The Strange Case of Alfred Eychaner (3 of 3)

by Jerome

(Addenda – part 3 of 3)

For part 1 – Pittsburgh Presbyterians – see post on June 2.

For part 2 - An Evening Prayer and the Case of William Hickey – see post on June 7.

The final addenda in this three part series relates to events in 1895. While this is beyond the timeline covered in Separate Identity volume one, events of those early days do have a bearing on a footnote found in that book in chapter 2, footnote 87. New information has been discovered to resolve a question which the footnote iindirectly raises.

The valid point is made in the footnote that Russell worked with others who did not hold to his exact doctrine. This would certainly include at some point those associated with the Age to Come/One Faith/Church of God movement. The meetings held at Quincy Hall, Leacock Street were attended by an independent mixture of people and although were sometimes billed as Advent Christian in the early 1870s were also billed as One Faith/Church of God. The Church of God newspaper at the time was The Restitution and in its Church Directory in the issue for November 5, 1874, it listed G D Clowes as preacher at Quincy Hall.

Clowes is mentioned in early ZWTs and his death is recorded in 1889 with a very positive obituary. All this is found in this footnote.

As the Advent Christian Church became a more formal denomination, it caused an inevitable parting of the ways. By 1880 One Faith adherents were sniping at the Advent Christians as only being “half-brethren.” (see for example The Restitution for July 28, 1880, page 2).

But then we travel further on in time to 1895 when a Church of God/One Faith tent meeting appears to have Charles Taze Russell sharing the platform for several days with Andrew James Eychaner (1842-1936). Or does he?

Looking at the evidence for or against this happening in 1895 highlights the problem in evaluating primary and secondary sources, and how new discoveries can sometimes change conclusions.

The main source, and in fact the only source, for putting C T Russell on a One Faith/Church of God platform as late as the mid-1890s is a diary kept by Eychaner. This was featured by Jan Turner Stilson in her excellent Biographical Encyclopedia: Chronicling the History of the Church of God Abrahamic Faith (ISBN 0-615-46561-6). The diary pages for the event are reproduced below.

Reproduced by kind permission of Jan Stilson. Original in Atlanta Bible College

This has naturally been viewed as a primary source and a pretty conclusive source too. Eychaner was there, Eychaner knew who was there with him, so Eychaner knew what he was writing. What could be simpler? Added to this, Eychaner was a bit of a maverick whose personal beliefs were not always completely in step with the main One Faith movement. (See his detailed biography in Jan Stilson’s work). So if anyone was going to invite C T Russell to speak, it would be someone like Eychaner, and Russell would generally accept most offered platforms to share his views.

But then as they say, the plot thickens. First, it should be noted that this was not just an ordinary run-of-the mill tent meeting; this was a convention lasting several days, officially the annual Iowa State Conference for the Church of God for 1895. So it was quite high profile and received good publicity in the Church of God’s weekly newspaper The Restitution.

Below is one example taken from The Restitution for August 7, 1895, page 2.

This was an advertisement to get readers to attend, and gave the complete conference program with speakers in detail. When compared with Eychaner’s diary it is obviously the same conference, even though there were some changes between planning and reality. It appears that some billed speakers didn’t show, and those who were there had to fill in for them.

But now let’s examine The Restitution advertisement in more detail. The first day of sermons was to be on Friday, August 16, and one of the speakers was to be Russell. But this time the speaker is billed as C W Russell, not C T Russell.

Compare that with Eychaner’s diary entry for Friday, August 16. This abbreviated program has C T Russell giving the sermon.

So is it C W or C T Russell? Was there a misprint in The Restitution?

C W Russell was a real person, and to confuse matters further he was also called Charles. In the pages of The Restitution he was a regular assistant to Andrew Eychaner. C W had moved from Chicago to Iowa in 1894 and received his teaching certificate from the Church of God in July 1894. Over the next year his name was regularly linked with Eychaner’s in tent work. Years later, in 1912 he was still preaching for the Church of God.

So, leaving aside Eychaner’s diary, it would be logical for C W to appear at the Marshalltown conference. People would be expecting him. Hence he is clearly billed in The Restitution for August 7, 1895, as reproduced above.

If there had been no diary entry, these newspaper announcements would be primary sources. But the diary entry would normally kick them into secondary source territory and take precedence.

But then we have to ask – if it was logical for C W Russell, Eychaner’s regular sidekick, to be there, would it have been logical for C T Russell to replace him for several days?

