THE SEVERAL WORLDS OF ALEXANDER CAMPBELL
by Louis Cochran

Alexander Campbell was a many-splendored man, a leader in several worlds, none of which could totally contain him. He was an astute and successful man of business; a far-sighted and original educator; a perceptive writer, and a discerning editor and publisher whose published writings ransacked the mind and conscience of man-kind; a great public speaker, and debater, and a preacher of the Gospel who commanded the deep respect even of those who disagreed with him the most. Perhaps foremost of all, he was a religious reformer in the succession of Martin Luther, and John Calvin and John Knox, who, like them, changed the course of religious thought. But above all, and at the same time fundamental to all, he was a great human being, a tremendous person, endowed with such sensitivity in all his personal relationships that one is impelled first to a scrutiny of his Private World if one would hope to discover the secret of his vast powers of mind and heart.

One of the fascinating and surprising facets of the Private World of Alexander Campbell is that, in reality, Campbell was actually not the cold, aloof intellectual he is generally pictured, but a romanticist, ruled by his heart as much as by his head in matters affecting his personal affairs.

This generally unknown fact is first detected in the fragments that have come down to us of his days as a young man in Scotland. It was after the historic wreck of the good ship Hibernia in 1808, on which the Campbell family had undertaken to sail from Londonderry, Ireland, to America to join Father Thomas Campbell, who had emigrated two years before, that Alexander — then aged twenty-spent a happy and productive year at the University of Glasgow, and also taught for several weeks at Helensburgh in Dumbartonshire, Scotland, before again setting sail for America. Dr. Robert Richardson tells us in his “Memoirs of Alexander Campbell” that this period “ . . . seems to have thrown over his life a charm which he felt quite reluctant to dissolve:” Certainly, we know that the charms of his feminine associates in this idyllic setting inspired him to outbursts of romantic poesy which few in after years would have attributed to the grave and dignified founder of Bethany College. Sang young Alexander:

There’s the elm and beach in shady rows,

With other shrubs, entwine their pliant boughs,

And form the cool retreat, the sweet alcove,

The seats of pleasure, and the haunts of love!

There is more of this, much more, but this brief quotation is sufficient to refute the pious canard that Alexander Campbell thought even in his youth only of the salvation of souls; and of other meats upon which heroes feed.

Definitely, young Campbell had his moments, and his memories!

On October 23, 1809, Alexander and his family were finally united with Father Thomas in America, settling in a two-storied log house in Washington, Pennsylvania, on what was then the corner of Strawberry Alley and Chartiers Street. And there, between assisting his father in teaching his younger brothers and sisters, and in reading and assimilating, and committing his life to the great precepts of Father Thomas’s then heretical Declaration and Address, he still found time to give voice to his romantic inclinations. He paid court in person, and in rapturous prose and poetry, some of which has come down to us, to a childhood playmate, Hannah Acheson, who has also emigrated to America from Ireland, and was living with her family near the Campbell home. Hannah was a beautiful lass, from all accounts, but Alexander Campbell did not marry her, although the young lady, like Barkis, it is reported, was willing. If he seems to us from the perspective of one hundred and fifty years to have been somewhat fickle, we must admit that in that respect he but proved his kinship with the weakness inherent to the great majority of the masculine sex. Whatever the reason, legend has it that Hannah insisted that he become a lawyer and amount to something in the world, whereas Alexander had already decided to become a “Fool of God” after the manner of the Apostle Paul, and devote his life to the unification of modern Christendom. And thus their romance came to an untimely end.

Further attesting to the basic streak of romanticism which flowed so turbulently within him are the essays he wrote about this time for a weekly newspaper in the town of Washington, Pennsylvania, a newspaper called The Reporter. Characteristically, he wrote under pseudonyms, signing some of his essays “Clarinda,” some as “Bonus Homo.” In one of the first of these under the name “Clarinda,” a dissertation on “Ole Maids,” he made a perhaps understandable, self-serving declaration to the general effect that “ . . . women are geese and have no brains . . . “ although we have no proof that he intended reference to the lovely, but stubborn, Hannah, as some have thought. And in the same fulmination, he quoted with no apparent disapproval an alleged Turkish maxim that “Women have no souls!”

