Alexander Campbell’s “Synopsis of Reform”

THE RECOVERY OF FAMILY RELIGION

Perhaps it was because they had more time for it, but more probably it was because they had more will for it; but whatever the reason our pioneers put most of us to shame in making the home the center of piety and devotion. It was at the family altar that the children learned the great stories of the Bible. With the father leading in the devotionals, the entire family, along with servants and guests, would sing praises together, read the scriptures and discuss them, and listen to the children recite memory verses. In the absence of the father the mother would not neglect the family altar.

Robert Burns, the Scottish bard, describes such scenes in his The Cotter’s Saturday Night, where he pictures the lowly farmer making his way home to his modest cottage after a hard day’s work. After “the supper crowns their simple board,” the family gathers in a circle to listen as “The priestlike father reads the sacred page.” It is a touching scene where Burns sees the father:

Then kneeling down, to heaven’s eternal King

The saint, the father, and the husband prays;

Hope springs exulting on triumphant wing

That thus they all shall meet in future days:

There ever bask in uncreated rays,

No more to sigh, or shed the bitter tear,

Together hymning their Creator’s praise,

In such society, yet still more dear;

While circling time moves round in an eternal sphere.

Burns believed that “poor Religion’s pride, in all the pomp of method and of art,” his description of the institutional church with its “pompous strain, the sacerdotal stole” could not compare with the simple and genuine religion of the humble home.

From scenes like these old Scotia’s grandeur springs,

That makes her loved at home, revered abroad;

Princes and lords are but the breath of kings,

An honest man’s the noblest work of God.

These were the values Alexander Campbell was seeking to recover when he included “Personal and Family Reformation” as a chapter in his Synopsis of Reform.

As personal intelligence, purity, and happiness is the end of all public and private, theoretic or practical reformation, the present standard of personal knowledge, faith, piety, and morality being too low, must be greatly elevated.

Campbell believed that “the abundant life” that Jesus came to bring implied intelligence, purity, and happiness. The mission of religion is to make men whole. Holiness and wholeness are closely related, and it is the happy, full life that is the abundant life. And all this implies intelligence. Campbell believed that man is morally obligated to improve his mind as well as his heart. This is what he means by Christian culture, and the lack of it in his time was disturbing to his reforming mind.

“The church is filled with an ignorant, faithless, carnal, and immoral class of professors,” he wrote, “the natural result of the operation of text-preaching, sermonizing, and. speculating upon points of doctrine and sound notions.” He lamented the fact that the scriptures are not studied, conversed upon, and laid up in the heart even by those who profess Christ. So whatever may be said for the need of restoring institutions, such as the Lord’s supper and immersion, he saw a restoration of piety and devotion to the private lives of saints as second to nothing in importance.

Family education and domestic religion must be, I need not say, greatly advanced, but begun.

He complained that “We have nominal Christian parents with almost Pagan families in all churches in the land. We mean that there are many professed Christian parents who almost wholly neglect their families, and suffer them to grow up without religious and moral culture.”

It grieved Campbell that many parents take pains to rear their children for the best circles on earth, but do so little to prepare them for heavenly associations. So he insisted: “We want, and must have, a radical and thorough reformation in family religion and family education.” He called for more reading in God’s Book, more meditating upon it, more conversation about it, more praying, more singing, more fasting, more rejoicing, more zeal, more morality.

It is to his credit that he did not neglect the altar in his own home, despite his busy life. W. K. Pendleton, who succeeded Campbell as president of Bethany College and who was twice his son-in-law, wrote a memorial to his fruitful life. In the essay he spoke of Campbell’s home life:

He was the most persistent man in the religious instruction of his family that I ever knew. Morning and evening worship were as regular as the daily meals. Never in any family were the Scriptures more copiously recited by the children or elaborately explained by the parent. No matter what had been the fatigue and labors of the day, he always found strength and time enough for this cardinal feature in his household economy. He had but little confidence in a piety that was not nourished and instructed by the daily study of the Word of God, and a perpetual habit of prayer. So he taught and thus he practiced. How did it fit him to die? (Mill. Harb., 1866, p. 136)

In her Home Life and Reminiscences of Alexander Campbell, Selina Campbell, his wife, writes of his concern for the spiritual welfare of his family. She tells how the family was gathered into a little congregation of believers each morning and evening. Nothing was allowed to interfere with this “sublime privilege.” Sometimes they took turns in reading verses, sometimes in reciting them from memory. Hymns were also recited. Servants and slaves were made a part of the family congregation. They would all sing and pray together, and Mr. Campbell would expound upon some portion of scripture.

