Free Ancestors by William Maxwell Page A

and admitted them as true, yet unfathomable mysteries. Viewing them as such, I let them alone in my public discourses, and confined myself to the practical part of religion, and to subjects within my depth. But in reexamining these doctrines, I found the covering put over them could not hide them from a discerning eye with close inspection. Indeed, I saw they were necessary to the system without any covering.”
    Before the Presbytery convened, Stone took two of the members aside and “made known to them my difficulties, and that I had determined to decline the ordination at that time. They labored, but in vain, to remove my difficulties and objections. They asked me how far I was willing to receive the confession? I told them, as far as I saw it consistent with the word of God. They concluded that was sufficient. I went into Presbytery and when the question was proposed, ‘Do you receive and adopt the Confession of Faith, as containing the system of doctrine taught in the Bible?’ I answered aloud, so that the whole congregation could hear, ‘I do, as far as I see it consistent with the word of God.’ No objection being made I was ordained.”
    He was twenty-four years old.
    He continued to be nagged by doubts, which he labored to repel as Satanic temptations. Nevertheless, as he was addressing his congregations on the doctrine of total depravity and the necessity of the physical power of God to produce faith, and at the same time urging them to repent and believe the gospel, his zeal would be chilled at the contradiction.
For how could they believe? How could they repent unless it was God’s sovereign will and pleasure that they should repent? How could they do impossibilities? And how could they be guilty in not doing them?
“Such thoughts would almost stifle utterance, and were as mountains pressing me down to the shades of death.” He tried to take refuge in the distinction between natural and moral ability and inability, but by whatever name it was called that inability was in the sinner, and therefore he could not believe, or repent, but must be damned.
    *
The Biography of Elder Barton Warren Stone written by himself, with Additions and Reflections by Elder John Rogers
(Cincinnati, 1847).

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    Stone resolved not to declare his views publicly until he felt able to defend them. He read the Bible. He retired to the solitude of the woods and sank down on his knees. At the thought of a God who, professing great love for his children, would punish them for not carrying out impossible commands, blasphemy rose in his heart and he was tempted to utter it. Sweat burst from the pores of his body. He prayed for the ruined world.
    In his parish and in the rest of Kentucky, life went on quietly. His own passionate feelings met with no response. Preaching from the pulpit at Cane Ridge or at Concord, he was aware of a universal apathy, as if the powers of religion had disappeared and even the form of it was fast waning away.
    At the end of the 18th century the Protestant church was completely given over to sectarianism. There were five kinds of Baptists and six kinds of Presbyterians—in the American wilderness, where congregations were small and poor and widely scattered and for the most part dependent on itinerant preachers. Only one person in ten belonged to any church whatever. Among the Presbyterians, a minister of one branch was not acceptable to any of the other five, and weeks passed during which it was impossible to hold a service or take communion. The presbyteries and synods were powerful and suspicious, and the slightest deviation from the Westminster Confession was sufficient to bring about a minister’s expulsion from the church.
    Faith and reason being of no avail, the scrupulous person waited, often in vain, for convincing proof—a dream, a vision, a voice, an uncommon appearance of light—that he had arrived at belief through the direct action of God. In his autobiography Stone cries out, “Let me here