A sermon preached in 1803 to the Presbyterian synod of Kentucky, by the Rev. David Rice, has the value of testimony given in the presence of other competent witnesses, and liable thus to be questioned or contradicted. In it he says:

"Neighborhoods noted for their vicious and profligate manners are now as much noted for their piety and good order. Drunkards, profane swearers, liars, quarrelsome persons, etc., are remarkably reformed.... A number of families who had lived apparently without the fear of God, in folly and in vice, without any religious instruction or any proper government, are now reduced to order and are daily joining in the worship of God, reading his word, singing his praises, and offering up their supplications to a throne of grace. Parents who seemed formerly to have little or no regard for the salvation of their children are now anxiously concerned for their salvation, are pleading for them, and endeavoring to lead them to Christ and train them up in the way of piety and virtue."

That same year the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, in its annual review of the state of religion, adverted with emphasis to the work in the Cumberland country, and cited remarkable instances of conversion—malignant opposers of vital piety convinced and reconciled, learned, active, and conspicuous infidels becoming signal monuments of that grace which they once despised; and in conclusion declared with joy that "the state and prospects of vital religion in our country are more favorable and encouraging than at any period within the last forty years."[238:1]

In order successfully to study the phenomena of this remarkable passage in the history of the church, it is necessary to bear in mind the social conditions that prevailed. A population perfervido ingenio, of a temper peculiarly susceptible of intense excitement, transplanted into a wild country, under little control either of conventionality or law, deeply ingrained from many generations with the religious sentiment, but broken loose from the control of it and living consciously in reckless disregard of the law of God, is suddenly aroused to a sense of its apostasy and wickedness. The people do not hear the word of God from Sabbath to Sabbath, or even from evening to evening, and take it home with them and ponder it amid the avocations of daily business; by the conditions, they are sequestered for days together in the wilderness for the exclusive contemplation of momentous truths pressed upon the mind with incessant and impassioned iteration; and they remain together, an agitated throng, not of men only, but of women and children. The student of psychology recognizes at once that here are present in an unusual combination the conditions not merely of the ready propagation of influence by example and persuasion, but of those nervous, mental, or spiritual infections which make so important a figure in the world's history, civil, military, or religious. It is wholly in accord with human nature that the physical manifestations attendant on religious excitement in these circumstances should be of an intense and extravagant sort.

And such indeed they were. Sudden outcries, hysteric weeping and laughter, faintings, catalepsies, trances, were customary concomitants of the revival preaching. Multitudes fell prostrate on the ground, "spiritually slain," as it was said. Lest the helpless bodies should be trampled on by the surging crowd, they were taken up and laid in rows on the floor of the neighboring meeting-house. "Some lay quiet, unable to move or speak. Some talked, but could not move. Some beat the floor with their heels. Some, shrieking in agony, bounded about, it is said, like a live fish out of water. Many lay down and rolled over and over for hours at a time. Others rushed wildly over the stumps and benches, and then plunged, shouting 'Lost! Lost!' into the forest."

As the revival went on and the camp-meeting grew to be a custom and an institution, this nervous epidemic took on certain recognizable forms, one of which was known as "the jerks." This malady "began in the head and spread rapidly to the feet. The head would be thrown from side to side so swiftly that the features would be blotted out and the hair made to snap. When the body was affected the sufferer was hurled over hindrances that came in his way, and finally dashed on the ground, to bounce about like a ball." The eccentric Lorenzo Dow, whose freaks of eloquence and humor are remembered by many now living, speaks from his own observation on the subject:

"I have passed a meeting-house where I observed the undergrowth had been cut for a camp-meeting, and from fifty to a hundred saplings were left breast-high on purpose for persons who were 'jerked' to hold on to. I observed where they had held on they had kicked up the earth as a horse stamping flies.... I believe it does not affect those naturalists who wish to get it to philosophize about it; and rarely those who are the most pious; but the lukewarm, lazy professor is subject to it. The wicked fear it and are subject to it; but the persecutors are more subject to it than any, and they have sometimes cursed and sworn and damned it while jerking."[240:1]

There is nothing improbable in the claim that phenomena like these, strange, weird, startling, "were so much like miracles that they had the same effect as miracles on unbelievers." They helped break up the apathetic torpor of the church and summon the multitudes into the wilderness to hear the preaching of repentance and the remission of sins. But they had some lamentable results. Those who, like many among the Methodists,[241:1] found in them the direct work of the Holy Spirit, were thereby started along the perilous incline toward enthusiasm and fanaticism. Those, on the other hand, repelled by the grotesqueness and extravagance of these manifestations, who were led to distrust or condemn the good work with which they were associated, fell into a graver error. This was the error into which, to its cost, the Presbyterian Church was by and by drawn in dealing with questions that emerged from these agitations. The revival gave rise to two new sects, both of them marked by the fervor of spirit that characterized the time, and both of them finding their principal habitat in the same western region. The Cumberland Presbyterians, now grown to large numbers and deserved influence and dignity in the fellowship of American sects, separated themselves from the main body of Presbyterians by refusing to accept, in face of the craving needs of the pastorless population all about them, the arbitrary rule shutting the door of access to the Presbyterian ministry to all candidates, how great soever their other qualifications, who lacked a classical education. Separating on this issue, they took the opportunity to amend the generally accepted doctrinal statements of the Presbyterian churches by mitigating those utterances which seemed to them, as they have seemed to many others, to err in the direction of fatalism.

About the same time there was manifested in various quarters a generous revolt against the existence and multiplication of mutually exclusive sects in the Christian family, each limited by humanly devised doctrinal articles and branded with partisan names. How these various protesting elements came together on the sole basis of a common faith in Christ and a common acceptance of the divine authority of the Bible; how, not intending it, they came to be themselves a new sect; and how, struggling in vain against the inexorable laws of language, they came to be distinguished by names, as Campbellite Baptist, Christ-ian (with a long i), and (kat' exochen) Disciples, are points on which interesting and instructive light is shed in the history by Dr. B. B. Tyler.[242:1]

* * * * *

The great revival of the West and Southwest was not the only revival, and not even the earliest revival, of that time of crisis. As early as 1792 the long inertia of the eastern churches began to be broken here and there by signs of growing earnestness and attentiveness to spiritual things. There was little of excited agitation. There was no preaching of famous evangelists. There were no imposing convocations. Only in many and many of those country towns in which, at that time, the main strength of the population lay, the labors of faithful pastors began to be rewarded with large ingatherings of penitent believers. The languishing churches grew strong and hopeful, and the insolent infidelity of the times was abashed. With such sober simplicity was the work of the gospel carried forward, in the opening years of this century, among the churches and pastors that had learned wisdom from the mistakes made in the Great Awakening, that there are few striking incidents for the historian. Hardly any man is to be pointed out as a preeminent leader of the church at this period. If to any one, this place of honor belongs to Timothy Dwight, grandson of Jonathan Edwards, whose accession to the presidency of Yale College at the darkest hour in its history marked the turning-point. We have already learned from the reminiscences of Lyman Beecher how low the college had sunk in point of religious character, when most of the class above him were openly boastful of being infidels.[243:1] How the new president dealt with them is well described by the same witness:

"They thought the faculty were afraid of free discussion. But when they handed Dr. Dwight a list of subjects for class disputation, to their surprise, he selected this: 'Is the Bible the word of God?' and told them to do their best. He heard all they had to say, answered them, and there was an end. He preached incessantly for six months on the subject, and all infidelity skulked and hid its head. He elaborated his theological system in a series of forenoon sermons in the chapel; the afternoon discourses were practical. The original design of Yale College was to found a divinity school. To a mind appreciative, like mine, his preaching was a continual course of education and a continual feast. He was copious and polished in style, though disciplined and logical. There was a pith and power of doctrine there that has not been since surpassed, if equaled."[243:2]

It may be doubted whether to any man of his generation it was given to exercise a wider and more beneficent influence over the American church than that of President Dwight. His system of "Theology Explained and Defended in a Series of Sermons," a theology meant to be preached and made effective in convincing men and converting them to the service of God, was so constructed as to be completed within the four years of the college curriculum, so that every graduate should have heard the whole of it. The influence of it has not been limited by the boundaries of our country, nor has it expired with the century just completed since President Dwight's accession.

At the East also, as well as at the West, the quickening of religious thought and feeling had the common effect of alienating and disrupting. Diverging tendencies, which had begun to disclose themselves in the discussions between Edwards and Chauncy in their respective volumes of "Thoughts" on the Great Awakening, became emphasized in the revival of 1800. That liberalism which had begun as a protest against a too peremptory style of dogmatism was rapidly advancing toward a dogmatic denial of points deemed by the opposite party to be essential. Dogmatic differences were aggravated by differences of taste and temperament, and everything was working toward the schism by which some sincere and zealous souls should seek to do God service.

In one most important particular the revival of 1800 was happily distinguished from the Great Awakening of 1740. It was not done and over with at the end of a few years, and then followed by a long period of reaction. It was the beginning of a long period of vigorous and "abundant life," moving forward, not, indeed, with even and unvarying flow, yet with continuous current, marked with those alternations of exaltation and subsidence which seem, whether for evil or for good, to have become a fixed characteristic of American church history.

