xt72jm23bn90 https://exploreuk.uky.edu/dips/xt72jm23bn90/data/mets.xml Haley, J. J. (Jesse James), 1851-1924. 1914  books b92-164-30098403 English Christian Board of Publication, : St. Louis : Contact the Special Collections Research Center for information regarding rights and use of this collection. Disciples of Christ Biography. Makers and molders of the Reformation movement  : a study of leading men among the Disciples of Christ / by J. J. Haley ; with an introduction by J.H. Garrison. text Makers and molders of the Reformation movement  : a study of leading men among the Disciples of Christ / by J. J. Haley ; with an introduction by J.H. Garrison. 1914 2002 true xt72jm23bn90 section xt72jm23bn90 




  Makers and Molders


              of the


Reformation Movement



A STUDY OF LEADING MEN AMONG
   THE DISCIPLES OF CHRIST

       BY J. J. HALEY




           WITH AN
INTRODUCTION BY J. H. GARRISON
     Editor Emeritus Christian-E'angebst






        Printed and Published by
CHRISTIAN BOARD OF PUBLICATION
27 2 PINE STREET,     ST. LOUIS, MO.

 

































          Copy-ight. 1914
CHRISTIAN BOARD OF PUBLICATION
          St. I ouis. Mo.

 

          INTRODUCTION

  To revitalize history, by making the men
who were chief actors in it to live again, is
the work of a literary artist. One who does it
successfully must know the history of the
movement he writes about, not only in its ex-
ternal phases of growth and achievement, but
in the hidden forces which underlie these
changes and activities.  Great personalities
are the dominant factors of history. As no
one can know the history of the United States
without knowing something of George Wash-
ington, Patrick Henry, John Adams, Thomas
Jefferson, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Abra-
ham Lincoln, and a host of other patriot-
statesmen, so the history of the Reformation
of the Nineteenth Century, as urged by the
Disciples of Christ, can be understood only by
those who know something of the chief per-
sonalities who, at different periods of its de-
velopment, have, under God, done most to
shape its policy and mold its spirit. In this
volume the author has called up out of the
more or less misty Past some of the most
forceful personalities in the history of this
movement, and with a few touches of a mas-
ter's hand, has caused them to pass before us

 

INTRODUCTION



again; a noble company, whose memories we
are to revere, whose virtues we are to emu-
late, and whose mistakes, natural to their age
and environment, we are to avoid, if we are
able to discern them in the larger light of our
day.
  Of the ten men whose character and work
are sketched in this volume, more than half
were personally known to the writer and sev-
eral were his warm personal friends. The
others are known by their writings. In every
case the able author has shown a discriminat-
ing mind in estimating the chief character-
istics of the man and his contribution to our
history. The readers of this small volume
may well feel that they have here true por-
traits. as far as they go. of the men and of
their work.
  One of the most valuable features of this
volume is the faithful portraiture of the reli-
gious movement itself. Its mistakes and er-
rors are not concealed, but the author sees
that these are the natural, if not inevitable,
results of fallible men, no matter how great
and good they may be, who seek to incarnate
a high ideal. H-e points out how these mis-
takes have been, and are being, outgrown.
How could it he otherwise if the movement be



4

 

INTRODUCTION                            5

of God and is indwelt by the Holy Spirit, who
is to guide us into all truth
  We welcome this volume and the great and
good men it causes to pass before us again in
review. We seem to hear their voices, soft-
ened and mellowed by their celestial experi-
ences, bidding us to be true to the great Leader
and Captain of our salvation and to the holy
cause of unity among his followers. Inspired
by their heroism and their unselfish devotion
to high ideals, we shall be better able to ac-
complish the great unfinished tasks before us.
                           J. H. Garrison.

 This page in the original text is blank.


