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V ICTOR HUGO in his William Shakespeare tells us that in the realm of high art there is no greatest poet. Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare are each supreme. Dante is different but just as great as Homer. So, Isaac Errett and J. H. Garrison, as editors of the Christian Standard and The Christian Evangelist, the one now wearing a crown of glory and the other still fighting valiantly the good fight of faith, have each been of first importance to the Restoration of Primitive Christianity—its doctrine, its ordinances, and its fruits. Mr. Errett was, and Mr. Garrison is the greatest protagonist of Christian liberty under the supreme authority of the Lord Jesus Christ in the line of noble men who have plead for Christian Union upon the New Testament basis. Both of them labored unceasingly with pen and voice for Christian Missions, and Mr. Garrison has been the especial champion of a larger recognition among the Disciples of Christ of the power personality of the Holy Spirit in the development of Christian char [336] acter and the progress of Christian Missions, He is a man of like passions with the rest of us who have our limitations, and being still one of us, we cannot fully appreciate all he has been to the Restoration of the Christianity of Christ as the method of restoring the unity of the body of Christ. However, we need not wait until Mr. Garrison joins Barton W. Stone, Thomas Campbell, Alexander Campbell and Isaac Errett on the other shore to recognize the fact that if the responsibility of leadership in the balance of loyalty to the Word of God and liberty in the Son of God fell upon Mr. Errett when Mr. Campbell died, in 1866, the same responsibility fell upon Mr. Garrison, when Mr. Errett died, in 1888. The present generation of growing and aggressive Disciples of Christ owe more to Mr. Garrison than to any other living man for the liberty we enjoy in Christ Jesus. The champion of Christian missions, Christian liberty and Christian progress, he has ever recognized the supreme authority of our divine Lord and the New Testament alone as our guide in matters of doctrine and discipline. James Harvey Garrison was born in Mis - [337] souri on the second day of February in 1842. At the age of fifteen he made a public profession of religion and united with the Baptist church After studying under C. P. Hall, a Yankee school-teacher, young Garrison taught a district school himself at the age of sixteen. At the beginning of the Civil War he was attending a high school at Ozark, his birthplace. He identified himself with a company of Home Guards at Springfield, Missouri, and after the battle of Wilson's Creek he enlisted in the Twenty-fourth Missouri Infantry Volunteers, and was severely wounded at the battle of Pea Ridge, in March, 1862. Upon his recovery he raised a company of cavalry volunteers and continued his services until the close of the war, participating in several battles, acting as Assistant Inspector General and receiving the rank of Major for meritorious service. When mustered out of the army in 1865, he entered Abingdon College in Illinois and graduated in 1868 as Bachelor of Arts. The week following his graduation he married Miss Judith E. Garrett, of Camp Point, Illinois, who graduated in the same class with him, and has been to him all that a faithful and affectionate [338] wife could be to her husband. In 1868 Mr. Garrison and J. C. Reynolds jointly published and edited the Gospel Echo, which was the forerunner of the Christian Evangelist, which, with the Christian Standard, under the leadership of Isaac Errett, became, the two mighty advocates for Christian Missions Christian Liberty and Christian Progress J. H. Garrison's influence in his preaching and writing has been and spiritual rather than polemical and controversial. He is the author of several books; the most widely read, however, is the one which is the truest expression of his own personality, “Alone with God.” As his biographer in the “Churches of Christ” has aptly said: “All of his work, either as editor or author, is in the very highest and best sense purely Christian and always reflects the spirit and teaching of the Word of God.” Indeed, he is the best representative of open-minded conservatism in Scriptural teaching and aggressiveness in the practical work of Christian Evangelism, in the religious body of which since the death of Isaac Errett, he has been the acknowledged leader. Pleading for a larger place for the Holy Spirit's power in the life of the Christian, warning his brethren against [339] narrowness and the spirit of sectism, welcoming new light on old faiths, firm and free, J. H. Garrison is the leading living representative of the Disciples of Christ. His statement, the World's Need of Our Plea, is a fitting document with which to close this volume of Historical Documents, which give the literary succession of the principles of the Restoration Movement of the Nineteenth Century.
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