THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED TO ISADORA
CHAPTER I
THE CAMPBELLITE, THE FLORIST AND THE HOSTESS
In this, our town, we call “New Springfield,” David Carson, a young minister of the Disciples of Christ is a near neighbor of mine. He is a graduate of Bethany College. His great-grandfather studied there before him, when Alexander Campbell, the founder of Bethany, was in his prime. If you want to know of this man as we know him, read Richardson’s staid old biography, or walk the shades of Bethany, West Virginia. Campbell, in our eyes, was the American pioneer theologian.
He was devoted to the union of the churches of Christendom. He pleaded that all disciples of Christ call themselves “simply” Christians, and unite on those symbols and ordinances which Christendom has in common. If it would not make our great-grandfathers turn over in their graves, I and my neighbor would call ourselves “simply” Campbellites. We would do it for a human, and not lofty reason. It seems that those spiritually or physically descended from the early Campbellites are on family terms, no matter how they seem to roam in thought or experience, or no matter what their hereditary argumentative disposition. For a “Campbellite” is sure to argue, on the least provocation. There are traces of this tendency even in Richardson’s reverent biography.
Ultra modern followers of Campbell hang in their libraries with unlimited pride a certain Rembrandtesque lithograph of the great man, an heirloom that is now quite rare, and to be classed in its southern way, as the spinning wheels and old Bibles of the Mayflower are classed in a northern way. This lithograph is the enlargement of the engraving in the front of the Richardson biography, but much color and magic have been added. Out of the darkness emerges a smooth-shaven, high bred, masterful physiognomy more like that of the statesmen who were the fathers of the republic, than of a member of any priesthood. Campbell’s cheeks and eyes are still fired with youth and authority militant. He has a head bowed with thought, crowned with grey hair, and beneath his chin is the most statesmanlike of cravats, with a peculiarly old-fashioned roll. Thus he must have looked, at the height of debate with the infidel.
This is the man who put so much learning, and deathless controversy, and high distinction into the log cabins of the Ohio river basin, especially the romantic regions of Mason and Dixon’s line. On west of the Mississippi his followers carried his light to Seattle, Portland, and Los Angeles, and the cities of Alaska and Canada and the farms between. And they start ’round the world with it all over again at this hour. Yet in the end that light is apt to have a color of its origin, touched with Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky;—a southern gospel, far indeed from Plymouth Rock, or Manhattan Island.
I can never forget the copy of the lithograph that hung over my grandmother’s front room fireplace in the patriarchal Frazee farm house in Indiana. Under it I heard proverbs from Campbell every summer, from the time I can remember anything. All those sayings were mixed up with stories that came with my people along the old Daniel Boone trail from Kentucky and Virginia. And when that old frame house was new and novel, and most other dwelling houses near were log cabins, Campbell had been a guest received with breathless reverence. Under that picture I was personally conducted through all the daguerreotypes and records pertaining to the Kentucky pioneers of our blood.
And now, in Springfield, under the same rich lithograph my neighbor keeps the bound volumes of Campbell’s Christian Baptist and Millenial Harbinger, once the arsenal of every debating “elder” of our persuasion. My grandfather’s copies were marked, every page, and these are marked by my radical friend, but with a different point of view.
On a certain evening I am in the pastor’s study tracing with astonishment the suggestion of Christian Socialism in the first number of the Harbinger. My Grandma had said nothing about that!
Few of Campbell’s older followers dwell on the hope of a practical City of God that shouted from the covers even before they were opened. This reasonable, non-miraculous millennium is much in the mind of my neighbor, and he tells me again and again of a vision that he has of Springfield a hundred years hence. But more of this later.