1

CHAPTER ONE

On October 13, 1832, after two years of what historian David Bell has called “probably
the greatest revival New Brunswick has ever seen”,1 representatives of six independent
New Light2 churches met in Wakefield, New Brunswick. The New Lights had spent over
two decades at the fringes of New Brunswick society, the result of a search for
respectability and order that during the first decade of the nineteenth century had seen
the nascent Maritime Baptist and Methodist leadership deliberately jettison much of the
emotionalism and radical evangelical spirituality that had formed the core of the
region’s First Great Awakening under the leadership of Henry Alline and Freeborn
Garrettson. Those who did not go along with this turn away from the New Light
message were discarded, forced out of their churches and marginalized in the broader
culture.3 In a region where literacy was limited and settlement was still scattered and
isolated outside of the few small urban areas, however, the New Light message and
subculture continued to flourish, primarily for the same reasons that it had taken root in
the first place. Its basic message of experiential piety was simple to grasp, and was
easily and effectively transmitted through sermon and song by native itinerants who
could identify with the needs of their own communities. Men such as Daniel Shaw,
Clark Alline, John Pineo, and Robert Colpitts travelled throughout the rural areas of the
Maritimes in the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, organizing meetings and
keeping the spirit of Alline and Garrettson alive, despite opposition from Baptist and
Methodist leaders such as Edward Manning.4

The representatives of the six New Light churches that met in Wakefield in 1832 agreed
to form a new denomination, to be known as the New Brunswick Christian Conference.
This development had been prompted by American evangelists from the Christian
Connection who had visited New Brunswick for over a decade, but the new
denomination was from the beginning fiercely independent and resisted all attempts by
the Americans to exert anything more than a benign third party influence. 5 The
organization of the Conference marked the transcongregational unification of New
Brunswick’s disparate New Light groups. Three key characteristics defined the
Conference as a continued manifestation of this indigenous radical evangelicalism, and
set its membership apart from the more respectable Baptists and Methodists.

The first was the overwhelming emphasis that they placed upon the conversion
experience as the only requirement for membership in the christian community.
Concomitant to this was their rejection of church orders and forms as mere ‘externals’.
For example, they still viewed water baptism, so important to the Baptists, as a ‘non-
essential’.6 Their communion was defined as “true piety alone” with the Bible as the
only source of doctrine.7The second characteristic, closely related to the first, was their
rejection of religious hierarchy, and acceptance of regular participation in the worship
meeting by the laity.8 This feature was particularly appealing to women, young people,
members of the rural working class, and immigrants, who in the Christian Conference
found an outlet for self expression that was denied to them elsewhere in society. 9
These groups were still disenfranchised by a political process and social order that had
expanded to include the growing colonial merchant class from which the key leadership
 2

of the Baptists and Methodists was drawn. 10 Finally, the New Lights who formed the
Christian Conference, like Alline and Garrettson, expected immediate impulses from
Heaven. They wholeheartedly embraced the experiential religion that the Methodists
and Baptists had consciously distanced themselves from, and that the upper echelons
of colonial society continued to view as improper and harmful to good religious and
social order.11

These characteristics represented a purist, anti-formal religious practice rather than a

definitive doctrine.12 Even the limited delegation of local authority that was implied in the
new organization proved, at least initially, too much for some New Light preachers.
Samuel Hartt, for example, did not join the Conference immediately. One of the leading
New Light itinerants, he “could in no wise agree” with the formation of the new
organization.13 Others followed Hartt’s lead, casting a wary eye towards the
Conference. In large part this can be traced to what were still painful memories of the
beginnings of the Baptist Association. The rationale offered by Elder Samuel Nutt of the
Maine Christian Conference for the formation of the New Brunswick Conference, that it
would “be to the furtherance of the cause... for the better regulation of the churches,”
was not unlike the reasons that had been given for the creation of the Baptist
Association.14 The underlying subtext that they feared was that this was another drive to
sacrifice the essential individual spirituality of their religious beliefs for a more
‘respectable’, and thus acceptable to the colonial elite, form of religion. Furthermore,
the presence of an American influence was also reminiscent of the organization of the
Baptists,15 and gave some of the prospective members of the Conference pause. Too
many of the Newlights had suffered repudiation and condemnation from Baptist and
Methodist relatives and friends to easily accept an organization that might make them
“like other nations or sects.”16

While these factors weighed on the minds of all New Lights faced with the question of
whether or not to join the Conference, there was another consideration motivating the
actions of many of the New Light preachers and senior laity. They were suspicious of
outsiders, and were particularly concerned that the considerable position of social
influence they as preachers and senior laity enjoyed in the rural communities
frequented by the New Lights would be undone by greater organization and the
centralization of power that such organization implied. In order to understand the nature
of these suspicions, one first has to examine the power and character of both the
revival and the men who used it to spread their vision of the gospel and exert a
profound influence on the daily lives of rural New Brunswickers.

The revivalists themselves lacked any formal education or training, were itinerants as
opposed to settled pastors, were not paid a regular sum for their preaching, and
refused to deliver prepared sermons, instead exhorting as the ‘spirit of God’ led them.
Their sole purpose was to convert the unconverted and reinvigorate the faith of
‘backsliders’, and their sole qualification for doing so was a ‘call from God’ and the
support of church members. Almost all of them were involved in a secular business of
some sort in order to support their families. Among the earliest Elders of the Christian
Conference, for example, Hartt and Ezekiel Sipprell were farmers who also dabbled in
 3

the lumber trade, William Pennington was a trader, and Henry Cronkhite and Charles
McMullin were innkeepers. McMullin and another elder, Abner Mersereau, were known
as men “of property”.17 Most of them, to varying degrees, were reasonably prosperous
citizens of northwestern New Brunswick. Often they would mix business trips with
revival campaigns. In June 1830, for example, Hartt and Nathaniel Churchill journeyed
down the Saint John River from Wakefield and participated in a revival at Millstream
and Sussex. While Churchill remained for “some time superintending a good revival”,
however, Harrt left after just a few days and continued on to Saint John, where he had
“business” to conduct.18

On their revival campaigns, a preacher like Hartt would travel to “the scattered hamlets
and back settlements” of the colony, where he would visit every home where
admittance was granted.19 When he arrived at a home, the family was summoned, and
a “few moments of kindly talk dispersed”, after which he would read a chapter from the
Bible. He would then comment upon it, and lead the family in prayer, “often most
fervent and effective.” Evening and Sunday services were held in a church or meeting
house if a community had one or, as was the case in many areas, a schoolroom or a
cleanly swept barn. Thr preacher would seek the repentance and conversion of the
individual from the state of the original sin, and his subsequent enrolment in the “list of
the regenerate and saved.” Public confession of sin and profession of faith was “strictly
enjoined”, as was the relation by the individual congregation member of his or her
experience in the new life. From this evolved what was known as the “prayer and
experience meeting and the organized working church.”20

Once this preliminary visitation work had been completed, the first preacher was joined
by one or two others, and together they would hold a week or more of revival meetings
in the community. During this time,

...exhortations to forsake sin and acknowledge God

and become Christians in word and deed were nightly
listened to, and participated in by crowded audiences...
The condition of the sinner here and in his life
thereafter was vividly depicted; the contrast in the lot of
the converted and the redeemed was painted in
glowing words; the appeals to forsake the evil and
cleave to Christ were direct and wonderfully effective.21

As one person after another yielded to the “power of the Spirit” and “embraced”
religion, interest throughout the nearby areas increased rapidly, and the revival “circle”
widened.22 The result was that conversions multiplied rapidly as “scores and
hundreds... set out seriously upon the new life.” Through the revival, wrote one
observer, whole communities were “informed with a new life.”23

This type of itinerant revivalism was conducted in almost the exact same manner as
that practises by Alline and Garrettson in the late eighteenth century. It was no
coincidence that a Christian Conference preacher like McMullin owned a copy of
 4

Alline’s journal and sought to emulate his proven methods. During the 1830s and 1840s
these preachers, known as Elders, experienced the most success and achieved the
most influence in the small rural farming and logging communities of western New
Brunswick, largely because they fulfilled the same function that Alline and Garrettson
had fifty years before. They provided a sense of stability to the isolated settlements,
renewed familial relationships and extended kin ties through the revival, and gave
people a respite from the routine life of the farmer or the woodsman. They were also
often the only thing close to an organized religious presence in many areas.

