|
Originally, of course, all
the churches in southwestern Pennsylvania were in the country, because
there were no towns as yet, the entire population being made up of
farmers. There were at least eight or ten quite large congregations in
various parts of Washington county a good while before there was an
organized congregation in the town of Washington, or in Pittsburgh. The
constituency of these churches in the forest was very widely extended, as
people thought nothing of going ten miles or more to service. Everybody in
all the scattered settlements except the very aged and the infirm, went to
service on the Lord's Day. The matrons and small children went on
horseback, the men and young people afoot, the men striding by the side of
their mounted women, dressed in buckskin trousers and hunting-shirts, and
with rifles in their hands. My paternal great-grandfather was an elder in
Bethel, which being six or seven miles from his home and over fearful
roads, or rather no roads at all, and being a very bulky man, he found the
trip irksome, and so he bought and removed to a tract of land within the
bounds of Upper Buffalo, "to be near church." He was now only three miles
away. Wheeled vehicles were unknown, or nearly so. My grandfather used to
tell us that when his mother died in 1784, there was in the entire
settlement but one pair of very clumsy front wheels of a wagon, and on the
axle the rude box in which his mother's dead body was laid, was strapped,
and bounced over the rough roads to the Bethel burying-ground. His father
and a few neighbors on horseback followed the body. He, a little boy of
five years, ran after the procession pleading to be permitted to follow
his mother to the grave, but was forbidden. This is a pathetic picture of
the times. Every man worked his clearing with his rifle at hand, and every
family stood ready night and day to make a fight, or escape to a
neighboring fort. These forts were simply large block-houses built of
logs, and placed at convenient points through the settlements. At first
sign of an Indian raid, a runner, or mounted courier would scurry through
the settlement sounding the alarm. During the years from 1770 to 1790 the
settlers very often had to fly from their burning cabins and devastated
fields to these forts for shelter. The men would sally forth to drive off
the savages, and bloody conflicts would take place in the deep forest.
Meanwhile a ceaseless vigilance was kept up in the forts. When thus shut
up, the people acted according to their renewed nature. They held
religious services and many were converted to Christ. In Vance's fort near
Cross Creek, where many people were shut up for a considerable time, there
was a great revival, with many converts, one of these being Thomas
Marquis, who later became a very eloquent minister, and the progenitor of
a large number of useful ministers. These meetings and revivals went on
while the Indians were swarming in the surrounding woods and laying waste
the settlements. I can well remember when a small child often seeing in
the old Buffalo church, one of the daughters of the "silver-tongued"
Marquis. She was then a very aged woman and a widow. She still retained
remnants of the beauty for which she had been noted in her youth, and was
a famous singer in those rude settlements. When she was more than eighty
years old, we used to hear her voice in a high falsetto, singing "counter"
in the services. Like that of many other old people, her voice shivered
and quavered a good deal, and not from purpose at all, for this was long
before the time when such a tremolo became a silly fad in certain
quarters.
Very often, at least one
son of a family, and sometimes more than one was dedicated to the
ministry, or to one of the learned professions, and so was sent to school
and college. When in 1879, Buffalo and Cross Creek, originally one charge,
celebrated their centennial, it was found that up to that time above one
hundred young men had gone out of that rural community into the Christian
ministry, besides a large number who had gone into other professions. When
I was a student in Allegheny Seminary there were six of us in that one
institution from Upper Buffalo, and I believe nearly as many from Cross
Creek. It was found that during that first century, several hundred men
had gone out to be ruling elders of the Church in widely separated
sections of the land. Many others had been highly useful in other
callings, and some had attained high distinction. These were but two of a
group of ancient congregations in that general region, and every one of
them had had a similar history. The like was true of the neighboring
congregations which belonged to the Associate and Associate Reformed
communions, now happily united in the United Presbyterian Church. They
were popularly known as Seceder and Union, and were not too friendly at
that time. The differences between them were exceedingly minute, but the
lines were tensely drawn, and there was no intercommunion. In race, type,
temperament, theology and history, they were precisely alike, and like
their Presbyterian neighbors, only they were stricter in some respects.
