History of American Christianity — Chapter XVII A Decade of Controversies and Schisms, Part 1

A DECADE OF CONTROVERSIES AND SCHISMS.

During the period from 1835 to 1845 the spirit of schism seemed to be in the air.

In this period no one of the larger organizations of churches was free from agitating controversies, and some of the most important of them were rent asunder by explosion.

At the time when the Presbyterian Church suffered its great schism, in 1837, it was the most influential religious body in the United States.

In 120 years its solitary presbytery had grown to 135 presbyteries, including 2140 ministers serving 2865 churches and 220,557 communicants.

But these large figures are an inadequate measure of its influence.

It represented in its ministry and membership the two most masterful races on the continent, the New England colonists and the Scotch-Irish immigrants; and the tenacity with which it had adhered to the tradition derived through both these lines, of admitting none but liberally educated men to its ministry, had given it exceptional social standing and control over men of intellectual strength and leadership.

In the four years beginning with 1831 the additions to its roll of communicants "on examination" had numbered nearly one hundred thousand.

But this spiritual growth was chilled and stunted by the dissensions that arose.

The revivals ceased and the membership actually dwindled.

The contention had grown (a fact not without parallel in church history) out of measures devised in the interest of coöperation and union.

In 1801, in the days of its comparative feebleness, the General Assembly had proposed to the General Association of Connecticut a "Plan of Union" according to which the communities of New England Christians then beginning to move westward between the parallels that bound "the New England zone," and bringing with them their accustomed Congregational polity, might coöperate on terms of mutual concession with Presbyterian churches in their neighborhood.

The proposals had been fraternally received and accepted, and under the terms of this compact great accessions had been made to the strength of the Presbyterian Church, of pastors and congregations marked with the intellectual activity and religious enterprise of the New England churches, who, while cordially conforming to the new methods of organization and discipline, were not in the least penetrated with the traditionary Scotch veneration for the Westminster standards.

For nearly thirty years the great reinforcements from New England and from men of the New England way of thinking had been ungrudgingly bestowed and heartily welcomed.

But the great accessions which in the first four years of the fourth decade of this century had increased the roll of the communicants of the Presbyterian Church by more than fifty per cent.

had come in undue proportion from the New Englandized regions of western New York and Ohio.

It was inevitable that the jealousy of hereditary Presbyterians, "whose were the fathers," should be aroused by the perfectly reasonable fear lest the traditional ways of the church which they felt to be in a peculiar sense _their_ church might be affected by so large an element from without.

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

In the Presbyterian Church at this time were three pretty distinct types of theological thought.

First, there was the unmitigated Scotch Calvinism; secondly, there was the modification of this system, which became naturalized in the church after the Great Awakening, when Jonathan Dickinson and Jonathan Edwards, from neighbor towns in Massachusetts, came to be looked upon as the great Presbyterian theologians; thirdly, there was the "consistent Calvinism," that had been still further evolved by the patient labor of students in direct succession from Edwards, and that was known under the name of "Hopkinsianism."

Just now the latest and not the least eminent in this school, Dr. Nathaniel W. Taylor, of New Haven, was enunciating to large and enthusiastic classes in Yale Divinity School new definitions and forms of statement giving rise to much earnest debate.

The alarm of those to whom the very phrase "improvement in theology" was an abomination expressed itself in futile indictments for heresy brought against some of the most eminently godly and useful ministers in all the church.

Lyman Beecher, of Lane Seminary, Edward Beecher, J. M.

Sturtevant, and William Kirby, of Illinois College, and George Duffield, of the presbytery of Carlisle, Pa.

, were annoyed by impeachments for heresy, which all failed before reaching the court of last resort.

But repeated and persistent prosecutions of Albert Barnes, of Philadelphia, were destined to more conspicuous failure, by reason of their coming up year after year before the General Assembly, and also by reason of the position of the accused as pastor of the mother church of the denomination, the First Church of Philadelphia, which was the customary meeting-place of the Assembly; withal by reason of the character of the accused, the honor and love in which he was held for his faithful and useful work as pastor, his world-wide fame as a devoted and believing student of the Scriptures, and the Christlike gentleness and meekness with which he endured the harassing of church trials continuing through a period of seven years, and compelling him, under an irregular and illegal sentence of the synod, to sit silent in his church for the space of a year, as one suspended from the ministry.

