Desirableness Of Active Service

Desirableness of Active Service is a work by Henry Clay Trumbull, the American Congregational minister, Civil War chaplain, editor, and writer who lived from 1830 to 1903. Trumbull was one of the most influential American Protestant religious educators of the late nineteenth century and edited the Sunday School Times for nearly thirty years from 1875 until his death.

Trumbull served as chaplain of the Tenth Connecticut Volunteer Infantry during the Civil War, with substantial service across the major campaigns of the eastern theatre. His war experiences gave him substantial material for his later religious writing and contributed to his lasting position as one of the leading figures in the American Protestant religious response to the Civil War experience. His memoir War Memories of an Army Chaplain of 1898 became one of the better known American Civil War religious memoirs.

After the war Trumbull devoted his career substantially to the American Sunday school movement, the substantial late nineteenth century American Protestant religious education enterprise that organised weekly religious instruction for children and substantial numbers of adults across the various American Protestant denominations. Trumbull’s editorial work at the Sunday School Times made the publication one of the central organs of the broader American Sunday school movement, with substantial circulation and substantial influence on the curriculum, methods, and theology of American Protestant religious education during the period.

Desirableness of Active Service belongs to Trumbull’s substantial body of religious writing aimed at the practical conduct of Christian life. The title suggests the broad subject. The desirableness of active service in the Christian context refers to the broader question of whether and why Christians should be actively engaged in the various forms of religious, charitable, and reform work that the substantial American Protestant culture of the period understood as central expressions of authentic Christian commitment. The book likely combines biblical and theological argument with practical examples and exhortation in the mode that Trumbull’s other devotional and instructional writing characteristically favoured.

The book is of interest now to historians of late nineteenth century American Protestant religious life, of the Sunday school movement, and of the broader practical theological literature that the period produced. It pairs naturally with Trumbull’s other writings on Christian religious education and with the substantial broader devotional literature of the period.