Rev. Philip Schaff, D.D. LL.D. | Bishop John F. Hurst, D.D., LL. D |
Rt. Rev. H. C. Potter, D.D., LL. D. | Rev. E. J. Wolf, D.D. |
Rev. Geo. P. Fisher, D.D., LL. D. | Henry C. Vedder, M.A. |
Rev. Samuel M. Jackson, D.D. LL. D. |
Copyright, 1897, by
The Christian Literature Co.
PAGE | |
CHAP. I.—Providential Preparations for the Discovery of America |
1–5 |
Purpose of the long concealment of America, 1. A medieval church to America, 2. Revival of the Catholic Church, 3. especially in Spain, 4, 5. |
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CHAP. II.—Spanish Christianity in America |
6–15 |
Vastness and swiftness of the Spanish conquests, 6. Conversion by the sword, 7. Rapid success and sudden downfall of missions in Florida, 9. The like story in New Mexico, 12, and in California, 14. |
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CHAP. III.—French Christianity in America. |
16–29 |
Magnificence of the French scheme of western empire, 16. Superior dignity of the French missions, 19. Swift expansion of them, 20. Collision with the English colonies, and triumph of France, 21. Sudden and complete failure of the French church, 23. Causes of failure: (1) Dependence on royal patronage, 24. (2) Implication in Indian feuds, 25. (3) Instability of Jesuit efforts, 26. (4) Scantiness of French population, 27. Political aspect of French missions, 28. Recent French Catholic immigration, 29. |
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CHAP. IV.—Antecedents of Permanent Christian Colonization. |
30–37 |
Controversies and parties in Europe, 31, and especially in England, 32. Disintegration of Christendom, 34. New experiment of church life, 35. Persecutions promote emigration, 36, 37. |
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CHAP. V.—Puritan Beginnings of the Church in Virginia. |
38–53 |
The Rev. Robert Hunt, chaplain
to the Virginia colony, 38.
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CHAP. VI.—Maryland and the Carolinas |
54–67 |
George Calvert, Lord Baltimore, 54; secures grant of Maryland, 55. The second Lord Baltimore organizes a colony on the basis of religious liberty, 56. Success of the two Jesuit priests, 57. Baltimore restrains the Jesuits, 58, and encourages the Puritans, 59. Attempt at an Anglican establishment, 61. Commissary Bray, 61. Tardy settlement of the Carolinas, 62. A mixed population, 63. Success of Quakerism, 65. American origin of English missionary societies, 66. |
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CHAP. VII.—Dutch Calvinists and Swedish Lutherans. |
68–81 |
Faint traces of religious life in the Dutch settlements, 69. Pastors Michaelius, Bogardus, and Megapolensis, 70. Religious liberty, diversity, and bigotry, 72. The Quakers persecuted, 73. Low vitality of the Dutch colony, 75. Swedish colony on the Delaware, 76; subjugated by the Dutch, 77. The Dutch evicted by England, 78. The Dutch church languishes, 79. Attempts to establish Anglicanism, 79. The S. P. G., 80. |
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CHAP. VIII.—The Church in New England. |
82–108 |
Puritan and Separatist, 82. The Separatists of Scrooby, 83. Mutual animosity of the two parties, 84. Spirit of John Robinson, 85. the “social compact” of the Pilgrims, in state, 87; and in church, 88. Feebleness of the Plymouth colony, 89. The Puritan colony at Salem, 90. Purpose of the colonists, 91. Their right to pick their own company, 92. Fellowship with the Pilgrims, 93. Constituting the Salem church, and ordination of its ministers, 95. Expulsion of schismatics, 97. Coming of the great Massachusetts colony bringing the charter, 98. The New England church polity, 99. Nationalism of the Puritans, 100. Dealings with Roger Williams, Mrs. Hutchinson, and the Quakers, 101. Diversities among the colonies, 102. Divergences of opinion and practice in the churches, 103. Variety of sects in Rhode Island, 106, with mutual good will, 107. Lapse of the Puritan church-state, 108. |
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CHAP. IX.—The MIddle Colonies and Georgia. |
109–126 |
Dutch, Puritan, Scotch, and Quaker settlers in New Jersey, 109. Quaker corporation and government, 110. Quaker reaction from Puritanism, 113. Extravagance and discipline, 114. Quakerism in continental Europe, 115. Penn’s “Holy Experiment,” 116. Philadelphia founded, 117. German sects, 18. Keith’s schism, and the mission of the “S. P. G.,” 119. Lutheran and Reformed Germans, 120. Scotch-Irish, 121. Georgia, 122. Oglethorpe’s charitable scheme, 123. The Salzburgers, the Moravians, and the Wesleys, 124. George Whitefield, 126. |
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CHAP. X.-THE EVE OF THE GREAT AWAKENING |
127-154 |
Fall of the New England theocracy, 128. Dissent from the “Standing Order”: Baptist, 130; Episcopalian, 131. In New York: the Dutch church, 134; the English, 135; the Presbyterian, 136. New Englanders moving west, 137. Quakers, Huguenots, and Palatines, 139. New Jersey: Frelinghuysen and the Tennents, 141. Pennsylvania: successes and failures of Quakerism, 143. The southern colonies: their established churches, 148; the mission of the Quakers, 149. The gospel among the Indians, 150. The church and slavery, 151. |
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CHAP. XI.-THE GREAT AWAKENING |
155-180 |
Jonathan Edwards at Northampton, 156. An Awakening, 157. Edwards’s “Narrative” in America and England, 159. Revivals in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, 16o. Apostolate of Whitefield, 163. Schism of the Presbyterian Church, 166. Whitefield in New England, 168. Faults and excesses of the evangelists,169. Good fruits of the revival, 173. Diffusion of Baptist, principles, 173. National religious unity, 175. Attitude of the Episcopal Church, 177. Zeal for missions, 179. |
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CHAP. XII.—CLOSE OF THE COLONIAL ERA |
181-207 |
Growth of the New England theology, 181. Watts’s Psalms, 182. Warlike agitations, 184. The Scotch-Irish immigration, 186. The German immigration, 187. Spiritual destitution, 188. Zinzendorf, 189. Attempt at union among the Germans, 190. Alarm of the sects, 191. Mühlenberg and the Lutherans, 191. Zinzendorf and the Moravians, 192. Schlatter and the Reformed, 195. Schism made permanent, 197. Wesleyan Methodism, 198. Francis Asbury, 200. Methodism gravitates southward and grows apace, 201. Opposition of the church to slavery, 203; and to intemperance, 205. Project to introduce bishops from England, resisted in the interest of liberty, 206. |
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CHAP. XIII.—RECONSTRUCTION |
208-229 |
Distraction and depression after the War of Independence, 208. Forlorn condition of the Episcopalians, 210. Their republican constitution, 211. Episcopal consecration secured in Scotland and in England, 212. Feebleness of American Catholicism, 214. Bishop Carroll, 215. “Trusteeism,” 216. Methodism becomes a church, 217. Westward movement of Christianity, 219. Severance of church from state, 221. Doctrinal divisions; Calvinist and Arminian, 222. Unitarianism, 224. Universalism, 225. Some minor sects, 228. |
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CHAP. XIV.—The Second Awakening |
230-245 |
Ebb-tide of spiritual life, 230. Depravity and revival at the West, 232. The first camp-meetings, 233. Good fruits, 237. Nervous epidemics, 239. The Cumberland Presbyterians, 241. The antisectarian sect of The Disciples, 242. Revival at the East, 242. President Dwight, 243. |
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CHAP. XV. —Organized Beneficence |
246-260 |
Missionary spirit of the revival, 246. Religious earnestness in the colleges, 247. Mills and his friends at Williamstown, 248; and at Andover, 249. The Unitarian schism in Massachusetts, 249. New era of theological seminaries, 251. Founding of the A. B. C. F. M., 252; of the Baptist Missionary Convention, 253. Other missionary boards, 255. The American Bible Society, 256. Mills, and his work for the West and for Africa, 256. Other societies, 258. Glowing hopes of the church, 259. |
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CHAP. XVI.—Conflicts with Public Wrongs |
261-291 |
Working of the voluntary system of church support, 261. Dueling, 263. Crime of the State of Georgia against the Cherokee nation, implicating the federal government, 264. Jeremiah Evarts and Theodore Frelinghuysen, 267. Unanimity of the church, North and South, against slavery, 268. The Missouri Compromise, 270. Antislavery activity of the church, at the East, 271; at the West, 273; at the South, 274. Difficulty of antislavery church discipline, 275. The southern apostasy, 277. Causes of the sudden revolution of sentiment, 279. Defections at the North, and rise of a pro-slavery party, 282. The Kansas-Nebraska Bill; solemn and unanimous protest of the clergy of New England and New York, 284. Primeval temperance legislation, 285. Prevalence of drunkenness, 286. Temperance reformation a religious movement, 286. Development of “the saloon,” 288. The Washingtonian movement and its drawbacks, 289. The Prohibition period, 290. |
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CHAP. XVII.—A Decade of Controversies and Schisms. |
292-314 |
Dissensions in the Presbyterian Church, 292. Growing strength of the New England element, 293. Impeachments of heresy, 294. Benevolent societies, 295. Sudden excommunication of nearly one half of the church by the other half, 296. Heresy and schism among Unitarians: Emerson, 298; and Parker, 300. Disruption, on the slavery question, of the Methodists, 301; and of the Baptists, 303. Resuscitation of the Episcopal Church, 304. Bishop Hobart and a High-church party, 306. Rapid growth of this church, 308. Controversies in the Roman Catholic Church, 310. Contention against Protestant fanaticism, 312. |
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CHAP. XVIII.—The Great Immigration |
315-339 |
Expansion of territory and increase of population in the early part of the nineteenth century, 315. Great volume of immigration from 1840 on, 316. How drawn and how driven, 316. At first principally Irish, then German, then Scandinavian, 318. The Catholic clergy overtasked, 320. Losses of the Catholic Church, 321. Liberalized tone of American Catholicism, 323. Planting the church in the West, 327. Sectarian competitions, 328. Protestant sects and Catholic orders, 329. Mormonism, 335. Millerism, 336. Spiritualism, 337. |
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CHAP. XIX.—The Civil War |
340-350 |
Material prosperity, 340. The Kansas Crusade, 341. The revival of 1857, 342. Deepening of the slavery conflict, 345. Threats of war, 347. Religious sincerity of both sides, 348. The church in war-time, 349. |
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CHAP. XX.—AFTER THE CIVIL WAR |
351-373 |
Reconstructions, 351. The Catholic Church, 352. The Episcopal Church, 352. Persistent divisions among Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians, 353. Healing of Presbyterian schisms, 355. Missions at the South, 355. Vast expansion of church activities, 357. Great religious and educational endowments, 359. The enlisting of personal service: The Sunday-school, 362. Chautauqua, 363. Y. M. C. A., 364. Y. W. C. A., 366. W. C. T. U., 367. Women’s missionary boards, 367. Nursing orders and schools, 368. Y. P. S. C. E., and like associations, 368. “The Institutional Church,” 369. The Salvation Army, 370. Loss of “the American Sabbath,” 371. |
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CHAP. XXI.—THE CHURCH IN THEOLOGY AND LITERATURE |
374-397 |
Unfolding of the Edwardean theology, 374. Horace Bushnell, 375.
The Mercersburg theology, 377. “Bodies of divinity,” 378. Biblical |
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CHAP. XXII.—TENDENCIES TOWARD A MANIFESTATION OF UNITY |
398-420 |
Growth of the nation and national union, 398. Parallel growth of the church, 399; and ecclesiastical division, 400. No predominant sect, 401. Schism acceptable to politicians, 402; and to some Christians, 403. Compensations of schism, 404. Nisus toward manifest union, 405. Early efforts at fellowship among sects, 406. High-church protests against union, 407. The Evangelical Alliance, 408. Fellowship in non-sectarian associations, 409. Cooperation of leading sects in Maine, 410. Various unpromising projects of union: I. Union on sectarian basis, 411. II. Ecumenical sects, 412. III. Consolidation of sects, 413. The hope of manifested unity, 416. Conclusion, 419. |
THE heroic discovery of America, at the close of the fifteenth century after Christ, has compelled the generous and just admiration of the world; but the grandeur of human enterprise and achievement in the discovery of the western hemisphere has a less claim on our admiration than that divine wisdom and controlling providence which, for reasons now manifested, kept the secret hidden through so many millenniums, in spite of continual chances of disclosure, until the fullness of time.
How near, to “speak as a fool,” the plans of God came to being
defeated by human enterprise is illustrated by unquestioned facts. The fact of medieval
exploration, colonization, and even evangelization in North America seems now to
have emerged from the region of fanciful conjecture
See the account of the Greenland church and its missions
in Professor O’Gorman’s “History of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States” (vol. ix. of the American Church History Series), pp. 3-12.
By a prodigy, of divine providence, the secret of the ages had
been kept from premature disclosure during the centuries in which, without knowing
it, the Old World was actually in communication with the New. That was high strategy
in the warfare the advancement of the kingdom of God in the earth. What possibilities,
even yet only beginning to be accomplished, were thus saved to both hemispheres,
If the discovery of America had been achieved four centuries or even a single century
earlier, the Christianity to be transplanted to the western world would have been
that of the church of Europe at its lowest stage of decadence. The period closing
with the fifteenth century was that of the dense darkness that goes before the dawn.
It was a period in which the lingering life of the church was chiefly manifested
in feverish complaints of the widespread corruption and outcries for “reformation
of the church in head and members.” The degeneracy of
Let it not be thought, as some of us might be prone to think,
that the timeliness of the discovery of the western hemisphere, in its relation
to church history, is summed up in this, that it coincided with the Protestant Reformation,
so that the New World might be planted with a Protestant Christianity. For a hundred
years the colonization and evangelization of America were, in the narrowest sense
of that large word, Catholic, not Protestant. But the Catholicism brought hither
was that of the sixteenth century, not of the fifteenth. It is a most one-sided
reading of the history of that illustrious age which fails to recognize that the
great Reformation was a reformation of the church as well as a reformation
from the church. It was in Spain itself, in which the corruption of the church
had been foulest, but from which all symptoms of “heretical pravity” were purged
away with the fiercest zeal as fast as they appeared,—in Spain under the reign of
Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic,—that the demand for a Catholic reformation
made itself earliest and most effectually felt. The highest ecclesiastical dignitary
of the realm, Ximenes, confessor to the queen, Archbishop of Toledo, and cardinal,
was himself the leader of reform. No changes in the rest of Christendom
An incident of the Catholic Reformation of the sixteenth century—inevitable
incident, doubtless, in that age, but none the less deplorable—was the engendering
or intensifying of that cruel and ferocious form of fanaticism which is defined
as the combination of religious emotion with the malignant passions. The tendency
to fanaticism is one of the perils attendant on the deep stirring of religious feeling
at any time; it was especially attendant on the religious agitations of that period;
but most of all it was in Spain,
The earlier pages of American church history will not be intelligently read unless it is well understood that the Christianity first to be transplanted to the soil of the New World was the Christianity of Spain—the Spain of Isabella and Ximenes, of Loyola and Francis Xavier and St. Theresa, the Spain also of Torquemada and St. Peter Arbues and the zealous and orthodox Duke of Alva.
IT is a striking fact that the earliest monuments of colonial and ecclesiastical antiquity within the present domain of the United States, after the early Spanish remains in Florida, are to be found in those remotely interior and inaccessible highlands of New Mexico, which have only now begun to be reached in the westward progress of migration. Before the beginnings of permanent English colonization at Plymouth and at Jamestown, before the French beginnings on the St. Lawrence, before the close of the sixteenth century, there had been laid by Spanish soldiers, adventurers, and missionaries, in those far recesses of the continent, the foundations of Christian towns and churches, the stately walls and towers of which still invite the admiration of the traveler.
The fact is not more impressive than it is instructive. It illustrates
the prodigious impetuosity of that tide of conquest which within so few years from
the discovery of the American continents not only swept over the regions of South
and Central America and the great plateau of Mexico, but actually occupied with
military posts, with extensive and successful missions, and with a colonization
which seemed to show every sign of stability and future expansion, by far the
greater part of the present domain
There is no reason to question the sincerity with which the rulers
of Spain believed themselves to be actuated by the highest motives of Christian
charity in their terrible and fatal American policy. “The conversion of the Indians
is the principal foundation of the conquest—that which ought principally to be attended
to.” So wrote the king in a correspondence in which a most cold-blooded authorization
is given for the enslaving of the Indians. Helps, “Spanish Conquest in America,” vol. i., p. 234, American edition.
This subsidizing of the church was the least serious of the injuries
inflicted on the cause of the gospel by the piety of the Spanish government. That
such subsidizing is in the long run an injury is a lesson illustrated not only in
this case, but in many parallel cases in the course of this history. A far more
dreadful wrong was the identifying of the religion of Jesus Christ with a system
of war and slavery, well-nigh the most atrocious in recorded history. For such a
policy the Spanish nation had just received a Helps, “Spanish Conquest in America,” vol. i., p. 235; also
p. 355, where the grotesquely horrible document is given in full. In the practical prosecution of this scheme of evangelization, it
was found necessary to the due training of the Indians in
the holy faith that they should be enslaved, whether or no. It was on this religious consideration,
clearly laid down in a report of the king’s chaplains, that the atrocious system of
encomiendas was founded.
While the church was thus implicated in crimes against humanity which history shudders to record, it is a grateful duty to remember that it was from the church also and in the name of Christ that bold protests and strenuous efforts were put forth in behalf of the oppressed and wronged. Such names as Las Casas and Montesinos shine with a beautiful luster in the darkness of that age; and the Dominican order, identified on the other side of the sea with the fiercest cruelties of the Spanish Inquisition, is honorable in American church history for its fearless championship of liberty and justice.
The first entrance of Spanish Christianity upon the soil of the United States was wholly characteristic. In quest of the Fountain of Youth, Ponce de Leon sailed for the coast of Florida equipped with forces both for the carnal and for the spiritual warfare. Besides his colonists and his men-at-arms, he brought his secular priests as chaplains and his monks as missionaries; and his instructions from the crown required him to summon the natives, as in the famous “Requerimiento,” to submit themselves to the Catholic faith and to the king of Spain, under threat of the sword and slavery. The invaders found a different temper in the natives from what was encountered in Mexico and Peru, where the populations were miserably subjugated, or in the islands, where they were first enslaved and presently completely exterminated. The insolent invasion was met, as it deserved, by effective volleys of arrows, and its chivalrous leader was driven back to Cuba, to die there of his wounds.
It is needless to recount the successive failures of Spanish
civilization and Christianity to get foothold on the domain
The colony thus inaugurated seemed to give every promise of permanent
success as a center of religious influence. The spiritual work was naturally and
wisely divided into the pastoral care of the Spanish garrisons and settlements,
which was taken in charge by “secular” priests, and the mission work among the
Indians, committed to friars of those “regular” orders whose solid organization
and independence of the episcopal hierarchy, and whose keen emulation in enterprises
of self-denial, toil, and peril, have been so large an element of strength, and
sometimes of weakness, in the Roman system. In turn, the mission field of the Floridas
was occupied by the Dominicans, the Jesuits, and the Franciscans. Before the end
of seventy years from the founding of St. Augustine the number of Christian Indians
was reckoned at twenty-five or thirty thousand, distributed among forty-four missions,
under the direction of thirty-five Franciscan missionaries, while the city of St.
Augustine was fully equipped with religious institutions and organizations. Grave
complaints are on record, which indicate that the great number of the Indian converts
was out of all proportion to their meager advancement in Christian grace and knowledge but with these
For one hundred and fifteen years Spain and the Spanish missionaries had exclusive possession in Florida, and it was during this period that these imposing results were achieved. In 1680 a settlement of Scotch Presbyterians at Port Royal in South Carolina seemed like a menace to the Spanish domination. It was wholly characteristic of the Spanish colony to seize the sword at once and destroy its nearest Christian neighbor. It took the sword, and perished by the sword. The war of races and sects thus inaugurated went on, with intervals of quiet, until the Treaty of Paris, in 1763, transferred Florida to the British crown. No longer sustained by the terror of the Spanish arms and by subsidies from the Spanish treasury, the whole fabric of Spanish civilization and Christianization, at the end of a history of almost two centuries, tumbled at once to complete ruin and extinction.
The story of the planting of Christian institutions in New Mexico
runs parallel with the early history of Florida. Omitting from this brief summary
the first discovery of these regions by fugitives from one of the disastrous early
attempts to effect a settlement on the Florida coast, omitting (what we would fain
narrate) the stories of heroic adventure and apostolic zeal and martyrdom which
antedate the permanent occupation of the country, we note the arrival, in 1598,
of a strong, numerous, and splendidly equipped colony, and the founding of a Christian
city in the heart of the American continent. As usual in such Spanish enterprises,
the missionary work was undertaken by a body of Franciscan
friars. After the first months of hardship and discouragement, the work of the Christian
Fourscore years after the founding of the colony and mission the sudden explosion of a conspiracy, which for a long time had been secretly preparing, revealed the true value of the allegiance of the Indians to the Spanish government and of their conversion to Christ. Confounding in a common hatred the missionaries and the tyrannous conquerors, who had been associated in a common policy, the Christian Indians turned upon their rulers and their pastors alike with undiscriminating warfare. “In a few weeks no Spaniard was in New Mexico north of El Paso. Christianity and civilization were swept away at one blow.” The successful rebels bettered the instruction that they had received from their rejected pastors. The measures of compulsion that had been used to stamp out every vestige of the old religion were put into use against the new.
The cause of Catholic Christianity in New Mexico never recovered
from this stunning blow. After twenty years the Spanish power, taking advantage
of the anarchy and depopulation of the province, had reoccupied its former posts
by military force, the missionaries were brought back under armed protection, the
practice of the ancient religion was suppressed by the strong hand, and efforts,
too often unsuccessful, were made to win back the apostate
To complete the story of the planting of Spanish Christianity
within the present boundaries of the United States, it is necessary to depart from
the merely chronological order of American church history; for, although the immense
adventurousness of Spanish explorers by sea and land had, early in the sixteenth
century, made known to Christendom the coasts and harbors of the Californias, the
beginnings of settlement and missions on that Pacific coast date from so late as
1769. At this period the method of such work had become settled into a system. The
organization was threefold, including (1) the garrison town, (2) the Spanish settlement,
and (3) the mission, at which the Indian neophytes were gathered under the tutelage
and strict government of the convent of Franciscan friars. The whole system was
sustained by the authority and the lavish subventions of the Spanish government,
and herein lay its strength and, as the event speedily proved, its fatal weakness.
The inert and feeble character of the Indians of that region offered little excuse
for the atrocious cruelties that had elsewhere marked the Spanish occupation; but
the paternal kindness of the stronger race was hardly less
Meanwhile the Spanish population had gone on slowly increasing. In the year 1840, seventy years from the Spanish occupancy, it had risen to nearly six thousand; but it was a population the spiritual character of which gave little occasion of boasting to the Spanish church. Tardy and feeble efforts had been instituted to provide it with an organized parish ministry, when the supreme and exclusive control of that country ceased from the hands that so long had held it. “The vineyard was taken away, and given to other husbandmen.” In the year 1848 California was annexed to the United States.
This condensed story of Spanish Christianity within the present
boundaries of the United States is absurdly brief compared with the vast extent
of space, the three centuries of time, and what seemed at one time the grandeur
of results involved in it. But in truth it has strangely little connection with
the extant Christianity of our country. It is almost as completely severed from
historical relation with the church of the present day as the missions of the Greenlanders
in the centuries before Columbus.
If we “The Roman Catholic Church in the United States,” by Professor Thomas O’Gorman, (vol. ix., American Church History Series), p. 112.
FOR a full century, from the discovery of the New World until the first effective effort at occupation by any other European people, the Spanish church and nation had held exclusive occupancy of the North American continent. The Spanish enterprises of conquest and colonization had been carried forward with enormous and unscrupulous energy, and alongside of them and involved with them had been borne the Spanish chaplaincies and missions, sustained from the same treasury, in some honorable instances bravely protesting against the atrocities they were compelled to witness, in other instances implicated in them and sharing the bloody profits of them. But, unquestionable as was the martial prowess of the Spanish soldier and adventurer, and the fearless devotion of the Spanish missionary, there appears nothing like systematic planning in all these immense operations. The tide of conquest flowed in capricious courses, according as it was invited by hopes of gold or of a passage to China, or of some phantom of a Fountain of Youth or a city of Quivira or a Gilded Man; and it seemed in general to the missionary that he could not do else than follow in the course of conquest.
It is wholly characteristic of the French people that its
We can easily believe that the famous “Bull of Partition” of Pope Alexander VI.
was not one of the hindrances that so long delayed the beginnings of a New France in the West. Incessant dynastic
wars with near neighbors, the final throes of the long struggle between the crown and
the great vassals, and finally the religious wars that culminated in the awful slaughter of St. Bartholomew’s,
and ended, at the close of the century with the politic conversion and the coronation of Henry IV.—these were among the causes that had held back the great nation from distant undertakings: But thoughts of great things to be achieved in the New World had never for long at a
time been absent from the minds of Frenchmen. The annual
visits of the Breton fishing-fleets to the banks of Newfoundland kept in mind such rights of discovery as were alleged by France, and kept attention fixed in the direction of the great gulf and river of St. Lawrence. Long before the middle of the sixteenth century Jacques Cartier had explored the St. Lawrence beyond the commanding position which he named Montreal, and a royal commission had issued, under which he was to undertake an enterprise of
“discovery, settlement, and the conversion of the Indians.” But it was not till the year
1608 that the first permanent French settlement was effected. With the
coup d’oeil of
a general or the foresight of a prophet, Champlain, the illustrious first founder of French empire in America, in 1608 fixed the starting-point of it at the natural fortress of Quebec. How early the great project had begun to take shape in the leading minds of the nation it may not be easy to determine. It was only after the adventurous explorations of the French pioneers,
traders, and friars—men of like So Parkman. Bancroft’s “United States,” vol. iv.,
p. 267.
The comparison between the Spanish and the French methods of colonization and missions in America is at almost every point honorable to the French. Instead of a greedy scramble after other men’s property in gold and silver, the business basis of the French enterprises was to consist in a widely organized and laboriously prosecuted traffic in furs. Instead of a series of desultory and savage campaigns of conquest, the ferocity of which was aggravated by the show of zeal for the kingdom of righteousness and peace, was a large-minded and far-sighted scheme of empire, under which remote and hostile tribes were to be combined by ties of mutual interest and common advantage. And the missions, instead of following servilely in the track of bloody conquest to assume the tutelage of subjugated and enslaved races, were to share with the soldier and the trader the perilous adventures of exploration, and not so much to be supported and defended as to be themselves the support and protection of the settlements, through the influence of Christian love and self-sacrifice over the savage heart. Such elements of moral dignity, as well as of imperial grandeur, marked the plans for the French occupation of North America.
To a wonderful extent those charged with this enterprise
From the founding of Quebec, in 1608, the expansion of the French
enterprise was swift and vast. By the end of fifty years Quebec had been equipped
with hospital, nunnery, seminary for the education of priests, all affluently endowed
from the wealth of zealous courtiers, and served in a noble spirit of self-devotion
by the choicest men and women that the French church could furnish; besides these
institutions, the admirable plan of a training colony, at which converted Indians
should be trained to civilized life, was realized at Sillery, in the neighborhood.
The sacred city of Montreal had been established as a base for missions to the remoter
west. Long in advance of the settlement at Plymouth, French Christianity was actively
and beneficently busy among the savages of eastern Maine, among the so-called “neutral nations” by the Niagara, among the fiercely hostile Iroquois of northern
New York, by Lake Huron and Lake Nipissing, and, with wonderful tokens of success,
by the Falls of St. Mary. “Thus did the religious zeal of the French bear the cross
to the banks of the St. Mary and the confines of Lake Superior, and look wistfully
toward the homes of the Sioux in the valley Bancroft’s “United States,” vol. iii., p. 131.
Thirty years more passed, bringing the story down to the memorable
year 1688. The French posts, military, commercial, and religious, had been pushed
westward to the head of Lake Superior. The Mississippi had been discovered and explored,
and the colonies planted from Canada along its banks and the banks of its tributaries
had been met by the expeditions proceeding direct from France through the Gulf of
Mexico. The claims of France in America included not only the vast domain of Canada,
but a half of Maine, a half of Vermont, more than a half of New York, the entire
valley of the Mississippi, and Texas as far as the Rio Bravo del Norte. Ibid., p. 175.
The seventy years that followed were years of “storm and stress” for the French colonies and missions. The widening areas occupied by the French
and by the English settlers brought the rival establishments into nearer neighborhood,
into sharper competition, and into bloody collision. Successive European wars—King
William’s War, Queen Anne’s War (of the Spanish succession), King George’s War (of
the Austrian succession)—involved the dependencies of France and those of England
in the conflicts of their sovereigns. These were the years of terror along the exposed
northern frontier of English settlements in New England and New York, when massacre
and burning by bands of savages, under French instigation and leadership, made the
names of Haverhill and Deerfield and Schenectady memorable in American history,
and when, Bancroft, vol. iii., p. 121.
There seemed little reason to doubt that the French empire in
America, which for a century and a half had gone on expanding and strengthening,
would continue to expand and strengthen for centuries to come. Sudden as lightning,
in August, 1756, the Seven Years’ War broke out on the other side of the globe.
The treaty with which it ended, in February, 1763, transferred to Great Britain,
together with the Spanish territory of Florida, all the French possessions in America,
from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. “As a dream when one awaketh,” the
magnificent vision of empire, spiritual and secular, which for so many generations
had occupied the imagination of French statesmen and churchmen, was rudely and forever
dispelled. Of the princely wealth, the brilliant talents, the unsurpassed audacity
of adventure, the unequaled heroism of toil and martyrdom expended on the great
project, how strangely meager and evanescent the Bishop O’Gorman, “The Roman Catholic
Church in the United States,” 136. Ibid., pp. 191-193. Ibid., p. 211. See O’Gorman, chaps. ix.–xiv., xx.
There are not a few of us, wise after the event, who recognize a final cause of this surprising and almost dramatic failure, in the manifest intent of divine Providence that the field of the next great empire in the world’s history should not become the exclusive domain of an old-world monarchy and hierarchy; but the immediate efficient causes of it are not so obvious. This, however, may justly be said: some of the seeming elements of strength in the French colonization proved to be fatal elements of weakness.
1. The French colonies had the advantage of royal patronage,
endowment, Mr. Bancroft, describing the “sad condition” of La Salle’s
colony at Matagorda after the wreck of his richly laden store-ship, adds that “even now this colony possessed, from the bounty of Louis XIV., more than was contributed
by all the English monarchs together for the twelve English colonies on the Atlantic.
Its number still exceeded that of the colony of Smith in Virginia, or of those who
embarked in the ‘Mayflower’” (vol. p. 171).
2. The business basis of the French colonies, being that of trade with the Indians rather than a self-supporting agriculture, favored the swift expansion of these colonies and their wide influence among the Indians. Scattered companies of fur-traders would be found here and there, wherever were favorable points for traffic, penetrating deeply into the wilderness and establishing friendly business relations with the savages. It has been observed that the Romanic races show an alacrity for intermarriage with barbarous tribes that is not to be found in the Teutonic. The result of such relations is ordinarily less the elevating of the lower race than the dragging down of the higher; but it tends for the time to give great advantage in maintaining a powerful political influence over the barbarians. Thus it was that the French, few in number, covered almost the breadth of the continent with their formidable alliances; and these alliances were the offensive and defensive armor in which they trusted, but they were also their peril. Close alliance with one savage clan involved war with its enemies. It was an early misfortune of the French settlers that their close friendly relations with their Huron neighbors embattled against them the fiercest; bravest, and ablest of the Indian tribes, the confederacy of the Six Nations, which held, with full appreciation of its strategic importance, the command of the exits southward from the valley of the St. Lawrence. The fierce jealousy of the Iroquois toward the allies of their hereditary antagonists, rather than any good will toward white settlers of other races, made them an effectual check upon French encroachments upon the slender line of English, Dutch, and Swedish settlements that stretched southward from Maine along the Atlantic coast.
3. In one aspect it was doubtless an advantage to the French missions
in America that the sharp sectarian competitions Dr. R. F. Littledale,
in “Encyclopaedia Britannica,” vol. xiii., pp. 649-652. Both these charges are solemnly affirmed
by the pope in the bull of suppression of the society (Dr. R. F. Littledale, in
“Encyclopaedia Britannica,” vol. xiii., p. 655).
4. The conditions which favored the swift and magnificent expansion
of the French occupation were unfavorable to the healthy natural growth of permanent
settlements. A post of soldiers, a group of cabins of trappers and fur-traders,
and a mission of nuns and celibate priests, all together give small promise of rapid
increase of population. It is rather to the fact that the French settlements, except
at the seaboard, were constituted so largely of these elements, than to any alleged
sterility of the French stock, that the fatal weakness of the French occupation
is to be ascribed. The lack of French America was men. The population of Canada
in 1759, according to census, was about eighty-two thousand; Bancroft, vol. iii., p. 320. Ibid., pp. 128, 129. The contrast is vigorously emphasized
by Mr. Bancroft: “Such was Louisiana more than a half-century after the first
attempt at colonization by La Salle. Its population may have been five thousand
whites and half that number of blacks. Louis XIV. had fostered it with pride and
liberal expenditures; an opulent merchant, famed for his successful enterprise,
assumed its direction; the Company of the Mississippi, aided by boundless
but transient credit, had made it the foundation of their hopes; and, again, Fleury
and Louis XV. had sought to advance its fortunes. Priests and friars, dispersed
through nations from Biloxi to the Dahcotas, propitiated the favor of the savages; but still the
valley of the Mississippi was nearly a wilderness. All its patrons—though among
them it counted kings and ministers of state—had not accomplished for it in half
a century a tithe of the prosperity which within the same, period sprang
naturally from the benevolence of William Penn to the peaceful settlers on the Delaware” (vol. iii., p. 369).
Under these hopeless conditions the French colonies had not even the alternative of keeping the peace. The state of war was forced by the mother countries. There was no recourse for Canada except to her savage allies, won for her through the influence of the missionaries.
It is justly claimed that in the mind of such early leaders as
Champlain the dominant motive of the French colonization was religious; but in
the cruel position into which the colony was forced it was almost inevitable
that the missions should become political. It was boasted in their behalf that
they had taught the Indians “to mingle Jesus Christ and France together in their
affections.” “Encyclopaedia Britannica,” vol. xiii., p. 654. Bishop O’Gorman, pp. 137-142. Bancroft, vol. iii., pp.
187, 188.
I have spoken of the complete extinction within the present domain of the United States of the magnificent beginnings of the projected French Catholic Church and empire. It is only in the most recent years, since the Civil War, that the results of the work inaugurated in America by Champlain begin to reappear in the field of the ecclesiastical history of the United States. The immigration of Canadian French Catholics into the northern tier of States has already grown to considerable volume, and is still growing in numbers and in stability and strength, and adds a new and interesting element to the many factors that go to make up the American church.
WE have briefly reviewed the history of two magnificent schemes of secular and spiritual empire, which, conceived in the minds of great statesmen and churchmen, sustained by the resources of the mightiest kingdoms of that age, inaugurated by soldiers of admirable prowess, explorers of unsurpassed boldness and persistence, and missionaries whose heroic faith has canonized them in the veneration of Christendom, have nevertheless come to naught.
We turn now to observe the beginnings, coinciding in time with
those of the French enterprise, of a series of disconnected plantations along the
Atlantic seaboard, established as if at haphazard, without plan or mutual preconcert,
of different languages and widely diverse Christian creeds, depending on scanty
private resources, unsustained by governmental arms or treasuries, but destined,
in a course of events which no human foresight could have calculated, to come under
the plastic influence of a single European power, to be molded according to the
general type of English polity, and to become heir to English traditions, literature,
and language. These mutually alien and even antagonistic communities were to be
Looking back after the event, we find it easy to trace the providential preparations for this great result. There were few important events in the course of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that did not have to do with it; but the most obvious of these antecedents are to be found in controversies and persecutions.
The protest of northern Europe against the abuses and corruptions
prevailing in the Roman Church was articulated in the Augsburg Confession. Over
against it were framed the decrees of the Council of Trent. Thus the lines were
distinctly drawn and the warfare between contending principles was joined. Those
who fondly dreamed of a permanently united and solid Protestantism to withstand
its powerful antagonist were destined to speedy and inevitable disappointment. There
have been many to deplore that so soon after the protest of Augsburg was set forth
as embodying the common belief of Protestants new parties should have arisen protesting
against the protest. The ordinance of the Lord’s Supper, instituted as a sacrament
of universal Christian fellowship, became (as so often before and since) the center
of contention and the badge of mutual alienation. It was on this point that Zwingli
and the Swiss parted from Luther and the Lutherans; on the same point, in the next
generation of Reformers, John Calvin, attempting to mediate between the two contending
parties, became the founder of still a third party, strong not only in the lucid
and logical doctrinal statements in which it delighted, but also in the possession
of a definite
In view of the destined predominance of English influence in the seaboard colonies of America, the history of the divisions of the Christian people of England is of preeminent importance to the beginnings of the American church. The curiously diverse elements that entered into the English Reformation, and the violent vicissitudes that marked the course of it, were all represented in the parties existing among English Christians at the period of the planting of the colonies.
The political and dynastic character of the movements that detached
the English hierarchy from the Roman see had for one inevitable result to leaven
the English church as a lump with the leaven of Herod. That considerable part of
the clergy and people that moved to and fro, without so much as the resistance of
any very formidable vis inertiae, with the change of the monarch or of the monarch’s caprice,
might leave the student of the history of those times in doubt as to whether they
belonged to the kingdom of heaven or to the kingdom of this world. But, however
severe the judgment that any may pass upon the
Such a Christendom was it, so disorganized, divided, and subdivided
into parties and sects, which was to furnish the materials for the peopling of the
new continent with a Christian population. It would seem that the same “somewhat
not ourselves,” which had defeated in succession the plans of two mighty nations
to subject the New World to a single hierarchy, had also provided that no one form
or organization of Christianity should be exclusive or even dominant in the occupation
of the American soil. From one point of view the American colonies will present
a sorry aspect. Schism, mutual alienation, antagonism, competition, are uncongenial
to the spirit of the gospel, which seeks “that they all may be one.” And yet the
history of the church has demonstrated by many a sad example that this offense “must needs come.” No widely extended organization of church discipline in exclusive
occupation of any country has ever long avoided the intolerable mischiefs attendant
on spiritual despotism. It was a shock to the hopes and the generous sentiments
of those who had looked to see one undivided body of a reformed church erected over
against the medieval church,
The new experiment of church life that was initiated in the colonization
of America is still in progress. The new States were to be planted not only with
diverse companies from the Old World, but with all the definitely organized sects
by which the map of Christendom was at that time variegated, to which should be
added others of native origin. Notwithstanding successive “booms” now of one and
then of another, it was soon to become obvious to all that no one of these mutually
jealous sects was to have any exclusive predominance, even over narrow precincts
of territory. The old-world state churches, which under the rule,
cujus regio ejus religio, had been supreme
and exclusive each in its jurisdiction, were to find themselves side by side and
mingled through the community on equal terms with those over whom in the old country
they had domineered as dissenters, or whom perhaps they had even persecuted as heretics
or as Antichrist. Thus placed, they were to be trained by the discipline of divine
Providence
That mutual intolerance of differences in religious belief which,
in the seventeenth century, was, throughout Christendom, coextensive with religious
earnestness had its important part to play in the colonization of America. Of the
persecutions and oppressions which gave direct impulse to the earliest colonization
of America, the most notable are the following: (1) the persecution of the English
Puritans in the reigns of James I. and Charles I., ending with the outbreak of the
civil war in 1642; (2) the persecution of the English Roman Catholics during the
same period; (3) the persecution of the English Quakers during the twenty-five
Beyond dispute, the best and most potent elements in the settlement of the seaboard colonies were the companies of earnestly religious people who from time to time, under severe compulsion for conscience’ sake, came forth from the Old World as involuntary emigrants. Cruel wars and persecutions accomplished a result in the advancement of the kingdom of Christ which the authors of them never intended. But not these agencies alone promoted the great work. Peace, prosperity, wealth, and the hope of wealth had their part in it. The earliest successful enterprises of colonization were indeed marked with the badge of Christianity, and among their promoters were men whose language and deeds nobly evince the Christian spirit; but the enterprises were impelled and directed by commercial or patriotic considerations. The immense advantages that were to accrue from them to the world through the wider propagation of the gospel of Christ were not lost sight of in the projecting and organizing of the expeditions, nor were provisions for church and ministry omitted; but these were incidental, not primary.
This story of the divine preparations carried forward through unconscious human agencies in different lands and ages for the founding of the American church is a necessary preamble to our history. The scene of the story is now to be shifted to the other side of the sea.
THERE is sufficient evidence that the three little vessels which on the 13th of May, 1607, were moored to the trees on the bank of the James River brought to the soil of America the germ of a Christian church. We may feel constrained to accept only at a large discount the pious official professions of King James I., and critically to scrutinize many of the statements of that brilliant and fascinating adventurer, Captain John Smith, whether concerning his friends or concerning his enemies or concerning himself. But the beauty and dignity of the Christian character shine unmistakable in the life of the chaplain to the expedition, the Rev. Robert Hunt, and all the more radiantly for the dark and discouraging surroundings in which his ministry was to be exercised.
For the company which Captain Smith and that famous mariner,
Captain Bartholomew Gosnold, had by many months of labor and “many a forgotten
pound” of expense succeeded in recruiting for the enterprise was made up of most
unhopeful material for
the founding of a Christian colony. Those
were the years of ignoble peace with which the reign of James
began; and the glittering hopes of gold might well attract some of the brave men
who
The little squadron had hardly set sail when the unfitness of the emigrants for their work began to discover itself. Lying weather-bound within sight of home, “some few, little better than atheists, of the greatest rank among them,” were busying themselves with scandalous imputations upon the chaplain, then lying dangerously ill in his berth. All through the four months’ passage by way of the Canaries and the West India Islands discontents and dissensions prevailed. Wingfield, who had been named president of the colony, had Smith in irons, and at the island of Nevis had the gallows set up for his execution on a charge of conspiracy, when milder counsels prevailed, and he was brought to Virginia, where he was tried and acquitted and his adversary mulcted in damages.
Arrived at the place of settlement, the colonists set about the
work of building their houses, but found that their total number of one hundred
and five was made up in the proportion of four carpenters to forty-eight “gentlemen.”
Not inadequately provisioned for their work, they came repeatedly almost to perishing
through their sheer incapacity and unthrift, and their needless quarrels with one
another and with the Indians. In five months one half of, the company were dead.
In January, 1608, eight months from the landing, when the second expedition arrived
with reinforcements and supplies, only thirty-eight were surviving out of the one
hundred and five, and of
The newcomers were no better than the first. They were chiefly “gentlemen” again, and goldsmiths, whose duty was to discover and refine the quantities of gold that the stockholders in the enterprise were resolved should be found in Virginia, whether it was there or not. The ship took back on her return trip a full cargo of worthless dirt.
Reinforcements continued to arrive every few months, the quality
of which it might be unfair to judge simply from the disgusted complaints of Captain
Smith. He begs the Company to send but thirty honest laborers and artisans, “rather
than a thousand such as we have,” and reports the next ship-load as “fitter to
breed a riot than to found a colony.” The wretched settlement became an object of
derision to the wits of London, and of sympathetic interest to serious minds. The
Company, reorganized under a new charter, was strengthened by the accession of some
of the foremost men in England, including four bishops, the Earl of Southampton,
and Sir Francis Bacon. Appeals were made to the Christian public in behalf of an
enterprise so full of promise of the furtherance of the gospel. A fleet of nine
ships was fitted out, carrying more than five hundred emigrants, with ample supplies.
Captain Smith, representing what there was of civil authority in the colony, had
a brief struggle with their turbulence, and recognized them as of the same sort
with the former companies, for the most part “poor gentlemen, tradesmen, serving-men,
libertines, and such like, ten times more fit to spoil a commonwealth than either
begin one or help to maintain one.” When only part of this expedition had arrived,
Captain Smith departed for England, disabled by an accidental wound, leaving
a settlement Bancroft, vol. i., p. 138.
One almost shrinks from being assured that this worthless crew,
through all these years of suicidal crime and folly, had been assiduous in religious
duties. First under an awning made of an old sail, seated upon logs, with a rail
nailed to two trees for a pulpit, afterward in a poor shanty of a church, “that
could neither well defend wind nor rain,” they “had daily common prayer morning
and evening, every Sunday two sermons, and every three months the holy communion,
till their minister died”; and after that “prayers daily, with an homily
on Sundays, two or three years, till more preachers came.” The sturdy and terrible
resolution of Captain Smith, who in his marches through the wilderness was
wont to begin the day with prayer and psalm, and was not unequal to the duty, when
it was laid on him, of giving Christian exhortation as well as righteous punishment,
and the gentle Christian influence of the Rev. Robert Hunt, were the salt that saved
the colony from utterly perishing of its vices. It was not many months before the
frail body of
Armed, under the new charter, with adequate authority, the new governor was not slow in putting on the state of a viceroy. Among his first cares was to provide for the external dignity of worship. The church, a building sixty feet by twenty-four, built long enough before to be now in need of repairs, was put into good condition, and a brave sight it was on Sundays to see the Governor, with the Privy Council and the Lieutenant-General and the Admiral and the Vice-Admiral and the Master of the Horse, together with the body-guard of fifty halberdiers in fair red cloaks, commanded by Captain Edward Brewster, assembled for worship, the governor seated in the choir in a green velvet chair, with a velvet cushion on a table before him. Few things could have been better adapted to convince the peculiar public of Jamestown that divine worship was indeed a serious matter. There was something more than the parade of government manifested by his lordship in the few months of his reign; but the inauguration of strong and effective control over the lazy, disorderly, and seditious crowd to be dealt with at Jamestown was reserved for his successor, Sir Thomas Dale, who arrived in May, 1611, in company with the Rev. Alexander Whitaker, the “apostle of Virginia.”
It will not be possible for any to understand the relations of
this colony to the state of parties in England without distinctly
recognizing that the Puritans were not a party against the
Church of England, but a party
in the Church of England. The Puritan party was the
party of reform, and was strong in a deep fervor of religious conviction widely
diffused among people and clergy, and extending to the highest places of the nobility
and the episcopate. The anti-Puritan party was the conservative or
The Virginia Company was a Puritan corporation. See the interesting demonstration of this point in articles by
E. D. Neill in “Hours at Home,” vol. vi., pp. 22, 201. Mr. Neil’s various publications on the colonial, history of Virginia
and Maryland are of the highest value and authority. They include: “The English
Colonization of America During the Seventeenth Century”; “History of the Virginia
Company”; “Virginia Vetusta”; “Virginia Carolorum”; “Terra Mariae;
or, Threads of Maryland Colonial History”; “The Founders of Maryland”;
“Life of
Patrick Copland.” It was customary for
the Company, when a candidate was proposed for a chaplaincy in the colony, to select
a text for him and appoint a Sunday and a church for a “trial sermon” from
which they might judge of his qualifications.
The Company had picked their man with care—“a man of good conscience
and knowledge in divinity,” and a soldier and disciplinarian proved in the wars
of the Low Countries—a very prototype of the great Cromwell. He understood what
manner of task he had undertaken, and executed it without flinching. As a matter
of course—it was the way in that colony—there was a conspiracy against his authority.
