CHAPTER V

RELIGION

What of the religious life of the Nesbits arid of the Wrights? All four grandparents were religious. They were all Protestants, as were their families for generations before them. The Nesbits were all Presbyterians. All scattered Nesbits I have ever come across, bearing the name but not of our branch—some in Pennsylvania, some in Maryland, a great many in Georgia, and the Nesbits of Calloway County, Missouri—were Presbyterians.

In Scotland they were followers of John Knox. He was a Roman Catholic priest who turned reformer and led not only Scotland but the entire Reformation by the power of his preaching. When the Protestants were persecuted after his death, our ancestors came to Pennsylvania. Grandfather Nesbit (John Clark) did not join the church until after he was fifty years old. Grandmother Nesbit was a "Campbellite," as the now-called Christian Church was first called. She was converted by no less remarkable a man than Alexander Campbell himself. He was one of the most powerful preachers America ever knew. She saw few, if any, of this sect after going to Missouri and was always happy in the Presbyterian Church.

The Coffins were not much attached to any denomination, nor, so far as I can learn, were they a very religious folk. Keen, honest, fair-minded people who met life with a bluff good humor, they were all rather skeptical of priests.

There were two family traditions as to religion often told. One was of a Nesbit woman taken in Scotland by the reigning powers. She was commanded to recant her Presbyterianism. but refused. She was taken into the sea at low tide and tied to a stake. As the tide rose her child, a baby of a few months, was held up to her, and she was promised release if she would renounce her faith and return to the ONE CHURCH. Her relatives urged her to hold fast. The water came up and up as the tide flowed in, up to her breasts swelling with milk for which her babe was crying, up to her neck. She lifted her eyes to Heaven in prayer. The merciless sea swept over her as the still more merciless priests looked on, and she passed to the Great Beyond. The grim, determined Scotch Presbyterians thus defied the power of the Church. They had character, endurance, and wills which all the power of Rome or the Church of England could not and did not break or subdue. This story of the martyrdom of one of our ancestors was told with a reverent pride. My Uncle Charles, my own mother, Tressie, and Sade, I believe, carried this quality of steadfast faith even to the Twentieth Century.

As I grew older, I sometimes felt that possibly this tale had received additions throughout the generations. But in reading recently I came across the following passage in E. E. H. Lecky’s Rationalism in Europe:

"The Presbyterians were hunted like criminals over the mountains. Their ears were torn from the roots. They were branded with hot irons. Their fingers were wrenched asunder by the splints. The bones of their legs were shattered in the iron boots. Women were scourged publicly through the streets. Multitudes were transported to the Barbados. An infuriated soldiery was let loose upon them and encouraged to exercise all their ingenuity in torturing them." (Vol. 2, p. 48.)

The Presbyterians have been charged with holding a hard, uncompromising, and severe creed. Yet it made men and women with characters like granite. They stood the shocks of all that the priests of Rome or Church of England could devise or do.

The Presbyterians in the United States of America have stood uncompromisingly against any union of church and State. The Methodists and Baptists may enter politics, and the Anti-Saloon League outdid the politicians before them, but the Presbyterians so far have largely held to the idea of a complete separation from politics or state activities by the church.

While the Coffins were not much given to church membership, they lived lives of helpfulness and good cheer to their neighborhoods. They may have produced more devil-may-care, free, and hearty men than they did theologians, but they also lined up early against the Power of Authoritative Churches.

An old tradition in my grandmother’s branch of the Coffin family was of one of our ancestors, an English country squire. Riding to town one day, he saw a crowd in a little graveyard, Evidently a heated argument or controversy was going on. He rode to the fence. The burial of a peasant had been suspended. On inquiry, he found that the priest demanded his fee before committing the dust to dust. The widow had no money, but she had a cow, which the priest insisted she give up. She had two small children and demurred at giving up the cow. The peasants sided in a sullen, quiet way with the woman. Squire Coffin heard the case there in his riding suit and boots and with his whip in his hand. He urged the priest to go on with the service and wait for the fee. But, feeling the power of the Church behind him, the priest refused and stubbornly stood his ground. The squire’s anger rose, and he dismounted and demanded that the priest proceed. The priest refused. Finally the squire said, "You go ahead like a Christian and bury the corpse of this man, or I will throw you into the grave and bury you." The priest was just as angry now as the squire, and refused to go on. So into the open grave he was thrown, and the peasants, fired by the courageous leadership of Squire Coffin, who had himself first laid hands on the priest, began shoveling in the dirt. The enraged, surprised, outraged priest soon gave in as the dirt began to cover him. The ceremony was performed, the woman went home still owning her cow, and the squire mounted his horse and rode on to town.

In our ancestry were Presbyterians and Huguenots, men and women who for will power and character were never surpassed. We can in our day little understand what a marvelous quality of manhood, of courage and conviction was required to brook and break the arrogant power of the Church of Rome and free the human spirit and release its intellect from bondage.

For centuries the black-robed army of priests had swarmed over Europe, "holding in one hand the tempting bribe of Heaven and in the other the withering threat of Hell, saying to poor, ignorant, distracted humanity, ‘Do as we say, surrender absolutely your minds and souls to us.’" Not to comply and submit, for centuries meant not only anathema and damnation for the future life, but at times confiscation of their goods and the torture of their bodies or death itself in most horrible form. That mankind had the courage and intelligence to break this spiritual, intellectual, and physical tyranny is one of its most brilliant achievements.

