CHAPTER ONE

On October 13, 1832, after two years of what historian David Bell has called “probably the greatest revival New Brunswick has ever seen”,1 representatives of six independent New Light2 churches met in Wakefield, New Brunswick. The New Lights had spent over two decades at the fringes of New Brunswick society, the result of a search for respectability and order that during the first decade of the nineteenth century had seen the nascent Maritime Baptist and Methodist leadership deliberately jettison much of the emotionalism and radical evangelical spirituality that had formed the core of the region’s First Great Awakening under the leadership of Henry Alline and Freeborn Garrettson. Those who did not go along with this turn away from the New Light message were discarded, forced out of their churches and marginalized in the broader culture.3 In a region where literacy was limited and settlement was still scattered and isolated outside of the few small urban areas, however, the New Light message and subculture continued to flourish, primarily for the same reasons that it had taken root in the first place. Its basic message of experiential piety was simple to grasp, and was easily and effectively transmitted through sermon and song by native itinerants who could identify with the needs of their own communities. Men such as Daniel Shaw, Clark Alline, John Pineo, and Robert Colpitts travelled throughout the rural areas of the Maritimes in the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, organizing meetings and keeping the spirit of Alline and Garrettson alive, despite opposition from Baptist and Methodist leaders such as Edward Manning.4

The representatives of the six New Light churches that met in Wakefield in 1832 agreed to form a new denomination, to be known as the New Brunswick Christian Conference. This development had been prompted by American evangelists from the Christian 11.D.G. Bell, “From Newlight to Arminian Baptist, 1776-1832" [an unpublished 1981 Harvard Divinity School paper, a copy of which is on deposit at the Atlantic Baptist Historical Collection, Acadia University], 56.

2.The term “Newlight” is the most descriptive of the varied and generally inclusive membership of these churches, which included Allinites, disaffected Methodists, and immersed Baptists unwilling to accept the Calvinism and close communion practices of the Regular Baptists.

3.The best examination of how the New Lights survived in this period as a separate tradition can be found in D.G. Bell, “From Newlight to Arminian Baptist, 1776-1832", ibid. Bell’s Newlight Journals of James Manning and James Innis (Hantsport, Nova Scotia: Lancelot Press, 1984) is also an extremely valuable source.

4.Of Pineo, for example, Manning wrote, “[He] made confusion among the people. I made some remarks to [him] and he got quite exasperated, to wit, abusive. Threatened violence with much temper. Said I was no gentleman, but a vagabond... I was sorry he was such a man... I feel a desire to pity and pray for him, but never want to have any connection with him while he is in the strain that he is in.” Edward Manning journals, 30 December, 1812 {Atlantic Baptist Collection, Acadia University].

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The first was the overwhelming emphasis that they placed upon the conversion experience as the only requirement for membership in the christian community. Concomitant to this was their rejection of church orders and forms as mere ‘externals’. For example, they still viewed water baptism, so important to the Baptists, as a ‘non-essential’.6 Their communion was defined as “true piety alone” with the Bible as the only source of doctrine.7The second characteristic, closely related to the first, was their rejection of religious hierarchy, and acceptance of regular participation in the worship meeting by the laity.8 This feature was particularly appealing to women, young people, members of the rural working class, and immigrants, who in the Christian Conference found an outlet for self expression that was denied to them elsewhere in society. 9

These groups were still disenfranchised by a political process and social order that had expanded to include the growing colonial merchant class from which the key leadership of the Baptists and Methodists was drawn.10 Finally, the New Lights who formed the Christian Conference, like Alline and Garrettson, expected immediate impulses from Heaven. They wholeheartedly embraced the experiential religion that the Methodists and Baptists had consciously distanced themselves from, and that the upper echelons of colonial society continued to view as improper and harmful to good religious and social order.11

These characteristics represented a purist, anti-formal religious practice rather than a definitive doctrine.12 Even the limited delegation of local authority that was implied in the new organization proved, at least initially, too much for some New Light preachers. Samuel Hartt, for example, did not join the Conference immediately. One of the leading New Light itinerants, he “could in no wise agree” with the formation of the new organization.13 Others followed Hartt’s lead, casting a wary eye towards the Conference. In large part this can be traced to what were still painful memories of the beginnings of the Baptist Association. The rationale offered by Elder Samuel Nutt of the Maine Christian Conference for the formation of the New Brunswick Conference, that it would “be to the furtherance of the cause... for the better regulation of the churches,” was not unlike the reasons that had been given for the creation of the Baptist Association.14 The underlying subtext that they feared was that this was another drive to sacrifice the essential individual spirituality of their religious beliefs for a more ‘respectable’, and thus acceptable to the colonial elite, form of religion. Furthermore, the presence of an American influence was also reminiscent of the organization of the Baptists,15 and gave some of the prospective members of the Conference pause. Too many of the Newlights had suffered repudiation and condemnation from Baptist and Methodist relatives and friends to easily accept an organization that might make them “like other nations or sects.”16

5.As Bell has demonstrated, the influence of Samuel Nutt, the American evangelist from the Christian Connection who took an active role in the revivals, although crucial in terms of “giving leadership to the influential band of native exhorters”, was catalytic, not substantive; Bell, “From Newlight to Arminian Baptist, 1776-1832", ibid., 56-57.

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While these factors weighed on the minds of all New Lights faced with the question of whether or not to join the Conference, there was another consideration motivating the actions of many of the New Light preachers and senior laity. They were suspicious of outsiders, and were particularly concerned that the considerable position of social influence they as preachers and senior laity enjoyed in the rural communities frequented by the New Lights would be undone by greater organization and the centralization of power that such organization implied. In order to understand the nature of these suspicions, one first has to examine the power and character of both the revival and the men who used it to spread their vision of the gospel and exert a profound influence on the daily lives of rural New Brunswickers.

The revivalists themselves lacked any formal education or training, were itinerants as opposed to settled pastors, were not paid a regular sum for their preaching, and refused to deliver prepared sermons, instead exhorting as the ‘spirit of God’ led them. Their sole purpose was to convert the unconverted and reinvigorate the faith of ‘backsliders’, and their sole qualification for doing so was a ‘call from God’ and the support of church members. Almost all of them were involved in a secular business of some sort in order to support their families. Among the earliest Elders of the Christian Conference, for example, Hartt and Ezekiel Sipprell were farmers who also dabbled in the lumber trade, William Pennington was a trader, and Henry Cronkhite and Charles McMullin were innkeepers. McMullin and another elder, Abner Mersereau, were known as men “of property”.17 Most of them, to varying degrees, were reasonably prosperous citizens of northwestern New Brunswick. Often they would mix business trips with revival campaigns. In June 1830, for example, Hartt and Nathaniel Churchill journeyed down the Saint John River from Wakefield and participated in a revival at Millstream and Sussex. While Churchill remained for “some time superintending a good revival”, however, Harrt left after just a few days and continued on to Saint John, where he had “business” to conduct.18

On their revival campaigns, a preacher like Hartt would travel to “the scattered hamlets and back settlements” of the colony, where he would visit every home where admittance was granted.19 When he arrived at a home, the family was summoned, and a “few moments of kindly talk dispersed”, after which he would read a chapter from the Bible. He would then comment upon it, and lead the family in prayer, “often most fervent and effective.” Evening and Sunday services were held in a church or meeting house if a community had one or, as was the case in many areas, a schoolroom or a cleanly swept barn. Thr preacher would seek the repentance and conversion of the individual from the state of the original sin, and his subsequent enrolment in the “list of the regenerate and saved.” Public confession of sin and profession of faith was “strictly enjoined”, as was the relation by the individual congregation member of his or her experience in the new life. From this evolved what was known as the “prayer and experience meeting and the organized working church.”20

