Thomas Campbell and the Principles He Promulgated

H. L. Willett, Chicago, Ill.

However, when one turns to ask what was the essence of his message, the answer must be given in clear and emphatic form. Mr. Campbell did not concern himself with a variety of interests. “Principles” is not a word that defines his statements. He held to one principle and to one alone–the union of God’s people. To that one theme he devoted his life; he lived for nothing else. No really first-rank interpreter of God has ever had more than one commanding truth to proclaim. It was so of all the prophets. It was so of Christ. Men of the second rank can concern themselves with various ideas; the great prophets know but one. Thomas Campbell shared the fundamental convictions of his age and ours on the essentials of the faith. But the one principle which absorbed him and claimed his life, was the truth that the church is ideally one, and ought to realize that unity in actual and visible experience. To him this was the most outstanding and impressive fact in all the range of the church’s life. Others might devote themselves to different tasks. But as for himself, and all who were minded to stand with him, this was the supreme need and duty. He was keenly sensitive of this crying necessity of the time. It haunted his soul like a prophetic burden. The waste places of Jerusalem, where the debris of sectarian strife lay scattered and obstructive, filled him with as profound a sorrow as Nehemiah felt in his night circuit of the city. With that same restorer, he might have cried, “Why should I not mourn when the city of my fathers lieth desolate, and its gates are burned with fire?” His hope and passion was the restoration of its undivided glory. The beauty of that vision allured him. The music of the reunited church already filled his soul. Though as yet a choir invisible, its anthem floated to him as if a door in heaven were left ajar and cherubim were singing. To the realization of this hope he devoted all his energies through the lengthening years of his life.

Have we lost the priniple of unity, the burden that Thomas Campbell himself felt?  We must find a way to recreate this passion, this internal burden in Christ’s church today.  There was a reason for Thomas Campbell to restore, and we are creating more reasons for a new restoration as we stray further from the principles of being simply Christian.  It is time to refocus, restore and seek Christian unity by allowing ourselves to be burdened by this plea.

I was thinking of what to do with Mother’s Day and trying to keep with the point of this blog and it dawned on me;  behind every great man or men there is a great woman.  This is the writing of Alexander Campbell as a portion of his memoir on his Father, Thomas Campbell.  As expected, there was a great woman behind these men.  I was going to rant and rave about my mother, but I think this will do her justice.  To see the entire memoir of Jane Campbell see the link in the Historical Links section to the right.

Jane Campbell

There are few facts or events of great importance and value in the life of most men, and still fewer in the life of most women. A truly good woman, as a wife and a mother, is, indeed, the most splendid spectacle in the horizon of human apprehension. Her empire is small, but her power is immense. The destiny, temporal, spiritual, and eternal, of the family of which she is the mother, and in whose hands God has placed, more or less, its temporal, spiritual, and eternal destiny, is one of the most interesting positions–the most soul-stirring, the most absorbing, and the most blissful in which a human being can be placed. Great are its cares, great are its labors, great are its responsibilities, but greater still are its honors, glories, and beatitudes.

Woman, next to God, makes the living world of humanity. She makes man what he is in this world, and very frequently makes him what he shall hereafter be in the world to come. We do not infringe on the pulpit or on the press in so affirming. These are, indeed, a supply of means to compensate the want or neglect of maternal influence, enlightened by the Gospel, and properly directed by its spirit.

Maternal influence is paramount to paternal influence. We read of an hereditary maternal influence possessed and developed by Grandmother Lois and Mother Eunice, but never of a grandfather’s influence by any hero in the Christian Scriptures. I do not say that a grandfather or a father may not, can not be the means of saving his descendants; but I do say that such cases are the exception and not the rule. Maternal love and assiduity are paramount to paternal love and assiduity. Besides, every infant looks up more to its mother for everything it wants than to its father. It is mercifully necessitated to look up to and to love its mother more than its father; and, therefore, a mother’s influence is paramount to every other human influence.

In this excursive view of the character of a mother, of a Christian mother, We have been only sketching out the more prominent characteristics of Mother Campbell. She made a nearer approximation to the acknowledged [316] beau ideal of a truly Christian mother than any one of her sex with whom I have had the pleasure of forming a special acquaintance.