Organized Beneficence

When the Presbyterian General Assembly, in 1803, made a studious review

of the revivals which for several years had been in progress, especially

at the South and West, it included in its Narrative the following

observations:



The Assembly observe with great pleasure that the desire for

spreading the gospel among the blacks and among the savage

tribes on our borders has been rapidly increasin during the

last year. The Assembly take notice of this circumstance with

the more satisfaction, as it not only affords a pleasing

presage of the spread of the gospel, but also furnishes

agreeable evidence of the genuineness and the benign tendency

of that spirit which God has been pleased to pour out upon his

people.



In New England the like result had already, several years before,

followed upon the like antecedent. In the year 1798 the Missionary

Society of Connecticut was constituted, having for its object to

Christianize the heathen in North America, and to support and promote

Christian knowledge in the new settlements within the United States;

and in August, 1800, its first missionary, David Bacon, engaged at a

salary of one hundred and ten cents per day, set out for the

wilderness south and west of Lake Erie, afoot and alone, with no more

luggage than he could carry on his person, to visit the wild tribes of

that region, to explore their situation, and learn their feelings with

respect to Christianity, and, so far as he had opportunity, to teach

them its doctrines and duties. The name forms a link in the bright

succession from John Eliot to this day. But it must needs be that some

suffer as victims of the inexperience of those who are first to take

direction of an untried enterprise. The abandonment of its first

missionary by one of the first missionary societies, leaving him

helpless in the wilderness, was a brief lesson in the economy of

missions opportunely given at the outset of the American mission work,

and happily had no need to be repeated.[247:1]



David Bacon, like Henry Martyn, who at that same time, in far different

surroundings, was intent upon his plans of mission work in India, was

own son in the faith to David Brainerd. But they were elder sons in a

great family. The pathetic story of that heroic youth, as told by

Jonathan Edwards, was a classic at that time in almost every country

parsonage; but its influence was especially felt in the colleges, now no

longer, as a few years earlier, the seats of the scornful, but the homes

of serious and religious learning which they were meant to be by their

founders.



Of the advancement of Christian civilization in the first

quarter-century from the achievement of independence there is no more

distinguished monument than the increase, through those troubled and

impoverished years, of the institutions of secular and sacred learning.

The really successful and effective colleges that had survived from the

colonial period were hardly a half-dozen. Up to 1810 these had been

reinforced by as many more. By far the greater number of them were

founded by the New England Congregationalists, to whom this has ever

been a favorite field of activity. But special honor must be paid to the

wise and courageous and nobly successful enterprise of large-minded and

large-hearted men among the Baptists, who as early as 1764, boldly

breasting a current of unworthy prejudice in their own denomination,

began the work of Brown University at Providence, which, carried forward

by a notable succession of great educators, has been set in the front

rank of existing American institutions of learning. After the revivals

of 1800 these Christian colleges were not only attended by students

coming from zealous and fervid churches; they themselves became the foci

from which high and noble spiritual influences were radiated through the

land. It was in communities like these that the example of such lives as

that of Brainerd stirred up generous young minds to a chivalrous and

even ascetic delight in attempting great labors and enduring great

sacrifices as soldiers under the Captain of salvation.



It was at Williams College, then just planted in the Berkshire hills,

that a little coterie of students was formed which, for the grandeur of

the consequences that flowed from it, is worthy to be named in history

beside the Holy Club of Oxford in 1730, and the friends at Oriel College

in 1830. Samuel J. Mills came to Williams College in 1806 from the

parsonage of Father Mills of Torringford, concerning whom quaint

traditions and even memories still linger in the neighboring parishes of

Litchfield County, Connecticut. Around this young student gathered a

circle of men like-minded. The shade of a lonely haystack was their

oratory; the pledges by which they bound themselves to a life-work for

the kingdom of heaven remind one of the mutual vows of the earliest

friends of Loyola. Some of the youths went soon to the theological

seminary, and at once leavened that community with their own spirit.



The seminary--there was only one in all Protestant America. As early as

1791 the Sulpitian fathers had organized their seminary at Baltimore.

