USA > New York > Tompkins County > Ithaca > History of the First Presbyterian church of Ithaca, New York, during one hundred years : the anniversary exercises, January twenty-first to twenty-fourth, 1904 > Part 16
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ship of these rights built the noblest type of free and thoughtful manhood, which was to shape and establish the national life and fill its veins with the hot, free, brave blood that should create, when the hour should strike, the great Republic of the Future.
When the hour struck ! Every strain of these purged and assorted bloods, vital with the red corpuscles of their tried and hardy faith,-brains packed with the " grey matter" of serious thinking of most momentous themes,- souls attempered as by fire,-I say, every strain of these bloods, Dutch, German, Swiss, Huguenot, English, Scotch, Scotch-Irish and the rest of lesser numbers and note,-every variety of that great believing, was dedi- cated to the great " Declaration" and the Holy War, whose Liberty Bell rang out not merely for their own independence but for the enfranchisement of universal man and signalled the march of the world up towards light and liberty and the kingdom of righteousness and of manhood and of God. The men and women who for faith's sake and conscience, had suffered all manners of torments in the old lands, had abandoned home and country and, often, culture, ease and opulence for rugged wildernesses and savage perils, had begotten into the generations following an independence of character and a force of conviction and will that would brook no oppression ; for which freedom was a necessity. The British commonly called the struggle the " Presbyterian Rebellion"; King James had long before said : " Presbytery agreeth with King as God with the Devil". A distinguished Tory wrote to the court : " I fix all the blame of these extraordinary proceedings on the Presbyterians ". Walpole said in Parliament : " Cousin America has run off with a Presbyterian Parson."
It is history that the brunt of the war was borne by the holders of the faith which we Presbyterians most largely represent. The larger part of the patriot armies, both officers and soldiers were of that faith. At Kings' Mountain, whence Cornwallis was driven to his final, fatal coup at York- town, all save one of the six Colonels in command were Presbyterian Elders. Generals Morgan and Pickens, who won the battle of the Cowpens, were both Presbyterian Elders. A leading Methodist writer has just now said, in an organ of that Church : " In achieving the liberties of the United States the Presbyterians of every class were foremost". From that sublime and holy struggle the English Church of the colonies almost solidly drew back, took Tory ground, even largely abandoning the country. The Church went nigh to perish. Virginia Episcopacy was a happy exception. That colony had been specially harried by British policies and, so, was ripe for revolt. One of the last acts of her House of Burgesses before sending representa- tives to the Continental Congress, was an indignant protest against the
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Crown's veto of her right to prohibit the importation of Negro slaves to her bounds ! Methodism had but just come to birth and cut little figure and the Baptists were yet but a feeble folk.
The first declaration of the necessity for armed severance of all ties with the British Crown was issued in noblest terms by the Mechlenberg Conven- tion composed of twenty-seven stiff Presbyterians, nine of them Ruling Elders and one a Minister, a full year before the great Fourth of July. Much of its phrasing and all of its brave spirit re-appear (without quotation marks) in that immortal document. Another proclamation of like sort, pledging its advocates to arın for active hostilities, was issued by a body of Presby- terians in Western Pennsylvania as early, I think, as May, '76, while Wash- ington was still declaring that he " Abhorred the thought of independence ", and Jefferson was saying that he " Preferred to depend on Great Britain rather than on any other nation, or on none." Pres. Witherspoon is said to have spoken the decisive word in Congress at the critical point between decision and delay, saying : "This Declaration ought to be signed by every member of this House within this hour." It was a Presbyterian Pastor in the battle of Trenton, near his church, who, when the wadding for the Con- tinental guns had given out, rushed from his church with his arms full of hymn-books and flung them to the men, shouting : " Give 'em Watts, boys ! Give 'emn Watts !"
