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Dispensational Modernism
Dispensational
Modernism
z
B. M. PIETSCH

1
 3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of
Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research,
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Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the
Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pietsch, B. M.
Dispensational modernism / B.M. Pietsch.
pages cm
ISBN 978–0–19–024408–8 (hardback)
1. Dispensationalism—History of doctrines. 2. Bible—Hermeneutics.
3. United States—Church history. I. Title.
BT157.P54 2015
230’.0463—dc23
2014043329

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
 Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1
1. Taxonomic Minds and the Technological Construction of
Confidence 17
2. The Social Construction of Confidence 44
3. Competing Sciences of Biblical Interpretation 73
4. Dispensational Hermeneutics 96
5. Building the Dispensations 125
6. Engineering Time 146
7. The Scofield Reference Bible amidst a Dispensational Century 173

Notes 213
Index 255
 Acknowledgments

I bl ame all of you. Writing this book has been an exercise in sustained
suffering. The casual reader may, perhaps, exempt herself from excessive
guilt, but for those of you who have played the larger role in prolonging
my agonies with your encouragement and support, well … you know who
you are, and you owe me.
Dispensational Modernism
 Introduction

In 1991 anthropologist Joel Robbins moved to a remote village in

Papua New Guinea for two years of fieldwork among the small Urapmin
community. Subjects of decades of anthropological scrutiny, the extended
Min cultural groups had become well known for their complex indige-
nous religious systems. Yet Robbins found a community of self-identified
Christians. More surprisingly, the seemingly isolated Urapmin were
practicing dispensational premillennialists, waiting eagerly for Jesus’s
imminent return and an end-times Rapture. They peppered Robbins with
questions about current world affairs, seeking signs of prophecy fulfilled,
looking for the rise of a new world government and the Antichrist.1
The dispensational premillennialism Robbins encountered is often
described by scholars as part of the wacky, anti-modern fringe American
Protestant fundamentalism. Indeed, many of the distinctive theological
ideas of dispensational premillennialism seem ready-made for imagi-
nations attuned to globalization and honed by Hollywood: Rapture!
Antichrist! Holy Land! Global War! Apocalypse! The hope of premi-
llennialists is for the arrival of the promised Millennium, Christ’s
thousand-year reign of peace and harmony over the Earth. The expec-
tation of premillennialists is that the Bible offers accurate predictions
about the future sequence of events that will lead up to the Millennium,
including the Rapture of Christians into heaven, the brief and sinister
rule of the Antichrist, the tormented seven years of the Tribulation, and
the culminating battle of Armageddon. Dispensational theology lays the
groundwork for premillennial interpretations by helping readers parse
different passages of biblical prophecy and apply them into different eras
of divinely ordered time, or dispensations.
2 Dispens a t iona l Moder nism

Emerging in the late nineteenth century among interdenominational

Protestant clergy, dispensational premillennialism found key expressions
in the Scofield Reference Bible and flourished among Bible Institutes, semi-
naries, and missionary training schools. But dispensationalism always fit
uneasily within the bounds of fundamentalism. By the 1970s, the frictions
between the two movements burst into a new form of popular premillenni-
alism, which now plays a major and independent role in American popular
culture (witness the 65 million copies of the Left Behind novels sold) and
throughout the modern world, influencing movements from the Nation
of Islam to global Pentecostalism. With hundreds of millions of adherents
worldwide, dispensational theology and popular premillennialism have
had profound impacts on politics (particularly regarding Israel), econom-
ics, and global religious practices. Just eight decades after its original pub-
lication from the New York branch of Oxford University Press, Robbins
was able to purchase a Scofield Reference Bible 9,000 miles away in Goroka,
Papua New Guinea. Closer to home, a 2006 Pew survey found that 79 per-
cent of Americans believe in the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, and a
2014 report found that 35 percent of regular Bible readers did so to learn
about the future.2 In the twenty-first century, dispensational premillen-
nialism has emerged as one of the most powerful forces in American reli-
gion, as well as one of America’s most significant religious exports.
This is not a book about dispensational theology or popular premi-
llennialism. Instead, this book tells a story about dispensational mod-
ernism, the epistemic and methodological techniques that undergird
dispensational thinking. The spread of prophecy belief in the twentieth
century makes little sense without a richer understanding of how dis-
pensational theology was built upon modernist epistemic foundations.
These foundations—what I call dispensational modernism—comprised
a pervasive system of attitudes, assumptions, and methods that gave
prophecy belief its meaning, traction, and popularity. Emerging between
1870 and 1920, dispensational modernism grew out of popular fascina-
tion with applying technological methods—such as quantification and
classification—to the interpretation of texts and time. Situating dispen-
sationalism in conversations about the nature of mainstream, modern
Protestantism in America, this book examines the role of scientific rheto-
ric in these forms of religious confidence-making. Through technologi-
cal methods, dispensationalists sought to imbue religious ideas with the
same quality of factuality that increasingly buttressed the cultural author-
ity of scientists and other experts.
 Introduction 3

Dispensationalists inherited their scientific aspirations from popu-

lar culture, and the story begins with engineering values in American
mass culture. One example will help to illustrate. In 1896 Fannie Farmer
published the Boston Cooking School Cookbook, the first cookbook in
America to incorporate level measurements in recipes. Demonstrating
popular fascination with precision, Farmer linked cooking and quantifi-
cation with scientific spirit, describing her cookbook as “condensed sci-
entific knowledge which will lead to deeper thought and broader study
of what to eat.”3 Popular confidence in classification and quantification
became the core of what is best described as the taxonomic mind, the spe-
cific intellectual commitments that informed dispensational methods.
If dispensational premillennialism flowered in many unexpected places
in the twentieth century, it was because the taxonomic mind spread rhi-
zomatically beneath the twentieth-century religious landscape. Chapter 1
describes the taxonomic mind in American mass culture and American
Protestantism by tracing the proliferation of engineering values in the
Sunday school movement, and argues that this context is the best place to
start for understanding modern dispensationalism.
Said simply, dispensationalists embraced engineering methods to
produce authoritative interpretations of texts and time. Based on these
methods, they came to believe biblical prophecy was a unified whole that
gave meaning to the experience of discontinuous time, and its deeper,
scientific meaning emerged in intricate literary intertextual referentiality.
These beliefs were mirrored opposites of those held by other Protestant
modernists—theological liberals and academic higher critics—who held
that the context of history explained the patchwork text of the Bible and
that deeper scientific meanings came from intricate reconstructions of
historical contexts. Both groups found comfort in the rhetoric of scien-
tific and technological method, and both sought cultural and intellectual
authority through professionalization and specialization. Both claimed to
speak for mainstream American Protestantism. In the juxtaposition of
these views, both the modernist and counter-modernist aspects of dis-
pensationalism show sharply. Chapter 2 explores the role of professional-
ization and specialization in the mirrored institutional histories of early
dispensationalism and higher education. If this chapter is, perhaps, the
least satisfying part of the argument and falls short of fully convincing, it
still suggests what I think is the appropriate vector for questions about dis-
pensationalism’s institutional origins and aspirations. Dispensationalists,
like other elite knowledge producers, were concerned about status and
4 Dispens a t iona l Moder nism

prestige, about academic credentials and titles, and about their own ability
to speak to and for mainstream American Protestantism.
The core epistemic products of dispensational modernists were their
methods for reading the Bible. Far from simple literalism, proof-texting,
or conservative retrenchments, dispensationalist understandings of inter-
pretation reveal thoroughly modernist assumptions. The first of these
was that knowledge-making required explicit use of method: the Bible
must be interpreted to “unlock” its true meaning. They held that authori-
tative biblical knowledge required years of specialized study, study that
made use of engineering methods, such as classification, enumeration,
cross-referencing, and taxonomic comparison of literary units. The result
was a view of the Bible as an internally coherent whole with a progres-
sive unfolding of meaning, meaning that was located in elaborately coded
systems of intertextual relationships, particularly numerical sequences,
types and antitypes, literary analogical figures, theological themes, and
other intentionally ordered systems. Chapters 3 and 4 discuss the late
nineteenth-century battles for “scientific” biblical interpretation. The for-
mer examines debates about biblical interpretation in academic settings,
and the emergence of higher criticism. The latter discusses the broader
context of popular biblical interpretation, and the sources dispensational-
ists drew upon to develop their own form of scientific hermeneutics.
Dispensationalist engagement with time—both history and the
future—helped produce their understanding of texts even while it
reflected it. Experiencing time as disjunctive and divided, progressive and
polyvalent, they sought the meaning of time in its fissures, as divine dic-
tates defined discrete dispensations. Not satisfied with reflecting on the
meaning of time, they sought the best means for engineering time to
make sense of the present and future. Chapters 5 and 6 discuss, respec-
tively, dispensationalists’ ideas about the meaning and structure of time,
and the attempts they made to engineer time, or to organize it through
technological methods.
These ideas were developed and disseminated among conservative
and interdenominational Protestants in new networks of texts, people,
and institutions. By the time the early dispensational network matured
around 1910, its central node was the lightning-rod Bible teacher C. I.
Scofield. His edited Scofield Reference Bible—the best-selling volume in
the history of Oxford University Press—became the near-canonical state-
ment of dispensational thought and the most popular mechanism for
propagation of dispensational methods. As the Scofield Reference Bible
 Introduction 5

became part of the fabric of American religious life, it served as a schol-

arly, authoritative guide to modernist interpretive method for millions of
Americans, and as a textbook within the global missionary movement.
Chapter 7 describes the twentieth-century history of the Scofield Bible in
order to illustrate the complex interactions of dispensational modernism
with popular religious movements.

Who were the early dispensationalists? A number of names recur in

this story, including James H. Brookes, George Carter Needham, Arthur
Tappan Pierson, Arno Gaebelein, Cyrus I. Scofield, Charles Gallaudet
Trumbull, and Lewis Sperry Chafer. All were ministers or evangelists
connected to evangelist Dwight L. Moody’s interdenominational net-
work. Alongside common commitments to missions and urban evange-
lism, they all took the idea of clerical professionalization seriously and
labored exhaustively to train, educate, and build nondenominational
associations for clergy and Christian workers, through Bible confer-
ences, Bible institutes, and seminaries. They did not share a common
background—the self-educated Scofield lived a hardscrabble youth and
served in the Confederate Army, while Trumbull graduated from Yale and
inherited editorship of one of the nation’s largest and most respectable
religious periodicals. Yet with the exception of a few women—such as
Chicago educator Emma Dryer—the architects of American dispensa-
tionalism were white, male, urban Protestants who had achieved some
kind of middle-class respectability.
Dispensationalists rarely reflected on the role that social contexts
played in creating authoritative religious knowledge. Instead, as part of
a highly aspirational culture, and like their liberal Protestant cousins,
they sought to speak to and for the American religious mainstream. This
mainstream was, of course, always more of a symbolic goal than an insti-
tutional or ideological reality. Insofar as they imagined the mainstream in
their own image, they unreflexively assumed it mirrored their own white,
male, urban, middle-class concerns and desires, perceived as neutral and
objective features of society. Dispensationalists’ interest in securing reli-
gious knowledge through technological and “scientific” methods was an
extension of this social location, as was their perception that the main-
stream bowed to the same kind of intellectual and scientific authorities
that they aspired to. For knowledge to be produced scientifically and objec-
tively was for power to work invisibly, including for the dispensationalists
themselves. If the sources they left show an obsessive reflexivity about
6 Dispens a t iona l Moder nism

their situatedness relative to their epistemic methods, the vast silences

concerning race, class, and gender testify to their relatively elite social
locations and aspirations.
Recovering this history leads to a more robust definition of dispensa-
tionalism and locates it within the spectrum of American modernism.
When viewed in a broad context, it is best understood as a new constella-
tion of ideas about time, narrative, and epistemic method. Even as the pub-
lic sphere became repeatedly disenchanted and re-enchanted—through
encounters with Darwin, liberal theology, secularism, consumer capital-
ism, and other forms of modernist thought—dispensationalists labored
to re-enchant the world, and build confidence, through their own scien-
tific methods. Not simply restating nineteenth-century certainties, dis-
pensationalists sought secure religious knowledge through taxonomic
readings of texts and time. They developed new methods for interpreting
the Bible and contemporary world events, in order to construct elaborate
schemas for dividing the dispensations and ordering history. In common
with other modernist thinkers, dispensationalists insisted on the explicit
use of method for constructing knowledge.

Why spend so much effort attempting to reimagine the intellectual

world of early dispensationalism? After all, dispensational theology and
popular premillennialism have suffered from no shortage of attention as
scholars have mapped large swaths of the road from New York to Papua
New Guinea, elaborately detailing premillennial theology, history, poli-
tics, and popular culture.4 When, in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan revealed
his belief that Armageddon may come soon, journalists found a plethora
of scholars prepared to weigh in to help explain the phenomenon, in doc-
umentaries, newspaper articles, and general media coverage. Predictably
for a set of religious, political, and social ideas that have produced consider-
able public anxiety, there is a long bibliography describing dispensational
premillennialism, including both histories of theology and reductionist
theories for explaining millenarian and apocalyptic belief.
Yet shifting our gaze from theology and politics to epistemology,
methodology, and intellectual authority allows us to discover a richer
account of what makes dispensationalism compelling to its millions of
advocates, along with a fuller account of its development and spread. Most
importantly, it allows us to sidestep a number of problematic assump-
tions that have become embedded in the historiography of premillennial-
ism. Despite careful attempts by scholars to listen to dispensationalist
 Introduction 7

voices, the study of premillennialism still reflects the fact that the analyti-
cal categories were defined and constructed by theological opponents. In
both academic and popular writing, premillennial theology is often held
up alongside Mormon polygamy and Islamic fundamentalism as a stock
image of religious unreason.
Contemporary analyses reflect the historiography of dispensation-
alism, as from the early twentieth century scholars described dispen-
sational thinking as simply anti-intellectual apocalyptic theology. The
period around the end of the First World War saw liberal Protestant schol-
ars seeking to explain the phenomenon of dispensational belief in ways
that would undermine its authority and popular appeal in mainstream
American religion. In 1918 Shirley Jackson Case published an article in
The Biblical World titled “The Premillennial Menace.” Case, a distin-
guished professor of early church history at the University of Chicago and
a proponent of the new scientific history, found premillennial beliefs to
be “a very old and persistent delusion.”5 That same year his University of
Chicago colleague Herbert Willett dismissed all dispensationalist schol-
arship as “nervous scanning of particular sections of the Bible, most of
them apocalyptic,” from “untrained students of the Scriptures and of his-
tory.”6 A year later, Methodist theologian Harris Franklin Rall penned
a three-part series on premillennialism published in The Biblical World,
where he lambasted premillennialists’ “pessimism” and “brutal” theol-
ogy, charged adherents with “personal abuse” in disagreements, and
described the movement as “concerted, vigorous, and well-financed pro-
paganda.”7 Conservative denominationalists were no more sympathetic,
as Princeton theologians and national leaders such as J. Gresham Machen
took their own shots at premillennial beliefs. Dispensationalists ended
with few allies in the places where histories were being written.
Case and his fellow theologians’ accounts of premillennial origins and
logic, despite their overt vitriol, formed the basis for later scholarship.
Mid-century accounts elaborated the critique, exemplified by Clarence
Bass’s 1960 study proclaiming: “The theses of this book are: dispensation-
alism is not part of the historic faith of the church … and it is based on a
faulty hermeneutical basis of interpretation.”8 In 1963 historian Richard
Hofstadter accepted the reductionist categories of the Chicago theolo-
gians when he wrote of evangelist D. L. Moody: “His conservatism was
a reflection of his pre-millennialist beliefs, which in him engendered a
thoroughgoing social pessimism.”9 By the time historian Ernest Sandeen
published his influential 1970 study, The Roots of Fundamentalism,
8 Dispens a t iona l Moder nism

