What may be called the Prohibition period of the temperance reformation begins about 1850 and still continues. It is characterized by the pursuit of a type of legislation of variable efficacy or inefficacy, the essence of which is that the sale of intoxicating liquors shall be a monopoly of the government.[290:1] Indications begin to appear that the disproportionate devotion to measures of legislation and politics is abating. Some of the most effective recent labor for the promotion of temperance has been wrought independently of such resort. If the cycle shall be completed, and the church come back to the methods by which its first triumphs in this field were won, it will come back the wiser and the stronger for its vicissitudes of experience through these threescore years and ten.

FOOTNOTES:

[264:1] "An impression was made that never ceased. It started a series of efforts that have affected the whole northern mind at least; and in Jackson's time the matter came up in Congress, and a law was passed disfranchising a duelist. And that was not the last of it; for when Henry Clay was up for the Presidency the Democrats printed an edition of forty thousand of that sermon and scattered them all over the North" ("Autobiography of Lyman Beecher," vol. i., pp. 153, 154; with foot-note from Dr. L. Bacon: "That sermon has never ceased to be a power in the politics of this country. More than anything else, it made the name of brave old Andrew Jackson distasteful to the moral and religious feeling of the people. It hung like a millstone on the neck of Henry Clay").

[265:1] "A Century of Dishonor," pp. 270, 271.

[266:1] "A Century of Dishonor," pp. 275, 276.

[268:1] See above, pp. 203-205, 222.

[270:1] Deliverance of General Assembly, 1818.

[271:1] The persistent attempt to represent this period as one of prevailing apathy and inertia on the subject of slavery is a very flagrant falsification of history. And yet by dint of sturdy reiteration it has been forced into such currency as to impose itself even on so careful a writer as Mr. Schouler, in his "History of the United States." It is impossible to read this part of American church history intelligently, unless the mind is disabused of this misrepresentation.

[271:2] "Christian Spectator" (monthly), New Haven, 1828, p. 4.

[272:1] "Christian Spectator," 1823, pp. 493, 494, 341; "The Earlier Antislavery Days," by L. Bacon, in the "Christian Union," December 9 and 16, 1874, January 6 and 13, 1875. It is one of the "Curiosities of Literature," though hardly one of its "Amenities," that certain phrases carefully dissected from this paper (which was written by Mr. Bacon at the age of twenty-one) should be pertinaciously used, in the face of repeated exposures, to prove the author of it to be an apologist for slavery!

[273:1] "Christian Spectator," 1825-1828.

[273:2] Wilson, "Slave Power in America," vol. i., p. 164; "James G. Birney and his Times," pp. 64, 65. This last-named book is an interesting and valuable contribution of materials for history, especially by its refutation of certain industriously propagated misrepresentations.

[274:1] "Birney and his Times," chap. xii., on "Abolition in the South before 1828." Much is to be learned on this neglected topic in American history from the reports of the National Convention for the Abolition of Slavery, meeting biennially, with some intermissions, at Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington down to 1829. An incomplete file of these reports is at the library of Brown University.

[274:2] Wilson, "The Slave Power," vol. i., chap. xiv.

[275:1] See above, pp. 204, 205.

[275:2] Newman, "The Baptists," pp. 288, 305. Let me make general reference to the volumes of the American Church History Series by their several indexes, s. v. Slavery.

[275:3] One instance for illustration is as good as ten thousand. It is from the "Life of James G. Birney," a man of the highest integrity of conscience: "Michael, the husband and father of the family legally owned by Mr. Birney, and who had been brought up with him from boyhood, had been unable to conquer his appetite for strong liquors, and needed the constant watchful care of his master and friend. For some years the probability was that if free he would become a confirmed drunkard and beggar his family. The children were nearly grown, but had little mental capacity. For years Michael had understood that his freedom would be restored to him as soon as he could control his love of ardent spirits" (pp. 108, 109).

[277:1] "If human beings could be justly held in bondage for one hour, they could be for days and weeks and years, and so on indefinitely from generation to generation" ("Life of W. L. Garrison," vol. i., p. 140).

[278:1] "New Englander," vol. xii., 1854, p. 639, article on "The Southern Apostasy."

[278:2] Ibid., pp. 642-644.

[281:1] "New Englander," vol. xii., 1854, pp. 660, 661.

[281:2] Wilson, "The Slave Power," vol. i., pp. 190-207.

[282:1] "Biblical Repertory," Princeton, July, 1833, pp. 294, 295, 303.

[282:2] The true story of Mr. William Lloyd Garrison and his little party has yet to be written faithfully and fully. As told by his family and friends and by himself, it is a monstrous falsification of history. One of the best sources of authentic material for this chapter of history is "James G. Birney and his Times," by General William Birney, pp. 269-331. I may also refer to my volume, "Irenics and Polemics" (New York, the Christian Literature Co.), pp. 145-202. The sum of the story is given thus, in the words of Charles Sumner: "An omnibus-load of Boston abolitionists has done more harm to the antislavery cause than all its enemies" ("Birney," p. 331).

[285:1] Birney, p. 321.

[287:1] Sermon of L. Bacon (MS.), New Haven, July 4, 1830.

[288:1] "Eastern and Western States of America," by J. S. Buckingham, M. P., vol. i., pp. 408-413.

[290:1] By a curious anomaly in church polity, adhesion to this particular device of legislation is made constitutionally a part of the discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church. In most other communions liberty of judgment is permitted as to the form of legislation best fitted to the end sought.



CHAPTER XVII.

A DECADE OF CONTROVERSIES AND SCHISMS.

During the period from 1835 to 1845 the spirit of schism seemed to be in the air. In this period no one of the larger organizations of churches was free from agitating controversies, and some of the most important of them were rent asunder by explosion.

At the time when the Presbyterian Church suffered its great schism, in 1837, it was the most influential religious body in the United States. In 120 years its solitary presbytery had grown to 135 presbyteries, including 2140 ministers serving 2865 churches and 220,557 communicants. But these large figures are an inadequate measure of its influence. It represented in its ministry and membership the two most masterful races on the continent, the New England colonists and the Scotch-Irish immigrants; and the tenacity with which it had adhered to the tradition derived through both these lines, of admitting none but liberally educated men to its ministry, had given it exceptional social standing and control over men of intellectual strength and leadership. In the four years beginning with 1831 the additions to its roll of communicants "on examination" had numbered nearly one hundred thousand. But this spiritual growth was chilled and stunted by the dissensions that arose. The revivals ceased and the membership actually dwindled.

The contention had grown (a fact not without parallel in church history) out of measures devised in the interest of cooeperation and union. In 1801, in the days of its comparative feebleness, the General Assembly had proposed to the General Association of Connecticut a "Plan of Union" according to which the communities of New England Christians then beginning to move westward between the parallels that bound "the New England zone," and bringing with them their accustomed Congregational polity, might cooeperate on terms of mutual concession with Presbyterian churches in their neighborhood. The proposals had been fraternally received and accepted, and under the terms of this compact great accessions had been made to the strength of the Presbyterian Church, of pastors and congregations marked with the intellectual activity and religious enterprise of the New England churches, who, while cordially conforming to the new methods of organization and discipline, were not in the least penetrated with the traditionary Scotch veneration for the Westminster standards. For nearly thirty years the great reinforcements from New England and from men of the New England way of thinking had been ungrudgingly bestowed and heartily welcomed. But the great accessions which in the first four years of the fourth decade of this century had increased the roll of the communicants of the Presbyterian Church by more than fifty per cent. had come in undue proportion from the New Englandized regions of western New York and Ohio. It was inevitable that the jealousy of hereditary Presbyterians, "whose were the fathers," should be aroused by the perfectly reasonable fear lest the traditional ways of the church which they felt to be in a peculiar sense their church might be affected by so large an element from without.

The grounds of explicit complaint against the party called "New School" were principally twofold—doctrine and organization.

