A PRESBYTERIAN CLERGYMAN EVALUATES
ALEXANDER CAMPBELL AND HIS WORK

Concerning the man who wrote the following letter Alexander Campbell said, “Herman Humphrey, D.D., formerly President of Amherst College, Massachusetts, is a gentleman and a theologian of well established character. As a writer of much vigor, fervid eloquence, and good taste, he occupies a very high standing amongst his contemporaries; and as a good, sound, orthodox Presbyterian clergyman, he has few superiors in the country.”

President Humphrey’s two letters concerning Alexander Campbell appeared in the New York Observer in about 1850, and they were republished by Campbell along with his response in volume 21 (1850) of the Millennial Harbinger. After more than a century it appears that the disciples themselves are confused about the relevance of the Restoration concept. Such criticisms as the following will not only provide interesting descriptions of Campbell, but will allow us to see some of the problems the Movement faced in his time. We think it helpful to look at the early stages of the work of our pioneers through the eyes of their opponents. --- THE EDITOR

No man of any religious denomination in this part of the country, has kept himself so prominently before the public for the last five and twenty years, or wielded so wide an influence, as Dr. Alexander Campbell, the acknowledged head and founder of that numerous secession from the regular Baptist order, which bears his name. He is now, and has been for many years, president of their College, in Bethany, Va. Having heard so much of him on my former visit to Kentucky, and since that time, I own that when, a few weeks ago, I understood he was in town, and would preach in the Campbellite church, I had a strong curiosity to see and hear him. I did not think it right to gratify this curiosity, by leaving my own place of worship on the Sabbath, but I had two opportunities in the course of the week.

Though on the first evening, I went half an hour before the time, I found the house and aisles densely crowded from the porch up to the pulpit stairs. Very many, I am sure, must have gone away because they could find no room, even to stand, within hearing of the preacher’s voice.

At length Dr. Campbell made his way up through the crowd, and took his seat in the pulpit. He is somewhat above the middle stature, with broad shoulders, a little stooping, and though stoutly built, rather spare and pale. He has a high intellectual forehead, a keen dark eye, somewhat shaded, and a well covered head of gray hair, fast changing into the full bloom of the almond tree. I think he must be rather over than under sixty-five years of age. He looks like a hard-working man, as he has been from his youth up. Very few could have endured so much mental and physical labor, as has raised him to the commanding position which he occupies, and so long sustained him in it. His voice is not strong, evidently owing, in part at least, to the indifferent state of his health, but it is clear and finely modulated. His enunciation is distinct; and as he uses no notes, his language is remarkably pure and select. In his delivery, he has not much action, and but little of that fervid outpouring which characterizes western and southern eloquence. There is nothing vociferous and impassioned in his manner. I think he is the most perfectly self-possessed, the most perfectly at ease in the pulpit, of any preacher I ever listened to, except, perhaps, the celebrated Dr. John Mason, of New York. No gentleman could be more free and unembarrassed in his own parlor. At the same time, there was not the least apparent want of deference for his audience.

In laying out his work, his statements are simple, clear and concise; his topics are well and logically arranged; his reasoning is calm and deliberate, but full of assurance. His appeals are not very earnest, nor indicative of deep feeling; but, nevertheless, winning and impressive in a high degree. There were many fine, and some truly eloquent passages in the two discourses which I heard; but they seemed to cost him no effort, and to betray no consciousness on his part that they were fine. In listening to him, you feel that you are in the presence of a great man. He speaks like a “master of assemblies,” who has entire confidence in the mastery of his subject and his powers, and who expects to carry conviction to the minds of his hearers, without any of those adventitious aids on which ordinary men find it necessary to rely. On both evenings when I heard him, he held the great congregation, for an hour and a half, in that profound stillness which shows that his listeners are not aware of the lapse of time.

Dr. Campbell’s first discourse was an exceedingly interesting eulogy, if I may so call it, upon the Bible, glancing rapidly at some of the internal proofs of its divine origin, dwelling as much as his time would allow, upon its wonderful history, biography and prophecies, and following the sacred stream down through the several dispensations, or, as he expressed it, through “the star-light and moon-light ages of the patriarchs, and of the Jewish commonwealth,” till the glorious Sun of Righteousness rose upon the world, and introduced the Christian era.