Once this preliminary visitation work had been completed, the first preacher was joined

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by one or two others, and together they would hold a week or more of revival meetings in the community. During this time,

...exhortations to forsake sin and acknowledge God and become Christians in word and deed were nightly listened to, and participated in by crowded audiences... The condition of the sinner here and in his life thereafter was vividly depicted; the contrast in the lot of the converted and the redeemed was painted in glowing words; the appeals to forsake the evil and cleave to Christ were direct and wonderfully effective.21

As one person after another yielded to the “power of the Spirit” and “embraced” religion, interest throughout the nearby areas increased rapidly, and the revival “circle” widened.22 The result was that conversions multiplied rapidly as “scores and hundreds... set out seriously upon the new life.” Through the revival, wrote one observer, whole communities were “informed with a new life.”23

This type of itinerant revivalism was conducted in almost the exact same manner as that practises by Alline and Garrettson in the late eighteenth century. It was no coincidence that a Christian Conference preacher like McMullin owned a copy of Alline’s journal and sought to emulate his proven methods. During the 1830s and 1840s these preachers, known as Elders, experienced the most success and achieved the most influence in the small rural farming and logging communities of western New Brunswick, largely because they fulfilled the same function that Alline and Garrettson had fifty years before. They provided a sense of stability to the isolated settlements, renewed familial relationships and extended kin ties through the revival, and gave people a respite from the routine life of the farmer or the woodsman. They were also often the only thing close to an organized religious presence in many areas.

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The Elders also exercised a great deal of authority in these rural communities, where they “powerfully affected and influenced social life.”24 For example, people were encouraged to resolve secular disputes within the Christian community, not with the aid of the civilian judicial authorities but under the guidance of the Elders and senior laity. The Elders also exercised a significant degree of control over the personal moral standards of their congregations through both their preaching and the example they tried to set of living the ‘good christian life’. Discipline for immoral behaviour was rigorously enforced by the Elders and the senior laity, who acted as travelling ‘courts’,

6?.G. Garraty, Rise and Progress of the “New Brunswick Christian Conference”: A Narrative of the Illiberal, Partial, and Unscriptural Conduct of Said Conference towards George Garraty (Saint John: 1840), 7.

7. Philip G.A. Griffin-Allwood, “‘To Hear A Free Gospel’: The Christian Connexion in Canada” in CSCH Papers (1988), 75.

8. Rev. A. Taylor, “Semi-Centennial Sermon” in Minutes of the Fiftieth General Conference of the Free Christian Baptists of New Brunswick (Saint John: George W. Day, 1882), 46. Taylor noted that “Our fathers believed that... the membership should exercise... the gifts of the church in any religious service, even if they were not in holy orders, or were not ordained to the work of thecjristian ministry... [they] believed in lay preaching, and they properly allowed it to have its fullest and widest extent.”

9. With regard to the participation of women, see Rev. D. Dunbar, A Concise View of the Origin and Principles of the Several Religious Denominations Exisiting at Present in the Province of New Brunswick... (Eastport, Maine: Benjamin Folsom, 1819), 81-82. Dunbar observed that “In [New Brunswick] the Baptists have been too often confounded with a set of enthusiastic professors, who call themselves by no other name than christians [and] who pretend to be moved to speak by the spirit, and their females are generally the most active in this part of the worship.” On the attraction of radical evangelicalism for women, see Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s excellent chapter “Women and Religious Revivals: Anti-Ritualism, Liminality, and the Emergence of the American Bourgeoisie” in Leonard Sweet, ed., The Evangelical Tradition in America (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1984), 199-233.

10.Men such as John M. Wilmot, Thomas Harding, George Bond, and David Ansley were typical of this influential new merchant class. All served as Saint John aldermen in the 1820s and 1830s; Bond, Harding and Wilmot were Baptists, and Ansley was a Methodist. See T.W. Acheson, Saint John: The Making of a Colonial Urban Community (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 42-43.

11. Compare the views of Charles Inglis, the first Anglican Bishop in the Maritimes and arch-foe of radical evangelicalism, with those of Baptist patriarch Edward Manning. In 1792 Inglis wrote “The Church of Christ is not a tumultuous, disorderly, and unorganized multitude, as [the

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adjudicating and ultimately punishing those who had transgressed the rules of the church. Such influence and control, however, was always carefully balanced by the input given to the congregation, who expected to be consulted on major decisions and who played an even more active role in the day-to-day affairs of the congregation than the Elders.

Throughout the 1830s and 1840s this un-tempered rural revivalism was contrasted by the increasingly organized revivalism that the Methodist and Baptist leadership, growing more urban in character and composition, advocated.25 Even many prominent rural Baptists were in favour of a more settled and educated ministry with regular, systematic

enthusiasts] seem to suppose... to suppose any man may usurp the ministerial office, without any other warrant or authority than his own good opinion of his own sufficiency, is an error fraught with consequences destructive to Christianity...” A Charge delivered to the Clergy of Nova-Scotia, at the Triennial Visitation holden in the Town of Halifax, in the month of June 1791 (Halifax:: 1792). For his part, Manning, who was one of the Inglis’ targets in 1792, wrote in 1814, “Mr. William Blenkorn... who is in the habit of speaking in public, [is] but a vile enthusiast... [he] arose and contradicted the plain truth of the Gospel... I wish he may never return to this place.. Much hurt may be done by such unskillful guides as he is.”; Edward Manning journal, 9 November and 26 November, 1814, ibid.

12. D.G. Bell, “The Allinite Tradition and the New Brunswick Free Christian Baptists, 1830-1875" in Robert S. Wilson, ed., An Abiding Conviction: Maritime Baptists and Their World (Hantsport, Nova Scotia: Lancelot Press, 1988), 59.

13. Garraty, ibid., 5.

14. Ibid., 4.

15. Or British influence on the Methodists at about the same time.

16. Garratty, ibid. When Hartt began preaching, for example, many of his Baptist relatives were “considerably opposed to him,” and “a great outcry through the country from his nearest friends [arose] that [he] was deluded...” Edward Weyman, “Notes Regarding Early Ministers” [Atlantic Baptist Historical Collection, Acadia University], 4-5.

17. Weyman, ibid., 1-12.

1818. Ibid., 5.

19. Taylor, ibid., 43-45. Sir George Eulas Foster, who emerged in the 1870s and 1880s as a key member of the laity pressing for a more ordered and professional church, commented in his autobiography that the 1830s and 1840s, when he was a young boy in Wakefield, were the “days of militant pioneer church life... in the itinerant revivalist effort which invaded all our settlements”; W. Stewart Wallace, ed., The Memoirs of the Rt. Hon. Sir George Foster, P.C., G.C.M.G. (Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada Limited, 1933), 11-12.