In the Presbyterian Church at this time were three pretty distinct types of theological thought. First, there was the unmitigated Scotch Calvinism; secondly, there was the modification of this system, which became naturalized in the church after the Great Awakening, when Jonathan Dickinson and Jonathan Edwards, from neighbor towns in Massachusetts, came to be looked upon as the great Presbyterian theologians; thirdly, there was the "consistent Calvinism," that had been still further evolved by the patient labor of students in direct succession from Edwards, and that was known under the name of "Hopkinsianism." Just now the latest and not the least eminent in this school, Dr. Nathaniel W. Taylor, of New Haven, was enunciating to large and enthusiastic classes in Yale Divinity School new definitions and forms of statement giving rise to much earnest debate. The alarm of those to whom the very phrase "improvement in theology" was an abomination expressed itself in futile indictments for heresy brought against some of the most eminently godly and useful ministers in all the church. Lyman Beecher, of Lane Seminary, Edward Beecher, J. M. Sturtevant, and William Kirby, of Illinois College, and George Duffield, of the presbytery of Carlisle, Pa., were annoyed by impeachments for heresy, which all failed before reaching the court of last resort. But repeated and persistent prosecutions of Albert Barnes, of Philadelphia, were destined to more conspicuous failure, by reason of their coming up year after year before the General Assembly, and also by reason of the position of the accused as pastor of the mother church of the denomination, the First Church of Philadelphia, which was the customary meeting-place of the Assembly; withal by reason of the character of the accused, the honor and love in which he was held for his faithful and useful work as pastor, his world-wide fame as a devoted and believing student of the Scriptures, and the Christlike gentleness and meekness with which he endured the harassing of church trials continuing through a period of seven years, and compelling him, under an irregular and illegal sentence of the synod, to sit silent in his church for the space of a year, as one suspended from the ministry.

The earliest leaders in national organization for the propagation of Christianity at home and abroad were the Congregationalists of New England and men like-minded with them. But the societies thus originated were organized on broad and catholic principles, and invited the cooeperation of all Christians. They naturally became the organs of much of the active beneficence of Presbyterian congregations, and the Presbyterian clergy and laity were largely represented in the direction of them. They were recognized and commended by the representative bodies of the Presbyterian Church. As a point of high-church theory it was held by the rigidly Presbyterian party that the work of the gospel in all its departments and in all lands is the proper function of "the church as such"—meaning practically that each sect ought to have its separate propaganda. There was logical strength in this position as reached from their premisses, and there were arguments of practical convenience to be urged in favor of it. But the demand to sunder at once the bonds of fellowship which united Christians of different names in the beneficent work of the great national societies was not acceptable even to the whole of the Old-School party. To the New Englanders it was intolerable.

There were other and less important grounds of difference that were discussed between the parties. And in the background, behind them all, was the slavery question. It seems to have been willingly kept in the background by the leaders of debate on both sides; but it was there. The New-School synods and presbyteries of the North were firm in their adherence to the antislavery principles of the church. On the other hand, the Old-School party relied, in the coup d'eglise that was in preparation, on the support of "an almost solid South."[296:1]

It was an unpardonable offense of the New-School party that it had grown to such formidable strength, intellectually, spiritually, and numerically. The probability that the church might, with the continued growth and influence of this party, become Americanized and so lose the purity of its thoroughgoing Scotch traditions was very real, and to some minds very dreadful. To these the very ark of God seemed in danger. Arraignments for heresy in presbytery and synod resulted in failure; and when these and other cases involving questions of orthodoxy or of the policy of the church were brought into the supreme judicature of the church, the solemn but unmistakable fact disclosed itself that even the General Assembly could not be relied on for the support of measures introduced by the Old-School leaders. In fact, every Assembly from 1831 to 1836, with a single exception, had shown a clear New-School majority. The foundations were destroyed, and what should the righteous do?

History was about to repeat itself with unwonted preciseness of detail. On the gathering of the Assembly of 1837 a careful count of noses revealed what had been known only once before in seven years, and what might never be again—a clear Old-School majority in the house. To the pious mind the neglecting of such an opportunity would have been to tempt Providence. Without notice, without complaint or charges or specifications, without opportunity of defense, 4 synods, including 533 churches and more than 100,000 communicants, were excommunicated by a majority vote. The victory of pure doctrine and strict church order, though perhaps not exactly glorious, was triumphant and irreversible. There was no more danger to the church from a possible New-School majority.

When the four exscinded synods, three in western New York and one in Ohio, together with a great following of sympathizing congregations in all parts of the country, came together to reconstruct their shattered polity, they were found to number about four ninths of the late Presbyterian Church. For thirty years the American church was to present to Christendom the strange spectacle of two great ecclesiastical bodies claiming identically the same name, holding the same doctrinal standards, observing the same ritual and governed by the same discipline, and occupying the same great territory, and yet completely dissevered from each other and at times in relations of sharp mutual antagonism.[297:1]

The theological debate which had split the Presbyterian Church from end to end was quite as earnest and copious in New England. But owing to the freer habit of theological inquiry and the looser texture of organization among the Congregationalist churches, it made no organic schism beyond the setting up of a new theological seminary in Connecticut to offset what were deemed the "dangerous tendencies" of the New Haven theology. After a few years the party lines had faded out and the two seminaries were good neighbors.

The unlikeliest place in all American Christendom for a partisan controversy and a schism would have seemed to be the Unitarian denomination in and about Boston. Beginning with the refusal not only of any imposed standard of belief, but of any statement of common opinions, and with unlimited freedom of opinion in every direction, unless, perhaps, in the direction of orthodoxy, it was not easy to see how a splitting wedge could be started in it. But the infection of the time was not to be resisted. Even Unitarianism must have its heresies and heresiarchs to deal with. No sooner did the pressure of outside attack abate than antagonisms began pretty sharply to declare themselves. In 1832 Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson, pastor of the Second Church in Boston, proposed to the church to abandon or radically change the observance of the Lord's Supper. When the church demurred at this extraordinary demand he resigned his office, firing off an elaborate argument against the usage of the church by way of a parting salute. Without any formal demission of the ministry, he retired to his literary seclusion at Concord, from which he brought forth in books and lectures the oracular utterances which caught more and more the ear of a wide public, and in which, in casual-seeming parentheses and obiter dicta, Christianity and all practical religion were condemned by sly innuendo and half-respectful allusion by which he might "without sneering teach the rest to sneer." In 1838 he was still so far recognized in the ministry as to be invited to address the graduating class of the Harvard Divinity School. The blank pantheism which he then enunciated called forth from Professor Henry Ware, Jr., a sermon in the college chapel on the personality of God, which he sent with a friendly note to Mr. Emerson. The gay and Skimpolesque reply of the sage is an illustration of that flippancy with which he chose to toy in a literary way with momentous questions, and which was so exasperating to the earnest men of positive religious convictions with whom he had been associated in the Christian ministry.

"It strikes me very oddly that good and wise men at Cambridge should think of raising me into an object of criticism. I have always been, from my incapacity of methodical writing, 'a chartered libertine,' free to worship and free to rail, lucky when I could make myself understood, but never esteemed near enough to the institutions and mind of society to deserve the notice of masters of literature and religion.... I could not possibly give you one of the 'arguments' you so cruelly hint at on which any doctrine of mine stands, for I do not know what arguments mean in reference to any expression of thought. I delight in telling what I think, but if you ask me how I dare say so, or why it is so, I am the most helpless of mortal men. I do not even see that either of these questions admits of an answer. So that in the present droll posture of my affairs, when I see myself suddenly raised into the importance of a heretic, I am very uneasy when I advert to the supposed duties of such a personage who is to make good his thesis against all comers. I certainly shall do no such thing."

The issue was joined and the controversy began. Professor Andrews Norton in a pamphlet denounced "the latest form of infidelity," and the Rev. George Ripley replied in a volume, to which Professor Norton issued a rejoinder. But there was not substance enough of religious dogma and sentiment in the transcendentalist philosophers to give them any permanent standing in the church. They went into various walks of secular literature, and have powerfully influenced the course of opinions; but they came to be no longer recognizable as a religious or theological party.

