History of American Christianity — Chapter XIII Reconstruction, Part 2

* * * * * The two decades from the close of the War of Independence include the period of the lowest ebb-tide of vitality in the history of American Christianity.

The spirit of half-belief or unbelief that prevailed on the other side of the sea, both in the church and out of it, was manifest also here.

Happily the tide of foreign immigration at this time was stayed, and the church had opportunity to gather strength for the immense task that was presently to be devolved upon it.

But the westward movement of our own population was now beginning to pour down the western slope of the Alleghanies into the great Mississippi basin.

It was observed by the Methodist preachers that the members of their societies who had, through fear, necessity, or choice, moved into the back settlements and into new parts of the country, as soon as peace was settled and the way was open solicited the preachers to come among them, and so the work followed them to the west.

[219:1] In the years 1791-1810 occurred the great movement of population from Virginia to Kentucky and from Carolina to Tennessee.

It was reckoned that one fourth of the Baptists of Virginia had removed to Kentucky, and yet they hardly leavened the lump of early frontier barbarism.

The Presbyterian Church, working in its favorite methods, devised campaigns of home missionary enterprise in its presbyteries and synods, detailing pastors from their parishes for temporary mission service in following the movement of the Scotch-Irish migration into the hill-country in which it seemed to find its congenial habitat, and from which its powerful influences were to flow in all directions.

The Congregationalists of New England in like manner followed with Christian teaching and pastoral care their sons moving westward to occupy the rich lands of western New York and of Ohio.

The General Association of the pastors of Connecticut, solicitous that the work of missions to the frontier should be carried forward without loss of power through division of forces, entered, in 1801, into the compact with the General Assembly of the Presbyterians known as the "Plan of Union," by which Christians of both polities might coöperate in the founding of churches and in maintaining the work of the gospel.

In the year 1803 the most important political event since the adoption of the Constitution, the purchase of Louisiana by President Jefferson, opened to the American church a new and immense field for missionary activity.

This vast territory, stretching from the Mississippi westward to the summits of the Rocky Mountains and nearly doubling the domain of the United States, was the last remainder of the great projected French Catholic empire that had fallen in 1763. Passed back and forth with the vicissitudes of European politics between French and Spanish masters, it had made small progress in either civilization or Christianity.

But the immense possibilities of it to the kingdoms of this world and to the kingdom of heaven were obvious to every intelligent mind.

Not many years were to pass before it was to become an arena in which all the various forces of American Christianity were to be found contending against all the powers of darkness, not without dealing some mutual blows in the melley.

* * * * * The review of this period must not close without adverting to two important advances in public practical Christianity, in which (as often in like cases) the earnest endeavors of some among the Christians have been beholden for success to uncongenial reinforcements.

As it is written, "The earth helped the woman."

In the establishment of the American principle of the non-interference of the state with religion, and the equality of all religious communions before the law, much was due, no doubt, to the mutual jealousies of the sects, no one or two of which were strong enough to maintain exceptional pretensions over the rest combined.

Much also is to be imputed to the indifferentism and sometimes the anti-religious sentiment of an important and numerous class of doctrinaire politicians of which Jefferson may be taken as a type.

So far as this work was a work of intelligent conviction and religious faith, the chief honor of it must be given to the Baptists.

Other sects, notably the Presbyterians, had been energetic and efficient in demanding their own liberties; the Friends and the Baptists agreed in demanding liberty of conscience and worship, and equality before the law, for all alike.

But the active labor in this cause was mainly done by the Baptists.

It is to their consistency and constancy in the warfare against the privileges of the powerful "Standing Order" of New England, and of the moribund establishments of the South, that we are chiefly indebted for the final triumph, in this country, of that principle of the separation of church from state which is one of the largest contributions of the New World to civilization and to the church universal.

It is not surprising that a people so earnest as the Baptists showed themselves in the promotion of religious liberty should be forward in the condemnation of American slavery.

We have already seen the vigor with which the Methodists, having all their strength at the South, levied a spiritual warfare against this great wrong.

It was at the South that the Baptists, in 1789, "_Resolved_, That slavery is a violent deprivation of the rights of nature, and inconsistent with a republican government, and we therefore recommend it to our brethren to make use of every legal measure to extirpate this horrid evil from the land."

[222:1] At the North, Jonathan Edwards the Younger is conspicuous in the unbroken succession of antislavery churchmen.

His sermon on the "Injustice and Impolicy of the Slave-trade," preached in 1791 before the Connecticut Abolition Society, of which President Ezra Stiles was the head, long continued to be reprinted and circulated, both at the North and at the South, as the most effective argument not only against the slave-trade, but against the whole system of slavery.

* * * * * It will not be intruding needlessly upon the difficult field of dogmatic history if we note here the widely important diversities of Christian teaching that belong to this which we may call the sub-Revolutionary period.

It is in contradiction to our modern association of ideas to read that the prevailing type of doctrine among the early Baptists of New England was Arminian.

[222:2] The pronounced individualism of the Baptist churches, and the emphasis which they place upon human responsibility, might naturally have created a tendency in this direction; but a cause not less obvious was their antagonism to the established Congregationalism, with its sharply defined Calvinistic statements.

