Part 21 (1/2)
1825-35 330,737 1835-45 707,770 1845-55 2,944,833 1855-65 1,578,483 1865-75 3,234,090 1875-85 4,061,278
[358:1] _Ibid._, p. 714. We have quoted in round numbers. The figures do not include the large sums expended annually in the colportage work of Bible and tract societies, in Sunday school missions, and in the building of churches and parsonages. In the accounts of the last-named most effective enterprise the small amounts received and appropriated to aid in building would represent manifold more gathered and expended by the pioneer churches on the ground.
[359:1] Dorchester, _op. cit._, p. 709.
[359:2] Above, pp. 259, 260.
[359:3] A pamphlet published at the office of the New York ”Sun,” away back in the early thirties, was formerly in my possession, which undertook to give, under the t.i.tle ”The Rich Men of New York,” the name of every person in that city who was worth more than one hundred thousand dollars--and it was not a large pamphlet, either. As nearly as I remember, there were less than a half-dozen names credited with more than a million, and one solitary name, that of John Jacob Astor, was reported as good for the enormous and almost incredible sum of ten millions.
[361:1] Dorchester, ”Christianity in the United States,” p. 715.
[361:2] See above, p. 70.
[363:1] Bishop Vincent, in ”Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia,” p. 441. The number of students in the ”Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle”
already in 1891 exceeded twenty-five thousand.
[367:1] Among the t.i.tles omitted from this list are the various ”Lend-a-Hand Clubs,” and ”10 1 = 10 Clubs,” and circles of ”King's Daughters,” and like coteries, that have been inspired by the tales and the ”four mottoes” of Edward Everett Hale.
[369:1] Dr. H. K. Carroll, in ”The Independent,” April 1, 1897.
[369:2] ”Congregationalist Handbook for 1897,” p. 35.
[371:1] Westminster Shorter Catechism, Ans. 60. The commentaries on the Catechism, which are many, like Gemara upon Mishna, build wider and higher the ”fence around the law,” in a fas.h.i.+on truly rabbinic.
[372:1] Colossians, ii. 16.
CHAPTER XXI.
THE CHURCH IN THEOLOGY AND LITERATURE.
The rapid review of three crowded centuries, which is all that the narrowly prescribed limits of this volume have permitted, has necessarily been mainly restricted to external facts. But looking back over the course of visible events, it is not impossible for acute minds devoted to such study to trace the stream of thought and sentiment that is sometimes hidden from direct view by the overgrowth which itself has nourished.
We have seen a profound spiritual change, renewing the face of the land and leaving its indelible impress on successive generations, springing from the profoundest contemplations of G.o.d and his work of salvation through Jesus Christ, and then bringing back into thoughtful and teachable minds new questions to be solved and new discoveries of truth to be pondered. The one school of theological opinion and inquiry that can be described as characteristically American is the theology of the Great Awakening. The disciples of this school, in all its divergent branches, agree in looking back to the first Jonathan Edwards as the founder of it. Through its generations it has shown a striking sequence and continuity of intellectual and spiritual life, each generation answering questions put to it by its predecessor, while propounding new questions to the generation following. After the cla.s.sical writings of its first founders, the most widely influential production of this school is the ”Theology Explained and Defended in a Series of Sermons”
of President Dwight. This had the advantage over some other systems of having been preached, and thus proved to be preachable. The ”series of sermons” was that delivered to successive generations of college students at Yale at a time of prevailing skepticism, when every statement of the college pulpit was liable to sharp and not too friendly scrutiny; and it was preached with the fixed purpose of convincing and converting the young men who heard it. The audience, the occasion, and the man--a fervid Christian, and a born poet and orator--combined to produce a work of wide and enduring influence. The dynasty of the Edwardeans is continued down to the middle of the nineteenth century, and later, through different lines, ending in Emmons of Franklin, Taylor of New Haven, and Finney of Oberlin, and is represented among the living by the venerable Edwards A. Park, of Andover, who adds to that power of sustained speculative thinking in a straight line which is characteristic of the whole school, a wide learning in the whole field of theological literature, which had not been usual among his predecessors. It is a prevailing trait of this theology, born of the great revival, that it has constantly held before itself not only the question, What is truth? but also the question, How shall it be preached? It has never ceased to be a revival theology.