Among the minor combatants in the conflict between the Unitarians and the pantheists was a young man whose name was destined to become conspicuous, not within the Unitarian fellowship, but on the outskirts of it. Theodore Parker was a man of a different type from the men about him of either party. The son of a mechanic, he fought his way through difficulties to a liberal education, and was thirty years old before his very great abilities attracted general attention. A greedy gormandizer of books in many languages, he had little of the dainty scholarship so much prized at the neighboring university. But the results of his vast reading were stored in a quick and tenacious memory as ready rhetorical material wherewith to convince or astonish. Paradox was a passion with him, that was stimulated by complaints, and even by deprecations, to the point of irreverence. He liked to "make people's flesh crawl." Even in his advocacy of social and public reforms, which was strenuous and sincere, he delighted so to urge his cause as to inflame prejudice and opposition against it. With this temper it is not strange that when he came to enunciate his departure from some of the accepted tenets of his brethren, who were habitually reverent in their discipleship toward Jesus Christ, he should do this in a way to offend and shock. The immediate reaction of the Unitarian clergy from the statements of his sermon, in 1841, on "The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity," in which the supernatural was boldly discarded from his belief, was so general and so earnest as to give occasion to Channing's exclamation, "Now we have a Unitarian orthodoxy!" Channing did not live to see the characteristic tenets of the heresiarch to whom he hesitated to give the name of Christian not only widely accepted in the Unitarian churches, but some of them freely discussed as open questions among some orthodox scholars.

* * * * *

Two very great events in this period of schism may be dispatched with a brevity out of all proportion to their importance, on account of the simplicity of motive and action by which they are characterized.

In the year 1844 the slavery agitation in the Methodist Episcopal Church culminated, not in the rupture of the church, but in the well-considered, deliberate division of it between North and South. The history of the slavery question among the Methodists was a typical one. From the beginning the Methodist Society had been committed by its founder and his early successors to the strictest (not the strongest) position on this question. Not only was the system of slavery denounced as iniquitous, but the attempt was made to enforce the rigid rule that persons involved under this system in the relation of master to slave should be excluded from the ministry, if not from the communion. But the enforcement of this rule was found to be not only difficult, but wrong, and difficult simply because it was wrong. Then followed that illogical confusion of ideas studiously fostered by zealots at either extreme: If the slave-holder may be in some circumstances a faithful Christian disciple, fulfilling in righteousness and love a Christian duty, then slavery is right; if slavery is wrong, then every slave-holder is a manstealer, and should be excommunicated as such without asking any further questions. Two statements more palpably illogical were never put forth for the darkening of counsel. But each extreme was eager to sustain the unreason of the opposite extreme as the only alternative of its own unreason, and so, what with contrary gusts from North and South, they fell into a place where two seas met and ran the ship aground. The attempts made from 1836 to 1840, by stretching to the utmost the authority of the General Conference and the bishops, for the suppression of "modern abolitionism" in the church (without saying what they meant by the phrase) had their natural effect: the antislavery sentiment in the church organized and uttered itself more vigorously and more extravagantly than ever on the basis, "All slave-holding is sin; no fellowship with slave-holders." In 1843 an antislavery secession took place, which drew after it a following of six thousand, increased in a few months to fifteen thousand. The paradoxical result of this movement is not without many parallels in church history: After the drawing off of fifteen thousand of the most zealous antislavery men in the church, the antislavery party in the church was vastly stronger, even in numbers, than it had been before. The General Conference of 1836 had pronounced itself, without a dissenting vote, to be "decidedly opposed to modern abolitionism." The General Conference of 1844, on the first test vote on the question of excluding from the ministry one who had become a slave-holder through marriage, revealed a majority of one hundred and seventeen to fifty-six in favor of the most rigorous antislavery discipline. The graver question upon the case of Bishop Andrew, who was in the like condemnation, could not be decided otherwise. The form of the Conference's action in this case was studiously inoffensive. It imputed no wrong and proposed no censure, but, simply on the ground that the circumstances would embarrass him in the exercise of his office, declared it as "the sense of this General Conference that he desist from the exercise of this office so long as this impediment remains." The issue could not have been simpler and clearer. The Conference was warned that the passage of the resolution would be followed by the secession of the South. The debate was long, earnest, and tender. At the end of it the resolution was passed, one hundred and eleven to sixty-nine. At once notice was given of the intended secession. Commissioners were appointed from both parties to adjust the conditions of it, and in the next year (1845) was organized the "Methodist Episcopal Church, South."

Under the fierce tyranny then dominant at the South the southern Baptists might not fall behind their Methodist neighbors in zeal for slavery. This time it was the South that forced the issue. The Alabama Baptist Convention, without waiting for a concrete case, demanded of the national missionary boards "the distinct, explicit avowal that slave-holders are eligible and entitled equally with non-slave-holders to all the privileges and immunities of their several unions." The answer of the Foreign Mission Board was perfectly kind, but, on the main point, perfectly unequivocal: "We can never be a party to any arrangement which would imply approbation of slavery." The result had been foreseen. The great denomination was divided between North and South. The Southern Baptist Convention was organized in May, 1845, and began its home and foreign missionary work without delay.

This dark chapter of our story is not without its brighter aspects. (1) Amid the inevitable asperities attendant on such debate and division there were many and beautiful manifestations of brotherly love between the separated parties. (2) These strifes fell out to the furtherance of the gospel. Emulations, indeed, are not among the works of the Spirit. In the strenuous labors of the two divided denominations, greatly exceeding what had gone before, it is plain that sometimes Christ was preached of envy and strife. Nevertheless Christ was preached, with great and salutary results; and therein do we rejoice, yea, and will rejoice.

* * * * *

Two important orders in the American church, which for a time had almost faded out from our field of vision, come back, from about this epoch of debate and division, into continually growing conspicuousness and strength. Neither of them was implicated in that great debate involving the fundamental principles of the kingdom of heaven,—the principles of righteousness and love to men,—by which other parts of the church had been agitated and sometimes divided. Whether to their discredit or to their honor, it is part of history that neither the Protestant Episcopal Church nor the Roman Catholic Church took any important part, either corporately or through its representative men, in the agonizing struggle of the American church to maintain justice and humanity in public law and policy. But standing thus aloof from the great ethical questions that agitated the conscience of the nation, they were both of them disturbed by controversies internal or external, which demand mention at least in this chapter.

The beginning of the resuscitation of the Protestant Episcopal Church from the dead-and-alive condition in which it had so long been languishing is dated from the year 1811.[304:1] This year was marked by the accession to the episcopate of two eminent men, representing two strongly divergent parties in that church—Bishop Griswold, of Massachusetts, Evangelical, and Bishop Hobart, of New York, High-churchman. A quorum of three bishops having been gotten together, not without great difficulty, the two were consecrated in Trinity Church, New York, May 29, 1811.

The time was opportune and the conjuncture of circumstances singularly favorable. The stigma of Toryism, which had marked the church from long before the War of Independence, was now more than erased. In New England the Episcopal Church was of necessity committed to that political party which favored the abolition of the privileges of the standing order; and this was the anti-English party, which, under the lead of Jefferson, was fast forcing the country into war with England. The Episcopalians were now in a position to retort the charge of disloyalty under which they had not unjustly suffered. At the same time their church lost nothing of the social prestige incidental to its relation to the established Church of England. Politicians of the Democratic party, including some men of well-deserved credit and influence, naturally attached themselves to a religious party having many points of congeniality.[305:1]

