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 church, Dr. Samuel Fuller, hastened to their relief. On what themes the discourse revolved between the Puritan governor just from England and the Separatist deacon already for so many years an exile, and whither it tended, is manifested in a letter written soon after by Governor Endicott, of Salem, to Governor Bradford, of Plymouth, under date May 11 (= 21), 1629. The letter marks an epoch in the history of American Christianity:

"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.[94:1] It is, as far as I can yet gather, no other than is warranted by the evidence of truth, and the same which I have professed and maintained ever since the Lord in mercy revealed himself to me, being very far different from the common report that hath been spread of you touching that particular. But God's children must not look for less here below, and it is the great mercy of God that he strengthens them to go through with it.

"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 the spiritual house. A day of solemn fasting was held, by the governor's appointment, for the choice of pastor and teacher, and after prayer the two recognized candidates for the two offices, Skelton and Higginson, were called upon to give their views as to a divine call to the ministry. "They acknowledged there was a twofold calling: the one, an inward calling, when the Lord moved the heart of a man to take that calling upon him, and fitted him with gifts for the same; the second (the outward calling) was from the people, when a company of believers are joined together in covenant to walk together in all the ways of God." Thereupon the assembly proceeded to a written ballot, and its choice fell upon Mr. Skelton and Mr. Higginson. It remained for the ministers elect to be solemnly inducted into office, which was done with prayer and the laying on of hands in benediction.

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.[96:1]

Before the solemnities of that notable day were concluded, a belated vessel that had been eagerly awaited landed on the beach at Salem the "messengers of the church at Plymouth." They came into the assembly, Governor Bradford at the head, and in the name of the Pilgrim church declared their "approbation and concurrence," and greeted the new church, the first-born in America, with "the right hand of fellowship." A thoughtful and devoted student declares this day's proceedings to be "the beginning of a distinctively American church history."[97:1]

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 the same year."[98:1] Neither then nor afterward was there any trace of doubt in the minds of the New England settlers, in going three thousand miles away into the seclusion of the wilderness, of their indefeasible moral right to pick their own company. There was abundant opportunity for mistake and temptation to wrong-doing in the exercise of this right, but the right itself is so nearly self-evident as to need no argument.

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'etat 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 1630 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 king and the archbishop to stay the flow of emigration, but with only transient success. "At the end of ten years from Winthrop's arrival about twenty-one thousand Englishmen, or four thousand families, including the few hundreds who were here before him, had come over in three hundred vessels, at a cost of two hundred thousand pounds sterling."[99:1] What could not be done by despotism was accomplished by the triumph of the people over the court. The meeting of the Long Parliament in 1640 made it safe for Puritans to stay in England; and the Puritans stayed. The current of migration was not only checked, but turned backward. It is reckoned that within four generations from that time more persons went to old England than originally came thence. The beginnings of this return were of high importance. Among the home-going companies were men who were destined to render eminent service in the reconstruction of English society, both in the state and in the army, and especially in the church. The example of the New England churches, voluminously set forth in response to written inquiries from England, had great influence in saving the mother country from suffering the imposition of a Presbyterian hierarchy that threatened to be as intolerant and as intolerable as the tyranny of Laud.

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 best Christians entered into mutual covenant as a church of Christ, and this number, growing by well-considered accessions, added to itself from time to time other believers on the evidence and confession of their faith in Christ. The ministers, all or nearly all of whom had been clergymen in the orders of the Church of England, were of one mind in declining to consider their episcopal ordination in England as conferring on them any spiritual authority in a church newly gathered in America. They found rather in the free choice of the brotherhood the sign of a divine call to spiritual functions in the church, and were inducted into office by the primitive form of the laying on of hands.

