Page:Men of Mark in America vol 2.djvu/141

 SAMUEL SPAHR LAWS AWS, SAMUEL SPAHR, M.D., D.D., LL.D., clergyman, teacher of physical and metaphysical science, inventor, president of Westminster college, and later chancellor of the University of the State of Missouri, is an example of the type of American whose versatility and many-sided ability is equaled by his devotion to study, and whose executive talent has enabled him to succeed in what he has attempted. His earliest known ancestor in America was one of two brothers, Quakers, who came from England to Maryland in 1672. He is a son of James and Rachel Laws, and was born near Wheeling, then Virginia, on March 23, 1824.

His early life in the country, where he entered into all the pursuits and enjoyments of a healthy and active minded boy, strengthened his fiber and developed his self-reliance, and provided him with an ordinary common school education. His mother died while he was still young, and at twelve he was placed with the head of a considerable hardware and manufacturing firm at St. Louis to learn this business, under an indenture extending to his twenty-first year. He soon became an expert workman and salesman. When he decided in his seventeenth year to study for the ministry, he was offered a partnership in the firm whose principals subsequently retired from business with accumulated wealth. But he at once entered privately upon studies preparatory to college. He was graduated, A.B., in 1848, from Miami university, Oxford, Ohio, valedictorian of his class. He feels that it was his business training which had given him such habits of persistent industry as enabled him easily to outrank other students. His standing was the highest taken by any one in that college up to that time. He has "never ceased to feel satisfaction in his choice of this higher, more exacting career, in place of the lower, in which success would have been more easily won."

He took a theological course at Princeton seminary; he was class orator, and was graduated in 1851 ; was ordained to the ministry, and installed pastor of the West Presbyterian church at St. Louis, Missouri, in October of the same year. February 27, 1854, he was