Isaac Errett's grandfather, William Errett, was a British army officer in the south of Ireland, and there his son Henry Errett, father of Isaac, was born, May 13, 1788, in the seaport of Arklow, County Wicklow, near that "sweet vale of Avoca" of which More sings in "The Meeting of the Waters."

      However pleasing the prospect, the times were troublous. While at home

F. A. HENRY.

temporarily from Dublin University, Henry Errett witnessed the foul assassination of his father by a masked party of wearers of the green. His mother, Sarah Redmond, a woman of family and fortune, was permanently crazed by the shock, and after vain efforts to restore her reason, Henry placed her in a retreat and emigrated to New York.

      Here he was employed by the real-estate firm of R. and A. Stewart, in which he was about to become a partner at the time of his early death, Feb. 17, 1825. Here, too, he married Sophia Kemmish, June 12, 1811, having in the previous November united with the little church to which her family belonged.

      Isaac Errett was the fifth of seven children--all sons but the youngest, all of decided ability, and two, at least, destined to become men of distinction.

      Born in New York, Jan. 2, 1820, Isaac was barely five years old at his father's death. His mother, finding it hard to support so large a family and especially to control so many growing boys, married, two years later, a pious, parsimonious stonemason, named Souter.

      In 1832, they all, with many others from the New York Church, removed to Pittsburg. In the spring of the year after they came West, Isaac and his next older brother, Russell, were both baptized by Elder Robert McLaren, in the Allegheny River.

      At sixteen Isaac was bound to a Mr. A. A. Anderson, of Pittsburg, in whose office he attained to great expertness as a compositor. At twenty-one he became the editor of a weekly paper--the Pittsburg Intelligencer--which Anderson had been printing and now purchased. Meanwhile, however, young Errett had bought his release from Anderson and had worked for him as a journeyman. He also taught school for a year in Robertson Township, near Pittsburg, and the next year a better school at a salary of five hundred dollars.

      Last, but not least, was the active part he took in the public services of the Pittsburg church, which was then without a regular preacher. "On the 21st of April, 1839," he says, "I delivered my first regular discourse." On the 18th of June, 1840, he was ordained an evangelist, in the newly organized Smithfield Street Church, to which, in October following, he began regularly to minister, resigning his school for that purpose. [402]

      His delicacy of constitution was now somewhat outgrown; his shabby apparel was cast aside; his habits of life were well and wisely formed; his education was solidly founded; his spiritual anchorage was secure.

      In October, 1841, an event occurred whereof, long afterwards, he says: "On the eighteenth of this month I was united in marriage with Harriet Reeder, daughter of James and Hannah--a native of England, but reared in this country. I have not been disappointed. Peace and happiness have attended us thus far in our married life."

      Three years of poorly paid, but richly rewarded, ministry in Pittsburg were followed by his call to the church at New Lisbon, O. Their young preacher was promised five hundred dollars for his first year, only half of which was paid, and the other half again promised for half his time the next year. The third year he was obliged to depend upon evangelistic meetings for the support of his growing family.

      He had ministered to the New Lisbon Church for five years, when he removed his family--wife and four children--to North Bloomfield, March 28, 1849, in acceptance of a pleasing call. The church being small, he agreed to give half his time to the large Warren Church.

      As illustrative of the times, we may glance at the great yearly meetings held that year in North Bloomfield, and note the Erretts' small house lodging sixty persons at one and the same time!

      In 1851, the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, now Hiram College, was founded a few miles to the westward, numbering Isaac Errett in its first Board of Trustees.

      At Warren, Feb. 9, 1851, Mr. Errett preached a sermon on "Civil Government," in which he denounced the Fugitive Slave Law. The next March the Erretts moved to Warren, where Judge King made them the gift of a house, conditioned on a certain duration of their stay.

      The Ohio State Convention this year was organized in affiliation with the American Christian Missionary Society. At the next annual meeting Mr. Errett was elected corresponding secretary.

      By 1855, his reputation, transcending denominational and sectional bounds, brought him an invitation to address a convention of the American Bible Union in New York City. Meanwhile, his pastorate in Warren was increasingly influential. The place was emphatically a seat of culture. Among those, from outside the membership of his church, who were drawn to his sermons "by qualities in them and in him which were very attractive," was a young lawyer, Jacob D. Cox, who later became a major-general of volunteers and Governor of Ohio. Writing after Mr. Errett's death of those "brilliant days of his younger manhood," he dilates upon "his great influence and the steady ripening of his character as long as he lived."