In another sense, also, the time was opportune for an advance of the Episcopal Church. In the person of Bishop Hobart it had now a bold, energetic, and able representative of principles hitherto not much in favor in America—the thoroughgoing High-church principles of Archbishop Laud. Before this time the Episcopal Church had had very little to contribute by way of enriching the diversity of the American sects. It was simply the feeblest of the communions bearing the common family traits of the Great Awakening, with the not unimportant differentia of its settled ritual of worship and its traditions of order and decorum. But when Bishop Hobart put the trumpet to his lips and prepared himself to sound, the public heard a very different note, and no uncertain one. The church (meaning his own fragment of the church) the one channel of saving grace; the vehicles of that grace, the sacraments, valid only when ministered by a priesthood with the right pedigree of ordination; submission to the constituted authorities of the church absolutely unlimited, except by clear divine requirements; abstinence from prayer-meetings; firm opposition to revivals of religion; refusal of all cooeperation with Christians outside of his own sect in endeavors for the general advancement of religion—such were some of the principles and duties inculcated by this bishop of the new era as of binding force.[306:1] The courage of this attitude was splendid and captivating. It requires, even at the present time, not a little force of conviction to sustain one in publicly enunciating such views; but at the time of the accession of Hobart, when the Episcopal Church was just beginning to lift up its head out of the dust of despair, it needed the heroism of a martyr. It was not only the vast multitude of American Christians outside of the Episcopal Church, comprising almost all the learning, the evangelistic zeal, and the charitable activity and self-denial of the American church of that time, that heard these unwonted pretensions with indignation or with ridicule; in the Episcopal Church itself they were disclaimed, scouted, and denounced with (if possible) greater indignation still. But the new party had elements of growth for which its adversaries did not sufficiently reckon. The experience of other orders in the church confirms this principle: that steady persistence and iteration in assuring any body of believers that they are in some special sense the favorites of Heaven, and in assuring any body of clergy that they are endued from on high with some special and exceptional powers, will by and by make an impression on the mind. The flattering assurance may be coyly waived aside; it may even be indignantly repelled; but in the long run there will be a growing number of the brethren who become convinced that there is something in it. It was in harmony with human nature that the party of high pretensions to distinguished privileges for the church and prerogatives for the "priesthood" should in a few years become a formidable contestant for the control of the denomination. The controversy between the two parties rose to its height of exacerbation during the prevalence of that strange epidemic of controversy which ran simultaneously through so many of the great religious organizations of the country at once. No denomination had it in a more malignant form than the Episcopalians. The war of pamphlets and newspapers was fiercely waged, and the election of bishops sometimes became a bitter party contest, with the unpleasant incidents of such competitions. In the midst of the controversy at home the publication of the Oxford Tracts added new asperity to it. A distressing episode of the controversy was the arraignment of no less than four of the twenty bishops on charges affecting their personal character. In the morbid condition of the body ecclesiastic every such hurt festered. The highest febrile temperature was reached when, at an ordination in 1843, two of the leading presbyters in the diocese of New York rose in their places, and, reading each one his solemn protest against the ordaining of one of the candidates on the ground of his Romanizing opinions, left the church.

The result of the long conflict was not immediately apparent. It was not only that "high" opinions, even the highest of the Tractarian school, were to be tolerated within the church, but that the High-church party was to be the dominant party. The Episcopal Church was to stand before the public as representing, not that which it held in common with the other churches of the country, but that which was most distinctive. From this time forth the "Evangelical" party continued relatively to decline, down to the time, thirty years later, when it was represented in the inconsiderable secession of the "Reformed Episcopal Church." The combination of circumstances and influences by which this party supremacy was brought about is an interesting study, for which, however, there is no room in this brief compendium of history.

A more important fact is this: that in spite of these agitating internal strifes, and even by reason of them, the growth of the denomination was wonderfully rapid and strong. No fact in the external history of the American church at this period is more imposing than this growth of the Episcopal Church from nothing to a really commanding stature. It is easy to enumerate minor influences tending to this result, some of which are not of high spiritual dignity; but these must not be overestimated. The nature of this growth, as well as the numerical amount of it, requires to be considered. This strongly distinguished order in the American church has been aggrandized, not, to any great degree, by immigration, nor by conquest from the ranks of the irreligious, but by a continual stream of accessions both to its laity and to its clergy from other sects of the church. These accessions have of course been variable in quality, but they have included many such as no denomination could afford to lose, and such as any would be proud to receive. Without judging of individual cases, it is natural and reasonable to explain so considerable a current setting so steadily for two generations toward the Episcopal Church as being attracted by the distinctive characteristics of that church. Foremost among these we may reckon the study of the dignity and beauty of public worship, and the tradition and use of forms of devotion of singular excellence and value. A tendency to revert to the ancient Calvinist doctrine of the sacraments has prepossessed some in favor of that sect in which the old Calvinism is still cherished. Some have rejoiced to find a door of access to the communion of the church not beset with revivalist exactions of examination and scrutiny of the sacred interior experiences of the soul. Some have reacted from an excessive or inquisitive or arbitrary church discipline, toward a default of discipline. Some, worthily weary of sectarian division and of the "evangelical" doctrine that schism is the normal condition of the church of Christ, have found real comfort in taking refuge in a sect in which, closing their eyes, they can say, "There are no schisms in the church; the church is one and undivided, and we are it." These and other like considerations, mingled in varying proportions, have been honorable motives impelling toward the Episcopal denomination; and few that have felt the force of them have felt constrained stubbornly to resist the gentle assurances offered by the "apostolic succession" theory of a superior authority and prerogative with which they had become invested. The numerous accessions to the Episcopal Church from other communions have, of course, been in large part reinforcements to the already dominant party.

In the Roman Catholic Church of the United States, during this stormy period, there was by no means a perfect calm. The ineradicable feeling of the American citizen—however recent his naturalization—that he has a right to do what he will with his own, had kept asserting itself in that plausible but untenable claim of the laity to manage the church property acquired by their own contributions, which is known to Catholic writers as "trusteeism." Through the whole breadth of the country, from Buffalo to New Orleans, sharp conflicts over this question between clergy and laity had continued to vex the peace of the church, and the victory of the clergy had not been unvarying and complete. When, in 1837, Bishop John Hughes took the reins of spiritual power in New York, he resolved to try conclusions with the trustees who attempted to overrule his authority in his own cathedral. Sharply threatening to put the church under interdict, if necessary, he brought the recalcitrants to terms at last by a less formidable process. He appealed to the congregation to withhold all further contributions from the trustees. The appeal, for conscience' sake, to refrain from giving has always a double hope of success. And the bishop succeeded in ousting the trustees, at the serious risk of teaching the people a trick which has since been found equally effective when applied on the opposite side of a dispute between clergyman and congregation. In Philadelphia the long struggle was not ended without the actual interdicting of the cathedral of St. Mary's, April, 1831. In Buffalo, so late as 1847, even this extreme measure, applied to the largest congregation in the newly erected diocese, did not at once enforce submission.

The conflict with trusteeism was only one out of many conflicts which gave abundant exercise to the administrative abilities of the American bishops. The mutual jealousies of the various nationalities and races among the laity, and of the various sects of the regular clergy, menaced, and have not wholly ceased to menace, the harmony of the church, if not its unity.

One disturbing element by which the Roman Catholic Church in some European countries has been sorely vexed makes no considerable figure in the corresponding history in America. There has never been here any "Liberal Catholic" party. The fact stands in analogy with many like facts. Visitors to America from the established churches of England or Scotland or Germany have often been surprised to find the temper of the old-country church so much broader and less rigid than that of the daughter church in the new and free republic. The reason is less recondite than might be supposed. In the old countries there are retained in connection with the state-church, by constraint of law or of powerful social or family influences, many whose adhesion to its distinctive tenets and rules is slight and superficial. It is out of such material that the liberal church party grows. In the migration it is not that the liberal churchman becomes more strict, but that, being released from outside pressure, he becomes less of a churchman. He easily draws off from his hereditary communion and joins himself to some other, or to none at all. This process of evaporation leaves behind it a strong residuum in which all characteristic elements are held as in a saturated solution.

A further security of the American Catholic Church against the growth of any "Liberal Catholic" party like those of continental Europe is the absolutist organization of the hierarchy under the personal government of the pope. In these last few centuries great progress has been made by the Roman see in extinguishing the ancient traditions of local or national independence in the election of bishops. Nevertheless in Catholic Europe important relics of this independence give an effective check to the absolute power of Rome. In America no trace of this historic independence has ever existed. The power of appointing and removing bishops is held absolutely and exclusively by the pope and exercised through the Congregation of the Propaganda. The power of ordaining and assigning priests is held by the bishop, who also holds or controls the title to the church property in his diocese. The security against partisan division within the church is as complete as it can be made without gravely increasing the risks of alienating additional multitudes from the fellowship of the church.[312:1]

