A History of American Christianity

L >> Leonard Woolsey Bacon >> A History of American Christianity

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33

"If there is any one thing more than another upon which people
agree, it is respect and reverence for the person and the
character of the Founder of Christianity. How the Protestant
loves his Saviour! How the Protestant eye will sometimes grow
dim when speaking of our Lord! In this great center of union
is found the hope of human society, the only means of
preserving Christian civilization, the only point upon which
Catholic and Protestant may meet. As if foreseeing that this
should be, Christ himself gave his example of fraternal
charity, not to the orthodox Jew, but to the heretical
Samaritan, showing that charity and love, while faith remains
intact, can never be true unless no distinction is made
between God's creatures."[325:1]

Herein is fellowship higher than that of symbols and sacraments. By so
far as it receives this spirit of love the American Catholic Church
enters into its place in that greater Catholic Church of which we all
make mention in the Apostles' Creed--"the Holy Universal Church, which
is the fellowship of holy souls."

* * * * *

The effect of the Great Immigration on the body of the immigrant
population is not more interesting or more important than the effect of
it on the religious bodies already in occupation of the soil. The
impression made on them by what seemed an irruption of barbarians of
strange language or dialect, for the most part rude, unskilled, and
illiterate, shunning as profane the Christian churches of the land, and
bowing in unknown rites as devotees of a system known, and by no means
favorably known, only through polemic literature and history, and
through the gruesome traditions of Puritan and Presbyterian and
Huguenot, was an impression not far removed from horror; and this
impression was deepened as the enormous proportions of this invasion
disclosed themselves from year to year. The serious and not unreasonable
fear that these armies of aliens, handled as they manifestly were by a
generalship that was quick to seize and fortify in a conspicuous way the
strategic points of influence, especially in the new States, might
imperil or ruin the institutions and liberties of the young Republic,
was stimulated and exploited in the interest of enterprises of
evangelization that might counter-work the operations of the invading
church. The appeals of the Bible and tract societies, and of the
various home mission agencies of the different denominations, as well as
of the distinctively antipopery societies, were pointed with the alarm
lest "the great West" should fall under the domination of the papal
hierarchy. Naturally the delineations of the Roman system and of its
public and social results that were presented to the public for these
purposes were of no flattering character. Not history only, but
contemporary geography gave warnings of peril. Canada on one hand, and
Mexico and the rest of Spanish America on the other, were cited as
living examples of the fate which might befall the free United States.
The apocalyptic prophecies were copiously drawn upon for material of
war. By processes of exegesis which critical scholarship regards with a
smile or a shudder, the helpless pope was made to figure as the
Antichrist, the Man of Sin and Son of Perdition, the Scarlet Woman on
the Seven Hills, the Little Horn Speaking Blasphemies, the Beast, and
the Great Red Dragon. That moiety of Christendom which, sorely as its
history has been deformed by corruption and persecution, violently as it
seems to be contrasted with the simplicity of the primeval church, is
nevertheless the spiritual home of multitudes of Christ's well-approved
servants and disciples, was held up to gaze as being nothing but the
enemy of Christ and his cause. The appetite of the Protestant public for
scandals at the expense of their fellow-Christians was stimulated to a
morbid greediness and then overfed with willful and wicked fabrications.
The effect of this fanaticism on some honest but illogical minds was
what might have been looked for. Brought by and by into personal
acquaintance with Catholic ministers and institutions, and discovering
the fraud and injustice that had been perpetrated, they sprang by a
generous reaction into an attitude of sympathy for the Roman Catholic
system. A more favorable preparation of the way of conversion to Rome
could not be desired by the skillful propagandist. One recognizes a
retributive justice in the fact, when notable gains to the Catholic
Church are distinctly traced to the reaction of honest men from these
fraudulent polemics.[327:1]

The danger to the Republic, which was thus malignantly or ignorantly
exaggerated and distorted, was nevertheless real and grave. No sincerely
earnest and religious Protestant, nor even any well-informed patriotic
citizen, with the example of French and Spanish America before his eyes,
could look with tolerance upon the prospect of a possible Catholicizing
of the new States at the West; and the sight of the incessant tide of
immigration setting westward, the reports of large funds sent hither
from abroad to aid the propagation of the Roman Church, and the accounts
of costly and imposing ecclesiastical buildings rising at the most
important centers of population, roused the Christian patriotism of the
older States to the noblest enterprises of evangelization. There was no
wasting of energy in futile disputation. In all the Protestant
communions it was felt that the work called for was a simple, peaceful,
and positive one--to plant the soil of the West, at the first occupation
of it by settlers, with Christian institutions and influences. The
immensity of the task stimulated rather than dismayed the zeal of the
various churches. The work undertaken and accomplished in the twenty
years from 1840 to 1860 in providing the newly settled regions with
churches, pastors, colleges, and theological seminaries, with
Sunday-schools, and with Bibles and other religious books, was of a
magnitude which will never be defined by statistical figures. How great
it was, and at what cost it was effected in gifts of treasure and of
heroic lives of toil and self-denial, can only be a matter of vague
wonder and thanksgiving.

