A History of American Christianity

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"They thought the faculty were afraid of free discussion. But
when they handed Dr. Dwight a list of subjects for class
disputation, to their surprise, he selected this: 'Is the
Bible the word of God?' and told them to do their best. He
heard all they had to say, answered them, and there was an
end. He preached incessantly for six months on the subject,
and all infidelity skulked and hid its head. He elaborated his
theological system in a series of forenoon sermons in the
chapel; the afternoon discourses were practical. The original
design of Yale College was to found a divinity school. To a
mind appreciative, like mine, his preaching was a continual
course of education and a continual feast. He was copious and
polished in style, though disciplined and logical. There was a
pith and power of doctrine there that has not been since
surpassed, if equaled."[243:2]

It may be doubted whether to any man of his generation it was given to
exercise a wider and more beneficent influence over the American church
than that of President Dwight. His system of "Theology Explained and
Defended in a Series of Sermons," a theology meant to be preached and
made effective in convincing men and converting them to the service of
God, was so constructed as to be completed within the four years of the
college curriculum, so that every graduate should have heard the whole
of it. The influence of it has not been limited by the boundaries of our
country, nor has it expired with the century just completed since
President Dwight's accession.

At the East also, as well as at the West, the quickening of religious
thought and feeling had the common effect of alienating and disrupting.
Diverging tendencies, which had begun to disclose themselves in the
discussions between Edwards and Chauncy in their respective volumes of
"Thoughts" on the Great Awakening, became emphasized in the revival of
1800. That liberalism which had begun as a protest against a too
peremptory style of dogmatism was rapidly advancing toward a dogmatic
denial of points deemed by the opposite party to be essential. Dogmatic
differences were aggravated by differences of taste and temperament, and
everything was working toward the schism by which some sincere and
zealous souls should seek to do God service.

In one most important particular the revival of 1800 was happily
distinguished from the Great Awakening of 1740. It was not done and over
with at the end of a few years, and then followed by a long period of
reaction. It was the beginning of a long period of vigorous and
"abundant life," moving forward, not, indeed, with even and unvarying
flow, yet with continuous current, marked with those alternations of
exaltation and subsidence which seem, whether for evil or for good, to
have become a fixed characteristic of American church history.

The widespread revivals of the first decade of the nineteenth century
saved the church of Christ in America from its low estate and girded it
for stupendous tasks that were about to be devolved on it. In the glow
of this renewed fervor, the churches of New England successfully made
the difficult transition from establishment to self-support and to the
costly enterprises of aggressive evangelization into which, in company
with other churches to the South and West, they were about to enter. The
Christianity of the country was prepared and equipped to attend with
equal pace the prodigious rush of population across the breadth of the
Great Valley, and to give welcome to the invading host of immigrants
which before the end of a half century was to effect its entrance into
our territory at the rate of a thousand a day. It was to accommodate
itself to changing social conditions, as the once agricultural
population began to concentrate itself in factory villages and
commercial towns. It was to carry on systematic campaigns of warfare
against instituted social wrong, such as the drinking usages of society,
the savage code of dueling, the public sanction of slavery. And it was
to enter the "effectual door" which from the beginning of the century
opened wider and wider to admit the gospel and the church to every
nation under heaven.

FOOTNOTES:

[231:1] "Autobiography of Lyman Beecher," vol. i., p. 43. The same
charming volume contains abundant evidence that the spirit of true
religion was cherished in the homes of the people, while there were so
many public signs of apostasy.

[232:1] Tiffany, "Protestant Episcopal Church," pp. 388, 394, 395.

[232:2] Dr. Jacobs, chap. xix.

[233:1] "Autobiography of Peter Cartwright," quoted by Dorchester,
"Christianity in the United States," p. 348.

[236:1] See B. B. Tyler, "History of the Disciples," pp. 11-17; R. V.
Foster, "The Cumberland Presbyterians," pp. 260-263 (American Church
History Series, vols. xi., xii.).

[238:1] Tyler, "The Disciples"; Foster, "The Cumberland Presbyterians,"
_ubi supra_.

