“AND HE WENT FORTH CONQUERING
AND TO CONQUER” (Rev. 6:2)
By Louis Cochran

If I were to choose a text for my remarks here this afternoon, I do not believe one could be chosen more applicable to Alexander Campbell, and the occasion for which we have gathered, than these few words of the second verse of the sixth chapter of Revelation as recorded by St. John the Beloved. Led by the Saviour, and the Apostles, and the great souls of the Universal Church, they march into the future — “conquering and to conquer,” teaching, as Timothy said, that “there is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Jesus Christ.” (1 Timothy 5); preaching the Oneness of all Christians; the Restoration of that Unity of the Church for which Jesus prayed in His final agony, before the Crucifixion—that they all might be One even as He and the Father are One. (John 17:21)

Unlike the great religious reformers of the ages, to whom we all owe so much, such as Huss, and Zwingli, and John Knox, and Calvin, and John Wesley, and the greatest of them all, Martin Luther, the Campbells, Thomas and Alexander, envisioned not a “reformed church,” but the restoration of the Church of Christ as it had existed during the days of the Apostles, and in the First Century, before apostasy began to bear its ugly fruit. As the late Thomas W. Phillips so well said in his book, “The Church of Christ,” the finest exposition of the Early Church ever written by a layman:

“There have been reformers of churches and numerous reformers of reformed churches, but none has ever attempted to reform the Church of Christ (p. 282) . . . The religion of Jesus was complete within itself, and was established once and for all time. He has no rival and no successor. (p. 299-300).”

“The Church of Christ on earth is essentially, intentionally and constitutionally one,” proclaimed Thomas Campbell in his Declaration and Address, “and nothing ought to be an article of faith, a term of communion, or an obligatory rule for the Constitution and government of the Church except what is expressly taught by Christ and His Apostles.” Full knowledge of all revealed truth, he said, is not necessary to entitle persons to membership in the Church, “neither should they for this purpose be required to make a profession more extensive than their know ledge. (Prop. 8) Those who are thus qualified should love one another as brothers and be united as children of one family (Prop. 9), for division among Christians,” said Father Thomas, “is a horrid evil, fraught with many evils.”

Upon these simple yet profound statements of truth, Alexander and Thomas Campbell took their stand, and spent their lives in working for the Restoration of that Apostolic Era when Christians recognized each other as brothers, united as the children of one father, with Christ their Lord. Years later in that incomparable statement of belief, The Christian System, first published in 1835, Alexander Campbell summed it up even more simply. “The grandeur, sublimity, and beauty of the foundation of hope, and of ecclesiastical, or social union, established by the author and founder of Christianity,” said Campbell, “consisted in this: that the belief of one fact . . . is all that is requisite, as far as faith goes, to salvation. The belief of this one fact and submission to one institution expressive of it, is all that is required of Heaven to admission into the Church. . . . The one fact is expressed in a single proposition-that Jesus the Nazarene is the Messiah. . . The one institution is baptism.” (Christian System, pp. 121-122)

It was in this belief, this dedication to one consuming cause, “the peculiar plea,” as it was called by scoffers, for the Restoration of the Union of all the followers of Christ, based upon these essentials in which all Christians agree, that motivated Alexander Campbell in almost every act of his adult life. Like the Apostle Paul, he “went forth conquering and to conquer” as a missionary, teacher, and preacher, always endeavoring, according to the injunction of the Great Apostle, “to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace;” preaching always that there is “one Lord, one baptism, one God and Father of all!” (Eph. 4:3-5:15)

It was to implement this plea to forsake all human creeds, and vested interests, and return to the teachings of Christ and the Apostles, and that alone, after their failure to influence the orthodox churches, that Alexander Campbell first established in the Fall of 1818 in his home, the Campbell farmhouse (for some reason then and now called a “mansion”), the Buffalo Seminary, a school for boys who, he hoped, would grow up into Timothys of the Faith. But the young Alexander was again disappointed. As Dr. Robert Richardson tells us in a classic understatement, he “soon found that his materials were not suitable.” R. - p. 492), and that “it did not serve to any extent the chief purpose for which he had established it, which was the preparation of young men colabor in behalf of the primitive gospel” On one occasion during this period, Richardson tells us, when a few of the hoped-co-be Timothys, who unfortunately could find admittance nowhere else, attempted a “rebellion,” the young teacher first demonstrated that he possessed administrative ability of the highest order. Dr. Richardson tells us that “Mr. Campbell seizing unexpectedly the ringleader with a strong hand, gave him so severe a castigation before the whole school, with a whip he had provided, that he was completely subdued, and from that time on the Master’s authority was perfectly established.” R. p. 492) But Alexander Campbell had no desire to operate a reform school, no matter how successful, and discontinued the school in 1823 to devote his major time to his preaching, and to the publication of a new religious journal, “The Christian Baptist,” which was to start such a buzzing in the ears of the theologians that it has not subsided to this day.