There was no second conspiracy under him. Punishment was inflicted on the ringleaders
so swift, so terrible, as to paralyze all future sedition. He put in force, in the
name of the Company, a code of “Laws, Divine, Moral, and Martial,” to which no
parallel can be found in the severest legislation of New England. An invaluable
service to the colony was the abolition of that demoralizing socialism that had
been enforced on the colonists, by which all their labor was to be devoted to the
common stock. He gave out land in severalty, and the laborer enjoyed the.
fruits of his own industry and thrift, or suffered
With Dale was associated as chaplain Alexander Whitaker, son of the author of the Calvinistic Lambeth Articles, and brother of a Separatist preacher of London. What was his position in relation to church parties is shown by his letter to his cousin, the “arch-Puritan,” William Gouge, written after three years’ residence in Virginia, urging that nonconformist clergymen should come over to Virginia, where no question would be raised on the subject of subscription or the surplice. What manner of man and minister he was is proved by a noble record of faithful work. He found a true workfellow in Dale. When this statesmanlike and soldierly governor founded his new city of Henrico up the river, and laid out across the stream the suburb of Hope-in-Faith, defended by Fort Charity and Fort Patience, he built there in sight from his official residence the parsonage of the “apostle of Virginia.” The course of Whitaker’s ministry is described by himself in a letter to a friend: “Every Sabbath day we preach in the forenoon and catechise in the afternoon. Every Saturday, at night, I exercise in Sir Thomas Dale’s house.” But he and his fellow-clergymen did not labor without aid, even in word and doctrine. When Mr. John Rolfe was perplexed with questions of duty touching his love for Pocahontas, it was to the old soldier, Dale, that he brought his burden, seeking spiritual counsel. And it was this “religious and valiant governor,” as Whitaker calls him, this “man of great knowledge in divinity, and of a good conscience in all things,” that “labored long to ground the faith of Jesus Christ” in the Indian maiden, and wrote concerning her, “Were it but for the gaining of this one soul, I will think my time, toils, and present stay well spent.”
The progress of the gospel in reclaiming the unhappy colony to Christian civilization varies with the varying fortunes of contending parties in England. Energetic efforts were made by the Company under Sandys, the friend of Brewster, to send out worthy colonists; and the delicate task of finding young women of good character to be shipped as wives to the settlers was undertaken conscientiously and successfully. Generous gifts of money and land were contributed (although little came from them) for the endowment of schools and a college for the promotion of Christ’s work among the white people and the red. But the course of events on both sides of the sea may be best illustrated by a narrative of personal incidents.
In the year 1621, an East India Company’s chaplain, the Rev. Patrick Copland, who perhaps deserves the title of the first English missionary in India, on his way back from India met, probably at the Canaries, with ships bound for Virginia with emigrants. Learning from these something of the needs of the plantation, he stirred up his fellow-passengers on the “Royal James,” and raised the sum of seventy pounds, which was paid to the treasurer of the Virginia Company; and, being increased by other gifts to one hundred and twenty-five pounds, was, in consultation with Mr. Copland, appropriated for a free school to be called the “East India School.”
The affairs of the colony were most promising. It was growing
in population and in wealth and in the institutions of a Christian commonwealth.
The territory was divided into parishes for the work of church and clergy. The stupid
obstinacy of the king, against the remonstrances of the Company, perpetrated the
crime of sending out a hundred convicts into the young community, extorting from
Captain Smith the protest that this act “hath laid one of the finest countries
of America under the just scandal of
In 1624 the long contest of the king and the court party against the Virginia Company was ended by a violent exercise of the prerogative dissolving the Company, but not until it had established free representative government in the colony. The revocation of the charter was one of the last acts of James’s ignoble reign. In 1625 he died, and Charles I. became king. In 1628 “the most hotheaded and hard-hearted of prelates,” William Laud, became Bishop of London, and in 1633 Archbishop of Canterbury. But the Puritan principles of duty and liberty already planted in Virginia were not destined to be eradicated.
From the year 1619, a settlement at Nansemond, near Norfolk,
had prospered, and had been in relations of trade with New England. In
1642 Philip Bennett, of Nansemond, visiting
Boston in his coasting vessel, bore with him a letter
to the Boston church, signed by seventy-four names, stating the needs of their great
county, now without a pastor, and offering
a maintenance to three good
The sequel of this story is a strange one. There must have been somewhat in the character and bearing of these silenced and banished ministers that touched the heart of Thomas Harrison, the governor’s chaplain. He made a confession of his insincere dealings toward them: that while he had been showing them “a fair face” he had privately used his influence to have them silenced. He himself began to preach in that earnest way of righteousness, temperance, and judgment, which is fitted to make governors tremble, until Berkeley cast him out as a Puritan, saying that he did not wish so grave a chaplain whereupon Harrison crossed the river to Nansemond, became pastor of the church, and mightily built up the cause which he had sought to destroy.
A few months later the Nansemond people
had the opportunity The project of Eleuthera is entitled to
honorable mention in the history of religious liberty. For fuller details concerning the Puritan character of the
Virginia Company and of the early ministers of Virginia, see the articles of E.
D. Neill, above referred to, in Hours at Home,” vol. vi.
Of course this is a brief triumph. With the restoration of the
Stuarts, Berkeley comes back into power as royal governor, and for many years afflicts
the colony with his malignant Toryism. The last state is worse than the first;
for during the days of the Commonwealth old soldiers of the king’s army had come
to Virginia in such numbers as to form an appreciable and not wholly admirable element
in the population. Surrounded by such society, the governor was encouraged to indulge
his natural disposition to bigotry and tyranny. Under such a nursing father the
interests of the kingdom of Christ fared as might have been expected. Rigorous measures
were instituted for the suppression of nonconformity, Quaker preachers were severely
dealt with, and clergymen, such as they were, were imposed upon the more or less
reluctant parishes. But though the governor held the right of presentation, the
vestry of each parish asserted and maintained the right of induction or of refusing
to induct. Without the consent of these representatives of the people the candidate
could secure for himself no more than the people should from year to year consent
to allow him. It was the only protection of the people from absolute spiritual despotism.
The power might be used to repel a too faithful pastor, but if there was sometimes
a temptation to this, the occasion was far more frequent for putting the people’s
reprobation upon the unfaithful and unfit. The colony, growing in wealth and population,
soon became infested with a rabble of worthless and scandalous priests. In a report
which has been often quoted, Governor Berkeley,
The scandal of the Virginia clergy went on from bad to worse.
Whatever could be done by the courage and earnestness of one man was done by Dr.
Blair, who arrived in 1689 with limited powers as commissary of the Bishop of London,
and for more than fifty years struggled against adverse influences to recover the
church from its degradation. He succeeded in getting a charter for William and Mary
College, but the generous endowments of the institution were wasted, and the college
languished in doing the work of a grammar school. Something was accomplished in
the way of discipline, though the cane of Governor Nicholson over the back of an
insolent priest was doubtless more effective than the commissary’s admonitions.
But discipline, while it may do something toward abating scandals, cannot create
life from the dead; and the church established in Virginia had hardly more than
a name to live. Its best estate is described by Spotswood, the best of the royal
governors, when, looking on the outward appearance, he reported: “This government
is in perfect peace and tranquillity, under a
due obedience to the royal authority and a gentlemanly conformity to the
Church of England.” The poor man was soon to find how uncertain is the peace
and tranquillity that is founded on “a gentlemanly conformity.” The
most honorable page in his record is the story of his effort
THE chronological order would require us at this point to turn to the Dutch settlements on the Hudson River; but the close relations of Virginia with its neighbor colonies of Maryland and the Carolinas are a reason for taking up the brief history of these settlements in advance of their turn.
The occupation of Maryland dates from the year 1634. The period
of bold and half-desperate adventure in making plantations along the coast was past.
To men of sanguine temper and sufficient fortune and influence at court, it was
now a matter of very promising and not too risky speculation. To George Calvert,
Lord Baltimore, one of the most interesting characters at the court of James I.,
the business had peculiar fascination. He was in both the New England Company and
the Virginia Company, and after the charter of the latter was revoked he was one
of the Provisional Council for the government of Virginia. Nothing daunted by the
ill luck of these companies, he tried colonizing on his account in 1620, in what
was represented to him as the genial soil and climate of Newfoundland. Sending good
money after bad, he was glad to get out of this venture at the end of nine
Returned to London, he at once set in motion the powerful
influences at his command to secure a charter for a tract of land south of the
James River, and when this was defeated by the energetic opposition of the
friends of Virginia, he succeeded in securing a grant of land north and east of
the Potomac, with a charter bestowing on him and his heirs “the most ample
rights and privileges ever conferred by a sovereign of England.” W. H. Browne,
“Maryland” (in American Commonwealths),
p. 18.
The first Lord Baltimore died three months before the charter
of Maryland received the great seal, but his son Cecilius took up the business with
energy and great liberality of investment. The cost of fitting out the first emigration
was estimated at not less than forty thousand pounds. The company consisted of “three hundred laboring men, well provided in all things,” headed by Leonard and
George Calvert, brothers of the lord proprietor, “with very near twenty other gentlemen
of very good fashion.” Two earnest Jesuit priests were quietly added to the expedition
as it passed the Isle of Wight, but in general it was a Protestant emigration under
Catholic patronage. It was stipulated in the charter that all liege subjects of
the English king might freely transport themselves and their families to Maryland.
To discriminate against any religious body in England would have been for the proprietor
to limit his hope of rapid colonization and revenue and to embroil himself with
political enemies at home. His own and his father’s intimate acquaintance with failure
in the planting of Virginia and of Newfoundland had taught him what not to do
in such enterprises. If the proprietor meant to succeed (and he did mean to)
he was shut up without alternative to the policy of impartial non-interference with
religious differences among his colonists, and the promotion of mutual forbearance
among sects. Lord Baltimore may not have been a profound political philosopher nor
a prophet of the coming era of religious liberty, but he was an adroit courtier,
like his father before him, and he was a man of practical good sense engaged in an enormous land speculation in which This seems to be the whole explanation
of the curious paradox that the first experiment of religious liberty and equality
before the law among all Christian sects should have been made apparently under
the auspices of that denomination which alone at the present day continues to maintain
in theory that it is the duty of civil government to enforce sound doctrine by pains
and penalties. We would not grudge the amplest recognition of Lord Baltimore’s faith
or magnanimity or political wisdom; but we have failed to find evidence of his
rising above the plane of the smart real-estate speculator, willing to be all things
to all men, if so he might realize on his investments. Happily, he was clear-sighted
enough to perceive that his own interest was involved in the liberty, contentment,
and prosperity of his colonists. Mr. E. D. Neill, who has excelled other writers in patient and
exact study of the original sources of this part of colonial history, characterizes
Cecilius, second Lord Baltimore, as “one whose whole life was passed in self-aggrandizement,
first deserting Father White, then Charles I., and making friends of Puritans and
republicans to secure the rentals of the province of Maryland, and never contributing
a penny for a church or school-house” (“English Colonization of America,” p. 258).
The two priests of the first Maryland company began their work
with characteristic earnestness and diligence. Finding no immediate access to the
Indians, they gave the more constant attention to their own countrymen, both Catholic
and Protestant, and were soon able to give thanks that by God’s blessing on their
labors almost all the Protestants of that year’s arrival had been converted, besides
many others. In 1640 the first-fruits of their mission work among the savages were
gathered in; the chief of an Indian village on the Potomac nearly opposite Mount
The first start of the Maryland colony was of a sort to give
promise of feuds and border strifes with the neighbor colony of Virginia, and the
promise was abundantly fulfilled. The conflict over boundary questions came to bloody
collisions by land and sea. It is needless to say that religious differences were
at once drawn into the dispute. The vigorous proselytism of the Jesuit fathers,
the only Christian ministers in the colony, under the patronage of the lord proprietor
was of course reported to London by the Virginians; and in December, 1641, the
House of Commons, then on the brink of open rupture with the king, presented a remonstrance
to Charles at Hampton Court, complaining that he had permitted “another state,
molded within this state, independent in government, contrary in interest and affection,
secretly corrupting the ignorant or negligent professors of religion, and clearly
uniting themselves against such.” Lord Baltimore, perceiving that his property rights
were coming into jeopardy, wrote to the too zealous priests, warning them that they
were under English law and were not to expect from him “any more or other privileges,
exemptions, or immunities for their lands, persons, or goods than is allowed by
his Majesty or officers to like persons in England.” He annulled the grants of land
made to the missionaries by certain Indian chiefs, which they affected to hold as
the property of their order, and confirmed for his colony the law of mortmain. In
his not unreasonable anxiety for the tenure of his estate, he went further still;
he had the Jesuits removed from the charge of the missions, to be replaced by seculars,
and only receded from this severe measure when the Jesuit order acceded to his terms.
The Browne, pp. 54-57; Neill, op. cit., pp. 270-274. The
act of Parliament provided full religious liberty for dissenters from the
established order, save only “so as nothing be done by them to the disturbance
of the peace of the kingdom.”
In the turbulence of the colony during and after the civil wars
of England, there becomes more and more manifest a growing spirit of fanaticism,
especially in the form of antipopery crusading. While Jacobite intrigues or wars
with France were in progress it was easy for demagogues to cast upon the Catholics
the suspicion of disloyalty and of complicity with the public enemy. The numerical
unimportance of the Catholics of Maryland was insufficient to guard them from such
suspicions; for it had soon become obvious that the colony of the Catholic lord
was to be anything but a Catholic colony. The Jesuit mission had languished; the
progress of settlement, and what there had been of religious life and teaching,
had brought no strength to the Catholic cause. In 1676 a Church of England minister,
John Yeo, writes to the Archbishop of Canterbury of the craving lack of ministers,
excepting among the Catholics and the Quakers, “not doubting but his Grace may
so prevail with Lord Baltimore that a maintenance for a Protestant ministry may
be established.” The Bishop of London, echoing this complaint, speaks of the “total
want of ministers and divine worship, except among those of the Romish belief, who,
’tis conjectured, does not amount to one of a hundred of the people.” To which his
lordship replies that all
After the Revolution of 1688 it is not strange that a like movement
was set on foot in Maryland. The “beneficent despotism” of the Calverts, notwithstanding
every concession on their part, was ended for the time by the efforts of an “Association
for the Defense of the Protestant Religion,” and Maryland became a royal colony.
Under the new regime it was easier to inflict annoyances and disabilities on the
petty minority of the Roman Catholics than to confer the privileges of an established
church on the hardly more considerable minority of Episcopalians. The Church of
England became in name the official church of the colony, but two parties so remotely
unlike as the Catholics and the Quakers combined successfully to defeat more serious
encroachments on religious liberty. The attempt to maintain the church of a small
minority by taxes extorted by a foreign government from the whole people had the
same effect in Maryland as in Ireland: it tended to make both church and government
odious. The efforts of Dr. Thomas Bray, commissary of the Bishop of London, a man
of true apostolic fervor, accomplished little in withstanding the downward tendency
of the provincial establishment. The demoralized and undisciplined clergy resisted
the attempt of the provincial government to abate the scandal of their lives, and
the people resisted the attempt to introduce a bishop. The body thus set before
the people as the official representative of the religion of H. C. Lodge, “British Colonies in America,” pp. 119-124, with authorities cited. The severe characterization seems to be sustained
by the evidence.
The Carolinas, North and South, had been the scene of the earliest
attempts at Protestant colonization in America. The Huguenot enterprise at Beaufort,
on Port Royal harbor, was planted in 1562 under the auspices of Coligny, and came
to a speedy and unhappy end. The costly and disastrous experiment of Sir Walter
Raleigh was begun in 1584 on Roanoke Island, and lasted not many months. But the
actual occupation of the region was late and slow. When, after the Restoration,
Charles II. took up the idea of paying his political debts with free and easy cessions
of American lands, Clarendon, Albemarle, and Shaftesbury were among the first and
luckiest in the scramble. When the representatives of themselves and their partners
arrived in Carolina in 1670, bringing with them that pompous and preposterous anachronism,
the “Fundamental Constitutions,” contrived by the combined wisdom of Shaftesbury
and John Locke to impose a feudal government upon an immense domain of wilderness,
they found
South Carolina, on the other hand, was settled direct from Europe,
first by cargoes of emigrants shipped on speculation by the great real-estate “operators” who had at heart not only the creation of a gorgeous aristocracy in
the West, but also the realization of fat dividends on their heavy ventures. Members
of the dominant politico-religious party in England were attracted to a country
in which they were still to be regarded before the law as of the “only true and
orthodox” church; and religious dissenters gladly accepted the offer of toleration
and freedom, even without the assurance of equality. One of the most notable contributions
to the new colony was a company of dissenters from Somersetshire, led by Joseph
Blake, brother to Cromwell’s illustrious admiral. Among these were
It ought to have been plain to the proprietors, in their monstrous
conceit of political wisdom, that communities so constituted should have been the
last on which to impose the uniformity of an established church. John Locke
did see this,
but was overruled. The Church of England was established in name, but for long years
had only this shadow of existence. We need not, however, infer from the absence
of organized church and official clergy among the rude and turbulent pioneers of
North Carolina that the kingdom of God was not among them, even from the beginning.
But not until the year 1672 do we find manifestation of it such as history can recognize.
In that
year came William Edmundson, “the voice of one crying in the wilderness,” bringing
his testimony of the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. The
honest man, who had not thought it reasonable in the Christians of Massachusetts
to be offended at one’s sitting in the Tiffany, “Protestant Episcopal Church,” p. 237.
The attempt of a foreign proprietary government to establish by law the church of an inconsiderable and not preeminently respectable minority had little effect except to exasperate and alienate the settlers. Down to the end of the seventeenth century the official church in North Carolina gave no sign of life. In South Carolina almost twenty years passed before it was represented by a single clergyman. The first manifestation of church life seems to have been in the meetings on the banks of the Cooper and the Santee, in which the French refugees worshiped their fathers’ God with the psalms of Marot and Beza.
But with the eighteenth century begins a better era for
In an important sense the organization of religious societies
which is characteristic of modern Christendom is of American origin. The labors
of John Eliot among the Indians of New England stirred so deep an interest in
the hearts of English Christians that in 1649 an ordinance was passed by the
Long Parliament creating a corporation to be called “The President and Society
for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England”; and a general collection made
under Cromwell’s direction produced nearly twelve thousand pounds, from the
income of which missionaries were maintained among some of the Northern tribes
of Indians. With the downfall of the Commonwealth the corporation became
defunct; but through the influence of the saintly Richard Baxter, whose tender
interest in the work of Eliot is witnessed by a touching passage in his
writings, the charter was revived in 1662, with Robert Boyle for president and
patron. It was largely through his generosity that Eliot was enabled to publish
his Indian Bible. This society, “The New England Company,” as it is called, is
still extant—the oldest of Protestant missionary societies. “Digest of S. P. G. Records,” pp. 2, 3;
“Encyclopaedia Britannica,” vol. xvi., p. 514.
It is to that Dr. Thomas Bray who returned in 1700 to England
from his thankless and discouraging work as commissary in Maryland of the Bishop
of London, that the Church of England owes a large debt of gratitude for having “Digest of S. P. G. Records,” pp. 849, 850.
But the zeal of these good men was sorely encumbered with the armor of Saul. Too much favorable legislation and patronizing from a foreign proprietary government, too arrogant a tome of superiority on the part of official friends, attempts to enforce conformity by imposing disabilities on other sects—these were among the chief occasions of the continual collision between the people and the colonial governments, which culminated in the struggle for independence. By the time that struggle began the established church in the Carolinas was ready to vanish away.
WHEN the Englishman Henry Hudson, in the Dutch East India Company’s ship, the “Half-moon,” in September, 1609, sailed up “the River of Mountains” as far as the site of Albany, looking for the northwest passage to China, the English settlement at Jamestown was in the third year of its half-perishing existence. More than thirteen years were yet to pass before the Pilgrims from England by way of Holland should make their landing on Plymouth Rock.
But we are not at liberty to assign so early a date to the Dutch
settlement of New York, and still less to the church. There was a prompt reaching
out, on the part of the immensely enterprising Dutch merchants, after the lucrative
trade in peltries; there was a plying to and fro of trading-vessels, and there
were trading-posts established on Manhattan Island and at the head of navigation
on the Hudson, or North River,
and on the South River, or Delaware. Not until the great Dutch West India Company
had secured its monopoly of trade and perfected its organization,
in 1623, was there a beginning of colonization. Dr. E. T. Corwin,
“History of the Reformed
(Dutch) Church in America” (in the American Church. History Series), pp. 28-32.
The sagacious men in control of the Dutch West India Company
were quick to recognize that weakness in their enterprise which in the splendid
colonial attempt of the “The province, under the long years
of Dutch supremacy, had gathered only some seven thousand inhabitants, against the
hundred and twenty thousand of their New England neighbors (Lodge, “English Colonies,” p. 297).
In 1633 arrived a new pastor, Everard Bogardus, in the same ship
with a schoolmaster—the first in the colony—and the new governor, Van Twiller. The
governor was incompetent and corrupt, and the minister was faithful and plain-spoken; what could result but conflict? During Van Twiller’s five years of mismanagement,
nevertheless, the church emerged from the mill-loft and was installed in a barn-like
meeting-house of wood. During the equally wretched administration of Kieft, the
governor, listening to the reproaches of a guest, who quoted the example of New
England, where the people were wont to build a fine church as soon as they had
houses for themselves, was incited to build a stone church within the fort. There
seems to have been little else that he did for the kingdom of heaven. Pastor Bogardus
is entitled to the respect of later ages for the chronic quarrel that he kept up
with the
Meanwhile the patroon Van Rensselaer, on his great manor near
Albany, showed some sense of his duty to the souls of the people whom he had brought
out into the wilderness. He built a church and put into the pastoral charge over
his subjects one who, under his travestied name of Megapolensis, has obtained a
good report as a faithful minister of Jesus Christ. It was he who saved Father Jogues,
the Jesuit missionary, from imminent torture and death among the Mohawks, and befriended
him, and saw him safely off for Europe. This is one honorable instance, out of not
a few, of personal respect and kindness shown to members of the Roman clergy and
the Jesuit society by men who held these organizations in the severest reprobation.
To his Jesuit brother he was drawn by a peculiarly strong bond of fellowship, for
the two were fellow-laborers in the gospel to the red men. For Domine Megapolensis
is claimed See Corwin, p. 37; but compare the claim
made in behalf of the Puritan Whitaker, “apostle to the Indians” thirty years
earlier (Tiffany, “Protestant Episcopal Church,” p. 18); compare also the work
of the Lutheran Campanius in New Sweden (Jacobs, “The Lutherans,” p. 83).
In 1647, to the joy of all the colonists, arrived a new governor,
Peter Stuyvesant, not too late to save from utter ruin the colony that had suffered
everything short of ruin from the incompetency and wickedness of Kieft. About the
time that immigration into New England ceased with
Started thus in the wrong direction, it was easy for the colonial government to go from bad to worse. At a time when the entire force of Dutch clergy in the colony numbered only four, they were most unapostolically zealous to prevent any good from being done by “unauthorized conventicles and the preaching of unqualified persons,” and procured the passing of an ordinance forbidding these under penalty of fine and imprisonment. The mild remonstrances of the Company, which was eager to get settlers without nice inquiries as to their religious opinions, had little effect to restrain the enterprising orthodoxy of Peter Stuyvesant. The activity of the Quakers among the Long Island towns stirred him to new energy. Not only visiting missionaries, but quiet dwellers at home, were subjected to severe and ignominious punishments. The persecution was kept up until one of the banished Friends, John Bowne, reached Amsterdam and laid the case before the Company. This enlightened body promptly shortened the days of tribulation by a letter to the superserviceable Stuyvesant, conceived in a most commercial spirit. It suggested to him that it was doubtful whether further persecution was expedient, unless it was desired to check -the growth of population, which at that stage of the enterprise ought rather to be encouraged. No man, they said, ought to be molested so long as he disturbed neither his neighbors nor the government. “This maxim has always been the guide of the magistrates of this city, and the consequence has been that from every land people have flocked to this asylum. Tread thus in their steps, and we doubt not you will be blessed.”
The stewardship of the interests of the kingdom of Christ in
the New Netherlands was about to be taken away from
Doubtless there is a record in heaven of faithful living and serving of many true disciples among this people, whose names are unknown on earth; but in writing history it is only with earthly memorials that we have to do. The records of the Dutch regime present few indications of such religious activity on the part of the colonists as would show that they regarded religion otherwise than as something to be imported from Holland at the expense of the Company.
A studious and elegant writer, Mr. Douglas Campbell, has presented
in two ample and interesting volumes “The Puritans in Holland, England,
and America” (New York, 1892).
Before bidding a willing good-bye to the Dutch regime of the New Netherlands, it remains to tell the story of another colony, begun under happy auspices, but so short-lived that its rise and fall are a mere episode in the history of the Dutch colony.
As early as 1630, under the feudal concessions of the Dutch West
India Company, extensive tracts had been taken on the South River, or Delaware,
and, after purchase from the Indians, settled by a colony under the conduct of the
best of all the Dutch leaders, De Vries. Quarrels
Years before, the great Gustavus Adolphus had pondered and decided
on an enterprise of colonization in America. The king’s noble conceptions of what such a colony should be and should accomplish
are quoted in Bancroft, vol. ii., pp. 284, 285.
The governor fixed his residence at Tinicum, now almost included within the vast circumference of Philadelphia, and there, forty years before the arrival of William Penn, Campanius preached the gospel of peace in two languages, to the red men and to the white.
The question of the Swedish title, raised at the outset by the protest of the Dutch governor, could not long be postponed. It was suddenly precipitated on the arrival of Governor Rising, in 1654, by his capture of Fort Casimir, which the Dutch had built for the practical assertion of their claim. It seems a somewhat grotesque act of piety on the part of the Swedes, when, having celebrated the festival of Trinity Sunday by whipping their fellow-Christians out of the fort, they commemorated the good work by naming it the Fort of the Holy Trinity. It was a fatal victory. The next year came Governor Stuyvesant with an overpowering force and demanded and received the surrender of the colony to the Dutch. Honorable terms of surrender were conceded; among them, against the protest, alas! of good Domine Megapolensis, was the stipulation of religious liberty for the Lutherans.
It was the end of the Swedish colony, but not at once of the church. The Swedish community of some seven hundred souls, cut off from reinforcement and support from the fatherland, cherished its language and traditions and the mold of doctrine in which it had been shaped; after more than forty years the reviving interest of the mother church was manifested by the sending out of missionaries to seek and succor the daughter long absent and neglected in the wilderness. Two venerable buildings, the Gloria Dei Church in the southern part of Philadelphia, and the Old Swedes’ Church at Wilmington, remain as monuments of the honorable story. The Swedish language ceased to be spoken; the people became undistinguishably absorbed in the swiftly multiplying population about them.
It was a short-lived triumph in which the Dutch colony reduced
the Swedish under its jurisdiction. It only prepared a larger domain for it to
surrender, in its turn, to
The British government was happy in the character of Colonel
Nicolls, who came as commandant of the invading expedition and remained as
governor. Not only faithful to the terms of the surrender, but considerate of
the feelings and interests of the conquered province, he gave the people small
reason to regret the change of government. The established Dutch church not only
was not molested, but was continued in full possession of its exceptional
privileges. And it continued to languish. At the time of the surrender the
province contained “three cities, thirty villages, and ten thousand
inhabitants,” Corwin, p. 54. Corwin, pp. 105, 121. Corwin, p. 105.
It need not be denied that government patronage, even when
dispensed by the dirty hands of such scurvy nursing fathers as Fletcher and Lord
Cornbury, may give strength of a certain sort to a religious organization.
Whatever could be done in the way of endowment or of social preferment in behalf
of the English church was done eagerly. But happily this church had a better
resource than royal governors in the well-equipped and sustained, and generally
well-chosen, army of missionaries of the Society for the Propagation of the
Gospel. Not fewer than fifty-eight of them were placed by the society in this
single province. And if among them there were those who seemed to “preach Christ
of envy and strife,” as if the great aim of the preacher of the gospel were to
get a man out of one Christian sect into another, there were others who showed a
more Pauline and more Christian conception of their work, taking their full
share of the task of bringing the knowledge of Christ to the unevangelized,
whether white, red, or black. “Digest of S. P. G. Records,” pp. 57-79. That the sectarian
proselyting zeal manifested in some of the missionaries’ reports made an unfavorable
impression on the society is indicated by the peremptory terms of a resolution adopted
in 17I0: “That a stop be put to the sending any more missionaries among Christians,
except to such places whose ministers are, or shall be, dead or removed” (ibid., p.
69). A good resolution, but not well kept.
The diversity of organization which was destined to characterize
the church in the province of New York was increased by the inflow of population
from New England. The settlement of Long Island was from the beginning Puritan English.
The Hudson Valley began early to be occupied by New Englanders bringing with
them their
The spectacle of the ancient Dutch church thus dwindling, and
seemingly content to dwindle, to one of the least of the tribes, is not a cheerful
one, nor one easy to understand. But out of this little and dilapidated Bethlehem
was to come forth a leader. Domine Frelinghuysen, arriving in America in I 720,
was to begin a work of training for the ministry, which would result, in 1784, in
the establishment of the first American professorship of theology; Corwin, p. 207. Undue stress should not
be laid upon this formal fact. The early New England colleges were primarily and
mainly theological seminaries and training-schools for the ministry. Their professors
were all theological professors. It is stated in Dwight’s “Life of Edwards” that
James Pierpont, of New Haven, Edwards’s father-in-law, who died in 1714, lectured
to the students of Yale College, as professor of moral philosophy.
THE attitude of the Church of England Puritans toward the Separatists from that church was the attitude of the earnest, patient, hopeful reformer toiling for the removal of public abuses, toward the restless “come-outer” who quits the conflict in despair of succeeding, and, “without tarrying for any,” sets up his little model of good order outside. Such defection seemed to them not only of the nature of a military desertion and a weakening of the right side, but also an implied assertion of superior righteousness which provoked invidious comparison and mutual irritation of feeling. The comparison must not be pressed too far if we cite in illustration the feeling of the great mass of earnest, practical antislavery men in the American conflict with slavery toward the faction of “come-outer” abolitionists, who, despairing of success within the church and the state, seceded from both, thenceforth predicting failure for every practical enterprise of reform on the part of their former workfellows, and at every defeat chuckling, “I told you so.”
If we should compare the English Separatist of the seventeenth
century with this American Separatist of the nineteenth, we should be in still
greater danger of misleading.
It would be incompatible with the limits of this volume to recite in detail the story of the Pilgrims; it has been told more amply and with fuller repetition than almost any other chapter of human history, and is never to be told or heard without awakening that thrill with which the heartstrings respond to the sufferings and triumphs of Christ’s blessed martyrs and confessors. But, more dispassionately studied with reference to its position and relations in ecclesiastical history, it cannot be understood unless the sharp and sometimes exasperated antagonism is kept in view that existed between the inconsiderable faction, as it was esteemed, of the Separatists, and the great and growing Puritan party at that time in disfavor with king and court and hierarchy, but soon to become the dominant party not only in the Church of England, but in the nation. It is not strange that the antagonism between the two parties should be lost sight of. The two are identified in their theological convictions, in their spiritual sympathies, and, for the most part, in their judgment on questions concerning the externals of the church; and presently their respective colonies, planted side by side, not without mutual doubts and suspicions, are to grow together, leaving no visible seam of juncture,
Like kindred drops commingling into one. The mutual opposition of Puritan and
Pilgrim is brought out with emphasis in “The Genesis of the New England Churches,” by L. Bacon, especially chaps. v., vii., xviii.
To the Puritan reformer within the Church of England, the act
of the Pilgrims at Scrooby in separating themselves from the general mass of English
Christians, mingled though that mass might be with a multitude of unworthy
Nothing of this bitterness and narrowness is found in
Robinson. Strenuously as he maintained the right and duty of separation from the
Establishment, he was, especially in his later years, no less earnest in
condemning the “Separatists who carried their separation too far and had gone
beyond the true landmarks in matters of Christian doctrine or of Christian
fellowship.” L. Bacon, “Genesis of New England Churches,” p. 245.
The moderateness of Robinson’s position, and the brotherly kindness
of his temper, could not save him and his people from the prevailing odium that
rested upon the Separatist. Many and grave were the sorrows through which the Pilgrim
church had to pass in its way from the
In the year 1607, when the ships of the Virginia Company were
about landing their freight of emigrants and supplies at Jamestown, the first and
unsuccessful attempt of the Pilgrims was made to escape from their native land to
Holland. Before the end of 1608 the greater part of them, in scattering parties,
had effected the passage of the North Sea, and the church was reunited in a land
of religious freedom. With what a blameless, diligent, and peaceful life they adorned
the name of disciple through all the twelve years of their sojourn, how honored
and beloved they were among the churches and in the University of Leyden, there
are abundant testimonies. The twelve years of seclusion in an alien land among a
people of strange language was not too long a discipline of preparation for that
work for which the Head of the church had set them apart. This was the period of
Robinson’s activity as author. In erudite studies, in grave debate
with gainsayers at home and with fellow-exiles in Holland, he was maturing in his
own mind, and in the minds of the church, those large and liberal yet definite views
of church organization L. Bacon, “Genesis,” p. 245.
We pass by the heroic and pathetic story of the consultations and correspondences, the negotiations and disappointments, the embarkation and voyage, and come to that memorable date, November 11 (= 21), 1620, when, arrived off the shore of Cape. Cod, the little company, without charter or warrant of any kind from any government on earth, about to land on a savage continent in quest of a home, gathered in the cabin of the “Mayflower,” and after a method quite in analogy with that in which, sixteen years before, they had constituted the church at Scrooby, entered into formal and solemn compact “in the presence of God and one of another, covenanting and combining themselves together into a civil body politic.”
It is difficult, in reading the instrument then subscribed, to
avoid the conviction that the theory of the origin of the powers of civil government
in a social compact, which had long floated in literature before it came to be distinctly
articulated in the “Contrat Social” of Jean Jacques Rousseau, was familiar to
the minds of those by whom the paper was drawn. Thoughtful men at the present day
universally recognize the fallacy of this plausible hypothesis, which once had such
wide currency and so serious an influence on the course of political history in
America. But whether or not they were affected by the theory, the practical good
sense of the men and their deference to the teachings of the Bible secured them
from the vicious and absurd consequences deducible from it. Not all the names of
the colonists were subscribed to the compact,—a clear indication of the freedom
of individual judgment in that
The social-compact theory as applied to the church, implying
that the mutual duties of Christian disciples in society are derived solely from
mutual stipulations, is quite as transparently fallacious as when it is applied
to civil polity, and the consequences deducible from it are not less absurd. But
it cannot be claimed for the Plymouth men, and still less for their spiritual successors,
that they have wholly escaped the evil consequences of their theory in its practical
applications. The notion that a church of Christ is a club, having no authority
or limitations but what it derives from club rules agreed on among the members,
would have
been scouted by the Pilgrims; among those who now claim to sit in their seats there
are some who would hesitate to admit it, and many who would frankly avow it with
all its mischievous implications. Planted in the soil of Plymouth, it spread at once
through New England, The writer takes leave to refer to two essays of his own, in
“Irenics and Polemics” (New York, Christian Literature Co., 1895), for a
fuller statement of this point.
The church of Plymouth, though deprived of its pastor, continued to be rich in faith and in all spiritual gifts, and most of all in the excellent gift of charity. The history of it year after year is a beautiful illustration of brotherly kindness and mutual self-sacrifice among themselves and of forgiving patience toward enemies. But the colony, beginning in extreme feebleness and penury, never became either strong or rich. One hundred and two souls embarked in the “Mayflower,” of whom nearly one half were dead before the end of four months. At the end of four years the number had increased to one hundred and eighty. At the end of ten years the settlement numbered three hundred persons.
It could not have been with joy wholly unalloyed with misgivings
that this feeble folk learned of a powerful movement for planting a Puritan colony
close in the neighborhood. The movement had begun in the heart of the national church,
and represented everything that was best in that institution. The Rev. John White,
rector of Dorchester, followed across the sea with pastoral solicitude the young
men of his parish, who, in the business of the fisheries, were wont to make long
stay on the New England coast, far from home and church. His thought was to establish
a settlement that should be a sort of depot of supplies for the fishing fleets,
and a temporary home attended with the comforts and safeguards of Christian influence.
The project was a costly failure; but it was like the corn of wheat falling into
the ground to die, and bringing forth much fruit. A gentleman of energy and dignity,
John
“When they came to the Land’s End, Mr. Higginson,
The story ought to be true, for the intrinsic likeliness of it;
and it is all the likelier for the fact that among the passengers, kindly and even
fraternally treated, and yet the object of grave misgivings, was the honest Separatist
minister, Ralph Smith. L. Bacon, “Genesis,” p. 467.
We do not need to be told that to the little Separatist settlement at Plymouth, still in the first decade of its feeble existence, the founding, within a day’s journey, of this powerful colony, on ecclesiastical principles distinctly antagonistic to their own, was a momentous, even a formidable fact. Critical, nay, vital questions emerged at once, which the subtlest churchcraft might have despaired of answering. They were answered, solved, harmonized, by the spirit of Christian love.
That great spiritual teacher, John Robinson, besides his more
general exhortations to brotherly kindness and charity, had spoken, in the spirit
of prophecy, some promises and assurances which came now to a divine fulfillment.
The solitude of the little starving hamlet by the sea was favorable
to the springing and fructifying of this seed in the good and honest hearts into
which it had been cast. Before the great fleet of colonists, with its three unconformable
Church of England clergymen, had reached the port of Salem the good seed had been
planted anew in other hearts not less honest and good. It fell on this wise. The
pioneer party at Salem who came with Endicott, “arriving there in an uncultivated
desert, many of them, for want of wholesome diet and convenient lodgings, were seized
with the scurvy and other distempers, which shortened many of their days, and prevented
many of the rest from performing any great matter of labor that year for advancing
the work of the plantation.” Whereupon the governor, hearing that at Plymouth lived
a physician “that had some skill that way,” wrote thither for help, and at once
the beloved physician and deacon of the Plymouth
“To the worshipful and my right worthy friend, William Bradford, Esq., Governor of New Plymouth, these:
“RIGHT WORTHY SIR: It is a thing not usual that servants to one Master and of the same household should be strangers. I assure you I desire it not; nay, to speak more plainly, I cannot be so to you. God’s people are marked with one and the same mark, and sealed with one and the same seal, and have, for the main, one and the same heart, guided by one and the same Spirit of truth; and where this is there can be no discord—nay, here must needs be sweet harmony. The same request with you I make unto the Lord, that we may as Christian brethren be united by a heavenly and unfeigned love, bending all our hearts and forces in furthering a work beyond our strength, with reverence and fear fastening our eyes always on him that only is able to direct and prosper all our ways.
“I acknowledge myself much bound to you for your kind love and
care in sending Mr. Fuller among us, and I rejoice much that I am by him
satisfied touching your judgments of the outward form of God’s worship. The phrase is used in a large sense,
as comprehending the whole subject of the nature and
organization of the visible church (L. Bacon, “Genesis,” p. 456,
note).
“I shall not need at this time to be tedious unto you, for, God willing, I purpose to see your face shortly. In the meantime I humbly take my leave of you, committing you to the Lord’s blessed protection, and rest
“Your assured loving friend and servant,
“JOHN ENDICOTT.”
“The positive part of church reformation,” which Higginson and his companions had come into the wilderness to practice, appeared in a new light when studied under the new conditions. The question of separation from the general fellowship of English Christians, which had lain heavily on their consciences, was no longer a question; instead of it arose the question of separation from their beloved and honored fellow-Christians at Plymouth. The Act of Uniformity and the tyrannous processes by which it was enforced no longer existed for them. They were free to build the house of God simply according to the teaching of the divine Word. What form will the structure take?
One of the first practical questions to emerge was the question
by what authority their ministry was to be exercised. On one point they seem to
have been quite clear. The episcopal ordination, which each of them had received
in England, whatever validity it may have had in English law, gave them no authority
in the church of God in Salem. Further, their appointment from the Company in London,
although it was a regular commission from the constituted civil government of the
colony, could confer no office in
But presently there were searchings of heart over the anterior
question as to the constituency of the church, Were all the population of Salem
to be reckoned as of the church of Salem? and if not, who should “discern between
the righteous and the wicked”? The result of study of this question, in the light
of the New Testament, was this—that it was “necessary for those who intended
to be of the church solemnly to enter into a covenant engagement one with another,
in the presence of God, to walk together before him according to his Word.” Thirty
persons were chosen to be the first members of the church, who in a set form of
words made public vows of faithfulness to each other and to Christ. By the church
thus constituted the pastor and teacher, already installed in office in the parish,
were instituted as ministers of the church. L. Bacon, “Genesis,” p.
475.
Before the solemnities of that notable day were concluded, a
belated vessel that had been eagerly awaited L. Bacon, “Genesis,” p. 477.
The immediate sequel of this transaction is characteristic and
instructive. Two brothers, John and Samuel Browne, members of the council of the
colony, took grave offense at this departure from the ways of the Church of England, and, joining
to themselves others like-minded, set up separate worship according to the Book
of Common Prayer. Being called to account before the governor for their schismatic
procedure, they took an aggressive tone and declared that the ministers “were Separatists,
and would be Anabaptists.” The two brothers were illogical. The ministers had not
departed from the Nationalist and anti-Separatist principles enunciated by Higginson
from the quarter-deck of the “Talbot.” What they had just done was to lay the foundations
of a national church for the commonwealth that was in building. And the two brothers,
trying to draw off a part of the people into their schism-shop, were Separatists,
although they were doubtless surprised to discover it. There was not.
the slightest hesitation on the governor’s part as to the proper course to be pursued.
“Finding those two brothers to be of high spirits, and their speeches and practices
tending to mutiny and faction, the governor told them that New England was no place
for such as they, and therefore he sent them both back for England at the return
of the ships Morton’s Memorial, in Palfrey, vol. i., p. 298.
While the civil and ecclesiastical foundations of the Salem community
are thus being laid, there is preparing on the other side of the sea that great
coup d’état which is to create, almost in a day, a practically
independent American republic. Until this is accomplished the colonial organization
is according to a common pattern, a settlement on a distant shore, equipped, sustained,
and governed with authority all but sovereign by a commercial company at the metropolis,
within the reach, and thus under the control, of the supreme power. Suppose, now,
that the shareholders in the commercial company take their charter conferring all
but sovereign authority, and transport themselves and it across the sea to the heart
of the settlement, there to admit other planters, at their discretion, to the franchise
of the Company, what then? This was the question pondered and decided in those
dark days of English liberty, when the triumph of despotism, civil and spiritual,
over the rights of Englishmen seemed almost achieved. The old officers of the Company
resigned; their places were filled by Winthrop and Dudley and others, who had undertaken
to emigrate; and that memorable season of 163o not less than seventeen ships, carrying
about one thousand passengers, sailed from English ports for Massachusetts Bay.
It was the beginning of the great Puritan exodus. Attempts were made by the Palfrey, vol. i., p. 584.
For the order of the New England churches crystallized rapidly
into a systematic and definite church polity, far removed from mere Separatism even
in the temperate form in which this had been illustrated by Robinson and the Pilgrim
church. The successive companies of emigrants as they arrived, ship-load after ship-load,
each with its minister or college of ministers, followed with almost monotonous
exactness the method adopted in the organization of the church in Salem. A small
company of the
In many ways, but especially in the systematized relations of the churches with one another and in their common relations with the civil government, the settled Nationalism of the great Puritan migration was illustrated. With the least possible constraint on the individual or on the church, they were clear in their purpose that their young state should have its established church.
Through what rude experiences the system and the men were tested
has been abundantly told and retold. As, for example, with great amplitude
by Palfrey; and in more condensed form by Dr. Williston Walker, “Congregationalists” (in American Church History Series).
Of course, in maintaining the principle of Nationalism, the New
England Puritans did not decline the implications and corollaries of that principle.
It was only to a prophetic genius like the Separatist Roger Williams that it was
revealed that civil government had no concern to enforce “the laws of the first
table.” But the historical student might be puzzled to name any other church establishment
The general uniformity of church organization among the Puritan
plantations is the more remarkable in view of the notable independence and originality
of the leading men, who represented tendencies of opinion as widely diverging as
the quasi-Presbyterianism of John Eliot and the doctrinaire democracy of John Wise.
These variations of ecclesiastico-political theory had much to do with the speedy
diffusion of the immigrant population. For larger freedom in building his ideal
New Jerusalem, the statesmanlike pastor, Thomas Hooker, led forth his flock a second
time into the great and terrible wilderness, and with his associates devised what
has been declared to be “the first example in history of a written constitution—a
distinct organic law constituting a government and defining its powers.” L. Bacon,
“Early Constitutional History of Connecticut.” L. Bacon, “Thirteen Historical Discourses.” The two mutually
independent republics at Hartford and New Haven represented opposite tendencies.
That at New Haven was after the highest type of theocracy; the Connecticut colony
inclined to the less rigorous model of Plymouth, not exacting church-membership
as a condition of voting. How important this condition appeared to the mind of Davenport
may be judged from his exclamation when it ceased, at the union of New Haven with
Connecticut. He wrote to a friend, “In N. H. C. Christ’s interest is miserably
lost;” and prepared to turn his back forever on the colony of which he was the
father.
The traditions of the fathers of New England had been piously
cherished down to this third and fourth generation. The model of an ideal state
that had been set up had, meanwhile, been more or less deformed, especially in Massachusetts,
by the interference of England; the dominance of the established churches had been
slightly infringed by the growth here and there of dissenting churches, Baptist,
Episcopalian, and Quaker; but the framework both of church and of state was wonderfully
little decayed or impaired. The same simplicity in the outward order of worship
was maintained; the same form of high Calvinistic theology continued to be cherished
as a norm of sound preaching and as a vehicle of instruction to children. All things
continued as they had been; and yet it would have been a most superficial observer
who had failed to detect signs of approaching change. The disproportions of the
Calvinistic system, exaggerated in the popular acceptation, as in the favorite “Day of Doom” of Michael Wigglesworth, forced the effort after practical readjustments.
The magnifying of divine sovereignty in the saving of men, to the obscuring of human
responsibility, inevitably mitigated the church’s reprobation of respectable The name, applied at first
as a stigma to the liberalizing school of New England theology, may easily mislead
if taken either in its earlier historic sense or in the sense which it was about
to acquire in the Wesleyan revival. The surprise of the eighteenth century New
England theologians at finding the word associated with intense fervor of preaching
and of religious experience is expressed in the saying, “There is all the difference
between a cold Arminian and a hot Arminian that there is between a cold potato and
a hot potato.” For a lucid account of the subject, see W. Walker, “History of the
Congregational Churches,” chap. viii.
These divergences from the straight lines of the primeval New
England Calvinism had already begun to be manifest during the lifetime of some of
the founders. Of not less grave import was the deflection from the lofty moral standard
of the fathers. A great New Englander, Horace Bushnell, maintaining his thesis that
great migrations are followed by a tendency to barbarism, has cited in proof this
part of New England history. Sermon on “Barbarism the First Danger.”
The set and sturdy resolution of the founders of the four colonies
of the New England confederacy that the first planting of their territory should
be on rigorously exclusive principles, with a homogeneous and mutually congenial
population, under a firm discipline both civil and And yet,
even in the Rhode Island communities, the arbitrary right of exclusion, in the
exercise of which Roger Williams had been shut out from Massachusetts, was
asserted and adopted. It was forbidden to sell land to a newcomer, except by
consent of prior settlers.
The results of the manner of the first planting on the growth
of the church in Rhode Island were of a like sort. Dr. J. G. Vose, “Congregationalism in Rhode Island,” pp. 16, 53, 63.
Meanwhile the inadequate compensations of a state of schism began to show themselves. In the absence of any organized fellowship of the whole there grew up, more than elsewhere, a mutual tolerance and even love among the petty sects, the lesson of which was learned where it was most needed. The churches of “the standing order” in Massachusetts not only admired but imitated “the peace and love which societies of different modes of worship entertained toward each other in Rhode Island.” In 1718, not forty years from the time when Baptist churches ceased to be
religio illicita in Massachusetts, three foremost
pastors of Boston assisted in the ordination of a minister to the Baptist
church, at which Cotton Mather preached the sermon, entitled “Good Men United.” It contained a frank confession of repentance for the persecutions of which the
Boston churches had been guilty. Ibid., pp. 56, 57. “Good men, alas!
have done such ill things as these. New England also has in former times done
something of this aspect which would not now be so well approved; in which, if
the brethren in whose house we are now convened met with anything too
unbrotherly, they now with satisfaction hear us expressing our dislike of
everything which looked like persecution in the days that have passed over us.”
There is a double lesson to be learned from the history of these neighbor colonies: first, that a rigorously exclusive selection of men like-minded is the best seed for the first planting of a commonwealth in the wilderness; secondly, that the exclusiveness that is justified in the infancy of such a community cannot wisely, nor even righteously, nor even possibly, be maintained in its adolescence and maturity. The church-state of Massachusetts and New Haven was overthrown at the end of the first generation by external interference. If it had continued a few years longer it must have fallen of itself; but it lasted long enough to be the mold in which the civilization of the young States should set and harden.
THE bargainings and conveyancings, the confirmations and reclamations, the setting up and overturning, which, after the conquest of the New Netherlands, had the effect to detach the peninsula of New Jersey from the jurisdiction of New York, and to divide it for a time into two governments, belong to political history; but they had, of course, an important influence on the planting of the church in that territory. One result of them was a wide diversity of materials in the early growth of the church.
