Ancestors (15 page)

Thomas Campbell sent a copy of the Declaration and Address to ministers of all denominations, and in an accompanying letter assured them he would thankfully receive written objections but that he did not want to enter into verbal controversy. There was no response whatever. No one was moved by or even interested in his plan for uniting the Christian churches with the Bible as the one broad basis for belief. However, the minister of the regular Presbyterian Church in Upper Buffalo encouraged the Christian Association of Washington to think that the Synod of Pittsburgh would accept them into that branch of the Presbyterian Church on the principles they advocated. It was a good deal to hope for, but Thomas Campbell did not want to start a new church when there were already so many, so he tried to believe that it was possible. Their application was curtly rejected, and they constituted themselves a separate denomination consisting of one small country church at Brush Run, Pennsylvania, with thirty members. Thomas Campbell was chosen elder, there were four deacons, and Alexander was licensed to preach.

He preached his first sermon from a stand in a grove of maple trees on a farm eight miles from Washington. His audience was sitting on rough planks or on the grass. “He was now in his twenty-second year,” Richardson says, “still preserving the freshness of complexion and bloom of the cheeks with which he had left Ireland,” but he had grown taller, and his frame had filled out; it wasn’t a boy who was
speaking to them. In the beginning he betrayed a certain nervousness, but it soon left him and his clear ringing voice resounded through the grove as he recounted—not as if he were speaking of a parable from the New Testament but as if it were a fact—how the wise man built his house upon a rock but the foolish man built his house on the sands.

“Afterward the young gazed upon the youth with wondering eyes, and the older members said to one another in subdued tones, ‘Why, this is a better preacher than his father!’ ” This opinion probably ought to be taken as the expression of excessive amiability and enthusiasm. In time he was a better preacher than his father.

During the next twelve months he preached on a hundred and six occasions. He was trained by his father in the form that must be followed. There must be no violation of the rules of logic and rhetoric. The precepts should be truly those of the text, and there should be no distortion of it through failure to consider the verses that came before and after. There should be no fanciful interpretations or farfetched applications, and the sermon itself must not go beyond the range of the ideas in the text. When I think of them sitting side by side at a rude table in the backwoods of Pennsylvania, with the Bible and the Concordance open before them, and pen and ink and paper, I think of another scene that is superficially quite different but in essence identical: In Venice, in the Piazza San Marco, I saw a waiter showing his fifteen-year-old son—with the utmost professional seriousness and also with so much love that I felt obliged to look somewhere else—how the knife and fork should be placed and the only proper way to fold a napkin.

Working together over those first sermons, father and son must have come rather soon to a realization that their minds were different in certain fundamental ways. If Thomas Campbell was called upon to admire the view, he would politely express his admiration and the next moment be talking
eloquently about the goodness of God and the salvation of mankind. When somebody pointed out a flower to him, he was likely to ask whether it had medicinal properties. Richardson says that Alexander had an appreciation of the beautiful, and especially of the grand, in both nature and art; and he took great pleasure in sacred music, and was visibly affected by it, though he was not very good at carrying a tune. He read and also wrote poetry:

For fiction, Richardson says, he had no taste whatever, and in later years would “express his wonder that anyone could take an interest in works of mere invention, such as romances, when they knew, perfectly well, that not one of the things related had ever happened.”

In Buffalo Valley lived a man named John Brown, who was a carpenter and had a gristmill and a sawmill and a very fine farm, and on it a comfortable two-story frame house where Thomas Campbell was often made to feel welcome. Though a Presbyterian, Mr. Brown had an independent and inquiring mind. He also had a childlike confidence in people he trusted. Thomas Campbell sent some books to him by Alexander, who had never been in that valley before, and Mr. Brown took an immediate liking to him, and Alexander was drawn not only to the carpenter but to his hazel-eyed daughter, and eventually proposed to her. At morning prayers, on the day after the wedding, Alexander’s sister Jane, who was then eleven years old, recited the last twenty-two verses from the concluding chapter of the book of Proverbs, which are a description of a model wife. Such the
bride turned out to be. The young couple lived with her father, and Alexander, who had had some experience of farming in his boyhood, threw himself into the work of spring plowing and planting. He had determined never to accept pay for his preaching, and was at this time without any means of support. But soon afterward the Christian Association of Washington, discouraged by the fact that they had failed to make any impression on the community, and somewhat infected, Richardson says, with the prevailing spirit of migration, considered removing to a place near Zanesville, Ohio. They didn’t, largely because Alexander Campbell’s father-in-law, not wanting his daughter to go so far away from him, deeded the farm to Alexander and so provided him with a home and a livelihood for the rest of his life.

After he put up a hundred panels of rail fence with his own hands in one day, the neighbors did not look down on him for being a scholar and a preacher. “No one could be more observant of the duties of social life,” Richardson says “or more careful to maintain the most agreeable relation with all his neighbors, than Mr. Campbell.… Full of the vivacity and wit belonging to the Irish character, and ever cheerful as the morning light, his presence diffused an agreeable charm over the social life of the neighborhood.” Even the religious prejudices of the Methodists and the Presbyterians “melted away under the influence of personal acquaintance.”