Perhaps sensing his son’s disquieted tendency towards anti-feminism at this stage of his development, and wishing to assure him that there was more than one goose in the flock, Father Thomas wisely sent him on an errand to the home of Farmer John Brown on Buffalo Creek, well knowing that Farmer Brown had a daughter, an only child, named Margaret, comely and fair with dark hazel eyes and brown hair and “a benign disposition.” The ancient plot worked well, and soon we have an essay on “Old Bachelors,” offering Alexander’s lament, probably with his own sad state in mind, that” . . . an old bachelor is a forlorn mortal insulated in society; he is like a dry tree standing in the forest, merely an encumberer of the ground.” Certainly the winsome Margaret caused his forlorn bachelorhood to appear even more untenable, and the young lady being willing, Alexander Campbell and Margaret Brown were married in the parlor of the bride’s home in what has long since been styled “the Campbell mansion” on March 12, 1811. Margaret was eighteen, and Alexander was twenty-two years of age.

Although the Public Worlds in which he played his great parts might have been better served, as some have argued, if, at this point, he had moved to a larger settlement, perhaps in the booming State of Ohio, as he had once planned, it is not of record that Alexander ever regretted his decision to make his permanent home and headquarters in west Virginia. Certainly he was influenced in this decision by a fortuitous gift from his father-in-law of the Brown homestead, and three hundred acres of fine farm land, but also entering into the decision was his romantic attachment to the tumbling hills and secluded valleys of what is now Bethany; an attachment which remained with him throughout his life.

This brings us to another view of his many-sided nature which had its roots deep in his Private World — his loyalty to those he loved. He was devoted to his gentle Margaret as to no other woman of his life; a devotion that endured to the end. Their marriage, from all available accounts, was one of serene happiness for sixteen years and then, at the age of thirty-four, Margaret died of consumption. She had borne him eight children, five of whom survived her; all girls under fifteen years of age. Her death left Alexander with a haunting sense of guilt that her passing might have been hastened by the years of living in the damp basement of the Campbell homestead while he was operating a boarding school for boys, the Buffalo Seminary, in the upstairs rooms. At any rate, the void in the heart of the young husband was never entirely filled. On her deathbed, Margaret, realizing her condition, and deeply concerned for her young husband and children, asked Alexander to marry her close friend and almost constant companion, Selina Blakewell, then a spinster of twenty-six. That Selina would be willing to assume the relationship, Margaret apparently had little doubt, and in securing Alexander’s promise she insured not only a good mother for her young children but a capable helpmate for her husband; who, in accord with her wishes, quietly married his wife’s choice less than a year later.

Alexander Campbell was a prolific letter writer, but strange to say, of all the letters which have come down to us, there is not one original letter addressed to his first wife, Margaret. Yet during their marriage he was often away from home on long preaching missions and it is inconceivable that no written words passed between them, especially as, in those days, letters were precious documents which were preserved. What became of the letters to Margaret? No one knows. One theory is that the letters may have been distributed among Margaret’s five surviving daughters, and were ultimately lost to posterity. Another theory is that they may have been destroyed by Margaret herself, to keep them from falling into the hands of her successor. A more widely-held theory is that they were destroyed by Selina in moments of jealousy as the second wife. This could be true, for although Selina had a prophetic insight into the future value of such documents, as is evidenced by the fact that she carefully preserved every line that Alexander ever addressed to her, nevertheless she may have felt the need to minimize Margaret’s role in history; for she endured what few, if any, second wives have ever been called upon to endure — the celebration each year, not of her own wedding anniversary, but the anniversary of her husband’s wedding to his first wife. Not only that, but she carried with her the disquieting knowledge that she owed her marriage, at least in part, to the fact she had been selected by the first wife to take her place. Even her first child, a daughter, was given the name of the first wife, “Margaret Brown Campbell.”

