Augustus H. Strong was born in Rochester New York. Ordained in 1861, he pastored for eleven years in Massachusetts and Ohio before becoming the president of Rochester Theological Seminary. Highly regarded by his generation as a teacher and leader, Strong was also president of the American Baptist Missionary Union and the first president of the Northern Baptist Convention. He published a three-volume Systematic Theology, which is still in print. After embracing the possibility of evolution for a time, he eventually came out strongly against modernism, declaring Christ to be the one and only revealer of God, in nature, in humanity, in history, in science, and in scripture.
Maltbie Davenport Babcock was born in Syracuse, NY. A member of a socially prominent family, he was educated at Syracuse University and Auburn Theological Seminary, where he excelled as a student, as an athlete and also as a musician. Ordained in the Presbyterian church, he served three prominent churches in Maryland and New York, but it is for four verses of a 16 stanza poem that we remember him--the hymn "This Is My Father's World."