Of Alexander Campbell’s vivacity and wit, some written examples have survived. When he first came to America he wrote, and published in a weekly newspaper, a series of ten essays, using the pen name of “Clarinda.” In the second, after describing a moment of general silence such as in my childhood always produced the remark, “It must be twenty minutes of or twenty minutes after,” he goes on to say, “when one of those chasms occurs in conversation, when
invention is on the rack, you will observe that the person who speaks begins by telling you (as if you did not know) something about the weather. You will also observe that when one has broken silence in this way, there arises a general chatter among the rest, as when one goose of a flock chatters all the rest begin. When I am a spectator at these gabbling matches, the Turkish maxim comes into my mind, namely, that ‘women have no souls,’ and although this sentiment shocks me and causes me to search my own breast, yet frequently I must confess, if I were to judge from the frivolity of the conversation and the levity of the sentiment at these parties, I must conclude that female minds are not capacious.” And six sentences farther on, there is a smell of smoke and brimstone. “Will it be comfortable for you to say when you are bidding an eternal adieu to the world, I have spent many a
precious evening
in a genteel party, many an hour in giddy dissipation, in thoughtless mirth, in needless festivity? At some distant, far distant point in eternity, will you remember with joy or with sorrow that you spent an evening once a week, or once a month, for, it may be, then, twenty, or thirty years, in one of these parties which you now so much like? Ah, my female friends, did you but consider the value and dignity of your nature” and so on.

The opinions and prose style of a young man of twenty-one ought not, I suppose, be held against him. Thirty-nine years later, when asked whether people who attend dances, theaters, the Thespian Society, or who indulge in chess, backgammon, or draughts should be allowed to stay in the church, he replied, in the
Millennial Harbinger
, that these were the works of the Devil and all who delighted in such amusements were not fit for the Kingdom of God.

The whole history of the Christian Church hangs on a conversation the young Alexander Campbell had with a rather
disagreeable Presbyterian minister. They had met accidentally, and it was probably Alexander and not the minister who brought up the matter of the Declaration and Address. They found themselves discussing article 3, which states that nothing should be required either as an article of faith or as a term of communion but what is expressly taught and enjoined in the Word of God.

“Sir,” the minister said, “these words, however plausible in appearance, are not sound. For if you follow them out, you must become a Baptist.”

 “Why, sir,” Alexander replied, “is there in the Scriptures no express precept or precedent for infant baptism?”

“Not one, sir,” said the minister.

When Alexander found that he could not refute this statement, he asked Alexander Munro the bookseller to furnish him with all the books he had that dealt favorably with infant baptism. He went through them and was disgusted by their fallacious reasoning. Turning to the Greek New Testament he found no support there either.

He spoke to his father about the matter and his father said, as always, that whatever was not found in the Bible they must of course abandon. Alexander was not ready to let the question drop. He could not bear uncertainty. He would have liked to believe in the claims of infant baptism, but the more he read, the more convinced he became that it was a human invention. His father said, “For those who are already members of the church and participants of the Lord’s Supper, I can see no propriety, even if the scriptural evidence for infant baptism be found deficient, in their unchurching themselves, or in putting off Christ, merely for the sake of making a new profession; thus going out of the church merely for the sake of coming in again.”

Infant baptism had already on one occasion made Thomas Campbell lose his temper. Riding along beside James Foster, one of his deacons, he remarked that though there was no
mention of paedobaptism in the New Testament, it was a concession that, for the sake of Christian union, he was willing to make. Turning to him, James Foster said, “Father Campbell, how could you, in the absence of any authority in the word of God, baptize a child in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit?” Whereupon Thomas Campbell grew red in the face and said, “Sir, you are the most intractable man I ever met!”

With respect to the proper form of baptism, Thomas Campbell was of the opinion that there was no question but that immersion was the action meant. “Water is water,” he said, “and earth is earth. We certainly could not call a person buried in earth if only a little dust were sprinkled on him.” But that did not mean that a person who had been sprinkled should consider himself a pagan. And he recommended that, since it had nothing to do with essential faith and therefore was not a doctrine of the first importance, it be left a matter of forbearance.

When three members of his following who had never been baptized asked him to immerse them he consented. Standing on a root that projected out over a deep pool, he said, “In the name of the Father,” etc., and pushed their heads under. James Foster was present and didn’t approve either of the manner of the baptism or of the fact that someone who had not himself been immersed should undertake to immerse others.

Out of respect for his father’s feelings, Alexander Campbell agreed to let the question of infant baptism alone. But when his first child was born, he was no longer content to abide by mere expediency: There was the child’s soul to consider. His wife and father-in-law were both members of the Presbyterian Church, whose position it was that a child who dies unbaptized is eternally damned. He applied himself to the Scriptures once more, and came to the conclusion that “the sprinkling of infants does not constitute baptism”
because the word
baptism
in Greek could only mean immersion, and furthermore only those who believed in Jesus Christ as the Son of God was it proper to baptize. So his own baptism in infancy was the application of an unauthorized form to an incompetent subject.