CHAPTER VII
FIRST YEARS OF INDEPENDENCE, 1830-49
With the dissolution of the Mahoning Association, the Disciples became a separate people with churches of their own, which were generally called “Churches of Christ.” The disbanding of several Baptist associations in Kentucky within the next few months and the division of others added to the number of churches in the new body. Scattered through the entire area which had been affected by the teaching of Mr. Campbell and the Christian Baptist were many churches which were ready to follow the Reform, or had already begun to do so. Some of these voluntarily withdrew from the Baptist associations with which they were connected; others were put out. And in Baptist churches which adhered to their old position, the individuals or minority groups who accepted the new way were generally excluded. One point should be made clear: there is no known record of any case in which the Reforming, or Disciple, element in what had been a Baptist church ever excluded those who insisted on continuing to be Baptists.
By 1833 the Disciples had been pretty thoroughly eliminated from the Baptist churches, to the number of something like twenty thousand members, nearly all in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Their most important accomplishments during the next two decades were: the growth of a conscious fellowship and the sense of being a united group; the union with the greater part of the western “Christian” churches; the development of institutions, customs, and procedures by which their common life and purpose could be expressed; and a remarkable increase in numbers and geographical extent.
Mr. Campbell brought the Christian Baptist to an end with the completion of its seventh volume and immediately began the publication of the Millennial Harbinger, January, 1830. This was a larger magazine, devoted less to “detecting and exposing” the corruptions of the divided churches than to presenting a constructive program for curing their ills. Moreover, it had the responsibility, as the earlier magazine had not, of reporting the news of a movement which had now become a going concern and of discussing the problems which arose in the life of the new body. The name does not indicate any special interest in what is generally called the “millennium,” as implying a visible second coming of Christ in the near future. The kind of millennium of which this magazine proposed to be the harbinger was the triumph of the Kingdom of God on earth. If that was ever to come, the editor thought, it could be only when the church had been purified and united.
The Millennial Harbinger appeared monthly from 1830 to 1870. Mr. Campbell was its editor for nearly thirty years. During this time it was the backbone of Disciples’ periodical literature. A great many small monthlies very soon began to spring up. Most of them had small circulation and short life, but their total influence was great, and a few became important. A list printed in 1845, and not claiming to be complete, names fifteen monthlies and two weeklies in existence at that time.
Disciples and Christians
The union between the Disciples and the Christian churches in Kentucky and adjacent states west of the Alleghenies was an event of the utmost importance for the whole movement. Since the churches of both groups exercised a high degree of local independence, union could not have been brought about by any binding act of conferences or conventions, even if there had been general conferences or conventions in either party, as there were not. It had to depend upon a contagion of fellowship between their congregations in many communities. But the process was rapid, and the union may be dated as of 1832. It began with a consultation among some of their leaders on the first day of that year and was far enough advanced to insure its success before the end of the year.
Barton W. Stone and Alexander Campbell first met in 1824. They were friends from the start, and both were impressed by the similarity of their pleas for simple and evangelical Christianity. In 1826 Mr. Stone began the publication of a monthly, the Christian Messenger, at Georgetown, Kentucky. In a communion having no general organization and no cooperative work, it was his position as editor which, more than anything else, gave him the prominence that has led to calling the Christian church in Kentucky, not very accurately, “the Stone movement.” Since he wrote constantly and copiously for his magazine and also published reports of the activities of the churches and evangelists, it gives a good contemporary picture of his mind and of the principles and practices of the Christian churches during the years immediately before the union.
The unity of all Christians was the theme of a series of articles which began in the first issue of the Christian Messenger, and the topic frequently recurs. Stone gives the arguments for unity and states and answers the possible objections. The principal obstacle to union, as he sees it, is insistence upon doctrinal agreement. Stone is for tolerance on all matters of opinion. Yet there are some doctrines in the orthodox creeds which Stone considers so erroneous that he is not content to say that they ought not to be made tests of fellowship; he must try to disprove them and eliminate them from the minds of all Christians. These are the generally accepted doctrines of the Trinity, the nature of Christ, and the atonement. Upon each of these subjects Mr. Stone wrote many long articles and editorials. He did not hesitate to say that “we deny the Trinity,” not because it is mysterious but because it is not a revealed doctrine. The character of God is revealed, but not his essence or the mode of his existence. Christ was the Son of God, being of the same nature but not of the same substance. The Holy Spirit “means the power or energy of God, never a third person in deity.”
