BY 1856 the long deep valley of shadows in which Robert Richardson had been walking for the past three years yielded to a tableland of returning vision. He was able to go back to his post on the staff of the Millennial Harbinger.¹

      Robert Milligan, professor of mathematics in Bethany College, was also added to the staff. Before coming to Bethany in 1855, Milligan was a member of the faculty of Indiana University, at Bloomington, and had previously taught in Washington College, his alma mater, in Washington, Pennsylvania. A rising young star of the reformation, he was a brilliant teacher and a writer of great promise. The senior editor heralded his coming and the reappointment of the other editors in the following words:

      We are happy in informing our readers that we have secured to our Editorship, as Associate Editors, Professors Richardson, Pendleton, and Milligan, who will henceforth furnish contributions to our monthly bill of fare. The additional expense incurred by this arrangement, will be a new argument with those who appreciate our conjoint efforts to make the Harbinger still more worthy of the cause we plead, and still more interesting to our readers.²

      One reason why Alexander Campbell needed so many associate editors was that his own iron-bound constitution was beginning to weaken. His sixty-eight years had been [157] hard-driven ones; to a man of lesser endurance, they would have been health shattering long before. The flame of his mind, which had previously shone so brilliantly and so steadily, now flickered. There were times of sustained radiance of the old sort, but these faded again into the dimness which claimed him more often and for longer periods.

      This doleful news about the Patriarch of Bethany was not the sort of thing that any Disciple would commit to print, but it was known and sorrowfully discussed in the inner circle, and in the wider circles many guessed it. This circumstance makes the waning of Mr. Campbell's powers a thing exceedingly hard to document, but the certainty of it is so clear to those who now know most about him and his family that it seems impossible to doubt it. Besides, there is a letter written by W. K. Pendleton to his daughter "Cammie" on June 2, 1854:

      Your grandpa has not been so well lately as he generally is. He complains a good deal of debility and seems almost overcome with the weight of his labors. He is from home now spending some days at a water cure established in Ohio river near Pittsburgh.³

      Associate Editor Richardson got right into the swing of his work with a series on the "Nature of Christian Faith." In its main features, this series was really a reaffirmation of his pronouncements on "The Christian Faith" in his book, The Principles and Objects of the Religious Reformation. "Protestantism," he asserted, "is, in its very nature, a grand doctrinal controversy. It has never been a converting power for Christ."⁴ [158]

      The strife among the denominations was rooted in an equating of faith with knowledge, that is to say, the supposition that the Christian life and Christian belief are identical. "Hence conversion has come to be not so much a change of heart as a change of head."

      Richardson pleaded for something very different, for a Christian doctrine which would be truly spiritual and vitally unifying: "Let not an intellectual assent to points of doctrine be mistaken for the Christian faith. But let this faith be allowed to stand forth in its true character, as a personal trust in Christ, and let the doctrines of Christianity be the study of those who are already converted to Christ." "The primitive Christian faith, as defined by Paul, is simply 'trust in Christ.' . . . Christ is not a doctrine, but a person . . . Faith is just as personal as love or hope, and the same perversion which makes faith doctrinal, makes love also doctrinal, and hope a theory. It is not the love of Christ that animates the sectary, but love of the system . . . It is not Christ that is formed in him 'the hope of glory'; but an intolerant spirit of bigotry and spiritual pride."

      For this there was a cure. "It is the characteristic feature of the present reformation to endeavor to disentangle the Christian faith from doctrinal controversy." What was required was not a new organizational alignment, but a change of spirit. This could begin within any church or denomination; indeed, it had already begun in many places. Individuals are found everywhere "who, though in sects, are not of them," men and women [159] "who constitute, indeed, the only true people of God on earth."

      In a series on "The Misinterpretation of Scripture," a sort of sequel to the series on "Interpretation of the Scriptures," Richardson revived the discussions which he had prolonged over several years prior to his latest attack of "amaurosis." He also, the following year, 1857, had occasion to direct several well-aimed blows at "spiritualism," which was then agitating the religious public.

      He took time, as well, to give his hearty approbation to the "Revision Movement" then afoot to produce a new version of the Bible.⁵ In the translation of Scripture out of the original Hebrew and Greek languages, he himself was something more than an amateur. His Harbinger articles dealing with Bible texts reveal a careful study of them and a thorough acquaintance with translation problems. In his own sermons, meditations, and discussions he used the Scriptures with deference for the accurate and precise meanings of their original. Faulty translations received his critical attention. A case of particular interest is that of his calling attention to the inaccurate rendering of the last clause of 2 Timothy 2:15; thirty years later, the translation he suggested as correctly conveying the meaning of the original was the one adopted by the American Revision Committee. It is therefore not surprising that he not only belonged to the American Bible Union, paying the high fee for life membership, nor that he contributed out of his scholarship many specific suggestions for the revision itself. A letter from New York, March 20, 1854, confirms this:⁶ [160]

MY DEAR BROTHER,

      We thank you for the remittance and the criticism. To me the force of the criticism appears irrefragable. I will pass it over to the revisers, who will give it due attention.