The Elders also exercised a great deal of authority in these rural communities, where
they “powerfully affected and influenced social life.” 24 For example, people were
encouraged to resolve secular disputes within the Christian community, not with the aid
of the civilian judicial authorities but under the guidance of the Elders and senior laity.
The Elders also exercised a significant degree of control over the personal moral
standards of their congregations through both their preaching and the example they
tried to set of living the ‘good christian life’. Discipline for immoral behaviour was
rigorously enforced by the Elders and the senior laity, who acted as travelling ‘courts’,
adjudicating and ultimately punishing those who had transgressed the rules of the
church. Such influence and control, however, was always carefully balanced by the
input given to the congregation, who expected to be consulted on major decisions and
who played an even more active role in the day-to-day affairs of the congregation than
the Elders.

Throughout the 1830s and 1840s this un-tempered rural revivalism was contrasted by
the increasingly organized revivalism that the Methodist and Baptist leadership,
growing more urban in character and composition, advocated.25 Even many prominent
rural Baptists were in favour of a more settled and educated ministry with regular,
systematic financial support.26 Jarvis Ring, for example, while remaining attached to the
more emotional and participatory services favoured by the Christian Conference, felt
nonetheless that the day of the itinerant, part-time evangelist, such as Hartt, his
brother-in-law, was over, and that rural communities suffered from the lack of a settled
pastor. Commenting on Hartt’s presence in Sussex Ring wrote, “Br. Samuel Hartt had a
church in that place, he was on a visit while I was thair [sic] & Baptised, this made it
more plane to me that the Church wanted an Ordaned [sic] minister.” 27 During a period
when the rest of the evangelical Protestant culture of New Brunswick was moving
towards the acceptance of a paid professional clergy, initiating inter-denominational
cooperation in a broad range of concerns extending from missionary work to
temperance reform, and working to establish educational institutions such as Mount
Allison in Sackville and the Baptist Seminary in Fredericton, the Christian Conference
remained fiercely independent, rural, committed to neo-Whitefieldian revivalism, and
resistant to, and suspicious of, a centralized, more organized form of
denominationalism.28

Problems within the new Christian Conference quickly became evident, however,
particularly at the leadership level. The Elders jealously guarded their congregations
from both each other Elders and from outside forces, whether these were indigenous
 5

Baptist and Methodist preachers or travelling evangelists from New England. Internal
conflict was frequent during the 1830s and 1840s, as groups of competing Elders and
senior laymen allied themselves with each other, and on occasion with outside
interests, in ever changing coalitions to fight out disputes over everything from doctrinal
points to questions of discipline. One such controversy, which had been simmering for
a few years, erupted in 1837-38 between George Garraty, a schoolteacher and
itinerant preacher licensed by the Conference, and prominent Elders such as Hartt and
William Pennington. Garraty was expelled from the Conference after he questioned its
leaders on their growing support for the more radical views of the Hamiltonians, a
schismatic breakaway sect from the Christian Connection in New England. He was
accused of preaching false doctrine; in fact, he was suspicious of the “peculiar
revelations” often claimed by the Elders and the unbridled enthusiasm of the
Conference.29 He criticised the Elders for being dishonest, ignorant and dictatorial, and
charged them with holding private ecclesiastical courts where “there is always a little
pope.”30

Such open conflict was detrimental to the Conference’s efforts to increase its
membership and extend its area of influence beyond the rural areas of western and
central New Brunswick. The lack of unity at the leadership level undermined the
confidence their followers had in the Elders and senior laity, and some of them turned
away from the Conference and joined the more respectable Baptists and Methodists, or
drifted off into other groups, such as the Millerites. Dwindling congregations meant less
potential revenue for many of the often financially troubled Elders, whose secular affairs
frequently suffered while they were engaged in itinerant preaching.31

As a result, by the late 1840s the majority of the Elders had come to the conclusion that
a degree of increased organization and a statement of what they believed in was
needed in order to differentiate themselves from other denominations, particularly
similar American groups, prevent the introduction of “erroneous doctrine” among the
churches, and guarantee a basic degree of stability and order that would allow the
Conference to expand. This in turn would provide the Elders and the Deacons with the
means to maintain and enhance their influence and achieve a measure of financial
security. They embraced immersion as a requirement for church membership, although
communion remained open to any converted christian, adopted a Treatise of Faith in
1848, and decided to publish annual Conference minutes in 1850.These were critical
departures from the New Light belief that mere externals ought not to divide Christians.
The most important change, however, was that of the denomination’s name. In 1847
the New Brunswick Christian Conference was replaced by the New Brunswick Free
Christian Baptist Conference, in order to “relieve the minds of many of our brethren who
were never fully reconciled to the name ‘Christian’ only, and thereby cultivate greater
union among ourselves [and] to open a door for union with our brethren in Nova Scotia
bearing that name.”32 This change, more than any other, signalled publicly the
leadership’s break from the denomination’s roots, as they embraced a positive doctrine
- free will.33

For most of the Elders and Deacons this change was as far as they wanted to go, and
 6

was not intended to alter the central belief in enthusiastic religion or in the model of the
itinerant preacher. The minutes of the General Conference continued to reflect the
leadership’s belief in the direct guidance of God in their day-to-day lives. At one point,
for example, they noted that “The result of District meetings on the Saint John River...
has been very blessed in several instances, and we hope for increasing showers of
divine favour,” language that was purposefully New Light. Even within new rules
adopted by the Conference the signs of New Light belief and practice remained clearly
at the forefront. For example, all Elders were required to attend the annual General
Conference unless detained by circumstances beyond their control, the most important
of which was a call from God to participate in a revival.34

There were those among the Conference leadership, however, who viewed these steps
as merely the prelude to a far more ambitious and comprehensive program of
denominational organization and moral and social reform. 35 The man who emerged as
the undisputed leader of this reform faction within the Conference was Elder Ezekiel
McLeod, a shopkeeper who had been ordained in 1848 after several years of holding
religious meetings in Saint John. As the son of the widow of itinerant Allinite preacher
Henry Weyman, his New Light lineage was impeccable. Even prior to his ordination
McLeod had been in a position to influence several of the Conference’s important
Elders, including his brother-in-law Edward Weyman, Weyman’s father-in-law Robert
Colpitts, and Hartt, who had converted McLeod in 1842. It is quite probable, for
example, that McLeod was one of the key forces behind the adoption of the 1848
Treatise of Faith, even though he had not yet been ordained.36

In 1850, after two years of itinerating throughout Westmoreland County, McLeod

entered into a regular pastoral relationship with the Waterloo Street Free Christian
Baptist church in Saint John.37 This decision represented McLeod’s first major, overt
departure from the traditional beliefs and methods of the Free Christian Baptists. He
had come to believe that the New Light emphasis on the sudden revival and the
itinerant evangelist was losing its relevancy in a rapidly changing society marked by the
increasing urbanization and industrialization that he saw his congregation confronting in
Saint John. Furthermore, he had become convinced that simply seeking to convert
individuals, while still the central focus of the Church’s mission, was no longer sufficient
to provide it with a moral or practical base upon which it could continue to expand. He
believed that it was becoming more and more difficult to attract converts by exhorting
them to separate themselves from the world around them, and even harder, once they
had the convert, to keep him or her without the regular pastoral oversight that the
evangelist, by his very nature, could not provide. “Much evil,” he wrote, “results from the
disorderly manner in which ministerial labour is expended in churches and
neighbourhoods; it not only prevents the regular ministrations of God’s word... but it
gives the people irregular habits, which are often very hard for them to abandon
afterwards.”38

