After Boston, Finney was successful in New York, at the Chatham Street Theatre[2] which Lewis Tappan had leased and fitted up for a church, but he was smitten with cholera which was then epidemic, and presently went abroad. On his return, he delivered a course of lectures which became a standard work on revivals, and began his series of meetings at the Broadway Tabernacle which had been built for him and for which he resigned from the Presbytery, since the Tabernacle was a Congregational church. Later he gave this up to go out to Oberlin College.
Here again he crosses the path of Lyman Beecher, who was at that time president of Lane Seminary at Cincinnati. There he had been bedeviled by Theodore Weld, one of Finney’s converts and disciples, the apostle of manual labor to the colleges of the country. It was Weld who brought up the question of slavery—and Lane was only across the river from Kentucky. Beecher was not a friend to abolitionists; he despised them as “offspring of Finney’s ‘denunciatory revivals.’” It may be said in Beecher’s defense that abolition was not as popular then as it is now. It was always the work of an extremely small group and a great many of the abolitionists were known to be infidels and suspected of intentions to destroy all discipline, all property, even the family and the home. Yet Beecher acted without any trace of recklessness. He had promised Arthur Tappan, a contributor to the Seminary’s fund, that he would never consent to any limitation of the students’ right to discuss abolition but, when the trustees of Lane, without consulting him, ordered the faculty to prohibit all public meetings on the Seminary grounds and dismissed the one member of the faculty whose anti-slavery sentiments were marked, Beecher did nothing in particular, in spite of the abolitionists’ demand that he resign. Miss Rourke notes that, had he resigned, he could only have become the tail to Weld’s kite, since Weld was leading the insurgent students. Beecher temporized and was lost. Just at that time, Asa Mahan invited Finney to come to Oberlin as professor of theology. The particular inducement was that students formerly at Lane Seminary had proposed to come to Oberlin if Weld’s master, Finney, would accept the call. Arthur Tappan, on hearing that Finney had held out for admission of negroes on equality with whites, offered his entire income of about $100,000 a year to the new institution. In the summer of 1835, Finney went to the new college. He brought with him a tent a hundred feet in diameter, and the streamer which topped the center pole bore the words “Holiness to the Lord.” For several years Finney divided his time between Oberlin and various revivals. He went again to Boston (where his wife died) and, if Boston was a bit superior, Finney was positively arrogant. In his book, when he has to record some great success, he makes it a point to disclaim any merit. It is for the glory of Christ that he notes how well his sermons sold. At best he attributes the wonderful results to a blessed answer to his prayers, but in his chapter on the second Boston visit, we find an unexpected trace of intellectual pride:
“. . . But in preaching, I have found that nowhere can I preach those truths, on which my own soul delights to live, and be understood, except it be by a very small number. I have never found that more than a very few, even of my own people, appreciate and receive those views of God and Christ, and the fullness of his free salvation, upon which my own soul still delights to feed. Everywhere, I am obliged to come down to where the people are, in order to make them understand me; and in every place where I have preached, for many years, I have found the churches in so low a state, as to be utterly incapable of apprehending and appreciating, what I regard as the most precious truths of the whole Gospel.”
He had, without any other trace of mysticism, an absolute conviction of God’s special interest in him and, at Auburn in 1826, the Lord drew near to him and “assured me that he would use and uphold me; that no opposition would prevail against me. . . .” With this confidence he had become a reviver of souls, untiring, astute, sly, and without compassion. His autobiography is full of professions of kind feelings toward Beecher and Nettleton and his other enemies, but one can easily feel the shrewd rancor which persists. He was a hard man engaged in a hard work. He knew no other pleasure than those floods of light which followed the anguish of his prayers and he trampled upon the pleasures of others if they interfered with his work. Once, at the very time when he proposed an inquiry meeting, the church had arranged a sociable, so he broke down the arrangement. At Oberlin, when he was about to harvest a few student souls, he found that secular activities had been arranged. He threatened to resign unless he could control everything and make all pleasures secondary to religious zeal. He was monumentally sincere. The offer of a hundred thousand dollars from Tappan hardly interested him and, when Tappan went bankrupt, Finney lived with his family at Oberlin in such destitution that an unexpected check for $100 was like the opening of heaven to them. There is nothing whatever endearing about his record of himself. There is a great deal that is unctuous and his careful efforts not to appear proud of his work sound faintly hypocritical to one who cannot accept in full his sense of divine appointment. But with the exception of the usual faith in coincidences regarded as miracles, there is nothing trivial about Finney. He was always concerned with a matter which was to him of supreme dignity and superlatively important: the regeneration of mankind through Christ.