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financial support.26 Jarvis Ring, for example, while remaining attached to the more emotional and participatory services favoured by the Christian Conference, felt nonetheless that the day of the itinerant, part-time evangelist, such as Hartt, his brother-in-law, was over, and that rural communities suffered from the lack of a settled pastor. Commenting on Hartt’s presence in Sussex Ring wrote, “Br. Samuel Hartt had a church in that place, he was on a visit while I was thair [sic] & Baptised, this made it more plane to me that the Church wanted an Ordaned [sic] minister.”27 During a period when the rest of the evangelical Protestant culture of New Brunswick was moving towards the acceptance of a paid professional clergy, initiating inter-denominational cooperation in a broad range of concerns extending from missionary work to temperance reform, and working to establish educational institutions such as Mount Allison in Sackville and the Baptist Seminary in Fredericton, the Christian Conference remained fiercely independent, rural, committed to neo-Whitefieldian revivalism, and resistant to, and suspicious of, a centralized, more organized form of denominationalism.28

Problems within the new Christian Conference quickly became evident, however, particularly at the leadership level. The Elders jealously guarded their congregations from both each other Elders and from outside forces, whether these were indigenous Baptist and Methodist preachers or travelling evangelists from New England. Internal conflict was frequent during the 1830s and 1840s, as groups of competing Elders and senior laymen allied themselves with each other, and on occasion with outside interests, in ever changing coalitions to fight out disputes over everything from doctrinal points to questions of discipline. One such controversy, which had been simmering for

20. Wallace, ibid.

21. Ibid.

22. Peer pressure was certainly an important factor in the success of the revivals: to not participate was often to cut oneself off from friends and family. Rev. Alexander Taylor in his memoirs recounted how this social reality first led him to evangelical religion in his early twenties: “It was about the first of March 1833, when I was residing in Richmond, near the [Maine-New Brunswick] boundary line... that awaking from sleep one Sunday morning... my first thought was to go and see some young friends... A very different reception awaited me from what I had anticipated, for the young people avoided me, and appeared to be afraid in my presence. I soon noticed they appeared very solemn... I wondered what was the matter with them, and I soon learned that they were deeply concerned about themselves and were then seeking religion. I felt very cross and concluded I was being treated badly... one of the party told me they were going to meeting, and asked me to go with them. I answered roughly, ‘No, I will go to no meeting.’ They turned and left me. Instantly I made up my mind that I would go to the meeting [and] when they went away I followed.” Rev. Alexander Taylor, “Reminiscences of my Early Life and my Religious Experience, #6" Religious Intelligencer, 9 March 1887.

23. Ibid.

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a few years, erupted in 1837-38 between George Garraty, a schoolteacher and itinerant preacher licensed by the Conference, and prominent Elders such as Hartt and William Pennington. Garraty was expelled from the Conference after he questioned its leaders on their growing support for the more radical views of the Hamiltonians, a schismatic breakaway sect from the Christian Connection in New England. He was accused of preaching false doctrine; in fact, he was suspicious of the “peculiar revelations” often claimed by the Elders and the unbridled enthusiasm of the Conference.29 He criticised the Elders for being dishonest, ignorant and dictatorial, and charged them with holding private ecclesiastical courts where “there is always a little pope.”30

Such open conflict was detrimental to the Conference’s efforts to increase its membership and extend its area of influence beyond the rural areas of western and central New Brunswick. The lack of unity at the leadership level undermined the confidence their followers had in the Elders and senior laity, and some of them turned away from the Conference and joined the more respectable Baptists and Methodists, or drifted off into other groups, such as the Millerites. Dwindling congregations meant less potential revenue for many of the often financially troubled Elders, whose secular affairs frequently suffered while they were engaged in itinerant preaching.31

As a result, by the late 1840s the majority of the Elders had come to the conclusion that a degree of increased organization and a statement of what they believed in was needed in order to differentiate themselves from other denominations, particularly similar American groups, prevent the introduction of “erroneous doctrine” among the churches, and guarantee a basic degree of stability and order that would allow the Conference to expand. This in turn would provide the Elders and the Deacons with the means to maintain and enhance their influence and achieve a measure of financial security. They embraced immersion as a requirement for church membership, although communion remained open to any converted christian, adopted a Treatise of Faith in 1848, and decided to publish annual Conference minutes in 1850.These were critical departures from the New Light belief that mere externals ought not to divide Christians. The most important change, however, was that of the denomination’s name. In 1847 the New Brunswick Christian Conference was replaced by the New Brunswick Free Christian Baptist Conference, in order to “relieve the minds of many of our brethren who were never fully reconciled to the name ‘Christian’ only, and thereby cultivate greater union among ourselves [and] to open a door for union with our brethren in Nova Scotia bearing that name.”32 This change, more than any other, signalled publicly the leadership’s break from the denomination’s roots, as they embraced a positive doctrine - free will.33

For most of the Elders and Deacons this change was as far as they wanted to go, and was not intended to alter the central belief in enthusiastic religion or in the model of the itinerant preacher. The minutes of the General Conference continued to reflect the leadership’s belief in the direct guidance of God in their day-to-day lives. At one point, for example, they noted that “The result of District meetings on the Saint John River...

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has been very blessed in several instances, and we hope for increasing showers of divine favour,” language that was purposefully New Light. Even within new rules adopted by the Conference the signs of New Light belief and practice remained clearly at the forefront. For example, all Elders were required to attend the annual General Conference unless detained by circumstances beyond their control, the most important of which was a call from God to participate in a revival.34

There were those among the Conference leadership, however, who viewed these steps as merely the prelude to a far more ambitious and comprehensive program of denominational organization and moral and social reform.35 The man who emerged as the undisputed leader of this reform faction within the Conference was Elder Ezekiel McLeod, a shopkeeper who had been ordained in 1848 after several years of holding religious meetings in Saint John. As the son of the widow of itinerant Allinite preacher Henry Weyman, his New Light lineage was impeccable. Even prior to his ordination McLeod had been in a position to influence several of the Conference’s important Elders, including his brother-in-law Edward Weyman, Weyman’s father-in-law Robert Colpitts, and Hartt, who had converted McLeod in 1842. It is quite probable, for example, that McLeod was one of the key forces behind the adoption of the 1848 Treatise of Faith, even though he had not yet been ordained.36

In 1850, after two years of itinerating throughout Westmoreland County, McLeod entered into a regular pastoral relationship with the Waterloo Street Free Christian Baptist church in Saint John.37 This decision represented McLeod’s first major, overt departure from the traditional beliefs and methods of the Free Christian Baptists. He had come to believe that the New Light emphasis on the sudden revival and the itinerant evangelist was losing its relevancy in a rapidly changing society marked by the increasing urbanization and industrialization that he saw his congregation confronting in Saint John. Furthermore, he had become convinced that simply seeking to convert individuals, while still the central focus of the Church’s mission, was no longer sufficient to provide it with a moral or practical base upon which it could continue to expand. He believed that it was becoming more and more difficult to attract converts by exhorting them to separate themselves from the world around them, and even harder, once they had the convert, to keep him or her without the regular pastoral oversight that the evangelist, by his very nature, could not provide. “Much evil,” he wrote, “results from the disorderly manner in which ministerial labour is expended in churches and neighbourhoods; it not only prevents the regular ministrations of God’s word... but it gives the people irregular habits, which are often very hard for them to abandon afterwards.”38

535. Minutes (1856), 5.

636. McLeod, ibid., 420.

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These conclusions were essentially the same ones that had been reached by Methodist and Baptist leaders such as William Black and Edward Manning forty years earlier. Once viewed by the established church as part of the extreme fringe of the religious spectrum, they had successfully integrated their churches into the cultural mainstream by articulating a more broad based social order that nevertheless stressed concepts such as loyalty, order, structure, and respectability, that resonated with the colonial elite.39 Manning, for example, had begun his career as an itinerant preacher and leader of the extremist (even for the New Lights) New Dispensationalist movement in the early 1790s.40 By the mid 1790s, however, he had repudiated his radical views and swung to

24. Ibid.

25. The membership of the Baptist Missionary Board in 1829 provides an early example of this development. The Board was chaired by Rev. F.W. Miles, of Saint John, and included seven other ministers and eight members of the laity. While the ministers represented, with the exception of Miles and Rev. David Harris in Fredericton, rural congregations, the lay members were all from Saint John, and included fairly prominent middle class citizens such as Joshua Bunting, the High Constable of the city, and merchant John M. Wilmot, who later served on the Common Council and was married into the family of influential merchant and ship-owner Stephen Wiggins.

