On this episode of five minutes in church history we are talking about the life of

Francis Grimke. Francis Grimke was born in 1850. He was born a slave on a plantation near Charleston, South Carolina.

He had a white father who died when he was rather young,

and as the law had it at the time, he became the property of his white half brother.

Initially, this half brother treated him well, and he and his other siblings,

along with his mother, lived in town as basically free persons.

But then something happened and as Grimke was moving into his upper teens, his half-brother brought him into his home as a house slave and by all

accounts treated him very harshly.

During the Civil War, one of Grimke's other brothers managed to run away successfully and so Francis himself attempted a runaway during the Civil War.

He was caught and returned but then of, after the war he was finally emancipated and freed.

He went along with one of his brothers to Lincoln University and received his bachelor's degree there in 1870 and after a few years he

made his way up to New Jersey and enrolled and became a student at Princeton

Theological Seminary.

He studied in earnest from 1875 to 1878,

upon which he graduated and also was ordained as a minister in the Presbyterian Church.

Just as a fun fact, from those years 1875 to 1878, Grimke was among the last group of students to have Charles Hodge as his theology

professor for all three years of the theology curriculum at Princeton Theological Seminary.

It was years later that Grimke wrote of his appreciation for Princeton, and this is what he said this was in

1928 on the 50th anniversary of his being in the ministry he said the findings of

higher critics the rationalist tendencies within the church, the dogmatic and

arrogant assumptions and declarations of science that would banish God from the universe or limit his power. of 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, Grimke says, all of that have not affected me in the least or affected

my perfect faith in the Bible. That's a testament to the education that he received

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