Old School on sacraments

In his fine recent biography of John Williamson Nevin, DG Hart notes that the Old School Presbyterians failed to express “the mediated character of grace and of the church’s centrality in dispensing the blessings of the gospel” as clearly as Nevin himself. He attributes this failure not to the influence of Puritanism, but rather to the fact that the Old School were themselves heirs of the New Side revivalist Presbyterians of an earlier age. As a result, “Unlike Nevin, high-church Anglicans, and confessional Lutherans . . . the Old School did not regard the populist Christianity sweeping the United States after the Second Great Awakening as fundamentally at odds with the churchly forms of devotion practiced by the historic Protestant churches.”