[240:1] Let me add an illustrative instance related to me by the
distinguished Methodist, Dr. David P. Durbin. Standing near the platform
from which he was to preach at a camp-meeting, he observed a powerfully
built young backwoodsman who was manifestly there with no better intent
than to disturb and break up the meeting. Presently it became evident
that the young man was conscious of some influence taking hold of him to
which he was resolved not to yield; he clutched with both hands a
hickory sapling next which he was standing, to hold himself steady, but
was whirled round and round, until the bark of the sapling peeled off
under his grasp. But, as in the cases referred to by Dow, the attack was
attended by no religious sentiment whatever.

On the manifestations in the Cumberland country, see McMasters, "United
States," vol. ii., pp. 581, 582, and the sources there cited. For some
judicious remarks on the general subject, see Buckley, "Methodism," pp.
217-224.

[241:1] So Dr. Buckley, "Methodism," p. 217.

[242:1] American Church History Series, vol. xii.

[243:1] See above, pp. 230, 231.

[243:2] "Autobiography of Lyman Beecher," vol. i., pp. 43, 44.

CHAPTER XV.

ORGANIZED BENEFICENCE.

When the Presbyterian General Assembly, in 1803, made a studious review
of the revivals which for several years had been in progress, especially
at the South and West, it included in its "Narrative" the following
observations:

"The Assembly observe with great pleasure that the desire for
spreading the gospel among the blacks and among the savage
tribes on our borders has been rapidly increasing during the
last year. The Assembly take notice of this circumstance with
the more satisfaction, as it not only affords a pleasing
presage of the spread of the gospel, but also furnishes
agreeable evidence of the genuineness and the benign tendency
of that spirit which God has been pleased to pour out upon his
people."

In New England the like result had already, several years before,
followed upon the like antecedent. In the year 1798 the "Missionary
Society of Connecticut" was constituted, having for its object "to
Christianize the heathen in North America, and to support and promote
Christian knowledge in the new settlements within the United States";
and in August, 1800, its first missionary, David Bacon, engaged at a
salary of "one hundred and ten cents per day," set out for the
wilderness south and west of Lake Erie, "afoot and alone, with no more
luggage than he could carry on his person," to visit the wild tribes of
that region, "to explore their situation, and learn their feelings with
respect to Christianity, and, so far as he had opportunity, to teach
them its doctrines and duties." The name forms a link in the bright
succession from John Eliot to this day. But it must needs be that some
suffer as victims of the inexperience of those who are first to take
direction of an untried enterprise. The abandonment of its first
missionary by one of the first missionary societies, leaving him
helpless in the wilderness, was a brief lesson in the economy of
missions opportunely given at the outset of the American mission work,
and happily had no need to be repeated.[247:1]

David Bacon, like Henry Martyn, who at that same time, in far different
surroundings, was intent upon his plans of mission work in India, was
own son in the faith to David Brainerd. But they were elder sons in a
great family. The pathetic story of that heroic youth, as told by
Jonathan Edwards, was a classic at that time in almost every country
parsonage; but its influence was especially felt in the colleges, now no
longer, as a few years earlier, the seats of the scornful, but the homes
of serious and religious learning which they were meant to be by their
founders.

Of the advancement of Christian civilization in the first
quarter-century from the achievement of independence there is no more
distinguished monument than the increase, through those troubled and
impoverished years, of the institutions of secular and sacred learning.
The really successful and effective colleges that had survived from the
colonial period were hardly a half-dozen. Up to 1810 these had been
reinforced by as many more. By far the greater number of them were
founded by the New England Congregationalists, to whom this has ever
been a favorite field of activity. But special honor must be paid to the
wise and courageous and nobly successful enterprise of large-minded and
large-hearted men among the Baptists, who as early as 1764, boldly
breasting a current of unworthy prejudice in their own denomination,
began the work of Brown University at Providence, which, carried forward
by a notable succession of great educators, has been set in the front
rank of existing American institutions of learning. After the revivals
of 1800 these Christian colleges were not only attended by students
coming from zealous and fervid churches; they themselves became the foci
from which high and noble spiritual influences were radiated through the
land. It was in communities like these that the example of such lives as
that of Brainerd stirred up generous young minds to a chivalrous and
even ascetic delight in attempting great labors and enduring great
sacrifices as soldiers under the Captain of salvation.