The work of planting the church in the West exhibits the voluntary
system at its best--and at its worst. A task so vast and so momentous
has never been imposed on the resources of any state establishment. It
is safe to say that no established church has ever existed, however
imperially endowed, that would have been equal to the undertaking of it.
With no imposing combination of forces, and no strategic concert of
action, the work was begun spontaneously and simultaneously, like some
of the operations of nature, by a multitude of different agencies, and
went forward uninterrupted to something as nearly like completeness as
could be in a work the exigencies of which continually widened beyond
all achievements. The planting of the church in the West is one of the
wonders of church history.

But this noble act of religious devotion was by no means a sacrifice
without blemish. The sacred zeal for advancing God's reign and
righteousness was mingled with many very human motives in the progress
of it. Conspicuous among these was the spirit of sectarian competition.
The worthy and apostolic love for kindred according to the flesh
separated from home and exposed to the privations and temptations of the
frontier, the honest anxiety to forestall the domination of a
dangerously powerful religious corporation propagating perverted views
of truth, even the desire to advance principles and forms of belief
deemed to be important, were infused with a spirit of partisanship as
little spiritual as the enthusiasm which animates the struggles and the
shouters at a foot-ball game. The devoted pioneer of the gospel on the
frontier, seeing his work endangered by that of a rival denomination,
writes to the central office of his sect; the board of missions makes
its appeal to the contributing churches; the churches respond with
subsidies; and the local rivalry in the mission field is pressed,
sometimes to a good result, on the principle that "competition is the
life of business." Thus the fragrance of the precious ointment of loving
sacrifice is perceptibly tainted, according to the warning of
Ecclesiastes or the Preacher. And yet it is not easy for good men, being
men, sternly to rebuke the spirit that seems to be effective in
promoting the good cause that they have at heart.

If the effect of these emulations on the contributing churches was
rather carnal than spiritual, the effect in the mission field was worse.
The effect was seen in the squandering of money and of priceless service
of good men and women, in the debilitating and demoralizing division and
subdivision of the Christian people, not of cities and large towns, but
of villages and hamlets and of thinly settled farming districts. By the
building of churches and other edifices for sectarian uses, schism was
established for coming time as a vested interest. The gifts and service
bestowed in this cause with a truly magnificent liberality would have
sufficed to establish the Christian faith and fellowship throughout the
new settlements in strength and dignity, in churches which, instead of
lingering as puny and dependent nurslings, would have grown apace to be
strong and healthy nursing mothers to newer churches yet.

There is an instructive contrast, not only between the working of the
voluntary system and that of the Old World establishments, but between
the methods of the Catholic Church and the Protestant no-method. Under
the control of a strong cooerdinating authority the competitions of the
various Catholic orders, however sharp, could never be allowed to run
into wasteful extravagance through cross-purposes. It is believed that
the Catholics have not erected many monuments of their own unthrift in
the shape of costly buildings begun, but left unfinished and abandoned.
A more common incident of their work has been the buying up of these
expensive failures, at a large reduction from their cost, and turning
them to useful service. And yet the principle of sectarian competition
is both recognized and utilized in the Roman system. The various
clerical sects, with their characteristic names, costumes, methods, and
doctrinal differences, have their recognized aptitudes for various sorts
of work, with which their names are strongly associated: the Dominican
for pulpit eloquence, the Capuchin for rough-and-ready street-preaching,
the Benedictine for literary work, the Sulpitian for the training of
priests, and the ubiquitous Jesuit for shifty general utility with a
specialty of school-keeping. These and a multitude of other orders, male
and female, have been effectively and usefully employed in the arduous
labor _Romanam condere gentem_. But it would seem that the superior
stability of the present enterprise of planting Catholicism in the
domain of the United States, as compared with former expensive failures,
was due in some part to the larger employment of a diocesan parish
clergy instead of a disproportionate reliance on the "regulars."

