Ancestors (17 page)

He became an instructor in a school conducted by a fellow countryman who was a Kissing Baptist, and he ended up running the school and preaching. He was something of an oddity, with many of the attributes of a poet—timid, diffident, delighting in comparisons. Through his reading Scott had arrived at a position so near that of Alexander Campbell that when they met they were immediately congenial. The congeniality seems to have been enforced rather than inhibited by temperamental differences. Scott wrote a number of articles for the
Christian Baptist
, and when he moved to Steubenville, Ohio, the two men were, in a manner of speaking, neighbors. By this time the five Reformer congregations had been accepted into the Mahoning Baptist Association. As a roving evangelist for this group of churches, Scott worked out an entirely new approach to religious conversion. There were three things, he said, for man to do: “He must believe, upon the evidence, that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God; he must repent of his personal sins with godly sorrow and resolve to sin no more; and
he must be baptised.” After which God would, according to His promises, deliver man from the guilt, power, and penalty of his repented sins; bestow the gift of the Holy Spirit; and grant eternal life.

The response to this blending of rationality and authority was spectacular. “Mr. Scott,” Richardson says, “fully conscious of the momentous nature of the issues he had evoked, but confident in the power of the gospel and all aflame with zeal, passed rapidly, like a meteor, throughout the Western Reserve, startling the people by the abruptness and directness of his appeals, but exciting many to enquiry and obedience.”

The year before his appointment there had been thirty-four baptisms, thirteen additions otherwise, and thirteen brethren had been excommunicated. During the next twelve months, Scott baptized over a thousand people, and the number of churches in the association doubled. It was, of course, what they wanted, but it was also much more than they had had any expectation of, and at first they were doubtful. Rumors and misrepresentations spread, and Thomas Campbell, fearing that Scott’s precipitate nature had betrayed him into indiscretions which might be prejudicial to the cause, came to examine for himself how things were, and could only admire what he saw. The Baptists did not admire what they saw, and threw the Reformers out—the phrase is perhaps too strong to describe an event that occurred over a period of years and resulted from actions by both sides—that is, it was both a withdrawing and a rejecting. But anyway, this separation did not hurt the cause of the Reformers. A minor religious movement had become a major one, and nothing could stop it.

The debates and the
Christian Baptist
had made Alexander Campbell’s ideas known in Kentucky, and in 1823 he
came there himself to debate with a Presbyterian minister on the subject of infant baptism. The debate stirred up so much excitement that Campbell returned the following year for a three-month speaking tour. Barton Stone went again and again to hear him and concluded that the Reformers were, in all but three or four rather minor points, in exact agreement with the Christian Church. In his autobiography, after knowing Alexander Campbell for roughly fifteen years, he wrote: “I will not say there are no faults in brother Campbell; but there are fewer, perhaps, in him, than in any man I know on earth; and over these few my love would throw a veil, and hide them forever.”

Disconcertingly, the all but faultless man published a pamphlet entitled “Strictures on ‘Two Letters’ of B. W. Stone on Atonement,” in which he accused Stone of denying the Lord that made him, of being an apostate, of uniting with errorists and deists of every age, to destroy the sheet anchor of the Christian’s hope.

Stone was used to being called names, and he reconsidered his position on the Atonement and moved closer to Alexander Campbell’s, and forgave the harsh words, which were part of the usual rhetoric of pamphleteering.

For eight years Alexander Campbell continually made overtures to the Christians and to Stone, and the two movements slowly moved together.

Among the things they differed over was the Reformers’ insistence that immersion should be a condition of membership in the church. Barton Stone said, “As well might we forbid unimmersed persons to pray, to praise, to teach, as to forbid them to commune.… What authority have we for inviting or debarring any pious, holy believer from the Lord’s table.” Richardson says, “Mr. Campbell had formerly expressed sentiments precisely similar, but a fuller comprehension of the relations of baptism to the regeneration and the remission of sins had latterly inclined him to
stricter views. He dreaded even the appearance of setting aside any divine institution, or of assuming to judge of men by their supposed
sincerity
rather than by their actual
obedience
to the word of God.”

Though the Christians could not bring themselves to exclude the unimmersed from communion, they stopped going out of their way to invite them and instead let every person examine himself regarding his fitness, and this seems to have satisfied the Reformers.

