Reconstruction

Seven years of war left the American people exhausted, impoverished,

disorganized, conscious of having come into possession of a national

existence, and stirred with anxious searchings of heart over the

question what new institutions should succeed to those overthrown in the

struggle for independence.



Like questions pervaded the commonwealth of American Christians through

all its divisions. The interconfe sional divisions of the body

ecclesiastic were about to prove themselves a more effectual bar to

union than the political and territorial divisions of the body politic.

The religious divisions were nearly equal in number to the political.

Naming them in the order in which they had settled themselves on the

soil of the new nation, they were as follows: 1. The Protestant

Episcopalians; 2. The Reformed Dutch; 3. The Congregationalists; 4. The

Roman Catholics; 5. The Friends; 6. The Baptists; 7. The Presbyterians;

8. The Methodists; to which must be added three sects which up to this

time had almost exclusively to do with the German language and the

German immigrant population, to wit, 9. The German Reformed; 10. The

Lutherans; 11. The Moravians. Some of these, as the Congregationalists

and the Baptists, were of so simple and elastic a polity, so

self-adaptive to whatever new environment, as to require no effort to

adjust themselves. Others, as the Dutch and the Presbyterians, had

already organized themselves as independent of foreign spiritual

jurisdiction. Others still, as the German Reformed, the Moravians, and

the Quakers, were content to remain for years to come in a relation of

subordination to foreign centers of organization. But there were three

communions, of great prospective importance, which found it necessary to

address themselves to the task of reorganization to suit the changed

political conditions. These were the Episcopalians, the Catholics, and

the Methodists.



In one respect all the various orders of churches were alike. They had

all suffered from the waste and damage of war. Pastors and missionaries

had been driven from their cures, congregations had been scattered,

houses of worship had been desecrated or destroyed. The Episcopalian and

Methodist ministers were generally Tories, and their churches, and in

some instances their persons, were not spared by the patriots. The

Friends and the Moravians, principled against taking active part in

warfare, were exposed to aggressions from both sides. All other sects

were safely presumed to be in earnest sympathy with the cause of

independence, which many of their pastors actively served as chaplains

or as combatants, or in other ways; wherever the British troops held the

ground, their churches were the object of spite. Nor were these the

chief losses by the war. More grievous still were the death of the

strong men and the young men of the churches, the demoralization of camp

life, and, as the war advanced, the infection of the current fashions of

unbelief from the officers both of the French and of the British armies.

The prevalent diathesis of the American church in all its sects was one

of spiritual torpor, from which, however, it soon began to be aroused

as the grave exigencies of the situation disclosed themselves.



Perhaps no one of the Christian organizations of America came out of the

war in a more forlorn condition than the Episcopalians. This condition

was thus described by Bishop White, in an official charge to his clergy

at Philadelphia in 1832:



The congregations of our communion throughout the United

States were approaching annihilation. Although within this

city three Episcopal clergymen were resident and officiating,

the churches over the rest of the State had become deprived of

their clergy during the war, either by death or by departure

for England. In the Eastern States, with two or three

exceptions, there was a cessation of the exercises of the

pulpit, owing to the necessary disuse of the prayers for the

former civil rulers. In Maryland and Virginia, where the

church had enjoyed civil establishments, on the ceasing of

these, the incumbents of the parishes, almost without

exception, ceased to officiate. Farther south the condition of

the church was not better, to say the least.[210:1]



This extreme feebleness of Episcopalianism in the several States

conspired with the tendencies of the time in civil affairs to induce

upon the new organization a character not at all conformed to the ideal

of episcopal government. Instead of establishing as the unit of

organization the bishop in every principal town, governing his diocese

at the head of his clergy with some measure of authority, it was almost

a necessity of the time to constitute dioceses as big as kingdoms, and

then to take security against excess of power in the diocesan by

overslaughing his authority through exorbitant powers conferred upon a

periodical mixed synod, legislating for a whole continent, even in

matters confessedly variable and unessential. In the later evolution of

the system, this superior limitation of the bishop's powers is

supplemented from below by magnifying the authority of representative

bodies, diocesan and parochial, until the work of the bishop is reduced

as nearly as possible to the merely ministerial performance of certain

assigned functions according to prescribed directions. Concerning this

frame of government it is to be remarked: 1. That it was quite

consciously and confessedly devised for the government of a sect, with

the full and fraternal understanding that other religious denominations

of Christians (to use the favorite American euphemism) were left at

full and equal liberty to model and organize their respective churches

to suit themselves.[211:1] 2. That, judged according to its professed

purpose, it has proved itself a practically good and effective

government. 3. That it is in no proper sense of the word an episcopal

government, but rather a classical and synodical government, according

to the common type of the American church constitutions of the

period.[211:2]