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.[100:1] Roger Williams, learned, eloquent, sincere, generous, a man after their own heart, was a very malignant among Separatists, separating himself not only from the English church, but from all who would not separate from it, and from all who would not separate from these, and so on, until he could no longer, for conscience' sake, hold fellowship with his wife in family prayers. After long patience the colonial government deemed it necessary to signify to him that if his conscience would not suffer him to keep quiet, and refrain from stirring up sedition, and embroiling the colony with the English government, he would have to seek freedom for that sort of conscience outside of their jurisdiction; and they put him out accordingly, to the great advantage of both parties and without loss of mutual respect and love. A little later, a clever woman, Mrs. Ann Hutchinson, with a vast conceit of her superior holiness and with the ugly censoriousness which is a usual accompaniment of that grace, demonstrated her genius for mixing a theological controversy with personal jealousies and public anxieties, and involved the whole colony of the Bay in an acrimonious quarrel, such as to give an unpleasant tone of partisanship and ill temper to the proceedings in her case, whether ecclesiastical or civil. She seems clearly to have been a willful and persistent nuisance in the little community, and there were good reasons for wanting to be rid of her, and right ways to that end. They took the wrong way and tried her for heresy. In like manner, when the Quakers came among them,—not of the mild, meek, inoffensive modern variety to which we are accustomed, but of the fierce, aggressive early type,—instead of proceeding against them for their overt offenses against the state, disorderly behavior, public indecency, contempt of court, sedition, they proceeded against them distinctly as Quakers, thus putting themselves in the wrong and conceding to their adversaries that crown of martyrdom for which their souls were hankering and to which they were not fully entitled.

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 under which less of molestation was suffered by dissenters, or more of actual encouragement given to rival sects, than under the New England theocracies. The Nationalist principle was exclusive; the men who held it in New England (subject though they were to the temptations of sectarian emulation and fanatic zeal) were large-minded and generous men.

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."[102:1] The like motive determined the choice company under John Davenport and Theophilus Eaton to refuse all inducements and importunities to remain in Massachusetts, choosing rather to build on no other man's foundations at New Haven.[102:2] At the end of a hundred years from the settlement of Boston the shores and river valleys of Massachusetts and Connecticut were planted with towns, each self-governing as a pure democracy, each with its church and educated minister and its system of common schools. The two colleges at Cambridge and New Haven were busy with their appointed work of training young men to the service of God "in church or civil state." And this great and prosperous and intelligent population was, with inconsiderable exceptions, the unmingled progeny of the four thousand English families who, under stress of the tyranny of Charles Stuart and the persecution of William Laud, had crossed the sea in the twelve years from 1628 to 1640.

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 people who could testify of no experience of conversion, and yet did not wish to relinquish for themselves or their families their relation to the church. Out of the conflict between two aspects of theological truth, and the conflict between the Nationalist and the Separatist conceptions of the church, and especially out of the mistaken policy of restricting the civil franchise to church-members, came forth that device of the "Half-way Covenant" which provided for a hereditary quasi-membership in the church for worthy people whose lives were without scandal, and who, not having been subjects of an experience of conscious conversion, were felt to be not altogether to blame for the fact. From the same causes came forth, and widely prevailed, the tenet of "Stoddardeanism," so called as originating in the pastoral work, and, it is said, in the personal experience, of Solomon Stoddard, the saintly minister of Northampton from 1669 till 1729, when he was succeeded by his colleague and grandson, Jonathan Edwards. It is the view that the Lord's Supper is instituted as a means of regeneration as well as of sanctification, and that those who are consciously "in a natural condition" ought not to be repelled, but rather encouraged to come to it. From the same causes, by natural sequence, came that so-called Arminianism[104:1] which, instead of urging the immediate necessity and duty of conversion, was content with commending a "diligent use of means," which might be the hopeful antecedent of that divine grace.