Historians of every nationality and every stripe, British, German, French, American, Calvinist, Arminian, Agnostic, unite in testimony that the domi- nant element of our colonial life was the stalwart stock of all varieties of the substantial Presbyterian faith. That faith dominated the character, policies and history of all the greater colonies, save Virginia alone. Its confessors were the leading factors both in numbers and influence up to and through the Revolutionary War. The heroes who gathered around the great Vir- ginia Churchman,-the Father of his country, like the Pickens, the Sumpters, the Putnams, Starks, Gates and Allens were largely of that origin. Patrick Henry gained his first laurels in the famous Glebe cases which freed the Presbyterians of Western Virginia from the last remnant of enforced support of the Episcopal Church. These sturdy folk had long before secured from the Burgesses the right to establish and maintain Churches of their own by pledging themselves to guard their eastward lowland Episcopal neighbors from savage incursions from the western wildernesses.
The loose Federation into which the colonies emerged from the war was too loose to govern, to collect taxes, to execute the ordinary functions of necessary authority,-too loose to survive. The Presbyterian Church also felt and suffered from the disorders and losses of the war and recognized the
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need of constitutional reconstruction. So the processes of constitutional re- building began almost simultaneously both in Church and State, in the Church a little the earlier and were prosecuted and completed almost in con- cert, during the same period by kindred convictions and judgments, under the impulse of the common public opinion of the time which commanded both. It is no wonder, then, that there should appear in the two constitu- tions, so constructed, striking resemblances. It could not have been other- wise. The common faiths and free principles and practices of orderly repre- sentative government, were already traditions firmly imbedded in the hearts and habits of men and in the institutions of both Church and Colony, so were at hand for formulation into a strong, orderly and consistent shape for either Church polity or civil government. What is clearly in the mind and heart of two-thirds of the people can hardly fail of control in devising for either Church or State when people are let to control of their own. So, in this case, closely analogous systems issued of elective representative govern- ment in both civil and religious affairs. In each is the same discrimination of Legislative, Executive and Judicial powers and functions ; regular orders of courts from those of first instance to those of review ; fixed rules of pro- cedure, references, appeals and the like. Local bodies in the Church, as Churches with their elected Sessions, Presbyteries and Synods, stand related to the General Assembly of the whole Church as towns, cities, counties and states stand to the General Government of the Republic. Each constituent body is alike autonomous in its local affairs, while the larger common interests of each and all are administered under a written constitution by the elected representatives of the whole. Few writers on the constitutional his- tory of the United States fail to note these and other close correspondences between our own Church organization and that of the Republic, of which, at its birth, that Church was so large a factor. Indeed, the compact of civil government in the cabin of the Mayflower was the type and germ of the free Church in the free State, which is the glory of the Nation's life, and its hope !
But since the Republic's birth ? Presbyterianism ? I boast not the Pres- byterian name, but the faith and stock which she represents in common with the Dutch and Huguenot and Congregationalist. We have marched together westward, northward, southward, everywhere. The old Scotch and Scotch- Irish of West Virginia and Pennsylvania pioneered the mountains of the Carolinas and Georgia and Tennesee and Kentucky into civilization. Their fruitful loins gave their sons and daughters to Ohio and all the remoter north and west. Of them sprang Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln, the Harrisons and William Mckinley. The Websters and Garfields
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and Greeleys and Gen. Grant were of the New England origin ; the Calhouns and Haynes, and many prominent southern orators and statesmen and soldiers were sons of the same great faith, and Theodore Roosevelt is staunch to his Dutch ancestral faith and habit. No, no! I can not call the roll of the statesmen, soldiers, orators, men of affairs, captains of industry, preachers, lawyers, judges, poets, men and women of letters, of philanthropy, of science, of philosophy and of the arts, who have made illustrious the annals of the Republic, who have been nurtured in the holy cult of our faith.