equating dispensationalism with fundamentalism, the stage largely had

been set. Scholars assumed that dispensationalism was an anti-modern
theological system that led directly to the militant, pessimistic fundamen-
talist movement.
This historiography embedded some theological and analytic assump-
tions deep in the study of dispensational premillennialism. The most
pervasive of these was that dispensationalism had something to do with
psychological moods, such as pessimism, anxiety, status disenfranchise-
ment, or fear. Related to this claim was the corollary that dispensational-
ist minds were incapable of accepting ambiguity, doubt, or the fractured
nature of modern thought, and thus they made extraordinary efforts to
seek certainty. Third was the argument that dispensationalism was a
defensive reaction against the theological challenges of higher criticism, or
against modernity itself. This analysis led to contradictory and often asso-
ciated claims that dispensationalism was both grouchily conservative and
radically new. Regarding their central concerns, many scholars argued that
dispensationalists relied on wooden, ham-fisted, “literal” interpretations of
the Bible, that they were anti-intellectual pietists, or that they just recapitu-
lated mid-nineteenth-century methods such as simple Baconian induction
and common sense reasoning, accompanied by fist-thumping defenses of
the inspiration of the Bible. Scholars agreed that North American dispen-
sationalists got their theological ideas in a direct chain of transmission
from Plymouth Brethren leader John Nelson Darby, and Darby’s role in
inventing dispensationalism is now taken for granted in encyclopedias,
textbooks, and even by some contemporary dispensationalists. Finally, con-
necting these assumptions has been the idea that dispensationalists were
a fringe group of militant religious radicals. As fundamentalism became
defined in terms of militant anti-modernism, it seemed clear to many
observers that dispensationalists were paradigmatic fundamentalists.
The problem is that none of these assumptions hold true for the men
and women building dispensationalism between 1870 and 1920. Certainly
exceptions can be found, and by the mid-twentieth century there was sig-
nificant overlap between fundamentalist networks and dispensationalist
ones. Yet collapsing these two categories is unhelpful for understanding
the origins of dispensationalism and for making sense of its later global
appeal. By and large, early dispensationalists were not characterized by
conservatism, pessimism, an aversion to complexity or doubt, or a sense of
defensive inferiority. They did not reside in marginal social positions, read
the Bible literally, or militantly oppose modernity. The historical evidence
 Introduction 9

for connections with Darby, or for any direct theological transmission of

premillennial ideas, remains weak.10 Dispensationalists believed their
interpretive methods were more scientific than the speculative hypoth-
eses of higher critics, and deserved to be taken seriously in mainstream
Protestantism. Like nearly all professionals, they did sometimes militate
to preserve their intellectual authority, but they did so alongside construc-
tive intellectual attempts to create new and alternate modernist methods
for producing confident belief.
If standard scholarly characterizations did not hold true for the first
and second generation of American dispensationalists, a better under-
standing of dispensational history and its appeal in the contemporary
world requires a retelling of this history, using new assumptions. It was
not the specific form of premillennial theology that made dispensational-
ism compelling in America, but its modernist epistemic assumptions.

Preliminary Apologies
An introduction should not only describe the project of the book, but make
an attempt to defend the author’s questionable interpretive decisions, or
at least the most egregious of them, and I turn now to that task. Readers
impatient with reflexive hand-wringing or historiographical self-criticism
are invited to skip ahead to the first chapter.
The sensitive reader may be distressed by the seemingly casual use
of the categories of “science,” “technology,” and “engineering.” There
are significant conceptual differences between these terms, in both
historical and contemporary usage. Yet it is important to recognize the
way these categories were conflated by many late-nineteenth and early
twentieth-century Americans. Exploring the scope and implications of
this categorical conflation is one of the primary tasks of this book. For
most of the characters in this story, “science” and “technology” held
a number of shifting, sometimes contradictory meanings, and they
invoked an even larger set of values. Most often, in popular religious
contexts, these terms were used as rhetorical containers, fetishistic ide-
als of powerful knowledge, forms of magical language, or advertising
slogans. Although, by the mid-twentieth century “science” had become
thoroughly professionalized, and associated with Darwinian evolution,
statistical probabilities among groups, or large-scale laboratory research,
the majority of religious Americans did not imagine science in this way
half a century earlier. This is not to say that dispensationalists were still
10 Dispens a t iona l Moder nism

invested in mid-nineteenth-century inductive models of science, nor that

their self-identifications as “scientific” were out of step with the times.
Dispensationalists’ conceptions of science aligned with much of mass
culture in North America, which saw science in terms of technological
methods of knowing and problem-solving. Even as liberal Protestants
sought to make their beliefs more compatible with the demands of “mod-
ern science,” so, too, did dispensationalists, albeit with a different com-
mitment to what constituted “science” or “scientific knowledge.” Rather
than attempting to demystify or clarify the various possible meanings
based on contemporary categories, I employ these terms in an approxi-
mation of historical usage, generally to invoke a mingled sense of desire,
intellectual authority, and social power.
Through most of this book I try to avoid using the language of “fun-
damentalism.” Fundamentalism is a contentious category, defined in
relationship to at least two distinct religious phenomena, one in terms
of American religious history and the other in contemporary global
sociology. Neither seems appropriate to my objects of study. Although
dispensationalism grew up in some of the same soil as early American
fundamentalism—classically defined as “militantly anti-modernist evan-
gelicalism”—and the chief concerns of both groups overlapped, defini-
tions of fundamentalism that focus on militancy or anti-modernism
obscure more than they reveal about the impulses of early dispensational-
ists.11 Well into the twentieth century, many dispensationalists distanced
themselves from militant evangelicalism. Chapter 7 describes early dis-
pensationalists’ own ambivalence about the label “fundamentalism,”
and their concern that already by 1920 it contained more pejorative asso-
ciations than positive ones. A new generation of scholarship has begun
re-examining the theological work that the category of fundamentalism
performs in American history, and in recognition of that work I try to
avoid confusion by resisting the use of the term “fundamentalist” to
describe early dispensationalists.12
Perhaps the greatest interpretive fiction in this book is that I treat
“dispensationalism” as a coherent whole, and “dispensationalists” as self-
conscious parts of a discrete religious movement. There were, of course,
many types of dispensationalisms, and adherents were involved in many
simultaneous projects and networks.13 To the extent they saw themselves
as a single movement before 1900, it was grounded in premillennial
Bible readings, usually describing themselves as “believers in the Second
Coming.” Certainly none of the early dispensationalists would have been
 Introduction 11

comfortable being labeled as a “dispensational modernist.” Historians

must reduce complexity to produce narrative and analysis, but it must be
admitted that the result is a narrative in which the subjects may have had
difficulty recognizing themselves.
My use of the term “modernism” raises additional questions. The
scholarly literature engaging with modernity and modernism is bloated
with contested, conflicting, obscure, and mischievous definitional and
theoretical arguments. In a survey of these terms, English professor
Susan Stanford Friedman suggested it may be “a critical Tower of Babel …
a parody of critical discourse in which everyone keeps talking at the same
time in a language without common meanings.”14 Likewise, historian
David Hollinger described it as “a walk through a multisided room of mir-
rors. Each wall is said to be ‘modernist,’ yet each reflects light differently,
and makes it difficult to get a clear view of any object in the room, includ-
ing the walls themselves.”15 If scholarship on modernism is so fraught
with confusion and conflicts, why wade into such troubled waters? What
is to be gained?
Before attempting an answer, we must first compound the difficulties.
American Protestants have long equated “modernism” with “theological
modernism,” and both the primary sources and canonical histories of lib-
eralism and fundamentalism often adopt this elision. Starting in the late-
nineteenth century, American Protestants used the term “modernism” to
refer to a specific set of theological commitments promoted by the liberal
advocates of New Theology, related particularly to their views of the Bible
and history. This sensibility was captured by University of Chicago theolo-
gian Shailer Mathews’s 1924 assertion: “To the Modernist any statement
of Scripture is to be located in its proper historical environment and seen
as the expression of the religious attitude of men in that environment.
The Bible sprang from our religion, not our religion from the Bible.”16 The
definitive scholarly works on mainline Protestantism and fundamental-
ism accept this sense of the term. William Hutchison mirrored Mathews
when he defined modernism in terms of “conscious, intended adaptation
of religious ideas to modern culture,” the “idea that God is immanent in
human cultural development,” and “a belief that human society is moving
toward realization … of the Kingdom of God.”17 George Marsden accepted
Hutchinson’s categories, and doubled down by defining fundamental-
ism in theological opposition, as a “militantly anti-modernist” phenome-
non.18 This theological understanding of “modernism” offers consistency
with primary sources and clear analytical binaries—modernists and
12 Dispens a t iona l Moder nism

anti-modernists, liberals and fundamentalists—and thus has proven use-

ful for many scholars.
In this narrow theological sense of the term, dispensationalists were
certainly not modernists. They frequently attacked “modernism,” and
they vigorously defended themselves from accusations (mostly from con-
servative denominationalists) of being modernist. Dispensationalists
rejected most of the theological impulses of liberal theological modern-
ism, which they saw as hostile to beliefs in the material fulfillment of
prophecy, the reality of miracles and the resurrection, and the unity of
the Bible. Dispensationalist Lewis Sperry Chafer responded testily to one
allegation that his mentor, C. I. Scofield, was a modernist by arguing that
this accusation “evinces ignorance of the facts” and was an “unqualified
misrepresentation.”19 Furthermore, in a somewhat confusing irony, lib-
eral theological modernists themselves often accused premillennialism
of being “a modern heresy,” by which they meant to suggest it was a recent
innovation and had no basis in historic Christianity. Dispensationalists
found this claim equally offensive, and made equally strident attempts to
establish their historic bona fides.20 Likewise, in a broader cultural sense,
dispensationalists could also be described as anti-modernist. Historian
Jackson Lears described how anti-modernism developed when “many ben-
eficiaries of modern culture began to feel they were its secret victims.”21
Certainly many dispensationalists, along with Americans of many other
stripes, felt victimized by modern culture, even as they embraced it.
Yet dispensationalists’ twinned desire for, and revulsion toward, the
“modern” world—articulated in their own specific ways—is best under-
stood in the context of other American religious engagements with
modernity. In attempting to expand the category beyond theological con-
cerns, this work follows in the footsteps of a generation of scholarship that
has been arguing about the merits and disadvantages of using theological
modernism and adherents’ self-descriptions to talk about modernism in
American religion. Such scholarship suggests a number of drawbacks to
using “modernism” as shorthand for “theological modernism.”
First, it has become commonplace to observe that anti-modernists
and fundamentalists were also often modernists, even according to
Hutchison’s categories. Fundamentalists self-consciously adapted them-
selves to the modern world, looked for God’s immanence in culture, and,
although perhaps not believing that society is progressing in moral vir-
tues, still imagined that time progressed along a divinely ordained linear
track toward the Kingdom of God. For example, in his study of holiness
 Introduction 13

leader A. J. Tomlinson, historian Roger Robins argued that holiness

movements “encompassed multiple strategies of change and preserva-
tion in the face of the social dynamics of their day,” and that both holi-
ness and modernist movements “directly engaged the ‘modern’ world.
Both tried to live relevantly within it.”22 Acknowledging Hutchison’s
categories, Robins argued that many other Americans fit the definition
equally well: “Mainline Protestant Modernists … developed an intel-
lectual architecture that they believed to be uniquely compatible with
modernity, and they were not far wrong … their faith in human prog-
ress, and their celebration of change and subjectivity certainly qualified
them for the term modernist. But though they merited the term, they
by no means exhausted it.”23 In the past few decades, historians have
paid increasing attention to the modernity and modernism of supposed
anti-modern movements.
More recently, scholars have questioned whether Hutchison’s descrip-
tion of theological modernism could be improved. Historian Kathryn
Lofton suggested that instead of theological beliefs, a focus on method-
ology best described the self-conscious practices of American theologi-
cal modernists. “What made them Christian modernists,” Lofton argued,
“was their overt allegiance to the inherent virtues of method.” She
described these concerns as a “preoccupation with the intellectual pro-
cedures over consequences,” worked out “through detailed strategies for
biblical exploration and self-examination.”24 This focus on methodology
was also evident in the epistemic reflections of early dispensational think-
ers. From plainfolk to elites, Americans came to believe that the explicit
use of epistemic method—and particularly “scientific” method—was
necessary to produce authoritative, “modern” knowledge, according to
modern standards. Although they disliked the label “modernist,” dis-
pensationalists, too, sought to be modern thinkers, in the sense of but-
tressing their ideas with sufficient methodological reflexivity to warrant
confidence. More than simply using epistemic methods, dispensational-
ists remained aware of their relationship to their methods as the basis
for their knowing. As Lofton argued, “To be conscious of method is to
watch how oneself enacts something or imagines its fruition; in other
words, methodological awareness is nothing more than another way of
describing self-consciousness.”25 Time and again, adherents signaled
their modernity by revealing their methods, and their relationship to
their methods. This is the sense in which I use the term “modernism”
in the phrase “dispensational modernism.” Dispensational thinkers were
14 Dispens a t iona l Moder nism

committed to this explicit and reflective use of methods in knowledge

production.
Focusing on methodology suggests that here, as in other respects,
self-described modernists and anti-modernists shared more in common
than perhaps either group might have recognized, or cared to admit.
Indeed, the taxonomic mind was prevalent throughout American reli-
gion, not just among dispensationalists, and broadening the category of
“modernism” helps expose the underlying commonalities that have often
been hidden by binary categories in the scholarship that function to high-
light difference.
However, neither a focus on theology nor a focus on method comes
close to representing all the useful senses of the term “modernism.”
In the past decade, scholars have argued that American religious mod-
ernism could best be described in terms of specific forms of literary or
artistic representation, or as crises of representation, or ways of position-
ing oneself in space, or through the bureaucratization and rationaliza-
tion of society, or as ways of imagining the secular, or about adaptations
to technological modernization, or concerning nostalgia, or coercion, or
enchantment, or through particular relationships to time, progress, and
the present, or with regard to individuals’ relationships to knowledge. To
be modernist was to embrace “an esthetic style that incorporates other-
wise misfitting elements in a unified composition, relying forthrightly on
the composer’s subjectivity as the unifying ingredient.”26 To be modernist
was to accept a world in which religion became a choice vis-à-vis the secu-
lar, to live in a “situation in which individuals feel the authority of their
choices or, at the very least, arrive at a place in which some choice can and
must be made.”27 To be modernist was to recognize in present representa-
tions “a ruthless break with any or all preceding historical conditions …
a never-ending process of internal ruptures and fragmentations within
itself.”28 To be modernist was to be inflicted with the fractured conscious-
ness of modernity, and thus even anti-modernism itself has been identi-
fied as fundamentally modernist.
If this litany of modernisms is exhausting—a “critical Tower of
Babel”—then it at least points to a final reason to describe dispensational-
ists as modernists. More than anything, to be modernist means, and has
meant, to belong as part of a conversation about the promise and perils
of change in the modern world. Central to this conversation was reflexive
subjectivity, and the attempt to find methods to represent the world from
within this subjectivity. Thus, to be modernist was to take part in that
 Introduction 15

