A History of American Christianity

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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 for the beginning of the enterprise was embodied in
one of the most interesting personages of the dreary eighteenth
century--General James Oglethorpe. His eventful life covered the greater
part of the eighteenth century, but in some of the leading traits of his
character and incidents of his career he was rather a man of the
nineteenth. At the age of twenty-one he was already a veteran of the
army of Prince Eugene, having served with honorable distinction on the
staff of that great commander. Returning to England, in 1722 he entered
Parliament, and soon attained what in that age was the almost solitary
distinction of a social reformer. He procured the appointment of a
special committee to investigate the condition of the debtors' prisons;
and the shocking revelations that ensued led to a beginning of
reformation of the cruel and barbarous laws of England concerning
imprisonment for debt. But being of the higher type of reformers, he was
not content with such negative work. He cherished and elaborated a
scheme that should open a new career for those whose ill success in life
had subjected them to the pains and the ignominy due to criminals. It
was primarily for such as these that he projected the colony of Georgia.
But to a mind like his the victims of injustice in every land were
objects of practical sympathy. His colony should be an asylum for
sufferers from religious persecution from whatever quarter. The
enterprise was organized avowedly as a work of charity. The territory
was vested in trustees, who should receive no pay or emolument for their
services. Oglethorpe himself gave his unpaid labor as military and civil
head of the colony, declining to receive in return so much as a
settler's allotment of land. An appropriation of ten thousand pounds was
made by Parliament for the promotion of the work--the only government
subsidy ever granted to an American colony. With eager and unselfish
hopes of a noble service to be rendered to humanity, the generous
soldier embarked with a picked company of one hundred and twenty
emigrants, and on the 12th of February, 1733, landed at the foot of the
bluff on which now stands the city of Savannah. The attractions of the
genial climate and fertile soil, the liberal terms of invitation, and
the splendid schemes of profitable industry were diligently advertised,
and came to the knowledge of that noble young enthusiast, Zinzendorf,
count and Moravian bishop, whose estate of Herrnhut in Lusatia had
become an asylum for persecuted Christians; and missionary colonists of
that Moravian church of which every member was a missionary, and
companies of the exiled Salzburgers, the cruelty of whose sufferings
aroused the universal indignation of Protestant Europe, were mingled
with the unfortunates from English prisons in successive ship-loads of
emigrants. One such ship's company, among the earliest to be added to
the new colony, included some mighty factors in the future church
history of America and of the world. In February, 1736, a company of
three hundred colonists, with Oglethorpe at their head, landed at
Savannah. Among them was a reinforcement of twenty colonists for the
Moravian settlement, with Bishop David Nitschmann, and young Charles
Wesley, secretary to the governor, and his elder brother, John, now
thirty-three years old, eager for the work of evangelizing the heathen
Indians--an intensely narrow, ascetic, High-church ritualist and
sacramentarian. The voyage was a memorable one in history. Amid the
terrors of a perilous storm, Wesley, so liable to be lifted up with the
pride that apes humility, was humbled as he contrasted the agitations of
his own people with the cheerful faith and composure of his German
shipmates; and soon after the landing he was touched with the primitive
simplicity and beauty of the ordination service with which a pastor was
set over the Moravian settlement by Bishop Nitschmann. During the
twenty-two months of his service in Georgia, through the ascetic toils
and privations which he inflicted on himself and tried to inflict on
others, he seems as one whom the law has taken severely in hand to lead
him to Christ. It was after his return from America, among the
Moravians, first at London and afterward on a visit to Herrnhut, that he
was "taught the way of the Lord more perfectly."[125:1]

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 against him, and his returning to London to resign to the
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel his commission as missionary.
Just as he was landing, the ship was setting sail which bore to his
deserted field his old Oxford friend and associate in "the Methodist
Club," George Whitefield, then just beginning the career of meteoric
splendor which for thirty-two years dazzled the observers of both
hemispheres. He landed in Savannah in May, 1738. This was the first of
Whitefield's work in America. But it was not the beginning of the Great
Awakening. For many years there had been waiting and longing as of them
that watch for the morning. At Raritan and New Brunswick, in New Jersey,
and elsewhere, there had been prelusive gleams of dawn. And at
Northampton, in December, 1734, Jonathan Edwards had seen the sudden
daybreak and rejoiced with exceeding great joy.

FOOTNOTES:

[109:1] Corwin, pp. 58, 128.

[111:1] 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. 134). 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.

[113:1] See the vindication of 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.'"

[114:1] 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.).

[116:1] Quoted in Bancroft, vol. iii., p. 366.

[117:1] Bancroft, vol. ii., p. 392.

[117:2] H. C. Lodge, p. 213.

[118:1] For a fuller account of the sources of the population of
Pennsylvania, see "The Making of Pennsylvania," by Sydney George Fisher
(Philadelphia, 1896).

[120:1] 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 _naif_ 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).

