Part 18 (2/2)

But this n.o.ble act of religious devotion was by no means a sacrifice without blemish. The sacred zeal for advancing G.o.d's reign and righteousness was mingled with many very human motives in the progress of it. Conspicuous among these was the spirit of sectarian compet.i.tion.

The worthy and apostolic love for kindred according to the flesh separated from home and exposed to the privations and temptations of the frontier, the honest anxiety to forestall the domination of a dangerously powerful religious corporation propagating perverted views of truth, even the desire to advance principles and forms of belief deemed to be important, were infused with a spirit of partisans.h.i.+p as little spiritual as the enthusiasm which animates the struggles and the shouters at a foot-ball game. The devoted pioneer of the gospel on the frontier, seeing his work endangered by that of a rival denomination, writes to the central office of his sect; the board of missions makes its appeal to the contributing churches; the churches respond with subsidies; and the local rivalry in the mission field is pressed, sometimes to a good result, on the principle that ”compet.i.tion is the life of business.” Thus the fragrance of the precious ointment of loving sacrifice is perceptibly tainted, according to the warning of Ecclesiastes or the Preacher. And yet it is not easy for good men, being men, sternly to rebuke the spirit that seems to be effective in promoting the good cause that they have at heart.

If the effect of these emulations on the contributing churches was rather carnal than spiritual, the effect in the mission field was worse.

The effect was seen in the squandering of money and of priceless service of good men and women, in the debilitating and demoralizing division and subdivision of the Christian people, not of cities and large towns, but of villages and hamlets and of thinly settled farming districts. By the building of churches and other edifices for sectarian uses, schism was established for coming time as a vested interest. The gifts and service bestowed in this cause with a truly magnificent liberality would have sufficed to establish the Christian faith and fellows.h.i.+p throughout the new settlements in strength and dignity, in churches which, instead of lingering as puny and dependent nurslings, would have grown apace to be strong and healthy nursing mothers to newer churches yet.

There is an instructive contrast, not only between the working of the voluntary system and that of the Old World establishments, but between the methods of the Catholic Church and the Protestant no-method. Under the control of a strong coordinating authority the compet.i.tions of the various Catholic orders, however sharp, could never be allowed to run into wasteful extravagance through cross-purposes. It is believed that the Catholics have not erected many monuments of their own unthrift in the shape of costly buildings begun, but left unfinished and abandoned.

A more common incident of their work has been the buying up of these expensive failures, at a large reduction from their cost, and turning them to useful service. And yet the principle of sectarian compet.i.tion is both recognized and utilized in the Roman system. The various clerical sects, with their characteristic names, costumes, methods, and doctrinal differences, have their recognized apt.i.tudes for various sorts of work, with which their names are strongly a.s.sociated: the Dominican for pulpit eloquence, the Capuchin for rough-and-ready street-preaching, the Benedictine for literary work, the Sulpitian for the training of priests, and the ubiquitous Jesuit for s.h.i.+fty general utility with a specialty of school-keeping. These and a mult.i.tude of other orders, male and female, have been effectively and usefully employed in the arduous labor _Romanam condere gentem_. But it would seem that the superior stability of the present enterprise of planting Catholicism in the domain of the United States, as compared with former expensive failures, was due in some part to the larger employment of a diocesan parish clergy instead of a disproportionate reliance on the ”regulars.”

On the whole, notwithstanding its immense armies of immigrants and the devoted labors of its priests, and notwithstanding its great expansion, visible everywhere in conspicuous monuments of architecture, the Catholic advance in America has not been, comparatively speaking, successful. For one thing, the campaign was carried on too far from its base of supplies. The subsidies from Lyons and Vienna, liberal as they were, were no match for the home missionary zeal of the seaboard States in following their own sons westward with church and gospel and pastor.