conversation. Or to be more precise, if one can be forgiven for excessive

recursion, to be modernist was to see oneself as a part of this conversation.
Dispensationalists were fundamentally engaged in this conversation. The
fact that their voices—and epistemic methods and solutions—have been
left out of the story of religious modernism in America has impoverished
our analysis.
The category of dispensational modernism, then, is an attempt to
explore the intellectual foundations of dispensationalism in terms of one
late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century conversation about modern
knowledge. Participation in this conversation is what made dispensation-
alism so compelling to its adherents. Put differently, this book argues that
the success of a dispensational product like the Scofield Reference Bible
came not because it was dispensational but because it was modernist.
This study is not meant as an apology for this tradition, nor an inter-
vention in theological battles. The twentieth century saw dispensational-
ists embroiled in many such theological battles: with liberal theologians,
with conservative denominationalists, with covenant theologians,
and with each other. To borrow a phrase I learned after moving to the
South: I have no dog in those fights. I hope the account I have written
of early dispensationalism proves both generous and unsympathetic in
measures. However, my primary goal was to describe an episode in the
broader history of confidence, showing how early dispensationalism fit
alongside other forms of religious modernism, and seeing what it tells
us about modernist ambitions and strategies for securing confident
knowledge. This is a story about the ways in which the boundaries have
been drawn in the modern world—around orthodoxy, around piety, and
around knowledge—and the powers that created these boundaries. If the
purpose of writing history is liberation, and sometimes I believe that it
should be, then this story may help us to see what, precisely, we need
liberation from.
But perhaps the purpose of history is not liberation at all, but humil-
ity? This is also a story about how the desire for confidence and intellec-
tual authority can lead down unexpected and unreliable paths. Reminders
of the need for humility are everywhere. Early dispensationalists had as
many reasons for confidence in their interpretations as I do for confidence
in my historical methods. While it is one thing to say that early dispen-
sationalists might not recognize themselves in the following pages, it is
quite another, and perhaps more serious, to write history about subjects
who rejected the idea that historicism or historical contexts provide us
16 Dispens a t iona l Moder nism

with real meaning or scientific truths. Dispensationalists were neither

the first nor the last to distrust the slippery ease with which historical
narratives tell us what happened in the past and what it meant. As the
English modernist novelist B. S. Johnson observed: “Life does not tell sto-
ries. Life is chaotic, fluid, random … Writers can extract a story from life
only by strict, close selection, and this must mean falsification. Telling
stories really is telling lies.”29 Perhaps early dispensationalists were right
to be wary of historical narratives that come bearing gifts, particularly
gifts disguised as confident knowledge about the past. If there is a larger
significance to this project (and I am far from certain there is), it may be
that what we most need liberation from is our own perennial lust for con-
fidence in our stories about the past.
 1

Taxonomic Minds and

the Technological Construction
of Confidence

Backgrounds to Dispensationalism
Philadelphia merchant John Wanamaker was big stuff. Physiognomically,
as well as socially. During his stint as US Postmaster General from 1889
to 1893, his “chubby face uncannily resembling that of a cherub” made
him a common subject of satire and caricature in magazines like Puck and
Judge.1 Beyond appearances, Wanamaker’s impact on American culture
was weighty, particularly through his innovations in retailing and advertis-
ing. The eponymous store Wanamaker opened in 1861 distinguished itself
as the first department store in the United States. A series of ads in 1871
captured Wanamaker’s sense of revolutionary historical significance: “At
this very moment, the Oak Hall buildings of Wanamaker & Brown are
now the scene of the GREATEST POPULAR MOVEMENT!! in Fine
Clothing ever inaugurated anywhere in America.”2 Wanamaker’s policies
of fixed prices, guaranteed returns, and exemplary service transformed the
way merchants and middle-class consumers imagined their interactions,
systematizing and institutionalizing the trust required for commercial
exchanges. Perhaps nothing illustrates this as clearly as his introduction
of price tags, which helped shift the basis of commercial transactions from
interpersonal haggling to impersonal, quantified purchasing.
Despite his cherubic bearing, Wanamaker’s portrait is not usually one
that first welcomes readers into a history of American dispensationalism.
His commitment to dispensationalism was secondary to his other ambitions,
18 Dispens a t iona l Moder nism

and his direct influence on the movement was small. Yet as much as any-
one, Wanamaker illustrated the forces in American culture that gave birth
to dispensational modernism. Like other forms of modernism, dispensa-
tionalism was born out of epistemic crisis. Mid-nineteenth-century meth-
ods for securing confident knowledge, such as plain reasonableness and
common sense, were insufficient for the challenges facing late-nineteenth-
century urban Americans. As social life became more complex between
1870 and 1920, the tasks of knowledge production required correspond-
ingly more complex tools and methods. Facing this epistemic crisis, many
Americans such as Wanamaker embraced a way of thinking best described
as the taxonomic mind, evinced by a mania for quantification, precise mea-
surement, classification, standardization, and “scientific” explanations.
Taxonomic thinking became so embedded in American intellectual life
that its assumptions about knowledge became unconscious.
Popular taxonomic thinking breathed life into dispensationalism. To
be sure, many of the theological ideas of dispensational premillennialism
had existed for centuries, as a system of biblical interpretation that divided
history into distinct eras (or dispensations) and found in biblical prophecy
an accurate chronology of the last days: the Rapture of the Church into
heaven, the unholy reign of the Antichrist over a seven-year period of tur-
moil and suffering called the Tribulation, the bodily return of Jesus Christ
to earth in the Second Coming, and the establishment of a thousand-year
period of peace and justice known as the Millennium. These theological
ideas are often traced to nineteenth-century Irish preacher John Nelson
Darby and the influence of the Plymouth Brethren movement. Yet if Darby
or other early premillennialists provided the raw clay of biblical interpreta-
tion, the animating spirit of dispensationalism that made it compelling
for modern believers appeared in the epistemic methods of taxonomic
modernity. In the popular culture they inhabited, dispensationalists found
the tools and methods they needed to produce confident religious ideas.
Perhaps nothing illustrated the pervasive influence of popular taxonomic
thinking as clearly as the nineteenth-century Sunday school movement.

Sunday Schools and the Shifting

Terrain of Popular Confidence
For all his commercial success, Wanamaker’s chief passion was not
retailing but religion. Active in Presbyterian causes throughout his life,
he founded churches in Philadelphia that grew to national prominence.
 Taxonomic Minds and Technological Confidence 19

A lifelong YMCA supporter, he served as president of the organization

from 1870 to 1883.3 He founded the Pennsylvania State Sunday School
Association and served as its president until 1898. Wanamaker planned
and organized his religious work as systematically as his businesses.
Along with innovations in religious advertising, he sought new ways to
institutionalize trust between religious institutions and their patrons.
In February 1858, as a nineteen-year-old store clerk, Wanamaker began
canvassing the poor Schuylkill River district of Philadelphia, looking for
children to attend his Sunday services. Never progressing beyond grade
school, he often said that his most important education came from his
childhood Sunday school, and he hoped to pass on the experience. His
first meetings were interrupted by local hoodlums, but after securing pro-
tection from volunteer firemen, Wanamaker’s Sunday school meetings
quickly grew. By July of the same year, space considerations forced him to
move services into a giant outdoor tent; more than three hundred children
attended the first tent service. By October Wanamaker felt sufficiently
established—or ambitious—to begin a subscription service among the
local families for a building fund. Continuing the same rapid trajectory,
the Bethany Sunday school quickly grew into the largest Sunday school in
America. Evincing what one biographer described as his “talent of devel-
oping on a grandiose scale, of doing everything in a big way,” Bethany
soon developed into a full-fledged church and one of the most important
religious centers in Philadelphia.4
Wanamaker’s success in establishing the Bethany Sunday school
revealed new forces at work in the institutional development of American
Protestantism. Wanamaker brought market techniques to bear on his
religious projects from his earliest days. A meticulous record keeper,
Wanamaker’s financial statement for Bethany in October 1858 included
the following items: “Advertising, June 24 to October 6—$17.81. Posters
and handbills—$6.25.”5 Out of a total budget of less than seventy dollars,
Wanamaker devoted more than 25 percent to marketing. Recognizing that
religious services faced competition and putting no great store in dreary
theology or morose hymns, he pioneered the use of innovative and upbeat
church music, accompanied by as many instrumentalists as he could find
or train. Bethany illustrated how religious institutions integrated tech-
niques from the broader culture to solve problems of urban Christianity.
Sunday schools like Bethany illustrate the changing dynamics of
religion in the period not because they were exceptional, but because
they were so typical. Sunday schools formed one of the largest lay-led
20 Dispens a t iona l Moder nism

Figure 1.1 John Wanamaker’s Philadelphia buildings. Both the Bethany Church
and the Wanamaker Department Store became Philadelphia landmarks, visible
here in early commemorative postcards.
Source: “Philadelphia Wanamaker Store,” postcard, The World Post Card Co.,
Philadelphia, PA, circa 1910. “Philadelphia Bethany Church,” postcard, Souvenir Post
Card Co., Philadelphia, PA, circa 1912. Commemorative postcards in possession of the
author.

movements in United States history—including, by 1906, 192,722

schools, 1,746,074 officers and teachers, and 15,337,811 students.6
Without a central administration, American Protestant Sunday schools
were structured by common understandings of the world and domi-
nant themes in the wider culture. The American Sunday School Union,
founded in 1824, gradually took the lead in directing interdenomina-
tional projects, yet its influence was voluntary and its activities largely
 Taxonomic Minds and Technological Confidence 21

educational, such as organizing conferences, gathering national statis-

tics, and publishing advice manuals. Despite growing theological divi-
sions, education of children remained one of the unifying factors in
American Protestantism well into the twentieth century. Thus, tracking
changes in the Sunday school movement reveals the challenges faced in
the main channels of American Protestantism, and the kinds of solu-
tions that were compelling.
Two key issues in the late nineteenth century concerned the sufficiency
of the Bible as the sole curriculum and the required qualifications of teach-
ers. The Bible was at the center of mid-nineteenth-century Protestant life,
and thus central for Sunday school work as well. Memorization of popular
biblical passages was the standard form of Sunday school pedagogy before
1850.7 The shared assumption was that the Bible was digestible even for
little children, and that exposure to the plain words of scripture would
provide students with the insights necessary to understand and embrace
Christian principles. In this, the Sunday school movement was built on
common impulses among American Protestants, particularly republi-
canism, anti-clericalism, Common Sense reasoning, and an overwhelm-
ing reverence for the Bible, plainly understood.8 Sunday school classes
were generally taught by lay people, and even administrators, superinten-
dents, and national leaders (such as Wanamaker) were often not clergy.
Sunday schools across the country reflected populist ideas of intellectual
authority, as common people expressed their religious values by teaching
commonly understood doctrine to common children. These lay teachers
grounded their authority in the Protestant principle of sola scriptura—the
Bible alone—refigured through nineteenth-century Common Sense
reasoning.
The keyword for most mid-nineteenth-century use of the Bible was
“reasonableness,” and this reasonableness was a matter of both individ-
ual minds and shared worldviews. Historian Nathan Hatch described
this impulse as “the assertion that private judgment should be the ulti-
mate tribunal in religious matters.”9 Ideas warranted attention because
they met the standards of popular reason. Hermeneutical and peda-
gogical methods were largely notable by their denial; thinkers did not
need to do anything fancy to translate common sense experience into
knowledge, or to transform the plain language of the Bible into religious
teaching. In turn, these ideas of reasonableness naturalized assump-
tions about the authority of individual knowing and the private nature
of religious belief.
22 Dispens a t iona l Moder nism

Throughout the nineteenth century, most of the era’s Protestants were

comfortable with untrained lay persons teaching their children from wide-
spread and “common” understandings of the Bible. Plain reasonableness
was the approach espoused by evangelists working among the urban poor
and lower middle classes, particularly with children. After mid-century
large Sunday schools started flourishing in many American cities. In
1858—the same year as Wanamaker began his Bethany Sunday school—a
young Chicago shoe salesman named Dwight L. Moody launched his own
Sunday school program, recruiting students by chasing down urchins in
the shabby back streets of Chicago.
Similarities between Moody’s evangelistic project and Wanamaker’s
abounded. Moody’s Sunday school saw astronomical growth, reaching
several hundred children within a few years.10 Moody’s North Market Hall
School quickly grew into the largest institution of its kind in Chicago,
becoming a well-known tourist attraction. North Market Hall relied on
lay teachers and a curriculum based solely on the Bible. As Moody’s son
William described the early years: “scholars and teachers had but one
text-book, the Bible, and denominational lines were not recognized.”11
Both Moody and Wanamaker’s work illustrate how large, urban, inter-
denominational, lay-led, Bible-based Sunday school programs became a
major feature of religious life in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Yet as the century wore on, a proliferation of new Sunday school
publications began to reveal growing uncertainty about the prospects
of the Bible-only curricula. Where churches once supplied pupils of all
ages simply with a King James Bible, now they began investing in many
other sorts of Sunday school material. Publishing this Sunday school
literature—study guides, lesson plans, review questions, maps, Bible
dictionaries, and more—became a burgeoning business. The American
Sunday School Union saw sales from their publication arm grow from
$10,000 in 1826 to $235,000 in 1860.12 Denominations such as the
Baptists and Methodists launched their own Sunday school publishing
empires. The growth of both denominational and trans-denominational
materials among evangelical churches suggested that their faith in their
untrained lay teachers’ perspicuity to interpret the Bible was not as iron-
clad as their persistent rhetoric of “the Bible alone” suggested.
John Wanamaker, attuned to market conditions in religious contexts
as well as commercial ones, aspired to help transform American Sunday
school curriculum, not merely in Bethany, but nationally. In 1871 he
purchased a floundering publication named The Sunday School Times.
 Taxonomic Minds and Technological Confidence 23