The objections which only a few years before had withstood the

importation into the colonies of lord bishops, with the English common

and canon law at their backs, vanished entirely before the proposal for

the harmless functionaries provided for in the new constitution. John

Adams himself, a leader of the former opposition, now, as American

minister in London, did his best to secure for Bishops-elect White and

Provoost the coveted consecration from English bishops. The only

hindrance now to this long-desired boon was in the supercilious

dilatoriness of the English prelates and of the civil authorities to

whom they were subordinate. They were evidently in a sulky temper over

the overwhelming defeat of the British arms. If it had been in their

power to blockade effectively the channels of sacramental grace, there

is no sign that they would have consented to the American petition.

Happily there were other courses open. 1. There was the recourse to

presbyterial ordination, an expedient sanctioned, when necessary, by the

authority of the judicious Hooker, and actually recommended, if the

case should require, by the Rev. William White, soon to be consecrated

as one of the first American bishops. 2. Already for more than a

half-century the Moravian episcopate had been present and most

apostolically active in America. 3. The Lutheran Episcopal churches of

Denmark and Sweden were fully competent and known to be not unwilling to

confer the episcopal succession on the American candidates. 4. There

were the Scotch nonjuring bishops, outlawed for political reasons from

communion with the English church, who were tending their persecuted

remnant of a flock in Scotland. Theirs was a not less valid succession

than those of their better-provided English brethren, and fully as

honorable a history. It was due to the separate initiative of the

Episcopalian ministers of Connecticut, and to the persistence of their

bishop-elect, Samuel Seabury, that the deadlock imposed by the

Englishmen was broken. Inheriting the Puritan spirit, which sought a

jus divinum in all church questions, they were men of deeper

convictions and higher principles than their more southern brethren.

In advance of the plans for national organization, without conferring

with flesh and blood, they had met and acted, and their candidate for

consecration was in London urging his claims, before the ministers in

the Middle States had any knowledge of what was doing. After a year of

costly and vexatious delay in London, finding no progress made and no

hope of any, he proceeded to Aberdeen and was consecrated bishop

November 14, 1784. It was more than two years longer before the English

bishops succeeded in finding a way to do what their unrecognized Scotch

brethren had done with small demur. But they did find it. So long as the

Americans seemed dependent on English consecration they could not get

it. When at last it was made quite plain that they could and would do

without it if necessary, they were more than welcome to it. Dr. White

for Pennsylvania, and Dr. Provoost for New York, were consecrated by the

Archbishop of Canterbury at the chapel of Lambeth Palace, February 4,

1787. Dr. Griffith, elected for Virginia, failed to be present; in all

that great diocese there was not interest enough felt in the matter to

raise the money to pay his passage to England and back.



The American Episcopal Church was at last in a condition to live. Some

formidable dangers of division arising from the double derivation of the

episcopate were happily averted by the tact and statesmanship of Bishop

White, and liturgical changes incidental to the reconstitution of the

church were made, on the whole with cautious judgment and good taste,

and successfully introduced. But for many years the church lived only a

languishing life. Bishop Provoost of New York, after fourteen years of

service, demitted his functions in 1801, discouraged about the

continuance of the church. He thought it would die out with the old

colonial families.[213:1] The large prosperity of this church dates

only from the second decade of this century. It is the more notable for

the brief time in which so much has been accomplished.



