THE “CHRISTIANS”
The longest direct tributary to the stream which became the Disciples of
Christ is the movement with which the name of Barton W. Stone is
generally associated. This took visible form when he and his four
colleagues dissolved the Springfield Presbytery, in 1804, and took the
name “Christians.” Back of this, however, lay two other movements which
led to the formation of “Christian” churches. Stone was certainly fully
informed about the first of these before taking his own step, but
probably not about the second. The three were so nearly identical in
principles and objectives that they considered themselves as
constituting a single body as soon as they learned of one another’s work
and long before they had any organizational unity. We shall consider the
three parts of the “Christian” Church in the order of their origin. The
first was a secession from the Methodists, the second from the Baptists,
the third from the Presbyterians.
In Virginia and North Carolina, 1794
Methodism was not a denomination but only a revival movement in the
Church of England until the end of the Revolutionary War. In 1771, John
Wesley sent Francis Asbury from England. He became the most important
factor in winning converts, enlisting workers, setting up the system of
circuits and itinerant preachers, and organizing the church. By 1784,
about 15,000 members were enrolled in Methodist societies in Virginia
and the adjacent states. But these societies were not churches. They had
no ordained ministers and therefore could not have the sacraments.
Asbury himself was still a lay preacher. The Virginia Methodist
preachers voted to break away from the Anglican Church, but Asbury,
backed by Wesley, resisted. The end of the war and the independence of
the American colonies changed the situation. Wesley sent over, by the
hand of Dr. Coke, a letter which has become a famous document. Part of
it has been quoted in another connection. In conclusion Wesley wrote:
As our American brethren are now totally disentangled from the state
and from the English hierarchy, we dare not entangle them again either
with the one or the other. They are now at full liberty simply to
follow the Scriptures and the primitive church. And we judge it best
that they should stand fast in that liberty with which God has so
strangely made them free.
(It seemed strange to Wesley that God should wish the American colonies
to be free from Great Britain, an outcome to which he himself had been
bitterly opposed.)
Wesley’s letter was read to a conference which met on Christmas Eve,
1784, at Baltimore. The conference declared the independence of
Methodism, adopted the name “The Methodist Episcopal Church,” and
ordained Asbury as deacon, elder, and superintendent. James O’Kelly and
twelve others were ordained as elders. Simultaneously with counseling
the American brethren to follow the primitive church and stand fast in
their liberty, Wesley had appointed Asbury and Coke to be
“superintendents” of American Methodism. Coke soon returned to England,
and Asbury changed his own title to that of “bishop” and assumed such
powers as no Anglican bishop or Methodist superintendent in England ever
had. For one thing, Asbury assigned every preacher to his field, every
presiding elder to his district, and from his assignments there was no
appeal.
James O’Kelly had become a Methodist lay preacher in 1775, when he was
about forty years old. He had been one of “Asbury’s Ironsides,” and had
been the leader of those who urged an earlier separation from the
Anglican Church. He had also led the futile protest against Asbury’s
assumption of the title of “bishop.” Asbury had made him a presiding
elder, but he continued to be the head and front of the resistance to
the bishop’s autocracy. When a demand for the “right of appeal” was
voted down by a general conference in 1792, O’Kelly and a number of
other preachers withdrew. A year later they organized the “Republican
Methodist Church,” with about thirty ministers and 1,000 members. This
stage of the independent movement lasted only seven months.
On August 4, 1794, the Republican Methodists met in conference at Old
Lebanon Church, in Surry County, Virginia, and adopted as their name
“The Christian Church.” This name was suggested by Rice Haggard,
formerly a Methodist lay preacher and one of O’Kelly’s partners in
protest from the beginning. The members of the conference resolved,
further, to take the Bible as their only creed. They had discovered, as
one of them put it, that “the primitive church government, which came
down from heaven, was a republic, though ‘Christian Church’ is its
name.” All preachers were to be on an equal footing. Ministers and
laymen were to have liberty of private judgment. Conferences were to be
merely advisory, and each congregation should “call its own pastor and
enjoy the greatest possible freedom.” It is to be noted that this
secession from the Methodist Church involved no dissent from Methodist
doctrine. It grew solely out of dissatisfaction with that church’s
system of government. The type of religious thought and preaching in the
separated group remained substantially Methodist.