Toward the end of the Dutch occupation, one lonely congregation
had been planted in that region which, at a later time, when the Dutch church in
America had awaked from its lethargy, was to become known as “the garden of the
Dutch church.” Corwin,
pp. 58, 128.
After the extinction of the high theocracy of the New Haven Colony
by the merger of it in Connecticut, a whole church and town, headed by the pastor,
having secured such guaranty of their political liberty as the unstable government
of New Jersey was able to give, left the homes endeared to them by thirty years
of toil and thrift, and lifting the ark of the covenant by the staves, set themselves
Twenty years later the ferocious persecution of the Scottish Covenanters, which was incited by the fears or the bloody vindictiveness of James II. after the futile insurrection of Monmouth, furnished a motive for emigration to the best people in North Britain, which was quickly seized and exploited by the operators in Jersey lands. Assurances of religious liberty were freely given; men of influence were encouraged to bring over large companies; and in 1686 the brother of the martyred Duke of Argyle was made governor of East Jersey. The considerable settlements of Scotchmen found congenial neighbors in the New Englanders of Newark. A system of free schools, early established by a law of the commonwealth, is naturally referred to their common influence.
Meanwhile a series of events of the highest consequence to the
future of the American church had been in progress in the western half of the province.
Passing from hand to hand, the ownership and lordship of West Jersey had become
vested in a land company dominated by Quakers. For the first time in the brief history
of that sect, it was charged with the responsibility of the organization and conduct
of government. Hitherto it had been publicly known by the fierce and defiant and
often outrageous protests of its representatives against existing governments
and dignities both in state and in church, such as exposed them to the natural
and reasonable suspicion of being wild
The Quakers bore the test nobly. Never did a commercial
company show itself so little mercenary; never was a sovereign more magnanimous
and unselfish. With the opening of the province to settlement, the proprietors
set forth a statement of their purposes: “We lay a foundation for after ages to
understand their liberty as men and Christians, that they may not be brought
into bondage but by their own consent; for we put the power in the people.” This
was followed by a code of “Concessions and Agreements” in forty-four
articles, which were at once a constitution of government and a binding compact
with such as should enter themselves as colonists on these terms. They left
little to be desired in securities for personal, political, and religious
liberty. It is notable that the concessions
offered already by Carteret and Berkeley in 1664 contained an unlimited pledge of
religious liberty, “any law, statute, usage, or custom of the realm of England
to the contrary notwithstanding” (Mulford, “History of New Jersey,” p. 534).
A half-century of experience in colonization had satisfied some minds that the principle
adopted by the Quakers for conscience’ sake was also a sound business principle.
At once population began to flow amain. In 1677 two hundred and
thirty Quakers came in one ship and founded the town of Burlington. By 1681 there
had come fourteen hundred. Weekly, monthly, quarterly meetings were established; houses of worship were built; and in August, 1681, the Quaker hierarchy (if
it may so be called without offense) was completed by the establishment of the Burlington
Yearly Meeting. The same year the corporation, encouraged by its rapid success,
increased its numbers and its capital, bought out the proprietors of East Jersey,
and appointed as governor over the whole province the
This enterprise of the Quaker purchase and settlement of New Jersey brings upon the stage of American history the great apostle of Christian colonization, William Penn. He came into relation to the New Jersey business as arbiter of some differences that arose between the two Friends who had bought West Jersey in partnership. He continued in connection with it when the Quaker combination had extended itself by purchase over the whole Jersey peninsula, and he was a trusted counselor of the corporation, and the representative of its interests at court. Thus there grew more and more distinct before his peculiarly adventurous and enterprising mind the vision of the immense possibilities, political, religious, and commercial, of American colonization. With admirable business shrewdness combined with courtly tact, he canceled an otherwise hopeless debt from the crown in consideration of the concession to him of a domain of imperial wealth and dimensions, with practically unlimited rights of jurisdiction. At once he put into exercise the advantages and opportunities which were united in him so as never before in the promoter of a like enterprise, and achieved a success speedy and splendid beyond all precedent.
The providential preparations for this great enterprise—“the
Holy Experiment,” as Penn delighted to call it—had been visibly in progress in England
for not more than the third part of a century. It was not the less divine for being
wholly logical and natural, that, just when the Puritan Reformation culminated in
the victory of the Commonwealth, the Quaker Reformation should suddenly See the vindication a
the act of the New Haven colonists in adopting the laws of
Moses as the statute-book of the colony, in the “Thirteen Historical Discourses
of L. Bacon,” pp. 29-32. “The greatest and boldest improvement which has been made
in criminal jurisprudence by any one act since the dark ages was that which was
made by our fathers when they determined that the judicial laws of God, as they
were delivered by Moses, and as they are a fence to the moral law, being neither
typical nor ceremonial nor having any reference to Canaan, shall be accounted of
moral equity, and generally bind all offenders and be a rule to all the courts.’”
In their bold reassertion of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit,
that his light “lighteth every man who cometh into the world,” it is not strange
that the first Quakers should sometimes have lost sight of those principles the
enunciation of which gives such a character of sober sanity to the apostolic teachings
on this subject—that a divine For the dealing of Fox with the case
of John Perrot, who had a divine call to wear his hat in meeting, see the “History
of the Society of. Friends,” by the Messrs. Thomas, pp. 197-199 (American Church
History Series, vol. xii.).
Entering into continental Europe, the Quaker Reformation found itself anticipated in the progress of religious history. The protests of the Anabaptists against what they deemed the shortcomings of the Lutheran Reformation had been attended with far wilder extravagances than those of the early Quakers, and had been repressed with ruthless severity. But the political and militant Anabaptists were succeeded by communities of mild and inoffensive non-resistants, governing themselves by a narrow and rigorous discipline, and differing from the order of Quakers mainly at this point, that whereas the Quakers rejected all sacraments, these insisted strenuously on their own views of Baptism and the Supper, and added to them the ordinance of the Washing of Feet. These communities were to be found throughout Protestant Europe, from the Alps to the North Sea, but were best known in Holland and Lower Germany, where they were called Mennonites, from the priest, Menno Simons, who, a hundred years before George Fox, had enunciated the same principles of duty founded on the strict interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount.
The, combination of circumstances to promote the “Holy Experiment” of William Penn is something prodigious. How he could be a petted favorite at
the shameful court of the last two Stuarts, while his brethren throughout the realm were
languishing under persecution, is a fact not in itself honorable, but capable of
being honorably explained; and both the persecution and the court favor helped
on his enterprise. The time was opportune; the period of tragical uncertainty in
colonization was past; emigration had come to be a richly promising enterprise.
For leader of the enterprise what endowment was lacking in the elegantly
Penn’s address inviting colonists to his new domain announced
the outlines of his scheme. His great powers of jurisdiction were held by him.
only to be transferred to the future inhabitants in a free and righteous government.
“I purpose,” said he, conscious of the magnanimity of the intention, “for the
matters of liberty, I purpose that which is extraordinary—to leave myself and successors
no power of doing mischief, that the will of one man may not hinder the good of
a whole country;” and added, in language which might have fallen from his intimate
friend, Algernon Sidney, but was fully expressive of his own views, “It is the
great end of government to support power in reverence with the people, and to secure
the people from the abuse of power; for liberty without obedience is confusion,
and obedience without liberty is slavery.” Quoted in Bancroft, vol. iii., p. 366.
Through the correspondence of the Friends’ meetings, these proposals
could be brought to the attention of many thousands of people, sifted and culled
by persecution, the best stuff for a colony in all the United Kingdom. The response
was immediate. Within a year three ship-loads of emigrants went out. The next year
Penn himself went with a company of a hundred, and stayed long enough to see the
government organized by the free act of the colonists Bancroft, vol. ii., p. 392. H. C. Lodge, p. 213.
But Great Britain, although the chief source of population, was
not the only source. It had been part of the providential equipment of Penn for
his great work to endow him with the gift of tongues and bring him into intimate
relations with the many congregations of the broken and persecuted sects kindred
to his own on the continent of Europe. The summer and autumn of 1678, four years
before his coming to Pennsylvania, had been spent by him, in company with George
Fox, Robert Barclay, and other eminent Friends, in a mission tour through Holland
(where he preached in his mother’s own language) and Germany. The fruit of this
preaching and of previous missions appeared in an unexpected form. One of the first
important accessions to the colony was the company of Mennonites led by Pastorius,
the “Pennsylvania Pilgrim,” who founded Germantown, now a beautiful suburb of Philadelphia.
Group after group of picturesque devotees that had been driven into seclusion
and eccentricity by long and cruel persecution—the Tunkers, the Schwenkfelders,
the Amish—kept coming and bringing with them their traditions, their customs, their
sacred books, their timid and pathetic disposition to hide by themselves, sometimes
in quasi-monastic communities like that at Ephrata,
It was the rough estimate of Dr. Franklin that colonial
Pennsylvania was made up of one third Quakers, one third Germans, and one third
miscellaneous. The largest item under this last head was the Welsh, most of them
Quakers, who had been invited by Penn with the promise of a separate tract of
forty thousand acres in which to maintain their own language, government, and
institutions. Happily, the natural and patriotic longing of these immigrants for
a New Wales on this side the sea was not to be realized. The “Welsh Barony” became soon a mere geographical tradition, and the whole strength of this fervid
and religious people enriched the commonwealth. For a fuller account of the sources of the population of Pennsylvania,
see “The Making of Pennsylvania,” by Sydney George Fisher (Philadelphia, 1896).
Several notable beginnings of church history belong to the later part of the period under consideration.
An interesting line of divergence from
the current teachings of the Friends
was led, toward the end of the seventeenth Tiffany, “Protestant Episcopal
Church,” pp. 210-212, 220. In a few instances the work suffered from the unfit character
of the missionaries. A more common fault was the vulgar proselyting spirit which
appears in the missionaries’ reports (“Digest of S. P. G. Records,” pp. 12-79).
A certain naïf insularity sometimes betrays itself in their incapacity to adapt
themselves to their new-world surroundings. Brave and zealous Mr. Barton in Cumberland
County recites a formidable list of sects into which the people are divided, and
with unconscious humor recounts his efforts to introduce one sect more (ibid., p.
37). They could hardly understand that in crossing the ocean they did not bring
with them the prerogatives of a national establishment, but were in a position of
dissent from the existing establishments. “It grieved them that Church of England
men should be stigmatized with the grim and horrid title of dissenters” (“The
Making of Pennsylvania,” p. 192). One of the most pathetically amusing instances of
the misfit of the Englishman in America is that of the Rev. Mr. Poyer at Jamaica,
L. I. The meeting-house and glebe-lands that had been provided by the people of
that parish for the use of themselves and their pastor were gotten, neither
honorably nor lawfully, into the possession of the missionary of the “S. P. G.”
and his scanty following, and held by him in spite of law and justice for twenty-five
years. At last the owners of the property succeeded in evicting him by process of
law. The victim of this persecution reported plaintively to the society his “great
and almost continual contentions with the Independents in his parish.” The litigation
had been over the salary settled for the minister of that parish, and also over
the glebe-lands. But “by a late Tryal at Law he has lost them and the Church itself,
of which his congregation has had the possession for twenty-five years.” The grievance
went to the heart of his congregation, who bewail “the emperious behaviour of these
our enemies, who stick not to call themselves the Established Church and us Dissenters”
(“Digest of S. P. G. Records,” p. 61; Corwin,
“Dutch Church,” pp. 104, 105,
126, 127).
Another great beginning that comes within the field of vision
in the first four decades of the eighteenth century is the planting of the great
national churches of Germany. We have observed the migration of the minor sects
of Germany—so complete, in some cases, that the entire sect was transplanted, leaving
no representative in the fatherland. In the mixed multitude of refugees from the
Palatinate and other ravaged provinces were many belonging both to the Lutheran
and to the Reformed churches, as well as some Catholics. But they were scattered
as sheep having no shepherd. The German Lutheran and Reformed immigration was destined to attain by and by to Dubbs, “Reformed Church,” p. 281;
Jacobs, “The Lutherans,” p. 260.
But the greatest in its consequences, both religious and political,
of the great beginnings in the early part of the eighteenth century, was the first
flow of the swelling tide of the Scotch-Irish immigration. Already, in 1669, an
English Presbyterian, Matthew Hill, persuaded to the work by Richard Baxter, was
ministering to “many of the Reformed religion” in Maryland; and in 1683 an appeal
from them to the Irish presbytery of Laggan had brought over to their aid that sturdy
and fearless man of God, Francis Makemie, whose successful defense in 1707, when
unlawfully imprisoned in New York by that unsavory defender of the Anglican faith,
Lord Cornbury, gave assurance of religious liberty to his communion throughout the
colonies. In 1705 he was moderator of the first presbytery R. E. Thompson,
“The Presbyterian Churches,” pp. 22-29; S. S. Green, “The Scotch-Irish in America,” paper before the American
Antiquarian Society, April, 1895. “The great bulk of the emigrants came to this
country at two distinct periods of time: the first from 1718 to the middle of the
century, the second from 1771 to 1773. . . . In consequence of the famine of 1740
and 1741, it is stated that for several years afterward 12,000 emigrants annually
left Ulster for the American plantations; while from 1771 to 1773 the whole emigration
from Ulster is estimated at 30,000, of whom 10,000 are weavers” (Green, p. 7).
The companies that came to New England in 1718 were mainly absorbed by the Congregationalism
of that region (Thompson, p. 15). The church founded in Boston by the Irish Presbyterians
came in course of time to have for its pastor the eminent William Ellery Channing
(Green, p. I I). Since the organization of the annual Scotch-Irish Congress in 1889,
the literature of this subject has become copious. (See “Bibliographical Note” at the end of Mr. Green’s pamphlet.)
The colony of Georgia makes its appearance among the thirteen
British colonies in America, in 1733, as one born out of due time. But no colony
of all the thirteen had a more distinctly Christian origin than this. The foundations
of other American commonwealths had been laid in faith and hope, but the ruling
motive of the founding of Georgia was charity, and that is the greatest of these
three. The spirit which dominated in the measures taken The beautiful story of the
processional progress of the Salzburg exiles across the continent of Europe is well
told by Dr. Jacobs, “History of the Lutherans,” pp. 153-159, with a copious extract
from Bancroft, vol. iii., which shows that that learned author did not distinguish
the Salzburgers from the Moravians. The account of the ship’s company in the storm,
in Dr. Jacobs’s tenth chapter, is
full of interest. There is a pathetic probability in his suggestion
that in the hymn “Jesus, lover of my soul,” we have Charles Wesley’s reminiscence
of those scenes of peril and terror. For this episode in the church history of Georgia
as seen from different points of view, see American Church History Series, vols.
iv., v.,
vii., viii.
The three shipmates, the Wesleys and Bishop Nitschmann, did not
remain long together. Nitschmann soon returned to Germany to lead a new colony of
his brethren to Pennsylvania; Charles Wesley remained for four months at Frederica,
and then recrossed the ocean, weary of the hardness of the people’s hearts; and,
except for the painful and humiliating discipline which was preparing him to “take
the whole world to be his parish,” it had been well for John Wesley if he had returned
with his brother. Never did a really great and good man act more like a fool than
he did in his Georgia mission. The priestly arrogance with which he attempted to
enforce his crotchets of churchmanship on a mixed community in the edge of the wilderness
culminated at last in his hurling the thunderbolts of excommunication at a girl
who had jilted him, followed by his slipping away from the colony between two days,
with an indictment for defamation on record
BY the end of one hundred years from the settlement of Massachusetts important changes had come upon the chain of colonies along the Atlantic seaboard in America. In the older colonies the people had been born on the soil at two or three generations’ remove from the original colonists, or belonged to a later stratum of migration superimposed upon the first. The exhausting toil and privations of the pioneer had been succeeded by a good measure of thrift and comfort. There were yet bloody campaigns to be fought out against the ferocity and craft of savage enemies wielded by the strategy of Christian neighbors; but the severest stress of the Indian wars was passed. In different degrees and according to curiously diverse types, the institutions of a Christian civilization were becoming settled.
In the course of this hundred years the political organization
of these various colonies had been drawn into an approach to uniformity. In
every one of them, excepting Connecticut and Rhode Island, the royal or proprietary
government was represented by a governor and his staff, appointed from England,
and furnishing a point of contact which was in every case and all the time a
point of
The Massachusetts theocracy, so called, fell with the revocation
of the charter by James II. It had stood for nearly fifty years—long enough to accomplish
the main end of that Nationalist principle which the Puritans, notwithstanding their
fraternizing with the Pilgrim Separatists, had never let go. The organization of
the church throughout New England, excepting Rhode Island, had gone forward in even
step with the advance of population. Two rules had with these colonists the force
of axioms: first, that it was the duty of every town, as a Christian community,
to sustain the town church; secondly, that it was the duty of every citizen of
the town to contribute to this end according to his ability. The breaking up of
the town church by schisms and the shirking of individual duty on the ground
of dissent were alike discountenanced, sometimes by severely intolerant measures. The ultimate One
is touched by the plaintive grief of the Rev. Mr. Muirson, who has come from
the established church of England to make proselytes from the established
churches of Connecticut. He writes to the “S. P. G.,” without a thought of casting
any reflections upon his patrons: “It would require more time than you would willingly
bestow on these Lines, to express how rigidly and severely they treat our People,
by taking their Estate by distress when they do not willingly pay to support their
Ministers” (“Digest of S. P. G. Records,” p. 43). The pathos of the situation
is intensified when we bear in mind the relation of this tender-hearted gentleman’s
own emoluments to the taxes extorted from the Congregationalists in his New York
parish.
So solid and vital, at .the point of time which we have assumed (1730), seemed the cohesion of the “standing order” in New England, that only two inconsiderable defections are visible to the historian.
The tendency toward Baptist principles early disclosed itself
among the colonists. The example of Roger Williams was followed by less notable
instances; the shameful intolerance with which some of these were treated shows
how formidable this tendency seemed to those in authority. But a more startling
defection appeared about the year 1650, when President Dunster of Harvard College,
a man most honorable and lovable, signified his adoption of the Baptist tenets.
The treatment of him was ungenerous, and for a time the petty persecutions that
followed served rather to discredit the clergy than really to hinder the spread
of Baptist principles. In the year 1718 the Baptist church of Boston received fraternal
recognition from the foremost representatives of the Congregational clergy of Boston,
with a public confession of the wrong that they had done. See above, p. 107. Newman, “Baptist Churches in the United States,” pp. 197,
198, 231.
The other departure from the “standing order” was at this date
hardly more extensive. The early planting of Episcopalian churches in Maine and
New Hampshire, with generous patronage and endowment, had languished and died. In
1679 there was no Episcopal minister in all New England. In 1702 were begun the
energetic and richly supported missions of the “S. P. G.” At the end of twenty-eight
years there were in Rhode Island four Episcopalian churches; in Massachusetts,
three, two of them in the city of Boston; in Connecticut, three. Tiffany, “Protestant Episcopal Church,” chaps. iv., v.; C. F. Adams,
“Three
Episodes in Massachusetts History,” pp. 342, 621.
The incident was strikingly parallel to that of seventy years
before; when the president of Harvard College announced his acceptance of Baptist
principles. The day after the Yale commencement in September, 1722, a modest and
respectful paper was presented to the trustees of the college, signed by Rector
Timothy Cutler and Tutor Brown (who constituted the entire faculty of the college)
and by five pastors of good standing in the Connecticut churches. Two other pastors
of note were named as assenting to the paper, although not subscribing it. It seemed a
formidable proportion of the Connecticut clergy. The purport of the paper was to
signify that the signers
This secession, small in number, but weighty in character, was
of course a painful shock to the hitherto unbroken unity of the church and clergy
of Connecticut. But it was not quite like a thunderbolt from a clear sky. It had
been immediately preceded by not a little conference and correspondence with Connecticut
pastors on the one hand, and on the other hand with representatives of the powerful
and wealthy Propagation Society, on the question of support to be received from
England for those who should secede. Its prior antecedents reached farther back
into history. The Baptist convictions of the president of Harvard in 1650 were not
more clearly in line with the individualism of the Plymouth Separatists than the
scruples of the rector of Yale in 1722 were in line with the Nationalism of Higginson
and Winthrop. This sentiment, especially strong in Connecticut, had given rise to
much study as to the best form of a colonial church constitution; and the results
of this had recently been embodied (in 1708) in the mildly classical system of the Saybrook Platform. The filial love of the Puritan colonists toward the mother “Digest of S.
P. G.,” p. 42.
The immediate results of what had been expected to lead off a
large defection from the colonial clergy were numerically insignificant; but very
far from insignificant was the fact that in Connecticut a sincere and spontaneous
movement toward the Episcopal Church had arisen among men honored and beloved, whose
ecclesiastical views were not tainted with self-seeking or servility or with an
unpatriotic shame for their colonial home and sympathy with its political enemies.
Elsewhere in New England, and largely in Connecticut also, the Episcopal Church
in its beginnings was handicapped with a dead-weight of supercilious and odious
Toryism. The example of a man like Johnson showed that one might become an Episcopalian
without ceasing to be a patriotic American and without Tiffany, chap. v. For a full
account of these beginnings in Connecticut in their historical relations, see L.
Bacon on “The Episcopal Church in Connecticut” (“New Englander,” vol. xxv.,
pp. 283-329).
Crossing the recently settled boundary line into New York, not yet risen to rank with the foremost colonies, we find in 1730 a deepening of the early character, which had marked that colony, of wide diversity among the Christian people in point of race, language, doctrinal opinion, and ecclesiastical connection.
The ancient Dutch church, rallying from its almost asphyxia, had begun not only to receive new life, but, under the fervid spiritual influence of Domine Frelinghuysen, to “have it more abundantly” and to become a means of quickening to other communions. It was bearing fruit, but its fruit had not seed within itself after its kind. It continued to suffer, in common with some other imported church systems, from depending on a transatlantic hierarchy for the succession of its ministry. The supply of imported ministers continued to be miserably inadequate to the need. In the first four decades of the century the number of its congregations more than doubled, rising to a total of sixty-five in New York and New Jersey; and for these sixty-five congregations there were nineteen ministers, almost all of them from Europe. This body of churches, so inadequately manned, was still further limited in its activities by the continually contracting barrier of the Dutch language.
The English church, enjoying “the prestige of royal favor and
princely munificence,” suffered also the drawbacks There were on duty in New York in 1730, besides the minister
of Trinity Church, ten missionaries of the “S. P. G.,” including several
employed specially among the Indians and the negroes. Fifteen years later there
were reported to the “Venerable Society” in New York and New Jersey twenty-two
churches (“Digest of S. P. G.,” pp. 855, 856; Tiffany,
p. 178). “Digest of S. P. G.,” p. 68 and note.
A third element in the early Christianity of New York
The immense volume and strength of the Scotch-Irish immigration had hardly begun to be perceptible in New York as early as 1730. The total strength of the Presbyterian Church in 1705 was organized in Philadelphia into a solitary presbytery containing six ministers. In 1717, the number having grown to seventeen, the one presbytery was divided into four, which constituted a synod; and one of the four was the presbytery of New York and New Jersey. But it was observed, at least it might have been observed, that the growing Presbyterianism of this northernmost region was recruited mainly from old England and from New England—-a fact on which were to depend important consequences in later ecclesiastical history.
The chief increment of the presbytery of New York and New Jersey
was in three parts, each of them planted from New England. The churches founded
from New Haven Colony in the neighborhood of Newark and Elizabethtown, and the churches
founded by Connecticut settlers on Long Island when this was included in the jurisdiction
of Connecticut, easily and without serious objection conformed their organization
to the Presbyterian order. The first wave of the perennial westward migration of
the New Englanders, as it flowed over the hills from the valley of the Housatonic
into the valley of the Hudson, was observed Corwin, “Reformed (Dutch) Church,” p.
14.
The facility with which the New England Christians, moving westward
or southwestward from their cold northeastern corner of the country, have commonly
consented to forego their cherished usages and traditions of church order and accept
those in use in their new homes, and especially their readiness in conforming to
the Presbyterian polity, has been a subject of undue lamentation and regret to many
who have lacked the faculty of recognizing in it one of the highest honors of the
New England church. But whether approved or condemned, a fact so unusual in church
history, and especially in the history of the American church, is entitled to some
study. 1. It is to be explained in part, but not altogether, by the high motive
of a willingness to sacrifice personal preferences, habits, and convictions of judgment,
on matters not of primary importance, to the greater general good of the community.
2. The Presbyterian
polity is the logical expression of that Nationalist principle which was cherished
by many of the Puritan fathers, which contended at the birth of New England with
the mere Independency of the Pilgrims, and which found an imperfect embodiment in
the platforms of Cambridge and Saybrook. The New England fathers in general, before
their views suffered a sea-change in the course of their migrations, were Episcopalians
and Presbyterians rather than Congregationalists; and if, in the course of this
history, we shall find many in their later generations conforming to a mitigated
form of the Westminster polity, or to a liberalized and Americanized Episcopal Church,
instead of finding this to be a degeneration, we “Mr. Hooker did often quote
a saying out of Mr. Cartwright, that no man fashioneth his house to his hangings,
but his hangings to his house. It is better that the commonwealth be fashioned to
the setting forth of God’s house, which is his church, than to accommodate the church
frame to the civil state John Cotton, quoted by L. Bacon, “Historical
Discourses,” p. 18).
The other factors of the religious life of New York require only brief mention.
There were considerable Quaker communities, especially Thomas, “The Society of Friends,” p. 239.
Inconsiderable in number, but of the noblest quality, was the
immigration of French Huguenots, which just before and just after the revocation
of the Edict of Nantes brought to New York and its neighborhood a half-dozen congregations,
accompanied by pastors whose learning, piety, and devotion to the work of Christ
were worthy of that school of martyrdom in which they had been trained. They were
not numerous enough, nor compactly enough settled, to maintain their own language
in use, and soon became merged, some in the Dutch church and some in the English.
Some of their leading pastors accepted salaries from the Propagation Society, tendered
to them on condition of their accepting the ordination and conforming to the ritual
of the English church. The French Reformed Church does not appear organically in
the later history of the colony, but the history of the State and of the nation
is never largely written without commemorating, by the record of family names made
illustrious in every department of honorable activity, the rich contribution made
to the American church and nation by the cruel bigotry and the political fatuity
of Louis XIV. Corwin, “Reformed (Dutch) Church,” pp. 77, 78, 173.
The German element in the religious life of New York, at the
period under consideration, was of even less historical
importance. The political philanthropy of Queen Illustrations of the sordid sectarianism
of the “Venerable Society’s” operations are painfully frequent in the pages of
the “Digest of the S. P. G.” See especially on this particular case the action
respecting Messrs. Kocherthal, Ehlig, and Beyse (p. 61).
The general impression left on the mind by this survey of the
Christian people of New York in 1730 is of a mass
The population of the two Jerseys continued to bear the character impressed on it by the original colonization. West Jersey was predominantly Quaker; East Jersey showed in its institutions of church and school the marks made upon it by the mingling of Scotch and Yankee. But there was one point at which influences had centered which were to make New Jersey the seed-plot of a new growth of church life for the continent.
The intolerable tyranny of Lord Cornbury in New York, at the beginning of the century, had driven many of the Dutch Christians of that colony across the Hudson. The languishing vine throve by transplanting. In the congenial neighborhood of the Calvinists of Scotland and New England the cluster of churches in the region of New Brunswick came to be known as “the garden of the Dutch church.” To this region, bearing a name destined to great honor in American church history, came from Holland, in 1720, Domine Theodore J. Frelinghuysen. The fervor and earnestness of his preaching, unwonted in that age, wakened a religious feeling in his own congregation, which overflowed the limits of a single parish and became as one of the streams that make glad the city of God.
In the year 1718 there arrived at the port of Philadelphia an
Irishman, William Tennent, with his four sons, the eldest a boy of fifteen. He was
not a Scotch-Irishman, but an English-Irishman—a clergyman of the established Protestant
Episcopal Church of Ireland. He lost no time in connecting himself with the Presbyterian
synod of Philadelphia, and after a few years of pastoral service
in
In the year 1730 the total population of Pennsylvania was estimated
by Governor Gordon at forty-nine thousand. In the less than fifty years since the
colony was settled it had outstripped all the older colonies, and Philadelphia,
its chief town, continued to be by far the most important port for the landing of
immigrants. The original Quaker influence was still dominant in the colony, but
the very large majority of the population was German; and presently the Quakers
were to find their political supremacy departing, and were to acquiesce in the change
by abdicating political S. G. Fisher, “The Making of Pennsylvania,” p. 125; Thomas,
“The Society
of Friends,” p. 235. “Religion gave birth to wealth, and was devoured by her own offspring.” The
aphorism is ascribed to Lord Falkland. Thomas, “The Society of Friends,” p. 236.
Notwithstanding these eminent honors, there is much in the later history of the great commonwealth in which Quakerism held dominion for the greater part of a century to reflect doubt on the fitness of that form of Christianity for conducting the affairs, either civil or religious, of a great community.
There is nothing in the personal duty of
non-resistance of evil, as inculcated in the New Testament, that conflicts with
the functions of the civil governor—even the function of bearing the sword as God’s
minister. Rather, each of these is the complement and counterpart of the other.
Among the early colonial governors no man wielded the sword of the ruler more effectively
than the Quaker Archdale in the Carolinas. It is when this law of personal duty
is assumed as the principle of public government that the order of society is inverted,
and the function of the magistrate is inevitably taken up by the individual, and
the old wilderness law of blood-revenge is reinstituted. The
legislation of William Penn involved no abdication of the power of the sword by
the civil governor. The enactment, however sparing, of capital laws conceded by
implication every point that is claimed by Christian moralists in justification
of war. But it is hardly to be doubted that the tendency of Quaker politics so to
conduct civil government as that it shall “resist not evil” is responsible for
some of the strange paradoxes in the later history of Pennsylvania. The commonwealth
was founded in good faith on principles of mutual good will with the Indians and
tender regard for Indian rights, of religious liberty and interconfessional amity,
and of a permanent peace policy. Its history has been characterized, beyond that
of other States, by foul play toward the Indians and protracted Indian wars, by
acrimonious and sometimes bloody sectarian conflicts, by obstinate insurrections
against public order, Fisher, “The Making of Pennsylvania,” pp. 166-169,
174. It is not easy to define the peculiarity
of Penn’s Indian policy. It is vulgarly referred to as if it consisted in just dealing,
especially in not taking their land except by fair purchase; and the “Shackamaxon
Treaty,” of which nothing is known except by vague report and tradition, is spoken of as something quite unprecedented in this respect. The fact is that this
measure of virtue was common to the English colonists generally, and eminently to
the New England colonists. A good example of the ordinary cant of historical writers
on this subject is found in “The Making of Pennsylvania,” p. 238. The writer says
of the Connecticut Puritans: “They occupied the land by squatter sovereignty.
. . . It seemed like a pleasant place; they wanted it. They were the saints, and
the saints, as we all know, shall inherit the earth. . . . Having originally acquired
their /and simply by taking it, . . . they naturally grew up with rather liberal
views as to their right to any additional territory that pleased their fancy.” No
purchase by Penn was made with more scrupulous regard to the rights of the Indians
than the purchases by which the settlers of Connecticut acquired title to their
lands; but I know of no New England precedent for the somewhat Punic piece of sharp
practice by which the metes and bounds of one of the Pennsylvania purchases were
laid down. The long exemption of Pennsylvania from trouble with the Indians
seems to be due to the fact that an exceptionally mild, considerate, and conscientious
body of settlers was confronted with a tribe of savages thoroughly subdued and cowed
in recent conflicts with enemies both red and white. It seems clear, also, that
the exceptional ferocity of the forty years of uninterrupted war with the Indians
that ensued was due in part to the long dereliction by the Quaker government of
its duty of protecting its citizens and punishing murder, robbery, and arson when
committed by its copper-colored subjects.
The failure of Quakerism
is even more conspicuous considered as a church discipline. There is a charm as
of apostolic simplicity and beauty in its unassuming hierarchy of weekly, monthly,
quarterly, and yearly meetings, corresponding by epistles and by the visits of traveling
evangelists, which realizes the type of the primitive church presented in “The
Teaching of the Twelve Apostles.” But it was never able to outgrow, in the large
and free field to which it was transplanted, the defects incident to its origin
in a protest and a schism. It never learned to commend itself to men as a church
for all Christians, and never ceased to be, even in its own consciousness, a coterie
of specialists. Penn, to be sure, in his youthful overzeal, had claimed exclusive
and universal rights for Quakerism as “the alone good way of life and salvation,” all religions, faiths, and worships
besides being “in the darkness of apostasy.” Penn’s “Truth Exalted” (quoted in
“Encyclopaedia Britannica,” vol. xviii., p. 493).
And there were no other husbandmen to take the vineyard. The
petty German sects, representing so large a part of the population, were isolated
by their language and habits. The Lutherans and the Reformed, trained in established
churches to the methods and responsibilities of parish work, were not yet represented
by any organization. The Scotch-Irish Presbyterian immigration was pouring in at
Philadelphia like a flood, sometimes whole parishes at once, each bringing its own
pastor; and it left large traces of itself in the eastern counties of Pennsylvania,
while it rushed to the western frontier and poured itself like a freshet southwesterly
through the valleys of the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies. But the Presbyterian
churches of eastern Pennsylvania, even as reinforced from England and New England,
were neither many nor strong; the Baptists were feebler yet, although both these
bodies were giving signs of the strength they were both about to develop. In 1741, after a decade of
great activity and growth, the entire clerical strength of the American Presbyterian
Church, in its four presbyteries, was forty-seven ministers (Thompson, “Presbyterian
Churches,” p. 33).
Crossing the boundary line from Pennsylvania into Maryland—the line destined to become famous in political history as Mason and Dixon’s—we come to the four Southern colonies, Maryland, Virginia, and, the two Carolinas. Georgia in 1730 has not yet begun to be. All these have strongly marked characteristics in common, which determine in advance the character of their religious history. They are not peculiar in being slave colonies; there is no colony North or South in which slaves are not held under sanction of law. Georgia, in its early years, is to have the solitary honor of being an antislavery and prohibitionist colony. But the four earlier Southern colonies are unlike their Northern neighbors in this, that the institution of slavery dominates their whole social life. The unit of the social organism is not the town, for there are no towns; it is the plantation. In a population thus dispersed over vast tracts of territory, schools and churches are maintained with difficulty, or not maintained at all. Systems of primary and secondary schools are impracticable, and, for want of these, institutions of higher education either languish or are never begun. A consequent tendency, which, happily, there were many influences to resist, was for this townless population to settle down into the condition of those who, in distinction from the early Christians, came to be called pagani, or “men of the hamlets,” and Heiden, or “men of the heath.”
Another common characteristic of the four Southern colonies is
that upon them all was imposed by foreign power a church establishment not acceptable
to the people. In the Carolinas the attempted establishment of the English church
was an absolute failure. It was a church (with slight exceptions) without parishes,
without services, without clergy, without people, but with certain pretensions in
law which were hindrances in the way of other Christian work, and which tended to
make itself generally odious. In the two older colonies the Established Church was
worse than a failure. It had endowments, parsonages, glebes, salaries raised by
public tax, and therefore it had a clergy—and such a clergy! Transferring to America the most shameful faults of the English Establishment,
it gave the sacred offices of the Christian ministry by “patronage” into the hands
of debauched and corrupt adventurers, whose character in general was below the not
very lofty standard of the people whom they pretended to serve in the name of Jesus
Christ. Both in Virginia and in Maryland the infliction of this rabble of simonists
as a burden upon the public treasury was a nuisance under which the people grew
more and more restive from year to year. There was no spiritual discipline to which
this prêtraille was amenable. It is a subject
of unceasing lament on the part of historians of the American Episcopal Church that
the mother church, all through the colonial days, should have obstinately refused
to the daughter the gift of the episcopate. There is no denying the grave disadvantages
thus inflicted. But it admits of doubt whether such bishops, with such conditions,
as would have been conceded by the English church of the eighteenth century, would,
after all, have been so very precious a boon. We shrink from the imputation upon
the colonial church of Maryland and Virginia which is implied in suggesting that
it would have been considerably improved by gaining the disciplinary purity of the
English church of the Georgian era. The long fight in Virginia, culminating in Patrick
Henry’s speech in the Parsons’ Case, so far Americanized the Episcopal Church as
to make sure that no unwelcome minister was ever to be forced from outside on one
of its parishes. After the Revolution it became possible to set up the episcopate
also on American principles. Those who are burdened with regret over the long delay of the
American Protestant episcopate may find no small consolation in pondering the question, what kind of an outfit of bishops, with canons attached, might have been hoped
for from Sir Robert Walpole or Lord Bute? On the whole, at this point the American
Episcopal Church is in the habit of pitying itself too much. It has something to
be thankful for.
In the general dereliction of churchly care for the people of
the Southern colonies, on the part of those who professed the main responsibility
for it, the duty was undertaken, in the face of legal hindrances, by earnest Christians
of various names, whom the established clergy vainly affected to despise. The Baptists
and the Presbyterians, soon to be so powerfully prevalent throughout the South,
were represented by a few scattered congregations. But the church of the people
of the South at this period seems to have been the Quaker meeting, and the ministry
the occasional missionary who, bearing credentials from some yearly meeting, followed
in the pioneer footsteps of George Fox, and went from one circle of Friends to another,
through those vast expanses of thinly settled territory, to revive and confirm and
edify. The early fervors of the Society were soon spent. Its work was strangely
unstable. The proved defects of it as a working system were grave. The
criticism of George Keith seems justified by the event—its candle needed a
candlestick. But no man can truly write the history of the church of Christ
in the United States without giving honor to the body which for so long
a time and over so vast an area bore the name and testimony
One impression made by this general survey of the colonies is that of the absence of any sign of unity among the various Christian bodies in occupation. One corner of the great domain, New England, was thickly planted with homogeneous churches in mutual fellowship. One order of Christians, the Quakers, had at least a framework of organization conterminous with the country. In general there were only scattered members of a Christian community, awaiting the inbreathing of some quickening spiritual influence that should bring bone to its bone and erect the whole into a living church.
Another and very gratifying impression from the story thus far
is the general fidelity of the Christian colonists in the work of the gospel among
the heathen Indians. There was none of the colonies that did not make profession
of a zealous purpose for the Christianizing of the savages; and it is only just
to say, in the face of much unjust and evil talk, that there was none that did not
give proof of its sincerity. In Virginia, the Puritans Whitaker and Thomas Dale; in Maryland, the earliest companies of Jesuit missionaries; Campanius among the
Swedish Lutherans; Megapolensis among the Dutchmen, and the Jesuit martyr Jogues
in the forests of New York; in New England, not only John Eliot and Roger Williams
and the Mayhews, but many a village pastor like Fitch of Norwich and Pierson
of Branford,
were distinguished in the first generation by their devotion to
this duty. It is a curious exception, if it is indeed an exception, that
the one Christian colony that shows no record of early Indian missions should be
that of William Penn. Could this be due to the Quaker faith in the sufficiency
of “the Light that lighteneth every man that cometh into the world “? The type of theology and method of instruction used by some of
the earliest laborers in this field left something to be desired in point of
adaptedness to the savage mind. Without irreverence to the great name of
Jonathan Edwards, there is room for doubt whether he was just the man for the
Stockbridge Indians. In the case of the Rev. Abraham Pierson, of Branford, in
New Haven Colony, afterward founder of Newark, we have an illustration both of
his good intentions and of his methods, which were not so good, in “Some Helps for the Indians: Shewing them
how to Improve their Natural Reason, to Know the True God and the Christian
Religion.” This catechism is printed in the Indian language
with an English version interlined. “Q. How do you prove that there is but
one true God? “An. Because the reason why singular
things of the same kind are multiplied is not to be found in the nature of God;
for the reason why such like things are multiplied is from the fruitfulness of their
causes: but God hath no cause of his being, but is of himself. Therefore he is
one.” (And so on through secondly and
thirdly.) Per contra, a sermon to the Stockbridge
Indians by the most ponderous of the metaphysical preachers of New England, Samuel
Hopkins, is beautifully simple and childlike. It is given in full in Park’s
“Life of Hopkins,” pp. 46-49. McConnell, “History of the American Episcopal Church,” p.
7. The statement calls for qualification in detail, but the general fact is unmistakable.
It will be a matter of growing interest, as we proceed, to trace the relation of the American church to negro slavery.
It is a curious fact, not without some later analogies,
The voice of New England was echoed from Pennsylvania. The Mennonites
of Germantown, in 1688, framed in quaint and touching language their petition for
the abolition of slavery, and the Quaker yearly meetings responded one to another
with unanimous protest. But the mischief grew and grew. In the Northern colonies
the growth was stunted by the climate. Elsewhere the institution, beginning with
the domestic service of a few bondmen attached to their masters’ families, took
on a new type of malignity as it expanded. In proportion as the servile population
increases to such numbers as to be formidable, laws of increasing severity are directed
to restraining or repressing it. The first symptoms of insurrection are followed
by horrors of bloody vengeance, and “from that time forth the slave laws have but
one quality—that of ferocity engendered by fear.” H. C. Lodge, “English Colonies,” p. 67
et seq.
IT was not wholly dark in American Christendom before the dawn of the Great Awakening. The censoriousness which was the besetting sin of the evangelists in that great religious movement, the rhetorical temptation to glorify the revival by intensifying the contrast with the antecedent condition, and the exaggerated revivalism ever since so prevalent in the American church,—the tendency to consider religion as consisting mainly in, scenes and periods of special fervor, and the intervals between as so much void space and waste time,—all these have combined to deepen the dark tints in which the former state is set before us in history.
The power of godliness was manifest in the earlier days by many
infallible signs, not excluding those “times of refreshing” in which the simultaneous
earnestness of many souls compels the general attention. Even in Northampton, where
the doctrine of the venerable Stoddard as to the conditions of communion has been
thought to be the low-water mark of church vitality, not less than five such “harvest seasons” were within recent memory. It was to this parish
in a country town on the frontier of civilization, but the most important in Massachusetts
outside of Boston, that there came, in the year 1727, to serve as colleague to his
aged grandfather, Pastor Stoddard, a young man whose Of how little relative importance was this charge may be judged
from the fact that a quarter-century later, when the famous Joseph Bellamy was invited
to it from his tiny parish of Bethlem, Conn., the council called to advise in the
case judged that the interests of Bethlem were too important to be sacrificed to
the demands of New York. See the altogether admirable monograph of Professor A. V. G. Allen on
“Jonathan
Edwards,” p. 23.
The intensely earnest sermons, the holy life, and the loving
prayers of one of the greatest preachers in the history of the church were not long
in bearing abundant fruit. In a time of spiritual and moral depression, when
“The work of God, as it was carried on, and the number of true
saints multiplied, soon made a glorious alteration in the town, so that in the spring
and summer, anno 1735, the town seemed to be full of the presence of God. It was
never so full of love, nor so full of joy, and yet so full of distress, as it was
then. There were remarkable tokens of God’s presence in almost every house. It was
a time of joy in families on the account of salvation’s being brought unto
them; parents rejoicing over their children as being new-born, and husbands over
their wives, and wives over their husbands. The goings of God were then seen in
his sanctuary. God’s day was a delight, and his tabernacles were amiable. Our public
assemblies were then beautiful; the congregation was alive in God’s service, every
one intent on the public worship, every hearer eager to drink in the words of the
minister as they came from his mouth; the assembly in general were from time to
time in tears while the Word was preached, some weeping with sorrow and distress,
others with joy and love, others with pity and concern for the souls of their
neighbors. Our
The crucial test of the divineness of the work was given when the people presented themselves before the Lord with a solemn act of thanksgiving for his great goodness and his gracious presence in the town of Northampton, with publicly recorded vows to renounce their evil ways and put away their abominations from before his eyes. They solemnly promise thenceforth, in all dealings with their neighbor, to be governed by the rules of honesty, justice, and uprightness; not to overreach or defraud him, nor anywise to injure him, whether willfully or through want of care; to regard not only their own interest, but his; particularly, to be faithful in the payment of just debts; in the case of past wrongs against any, never to rest till they have made full reparation; to refrain from evil speaking, and from everything that feeds a spirit of bitterness; to do nothing in a spirit of revenge; not to be led by private or partisan interest into any course hurtful to the interests of Christ’s kingdom; particularly, in public affairs, not to allow ambition or partisanship to lead them counter to the interest of true religion. Those who are young promise to allow themselves in no diversions that would hinder a devout spirit, and to avoid everything that tends to lasciviousness, and which will not be approved by the infinitely pure and holy eye of God. Finally, they consecrate themselves watchfully to perform the relative duties of parents and children, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, masters, mistresses, and servants.
So great a work as this could not be hid. The whole region of
the Connecticut Valley, in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and neighboring regions
felt the influence of it. The fame of it went abroad. A letter of Edwards’s in
Both in this narrative and in a later work on “The Distinguishing
Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God,” one cannot but admire the divine gift of
a calm wisdom with which Edwards had been endowed as if for this exigency. He is
never dazzled by the incidents of the work, nor distracted by them from the essence
of it. His argument for the divineness of the work is not founded on the unusual
or extraordinary character of it, nor on the impressive bodily effects sometimes
attending it, such as tears, groans, outcries, convulsions, or faintings, nor on
visions or ecstasies or “impressions.” What he claims is that the work may be divine,
notwithstanding the presence of these incidents. Allen, “Jonathan Edwards,” pp. 164-174.
It is not difficult to understand how one of the first places
at a distance to feel the kindling example of Northampton should be the neighborhood
of Newark. To this
Like scenes of spiritual quickening were witnessed that same season in other parts of New Jersey but special interest attaches to the report from New Londonderry, Penn., where a Scotch-Irish community received as its pastor, in the spring of 1740, Samuel Blair, a native of Ireland, trained in the Log College of William Tennent. He describes the people, at his first knowledge of them, as sunk in a religious torpor, ignorance, and indifference. The first sign of vitality was observed in March, 1740, during the pastor’s absence, when, under an alarming sermon from a neighbor minister:
“There was a visible- appearance of much soul-concern
“In some time many of the convinced and distressed afforded
very hopeful, satisfying evidence that the Lord had brought them to true closure
with Jesus Christ, and that their distresses and fears had been in a great
measure removed in a right gospel way, by believing in the Son of God. Several
of them had very remarkable and sweet deliverances this way. It was very
agreeable to hear their accounts how that when they were in the deepest
perplexity and darkness, distress and difficulty, seeking God as poor,
condemned, hell-deserving sinners, the scene of recovering grace through a
Redeemer has been opened to their understandings with a surprising beauty and
glory, so that they were enabled to believe in Christ with joy unspeakable and
full of glory.” Joseph Tracy, “The Great
Awakening,” chap. ii. This work, of acknowledged value and authority, is on the
list of the Congregational Board of Publication. It is much
to be regretted that the Board does not publish it as well as announce it. A new
edition of it, under the hand of a competent editor, with a good index, would be
a useful service to history.
The experience of Gilbert Tennent at New Brunswick had no connection
with the first awakening at Northampton, but had important relations with later
events. He was the eldest of the four sons whom William Tennent, the Episcopalian
minister from Ireland, had brought with him to America and educated at his Log College.
In 1727 he became pastor of a church at New Brunswick, where he was much
impressed with what he saw of the results of
It was in that year (1735) in which the town of Northampton
was all ablaze with the glory of its first revival under Edwards that George Whitefield,
first among the members of Wesley’s “Holy Club” at Oxford, attained to that
“sense of the divine love” from which he was wont to date his conversion. In May,
1738, when the last reflections from the Northampton revival had faded out from
all around the horizon, the young clergyman, whose first efforts as a preacher
in pulpits of the Church of England had astonished all hearers by the power
of his eloquence, arrived at Savannah, urged by the importunity of the Wesleys to
take up the work in Georgia in which they had so conspicuously failed. He entered
eagerly into
At New York the Episcopal church was closed against him, but the pastor of the Presbyterian church, Mr. Pemberton, from Boston, made him welcome, and the fields were free to him and his hearers. On the way to New York and back, the tireless man preached at every town. At New Brunswick he saw and heard with profound admiration Gilbert Tennent, thenceforth his friend and yokefellow.