The text on the following evening was, “Great is the mystery of godliness.” It was an able and orthodox discourse throughout. He dwelt chiefly upon the two clauses of the text, “justified in the Spirit, received up into glory;” and I cannot, in justice, refrain from acknowledging, that I never remember to have listened to, or to have read a more thrilling outburst of sacred eloquence, than when he came to the scene of the coronation of Christ, and quoted that sublime passage from the 24th Psalm, beginning, “Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, that the King of Glory may come in;” when he represented all the angels, principalities and powers of heaven, as coming together, to assist, as it were, in placing the crown upon the Redeemer’s head.

Dr. Campbell is certainly a great man. He is a Scotchman by birth; was educated, I believe, in the University of Glasgow; was licensed by one of the Presbyteries in Scotland, and emigrated to this country at an early age, with his father, who was also a Presbyterian preacher. They settled first on the southern border of Pennsylvania. What year they came over, or how long they remained in the Presbyterian connection, I have not been able to learn; but it could not have been many years, for both broke off and joined the Baptists in 1812. Alexander “being a young man of great natural gifts, a cool, clear head, a smooth, oily eloquence, a respectable share of learning, considerable knowledge of human nature, and a keen, polemic turn,” the Baptists welcomed him with open arms, as a great acquisition to their denomination. Low as their opinion was, at that time, of “book-learning,” they were glad enough to have a champion come over to their ranks, armed cap-a-pie, for any future conflict with the Presbyterians, whom he had left on the subject of baptism. But they little knew what was to follow. Mr. Campbell soon convinced them that he did not come over to fight their battles under any dictation, nor to stop where he found them; but to lead them on “unto perfection.” He soon commenced a weekly paper, which he entitled the Christian Baptist, and which had a wide circulation. In this paper he gradually brought out those views of baptismal regeneration which so distracted and rent the Baptist churches of Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee, for many years, and resulted in one of the most remarkable schisms which can be found in the ecclesiastical history of this country. In this great reformation, as Mr. Campbell doubtless regarded it, he was essentially aided by the great stress which the old Baptists laid upon the efficacy of immersion; making it fall, as their preachers were understood to hold, but little short of spiritual regeneration. Mr. Campbell had to go but one step further to reach the point at which he aimed. Discarding all creeds, as mere human inventions, he maintained that “Believe and be baptized,” were the only requirements of the gospel; and that upon this broad Bible platform persons ought to be received into the church, without asking any more questions. They might believe the scriptures in any sense they chose, and no one had any right to inquire how they understood any chapter or verse. That was a matter, he insisted, between God and themselves alone.

Mr. Campbell’s reasonings in the pulpit and by his pen, in support of the new doctrine, were so extremely plausible, and men are always so ready to forsake “the old path up the hill of difficulty,” and take the newest and easiest road to heaven, it is no wonder that “he drew away disciples after him,” and became, as I have said, the acknowledged founder and head of that numerous sect in the west and the south, which now bears his name.

I have no room in this letter to follow him in his extraordinary career, down to the time of the celebrated debate, of nearly three weeks, which took place at Levington, in 1843, between him and Dr. Rice, now of Cincinnati; but must reserve what I intend to finish in this, for another communication.

(Space will not permit the inclusion of all of President Humphrey’s second letter, but we will give those paragraphs that are especially critical of Campbell’s work of reformation. Humphrey’s judgments, we think, are relevant to our own study of the meaning of Restoration. A good discipline for us is to ask ourselves how we would answer him. Campbell answers both letters in detail, which we cannot now include. Our chief concern in this presentation is to gain some insight into how the Restoration Movement was evaluated by its responsible opposition.)

“Such was the zeal of the proclaimers,” says Dr. Davidson, one of the highest authorities to which I have had access, “that they swept over Virginia, Kentucky, and the other western country, like a torrent; whole churches, both of Baptists and Methodists, declaring for them, and their progress has been onward ever since, swelling, in less than twenty years to 150,000 members and upwards.” Mr. Campbell boasted in his debate with Dr. Rice, in 1842, that his denomination numbered 200,000, not all, however, in this country.

