Isaac Lamar Chestnutt (1851-1907), Part 1

In the records of the Disciples of Christ in North Carolina, Isaac Chestnutt appears for the first time among the delegates who attended the denomination's annual state convention in 1877, held that year at Salem. The "List of Preachers" indicates he was minister for the church at Johnson's Mills in Pitt County.[1] Chestnutt delivered the "Introductory discourse" to the assembled representatives on the first day of the convention, no small honor for a minister just twenty-six years old. Also, he was appointed to serve on a three-man committee that would report on "Lord'sday [sic] Schools" in the state.[2] The recommendation of his committee included the following: "We respectfully recommend to this Convention, the importance of urging upon our preachers the necessity of laying this matter before their respective congregations without delay, making the subject of Lord'sday Schools a specialty." The committee also recommended curricula by Isaac Errett in Cincinnati, and by the Transylvania Publishing Co. in Lexington, Kentucky, trusted sources among the Disciples.[3] 

The annual reports from the years 1877 to 1895, after which Isaac Chestnutt no longer appears, reveal a pattern of frequent moves. During the fifteen years from 1877 to 1892, he and his family moved six times, never staying with a congregation longer than about three years. They went from the church in Johnson's Mills to the church at Maple Cypress, and from there on to Kinston, Farmville, Snow Hill, New Berne, and back to Snow Hill again. Their life seems to have combined social prominence with a good measure of hardship.[4]

Notes

[1] Minutes of the Annual Convention of the Disciples of Christ in North Carolina, Held with the Church at Salem, Pitt County, N. C., October 11th, 12th, and 13th, 1877 (New-Berne, NC: N. S. Richardson, 1877), 2. Chestnutt's name is misspelled twice as "Chesnutt." 

[2] Ibid., 3, 6. The expression Lord'sday appears more than once in this document.

[3] Ibid., 6.

[4] See the various Minutes, sometimes called Proceedings, from the annual gatherings of North Carolina Disciples of Christ.

Origin of the Baptists in America

What is now the Baptist denomination emerged from English Puritanism around the dawn of the seventeenth century. Similar to the sixteenth-century Anabaptists on the continent of Europe, English Baptists insisted on the immersion of penitent believers, as opposed to the sprinkling of infants.[1] True to their Puritan ancestry, the early sect took up the motifs of restoration. For example, early Baptist leader John Smyth (1570-1612), a radical dissenter from the Church of England, said he was seeking to restore "the worship and ministry of the Church, to the primitive Apostolic institution from which as yet it is so far distant."[2] Thomas Helwys (1550-1616), another leader among the early English Baptists, claimed that baptizing believers by immersion was the practice of the first-century church and, therefore, met the standard of apostolic Christianity, a conviction that led to the group's name.[3]

Early Baptists divided into two distinct groups. Particular (sometimes called Regular) Baptists upheld a Calvinist doctrine of salvation according to which God chose and predestined certain people to be saved and all others to be damned. By contrast, General Baptists embraced an Arminian doctrine of salvation according to which Christ died for all people, and individuals determined for themselves whether they would be saved or lost. The same distinction can be described from the standpoint of Christ's atoning sacrifice on the cross. Particular Baptists subscribed to a doctrine of limited atonement; the saving power of Christ's death was reserved for those predestined to be saved. General Baptists subscribed to the doctrine of general atonement; Christ died for everyone, so all could be saved.[4]

Through the seventeenth-century, the Baptist movement remained weak in America. Puritanism dominated New England, and Anglicanism controlled most of the colonies further south.[5] There were notable exceptions. In 1639, Roger Williams (1603-83), rejected by the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony, established the first Baptist congregation in America at Providence, Rhode Island. Also, in the early 1650s, Henry Dunster (1609-59), the first president of Harvard College, adopted Baptist beliefs about the ordinance of baptism. His change of mind led to his removal from office.[6]