Believing as he did, to use his own words, that “no class of men in any department of society, have more of the good or evil destiny of the world in their hands, and under their influence, than the teachers of the schools and colleges” (Lectures - p. 245), it was inevitable that he should again seek to multiply his voice and of those like him in the Restoration Movement, and co establish another school And that he did, without audible encouragement from any man, without endowment, and without means other than he could himself supply, sustained only by his unconquerable faith that it was the Lord’s will Thus it was that in these rugged hills, on his own farm, on acreage supplied by him, that Bethany College was established in 1840, opening its doors on October 21, 1841, to about 120 students, and first began in Stewart’s Inn, the College Library, then consisting mainly of a few books on religion furnished by the Campbells, and now to be housed and implemented in this splendid new building supplied through the generosity of the Phillips family.

Although denied by circumstances of the advantages of formal college training, Alexander Campbell, we well know, had very definite ideas as co its need and purposes.

“Colleges and churches,” he said, in his famous address on colleges, “go hand in hand in the progress of Christian civilization . . . and all colleges and schools are, or ought to be, founded on some great principle in human nature and in human society.”

Alexander Campbell believed, like Alexander Pope, that “the proper study of mankind is man.”

“Hence,” he said, “the first principle to be satisfactorily settled is: What is man?

“If man, then, were a mere animal, his education, of course, should differ but little from that of the dog, or horse, or the ox. And, indeed, with shame be it spoken, we occasionally find some beings in human form not even so well educated as their dogs, oxen, and horses.” (Lectures, pp. 291-296)

“Lord,” he asked, “What is man?”

And then he answered: “Thine own offspring, reared of the dust of the earth, inspired with a portion of Thine own spirit, and endowed with an intellectual, and a moral as well as an animal nature.

“A man without reason is not a man, although he may wear the outward form and livery of man, and reason without religion is both halt and blind, although it may be, by the simpleton, presumed

to be perfect and complete. (Lectures, p. 927)

“And where derived you your learning and science? From books. And whence the books? Originally doubtlessly from those who were nurtured in colleges. (Lectures, p. 301)

“Men and not brick and mortar make colleges,” said Alexander Campbell, “and these colleges make men. These men make books, and these books make the living world in which we individually live and move and have our being.”

Like Shakespeare, whom he often quoted, Alexander Campbell believed that:

“He hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book; he hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink; his intellect is not replenished; he is only an animal, only sensible in the duller parts.” (Loves’ Labor Lost, Act. IV, See. 2, 1)

We must remember that Alexander Campbell, though a lover of books, and a powerful, dynamic leader in religious thought, was no theologian. He despised the name, and the profession, as the makers of creeds and the brewers of obtuse and metaphysical obscurations which obscured and distorted the simple teachings of Christ and His Apostles so gladly heard and understood by the multitudes. And so he saw to it that the charter of his beloved Bethany College forever forbade the teaching within its walls of theology, as such, or of any sectarian creed, but that instead the literature, and the religious teachings of the Bible, would be given its students as a daily textbook; and the inspiring fountainhead of the College Library.

“We make no apology,” he declared many times, “for thus uniting the Bible and the College. The Bible is the charter of all our wisdom, and alpha and the omega of all the sciences, and the knowledge of man as he was, as he is, and as he shall hereafter and forever be.”

Alexander Campbell was proud of Bethany College, which he considered the prime achievement of his life, and when it burned to the ground in December, 1857, and only Stewart’s Inn was left, he stood almost alone in his faith and unconquerable will as he saw in his mind’s eye the new Bethany College rising from its ashes more beautiful and better equipped, more influential in its outreach than before, and with the Bible and its eternal truths still its everlasting cornerstone. Alexander Campbell lived to see the beginnings of the new Bethany, even as he had dreamed it, and in his brief speech at the laying of the cornerstone of the new College in 1858, voiced again his pride that Bethany College was the first college in the Union, and “the first known to any history accessible to us,” he says, “that was founded upon the Holy Bible as an everyday lecture, and an everyday study, as the only safe and authoritative textbook of humanity, theology, and Christology, of all true science based upon the problems of Divinity, or the world, or worlds, that preceded this, or shall succeed it.”

