Virginia was Anglican by intention, but from the start the Puritan element in both the company and the colony was strong. When the first settlement was made, and for a good while after, the Puritans were still a party in the Church of England. Episcopacy remained established in Virginia until the Revolution, though there was a strong influx of Scotch-Irish (Presbyterian, of course) and of Baptists in the eighteenth century. Since there was no Anglican bishop in America during all these years, there could be no confirmations. As always with established churches, nominal adherents greatly outnumbered communicants, and many were content with a “gentlemanly conformity.” Episcopacy was established also in North and South Carolina, though it never had a majority in either colony, and in New York after the British took it from the Dutch in 1667.
The great Puritan migration to New England had for its religious purpose the founding of a Puritan state somewhat on the pattern of Calvin’s Geneva. The developments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries produced, instead, a group of colonies—states in the American union by 1800—in which Congregationalism was the “standing order,” or established church, and one state, Rhode Island, in which, thanks to Roger Williams and the Baptists, complete religious liberty, deliberately adopted as a matter of conviction, got its first fair trial as a principle of government. But Congregationalism, though clinging to some of its legal advantages, had also grown tolerant, partly because dissenters and noncommunicants had become so very numerous. As early as 1760, the president of Yale estimated that 12 per cent in the four New England colonies were dissenters, and that not morethan one-fifth of the others were communicant members of Congregational churches.
New England Congregationalism, though already disturbed by the theological controversy which later produced the Unitarian defection, was in the main soundly Calvinistic. It differed from Presbyterianism only in its tradition of the independence of the local church, and even this was qualified by the growth of what was called “associationism” by those who viewed it with alarm. So, when an interest in home missions began to appear, about 1800, the Plan of Union was formed under which Congregationalists and Presbyterians cooperated until 1837 in carrying the gospel to the new settlements, first in western New York and then in the regions beyond. The Presbyterians ultimately got most of the churches organized in the Middle West by Congregational missionaries operating under this plan.
Presbyterians came from England, Scotland, and North Ireland. They never had a colony of their own, though they missed having Massachusetts Bay only because the Presbyterian Puritans who founded it became Congregational. Puritans who came to other colonies generally were and remained Presbyterians. They found a footing in New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia and were among the first settlers of Kentucky. Pennsylvania became the scene of some of their most vigorous activities, both in and around Philadelphia and in the central and western part, where they were the most numerous and influential group. William Tennent’s “Log College” at Neshaminy (1720) initiated theological education in America, at least outside of Harvard’s effort to provide a learned clergyfor New England. It trained evangelists as well as scholars, and led to the founding of Princeton. The great Scotch-Irish immigration, about the middle of the eighteenth century, brought both regular Presbyterians, in communion with the Church of Scotland, and Seceder Presbyterians, representing the Great Secession of 1733. Large numbers of both came to the western parts of Pennsylvania and Virginia, where these Presbyterian Ulstermen “formed an American Ulster larger and richer than that they had abandoned,” as one of them wrote, with some exaggeration of the degree of their occupancy though not of the size and resources of the area. Thomas Campbell was following a stream of Scotch-Irish Seceder Presbyterians when he migrated from the vicinity of Belfast, Ireland, to the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania.
Baptist beginnings in America are easily localized in Rhode Island, but their dispersal and multiplication cannot be simply diagramed. They went everywhere, on their individual initiative, with no general organization, were persecuted wherever intolerance ruled, and generally despised by their more conventional and respectable neighbors, chiefly because they insisted that religion was a purely voluntary matter, that Christian, Turk, Jew, or atheist should be allowed to follow his own convictions about faith and worship, and that the state had nothing to do with it. That position seemed almost equivalent to anarchy. The fact that most of the Baptist preachers were ignorant men, or self-taught and uncouth, and that a great many of them were farmers six days in the week and preachers only on Sunday, made the matter worse. But the Baptists did have a college, founded in 1764, which became Brown University. In cities and townstheir preachers became more urbane, but they kept the aggressiveness and the popular appeal which brought immense success to their cause in the Middle West and in the South. Regular Baptists were Calvinistic. Their Philadelphia Confession, which was very similar in doctrine to the Presbyterians’ Westminster Confession, was commonly used as a standard of orthodoxy. It taught that Christ died only for the elect. But there were also “General Baptists,” who believed in a general atonement, or that Christ died for all. The difference between the two became significant.
