Such has been the progress of Scriptural knowledge since the days when Farmer Miller went to work with his arithmetic and slate upon the strange symbols and enigmatic figures of the Old and New Testament Apocalypses, that plain Christians everywhere have now the means of knowing that the lines of calculation along which good people were led into delusion a half-century ago started from utterly fallacious premises. It is to the fidelity of critical scholars that we owe it that hereafter, except among the ignorant and unintelligent, these two books, now clearly understood, will not again be used to minister to the panic of a Millerite craze, nor to furnish vituperative epithets for antipopery agitators.

To this period also must be referred the rise of that system of necromancy which, originating in America, has had great vogue in other countries, and here in its native land has taken such form as really to constitute a new cult. Making no mention of sporadic instances of what in earlier generations would have been called (and properly enough) by the name of witchcraft, we find the beginning of so-called "spiritualism" in the "Rochester rappings," produced, to the wonder of many witnesses, by "the Fox girls" in 1849. How the rappings and other sensible phenomena were produced was a curious question, but not important; the main question was, Did they convey communications from the spirits of the dead, as the young women alleged, and as many persons believed (so they thought) from demonstrative evidence? The mere suggestion of the possibility of this of course awakened an inquisitive and eager interest everywhere. It became the subject of universal discussion and experiment in society. There was demand for other "mediums" to satisfy curiosity or aid investigation; and the demand at once produced a copious supply. The business of medium became a regular profession, opening a career especially to enterprising women. They began to draw together believers and doubters into "circles" and "seances," and to organize permanent associations. At the end of ten years the "Spiritual Register" for 1859, boasting great things, estimated the actual spiritualists in America at 1,500,000, besides 4,000,000 more partly converted. The latest census gives the total membership of their associations as 45,030. But this moderate figure should not be taken as the measure of the influence of their leading tenet. There are not a few honest Christians who are convinced that communications do sometimes take place between the dead and the living; there are a great multitude who are disposed, in a vague way, to think there must be something in it. But there are few even of the earnest devotees of the spiritualist cult who will deny that the whole business is infested with fraud, whether of dishonest mediums or of lying spirits. Of late years the general public has come into possession of material for independent judgment on this point. An earnest spiritualist, a man of wealth, named Seybert, dying, left to the University of Pennsylvania a legacy of sixty thousand dollars, on condition that the university should appoint a commission to investigate the claims of spiritualism. A commission was appointed which left nothing to be desired in point of ability, integrity, and impartiality. Under the presidency of the renowned Professor Joseph Leidy, and with the aid and advice of leading believers in spiritualism, they made a long, patient, faithful investigation, the processes and results of which are published in a most amusing little volume.[338:1] The gist of their report may be briefly summed up. Every case of alleged communication from the world of departed spirits that was investigated by the commission (and they were guided in their selection of cases by the advice of eminent and respectable believers in spiritualism) was discovered and demonstrated to be a case of gross, willful attempted fraud. The evidence is strong that the organized system of spiritualism in America, with its associations and lyceums and annual camp-meetings, and its itinerancy of mediums and trance speakers, is a system of mere imposture. In the honest simplicity of many of its followers, and in the wicked mendacity of its leaders, it seems to be on a par with the other American contribution to the religions of the world, Mormonism.

FOOTNOTES:

[316:1] For condensed statistics of American immigration, see "Encyclopaedia Britannica," 9th ed., s. vv. "Emigration" and "United States." For the facts concerning the Roman Empire one naturally has recourse to Gibbon. From the indications there given we do not get the impression that in the three centuries of the struggle of the empire against the barbarians there was ever such a thirty years' flood of invasion as the immigration into the United States from 1840 to 1869. The entrance into the Roman Empire was indeed largely in the form of armed invasion; but the most destructive influence of the barbarians was when they were admitted as friends and naturalized as citizens. See "Encyclopaedia Britannica," vol. xx., pp. 779, 780.

[318:1] Jacobs, "The Lutherans," p. 446.

[321:1] Bishop O'Gorman, "The Roman Catholics," p. 375. The atrocity of such a plot seems incredible. We should have classed it at once with the Maria Monk story, and other fabulous horrors of Dr. Brownlee's Protestant Society, but that we find it in the sober and dispassionate pages of Bishop O'Gorman's History, which is derived from original sources of information. If anything could have justified the animosity of the "native Americans" (who, by the way, were widely suspected to be, in large proportion, native Ulstermen) it would have been the finding of evidence of such facts as this which Bishop O'Gorman has disclosed.

[321:2] The subject is reviewed in detail, from opposite points of view, by Bishop O'Gorman, pp. 489-500, and by Dr. Daniel Dorchester, "Christianity in the United States," pp. 618-621. One of the most recent estimates is that presented to the Catholic Congress at Chicago, in 1893, in a remarkable speech by Mr. M. T. Elder, of New Orleans. Speaking of "the losses sustained by the church in this country, placed by a conservative estimate at twenty millions of people, he laid the responsibility for this upon neglect of immigration and colonization, i.e., neglect of the rural population. From this results a long train of losses." He added: "When I see how largely Catholicity is represented among our hoodlum element, I feel in no spread-eagle mood. When I note how few Catholics are engaged in honestly tilling the honest soil, and how many Catholics are engaged in the liquor traffic, I cannot talk buncombe to anybody. When I reflect that out of the 70,000,000 of this nation we number only 9,000,000, and that out of that 9,000,000 so large a proportion is made up of poor factory hands, poor mill and shop and mine and railroad employees, poor government clerks, I still fail to find material for buncombe or spread-eagle or taffy-giving. And who can look at our past history and feel proud of our present status?" He advocated as a remedy for this present state of things a movement toward colonization, with especial attention to extension of educational advantages for rural Catholics, and instruction of urban Catholics in the advantages of rural life. "For so long as the rural South, the pastoral West, the agricultural East, the farming Middle States, remain solidly Protestant, as they now are, so long will this nation, this government, this whole people, remain solidly Protestant" ("The World's Parliament of Religions," pp. 1414, 1415).

It is a fact not easy to be accounted for that the statistics of no Christian communion in America are so defective, uncertain, and generally unsatisfactory as those of the most solidly organized and completely systematized of them all, the Roman Catholic Church.

[325:1] "Parliament of Religions," p. 1417. An obvious verbal misprint is corrected in the quotation.

[327:1] Bishop O'Gorman, pp. 439, 440. James Parton, in the "Atlantic Monthly," April and May, 1868. So lately as the year 1869 a long list of volumes of this scandalous rubbish continued to be offered to the public, under the indorsement of eminent names, by the "American and Foreign Christian Union," until the society was driven by public exposure into withdrawing them from sale. See "The Literature of the Coming Controversy," in "Putnam's Magazine" for January, 1869.

[331:1] Speech of Mr. M. T. Elder, of New Orleans, in the Catholic Congress at Chicago, 1893, quoted above, p. 322, note.

[333:1] Tiffany, "Protestant Episcopal Church," p. 459.

[335:1] Carroll, "Religious Forces of the United States," pp. 165-174; Bishop Tuttle, in "Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia," pp. 1575-1581; Professor John Fraser, in "Encyclopaedia Britannica," vol. xvi., pp. 825-828; Dorchester, "Christianity in the United States," pp. 538-646.

[338:1] "Report of the Seybert Commission," Philadelphia, Lippincott.



CHAPTER XIX.

THE CIVIL WAR—ANTECEDENTS AND CONSEQUENCES.

It has been observed that for nearly half a generation after the reaction began from the fervid excitement of the Millerite agitation no season of general revival was known in the American church.

These were years of immense material prosperity, "the golden age of our history."[340:1] The wealth of the nation in that time far more than doubled; its railroad mileage more than threefolded; population moved westward with rapidity and volume beyond precedent. Between 1845 and 1860 there were admitted seven new States and four organized Territories.

Withal it was a time of continually deepening intensity of political agitation. The patchwork of compromises and settlements contrived by make-shift politicians like Clay and Douglas would not hold; they tore out, and the rent was made worse. Part of the Compromise of 1850, which was to be something altogether sempiternal, was a Fugitive Slave Law so studiously base and wicked in its provisions as to stir the indignation of just and generous men whenever it was enforced, and to instruct and strengthen and consolidate an intelligent and conscientious opposition to slavery as not a century of antislavery lecturing and pamphleteering could have done. Four years later the sagacious Stephen Douglas introduced into Congress his ingenious permanent pacification scheme for taking the slavery question "out of politics" by perfidiously repealing the act under which the western Territories had for the third part of a century been pledged to freedom, and leaving the question of freedom or slavery to be decided by the first settlers upon the soil. It was understood on both sides that the effect of this measure would be to turn over the soil of Kansas to slavery; and for a moment there was a calm that did almost seem like peace. But the providential man for the emergency, Eli Thayer, boldly accepted the challenge under all the disadvantageous conditions, and appealed to the friends of freedom and righteousness to stand by him in "the Kansas Crusade." The appeal was to the same Christian sentiment which had just uttered its vain protest, through the almost unanimous voice of the ministers of the gospel, against the opening of the Territories to the possibility of slavery. It was taken up in the solemn spirit of religious duty. None who were present are likely to forget the scene when the emigrants from New Haven assembled in the North Church to be sped on their way with prayer and benediction; how the vast multitude were thrilled by the noble eloquence of Beecher, and how money came out of pocket when it was proposed to equip the colonists with arms for self-defense against the ferocity of "border ruffians." There were scenes like this in many a church and country prayer-meeting, where Christian hearts did not forget to pray "for them in bonds, as bound with them." There took place such a religious emigration as America had not known since the days of the first colonists. They went forth singing the words of Whittier:

We cross the prairies as of old Our fathers crossed the sea, To make the West, as they the East, The empire of the free.