These conclusions were essentially the same ones that had been reached by Methodist
and Baptist leaders such as William Black and Edward Manning forty years earlier.
Once viewed by the established church as part of the extreme fringe of the religious
 7

spectrum, they had successfully integrated their churches into the cultural mainstream
by articulating a more broad based social order that nevertheless stressed concepts
such as loyalty, order, structure, and respectability, that resonated with the colonial
elite.39 Manning, for example, had begun his career as an itinerant preacher and leader
of the extremist (even for the New Lights) New Dispensationalist movement in the early
1790s.40 By the mid 1790s, however, he had repudiated his radical views and swung to
the opposite side of the religious continuum, desperate to achieve respectability. For
his part, McLeod followed a similar path, flirting with the pre-millenialism of the Millerites
in 1843-1844, at one point acting as publisher for The Herald of Truth, a short-lived
Adventist newspaper printed in Saint John.41

A group that predicted the imminent coming of Christ, the Millerites advocated a
doctrine of “comeoutism”, which called upon Christians to leave the mainstream
churches and hold to the true doctrines of the Bible, views that were particularly
attractive to purist New Lights of the Christian Conference like McLeod. They were
motivated by a belief that evil had become so widespread in the world that only the
sudden return of Christ in a physical form could lead the forces of good and save the
world.42 Once the Millerite predictions of the speedy Second Coming proved to be false,
however - the son of God failing to arrive on the forecast day - most of their adherents,
including McLeod, returned to the churches that they had left.

Like the profound effect that the excesses and ultimate failure of New
Dispensationalism had upon Manning, the disillusionment that followed the Millerite
experience had a marked influence upon McLeod and others who had been caught up
in the movement. He began to evidence a deep distrust of enthusiastic religion and
became convinced that the Christian Connection had to become more ordered and
respectable - in essence, more like the Baptists and Methodists - in order to protect
people from the influence of groups like the Millerites.43 Instead of leading his church
away from the evils of society, Mcleod determined to mould them into Christian soldiers
and join the growing evangelical army of mainstream society, a repudiation of Millerite
premillenialism and an acceptance of mainstream evangelical postmillenialism, with its
belief in a gradual process designed to prepare the world for Christ’s physical return at
the end of the millenium.44

Having embraced the progressive and reformist outlook of mid-Victorian

Preotestantism, McLeod searched for a way to disseminate his views to the entire
denomination. Despite the fact that he visited other churches, his acceptance of a
regular pastorate in Saint John, located far from the traditional Free Christian Baptist
heartland of western New Brunswick, denied him the opportunity to cultivate a base of
personal support throughout the rural areas of the colony by itinerating from community
to community. What was needed, he concluded, was an approach that would enable
him to increase his influence and spread his views among both the Conference
leadership and the congregations without having to constantly travel. Given his
background in printing, and the proliferation of denominational newspapers throughout
New Brunswick by the mainstream evangelical churches earlier in the century, the
obvious choice was to launch a religious newspaper of his own, with the ultimate goal
 8

of making it the official paper of the Free Christian Baptists. Thus he founded, in 1853,
the Religious Intelligencer. As David Bell has concluded, this event can only be viewed
in the context of McLeod’s conscious agenda of denominational organization and moral
and social reform based upon interdenominational evangelical cooperation. He began
the Intelligencer with “a view to bringing New Brunswick’s least formal, least hierarchial
religious group into the modern world.”45

To its professors, the postmillenial vision of mainstream evangelicalism was marked by

visible signs of Christian progress, which included the growth of foreign missions,
enlightenment both secular and sacred, in which Sabbath schools for the young played
an integral role, harmony among nations and churches, prosperity understood not
merely as the increase in wealth but in its more general distribution, and a growth in
personal hloiness.46 In contrast to the premillenialists, who saw no hope in a sinful
world, the postmillenialists exuded a convincing optimism that stressed the gradual
mingling of providence and the human world so that an earthly kingdom would be
realized in time.47 McLeod’s views as set out in the Religious Intelligencer clearly
reflected this postmillenial evangelical impulse. In his first editorial on 1 January, 1853,
he proclaimed that the Intelligencer “is not designed as a newspaper, but it is intended
to convey facts in connection with the rise and progress of the various branches of
Christian labour, employed in the advancement of Christianity.”48 Good works were
evidence of a vital religious life, and showed the broader populace in which the
evangelicals lived that piety and the capitalist economy, which was beginning to
dominate Maritime society, were not mutually exclusive.49

In the same issue McLeod also marvelled at the technological advances of the day,
such as the telegraph and the railroad. “The modern system of telegraphic
communication,” he concluded, “is one of the most extraordinary applications of
science in existence, and yet when understood, it seems very simple.” To him the
themes of Christian labour and technological progress were inextricably linked.
Advances in scientific knowledge were by the middle of the nineteenth century
undeniable, and had shown people that they could exert a measure of control over their
own destiny, which fit well with the general ‘free will’ theology of the Free Christian
Baptists.50 McLeod now saw a confident and optimistic age where the evangelization of
the world was well within reach, and where the wealth and progress of the secular
world could be matched and complemented by growth and progress in the sacred.

At the Free Christian Baptist General Conference in July, 1853, McLeod offered the
Religious Intelligencer to the Church, in order that “it should become the property... and
organ of the denomination.”51 A Committee was struck to decide whether the
Conference should accept McLeod’s offer and undertake to publish the paper. The
committee concluded that the Intelligencer’s “publication is for the information and
benefit of our people, and that it should be continued in such a manner as would be for
the interest of our denomination, and the cause of religion in general.” 52 They
recommended that the paper become the property of the Conference, to be published
by a business committee appointed by the Conference. McLeod was employed as the
editor, and an Association was formed “on some safe and judicious principles” to raise
 9

money for the enterprise by taking out loans in the form of L5 shares. All of the
committee’s recommendations were adopted, and an ‘Association Loan Fund’ was
established immediately.

The acceptance by the committee of a denominational paper committed to a program

of both organizational and moral reform, funded by a debt for which the Conference,
and thus the individual churches and their members, were responsible, marked a major
departure from past practice. What makes the decision even more remarkable is the
composition of the committee itself. All five of the Elders on the committee - Samuel
Hartt, William Pennington, Jacob Gunter, George Orser, and Elijah Sisson - were
traditionalist conservatives who represented, with the exception of Gunter in
Fredericton, rural congregations. Hartt and Pennington were the leading evangelists
among the Free Christian Baptists, committed to the New Light method of revival and
itineracy.53 Orser had already found himself at odds with McLeod and the Conference
over the issue of the Orange Lodges, which Orser supported in defiance of the
Conference.54 Furthermore, Gunter, Pennington and Sisson were all engaged in
outside business enterprises.55 To a reformer like McLeod the practice of splitting time
between preaching and secular business was one of the old ways that had to be
changed in order to achieve an efficient and professional clergy. Given the background
and character of these five men, the question that arises is why they chose to not only
support the Intelligencer in principle, but also decided to commit the Conference’s
resources to its publication and adopt it as the official denominational organ? The
answer lies in what the conservatives themselves hoped to accomplish.