[121:1] Dubbs, "Reformed Church," p. 281; Jacobs, "The Lutherans," p.
260.

[122:1] 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. 11).
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.)

[125:1] 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.

CHAPTER X.

THE AMERICAN CHURCH ON THE EVE OF THE GREAT AWAKENING--A GENERAL VIEW.

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 friction and irritation between
the colony and the mother country. The reckless laxity of the early
Stuart charters, which permitted the creation of practically independent
democratic republics with churches free from the English hierarchy, was
succeeded, under the House of Orange, by something that looked like a
statesmanlike care for the prerogatives of the crown and the privileges
of the English church. Throughout the colonies, at every viceregal
residence, it was understood that this church, even where it was not
established by law, was the favored official and court church. But
inasmuch as the royal governors were officially odious to the people,
and at the same time in many cases men of despicable personal character,
their influence did little more than create a little "sect of the
Herodians" within the range of their patronage. But though it gave no
real advantage to the preferred church, it was effective (as in
Massachusetts) in breaking down the exclusive pretensions of other
organizations.

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 collision of
these principles with the sturdy individualism that had been accepted
from the Separatists of Plymouth was inevitable. It came when the
"standing order" encountered the Baptist and the Quaker conscience. It
came again when the missionaries of the English established church, with
singular unconsciousness of the humor of the situation, pleaded the
sacred right of dissenting and the essential injustice of compelling
dissenters to support the parish church.[129:1] The protest may have
been illogical, but it was made effective by "arguments of weight,"
backed by all the force of the British government. The exclusiveness of
the New England theocracies, already relaxed in its application to other
sects, was thenceforth at an end. The severity of church establishment
in New England was so far mitigated as at last to put an actual premium
on dissent. Holding still that every citizen is bound to aid in
maintaining the institutions of public worship, it relieved any one of
his assessment for the support of the parish church upon his filing a
certificate that he was contributing to the support of another
congregation, thus providing that any disaffection to the church of the
town must be organized and active. It was the very euthanasia of
establishment. But the state-church and church-state did not cease to be
until they had accomplished that for New England which has never been
accomplished elsewhere in America--the dividing of the settled regions
into definite parishes, each with its church and its learned minister.
The democratic autonomy of each church was jealously guarded, and yet
they were all knit together by terms of loose confederation into a vital
system. The impracticable notion of a threefold ministry in each church,
consisting of pastor, teacher, and ruling elder, failed long before the
first generation had passed; but, with this exception, it may justly be
said that the noble ideal of the Puritan fathers of New England of a
Christian state in the New World, "wherein dwelleth righteousness," was,
at the end of a hundred years from their planting, realized with a
completeness not common to such prophetic dreams.

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.[130:1] It is surprising to find, after all this
agitation and sowing of "the seed of the church," that in all New
England outside of Rhode Island there are in 1730 only six Baptist
churches, including (an honorable item) two Indian churches on the
islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket.[131:1]

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.[131:2] But in the last-named colony an
incident had occurred, having apparently no intimate connection with the
"Venerable Society's" missions, but charged with weighty, and on the
whole beneficent, consequences for the future of the kingdom of Christ
in America.

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 were doubtful of the
validity, or persuaded of the invalidity, of presbyterial as
distinguished from episcopal ordination. The matter was considered with
the gravity which it merited, and a month later, at the time of the
meeting of the colonial legislature, was made the subject of a public
discussion, presided over with great dignity and amenity by Governor
Gurdon Saltonstall, formerly pastor of the church in New London. The
result was that, of the seven pastors assenting to the paper of the two
college men, only two adhered to them; but one of these two was that
able and excellent Samuel Johnson, whose later career as president of
King's College in New York, as well as the career of his no less
distinguished son, is an ornament to American history both of church and
state.

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 church of England was by no means extinct in the third
generation. Alongside of the inevitable repugnance felt and manifested
toward the arrogance, insolence, and violence with which the claims of
the Episcopal Church were commended by royal governors and their
attaches and by some of the imported missionaries, there is ample
evidence of kindly and fraternal feeling, far beyond what might have
been expected, on the part of the New England clergy toward the
representatives of the Church of England. The first missionaries of the
"Venerable Society," Keith and Talbot, arriving in New England in 1702,
met with welcome from some of the ministers, who "both hospitably
entertained us in their houses and requested us to preach in their
congregations, which accordingly we did, and received great thanks both
from the ministers and people."[133:1] One of these hospitable pastors
was the Rev. Gurdon Saltonstall, of New London, who twenty years later,
as governor of the colony, presided at the debate which followed upon
the demission of Rector Cutler.

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
holding himself aloof from the fellowship of good men. The conference
in Yale College library, September 13, 1722, rather than the planting of
a system of exotic missions, marks the true epoch from which to date the
progress of a genuinely American Episcopal Church.[134:1]

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.

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