Around the turn of the eighteenth century, Baptist destiny in America began to change. In 1707, five Particular or Regular Baptist congregations representing the colonies of New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania came together to form the Philadelphia Baptist Association.[7]  As Baptist historian Harry L. McBeth explains, an association "is a regional grouping of churches designed for fellowship, mutual guidance and cooperation in missions and other endeavors," and forming one is a Baptist tradition that reaches back to in England in the 1640s.[8] The association at Philadelphia, which still meets to this day, was not the first in America. Yet, it was significant for three reasons. First, it enabled American Baptists "to launch a vigorous missionary effort."[9] It also gave definition to the Baptist movement in America by publishing its Philadelphia Confession of Faith, "a modified version of the Westminster Confession, along with A Short Treatise of Church Discipline."[10] Finally, in 1764, the association sponsored the founding of a Baptist college in Rhode Island, today's Brown University.[11]. By then, the riveting sermons, ecstatic revivals, and published works of what was later called the Great Awakening had long since sparked incredible growth among Baptists in America so that congregations in the Philadelphia Association reached from southern New England all the way to Virginia.[12]

Notes

[1] Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 171-72; Richard T. Hughes and C. Leonard Allen, Illusions of Innocence: Protestant Primitivism in America, 1630-1875 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 82; Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (New York: Viking, 2009), 653.

[2] Hughes and Allen, Illusions of Innocence, 82. See also B. L. Shelley, "Baptist Churches in U.S.A." in Dictionary of Christianity in America, ed. Daniel G. Reid (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1990), 110.

[3] Hughes and Allen, Illusions of Innocence, 82; Shelley, "Baptist Churches in U.S.A.," 110.

[4] Ahlstrom, Religious History of the American People, 171-73; Hughes and Allen, Illusions of Innocence, 82. Although Calvinism held sway in seventeenth-century France, Switzerland, and Scotland, the picture was different in the Netherlands and England. In England, according to Philip Benedict, Christ's Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 314, Arminianism had been anticipated by Peter Baro who “left behind at Cambridge a number of loyal, if cautious, disciples, notably Lancelot Andrewes and the Regius professor of divinity John Overall.” As time went on, “positions . . . bearing the labels Arminian and Calvinist would wage a continuing and roughly equal struggle for supremacy within English theology” (316). This helps to explain the competing positions among early English Baptists.

[5] Edwin Scott Gaustad and Philip L. Barlow, New Historical Atlas of Religion in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 357.

[6] Shelley, "Baptist Churches in U.S.A," 110-11; Ahlstrom, Religious History, 174. On Roger Williams, see Henry Warner Bowden, Dictionary of American Religious Biography, 2nd ed. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), 155-56. On Henry Dunster, see Ibid., 155-56.

[7] Hughes and Allen, Illusions of Innocence, 83; Shelley, "Baptist Churches in U.S.A.," 111.

[8] H. L. McBeth, "Philadelphia Baptist Association," in Dictionary of Christianity in America, ed. Daniel G. Reid (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1990), 895.

[9] Shelley, "Baptist Churches in U.S.A.," 111.

[10] Hughes and Allen, Illusions of Innocence, 83. See also McBeth, "Philadelphia Baptist Association," 895.

[11] McBeth, "Philadelphia Baptist Association," 895.

[12] Shelley, "Baptist Churches in U.S.A," 111.

The Great Dismal Swamp

The Great Dismal Swamp, known by that name since the early eighteenth century, is a forested marshland in southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina. Although it has been shrinking over the centuries, it still covers about 175 square miles. Gazetteers and travel writers often note that it was surveyed in 1763 by George Washington. A vast wilderness, the area once served as a haven for Native Americans avoiding colonists, and as a hiding place for runaway slaves, the theme of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1842 poem "The Slave in the Dismal Swamp."[1] At its center is Lake Drummond, sometimes called the Lake of the Dismal Swamp. Writer John Tidwell has described the lake as a place that "feels ancient and dreamlike," where "huge cypresses form prehistoric-looking islands in the black, shallow water."[2] It must have made a similar impression on the Irish poet Thomas Moore. In late 1803, Moore was taken to see the Dismal Swamp and Lake Drummond by John Hamilton, the British consul at Norfolk, Virginia, and Moore's host in America. Hamilton told Moore the story he used as the inspiration for a ballad he titled "The Lake of the Dismal Swamp," first published in 1806. Moore's introduction to the ballad reads as follows:

They tell of a young man, who lost his mind upon the death of a girl he loved, and who, suddenly disappearing from his friends, was never afterwards heard of. As he had frequently said, in his ravings, that the girl was not dead, but gone to the Dismal Swamp; it is supposed he had wandered into that dreary wilderness, and had died of hunger, or been lost in some of its dreadful morasses.[3]

According to Howard Mumford Jones, Moore's biographer, the ballad was "greatly admired" by "that sentimental epoch."[4] The poem's popularity in the nineteenth century and the close proximity of the Dismal Swamp to Meta Chestnutt's home in Lenoir County, North Carolina, helps to explain why she would have memorized the poem in her youth.

Notes

[1] William S. Powell, North Carolina Gazetteer: A Dictionary of Tar Heel Places (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 145;  Archie Hobson, ed., Cambridge Gazetteer of the United States and Canada (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 176; Saul B. Cohen, ed., Columbia Gazetteer of the World, ed. Saul B. Cohen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 1:839. Ridwaana Allen, "Wild Paradise: Hope in the Great Dismal Swamp." Southeastern Geographer 61, no. 1 (Spring 2021): 1-4, reports that in 2021 the swamp covers 112,000 acres, which comes out to approximately 175 square miles. For Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem "The Slave in the Dismal Swamp," see Poems on Slavery, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: John Owen, 1842), 18-20.

[2] John Tidwell, "The Great Dismal Swamp," American Heritage 53, no. 2 (April-May 2002), 68.

[3] Thomas Moore, Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (Philadelphia: Hugh Maxwell, 1806), 28. For Moore's trip with John Hamilton to the Dismal Swamp and its lake, see Howard Mumford Jones, The Harp That Once--A Chronicle of the Life of Thomas Moore (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1937), 69-70; B. J. Lossing, "Tom Moore in America," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 55 (September 1877), 537-41.

[4] Jones, The Harp That Once, 70.

Thomas Meredith's Reaction to the Success of B. F. Hall at Edenton, North Carolina, 1833

In a scathing article against the Edenton Baptist Church, where he had served as pastor and would eventually resume that role, Thomas Meredith wrote that a majority of the congregation had recently discovered that their forefathers "in many important particulars" had been "entirely mistaken," and that their ministers had been guilty of "'darkening counsel by words without knowledge'," a quotation from Job 38:2, in which the Lord describes and challenges uninformed Job. Furthermore, the congregation had recently determined "that some of the distinctive principles of the Baptist Church are entirely unauthorised by the scriptures;" that "Articles of Faith, Church Covenants, Church Constitutions, Rules of Decorum, Systems of Discipline, &c. are unnecessary, unscriptural, and hurtful." They had also concluded "that the practice of receiving members into the church on the ground of a religious experience is unauthorised, and ought to be abolished," and that "any person is qualified for baptism who will say that he believes in Christ, loves God, and is desirous for the ordinance."  If the congregation were continue on its present course, wrote Meredith, the world would finally have "at least one genuine Apostolical Church!!"

Thomas Meredith, "Something New," North Carolina Baptist Interpreter 1, no. 7 (July 1833), 161-62.

Religious Journalism in the Nineteenth Century

A 1926 article appearing in The Outlook claimed: "Less than one hundred years ago the religious journals had more influence than any other papers in this country. In 1830 the circulation of church papers in New York City exceeded the circulation of all secular periodicals. The church press maintained its important position all through the nineteenth century."

Sources

"The Church Press," The Outlook 143, no. 3 (May 19, 1926), 90-91. (The quotation comes from page 90). The article was reprinted as "The Church Press," The Living Message 4, no. 21 (May 27, 1926), 329, 332.