* * * * *



The difficulties in the way of the organization of the Catholic Church

for the United States were not less serious, and were overcome with

equal success, but not without a prolonged struggle against opposition

from within. It is not easy for us, in view either of the antecedent or

of the subsequent history, to realize the extreme feebleness of American

Catholicism at the birth of our nation. According to an official

Relation on the State of Religion in the United States, presented by

the prefect apostolic in 1785, the total number of Catholics in the

entire Union was 18,200, exclusive of an unascertainable number,

destitute of priests, in the Mississippi Valley. The entire number of

the clergy was twenty-four, most of them former members of the Society

of Jesuits, that had been suppressed in 1773 by the famous bull,

Dominus ac Redemptor, of Clement XIV. Sorely against their will, these

missionaries, hitherto subject only to the discipline of their own

society, were transformed into secular priests, under the jurisdiction

of the Vicar Apostolic of London. After the establishment of

independence, with the intense jealousy felt regarding British

influence, and by none more deeply and more reasonably felt than by the

Catholics, this jurisdiction was impracticable. The providentially fit

man for the emergency was found in the Rev. John Carroll, of an old

Maryland family distinguished alike for patriotism and for faithfulness

to Catholic principles. In June, 1784, he was made prefect apostolic

over the Catholic Church in the United States, and the dependence on

British jurisdiction was terminated.



When, however, it was proposed that this provisional arrangement should

be superseded by the appointment of a bishop, objections not unexpected

were encountered from among the clergy. Already we have had occasion to

note the jealousy of episcopal authority that is felt by the clergy of

the regular orders. The lately disbanded Jesuits, with characteristic

flexibility of self-adaptation to circumstances, had at once

reincorporated themselves under another name, thus to hold the not

inconsiderable estates of their order in the State of Maryland. But the

plans of these energetic men either to control the bishop or to prevent

his appointment were unsuccessful. In December, 1790, Bishop Carroll,

having been consecrated in England, arrived and entered upon his see of

Baltimore.



Difficulties, through which there were not many precedents to guide him,

thickened about the path of the new prelate. It was well both for the

church and for the republic that he was a man not only versed in the

theology and polity of his church, but imbued with American principles

and feelings. The first conflict that vexed the church under his

administration, and which for fifty years continued to vex his

associates and successors, was a collision between the American

sentiment for local and individual liberty and self-government, and the

absolutist spiritual government of Rome. The Catholics of New York,

including those of the Spanish and French legations, had built a church

in Barclay Street, then on the northern outskirt of the city; and they

had the very natural and just feeling that they had a right to do what

they would with their own and with the building erected at their

charges. They proceeded accordingly to put in charge of it priests of

their own selection. But they had lost sight of the countervailing

principle that if they had a right to do as they would with their

building, the bishop, as representing the supreme authority in the

church, had a like right to do as he would with his clergy. The building

was theirs; but it was for the bishop to say what services should be

held in it, or whether there should be any services in it at all, in the

Roman Catholic communion. It is surprising how often this issue was

made, and how repeatedly and obstinately it was fought out in various

places, when the final result was so inevitable. The hierarchical power

prevailed, of course, but after much irritation between priesthood and

people, and great loss of souls to the church.[216:1] American ideas

and methods were destined profoundly and beneficially to affect the

Roman Church in the United States, but not by the revolutionary process

of establishing trusteeism, or the lay control of parishes. The

damaging results of such disputes to both parties and to their common

interest in the church put the two parties under heavy bonds to deal by

each other with mutual consideration. The tendency, as in some parallel

cases, is toward an absolute government administered on republican

principles, the authoritative command being given with cautious

consideration of the disposition of the subject. The rights of the laity

are sufficiently secured, first, by their holding the purse, and,

secondly, in a community in which the Roman is only one of many churches

held in like esteem and making like claims to divine authority, by their

holding in reserve the right of withdrawal.



Other and unwonted difficulties for the young church lay in the Babel

confusion of races and languages among its disciples, and in the lack of

public resources, which could be supplied no otherwise than by free

gift. Yet another difficulty was the scant supply of clergy; but events

which about this time began to spread desolation among the institutions

of Catholic Europe proved to be of inestimable benefit to the

ill-provided Catholics of America. Rome might almost have been content

to see the wasting and destruction in her ancient strongholds, for the

opportune reinforcement which it brought, at a critical time, to the

renascent church in the New World. More important than the priests of

various orders and divers languages, who came all equipped for mission

work among immigrants of different nationalities, was the arrival of the

Sulpitians of Paris, fleeing from the persecutions of the French

Revolution, ready for their special work of training for the parish

priesthood. The founding of their seminary in Baltimore in 1791, for the

training of a native clergy, was the best security that had yet been

given for the permanence of the Catholic revival. The American Catholic

Church was a small affair as yet, and for twenty years to come was to

continue so; but the framework was preparing of an organization

sufficient for the days of great things that were before it.