Seeing the solemn eagerness of the people everywhere to hear him, he determined to make the journey to Savannah by land, and again he turned the long journey into a campaign of preaching. Arriving at Savannah in January, 1740, he laid the foundation of his orphan-house, “Bethesda,” and in March was again on his way northward on a tour of preaching and solicitation of funds. Touching at Charleston, where the bishop’s commissary, Dr. Garden, was at open controversy with him, he preached five times and received seventy pounds for his charitable work. Landing at New Castle on a Sunday morning, he preached morning and evening. Monday morning he preached at Wilmington to a vast assemblage. Tuesday evening he preached on Society Hill, in Philadelphia, “to about eight thousand,” and at the same place Wednesday morning and evening. Then once more he made the tour to New York and back, preaching at every halting-place. A contemporary newspaper contains the following item:
“New Castle, May 15th. This evening Mr. Whitefield went on board
his sloop here in order to sail for Georgia. On Sunday he preached twice in Philadelphia,
and in the evening, when he preached his farewell sermon, it is supposed he had
twenty thousand hearers. On Monday he preached at Darby and Chester; on Tuesday
at Wilmington and Whiteclay Creek; on Wednesday, twice at Nottingham;
Into the feeble but rapidly growing presbyteries and the one
synod of the American Presbyterian Church the revival had brought, not peace,
but a sword. The collision was inevitable between the fervor and unrestrained
zeal of the evangelists and the sense of order and decorum, and of the
importance of organization and method, into which men are trained in the
ministry of an established church. No man, even at this day, can read the
“standards” of the Presbyterian Church without seeing that they have had to be
strained to admit those “revival methods” which ever since the days of
Whitefield have prevailed in that body. The conflict that arose was not unlike
that which from the beginning of New England history had subsisted between
Separatist and Nationalist. In the Presbyterian conflict, as so often in
religious controversies, disciplinary and doctrinal questions were complicated
with a difference of race. The “Old Side” was the Scotch and Irish party; the
“New Side” was the New England party, to which many of the old-country ministers
adhered. For successive years the mutual opposition had shown itself in the
synod; and in 1740, at the synod meeting at Philadelphia, soon after the
departure of Whitefield, the real gravamen of the controversy appeared, in the
implied and even express impeachment of the spiritual character of the Old Side
ministers. The impeachment had been implied in the coming of the evangelists
uninvited into other men’s
It is needless further to follow in detail the amazing career
of Whitefield, “posting o’er land and ocean without The critical historian has the unusual
satisfaction, at this point, of finding a gauge by which to discount the large round
numbers given in Whitefield’s journal. He speaks of preaching in the Old South Church
to six thousand persons. The now venerable building had at that time a seating capacity
of about twelve hundred. Making the largest allowance for standing-room, we may
estimate his actual audience at two thousand. Whitefield was an honest man, but
sixty-six per cent. is not too large a discount to make from his figures; his estimates
of spiritual effect from his labor are liable to a similar deduction.
Relieved thus of the glamor of his presence, the New England
people began, some of them, to recognize in what an earthen vessel their treasure
had been borne. Already, in his earlier youth, when his vast powers had been suddenly
revealed to him and to the world, he had had wise counsel from such men as Watts
and Doddridge against some of his perils. Watts warned him against his superstition Tracy, “Great Awakening,” p. 51.
The faults of Whitefield were intensified to a hateful degree
in some of his associates and followers. Leaving Boston, he sent, to succeed to
his work, Gilbert Tennent, then glowing with the heat of his noted Nottingham
sermon on “An Unconverted Ministry.” At once men’s minds began to be divided.
On the one hand, so wise and sober a critic as Thomas Prince, listening with
severe attention, gave his strong and unreserved approval to the preaching and
demeanor of Tennent. Ibid., pp.
114-120.
“It would be an endless attempt to describe that scene of confusion
and disturbance occasioned by him [White-field]: the division of families, neighborhoods,
and towns, the contrariety of husbands and wives, the undutifulness of children
and servants, the quarrels among teachers, the disorders of the night, the intermission
of labor and business, Letter of September 24, 1743, quoted in McConnell,
“American Episcopal Church,” p. 142, note.
This is in a tone of bitter sectarian railing. But, after all, the main allegations in it are sustained by the ample evidence produced by Dr. Charles Chauncy, pastor of the First Church in Boston, in his serious and weighty volume of “Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England,” published in 1743, as he sincerely says, “to serve the interests of Christ’s kingdom,” and “faithfully pointing out the things of a bad and dangerous tendency in the late and present religious appearance in the land,” Dr. Chauncy was doubtless included in the sweeping denunciation of the Christian ministry in general as “unconverted,” “Pharisees,” “hypocrites.” And yet it does not appear in historical evidence that Chauncy was not every whit as good a Christian as Tennent or Whitefield.
The excesses of the revival went on from bad to worse. They culminated,
at last, in the frenzy of poor James Davenport, great-grandson of the venerable
founder of New Haven, who, under the control of “impressions” and Chauncy, “Seasonable Thoughts,” pp. 230-423.
As in the middle colonies, the revival had brought division in
New England. But, after the New England fashion, it was division merely into ways
of thinking, not into sects. Central in the agitated scene is the calm figure of
Edwards, uniting the faith and zeal of an apostle with the acuteness of a philosopher,
and applying the exquisite powers of his intellect to discriminate between a divine
work and its human or Satanic admixtures, and between true and spurious religious
affections. He won the blessing of the peacemaker. When half a generation had passed
there had not ceased, indeed, to be differences of opinion, but there was none left
to defend the wild extravagances which the very authors of them lamented, and there
was none to deny, in face of the rich and enduring fruits of the revival, that the
power of God had been present in it. In the twenty years ending in 1760 the number
of the New England churches had been increased by one hundred and fifty. Tracy,
“Great Awakening,” p, 389.
In the middle colonies there had been like progress. The Presbyterian
ministry had increased from forty-five to more than a hundred; and the increase
had been wholly on the “New Side.” An early move of the conservative party, to
require a degree from a British or a New England college as a condition of license
to preach, was promptly recognized as
intended to exclude the fervid students from the Log College. It was met by the organization
In Virginia the quickening was as when the wind breathed in the
valley of dry bones. The story of Samuel Morris and his unconscious mission, although
authentic fact, belongs with the very romance of evangelism. See the autobiographical narrative in Tracy, p. 377. Tiffany, “Protestant Episcopal Church,” p. 45.
An even more important result of the Awakening was the swift
and wide extension of Baptist principles and churches. This was altogether logical.
The revival had come, not so much in the spirit and power of Elijah, turning to
each other the hearts of fathers and of children, as in the spirit of Ezekiel, the
preacher of individual responsibility and duty. The temper of the revival was wholly
Throughout the country the effect of this vigorous propagation of rival sects openly, in the face of whatever there was of church establishment, settled this point: that the law of American States, by whomsoever administered, must sooner or later be the law of liberty and equality among the various religious communions. In the southern colonies, the empty shell of a church establishment had crumbled on contact with the serious earnestness of the young congregations gathered by the Presbyterian and Baptist evangelists. In New England, where establishment was in the form of an attempt by the people of the commonwealth to confirm the people of each town in the maintenance of common worship according to their conscience and judgment, the “standing order” had solid strength; but when it was attempted by public authority to curb the liberty of a considerable minority conscientiously intent on secession, the reins were ready to break. It soon came to be recognized that the only preeminence the parish churches could permanently hold was that of being “servants of all.”
With equal and unlimited liberty, was to follow, as a prevailing characteristic of American Christianity, a large diversity of organization. Not only that men disagreeing in their convictions of truth would be enrolled in different bodies, but that men holding the same views, in the same statement of them, would feel free to go apart from one another, and stay apart. There was not even to be any one generally predominating organization from which minor ones should be reckoned as dissenting. One after another the organizations which should be tempted by some period of exceptional growth and prosperity to pretend to a hegemony among the churches—Catholic, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist—would meet with some set-back as inexorable as “the law of nature that prevents the trees from growing up into the sky.”
By a curious paradox, the same spiritual agitation which deepened
the divisions of the American church aroused in the colonies the consciousness of
a national religious unity. We have already seen that in the period before the Awakening
the sole organ of fellowship reaching through the whole chain of the British colonies
was the correspondence of the Quaker meetings and missionaries. In the glow of the
revival the continent awoke to the consciousness of a common spiritual life. Ranging
the continent literally from Georgia to Maine, with all his weaknesses and indiscretions,
and with his incomparable eloquence, welcomed by every sect, yet refusing an exclusive
allegiance to any, Whitefield exercised a true apostolate, bearing daily the care
of all the churches, and becoming a messenger of mutual fellowship not only between
the ends of the continent, but between the Christians of two hemispheres. Remote
churches exchanged offices of service. Tennent came from New Jersey to labor in
New England; Dickinson and Burr and Edwards were the gift of the northern
Whether for good or for evil, the few years from 1740 to 1750
were destined to impress upon the American church in its various orders, for a hundred
years to come, the character of Methodism. “The Great Awakening . . . terminated the Puritan and
inaugurated the Pietist or Methodist age of American church history” (Thompson,
“Presbyterian Churches in the United States,” p. 34). It is not unnecessary to
remark that the word “Methodist” is not used in the narrow sense of “Wesleyan.”
In New England, the idea, into which the first pastors had been trained by their experience as parish ministers in the English established church, of the parochial church holding correlative rights and duties toward the community in all its families, succumbed at last, after a hundred years of more or less conscious antagonism, to the incompatible principle, adopted from the Separatists of Plymouth, of the church formed according to elective affinity by the “social compact” of persons of the age of discretion who could give account to themselves and to one another of the conscious act and experience of conversion. This view, subject to important mitigations or aggravations in actual administration, held almost unquestioned dominance in the New England churches until boldly challenged by Horace Bushnell, in his “epoch-making” volume on “Christian Nurture” (1846), as a departure from the orthodoxy of the fathers.
In the Presbyterian Church, revivalism as a principle of church
life had to contend with rules distinctly articulated in its constitutional documents.
So exclusively does the Westminster institute contemplate the church as an established
parish that its “Directory for Worship” contains
The Episcopal Church of the colonies was almost forced into an
attitude of opposition to the revival. The unspeakable folly of the English
bishops in denouncing and silencing the most effective preachers in the national
church had betrayed Whitefield into his most easily besetting sin, that of
censorious judgment, and his sweeping counter-denunciations of the Episcopalian
clergy in general as unconverted closed to him many hearts and pulpits that at
first had been hospitably open to him. Being human, they came into open
antagonism to him and to the revival. From the protest against extravagance and
disorder, it was a short and perilously easy step to the rejection of religious
fervor and earnestness. The influence of the mother church of that dreary period
and the influence of the official rings around every royal governor were all too
potent in the same direction. The Propagation Society’s missionaries boasted,
with reason, of large accessions of proselytes alienated from other churches by
their distaste for the methods of the revival. The effect on the Episcopal
Church itself was in some respects unhappy. It “lowered a spiritual temperature
already too low,” Unpublished lectures of the
Rev. W. G. Andrews on “The Evangelical Revival of 1740 and American Episcopalians.”
It is much to be hoped that these valuable studies of the critical period of American
church history may not long remain unpublished. This sharp antithesis is quoted at second
hand from Charles Kingsley. The stories of little children frightened into screaming,
and then dragged (at four years of age, says Jonathan Edwards) through the agitating
vicissitudes of a “revival experience,” occupy some of the most pathetic, not to
say tragical, pages of the history of the Awakening.
In all this the Episcopal Church was affected by the Awakening
only by way of reaction. But it owes a debt to the direct influence of the Awakening
which it has not always been careful to acknowledge. We have already seen that the requickening of the asphyxiated church of Virginia was part of the great revival,
and this character remains impressed on that church to this day. The best of those
traits by which the American Episcopal Church is distinguished from the Church of
England, as, for instance, the greater purity of the ministry and of the membership,
are family traits of the revival churches; the most venerated of its early bishops,
White and Griswold, McConnell, pp. 144-146; W. G. Andrews, Lecture III.
An incident of the revival, failing which it would have lacked
an essential token of the presence of the Spirit of Christ, was the kindling of
zeal for communicating the gospel to the ignorant, the neglected, and the heathen.
Among the first-fruits of Whitefield’s preaching at the South was a practical movement
among the planters for the instruction of their slaves—devotees, most of them, of
the most abject fetich-worship of their native continent. Of the evangelists and
pastors most active in the revival, there were few, either North or South, whose
letters or journals do not report the drawing into the churches of large numbers
of negroes and Indians, whose daily lives witnessed to the sincerity of their profession
of repentance and Christian faith. The Indian population of the southeastern corner
of Connecticut with such accord received the gospel at the hands of the evangelists
that heathenism seemed extinct among them. Tracy, pp. 187-192.
Among the first trophies of the revival at Norwich was a Mohegan
boy named Samson Occum. Wheelock, pastor at Lebanon, one of the most ardent of the
revival preachers, took him into his family as a student. This was the beginning
of that school for the training of Indian preachers which, endowed in part with
funds gathered by Occum in England, grew at last into Dartmouth College. The choicest
spiritual gifts at the disposal of the church were freely spent on the missions.
Whitefield visited the school and the field, and sped Kirkland on his way to the
Oneidas. Edwards, leaving Northampton in sorrow of heart, gave
THE quickening of religious feeling, the deepening of religious conviction, the clearing and defining of theological opinions, that were incidental to the Great Awakening, were a preparation for more than thirty years of intense political and warlike agitation. The churches suffered from the long distraction of the public mind, and at the end of it were faint and exhausted. But for the infusion of a “more abundant life” which they had received, it would seem that they could hardly have survived the stress of that stormy and revolutionary period.
The religious life of this period was manifested in part in the
growth of the New England theology. The great leader of this school of theological
inquiry, the elder Edwards, was born at the opening of the eighteenth century. The
oldest and most eminent of his disciples and successors, Bellamy and Hopkins, were
born respectively in 1719 and 1721, and entered into the work of the Awakening in
the flush of their earliest manhood. A long dynasty of acute and strenuous argumentators
has continued, through successive generations to the present day, this distinctly
American school of theological thought. This is not the See G. P. Fisher,
“History of Christian Doctrine,” pp. 394-418; also E. A. Park in the “Schaff-Herzog
Encyclopedia,” vol. iii., pp. 1634-38. The New England theology is not so called
as being confined to New England. Its leading “improvements on Calvinism” were
accepted by Andrew Fuller and Robert Hall among the English Baptists, and by Chalmers
of the Presbyterians of Scotland.
Not less notable than the new theology of the revival was the
new psalmody. In general it may be said that every flood-tide of spiritual emotion
in the church leaves its high-water mark in the form of “new songs to the Lord” that remain after the tide of feeling has assuaged. In this instance the new songs
were not produced by the revival, but only adopted by it. It is not easy for us
at this day to conceive the effect that must have been produced in the Christian
communities of America by the advent of Isaac Watts’s marvelous poetic work,
“The
Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament.” Important religious
results have more than once followed in the church on the publication of religious
poems—notably, in our own century, on the publication of “The Christian Year.”
But no other instance of the kind is comparable with the publication in America
of Watts’s Psalms. When we remember how scanty were the resources of religious poetry
in American homes in the early eighteenth century, and especially how rude and even
grotesque the rhymes that served in the various churches as a vehicle of worship,
it seems that the coming of those melodious stanzas, in which the meaning of one
poet is largely interpreted by the sympathetic insight of another poet, and the
fervid devotion of the Old Testament is informed with the life and transfigured
in the language of the New, must have been like a glow of sunlight breaking
The introduction of the new psalmody was not accomplished all
at once, nor without a struggle. But we gravely mistake if we look upon the controversy
that resulted in the adoption of Watts’s Psalms as a mere conflict between enlightened
good taste and stubborn conservatism. The action proposed was revolutionary. It
involved the surrender of a long-settled principle of Puritanism. At
It was not in the common course of church history that the period
under consideration should be a period of vigorous internal activity and development
in the old settled churches of America. The deep, often excessive, excitements of
the Awakening had not only ceased, but had been succeeded by intense agitations
of another sort. Two successive “French and Indian” wars kept the long frontier,
at a time when there was little besides frontier to the British colonies, in continual
peril of fire and scalping-knife. Of what sort was the life of a church and its pastor in those
days is illustrated in extracts from the journal of Samuel Hopkins, the theologian,
pastor at Great Barrington, given in the Memoir by Professor Park, pp.
40-43. The Sabbath worship was disturbed by the arrival of warlike news. The
pastor and the families of his flock were driven from their homes to take refuge
in blockhouses crowded with fugitives. He was gone nearly three months of fall and
winter with a scouting party of a hundred whites and nineteen Indians in the woods.
He sent off the fighting men of his town with sermon and benediction on an expedition
to Canada. During the second war he writes to his friend Bellamy (1754) of a dreadful
rumor that “good Mr. Edwards” had perished in a massacre at Stockbridge. This
rumor was false, but he adds: On the Lord’s day P.M., as I was reading the psalm,
news came that Stockbridge was beset by an army of Indians, and on fire, which broke up the assembly in an instant. All were put into the
utmost consternation—men, women, and children crying, ‘What shall we do?’ Not a
gun to defend us, not a fort to flee to, and few guns and little ammunition in
the place. Some ran one way and some another; but the general course was to the
southward, especially for women and children. Women, children, and squaws
presently flocked in upon us from Stockbridge, half naked and frighted almost to
death; and fresh news came that the enemy were on the plains this side
Stockbridge, shooting and killing and scalping people as they fled. Some
presently came along bloody, with news that they saw persons killed and scalped,
which raised a consternation, tumult, and distress inexpressible.”
Another consequence of the prostrating of the French power in America has been less noticed by historians, but the course of this narrative will not be followed far without its becoming manifest as not less momentous in its bearing on the future history of the church. The extinction of the French- Catholic power in America made possible the later plantation and large and free development of the Catholic Church in the territory of the United States. After that event the Catholic resident or citizen was no longer subject to the suspicion of being a sympathizer with a hostile neighboring power, and the Jesuit missionary was no longer liable to be regarded as a political intriguer and a conspirator with savage assassins against the lives of innocent settlers and their families. If there are those who, reading the earlier pages of this volume, have mourned over the disappointment and annihilation of two magnificent schemes of Catholic domination on the North American continent as being among the painful mysteries of divine providence, they may find compensation for these catastrophes in later advances of Catholicism, which without these antecedents would seem to have been hardly possible.
Although the spiritual development of the awakened American churches, after the Awakening until the independence of the States was established and acknowledged, was limited by these great hindrances, this period was one of momentous influences from abroad upon American Christianity.
The Scotch-Irish immigration kept gathering volume and force. The great stream of immigrants entering at the port of Philadelphia and flowing westward and southwestward was joined by a tributary stream entering at Charleston. Not only the numbers of this people, occupying in force the hill-country from Pennsylvania to Georgia, but still more its extraordinary qualities and the discipline of its history, made it a factor of prime importance in the events of the times just before and just after the achievement of the national independence. For generations it had been schooled to the apprehension and acceptance of an elaborately articulated system of theology and church order as of divine authority. Its prejudices and animosities were quite as potent as its principles. Its fixed hereditary aversion to the English government and the English church was the natural fruit of long memories and traditions of outrages inflicted by both these; its influence was now about to be powerfully manifested in the overthrow of the English power and its feeble church establishments in the colonies. At the opening of the War of Independence the Presbyterian Church, reunited since the schism of 1741, numbered one hundred and seventy ministers in seventeen presbyteries; but its weight of influence was out of all proportion to its numbers, and this entire force, not altogether at unity with itself on ecclesiastical questions, was united as one man in the maintenance of American rights.
The great German immigration begins to flow in earnest
in this period. Three successive tides of migration have set from Germany to America.
The first was the movement of the petty sects under the invitation and patronage
of William Penn, quartering themselves in the eastern parts of Pennsylvania. The
second was the transportation of “the Palatines,” expatriated by stress of persecution
and war, not from the Rhenish Palatinate only, but from the archduchy of Salzburg
and from other parts of Germany and Switzerland, gathered up and removed to America,
some of them directly, some by way of England, as an act of political charity by
Queen Anne’s government, with the idea of strengthening the colonies by planting
Protestant settlers for a safeguard against Spanish or French aggressions. The third
tide continues flowing, with variable volume, to this day. It is the voluntary flow
of companies of individual emigrants seeking to better the fortunes of themselves
or their families. But this voluntary migration has been unhealthily and sometimes
dishonestly stimulated, from the beginning of it, by the selfish interests of those
concerned in the business of transportation or in the sale of land. It seems to
have been mainly the greed of shipping merchants, at first, that spread abroad
in the German states florid announcements of the charms and riches of America,
decoying multitudes of ignorant persons to risk everything on these representations,
and to mortgage themselves into a term of slavery until they should have
paid the cost of their passage by their labor. This class of bondmen, called “redemptioners,” made no inconsiderable part of the population of the middle colonies; and it seems
to have been a worthy part. The trade of “trepanning” the unfortunates
and transporting them and selling their term of service was not by several
degrees as bad as the African slave-trade;
but
In one way and another the German immigration had grown by the
middle of the eighteenth century to great dimensions. In the year 1749 twelve thousand
Germans landed at the port of Philadelphia. In general they were as sheep having
no shepherd. Their deplorable religious condition was owing less to poverty than
to diversity of sects. Jacobs, “The Lutherans,” pp. 191, 234; Dobbs, “German Reformed
Church,” p. 271.
The famine of the word was sorely felt. In 1733 three great Lutheran congregations in Pennsylvania, numbering five hundred families each, sent messengers with an imploring petition to their correligionists at London and Halle, representing their “state of the greatest destitution.” “Our own means” (they say) “are utterly insufficient to effect the necessary relief, unless God in his mercy may send us help from abroad. It is truly lamentable to think of the large numbers of the rising generation who know not their right hand from their left; and, unless help be promptly afforded, the danger is great that, in consequence of the great lack of churches and schools, the most of them will be led into the ways of destructive error.”
This urgent appeal bore fruit like the apples of Sodom. It resulted
in a painful and pitiable correspondence with the chiefs of the mother church, these
haggling for months and years over stipulations of salary, and refusing to send
a minister until the salary should be pledged in cash; and their correspondents
pleading their poverty and need. See extracts from the correspondence given by Dr.
Jacobs, pp.
193-195. Dr. Jacobs’s suggestion that three congregations of five hundred families
each might among them have raised the few hundreds a year required seems reasonable, unless a large number of these were families of redemptioners,
that is, for the time, slaves.
It seems to us, as we read the story after the lapse of a hundred
and fifty years, as if the man expressly designed and equipped by the providence
of God for this exigency in the progress of his kingdom had arrived when Zinzendorf,
the Moravian, made his appearance at Philadelphia, December 10, 1741. The American
church, in all its history, can point to no fairer representative of the charity
that “seeketh not her own” than this Saxon nobleman, who, for the true love that
he bore to Christ and all Christ’s brethren, was willing to give up his home, his
ancestral estates, his fortune, his title of nobility, his patrician family name,
his office of bishop in the ancient Moravian church, and even (last infirmity of
zealous spirits) his interest in promoting specially that order of consecrated men
and women in the church catholic which he had done and sacrificed so much to save
from extinction, and to which his “cares and toils were given.” He hastened first
up the Lehigh Valley to spend Christmas at Bethlehem, where the foundations had
already been laid on which have been built up the half-monastic institutions of
charity and education and missions which have done and are still doing so much to
bless the world in both its hemispheres. It was in commemoration of this Christmas
visit of Bishop Zinzendorf that the mother house of the Moravian communities in
America received its name of Bethlehem. Returning to Philadelphia, he took this
city as the base of his unselfish and unpartisan labors in behalf of the great and
multiplying population from his fatherland, which through its sectarian divisions
had become so helpless and spiritually needy. Already for
To the scattered, distracted, and demoralized flocks of his German
fellow-Christians in the middle colonies came Zinzendorf, knowing Jesus Christ crucified,
knowing no man according to the flesh; and at once “the neglected congregations
were made to feel the thrill of a strong religious life.” “Aglow with zeal for
Christ, throwing all emphasis in his teaching upon the one doctrine of redemption
through the blood shed on Calvary, all the social advantages and influence and wealth
which his position gave him were made subservient to the work of preaching Christ,
and him crucified, to the rich and the poor, the learned and the ignorant.” Jacobs,
“The Lutherans,” p. 196. The story of Zinzendorf, as seen from different points of view, may be studied
in the volumes of Drs. Jacobs, Dubbs, and Hamilton (American Church History Series). Acrelius, quoted by Jacobs, p. 218,
note.
At once the “drum ecclesiastic” beat to arms. In view of the
impending danger that their scattered fellow-countrymen might come into mutual fellowship
on the basis of their common faith in Christ, the Lutheran leaders at Halle, who
for years had been dawdling and haggling over the imploring entreaties of the shepherdless
Lutheran populations in America, promptly reconsidered their non possumus, and found and sent a man
admirably qualified for the desired work, Henry Melchior Mühlenberg, a man
of eminent
ability and judgment, of faith, devotion, and untiring diligence, not illiberal,
but a conscientious sectarian. An earnest preacher of the gospel, he was also earnest
that the gospel should be preached according to the Lutheran formularies, to congregations
organized according to the Lutheran discipline. The easier and less worthy part
of the appointed task was soon achieved. The danger that the
religious factions that had divided
The brief remainder of Zinzendorf’s work in America may be briefly told. There is no- doubt that, like many another eager and hopeful reformer, he overestimated the strength and solidity of the support that was given to his generous and beneficent plans. At the time of Mühlenberg’s arrival Zinzendorf was the elected and installed pastor of the Lutheran congregation in Philadelphia. The conflict could not be a long one between the man who claimed everything for his commission and his sect and the man who was resolved to insist on nothing for himself. Notwithstanding the strong love for him among the people, Zinzendorf was easily displaced from his official station. When dispute arose about the use of the empty carpenter’s shop that stood them instead of a church, he waived his own claims and at his own cost built a new house of worship. But it was no part of his work to stay and persist in maintaining a division. He retired from the field, leaving it in charge of Muhlenberg, “being satisfied if only Christ were preached,” and returned to Europe, having achieved a truly honorable and most Christian failure, more to be esteemed in the sight of God than many a splendid success.
But his brief sojourn in America was not without visible fruit.
He left behind him the Moravian church fully organized under the episcopate of Bishop
David Nitschmann, with communities or congregations begun at nine different centers,
and schools established in four places. An extensive itinerancy had been set in
operation under careful supervision, and, most characteristic of all, a great beginning
had been made of those missions to the heathen Indians, in which the devoted and
successful labors of this little society of Christians have put to shame the whole
American church besides. Not all of this is to be ascribed to the activity of Zinzendorf; but in all of it he was a sharer, and his share was a heroic one. The two years’ visit of Count Zinzendorf to America forms a beautiful and quite singular episode
in our church history. Returning, to his ancestral estates splendidly
impoverished by his free-handed beneficence, he passed many of the later years of
his life at Herrnhut, that radiating center from which the light of the gospel was
borne by the multitude of humble missionaries to every continent under the whole
heaven. The news that came to him from the “economies” that he had planted in
the forests of Pennsylvania was such as to fill his generous soul with joy. In the
communities of Nazareth and Bethlehem was renewed the pentecostal consecration when
no man called anything his own. The prosperous farms and varied industries, in which
no towns in Pennsylvania could equal them, were carried on, not for private interest,
but for the church. After three years the community work was not only self-supporting,
but sustained about fifty missionaries in the field, and was preparing to send aid
to the missions of the mother church in Germany. The Moravian settlements multiplied
at distant points, north and south. The educational establishments grew strong and
famous. But especially the Jacobs, “The Lutherans,” pp. 215-218; Hamilton,
“The Moravians,” chaps. iii.-viii., xi.
The work of Mühlenberg for the Lutherans stimulated the Reformed
churches in Europe to a like work for their own scattered and pastorless sheep.
In both cases the fear that the work of the gospel might not be done seemed a less
effective incitement to activity than the fear that it might be done by others.
It was the Reformed Church of Holland, rather than those of Germany, miserably broken
down and discouraged by ravaging wars, that assumed the main responsibility for
this task. As early as 1728 the Dutch synods had earnestly responded to the appeal
of their impoverished brethren on the Rhine in behalf of the sheep scattered abroad.
And in 1743, acting through the classis of Amsterdam, they had made such progress
toward beginning the preliminary arrangements of the work as to send to the Presbyterian
synod of Philadelphia a proposal to combine into one the Presbyterian, or Scotch
Reformed, the Dutch Reformed, and the German Reformed
churches in America. It had already been proved impossible
to draw together in common activity
Diplomacies ended, the synods of Holland took up their work with
real munificence. Large funds were raised, sufficient to make every German Reformed
missionary in America a stipendiary of the classis of Amsterdam; and if these subsidies
were encumbered with severe conditions of subordination to a foreign directory,
and if they begot an enfeebling sense of dependence, these were necessary incidents
of the difficult situation—res dura et novitas regni. The most important service which
the synods of Holland rendered to their American beneficiaries was to find a man
who should do for them just the work which Mühlenberg was already doing with great
energy for the Lutherans. The man was Michael Schlatter. If in any respect
he was inferior to Mühlenberg, it was not in respect to diligent devotion to the
business on which he had been sent. It is much to
the credit of both of them that, in organizing and promoting their two sharply competing
sects, they never failed of fraternal personal relations. They worked together with
one heart to keep their people apart from each other. The Christian instinct, in
a community of German Christians, to gather in one congregation for common worship
was solemnly discouraged by the two apostles and the synods which they organized.
How could the two parties walk together when one prayed Vater unser, and the other
unser
Vater? But the beauty of Christian unity was illustrated
in such incidents as this: Mr. Schlatter and some of the Reformed Christians, being
present at a Lutheran church on a communion Sunday, Jacobs,
“The Lutherans,” p. 289.
Such was the diligence of Schlatter that the synod or coetus of the Reformed Church was instituted in 1747, a year from his arrival. The Lutheran synod dates from 1748, although Mühlenberg was on the ground four years earlier than Schlatter. Thus the great work of dividing the German population of America into two major sects was conscientiously and effectually performed. Seventy years later, with large expenditure of persuasion, authority, and money, it was found possible to heal in some measure in the old country the very schism which good men had been at such pains to perpetuate in the new.
High honor is due to the prophetic wisdom of these two leaders
of German-American Christianity, in that they clearly recognized in advance that
the English was destined to be the dominant language of North America. Their strenuous
though unsuccessful effort to promote a system of public schools in Pennsylvania
was defeated through their own ill judgment and the ignorant prejudices of the immigrant
people played upon by politicians. But the mere attempt entitles them to lasting
gratitude. It is not unlikely that their divisive work of church organization may
have contributed indirectly to defeat the aspirations of their fellow-Germans after
the perpetuation of a Germany in America. The combination of the mass of the German
population in one solid church organization would have been a formidable support
to such aspirations. The splitting of this mass in half, necessitating petty local
So, then, the German church in America at the close of the colonial
era exists, outside of the petty primeval sects, in three main divisions: the Lutheran,
the Reformed, and the Moravian. There is free opportunity for Christians of this
language to sort themselves according to their elective affinities. That American
ideal of edifying harmony is well attained, according to which men of partial or
one-sided views of truth shall be associated exclusively in church relations with
others of like precious defects. Mühlenberg seems to have been sensible of the nature
of the division he was making in the body of Christ, when, after severing successfully
between the strict Lutherans in a certain congregation and those of Moravian sympathies,
he finds it “hard to decide on which side of the controversy the greater justice
lay. The greater part of those on the Lutheran side, he feared, was composed of
unconverted men,” while the Moravian party seemed open to the reproach of enthusiasm.
So he concluded that each sort of Christians would be better off without the other.
Time proved his diagnosis to be better than his treatment. In the course of a generation
the Lutheran body, carefully weeded of pietistic admixtures, sank perilously deep
in cold rationalism, and the Moravian church was quite carried away for a time on
a flood of sentimentalism. What might have been the course of this part of church
history if Mühlenberg and Schlatter had shared more deeply with Zinzendorf in the
spirit of apostolic and catholic Christianity, and if all three had conspired to
draw together into one the various temperaments and tendencies of the German Americans
in the unity of the Spirit with the bond of peace, may seem like an idle historical
conjecture, but the Jacobs, pp. 227, 309, sqq.; Hamilton, p. 457. No account of the German-American churches is adequate which
does not go back to the work of Spener, the influence of which was felt through
them all. The author is compelled to content himself with inadequate work on many
topics.
By far the most momentous event of American church history in
the closing period of the colonial era was the planting of the Methodist Episcopal
Church. The Wesleyan revival was strangely tardy in reaching this country, with
which it had so many points of connection. It was in America, in 1737, that John
Wesley passed through the discipline of a humiliating experience, by which his
mind had been opened, and that he had been brought into acquaintance with the Moravians,
by whom he was to be taught the way of the Lord more perfectly. It was John Wesley
who sent Whitefield to America, from whom, on his first return to England, in 1738,
he learned the practice of field-preaching. It was from America that Edwards’s
“Narrative of Surprising Conversions” had come to Wesley, which, being read by him
on the walk from London to Oxford, opened to his mind unknown possibilities of the
swift advancement of the kingdom of God. The beginning of the Wesleyan societies
in England followed in close connection upon the first Awakening in America.
It went on with
growing momentum in England and Ireland for quarter of a century, until, in 1765,
it numbered
At last, in 1766, in a little group of Methodist families that had found one another out among the recent corners in New York, Philip Embury, who in his native Ireland long before had been a recognized local preacher, was induced by the persuasions and reproaches of a pious woman to take his not inconsiderable talent from the napkin in which he had kept it hidden for six years, and preach in his own house to as many as could be brought in to listen to him. The few that were there formed themselves into a “class” and promised to attend at future meetings.
A more untoward time for the setting on foot of a religious enterprise
could hardly have been chosen. It was a time of prevailing languor in the churches,
in the reaction from the Great Awakening; it was also a time of intense political
agitation. The year before the Stamp Act had been passed, and the whole chain of
colonies, from New Hampshire to Georgia, had been stirred up to resist the execution
of it. This year the Stamp Act had been repealed, but in such terms as to imply
a new menace and redouble the agitation. From this time forward to the outbreak
of war in 1775, and from that year on till the conclusion of peace in 1783, the
land was never at rest from turmoil. Through it all the Methodist societies grew
and multiplied. In 1767 Embury’s house had overflowed, and a sail-loft was hired
for the growing congregation.
Very great is the debt that American Christianity owes to Francis
Asbury. It may reasonably be doubted whether any one man, from the founding of the
church in America until now, has achieved so much in the visible and traceable results
of his work. It is very certain that Wesley himself, with his despotic temper and
his High-church and Tory principles, could not have carried the Methodist movement
in the New World onward through the perils of its infancy on the way to so eminent
a success as that which was prepared by his vicegerent. Fully possessed of the principles
of that autocratic discipline ordained by Wesley, he knew how to use it as not abusing
it, being aware that such a discipline can continue to subsist, in the long run,
only by studying the temper of the subjects of it, and making sure of obedience
to orders by making sure that the orders are agreeable, on the whole, to the subjects.
More than one polity theoretically aristocratic or monarchic in the atmosphere of
our republic has grown into a practically popular government, simply through tact
and good judgment in the administration of it, without changing a syllable of
its constitution. Very early in the history of Dr. J. M. Buckley,
“The Methodists,” p. 181.
The center of gravity of the Methodist Society, beginning at New York, moved rapidly southward. Boston had been the metropolis of the Congregationalist churches; New York, of the Episcopalians; Philadelphia, of the Quakers and the Presbyterians; and Baltimore, latest and southernmost of the large colonial cities, became, for a time, the headquarters of Methodism. Accessions to the Society in that region were more in number and stronger in wealth and social influence than in more northern communities. It was at Baltimore that Asbury fixed his residence—so far as a Methodist bishop, ranging the country with incessant and untiring diligence, could be said to have a fixed residence.
The record of the successive annual conferences of the Methodists gives a gauge of their increase. At the first, in 1773, at Philadelphia, there were reported 1160 members and 10 preachers, not one of these a native of America.
At the second annual conference, in Philadelphia, there were reported 2073 members and 17 preachers.
The third annual conference sat at Philadelphia in 1775, simultaneously with the Continental Congress. It was the beginning of the war. There were reported 3148 members. Some of the foremost preachers had gone back to England, unable to carry on their work without being compelled to compromise their royalist principles. The preachers reporting were 19. Of the membership nearly 2500 were south of Philadelphia—about eighty per cent.
At the fourth annual conference, at Baltimore, in 1776, were reported 4921 members and 24 preachers.
At the fifth annual conference, in Harford County, Maryland,
were reported 6968 members and 36 preachers. This was in the thick of the war. More
of the leading preachers, sympathizing with the royal cause, were going home to
England. The Methodists as a body were subject to not unreasonable suspicion of
being disaffected to the cause of independence. Their preachers were principally
Englishmen with British sympathies. The whole order was dominated and its property
controlled by an offensively outspoken Tory of the Dr. Johnson type. The attitude of Wesley toward the American
cause is set forth with judicial fairness by Dr. Buckley, pp. 158-168.
In these circumstances, it is no wonder that at the conference of 1778, at Leesburg, Va., at which five circuits in the most disturbed regions were unrepresented, there was a decline in numbers. The members were fewer by 873; the preachers fewer by 7.
But it is really wonderful that the next year (1779)
In the sixteen years from the meeting in Philip Embury’s house to the end of the War of Independence the membership of the Methodist societies grew to about 12,000, served by about 70 itinerant preachers. It was a very vital and active membership, including a large number of “local preachers” and exhorters. The societies and classes were effectively organized and officered for aggressive work; and they were planted, for the most part, in the regions most destitute of Christian institutions.
Parallel with the course of the gospel, we trace in every period
the course of those antichristian influences with which the gospel is in conflict.
The system of slavery must continue, through many sorrowful years, to be in view
from the line of our studies. We shall know it by the unceasing protest made against
it in the name of the Lord. The arguments of John Woolman and Anthony Benezet
were sustained by the yearly meetings of the Friends. At Newport, the chief
center of the African slave-trade, the A full account of Hopkins’s long-sustained activity against
both slavery and the slave-trade is given in Park’s “Memoir of Hopkins,” pp. 214157. His sermons on the subject began in 1770. His monumental
“Dialogue
Concerning the Slavery of the Africans, with an Address to Slave-holders,” was published
in 1776. For additional information as to the antislavery attitude of the church
at this period, and especially that of Stiles, see review of “The Minister’s Wooing,” by L. Bacon
(“New Englander,” vol. xviii., p. 145). I have not been able to find a copy of this poem, the character
of which, however, is well known. The son of Aaron Cleveland, William, was a silversmith
at Norwich, among whose grandsons may be named President Grover Cleveland, and Aaron
Cleveland Cox, later known as Bishop Arthur Cleveland Coxe. Dr. A. Green’s Life of his father, in
“Monthly Christian
Advocate.”
It must not be supposed that the instances here cited represent exceptions to the general course of opinion in the church of those times. They are simply expressions of the universal judgment of those whose attention had been seriously fixed upon the subject. There appears no evidence of the existence of a contrary sentiment. The first beginnings of a party in the church in opposition to the common judgment of the Christian conscience on the subject of slavery are to be referred to a comparatively very recent date.
Another of the great conflicts of the modern church was impending.
But it was only to prophetic minds in the middle of the eighteenth century that
it was visible in the greatness of its proportions. The vice of drunkenness, which
Isaiah had denounced in Samaria and Paul had denounced at Ephesus, was growing insensibly,
since the introduction of distilled liquors as a common beverage, to a fatal prevalence.
The trustees of the charitable colony of Georgia, consciously laying the foundations
of many generations, endeavored to provide for the welfare of the nascent State
by forbidding at once the importation of negro slaves and of spirituous liquors; but the salutary interdict was soon nullified in the interest of the crops and
of the trade with the Indians. Dr. Hopkins “inculcated, at a very early day, the
duty of entire abstinence from Park,
“Memoir of Hopkins,” p. 112. Buckley, “The Methodists,” Appendix, pp. 688, 689.
An incident of the times immediately preceding the War of Independence
requires to be noted in this place, not as being of great importance in itself,
but as characteristic of the condition of the country and prophetic of changes that
were about to take place. During the decade from 1760 to 1775 the national
body of the Presbyterians—the now reunited synod of New York and Philadelphia—and
the General Association of the Congregational pastors of Connecticut met together
by their representatives in annual convention to take counsel over a grave peril
that seemed to be impending. A petition had been urgently pressed, in behalf of
the American Episcopalians, for the establishment of bishops in the colonies under
the authority of the Church of England. The reasons for this measure were obvious
and weighty; and the protestations of those who promoted it, that they sought no
advantage before the law over their fellow-Christians, were doubtless sincere. Nevertheless,
the fear that the bringing in of Church of England bishops would involve the bringing
in of many of those mischiefs of the English church establishment which neither
they nor their fathers had been able to bear was a perfectly reasonable fear both
to the Puritans of New England and to the Presbyterians from Ireland. It See Tiffany, “Protestant Episcopal Church,” pp. 267-278, where the subject is treated fully and with characteristic fairness.
The alliance thus occasioned between the national synod of the Presbyterian Church and the Congregationalist clergy of the little colony of Connecticut seems like a disproportioned one. And so it was indeed; for the Connecticut General Association was by far the larger and stronger body of the two. By and by the disproportion was inverted, and the alliance continued, with notable results.
SEVEN years of war left the American people exhausted, impoverished, disorganized, conscious of having come into possession of a national existence, and stirred with anxious searchings of heart over the question what new institutions should succeed to those overthrown in the struggle for independence.
Like questions pervaded the commonwealth of American Christians
through all its divisions. The interconfessional divisions of the body ecclesiastic
were about to prove themselves a more effectual bar to union than the political
and territorial divisions of the body politic. The religious divisions were nearly
equal in number to the political. Naming them in the order in which they had settled
themselves on the soil of the new nation, they were as follows: 1. The Protestant
Episcopalians; 2. The Reformed Dutch; 3. The Congregationalists; 4. The Roman Catholics; 5. The Friends; 6. The Baptists; 7. The Presbyterians; 8. The Methodists;
to which must be added three sects which up to this time had almost exclusively
to do with the German language and the German immigrant population, to wit, 9. The
German Reformed; 1o. The Lutherans; 11. The Moravians. Some of these, as the
Congregationalists and the Baptists, were of so simple and
In one respect all the various orders of churches were alike.
They had all suffered from the waste and damage of war. Pastors and missionaries
had been driven from their cures, congregations had been scattered, houses of worship
had been desecrated or destroyed. The Episcopalian and Methodist ministers were
generally Tories, and their churches, and in some instances their persons, were
not spared by the patriots. The Friends and the Moravians, principled against taking
active part in warfare, were exposed to aggressions from both sides. All other sects
were safely presumed to be in earnest sympathy with the cause of independence, which
many of their pastors actively served as chaplains or as combatants, or in other
ways; wherever the British troops held the ground, their churches were the object
of spite. Nor were these the chief losses by the war. More grievous still were the
death of the strong men and the young men of the churches, the demoralization of
camp life, and, as the war advanced, the infection of the current fashions of unbelief
from the officers both of the French and of the British armies. The prevalent diathesis
of the American church in all its sects was one of spiritual torpor, from which,
however, it soon
Perhaps no one of the Christian organizations of America came out of the war in a more forlorn condition than the Episcopalians. This condition was thus described by Bishop White, in an official charge to his clergy at Philadelphia in 1832:
“The congregations of our communion throughout the United States
were approaching annihilation. Although within this city three Episcopal clergymen
were resident and officiating, the churches over the rest of the State had become
deprived of their clergy during the war, either by death or by departure for England.
In the Eastern States, with two or three exceptions, there was a cessation of the
exercises of the pulpit, owing to the necessary disuse of the prayers for the former
civil rulers. In Maryland and Virginia, where the church had enjoyed civil establishments,
on the ceasing of these, the incumbents of the parishes, almost without exception,
ceased to officiate. Farther south the condition of the church was not better, to
say the least.” Quoted in Tiffany, p. 289,
note. The extreme depression of the Protestant Episcopal and (as will soon appear)
of the Roman Catholic Church, at this point of time, emphasizes all the more the
great advances made by both these communions from this time forward.
This extreme feebleness of Episcopalianism in the several States
conspired with the tendencies of the time in civil affairs to induce upon the new
organization a character not at all conformed to the ideal of episcopal government.
Instead of establishing as the unit of organization the bishop in every principal
town, governing his diocese at the head of his clergy with some measure of authority,
it was almost a necessity of the time to constitute dioceses as big as kingdoms,
and, then to take security against excess Preface to the American
“Book of Common Prayer,” 1789. See the critical observations of Dr. McConnell,
“History of
the American Episcopal Church,” pp. 264-276. The polity of this church seems to
have suffered for want of a States’ Rights and Strict Construction party. The centrifugal
force has been overbalanced by the centripetal.
The objections which only a few years before had withstood the
importation into the colonies of lord bishops, with the English common and canon
law at their backs, vanished entirely before the proposal for the harmless functionaries
provided for in the new constitution. John Adams himself, a leader of the former
opposition, now, as American minister in London, did his best to secure for
The American Episcopal Church was at last in a condition to live.
Some formidable dangers of division arising from the double derivation of the episcopate
were happily averted by the tact and statesmanship of Bishop White, and liturgical
changes incidental to the reconstitution of the church were made, on the whole with
cautious judgment and good taste, and successfully introduced. But for many years
the church lived only a languishing life. Bishop Provoost of New York, after fourteen
years of service, demitted his functions in 1801, discouraged about the continuance
of the church. He “thought it would die out with the old colonial families.” Tiffany, pp. 385-399.
The difficulties in the way of the organization of the Catholic Church for the United States were not less serious, and were overcome with equal success, but not without a prolonged struggle against opposition from within. It is not easy for us, in view either of the antecedent or of the subsequent history, to realize the extreme feebleness of American Catholicism at the birth of our nation. According to an official “Relation on the State of Religion in the United States,” presented by the prefect apostolic in 1785, the total number of Catholics in the entire Union was 18,200, exclusive of an unascertainable number, destitute of priests, in the Mississippi Valley. The entire number of the clergy was twenty-four, most of them former members of the Society of Jesuits, that had been suppressed in 1773 by the famous bull, Dominus ac Redemptor, of Clement XIV. Sorely against their will, these missionaries, hitherto subject only to the discipline of their own society, were transformed into secular priests, under the jurisdiction of the Vicar Apostolic of London. After the establishment of independence, with the intense jealousy felt regarding British influence, and by none more deeply and more reasonably felt than by the Catholics, this jurisdiction was impracticable. The providentially fit man for the emergency was found in the Rev. John Carroll, of an old Maryland family distinguished alike for patriotism and for faithfulness to Catholic principles. In June, 1784, he was made prefect apostolic over the Catholic Church in the United States, and the dependence on British jurisdiction was terminated.
When, however, it was proposed that this provisional arrangement
should be superseded by the appointment of
Difficulties, through which there were not many precedents to
guide him, thickened about the path of the new prelate. It was well both for the
church and for the republic that he was a man not only versed in the theology and
polity of his church, but imbued with American principles and feelings. The first
conflict that vexed the church under his administration, and which for fifty years
continued to vex his associates and successors, was a collision between the American
sentiment for local and individual liberty and self-government, and the absolutist
spiritual government of Rome. The Catholics of New York, including those of the
Spanish and French legations, had built a church in Barclay Street, then on the
northern outskirt of the city; and they had the very natural and just feeling that
they had a right to do what they would with their own and with the building erected
at their charges. They proceeded accordingly to put in charge of it priests of their
own selection. But they had lost sight of the countervailing principle that if they
had a right to do as they would with their building, the bishop, as representing
the supreme authority in the church; had a like right to do as he would with his
clergy. The building Bishop O’Gorman, pp. 269-323,
367, 399.
Other and unwonted difficulties for the young church lay in the
Babel confusion of races and languages among its disciples, and in the lack of public
resources, which could be supplied no otherwise than by free gift. Yet another difficulty
was the scant supply of clergy; but events which about this time began to spread
desolation among the institutions of Catholic Europe proved to be of inestimable
benefit to the ill-provided Catholics of America. Rome might almost have been content
to see the
The most revolutionary change suffered by any religious body
in America, in adjusting itself to the changed conditions after the War of Independence,
was that suffered by the latest arrived and most rapidly growing of them all. We
have seen the order of the Wesleyan preachers coming so tardily across the ocean,
and propagated with constantly increasing momentum southward from the border of
Maryland. Its congregations were not a church; its preachers were not a clergy.
