THE AGE OF ALEXANDER CAMPBELL
By Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

When Alexander Campbell first arrived in the United States on September 29, 1809, he found a nation in a state of spectacular growth. The area of the country had almost doubled in the decade before his disembarkation in New York, the population had increased nearly 40 percent. Society was everywhere on the move. People were pressing restlessly into the west, seeking new homes on the ever receding frontier. And a growing fluidity of life was marked in the east as well. The old class distinctions were beginning to break down; the knee-breeches, ruffled shirts, cocked hats and wigs of the past were beginning to disappear. Democratizing forces, accumulating in the course of the 18th century, released during the War for Independence, renewed by the excitements of the election of 1800 and by the pull of westward expansion, were giving the nation new expectations and new values. Nor could anything hope to escape the democratizing process—not politics, nor literature, nor even religion itself.

The democratic mood was composed of many elements. Perhaps most basic was the new estimate, emerging over the last two centuries, of the worth and possibility of the ordinary individual, not only as a soul to be saved, but equally as a being deserving happiness during his passage on earth. From this new focus much else followed. A heightened faith in individual dignity was leading to the assertion of man’s right to inquire and judge for himself. A heightened concern for the individual personality was leading to the conviction that “the pursuit of happiness” was a proper human goal. A heightened respect for individual enterprise was leading to the sense that the interests of all were best served by indulging the interests of each. A heightened faith in individual reason was leading to the growing commitment to the methods and objectives of natural science. The new individualism was, above all, rationalistic and optimistic: it expected the universe to be intelligible, and it expected it to be kind. If democracy was the politics of the new individualism, then humanitarianism was its ethics, capitalism its economics and science increasingly its cosmology.

Yet the democratic mood clashed with much of the past—not alone with the politics of George III and the economics of mercantilism but also with the theology of John Calvin. For, in its most severe form, Calvinism relentlessly challenged basic pre-suppositions of democratic individualism. Its belief in total depravity contradicted the new faith in natural reason. Its belief in foreordination, election and eternal punishment affronted the new humanitarian ideas of justice. Its belief in imputation and hereditary guilt was incompatible with the new faith in personal merit and demerit. Its belief in dogmatic theology conflicted with the new assertion of the right of private judgment. Its predisposition in favor of strict ecclesiastical discipline offended democratic notions of social organization. Above all, Calvinism pursued happiness in the next world, not in this, and for the Supreme Deity, not for vile and corrupt man. In an important sense Calvinism was both irrational and pessimistic: It did not expect the universe to conform to human notions of justice and reasonableness; nor did it expect man’s travail, either now or hereafter, to be sweet and easy.

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The contrast between the old Calvinism and the new democratic individualism was bound to set up strains. It did so, and on fundamental levels. Young men and women, growing up in the new mood, found the old faith harder and harder to accept. It was not only that Calvinism was unreasonable; more important, perhaps, was the fact that it was unbearable. The demands it made, not just on human reason, but on the human sensibility, were too appalling to be endured. Consider for a moment the testimony of those born in the last years of the 18th century.

Horace Mann, born in 1796:

“In the way in which they (the Calvinist doctrines) carne to my youthful mind, a certain number of souls were to be forever lost, and nothing—not powers, nor principalities, nor man, nor angel, nor Christ, nor the Holy Spirit, nay, nor God himself—could save them; for He had sworn before time was, to get eternal glory out of their eternal torment . . . Like all children, I believed what I was taught. To my vivid imagination, a physical hell was a living reality, as much so as though I could have heard the shrieks of the tormented, or stretched out my hand to grasp their burning souls, in a vain endeavor for their rescue. Such a faith spread a pall of blackness over the whole heavens, shutting out every beautiful and glorious thing . . . Often on going to bed at night, did the objects of the day and the faces of friends give place to a vision of the awful throne, the inexorable Judge, and the hapless myriads, among whom I often seemed to see those whom I loved best; and there I wept and sobbed until Nature found that counterfeit repose in exhaustion.” ¹¹