It is not surprising that the orthodox denominations regarded the writer of these statements as a dangerous man and the “Christians” as rank heretics. The orthodox, and especially the Presbyterians, would have been sensitive about such statements at any time; but just at this time they were in a more than usually suspicious mood, for the first year of the Christian Messenger (1826) was the very year in which the Unitarian, Dr. Horace Holley, had been dismissed from the presidency of Transylvania University, and Kentucky was still ringing with the conflict between the orthodox and the “liberals.” So it was inevitable that the charge of “Unitarianism” should be hurled at Stone and his party. In the eyes of his most bitter critics, Stone was also a “Crypto-Arian” and a “Crypto-Socinian.” Controversial pamphlets flew back and forth. As one reads them now, Stone seems to hold his own in theological scholarship and English style, and they cast no cloud upon his devotion to Christ or upon his zeal for the union of Christ’s followers in one family of faith and the salvation of sinners by the power of the gospel. Stone was anti-Calvinist, anti-Trinitarian, anticreed, but he was not a Unitarian.
Likenesses and Differences
Studying Campbell’s Christian Baptist and Millennial Harbinger and Stone’s Christian Messenger for the period shortly before the union of the two movements, one finds the evidence of some important likenesses and of certain differences, which were soon adjusted without much trouble. The likenesses were these:
1. Both groups consciously and explicitly aimed to promote the union of Christians.
2. Both rejected creeds and theologies as tests of fellowship, insisted on liberty of opinion on all matters of doctrine that were not considered as unmistakably revealed, and held that simple faith in Christ was sufficient.
3. They agreed that Christ died for all and that all could believe on him and be saved.
4. They agreed that saving faith, at least in its minimum essentials, was nothing else than an act of the mind in accepting rational evidence of the truth, and that even fallen and sinful man was capable of that act without special assistance from the Holy Spirit. This idea was prominent in Campbell’s thought, and it was fundamental in Scott’s method, which gave the Reformers their evangelistic drive. Stone had expressed the same idea earlier but he did not make much use of it, and the evangelism of the Christians does not seem to have been greatly affected by it.
5. The practice of believers’ baptism by immersion and the conception of baptism for the remission of sins were common to both, subject to some limitations to be mentioned presently.
6. Both opposed the use of unscriptural names as sectarian and divisive. On Stone’s side there was much argument that Acts 11:26 (“The disciples were called Christians first in Antioch”) meant that they were so called by divine appointment, so that this name must be used. But this extreme opinion was not insisted upon, and Campbell’s preference for “Disciples” was no obstacle. The use of the two names—and of “Churches of Christ” as well—confused the public but was no barrier to union.
Replying to a correspondent who asked why the Christians should not unite with the “New Testament Baptists” (meaning Campbell’s Reformers), Stone wrote in 1828: “If there is a difference between us, we know it not. We have nothing in us to prevent a union; and if they have nothing in them in opposition to it, we are in spirit one. May God strengthen the cords of Christian union.”
But there were some differences of emphasis and practice. The chief differences were these:
1. The Christians did not make immersion a condition of membership. Most of them had been immersed, but they considered baptism as lying in the field of opinion, in which there should be liberty. Stone repeatedly defended this position. In 1830 he wrote: “These reforming Baptists are engaged in a good work. They proclaim union with all who believe the simple facts of revelation and manifest their faith by their works of holiness and love, without any regard to the opinions they may have formed of truth. Should they make their own peculiar views of immersion a term of fellowship, it will be impossible for them to repel successfully the imputation of being sectarians and of having an authoritative creed (though not written) of one article at least, which is formed of their own opinion of truth; and this short creed would exclude more Christians from union than any creed with which I am acquainted.” Yet only a few months later he admitted feeling some inconsistency between preaching immersion for remission of sins and admitting to church membership without it. “When asked for our divine authority from the New Testament, we have none that can fully satisfy our own minds. In this state our minds have labored, and are still laboring.” (Christian Messenger, Vol. IV, pp. 200, 275.)
2. The Christians had at least the beginnings of a method of obtaining a responsible ministry. Stone criticized those who thought that a church could “induct into the ministerial office”; that function belongs to the “bishops and elders.” If a minister is charged with “preaching doctrine contrary to the gospel,” he should be examined by a “conference of bishops and elders.” The idea was that the ministry as a whole, or by conference groups, should have power to protect the churches against erratic or unworthy ministers. There is no evidence that such control was actually exercised, but even the idea of such control was alien to the Disciples until much later, and still is with most of them. But at the time of the union, the Christians seem to have had a somewhat “higher” conception of the office of the ministry.