The new movement started with a staff of experienced and zealous
ministers, under whose influence a considerable number of Methodist
churches now became “Christian.” The Methodist Church in Virginia and
North Carolina suffered a net loss of 3,670, in spite of its vigorous
evangelism, during the first year of the “Christian” church. Fifteen
years later it was estimated that the Christian Church had 20,000
members “in the southern and western states.” This doubtless includes
Kentucky and Tennessee.
In New England, 1801
The first “Christian Church” in New England was about seven years later
than the first in the South, and its origin was entirely unrelated to
the earlier one. The New England movement got its impulse from the
independent reactions of two young men against the type of religion they
found in the Baptist churches of which they were members and in which
they began to preach. These churches were Calvinistic in their emphasis
on original sin, the limitation of the benefits of Christ’s atonement to
the “elect,” the wrath of God toward sinners, the threat of hell, and
the inability of man to do anything for his own salvation.
Elias Smith, born in 1769 at Lyme, Connecticut, spent his boyhood under
very crude frontier conditions in a new settlement in Vermont, and had a
violent experience of conversion when a log fell on him in the woods. He
joined the Baptist church, and began to preach when he was about
twenty-one. In spite of his almost complete lack of education, the
Baptist ministers of Boston ordained him two years later. For almost a
decade he was a somewhat irregular Baptist preacher, improving his
education by diligent private study, becoming more and more dissatisfied
with orthodox Calvinism, seeking a way out of his confusion by
independent study of the New Testament, and moving toward the conviction
that the churches should abandon their theological and ecclesiastical
systems and restore the simple faith and practice of the primitive
church.
Abner Jones, born in 1772 at Royalton, Massachusetts, had a Vermont
boyhood not unlike Smith’s in its combination of frontier hardship, lack
of schools, and torturing religious experience. Having achieved
conversion, he joined the Baptist church, taught school for a time, then
studied and practiced medicine by the short-cut “Thompsonian” system;
but he also preached as opportunity offered. Still in his early
twenties, he “quit the fellowship of the Calvinist Baptists,” as his
biographer testifies, after hearing Elias Smith preach, though Smith was
then still a Baptist. As the result of his own thinking, stirred by
Smith’s influence, Jones organized an independent church at Lyndon,
Vermont, in the Autumn of 1801, to which he would give no name but
“Christian.” This, says the historian of the movement, was “the first
Christian church in New England.” During the next year Jones secured
ordination by three Free Will Baptist preachers—not as a Baptist but
“only as a Christian”—and organized “Christian” churches at Hanover and
Piermont, New Hampshire. Up to this time, Smith had been the leader in
thought but had hesitated to break his Baptist ties. Jones now persuaded
him to abandon the Baptist name and joined him in organizing a
“Christian” church at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. In 1804 Jones moved to
Boston and formed a church there.
These two men, Smith and Jones, lived and worked for nearly forty years
after that. Jones established churches at Salem, Massachusetts, where he
lived for several years, and at many other towns in New England, never
striking root very deeply in any place but winning many followers to the
movement and a number of preachers to its advocacy. Smith’s most
important contribution was the founding of a religious paper, the
_Herald of Gospel Liberty_, the first issue of which was published on
September 1, 1808, at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. With some slight
intermissions and under a variety of names, finally returning to the
original one, this journal was published for 122 years and then merged
with the _Congregationalist_.
Within twenty years after the founding of that first “Christian” church
at Lyndon, Vermont, there were dozens of such churches in New England
and others in adjacent parts of Canada and in New York and Pennsylvania,
all deriving from this original impulse. These were, on principle,
independent churches. No organization directed or controlled them and
they had no cooperative activities. However, there was a sense of
fellowship among them and they soon began to hold informal conferences.
There is record of a meeting of “the elders of the Christian Churches in
the New England states, assembled at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, June 23,
1809,” which authorized a fraternal reply to a letter from
representatives of the Christian Churches in Virginia and North
Carolina. The “general conference” held at Windham, Connecticut, in
1816, and the series of “United States conferences” beginning in 1820
were really, in spite of their comprehensive names, only conferences of
the churches in the northeastern states. One of these, in 1827, voted
that it was not proper for ministers to use the title “Reverend” and
passed a resolution condemning the use of instrumental music in public
worship. About thirty regional conferences, by states or parts of
states, had been organized within this area before 1832.
In Kentucky, 1804
Third in order of time, but first in importance in relation to the
Disciples, among the three movements which together constituted the
“Christian Church” was the one in which Stone emerged as the leading
figure.