* * * * *

During the whole of this dreary decade there were "fightings without" as well as within for the Catholic Church in the United States. Its great and sudden growth solely by immigration had made it distinctively a church of foreigners, and chiefly of Irishmen. The conditions were favorable for the development of a race prejudice aggravated by a religious antipathy. It was a good time for the impostor, the fanatic, and the demagogue to get in their work. In Boston, in 1834, the report that a woman was detained against her will in the Ursuline convent at Charlestown, near Boston, led to the burning of the building by a drunken mob. The Titus Oates of the American no-popery panic, in 1836, was an infamous woman named Maria Monk, whose monstrous stories of secret horrors perpetrated in a convent in Montreal, in which she claimed to have lived as a nun, were published by a respectable house and had immense currency. A New York pastor of good standing, Dr. Brownlee, made himself sponsor for her character and her stories; and when these had been thoroughly exposed, by Protestant ministers and laymen, for the shameless frauds that they were, there were plenty of zealots to sustain her still. A "Protestant Society" was organized in New York, and solicited the contributions of the benevolent and pious to promote the dissemination of raw-head-and-bloody-bones literature on the horrors of popery. The enterprise met with reprobation from sober-minded Protestants, but it was not without its influence for mischief. The presence of a great foreign vote, easily manipulated and cast in block, was proving a copious source of political corruption. Large concessions of privilege or of public property to Catholic institutions were reasonably suspected to have been made in consideration of clerical services in partisan politics.[313:1] The conditions provoked, we might say necessitated, a political reform movement, which took the name and character of "Native American." In Philadelphia, a city notorious at that time for misgovernment and turbulence, an orderly "American" meeting was attacked and broken up by an Irish mob. One act of violence led to another, the excitement increasing from day to day; deadly shots were exchanged in the streets, houses from which balls had been fired into the crowd were set in flames, which spread to other houses, churches were burned, and the whole city dominated by mobs that were finally suppressed by the State militia. It was an appropriate climax to the ten years of ecclesiastical and social turmoil.[314:1]

FOOTNOTES:

[296:1] Johnson, "The Southern Presbyterians," p. 359.

[297:1] For the close historical parallel to the exscinding acts of 1837 see page 167, above. A later parallel, it is claimed, is found in the "virtually exscinding act" of the General Assembly of 1861, which was the occasion of the secession of the Southern Presbyterians. The historian of the Southern Presbyterians, who remarks with entire complacency that the "victory" of 1837 was won "only by virtue of an almost solid South," seems quite unconscious that this kind of victory could have any force as a precedent or as an estoppel (Johnson, "The Southern Presbyterians," pp. 335, 359). But it is natural, no doubt, that exscinding acts should look different when examined from the muzzle instead of from the breech.

[304:1] Tiffany, chap. xv.

[305:1] The intense antagonism of the New England Congregationalists to Jefferson and his party as representing French infidelity and Jacobinism admits of many striking illustrations. The sermon of Nathanael Emmons on "Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin" is characterized by Professor Park as "a curiosity in politico-homiletical literature." At this distance it is not difficult to see that the course of this clergy was far more honorable to its boldness and independence than to its discretion and sense of fitness. Both its virtues and its faults had a tendency to strengthen an opposing party.

[306:1] Hobart's sermon at the consecration of Right Rev. H. U. Onderdonk, Philadelphia, 1827.

[312:1] For a fuller account of the dissensions in the Catholic Church, consult, by index, Bishop O'Gorman's "History." On the modern organization of the episcopate in complete dependence on the Holy See, consult the learned article on "Episcopal Elections," by Dr. Peries, of the Catholic University at Washington, in the "American Catholic Quarterly Review" for January, 1896; also the remarks of Archbishop Kenrick, of St. Louis, in his "Concio in Concilio Vaticano Habenda at non Habita," in "An Inside View of the Vatican Council," by L. W. Bacon, pp. 61, 121.

[313:1] A satirical view of these concessions, in the vast dimensions which they had reached twenty-five years later in the city and county of New York, was published in two articles, "Our Established Church," and "The Unestablished Church," in "Putnam's Magazine" for July and December, 1869. The articles were reissued in a pamphlet, "with an explanatory and exculpatory preface, and sundry notices of the contemporary press."

[314:1] A studiously careful account of the Philadelphia riots of 1844 is given in the "New Englander," vol. ii. (1844), pp. 470, 624.

This account of the schisms of the period is of course not complete. The American Missionary Association, since distinguished for successful labors chiefly among the freedmen, grew out of dissatisfaction felt by men of advanced antislavery views with the position of the "American Board" and the American Home Missionary Society on the slavery question. The organization of it was matured in 1846. A very fruitful schism in its results was that which, in 1835, planted a cutting from Lane Seminary at Cincinnati, in the virgin soil at Oberlin, Ohio. The beginning thus made with a class in theology has grown into a noble and widely beneficent institution, the influence of which has extended to the ends of the land and of the world.

The division of the Society of Friends into the two societies known as Hicksite and Orthodox is of earlier date—1827-28.

No attempt is made in this volume to chronicle the interminable splittings and reunitings of the Presbyterian sects of Scottish extraction. A curious diagram, on page 146 of volume xi. of the present series, illustrates the sort of task which such a chronicle involves.

An illustration of the way in which the extreme defenders of slavery and the extreme abolitionists sustained each other in illogical statements (see above, pp. 301, 302) is found in Dr. Thornwell's claim (identical with Mr. Garrison's) that if slavery is wrong, then all slave-holders ought to be excommunicated (vol. vi., p. 157, note). Dr. Thornwell may not have been the "mental and moral giant" that he appears to his admirers (see Professor Johnson in vol. xi., p. 355), but he was an intelligent and able man, quite too clear-headed to be imposed upon by a palpable "ambiguous middle," except for his excitement in the heat of a desperate controversy with the moral sense of all Christendom.



CHAPTER XVIII.

THE GREAT IMMIGRATION.

At the taking of the first census of the United States, in 1790, the country contained a population of about four millions in its territory of less than one million of square miles.

Sixty years later, at the census of 1850, it contained a population of more than twenty-three millions in its territory of about three millions of square miles.

The vast expansion of territory to more than threefold the great original domain of the United States had been made by honorable purchase or less honorable conquest. It had not added largely to the population of the nation; the new acquisitions were mainly of unoccupied land. The increase of the population, down to about 1845, was chiefly the natural increase of a hardy and prolific stock under conditions in the highest degree favorable to such increase. Up to the year 1820 the recent immigration had been inconsiderable. In the ten years 1820-29 the annual arrival of immigrants was nine thousand. In the next decade, 1830-39, the annual arrival was nearly thirty-five thousand, or a hundred a day. For forty years the total immigration from all quarters was much less than a half-million. In the course of the next three decades, from 1840 to 1869, there arrived in the United States from the various countries of Europe five and a half millions of people. It was more than the entire population of the country at the time of the first census;—

A multitude like which the populous North Poured never from her frozen loins to pass Rhene or the Danaw, when her barbarous sons Came like a deluge on the South and spread Beneath Gibraltar to the Libyan sands.

Under the pressure of a less copious flood of incursion the greatest empire in all history, strongest in arts and polity as well as arms, had perished utterly. If Rome, with her population of one hundred and twenty millions, her genius for war and government, and her long-compacted civilization, succumbed under a less sudden rush of invasion, what hope was there for the young American Republic, with its scanty population and its new and untried institutions?[316:1]

An impressive providential combination of causes determined this great historic movement of population at this time. It was effected by attractions in front of the emigrant, reinforced by impulses from behind. The conclusion of the peace of 1815 was followed by the beginning of an era of great public works, one of the first of which was the digging of the Erie Canal. This sort of enterprise makes an immediate demand for large forces of unskilled laborers; and in both hemispheres it has been observed to occasion movements of population out of Catholic countries into Protestant countries. The westward current of the indigenous population created a vacuum in the seaboard States, and a demand for labor that was soon felt in the labor-markets of the Old World. A liberal homestead policy on the part of the national government, and naturalization laws that were more than liberal, agencies for the encouragement of settlers organized by individual States and by railroad corporations and other great landed proprietors, and the eager competition of steamship companies drumming for steerage passengers in all parts of Europe—all these cooeperated with the growing facility and cheapness of steam transportation to swell the current of migration. The discovery of gold in California quickened the flow of it.

As if it had been the divine purpose not only to draw forth, but to drive forth, the populations of the Old World to make their homes in the New, there was added to all these causes conducive to migration the Irish famine of 1846-47, and the futile revolutions of 1848, with the tyrannical reactions which followed them. But the great stimulus to migration was the success and prosperity that attended it. It was "success that succeeded." The great emigration agent was the letter written to his old home by the new settler, in multitudes of cases inclosing funds to pay the passage of friends whom he had left behind him.

The great immigration that began about 1845 is distinguished from some of the early colonizations in that it was in no sense a religious movement. Very grave religious results were to issue from it; but they were to be achieved through the unconscious cooeperation of a multitude of individuals each intent with singleness of vision on his own individual ends. It is by such unconscious cooeperation that the directing mind and the overruling hand of God in history are most signally illustrated.