John A. Dix, born in 1798:

“I derived no agreeable impression whatever from these religious observances . . .. My mother’s affectionate teachings had implanted within me grains of devotion which time could not fail to bring forth and ripen. But her God never seemed to me the same Deity who was worshiped at the meeting-house. Hers was all goodness and mercy and pardoning love; while the other seemed to me a severe master, burning with anger at the impenitence of the human race.” ²

Catherine Beecher, born in 1800:

“I then felt I was created a miserable, helpless creature; that I and all my fellow-men were placed under a severe law which we were naturally unable to obey, and threatened with everlasting despair for violating one of its precepts.” ³

William H. Seward, born in 1801:

“The first mental anxiety which I recall was, manifestly, an effect of the fearful presentations of death and its consequences, so common in the sermons and exhortations of the clergy at that day . . . I often was watchful at night, through fear that if I should fall asleep I should awake in the consuming flame which was appointed as a discipline that allows no reformation . . . Reflecting upon this incident, it became an interesting study afterward, how constantly a decline of imaginary terrors in the future state of being attends the progress of mankind in natural science.” ⁴

A faith which had seemed stern common sense in an earlier century was now beginning to appear, in the words of the editor Joseph T. Buckingham, “a piece of gratuitous and unprofitable cruelty.” “My whole mind rebelled against this teaching,” said the young Benjamin F. Butler. “I could not and did not believe it.” Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes argued that Calvinism, consistently accepted, could only end in madness. John Quincy Adams, hearing a minister quote Isaac Watt’s view that men were more base and brutish than the beasts, reflected, “If Watts had said this on a weekday to anyone of his parishioners, would he not have knocked him down? And how can that be taught as a solemn truth of religion, applicable to all mankind which, if said at any other time to anyone individual, would be punishable as slander?” “God,” it was Adams’ creed, “will not suffer us to do evil, and then sentence us severely for what He has suffered us to do. My reason and my sense of justice will not yield to any other creed than this.” ⁵

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The reason and the sense of justice of a whole generation were at stake. The emotions experienced by the Manns and Dixes, Catharine Beechers and Sewards, multiplied a thousandfold, could result only in an invincible distaste for the unacceptable doctrines. With this distaste there came in many cases a turning away from the churches themselves; for the insistence on maintaining the old dogma in its harshness as a qualification for membership was making communion increasingly difficult. The total number of communicants in 1800 was less than 400,000—an average of one for about every 14.5 persons in the country (as compared to one for every 1.6 per-sons claimed today). ⁶ The very incidence of revivalism was itself a symptom of a situation where people combined a great anxiety to believe with a great inability to accept prevailing doctrine. The characteristic cycle from spiritual “deadness” to revivalist ecstasy to “backsliding” revealed a condition of apathy, occasionally energized by guilt into a frenzy of belief, but soon relapsing into the original indifference.

In such conditions, it was inevitable that people imbued with the democratic spirit should begin to revise the unacceptable doctrines in accordance with the new standards of justice and reasonableness. It was inevitable too that they should rebel against authoritarian forms of church polity. As Americans had already declared independence in politics, so at the end of the 18th and start of the 19th centuries Americans began to declare independence in religion. And, as the attempt to narrow the gap between political theory and the people had produced an extraordinary burst of political creativity, so the attempt to narrow the gap between theology and the people now brought about a great release of invention and energy in the field of religion.

The democratic impulse emphasized individual judgment and individual initiative. It was this impulse, for example, which led young Barton Warren Stone in the late 1790’s to revolt against the severe Presbyterian of his youth. The Presbyterian God professed great love for His children, Stone said, but then gave them commands which could not be obeyed and punished them for disobedience; such a God, he wrote, “no rational creature can love or honor”; “what man acting thus would not be despised as a monster, or demon in human shape, and be hissed from all respectable society?” If rational man were the measure of God, then Calvinism had to be rejected. As Stone later put it, “Calvinism is among the heaviest clogs on Christianity in the world. It is a dark mountain between heaven and earth, and is among the most discouraging hindrances to sinners from seeking the kingdom of God.” ⁷ And, where the democratic impulse moved Stone to challenge dogma, it led a young Methodist minister, James O’Kelley, to challenge polity. Rising against the episcopal organization of Methodism, O’Kelley formed a new group whose name testified to its character. They called themselves “Republican Methodists,” a plain assertion that the church was as necessary a field for republicanization as society itself.