Those were choice companies; it was said that in some of their settlements every third man was a college graduate. Thus it was that, not all at once, but after desperate tribulations, Kansas was saved for freedom. It was the turning-point in the "irrepressible conflict." The beam of the scales, which politicians had for forty years been trying to hold level, dipped in favor of liberty and justice, and it was hopeless thenceforth to restore the balance.[342:1]

Neither of the two characteristics of this time, the abounding material prosperity or the turbid political agitation, was favorable to that fixed attention to spiritual themes which promotes the revival of religion. But the conditions were about to be suddenly changed.

Suddenly, in the fall of 1857, came a business revulsion. Hard times followed. Men had leisure for thought and prayer, and anxieties that they were fain to cast upon God, seeking help and direction. The happy thought occurred to a good man, Jeremiah Lanphier, in the employ of the old North Dutch Church in New York, to open a room in the "consistory building" in Fulton Street as an oratory for the common prayer of so many business men as might be disposed to gather there in the hour from twelve to one o'clock, "with one accord to make their common supplications." The invitation was responded to at first by hardly more than "two or three." The number grew. The room overflowed. A second room was opened, and then a third, in the same building, till all its walls resounded with prayer and song. The example was followed until at one time, in the spring of 1858, no fewer than twenty "daily union prayer-meetings" were sustained in different parts of the city. Besides these, there was preaching at unwonted times and places. Burton's Theater, on Chambers Street, in the thick of the business houses, was thronged with eager listeners to the rudimental truths of personal religion, expounded and applied by great preachers. Everywhere the cardinal topics of practical religious duty, repentance and Christian faith, were themes of social conversation. All churches and ministers were full of activity and hope. "They that feared the Lord spake often one with another."

What was true of New York was true, in its measure, of every city, village, and hamlet in the land. It was the Lord's doing, marvelous in men's eyes. There was no human leadership or concert of action in bringing it about. It came. Not only were there no notable evangelists traveling the country; even the pastors of churches did little more than enter zealously into their happy duty in things made ready to their hand. Elsewhere, as at New York, the work began with the spontaneous gathering of private Christians, stirred by an unseen influence. Two circumstances tended to promote the diffusion of the revival. The Young Men's Christian Association, then a recent but rapidly spreading institution, furnished a natural center in each considerable town for mutual consultation and mutual incitement among young men of various sects. For this was another trait of the revival, that it went forward as a tide movement of the whole church, in disregard of the dividing-lines of sect. I know not what Christian communion, if any, was unaffected by it. The other favorable circumstance was the business interest taken in the revival by the secular press. Up to this time the church had been little accustomed to look for cooeperation to the newspaper, unless it was the religious weekly. But at this time that was fulfilled which was spoken of the prophet, that "holiness to the Lord" should be written upon the trains of commerce and upon all secular things. The sensation head-lines in enterprising journals proclaimed "Revival News," and smart reporters were detailed to the prayer-meeting or the sermon, as having greater popular interest, for the time, than the criminal trial or the political debate. Such papers as the "Tribune" and the "Herald," laying on men's breakfast-tables and counting-room desks the latest pungent word from the noon prayer-meeting or the evening sermon, did the work of many tract societies.

As the immediate result of the revival of 1857-58 it has been estimated that one million of members were added to the fellowship of the churches. But the ulterior result was greater. This revival was the introduction to a new era of the nation's spiritual life. It was the training-school for a force of lay evangelists for future work, eminent among whom is the name of Dwight Moody. And, like the Great Awakening of 1740, it was the providential preparation of the American church for an immediately impending peril the gravity of which there were none at the time far-sighted enough to predict. Looking backward, it is instructive for us to raise the question how the church would have passed through the decade of the sixties without the spiritual reinforcement that came to it amid the pentecostal scenes of 1857 and 1858.

And yet there were those among the old men who were ready to weep as they compared the building of the Lord's house with what they had known in their younger days: no sustained enforcement on the mind and conscience of alarming and heart-searching doctrines; no "protracted meetings" in which from day to day the warnings and invitations of the gospel were set forth before the hesitating mind; in the converts no severe and thorough "law-work," from the agonizing throes of which the soul was with no brief travail born to newness of life; but the free invitation, the ready and glad acceptance, the prompt enrollment on the Lord's side. Did not these things betoken a superficial piety, springing up like seed in the thin soil of rocky places? It was a question for later years to answer, and perhaps we have not the whole of the answer yet. Certainly the work was not as in the days of Edwards and Brainerd, nor as in the days of Nettleton and Finney; was it not, perhaps, more like the work in the days of Barnabas and Paul and Peter?

* * * * *

It does not appear that the spiritual quickening of 1857 had any effect in allaying the sharp controversy between northern and southern Christians on the subject of slavery. Perhaps it may have deepened and intensified it. The "southern apostasy," from principles universally accepted in 1818, had become complete and (so far as any utterance was permitted to reach the public) unanimous. The southern Methodists and the southern Baptists had, a dozen years before, relieved themselves from liability to rebuke, whether express or implied, from their northern brethren for complicity with the crimes involved in slavery, by seceding from fellowship. Into the councils of the Episcopalians and the Catholics this great question of public morality was never allowed to enter. The Presbyterians were divided into two bodies, each having its northern and its southern presbyteries; and the course of events in these two bodies may be taken as an indication of the drift of opinion and feeling. The Old-School body, having a strong southern element, remained silent, notwithstanding the open nullification of its declaration of 1818 by the presbytery of Harmony, S. C., resolving that "the existence of slavery is not opposed to the will of God," and the synod of Virginia declaring that "the General Assembly had no right to declare that relation sinful which Christ and his apostles teach to be consistent with the most unquestionable piety." The New-School body, patient and considerate toward its southern presbyteries, did not fail, nevertheless, to reassert the principles of righteousness, and in 1850 it declared slave-holding to be prima facie a subject of the discipline of the church. In 1853 it called upon its southern presbyteries to report what had been done in the case. One of them replied defiantly that its ministers and church-members were slave-holders by choice and on principle. When the General Assembly condemned this utterance, the entire southern part of the church seceded and set up a separate jurisdiction.[346:1]

There seems no reason to doubt the entire sincerity with which the southern church, in all its sects, had consecrated itself with religious devotion to the maintenance of that horrible and inhuman form of slavery which had drawn upon itself the condemnation of the civilized world. The earnest antislavery convictions which had characterized it only twenty-five years before, violently suppressed from utterance, seem to have perished by suffocation. The common sentiment of southern Christianity was expressed in that serious declaration of the Southern Presbyterian Church, during the war, of its "deep conviction of the divine appointment of domestic servitude," and of the "peculiar mission of the southern church to conserve the institution of slavery."[346:2]

At the North, on the other hand, with larger liberty, there was wider diversity of opinion. In general, the effect of continued discussion, of larger knowledge of facts, and of the enforcement on the common conscience, by the course of public events, of a sense of responsibility and duty in the matter, had been to make more intelligent, sober, and discriminating, and therefore more strong and steadfast, the resolution to keep clear of all complicity with slavery. There were few to assume the defense of that odious system, though there were some. There were many to object to scores of objectionable things in the conduct of abolitionists. And there were a very great number of honest, conscientious men who were appalled as they looked forward to the boldly threatened consequences of even the mildest action in opposition to slavery—the rending of the church, the ruin of the country, the horrors of civil war, and its uncertain event, issuing perhaps in the wider extension and firmer establishment of slavery itself. It was an immense power that the bold, resolute, rule-or-ruin supporters of the divine right of slavery held over the Christian public of the whole country, so long as they could keep these threats suspended in the air. It seemed to hold in the balance against a simple demand to execute righteousness toward a poor, oppressed, and helpless race, immense interests of patriotism, of humanity, of the kingdom of God itself. Presently the time came when these threats could no longer be kept aloft. The compliance demanded was clearly, decisively refused. The threats must either be executed or must fall to the ground amid general derision. But the moment that the threat was put in execution its power as a threat had ceased. With the first stroke against the life of the nation all great and noble motives, instead of being balanced against each other, were drawing together in the same direction. It ought not to have been a surprise to the religious leaders of disunion, ecclesiastical and political, to find that those who had most anxiously deprecated the attack upon the government should be among the most earnest and resolute to repel the attack when made.