At the time of its creation, the Intelligencer was seen by the conservatives as an
instrument through which the voluntary Christian causes both they and the reformers
believed in, such as Sabbath Schools and mission work, could be more effectively
promoted.56 To the conservatives they were tools that could be used to convert people
to Christianity - Sabbath Schools to prepare the young for a mature Christian life, and
missions to spread the gospel both at home and abroad. They might not have been the
methods that the conservatives themselves used, with their belief in the office of the
itinerant evangelist, although many participated in home mission work, but they
certainly saw their value when implemented by others in the denomination, and were
happy to offer their support. Their continued financial difficulties also proved a powerful
motivating factor in their backing increased organizational reform within the structure of
the denomination itself, specifically the implementation in 1850 of a voluntary fund to be
used by the General Conference to “carry forward our labours” 57 and the creation of a
system of ministerial labour that would allow for more regular income for the Elders.

A year later McLeod, Hartt and Pennington comprised a committee to devise a

compromise circuit system for the ministers that reflected both the need for
organization and the continued importance of the evangelist. 58 The key factor
underlying this decision was the lack of support for the Elders from the congregations,
particularly in rural areas. The committee wrote that “Some of [the Elders] have already
suffered much embarrassment and adversity, and in some degree discouraged by the
apathy and indifference of those for whom they have laboured, have been almost ready
 10

to retire from the field.” The recommendation that the Conference adopt the circuit
system was made “that this Conference may be relieved from any charge of neglect of
duty, and that the blood of those that perish through neglect may rest where it ought -
on the Elder who refused his spiritual labour, or the Church that withholds its support,
and starves him from the field.”59

Beyond the question of limited organizational reform, however, the conservatives found
the most common ground with McLeod and the reformers on the moral issue of
temperance. McLeod did not initiate the concept of temperance among the Free
Christian Baptists; promotion of organized temperance reform had been growing in
strength among Maritime evangelicals of all denominations since the early 1820s. 60 The
belief in the social and individual damage that alcohol caused could be traced back
directly to Henry Alline’s own personal ascetism and rejection of the ‘carnal lifestyle’,
which included drinking. However, while there was thus a predisposition among the
Free Christian Baptists in general to support temperance, it was not until the 1840s that
an active interest in organized temperance reform, led by Hartt and McLeod,
manifested itself.

Hartt was known by his fellow Elders as “a pioneer in the temperance work, organiz[ing]
temperance societies wherever he could among our people, and lay[ing] the foundation
of our present temperance work.” To Hartt, wrote Rev. Alexander Taylor in 1882, “more
than any other man are we indebted for the temperance principles that prevailed in our
churches.”61 He had seen the “devastations that the monster Alcohol has made, and is
still making in our province”62 during his widespread itinerating, especially in the lumber
camps and farms of western New Brunswick where alcohol and drunkenness drew men
away from work, the Church, and their families, and was seen as being at the root of
social instability.63 Furthermore, as a fairly prosperous farmer Hartt, like all of the Elders
engaged in business as well as preaching, had a vested interest in the character and
behaviour of the people with whom he was dealing. By the 1840s, however, it was no
longer possible, due to an ever increasing population, to know personally the character
of every employee, transporter, and fellow businessman or farmer. Thus, the growing
middle class, of which Hartt and the others were a part, had a great deal to gain from a
workforce that was careful, spent its money on consumer goods, and was sober
enough to put in a good days work or to be trusted as a party to a commercial
transaction.64

In Saint John McLeod had witnessed the proliferation of whiskey shops in the working
class districts of the city, especially among the growing numbers of labourers who
suffered seasonal or chronic unemployment.65 That the increase in drinking coincided
with increased Roman Catholic - meaning Irish - immigration to both the urban and
rural areas of the colony served only to heighten the moralistic temperance fervour of
the Free Christian Baptists, many of whom, including McLeod, were vehemently anti-
Catholic. Traditionalists like Hartt saw in the Intelligencer the perfect vehicle, and in
McLeod the perfect spokesperson, for the promotion of not just temperance but
complete prohibition. The paper’s attacks on the Roman Catholic Church - such as
references to the pope as “the arch imposter” and Roman Catholicism as “traitorism66 -
 11

were also clearly an important factor.67

McLeod’s involvement with the movement also served his goal of slowly broadening the
denomination’s contacts with the rest of society.68 Temperance reform was an integral
part of the mainstream evangelical agenda. It also tied the Free Christian Baptists to
politicians and other secular leaders, notably Samuel Tilley, who supported
temperance. In the early 1840s Tilley emerged in Saint John as a vocal liberal reformer
and strong temperance advocate, was in the thick of the temperance movement,
speaking, preparing petitions, writing reports and letters, and considering possible
legislation, particularly after his election to the legislature in 1854. 69 Although their first
contact came through the temperance movement, McLeod and Tilley shared similar
views on virtually every other major issue of the day. Each was a determined supporter
of the intercolonial railroad, for example, as well as reform of the colony’s political
system and opposition to denominational schools.

As Tilley’s political star rose throughout the 1850s he enjoyed the unwavering support
of McLeod and the Intelligencer. In turn, McLeod had made a valuable ally that
increased his influence both within and without the Conference, and established the
connection he sought for the Conference between the secular and non-secular worlds.
He had succeeded in firmly tying the denomination’s leaders to a social cause which
implied in its promotion an acceptance for the welfare of the community at large, and
not just individual members of the Church. However, so long as these connections with
liberal political reformers, known popularly as the “smashers”, and mainstream
evangelicalism were useful in promoting moral reform, benevolent causes, and anti-
Catholicism, without undermining the distinctive nature and practice of the Free
Christian Baptists or the influence of the Elders, the conservatives in the Conference
were willing to give McLeod and the Intelligencer their cautious support.

The result of this somewhat uneasy alliance was, on the surface, a ‘golden era’ for the
Free Christian Baptists during most of the 1850s. As the Free Christian Baptists
increased their contacts with the evangelical culture of mid-Victorian New Brunswick,
their influence within that culture grew. B.J. Underhill and William Peters, key middle
class members of McLeod’s Saint John congregation, emerged as the most important
lay members of the Conference leadership, occupying the positions of Clerk and
Treasurer of the Conference, respectively, throughout the latter half of the decade.
Underhill was involved with McLeod in the publication of the Intelligencer, and also
maintained an active presence in several of the city’s major evangelical organizations,
such as the YMCA, where he served as Vice President, and the New Brunswick
Auxiliary Bible Society. His involvement in these groups kept him in regular contact with
influential citizens in Saint John’s interdenominational evangelical culture, like Judge
Robert Parker, John M. Robinson, Dr. LeBaron Botsford, and the Hon. William B.
Kinnear. Peters was primarily responsible for the financial affairs of the Conference and
served as the Clerk of the Fifth District of the Conference, which included Saint John.
Both were regular members, along with fellow Saint John reformer Daniel Clark, of the
denomination’s Board of Managers, created in 1855 to oversee the general financial
affairs of the Conference, particularly the Intelligencer and the book store in Saint
 12

John.70

In Woodstock Edwin R. Parsons, a shoemaker, Justice of the Peace, and influential

young lay member of the Conference, provided McLeod with an ally in the western
denominational heartland.71 Parsons was one of two lay members on the committee
that adopted the Religious Intelligencer as the denominational paper in 1853, and was
on the committee overseeing the incorporation of the denomination in 1853-54. He
was also involved in such secular organizations as the Woodstock Mechanics’ Institute,
acting as a director.72 The Institute, with its goal of “increasing the intelligence of the
community” by delivering lectures on “literary, historical and scientific Subjects”,
represented the type of organization that was in competition with any religious group
that sought to remain isolated from the secular world. An enterprising business man like
Parsons was no longer willing to remain other-worldly in interest or outlook, and was
exactly the type of Church member that McLeod’s views were most likely to appeal to -
middle class and urban.73