On the whole, notwithstanding its immense armies of immigrants and the
devoted labors of its priests, and notwithstanding its great expansion,
visible everywhere in conspicuous monuments of architecture, the
Catholic advance in America has not been, comparatively speaking,
successful. For one thing, the campaign was carried on too far from its
base of supplies. The subsidies from Lyons and Vienna, liberal as they
were, were no match for the home missionary zeal of the seaboard States
in following their own sons westward with church and gospel and pastor.
Even the conditions which made possible the superior management and
economy of resources, both material and personal, among the Catholics,
were attended with compensating drawbacks. With these advantages they
could not have the immense advantage of the popular initiative. In
Protestantism the people were the church, and the minister was chief
among the people only by virtue of being servant of all; the people were
incited to take up the work for their own and carry it on at their best
discretion; and they were free to make wasteful and disastrous blunders
and learn therefrom by experience. With far greater expenditure of
funds, they make no comparison with their brethren of the Roman
obedience in stately and sumptuous buildings at great centers of
commerce and travel. But they have covered the face of the land with
country meeting-houses, twice as many as there was any worthy use for,
in which faithful service is rendered to subdivided congregations by
underpaid ministers, enough in number, if they were wisely distributed,
for the evangelization of the whole continent; and each country
meeting-house is a mission station, and its congregation, men, women,
and children, are missionaries. Thus it has come about, in the language
of the earnest Catholic from the once Catholic city of New Orleans, that
"the nation, the government, the whole people, remain solidly
Protestant."[331:1] Great territories originally discovered by Catholic
explorers and planted in the name of the church by Catholic missionaries
and colonists, and more lately occupied by Catholic immigrants in what
seemed overwhelming numbers, are now the seat of free and powerful
commonwealths in which the Catholic Church is only one of the most
powerful and beneficent of the Christian sects, while the institutions
and influences which characterize their society are predominantly
Protestant.

In the westward propagation of Protestantism, as well as of Catholicism,
the distinctive attributes of the several sects or orders is strikingly
illustrated.

Foremost in the pioneer work of the church are easily to be recognized
the Methodists and the Baptists, one the most solidly organized of the
Protestant sects, the other the most uncompact and individualist; the
first by virtue of the supple military organization of its great corps
of itinerants, the other by the simplicity and popular apprehensibleness
of its distinctive tenets and arguments and the aggressive ardor with
which it inspires all its converts, and both by their facility in
recruiting their ministry from the rank and file of the church, without
excluding any by arbitrarily imposed conditions. The Presbyterians were
heavily cumbered for advance work by traditions and rules which they
were rigidly reluctant to yield or bend, even when the reason for the
rule was superseded by higher reasons. The argument for a learned
ministry is doubtless a weighty one; but it does not suffice to prove
that when college-bred men are not to be had it is better that the
people have no minister at all. There is virtue in the rule of
ministerial parity; but it should not be allowed to hinder the church
from employing in humbler spiritual functions men who fall below the
prescribed standard. This the church, in course of time, discovered, and
instituted a "minor order" of ministers, under the title of colporteurs.
But it was timidly and tardily done, and therefore ineffectively. The
Presbyterians lost their place in the skirmish-line; but that which had
been their hindrance in the advance work gave them great advantage in
settled communities, in which for many years they took precedence in
the building up of strong and intelligent congregations.

To the Congregationalists belongs an honor in the past which, in recent
generations, they have not been jealous to retain. Beyond any sect,
except the Moravians, they have cherished that charity which seeketh not
her own. The earliest leaders in the organization of schemes of national
beneficence in cooeperation with others, they have sustained them with
unselfish liberality, without regard to returns of sectarian advantage.
The results of their labor are largely to be traced in the upbuilding of
other sects. Their specialty in evangelization has been that of the
religious educators of the nation. They have been preeminently the
builders of colleges and theological seminaries. To them, also, belongs
the leadership in religious journalism. Not only the journals of their
own sect and the undenominational journals, but also to a notable extent
the religious journals of other denominations, have depended for their
efficiency on men bred in the discipline of Congregationalism.

