ALTER SCOTT had been fortunate enough to find employment. George Forrester, to whom he had been directed, proved to be something more than a schoolmaster. He was a Scotsman who, like himself, had come to America in answer to the call of the New World. He was also a lay preacher. Simple in manner, earnest, and thoughtful about his religion, he presided over a tiny congregation meeting in the courthouse.

      Walter had been devout from his earliest childhood. Reared by his strict parents to have implicit trust in the Church of Scotland, he had been faithful in his attendance upon divine services and in performing his daily devotions. If he had not gladdened the heart of his mother by entering the Presbyterian ministry as she had hoped, it was not from lack of religious inclinations but because he had never grasped the whole matter of church and Scripture with one clear, luminous insight. Being of a logical nature, he could not act from pure emotion or blind habit; he had to see his course. Because he had never found a teacher who could enable him to do this, his faith had remained that of a pious but somewhat bewildered layman.

      Walter learned that the religion of his principal and host was not cut upon the conventional Presbyterian pattern. Their discussions soon disclosed that. He found that Forrester knew the Scriptures intimately and that he did not; and, what was even more [23] important, he learned that religion was a subject which could excite and engage the mind.

      It was therefore out of something richer than custom that he walked with his new friend to meeting the following Sunday. What he found there excited him further. The members of the congregation greeted one another with "a holy kiss"! Had not Paul directed this in Romans 16:16? They washed one another's feet, for had not Jesus commanded it? (John 13:14). Moreover, he had arrived on Communion Sunday only to learn that every Sunday was Communion day. He heard no creeds recited. The service was simple and, wherever possible, in the language of Scripture. Infant baptism was not admitted. This church accepted as members only those who were old enough to decide for themselves that they wanted to be Christians and who, following that decision, were baptized by complete immersion. He discovered that this congregation was an independent unit; it was subject to no presbytery or synod, or to any other authoritative body outside itself. In fact, the whole notion of authority was centered with simple vigor in the Scripture, and that not in general but in specific terms. Here was a church determined to be guided by nothing that it could not find in the letter of the Bible. It was a "Haldane" church.

      In 1799, two wealthy brothers, Robert Haldane and James Alexander Haldane, had withdrawn from the Church of Scotland in protest against its complacent respectability and its professionalized clergy. They had formed Sunday schools, institutes for the training of lay preachers, and had gradually evolved a simple theology and church order, which quickly spread, creating many small congregations in [24] Scotland, Ireland, and the United States. The Haldanes were, in fact native citizens of Edinburgh!

      Scott was now plunged into an all-engrossing quest. With George Forrester as eager guide, he examined the Scriptures minutely to see whether these things were so. He gave special attention to baptism, for if Forrester and his church proved to be correct on this point, his own infant baptism and his whole status as a Christian were brought into question. At the close of each day, he rushed from the classroom to the Bible. Far into the night, he and his host pored over it.

      Days followed days, and weeks passed. Each Sunday Walter walked companionably with the Forrester family to church and then sat in the congregation avidly reaching for every word that was spoken. Aided by his knowledge of Greek, the young tutor studied all the New Testament references to baptism. How was baptism performed in earliest times? From this study he came away convinced. Baptism was by immersion only!

      Well, then! There was nothing to do but to be baptized! And George Forrester immersed him. So great was the change of perspective wrought in him by these past few weeks, and by the decisive act which had brought all the discussion and questioning to a focus, that what he had formerly known seemed like a pale imitation of religion, if not a mistake altogether.

      "I have now been converted to Christianity!" he exulted.¹

      In the months that followed, his discovery became a new point of departure for other intellectual adventures. He was not content to stop with a verification [25] of the practice of the church which had now become his own spiritual family. He must show others the light he had glimpsed. The rapt listener of a few weeks before now became an apt teacher. When he could not reason and persuade in public, he did so in private.

      As winter wore on into the spring of 1820, George Forrester found his church requiring more and more of his time. Discovering in young Scott such an able teacher, he resolved to withdraw from the academy, leaving all in the hands of his assistant, so as to devote his undivided energies to his ministry.

      With his teaching burdens increased, Scott's zeal for the study of the Bible was not relaxed. He gave more and more time to it. He felt the thrill of fresh discovery in each encounter with Holy Writ and he came back to its pages with joy. Questions were forming in his mind faster than he could answer them. How did the Holy Spirit operate in conversion? Was there one clear scriptural plan of salvation which would correct and reconcile the divergent practices of Christendom? How would one classify the teachings of Scripture? What was its central teaching?

      His clear, logical mind began to discern an outline. The Bible contained "precepts, duties, ordinances, promises, blessings,"² which were meant to precede or follow one another in just that order. The disarranging of these, as in infant baptism, where an ordinance was made to precede both teaching and faith, accounted in no small degree for the confusion and disunity of the church.

      The mystery of conversion, upon a fresh study of the Acts of the Apostles, was found to be no mystery at all. It was not, as his Calvinistic training had led [26] him to expect, a matter of long and agonizing "seekings," or of strange signs and mystical feelings induced by the Holy Spirit, selecting some and rejecting others. A converted person was one who heard, believed, and obeyed! It was that simple.