There were problems lying under the surface for McLeod and his reform allies,
however. Authority within the Conference was diffused, and ultimately it was individual
congregations that decided whether they would support circuit systems of ministerial
labour, and individual church members who decided if they would contribute to
Conference funds or subscribe to the Intelligencer. Sabbath Schools grew in number
and enrolment during the 1850s, for instance, but not at a rate deemed sufficient by
reform-minded Elders like William Kinghorn, who in 1858 wrote in the Intelligencer that
“we are living in an age of progress, and great advance is being made in arts and
sciences.” He lamented, however, the failure of some in the Conference to fully
embrace Sabbath Schools as a “means of usefulness in the cause of Christ”, and
called for an increased effort to “improve our Sabbath Schools and render them as
efficient as they might be.”74

It was in the rural districts, however, where traditional New Light beliefs were most
firmly rooted, that opposition to the Conference’s modernization and reform program
was the most pronounced. Most disturbing to them was McLeod’s explicit rejection in
the Intelligencer and at Conference meetings of the emotional aspects of Christianity,
which was at the heart of New Light traditionalism. McLeod wrote that “there is
frequently tolerated in religious meetings so much noise and confusion, so much of
what some please to term ‘outgushings of Christian rapture’, as to frighten the spirit of
sober, candid reflection, which will excite the mind to ‘good works.”75 Warning that the
“spirit of serious, earnest thought is frightened away by the careless, unmeaning
outcries of a few misguided brethren and sisters”, McLeod sounded to many like an
Anglican Bishop when he wrote that “real excitement [is] not that kind of excitement that
is ‘got up’, but the excitement which follows from a deep and intelligent consideration of
the great truths of salvation.”76 His admonition that Church members should
concentrate on “thought first” and “excitement second” was a positive repudiation of
New Light belief that appealed to members of the urban congregations, but provoked a
backlash amongst conservative Elders and their congregations.
 13

McLeod and his supporters were in step with all elements of mainstream Victorian
evangelicalism, but they were slowly losing touch with the grassroots of their own
Church. The fact that the major supporters of the Intelligencer and the reform
movement were from Saint John only served to further alienate members of rural
congregations. McLeod wanted an “army [full] of good soldier[s] of Jesus Christ” that
would “fight the good fight of faith”.77 Instead, he and the reformers were by 1860 facing
a revolt in both the ranks and amongst their fellow ‘generals’. Pennington, for instance,
exemplified the independent nature of the more conservative Elders. In 1855 he was
appointed by the Conference as a travelling missionary, to visit the areas of the colony
where there were no settled pastors, at the direction of the Board Of Missions, for
which McLeod acted as Corresponding Secretary and Missionary Agent. It was the
Board’s intent that Pennington should visit the churches in the eastern area of New
Brunswick, but Pennington refused and remained at home in Houlton, Maine, where he
conducted a series of revivals. McLeod was forced to report to the Conference that
“[Pennington’s] connection to the Board soon after ceased in consequence of his not
labouring in the field which they wished to supply.” 78 The traditional New Light emphasis
on the sudden revival continued to frustrate the reformers and their plans for a more
systematic ministry.

In 1858 the reformers, and McLeod personally, suffered a major setback and loss of
prestige within the denomination when the Intelligencer, having incurred a substantial
debt of nearly L800, faced bankruptcy. Since its inception, The Association Loan Fund
had met with an indifferent response from much of the denomination. In 1854 the
committee overseeing the Intelligencer had signalled the lukewarm reception the fund
was receiving when they reported that “encouraging as this branch of labour seems, we
regret that the sums paid into our ‘Association Loan Fund’ have not been more
numerous, and the calls in its behalf more cheerfully responded to, by members and
churches, whose goods the Lord has increased.” 79By the time of annual meeting of the
Conference in 1857, however, the Conference was forced to send Hartt, their most
popular Elder, on a mission to visit the churches and try to raise “not less than One
Thousand Pounds” from the congregations to pay off the debt 80. He was only partly
successful, however, and the next year McLeod was forced to beg for support. “The
serious financial embarrassment which is now upon our Conference,” he stated in his
report to the Conference as Corresponding Secretary, “threatens with extinction every
enterprise in which we have felt an interest.”81

The fact that it was McLeod and the other members of the committee overseeing the
paper which had run up the debt over the previous five years was evidence to the
conservatives that organizational reform was moving too fast, and that allowing the
Saint John reformers free reign in any area had led to disaster. McLeod asked the
Conference to bail out the paper, and they did, but only after returning it to the control
of McLeod and fellow reformer Elder George A. Hartley as a private enterprise, for
which the Conference was no longer responsible. The method of the bail-out, however,
proved particularly galling to the rural congregations. After “much deliberation” at a
special meeting of the Conference in October, 1858, each church was assessed a
portion of the debt. Recognizing that this would be an unpopular move, the Conference
 14

drafted an appeal to be made to the churches by Elder Benjamin Merritt, the Chairman
of the Conference, that was half mea culpa and half plea for help. “As you are aware,”
the appeal began, “we are under a heavy burden of financial embarrassment, brought
upon us by the mismanagement of our business in connection with our Paper and Book
Concern.” Merritt continued:

We have published the Intelligencer too cheaply, and too long on

credit, but although conscious of having erred we have aimed at
doing good... unless relieved from our present liabilities we must
become nearly useless in advancing the cause of God... we
sincerely regret that circumstances compel us, as our only hope of
aid, thus to come to you. We now ask your sympathies whilst in
trouble, and your means to assist in the liquidation of our liabilities.82

The appeal then listed the amount that each church had been assigned to raise to help
cover the debt, a total of L632.

The belief that individual church members were being forced to pay for the
mismanagement of Saint John reformers was widespread, and hardly encouraged
confidence among the rural congregations in further centralization. Peters and
Underhill, as the two persons most responsible for the financial affairs of the
Conference, came under a great deal of criticism, so much so that the Conference
passed a resolution in 1858 exonerating them from “all charges whatever... prejudicial
to [their] character”.83The financial problems also had an adverse effect on other areas
of the Conference’s work, such as missionary efforts.84 It undermined a renewed effort
by the Conference to re-impose the circuit system, to the extent that a committee
appointed in 1858 to set up a circuit system concluded the following year that the
proposal should be “suspended for the present year, and that our ministers and
churches be allowed to make such mutual arrangements with each other as they may
deem necessary for their mutual benefit,”85 which represented a further defeat for
McLeod. Elder George Orser, from his virtual fiefdom in northern Carleton County and
southern Victoria County, indicated his disapproval of the direction the Conference had
taken by not attending the annual meeting in 1859 and not submitting a report of his
work.

This dissatisfaction continued into 1860. Although McLeod was elected that year by his
fellow Elders to be Chairman of the Conference for the first time, a vote of confidence in
his good intentions and work on moral reform if not in his complete agenda, and even
with reformers occupying all of the executive positions of the Conference 86, he was well
aware of the spirit of dissent growing throughout the denomination. The benevolent
societies and programs like the Sabbath schools and campaign for Sabbath
observance continued to enjoy majority support throughout the denomination. The
plans of the reformers to centralize control of the Conference and to turn the ministry
into a more professional and disciplined group, however, had met with increased
opposition in the wake of the financial fiasco of the late 1850s. Nevertheless, the
reformers were convinced that the former could not survive in the long run without the
 15

latter, and determined to put the troubles of the past behind them and move firmly
ahead with organizational reform.