Instituted in England by a narrow, High-church clergyman of the established church,
its preachers were simply a company of lay missionaries under the command of John
Wesley; its adherents were members of the Church of England, bound to special fidelity
to their duties as such in their several parish churches, but united in clubs and
classes for the mutual promotion of holy living in an unholy age; and its chapels and other property, fruits of the self-denial of many
It seems hardly worthy of the immense practical sagacity
of Wesley that he should have thought to transplant this system unchanged into the
midst of circumstances so widely different as those which must surround it in
America. And yet even here, where the best work of his preachers was to be done
among populations not only churchless, but out of reach of church or ministry of
whatever name, in those Southern States in which nine tenths of his penitents and
converts were gained, his preachers were warned against the sacrilege of ministering
to the craving converts the Christian ordinances of baptism and the holy supper,
and bidden to send them to their own churches—when they had none. The wretched incumbents
of the State parishes at the first sounds of war had scampered from the field like
hirelings whose own the sheep are not, and the demand that the preachers of the
word should also minister the comfort of the Christian ordinances became too strong
to be resisted. The call of duty and necessity seemed to the preachers gathered
at a conference at Fluvanna in 1779 to be a call from. God; and, contrary to the
strong objections of Wesley and Asbury, they chose from the older of their ‘own
number a committee who “ordained themselves, and proceeded to ordain and set apart
other ministers for the same purpose —that they might minister the holy ordinances
to the church of Christ.” Buckley, “The Methodists,” pp. 182, 183.
It was an important day in the history of the American church, that second day of September, 1784, when John Wesley, assisted by other presbyters of the Church of England, laid his hands in benediction upon the head of Dr. Thomas Coke, and committed to him the superintendency of the Methodist work in America, as colleague with Francis Asbury. On the arrival of Coke in America, the preachers were hastily summoned together in conference at Baltimore, and there, in Christmas week of the same year, Asbury was ordained successively as deacon, as elder, and as superintendent. By the two bishops thus constituted were ordained elders and deacons, and Methodism became a living church.
The two decades from the close of the War of Independence
include the period of the lowest ebb-tide of vitality in the history of American
Christianity. The spirit of half-belief or unbelief that prevailed on the other
side of the sea, both in the church and out of it, was manifest also here.
Happily the tide of foreign immigration at this time was stayed, and the church
had opportunity to gather strength for the immense task that was presently to be
devolved upon it. But the westward movement of our own population was now
beginning to pour down the western slope of the Alleghanies into the great
Mississippi basin. It was observed by the Methodist preachers that the members
of their societies who had, through fear, necessity, or choice, moved into the
back settlements and into new parts of the country, as soon as peace was settled
and the way was open solicited the preachers to come among them, and so the work
followed them to the west. Jesse Lee, quoted by Dr. Buckley, p. 195.
In the year 1803 the most important political event since the
adoption of the Constitution, the purchase of Louisiana by President Jefferson,
opened to the American church a new and immense field for missionary activity. This
vast territory, stretching from the Mississippi westward to the summits of the Rocky
Mountains and nearly doubling the domain of the United States, was the last remainder
of the great projected French Catholic empire that had fallen in 1763. Passed back
and forth with the vicissitudes of European politics between French and Spanish
masters, it had made small progress in either civilization or Christianity.
The review of this period must not close without adverting to two important advances in public practical Christianity, in which (as often in like cases) the earnest endeavors of some among the Christians have been beholden for success to uncongenial reinforcements. As it is written, “The earth helped the woman.”
In the establishment of the American principle of the non-interference
of the state with religion, and the equality of all religious communions before
the law, much was due, no doubt, to the mutual jealousies of the sects, no one or
two of which were strong enough to maintain exceptional pretensions over the rest
combined. Much also is to be imputed to the indifferentism and sometimes the anti-religious
sentiment of an important and numerous class of doctrinaire politicians of which
Jefferson may be taken as a type. So far as this work was a work of intelligent
conviction and religious faith, the chief honor of it must be given to the Baptists.
Other sects, notably the Presbyterians, had been energetic and efficient in demanding
their own liberties; the Friends and the Baptists agreed in demanding liberty of
conscience and worship, and equality before the law, for all alike. But the active
labor in this cause was mainly done by the Baptists. It is to their consistency
and constancy in the warfare against the privileges of the powerful “Standing Order” of New England, and of the moribund establishments of the South, that we are
It is not surprising that a people so earnest as the Baptists
showed themselves in the promotion of religious liberty should be forward in the
condemnation of American slavery. We have already seen the vigor with which the
Methodists, having all their strength at the South, levied a spiritual warfare
against this great wrong. It was at the South that the Baptists, in 1789, “Resolved, That slavery is a violent
deprivation of the rights of nature, and inconsistent with a republican government,
and we therefore recommend it to our brethren to make use of every legal measure
to extirpate this horrid evil from the land.” Newman, “The Baptists,” p. 305.
It will not be intruding needlessly upon the difficult field of dogmatic history if we note here the widely important diversities of Christian teaching that belong to this which we may call the sub-Revolutionary period.
It is in contradiction to our modern association of ideas to
read that the prevailing type of doctrine among the early Baptists of New England
was Arminian. Ibid., p. 243.
It is to this period that we trace the head-waters of several important existing denominations.
At the close of the war the congregation of the “King’s Chapel,” the oldest Episcopal church in New England, had been thinned and had lost its rector
in the general migration of leading Tory families to Nova Scotia. At the restoration
of peace it was served in the capacity of lay reader by Mr. James Freeman, a young
graduate of Harvard, who came soon to be esteemed very highly in love both for his
work’s sake and for his own. Being chosen pastor of the church, he was not many
months in finding that many things in the English Prayer-book were irreconcilable
with doubts and convictions concerning the Trinity and related doctrines, which
about this time were widely prevalent among theologians both in the Church of England
and outside of it. In June, 1785, it was voted in the congregation, by a very large
majority, to amend the order of worship in accordance with these scruples. The changes
were in a direction in which not a few Episcopalians were disposed to move, Tiffany, p. 347; McConnell, p. 249.
Close as might seem to be the kindred between Unitarianism and Universalism,
coeval as they are in their origin Dr. Richard Eddy,
“The Universalists,” p. 429. Ibid., pp. 392-397. The sermons of Smalley were preached at Wallingford,
Conn., “by particular request, with special reference to the Murrayan
controversy.”
Mr. Murray arrived in America in 1770, and after much going to
and fro organized, in 1779, at Gloucester, Mass., the first congregation in America
on distinctly Universalist principles. But other men, along other lines of
It was along still another line of argument, proceeding from the assumed “rectitude of human nature,” that the Unitarians came, tardily and hesitatingly, to the Universalist position. The long persistence of definite boundary lines between two bodies so nearly alike in their tenets is a subject worthy of study. The lines seem to be rather historical and social than theological. The distinction between them has been thus epigrammatically stated: that the Universalist holds that God is too good to damn a man; the Unitarian holds that men are too good to be damned.
No controversy in the history of the American church has been
more deeply marked by a sincere and serious earnestness, over and above the competitive
zeal and invidious acrimony that are an inevitable admixture in such debates, than
the controversy that was at once waged against the two new sects claiming the title
“Liberal.” It was sincerely felt by their antagonists that, while the one abandoned
the foundation of the Christian faith, the Leonard
Bacon, of New Haven, in conversation.
There is instruction to be gotten from studying, in comparison,
the course of these opinions in the established churches of Great Britain and among
the unestablished churches of America. Under the enforced comprehensiveness or tolerance
of a national church, it is easier for strange doctrines to spread within the pale.
Under the American plan of the organization of Christianity by voluntary mutual
association according to elective affinity, with freedom to receive or exclude,
the flock within the fold may perhaps be kept safer from contamination; as when
the Presbyterian General Assembly in 1792, and Eddy, p. 387.
To this period is to be referred the origin of some of the minor American sects.
The “United Brethren in Christ” grew into a distinct organization about the year 1800. It arose incidentally to the Methodist evangelism, in an effort on the part of Philip William Otterbein, of the German Reformed Church, and Martin Boehm, of the Mennonites, to provide for the shepherdless German-speaking people by an adaptation of the Wesleyan methods. Presently, in the natural progress of language, the English work outgrew the German. It is now doing an extensive and useful work by pulpit and press, chiefly in Pennsylvania and the States of that latitude. The reasons for its continued existence separate from the Methodist Church, which it closely resembles both in doctrine and in polity, are more apparent to those within the organization than to superficial observers from outside.
The organization just described arose from the unwillingness of the German Reformed Church to meet the craving needs of the German people by using the Wesleyan methods. From the unwillingness of the Methodist Church to use the German language arose another organization, “the Evangelical Association,” sometimes known, from the name of its founder, by the somewhat grotesque title of “the Albrights.” This also is both Methodist and Episcopal, a reduced copy of the great Wesleyan institution, mainly devoted to labors among the Germans.
In 1792 was planted at Baltimore the first American congregation of that organization of disciples of Emanuel Swedenborg which had been begun in London nine years before and called by the appropriately fanciful name of “the Church of the New Jerusalem.”
THE closing years of the eighteenth century show the lowest low-water mark of the lowest ebb-tide of spiritual life in the history of the American church. The demoralization of army life, the fury of political factions, the catchpenny materialist morality of Franklin, the philosophic deism of men like Jefferson, and the popular ribaldry of Tom Paine, had wrought, together with other untoward influences, to bring about a condition of things which to the eye of little faith seemed almost desperate.
From the beginning of the reaction from the stormy excitements of the Great Awakening, nothing had seemed to arouse the New England churches from a lethargic dullness; so, at least, it seemed to those who recalled those wonderful days of old, either in memory or by tradition. We have a gauge of the general decline of the public morals, in the condition of Yale College at the accession of President Dwight in 1795, as described in the reminiscences of Lyman Beecher, then a sophomore.
“Before he came, college was in a most ungodly state. The college
church was almost extinct. Most of the students were skeptical, and rowdies were plenty. Wine
“Autobiography
of Lyman Beecher,” vol. i., p. 43. The same charming volume contains abundant evidence
that the spirit of true religion was cherished in the homes of the people, while
there were so many public signs of apostasy.
In the Middle States the aspect was not more promising. Princeton College had been closed for three years of the Revolutionary War. In 1782 there were only two among the students who professed themselves Christians. The Presbyterian General Assembly, representing the strongest religious force in that region, in 1798 described the then existing condition of the country in these terms:
“Formidable innovations and convulsions in Europe threaten destruction to morals and religion. Scenes of devastation and bloodshed unexampled in the history of modern nations have convulsed the world, and our country is threatened with similar calamities. We perceive with pain and fearful apprehension a general dereliction of religious principles and practice among our fellow-citizens, a visible and prevailing impiety and contempt for the laws and institutions of religion, and an abounding infidelity, which in many instances tends to atheism itself. The profligacy and corruption of the public morals have advanced with a progress proportionate to our declension in religion. Profaneness, pride, luxury, injustice, intemperance, lewdness, and every species of debauchery and loose indulgence greatly abound.”
From the point of view of the Episcopalian of that day the prospect
was even more disheartening. It was at this time that Bishop Provoost of New York
laid down his functions, not expecting the church to continue much longer; and Bishop
Madison of Virginia shared the despairing conviction of Chief-Justice Marshall that
the church was too far gone ever to be revived. Tiffany, “Protestant Episcopal
Church,” pp. 388, 394, 395. Dr.
Jacobs, chap. xix.
Even the Methodists, the fervor of whose zeal and vitality of whose organization had withstood what seemed severer tests, felt the benumbing influence of this unhappy age. For three years ending in 1796 the total membership diminished at the rate of about four thousand a year.
Many witnesses agree in describing the moral and religious condition of the border States of Kentucky and Tennessee as peculiarly deplorable. The autobiography of that famous pioneer preacher, Peter Cartwright, gives a lively picture of Kentucky society in 1793 as he remembered it in his old age:
“Logan County, when my father moved into it, was called ‘Rogues’
Harbor.’ Here many refugees from all parts of the Union fled to escape punishment
or justice; for although there was law, yet it could not be executed, and it was
a desperate state of society. Murderers, horse-thieves, highway robbers, and counterfeiters
fled there, until they combined and actually formed a majority. Those who favored
a better state of morals were called ‘Regulators.’ But they encountered fierce opposition
from the ‘Rogues,’ and a battle was fought with guns, “Autobiography of Peter Cartwright,” quoted by Dorchester,
“Christianity in the United States,” p. 348.
The people that walked in this gross darkness beheld a great light.
In 1796 a Presbyterian minister, James McGready, who for more than ten years had
done useful service in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, assumed charge of several
Presbyterian churches in that very Logan County which we know through the reminiscences
of Peter Cartwright. As he went the round of his scattered congregations his preaching
was felt to have peculiar power “to arouse false professors, to awaken a dead church,
and warn sinners and lead them to seek the new spiritual life which he himself had
found.” Three years later two brothers, William and John McGee, one a Presbyterian
minister and the other a Methodist, came through the beautiful Cumberland country
in Kentucky and Tennessee, speaking, as if in the spirit and power of John the Baptist,
to multitudes that gathered from great distances to hear them. On one occasion,
in the woods of Logan County, in July, 1800, the gathered families, many of whom
came from far, tethered their teams and encamped for several days for the unaccustomed
privilege of common worship and Christian preaching. This is believed to have been
the first American camp-meeting—an era worth remembering in our history. Not without
abundant New Testament antecedents, it naturalized itself at once on our soil as
a natural expedient for scattered frontier populations unprovided with settled institutions.
By a natural process of evolution, adapting itself to other environments and uses,
the backwoods camp-meeting has grown into the “Chautauqua” assembly, which at
so many places besides
We are happy in having an account of some of these meetings from one who was personally and sympathetically interested in them. For in the spring of the next year Barton Warren Stone, a Presbyterian minister serving his two congregations of Concord and Cane Ridge in Bourbon County, and oppressed with a sense of the religious apathy prevailing about him, made the long journey across the State of Kentucky to see for himself the wonderful things of which he had heard, and afterward wrote his reminiscences.
“There, on the edge of a prairie in Logan County, Kentucky, the multitudes came together and continued a number of days and nights encamped on the ground, during which time worship was carried on in some part of the encampment. The scene was new to me and passing strange. It baffled description. Many, very many, fell down as men slain in battle, and continued for hours together in an apparently breathless and motionless state, sometimes for a few moments reviving and exhibiting symptoms of life by a deep groan or piercing shriek, or by a prayer for mercy fervently uttered. After lying there for hours they obtained deliverance. The gloomy cloud that had covered their faces seemed gradually and visibly to disappear, and hope, in smiles, brightened into joy. They would rise, shouting deliverance, and then would address the surrounding multitude in language truly eloquent and impressive. With astonishment did I hear men, women, and children declaring the wonderful works of God and the glorious mysteries of the gospel. Their appeals were solemn, heart-penetrating, bold, and free. Under such circumstances many others would fall down into the same state from which the speakers had just been delivered.
“Two or three of my particular acquaintances from a distance were struck down. I sat patiently by one of them, whom I knew to be a careless sinner, for hours, and observed with critical attention everything that passed, from the beginning to the end. I noticed the momentary revivings as from death, the humble confession of sins, the fervent prayer, and the ultimate deliverance; then the solemn thanks and praise to God, and affectionate exhortation to companions and to the people around to repent and come to Jesus. I was astonished at the knowledge of gospel truth displayed in the address. The effect was that several sank down into the same appearance of death. After attending to many such cases, my conviction was complete that it was a good work—the work of God; nor has my mind wavered since on the subject. Much did I see then, and much have I seen since, that I consider to be fanaticism; but this should not condemn the work. The devil has always tried to ape the works of God, to bring them into disrepute; but that cannot be a Satanic work which brings men to humble confession, to forsaking of sin, to prayer, fervent praise and thanksgiving, and a sincere and affectionate exhortation to sinners to repent and come to Jesus the Saviour.”
Profoundly impressed by what he had seen and heard, Pastor Stone returned to his double parish in Bourbon County and rehearsed the story of it. “The congregation was affected with awful solemnity, and many returned home weeping.” This was in the early spring. Not many months afterward there was a notable springing up of this seed.
“A memorable meeting was held at Cane Ridge in August, 1801.
The roads were crowded with wagons, carriages, horses, and footmen moving to the
solemn camp. It was judged by military men on the ground that between twenty and
thirty thousand persons were assembled.
“To this meeting many had come from Ohio and other distant parts.
These returned home and diffused the same spirit in their respective neighborhoods.
Similar results followed. So low had religion sunk, and such carelessness had universally
prevailed, that I have thought that nothing common could have arrested and held
the attention of the people.” See B. B. Tyler, “History of the Disciples,” pp.
11-17; R.
V. Foster, “The Cumberland Presbyterians,” pp. 260-263 (American Church History
Series, vols. xi., xii.).
The sober and cautious tone of this narrative will already have impressed the reader. These are not the words of a heated enthusiast, or a man weakly credulous. We may hesitate to accept his judgment, but may safely accept his testimony, amply corroborated as it is, to facts which he has seen and heard.
But the crucial test of the work, the test prescribed by the Lord
of the church, is that it shall be known by its fruits. And this test it seems to
bear well. Dr. Archibald Alexander, had in high reverence in the Presbyterian
“On my way I was informed by settlers on the road that the character of Kentucky travelers was entirely changed, and that they were as remarkable for sobriety as they had formerly been for dissoluteness and immorality. And indeed I found Kentucky to appearances the most moral place I had ever seen. A profane expression was hardly ever heard. A religious awe seemed to pervade the country. Upon the whole, I think the revival in Kentucky the most extraordinary that has ever visited the church of Christ; and, all things considered, it was peculiarly adapted to the circumstances of the country into which it came. Infidelity was triumphant and religion was on the point of expiring. Something extraordinary seemed necessary to arrest the attention of a giddy people who were ready to conclude that Christianity was a fable and futurity a delusion. This revival has done it. It has confounded infidelity and brought numbers beyond calculation under serious impressions.”
A sermon preached in 1803 to the Presbyterian synod of Kentucky, by the Rev. David Rice, has the value of testimony given in the presence of other competent witnesses, and liable thus to be questioned or contradicted. In it he says:
“Neighborhoods noted for their vicious and profligate manners
are now as much noted for their piety and good order. Drunkards, profane swearers,
liars, quarrelsome persons, etc., are remarkably reformed. . . . A number of families
who had lived apparently without the fear of
That same year the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church,
in its annual review of the state of religion, adverted with emphasis to the work
in the Cumberland country, and cited remarkable instances of conversion—malignant
opposers of vital piety convinced and reconciled, learned, active, and conspicuous
infidels becoming signal monuments of that grace which they once despised; and in
conclusion declared with joy that “the state and prospects of vital
religion in our country are more favorable and encouraging than at any period
within the last forty years.” Tyler, “The Disciples”; Foster, “The Cumberland Presbyterians,”
ubi supra.
In order successfully to study the phenomena of this remarkable
passage in the history of the church, it is necessary to bear in mind the social
conditions that prevailed. A population perfervido ingenio, of a temper peculiarly
susceptible of intense excitement, transplanted into a wild country, under little
control either of conventionality or law, deeply ingrained from many generations
with the religious sentiment, but broken loose from the control of it and living
consciously in reckless disregard of the law of God, is suddenly aroused to a sense
of its apostasy and wickedness. The people do not hear the word of God from Sabbath
to Sabbath, or even from evening to evening,
And such indeed they were. Sudden outcries, hysteric weeping and laughter, faintings, catalepsies, trances, were customary concomitants of the revival preaching. Multitudes fell prostrate on the ground, “spiritually slain,” as it was said. Lest the helpless bodies should be trampled on by the surging crowd, they were taken up and laid in rows on the floor of the neighboring meeting-house. “Some lay quiet, unable to move or speak. Some talked, but could not move. Some beat the floor with their heels. Some, shrieking in agony, bounded about, it is said, like a live fish out of water. Many lay down and rolled over and over for hours at a time. Others rushed wildly over the stumps and benches, and then plunged, shouting ‘Lost! Lost!’ into the forest.”
As the revival went on and the camp-meeting grew to be a custom
and an institution, this nervous epidemic took on certain recognizable forms, one
of which was known as “the jerks.” This malady “began in the head and
“I have passed a meeting-house where I observed the undergrowth
had been cut for a camp-meeting, and from fifty to a hundred saplings were left
breast-high on purpose for persons who were ‘jerked’ to hold on to. I observed
where they had held on they had kicked up the earth as a horse stamping flies. .
. . I believe it does not affect those naturalists who wish to get it to philosophize
about it; and rarely those who are the most pious; but the lukewarm, lazy professor
is subject to it. The wicked fear it and are subject to it; but the persecutors
are more subject to it than any, and they have sometimes cursed and sworn and damned
it while jerking.” Let me add an illustrative instance related to me by the distinguished
Methodist, Dr. David P. Durbin. Standing near the platform from which he was to
preach at a camp-meeting, he observed a powerfully built young backwoodsman who
was manifestly there with no better intent than to disturb and break up the meeting.
Presently it became evident that the young man was conscious of some influence taking
hold of him to which he was resolved not to yield; he clutched with both hands a
hickory sapling next which he was standing, to hold himself steady, but was whirled
round and round, until the bark of the sapling peeled off under his grasp. But,
as in the cases referred to by Dow, the attack was attended by no religious sentiment
whatever. On the manifestations in the Cumberland country, see McMasters,
“United States,” vol. ii., pp. 581, 582, and the sources there cited. For some
judicious remarks on the general subject, see Buckley, “Methodism,” pp.
217-224.
There is nothing improbable in the claim that phenomena like these,
strange, weird, startling, “were so much like miracles that they had the same effect
as miracles on So Dr. Buckley, “Methodism,” p. 217.
About the same time there was manifested in various quarters a
generous revolt against the existence and multiplication of mutually exclusive sects
in the Christian American Church History Series, vol. xii.
The great revival of the West and Southwest was not the only revival,
and not even the earliest revival, of that time of crisis. As early as 1792 the
long inertia of the eastern churches began to be broken here and there by signs
of growing earnestness and attentiveness to spiritual things. There was little of
excited agitation. There was no preaching of famous evangelists. There were no imposing
convocations. Only in many and many of those country towns in which, at that time,
the main strength of the population lay, the labors of faithful pastors began to
be rewarded with large ingatherings of penitent believers. The languishing churches
grew strong and hopeful, and the insolent infidelity of the times was abashed. With
such sober simplicity was the work of the gospel carried forward, in the opening
years of this century, among the churches and pastors that had learned wisdom from
the mistakes made in the Great Awakening, that there are few striking incidents
for the historian. Hardly any man is to be pointed out as a preeminent leader of
the church at this period. If to any one, this place of honor belongs to Timothy
Dwight, grandson of Jonathan Edwards, whose See above, pp. 230, 231.
“They thought the faculty were afraid of free discussion. But
when they handed Dr. Dwight a list of subjects for class disputation, to their surprise,
he selected this: ‘Is the Bible the word of God?’ and told them to do their best.
He heard all they had to say, answered them, and there was an end. He preached incessantly
for six months on the subject, and all infidelity skulked and hid its head. He elaborated
his theological system in a series of forenoon sermons in the chapel; the afternoon
discourses were practical. The original design of Yale College was to found a divinity
school. To a mind appreciative, like mine, his preaching was a continual course
of education and a continual feast. He was copious and polished in style, though
disciplined and logical. There was a pith and power of doctrine there that has not
been since surpassed, if equaled.” “Autobiography of Lyman Beecher,”
vol. i., pp. 43, 44.
It may be doubted whether to any man of his generation it was
given to exercise a wider and more beneficent influence over the American church
than that of President Dwight. His system of “Theology Explained and Defended in
a Series of Sermons,” a theology meant to be preached and made effective in convincing
men and converting them to the service of God, was so constructed as to be completed
within the four years of the college curriculum, so that every graduate should have
heard the
At the East also, as well as at the West, the quickening of religious thought and feeling had the common effect of alienating and disrupting. Diverging tendencies, which had begun to disclose themselves in the discussions between Edwards and Chauncy in their respective volumes of “Thoughts” on the Great Awakening, became emphasized in the revival of 1800. That liberalism which had begun as a protest against a too peremptory style of dogmatism was rapidly advancing toward a dogmatic denial of points deemed by the opposite party to be essential. Dogmatic differences were aggravated by differences of taste and temperament, and everything was working toward the schism by which some sincere and zealous souls should seek to do God service.
In one most important particular the revival of 1800 was happily distinguished from the Great Awakening of 1740. It was not done and over with at the end of a few years, and then followed by a long period of reaction. It was the beginning of a long period of vigorous and “abundant life,” moving forward, not, indeed, with even and unvarying flow, yet with continuous current, marked with those alternations of exaltation and subsidence which seem, whether for evil or for good, to have become a fixed characteristic of American church history.
The widespread revivals of the first decade of the nineteenth
century saved the church of Christ in America from its low estate and girded it
for stupendous tasks that were about to be devolved on it. In the glow of this renewed
fervor, the churches of New England successfully made the difficult transition from
establishment to self-support and to the costly enterprises of aggressive evangelization
WHEN the Presbyterian General Assembly, in 1803, made a studious review of the revivals which for several years had been in progress, especially at the South and West, it included in its “Narrative” the following observations:
“The Assembly observe with great pleasure that the desire for spreading the gospel among the blacks and among the savage tribes on our borders has been rapidly increasing during the last year. The Assembly take notice of this circumstance with the more satisfaction, as it not only affords a pleasing presage of the spread of the gospel, but also furnishes agreeable evidence of the genuineness and the benign tendency of that spirit which God has been pleased to pour out upon his people.”
In New England the like result had already, several years before,
followed upon the like antecedent. In the year 1798 the “Missionary Society of
Connecticut” was constituted, having for its object “to Christianize the heathen
in North America, and to support and promote Christian knowledge in the new settlements
within the United States”; and in August, 1800, its first missionary, David Bacon,
engaged at a salary of “one hundred and “Life of David Bacon,” by his son (Boston, 1876).
David Bacon, like Henry Martyn, who at that same time, in far different surroundings, was intent upon his plans of mission work in India, was own son in the faith to David Brainerd. But they were elder sons in a great family. The pathetic story of that heroic youth, as told by Jonathan Edwards, was a classic at that time in almost every country parsonage; but its influence was especially felt in the colleges, now no longer, as a few years earlier, the seats of the scornful, but the homes of serious and religious learning which they were meant to be by their founders.
Of the advancement of Christian civilization in the first quarter-century
from the achievement of independence there is no more distinguished monument than
the increase, through those troubled and impoverished years, of the institutions
of secular and sacred learning. The really successful and effective colleges that
had survived from the colonial period were hardly a half-dozen. Up to 1810,
It was at Williams College, then just planted in the Berkshire
hills, that a little coterie of students was formed which, for the grandeur of the
consequences that flowed from it, is worthy to be named in history beside the Holy
Club of Oxford in 1730, and the friends at Oriel College in 1830. Samuel J. Mills
came to Williams College in i8o6 from the parsonage of “Father Mills” of Torringford,
concerning whom quaint traditions and even memories still linger in the neighboring
parishes of Litchfield County, Connecticut. Around this young student gathered a
circle of men like-minded. The shade of a lonely haystack was their oratory; the
pledges by which they bound themselves to a life-work for the kingdom of
The seminary—there was only one in all Protestant America. As early as 1791 the Sulpitian fathers had organized their seminary at Baltimore. But it was not until 1808 that any institution for theological studies was open to candidates for the Protestant ministry. Up to that time such studies were made in the regular college curriculum, which was distinctly theological in character; and it was common for the graduate to spend an additional year at the college for special study under the president or the one professor of divinity. But many country parsonages that were tenanted by men of fame as writers and teachers were greatly frequented by young men preparing themselves for the work of preaching.
The change to the modern method of education for the ministry
was a sudden one. It was precipitated by an event which has not even yet ceased
to be looked on by the losing party with honest lamentation and with an unnecessary
amount of sectarian acrimony. The divinity professorship in Harvard College, founded
in 1722 Compare the claim of priority for the Dutch church, p. 81 note. J. H. Allen, “The Unitarians,” p. 194. “Autobiography of L.
Beecher,” p. 110.
The schism, with its acrimonies and heartburnings, was doubtless
in some sense necessary. And it was attended with some beneficent consequences.
It gave rise to instructive and illuminating debate. And on the part of the Orthodox
it occasioned an outburst of earnest zeal which in a wonderfully short time had
more than repaired their loss in numbers, and had started them on a career of wide
beneficence, with a momentum that has been increasing to
The seating of a pronounced Unitarian in the Hollis chair of theology
at Harvard took place in 1805. Three years later, in 1808, the doors of Andover
Seminary were opened to students. Thirty-six were present, and the number went on
increasing. The example was quickly followed. In 1810 the Dutch seminary was begun
at New Brunswick, and in 1812 the Presbyterian at Princeton. In 1816 Bangor Seminary
(Congregationalist) and Hartwick Seminary (Lutheran) were opened. In 1819 the Episcopalian
“General Seminary” followed, and the Baptist “Hamilton Seminary” in 1820. In
1821 Presbyterian seminaries were begun at Auburn, N. Y., and Marysville, Tenn.
In 1822 the Yale Divinity College was founded (Congregationalist); in 1823 the Virginia “Herzog-Schaff Encyclopedia,” pp. 2328-2331.
To Andover, in the very first years of its great history, came Mills and others of the little Williams College circle; and at once their infectious enthusiasm for the advancement of the kingdom of God was felt throughout the institution. The eager zeal of these young men brooked no delay. In June, 1810, the General Association of Massachusetts met at the neighboring town of Bradford; there four of the students, Judson, Nott, Newell, and Hall, presented themselves and their cause; and at that meeting was constituted the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. The little faith of the churches shrank from the responsibility of sustaining missionaries in the field, and Judson was sent to England to solicit the coöeration of the London Missionary Society. This effort happily failing, the burden came back upon the American churches and was not refused. At last, in February, 1812, the first American missionaries to a foreign country, Messrs. Judson, Rice, Newell, Nott, and Hall, with their wives, sailed, in two parties, for Calcutta.
And now befell an incident perplexing, embarrassing, and disheartening to the supporters of the mission, but attended with results for the promotion of the gospel to which their best wisdom never could have attained. Adoniram Judson, a graduate of Brown University, having spent the long months at sea in the diligent and devout study of the Scriptures, arrived at Calcutta fully persuaded of the truth of Baptist principles. His friend, Luther Rice, arriving by the other vessel, came by and by to the same conclusion; and the two, with their wives, were baptized by immersion in the Baptist church at Calcutta. The announcement of this news in America was an irresistible appeal to the already powerful and rapidly growing Baptist denomination to assume the support of the two missionaries who now offered themselves to the service of the Baptist churches. Rice returned to urge the appeal on their immediate attention, while Judson remained to enter on that noble apostolate for which his praise is in all the churches.
To the widespread Baptist fellowship this sudden, unmistakable,
and imperative providential summons to engage in the work of foreign missions was
(it is hardly too much to say) like life from the dead. The sect had doubled its
numbers in the decade just passed, and was estimated to include two hundred thousand
communicants, all “baptized believers.” But this multitude was without common organization,
and, while abundantly endowed with sectarian animosities, was singularly lacking
in a consciousness of common spiritual life. It was pervaded by a deadly fatalism,
which, under the guise of reverence for the will of God, was openly pleaded as a
reason for abstaining from effort and self-denial in the promotion of the gospel.
Withal it was widely characterized not only by a lack of education in its ministry,
but by a violent and
Thus the great debt which the English Congregationalists had owed
to the Baptists for heroic leadership in the Work of foreign missions was repaid
with generous usury “The Baptists,” by Dr. A. H. Newman, pp. 379-442.
The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions
continued for twenty-seven years to be the common organ of foreign missionary
operations for the Congregationalists, the Presbyterians, and the Dutch and
German Reformed churches. In the year 1837 an official. Presbyterian Board of
Missions was erected by the Old-School fragment of the disrupted Presbyterian
Church; and to this, when the two fragments were reunited, in 1869, the
contributions of the New-School side began to be transferred. In 1858 the Dutch
church, and in 1879 the German church, instituted their separate mission operations. Thus the initiative of the Andover students in 1810 resulted in the
erection, not of one mission board, timidly venturing to set five missionaries
in the foreign field, but of five boards, whose total annual resources are
counted by millions of dollars, whose evangelists, men and women, American and
foreign-born, are a great army, and whose churches, schools, colleges,
theological seminaries, hospitals, printing-presses, with the other equipments
of a Christian civilization, and the myriads of whose faithful Christian
converts, in every country under the whole heaven, have done more for the true
honor of our nation than all that it has achieved in diplomacy and war. I have omitted from this list of results in the direct line from
the inception at Andover, in 181o, the American Missionary Association. It owed its origin, in 1846, to the dissatisfaction felt by a considerable
number of the supporters of the American Board with the attitude of that institution
on some of the questions arising incidentally to the antislavery discussion. Its
foreign missions, never extensive, were transferred to other hands, at the close
of the Civil War, that it might devote itself wholly to its great and successful
work among “the oppressed races” at home.
The Episcopalians entered on foreign mission work in 1819, and the Methodists, tardily but at last with signal efficiency and success, in 1832. No considerable sect of American Christians at the present day is unrepresented in the foreign field.
In order to complete the history of this organizing era in the
church, we must return to the humble but memorable figure of Samuel J. Mills. It
was his characteristic word to one of his fellows, as they stood ready to leave
the seclusion of the seminary for active service, “You and I, brother, are little
men, but before we die, our influence must be felt on the other side of the world.”
No one claimed that he was other than a “little man,” except as he was filled and
possessed with a great thought, and that the thought that filled the mind of Christ—the
thought of the Coming Age and of the Reign of God on earth. It may be worth considering how far the course of religious
and theological thought would have been modified if the English New Testament had
used these phrases instead of World to Come and Kingdom of God.
But already this nobly enterprising mind was intent on The colored Baptists of Richmond entered eagerly into the Colonization
project, and in 1822 their “African Missionary Society” sent out its mission to
the young colony of Liberia. One of their missionaries was the Rev. Lott Cary, the
dignity of whose character and career was an encouragement of his people in their
highest aspirations, and a confirmation of the hopes of their friends (Newman, “The Baptists,” p. 402; Gurley,
“Life of Ashmun,” pp. 147-160).
Other societies, national in their scope and constituency, the
origin of which belongs in this organizing period, are the American Education Society
(1815), the American Sunday-school Union (1824), the American Tract Society (1825),
the Seamen’s Friend Society (1826), and the American Home Missionary Society (1826),
in which last the Congregationalists of New England coöerated with the Presbyterians
on the basis of a Plan of Union entered into between the General Assembly and the
General Association of Connecticut, the tendency of which was to reinforce the Presbyterian
Church with the numbers and
The grandeur of this work was to consist not only in the results of it, but in the resources of it. As never before, the sympathies, prayers, and personal coöeration of all Christians, even the feeblest, were to be combined and utilized for enterprises coextensive with the continent and the world and taking hold on eternity. The possibilities of the new era were dazzling to the prophetic imagination. A young minister then standing on the threshold of a long career exulted in the peculiar and excelling glory of the dawning day:
“Surely, if it is the noblest attribute of our nature that spreads
out the circle of our sympathies to include the whole family of man, and sends forth
our affections to embrace the ages of a distant futurity, it must be regarded as
a privilege no less exalted that our means of doing good are limited by no
remoteness of country or distance of duration, but we may operate, if we will, to
assuage the miseries of another hemisphere, or to prevent the necessities of an
unborn generation. The time has been when a man might weep over the wrongs of Africa,
and he might look forward to weep over the hopelessness of her degradation, till
his heart should bleed; and yet his tears would be all that he could give her. He
might relieve the beggar at his door, but he could do nothing for a dying continent.
He might provide for his children, but he could do nothing for the nations that
were yet to be born to an inheritance of utter wretchedness. Then the privilege
of Leonard Bacon,
“A Plea for Africa,” in the Park Street Church, Boston, July 4, 1824.
THE transition from establishment to the voluntary system for the support of churches was made not without some difficulty, but with surprisingly little. In the South the established churches were practically dead before the laws establishing them were repealed and the endowments disposed of. In New York the Episcopalian churches were indeed depressed and discouraged by the ceasing of State support and official patronage; and inasmuch as these, with the subsidies of the “S. P. G.,” had been their main reliance, it was inevitable that they should pass through a period of prostration until the appreciation of their large endowments, and the progress of immigration and of conversion from other sects, and especially the awakening of religious earnestness and of sectarian ambition.
In New England the transition to the voluntary system was more
gradual. Not till 1818 in Connecticut, and in Massachusetts not till 1834, was the
last strand of connection severed between the churches of the standing order and
the state, and the churches left solely to their own resources. The exaltation and
divine inspiration that had come to these churches with the revivals which from
the end of the eighteenth century were never for a long time intermitted, and the
example of the dissenting congregations,
Among the conflicts of the American church with public wrongs
strongly intrenched in law or social usage, two are of such magnitude and protracted
through so long a period as to demand special consideration—the conflict with drunkenness
and the conflict with slavery. Some less conspicuous illustrations of the fidelity
of the church
The death of Alexander Hamilton, in July, 1804, in a duel with Aaron Burr, occasioned a wide and violent outburst of indignation against the murderer, now a fugitive and outcast, for the dastardly malignity of the details of his crime, and for the dignity and generosity as well as the public worth of his victim. This was the sort of explosion of excited public feeling which often loses itself in the air. It was a different matter when the churches and ministers of Christ took up the affair in the light of the law of God, and, dealing not with the circumstances but with the essence of it, pressed it inexorably on the conscience of the people. Some of the most memorable words in American literature were uttered on this occasion, notwithstanding that there were few congregations in which there were not sore consciences to be irritated or political anxieties to be set quaking by them. The names of Eliphalet Nott and John M. Mason were honorably conspicuous in this work. But one unknown young man of thirty, in a corner of Long Island, uttered words in his little country meeting-house that pricked the conscience of the nation. The words of Lyman Beecher on this theme may well be quoted as being a part of history, for the consequences that followed them.
“Dueling is a great national sin. With the exception of a small
section of the Union, the whole land is defiled with blood. From the lakes of the
North to the plains of Georgia is heard the voice of lamentation and woe—the cries
of the widow and fatherless. This work of desolation is performed often by men in
office, by the appointed guardians of life and liberty. On the floor of Congress
challenges have been threatened, if not given, and thus powder and ball have been
introduced as the auxiliaries of
Words such as these resounding from pulpit after pulpit,
multiplied and disseminated by means of the press, acted on by representative
bodies of churches, becoming embodied in anti-dueling societies, exorcised the
foul spirit from the land. The criminal folly of dueling did not, indeed, at
once and altogether cease. Instances of it continue to be heard of to this day.
But the conscience of the nation was instructed, and a warning was served upon
political parties to beware of proposing for national honors men whose hands
were defiled with blood. “An impression was made that never ceased. It started a series
of efforts that have affected the whole northern mind at least; and in Jackson’s
time the matter came up in Congress, and a law was passed disfranchising a duelist.
And that was not the last of it; for when Henry Clay was up for the Presidency the
Democrats printed an edition of forty thousand of that sermon and scattered them
all over the North” (“Autobiography of Lyman Beecher,” vol. i., pp. 553, 154;
with foot-note from Dr. L. Bacon: “That sermon has never ceased to be a power in
the politics of this country. More than anything else, it made the name of brave
old Andrew Jackson distasteful to the moral and religious feeling of the people.
It hung like a millstone on the neck of Henry Clay”).
Another instance of the fidelity of the church in resistance to public wrong was its action in the matter of the dealing of the State of Georgia and the national government toward the Georgia Indians. This is no place for the details of the shameful story of perfidy and oppression. It is well told by Helen Hunt Jackson in the melancholy pages of “A Century of Dishonor.” The wrongs inflicted on the Cherokee nation were deepened by every conceivable aggravation.
“In the whole history of our government’s dealings with the Indian
tribes there is no record so black as the record of its perfidy to this nation.
There will come a “A Century of Dishonor,” pp. 270, 271.
We do well to give authentic details of the condition of the Cherokee nation in the early part of the century, for the advanced happy and peaceful civilization of this people was one of the fairest fruits of American Christianity working upon exceptionally noble race-qualities in the recipients of it. An agent of the War Department in 1825 made official report to the Department on the rare beauty of the Cherokee country, secured to them by the most sacred pledges with which it was possible for the national government to bind itself, and covered by the inhabitants, through their industry and thrift, with flocks and herds, with farms and villages; and goes on to speak of the Indians themselves:
“The natives carry on considerable trade with the adjoining
States; some of them export cotton in boats down the Tennessee to the
Mississippi, and down that river to New Orleans. Apple and peach orchards are
quite common, and gardens are cultivated and much attention paid to them. Butter
and cheese are seen on Cherokee tables. There are many public roads in the
nation, and houses of entertainment kept by natives. Numerous and flourishing
villages are seen in every section of the country. Cotton and woolen cloths are
manufactured; blankets of various dimensions, manufactured by Cherokee hands,
are very common. Almost every family in the nation grows cotton for its own
consumption. Industry and commercial enterprise are extending themselves in
every part. Nearly all the merchants in the nation are native Cherokees.
Agricultural pursuits engage the chief attention of the people. Different
branches in mechanics are pursued. The population is rapidly increasing. . . .
The Christian religion is the religion of the nation. Presbyterians, Methodists,
Baptists, and Moravians are the most numerous sects. Some of the most
influential characters are members of the church and live consistently with
their professions. The whole nation is penetrated with gratitude for the aid it
has received from the United States government and from different religious
societies. Schools are increasing every year; learning is encouraged and
rewarded; the young class acquire the English and those of mature age the
Cherokee system of learning.” “A Century of Dishonor,” pp. 275, 276.
This country, enriched by the toil and thrift of its owners, the
State of Georgia resolved not merely to subjugate to its jurisdiction, but to steal
from its rightful and lawful owners, driving them away as outlaws. As a sure expedient
for securing popular consent to the intended infamy, the farms of the Cherokees
were parceled out to be drawn
In earlier pages we have already traced the succession of bold
protests and organized labors on the part of church and clergy against the institution
of slavery. See above, pp. 203-205, 222.
“We consider the voluntary enslaving of one part of the human
race by another as a gross violation of the most precious and sacred rights of human
nature; as utterly inconsistent with the law of God, which requires us to love our
neighbor as ourselves; and as totally irreconcilable
“From this view of the consequences resulting from the practice
into which Christian people have most inconsistently fallen of enslaving a portion
of their brethren of mankind,—for ‘God hath made of one blood all nations
of men to dwell on the face of the earth,’—it is manifestly the duty of all Christians
who enjoy the light of the present day, when the inconsistency of slavery both with
the dictates of humanity and religion has been demonstrated and is generally seen
and acknowledged, to use their honest, earnest, and unwearied endeavors to correct
the errors of former times, and as speedily as possible to efface this blot on our
holy religion and to obtain the complete abolition
It was not strange that while sentiments like these prevailed
without contradiction in all parts of the country, while in State after State emancipations
were taking place and acts of abolition were passing, and even in the States most
deeply involved in slavery “a great, and the most virtuous, part of the community
abhorred slavery and wished its extermination,” Deliverance of General Assembly, 1818.
In the spring of 1820, at the close of two years of agitating discussion, the new State of Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave State, although with the stipulation that the remaining territory of the United States north of the parallel of latitude bounding Missouri on the south should be consecrated forever to freedom. The opposition to this extension of slavery was taken up by American Christianity as its own cause. It was the impending danger of such an extension that prompted that powerful and unanimous declaration of the Presbyterian General Assembly in 1818. The arguments against the Missouri bill, whether in the debates of Congress or in countless memorials and resolutions from public meetings both secular and religious, were arguments from justice and duty and the law of Christ. These were met by constitutional objections and considerations of expediency and convenience, and by threats of disunion and civil war. The defense of slavery on principle had not yet begun to be heard, even among politicians.
The successful extension of slavery beyond the Mississippi The persistent attempt to represent this period as one of prevailing
apathy and inertia on the subject of slavery is a very flagrant falsification of
history. And yet by dint of sturdy reiteration it has been forced into such currency
as to impose itself even on so careful a writer as Mr. Schouler, in his “History
of the United States.” It is impossible to read this part of American church history
intelligently, unless the mind is disabused of this misrepresentation. “Christian Spectator” (monthly), New Haven, 1828, p. 4.
“Excepting only the horrible system of the West India Islands,
we have never heard of slavery in any country, ancient or modern, pagan, Mohammedan,
or Christian, so terrible in its character, so pernicious in its tendency, so remediless
in its anticipated results, as the slavery which exists in these United States.
. . . When we use the strong language which we feel ourselves compelled to use in
relation to this subject, we do not mean to speak of animal suffering, but of an
immense moral and political evil. . . . In regard to its influence on the white
population the most lamentable proof of its deteriorating effects may be found in
the fact that, excepting the pious, whose hearts are governed by the Christian law
of reciprocity between man and man, and the wise, whose minds have looked far into
the relations and tendencies of things, none can be found to lift their voices against
a system so utterly repugnant to the feelings of unsophisticated humanity—a system
which permits all the atrocities of the domestic slave trade—which permits the father
to sell his children as he would his cattle—a system which consigns one half of
the community to hopeless and utter degradation, and which threatens in its final
catastrophe to bring down the same ruin on the master and the slave.” “Christian Spectator,” 1823, pp. 493, 494, 341;
“The Earlier
Antislavery Days,” by L. Bacon, in the “Christian Union,” December 9 and 16, 1874,
January 6 and 13, 1875. It is one of the “Curiosities of Literature,” though hardly
one of its “Amenities,” that certain phrases carefully dissected from this paper (which was written by Mr. Bacon at the age of
twenty-one) should be pertinaciously used, in the face of repeated exposures, to
prove the author of it to be an apologist for slavery!
The historical value of the paper from which these brief extracts
are given, as illustrating the attitude of the church at the time, is enhanced by
the use that was made of it. Published in the form of a review article in a magazine
of national circulation, the recognized organ of the orthodox Congregationalists,
it was republished in a pamphlet for gratuitous distribution and extensively circulated
in New England by the agency of the Andover students. It was also republished at
Richmond, Va. Other laborers at the East in the same cause were Joshua Leavitt, Bela B. Edwards, and Eli Smith, afterward illustrious as a missionary, “Christian Spectator,” 1825-1828.
At the West an audacious movement of the slavery extension politicians,
flushed with their success in Missouri, to introduce slavery into Illinois, Indiana,
and even Ohio, was defeated largely by the aid of the Baptist and Methodist clergy,
many of whom had been southern men and had experienced the evils of the system. Wilson,
“Slave Power in America,” vol. i., p. 164; “James
G. Birney and his Times,” pp. 64, 65. This last-named book is an interesting and
valuable contribution of materials for history, especially by its refutation of
certain industriously propagated misrepresentations. “Birney and his Times,” chap. xii., on
“Abolition in the South
before 1828.” Much is to be learned on this neglected topic in American history
from the reports of the National Convention for the Abolition of Slavery, meeting
biennially, with some intermissions, at Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington
down to 1829. An incomplete file of these reports is at the library of Brown University. Wilson,
“The Slave Power,” vol. i., chap. xiv.
We have already recognized the Methodist organization as the effective
pioneer of systematic abolitionism in America. See above, pp. 204, 205. Newman, “The Baptists,” pp. 288, 305. Let me make general reference
to the volumes of the American Church History Series by their several indexes, s.v. Slavery. One instance for illustration is as good as ten thousand. It
is from the “Life of James G. Birney,” a man of the highest integrity of conscience:
“Michael, the husband and father of the family legally owned by Mr. Birney, and
who had been brought up with him from boyhood, had been unable to conquer his appetite
for strong liquors, and needed the constant watchful care of his master and friend.
For some years the probability was that if free he would become a confirmed drunkard
and beggar his family. The children were nearly grown, but had little mental capacity.
For years Michael had understood that his freedom would be restored to him as soon
as he could control his love of ardent spirits” (pp. 108, 109). “If human beings could be
justly held in bondage for one hour, they could be for days and weeks and years,
and so on indefinitely from generation to generation” (“Life of W. L. Garrison,” vol. i., p. 140).