 

             CONTENTS

                                     Page
THOMAS CAMPBELL       .   .   .  .   .  11
   Creative Personalitv of the Union Move-
   ment of the Nineteenth Century.
ALEXANDER CAMPBELL        .   .  .   .  25
   Prophet and Leader of the Reformation
   Movement.
BARTON W. STONE       .   .   .  .   .  42
   Prophet of Evangelism and Piety in the
   Reformation Movement.
WALTER SCOTT       .   .  .   .  .   .  59
   Masterful Preacher and Teacher.
ISAAC  ERRETT     .   .   .   .  .   .  77
   Major Prophet of the Second Generation
   of Disciples.
MOSES E. LARD     .   .   .  .   .   .  95
   Prophet of Radicalism, Literalism and
   Conservatism in the Second Generation of
   the Reformation Movement.
WINTHROP H. HOPSON AND GEORGE
   W. LONGAN      .   .   .  .   .   . 116
   Two Representative Types of Leadership
   in the Middle Period of Our History.
JOHN W. McGARVEY AND ALEXANDER
   PROCTER        .   .  .   .   .   . 136
   Two Representatives of Conservative and
   Progressive Leadership.



THE REFORMATION MOVEMENT UP
   TO DATE      .   .   .  .   .  .



159

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MAKERS AND MOLDERS
      OF THE
REFORMATION MOVEMENT

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        THOMAS CAMPBELL
Creative Personality of the Union Movement
        of the Nineteenth Century


W    HEN a religion comes into the world
      with vitality enough to survive in the
struggle for existence, four things happen in
the working out of its problems:
  First, a supreme creative personality ap-
pears, who, passing the truth through the
alymbic of his genius, molds it into a vital and
consistent whole. A second personality, one
or more, but little inferior to the first, comes
after the founder, a man of interpretative
genius, who interprets and mediates the truth
in the application of its principles to life. Crea-
tion and interpretation call for a third man or
men in the supreme order, call for a man of
constructive ability, architectonic power, a
builder who organizes the religion into a sys-
tem and the church into methods, forms, and
an order of administration. It is in this period
of organization that the ecclesiastic, the priest
and creed maker get in their oars. Inspiration
is succeeded by convention, the spirit by the

 

MAKERS AND MOLDERS OF



letter, and things drop to a lower level. The
lofty ideals of the founder and his first inter-
preters are blurred. confused and lost. Cor-
ruption and stagnation come in like a flood.
This is the reformer's opportunity, and refor-
mation, necessitated by conditions, runs along
historic lines similar to those of the original
faith itself.
  Moses was the creative personality of Ju-
daism, the great prophets were his interpre-
ters. Ezra and Nehemiah organized the law
into Leviticism. During the exile and after
the restoration, the Divine Legation of Moses
was organized into later Judaism, an inferior
product of ecclesiasticism and priestcraft.
Dead consciences, lowered moral standards,
corruption in faith and life, formalism, hypoc-
risy and shallowness; no open vision, no in-
spired prophet to correct abuses till John the
Reformer appears in the wilderness, calling
upon the people to hark back to the founder
and his first interpreters. "Prepare ye the way
of the Lord, make his paths straight."

Four Periods of Religious History

  Jesus of Nazareth was the creative person-
ality of Christianity, John and Paul were his
first great interpreters, the Greek period
organized theology and the Roman period or-



12

 

THE REFORMATION MOVEMENT



ganized the church. Organization was the
straight way to crystallization, life and passion
went out, corruption and tradition came in.
Theological degradation, ecclesiastical prosti-
tution, creed making, sect building, low grade
morals in the life of the church, and the dark
ages came on for a thousand years. Prophet
reformers arose who felt the darkness and saw
the light: Savonarola in Italy, t1uss in Bohe-
mia, Tyndall in England, Layfevre in France,
Luther in Germany. The dawn was breaking,
and when Luther nailed his theses to the door
of the university church at Wittenburg, the
Reformation Ship was launched, the banner of
Apostolic Christianity was flung to the breeze.
  The four periods, therefore, through which
the evolution of the Christian religion has
passed have been the creative, the interpreta-
tive, the constructive, and the reformative-
creation, interpretation, construction and ref-
ormation. Reform and restoration move-
ments pass through similar phases. St. Augus-
tine was the creative, originating personality
of Calvinism, John Calvin and Jonathan Ed-
wards were its great interpreters, John Knox
was the organizing genius of the Calvinistic
reformation.



