• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1811 0

turned away from the brutal majesty of the Old Testament toward what they esteemed the unadorned teachings of the Gospels: faith, repentance, and the imitation of Christ’s virtues. Each member of the church was encouraged to study the Bible for himself or herself with the “fullest liberty of discourse and investigation,” an extreme form of sola scriptura. Disciples renounced all hierarchies; church elders wore plain clothes and preached in simple wooden meetinghouses without steeple or pulpit; and followers addressed one another as Brother and Sister. Women played important roles in congregations, and at least a few integrated and all-black churches sprang up. The sect’s founder, Alexander Campbell, was equivocal on the slavery question: he disapproved personally of human bondage, yet also felt that Christians had no business interfering in the relationship between master and servant and that politics had no place in the church. He wanted his religious message to attract both Northerners and Southerners. (Brother Campbell and other elders preached under a huge canvas canopy known as the Big Tent. Later, during the Civil War, it was cut up into strips of cloth to make bandages for wounded Union soldiers.)34

So quickly did the movement spread across the Western Reserve that Brother Campbell and his fellow Disciples fully expected it just as quickly to convert the entire planet, sweeping aside old sects and heresies and bringing about the return of Christ in very short order. They were disappointed when the world continued going on, messiah-less, more or less as before. But they did not lose hope: Campbell began to prophesy that the year 1866 would usher in a new epoch in human and divine affairs.35 After a time, these millenniarian dreams began hardening into militancy among some Disciples. In 1832, a group of Mormons—led by Prophet Joseph Smith himself—settled in Hiram and began converting townsfolk. Local Disciples hastened forth into battle. They seized the prophet from his bed in the middle of the night, stripped off his clothes, threatened to castrate him, and finally poured hot tar over his naked body, sending him fleeing into the darkness to seek a more hospitable haven farther west.36

James Garfield was born again into that austere faith at the age of eighteen, baptized one March morning in the bone-chilling waters of the Chagrin River.37 Like millions of other Americans, especially in the North, swept up in the nation’s Second Great Awakening, he embraced a form of Protestantism focused not just on the distant promise of Heaven but also on the obligations of the here and now. Conversion as a Disciple was not supposed to be an emotional or mystical experience but rather an intellectual one by which a man or woman became rationally convinced to accept Christ. (Perhaps Joseph Smith would have disputed this.) Brother Campbell and other elders held public debates on equal terms with prominent “nonbelievers,” including the famous British socialist Robert Owen. Campbell also frequently preached a sermon called “The Progress of Revealed Thought,” in which he traced the ever-growing human understanding of religion from pre-Mosaic times up through the “Modern age” or “Sunlight age” ushered in by Christ.38

Such intellectualism—and faith in progress—appealed to the scholarly young Garfield, so much so that he soon took to the circuit himself as a preacher. In Disciple meetinghouses throughout the Western Reserve, he gave sermons on Christian ethics and morality and on the relationship of science to religion. Reason and morality, he preached, “are alike the work of a perfect Creator who is himself the union of perfect intelligence and infinite goodness.”

God’s hand was visible in the scientific laws that governed nature—and also throughout the affairs of mankind. “In every nation,” Garfield told his students in November 1860, “there is a political and a religious history.… Prophecy [is] the dim side of the tapestry—history the bright side.” The discovery of the New World and the birth of “Republicanism” in America fulfilled