The distracted Samuel Miller

As a professor at Princeton, Miller would devote himself to preaching and building up the pastoral office through his teaching and publications. He is often remembered for these publications on pastoral issues, including his Letters on Clerical Manners (1827) and his famous An Essay on the Warrant, Nature, and Duties of the Office of the Ruling Elder in the Presbyterian Church (1831). It is often overlooked, however, that he had struggled to maintain his pastoral focus and unswerving devotion to his pastoral duties while a pastor in New York. His eventual triumph over pastoral distractions would win him universal esteem of his colleagues, and by the time he reached his maturity as a professor, the younger James W. Alexander, would be able to look on him with admiration and say, “I think [Samuel Miller] one of the most conscientious and pious men I ever knew.”

You can read about the struggle that Samuel Miller had here. It is a painful history, all the more so because he only learned as a professor what he needed to know as a pastor.