No man can read the history of the American church in the Civil War intelligently who does not apprehend, however great the effort, that the Christian people of the South did really and sincerely believe themselves to be commissioned by the providence of God to "conserve the institution of slavery" as an institution of "divine appointment." Strange as the conviction seems, it is sure that the conviction of conscience in the southern army that it was right in waging war against the government of the country was as clear as the conviction, on the other side, of the duty of defending the government. The southern regiments, like the northern, were sent forth with prayer and benediction, and their camps, as well as those of their adversaries, were often the seats of earnest religious life.[348:1]

At the South the entire able-bodied population was soon called into military service, so that almost the whole church was in the army. At the North the churches at home hardly seemed diminished by the myriads sent to the field. It was amazing to see the charities and missions of the churches sustained with almost undiminished supplies, while the great enterprises of the Sanitary and Christian Commissions were set on foot and magnificently carried forward, for the physical, social, and spiritual good of the soldiers. Never was the gift of giving so abundantly bestowed on the church as in these stormy times. There was a feverish eagerness of life in all ways; if there was a too eager haste to make money among those that could be spared for business, there was a generous readiness in bestowing it. The little faith that expected to cancel and retrench, especially in foreign missions, in which it took sometimes three dollars in the collection to put one dollar into the work, was rebuked by the rising of the church to the height of the exigency.

One religious lesson that was learned as never before, on both sides of the conflict, was the lesson of Christian fellowship as against the prevailing folly of sectarian divisions, emulations, and jealousies. There were great drawings in this direction in the early days of the war, when men of the most unlike antecedents and associations gathered on the same platform, intent on the same work, and mutual aversions and partisan antagonisms melted away in the fervent heat of a common religious patriotism. But the lesson which was commended at home was enforced in the camp and the regiment by constraint of circumstances. The army chaplain, however one-sided he might have been in his parish, had to be on all sides with his kindly sympathy as soon as he joined his regiment. He learned in a right apostolic sense to become all things to all men, and, returning home, he did not forget the lesson. The delight of a fellowship truly catholic in the one work of Christ, once tasted, was not easily foregone. Already the current, perplexed with eddies, had begun to set in the direction of Christian unity. How much the common labors of Christian men and women and Christian ministers of every different name, through the five years of bloody strife, contributed to swell and speed the current, no one can measure.

According to a well-known law of the kingdom of heaven, the intense experiences of the war, both in the army and out of it, left no man just as he was before. To "them that were exercised thereby" they brought great promotion in the service of the King. The cases are not few nor inconspicuous of men coming forth from the temptations and the discipline of the military service every way stronger and better Christians than they entered it. The whole church gained higher conceptions of the joy and glory of self-sacrifice, and deeper and more vivid insight into the significance of vicarious suffering and death. The war was a rude school of theology, but it taught some things well. The church had need of all that it could learn, in preparation for the tasks and trials that were before it.

There were those, on the other hand, who emerged from the military service depraved and brutalized; and those who, in the rush of business incidental to the war, were not trained to self-sacrifice and duty, but habituated to the seeking of selfish interests in the midst of the public peril and affliction. We delight in the evidences that these cases were a small proportion of the whole. But even a small percentage of so many hundreds of thousands mounts up to a formidable total. The early years of the peace were so marked by crimes of violence that a frequent heading in the daily newspapers was "The Carnival of Crime." Prosperity, or the semblance of it, came in like a sudden flood. Immigration of an improved character poured into the country in greater volume than ever. Multitudes made haste to be rich, and fell into temptations and snares. The perilous era of enormous fortunes began.

FOOTNOTES:

[340:1] E. B. Andrews, "History of the United States," vol. ii., p. 66.

[342:1] Read "The Kansas Crusade," by Eli Thayer, Harpers, New York, 1889. It is lively reading, and indispensable to a full understanding of this part of the national history.

[346:1] Thompson, "The Presbyterians," p. 135.

[346:2] "Narrative of the State of Religion" of the Southern General Assembly of 1864.

[348:1] For interesting illustrations of this, see Alexander, "The Methodists, South," pp. 71-75. The history of the religious life of the northern army is superabundant and everywhere accessible.



CHAPTER XX.

AFTER THE WAR.

When the five years of rending and tearing had passed, in which slavery was dispossessed of its hold upon the nation, there was much to be done in reconstructing and readjusting the religious institutions of the country.

Throughout the seceding States buildings and endowments for religious uses had suffered in the general waste and destruction of property. Colleges and seminaries, in many instances, had seen their entire resources swept away through investment in the hopeless promises of the defeated government. Churches, boards, and like associations were widely disorganized through the vicissitudes of military occupation and the protracted absence or the death of men of experience and capacity.

The effect of the war upon denominational organizations had been various. There was no sect of all the church the members and ministers of which had not felt the sweep of the currents of popular opinion all about them. But the course of events in each denomination was in some measure illustrative of the character of its polity.

In the Roman Catholic Church the antagonisms of the conflict were as keenly felt as anywhere. Archbishop Hughes of New York, who, with Henry Ward Beecher and Bishop McIlvaine of Ohio, accepted a political mission from President Lincoln, was not more distinctly a Union man than Bishop Lynch of Charleston was a secessionist. But the firm texture of the hierarchical organization, held steadily in place by a central authority outside of the national boundaries, prevented any organic rupture. The Catholic Church in America was eminently fortunate at one point: the famous bull Quanta Cura, with its appended "Syllabus" of damnable errors, in which almost all the essential characteristics of the institutions of the American Republic are anathematized, was fulminated in 1864, when people in the United States had little time to think of ecclesiastical events taking place at such a distance. If this extraordinary document had been first published in a time of peace, and freely discussed in the newspapers of the time, it could hardly have failed to inflict the most serious embarrassment on the interests of Catholicism in America. Even now it keeps the Catholic clergy in a constantly explanatory attitude to show that the Syllabus does not really mean what to the ordinary reader it unmistakably seems to mean; and the work of explanation is made the more necessary and the more difficult by the decree of papal infallibility, which followed the Syllabus after a few years.

Simply on the ground of a de facto political independence, the southern dioceses of the Protestant Episcopal Church, following the principles and precedents of 1789, organized themselves into a "Church in the Confederate States." One of the southern bishops, Polk, of Louisiana, accepted a commission of major-general in the Confederate army, and relieved his brethren of any disciplinary questions that might have arisen in consequence by dying on the field from a cannon-shot. With admirable tact and good temper, the "Church in the United States" managed to ignore the existence of any secession; and when the alleged de facto independence ceased, the seceding bishops and their dioceses dropped quietly back into place without leaving a trace of the secession upon the record.

The southern organizations of the Methodists and Baptists were of twenty years' standing at the close of the war in 1865. The war had abolished the original cause of these divisions, but it had substituted others quite as serious. The exasperations of the war, and the still more acrimonious exasperations of the period of the political reconstruction and of the organization of northern missions at the South, gendered strifes that still delay the reintegration which is so visibly future of both of these divided denominations.

At the beginning of the war one of the most important of the denominations that still retained large northern and southern memberships in the same fellowship was the Old-School Presbyterian Church; and no national sect had made larger concessions to avert a breach of unity. When the General Assembly met at Philadelphia in May, 1861, amid the intense excitements of the opening war, it was still the hope of the habitual leaders and managers of the Assembly to avert a division by holding back that body from any expression of sentiment on the question on which the minds of Christians were stirred at that time with a profound and most religious fervor. But the Assembly took the matter out of the hands of its leaders, and by a great majority, in the words of a solemn and temperate resolution drawn by the venerable and conservative Dr. Gardiner Spring, declared its loyalty to the government and constitution of the country. With expressions of horror at the sacrilege of taking the church into the domain of politics, southern presbyteries one after another renounced the jurisdiction of the General Assembly that could be guilty of so shocking a profanation, and, uniting in a General Assembly of their own, proceeded with great promptitude to make equally emphatic deliverances on the opposite side of the same political question.[354:1] But nice logical consistency and accurate working within the lines of a church theory were more than could reasonably be expected of a people in so pitiable a plight. The difference on the subject of the right function of the church continued to be held as the ground for continuing the separation from the General Assembly after the alleged ground in political geography had ceased to be valid; the working motive for it was more obvious in the unfraternal and almost wantonly exasperating course of the national General Assembly during the war; but the best justification for it is to be found in the effective and useful working of the Southern Presbyterian Church. Considering the impoverishment and desolation of the southern country, the record of useful and self-denying work accomplished by this body, not only at home, but in foreign fields, is, from its beginning, an immensely honorable one.

Another occasion of reconstruction was the strong disposition of the liberated negroes to withdraw themselves from the tutelage of the churches in which they had been held, in the days of slavery, in a lower-caste relation. The eager entrance of the northern churches upon mission work among the blacks, to which access had long been barred by atrocious laws and by the savage fury of mobs, tended to promote this change. The multiplication and growth of organized negro denominations is a characteristic of the period after the war. There is reason to hope that the change may by and by, with the advance of education and moral training among this people, inure to their spiritual advantage. There is equal reason to fear that at present, in many cases, it works to their serious detriment.