      Garfield, then principal at Hiram, writing him May 3, 1859, of his troubles, said: "While I stay here, the school shall never be given up to an overheated and brainless faction. I know you can sympathize with me."

      In May, 1860, Professor Pendleton, son-in-law of Mr. Campbell, and acting for both, induced Mr. Errett to undertake the task of obtaining an increased endowment for Bethany College, and, this done, to become a co-editor of the Millennial Harbinger, published in Bethany. His editorial work which followed was a pronounced success, in the sense that it was helpful to the churches, while it also advertised and aided his own firm grasp and felicitous restatement of first principles.

      There came to his home in Muir, to offer him a theological chair at Hiram, a committee composed of Mr. Garfield, Dr. Robinson and Harmon Austin, followed later by J. H. Jones. But, Bethany and the Harbinger still claiming him, all these overtures were rejected.

      In 1862, Mr. Errett's son James enlisted in the army; but his own application to the Governor of Michigan for a commission was overruled, because the quota of officers from that part of the State was full.

      The church in Detroit, a call from which he had refused some years before, was at this time dominated by certain Scotch brethren as opinionated as they were pious. Two of its more progressive members, Messrs. Hawley and Campbell, now persuaded Mr. Errett to take the pastorate of a new church in that city, in a meeting-house [403] which they purchased from the Congregationalists.

      The new church was dedicated in 1863, and attracted such attention that, at the instance of a Detroit paper, Mr. Errett published therein a formal statement of the faith and practice of the Disciples, in numbered paragraphs.

      In 1865, a committee from Hiram, composed of the same men who had visited him four years before, succeeded this time in obtaining his acceptance of the headship of a Bible department, which he conducted as a summer school, for three years, from 1866 to 1868, in the midst of which the old Western Reserve Eclectic Institute became Hiram College. This salutary project for the improvement of the Christian ministry was financed by the four Phillips brothers, of New Castle, Pa., whose intelligent pioneering in the oil fields had been exceptionally successful.

      The publication idea crystalized in the founding of the Christian Standard.

H. B. BROWN.

A dozen prominent Disciples, including Messrs. Errett, Robinson, Pendleton, Garfield and Ford, met with three of the Phillips brothers, at Thomas W. Phillips' elegant and hospitable home, Dec. 22, 1865, and formally resolved upon the organization of a joint stock company to conduct a religious weekly newspaper. It was voted to start the enterprise in Cleveland.

      The Christian Publishing Association was accordingly chartered Jan. 2, 1866, and at the first board meeting, February 14, Dr. Streator was elected President; W. J. Ford, Secretary, and Dr. Robinson, Treasurer of the corporation, and Mr. Errett was chosen editor and manager of the Christian Standard, in which it was arranged that the Christian Record, of Indianapolis, edited by Elijah Goodwin, should be merged.

      Again, succeeded in his Michigan pulpits by Alanson Wilcox, Mr. Errett, with his daughter Jennie as secretary, came to Cleveland, leaving the rest of the family temporarily on the Muir farm. The Standard first appeared Apr. 7, 1866, from the Cleveland Herald's press, in touch with which, at 99 Bank Street, the Standard's office was located.

      "There had been for years," as Mr. Errett long afterwards recalls, "a growing desire among the Disciples for a weekly religious paper of broader range, more generous spirit and a higher order of literary skill and taste than any that had yet appeared under their patronage." Such, indeed, with Errett and Hinsdale molding its contents, the Standard, from the very outset, undoubtedly was.

      Mr. Campbell's influence, already somewhat weakened in the Abolitionist strongholds, was now further abated by the infirmities of age. Never were his sound judgment and masterful personality more sorely needed by the church than in the hour of his death, March 4, 1866.

      It was thus in the nick of time that, one month afterwards, the Christian Standard was started as the radical organ of innovators and modernists. It was, for example, reproached erelong by its contemporaries, and exultingly proclaimed by its editor, as "the only weekly among us that advocates missionary societies," with organizations distinct from those of the congregations.

      The Standard proved, however, with all its excellence, to be disappointingly slow in becoming self-sustaining. After two years it was transferred by the discouraged stockholders of the association to Mr. Errett, on condition that he assume the debts and continue the publication. His family had meanwhile moved to Cleveland, and, save for his anxiety about the fate of the paper, their life there was most happy.