The archives of the Disciples of Christ Historical Society in Nashville hold a letter written by Alexander to Selina years later which reveals the stark honesty of the man respecting this relationship, a basic trait of honesty and lack of pretense that is reflected in all aspects of his life. In this letter he said:

My dear Selina:

This day twenty-eight years ago I gave my hand, and my heart accompanied it, to your excellent predecessor in the holy bonds of matrimony. Heaven lent me that precious gift more than sixteen years, of the value of which I never did form an over-estimate. But more than ten years ago He appointed you to fill her place in my affections, and to be her successor.

Then he adds this comforting thought:

I have, my dear Selina, found you worthy of all the affection and esteem which were due to her who desired to bless both you and me by nominating you to be her successor.

And then this final accolade:

“I have never thought I saw one more deserving of my affection and esteem than yourself!”

Selina was a capable business woman, and most of Alexander’s letters to her while away from home on his many journeys, sometimes for as long as eight or nine months at a time, have to do with business affairs. But there are other letters which reveal a droll side to his nature, little suspected by those who knew him only as a religious reformer, letters brimming with playful humor; a characteristic which fortified him in many of his public trials. There is, for instance, the rather precious one written at Richmond, Virginia, during his services as a delegate from Brooke County to the Virginia State Constitutional Convention in December, 1829:

I am still in Richmond and when I shall leave I cannot tell. The people like me, and I like them, but I love those at home even better. I believe, however, I could get a wife here pretty handy, for the ladies in the city have a very high opinion of me. But I must have your consent first, as well as my own. What do you think? I am still, however, unwilling to give you up, unless I could provide well for you, and I fear you would not consent.

And then he calms her fears:

After this drollery I must tell you, my dear, “England, with all thy faults, I love thee still.” Yes, my dear Selina, I can find none to supplant you; you are my one woman of all the sex.

And then he adds, perhaps regretfully: “And one is all that God has given to any man!”

Although such letters reveal the harmony and affection which existed in the Campbell household, and the somewhat gusty humor and husbandly delight which Alexander occasionally took in teasing the rather prim Selina, they also reveal what is known to be a fact, that wherever Alexander Campbell traveled, he was the center of feminine admiration as well as of the highest esteem of his masculine compeers. There was, for instance, the little-known case of Mrs. Eliza Davis, a young widow who heard Campbell preach in her native city of Paisley, Scotland, on his visit back to the land of his youth in 1847. On this trip he became involved in a libel suit and, refusing bail, was incarcerated for ten days in a Glasgow jail before the charge against him was thrown out of Court as without cause or merit. Whether this dramatic incident heightened the young widow’s interest is not known, but it is known that she was prominent among his visitors while in the local Bastille, and later followed him to America, and presented herself at his home where she remained for two years, treated as a member of the Campbell household, before Alexander found a position for her as a teacher in Kentucky Female Orphan School at Midway, Kentucky. Eventually this impetuous young lady journeyed as a teacher to Australia, where she had many exciting adventures, and returned to visit again in Bethany only after Campbell’s death.

Also revealed by a scrutiny of his Private World is the heart-warming fact that this great public servant was also a great family patriarch, “the last of the minor prophets,” some have called him, and about all his family, by blood and by marriage, he threw his strong protecting arms. This is a more significant aspect of his character than may at first be suspected, as many of his relatives on both sides of the house were often a sore trial.

There was his second father-in-law, for instance, Samuel Blakewell, a school teacher, an inventor, and a general ne’er-do-well, who showed up now and then, but for the most part wandered about the country separated from his wife, Anna, Selina’s mother, and eventually died in the home of a brother in England. His mother-in-law was even more of a problem, spending her own last years in the Campbell household, complaining at everything. Selina’s four brothers, Theron, Horatio, Arthur, and Edwin Blakewell, were equally unsuccessful in their various business ventures, borrowing money from Alexander which they seldom made an effort to repay, despite occasional mild remonstrances from their sister, and whose offspring at various times were cared for as members of the Campbell family. And in his own immediate family, there was the celebrated case of his younger brother, Thomas Campbell, Jr., the deliberately forgotten man of the Campbell clan, whose life and final end has been too much shrouded in mystery through the years.

