A DISPENSATION OF GOD
We apprehend, then, that wondrous times have come upon us. Great ecclesiastical systems are crumbling and are being left destitute as God's people make their escape. This movement proceeds with no show of prominence in the world. It causes no political disturbance, but works only in the province of genuine Christianity, silently, effectively, as the leaven in the meal. It is altogether a spiritual movement and its discernment can therefore only be spiritual. It may appear outwardly as only one religious body among many; for it is only when judged by the spiritual standard of God's word that its character is seen. It is a call to those who are willing to be led of God.
The dispensations of God are in their beginning often insignificant and despised in man's eyes. God chooses things that are not, to bring to naught things that are. The fact that Brother Warner's work was done in comparative obscurity counts for nothing against its being the work of God. It is quality that counts. Brother Warner had the right spiritual quality, the secret of which was letting God have his way. His entire abandonment to God in a complete consecration, together with his adaptable temperament and gifts, made him suitable for God's use in this great work, and God chose him. The time was at hand. Others, contemporary with him and leaders in the holiness movement, saw the evils of sects and deplored them, but when it came to renouncing their sectarian affiliations and coming out of the spiritual Babylon in obedience to God's call, "Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues," they drew back. This point of leaving the sects, abiding in Christ alone and allowing God to reestablish his church on the primitive basis, was the real test. They longed for the time when God's people should all be one, but chose to believe that the time was not yet. And so they have been believing for forty years, and are today in the greater confusion. They lacked the spiritual equipment. One of Brother Warner's special endowments was that of considerable light on the prophecies. He saw that the sectarian denominations were of the true spiritual Babylon in which God's people were being held captive. He also had in the Spirit the prospective vision of the pure church unruled by man. His contemporary leaders who opposed him were too blind spiritually to have such a vision; or, if they had it, were disobedient to it.
But there were those, the humble ones, who were willing to let God have his way. At the sound of the trumpet, which God was giving through Brother Warner, thousands have rallied to the standard of truth, and through them the truth has been and is being vindicated. If God has his way all Christians will be led out of sects, all justified believers will be led into sanctification, the church will be perfectly organized and governed by the Holy Spirit, the whole truth will be preached uncompromisingly, full salvation will be held out to the world, and all will be led to cooperate and do their part. This is the full measure of Christianity today, and is God's design with his people. Here is true Christian unity. Such unity can come only by absolute abandonment to God, for he must be the one-making agent. Men may attempt a unity through some Interchurch World Movement or other plan, but no plan can represent the true Scriptural unity unless God does the work himself. He must have the full right of way in human hearts.
Brother Warner's mission was strictly that of a reformer. It was his part to venture boldly with the truth God had given him, with a willingness to run the gauntlet of persecutions that were sure to greet him on the right and left. His severe denunciation of all things sectarian was consistent with his pioneer position. There first had to be an awakening, a breaking up of old conditions, particularly of the recognition (into which the minds of people generally had settled) of the sects as being the church of God. His work was the initial, or birth, stage of the reform.
Following the initial stage has come the constructive, which comprehends the reformation in the local sense, the sense in which the Christian life and true ideal of the church must be exemplified in the community as something more than theory, something that will appeal as being better than what is represented in the sects. The constructive stage calls not so much for continual denunciation of sects as for manifesting those essential principles that characterize the church in her unity and entirety. The responsibility is to make good the claim, and this means much. Any tendency to establish traditions, or to regard a past course as giving direction in all respects for the future, or to become self-centered and manifest a "we are it" spirit and bar the door of progress against the entrance of further light and truth, or in any way to refuse fellowship with any others who may be Christians, would itself be sectarian, altogether unlike the true reformation, which, if it be final, must necessarily be a restoration and possess universal characteristics.
For proper representation everything depends upon the understanding of, and the attitude toward, this great movement. For any body of people to hold that the reformation is entrusted to them, or that they have become the standard for the world, is a self-centered attitude, vastly different from that which regards the reformation as something prophetically due, as having come independent of man, and as being greater than the people who have been favored with its light, and that it is their part to conform to it in principle, doctrine, and everything. The great movement is in the world, and any attempt to "corner" it or to limit it to a particular body of people could only result in making that body a sect, or faction, while the movement itself would proceed independently.