26. Daniel Godwin has argued that the baptismal controversy of the first half of the nineteenth century was part of an intellectual awakening amongst the leadership of the four major Protestant denominations - Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterians and Anglicans - and symbolized the growing desire of Baptist and Methodist leaders to achieve equality with the established churches by debating them on theological issues. These denominations were moving beyond mere questions of survival and internal organization, and were beginning to define a more ordered and structured creed for their congregations to follow; Daniel Goodwin, “The Baptismal Controversy and the Intellectual Awakening in Nova Scotia, 1811-1848" in Priestly, David T., ed., A Fragile Stability: Definition and Redefinition of Maritime Baptist Identity (Hantsport, Nova Scotia: Lancelot Press, 1994), 3-21.

27. Quoted in Philip G.A. Griffin-Allwood, “‘The Sucksess of the Baptist denomination in New Brunswick’: The Structure of Baptist Triumphalism in ‘The Memoirs of the Rev. Jarvis Ring, Baptist Minister” in Historical Papers 1992: Canadian Society of Church History, 46-47.

28. The Baptists and Methodists were not without their opponents to greater organization and a more professional and educated ministry. A British observer visiting a Baptist general meeting in the early 1840s watched as these issues were fiercely debated. “[The] present subject,” she observed, “was the appropriation of certain funds - whether they should be applied towards increasing their seminary, so as to fit it for the proper education of ministers for their churches, or whether they should not be applied to some other purpose, and their priesthood be still allowed to spring uncultured from the mass... Some white-headed leaders of the sect, old refugees, who had left the bounds of civilization before they had received any education...

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the opposite side of the religious continuum, desperate to achieve respectability. For his part, McLeod followed a similar path, flirting with the pre-millenialism of the Millerites in 1843-1844, at one point acting as publisher for The Herald of Truth, a short-lived Adventist newspaper printed in Saint John.41

A group that predicted the imminent coming of Christ, the Millerites advocated a doctrine of “comeoutism”, which called upon Christians to leave the mainstream churches and hold to the true doctrines of the Bible, views that were particularly attractive to purist New Lights of the Christian Conference like McLeod. They were motivated by a belief that evil had become so widespread in the world that only the sudden return of Christ in a physical form could lead the forces of good and save the world.42 Once the Millerite predictions of the speedy Second Coming proved to be false,

sternly declaimed against the education system, declaring that grace [alone] was what formed the teacher... The old men, stern in their prejudices as their zeal, were conquered, and the baptists have now well conducted establishments of learning throughout the province.” Frances Beaven, Life in the Backwoods of New Brunswick (London: George Routledge, 1845), 60-64.

29. “My mind was always sceptical in these modern peculiar revelations, consequently I had no faith in what [they] told me; as [they] could work no miracle to prove it, I could not rank it with the old revelation which was proved to be true by miracles, therefore set it down for... false one[s]” Garraty, ibid., 10.

30. Ibid., 11. Garraty wrote, “did ever the Pope of Rome lay stronger claims to the keys of the kingdom, and infallibility, than these, my humble brethren? I then bade them adieu, resolving to meet them in Conference no more unless a radical change should ensue. They then met in their private meeting to see what could be done with the heretic, as they declared me to be.”

31. In 1849, for example, Alexander Taylor, a Free Will Baptist from Maine who had moved to New Brunswick and sought to join the Free Christian Baptists, with a new house to pay for, faced the prospect of being “left out in the cold, my debts unpaid, and my name and credit damaged,” and had to give up preaching for teaching school during the winter to pay his bills.

232. A Treatise on the Faith of the Free Christian Baptists of Nova-Scotia and New-Brunswick (Saint John: Bailey & Day, 1848), 2-3; Rev. Joseph McLeod, “A Sketch of the History of the Free Baptists in New Brunswick,” in E.M. Saunders, History of the Baptists of the Maritime Provinces (Halifax:: John Burgoyne, 1902), 424.

33. Bell, “The Allinite Tradition and the New Brunswick Free Christian Baptists, 1830-1875", ibid., 62.

434. Rules and Minutes of the Free Christian Baptist General Conference of New Brunswick (1850) (Saint John: George W. Day, 1850), 5. Another example: three preachers were to be appointed by the Moderator of the General Conference to attend each District Meeting, and they were bound to attend “if the Lord will [it].”

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however - the son of God failing to arrive on the forecast day - most of their adherents, including McLeod, returned to the churches that they had left.

Like the profound effect that the excesses and ultimate failure of New Dispensationalism had upon Manning, the disillusionment that followed the Millerite experience had a marked influence upon McLeod and others who had been caught up in the movement. He began to evidence a deep distrust of enthusiastic religion and became convinced that the Christian Connection had to become more ordered and respectable - in essence, more like the Baptists and Methodists - in order to protect people from the influence of groups like the Millerites.43 Instead of leading his church away from the evils of society, Mcleod determined to mould them into Christian soldiers and join the growing evangelical army of mainstream society, a repudiation of Millerite premillenialism and an acceptance of mainstream evangelical postmillenialism, with its belief in a gradual process designed to prepare the world for Christ’s physical return at the end of the millenium.44

Having embraced the progressive and reformist outlook of mid-Victorian Preotestantism, McLeod searched for a way to disseminate his views to the entire denomination. Despite the fact that he visited other churches, his acceptance of a regular pastorate in Saint John, located far from the traditional Free Christian Baptist heartland of western New Brunswick, denied him the opportunity to cultivate a base of personal support throughout the rural areas of the colony by itinerating from community to community. What was needed, he concluded, was an approach that would enable

737. Ibid.

838. Religious Intelligencer, 25 February 1859.

939. Michael Gauvreau, “Protestantism Transformed: Personal Piety and the Evangelical Social Vision, 1815-1867" in George A. Rawlyk, ed., The Canadian Protestant Experience, 1760-1990 (McGill-Queen’s University Press: Montreal, 1990), 61.

040. The best description of the New Dispensationalists can be found in Brian Cuthbertson, ed., The Journal of John Payzant (Hantsport, Nova Scotia: Lancelot Press, 1981), 77-85; and Bell, The Newlight Journals of James Manning and James Innis, ibid., 14-20, 180-190.

141. The Herald of Truth, (Vol. 1, No. 3: 12 August 1843) PANB

242. William Westfall, Two Worlds: The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth Century Ontario (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), 166.

343. For more on the Millerite phenomenon, see S.D. Clark, Church and Sect in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1948), 308-313.

44. John Webster Grant, A Profusion of Spires: Religion in Nineteenth Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 167.