But it was not until 1808 that any institution for theological studies

was open to candidates for the Protestant ministry. Up to that time such

studies were made in the regular college curriculum, which was

distinctly theological in character; and it was common for the graduate

to spend an additional year at the college for special study under the

president or the one professor of divinity. But many country parsonages

that were tenanted by men of fame as writers and teachers were greatly

frequented by young men preparing themselves for the work of preaching.



The change to the modern method of education for the ministry was a

sudden one. It was precipitated by an event which has not even yet

ceased to be looked on by the losing party with honest lamentation and

with an unnecessary amount of sectarian acrimony. The divinity

professorship in Harvard College, founded in 1722[249:1] by Thomas

Hollis, of London, a Baptist friend of New England, was filled, after a

long struggle and an impassioned protest, by the election of Henry Ware,

an avowed and representative Unitarian. It was a distinct announcement

that the government of the college had taken sides in the impending

conflict, in opposition to the system of religious doctrine to the

maintenance of which the college had from its foundation been devoted.

The significance of the fact was not mistaken by either party. It meant

that the two tendencies which had been recognizable from long before

the Great Awakening were drawing asunder, and that thenceforth it must

be expected that the vast influence of the venerable college, in the

clergy and in society, would be given to the Liberal side. The dismay of

one party and the exultation of the other were alike well grounded. The

cry of the Orthodox was To your tents, O Israel! Lines of

ecclesiastical non-intercourse were drawn. Church was divided from

church, and family from family. When the forces and the losses on each

side came to be reckoned up, there was a double wonder: First, at the

narrow boundaries by which the Unitarian defection was circumscribed: A

radius of thirty-five miles from Boston as a center would sweep almost

the whole field of its history and influence;[250:1] and then at the

sweeping completeness of it within these bounds; as Mrs. H. B. Stowe

summed up the situation at Boston, All the literary men of

Massachusetts were Unitarian; all the trustees and professors of Harvard

College were Unitarian; all the élite of wealth and fashion crowded

Unitarian churches; the judges on the bench were Unitarian, giving

decisions by which the peculiar features of church organization so

carefully ordered by the Pilgrim Fathers had been nullified and all the

power had passed into the hands of the congregation.[250:2]



The schism, with its acrimonies and heartburnings, was doubtless in some

sense necessary. And it was attended with some beneficent consequences.

It gave rise to instructive and illuminating debate. And on the part of

the Orthodox it occasioned an outburst of earnest zeal which in a

wonderfully short time had more than repaired their loss in numbers, and

had started them on a career of wide beneficence, with a momentum that

has been increasing to this day. But it is not altogether useless to

put the question how much was lost to both parties and to the common

cause by the separation. It is not difficult to conceive that such

dogged polemics as Nathanael Emmons and Jedidiah Morse might have been

none the worse for being held in some sort of fellowship, rather than in

exasperated controversy, with such types of Christian sainthood as the

younger Ware and the younger Buckminster; and it is easy to imagine the

extreme culture and cool intellectual and spiritual temper of the

Unitarian pulpit in general as finding its advantage in not being cut

off from direct radiations from the fiery zeal of Lyman Beecher and

Edward Dorr Griffin. Is it quite sure that New England Congregationalism

would have been in all respects worse off if Channing and his friends

had continued to be recognized as the Liberal wing of its clergy? or

that the Unitarian ministers would not have been a great deal better off

if they had remained in connection with a strong and conservative right

wing, which might counterbalance the exorbitant leftward flights of

their more impatient and erratic spirits?



The seating of a pronounced Unitarian in the Hollis chair of theology at

Harvard took place in 1805. Three years later, in 1808, the doors of

Andover Seminary were opened to students. Thirty-six were present, and

the number went on increasing. The example was quickly followed. In 1810

the Dutch seminary was begun at New Brunswick, and in 1812 the

Presbyterian at Princeton. In 1816 Bangor Seminary (Congregationalist)