Founded in 1858, The Sunday School Times had never gained much atten-
tion. Wanamaker intended to change that. In 1875 Wanamaker hired long-
time national Sunday school leader Henry Clay Trumbull as editor, along
with a business manager, John D. Wattles. With sound financial footing,
a keen understanding of advertising, and two well-qualified leaders, The
Sunday School Times prospered. Once on firm footing, Wanamaker sold
the business to Trumbull and Wattles in 1877, and by 1896, circulation for
The Sunday School Times had risen to 156,038, making it the second most
popular religious periodical in the United States, narrowly behind The
Christian Herald’s 167,000 subscribers.13
With this wide audience, editor Henry Clay Trumbull became one of
the most influential leaders in American religious life. A Civil War chap-
lain and a longtime Sunday school worker, Trumbull seems nevertheless
a strange fit for his chosen profession. His associate Edwin Wilbur Rice
described him as “fiery in temperament, imperious in manner, alert in
mind, acute in judgment, and working at a high tension … proud to
be counted a Puritan of Puritans.”14 Trumbull’s ambitions were evident.
Over the years Trumbull secured and printed statements about the value
of Sunday schools from Presidents Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes,
William McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt, revealing his lofty ambitions
for both the magazine and the movement.
The mass of supplementary materials on sale in every edition of The
Sunday School Times demonstrated a professional commitment to an
unstated—perhaps unstatable—policy of “the Bible plus help.” Alongside
advertisements for corsets and elastic belt buckles and burglar safes—
evidence of Wanamaker’s entrepreneurial acumen—were pages of adver-
tisements for review exercises, Sunday school reference libraries, tracts,
lesson leaves, hymnbooks and singing books, illustrated Bibles and other
sundry resources for Sunday school educators. Appeals to expertise
grew more explicit toward the turn of the century. In 1896 The Sunday
School Times ran a short editorial titled “Common-sense in Bible Study.”
It began with a punchy refutation of popular faith in popular reason-
ableness: “It is a violation of common-sense to attach undue importance
to common-sense views.”15 The author continued: “we do not weigh the
common-sense views of an ignorant man concerning electrical phenom-
ena against the knowledge of an expert electrician. ‘Common-sense’ and
special knowledge are of the same relative importance in Bible study as
elsewhere.”16 In the Sunday school movement, as in the wider culture,
reasonableness seemed less and less a product of common sense and
24 Dispens a t iona l Moder nism

more and more related to the faith put in the products of education and
expertise.
This proliferation of Sunday school material told volumes. In the 1850s
the Bible was seen as the only necessary text for teaching Sunday school
classes, yet by the 1870s many more helps were needed. It was increas-
ingly unclear whether to view Sunday schools as a great democratic move-
ment for Bible education, or as a scientific process of regulating the stages
of childhood religious development, or both simultaneously. Trumbull
and The Sunday School Times advocated both populist and specialist views
about teaching Sunday school. Non-specialists, including US presidents,
could not always figure out the balance. In 1876 Trumbull solicited a note
from President Ulysses S. Grant for a centennial edition of The Sunday
School Times. “My advice to Sunday-schools,” Grant proclaimed, “is: Hold
fast to the Bible as the sheet-anchor of your liberties … To the influ-
ence of this book are we indebted for all the progress made in true civi-
lization, and to this we must look as our guide in the future.”17 Yet in
the same issue, an article by longtime Sunday school administrator John
S. Hart—founder and editor of the magazine from 1859 to 1871—argued
that Sunday schools’ methods must go beyond this simple Biblicism, put-
ting behind amateurism and embracing scientific educational theories.
Hart suggested that Sunday schools needed to be professionally managed.
“There should be intelligent classification of the scholars,” he argued, “not
according to years or size, but according to intellectual capacity and devel-
opment; classification of the school … blackboard exercises, not acrostic
gymnastics, but explanations addressed to the eye as the most certain
method of reaching the understanding and the memory.”18 By 1876 Hart,
along with most national Sunday school leaders, believed that specialized
methods and materials were needed for pupils to approach the Bible effec-
tively in Sunday school classes. Like Grant, they imagined the Bible as a
“sheet-anchor,” but one enmeshed in thick nets of pedagogical theories,
methods, exercises, teaching practices, and study guides. The surge of
Sunday school publications made manifest a profound but subtle shift in
the cultural mechanisms of knowledge production.
Why, by the end of the nineteenth century, did plain reasonableness
and lay interpretations of the Bible not seem as effective as they had half
a century before? It started with the city. The rapid growth of cities in the
late nineteenth century produced new forms of crisis and new visions
of mass culture, along with new technological and social solutions for
the disorientations of urban life.19 The end of the nineteenth century saw
 Taxonomic Minds and Technological Confidence 25

the decline of the autonomy and cultural power of what historian Robert
Wiebe called the “island community.”20 While urbanization had been a
fear of small communities for the better part of a century, in the stormy
aftermath of the Civil War, hitherto powerful rural alliances of repub-
lican patriarchy, small-scale capitalism, and Victorian moralism began
to crumble at an accelerated rate.21 In their place came a new order of
industrial capitalism, accompanied by sweeping new immigration, messy
urban politics, consumer culture, and racial, ethnic, and class struggles,
all mediated onto a national stage by massive technological systems such
as electric and telephone grids. In this context, fear of social change was
outpaced only by desire for it.
For all their disorientation and fragmentation, cities helped produce
a more unified national culture in this period. To be sure, looking at
demographic measures such as ethnicity, wealth, class, and politics,
American culture became more diverse and contentious, and what
came to be seen as American mass culture was never available to the
majority of Americans. Yet by other measures—such as the rise of a
middle-class consumer culture and the adoption of large-scale techno-
logical systems—a more interconnected national landscape emerged.
Promoters of a national mass culture—men like John Wanamaker—had
confidence that a unified set of values and technological solutions could
cure the increasing fragmentation of society. This new national culture
abstracted values from white, Protestant, middle-class communities and
marketed them as essential American ideals, a vision of the Good Life.22
Historian William Leach described this as the production of: “a distinct
culture, unconnected to traditional family or community values, to reli-
gion in any conventional sense, or to political democracy. It was a secular
business and market-oriented culture, with the exchange and circulation
of money and goods at the foundation of its aesthetic life and of its moral
sensibility.”23 National mass culture promised that “good” Americans
could improve their lives through more efficient production, consump-
tion of material goods and services, and reliance on technology and tech-
nological values. Technological systems—such as railroads, electricity,
the telegraph, and large mechanized factories—mediated many of these
urban and national transformations. On the one hand, they generated or
exacerbated many forms of crisis, highlighting inequalities and natural-
izing certain forms of social capital. At the same time, they promised
solutions to the problems of the age, including the very problems they
created or exposed.
26 Dispens a t iona l Moder nism

Yet the changes wrought by urban transformations, the emergence of

mass culture, and the spread of technological systems were not only social,
but profoundly epistemic. The challenges facing urban life outstripped
the capacity of plain reasonableness to address. In light of the growing
diversity and complexity of these problems, Americans demanded more
complex solutions that reflected these transformed conditions of know-
ing. Seeking new methods for producing knowledge, they increasingly
turned to technological specialists and their values.

Engineering a New World

The end of the nineteenth century gave birth to a world of engineers. It
was a world built by engineers—trains and tractors and electric street-
lights and skyscrapers—but also a world built for engineers, as ever more
instruments for measurement and classification came into popular use,
such as stopwatches and railroad schedules and measuring cups. Many
Americans focused on the salvific power of technology, both to solve
problems and to create new middle-class lives based on middle-class
Anglo-Protestant desires and expectations. Engineering impulses were
venerated in inventors like Thomas Edison and industrial systematiz-
ers like Frederick Winslow Taylor. The appetite for technological values
was illustrated in the explosive growth of engineering as a profession.
Census data showed the number of professional engineers rose from a
mere seven thousand in 1880 to 136,000 in 1920.24 Historian Thomas
Hughes suggested that this did more than simply produce a new world
based on technology: “A nation of machine makers and system builders,
they became imbued with a drive for order, system, and control.”25 The
boom in professional engineering revealed not only changing industrial
needs, but also the technological desires of the culture at large.
Beyond the work of professionals, the engineering mindset took hold
in the everyday life of American people, and in their efforts to remap mod-
ern culture. In 1896 Fannie Farmer published her now-famous edition of
the Boston Cooking School Cookbook, the first cookbook in America to use
level measurements. Prior to this, following a recipe required prior mas-
tery of the art of cooking, presumably learned in traditional households.
By the turn of the twentieth century, though, this conception was giving
way before a growing engineering spirit. Farmer’s cookbook relied on a
different concept of the recipe: a set of precise textual rules that, read lit-
erally, promised cooks consistent and reproducible results. Farmer linked
 Taxonomic Minds and Technological Confidence 27

cooking and quantification with the popular desire for technological prog-
ress, describing her cookbook as “condensed scientific knowledge which
will lead to deeper thought and broader study of what to eat.”26 Farmer
thought scientific explanations and technological processes should not be
reserved for experts, but were an imperative part of new mass consump-
tion. She wrote: “During the last decade much time has been given by
scientists to the study of foods and their dietetic value, and … the time
is not far distant when a knowledge of the principles of diet will be an
essential part of one’s education.”27 Farmer was not alone in this belief,
and her cookbook—and its scientific explanations—was widely adopted
by hundreds of thousands of American households.28 As cooks devoured
Farmer’s instructions for making measurements, precise measurement
itself became a product for popular consumption.
New social practices were predicated on the widespread cultural adop-
tion of engineering values, particularly the social power of numbers
and quantification, the ideal of efficiency, the popular embrace of ideas
about taxonomy and classification, and the quest for standardization. In
American popular culture, these values became conflated with objective,
scientific knowing. To be sure, technological values were not the only way
of imagining science. Most mid-nineteenth-century Americans thought
scientific method to be more or less synonymous with observation and
egalitarian common sense, and by the end of the century professional
researchers often associated science with probabilistic variation among
groups. Yet in the half century after the Civil War, popular imagination
held that scientific method necessarily involved the application of engi-
neering values or technological solutions. Engineering values became the
prime epistemic currency as Americans searched for new methods that
could buttress their confidence in their knowledge.
Observers did not recognize how their ways of thinking altered, nor
when they developed taxonomic minds. In the mid-nineteenth century,
the smooth, ocular faiths and plain truths of the world, understood
through common sense, rendered the world readily intelligible. Yet the
taxonomic mind of the late nineteenth century saw the world as anything
but clear, grounding its knowledge in specialized processes of measure-
ment, efficiency, classification, and standardization. These privileged
methods guided Americans, religious and otherwise, through the cultural
and intellectual changes of the end of the century. In turn, Protestant life
in America was transformed as innovators like Wanamaker brought com-
mercial practices into Sunday school work. The epistemic methods and
28 Dispens a t iona l Moder nism

values exemplified by the taxonomic mind became the central elements

of dispensational thinking.
The most fundamental engineering value was quantification,
grounded in basic numeracy. The growth of popular mathematical capaci-
ties in the early nineteenth century, along with the corresponding boom
in public education, enabled the subsequent development of a new cul-
tural faith in numbers. Historian Patricia Cline Cohen described: “By the
mid-nineteenth century the prestige of quantification was in the ascen-
dant. Counting was presumed to advance knowledge, because knowledge
was composed of facts and counting led to the most reliable and objective
form of fact there was, the hard number. … Counting was an end in
itself; it needed no further justification.”29
Implicitly, one of the powers of numbers came from their ability to
produce confidence in social relations. Trust in numbers became a vital
form of communication.30 As cities made personal relationships with mer-
chants impossible, urban residents were increasingly compelled to place
their trust in larger corporations or unknown merchants. Innovators like
John Wanamaker were quick to make use of quantification as a technol-
ogy of confidence. Wanamaker instituted novel policies for generating
customer confidence, such as fixed prices and one of the first “guaranteed
return” policies in American business. Recognizing that one of the chief
impediments to building huge urban stores was giving customers suf-
ficient grounds for trust, Wanamaker invoked the power of numbers to
produce social trust. Consumers found safety in numbers.
Numbers produced confidence not just in retail transactions, but in
the formation of basic knowledge. Tables of figures sprouted everywhere.
Americans could hardly swing a stick through late nineteenth-century
popular culture without encountering extensive evidence of quantifi-
cation. Even stick swinging itself became an object of quantification at
the turn of the twentieth century, as the American national pastime of
baseball found itself described through numbers: box scores, earned run
averages, batting averages, and other statistical means for quantifying
entertainment became an integral part of how the game was described,
played, managed, and enjoyed.
Alongside this steady diet of numbers, precise measurement fed a
generation craving engineering values. In her cookbook, Fannie Farmer
emphasized that the most important operation of cooking method was
measurement. Precise measurement of heat and moisture, proportions,
and ingredients were vital to predicable cooking success. In a section titled
 Taxonomic Minds and Technological Confidence 29

Figure 1.2 Fannie Farmer’s cookbook offered illustrations and instructions on

how modern cooks could incorporate precise measurement into the age-old pro-
cess of cooking.
Source: Fannie Merritt Farmer, The Boston Cooking-school Cook Book (Boston: Little,
Brown, and Company, 1896), 28.