The widespread revivals of the first decade of the nineteenth century saved the church of Christ in America from its low estate and girded it for stupendous tasks that were about to be devolved on it. In the glow of this renewed fervor, the churches of New England successfully made the difficult transition from establishment to self-support and to the costly enterprises of aggressive evangelization into which, in company with other churches to the South and West, they were about to enter. The Christianity of the country was prepared and equipped to attend with equal pace the prodigious rush of population across the breadth of the Great Valley, and to give welcome to the invading host of immigrants which before the end of a half century was to effect its entrance into our territory at the rate of a thousand a day. It was to accommodate itself to changing social conditions, as the once agricultural population began to concentrate itself in factory villages and commercial towns. It was to carry on systematic campaigns of warfare against instituted social wrong, such as the drinking usages of society, the savage code of dueling, the public sanction of slavery. And it was to enter the "effectual door" which from the beginning of the century opened wider and wider to admit the gospel and the church to every nation under heaven.

FOOTNOTES:

[231:1] "Autobiography of Lyman Beecher," vol. i., p. 43. The same charming volume contains abundant evidence that the spirit of true religion was cherished in the homes of the people, while there were so many public signs of apostasy.

[232:1] Tiffany, "Protestant Episcopal Church," pp. 388, 394, 395.

[232:2] Dr. Jacobs, chap. xix.

[233:1] "Autobiography of Peter Cartwright," quoted by Dorchester, "Christianity in the United States," p. 348.

[236:1] See B. B. Tyler, "History of the Disciples," pp. 11-17; R. V. Foster, "The Cumberland Presbyterians," pp. 260-263 (American Church History Series, vols. xi., xii.).

[238:1] Tyler, "The Disciples"; Foster, "The Cumberland Presbyterians," ubi supra.

[240:1] Let me add an illustrative instance related to me by the distinguished Methodist, Dr. David P. Durbin. Standing near the platform from which he was to preach at a camp-meeting, he observed a powerfully built young backwoodsman who was manifestly there with no better intent than to disturb and break up the meeting. Presently it became evident that the young man was conscious of some influence taking hold of him to which he was resolved not to yield; he clutched with both hands a hickory sapling next which he was standing, to hold himself steady, but was whirled round and round, until the bark of the sapling peeled off under his grasp. But, as in the cases referred to by Dow, the attack was attended by no religious sentiment whatever.

On the manifestations in the Cumberland country, see McMasters, "United States," vol. ii., pp. 581, 582, and the sources there cited. For some judicious remarks on the general subject, see Buckley, "Methodism," pp. 217-224.

[241:1] So Dr. Buckley, "Methodism," p. 217.

[242:1] American Church History Series, vol. xii.

[243:1] See above, pp. 230, 231.

[243:2] "Autobiography of Lyman Beecher," vol. i., pp. 43, 44.



CHAPTER XV.

ORGANIZED BENEFICENCE.

When the Presbyterian General Assembly, in 1803, made a studious review of the revivals which for several years had been in progress, especially at the South and West, it included in its "Narrative" the following observations:

"The Assembly observe with great pleasure that the desire for spreading the gospel among the blacks and among the savage tribes on our borders has been rapidly increasing during the last year. The Assembly take notice of this circumstance with the more satisfaction, as it not only affords a pleasing presage of the spread of the gospel, but also furnishes agreeable evidence of the genuineness and the benign tendency of that spirit which God has been pleased to pour out upon his people."

In New England the like result had already, several years before, followed upon the like antecedent. In the year 1798 the "Missionary Society of Connecticut" was constituted, having for its object "to Christianize the heathen in North America, and to support and promote Christian knowledge in the new settlements within the United States"; and in August, 1800, its first missionary, David Bacon, engaged at a salary of "one hundred and ten cents per day," set out for the wilderness south and west of Lake Erie, "afoot and alone, with no more luggage than he could carry on his person," to visit the wild tribes of that region, "to explore their situation, and learn their feelings with respect to Christianity, and, so far as he had opportunity, to teach them its doctrines and duties." The name forms a link in the bright succession from John Eliot to this day. But it must needs be that some suffer as victims of the inexperience of those who are first to take direction of an untried enterprise. The abandonment of its first missionary by one of the first missionary societies, leaving him helpless in the wilderness, was a brief lesson in the economy of missions opportunely given at the outset of the American mission work, and happily had no need to be repeated.[247:1]

David Bacon, like Henry Martyn, who at that same time, in far different surroundings, was intent upon his plans of mission work in India, was own son in the faith to David Brainerd. But they were elder sons in a great family. The pathetic story of that heroic youth, as told by Jonathan Edwards, was a classic at that time in almost every country parsonage; but its influence was especially felt in the colleges, now no longer, as a few years earlier, the seats of the scornful, but the homes of serious and religious learning which they were meant to be by their founders.

Of the advancement of Christian civilization in the first quarter-century from the achievement of independence there is no more distinguished monument than the increase, through those troubled and impoverished years, of the institutions of secular and sacred learning. The really successful and effective colleges that had survived from the colonial period were hardly a half-dozen. Up to 1810 these had been reinforced by as many more. By far the greater number of them were founded by the New England Congregationalists, to whom this has ever been a favorite field of activity. But special honor must be paid to the wise and courageous and nobly successful enterprise of large-minded and large-hearted men among the Baptists, who as early as 1764, boldly breasting a current of unworthy prejudice in their own denomination, began the work of Brown University at Providence, which, carried forward by a notable succession of great educators, has been set in the front rank of existing American institutions of learning. After the revivals of 1800 these Christian colleges were not only attended by students coming from zealous and fervid churches; they themselves became the foci from which high and noble spiritual influences were radiated through the land. It was in communities like these that the example of such lives as that of Brainerd stirred up generous young minds to a chivalrous and even ascetic delight in attempting great labors and enduring great sacrifices as soldiers under the Captain of salvation.

It was at Williams College, then just planted in the Berkshire hills, that a little coterie of students was formed which, for the grandeur of the consequences that flowed from it, is worthy to be named in history beside the Holy Club of Oxford in 1730, and the friends at Oriel College in 1830. Samuel J. Mills came to Williams College in 1806 from the parsonage of "Father Mills" of Torringford, concerning whom quaint traditions and even memories still linger in the neighboring parishes of Litchfield County, Connecticut. Around this young student gathered a circle of men like-minded. The shade of a lonely haystack was their oratory; the pledges by which they bound themselves to a life-work for the kingdom of heaven remind one of the mutual vows of the earliest friends of Loyola. Some of the youths went soon to the theological seminary, and at once leavened that community with their own spirit.

The seminary—there was only one in all Protestant America. As early as 1791 the Sulpitian fathers had organized their seminary at Baltimore. But it was not until 1808 that any institution for theological studies was open to candidates for the Protestant ministry. Up to that time such studies were made in the regular college curriculum, which was distinctly theological in character; and it was common for the graduate to spend an additional year at the college for special study under the president or the one professor of divinity. But many country parsonages that were tenanted by men of fame as writers and teachers were greatly frequented by young men preparing themselves for the work of preaching.

The change to the modern method of education for the ministry was a sudden one. It was precipitated by an event which has not even yet ceased to be looked on by the losing party with honest lamentation and with an unnecessary amount of sectarian acrimony. The divinity professorship in Harvard College, founded in 1722[249:1] by Thomas Hollis, of London, a Baptist friend of New England, was filled, after a long struggle and an impassioned protest, by the election of Henry Ware, an avowed and representative Unitarian. It was a distinct announcement that the government of the college had taken sides in the impending conflict, in opposition to the system of religious doctrine to the maintenance of which the college had from its foundation been devoted. The significance of the fact was not mistaken by either party. It meant that the two tendencies which had been recognizable from long before the Great Awakening were drawing asunder, and that thenceforth it must be expected that the vast influence of the venerable college, in the clergy and in society, would be given to the Liberal side. The dismay of one party and the exultation of the other were alike well grounded. The cry of the Orthodox was "To your tents, O Israel!" Lines of ecclesiastical non-intercourse were drawn. Church was divided from church, and family from family. When the forces and the losses on each side came to be reckoned up, there was a double wonder: First, at the narrow boundaries by which the Unitarian defection was circumscribed: "A radius of thirty-five miles from Boston as a center would sweep almost the whole field of its history and influence;"[250:1] and then at the sweeping completeness of it within these bounds; as Mrs. H. B. Stowe summed up the situation at Boston, "All the literary men of Massachusetts were Unitarian; all the trustees and professors of Harvard College were Unitarian; all the elite of wealth and fashion crowded Unitarian churches; the judges on the bench were Unitarian, giving decisions by which the peculiar features of church organization so carefully ordered by the Pilgrim Fathers had been nullified and all the power had passed into the hands of the congregation."[250:2]

The schism, with its acrimonies and heartburnings, was doubtless in some sense necessary. And it was attended with some beneficent consequences. It gave rise to instructive and illuminating debate. And on the part of the Orthodox it occasioned an outburst of earnest zeal which in a wonderfully short time had more than repaired their loss in numbers, and had started them on a career of wide beneficence, with a momentum that has been increasing to this day. But it is not altogether useless to put the question how much was lost to both parties and to the common cause by the separation. It is not difficult to conceive that such dogged polemics as Nathanael Emmons and Jedidiah Morse might have been none the worse for being held in some sort of fellowship, rather than in exasperated controversy, with such types of Christian sainthood as the younger Ware and the younger Buckminster; and it is easy to imagine the extreme culture and cool intellectual and spiritual temper of the Unitarian pulpit in general as finding its advantage in not being cut off from direct radiations from the fiery zeal of Lyman Beecher and Edward Dorr Griffin. Is it quite sure that New England Congregationalism would have been in all respects worse off if Channing and his friends had continued to be recognized as the Liberal wing of its clergy? or that the Unitarian ministers would not have been a great deal better off if they had remained in connection with a strong and conservative right wing, which might counterbalance the exorbitant leftward flights of their more impatient and erratic spirits?

