Ancestors

by William Maxwell

  For some days afterwards he went back to the wreck, as often as the weather permitted, and recovered what books and clothing had not been washed overboard. The laird of the island, impressed by the young man’s water-logged books—chiefly works of theology—and by his good manners, invited him to his house and treated him like a relative. The schoolmaster was equally kind.

  It was too late in the year to risk a second voyage and Alexander saw in their misfortune an opportunity until now denied him: They would spend the winter in Glasgow, where he could attend the university. From the islanders he obtained several letters of introduction, one of which was to the Reverend Greville Ewing, and it changed the course of his life.

  In the 18th and 19th centuries there were upwards of forty small movements, none of them separate churches, that were bent on restoring in a more literal and precise way the simple patterns of early Christianity, and Ewing was at the center of a movement of this kind. As a young man he had wanted to introduce Christianity among the natives of Bengal, but the East India Company was uncooperative and the project had to be abandoned. When Alexander Campbell arrived in Glasgow, Ewing was conducting a religious seminary and preaching regularly to audiences of sometimes two thousand people, in a huge building that had originally housed a circus. He was a brilliant lecturer and a most kind and generous and openhearted man. He found better accommodations for the shipwrecked family and became Alexander’s mentor and friend. At Ewing’s house he met and became acquainted with other students and professors of the university, preachers of all sorts and kinds, and many persons of respectability. He had left a country village for the largest and wealthiest city in Scotland, where he found himself not only taken in but a family pet in the household of a man of importance.

  He was already a member of the Seceder Church in Ireland, and he felt it his duty, while he was in Glasgow, to unite with the Scottish Seceder Church. He had no letter, and therefore had to appear before the elders and be examined. His answers were satisfactory, but he was of two minds about the step he was about to take. One cannot travel, let alone go through a shipwreck, without having one’s mind opened to new ideas. At Ewing’s house, Alexander Campbell heard a good deal of talk about the behavior of the clergy of established denominations—how they were consistently opposed to any attempt at reformation, and how they often resorted to unscrupulous methods to hinder the progress of propositions they did not hold with. And he came to share Ewing’s belief that a religious congregation wholly independent and free from the dominating control of Synods and General Assemblies was much more in accord with the way things were in the primitive church. At the last minute, during communion service, he decided that the Seceder Church was not the Church of Christ, and he got up and walked out.

  In America, Thomas Campbell continued to preach in the houses of a few loyal friends, mostly in the neighborhood of Washington. They had no intention of founding a new religion, Richardson says, but they felt themselves slowly drifting away from familiar teachings and in need of a clearer understanding of the course they ought to pursue. They met to consider the questions. “Thomas Campbell, having opened the meeting in the usual manner, and, in earnest prayer, especially invoked the Divine guidance, proceeded to rehearse the matter from the beginning, and to dwell with unusual force upon the manifold evils resulting from the divisions of religious society—divisions which, he urged, were as unnecessary as they were injurious.… Finally … he went on to announce, in the most simple and emphatic terms, the great principle or rule upon which he understood they were acting and … would continue to act … WHERE THE SCRIPTURES SPEAK, WE SPEAK: AND WHERE THE SCRIPTURES ARE SILENT, WE ARE SILENT.

  “Never before had religious duty been presented to them in so simple a form.… It was to many of them as a new revelation … for ever engraven upon their hearts. Henceforth, the plain and simple teaching of the Word of God itself was to be their guide. God himself should speak to them, and they should receive and repeat his words alone.”

  It was quite some time before anyone presumed to break the silence. At length, Andrew Monro, who was a bookseller and postmaster at Canonsburg, said, “Mr. Campbell, if we adopt that as a basis, then there is an end to infant baptism.” Profound sensation. “If infant baptism be not found in the Scripture,” Thomas Campbell said, “we can have nothing to do with it.” Thomas Acheson, greatly excited, laying his hand on his heart, exclaimed, “I hope I may never see the day when my heart will renounce that blessed saying of the Scripture, ‘Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven,’ ” and burst into tears. Whereupon James Foster cried, “Mr. Acheson, I would remark that in the portion of the Scriptures you have quoted there is no reference, whatever, to infant baptism.” Mr. Acheson left the meeting to weep alone, and the proposal was unanimously adopted.

  Subsequently Thomas Campbell prepared a “Declaration and Address of the Christian Association of Washington” which, when printed in the office of the local newspaper, was a pamphlet of fifty-six closely spaced pages. It and “The Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery” are the two basic documents of the Christian Church. The “Declaration” assumes that it is possible to have a simple and evangelical Christianity derived entirely from the Scriptures; that the individual person has a right to interpret the Bible for himself; and that when this right is recognized there will be unity among all the Christian churches. What is “expressly revealed and enjoined” in the Scriptures—such as, for example, the form of worship—does not require interpretation and should simply be obeyed.

  The Address begins: “Dearly Beloved Brethren, That it is the grand design and native tendency, of our holy religion, to reconcile and unite men to God, and to each other, in truth and love, to the glory of God, and their own present and eternal good, will not, we presume, be denied, by any of the genuine subjects of Christianity;” and goes on to list thirteen propositions that have to do with building a united church and the formation of similar associations devoted to the same principles.

