The African Boy Who Taught the Professors to Pray

In 1891, a young Liberian man named Samuel Morris arrived at Taylor University in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He had no formal education. He owned no shoes. He spoke broken English and carried nothing but an unshakable certainty that the Holy Spirit had sent him to America to learn more about God.

The faculty did not know what to make of him. Here was a student who could barely follow lectures on systematic theology, yet when he prayed, something shifted in the room. Hardened students wept. Professors who had studied Greek and Hebrew for decades found themselves undone by the simple, direct way this young man spoke to the Almighty as though He were standing right there.

Dr. Thaddeus Reade, the university president, later admitted that Samuel Morris taught him more about the Holy Spirit than all his years of academic study combined. Morris had no credentials, no rhetorical training, no sophisticated arguments. He had only what Paul described to the Corinthians — a demonstration of the Spirit's power.

Samuel Morris died at twenty-one, but the revival he sparked at Taylor University continued for years. The professors had the wisdom of this age. The young man from Liberia carried something their libraries could not contain.

Paul wrote that the Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. Samuel Morris never needed to search the footnotes. The Spirit had already shown him what the scholars were still trying to find.