Definitely, we know that young Thomas was seven years old when the Campbell family arrived in America. We know that he studied and practiced medicine, possibly with his brother, Dr. Archibald Campbell, in Wellsburg and Wheeling. We know that he married a girl named Sarah Speer, who died of the Campbell scourge of consumption, leaving four small children, Thomas, Mary, Jane, Lavina, and John, who were taken into the Alexander Campbell household and cared for as Alexander’s own children. Mary Jane died of consumption at seventeen; Lavina married and moved into other fields; and the boys, John and Thomas, so family legend has it, became railroad men in Pennsylvania and rolled away into oblivion.

But what became of their father, Alexander’s brother, Thomas Campbell, Jr.?

The family legends have it that Thomas, although bearing the name of his dedicated father, Thomas Campbell, was not a churchman; that as a physician, the human body attracted him more than the state of his soul, and he is never mentioned in any church reports, nor in any of Alexander Campbell’s writings. He was something of a scientist, with a consuming curiosity about the human anatomy, and its ailments, and various stories are told in family folklore of his unorthodox acquisition of human specimens for dissection, and study, sometimes in ways that outraged the relatives of the deceased. Be that as it may, and none of the stories can be authenticated, or disproved, we can be certain that young Doctor Thomas Campbell, Jr., was in his own separate world as far ahead of his time in his frustrated efforts at autopsy, and anatomical research, as his famous older brother was in the world of religious reform. If he took to drink, as is alleged, and died an untimely death in his brother’s house, which we know for a fact, leaving his four orphaned children to the care of Alexander, we can but have a sympathy and admiration for both of them. Each man lived according to his lights, and was true to himself, and today the two brothers lie together in peace in God’s Acre in the Bethany hills. That Thomas, Jr., rests in an unmarked grave we may assume was due to Alexander’s concern in protecting his younger brother even in death from the possible retribution of those who may have felt he had despoiled the final resting places of their loved ones, and who cared not to leave their vengeance entirely unto the Lord.

Although there were many jeweled days in the Private World of Alexander Campbell, which give depth and luster and significance to his public life, there were also many shadows. Death was a frequent and lingering visitor in his home. In addition to the early death of his first wife, Margaret, he buried all eight of their children, and two of the six children Selina bore him, before passing on to his own reward in 1866. The brilliant young son of his aging years, Wickliffe, drowned in Buffalo Creek while Alexander was in Europe in 1847; an almost crushing blow. Many of his grandchildren died in the Campbell homestead, several in-laws, and other relatives and close friends, but through it all he stood unbowed, his faith in God and his dedication to the tasks he believed God wanted him to do unshaken to the last. In addition to the sorrows of death, he endured in his old age the agonies of the arrest and trial at Wellsburg of his son and namesake, Alexander Campbell, Jr., on the charge of High Treason because of his service as a Confederate officer during the Civil War. That Alexander, Jr., was saved from a Federal prison term, or worse, through a Presidential pardon, could not erase from the father’s heart the scars of this final ignominy. If the test is, as Paul wrote in Hebrews, that he “ . . . whom the Lord loveth, He chastiseth and scourgeth,” then Alexander Campbell in his Private World was surely a much beloved son of God.