The earliest leaders in national organization for the propagation of Christianity at home and abroad were the Congregationalists of New England and men like-minded with them.

But the societies thus originated were organized on broad and catholic principles, and invited the coöperation of all Christians.

They naturally became the organs of much of the active beneficence of Presbyterian congregations, and the Presbyterian clergy and laity were largely represented in the direction of them.

They were recognized and commended by the representative bodies of the Presbyterian Church.

As a point of high-church theory it was held by the rigidly Presbyterian party that the work of the gospel in all its departments and in all lands is the proper function of "the church as such"--meaning practically that each sect ought to have its separate propaganda.

There was logical strength in this position as reached from their premisses, and there were arguments of practical convenience to be urged in favor of it.

But the demand to sunder at once the bonds of fellowship which united Christians of different names in the beneficent work of the great national societies was not acceptable even to the whole of the Old-School party.

To the New Englanders it was intolerable.

There were other and less important grounds of difference that were discussed between the parties.

And in the background, behind them all, was the slavery question.

It seems to have been willingly _kept_ in the background by the leaders of debate on both sides; but it was there.

The New-School synods and presbyteries of the North were firm in their adherence to the antislavery principles of the church.

On the other hand, the Old-School party relied, in the _coup d'église_ that was in preparation, on the support of "an almost solid South."

[296:1] It was an unpardonable offense of the New-School party that it had grown to such formidable strength, intellectually, spiritually, and numerically.

The probability that the church might, with the continued growth and influence of this party, become Americanized and so lose the purity of its thoroughgoing Scotch traditions was very real, and to some minds very dreadful.

To these the very ark of God seemed in danger.

Arraignments for heresy in presbytery and synod resulted in failure; and when these and other cases involving questions of orthodoxy or of the policy of the church were brought into the supreme judicature of the church, the solemn but unmistakable fact disclosed itself that even the General Assembly could not be relied on for the support of measures introduced by the Old-School leaders.

In fact, every Assembly from 1831 to 1836, with a single exception, had shown a clear New-School majority.

The foundations were destroyed, and what should the righteous do?

History was about to repeat itself with unwonted preciseness of detail.

On the gathering of the Assembly of 1837 a careful count of noses revealed what had been known only once before in seven years, and what might never be again--a clear Old-School majority in the house.

To the pious mind the neglecting of such an opportunity would have been to tempt Providence.

Without notice, without complaint or charges or specifications, without opportunity of defense, 4 synods, including 533 churches and more than 100,000 communicants, were excommunicated by a majority vote.

The victory of pure doctrine and strict church order, though perhaps not exactly glorious, was triumphant and irreversible.

There was no more danger to the church from a possible New-School majority.

When the four exscinded synods, three in western New York and one in Ohio, together with a great following of sympathizing congregations in all parts of the country, came together to reconstruct their shattered polity, they were found to number about four ninths of the late Presbyterian Church.

For thirty years the American church was to present to Christendom the strange spectacle of two great ecclesiastical bodies claiming identically the same name, holding the same doctrinal standards, observing the same ritual and governed by the same discipline, and occupying the same great territory, and yet completely dissevered from each other and at times in relations of sharp mutual antagonism.

[297:1] The theological debate which had split the Presbyterian Church from end to end was quite as earnest and copious in New England.

But owing to the freer habit of theological inquiry and the looser texture of organization among the Congregationalist churches, it made no organic schism beyond the setting up of a new theological seminary in Connecticut to offset what were deemed the "dangerous tendencies" of the New Haven theology.

After a few years the party lines had faded out and the two seminaries were good neighbors.

The unlikeliest place in all American Christendom for a partisan controversy and a schism would have seemed to be the Unitarian denomination in and about Boston.

Beginning with the refusal not only of any imposed standard of belief, but of any statement of common opinions, and with unlimited freedom of opinion in every direction, unless, perhaps, in the direction of orthodoxy, it was not easy to see how a splitting wedge could be started in it.

