A History of American Christianity

by Leonard Woolsey Bacon

A DECADE OF CONTROVERSIES AND SCHISMS.

During the period from 1835 to 1845 the spirit of schism seemed to be in the air. In this period no one of the larger organizations of churches was free from agitating controversies, and some of the most important of them were rent asunder by explosion.

At the time when the Presbyterian Church suffered its great schism, in 1837, it was the most influential religious body in the United States. In 120 years its solitary presbytery had grown to 135 presbyteries, including 2140 ministers serving 2865 churches and 220,557 communicants. But these large figures are an inadequate measure of its influence. It represented in its ministry and membership the two most masterful races on the continent, the New England colonists and the Scotch-Irish immigrants; and the tenacity with which it had adhered to the tradition derived through both these lines, of admitting none but liberally educated men to its ministry, had given it exceptional social standing and control over men of intellectual strength and leadership. In the four years beginning with 1831 the additions to its roll of communicants "on examination" had numbered nearly one hundred thousand. But this spiritual growth was chilled and stunted by the dissensions that arose. The revivals ceased and the membership actually dwindled.

The contention had grown (a fact not without parallel in church history) out of measures devised in the interest of coöperation and union. In 1801, in the days of its comparative feebleness, the General Assembly had proposed to the General Association of Connecticut a "Plan of Union" according to which the communities of New England Christians then beginning to move westward between the parallels that bound "the New England zone," and bringing with them their accustomed Congregational polity, might coöperate on terms of mutual concession with Presbyterian churches in their neighborhood. The proposals had been fraternally received and accepted, and under the terms of this compact great accessions had been made to the strength of the Presbyterian Church, of pastors and congregations marked with the intellectual activity and religious enterprise of the New England churches, who, while cordially conforming to the new methods of organization and discipline, were not in the least penetrated with the traditionary Scotch veneration for the Westminster standards. For nearly thirty years the great reinforcements from New England and from men of the New England way of thinking had been ungrudgingly bestowed and heartily welcomed. But the great accessions which in the first four years of the fourth decade of this century had increased the roll of the communicants of the Presbyterian Church by more than fifty per cent. had come in undue proportion from the New Englandized regions of western New York and Ohio. It was inevitable that the jealousy of hereditary Presbyterians, "whose were the fathers," should be aroused by the perfectly reasonable fear lest the traditional ways of the church which they felt to be in a peculiar sense their church might be affected by so large an element from without.

The grounds of explicit complaint against the party called "New School" were principally twofold—doctrine and organization.

In the Presbyterian Church at this time were three pretty distinct types of theological thought. First, there was the unmitigated Scotch Calvinism; secondly, there was the modification of this system, which became naturalized in the church after the Great Awakening, when Jonathan Dickinson and Jonathan Edwards, from neighbor towns in Massachusetts, came to be looked upon as the great Presbyterian theologians; thirdly, there was the "consistent Calvinism," that had been still further evolved by the patient labor of students in direct succession from Edwards, and that was known under the name of "Hopkinsianism." Just now the latest and not the least eminent in this school, Dr. Nathaniel W. Taylor, of New Haven, was enunciating to large and enthusiastic classes in Yale Divinity School new definitions and forms of statement giving rise to much earnest debate. The alarm of those to whom the very phrase "improvement in theology" was an abomination expressed itself in futile indictments for heresy brought against some of the most eminently godly and useful ministers in all the church. Lyman Beecher, of Lane Seminary, Edward Beecher, J. M. Sturtevant, and William Kirby, of Illinois College, and George Duffield, of the presbytery of Carlisle, Pa., were annoyed by impeachments for heresy, which all failed before reaching the court of last resort. But repeated and persistent prosecutions of Albert Barnes, of Philadelphia, were destined to more conspicuous failure, by reason of their coming up year after year before the General Assembly, and also by reason of the position of the accused as pastor of the mother church of the denomination, the First Church of Philadelphia, which was the customary meeting-place of the Assembly; withal by reason of the character of the accused, the honor and love in which he was held for his faithful and useful work as pastor, his world-wide fame as a devoted and believing student of the Scriptures, and the Christlike gentleness and meekness with which he endured the harassing of church trials continuing through a period of seven years, and compelling him, under an irregular and illegal sentence of the synod, to sit silent in his church for the space of a year, as one suspended from the ministry.

The earliest leaders in national organization for the propagation of Christianity at home and abroad were the Congregationalists of New England and men like-minded with them. But the societies thus originated were organized on broad and catholic principles, and invited the coöperation of all Christians. They naturally became the organs of much of the active beneficence of Presbyterian congregations, and the Presbyterian clergy and laity were largely represented in the direction of them. They were recognized and commended by the representative bodies of the Presbyterian Church. As a point of high-church theory it was held by the rigidly Presbyterian party that the work of the gospel in all its departments and in all lands is the proper function of "the church as such"—meaning practically that each sect ought to have its separate propaganda. There was logical strength in this position as reached from their premisses, and there were arguments of practical convenience to be urged in favor of it. But the demand to sunder at once the bonds of fellowship which united Christians of different names in the beneficent work of the great national societies was not acceptable even to the whole of the Old-School party. To the New Englanders it was intolerable.

There were other and less important grounds of difference that were discussed between the parties. And in the background, behind them all, was the slavery question. It seems to have been willingly kept in the background by the leaders of debate on both sides; but it was there. The New-School synods and presbyteries of the North were firm in their adherence to the antislavery principles of the church. On the other hand, the Old-School party relied, in the coup d'église that was in preparation, on the support of "an almost solid South."[296:1]