The effect of the war was not exclusively divisive. In two instances, at least, it had the effect of healing old schisms. The southern secession from the New-School Presbyterian Church, which had come away in 1858 on the slavery issue, found itself in 1861 side by side with the southern secession from the Old School, and in full agreement with it in morals and politics. The two bodies were not long in finding that the doctrinal differences which a quarter-century before had seemed so insuperable were, after all, no serious hindrance to their coming together.

Even after the war was over, its healing power was felt, this time at the North. There was a honeycomb for Samson in the carcass of the monster. The two great Presbyterian sects at the North had found a common comfort in their relief from the perpetual festering irritation of the slavery question; they had softened toward each other in the glow of a religious patriotism; they had forgotten old antagonisms in common labors; and new issues had obscured the tenuous doctrinal disputes that had agitated the continent in 1837. Both parties grew tired and ashamed of the long and sometimes ill-natured quarrel. With such a disposition on both sides, terms of agreement could not fail in time to be found. For substance, the basis of reunion was this: that the New-School church should yield the point of organization, and the Old-School church should yield the point of doctrine; the New-School men should sustain the Old-School boards, and the Old-School men should tolerate the New-School heresies. The consolidation of the two sects into one powerful organization was consummated at Pittsburg, November 12, 1869, with every demonstration of joy and devout thanksgiving.

One important denomination, the Congregationalists, had had the distinguished advantage, through all these turbulent years, of having no southern membership. Out of all proportion to its numerical strength was the part which it took in those missions to the neglected populations of the southern country into which the various denominations, both of the South and of the North, entered with generous emulation while yet the war was still waging. Always leaders in advanced education, they not only, acting through the American Missionary Association, provided for primary and secondary schools for the negroes, but promoted the foundation of institutions of higher, and even of the highest, grade at Hampton, at Atlanta, at Tuskegee, at New Orleans, at Nashville, and at Washington. Many noble lives have been consecrated to this most Christlike work of lifting up the depressed. None will grudge a word of exceptional eulogy to the memory of that splendid character, General Samuel C. Armstrong, son of one of the early missionaries to the Sandwich Islands, who poured his inspiring soul into the building up of the "Normal Institute" at Hampton, Va., thus not only rearing a visible monument of his labor in the enduring buildings of that great and useful institution, but also establishing his memory, for as long as human gratitude can endure, in the hearts of hundreds of young men and young women, negro and Indian, whose lives are the better and nobler for their having known him as their teacher.

It cannot be justly claimed for the Congregationalists of the present day that they have lost nothing of that corporate unselfishness, seeking no sectarian aggrandizement, but only God's reign and righteousness, which had been the glory of their fathers. The studious efforts that have been made to cultivate among them a sectarian spirit, as if this were one of the Christian virtues, have not been fruitless. Nevertheless it may be seen that their work of education at the South has been conducted in no narrow spirit. The extending of their sect over new territory has been a most trivial and unimportant result of their widespread and efficient work. A far greater result has been the promotion among the colored people of a better education, a higher standard of morality, and an enlightened piety, through the influence of the graduates of these institutions, not only as pastors and as teachers, but in all sorts of trades and professions and as mothers of families.

This work of the Congregationalists is entitled to mention, not as exceptional, but only as eminent among like enterprises, in which few of the leading sects have failed to be represented. Extravagant expectations were at first entertained of immediate results in bringing the long-depressed race up to the common plane of civilization. But it cannot be said that reasonable and intelligent expectations have been disappointed. Experience has taught much as to the best conduct of such missions. The gift of a fund of a million dollars by the late John F. Slater, of Norwich, has through wise management conduced to this end. It has encouraged in the foremost institutions the combination of training to skilled productive labor with education in literature and science.

The inauguration of these systems of religious education at the South was the most conspicuously important of the immediate sequels of the Civil War. But this time was a time of great expansion of the activities of the church in all directions. The influx of immigration, temporarily checked by the hard times of 1857 and by the five years of war, came in again in such floods as never before.[357:1] The foreign immigration is always attended by a westward movement of the already settled population. The field of home missions became greater and more exacting than ever. The zeal of the church, educated during the war to higher ideas of self-sacrifice, rose to the occasion. The average yearly receipts of the various Protestant home missionary societies, which in the decade 1850-59 had been $808,000, rose in the next decade to more than $2,000,000, in the next to nearly $3,000,000, and for the seven years 1881-87 to $4,000,000.[358:1]

In the perils of abounding wealth by which the church after the war was beset, it was divine fatherly kindness that opened before it new and enlarged facilities of service to the kingdom of heaven among foreign nations. From the first feeble beginnings of foreign missions from America in India and in the Sandwich Islands, they had been attended by the manifest favor of God. When the convulsion of the Civil War came on, with prostrations of business houses, and enormous burdens of public obligation, and private beneficence drawn down, as it seemed, to its "bottom dollar" for new calls of patriotism and charity, and especially when the dollar in a man's pocket shrank to a half or a third of its value in the world's currency, it seemed as if the work of foreign missions would have to be turned over to Christians in lands less burdened with accumulated disadvantages. But here again the grandeur of the burden gave an inspiration of strength to the burden-bearer. From 1840 to 1849 the average yearly receipts of the various foreign missionary societies of the Protestant churches of the country had been a little more than a half-million. In the decade 1850-59 they had risen to $850,000; for the years of distress, 1860-69, they exceeded $1,300,000; for the eleven years 1870-80 the annual receipts in this behalf were $2,200,000; and in the seven years 1881-87 they were $3,000,000.[359:1]

We have seen how, only forty years before the return of peace, in the days of a humble equality in moderate estates, ardent souls exulted together in the inauguration of the era of democracy in beneficence, when every humblest giver might, through association and organization, have part in magnificent enterprises of Christian charity such as had theretofore been possible "only to princes or to men of princely possessions."[359:2] But with the return of civil peace we began to recognize that among ourselves was growing up a class of "men of princely possessions"—a class such as the American Republic never before had known.[359:3] Among those whose fortunes were reckoned by many millions or many tens of millions were men of sordid nature, whose wealth, ignobly won, was selfishly hoarded, and to whose names, as to that of the late Jay Gould, there is attached in the mind of the people a distinct note of infamy. But this was not in general the character of the American millionaire. There were those of nobler strain who felt a responsibility commensurate with the great power conferred by great riches, and held their wealth as in trust for mankind. Through the fidelity of men of this sort it has come to pass that the era of great fortunes in America has become conspicuous in the history of the whole world as the era of magnificent donations to benevolent ends. Within a few months of each other, from the little State of Connecticut, came the fund of a million given by John F. Slater in his lifetime for the benefit of the freedmen, the gift of a like sum for the like purpose from Daniel Hand, and the legacy of a million and a half for foreign missions from Deacon Otis of New London. Great gifts like these were frequently directed to objects which could not easily have been attained by the painful process of accumulating small donations. It was a period not only of splendid gifts to existing institutions, but of foundations for new universities, libraries, hospitals, and other institutions of the highest public service, foundations without parallel in human history for large munificence. To this period belong the beginnings of the Johns Hopkins University and Hospital at Baltimore, the University of Chicago, the Clarke University at Worcester, the Vanderbilt University at Nashville, the Leland Stanford, Jr., University of California, the Peabody and Enoch Pratt Libraries at Baltimore, the Lenox Library at New York, the great endowed libraries of Chicago, the Drexel Institute at Philadelphia, and the Armour Institute at Chicago. These are some of the names that most readily occur of foundations due mainly to individual liberality, set down at the risk of omitting others with equal claim for mention. Not all of these are to be referred to a religious spirit in the founders, but none of them can fail of a Christian influence and result. They prepare a foothold for such a forward stride of Christian civilization as our continent has never before known.

The sum of these gifts of millions, added to the great aggregates of contribution to the national missionary boards and societies, falls far short of the total contributions expended in cities, towns, and villages for the building of churches and the maintenance of the countless charities that cluster around them. The era following the war was preeminently a "building era." Every one knows that religious devotion is only one of the mingled motives that work together in such an enterprise as the building of a church; but, after all deductions, the voluntary gifts of Christian people for Christ's sake in the promotion of such works, when added to the grand totals already referred to, would make an amount that would overtax the ordinary imagination to conceive.

And yet it is not certain that this period of immense gifts of money is really a period of increased liberality in the church from the time, thirty or forty years before, when a millionaire was a rarity to be pointed out on the streets, and the possession of a hundred thousand dollars gave one a place among "The Rich Men of New York." In 1850 the total wealth of the United States was reported in the census as seven billions of dollars. In 1870, after twenty years, it had more than fourfolded, rising to thirty billions. Ten years later, according to the census, it had sixfolded, rising to forty-three billions.[361:1] From the point of view of One "sitting over against the treasury" it is not likely that any subsequent period has equaled in its gifts that early day when in New England the people "were wont to build a fine church as soon as they had houses for themselves,"[361:2] and when the messengers went from cabin to cabin to gather the gifts of "the college corn."

