The service of Isaac Errett would have been less significant than it was if it had been only the championing of the progressive side in certain controversies. What was more important was the breadth of his spirit, the depth of his religious life, and the power of his leadership away from a cramping legalism and toward a broader spiritual culture. In an article entitled “What Is Sectarianism?” in the Christian Quarterly, January, 1871, Mr. Errett restated the aim of the Disciples of Christ as union upon Christ, not upon our own interpretation of the Bible or on an exact pattern of the “ancient order of things.” J. J. Haley later called this article “the Declaration and Address brought down to date.”
CHAPTER IX
RENAISSANCE, 1874-1909
After the dark ages of controversy and organizational stagnation—which were by no means so dark in other respects—came a renaissance in which the Disciples gained a clearer view of their central purpose and a better command of the resources for realizing it. They began to make more intimate contacts with the social and intellectual currents of the time and to escape from the cultural isolation into which they had fallen. Those who thought of this as apostasy from the true faith tended to withdraw, and ultimately did withdraw, into a separate and noncooperating group. The main body no longer took interest in what now seemed trivial disputes about organs, pastors, and the legitimacy of missionary organizations. The new issues which arose were such as were shared by the whole Christian world, so that even their dissensions related them to the main currents of religious thought.
This period saw the continuance of westward expansion, the winning of a second and almost a third half-million members, the creation of new missionary and benevolent organizations, more than a hundredfold increase in giving for missions, new journalistic enterprises, an educational awakening, a new type of evangelism, new outreaches in Christian union and interdenominational cooperation, and some slight beginning of a discovery of social ethics as a field of Christian responsibility.
The “dark ages” had not been stagnant in numerical and geographical growth. That process needed only to be continued. As the completion of the transcontinental railroads brought new land within reach for settlement, and as homesteaders invaded what had been the open range, towns sprang up throughout the West. In town and country, Disciples were there among the first, and churches were planted. After the American Christian Missionary Society was relieved of its foreign responsibilities, it could do more in promoting new work in the West. Soon the Board of Church Extension came to give first aid to the new church needing a house. It was never a log-cabin frontier west of the Mississippi (except Missouri and Arkansas), and building was a different problem from what it had been on the old timbered frontier. Even though the Disciples could draw less support from the East than some denominations, they became relatively strong in most of the Western states and very strong in some, such as Kansas and Oklahoma.
Total estimated membership in 1875 was 400,000. The official figure was 641,000 for 1890; 1,120,000 for 1900; 1,363,533 for 1910.
Journalism and Missions
A new center of journalistic influence began when J. H. Garrison moved his paper, the Christian, from Quincy, Illinois, to St. Louis, on January 1, 1874, and organized the Christian Publishing Company. He had been on the point of moving it to Chicago, when the Great Fire of 1871 intervened. B. W. Johnson’s Evangelist, which had lately moved from Iowa to Chicago, merged with the Christian in 1882 to produce the Christian-Evangelist. By its conservatively progressive policy, it became at once a powerful force in leading the Disciples out of the age of sterile controversy and into a wider conception of religion and more active work in its promotion. The Christian Standard, at Cincinnati, under Isaac Errett, was already exercising a similar influence. As long as Mr. Errett lived, the two papers worked together for the same ends. The relations between these two great editors were always intimate and affectionate. Writing from his deathbed (1888) to his brother editor, J. H. Garrison, who was his junior by twenty-two years, Mr. Errett said:
We have been together from the beginning of this missionary work. We have stood shoulder to shoulder ... and the two most effective instrumentalities in educating our people and bringing them into active cooperation in spreading the gospel in all lands have been the Christian-Evangelist and the Christian Standard; and indeed, upon all points of doctrine and practice and expediency you and I have always worked on the same lines in perfect harmony.
A third paper, destined to hold a very prominent place in American journalism at a later date, was plodding its useful way through most of this period with a rather local constituency. This was the Christian Oracle, which began at Des Moines in 1884 and later moved to Chicago. In 1900 it became the Christian Century. For several years thereafter it reflected the liberal spirit of Herbert L. Willett, who was its editor for a time. Coming under the control and editorship of Charles Clayton Morrison in 1908, it soon began to evolve into an undenominational journal of religion.