California had two churches, at Stockton and Santa Clara, within two years after the discovery of gold. They were established by Thomas Thompson, a Disciple preacher who went west with the forty-niners but preferred to evangelize, at his own expense, rather than to seek gold. This falls just beyond the limits of our period, the first two decades, but it illustrates the promptness with which Disciples followed the frontier. There is a report of a congregation organized in Oregon Territory in 1846, three years after the beginning of the “great immigration” and the very year in which American title to the territory was settled by treaty with England.
Campbell at His Zenith
Alexander Campbell’s activities during these years were constant and varied. The Millennial Harbinger furnished a medium for the development and expression of his ideas and for the exchange of news and opinions among the churches. His many long tours for lecturing and preaching were more fruitful in building morale and gaining publicity for the movement than in winning converts, for he was never a very effective evangelist. But from the testimony of unbiased witnesses, he must have been one of the most impressive figures that ever stood upon an American platform. Mrs. Trollope, mother of the English novelist, and herself the author of Domestic Manners of the Americans, was present at the debate with Owen and described Mr. Campbell as “the universal admiration of his audience.”
In 1836 Mr. Campbell published a volume entitled The Christian System. This came near to being such an “exhibition of the fullness and precision of the Holy Scriptures upon the entire subject of Christianity” as Thomas Campbell had suggested in the Postscript to the Declaration and Address. Those who had felt the sting of his denunciation of creeds now shouted with glee that here at last was the “Campbellites’ creed.” But it was not a creed, because it was never used as a creed and was never intended to be so used. It was a rather full statement of Mr. Campbell’s views on every religious topic that he considered important. But no church or organization of churches ever adopted it. No applicant for membership was ever asked to accept it. No minister’s orthodoxy was ever tested by it. No one could even be required to read it. The book itself repudiates the notion of requiring conformity to this or any other body of doctrine. In it the author says:
The belief of one fact is all that is requisite, as far as faith goes, to salvation. The belief of this one fact and submission to one institution expressive of it, is all that is required of Heaven to admission into the church. The one fact is expressed in the single proposition, that Jesus the Nazarene is the Messiah. The one institution is baptism.
The Christian System, then, was certainly not a creed, since it declared that only “one fact and one institution” were essential.
But when he placed the “one institution” on a par with the “one fact,” Mr. Campbell did not mean to imply that the unimmersed could not be Christians. A lady wrote from Lunenburg, Virginia, in 1837, expressing surprise at some reference he had made to unimmersed Christians. In reply to this “Lunenburg letter,” Mr. Campbell wrote a memorable article for the Millennial Harbinger and followed it with two even more emphatic statements answering objections. In this article, he wrote:
Who is a Christian? I answer, Everyone that believes in his heart that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah, the Son of God; repents of his sins, and obeys him in all things according to his measure of knowledge of his will....
I cannot ... make any one duty the standard of Christian state or character, not even immersion....
* * * * * * *
It is the image of Christ the Christian looks for and loves; and this does not consist in being exact in a few items, but in general devotion to the whole truth as far as known.
There is no occasion, then, for making immersion, on a profession of the faith, absolutely essential to a Christian—though it may be greatly essential to his sanctification and comfort.
In answering an objection to the original article, Mr. Campbell stated:
Now the nice point of opinion on which some brethren differ, is this: Can a person who simply, not perversely, mistakes the outward baptism, have the inward ... which changes his state and has praise of God, though not of all men?... To which I answer, that, in my opinion, it is possible.