The professed object of these Reformers is, by abjuring written creeds, and taking the Bible alone as their platform, to break up all the existing denominations, and bring them together into one great Christian brotherhood, having “one Lord, one faith, one baptism.” It is an imposing scheme, well calculated to dazzle weak eyes; but practically to corrupt and ruin the churches, by filling them with the most discordant materials. Anybody who will examine the theory of one grand organization, on Mr. Campbell’s plan, will see that it opens the door to every shade of error which men can embrace, under the general and very indefinite declaration that they believe the Bible to be the Word of God; and thus breaks down the distinction between the church and the world. So it has proved in the Campbellite churches.

Mr. Campbell himself tells us in his Millennial Harbinger, a monthly of immense circulation, which he has edited and published for more than twenty years, “We have had a very large portion of this unhappy influence to contend with. Every sort of doctrine has been proclaimed, by almost all sorts of preachers, under the broad banner, and with the supposed sanction of the begun Reformation.”

So it always must be where there is no creed, and no way of ascertaining how applicants for admission into the church understand the Bible. There are, I know not how many more than thirty different sects in this great valley, claiming the Christian name, not one of whom could be shut out or questioned upon Mr. Campbell’s scheme. Fifty men, if so many can be found, “holding all sorts of doctrine,” and no two of them holding the same, might unite and call themselves a church of the Reformers, having come out from all the other sects for this very purpose. And this is the sort of union by which the world is to be converted! . . .

The consequence is, that “every sort of doctrine” is proclaimed by their preachers, and embraced by their members. This being the case, it is a mystery to many, how they have kept together so long, and spread themselves over so wide a territory.

It is certainly a remarkable chapter in ecclesiastical history. I have no doubt it is mainly to be ascribed to the extraordinary influence of their founder. I had almost said their law-giver. Mr. Campbell has for more than twenty years wielded a power over men’s minds, on the subject of religion, which has no parallel in the Protestant history of this country, nor in the Romish either. No single individual has ever made such inroads upon other denominations, and in his life-time planted churches and been the animating spirit and soul of them all for a quarter of a century, as Alexander Campbell.

And how has he done it? By a rare combination of those talents which arc necessary to make a popular leader; by great knowledge of human nature; by an education far superior to that of any of his disciples; by his smooth and captivating eloquence as a preacher; by his skill as a debater; by his easy address and vast personal acquaintance in his wide circuits, and by the untiring industry of his pen and his press. Besides the books which he has published, and which are everywhere found in the hands of his followers, the Millennial Harbinger, edited, and the important articles written by himself, goes monthly into thousands of families, and gives him a sort of ubiquity of influence which no other ecclesiastic in this country has ever had over so many minds and so wide a space. This I take to be the secret, if there be any, of Mr. Campbell’s prodigious moral power. His great strength lies, not in one prominent faculty, but in the harmonious working of many; not in his preaching alone, nor his press alone, nor his college alone, nor in his industry, nor in his personal popularity, nor in his far-reaching policy alone, but in the combined convergency of all . . .

But Alexander Campbell is mortal. He is now an old man, and when he is “taken from their head” on whom will his mantle fall? I believe there is no one in the connection to receive it; no one whom they will think entitled to wear it. Whenever he departs, the great central attraction, which in spite of so many discordant elements, has so long held them together, will cease. The central orb, around which as satellites they revolve, once struck out, what shall save them from the nameless disturbances and catastrophes of sinister attractions?

I am no prophet, nor the son of a prophet, but it seems to me, that churches constituted as the Campbellite churches are, embracing all sorts of members, with “all sorts of ministers,” preaching all sorts of doctrine, cannot stand a single generation after the death of their founder. They must change their system or fall to pieces. So many elements of repulsion cannot long coalesce. Almost any error can hold its ground for a long time, if it will be consistent with itself; but there must be a union of homogeneous elements. Alexander Campbell has undertaken a task which no mortal man can ever accomplish . . .