Methodism in America began when two or three lay preachers came in the 1760’s, and when John Wesley sent two preachers from England in 1769. But the revival of 1740, known as the Great Awakening, had prepared the way for it. Through the Revolution and until 1784, Methodism remained nominally a movement in the Anglican Church, but it had its societies, preachers, classes, and circuits, and its evangelists converted thousands of the religiously indifferent. Formal organization began with the Christmas conference, 1784. The Methodist system of supervision by “superintendents,” who promptly became bishops, and by presiding elders, with preachers riding circuits and class leaders conserving local gains, constituted a planned economy in the business of serving the religious needs of the frontier. But without tireless energy and zealous devotion, all this machinery could not have been effective. Methodism began on the Atlantic Seaboard and it had good success there, but the scene of its most spectacular growth was in the West and South. By 1800 the Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians had become the great “popular churches” on the frontier; and the frontier itself was on the verge of a startlingly rapid transformation.
It must not be supposed that the attitudes of the denominations toward each other were altogether those of mutual hostility and competition, or even of isolation. There was much of this, but there was also much of mutual respect and friendliness. From 1800 to about 1837 there was a noticeable increase of cooperation among the members of many denominations. This is seen in the earliest phases of Sunday school work, in Bible publication and distribution, in certain aspects of foreign and home missionary activity, and in the antislavery and temperance societies. But the most conspicuous feature of American Christianity continued to be its divided state.
One reason for this sectarian condition was that this was a free country. Under the First Amendment to the Constitution, which is the first article of the Bill of Rights, no church could ever receive special favors from the government nor could there be discrimination against any. When the American Government adopted this hands-off policy, leaving the whole matter of religion to the churches and to the people, the old compulsory unity disappeared—even the ghost of unity which England had, with its one national church and a number of “dissenting” bodies still under certain legal handicaps.
It is little wonder that America had many churches. Colonists had come from many countries bringing all the varieties of religion that existed in all those countries. Many of them had come as refugees from persecution. In later years, some divisions occurred on American soil, but the sects that were here in 1800 had all been imported from Europe.
Moreover, since the United States was formed by the union of thirteen colonies, the new nation, of course, had as many different churches as all the colonies together had had. In some colonies, especially Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, there had been a considerable variety of churches enjoying equal liberty. In others the situation was much as it was in England at the same time, with their established churches and with dissenting bodies existing as best they could under the shadow of the favored church. The founders and builders of the American colonies, with a few exceptions, had not believed in the separation of church and state or in equal liberty for all religious groups. But the idea of religious liberty had been growing, and the multiplicity of churches in the new nation made the establishment of any one of them asthenational church a practical impossibility. No one even suggested it in the Constitutional Convention of 1787.
It is hard for us now to realize how continuous and almost universal had been the belief that the welfare of the state was bound up with religious uniformity. For more than a thousand years, and throughout Christendom, practically everybody except little bands of heretics and rebels believed that the institutional unity of the church was essential to the security of the state and the stability of the social order, and that it was the state’s duty to enforce this unity. That belief furnished the reason—and when not the reason, the excuse—for most of the persecutions that have occurred. Roman Catholics, of course, believed it, and it is still the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. But most Protestants also believed it. Only the Baptists and Quakers and some small separatistsects in Germany believed in religious liberty as a matter of principle. But the established and respectable bodies considered these as wild-eyed radicals.
Episcopalians and Puritans who founded colonies in America brought with them this idea of a state church and a religious unity enforced by the police power, not because they were bigoted or cruel by preference but because they believed, as almost everybody had believed for centuries, that in no other way could a political society be strong enough to survive. Surprise is sometimes expressed at the “inconsistency” of the Puritans, who “came seeking religious liberty” and then persecuted the Quakers and Baptists. But there is no inconsistency, for they did not come seeking religious liberty. They came to establish a Puritan state. They had to learn religious liberty after they arrived, and they were rather slow in learning it. But even the vestiges of the colonial religious establishments withered away after the Revolution, and America became, in fact as well as in constitutional theory, a nation in which all churches, like all individuals, are free and equal before the law.
A new epoch in the history of religion began when a nation was born which (a) disclaimed for its civil power the right and duty of giving special protection to a favored church, (b) declared implicitly, as the Virginia Bill of Rights in 1776 had done explicitly, that religion must be purely voluntary, and (c) abandoned the medieval political philosophy which justified intolerance on the theory that the state must enforce religious uniformity in the interest of its own stability and security.
These new American conditions had, among others, three results that are of vital importance in connection with the present study:
First, the removal of the repressive hand of government made it easier for new religious movements to spring up or for old ones to divide. Hence new divisions in the church arose in addition to those which had been imported from Europe. The divided state of the Christian forces became more acute and called more urgently for correction.