Against this background we come to a better understanding of and appreciation for the public life of this many-splendored man which embraced many labors and rich rewards, and some bitter disappointments as well. He sat in the renowned Constitutional Convention of Virginia at Richmond in 1829, and held his own with some of the best minds of the Republic, demonstrating again that, had he been so inclined, he could have become one of the great political statesmen of the age. He possessed the undoubted political acumen and dedication of Henry Clay; the oratorical mastery of assemblies of Robert Hayne; the dignity and the presence, and the logical, incisive mind of Daniel Webster. Evidence of his prophetic leadership is seen in some of the measures for which he fought. He advocated free public schools; the direct election of judges; the enlargement of suffrage rights; the gradual, compensated emancipation of the slaves, a measure which, if adopted, might have prevented the fratricidal Civil War. The times were not ripe for such reforms, but seeds were sown which are even now bearing fruit. He made an indelible imprint upon his colleagues, the intellectual giants of their time, numbering among them two former Presidents of the United States, James Monroe and James Madison; a future President, John Tyler; as well as Governor Tazewell of Virginia; Chief Justice John Marshall; John Mason; John Randolph of Roanoke, and others of like stature. We are indebted to Hugh Blair Grigsby, a young delegate from Norfolk, for a discerning portrait of Alexander Campbell as he appeared there among his great contemporaries. Grigsby opposed Campbell on almost every measure, and at first apparently disliked him personally, but in his more mature years he became a warm admirer of the Great Reformer. In 1853 he gave an address before the Virginia Historical Society in which he paid his respects to Campbell, in part as follows:

In Virginia there has been a strong dislike of theologians, and it was feared that by the presence of a popular divine in the Convention, the element of religion might be mixed up in topics sufficiently exciting in themselves. But the course of Alexander Campbell dispelled all fears. There was no danger to religious freedom from him. He needed it more than anybody else! For with the doctrines of his church (the Baptist church), and with the Constitution of Virginia he was equally at war . . .

In his personal appearance, in his dress and manner, in his style of speaking, he was a man of the world; and it would not have been suspected that he was other than a layman, if, in his speeches he had nor drawn his illustrations from the Jewish system, and sought to strike out the Constitution of the State of Virginia with the view of inserting the Book of Deuteronomy in its stead. . . He had a great fund of humor.

He was a fine scholar and with the younger members of the body, who relished his amusing thrusts, his pleasant address and social feelings rendered him very acceptable.

And then Grigsby added the supreme salute, cherished by all who would hope to survive in the Political World:

As a Controvertist he (Campbell) had some great qualities. He was bold, subtle, indefatigable; and as insensitive to attack as if he were sheathed in the hide of a rhinoceros!

But Alexander Campbell did not choose to devote his time, or his great talents, to the political arena. In writing to his friend and fellow delegate, Colonel Charles S. Morgan, of Morgantown, Virginia, after the Convention, he explained:

I am conscious that many are infatuated with the charms of political life. They never have any for me, and never will have any. I view man kind in a higher relation than as a subject of taxation, or as a name on the muster roll. I view him as one who may be immortal, a citizen of Heaven, and a priest of God. I have more pleasure in thinking on man’s eternal destinies, or in reading one section of the Oracles of God, than in all the splendid schemes of earthly ambition and political grandeur.

Alexander Campbell would also have excelled in the World of Business, his financial acumen being amply demonstrated by the fact that when he died in 1866 his personal fortune was then valued at between $175,000.00 and $200,000.00. He had the foresight, and the faith, in the expanding economy of his adopted country, to consistently increase his holdings, buying property not only around Bethany, Virginia, but in Pennsylvania and Illinois and Ohio. He discovered that the raising of Merino sheep was a profitable business, and became one of the leading wool growers in the nation. He went so far as to preside over several national gatherings of wool growers but, as with his experiment in politics, the acquisition of mere wealth, as such, in this field, as in others, held no allure for him. But it did provide him with a strange friendship. John Brown of Ohio, later of Osawatomie, Kansas, who was to achieve a dubious fame through the notorious Kansas Massacre in 1855, and as the leader of the abortive Abolitionist raid against Harper’s Ferry in 1859, was one of his commission wool merchants, or agents; and the two became friends. Campbell’s last meeting with John Brown was in August, 1855, when Brown, then a fanatical Abolitionist, and some of his followers were passing through Detroit, Michigan, with a cargo of arms and ammunition, and stopped overnight to hear Campbell, who was there on a visit, preach at the church of Elder Richard Hawley. A letter in the possession of the Chicago Historical Society, written by Brown’s son-in-law, Henry Thompson, refers to this meeting. Thompson says:

We left Cleveland Saturday morning at 8 ½ o’clock for Detroit. Stayed over the Sabbath; went to church. Heard Bishop Campbell preach. He is the father of all the Campbellites, and is a great man.

