HE momentous events of August, 1830, were followed by an anticlimax. For three whole years Scott had held himself at a pitch of nearly superhuman activity. All he had fought for was finally accomplished. Dozens of eager hands were sharing his toil and were competent to take it over. He could relax, or look elsewhere.

      But as soon as he began to relax, he found himself on the point of exhaustion. His willing spirit had not taken account of the weakening flesh; indeed he had not even consulted it. Now it began to assert itself, even to tyrannize over his mind. Where there had been cyclonic energy, there was now lethargy. Where there had been high spirits, there was depression.

      His fifth child, and third son, Samuel C. Scott, was born on December 20, and this, with the ensuing Christmas season, afforded him a momentary relief from the overhanging cloud of gloom which threatened to descend yet closer; but the respite of sunshine was brief. The frail human body, with its high-strung nervous system, had taken all it could stand.

      He told Sarah that he could not continue longer on the Reserve. She understood, and the two of them decided to return to Pittsburgh, where they had met and had spent the first happy months of their marriage eight years before. They went without plan. It would be well to rest a while and await a new opening.

      When they came back to Pittsburgh in the early winter of 1831, they found it a thriving city of [119] twenty-one thousand persons, a growing industrial center of great promise.

      The stirrings of American life were unprecedented. Political leadership had passed in 1829 from the East to the West and from the rich and wellborn into the hands of the common man. Andrew Jackson was president. The rugged frontier, steadily increasing its power since the days of the Revolutionary War, was now a force to be reckoned with. In 1830 there were 12,866,020 people in the United States. Three and a half million of these were west of the mountains.¹ To the continuous westward migration of native Americans, there was now added the influx of the immigrant. Within the next twenty years, two and a half million "foreigners" would be added to the nation. Population increase was so rapid that the trend of these years, if maintained, would have produced a nation of 269 millions by 1930.

      Senators Calhoun, Hayne, and Webster were shaking Congress with thunderous utterances over States' rights and the preservation of the Federal Union.²

      The common people were pressing with success for the expansion of voting privileges without prerequisite of property. Demands for a public school system were becoming articulate. Prison reforms, temperance movements, and antislavery campaigns were emerging.

      American activism was born. A note of hurry entered the life of the country, and the race for money and success was afoot, all of it an expression of the frontier spirit of conquest and expansion.

      A powerful implement of this expansion was a growing transportation system. In 1830 the first steam locomotive appeared on the Baltimore and [120] Ohio's twenty-three miles of track. The company had only thirteen more years. to live up to its contractual obligations to build a line all the way to Pittsburgh.³

      As a promise of what was coming, although the realization was to be delayed until 1852, a railroad car was exhibited in the city in 1830, and the whole city flocked to see it. Steamboats were plying the Ohio River, and a system of highways connected Pittsburgh with Harrisburg, Wheeling, Steubenville, Beaver, and Erie.⁴ In 1831, Pittsburgh was agog with talk of "Craig's Spider": Neville B. Craig, editor of the Gazette, published a map of the city showing a great network of roads, canals, and railroads radiating from it. Most of this visionary project was close to fulfillment.⁵

      The Disciples, who sprang up in the spirit of the frontier on the frontier itself, had at this time multiplied until they were about 20,000 in number.⁶ Stone's "Christians" and Campbell's "New Testament Baptists" or "Reformed Baptists" were talking of union on a grand scale, and some congregations of the two movements had already united locally.⁷

      Socially, politically, and religiously the environment was one grown big with the promise of the future. Optimism and expectancy were in the air, but they were not at this moment in the heart of Walter Scott. He was exhausted, spent in body and mind.

      Striking when he was least able to defend himself, the cruel angel of death came this selfsame winter to take away his darling daughter, Sarah Jane, in the first months of her second year. The loss broke his heart. His gloom-ridden soul was now laden with this added burden of grief. His depression was so [121] deep that it seemed to him that he could not survive it. Days wore on into weeks, and weeks into months. It did not lift.

      To stay in Pittsburgh became as intolerable as staying on the Reserve. He must go somewhere, do something. It was then that news came from Cincinnati that James Challen had moved to Louisiana, leaving his church in want of a minister. Would Scott become his successor?

      Cincinnati was at this time the leading city in Ohio, the "Queen City of the West." He decided to accept the opening, and in May of 1831 began preaching there, leaving his family behind until his plans should become certain.

      But it did not go well. His health did not improve, and his depression did not lift. He seemed like a broken machine. His celebrity had preceded him, and everywhere he disappointed expectations. Great crowds assembled to hear him and went away murmuring. Now and then, when nothing was expected of him, and only a small congregation had gathered, he seemed again to find the golden track and to carry his hearers into realms of ecstasy, but these times were infrequent, and they came and went without apparent relation to the occasion or to his own will. He missed, it is true, the thousands of singing people on the Reserve, their expectancy and enthusiasm; but that did not account for his depression. He was down, and it looked for a time as though his usefulness as a preacher was finished.

      "How is it, Brother Scott," asked one of the elders of his church, "that when we don't expect anything from you, you go beyond yourself, but when our hopes and wishes are the highest, you fall so low?" [122]

      "Oh," he answered, "I don't know how it happens, but I feel that if I cannot get it out of me at times, it is in me nevertheless."⁸

      He struggled along this way for three months, and then sat down to write a letter to James Challen in Louisiana:

      "The flock are sighing and pining for their former shepherd; you must come back, you alone can satisfy them. I can not and will not consent to remain with them as long as there is any hope or prospect of your return."

