Belford's Magazine, Vol 2, December 1888

by Various

We give space to give one extract not only as an example of our author's style, but for the facts he narrates. Speaking of the early Methodist Church of Tennessee and its pioneer preachers, he says:

"His manners were not polished, but they were far from rude. They were simple and sincere, and were filled with a real sympathy and warmed the hearts of his associates. He was plain of speech, however, though if he wounded the vanity of his hearers he never wounded their sensibilities. These were his chief limitations: he was narrow, sectional, and bigoted, unpolished, beyond the grasp of any but Christian fellowship, taking a hard, austere, and almost terrible view of the world as it is, having real sympathy alone with the world as it should be or as he would make it. Religion to him was the goal of existence; all other interests were greater or less temptations that drew away from the path of that goal.... It is not a figure of speech to say that his path was beset with death, and that for months at a time the penances of a Trappist monastery were but as luxuries as compared to the daily trials of hunger and thirst and sleeplessness which fell to his lot. He would ride for days at a time, through any inclemency of weather, through any degree of heat or cold, to keep an appointment to preach the Word to those who hungered for the Lord. The last rain perhaps had swept a bridge away. A tribe of hostile Indians were prowling through the forests which he would have to penetrate. A heavy fall of snow had obscured the trail that led through the intricacies of a swamp. It was doubtful if he could procure food for man or beast for days, and it was vain to try to carry a sufficient supply. It was impossible to procure a guide across 'the forks' of some range of hills, thickly covered with ravines and with dangerous defiles. Starvation and all the forms of death lay thick around and before him. The stoutest heart might have quailed, the most unflinching sense of duty might have wavered. The rational mind might have justly demanded a greater degree of equality between the magnitude of the thing to be accomplished and the difficulties and dangers attending its accomplishment. All these things gave him not a moment's pause. Herein was manifest the grandeur of the circuit rider's character. His mind was not the mind of a rational man, as we estimate rationality. His profession of faith and his wish for salvation were sincere to the full extent of their importance as he estimated it. Religion was a real and a tangible thing to him. The simple, unhesitating sincerity of his faith was grand, it was wonderful, it was sublime.... He merged the individual completely in the work, he lost all sense of personal interest in the craving to advance the interests of others. He was willing to meet death for the attainment of the smallest of the tasks set before him. He was willing to forego all personal comfort as a part of the daily life of which hunger and thirst were the incidents. Luxury he had never known or seen.... As the Church increased in numbers and influence, the pioneer of religion, the one who had hewn for it a way through the primeval forests, either pushed forward with the advance line of civilization or yielded to the mellowing influence of a more genial state of society. As villages developed into towns with souls enough to repay an exclusive charge, the saddle-bags and the saddle were exchanged for a settled habitation. Sometimes he married, and from the first, marriage had practically destroyed his usefulness as an itinerant. He is now familiar to us only in tradition. The discipline of Conference assignments of duty, which carry with them change of habitation, still suggests his noble activity in the early days of Tennessee history."

And yet, remembering the self-devotion, the sacrifices, the fervor and force of this religious enthusiasm, how little trace was left. The religion of Tennessee to-day is farther removed from the teachings of those early martyrs to what they believed the cause of God than were the Indians they cared little for, or the rough settlers they sought so fervently to convert. There is no trace of Indian or settler, nor the remotest vestige of the religion these preachers so earnestly taught. This because it was the religion of dogmas, founded upon the vengeance of God as they saw it in the chronicles of the Hebrews. They carried what Burns called "tyding o' damnation;" and the long-haired, hollow-eyed, hot gospeller gave vivid descriptions of unending torture of hell to the unbeliever. The love of God, the tender mercy of our blessed Redeemer, were lost in the awful vengeance of an offended and unforgiving Deity.

Poor human nature, as found among those earlier settlers, was frightened. The historian tells us that these attacks, more on the nerves than the conscience, culminated at revivals in what was called the "jerks." He says: "They were involuntary and irresistible. When under their influence the sufferers would dance, or sing, or shout. Sometimes they would sway from side to side, or throw the head backward or forward, or leap, or spring. Generally those under the influence would, at the end, fall upon the ground and remain rigid for hours, and sometimes whole multitudes would become dumb and fall prostrate. As the swoon passed away, the sufferer would weep piteously, moan and sob. After a while the gloom would lift, a smile of heavenly peace would irradiate the countenance, words of joy and rapture would break forth, and conversion always followed."