It was in the final development of his work that Finney broached a doctrine full of danger. I noted at the very beginning the feeling he had on being converted that sin and guilt had fallen away from him. Many years later he began to wonder whether the Gospel did not provide means for life on a higher plane than that which most Christians enjoyed. It is only a guess that he wished to recapture, and in some way make permanent, that feeling of ecstatic sinlessness, which he had once experienced, that entire harmony of the soul not only in its own movements, but in relation to a higher power. As usual he searched his only authority, the Scriptures, and preached two sermons in which he defined Christian perfection and proved that it is in a way attainable in this life. This was his doctrine of sanctification “in the sense that it was the privilege of Christians to live without known sin.” It was unfortunate for him that, at the same time, another version of perfectionism was gaining ground, a version which met the moral law with defiance and was associated in the popular mind with licentiousness and immorality. By an irony which Finney does not appreciate, these other perfectionists were his own disciples, following his own theories to a logical, if not human, conclusion. They muddied the pure stream of Finney’s doctrine and were so near to the source that, when Finney went to Oberlin, misunderstandings and misrepresentations followed him and that persistent enemy, Lyman Beecher, was the leading spirit in a convention which tried to close Oberlin for its false doctrines. The quarrel about Christian sanctity, or Perfection, went on for many years. Finney hammered his weapons, unwearied and unbroken, escaped from compromising allies, fighting always on two fronts.
We shall come to Perfectionism again in a more interesting phase, not as a theory, but as the astounding practice of John Humphrey Noyes, a happy example of the effects of revivalism on a superior individual.
Revivalism continued long after Finney’s time. It is going on to-day. But before we follow its later course and attempt to discover its motives, we can stop to observe the case of Matthias, an example as happy as that of Noyes, but in the opposite sense. In Matthias we see clearly what revivalism could do with a subject naturally unbalanced. Matthias is not a typical figure but, precisely because he is exceptional, he throws the workings of revivalism into the highest relief.
[1] Finney always talks of Oneida county, New York, as the West.
[2] The bar-room was naturally changed into a prayer room and it is recorded that one of the penitents cried out, “O Lord! Forgive my sins. The last time I was here Thou knowest I was a wicked actor on this stage. O Lord, have mercy on me!”
† Fireplaces were beginning to be closed over and, in 1820, the city of Philadelphia used 365 tons of coal. There was gas light in the streets of New York, but rooms were generally without ventilation. † T
he Erie Canal was opened in 1825 and Chicago had a population of seventy souls. † In New York City 3,000 buildings were in the course of erection in one year and, on one first of May, which was moving day, hundreds of people waited in the parks or slept in jail while their houses were being finished. † Farmers in Ohio complained that oil made their water undrinkable. † Railroads when they entered cities were drawn by horses through the streets and, in 1825, an author wrote “nothing can do more harm to the adoption of railroads than the promulgation of such nonsense as that we shall see locomotive engines traveling at the rate of twelve miles per hour.” † Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati were surrounded by “liberties”; in the last of these cities there were, in 1829, sixty lawyers, one to every 5,000 inhabitants. † The distribution of religious tracts, gratis, flourished. † Members of the House of Representatives kept their hats on while they sat. † Between 1825 and the Civil War, the juvenile works of Peter Parley sold 7,000,000 copies. † In 1826, there was a slave hunt in Poultney, Vermont. † Girls worked half naked in factories rather than be servants at twice the wage. † Phrenological societies were founded in the Middle West. † Bed sheets in hotels were considered fresh if used only a few nights. † Among the favorite painters were Washington Alston and Mr. Ingham, because of their mastery over draperies and resemblances. The gallery of antique statues in Philadelphia was open to women as well as to men but at different times. At the Chestnut Street Theatre, Booth played in King Lear, and at the Walnut Street Theatre there was a living skeleton. On Sundays chains were stretched across many streets. † At Long Branch it was correct for two girls to go into the water accompanied by one man. † Silk and satin were as often seen in New York City as chintz. † Mrs. Mitford’s Rienzi was played at the Chatham Theatre in New York City and Forrest appeared in Damon and Pythias. † Brownstone was beginning to be used for building houses and there was an abundance of ice for domestic purposes.