Even the conditions which made possible the superior management and economy of resources, both material and personal, among the Catholics, were attended with compensating drawbacks. With these advantages they could not have the immense advantage of the popular initiative. In Protestantism the people were the church, and the minister was chief among the people only by virtue of being servant of all; the people were incited to take up the work for their own and carry it on at their best discretion; and they were free to make wasteful and disastrous blunders and learn therefrom by experience. With far greater expenditure of funds, they make no comparison with their brethren of the Roman obedience in stately and sumptuous buildings at great centers of commerce and travel. But they have covered the face of the land with country meeting-houses, twice as many as there was any worthy use for, in which faithful service is rendered to subdivided congregations by underpaid ministers, enough in number, if they were wisely distributed, for the evangelization of the whole continent; and each country meeting-house is a mission station, and its congregation, men, women, and children, are missionaries. Thus it has come about, in the language of the earnest Catholic from the once Catholic city of New Orleans, that ”the nation, the government, the whole people, remain solidly Protestant.”[331:1] Great territories originally discovered by Catholic explorers and planted in the name of the church by Catholic missionaries and colonists, and more lately occupied by Catholic immigrants in what seemed overwhelming numbers, are now the seat of free and powerful commonwealths in which the Catholic Church is only one of the most powerful and beneficent of the Christian sects, while the inst.i.tutions and influences which characterize their society are predominantly Protestant.

In the westward propagation of Protestantism, as well as of Catholicism, the distinctive attributes of the several sects or orders is strikingly ill.u.s.trated.

Foremost in the pioneer work of the church are easily to be recognized the Methodists and the Baptists, one the most solidly organized of the Protestant sects, the other the most uncompact and individualist; the first by virtue of the supple military organization of its great corps of itinerants, the other by the simplicity and popular apprehensibleness of its distinctive tenets and arguments and the aggressive ardor with which it inspires all its converts, and both by their facility in recruiting their ministry from the rank and file of the church, without excluding any by arbitrarily imposed conditions. The Presbyterians were heavily c.u.mbered for advance work by traditions and rules which they were rigidly reluctant to yield or bend, even when the reason for the rule was superseded by higher reasons. The argument for a learned ministry is doubtless a weighty one; but it does not suffice to prove that when college-bred men are not to be had it is better that the people have no minister at all. There is virtue in the rule of ministerial parity; but it should not be allowed to hinder the church from employing in humbler spiritual functions men who fall below the prescribed standard. This the church, in course of time, discovered, and inst.i.tuted a ”minor order” of ministers, under the t.i.tle of colporteurs.

But it was timidly and tardily done, and therefore ineffectively. The Presbyterians lost their place in the skirmish-line; but that which had been their hindrance in the advance work gave them great advantage in settled communities, in which for many years they took precedence in the building up of strong and intelligent congregations.

To the Congregationalists belongs an honor in the past which, in recent generations, they have not been jealous to retain. Beyond any sect, except the Moravians, they have cherished that charity which seeketh not her own. The earliest leaders in the organization of schemes of national beneficence in cooperation with others, they have sustained them with unselfish liberality, without regard to returns of sectarian advantage.

The results of their labor are largely to be traced in the upbuilding of other sects. Their specialty in evangelization has been that of the religious educators of the nation. They have been preeminently the builders of colleges and theological seminaries. To them, also, belongs the leaders.h.i.+p in religious journalism. Not only the journals of their own sect and the undenominational journals, but also to a notable extent the religious journals of other denominations, have depended for their efficiency on men bred in the discipline of Congregationalism.

It is no just reproach to the Episcopalians that they were tardy in entering the field of home missions. When we remember that it is only since 1811 that they have emerged from numerical insignificance, we find their contribution to the planting of the church in the new settlements to be a highly honorable one. By a suicidal compact the guileless Evangelical party agreed, in 1835, to take direction of the foreign missions of the church, and leave the home field under the direction of the aggressive High-church party. It surrendered its part in the future of the church, and determined the type of Episcopalianism that was to be planted in the West.[333:1] Entering thus late into the work, and that with stinted resources, the Episcopal Church wholly missed the apostolic glory of not building on other men's foundations. Coming with the highest pretensions to exclusive authority, its work was very largely a work of proselyting from other Christian sects. But this work was prosperously carried on; and although not in itself a work of the highest dignity, and although the methods of it often bore a painfully schismatic character, there is little room for doubt that the results of it have enriched and strengthened the common Christianity of America.