* * * * *



The most revolutionary change suffered by any religious body in America,

in adjusting itself to the changed conditions after the War of

Independence, was that suffered by the latest arrived and most rapidly

growing of them all. We have seen the order of the Wesleyan preachers

coming so tardily across the ocean, and propagated with constantly

increasing momentum southward from the border of Maryland. Its

congregations were not a church; its preachers were not a clergy.

Instituted in England by a narrow, High-church clergyman of the

established church, its preachers were simply a company of lay

missionaries under the command of John Wesley; its adherents were

members of the Church of England, bound to special fidelity to their

duties as such in their several parish churches, but united in clubs and

classes for the mutual promotion of holy living in an unholy age; and

its chapels and other property, fruits of the self-denial of many poor,

were held under iron-bound title-deeds, subject to the control of John

Wesley and of the close corporation of preachers to whom he should demit

them.



It seems hardly worthy of the immense practical sagacity of Wesley that

he should have thought to transplant this system unchanged into the

midst of circumstances so widely different as those which must surround

it in America. And yet even here, where the best work of his preachers

was to be done among populations not only churchless, but out of reach

of church or ministry of whatever name, in those Southern States in

which nine tenths of his penitents and converts were gained, his

preachers were warned against the sacrilege of ministering to the

craving converts the Christian ordinances of baptism and the holy

supper, and bidden to send them to their own churches--when they had

none. The wretched incumbents of the State parishes at the first sounds

of war had scampered from the field like hirelings whose own the sheep

are not, and the demand that the preachers of the word should also

minister the comfort of the Christian ordinances became too strong to be

resisted. The call of duty and necessity seemed to the preachers

gathered at a conference at Fluvanna in 1779 to be a call from God; and,

contrary to the strong objections of Wesley and Asbury, they chose from

the older of their own number a committee who ordained themselves, and

proceeded to ordain and set apart other ministers for the same

purpose--that they might minister the holy ordinances to the church of

Christ.[218:1] The step was a bold one, and although it seemed to be

attended by happy spiritual results, it threatened to precipitate a

division of the Society into two factions. The progress of events, the

establishment and acknowledgment of American independence, and the

constant expansion of the Methodist work, brought its own solution of

the divisive questions.



It was an important day in the history of the American church, that

second day of September, 1784, when John Wesley, assisted by other

presbyters of the Church of England, laid his hands in benediction upon

the head of Dr. Thomas Coke, and committed to him the superintendency of

the Methodist work in America, as colleague with Francis Asbury. On the

arrival of Coke in America, the preachers were hastily summoned together

in conference at Baltimore, and there, in Christmas week of the same

year, Asbury was ordained successively as deacon, as elder, and as

superintendent. By the two bishops thus constituted were ordained elders

and deacons, and Methodism became a living church.



* * * * *



The two decades from the close of the War of Independence include the

period of the lowest ebb-tide of vitality in the history of American

Christianity. The spirit of half-belief or unbelief that prevailed on

the other side of the sea, both in the church and out of it, was

manifest also here. Happily the tide of foreign immigration at this time

was stayed, and the church had opportunity to gather strength for the

immense task that was presently to be devolved upon it. But the westward

movement of our own population was now beginning to pour down the

western slope of the Alleghanies into the great Mississippi basin. It

was observed by the Methodist preachers that the members of their

societies who had, through fear, necessity, or choice, moved into the

back settlements and into new parts of the country, as soon as peace was

settled and the way was open solicited the preachers to come among them,

and so the work followed them to the west.[219:1] In the years

1791-1810 occurred the great movement of population from Virginia to

Kentucky and from Carolina to Tennessee. It was reckoned that one fourth

of the Baptists of Virginia had removed to Kentucky, and yet they hardly

leavened the lump of early frontier barbarism. The Presbyterian Church,

working in its favorite methods, devised campaigns of home missionary

enterprise in its presbyteries and synods, detailing pastors from their

parishes for temporary mission service in following the movement of the

Scotch-Irish migration into the hill-country in which it seemed to find

its congenial habitat, and from which its powerful influences were to

flow in all directions. The Congregationalists of New England in like

manner followed with Christian teaching and pastoral care their sons

moving westward to occupy the rich lands of western New York and of

Ohio. The General Association of the pastors of Connecticut, solicitous

that the work of missions to the frontier should be carried forward

without loss of power through division of forces, entered, in 1801, into

the compact with the General Assembly of the Presbyterians known as the

Plan of Union, by which Christians of both polities might coöperate in

the founding of churches and in maintaining the work of the gospel.