	Very affectionately,
WM. H. WYCKOFF

      The verse, "Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in yourselves!" (John 6:53), was discussed in a footnote with this comment:

      This passage is incorrectly rendered in the common version, "Ye have no life in you." The true sense is thus quite lost. For, to say that any one "has life in him," is a very different proposition from this: that "he has life in himself." The former denotes merely the possession of life; the latter implies not only this, but that the life possessed is an essential part of the nature of the person of whom it is affirmed.⁷

      With all the children born and growing, and with visitors coming in larger numbers, Bethphage became increasingly dear to Richardson. Now, however, he came with some shock to the time when his fledglings began to leave the nest with their own mates. Anne was the first of these. On July 8, 1856, she was married to J. M. Dunning of Missouri and departed for the West.

      Nearly twenty years of possession had transformed his home and farm into the image of the doctor's own personality. Studying London's Encyclopedia o f Trees and Shrubs, he grew every kind of fruit indigenous to the climate of Virginia's northern panhandle. He did his own grafting of plums, cherries, and apples. Spraying [161] his trees frequently and looking over them carefully, he assured himself that insects were not spoiling the fine quality of fruit in which he prided himself. He also planted his own wheat, sowing it by the method as old as the world, scattering it with his hands. The hired help about the farm were trusted to do most of the work on his orders, but the sowing of the yearly wheat was a ritual that he reserved strictly for himself.

      It was a great day in the fall at the Richardson home when the time came to make apple butter. Juice was pressed from some of the apples and made into cider. Other apples were pared and cored for the making of apple butter, which was cooked in large kettles over open fires in the yard.

      Not long after apple butter time came butchering. Here again, Richardson supervised. He himself always shot the animal to be butchered, being, queerly enough, a very good marksman. Hams and sides and shoulders were hung in the smokehouse for the process of curing in the smoke of a hickory fire that had to be built just right and kept burning for just the proper length of time.

      A flail was used for threshing, and a fan mill in the barn cleaned the grain. No farm machinery was allowed to stand in the field encountering the weather but was carefully stored in the barns and sheds. Tools were kept in repair and sharpened, as the following item from the doctor's diary demonstrates: "A saw should be set before sharpening; it may be set by a nail on the end of a log, For sawing across the grain should be filed as slanting as possible, to give each tooth a sharp edge. For ripping should be filed straight across nearly." [162]

      The farmer of Bethphage was greatly interested in Irish potatoes and was even instrumental in introducing the Early Rose and the Blue Meshanio varieties of this vegetable to his part of the country. Then as now insect pests bedeviled the gardner, and the Richardson children were pressed into service to "pick potato bugs" off the patch near the house.

      Mrs. Fannie Thompson, a daughter, told of a morning following a day of picking potato bugs when her brothers and sisters awoke to find their hands and faces a mass of blisters. Chemist Richardson went into immediate action and analyzed the secretions of some of the bugs. He discovered that they were about the same as those of the Spanish fly, which was then used by physicians for "blistering." Thereafter, the children never again picked bugs with their bare hands.

      Emma, one of the twins, disclosed one of her father's weaknesses--for public auctions! "He would ride away to a public sale, spend half a day talking with the farmers, and came home bringing articles he had bid up to help the sale along, that we very often could make no use of, to my mother's great amusement."

      The Richardson children attended school in Bethany; their teacher for many years was Miss Jane Smith, who taught all the children of the Bethany community in a little school building not far from Bethany's old stone church.

      Through four years of the Millennial Harbinger, from 1847 to 1850, Coeditor Richardson published over his own name a continuing series of devotional essays under the title "Communings in the Sanctuary." These were [163] really Communion talks which he had delivered in the Bethany church. Later on, twenty-four of the best of these meditations were gathered together to make the Disciples' first and most celebrated book of devotions. It was published by the Transylvania Press, but unfortunately the year is not known.

      J. W. McGarvey recalled these talks in his student days while attending services in the old Bethany church. "The richest service of all," he said, "was when they had a sermon by Mr. Campbell followed by Dr. Richardson in a five or ten minute talk at the Lord's Table."⁸ He said that these talks were gems of beauty.

