Ancestors (16 page)

Richardson does not say what conclusion Mrs. Campbell came to with regard to the baptism of their child.

Dorothea Campbell confided to her brother that she was greatly troubled about her own baptism, which had occurred in infancy, and had taken the form of sprinkling, and she begged him to speak to their father on her behalf. He did. But first he arranged with a Baptist minister who lived nearby to come and baptize him and his wife and sister, and only then did he reveal to his father that he had come to the conclusion that the form of baptism
was
a matter of the first importance, and that he was about to be immersed. To his surprise, his father had very little to say. Thomas Campbell stated his own position once more, and then said, “I have no more to add. You must please yourself.” But in view of the position they occupied in the movement it was only right, he said, that Alexander should make a public announcement and that the baptism should take place in the presence of the people they preached to.

The next day, when the minister arrived, Thomas Campbell remarked that his wife was bringing a change of clothing for herself and him, and that was the first anybody knew that he had changed his mind and was going to be immersed with the others.

On the riverbank, before a large gathering, he reviewed his past and present opinions about baptism at length, and when he sat down Alexander stood up. Together, they spoke for seven hours. Very likely the Baptist minister had something to say also. In the end they all went into the water, and the movement was in trouble from then on.

In 1836, Alexander Campbell, “though of the opinion that the science of phrenology is but in progress and not yet perfected,” allowed his head to be studied. In the scale of numbers, 20 represents the highest possible development.

“Skull, thin; frontal sinuses rather full; temperament, nervo-sanguinous. Amativeness, 16; Philoprogenitiveness, 18; Concentrativeness, 18; Constructiveness, 14; Destructiveness, 17; Combativeness, 16; Secretiveness, 15; Firmness, 19; Self-esteem, 15; Love of Approbation, 14; Cautiousness, 16; Conscientiousness, 20; Hope, 12; Veneration, 13; Wonder, 10; Adhesiveness, 13; Acquisitiveness, 16; Ideality, 18; Causality, 17; Comparison, 20; Mirthfulness, 15; Tune, 11; Time, 12; Locality, 20; First Individuality, 18; Second Individuality, 14; Form, 16; Color, 12; Size, 17; Weight, 18; Method, 20; Language, 18; Eventuality, 14; Imitation, 17; Benevolence, 19.”

This reading is on the whole, I should think, quite accurate.

By insisting that immersion was the only form of baptism sanctioned by the Scriptures (a belief shared only by the Baptists), Alexander Campbell narrowed the field to a point where there was no one the new movement
could
join but the Baptists. After many discussions, the Brush Run church managed to get itself accepted into an association of Baptist churches (“provided always that we should be allowed to teach and preach whatever we learned from the Holy Scripture, regardless of any human creed”—in short they were willing to join the Baptists but did not intend to be indistinguishable from them) and this connection lasted seventeen years.

They got on badly.

I don’t mean to slight in any way the combativeness and self-esteem of the Baptists, but it was largely Alexander’s doing. He accused the Protestant clergy in general of being
proud, pretentious, covetous, interested in advancing their own personal ends, given to affectations of piety and professional mannerisms of speech and dress, to setting themselves above their brethren. “Amongst the Baptists,” he wrote, “it is to be hoped there are but few
clergy
, and would to God there were none!”

He attacked Bible societies, all ecclesiastical structures, synods, presbyteries, conferences, and assemblies. He denounced all creeds—and the Redstone Baptist Association, which the Brush Run church had just joined, subscribed to the Westminster Confession. He said there were no missionary societies in the first century, there could be no missionary societies now. Organs were not used in public worship in the churches of Jerusalem and Corinth. They were “founded on the Jewish pattern of things” and in the same general category as the sprinkling of infants. The unimmersed must not be admitted to communion.

He had begun to publish a small magazine, the
Christian Baptist
, which all the denominations found annoying, but the Baptists most of all, for they were being criticized from within. He said, referring to the poor Baptists, “I intend to continue in connection with this people so long as they permit me to say what I believe, to teach what I am assured of, and to censure what is amiss in their views and practises.” He described the unity of the early Christians in their simple obedience to and faith in Christ, and then went on to quote Jeremiah 1:10—“See, I have this day set thee over the nations, to root out, and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw down, to build, to plant.”

Among the laity his preaching was very popular. His sermons were clear, and his approach to all religious questions was essentially rational and practical. His audience felt that they were on solid ground, even when with the greatest frankness he was cutting the ground out from under their feet—which he did regularly.

He didn’t stick to his own churches but made preaching trips twice a year among the Baptist churches, from which he couldn’t be excluded because he was a member in good standing of the Redstone Baptist Association. He raised a thousand dollars and built a Reformer church in what was considered Baptist territory. He brought out a new translation of the Bible.

The committee in charge of the annual meeting of the Redstone Association tried to keep him off the program, but there was a vacancy at the last minute and they gave way to pressure and had to sit and listen to him hacking away at the Ten Commandments.

He was a more aggressive and disputatious preacher than any the Baptists had, and his position on baptism was sound, so when a Presbyterian minister of Mount Pleasant, Ohio, issued a general challenge to debate on this subject, the Baptists invited Alexander Campbell to represent them, and, putting aside his “natural aversion to controversy,” he did. Unfortunately he would not stick to the subject. Or rather, he enlarged the area of reference so as to include his views on the degree to which, and in what ways, and on whom the laws of the Old and the New Testament were binding. The laws of the Old Testament applied only to the Jews, he said, and had failed; with the coming of Christ, God made a new covenant that was radically different in principle and content and that applied to the whole human race. This was not what the Baptists had in mind when they invited him to represent them, and neither did they agree with what he said. To imply that the Mosaic Law was obsolete was surely antinomianism. But it was generally agreed that he had triumphed gloriously over his opponent.

