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Early
on the morning of Dec. 15, 1974, a few hours before gathering with
the saints at the old Coplaw Street Church of Christ, it was my
pleasure to visit the Old Cathedral in Glasgow, Scotland, whose
elegant spire has stood like a sentinel over the ancient city since
the Middle Ages. The old kirk was once the home of the archbishops
who ruled Scotland for the pope in Rome, and it went on to witness
the great Reformation under Luther, which swept through old Scotia
under the leadership of the fiery John Knox.
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The
reformation adage, “The blood of martyrs became the seed of
the kingdom,” was especially true of Scotland. John Knox
himself, born in 1505 (12 years before Luther nailed his theses on
the Wittenberg castle door), was inspired by George Wishart, who was
burned at the stake for. preaching the priesthood of all believers
throughout Scotland. Young Knox would stand at Wishart’s side,
with his sword drawn, protecting him from the papal forces which
still held sway in that country. But a single sword was not enough.
The cardinal that condemned Wishart to the stake was himself
murdered not long afterwards. Scotland was bleeding in those days,
not only with the blood of her sturdy sons who would reform her, but
from the continuing war with England that had gone on for over two
centuries.
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Patrick
Hamilton is one of the great names in Scottish history. He was of
royal lineage, educated at the influential University of Paris, and
motivated by the teachings of Erasmus. He was on the faculty at
Edinburgh when the Parliament ruled that Luther’s work could
not be circulated or read anywhere in Scotland. This stirred his
evangelical soul, and he was soon advocating reform everywhere. He
died heroically at the stake in 1528.
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But
Scottish martyrs had borne witness to reformation for a century or
more before Knox, Hamilton and Wishart. John Resby, a Lollard
preacher, and Paul Crawer, a Hussite, were burned for disseminating
their antipapal views in 1407 and 1432, respectively. For a century
and a half a religious war was waged between papal forces until
finally, in 1560, when Knox’s preaching led to the destruction
of shrines, images and cathedrals, the Parliament recognized the
reformers as victorious. Knox was asked to draw up a summary of
doctrine, which was strictly Calvinistic, which became the
“official” religion of the country. This was the
beginning of the Church of Scotland, which, as we shall see in our
ensuing study, became as intolerant and persecuting as the Roman
Church, a fact that is helpful in understanding the early history of
our own Restoration Movement.
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Such
history as all this seemed to fill the air around the old Glasgow
Cathedral as I walked her yards that cold December morn, where, they
say, as many as a
million
(!)
saints are interred. Before my mind’s eye passed the gallant
lives of John Glas, Robert Sandeman, Greville Ewing, John Campbell,
Pastor Innes of Stirling, and the Haldane brothers, Robert and
James. All these were Scotland’s own native sons, reared in
the official state church, who finally, one by one, left that church
and started free congregations. They staged a reformation or
restoration that called down the fury of ecclesiastical authority
upon them. Thomas Campbell, a pastor in his native Ireland, was
exposed to their thinking when some of them made their way across
the Irish sea. Alexander Campbell was exposed to it even more when
he studied in Glasgow in 1808. All this we shall be reviewing in
subsequent installments.
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Had
I listened quietly enough that Lord’s day morn I might have
heard, through the ear of faith at least, the clarion voice of
Rowland Hill, the English evangelist, who was brought to Scotland in
1798 by the Haldane brothers. His preaching of Jesus fired the
hearts of the Scots like the poetry of their own Robert Burns.
Rowland Hill remained always a part of the Church of England,
working for reform from within. Chastened by the ignorance of the
gospel he found even within the church, along with all the
carnality, he was dedicated to the cause of church reform.
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One
of Hill’s great meetings was right there on the grounds of the
old Cathedral, where 5,000 persons heard him lift up Jesus as the
light of life. Basing his remarks on Isa. 60:19, where the prophet
says, “The Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and
thy God thy glory,” he urged the people to accept Jesus as God
in Christ, the hope of glory and the light of the world. Robert
Haldane, a wealthy layman who worked outside the established church,
brought Hill to Scotland, and together they brought many laymen into
a reformation movement. Robert Haldane, an old sea captain whose
story we shall be telling with some detail, preached reform with
such zeal that he sometimes had to refrain on account of spitting up
blood.