Barton W. Stone, born in 1772 at Port Tobacco, Maryland, was a member of
one of the oldest American families. His great-great-great-grandfather
was the first Protestant governor of Maryland, 1648-53. Barton Stone’s
father, a man of some property, died just before the outbreak of the
Revolutionary War, and his mother moved with her large family to
Pittsylvania County, Virginia, very close to the North Carolina line.
With his share of the money from his father’s estate, Barton spent three
years in David Caldwell’s academy at Greensboro, North Carolina, thirty
miles southwest of his home. Here he “completed the classical course” in
1793. This school was hospitable to revivalism. Caldwell himself was a
Princeton graduate and a Presbyterian minister of the “New Light”
type—that is, of evangelistic temper and with an easy tolerance in
theology. McGready, the Presbyterian evangelist who was later to set
southern Kentucky afire, came to Greensboro and converted most of the
students. Stone was stirred by the appeal but repelled by the theology.
Meanwhile his mother, who had been an Anglican, had become a Methodist.
William Hodge, a young “New Light” Presbyterian, who had been one of
Caldwell’s boys, came preaching the love rather than the wrath of God.
Stone abandoned his purpose to study law and decided to be that kind of
Presbyterian preacher. The presbytery to which he applied for license
directed him to prepare a trial sermon on the Trinity. He struggled with
the theme, and his sermon was accepted, but he always had trouble with
the doctrine of the Trinity.
While waiting for his license to preach, he went to Georgia to visit his
brother and while there he served for about a year, beginning in
January, 1795, as “professor of languages” in Succoth Academy, a
Methodist school at Washington, Georgia. The principal of this academy
was Hope Hull, a Methodist preacher who had been closely associated with
O’Kelly in his protest at the Methodist conference two years earlier but
who had remained with the Methodist Church when O’Kelly and the other
insurgents withdrew to form the Christian Church. Stone and Hull became
very intimate friends, and Stone accompanied Hull on a journey to
Charleston, South Carolina, to attend a Methodist conference. John
Springer, an ardently evangelistic Presbyterian preacher of the “New
Light” type, whose field was only a few miles from the academy and who
had the most cordial relations with the Baptists and Methodists in his
neighborhood, became another counselor and friend and exercised, says
Ware, a “decisive influence” on Stone.
Returning to North Carolina, Stone received his license to preach from
the hands of the venerable and liberal Henry Pattillo, who, in a
published sermon on “Divisions among Christians,” had recommended the
name “Christians” as the one “first given to the disciples by divine
appointment at Antioch,” and who declared that men ought to be permitted
to differ peaceably about the doctrines of religion.
To summarize the influences of Stone’s early background and environment,
these items may be listed:
1. The Great Awakening, which, under the preaching of men trained in
William Tennent’s Log College and of George Whitefield, beginning
about 1740 but echoing through the middle and southern colonies for
more than half a century after that in the work of Samuel Davies and
many other evangelistic or “New Light” Presbyterians, had stressed the
common elements of the gospel and put the divisive doctrines of the
creeds into a subordinate place.
2. The Methodist movement, which did not cease to be a revival when it
became a church and which challenged the Calvinism of the Presbyterian
creed.
3. The “Christian” Church, which was having its first rapid growth in
Virginia and North Carolina while Stone was in the first formative
stage of his ministry in the same region.
4. The direct and personal influence of the men who have been
mentioned in the preceding paragraphs: David Caldwell, James McGready,
William Hodge, Hope Hull, John Springer, and Henry Pattillo.
After an experimental and not very successful missionary trip which took
him through the eastern part of North Carolina and back through
Virginia, and feeling that there was a better field on the frontier,
Stone headed west, on horseback again. Within three months he had ridden
to Knoxville and, at some peril from Indians, on to Nashville
(population 346 by the next census); had associated for a time with
Thomas Craighead, a Princeton-trained Presbyterian preacher of
independent mind, famous for his zeal for a “rational and scriptural
evangelism” and his scant respect for the authority of creed and
presbytery; had itinerated and preached in the Cumberland district of
Tennessee; and had then crossed Cumberland Gap into Kentucky, spent a
little time at Danville and Lexington, and by October, 1796, was
installed as regular supply pastor of two Presbyterian churches at Cane
Ridge and Concord. Cane Ridge was seven miles east of Paris; Concord,
ten miles northeast of Cane Ridge.