“How to Measure,” Farmer wrote: “Correct measurements are absolutely

necessary to insure the best results. Good judgment, with experience, has
taught some to measure by sight; but the majority need definite guides.”31
Precise measurements proved seductive to many of the scientific minds
of the generation, and in aspirational mass culture, every mind was a
scientific mind.
Quantification and measurement were used to generate trust in
Sunday school work in a variety of ways. Numbers were publicized to
demonstrate popular appeal, and thus credibility. The American Sunday
School Association produced copious reports full of statistics and charts
quantifying the movement. Giving the 1888 Lyman Beecher lectures at
Yale Divinity School, Trumbull suggested that advertising the member-
ship success of Sunday school projects could not only attract more stu-
dents, but improve the capacity of students to learn. “There is a power in
numbers in the Sunday-school,” he wrote, “not only as promoting enthu-
siasm in the school as a whole, but as quickening and aiding the mental
perceptions and the spiritual life of the individual scholar.”32 Likewise,
30 Dispens a t iona l Moder nism

measuring things—even seemingly difficult things to measure, like

language—became an essential tool for more effective teaching. In his
advice to Sunday school workers for preparing “children’s sermons,”
Trumbull advocated replacing Latinate words with Anglo-Saxon monosyl-
lables, and favorably quoted one speaker who communicated with “clus-
ters of twenty and thirty, or even forty and fifty, words of one syllable.”33
Sometimes numbers seemed to have a power to generate confidence
independent of their function. In the advertisement section of an 1893
edition of The Sunday School World, a Bible dictionary edited by eminent
historian Philip Schaff was marketed primarily in terms of quantities: “It
has 12 maps and over 400 illustrations, tables of Jewish weights and mea-
sures, etc. etc. It contains nearly 1000 pages, and measures 8 inches by
2 inches.”34 The ad created some ambiguity about how, precisely, this dic-
tionary would help the Sunday school worker. The vast quantity of reli-
able helps inside could provide the owner with a more reliable basis for
teaching. Perhaps just as important, it could also convey confidence in
the authority of the Sunday school teacher simply by the sheer volume of
space the book took on a shelf.
In the field of industrial engineering, devotion to precise measure-
ment reached new heights because it supported efficiency. A generation
of engineering-minded reformers sought to apply the principles of effi-
ciency to improve productivity in the factory, in the home, and in the
Sunday school. Industrial engineering, and particularly scientific man-
agement, was the product of a new generation of school-trained (instead
of shop-trained) factory managers.35 While the movement was concerned
with labor costs, politics, race, and class, at its core was a debate about
epistemic and methodological authority. Older shop-trained managers
valued tradesmen mentors and an older system of craftsmanship, but
new engineering managers assumed relevant skills could best be learned
in classrooms, from instructors and blueprints. Most famously, in 1884
a young mechanical engineer named Frederick Winslow Taylor became
the chief engineer of the Midvale Steel Works, and his work transformed
American factory management. Taylor believed that the chief problem for
American business was inefficiency. Linking efficiency with epistemol-
ogy, he argued: “the remedy for this inefficiency lies in systematic man-
agement … The best management is a true science, resting upon clearly
defined laws, rules, and principles, as a foundation.”36 Taylor’s new sci-
ence of efficiency promised to transform economic and social life accord-
ing to modern methods of knowledge production.
 Taxonomic Minds and Technological Confidence 31

Taylor mass-produced imitators and disciples. Two of the most impor-

tant were Lillian and Frank Gilbreth. Frank Gilbreth described the under-
lying anthropology of their work: “It is the aim of Scientific Management
to induce men to act as nearly like machines as possible, so far as doing
the work in the one best way that has been discovered is concerned.”37 The
two primary tools of the Gilbreths were the stopwatch—used for mea-
suring time precisely—and the scientific diagram—used to disseminate
the technical knowledge gleaned through observation, measurement, and
analysis. To create their time studies, the Gilbreths measured the motions
of a master craftsman to break down each into the smallest possible ele-
ments and durations. These were then diagramed, analyzed, optimized,
and publicized through scientific diagrams so that other workers could
imitate the “one best way” of doing a task and thus maximize overall
efficiency.
Yet interest in scientific management did not end at the factory door.
Lillian Gilbreth helped usher time studies from the shop floor to the
kitchen counter, catering to middle-class homemakers who wished to
adopt the tools of precise measurement and careful charting to improve
the efficiency and quality of their labor. The title of one of her many
books, Management in the Home: Happier Living Through Saving Time and
Energy, aptly described this goal, promising close connections between
efficiency and an idealized Good Life. By measuring and dividing time
and tasks into increasingly precise units, Gilbreth could determine the
“one best way” to accomplish everyday household chores, such as boiling
an egg or preparing meatloaf. Gilbreth encouraged homemakers to take
up technical charting on their own, just like professional engineers: “In
the process of the chart the engineer gives a description of every step used
in doing the job. … You can do this too. Make process charts of some of
your household tasks and see what a clear picture you get of what you are
doing and how you might improve.”38 Writing in popular magazines such
as the Ladies’ Home Journal, Gilbreth’s household management theories
conveyed to consumers, even those who did not manage their household
scientifically, that engineering values offered the best solutions for the
anxieties of the age.
Everyday efficiency and Sunday efficiency were only short steps away.
Insofar as Taylorism and scientific management represented the crystal-
lization of what historian Carroll Pursell described as “a national incli-
nation to try and solve social problems through technical means,” it is
small surprise that efficiency became a mantra within the Sunday school
32 Dispens a t iona l Moder nism

movement.39 More than a decade before Taylor published his Principles of

Scientific Management, New Jersey minister and Sunday school adminis-
trator E. Morris Fergusson was championing efficiency and engineering
methods. “The Sunday-school ought to be the most efficient arm of the
church,” Fergusson argued in The Sunday School Times. He proposed the
efficiently organized mill or factory as the proper model to follow: “There
must be a standard of work. Superintendent, foreman, engineer, skilled
workman, apprentice, yard hand,—each must know his task and be able
to perform it above a recognized limit of allowable error. This standard …
is determined by the impersonal conditions.”40 Celebrating industry’s
“complete domination of every process by the will of the superintendent,”
Fergusson sought to improve the work of the Sunday schools by putting
trained professionals firmly in charge.
More systematic approaches followed. Applying scientific manage-
ment principles to religion caught the imagination of Henry Frederick
Cope, general secretary of the Religious Education Association, who in
1912 published Efficiency in the Sunday School. Cope giddily described
“efficiency” as “a word to conjure with.” Even stronger, Cope thought, it
might be a moral imperative. “No church,” he wrote, “has a moral right to
cumber the ground and to draw support from men unless it is developing
efficiency to do its work.”41 Repeatedly comparing churches to factories,
Cope found much to admire and emulate in the order of a scientifically
managed factory floor. In chapters bearing names such as “Applying
Some Efficiency Tests,” “Order and Discipline. The Organization Test,”
and “Making Your Experts at Home,” Cope offered stringent, if not suc-
cinct, advice on how to run a Sunday school like an efficient industrial
factory. “An efficient Sunday school,” he concluded, “develops efficient
Christians.”42
Efficiency minded Sunday school teachers could have spent years wad-
ing through the advice. In 1916 the journal The Biblical World published
an article by Warren Grant titled “Scientific Management and Sunday
School Superintendence.” Grant may have had specific targets in mind
when he opined: “There is no reason why a church should be ineffective
simply because it is composed of good people.”43 An efficient system, as he
proposed, involved an elaborate multi-tiered arrangement of superinten-
dence and oversight based on “specialization of endeavor” that he called
“functional foremanship.” Even more ambitiously, that same year Eugene
M. Camp wrote a book titled Christ’s Economy: Scientific Management
of Men and Things in Relation to God and His Cause. President of the
 Taxonomic Minds and Technological Confidence 33

symptomatically named American Board of Applied Christianity, Camp

sought to demonstrate that Jesus was the original scientific manager.
Chugging ahead with contemporary metaphors, Camp argued, “The men
of a parish are like locomotives in a railway yard. Evangelists and firemen
may kindle fires in fireboxes, but there are no dividends until there are defi-
nite plans and work—tracks and engineers.”44 Mixing the newest theories
of scientific management with a dollop of nineteenth-century Protestant
primitivism, Camp argued that efficient “plans and work” had been avail-
able since the teachings of Jesus. He announced: “Christ taught scientific
management of men and things in relation to God and His cause, and
that that management which solves the problems of the church, solves
also the pressing human problems of industry, of commerce, of govern-
ment.”45 A magisterial and ambitious work of anachronism, Camp encap-
sulated the Progressive Era desire to make the primitive church function
like an efficient machine.
If quantification, measurement, and efficiency were the basic epis-
temic currency of the era, classification was the gold standard. Perhaps
the most seductive form of classification was taxonomy. This offered new
tools—visual and conceptual—for efficiently and scientifically order-
ing the world. Ambitious projects of taxonomy began in the eighteenth
century, including Linnaeus’s biological classifications and the work
of the French Encyclopediasts, led by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond
d’Alembert, who invested vast energies in the taxonomic classification
of all human knowledge.46 The “taxonomic approach to knowledge,” as
historian Robert Darnton argued, promised that “epistemological prob-
lems would disappear in a Linnaen-like process of naming and classify-
ing.”47 Although modern systems of classification had emerged decades or
centuries earlier, it was in the late nineteenth century that classification
became naturalized in popular thinking.
As taxonomic impulses became instinctive, and corresponding
assumptions became largely invisible, popular taxonomy was extended
to order the natural world, the human world, and language itself. Even
children got involved. Grammar school readers demonstrated these
new expectations. Lindley Murray’s English Grammar—one of the most
popular American school readers in the pre-taxonomic early nineteenth
century—followed long-standing pedagogical practice by emphasizing
memorization and practical illustrations. Changing trends, however, sur-
faced with the 1877 publication of Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg’s
edition of Higher Lessons in English. Suggesting that students must “know
34 Dispens a t iona l Moder nism

the sentence as a skillful engineer knows his engine,” Reed and Kellogg
believed that dissecting the relations between linguistic elements taught
students “the laws of discourse in general.”48 The crux of Reed and
Kellogg’s appeal lay in their introduction of a taxonomic way of ordering
language relations: the sentence diagram. “In written analysis,” Reed and
Kellogg wrote, “the simple map, or diagram … will enable the pupil to
present directly and vividly to the eye the exact function of every clause
in the sentence.”49 The sentence diagram provided children with the tools
(and tasks) of the engineer.
What made taxonomy so appealing? There were many reasons.
Taxonomies produced pleasure.50 Taxonomy was a means for building
confidence in a knower’s comprehension of the structures of the world.
Visually, taxonomy often produced dramatic and compelling results.
Taxonomies, generally heuristic, hierarchical, and multidimensional, were
capable of producing elaborate, scientific-looking diagrams—creating an
aesthetic of expertise. Taxonomies simplified history. More often than
not, taxonomies eliminated the messiness of historical development by
focusing on synchronic distinctions between classes. Taxonomies were
powerful. Choosing grounds to evaluate similarity and difference was
both a scientific and a political act, and power was necessarily involved in
making the axes of classification stick. Classifiers often asserted that their

Figure 1.3 Introducing the sentence diagram, Reed and Kellogg suggested that
recognizing the taxonomy of grammar was an essential part of any scientific
understanding of language. “English Grammar,” they wrote, “is the science which
teaches the forms, uses, and relations of the words of the English language.”
Quote from: Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg, Higher Lessons in English (New York:
Clark & Maynard, 1880), 12.
Source: Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg, Higher Lessons in English (New York: Clark &
Maynard, 1880), 37.
 Taxonomic Minds and Technological Confidence 35

systems were based in the structure of the natural world itself, but no mat-
ter how invisible to the times, such structures were always constructions.
Taxonomies were also remarkably effective in naturalizing human
projects of ordering time. Often the classification of time involved the
construction of complex and large-scale systems of division. The intro-
duction of time zones was perhaps the greatest example of this work.
Through the collusion of the largest railroad companies—who sought to
increase measurability and predictability of train schedules—the United
States was functionally divided into four time zones in 1883. The railroads
were powerful interests, but the project was compelling to Americans in
its own right, and time zones achieved rapid popularity.51 Dividing time
into distinct zones seemed to be a reflection of the natural world—fol-
lowing the rotation of the sun around the earth—and over time it began
to take on the aura of natural inevitability. By the time Congress passed
a law confirming the use of time zones in 1918, many had forgotten that
these were a cultural product of division and distinction, and that these
particular boundaries and measurements were not the only way time
could be ordered.
Corporations became increasingly dependent on classifications of
time in their projects to promote efficiency. Historian T. J. Jackson Lears
argued that: “The corporate drive for efficiency underwrote quantified
time as a uniform standard of measurement and reinforced the spread-
ing requirement that people regulate their lives by the clock.”52 For many,
days became instinctively divided into work hours and leisure hours, work
hours further divided into tasks and goals and processes, measured by
the stopwatch of the industrial scientific manager and the punch-clock of
the factory floor. Public schools were just as hasty to embrace this model
of time. Post–Civil War schools in northern cities were some of the first
public institutions to be run by the clock. Along with teaching efficiency,
this clock-structured day helped train students for work in an increasingly
commercial world.53 Collectively, engineering principles forged an under-
standing of time as both economic and taxonomic.
Grammar lessons taught children to classify, even while these same
children were seen as appropriate subjects to be classified. In the Sunday
schools, one of the most vigorous debates surrounding classification came
with the introduction of systems of Graded Lessons. Instead of teaching
all children the same lessons with the same biblical texts, many Sunday
schools began separating students by age into different graded classes.
This responded to the practical problems of size in large, urban Sunday
36 Dispens a t iona l Moder nism

schools, but more pertinently, Graded Lessons attempted to ground new

teaching methods in scientific understandings of the nature of the child.
Writing in the Sunday School Times, Sunday school worker Frederica
Beard described: “Scientific observation of child nature has brought to
light two facts,—first that spiritual development runs along parallel lines
with physical and mental growth; second, that there are definite stages
of growth, determined by nascent periods, that stand out distinctly, and
must be reckoned with in any attempt to supply the needed nourishment
and training at any one stage.”54 These theories drew on new psychologies
of human development, and they were put into practice through debates
about taxonomies. Professionals argued about whether it was best to divide
classes based on age, on length of time as a Christian, or on the basis of
other measurable capacities. They argued just as much about which theo-
logical themes were appropriate for each graded class, and which biblical
texts accessible for each age. Several large systems of Graded Lesson plans
were produced by layering taxonomies, offering, for example, sequences
of seven years of weekly lesson plans, each adapted for age (or maturity) as
well as differing standards of theological and biblical complexity.
For Sunday schools to work like an efficient machine, however, they
needed more than simply to be governed by technological values. They
needed to work consistently. Close ties between national Sunday school
leaders and industrial pioneers helped produce the required virtues. In
1908 John Wanamaker was succeeded as president of the Pennsylvania
Sabbath School Association by condiment mogul Henry J. Heinz, presi-
dent of the Pittsburgh-based H. J. Heinz food company. Born in 1844 in
Pittsburgh, Heinz’s devout Lutheran parents hoped he would become a
minister. But Heinz got a taste of pickle peddling as a boy and devoted his
life to producing and selling produce. In 1876 he founded the eponymous
H. J. Heinz Company; by 1907 he was producing more than twelve mil-
lion bottles of ketchup per year (nearly one for every Sunday school stu-
dent in the country), and by his death in 1919 he had twenty-five branches,
6,523 employees, and eighty-five pickle-salting stations to his name.
Many of Heinz’s commercial innovations had to do with standardizing
his product, processes, and image. Heinz insisted his factory employees
were always clean-scrubbed and wearing spotless uniforms to impress
the many tourists that came to visit his factories. He standardized the
packaging of his products; in 1890 he created and patented the octagonal
screw-cap bottle that became ubiquitous for ketchup.55 This quest for uni-
formity extended beyond appearances. Heinz fought for the Pure Food
 Taxonomic Minds and Technological Confidence 37

and Drug Act of 1906, and was a strong proponent of greater sanitation
and health standards, in food and elsewhere.56 Standardization and uni-
formity were more than simple business strategies; they represented tech-
nological values that best solved the problems of the congealing American
mass culture.
Heinz relied on modern advertising to simultaneously appeal to and
spread the values of standardization, in order to generate public trust.
Like Wanamaker, Heinz was widely recognized as an advertising genius,
responsible for the ubiquitous “57 varieties” slogan. Although the com-
pany produced more than fifty-seven varieties of food in 1896 when the
slogan was unveiled, Heinz thought it sounded like a magic number.
(The fact that simple enumeration could serve on its own as an advertis-
ing slogan was itself remarkable.) The ketchup tycoon was also respon-
sible for one of the first electric signs in New York during the year 1900,
a six-story spectacle featuring 1,200 flashing light bulbs illuminating a
40-foot-long pickle. At the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago,
Heinz hired “pretty girls” to hand out samples and more than a million
green, pickle-shaped buttons labeled “Heinz.”57 Marketing and standard-
ization went hand in hand. He began having his salesmen forgo selling on
Saturdays to devote their time to helping middleman grocers learn how to
store and display produce. Heinz’s advertisements for standardized prod-
ucts and uniform quality simultaneously appealed to and promoted these
ideals. Standardization, like numbers, was useful in generating public
trust in an era of growing impersonal relations.
As a patron of both local and international Sunday schools, Heinz
helped shape the movement according to engineering values. He worked
alongside fellow industrialist barons like Wanamaker, as well as with a
number of national religious leaders who shared many of his values, par-
ticularly full-time Sunday school workers like John H. Vincent, Henry
Clay Trumbull, and Edwin Wilbur Rice.
In 1872 the American Sunday School Union made one of the first
strong moves toward standardization and unification when they adopted
a plan to create and distribute a common set of weekly lessons. Developed
by Vincent, Trumbull, and Rice, the uniform lesson plans were an ambi-
tious project that promised to introduce all children, regardless of denom-
ination, to the same Bible passage each week. These leaders described the
project not as a top-down imposition of order, but a fulfillment of populist
wishes for greater standardization. Trumbull offered: “The movement
for uniformity was popular rather than personal … It was the common
38 Dispens a t iona l Moder nism

people of the United States—the great mass of Bible students through

the length and breadth of the land—who pressed for it, creating a public
sentiment in its behalf not easily remedied.”58 Uniform lessons offered
engineered solutions to the perceived problems of Sunday school educa-
tion, standardizing the material that each child would be exposed to and
helping ameliorate the problem of unevenly trained lay teachers. Perhaps
not surprising given the close ties between industrialists like Heinz and
Wanamaker and the Sunday school movement, the goals of the Uniform
Lessons mirrored the goals of industrial capitalism and commercial mar-
keting: efficiency, standardization, control, and order.
To be sure, it was not always clear how to integrate these engineering
values into popular religious practices. In the Sunday school movement,
advocates of Uniform Lessons and Graded Lessons sometimes found
themselves at loggerheads while trying to balance the benefits of stan-
dardization and proper classification. In 1908 a group of sixty national
Sunday school leaders met in Boston and unanimously adopted two
seemingly contradictory resolutions:

1. That the system of a general lesson for the whole school, which has
been in successful use for thirty-five years, is still the most practicable
and effective system for the great majority of the Sunday-Schools of
North America. …
2. That the need of a graded system of lessons is expressed by so many
Sunday-Schools and workers that it should be adequately met by the
International Convention.59

Many similar paradoxical plans were hatched as Sunday school workers

sought the one best way to take the raw materials of denominational the-
ologies, biblical texts, and American children and forge them into uni-
formly confident Christian citizens.
If it was not always clear how to be scientific, it was clear that one
needed to be. In the Anglo-Protestant religious world, Sunday schools
revealed the impulse to transform all learning into a scientific enterprise.
Perhaps nothing showed this as clearly as the boom in publications of
theoretical materials about proper methods for teaching Sunday school.
Experts were busy preparing not only lessons for children, but method-
ological texts to teach Sunday school teachers how to teach. As methods
multiplied, prescriptive teaching materials proliferated.60
 Taxonomic Minds and Technological Confidence 39

Giddy with recursion, some thinkers imagined that if the use of

method was scientific, then studies of method must be doubly so.
Materials about materials sprung up. In A History of the American
Sunday School Curriculum, Frank Glenn Lankard, a professor of Biblical
Literature at Northwestern University, began to catalog and classify the
massive literature on Sunday school teaching.61 The science of Sunday
school reached a peak with Leonidas Wakefield Crawford. In a 1922
Northwestern University dissertation, Crawford attempted to analyze
and classify the contents of the various Sunday school materials cur-
rently in use. Titled The Status and Evaluation of Extra-Biblical Material
in Curriculum of Religious Education in the United States, Crawford’s work
represented one apex of recursive synthesis.62 For example, evaluating the
texts of the popular Constructive Studies in Religion Series of lessons,
Crawford estimated: “32.7 per cent of the lesson material is biblical, 52 per
cent is quasi-biblical, and 15.3 per cent is extra-biblical.”63 As arguments
about method spawned ever-more methodological edifices, scientific
method—associated for many in American culture with the engineer-
ing values of quantification, measurement, efficiency, classification, and
standardization—became the holy grail of educational crusades.

Aspirational Mainstream Religion

Wanamaker and the Sunday school movement demonstrated the porous-
ness of the boundaries between mass culture, corporate culture, and
religious culture in the late nineteenth century. Or rather, they demon-
strated how these boundaries were simultaneously being constructed and
transgressed. Although professionalization was actively producing silos
of specialization in American culture, in the popular imagination there
were often fuzzy boundaries between science and technology, between
business and religion, and between the kinds of knowledge produced by
education and those produced by advertising.
In this respect, the Sunday school movement helped erect the vast
architecture of “mainstream” Protestantism and American mass culture
constructed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To be sure, there
was never, institutionally or theologically, a mainstream Protestantism.
By the time transportation and communications made such unity and
cohesion possible, the landscape was irrevocably divisive. There were,
however, a number of groups with aspirations to speak to and for the
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
said to have made it a by-law to himself to use only four colours in
painting: probably Apelles found his advantage in that restraint, or
he would not have imposed it on his pallet. But if Zeuxis found that
he, Zeuxis, painted better by using a dozen colours than by confining
himself to four, he would have used a dozen, or he would not have
been Zeuxis.
On careful and thoughtful examination we shall find, that neither
in narrative nor dramatic fiction do great writers differ on the
principles of art in the works which posterity accepts from them as
great—whereas they all differ more or less in technical rules. There is
no great poetic artist, whether in narrative or the drama, who, in his
best works, ever represents a literal truth rather than the idealised
image of a truth—who ever condescends to servile imitations of
nature—who ever prefers the selection of particulars, in the
delineation of character or the conception of fable, to the expression
of generals—who does not aim at large types of mankind rather than
the portraiture of contemporaries—or, at least, wherever he may
have been led to reject these principles, it will be in performances
that are allowed to be beneath him. But merely technical rules are no
sooner laid down by the critics of one age, than they are scornfully
violated by some triumphant genius in the next. Technical rules have
their value for the artist who employs them, and who usually invents
and does not borrow them. Those that he imposes on himself he
seldom communicates to others. They are his secret—they spring
from his peculiarities of taste; and it is the adherence to those rules
which constitutes what we sometimes call his style, but more
properly his manner. It is by such rules, imposed on himself, that
Pope forms his peculiar cæsura, and mostly closes his sense at the
end of a couplet. When this form of verse becomes trite and
hackneyed, up rises some other poet, who forms by-laws for himself,
perhaps quite the reverse. All that we should then ask of him is
success: if his by-laws enable him to make as good a verse as Pope’s
in another way, we should be satisfied; if not—not. One main use in
technical rules to an author, if imposed on himself, or freely assented
to by himself, is this—the interposition of some wholesome
impediment to the over-facility which otherwise every writer
acquires by practice. And as this over-facility is naturally more apt to
be contracted in prose than in verse, and in the looseness or length of
the novel or romance, than in any other more terse and systematic
form of imaginative fiction—so I think it a wise precaution in every
prolific novelist to seek rather to multiply, than emancipate himself
from, the wholesome restraints of rules; provided always that such
rules are the natural growth of his own mind, and confirmed by his
own experience of their good effect on his productions. For if Art be
not the imitator of Nature, it is still less the copyist of Art. Its base is
in the study of Nature—not to imitate, but first to select, and then to
combine, from Nature those materials into which the artist can
breathe his own vivifying idea; and as the base of Art is in the study
of Nature, so its polish and ornament must be sought by every artist
in the study of those images which the artists before him have
already selected, combined, and vivified; not, in such study, to
reproduce a whole that represents another man’s mind, and can no
more be born again than can the man who created it; but again to
select, to separate, to recombine—to go through the same process in
the contemplation of Art which he employed in the contemplation of
Nature; profiting by all details, but grouping them anew by his own
mode of generalisation, and only availing himself of the minds of
others for the purpose of rendering more full and complete the
realisation of that idea of truth or beauty which has its conception in
his own mind. For that can be neither a work of art (in the æsthetic
sense of the word) nor a work of genius in any sense of the word,
which does not do a something that, as a whole, has never been done
before; which no other living man could have done; and which never,
to the end of time, can be done again—no matter how immeasurably
better may be the other things which other men may do. ‘Ivanhoe’
and ‘Childe Harold’ were produced but the other day; yet already it
has become as impossible to reproduce an ‘Ivanhoe’ or a ‘Childe
Harold’ as to reproduce an ‘Iliad.’ A better historical romance than
‘Ivanhoe,’ or a better contemplative poem than ‘Childe Harold,’ may
be written some day or other; but, in order to be better, it must be
totally different. The more a writer is imitated the less he can be
reproduced. No one of our poets has been so imitated as Pope, not
because he is our greatest or our most fascinating poet, but because
he is the one most easily imitated by a good versifier. But is there a
second Pope, or will there be a second Pope, if our language last ten
thousand years longer?
 THE LIFE OF GENERAL SIR HOWARD
DOUGLAS, BART.[3]