3. The Christians were much more zealous in evangelism than the Reformers had been before the outburst of evangelistic fervor with John Smith and a few other “New Testament Baptists” in Kentucky and the campaign of Walter Scott in Ohio in 1827. But their method of evangelism had been of the Methodist type. There is clear evidence that theirs was, in practice, a “mourners’ bench” revivalism, in spite of Stone’s theory of faith as a rational act. Christian evangelists, sending to Stone’s paper the reports of their meetings, write that “crowds of mourners came forward weeping and crying for mercy”; or, “the preachers had a good measure of the Holy Ghost and ... several [hearers] appeared to be cut to the heart and were crying for mercy”; or, “crowds of weeping mourners came forward to unite with us in prayer”; or, more specifically, that the summer camp meetings (in Georgia) are “conducted in the main in the manner of Methodist camp meetings.” Scott’s new method of presenting the “Gospel restored” in clear steps created some surprise and questioning. A Christian preacher writes: “His method and manner are somewhat novel to me.... He seems to suppose the apostolical gospel to consist of the use of the following particulars: faith, repentance, baptism for remission of sins, the gift of the Holy Spirit, and eternal life. Thus, you see, he baptizes the subject previous to the remission of his sins or the receiving of the Holy Spirit.” Stone replies: “We have for some time practiced in this way throughout our country.” Evidently Stone had already come to a position identical with that of Campbell and Scott as to the nature of faith, the purpose of baptism, and the technique of evangelism. But just as evidently, the Christian preachers and churches generally had not. They had zeal for evangelism, but they still had much to learn about its method. Scott was their teacher.
4. Whereas the Reformers early adopted the practice of observing the Lord’s Supper every Sunday, the Christians did not. By 1830, Stone had decided that this was the practice of the early church, and he wrote: “Whenever the church shall be restored to her former glory, she will again receive the Lord’s Supper every first day of the week.” But he was less ardent than Campbell about “restoring the ancient order of things,” and he was disposed to be patient about this as he was about immersion.
Union and Growth
By 1830 the Christian churches west of the Alleghenies had, it is estimated, seven or eight thousand members in Kentucky, somewhat fewer in Tennessee, and smaller numbers in all the states to which migrants had been going from these two. There were district conferences in Ohio and Indiana, in Alabama and Mississippi; a Christian church organized in Missouri in 1816 was only the first of several; and there were two conferences in Iowa by 1828.
The growing acquaintance and sympathy between Christians and Disciples led to a number of consultations between their leaders at various places in Kentucky, and finally to a meeting at Lexington, January 1, 1832, attended by prominent representatives of both. It was unanimously agreed that they should unite. Since neither group recognized any church authority superior to the local congregation, actual union could be accomplished only by going to the congregations and persuading them to unite. “Raccoon” John Smith (Disciple) and John Rogers (Christian) went out as a team to carry this message to the churches. Others took it up. Stone’s Christian Messenger and Campbell’s Millennial Harbinger supported it. Within three years the greater part of the Christian churches in the area mentioned had joined the merger. On the points of difference, especially baptism and evangelistic method, the practice of Campbell and Scott prevailed. The Christians contributed a revived emphasis upon liberty of opinion and upon union, which the Reformers had been in danger of subordinating in their zeal for the restoration of “a particular ecclesiastical order.”
There had been, up to this time, no organizational connection among the three great groups of “Christian” churches. Those in New England and those in the southern Atlantic states were not affected by the merger with the Disciples. They tightened their denominational organization and continued their separate existence until, nearly a hundred years later (1930), they united with the Congregationalists.
It is not possible to give a clear picture of the numerical growth and geographical expansion of the Disciples in their first twenty years. There were at first no organizations to promote the movement, no headquarters to project plans, no agencies to collect statistics, no yearbook to list churches and preachers. The energy of the movement was tremendous. As a plea for union, its appeal was to Christians of all faiths; therefore there was no hesitation about proselyting. As a presentation of the way of salvation, its message was to the unconverted. Both classes responded in large numbers. This “Gospel restored”—Scott’s five steps in conversion—and the call to union on that basis were a simple message. One had only to hear it to believe it, and almost anyone who believed it could preach it—and a great many did. Most of those who evangelized went out on their own initiative and responsibility. The frontier was open, and there was a steady flow of migration to the west. Among the migrants were many preachers, who were often farmers also. But if there was no preacher in the new community, laymen might carry the message and plant the seed of a church. The distinction between ministers and laymen was often very vague. One who could preach became ipso facto a preacher. Besides farmer-preachers, there were lawyers, doctors, teachers, and merchants who preached, won converts, baptized them, and established churches.