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Stone and O’Kelley were only two of many men responding to the tensions between Calvinism and democracy by new religious departures; but they were men whose experiments were especially relevant, of course, to the story of Alexander Campbell. When Campbell himself arrived in America a few years later, he found the democratizing process even further advanced. And he himself had already in his native Scotland begun to respond to the same tensions between Calvinism and the new spirit—a fact which should caution those too easily inclined to interpret the rise of the Christian Churches as the by-product of religion on the frontier. Long before he ever saw the American wilderness, Campbell’s recoil from the ecclesiastical organization of the Scottish Presbyterians had given him a belief in independency in church polity. And the spreading faith in human capacity—as vital in Britain and France as in Kentucky and Tennessee—had already raised doubts in his mind concerning the rigid fatalism of the older Calvinism.

Yet Campbell was also uneasily aware that the surge toward private judgment in dogma and independency in organization was creating problems. In particular, these tendencies had accelerated a rush toward sectarianism which obviously conflicted with the universalist aspirations of Christianity. Alexander Campbell and his father, reared in the intense atmosphere of Scottish theological' disputation, with Seceders, Burghers, Anti-Burghers, Old Light Burghers, New Light Burghers and all the rest, had a peculiar detestation for what Thomas Campbell called "the bitter jarrings and janglings of a party spirit:' When they came to America, they found that their remarks on this theme provoked a heartening response. For their dislike of what they called "partyism" in religion had much in common with George Washington's warning in his Farewell Address against the "baneful effects of the spirit of party" in politics. Division among Christians, said Campbell's Declaration and Address of the Christian Association, was "a horrid evil," anti-Christian, anti-scriptural, anti-natural, "productive of confusion and of every evil work” ⁸ When the Campbells proposed to bring peace and unity to religion, they expressed aspirations highly congenial to the new democratic faith which, for all its individualism, nonetheless conceived society as uniform and homogeneous. "The appearance of party is a beacon proclaiming a tendency, which instantly alarms despotism," John Taylor of Caroline had said. " . . . General, and not party opinion, is the principle of our policy. ⁹

The Campbells thus confronted a dilemma on their arrival in the United States. On the one hand, the old religion had lost much of its relevance to people’s needs and hopes; on the other, agitated attempts to restore that relevance had produced only a confusion of clamoring sects. The need was plainly to restate the Christian faith in terms which would appeal to people’s sense of reason and justice, as Calvinism no longer did—but, at the same time, to do this in a way which, instead of promoting partyism, might provide even a stronger basis for Christian unity than the Westminster Confession. It was to this great task that the Campbells now dedicated themselves.

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What did the new democratic spirit seek of theology? Against the old belief in abstruse and complex doctrine, it insisted on simplicity and intelligibility. Against the old belief in dogmatic and binding creeds, it affirmed the right of private judgment. It wanted a God of mercy, not a God of wrath; and it saw the individual, not as a helpless instrument of unpredictable divine grace, but as a man capable of making his own contribution toward salvation. And, while in the last resort it gave priority to the right of private judgment, it still yearned for a rebirth of Christian unity.