Second, the problem of Christian union ceased to be in any sense a political problem and became a purely religious problem to be solved by religious means. Seventeenth century advocates of union had, to be sure, preached brotherly love and made some statements about uniting on the simple essentials of Christianity; but they had sought support largely from political leaders, trying to show them how a national church, united by making concessions to bring back the dissenters, would increase the nation’s strength, or how an alliance between the churches of different countries would be a good stroke of diplomacy. The conceptions of complete religious liberty for the individual and of free churches in a free state introduced an entirely new approach to the question of union. Those conceptions had to be thoroughly worked out before the problem of Christian union in the modern sense—which is also the primitive sense—could even be stated; and they had to be made operative in government before a solution could be hopefully attempted. There had to be complete freedom to divide before there could be a union that would not deny freedom.
Third, separation of church and state and recognition of the voluntary character of religion threw directly upon the members of churches the whole responsibility for supporting the churches and promoting their work by voluntary contributions. TheChristian discovery and conquest of America was to be organized and financed on a voluntary basis.
Such, in bare outline, was the American scene in which the forerunners and fathers of the Disciples of Christ, about the beginning of the nineteenth century, began to advocate a simple and noncreedal Christianity, the union of all Christians on the basis of the essential and primitive conditions of discipleship, and the restoration of such features of the “ancient order of things” as might be agreed upon as designed to be permanent practices of the church.
The longest direct tributary to the stream which became the Disciples of Christ is the movement with which the name of Barton W. Stone is generally associated. This took visible form when he and his four colleagues dissolved the Springfield Presbytery, in 1804, and took the name “Christians.” Back of this, however, lay two other movements which led to the formation of “Christian” churches. Stone was certainly fully informed about the first of these before taking his own step, but probably not about the second. The three were so nearly identical in principles and objectives that they considered themselves as constituting a single body as soon as they learned of one another’s work and long before they had any organizational unity. We shall consider the three parts of the “Christian” Church in the order of their origin. The first was a secession from the Methodists, the second from the Baptists, the third from the Presbyterians.
Methodism was not a denomination but only a revival movement in the Church of England until the end of the Revolutionary War. In 1771, John Wesley sent Francis Asbury from England. He became the most important factor in winning converts, enlisting workers, setting up the system of circuits and itinerant preachers, and organizing the church. By 1784, about 15,000 members were enrolled in Methodist societiesin Virginia and the adjacent states. But these societies were not churches. They had no ordained ministers and therefore could not have the sacraments. Asbury himself was still a lay preacher. The Virginia Methodist preachers voted to break away from the Anglican Church, but Asbury, backed by Wesley, resisted. The end of the war and the independence of the American colonies changed the situation. Wesley sent over, by the hand of Dr. Coke, a letter which has become a famous document. Part of it has been quoted in another connection. In conclusion Wesley wrote:
As our American brethren are now totally disentangled from the state and from the English hierarchy, we dare not entangle them again either with the one or the other. They are now at full liberty simply to follow the Scriptures and the primitive church. And we judge it best that they should stand fast in that liberty with which God has so strangely made them free.
As our American brethren are now totally disentangled from the state and from the English hierarchy, we dare not entangle them again either with the one or the other. They are now at full liberty simply to follow the Scriptures and the primitive church. And we judge it best that they should stand fast in that liberty with which God has so strangely made them free.
(It seemed strange to Wesley that God should wish the American colonies to be free from Great Britain, an outcome to which he himself had been bitterly opposed.)
Wesley’s letter was read to a conference which met on Christmas Eve, 1784, at Baltimore. The conference declared the independence of Methodism, adopted the name “The Methodist Episcopal Church,” and ordained Asbury as deacon, elder, and superintendent. James O’Kelly and twelve others were ordained as elders. Simultaneously with counseling the American brethren to follow the primitive church and stand fast in their liberty, Wesley had appointed Asbury and Coke to be “superintendents” of American Methodism. Coke soon returned to England, andAsbury changed his own title to that of “bishop” and assumed such powers as no Anglican bishop or Methodist superintendent in England ever had. For one thing, Asbury assigned every preacher to his field, every presiding elder to his district, and from his assignments there was no appeal.
James O’Kelly had become a Methodist lay preacher in 1775, when he was about forty years old. He had been one of “Asbury’s Ironsides,” and had been the leader of those who urged an earlier separation from the Anglican Church. He had also led the futile protest against Asbury’s assumption of the title of “bishop.” Asbury had made him a presiding elder, but he continued to be the head and front of the resistance to the bishop’s autocracy. When a demand for the “right of appeal” was voted down by a general conference in 1792, O’Kelly and a number of other preachers withdrew. A year later they organized the “Republican Methodist Church,” with about thirty ministers and 1,000 members. This stage of the independent movement lasted only seven months.
