In this, our town, we call “New Springfield,” David Carson, a young minister of the Disciples of Christ is a near neighbor of mine. He is a graduate of Bethany College. His great-grandfather studied there before him, when Alexander Campbell, the founder of Bethany, was in his prime. If you want to know of this man as we know him, read Richardson’s staid old biography, or walk the shades of Bethany, West Virginia. Campbell, in our eyes, was the American pioneer theologian. He was devoted to the union of the churches of Christendom. He pleaded that all disciples of Christ call themselves “simply” Christians, and unite on those symbols and ordinances which Christendom has in common. If it would not make our great-grandfathers turn over in their graves, I and my neighbor would call ourselves “simply” Campbellites. We would do it for a human, and not lofty reason. It seems that those spiritually or physically descended from the early Campbellites 4are on family terms, no matter how they seem to roam in thought or experience, or no matter what their hereditary argumentative disposition. For a “Campbellite” is sure to argue, on the least provocation. There are traces of this tendency even in Richardson’s reverent biography.
Ultra modern followers of Campbell hang in their libraries with unlimited pride a certain Rembrandtesque lithograph of the great man, an heirloom that is now quite rare, and to be classed in its southern way, as the spinning wheels and old Bibles of the Mayflower are classed in a northern way. This lithograph is the enlargement of the engraving in the front of the Richardson biography, but much color and magic have been added. Out of the darkness emerges a smooth-shaven, high bred, masterful physiognomy more like that of the statesmen who were the fathers of the republic, than of a member of any priesthood. Campbell’s cheeks and eyes are still fired with youth and authority militant. He has a head bowed with thought, crowned with grey hair, and beneath his chin is the most statesmanlike of cravats, with a peculiarly old-fashioned roll. Thus he must have looked, at the height of debate with the infidel.
This is the man who put so much learning, 5and deathless controversy, and high distinction into the log cabins of the Ohio river basin, especially the romantic regions of Mason and Dixon’s line. On west of the Mississippi his followers carried his light to Seattle, Portland, and Los Angeles, and the cities of Alaska and Canada and the farms between. And they start ’round the world with it all over again at this hour. Yet in the end that light is apt to have a color of its origin, touched with Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky;—a southern gospel, far indeed from Plymouth Rock, or Manhattan Island.
I can never forget the copy of the lithograph that hung over my grandmother’s front room fireplace in the patriarchal Frazee farm house in Indiana. Under it I heard proverbs from Campbell every summer, from the time I can remember anything. All those sayings were mixed up with stories that came with my people along the old Daniel Boone trail from Kentucky and Virginia. And when that old frame house was new and novel, and most other dwelling houses near were log cabins, Campbell had been a guest received with breathless reverence. Under that picture I was personally conducted through all the daguerreotypes and records pertaining to the Kentucky pioneers of our blood.
6And now, in Springfield, under the same rich lithograph my neighbor keeps the bound volumes of Campbell’s Christian Baptist and Millenial Harbinger, once the arsenal of every debating “elder” of our persuasion. My grandfather’s copies were marked, every page, and these are marked by my radical friend, but with a different point of view.
On a certain evening I am in the pastor’s study tracing with astonishment the suggestion of Christian Socialism in the first number of the Harbinger. My Grandma had said nothing about that!
Few of Campbell’s older followers dwell on the hope of a practical City of God that shouted from the covers even before they were opened. This reasonable, non-miraculous millennium is much in the mind of my neighbor, and he tells me again and again of a vision that he has of Springfield a hundred years hence. But more of this later.
There is a woman who is florist of our town, Anne Morrison a descendant of the Chapman family. She holds in special reverence, John Chapman, (Johnny Appleseed,) who began his labors in a region a little north of Alexander Campbell’s diocese, in the Ohio basin. He remains a tradition among the more northern group of those who worshipped Campbell, and 7among similar pioneers. He is especially honored by that splendid sect, the Swedenborgians, for he was a preacher and teacher of the doctrines of Swedenborg. But he was even more notably a nurseryman. He was deserving of the laurels of Thoreau, three times and more, and by the test of life rather than writing, to him belongs nearly every worth-while crown of Whitman. He skirmished on the very edge of the frontier, but fought the wilderness, not the Indian. The aborigines thought him a great medicine man and holy man, because of his magical bag of seeds, for along their trails, wherever he tramped, there soon came up pennyroyal and all beneficent herbs. With the tenderness of St. Francis he wept over every wounded bird, and with the steadiness of a nation builder, he planted orchards of apples in the openings of the forest, fenced them in, and left them for the pioneers to find, long after. He wore for a shirt and sole article of clothing an old gunny-sack with holes cut for arms and legs, and winter or summer slept in the hollow tree on the pile of old leaves, and weathered it past seventy years, while the great Whitman lived in houses, and Thoreau was on Walden but a season or two. These men left behind them certain writings, but Johnny Appleseed 8left behind him apples, orchards heavy with fruit, beauty from the very black earth, and a tradition whose wonder shall yet ring through all the palaces of mankind. He was swift as the deer, and gentle as the fawn,—and stern with himself, as the Red Indian. Like Christ and Socrates he wrote only in the soil. He was welcomed more like an angel than a man in the pioneer cabins, and if ever there was an American saint left uncanonized in 1920, it is John Chapman, Johnny Appleseed, and by 2018 he is canonized indeed, and has his niche in the Springfield Cathedral, according to Anne Morrison’s revelation.
Another friend is a great hostess of Springfield, Eloise Terry, by name. Her enemies declare that she is the representative of her family fortune, and little else. But they are apt to be people who do not attend her quite earnest parties, where every ramification of the social fabric is candidly examined, at least for one evening. The most competent person is brought in to speak of his strand of the web, be he bootblack or jailbird or poet. But this is an advance on her family who are dully conventional, to the core of their souls. And her constant companions, though they are in fact people of the same general stratification of good fortune as herself, are selected 9for their human interest in her unconsciously inhuman inquisitions. And inquisitions, after all, come but once a month or so. In general she and her cronies are taking a decent part in politics, and their wealth does not interfere with an unprejudiced estimate of candidates, entirely apart from bank accounts. Her presence in town makes for the truth, and for progress that much. Liars hate her intensely. Petty political lies fade before her, however poor her remedies may be for the great lies. She is a golden-haired girl, around thirty years of age, with three thriving and well-reared children. Her distinction, in my eyes, is not her opinions, but the fact that she dresses in schemes allied to the gold of her hair. I meet her on the street like a bit of blessed sunshine. Also her heart is quite warm. If she had been a musician, instead of a kind of contemporary conversational historian, she would have talked of music, instead of events, with the same ardor and fine tone, to a similar circle of friends, and brought in the singers, to sing for them, from the very gutters if necessary, and have been as decent to such songbirds as she knew how.