  The Postscript contains this most admirable sentence, “Our dear brethren, of all denominations, will please to remember, that we have our educational prejudices, and peculiar customs to struggle against as well as they.”

  Early in October Thomas Campbell had word that his family had landed in New York, and were going by stagecoach to Philadelphia, and had made arrangements with a wagoner to convey them from there to Washington—a distance of about three hundred and fifty miles.

  Sometimes walking and sometimes riding in the wagon that conveyed their luggage, Alexander and his mother and the six younger children pursued their westward way across ridge after ridge of the Allegheny Mountains. They were enchanted by the wild and romantic character of the landscape and by the colors of the autumn foliage. When they first reached the country of extensive, unbroken forest, Alexander was so excited that he went for an evening walk. “Returning to the hotel, he found that all its inmates had retired to rest, a light having been left for him upon the table. Upon attempting to fasten the door, he was surprised to find it without lock or bolt, and with nothing but a latch, as he perceived was also the case with the door of his sleeping apartment.” Lying in bed, he concluded that in the New World, robbery and injustice were unknown, because here you had a purely Protestant community.

  Richardson describes the inns of the period as “very spacious and comfortable buildings, and abundantly provided with all necessary comforts for the traveler. They were sometimes frame buildings, with long capacious porches in front and rear. Others were built with a species of blue limestone, which, contrasting with the white mortar between the blocks, and the white window frames and green Venetian shutters, produced a pleasing effect, and formed solid and substantial structures. On the opposite side of the road were usually placed the spacious stables, sheds, and other outbuildings required for the accommodation of teamsters; and, near at hand, was the immense wooden trough, into which poured constantly,
from a hydrant, a stream of pure water, carried under the ground in wooden pipes from a spring upon the side of the neighboring hill. As the hotel stood back some distance from the road, abundant room was left, in the wide recess, thus formed for the wagons and other vehicles, from which the horses were disengaged. The interior of the hotel itself was usually plain, but commodious—a bar-room, connected with a dining room, and this with the kitchen, on one side of a wide hall; and, upon the other, the parlors for the better sort of guests. These were entirely covered with carpeting of domestic manufacture. At other times, only the middle portions were thus covered, the rest of the floor being strewed with white sand, arranged in curving lines and forming various patterns, according to the taste of the tidy hostess. In some cases, the white sand was used as an entire substitute for carpeting, and gritted unpleasantly beneath the feet. Above stairs were usually the comfortable sleeping apartments. At this period hotels of this character could be found every ten or twenty miles …”

  When they were about three days’ journey from Washington, Thomas Campbell’s family stopped for the night at just such an inn. He himself slept at another, to the west of them. Early in the morning he started on and met his family a short while after he left the inn. He “kissed and embraced them all with the utmost tenderness. When Jane was presented to him, so much changed in appearance by the effect of the small-pox that he would not have recognized her, he said, as he took her into his arms, ‘And is this my little whitehead?’ a phrase of endearment amongst the Irish, and kissing her affectionately, gave thanks to God for her recovery.”

  All that day, and the next, and the next, they talked. He told them about the wilderness they were coming to, and they told him about their voyages, and about Glasgow, and Mr. Ewing’s kindness to them, and the last news they had had from home. At some point he got around to telling Alexander about the Declaration and Address, but he could not do this without also explaining the circumstances in which they had been written. Leaving out as much as possible of the animosity he had met with—for he wanted his family to like their new home—he presented rather fully the background of his withdrawal from the Seceder Church. As he did this, he was aware that Alexander kept opening his mouth as if there was something he wanted to say.

  * By far the best history of the Christian Church is The Disciples of Christ, by W. E. Garrison and A. T. De Groot (1948), which I am, in general, much indebted to. And it has a concise explanation of this tangle: “The Seceder Presbyterian Church had withdrawn from the Church of Scotland in 1733 in protest against certain aspects of the connection between church and government, especially against the ‘patronage’ system, under which the right to appoint ministers belonged, not to parish, session or presbytery, but to the lay landlords. No question of doctrine was involved in this secession. Indeed, the Seceders were, through the latter part of the eighteenth century, stricter Calvinists than the Church of Scotland. The Seceders in Scotland soon divided into two parties, Burghers and Antiburghers, on the issue as to whether or not the members of their communion could properly subscribe to the oath imposed by law upon any who would become burgesses. The oath was a declaration of adherence to ‘the religion presently professed in this realm.’ The question was whether this meant Presbyterianism in general, to which they did adhere, or specifically the established Church of Scotland, to which, although it was Presbyterian, they did not adhere. Burghers and Anti-burghers both sent missionaries to north Ireland … and gained considerable followings.… During the time of Thomas Campbell’s ministry in Ireland each of the two parties was again divided into ‘Old Lights’ and ‘New Lights,’ on another obscure and minute point involved in church-state relations. Mr. Campbell … early outgrew all interest in these divisive trivialities.”

  † Memoirs of Alexander Campbell (Cincinnati, 1868).

  * Lester G. McAllister: Thomas Campbell, Man of the Book (Bethany, W. Va.: Bethany Press, 1954).

  7

  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:

  When darkness o’er the deep extended lay,

  And night still reigned, unbounded yet by day;

  When awful stillness filled the boundless space,

  And wild confusion sat on Nature’s face …

  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.