On August 4, 1794, the Republican Methodists met in conference at Old Lebanon Church, in Surry County, Virginia, and adopted as their name “The Christian Church.” This name was suggested by Rice Haggard, formerly a Methodist lay preacher and one of O’Kelly’s partners in protest from the beginning. The members of the conference resolved, further, to take the Bible as their only creed. They had discovered, as one of them put it, that “the primitive church government, which came down from heaven, was a republic, though ‘Christian Church’ is its name.” All preachers were to be on an equal footing. Ministers and laymen were to have liberty of private judgment. Conferences were to be merely advisory, and each congregationshould “call its own pastor and enjoy the greatest possible freedom.” It is to be noted that this secession from the Methodist Church involved no dissent from Methodist doctrine. It grew solely out of dissatisfaction with that church’s system of government. The type of religious thought and preaching in the separated group remained substantially Methodist.
The new movement started with a staff of experienced and zealous ministers, under whose influence a considerable number of Methodist churches now became “Christian.” The Methodist Church in Virginia and North Carolina suffered a net loss of 3,670, in spite of its vigorous evangelism, during the first year of the “Christian” church. Fifteen years later it was estimated that the Christian Church had 20,000 members “in the southern and western states.” This doubtless includes Kentucky and Tennessee.
The first “Christian Church” in New England was about seven years later than the first in the South, and its origin was entirely unrelated to the earlier one. The New England movement got its impulse from the independent reactions of two young men against the type of religion they found in the Baptist churches of which they were members and in which they began to preach. These churches were Calvinistic in their emphasis on original sin, the limitation of the benefits of Christ’s atonement to the “elect,” the wrath of God toward sinners, the threat of hell, and the inability of man to do anything for his own salvation.
Elias Smith, born in 1769 at Lyme, Connecticut, spent his boyhood under very crude frontier conditions in a new settlement in Vermont, and had a violentexperience of conversion when a log fell on him in the woods. He joined the Baptist church, and began to preach when he was about twenty-one. In spite of his almost complete lack of education, the Baptist ministers of Boston ordained him two years later. For almost a decade he was a somewhat irregular Baptist preacher, improving his education by diligent private study, becoming more and more dissatisfied with orthodox Calvinism, seeking a way out of his confusion by independent study of the New Testament, and moving toward the conviction that the churches should abandon their theological and ecclesiastical systems and restore the simple faith and practice of the primitive church.
Abner Jones, born in 1772 at Royalton, Massachusetts, had a Vermont boyhood not unlike Smith’s in its combination of frontier hardship, lack of schools, and torturing religious experience. Having achieved conversion, he joined the Baptist church, taught school for a time, then studied and practiced medicine by the short-cut “Thompsonian” system; but he also preached as opportunity offered. Still in his early twenties, he “quit the fellowship of the Calvinist Baptists,” as his biographer testifies, after hearing Elias Smith preach, though Smith was then still a Baptist. As the result of his own thinking, stirred by Smith’s influence, Jones organized an independent church at Lyndon, Vermont, in the Autumn of 1801, to which he would give no name but “Christian.” This, says the historian of the movement, was “the first Christian church in New England.” During the next year Jones secured ordination by three Free Will Baptist preachers—not as a Baptist but “only as a Christian”—and organized “Christian” churches at Hanover and Piermont, New Hampshire. Up to this time, Smithhad been the leader in thought but had hesitated to break his Baptist ties. Jones now persuaded him to abandon the Baptist name and joined him in organizing a “Christian” church at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. In 1804 Jones moved to Boston and formed a church there.
These two men, Smith and Jones, lived and worked for nearly forty years after that. Jones established churches at Salem, Massachusetts, where he lived for several years, and at many other towns in New England, never striking root very deeply in any place but winning many followers to the movement and a number of preachers to its advocacy. Smith’s most important contribution was the founding of a religious paper, theHerald of Gospel Liberty, the first issue of which was published on September 1, 1808, at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. With some slight intermissions and under a variety of names, finally returning to the original one, this journal was published for 122 years and then merged with theCongregationalist.