The seating of a pronounced Unitarian in the Hollis chair of theology at Harvard took place in 1805. Three years later, in 1808, the doors of Andover Seminary were opened to students. Thirty-six were present, and the number went on increasing. The example was quickly followed. In 1810 the Dutch seminary was begun at New Brunswick, and in 1812 the Presbyterian at Princeton. In 1816 Bangor Seminary (Congregationalist) and Hartwick Seminary (Lutheran) were opened. In 1819 the Episcopalian "General Seminary" followed, and the Baptist "Hamilton Seminary" in 1820. In 1821 Presbyterian seminaries were begun at Auburn, N. Y., and Marysville, Tenn. In 1822 the Yale Divinity College was founded (Congregationalist); in 1823 the Virginia (Episcopalian) seminary at Alexandria; in 1824 the Union (Presbyterian) Seminary, also in Virginia, and the Unitarian seminary at Cambridge; in 1825 the Baptist seminary at Newton, Mass., and the German Reformed at York, Pa.; in 1826 the Lutheran at Gettysburg; in 1827 the Baptist at Rock Spring, Ill. Thus, within a period of twenty years, seventeen theological schools had come into existence where none had been known before. It was a swift and beneficent revolution, and the revolution has never gone backward. In 1880 were enumerated in the United States no less than one hundred and forty-two seminaries, representing all sects, orders, and schools of theological opinion, employing five hundred and twenty-nine resident professors.[252:1]

To Andover, in the very first years of its great history, came Mills and others of the little Williams College circle; and at once their infectious enthusiasm for the advancement of the kingdom of God was felt throughout the institution. The eager zeal of these young men brooked no delay. In June, 1810, the General Association of Massachusetts met at the neighboring town of Bradford; there four of the students, Judson, Nott, Newell, and Hall, presented themselves and their cause; and at that meeting was constituted the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. The little faith of the churches shrank from the responsibility of sustaining missionaries in the field, and Judson was sent to England to solicit the cooeperation of the London Missionary Society. This effort happily failing, the burden came back upon the American churches and was not refused. At last, in February, 1812, the first American missionaries to a foreign country, Messrs. Judson, Rice, Newell, Nott, and Hall, with their wives, sailed, in two parties, for Calcutta.

And now befell an incident perplexing, embarrassing, and disheartening to the supporters of the mission, but attended with results for the promotion of the gospel to which their best wisdom never could have attained. Adoniram Judson, a graduate of Brown University, having spent the long months at sea in the diligent and devout study of the Scriptures, arrived at Calcutta fully persuaded of the truth of Baptist principles. His friend, Luther Rice, arriving by the other vessel, came by and by to the same conclusion; and the two, with their wives, were baptized by immersion in the Baptist church at Calcutta. The announcement of this news in America was an irresistible appeal to the already powerful and rapidly growing Baptist denomination to assume the support of the two missionaries who now offered themselves to the service of the Baptist churches. Rice returned to urge the appeal on their immediate attention, while Judson remained to enter on that noble apostolate for which his praise is in all the churches.

To the widespread Baptist fellowship this sudden, unmistakable, and imperative providential summons to engage in the work of foreign missions was (it is hardly too much to say) like life from the dead. The sect had doubled its numbers in the decade just passed, and was estimated to include two hundred thousand communicants, all "baptized believers." But this multitude was without common organization, and, while abundantly endowed with sectarian animosities, was singularly lacking in a consciousness of common spiritual life. It was pervaded by a deadly fatalism, which, under the guise of reverence for the will of God, was openly pleaded as a reason for abstaining from effort and self-denial in the promotion of the gospel. Withal it was widely characterized not only by a lack of education in its ministry, but by a violent and brutal opposition to a learned clergy, which was particularly strange in a party the moiety of whose principles depends on a point in Greek lexicology. It was to a party—we may not say a body—deeply and widely affected by traits like these that the divine call was to be presented and urged. The messenger was well fitted for his work. To the zeal of a new convert to Baptist principles, and a missionary fervor deepened by recent contact with idolatry in some of its most repulsive forms, Luther Rice united a cultivated eloquence and a personal persuasiveness. Of course his first address was to pastors and congregations in the seaboard cities, unexcelled by any, of whatever name, for intelligent and reasonable piety; and here his task was easy and brief, for they were already of his mind. But the great mass of ignorance and prejudice had also to be reckoned with. By a work in which the influence of the divine Spirit was quite as manifest as in the convulsive agitations of a camp-meeting, it was dealt with successfully. Church history moved swiftly in those days. The news of the accession of Judson and Rice was received in January, 1813. In May, 1814, the General Missionary Convention of the Baptists was organized at Philadelphia, thirty-three delegates being present, from eleven different States. The Convention, which was to meet triennially, entered at once upon its work. It became a vital center to the Baptist denomination. From it, at its second meeting, proceeded effective measures for the promotion of education in the ministry, and, under the conviction that "western as well as eastern regions are given to the Son of God as an inheritance," large plans for home missions at the West.

Thus the great debt which the English Congregationalists had owed to the Baptists for heroic leadership in the work of foreign missions was repaid with generous usury by the Congregationalists to the Baptists of America. From this time forward the American Baptists came more and more to be felt as a salutary force in the religious life of the nation and the world. But against what bitter and furious opposition on the part of the ancient ignorance the new light had to struggle cannot easily be conceived by those who have only heard of the "Hard-Shell Baptist" as a curious fossil of a prehistoric period.[255:1]

The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions continued for twenty-seven years to be the common organ of foreign missionary operations for the Congregationalists, the Presbyterians, and the Dutch and German Reformed churches. In the year 1837 an official Presbyterian Board of Missions was erected by the Old-School fragment of the disrupted Presbyterian Church; and to this, when the two fragments were reunited, in 1869, the contributions of the New-School side began to be transferred. In 1858 the Dutch church, and in 1879 the German church, instituted their separate mission operations. Thus the initiative of the Andover students in 1810 resulted in the erection, not of one mission board, timidly venturing to set five missionaries in the foreign field, but of five boards, whose total annual resources are counted by millions of dollars, whose evangelists, men and women, American and foreign-born, are a great army, and whose churches, schools, colleges, theological seminaries, hospitals, printing-presses, with the other equipments of a Christian civilization, and the myriads of whose faithful Christian converts, in every country under the whole heaven, have done more for the true honor of our nation than all that it has achieved in diplomacy and war.[255:2]

The Episcopalians entered on foreign mission work in 1819, and the Methodists, tardily but at last with signal efficiency and success, in 1832. No considerable sect of American Christians at the present day is unrepresented in the foreign field.

In order to complete the history of this organizing era in the church, we must return to the humble but memorable figure of Samuel J. Mills. It was his characteristic word to one of his fellows, as they stood ready to leave the seclusion of the seminary for active service, "You and I, brother, are little men, but before we die, our influence must be felt on the other side of the world." No one claimed that he was other than a "little man," except as he was filled and possessed with a great thought, and that the thought that filled the mind of Christ—the thought of the Coming Age and of the Reign of God on earth.[256:1] While his five companions were sailing for the remotest East, Mills plunged into the depth of the western wilderness, and between 1812 and 1815, in two toilsome journeys, traversed the Great Valley as far as New Orleans, deeply impressed everywhere with the famine of the word, and laboring, in cooeperation with local societies at the East, to provide for the universal want by the sale or gift of Bibles and the organization of Bible societies. After his second return he proposed the organization of the American Bible Society, which was accomplished in 1816.