Though he took part in only five debates, in each instance he used the occasion to clarify his position on important matters of faith and doctrine, and so the Walker debate, the Maccala debate, the Purcell debate, and the rest, were constantly
referred to by his followers and stand like so many signposts indicating where the church was going. The debate that achieved the most notoriety was with the reformer and philanthropist, Robert Owen, and took place in Cincinnati, in the spring of 1829, in a Methodist meetinghouse, before an audience of a thousand persons. Mrs. Trollope was present. Around the pulpit, she says, there was a small stage, large enough to accommodate Owen and Alexander Campbell and two stenographers. “The pulpit was occupied by the aged father of Mr. Campbell, whose flowing white hair, and venerable countenance, constantly expressive of the deepest attention … made him a very striking figure of the group.” On another platform—Mrs. Trollope doesn’t say where—sat the seven moderators.

Her traveling companion, Auguste Hervieu, made a drawing of the interior of the meetinghouse that is reproduced in her book. In the foreground there is a row of large-brimmed bonnets trimmed with ribbon and ostrich feathers. Owen is on his feet, speaking, and looks rather like a member of the Pickwick Club. Alexander Campbell, with a book in his hand, is listening intently to his opponent’s argument, and Thomas Campbell’s head is seen over the top of the pulpit, faintly drawn, and unearthly.

The debate lasted through fifteen sittings, and Mrs. Trollope was struck with the fact that neither Alexander Campbell nor Owen ever appeared to lose their tempers. “I was told that they were much in each other’s company, constantly dining together.… All this I think could only have happened in America.”

Owen undertook to prove that religions are founded on ignorance and fear, that they are in conflict with unchanging natural laws, and that the entire history of Christianity was a fraud. An excited speaker saying the same things might have been tarred and feathered, but Owen’s tone of voice was so gentle, his manner so candid and mild, he showed
such affectionate concern for “the whole human family” and his smile was so genuinely kind that the audience simply listened.

When a half hour had passed, the moderators looked meaningly at their watches, and Owen then looked at his, smiled, said “A moment’s patience,” and continued speaking for another half hour.

Mrs. Trollope found Alexander Campbell’s person, voice, and manner all greatly in his favor. His watch, she said, was “the only one which reminded us that we had listened to him for half an hour; and having continued speaking a few minutes after he had looked at it, he sat down, with, I should think, the universal admiration of his auditory.”

Owen read a two-hundred-page manuscript largely devoted to what he called the twelve fundamental “facts” or laws of human nature. To Mrs. Trollope they appeared “twelve truisms that no man in his senses would think of contradicting;… how he can have dreamed that they could be twisted into a refutation of the Christian religion, is a mystery which I never expect to understand.”

Owen entrenched himself behind his twelve laws, which Alexander Campbell said applied equally well to a goat, and he in turn confined himself to quoting one theological authority after another as evidence of the truth of revealed religion. Neither one ever seriously attempted to answer the arguments of the other. As soon as Owen had finished reading his manuscript he conceded to his opponent the privilege of speaking uninterruptedly, and Alexander Campbell completed the course of his argument in a speech that went on—with adjournments—for twelve hours. Four or five sentences are perhaps enough to suggest what his manner of speaking was like when he closed his books and trusted to himself: “Whatever comes from religion comes from God. The greatest joys derivable to mortal man come from this
source. I cannot speak of all who wear the Christian name, but for myself, I must say that worlds piled on worlds, to fill the universal scope of my imagination, would be a miserable per contra against the annihilation of the idea of God the Supreme. And the paradox of paradoxes, the miracle of miracles and the mystery of mysteries with me, was, is now, and evermore shall be,
how any good man could wish there were no God!
… Everything within us and everything without, from the nails upon the ends of our fingers to the sun, moon, and stars, confirm the idea of his existence and adorable excellences.”

In following Alexander on the arguable question of immersion, Thomas Campbell, in effect, handed the leadership of the movement over to his son. He himself was approaching fifty, with a large family to support, and his heart was not in creating a new church but in uniting all the existing ones, which more and more appeared to be an impossibility. So he kept drifting away—to Cambridge, Ohio, ninety miles to the west, and then to Pittsburgh, where he opened a school, and eventually to Kentucky, where he started another. It was ten years before he came back to the neighborhood where the movement originated. Not very much had happened in the meantime. The ideas of the Brush Run church had been accepted by four other small congregations, two in Brooke County, Virginia, one in Harrison County, Ohio, and one in Guernsey County, also in Ohio. At every annual meeting of the Redstone Association, charges of heresy were brought against Alexander Campbell and voted down. And when at last his opponents believed they had mustered enough votes to bring about his removal, they discovered that they couldn’t get at him: He had taken the five Reformer congregations out of the Baptist association, and they weren’t a part of any other.

His fame as a preacher had spread throughout the countryside, but all told there were no more than two hundred members in the five congregations. Then there was a great change, which came about through the ideas and efforts of a young man named Walter Scott. The son of a music teacher with ten children, Scott attended the University of Edinburgh. His name is so common in Scotland that it has not been possible to discover whether he received a degree. When he was twenty-one years old, he came to America at the suggestion of an uncle in the New York Customs office. A year later, he and a friend walked to Pittsburgh, admiring the scenery and, very often, in a state of extreme merriment at what they saw along the way. On arriving at Pittsburgh, Scott took himself to task for behavior incompatible with the gravity and solemnity of a Presbyterian, and there is no record that he was ever funny again.