Its specialties in the planting work have been the setting of a worthy example of dignity and simplicity in the conduct of divine wors.h.i.+p, and in general of efficiency in the administration of a parish, and, above all, the successful handling of the immensely difficult duties imposed upon Christian congregations in great cities, where the Episcopal Church has its chief strength and its most effective work.

One must needs ascend to a certain alt.i.tude above the common level in order to discern a substantial resultant unity of movement in the strenuous rivalries and even antagonisms of the many sects of the one church of Christ in America in that critical quarter-century from the year 1835 to the outbreak of the Civil War, in which the work of the church was suddenly expanded by the addition of a whole empire of territory on the west, and the bringing in of a whole empire of alien population from the east, and when no one of the Christian forces of the nation could be spared from the field. The unity is very real, and is visible enough, doubtless, from ”the circle of the heavens.” The sharers in the toil and conflict and the near spectators are not well placed to observe it. It will be for historians in some later century to study it in a truer perspective.

It is not only as falling within this period of immigration, but as being largely dependent on its accessions from foreign lands, that the growth of Mormonism is ent.i.tled to mention in this chapter. In its origin Mormonism is distinctly American--a system of gross, palpable imposture contrived by a disreputable adventurer, Joe Smith, with the aid of three confederates, who afterward confessed the fraud and perjury of which they had been guilty. It is a shame to human nature that the silly lies put forth by this precious gang should have found believers.

But the solemn pretensions to divine revelation, mixed with elements borrowed from the prevalent revivalism, and from the immediate adventism which so easily captivates excitable imaginations, drew a number of honest dupes into the train of the knavish leaders, and made possible the pitiable history which followed. The chief recruiting-grounds for the new religion were not in America, but in the manufacturing and mining regions of Great Britain, and in some of the countries, especially the Scandinavian countries, of continental Europe. The able handling of an emigration fund, and the dexterous combination of appeals to many pa.s.sions and interests at once, have availed to draw together in the State of Utah and neighboring regions a body of fanatics formidable to the Republic, not by their number, for they count only about one hundred and fifty thousand, but by the solidity with which they are compacted into a political, economical, religious, and, at need, military community, handled at will by unscrupulous chiefs. It is only incidentally that the strange story of the Mormons, a story singularly dramatic and sometimes tragic, is connected with the history of American Christianity.[335:1]

To this same period belongs the beginning of the immigration of the Chinese, which, like that of the Mormons, becomes by and by important to our subject as furnis.h.i.+ng occasion for active and fruitful missionary labors.

In the year 1843 culminated the panic agitation of Millerism. From the year 1831 an honest Vermont farmer named William Miller had been urging upon the public, in pamphlets and lectures, his views of the approaching advent of Christ to judgment and the destruction of the world. He had figured it out on the basis of prophecies in Daniel and the Revelation, and the great event was set down for April 23, 1843. As the date drew near the excitement of many became intense. Great meetings were held, in the open air or in tents, of those who wished to be found waiting for the Lord. Some n.o.bly proved their sincerity by the surrender of their property for the support of their poorer brethren until the end should come. The awful day was awaited with glowing rapture of hope, or by some with terror. When it dawned there was eager gazing upon the clouds of heaven to descry the sign of the Son of man. And when the day had pa.s.sed without event there were various revulsions of feeling. The prophets set themselves to going over their figures and fixing new dates; earnest believers, sobered by the failure of their pious expectations, held firmly to the substance of their faith and hope, while no longer attempting to ”know times and seasons, which the Father hath put within his own power”; weak minds made s.h.i.+pwreck of faith; and scoffers cried in derision, ”Where is the promise of his coming?” A monument of this honest delusion still exists in the not very considerable sect of Adventists, with its subdivisions; but sympathizers with their general scheme of prophetical interpretation are to be found among the most earnest and faithful members of other churches.