W. T. Moore and Earl I. West on Editors as Bishops

In his 1909 Comprehensive History of the Disciples of Christ, W. T. Moore wrote: "The Disciples have no Diocesan Bishops, and consequently their leading religious periodicals have practically occupied that place."[1] Among historians of the Stone-Campbell Movement, this passage has been paraphrased to say: "The Disciples do not have bishops, they have editors."[2] Moore noted that the editors of the most popular journals and magazines of the movement "came to be practically general bishops, and exercised nearly as much power as the bishops do in some of the religious denominations."[3] Consequently, "there can be no doubt about the fact that, from the beginning of the movement to the present time, the chief authority in regard to all important questions has been the Disciple press."[4] Forty years later, Churches of Christ historian Earl I. West reflected on the significance of periodicals in the history of the Restoration Movement and issued the same judgment: "The chief forces of opinion and policy in the brotherhood have always been the brotherhood publications. Here the issues are discussed. Here the merits of any issue are weighed. Here the opinions are finally fixed."[5]

First and foremost, this observation applies to Alexander Campbell. After his Christian Baptist magazine was discontinued in 1830, its successor, the Millennial Harbinger, became "the chief organ of the movement." Until he died in 1866, Campbell's editorial direction "was generally accepted without question."[6] In addition, Barton W. Stone published his monthly journal, the Christian Messenger, from 1826 until 1845. The journal was plagued by financial troubles and Stone sometimes had to suspend publication, the longest break stretching from January 1837 through August 1840. Nevertheless, as Carl W. Cheatham describes its influence, the Christian Messenger "was an invaluable means of expression and communication for Stone's followers. In the absence of any general organization among the churches, it became the chief instrument of their unity."[7]

Notes

[1] William Thomas Moore, A Comprehensive History of the Disciples of Christ (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1909), 12.

[2] In fact, that particular wording, which does not appear in Moore's history, has become something of a written and oral tradition among Restoration historians. It seems that the creator of the written tradition is Richard T. Hughes. See, for example, his Reviving the Ancient Faith: The Story of the Churches of Christ in America (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1996), 10; Hughes, Part One: The Churches of Christ: A History, in Richard T. Hughes and R. L.  Roberts, The Churches of Christ (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 115.

[3] Moore, Comprehensive History of the Disciples, 523.

[4] Ibid., 699.

[5] Earl Irvin West, The Search for the Ancient Order, vol. 2, 1866-1906 (Indianapolis, IN: Religious Book Service, 1950), 461.

[6] Moore, Comprehensive History of the Disciples, 522-23.

[7] Carl W. Cheatham, "Christian Messenger," Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement, 194.

Barton W. Stone on the Lord's Supper

Query.--By Elder John Scott of Indiana. "Did the ancient Christians take the Lord's supper every Lord's day.

Answer.--It is evident that from the institution of this ordinance as recorded by the Evangelists, nothing decisive can be adduced as to the frequency of receiving it. The same institution as recorded by Paul, who received it from the Lord, is more decisive as to time. I.Cor. 11. 25,26. "This do ye, as oft as you drink it, in rememberance [sic] of me. For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord's death till he come." Yet it cannot from this be determined, how often, whether once, twice, or a dozen times a year. Some have thought that Acts 2. 42, 46, refers to the Lord's supper; but others have thought differently. It cannot be determined, which opinion is most correct. I incline to think with the latter, though I am not positive.

Acts 20. 7, seems to me to decide how often the ancient christians received the supper, "And upon the first day of the week, when the disciples came together to break bread, Paul preached to them." From this it is plain that the disciples came together on the first day of the week, and the great end of their coming together was to break bread. This was the principle part of their worship, mingled with songs of praise, with prayer, reading the scriptures and exhortation or preaching. This is further confirmed by I. Cor. 11,20, "When ye come together therefore into one place, this is not to eat the Lord's supper." The meaning of the Apostle, doubtless, is this "you come together professedly to eat the Lord's supper; but your abuse of this holy ordinance, is a profanation of it rather than anything else." These [229] are all the passages in the N. Testament on this subject,& these plainly to my mind prove that the practice of the ancient christians was, to take the Lord's supper every first day of the week. This, we are informed by church historians, continued to be the constant practice of the church for the first three centuries after Christ. Whenever the church shall be restored to her former glory, she will again receive the Lord's supper on every first day of the week. Certainly, then, christians should seriously take this subject into consideration and reform.

EDITOR.

Barton W. Stone, Christian Messenger 4, no. 10 (September 1830), 228-29.