By COLEMAN E. BISHOP.
V.—A METHODIST DON QUIXOTE.
The place of Lorenzo Dow in the American pulpit is peculiar. He might be called “The Great Disowned.” He passed his life a wandering, outcast preacher; did a great work alone, generally unacknowledged by any religious body; opposed by the societies and maligned by many of the clergy, whom he powerfully aided; and in death his name and work would have sunk into undeserved oblivion, but for his own writings in which, with prophetic instinct, he preserved the record of his own sacrifices and successes, and the scant recognition accorded them. He also recorded with impartial fidelity his own “fantastic tricks” and erratic independence, which furnish the only excuse for the treatment he received. He called himself a Methodist, and refused to work inside church lines. A zealous, even bigoted sectarian; he preached in open defiance of all denominational polity. He was a clerical bushwhacker.
The time in which Dow flourished was a remarkable one politically, commercially and religiously. It was the formative age of the Constitution and of the American Republic. It saw the creation of American commerce and the opening up of the continent to settlement. And it has been well called “the heroic age of American Methodism.”
As the sense of dependence on the mother country, and of subjection to royal authority wore off, the people began to grow rapidly in mental and moral stature. The population which had timidly hugged the Atlantic coast, as if afraid to lose sight of the British navy, now turned its eyes inland, its thoughts over the whole world. The pioneer spirit awoke. The “Northwest Territory” was organized for settlement; Louisiana and Florida were purchased and the great Mississippi basin was opened up. Indian nations were subdued and “city lots were staked for sale above old Indian graves.” A second war was fought with Great Britain, to drive her from our path of advance on land or sea. Settlers in a thousand directions ramified the wilderness with the nerves and arteries of civilization. The growth of men’s ideas was to correspond with expansion of territory—for “the spirit grows with its allotted spaces.” It became evident, even in the first generation of the Republic, that a new people had been raised up—almost as Roderick Dhu’s men sprang from the brake—to subjugate a continent and to create sovereign states out of the rudiments of empire which yet lay plastic and warm in the wilderness.
The spirit of unrest, of adventure, of expansion, seized all classes and occupations; and the pioneers of the Cross pressed into the wilderness side by side with the bearers of the ax and rifle.
Not the least remarkable feature of the evolution of this people was the deepening of the religious spirit. Wars, indeed, are generally followed by seasons of revival; but now the sobered thoughts of the American people seemed to increase as they receded from the war period, and realized the burdens of a new nationality, of self-government, and of continental subjugation which they had taken upon themselves. They had not only cut loose from the mother country, but had cut loose from all the ancient traditions of government and the experience of mankind. Responsibility brought seriousness; daily perils inclined men’s thoughts to hear whoever would discourse of eternal things. Thus the movement of the time at once prepared the way for the work of gospel spreading, and raised up strong men to do it.
One of the young men who was “set on fire of freedom” to this work was Lorenzo Dow. Never was more unpromising candidate for the ministry. He was eighteen years of age (1795), thin, angular, ungainly, eccentric in manner, illiterate, diffident, and, worst of all, an invalid, supposed to be a consumptive. No wonder the proposition of this sick, gawky boy to go upon circuit without any preparation met with opposition from his parents and brethren, was discouraged by those who dared not contradict his solemn protestations of an irresistible call, and was rejected by all the authorities of a church most liberal in its requirements of licentiates of any then extant.