But already this nobly enterprising mind was intent on a new plan, of most far-reaching importance, not original with himself, but, on the contrary, long familiar to those who studied the extension of the church and pondered the indications of God's providential purposes. The earliest attempt in America toward the propagation of the gospel in foreign lands would seem to have been the circular letter sent out by the neighbor pastors, Samuel Hopkins and Ezra Stiles, in the year 1773, from Newport, chief seat of the slave-trade, asking contributions for the education of two colored men as missionaries to their native continent of Africa. To many generous minds at once, in this era of great Christian enterprises, the thought recurred of vast blessings to be wrought for the Dark Continent by the agency of colored men Christianized, civilized, and educated in America. Good men reverently hoped to see in this triumphant solution of the mystery of divine providence in permitting the curse of African slavery, through the cruel greed of men, to be inflicted on the American republic. In 1816 Mills successfully pressed upon the Presbyterian "Synod of New York and New Jersey" a plan for educating Christian men of color for the work of the gospel in their fatherland. That same year, in cooeperation with an earnest philanthropist, Dr. Robert Finley, of New Jersey, he aided in the instituting of the American Colonization Society. In 1817 he sailed, in company with a colleague, the Rev. Ebenezer Burgess, to explore the coast of Africa in search of the best site for a colony. On the return voyage he died, and his body was committed to the sea: a "little man," to whom were granted only five years of what men call "active life"; but he had fulfilled his vow, and the ends of the earth had felt his influence for the advancement of the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ. The enterprise of African colonization, already dear to Christian hearts for the hopes that it involved of the redemption of a lost continent, of the elevation of an oppressed race in America, of the emancipation of slaves and the abolition of slavery, received a new consecration as the object of the dying labors and prayers of Mills. It was associated, in the minds of good men, not only with plans for the conversion of the heathen, and with the tide of antislavery sentiment now spreading and deepening both at the South and at the North, but also with "Clarkson societies" and other local organizations, in many different places, for the moral and physical elevation of the free colored people from the pitiable degradation in which they were commonly living in the larger towns. Altogether the watchmen on the walls of Zion saw no fairer sign of dawn, in that second decade of the nineteenth century, than the hopeful lifting of the cloud from Africa, the brightening prospects of the free negroes of the United States, and the growing hope of the abolition of American slavery.[258:1]

Other societies, national in their scope and constituency, the origin of which belongs in this organizing period, are the American Education Society (1815), the American Sunday-school Union (1824), the American Tract Society (1825), the Seamen's Friend Society (1826), and the American Home Missionary Society (1826), in which last the Congregationalists of New England cooeperated with the Presbyterians on the basis of a Plan of Union entered into between the General Assembly and the General Association of Connecticut, the tendency of which was to reinforce the Presbyterian Church with the numbers and the vigor of the New England westward migration. Of course the establishment of these and other societies for beneficent work outside of sectarian lines did not hinder, but rather stimulated, sectarian organizations for the like objects. The whole American church, in all its orders, was girding itself for a work, at home and abroad, the immense grandeur of which no man of that generation could possibly have foreseen.

The grandeur of this work was to consist not only in the results of it, but in the resources of it. As never before, the sympathies, prayers, and personal cooeperation of all Christians, even the feeblest, were to be combined and utilized for enterprises coextensive with the continent and the world and taking hold on eternity. The possibilities of the new era were dazzling to the prophetic imagination. A young minister then standing on the threshold of a long career exulted in the peculiar and excelling glory of the dawning day:

"Surely, if it is the noblest attribute of our nature that spreads out the circle of our sympathies to include the whole family of man, and sends forth our affections to embrace the ages of a distant futurity, it must be regarded as a privilege no less exalted that our means of doing good are limited by no remoteness of country or distance of duration, but we may operate, if we will, to assuage the miseries of another hemisphere, or to prevent the necessities of an unborn generation. The time has been when a man might weep over the wrongs of Africa, and he might look forward to weep over the hopelessness of her degradation, till his heart should bleed; and yet his tears would be all that he could give her. He might relieve the beggar at his door, but he could do nothing for a dying continent. He might provide for his children, but he could do nothing for the nations that were yet to be born to an inheritance of utter wretchedness. Then the privilege of engaging in schemes of magnificent benevolence belonged only to princes and to men of princely possessions; but now the progress of improvement has brought down this privilege to the reach of every individual. The institutions of our age are a republic of benevolence, and all may share in the unrestrained and equal democracy. This privilege is ours. We may stretch forth our hand, if we will, to enlighten the Hindu or to tame the savage of the wilderness. It is ours, if we will, to put forth our contributions and thus to operate not ineffectually for the relief and renovation of a continent over which one tide of misery has swept without ebb and without restraint for unremembered centuries. It is ours, if we will, to do something that shall tell on all the coming ages of a race which has been persecuted and enslaved, trodden down and despised, for a thousand generations. Our Father has made us the almoners of his love. He has raised us to partake, as it were, in the ubiquity of his own beneficence. Shall we be unworthy of the trust? God forbid!"[260:1]

FOOTNOTES:

[247:1] "Life of David Bacon," by his son (Boston, 1876).

[249:1] Compare the claim of priority for the Dutch church, p. 81, note.

[250:1] J. H. Allen, "The Unitarians," p. 194.

[250:2] "Autobiography of L. Beecher," p. 110.

[252:1] "Herzog-Schaff Encyclopedia," pp. 2328-2331.

[255:1] "The Baptists," by Dr. A. H. Newman, pp. 379-442.

[255:2] I have omitted from this list of results in the direct line from the inception at Andover, in 1810, the American Missionary Association. It owed its origin, in 1846, to the dissatisfaction felt by a considerable number of the supporters of the American Board with the attitude of that institution on some of the questions arising incidentally to the antislavery discussion. Its foreign missions, never extensive, were transferred to other hands, at the close of the Civil War, that it might devote itself wholly to its great and successful work among "the oppressed races" at home.

[256:1] It may be worth considering how far the course of religious and theological thought would have been modified if the English New Testament had used these phrases instead of World to Come and Kingdom of God.

[258:1] The colored Baptists of Richmond entered eagerly into the Colonization project, and in 1822 their "African Missionary Society" sent out its mission to the young colony of Liberia. One of their missionaries was the Rev. Lott Cary, the dignity of whose character and career was an encouragement of his people in their highest aspirations, and a confirmation of the hopes of their friends (Newman, "The Baptists," p. 402; Gurley, "Life of Ashmun," pp. 147-160).

[260:1] Leonard Bacon, "A Plea for Africa," in the Park Street Church, Boston, July 4, 1824.



CHAPTER XVI.

CONFLICTS OF THE CHURCH WITH PUBLIC WRONGS.

The transition from establishment to the voluntary system for the support of churches was made not without some difficulty, but with surprisingly little. In the South the established churches were practically dead before the laws establishing them were repealed and the endowments disposed of. In New York the Episcopalian churches were indeed depressed and discouraged by the ceasing of State support and official patronage; and inasmuch as these, with the subsidies of the "S. P. G.," had been their main reliance, it was inevitable that they should pass through a period of prostration until the appreciation of their large endowments, and the progress of immigration and of conversion from other sects, and especially the awakening of religious earnestness and of sectarian ambition.

In New England the transition to the voluntary system was more gradual. Not till 1818 in Connecticut, and in Massachusetts not till 1834, was the last strand of connection severed between the churches of the standing order and the state, and the churches left solely to their own resources. The exaltation and divine inspiration that had come to these churches with the revivals which from the end of the eighteenth century were never for a long time intermitted, and the example of the dissenting congregations, Baptist, Episcopalian, and Methodist, successfully self-supported among them, made it easy for them, notwithstanding the misgivings of many good men, not only to assume the entire burden of their own expenses, but with this to undertake and carry forward great and costly enterprises of charity reaching to the bounds of the country and of the inhabited earth. It is idle to claim that the American system is at no disadvantage in comparison with that which elsewhere prevails almost throughout Christendom; but it may be safely asserted that the danger that has been most emphasized as a warning against the voluntary system has not attended this system in America. The fear that a clergy supported by the free gifts of the people would prove subservient and truckling to the hand by which it is fed has been proved groundless. Of course there have been time-servers in the American ministry, as in every other; but flagrant instances of the abasement of a whole body of clergy before the power that holds the purse and controls promotion are to be sought in the old countries rather than the new. Even selfish motives would operate against this temptation, since it has often been demonstrated that the people will not sustain a ministry which it suspects of the vice of subserviency. The annals of no established church can show such unsparing fidelity of the ministry in rebuking the sins of people and of rulers in the name of the Lord, as that which has been, on the whole, characteristic of the Christian ministers of the United States.

Among the conflicts of the American church with public wrongs strongly intrenched in law or social usage, two are of such magnitude and protracted through so long a period as to demand special consideration—the conflict with drunkenness and the conflict with slavery. Some less conspicuous illustrations of the fidelity of the church in the case of public and popular sins may be more briefly referred to.

The death of Alexander Hamilton, in July, 1804, in a duel with Aaron Burr, occasioned a wide and violent outburst of indignation against the murderer, now a fugitive and outcast, for the dastardly malignity of the details of his crime, and for the dignity and generosity as well as the public worth of his victim. This was the sort of explosion of excited public feeling which often loses itself in the air. It was a different matter when the churches and ministers of Christ took up the affair in the light of the law of God, and, dealing not with the circumstances but with the essence of it, pressed it inexorably on the conscience of the people. Some of the most memorable words in American literature were uttered on this occasion, notwithstanding that there were few congregations in which there were not sore consciences to be irritated or political anxieties to be set quaking by them. The names of Eliphalet Nott and John M. Mason were honorably conspicuous in this work. But one unknown young man of thirty, in a corner of Long Island, uttered words in his little country meeting-house that pricked the conscience of the nation. The words of Lyman Beecher on this theme may well be quoted as being a part of history, for the consequences that followed them.