      But some shift was now inevitable; and, accepting the tendered presidency of Alliance College, he removed his family, rather against their judgment, to the seat, some forty miles south of Cleveland, of that alluring, but altogether visionary, educational enterprise; and some months afterward the Standard office was also transferred to the same place. The paper's financial condition, which had never been entirely satisfactory, was now again declining, owing to the divided allegiance of its [404] editor whereby his own indispensable energies were in part diverted to the college, while distrust of the Standard's impartiality was aroused among the friends of other colleges.

      A timely offer from the publishing-house of R. W. Carroll & Co., of Cincinnati, to take over the paper and to retain Mr. Errett upon salary as its editor, was therefore gladly accepted, especially as suspicions were gaining currency that the resources of Alliance College were not such as the promoter had represented them to be.

      In the last number of the Standard issued from Alliance, July 24, 1869, the editor, announcing the transfer, said: "After mature deliberation and extensive consultation with leading brethren, we have concluded to decline offers of our institutions of learning at Alliance, Bethany and Lexington, and give our time and strength to the Standard.

      So now, in his fiftieth year, frequent changes of residence culminate in the permanent planting of his home in Cincinnati. This move was abundantly justified by the results. The Standard steadily grew and prospered; many strong men were from time to time attracted to its service, and henceforth the life of the paper and that of its editor-in-chief are inseparably related.

      It is therefore at this epoch that he sounds, in its due season, a keynote in the Standard, which it were well to keep forever at the head of its foremost column, in his very words, italicized as he italicized them: "And any attempt to compel uniformity in thinking or in practice, where the apostles have left us free, is virtual apostasy."

      In 1874, largely through his encouragement, the Christian Woman's Board of Missions was organized; and in the following year he was chiefly instrumental in forming the Foreign Christian Missionary Society, the presidency of which he occupied till his death. This was constructive work of the first order, the far-reaching value of which no mere mention can justly appraise.

      In 1876 appeared his correspondence, or discussion, with "Herbert" on the Christian evidences, and also his inspiring "Letters to a Young Christian," which were afterwards republished in a small volume still widely read.

      In 1880 appeared his "Evenings with the Bible." This splendid undertaking, a summary of and commentary upon the entire Scriptures, was published in three volumes, and he rightly regarded it as his greatest literary work. This year is signalized also by the Garfield Presidential campaign, and by the mysterious death, by shooting, of his noble and talented son, Henry Errett, an art student in Paris. Near the close of the year, in the shadow of this melancholy event, Mr. Errett parted with his stock in the Standard Publishing Company, which seven years before had succeeded to the ownership of the paper; and, though he continued as its editor, his son Russell now purchased the control that he has ever since retained.

      Mr. Errett's view of inspiration, as disclosed in a lecture, differs not at all from that of Alexander Campbell. "By general consent," he declares, "and on any hypothesis, even the most rationalistic, the Bible, as a whole, must be regarded as a book of inspiration." He moreover affirms it to be "a trustworthy communication of the will of God, in all that pertains to salvation, righteousness and holiness." But he boldly avers that "any assertion of infallibility as belonging to the inspired Scriptures, must be subject to the limitations growing out of the imperfections of human language, and the uncertainties and perils ever attendant upon materials placed in human custody, and subject, more or less, to the control of ignorance, credulity, prejudice or superstition."

      In 1884 Mr. Errett was chosen a member of the International Sunday-school Lesson Committee, and continued to serve as such until his death. In April, 1885, he preached two of the university sermons at Cornell. The extent and variety of his activities in these years are prodigious. But by 1886 he encounters, in failing health, the premonition of his final call, which a trip abroad and through the Holy Land the next year fails to dispel. His travel letters are, however, full of life and humor, as is also his account in the Standard of his last meeting with the three other surviving members of the Quintinkle in Cleveland in September of the same year.

      He contributed powerfully to practical [405] church unity by encouragement of, and personal participation in, interdenominational work. He rescued the Christian Church, by his commanding editorial influence and his discreetly sympathetic personality, from narrow and schismatic perversions of the ideal of primitive Christianity restored. He preached with tongue and pen, and incessantly, persuasively, compellingly, the Christ and him crucified, the risen Lord and loving Saviour, living and reigning on the throne of heaven and in the hearts of men. He saw and caused the church to see, and to realize in splendid achievement, that its salvation consists wholly in organized, persistent and supreme effort to "go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature," in obedience to the Saviour.

[CCR 402-406]