and pecuniary aid of the society as long as there is hope of usefulness, and then when duty bids him depart, he is assisted to enter other fields." In this utterance, the society claimed that it stood on the same ground as the New School Presbyterian and Congregational churches as affirmed by the General Assemblies of 1818, 1846 and 1850, and by the General Convention of Congregational Ministers at Albany in 1852. The latter declared it "to be the duty of the missionary societies to grant aid to churches in slaveholding states, in support of such ministers only as shall so preach the Gospel and inculcate the principles and application of Gospel discipline that, with the blessing of God, it shall have its effect in awakening and enlightening the moral sense in regard to slavery and in bringing to pass the speedy abolition of that evil." 1 In spite of this statement, the society had soon to take the position of the churches and refuse financial aid to all churches not excluding slaveowners from membership. An example of the divisive power of this great question is shown in the history of the Third Presbyterian Church of Chicago. Up to 1851, all churches of eastern origin in Chicago were Presbyterian. The Third Presbyterian Church was noted for its strong anti-slavery sentiment, including as it did in its membership Hon. W. W. Farwell, prominent in anti-slavery political measures of the time, and Philo Carpenter, whose house and store were famous terminals of the Underground Railroad. The General Assembly of 1850 meeting at Detroit, having failed to take positive ground against slavery, a majority of the Chicago church voted to stand aloof from all meetings of Synod and Presbytery till this policy should be changed. Disciplined for this irregularity, a majority of the church established themselves in the lecture room of the church, the personal property of Mr. Carpenter, and there formed the First Congregational Church of Chicago, preached to in its early days by Jonathan Blanchard, later identified with Wheaton College, by J. M. Sturtevant and Owen Lovejoy, and in time proud of its record as "turned out, burned out," jeered at as a "nigger church." This church strongly criticised the conservatism of the Home Missionary Society. For years it held a Fourth of July prayer-meeting for the deliverance of the slave; it observed a month of prayer before the inauguration of President Lincoln. There was much in the internal development of Illinois to lead to a constantly increasing anti-slavery feeling. Even her early settlers, mainly from the south, did not wish slavery in Illinois, both for economic, and, in many cases, for moral reasons. This was proved by the majority, small indeed, which prevented the constitutional amendment permitting slavery in 1824. Then came the large influx of Easterners, most of them opposed to slavery, and accustomed to give ear to the moral instructions of their religious leaders. Their moral sentiments were shocked by the turbulent acts and temper of the border and by the sight of the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law. Moral sentiment aroused led to such a certainty of conviction 1 Home Missionary. March, 1853. that Illinois could even criticise New England for her moderateness of statement; churches criticised the society that gave them existence; and church members criticised the reserve of the church itself; and the religious leaders saw in all the agitation and in the threatening danger still greater need for the spread of Christian truth. As the contest deepened and patriotism was invoked to bring the country out of her trouble, it seems only a natural result that one in four of the entire male membership of the Puritan church in Illinois sprang to the defense of the Union against the coalition of slaveholding states. CHAPTER XIII. ECCLESIASTICAL RIVALRIES. During this era of anti-slavery agitation, New England Puritanism was disturbed by the rapid development of the Roman Catholic Church in the Northwest. The French Catholic priests of the early days had offered little opposition to the Protestants They did not object to the distribution of tracts and Bibles among their own people, and they never attempted to take the matter of education from the Protestants, who were so eager and so sure of their own method. What now particularly alarmed the Home Missionary Society and its constituency, was what appeared to be a definite plan on the part of European Catholics to capture a large part of the Northwest for their faith. 66 A warning was given in May, 1842, through the organ of the society: The territory of this nation is an unlimited and inviting field, to which the human swarms are gathering from other lands. The crumbling dynasties of the old world are sending hither materials to reconstruct the fabrics which are there tottering to ruin. Already the foundations are laid for social institutions such as our own fathers knew not. Foreign Papists are planting our fairest territories thick with their schools. Colony after colony of men of a strange tongue and stranger associations, are possessing themselves of our soil and gathering around our ballot boxes." "In Missouri, Illinois and Arkansas there are seventy-four priests with literary institutions of every grade in which, at least, a thousand youths are now traininghere then the very heart of the West is infected and every pulsation throws abroad a strain of influence baneful to the civil freedom and religious well-being of unnumbered thousands." 1 More hopeful was the following expression: "The most formidable foe of the universal spread of the Gospel is, doubtless, to be found in the Roman apostacy-where else could the contest be bloodless, where so successful as here, where no racks or tortures forestall the force of argument-here where the benighted children of error will surrounded and pervaded by the silent but resistless influence of our schools and presses; here, where every one of them may stand erect and feel that he is a man and may assert his right to doubt as well as to believe; to discuss and judge as well as to listen and obey? Instead, therefore, of deprecating the coming of so many foreigners as a curse, we should regard it as the fulfillment of our national destiny." 