* * * * *

The greatest addition to the forces of the church in the period since the war has come from deploying into the field hitherto unused resources of personal service. The methods under which the personal activity of private Christians has formerly been organized for service have increased and multiplied, and old agencies have taken on new forms.

The earliest and to this day the most extensive of the organizations for utilizing the non-professional ministry in systematic religious labors is the Sunday-school. The considerable development of this instrumentality begins to be recognized after the Second Awakening in the early years of the present century. The prevailing characteristic of the American Sunday-school as distinguished from its British congener is that it is commonly a part of the equipment of the local church for the instruction of its own children, and incidentally one of the most important resources for its attractive work toward those that are without. But it is also recognized as one of the most flexible and adaptable "arms of the service" for aggressive work, whether in great cities or on the frontier. It was about the year 1825 that this work began to be organized on a national scale. But it is since the war that it has sprung into vastly greater efficiency. The agreement upon uniform courses of biblical study, to be followed simultaneously by many millions of pupils over the entire continent, has given a unity and coherence before unknown to the Sunday-school system; and it has resulted in extraordinary enterprise and activity on the part of competent editors and publishers to provide apparatus for the thorough study of the text, which bids fair in time to take away the reproach of the term "Sunday-schoolish" as applied to superficial, ignorant, or merely sentimental expositions of the Scriptures. The work of the "Sunday-school Times," in bringing within the reach of teachers all over the land the fruits of the world's best scholarship, is a signal fact in history—the most conspicuous of a series of like facts. The tendency, slow, of course, and partial, but powerful, is toward serious, faithful study and teaching, in which "the mind of the Spirit" is sought in the sacred text, with strenuous efforts of the teachable mind, with all the aids that can be brought from whatever quarter. The Sunday-school system, coextensive with Protestant Christianity in America, and often the forerunner of church and ministry, and, to a less extent and under more scrupulous control of clergy, adopted into the Catholic Church, has become one of the distinctive features of American Christianity.

An outgrowth of the Sunday-school system, which, under the conduct of a man of genius for organization, Dr. John H. Vincent, now a bishop of the Methodist Church, has expanded to magnificent dimensions, is that which is suggested by the name "Chautauqua." Beginning in the summer of 1874 with a fortnight's meeting in a grove beside Chautauqua Lake for the study of the methods of Sunday-school teaching, it led to the questions, how to connect the Sunday-school more intimately with other departments of the church and with other agencies in society; how to control in the interest of religious culture the forces, social, commercial, industrial, and educational, which, for good or evil, are affecting the Sunday-school pupils every day of the week. Striking root at other centers of assembly, east, west, and south, and combining its summer lectures with an organized system of home studies extending through the year, subject to written examinations, "Chautauqua," by the comprehensive scope of its studies and by the great multitude of its students, is entitled to be called, in no ignoble sense of the word, a university.[363:1] A weighty and unimpeachable testimony to the power and influence of the institution has been the recent organization of a Catholic Chautauqua, under the conduct of leading scholars and ecclesiastics of the Roman Church.

* * * * *

Another organization of the unpaid service of private Christians is the Young Men's Christian Association. Beginning in London in 1844, it had so far demonstrated its usefulness in 1851 as to attract favorable attention from visitors to the first of the World's Fairs. In the end of that year the Association in Boston was formed, and this was rapidly followed by others in the principal cities. It met a growing exigency in American society. In the organization of commerce and manufacture in larger establishments than formerly, the apprenticeship system had necessarily lapsed, and nothing had taken its place. Of old, young men put to the learning of any business were "articled" or "indentured" as apprentices to the head of the concern, who was placed in loco parentis, being invested both with the authority and with the responsibility of a father. Often the apprentices were received into the house of the master as their home, and according to legend and romance it was in order for the industrious and virtuous apprentice to marry the old man's daughter and succeed to the business. After the employees of a store came to be numbered by scores and the employees of a factory by hundreds, the word "apprentice" became obsolete in the American language. The employee was only a "hand," and there was danger that employers would forget that he was also a heart and a soul. This was the exigency that the Young Men's Christian Association came to supply. Men of conscience among employers and corporations recognized their opportunity and their duty. The new societies did not lack encouragement and financial aid from those to whom the character of the young men was not only a matter of Christian concern, but also a matter of business interest. In every considerable town the Association organized itself, and the work of equipment, and soon of building, went on apace. In 1887 the Association buildings in the United States and Canada were valued at three and a half millions. In 1896 there were in North America 1429 Associations, with about a quarter of a million of members, employing 1251 paid officers, and holding buildings and other real estate to the amount of nearly $20,000,000.

The work has not been without its vicissitudes. The wonderful revival of 1857, preeminently a laymen's movement, in many instances found its nidus in the rooms of the Associations; and their work was expanded and invigorated as a result of the revival. In 1861 came on the war. It broke up for the time the continental confederacy of Associations. Many of the local Associations were dissolved by the enlistment of their members. But out of the inspiring exigencies of the time grew up in the heart of the Associations the organization and work of the Christian Commission, cooeperating with the Sanitary Commission for the bodily and spiritual comfort of the armies in the field. The two organizations expended upward of eleven millions of dollars, the free gift of the people at home. After the war the survivors of those who had enlisted from the Associations came back to their home duties, in most cases, better men for all good service in consequence of their experience of military discipline.

* * * * *

A natural sequel to the organization and success of the Young Men's Christian Association is the institution of the Young Women's Christian Association, having like objects and methods in its proper sphere. This institution, too, owes the reason of its existence to changed social conditions. The plausible arguments of some earnest reformers in favor of opening careers of independent self-support to women, and the unquestionable and pathetic instances by which these arguments are enforced, are liable to some most serious and weighty offsets. Doubtless many and many a case of hardship has been relieved by the general introduction of this reform. But the result has been the gathering in large towns of populations of unmarried, self-supporting young women, severed from home duties and influences, and, out of business hours, under no effective restraints of rule. There is a rush from the country into the city of applicants for employment, and wages sink to less than a living rate. We are confronted with an artificial and perilous condition for the church to deal with, especially in the largest cities. And of the various instrumentalities to this end, the Young Women's Christian Association is one of the most effective.

* * * * *

The development of organized activity among women has been a conspicuous characteristic of this period. From the beginning of our churches the charitable sewing-circle or "Dorcas Society" has been known as a center both of prayer and of labor. But in this period the organization of women for charitable service has been on a continental scale.

In 1874, in an outburst of zeal, "women's crusades" were undertaken, especially in some western towns, in which bands of singing and praying women went in person to tippling-houses and even worse resorts, to assail them, visibly and audibly, with these spiritual weapons. The crusades, so long as they were a novelty, were not without result. Spectacular prayers, offered with one eye on the heavens and the other eye watching the impressions made on the human auditor, are not in vain; they have their reward. But the really important result of the "crusades" was the organization of the "Women's Christian Temperance Union," which has extended in all directions to the utmost bounds of the country, and has accomplished work of undoubted value, while attempting other work the value of which is open to debate.

The separate organization of women for the support and management of missions began on an extensive scale, in 1868, with the Women's Board of Missions, instituted in alliance with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions of the Congregationalist churches. The example at once commended itself to the imitation of all, so that all the principal mission boards of the Protestant churches are in alliance with actively working women's boards.

The training acquired in these and other organizations by many women of exceptional taste and talent for the conduct of large affairs has tended still further to widen the field of their activity. The ends of the earth, as well as the dark places nearer home, have felt the salutary results of it.[367:1]

In this brief and most incomplete sketch of the origin of one of the distinguishing features of contemporary Christianity—the application of the systematized activity of private Christians—no mention has been made of the corps of "colporteurs," or book-peddlers, employed by religious publication societies, nor of the vastly useful work of laymen employed as city missionaries, nor of the houses and orders of sisters wholly devoted to pious and charitable work. Such work, though the ceremony of ordination may have been omitted, is rather clerical or professional than laical. It is on this account the better suited to the genius of the Catholic Church, whose ages of experience in the conduct of such organizations, and whose fine examples of economy and efficiency in the use of them, have put all American Christendom under obligation. Among Protestant sects the Lutherans, the Episcopalians, and the Methodists have (after the Moravians) shown themselves readiest to profit by the example. But a far more widely beneficent service than that of all the nursing "orders" together, both Catholic and Protestant, and one not less Christian, while it is characteristically American in its method, is that of the annually increasing army of faithful women professionally educated to the work of nursing, at a hundred hospitals, and fulfilling their vocation individually and on business principles. The education of nurses is a sequel of the war and one of the beneficent fruits of it.

