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Would an Urgent Appeal to Heaven Bring RAIN?

[ABOVE: H. Alonzo Pease, "Partial View of Oberlin-1838", Oberlin Electronic Group, http://www.oberlin.edu/external/EOG/OYTT/ch4.html, photograph by unknown photographer of 1837 sketch, public domain / Wikimedia]


HENRY COWLES was a Yale-educated Congregationalist pastor, completing his seminary studies in 1828. Rather than return to Connecticut where he was born, for the next eight years he pastored churches in Ohio. In 1835, he became professor of Greek and Latin at recently-founded Oberlin College. 1838 saw his role expand to professor of ecclesiastical history, church polity, and Old Testament language and literature. At Oberlin he pushed hard for equal education of the races and sexes, for holy living, and for the abolition of slavery.

Oberlin seems to have been the first predominantly white US college to admit Black students. Cowles took a keen interest in the experiment and compiled a “Catalogue and Record of Colored Students in Oberlin, 1835 to 1862.”

In 1848, he became editor of the Oberlin Evangelist. Not many college papers, even in that era, took as deep an interest in sanctification or in the activities of God. In its pages, Cowles recorded an instance of divine intervention that occurred on this day, 14 August 1853.

The scenes in our church, on Sabbath, August 14th, demand a suitable notice, in honor of divine mercy. A heavy drought lay on us, coupled with intense heat. It affected our mind the more, perhaps, for our having noticed, the day previous, that the autumn grains were wilting under the scorching sun, and that the potatoes, yet small, had apparently ceased to grow. There had been rain in the counties west of us, from fifty to a hundred miles distant; but we could see only the dim form of spent showers: no rain reached our village. 
Under these circumstances, we met for Sabbath morning worship. Our pastor prayed for rain. His prayer expressed our entire confidence that God always did things well; that he knew, infinitely better than we, the reasons for giving or withholding rain; but that he would not be offended with us, if we should express before him our views of the case, as far as we could see, and our feeling of intense desire, that he would grant us what seemed to us so great a blessing.

What would be outcome of this appeal to heaven?

The prayer closed, we sang a hymn, and the pastor gave out his text and entered upon his discourse, when the rain broke upon us in torrents. It is rare that we have felt God’s presence more deeply than in that solemn moment. Our first thought was, let us suspend this sermon, and give public thanks to Almighty God. Soon the pastor did pause, the storm roaring so loud he could scarcely be heard over the house, and said: “Perhaps I ought to stop preaching, and lead out in thanksgiving.” After a short sermon, we had a thanksgiving hymn, in which all the people seemed to praise God with one consent. The rain continued with little cessation for four hours, and then onward for four days, before the weather became again settled; so that the earth is supplied with water as we rarely see it in the middle of August.

From 1851 to the end of his life he served as a trustee for Oberlin. In the early 1860s, he spent three years as an agent and fundraiser for the college. In 1862 the Oberlin Evangelist suspended publication because of the disruptions of the Civil War. The following year Hillsdale College, which then had similar ideals as Oberlin, granted Cowles an honorary Doctor of Divinity. 

Cowles closed out his life writing a sixteen-volume Bible commentary. With characteristic concern for promoting the spread of the gospel, a few months before his death he deeded the copyrights of his commentaries to three mission societies. He died in 1881 of ataxia, a disorder in which muscles can no longer coordinate. He had been living in Janesville, Wisconsin, with his daughter Sarah, but his body was returned to Oberlin for burial.

—Dan Graves

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For more on Oberlin College, see CH 20 Charles Grandison Finney

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