In the year 1803 the most important political event since the adoption

of the Constitution, the purchase of Louisiana by President Jefferson,

opened to the American church a new and immense field for missionary

activity. This vast territory, stretching from the Mississippi westward

to the summits of the Rocky Mountains and nearly doubling the domain of

the United States, was the last remainder of the great projected French

Catholic empire that had fallen in 1763. Passed back and forth with the

vicissitudes of European politics between French and Spanish masters, it

had made small progress in either civilization or Christianity. But the

immense possibilities of it to the kingdoms of this world and to the

kingdom of heaven were obvious to every intelligent mind. Not many years

were to pass before it was to become an arena in which all the various

forces of American Christianity were to be found contending against all

the powers of darkness, not without dealing some mutual blows in the

melley.



* * * * *



The review of this period must not close without adverting to two

important advances in public practical Christianity, in which (as often

in like cases) the earnest endeavors of some among the Christians have

been beholden for success to uncongenial reinforcements. As it is

written, The earth helped the woman.



In the establishment of the American principle of the non-interference

of the state with religion, and the equality of all religious communions

before the law, much was due, no doubt, to the mutual jealousies of the

sects, no one or two of which were strong enough to maintain exceptional

pretensions over the rest combined. Much also is to be imputed to the

indifferentism and sometimes the anti-religious sentiment of an

important and numerous class of doctrinaire politicians of which

Jefferson may be taken as a type. So far as this work was a work of

intelligent conviction and religious faith, the chief honor of it must

be given to the Baptists. Other sects, notably the Presbyterians, had

been energetic and efficient in demanding their own liberties; the

Friends and the Baptists agreed in demanding liberty of conscience and



worship, and equality before the law, for all alike. But the active

labor in this cause was mainly done by the Baptists. It is to their

consistency and constancy in the warfare against the privileges of the

powerful Standing Order of New England, and of the moribund

establishments of the South, that we are chiefly indebted for the final

triumph, in this country, of that principle of the separation of church

from state which is one of the largest contributions of the New World to

civilization and to the church universal.



It is not surprising that a people so earnest as the Baptists showed

themselves in the promotion of religious liberty should be forward in

the condemnation of American slavery. We have already seen the vigor

with which the Methodists, having all their strength at the South,

levied a spiritual warfare against this great wrong. It was at the South

that the Baptists, in 1789, Resolved, That slavery is a violent

deprivation of the rights of nature, and inconsistent with a republican

government, and we therefore recommend it to our brethren to make use of

every legal measure to extirpate this horrid evil from the land.[222:1]

At the North, Jonathan Edwards the Younger is conspicuous in the

unbroken succession of antislavery churchmen. His sermon on the

Injustice and Impolicy of the Slave-trade, preached in 1791 before the

Connecticut Abolition Society, of which President Ezra Stiles was the

head, long continued to be reprinted and circulated, both at the North

and at the South, as the most effective argument not only against the

slave-trade, but against the whole system of slavery.



* * * * *



It will not be intruding needlessly upon the difficult field of dogmatic

history if we note here the widely important diversities of Christian

teaching that belong to this which we may call the sub-Revolutionary

period.