In his report to the annual Conference as outgoing Corresponding Secretary, McLeod

wrote that he was encouraged by the “spirit of union in some places among brethren of
different denominations” which had been cultivated in “some cities and villages”, but
decried the condition of his own denomination.87 “The general condition of our churches
is not satisfactory,” he observed, “[and] elements of anarchy and insubordination exist
in some places which threaten the saddest consequences.” To McLeod the reason was
clearly a lack of “regular ministerial care” with many preachers “hav[ing] no stated field
of labour.” He lectured his fellow Elders that the ministerial office they held was “of
divine appointment”, and that they had to “lead the sacramental army forward in her
mighty struggle”. He chastised those who were unwilling to “settle down in the pastoral
office and to take responsibility of watching for souls.” Most significantly, he rebuked
those churches which maintained the idea “that regular ministerial labour and care is
not necessary to their growth in grace and increase in the knowledge of God.” 88 Finally,
he spoke directly to the senior lay members of rural congregations whom he viewed as
the greatest impediment to denominational reform and centralized organization, and
warned that their ability to effectively hire and fire ministers on a yearly basis must be
done away with. “Let it [not] be conceived for a moment,” he told his colleagues, “that
overseers in the church are mere ‘hirelings’, employed for a year, then to be set adrift
at the caprice of two or three persons, whom they have failed to please.” 89 This was a
direct attack on the churches and Elders in rural areas that had consistently ignored the
circuit system devised by the Conference.

McLeod took the opportunity of his annual report to not only attack the forces he felt
were impeding the progress of the denomination, but also to restate the case for
progressive reform. “We live in an extraordinary age,” he told the assembled leaders of
the Conference, “an age of wonder.” All of the other major denominations were “adding
vast numbers” to their ranks from “almost every condition and state of society”,
reinvigorating the church. “The impression,” he said, “seems to be upon all christians
[sic] who watch the signs of the times that important events are at the door.” The
various benevolent societies and agencies were “straining every nerve and exerting
every power to extend their beneficence,” working hard to “hasten the glorious period
when the knowledge of the Lord shall cover the earth, as the waters cover the sea.” 90
The Free Christian Baptists, McLeod cautioned his colleagues, risked being left behind
in God’s great enterprise if they continued to try to apply the methods of the past to the
needs of the present and future. He ended his report by charging the assembled
brethren to,

Let us not separate this year, until we have, under the teachings of
the Divine Wisdom, matured a plan for the most efficient care of our
people; until we can go forth and say every minister will and shall
devote himself to the work to which he has professed to be called:
and every church is expected, and must cast into the Lord’s treasury
as he prospers them, for the maintenance of the Gospel, and the
 16

spread of the Kingdom of Christ.

The problem McLeod faced, even as he tried to unify the church under the banner of
progressive reform, came from the fact that he was attempting to organize people who
had their roots in anti-formalism and a rejection of organizational structures and
professional ministers. Many Free Christian Baptists still looked upon such things as
non-essentials, part of the worldly society that was the antithesis of true Christianity.

