“Declaration and Address”: Mandate for Renewal . . .

THE BACKGROUND TO THE “DECLARATION AND ADDRESS”

The year 1809 was an uneasy time for the youthful United States. George Washington had been dead only ten years. Thomas Jefferson retired from the presidency that year, declaring: “Never did a prisoner, released from his chains, feel such relief as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power.” Both France and England were giving the United States trouble on the high seas, and Congress had declared the Embargo Act in an effort to put pressure on her enemies. American ports were closed to foreign ships and exports fell from $108 million in 1807 to only $22 million in 1808. The Embargo did not work, but only added to the woes of a young nation.

It was the year that James Madison became the country’s fourth president, but only with difficulty and much protest. He wanted peace, but the nation wanted war. Napoleon was ravaging Europe. England, in need of both men and goods, captured seaman from American ships. The War of 1812 was imminent.

Thomas Campbell arrived in Philadelphia in May, 1807, after a voyage of 35 days from Londonderry, Ireland. It was only a month before the British warship Leopold fired on the American frigate Chesapeake just off the coast of Virginia. The country, then a nation of but ten million, was enraged. War fever swept the country. But Jefferson would not be pressured. He delayed war by keeping cool. “If nations go to war for every degree of injury, there would never be peace on earth,” he told the country.

Mr. Campbell had left his family in Ireland. He was to explore the New World as a possible home for them. If he prospered in his venture, he would send for them; if not, he would return to Ireland. His son, Alexander, influenced his decision to make the journey by revealing to his father that he himself planned to migrate to America when he came of age.

It so happened that the Seceder Synod of the Presbyterian Church was in session in Philadelphia when Mr. Campbell arrived there. He presented his credentials to them and was assigned to the Presbytery of Chartiers in western Pennsylvania. He moved out into the American frontier, settling in Washington, Pennsylvania, where he had a number of friends who had also emigrated from Ireland.

The Seceder Presbyterians were few in number in frontier America. It was Mr. Campbell’s task to minister to the scattered faithful in a sparsely settled wilderness. He was soon popular with the people, and was respected for his ability as well as for his piety. He was regarded as the most learned and talented preacher in their ranks. Due to some changes that had for years been taking place in his own thinking, Mr. Campbell found it increasingly difficult to be as sectarian as his job required of him. Belonging as he did to the strictest sect of the Presbyterians, he was required to limit his ministrations, not only to Presbyterians, but to Seceder Presbyterians. He could not even serve the Lord’s Supper to other Presbyterians, much less to believers generally. But he did not follow this strict rule. To the contrary he was then about as liberal in his views of fellowship as he ever became, and he ministered to all believers alike, whether Seceder Presbyterian or not.

He soon found himself in trouble with the clergy. Some of those who accompanied him in his travels told on him. Other spied on his meetings to see what he was up to, taking notes on all he said. The only reason they didn’t bring tape recorders in was that they had not yet been invented. His “heresy” was pronounced insofar as his fellow clergy was concerned, for he not only served the Supper to all believers who were disposed to partake of it, but he prefaced this with lamentations over the ugly divisions among Christians.

The Presbytery soon had him on the carpet, asking him all Sorts of questions about his private views. It was here that he spoke in favor of the Bible as the only standard of faith and practice, insisting that he had done nothing contrary to the scared writings. Yet he was conciliatory, doing all in his power to preserve peace with his Seceder brethren. He had no intention of leaving them. He was, however, censured for not abiding by the Seceder way of doing things.

His case was taken to a higher court, the Synod, which removed the censure that had been inflicted by the Presbytery, leading Mr. Campbell to suppose that he would henceforth be free to minister among the people without interference. In this he was wrong, for the clergy would not cease in their attacks until they had ruined him. They were in constant pursuit of fresh evidence against him. The spirit was bitter and vindictive, despite Mr. Campbell’s efforts to preserve peace.

He at last decided that he should withdraw himself from the Seceders, convinced as he was that they had no interest at all in healing the religious dissensions of the time. He accordingly submitted to the Synod a formal renunciation of its authority, withdrawing himself completely from it. He was now on his own, bound only to the Lord and His Word, which he was advocating as the only basis for authority in religion.

He kept right on with his work, preaching along the frontier as before, but there was an important difference. He was now free to work for the unity among Christians as he had long desired to do. As he spoke of unity and fellowship, inviting people to look to the Bible only as the rule of faith and practice, he found himself with a following. He spoke to large crowds under shade trees and in private homes. No church was his home. Christian unity became his theme. He had himself a movement. The Restoration Movement was born, insofar as the Campbell part of it was concerned.

He started having a different kind of meeting, first in the home of Abraham Altars, near Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania. They were organizational meetings, and soon “The Christian Association of Washington” was born. It was August 17, 1809. If one should attempt to give an exact date for the beginning of the Restoration Movement in this country, this would be as good as any. The Christian Association was not actually a church, and did not intend to be, but it led to the first “Campbellite” congregation at Brush Run, only a few miles away, 13 months later.

