Alexander Campbell (1788-1866) is recognized as one of the leading figures in the Restoration Movement. However, his influence did not come as a result of him preaching for a large congregation or because he lived in some big city. Instead, he lived “among the hills of Western Virginia” as Moses E. Lard wrote in the excerpt below. In fact, Lard suggested that the place in which Campbell resided was surprisingly advantageous to him and his work.

“Besides, we can not but think that the very location he chose for his home was specially designed for him in the providence of God, and that it had no small influence on the great work he did. He sat down among the hills of Western Virginia, on the little stream of Buffalo, amid a hardy, simple population, who had no more power to appreciate him than they had to compute the distance from their respective doors to the most distant star. Here he lived in comparative seclusion to the day of his death, dwelling in the same house in which he had married his first wife, and in which his children were born. True, in the course of time, he collected around him a few highly cultivated and gifted friends, as professors in his beloved college. These accomplished brethren were his life-long friends, and helped him much. Still must it be said that for the most part he dwelt alone, far away from the great marts of trade and centres of literature and fashion. Whether these could ever have had any influence on him or not, we, of course, are not able to say; but of this we feel glad, that he dwelt remotely from them. The pride of his life was thus passed in the lap of his own romantic hills.

“Here on the Lord’s day, for many a year, in a rude, untidy little meeting-house, he wasted the splendors of his great mind. His dozy congregation often numbered not more than fifty. They had wound down their hill-side paths to hear him preach. Many of them passed the time as unconsciously as did the bodies of the dead, which slept in the yard close by. Others lent him a drowsy ear, as incapable of appreciating his masterly inductions as were the kine that browsed on his pastures.

“The week he would pass in his study, amid his choice books, illumining and spicing the pages of his immortal Christian Baptist, or enriching with his riper and more sober thought his great Harbinger. Many a piece of a day he spent wandering beside his winding Buffalo, or clambering over its neighboring woody slopes. Here, often seated on a log, or perched like the wild mountain bird on some lone rock, he would pass unconscious hours deep wrapped in thought, or searching the meaning of some dark text in his Greek Testament. If he passed a teamster stuck in the mud, he clapped his burly shoulder to the wheel, and shouted to the team, as if he had been bred to the cart and its toils. If he passed a ragged orphan boy, he stopped him, asked for his mother, gave him his secret penny, and then wept over him tenderly as did the Savior with the stricken Martha and Mary. Such were the scenes amid which he ripened and mellowed for the work to which God in his mercy called him.

“If the flocks of Midian were the most fitting school in which to train Moses for his immortal mission, were not the oak-covered hills and deep shadowy vales of Bethany the very spot in which to nurse this great restorer of the gospel to the age in which we live? We can not but think that one greater than he had much to do in fixing even his home where it stood. Being here alone he was left free to prosecute his studies and pursue his thoughts in his own original way, with no interference from those great local and religious forces which are constantly at work in large cities. He thus studied Christianity in the light of nature, because in the light of his own unperverted mind. Never could he have succeeded otherwise.” (The Reformation for Which We Are Pleading, p. 159-160).

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