When the announcement first appeared that a biography of the

late Sir Howard Douglas was in progress, the impression made upon
our minds was anything but favourable to the enterprise. Of the good
and gifted man himself, as he mixed in general society, our
recollections were indeed of the most pleasurable kind. He stood
before us with his kindly manner, his noble appearance, his high
bearing, his generous nature, the perfect model of what an English
officer and gentleman ought to be. And casting our eyes across the
room to the shelf on which his ‘Naval Gunnery’ and ‘Military Bridges’
were ranged, we thought of him as a man of science more than
ordinarily well read in his profession. But not all our desire to find in
connection with him materials for a consecutive history, helped us to
any other conclusion than this, that the story of his life, if told at
length, must be a dull one. We acknowledge, less with shame than
with satisfaction and some surprise, that we were quite mistaken. Sir
Howard Douglas’s career had more of romance about it than that of
many a man who has filled a much larger space in the world’s
observation. It was successful as far as it carried him, because a
sound judgment controlled good abilities, and directed them to a
wise end. And, above all, it reads this lesson to coming generations,
that he who honestly seeks the wellbeing of others rarely fails, sooner
or later, to secure his own. Nor must we omit to render to Sir
Howard’s biographer the commendation which he deserves. Mr
Fullom has executed his task well; neither overlaying his narrative
with details, which sometimes weary, nor keeping back anything
which might conduce to its completeness, he has given us one of the
pleasantest books which, for some time past, has come under our
notice.
 The house of Douglas has from the earliest times been renowned
in Scottish story. Its alliance with the royal family began in the
fourteenth century, when the Lord of Dalkeith took to wife Mary the
fifth daughter of James I. On this same Lord of Dalkeith the earldom
of Morton was not long afterwards conferred by his brother-in-law,
James II. From father to son, or from uncle to nephew, the earldom
passed through twelve generations, and narrowly escaped coming in
the thirteenth to the father of Sir Howard. But Charles Douglas, if he
missed a coronet, won for himself a baronetcy and great distinction
as a British sailor. He it was who, when Arnold and Montgomery
besieged Quebec, forced his squadron through the ice on the St
Lawrence and relieved the place. He it was who first of all
constructed a flotilla for himself, and then swept the Canadian lakes
of the rebel gunboats; and by-and-by, on the 12th of April 1782, he
caught, as if by inspiration, that idea, the application of which
enabled Admiral Rodney to break the enemy’s line, and to save at a
critical moment the honour of the British fleet.
Of this Sir Charles Douglas, Howard was the eldest son by a
second marriage. Sir Charles’s first wife, a foreign lady, had brought
him two sons and a daughter, so that Howard’s prospects, so far as
title and fortune were concerned, could not have been in his infancy
very bright: and they would have been entirely overcast by the early
death of his mother, had not her place been well supplied by a
maternal aunt. Under the roof of this lady, Mrs Bailey of Olive Bank,
near Musselburgh, the little fellow grew and prospered, repaying all
the tenderness with which he was reared by his affectionate and
gentle disposition, as well as by his industry and success over his
books.
Howard’s brothers both entered the navy. This was natural, and it
was perhaps equally so that Howard should desire to follow their
example; but Sir Charles considered that, if his three sons were all to
embrace the same profession, the chances were that they would only
stand in each other’s way. He gave directions, therefore, that Howard
should be educated for a different walk in life, and the boy ascended
in due time from the charge of the governess to the grammar-school.
Yet the child’s tastes were entirely naval all the while. He built toy
ships, and sailed them on a pond in the garden; he made friends of
the fisher-lads and cabin-boys along the coast, and became so
initiated into the mysteries of their craft that none among them
could better manage than he a fishing-boat or a ship’s yawl. It thus
became clear to Sir Charles Douglas, who visited his sister in 1789,
previously to assuming the command on a foreign station, that
nature had designed his youngest son for a career similar to his own,
and he made up his mind to take Howard with him, and to rate him
as a midshipman on board the flag-ship. But the coveted flag he was
never destined to hoist. A sudden illness carried him off while the
guest of his sister, and Howard’s lot was cast for him in the army.
The Royal Academy at Woolwich was more easily entered in those
days than it is now. A pass examination was, however, required; and
young Douglas, strange to say, in spite of his marked bias for
practical mechanics, failed in the elements of geometry. But he had
made so good a figure in other respects, and appeared so cast down
by the circumstance, that the examiner, Dr Hutton, encouraged him
to try again; and three weeks spent with a clever crammer sufficed to
bring him up to the mark. He therefore presented himself a second
time, passed, and was admitted.
There is one defect in Mr Fullom’s history which puts his readers
to considerable inconvenience—he is not very accurate in his dates.
We do not quite make out, for example, when young Douglas made
his way into the Academy, or how long he continued a cadet; but we
are told, what is extremely probable in itself, that he was much
beloved by his contemporaries, and that he soon took the lead among
them both in the playground and in the class-room. His passion for
naval affairs continued as strong as ever, and he indulged it by
frequent boat excursions on the Thames. He swam, also, like a duck,
and paid many a furtive visit to Deptford dockyard, where he studied
by fits and starts the art of shipbuilding. His vacations he spent in
Scotland, passing to and from Leith in one of the smacks;—an
intense delight to him, because he was instructed by the crews in the
arts of knotting and splicing, of plaiting points and gaskets, of
making gammets, and heaving the lead. It is not often that a youth
displays such unmistakable aptitude for a career which he is not
destined to follow; and it still more rarely happens that the
amusements of the boy, whom circumstances in after life place in a
groove apparently wide apart from them, turn out to have been by no
means the least useful branches of his education, either to himself or
to others.
After completing his college course, Douglas received a
lieutenant’s commission, and in 1795 assumed the command of a
small artillery corps in the north of England. His headquarters were
in Tynemouth Castle, and he had detachments at Sunderland,
Hartlepool, and Berwick-upon-Tweed. His entire force in gunners
fell short of fifty men; yet this was at a time when the risk of invasion
appeared to be imminent, and Douglas and his gunners were
necessarily exposed to bear the brunt of it. The young lieutenant felt
how perfectly inefficient his force was, and cast about to devise some
means of increasing it. He asked first for a reinforcement of
artillerymen, which could not be afforded. He then suggested to the
general officer of the district the propriety of drilling a portion of his
infantry to the great-gun exercise; and himself, with unwearied
diligence, instructed thirty men from each of the regiments
quartered within many miles of Tynemouth. He was not, however,
satisfied even with this—the thought struck him that he might enlist
the sympathies of the fishermen and coasting sailors in the cause
which he had at heart; and having obtained through General Balfour
the sanction of the Government, he invited them to form themselves
into companies of volunteer artillery. Upwards of five hundred fine
fellows answered to the call; and the thoughtful lad had soon the
satisfaction of knowing that danger, if it did come, would not find
him unprepared, and that the merit of having provided a remedy for
a great and acknowledged evil was entirely his own.
It is not to be supposed that the young man was so given up to
serious matters as to turn away from the recreations common to his
age and profession: on the contrary, Douglas seems to have been at
Tynemouth the gayest of the gay. He danced well, rode well,
established a yacht in which he made many adventurous cruises, and
won the hearts of young and old by his frank and graceful manners.
But sterner work awaited him, and the romance of his existence
began.
Early in August 1795 he received orders to take charge of a
detachment of troops, which, with women and children, were to
proceed from Woolwich to Quebec. He joined the Phillis transport at
Gravesend, and found himself the senior officer, with six subalterns
besides himself on board. To him the prospect of a voyage across the
Atlantic was a positive delight. What cared he about the inadequacy
of accommodation, or the wretched nature of the food which was
then issued to soldiers embarked? His thoughts were entirely given
up to the great object of his boyish fancy—the actual navigation of a
ship out of sight of land, and all the enterprise and excitement
incident thereto. Never neglecting his own proper duties, he
accordingly found time to make himself one of the crew, and, sharing
their labours, and evincing perfect intelligence of all that was
required, he won more than the goodwill, the confidence and respect
of every one on board.
The Phillis was a slow sailer. She encountered various changes of
weather, behaving, upon the whole, tolerably well, though sometimes
uneasy and always uncomfortable. At last, however, a tempest
overtook her about forty leagues to the east of the southern entrance
of the Gulf of St Lawrence, and the sea swept over her decks,
knocking the boats from their fastenings. The gale lasted all that day
and throughout the night; but a lull came in the morning, and the
women and children, who had been kept below, were allowed to
come on deck. The same evening the officers entertained the skipper,
and all were rejoicing in the prospect of escape from danger, when
the mate suddenly broke into the cabin and requested the captain to
follow him. Douglas guessed from the manner of the two men that
something must be wrong. He ran up the companion-stair, and
heard—for he could see nothing—the roar of breakers close ahead.
The ship had drifted before the wind, and was already in imminent
danger. Immediately the soldiers were ordered up, and, with their
assistance, the best bower anchor was let go. But though it seemed to
check the vessel for a moment, it soon began to drag; and, with
breakers on the bow, practised eyes discovered that there was land
on both quarters—that the ship was embayed.
It was evident, under such circumstances, that the single chance of
saving the lives of those on board was to force the Phillis, if possible,
round a projecting reef on her lee bow. But this could be done only
by making more sail, and to go aloft at that moment and shake out
reefs was a service of the utmost hazard. The seamen ordered to do
so hung back, whereupon Douglas sprang into the shrouds, and,
followed by two cabin-boys, accomplished the operation. The
consequence was that the Phillis bore up and cleared the point,
though very narrowly; but it was a mere respite from danger. The
storm grew more and more tremendous. The boats could with
difficulty be moved, and one of them (the long-boat) was scarce got
over the side ere she went to pieces. The ship was now upon the
rocks, and another boat was lowered chiefly by the exertions of the
soldiers. But she in her turn seemed in danger of being broken to
pieces; whereupon Douglas, followed by two officers, sprang in,
hoping to fend her off from the ship’s side. Already she was more
than half full of water, which compelled the three youths to spring
back, in doing which Douglas missed his footing and fell into the sea.
Happily he had divested himself of most of his clothing, and his skill
as a swimmer stood him in good stead, for he rose upon the top of a
wave, and one of his friends, seizing his collar at the moment,
dragged him on to the deck.
Shipwreck under any circumstances is an awful thing. The wreck
of the Phillis went on, so to speak, through two days and as many
nights. Men and women went overboard; children died from
exposure in their mothers’ arms. One poor fellow struck out in
despair for the land, and was lost among the breakers. The first raft
which the survivors constructed carried two of their number to the
shore, who, regardless of the fate of their companions, immediately
deserted. A second raft was put together, and on that Mr Douglas
reached the land. He had carried a rope with him, and began
immediately to construct a bridge. Fortunately the wind lulled at this
moment, and the wreck was cleared of its living occupants. But
scarcely was this done ere the Phillis went to pieces without an
opportunity having been afforded of securing the means of
subsistence even for a single day.
The sufferings of these poor people on the barren cliff to which
they escaped were dreadful. Happily the waves brought ashore some
pieces of cloth as well as a cask of wine and a quantity of smoked
pork. But the sailors seized the wine and drank it; and the first night
was spent in cold and misery, for the snow lay deep on the ground,
and there was no fuel with which to make a fire. All lay down and
slept—a sleep from which they would probably never have wakened
had not Douglas been roused by a fearful scream, to which the wife
of his servant gave utterance. She had gone mad from privations and
excitement, and died shrieking to the last, so that her voice was
heard over the wind and rain. She had outlived all the women who
went on board at Gravesend, and not a child survived.
Mr Douglas was at this time barely nineteen years of age, yet such
was the force of his character that all about him, seamen as well as
soldiers, looked to him for instructions. He rescued a second cask of
wine from being broached this time by soldiers, though not without a
struggle. “We are all equals now,” said the leader of the mutineers;
“we’ll take no orders from you or anybody else.” “Won’t you!” cried
Douglas, springing at his throat with a knife; “you are under my
command; and if you don’t obey, by heavens, I’ll kill you!” The man
yielded; the small stock of provisions and wine was secured, and
after a vain attempt to penetrate through the forest, the whole party
returned again to the cliff—there to wait till either help should come
from the sea, or famine do its work and destroy them.
A feeling of despair was beginning to gain the mastery, when one
day the cry was heard, “A sail! a sail!” They had already set up a spar,
and hoisted a piece of cloth upon it; but the object was small, and
might not be discerned from a distance, and then what a fate awaited
them! It was not, however, so ordered. The sail approached; she was
a small schooner trading between St John and Great Jarvis; and the
crew gave back the cheer which the poor castaways raised in their
agony, crowding at the same time to the beach. They were all taken
off and carried to the place whither the schooner was bound, and
spent the winter, roughly but not unhappily, among the honest
fishermen who had there established themselves.
The winter seemed long, the days being very short in that latitude.
Not ungrateful, but tired of the monotony, Douglas purchased a
whale-boat, and, having fitted it with a deck, determined, as soon as
the season should advance a little, to risk a voyage to the West
Indies. Several of his brother officers agreed to share the danger with
him, and they got a St Lawrence pilot and a seaman from
Newfoundland to join them. But a succession of heavy gales hindered
them from starting till April was far spent. At last, just as their
preparations were completed, there arrived in the harbour a
schooner bound from Halifax to St John, the commander of which
had heard of their misfortunes, and gone out of his way to offer them
assistance. Adventurous as they were, Douglas and his friends did
not hesitate to abandon their own project, and to avail themselves of
the superior accommodation thus placed at their disposal. They were
accordingly conveyed in the first instance to St John, Mr Douglas
doing seaman’s duty throughout the voyage, and by-and-by to
Halifax, whither, after discharging cargo, the schooner returned.
The Duke of Kent, the father of her present Majesty, was at that
time Governor and Commander-in-Chief in Nova Scotia. He had
heard of the fate of the Phillis, and of the sufferings of the crew and
passengers, and sent an aide-de-camp to request that such of the
officers as might be in a state to be moved, should present
themselves at Government House. Douglas and his friend Mr Forbes
obeyed the summons, and were most kindly treated by the Royal
Duke. But their destination was Quebec, whither, as soon as means
of transport could be found, they proceeded. The reception awarded
them there, and especially Mr Douglas, was gratifying in the extreme.
The important services rendered by the father to the colony had not
yet passed out of men’s minds, and they believed that they saw in the
son qualities which proved him worthy of his parentage. He was
taken at once, so to speak, to the hearts of the people, and had the
still higher gratification to find that the authorities, civil and military,
entertained a just appreciation of his talents, and were determined to
make use of them.
There was an alarm of a French fleet hovering near the coast, and
not a single cruiser lay in the St Lawrence. The Governor became
anxious, and having often observed Mr Douglas guiding with
remarkable adroitness a sailing-boat in boisterous weather about the
bay, he bethought him that the nautical skill of the young officer
might be applied to better purposes than those of mere amusement.
Douglas was sent for, and asked if he would be disposed to take
command of an armed coaster, and go off as far as the Banks of
Newfoundland in search of the enemy. He accepted the trust without
a moment’s hesitation; and, carrying with him, in addition to a good
crew, artillerymen enough to man his ten guns, he hoisted his
pennant on board a schooner of 250 tons burden, and stood out to
sea. Though never coming up with the French fleet—which, indeed,
had steered in a different direction—he found more than one
opportunity of showing how well qualified he was, under trying
circumstances, to manage a ship of war, and probably to fight her.
And many a time in after life he used to tell the story, adding that,
“after all, a naval life was that for which nature had peculiarly fitted
him.”
So passed a year in Lower Canada, at the close of which the roster
of service carried Mr Douglas to Toronto, where he still found vent
for his marine propensities on Lake Ontario. He became likewise a
great sportsman, as well with the gun as with the fishing-rod, and
made frequent incursions into the forests in search of game. This
brought him more than once in contact with the Red men, over
whom, by his cool courage and endurance of fatigue, he acquired a
remarkable ascendancy. Among other circumstances worth noticing
was his encounter in the bush with a young white girl, of surpassing
beauty, who had lived among the Indians from her infancy. He states
in his note-book that she had been carried off by a party of warriors
who had ravaged a settlement, and that they treated her, as she grew
up, with the utmost kindness and respect. “A strange chance
discovered her to her brother, and he entreated her to return home;
but she refused, declaring that she was perfectly happy, and could
not support a different existence.”
In the autumn of 1798, tidings reached Mr Douglas of the death of
the elder of his half-brothers. The event rendered necessary his
immediate return to England, and he took a passage in the last ship
of the season, a little brig, timber-laden and bound for Greenock. It
seems to have been his destiny never to go to sea without
encountering danger and difficulty. One night, shortly after clearing
the Bay of St Lawrence, Mr Douglas was awakened by the vessel
giving a sudden lurch, for which he could not account otherwise than
by supposing she had struck on some sunken rock. He jumped out of
bed, and, staying only to throw a greatcoat about him, ran upon
deck. A brisk gale was blowing, and the brig, having got into the
trough of the sea, staggered under single-reefed topsails, main-top-
gallant-sails, and jib, and fore-and-aft main-sail, with the wind on
the beam. The mate, whose watch it was, had got drunk, and gone
below, and the helmsman seemed quite at a loss how to guide the
rudder. Douglas saw that there was not a moment to be lost. He took
the command of the ship, called up all hands, issued with clearness
and promptitude orders which were instantly obeyed, and kept the
vessel from foundering. The tumult brought the captain on deck, who
stood by astonished and speechless. No sooner, however, had he
satisfied himself of the untrustworthiness of the mate, than he
directed the vessel to be put about, and would have returned to
Quebec had not Mr Douglas volunteered to do mate’s duty during the
remainder of the passage. There could be no hesitation on the
captain’s part, after what he had just seen, to accede to this proposal:
so the brig held her course, and arrived safe in the Clyde, where, with
protestations of mutual respect and esteem, he and his friendly
skipper parted.
Mr Douglas had not been long in Scotland before he fell in love,
and soon afterwards married Miss Anne Dundas, a young lady of
great personal beauty and cultivated mind. He obtained his
promotion likewise in 1799; and having done duty for a while as
adjutant of a battalion, he was subsequently posted to the horse-
artillery. But better things than the command of a troop were in store
for him. The military authorities had established at High Wyckham a
cadet school, with a senior department attached to it, in which
officers might be instructed for the Staff; and General Zamy, an old
aide-de-camp of Frederick the Great, being appointed commandant,
it was proposed to Captain Douglas that he should undertake the
superintendence of the Staff College. Captain Douglas was not
unnaturally reluctant to give up the proper line of his profession, but
finding the Duke of York bent upon the arrangement, and being
tempted to accede to it by the offer of a step of rank, he passed from
the artillery into the line as a major, and took the place for which
both his natural talents and acquired information eminently fitted
him.
From 1804 up to 1814 Douglas continued to be connected with the
educational department of the army. It would be impossible to
overestimate the importance of the services which he rendered. He
not only instructed candidates for Staff employment by lessons
gathered from the past, but deduced, from his own clear perception
of things, hints and suggestions which were then entirely new. He
had many differences because of this habit with General Zamy, who,
like veterans in general, was slow to believe that the tactics and
strategy of his own youth could be improved upon. But in 1806 the
old man retired, and Douglas, with the rank of lieutenant-colonel,
took his place at the head of the establishment. A fresh impulse was
immediately given to the course of study. Not surveying only, but
pontooning, artillery, and the theory of the whole art of war, were
taught, and those brilliant Staff officers sent out who in the
Peninsular struggle gave to the Great Duke such efficient support. Sir
Howard, however—for he had by this time succeeded by the death of
another brother to the baronetcy—yearned for active employment in
the field. He applied for and obtained permission to join Sir John
Moore’s army, which he overtook just as the retreat from Benevente
began; and he shared its fortunes both in the painful marches which
it accomplished, and in the battle near Corunna, which enabled it to
re-embark without dishonour. By-and-by, when the expedition to the
Scheldt was fitted out, Sir Howard prevailed upon the Duke of York
to appoint him to the Staff of Lord Chatham’s army as Deputy
Quartermaster-General. The enterprise grievously failed; and the
loss by disease among the troops and ships’ companies engaged was
very severe. But even under such circumstances Sir Howard proved
of great service to his chief: for having kept a journal of each day’s
proceedings as it occurred, he was able to show, when examined
concerning the causes of the failure, that by far the largest share of
blame rested with the navy, or rather with the officer whom the
Admiralty had placed at its head.
For two years subsequently to his return from Walcheren, Sir
Howard led a quiet and useful life as head of the Military College. In
1811, however, a fresh opportunity was found for employing him
abroad. The Government of that day put a far higher value on the
services of the Spanish guerillas than they deserved, and were
incredulous of Lord Wellington’s assurances, that on the regular
armies of Spain no dependence could be placed. It seemed to Lord
Liverpool and his colleagues that the Spaniards, if properly armed
and supplied, were capable by their own valour of driving the French
beyond the Pyrenees; and they made choice of Sir Howard Douglas
to go among them, because they believed that he possessed talents
and energy enough to awaken them to a sense of their duty. He
received instructions, therefore, towards the end of July, to proceed
without delay to Lord Wellington’s headquarters, and to arrange
with him all details respecting his future proceedings. Perhaps there
is no interval in the long and useful career of Sir Howard Douglas
which afforded him more frequent opportunities of doing good
service to his country than that which, extending over little more
than a year, was spent by him in Spain; but the tale is one which will
not bear condensation.
After conferring with Lord Wellington on the Portuguese frontier,
Sir Howard rode across the country to Oporto, and thence took a
passage by sea to Corunna. He entered there into relations with
Spanish juntas, Spanish generals, and the chiefs of guerilla bands,
and found them all, with the exception of one or two individuals
belonging to the latter class, even more impracticable than he had
been led to expect. He gave them first arms, money, clothing, and
had the mortification to learn that the best battalions and batteries,
as soon as they became fit for war, were shipped off for South
America. He turned next to the irregulars, and succeeded in getting a
levy en masse set on foot, which very much perplexed, and gave
constant occupation to, the French troops scattered over that and the
adjoining provinces. But the circumstance which more than any
other affected his own fortunes, was a combined attack on the
fortified convent of St Cintio Rey by Sir Home Popham’s squadron
from the sea, and the guerilla band of Don Gaspar on shore. It was
while watching the effect of the Venerable’s fire that Sir Howard
became struck with the ignorance of the first principles of gunnery
which manifested itself both among officers and men, and that he
conceived the idea of applying, should leisure ever be afforded him, a
proper remedy to the evil. From that idea emanated his first great
treatise, to which the British navy owes so much, and of which the
rulers of the British navy, the Lords of the Admiralty, did not
condescend, for many months after it had been submitted to them,
even to acknowledge the receipt.
There can be no doubt that to Sir Howard’s activity in Galicia the
successful issues of Lord Wellington’s campaign, in the early summer
of 1812, were greatly owing. Had he not managed to find
employment for two whole divisions of French infantry, these, with a
division of cavalry, must have joined Marmont’s army; in which case
the battle of Salamanca would have either not been fought at all, or it
might have ended less triumphantly than it did. But no man can
work impossibilities; and the time arrived when, having
accomplished the main purpose of his mission, Sir Howard received
orders to return to England. He could not quit the Peninsula,
however, without once again communicating with Lord Wellington,
whom he found just about to undertake the siege of the Castle of
Burgos. To Douglas’s practised eye the place appeared of immense
strength in proportion to the means disposable for its reduction; and
a private reconnaissance led him to conclude that the whole plan of
attack was faulty. In both opinions he stood alone; yet such was the
respect in which his judgment was held, that the chiefs of artillery
and engineers communicated what he had said to Lord Wellington,
and Lord Wellington sent for him. The following is Mr Fullom’s
account of this interview:—“‘Well, Sir Howard, you have something
to say about the siege?’ ‘I think the place is stronger than we
supposed, my Lord.’ ‘Yes, by G—; but our way is to take the
hornwork, and from there breach the wall, and then assault over the
two advanced profiles.’ ‘I would submit to your Lordship whether our
means are equal to such an attack?’ ‘I am not satisfied about our
ammunition,’ replied Lord Wellington. ‘The enemy’s guns are 24-
pounders, my Lord, and we have only three 18-pounders and five 24-
pound howitzers. The 18-pounders will not breach the wall, and our
fire must be overpowered, unless your Lordship brings up some guns
from the ships at Santander.’ ‘How would you do that?’ ‘With
draught oxen as far as the mountains, and then drag them on by
hand; we can employ the peasantry, and put a hundred men to a
gun.’ ‘It would take too long.’ ‘I think the place may be captured, with
our present means, from the eastern front, my Lord,’ returned Sir
Howard; and he disclosed his plan, with his reasons for thinking it
the most practicable. Lord Wellington made no remark. Possibly he
saw the defects of his own plan, but it had been deliberately adopted,
and he was not convinced that it ought to be abandoned.”
Mr Fullom has not told this anecdote quite correctly. Sir Howard
was more closely questioned as to the mode of conveyance for the
guns, and answered more pertinently, than is here set down. He
suggested that the 24-pounders should be dismounted, the guns
placed in the boles of trees hollowed out, and the carriages run
forward by themselves. Thus the narrowest track through woods and
round rocks would suffice for the conveyance of the former, while the
latter, being comparatively light, would offer no formidable
resistance wherever men or bullocks could travel. Lord Wellington,
however, adhered to his own plan, and sustained the only reverse
which marks the progress of an experience in war extending wellnigh
over a quarter of a century. It is just towards both parties to observe,
that the baffled hero was too magnanimous not to acknowledge his
error. “Douglas was right,” he exclaimed, as he mounted his horse to
begin the retreat; “he was the only man who told me the truth.”
Sir Howard returned to England, and there resumed his
occupations as a military instructor; but his mind was full of a
project for forcing attention to gunnery on the chiefs of the navy; and
the disastrous results of the first frigate-actions in the American war
not a little quickened his zeal. He had a more herculean task before
him, however, than he himself imagined. Strange to say, his
disinclination to the study of pure mathematics had never been
overcome; and now he found himself obliged to master all the arcana
of the science, so far as these had any relation to the movement of a
vessel through water under all possible contingencies. While
pursuing these studies he effected such improvements in the
reflecting circle and semicircle for land and marine surveying as
attracted the attention of the Royal Society, which immediately
elected him a member; and then he gave himself up steadily to the
object for which all this abstruse study had been only the
preparation. He produced a treatise in which every point connected
with the theory and practice of artillery was handled. He discussed
not only the power and range of various kinds of ordnance, with the
uses of their several parts, and the effects of transit, windage, recoil,
and suchlike, but he explained how a school of naval gunnery could
be established, and submitted the whole in MS. for the consideration
of the Lords of the Admiralty. Weeks and months passed by,
however, without bringing him so much as a written
acknowledgment of its receipt; and then, and not till then, he wrote
privately to his friend Sir Graham Moore. Sir Graham made such
apology as the case would admit of, and did his best to fix upon the
subject the attention of his colleagues; but a year elapsed before any
decided steps were taken. At last the scheme was adopted; and in
1819, Sir Howard, having first of all obtained the sanction of the
Government, gave his valuable treatise to the world. It attracted at
once the attention of scientific men both at home and abroad, and
led to frequent correspondence between the author and all persons
capable of appreciating and taking an interest in so important a
matter.
 Promoted to the rank of Major-General, Sir Howard was
nominated in 1824 to the Governorship of New Brunswick, and to
the command of the troops stationed there, and in Nova Scotia, Cape
Breton, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland, and Bermuda. Mr
Fullom tells an amusing story of Sir Howard being met on the pier at
Halifax by Mr Justice Haliburton, which fails in this respect, that it
happens unfortunately not to be accurate. It was not Sam Slick, but
his cousin of the same name, who in 1796 had served in the Fusiliers,
and in 1824 greeted his old comrade as Governor of New Brunswick.
But there is so much of vraisemblance in the matter, that the
anecdote may very well remain where it is. On the other hand, Mr
Fullom’s narrative of Sir Howard’s administration of the province is
not only correct to the letter, but extremely interesting. It came to
pass while he was there that one of those fires occurred, of the
appalling effects of which we in this old world of Europe can form no
conception. It was an unusually dry summer, the third of a
succession of such, when first in the town, and by-and-by far off in
the forest, flames suddenly broke out. Government House was the
first to be burned down; then whole streets ignited at once; and just
as a line began to be drawn between what remained of the town and
the ashes of dwellings consumed, a lurid glare, seen afar off, gave
warning that even a worse calamity was in progress.