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him to increase his influence and spread his views among both the Conference leadership and the congregations without having to constantly travel. Given his background in printing, and the proliferation of denominational newspapers throughout New Brunswick by the mainstream evangelical churches earlier in the century, the obvious choice was to launch a religious newspaper of his own, with the ultimate goal of making it the official paper of the Free Christian Baptists. Thus he founded, in 1853, the Religious Intelligencer. As David Bell has concluded, this event can only be viewed in the context of McLeod’s conscious agenda of denominational organization and moral and social reform based upon interdenominational evangelical cooperation. He began the Intelligencer with “a view to bringing New Brunswick’s least formal, least hierarchial religious group into the modern world.”45

To its professors, the postmillenial vision of mainstream evangelicalism was marked by visible signs of Christian progress, which included the growth of foreign missions, enlightenment both secular and sacred, in which Sabbath schools for the young played an integral role, harmony among nations and churches, prosperity understood not merely as the increase in wealth but in its more general distribution, and a growth in personal hloiness.46 In contrast to the premillenialists, who saw no hope in a sinful world, the postmillenialists exuded a convincing optimism that stressed the gradual mingling of providence and the human world so that an earthly kingdom would be realized in time.47 McLeod’s views as set out in the Religious Intelligencer clearly reflected this postmillenial evangelical impulse. In his first editorial on 1 January, 1853, he proclaimed that the Intelligencer “is not designed as a newspaper, but it is intended to convey facts in connection with the rise and progress of the various branches of Christian labour, employed in the advancement of Christianity.”48 Good works were evidence of a vital religious life, and showed the broader populace in which the evangelicals lived that piety and the capitalist economy, which was beginning to dominate Maritime society, were not mutually exclusive.49

In the same issue McLeod also marvelled at the technological advances of the day, such as the telegraph and the railroad. “The modern system of telegraphic communication,” he concluded, “is one of the most extraordinary applications of science in existence, and yet when understood, it seems very simple.” To him the themes of Christian labour and technological progress were inextricably linked. Advances in scientific knowledge were by the middle of the nineteenth century

646. Grant, ibid.

747. Gauvreau, ibid., 84.

848. Religious Intelligencer, 1 January 1853. By ‘branches of labour’ McLeod clearly meant missions, Sabbath Schools, and Bible societies. “Second only to the great object of personal holiness,” he wrote, “we shall endeavor to enlist the benevolence of the people in favour of these institutions.”

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undeniable, and had shown people that they could exert a measure of control over their own destiny, which fit well with the general ‘free will’ theology of the Free Christian Baptists.50 McLeod now saw a confident and optimistic age where the evangelization of the world was well within reach, and where the wealth and progress of the secular world could be matched and complemented by growth and progress in the sacred.

At the Free Christian Baptist General Conference in July, 1853, McLeod offered the Religious Intelligencer to the Church, in order that “it should become the property... and

organ of the denomination.”51 A Committee was struck to decide whether the Conference should accept McLeod’s offer and undertake to publish the paper. The committee concluded that the Intelligencer’s “publication is for the information and benefit of our people, and that it should be continued in such a manner as would be for the interest of our denomination, and the cause of religion in general.” 52 They recommended that the paper become the property of the Conference, to be published by a business committee appointed by the Conference. McLeod was employed as the editor, and an Association was formed “on some safe and judicious principles” to raise money for the enterprise by taking out loans in the form of L5 shares. All of the committee’s recommendations were adopted, and an ‘Association Loan Fund’ was established immediately.

The acceptance by the committee of a denominational paper committed to a program of both organizational and moral reform, funded by a debt for which the Conference, and thus the individual churches and their members, were responsible, marked a major departure from past practice. What makes the decision even more remarkable is the composition of the committee itself. All five of the Elders on the committee - Samuel Hartt, William Pennington, Jacob Gunter, George Orser, and Elijah Sisson - were traditionalist conservatives who represented, with the exception of Gunter in Fredericton, rural congregations. Hartt and Pennington were the leading evangelists among the Free Christian Baptists, committed to the New Light method of revival and itineracy.53 Orser had already found himself at odds with McLeod and the Conference

949. Allen B. Robertson, “‘Give All You Can’: Methodists and Charitable Causes in Nineteenth-Century Nova Scotia” in Charles H.H. Scobie and John Webster Grant, eds., The Contribution of Methodism to Atlantic Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992), 93-100.

151. Minutes (1853), 8-9.

252. Ibid., 9.

545. Bell, An Abiding Conviction, ibid., 64.

050. David B, Marshall, Secularizing the Faith: Canadian Protestant Clergy and the Crisis of Belief, 1850-1940 (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1992), 47.

353. McLeod, ibid, 416-418. McLeod noted that “Hartt was not an organizer; he was an

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over the issue of the Orange Lodges, which Orser supported in defiance of the Conference.54 Furthermore, Gunter, Pennington and Sisson were all engaged in outside business enterprises.55 To a reformer like McLeod the practice of splitting time between preaching and secular business was one of the old ways that had to be changed in order to achieve an efficient and professional clergy. Given the background and character of these five men, the question that arises is why they chose to not only support the Intelligencer in principle, but also decided to commit the Conference’s resources to its publication and adopt it as the official denominational organ? The answer lies in what the conservatives themselves hoped to accomplish.

At the time of its creation, the Intelligencer was seen by the conservatives as an instrument through which the voluntary Christian causes both they and the reformers believed in, such as Sabbath Schools and mission work, could be more effectively promoted.56 To the conservatives they were tools that could be used to convert people to Christianity - Sabbath Schools to prepare the young for a mature Christian life, and missions to spread the gospel both at home and abroad. They might not have been the methods that the conservatives themselves used, with their belief in the office of the itinerant evangelist, although many participated in home mission work, but they certainly saw their value when implemented by others in the denomination, and were happy to offer their support. Their continued financial difficulties also proved a powerful motivating factor in their backing increased organizational reform within the structure of the denomination itself, specifically the implementation in 1850 of a voluntary fund to be used by the General Conference to “carry forward our labours”57 and the creation of a system of ministerial labour that would allow for more regular income for the Elders.

A year later McLeod, Hartt and Pennington comprised a committee to devise a compromise circuit system for the ministers that reflected both the need for organization and the continued importance of the evangelist.58 The key factor underlying this decision was the lack of support for the Elders from the congregations, particularly in rural areas. The committee wrote that “Some of [the Elders] have already suffered much embarrassment and adversity, and in some degree discouraged by the apathy and indifference of those for whom they have laboured, have been almost ready to retire from the field.” The recommendation that the Conference adopt the circuit system was made “that this Conference may be relieved from any charge of neglect of duty, and that the blood of those that perish through neglect may rest where it ought - on the Elder who refused his spiritual labour, or the Church that withholds its support,

evangelist... with remarkable power in exhortation and prayer.”

656. The Conference included in the Minutes an appeal to Church members to support the Association and the Intelligencer. “The object of the Association is to do good,” it said, “[and] to labour side by side with those who have God’s glory and man’s god in view”; Minutes (1853), 15.

757. Minutes (1850), 6.

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and starves him from the field.”59

Beyond the question of limited organizational reform, however, the conservatives found the most common ground with McLeod and the reformers on the moral issue of temperance. McLeod did not initiate the concept of temperance among the Free Christian Baptists; promotion of organized temperance reform had been growing in strength among Maritime evangelicals of all denominations since the early 1820s.60 The belief in the social and individual damage that alcohol caused could be traced back directly to Henry Alline’s own personal ascetism and rejection of the ‘carnal lifestyle’, which included drinking. However, while there was thus a predisposition among the Free Christian Baptists in general to support temperance, it was not until the 1840s that an active interest in organized temperance reform, led by Hartt and McLeod, manifested itself.