Here is where the history of C T Russell and Church of God needs to be considered. We have already established with the example of George Clowes that there were links between them on a local level. And Charles Taze Russell is mentioned many times in the pages of The Restitution.

The readers of The Restitution were a logical audience to be targeted with the writings of Charles Taze in the early days. How they were received by that group as the years rolled by tells a very clear story of a deteriorating relationship.

Three Worlds, written by Barbour but published by Russell, was featured in an advertisement in The Restitution for May 30, 1879, page 3. The by-line read “Should be in the hands of every Bible student.” No actual review has been found in surviving issues of the paper.

Object and Manner of Our Lords Return was given away with The Restitution as a freebie with the issue of February 20, 1878. This issue is no longer extant but the following week’s issue of February 27 commented on it: “The Restitution supplement, as was noticed last week, was furnished by the writer C T Russell, to the readers of our paper, at his own expense both for the printing and mailing. “ The review has a friendly but condescending tone. Rather magnanimously it states “we do not wish to prejudice our readers as it is a present to them which has been quite an expense to the writer”. However, readers must “prove all things” and the reviewer certainly had different views on resurrection and the Second Advent. Still “the ‘fair chance’ part of the supplement will probably please some of our readers.”

When others had time to assimilate its contents, they were not prepared to be so charitable. In The Restitution for June 26, 1878 one Restitution stalwart, J. B. Cook, had read it through thoroughly and did not like it one bit.

Cook’s review took center stage on the front page – The Object and Manner of Our Lord’s Return by C.T. Russel (sic), noticed by J.B.Cook.

Cook starts by saying the pamphlet had been circulated both directly and indirectly and he received his copy with Herald of the Morning. The suggestion that Christ’s return had already taken place invisibly did not sit at all well with him. And as for the “second chance” gospel from H. Dunn, this was “another gospel”. Cook’s review is peppered with expressions like – delusive - utterly fallacious - the phantom of an excited brain... He concludes his attack with the words:  “It is in deep sorrow for them that I write. Brother R is spending his money for that which is not bread, and the brethren are scattered by ‘uncertain sounds,’ yet I rejoice. ‘The Lord knoweth them that are his.’ Amen. ‘The half has not been told’ to these brethren, but adieu.”

There is a hint of theatrical flourish in the final “adieu” with perhaps a suggestion of 1 John 2 v.19 about it – “They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us” (NIV).

CTR’s next publication for mass distribution was the 160 page pamphlet Food for Thinking Christians. Ultimately, over one million were circulated. This could hardly be ignored by The Restitution, although they really tried.

 It was general policy to include cuttings from exchanged journals as fillers, and the November 2, 1881 issue of The Restitution, page 2, quoted from a letter J. C. Sunderlin sent to Zion’s Watch Tower from London. Sunderlin gives a little homily on running the Christian race, prompted by an engraving seen in a Fleet Street window. (The original is found in Zion’s Watch Tower for October-November 1881, reprints page 292.)

Sunderlin’s whole point in being in London was to organize the distribution of Food for Thinking Christians, but you would never know that from The Restitution. One wonders why they even quoted what they did.

The silence about Food continued for a year or two, by which time many Age to Come groups were familiar with the publication and it could no longer be ignored. The June 13, 1883 Restitution finally devoted four long columns on its back page to the problem, in the article A Brief Review by regular writer Wiley Jones. In a critical and not particularly brief review, Jones studiously managed to avoid mentioning either the name of the book, the publisher, or the author. He even makes the point that “the name of the writer does not appear on the title-page” – which was true but the implication appears deliberately misleading. All Jones would admit to was that “a pamphlet of 160 pages, published in 1881...has been handed to me with a request that I would say something against its errors.”

Wiley Jones obligingly referred to specific page numbers as he presented his criticism. His pen was not quite as poisonous in tone as J.B. Cook’s, but his view was much the same. The idea of the “second chance” for many dead did not appeal, and the chronological speculations on the timing of an invisible presence and the start of the resurrection were definitely not something for Restitution readers. By his amnesic approach to title and author Jones no doubt hoped to prevent further readers checking it out for themselves – even if just out of curiosity. But those who had seen the Food booklet would have no doubt what was being criticized.

Russell’s next major work, and ultimately the one that received the widest distribution of all was the first volume of Millennial Dawn, entitled The Divine Plan of the Ages.