The public challenging of these statements made a favorite issue on which to appeal to the people from their constituted teachers.

But when the South and Southwest opened itself as the field of a wonderfully rapid expansion before the feet of the Baptist evangelists, the antagonism was quite of another sort.

Their collaborators and sharp competitors in the great and noble work of planting the gospel and the church in old and neglected fields at the South, and carrying them westward to the continually advancing frontier of population, were to be found in the multiplying army of the Methodist itinerants and local exhorters, whose theology, enjoined upon them by their commission, was the Arminianism of John Wesley.

No explanation is apparent for the revulsion of the great body of American Baptists into a Calvinism exaggerated to the point of caricature, except the reaction of controversy with the Methodists.

The tendency of the two parties to opposite poles of dogma was all the stronger for the fact that on both sides teachers and taught were alike lacking in liberalizing education.

The fact that two by far the most numerous denominations of Christians in the United States were picketed thus over against each other in the same regions, as widely differing from each other in doctrine and organization as the Dominican order from the Jesuit, and differing somewhat in the same way, is a fact that invites our regret and disapproval, but at the same time compels us to remember its compensating advantages.

* * * * * It is to this period that we trace the head-waters of several important existing denominations.

At the close of the war the congregation of the "King's Chapel," the oldest Episcopal church in New England, had been thinned and had lost its rector in the general migration of leading Tory families to Nova Scotia.

At the restoration of peace it was served in the capacity of lay reader by Mr. James Freeman, a young graduate of Harvard, who came soon to be esteemed very highly in love both for his work's sake and for his own.

Being chosen pastor of the church, he was not many months in finding that many things in the English Prayer-book were irreconcilable with doubts and convictions concerning the Trinity and related doctrines, which about this time were widely prevalent among theologians both in the Church of England and outside of it.

In June, 1785, it was voted in the congregation, by a very large majority, to amend the order of worship in accordance with these scruples.

The changes were in a direction in which not a few Episcopalians were disposed to move,[224:1] and the congregation did not hesitate to apply for ordination for their pastor, first to Bishop Seabury, and afterward, with better hope of success, to Bishop Provoost.

Failing here also, the congregation proceeded to induct their elect pastor into his office without waiting further upon bishops; and thus "the first Episcopal church in New England became the first Unitarian church in America."

It was not the beginning of Unitarianism in America, for this had long been "in the air."

But it was the first distinct organization of it.

How rapidly and powerfully it spread within narrow geographical limits, and how widely it has affected the course of religious history, must appear in later chapters.

* * * * * Close as might seem to be the kindred between Unitarianism and Universalism, coeval as they are in their origin as organized sects, they are curiously diverse in their origin.

Each of them, at the present day, holds the characteristic tenet of the other; in general, Unitarians are Universalists, and Universalists are Unitarians.

[225:1] But in the beginning Unitarianism was a bold reactionary protest against leading doctrines of the prevailing Calvinism of New England, notably against the doctrines of the Trinity, of expiatory atonement, and of human depravity; and it was still more a protest against the intolerant and intolerable dogmatism of the sanhedrim of Jonathan Edwards's successors, in their cock-sure expositions of the methods of the divine government and the psychology of conversion.

Universalism, on the other hand, in its first setting forth in America, planted itself on the leading "evangelical" doctrines, which its leaders had earnestly preached, and made them the major premisses of its argument.

Justification and salvation, said John Murray, one of Whitefield's Calvinistic Methodist preachers, are the lot of those for whom Christ died.

But Christ died for the elect, said his Calvinistic brethren.

Nay, verily, said Murray (in this following one of his colleagues, James Relly); what saith the Scripture?

"Christ died for _all_."

It was the pinch of this argument which brought New England theologians, beginning with Smalley and the second Edwards, to the acceptance of the rectoral theory of the atonement, and so prepared the way for much disputation among the doctors of the next century.

[225:2] Mr. Murray arrived in America in 1770, and after much going to and fro organized, in 1779, at Gloucester, Mass.

, the first congregation in America on distinctly Universalist principles.

But other men, along other lines of thought, had been working their way to somewhat similar conclusions.

In 1785 Elhanan Winchester, a thoroughly Calvinistic Baptist minister in Philadelphia, led forth his excommunicated brethren, one hundred strong, and organized them into a "Society of Universal Baptists," holding to the universal _restoration_ of mankind to holiness and happiness.

The two differing schools fraternized in a convention of Universalist churches at Philadelphia in 1794, at which articles of belief and a plan of organization were set forth, understood to be from the pen of Dr. Benjamin Rush; and a resolution was adopted declaring the holding of slaves to be "inconsistent with the union of the human race in a common Saviour, and the obligations to mutual and universal love which flow from that union."

It was along still another line of argument, proceeding from the assumed "rectitude of human nature," that the Unitarians came, tardily and hesitatingly, to the Universalist position.

The long persistence of definite boundary lines between two bodies so nearly alike in their tenets is a subject worthy of study.

The lines seem to be rather historical and social than theological.

The distinction between them has been thus epigrammatically stated: that the Universalist holds that God is too good to damn a man; the Unitarian holds that men are too good to be damned.