It was at Williams College, then just planted in the Berkshire hills,
that a little coterie of students was formed which, for the grandeur of
the consequences that flowed from it, is worthy to be named in history
beside the Holy Club of Oxford in 1730, and the friends at Oriel College
in 1830. Samuel J. Mills came to Williams College in 1806 from the
parsonage of "Father Mills" of Torringford, concerning whom quaint
traditions and even memories still linger in the neighboring parishes of
Litchfield County, Connecticut. Around this young student gathered a
circle of men like-minded. The shade of a lonely haystack was their
oratory; the pledges by which they bound themselves to a life-work for
the kingdom of heaven remind one of the mutual vows of the earliest
friends of Loyola. Some of the youths went soon to the theological
seminary, and at once leavened that community with their own spirit.

The seminary--there was only one in all Protestant America. As early as
1791 the Sulpitian fathers had organized their seminary at Baltimore.
But it was not until 1808 that any institution for theological studies
was open to candidates for the Protestant ministry. Up to that time such
studies were made in the regular college curriculum, which was
distinctly theological in character; and it was common for the graduate
to spend an additional year at the college for special study under the
president or the one professor of divinity. But many country parsonages
that were tenanted by men of fame as writers and teachers were greatly
frequented by young men preparing themselves for the work of preaching.

The change to the modern method of education for the ministry was a
sudden one. It was precipitated by an event which has not even yet
ceased to be looked on by the losing party with honest lamentation and
with an unnecessary amount of sectarian acrimony. The divinity
professorship in Harvard College, founded in 1722[249:1] by Thomas
Hollis, of London, a Baptist friend of New England, was filled, after a
long struggle and an impassioned protest, by the election of Henry Ware,
an avowed and representative Unitarian. It was a distinct announcement
that the government of the college had taken sides in the impending
conflict, in opposition to the system of religious doctrine to the
maintenance of which the college had from its foundation been devoted.
The significance of the fact was not mistaken by either party. It meant
that the two tendencies which had been recognizable from long before
the Great Awakening were drawing asunder, and that thenceforth it must
be expected that the vast influence of the venerable college, in the
clergy and in society, would be given to the Liberal side. The dismay of
one party and the exultation of the other were alike well grounded. The
cry of the Orthodox was "To your tents, O Israel!" Lines of
ecclesiastical non-intercourse were drawn. Church was divided from
church, and family from family. When the forces and the losses on each
side came to be reckoned up, there was a double wonder: First, at the
narrow boundaries by which the Unitarian defection was circumscribed: "A
radius of thirty-five miles from Boston as a center would sweep almost
the whole field of its history and influence;"[250:1] and then at the
sweeping completeness of it within these bounds; as Mrs. H. B. Stowe
summed up the situation at Boston, "All the literary men of
Massachusetts were Unitarian; all the trustees and professors of Harvard
College were Unitarian; all the _elite_ of wealth and fashion crowded
Unitarian churches; the judges on the bench were Unitarian, giving
decisions by which the peculiar features of church organization so
carefully ordered by the Pilgrim Fathers had been nullified and all the
power had passed into the hands of the congregation."[250:2]

The schism, with its acrimonies and heartburnings, was doubtless in some
sense necessary. And it was attended with some beneficent consequences.
It gave rise to instructive and illuminating debate. And on the part of
the Orthodox it occasioned an outburst of earnest zeal which in a
wonderfully short time had more than repaired their loss in numbers, and
had started them on a career of wide beneficence, with a momentum that
has been increasing to this day. But it is not altogether useless to
put the question how much was lost to both parties and to the common
cause by the separation. It is not difficult to conceive that such
dogged polemics as Nathanael Emmons and Jedidiah Morse might have been
none the worse for being held in some sort of fellowship, rather than in
exasperated controversy, with such types of Christian sainthood as the
younger Ware and the younger Buckminster; and it is easy to imagine the
extreme culture and cool intellectual and spiritual temper of the
Unitarian pulpit in general as finding its advantage in not being cut
off from direct radiations from the fiery zeal of Lyman Beecher and
Edward Dorr Griffin. Is it quite sure that New England Congregationalism
would have been in all respects worse off if Channing and his friends
had continued to be recognized as the Liberal wing of its clergy? or
that the Unitarian ministers would not have been a great deal better off
if they had remained in connection with a strong and conservative right
wing, which might counterbalance the exorbitant leftward flights of
their more impatient and erratic spirits?