In the first rush of this increased immigration by far the greatest contributor of new population was Ireland. It not only surpassed any other country in the number of its immigrants, but in the height of the Irish exodus, in the decade 1840-50, it nearly equaled all other countries of the world together. The incoming Irish millions were almost solidly Roman Catholic. The measures taken by the British government for many generations to attach the Irish people to the crown and convert them to the English standard of Protestantism had had the result of discharging upon our shores a people distinguished above all Christendom besides for its ardent and unreserved devotion to the Roman Church, and hardly less distinguished for its hatred to England.

After the first flood-tide the relative number of the Irish immigrants began to decrease, and has kept on decreasing until now. Since the Civil War the chief source of immigration has been Germany; and its contributions to our population have greatly aggrandized the Lutheran denomination, once so inconsiderable in numbers, until in many western cities it is the foremost of the Protestant communions, and in Chicago outnumbers the communicants of the Episcopalian, the Presbyterian, and the Methodist churches combined.[318:1] The German immigration has contributed its share, and probably more than its share, to our non-religious and churchless population. Withal, in a proportion which it is not easy to ascertain with precision, it added multitudinous thousands to the sudden and enormous growth of the Roman Catholic Church. But there is an instructive contrast between the German immigrations, whether Catholic or Protestant, and the Irish immigration. The Catholicism of the Irish, held from generation to generation in the face of partisan and sometimes cruelly persecuting laws, was held with the ardor, if not of personal conviction, at least of strong hereditary animosity. To the Germans, their religious sect, whether Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed, is determined for them by political arrangement, under the principle cujus regio, ejus religio. It is matter of course that tenets thus acquired should be held by a tenure so far removed from fanaticism as to seem to more zealous souls much like lukewarmness. Accustomed to have the cost of religious institutions provided for in the budget of public expenses, the wards of the Old World state-churches find themselves here in strange surroundings, untrained in habits of self-denial for religious objects. The danger is a grave and real one that before they become acclimated to the new conditions a large percentage will be lost, not only from their hereditary communion, but from all Christian fellowship, and lapse into simple indifferentism and godlessness. They have much to learn and something to teach. The indigenous American churches are not likely to be docile learners at the feet of alien teachers; but it would seem like the slighting of a providential opportunity if the older sects should fail to recognize that one of the greatest and by far the most rapidly growing of the Protestant churches of America, the Lutheran, growing now with new increments not only from the German, but also from the Scandinavian nations, is among us in such force to teach us somewhat by its example of the equable, systematic, and methodical ways of a state-church, as well as to learn something from the irregular fervor of that revivalism which its neighbors on every hand have inherited from the Great Awakening. It would be the very extravagance of national self-conceit if the older American churches should become possessed of the idea that four millions of German Christians and one million of Scandinavians, arriving here from 1860 to 1890, with their characteristic methods in theology and usages of worship and habits of church organization and administration, were here, in the providence of God, only to be assimilated and not at all to assimilate.

* * * * *

The vast growth of the Roman Catholic Church in America could not but fill its clergy and adherents with wonder and honest pride. But it was an occasion of immense labors and not a little anxiety. One effect of the enormous immigration was inevitably to impose upon this church, according to the popular apprehension, the character of a foreign association, and, in the earlier periods of the influx, of an Irish association. It was in like manner inevitable, from the fact that the immigrant class are preponderantly poor and of low social rank, that it should for two or three generations be looked upon as a church for the illiterate and unskilled laboring class. An incident of the excessive torrent rush of the immigration was that the Catholic Church became to a disproportionate extent an urban institution, making no adequate provision for the dispersed in agricultural regions.

Against these and other like disadvantages the hierarchy of the Catholic Church have struggled heroically, with some measure of success. The steadily rising character of the imported population in its successive generations has aided them. If in the first generations the churches were congregations of immigrants served by an imported clergy, the most strenuous exertions were made for the founding of institutions that should secure to future congregations born upon the soil the services of an American-trained priesthood. One serious hindrance to the noble advances that have nevertheless been made in this direction has been the fanatical opposition levied against even the most beneficent enterprises of the church by a bigoted Native-Americanism. It is not a hopeful method of conciliating and naturalizing a foreign element in the community to treat them with suspicion and hostility as alien enemies. The shameful persecution which the mob was for a brief time permitted to inflict on Catholic churches and schools and convents had for its chief effect to confirm the foreigner in his adherence to his church and his antipathy to Protestantism, and to provoke a twofold ferocity in return. At a time when there was reason to apprehend a Know-nothing riot in New York, in 1844, a plan was concerted and organized by "a large Irish society with divisions throughout the city," by which, "in case a single church was attacked, buildings should be fired in all quarters and the great city should be involved in a general conflagration."[321:1]

The utmost that could have been hoped for by the devoted but inadequate body of the Roman Catholic clergy in America, overwhelmed by an influx of their people coming in upon them in increasing volume, numbering millions per annum, was that they might be able to hold their own. But this hope was very far from being attained. How great have been the losses to the Roman communion through the transplantation of its members across the sea is a question to which the most widely varying answers have been given, and on which statistical exactness seems unattainable. The various estimates, agreeing in nothing else, agree in representing them as enormously great.[321:2] All good men will also agree that in so far as these losses represent mere lapses into unbelief and irreligion they are to be deplored. Happily there is good evidence of a large salvage, gathered into other churches, from what so easily becomes a shipwreck of faith with total loss.

It might seem surprising, in view of the many and diverse resources of attractive influence which the Roman Church has at its command, that its losses have not been to some larger extent compensated by conversions from other sects. Instances of such conversion are by no means wanting; but so far as a popular current toward Catholicism is concerned, the attractions in that direction are outweighed by the disadvantages already referred to. It has not been altogether a detriment to the Catholic Church in America that the social status and personal composition of its congregations, in its earlier years, have been such that the transition into it from any of the Protestant churches could be made only at the cost of a painful self-denial. The number of accessions to it has been thereby lessened, but (leaving out the case of the transition of politicians from considerations of expediency) the quality of them has been severely sifted. Incomparably the most valuable acquisition which the American Catholic Church has received has been the company of devoted and gifted young men, deeply imbued with the principles and sentiments of the High-church party in the Episcopal Church, who have felt constrained in conscience and in logic to take the step, which seems so short, from the highest level in the Anglican Church into the Roman, and who, organized into the Order of the Paulist Fathers, have exemplified in the Roman Church so many of the highest qualities of Protestant preaching.

He is a bold man who will undertake to predict in detail the future of the Roman Church in America. To say that it will be modified by its surroundings is only to say what is true of it in all countries. To say that it will be modified for the better is to say what is true of it in all Protestant countries. Nowhere is the Roman Church so pure from scandal and so effective for good as where it is closely surrounded and jealously scrutinized by bodies of its fellow-Christians whom it is permitted to recognize only as heretics. But when the influence of surrounding heresy is seen to be an indispensable blessing to the church, the heretic himself comes to be looked upon with a mitigated horror. Not with the sacrifice of any principle, but through the application of some of those provisions by which the Latin theology is able to meet exigencies like this,—the allowance in favor of "invincible ignorance" and prejudice, the distinction between the body and "the soul of the church,"—the Roman Catholic, recognizing the spirit of Christ in his Protestant fellow-Christian, is able to hold him in spiritual if not formal communion, so that the Catholic Church may prove itself not dissevered from the Church Catholic. In the common duties of citizenship and of humanity, in the promotion of the interests of morality, even in those religious matters that are of common concern to all honest disciples of Jesus Christ, he is at one with his heretic brethren. Without the change of a single item either of doctrine or of discipline, the attitude and temper of the church, as compared with the church of Spain or Italy or Mexico, is revolutionized. The change must needs draw with it other changes, which may not come without some jar and conflict between progressive and conservative, but which nevertheless needs must come. Out of many indications of the spirit of fellowship with all Christians now exemplified among American Catholics, I quote one of the most recent and authoritative from an address of Archbishop Ryan at the Catholic Congress in Chicago in 1893. Speaking on Christian union, he said:

"If there is any one thing more than another upon which people agree, it is respect and reverence for the person and the character of the Founder of Christianity. How the Protestant loves his Saviour! How the Protestant eye will sometimes grow dim when speaking of our Lord! In this great center of union is found the hope of human society, the only means of preserving Christian civilization, the only point upon which Catholic and Protestant may meet. As if foreseeing that this should be, Christ himself gave his example of fraternal charity, not to the orthodox Jew, but to the heretical Samaritan, showing that charity and love, while faith remains intact, can never be true unless no distinction is made between God's creatures."[325:1]

Herein is fellowship higher than that of symbols and sacraments. By so far as it receives this spirit of love the American Catholic Church enters into its place in that greater Catholic Church of which we all make mention in the Apostles' Creed—"the Holy Universal Church, which is the fellowship of holy souls."