It is no just reproach to the Episcopalians that they were tardy in
entering the field of home missions. When we remember that it is only
since 1811 that they have emerged from numerical insignificance, we find
their contribution to the planting of the church in the new settlements
to be a highly honorable one. By a suicidal compact the guileless
Evangelical party agreed, in 1835, to take direction of the foreign
missions of the church, and leave the home field under the direction of
the aggressive High-church party. It surrendered its part in the future
of the church, and determined the type of Episcopalianism that was to be
planted in the West.[333:1] Entering thus late into the work, and that
with stinted resources, the Episcopal Church wholly missed the
apostolic glory of not building on other men's foundations. Coming with
the highest pretensions to exclusive authority, its work was very
largely a work of proselyting from other Christian sects. But this work
was prosperously carried on; and although not in itself a work of the
highest dignity, and although the methods of it often bore a painfully
schismatic character, there is little room for doubt that the results of
it have enriched and strengthened the common Christianity of America.
Its specialties in the planting work have been the setting of a worthy
example of dignity and simplicity in the conduct of divine worship, and
in general of efficiency in the administration of a parish, and, above
all, the successful handling of the immensely difficult duties imposed
upon Christian congregations in great cities, where the Episcopal Church
has its chief strength and its most effective work.

One must needs ascend to a certain altitude above the common level in
order to discern a substantial resultant unity of movement in the
strenuous rivalries and even antagonisms of the many sects of the one
church of Christ in America in that critical quarter-century from the
year 1835 to the outbreak of the Civil War, in which the work of the
church was suddenly expanded by the addition of a whole empire of
territory on the west, and the bringing in of a whole empire of alien
population from the east, and when no one of the Christian forces of the
nation could be spared from the field. The unity is very real, and is
visible enough, doubtless, from "the circle of the heavens." The sharers
in the toil and conflict and the near spectators are not well placed to
observe it. It will be for historians in some later century to study it
in a truer perspective.

* * * * *

It is not only as falling within this period of immigration, but as
being largely dependent on its accessions from foreign lands, that the
growth of Mormonism is entitled to mention in this chapter. In its
origin Mormonism is distinctly American--a system of gross, palpable
imposture contrived by a disreputable adventurer, Joe Smith, with the
aid of three confederates, who afterward confessed the fraud and perjury
of which they had been guilty. It is a shame to human nature that the
silly lies put forth by this precious gang should have found believers.
But the solemn pretensions to divine revelation, mixed with elements
borrowed from the prevalent revivalism, and from the immediate adventism
which so easily captivates excitable imaginations, drew a number of
honest dupes into the train of the knavish leaders, and made possible
the pitiable history which followed. The chief recruiting-grounds for
the new religion were not in America, but in the manufacturing and
mining regions of Great Britain, and in some of the countries,
especially the Scandinavian countries, of continental Europe. The able
handling of an emigration fund, and the dexterous combination of appeals
to many passions and interests at once, have availed to draw together in
the State of Utah and neighboring regions a body of fanatics formidable
to the Republic, not by their number, for they count only about one
hundred and fifty thousand, but by the solidity with which they are
compacted into a political, economical, religious, and, at need,
military community, handled at will by unscrupulous chiefs. It is only
incidentally that the strange story of the Mormons, a story singularly
dramatic and sometimes tragic, is connected with the history of American
Christianity.[335:1]

To this same period belongs the beginning of the immigration of the
Chinese, which, like that of the Mormons, becomes by and by important to
our subject as furnishing occasion for active and fruitful missionary
labors.

In the year 1843 culminated the panic agitation of Millerism. From the
year 1831 an honest Vermont farmer named William Miller had been urging
upon the public, in pamphlets and lectures, his views of the approaching
advent of Christ to judgment and the destruction of the world. He had
figured it out on the basis of prophecies in Daniel and the Revelation,
and the great event was set down for April 23, 1843. As the date drew
near the excitement of many became intense. Great meetings were held, in
the open air or in tents, of those who wished to be found waiting for
the Lord. Some nobly proved their sincerity by the surrender of their
property for the support of their poorer brethren until the end should
come. The awful day was awaited with glowing rapture of hope, or by some
with terror. When it dawned there was eager gazing upon the clouds of
heaven to descry the sign of the Son of man. And when the day had passed
without event there were various revulsions of feeling. The prophets set
themselves to going over their figures and fixing new dates; earnest
believers, sobered by the failure of their pious expectations, held
firmly to the substance of their faith and hope, while no longer
attempting to "know times and seasons, which the Father hath put within
his own power"; weak minds made shipwreck of faith; and scoffers cried
in derision, "Where is the promise of his coming?" A monument of this
honest delusion still exists in the not very considerable sect of
Adventists, with its subdivisions; but sympathizers with their general
scheme of prophetical interpretation are to be found among the most
earnest and faithful members of other churches.

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

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

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33