But the infection of the time was not to be resisted.

Even Unitarianism must have its heresies and heresiarchs to deal with.

No sooner did the pressure of outside attack abate than antagonisms began pretty sharply to declare themselves.

In 1832 Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson, pastor of the Second Church in Boston, proposed to the church to abandon or radically change the observance of the Lord's Supper.

When the church demurred at this extraordinary demand he resigned his office, firing off an elaborate argument against the usage of the church by way of a parting salute.

Without any formal demission of the ministry, he retired to his literary seclusion at Concord, from which he brought forth in books and lectures the oracular utterances which caught more and more the ear of a wide public, and in which, in casual-seeming parentheses and _obiter dicta_, Christianity and all practical religion were condemned by sly innuendo and half-respectful allusion by which he might "without sneering teach the rest to sneer."

In 1838 he was still so far recognized in the ministry as to be invited to address the graduating class of the Harvard Divinity School.

The blank pantheism which he then enunciated called forth from Professor Henry Ware, Jr. , a sermon in the college chapel on the personality of God, which he sent with a friendly note to Mr. Emerson.

The gay and Skimpolesque reply of the sage is an illustration of that flippancy with which he chose to toy in a literary way with momentous questions, and which was so exasperating to the earnest men of positive religious convictions with whom he had been associated in the Christian ministry.

"It strikes me very oddly that good and wise men at Cambridge should think of raising me into an object of criticism.

I have always been, from my incapacity of methodical writing, 'a chartered libertine,' free to worship and free to rail, lucky when I could make myself understood, but never esteemed near enough to the institutions and mind of society to deserve the notice of masters of literature and religion....

I could not possibly give you one of the 'arguments' you so cruelly hint at on which any doctrine of mine stands, for I do not know what arguments mean in reference to any expression of thought.

I delight in telling what I think, but if you ask me how I dare say so, or why it is so, I am the most helpless of mortal men.

I do not even see that either of these questions admits of an answer.

So that in the present droll posture of my affairs, when I see myself suddenly raised into the importance of a heretic, I am very uneasy when I advert to the supposed duties of such a personage who is to make good his thesis against all comers.

I certainly shall do no such thing."

The issue was joined and the controversy began.

Professor Andrews Norton in a pamphlet denounced "the latest form of infidelity," and the Rev. George Ripley replied in a volume, to which Professor Norton issued a rejoinder.

But there was not substance enough of religious dogma and sentiment in the transcendentalist philosophers to give them any permanent standing in the church.

They went into various walks of secular literature, and have powerfully influenced the course of opinions; but they came to be no longer recognizable as a religious or theological party.

Among the minor combatants in the conflict between the Unitarians and the pantheists was a young man whose name was destined to become conspicuous, not within the Unitarian fellowship, but on the outskirts of it.

Theodore Parker was a man of a different type from the men about him of either party.

The son of a mechanic, he fought his way through difficulties to a liberal education, and was thirty years old before his very great abilities attracted general attention.

A greedy gormandizer of books in many languages, he had little of the dainty scholarship so much prized at the neighboring university.

But the results of his vast reading were stored in a quick and tenacious memory as ready rhetorical material wherewith to convince or astonish.

Paradox was a passion with him, that was stimulated by complaints, and even by deprecations, to the point of irreverence.

He liked to "make people's flesh crawl."

Even in his advocacy of social and public reforms, which was strenuous and sincere, he delighted so to urge his cause as to inflame prejudice and opposition against it.

With this temper it is not strange that when he came to enunciate his departure from some of the accepted tenets of his brethren, who were habitually reverent in their discipleship toward Jesus Christ, he should do this in a way to offend and shock.

The immediate reaction of the Unitarian clergy from the statements of his sermon, in 1841, on "The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity," in which the supernatural was boldly discarded from his belief, was so general and so earnest as to give occasion to Channing's exclamation, "Now we have a Unitarian orthodoxy!"

Channing did not live to see the characteristic tenets of the heresiarch to whom he hesitated to give the name of Christian not only widely accepted in the Unitarian churches, but some of them freely discussed as open questions among some orthodox scholars.