It is in contradiction to our modern association of ideas to read that

the prevailing type of doctrine among the early Baptists of New England

was Arminian.[222:2] The pronounced individualism of the Baptist

churches, and the emphasis which they place upon human responsibility,

might naturally have created a tendency in this direction; but a cause

not less obvious was their antagonism to the established

Congregationalism, with its sharply defined Calvinistic statements. The

public challenging of these statements made a favorite issue on which to

appeal to the people from their constituted teachers. But when the South

and Southwest opened itself as the field of a wonderfully rapid

expansion before the feet of the Baptist evangelists, the antagonism was

quite of another sort. Their collaborators and sharp competitors in the

great and noble work of planting the gospel and the church in old and

neglected fields at the South, and carrying them westward to the

continually advancing frontier of population, were to be found in the

multiplying army of the Methodist itinerants and local exhorters, whose

theology, enjoined upon them by their commission, was the Arminianism of

John Wesley. No explanation is apparent for the revulsion of the great

body of American Baptists into a Calvinism exaggerated to the point of

caricature, except the reaction of controversy with the Methodists. The

tendency of the two parties to opposite poles of dogma was all the

stronger for the fact that on both sides teachers and taught were alike

lacking in liberalizing education. The fact that two by far the most

numerous denominations of Christians in the United States were picketed

thus over against each other in the same regions, as widely differing

from each other in doctrine and organization as the Dominican order from

the Jesuit, and differing somewhat in the same way, is a fact that

invites our regret and disapproval, but at the same time compels us to

remember its compensating advantages.



* * * * *



It is to this period that we trace the head-waters of several important

existing denominations.





At the close of the war the congregation of the King's Chapel, the

oldest Episcopal church in New England, had been thinned and had lost

its rector in the general migration of leading Tory families to Nova

Scotia. At the restoration of peace it was served in the capacity of lay

reader by Mr. James Freeman, a young graduate of Harvard, who came soon

to be esteemed very highly in love both for his work's sake and for his

own. Being chosen pastor of the church, he was not many months in

finding that many things in the English Prayer-book were irreconcilable

with doubts and convictions concerning the Trinity and related

doctrines, which about this time were widely prevalent among theologians

both in the Church of England and outside of it. In June, 1785, it was

voted in the congregation, by a very large majority, to amend the order

of worship in accordance with these scruples. The changes were in a

direction in which not a few Episcopalians were disposed to move,[224:1]

and the congregation did not hesitate to apply for ordination for their

pastor, first to Bishop Seabury, and afterward, with better hope of

success, to Bishop Provoost. Failing here also, the congregation

proceeded to induct their elect pastor into his office without waiting

further upon bishops; and thus the first Episcopal church in New

England became the first Unitarian church in America. It was not the

beginning of Unitarianism in America, for this had long been in the

air. But it was the first distinct organization of it. How rapidly and

powerfully it spread within narrow geographical limits, and how widely

it has affected the course of religious history, must appear in later

chapters.



* * * * *



Close as might seem to be the kindred between Unitarianism and

Universalism, coeval as they are in their origin as organized sects,

they are curiously diverse in their origin. Each of them, at the present

day, holds the characteristic tenet of the other; in general, Unitarians

are Universalists, and Universalists are Unitarians.[225:1] But in the

beginning Unitarianism was a bold reactionary protest against leading

doctrines of the prevailing Calvinism of New England, notably against

the doctrines of the Trinity, of expiatory atonement, and of human

depravity; and it was still more a protest against the intolerant and

intolerable dogmatism of the sanhedrim of Jonathan Edwards's successors,

in their cock-sure expositions of the methods of the divine government

and the psychology of conversion. Universalism, on the other hand, in

its first setting forth in America, planted itself on the leading

evangelical doctrines, which its leaders had earnestly preached, and

made them the major premisses of its argument. Justification and

salvation, said John Murray, one of Whitefield's Calvinistic Methodist

preachers, are the lot of those for whom Christ died. But Christ died

for the elect, said his Calvinistic brethren. Nay, verily, said Murray

(in this following one of his colleagues, James Relly); what saith the

Scripture? Christ died for all. It was the pinch of this argument

which brought New England theologians, beginning with Smalley and the

second Edwards, to the acceptance of the rectoral theory of the

atonement, and so prepared the way for much disputation among the

doctors of the next century.[225:2]



Mr. Murray arrived in America in 1770, and after much going to and fro

organized, in 1779, at Gloucester, Mass., the first congregation in

America on distinctly Universalist principles. But other men, along

other lines of thought, had been working their way to somewhat similar

conclusions. In 1785 Elhanan Winchester, a thoroughly Calvinistic

Baptist minister in Philadelphia, led forth his excommunicated brethren,

one hundred strong, and organized them into a Society of Universal

Baptists, holding to the universal restoration of mankind to holiness

and happiness. The two differing schools fraternized in a convention of

Universalist churches at Philadelphia in 1794, at which articles of

belief and a plan of organization were set forth, understood to be from

the pen of Dr. Benjamin Rush; and a resolution was adopted declaring the

holding of slaves to be inconsistent with the union of the human race

in a common Saviour, and the obligations to mutual and universal love

which flow from that union.



