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Unity in Diversity? North Atlantic Evangelical Thought in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
Leonard Bacon, minister of the First Congregational Church at New Haven, preaching before the Foreign Evangelical Society in New York in May 1845, found in the Atlantic Ocean a vivid image of an underlying unity which he perceived in the divided evangelical churches that surrounded it. Separated though they were, still influences upon them operated like ‘the tide raised from the bosom of the vast Atlantic when the moon hangs over it in her height, [which] swells into every estuary, and every bay and sound, and every quiet cove and sheltered haven, and is felt far inland where mighty streams rise in their channels and pause upon their journey to the sea’. The choice of metaphor betrayed an aspiration that the North Atlantic itself should become an evangelical lake. Such hopes, Bacon appreciated, would be worse than fruitless if they were driven by a model of Christianity as ‘one and indivisible’. No, the model should be the American, not the French Republic, e pluribus unum, unity in diversity.
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References
1 Bacon, Leonard, Christian Unity (New Haven, Conn., 1845), p. 25.Google Scholar
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19 Thomas Chalmers, ‘How such a union may begin and to what it may eventually lead’, in Essays on Christian Union, pp. 3-17.
20 ‘They make a desolation and call it peace’ (Tacitus, Agricola, c. 20).
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22 Ibid., pp. 40-8.
23 Ibid., pp. 84-92.
24 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bickersteth Papers, Box 25.
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29 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bickersteth Papers, Box 25.
30 Evangelical Christendom, 1 (1847), p. 69.
31 Bacon, Christian Unity, p. 31.
32 The Evangelical Alliance the Embodiment of the Spirit of Christendom (Edinburgh, 1847), pp. 83-97.
33 Anti-Schism, p. 15.
34 The Christian Observer, 45 (1845), pp. 722-61; 46 (1846), pp. 29-60 and passim; The Record, 22 Dec. 1845.
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36 Evangelical Christendom, 1 (1847), p. 194.