OVEMBER 17, 1849, found Walter Scott with J. T. Johnson holding a thirteen-day meeting at Mays Lick, Kentucky. Scott had been in Mays Lick for the first time in 1832, seventeen years before; he had returned many times, and something about the village attracted him greatly. At the end of the meeting he proposed to stay on as pastor, and the church record for November 29 confirms the acceptance: "On Thursday 29th [Nov., 1849] the church agreed to employ Brother Scott half the time."

      He preached each Sunday. Finally, on January 6, 1850, he proposed to the church that he should give them his entire service for one year, to be associated with the elders, as the "teaching elder," for $700. Since all agreed except four or five, who felt that it was unscriptural for the minister to be an elder, it was voted to continue the current arrangement until April, when it would be subject to review. To satisfy the scruples of the objecting brethren, Scott, on January 20, withdrew his association as an elder.

      The church of which Walter Scott was now minister had a membership just short of 250. Church records for January 1, 1849, show "192 white members and 36 black members." His "half-time service" to this congregation was an unusually arduous one. Several Sundays he preached "at 11 at 3 and at candlelighting."¹

      For the energetic Scott, however, this was a lull in activity. Without his magazine, he needed something [200] besides his occasional evangelistic tours to occupy him; so, on February 17, he publicly announced from the Mays Lick pulpit that he would start a female school if he could enroll twenty scholars. The scholars duly presented themselves, and the school began.

      Faithful to its January promise, the church met on March 30 to make a decision about a contract with the minister. From this meeting there resulted the following resolution:

      Resolved that we the congregation of Disciples at Mays Lick agree to give Bro. Scott five hundred and fifty dollars for one year from the first of April, 1850, as teacher and preacher of the gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ granting him the privilege of keeping an Academy.

      During this same year he was engaged in three known evangelistic meetings, at Maysville in March, at Versailles in November, and at Mount Sterling in December, in addition to which he helped organize the first Kentucky annual state meeting at Lexington, May 9, and attended the national meeting in Cincinnati in October.

      It was also during this year that the lonely Scott remarried. With his wife gone and his children in Pittsburgh, the man who had been so dependent upon the intimacy of the family circle and upon the encouragement of a spouse could walk alone no longer. His choice was the young and beautiful Nannie B. Allen, a member of his congregation. Delicate, refined, and genuinely religious, she was remarkably suited to Scott, although she was many years his junior. He was at this time fifty-four. [201]

      Some of Nannie's friends had remonstrated with her: "You'll be a widow! Brother Scott is certain to die before you do."

      To this she had replied, " I would rather be the widow of Walter Scott than the wife of any other man."²

      She cherished him with great tenderness, and he loved her with that mingled affection and sorrow which brought to their marriage a great mellowness and a great peace.

      The nation was astir in these years. The California gold rush had swollen the population of that western territory until it came to statehood in the fall of 1850. The revised Missouri Compromise had been enacted, and the Fugitive Slave Law had been passed in a country boiling with the slavery question. The population of the United States now stood at 23,192,000.³

      Walter Scott, who was always sensitive to the life of his adopted nation, felt the tremors of approaching earthquake and trembled for his beloved land. Mays Lick, only twelve miles from the Ohio River, was rife with red-faced debate, from which he could not entirely disengage himself. July 19, 1851, found both "Brother Shackleford and Brother Scott" confessing to the church that they had done wrong in becoming excited in A. R. Runyon's store. Incidents of this kind were to be repeated with some frequency as the decade advanced, and especially after Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, with fuse flying, was tossed into the midst of an already excited land.

      This year, 1851, he returned in August to visit the Western Reserve in company with Alexander Campbell and was also among the distinguished delegates [202] to the state and national meetings in October and November. His terms of service with the Mays Lick church, now reduced to $500 per year, continued until April of 1852. He also kept up his academy.

      Meantime Walter Scott's seventh and last child was born; Nannie and he named her Carrie Allen.

      At Covington, Kentucky, just across the river from Cincinnati, the Baptist Theological Seminary had closed, making its campus available on a rental basis to an enterprising educator.⁴ Walter Scott decided to take advantage of this opportunity. Announcing the opening of a female academy at Covington, he preached his last sermon at Mays Lick and took his departure, with wife and infant daughter, on April 11, 1852.

      In publishing the policy of his new Covington Female Institute, Scott wrote, "The Principal of the Institute will aim to impart to his pupils a thorough course of elementary knowledge, both Sacred and Secular; and will unceasingly direct their attention to those maxims and principles by which they may become the architects of their own character, and train themselves to loveliness and perfection." The basis of the curriculum was the Bible. "Touching the Secular part of the course, it will be strictly classical."