The need of some simple and efficient method of cooperation was soon felt. Some doubted whether any organization of the churches was scriptural. But the decision of most was that organized cooperation among the churches to spread the gospel—but not to exercise authority over the churches—was a proper expedient. A meeting of representatives of several churches at New Lisbon, Ohio, in 1831, and another at Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1835, reached this conclusion and considered ways and means of cooperation. A few glimpses, almost at random, at the beginnings of churches and organizations in certain states will indicate something of the method and rate of expansion during these two decades.
In Indiana, several local movements, some beginning as early as 1810, contributed to the stream of the Reform. Some Free Will Baptists, regular Baptists, Dunkers, and “Christians” had arrived independently at similar ideas, and presently the Christian Baptist helped to unify them, and the merging of the Disciples and Christians completed the process. Their first cooperation for a specific purpose was when five churches joined in supporting John O’Kane as an evangelist, and his first work was to organize the First Church in Indianapolis in 1833. Indiana’s first state convention was held in 1839, with fifty preachers present and reports of 115 churches with over 7,000 members. The state missionary society was formed ten years later. But the growth in numbers and churches—and it was rapid and substantial—was due to the work of individuals, local churches, and county cooperation more than to the state organization.
The first Disciples in Illinois came from Kentucky and Indiana in 1830. Stone visited Jacksonville in 1832, preparatory to moving there two years later. He found a Christian church and a Disciple church, and persuaded them to unite. In 1834 a group of churches in that vicinity voted to employ an evangelist and issued an invitation to a state meeting. But the first state meeting was not held until 1842.
To Missouri came the Christian preacher, Thomas McBride, from Kentucky in 1816, followed soon by Joel Haden, T. M. Allen, and others. By 1820 there were eight churches. State meetings began, irregularly, in 1837. In that year a church was formed in St. Louis, but it did not persist and was started again in 1842. Missouri was, from the start, a “strong state” for the Disciples.
Texas was still a part of Mexico when Collin McKinney, a devout “Christian” layman from Kentucky, came to the vicinity of Texarkana in 1824 and then moved on to what became Bowie County, where he spent the rest of a long and active life. He did not have a church there until a preacher came in 1842; but when there was a church, McKinney was a pillar of it, as he was of the republic, and then the state, of Texas. The first church in Texas was one that came in a body from Tennessee, with reinforcements from Alabama and Mississippi, in 1836, and settled at Clarksville. Lynn D’Spain and Mansil W. Matthews were the preachers who came with this church. David Crockett accompanied this caravan on part of its journey. At that time the Mexican constitution prohibited the exercise of any religion except the Roman Catholic, but the agencies of enforcement were weak, the seat of government was far away, and the revolution which made Texas an independent republic was imminent.
California had two churches, at Stockton and Santa Clara, within two years after the discovery of gold. They were established by Thomas Thompson, a Disciple preacher who went west with the forty-niners but preferred to evangelize, at his own expense, rather than to seek gold. This falls just beyond the limits of our period, the first two decades, but it illustrates the promptness with which Disciples followed the frontier. There is a report of a congregation organized in Oregon Territory in 1846, three years after the beginning of the “great immigration” and the very year in which American title to the territory was settled by treaty with England.
Campbell at His Zenith
Alexander Campbell’s activities during these years were constant and varied. The Millennial Harbinger furnished a medium for the development and expression of his ideas and for the exchange of news and opinions among the churches. His many long tours for lecturing and preaching were more fruitful in building morale and gaining publicity for the movement than in winning converts, for he was never a very effective evangelist. But from the testimony of unbiased witnesses, he must have been one of the most impressive figures that ever stood upon an American platform. Mrs. Trollope, mother of the English novelist, and herself the author of Domestic Manners of the Americans, was present at the debate with Owen and described Mr. Campbell as “the universal admiration of his audience.”