The disastrous epoch of the beginning of what has been called
“the southern apostasy” from the universal moral sentiment of Christendom on the
subject of slavery may be dated at about the year 1833. A year earlier began to
be heard those vindications on political grounds of what had just been declared
in the legislature of Virginia to be by common consent the most pernicious of political
evils—vindications which continued for thirty years to invite the wonder of the
civilized world. When (about 1833) a Presbyterian minister in Mississippi, the Rev.
James Smylie, made the “discovery,” which “surprised himself,” that the system
of American slavery was sanctioned and approved “New Englander,” vol. xii., 1854, p. 639, article on
“The
Southern Apostasy.” Ibid., pp.
642-644.
The historian may not excuse himself from the task of inquiring
into the cause of this sudden and immense moral revolution. The explanation offered
by Dr. Bachman
“The Southampton insurrection, occurring at a time when the price
of slaves was depressed in consequence of a depression in the price of cotton, gave
occasion to a sudden development of opposition to slavery in the legislature of
Virginia. A measure for the prospective abolition of the institution in that ancient
commonwealth was proposed, earnestly debated, eloquently urged, and at last defeated,
with a minority ominously large in its favor. Warned by so great a peril, and strengthened
soon afterward by an increase in the market value of cotton and of slaves, the slave-holding
interest in all the South was stimulated to new activity. Defenses of slavery more
audacious than had been heard before began to be uttered by southern politicians
at home and by southern representatives and senators in Congress. A panic seized
upon the planters in some districts of the Southwest. Conspiracies “New Englander,” vol. xii., 1854, pp. 66o, 661.
There is no good reason to question the genuineness and sincerity
of the fears expressed by the slave-holding population as a justification of their
violent measures for the suppression of free speech in relation to slavery; nor
of their belief that the papers and prints actively disseminated from the antislavery
press in Boston were fitted, if not distinctly intended, to kindle bloody insurrections.
These terrors were powerfully pleaded in the great debate in the Virginia legislature
as an argument for the abolition of slavery. Wilson, “The Slave Power,” vol. i., pp. 190-207. “Biblical Repertory,” Princeton, July, 1833, pp. 294, 295,
303.
The strange and swiftly spreading moral epidemic did not stop
at State boundary lines. At the North the main cause of defection was not, indeed,
directly operative. There was no danger there of servile insurrection. But there
was true sympathy for those who lived under the shadow of such impending horrors,
threatening alike the guilty and the innocent. There was a deep passion of honest
patriotism, now becoming alarmed lest the threats of disunion proceeding from the
terrified South should prove a serious peril to the nation in whose prosperity the
hopes of the world seemed to be involved. There was a worthy solicitude lest the
bonds of intercourse between the churches of North and South should be ruptured
and so the integrity of the nation be the more imperiled. Withal there was a spreading
and deepening and most reasonable disgust at the reckless ranting of a little knot
of antislavery men having their headquarters at Boston, who, exulting in their irresponsibility,
scattered loosely appeals to men’s vindictive passions and filled the unwilling
air with clamors against church and ministry and Bible and law and government, denounced
as “pro-slavery” all who declined to accept their measures or their persons, and,
arrogating to themselves exclusively the name of abolitionist, made that name, so
long a title of honor, to be universally odious. The true story of Mr. William Lloyd Garrison and his little
party has yet to be written faithfully and fully. As told by his family and friends
and by himself, it is a monstrous falsification of history. One of the best sources
of authentic material for this chapter of history is “James G. Birney
and his Times,” by General William Birney, pp. 269-331. I may also refer to my volume,
“Irenics and Polemics” (New York, the Christian Literature Co.), pp. 145-202.
The sum of the story is given thus, in the words of Charles Sumner: “An omnibus-load
of Boston abolitionists has done more harm to the antislavery cause than all its
enemies” (“Birney,” p. 331).
These various factors of public opinion were actively manipulated.
Political parties competed for the southern vote. Commercial houses competed for
southern business. Religious sects, parties, and societies were emulous in conciliating
southern adhesions or contributions and averting schisms. The condition of success
in any of these cases was well understood to be concession, or at least silence,
on the subject of slavery. The pressure of motives, some of which were honorable
and generous, was everywhere, like the pressure of the atmosphere. It was not strange
that there should be defections from righteousness. Even the enormous effrontery
of the slave power in demanding for its own security that the rule of tyrannous
law and mob violence by which freedom of speech and of the press had been extinguished
at the South should be extended over the so-called free States did not fail of finding
citizens of reputable standing so base as to give the demand their countenance,
their public advocacy, and even their personal assistance. As the subject emerged
from time to time in the religious community, the questions arising were often confused
and embarrassed by false issues and illogical statements, and the state of opinion
was continually misrepresented through the incurable habit of the over-zealous in
denouncing as “pro-slavery” those who dissented from their favorite formulas.
But after all deductions, the historian who shall by and by review this period with
the advantage of a longer perspective will be compelled to record not a few lamentable
defections, both individual and corporate, from Birney, p. 321.
The protest of the church was of no avail to defeat the machination of demagogues. The iniquitous measure was carried through. But this was not the end; it was only the beginning of the end. Yet ten years, and American slavery, through the mad folly of its advocates and the steadfast fidelity of the great body of the earnestly religious people of the land, was swept away by the tide of war.
The long struggle of the American church against drunkenness as
a social and public evil begins at an early date. One of the thirteen colonies,
Georgia, had the prohibition of slavery and of the importation of spirituous liquors
incorporated by Oglethorpe in its early and short-lived constitution. It would be
interesting to discover, if we could, to what extent the rigor of John Wesley’s
discipline against both these mischiefs was due to his association with Oglethorpe
in the founding of that latest of the colonies. Both the imperious nature of Wesley
and the peculiar character of his fraternity as being originally not a church, but
a voluntary society within the church, predisposed to a policy of arbitrary exclusiveness
by hard and fast lines drawn according to formula, which might not have been ventured
on by one who was consciously drawing up the conditions of communion in the church.
In the Puritan colonies the public morals in respect to temperance were from the
beginning guarded by salutary license laws devised to suppress all dram-shops and
tippling-houses, and to prevent, as far as law could wisely undertake to prevent,
all abusive and mischievous sales of
“The wonderful change which the past five years have
witnessed in the manners and habits of this people in regard to the use of
ardent spirits—the new phenomenon of an intelligent people rising up, as it
were, with one consent, without law, without any attempt at legislation, to put
down by the mere force of public opinion, expressing itself in voluntary
associations, a great social evil which no despot on earth could have put down
among his subjects by any system of efforts—has excited admiration and roused to
imitation not only in our sister country of Great Britain, but in the heart of
continental Europe.” Sermon of L. Bacon (MS.), New Haven, July 4, 1830.
It is worthy of remark, for any possible instruction there may be in it, that the first, greatest, and most permanent of the victories of the temperance reformation, the breaking down of almost universal social drinking usages, was accomplished while yet the work was a distinctively religious one, “without law or attempt at legislation,” and while the efforts at suppression were directed at the use of ardent spirits. The attempt to combine the friends of temperance on a basis of “teetotal” abstinence, putting fermented as well as distilled liquors under the ban, dates from as late as 1836.
But it soon appeared that the immense gain of banishing ardent
spirits from the family table and sideboard, the social entertainment, the haying
field, and the factory had not been attained without some corresponding loss. Close
upon the heels of the reform in the domestic and social habits of the people there
was spawned a monstrous brood of obscure tippling-shops—a nuisance, at least in
New England, till then unknown. From the beginning wise and effective license laws
had interdicted all dram-shops; even the taverner might sell spirits only to his
transient guests, not to the people of the town. With the suppression of social
drinking there was effected, in spite of salutary law to the contrary, a woeful
change. The American “saloon” was, in an important sense, the offspring of
the American temperance reformation. The fact justified the reformer in turning
his attention to the law. From that time onward the history of the temperance
reformation has included the history of multitudinous experiments in
legislation, none of which has been so conclusive as to satisfy all students of
the subject that any later law is, on the whole, more usefully effective than
the original statutes of the Puritan colonies. “Eastern and Western States of America,” by J. S. Buckingham,
M. P., vol. i., pp. 408-413.
In 1840 the temperance reformation received a sudden forward impulse
from an unexpected source. One evening a group of six notoriously hard drinkers,
coming together greatly impressed from a sermon of that noted evangelist, Elder
Jacob Knapp, pledged themselves by mutual vows to total abstinence; and from this
beginning went forward that extraordinary agitation known as “the Washingtonian
movement.” Up to this time the aim of the reformers had been mainly directed to
the prevention
Certainly good was accomplished by the transient whirlwind of the “Washingtonian” excitement. But the evil that it did lived after it. Already at the time of its breaking forth the temperance reformation had entered upon that period of decadence in which its main interest was to be concentrated upon law and politics. And here the vicious ethics of the reformed-drunkard school became manifest. The drunkard, according to his own account of himself (unless he was not only reformed, but repentant), had been a victim of circumstances. Drunkenness, instead of a base and beastly sin, was an infirmity incident to a high-strung and generous temperament. The blame of it was to be laid, not upon the drunkard, whose exquisitely susceptible organization was quite unable to resist temptation coming in his way, but on those who put intoxicating liquor where he could get at it, or on the State, whose duty it was to put the article out of the reach of its citizens. The guilt of drunkenness must rest, not on the unfortunate drunkard who happened to be attacked by that disease, but on the sober and well-behaving citizen, and especially the Christian citizen, who did not vote the correct ticket.
What may be called the Prohibition period of the temperance reformation
begins about 1850 and still continues. It is characterized by the pursuit of a type
of legislation of variable efficacy or inefficacy, the essence of which is that
the sale of intoxicating liquors shall be a monopoly of the government. By a curious anomaly in church polity, adhesion to this particular
device of legislation is made constitutionally a part of the discipline of the Methodist
Episcopal Church. In most other communions liberty of judgment is permitted as to
the form of legislation best fitted to the end sought.
DURING the period from 1835 to 1845 the spirit of schism seemed to be in the air. In this period no one of the larger organizations of churches was free from agitating controversies, and some of the most important of them were rent asunder by explosion.
At the time when the Presbyterian Church suffered its great schism, in 1837, it was the most influential religious body in the United States. In 120 years its solitary presbytery had grown to 135 presbyteries, including 2140 ministers serving 2865 churches and 220,557 communicants. But these large figures are an inadequate measure of its influence. It represented in its ministry and membership the two most masterful races on the continent, the New England colonists and the Scotch-Irish immigrants; and the tenacity with which it had adhered to the tradition derived through both these lines, of admitting none but liberally educated men to its ministry, had given it exceptional social standing and control over men of intellectual strength and leadership. In the four years beginning with 1831 the additions to its roll of communicants “on examination” had numbered nearly one hundred thousand. But this spiritual growth was chilled and stunted by the dissensions that arose. The revivals ceased and the membership actually dwindled.
The contention had grown (a fact not without parallel in church history) out of measures devised in the interest of coöeration and union. In 1801, in the days of its comparative feebleness, the General Assembly had proposed to the General Association of Connecticut a “Plan of Union” according to which the communities of New England Christians then beginning to move westward between the parallels that bound “the New England zone,” and bringing with them their accustomed Congregational polity, might coöerate on terms of mutual concession with Presbyterian churches in their neighborhood. The proposals had been fraternally received and accepted, and under the terms of this compact great accessions had been made to the strength of the Presbyterian Church, of pastors and congregations marked with the intellectual activity and religious enterprise of the New England churches, who, while cordially conforming to the new methods of organization and discipline, were not in the least penetrated with the traditionary Scotch veneration for the Westminster standards. For nearly thirty years the great reinforcements from New England and from men of the New England way of thinking had been ungrudgingly bestowed and heartily welcomed. But the great accessions which in the first four years of the fourth decade of this century had increased the roll of the communicants of the Presbyterian Church by more than fifty per cent. had come in undue proportion from the New Englandized regions of western New York and Ohio. It was inevitable that the jealousy of hereditary Presbyterians, “whose were the fathers,” should be aroused by the perfectly reasonable fear lest the traditional ways of the church which they felt to be in a peculiar sense their church might be affected by so large an element from without.
The grounds of explicit complaint against the party called “New School” were principally twofold—doctrine and organization.
In the Presbyterian Church at this time were three pretty distinct
types of theological thought. First, there was the unmitigated Scotch Calvinism;
secondly, there was the modification of this system, which became naturalized in
the church after the Great Awakening, when Jonathan Dickinson and Jonathan Edwards,
from neighbor towns in Massachusetts, came to be looked upon as the great Presbyterian
theologians; thirdly, there was the “consistent Calvinism,” that had been still
further evolved by the patient labor of students in direct succession from Edwards,
and that was known under the name of “Hopkinsianism.” Just now the latest and not
the least eminent in this school, Dr. Nathaniel W. Taylor, of New Haven, was enunciating
to large and enthusiastic classes in Yale Divinity School new definitions and forms
of statement giving rise to much earnest debate. The alarm of those to whom the
very phrase “improvement in theology” was an abomination expressed itself in futile
indictments for heresy brought against some of the most eminently godly and useful
ministers in all the church. Lyman Beecher, of Lane Seminary, Edward Beecher, J.
M. Sturtevant, and William Kirby, of Illinois College, and George Duffield, of the
presbytery of Carlisle, Pa., were annoyed by impeachments for heresy, which all
failed before reaching the court of last resort. But repeated and persistent prosecutions
of Albert Barnes, of Philadelphia, were destined to more conspicuous failure, by
reason of their coming up year after year before the General Assembly, and also
by reason of the position of the accused, as pastor of the mother church of the
denomination, the First Church of Philadelphia, which was the customary meeting-place
The earliest leaders in national organization for the propagation of Christianity at home and abroad were the Congregationalists of New England and men like-minded with them. But the societies thus originated were organized on broad and catholic principles, and invited the coöeration of all Christians. They naturally became the organs of much of the active beneficence of Presbyterian congregations, and the Presbyterian clergy and laity were largely represented in the direction of them. They were recognized and commended by the representative bodies of the Presbyterian Church. As a point of high-church theory it was held by the rigidly Presbyterian party that the work of the gospel in all its departments and in all lands is the proper function of “the church as such”—meaning practically that each sect ought to have its separate propaganda. There was logical strength in this position as reached from their premisses, and there were arguments of practical convenience to be urged in favor of it. But the demand to sunder at once the bonds of fellowship which united Christians of different names in the beneficent work of the great national societies was not acceptable even to the whole of the Old-School party. To the New Englanders it was intolerable.
There were other and less important grounds of difference that
were discussed between the parties. And in Johnson, “The Southern Presbyterians,” p. 359.
It was an unpardonable offence of the New-School party that it had grown to such formidable strength, intellectually, spiritually, and numerically. The probability that the church might, with the continued growth and influence of this party, become Americanized and so lose the purity of its thoroughgoing Scotch traditions was very real, and to some minds very dreadful. To these the very ark of God seemed in danger. Arraignments for heresy in presbytery and synod resulted in failure; and when these and other cases involving questions of orthodoxy or of the policy of the church were brought into the supreme judicature of the church, the solemn but unmistakable fact disclosed itself that even the General Assembly could not be relied on for the support of measures introduced by the Old-School leaders. In fact, every Assembly from 1831 to 1836, with a single exception, had shown a clear New-School majority. The foundations were destroyed, and what should the righteous do?
History was about to repeat itself with unwonted preciseness of
detail. On the gathering of the Assembly of 1837 a careful count of noses revealed
what had been known only once before in seven years, and what might never be again—a
clear Old-School majority in the house. To the pious mind the neglecting of such
an opportunity would have been to tempt Providence. Without notice,
When the four exscinded synods, three in western New York and
one in Ohio, together with a great following of sympathizing congregations in
all parts of the country, came together to reconstruct their shattered polity,
they were found to number about four ninths of the late Presbyterian Church. For
thirty years the American church was to present to Christendom the strange
spectacle of two great ecclesiastical bodies claiming identically the same name,
holding the same doctrinal standards, observing the same ritual and governed by
the same discipline, and occupying the same great territory, and yet completely
dissevered from each other and at times in relations of sharp mutual antagonism. For the close historical parallel to the exscinding acts of
1837 see page 167, above. A later parallel, it is claimed, is found in the “virtually
exscinding act” of the General Assembly of 1861, which was the occasion of the
secession of the Southern Presbyterians. The historian of the Southern Presbyterians,
who remarks with entire complacency that the “victory” of 1837 was won “only
by virtue of an almost solid South,” seems quite unconscious that this kind of victory
could have any force as a precedent or as an estoppel (Johnson, “The Southern Presbyterians,”
pp. 335, 359). But it is natural, no doubt, that exscinding acts should look
different when examined from the muzzle instead of from the breech.
The theological debate which had split the Presbyterian Church
from end to end was quite as earnest and copious in New England. But owing to the
freer habit of theological inquiry and the looser texture of organization among
the Congregationalist churches, it made no organic schism beyond the setting up
of a new theological seminary
The unlikeliest place in all American Christendom for a partisan
controversy and a schism would have seemed to be the Unitarian denomination in and
about Boston. Beginning with the refusal not only of any imposed standard of belief,
but of any statement of common opinions, and with unlimited freedom of opinion in
every direction, unless, perhaps, in the direction of orthodoxy, it was not easy
to see how a splitting wedge could be started in it. But the infection of the time
was not to be resisted. Even Unitarianism must have its heresies and heresiarchs
to deal with. No sooner did the pressure of outside attack abate than antagonisms
began pretty sharply to declare themselves. In 1832 Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson, pastor
of the Second Church in Boston, proposed to the church to abandon or radically change
the observance of the Lord’s Supper. When the church demurred at this extraordinary
demand he resigned his office, firing off an elaborate argument against the usage
of the church by way of a parting salute. Without any formal demission of the ministry,
he retired to his literary seclusion at Concord, from which he brought forth in
books and lectures the oracular utterances which caught more and more the ear of
a wide public, and in which, in casual-seeming parentheses and
obiter dicta, Christianity and all practical religion were condemned by sly innuendo and half-respectful
allusion by which he might “without sneering teach the rest to sneer.” In 1838
he was still so far recognized in the ministry as to be invited to address the graduating
class of the Harvard Divinity School. The blank pantheism which he then enunciated
called forth from Professor
“It strikes me very oddly that good and wise men at Cambridge should think of raising me into an object of criticism. I have always been, from my incapacity of methodical writing, ‘a chartered libertine,’ free to worship and free to rail, lucky when I could make myself understood, but never esteemed near enough to the institutions and mind of society to deserve the notice of masters of literature and religion. . . . I could not possibly give you one of the ‘arguments’ you so cruelly hint at on which any doctrine of mine stands, for I do not know what arguments mean in reference to any expression of thought. I delight in telling what I think, but if you ask me how I dare say so, or why it is so, I am the most helpless of mortal men. I do not even see that either of these questions admits of an answer. So that in the present droll posture of my affairs, when I see myself suddenly raised into the importance of a heretic, I am very uneasy when I advert to the supposed duties of such a personage who is to make good his thesis against all comers. I certainly shall do no such thing.”
The issue was joined and the controversy began. Professor Andrews
Norton in a pamphlet denounced “the latest form of infidelity,” and the Rev. George
Ripley replied in a volume, to which Professor Norton issued a rejoinder. But there
was not substance enough of religious dogma and sentiment in the transcendentalist
philosophers
Among the minor combatants in the conflict between the Unitarians
and the pantheists was a young man whose name was destined to become conspicuous,
not within the Unitarian fellowship, but on the outskirts of it. Theodore Parker
was a man of a different type from the men about him of either party. The son of
a mechanic, he fought his way through difficulties to a liberal education, and was
thirty years old before his very great abilities attracted general attention. A
greedy gormandizer of books in many languages, he had little of the dainty scholarship
so much prized at the neighboring university. But the results of his vast reading
were stored in a quick and tenacious memory as ready rhetorical material wherewith
to convince or astonish. Paradox was a passion with him, that was stimulated by
complaints, and even by deprecations, to the point of irreverence. He liked to “make people’s flesh crawl.” Even in his advocacy of social and public reforms, which
was strenuous and sincere, he delighted so to urge his cause as to inflame prejudice
and opposition against it. With this temper it is not strange that when he came
to enunciate his departure from some of the accepted tenets of his brethren, who
were habitually reverent in their discipleship toward Jesus Christ, he should do
this in a way to offend and shock. The immediate reaction of the Unitarian clergy
from the statements of his sermon, in 1841, on “The Transient and the Permanent
in Christianity,” in which the supernatural was boldly discarded from his belief,
was so general and so earnest as to give occasion to Channing’s exclamation,
“Now
we
Two very great events in this period of schism may be dispatched with a brevity out of all proportion to their importance, on account of the simplicity of motive and action by which they are characterized.
In the year 1844 the slavery agitation in the Methodist Episcopal
Church culminated, not in the rupture of the church, but in the well-considered,
deliberate division of it between North and South. The history of the slavery question
among the Methodists was a typical one. From the beginning the Methodist Society
had been committed by its founder and his early successors to the strictest (not
the strongest) position on this question. Not only was the system of slavery denounced
as iniquitous, but the attempt was made to enforce the rigid rule that persons involved
under this system in the relation of master to slave should be excluded from the
ministry, if not from the communion. But the enforcement of this rule was found
to be not only difficult, but wrong, and difficult simply because it was wrong.
Then followed that illogical confusion of ideas studiously fostered by zealots at
either extreme: If the slave-holder may be in some circumstances a faithful Christian
disciple, fulfilling in righteousness and love a Christian duty, then slavery is
right; if slavery is wrong, then every slave-holder is a manstealer, and should
be excommunicated as such without asking any further questions. Two statements more
palpably illogical were never put forth for the darkening of counsel.
Under the fierce tyranny then dominant at the South the southern Baptists might not fall behind their Methodist neighbors in zeal for slavery. This time it was the South that forced the issue. The Alabama Baptist Convention, without waiting for a concrete case, demanded of the national missionary boards “the distinct, explicit avowal that slave-holders are eligible and entitled equally with non-slave-holders to all the privileges and immunities of their several unions.” The answer of the Foreign Mission Board was perfectly kind, but, on the main point, perfectly unequivocal: “We can never be a party to any arrangement which would imply approbation of slavery.” The result had been foreseen. The great denomination was divided between North and South. The Southern Baptist Convention was organized in May, 1845, and began its home and foreign missionary work without delay.
This dark chapter of our story is not without its brighter aspects.
(1) Amid the inevitable asperities attendant on such debate and division there were
many and beautiful manifestations of brotherly love between the separated parties.
(2) These strifes fell out to the furtherance of the gospel. Emulations, indeed,
are not among the works of
Two important orders in the American church, which for a time had almost faded out from our field of vision, come back, from about this epoch of debate and division, into continually growing conspicuousness and strength. Neither of them was implicated in that great debate involving the fundamental principles of the kingdom of heaven,—the principles of righteousness and love to men,—by which other parts of the church had been agitated and sometimes divided. Whether to their discredit or to their honor, it is a part of history that neither the Protestant Episcopal Church nor the Roman Catholic Church took any important part, either corporately or through its representative men, in the agonizing struggle of the American church to maintain justice and humanity in public law and policy. But standing thus aloof from the great ethical questions that agitated the conscience of the nation, they were both of them disturbed by controversies internal or external, which demand mention at least in this chapter.
The beginning of the resuscitation of the Protestant Episcopal
Church from the dead-and-alive condition in which it had so long been languishing
is dated from the year 1811. Tiffany, chap. xv.
The time was opportune and the conjuncture of circumstances singularly
favorable. The stigma of Toryism, which had marked the church from long before the
War of Independence, was now more than erased. In New England the Episcopal Church
was of necessity committed to that political party which favored the abolition of
the privileges of the standing order; and this was the anti-English party, which,
under the lead of Jefferson, was fast forcing the country into war with England.
The Episcopalians were now in a position to retort the charge of disloyalty under
which they had not unjustly suffered. At the same time their church lost nothing
of the social prestige incidental to its relation to the established Church of England.
Politicians of the Democratic party, including some men of well-deserved credit
and influence, naturally attached themselves to a religious party having many points
of congeniality. The intense antagonism of the New England Congregationalists
to Jefferson and his party as representing French infidelity and Jacobinism admits
of many striking illustrations. The sermon of Nathanael Emmons on “Jeroboam the
son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin” is characterized by Professor Park as “a
curiosity in politico-homiletical literature.” At this distance it is not difficult
to see that the course of this clergy was far more honorable to its boldness and
independence than to its discretion and sense of fitness. Both its virtues and its
faults had a tendency to strengthen an opposing party.
In another sense, also, the time was opportune for an advance
of the Episcopal Church. In the person of Bishop Hobart it had now a bold, energetic,
and able representative of principles hitherto not much in favor in America —the
thoroughgoing High-church principles of Archbishop Laud. Before this time the Episcopal
Church had Hobart’s sermon at the consecration of Right Rev. H. U. Onderdonk,
Philadelphia, 1827.
The result of the long conflict was not immediately apparent. It was not only that “high” opinions, even the highest of the Tractarian school, were to be tolerated within the church, but that the High-church party was to be the dominant party. The Episcopal Church was to stand before the public as representing, not that which it held in common with the other churches of the country, but that which was most distinctive. From this time forth the “Evangelical” party continued relatively to decline, down to the time, thirty years later, when it was represented in the inconsiderable secession of the “Reformed Episcopal Church.” The combination of circumstances and influences by which this party supremacy was brought about is an interesting study, for which, however, there is no room in this brief compendium of history.
A more important fact is this: that in spite of these agitating
internal strifes, and even by reason of them, the growth of the denomination was
wonderfully rapid and strong. No fact in the external history of the American church
at this period is more imposing than this growth of the Episcopal Church from nothing
to a really commanding stature. It is easy to enumerate minor influences tending
to this result, some of which are not of high spiritual dignity; but these must
not be overestimated. The nature of this growth, as well as the numerical amount
of it, requires to be considered. This strongly distinguished order in the American
church has been aggrandized, not, to any great degree, by immigration, nor by conquest
from the ranks of the irreligious, but by a continual stream of accessions both
to its laity and to its clergy from other sects of the church. These accessions
have of
In the Roman Catholic Church of the United States,
The conflict with trusteeism was only one out of many conflicts
which gave abundant exercise to the administrative abilities of the American bishops.
The mutual jealousies of the various nationalities and races among the
One disturbing element by which the Roman Catholic Church in some European countries has been sorely vexed makes no considerable figure in the corresponding history in America. There has never been here any “Liberal Catholic” party. The fact stands in analogy with many like facts. Visitors to America from the established churches of England or Scotland or Germany have often been surprised to find the temper of the old-country church so much broader and less rigid than that of the daughter church in the new and free republic. The reason is less recondite than might be supposed. In the old countries there are retained in connection with the state-church, by constraint of law or of powerful social or family influences, many whose adhesion to its distinctive tenets and rules is slight and superficial. It is out of such material that the liberal church party grows. In the migration it is not that the liberal churchman becomes more strict, but that, being released from outside pressure, he becomes less of a churchman. He easily draws off from his hereditary communion and joins himself to some other, or to none at all. This process of evaporation leaves behind it a strong residuum in which all characteristic elements are held as in a saturated solution.
A further security of the American Catholic Church against the
growth of any “Liberal Catholic” party like those of continental Europe is the
absolutist organization of the hierarchy under the personal government of the pope.
In these last few centuries great progress has been made by the Roman see in extinguishing
the ancient traditions of local or national independence in the election of bishops.
Nevertheless in Catholic Europe important relics For a fuller account of the dissensions in the Catholic Church,
consult, by index, Bishop O’Gorman’s “History.” On the modern organization of the
episcopate in complete dependence on the Holy See, consult the learned article on
“Episcopal Elections,” by Dr. Peries, of the Catholic University at Washington,
in the “American Catholic Quarterly Review” for January, 1896; also the remarks
of Archbishop Kenrick, of St. Louis, in his “Concio in Concilio Vaticano Habenda
at non Habita,” in “An Inside View of the Vatican Council,” by L. W. Bacon,
pp. 61, 121.
During the whole of this dreary decade there were “fightings
without” as well as within for the Catholic Church in the United States. Its great
and sudden growth solely by immigration had made it distinctively a church of foreigners,
and chiefly of Irishmen. The conditions were favorable for the development of a
race prejudice aggravated by a religious antipathy. It was a good time for the impostor,
the fanatic, and the demagogue to get in their work. In Boston, in 1834, the report
that a woman was detained against her will in the Ursuline convent at Charlestown,
near Boston, led to the burning of the building by a drunken mob. The Titus Oates
of the American no-popery panic, in 1836, was an infamous woman named Maria Monk,
whose monstrous stories of secret horrors perpetrated in a convent in Montreal,
in A satirical view of these concessions, in the vast dimensions
which they had reached twenty-five years later in the city and county of New York,
was published in two articles, “Our Established Church,” and “The Unestablished
Church,” in “Putnam’s Magazine” for July and December, 1869. The articles
were reissued in a pamphlet, “with an explanatory and exculpatory preface, and
sundry notices of the contemporary press.” A studiously careful account of the Philadelphia riots of 1844
is given in the “New Englander,” vol. ii. 470, 624. (1844), pp. 624. This account of the schisms of the period is of course not complete.
The American Missionary Association, since distinguished for successful labors chiefly
among the freedmen, grew out of dissatisfaction felt by men of advanced antislavery
views with the position of the “American Board” and the American Home Missionary
Society on the slavery question. The organization of it was matured in 1846. A very
fruitful schism in its results was that which, in 1835, planted a cutting from Lane
Seminary at Cincinnati, in the virgin soil at Oberlin, Ohio. The beginning thus
made with a class in theology has grown into a noble and widely beneficent institution,
the influence of which has extended to the ends of the land and of the world. The division of the Society of Friends into the two societies
known as Hicksite and Orthodox is of earlier date—1827-28. No attempt is made in this volume to chronicle the interminable
splittings and reunitings of the Presbyterian sects of Scottish extraction. A curious
diagram, on page 146 of volume xi. of the present series, illustrates the sort of
task which such a chronicle involves. An illustration of the way in which the extreme defenders of slavery
and the extreme abolitionists sustained each other in illogical statements (see
above, pp. 301, 302) is found in Dr. Thornwell’s claim (identical with Mr. Garrison’s)
that if slavery is wrong, then all slave-holders ought to be excommunicated (vol.
vi., p. 157, note). Dr. Thornwell may not have been the “mental and moral
giant” that he appears to his admirers (see Professor Johnson in vol. xi., p. 355),
but he was an intelligent and able man, quite too clear-headed to be imposed upon
by a palpable “ambiguous middle,” except for his excitement in the heat of a
desperate controversy with the moral sense of all Christendom.
AT the taking of the first census of the United States, in 1790, the country contained a population of about four millions in its territory of less than one million of square miles.
Sixty years later, at the census of 1850, it contained a population of more than twenty-three millions in its territory of about three millions of square miles.
The vast expansion of territory to more than threefold the great
original domain of the United States had been made by honorable purchase or less
honorable conquest. It had not added largely to the population of the nation; the
new acquisitions were mainly of unoccupied land. The increase of the population,
down to about 1845, was chiefly the natural increase of a hardy and prolific stock
under conditions in the highest degree favorable to such increase. Up to the year
1820 the recent immigration had been inconsiderable. In the ten years 1820-29 the
annual arrival of immigrants was nine thousand. In the next decade, 1830-39, the
annual arrival was nearly thirty-five thousand, or a hundred a day. For forty years
the total immigration from all quarters was much less than a half-million. In the
course of the next three decades, from 1840 to 1869, there arrived in the United
States from
Under the pressure of a less copious flood of incursion the greatest
empire in all history, strongest in arts and polity as well as arms, had perished
utterly. If Rome, with her population of one hundred and twenty millions, her genius
for war and government, and her long-compacted civilization, succumbed under a less
sudden rush of invasion, what hope was there for the young American Republic, with
its scanty population and its new and untried institutions? For condensed statistics of American immigration, see
“Encyclopaedia
Britannica,” 9th ed., s.vv. “Emigration” and “United States.” For the facts
concerning the Roman Empire one naturally has recourse to Gibbon. From the indications
there given we do not get the impression that in the three centuries of the struggle
of the empire against the barbarians there was ever such a thirty years’ flood of
invasion as the immigration into the United States from 1840 to 1869. The entrance
into the Roman Empire was indeed largely in the form of armed invasion; but the
most destructive influence of the barbarians was when they were admitted as friends
and naturalized as citizens. See “Encyclopaedia Britannica,” vol. xx., pp. 779,
780.
An impressive providential combination of causes determined this
great historic movement of population at this time. It was effected by attractions
in front of the emigrant, reinforced by impulses from behind. The conclusion of
the peace of 1815 was followed by the beginning of an era of great public works,
one of the first of which was the digging of the Erie Canal. This sort of enterprise
makes an immediate demand for large forces of unskilled laborers; and in both hemispheres
it has been observed to occasion movements of population out of Catholic countries
As if it had been the divine purpose not only to draw forth, but to drive forth, the populations of the Old World to make their homes in the New, there was added to all these causes conducive to migration the Irish famine of 1846-47, and the futile revolutions of 1848, with the tyrannical reactions which followed them. But the great stimulus to migration was the success and prosperity that attended it. It was “success that succeeded.” The great emigration agent was the letter written to his old home by the new settler, in multitudes of cases inclosing funds to pay the passage of friends whom he had left behind him.
The great immigration that began about 1845 is distinguished from some of the early colonizations in that it was in no sense a religious movement. Very grave religious results were to issue from it; but they were to be achieved through the unconscious coöeration of a multitude of individuals each intent with singleness of vision on his own individual ends. It is by such unconscious coöeration that the directing mind and the overruling hand of God in history are most signally illustrated.
In the first rush of this increased immigration by far the greatest contributor of new population was Ireland. It not only surpassed any other country in the number of its immigrants, but in the height of the Irish exodus, in the decade 1840-50, it nearly equaled all other countries of the world together. The incoming Irish millions were almost solidly Roman Catholic. The measures taken by the British government for many generations to attach the Irish people to the crown and convert them to the English standard of Protestantism had had the result of discharging upon our shores a people distinguished above all Christendom besides for its ardent and unreserved devotion to the Roman Church, and hardly less distinguished for its hatred to England.
After the first flood-tide the relative number of the Irish immigrants
began to decrease, and has kept on decreasing until now. Since the Civil War the
chief source of immigration has been Germany and its contributions to our population
have greatly aggrandized the Lutheran denomination, once so inconsiderable in numbers,
until in many western cities it is the foremost of the Protestant communions, and
in Chicago outnumbers the communicants of the Episcopalian, the Presbyterian, and
the Methodist churches combined. Jacobs, “The Lutherans,” p. 446.
The vast growth of the Roman Catholic Church in America could not but fill its clergy and adherents with wonder and honest pride. But it was an occasion of immense labors and not a little anxiety. One effect of the enormous immigration was inevitably to impose upon this church, according to the popular apprehension, the character of a foreign association, and, in the earlier periods of the influx, of an Irish association. It was in like manner inevitable, from the fact that the immigrant class are preponderantly poor and of low social rank, that it should for two or three generations be looked upon as a church for the illiterate and unskilled laboring class. An incident of the excessive torrent rush of the immigration was that the Catholic Church became to a disproportionate extent an urban institution, making no adequate provision for the dispersed in agricultural regions.
Against these and other like disadvantages the hierarchy of the
Catholic Church have straggled heroically, with some measure of success. The steadily
rising character of the imported population in its successive generations has aided
them. If in the first generations the churches were congregations of immigrants
served by an imported clergy, the most strenuous exertions were made for the founding
of institutions that should secure to future congregations born upon the soil the
services of an American-trained priesthood. One serious hindrance to the noble advances
that have nevertheless been made in this direction has been the fanatical opposition
levied against even the most beneficent enterprises of the church by a bigoted Native-Americanism. Bishop O’Gorman,
“The Roman Catholics,” p. 375. The atrocity
of such a plot seems incredible. We should have classed it at once with the Maria
Monk story, and other fabulous horrors of Dr. Brownlee’s Protestant Society, but
that we find it in the sober and dispassionate pages of Bishop O’Gorman’s History,
which is derived from original sources of information. If anything could have justified
the animosity of the “native Americans” (who, by the way, were widely suspected
to be, in large proportion, native Ulstermen) it would have been the finding of
evidence of such facts as this which Bishop O’Gorman has disclosed.
The utmost that could have been hoped for by the devoted but inadequate
body of the Roman Catholic clergy in America, overwhelmed by an influx of their
people coming in upon them in increasing volume, numbering millions per annum, was
that they might be able to hold their own. But this hope was very far from being
attained. How great have been the losses to the Roman communion through the transplantation
of its members across the sea is a question to which the most widely varying answers
have been given, and on which statistical exactness seems unattainable. The various
estimates, agreeing in nothing else, agree in representing them as enormously great. The
subject is reviewed in detail, from opposite points of view,
by Bishop O’Gorman, pp. 489-500, and by Dr. Daniel Dorchester, “Christianity
in the United States,” pp. 618-621. One of the most recent estimates is that presented
to the Catholic Congress at Chicago, in 1893, in a remarkable speech by Mr. M. T.
Elder, of New Orleans. Speaking of “the losses sustained by the church in this country,
placed by a conservative estimate at twenty millions of people, he laid the responsibility
for this upon neglect of immigration and colonization, i.e., neglect of the rural
population. From this results a long train of losses.” He added: “When I see how
largely Catholicity is represented among our hoodlum element, I feel in no spread-eagle
mood. When I note how few Catholics are engaged in honestly tilling the honest soil,
and how many Catholics are engaged in the liquor traffic, I cannot talk buncombe
to anybody. When I reflect that out of the 70,000,000 of this nation we number only
9,000,000, and that out of that 9,000,000 so large a proportion is made up of poor
factory hands, poor mill and shop and mine and railroad employees, poor government
clerks, I still fail to find material for buncombe or spread-eagle or taffy-giving.
And who can look at our past history and feel proud of our present status?” He
advocated as a remedy for this present state of things a movement toward colonization,
with especial attention to extension of educational advantages for rural Catholics,
and instruction of urban Catholics in the advantages of rural life. “For so long
as the rural South, the pastoral West, the agricultural East, the farming Middle
States, remain solidly Protestant, as they now are, so long will this nation, this
government, this whole people, remain solidly Protestant” (“The World’s Parliament
of Religions,” pp. 1414, 1415). It is a fact not easy to be accounted for that the statistics
of no Christian communion in America are so defective, uncertain, and generally
unsatisfactory as those of the most solidly organized and completely systematized
of them all, the Roman Catholic Church.
All good men will also agree that in so far as these losses represent mere lapses into unbelief and irreligion they are to be deplored. Happily there is good evidence of a large salvage, gathered into other churches, from what so easily becomes a shipwreck of faith with total loss.
It might seem surprising, in view of the many and diverse resources
of attractive influence which the Roman Church has at its command, that its losses
have not been to some larger extent compensated by conversions from other sects.
Instances of such conversion are by no means wanting; but so far as a popular current
toward Catholicism is concerned, the attractions in that direction are outweighed
by the disadvantages already referred to. It has not been altogether a detriment
to the Catholic Church in America that the social status and personal composition
of
He is a bold man who will undertake to predict in detail the future
of the Roman Church in America. To say that it will be modified by its surroundings
is only to say what is true of it in all countries. To say that it will be modified
for the better is to say what is true of it in all Protestant countries. Nowhere
is the Roman Church so pure from scandal and so effective for good as where it is
closely surrounded and jealously scrutinized by bodies of its fellow-Christians
whom it is permitted to recognize only as heretics. But when the influence of surrounding
heresy is seen to be an indispensable blessing to the church, the heretic himself
comes to be looked upon with a mitigated horror. Not with the sacrifice of any principle,
but through the application of some of those provisions by which the Latin theology
is able to meet exigencies like this,—the allowance in favor of “invincible ignorance” and prejudice, the distinction between the body and
“the
“If there is any one thing more than another upon which people
agree, it is respect and reverence for the person and the character of the Founder
of Christianity. How the Protestant loves his Saviour! How the Protestant eye will
sometimes grow dim when speaking of our Lord! In this great center of union is
found the hope of human society, the only means of preserving Christian civilization,
the only point upon which Catholic and Protestant may meet. As if foreseeing that
this should be, Christ himself gave his example of fraternal charity, not to the
orthodox Jew, but to the heretical Samaritan, showing that charity and love, while
faith remains intact, can never “Parliament of Religions,” p. 1417. An obvious verbal misprint
is corrected in the quotation.
Herein is fellowship higher than that of symbols and sacraments. By so far as it receives this spirit of love the American Catholic Church enters into its place in that greater Catholic Church of which we all make mention in the Apostles’ Creed—“the Holy Universal Church, which is the fellowship of holy souls.”
The effect of the Great Immigration on the body of the immigrant
population is not more interesting or more important than the effect of it on the
religious bodies already in occupation of the soil. The impression made on them
by what seemed an irruption of barbarians of strange language or dialect, for the
most part rude, unskilled, and illiterate, shunning as profane the Christian churches
of the land, and bowing in unknown rites as devotees of a system known, and by no
means favorably known, only through polemic literature and history, and through
the gruesome traditions of Puritan and Presbyterian and Huguenot, was an impression
not far removed from horror; and this impression was deepened as the enormous proportions
of this invasion disclosed themselves from year to year. The serious and not unreasonable
fear that these armies of aliens, handled as they manifestly were by a generalship
that was quick to seize and fortify in a conspicuous way the strategic points of
influence, especially in the new States, might imperil or ruin the institutions
and liberties of the young Republic, was stimulated and exploited in the interest
of enterprises of evangelization that might counter-work the operations of the invading
church. The appeals Bishop O’Gorman, pp. 439, 440. James Parton, in the
“Atlantic
Monthly,” April and May, 1868. So lately as the year 1869 a long list of volumes
of this scandalous rubbish continued to be offered to the public, under the indorsement
of eminent names, by the “American and Foreign Christian Union,” until the society
was driven by public exposure into withdrawing them from sale. See “The Literature
of the Coming Controversy,” in “Putnam’s Magazine” for January, 1869.
The danger to the Republic, which was thus malignantly or ignorantly
exaggerated and distorted, was nevertheless real and grave. No sincerely earnest
and religious Protestant, nor even any well-informed patriotic citizen, with the
example of French and Spanish America before his eyes, could look with tolerance
upon the prospect of a possible Catholicizing of the new States at the West; and
the sight of the incessant tide of immigration setting westward, the reports of
large funds sent hither from abroad to aid the propagation of the Roman Church,
and the accounts of costly and imposing ecclesiastical buildings rising at the most
important centers of population, roused the Christian patriotism of the older States
to the noblest enterprises of evangelization. There was no wasting of energy in
futile disputation. In all the Protestant communions it was felt that the work called
for was a simple, peaceful, and positive one—to plant the soil of the West, at the
first occupation of it by settlers, with Christian institutions and influences.
The immensity of the task stimulated rather than dismayed the zeal of the various churches. The work undertaken and accomplished in the twenty years from 1840 to
1860 in providing the newly settled regions with churches, pastors, colleges, and
theological seminaries, with Sunday-schools, and with Bibles
The work of planting the church in the West exhibits the voluntary system at its best—and at its worst. A task so vast and so momentous has never been imposed on the resources of any state establishment. It is safe to say that no established church has ever existed, however imperially endowed, that would have been equal to the undertaking of it. With no imposing combination of forces, and no strategic concert of action, the work was begun spontaneously and simultaneously, like some of the operations of nature, by a multitude of different agencies, and went forward uninterrupted to something as nearly like completeness as could be in a work the exigencies of which continually widened beyond all achievements. The planting of the church in the West is one of the wonders of church history.
But this noble act of religious devotion was by no means a sacrifice
without blemish. The sacred zeal for advancing God’s reign and righteousness was
mingled with many very human motives in the progress of it. Conspicuous among these
was the spirit of sectarian competition. The worthy and apostolic love for kindred
according to the flesh separated from home and exposed to the privations and temptations
of the frontier, the honest anxiety to forestall the domination of a dangerously
powerful religious corporation propagating perverted views of truth, even the desire
to advance principles and forms of belief deemed to be important, were infused with
a spirit of partisanship as little spiritual as the enthusiasm which animates the
strugglers and the shouters at a foot-ball game. The devoted pioneer of the gospel
on the frontier, seeing his work
If the effect of these emulations on the contributing churches was rather carnal than spiritual, the effect in the mission field was worse. The effect was seen in the squandering of money and of priceless service of good men and women, in the debilitating and demoralizing division and subdivision of the Christian people, not of cities and large towns, but of villages and hamlets and of thinly settled farming districts. By the building of churches and other edifices for sectarian uses, schism was established for coming time as a vested interest. The gifts and service bestowed in this cause with a truly magnificent liberality would have sufficed to establish the Christian faith and fellowship throughout the new settlements in strength and dignity, in churches which, instead of lingering as puny and dependent nurslings, would have grown apace to be strong and healthy nursing mothers to newer churches yet.
There is an instructive contrast, not only between the working
of the voluntary system and that of the Old World establishments, but between
the methods of the Catholic Church and the Protestant no-method. Under the control
of a strong coordinating authority the competitions of the various Catholic orders,
however sharp, could never be
On the whole, notwithstanding its immense armies of immigrants
and the devoted labors of its priests, and notwithstanding its great expansion,
visible everywhere in conspicuous monuments of architecture, the Catholic advance
in America has not been, comparatively speaking, successful. For one thing, the
campaign was carried on too far from its base of supplies. The subsidies from Lyons
and Vienna, liberal as they were, were no match for the home missionary zeal of
the seaboard States in Speech of Mr. M. T. Elder, of New Orleans, in the Catholic Congress
at Chicago, 1893, quoted above, p. 322, note.
In the westward propagation of Protestantism, as well as of Catholicism, the distinctive attributes of the several sects or orders is strikingly illustrated.
Foremost in the pioneer work of the church are easily to be recognized
the Methodists and the Baptists, one the most solidly organized of the Protestant
sects, the other the most uncompact and individualist; the first by virtue of the
supple military organization of its great corps of itinerants, the other by the
simplicity and popular apprehensibleness of its distinctive tenets and arguments
and the aggressive ardor with which it inspires all its converts, and both by their
facility in recruiting their ministry from the rank and file of the church, without
excluding any by arbitrarily imposed conditions. The Presbyterians were heavily
cumbered for advance work by traditions and rules which they were rigidly reluctant
to yield or bend, even when the reason for the rule was superseded by higher reasons.
The argument for a learned ministry is doubtless a weighty one; but it does not
suffice to prove that when college-bred men are not to be had it is better that
the people have no minister at all. There is virtue in the rule of ministerial parity;
but it should not be allowed to hinder the church from employing in humbler spiritual
functions men who fall below the prescribed standard. This the church, in course
of time, discovered, and instituted a “minor order” of ministers, under the title
of colporteurs. But it was timidly and tardily done, and therefore ineffectively.
The Presbyterians lost their place in the skirmish-line; but that which had been
their hindrance in the advance work gave them great advantage in settled communities,
in which for many years they took
To the Congregationalists belongs an honor in the past which, in recent generations, they have not been jealous to retain. Beyond any sect, except the Moravians, they have cherished that charity which seeketh not her own. The earliest leaders in the organization of schemes of national beneficence in coöeration with others, they have sustained them with unselfish liberality, without regard to returns of sectarian advantage. The results of their labor are largely to be traced in the upbuilding of other sects. Their specialty in evangelization has been that of the religious educators of the nation. They have been preeminently the builders of colleges and theological seminaries. To them, also, belongs the leadership in religious journalism. Not only the journals of their own sect and the undenominational journals, but also to a notable extent the religious journals of other denominations, have depended for their efficiency on men bred in the discipline of Congregationalism.
It is no just reproach to the Episcopalians that they were tardy
in entering the field of home missions. When we remember that it is only since 1811
that they have emerged from numerical insignificance, we find their contribution
to the planting of the church in the new settlements to be a highly honorable one.
By a suicidal compact the guileless Evangelical party agreed, in 1835, to take direction
of the foreign missions of the church, and leave the home field under the direction
of the aggressive High-church party. It surrendered its part in the future of the
church, and determined the type of Episcopalianism that was to be planted in the
West. Tiffany, “Protestant Episcopal Church,” p. 459.
One must needs ascend to a certain altitude above the common level in order to discern a substantial resultant unity of movement in the strenuous rivalries and even antagonisms of the many sects of the one church of Christ in America in that critical quarter-century from the year 1835 to the outbreak of the Civil War, in which the work of the church was suddenly expanded by the addition of a whole empire of territory on the west, and the bringing in of a whole empire of alien population from the east, and when no one of the Christian forces of the nation could be spared from the field. The unity is very real, and is visible enough, doubtless, from “the circle of the heavens.” The sharers in the toil and conflict and the near spectators are not well placed to observe it. It will be for historians in some later century to study it in a truer perspective.