* * * * *

The effect of the Great Immigration on the body of the immigrant population is not more interesting or more important than the effect of it on the religious bodies already in occupation of the soil. The impression made on them by what seemed an irruption of barbarians of strange language or dialect, for the most part rude, unskilled, and illiterate, shunning as profane the Christian churches of the land, and bowing in unknown rites as devotees of a system known, and by no means favorably known, only through polemic literature and history, and through the gruesome traditions of Puritan and Presbyterian and Huguenot, was an impression not far removed from horror; and this impression was deepened as the enormous proportions of this invasion disclosed themselves from year to year. The serious and not unreasonable fear that these armies of aliens, handled as they manifestly were by a generalship that was quick to seize and fortify in a conspicuous way the strategic points of influence, especially in the new States, might imperil or ruin the institutions and liberties of the young Republic, was stimulated and exploited in the interest of enterprises of evangelization that might counter-work the operations of the invading church. The appeals of the Bible and tract societies, and of the various home mission agencies of the different denominations, as well as of the distinctively antipopery societies, were pointed with the alarm lest "the great West" should fall under the domination of the papal hierarchy. Naturally the delineations of the Roman system and of its public and social results that were presented to the public for these purposes were of no flattering character. Not history only, but contemporary geography gave warnings of peril. Canada on one hand, and Mexico and the rest of Spanish America on the other, were cited as living examples of the fate which might befall the free United States. The apocalyptic prophecies were copiously drawn upon for material of war. By processes of exegesis which critical scholarship regards with a smile or a shudder, the helpless pope was made to figure as the Antichrist, the Man of Sin and Son of Perdition, the Scarlet Woman on the Seven Hills, the Little Horn Speaking Blasphemies, the Beast, and the Great Red Dragon. That moiety of Christendom which, sorely as its history has been deformed by corruption and persecution, violently as it seems to be contrasted with the simplicity of the primeval church, is nevertheless the spiritual home of multitudes of Christ's well-approved servants and disciples, was held up to gaze as being nothing but the enemy of Christ and his cause. The appetite of the Protestant public for scandals at the expense of their fellow-Christians was stimulated to a morbid greediness and then overfed with willful and wicked fabrications. The effect of this fanaticism on some honest but illogical minds was what might have been looked for. Brought by and by into personal acquaintance with Catholic ministers and institutions, and discovering the fraud and injustice that had been perpetrated, they sprang by a generous reaction into an attitude of sympathy for the Roman Catholic system. A more favorable preparation of the way of conversion to Rome could not be desired by the skillful propagandist. One recognizes a retributive justice in the fact, when notable gains to the Catholic Church are distinctly traced to the reaction of honest men from these fraudulent polemics.[327:1]

The danger to the Republic, which was thus malignantly or ignorantly exaggerated and distorted, was nevertheless real and grave. No sincerely earnest and religious Protestant, nor even any well-informed patriotic citizen, with the example of French and Spanish America before his eyes, could look with tolerance upon the prospect of a possible Catholicizing of the new States at the West; and the sight of the incessant tide of immigration setting westward, the reports of large funds sent hither from abroad to aid the propagation of the Roman Church, and the accounts of costly and imposing ecclesiastical buildings rising at the most important centers of population, roused the Christian patriotism of the older States to the noblest enterprises of evangelization. There was no wasting of energy in futile disputation. In all the Protestant communions it was felt that the work called for was a simple, peaceful, and positive one—to plant the soil of the West, at the first occupation of it by settlers, with Christian institutions and influences. The immensity of the task stimulated rather than dismayed the zeal of the various churches. The work undertaken and accomplished in the twenty years from 1840 to 1860 in providing the newly settled regions with churches, pastors, colleges, and theological seminaries, with Sunday-schools, and with Bibles and other religious books, was of a magnitude which will never be defined by statistical figures. How great it was, and at what cost it was effected in gifts of treasure and of heroic lives of toil and self-denial, can only be a matter of vague wonder and thanksgiving.

The work of planting the church in the West exhibits the voluntary system at its best—and at its worst. A task so vast and so momentous has never been imposed on the resources of any state establishment. It is safe to say that no established church has ever existed, however imperially endowed, that would have been equal to the undertaking of it. With no imposing combination of forces, and no strategic concert of action, the work was begun spontaneously and simultaneously, like some of the operations of nature, by a multitude of different agencies, and went forward uninterrupted to something as nearly like completeness as could be in a work the exigencies of which continually widened beyond all achievements. The planting of the church in the West is one of the wonders of church history.

But this noble act of religious devotion was by no means a sacrifice without blemish. The sacred zeal for advancing God's reign and righteousness was mingled with many very human motives in the progress of it. Conspicuous among these was the spirit of sectarian competition. The worthy and apostolic love for kindred according to the flesh separated from home and exposed to the privations and temptations of the frontier, the honest anxiety to forestall the domination of a dangerously powerful religious corporation propagating perverted views of truth, even the desire to advance principles and forms of belief deemed to be important, were infused with a spirit of partisanship as little spiritual as the enthusiasm which animates the struggles and the shouters at a foot-ball game. The devoted pioneer of the gospel on the frontier, seeing his work endangered by that of a rival denomination, writes to the central office of his sect; the board of missions makes its appeal to the contributing churches; the churches respond with subsidies; and the local rivalry in the mission field is pressed, sometimes to a good result, on the principle that "competition is the life of business." Thus the fragrance of the precious ointment of loving sacrifice is perceptibly tainted, according to the warning of Ecclesiastes or the Preacher. And yet it is not easy for good men, being men, sternly to rebuke the spirit that seems to be effective in promoting the good cause that they have at heart.

If the effect of these emulations on the contributing churches was rather carnal than spiritual, the effect in the mission field was worse. The effect was seen in the squandering of money and of priceless service of good men and women, in the debilitating and demoralizing division and subdivision of the Christian people, not of cities and large towns, but of villages and hamlets and of thinly settled farming districts. By the building of churches and other edifices for sectarian uses, schism was established for coming time as a vested interest. The gifts and service bestowed in this cause with a truly magnificent liberality would have sufficed to establish the Christian faith and fellowship throughout the new settlements in strength and dignity, in churches which, instead of lingering as puny and dependent nurslings, would have grown apace to be strong and healthy nursing mothers to newer churches yet.

There is an instructive contrast, not only between the working of the voluntary system and that of the Old World establishments, but between the methods of the Catholic Church and the Protestant no-method. Under the control of a strong cooerdinating authority the competitions of the various Catholic orders, however sharp, could never be allowed to run into wasteful extravagance through cross-purposes. It is believed that the Catholics have not erected many monuments of their own unthrift in the shape of costly buildings begun, but left unfinished and abandoned. A more common incident of their work has been the buying up of these expensive failures, at a large reduction from their cost, and turning them to useful service. And yet the principle of sectarian competition is both recognized and utilized in the Roman system. The various clerical sects, with their characteristic names, costumes, methods, and doctrinal differences, have their recognized aptitudes for various sorts of work, with which their names are strongly associated: the Dominican for pulpit eloquence, the Capuchin for rough-and-ready street-preaching, the Benedictine for literary work, the Sulpitian for the training of priests, and the ubiquitous Jesuit for shifty general utility with a specialty of school-keeping. These and a multitude of other orders, male and female, have been effectively and usefully employed in the arduous labor Romanam condere gentem. But it would seem that the superior stability of the present enterprise of planting Catholicism in the domain of the United States, as compared with former expensive failures, was due in some part to the larger employment of a diocesan parish clergy instead of a disproportionate reliance on the "regulars."