"Dueling is a great national sin. With the exception of a small section of the Union, the whole land is defiled with blood. From the lakes of the North to the plains of Georgia is heard the voice of lamentation and woe—the cries of the widow and fatherless. This work of desolation is performed often by men in office, by the appointed guardians of life and liberty. On the floor of Congress challenges have been threatened, if not given, and thus powder and ball have been introduced as the auxiliaries of deliberation and argument.... We are murderers—a nation of murderers—while we tolerate and reward the perpetrators of the crime."

Words such as these resounding from pulpit after pulpit, multiplied and disseminated by means of the press, acted on by representative bodies of churches, becoming embodied in anti-dueling societies, exorcised the foul spirit from the land. The criminal folly of dueling did not, indeed, at once and altogether cease. Instances of it continue to be heard of to this day. But the conscience of the nation was instructed, and a warning was served upon political parties to beware of proposing for national honors men whose hands were defiled with blood.[264:1]

Another instance of the fidelity of the church in resistance to public wrong was its action in the matter of the dealing of the State of Georgia and the national government toward the Georgia Indians. This is no place for the details of the shameful story of perfidy and oppression. It is well told by Helen Hunt Jackson in the melancholy pages of "A Century of Dishonor." The wrongs inflicted on the Cherokee nation were deepened by every conceivable aggravation.

"In the whole history of our government's dealings with the Indian tribes there is no record so black as the record of its perfidy to this nation. There will come a time in the remote future when to the student of American history it will seem well-nigh incredible. From the beginning of the century they had been steadily advancing in civilization. As far back as 1800 they had begun the manufacture of cotton cloth, and in 1820 there was scarcely a family in that part of the nation living east of the Mississippi but what understood the use of the card and spinning-wheel. Every family had its farm under cultivation. The territory was laid off into districts, with a council-house, a judge, and a marshal in each district. A national committee and council were the supreme authority in the nation. Schools were flourishing in all the villages. Printing-presses were at work.... They were enthusiastic in their efforts to establish and perfect their own system of jurisprudence. Missions of several sects were established in their country, and a large number of them had professed Christianity and were leading exemplary lives. There is no instance in all history of a race of people passing in so short a space of time from the barbarous stage to the agricultural and civilized."[265:1]

We do well to give authentic details of the condition of the Cherokee nation in the early part of the century, for the advanced happy and peaceful civilization of this people was one of the fairest fruits of American Christianity working upon exceptionally noble race-qualities in the recipients of it. An agent of the War Department in 1825 made official report to the Department on the rare beauty of the Cherokee country, secured to them by the most sacred pledges with which it was possible for the national government to bind itself, and covered by the inhabitants, through their industry and thrift, with flocks and herds, with farms and villages; and goes on to speak of the Indians themselves:

"The natives carry on considerable trade with the adjoining States; some of them export cotton in boats down the Tennessee to the Mississippi, and down that river to New Orleans. Apple and peach orchards are quite common, and gardens are cultivated and much attention paid to them. Butter and cheese are seen on Cherokee tables. There are many public roads in the nation, and houses of entertainment kept by natives. Numerous and flourishing villages are seen in every section of the country. Cotton and woolen cloths are manufactured; blankets of various dimensions, manufactured by Cherokee hands, are very common. Almost every family in the nation grows cotton for its own consumption. Industry and commercial enterprise are extending themselves in every part. Nearly all the merchants in the nation are native Cherokees. Agricultural pursuits engage the chief attention of the people. Different branches in mechanics are pursued. The population is rapidly increasing.... The Christian religion is the religion of the nation. Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, and Moravians are the most numerous sects. Some of the most influential characters are members of the church and live consistently with their professions. The whole nation is penetrated with gratitude for the aid it has received from the United States government and from different religious societies. Schools are increasing every year; learning is encouraged and rewarded; the young class acquire the English and those of mature age the Cherokee system of learning."[266:1]

This country, enriched by the toil and thrift of its owners, the State of Georgia resolved not merely to subjugate to its jurisdiction, but to steal from its rightful and lawful owners, driving them away as outlaws. As a sure expedient for securing popular consent to the intended infamy, the farms of the Cherokees were parceled out to be drawn for in a lottery, and the lottery tickets distributed among the white voters. Thus fortified, the brave State of Georgia went to all lengths of outrage. "Missionaries were arrested and sent to prison for preaching to Cherokees; Cherokees were sentenced to death by Georgia courts and hung by Georgia executioners." But the great crime could not be achieved without the connivance, and at last the active consent, of the national government. Should this consent be given? Never in American history has the issue been more squarely drawn between the kingdom of Satan and the kingdom of Christ. American Christianity was most conspicuously represented in this conflict by an eminent layman, Jeremiah Evarts, whose fame for this public service, and not for this alone, will in the lapse of time outshine even that of his illustrious son. In a series of articles in the "National Intelligencer," under the signature of "William Penn," he cited the sixteen treaties in which the nation had pledged its faith to defend the Cherokees in the possession of their lands, and set the whole case before the people as well as the government. But his voice was not solitary. From press and pulpit and from the platforms of public meetings all over the country came petitions, remonstrances, and indignant protests, reinforcing the pathetic entreaties of the Cherokees themselves to be protected from the cruelty that threatened to tear them from their homes. In Congress the honor of leadership among many faithful and able advocates of right and justice was conceded to Theodore Frelinghuysen, then in the prime of a great career of Christian service. By the majority of one vote the bill for the removal of the Cherokees passed the United States Senate. The gates of hell triumphed for a time with a fatal exultation. The authors and abettors of the great crime were confirmed in their delusion that threats of disunion and rebellion could be relied on to carry any desired point. But the mills of God went on grinding. Thirty years later, when in the battle of Missionary Ridge the chivalry of Georgia went down before the army that represented justice and freedom and the authority of national law, the vanquished and retreating soldiers of a lost cause could not be accused of superstition if they remembered that the scene of their humiliating defeat had received its name from the martyrdom of Christian missionaries at the hands of their fathers.

* * * * *

In earlier pages we have already traced the succession of bold protests and organized labors on the part of church and clergy against the institution of slavery.[268:1] If protest and argument against it seem to be less frequent in the early years of the new century, it is only because debate must needs languish when there is no antagonist. Slavery had at that time no defenders in the church. No body of men in 1818 more unmistakably represented the Christian citizenship of the whole country, North, South, and West, outside of New England, than the General Assembly of the then undivided Presbyterian Church. In that year the Assembly set forth a full and unanimous expression of its sentiments on the subject of slavery, addressed "to the churches and people under its care." This monumental document is too long to be cited here in full. The opening paragraphs of it exhibit the universally accepted sentiment of American Christians of that time:

"We consider the voluntary enslaving of one part of the human race by another as a gross violation of the most precious and sacred rights of human nature; as utterly inconsistent with the law of God, which requires us to love our neighbor as ourselves; and as totally irreconcilable with the spirit and principles of the gospel of Christ, which enjoin that 'all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.' Slavery creates a paradox in the moral system. It exhibits rational, accountable, and immortal beings in such circumstances as scarcely to leave them the power of moral action. It exhibits them as dependent on the will of others whether they shall receive religious instruction; whether they shall know and worship the true God; whether they shall enjoy the ordinances of the gospel; whether they shall perform the duties and cherish the endearments of husbands and wives, parents and children, neighbors and friends; whether they shall preserve their chastity and purity or regard the dictates of justice and humanity. Such are some of the consequences of slavery—consequences not imaginary, but which connect themselves with its very existence. The evils to which the slave is always exposed often take place in fact, and in their worst degree and form; and where all of them do not take place, as we rejoice to say that in many instances, through the influence of the principles of humanity and religion on the minds of masters, they do not, still the slave is deprived of his natural right, degraded as a human being, and exposed to the danger of passing into the hands of a master who may inflict upon him all the hardships and injuries which inhumanity and avarice may suggest.

"From this view of the consequences resulting from the practice into which Christian people have most inconsistently fallen of enslaving a portion of their brethren of mankind,—for 'God hath made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on the face of the earth,'—it is manifestly the duty of all Christians who enjoy the light of the present day, when the inconsistency of slavery both with the dictates of humanity and religion has been demonstrated and is generally seen and acknowledged, to use their honest, earnest, and unwearied endeavors to correct the errors of former times, and as speedily as possible to efface this blot on our holy religion and to obtain the complete abolition of slavery throughout Christendom, and if possible throughout the world."