It is not only as falling within this period of immigration, Carroll, “Religious Forces of the United States,” pp. 165-174;
Bishop Tuttle, in “Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia,” pp. 1575-1581; Professor John Fraser,
in “Encyclopaedia Britannica,” vol. xvi., pp. 825-828; Dorchester, “Christianity
in the United States,” pp. 538-646.
To this same period belongs the beginning of the immigration
In the year 1843 culminated the panic agitation of Millerism. From the year 1831 an honest Vermont farmer named William Miller had been urging upon the public, in pamphlets and lectures, his views of the approaching advent of Christ to judgment and the destruction of the world. He had figured it out on the basis of prophecies in Daniel and the Revelation, and the great event was set down for April 23, 1843. As the date drew near the excitement of many became intense. Great meetings were held, in the open air or in tents, of those who wished to be found waiting for the Lord. Some nobly proved their sincerity by the surrender of their property for the support of their poorer brethren until the end should come. The awful day was awaited with glowing rapture of hope, or by some with terror. When it dawned there was eager gazing upon the clouds of heaven to descry the sign of the Son of man. And when the day had passed without event there were various revulsions of feeling. The prophets set themselves to going over their figures and fixing new dates; earnest believers, sobered by the failure of their pious expectations, held firmly to the substance of their faith and hope, while no longer attempting to “know times and seasons, which the Father hath put within his own power”; weak minds made shipwreck of faith; and scoffers cried in derision, “Where is the promise of his coming?” A monument of this honest delusion still exists in the not very considerable sect of Adventists, with its subdivisions; but sympathizers with their general scheme of prophetical interpretation are to be found among the most earnest and faithful members of other churches.
Such has been the progress of Scriptural knowledge
To this period also must be referred the rise of that system of
necromancy which, originating in America, has had great vogue in other countries,
and here in its native land has taken such form as really to constitute a new cult.
Making no mention of sporadic instances of what in earlier generations would have
been called (and properly enough) by the name of witchcraft, we find the beginning
of so-called “spiritualism” in the “Rochester rappings,” produced, to the wonder
of many witnesses, by “the Fox girls” in 1849. How the rappings and other sensible
phenomena were produced was a curious question, but not important; the main question
was, Did they convey communications from the spirits of the dead, as the young women
alleged, and as many persons believed (so they thought) from demonstrative evidence? The mere suggestion of the possibility of this of course awakened an inquisitive
and eager interest everywhere. It became the subject of universal discussion and
experiment in society. There was demand for other “mediums” to satisfy curiosity
or aid investigation; and the demand at once produced a copious supply. The business
of medium became a regular profession, opening a career especially to enterprising “Report of the Seybert Commission,” Philadelphia, Lippincott.
IT has been observed that for nearly half a generation after the reaction began from the fervid excitement of the Millerite agitation no season of general revival was known in the American church.
These were years of immense material prosperity, “the golden
age of our history.” E. B. Andrews, “History of the United States,” vol. ii., p.
66.
Withal it was a time of continually deepening intensity of political
agitation. The patchwork of compromises and settlements contrived by make-shift
politicians like Clay and Douglas would not hold; they tore out, and the rent was
made worse. Part of the Compromise of 1850, which was to be something altogether
sempiternal, was a Fugitive Slave Law so studiously base and wicked in its provisions
as to stir the indignation of just and generous men whenever it was enforced, and
to instruct and strengthen and consolidate an intelligent and conscientious opposition
Those were choice companies; it was said that in some of their
settlements every third man was a college graduate. Thus it was that, not all at
once, but after desperate tribulations, Kansas was saved for freedom. It was the
turning-point in the “irrepressible conflict.” The beam of the scales,
which politicians had for forty years been trying to hold level, dipped in favor
of liberty and justice, and it was hopeless thenceforth to restore the balance. Read
“The Kansas Crusade,” by Eli Thayer, Harpers, New York,
1889. It is lively reading, and indispensable to a full understanding of this part
of the national history.
Neither of the two characteristics of this time, the abounding material prosperity or the turbid political agitation, was favorable to that fixed attention to spiritual themes which promotes the revival of religion. But the conditions were about to be suddenly changed.
Suddenly, in the fall of 1857, came a business revulsion. Hard
times followed. Men had leisure for thought and prayer, and anxieties that they
were fain to cast upon God, seeking help and direction. The happy thought occurred
to a good man, Jeremiah Lanphier, in the employ of the old North Dutch Church in
New York, to open a room in the “consistory building” in Fulton Street as an oratory
for the common prayer of so many business men as might be disposed to gather there
in the hour from twelve to one o’clock, “with one accord to make their common supplications.”
The invitation was responded to at first by hardly more than “two or three.” The
number grew. The room overflowed. A second room was opened, and then a third, in
the same building, till all its walls resounded with prayer and song. The example
was
What was true of New York was true, in its measure, of every city,
village, and hamlet in the land. It was the Lord’s doing, marvelous in men’s eyes.
There was no human leadership or concert of action in bringing it about. It came.
Not only were there no notable evangelists traveling the country; even the pastors
of churches did little more than enter zealously into their happy duty in things
made ready to their hand. Elsewhere, as at New York, the work began with the spontaneous
gathering of private Christians, stirred by an unseen influence. Two circumstances
tended to promote the diffusion of the revival. The Young Men’s Christian Association,
then a recent but rapidly spreading institution, furnished a natural center in each
considerable town for mutual consultation and mutual incitement among young men
of various sects. For this was another trait of the revival, that it went forward
as a tide movement of the whole church, in disregard of the dividing-lines of sect.
I know not what Christian communion, if any, was unaffected by it. The other favorable
circumstance was the business interest taken in the revival by the secular press.
Up to this time the church had been little accustomed to look for coöperation
As the immediate result of the revival of 1857-58 it has been estimated that one million of members were added to the fellowship of the churches. But the ulterior result was greater. This revival was the introduction to a new era of the nation’s spiritual life. It was the training-school for a force of lay evangelists for future work, eminent among whom is the name of Dwight Moody. And, like the Great Awakening of 1740, it was the providential preparation of the American church for an immediately impending peril the gravity of which there were none at the time far-sighted enough to predict. Looking backward, it is instructive for us to raise the question how the church would have passed through the decade of the sixties without the spiritual reinforcement that came to it amid the pentecostal scenes of 1857 and 1858.
And yet there were those among the old men who were ready to weep
as they compared the building of the Lord’s house with what they had known in their
younger days: no sustained enforcement on the mind and conscience of alarming and
heart-searching doctrines; no “protracted meetings” in which from day to day the
warnings and invitations
It does not appear that the spiritual quickening of 1857 had any
effect in allaying the sharp controversy between northern and southern Christians
on the subject of slavery. Perhaps it may have deepened and intensified it. The
“southern apostasy,” from principles universally accepted in 1818, had become complete
and (so far as any utterance was permitted to reach the public) unanimous. The southern
Methodists and the southern Baptists had, a dozen years before, relieved themselves
from liability to rebuke, whether express or implied, from their northern brethren
for complicity with the crimes involved in slavery, by seceding from fellowship.
Into the councils of the Episcopalians and the Catholics this great question of
public morality was never allowed to enter. The Presbyterians were divided into
two bodies, each having its northern and its southern presbyteries; and the course
of events in these two bodies may be taken as an indication of the drift of opinion
and feeling. The Old-School body, having a strong southern element, remained silent,
notwithstanding the open nullification of its declaration Thompson,
“The Presbyterians,” p. 135.
There seems no reason to doubt the entire sincerity with which
the southern church, in all its sects, had consecrated itself with religious devotion
to the maintenance of that horrible and inhuman form of slavery which had drawn
upon itself the condemnation of the civilized world. The earnest antislavery convictions
which had characterized it only twenty-five years before, violently suppressed from
utterance, seem to have perished by suffocation. The common sentiment of southern
Christianity was expressed in that serious declaration of the Southern Presbyterian
Church, during the war, of its “deep conviction of the divine appointment of domestic
servitude,” and of the “peculiar mission of the southern church to conserve the
institution of slavery.” “Narrative of the State of Religion” of the Southern General
Assembly of 1864.
At the North, on the other hand, with larger liberty, there was
wider diversity of opinion. In general, the effect of continued discussion, of larger
knowledge of facts, and of the enforcement on the common conscience, by the course
of public events, of a sense of responsibility and duty in the matter, had been
to make more intelligent, sober, and discriminating, and therefore more strong and
steadfast, the resolution to keep clear of all complicity with slavery. There were
few to assume the defense of that odious system, though there were some. There were
many to object to scores of objectionable things in the conduct of abolitionists.
And there were a very great number of honest, conscientious men who were appalled
as they looked forward to the boldly threatened consequences of even the mildest
action in opposition to slavery—the rending of the church, the ruin of the country,
the horrors of civil war, and its uncertain event, issuing perhaps in the wider
extension and firmer establishment of slavery itself. It was an immense power that
the bold, resolute, rule-or-ruin supporters of the divine right of slavery held
over the Christian public of the whole country, so long as they could keep these
threats suspended in the air. It seemed to hold in the balance against a simple
demand to execute righteousness toward a poor, oppressed, and helpless race, immense
interests of patriotism, of humanity, of the kingdom of God itself. Presently the
time came when these threats could no longer be kept aloft. The compliance demanded
was clearly, decisively refused. The threats must either be executed or must fall
to the ground amid general derision. But the moment that the threat was put in execution
its power as a threat had ceased. With the first stroke against the life of the
nation all great and noble motives, instead of being balanced against each other,
were drawing together in the
No man can read the history of the American church in the Civil
War intelligently who does not apprehend, however great the effort, that the Christian
people of the South did really and sincerely believe themselves to be commissioned
by the providence of God to “conserve the institution of slavery” as an institution
of “divine appointment.” Strange as the conviction seems, it is sure that
the conviction of conscience in the southern army that it was right in waging
war against the government of the country was as clear as the conviction, on the
other side, of the duty of defending the government. The southern regiments,
like the northern, were sent forth with prayer and benediction, and their camps,
as well as those of their adversaries, were often the seats of earnest religious
life. For interesting illustrations of this, see Alexander, “The
Methodists, South,” pp. 71-75. The history of the religious life of the northern
army is superabundant and everywhere accessible.
At the South the entire able-bodied population was soon called
into military service, so that almost the whole church was in the army. At the North
the churches at home hardly seemed diminished by the myriads sent to the field.
It was amazing to see the charities and missions of the churches sustained with
almost undiminished supplies, while the great enterprises of the Sanitary and Christian
Commissions were set on foot and magnificently carried forward, for the physical,
social, and spiritual good of the soldiers. Never was the gift of giving so abundantly
bestowed on the church as in these stormy times. There was a feverish eagerness
of life in all ways; if there
One religious lesson that was learned as never before, on both sides of the conflict, was the lesson of Christian fellowship as against the prevailing folly of sectarian divisions, emulations, and jealousies. There were great drawings in this direction in the early days of the war, when men of the most unlike antecedents and associations gathered on the same platform, intent on the same work, and mutual aversions and partisan antagonisms melted away in the fervent heat of a common religious patriotism. But the lesson which was commended at home was enforced in the camp and the regiment by constraint of circumstances. The army chaplain, however one-sided he might have been in his parish, had to be on all sides with his kindly sympathy as soon as he joined his regiment. He learned in a right apostolic sense to become all things to all men, and, returning home, he did not forget the lesson. The delight of a fellowship truly catholic in the one work of Christ, once tasted, was not easily foregone. Already the current, perplexed with eddies, had begun to set in the direction of Christian unity. How much the common labors of Christian men and women and Christian ministers of every different name, through the five years of bloody strife, contributed to swell and speed, the current, no one can measure.
According to a well-known law of the kingdom of heaven, the intense
experiences of the war, both in the army and out of it, left no man just as he was
before.
There were those, on the other hand, who emerged from the military service depraved and brutalized; and those who, in the rush of business incidental to the war, were not trained to self-sacrifice and duty, but habituated to the seeking of selfish interests in the midst of the public peril and affliction. We delight in the evidences that these cases were a small proportion of the whole. But even a small percentage of so many hundreds of thousands mounts up to a formidable total. The early years of the peace were so marked by crimes of violence that a frequent heading in the daily newspapers was “The Carnival of Crime.” Prosperity, or the semblance of it, came in like a sudden flood. Immigration of an improved character poured into the country in greater volume than ever. Multitudes made haste to be rich, and fell into temptations and snares. The perilous era of enormous fortunes began.
WHEN the five years of rending and tearing had passed, in which slavery was dispossessed of its hold upon the nation, there was much to be done in reconstructing and readjusting the religious institutions of the country.
Throughout the seceding States buildings and endowments for religious uses had suffered in the general waste and destruction, of property. Colleges and seminaries, in many instances, had seen their entire resources swept away through investment in the hopeless promises of the defeated government. Churches, boards, and like associations were widely disorganized through the vicissitudes of military occupation and the protracted absence or the death of men of experience and capacity.
The effect of the war upon denominational organizations had been various. There was no sect of all the church the members and ministers of which had not felt the sweep of the currents of popular opinion all about them. But the course of events in each denomination was in some measure illustrative of the character of its polity.
In the Roman Catholic Church the antagonisms of the conflict were
as keenly felt as anywhere. Archbishop Hughes of New York, who, with Henry Ward
Beecher and Bishop McIlvaine of Ohio, accepted a political mission
Simply on the ground of a de facto political independence,
the southern dioceses of the Protestant Episcopal Church, following the principles
and precedents of 1789, organized themselves into a “Church in the Confederate
States.” One of the southern bishops, Polk, of Louisiana, accepted a commission
of major-general in the Confederate army, and relieved his brethren of any disciplinary
questions that might have arisen in consequence by dying on the field from a cannon-shot.
With admirable tact and good temper, the “Church in the United States” managed
to ignore the existence of any secession; and when
The southern organizations of the Methodists and Baptists were of twenty years’ standing at the close of the war in 1865. The war had abolished the original cause of these divisions, but it had substituted others quite as serious. The exasperations of the war, and the still more acrimonious exasperations of the period of the political reconstruction and of the organization of northern missions at the South, gendered strifes that still delay the redintegration which is so visibly future of both of these divided denominations.
At the beginning of the war one of the most important of the denominations
that still retained large northern and southern memberships in the same fellowship
was the Old-School Presbyterian Church; and no national sect had made larger concessions
to avert a breach of unity. When the General Assembly met at Philadelphia in May,
1861, amid the intense excitements of the opening war, it was still the hope of
the habitual leaders and managers of the Assembly to avert a division by holding
back that body from any expression of sentiment on the question on which the minds
of Christians were stirred at that time with a profound and most religious fervor.
But the Assembly took the matter out of the hands of its leaders, and by a great
majority, in the words of a solemn and temperate resolution drawn by the venerable
and conservative Dr. Gardiner Spring, declared its loyalty to the government and
constitution of the country. With expressions of horror at the sacrilege of taking
the church into the domain of politics, southern presbyteries one after another
renounced the jurisdiction of the General Assembly that could be guilty of so shocking
a profanation, and, uniting Thompson, “The Presbyterians,” chap. xiii.; Johnson, “The Southern
Presbyterians,” chap. v.
Another occasion of reconstruction was the strong disposition of the liberated negroes to withdraw themselves from the tutelage of the churches in which they had been held, in the days of slavery, in a lower-caste relation. The eager entrance of the northern churches upon mission work among the blacks, to which access had long been barred by atrocious laws and by the savage fury of mobs, tended to promote this change. The multiplication and growth of organized negro denominations is a characteristic of the period after the war. There is reason to hope that the change may by and by, with the advance of education and moral training among this people, inure to their spiritual advantage. There is equal reason to fear that at present, in many cases, it works to their serious detriment.
The effect of the war was not exclusively divisive. In two instances, at least, it had the effect of healing old schisms. The southern secession from the New-School Presbyterian Church, which had come away in 1858 on the slavery issue, found itself in 1861 side by side with the southern secession from the Old School, and in full agreement with it in morals and politics. The two bodies were not long in finding that the doctrinal differences which a quarter-century before had seemed so insuperable were, after all, no serious hindrance to their coming together.
Even after the war was over, its healing power was felt, this time at the North. There was a honeycomb for Samson in the carcass of the monster. The two great Presbyterian sects at the North had found a common comfort in their relief from the perpetual festering irritation of the slavery question; they had softened toward each other in the glow of a religious patriotism; they had forgotten old antagonisms in common labors; and new issues had obscured the tenuous doctrinal disputes that had agitated the continent in 1837. Both parties grew tired and ashamed of the long and sometimes ill-natured quarrel. With such a disposition on both sides, terms of agreement could not fail in time to be found. For substance, the basis of reunion was this: that the New-School church should yield the point of organization, and the Old-School church should yield the point of doctrine; the New-School men should sustain the Old-School boards, and the Old-School men should tolerate the New-School heresies. The consolidation of the two sects into one powerful organization was consummated at Pittsburg, November 12, 1869, with every demonstration of joy and devout thanksgiving.
One important denomination, the Congregationalists, had had the
distinguished advantage, through all these turbulent years, of having no southern
membership. Out of all proportion to its numerical strength was the part
It cannot be justly claimed for the Congregationalists of the
present day that they have lost nothing of that corporate unselfishness, seeking
no sectarian aggrandizement, but only God’s reign and righteousness, which had been
the glory of their fathers. The studious efforts that have been made to cultivate
among them a sectarian spirit, as if this were one of the Christian virtues, have
not been fruitless. Nevertheless it may be seen that their work of education at
the South has been conducted in no narrow spirit. The extending of their sect over
new territory has
This work of the Congregationalists is entitled to mention, not as exceptional, but only as eminent among like enterprises, in which few of the leading sects have failed to be represented. Extravagant expectations were at first entertained of immediate results in bringing the long-depressed race up to the common plane of civilization. But it cannot be said that reasonable and intelligent expectations have been disappointed. Experience has taught much as to the best conduct of such missions. The gift of a fund of a million dollars by the late John F. Slater, of Norwich, has through wise management conduced to this end. It has encouraged in the foremost institutions the combination of training to skilled productive labor with education in literature and science.
The inauguration of these systems of religious education at the
South was the most conspicuously important of the immediate sequels of the Civil
War. But this time was a time of great expansion of the activities of the church
in all directions. The influx of immigration, temporarily checked by the hard times
of 1857 and by the five years of war, came in again in such floods as never before. The immigration is thus given by decades, with an illustrative diagram, by by Dr. Dorchester,
“Christianity in the United States,”
p. 759:
1825-35
330,737
1835-45
707,770
1845-55
2,944,833
1855-65
1,578,483
1865-75
3,234,090
1875-85
4,061,278
The foreign immigration
is always attended by a westward movement of the already settled population. The
field of home missions became greater and more exacting than ever. The
zeal of the church, educated during the war to higher ideas of self-sacrifice, rose
to the occasion. The average yearly receipts of the various Protestant home missionary
societies, which in the decade 1850-59 had been $808,000, rose in the next decade
to more than $2,000,000, in the next to nearly $3,000,000, and for the seven years
1881-87 to $4,000,000. Ibid., p. 714. We have quoted in round numbers. The figures
do not include the large sums expended annually in the colportage work of Bible
and tract societies, in Sunday school missions, and in the building of churches
and parsonages. In the accounts of the last-named most effective enterprise the
small amounts received and appropriated to aid in building would represent manifold
more gathered and expended by the pioneer churches on the ground.
In the perils of abounding wealth by which the church after the
war was beset, it was divine fatherly kindness that opened before it new and enlarged
facilities of service to the kingdom of heaven among foreign nations. From the first
feeble beginnings of foreign missions from America in India and in the Sandwich
Islands, they had been attended by the manifest favor of God. When the convulsion
of the Civil War came on, with prostrations of business houses, and enormous burdens
of public obligation, and private beneficence drawn down, as it seemed, to its “bottom dollar” for new calls of patriotism and charity, and especially when the
dollar in a man’s pocket shrank to a half or a third of its value in the world’s
currency, it seemed as if the work of foreign missions would have to be turned over
to Christians in lands less burdened with accumulated disadvantages. But here again
the grandeur of the burden gave an inspiration of strength to the burden-bearer.
From 1840 to 1849 the average yearly receipts of the various foreign missionary
societies of the Dorchester, op. cit., p. 709.
We have seen how, only forty years before the return of peace,
in the days of a humble equality in moderate estates, ardent souls exulted together
in the inauguration of the era of democracy in beneficence, when every humblest
giver might, through association and organization, have part in magnificent enterprises
of Christian charity such as had theretofore been possible “only to princes or
to men of princely possessions.” Above, pp. 259, 260. A pamphlet published at the office of the New York
“Sun,” away
back in the early thirties, was formerly in my possession, which undertook to give,
under the title “The Rich Men of New York,” the name of every person in that city
who was worth more than one hundred thousand dollars—and it was not a large pamphlet,
either. As nearly as I remember, there were less than a half-dozen names credited
with more than a million, and one solitary name, that of John Jacob Astor, was reported
as good for the enormous and almost incredible sum of ten millions.
The sum of these gifts of millions, added to the great aggregates
of contribution to the national missionary
And yet it is not certain that this period of immense gifts of
money is really a period of increased liberality in the church from the time, thirty
or forty years before, when a millionaire was a rarity to be pointed out on the
streets, and the possession of a hundred thousand dollars gave one a place among
“The Rich Men of New York.” In 1850 the total wealth of the United States was reported
in the census as seven billions of dollars. In 187o, after twenty years, it had
more than fourfolded, rising to thirty billions. Ten years later, according to the
census, it had sixfolded, rising to forty-three billions. Dorchester, “Christianity in the United States,” p. 715. See above, p. 70.
The greatest addition to the forces of the church in the period
since the war has come from deploying into the
The earliest and to this day the most extensive of the organizations
for utilizing the non-professional ministry in systematic religious labors is the
Sunday-school. The considerable development of this instrumentality begins to be
recognized after the Second Awakening in the early years of the present century.
The prevailing characteristic of the American Sunday-school as distinguished from
its British congener is that it is commonly a part of the equipment of the local
church for the instruction of its own children, and incidentally one of the most
important resources for its attractive work toward those that are without. But it
is also recognized as one of the most flexible and adaptable “arms of the service” for aggressive work, whether in great cities or on the frontier. It was about
the year 1825 that this work began to be organized on a national scale. But it is
since the war that it has sprung into vastly greater efficiency. The agreement upon
uniform courses of biblical study, to be followed simultaneously by many millions
of pupils over the entire continent, has given a unity and coherence before unknown
to the Sunday-school system; and it has resulted in extraordinary enterprise and
activity on the part of competent editors and publishers to provide apparatus for
the thorough study of the text, which bids fair in time to take away the reproach
of the term “Sunday-schoolish” as applied to superficial, ignorant, or merely sentimental
expositions of the Scriptures. The work of the “Sunday-school Times,” in bringing
within the reach of teachers all over the land the fruits of the world’s best
An outgrowth of the Sunday-school system, which, under the conduct
of a man of genius for organization, Dr. John H. Vincent, now a bishop of the Methodist
Church, has expanded to magnificent dimensions, is that which is suggested by the
name “Chautauqua.” Beginning in the summer of 1874 with a fortnight’s meeting in
a grove beside Chautauqua Lake for the study of the methods of Sunday-school teaching,
it led to the questions, how to connect the Sunday-school more intimately with other
departments of the church and with other agencies in society; how to control in
the interest of religious culture the forces, social, commercial, industrial, and
educational, which, for good or evil, are affecting the Sunday-school pupils every
day of the week. Striking root at other centers of assembly, east, west, and south,
and combining its summer lectures with an organized system of home studies extending
through the year, subject to written examinations, “Chautauqua,” by the comprehensive
scope of its studies and by the great multitude of its students, is entitled to
be called, in no ignoble sense of the word, a university. Bishop Vincent, in
“Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia,” p. 441. The number of students in the “Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle” already
in 1891 exceeded twenty-five thousand.
Another organization of the unpaid service of private Christians
is the Young Men’s Christian Association. Beginning in London in 1844, it had so
far demonstrated its usefulness in 1851 as to attract favorable attention from visitors
to the first of the World’s Fairs. In the end of that year the Association in Boston
was formed, and this was rapidly followed by others in the principal cities. It
met a growing exigency in American society. In the organization of commerce and
manufacture in larger establishments than formerly, the apprenticeship system had
necessarily lapsed, and nothing had taken its place. Of old, young men put to the
learning of any business were “articled” or “indentured” as apprentices to the
head of the concern, who was placed in loco parentis, being invested both
with the authority and with the responsibility of a father. Often the apprentices
were received into the house of the master as their home, and according to legend
and romance it was in order for the industrious and virtuous apprentice to marry
the old man’s daughter and succeed to the business. After the employees of a store
came to be numbered by scores and the employees of a factory by hundreds, the word
“apprentice” became obsolete in the American language. The employee was only a “hand,” and there was danger that employers would forget that he was also a heart
and a soul. This was the exigency that the Young Men’s Christian Association came
to supply. Men of conscience among employers
The work has not been without its vicissitudes. The wonderful revival of 1857, preeminently a laymen’s movement, in many instances found its nidus in the rooms of the Associations; and their work was expanded and invigorated as a result of the revival. In 1861 came on the war. It broke up for the time the continental confederacy of Associations. Many of the local Associations were dissolved by the enlistment of their members. But out of the inspiring exigencies of the time grew up in the heart of the Associations the organization and work of the Christian Commission, coöerating with the Sanitary Commission for the bodily and spiritual comfort of the armies in the field. The two organizations expended upward of eleven millions of dollars, the free gift of the people at home. After the war the survivors of those who had enlisted from the Associations came back to their home duties, in most cases, better men for all good service in consequence of their experience of military discipline.
A natural sequel to the organization and success of the Young
Men’s Christian Association is the institution of
The development of organized activity among women has been a conspicuous characteristic of this period. From the beginning of our churches the charitable sewing-circle or “Dorcas Society” has been known as a center both of prayer and of labor. But in this period the organization of women for charitable service has been on a continental scale.
In 1874, in an outburst of zeal, “women’s crusades” were undertaken,
especially in some western towns, in which bands of singing and praying women went
in person to tippling-houses and even worse resorts, to assail them, visibly and
audibly, with these spiritual weapons.
The separate organization of women for the support and management of missions began on an extensive scale, in 1868, with the Women’s Board of Missions, instituted in alliance with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions of the Congregationalist churches. The example at once commended itself to the imitation of all, so that all the principal mission boards of the Protestant churches are in alliance with actively working women’s boards.
The training acquired in these and other organizations by many
women of exceptional taste and talent for the conduct of large affairs has
tended still further to widen the field of their activity. The ends of the
earth, as well as the dark places nearer home, have felt the salutary results of
it. Among the titles omitted from this list are the various “Lend-a-Hand
Clubs,” and “10 x 1 = 10 Clubs,” and circles of “King’s Daughters,” and like coteries,
that have been inspired by the tales and the “four mottoes” of Edward Everett Hale.
In this brief and most incomplete sketch of the origin of one
of the distinguishing features of contemporary Christianity—the application of the
systematized activity of private Christians—no mention has been made of the corps
of “colporteurs,” or book-peddlers, employed by
Not the least important item in the organization of lay activity
is the marvelously rapid growth of the “Young People’s Society of Christian Endeavor.”
In February, 1881, a pastor in Portland, Me., the Rev. Francis E. Clark, organized
into an association within his church a number of young people pledged to certain
rules of regular attendance and participation in the association meetings and of
coöeration in useful service. There seems to have been no particular originality
in the plan, but through some felicity in arrangement and opportuneness in the time
it caught like a forest fire, and in an amazingly short Dr. H. K. Carroll, in “The Independent,” April 1, 1897. “Congregationalist Handbook for 1897,” p. 35.
Contemporary currents of theological thought, setting away from
the excessive individualism which has characterized the churches of the Great Awakening,
confirm the tendency of the Christian life toward a vigorous and even absorbing
external activity. The duty of the church to human society is made a part of the
required curriculum of study in preparation for the ministry, in fully equipped
theological seminaries. If ever it has been a just reproach of the church that its
frequenters were so absorbed in the saving of their own souls that they forgot the
multitude about them, that reproach is fast passing away. “The Institutional
It is not to be supposed that this immense, unprecedented growth
of outward activity can have been gained without some corresponding loss. The time
is not long gone by, when the sustained contemplation of the deep things of the
cross, and the lofty things in the divine nature, and the subtile and elusive facts
concerning the human constitution and character and the working of the human will,
were eminently characteristic of the religious life of the American church. In the
times when that life was stirred to its most strenuous activity, it was marked by
the vicissitude of prolonged passions of painful sensibility at the consciousness
of sin, and ecstasies of delight in the contemplation of the infinity of God and
the glory of the Saviour and his salvation. Every one who is conversant with the
religious biography of the generations before our own, knows of the still hours
and days set apart for the severe inward scrutiny of motives and “frames” and
the grounds of one’s hope. However truly the church of to-day
An event of great historical importance, which cannot be determined
to a precise date, but which belongs more to this period than to any other, is the
loss of the Scotch and Puritan Sabbath, or, as many like to call it, the American
Sabbath. The law of the Westminster divines on this subject, it may be affirmed
without fear of contradiction from any quarter, does not coincide in its language
with the law. of God as expressed either in the Old Testament or in the New. The
Westminster rule requires, as if with a “Thus saith the Lord,” that on the first
day of the week, instead of the seventh, men shall desist not only from labor but
from recreation, and “spend the whole time in the public and private exercises
of God’s worship, except so much as is to be taken up in the works of necessity
and mercy.” Westminster Shorter Catechism, Ans. 60. The commentaries on
the Catechism, which are many, like Gemara upon Mishna, build wider and higher the
“fence around the law,” in a fashion truly rabbinic.
THE rapid review of three crowded centuries, which is all that the narrowly prescribed limits of this volume have permitted, has necessarily been mainly restricted to external facts. But looking back over the course of visible events, it is not impossible for acute minds devoted to such study to trace the stream of thought and sentiment that is sometimes hidden from direct view by the overgrowth which itself has nourished.
We have seen a profound spiritual change, renewing the face of
the land and leaving its indelible impress on successive generations, springing
from the profoundest contemplations of God and his work of salvation through Jesus
Christ, and then bringing back into thoughtful and teachable minds new questions
to be solved and new discoveries of truth to be pondered. The one school of theological
opinion and inquiry that can be described as characteristically American is the
theology of the Great Awakening. The disciples of this school, in all its divergent
branches, agree in looking back to the first Jonathan Edwards as the founder of
it. Through its generations it has shown a striking sequence and continuity of intellectual
and spiritual life, each generation answering questions put to it by its predecessor,
while propounding new questions
A bold and open breach of traditionary assumptions and habits
of reasoning was made by Horace Bushnell. This was a theologian of a different type
from his New England predecessors. He was of a temper little disposed to accept
either methods or results as a local tradition, and
Another wholesome and edifying debate was occasioned by the publications
that went forth from the college and theological seminary of the German Reformed
Church, situated at Mercersburg in Pennsylvania. At this institution was effected
a fruitful union of American and German theology; the result was to commend to the
general attention aspects of truth, philosophical, theological, and historical,
not previously current among American Protestants. The book of Dr. John Williamson
Nevin, entitled “The Mystical Presence: A Vindication of the Reformed or Calvinistic
Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist,” revealed to the vast multitude of churches and
ministers that gloried in the name of Calvinist the fact that on the most distinctive
article of Calvinism they were not Calvinists at all, but Zwinglians. The enunciation
of the standard doctrine of the various Presbyterian churches excited among themselves
a clamor of “Heresy!” and the doctrine of Calvin was put upon trial before the
Calvinists. The outcome of a discussion that extended itself far beyond the boundaries
of the comparatively small and uninfluential German Reformed Church was to elevate
the point of view and broaden the horizon of American students of the constitution
and history of the church. Later generations of such students owe no light obligation
to the fidelity and courage of Dr. Nevin, as well as to the erudition and immense
productive diligence of his associate, Dr. Philip Schaff. For fuller accounts of
“the Mercersburg theology,” with references
to the literature of the subject, see Dubbs, “The Reformed Church, German” (American
Church History Series, vol. viii.), pp. 219, 220, 389-378; also, Professor E. V. Gerhart in
“Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia,” pp. 1473-1475.
It is incidental to the prevailing method of instruction in theology
by a course of prelections in which the teacher
How great is the debt which the church owes to its heretics is
frequently illustrated in the progress of Christianity in America. If it had not
been for the Unitarian defection in New England, and for the attacks from Germany
upon the historicity of the gospels, the theologians of America might to this day
have been engrossed in “threshing old straw” in endless debates on “fixed fate,
free will, foreknowledge absolute.” The exigencies of controversy forced the study
of the original documents of the church. From his entrance upon his professorship
at Andover, in 1810, the eager enthusiasm of Moses Stuart made him the father of
exegetical science not only for America, but for all the English-speaking countries.
His not less eminent pupil and associate, Edward Robinson, later of the Union Seminary,
New York, created out of nothing the study of biblical geography. Associating with
himself the most accomplished living Arabist, Eli Smith, of the American mission
at Beirut, he made those
Monumental works in lexicography have been produced by Dr. Thayer, of Cambridge, on New Testament Greek; by Professor Francis Brown, of New York, in conjunction with Canon Driver, of Oxford, on the languages of the Old Testament; and by Dr. Sophocles, of Cambridge, on the Byzantine Greek.
In the work of the textual criticism of the Scriptures, notwithstanding its remoteness from the manuscript sources of study, America has furnished two names that are held in honor throughout the learned world: among the recent dead, Ezra Abbot, of Cambridge, universally beloved and lamented; and among the living, Caspar Rene Gregory, successor to the labors and the fame of Tischendorf. A third name is that of the late Dr. Isaac H. Hall, the successful collator of Syriac New Testament manuscripts.
In those studies of the higher criticism which at the present
day are absorbing so much of the attention of biblical scholars, and the progress
of which is watched with reasonable anxiety for their bearing on that dogma of the
absolute inerrancy of the canonical Scriptures which
The undeniably grave theological difficulties occasioned by the
results of critical study have given rise to a novel dogma concerning the Scriptures,
which, if it may justly be claimed as a product of the Princeton Seminary, would
seem to discredit the modest boast of the venerated Dr.
The field of church history, aside from local and sectarian histories, was late in being invaded by American theologians. For many generations the theology of America was distinctly unhistorical, speculative, and provincial. But a change in this respect was inevitably sure to come. The strong propensity of the national mind toward historical studies is illustrated by the large proportion of historical works among the masterpieces of our literature, whether in prose or in verse. It would seem as if our conscious poverty in historical monuments and traditions had engendered an eager hunger for history. No travelers in ancient lands are such enthusiasts in seeking the monuments of remote ages as those whose homes are in regions not two generations removed from the prehistoric wilderness. It was certain that as soon as theology should begin to be taught to American students in its relation to the history of the kingdom of Christ, the charm of this method would be keenly felt.
We may assume the date of 1853 as an epoch from which to date
this new era of theological study. It was in that year that the gifted, learned,
and inspiring teacher, Henry Boynton Smith, was transferred from the chair of
In practical theology the productiveness of the American church
in the matter of sermons has been so copious that even for the briefest mention
some narrow rule of exclusion must be followed. There is no doubt that in a multitude
of cases the noblest utterances of the American pulpit, being unwritten, have never
come into literature, but have survived for a time as a glowing memory, and then
a fading tradition. The statement applies to many of the most famous revival preachers;
and in consequence of a prevalent prejudice against the writing of sermons, it applies
especially to the great Methodist and Baptist preachers, whose representation on
the shelves of libraries is most
In the early years of the nineteenth century the Unitarian pulpits of Boston were adorned with every literary grace known to the rhetoric of that period. The luster of Channing’s fame has outshone and outlasted that of his associates; and yet these were stars of hardly less magnitude. The two Wares, father and son, the younger Buckminster, whose singular power as a preacher was known not only to wondering hearers, but to readers on both sides of the ocean, Gannett and Dewey—these were among them; and, in the next generation, Henry W. Bellows, Thomas Starr King, and James Freeman Clarke. No body of clergy of like size was ever so resplendent with talents and accomplishments. The names alone of those who left the Unitarian pulpit for a literary or political career—Sparks, Everett, Bancroft, Emerson, Ripley, Palfrey, Upham, among them—are a constellation by themselves.
To the merely literary critic those earnest preachers, such as Lyman and Edward Beecher, Griffin, Sereno Dwight, Wayland, and Kirk, who felt called of God to withstand, in Boston, this splendid array of not less earnest men, were clearly inferior to their antagonists. But they were successful.
A few years later, the preeminent American writer of sermons to
be read and pondered in every part of the world was Horace Bushnell; as the great
popular preacher,
Of living preachers whose sermons have already attained a place of honor in libraries at home and abroad, the name of Bishop F. D. Huntington stands among the foremost; and those who have been charmed by the brilliant rhetoric and instructed from the copious learning of his college classmate, Dr. Richard S. Storrs, must feel it a wrong done to our national literature that these gifts should be chiefly known to the reading public only by occasional discourses and by two valuable studies in religious history instead of by volumes of sermons. Perhaps no American pulpits have to-day a wider hearing beyond the sea than two that stand within hearing distance of each other on New Haven Green, occupied by Theodore T. Munger and Newman Smyth. The pulpit of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, has not ceased, since the accession of Lyman Abbott, to wield a wide and weighty influence,—less wide, but in some respects more weighty, than in the days of his famous predecessor,—by reason of a well-deserved reputation for biblical learning and insight, and for candor and wisdom in applying Scriptural principles to the solution of current questions.
The early American theology was, as we have seen, a rhetorical
and not a merely scholastic theology—a theology to be preached. See above, p. 375.
A direction in which the literature of practical theology in America
is sure to expand itself in the immediate future is indicated in the title of a
recent work of that versatile and useful writer, Dr. Washington Gladden, “Applied
Christianity.” The salutary conviction that political economy cannot be relied on
by itself to adjust all the intricate relations of men under modern conditions of
life, that the ethical questions that arise are not going to solve themselves automatically
by the law of demand and supply, that the gospel and the church and the Spirit of
Christ have somewhat to do in the matter, has been settling itself deeply into the
minds of Christian believers. The impression that the questions between labor and
capital, between sordid poverty and overgrown wealth, were old-world questions,
of which we of the New World are relieved, is effectually dispelled. Thus far there
is not much of history to be written under this head, but somewhat of prophecy. The program of Yale Divinity School for 1896-97 announces among
the “required studies in senior year” lectures “on some important problems of
American life, such as Socialism, Communism, and Anarchism; Races in the United
States; Immigration; the Modern City; the Wage System; the Relations of Employer
and Employed; Social Classes; the Causes, Prevention, and Punishment of Crime; and
University Settlements.”
In one noble department of religious literature, the
liturgical, the record of the American church is meager. The reaction among the
early colonists and many of the later settlers against forms of worship imposed
by political authority was violent. Seeking for a logical basis, it planted
itself on the assumption that no form (unless an improvised form) is permitted
in public worship, except such as are sanctioned by express word of Scripture.
In their sturdy resolution to throw off and break up the yoke, which neither
they nor their fathers had been able to bear, of ordinances and traditions
complicated with not a little of debilitating superstition, the extreme Puritans
of England and Scotland rejected the whole system of holy days in the Christian
year, including the authentic anniversaries of Passover and Pentecost, and
discontinued the use of religious ceremonies at marriages and funerals. Williston Walker,
“The Congregationalists,” pp. 245, 246. See above, pp. 182-184. The only relic of this work that survives in common use is the
immortal lyric, “I love thy kingdom, Lord,” founded on a motif in the one
hundred and thirty-seventh psalm. This, with Doddridge’s hymn, “My God, and is
thy table spread?” continued for a long time to be the most important church
hymn and eucharistic hymn in the English language. We should not perhaps have looked
for the gift of them to two Congregationalist ministers, one in New England and
the other in old England. There is no such illustration of the spiritual unity of
“the holy catholic church, the fellowship of the holy,” as is presented in
a modern hymn-book.
Soon after the mid-point of the nineteenth century, began a serious
study of the subject of the conduct of public worship, which continues to this day,
with good promise of sometime reaching useful and stable results. In 1855 was published
“Eutaxia, or the Presbyterian Liturgies: Historical Sketches. By a Minister of
the Presbyterian Church.” The author, Charles W. Baird, was a man peculiarly fitted
to render the church important service, such as indeed he did render in this volume,
and in the field of Huguenot history which he divided with his brother, Henry M.
Baird. How great the loss to historical theology through his protracted feebleness
of body and his death may be conjectured, not measured. This brief volume awakened
an interest in the subject of it in America, and in Scotland, and among the nonconformists
of England. To American Presbyterians in general it was something like a surprise
to be reminded that the sisterhood of the “Reformed” sects were committed by their
earliest and best traditions in favor of liturgic uses in public worship. At about
the same time the fruitful discussions of the Mercersburg controversy were in progress
in the German Reformed Church. “Mercersburg found fault with the common style of
extemporaneous public prayer, and advocated a revival of the liturgical church service
of the Reformation period, but so modified and reproduced as to be adapted to the
existing wants of Protestant congregations.” Professor Gerhart, in “Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia,” p. 1475.
The influence of the Protestant Episcopal Church upon this growing
tendency has been sometimes favorable, sometimes unfavorable, but always important.
To begin with, it has held up before the whole church an example of prescribed forms
for divine worship, on the whole, the best in all history. On the other hand, it
has drawn to
It is safe to prognosticate, from the course of the history up to this point, that the subject of the conduct of worship will become more and more seriously a subject of study in the American church in all its divisions; that the discussions thereon arising will be attended with strong antagonisms of sentiment; that mutual antagonisms within the several sects will be compensated by affiliations of men like-minded across sectarian lines; and that thus, as many times before, particular controversies will tend to general union and fellowship.
One topic under this title of Liturgics requires special “Massachusetts Historical Collections,” second series, vol. iv.,
p. 301; quoted in the “New Englander,” vol. xiii., p. 467 (August, 1855).
The use of these rudely artificial tunes involved a gravely important change in the course of public worship. In congregations that accepted them the singing necessarily became an exclusive privilege of the choir. To a lamentable extent, where there was neither the irregular and spontaneous ejaculation of the Methodist nor the rubrical response of the Episcopalian, the people came to be shut out from audible participation in the acts of public worship.
A movement of musical reform in the direction of greater simplicity
and dignity began early in this century, when Lowell Mason in Boston and Thomas
Hastings in New York began their multitudinous publications of psalmody. Between
them not less than seventy volumes of music were published in a period of half as
many years. Their immense and successful fecundity was imitated with less success
by others, until the land was swamped with an annual flood of church-music books.
A thin diluvial stratum remains to us from that time in tunes, chiefly from the
pen of Dr. Mason, that have taken permanent place as American chorals. Such pieces
as “Boylston,” “Hebron,” “Rockingham,” “Missionary Hymn,” and the adaptations
of Gregorian melodies, “Olmutz” and “Hamburg,” are not likely to be displaced
from their hold on the American church by more skilled and exquisite compositions
of later schools. But the fertile labors of the church musicians of this period
were affected by the market demand for new material for the singing-school, the
large church choir, and the musical convention. The music thus introduced into the
churches consisted not so much of hymn-tunes and anthems as of “sacred
glees.” This was the criticism of the late Rev. Mr. Havergal, of Worcester
Cathedral, to whom Dr. Mason had sent copies of some of his books. The incident
was freely told by Dr. Mason himself.
Before the middle of the century the Episcopal Church had arrived at a point at which it was much looked to to set the fashions in such matters as church music and architecture. Its influence at this time was very bad. It was largely responsible for the fashion, still widely prevalent, of substituting for the church choir a quartet of professional solo singers, and for the degradation of church music into the dainty, languishing, and sensuous style which such “artists” do most affect. The period of “The Grace Church Collection,” “Greatorex’s Collection,” and the sheet-music compositions of George William Warren and John R. Thomas was the lowest tide of American church music.
A healthy reaction from this vicious condition began about 1855, with the introduction of hymn-and-tune books and the revival of congregational singing. From that time the progressive improvement of the public taste may be traced in the character of the books that have succeeded one another in the churches, until the admirable compositions of the modern English school of psalmody tend to predominate above those of inferior quality. It is the mark of a transitional period that both in church music and in church architecture we seem to depend much on compositions and designs derived from older countries. The future of religious art in America is sufficiently well assured to leave no cause for hurry or anxiety.
In glancing back over this chapter, it will be strange if some
are not impressed, and unfavorably impressed, with a disproportion in the names
cited as representative, which are taken chiefly from some two or three sects. This
may justly be referred in part, no doubt, to the author’s point of view and to the
“personal equation”; but it is more largely due to the fact that in the specialization
of the For many generations the religious and theological literature
of the country proceeded almost exclusively, at first or second hand, from New England.
The Presbyterian historian, Professor Robert Ellis Thompson, remarks that “until
after the division of 1837 American Presbyterianism made no important addition to
the literature of theology” (“The Presbyterians,” p. 143). The like observation
is true down to a much more recent date of the Protestant Episcopal Church.
Noble progress has been made in both these denominations in reversing this record.
Special mention must be made of the peculiarly valuable contribution to the liturgical literature of America that is made by the oldest of our episcopal churches, the Moravian. This venerable organization is rich not only in the possession of a heroic martyr history, but in the inheritance of liturgic forms and usages of unsurpassed beauty and dignity. Before the other churches had emerged from a half-barbarous state in respect to church music, this art was successfully cultivated in the Moravian communities and missions. In past times these have had comparatively few points of contact and influence with the rest of the church; but when the elements of a common order of divine worship shall by and by begin to grow into form, it is hardly possible that the Moravian traditions will not enter into it as an important factor.
A combination of conditions which in the case of other bodies
in the church has been an effective discouragement to literary production has applied
with especial force to the Roman Catholic Church in America. First, its energies
and resources, great as they are, have been engrossed by absolutely prodigious burdens
of practical labor; and secondly, its necessary literary material has been furnished
Recent events in the Catholic Church in America tend to reassure
all minds on an important point on which not bigots and alarmists only, but liberal-minded
citizens apostolically willing to “look not only on their own things but also on
the things of others,” have found reasonable ground for anxiety. The American Catholic
Church, while characterized in . all its ranks, in respect of loyal devotion to
the pope, by a high type of ultramontane orthodoxy, is to be administered on patriotic
American principles. The brief term of service of Monsignor Satolli as papal legate
clothed with plenipotentiary authority from the Roman see stamped out the scheme
called from its promoter “Cahenslyism,” which would have divided the American Catholic
Church into permanent alien communities, conserving each its foreign language and
organized under its separate hierarchy. The organization of parishes to be administered
in other languages than English is suffered only as a temporary necessity. The deadly
warfare against the American common-school system has abated. And the anti-American
denunciations contained in the bull and syllabus of December 8, 1864, are openly
renounced as lacking the note of infallibility. So (for example) Bishop O’Gorman,
“The Roman Catholics,” p.
434. And yet, at the time, the bull with its appendix was certainly looked upon
as “an act of infallibility.” See, in “La Bulle Quanta Cura et la Civilisation
Moderne, par l’Abbé Pélage” (Paris, 1865), the utterances of all the French bishops.
The language of Bishop Plantier of Poitiers seems decisive: “The Vicar of Jesus
Christ, doctor and pastor charged with the teaching and ruling of the entire church,
addressed to the bishops, and through them to all the Christian universe, instructions,
the object of which is to settle the mind and enlighten the conscience on sundry
points of Christian doctrine and morals” (pp. 503, 504). See also pp. 445, 450.
This brings it within the Vatican Council’s definition of an infallible utterance.
But we are bound to bear in mind that not only is the infallible authority of this
manifesto against “progress, liberalism, and modern civilization” disclaimed,
but the meaning of it, which seems unmistakably clear, is disputed. “The syllabus,”
says Bishop O’Gorman, “is technical and legal in its language, . . . and
needs to be interpreted to the lay reader by the ecclesiastical lawyer” (p. 435). A seriously important desideratum in .theological literature is
some authoritative canon of the infallible utterances of the Roman see. It is difficult
to fix on any one of them the infallible authority of which is not open to dispute
within the church itself; while the liability of them to misinterpretation (as in
the case of the Quanta Cura and Syllabus) brings in still another
element of vagueness and uncertainty.
