BADLEY, Brenton H. (1849-1891)

BADLEY

Posted By: Karon Velau (email)
Date: 12/6/2018 at 21:07:40

Brenton H. Badley
(April 27, 1849 - November 20, 1891)

[note - this is not so much of an obituary, but an ad for missionary funds to carry on the work of Brenton H. Badley after his death]
Advocate Tribune, Indianola, IA, Thurs., Dec 10, 1891, p.2, col.2-3
Rev B. H. Badley, D.D.
At last the sad news has come, Brenton Badley is dead. It is nearly a quarter of a century since he entered “Blue Bird,” and more than a score of years since he stood on yonder platform and delivered the valedictory address to the first class (1870) that graduated from Simpson College. During all these years our hearts have followed him with loving interest. Feeling myself lonely without him, and knowing that his dear wife and children feel a thousand fold more lonely, our hearts go out in prayer to God that he will greatly comfort and sustain the bereaved ones. This loneliness comes from an intimate association with him during all these years I have been permitted to labor in India. I had just entered the Conference room, in far famed Caunpore, in January 1880, when Brother Badley, who was secretary of the Conference, nominated me as his assistant. From that day down through the annual sessions of the next eleven years I esteemed it a great privilege to sit as his desk and assist him in the work of the secretary. Late in my Indian life I was associated with him on the Conference Board of Education, and still later on the Board of Trustees of the Lucknow Christian College. In these various departments of our growing work I was thrown much in his society. Moreover, Mrs. Bare and I were reckoned among their dearest friends, being alumni of the same college and coming from the same annual Conference at home. We were always welcome guests at their home in Lucknow where they lived and labored. Hence we had the amplest opportunity to know Brother Badley, and to know him was to love him.
I take this opportunity to say a word regarding the Lucknow Christian College. To Brother Badley perhaps more than to any one else is due the fact that there is such an institution in India. Appointed to Lucknow soon after going to India he had charge of all our growing educational work in that important city. He early foresaw that Christianity must spread in the north-west provinces and Oudh where our and other missions were at work; that our own Conference there must ere long number her Christian children of school going age by the thousands, and that these boys and girls would surely ask us to provide the best schools possible where they could obtain a good education. What he foresaw came to pass. Primary and middle grade schools rose on every hand. Ere long bright promising young men and women asked for higher education, and high schools were opened in Lucknow, Counpore, Moradabad and Naini Tal. But Brother Badley had also foreseen that our system of education in North India would never be complete without the college. There were colleges, but they were not Christian. Young men and women educated in Christian high schools asked for further training in Christian college. Hence Dr. Badley set himself in these last years of his devoted life to build up such an institution in Lucknow.
What now is the result? In July, 1888, the school was opened as a College. Two American Professors, Messrs. Monsell and Hewes, have been sent out for the college by the students of the Ohio Wesleyan and DePauw Universities. Thirty scholarships of $500 each have been secured, the interest of which goes perpetually to the education of Christian young men. The government of the north-west provinces and Oudh have given the college a beautiful site of five acres of land adjoining the high school grounds. On this a find new college building is approaching completion. Towards this building our Missionary Board gave $5,000 last year. This had come in from special gifts in response to an appeal by the Board in behalf of the college. But although this was a generous gift, it was not sufficient to complete and furnish the building, and funds are now sorely needed. Here is an opportunity, as Brother Badley so aptly put it in the New York Christian Advocate of August, 1980, to invest for Christ in the Orient. The Board of Trustees are sorely in need just now of $5,000 to prosecute and complete the work on the new building.
But while I make this general appeal for the college in memory of “Dear Badley,” as we are wont of late years to call him, there is a special appeal I want to make of all Indianola and college people who personally knew or knew of Brother Badley and his work. Most worthy Christian young men early began to graduate from our various high schools. It was deemed advisable by all that these ought to continue their studies in college. But they had no means. Brother Badley began to write to friends, both in India and in America, and appealed for funds to be used directly or indirectly through the income from these gifts, for the education of worthy young men. He set about to raise fifty scholarships of $500 each. Up to the time of his death he had secured some thirty of these. Many of them have been founded in the name of some person. There are the Bishops Simpson and Wiley memorial scholarships, Bishops Bowman, Foote and Merrill scholarships, and the Queen’s Jubilee and the Dr. Wm. Butler scholarships. These are others all named, among which two are called the Des Moines and Upper Iowa Conference scholarships. What I wish to propose is that we raise a memorial scholarship of $500 and call it the Rev. Dr. Brenton H. Badley scholarship.
There is something beautiful in the thought that “he being dead yet speaketh,” and that he who toiled so arduously in that hot land for nearly twenty years (almost half his natural life) and refused to withdraw when struck down, preferring rather to toil on for India’s millions and fall, if fall he must, in the harness and make his grave among the people for whom he had labored, that he, I say, will continue to educate through all the years to come, by means of this scholarship, the Christian young men of that land.
No student, as a general rule, will use the income from the scholarship for a longer period than five or six years, and when he graduates from the school, another will enter on the same scholarship and graduate and pass out, and thus this Brenton H. Badley scholarship will go on perpetually doing good.
There is something appropriate in the people of Indianola and Simpson College raising this fund. It was here that he went to school; it was here in our court Louse office that the pen of this ready writer was in great demand and where he wrote early and late to support himself in college necessitating oftentimes the burning of the midnight oil to get his lessons for the coming day; and it was from among us that he went out to live, to labor, to die in that far off land.
Now I will be one of fifty to give $10 to this Memorial scholarship. Who will be the next? Send me your name on a postal card. Box 40, Indianola, Iowa. Let us raise the $500 and keep that grand missionary, though promoted to glory, laboring still for India’s redemption. Let persons who cannot give as much as $10 group together and give that amount any time between this and the 1st of April, 1892. But send your name now, and the amount you can give, in memory of Dear Badley. Yours Sincerely, C. L. Bare, Indianola, Iowa, December 7, 1891