And so he was! The World of Religion was his prime domain, and always Alexander Campbell remained faithful to it, lavishing upon it the outpourings of his rich mind and heart; devoting to it the loftiest dedication of his great soul.

While still a young man of twenty-six, Alexander Campbell gained considerable renown among the Faithful, although not always favorable, according to their viewpoint, with his controversial and now famous Sermon on The Law, preached before the Red Stone Baptist Association at Cross Creek, Virginia. In this sermon he first sounded the then astounding doctrine that the teachings of Jesus superseded and supplanted the Hebraic laws of Moses. Notwithstanding this heresy, now generally accepted by all Christian bodies but which then led eventually to his permanent separation from the Baptists, he drew increasingly large audiences. With the publication of his great debates, beginning with his debate on Baptism with the Presbyterian, John Walker, and climaxed with his brilliant defense of Christianity against the celebrated British atheist, capitalist, and philosopher, Robert Dale Owen, in Cincinnati in 1829, and with Dr. Nathan B. Rice on the subject of Baptism, and Human Creeds, at Lexington, Kentucky, in which Henry Clay was the Chief Moderator, in 1843, his fame as an original thinker, and religious reformer, who feared no man nor the devil, only God, spread throughout the land. But Campbell had begun to realize long before that a man’s voice in that or any other age could only reach so far; it needed to be amplified by the power of the written word. In 1824 he entered the World of Publishing by establishing his own printing shop at Bethany, issuing on July 4th the first copy of his famous journal, The Christian Baptist, a sometimes caustic but always instructive and lively journal of religious opinion, open to readers of every faith, and of none, but filled mainly with the writings of Alexander Campbell. This was merged in 1830 with the more tolerant Millennial Harbinger, and he continued as its editor, publisher, and chief contributor for another thirty-six years. In addition to these journals, he produced a flood of books, sixty-nine in all, and Bethany became in due course the publication center, as well as the fountainhead, of the “Restoration Movement,” and so remained until his death.

While still a comparatively young man, Alexander Campbell became known and acclaimed as the greatest religious reformer of his day. Yet he was not a reformer of the existing churches, each with its own capsule of truth, each crying to the others: “Come over and join us!” Instead, he blazed a new pathway to Heaven; he tore down the fences which separated the denominations, and for the first time pointed the way to a real Christian unity between them. He preached that the unfettered teachings of Christ and His Apostles were the only basis upon which there can ever be a true universal Catholic Church; a plea for unity based upon the essentials on which all Christians were in agreement, leaving to each man complete freedom in matters of opinion. This teaching was as unique, and as simple, and as misunderstood as the unadorned teachings of Christ Himself, and today his followers, while still preaching that “The church of Christ upon earth is essentially, intentionally, and constitutionally one,” as stated by Father Thomas Campbell in his Declaration and Address,. speak in many different tongues, their voices as discordant, clanging cymbals in the land.

“Everyone is a Christian,” said Alexander Campbell, “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.”

Campbell was a heretic when he spoke thus to the inquiring lady of Lunenburg, sweeping aside the theological rubbish of the ages, and he speaks to us as a heretic today. Few of the faithful who accept him as their leader can climb to the heights with him. But he endures; his teachings slowly prevail, though still distorted and misunderstood by many, and as time sweeps aside the clouds of misrepresentation and calumny he looms before us in his several worlds larger than life, and heroic in his ultimate objectives.