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.[105:1] As early as the second generation, the evil tendency seemed so formidable as to lead to the calling, by the General Court of Massachusetts, of the "Reforming Synod" of 1679. No one can say that the heroic age of New England was past. History has no nobler record to show, of courage and fortitude in both men and women, than that of New England in the Indian wars. But the terrors of those days of tribulation, the breaking up of communities, the decimation of the population, the long absences of the young men on the bloody business of the soldier, were not favorable for maturing the fruits of the Spirit. Withal, the intrigues of British politicians, the threatened or actual molestations of the civil governments of the colonies, and the corrupting influences proceeding from every center of viceregal authority, abetted the tendency to demoralization. By the end of the first third of the eighteenth century, New England, politically, ecclesiastically, theologically, and morally, had come into a state of unstable equilibrium. An overturn is impending.

* * * * *

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 ecclesiastical, finds an experimental justification in the history of the neighbor colony of Rhode Island. No commonwealth can boast a nobler and purer name for its founder than the name of Roger Williams. Rhode Island, founded in generous reaction from the exclusiveness of Massachusetts, embodied the principle of "soul-liberty" in its earliest acts. The announcement that under its jurisdiction no man was to be molested by the civil power for his religious belief was a broad invitation to all who were uncomfortable under the neighboring theocracies.[106:1] And the invitation was freely accepted. The companions of Williams were reinforced by the friends of Mrs. Hutchinson, some of them men of substance and weight of character. The increasing number of persons inclined to Baptist views found in Rhode Island a free and congenial atmosphere. Williams himself was not long in coming to the Baptist position and passing beyond it. The Quakers found Rhode Island a safe asylum from persecution, whether Puritan or Dutch. More disorderly and mischievous characters, withal, quartered themselves, unwelcome guests, on the young commonwealth, a thorn in its side and a reproach to its principles. It became clear to Williams before his death that the declaration of individual rights and independence is not of itself a sufficient foundation for a state. The heterogeneous population failed to settle into any stable polity. After two generations the tyranny of Andros, so odious elsewhere in New England, was actually welcome as putting an end to the liberty that had been hardly better than anarchy.

The results of the manner of the first planting on the growth of the church in Rhode Island were of a like sort. There is no room for question that the material of a true church was there, in the person of faithful and consecrated disciples of Christ, and therefore there must have been gathering together in common worship and mutual edification. But the sense of individual rights and responsibilities seems to have overshadowed the love for the whole brotherhood of disciples. The condition of the church illustrated the Separatism of Williams reduced to the absurd. There was feeble organization of Christians in knots and coteries. But sixty years passed before the building of the first house of worship in Providence, and at the end of almost a century "there had not existed in the whole colony more than eight or ten churches of any denomination, and these were mostly in a very feeble and precarious state."[107:1]

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.[107:2]

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.

FOOTNOTES:

[84:1] 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.

[85:1] L. Bacon, "Genesis of New England Churches," p. 245.

[87:1] L. Bacon, "Genesis," p. 245.

[89:1] 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.

[91:1] L. Bacon, "Genesis," p. 467.

[94:1] 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).

[96:1] L. Bacon, "Genesis," p. 475.

[97:1] L. Bacon, "Genesis," p. 477.

[98:1] Morton's Memorial, in Palfrey, vol. i., p. 298.

[99:1] Palfrey, vol. i., p. 584.

[100:1] As, for example, with great amplitude by Palfrey; and in more condensed form by Dr. Williston Walker, "Congregationalists" (in American Church History Series).

[102:1] L. Bacon, "Early Constitutional History of Connecticut."

[102:2] 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.

[104:1] 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.

[105:1] Sermon on "Barbarism the First Danger."

[106:1] 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.

[107:1] Dr. J. G. Vose, "Congregationalism in Rhode Island," pp. 16, 53, 63.

[107:2] 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."



CHAPTER IX.

THE MIDDLE COLONIES: THE JERSEYS, DELAWARE, AND PENNSYLVANIA—THE QUAKER COLONIZATION—GEORGIA.

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."[109:1]

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 down beside the Passaic, calling their plantation the New-Ark, and reinstituted their fundamental principle of restricting the franchise to members of the church. Thus "with one heart they resolved to carry on their spiritual and town affairs according to godly government." The Puritan migration, of which this was the nucleus, had an influence on the legislation and the later history of New Jersey out of all proportion to its numbers.