As these elements were dominant up to the birth of the Republic, so were they in its preservation in the awful sixties. They were the Union hosts. The old Presbyterian mountains even of the South were loyal to the old flag. They kept Kentucky in the Union and divided the allegiance of Ten- nessee. They flung their brave regiments into the fray wherever the fray was hottest. Wherever the descendants of these old stocks predominated, hostility to slavery prevailed. It did so through all the southern colonies till after the Revolutionary War, and until Cotton became King. The fiercest Phillippics against that system that have ever been uttered have fallen from the lips of southern statesmen and philanthropists. The doctrine of State Sovereignty, also, was scouted by the vast majority of these descents, and the old loyalty to the Union maintained. The heroic stubbornness of the South was found in the stalwart vigor of the same faith and gave us soldier heroes aud saints on the other side who were all but indomitable. And now we are all together building up a new South with incredible rapidity,-a South that throbs with new industrial, social, educational and, as I believe, political vitality, far richer in promise than in present attainment or in present dreams.
It would not be candid, however, to give this hour to mere eulogy of what we have been and have done, in the face of the fact that we have been so vastly outrun in these later days by our Methodist and Baptist brethren. We Presbyterians, in all the twelve varieties of us number 1,662,000; the Bap- tists (thirteen bodies) 4,725,000 ; the Methodists (seventeen bodies) 6, 193,000. Yet we held the ground first; had the wealth, the education, the social, as well as the numerical, supremacy and the hardy enterprise essential to mighty progress. Everything,-the very air and spirit of the Republic was for us. We ought to have remained the vastly preponderating communion of the Nation. The Baptists came in later, despised and persecuted, yet have outstripped us. The Methodists came a hundred and fifty years after us, with much scorned beginnings, and have gone shouting past us, not in membership only but in the number and riches of their educational facilities and the sweep of their religious power. Why? Two things chiefly.
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(I.) The stern rigidity with which we have held to the harshest statements of our creedal Confession. These have repelled candid,-" superficial" as we have been too fond of saying,-seekers after truth, have offended their moral sentiments, have conflicted with their consciousness of personal free- dom and responsibility, have seemed to hold them under an arbitrary fatalism which their reason, their consciences and their very consciousness have re- pudiated. In 1784, just while our Church was completing her constitution, Wesley had revised for his followers the "Thirty Nine Articles" of the English Church, cutting out every metaphysical proposition, every one that could not be understood by the simplest believer, or which should stir dis- pute among evangelical Christians, leaving only the unquestioned funda- mentals of the Gospel. This new creed,-a consensus of the things " always and everywhere held by all Christians" was just then put forth to the world. The "Great Awakening" had come in England and was at hand in America. To the awakened attention of new enquirers, untrained to the subtle analyses of a scholastic theology, were presented, in the midst of high religious excitement, these two creeds,-the one bristling with metaphysical difficulties, far beyond their power to solve, which seemed to them full of inconsistencies, whose appeals to their free wills seemed to contradict its assertion of their entire inability to obey ; the other, Wesley's plain, di- rect and simple summary of the mere fundamentals of a free salvation. Is it a wonder that these awakened and truly converted souls, often in wild new regions, seeking and finding a plain and direct way of life, unused to the subtleties of controversy of the old times of keen theological strife among learned men, turned in multitudes to the more practicably manage- able terms of the Wesleyan confession? They did it and their like have kept on doing it to this day. Our difficult standards repelled them. The Wesleyan attracted and won. Somebody has wittily called ours "A Sheep in Wolf's clothing."
The Baptists have made their mighty way through their Church polity of Independency, the right of each Church to formulate its own creed and their deep-water-believer's-only-Baptism.