It was not strange that while sentiments like these prevailed without contradiction in all parts of the country, while in State after State emancipations were taking place and acts of abolition were passing, and even in the States most deeply involved in slavery "a great, and the most virtuous, part of the community abhorred slavery and wished its extermination,"[270:1] there should seem to be little call for debate. But that the antislavery spirit in the churches was not dead was demonstrated with the first occasion.

In the spring of 1820, at the close of two years of agitating discussion, the new State of Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave State, although with the stipulation that the remaining territory of the United States north of the parallel of latitude bounding Missouri on the south should be consecrated forever to freedom. The opposition to this extension of slavery was taken up by American Christianity as its own cause. It was the impending danger of such an extension that prompted that powerful and unanimous declaration of the Presbyterian General Assembly in 1818. The arguments against the Missouri bill, whether in the debates of Congress or in countless memorials and resolutions from public meetings both secular and religious, were arguments from justice and duty and the law of Christ. These were met by constitutional objections and considerations of expediency and convenience, and by threats of disunion and civil war. The defense of slavery on principle had not yet begun to be heard, even among politicians.

The successful extension of slavery beyond the Mississippi River was disheartening to the friends of justice and humanity, but only for the moment. Already, before the two years' conflict had been decided by "the Missouri Compromise," a powerful series of articles by that great religious leader, Jeremiah Evarts, in the "Panoplist" (Boston, 1820), rallied the forces of the church to renew the battle. The decade that opened with that defeat is distinguished as a period of sustained antislavery activity on the part of the united Christian citizenship of the nation in all quarters.[271:1] In New England the focus of antislavery effort was perhaps the theological seminary at Andover. There the leading question among the students in their "Society of Inquiry concerning Missions" was the question, what could be done, and especially what they could do, for the uplifting of the colored population of the country, both the enslaved and the free. Measures were concerted there for the founding of "an African college where youth were to be educated on a scale so liberal as to place them on a level with other men";[271:2] and the plan was not forgotten or neglected by these young men when from year to year they came into places of effective influence. With eminent fitness the Fourth of July was taken as an antislavery holiday, and into various towns within reach from Andover their most effective speakers went forth to give antislavery addresses on that day. Beginning with the Fourth of July, 1823, the annual antislavery address at Park Street Church, Boston, before several united churches of that city, continued for the rest of that decade at least to be an occasion for earnest appeal and practical effort in behalf of the oppressed. Neither was the work of the young men circumscribed by narrow local boundaries. The report of their committee, in the year 1823, on "The Condition of the Black Population of the United States," could hardly be characterized as timid in its utterances on the moral character of American slavery. A few lines will indicate the tone of it in this respect:

"Excepting only the horrible system of the West India Islands, we have never heard of slavery in any country, ancient or modern, pagan, Mohammedan, or Christian, so terrible in its character, so pernicious in its tendency, so remediless in its anticipated results, as the slavery which exists in these United States.... When we use the strong language which we feel ourselves compelled to use in relation to this subject, we do not mean to speak of animal suffering, but of an immense moral and political evil.... In regard to its influence on the white population the most lamentable proof of its deteriorating effects may be found in the fact that, excepting the pious, whose hearts are governed by the Christian law of reciprocity between man and man, and the wise, whose minds have looked far into the relations and tendencies of things, none can be found to lift their voices against a system so utterly repugnant to the feelings of unsophisticated humanity—a system which permits all the atrocities of the domestic slave trade—which permits the father to sell his children as he would his cattle—a system which consigns one half of the community to hopeless and utter degradation, and which threatens in its final catastrophe to bring down the same ruin on the master and the slave."[272:1]

The historical value of the paper from which these brief extracts are given, as illustrating the attitude of the church at the time, is enhanced by the use that was made of it. Published in the form of a review article in a magazine of national circulation, the recognized organ of the orthodox Congregationalists, it was republished in a pamphlet for gratuitous distribution and extensively circulated in New England by the agency of the Andover students. It was also republished at Richmond, Va. Other laborers at the East in the same cause were Joshua Leavitt, Bela B. Edwards, and Eli Smith, afterward illustrious as a missionary,[273:1] and Ralph Randolph Gurley, secretary of the Colonization Society, whose edition of the powerful and uncompromising sermon of the younger Edwards on "The Injustice and Impolicy of the Slave Trade and of the Slavery of the Africans" was published at Boston for circulation at the South, in hopes of promoting the universal abolition of slavery. The list might be indefinitely extended to include the foremost names in the church in that period. There was no adverse party.

At the West an audacious movement of the slavery extension politicians, flushed with their success in Missouri, to introduce slavery into Illinois, Indiana, and even Ohio, was defeated largely by the aid of the Baptist and Methodist clergy, many of whom had been southern men and had experienced the evils of the system.[273:2] In Kentucky and Tennessee the abolition movement was led more distinctively by the Presbyterians and the Quakers. It was a bold effort to procure the manumission of slaves and the repeal of the slave code in those States by the agreement of the citizens. The character of the movement is indicated in the constitution of the "Moral Religious Manumission Society of West Tennessee," which declares that slavery "exceeds any other crime in magnitude" and is "the greatest act of practical infidelity," and that "the gospel of Christ, if believed, would remove personal slavery at once by destroying the will in the tyrant to enslave."[274:1] A like movement in North Carolina and in Maryland, at the same time, attained to formidable dimensions. The state of sentiment in Virginia may be judged from the fact that so late as December, 1831, in the memorable debate in the legislature on a proposal for the abolition of slavery, a leading speaker, denouncing slavery as "the most pernicious of all the evils with which the body politic can be afflicted," could say, undisputed, "By none is this position denied, if we except the erratic John Randolph."[274:2] The conflict in Virginia at that critical time was between Christian principle and wise statesmanship on the one hand, and on the other hand selfish interest and ambition, and the prevailing terror resulting from a recent servile insurrection. Up to this time there appears no sign of any division in the church on this subject. Neither was there any sectional division; the opponents of slavery, whether at the North or at the South, were acting in the interest of the common country, and particularly in the interest of the States that were still afflicted with slavery. But a swift change was just impending.

We have already recognized the Methodist organization as the effective pioneer of systematic abolitionism in America.[275:1] The Baptists, also having their main strength in the southern States, were early and emphatic in condemning the institutions by which they were surrounded.[275:2] But all the sects found themselves embarrassed by serious difficulties when it came to the practical application of the principles and rules which they enunciated. The exacting of "immediate emancipation" as a condition of fellowship in the ministry or communion in the church, and the popular cries of "No fellowship with slave-holders," and "Slave-holding always and every where a sin," were found practically to conflict with frequent undeniable and stubborn facts. The cases in which conscientious Christians found themselves, by no fault of their own, invested by inhuman laws with an absolute authority over helpless fellow-men, which it would not be right for them suddenly to abdicate, were not few nor unimportant.[275:3] In dealing with such cases several different courses were open to the church: (1) To execute discipline rigorously according to the formula, on the principle, Be rid of the tares at all hazards; never mind the wheat. This course was naturally favored by some of the minor Presbyterian sects, and was apt to be vigorously urged by zealous people living at a distance and not well acquainted with details of fact. (2) To attempt to provide for all cases by stated exceptions and saving clauses. This course was entered on by the Methodist Church, but without success. (3) Discouraged by the difficulties, to let go all discipline. This was the point reached at last by most of the southern churches. (4) Clinging to the formulas, "Immediate emancipation," "No communion with slave-holders," so to "palter in a double sense" with the words as to evade the meaning of them. According to this method, slave-holding did not consist in the holding of slaves, but in holding them with evil purpose and wrong treatment; a slave who was held for his own advantage, receiving from his master "that which is just and equal," was said, in this dialect, to be "morally emancipated." This was the usual expedient of a large and respectable party of antislavery Christians at the North, when their principle of "no communion with slave-holders" brought them to the seeming necessity of excommunicating an unquestionably Christian brother for doing an undeniable duty. (5) To lay down, broadly and explicitly, the principles of Christian morality governing the subject, leaving the application of them in individual cases to the individual church or church-member. This was the course exemplified with admirable wisdom and fidelity in the Presbyterian "deliverance" of 1818. (6) To meet the postulate, laid down with so much assurance, as if an axiom, that "slave-holding is always and everywhere a sin, to be immediately repented of and forsaken," with a flat and square contradiction, as being irreconcilable with facts and with the judgment of the Christian Scriptures; and thus to condemn and oppose to the utmost the system of slavery, without imputing the guilt of it to persons involved in it by no fault of their own. This course commended itself to many lucid and logical minds and honest consciences, including some of the most consistent and effective opponents of slavery. (7) Still another course must be mentioned, which, absurd as it seems, was actually pursued by a few headlong reformers, who showed in various ways a singular alacrity at playing into the hands of their adversaries. It consisted in enunciating in the most violent and untenable form and the most offensive language the proposition that all slave-holding is sin and every slave-holder a criminal, and making the whole attack on slavery to turn on this weak pivot and fail if this failed. The argument of this sort of abolitionist was: If there can be found anywhere a good man holding a bond-servant unselfishly, kindly, and for good reason justifiably, then the system of American slavery is right.[277:1] It is not strange that men in the southern churches, being offered such an argument ready made to their hand, should promptly accept both the premiss and the conclusion, and that so at last there should begin to be a pro-slavery party in the American church.