Hartt was known by his fellow Elders as “a pioneer in the temperance work, organiz[ing] temperance societies wherever he could among our people, and lay[ing] the foundation of our present temperance work.” To Hartt, wrote Rev. Alexander Taylor in 1882, “more than any other man are we indebted for the temperance principles that prevailed in our churches.”61 He had seen the “devastations that the monster Alcohol has made, and is still making in our province”62 during his widespread itinerating, especially in the lumber camps and farms of western New Brunswick where alcohol and drunkenness drew men away from work, the Church, and their families, and was seen as being at the root of social instability.63 Furthermore, as a fairly prosperous farmer Hartt, like all of the Elders engaged in business as well as preaching, had a vested interest in the character and behaviour of the people with whom he was dealing. By the 1840s, however, it was no longer possible, due to an ever increasing population, to know personally the character of every employee, transporter, and fellow businessman or farmer. Thus, the growing middle class, of which Hartt and the others were a part, had a great deal to gain from a workforce that was careful, spent its money on consumer goods, and was sober enough to put in a good days work or to be trusted as a party to a commercial transaction.64

In Saint John McLeod had witnessed the proliferation of whiskey shops in the working class districts of the city, especially among the growing numbers of labourers who suffered seasonal or chronic unemployment.65 That the increase in drinking coincided with increased Roman Catholic - meaning Irish - immigration to both the urban and rural areas of the colony served only to heighten the moralistic temperance fervour of the Free Christian Baptists, many of whom, including McLeod, were vehemently anti-Catholic. Traditionalists like Hartt saw in the Intelligencer the perfect vehicle, and in McLeod the perfect spokesperson, for the promotion of not just temperance but

858. Minutes (1851), 7-8. The committee recommended that “the Churches... be arranged in Circuits, and each Elder take a certain circuit as a district of care, to watch over them, exercise discipline, and administer the ordinances - such care of course never standing in the way of the general labour in the Gospel as an Evangelist.”

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complete prohibition. The paper’s attacks on the Roman Catholic Church - such as references to the pope as “the arch imposter” and Roman Catholicism as “traitorism66 - were also clearly an important factor.67

McLeod’s involvement with the movement also served his goal of slowly broadening the denomination’s contacts with the rest of society.68 Temperance reform was an integral part of the mainstream evangelical agenda. It also tied the Free Christian Baptists to politicians and other secular leaders, notably Samuel Tilley, who supported temperance. In the early 1840s Tilley emerged in Saint John as a vocal liberal reformer and strong temperance advocate, was in the thick of the temperance movement, speaking, preparing petitions, writing reports and letters, and considering possible legislation, particularly after his election to the legislature in 1854.69 Although their first contact came through the temperance movement, McLeod and Tilley shared similar views on virtually every other major issue of the day. Each was a determined supporter of the intercolonial railroad, for example, as well as reform of the colony’s political system and opposition to denominational schools.

868. Clark, ibid., 255; Acheson, ibid., 140. Acheson notes that temperance was a “broadly based movement [that] became a coalition of interest groups containing individuals motivated by religious conviction, humanitarian concern, and fears of the threat posed to the social order.”

969. Carl Murray Wallace, “Sir Leonard Tilley, A Political Biography” (PhD Thesis, University of Alberta, 1972), 33.

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As Tilley’s political star rose throughout the 1850s he enjoyed the unwavering support of McLeod and the Intelligencer. In turn, McLeod had made a valuable ally that increased his influence both within and without the Conference, and established the connection he sought for the Conference between the secular and non-secular worlds. He had succeeded in firmly tying the denomination’s leaders to a social cause which implied in its promotion an acceptance for the welfare of the community at large, and not just individual members of the Church. However, so long as these connections with liberal political reformers, known popularly as the “smashers”, and mainstream evangelicalism were useful in promoting moral reform, benevolent causes, and anti-Catholicism, without undermining the distinctive nature and practice of the Free Christian Baptists or the influence of the Elders, the conservatives in the Conference were willing to give McLeod and the Intelligencer their cautious support.

The result of this somewhat uneasy alliance was, on the surface, a ‘golden era’ for the Free Christian Baptists during most of the 1850s. As the Free Christian Baptists increased their contacts with the evangelical culture of mid-Victorian New Brunswick, their influence within that culture grew. B.J. Underhill and William Peters, key middle class members of McLeod’s Saint John congregation, emerged as the most important lay members of the Conference leadership, occupying the positions of Clerk and Treasurer of the Conference, respectively, throughout the latter half of the decade. Underhill was involved with McLeod in the publication of the Intelligencer, and also maintained an active presence in several of the city’s major evangelical organizations, such as the YMCA, where he served as Vice President, and the New Brunswick Auxiliary Bible Society. His involvement in these groups kept him in regular contact with influential citizens in Saint John’s interdenominational evangelical culture, like Judge Robert Parker, John M. Robinson, Dr. LeBaron Botsford, and the Hon. William B. Kinnear. Peters was primarily responsible for the financial affairs of the Conference and served as the Clerk of the Fifth District of the Conference, which included Saint John. Both were regular members, along with fellow Saint John reformer Daniel Clark, of the denomination’s Board of Managers, created in 1855 to oversee the general financial affairs of the Conference, particularly the Intelligencer and the book store in Saint John.70

In Woodstock Edwin R. Parsons, a shoemaker, Justice of the Peace, and influential young lay member of the Conference, provided McLeod with an ally in the western denominational heartland.71 Parsons was one of two lay members on the committee that adopted the Religious Intelligencer as the denominational paper in 1853, and was on the committee overseeing the incorporation of the denomination in 1853-54. He was also involved in such secular organizations as the Woodstock Mechanics’ Institute, acting as a director.72 The Institute, with its goal of “increasing the intelligence of the community” by delivering lectures on “literary, historical and scientific Subjects”, represented the type of organization that was in competition with any religious group that sought to remain isolated from the secular world. An enterprising business man like

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Parsons was no longer willing to remain other-worldly in interest or outlook, and was exactly the type of Church member that McLeod’s views were most likely to appeal to - middle class and urban.73

There were problems lying under the surface for McLeod and his reform allies, however. Authority within the Conference was diffused, and ultimately it was individual congregations that decided whether they would support circuit systems of ministerial labour, and individual church members who decided if they would contribute to Conference funds or subscribe to the Intelligencer. Sabbath Schools grew in number and enrolment during the 1850s, for instance, but not at a rate deemed sufficient by reform-minded Elders like William Kinghorn, who in 1858 wrote in the Intelligencer that “we are living in an age of progress, and great advance is being made in arts and sciences.” He lamented, however, the failure of some in the Conference to fully embrace Sabbath Schools as a “means of usefulness in the cause of Christ”, and called for an increased effort to “improve our Sabbath Schools and render them as efficient as they might be.”74

It was in the rural districts, however, where traditional New Light beliefs were most firmly rooted, that opposition to the Conference’s modernization and reform program was the most pronounced. Most disturbing to them was McLeod’s explicit rejection in the Intelligencer and at Conference meetings of the emotional aspects of Christianity, which was at the heart of New Light traditionalism. McLeod wrote that “there is frequently tolerated in religious meetings so much noise and confusion, so much of what some please to term ‘outgushings of Christian rapture’, as to frighten the spirit of sober, candid reflection, which will excite the mind to ‘good works.”75 Warning that the “spirit of serious, earnest thought is frightened away by the careless, unmeaning outcries of a few misguided brethren and sisters”, McLeod sounded to many like an Anglican Bishop when he wrote that “real excitement [is] not that kind of excitement that is ‘got up’, but the excitement which follows from a deep and intelligent consideration of the great truths of salvation.”76 His admonition that Church members should concentrate on “thought first” and “excitement second” was a positive repudiation of New Light belief that appealed to members of the urban congregations, but provoked a backlash amongst conservative Elders and their congregations.