Campbell believed with Emerson that “books are the best of things, well used; abused, they are among the worst. But what is the right use? They are for nothing but to inspire,” said Emerson. So thought Campbell, and for that reason the Bible, “the only infallible textbook of the true science of mankind,” said Mr. Campbell, was, and is, a textbook in the life of Bethany College; and the foundation. of its Library today.

Though the Bible was the foundation, the one indispensable text in the curriculum of Bethany College, its Library from the beginning was a choice, though a small, collection of books. From his early youth Alexander Campbell was a lover of books, a reader, and a writer of books. From his own journals written in after years we get a vivid picture of the young Alexander, when his mother and the younger children had been safely taken ashore after the wreck of the Hibernia off the Hebrides in October, 1808, as he risked his life in the rescue of the few carefully selected books of his erudite father, Thomas, which had been stored away in the hold of the ship, and were then floating about in the water between decks. Some of these precious books were later made a part of the first Library of Bethany College to be consumed in the flames when the College burned in 1857.

Alexander Campbell loved books as he loved life, as the mirrors of that life; as the storehouse of the wisdom of the ages, and the hope of posterity. He was at home in the world of books. When he was not preaching, or teaching, or trying to find the time to look after his business interests, which supplied all the rest, he was writing books. He lived to see 69 of his published volumes given to the world, including a new translation of the Bible, the Campbell, Macknight, Doddridge translation, which he edited and published and presented to the religious world in 1826; and The Christian System, a statement of his religious beliefs which is still read and studied in many of the colleges and seminaries of the land. In addition to the seven volumes of The Christian Baptist, and the forty-six volumes of the Millennial Harbinger, after one hundred years still read by thousands of Christian people as avidly as when they were first published as monthly journals, there were the stenographic reports of his great debates which circulated in the thousands of copies, and gained many adherents not only to the Movement to eliminate man-made creeds and to restore the simplicities of primitive Christianity, but were acclaimed by all Christian communions.

His 12-day debate at Cincinnati in 1829 with the celebrated capitalist-socialist-atheist and philosopher—Robert Owen—in which he defended the Evidences of Christianity against the attacks of the renowned atheist after no other clergyman of any communion would accept Owen’s challenge; his debate with Catholic Bishop John B. Purcell, also at Cincinnati, in 1837, on the Bishop’s premise “that the Protestant Reformation is the root of all evil;” and his final 16-day debate in 1843 with Dr. Nathan 1. Rice, at which Henry Clay was the moderator, on baptism and human creeds, were published in volumes which circulated in the many thousands through out the world, and are widely read and quoted today. Any Library which could boast only the Bible, and the works of Alexander Campbell, would be a creditable Library, indeed, even though Campbell personally did not style himself as a fine or profound writer. He was too busy; he wrote too rapidly, rarely having the time to revise his articles before publication; and his speeches and sermons were all extemporaneous. Nevertheless, such was the fountainhead of his knowledge, and his vast learning, that his spoken words, flowing as they did in cascading torrents, read often like the words of a master poet; always clear and concise, and understandable, which is the best writing of all.

“The true university,” according to Thomas Carlyle, “is a collection of books.” Alexander Campbell would agree with that definition today, and would be proud not only of the splendid Library which his beloved Bethany College has acquired, and the magnificence of the building which we dedicate here this afternoon, I think he would also take an humble pride in “the Campbell Room” and perhaps might mildly suggest in that high, clear, resonant voice of his, that it could well be a good place for some of the present-day students of Bethany to begin the reading of his wise, old and yet ever new, religious journals, the youthful, ebullient Christian Baptist, and the more reserved Millennial Harbinger. I think he would agree, too, with the ancient proverb that “He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry out the wealth of the Indies,” and would suggest to the student there could be no better place to avail himself of that wealth of creative reading than in the fine Library which the College now possesses.

Alexander Campbell would not agree with Rufus Choate that “a book is the only immortality,” but he assuredly did agree with John Milton in the conviction that: “As good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.” Campbell was one with Voltaire in the conviction that “All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books,” and during a long life he did what he could to contribute his mete to the store of human knowledge. As he was proud of “his college” all the days of his life, so would he be proud of it today under the guidance of President Gresham, who walks and talks in the true tradition of the “Sage of Bethany,” and those who work with your President in the continuing building of a great college whose aim is not only the enrichment of the mind in a sturdy body, but a true enlightenment of the soul.