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

In the year 1844 the slavery agitation in the Methodist Episcopal Church culminated, not in the rupture of the church, but in the well-considered, deliberate division of it between North and South.

The history of the slavery question among the Methodists was a typical one.

From the beginning the Methodist Society had been committed by its founder and his early successors to the strictest (not the strongest) position on this question.

Not only was the system of slavery denounced as iniquitous, but the attempt was made to enforce the rigid rule that persons involved under this system in the relation of master to slave should be excluded from the ministry, if not from the communion.

But the enforcement of this rule was found to be not only difficult, but wrong, and difficult simply because it was wrong.

Then followed that illogical confusion of ideas studiously fostered by zealots at either extreme: If the slave-holder may be in some circumstances a faithful Christian disciple, fulfilling in righteousness and love a Christian duty, then slavery is right; if slavery is wrong, then every slave-holder is a manstealer, and should be excommunicated as such without asking any further questions.

Two statements more palpably illogical were never put forth for the darkening of counsel.

But each extreme was eager to sustain the unreason of the opposite extreme as the only alternative of its own unreason, and so, what with contrary gusts from North and South, they fell into a place where two seas met and ran the ship aground.

The attempts made from 1836 to 1840, by stretching to the utmost the authority of the General Conference and the bishops, for the suppression of "modern abolitionism" in the church (without saying what they meant by the phrase) had their natural effect: the antislavery sentiment in the church organized and uttered itself more vigorously and more extravagantly than ever on the basis, "All slave-holding is sin; no fellowship with slave-holders."

In 1843 an antislavery secession took place, which drew after it a following of six thousand, increased in a few months to fifteen thousand.

The paradoxical result of this movement is not without many parallels in church history: After the drawing off of fifteen thousand of the most zealous antislavery men in the church, the antislavery party in the church was vastly stronger, even in numbers, than it had been before.

The General Conference of 1836 had pronounced itself, without a dissenting vote, to be "decidedly opposed to modern abolitionism."

The General Conference of 1844, on the first test vote on the question of excluding from the ministry one who had become a slave-holder through marriage, revealed a majority of one hundred and seventeen to fifty-six in favor of the most rigorous antislavery discipline.

The graver question upon the case of Bishop Andrew, who was in the like condemnation, could not be decided otherwise.

The form of the Conference's action in this case was studiously inoffensive.

It imputed no wrong and proposed no censure, but, simply on the ground that the circumstances would embarrass him in the exercise of his office, declared it as "the sense of this General Conference that he desist from the exercise of this office so long as this impediment remains."

The issue could not have been simpler and clearer.

The Conference was warned that the passage of the resolution would be followed by the secession of the South.

The debate was long, earnest, and tender.

At the end of it the resolution was passed, one hundred and eleven to sixty-nine.

At once notice was given of the intended secession.

Commissioners were appointed from both parties to adjust the conditions of it, and in the next year (1845) was organized the "Methodist Episcopal Church, South."

Under the fierce tyranny then dominant at the South the southern Baptists might not fall behind their Methodist neighbors in zeal for slavery.

This time it was the South that forced the issue.

The Alabama Baptist Convention, without waiting for a concrete case, demanded of the national missionary boards "the distinct, explicit avowal that slave-holders are eligible and entitled equally with non-slave-holders to all the privileges and immunities of their several unions."

The answer of the Foreign Mission Board was perfectly kind, but, on the main point, perfectly unequivocal: "We can never be a party to any arrangement which would imply approbation of slavery."

The result had been foreseen.

The great denomination was divided between North and South.

The Southern Baptist Convention was organized in May, 1845, and began its home and foreign missionary work without delay.

This dark chapter of our story is not without its brighter aspects.

(1) Amid the inevitable asperities attendant on such debate and division there were many and beautiful manifestations of brotherly love between the separated parties.

(2) These strifes fell out to the furtherance of the gospel.

Emulations, indeed, are not among the works of the Spirit.

In the strenuous labors of the two divided denominations, greatly exceeding what had gone before, it is plain that sometimes Christ was preached of envy and strife.

Nevertheless Christ was preached, with great and salutary results; and therein do we rejoice, yea, and will rejoice.