On the whole, notwithstanding its immense armies of immigrants and the devoted labors of its priests, and notwithstanding its great expansion, visible everywhere in conspicuous monuments of architecture, the Catholic advance in America has not been, comparatively speaking, successful. For one thing, the campaign was carried on too far from its base of supplies. The subsidies from Lyons and Vienna, liberal as they were, were no match for the home missionary zeal of the seaboard States in following their own sons westward with church and gospel and pastor. Even the conditions which made possible the superior management and economy of resources, both material and personal, among the Catholics, were attended with compensating drawbacks. With these advantages they could not have the immense advantage of the popular initiative. In Protestantism the people were the church, and the minister was chief among the people only by virtue of being servant of all; the people were incited to take up the work for their own and carry it on at their best discretion; and they were free to make wasteful and disastrous blunders and learn therefrom by experience. With far greater expenditure of funds, they make no comparison with their brethren of the Roman obedience in stately and sumptuous buildings at great centers of commerce and travel. But they have covered the face of the land with country meeting-houses, twice as many as there was any worthy use for, in which faithful service is rendered to subdivided congregations by underpaid ministers, enough in number, if they were wisely distributed, for the evangelization of the whole continent; and each country meeting-house is a mission station, and its congregation, men, women, and children, are missionaries. Thus it has come about, in the language of the earnest Catholic from the once Catholic city of New Orleans, that "the nation, the government, the whole people, remain solidly Protestant."[331:1] Great territories originally discovered by Catholic explorers and planted in the name of the church by Catholic missionaries and colonists, and more lately occupied by Catholic immigrants in what seemed overwhelming numbers, are now the seat of free and powerful commonwealths in which the Catholic Church is only one of the most powerful and beneficent of the Christian sects, while the institutions and influences which characterize their society are predominantly Protestant.

In the westward propagation of Protestantism, as well as of Catholicism, the distinctive attributes of the several sects or orders is strikingly illustrated.

Foremost in the pioneer work of the church are easily to be recognized the Methodists and the Baptists, one the most solidly organized of the Protestant sects, the other the most uncompact and individualist; the first by virtue of the supple military organization of its great corps of itinerants, the other by the simplicity and popular apprehensibleness of its distinctive tenets and arguments and the aggressive ardor with which it inspires all its converts, and both by their facility in recruiting their ministry from the rank and file of the church, without excluding any by arbitrarily imposed conditions. The Presbyterians were heavily cumbered for advance work by traditions and rules which they were rigidly reluctant to yield or bend, even when the reason for the rule was superseded by higher reasons. The argument for a learned ministry is doubtless a weighty one; but it does not suffice to prove that when college-bred men are not to be had it is better that the people have no minister at all. There is virtue in the rule of ministerial parity; but it should not be allowed to hinder the church from employing in humbler spiritual functions men who fall below the prescribed standard. This the church, in course of time, discovered, and instituted a "minor order" of ministers, under the title of colporteurs. But it was timidly and tardily done, and therefore ineffectively. The Presbyterians lost their place in the skirmish-line; but that which had been their hindrance in the advance work gave them great advantage in settled communities, in which for many years they took precedence in the building up of strong and intelligent congregations.

To the Congregationalists belongs an honor in the past which, in recent generations, they have not been jealous to retain. Beyond any sect, except the Moravians, they have cherished that charity which seeketh not her own. The earliest leaders in the organization of schemes of national beneficence in cooeperation with others, they have sustained them with unselfish liberality, without regard to returns of sectarian advantage. The results of their labor are largely to be traced in the upbuilding of other sects. Their specialty in evangelization has been that of the religious educators of the nation. They have been preeminently the builders of colleges and theological seminaries. To them, also, belongs the leadership in religious journalism. Not only the journals of their own sect and the undenominational journals, but also to a notable extent the religious journals of other denominations, have depended for their efficiency on men bred in the discipline of Congregationalism.

It is no just reproach to the Episcopalians that they were tardy in entering the field of home missions. When we remember that it is only since 1811 that they have emerged from numerical insignificance, we find their contribution to the planting of the church in the new settlements to be a highly honorable one. By a suicidal compact the guileless Evangelical party agreed, in 1835, to take direction of the foreign missions of the church, and leave the home field under the direction of the aggressive High-church party. It surrendered its part in the future of the church, and determined the type of Episcopalianism that was to be planted in the West.[333:1] Entering thus late into the work, and that with stinted resources, the Episcopal Church wholly missed the apostolic glory of not building on other men's foundations. Coming with the highest pretensions to exclusive authority, its work was very largely a work of proselyting from other Christian sects. But this work was prosperously carried on; and although not in itself a work of the highest dignity, and although the methods of it often bore a painfully schismatic character, there is little room for doubt that the results of it have enriched and strengthened the common Christianity of America. Its specialties in the planting work have been the setting of a worthy example of dignity and simplicity in the conduct of divine worship, and in general of efficiency in the administration of a parish, and, above all, the successful handling of the immensely difficult duties imposed upon Christian congregations in great cities, where the Episcopal Church has its chief strength and its most effective work.

One must needs ascend to a certain altitude above the common level in order to discern a substantial resultant unity of movement in the strenuous rivalries and even antagonisms of the many sects of the one church of Christ in America in that critical quarter-century from the year 1835 to the outbreak of the Civil War, in which the work of the church was suddenly expanded by the addition of a whole empire of territory on the west, and the bringing in of a whole empire of alien population from the east, and when no one of the Christian forces of the nation could be spared from the field. The unity is very real, and is visible enough, doubtless, from "the circle of the heavens." The sharers in the toil and conflict and the near spectators are not well placed to observe it. It will be for historians in some later century to study it in a truer perspective.

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It is not only as falling within this period of immigration, but as being largely dependent on its accessions from foreign lands, that the growth of Mormonism is entitled to mention in this chapter. In its origin Mormonism is distinctly American—a system of gross, palpable imposture contrived by a disreputable adventurer, Joe Smith, with the aid of three confederates, who afterward confessed the fraud and perjury of which they had been guilty. It is a shame to human nature that the silly lies put forth by this precious gang should have found believers. But the solemn pretensions to divine revelation, mixed with elements borrowed from the prevalent revivalism, and from the immediate adventism which so easily captivates excitable imaginations, drew a number of honest dupes into the train of the knavish leaders, and made possible the pitiable history which followed. The chief recruiting-grounds for the new religion were not in America, but in the manufacturing and mining regions of Great Britain, and in some of the countries, especially the Scandinavian countries, of continental Europe. The able handling of an emigration fund, and the dexterous combination of appeals to many passions and interests at once, have availed to draw together in the State of Utah and neighboring regions a body of fanatics formidable to the Republic, not by their number, for they count only about one hundred and fifty thousand, but by the solidity with which they are compacted into a political, economical, religious, and, at need, military community, handled at will by unscrupulous chiefs. It is only incidentally that the strange story of the Mormons, a story singularly dramatic and sometimes tragic, is connected with the history of American Christianity.[335:1]

To this same period belongs the beginning of the immigration of the Chinese, which, like that of the Mormons, becomes by and by important to our subject as furnishing occasion for active and fruitful missionary labors.

In the year 1843 culminated the panic agitation of Millerism. From the year 1831 an honest Vermont farmer named William Miller had been urging upon the public, in pamphlets and lectures, his views of the approaching advent of Christ to judgment and the destruction of the world. He had figured it out on the basis of prophecies in Daniel and the Revelation, and the great event was set down for April 23, 1843. As the date drew near the excitement of many became intense. Great meetings were held, in the open air or in tents, of those who wished to be found waiting for the Lord. Some nobly proved their sincerity by the surrender of their property for the support of their poorer brethren until the end should come. The awful day was awaited with glowing rapture of hope, or by some with terror. When it dawned there was eager gazing upon the clouds of heaven to descry the sign of the Son of man. And when the day had passed without event there were various revulsions of feeling. The prophets set themselves to going over their figures and fixing new dates; earnest believers, sobered by the failure of their pious expectations, held firmly to the substance of their faith and hope, while no longer attempting to "know times and seasons, which the Father hath put within his own power"; weak minds made shipwreck of faith; and scoffers cried in derision, "Where is the promise of his coming?" A monument of this honest delusion still exists in the not very considerable sect of Adventists, with its subdivisions; but sympathizers with their general scheme of prophetical interpretation are to be found among the most earnest and faithful members of other churches.