Such has been the progress of Scriptural knowledge since the days when Farmer Miller went to work with his arithmetic and slate upon the strange symbols and enigmatic figures of the Old and New Testament Apocalypses, that plain Christians everywhere have now the means of knowing that the lines of calculation along which good people were led into delusion a half-century ago started from utterly fallacious premises. It is to the fidelity of critical scholars that we owe it that hereafter, except among the ignorant and unintelligent, these two books, now clearly understood, will not again be used to minister to the panic of a Millerite craze, nor to furnish vituperative epithets for antipopery agitators.

To this period also must be referred the rise of that system of necromancy which, originating in America, has had great vogue in other countries, and here in its native land has taken such form as really to const.i.tute a new cult. Making no mention of sporadic instances of what in earlier generations would have been called (and properly enough) by the name of witchcraft, we find the beginning of so-called ”spiritualism” in the ”Rochester rappings,” produced, to the wonder of many witnesses, by ”the Fox girls” in 1849. How the rappings and other sensible phenomena were produced was a curious question, but not important; the main question was, Did they convey communications from the spirits of the dead, as the young women alleged, and as many persons believed (so they thought) from demonstrative evidence? The mere suggestion of the possibility of this of course awakened an inquisitive and eager interest everywhere. It became the subject of universal discussion and experiment in society. There was demand for other ”mediums” to satisfy curiosity or aid investigation; and the demand at once produced a copious supply. The business of medium became a regular profession, opening a career especially to enterprising women. They began to draw together believers and doubters into ”circles” and ”seances,” and to organize permanent a.s.sociations. At the end of ten years the ”Spiritual Register” for 1859, boasting great things, estimated the actual spiritualists in America at 1,500,000, besides 4,000,000 more partly converted. The latest census gives the total members.h.i.+p of their a.s.sociations as 45,030. But this moderate figure should not be taken as the measure of the influence of their leading tenet. There are not a few honest Christians who are convinced that communications do sometimes take place between the dead and the living; there are a great mult.i.tude who are disposed, in a vague way, to think there must be something in it. But there are few even of the earnest devotees of the spiritualist cult who will deny that the whole business is infested with fraud, whether of dishonest mediums or of lying spirits. Of late years the general public has come into possession of material for independent judgment on this point. An earnest spiritualist, a man of wealth, named Seybert, dying, left to the University of Pennsylvania a legacy of sixty thousand dollars, on condition that the university should appoint a commission to investigate the claims of spiritualism. A commission was appointed which left nothing to be desired in point of ability, integrity, and impartiality.

Under the presidency of the renowned Professor Joseph Leidy, and with the aid and advice of leading believers in spiritualism, they made a long, patient, faithful investigation, the processes and results of which are published in a most amusing little volume.[338:1] The gist of their report may be briefly summed up. Every case of alleged communication from the world of departed spirits that was investigated by the commission (and they were guided in their selection of cases by the advice of eminent and respectable believers in spiritualism) was discovered and demonstrated to be a case of gross, willful attempted fraud. The evidence is strong that the organized system of spiritualism in America, with its a.s.sociations and lyceums and annual camp-meetings, and its itinerancy of mediums and trance speakers, is a system of mere imposture. In the honest simplicity of many of its followers, and in the wicked mendacity of its leaders, it seems to be on a par with the other American contribution to the religions of the world, Mormonism.

FOOTNOTES:

[316:1] For condensed statistics of American immigration, see ”Encyclopaedia Britannica,” 9th ed., s. vv. ”Emigration” and ”United States.” For the facts concerning the Roman Empire one naturally has recourse to Gibbon. From the indications there given we do not get the impression that in the three centuries of the struggle of the empire against the barbarians there was ever such a thirty years' flood of invasion as the immigration into the United States from 1840 to 1869.

The entrance into the Roman Empire was indeed largely in the form of armed invasion; but the most destructive influence of the barbarians was when they were admitted as friends and naturalized as citizens. See ”Encyclopaedia Britannica,” vol. xx., pp. 779, 780.

[318:1] Jacobs, ”The Lutherans,” p. 446.

<script>