In 1836 Mr. Campbell published a volume entitled The Christian System. This came near to being such an “exhibition of the fullness and precision of the Holy Scriptures upon the entire subject of Christianity” as Thomas Campbell had suggested in the Postscript to the Declaration and Address. Those who had felt the sting of his denunciation of creeds now shouted with glee that here at last was the “Campbellites’ creed.” But it was not a creed, because it was never used as a creed and was never intended to be so used. It was a rather full statement of Mr. Campbell’s views on every religious topic that he considered important. But no church or organization of churches ever adopted it. No applicant for membership was ever asked to accept it. No minister’s orthodoxy was ever tested by it. No one could even be required to read it. The book itself repudiates the notion of requiring conformity to this or any other body of doctrine. In it the author says:
The belief of one fact is all that is requisite, as far as faith goes, to salvation. The belief of this one fact and submission to one institution expressive of it, is all that is required of Heaven to admission into the church. The one fact is expressed in the single proposition, that Jesus the Nazarene is the Messiah. The one institution is baptism.
The Christian System, then, was certainly not a creed, since it declared that only “one fact and one institution” were essential.
But when he placed the “one institution” on a par with the “one fact,” Mr. Campbell did not mean to imply that the unimmersed could not be Christians. A lady wrote from Lunenburg, Virginia, in 1837, expressing surprise at some reference he had made to unimmersed Christians. In reply to this “Lunenburg letter,” Mr. Campbell wrote a memorable article for the Millennial Harbinger and followed it with two even more emphatic statements answering objections. In this article, he wrote:
Who is a Christian? I answer, Everyone that believes in his heart that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah, the Son of God; repents of his sins, and obeys him in all things according to his measure of knowledge of his will....
I cannot ... make any one duty the standard of Christian state or character, not even immersion....
* * * * * * *
It is the image of Christ the Christian looks for and loves; and this does not consist in being exact in a few items, but in general devotion to the whole truth as far as known.
There is no occasion, then, for making immersion, on a profession of the faith, absolutely essential to a Christian—though it may be greatly essential to his sanctification and comfort.
In answering an objection to the original article, Mr. Campbell stated:
Now the nice point of opinion on which some brethren differ, is this: Can a person who simply, not perversely, mistakes the outward baptism, have the inward ... which changes his state and has praise of God, though not of all men?... To which I answer, that, in my opinion, it is possible.
In 1837 Mr. Campbell defended Protestantism in a debate with the Roman Catholic, Archbishop Purcell, of Cincinnati. It was a period in which there was much anti-Catholic agitation, stimulated by what the Native American party called “the rapidly increasing political influence of the papal power in the United States” and by the violently reactionary policy of the papacy against every liberal and democratic movement in Europe. The public and the press had not yet adopted the hush-hush attitude toward the Catholic question. Neither of the contestants sought this controversy. They were virtually forced into it by the public interest in lectures which both had delivered before a teachers’ association in Cincinnati. The debate was held in Cincinnati. It continued through eight days and made a great impression on the city. Mr. Campbell had now defended Protestantism against the highest Roman Catholic dignitary who ever participated in such a public discussion in this country, and he had earlier defended Christianity against one of the most eminent secularists and skeptics of the time. These debates were published and widely circulated.
But for the exposition and defense of his own movement, the high point in Campbell’s career as a debater was his debate with the Presbyterian minister, N. L. Rice, at Lexington, Kentucky, in 1843. Henry Clay served as moderator. The debate lasted for eighteen days. Four of the six propositions had to do with baptism. Campbell affirmed that the act is immersion and the purpose is the remission of past sins. Rice affirmed that the infant of a believing parent is a proper subject, and that baptism may be administered only by a bishop or ordained presbyter. In the other two propositions, Campbell affirmed that the Holy Spirit operates only through the Word in conversion and sanctification, and that creeds are necessarily “heretical and schismatical.” This debate, published in a thick volume of more than 900 closely printed pages, became a book of reference for generations of Disciples and perhaps did as much as any other one thing to standardize their thinking and practice.
The duty of founding colleges for the education of ministers, the building of an intelligent laity, and the Christian culture of society was suggested almost as soon as the Disciples realized that they were a separate body committed to a long-term enterprise. A charter was obtained in 1833 for a college at New Albany, Indiana, but nothing came of it. The first actual college of the Disciples was Bacon College, founded at Georgetown, Kentucky, in 1836. The name was selected to honor Francis Bacon and to register approval of his empirical philosophy. Walter Scott was its first president, but he did little beyond delivering an inaugural address, and within less than a year he was succeeded by D. S. Burnet. The school was moved to Harrodsburg in 1839, was discontinued in 1850, was revived as Kentucky University, and in 1865 was moved to Lexington, where it acquired the property and historic tradition of Transylvania University.