Of course, as in all large communities of vigorous vitality, there will be mutually antagonist parties in this body but it is hardly to be doubted that with the growth and acclimatization of the Catholic Church in America that party will eventually predominate which is most in sympathy with the ruling ideas of the country and the age.
THE three centuries of history which we have passed under rapid
review comprise a series of political events of the highest importance to mankind.
We have seen, from our side-point of view, the planting, along the western coast
of the Atlantic Ocean, without mutual concert or common direction, of many independent
germs of civilization. So many of these as survived the perils of infancy we have
seen growing to a lusty youth, and becoming drawn each to each by ties of common
interest and mutual fellowship. Releasing themselves from colonial dependence on
a transatlantic power, we find these several communities, now grown to be States,
becoming conscious, through common perils, victories, and hopes, of national unity
and life, and ordaining institutes of national government binding upon all. The
strong vitality of the new nation is proved by its assimilating to itself an immense
mass of immigrants from all parts of Europe, and by expanding itself without essential
change over the area of a continent. It triumphs again and again, and at last in
a struggle that shakes the world, over passions and interests that threaten schism
in the body politic, and gives good reason to its friends to boast the solid unity
of the republic
The ecclesiastical history which has been recounted in this volume,
covering the same territory and the same period of time, runs with equal pace in
many respects parallel with the political history, but in one important respect
with a wide divergence. As with civilization so with Christianity: the germs of
it, derived from different regions of Christendom, were planted without concert
of purpose, and often with distinct cross-purposes, in different seed-plots along
the Atlantic seaboard. Varying in polity, in forms of dogmatic statement, and even
in language, the diverse growths were made, through wonders of spiritual influence
and through external stress of trial, to feel their unity in the one faith. The
course of a common experience tended to establish a predominant type of religious
life the influence of which has been everywhere felt, even when it has not been
consented to. The vital strength of the American church, as of the American nation,
has been subjected to the test of the importation of enormous masses of more or
less uncongenial population, and has shown an amazing power of digestion and assimilation.
Its resources have been taxed by the providential imposition of burdens of duty
and responsibility such, in magnitude and weight, as never since the early preaching
of the gospel have pressed upon any single generation of the church. Within the
space of a single lifetime, at an expenditure of toil and treasure which it is idle
to attempt to compute, the wide and desolate wilderness, as fast as civilization
has invaded it, has been occupied by the church with churches,
So much for the parallel. The divergence is not less impressive.
In contrast with the solid political unity into which the various and incongruous
elements have settled themselves, the unity of the Christian church is manifested
by oneness neither of jurisdiction nor of confederation, nor even by diplomatic
recognition and correspondence. Out of the total population of the United States,
amounting, according to the census of 1890, to 62,622,000 souls, the 57,000,000
accounted as Christians, including 20,000,000 communicant church-members, are gathered
into 165,297 congregations, assembling in 142,000 church edifices containing 43,000,000
sittings, and valued (together with other church property) at $670,000,000; and
are served in the ministry of the gospel by more than 111,000 ministers. These statistical figures are taken from the authoritative work
of Dr. H. K. Carroll, “The Religious Forces of the United States” (American
Church History Series, vol. i.). The volume gives no estimate of the annual
expenditure for the maintenance of religious institutions. If we assume the
small figure of $500 as the average annual expenditure in connection with each house of worship,
it makes an aggregate of $82,648,500 for parochial expenses. The annual contributions
to Protestant foreign and home missions amount to $7,000,000. (See above, pp. 358,
359.) The amounts annually contributed as free gifts for Christian schools and colleges
and hospitals and other charitable objects can at present be only conjectured.
This situation is too characteristic of America, and too distinctly connected with the whole course of the antecedent history, not to be brought out with emphasis in this concluding chapter. In other lands the church is maintained, through the power of the civil government, under the exclusive control of a single organization, in which the element of popular influence may be wholly wanting, or may be present (as in many of the “Reformed” polities) in no small measure. In others yet, through government influence and favor, a strong predominance is given to one organized communion, under the shadow of which dissentient minorities are tolerated and protected. Under the absolute freedom and equality of the American system there is not so much as a predominance of any one of the sects. No one of them is so strong and numerous but that it is outnumbered and outweighed by the aggregate of the two next to it. At present, in consequence of the rush of immigration, the Roman Catholic Church is largely in advance of any single denomination besides, but is inferior in numerical strength and popular influence to the Methodists and Baptists combined—if they were combined.
And there is no doubt that this comminution of the church is frankly
accepted, for reasons assigned, not only as an inevitable drawback to the blessings
of religious freedom, but as a good thing in itself. A weighty sentence The “Federalist,” No.
51.
It is not altogether a pleasing object of contemplation —the citizen
and the statesman looking with contentment on the schism of the church as averting
a danger to the state. It is hardly more gratifying when we find ministers of the
church themselves accepting the condition of schism as being, on the whole, a very
good condition for the church of Christ, if not, indeed, the best possible. It is
Sectarian divisions tend strongly to perpetuate themselves. The starting of schism is easy and quick; the healing of it is a matter of long diplomatic negotiations. In a very short time the division of the church, with its necessary relations to property and to the employment of officials, becomes a vested interest. Provision for large expenditure unnecessary, or even detrimental, to the general interests of the kingdom of Christ, which had been instituted in the first place at heavy cost to the many, is not to be discontinued without more serious loss to influential individuals. Those who would set themselves about the healing of a schism must reckon upon personal and property interests to be conciliated.
This least amiable characteristic of the growth of the Christian
church in America is not without its compensations. The very fact of the existence,
in presence of one another, of these multitudinous rival sects, all equal before “This habit of respecting one another’s rights cherishes a
feeling of mutual respect and courtesy. If on the one hand the spirit of independence
fosters individualism, on the other it favors good fellowship. All sects are equal
before the law. . . . Hence one great cause of jealousy and distrust is removed;
and though at times sectarian zeal may lead to rivalries and controversies unfavorable
to unity, on the other hand the independence and equality of the churches favor
their voluntary coöperation; and in no country is the practical union of Christians
more beautifully or more beneficially exemplified than in the United States. With
the exception of the Roman Catholics, Christians of all communions are accustomed
to work together in the spirit of mutual concession and confidence, in educational,
missionary, and philanthropic measures for the general good. The motto of the state
holds of the church also, E pluribus unum. As a rule, a bigoted church or
a fierce sectarian is despised” (Dr. J. P. Thompson, in “Church and State
in the United States,” pp. 98, 99). See, to the like purport, the judicious remarks
of Mr. Bryce, “American Commonwealth,” vol. ii., pp. 568, 664. Bryce,
“American Commonwealth,” vol. ii.,
568.
There are many indications, in the recent history of the American
church, pointing forward toward some higher manifestation of the true unity of the
church than is to be found in occasional, or even habitual, expressions of mutual
good will passing to and fro among sharply competing and often antagonist sects.
Instead of easy-going and playful felicitations on the multitude of sects as contributing
to the total effectiveness of the church, such as used to be common enough on “anniversary” platforms, we hear, in one form and another, the acknowledgment that
the divided and subdivided state of American Christendom is not right, but wrong.
Whose is the wrong need not be decided; certainly it does not wholly belong to the
men of this generation or of this country; we are heirs of the schisms of other
lands and ages, and have added to them schisms of our own making. The matter begins
to be taken soberly and seriously. The tender entreaty of the Apostle Paul not
to suffer ourselves to be split up into sects
Already in the early history we have observed a tendency toward
the healing, in America, of differences imported from over sea. Such was the commingling
of Separatist and Puritan in New England; the temporary alliance of Congregationalist
and Presbyterian to avert the imposition of a state hierarchy; the combination of
Quaker and Roman Catholic to defeat a project of religious oppression in Maryland;
the drawing, together of Lutheran and Reformed Germans for common worship, under
the saintly influence of the Moravian Zinzendorf; and the “Plan of Union” by which
New Englander and Scotch-Irishman were to labor in common for the evangelization
of the new settlements. See above, pp. 61, 95, 190, 206, 220, 258. See above, pp. 252-259. Among the New England Congregationalists the zeal for union went
so far as to favor combination with other sects even in the work of training candidates for the ministry. Among the
“honorary vice-presidents” of their “American Education Society” was Bishop Griswold, of the Eastern Diocese
of the Protestant Episcopal Church. Sermon at consecration of Bishop H. U. Onderdonk, 1827. Minutes of the Convention of Delegates met to consult on Missions
in the City of Cincinnati, A.D. 1831. The position of the bishop was more logical
than that of the convention, forasmuch as he held, by a powerful effort of faith,
that “his own” church is the church of the United States, in an exclusive sense;
while the divines at Cincinnati earnestly repudiate such exclusive pretensions for
their church, and hold to a plurality of sectarian churches on the same territory,
each one of which is divinely invested with the prerogatives and duties of “the
church of Christ.” A usus loquendi which seems to be hopelessly imbedded
in the English language applies the word “church” to each one of the several sects
into which the church is divided. It is this corruption of language which leads
to the canonization of schism as a divine ordinance.
For all the waning of interest in the “catholic basis” societies,
the sacred discontent of the Christian people with sectarian division continued
to demand expression. How early the aspiration for an ecumenical council of evangelical
Christendom became articulate, it may not be easy to discover. The first proposal for such an assembly seems to be contained
in an article by L. Bacon in the “New Englander” for April, 1844. “Why might
there not be, ere long, some general conference in which the various evangelical
bodies of this country and Great Britain and of the continent of Europe should be
in some way represented, and in which the great cause of reformed and spiritual
Christianity throughout the world should be made the subject of detailed and deliberate
consideration, with prayer and praise? That would be an ‘ecumenical council’ such
as never yet assembled since the apostles parted from each other at Jerusalem—a
council not for legislation and division, but for union and communion and for the
extension of the living knowledge of Christ” (pp. 253, 254). See the pungent strictures of Horace Bushnell on
“The Evangelical
Alliance,” in the “New Englander” for January, 1847, p. 109.
It is in large part the eager appetency for some manifestation
of interconfessional fellowship that has hastened the acceptance of such organizations
as the Young Men’s Christian Association and the Young People’s Society of Christian
Endeavor; just as, on the other hand, it is the conscientious fear, on the part
of watchful guardians of sectarian interests, that habitual fellowship across the
boundary lines of denominations may weaken the allegiance to the sect, which has
induced the many attempts at substituting associations constituted on a narrower
basis. But the form of organization which most comprehensively illustrates the unity
of the church is that “Charity Organization” which has grown to be a necessity
to the social life of cities and considerable towns, furnishing a central office
of mutual correspondence and coordination to all churches and societies and persons
engaged in the Christian work of relieving poverty and distress. This central bureau
of charitable coöperation is not the less a center of catholic fellowship for the
fact that it does not shut its door against societies not distinctively Christian,
like Masonic fraternities, nor even against societies distinctively non-Christian,
A notable advance in true catholicity of communion is reported
from among the churches and scattered missions in Maine. Hitherto, in the various
movements of Christian union, it was common to attempt to disarm the suspicions
of zealous sectarians by urgent disclaimers of any intent or tendency to infringe
on the rights or interests of the several sects, or impair their claim to a paramount
allegiance from their adherents. The Christians of Maine, facing tasks of evangelization
more than sufficient to occupy all their resources even when well economized and
squandering nothing on needless divisions and competitions, have attained to the
high grace of saying that sectarian interests must and shall be sacrificed when
the paramount interests of the kingdom of Christ require it. An agreement has been made, in this State, among five
leading denominations, to avoid competing enterprises in sparsely settled
communities. An interdenominational committee sees to the carrying out of this
policy. At a recent mutual conference unanimous satisfaction was expressed in
the six years’ operation of the plan.
Meanwhile the signs of a craving for larger fellowship continue
to be multiplied. Quite independently of practical results achieved, the mere fact
of efforts and experiments is a hopeful fact, even when these are made in
I. No one need question the sincerity or the fraternal spirit with which some important denominations have each proposed the reuniting of Christians on the simple condition that all others should accept the distinctive tenet for which each of these denominations has contended against others. The present pope, holding the personal respect and confidence of the Christian world to a higher degree than any one of his predecessors since the Reformation (to name no earlier date), has earnestly besought the return of all believers to a common fellowship by their acceptance of the authority and supremacy of the Roman see. With equal cordiality the bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church have signified their longing for restored fellowship with their brethren on the acceptance by these of prelatical episcopacy. And the Baptists, whose constant readiness at fraternization in everything else is emphasized by their conscientious refraining from the sacramental sign of communion, are not less earnest in their desire for the unification of Christendom by the general acceptance of that tenet concerning baptism, the widespread rejection of which debars them, reluctant, from unrestricted fellowship with the general company of faithful men. But while we welcome every such manifestation of a longing for union among Christians, and honor the aspiration that it might be brought about in one or another of these ways, in forecasting the probabilities of the case, we recognize the extreme unlikeliness that the very formulas which for ages have been the occasions of mutual contention and separation shall become the basis of general agreement and lasting concord.
II. Another indication of the craving for a larger fellowship is found in the
efforts made for large sectarian
Qum regio in terris non nostri plena laboris?
The representative assembly of any other body of Christians, however widely ramified, must seem insignificant when contrasted with the real ecumenicity of the Vatican Council. But it has not been useless for the larger sects of Protestantism to arrange their international assemblies, if it were for nothing more than this, that such widening of the circle of practical fellowship may have the effect to disclose to each sect a larger Christendom outside to which their fellowship must sooner or later be made to reach.
The first of these international sectarian councils was that commonly
spoken of as “the Pan-Anglican Synod,” of Protestant Episcopal bishops gathered
at Lambeth by invitation of the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1867 and thrice since.
The example was bettered by the Presbyterians, who in 1876 organized for permanence
their” Pam-Presbyterian Alliance,” or “Alliance of the Reformed Churches throughout
the world holding the Presbyterian System.” The first of the triennial general councils
of this Alliance was held at Edinburgh in 1877, “representing more than forty-nine
separate churches scattered “Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia,” vol. i., p. 63. Buckley, “The Methodists,” p. 552.
Interesting and useful as this international organization of sects is capable of being made, it would be a mistake to look upon it as marking a stage in the progress toward a manifest general unity of the church. The tendency of it is, on the whole, in the opposite direction.
III. If the organization of “ecumenical” sects has little
tendency toward the visible communion of saints in the American church, not much
more is to be hoped from measures for the partial consolidation of sects, such
as are often projected and sometimes realized. The healing of the great thirty
years’ schism of the Presbyterian Church, in 1869, was so vast a gain in
ecclesiastical economy, and in the abatement of a long-reeking public scandal
and of a multitude of local frictions and irritations, that none need wonder at
the awakening of ardent desires that the ten Presbyterian bodies still surviving
might “find room for all within one fold” Thompson, “The Presbyterians,” p. 308. If the Lutherans of America were to be united with the Presbyterians,
it would be no more than was accomplished fourscore years ago in Prussia. In that
case, out of 20,618,307 communicants, there would be included in the four combinations,
18,768,859.
The pondering of these possibilities is pertinent to this closing chapter on account of the fact that, as we near the end of the nineteenth century, one of the most distinctly visible tendencies is the tendency toward the abatement of sectarian division in the church. It is not for us simply to note the converging lines of tendency, without some attempt to compute the point toward which they converge. There is grave reason to doubt whether this line of the consolidation or confederation of sects, followed never so far, would reach the desired result.
If the one hundred and forty-three sects enumerated in the eleventh
census of the United States Dr. Carroll, “Religious Forces,” p. xv.
Questions like these, put to be considered, not to be answered,
raise in the mind the misgiving that we have been seeking in diplomatic negotiations
between high contracting parties that which diplomacy can do only a little toward
accomplishing. The great aim is to be sought in humbler ways. It is more hopeful
to begin at the lower end. Not in great towns and centers of ecclesiastical influence,
but in villages and country districts, the deadly effects of comminuted fracture
in the church are most deeply felt. It is directly to the people of such communities,
not through the medium of persons or committees that represent national sectarian
interests, that the new commandment is to be preached, which yet is no new commandment,
but the old commandment which they have had from the beginning. It cannot always
be that sincere Christian believers, living together in a neighborhood in which
the ruinous effects of division are plain to every eye, shall continue to misapprehend
or disregard some of the tenderest and most unmistakable counsels of their Lord
and
The record of important events in the annals of American Christianity
may well end with that wholly unprecedented gathering at Chicago in connection with
the magnificent celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of
America by Columbus—I mean, of course, the Parliament of Religions. In a land which
bears among the nations the reproach of being wholly absorbed in devotion to material
interests, and in which the church, unsupported and barely recognized by the state,
and unregulated by any secular authority, scatters itself into what seem to be hopelessly
discordant fragments, a bold enterprise was undertaken in the name of American Christianity,
such as the church in no other land of Christendom would have had the power or the
courage to venture on. With large hospitality, representatives of all the religions
of the world were invited to visit Chicago, free of cost, as guests of the Parliament.
For seventeen days the Christianity of America, and of Christendom, and of Christian
missions in heathen lands, sat confronted—no, not confronted, but side by side on
the same platform—with the non-Christian religions represented by their priests,
prelates, and teachers. Of all the diversities of Christian opinion and organization
in America nothing important was unrepresented, from the authoritative dogmatic
system and the solid organization of the Catholic Church (present in the person
of its highest official dignitaries) to the broadest liberalism and the most unrestrained
individualism. There were those who stood aloof and prophesied that nothing could
come of such an assemblage but a hopeless jangle of discordant opinions. The forebodings
were disappointed. The diverse opinions were there, and were uttered with entire
unreserve. But the jangle of discord was not there. It was seen and felt that the
American church, in the presence of the unchristian and antichristian powers, and
The theme prescribed for this volume gives no opportunity for such a conclusion as the literary artist delights in—a climax of achievement and consummation, or the catastrophe of a decline and fall. We have marked the sudden divulging to the world of the long-kept secret of divine Providence; the unveiling of the hidden continent; the progress of discovery, of conquest, of colonization; the planting of the church; the rush of immigration; the occupation of the continent with Christian institutions by a strange diversity of sects; the great providential preparations as for some “divine event” still hidden behind the curtain that is about to rise on the new century,—and here the story breaks off half told.
To so many of his readers as shall have followed him to this last
page of the volume, the author would speak a parting word. He does not deprecate
the criticisms that
Abbot, Ezra, 379.
Abbot, George, Archbishop, 42.
Abbott, Lyman, 384.
Abolitionists, 82, 282, 284.
Adams, Charles Francis, 131.
Adventists, 336.
Albany, 69.
Albrights, 229.
Alexander, Dr. Gross, 348.
Alexander VI., pope, 3, 57.
Allen, Professor A. V. G., 156, 159, 382.
Allen, Professor J. H., 250.
Alliance, Evangelical, 408.
America: providential concealment of, 5; medieval church in, 2; Spanish conquests and missions in, 6-15; French occupation and missions, 16-29; English colonies in, 38-67, 82-126; Dutch and Swedes in, 68-81; churches of New England, 88; Quaker colonization, 109-117; other colonists, 120-124; diverse sects, 127-139; Great Awakening, 157-180; Presbyterians, 186; Reformed, 187; Lutheran, 188; Moravian, 189; Methodist, 198; severance of colonies from England and of church from state, 221; Second Awakening, 233; organized beneficence, 246; conflicts of the church, 261; dissension and schism, 292; immigration, 315; the church in the Civil War, 340; reconstruction and expansion of the church, 351; theology and literature, 374; political union and ecclesiastical division, 398; tendencies toward unity, 405.
American Bible Society, 256, 408.
American Board of Missions, 252-255.
American Missionary Association, 255, 314.
Andover Theological Seminary, 251, 271.
Andrew, Bishop, 302.
Andrews, E. B., 340.
Andrews, W. G., 177, 179.
Anglican Church established in American colonies, 51, 61, 64, 65.
Antipopery agitation, 312, 325.
Antislavery. See Slavery.
“Apostasy, the southern,” 277, 346.
“Applied Christianity,” 385.
Apprenticeship obsolete, 364.
Arminianism, 504, 222.
Armstrong, General S. C., 356.
Asbury, Bishop Francis, 200.
Awakening, the Great, 53, 81, 126, 141, 157, 181.
Awakening, the Second, 233, 242.
Bachman, John, 278.
Bacon, B. W., 380.
Bacon, David, 246.
Bacon, Francis, 4o.
Bacon, Leonard, 84, 94, 502, 113, 134, 227, 260, 272, 278, 287, 408.
Bacon, Nathaniel, 63.
Baird, Charles W. and Henry M., 388.
Baltimore, first Lord, 54; second Lord, 56.
Bancroft, George, 19, 21, 22, 24, 27, 29, 41, 116, 117, 383.
Baptist Young People’s Union, 369.
Baptists: in Virginia, 53; in Carolina, 64; in Rhode Island, 106; in Massachusetts, 130; in Pennsylvania, 146; in the South, 149; services to religious liberty, 221; antislavery, 222; become Calvinists, 223; found Brown University, 248; undertake foreign missions, 253; divide on slavery, 303; pioneer work, 332; plan of Christian union, 411.
Barclay, Robert, 112, 117.
Barnes, Albert, 294.
Baxter, George A., 237.
Baxter, Richard, 66, 121.
Beecher, Edward, 294, 383.
Beecher, Henry Ward, 341, 351, 384.
Beecher, Lyman, 230, 243, 251, 263, 286, 294, 383.
Belcher, Governor, 168.
Bellamy, Joseph, 156, 181.
Bellomont, Lord, 79.
Bellows, Henry W., 383.
Benezet, Anthony, 203.
Bennett, Philip, 48.
Bennett, Richard, 50.
Berkeley, Governor Sir William, 49, 50, 51, 63.
Bethlehem, Pa., 189.
Biblical science, 378.
Birney, James G., 273, 274, 275, 283.
Bishops, Anglican, consecrated, 213, 304.
Bishops, Catholic, consecrated, 215.
Bishops, colonial, not wanted, 206.
Bishops, Methodist, consecrated, 219.
Bishops, Moravian, 124, 193.
Bissell, Edwin C., 380.
Blair, Commissary, 52.
Blair, Samuel, 16o, 167.
Blake, Joseph, 63.
Boehm, Martin, 228.
Bogardus, Everard, 70.
Boyle, Robert, 66.
Bradford, Governor William, 94, 97.
Brainerd, David, 18o, 183, 247.
Bray, Thomas, 61, 62, 66.
Breckinridge, Robert J., 281, 378.
Brewster, Edward, 43, 44.
Brewster, William, 44, 83.
Briggs, Charles A., 380.
Brooks, Phillips, 384.
Brown, Francis, 379.
Brown, Tutor, 131.
Browne, J. and S., at Salem, 97.
Browne, W. II., 55, 59.
Bryce, James, 404, 405.
Buck, Richard, 42, 44.
Buckley, James M., 201, 202, 218, 219, 240, 241.
Buckminster, 251, 383.
Bushnell, Horace, 105, 176, 375, 383, 409.
Cahenslyism, 392.
Calvert, Cecilius, 56.
Calvert, George, 54, 55.
Calvert, Leonard and George, 56, 59.
Calvinism: in New England, 103, 225; among Baptists, 223; in the Presbyterian Church, 294.
Campanius, John, 76, 150.
Campbell, Douglas, 74.
Campbellites, 242.
Camp-meetings, 233.
Canada, 18-29.
Cane Ridge revival, 235.
Carolinas colonized, 62.
Carroll, Bishop John, 214.
Carroll, Dr. H. K., 335, 369.
Cartier, Jacques, 17.
Cartwright, Peter, 232.
Catholic Church, Roman: Revived and reformed in sixteenth century, 4. Spanish missions a failure, 10-15. French missions, their wide extension and final collapse, 17-29. Persecuted in England, 36. In Maryland, 56. Way prepared for, 185. Organized for United States, 215. Conflict with “trusteeism,” 216, 310; with fanaticism, 312. Gain and loss by immigration, 318322. Modified in America, 323-396. Methods of propagation, 330. Its literature, 394. Its relation to the Church Catholic, 324, 416, 418.
Cavaliers in Virginia, 51.
Champlain, 17, 20, 28.
Channing, William Ellery, 251, 30T, 383.
Charity Organization, 409.
Charles II. of England, 51, 62, 78.
Charter: of Massachusetts, 90; transferred to America, 98.
Charter of the Virginia Company: revoked, 48.
Chauncy, Charles, 170.
Chautauqua, 233, 363.
Cherokee nation, 265.
Chickasaws and Choctaws, 23.
Chinese immigration, 336.
Church polity in New England, 88, 95, 99, 102.
Clark, Francis E., 368.
Clarke, James Freeman, 383.
Clergy: of Virginia, 52; of Maryland, 6i.
Cleveland, Aaron, 204.
College settlement, 370.
Colleges, 48, 52, 102, 160, 172, 173, 176, 231, 247, 271.
Colonization in Africa, 257.
Congregationalists: in New England, 99; in New Jersey, 109; moving west, 137; coöerate with Presbyterians, 220; college-builders, 333; work at the South, 355.
Conservatism of American churches, 311.
Copland, Patrick, 47, 48, 50.
Cornbury, Lord, 80, 121, 135, 141.
Corwin, E. T., 69, 71, 78, 80, 121, 139.
Covenanters in New Jersey, 110.
Cumberland Presbyterians, 241.
Cutler, Timothy, 131, 156, 169.
Dabney, Robert L., 378.
Dale, Sir Thomas, 43, 45.
Davenport, James, 170.
Davenport, John, 49, 102.
Davies, Samuel, 173.
Deerfield, 21.
De la Warr, Lord, 41, 43.
Dewey, Orville, 383.
Dickinson, Jonathan, 160, 294.
Disciples, 242, 414.
Divisions of Christendom, 31.
Dominicans, 9, 10, 32.
Dorchester, Daniel, 322, 335, 357, 358, 359, 361.
Douglas, Stephen A., 341.
Dow, Lorenzo, 240.
Drunkenness prevalent, 286.
Dubbs, Joseph H., 121.
Dudley, Governor, 98.
Dueling, 263.
Duffield, George, 294.
Dunster, President, 130.
Durand, William, 49.
Durbin, David P., 240.
Dutch church, 68, 78, 109, 134.
Dutch in Carolina, 64.
“Dutch, Pennsylvania,” 118.
Dwight, Timothy, 230, 242, 375, 387.
Eaton, Theophilus, 102.
Eddy, Richard, 225, 228.
Edmundson, William, 64.
Edwards, Jonathan, 156, 169, 172, 179, 247, 294.
Edwards, Jonathan, the younger, 222, 225, 273.
Elder, M. T., 322, 331.
Eleuthera colony, 50.
Eliot, John, 66, 102, 150, 152.
Embury, Philip, 199.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 298, 383.
Emmons, Nathanael, 251, 305, 375.
Endicott, John, 90, 93, 94.
England, religious parties in, 33, 43.
Episcopal Church: in Virginia, 38-53; in Maryland, 60; in Carolina, 6.467, 148; in New York, 78-80, 135; in Pennsylvania, 119; in Georgia, 124; in New England, 128, 129, 131-134; hostile to revivals, 177, 306; extreme depression, 2,; consecration of bishops, 212; resuscitation, 304; violent controversy, 306; rapid growth, 308; specialties of, in evangelization, 334; reconstruction after Civil War, 352; Pan-Anglican Synod, 412.
Epworth League, 369.
Establishment of religion: in Virginia, 45, 51-53; in Maryland, 61; in the Carolinas, 64, 65, 148; in New York, 78-80; in New England, 91, 97, 100, 102, 128, 129. Disestablishment, 174, 221.
Evangelical Association, 229.
Evangelization at the South, 356.
Evangelization at the West, 327.
Evarts, Jeremiah, 267, 271, 286.
Exscinding Acts, 167, 297, 353.
Fanaticism of Spanish church, 4, 8.
Fanaticism, antipopery, 6o, 61, 312.
Finney, Charles G., 375.
Fisher, George Park, 182, 382.
Fisher, Sidney George, 118, 120, 143-145.
Fitch, John, 150.
Fletcher, Governor, 79, 80.
Florida, 9, 10, 22.
Foster, R. V., 236, 238.
Fox, George, 34, 65, 114, 117, 149.
Franciscans, 10, 11, 12, 32.
Franklin, Benjamin, 118.
Fraser, John, 335.
Frelinghuysen, Domine, 81, 134, 141, 142, 163.
Frelinghuysen, Senator, 267.
French missions: projected, 17; extinguished, 185, 220.
Fuller, Dr. and Deacon, 94.
Gates, Sir Thomas, 42.
Georgia, 122, 205, 264, 285.
German exiles, 53, 139.
German immigration, 117, 120, 187, 318.
Gladden, Washington, 385.
Gosnold, Bartholomew, 38.
Gough, John B., 289.
Great fortunes and great gifts, 359.
Greatorex’s collection, 393.
Green, Ashbel, 204.
Green, S. S., 122.
Green, W. H., 380.
Gregory, Caspar Rene, 379.
Griffin, Edward Dorr, 251, 383.
Griswold, Alexander V., 304.
Gurley, R. R., 273.
Hale, Edward Everett, 367, 386.
Half-way Covenant, 104.
IIall, Isaac H., 379.
Hamilton, J. Taylor, 190, 198.
Hampton Institute, 356.
Hand, Daniel, 360.
Hard times in 1857, 342.
Harrison, Thomas, 49, 5o, 60.
Hart, Levi, 204.
Hastings, Thomas, 387, 392.
Haupt, Bible-work, 380.
Haverhill, Mass., 21.
Hawkins, John, 289.
Helps, Arthur, 7, 8.
Higginson, Francis, 90.
High-church party: in Episcopal Church, 306, 308, 323, 407; in Presbyterian Church, 295, 407.
Hill, Matthew, 121.
Hilprecht, Dr., 379.
Historical theology, 381.
Hitchcock, Roswell D., 382.
Hobart, John Henry, 304, 407.
Hodge, Charles, 378, 381.
Holland: colony from, in New York, 68; not the source of New England institutions, 74; Pilgrims in, 86; mission from, to Germans, 194.
Hooker, Thomas, 102, 138.
Hopkins, Samuel, 151, 181, 183, 184, 204, 205.
Hopkins, Stephen, 44.
Hopkinsianism, 294.
Hudson, Henry, 68.
Hughes, John, 310, 351.
Huguenots, 37, 53, 62, 64, 65, 81, 139.
Humphrey, Heman, 286.
Hunt, Robert, 38, 41.
Huntington, Frederic D., 384.
Hurst, John F., 382.
Hutchinson, Ann, 101, 106.
Hymn-writers, 387.
Indians: evangelization of, 46, 47, 57, 71, 74, 76, 150, 151, 179, 246; Indian churches, 131.
Induction refused to unworthy parsons, 51.
Immigration, 315, 317, 357.
Infidelity, 219, 230.
Institutional Church, 369.
Intemperance, 75, 205, 285.
International sectarian councils, 412.
Ireland, 318.
Iroquois, 20, 23, 25.
Jackson, Helen Hunt, 264.
Jacobs, Henry E., 71, 121, 188, 190, 196, 198.
James I. of England, 36, 38, 44, 47, 48, 90.
James II. of England, 110, 112.
Jamestown, 30-45.
Jarratt, Devereux, 173.
Jefferson, Thomas, 221, 230, 305.
Jerks, the, 239, 240.
Jesuits, 4, 10, 26, 28, 29, 32, 56, 57, 71, 150, 214.
Jogues, Father, 71, 150.
Johnson, President Samuel, 132.
Johnson, Thomas Cary, 297, 314, note, 354.
Journalism, 333, 344.
Judson, Adoniram, 253.
Kansas-Nebraska Bill, 284, 341.
Kansas Crusade, 341.
Keith, George, 119, 133, 149.
Keith, Governor, 120.
Kieft, Governor, 70, 71.
King, Thomas Starr, 383.
King’s Chapel, Boston, 224.
Kirby, William, 294.
Kirk, Edward Norris, 383.
Knapp, Jacob, 288.
Lanphier, Jeremiah, 342.
La Salle, 18.
Las Casas, 9, 152.
Laud, William, 48.
Lea, Henry Charles, 382.
Leon, Ponce de, 9.
Leyden, 45, 83, 86.
Liberty, religious: in Eleuthera, 50; in Maryland, 56, 59; in Carolina, 63; in New York, 72; in New Jersey, 111; in Pennsylvania, 116; in Georgia, 123; defended by Makemie, 136; favored by sectarian division, 174; promoted by Baptists, 221.
Literature of American church, 374-395.
Littledale, R. F., 26, 27, 28.
Liturgics, 386, 394.
Locke, John, 62, 64.
Lodge, H. C., 62, 70, 117, 153.
Log College, 142, 160, 162, 172.
Logan County, Kentucky, 232, 234.
Louisiana, 23, 27, 220.
Lutherans, 72, 120, 146, 188, 190, 232.
Luther League, 369.
Madison, James, Bishop, 232.
Madison, James, President, 402.
Maine, 20, 21, 23, 410.
Makemie, Francis, 121, 136.
Maria Monk, 312.
Marshall, John, 232.
Maryland, 49, 54-62.
Mason, John M., 263.
Mason, Lowell, 392.
Massacres, 2, 10, 11, 12, 48, 71, 76, 151, 194.
Mather, Cotton, 107, 153.
Mayhews, the, 150.
McConnell, S. D., 151, 170, 179, 211, 224.
McGee brothers, 233.
McGready, James, 233.
McIlvaine, C. P., 351.
McMasters, John Bach, 240.
Megapolensis, Domine, 71, 77, 150.
Menendez, 10.
Mennonites, 72, 117, 153.
Mercersburg theology, 377, 388.
Methodism: tardy arrival in America, 198; spreads southward, 201; rapid growth, 202; against slavery and intemperance, 205; receives bishops, 219; divided by the slavery agitation, 301; in pioneer work, 332; at the South, 353; Ecumenical Conference, 413; consolidation of Methodist sects, 414.
Michaelius, Jonas, 69.
Millerism, 336.
Mills, Samuel J., 248, 256.
Minuit, Peter, 69, 70, 76.
Missionary societies, 62, 252, 253, 255, 257, 258, 367.
Missions, American: to Indians, 179, 246, 265; to the West, 220, 327; to the South, 355.
Missions, foreign, 252, 255, 257, 358.
Missions to America: Icelandic, 2; Spanish, 6-16; French, 17-29; of the S. P. G., 62, 66, 67, 8o, 126, 131, 133, 135, 140, 177; of the church of Holland, 195.
Missionary Ridge, 268.
Mississippi, the, 18, 21, 256.
Missouri Compromise, 270, 271, 284.
Mobs: antipopery, 321; pro-slavery, 283.
Montesinos, 9.
Montreal, 17, 20.
Moody, Dwight L., 344, 388.
Moor, Thoroughgood, 135.
Moore, George Foot, 380.
Moravians: in Georgia, 124; in Pennsylvania, 189, 193; missions to Indians, 194; their liturgies, 394.
Mormonism, 335.
Morris, Colonel, 79.
Morris, Samuel, 173.
Morse, Jedidiah, 251.
Morton, Thomas, 88.
Muhlenberg, Henry M., 191-198.
Mulford, Elisha, 378.
Munger, Theodore T., 384.
Murray, John, 225.
Music, church, 391, 394.
Nansemond church, 48, 49, 59.
Nationalism of the Puritans, 100, 101, 128, 132, 137, 176.
Native American party, 313, 321.
Neill, E. D., 44, 51, 59.
Neshaminy, 142.
Nevin, John W., 377.
Newark, no, 160.
New Brunswick, 162.
New England Company, 66.
New England theology, 181, 374.
New Englanders moving west, 80, 137.
New Haven theology, 294, 298.
New Jersey, 109-112.
New Jerusalem Church, 229.
New Londonderry, 160.
Newman, A. H., 131, 255, 275.
New Mexico, 6, Ir.
New-School Presbyterians, 294, 346, 355.
New-Side Presbyterians, 166.
New York, 68-81; diversity of sects, 134.
Nicholson, Governor, 52.
Nicolls, Governor, 78.
Nitschmann, David, 124, 193.
Northampton, 104, 155-159.
Norton, Andrews, 299.
Nott, Eliphalet,;63.
Nursing orders and schools, 368.
Oberlin College, 314.
Occum, Samson, 179.
Oglethorpe, James, 123.
O’Gorman, Bishop, 2, 15, 23, 24, 28, 216, 312, 321, 396.
Old-School Presbyterians, 295, 345, 353.
Old-Side Presbyterians, 166.
Orders in Roman Church, 330.
Ordination in New England, 96, 100.
Otis, Deacon, 360.
Otterbein, Philip William, 228.
Paine, Thomas, 230.
Palatines, 37, 53, 118, 140, 187.
Palfrey, John G., 98, 99, 100, 383.
Palmer, Ray, 387.
Pam-Methodist Conference, 413.
Pam-Presbyterian Alliance, 412.
Pan-Anglican Synod, 412.
Park, Edwards A., 151, 182, 184, 204, 305, 375.
Parker, Theodore, 300.
Parkman, Francis, 18.
Parliament of Religions, 418.
Pastorius, 117.
Penn, William, 112, 115, 143.
Persecutions, 36, 51, 107, 110, 130.
Pierpont, James, 81.
Pierpont, Sarah, 156.
Pierson, Abraham, 109, 150.
Pilgrims, 45, 83, 84, 86, 88, 93.
Plan of Union, 220, 258, 293.
Pocahontas, 46.
Pond, Enoch, 378.
Population of United States: in 1790, 315; in 1850, ibid.
Porter, Ebenezer, 286.
Pott, Governor, 55.
Presbyterians: in Scotland and Ireland, 37, 110; in America, 110, 121; in New York, 136; schism among, 166; rapid growth, 186; alliance with Congregationalists, 206; earnestly antislavery, 268; dissensions among, 292; the great schism, 296; characteristics as a sect, 332; new schisms and reunions, 346, 353, 355; liturgical movement, 388; early unproductiveness in theology and literature, 394; international alliance, 412.
Princeton College, 173, 175.
Princeton Seminary, 251, 380.
Prohibitory legislation, 290.
Protestant sects and Catholic orders, 330-334.
Protestantism in Europe divided, 3134.
Provoost, Bishop, 212, 213, 232.
Psalmody, 182, 387, 391-393.
Pulpit, the American, 382.
Puritan jurisprudence, 113; sabbatarian extravagance provokes reaction, 371.
Puritans: not Separatists, 43; in Virginia, 44-50; in Maryland, 59; antagonize the Separatists, 82; settle at Salem, 90; fraternize with the Pilgrims, 94; church order, 96; the great Puritan exodus bringing the charter, 98; intend an established church, zoo; exclude factious dissenters, 101; divergences of opinion, 103; in New Jersey, 109; Puritan church establishments fail, 108, 128, 174; Nationalist principle succumbs to Separatist, 176.
Quakerism: a reaction from Puritanism, 113; its enthusiasm, 114; its discipline, 114; anticipated in continental Europe, 115; Keith’s schism, 119; Quaker jurisprudence, 143; failure in civil government, 144; and in pastoral work, 145; its sole and faithful witness at the South, 149; the only organized church fellowship uniting the colonies, 150; Hicksite schism, 314.
Quakers: persecuted in England, 36; in Virginia, 51, 53; missions in Carolina, 64; persecuted in New York, 73; and in Massachusetts, lot; dominant in New Jersey, 110; and in Pennsylvania, 116; excluded from Evangelical Alliance, 408.
Quanta Cura, bull, with Syllabus, 352, 396.
Quebec, 17, 20.
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 39, 62.
Redemptioners, 187.
Reformation in Spain, 4.
Reformed Church, German: begins too late the care of German immigrants,140; long unorganized, 146; persists in separation from other German Christians, 195.
Reformed-drunkard ethics, 290.
Reformed Dutch Church: tardy birth in New York, 69; and languishing life, 74, 78; revival under Frelinghuysen, 81, 134, 141, 163.
Relly, James, 225.
Requirimiento of the Spanish, 9.
Restoration of the Stuarts, 51.
Revival of 1857, 342.
Revival of Roman Catholic Church, 214.
Rhode Island, 92, 106, 107.
Rice, David, 237.
Rice, Luther, 253.
Ripley, George, 299.
Rising, Governor, 77.
Robinson, Edward, 378.
Robinson, John, 83, 85, 86, 92.
Robinson, “One-eyed,” 173.
Rolfe, John, 46.
Roman Catholic. See Catholic.
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 87.
Rush, Benjamin, 226, 286.
Ryan, Archbishop, 324.
Sabbath observance, 371.
St. Andrew’s Brotherhood, 369.
St. Augustine, 10.
St. Lawrence, the, 17.
Salem, 90, 96.
Saloons, tippling, 285, 288.
Saltonstall, Gurdon, 132, 133.
Salvation Army, 370.
Salzburgers, 37, 124, 125.
Sandys, Archbishop, and his sons, 44, 47.
Satolli, Monsignor, 396.
Saybrook Platform, 132, 137.
Schaff, Philip, 377, 382.
Schenectady, 21.
Schism: in Presbyterian Church, 167, 241, 297, 346, 353; among Congregationalists, 249; among Unitarians, 298; in Methodist Church, 302, 303; among Baptists, 303; among Quakers, 314; healed, 355; compensations of, 107, 304, 354, 404.
Schlatter, Michael, 195.
Schools: for Virginia, 47, 48, 52; in New York, 70, 75; in New England, 103; in New Jersey, 110; in Pennsylvania, 196.
Scotch-Irish: in Virginia, 47; in Carolina, 64; in Maryland, r21; in Pennsylvania, 122; in New York, 136; in the Alleghanies, 146; in the Awakening, 160; principles and prejudices of, 186.
Screven, William, 64.
Scrooby, 44, 83.
Seabury, Samuel, 212.
Sects: European imported, 31-34; in New York, 72, 134, 140; in Rhode Island, to6; in New Jersey, 109; the German, 117, 120; multiply against established churches, 174; enfeebling effect of, 188; reconstruct themselves, 208; competition of, 328; characteristics of, 332; multitude of, 400; mischiefs of, 403.
Seminaries, theological, 249. Separatists, 33, 44; at Scrooby, Leyden, and Plymouth, 81-95; in Rhode Island, 107; their principle prevails, 176.
Sewall, Samuel, 152.
Seybert commission, 338.
Shaftesbury, Lord, 62.
Shedd, W. J. G., 382.
Sisterhoods, 368.
Slater educational fund, 357, 360.
Slavery: of Indians, 8, 9, 152; of negroes, in Florida, Jo; in Virginia, 48; in all colonies, 147; condemned in Massachusetts, 152; and in Pennsylvania, 153; increased cruelty of, 153. Kindness to slaves, 154, 179, 246, 271. Constant and unanimous protest of the church against slavery, 203-205, 222, 268-277. Beginning of a pro-slavery party in the church, 277; propagated by terror, 279-282. Pro-slavery reaction at the North, 282. Unanimous protests against extension of slavery, 284. Slavery question in Presbyterian Church, 296; in Methodist Church, 301; in Baptist Convention, 303. Failure of compromises, 340. The Kansas Crusade, 341. Apostasy of the southern church complete, 346. Diversity of feeling among northern Christians, 347. Slavery extinguished, 285, 351.
Smalley, John, 225.
Smith, Eli, 273, 378; Henry Boynton, 381; Henry Preserved, 38o; John, 38-42, 47; Ralph, 90.
Smylie, James, 277.
Smyth. Newman, 384.
Social science in seminaries, 369, 386.
Societies, charitable, 252-259, 295, 407.
Society P. C. K., 67.
Society P. G. in Foreign Parts, 62, 67; missions in Carolina, 67; in New York, 8o, 120, note, 135, 140; in Pennsylvania, 119; in New England, 131-133.
Society P. G. in New England, 66.
Sophocles, E. A., 379.
Southampton insurrection, 279.
Spain: Reformation in, 3; conquests and missions of, 7.
Spiritualism, 337-339.
Spotswood, Governor, 52.
Spring, Gardiner, 353.
Standish, Myles, 88.
Stiles, Ezra, 204, 222.
Stoddard, Solomon, 104, 155.
Stone, Barton W., 234.
Storrs, Richard S., 384.
Stowe, Mrs. H. B., 250.
Strawbridge, Robert, 200.
Strong, Augustus H., 378.
Stuart, Moses, 378.
Sturtevant, J. M., 294.
Stuyvesant, Peter, 71, 73, 77.
Sumner, Charles, 283.
Sunday observance, 371.
Sunday-schools, 258, 362.
Swedenborgians, 229.
Swedes, 75-77.
Syllabus of errors condemned by the pope, 352, 396.
Synod: “Reforming,” 105; Presbyterian, 136; disrupted, 167; excision of, 297; of Virginia, 346.
Talcott, Governor, 168.
Talmage, Thomas De Witt, 385.
Taylor, Nathaniel W., 294, 375.
Temperance: efforts for, 75, 205, 206; the Reformation, 285-291; early legislation, 75, 288; “Washingtonian movement,” 288; Prohibitionism, 290.
Tennent, Gilbert, 142, 162, 165, 167, 169.
Tennent, William, 141, 160.
Tennent, William, Jr., 180.
Thayer, Eli, 341, 342.
Thayer, Joseph H., 379.
Theological instruction, 81, 217, 249.
Theological seminaries, 249, 251, 252.
Theology, New England, 181, 243, 294, 355.
Theology, systems of, 375, 378.
Thomas, Allen C. and Richard H., 114, 139, 143.
Thomas, John R., 393.
Thompson, Joseph P., 404.
Thompson, Robert Ellis, 122, 147, 176, 346, 394.
Thomson, William M., 379. Thornwell, James H., 314, note, 378.
Tiffany, Charles C., 65, 71, 120, 131, 134, 173, 207, 210, 213, 224, 232.
Torkillus, Pastor, 76.
Tracy, Joseph, 162, 169, 172, 179.
Trumbull, Henry Clay, 362, 379.
“Trusteeism” 215, 310.
Tuttle, Daniel S., 335.
Tyler, B. B., 236, 238, 242.
Union, Christian: tendencies and attempts, 107, 191, 194, 206, 220, 349, 405, 406.
Unitarianism, 224, 249, 383.
United Brethren, 228.
Unity, real, in the church, 175, 324, 325, 334, 419; manifestation of it yet future, 36, 417, 419.
Universalism, 225-228.
Van Twiller, Governor, 70.
Vermont, 21.
Vincent, John H., 363.
Virginia, 38-53, 55, 173.
Virginia Company, 40, 44, 48, 54.
Voluntary system, 244, 261, 328.
Vose, James G., 107.
Walker, Williston, too, 104, 386.
Walloons, 69.
War: between France and England, 21, 184; the Seven Years’, 22, 24; Revolutionary, 202, 209; the Civil, 348, 365; produces schisms and healings, 353, 355.
Ward, William Hayes, 379.
Ware, Henry, 249, 383.
Ware, Henry, Jr., 251, 299, 383.
Warren, George William, 393.
Washingtonianism, 288.
Watts, Isaac, 158, 168, 182, 387, 391.
Wayland, Francis, 383.
Welsh immigrants, 118.
Wesley, Charles, 124, 125.
Wesley, John, 124, 159, 198, 200, 202, 217, 285.
Westminster League, 369.
Westminster Sabbath law, 371.
Westward progress of church, 219, 327, 358.
Wheelock, Eleazar, 179.
Whitaker, Alexander, 43, 46, 150.
White, Father, 57, 59.
White, John, 89.
White, Bishop William, 210, 212, 213.
Whitefield, George, 126, 163, 168, 173, 175, 177.
Wiggles worth, Michael, 103.
William and Mary, College of, 52.
Williams, Roger, 100, 106, 150.
Williams College, 248.
Wilson, Henry, 273, 274, 281.
Winchester, Elhanan, 226.
Wingfield, Governor, 39.
Winthrop, John, 49, 98.
Wise, John, 102.
Women’s C. T. Union, 367.
Women’s Crusade, 366.
Women’s mission boards, 367.
Woods, Leonard, 378.
Woolman, John, 150, 203.
Ximenes, Cardinal, 3.
Yale College, 230, 243.
Yeo, John, 60.
Young Men’s Christian Association, 343, 364, 409.
Young People’s Society of Christian Endeavor, 368, 409.
Young Women’s Christian Association, 366.
Zinzendorf, 124, 189, 190, 192.
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