VIII. A Messianic Murderer.
IN the fantastic figure of Robert Matthews (who called himself Matthias and let it be known that he was the reincarnation of that Matthias into whom the spirit of Jesus had passed, or, sometimes, that he was Almighty God, Himself) the sects and movements following the 1830 revivals of religion in America provide a perfect burlesque of themselves. The half-dozen men and women surrounding this incredible impostor exhibit nearly all the unhealthy varieties of religious experience: mania, delusion, sexual aberration, hallucination, catalepsy and hysteria of every sort. The daily lives in this group are full of minor disasters, from reform movements exploited by scoundrels, to fraud, bankruptcy, and the imputation of murder. Adultery and sadism were sanctified by the direct command of God. The characters move in and out of insane wards and prisons. Matthias, ragged and penniless, stands on the outskirts of a Finney revival. Matthias, in a coat of green velvet lined with pink silk and hung with golden tassels, sits in the house of Joseph Smith, at Kirtland, and discusses theology with his bewildered host before the latter starts the great Mormon trek across the Mississippi. Into this amazing story not one entirely normal person enters as a principal. It sums up and parodies, and to an extent discredits, the whole religious excitement from which it sprang.
The story is a little complicated at the beginning, for it involves three sets of characters, two married couples in the city of New York, and Matthias, a housejoiner, from up-state. The climax of the story, the trial of Matthias for murder, comes in 1835. It begins, many years earlier, with only a faint premonition, a suggestion of little cults and backwoods degeneracy, when the minister of the Anti-Burgher branch of the Seceders, visiting a member of his flock in Cambridge, Washington county, New York, lays his hands on the head of Robert Matthews, an orphan living there, and gives him his blessing. There had been eccentricity in the boy’s family. From the moment he received the clerical benediction, the boy felt that his own fate was to become a distinguished personage.
In pursuit of this ambition, Robert Matthews, as soon as he was grown up, went to New York and learned the trade of joiner. On his return up-state, he became a merchant, failed, and then returned to New York, married (an apparently sensible woman), became bankrupt, and moved from place to place. After trying one occupation after another, he finally settled down as a journeyman joiner in Albany. He had belonged to the Scotch church but after a quarrel with his minister, now attended the services of the Dutch Reformed Congregation. Having been very much moved by a visiting preacher, his excitement about religion grew steadily and reached its climax one evening when he went to hear Charles Grandison Finney and returned home from this particular service in a state bordering upon frenzy.[1]
Fanaticism laid hold upon him. He underwent all the enthusiasms and became a victim to every fad. He threw himself violently into the temperance movement, asserting that all men would be converted if they would only give up drink. In his own household, he went farther, keeping his entire family on a diet of bread, fruit, and vegetables. The fruit was often only whatever berries chanced to be ripe. Presently, he declared that he had been commissioned to convert the whole city of Albany and began a series of chaotic harangues on the streets. Disappointed in the progress of his mission, he declared, in 1830, that the entire city and all its inhabitants would be destroyed. At this time, he discovered a text which proved that no man who shaved his beard could be a true Christian. One night he aroused his wife and their five children and commanded them to fly with him to the hills, as the city would be destroyed the next day. The mother refused and kept back the youngest child. The eldest daughter also stayed behind. But three little children were dragged for twenty-four hours without stop into the country behind Albany.