Bethany College was incorporated in 1840 and opened soon after. Mr. Campbell projected and organized it, gave the land which became its beautiful campus, raised the money for its building and maintenance, and served as its president for more than twenty years. His writings on education, especially the series of articles in the Millennial Harbinger during the year when he was making his plans for Bethany, prove that he was an original and creative thinker in the field of both general and Christian education. His expectations as to the service his college would render to the movement as a whole were amply realized. It became for a time the principal training school for ministers and the educational center for the laity; and it was the “mother of colleges” among the Disciples.
CHAPTER VIII
ORGANIZATION AND TENSIONS, 1849-74
As the Disciples grew and spread, the need of organization on a national scale was felt. There were still lingering doubts as to whether fidelity to the “ancient order of things” permitted such organization. But the prevailing decision was that meetings of “deputies, messengers or representatives” of the churches might properly be held if they would remember that they are “voluntary expedients” and “have no authority to legislate in any matter of faith or moral duty” but exist only “to attend to the ways and means of successful cooperation.” These words, quoted from a resolution adopted by a conference on cooperation held at Steubenville, Ohio, in 1844, express the policy that became permanent.
Mr. Campbell himself, laying aside any earlier prejudice against what he had called “popular schemes” among the denominations, urged “a more general and efficient cooperation in the Bible cause, in the missionary cause, in the educational cause.” But so long as the Disciples had no agency of their own for foreign missionary work he recommended (1845) that they support the Baptist Missionary Society. And when, in the same year, D. S. Burnet and other brethren in Cincinnati organized an “American Christian Bible Society,” he felt that this action was premature, that it was not sufficiently representative of the whole brotherhood, and that more could be accomplished with the available funds by contributing them to the (Baptist) American and Foreign Bible Society. He was no isolationist, and he bore no grudge against the Baptists, in spite of the acrimonies that had accompanied the expulsion of the Reformers from Baptist churches and associations a few years earlier. He also endorsed the Evangelical Alliance as soon as it was formed in 1846.
The demand for a national convention that would represent the whole body of Disciples found voice through most of the influential journals. All who urged a convention spoke of it as a meeting of “delegates” appointed by the churches. To those who still objected that conventions and missionary societies were no part of the “ancient order,” Mr. Campbell replied that in such matters of method and procedure the church is “left free and unshackled by any apostolic authority.”
National Organization
The first national convention of Disciples met at Cincinnati, October 24-28, 1849, with 156 representatives from one hundred churches in eleven states. Some came as delegates with credentials from their churches. Others represented districts. The Indiana state meeting had elected messengers. But many ministers and active laymen were present who had no formal appointment and no credentials. Since these were well-known brethren, whose standing as representative Disciples no one could deny, and whose right to an equal status with the elected delegates it would have been embarrassing to challenge, it was voted to enroll all present as members of the convention. So this first national convention, though projected as a delegate convention, became a mass meeting.
The organization of a missionary society was the principal business of the convention. The name first chosen was “Home and Foreign Missionary Society,” but this was immediately changed to “American Christian Missionary Society,” because “the missionary cause is one”—a truth that was rediscovered in 1919. The society’s name meant that it was to be an American agency for missions throughout the world, including America. Alexander Campbell was elected its first president, and he was re-elected annually as long as he lived.
No sooner had the convention been held and the society formed than the opposition to both flared up again. Jacob Creath, Jr., who had been opposed to the convention from the beginning, wanted to have another convention to discuss the legitimacy of conventions and societies. Some others argued that “the church is the only missionary society and can admit no rivals”; but these also objected to any arrangement for united action by the churches, so that, in their view, each congregation would have to be a separate missionary society. The criticism of conventions and societies on the ground that there was no New Testament command or precedent for them did not seem to have much popular support at this time, and it soon died down. But a few years later it became a highly controversial issue, and finally a divisive one.
The first venture abroad was the Jerusalem mission, led by Dr. James T. Barclay. Even before the convention met and before the society was formed, Dr. Barclay had been pressing the cause of foreign missions upon the Disciples, had suggested Jerusalem as a field, and had offered his services. He was a man of fine culture, with a college degree from the University of Virginia and a degree in medicine from the University of Pennsylvania, and the depth of his piety equaled the ardor of his devotion to the cause. The selection of Jerusalem as the scene of the first foreign missionary effort was based chiefly on sentimental considerations. Since the gospel had first been preached “beginning at Jerusalem,” it seemed fitting that the world-wide proclamation of the “gospel restored” should also begin there. Dr. Barclay and his family reached Jerusalem in February, 1851. After three and a half years of work, not entirely unfruitful but on the whole disappointing, he returned with the report that conditions did not warrant the continuance of the mission at that time.
