Alexander Campbell at Glasgow

When Thomas Campbell came to America, he left his family in Ireland. Alexander, then nineteen years old, was to conduct his father’s school at Rich Hill until the end of the term and to bring his mother and the six younger children to America when his father gave the word. The word came when Thomas Campbell had been in America about fifteen months. On October 1, 1808, the family embarked at Londonderry. Their ship ran aground on one of the rocky islands of the Hebrides. During that experience, Alexander’s previous thought about devoting himself to the ministry 67 reached the point of a firm decision. The interruption of the voyage so late in the sailing season made it necessary to wait until spring for its continuance. The shipwrecked travelers made their way to Glasgow, where they remained almost an entire year.

This year in Glasgow proved to be very important. It gave Alexander opportunity to supplement the excellent instruction he had received from his father by a year of study in the University of Glasgow. In addition, it brought him into contact with the men from whom, as his biographer, Richardson, says, he derived “his first impulse as a religious reformer.” These were representatives of the movement led and financed by the brothers Robert and James Alexander Haldane.

Alexander Campbell came to Glasgow with a letter of introduction to Mr. Greville Ewing, who was in charge of the seminary, or training school for lay preachers, which the Haldanes had established in that city. Mr. Ewing became his closest and most helpful friend during that year in Glasgow. Ewing had introduced into his seminary the books of Glas and Sandeman, whose teachings gave the strongest possible emphasis to the restoration of primitive Christianity in all details. In Ewing’s conversation and Glas’s and Sandeman’s books, Alexander Campbell found not only the general concept of a needed restoration of primitive Christianity but such specific ideas as these: the independence of the local congregation; weekly observance of the Lord’s Supper; a plurality of elders; the denial of clerical privileges and dignities; the right and duty of laymen to have a part in the edification and discipline of the church; and a conception of faith as such a belief of testimony as any man is capable of by the application of his natural 68 intelligence to the facts supplied by Scripture. The Haldanes themselves, and some of the followers of Sandeman, had adopted immersion, but Ewing adhered to infant baptism and sprinkling.

The action of all these influences upon Alexander Campbell’s mind, and of his mind upon what he saw and learned of Presbyterianism in Scotland, brought him to a profound dissatisfaction with it. He had no quarrel with its theology. Near the end of his year in Glasgow, when he was examined by the Seceder church to determine his fitness to partake of the communion—because he brought no credentials, and the Seceders were very careful to permit no unqualified person to commune—no fault was found with his profession of faith, and he received the “token” which would admit him to the table. But at the communion service, after postponing his decision to the last possible moment, he laid down his token and walked out. This was, in effect, his break with the Seceder Presbyterian Church. He never went back.

Alexander Campbell and the family sailed for America early in August, 1809, landed at New York on September 29, and proceeded to Philadelphia by stage-coach and thence westward by wagon. Word had been sent ahead to Thomas Campbell, and he met them on the road in western Pennsylvania, October 19, with a copy of the freshly printed Declaration and Address in his pocket. Father and son, with an ocean between them, had independently broken with their religious past and moved by converging paths toward the same goal. Alexander read the Declaration and Address and was enthusiastic about it. It marshaled him the way that he was going.