Seventh-Day Baptist Nature Worship

Seventh Day Baptists go to meetin'

Today there will be snow, Google just told me. It's not the time to let James Leander Scott have his way with us. It'll just make us bitter--in addition to cold. 

But I can't help it. I just stumbled on this yesterday. 

James Leander Scott was a Seventh-Day Baptist, proud, even arrogant about it, unyielding, theologically at least. In 1842, the call to preach the gospel out west came to him without much hoopla it seems. What the call amounted to was a contract with the Almighty drawn up by what his own heavyweight sense of duty told him needed to be accomplished--someone had to go west and preach the unsullied gospel to keep all those sinner-pioneers from the fires of hell--and to hear the SDB's signature doctrine, the scripture's clarion call for a Saturday Sabbath. 

Oddly enough, one of his first stops was a Mormon temple, greatly deserted because at that moment most LDS had already left for Nauvoo. Three pages of his memoir are devoted the temple's features, so much that the editor in him couldn't help but judge. "This is as concise a description as I am able to give, and although my notes are somewhat defaced I believe it is correct." He wanted, he says, "to show how far delusion may go, even in this our enlightened land."

Catholics fare far worse than Mormons in the memoir. James Leander Scott took off for the great northwest fearing the immigrant Roman Catholic communities already staking out territory for a beachhead on the ocean of grass, all of that to create an American papacy and begin yet another bloody round of inquisitions.

But then he happened on the prairie's sheer and endless beauty, a colorful flowery maze all around him. "The Botanist," he says, "might be lost in this natural and almost unbounded garden of flowers." It's too beautiful for words. "It is in vain to attempt to describe fully this grandeur-dressed garden of nature, which is unparalleled in beauty." 

No matter. He tries.

Along with his wife and son (who barely get his attention), he can't help but fall into sheer wonder at the glamour of the prairie. Each of them, he says, "alike enchanted stand like fixed monuments with the head bent forward, as though the whole soul was thrown at once into the eyes," something he vain would call a "religious experience," even though it sounds Emersonian.

All of it is Hudson School, this breathtaking frontier world so wide and encompassing it wrings what's human right out of him. "All is silent as the house of eternal slumbers, and each is indifferent to all around." The man is taken by the beauty all around.

The world he sees when he leaves the forests is beyond real. James Leander Scott doesn't lose his senses on the prairie, he gains them. Once more tries his hand at getting something of its glory down on paper before.

The green carpet -- the never-to-be-described clusters of flowers -- the prairie hen, rising and falling into this and that bed -- the snipe, with his chattering bill -- and turkey-buzzard floating carelessly in the air, surveying all below -- the sand-hill crane strutting around -- the yelping wolf as he slips along from bank to bank --and add to this the enlivening notes of the feathered songsters, who could help being entranced? 

Lest you wonder, he can restrain the nature worship he feels, and he does. "Omnipotent is the hand that formed all these objects of beauty. Who that is a christian could refrain from adoring the God of Wisdom." 

In those early years of the 19th century, were the Reverend James Leander Scott a Winnebago or Sac or Fox, the God of Wisdom would be the Great Spirit. 

Art with all its grandeur and decorated form, is lost at once in this incomprehensible field of natural curiosities. The mind almost fancies
itself in an unsullied world of joy. 

The preacher says a June prairie is--dare I say it? dare he?--almost heaven. 

English visual artists pursued "the sublime," as did the French. It wasn't only Hudson River Yankees who tried to create something as mystically glorious, as sublime, as the magnificent American frontier landscape. 

Let me confess my sin. I wanted not to like James Leander Scott, this tent-meeting, tub-thumping, circuit-riding, Seventh Day Baptist whirlygig; but the earnestness he carries into making darn sure the reader sees what he sees and loves what he loves made me smile, made me give the stumper an inch or two more grace than he might have given the roughneck sinners lined up outside his tent. 

He just couldn't help himself amid all that beauty. He just about lost it.

All those clusters of flowers he describes won't stop the snow from whipping through this morning, but then again maybe a day like today is the right time to hearken to the parson's sermon out there on the gorgeous prairie. 

Hope springs eternal.