Had our Calvinistic Churches a hundred years ago, modulated the needless, extreme and extravagant severities of their standards, as we have at the too long last done, we should have gathered a vastly larger constituency, with- out the sacrifice of a jot or tittle of essential truth or of spiritual power. In the fierceness of political and theological warfare in past centuries it was inevitable that proportions and perspectives of truth should be warped and distorted. The Sovereignty of God over against the Divine right of kings and the Divine authority of the Papal Church on the one hand, and, on the
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other, against man's responsible free will, got an emphasis so undue as to obscure altogether truth that seemed antagonistic. The two propositions of Divine Sovereignty supreme and man's full responsibility for his own free choice,-that freedom irrevocably ordained of God as the basis of human character and responsibility, are both, and equally, scriptural, and funda- mental truths of revelation. The High Calvinist errs, not in his positive insistance, but by liis emphasis which obscures and relegates to insignificance the essential freedom of the soul, while the Arminian so emphasizes the latter as to obscure the former. Each is correct in his positive main doc- trine. Both err in the exclusiveness of their emphasis. The balanced believer is he who stands firm with his right foot on the august fact of the Divine Sovereignty and his left just as firm on the Free Will of man as the logical and revealed basis of human responsibility for sin, guilt and salva- tion. He cannot and does not try to formulate the reconciliation of the two but he finds them both in the Book, in reason, in daily devout experience, and in the very categories of thought. He, therefore, really believes both with an even emphasis and no shrugging of the shoulders. I have read, lately, a sermon of John Wesley as hyper-Calvinistic as ever Jonathan Ed- wards preached. Every stiffest Calvinist in urging on a fellow-man the imme- diate acceptance of Christ is as Arminian as Wesley, and every Methodist in prayer is Calvinistic as Edwards. This error of emphasis has cost Calvinism the constituency of a multitude of men whose fresh conversion has brought home to them the keen sense of their personal and entire responsibility for the rejection of Christ through all the sinful past, as well as their entire con- scious freedom in the new surrender. They have been not at all conscious of the prevenient, predestinating act of God and will become so only after a good deal of speculation afterward. So these good people, well saved, have gone in multitudes whither their own experience would naturally send them, into Methodism whose emphasis is on that freedom of which they are con- scious and whose creed is level to their comprehension. So the ranks of their joyous communion have been swelled by exultant hosts, and been recruited vastly from Presbyterian loins. It is estimated that three-fourths of the lineal descendants of the original Scotch and Scotch-Irish Presby- terians are to-day, so far as they are in any Church, are in these great fellow- ships of the Methodist and Baptist bodies.
(II.) But a second reason why Presbyterianism does not embody a host vast as these is to be found in its uniform insistance on a thoroughly edu- cated and, so, a very costly Ministry for the Pastorate of all its Churches. The progress of the Gospel has been, of course, largely into new, sparsely settled and as yet poor, sections of our immense territory. Churches, like
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children, are born small and weak. Nine out of ten of all our own Churches, east and west, have had to be aided at some time or other in their history. This Church required such help for years. With multiplication of small settlements which must have religions privilege; with great religious awak- enings at meetings held often in the open fields, far from any Church build- ings or even Church organizations, it grew impossible to supply College and Seminary men to shepherd the converts and Pastor the new Churches which the manifest grace of God had brought to birth. It has been an open neces- sity, in the history of rapid Church progress, that some method of running lighter than with our heavy and costly crafts. Battle ships won't run up small streams. The Methodists and Baptists have provided the needed lighter craft, by their systems of Lay Preachers. They have sought out and laid hands on godly men, of ability to lead and edify, each his little group of believers. They had little education, but were put to study as they could and had the Spirit of God. They worked their farms or in their shops at their ordinary occupations for a livelihood ; yet pastored well their flocks. Each received what little compensation his neighbors could afford. They were with their people and of them in all their common cares and burdens, in all the exigencies of the daily life, and did good work for the Master and for men. So these little Churches have gone alone on such ministries at a cost of one, two or three hundred dollars a year where a Presbyterian Church with its Seminary inan would have cost three or four times as much. So these Churches have gone where we could not and won for Christ and their Church regions into which we could not go. Under such ministries their little groups have grown, multiplied on every liand, on old fields as on new. Somewhere,-in many wheres,-an established Presbyterian Church has been supported at a cost of a thousand or more dollars a year. A little Methodist Church has come in almost under its shadow, with a farmer Pas- tor, a good man, whom everybody knows and respects. His services cost a hundred or two dollars a year. He does good, saves souls. Some members of the old Church always had a taste for the Methodists, and go over. Some family gets dissatisfied in the old Church and drops into the new. Burdens on those that remain get heavier as over against the trivial ex- pense of the other. So it has gone in many an old town of New England and New York and everywhere, till the old Church has died and the new, because the cheaper, holds the field. The question of relative cost, especially in new fields, is often the vital one. The small band of Christians, intend- ing Church organization, confront that question first of all. They cannot avoid it. One Church with a Lay Preacher they can maintain at a third of the cost of another. On that basis they can even go alone, dependent on