The Campbells expressed this democratic spirit with great fidelity. Though the elder Campbell’s health had been the immediate reason for their migration to the United States, the decision came in an atmosphere when many of their fellow-countrymen, confronting dispiriting economic and political prospects in Scotland, were avowedly seeking better opportunities in the American democracy. After seven years in the Unted States Alexander Campbell wrote a relative in Scotland, “I cannot speak too highly of the advantages that the people in this country enjoy in being delivered from a proud and lordly aristocracy; and here it becomes very easy to trace the common national evils of all European countries to their proper source, and chiefly to that first germ of oppression, of civil and religious tyranny. . . I would not exchange the honor and privilege of being an American citizen for the position of your king.” ¹⁰

The nature of their audience confirmed their democratic convictions. Addressing predominantly Scotch-Irish congregations in western Pennsylvania and western Virginia, they were appealing to the hardy and self-reliant small farmers, shopkeepers and workers whose aspirations would help bring about the Jacksonian revolution. “The chief priests, the scribes and the rulers of the people are generally in league against us,” wrote Campbell almost in Jacksonian terms, recalling his tours of the eighteen twenties. As late as 1839, describing his communicants in the South, he wrote, “We have a few educated intelligent men, as we have a few rich and powerful; but the majority are poor, ignorant and uneducated.” ¹¹

Why had religion lost contact with the rising democracy? One trouble, the Camp bells felt, was the extent to which essential religion had been overlaid through the centuries with man-made speculation. The substitution of creeds for faith, as they saw it, was the source of authoritarianism, of factionalism and of unintelligibility. Soon after coming to America, Thomas Campbell protested against “the introduction of human opinions and human inventions into the faith and worship of the Church”; and Alexander Campbell repeatedly deprecated “the unauthorized though consecrated jargon on trinity, unity, atonement, sacrifice, etc., etc.,” The only sure footing the Campbells could discern in this tumult of dogma was the Bible itself; thus Thomas Campbell’s dictum: “Where the Scripture speaks, we speak; and where the Scriptures are silent, we are silent.” And Scriptures meant, above all, the New Testament. “Outside of the apostolic canon,” said Alexander Campbell, “there is not, as it appears to me, one solid foot of terra firma on which to raise the superstructure ecclesiastic.” “We neither advocate,” he said on another occasion, “Calvinism, Arminianism, Socinianism, Arianism, Trinitarianism, Unitarianism, Deism nor Sectarianism, but New Testamentism.” ¹²

In these terms they sought to clear away the sophistications which encrusted the biblical faith and to uncover an unassailable basis for Christian unity in New Testament primitivism. This attack on the obfuscations of theology had certain resemblances to the contemporary attacks of Jacksonian reformers on the obfuscations of the common law. As codification would reduce the authority of judges and introduce stability into law, so New Testamentism would reduce the authority of ministers and introduce stability into religion. In each case there was a desire to render the subject accessible to the common man and thus to cut the ground from under the privileged class—whether of priests or of judges—who had held power through their vested interests in obscurity.

Nor was this search for definiteness incompatible with the right of private judgment; it was, indeed, the process which validated that right. The essential distinction was between “faith”—that is, “the Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible”—and “opinion.” “While we earnestly contend for the faith,” said Alexander Campbell, “to allow perfect freedom of opinion and of the expression of opinion, is the true philosophy of church union and the sovereign antidote against heresy.” Men, in other words, should “leave the conscience free where God has left it free.” On occasion, he made the comparison with republican society explicit. “Civil rulers have no right to tolerate or punish men on account of their opinions in matters of religion. Neither have Christians a right to condemn their brethren for difference of opinion.” Little could be worse than insistence on dogma. “When men make communion in religious worship dependent on uniformity of opinion,” Campbell said, “they make self-love, instead of the love of God, the bond of union.” ¹³

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In this manner, Campbell sought to make faith more intelligible and more definite, providing a basis for unity while at the same time strengthening the right of private judgment. But the simplification of faith was only part of the process of democratization. Another part was the humanization of faith—the transformation of Christianity from a hopeless contest between a severe and all-power-ful Deity and corrupt and impotent man to a constructive collaboration between rational man and a solicitous God.