McLeod believed that these views were being kept alive by Elders such as Pennington,
Orser, and Hartt, who resisted his vision of a more professional ministry, which they did
not see as necessary to accomplish the moral reform programme that they did accept.
Throughout the 1850s McLeod had worked hard to convince these men of the
necessity of changing methods in a changing world, but had met with only moderate
success. Most rural Elders remained committed to their “knight-errant-style of soul
winning in the charismatic mould of the [New Light] fathers.” 91 The changes in the
nature of the ministry, and the connection between preacher and congregation, that
McLeod advocated represented a breach of a core relationship considered inviolate by
many rural Free Christian Baptists and Elders, people bound together by shared
values, interests, and a history that was their anchor in a changing world of
urbanization, immigration, and industrialization. McLeod and the reformers wanted to
take the denomination to what they saw as a better future. The conservatives saw
nothing wrong with the past, and plenty to be wary of in an uncertain future. Two such
divergent views could only lead, in the words of anthropologist Victor Turner, to crisis
and “a trial of strength”.92 For the Free Christian Baptists, it was a trial of strength that
would first take place over the question of ministerial education and the office of the
itinerant evangelist.
1
1.D.G. Bell, “From Newlight to Arminian Baptist, 1776-1832" [an unpublished 1981 Harvard
Divinity School paper, a copy of which is on deposit at the Atlantic Baptist Historical Collection,
Acadia University], 56.
2
.The term “Newlight” is the most descriptive of the varied and generally inclusive membership of
these churches, which included Allinites, disaffected Methodists, and immersed Baptists unwilling to
accept the Calvinism and close communion practices of the Regular Baptists.
3
.The best examination of how the New Lights survived in this period as a separate tradition can be
found in D.G. Bell, “From Newlight to Arminian Baptist, 1776-1832", ibid. Bell’s Newlight Journals
of James Manning and James Innis (Hantsport, Nova Scotia: Lancelot Press, 1984) is also an extremely
valuable source.
4
.Of Pineo, for example, Manning wrote, “[He] made confusion among the people. I made some
remarks to [him] and he got quite exasperated, to wit, abusive. Threatened violence with much temper.
Said I was no gentleman, but a vagabond... I was sorry he was such a man... I feel a desire to pity and
pray for him, but never want to have any connection with him while he is in the strain that he is in.”
Edward Manning journals, 30 December, 1812 {Atlantic Baptist Collection, Acadia University].
5
.As Bell has demonstrated, the influence of Samuel Nutt, the American evangelist from the Christian
Connection who took an active role in the revivals, although crucial in terms of “giving leadership to
the influential band of native exhorters”, was catalytic, not substantive; Bell, “From Newlight to
Arminian Baptist, 1776-1832", ibid., 56-57.
6
.G. Garraty, Rise and Progress of the “New Brunswick Christian Conference”: A Narrative of the
Illiberal, Partial, and Unscriptural Conduct of Said Conference towards George Garraty (Saint John:
1840), 7.
7
. Philip G.A. Griffin-Allwood, “‘To Hear A Free Gospel’: The Christian Connexion in Canada” in
CSCH Papers (1988), 75.
8
. Rev. A. Taylor, “Semi-Centennial Sermon” in Minutes of the Fiftieth General Conference of the
Free Christian Baptists of New Brunswick (Saint John: George W. Day, 1882), 46. Taylor noted that
“Our fathers believed that... the membership should exercise... the gifts of the church in any religious
service, even if they were not in holy orders, or were not ordained to the work of thecjristian ministry...
[they] believed in lay preaching, and they properly allowed it to have its fullest and widest extent.”
9
. With regard to the participation of women, see Rev. D. Dunbar, A Concise View of the Origin and
Principles of the Several Religious Denominations Exisiting at Present in the Province of New
Brunswick... (Eastport, Maine: Benjamin Folsom, 1819), 81-82. Dunbar observed that “In [New
Brunswick] the Baptists have been too often confounded with a set of enthusiastic professors, who call
themselves by no other name than christians [and] who pretend to be moved to speak by the spirit, and
their females are generally the most active in this part of the worship.” On the attraction of radical
evangelicalism for women, see Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s excellent chapter “Women and Religious
Revivals: Anti-Ritualism, Liminality, and the Emergence of the American Bourgeoisie” in Leonard
Sweet, ed., The Evangelical Tradition in America (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1984),
199-233.
10
.Men such as John M. Wilmot, Thomas Harding, George Bond, and David Ansley were typical of
this influential new merchant class. All served as Saint John aldermen in the 1820s and 1830s; Bond,
Harding and Wilmot were Baptists, and Ansley was a Methodist. See T.W. Acheson, Saint John: The
Making of a Colonial Urban Community (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 42-43.
11
. Compare the views of Charles Inglis, the first Anglican Bishop in the Maritimes and arch-foe of
radical evangelicalism, with those of Baptist patriarch Edward Manning. In 1792 Inglis wrote “The
Church of Christ is not a tumultuous, disorderly, and unorganized multitude, as [the enthusiasts] seem
to suppose... to suppose any man may usurp the ministerial office, without any other warrant or
authority than his own good opinion of his own sufficiency, is an error fraught with consequences
destructive to Christianity...” A Charge delivered to the Clergy of Nova-Scotia, at the Triennial
Visitation holden in the Town of Halifax, in the month of June 1791 (Halifax:: 1792). For his part,
Manning, who was one of the Inglis’ targets in 1792, wrote in 1814, “Mr. William Blenkorn... who is
in the habit of speaking in public, [is] but a vile enthusiast... [he] arose and contradicted the plain truth
of the Gospel... I wish he may never return to this place.. Much hurt may be done by such unskillful
guides as he is.”; Edward Manning journal, 9 November and 26 November, 1814, ibid.
12
. D.G. Bell, “The Allinite Tradition and the New Brunswick Free Christian Baptists, 1830-1875" in
Robert S. Wilson, ed., An Abiding Conviction: Maritime Baptists and Their World (Hantsport, Nova
Scotia: Lancelot Press, 1988), 59.
13
. Garraty, ibid., 5.
14
. Ibid., 4.
15
. Or British influence on the Methodists at about the same time.
16
. Garratty, ibid. When Hartt began preaching, for example, many of his Baptist relatives were
“considerably opposed to him,” and “a great outcry through the country from his nearest friends
[arose] that [he] was deluded...” Edward Weyman, “Notes Regarding Early Ministers” [Atlantic
Baptist Historical Collection, Acadia University], 4-5.
17
. Weyman, ibid., 1-12.
18
18. Ibid., 5.
19
. Taylor, ibid., 43-45. Sir George Eulas Foster, who emerged in the 1870s and 1880s as a key
member of the laity pressing for a more ordered and professional church, commented in his
autobiography that the 1830s and 1840s, when he was a young boy in Wakefield, were the “days of
militant pioneer church life... in the itinerant revivalist effort which invaded all our settlements”; W.
Stewart Wallace, ed., The Memoirs of the Rt. Hon. Sir George Foster, P.C., G.C.M.G. (Toronto: The
Macmillan Company of Canada Limited, 1933), 11-12.
20
. Wallace, ibid.
21
. Ibid.
22
. Peer pressure was certainly an important factor in the success of the revivals: to not participate was
often to cut oneself off from friends and family. Rev. Alexander Taylor in his memoirs recounted how
this social reality first led him to evangelical religion in his early twenties: “It was about the first of
March 1833, when I was residing in Richmond, near the [Maine-New Brunswick] boundary line... that
awaking from sleep one Sunday morning... my first thought was to go and see some young friends... A
very different reception awaited me from what I had anticipated, for the young people avoided me, and
appeared to be afraid in my presence. I soon noticed they appeared very solemn... I wondered what
was the matter with them, and I soon learned that they were deeply concerned about themselves and
were then seeking religion. I felt very cross and concluded I was being treated badly... one of the party
told me they were going to meeting, and asked me to go with them. I answered roughly, ‘No, I will go
to no meeting.’ They turned and left me. Instantly I made up my mind that I would go to the meeting
[and] when they went away I followed.” Rev. Alexander Taylor, “Reminiscences of my Early Life and
my Religious Experience, #6" Religious Intelligencer, 9 March 1887.
23
. Ibid.
24
. Ibid.
25
. The membership of the Baptist Missionary Board in 1829 provides an early example of this
development. The Board was chaired by Rev. F.W. Miles, of Saint John, and included seven other
ministers and eight members of the laity. While the ministers represented, with the exception of Miles
and Rev. David Harris in Fredericton, rural congregations, the lay members were all from Saint John,
and included fairly prominent middle class citizens such as Joshua Bunting, the High Constable of the
city, and merchant John M. Wilmot, who later served on the Common Council and was married into
the family of influential merchant and ship-owner Stephen Wiggins.
26
. Daniel Godwin has argued that the baptismal controversy of the first half of the nineteenth century
was part of an intellectual awakening amongst the leadership of the four major Protestant
denominations - Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterians and Anglicans - and symbolized the growing desire
of Baptist and Methodist leaders to achieve equality with the established churches by debating them on
theological issues. These denominations were moving beyond mere questions of survival and internal
organization, and were beginning to define a more ordered and structured creed for their congregations
to follow; Daniel Goodwin, “The Baptismal Controversy and the Intellectual Awakening in Nova
Scotia, 1811-1848" in Priestly, David T., ed., A Fragile Stability: Definition and Redefinition of
Maritime Baptist Identity (Hantsport, Nova Scotia: Lancelot Press, 1994), 3-21.
27
. Quoted in Philip G.A. Griffin-Allwood, “‘The Sucksess of the Baptist denomination in New
Brunswick’: The Structure of Baptist Triumphalism in ‘The Memoirs of the Rev. Jarvis Ring, Baptist
Minister” in Historical Papers 1992: Canadian Society of Church History, 46-47.
28
. The Baptists and Methodists were not without their opponents to greater organization and a more
professional and educated ministry. A British observer visiting a Baptist general meeting in the early
1840s watched as these issues were fiercely debated. “[The] present subject,” she observed, “was the
appropriation of certain funds - whether they should be applied towards increasing their seminary, so