      Challen returned, and Scott fled to Pittsburgh and into the arms of his family.

      If he had failed to speak, perhaps he could yet write! He fell to work almost at once on a small book, A Discourse on the Holy Spirit. It was published in October, 1831, by Alexander Campbell, at Bethany, Virginia. The Bethany publisher advertised the work in the October issue of his new magazine, the Millennial Harbinger:

      Brother WALTER SCOTT, who, in the Fall of 1827, arranged the several items of Faith, Repentance, Baptism, Remission of Sins, the Holy Spirit, and Eternal Life, restored them in this order to the church under the title of Ancient Gospel, and successfully preached it for the conversion of the world--has written a discourse on the fifth point, (viz. the Holy Spirit,) which presents the subject in such an attitude as cannot fail to make all who read it understand the views entertained by us, and, as we think, taught by the Apostles in their writings. We can recommend to all the disciples this discourse as most worthy of a place in their families, because it perspicuously, forcibly, and with a brevity favorable to an easy apprehension of its meaning, presents the subject to the mind of the reader."⁹ [123]

      On no point had the Reformers been at sharper issue with the Calvinists than on the Holy Spirit. The Calvinists had taught that the Holy Spirit operated directly and mystically in conversion to deliver the soul from total depravity and make it capable of believing. Rejecting the doctrine of total depravity entirely, the Reformers had argued that the Holy Spirit operates in conversion solely through the word of Scripture. This was the sore point of contention.

      Campbell took note of this in his advertisement:

      Our opponents, too, who are continually misrepresenting, and many of them no doubt misconceiving our views on this subject, if they would be advised by us, we would request to furnish themselves with a copy, that they may be better informed on this topic; and if they should still be conscientiously opposed, that they may oppose what we teach, and not a phantom of their own creation. A discourse of this sort, detached from other matters, written with so much clearness, point, and energy, we deem better calculated to put this subject to rest than a more elaborate treatise upon it.

      The booklet was twenty-four closely printed pages, selling at the price of twenty-five cents per copy, five for a dollar.

      The argument of the. book was clarity itself:

      "Christianity, as developed in the sacred oracles, is sustained by three divine missions,--the mission of the Lord Jesus, the mission of the apostles, and the mission of the Holy Spirit; these embassies are distinct in three particulars, namely, person, termination, and design." The mission of Jesus was to the Jewish nation, that of his apostles to all nations, and that of the Holy Spirit to the church. The design of Jesus' mission was to proclaim and teach the gospel, that [124] of the apostles the same but on a wider scale, while the design of the Holy Spirit is to comfort the disciples, glorify Christ, and convince the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment through the word preached by the apostles.¹⁰

      The Holy Spirit . . . was not sent to dwell in any man in order to make him a Christian, but because he had already become a Christian; or, in other terms, it will be proved that the Holy Spirit is not given to men to make them believe and obey the gospel, but rather because they have believed and obeyed the gospel.

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      The Spirit, then, can do nothing in religion, nothing in Christianity, but by the members of the body of Christ. Even the word of God, the Scriptures, have been given by members filled with this Spirit--they spake as the Spirit gave them utterance.¹¹

      The booklet had a phenomenal sale. Letters of commendation arrived from all over the country. A second edition was called for, and that was soon exhausted. In 1833 a third edition was issued, this time through the pages of the Evangelist.

      Some gleam of hope began to stir within Scott. He had found another medium. True, it had not been untried before, for he had written numerous articles for the Christian Baptist, and had even helped to launch the periodical. He had also planned a magazine of his own in 1827, only to abandon it for the more pressing business of the Western Reserve. Now, he returned to this purpose. He would write and edit a magazine. The gloom began to lift.

      The "Queen City of the West," for all the disappointment of his recent months there, attracted him, and thither he moved his family in the closing weeks of [125] 1831, as he made ready to launch himself as a publisher.

      Nothing could have been more fitting as a title for this periodical than the one he chose, the Evangelist. A "prospectus" was printed in the Millennial Harbinger of January 2, 1832, and on the very same day the first issue came from the press. The magazine was really only a paper pulpit for the Ancient Gospel, with its editor as the preacher, and its readers forming a widely scattered congregation.

      The terms on which it was proposed to issue the magazine were stated: "The Evangelist will be published on the first Monday of every month, from January, 1832, on a royal sheet, and will contain 24 pages, at One Dollar per annum, if paid in advance, or One Dollar and Fifty Cents, if paid at the end of the year."¹²

      Addressing himself to the problem of circulation, the editor further advertised: "Any person acting as agent, and becoming responsible for five copies, payable in advance, shall have one copy for his trouble."¹³

      "The cause is still advancing," he wrote in a circular letter included in his first issue, "and I am persuaded that nothing but more zeal in our laborers, more zeal and devotedness in all the Disciples, are necessary to make it triumph among men."

      "I now reside in Cincinnati," he continued, "laboring in word and doctrine with the Brethren who meet in Sycamore-street; and being anxious to disseminate the principles and advance the science of eternal life, I have resolved, with the help of the Lord, to avail myself of the advantages afforded by the press."¹⁴ [126]

[WSVGO 119-126]