      Other students set the scene for us and enable us to enter into the atmosphere of reverence which the doctor created by these talks. Never did high priest enter the holy of holies with a more genuine reverence than did Dr. Richardson enter upon his duty on these occasions. By his timid and reserved manner he seemed to apologize for his presence at the Communion table. His words came slowly and even timidly, at first, and a stranger would have been ready to sympathize with him because of his apparent embarrassment; but after a sentence or two, one forgot the timidity in listening to the tender, pathetic, and quietly eloquent words which fell from his lips. His words in these meditations were in the form of prose, but they were the essence of poetry. Possibly Richardson was the only man among the polemical and didactic Reformers who spoke and wrote devotionally.

      The public worship of God was to him an art requiring not only the finest preparation of the service but the [164] erection, as well, of church buildings expressive of a worshipful purpose.

      Though we may indeed dispense with the "long-drawn aisle and fretted vault," the clustered pillars, the gorgeous tapestry, the carving and the gilding which merely gratify a love of worldly splendor, surely a decent respect for the service of the house of God should induce a careful attention to every means calculated to favor devotional feeling, and sanctify those rites whose mysterious import claims the undivided attention of the soul!

      How often may we justly impute to the absence of such aids, that want of reverence which is so conspicuous! How often are those wandering thoughts, those restless glances, those distracted feelings which are so readily marked, occasioned by those unpropitious arrangements by which the things and thoughts of the world are continually pressed upon the attention!⁹

      A lively sense of the presence of God seemed to the doctor to be the very soul of religion. Man has immense capacities:

      Placed, as it were, in the middle position of the universe, and blending in himself the material and the spiritual, he can reach to the lowest ranks of being, and also to the highest--even to God himself. He can contemplate every phasis of life and every variety of nature. Collecting the traces of the divine presence in his works, he can connect them with the Being from whom they issue, and, ascending upon the wings of Faith, hold sweet communion with the Infinite and Eternal One.

      To establish and maintain this communion is the great end of religion. To unite the soul to God; to erect in the human heart a living temple for his abode; to secure the enjoyment of that divine presence which is the earnest of eternal blessedness: these are its noble and exalted aims--its truest, holiest purposes.¹⁰ [165]

      To him there was nothing impersonal or mechanical about the relation between man and God. No legalistic system of salvation would answer to his demands:

      But Christianity is very far from being a mere system of redemption from sin, or salvation from punishment, or selfish rewards for obedience. It designs not only to bestow remission of sins, but to effect a renovation--a regeneration of the soul. Indeed, it is not too much to affirm that it can be a means of salvation only as it is a means of renovation . . . "In Christ Jesus," nothing is of the least avail but "a new creature."¹¹

      Having met his own hours of dark despair, the doctor could write with authority when he said: "It is especially amidst the abodes of sorrow, and in the dark hours of affliction, that we are likely to be found nearest to the 'man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.' . . . It is amid the disappointments of life; in the days of mourning and of desolation; in the hours of self-abasement and penitential love, that we meet with Jesus."¹²

      The sanctuary of God is the house of Memory and of Hope. . . . It is here that the two sacred institutions [baptism and Communion], which unite to commemorate the death and the resurrection of Jesus, harmoniously blend also the extremes of human destiny, and, reconciling grief with joy, unite the darkness of the grave with the light of life.¹³

      In these essays are many surprising and delightful epigrams and gleaming insights: "How little we know of life, although it is every-where around us, and even within us!"¹⁴ "Alas! how vain are tears of grief, or words of penitence, or promises of amendment, when the grave has hidden from our eyes the neglected or the injured!"¹⁵ [166] "It is not mere formal adoration of a carved, a graven, or a molten image that constitutes idolatry. On the contrary, it is the giving the heart's affections to anything that is not God."¹⁶

      It is only in the atmosphere of prayer that Christian growth can take place. Robert Richardson believed that devotional disciplines were indispensable to progress in the religious life:

      It is the contemplation of infinite excellence that exalts, as it is the society of the good and the noble that inspires nobility of soul. Unable of ourselves, perhaps, to form high conceptions, and, without "the bold warmth that generously dares," we catch, by degrees, something of the soaring spirit of the virtue that belongs to the noble minds with which we enjoy habitual intercourse, and thus learn to share and to imitate the excellencies we admire. It is thus that communion with Perfect Goodness shall lead us to be good. Infinite Holiness and Purity shall inspire us with pure and holy affections, and the love of God, awakening in the heart a kindred emotion, shall transform the soul and invest our nature with a divine beauty.¹⁷ [167]

[HTB 157-167]