and Hartwick Seminary (Lutheran) were opened. In 1819 the Episcopalian

General Seminary followed, and the Baptist Hamilton Seminary in

1820. In 1821 Presbyterian seminaries were begun at Auburn, N. Y., and

Marysville, Tenn. In 1822 the Yale Divinity College was founded

(Congregationalist); in 1823 the Virginia (Episcopalian) seminary at

Alexandria; in 1824 the Union (Presbyterian) Seminary, also in Virginia,

and the Unitarian seminary at Cambridge; in 1825 the Baptist seminary at

Newton, Mass., and the German Reformed at York, Pa.; in 1826 the

Lutheran at Gettysburg; in 1827 the Baptist at Rock Spring, Ill. Thus,

within a period of twenty years, seventeen theological schools had come

into existence where none had been known before. It was a swift and

beneficent revolution, and the revolution has never gone backward. In

1880 were enumerated in the United States no less than one hundred and

forty-two seminaries, representing all sects, orders, and schools of

theological opinion, employing five hundred and twenty-nine resident

professors.[252:1]



To Andover, in the very first years of its great history, came Mills and

others of the little Williams College circle; and at once their

infectious enthusiasm for the advancement of the kingdom of God was felt

throughout the institution. The eager zeal of these young men brooked no

delay. In June, 1810, the General Association of Massachusetts met at

the neighboring town of Bradford; there four of the students, Judson,

Nott, Newell, and Hall, presented themselves and their cause; and at

that meeting was constituted the American Board of Commissioners for

Foreign Missions. The little faith of the churches shrank from the

responsibility of sustaining missionaries in the field, and Judson was

sent to England to solicit the coöperation of the London Missionary

Society. This effort happily failing, the burden came back upon the

American churches and was not refused. At last, in February, 1812, the

first American missionaries to a foreign country, Messrs. Judson, Rice,

Newell, Nott, and Hall, with their wives, sailed, in two parties, for

Calcutta.



And now befell an incident perplexing, embarrassing, and disheartening

to the supporters of the mission, but attended with results for the

promotion of the gospel to which their best wisdom never could have

attained. Adoniram Judson, a graduate of Brown University, having spent

the long months at sea in the diligent and devout study of the

Scriptures, arrived at Calcutta fully persuaded of the truth of Baptist

principles. His friend, Luther Rice, arriving by the other vessel, came

by and by to the same conclusion; and the two, with their wives, were

baptized by immersion in the Baptist church at Calcutta. The

announcement of this news in America was an irresistible appeal to the

already powerful and rapidly growing Baptist denomination to assume the

support of the two missionaries who now offered themselves to the

service of the Baptist churches. Rice returned to urge the appeal on

their immediate attention, while Judson remained to enter on that noble

apostolate for which his praise is in all the churches.



To the widespread Baptist fellowship this sudden, unmistakable, and

imperative providential summons to engage in the work of foreign

missions was (it is hardly too much to say) like life from the dead. The

sect had doubled its numbers in the decade just passed, and was

estimated to include two hundred thousand communicants, all baptized

believers. But this multitude was without common organization, and,

while abundantly endowed with sectarian animosities, was singularly

lacking in a consciousness of common spiritual life. It was pervaded by

a deadly fatalism, which, under the guise of reverence for the will of

God, was openly pleaded as a reason for abstaining from effort and

self-denial in the promotion of the gospel. Withal it was widely

characterized not only by a lack of education in its ministry, but by a

violent and brutal opposition to a learned clergy, which was

particularly strange in a party the moiety of whose principles depends

on a point in Greek lexicology. It was to a party--we may not say a

body--deeply and widely affected by traits like these that the divine

call was to be presented and urged. The messenger was well fitted for

his work. To the zeal of a new convert to Baptist principles, and a

missionary fervor deepened by recent contact with idolatry in some of

its most repulsive forms, Luther Rice united a cultivated eloquence and

a personal persuasiveness. Of course his first address was to pastors

and congregations in the seaboard cities, unexcelled by any, of whatever

name, for intelligent and reasonable piety; and here his task was easy

and brief, for they were already of his mind. But the great mass of

ignorance and prejudice had also to be reckoned with. By a work in which

the influence of the divine Spirit was quite as manifest as in the

convulsive agitations of a camp-meeting, it was dealt with successfully.