Within twenty years after the founding of that first “Christian” church at Lyndon, Vermont, there were dozens of such churches in New England and others in adjacent parts of Canada and in New York and Pennsylvania, all deriving from this original impulse. These were, on principle, independent churches. No organization directed or controlled them and they had no cooperative activities. However, there was a sense of fellowship among them and they soon began to hold informal conferences. There is record of a meeting of “the elders of the Christian Churches in the New England states, assembled at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, June 23, 1809,” which authorized a fraternal reply to a letter from representatives of the Christian Churches in Virginia and North Carolina. The “generalconference” held at Windham, Connecticut, in 1816, and the series of “United States conferences” beginning in 1820 were really, in spite of their comprehensive names, only conferences of the churches in the northeastern states. One of these, in 1827, voted that it was not proper for ministers to use the title “Reverend” and passed a resolution condemning the use of instrumental music in public worship. About thirty regional conferences, by states or parts of states, had been organized within this area before 1832.
Third in order of time, but first in importance in relation to the Disciples, among the three movements which together constituted the “Christian Church” was the one in which Stone emerged as the leading figure.
Barton W. Stone, born in 1772 at Port Tobacco, Maryland, was a member of one of the oldest American families. His great-great-great-grandfather was the first Protestant governor of Maryland, 1648-53. Barton Stone’s father, a man of some property, died just before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, and his mother moved with her large family to Pittsylvania County, Virginia, very close to the North Carolina line. With his share of the money from his father’s estate, Barton spent three years in David Caldwell’s academy at Greensboro, North Carolina, thirty miles southwest of his home. Here he “completed the classical course” in 1793. This school was hospitable to revivalism. Caldwell himself was a Princeton graduate and a Presbyterian minister of the “New Light” type—that is, of evangelistic temper and with an easy tolerance in theology. McGready, the Presbyterianevangelist who was later to set southern Kentucky afire, came to Greensboro and converted most of the students. Stone was stirred by the appeal but repelled by the theology. Meanwhile his mother, who had been an Anglican, had become a Methodist. William Hodge, a young “New Light” Presbyterian, who had been one of Caldwell’s boys, came preaching the love rather than the wrath of God. Stone abandoned his purpose to study law and decided to be that kind of Presbyterian preacher. The presbytery to which he applied for license directed him to prepare a trial sermon on the Trinity. He struggled with the theme, and his sermon was accepted, but he always had trouble with the doctrine of the Trinity.
While waiting for his license to preach, he went to Georgia to visit his brother and while there he served for about a year, beginning in January, 1795, as “professor of languages” in Succoth Academy, a Methodist school at Washington, Georgia. The principal of this academy was Hope Hull, a Methodist preacher who had been closely associated with O’Kelly in his protest at the Methodist conference two years earlier but who had remained with the Methodist Church when O’Kelly and the other insurgents withdrew to form the Christian Church. Stone and Hull became very intimate friends, and Stone accompanied Hull on a journey to Charleston, South Carolina, to attend a Methodist conference. John Springer, an ardently evangelistic Presbyterian preacher of the “New Light” type, whose field was only a few miles from the academy and who had the most cordial relations with the Baptists and Methodists in his neighborhood, became another counselor and friend and exercised, says Ware, a “decisive influence” on Stone.
Returning to North Carolina, Stone received his license to preach from the hands of the venerable and liberal Henry Pattillo, who, in a published sermon on “Divisions among Christians,” had recommended the name “Christians” as the one “first given to the disciples by divine appointment at Antioch,” and who declared that men ought to be permitted to differ peaceably about the doctrines of religion.
To summarize the influences of Stone’s early background and environment, these items may be listed:
1. The Great Awakening, which, under the preaching of men trained in William Tennent’s Log College and of George Whitefield, beginning about 1740 but echoing through the middle and southern colonies for more than half a century after that in the work of Samuel Davies and many other evangelistic or “New Light” Presbyterians, had stressed the common elements of the gospel and put the divisive doctrines of the creeds into a subordinate place.2. The Methodist movement, which did not cease to be a revival when it became a church and which challenged the Calvinism of the Presbyterian creed.3. The “Christian” Church, which was having its first rapid growth in Virginia and North Carolina while Stone was in the first formative stage of his ministry in the same region.4. The direct and personal influence of the men who have been mentioned in the preceding paragraphs: David Caldwell, James McGready, William Hodge, Hope Hull, John Springer, and Henry Pattillo.
1. The Great Awakening, which, under the preaching of men trained in William Tennent’s Log College and of George Whitefield, beginning about 1740 but echoing through the middle and southern colonies for more than half a century after that in the work of Samuel Davies and many other evangelistic or “New Light” Presbyterians, had stressed the common elements of the gospel and put the divisive doctrines of the creeds into a subordinate place.
2. The Methodist movement, which did not cease to be a revival when it became a church and which challenged the Calvinism of the Presbyterian creed.
3. The “Christian” Church, which was having its first rapid growth in Virginia and North Carolina while Stone was in the first formative stage of his ministry in the same region.