The Divine Plan of the Ages was widely reviewed. J B Rotherham for example, in The Rainbow for December 1886 was to give it over nine pages. The Restitution regularly quoted from The Rainbow, and no doubt some of its readers subscribed. And these journals had other journals in common. The writing was on the Age to Come wall - you cannot avoid mentioning a book that everyone else will mention. So The Restitution’s own review appeared on October 13, 1886.

Unfortunately we hit a problem here. The extant Restitution file was put together from several church collections in the 1980s and unfortunately the poor quality paper used, along with a century of imperfect storage conditions means they are incomplete. Frustratingly a key chunk of the Restitution’s review – what THEY actually thought about CTR’s book is missing. Part that survives is a quoted review from the New York Independent: “So far as we can disentangle the confusion of the book, it is a ludicrous mixture of restorationism, pre-millennialism of the more or less orthodox type, and a large portion of adventism of a kind which we must leave to those who believe in it to say whether it is orthodox or heretical. To us it falls into the large but simple class of well-meant fooleries.”

The Restitution’s own reviewer commented:  “To speak for ourselves, we like some chapters of this work. Of other chapters we must say that the themes discussed are open questions. To those...”

At this tantalizing point virtually all the rest of the review is missing. It would be nice if – somewhere - a copy with the complete review could be found.

However, as the years went by, what comes across is an increasing distance growing between the Age-to-Come people and the fledgling Bible Student movement – although any attacks on conditional immortality would provoke a mutually defensive position.

It got worse for Russell’s next book The Time is at Hand. A brief review (actually by Eychaner) is found in The Restitution for February 4, 1891. Eychaner disputes aspects of chronology: “I wish in this paper simply to call attention to an error in the count of Bro. Russell, which I think is fatal to his whole time argument.” However, Eychaner ends with “Submitted in all charity”.

But by The Restitution for December 12, 1894, comments on Volume 2 were far more vitriolic. Part of a series called Justification by Faith by an unnamed author (but possibly M Joplin who was the paper’s corresponding editor at the time) had some choice epithets for Russell. He has been “blinded by his own invention...we squarely charge the author of Millennial Dawn with setting aside the death, burial and resurrection of Christ and representing his as deceiving the apostles by creating a body and clothing for that purpose. A man who would represent him in whose mouth was no guile, as capable of such abominable trickery in order to sustain his own, or some borrowed subterfuge, ought to be closed watched...All this folly grows out of want of faith in that great and glorious truth – justification by faith.”

What had probably not helped the writer’s blood pressure was the previous issue for December 5, 1894, detailing how a Bible Student had been giving out copies of the Old Theology Tract no. 21 Do You Know outside their place of worship. Restitution readers were being targeted! In the words of the above writer “evidently the Christ Mr Russell expects to reign with, never died for him....we admit there is a fraud, and as between the Lord Jesus and Mr. Russell, we decide it is the latter.”

            

Coming into 1895, The Restitution for April 17, 1895 reprinted an article The Millennial Dawn from Herald of the Coming One. This was a paper of the dwindling Evangelical Adventists, but they were apparently united in their distaste for Russell’s work: “The work is so craftily written that the unexpecting are liable to be led astray by it...unless you are on your guard you will swallow the poison with it...money is used freely to scatter works which deceive and lead away from God...the “Millennial Dawn” is not worth the paper it is printed on...the book referred to is good in its place, but a blazing hot fire is the place for it...We hope that none of our readers will be deceived by its false teachings.”

             

Ultimately the Church of God would promote its own special booklet attacking Russell’s theology. Benjamin Wilson’s nephew, W H Wilson wrote Cunningly Devised Fables of Russellism, reportedly first published in 1890. It’s all a very strong indication of where C T Russell came from originally, and from where (in their minds) he had deviated. 

            

By 1902, it must have seemed like the last straw for the Restitution office, who had stocked Wilson’s Emphatic Diaglott for decades, when CTR obtained the plates and took over the role of publisher. If their new people wanted a Diaglott, or if older members wished to replace one, now they had to go to The Watch Tower. This would mean that their Diaglott came with a complementary Watch Tower subscription. Horror of horrors! They might even choose to become Bible Students instead.

So with all this background, we have to return to our original question, would it have been logical to invite Charles T Russell to replace Charles W Russell for several days at the Iowa State conference as late as mid-1895?  Readers of The Restitution were more than ready to criticize and complain in their letters columns; there would surely have been some squawks of protest had Charles T been given a platform at their conference.

