"ROTTEN WOOD" Dr. Warfield's funeral took place yesterday afternoon at the First Church of Princeton. . . . It seemed to me that the old Princeton--a great institution it was--died when Dr. Warfield was carried out.
I am thankful for one last conversation I had with Dr. Warfield some weeks ago. He was quite himself that afternoon. And somehow I cannot believe that the faith which he represented will ever really die. In the course of the conversation I expressed my hope that to end the present intolerable condition there might be a great split in the Church, in order to separate the Christians from the anti-Christian propagandists. "No," he said, "you can't split rotten wood." His expectation seemed to be that the organized Church, dominated by naturalism, would become so cold and dead, that people would come to see that spiritual life could be found only outside of it, and that thus there might be a new beginning.
Nearly everything that I have done I have done with the inspiring hope that Dr. Warfield would think well of it.
J. Gresham Machen (1921)(1)
Footnote:
1. Letter to his mother (Feb. 19, 1921); cited in Ned B. Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen: A Biographical Memoir (Philadelphia: Westminster Theological Seminary, [1954] 1977), p. 310.