The next year a call to the settled pastorate of his churches made it
necessary for Stone to seek ordination from the Transylvania Presbytery.
This would require a declaration of his adherence to the Westminster
Confession. Renewed study did not resolve his doubts about the Trinity.
Before facing the presbytery, he privately stated his trouble to James
Blythe, then probably the most influential Presbyterian in Kentucky and
later one of the severest critics of Stone’s views. In the public
ceremony, Stone declared his acceptance of the Confession “as far as I
see it consistent with the Word of God.” Upon that guarded statement he
was ordained.
Cane Ridge Meeting
The Great Western Revival, with which the names of Stone and Cane Ridge
are closely associated, resulted from transplanting to Tennessee and
Kentucky the methods of evangelistic appeal which had been used by “New
Light” Presbyterians, Methodists, and “Christians” in the Southern
states east of the mountains. Under frontier conditions it developed
some bizarre and sensational features which have drawn attention away
from its real values. It began gradually with the preaching of four or
five men—especially James McGready and the brothers William and John
McGee—who had come west about the time Stone came, and who itinerated in
Tennessee, near and north of Nashville, and the adjacent part of
Kentucky. For three or four years the revival spirit grew and spread
until the countryside was in a fever of excitement. Fantastic
manifestations began to appear among persons who experienced “conviction
of sin,” and even among those who came to scoff—jerking and barking,
hysterical laughter, falling and lying rigid like dead men. These were
taken for manifestations of the power of the Holy Spirit.
Stone, who was concerned about religious apathy in his own parishes,
traveled the nearly two hundred miles from Cane Ridge to Logan County in
southwestern Kentucky, in the early spring of 1801, to see the revival
in progress under the preaching of McGready. He was impressed with the
genuineness of the revival. The physical demonstrations seemed to be
“the work of God,” but inexplicable and not wholly desirable. Stone was,
in a sense, the advance agent of the revival as it moved north and east
through Kentucky. By late spring it had reached the Bluegrass. On the
Sundays of May and June, there were great meetings at churches in the
area around Lexington, with attendance at the last three running to
4,000, then 8,000, then 10,000, according to contemporary estimates.
The climax came in the Cane Ridge camp meeting, which lasted from Friday
to Wednesday, August 7-12, 1801. The crowd was estimated at 20,000. Many
Presbyterian, several Methodist, and a few Baptist ministers preached,
often simultaneously at different stations through the woods. The
excitement was intense. The fantastic “exercises” occurred in great
profusion. This meeting was held at Stone’s church, and he had much to
do with bringing it about, but it was not in any sense his meeting. It
does not appear that he was the most prominent among the preachers.
Richard McNemar, for example, was more conspicuous, and so was McNemar’s
nine-year-old daughter, who became a child prophetess and poured forth a
torrent of exhortation from a perch on his shoulder. Stone rejoiced in
the awakened interest in religion and in the salvation of many sinners,
but the records do not show that he gave encouragement to the
spectacular “exercises.”
Not all the Presbyterians approved of this violent revivalism. Three
features especially offended them: the opportunity it gave to preachers
lacking education; the wild and disorderly physical “exercises”; and the
stress upon the idea that “Christ died for all,” not for a limited
number, the elect. The issue about education was especially acute in
southern Kentucky and became one of the grounds for the “Cumberland
secession” and the formation of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. The
“exercises” gradually ceased to be a prominent feature of revivalism,
except in remote and retarded communities, and left no permanent mark on
any major group. While they lasted they prepared the way for an invasion
by the Shakers, who won some temporary following. The declaration that
Christ died for all raised a real theological issue. This was what the
Methodists were preaching. So also were the “General” Baptists, who were
distinguished from the “Particular” Baptists by their belief in a
general atonement. Both kinds of Baptists were numerous in Kentucky, and
the “Generals” later became a fertile field for the Reformers. Within
two or three years after Cane Ridge the main wave had passed, but the
camp meeting remained as a popular pattern of religious and social life,
though without the more extreme features which had made the “great
revival” spectacular.
Richard McNemar, a Presbyterian minister, had not only been a prominent
figure at the Cane Ridge meeting but had elsewhere cooperated with the
Methodists, whose type of evangelistic appeal was congenial to him.