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It
does something to you, standing there all alone amidst so great a
cloud of witnesses, realizing that within the thick walls of that
ancient shrine lie the remains of Robert Haldane himself. It says
something for the independent mind of the Scots that they would bury
the old reformer within the sacred blocks of the Cathedral.
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It
was in the days of Rowland Hill and Robert Haldane that Bobby Burns,
old Scotia’s homemade poet, wrote as follows, in honor of a
humble cottager, who would no doubt have responded to the call for
reform:
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Compared
with this, how poor Religion’s pride,
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In
all the pomp of method and of art
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When
men display to congregations wide
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Devotion’s
every grace, except the heart!
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The
Power incensed, the pageant will desert,
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The
pompous strain, the sacerdotal stole;
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But
haply, in some cottage far apart,
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May
hear, well pleased the language of the soul,
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And
in His book of life the inmates poor enrol.
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Agony
and tragedy marks Scottish history, whether religious or political.
Two centuries ago our own Patrick Henry urged our founding fathers
against the English with that cry, “Give me liberty or give me
death!” and he went on to enjoy the liberty won as a governor
of Virginia, dying peacefully in his old age. Scotland’s
counterpart would be William Wallace, who also urged his countrymen
against the English, leading the army himself, as did our George
Washington. While he gained momentary victory, his lot was at last
an ignominious death. The king of England mangled his body and
impaled it on London Bridge, inspiring that line from Burns:
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O
Thou who poured the patriotic tide
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That
streamed through Wallace’s undaunted heart.
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The
young bard used the right word to describe the Scottish spirit —
undaunted.
The
Scots first appear in history keeping the Romans at bay, and a
millennium later they are routing the English, always struggling to
be a free people. Since 1707, seven decades before our own birth as
a nation, they have been a voluntary
(voluntary,
they’ll
have you know!) member of the British Commonwealth. Since the union
of the two countries no British monarch has dared to wear the crown
worn by the rulers of Scotland. For 269 years Scottish guards have
watched over the glass-encased crown in the old castle in Edinburgh,
once worn for nearly half a century by their beloved Mary, Queen of
Scots. The present British monarch, after her own coronation in
Westminster Abbey in London, visited the crown room in Scotland. She
gently put forth a hand and barely touched the crown, as if to pay
homage to that “patriotic tide that streamed through Wallace’s
undaunted heart.” It is a crown that will never again be worn,
unless perchance a Scot someday rules over the British Empire.
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Such
is the spirit of Scotland. Her history has lent distinction to her
culture, literature, law, education, and religion. The Church of
England, like ourselves, has congregations in Scotland, but, also
like ourselves, they must be part of the free churches, separate
from the Church of Scotland. Her several universities are among the
oldest and most renowned in the world. Her system of justice has for
centuries been uniquely respected by the world of jurisprudence. Her
scientists invented both TV and penicillin.
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And
this is the spirit of her martyrs and reformers. It is an august
roll call the Hamiltons, the Knoxes, the Haldanes, the Wisharts,
both before and after our own Revolution. John Knox came up from a
galley slave to wrest power from the pope in Rome, and her adopted
son, Alexander Campbell, came out of a wreck at sea to find new
directions in her changing religious culture.
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But
in this first installment of notes on our history as a distinct
religious movement, I want to review briefly a few other examples of
restoration thought that go back before the American Revolution.
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Only
heaven knows all those lesser lights who have worked for reform,
serving their own generation, not even a tithing of which are even
mentioned in the history books. Some of them were especially
conscious of the unity of the Spirit, realizing that a divided
church could never be the true Church of Christ on earth. There was,
for example, one George Calixtus: a Lutheran, who lived from 1586 to
1656. His father studied under the great Melanchthon. He antagonized
his fellow Lutherans by advocating union not only with other
Protestants but with Roman Catholics as well. His basis of union:
“what has been believed always, everywhere, and by all,”
which is strikingly similar to some of the slogans of our own
Movement.
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Then
there was John Dury (1595 - 1680), another Scotsman, by the way, but
one who labored all over Europe, appearing before courts as well as
churches, advocating a unity based upon “practical divinity”
rather than “ordinary philosophical jangling” of the
creedal theologies, which sounds as if it were lifted from our own
Thomas Campbell’s
Declaration
and Address.
