The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 79, July 1975 - April, 1976 Page: 298
528 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
Some of the deficiencies of the book are traceable to the circumstances
of its publication. Red died in 1933 before the projected three volumes of
his work had been published. His widow and his nephew, the Reverend
Malcolm Purcell, accepted an offer to publish, if they would compress
hundreds of pages of uncompleted manuscript into a single 5oo-page volume
which would preserve Red's scholarship and style. Purcell, laboring under
pressures of time, pastoral duties, and severely circumscribing instructions,
ably preserved the core of his uncle's thorough research. But the work lacks
the integration and smooth stylistic flow of The Texas Colonists and Reli-
gion. It also lacks a bibliography, index, and adequate footnotes.4
Other limitations of Red's History must be laid to his perspective. A
careful rather than a critical historian, he wrote with the twin myopias of
nostalgia and institutional tunnel vision. For him, the generations of the
frontier church represented a fading golden age to be elevated before the
eyes of later readers as a quiet exhortation to imitation. And in spite of a
well-known enthusiasm for nonecclesiastical Texana, he treated his church
in Texas (and organized religion collectively) largely as an isolated phenom-
enon and not as an integral part of the national religious life nor of the total
culture of the state. Moreover, his nearness in time and psychology to the
church fathers, a nearness which gives the work much of the authority of
a primary account, seems to have hidden from him the fact that the
Southern Presbyterian Church failed in crucial respects to meet the chal-
lenges of a frontier society."
As Red collected source material for his works, he restlessly pondered
ways to preserve records of Texas and southern churches for later historians.
Church in Texas (although not throughout the South). The post-Civil War Northern
Church of Texas awaits a competent historian, but the Cumberlanders can be studied in
the erratic work of Thomas H. Campbell, History of the Cumberland Presbyterian
Church in Texas (Nashville, 1936), and in the able volume of R. Douglas Brackenridge,
Voice in the Wilderness: A History of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in Texas
(San Antonio, 1968).
4Malcolm Purcell to R. B. H., February 4, I974, interview; Stuart Purcell to R. B. H.,
April Io, 1974, interview.
5Red focused on the pre-1865 period, although he purports to cover the Church from
the colonial period through the r92os. For examples of Texas religious history in a
broader context, compare Hogan, The Texas Republic, 191-223, and Carter E. Boren,
Religion on the Texas Frontier (San Antonio, 1968). The latter is only intermittently
successful in integrating religion and culture.
The Southern Presbyterian performance in the formative years is compared with the
Baptists, Methodists, Cumberland Presbyterians, and Episcopalians in Hughes, "Old
School Presbyterians: Eastern Invaders of Texas, 1830-1865," 324-336. Although the
Southern Presbyterians succeeded remarkably as educators, they were less successful than
the practitioners of a more emotional faith in meeting the religious needs of frontier
Texans.298
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 79, July 1975 - April, 1976, periodical, 1975/1976; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101203/m1/343/: accessed April 16, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.