Ministers of both movements met for four days in Georgetown, Kentucky, and a week later, at Lexington, on New Year’s Day, 1832, where Stone spoke in favor of the merger. Since there was no hierarchical structure in either movement, they could not unite by a single decision. What happened was that competing congregations of Disciples and Christians in a given community would agree to merge and make common cause, and, as they took in new members through their evangelistic efforts, the division was more and more lost sight of.

In 1834, Stone moved to Jacksonville, Illinois, where he found a Christian church and a Disciple church, and he refused to join either until they united. Only a small number of Christian churches failed to unite with the Reformers. They ended up as the Christian Denomination.

Thomas Campbell and Stone preferred that the united movement be called the Christian Church, and Alexander admitted that the name was proper and appropriate and only wished that all were worthy of it, but preferred “disciple” as more humble and more often used in the New Testament.

Both names are in use to this day. My grandmother always said the Christian Church, and so that name seems more natural to me. Under one name or the other the new
religion spread rapidly. From Kentucky the pioneers streamed out into other states—into Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Iowa—taking the new church with them. By 1842 it had reached Texas, and the following year it arrived in Oregon, in a wagon train from Missouri, causing an angry churchman to exclaim, “The Campbellites and the fern are taking the Willamette Valley!”

The only history of the Christian Church in Illinois is not the work of a professional historian but of a minister who was assigned the task by a committee appointed by the State Board of the Illinois Christian Missionary Society. It was written between 1912 and 1914, by which time nearly all the pioneers were dead and the records of many of the older congregations had disappeared, but the main hindrance, the author says, was “the lack of appreciation by very many of such a volume and their consequent indifference to its preparation.” Each congregation has anywhere from two sentences to two or three pages devoted to it, and there is no effort at literary style, but it has, nevertheless, a tone I recognize from my childhood—the pleasure that comes from allowing oneself to correct other people’s mistakes.

“In this work,” the author says, “preachers are not called ‘elders’ but ministers. Some ministers are elders but all cannot be; hence, as a general designation, it is wrong.… A true preacher is a servant of Christ, and this relation and its consequent obligations are Scripturally expressed by the word ‘minister.’ If an abbreviation is needed, ‘Min.’ is easily written and is so used herein. Nor are preachers termed ‘clergymen,’ since the Spirit calls the Lord’s ‘flock’ his clergy or inheritance. The title ‘Reverend’ and its contraction ‘Rev.’ are also avoided. By the mouth of David the Lord says ‘his name is holy and reverend,’ and it is not befitting that we so denote ourselves. If this title, which has become in recent years so glibly prevalent among the Disciples
of Christ, is to be used and recognized, then why not ‘Very Reverend’ and ‘Most Reverend,’ and so on up the scale to the climax of wicked assumption?”

Barton Stone died in 1844, Thomas Campbell in 1854, Scott in 1861, and Alexander Campbell in 1866. The second and third generations of ministers in the Christian Church were not university men like the founders and did not have anything like as much knowledge, scriptural or otherwise, to impart. What they did have was fervor.

The name of Hughes Bowles turns up more frequently than any other in the sparse records of the early period of the church in Illinois. He came from Kentucky in 1830, married twice, and was the father of twelve children. “He was a kind and sympathetic man, but very positive.… He was well versed in the Scriptures and could almost quote the New Testament from beginning to end. Members of his family maintained the farm of two hundred acres while the father gave his time to preaching the gospel. His trips were made on horseback and reached from ten to fifty miles. The storms of the winters, the miry sloughs and swollen streams of the springs and early summers frequently challenged the faith and courage of the itinerant preachers. But Mr. Bowles seldom missed an appointment.” The largest sum of money he ever received at one time was ten dollars, for his services at a protracted meeting that lasted two weeks, and this he gave to a poor widow, who had been thrown from her horse and injured while on her way to the meeting.

And here is his son, Watt Bowles, who was a friend of Abraham Lincoln: “In plowing time he would work in his fields Saturdays till 11 o’clock a.m., then come to his house. Then he would whet his razor on his boot-leg, hone it on the palm of his left hand, and shave his face clean and smooth without the aid of a mirror; then grease his boots,
wash up and redress; after eating his dinner, he would saddle his horse and gallop away ten to thirty miles and preach Saturday night and Sunday in a residence or schoolhouse to fifteen or more people. For this work he received not a dollar. His reward was the sweet consciousness of duty well done and that God was pleased.”