      So matters passed into the summer. Then tragedy came. George Forrester was drowned while bathing in the Allegheny River. Scott was left to steady a stricken family, to conduct an academy, and to minister to a shaken church. To the needs of the Forrester family he gave attention from natural sympathy, and to the church he gave what had rapidly become an overflowing passion. To his academy he gave what seemed to him to be no more than the crumbs of duty. He fretted to be free of it in order to devote all his energy to religious reforms.

     
This seething inner tension came to a crisis in the spring of 1821³ when a pamphlet, On Baptism, written by a Mr. Errette and published by a Haldane congregation in New York City, fell into his hands. By-passing the mode of baptism as no longer in question, this pamphlet went on to discuss the purpose or "design of baptism." It was a new idea! Scott had never thought of it before. He read with mounting exhilaration.

      After quoting Scripture in support of each proposition, this pamphlet asserted that the purpose of baptism was the remission of sins:

      From these several passages we may learn how baptism was viewed in the beginning by those who were qualified to understand its meaning best. No one who has been in the habit of considering it merely as an [27] ordinance, can read these passages with attention, without being surprised at the wonderful powers, and qualities, and effects, and uses, which are there apparently ascribed to it.⁴

      What! Was baptism then something more important than an ordinance? He continued to read:

      If the language employed respecting it, in many of the passages, were to be taken literally, it would import, that remission of sins is to be obtained by baptism, that an escape from the wrath to come is effected in baptism; that men are born the children of God by baptism;.  . . that the Church of God is sanctified and cleansed by baptism; that men are regenerated by baptism; and that the answer of a good conscience is obtained by baptism.⁵

      He continued. It was a literal interpretation of these scriptural passages, out of their settings, that had caused the church to attach so much efficacy to infant baptism. Baptism was more than a symbol or ordinance. It was a positive Christian action! Scott found himself startled into agreement that it was "in baptism that men professed, by deed, as they had already done by word, to have the remission of sins through the death of Jesus Christ."

      Here was the key that completed his thought on one phase of the gospel. He not only had achieved knowledge of the manner of baptism; he had also grasped its design. With both the form and the purpose of baptism settled, he was one step nearer the whole gospel.

      Suddenly the restlessness and yearning of all the preceding fall and winter crystallized into one clear line of action. He would dismiss his academy, take leave of his church, and set out on foot for a personal [28] visit to the congregation from which this pamphlet had issued!

      His action was as resolute as his decision. Taking little thought of how he would earn his living or what would happen to the school and local church, he gathered a bundle together, said his farewells, and set out. The intensity of his purpose reduced to insignificance the protracted days and nights on the road and the discomforts of the long Like. Just two years after he had crossed the ridges of the Allegheny Mountains going west, he was recrossing them in the opposite direction. But he was not retreating. He was still looking for a frontier. This time it was a frontier of the soul.

      In New York he was reunited for a time with his Uncle George, and made his home there while he investigated the life of the Haldane church in that city. The Errette pamphlet had led him to expect an aggressive, growing church, much interested in evangelism. Instead he found a conservative, cautious, and stagnant body stubbornly defending the tenets of the Haldanes and unwilling to go with him upon further explorations in the direction of more radical reform. How was it that this church, which outwardly seemed to be thoroughly scriptural, was so sadly lacking in the spirit which had characterized the New Testament church?

      His disappointment weighed heavily upon him. But it also drove him. There was something lacking in his reconstruction of the early church. What was it? His head was fairly bursting with thinking about it, and his eyes were weary from their long hours of prying into the Scriptures. [29]

      It was while he was in the midst of this gloomy and chaotic mental rummaging that a letter came from the father of Robert Richardson, one of his most promising pupils in the Pittsburgh academy. They missed him greatly. All efforts to fill his vacant chair had come to naught, and the boys, to say nothing of their parents, were impatient to have him back. If he did not care to resume his old position, perhaps he would be interested in a smaller school, a private one conducted for his son Robert and several other very apt pupils from the families of friends. They had already conferred about it and had subscribed a salary better than anything he had seen before. Would he not come back to them? At his present stage of discouragement and puzzlement, he was more than half inclined to accept. His reply was tentative, and noncommittal.

      Snatching at the hope of finding what he sought in other cities, he took again to the road. This time he was headed for Paterson, New Jersey, where he found a small, dispirited church in a very low condition. With sinking spirits but unrelenting purpose, he trudged on to Baltimore, and finally to Washington, D. C., where the same story was repeated. His last straw of hope had proved as worthless as the others.

      "Having searched them up," he said some years later, "I discovered them to be so sunken in the mire of Calvinism, that they refused to reform; and so finding no pleasure in them I left them. I then went to the Capitol, and, climbing up to the top of its lofty dome, I sat myself down, filled with sorrow at the miserable desolation of the Church of God."⁶ [30]

      To Walter's sorrow there was to be added a desolation even more immediate, for on June 17, 1821, his father, John Scott, died of a sudden illness while on a visit to the town of Annan, Scotland; and his mother, sensitive Mary Innes, when she heard the news, was so stricken by grief that she died on the very next day.⁷ Walter felt as alone as Elijah and all the orphans of the world. [31]

[WSVGO 23-31]