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no benevolent Board. Who can wonder at their manly, self-respecting, inde- pendent choice ? So, for these two very sufficient reasons, without crediting them with greater zeal or devotion than our Calvinistic Churches have pos- sessed, they have outrun us fast and far in every direction. In the early part of the last century we committed a sad blunder, and a blunder is often as bad as a crime, when we refused to the Cumberland Presbytery the right to license and ordain such men as I have described to take pastoral care of the numerous converts within its bounds during the great revivals of that period. That blunder sealed up our chance for the greatest power on this continent for Christ and barred us from chief hand in the evangelization of the West and of the world, as well as from the numerical supremacy of the Evangelical Churches of America. The Cumberland Church was thrown off on its independent way and numbers more than 200,000 good and true Presbyterians. She was wise and right and we were wrong. I pray God that the present movement for organic unity with these brethren may reach happy and early success. The motive in this most unwise course has been the fear of letting down the standards of a learned ministry. That fear was groundless, for, see! What has this imperfectly educated ministry done for the Methodist Church ? It has so multiplied its Churches and Pastors and so built them up in intelligence and resources as to create a demand for more adequate supply of completely trained Pastors, till that Church has to-day four times as many Colleges and Seminaries for their equipment as have we, and these are on the average better endowed and provided and attended than are our own, and their ministry is second to that of no Church in the world in ability, learning, eloquence, piety or effectiveness. Still they can run light where light-running is a necessity for the running at all.
Here, I think, has been our greatest Presbyterian failure in practical wis- dom in the past, and now. We have paid dear for it in the relative fewness of our membership and of our Churches and in the relative burdens of our new Churches on the benevolences for their support. A thousand dollars of Methodist Home Missionary money, on the average, probably goes as far as twice or thrice that amount with us. We had, in this country, all the start. We had the field practically to ourselves. We had the education, the wealth, the culture, the social influence, the educational facilities and a hundred and fifty years of time aliead of Methodisni, and everything else in our favor. We ought to outnumber them ten to one! I do not imagine that this incompre- hensible unwisdom of the past is so grievously to hinder us in the future as the country fills up and the little new Churches get bigger and abler. But I think that it is easy to see how these two great unwisdoms of the past have
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hindered us of the grandeur which was easily our manifest opportunity,-an opportunity which might well enough have seemed our birthright and our destiny.
Contributions, then, to the Nation's Life ! Well, this larger Presbyterianism of which we speak contributed the great mass of its original material,-its actual population, during the whole colonial period. It was the creator of their sturdy and indomitable character, as Froude and Motley and Macauley and Greene and Carlyle and Taine and D'Aubigné and DeTocqueville and Ban- croft and John Fiske and every other historian who has delivered his verdict have most copiously affirmed. That believing shaped their thinking and set them their ideals and was the one impulse that brought them to these wild and inhospitable regions. The religious motive was the practical builder of almost every colony from Roman Catholic Maryland to the Carolinas and from the Carolinas to Massachusetts. Tide-water Virginia is possibly an exception. This great faith which Presbyterianism most fully represents, built the Common School, and the early Colleges. It laid the responsibility of government, under God, on representatives elected by and answerable to the body of their electors. When the time came for the great revolt it was the revolt. During the war these believers were the chief and most numer- ous factors of the struggle. In the construction of the new constitution of the Republic their ideals prevailed in the formulation of the "most perfect instrument of government that ever issued from the brain and heart of man." In the advance of settlements and civilization up and down and out across the mountains and the plains, her hardy sons and daughters were the inde- fatigable and resistless pioneers. Mountains, rivers, forests, savage tribes, cruel winters could not arrest or daunt them. When the crisis of the sixties came they were still and every where at the front, on either side, but by vast and overwhelming majorities on the right side. And now it is the great old stock that inakes strong the faith and rich the blood, not merely of our own
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