Church history moved swiftly in those days. The news of the accession of

Judson and Rice was received in January, 1813. In May, 1814, the General

Missionary Convention of the Baptists was organized at Philadelphia,

thirty-three delegates being present, from eleven different States. The

Convention, which was to meet triennially, entered at once upon its

work. It became a vital center to the Baptist denomination. From it, at

its second meeting, proceeded effective measures for the promotion of

education in the ministry, and, under the conviction that western as

well as eastern regions are given to the Son of God as an inheritance,

large plans for home missions at the West.



Thus the great debt which the English Congregationalists had owed to the

Baptists for heroic leadership in the work of foreign missions was

repaid with generous usury by the Congregationalists to the Baptists of

America. From this time forward the American Baptists came more and more

to be felt as a salutary force in the religious life of the nation and

the world. But against what bitter and furious opposition on the part of

the ancient ignorance the new light had to struggle cannot easily be

conceived by those who have only heard of the Hard-Shell Baptist as a

curious fossil of a prehistoric period.[255:1]



The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions continued for

twenty-seven years to be the common organ of foreign missionary

operations for the Congregationalists, the Presbyterians, and the Dutch

and German Reformed churches. In the year 1837 an official Presbyterian

Board of Missions was erected by the Old-School fragment of the

disrupted Presbyterian Church; and to this, when the two fragments were

reunited, in 1869, the contributions of the New-School side began to be

transferred. In 1858 the Dutch church, and in 1879 the German church,

instituted their separate mission operations. Thus the initiative of the

Andover students in 1810 resulted in the erection, not of one mission

board, timidly venturing to set five missionaries in the foreign field,

but of five boards, whose total annual resources are counted by millions

of dollars, whose evangelists, men and women, American and foreign-born,

are a great army, and whose churches, schools, colleges, theological

seminaries, hospitals, printing-presses, with the other equipments of a

Christian civilization, and the myriads of whose faithful Christian

converts, in every country under the whole heaven, have done more for

the true honor of our nation than all that it has achieved in diplomacy

and war.[255:2]



The Episcopalians entered on foreign mission work in 1819, and the

Methodists, tardily but at last with signal efficiency and success, in

1832. No considerable sect of American Christians at the present day is

unrepresented in the foreign field.



In order to complete the history of this organizing era in the church,

we must return to the humble but memorable figure of Samuel J. Mills. It

was his characteristic word to one of his fellows, as they stood ready

to leave the seclusion of the seminary for active service, You and I,

brother, are little men, but before we die, our influence must be felt

on the other side of the world. No one claimed that he was other than a

little man, except as he was filled and possessed with a great

thought, and that the thought that filled the mind of Christ--the

thought of the Coming Age and of the Reign of God on earth.[256:1] While

his five companions were sailing for the remotest East, Mills plunged

into the depth of the western wilderness, and between 1812 and 1815, in

two toilsome journeys, traversed the Great Valley as far as New Orleans,

deeply impressed everywhere with the famine of the word, and laboring,

in coöperation with local societies at the East, to provide for the

universal want by the sale or gift of Bibles and the organization of

Bible societies. After his second return he proposed the organization of

the American Bible Society, which was accomplished in 1816.



But already this nobly enterprising mind was intent on a new plan, of

most far-reaching importance, not original with himself, but, on the

contrary, long familiar to those who studied the extension of the church

and pondered the indications of God's providential purposes. The

earliest attempt in America toward the propagation of the gospel in

foreign lands would seem to have been the circular letter sent out by

the neighbor pastors, Samuel Hopkins and Ezra Stiles, in the year 1773,

from Newport, chief seat of the slave-trade, asking contributions for

the education of two colored men as missionaries to their native

continent of Africa. To many generous minds at once, in this era of

great Christian enterprises, the thought recurred of vast blessings to

be wrought for the Dark Continent by the agency of colored men

Christianized, civilized, and educated in America. Good men reverently

hoped to see in this triumphant solution of the mystery of divine

providence in permitting the curse of African slavery, through the cruel

greed of men, to be inflicted on the American republic. In 1816 Mills

successfully pressed upon the Presbyterian Synod of New York and New

Jersey a plan for educating Christian men of color for the work of the

gospel in their fatherland. That same year, in coöperation with an

earnest philanthropist, Dr. Robert Finley, of New Jersey, he aided in

the instituting of the American Colonization Society. In 1817 he sailed,

in company with a colleague, the Rev. Ebenezer Burgess, to explore the

coast of Africa in search of the best site for a colony. On the return

voyage he died, and his body was committed to the sea: a little man,

to whom were granted only five years of what men call active life; but

he had fulfilled his vow, and the ends of the earth had felt his

influence for the advancement of the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The enterprise of African colonization, already dear to Christian hearts