“Several days elapsed before the fire subsided, and then it became masked by a
smoke which darkened the whole country. But night proved that it had not burned
out; for showers of flame shot up at intervals, and trees stood glaring in the dark,
while the mingled black and red of the sky seemed its embers overhead. Thus a
week passed, when Sir Howard determined to penetrate the forest, and visit the
different settlements. A friend has described his parting with Lady Douglas and his
daughters, whose pale faces betrayed their emotion, though they forbore to oppose
his design, knowing that nothing would keep him from his duty. But this was not
understood by others, and the gentlemen of the town gathered round his rough
country waggon at the door, and entreated him to wait a few days, pointing to the
mountains of smoke, and declaring that he must be suffocated if he escaped being
burned. He thanked them for their good feeling, grasped their hands, and mounted
the waggon. It dashed off at a gallop, and wondering eyes followed it to the woods,
where it disappeared in the smoke.
“The devastation he met exceeded his worst fears; for the settlements he went to
visit no longer existed. The fire seems to have burst in every quarter at once; for it
broke out at Miramichi the same moment as at Fredericktown, though one
hundred and fifty miles lay between. But here its aspect was even more dreadful,
and its ravages more appalling, as Miramichi stood in the forest completely girt
round except where escape was shut off by the river. Many were in bed when they
heard the alarm; many were first startled by the flames, or were suffocated in their
sleep, leaving no vestige but charred bones; others leaped from roof or window,
and rushed into the forest, not knowing where they went, or took fire in the street,
and blazed up like torches. A number succeeded in gaining the river, and threw
themselves in boats or on planks, and pushed off from the banks, which the fire
had almost reached, and where it presently raged as fiercely as in the town. One
woman was aroused from sleep by the screams of her children, whom she found in
flames, and caught fire herself as she snatched up an infant and ran into the river,
where mother and child perished together. Then came the hurricane, tearing up
burning trees and whirling them aloft, lashing the river and channel to fury, and
snapping the anchors of the ships, which flew before it like chaff, dashing on the
rocks, and covering the waves with wreck. Blazing trees lighted on two large
vessels, and they fired like mines, consuming on the water, which became so hot in
the shallows that large salmon and other fish leaped on shore, and were afterwards
found dead in heaps along the banks of the river. What can be said of such horrors,
combining a conflagration of one thousand miles with storm and shipwreck, and
surprising a solitary community at midnight? Happily the greater number
contrived to reach Chatham by the river; but floating corpses showed how many
perished in the attempt, and nearly three hundred lost their lives by fire or
drowning.”

No small portion of Sir Howard’s time henceforth was spent in

devising means for the relief of the unfortunate people whom this
calamity had ruined. He made strong appeals to the benevolence of
the British public, which were not disregarded, and he advanced
from his own funds more than he could well spare. Nor was he
inattentive to other matters. He made a voyage from harbour to
harbour throughout the extent of his military command, and, with
his usual luck, twice narrowly escaped shipwreck. Indeed, so
completely was his name up as a Jonah, that the captain of the
Niemen frigate, with whom he had been a passenger, took the alarm.

“The following day” (the day after one of these mishaps) “brought Captain
Wallace to dine with the Governor, and it came out that he had been hearing tales
about his Excellency which he did not consider to his advantage, for he suddenly
asked him if he had not once been shipwrecked. Sir Howard replied by telling the
story, and the captain’s face became longer as he proceeded, though he made no
remark till the close. He then observed that his regard for him was very great, and
he valued their interchange of hospitality in port and ashore, but should never like
to take him to sea again; for he had been twenty years afloat without mishap,
except on the two occasions when they had been together; and he should now look
upon his appearance in his ship as a passenger as a very bad omen indeed.”

On both occasions the ship had struck for lack of proper beacons,
and Sir Howard at once applied the remedy. He caused lighthouses
to be built where they were most required; and in order to improve
the internal communications of the province, he made roads, and
proposed a plan for connecting by a canal the Bay of Fundy with the
Gulf of St Lawrence. Meanwhile he was not neglectful of the
intellectual wants of the colonists, as yet very imperfectly attended
to. He founded, endowed, and, after a good deal of opposition,
obtained a charter for the University of Fredericktown, of which, in
1829, he became the first Chancellor, giving at the same time his own
name to the College. These were works of peace; and he was equally
careful in guarding against the chances of war. The treaty of 1783 had
left the boundary-line between Great Britain and the United States
very imperfectly defined; and as the inhabitants of the latter country
increased in number, they began to encroach on the territories of the
former. A good many squatters had forced themselves into New
Brunswick, and been driven away, till at last a person named Baker,
bolder than the rest, took possession of an outlying portion of land,
and hoisted the American standard. The proceeding was much
approved by the Government of Maine, and strong parties of the
militia were turned out in anticipation of a collision with the garrison
of Fredericktown.
Sir Howard Douglas, however, knew better than to precipitate
hostilities. He contented himself with sending a civil message to
Baker, requesting him to withdraw; and when no attention was paid
to it, he gave such orders to the troops as would bring them to the
frontier in a few hours should their presence be required. This done,
a parish constable was desired to perform his duty; and the man,
coming upon Baker without any fuss or parade, cut down the flag-
staff, seized the squatter, and carried him off in a waggon to the
capital of the province. All Maine was thrown into a ferment. The
Governor threatened, and demanded that Baker should be set at
liberty. Sir Howard refused so much as to see the messenger
intrusted with this demand, justly alleging that he could hold
communication on such subjects only with the Central Government
at Washington. The result was, that Baker, being put upon his trial,
was found guilty, and sentenced to pay a fine; which fine, after an
enormous amount of bluster, was duly paid. For his firm yet
judicious conduct throughout this awkward affair Sir Howard
received the approbation of the Home Government, becoming at the
same time more than ever an object of enthusiastic admiration to the
people whom he governed.
While approving all that their representative had done, the British
Government saw that it would be impossible with safety to leave the
boundary question longer unsettled. Arrangements were accordingly
made with the United States for referring the points at issue to
arbitration; and the King of the Netherlands being accepted as
arbitrator, Sir Howard was requested to return to Europe, and to
watch proceedings. The King’s decision gave, however, little
satisfaction to either party. England, indeed, would have acquiesced
in it, though feeling herself wronged; but America failed to get all
that she coveted, and refused to be bound. It remained for her, by
sharp practice at a future period, to gain her end; and for England,
under the management of Lord Ashburton and Sir Robert Peel, to be
made a fool of. The part played by Sir Howard Douglas during the
progress of this negotiation was every way worthy of his high
reputation; but that which strikes us most is the sagacity with which,
so early as 1828, he foretold events in the States themselves, which
have since come to pass. In a paper addressed to the Secretary for the
Colonies, which points out endless grounds of quarrel between the
Federal Government and the Governments of the several States, he
thus expresses himself:—

“Here we may see the manner in which the Union will be dissolved—viz., the
secession of any State which, considering its interest, property, or jurisdiction
menaced, may no longer choose to send deputies to Congress. This is a great defect
in the Bond of Union, which has not, perhaps, been very generally noticed, cloaked
as it is under article 1st, section 5th of the Constitution, which states ‘that where
there are not present, of either House, members sufficient to form a quorum to do
business, a smaller number may be authorised, for the purpose of forming one, to
compel the attendance of absent members.’ But this appears only to be authorised
for the purpose of forming a quorum, and only extends over members actually
sworn in, who, being delegated to Congress by the States they represent, are
subjected to whatever rules of proceeding and penalties each House may provide,
with the concurrence of two-thirds of its members. But there is nothing obligatory
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