The following is an excerpt from Early History of the Disciples in the Western Reserve by Amos S. Hayden.
In the opening of our plea on the Western Reserve the iconoclast was among us. He wrought for us, though in a far less honorable sense, the work which Goethe said was accomplished by Lord Bacon. “He took a sponge and wiped from the tablet all records of former knowledge.”
The cry ran—clear away the rubbish, that the foundations of the Lord’s house may be laid. Reformation is one thing, demolition another, and restoration still another. Discrimination did not well rule the hour. No records were kept after 1828. Some of the churches thought it a violation of this reformation to have any records whatever, even a list of the names of the members. There was no authority for it in the word of the Lord. “Where the Scriptures speak, we speak; where they are silent, we are silent.” The noblest of rules; but, applied to mere prudentials, most egregiously misapplied. So, as the Scriptures gave no instructions about church records the whole matter was ruled out of order, and out of the church.
Alas! what has been lost by this misdirected zeal! The zeal was good, but the wisdom was the essence of folly. What would we not give now for a continuance of the records of the Mahoning Association, which met two years under that name after the records ceased? Why were there no records of our yearly meetings? What rich and abundant materials for future history and instruction?
Who can tell us, from historic data, even now correctly, about our debates, and the mighty campaigns which have given us so many communities for Jesus Christ? Who now, from any preserved records, can tell the history of Henry, that swift messenger of the glad tidings? In vain we question records for an account of his conversion, his baptism, and how he came forth from being a driver of oxen and a bugler for regiments, to become a leader in the embattled hosts of the armies of the living God. And Brockett, the blessed; and Smith, the saint; and Collins, the colleague of the honorable!
In these pages, personal knowledge and gathered data have, in part, supplied this lack. But this source of information is, with the passing generation, rapidly going down to the dumb grave; the silent receptacle of all things human.
The scribe was a man of high authority among the Jews, a little vain, and a sweep of his robe somewhat too ample. The horn of oil made the nation jubilant when it was emptied in the consecration of a priest or a king. But the horn of ink has made many nations joyful by its recitals of their deeds, and its transmissions of their jubilees.
Oh, that Scott had kept a diary! that our earlier men had written as well as talked! Thanks to Baxter, whose skill and zeal have evoked from the tomb of the mighty, a history distinguished both for its beauty and its truth. Of what infinite embarrassment would he have been relieved by contemporaneous records!
The historic muse prepared his reed to sing the illustrious deeds of the panoplied pioneers, not in verse, but in plain and humble prose. Yet the prose should fall little below the powers of the loftiest muses, to record in fitting terms the grand anthem of their heroism and their triumph. Shall the next generation find this one as barren of records as we find the past?