            

And one final small point, but it flags up the incongruity of the situation – looking at Eychaner’s diary entries carefully, would Pastor Russell really have accepted one dollar (from the Lord’s box) for expenses?

We started this section of the chapter by referring to new information that has been discovered to help resolve the question.

            

The information comes from Jan Stilson, the Church of God historian who provided access to Eychaner’s diary. In 2015 she was reviewing a box of historic papers that had been donated by the great niece of A J Eychaner. They included Eychaner’s handwritten report to the Iowa Church Conference for the period 1895-1896. In the report he had clearly written several times the name of Bro. C W Russell (of Chicago) who had been hired as evangelist for six months.

            

The Restitution named C W Russell to open the conference. Eychaner’s report confirmed this.

Report of A J Eychaner, used courtesy of Jan Stilson from material

donated by Lois Cline, great niece of A J Eychaner

A transcript reads:

As your evangelist for the past year I submit to you the following report of work done, money received and amounts paid out in necessary expenses.

From Aug 15 to 25 I was with you in the conference at Marshalltown. I came on the 14^th and brother Prinner arrived on the 15^th. We found much to do in order that the conference might have a pleasant meeting. There was a lot to secure, water to arrange for with the city and ground to clean, tents to set up, and other necessary things to do. On Friday Aug 16 Brethren began to arrive and the meeting began at 8 o’cl. by brother C W Russell preaching the introductory sermon. During the meeting I helped along as I could in preaching 5 sermons and taking part in social meetings, Bible readings and business meetings. I think it was the best time we...    (last line indistinct)

So no matter what he wrote in his diary, when it came to an official report, we are back with C W Russell.

            

A J Eychaner’s account paints an entertaining and rather touching picture of those days. He didn’t just preach, he organised water, he put up tents, he dealt with the wind and the rain, he coped with local thieves who stole from his tent, and straight after the conference in question he mentions C W Russell again:

On Thurs Sep 5 I went to Lanark to assist in the conference of the State of Illinois, and again left C.W. Russell in charge of the tent. That eve there came up a severe storm and altho Bro Russell did all he could yet the wind damaged the tent considerable. I spoke six times at Lanark and preached one funeral discourse at Union church, returning to Laurens (?) and the tent Mond Sep 7, after an absence of only 4 days. Spoke on the life eternal through Jesus. That night thieves entered my tent and stole two chairs.

Later the conference made provision to fund this same Brother Russell for evangelistic services for the next six months.

So what do we have here? Three different sources and a conflict of information. To review:

            

First, from The Restitution for August 7, 1895, page 2, reproduced already in this article. This was the advertisement to get readers to attend. C W Russell was billed to give a sermon on the first day, Friday, August 16.

However, in Eychaner’s diary, it is now C T Russell giving the sermon on Friday, August 16.

But later when he wrote up his full official report, it reverted to C W Russell giving the opening sermon on Friday, August 16.

A more recent examination of the original diary suggests from the ink that the pages were written up in one block together, not line by line as events happened, possibly from other earlier notes; so a primary source now becomes a secondary source when compared with the new discovery.

            

But we are still left with CWR to CTR and then back to CWR again. What explanation can there be for this discrepancy?

            

I can only think of two possibilities. The first is deliberate misdirection. CWR was advertised, but CTR switched places with him. Then A J Eychaner put in his official report that it was CWR. And hoped that no-one would blow the whistle on the substitution.

            

Personally, I would find that impossible to believe, if for no other reason than Eychaner was an honorable man. He might have been a bit of maverick at times, but that very point means that if he’d wanted to do something controversial, he would have stuck to his guns. He wouldn’t have falsified records to cover it up. And frankly, he wouldn’t have gotten away with it.

            

The other possibility is what we might call, for want of a better expression, a Freudian slip. The name of CTR wasn’t foreign to Eychaner – as noted earlier he had previously written a review of one of the Millennial Dawn volumes in The Restitution.

            

So perhaps Eychaner approaching his mid-50s had what we might call a “senior moment.” We are all human, we all make mistakes. We don’t expect people to pore over our words and rough notes as if they were Holy Writ well over a century later. And on rare occasions it is possible for new discoveries to turn an existing hypothesis on its head. We should always be open to that possibility. Caveat lector – let the reader beware.

It is hoped that readers who love this subject will continue to delve and if they find out further information from reliable primary sources – that changes even the smallest details - they will be forthcoming. If they do, we will all continue to benefit.