Hughes Bowles and his son Watt were simple-hearted, self-educated men who had passionately embraced the idea that God has revealed to each of us his whole duty, in plain unmistakable terms, and that the Bible contains rules sufficient for every good work. But it was becoming much less easy to adhere to the patterns of primitive Christianity in a period that was so rapidly leaving behind the virtues and vices of—and in fact all resemblance to—a primitive society (that is to say, a society where people live by the labor of their hands). More and more the Disciples of Christ found themselves faced with situations a careful reading of the Bible did not throw any light on whatever.

Within the body of the church, one group (in the end, the prevailing one) tended to be open-minded and reasonable, and to tolerate a variety of opinion. The other group viewed any change as an innovation and was fanatically opposed to it.

What is the point of tolerating a variety of opinions if only one is true and all the others are errors? “An unimmersed person may be eminently good and pious,” a church quarterly for the year 1865 states, “but he is not a Christian; God may esteem him very highly, much more so than many of the immersed, and even very certainly save him, but he is not a Christian.”

And another quarterly says, “Let us agree to commune with the sprinkled sects around us and soon we shall come to recognize them as Christians, and immersion, with its deep significance, is buried in the grave of our folly. Then
in not one whit will we be better than the others. Let us countenance political charlatans as preachers, and we at once become corrupt as the loathsome nest on which Beecher sets to hatch the things he calls Christians.… Let us agree to admit organs, and soon the pious, the meek, the peace-loving, will abandon us, and our churches will become gay worldly things, literal Noah’s arks, full of clean and unclean beasts. To all this to us let add, by way of dessert, and as a sort of spice to the dish, a few volumes of innerlight speculations, and a cargo or two of reverend dandies dubbed pastors, and we may congratulate ourselves on having completed the trip in a wonderfully short time. We can now take rooms in Rome, and chuckle over the fact that we are as orthodox as the rankest heretic in the land.”

At the point at which I began to have a general working knowledge of persons, places, and things—that is to say, about 1912—Lincoln was a modestly flourishing county seat that seemed to have been there forever. It was not even very old, though it did have the air of being deeper in the shadow of the past than many of the towns around it. Nothing of any historical importance had ever happened there, or has to this day.

There was an older village named Postville, which the town of Lincoln absorbed. It was laid out in the eighteen-thirties by a Baltimore adventurer. He was caught in the financial panic of 1837, and the buildings and lots went at a forced sale for a tenth of their expected value. When the county was organized, two years later, Postville, with a population of about a hundred persons, became the first county seat. It also became a regular stopping place for stages on the direct road from St. Louis to Chicago when Chicago was still a village. It was a lively place, with a post office, a jail, an inn, and stores, all built around the courthouse square.
Nearby there was a sizable pond for watering stock and for skating on in winter.

When I was thirteen I had a newspaper route that consisted of thirteen houses in this shabby part of town. Riding along on my bicycle, I used to send a folded copy of the Lincoln
Evening Courier
sailing in the general direction of the front door of an unpainted two-story frame building that I knew had once been used as a courthouse. A Negro family lived in it, which seemed only proper since The Great Emancipator had practiced law there. But still, it wasn’t as interesting as it ought to have been. What was missing was this (I am quoting from
The History of Sangamon County
): “we sauntered into the courthouse. The court was in session, and a case was then in progress.… Upon the bench was seated the judge, with his chair tilted back and his heel as high as his head, and in his mouth a veritable corn cob pipe; his hair standing nine ways for Sunday, while his clothing was more like that worn by a wood-chopper than anybody else. There was a railing that divided the audience outside, of which smoking and spitting and chewing of tobacco seemed to be the principle employment.” Which is not to say that there was no such thing as good manners. The fourth governor of the State of Illinois was a man named John Reynolds, who for a time was judge of the circuit court of his county. He was not polished, but he was very polite. When he had to pronounce a sentence of death on a man found guilty of murder, he said to him, “Mr. Green, the jury in their verdict say you are guilty of murder, and the law says you are to be hung. Now, I want you and your friends down on Indian Creek to know that it is not I, but the jury and the law who condemn you. When would you like to be hung?”