13

 

4 MAKERS AND MOLDERS OF



The Creative Personality of Our Movement
  Thomas Campbell, author of the Declaration
and Address, and founder of the Christian As-
sociation of Washington, Pa., was the crea-
tive personality of our restoration movement.
Alexander, his son, and Isaac Errett of the
second generation of Disciples, were his great
interpreters. We are now, and have been for
thirty years, in the throes of the constructive
and organizing era of our reformatory ex-
perience. In the absence of conspicuous per-
sonal leadership in this branch of the service,
our organizing genius has yet to appear. Most
of our troubles have arisen, and are likely to
continue to arise, as in other reforming move-
ments. As Thomas Campbell was the Moses
of our Restoration, the Declaration and Ad-
dress was the Deuteronomy of our prophetic
reformation. As certainly as the fifth book of
Moses contains the basic principles and the
whole body of teaching and ideals of the
prophets that inspired and entered into the
structure of the Deuteronomic reformation in
Israel, this matchless document, whose origin
we celebrated four years ago, embraces every
truth we have taught, every principle we have
advocated, every ideal we have striven to
realize in the hundred years of our existence.



14

 

THE REFORMATION MOVEMENT



The Declaration and Address
  Father Campbell was the originator. The
illustrious son was the advocate, the ex-
pounder, the defender, the illuminator, the
adaptor of the teaching of his father in the con-
stitution of the Christian Association. the Ser-
mon on the Mount of our New Testament, if
you will allow me to change the figure from a
discourse of Moses in the Old Testament to
a discourse of Christ in the New. The relation
of the Sermon on the Mount to the kingdom of
God is the relation of the Declaration and Ad-
dress to our religious reformation. The effort
that has been made to trace the Christian
unity conception and emphasis to Thomas
Campbell, and the primitive Christianity idea
as the basis of union, to Alexander Campbell,
and to make the two stand over against each
other as variant reforming types, has not been
a success. The fact is, the two conceptions, as
common integers of New Testament Chris-
tianity, were emphatically and profusely
taught by the elder Campbell in the historic
document penned a hundred years ago in
Washington, Pa. I have been amazed at the
comprehensiveness and all-inclusiveness of
this composition. It is the most admirable
summary of apostolic Christianity to be found
in the literature of the church this side of the



15

 

MAKERS AND MOLDERS OF



New Testament. Even from the point of view
of modern criticism, which has claimed so
many new discoveries, we are chagrined to
find that Father Campbell has stolen all our
good ideas. The unification of Christendom
on the basis of the apostolic faith in Jesus
Christ, the restoration of the church with its
divine equipment for human service. "the
union of all who love in the service of all who
suffer," the purification and elevation of
morals to make way for the building of char-
acter after the likeness of Christ, opposition
to a fake mysticism in conversion, and all
divisive and corrupting instruments, such as
human creeds and an ignorant ministry; these
and all other essential and vital things that
pertain to the kingdom of God and the name of
Jesus Christ are distinctly and explicitly
taught, so that we have preached nothing the
last hundred years. and will preach nothing in
the oncoming centuries, not advanced. or at
least suggested, in this magna charta of our
restoration movement.
European Sources of Reformation Movement
  I am not saying these things, of course, in
ignorance of the fact that many of the root
principles of the restoration can be traced to
European soil. Both of the Campbells were of
European birth and education, and there was



16

 

THE REFORMATION MOVEMENT



much in religious training and social environ-
ment to suggest the need of reformation, and a
cue to their future work.  When Thomas
Campbell set sail for the lUnited States, in
1807, a revolt against Calvinism and hair-
brained mysticism had gained a foothold in
Scotland. More than one harbinger had arisen
in the wilderness of sectarianism to restore the
tabernacle of the Lord that had fallen down.
John Glass and his son-in-law, Sandeman; the
Haldane Brothers, and Greville Ewell, of Glas-
gow, were striking powerful blows at Calvin-
istic theology, the corrupt condition of re-
ligious society, and the divided state of the
church. Successive attempts at reformation
since Luther had culminated in a new effort.
at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to
get back to Christ and the apostles. These
efforts, however, were tentative and partial,
and short-lived for lack of genius and person-
ality in leadership. They were quite success-
ful in their diagnosis of the situation, which
called aloud for the restoration of the ancient
order of things, and the remedies suggested
were adequate to meet the needs of the case,
the moment was imminent, but the man did
not appear. He had emigrated to the United
States. The field of a great apostolic restora-
tion movement had been transferred from



