Stone is the founder the Disciples find easier to love. He was ordained in 1798 only after telling the Transylvania Presbytery that he accepted the Westminster Confession so far as he saw it consistent with the word of God, and they ordained him anyway. Cane Ridge in August 1801, at his own meeting house, was the largest camp meeting of the Second Great Awakening. In 1804 he and five colleagues dissolved the presbytery they had just created. He inherited enslaved people through marriage and freed them, opposed slavery publicly in Kentucky, and edited the Christian Messenger from 1826. Where Alexander Campbell was a systematiser and a debater, Stone was a revivalist with a horror of party spirit, and the Disciples' emphasis on unity over pattern is recognisably his rather than Campbell's.