This process of humanization had many aspects. Thus the fall of man lost for Campbell its decisive importance in the divine economy; original sin became a chronic human tendency rather than a state of total and constitutional depravity. The atonement now proceeded out of the mercy of God rather than out of His of-fended sense of justice. God himself somewhat receded in Campbell’s scheme, and Christ assumed a new and central significance. When Campbell spoke of Christian unity, he meant without derogation to God, unity around Christ-”Christ alone being the head, the centre; his word the rule, and explicit belief of and manifest conformity to it in all things, the terms.” Or, as Isaac Errett summed it up, “We therefore urge the Word of God against human creeds; faith in Christ against faith in systems of theology; obedience to Christ rather than obedience to church authority; the Church of Christ in place of sects.” ¹⁴

The orientation of faith around Christ expressed the shift in interest from sin to salvation. Perhaps the most striking of Campbell’s theological innovations (or, as he would have said, “restorations”) was his reconsideration of the processes of salvation. This reconsideration revolved particularly around the meaning of baptism—the question which entangled Campbell in some of his sharpest controversies and which, as much as any other, compelled him against his first inclination to found a communion of his own. The problem of baptism had many aspects. Much of the controversy—for example, the argument about “sprinkling” versus “immersion”—followed from Campbell’s effort to perform the baptismal rite as closely as possible in the manner of the primitive church. But the aspect of baptism relevant here was Campbell’s reinterpretation of the rite in terms which gave new scope in the pursuit of salvation to human initiative and human self-esteem.

For the older Calvinists, acceptance into communion required an unmistakable and convulsive religious experience. The pretense or illusion of belief was not enough, for sinners were by definition incapable of authentic belief; they required first a shattering sense of illumination by the spirit of God—an experience of physical reconstitution and regeneration which alone could make faith possible. For many who believe in God, the failure to have such a conclusive verification of faith was the cause of great guilt and tribulation. Barton W. Stone, recalling his youthful search for regeneration, later wrote, “For one year I was tossed on the waves of uncertainty—laboring, praying, and striving to obtain saving faith—sometimes desponding, and almost despairing of ever getting it.” When preachers “labored to arouse me from my torpor by the terrors of God, and the horrors of hell,” Stone could only sink into “an indescribable apathy.” ¹⁵ Indeed, the demand for a prolonged inner upheaval as a prerequisite to conversion was an important factor in producing the contagion of religious apathy at the end of the 18th century.

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If a man felt he believed in God and wanted to join a church but still could not achieve the experience of regeneration, either he was condemned to the cycle of anguish and apathy, or else he might attempt a personal break-through of his own to faith. Thus Stone at last found resolution by yielding to the non-Calvinist conviction that God was love, that Christ had come to seek and save the lost. “I now saw,” he wrote, “that a poor sinner was as much authorized to believe in Jesus at first, as at last”—as much at the beginning of the process of conversion, that is, as at the end—”that now was the accepted time, and day of salvation.” ¹⁶

Alexander Campbell himself had come to religion in Scotland in a similar manner. After a period of struggle, he was enabled to put his trust in the Saviour and feel his reliance on Him: “it never entered into my head,” he later wrote, “to investigate the subject of baptism or the doctrines of the creed.” ¹⁷ In the United States, like Stone, he now vigorously condemned the thesis that protracted internal agony was a condition precedent to the capacity for faith. He sharply rejected the view, as he put it, “that a sinner is so dead and buried in his sin that, even after he has heard the voice of God, speaking by Apostles and Prophets, he must wait still for the Spirit to descend and work faith in his heart by a supernatural process before he attempts even to call upon the name of the Lord.” ¹⁸ For Campbell—and for the primitive church, as he read Scriptures—faith simply meant belief in testimony. If a person accepted the evidence of Scriptures, if he confessed his faith in Christ, he qualified, without further ado, for communion and salvation. His own decision was essential; he did not have to wait in torment for the visitation of the Holy Spirit. In short, Campbell regarded faith, repentance, baptism and the remission of sins as possible before the regeneration wrought by the Holy Spirit; while, for the older Calvinists, nothing was possible until after the months of questioning, doubt, terror and the final illumination.