Our family had, in generations gone by, done its part in this great liberation. May all the descendants ever remain free in the Liberty which Jesus Christ came to give mankind!

In the great liberation of the human mind and spirit which we call the Reformation, it must be remembered that it was brought about by those who had been devoted Romanists, generally priests. Luther, Wyckliff, and John Knox were all ordained priests of the Church of Rome.

Often I find friends who are now Romanists resenting any kind word for the Reformers, as though they were enemies of everything good. This very attitude toward the deliverers raises a grave question as to the Roman Church today. It is, along with all the rest of the world, a beneficiary of their courage, sanity and spiritual vision. A church which is not tolerant can hardly by right call itself Christian.

When their three boys were young and growing, the Westfield Presbyterian Church in Pennsylvania was near the home of my grandparents. When a church building was deemed peeded in the Ohio neighborhood in St. Clair County, Missouri, grandfather gave the five acres of land on which the church and parsonage were built and the burial lot laid out, and it was called Westfield Church. The congregation of the neighborhood then moved from Ohio No. 6 as the little white schoolhouse was called.

Uncle Charles and Uncle Scott, in different years, attended the Presbyterian General Assembly of the United States as delegates. Uncle Charles and Aunt Lizzie were mainstays always of the church in the Ohio neighborhood and also when they went to Lowry City. He was superintendent of the Sunday School all the years I remember.

At Osceola Uncle Scott and Aunt Nettie were active in church work and my mother was organist. After we moved to Washington church activity was not so marked. My father was the only one who was not a church member. Once ii heard him say, "I feel like Abraham Lincoln—when the churches get together in one church, I will join." I think he had about the attitude towards the church and religion that Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Abraham Lincoln did.

It was my mother’s earnest wish that I be a clergyman, and after my conversion I consented. It was with this end in view that I attended Westminster College. Many of my fellow students there are now prominent Presbyterian clergymen. I have spent a large part of my life thinking and reading about religion or studying theology. My opinions on religion are not hastily formed. Most of the old theology is just a lot of lumber. The only real asset of the Christian religion is Jesus. They have obscured Him by doctrines. The churches are institutions—they must live. Most of their time is given to raising money to pay running expenses. If all the theology in existence could be forgotten and the Bible and Jesus left, it would be a great advance.

The Bible is a marvelous book, the greatest of all books. It is, in fact, 66 books bound together. It is a revolutionary book. It tells, in the Old Testament, of the revolt of the Jewish slaves in Egypt and their escape from bondage, and of their attempts to found a just and fair government. It tells in the New Testament a still more marvelous story.

Moses towers in the ancient legends and traditions of four thousand years ago like some mighty mountain in the mists.

Born among the oppressed slaves, rescued by Pharaoh’s daughter, reared in the palace in luxury, studying in the mighty tern-pies the wisdom of the ancient world, then leaving this to lead the slaves in revolt, carrying them out across the Red Sea, setting up for them laws and customs today still regarded as given mankind by God Himself, and then going up in a mountain to die alone, his body denied a sepulcher, refusing to found a Kingdom or dynasty. No wonder he is now revered by the followers of three great religions, the Jewish, Christian and Mohammedan.

Jesus said to men, "Follow Me." The church says, "Worship Him." It is so much easier to worship Jesus than to follow Him. Worship of Jesus entails no hardship or sacrifice. The world does not fear worshippers, but it is afraid of followers. Jesus was the supreme genius of the entire human race. He attained. He set humanity free. His peace is for those who know and follow Him. Thus, it seems to me, He will appear to men if only all the theollogy, with its silly miracles and absurd claims, can be got rid of. The church had bound Him about with chains, aye, with grave clothes! Yet He is not dead. He is alive forevermore. And in the hearts of men and women He Lives.

The crowning glory of the Christian religion has been that ethics and ideals of justice are by it made a part of religion. Just as it has done this has it been powerful. Yet today, when monopoly is entrenched in law, the church raises no voice against it. It benefits from the support of those who live by monopoly. It is thus rendered powerless.

The world is looking for the living, joyous, loving Christ— not an "encrusted" Christ, as the Indians say. The Way, the Truth, and the Life, not a Christ bound with the grave clothes of long-buried doctrinal controversy.

From a little book in which Uncle Scott copied statements that impressed him, I quote:

"Whenever the doctrinal aspect of Christianity has been predominant above the practical, whenever the first duty of the believer has been held to consist in holding particular opinions on the functions and nature of his Master and only second in obeying his Master’s commands, then always with a uniformity more remarkable than is obtained in any other historical phenomena, there have followed dissension, animosity, and in later ages bloodshed.

"Christianity, as a principle of life, has been the most powerful check on the passions of mankind. Christianity as a speculative system of opinion has converted them into monsters of cruelty.

Oh! Love Divine whose constant beam

Shines on the eyes that will not see

And waits to bless us while we dream,—

Nor leav’st us when we turn from Thee.

All Souls that struggle and aspire,

Nor bounds, nor clime, nor creed Thou know’st,

Wide as our need Thy favors fall;

The white wings of the Holy Ghost

Stoop unseen o’er the heads of all.