Thomas Campbell had no intention of starting a party, but we all know that many a party has started unintentionally. His purpose was to put an end to partyism, to encourage the various denominations to unite upon the Bible alone. He and his followers had formed an Association, the purpose of which was to be a unity effort among the established churches. It appears that he made no effort to get people to leave their churches, but to work with him for peace and unity. But it did not and could not work that way. Mr. Campbell had himself disassociated himself from the established church. Many of his followers were likewise disenchanted with their churches, and they walked off and left them, finding their spiritual strength in Campbell’s unity movement. Too, there were many who belonged to no church, but who found in Thomas Campbell’s movement the answer to their spiritual needs. So Mr. Campbell had a church on his hands whether he recognized it as such or not.

The next step was to arrange for a place for their meetings. A log cabin was erected on the farm of a man named Sinclair, some three miles from Mount Pleasant, which served as a school as well as meetinghouse. Near the meetinghouse was the residence of a Mr. Welch, a farmer who was friendly to the work of the Association. He provided a quiet room upstairs for Mr. Campbell’s use, and it was here that the Declaration and Address was written during the summer of 1809. The house still stands, and a tourist can see from the road the window of the room where Mr. Campbell wrote his famous document. The owner of the property is a Roman Catholic, but he is sufficiently aware of the historical significance of his home, and is cooperative with visitors who come around, and there are many.

The document was intended for the outsider. It was to be a clear and definite statement as to the objectives of the Movement. A committee of the Association had ruled that such a statement should be prepared, and when the committee listened to the reading of it from Mr. Campbell on September 7, 1809, they ordered that it be published immediately.

While Thomas Campbell was writing the Declaration and Address, his son, Alexander, was on the high seas, bringing the Campbell family to America. While his father was writing the essay, young Alexander, then only 21, was composing a poem, in which he said:

Thus while we wander through the mighty deep

Some foreign clime, some distant shore to seek,

These mighty scenes our wond’ring minds engage,

Too great to tell, or for th’ historic page.

But let us still that Power, that Goodness love,

That rules o’er all below and all above;

Each of his creatures move at His command

In the great sea, or on the spacious land.

Alexander Campbell arrived in New York with his family on September 29, 1809. On the only Sunday he was in the city before heading west, he hurried to hear Dr. John Mason preach, a man who was then urging the Presbyterians to make the Lord’s Supper central in their assemblies and to observe it with more frequency. It is noteworthy that the focal point in the thinking of the Campbells in these early days was the Lord’s Supper. The question of immersion came later.

Moving on to Philadelphia the family arranged for the long and arduous journey to Washington, 350 miles to the west, by wagon. They moved out into the frontier, a veritable wilderness, across the precipitous Alleghenies, to a new home and a destiny carved by Providence. That destiny found its essence in the Declaration and Address, a document now being set in type, awaiting the printer and awaiting the eyes of Alexander Campbell.

Along the way, while resting at an Inn in the valley of the Alleghenies, Alexander stole away into the forest, virtually untouched by man, luxuriating in the glorious beauty of his new home. As he ranged through the deep, untrodden glades and paused beneath the canopy of verdure, his heart overflowed with gratitude and reverence. God had saved him from a death at sea and from religious stagnation in the Old World. He was a new creature in a new world. He was soon to write an important chapter in the history of a young nation. The man who then lived in the White House, a name then barely known to Alexander, would one day hail him as the greatest expositor of the scriptures in the land. Thomas Jefferson had finished his work as President, and had ridden horseback to his native Monticello. Alexander Campbell was just beginning his, moving on by wagon to Washington, to Bethany, to the world, and to history. None of us should ever travel that way, the route of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, without thinking of those days.

History seems to provide flashbacks of its more impressive moments. As Campbell moved west to meet his father he met a tall young man dressed in black, riding horseback. He was erect and graceful like a general. As he passed he studied Alexander carefully, tipped his hat, and rode on. The night before he had met Thomas Campbell at an Inn back west, and was profoundly impressed with his wisdom and goodness. Since Mr. Campbell was riding to meet his family, this graceful young man realized it was the Campbell family he had met.

The young man was Adamson Bentley, an influential Baptist minister of Ohio, who was destined to be the man who introduced the primitive gospel to the Western Reserve, influenced as he was by the work of the Campbells.

Once united after a separation of two years and comfortably situated in Washington, Pennsylvania, Thomas and Alexander Campbell shared their experiences and exchanged notes on their intellectual pilgrimage. Their thinking about the evils of sectarianism, the unity of all Christians based on the Lordship of Christ, and the vagaries of the clergy were strikingly similar. Alexander was surprised to learn, however, that his father had withdrawn from the Presbyterians and already had a unity movement underway.

The page-proofs on the Declaration and Address were coming from the printer in installments. So eager was Alexander to read his father’s “Magna Charter” that he perused the proofs as they came from the printer even before Mr. Campbell could mark the corrections.

When he read the third proposition, page 48, as he himself recollected forty years later, he turned to his father and asked, How about the precedent for the sprinkling of infants?

His father equivocated. But Alexander Campbell was not to equivocate.

The Declaration and Address had won its first and most important victory, even before it reached the press.

(We intend this to be an extended study of the Declaration and Address, point by point and principle by principle. It will occupy us throughout this Volume 11. Next month: The Great Motto: “Where the Scriptures Speak, We Speak; and Where the Scriptures Are Silent, We Are Silent.” At year’s end this volume will be issued in book form under the title Renewal through Recovery. You may reserve a copy now, but send no money.—the Editor)