In 1845 the Disciples had three colleges: Bacon, at Harrodsburg, Kentucky; Bethany, at what is now Bethany, West Virginia; and Franklin, near Nashville, Tennessee. Within a year or two before or after 1850, at least nine colleges and institutes were established, most of which still live. These included: Kentucky Female Orphan School, Midway, Kentucky; Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, which became Hiram College, Hiram, Ohio; Northwestern Christian University, which became Butler University, Indianapolis, Indiana; Walnut Grove Academy, which grew into Eureka College, Eureka, Illinois; Christian College (for girls), Columbia, Missouri; Abington College, Abington, Illinois, which later merged with Eureka; Berea College, Jacksonville, Illinois, which died young; Arkansas College, Fayetteville, Arkansas, which met the same fate; and Oskaloosa College, Oskaloosa, Iowa, which had thirty useful years before it was dimmed by the brighter light of Drake University.
The percentage of survival in this list is unusually high. It was much lower among the colleges started during the next twenty or thirty years. The cost of maintaining a good college, according to the standards of that time, was very little in comparison with present needs, but it was more than most of the eager college founders thought it would be. Many schools were started which had not a sufficient constituency. Others were brought forth by the local pride of an optimistic young settlement and withered away when its hope was deferred or its boom collapsed—for while Chicago and Kansas City grew miraculously, many a “future metropolis” of the Middle West remained a village. Few of the new colleges were adequately financed, even for a modest beginning. The mortality rate was therefore high. The Disciples were not alone in this. Other denominations lost many infant colleges. By 1865 there was a general complaint about the reckless multiplication of weak colleges. Moses E. Lard expressed the mind of many when he wrote: “We are building ten where we should have but one. One great university, with a single well-endowed college in each state where we number fifty thousand, is sufficient.”
One is rather surprised to find, running through several issues of the Millennial Harbinger in that same year, a discussion as to whether the Disciples needed a good theological school for the graduate training of the ministry. W. K. Pendleton, Campbell’s son-in-law (twice) and his successor as president of Bethany College and as editor of the Millennial Harbinger, argued that there was need of a school to give ministers a professional education beyond what the colleges can or should furnish. Isaac Errett agreed with Pendleton. Ben Franklin, naturally, opposed. Nothing was done. For another thirty or forty years the Disciples continued to consider training for the ministry as a phase of undergraduate education.
“We Can Never Divide”
Through these years the slavery issue was mounting to the crisis of war. All the churches were deeply stirred. Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians divided. Congregationalists, being practically all in the North and therefore all on the same side of the question, did not divide. The Episcopal Church peaceably divided when the country was divided by secession, and as peaceably reunited when the country was reunited. Disciples were nearly equal in numbers, North and South. They might easily have divided, but they did not.
Alexander Campbell’s sentiments were against slavery and he was never a slaveholder, but he lived in a slave state and had little sympathy with radical abolitionism. Much of the patronage and financial support of Bethany College came from the South, and he tried to keep the college neutral on these controversial issues. The first graduating class of Northwestern Christian University (Butler) was made up of a group of students who withdrew from Bethany in sympathy with a young man who had been expelled for making an antislavery speech after the public discussion of that question in the college had been forbidden. Campbell had elaborated his position in a series of articles in 1845: slavery is not condemned in the New Testament; therefore holding slaves is not sinful per se and cannot be a ground for withdrawing Christian fellowship; masters must do their full Christian duty toward their slaves, though it is admittedly very difficult to maintain a fully Christian attitude toward a person while owning him as a slave; slavery is economically bad and morally dangerous; and the policy to be followed in any situation is a matter of “opinion” and therefore within the area of Christian liberty.
That useful distinction between faith and opinion, which was fundamental to the Disciples’ program for union, now saved them from division over slavery and war. All political and social questions were to be treated as matters of opinion on which Christians might differ without dividing. Fourteen ministers in Missouri, including J. W. McGarvey, published in 1861 a “pacifist manifesto” urging Disciples to take no part in the war. They did not argue that war is always wrong or anti-Christian, nor did they discuss any moral issue of the war that was then beginning. Their whole point was that “our movement” would suffer disastrously if its members were to take arms against each other. Few Disciples were guided by their advice. Most of them, North and South, apparently felt that their attitudes in a great national crisis could not be determined by the consideration of what might happen to “our movement”—or else they thought that the movement could stand it, as it did.
The first national convention after the outbreak of war, meeting at Cincinnati in October, 1861, took a ten-minute recess so that its members, not as the convention but as a mass meeting, might pass a resolution of loyalty to the national government. Two years later the convention itself adopted a stronger resolution deploring the “attempts of armed traitors to overthrow our government.” But even this produced no division. It was a Northern convention because, under war conditions, there could, of course, be no representation from the South. Southerners realized that the resolution was merely an expression of Northern opinion, which they already knew; and many Northerners soon came to feel that it was a mistake for a sectional convention bearing a national name to pass a resolution purporting to express the sentiments of all Disciples, including the half of the country which could not possibly be represented. The organizational weakness of the Disciples became a strength in maintaining unity when the slavery issue and civil war threatened division, for there was no court to rule out any church or section and no convention empowered to set up standards or to pass any resolution that would have the force of law for the churches.
“We can never divide!” shouted Moses E. Lard in his quarterly. If war could not divide us, he said, nothing ever can. But something could—and did. Disciples cannot divide through the exclusion of one element by another in control of denominational machinery, because there is no such machinery with power of exclusion. But it is possible to divide by voluntary withdrawal. If there is no power to put any church out, there is none to keep it in if it wants to go out. That is what happened some years later.