17

 

MAKERS AND MOLDERS OF



Scotland to North America; from the Old
World to the New.
  People not acquainted with the subject are
surprised to find in the books of Glass and
Sandeman, the Haldanes and Dr. Kirk, ideas,
arguments, doctrines, and even phrases, that
our reformation has made familiar to the world.
These men did not fail to grasp the truth, and
to realize the contrast between what they saw
and what Christ intended; but they lacked the
power and the opportunity to incarnate these
principles in a personality strong enough in
creative and adaptive genius to make the
movement go in the face of old world difficul-
ties. It was on this side of the Atlantic that
the man and the moment came together.

The Man and the Opportunity
  When the Campbells set foot on American
soil, they found the situation worse, the cir-
cumstances of contending sects calling more
loudly for reform, than in the old world. They
found more dogmatism, a fiercer sectarianism,
a more intense fanaticism, a wilder mysticism,
a narrower, harder, and less tractable denom-
inationalism than they had left behind them
in Europe. If the people were not hateful.
they certainly hated one another. Thomas
Campbell tells of a seceder divine who was so



is

 

THE REFORMATION MOVEMENT



intensely human that he exhorted his congre-
gation: "I beseech you, my brethren, to hate all
other denominations, especially the Catholics."
An age of increasing sects, multiplying creeds,
contending parties, and warring zealots, had
reached the stage where reaction must begin
to rally the forces of reformation. The time
had come to knock down the Dagons of the-
ology in the temple of sectarianism, and to call
back a divided church from the wilderness of
strife and bitterness to the unity of the Spirit
in the bond of peace.

The American Church in the Nineteenth Century
  Three things had happened to bring about
this ecclesiastical reign of terror: First, the
Bible had been lost in the church; second,
Christ had been lost in the Bible; third, the
church had been lost in the world. The first
thing a corrupt church does is to lose its Bible,
and the Bible is never lost in but one place,
and that is in the temple. The first thing a re-
stored church does is to find the Book and put
it in the place where it belongs. The greatest
spiritual reformation in Israel synchronized
with the discovery of the book of Deuter-
onomy in the Temple, where it had been lost
during the reign of corrupt Manasseh. John
the Harbinger launched his revolution by a



19

 

MAKERS AND MOLDERS OF



rediscovery of the Book of the Law and the
Prophets in the same old place of hiding, the
Temple in Jerusalem. In the Reformation of
the sixteenth century, Martin Luther found
the Holy Scriptures buried in a dead language,
and a Standard Bible chained to the lectern of
a Holy Catholic Church. The Book had to be
liberated from its temple prison, and a transla-
tion of it made into the common vernacular be-
fore reformation truth could find a place in the
consciousness of the people.

Back to the "Book of Books"
  The new religious freedom that came in
with Luther had its evil side. The abuse of
liberty brought in the era of sectarianism and
denominationalism. Two hundred years of
warring creeds and bellicose denominations,
and history repeats itself. The Bible is again
lost in a superincumbent mass of ignorance
and superstition and pharisaism, and the fate
of the Bible is always the fate of Christ and
the church. Necessarily, therefore, the first
characteristic of our restoration movement
was the rediscovery of the Holy Scriptures.
The assertion of the authority of the divine
Word and its all-sufficiency as a rule of faith
and practice was the first step towards realiz-
ing the need of reform. "Where the Scriptures



20

 