It was along still another line of argument, proceeding from the assumed

rectitude of human nature, that the Unitarians came, tardily and

hesitatingly, to the Universalist position. The long persistence of

definite boundary lines between two bodies so nearly alike in their

tenets is a subject worthy of study. The lines seem to be rather

historical and social than theological. The distinction between them has

been thus epigrammatically stated: that the Universalist holds that God

is too good to damn a man; the Unitarian holds that men are too good to

be damned.



No controversy in the history of the American church has been more

deeply marked by a sincere and serious earnestness, over and above the

competitive zeal and invidious acrimony that are an inevitable admixture

in such debates, than the controversy that was at once waged against the

two new sects claiming the title Liberal. It was sincerely felt by

their antagonists that, while the one abandoned the foundation of the

Christian faith, the other destroyed the foundation of Christian

morality. In the early propaganda of each of them was much to deepen

this mistrust. When the standard of dissent is set up in any community,

and men are invited to it in the name of liberality, nothing can hinder

its becoming a rallying-point for all sorts of disaffected souls, not

only the liberal, but the loose. The story of the controversy belongs to

later chapters of this book. It is safe to say at this point that the

early orthodox fears have at least not been fully confirmed by the

sequel up to this date. It was one of the most strenuous of the early

disputants against the liberal opinions[227:1] who remarked in his

later years, concerning the Unitarian saints, that it seemed as if their

exclusive contemplation of Jesus Christ in his human character as the

example for our imitation had wrought in them an exceptional beauty and

Christlikeness of living. As for the Universalists, the record of their

fidelity, as a body, to the various interests of social morality is not

surpassed by that of any denomination. But in the earlier days the

conflict against the two sects called liberal was waged ruthlessly,

not as against defective or erroneous schemes of doctrine, but as

against distinctly antichristian heresies.



There is instruction to be gotten from studying, in comparison, the

course of these opinions in the established churches of Great Britain

and among the unestablished churches of America. Under the enforced

comprehensiveness or tolerance of a national church, it is easier for

strange doctrines to spread within the pale. Under the American plan of

the organization of Christianity by voluntary mutual association

according to elective affinity, with freedom to receive or exclude, the

flock within the fold may perhaps be kept safer from contamination; as

when the Presbyterian General Assembly in 1792, and again in 1794,

decided that Universalists be not admitted to the sealing ordinances of

the gospel;[228:1] but by this course the excluded opinion is compelled

to intrench itself both for defense and for attack in a sectarian

organization. It is a practically interesting question, the answer to

which is by no means self-evident, whether Universalist opinions would

have been less prevalent to-day in England and Scotland if they had been

excluded from the national churches and erected into a sect with its

partisan pulpits, presses, and propagandists; or whether they would have

more diffused in America if, instead of being dealt with by process of

excommunication or deposition, they had been dealt with simply by

argument. This is one of the many questions which history raises, but

which (happily for him) it does not fall within the function of the

historian to answer.



* * * * *



To this period is to be referred the origin of some of the minor

American sects.



The United Brethren in Christ grew into a distinct organization about

the year 1800. It arose incidentally to the Methodist evangelism, in an

effort on the part of Philip William Otterbein, of the German Reformed

Church, and Martin Boehm, of the Mennonites, to provide for the

shepherdless German-speaking people by an adaptation of the Wesleyan

methods. Presently, in the natural progress of language, the English

work outgrew the German. It is now doing an extensive and useful work by

pulpit and press, chiefly in Pennsylvania and the States of that

latitude. The reasons for its continued existence separate from the

Methodist Church, which it closely resembles both in doctrine and in

polity, are more apparent to those within the organization than to

superficial observers from outside.



The organization just described arose from the unwillingness of the

German Reformed Church to meet the craving needs of the German people by

using the Wesleyan methods. From the unwillingness of the Methodist

Church to use the German language arose another organization, the

Evangelical Association, sometimes known, from the name of its founder,

by the somewhat grotesque title of the Albrights. This also is both

Methodist and Episcopal, a reduced copy of the great Wesleyan

institution, mainly devoted to labors among the Germans.



In 1792 was planted at Baltimore the first American congregation of that

organization of disciples of Emanuel Swedenborg which had been begun in

London nine years before and called by the appropriately fanciful name

of the Church of the New Jerusalem.