The seating of a pronounced Unitarian in the Hollis chair of theology at
Harvard took place in 1805. Three years later, in 1808, the doors of
Andover Seminary were opened to students. Thirty-six were present, and
the number went on increasing. The example was quickly followed. In 1810
the Dutch seminary was begun at New Brunswick, and in 1812 the
Presbyterian at Princeton. In 1816 Bangor Seminary (Congregationalist)
and Hartwick Seminary (Lutheran) were opened. In 1819 the Episcopalian
"General Seminary" followed, and the Baptist "Hamilton Seminary" in
1820. In 1821 Presbyterian seminaries were begun at Auburn, N. Y., and
Marysville, Tenn. In 1822 the Yale Divinity College was founded
(Congregationalist); in 1823 the Virginia (Episcopalian) seminary at
Alexandria; in 1824 the Union (Presbyterian) Seminary, also in Virginia,
and the Unitarian seminary at Cambridge; in 1825 the Baptist seminary at
Newton, Mass., and the German Reformed at York, Pa.; in 1826 the
Lutheran at Gettysburg; in 1827 the Baptist at Rock Spring, Ill. Thus,
within a period of twenty years, seventeen theological schools had come
into existence where none had been known before. It was a swift and
beneficent revolution, and the revolution has never gone backward. In
1880 were enumerated in the United States no less than one hundred and
forty-two seminaries, representing all sects, orders, and schools of
theological opinion, employing five hundred and twenty-nine resident
professors.[252:1]

To Andover, in the very first years of its great history, came Mills and
others of the little Williams College circle; and at once their
infectious enthusiasm for the advancement of the kingdom of God was felt
throughout the institution. The eager zeal of these young men brooked no
delay. In June, 1810, the General Association of Massachusetts met at
the neighboring town of Bradford; there four of the students, Judson,
Nott, Newell, and Hall, presented themselves and their cause; and at
that meeting was constituted the American Board of Commissioners for
Foreign Missions. The little faith of the churches shrank from the
responsibility of sustaining missionaries in the field, and Judson was
sent to England to solicit the cooeperation of the London Missionary
Society. This effort happily failing, the burden came back upon the
American churches and was not refused. At last, in February, 1812, the
first American missionaries to a foreign country, Messrs. Judson, Rice,
Newell, Nott, and Hall, with their wives, sailed, in two parties, for
Calcutta.

And now befell an incident perplexing, embarrassing, and disheartening
to the supporters of the mission, but attended with results for the
promotion of the gospel to which their best wisdom never could have
attained. Adoniram Judson, a graduate of Brown University, having spent
the long months at sea in the diligent and devout study of the
Scriptures, arrived at Calcutta fully persuaded of the truth of Baptist
principles. His friend, Luther Rice, arriving by the other vessel, came
by and by to the same conclusion; and the two, with their wives, were
baptized by immersion in the Baptist church at Calcutta. The
announcement of this news in America was an irresistible appeal to the
already powerful and rapidly growing Baptist denomination to assume the
support of the two missionaries who now offered themselves to the
service of the Baptist churches. Rice returned to urge the appeal on
their immediate attention, while Judson remained to enter on that noble
apostolate for which his praise is in all the churches.