Three months after the meeting a heresy charge against McNemar was
presented to his presbytery. The process was delayed because so many of
the “revival men” took his part that those who had filed the charge
hesitated to bring it to a vote. After various procedures in the
presbytery, all irregular and indecisive, and after another minister,
John Thompson, had become involved in the case, the Synod of Kentucky,
meeting at Lexington, September 6-13, 1803, formally censured the
presbytery for letting these two men continue to preach while the charge
of holding “Arminian tenets” (i.e., Methodist doctrines) was pending
against them.
As the synod was preparing to put McNemar and Thompson on trial, they
presented to the synod a document signed by themselves and three others,
protesting against the trial and withdrawing from the synod’s
jurisdiction. The other three were Barton W. Stone, John Dunlavy, and
Robert Marshall. After a futile effort to win them back, the synod
placed the five under suspension.
The Springfield Presbytery
These five men had left the Synod of Kentucky, not the Presbyterian
Church. Their first act was to organize the Springfield Presbytery,
independent of the synod. (Their “Springfield” is now Springdale, ten
miles north of Cincinnati.) Their second act was to issue a statement of
their position. This is a pamphlet of about 100 pages, the full title of
which is: _An Abstract of an Apology for Renouncing the Jurisdiction of
the Synod of Kentucky, Being a Compendious View of the Gospel and a few
Remarks on the Confession of Faith_, with the names of the five attached
as authors. The important points in this statement are: (1) Christ died
for all—as against a limited atonement for the elect only. (2) The
gospel itself is the means of regeneration, and faith is the act by
which any man, if he will, can lay hold on that means. (3) Faith is the
natural man’s belief of testimony—a rational, as against a mystical,
conception of faith. Nothing is said explicitly about either Christian
union or the restoration of primitive Christianity. (William Guirey, a
Virginia Christian minister, later sent a copy of this _Apology_ to the
New England Christians as expressing the sentiments of the
Virginia-North Carolina group, and said that the Kentucky five “united
with us” when they left the Presbyterians.)
So far, this was an anti-Calvinist movement within the Presbyterian
Church. Its leaders admitted that their position was not in agreement
with the Westminster Confession, but claimed the right to differ from
the Confession where they thought it differed from the Scriptures. The
whole history of “New Light” Presbyterianism in Virginia and the states
south of it from colonial days, as well as the recent revival in
Kentucky, gave them ground for saying: “We are not the only
Presbyterians who view the doctrine of the atonement different from the
Confession.”
But the Springfield Presbytery was only a transition stage. These five
men might make their independent presbytery the nucleus of a new
Presbyterian body, as the Seceders and others had done in Scotland long
before, and as the Cumberland Presbyterians were to do a little later;
or they might cease to be Presbyterians. They chose the latter course.
On June 28, 1804, less than a year after its organization, the
Springfield Presbytery met at Cane Ridge and decreed its own
dissolution. The document in which it recorded this action is called
“The Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery.” By this
instrument, the presbytery willed “that this body die, be dissolved and
sink into union with the Body of Christ at large,” that every
congregation should be independent in the choice and support of its
minister and the discipline of its members, and that the Bible alone
should be their guide and standard. Ministers are not to be called
“Reverend,” are to “obtain license from God to preach the simple
Gospel,” and are to be supported by free-will offerings “without a
written call or subscription.” And finally, the Synod of Kentucky is
exhorted to examine every suspect and suspend every heretic, “that the
oppressed may go free and taste the sweets of gospel liberty.” (The full
text of the “Last Will and Testament” was reprinted in the first issue
of Elias Smith’s _Herald of Gospel Liberty_, Portsmouth, N. H., Sept. 1,
1808.)
The Christian Church
At this same meeting, June 28, 1804, it was agreed that the name
“Christian” should be adopted, to the exclusion of all sectarian names.
This was suggested by Rice Haggard, who had made the same suggestion to
the O’Kelly group ten years earlier when the Republican Methodists were
looking for a new name. Haggard had been active as a minister of the
Christian Church in North Carolina and Virginia from 1794 until his
removal to Kentucky about the time of the Cane Ridge meeting.
The “Christians” of Kentucky immediately became a group of churches as
well as a group of preachers. Fervid evangelists as they were, the
ministers immediately won to the movement several of the Presbyterian
churches for which they had preached and organized some new ones. By the
end of 1804 there were at least thirteen Christian churches in
north-central Kentucky and about seven more in southwestern Ohio.