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 and mischievous anarchists. The opportunities and temptations that come to those in power would be a test of the quality of the sect more severe than trial by the cart-tail and the gibbet.

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.[111:1]

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 eminent Quaker theologian, Robert Barclay. The Quaker regime continued, not always smoothly, till 1688, when it was extinguished by James II. at the end of his perfidious campaigns against American liberties.

* * * * *

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 break forth. Puritanism was the last expression of that appeal from the church to the Scriptures, from existing traditions of Christianity to its authentic original documents, which is the essence of Protestantism. In Puritanism, reverence for the Scriptures is exaggerated to the point of superstition. The doctrine that God of old had spoken by holy men was supplemented by the pretension that God had long ago ceased so to speak and never would so speak again. The claim that the Scriptures contain a sufficient guide to moral duty and religious truth was exorbitantly stretched to include the last details of church organization and worship, and the minute direction of political and other secular affairs. In many a case the Scriptures thus applied did highly ennoble the polity and legislation of the Puritans.[113:1] In other cases, not a few, the Scriptures, perverted from their true purpose and wrested by a vicious and conceited exegesis, were brought into collision with the law written on the heart. The Bible was used to contradict the moral sense. It was high time for the Quaker protest, and it was inevitable that this protest should be extravagant and violent.

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 influence on the mind does not discharge one from the duty of self-control, but that "the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets"; that the divine inworking does not suspend nor supersede man's volition and activity, but that it behooves man to "work, because God worketh in him to will and to work." The lapse from these characteristically Christian principles into the enthusiastic, fanatic, or heathen conception of inspiration has been a perpetually recurring incident in the history of the church in all ages, and especially in times of deep and earnest spiritual feeling. But in the case of the Quaker revival it was attended most conspicuously by its evil consequences. Half-crazy or more than half-crazy adventurers and hysterical women, taking up fantastical missions in the name of the Lord, and never so happy as when they felt called of God to some peculiarly outrageous course of behavior, associated themselves with sincere and conscientious reformers, adding to the unpopularity of the new opinions the odium justly due to their own misdemeanors. But the prophet whose life and preaching had begun the Quaker Reformation was not found wanting in the gifts which the case required. Like other great religious founders, George Fox combined with profound religious conviction a high degree of tact and common sense and the faculty of organization. While the gospel of "the Light that lighteth every man" was speeding with wonderful swiftness to the ends of the earth, there was growing in the hands of the founder the framework of a discipline by which the elements of disorder should be controlled.[114:1] The result was a firmly articulated organization compacted by common faith and zeal and mutual love, and by the external pressure of fierce persecution extending throughout the British empire on both sides of the ocean.

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 accomplished young courtier, holding as his own the richest domain that could be carved out of a continent, who was at the same time brother, in unaffected humility and unbounded generosity, in a great fraternity bound together by principles of ascetic self-denial and devotion to the kingdom of God?

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."[116:1] With assurances of universal civil and religious liberty in conformity with these principles, he offered land at forty shillings for a hundred acres, subject to a small quit-rent.

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 on the principles which he had set forth, and in that brief sojourn of two years to witness the beginnings of a splendid prosperity. His city of Philadelphia consisted in August, 1683, of three or four little cottages. Two years afterward it contained about six hundred houses, and the schoolmaster and the printing-press had begun their work.[117:1] The growth went on accelerating. In one year seven thousand settlers are said to have arrived; before the end of the century the colonists numbered more than twenty thousand, and Philadelphia had become a thriving town.[117:2]

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, sometimes in actual hermitage, as in the ravines of the Wissahickon. But the most important contribution of this kind came from the suffering villages of the Rhenish Palatinate ravaged with fire and sword by the French armies in 1688. So numerous were the fugitives from the Palatinate that the name of Palatine came to be applied in general to German refugees, from whatever region. This migration of the German sects (to be distinguished from the later migration from the established Lutheran and Reformed churches) furnished the material for that curious "Pennsylvania Dutch" population which for more than two centuries has lain encysted, so to speak, in the body politic and ecclesiastic of Pennsylvania, speaking a barbarous jargon of its own, and refusing to assimilate with the surrounding people.