A deeper insight into the family’s devotion is found in her story of young Wycliffe’s death, the promising son of Campbell who drowned while his father was on his famous trip to England, Ireland, and Scotland in 1847. So devoted was 11-year old Wycliffe that he carried his Bible with him when he worked in the field, memorizing large portions of it, repeating to himself at night what he had learned during the day. While his father was in Europe he resolved to commit to memory the Gospel of John, and had completed the first five chapters when his mother suggested he memorize the Proverbs, fourteen chapters of which he had mastered at the time of his death, which was four months after his father had left home.

Mrs. Campbell tells how Wycliffe would recite to his grandfather, Thomas Campbell, each evening at the family devotionals what he had learned during the day. She also tells of the hymns he would recite, fifteen in all he had learned that summer. She remembers with tenderness the hymn he recited the evening before his death, which began with:

Father of Mercies in thy Word,

What endless glory shines!

Forever be thy name adored,

For these celestial lines!

The mother also fondly recalled how Wycliffe was enamored of some colored pictures that were brought into Bethany, most of them depicting generals and battle scenes, being as it was the time of the Mexican War. But it was a picture, not of a great general, but of a little boy praying with lifted hands that caught Wycliffe’s eye. “He had been taught by father and mother,” she explains, “that the religion of Jesus was a religion of love and goodwill to man, and not of war and hate.”

It wrings one’s heart to read of how Selina Campbell stood beside Buffalo creek, waiting for her son to be removed from the apron of the mill dam where in his confusion he was trapped while swimming. It was at the very spot where many had been immersed into Christ, the place where her husband had many times sounded forth the gospel to those gathered along the beautiful green banks. But now her son was dying in those same waters. She tells how Dr. Robert Richardson came with bellows to inflate his lungs, and how salt water was applied to his sides until blisters appeared. It was only when the good doctor gave up hope of reclaiming him that she burst into tears.

It was a traumatic experience for the Campbells. Mrs. Campbell was disconsolate for years, and W. K. Pendleton observed that Mr. Campbell was never the same after the tragedy. Something like what theologians call the numinous seemed to have played on their minds. Mrs. Campbell in after-years had a vision of Wycliffe appearing before her, now a grown man. She asked him how he had drowned, but he tenderly silenced her, as if there was a mystery about it that she could not know. And Mr. Campbell, still in Scotland, even on the day of the tragedy, had disturbing thoughts that something sad had happened back home, and said as much at the breakfast table the next morning.

They both struggled for an answer for their tragic loss. She concluded that God took Wycliffe in His providential care, to spare him of some impending evil that would have marred the beauty of his young life. Alexander wrote at length in the Millennial Harbinger on “The Mystery of Providence” in which he lays bare his grieved soul, and concludes that Wycliffe was taken of God to serve in some other part of the universe.

After confronting the deep mystery as to why some old sinner of vigorous health is allowed to live and blaspheme God for a half a century, while “many a pure and excellent stripling is Cut down as the green and tender herb in the very morning of his existence,” he concludes that God does not take such noble youth because He does not want them to bless humanity by their labors. Why then does he take them?

“What then remains but that there are other provinces in God’s immense universe in which they could be employed more happily and more usefully than here?”

We have dwelt on the Wycliffe story at some length because it so nobly illustrates the loveliness of the Christian home. The Bethany home represented the kind of environment that Campbell envisaged for all saints of God.

Are there not far too few Wycliffes in our time? Granted that he had several generations of piety before him, and that the likes of such a young man cannot be expected of many, do our homes provide the climate where such souls might be cultivated? Religion was important to him, very important, because it was to his parents and grandparents. We give importance to excellence in scholarship, athletics, science, business and many other things, while little significance is attached to achievement in moral and spiritual graces. In many, many homes of professed Christians, the likes of a Wycliffe Campbell are motivated to give their superior talents to pursuits that draw the applause of the world.