Presbyterians called it the “New Light schism.” The number of preachers
was increased by the adherence of a few revival Presbyterians, by the
coming of some Christians from the East, and by recognizing as preachers
a good many men who had little or no formal education.
Shaker missionaries came to Kentucky in 1805, attracted by reports of
the marvelous manifestations of the Spirit in the great revival. McNemar
and Dunlavy soon joined them.
In the new Christian Church, no question was at first raised about
baptism. Within a few years, Stone came to the belief that only the
immersion of believers was scriptural baptism, and this view spread
gradually through the group. Stone immersed many, including some
preachers, before he was himself immersed. But it was not made a test of
fellowship. Twenty years later Stone wrote:
It was unanimously agreed that every brother and sister should act
according to their faith; that we should not judge one another for
being baptized or for not being baptized in this mode. The far greater
part of the church submitted to be baptized by immersion, and now
[1827] there is not one in 500 among us who has not been immersed.
From the commencement we have avoided controversy on this subject.
(_Christian Messenger_, Vol. I, p. 267, Oct., 1827.)
This trend toward immersion existed only in the West. In the East it
became a divisive issue in 1809, and only a minority adopted it.
Immersion never became the common practice with the New England
Christians.
For some time there was no organization among the Christian churches. A
“general meeting” of the ministers was held at Bethel, Kentucky, August
8, 1810, at which they “agreed to unite themselves formally.” This
suggested to some the need of a clearer definition of doctrines,
especially those of the Trinity, Christ, and the atonement. After
statements had been drafted and discussed at a later meeting, it was
agreed by almost all that freedom of theological opinion was better than
conformity to a standard. Marshall and Thompson, feeling that the
creedless Christians were too loose in doctrine, returned to the
Presbyterian Church. This left only Stone, of the original five who had
seceded from the synod on account of the heresy charges against McNemar
and Thompson. So it was by survival, rather than by pre-eminence at the
beginning, that Stone came to be considered the founding father of the
Christian Church in Kentucky. Later, especially after he began the
publication of the _Christian Messenger_ in 1826, his leadership is
evident; and in guiding the greater part of the Christian Church in the
West into the merger with the Disciples, his influence was probably
decisive.
The growth of the western Christian Church was not confined to Kentucky.
It took root immediately in Tennessee and in southern Ohio and Indiana.
Traveling evangelists went also into the South. As the tide of migration
moved to new frontiers, unordained elders, farmer-preachers, and
sometimes regular ministers carried it to Illinois, Missouri, and Iowa.
The position of Kentucky, as a breeding ground of pioneers who went out
in steady streams to aid in laying the foundations of these states, made
it a strategic point from which a new religious movement might make its
influence felt throughout the Middle West.
Such was the emphasis upon the independence of local churches and of
preachers, and so firm the determination to avoid anything like the
Presbyterian or Methodist systems of centralized control, that
organization was slow and weak. That meeting in 1810, at which it was
agreed to “unite formally,” did not in fact lead to any formal
organization. District conferences were arranged. There was a Deer Creek
(Ohio) Conference as early as 1808, and in the following years there
were many such. But as late as 1826, Stone felt it necessary to defend
the practice of holding even district conferences for worship, to
exchange news of the churches, to arrange appointments so as to supply
destitute churches, and (a tentative suggestion) “for ordination, if
thought proper,” but emphatically with no authority over local churches.
In the same year the Wabash (Indiana) Conference agreed that it would be
well “to have a general conference established in some convenient place
in the western states,” but this was not done. The Christian Church in
the West had nothing corresponding to what is now called “cooperative
work,” and no agencies or structures through which such work could be
carried on. The churches of the Northeast had their so-called United
States Conference, but sometimes they had qualms about so much
ecclesiasticism. The (New England) general conference of 1832 voted to
dissolve forever, but revived the next year.
Though there was no inclusive organization, the three main divisions of
the Christian Church had some acquaintance with one another’s work and a
sense of being parts of one enterprise. The _Herald of Gospel Liberty_
circulated widely. Stone had an agent in New York for his _Christian
Messenger_. When he reported, in 1828, that “the sect called Christians
have, in little more than a quarter of a century, risen from nothing to
1,500 congregations with a membership of 150,000,” his
estimate—doubtless much too large in any case—evidently includes all
three, and his reference to “more than a quarter of a century” shows
that he was thinking of beginnings earlier than the dissolution of the
Springfield Presbytery.