for the hopes that it involved of the redemption of a lost continent,

of the elevation of an oppressed race in America, of the emancipation of

slaves and the abolition of slavery, received a new consecration as the

object of the dying labors and prayers of Mills. It was associated, in

the minds of good men, not only with plans for the conversion of the

heathen, and with the tide of antislavery sentiment now spreading and

deepening both at the South and at the North, but also with Clarkson

societies and other local organizations, in many different places, for

the moral and physical elevation of the free colored people from the

pitiable degradation in which they were commonly living in the larger

towns. Altogether the watchmen on the walls of Zion saw no fairer sign

of dawn, in that second decade of the nineteenth century, than the

hopeful lifting of the cloud from Africa, the brightening prospects of

the free negroes of the United States, and the growing hope of the

abolition of American slavery.[258:1]



Other societies, national in their scope and constituency, the origin of

which belongs in this organizing period, are the American Education

Society (1815), the American Sunday-school Union (1824), the American

Tract Society (1825), the Seamen's Friend Society (1826), and the

American Home Missionary Society (1826), in which last the

Congregationalists of New England coöperated with the Presbyterians on

the basis of a Plan of Union entered into between the General Assembly

and the General Association of Connecticut, the tendency of which was to

reinforce the Presbyterian Church with the numbers and the vigor of the

New England westward migration. Of course the establishment of these and

other societies for beneficent work outside of sectarian lines did not

hinder, but rather stimulated, sectarian organizations for the like

objects. The whole American church, in all its orders, was girding

itself for a work, at home and abroad, the immense grandeur of which no

man of that generation could possibly have foreseen.



The grandeur of this work was to consist not only in the results of it,

but in the resources of it. As never before, the sympathies, prayers,

and personal coöperation of all Christians, even the feeblest, were to

be combined and utilized for enterprises coextensive with the continent

and the world and taking hold on eternity. The possibilities of the new

era were dazzling to the prophetic imagination. A young minister then

standing on the threshold of a long career exulted in the peculiar and

excelling glory of the dawning day:



Surely, if it is the noblest attribute of our nature that

spreads out the circle of our sympathies to include the whole

family of man, and sends forth our affections to embrace the

ages of a distant futurity, it must be regarded as a privilege

no less exalted that our means of doing good are limited by

no remoteness of country or distance of duration, but we may

operate, if we will, to assuage the miseries of another

hemisphere, or to prevent the necessities of an unborn

generation. The time has been when a man might weep over the

wrongs of Africa, and he might look forward to weep over the

hopelessness of her degradation, till his heart should bleed;

and yet his tears would be all that he could give her. He

might relieve the beggar at his door, but he could do nothing

for a dying continent. He might provide for his children, but

he could do nothing for the nations that were yet to be born

to an inheritance of utter wretchedness. Then the privilege of

engaging in schemes of magnificent benevolence belonged only

to princes and to men of princely possessions; but now the

progress of improvement has brought down this privilege to the

reach of every individual. The institutions of our age are a

republic of benevolence, and all may share in the unrestrained

and equal democracy. This privilege is ours. We may stretch

forth our hand, if we will, to enlighten the Hindu or to tame

the savage of the wilderness. It is ours, if we will, to put

forth our contributions and thus to operate not ineffectually

for the relief and renovation of a continent over which one

tide of misery has swept without ebb and without restraint for

unremembered centuries. It is ours, if we will, to do

something that shall tell on all the coming ages of a race

which has been persecuted and enslaved, trodden down and

despised, for a thousand generations. Our Father has made us

the almoners of his love. He has raised us to partake, as it

were, in the ubiquity of his own beneficence. Shall we be

unworthy of the trust? God forbid![260:1]