* * * * *

Not the least important item in the organization of lay activity is the marvelously rapid growth of the "Young People's Society of Christian Endeavor." In February, 1881, a pastor in Portland, Me., the Rev. Francis E. Clark, organized into an association within his church a number of young people pledged to certain rules of regular attendance and participation in the association meetings and of cooeperation in useful service. There seems to have been no particular originality in the plan, but through some felicity in arrangement and opportuneness in the time it caught like a forest fire, and in an amazingly short time ran through the country and around the world. One wise precaution was taken in the basis of the organization: it was provided that it should not interfere with any member's fidelity to his church or his sect, but rather promote it. Doubtless jealousy of its influence was thus in some measure forestalled and averted. But in the rapid spread of the Society those who were on guard for the interests of the several sects recognized a danger in too free affiliations outside of sectarian lines, and soon there were instituted, in like forms of rule, "Epworth Leagues" for Methodists, "Westminster Leagues" for Presbyterians, "Luther Leagues" for Lutherans, "St. Andrew's Brotherhoods" for Episcopalians, "The Baptist Young People's Union," and yet others for yet other sects. According to the latest reports, the total pledged membership of this order of associated young disciples, in these various ramifications, is about 4,500,000[369:1]—this in the United States alone. Of the Christian Endeavor Societies still adhering to the old name and constitution, there are in all the world 47,009, of which 11,119 are "Junior Endeavor Societies." The total membership is 2,820,540.[369:2]

Contemporary currents of theological thought, setting away from the excessive individualism which has characterized the churches of the Great Awakening, confirm the tendency of the Christian life toward a vigorous and even absorbing external activity. The duty of the church to human society is made a part of the required curriculum of study in preparation for the ministry, in fully equipped theological seminaries. If ever it has been a just reproach of the church that its frequenters were so absorbed in the saving of their own souls that they forgot the multitude about them, that reproach is fast passing away. "The Institutional Church," as the clumsy phrase goes, cares for soul and body, for family and municipal and national life. Its saving sacraments are neither two nor seven, but seventy times seven. They include the bath-tub as well as the font; the coffee-house and cook-shop as well as the Holy Supper; the gymnasium as well as the prayer-meeting. The "college settlement" plants colonies of the best life of the church in regions which men of little faith are tempted to speak of as "God-forsaken." The Salvation Army, with its noisy and eccentric ways, and its effective discipline, and its most Christian principle of setting every rescued man at work to aid in the rescue of others, is welcomed by all orders of the church, and honored according to the measure of its usefulness, and even of its faithful effort to be useful.

* * * * *

It is not to be supposed that this immense, unprecedented growth of outward activity can have been gained without some corresponding loss. The time is not long gone by, when the sustained contemplation of the deep things of the cross, and the lofty things in the divine nature, and the subtile and elusive facts concerning the human constitution and character and the working of the human will, were eminently characteristic of the religious life of the American church. In the times when that life was stirred to its most strenuous activity, it was marked by the vicissitude of prolonged passions of painful sensibility at the consciousness of sin, and ecstasies of delight in the contemplation of the infinity of God and the glory of the Saviour and his salvation. Every one who is conversant with the religious biography of the generations before our own, knows of the still hours and days set apart for the severe inward scrutiny of motives and "frames" and the grounds of one's hope. However truly the church of to-day may judge that the piety of their fathers was disproportioned and morbidly introspective and unduly concerned about one's own salvation, it is none the less true that the reaction from its excesses is violent, and is providing for itself a new reaction. "The contemplative orders," whether among Catholics or Protestants, do not find the soil and climate of America congenial. And yet there is a mission-field here for the mystic and the quietist; and when the stir-about activity of our generation suffers their calm voices to be heard, there are not a few to give ear.

* * * * *

An event of great historical importance, which cannot be determined to a precise date, but which belongs more to this period than to any other, is the loss of the Scotch and Puritan Sabbath, or, as many like to call it, the American Sabbath. The law of the Westminster divines on this subject, it may be affirmed without fear of contradiction from any quarter, does not coincide in its language with the law of God as expressed either in the Old Testament or in the New. The Westminster rule requires, as if with a "Thus saith the Lord," that on the first day of the week, instead of the seventh, men shall desist not only from labor but from recreation, and "spend the whole time in the public and private exercises of God's worship, except so much as is to be taken up in the works of necessity and mercy."[371:1] This interpretation and expansion of the Fourth Commandment has never attained to more than a sectarian and provincial authority; but the overmastering Puritan influence, both of Virginia and of New England, combined with the Scotch-Irish influence, made it for a long time dominant in America. Even those who quite declined to admit the divine authority of the glosses upon the commandment felt constrained to "submit to the ordinances of man for the Lord's sake." But it was inevitable that with the vast increase of the travel and sojourn of American Christians in other lands of Christendom, and the multitudinous immigration into America from other lands than Great Britain, the tradition from the Westminster elders should come to be openly disputed within the church, and should be disregarded even when not denied. It was not only inevitable; it was a Christian duty distinctly enjoined by apostolic authority.[372:1] The five years of war, during which Christians of various lands and creeds intermingled as never before, and the Sunday laws were dumb "inter arma" not only in the field but among the home churches, did perhaps even more to break the force of the tradition, and to lead in a perilous and demoralizing reaction. Some reaction was inevitable. The church must needs suffer the evil consequence of overstraining the law of God. From the Sunday of ascetic self-denial—"a day for a man to afflict his soul"—there was a ready rush into utter recklessness of the law and privilege of rest. In the church there was wrought sore damage to weak consciences; men acted, not from intelligent conviction, but from lack of conviction, and allowing themselves in self-indulgences of the rightfulness of which they were dubious, they "condemned themselves in that which they allowed." The consequence in civil society was alike disastrous. Early legislation had not steered clear of the error of attempting to enforce Sabbath-keeping as a religious duty by civil penalties; and some relics of that mistake remained, and still remain, on some of the statute-books. The just protest against this wrong was, of course, undiscriminating, tending to defeat the righteous and most salutary laws that aimed simply to secure for the citizen the privilege of a weekly day of rest and to secure the holiday thus ordained by law from being perverted into a nuisance. The social change which is still in progress along these lines no wise Christian patriot can contemplate with complacency. It threatens, when complete, to deprive us of that universal quiet Sabbath rest which has been one of the glories of American social life, and an important element in its economic prosperity, and to give in place of it, to some, no assurance of a Sabbath rest at all, to others, a Sabbath of revelry and debauch.

FOOTNOTES:

[354:1] Thompson, "The Presbyterians," chap. xiii.; Johnson, "The Southern Presbyterians," chap. v.

[357:1] The immigration is thus given by decades, with an illustrative diagram, by Dr. Dorchester, "Christianity in the United States," p. 759:

1825-35 330,737 1835-45 707,770 1845-55 2,944,833 1855-65 1,578,483 1865-75 3,234,090 1875-85 4,061,278

[358:1] Ibid., p. 714. We have quoted in round numbers. The figures do not include the large sums expended annually in the colportage work of Bible and tract societies, in Sunday school missions, and in the building of churches and parsonages. In the accounts of the last-named most effective enterprise the small amounts received and appropriated to aid in building would represent manifold more gathered and expended by the pioneer churches on the ground.

[359:1] Dorchester, op. cit., p. 709.

[359:2] Above, pp. 259, 260.

[359:3] A pamphlet published at the office of the New York "Sun," away back in the early thirties, was formerly in my possession, which undertook to give, under the title "The Rich Men of New York," the name of every person in that city who was worth more than one hundred thousand dollars—and it was not a large pamphlet, either. As nearly as I remember, there were less than a half-dozen names credited with more than a million, and one solitary name, that of John Jacob Astor, was reported as good for the enormous and almost incredible sum of ten millions.

[361:1] Dorchester, "Christianity in the United States," p. 715.

[361:2] See above, p. 70.

[363:1] Bishop Vincent, in "Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia," p. 441. The number of students in the "Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle" already in 1891 exceeded twenty-five thousand.

[367:1] Among the titles omitted from this list are the various "Lend-a-Hand Clubs," and "10 x 1 = 10 Clubs," and circles of "King's Daughters," and like coteries, that have been inspired by the tales and the "four mottoes" of Edward Everett Hale.

[369:1] Dr. H. K. Carroll, in "The Independent," April 1, 1897.

[369:2] "Congregationalist Handbook for 1897," p. 35.

[371:1] Westminster Shorter Catechism, Ans. 60. The commentaries on the Catechism, which are many, like Gemara upon Mishna, build wider and higher the "fence around the law," in a fashion truly rabbinic.

[372:1] Colossians, ii. 16.



CHAPTER XXI.

THE CHURCH IN THEOLOGY AND LITERATURE.

The rapid review of three crowded centuries, which is all that the narrowly prescribed limits of this volume have permitted, has necessarily been mainly restricted to external facts. But looking back over the course of visible events, it is not impossible for acute minds devoted to such study to trace the stream of thought and sentiment that is sometimes hidden from direct view by the overgrowth which itself has nourished.