The Covenanters, of which there were two kinds, were still stricter. They
were the straightest of the straight. These divisions were not merely
formal and nominal; they were real and actual. The ministers of the
Seceders and Covenanters unsparingly denounced "occasional hearing," as a
grievous offence against God. By this they meant the going to hear a
preacher of one of the other divisions when they had no service of their
own. They were to stop at home, studying their bible and catechism. The
modern man would have to get out his microscope to see the difference
between the Old Side, and the New Side covenanters, but all the same, the
old side man would go through mud and snow ten miles to worship in his own
conventicle, though there might be a new side church within half a mile of
his home. The ministers of the different divisions had very little to do
with one another. Of ministerial fellowship they had absolutely none, and
even of neighborly fellowship there was next to none. Two of them might
live for years quite near each other, and yet the nearest approach to
familiarity be a formal salutation as they met in the highway. The Seceder
felt bound in conscience to testify against and denounce his neighbor who
sang Watts hymns, and the still stricter Covenanter could only consign his
Seceder brother to the "uncovenanted mercies of God." He probably tried in
charity to believe that the Lord might possibly have mercy on his
misguided and blinded soul. There was no apparent bitterness of spirit,
nor anything approaching personal hatred or malice in all this; not at
all; only there was the stern conviction on the part of each that the
other was in serious error, and that it was his solemn duty to testify
against his ways in public and in private. It is easy for us to condemn
all this, but it is a question whether it was more to be deplored than the
Saducean indifference of more modern times.
We must not belittle or
dismiss with a sneer these plain old country pastors of the early days.
They lived isolated and obscure lives, but they were faithful, earnest and
Godly men, and not a few of them, were very able men. Estimated by
results, they did a great work. Consider M'Millan, Dodd, Smith, and
Henderson; Marquis, M'Curdy and Patterson; the two Andersons, French,
Stockton, Eagleson, and many others of various branches of Presbyterianism
in those early days; men of education, ability and utter consecration, who
gave their lives to work in the woods, and yet see what came of it. They
have long since gone to be with God, but their works do follow them. They
are living and doing business in tens of thousands of lives all over the
world, and multitudes have already met them before the throne of God to
thank them for their fidelity. Measured by the test of widely-extended and
enduring influence, it may be questioned if any metropolitan minister in
the whole land was their peer. No faithful servant of Christ can tell what
is to be the ultimate outcome of his life. The essential thing is that he
do with his might the task given him by his Master, and as under that
Master's eye. In fact there is nothing great or small but doing the will
of God.
These Scotch-Irish people
had a great hunger for education, and the desire to give their children
better advantages than they had had themselves was central and dominant in
all their purposes. These old pastors assiduously encouraged this feeling
and wisely guided it. They founded classical, schools called academies in
many of their congregations, and thus gave encouragement and opportunity
to young people who aimed at the higher education. Particularly did they
lay on the conscience of their people the duty of dedicating the choicest
of their sons to the ministry of the gospel at home or abroad.
Consequently from almost every farm there was at least one boy who was set
apart to go to college, and it was a main part of the family purpose and
plan to send him. Many of these boys were solemnly dedicated to the sacred
office before they were born, as Samuel was by his pious mother. Mothers
bore sons for the ministry; fathers worked their hands to the bone to pay
their way, and the entire family when necessary, practised the closest
economy and self-denial, and all rejoiced in the honor God had done them
in choosing one of the boys for the holy office. What wonder that
Washington and Jefferson College founded and sustained by these people,
and fed by these parochial schools, should have had so great a part in
Presbyterian and American history? It is in place to ask whether there are
now many such breeding-places and nesting-places of trained and
consecrated ministers and elders in these madly materialistic days? Has
the great change in condition and conviction in this respect that has come
in recent years, anything to do with the alarming reduction in the number
of candidates for the ministry? Are there many communities where fathers
and mothers wrestle with God for their sons before they are born, pleading
that they may be chosen and qualified for His service anywhere in the
world, however that service may bring hardship, obscurity and poverty, if
only it contributes to the upbuilding of the Kingdom of God? Are pastors
as earnest and vigilant in pressing this duty on their people, and in
seeking out boys whom God may call to the sacred office, as were the
pastors of our childhood and of our fathers? This is worth thinking of. I