To the widespread Baptist fellowship this sudden, unmistakable, and
imperative providential summons to engage in the work of foreign
missions was (it is hardly too much to say) like life from the dead. The
sect had doubled its numbers in the decade just passed, and was
estimated to include two hundred thousand communicants, all "baptized
believers." But this multitude was without common organization, and,
while abundantly endowed with sectarian animosities, was singularly
lacking in a consciousness of common spiritual life. It was pervaded by
a deadly fatalism, which, under the guise of reverence for the will of
God, was openly pleaded as a reason for abstaining from effort and
self-denial in the promotion of the gospel. Withal it was widely
characterized not only by a lack of education in its ministry, but by a
violent and brutal opposition to a learned clergy, which was
particularly strange in a party the moiety of whose principles depends
on a point in Greek lexicology. It was to a party--we may not say a
body--deeply and widely affected by traits like these that the divine
call was to be presented and urged. The messenger was well fitted for
his work. To the zeal of a new convert to Baptist principles, and a
missionary fervor deepened by recent contact with idolatry in some of
its most repulsive forms, Luther Rice united a cultivated eloquence and
a personal persuasiveness. Of course his first address was to pastors
and congregations in the seaboard cities, unexcelled by any, of whatever
name, for intelligent and reasonable piety; and here his task was easy
and brief, for they were already of his mind. But the great mass of
ignorance and prejudice had also to be reckoned with. By a work in which
the influence of the divine Spirit was quite as manifest as in the
convulsive agitations of a camp-meeting, it was dealt with successfully.
Church history moved swiftly in those days. The news of the accession of
Judson and Rice was received in January, 1813. In May, 1814, the General
Missionary Convention of the Baptists was organized at Philadelphia,
thirty-three delegates being present, from eleven different States. The
Convention, which was to meet triennially, entered at once upon its
work. It became a vital center to the Baptist denomination. From it, at
its second meeting, proceeded effective measures for the promotion of
education in the ministry, and, under the conviction that "western as
well as eastern regions are given to the Son of God as an inheritance,"
large plans for home missions at the West.

Thus the great debt which the English Congregationalists had owed to the
Baptists for heroic leadership in the work of foreign missions was
repaid with generous usury by the Congregationalists to the Baptists of
America. From this time forward the American Baptists came more and more
to be felt as a salutary force in the religious life of the nation and
the world. But against what bitter and furious opposition on the part of
the ancient ignorance the new light had to struggle cannot easily be
conceived by those who have only heard of the "Hard-Shell Baptist" as a
curious fossil of a prehistoric period.[255:1]

The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions continued for
twenty-seven years to be the common organ of foreign missionary
operations for the Congregationalists, the Presbyterians, and the Dutch
and German Reformed churches. In the year 1837 an official Presbyterian
Board of Missions was erected by the Old-School fragment of the
disrupted Presbyterian Church; and to this, when the two fragments were
reunited, in 1869, the contributions of the New-School side began to be
transferred. In 1858 the Dutch church, and in 1879 the German church,
instituted their separate mission operations. Thus the initiative of the
Andover students in 1810 resulted in the erection, not of one mission
board, timidly venturing to set five missionaries in the foreign field,
but of five boards, whose total annual resources are counted by millions
of dollars, whose evangelists, men and women, American and foreign-born,
are a great army, and whose churches, schools, colleges, theological
seminaries, hospitals, printing-presses, with the other equipments of a
Christian civilization, and the myriads of whose faithful Christian
converts, in every country under the whole heaven, have done more for
the true honor of our nation than all that it has achieved in diplomacy
and war.[255:2]

The Episcopalians entered on foreign mission work in 1819, and the
Methodists, tardily but at last with signal efficiency and success, in
1832. No considerable sect of American Christians at the present day is
unrepresented in the foreign field.

In order to complete the history of this organizing era in the church,
we must return to the humble but memorable figure of Samuel J. Mills. It
was his characteristic word to one of his fellows, as they stood ready
to leave the seclusion of the seminary for active service, "You and I,
brother, are little men, but before we die, our influence must be felt
on the other side of the world." No one claimed that he was other than a
"little man," except as he was filled and possessed with a great
thought, and that the thought that filled the mind of Christ--the
thought of the Coming Age and of the Reign of God on earth.[256:1] While
his five companions were sailing for the remotest East, Mills plunged
into the depth of the western wilderness, and between 1812 and 1815, in
two toilsome journeys, traversed the Great Valley as far as New Orleans,
deeply impressed everywhere with the famine of the word, and laboring,
in cooeperation with local societies at the East, to provide for the
universal want by the sale or gift of Bibles and the organization of
Bible societies. After his second return he proposed the organization of
the American Bible Society, which was accomplished in 1816.

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