Soon after, the society attempted to plant a mission among the Negro freedmen who had migrated to Liberia. This colony on the west coast of Africa had but recently declared its independence, which had been recognized by most of the powers—except the United States. A Negro slave, Alexander Cross, was bought, freed, educated, and sent to evangelize among his own people; but he died of fever on the coast of Liberia before he could begin his work. In 1858 J. O. Beardslee, who had been a missionary in Jamaica with another communion, became a Disciple and returned to that island under the auspices of the American Christian Missionary Society. His work produced no notable results, but it may have helped to open the fray for the more substantial work in Jamaica some years later. These three—Jerusalem, Liberia, and Jamaica—were the only foreign missionary efforts in the twenty-five years during which the society undertook to conduct both foreign and home missions, and all three were counted as failures.
Growth, Journalism, Education
During the quarter-century to which our attention is now directed, the American Christian Missionary Society did something toward sending evangelists to neglected areas and planting churches on the frontier. State societies did more. But the work that produced the very substantial growth in this period was done chiefly by churches and evangelists acting independently, by county and neighborhood cooperation, and by individuals who were following the westward tide of migration. While churches were being established in the new Western territories and states as fast as population flowed into them, there was also a steady increase of membership in the Central states, where the movement had had its beginnings. After a tour of Indiana in 1850, Mr. Campbell reported that “our people” in that state were second only to the Methodists in numbers, resources, and influence. Their standing in Kentucky at that time was certainly no worse. Development east of the Alleghenies was relatively slow and slight, except in Virginia and North Carolina, where early visits and preaching by Disciple ministers had proved fruitful. These two states would have been even stronger if they had not lost, while the Western states were gaining, by the westward current of migration. In other Eastern states there were some notable old churches, some of which originated under Haldanean, Sandemanian, or similar influences and became affiliated with the Disciples, but they did not greatly multiply.
The total numerical growth from 1849 to 1874 was not merely substantial; it was amazing. By the middle of the nineteenth century, after twenty years of separate existence, the Disciples had about 118,000 members. In the 1850-60 decade their numbers were almost doubled to 225,000. For 1870, the figure is given as 350,000. By 1875 it was probably close to 400,000. This growth is the more remarkable because it was accomplished with very little help from promotional organizations and with very little general planning.
The abundance and vigor of the periodicals devoted to the defense of the faith and the dissemination of news of the churches did much to make up for the lack of more official agencies of cooperation. The editors had no authority, but they exercised wide influence in the spread of ideas and the promotion of acquaintance among the Disciples in scattered communities. James M. Mathes published the Christian Record at various places in Indiana, with some intermissions, from 1843 to 1884. By far the most influential editor, aside from Campbell and Errett, was Benjamin Franklin, a collateral relative of the famous Dr. Benj. Franklin.
Our Ben Franklin began his long and notable editorial career in 1845 with a paper which, beginning as the Reformer and passing through several changes and mergers, became the American Christian Review. He was a powerful supporter of the missionary society until, after serving as its secretary for a short time, he turned against it and became the most effective opponent of organized work. More important than this was the sledge-hammer evangelism that he carried on incessantly, with the spoken as well as the written word. Completely without formal education, he developed a clear and trenchant style which does not need his biographer’s apologies. The favorite theme of his writing, and the sole theme of his preaching, was the “plan of salvation” and the plea of the Disciples for that simple gospel and the restoration of the church on the apostolic pattern. A volume of his evangelistic sermons, The Gospel Preacher, was the handbook for hundreds of other preachers and kept its popularity for half a century. One must know Ben Franklin, and realize how many there were like him, though built to a smaller scale, to understand how the Disciples grew so fast in this pioneer period—and why they ran into some difficulties later. Franklin also helped to save the Disciples from division over slavery and the Civil War by urging that the sole business of the church is to preach the gospel. In doing this, he also helped to fasten upon them the idea that the church must be neutral on all social and economic questions. A Christian “should make his money according to the laws of business and spend it according to the laws of God,” said one eminent minister.
About 1850 there arose a great zeal for founding colleges. In several states the Disciples had become strong enough, or felt sure that they soon would be strong enough, to support a college. Schools were needed to train ministers, to provide an educated laity, to hold the loyalty of the young people of their own families and win others, and to make their fair contribution to the culture of new communities in which there was little provision for tax-supported education.