“One must not be swallowed up in books,” as John Wesley warned, but a human soul liberated from the fetters of human creeds; a free mind and heart returning to the simple and yet eternal teachings of the Saviour and the Apostles as recorded in the New Testament, would use books as they are intended to be used, as a storehouse of the knowledge and wisdom of the ages, and for the inspiration of the soul.

“All books, like human souls,” said Thomas Carlyle, “are divided into two kinds: the sheep and the goats.” Even good books may be wrongfully used by unthinking men; and the book which was intended to be a guide, becomes a tyrant; the end, the book itself, becomes the means. As Emerson said, instead of men thinking, we have merely the book-worm, a book collector only; one who values books as things, and not as they are related to human nature and wisdom. It was of such a person, a Lord, no less, than another Scotsman, one well known to Alexander Campbell, named Robert Burns, once wrote after observing certain other (though uninvited) guests during a visit to his Lordship’s ornamental, but unused, Library. Wrote Burns:

“Through and through the inspired leaves,

Ye maggots, make your windings;

But O respect his Lordship’s taste,

And spare the golden bindings!”

Too often this has been the fate of the writings of Alexander Campbell. There are millions of people today who make a fetish and a shibboleth of them, but who read them not. They put them to no better use than did the maggots winding through the books in his Lordship’s Library; and accomplish about the same result. They decimate and distort their usefulness; and shape them to their own selfish ends. There are those today who cry for Christian Unity, and claim Alexander Campbell as their leader, who look upon equally sincere and devoted but different-minded advocates of that same Christian Union, as preached by Thomas and Alexander Campbell, as heretics—as the Campbells were labeled in their day. Thus we have in our divided Brotherhood those who believe in open communion, and those who believe in closed communion; those who practice open church membership, and those who will have none but the immersed upon their church rolls. There are those who use instrumental music in formal worship, and other Christians who believe earnestly that the use of instrumental music in Christian worship is a mortal sin. There are those who advocate cooperative missionary effort among the churches, and those who will have none of it. We have others call upon the name of Alexander Campbell who berate Sunday School, or Sunday School literature; still others who decry the use of hymns in worship, preferring the psalms, and the Songs (though not all of them!) of Solomon; some who will affiliate with the National Council of Churches, and others who look upon any organized Christian effort among the denominations as a mockery of the Word of God. We even have “the single cupper,” earnest souls who tolerate only single cups, or goblets, at the Lord’s Supper, and those who can find no sin in the use of individual communion cups; and in Hawaii not long ago I came across a “Campbellite” Christian Church whose pastor forbids his flock to observe either the Christmas or the Easter season because such observances are not expressly commanded in the Scriptures, and, says this pastor, quoting Thomas Campbell: “Where the Scriptures are silent, we are silent!”

But we must not be dismayed by this confusion. Alexander Campbell, like all great men, was greatly misunderstood and misinterpreted. There are few, either today or yesterday, who can climb to the heights with him.

How halt and blind and deaf we are!

“It is not the object of my efforts to make men think alike on a thousand themes,” Campbell explained again and again. As he pleaded during the Rice debate in 1843, “Let men think as they please on any matter of human opinion, and upon doctrines of religion, provided only that they hold the Head, Christ, and keep His Commandments . . .” Nine years before he had emphasized the same truth in another manner in the Millennial Harbinger (1834). “Where we cannot agree in opinion we will agree to differ;” (he did not say “fight,” or “ambush” one another!); “and a free intercourse will do more to enlighten us, and to reform all abuses, than years of controversy and volumes of defamation.” (MH, 1834, p. 106) “Nothing is proposed,” he wrote in the Harbinger in 1836 (pp. 28-30) “as a bond of peace on earth other than the bond of peace in Heaven, which is all comprehended in the cardinal and sublime proposition that Jesus the Nazarene is the Messiah, the Son of God.” On this fundamental truth, as given in the Confession of Peter, the greatest declaration in history, as Paul said, “Other foundations can no man lay!” (1 Cor. 3:11)