Even in his own day Campbell’s brilliant championship of his “peculiar plea” of Christian unity, and his prophetic insight into the true nature of that unity, drew to him the great, and the near-great; the rich and the humble, and people of every diversity and race. He preached by special invitation before a crowded assembly from both Houses of Congress in the U. S. Hall of Representatives at Washington, and before the assembled Legislatures of Indiana and Missouri; he spoke before learned societies and unlettered groups. People by the thousands listened to him eagerly during his forty-four preaching missions across the length and breadth of the land; and thousands followed him into what he styled as “the Restoration of the New Testament Church.”

Jeremiah Sullivan Black of Pennsylvania, United States Attorney-General, and later Secretary of State, was baptized by him in Buffalo Creek; James A. Garfield, President of the United States, was his friend and fellow Disciple from his early manhood, and a Trustee of Bethany College. Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Horace Mann, President James Buchanan, were among his valued friends, and many came to Bethany as on a pilgrimage to visit with him, and to learn from him. He was so admired by Jefferson Davis that Davis caused his two young nephews, William Stamps, Jr., and Isaac Davis Stamps, of Mississippi, to enroll as students at Bethany College, where, incidentally, young William Stamps was killed by an accidental fall on the ice on Buffalo Creek in 1842. Thomas Lincoln, the father of Abraham Lincoln, accepted Campbell’s interpretation of the Scriptures, and was for many years an Elder of the little Christian Church at Charleston, Illinois, and even President Lincoln felt such kinship with the “Ancient Order of Things,” as many called the Campbell-led movement, that he was falsely accused by his enemies of coming at night, like Nicodemus, and of having been secretly baptized about 1862 in a creek near Springfield, Illinois, by Evangelist John O’Kane of that State.

But of all the several worlds of Alexander Campbell, none did he make more luminous, or leave more enrichened, than the World of Education.

In 1840, at the age of fifty-two, when too many men are joyously contemplating early entrance into the pleasures of the welfare state, this extraordinary man, whose own formal education had ended with his Freshman year at Glasgow University thirty years before, founded Bethany College on acreage set aside by him for that purpose on his own farm; a college in its inception and development unique in the history of the educational world, and gave to it a devotion, and a sacrificial effort, second only to his life-long, impassioned plea for Christian unity.

With all his many gifts, and his great achievements in other fields, Alexander Campbell was primarily a teacher. All his life he did little else in essence than teach. He illuminated every facet of life he touched, stretching minds, enlarging visions, creating new concepts of truth. But it was not until his later years that this tremendous talent was manifested in actual brick and stone. He founded and developed Bethany College as a unique and classic liberal arts college, known and respected throughout the nation. His inductive methods of teaching anticipated the so-called higher criticism of today, and gifted students came to him from all parts of the country, from Mexico, England, Australia, to sit at his feet during his six o’clock morning lectures on Biblical History and Literature, and to become followers of Alexander Campbell forever.

It was Campbell’s profound conviction, as he proclaimed on May 31, 1858, at the laying of the new cornerstone of Bethany College after the disastrous fire of the year before, that:

Colleges are, in every point of view, the most important and useful institutions on earth, second only to the Church of Christ as revealed in the Holy Bible in their inherent claims upon Christian liberality and Christian patronage.

So believing, the founder of Bethany College was understandably proud to claim that “Bethany College was the first college in the Union and the first known to any history accessible to us, that was founded upon the Holy Bible as an everyday lecture and an everyday study. The Bible,” he maintained, “is the only infallible textbook of the true science of man.”

Nevertheless, Campbell had no desire, nor intention, to indoctrinate students in a particular creed, or theology. Indeed, a provision in the charter of the College prohibiting altogether the establishment of a theological professorship, or the teaching of any theology, but embodied Campbell’s profound conviction that a knowledge of the Bible is a basic requisite to a liberal education, regardless of vocation or profession.

But Alexander Campbell with all his prophetic insight into the future, was a realist. No one understood better than he that the primary function of any college is to prepare young men and women for positions of leadership in the conflicts of life. He proclaimed in his great “Address on Colleges” at Wheeling in 1854:

How all important then, that our colleges should understand and teach the true philosophy of man.