This was the beginning of Matthews’ madness and, although his condition was recognized, the phenomenon was so common in that age of cranks that very little attention was paid to it. A few years earlier, the anti-Masonic hysteria had run through the whole of western New York. A few years later, the excesses of the Millerites, awaiting the last trump, followed the same course. Two things attacked the incurious, naturally balanced, mind of the backwoodsman: the progress of mechanical arts and the endless series of revivals which devastated county after county with stubble fire and made them, in the common phrase of revivalists, “burnt districts.” There was no intellectual make-weight to steady men when they observed the wonders of science. They heard of canals and steam engines and believed them to be the predicted signs of the coming of the Lord. Nor was there an established ritual or disciplined church to direct the religious fervor which wandering exhorters whipped up and left to die down without any permanent object to which it could attach itself. The country quivered and trembled. It was expectant and eager. It was as ready for spiritualism as for Mormonism. Barreled up in the narrow confines of unimaginative lives it was fermenting. The excitement of revivals came to nothing and, on the rare occasions when a revivalist returned, he groaned in spirit to see the “sad, frigid, carnal state into which the churches had fallen.” Evangelists arranged men and women in parallel lines and, passing up and down between them, cried out with violent gestures, “Agonize, I tell you. Agonize, why don’t you agonize?” Or they prostrated a whole camp-meeting on the ground and crept among them crying, “I am the old serpent that tempted Eve.” Violence bred hysteria and, after men and women had shrieked and groaned and fallen into epilepsy before the revivalist, they rose and announced that God had spoken to them, predicted the death of individuals, the destruction of cities, and the damnation of all who did not repent and accept Christ. Lunacy and licentiousness were sown in a fertile field.
This was the background of Robert Matthews who now, rejecting both his name and Scottish parentage and declaring that he was Matthias, the Jew, departed on a grand apostolic tour. Having made his way through forests and prairies and proclaimed his mission as far as the Ozark mountains, he turned back through Mississippi and Tennessee, to the Cherokee country in Georgia where he preached to the Indians. The authorities imprisoned him but, apparentl
y frightened by the curses which he called down upon them, they let him go free. He returned to New York where he could be seen daily promenading along the Battery, his beard unkempt, his nails filthy, his clothes torn, but walking with a majestic gait, shouting his exhortations to loafers and children, or mounted at times on a horse as dejected and scrawny as himself. At this point, the story of the impostor goes back to gather in his disciples.
The background of the cities was more sophisticated. In Boston, a mob might be driven by inflamed religious prejudices to destroy the Ursuline Convent. In New York, the prospect of graft in municipal government was great enough to justify rowdiness and thuggery at the polls. The idea of public schools was still a suitable subject for ridicule, but Boston already was known for its culture and every good college had, or was trying to buy, a philosophical apparatus. The quarrel about Byron’s morals was still going on. Noah Webster’s dictionary was accepted as standard. The various state governments had appointed official geologists. New York was sophisticated enough to enjoy the dancing of Fanny Elssler. The fruit of revivalism was not so notably seen in excesses of hysteria as in outbursts of moral reform. One of Finney’s subordinates, George Cragin, who was later to figure unhappily in the Oneida Community, collaborated with John R. McDowall in “a well-meant, but unwisely conducted work on behalf of the fallen women in New York.” This effort was one of hundreds. Timid women met and prayed under the guidance of their ministers and resolved “that while we recognize the obligation to the degraded and perishing heathen, we feel it to be not less our duty to labor for the salvation of those in this Christian land whose character and condition too much resemble theirs.” They formed Female Benevolent Societies “for the promotion of moral purity . . . in a way both corrective and preventive.” Those who were unhappy formed little sects of their own and dreamed of the miracles of Mesmer and, later, of the spiritualist, Mr. Hume. They also formed societies for educating the children of the poor and sewing circles to make money for converting the Jews. In one group, all ornament was rejected; in another, fasting went on for as much as three days a week.
The Stammering Century Page 16