We have seen a profound spiritual change, renewing the face of the land and leaving its indelible impress on successive generations, springing from the profoundest contemplations of God and his work of salvation through Jesus Christ, and then bringing back into thoughtful and teachable minds new questions to be solved and new discoveries of truth to be pondered. The one school of theological opinion and inquiry that can be described as characteristically American is the theology of the Great Awakening. The disciples of this school, in all its divergent branches, agree in looking back to the first Jonathan Edwards as the founder of it. Through its generations it has shown a striking sequence and continuity of intellectual and spiritual life, each generation answering questions put to it by its predecessor, while propounding new questions to the generation following. After the classical writings of its first founders, the most widely influential production of this school is the "Theology Explained and Defended in a Series of Sermons" of President Dwight. This had the advantage over some other systems of having been preached, and thus proved to be preachable. The "series of sermons" was that delivered to successive generations of college students at Yale at a time of prevailing skepticism, when every statement of the college pulpit was liable to sharp and not too friendly scrutiny; and it was preached with the fixed purpose of convincing and converting the young men who heard it. The audience, the occasion, and the man—a fervid Christian, and a born poet and orator—combined to produce a work of wide and enduring influence. The dynasty of the Edwardeans is continued down to the middle of the nineteenth century, and later, through different lines, ending in Emmons of Franklin, Taylor of New Haven, and Finney of Oberlin, and is represented among the living by the venerable Edwards A. Park, of Andover, who adds to that power of sustained speculative thinking in a straight line which is characteristic of the whole school, a wide learning in the whole field of theological literature, which had not been usual among his predecessors. It is a prevailing trait of this theology, born of the great revival, that it has constantly held before itself not only the question, What is truth? but also the question, How shall it be preached? It has never ceased to be a revival theology.

A bold and open breach of traditionary assumptions and habits of reasoning was made by Horace Bushnell. This was a theologian of a different type from his New England predecessors. He was of a temper little disposed to accept either methods or results as a local tradition, and inclined rather to prefer that which had been "hammered out on his own anvil." And yet, while very free in manifesting his small respect for the "logicking" by syllogistic processes which had been the pride of the theological chair and even the pulpit in America, and while declining the use of current phraseologies even for the expression of current ideas, he held himself loyally subject to the canon of the Scriptures as his rule of faith, and deferential to the voice of the church catholic as uttered in the concord of testimony of holy men in all ages. Endowed with a poet's power of intuition, uplifted by a fervid piety, uttering himself in a literary style singularly rich and melodious, it is not strange that such a man should have made large contributions to the theological thought of his own and later times. In natural theology, his discourses on "The Moral Uses of Dark Things" (1869), and his longest continuous work, on "Nature and the Supernatural" (1858), even though read rather as prose-poems than as arguments, sound distinctly new notes in the treatment of their theme. In "God in Christ" (1849), "Christ in Theology" (1851), "The Vicarious Sacrifice" (1866), and "Forgiveness and Law" (1874), and in a notable article in the "New Englander" for November, 1854, entitled "The Christian Trinity a Practical Truth," the great topics of the Christian system were dealt with all the more effectively, in the minds of thoughtful readers in this and other lands, for cries of alarm and newspaper and pulpit impeachments of heresy that were sent forth. But that work of his which most nearly made as well as marked an epoch in American church history was the treatise of "Christian Nurture" (1847). This, with the protracted controversy that followed upon the publication of it, was a powerful influence in lifting the American church out of the rut of mere individualism that had been wearing deeper and deeper from the days of the Great Awakening.

Another wholesome and edifying debate was occasioned by the publications that went forth from the college and theological seminary of the German Reformed Church, situated at Mercersburg in Pennsylvania. At this institution was effected a fruitful union of American and German theology; the result was to commend to the general attention aspects of truth, philosophical, theological, and historical, not previously current among American Protestants. The book of Dr. John Williamson Nevin, entitled "The Mystical Presence: A Vindication of the Reformed or Calvinistic Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist," revealed to the vast multitude of churches and ministers that gloried in the name of Calvinist the fact that on the most distinctive article of Calvinism they were not Calvinists at all, but Zwinglians. The enunciation of the standard doctrine of the various Presbyterian churches excited among themselves a clamor of "Heresy!" and the doctrine of Calvin was put upon trial before the Calvinists. The outcome of a discussion that extended itself far beyond the boundaries of the comparatively small and uninfluential German Reformed Church was to elevate the point of view and broaden the horizon of American students of the constitution and history of the church. Later generations of such students owe no light obligation to the fidelity and courage of Dr. Nevin, as well as to the erudition and immense productive diligence of his associate, Dr. Philip Schaff.[377:1]

It is incidental to the prevailing method of instruction in theology by a course of prelections in which the teacher reads to his class in detail his own original summa theologiae, that the American press has been prolific of ponderous volumes of systematic divinity. Among the more notable of these systems are those of Leonard Woods (in five volumes) and of Enoch Pond; of the two Drs. Hodge, father and son; of Robert J. Breckinridge and James H. Thornwell and Robert L. Dabney; and the "Systematic Theology" of a much younger man, Dr. Augustus H. Strong, of Rochester Seminary, which has won for itself very unusual and wide respect. Exceptional for ability, as well as for its originality of conception, is "The Republic of God: An Institute of Theology," by Elisha Mulford, a disciple of Maurice and of the realist philosophy, the thought of whose whole life is contained in this and his kindred work on "The Nation."

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How great is the debt which the church owes to its heretics is frequently illustrated in the progress of Christianity in America. If it had not been for the Unitarian defection in New England, and for the attacks from Germany upon the historicity of the gospels, the theologians of America might to this day have been engrossed in "threshing old straw" in endless debates on "fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute." The exigencies of controversy forced the study of the original documents of the church. From his entrance upon his professorship at Andover, in 1810, the eager enthusiasm of Moses Stuart made him the father of exegetical science not only for America, but for all the English-speaking countries. His not less eminent pupil and associate, Edward Robinson, later of the Union Seminary, New York, created out of nothing the study of biblical geography. Associating with himself the most accomplished living Arabist, Eli Smith, of the American mission at Beirut, he made those "Biblical Researches in Palestine" which have been the foundation on which all later explorers have built. Another American missionary, Dr. W. M. Thomson, has given the most valuable popular exposition of the same subject in his volumes on "The Land and the Book." With the exception of Dr. Henry Clay Trumbull in his determination of the site of Kadesh-barnea, the American successors to Robinson in the original exploration of the Bible lands have made few additions to our knowledge. But in the department of biblical archaeology the work of Drs. Ward, Peters, and Hilprecht in the mounds of Babylonia, and of Mr. Bliss in Palestine, has added not a little to the credit of the American church against the heavy balance which we owe to the scholarship of Europe.

Monumental works in lexicography have been produced by Dr. Thayer, of Cambridge, on New Testament Greek; by Professor Francis Brown, of New York, in conjunction with Canon Driver, of Oxford, on the languages of the Old Testament; and by Dr. Sophocles, of Cambridge, on the Byzantine Greek.

In the work of the textual criticism of the Scriptures, notwithstanding its remoteness from the manuscript sources of study, America has furnished two names that are held in honor throughout the learned world: among the recent dead, Ezra Abbot, of Cambridge, universally beloved and lamented; and among the living, Caspar Rene Gregory, successor to the labors and the fame of Tischendorf. A third name is that of the late Dr. Isaac H. Hall, the successful collator of Syriac New Testament manuscripts.

In those studies of the higher criticism which at the present day are absorbing so much of the attention of biblical scholars, and the progress of which is watched with reasonable anxiety for their bearing on that dogma of the absolute inerrancy of the canonical Scriptures which has so commonly been postulated as the foundation of Protestant systems of revealed theology, the American church has taken eager interest. An eminent, and in some respects the foremost, place among the leaders in America of these investigations into the substructure, if not of the Christian faith, at least of the work of the system-builders, is held by Professor W. H. Green, of Princeton, whose painstaking essays in the higher criticism have done much to stimulate the studies of younger men who have come out at conclusions different from his own. The works of Professors Briggs, of Union Seminary, and Henry P. Smith, of Lane Seminary, have had the invaluable advantage of being commended to public attention by ecclesiastical processes and debates. The two volumes of Professor Bacon, of Yale, have been recognized by the foremost scholars of Great Britain and Germany as containing original contributions toward the solution of the problem of Pentateuchal analysis. The intricate critical questions presented by the Book of Judges have been handled with supreme ability by Professor Moore, of Andover, in his commentary on that book. A desideratum in biblical literature has been well supplied by Professor Bissell, of Hartford, in a work on the Old Testament Apocrypha. But the magnum opus of American biblical scholarship, associating with itself the best learning and ability of other nations, is the publication, under the direction of Professor Haupt, of Baltimore, of a critical text of the entire Scriptures in the original languages, with new translations and notes, for the use of scholars.

The undeniably grave theological difficulties occasioned by the results of critical study have given rise to a novel dogma concerning the Scriptures, which, if it may justly be claimed as a product of the Princeton Seminary, would seem to discredit the modest boast of the venerated Dr. Charles Hodge, that "Princeton has never originated a new idea." It consists in the hypothesis of an "original autograph" of the Scriptures, the precise contents of which are now undiscoverable, but which differed from any existing text in being absolutely free from error of any kind. The hypothesis has no small advantage in this, that if it is not susceptible of proof, it is equally secure from refutation. If not practically useful, it is at least novel, and on this ground entitled to mention in recounting the contributions of the American church to theology at a really perilous point in the progress of biblical study.