And
he sounded like Barton W. Stone, over a century before Cane Ridge,
when he contended that all Protestants should be called simply
“Reformed Christians.” For 50 years this man labored
among the warring factions, pleading for freedom in Christ and
calling for a cessation of those controversies that divide
believers.
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There
were even books published on unity that far back. Hugo Grotius
(1583-1645) wrote
The
Way to Ecclesiastical Peace,
in
which he appealed to primitive Christianity as the basis for
oneness. And Edward Stillingfleet of the Church of England published
his
Irenicum
in
1662, in which he pled for unity on the ground that nothing should
be made a basis for communion that Jesus did not make a basis for
discipleship. He insisted that divisions have been caused by “the
adding of other conditions” than those required by Jesus and
his apostles. A German, Christoph Mathew Pfaff, issued his
Pacific
Address
in
1720 in which he pled for unity on the ground that all Protestant
churches are in essence one.
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There
were still others who may be better known to you. Richard Baxter
(1615-1691) was a Puritan who was fined and imprisoned for preaching
reform, and he was a fervent advocate of unity. He gave us the
slogan adapted by the Campbells: “In fundamentals, unity; in
non-fundamentals, liberty; in all things, charity.” John
Bunyan (1628-1688) was another Puritan who was imprisoned for
preaching contrary to traditional doctrines of the Anglican Church.
During one long imprisonment he produced
Pilgrim’s
Progress,
which
is a plea for biblically-based piety. Archbishop James Usher
(1581-1656) is known more for his chronology in the
King
James Bible
than
for his efforts toward reform and unity. He must have been the only
Irish Roman Catholic of high rank who accepted Presbyterian
ordination and advocated union with them.
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Most
all this reformed thinking had two characteristics: it took place
for the most part
within
the
churches, and they were efforts, in one way or another, to recover
the simplicity of primitive Christianity. They did not think of
themselves as innovators introducing new doctrines, but as agents of
renewal seeking to recover the old doctrines. Luther had long since
said in his commentary on Galatians: “We teach no new thing,
but we repeat and establish old things, which the apostles and all
godly teachers have taught before us.” Lancelot Andrewes
(1555-1626) was one of the 47 scholars who produced the
King
James Version,
and
he also was a reformer within the Anglican church, though not a
Puritan. Pleading for a return to the New Testament norm, he said:
“We are renovators, not innovators.”
Renovators,
not innovators!
Hardly
any saying coming out of pre-Revolutionary history so well
summarizes the ideal set forth by our own pioneers. And Alexander
Campbell was to say in his day what Bishop Hugh Latimer said in his,
almost in the same words: “But you say, it is new learning.
Now I tell you it is the old learning.” Latimer had to burn at
the stake for saying that, in defiance of “Bloody” Queen
Mary, being among the 300 (one-fifth of them women!) that she
executed as heretics. Campbell suffered in a different way when he
said it. But what Latimer said at the stake just before his death,
Campbell could have also said: “Be of good comfort, Master
Ridley (who was dying with him), we shall this day light such a
candle by God’s grace in England, as I trust, shall never be
put out!”
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Thank
God that the candles lighted by dedicated reformers have not only
kept burning all these years, but they have grown into mighty
torches that turn all the brighter the more they are born and shaken
by continuing generations!
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Lastly,
this kind of thinking is reflected in some pre-Revolutionary
philosophy and literature, which shows that it penetrated circles
beyond the church itself.
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The
pen of John Locke is generally credited for having ignited three
revolutions — the French, the Cromwellian in England, and the
American. This is because of the philosophical base he gave for
questioning of the old doctrine of divine right of kings, teaching
as he did that the power to rule really comes from God and resides
with the circumstances, making it easier to muster a nation against
injustices contrived against it. He spoke of moral law as few have,
and his reference to inalienable rights as life, property, and the
pursuit of happiness inspired our own Constitution.
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In
his
Letter
Concerning Toleration
(1689),
he revealed his conviction that the simple faith of primitive
Christianity, and that alone, should be the basis of communion
between believers, even though he belonged to the Church of England.