take the congregation of my forbears simply as a sample of the genuine
Scotch-Irish congregation of the early days in that section of the
country. It was fairly typical of multitudes of others. A correct
photograph of that community and that congregation needs only to be
duplicated to make it a correct picture of every section of the country
where these people were dominant. I select that particular community as an
illustration not only because it is, and from the first has been, one of
the most decidedly Scotch-Irish communities in America, but also because I
know it better than any other. I may be pardoned for saying that my people
have been a part of it for more than a century and a quarter. I was born
there, as my father was before me, and his father before him, and my
great-grandfather came into that country when it was a wilderness, and
when he was but thirty-two years old. The farms that he and his sons
carved out of the forest are in the hands of his lineal descendants
to-day. If these sketches have strongly local, and even personal features,
I trust it will be pardoned. Perhaps there is no better way of giving a
vivid impression of times and people than to describe particular
neighborhoods and individuals, provided these are fairly typical of the
conditions and the people in general. My memory is full of the fireside
and wayside tales related to me in my childhood by my forbears, and others
who were there in the earliest days. Every branch of the many divisions of
strict Presbyterianism was represented by one or more congregations within
ten miles of my birthplace. In no part of the country was the invincible
proclivity of Presbyterians to divide on small issues more strikingly
illustrated than among the Scotch-Irish of southwestern Pennsylvania. The
difference between tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum was great in comparison
with the differences between some of these numerous sects. Yet men would
have been crucified for these points of difference. Often have I seen a
man riding along the ridge above our farm on the Sabbath morning on his
way to a little gathering of Old-Side Covenanters, at least twelve miles
from his home. Late in the evening he might be seen wending his way
homeward, silent, saturnine, solemn, having done his duty as he saw it,
and given his testimony. On his way he passed within easy reach of several
Presbyterian churches, some of them very closely allied to his own, yet he
would have gone to the stake without a moment's hesitation for the
difference between them and him.
One of our near neighbors,
head of a large and substantial family, one of the oldest and most
respectable in the community, himself an elder in Buffalo, had married in
youth a woman who belonged to the Union church of Cross Roads. They lived
together for fifty years or more, in great affection and comfort, yet they
never went to church together. Many a time have I seen them ride side by
side on horseback to the top of the ridge where the roads forked, and
there part, he taking the left hand road to Buffalo and she the right hand
road to Cross Roads, and this they did during their entire lives. The sons
went with their father, and the daughters with their mother. This was not
an uncommon case. Within two or three miles of Upper Buffalo there was a
Seceder congregation, one of the most ancient in that section, about as
old as Upper Buffalo. It was a most strict and strenuous Seceder church.
For forty-two years the Rev. David French was the pastor, a faithful,
devoted and Godly man, but excessively narrow according to modern
standards. He enforced close communion of the closest kind; nobody but a
strict Seceder could come to the holy table in his church. He peremptorily
forbade his people going to other places of worship when they had no
service of their own. He was extremely protracted in his services, as
others of his persuasion were. He would explain the psalm for
three-quarters of an hour, pray for the same length of time, and on
special occasions longer, everybody standing, or pretending to stand; he
would preach for an hour and a half, and often much longer; the entire
service requiring sometimes five hours. The psalms in Rouse's version were
used exclusively, and always sung to the oldest tunes. The "clerk" read a
line in a sing-song tone, then led the congregation in singing it, when he
recited another line in the same sing-song tone and in the key of the
tune, sang this, and so on clear through. This was called "lining out,"
and so much importance was attached to it that when it was proposed to
abandon the practice it was like to have created a revolution. It did not
occur to them that this "lining out" was very like the intoning of the
Romish priest. No tune which required repetition of the words was allowed.
Anything like what musicians call a fugue would have raised a tempest.
This they would have denounced as vain repetitions which the heathen use.
In fact the chief difference between the Seceders and the regular
Presbyterians at that time was in respect to psalmody. The Presbyterians
gradually adopted Watts Psalms and Hymns, which collection the Seceders
denounced as human compositions, and utterly unauthorized. The debates
about this resulted in breaking up congregations and setting whole
neighborhoods by ears. Then these psalm-singing churches divided on other
issues, and hence the Presbyterians of the early settlements were much
separated among themselves. |
