Vaughan was born on July 15, 1827 in Charlotte County, Virginia, and studied at Hampden Sydney College, in the same state. There, he became an avid reader of the sermons of Moses Hoge, a Scott-Irish preacher who upheld historical Reformed Protestantism against the frequent abuses and misinterpretations of frontier revivals.

Today, Clement Read Vaughan (1827-1911) is remembered only occasionally for his comparison of faith to a bridge – an illustration used by many pastors. Not much is known about his life – mostly what Thomas Cary Johnson (1859-1936) recorded in his biography of the more famed Robert Lewis Dabney (1820-1898). In mentioning Vaughan, Johnson focuses almost exclusively on the warm and honest friendship between the two men. But there is enough in those brief glimpses to give a picture of who Vaughan was and what he believed.

Vaughan was born on July 15, 1827 in Charlotte County, Virginia, and studied at Hampden Sydney College, in the same state. There, he became an avid reader of the sermons of Moses Hoge, a Scott-Irish preacher who upheld historical Reformed Protestantism against the frequent abuses and misinterpretations of frontier revivals.

Impressed by Hoge’s example, in 1845 Vaughan entered Union Seminary with the intention of becoming a minister of the gospel. Union was considered “old school,” committed to the inerrancy and sufficiency to Scripture and to its clear exposition in the Reformed Confessions.

A Lasting Friendship

It was at Union that Vaughan met Dabney, who became a close and lasting friend. The comradery between the two is evident in one of their epistolary exchanges, when Vaughan chastised Dabney for sending him a letter empty of news about his life and focused on what seemed like topographical information. “Blast ye, ye beast!” Vaughan wrote. “Why didn’t you tell me something, my dear old crony Bob Dabney, instead of gabberin’ about bad roads, cross-country routes, etc.? Your sheet was just like a surveyor’s chart – minus the diagram.”[1]

Vaughan’s letters to Dabney – some amusing, most moving – chart the course of the two men’s life and friendship. Vaughan was there when Dabney became discouraged by frequent bouts of poor health and by the slow progress of the congregation under his care. In both cases, Vaughan could relate. His health had been equally poor, so much that he had to take an eleven-year leave from his pastorate in Lynchburg, Virginia. And his excessive zeal as young pastor had left him similarly frustrated and exhausted.

“My great mistake was in having too many meetings,” he told Dabney, “and I expect the cause of it was nothing but unbelief: an unwillingness to let Christ do his own work, and a desire to do too much myself.”[2]

He encouraged Dabney to fight depression “as much as possible, because I know, by a sad experience, how bad the effects are upon the mind, the body and the heart. It starves and clogs the energies of all these, prevents close and accurate thinking by dissipating the mind in wild and dreary reveries, sours the temper, makes one careless of health and the means of preserving it, and, in fine, is the very worst state of mind in its practical influence on a man’s usefulness of anything I know.”[3]

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