The Arena, Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891

Part 2 — Footnotes

Reading edition

Thus the independent farmer is disappearing, and although there was scarcely a tenant farmer in Illinois in 1840, there are more than 110,000 tenant farmers now; and we have a vast increase of large farms. But while the farmer sinks into poverty, those who handle his products grow rich. The Chicago Stock Yard that was started with a million of capital has grown so prosperously that its stock now amounts to $23,000,000. The monetary interests control all things, and Mr. Stewart forcibly says: “The time has come, gentlemen, when the government must run the railroads, or the railroads will run the government. In Pennsylvania to-day two roads own the State, its legislature, its governor, its courts, its people, own them body and soul, and stole the money from the people to buy them with. You elect men to positions and pay them salaries, and then the railroads buy them and make you pay for bribing your own officers, in the freight rates they charge you. The net income of the railroads of the United States is three times that of the entire revenue of the government.” Return to text

At the meeting of the Alumni of the Union Theological Seminary, on the eighteenth of May, the newly elected professor of systematic theology, the brilliant Rev. Henry J. Van Dyke, D. D. (since deceased) made the following bold remark while defending Dr. Briggs: “If we cannot have orthodoxy and liberty, let orthodoxy go and let us have liberty. Liberty has always produced progress.”

In his sermon on May the 24th, Rev. Thomas Dixon, one of the Baptist clergymen of New York City, said: The heresy trial is a record of barbarism, a relic of savagery. It belongs to the crudeness, and ignorance, and superstition of barbaric times. It smells of roasting flesh.

On the same Sunday the Rev. Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst, of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, of New York, quoted the ringing words given above by Dr. Van Dyke, with his cordial indorsement. He continued to thus severely arraign the Orthodox brethren in the Presbyterian Church:

“This question of inerrancy is not new. Calvin, Luther, and many others did not believe in the Bible’s inerrancy. If this is not according to the confession of faith—I don’t know whether it is or not—we had better square the confession with the truth rather than the truth with the confession. Let those who would prove that there are no mistakes in the Bible produce a cud-chewing coney, and then we will consider the question of inerrancy.

If the Church is to go on in the way that some are trying to persuade us it ought to go, the sooner it gives up the ghost the better, to save the medical expense.” Return to text

“Dr. Schaff’s international fame as a church historian and theologian will compel the greatest respect from not alone the ministers of the Presbyterian church, but also from the clergy of all Christian churches.

As early as 1845, he was tried for heresy in this country, and acquitted. In 1854, he represented the American German churches at the Ecclesiastical Diet at Frankfort, and received the degree of D. D. from the University at Berlin. In 1870, he accepted the chair of sacred literature in the Union Theological Seminary of this city. He is a member of the Leipsic Historical, the Netherland, and other historical and literary societies in this country and in Europe, and is one of the founders and honorary secretary of the American Branch of the Evangelical Alliance. In 1871, he was one of the Alliance delegates to the Emperor of Russia to plead for the religious liberty of his subjects in the Baltic Provinces.

He was president of the American Bible Revision Committee, which was appointed in 1871 at the request of the English committee, and in 1875 was sent to England to arrange for the co-operation and publication of the Anglo-American edition. The same year he attended officially the conferences of the Old Catholics, Greeks and Protestants at Bonn, to promote Christian unity.

Dr. Schaff was first president of the American Society of Church History, and is the author of a great number of historical and exegetical works, both in English and German, the latter having been translated into English.” Return to text

Notes in this chapter

Note 1 · Parker Pillsbury mentions a Governor of Maine, who owns in Maine, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Dakota, and Canada, 691,000 acres. Return Note 2 · As a single specimen of this, I would mention that those eminent politicians, John C. New, and Wm. H. English, of Indiana, under the laws en Note 3 · To save the nation we must reform and stop the production of 60,000 boy tramps and the half million of paupers and criminals which our horri Note 4 · Succession and income taxes are now beginning to be considered. Two very feeble propositions have been brought forward. The Massachusetts Le Note 5 · The United Presbyterian in a recent issue says, “It appears that Dr. Briggs does not stand alone in the theological seminaries of the Presby Note 6 · Dr. Philip Schaff, than whom there is no abler or more renowned biblical scholar in the New World, has in a recent paper in the New York Her Note 7 · Since writing the above the Assembly at Detroit has voted against the confirmation of Dr. Briggs by 440 against 59; thus, from a numerical p Note 8 · Wealth is the product of the nation—of all its work of brain and muscle. No one man by himself ever accumulated wealth. But in the entangled Note 9 · The rapid spread of heresy throughout the churches is creating genuine dismay in many quarters. When such ripe scholars and representative t Note 10 · The vote of the New York Presbytery on the twelfth of May, to present the case of Prof. Charles A. Briggs[10] before the synod will probably