived. His was a representative history—representative of those who break the line of ancestral piety, and force their way to an irreligious life and death, in defiance of God’s protective plans for their salvation. It is an appalling question—do not angels pause and “lean on their harps” to catch the answer?—“Who are the Aaron Burrs now living in Christian families?”—Professor Austin Phelps, D. D.