4. The direct and personal influence of the men who have been mentioned in the preceding paragraphs: David Caldwell, James McGready, William Hodge, Hope Hull, John Springer, and Henry Pattillo.
After an experimental and not very successful missionary trip which took him through the eastern part of North Carolina and back through Virginia, and feeling that there was a better field on the frontier,Stone headed west, on horseback again. Within three months he had ridden to Knoxville and, at some peril from Indians, on to Nashville (population 346 by the next census); had associated for a time with Thomas Craighead, a Princeton-trained Presbyterian preacher of independent mind, famous for his zeal for a “rational and scriptural evangelism” and his scant respect for the authority of creed and presbytery; had itinerated and preached in the Cumberland district of Tennessee; and had then crossed Cumberland Gap into Kentucky, spent a little time at Danville and Lexington, and by October, 1796, was installed as regular supply pastor of two Presbyterian churches at Cane Ridge and Concord. Cane Ridge was seven miles east of Paris; Concord, ten miles northeast of Cane Ridge.
The next year a call to the settled pastorate of his churches made it necessary for Stone to seek ordination from the Transylvania Presbytery. This would require a declaration of his adherence to the Westminster Confession. Renewed study did not resolve his doubts about the Trinity. Before facing the presbytery, he privately stated his trouble to James Blythe, then probably the most influential Presbyterian in Kentucky and later one of the severest critics of Stone’s views. In the public ceremony, Stone declared his acceptance of the Confession “as far as I see it consistent with the Word of God.” Upon that guarded statement he was ordained.
The Great Western Revival, with which the names of Stone and Cane Ridge are closely associated, resulted from transplanting to Tennessee and Kentucky the methods of evangelistic appeal which had beenused by “New Light” Presbyterians, Methodists, and “Christians” in the Southern states east of the mountains. Under frontier conditions it developed some bizarre and sensational features which have drawn attention away from its real values. It began gradually with the preaching of four or five men—especially James McGready and the brothers William and John McGee—who had come west about the time Stone came, and who itinerated in Tennessee, near and north of Nashville, and the adjacent part of Kentucky. For three or four years the revival spirit grew and spread until the countryside was in a fever of excitement. Fantastic manifestations began to appear among persons who experienced “conviction of sin,” and even among those who came to scoff—jerking and barking, hysterical laughter, falling and lying rigid like dead men. These were taken for manifestations of the power of the Holy Spirit.
Stone, who was concerned about religious apathy in his own parishes, traveled the nearly two hundred miles from Cane Ridge to Logan County in southwestern Kentucky, in the early spring of 1801, to see the revival in progress under the preaching of McGready. He was impressed with the genuineness of the revival. The physical demonstrations seemed to be “the work of God,” but inexplicable and not wholly desirable. Stone was, in a sense, the advance agent of the revival as it moved north and east through Kentucky. By late spring it had reached the Bluegrass. On the Sundays of May and June, there were great meetings at churches in the area around Lexington, with attendance at the last three running to 4,000, then 8,000, then 10,000, according to contemporary estimates.
The climax came in the Cane Ridge camp meeting, which lasted from Friday to Wednesday, August 7-12, 1801. The crowd was estimated at 20,000. Many Presbyterian, several Methodist, and a few Baptist ministers preached, often simultaneously at different stations through the woods. The excitement was intense. The fantastic “exercises” occurred in great profusion. This meeting was held at Stone’s church, and he had much to do with bringing it about, but it was not in any sense his meeting. It does not appear that he was the most prominent among the preachers. Richard McNemar, for example, was more conspicuous, and so was McNemar’s nine-year-old daughter, who became a child prophetess and poured forth a torrent of exhortation from a perch on his shoulder. Stone rejoiced in the awakened interest in religion and in the salvation of many sinners, but the records do not show that he gave encouragement to the spectacular “exercises.”
Not all the Presbyterians approved of this violent revivalism. Three features especially offended them: the opportunity it gave to preachers lacking education; the wild and disorderly physical “exercises”; and the stress upon the idea that “Christ died for all,” not for a limited number, the elect. The issue about education was especially acute in southern Kentucky and became one of the grounds for the “Cumberland secession” and the formation of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. The “exercises” gradually ceased to be a prominent feature of revivalism, except in remote and retarded communities, and left no permanent mark on any major group. While they lasted they prepared the way for an invasion by the Shakers, who won some temporary following. Thedeclaration that Christ died for all raised a real theological issue. This was what the Methodists were preaching. So also were the “General” Baptists, who were distinguished from the “Particular” Baptists by their belief in a general atonement. Both kinds of Baptists were numerous in Kentucky, and the “Generals” later became a fertile field for the Reformers. Within two or three years after Cane Ridge the main wave had passed, but the camp meeting remained as a popular pattern of religious and social life, though without the more extreme features which had made the “great revival” spectacular.