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The field of church history, aside from local and sectarian histories, was late in being invaded by American theologians. For many generations the theology of America was distinctly unhistorical, speculative, and provincial. But a change in this respect was inevitably sure to come. The strong propensity of the national mind toward historical studies is illustrated by the large proportion of historical works among the masterpieces of our literature, whether in prose or in verse. It would seem as if our conscious poverty in historical monuments and traditions had engendered an eager hunger for history. No travelers in ancient lands are such enthusiasts in seeking the monuments of remote ages as those whose homes are in regions not two generations removed from the prehistoric wilderness. It was certain that as soon as theology should begin to be taught to American students in its relation to the history of the kingdom of Christ, the charm of this method would be keenly felt.

We may assume the date of 1853 as an epoch from which to date this new era of theological study. It was in that year that the gifted, learned, and inspiring teacher, Henry Boynton Smith, was transferred from the chair of history in Union Theological Seminary, New York, to the chair of systematic theology. Through his premature and most lamented death the church has failed of receiving that system of doctrine which had been hoped for at his hands. But the historic spirit which characterized him has ever since been characteristic of that seminary. It is illustrative of the changed tone of theologizing that after the death of Professor Smith, in the reorganization of the faculty of that important institution, it was manned in the three chief departments, exegetical, dogmatic, and practical, by men whose eminent distinction was in the line of church history. The names of Hitchcock, Schaff, and Shedd cannot be mentioned without bringing to mind some of the most valuable gifts that America has made to the literature of the universal church. If to these we add the names of George Park Fisher, of Yale, and Bishop Hurst, and Alexander V. G. Allen, of Cambridge, author of "The Continuity of Christian Thought," and Henry Charles Lea, of Philadelphia, we have already vindicated for American scholarship a high place in this department of Christian literature.

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In practical theology the productiveness of the American church in the matter of sermons has been so copious that even for the briefest mention some narrow rule of exclusion must be followed. There is no doubt that in a multitude of cases the noblest utterances of the American pulpit, being unwritten, have never come into literature, but have survived for a time as a glowing memory, and then a fading tradition. The statement applies to many of the most famous revival preachers; and in consequence of a prevalent prejudice against the writing of sermons, it applies especially to the great Methodist and Baptist preachers, whose representation on the shelves of libraries is most disproportionate to their influence on the course of the kingdom of Christ. Of other sermons,—and good sermons,—printed and published, many have had an influence almost as restricted and as evanescent as the utterances of the pulpit improvisator. If we confine ourselves to those sermons that have survived their generation or won attention beyond the limits of local interest or of sectarian fellowship, the list will not be unmanageably long.

In the early years of the nineteenth century the Unitarian pulpits of Boston were adorned with every literary grace known to the rhetoric of that period. The luster of Channing's fame has outshone and outlasted that of his associates; and yet these were stars of hardly less magnitude. The two Wares, father and son, the younger Buckminster, whose singular power as a preacher was known not only to wondering hearers, but to readers on both sides of the ocean, Gannett and Dewey—these were among them; and, in the next generation, Henry W. Bellows, Thomas Starr King, and James Freeman Clarke. No body of clergy of like size was ever so resplendent with talents and accomplishments. The names alone of those who left the Unitarian pulpit for a literary or political career—Sparks, Everett, Bancroft, Emerson, Ripley, Palfrey, Upham, among them—are a constellation by themselves.

To the merely literary critic those earnest preachers, such as Lyman and Edward Beecher, Griffin, Sereno Dwight, Wayland, and Kirk, who felt called of God to withstand, in Boston, this splendid array of not less earnest men, were clearly inferior to their antagonists. But they were successful.

A few years later, the preeminent American writer of sermons to be read and pondered in every part of the world was Horace Bushnell; as the great popular preacher, whose words, caught burning from his lips, rolled around the world in a perpetual stream, was Henry Ward Beecher. Widely different from either of these, and yet in an honorable sense successor to the fame of both, was Phillips Brooks, of all American preachers most widely beloved and honored in all parts of the church.

Of living preachers whose sermons have already attained a place of honor in libraries at home and abroad, the name of Bishop F. D. Huntington stands among the foremost; and those who have been charmed by the brilliant rhetoric and instructed from the copious learning of his college classmate, Dr. Richard S. Storrs, must feel it a wrong done to our national literature that these gifts should be chiefly known to the reading public only by occasional discourses and by two valuable studies in religious history instead of by volumes of sermons. Perhaps no American pulpits have to-day a wider hearing beyond the sea than two that stand within hearing distance of each other on New Haven Green, occupied by Theodore T. Munger and Newman Smyth. The pulpit of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, has not ceased, since the accession of Lyman Abbott, to wield a wide and weighty influence,—less wide, but in some respects more weighty, than in the days of his famous predecessor,—by reason of a well-deserved reputation for biblical learning and insight, and for candor and wisdom in applying Scriptural principles to the solution of current questions.

The early American theology was, as we have seen, a rhetorical and not a merely scholastic theology—a theology to be preached.[384:1] In like manner, the American pulpit in those days was distinctly theological, like a professor's chair. One who studies with care the pulpit of to-day, in those volumes that seem to command the widest and most enduring attention, will find that it is to a large extent apologetic, addressing itself to the abating of doubts and objections to the Christian system, or, recognizing the existing doubts, urging the religious duties that are nevertheless incumbent on the doubting mind. It has ceased to assume the substantial soundness of the hearer in the main principles of orthodox opinion, and regards him as one to be held to the church by attraction, persuasion, or argument. The result of this attitude of the preacher is to make the pulpit studiously, and even eagerly, attractive and interesting. This virtue has its corresponding fault. The American preacher of to-day is little in danger of being dull; his peril lies at the other extreme. His temptation is rather to the feebleness of extravagant statement, and to an overstrained and theatric rhetoric such as some persons find so attractive in the discourses of Dr. Talmage, and others find repulsive and intolerable.

A direction in which the literature of practical theology in America is sure to expand itself in the immediate future is indicated in the title of a recent work of that versatile and useful writer, Dr. Washington Gladden, "Applied Christianity." The salutary conviction that political economy cannot be relied on by itself to adjust all the intricate relations of men under modern conditions of life, that the ethical questions that arise are not going to solve themselves automatically by the law of demand and supply, that the gospel and the church and the Spirit of Christ have somewhat to do in the matter, has been settling itself deeply into the minds of Christian believers. The impression that the questions between labor and capital, between sordid poverty and overgrown wealth, were old-world questions, of which we of the New World are relieved, is effectually dispelled. Thus far there is not much of history to be written under this head, but somewhat of prophecy. It is now understood, and felt in the conscience, that these questions are for every Christian to consider, and for those undertaking the cure of souls to make the subject of their faithful, laborious professional study. The founding of professorships of social ethics in the theological seminaries must lead to important and speedy results in the efficiency of churches and pastors in dealing with this difficult class of problems.[386:1] But whatever advances shall be made in the future, no small part of the impulse toward them will be recognized as coming from, or rather through, the inspiring and most Christian humanitarian writings and the personal influence and example of Edward Everett Hale.

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In one noble department of religious literature, the liturgical, the record of the American church is meager. The reaction among the early colonists and many of the later settlers against forms of worship imposed by political authority was violent. Seeking for a logical basis, it planted itself on the assumption that no form (unless an improvised form) is permitted in public worship, except such as are sanctioned by express word of Scripture. In their sturdy resolution to throw off and break up the yoke, which neither they nor their fathers had been able to bear, of ordinances and traditions complicated with not a little of debilitating superstition, the extreme Puritans of England and Scotland rejected the whole system of holy days in the Christian year, including the authentic anniversaries of Passover and Pentecost, and discontinued the use of religious ceremonies at marriages and funerals.[386:2] The only liturgical compositions that have come down to us from the first generations are the various attempts, in various degrees of harshness and rudeness, at the versification of psalms and other Scriptures for singing. The emancipation of the church from its bondage to an artificial dogma came, as we have already seen, with the Great Awakening and the introduction of Watts's "Psalms of David, Imitated in the Language of the New Testament."[387:1] After the Revolution, at the request of the General Association of Connecticut and the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, Timothy Dwight completed the work of Watts by versifying a few omitted psalms,[387:2] and added a brief selection of hymns, chiefly in the grave and solemn Scriptural style of Watts and Doddridge. Then followed, in successive tides, from England, the copious hymnody of the Methodist revival, both Calvinist and Wesleyan, of the Evangelical revival, and now at last of the Oxford revival, with its affluence of translations from the ancient hymnists, as well as of original hymns. It is doubtless owing to this abundant intermittent inflow from England that the production of American hymns has been so scanty. Only a few writers, among them Thomas Hastings and Ray Palmer, have written each a considerable number of hymns that have taken root in the common use of the church. Not a few names besides are associated each with some one or two or three lyrics that have won an enduring place in the affections of Christian worshipers. The "gospel hymns" which have flowed from many pens in increasing volume since the revival of 1857 have proved their great usefulness, especially in connection with the ministry of Messrs. Moody and Sankey; but they are, even the best of them, short-lived. After their season the church seems not unwilling to let them die.