1 Annual Report of Home Missionary Society, June, 1842. In July of this year, 1842, it was reported that an agent from Illinois had been in England and on the continent for the purpose of sending emigrants to the western states. Money to buy lands in Illinois and elsewhere had been raised. Land offices had been opened in England and Germany for the sale of western lands. The emigration from Ireland, England and Germany was large.1 66 In November of this year, the "Grand Scheme" itself is fully advertised and exposed with increased effort to rouse public sentiment against what was held to be an impending danger: That there is a formal conspiracy of the crowned heads of Europe to bring our republic under papal control, as has been sometimes asserted, may or may not be true. But there can be no doubt that many of the potentates and grandees of Catholic Europe greatly desire such a result. The nobility and political economists who regard with amazement and terror the accumulation of masses of population in the overcrowded states of the old world, withont instruction, without employment, and without bread, have a powerful reason for pushing these masses off upon our comparative vacant territory." During 1842 a pamphlet was issued in London and Dublin, entitled "Proposed New Plan of a General Emigration Society; by a Catholic Gentleman." The object was to be the sending of the Irish poor to America. From this well written pamphlet the editors of the missionary magazine made large extracts. The reasons for such emigration are stated, as follows: "1. To dispose of excess of population. 2. To create demand for British manufactures. 3. To make the Catholic religion predominant in the United States." The pamphlet contained a map copied by the missionary magazine to show the region it was thought best to settle in. The territory included Upper Canada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and part of Iowa. The desirableness of this country was proven by descriptive extracts from De Tocqueville, Captain Marryatt, Miss Martineau and Judge Haliburton. The officials of the Home Missionary Society drew three conclusions from this document: "1. We may expect colonization stimulated and systematized more and more. 2. The great field of conflict for religious and political supremacy will be the West. 3. Now is the the time to save the West." In the following year, 1843, the foundation of certain benevolent societies in Europe to advance Catholicism in America gave further occasion for alarm. Frederick Rese, Vicar General of the Diocese of Cincinnati, interested himself particularly in the spread of Catholic missions in America, promoting the gathering of funds for this purpose in a memorial to Leopoldina. Empress of Brazil. The Pope granted special indulgences to those aiding this fund, and Metternich wrote to the Bishop of Cincinnati commending the movement. It soon gathered $61,000. The Society for the Propagation of the Faith at Lyons. during 1840, appropriated $160,000 to missions in America.2 The intense feeling on the subject occasioned even such extravagant language as that used in an address in Painesville, Ohio, in 1 Home Missionary, July, 1842. 2 Home Missionary, February, 1843. 1844: "The Apocalyptic Beast is watching with intense anxiety, and From this time on Romanism is classed with intemperance and slavery as an evil threatening the country. The citation of a few titles of articles appearing in the Home Missionary, show the nature of the Protestant opposition: "Jesuits in the United States," January 1846; "Catholic Clergy in the United States," February, 1846; "Indulgences," June, 1848; "Aid to the Roman Catholic Church in America," August, 1848; "Jesuit Seminaries at the West," October, 1851; Does the Romish Church Discourage the Reading of the Bible?" July, 1853. 66 The utterances on the subject, of some of the most distinguished men of the day will show how seriously the matter was regarded. Dr. Leonard Bacon referred to the "gigantic efforts of the Papal church to achieve for itself the dominion of this hallowed soil." Professor Park, of Andover, wrote: "Send our armies to the great valley where the Pope will reign unless Puritanism be triumphant. Remembering the fires of Smithfield and the ashes of our fathers who Speaksleep in Bunhill fields, let us pray together for this 'vine'."3 ing of the moral conflicts before the country, Dr. Mark Hopkins wrote: "Rome and despotism are pouring in the materials of which mobs are made. Infidelity in its various forms is more extensive When we remember the sectional jealousies than many suppose. and distracting relations of slavery, and see how easily the standard of a civil and servile war might be unfurled, we cannot see the burden on the church likely to be diminished in our day."4 Catholicism was not the only "error" by which the West was assailed. The missionary fathers, after the comparative uniformity in religious beliefs to which they were accustomed in New England Rev. were astonished and shocked at the sectarian divisions, the multiplicity of sects, with which they came in contact in the West. Julian M. Sturtevant writes as follows of the conditions in New "We had Baptist, Episcopal and England when he was a boy:5 Methodist churches, but they were far too few in number to seriously. impair the unity of the New England church life. The Baptists Both they and the Methodist were numerous only in Rhode Island. societies that were beginning to be organized here and there, usually sought locations remote from Congregational places of worship, and thus rarely came in contact with them. The world was then broad enough for all. There was no crowding. The consequence was that the church in any particular town was not regarded as the representative of some distinct denomination, but simply as a branch of the church of Christ, the Church Universal.' We thought of ours as 1 Home Missionary, June, 1844. 2 Home Missionary, May, 1852. 3 Ibid., September, 1845. 4 Ibid., November, 1845. Julian M. Sturtevant, An Autobiography, 23. |