      Scott determined to avoid mass education and to devote himself to the individual interests and capacities of his students. He therefore announced, in somewhat startling fashion: "There are no classes in the school. Each is required to recite and review her own lessons. Each, therefore, may advance in her text-books in the ratio of her own taste and capacity for study, without being retarded in her progress by the imperfections of classmates." [203]

      A trace of the proprietor injected itself when he wrote, "The College [the campus on which the school met] with its fair and broad acres--at once lovely, magnificent and healthy--is better adapted to purposes of female education, perhaps, than any other locality in the three cities."

      The charge for board, light, fuel, washing, and tuition was $75 per session of five months, "the half-session to be paid invariably in advance.. . . No name will be entered on the roll till this is attended to. Music, Drawing, etc., extra. Miss Sargent will assist, and give lessons in Drawing."⁵

      It was in the summer of 1852 that Jethro Jackson's Christian Publication Rooms, Cincinnati, brought out Walter Scott's 128-page book, The Union of Christians on Christian Principles. When had he found time to write it? And was it written at Mays Lick or Covington?

      The editor of the Millennial Harbinger, in his August issue, took notice:

      I have read so much of it, and know its author so well, through all the intimacies of more than a quarter of a century's co-operation in the forests, in the fields, in the pulpit, and by the fireside, as to say of it, that it is one of the best tracts of the age, and the best on the Divinity of Christ, that has, in forty years' reading, come under my eye, and stands forth here as we have always taught it--the capital doctrine of the Christian Religion and of the current Reformation.⁶

      The thesis of the book is that Christian union will be achieved when men are drawn to the central element of the Christian religion, which is the divinity of Christ. Again the "Golden Oracle!" "It is no doctrine that Christ taught, nor any action that he [204] performed, that forms the article of faith in the gospel. It is himself--as God's son. " Bereft of this center of faith, Christianity is "like a watch without a spring, a clock without the weights, a solar system without the sun." The divinity of Christ is the creed of Christianity, the element of the confession, and the basis of union.

      The book falls into five divisions, all expounding the Golden Oracle: "Its Enunciation" (at the Jordan); "Its Demonstration by Miracle and Prophecy"; "Its Acceptation by Jesus Himself"; "Its Glorification on the Cross"; "Its Illustration" (in the Epistle to the Hebrews).

      The union of Christians can be restored as this central truth resumes its rightful place in Christian thought and loyalty. The result will be to produce a church which resembles "our own republican plan of union, in which the interaction of right, liberty, and authority are admirably harmonized. Christ and the holy apostles, by the Holy Scriptures constituted the general government, and each particular church a little republic within itself, bound in all duty by the force of its own doctrines and God's authority, to cooperate with others and to admit nothing exclusive into its constitution, nothing that would dissever it from the communion of all saints."

      He addresses himself, in the conclusion of the book, more especially to Disciples.

      Our Mission: What is that? Revolution, because it is to restore to its high and commanding position the constitution or the Creed of the Church; to restore to order all its first principles; to tranquilize the entire profession of Christianity; and finally to prepare the Church, by these principles, for fulfilling her proper [205] destinies. Protestants are in a transition state; the "Disciples" lead the way.

      Our Duty: Brethren, we are now a great people in the United States. We must realize this; we must realize our mission and our position; and acquit ourselves like men. We must not resign our ground to sectarianism. Faction is ever at war with the Church, and must never, when primitive Christianity can prevent it, be allowed to dispose of society; we must oppose ourselves as a breastworks against the deluge of sects that overflow our country. If we do not, we shall have to surrender our position to a more faithful people.

      The last pages of this book might have been directed straight at the twentieth century:

      All the friends of evangelical Christianity are loudly called on by the times, by the prevalence of infidelity, and the increase of the Papacy to surrender every prejudice to the faith; popularity to principle; party policy to the general interest of the Church of God; and every other inferior consideration to the great duty of Union and the conversion of mankind.

      The next year a companion volume, The Death of Christ, a book of 132 pages, was published by Bosworth in Cincinnati. Thereafter for many years the two works separately, and then together under one cover, passed through many printings in Cincinnati, Bethany, and Philadelphia; and their voice carried across the brotherhood long after that of their author was silenced.

