Cyrus I. Scofield

Cyrus Ingersoll Scofield (1843-1921) was an American lawyer and Bible scholar.

Scofield was born in rural Michigan. He studied law in St. Louis, Missouri and moved to Topeka, Kansas, where he was admitted to the bar in 1869. He was named the United States district attorney for Kansas under the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant. However, in his legal career, Scofield began drinking heavily and ran up substantial debts. He was replaced as U.S. attorney and served a brief prison sentence for forgery in 1879.

While in prison, Scofield underwent a religious conversion, and in 1883 he was ordained as a Congregationalist minister in Dallas, Texas. Scofield started a correspondence Bible study course, and from that course he created the work for which he is chiefly remembered, the Scofield Reference Bible, a widely circulated and popular annotated study Bible that first appeared in 1909. This Bible teaches the theology of dispensationalism that was devised in the nineteenth century by John Nelson Darby, and it was largely through the influence of Scofield's notes on the Bible that dispensationalism became influential among fundamentalist Christians in the U.S.A.

Quotation:

"Optimists" patter of peace when there is no peace, and will not see that the evils from which the philosophers would save us are as old as the human race itself. Every method whereby the race has sought to realize the deathless vision has been tried to the dregs, and has failed. The futility of the ideal commonwealth of Plato and the others is precisely the futility of all superficial optimism --- the notion that for the common good, men are going to give up ambition, greed, and pride. But that which has sought expression in the Utopias, stands boldly forth in Scripture as a revealed purpose of God.

What do the Prophets Say, (1918)