The disastrous epoch of the beginning of what has been called "the southern apostasy" from the universal moral sentiment of Christendom on the subject of slavery may be dated at about the year 1833. A year earlier began to be heard those vindications on political grounds of what had just been declared in the legislature of Virginia to be by common consent the most pernicious of political evils—vindications which continued for thirty years to invite the wonder of the civilized world. When (about 1833) a Presbyterian minister in Mississippi, the Rev. James Smylie, made the "discovery," which "surprised himself," that the system of American slavery was sanctioned and approved by the Scriptures as good and righteous, he found that his brethren in the Presbyterian ministry at the extreme South were not only surprised, but shocked and offended, at the proposition.[278:1] And yet such was the swift progress of this innovation that in surprisingly few years, we might almost say months, it had become not only prevalent, but violently and exclusively dominant in the church of the southern States, with the partial exception of Kentucky and Tennessee. It would be difficult to find a precedent in history for so sudden and sweeping a change of sentiment on a leading doctrine of moral theology. Dissent from the novel dogma was suppressed with more than inquisitorial rigor. It was less perilous to hold Protestant opinions in Spain or Austria than to hold, in Carolina or Alabama, the opinions which had but lately been commended to universal acceptance by the unanimous voice of great religious bodies, and proclaimed as undisputed principles by leading statesmen. It became one of the accepted evidences of Christianity at the South that infidelity failed to offer any justification for American slavery equal to that derived from the Christian Scriptures. That eminent leader among the Lutheran clergy, the Rev. Dr. Bachman, of Charleston, referred "that unexampled unanimity of sentiment that now exists in the whole South on the subject of slavery" to the confidence felt by the religious public in the Bible defense of slavery as set forth by clergymen and laymen in sermons and pamphlets and speeches in Congress.[278:2]

The historian may not excuse himself from the task of inquiring into the cause of this sudden and immense moral revolution. The explanation offered by Dr. Bachman is the very thing that needs to be explained. How came the Christian public throughout the slave-holding States, which so short a time before had been unanimous in finding in the Bible the condemnation of their slavery, to find all at once in the Bible the divine sanction and defense of it as a wise, righteous, and permanent institution? Doubtless there was mixture of influences in bringing about the result. The immense advance in the market value of slaves consequent on Whitney's invention of the cotton-gin had its unconscious effect on the moral judgments of some. The furious vituperations of a very small but noisy faction of antislavery men added something to the swift current of public opinion. But demonstrably the chief cause of this sudden change of religious opinion—one of the most remarkable in the history of the church—was panic terror. In August, 1831, a servile insurrection in Virginia, led by a crazy negro, Nat Turner by name, was followed (as always in such cases) by bloody vengeance on the part of the whites.

"The Southampton insurrection, occurring at a time when the price of slaves was depressed in consequence of a depression in the price of cotton, gave occasion to a sudden development of opposition to slavery in the legislature of Virginia. A measure for the prospective abolition of the institution in that ancient commonwealth was proposed, earnestly debated, eloquently urged, and at last defeated, with a minority ominously large in its favor. Warned by so great a peril, and strengthened soon afterward by an increase in the market value of cotton and of slaves, the slave-holding interest in all the South was stimulated to new activity. Defenses of slavery more audacious than had been heard before began to be uttered by southern politicians at home and by southern representatives and senators in Congress. A panic seized upon the planters in some districts of the Southwest. Conspiracies and plans of insurrection were discovered. Negroes were tortured or terrified into confessions. Obnoxious white men were put to death without any legal trial and in defiance of those rules of evidence which are insisted on by southern laws. Thus a sudden and convincing terror was spread through the South. Every man was made to know that if he should become obnoxious to the guardians of the great southern 'institution' he was liable to be denounced and murdered. It was distinctly and imperatively demanded that nobody should be allowed to say anything anywhere against slavery. The movement of the societies which had then been recently formed at Boston and New York, with 'Immediate abolition' for their motto, was made use of to stimulate the terror and the fury of the South.... The position of political parties and of candidates for the Presidency, just at that juncture, gave special advantage to the agitators—an advantage that was not neglected. Everything was done that practiced demagogues could contrive to stimulate the South into a frenzy and to put down at once and forever all opposition to slavery. The clergy and the religious bodies were summoned to the patriotic duty of committing themselves on the side of 'southern institutions.' Just then it was, if we mistake not, that their apostasy began. They dared not say that slavery as an institution in the State is essentially an organized injustice, and that, though the Scriptures rightly and wisely enjoin justice and the recognition of the slaves' brotherhood upon masters, and conscientious meekness upon slaves, the organized injustice of the institution ought to be abolished by the shortest process consistent with the public safety and the welfare of the enslaved. They dared not even keep silence under the plea that the institution is political and therefore not to be meddled with by religious bodies or religious persons. They yielded to the demand. They were carried along in the current of the popular frenzy; they joined in the clamor, 'Great is Diana of the Ephesians;' they denounced the fanaticism of abolition and permitted themselves to be understood as certifying, in the name of religion and of Christ, that the entire institution of slavery 'as it exists' is chargeable with no injustice and is warranted by the word of God."[281:1]

There is no good reason to question the genuineness and sincerity of the fears expressed by the slave-holding population as a justification of their violent measures for the suppression of free speech in relation to slavery; nor of their belief that the papers and prints actively disseminated from the antislavery press in Boston were fitted, if not distinctly intended, to kindle bloody insurrections. These terrors were powerfully pleaded in the great debate in the Virginia legislature as an argument for the abolition of slavery.[281:2] This failing, they became throughout the South a constraining power for the suppression of free speech, not only on the part of outsiders, but among the southern people themselves. The regime thus introduced was, in the strictest sense of the phrase, "a reign of terror." The universal lockjaw which thenceforth forbade the utterance of what had so recently and suddenly ceased to be the unanimous religious conviction of the southern church soon produced an "unexampled unanimity" on the other side, broken only when some fiery and indomitable abolitionist like Dr. Robert J. Breckinridge, of the Presbyterian Church in Kentucky, delivered his soul with invectives against the system of slavery and the new-fangled apologies that had been devised to defend it, declaring it "utterly indefensible on every correct human principle, and utterly abhorrent from every law of God," and exclaiming, "Out upon such folly! The man who cannot see that involuntary domestic slavery, as it exists among us, is founded on the principle of taking by force that which is another's has simply no moral sense.... Hereditary slavery is without pretense, except in avowed rapacity."[282:1] Of course the antislavery societies which, under various names, had existed in the South by hundreds were suddenly extinguished, and manumissions, which had been going on at the rate of thousands in a year, almost entirely ceased.

The strange and swiftly spreading moral epidemic did not stop at State boundary lines. At the North the main cause of defection was not, indeed, directly operative. There was no danger there of servile insurrection. But there was true sympathy for those who lived under the shadow of such impending horrors, threatening alike the guilty and the innocent. There was a deep passion of honest patriotism, now becoming alarmed lest the threats of disunion proceeding from the terrified South should prove a serious peril to the nation in whose prosperity the hopes of the world seemed to be involved. There was a worthy solicitude lest the bonds of intercourse between the churches of North and South should be ruptured and so the integrity of the nation be the more imperiled. Withal there was a spreading and deepening and most reasonable disgust at the reckless ranting of a little knot of antislavery men having their headquarters at Boston, who, exulting in their irresponsibility, scattered loosely appeals to men's vindictive passions and filled the unwilling air with clamors against church and ministry and Bible and law and government, denounced as "pro-slavery" all who declined to accept their measures or their persons, and, arrogating to themselves exclusively the name of abolitionist, made that name, so long a title of honor, to be universally odious.[282:2]

These various factors of public opinion were actively manipulated. Political parties competed for the southern vote. Commercial houses competed for southern business. Religious sects, parties, and societies were emulous in conciliating southern adhesions or contributions and averting schisms. The condition of success in any of these cases was well understood to be concession, or at least silence, on the subject of slavery. The pressure of motives, some of which were honorable and generous, was everywhere, like the pressure of the atmosphere. It was not strange that there should be defections from righteousness. Even the enormous effrontery of the slave power in demanding for its own security that the rule of tyrannous law and mob violence by which freedom of speech and of the press had been extinguished at the South should be extended over the so-called free States did not fail of finding citizens of reputable standing so base as to give the demand their countenance, their public advocacy, and even their personal assistance. As the subject emerged from time to time in the religious community, the questions arising were often confused and embarrassed by false issues and illogical statements, and the state of opinion was continually misrepresented through the incurable habit of the over-zealous in denouncing as "pro-slavery" those who dissented from their favorite formulas. But after all deductions, the historian who shall by and by review this period with the advantage of a longer perspective will be compelled to record not a few lamentable defections, both individual and corporate, from the cause of freedom, justice, and humanity. And, nevertheless, that later record will also show that while the southern church had been terrified into "an unexampled unanimity" in renouncing the principles which it had unanimously held, and while like causes had wrought potently upon northern sentiment, it was the steadfast fidelity of the Christian people that saved the nation from ruin. At the end of thirty years from the time when the soil of Missouri was devoted to slavery the "Kansas-Nebraska Bill" was proposed, which should open for the extension of slavery the vast expanse of national territory which, by the stipulation of the "Missouri Compromise," had been forever consecrated to freedom. The issue of the extension of slavery was presented to the people in its simplicity. The action of the clergy of New England was prompt, spontaneous, emphatic, and practically unanimous. Their memorial, with three thousand and fifty signatures, protested against the bill, "in the name of Almighty God and in his presence," as "a great moral wrong; as a breach of faith eminently injurious to the moral principles of the community and subversive of all confidence in national engagements; as a measure full of danger to the peace and even the existence of our beloved Union, and exposing us to the just judgments of the Almighty." In like manner the memorial of one hundred and fifty-one clergymen of various denominations in New York City and vicinity protested in like terms, "in the name of religion and humanity," against the guilt of the extension of slavery. Perhaps there has been no occasion on which the consenting voice of the entire church has been so solemnly uttered on a question of public morality, and this in the very region in which church and clergy had been most stormily denounced by the little handful of abolitionists who gloried in the name of infidel[285:1] as recreant to justice and humanity.