McLeod and his supporters were in step with all elements of mainstream Victorian evangelicalism, but they were slowly losing touch with the grassroots of their own Church. The fact that the major supporters of the Intelligencer and the reform movement were from Saint John only served to further alienate members of rural congregations. McLeod wanted an “army [full] of good soldier[s] of Jesus Christ” that would “fight the good fight of faith”.77 Instead, he and the reformers were by 1860 facing a revolt in both the ranks and amongst their fellow ‘generals’. Pennington, for instance, exemplified the independent nature of the more conservative Elders. In 1855 he was appointed by the Conference as a travelling missionary, to visit the areas of the colony where there were no settled pastors, at the direction of the Board Of Missions, for

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which McLeod acted as Corresponding Secretary and Missionary Agent. It was the Board’s intent that Pennington should visit the churches in the eastern area of New Brunswick, but Pennington refused and remained at home in Houlton, Maine, where he conducted a series of revivals. McLeod was forced to report to the Conference that “[Pennington’s] connection to the Board soon after ceased in consequence of his not labouring in the field which they wished to supply.”78 The traditional New Light emphasis on the sudden revival continued to frustrate the reformers and their plans for a more systematic ministry.

In 1858 the reformers, and McLeod personally, suffered a major setback and loss of prestige within the denomination when the Intelligencer, having incurred a substantial debt of nearly L800, faced bankruptcy. Since its inception, The Association Loan Fund had met with an indifferent response from much of the denomination. In 1854 the committee overseeing the Intelligencer had signalled the lukewarm reception the fund was receiving when they reported that “encouraging as this branch of labour seems, we regret that the sums paid into our ‘Association Loan Fund’ have not been more numerous, and the calls in its behalf more cheerfully responded to, by members and churches, whose goods the Lord has increased.”79By the time of annual meeting of the Conference in 1857, however, the Conference was forced to send Hartt, their most popular Elder, on a mission to visit the churches and try to raise “not less than One Thousand Pounds” from the congregations to pay off the debt80. He was only partly successful, however, and the next year McLeod was forced to beg for support. “The serious financial embarrassment which is now upon our Conference,” he stated in his report to the Conference as Corresponding Secretary, “threatens with extinction every enterprise in which we have felt an interest.”81

The fact that it was McLeod and the other members of the committee overseeing the paper which had run up the debt over the previous five years was evidence to the conservatives that organizational reform was moving too fast, and that allowing the Saint John reformers free reign in any area had led to disaster. McLeod asked the Conference to bail out the paper, and they did, but only after returning it to the control of McLeod and fellow reformer Elder George A. Hartley as a private enterprise, for which the Conference was no longer responsible. The method of the bail-out, however, proved particularly galling to the rural congregations. After “much deliberation” at a special meeting of the Conference in October, 1858, each church was assessed a portion of the debt. Recognizing that this would be an unpopular move, the Conference drafted an appeal to be made to the churches by Elder Benjamin Merritt, the Chairman of the Conference, that was half mea culpa and half plea for help. “As you are aware,” the appeal began, “we are under a heavy burden of financial embarrassment, brought upon us by the mismanagement of our business in connection with our Paper and Book Concern.” Merritt continued:

We have published the Intelligencer too cheaply, and too long on credit, but although conscious of having erred we have aimed at

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doing good... unless relieved from our present liabilities we must become nearly useless in advancing the cause of God... we sincerely regret that circumstances compel us, as our only hope of aid, thus to come to you. We now ask your sympathies whilst in trouble, and your means to assist in the liquidation of our liabilities.82

The appeal then listed the amount that each church had been assigned to raise to help cover the debt, a total of L632.

The belief that individual church members were being forced to pay for the mismanagement of Saint John reformers was widespread, and hardly encouraged confidence among the rural congregations in further centralization. Peters and Underhill, as the two persons most responsible for the financial affairs of the Conference, came under a great deal of criticism, so much so that the Conference passed a resolution in 1858 exonerating them from “all charges whatever... prejudicial to [their] character”.83The financial problems also had an adverse effect on other areas of the Conference’s work, such as missionary efforts.84 It undermined a renewed effort by the Conference to re-impose the circuit system, to the extent that a committee appointed in 1858 to set up a circuit system concluded the following year that the proposal should be “suspended for the present year, and that our ministers and churches be allowed to make such mutual arrangements with each other as they may deem necessary for their mutual benefit,”85 which represented a further defeat for McLeod. Elder George Orser, from his virtual fiefdom in northern Carleton County and southern Victoria County, indicated his disapproval of the direction the Conference had taken by not attending the annual meeting in 1859 and not submitting a report of his work.

This dissatisfaction continued into 1860. Although McLeod was elected that year by his fellow Elders to be Chairman of the Conference for the first time, a vote of confidence in his good intentions and work on moral reform if not in his complete agenda, and even with reformers occupying all of the executive positions of the Conference86, he was well aware of the spirit of dissent growing throughout the denomination. The benevolent societies and programs like the Sabbath schools and campaign for Sabbath observance continued to enjoy majority support throughout the denomination. The plans of the reformers to centralize control of the Conference and to turn the ministry into a more professional and disciplined group, however, had met with increased opposition in the wake of the financial fiasco of the late 1850s. Nevertheless, the reformers were convinced that the former could not survive in the long run without the latter, and determined to put the troubles of the past behind them and move firmly ahead with organizational reform.

In his report to the annual Conference as outgoing Corresponding Secretary, McLeod wrote that he was encouraged by the “spirit of union in some places among brethren of different denominations” which had been cultivated in “some cities and villages”, but decried the condition of his own denomination.87 “The general condition of our churches

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is not satisfactory,” he observed, “[and] elements of anarchy and insubordination exist in some places which threaten the saddest consequences.” To McLeod the reason was clearly a lack of “regular ministerial care” with many preachers “hav[ing] no stated field of labour.” He lectured his fellow Elders that the ministerial office they held was “of divine appointment”, and that they had to “lead the sacramental army forward in her mighty struggle”. He chastised those who were unwilling to “settle down in the pastoral office and to take responsibility of watching for souls.” Most significantly, he rebuked those churches which maintained the idea “that regular ministerial labour and care is not necessary to their growth in grace and increase in the knowledge of God.” 88 Finally, he spoke directly to the senior lay members of rural congregations whom he viewed as the greatest impediment to denominational reform and centralized organization, and

454. McLeod led the Free Christian Baptists in denouncing the Orangemen. Following the 1849 riots the General Conference admonished the Order in strong language, and in 1850 instructed the churches to withdraw fellowship from any person who would not leave the lodges. Shortly after Orser preached a sermon in Woodstock to the Edward Orser Lodge, in defiance of McLeod and the Conference; see Frederick C. Burnett, “George Whitefield Orser: Another View” (Paper presented to the Carleton County Historical Society, 24 October 1980, copy on deposit in the Atlantic Baptist Archives), 2-3.

