Background
Robert Ryland was the son of Josiah and Catharine (Peachey) Ryland of "Farmington, " King and Queen County, Virginia.
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Excerpt from Lectures on the Apocalypse The author of the following Lectures lays. No claim to originality in the views which they ex press. He has read several learned works on the Apocalypse, and has not hesitated to adopt their sentiments and language, without formal notice, whenever they have approved themselves to his judgment. Especially is he indebted to the very. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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Robert Ryland was the son of Josiah and Catharine (Peachey) Ryland of "Farmington, " King and Queen County, Virginia.
From 1820 to 1823 he was a student at Humanity Hall Academy, conducted by Peter Nelson in Hanover County, and in 1826 he was graduated from Columbian College, Washington, D. C.
Entering the Baptist ministry, Ryland accepted a call to the Second Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Va. When, in 1832, the Baptists established at Richmond the Virginia Baptist Seminary to educate young men for the ministry, he was placed in charge. No detail of direction was too minute for his watchful care. He recruited likely students as he drove through the state, combining the mission of preacher and teacher.
When the Seminary was chartered as Richmond College in 1840, he was made president and continued to direct its affairs with fidelity to two principles he had adopted--to keep the college out of debt and to make no educational claims that he was not able to substantiate.
When the Civil War interrupted its logical development, the faculty, student body, buildings, and endowment attested his successful and constructive leadership. In addition to his college work, he labored among the Negroes of Richmond, serving as pastor of the First African Church from 1841 to 1865, during which time nearly four thousand members were added to the church roll. The catechism he wrote for his unlettered members required only two answers, "yes" or "no, " with a passage of scripture to be memorized to support the answer. Many of the leaders of the Negroes in Richmond in the early decades of their struggle up from slavery had been taught their standards in life by him and gratefully acknowledged their indebtedness.
When the war was over, he resigned in the belief that the church would prefer a preacher of the Negro race, an arrangement not hitherto permitted under Virginia law. Before the war, in an address published under the title The American Union (1857), he had advised against the defense of slavery as right in the abstract, though he saw in the institution a means used by God to teach the Negroes the Christian religion.
In 1866, feeling that younger minds should direct the affairs of a college to serve the new generation, he resigned the presidency of Richmond College. Subsequently, he accepted a position to teach in the National Theological School for Negro preachers in Richmond, and was connected, also, with the Richmond Female Institute, a Baptist school for girls.
In 1868 he moved to Kentucky to become president of the Shelbyville Female College, served a similar institution at Lexington (1871 - 78), and another at New Castle (1878 - 81). He spent succeeding years with a daughter in Lexington, and in 1893, when nearly ninety years old, became chaplain of Southwest Virginia Institute, at Bristol, acting in that capacity for four years.
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His first wife, whom Ryland married in 1830, was Josephine, daughter of Thomas Norvell of Richmond. She died in 1846, and he later married Betty Presley Thornton, daughter of Anthony and Ann Thornton of Caroline County. There were four children by the first marriage and three by the second.