What Campbell, Stone and the others thus contended was that even sinners were capable of believing the testimony of the Bible, of acting upon it, of coming to Christ, of obeying Him, and then of obtaining from Him salvation and the Holy Spirit. Against this view, Calvinism, in Campbell’s judgment, divested “man of every attribute that renders him accountable to his Maker, and assimilates all his actions to the bending of the trees or the tumults of the ocean occasioned by the tempest.” As Stone later wrote, “When we first began to preach these things, the people appeared as just awakened from the sleep of ages—then seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings.” Human responsibility was the key. Men were no longer impotent before God: they could do things of their own initiative to bring themselves into the area of salvation, and they could do them forthwith. No one with access to Scriptures, Campbell said, had any excuse for un-belief and unregeneracy; “those who have put on the Lord Jesus are invited to abound in all the joys, consolations and purifying influences of this Holy Spirit.” ¹⁹

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The democratization of religion involved more than the simplification and humanization of theology. It also involved a reconsideration of the problems of church organization. Here again Campbell turned to the New Testament for guidance; but here again his proposals expressed the democratic temper of the times. The Christian Churches were growing as a result of self-organization and self-determination. Stone and his followers came to the new movement from the Presbyterians, the “Republican Methodists” from Methodism, others from Baptistism. Campbell and the Disciples offered a congregational polity on democratic lines, in which each church was independent and each congregation chose and ordained its own officers. So mistrustful was he of ecclesiastical organization that, for a time, he objected to missionary, education and Bible societies and even to Sunday Schools. ²⁰

This mistrust carried over to the clergy itself. As the Jacksonian uprising had an anti-intellectual strain, leaving in its trail a scorn for lawyers and for scholars, so Campbell for many years had little use for the professional clergy. Preachers seemed to him a collection of clerical operators, raising people’s admiration of themselves for their own advantage, scheming to make more money and gain more influence, committed to bigotry, sectarianism and obscurantism. “As a body of men,” he wrote, “they have taken away the key of knowledge from the people.” The Campbells could find nothing in Scriptures making a “high degree of doctrinal information necessary for salvation: “the Church from the beginning did, and ever will, consist of little children and young men, as well as fathers.” Alexander Campbell’s own mission, as he saw it, was democratic and militant—it was “to take the New Testament out of the abuses of the clergy and put it into the hands of the people.” ²¹

There was in all this an element, as Henry Adams suggested, of calling on the church to “ignore what it could not comprehend,” as if intellectual difficulties must be nonessential because they were insuperable. ²² But Jacksonian Democracy, while resenting what seemed to it the arrogance of the educated, placed a high value on education itself. So too did Campbell, who fought for many years for the principle of free public education and set up a school of his own, Buffalo Seminary, as early as 1818. Bethany College, which honors me today, has remained, of course, the great monument to Alexander Campbell’s faith in education. Campbell’s growing concern for education and, in time, even for a trained ministry resulted no doubt in part from the needs of the Christian Churches, as soon as they were established as a separate denomination; it resulted too perhaps from the rising social status and expectations of the members of the Christian movement. But it testified more basically to Campbell’s own deep faith in education as—in his words of 1853—“one of the chief bulwarks of religion, morality, and representative government.” ²³

Yet his eventual acceptance of a professional clergy did not diminish his abhorrence for the whole idea of the clergy as a privileged group or for the notion of established churches. ²⁴ He praised the United States as “a country happily exempted from the baneful influence of a civil establishment of any peculiar form of Christianity.” When Ezra Stiles Ely, a Presbyterian minister, proposed “a Christian party in politics,” Campbell denounced him; and he strongly supported Richard M. Johnson’s report rejecting the Sabbatarian attempt to stop the Sunday mails—so strongly, indeed, as to give rise to an unsubstantiated tradition that he was the report’s author. Though Campbell carried his belief in the separation of church and state to the point of virtually ignoring the politics of the day (“I know of nothing more antipodal to the gospel than politics”), he was nonetheless expressing a predominant Jacksonian mood in his opposition to the political presumptions of the churches. ²⁵