The true spirit of the reformation will be, however, with those who measure to its standard, whether they be few or many, and God will manifest himself accordingly. Satan has tried to becloud and defeat the movement by counterfeit factions—bodies of people who profess to be on the reformation line, but who misrepresent the truth by denying some part of it, as, for instance, the doctrine of entire sanctification in this life, or of the Christian ordinances, or who misrepresent it by advancing erroneous doctrine, such as the continuation of the Old Testmental law and Sabbath, or the speaking in tongues as a necessary evidence of having received the Holy Ghost. Many are the counterfeit movements today. One must ignore every influence of man and then rely on the witness of both the Word and the Spirit in order to be guided aright.
Brother Warner was a remarkable example of a man possessing the Christian spirit and the Christian graces wonderfully developed. While he could rebuke evil and deceptive influences in the strongest terms, he was one of the meekest and kindest of men. Christ-like, he loved all men, even his persecutors. As a husband, father, Christian brother and friend his love and respect were genuine and reached to the very soul. And yet the responsibility of his calling as a Christian and as a minister of God's truth as it applied to his time, he held more dear than all else, and to it he was wholly devoted. Not with any object of exalting the man, but to illustrate what God can accomplish in and through one who is so devoted, we introduce him to our readers.
[II]
ANCESTRY AND EARLY LIFE
Among those who fought in the second war against Great Britain was one Adam Warner, who was born in Virginia, and whose father was Christofel Warner. In this period of our national history a great tide of emigration from the Atlantic States was spreading itself over what is now the Middle West. Adam Warner seemed to catch the spirit of the times, and accordingly, in 1815, he set out with his family for the new country beyond the Alleghanies. He settled in Stark County, Ohio, where, about the year 1845, he died, at ninety-three years of age (a history of Williams County, Ohio, says ninety-eight, and that he had a sister who lived to the advanced age of one hundred and three). It is probable that before moving west Adam Warner lived for a while in Frederick County, Md., for there is where his son David was born, June 6, 1803.
David Warner, after moving to Stark County, was married, in 1823, to Leah Dierdorf, who was born in York County, Pa., Feb. 6, 1805. In 1830 he moved to Wayne County, Ohio, and a little later to Portage County, then back to Wayne County in 1836, to a place then called Bristol, where he kept a tavern for eight years. Of the parentage of David and Leah Warner, at their humble abode at Bristol, on June 25, 1842, amid the environment of tavern life, was born Daniel S. Warner, destined to be one of the principal instruments in God's hands to produce a shaking in the ranks of spiritual Israel, and to lead the hosts of the Lord back to Zion from their wanderings in the wilderness of denominationalism.
The children of David and Leah, in order, were as follows: Adam, Lewis, Joseph, John, Daniel, and Samantha. John died at the age of twenty, leaving but the five children. All are now deceased. A granddaughter says that the family was Pennsylvania German. Evidently the mother was. The father, as already noted, was a Virginian.
It was the misfortune of Daniel S. to be frail, sickly, and to a great extent unappreciated, from his very birth. His lungs were weak and he was denied that stock of vitality with which every child has the right to begin life. Intoxicants were freely used in those days, and David Warner had fallen an easy prey to intemperance. If the affliction of this infant may not be ascribed to paternal indiscreetness, possibly inebriety, it is not because such instances were uncommon. Into how many homes has the demon of strong drink entered to bring sorrow to the wife and mother and to curse the unborn with the blight of its baneful effects! In this case, at any rate, the father was rough, and inconsiderate of his offspring. While he exercised toward his family a degree of temporal care, it seemed that the very frailty of this child, which should have awakened compassion, met only his frown and disfavor. In later years Daniel, in reflecting on the circumstances attending his birth and childhood, wrote the following lines, which are a part of his poem on Innocence:
Conceived in sin, to sorrow born,
Unwelcome here on earth,
The shadows of a life forlorn
Hung gloomy o'er my birth.
A mother's heart oppressed with grief,
A father's wicked spleen,
Who cursed my faint and gasping breath,
Combine to paint the scene.
But life held on its tender thread,
Days unexpected grew
To weeks, and still he lived—
Why, Heaven only knew.
He lived, though life was bitter gain,
His youth a flood of tears,
His body doomed to cruel pain,
His mind to nervous fears.