In 1840 Campbell resolved to present practical lessons on how to make each Christian home a Bethel, meaning “house of God,” and so he began a series of articles on how to conduct instruction classes for the family. “All Christian dwellings should be Bethels—houses consecrated to God, in which his word should be read, his praises sung, and his name invoked on all the days of the year,” he wrote in introducing the series that he chose to call “Conversations at the Carlton House,” The series began with a new year, and he proposed that it was a good time to resolve “to erect an altar in every Christian family, upon which we shall constantly offer our morning and evening sacrifices to the Lord.” He stated his conviction that seems especially appropriate to our own time: “No person who has long lived in a Bethel can ever after relish the tabernacles of ungodly men.”

It is not clear as to the identity of “Carlton House,” though he associates it with a home he frequently visited in his travels. But it is likely that it is drawn from his own home life as much as from any other. Olympas and his wife Julia have nine children, natural and adopted, and six servants in “Carlton House,” which fell into three classes: those under 1, those between 7 and 14, and those beyond 14. Olympas was a non-class brother (!) in that all three classes sat in the same family circle. The father would assign the easier lessons to the younger set and the more difficult ones to the older groups. The circle gathered for an hour each morning and evening. One or two chapters of the Bible would be read each time, with the first class reciting the simple facts of the narrative, the second class explaining them, and the senior group drawing inferences and making practical applications.

For the next three years Campbell graced his Millennial Harbinger with “Conversations at the Carlton House,” in which he gave a running account of the discussions between Olympas and his household. The series runs through 31 installments, covering some 200 pages of rather fine print. In terms of modern publication it would make a sizable book. One only needs to read the material to realize what a glorious experience it would be for anyone to be able to sit within the Carlton family circle. This was Campbell’s point: to encourage others to do in their home something like what Olympas and Julia did in theirs.

Olympas began his children with the first chapter of the Bible and takes them through much of Genesis, and then to Luke for several sessions. Many interesting points come up in the conversations, such as how Isaac is a type of Christ, why angels have names, whether Zecharias was deaf as well as dumb, the causes of the flood, how Noah’s three sons populated the world.

It went like this:

Olympas. The Lord tempted Abraham; yet, saith James, “God tempteth no man to evil.” How then, Thomas, did God tempt Abraham?

Thomas. He tempted him by trying him—by trying how far he would obey God.

Olympas. God uses strong arguments, and therefore strong temptations. To what points in Abraham’s character was the temptation addressed?

Reuben. To his parental affection. Abraham loved Isaac, and he loved God; and God seems to have designed to test which of the two he loved most.

Olympas. True; Abraham had great parental affection for Isaac and much filial affection for God. Now the question was, Which of the two were the stronger—his parental or his filial affection? But was there nothing more in it than this, William?

To those of us who make the excuse that we cannot seem to find time to educate our children in the Lord, Campbell, who in his own busy life found time, says: “Astonishing! For what, then, was time given! You have nothing so deserving of time as this matter.” He likened such an attitude to the woman who says she has no time to snatch her child from the fire, for she is busy attaching ornaments to her person.

And yet it was on training rather than teaching that Campbell placed the emphasis. “Training sons is much more laborious,” he said, “than teaching sons.” You must cause your child to do the things you teach him, he observed, like horses in a circus trained by their masters. If you want your son to be generous and benevolent, show him how to do such acts and have him do them. “Take him with you,” Campbell advised, “while visiting the miseries and misfortunes of the sick and afflicted.” Further he said: “When you are pouring the wine and the oil of your consolation into the wounds and bruises of the lacerated and distressed, let him carry the vessel.”

To the contrary, if you want your child to be selfish and unfeeling, then accustom him to hard up and pocket everything he can acquire, and never let him hear you condole with the afflicted nor see a tear of sympathy fall from your eyes.

There were two passages that especially impressed the Campbells in reference to bringing up children. Selina Campbell, when thinking of Wycliffe, would quote Pro. 20:11: “Even a child is known by his doings, whether his work be pure and whether it be right.” Alexander Campbell, when writing on the education of children, would quote Pro. 22:6; “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.”

It was this kind of religion and the family altar at Bethany that produced a Wycliffe Campbell. It is a lesson well remembered in our efforts to renew the congregations of Christ in our time.—the Editor