This fundamental truth preached by Alexander Campbell, and others like him, stripped of all the impedimenta of human creeds, was the inspiration of all his efforts, including the establishment of this College; and it is that plea alone which is the supreme justification for our existence as a Brotherhood. But others have taken Campbell’s teachings, as they have of all great men, and wrapped themselves smugly into their separate little cells of truth, valiantly refusing to accept the whole, or even to view it, except through narrowed spectacles, and in the name of Alexander Campbell have fashioned after their own likenesses splinter-sects into the Church of Christ, which is the body of our Lord, which repudiate the very essence of His teachings. They are, some of them, at least consistent. They do not agree with Campbell, or with Ralph Waldo Emerson, that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” “With consistency, a great soul simply has nothing to do!” said Emerson. And so in a manner of speaking it was with Alexander Campbell. While hewing always to the fundamental truth that Jesus Christ is the Messiah, the Son of God, and in his behalf in the priesthood of all Believers, he changed his mind, and his convictions, about many things during that long tortuous journey from the City of Destruction to that Celestial City that “stood before a mighty hill,” so beautifully described by John Bunyan. As a youth of twenty he changed his mind as to the validity of human creeds and forever renounced them. From a closed communionist, he became a firm believe in open communion, and as a result in every congregation of our divided Brotherhood in this country today, all Christians of whatever persuasion are asked only to examine themselves before partaking of the Lord’s Supper; once he was against organized Sunday Schools, later he became a warm advocate of them; he changed his mind as to the value of cooperative missionary work, and was, for the last fifteen years of his life, the first and only President of the American Christian Missionary Society; he eventually changed his mind as to the worth of an especially trained ministry; the value of National Church Conventions, and central church organization in general.

Baptism for Alexander Campbell could only mean immersion, and yet he acknowledged as fellow Christians the unimmersed of all Christian denominations who confessed Jesus Christ as their Lord and Master and who in accordance with their best knowledge and belief obeyed His Commandments. As a follower of Jesus Christ, Campbell acknowledged no name but Christian, or Disciple, but he admitted that there were others of different religious persuasion as sanctified as he. He sat in council with both Unitarians and Quakers. He acknowledged as Christian “Everyone who believes in his heart that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah, the Son of God, repents of his sins, and obeys Him in all things according to his measure of knowledge of His will. . . . It is the image of Christ, the Christian looks for and loves,” said Campbell in the famous Lunenburg letter in 1837, “and this does not consist in being exact in a few items but in general devotion to the whole truth as far as is known.”

Of course, Alexander Campbell was misunderstood and misinterpreted, as he is today and will be the day after tomorrow. To be great is to be misunderstood, and Alexander Campbell is truly one of the great men of the ages. But if, as Emerson says, “Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; and every institution is but the lengthened shadow of one man,” so then we can say in humble pride, and truth, that the cause of Christian Unity today, the true Universal Church, is but the lengthened shadow of Alexander Campbell, and of Thomas Campbell, his father, and those other consecrated and humble spirits associated with him in the early Restoration Movement, such as Barton Stone, Walter Scott, and others like them. Bethany College is a part of the legacy of that great man who once walked these paths, and who planned the Gothic beauty of this sequestered college, and who brought his own books, and those he had rescued from the sea when but a boy, to form its first Library. The students, the faculty, the President, the Board of Trustees, the Alumni, and friends, such munificent benefactors as the Thomas W. Phillips family, can all take pride that they, too, stand with this luminous spirit of the ages who in his search for Christian Union “came forth conquering and to conquer,” and who will prevail, as Truth will ultimately prevail in all things.

To paraphrase in part the closing words of Alexander Campbell in his “Address on Colleges,” delivered before the Teachers’ Convention at Wheeling in 1854: “If ignorance be a reproach to any people, and if intelligence and righteousness exalt a nation,” and we remain true to the precepts, and the leadership bequeathed to us by the founder of this great College in the Movement for the Restoration of that Christian Unity for which the Saviour prayed, we shall yet stand before the world “great and happy and powerful, fair as a morning without clouds, bright as the sun!” a United Christian Brotherhood in the vanguard of a United Christian people.

May the Almighty and Merciful Father grant us the wisdom, the humility, and the courage to hold steadfast to our sacred heritage.

_________________

Mr. Cochran first presented this essay as the Dedication Address for Phillips Memorial Library, Bethany College, June 4, 1960. It is published here for the first time.

 

A philosophy of life which involves no sacrifice turns out in the end to be merely an excuse for being the sort of person one is. — T. S. Eliot