Richard McNemar, a Presbyterian minister, had not only been a prominent figure at the Cane Ridge meeting but had elsewhere cooperated with the Methodists, whose type of evangelistic appeal was congenial to him. Three months after the meeting a heresy charge against McNemar was presented to his presbytery. The process was delayed because so many of the “revival men” took his part that those who had filed the charge hesitated to bring it to a vote. After various procedures in the presbytery, all irregular and indecisive, and after another minister, John Thompson, had become involved in the case, the Synod of Kentucky, meeting at Lexington, September 6-13, 1803, formally censured the presbytery for letting these two men continue to preach while the charge of holding “Arminian tenets” (i.e., Methodist doctrines) was pending against them.
As the synod was preparing to put McNemar and Thompson on trial, they presented to the synod a document signed by themselves and three others, protesting against the trial and withdrawing from the synod’s jurisdiction. The other three were Barton W.Stone, John Dunlavy, and Robert Marshall. After a futile effort to win them back, the synod placed the five under suspension.
These five men had left the Synod of Kentucky, not the Presbyterian Church. Their first act was to organize the Springfield Presbytery, independent of the synod. (Their “Springfield” is now Springdale, ten miles north of Cincinnati.) Their second act was to issue a statement of their position. This is a pamphlet of about 100 pages, the full title of which is:An Abstract of an Apology for Renouncing the Jurisdiction of the Synod of Kentucky, Being a Compendious View of the Gospel and a few Remarks on the Confession of Faith, with the names of the five attached as authors. The important points in this statement are: (1) Christ died for all—as against a limited atonement for the elect only. (2) The gospel itself is the means of regeneration, and faith is the act by which any man, if he will, can lay hold on that means. (3) Faith is the natural man’s belief of testimony—a rational, as against a mystical, conception of faith. Nothing is said explicitly about either Christian union or the restoration of primitive Christianity. (William Guirey, a Virginia Christian minister, later sent a copy of thisApologyto the New England Christians as expressing the sentiments of the Virginia-North Carolina group, and said that the Kentucky five “united with us” when they left the Presbyterians.)
So far, this was an anti-Calvinist movement within the Presbyterian Church. Its leaders admitted that their position was not in agreement with the Westminster Confession, but claimed the right to differfrom the Confession where they thought it differed from the Scriptures. The whole history of “New Light” Presbyterianism in Virginia and the states south of it from colonial days, as well as the recent revival in Kentucky, gave them ground for saying: “We are not the only Presbyterians who view the doctrine of the atonement different from the Confession.”
But the Springfield Presbytery was only a transition stage. These five men might make their independent presbytery the nucleus of a new Presbyterian body, as the Seceders and others had done in Scotland long before, and as the Cumberland Presbyterians were to do a little later; or they might cease to be Presbyterians. They chose the latter course. On June 28, 1804, less than a year after its organization, the Springfield Presbytery met at Cane Ridge and decreed its own dissolution. The document in which it recorded this action is called “The Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery.” By this instrument, the presbytery willed “that this body die, be dissolved and sink into union with the Body of Christ at large,” that every congregation should be independent in the choice and support of its minister and the discipline of its members, and that the Bible alone should be their guide and standard. Ministers are not to be called “Reverend,” are to “obtain license from God to preach the simple Gospel,” and are to be supported by free-will offerings “without a written call or subscription.” And finally, the Synod of Kentucky is exhorted to examine every suspect and suspend every heretic, “that the oppressed may go free and taste the sweets of gospel liberty.” (The full text of the “Last Will and Testament” was reprintedin the first issue of Elias Smith’sHerald of Gospel Liberty, Portsmouth, N. H., Sept. 1, 1808.)
At this same meeting, June 28, 1804, it was agreed that the name “Christian” should be adopted, to the exclusion of all sectarian names. This was suggested by Rice Haggard, who had made the same suggestion to the O’Kelly group ten years earlier when the Republican Methodists were looking for a new name. Haggard had been active as a minister of the Christian Church in North Carolina and Virginia from 1794 until his removal to Kentucky about the time of the Cane Ridge meeting.
The “Christians” of Kentucky immediately became a group of churches as well as a group of preachers. Fervid evangelists as they were, the ministers immediately won to the movement several of the Presbyterian churches for which they had preached and organized some new ones. By the end of 1804 there were at least thirteen Christian churches in north-central Kentucky and about seven more in southwestern Ohio. Presbyterians called it the “New Light schism.” The number of preachers was increased by the adherence of a few revival Presbyterians, by the coming of some Christians from the East, and by recognizing as preachers a good many men who had little or no formal education.