      When the American Christian Missionary Society met as the national convention of the brotherhood on October 17, 1854, Walter Scott was its leading voice, for the president, Alexander Campbell, was absent. W. K. Pendleton reported: "In the absence of the [206] President of the Society, Bro. Walter Scott was called upon to deliver the Anniversary Address. He performed his task in a manner truly worthy of the catholic greatness of his Christian head and heart."⁷

      With the growth of the Disciples in rapid ascent toward a quarter of a million, he had given increasing thought to cooperation among the individual churches and to organization for effective action. He had been one of the original advocates of the National Convention. He had also pleaded for a Christian Union Society, and now he began to feel out the possibilities of a systematic program of evangelism:

      The systemization of our men and money, piety, and liberality is slow but advancing.. . . Would it then not be proper and analogous, that among the evangelical corps, which unites the church with society, there should also be a primus inter pares--a foreman--a wise, pious, and experienced person, in whom all the evangelical labor of the district should be organized, and who should superintend the work of the Lord there--looking well to the fact that the evangelists maintained the dignity of the office, and exercised themselves duly in labor, reading, and meditation? Then our evangelical corps would, like our corps of deacons, and elders, have the compactness and the strength of system.⁸

      While Scott was performing his task as head of the National Convention "in a manner worthy of catholic, greatness," his mind was weighed down with anxiety over his wife. Nannie had been in declining health for the past year, and in the summer of 1854 she had grown steadily worse. Burdened by his anxiety, Scott had taken her south for the cooling breezes off the lakes during the hot summer months, thinking that the [207] change would renew her vigor. But in that he had been mistaken. Nannie was dying of consumption. On November 18 she breathed her last, leaving Walter, now fifty-eight, and Carrie Allen, three, in the miserable companionship of bereavement.⁹

      Scott took her body home to Mays Lick for burial.¹⁰

      Not even four years was he allowed to have her gentle love; but, though of short duration, it had been like a blessing out of heaven. He went back to Covington alone.

      Early in 1855 Scott began to turn his thoughts toward the creation at Covington of a male orphan asylum to match the flourishing female orphan asylum at Midway, Kentucky. He associated himself with J. T. Johnson in an attempt to raise $50,000, which would be equal to the permanent support of 100 orphaned boys. He accordingly announced in March:

      It will be my duty, in the first instance, to make collections for the payment of the property. I am, therefore, now ready to take the field in behalf of this institution, and to visit any portion of our country, East, West, North or South, in which the beloved of Christ, the holy brethren, feel themselves animated and inspired with.  . . the zeal of doing good.¹¹

      The undertaking was an ambitious one, beyond the imagination or sympathy of the brotherhood, and it had to be abandoned. This having failed, Scott then turned his attention to the creation of a female college. The trustees of the Baptist Theological Seminary, desiring to sell their campus, had made a new proposition at a greatly reduced rate. A down payment of $5,000 would secure the property, which could be used [208] as the campus of the first Disciples college for women! It looked so easy. "Brethren," he wrote, "I dislike to have the prey shaken out of my mouth. I tell you I do, and I shall surrender only to circumstances of a lion-like force.¹²

      He got his campaign under way and raised at least $1,340 of which we have record.¹³ Then circumstances of a lionlike force did intervene. He could not raise the rest! The whole project had to be given up. In August of 1855 Walter Scott returned to Mays Lick.

      He was, perhaps, looking for consolation when he was married shortly after to Eliza Sandidge, the wealthy widow of L. A. Sandidge, who had died nearly ten years before. And he was looking again for consolation when, the last week in December of that year, he paid an extended visit to the home of Alexander Campbell in Bethany, Virginia. Brother Alexander, mellowed by his sixty-seven years, and touched, no doubt, by the memory of his friend's recent bereavement, received Brother Walter with such cordiality and hospitality that, it seemed to him, it would have been impossible for anyone to show him greater kindness.

      Remaining in Bethany several days, he availed himself of the invitation of his host to deliver several addresses to the students of Bethany College, now in its fifteenth prosperous year. He returned to Kentucky greatly refreshed.

      At the age of fifty-nine, there was little in the outward man to betray Walter Scott's years. The accent which he had brought from Scotland thirty-seven years before was as rich as ever, the voice as resonant. His steely figure was as thin and flexible--and as [209] straight. Even his hair was as full and nearly as black; it was only lightly sprinkled with gray. His keen expressive eyes glowed with the fire of youth, and the mind that looked out through them was alert and young.

      Nevertheless, the shadows were lengthening, and the evening was nigh. [210]

[WSVGO 200-210]