ous enterprise of the New England churches, who,
while cordially conforming to the new methods of organization and
discipline, were not in the least penetrated with the traditionary
Scotch veneration for the Westminster standards. For nearly thirty years
the great reinforcements from New England and from men of the New
England way of thinking had been ungrudgingly bestowed and heartily
welcomed. But the great accessions which in the first four years of the
fourth decade of this century had increased the roll of the communicants
of the Presbyterian Church by more than fifty per cent. had come in
undue proportion from the New Englandized regions of western New York
and Ohio. It was inevitable that the jealousy of hereditary
Presbyterians, "whose were the fathers," should be aroused by the
perfectly reasonable fear lest the traditional ways of the church which
they felt to be in a peculiar sense _their_ church might be affected by
so large an element from without.

The grounds of explicit complaint against the party called "New School"
were principally twofold--doctrine and organization.

In the Presbyterian Church at this time were three pretty distinct types
of theological thought. First, there was the unmitigated Scotch
Calvinism; secondly, there was the modification of this system, which
became naturalized in the church after the Great Awakening, when
Jonathan Dickinson and Jonathan Edwards, from neighbor towns in
Massachusetts, came to be looked upon as the great Presbyterian
theologians; thirdly, there was the "consistent Calvinism," that had
been still further evolved by the patient labor of students in direct
succession from Edwards, and that was known under the name of
"Hopkinsianism." Just now the latest and not the least eminent in this
school, Dr. Nathaniel W. Taylor, of New Haven, was enunciating to large
and enthusiastic classes in Yale Divinity School new definitions and
forms of statement giving rise to much earnest debate. The alarm of
those to whom the very phrase "improvement in theology" was an
abomination expressed itself in futile indictments for heresy brought
against some of the most eminently godly and useful ministers in all the
church. Lyman Beecher, of Lane Seminary, Edward Beecher, J. M.
Sturtevant, and William Kirby, of Illinois College, and George Duffield,
of the presbytery of Carlisle, Pa., were annoyed by impeachments for
heresy, which all failed before reaching the court of last resort.