55. Weyman, ibid. According to Weyman, one of McLeod’s key allies over the years, Sisson was “entangled in the lumber trade”, Gunter was a “strong conservative” who “hampered himself with... the business of this life”, and Pennington was “incline[d] to tradeing, and could not be Preavailed upon to give it up.”

959. Ibid.

060. For a thorough study of temperance in the Maritimes in the first half of the nineteenth century, see Sandra Lynn Barry, “Shades of Vice - and Moral Glory: The Temperance Movement in Nova Scotia, 1828-1848" (M.A. Thesis, University of New Brunswick, 1986), PANS; Stephen Ferguson, “The Temperance Movement in Nova Scotia, 1827-1849" (M.A. Thesis, Dalhousie University, 1974), PANS; Jan Noel, Canada Dry: Temperance Crusades Before Confederation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), chapters 1-3; and, with reference to Saint John, Acheson, ibid., chapter 7.

161. Taylor, “Semi-Centennial Sermon”, Minutes (1882), 50.

262. Minutes (1856), 16.

363. Scott W. See, Riots in New Brunswick: Orange Nativism and Social Violence in the 1840s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 38. Violent incidents with hard-drinking lumbermen had forced the government to send the militia to the Wakefield region in the late 1830s to restore order. Alexander Taylor describes the lumberers as “dreadfully wicked men”; ibid., 14.

464. Noel, ibid., 31.

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warned that their ability to effectively hire and fire ministers on a yearly basis must be done away with. “Let it [not] be conceived for a moment,” he told his colleagues, “that overseers in the church are mere ‘hirelings’, employed for a year, then to be set adrift at the caprice of two or three persons, whom they have failed to please.” 89 This was a direct attack on the churches and Elders in rural areas that had consistently ignored the circuit system devised by the Conference.

McLeod took the opportunity of his annual report to not only attack the forces he felt were impeding the progress of the denomination, but also to restate the case for

565. Acheson, ibid., 155-156.

66. Religious Intelligencer, 1 January 1858. The Free Christian Baptists were not alone in their anti-Catholicism, a mindset which was very much the essence of mid-nineteenth century Protestant evangelicalism, and served to help define evangelical identity; John Wolffe, “Anti-Catholicism and Evangelical Identity in Britain and the United States, 1830-1860," in Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700-1990, Mark A. Noll et al, eds.(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 179-180. The Maritime Methodist press, for example, referred to Catholics as “the malign impugners of christian experience, and the perverse nullifiers of sound christian morality,” and the Catholic Church as “a huge, monstrous, and palpable exhibition of pharasaism in its most corrupt form, intensely imbued with the cruel spirit”; The Provicial Wesleyan, 13 April 1854.

767. This latter consideration was quite likely crucial in gaining Orser’s support for the Intelligencer.

070. The Board of Managers had the power to “execute all leases, deeds, conveyances, bonds, contacts, or other written documents”; Constitution of the General Conference and District Meetings of Free Christian Baptists of New Brunswick, Minutes (1855), 24-25.

171. By the age of 27 Parsons and his younger brother employed eight apprentices, who all lived with them as lodgers, and a servant.

272. William T. Baird, Seventy Years of New Brunswick Life, Autobiographical Sketches (Saint John: George E. Day, 1890), 104.

373. Clark, ibid., 272. Another key McLeod ally in Carleton County was Charles Connell, a successful Woodstock merchant and Legislative Councillor.

474. Religious Intelligencer, 15 January 1858

575. Religious Intelligencer, 30 April 1858.

676. Ibid.

77. Religious Intelligencer, 1 April 1853.

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progressive reform. “We live in an extraordinary age,” he told the assembled leaders of the Conference, “an age of wonder.” All of the other major denominations were “adding vast numbers” to their ranks from “almost every condition and state of society”, reinvigorating the church. “The impression,” he said, “seems to be upon all christians [sic] who watch the signs of the times that important events are at the door.” The various benevolent societies and agencies were “straining every nerve and exerting every power to extend their beneficence,” working hard to “hasten the glorious period when the knowledge of the Lord shall cover the earth, as the waters cover the sea.” 90

The Free Christian Baptists, McLeod cautioned his colleagues, risked being left behind in God’s great enterprise if they continued to try to apply the methods of the past to the needs of the present and future. He ended his report by charging the assembled brethren to,

Let us not separate this year, until we have, under the teachings of the Divine Wisdom, matured a plan for the most efficient care of our people; until we can go forth and say every minister will and shall

878. Minutes (1855), 14.

979. Minutes (1854), 13.

080. Minutes (1857), 17

181. Minutes (1858), 5-7.

282. Ibid., 24.

383. Ibid. The resolution read in whole: “Whereas, certain reports have gone out and are in circulation prejudicial to the character of Brothers B.J. Underhill, and Wm. Peters in connection with the business intrusted to them, Therefore Resolved, that this Conference fully exonerate them from all charges whatever, and that we appreciate very highly their past services and would earnestly solicit their further continuance.”

484. Minutes (1858), 17. “The scarcity of money,” McLeod was required to report, “and the financial embarrassment of our Conference, has prevented any further Missionary operations during the year; and probably under existing circumstances but little will be done next year.”

585. Minutes (1859), 13. Elder George A. Hartley noted in his report as Corresponding Secretary that the circuit system had in some places proven beneficial, but in others “it has not”.

686. Rev. George Hartley, a strong supporter of McLeod and a regular contributor to the Intelligencer, as Corresponding Secretary, William Peters as Treasurer, B.J. Underhill as Recording Secretary, and E.M. Truesdale of Woodstock as Assistant Secretary; Minutes (1860).

7

87. Ibid., 3.

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devote himself to the work to which he has professed to be called: and every church is expected, and must cast into the Lord’s treasury as he prospers them, for the maintenance of the Gospel, and the spread of the Kingdom of Christ.

The problem McLeod faced, even as he tried to unify the church under the banner of progressive reform, came from the fact that he was attempting to organize people who had their roots in anti-formalism and a rejection of organizational structures and professional ministers. Many Free Christian Baptists still looked upon such things as non-essentials, part of the worldly society that was the antithesis of true Christianity.

McLeod believed that these views were being kept alive by Elders such as Pennington, Orser, and Hartt, who resisted his vision of a more professional ministry, which they did not see as necessary to accomplish the moral reform programme that they did accept. Throughout the 1850s McLeod had worked hard to convince these men of the necessity of changing methods in a changing world, but had met with only moderate success. Most rural Elders remained committed to their “knight-errant-style of soul winning in the charismatic mould of the [New Light] fathers.”91 The changes in the nature of the ministry, and the connection between preacher and congregation, that McLeod advocated represented a breach of a core relationship considered inviolate by many rural Free Christian Baptists and Elders, people bound together by shared values, interests, and a history that was their anchor in a changing world of urbanization, immigration, and industrialization. McLeod and the reformers wanted to take the denomination to what they saw as a better future. The conservatives saw nothing wrong with the past, and plenty to be wary of in an uncertain future. Two such divergent views could only lead, in the words of anthropologist Victor Turner, to crisis and “a trial of strength”.92 For the Free Christian Baptists, it was a trial of strength that would first take place over the question of ministerial education and the office of the itinerant evangelist.

88. Ibid., 4-5.

989. Ibid., 5.

090. Ibid.

191. Bell, An Abiding Conviction, op. cit., 68.

292. Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1974), 17, 78-79.

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