as to fit it for the proper education of ministers for their churches, or whether they should not be
applied to some other purpose, and their priesthood be still allowed to spring uncultured from the
mass... Some white-headed leaders of the sect, old refugees, who had left the bounds of civilization
before they had received any education... sternly declaimed against the education system, declaring
that grace [alone] was what formed the teacher... The old men, stern in their prejudices as their zeal,
were conquered, and the baptists have now well conducted establishments of learning throughout the
province.” Frances Beaven, Life in the Backwoods of New Brunswick (London: George Routledge,
1845), 60-64.
29
. “My mind was always sceptical in these modern peculiar revelations, consequently I had no faith in
what [they] told me; as [they] could work no miracle to prove it, I could not rank it with the old
revelation which was proved to be true by miracles, therefore set it down for... false one[s]” Garraty,
ibid., 10.
30
. Ibid., 11. Garraty wrote, “did ever the Pope of Rome lay stronger claims to the keys of the kingdom,
and infallibility, than these, my humble brethren? I then bade them adieu, resolving to meet them in
Conference no more unless a radical change should ensue. They then met in their private meeting to
see what could be done with the heretic, as they declared me to be.”
31
. In 1849, for example, Alexander Taylor, a Free Will Baptist from Maine who had moved to New
Brunswick and sought to join the Free Christian Baptists, with a new house to pay for, faced the
prospect of being “left out in the cold, my debts unpaid, and my name and credit damaged,” and had to
give up preaching for teaching school during the winter to pay his bills.
2
32. A Treatise on the Faith of the Free Christian Baptists of Nova-Scotia and New-Brunswick (Saint
John: Bailey & Day, 1848), 2-3; Rev. Joseph McLeod, “A Sketch of the History of the Free Baptists in
New Brunswick,” in E.M. Saunders, History of the Baptists of the Maritime Provinces (Halifax:: John
Burgoyne, 1902), 424.
3
3. Bell, “The Allinite Tradition and the New Brunswick Free Christian Baptists, 1830-1875", ibid., 62.
4
34. Rules and Minutes of the Free Christian Baptist General Conference of New Brunswick (1850)
(Saint John: George W. Day, 1850), 5. Another example: three preachers were to be appointed by the
Moderator of the General Conference to attend each District Meeting, and they were bound to attend
“if the Lord will [it].”
5
35. Minutes (1856), 5.
6
36. McLeod, ibid., 420.
7
37. Ibid.
8
38. Religious Intelligencer, 25 February 1859.
9
39. Michael Gauvreau, “Protestantism Transformed: Personal Piety and the Evangelical Social Vision,
1815-1867" in George A. Rawlyk, ed., The Canadian Protestant Experience, 1760-1990 (McGill-
Queen’s University Press: Montreal, 1990), 61.
0
40. The best description of the New Dispensationalists can be found in Brian Cuthbertson, ed., The
Journal of John Payzant (Hantsport, Nova Scotia: Lancelot Press, 1981), 77-85; and Bell, The
Newlight Journals of James Manning and James Innis, ibid., 14-20, 180-190.
1
41. The Herald of Truth, (Vol. 1, No. 3: 12 August 1843) PANB
2
42. William Westfall, Two Worlds: The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth Century Ontario (Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), 166.
3
43. For more on the Millerite phenomenon, see S.D. Clark, Church and Sect in Canada (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1948), 308-313.
4
4. John Webster Grant, A Profusion of Spires: Religion in Nineteenth Century Ontario (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1988), 167.
5
45. Bell, An Abiding Conviction, ibid., 64.
6
46. Grant, ibid.
7
47. Gauvreau, ibid., 84.
8
48. Religious Intelligencer, 1 January 1853. By ‘branches of labour’ McLeod clearly meant missions,
Sabbath Schools, and Bible societies. “Second only to the great object of personal holiness,” he wrote,
“we shall endeavor to enlist the benevolence of the people in favour of these institutions.”
9
49. Allen B. Robertson, “‘Give All You Can’: Methodists and Charitable Causes in Nineteenth-
Century Nova Scotia” in Charles H.H. Scobie and John Webster Grant, eds., The Contribution of
Methodism to Atlantic Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992), 93-100.
0
50. David B, Marshall, Secularizing the Faith: Canadian Protestant Clergy and the Crisis of Belief,
1850-1940 (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1992), 47.
1
51. Minutes (1853), 8-9.
2
52. Ibid., 9.
3
53. McLeod, ibid, 416-418. McLeod noted that “Hartt was not an organizer; he was an evangelist...
with remarkable power in exhortation and prayer.”
4
54. McLeod led the Free Christian Baptists in denouncing the Orangemen. Following the 1849 riots
the General Conference admonished the Order in strong language, and in 1850 instructed the churches
to withdraw fellowship from any person who would not leave the lodges. Shortly after Orser preached
a sermon in Woodstock to the Edward Orser Lodge, in defiance of McLeod and the Conference; see
Frederick C. Burnett, “George Whitefield Orser: Another View” (Paper presented to the Carleton
County Historical Society, 24 October 1980, copy on deposit in the Atlantic Baptist Archives), 2-3.
5
5. Weyman, ibid. According to Weyman, one of McLeod’s key allies over the years, Sisson was
“entangled in the lumber trade”, Gunter was a “strong conservative” who “hampered himself with...
the business of this life”, and Pennington was “incline[d] to tradeing, and could not be Preavailed upon
to give it up.”
6
56. The Conference included in the Minutes an appeal to Church members to support the Association
and the Intelligencer. “The object of the Association is to do good,” it said, “[and] to labour side by
side with those who have God’s glory and man’s god in view”; Minutes (1853), 15.
7
57. Minutes (1850), 6.
8
58. Minutes (1851), 7-8. The committee recommended that “the Churches... be arranged in Circuits,
and each Elder take a certain circuit as a district of care, to watch over them, exercise discipline, and
administer the ordinances - such care of course never standing in the way of the general labour in the
Gospel as an Evangelist.”
9
59. Ibid.
0
60. For a thorough study of temperance in the Maritimes in the first half of the nineteenth century, see
Sandra Lynn Barry, “Shades of Vice - and Moral Glory: The Temperance Movement in Nova Scotia,
1828-1848" (M.A. Thesis, University of New Brunswick, 1986), PANS; Stephen Ferguson, “The
Temperance Movement in Nova Scotia, 1827-1849" (M.A. Thesis, Dalhousie University, 1974),
PANS; Jan Noel, Canada Dry: Temperance Crusades Before Confederation (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1995), chapters 1-3; and, with reference to Saint John, Acheson, ibid., chapter 7.
1
61. Taylor, “Semi-Centennial Sermon”, Minutes (1882), 50.
2
62. Minutes (1856), 16.
3
63. Scott W. See, Riots in New Brunswick: Orange Nativism and Social Violence in the 1840s
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 38. Violent incidents with hard-drinking lumbermen had
forced the government to send the militia to the Wakefield region in the late 1830s to restore order.
Alexander Taylor describes the lumberers as “dreadfully wicked men”; ibid., 14.
4
64. Noel, ibid., 31.
5
65. Acheson, ibid., 155-156.
6
6. Religious Intelligencer, 1 January 1858. The Free Christian Baptists were not alone in their anti-
Catholicism, a mindset which was very much the essence of mid-nineteenth century Protestant
evangelicalism, and served to help define evangelical identity; John Wolffe, “Anti-Catholicism and
Evangelical Identity in Britain and the United States, 1830-1860," in Evangelicalism: Comparative
Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700-1990, Mark A.
Noll et al, eds.(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 179-180. The Maritime Methodist press, for
example, referred to Catholics as “the malign impugners of christian experience, and the perverse
nullifiers of sound christian morality,” and the Catholic Church as “a huge, monstrous, and palpable
exhibition of pharasaism in its most corrupt form, intensely imbued with the cruel spirit”; The
Provicial Wesleyan, 13 April 1854.
7
67. This latter consideration was quite likely crucial in gaining Orser’s support for the Intelligencer.
8
68. Clark, ibid., 255; Acheson, ibid., 140. Acheson notes that temperance was a “broadly based
movement [that] became a coalition of interest groups containing individuals motivated by religious
conviction, humanitarian concern, and fears of the threat posed to the social order.”
9
69. Carl Murray Wallace, “Sir Leonard Tilley, A Political Biography” (PhD Thesis, University of
Alberta, 1972), 33.
0
70. The Board of Managers had the power to “execute all leases, deeds, conveyances, bonds, contacts,
or other written documents”; Constitution of the General Conference and District Meetings of Free
Christian Baptists of New Brunswick, Minutes (1855), 24-25.
1
71. By the age of 27 Parsons and his younger brother employed eight apprentices, who all lived with
them as lodgers, and a servant.
2
72. William T. Baird, Seventy Years of New Brunswick Life, Autobiographical Sketches (Saint John:
George E. Day, 1890), 104.
3
73. Clark, ibid., 272. Another key McLeod ally in Carleton County was Charles Connell, a successful
Woodstock merchant and Legislative Councillor.
4
74. Religious Intelligencer, 15 January 1858
5
75. Religious Intelligencer, 30 April 1858.
6
76. Ibid.
7
7. Religious Intelligencer, 1 April 1853.
8
78. Minutes (1855), 14.
9
79. Minutes (1854), 13.
0
80. Minutes (1857), 17
1
81. Minutes (1858), 5-7.
2
82. Ibid., 24.
3
83. Ibid. The resolution read in whole: “Whereas, certain reports have gone out and are in circulation
prejudicial to the character of Brothers B.J. Underhill, and Wm. Peters in connection with the business
intrusted to them, Therefore Resolved, that this Conference fully exonerate them from all charges
whatever, and that we appreciate very highly their past services and would earnestly solicit their
further continuance.”
4
84. Minutes (1858), 17. “The scarcity of money,” McLeod was required to report, “and the financial
embarrassment of our Conference, has prevented any further Missionary operations during the year;
and probably under existing circumstances but little will be done next year.”
5
85. Minutes (1859), 13. Elder George A. Hartley noted in his report as Corresponding Secretary that
the circuit system had in some places proven beneficial, but in others “it has not”.
6
86. Rev. George Hartley, a strong supporter of McLeod and a regular contributor to the Intelligencer,
as Corresponding Secretary, William Peters as Treasurer, B.J. Underhill as Recording Secretary, and
E.M. Truesdale of Woodstock as Assistant Secretary; Minutes (1860).
7

87. Ibid., 3.
8
8. Ibid., 4-5.
9
89. Ibid., 5.
0
90. Ibid.
1
91. Bell, An Abiding Conviction, op. cit., 68.
2
92. Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, New
York: Cornell University Press, 1974), 17, 78-79.