They create the men that furnish the teachers of men — the men that fill the pulpits, the legislative halls, the senators, the judges, and the governors of the earth. Do we expect to fill these high stations ‘by merely voting, or praying for these men? Or shall we choose empirics, charlatans, mountebanks, and every pretender to eminent claims upon the suffrage of the people? Forbid it, reason, conscience, and Heaven!

With such conviction, Alexander Campbell spared no efforts, nor expense, to give to Bethany College, which he regarded as the crowning achievement of his life, the finest teachers he could obtain, as well as the best in buildings and equipment, instructing his students by example as well as by precept to search for Truth whatever the obstacles, and to stand for Truth whatever the consequences. He wrote in the Christian Baptist of 1828:

Truth has nothing to fear from investigation. It dreads not the light of science, nor shuns the scrutiny of the most prying inquiry. Like one conscious of spotless innocence and uncontaminated purity, i.e. challenges the fullest, the ablest, and the boldest examination.

“Truth,” he declared, “is Reality herself!”

But none knew better than Alexander Campbell that there would be times of trial and crisis for every man and every human institution, and he prepared his students for any eventuality. In a message which might well have been written for our own nuclear age, he warned the graduates of Bethany College in a Baccalaureate Address read for him by Vice-President William K. Pendleton while he was at sea en route to Europe in 1847:

Let us not dream of perpetual prosperity, of indefinite ages of tranquility, of an unbroken series of splendid triumphs. You owe it to yourselves, your country, and the human race, to understand the genius and character of your own age, and its bearings on the future.

Consider well then what you can do, for what you can do you ought to do in preparation for the business and conflicts of life. You must take some side in the great controversies of the age. Survey the battleground before you. On the one side are arranged antiquated error, superstition, despotism and misanthropy; on the other, truth, intelligence, liberty, religion, and humanity. In such a war no good man can be neutral!

Are you nor ardent for the encounter?

And that is the message I would leave with you today. Are you not ardent for the encounter? Indeed you are, or you would not be worthy of Bethany College, nor of this indomitable man, this extraordinary man of many worlds, who had the vision to found this college, and who endowed it not only with money, and time, and sacrificial effort, but with a richness of intellect and character of so vast a measure that it can never be spent, nor repaid, by those of us who come after him.

As George D. Prentice, one of the great editors of the time, wrote of him in the Louisville Journal in 1858 on the occasion of Campbell’s visit to that city seeking funds to rebuild his beloved Bethany College after its near-destruction by fire a few months before:

Alexander Campbell claims by virtue of his intrinsic qualities, as manifest in his achievements, a place among the very foremost spirits of the age. Surely the life of a man thus excellent and gifted is a part of the common treasure of society. In his essential character, he belongs to no sect, or parry, but to the world.

And so he does!

Ten years later on December 10, 1868, after Campbell’s death that great Christian, and Confederate Commander-in-chief, General Robert E. Lee, then President of Washington College, Lexington, Virginia, in a letter to his friend, Samuel M. Duncan of Nicholasville, Kentucky, thanking him for a copy of Campbell’s “Address on Colleges,” aptly characterized him for the ages:

As Dr. Symonds said of the great Milton, “so I may say of the late President of Bethany College, that “He was a man in whom were illustriously combined all the qualities that could adorn or elevate the nature to which he belonged . . . a man who, if he had been delegated as the representative of his species to one of the superior worlds, would have suggested a grand idea of the human race.” Such a man was President Campbell!

And so he was!

Alexander Campbell, Founder of Bethany College, Defender of the Faith, was from any viewpoint a many-splendored man who changed the course of history with his tremendous labors, and his vision of the unity of the Saints, enrichening and illuminating every world within which he moved. Now that the tumult of his life is a century passed, and the captains and the kings have long departed, and evil pygmies stride the earth, Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, lest we forget, lest we forget!