It came, in time, to be observed that this conversion affected only the converted member's manner. To be very serious and sad, to have profanity give place to prayers, made the substance of the process through which one escaped eternal punishment after death. Faith that is simply a longing for life was confounded with belief that, having its base in evidence, is entirely beyond the control of the would-be believer. The whole theological affair touched the moral conduct of the true believer only slightly. Life was harder in the Church than out of it. Charity, the love of one's neighbor, the forgiveness of sins on the part of the member—how could he forgive when his God would not forgive?—all gave way to a loud assertion of total depravity in the convert, and a profound belief in the dogmas. It was not long before these settlers observed that in dealing with a class-leader they had to be more cautious and guarded against being cheated than in like transactions with the godless.

However, those simple souls upon the border did not differ much from our humanity of to-day. Poor human nature is prone to love in the form itself the object for which the form was created. The white-chokered leader of Sunday-schools who flees to Canada with the cash of the bank where he was cashier is no more of a hypocrite than the president and directors. Religion to all these is one thing, moral conduct quite another. They are on a par with the bandit of Italy who hears mass, goes to confession, and has prayers said in his behalf before going out to rob and murder. Nor do they differ from the committee of negroes that waited on their white preacher and begged him to stop for one Sunday talking about lying and stealing, and "gib 'em one day ob good ole-fashioned glory-to-God religion."

Men and Measures of Half a Century, by Hugh McCulloch (Charles Scribner's Sons).—Here is a name that will loom up in the hereafter as that of one of the ablest financiers given our country. It is lost now in the yet lingering glare and blare of war, where little men, magnified by newspapers to gigantic generals, famous for the wanton slaughter of their own men, absorb public attention.

Mr. McCulloch was called to the Secretaryship of the Treasury by President Lincoln, and continued there by Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson. It was the hard task of Mr. McCulloch to rectify the errors of Salmon P. Chase. This great man had won success for the government in the war with the South on his financial blunders. Finding capital so unpatriotic that it would loan the government no money so long as the conflict was in doubt, Chase appealed to the people, and made his loans from them in the shape of promises to pay in the currency. While the soldiers in the field and the average citizen took a patriotic pride in accepting this currency at par, the financiers were as busy as Satan in depreciating it, until the Secretary was driven to buying up those money-getters. They drove a hard bargain with the oppressed Secretary, and this bargain ended in turning over a large part of the fiscal agency of the government, and all the currency, to nearly two thousand corporations.

When Mr. McCulloch took the portfolio of the Treasury our financial condition was most deplorable. The land was flooded with an irredeemable currency, and the source of credit being thus poisoned, all business was mere gambling. To understand this, one has to remember that in the first year of the war a tariff on imports was enacted by Congress that amounted at first to prohibition. In thus closing the door against foreign capitalists the government raised the prices of all manufactured goods against itself. The evil did not end here. As a purchaser of supplies in a paper currency for a million of wasteful and extravagant men in the field, the government again augmented prices to its own hurt. After the battle of Gettysburg, when the timid capital felt that it was safe, not to help an impoverished government, but to make investments, bonds were taken, paid for in the depreciated currency—and when the war ended, a subsidized Congress, leaving the loan in the shape of currency made by the people to take care of itself, enacted that these bonds, bought in currency, should be redeemed, capital and interest, in gold.

This was the situation that faced Mr. McCulloch when sworn in office as Secretary of the Treasury. He was selected by President Lincoln, and continued in office by Andrew Johnson. A more admirable appointment could not have been made. Hugh McCulloch is not only a remarkable man, but one singularly well adapted to the position assigned him. An eminently handsome man, he carried a large, healthy brain on a trunk capable of great endurance. It was health, good health, throughout. To a keen, sensitive intellect he adds a calm, dispassionate temperament and the highest courage. Although modest in manner and reticent in speech, his very presence commanded respect among his opponents, such as all positive characters possess; while his friends felt that their cause, whatever it might be, was safe in his hands. Trained a banker, he had made a success of his banking; and while possessed of a thorough acquaintance with the details of his business, he had also a philosophical knowledge of the science. This is a rare combination.