The problems of the millennial enthusiasms of the day require further study; but no one can doubt a relationship between social conditions and the millennial dream. A belief in the millennium has been a characteristic faith of the disinherited. In certain respects, the establishment of utopian communities in the United States in these years represented a secularization of the millennial hope. Though Campbell himself was always a cautious millenarian, nonetheless he named his magazine the Millennial Harbinger and plainly believed that the millennium was impending. The millennium, he declared in 1841, “will be a state of greatly enlarged and continuous prosperity, in which the Lord will be exalted and his divine spirit enjoyed in an unprecedented measure. All the conditions of society will be vastly improved; wars shall cease, and peace and good will among men will generally abound . . . Crimes and punishments will cease; governments will recognize human rights . . . The seasons will become more mild; climates more salubrious, health more vigorous, labor less, lands more fertile, and the animal creation more prolific.” ²⁶ The very language is reminiscent of contemporary predictions of Albert Brisbane and other disciples of Fourier.

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If Campbell expressed many of the aspirations of American democracy in the Jacksonian period, he expressed too his share of its confusions. His most conspicuous failure perhaps was his hesitation to come to grips with the moral challenge of slavery. While he was nominally in favor of abolition and had a vivid sense of the demoralizing consequences of the slavery system, he nonetheless could see no Christian reason to affirm the evil of slave-holding. Slavery, he lamely concluded, was inexpedient but not immoral. This equivocation may have been prompted in part by the explosive character of the issue for a church with many members in slave territory. But perhaps it came more profundly from his reluctance to apply Christianity to any social or political problems.²⁷

Campbell’s long campaign against the Roman Catholic Church expressed another of the less appealing aspects of the mass democracy of the day. While Campbell refrained on the whole from the cheap anti-Catholicism of the Know-Nothing type, he denounced Catholicism as “essentially anti-American, being opposed to the genius of all free institutions, and positively subversive of them.” ²⁸ Actually his own theology, with its emphasis on freedom of opinion, offered a formula for religious pluralism in America. Campbell underestimated the extent to which a vital pluralism could absorb even a faith with the universalist aspirations of Roman Catholicism.

These lapses of clear-sightedness were perhaps part of the somewhat literal and legalistic cast of mind which Campbell sometimes brought to religion—and here again he was typical of tendencies in the democracy of his time. Tocqueville, visiting America in the eighteen thirties, observed that the language of the law had become in some measure a vulgar tongue; “the spirit of the law, which is produced in the schools and courts of justice, gradually penetrates beyond their walls into the bosom of society, where it descends to the lowest classes, so that at last the whole people contract the habits and the tastes of the judicial magistrate.” ²⁹ Campbell’s effort to solve all problems by invoking the words of the New Testament with the naive belief that these words required no particular interpretation encouraged a verbalistic attention to the letter of the law, sometimes—as in the case of slavery—at the clear expense of the spirit. And, as Dr. Lunger has pointed out, Campbell concentrated on the Acts and Epistles rather than on the Gospels and the Sermon on the Mount. This emphasis further deprived his faith of the prophetic quality—the sense of tension between history and eternity—responsible for the more penetrating moral insights.

Yet Campbell, in his very lack of irony and tragedy, was once again faithful to the democratic mood of his times. These were days of expansion and hope, and they required a reinterpretation of religion. The sterile and mechanical pessimism of the older Calvinism, while retaining the language of tragedy, did not have, in any high sense, the tragic spirit; it was without the vitality to adjust to the new age. A group of religious pioneers attempted the exercise in adjustment. Because they were men of moral sensitivity and religious devotion, they sought earnestly to preserve the essence of the Christian tradition as they understood it. Because they loved their nation and their fellow-Americans, and because they believed profoundly in human dignity and reason, they sought to have religion recognize the capacities and aspirations of the people. Among these men, Alexander Campbell, by his high-mindedness, his generosity and his serenity, occupies a leading place. His theology and his life display his success in accommodating religion to the spirit of the times while keeping the sense of vantage-points beyond history without which religion would lose its meaning.

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Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. is Professor of History, Harvard University. This essay was originally given at Bethany College and is here presented with permission of the author.