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.[118:1]

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 century, by George Keith, for thirty years a recognized preacher of the Society. One is impressed, in a superficial glance at the story, with the reasonableness and wisdom of some of Keith's positions, and with the intellectual vigor of the man. But the discussion grew into an acrimonious controversy, and the controversy deepened into a schism, which culminated in the disowning of Keith by the Friends in America, and afterward by the London Yearly Meeting, to which he had appealed. Dropped thus by his old friends, he was taken up by the English Episcopalians and ordained by the Bishop of London, and in 1702 returned to America as the first missionary of the newly organized Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. An active missionary campaign was begun and sustained by the large resources of the Venerable Society until the outbreak of the War of Independence. The movement had great advantages for success. It was next of kin to the expiring Swedish Lutheran Church in the three counties that became afterward the State of Delaware, and heir to its venerable edifices and its good will; it was the official and court church of the royal governors, and after the degenerate sons of William Penn abandoned the simple worship, as well as the clean living, in which their father delighted, it was the church promoted by the proprietary interest; withal it proved itself, both then and afterward, to hold a deposit of truth and of usages of worship peculiarly adapted to supplement the defects of the Quaker system. It is not easy to explain the ill success of the enterprise. In Philadelphia it took strong root, and the building, in 1727, of Christ Church, which survives to this day, a monument of architectural beauty as well as historical interest, marks an important epoch in the progress of Christianity in America. But in the rural districts the work languished. Parishes, seemingly well equipped, fell into a "deplorable condition"; churches were closed and parishes dwindled away. About the year 1724 Governor Keith reported to the Bishop of London that outside the city there were "twelve or thirteen little edifices, at times supplied by one or other of the poor missionaries sent from the society." Nearly all that had been gained by the Episcopal Church in Pennsylvania, where the "Venerable Society" had maintained at times forty-seven missionaries and twenty-four central stations, was wiped out by the Revolutionary War.[120:1]

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 enormous proportions; but so late was the considerable expansion of it, and so tardy and inefficient the attention given to this diaspora by the mother churches, that the classical organization of the Reformed Church dates only from 1747, and that of the Lutheran Church from 1760.[121:1] The beautiful career of the Moravians began in Pennsylvania so late as 1734. In general it may be said that the German-American church was affected only indirectly by the Great Awakening.

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 in America, numbering six ministers. At the end of twelve years the number of ministers, including accessions from New England, had grown to seventeen. But it was not until 1718 that this migration began in earnest. As early as 1725 James Logan, the Scotch-Irish-Quaker governor of Pennsylvania, speaking in the spirit of prophecy, declares that "it looks as if Ireland were to send all her inhabitants hither; if they continue to come they will make themselves proprietors of the province." It was a broad-spread, rich alluvium superimposed upon earlier strata of immigration, out of which was to spring the sturdy growth of American Presbyterianism, as well as of other Christian organizations. But by 1730 it was only the turbid and feculent flood that was visible to most observers; the healthful and fruitful growth was yet to come.[122:1]

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.

