The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 4

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: Conferences Make Impress on Great Cities

I. New York City Comes of Age

Let us break the recital of the conferences long enough to get the historical background and contemporary setting of some of the larger General Conferences that follow, such as the sixth, held in the Broadway Tabernacle in New York City. Prior to 1825 New York City was only a provincial town. The actual city was then born, and Knickerbocker New York ended. In that year the Erie Canal was completed, and the city at the mouth of the Hudson was joined to the great West. The Great Lakes were thrown open to commerce, and the Ohio and Mississippi valleys brought close to her doors. A new life began. It was the beginning of a new and expansive era. PFF4 598.1

1. GREAT MATERIAL AND INTELLECTUAL CHANGES

The years from 1825 to 1840 were filled with ferment and confusion, progress and revolutionary developments. There was intense intellectual, moral, and religious activity. Mighty forces were gathering and consolidating. The population leaped from 166,000 to 312,000—phenomenal for that day. New Englanders poured in by the thousand, and sons from foreign soils came in increasing numbers, large groups planting themselves on Staten Island. Then the fire of 1835 was followed by the financial crash of 1837, sweeping New York City like a tempest. PFF4 598.2

The city became a boiling cauldron in which divers nationalities and hostile temperaments commingled, intensified by commercial forces let loose by the opening of the canal. The throbbing thirties were followed by the fateful forties. Buildings of wood gave way to structures of brick and stone, and climbed heavenward—first to seven or eight stories, then to twelve or fourteen. Horse—drawn cars of strange construction had just started running in the streets. Vanderbilt’s steamboats were plying the sound, but through trunk-line railroads had not yet appeared. There were no telegraph lines, although Morse was experimenting. And there were no electric lights or electric cars, no telephones, typewriters, phonographs, or bicycles, and of course no automobiles, radios, or television sets. PFF4 598.3

Intellectual life became aggressive. Horace Greeley and Wendell Phillips were just twenty-nine, Holmes and Lincoln thirty-one. Longfellow was only thirty-three and Garrison but thirty-five. Emerson was just thirty-seven, and Bryant and Vanderbilt forty-six. Religious life was active, as New York then had thirty-two Presbyterian, twenty-seven Episcopal, twenty Baptist, sixteen Methodist, fifteen Dutch, eleven Catholic, five Universalist, three Lutheran, and two LTnitarian churches. ¹ And now it was about to become one of the principal scenes of the great second advent awakening and the exposition of prophecy. PFF4 599.1

Newspapers were launched to satisfy the voracious hunger of an increased population—the Tribune in 1831, the Sun in 1833, and the Herald in 1835. The foundations of New York University and Union Theological Seminary had just been laid. The air was vibrant with attempts to set the poor against the rich, and there were riots among the foreign populations. So New York City in the thirties was quarrelsome and obstreperous. PFF4 599.2

2. ANTISLAVERY AGITATION BREAKS FORTH

The land was seething with new ideas and principles, and a deep sense of personal responsibility seemed to prevail. Promulgators of doctrines that disturbed the old order were all about. Antislavery and temperance became test questions, with the bulk of society frowning on their advocates and showering them with obloquy. The New York Anti-Slavery Society was organized in October, 1833, with a mob battering at the doors before the members were out of the building. Both a Young Men’s and a Ladies’ New York City Anti-Slavery Society were organized in 1834. And the second anniversary of the emancipation of the West Indian slaves was held in the large Broadway Tabernacle in 1837. ² Hard names were bandied about, and the churches were mobbed by proslavery advocates. PFF4 599.3

3. THE BIRTH OF TEMPERANCE SOCIETIES

Temperance advocates fared no better. Arthur Tappan, ³ ardently active inspiritual reforms, advertised pure juice of the grape, without alcohol, for communion service, and the newspapers uttered a “howl of derision.” Dr. George B. Cheever was cow-hided, tried for libel in a Massachusetts court, and suffered thirty days’ imprisonment for his little temperance skit, “Enquire at Deacon Giles’ Distillery.” Yet, by 1834, New York State was credited with having 2,500 branch temperance societies, and temperance societies for young men flourished in the churches. ⁴ PFF4 600.1

Meanwhile the political pot was boiling. Citizens had only begun to vote for the mayor in 1834. Campaigns were violent, and the Presidential campaign of Harrison versus Van Buren was exceptionally heated and furious. It was a tense time. PFF4 600.2

4. REVOLUTIONARY ATTITUDES IN RELIGIOUS FIELD

Every department of life was tempest-tossed, and the church did not escape. The old Calvinism of the eighteenth century had lost out to various newer concepts, and not a few who remained in churches under the Westminster Confession worked their way out into wider interpretations of its ancient phrases. And one of these religious innovators in Calvinism was Charles G. Finney, whose Broadway Tabernacle must now be noted. PFF4 600.3