The winter of 1855-6 that I spent in Illinois was uneventful. My success
was not such as to discourage an evangelist that desires to be useful,
neither was it such as to fill him with vanity. The weather was
intensely cold, and the snow was deep.
It is said that before the coming of an earthquake, the sea gives forth
deep moanings, as if it felt the approaching convulsion; so at that time
there seemed premonitions in the hearts of the people that the whole
nation, North, South, East and West, would be swept by a political
cyclone that should leave behind it the desolation that is sometimes, in
the West India Islands, left in the track of a tropical hurricane. We
had heard of the murder of Dow, the rescue of Branson, and the invasion
of Lawrence, and these certainly did not give promise that Kansas would
be a favorable field for evangelical work, at least for a time. The
writer had not hitherto spent much of his time in Adams county; he now
spent a considerable part of the winter there, and visited the churches
of Quincy, Chambersburg, Camp Point, and many others. The brethren at
Quincy were making that experiment of monthly preaching that has been
found so hazardous, especially to city churches. They have since changed
the plan with wonderfully good results. It was at the church at
Chambersburg that Bro. Cottingham who has now won a national reputation,
achieved some of his earliest successes.
The majority of the leading members of these churches had been men and
women of full age when they left Kentucky. Some had tarried a little
time in Indiana. The memory of some went back to the time when the
Mississippi Valley was almost an unbroken wilderness, with here and
there a scattered settlement, made up of a frontier and uneducated
people. What are now its great cities were then insignificant hamlets,
and its means of commerce were rude flat boats on its rivers, and
pack-horses, or clumsy, heavy lumber wagons on its rough and often
impassable roads. There were few schools, fewer churches and still fewer
educated men. The country was perambulated by itinerant preachers. These
were guided by visions and revelations. Signs, omens and impressions
directed them to their field of labor and controlled their lives.
Ecstatic joy, vivid impressions, voices in the air, or seeing the Lord
in the tree-tops, were their evidences of pardon.
Once every year the people came together to a great camp-meeting. There
was intense excitement and enthusiasm, and many got religion; and this
was followed by spiritual lethargy, coldness and apostasy. It was a
short, hot summer, followed by a long, cold winter of moral and
spiritual death.
Among the Old Baptists there was preaching once a month. This was all.
There were no prayer-meetings, no meeting together every first day of
the week to break break and read the Holy Scriptures. Christian morality
was at a low ebb, and Christian liberality down to zero.
At length there came a change. The fountains of the great deep were
broken up, and men broke loose from the dominion of these old and
man-made systems. John Smith took the lead, and was followed by old
Jacob Creath, Samuel Rogers, John Rogers, John Allen Gano, P. S. Fall,
and many others. Alex. Campbell once said:
If any man can read the Acts of Apostles through three times, chapter by
chapter, pondering each chapter as he reads, and then can remain an
advocate of these old systems of conversion, may the Lord have mercy on
him!
But the old Baptists fiercely resisted the Reformers, and cast them out
as heathen men and publicans. And now the Bible was a new revelation to
the men that came into this movement. The veil was taken off their eyes,
and they could read the Scriptures as they had never read them before.
They could now see that the Bible was a simple and intelligible volume,
written to be understood by the common people, and they were only amazed
at their former blindness. But they were made to know what persecution
means. All the denominations combined against them, and they were
compelled to read the Scriptures to defend themselves; and thus pressed
by their enemies on every hand, they were made to feel how near they
were to each other, and how much they loved each other, and it became an
easy thing to meet together every first day of the week to sing, to pray,
to exhort, and to commemorate the death of their risen Lord. But many of
them were poor, and had growing families, and they had heard that there
was a large and good land in the Military Tract in Illinois, and with
many a tearful adieu, and bidding farewell to the they loved so well,
like Abraham going out into the land that God had given him, into this
land flowing with milk and honey they came--and prospered.
And here the writer of these "Personal Recollections" found them,
growing strong, and rich, and influential, and more prosperous than any
other religious body in Adams county. It is now after the lapse of
thirty years, to be mentioned to their honor--and to the honor of the
churches of the State--that they have made commendable progress in the
direction of a Christian liberality, and of moral, intellectual, and
religious growth; still they are not yet up to the mark.