No controversy in the history of the American church has been more deeply marked by a sincere and serious earnestness, over and above the competitive zeal and invidious acrimony that are an inevitable admixture in such debates, than the controversy that was at once waged against the two new sects claiming the title "Liberal."

It was sincerely felt by their antagonists that, while the one abandoned the foundation of the Christian faith, the other destroyed the foundation of Christian morality.

In the early propaganda of each of them was much to deepen this mistrust.

When the standard of dissent is set up in any community, and men are invited to it in the name of liberality, nothing can hinder its becoming a rallying-point for all sorts of disaffected souls, not only the liberal, but the loose.

The story of the controversy belongs to later chapters of this book.

It is safe to say at this point that the early orthodox fears have at least not been fully confirmed by the sequel up to this date.

It was one of the most strenuous of the early disputants against the "liberal" opinions[227:1] who remarked in his later years, concerning the Unitarian saints, that it seemed as if their exclusive contemplation of Jesus Christ in his human character as the example for our imitation had wrought in them an exceptional beauty and Christlikeness of living.

As for the Universalists, the record of their fidelity, as a body, to the various interests of social morality is not surpassed by that of any denomination.

But in the earlier days the conflict against the two sects called "liberal" was waged ruthlessly, not as against defective or erroneous schemes of doctrine, but as against distinctly antichristian heresies.

There is instruction to be gotten from studying, in comparison, the course of these opinions in the established churches of Great Britain and among the unestablished churches of America.

Under the enforced comprehensiveness or tolerance of a national church, it is easier for strange doctrines to spread within the pale.

Under the American plan of the organization of Christianity by voluntary mutual association according to elective affinity, with freedom to receive or exclude, the flock within the fold may perhaps be kept safer from contamination; as when the Presbyterian General Assembly in 1792, and again in 1794, decided that Universalists be not admitted to the sealing ordinances of the gospel;[228:1] but by this course the excluded opinion is compelled to intrench itself both for defense and for attack in a sectarian organization.

It is a practically interesting question, the answer to which is by no means self-evident, whether Universalist opinions would have been less prevalent to-day in England and Scotland if they had been excluded from the national churches and erected into a sect with its partisan pulpits, presses, and propagandists; or whether they would have more diffused in America if, instead of being dealt with by process of excommunication or deposition, they had been dealt with simply by argument.

This is one of the many questions which history raises, but which (happily for him) it does not fall within the function of the historian to answer.

* * * * * To this period is to be referred the origin of some of the minor American sects.

The "United Brethren in Christ" grew into a distinct organization about the year 1800. It arose incidentally to the Methodist evangelism, in an effort on the part of Philip William Otterbein, of the German Reformed Church, and Martin Boehm, of the Mennonites, to provide for the shepherdless German-speaking people by an adaptation of the Wesleyan methods.

Presently, in the natural progress of language, the English work outgrew the German.

It is now doing an extensive and useful work by pulpit and press, chiefly in Pennsylvania and the States of that latitude.

The reasons for its continued existence separate from the Methodist Church, which it closely resembles both in doctrine and in polity, are more apparent to those within the organization than to superficial observers from outside.

The organization just described arose from the unwillingness of the German Reformed Church to meet the craving needs of the German people by using the Wesleyan methods.

From the unwillingness of the Methodist Church to use the German language arose another organization, "the Evangelical Association," sometimes known, from the name of its founder, by the somewhat grotesque title of "the Albrights."

This also is both Methodist and Episcopal, a reduced copy of the great Wesleyan institution, mainly devoted to labors among the Germans.

In 1792 was planted at Baltimore the first American congregation of that organization of disciples of Emanuel Swedenborg which had been begun in London nine years before and called by the appropriately fanciful name of "the Church of the New Jerusalem."

FOOTNOTES:

[210:1] Quoted in Tiffany, p. 289, note.

The extreme depression of the Protestant Episcopal and (as will soon appear) of the Roman Catholic Church, at this point of time, emphasizes all the more the great advances made by both these communions from this time forward.

[211:1] Preface to the American "Book of Common Prayer," 1789. [211:2] See the critical observations of Dr. McConnell, "History of the American Episcopal Church," pp. 264-276. The polity of this church seems to have suffered for want of a States' Rights and Strict Construction party.

The centrifugal force has been overbalanced by the centripetal.

[213:1] Tiffany, pp. 385-399. [216:1] Bishop O'Gorman, pp. 269-323, 367, 399. [218:1] Buckley, "The Methodists," pp. 182, 183. [219:1] Jesse Lee, quoted by Dr. Buckley, p. 195. [222:1] Newman, "The Baptists," p. 305. [222:2] _Ibid.

_, p. 243. [224:1] Tiffany, p. 347; McConnell, p. 249. [225:1] Dr. Richard Eddy, "The Universalists," p. 429. [225:2] _Ibid.

_, pp. 392-397. The sermons of Smalley were preached at Wallingford, Conn.

, "by particular request, with special reference to the Murrayan controversy."

[227:1] Leonard Bacon, of New Haven, in conversation.

[228:1] Eddy, p. 387. CHAPTER XIV.