In positions of honor.
Dr. Hoge had often been appointed to positions of honor and responsibility by the
Southern General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church.
In 1875 he was unanimously elected to the moderator's chair in the assembly, which met in
St. Louis.
In 1876, when the assembly convened in
Savannah, Ga., he advocated and carried by overwhelming majorities two measurers, greatly opposed at that time by some of the most distinguished members.
These were the establishment of ‘fraternal relations’—not ‘organic union’—with the
Northern Presbyterian Church, and the sending of commissioners to represent the Southern Church in alliance of the reformed churches of the world.
In 1877 he was a delegate to the
Pan-Presbyterian Council, which met in
Edinburgh.
His paternal ancestor fleeing from persecution for his religious faith, was of that worthy strain which has entered so influentially
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into the elements of Virginian character, which has made it so distinctive—the Huguenot—as referred to in the following statement:
A very graphic letter was written by
Moncure D. Conway, and extensively published in this country, describing
Dr. Hoge's appearance and the effect of a speech he delivered in the Council, especially the impression produced when he spoke of the old Bible which one of his family ancestors, fleeing from persecution, had carried to
Holland — the
Bible often wet with the salt spray of the sea and the salt tears of the sorrowing exiles, its leaves yellow with age, and the names of the family register faded and dim, but bright, as the speaker believed, in the
Book of Life.
Dr. Hoge was also a delegate to the meeting of the
Evangelical Alliance, which met in New York in 1873, in which he made an address in vindication of the civilization of the
South.
He also attended the
Alliance of the
Reformed Churches of the World, which met in
Copenhagen in 1884, and made there an address, which obtained for him an invitation to visit the
Crown Princess of
Denmark at the Palace.
He was sent as a commissioner to the
Alliance of the
Reformed Churches, which convened in
London in 1888, and his subject before that body was
The Antagonisms of Society and how to reconcile them.
His last mission of the kind was eight years ago, when, at the Conference of the
Evangelical Alliance in
Boston, he delivered a speech which was pronounced by the press of that city to have been one of the most effective of all that were made at that meeting, and extracts from which were frequently published and commented on by the newspaper press.