In 1845 the Disciples had three colleges: Bacon, at Harrodsburg, Kentucky; Bethany, at what is now Bethany, West Virginia; and Franklin, near Nashville, Tennessee. Within a year or two before or after 1850, at least nine colleges and institutes were established, most of which still live. These included: Kentucky Female Orphan School, Midway, Kentucky; Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, which became Hiram College, Hiram, Ohio; Northwestern Christian University, which became Butler University, Indianapolis, Indiana; Walnut Grove Academy, which grew into Eureka College, Eureka, Illinois; Christian College (for girls), Columbia, Missouri; Abington College, Abington, Illinois, which later merged with Eureka; Berea College, Jacksonville, Illinois, which died young; Arkansas College, Fayetteville, Arkansas, which met the same fate; and Oskaloosa College, Oskaloosa, Iowa, which had thirty useful years before it was dimmed by the brighter light of Drake University.
The percentage of survival in this list is unusually high. It was much lower among the colleges started during the next twenty or thirty years. The cost of maintaining a good college, according to the standards of that time, was very little in comparison with present needs, but it was more than most of the eager college founders thought it would be. Many schools were started which had not a sufficient constituency. Others were brought forth by the local pride of an optimistic young settlement and withered away when its hope was deferred or its boom collapsed—for while Chicago and Kansas City grew miraculously, many a “future metropolis” of the Middle West remained a village. Few of the new colleges were adequately financed, even for a modest beginning. The mortality rate was therefore high. The Disciples were not alone in this. Other denominations lost many infant colleges. By 1865 there was a general complaint about the reckless multiplication of weak colleges. Moses E. Lard expressed the mind of many when he wrote: “We are building ten where we should have but one. One great university, with a single well-endowed college in each state where we number fifty thousand, is sufficient.”
One is rather surprised to find, running through several issues of the Millennial Harbinger in that same year, a discussion as to whether the Disciples needed a good theological school for the graduate training of the ministry. W. K. Pendleton, Campbell’s son-in-law (twice) and his successor as president of Bethany College and as editor of the Millennial Harbinger, argued that there was need of a school to give ministers a professional education beyond what the colleges can or should furnish. Isaac Errett agreed with Pendleton. Ben Franklin, naturally, opposed. Nothing was done. For another thirty or forty years the Disciples continued to consider training for the ministry as a phase of undergraduate education.
“We Can Never Divide”
Through these years the slavery issue was mounting to the crisis of war. All the churches were deeply stirred. Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians divided. Congregationalists, being practically all in the North and therefore all on the same side of the question, did not divide. The Episcopal Church peaceably divided when the country was divided by secession, and as peaceably reunited when the country was reunited. Disciples were nearly equal in numbers, North and South. They might easily have divided, but they did not.
Alexander Campbell’s sentiments were against slavery and he was never a slaveholder, but he lived in a slave state and had little sympathy with radical abolitionism. Much of the patronage and financial support of Bethany College came from the South, and he tried to keep the college neutral on these controversial issues. The first graduating class of Northwestern Christian University (Butler) was made up of a group of students who withdrew from Bethany in sympathy with a young man who had been expelled for making an antislavery speech after the public discussion of that question in the college had been forbidden. Campbell had elaborated his position in a series of articles in 1845: slavery is not condemned in the New Testament; therefore holding slaves is not sinful per se and cannot be a ground for withdrawing Christian fellowship; masters must do their full Christian duty toward their slaves, though it is admittedly very difficult to maintain a fully Christian attitude toward a person while owning him as a slave; slavery is economically bad and morally dangerous; and the policy to be followed in any situation is a matter of “opinion” and therefore within the area of Christian liberty.
That useful distinction between faith and opinion, which was fundamental to the Disciples’ program for union, now saved them from division over slavery and war. All political and social questions were to be treated as matters of opinion on which Christians might differ without dividing. Fourteen ministers in Missouri, including J. W. McGarvey, published in 1861 a “pacifist manifesto” urging Disciples to take no part in the war. They did not argue that war is always wrong or anti-Christian, nor did they discuss any moral issue of the war that was then beginning. Their whole point was that “our movement” would suffer disastrously if its members were to take arms against each other. Few Disciples were guided by their advice. Most of them, North and South, apparently felt that their attitudes in a great national crisis could not be determined by the consideration of what might happen to “our movement”—or else they thought that the movement could stand it, as it did.