The protest of the church was of no avail to defeat the machination of demagogues. The iniquitous measure was carried through. But this was not the end; it was only the beginning of the end. Yet ten years, and American slavery, through the mad folly of its advocates and the steadfast fidelity of the great body of the earnestly religious people of the land, was swept away by the tide of war.

* * * * *

The long struggle of the American church against drunkenness as a social and public evil begins at an early date. One of the thirteen colonies, Georgia, had the prohibition of slavery and of the importation of spirituous liquors incorporated by Oglethorpe in its early and short-lived constitution. It would be interesting to discover, if we could, to what extent the rigor of John Wesley's discipline against both these mischiefs was due to his association with Oglethorpe in the founding of that latest of the colonies. Both the imperious nature of Wesley and the peculiar character of his fraternity as being originally not a church, but a voluntary society within the church, predisposed to a policy of arbitrary exclusiveness by hard and fast lines drawn according to formula, which might not have been ventured on by one who was consciously drawing up the conditions of communion in the church. In the Puritan colonies the public morals in respect to temperance were from the beginning guarded by salutary license laws devised to suppress all dram-shops and tippling-houses, and to prevent, as far as law could wisely undertake to prevent, all abusive and mischievous sales of liquor. But these indications of a sound public sentiment did not prevent the dismal fact of a wide prevalence of drunkenness as one of the distinguishing characteristics of American society at the opening of the nineteenth century. Two circumstances had combined to aggravate the national vice. Seven years of army life, with its exhaustion and exposure and military social usage, had initiated into dangerous drinking habits many of the most justly influential leaders of society, and the example of these had set the tone for all ranks. Besides this, the increased importation and manufacture of distilled spirits had made it easy and common to substitute these for the mild fermented liquors which had been the ordinary drink of the people. Gradually and unobserved the nation had settled down into a slough of drunkenness of which it is difficult for us at this date to form a clear conception. The words of Isaiah concerning the drunkards of Ephraim seem not too strong to apply to the condition of American society, that "all tables were full of vomit and filthiness." In the prevalence of intemperate drinking habits the clergy had not escaped the general infection. "The priest and the prophet had gone astray through strong drink." Individual words of warning, among the earliest of which was the classical essay of Dr. Benjamin Rush (1785), failed to arouse general attention. The new century was well advanced before the stirring appeals of Ebenezer Porter, Lyman Beecher, Heman Humphrey, and Jeremiah Evarts had awakened in the church any effectual conviction of sin in the matter. The appointment of a strong committee, in 1811, by the Presbyterian General Assembly was promptly followed by like action by the clergy of Massachusetts and Connecticut, leading to the formation of State societies. But general concerted measures on a scale commensurate with the evil to be overcome must be dated from the organization of the "American Society for the Promotion of Temperance," in 1826. The first aim of the reformers of that day was to break down those domineering social usages which almost enforced the habit of drinking in ordinary social intercourse. The achievement of this object was wonderfully swift and complete. A young minister whose pastorate had begun at about the same time with the organizing of the national temperance society was able at the end of five years to bear this testimony in the presence of those who were in a position to recognize any misstatement or exaggeration:

"The wonderful change which the past five years have witnessed in the manners and habits of this people in regard to the use of ardent spirits—the new phenomenon of an intelligent people rising up, as it were, with one consent, without law, without any attempt at legislation, to put down by the mere force of public opinion, expressing itself in voluntary associations, a great social evil which no despot on earth could have put down among his subjects by any system of efforts—has excited admiration and roused to imitation not only in our sister country of Great Britain, but in the heart of continental Europe."[287:1]

It is worthy of remark, for any possible instruction there may be in it, that the first, greatest, and most permanent of the victories of the temperance reformation, the breaking down of almost universal social drinking usages, was accomplished while yet the work was a distinctively religious one, "without law or attempt at legislation," and while the efforts at suppression were directed at the use of ardent spirits. The attempt to combine the friends of temperance on a basis of "teetotal" abstinence, putting fermented as well as distilled liquors under the ban, dates from as late as 1836.

But it soon appeared that the immense gain of banishing ardent spirits from the family table and sideboard, the social entertainment, the haying field, and the factory had not been attained without some corresponding loss. Close upon the heels of the reform in the domestic and social habits of the people there was spawned a monstrous brood of obscure tippling-shops—a nuisance, at least in New England, till then unknown. From the beginning wise and effective license laws had interdicted all dram-shops; even the taverner might sell spirits only to his transient guests, not to the people of the town. With the suppression of social drinking there was effected, in spite of salutary law to the contrary, a woeful change. The American "saloon" was, in an important sense, the offspring of the American temperance reformation. The fact justified the reformer in turning his attention to the law. From that time onward the history of the temperance reformation has included the history of multitudinous experiments in legislation, none of which has been so conclusive as to satisfy all students of the subject that any later law is, on the whole, more usefully effective than the original statutes of the Puritan colonies.[288:1]

In 1840 the temperance reformation received a sudden forward impulse from an unexpected source. One evening a group of six notoriously hard drinkers, coming together greatly impressed from a sermon of that noted evangelist, Elder Jacob Knapp, pledged themselves by mutual vows to total abstinence; and from this beginning went forward that extraordinary agitation known as "the Washingtonian movement." Up to this time the aim of the reformers had been mainly directed to the prevention of drunkenness by a change in social customs and personal habits. Now there was suddenly opened a door of hope to the almost despair of the drunkard himself. The lately reformed drunkards of Baltimore set themselves to the reforming of other drunkards, and these took up the work in their turn, and reformation was extended in a geometrical progression till it covered the country. Everywhere meetings were held, to be addressed by reformed drunkards, and new recruits from the gutter were pushed forward to tell their experience to the admiring public, and sent out on speaking tours. The people were stirred up as never before on the subject of temperance. There was something very Christian-like in the method of this propagation, and hopeful souls looked forward to a temperance millennium as at hand. But fatal faults in the work soon discovered themselves. Among the new evangelists were not a few men of true penitence and humility, like John Hawkins, and one man at least of incomparable eloquence as well as Christian earnestness, John B. Gough. But the public were not long in finding that merely to have wallowed in vice and to be able to tell ludicrous or pathetic stories from one's experience was not of itself sufficient qualification for the work of a public instructor in morals. The temperance platform became infested with swaggering autobiographers, whose glory was in their shame, and whose general influence was distinctly demoralizing. The sudden influx of the tide of enthusiasm was followed by a disastrous ebb. It was the estimate of Mr. Gough that out of six hundred thousand reformed drunkards not less than four hundred and fifty thousand had relapsed into vice. The same observer, the splendor of whose eloquence was well mated with an unusual sobriety of judgment, is credited with the statement that he knew of no case of stable reformation from drunkenness that was not connected with a thorough spiritual renovation and conversion.

Certainly good was accomplished by the transient whirlwind of the "Washingtonian" excitement. But the evil that it did lived after it. Already at the time of its breaking forth the temperance reformation had entered upon that period of decadence in which its main interest was to be concentrated upon law and politics. And here the vicious ethics of the reformed-drunkard school became manifest. The drunkard, according to his own account of himself (unless he was not only reformed, but repentant), had been a victim of circumstances. Drunkenness, instead of a base and beastly sin, was an infirmity incident to a high-strung and generous temperament. The blame of it was to be laid, not upon the drunkard, whose exquisitely susceptible organization was quite unable to resist temptation coming in his way, but on those who put intoxicating liquor where he could get at it, or on the State, whose duty it was to put the article out of the reach of its citizens. The guilt of drunkenness must rest, not on the unfortunate drunkard who happened to be attacked by that disease, but on the sober and well-behaving citizen, and especially the Christian citizen, who did not vote the correct ticket.