A History of American Christianity

by Leonard Woolsey Bacon

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 coöperation 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 coöperation 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.

But already this nobly enterprising mind was intent on a new plan, of most far-reaching importance, not original with himself, but, on the contrary, long familiar to those who studied the extension of the church and pondered the indications of God's providential purposes. The earliest attempt in America toward the propagation of the gospel in foreign lands would seem to have been the circular letter sent out by the neighbor pastors, Samuel Hopkins and Ezra Stiles, in the year 1773, from Newport, chief seat of the slave-trade, asking contributions for the education of two colored men as missionaries to their native continent of Africa. To many generous minds at once, in this era of great Christian enterprises, the thought recurred of vast blessings to be wrought for the Dark Continent by the agency of colored men Christianized, civilized, and educated in America. Good men reverently hoped to see in this triumphant solution of the mystery of divine providence in permitting the curse of African slavery, through the cruel greed of men, to be inflicted on the American republic. In 1816 Mills successfully pressed upon the Presbyterian "Synod of New York and New Jersey" a plan for educating Christian men of color for the work of the gospel in their fatherland. That same year, in coöperation with an earnest philanthropist, Dr. Robert Finley, of New Jersey, he aided in the instituting of the American Colonization Society. In 1817 he sailed, in company with a colleague, the Rev. Ebenezer Burgess, to explore the coast of Africa in search of the best site for a colony. On the return voyage he died, and his body was committed to the sea: a "little man," to whom were granted only five years of what men call "active life"; but he had fulfilled his vow, and the ends of the earth had felt his influence for the advancement of the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ. The enterprise of African colonization, already dear to Christian hearts for the hopes that it involved of the redemption of a lost continent, of the elevation of an oppressed race in America, of the emancipation of slaves and the abolition of slavery, received a new consecration as the object of the dying labors and prayers of Mills. It was associated, in the minds of good men, not only with plans for the conversion of the heathen, and with the tide of antislavery sentiment now spreading and deepening both at the South and at the North, but also with "Clarkson societies" and other local organizations, in many different places, for the moral and physical elevation of the free colored people from the pitiable degradation in which they were commonly living in the larger towns. Altogether the watchmen on the walls of Zion saw no fairer sign of dawn, in that second decade of the nineteenth century, than the hopeful lifting of the cloud from Africa, the brightening prospects of the free negroes of the United States, and the growing hope of the abolition of American slavery.[258:1]