A bold and open breach of traditionary a.s.sumptions and habits of reasoning was made by Horace Bushnell. This was a theologian of a different type from his New England predecessors. He was of a temper little disposed to accept either methods or results as a local tradition, and inclined rather to prefer that which had been ”hammered out on his own anvil.” And yet, while very free in manifesting his small respect for the ”logicking” by syllogistic processes which had been the pride of the theological chair and even the pulpit in America, and while declining the use of current phraseologies even for the expression of current ideas, he held himself loyally subject to the canon of the Scriptures as his rule of faith, and deferential to the voice of the church catholic as uttered in the concord of testimony of holy men in all ages. Endowed with a poet's power of intuition, uplifted by a fervid piety, uttering himself in a literary style singularly rich and melodious, it is not strange that such a man should have made large contributions to the theological thought of his own and later times. In natural theology, his discourses on ”The Moral Uses of Dark Things”
(1869), and his longest continuous work, on ”Nature and the Supernatural” (1858), even though read rather as prose-poems than as arguments, sound distinctly new notes in the treatment of their theme.
In ”G.o.d in Christ” (1849), ”Christ in Theology” (1851), ”The Vicarious Sacrifice” (1866), and ”Forgiveness and Law” (1874), and in a notable article in the ”New Englander” for November, 1854, ent.i.tled ”The Christian Trinity a Practical Truth,” the great topics of the Christian system were dealt with all the more effectively, in the minds of thoughtful readers in this and other lands, for cries of alarm and newspaper and pulpit impeachments of heresy that were sent forth. But that work of his which most nearly made as well as marked an epoch in American church history was the treatise of ”Christian Nurture” (1847).
This, with the protracted controversy that followed upon the publication of it, was a powerful influence in lifting the American church out of the rut of mere individualism that had been wearing deeper and deeper from the days of the Great Awakening.
Another wholesome and edifying debate was occasioned by the publications that went forth from the college and theological seminary of the German Reformed Church, situated at Mercersburg in Pennsylvania. At this inst.i.tution was effected a fruitful union of American and German theology; the result was to commend to the general attention aspects of truth, philosophical, theological, and historical, not previously current among American Protestants. The book of Dr. John Williamson Nevin, ent.i.tled ”The Mystical Presence: A Vindication of the Reformed or Calvinistic Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist,” revealed to the vast mult.i.tude of churches and ministers that gloried in the name of Calvinist the fact that on the most distinctive article of Calvinism they were not Calvinists at all, but Zwinglians. The enunciation of the standard doctrine of the various Presbyterian churches excited among themselves a clamor of ”Heresy!” and the doctrine of Calvin was put upon trial before the Calvinists. The outcome of a discussion that extended itself far beyond the boundaries of the comparatively small and uninfluential German Reformed Church was to elevate the point of view and broaden the horizon of American students of the const.i.tution and history of the church. Later generations of such students owe no light obligation to the fidelity and courage of Dr. Nevin, as well as to the erudition and immense productive diligence of his a.s.sociate, Dr. Philip Schaff.[377:1]
It is incidental to the prevailing method of instruction in theology by a course of prelections in which the teacher reads to his cla.s.s in detail his own original _summa theologiae_, that the American press has been prolific of ponderous volumes of systematic divinity. Among the more notable of these systems are those of Leonard Woods (in five volumes) and of Enoch Pond; of the two Drs. Hodge, father and son; of Robert J. Breckinridge and James H. Thornwell and Robert L. Dabney; and the ”Systematic Theology” of a much younger man, Dr. Augustus H. Strong, of Rochester Seminary, which has won for itself very unusual and wide respect. Exceptional for ability, as well as for its originality of conception, is ”The Republic of G.o.d: An Inst.i.tute of Theology,” by Elisha Mulford, a disciple of Maurice and of the realist philosophy, the thought of whose whole life is contained in this and his kindred work on ”The Nation.”
How great is the debt which the church owes to its heretics is frequently ill.u.s.trated in the progress of Christianity in America. If it had not been for the Unitarian defection in New England, and for the attacks from Germany upon the historicity of the gospels, the theologians of America might to this day have been engrossed in ”thres.h.i.+ng old straw” in endless debates on ”fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute.” The exigencies of controversy forced the study of the original doc.u.ments of the church. From his entrance upon his professors.h.i.+p at Andover, in 1810, the eager enthusiasm of Moses Stuart made him the father of exegetical science not only for America, but for all the English-speaking countries. His not less eminent pupil and a.s.sociate, Edward Robinson, later of the Union Seminary, New York, created out of nothing the study of biblical geography. a.s.sociating with himself the most accomplished living Arabist, Eli Smith, of the American mission at Beirt, he made those ”Biblical Researches in Palestine”