In contrast with this paternal attitude, however, was the constancy of a true-hearted mother. Blessed with this and endowed with indelible memories of a mother's devotion, what child growing up to cope with life's obstacles may not, after all, hold a chance of succeeding, however handicapped otherwise? If ever any planting bears fruit in the human breast, or becomes a latent force tending to guide one steadily through life's dangerous rapids, it is that of a mother's love. Especially is this true of the love of a Christian mother, coupled with her prayers.
Mrs. Warner was an excellent woman. Her patient and gentle bearing under disturbing conditions, her disposition to make the best of disappointment and discouragement, left an impress, not only upon the family, but upon the neighborhood. Her kindness is referred to in two other stanzas of the poem Innocence:
If angels blessed his thorny path,
It may be said in truth,
But two e'er showed their smiling face
In all his suffering youth.
One was his mother, ever kind,
A blessed providence;
The other, pure and lovely friend,
Was angel Innocence.
It has been true generally that great men have first had great mothers. But what is a mother's greatness, after all, but simple, unalloyed, Christian motherliness?
"I should have become an atheist but for one recollection, and that was the memory of the time when my departed mother used to take my little hand in hers and cause me on my knees to say, 'Our Father, who art in heaven.'"—John Randolph.
Parents of D. S. Warner. The father holds a whisky-glass
Mother of D. S. Warner
"All I am, all I hope to be, I owe to my angel mother—blessings on her memory! I remember my mother's prayers. They have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life."—Lincoln.
"If my mother could rise in the dead of the night and pray for my recovery from sickness, my life must be worth something. I then and there resolved to prove myself worthy of my mother's prayers."—Garfield.
"It is to my mother that I owe everything. If I am thy child, O my God, it is because thou gavest me such a mother. If I prefer the truth to all things, it is the fruit of my mother's teachings. If I did not perish long ago in sin and misery, it is because of the long and faithful years which she pleaded for me. What comparison is there between the honor I paid her and her slavery for me?"—St. Augustine.
One more tribute. In his book Bible Proofs of the Second Work of Grace, published in 1880, Daniel S. Warner places the following dedicatory note: "To the sacred memory of my sainted mother, whose tender affections were the only solace in my suffering childhood, and whose never-failing love, and whose pure and innocent life were the only stars that shone in the darkness of my youth, this volume is respectfully dedicated by the author."
From Wayne County, David Warner brought his family, in 1843, to a farm of 140 acres near New Washington, Crawford County, Ohio. The house, built partly of logs, stood three fourths of a mile southwest of the village. It was here that Daniel spent his childhood. Of this period he writes:
It seemed the special pleasure of
Another certain one
To quite demolish everything
He set his heart upon;
To chafe his spirit and extort
The flow of bitter tears
Out of a soft and pensive heart,
Through all his tender years.
He never knew that "Father" was
A sweet, endearing name;
Its very mention was a dread,
His life's most deadly bane.
The demon of intemp'rance there
Infused the wrath of hell,
And most upon this sickly head
The storm of fury fell.
Like chickens when the mother bird
Gives signal of a foe,
The little peeps are quickly hushed,
All chicks are lying low,
So, when returning from the town,
The dreaded steps we heard,
All ran and quickly settled down,
And not a lip was stirred.
O horrors of the liquor fiend!
We've seen thy hell on earth.
Thy serpent coils around us twined,
The moment of our birth.
O Rum! thy red infernal flame—
I witness to the truth—
Filled all my mother's cup with pain,
And swallowed up my youth.
The Warner family, though clever, straightforward, and strictly honest, were but a simple rural folk and not inclined to religion. That such a bright spiritual light as was afterward exhibited in Daniel could come from such a family, is one of the puzzling questions of blood relation. Was it that in the family blood there was latent quality which in his case only was near enough to the surface to be called into action and developed by higher influence? or should it be said that he represents a variation in the strain, such as is sometimes seen in biological observation? If the latter, the mystery remains; for why do such things occur? Aside from natural phenomena, we believe that Brother Warner was a "chosen vessel" unto the Lord. He possessed such a combination of qualities as made him capable of high development in the divine graces. He was a Christian than whom perhaps none other ever lived who was more reverent, spiritual, and devoted; and God had a special work for him.