THE REFORMATION MOVEMENT



speak we speak, and where the Scriptures are
silent we are silent." The life and power of
every forward movement in the history of or-
ganized Christianity is a fresh and vital re-in-
terpretation of the Bible and a new application
of its principles to the life of the church. And
this, of necessity, leads straight to the redis-
covery of Christ, and his installation on the
throne of universal empire and Lordship, fol-
lowed by the restoration of the New Testa-
ment church. 1\Ir. Campbell was quick to see
that any effective appeal to the conscience of
the Christian world must involve a fresh and
living interpretation of Holy Scripture, a vital
and loyal recognition of Christ as Prophet,
Priest, and King, as Saviour and Lord of all,
and an earnest effort towards the realization
of the ideals of the apostolic church, before it
was possible for the Saviour's intercessory
prayer to be answered-"that they all may be
one," as He and the Father are one. The plea
was for the unity, purity, spirituality, and
catholicity of the New Testament church,
fresh from the hands of Christ, and guided by
the Holy Spirit in the apostles.  A careful
analysis of the Declaration and Address will
show that this plea for unity was simple, scrip-
tural and catholic, an appeal to the conscience
of the universal church.



21

 

MAKERS AND MOLDERS OF



Catholicity of Our Plea
  1. The catholic creed of Christendom, "I
believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the
living God, the Saviour and Lord of Men."
  2. The catholic rule of faith and practice,
the Word of God, written in the Old and New
Testaments.
  3. The catholic ordinances, baptism and the
Lord's Supper.
  4. The catholic name, Christian.
  5. The catholic life, the ethics of the king-
dom of God, "WVhatsoever things are true,
whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever
things are just, whatsoever things are pure,
whatsoever things are lovely, of good report,
if there be any virture, if there be any praise,
think on these things."
  This plea is reasonable, feasible, beautiful,
and, in time, must become universal. The
spiritual movement originated and consecrated
in the manner I have endeavored to describe,
and brought forth on this new American con-
tinent in the last hundred years, is not a refor-
mation of existing institutions in the ordinary
sense of that term, nor a restoration of primi-
tive Christianity in the sense of literally re-
storing the historic apostolic church. It is a
realization movement whose aim and purpose
is to realize the ideals of New Testament



22

 

THE REFORMATION MOVEMENT



Christianity in the life of these modern cen-
turies. It was found not possible to reform
existing religious institutions, nor to restore
the primitive church by transferring it literally
and bodily to the nineteenth century, but it
was possible and eminently desirable to make
an honest effort to realize the ideals of the
apostolic faith that shine and make their ap-
peal from every page of the inspired record.

The Peculiar Glory of "The Reformation"
  This feature differentiates the movement
inaugurated by Thomas Campbell from all of
the mere reformations in the history of the
church. The old reformations would need to
be repeated through successive generations till
the end of time; but what we have chosen to
call "the current reformation," if rightly under-
stood, forever remains current, because it em-
bodies a principle that makes crystallization
forever impossible and growth forever neces-
sary. So long as we strive to actualize the
originals, to realize the ideals of the inspired
Christianity of the New Testament, we safe-
guard our religion from stagnation, open the
road to perpetual progress. and thus forestall
the necessity of further efforts at reformation.
This is the peculiarity and glory of our great
religious movement, and if, under God, we are



23

 

24         MAKERS AND MOLDERS OF

faithful to the charge committed to our care,
we shall contribute our share and more to the
bringing in of that far-off divine event to which
the whole creation moves, when they shall not
teach every man his neighbor, and every man
his brother, saying, "Know the Lord, for all
shall know him, from the least to the greatest
cf these."


 

THE REFORMATION M1OVEMIENT



    ALEXANDER CAMPBELL

 Prophet and Leader of the Reformation
                Movement

 A LEXANDER CAMPBELL was in the
    twenty-first year of his age when he
joined his distinguished father in Washington,
Pa. Thomas Campbell had preceded his
family by two years, coming to these shores
from the old world in 1807. His family, es-
saying to follow him a year later, were ship-
wrecked off the coast of Scotland and were
compelled to return to the old country, where
they remained a year before again setting sail.
This calamity and subsequent detention
turned out to be a providence, as far as the
future of young Alexander and the reformation
he was destined to lead, were concerned. The
opportunity which it gave him of three hun-
dred days' study in the University of Glasgow,
and association with leaders of religious
thought in Scotland, was joyfully embraced,
and always in after years acknowledged as