For the purpose of the moral, intellectual and religious education of
his people, the Lord has given us one day in seven, and in one year he
has given us fifty such days. This in seven years is one whole year, and
in seventy-five years it is ten years, leaving out five years as the
period of babyhood; and this as fitting men for the highest style of
religious life, and of American citizenship is, if well employed, the
best school on the face of the earth. Needs it to be said, that to do
this work well, the teachers in this school of the prophets have need to
be well qualified? There are certain Scriptures bearing on this point we
will do well to ponder:
Meditate on these things; give thyself _wholly_ to them, that thy
profitting may appear unto all.
No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this life,
that he may please him who hath called him to be a soldier. The Lord
give thee understanding in all things.
We have no churches in this nation to whom these admonitions apply with
greater weight of impressive authority than to the churches of Illinois.
Where much is given, there much is required, and to no State in the
Union has more been given in the way of worldly wealth than to the
Disciples of that commonwealth. There is not such another body of rich
land in this great nation, perhaps not in the world. Water is an element
essential to the highest productiveness, even of fertile soil, and the
vapors rising on the Gulf of Mexico have not a hillock three hundred
feet high to obstruct their flow up the Mississippi eastward and
northward, until they reach the State of Illinois. And the men that do
business in the cities of this prosperous State, or till its fertile and
alluvial soil, that was lifted up, not many geologic ages ago, from
beneath the bottom of the sea, are so rich they do not know how rich
they are. But it is a peril to be rich. Jesus, Paul and Solomon unite in
saying so, and it is especially a peril when wealth comes suddenly. When
a man starts poor, and has felt the sting of contempt because of his
poverty, and then finds himself rich and prosperous and flattered, and
tempted to indulge in every luxury, then this man is in great peril; and
there is no security against this danger like using the wealth that God
has given him for the glory of God and the good of men.
But there were brethren thirty years ago that needed no admonition as
touching the disposition they should make of their world goods. I could
give a goodly number of examples, but the reader will pardon me if,
because of the narrow limits of these "Recollections," I confine myself
to one.
Peter B. Garrett, of Camp Point, Adams county, had set himself, with
honest purpose, to bring his Kentucky brethren up to the level of the
demands of primitive and apostolic Christianity. Every man has his
hobby, and Bro. G. had his hobby. When the writer first visited Camp
Point, he was demanded of to know if it was not a fixed part of the
apostolic order that each disciple should, on the first day of the week,
lay by him in store, of money or goods, as the Lord had prospered him,
putting it into the Lord's treasury? I could not quite affirm this, but
Bro. G. stuck to his hobby.
Bro. Garrett knew the value of a full treasury, and was ready to do his
part towards settling a preacher in the church, and paying him. But he
could not bring his brethren up to the level of his own aspirations.
Bro. G. came from Kentucky a poor man, but he got hold of a considerable
body of good land, when it was cheap, and cultivated it skillfully. Then
the Quincy, Galesburg and Chicago Railroad was build in front of his
farm, and the town of Camp Point grew up adjoining his premises. He also
built a flouring mill, and this added to his gains; and thus he grew
rich and influential, but he never thought of himself only as plain
Peter Garrett. The writer in fifty years has known many excellent
Christian families, but he has never known one family that, with saint
and sinner, among persons outside and inside of the church, have had a
more honorable fame than this Christian family. His wife was a motherly
woman. She did not assume to know much, but what she did know she knew
well, and translated her little store of knowledge into an abundance of
good deeds. She knew how to guide the house, take good care of her
children, live in peace with her neighbors, love the church and attend
its meetings, fear God and entertain strangers; and so this house, like
the house of the Vicar of Wakefield, became a resort for
"All the vagrant train,"
whether of tramps or preachers. His children, from the time they were
able to toddle, were taught to do something useful. His little boys were
made to bring in wood, and run on errands, and his girls to wash the
dishes; and thus this house became a hive of industry, and it came to
pass that in process of time, when our beloved Bro. Garrison, of the
_Christian-Evangelist,_ went out to seek a woman to take care of his
house, he very properly sought this favor at the hands of Peter
Garrett's daughter. It is a good thing to follow a good example, and our
devoted Bro. Smart, hitherto of the _Witness_, now co-editor of the
_Evangelist_, went and did likewise. [3]
Bro. Garret loaned the writer a light spring wagon for the purpose of
bringing his family back from Kansas, and thus equipped, he started a
second time on the journey he had made one year before.
One thought filled his heart: Will this tumult pass away, and will the
American people go forward and fulfill that glorious destiny to which
God in his providence has called them?