Shaker missionaries came to Kentucky in 1805, attracted by reports of the marvelous manifestations of the Spirit in the great revival. McNemar and Dunlavy soon joined them.
In the new Christian Church, no question was at first raised about baptism. Within a few years, Stonecame to the belief that only the immersion of believers was scriptural baptism, and this view spread gradually through the group. Stone immersed many, including some preachers, before he was himself immersed. But it was not made a test of fellowship. Twenty years later Stone wrote:
It was unanimously agreed that every brother and sister should act according to their faith; that we should not judge one another for being baptized or for not being baptized in this mode. The far greater part of the church submitted to be baptized by immersion, and now [1827] there is not one in 500 among us who has not been immersed. From the commencement we have avoided controversy on this subject. (Christian Messenger, Vol. I, p. 267, Oct., 1827.)
It was unanimously agreed that every brother and sister should act according to their faith; that we should not judge one another for being baptized or for not being baptized in this mode. The far greater part of the church submitted to be baptized by immersion, and now [1827] there is not one in 500 among us who has not been immersed. From the commencement we have avoided controversy on this subject. (Christian Messenger, Vol. I, p. 267, Oct., 1827.)
This trend toward immersion existed only in the West. In the East it became a divisive issue in 1809, and only a minority adopted it. Immersion never became the common practice with the New England Christians.
For some time there was no organization among the Christian churches. A “general meeting” of the ministers was held at Bethel, Kentucky, August 8, 1810, at which they “agreed to unite themselves formally.” This suggested to some the need of a clearer definition of doctrines, especially those of the Trinity, Christ, and the atonement. After statements had been drafted and discussed at a later meeting, it was agreed by almost all that freedom of theological opinion was better than conformity to a standard. Marshall and Thompson, feeling that the creedless Christians were too loose in doctrine, returned to the Presbyterian Church. This left only Stone, of the original five whohad seceded from the synod on account of the heresy charges against McNemar and Thompson. So it was by survival, rather than by pre-eminence at the beginning, that Stone came to be considered the founding father of the Christian Church in Kentucky. Later, especially after he began the publication of theChristian Messengerin 1826, his leadership is evident; and in guiding the greater part of the Christian Church in the West into the merger with the Disciples, his influence was probably decisive.
The growth of the western Christian Church was not confined to Kentucky. It took root immediately in Tennessee and in southern Ohio and Indiana. Traveling evangelists went also into the South. As the tide of migration moved to new frontiers, unordained elders, farmer-preachers, and sometimes regular ministers carried it to Illinois, Missouri, and Iowa. The position of Kentucky, as a breeding ground of pioneers who went out in steady streams to aid in laying the foundations of these states, made it a strategic point from which a new religious movement might make its influence felt throughout the Middle West.
Such was the emphasis upon the independence of local churches and of preachers, and so firm the determination to avoid anything like the Presbyterian or Methodist systems of centralized control, that organization was slow and weak. That meeting in 1810, at which it was agreed to “unite formally,” did not in fact lead to any formal organization. District conferences were arranged. There was a Deer Creek (Ohio) Conference as early as 1808, and in the following years there were many such. But as late as 1826, Stone felt it necessary to defend the practice of holding even district conferences for worship, to exchangenews of the churches, to arrange appointments so as to supply destitute churches, and (a tentative suggestion) “for ordination, if thought proper,” but emphatically with no authority over local churches. In the same year the Wabash (Indiana) Conference agreed that it would be well “to have a general conference established in some convenient place in the western states,” but this was not done. The Christian Church in the West had nothing corresponding to what is now called “cooperative work,” and no agencies or structures through which such work could be carried on. The churches of the Northeast had their so-called United States Conference, but sometimes they had qualms about so much ecclesiasticism. The (New England) general conference of 1832 voted to dissolve forever, but revived the next year.
Though there was no inclusive organization, the three main divisions of the Christian Church had some acquaintance with one another’s work and a sense of being parts of one enterprise. TheHerald of Gospel Libertycirculated widely. Stone had an agent in New York for hisChristian Messenger. When he reported, in 1828, that “the sect called Christians have, in little more than a quarter of a century, risen from nothing to 1,500 congregations with a membership of 150,000,” his estimate—doubtless much too large in any case—evidently includes all three, and his reference to “more than a quarter of a century” shows that he was thinking of beginnings earlier than the dissolution of the Springfield Presbytery.