25

 

MAKERS AND MOLDERS OF



potential in its influence on his future life and
work.
  The previous education of this coming re-
former had been in no less efficient hands than
that of his eminent father. In the days of his
adolescent youth he had shown a marked in-
disposition to study and all indoor confine-
ment. A stout and vigorous lad, overflowing
with animal spirits and in love with God's
great out-of-doors, he was fond of fishing, gun-
ning, trapping wild animals, and wandering in
the fields of his native heather. Athletic sports
had more attraction for him than the serious
business of acquiring an education. James
Foster, a friend of the family, says the first
time he saw Alexander Campbell, a boy of
fifteen summers, he had a long pole in his hand
with a net attached to one end with which he
was catching small birds under the eaves of
the houses in the outskirts of the town.
  Like Adam Clark in his youthful days, our
nascent genius evinced but little ambition for
the acquisition of knowledge. He went out
under a shade tree one day to croon over his
French lesson in "The Adventures of Tele-
machus." A warm summer day, he was over-
come by the spirit of drowsiness, and falling
into a deep slumber, a cow came along, seized
his Telemachus and actually devoured it. On



26

 

THE REFORMATION MOVEMENT



reporting the disaster at home his father ad-
ministered a sound thrashing and told him by
way of further humiliation, that "the cow had
more French in her stomach than he had in his
head," a fact too obvious to be easily denied.
  This love of sport and the exuberance of
animal vitality in the activities of outdoor life,
tended to the toughening of fiber and the de-
velopment of a powerful physique that stood
him well in hand in the strenuous responsibili-
ties and labors of after life. It was not long
after the Telemachus episode till the physical
energy of the boy began to transmute itself
into the intellectual aptitudes and powers of
the man. John Locke's "Letters on Tolera-
tion" and his "Essay on the Human Under-
standing" were the first books that made a pro-
found and lasting impression on his mind.
These books of the English philosopher, in
fact, laid the foundation of Mr. Campbell's
theology and his conception of religious and
civil liberty. The association of father and son
with the Rich Hill Independents, who were
more liberal and catholic in their sympathies
than any of the sects of Scotch Presbyterian-
ism, had much to do with the initial impulse of
reform and progress in their minds.



27

 

28MKERS AND MOLDERS OF



Religious Influences of His Youth
  After the shipwreck and the return of the
family to Glasgow, Alexander was brought
into connection more or less intimate with the
Haldane Brothers and their new Baptist de-
nomination. The Haldanes were philanthro-
pists and reformers, pleading for some of the
principles that afterwards characterized the ref-
ormation of the Campbells. The Haldanean
movement in Scotland was the "immersion
wing" of Sandemanianism, which terminated
in the formation of the Scotch Baptists, from
which the Old Disciples in Europe borrowed
their ecclesiology, in such practices as mutual
edification and close communion. Sandeman
himself and his father-in-law, Glass, led the
Paedo-baptist wing, but Alexander Campbell
never accepted the Sandemanian theology in
either of its branches. He sympathized with
these reformers in their revolt against Calvin-
ism, in their plea for religious liberty, the
rights of conscience, and the restoration of the
New Testament interpretation of religion; he
differed from them on other points of their
contention. He listened with a measure of ap-
preciation to the conversations and sermons
of John Walker, the founder of the Plymouth
Brethren, but never at any time was he even



28

 

THE REFORMATION MOVEMENT



tinctured with the peculiarities of "Brethren-
ism."

His Entrance into His Life Task
  Providentially, young Campbell, in the sus-
ceptible and formative years of his life, was so
placed and environed as to breathe the atmos-
phere of religious revival and theological re-
form, by way of education and preparation for
the great leadership to which God was soon to
call him. When God raises a man up to per-
form a great task, he is prepared for its per-
formance, and the preparatory experience in
Scotland was the preliminary stage in the
education and inspiration of a prophet-re-
former who was soon to take his place as
leader of one of the great religious movements
of history. The man and the movement were
about to coincide, as they always do when the
hand of God directs the conjunction. The man
was being prepared and the moment was ap-
proaching.
  When young Campbell reached the United
States and joined his father at Washington,
Pa., the work of union and restoration had al-
ready begun. "The Declaration and Address,"
the constitution of the Christian Association
just organized, was passing through the press.
The father submitted the proof sheets to his



29

 

MAKERS AND MOLDERS OF



son, who read them with sympathetic interest
and profound approval. He lost no time in
expressing his determination to spend his life
in the advocacy and dissemination of the
principles so ably set forth in that immortal
document. The sole object of Thomas Camp-
bell in organizing the society known as the
Christian Association of Washington was the
inculcation of pure evangelical religion and the
promotion of Christian unity. The construc-
tive genius of Alexander Campbell led him not
only to clear the ground for the unification of
Christendom by the destruction of sectarian-
ism and human creeds that made the separat-
ing walls between the churches, but he sought
as the most fundamental thing, a basis of
union, the foundation of the reconstituted uni-
versal church of the Apostolic age. It had
been learned by experience and perceived, at
a glance, by observation that the viperous in-
tolerance and bigotry of sectarianism, and the
tweedledum and tweedledee differences of
opinion between warring denominations, were
the great hindrances to the unity among his
disciples for which the Saviour prayed. It was
this consideration that led to the war on
human creeds and opinionism by the Camp-
bells and their coadjutors. It was perceived
that these human formularies stopped growth,



30

 

THE REFORMATION MOVEMENT



hindered progress, made men dishonest, and
ministered everywhere to theological crystal-
lization fatal to the unity of the spirit in the
bond of peace.

Divine and Man-made Creeds
  Beginning, as they did, with the presupposi-
tion that the Bible of the Old and New Testa-
ments was the Word of God and the only law
of faith and practice among Christians, they
reasoned, if a human creed contains more than
the Bible it contains too much, if it contains
less than the Bible it contains too little; if it
contains anything different from the Bible it
is wrong; if it contains nothing more and
nothing less and nothing different from the
Bible, it is not a human creed but the Bible
itself, the only inspired and all-sufficient rule
of faith and morals.
  As remarked in the article on Thomas
Campbell, all religious reformations in any
way related to the history of Christianity, be-
gin, not with the discovery of a new Bible, but
the re-discovery of the old one. All progres-
sive and really effective movements within the
sphere of the Christian faith must begin with
a fresh and vital interpretation of holy Scrip-
ture. It was the consciousness of this fact that
led Alexander Campbell at the beginning to



31

 

MAKERS AND MOLDERS OF



honestly and fearlessly re-examine his re-
ligious position in the light of the inspired
teaching of Christ and the apostles. In line
with this conviction and while pursuing a de
novo investigation of his Greek New Testa-
ment, the fact, in the face of all his prejudices,
and pre-conceived opinions, dawned upon him
that immersion was the form of baptism com-
manded by Christ and practiced by his first
disciples.

Magnificent Loyalty to the Word of God
  It has been impossible from the first for any
man to rightly understand or properly appraise
the reformation inaugurated by the Campbells
without taking into account their magnificent
loyalty to the Word of God, and its relation to
these  men and their teaching.   The now
familiar utterance of the Declaration and Ad-
dress, "Where the Bible speaks we speak, and
where the Bible is silent we are silent," pro-
voked the remark from Alexander to his
father, "If you carry that out it will put an
end to infant baptism." The inspired Word
is the source of religious knowledge, the chan-
nel of divine authority, and the means of
spiritual edification, and because infant bap-
tism is not taught therein, it must not be
practiced or tolerated in the church of Jesus



32

 

THE REFORMATION MOVEMENT



Christ. The immersion of penitent believers
into the name of the Father, the Son, and the
Holy Spirit, for the remission of sins, is plain-
ly taught in the Scriptures, therefore the
Campbells were immersed, and all who fol-
lowed them into the union movement of the
current reformation. Nothing is to enter into
the program of preaching and practice not
definitely authorized by the Word of God, in
positive command, necessary inference, or ap-
proved example. On these ancient Scriptures,
inspired by the Holy Ghost, Jesus of Nazareth
is enthr