The English church, enjoying "the prestige of royal favor and princely munificence," suffered also the drawbacks incidental to these advantages—the odium attending the unjust and despotic measures resorted to for its advancement, the vile character of royal officials, who condoned their private vices by a more ostentatious zeal for their official church, and the well-founded popular suspicion of its pervading disloyalty to the interests and the liberties of the colonies in their antagonism to the encroachments of the British government. It was represented by one congregation in the city of New York, and perhaps a dozen others throughout the colony.[135:1] It is to the honor of the ministers of this church that it succeeded in so good a measure in triumphing over its "advantages." The early pastors of Trinity Church adorned their doctrine and their confession, and one such example as that of the Rev. Thoroughgood Moor did much to redeem the character of the church from the disgrace cast upon it by the lives of its patrons. This faithful missionary had the signal honor of being imprisoned by the dirty but zealous Lord Cornbury (own cousin to her Majesty the Queen, and afterward Earl of Clarendon), of whom he had said, what everybody knew, that he "deserved to be excommunicated"; and he had further offended by refusing the communion to the lieutenant-governor, "upon the account of some debauch and abominable swearing."[135:2] There was surely some vigorous spiritual vitality in a religious body which could survive the patronizing of a succession of such creatures as Cornbury and his crew of extortioners and profligates.

A third element in the early Christianity of New York was the Presbyterians. These were represented, at the opening of the eighteenth century, by that forerunner of the Scotch-Irish immigration, Francis Makemie. The arrest and imprisonment of Makemie in 1706, under the authority of Lord Cornbury, for the offense of preaching the gospel without a license from the government, his sturdy defense and his acquittal, make an epoch in the history of religious liberty in America, and a perceptible step in the direction of American political liberty and independence.

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 by Domine Selyns, away back in 1696, to be attended by many preachers educated at Harvard College.[137:1] But the churches which they founded grew into the type, not of Cambridge nor of Saybrook, but of Westminster.

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 shall do well to ask whether it is not rather a reversion to type. 3. Those who grow up in a solidly united Christian community are in a fair way to be trained in the simplicity of the gospel, and not in any specialties of controversy with contending or competing sects. Members of the parish churches of New England going west had an advantage above most others, in that they could go simply as representatives of the church of Christ, and not of a sect of the church, or of one side of some controversy in which they had never had occasion to interest themselves. 4. The principle of congregational independency, not so much inculcated as acted on in New England, carries with it the corollary that a congregation may be Presbyterian or Episcopalian or Methodist, if it judges best, without thereby giving the individual Christian any justification for secession or schism. 5. The change, in the westward movement of Christian civilization, from the congregational order to the classical, coincides with the change in the frame of civil polity from town government to county government. In the beginning the civil state in New England was framed after the model of the church.[138:1] It is in accordance with the common course of church history that when the people were transported from the midst of pure democracies to the midst of representative republics their church institutions should take on the character of the environment.

The other factors of the religious life of New York require only brief mention.

There were considerable Quaker communities, especially on western Long Island, in Flushing and its neighborhood. But before the year 1730 the fervid and violent and wonderfully brief early enthusiasm of this Society had long been waning, and the Society, winning no accessions and suffering frequent losses in its membership, was lapsing into that "middle age of Quakerism"[139:1] in which it made itself felt in the life of the people through its almost passive, but yet effective, protests against popular wrongs.

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.[139:2]

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 Anne's government, with a distinct understanding between the right hand and the left, took active measure to promote the migration of Protestant refugees from all parts of Germany to the English colonies in America. In the year 1709 a great company of these unhappy exiles, commonly called "poor Palatines" from the desolated region whence many of them had been driven out, were dropped, helpless and friendless, in the wilderness of Schoharie County, and found themselves there practically in a state of slavery through their ignorance of the country and its language. There were few to care for their souls. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel was promptly in the field, with its diligent missionaries and its ignoble policy of doing the work of Christ and humanity with a shrewd eye to the main chance of making proselytes to its party.[140:1] With a tardiness which it is difficult not to speak of as characteristic, after the lapse of twenty-one years the classis of Amsterdam recognized its responsibility for this multitude of wandering sheep; and at last, in 1793, the German Reformed Church had so far emancipated itself from its bondage to the old-country hierarchy as to assume, almost a century too late, the cure of these poor souls. But this migration added little to the religious life of the New York Colony, except a new element of diversity to a people already sufficiently heterogeneous. The greater part of these few thousands gladly found their way to the more hospitable colony of Pennsylvania, leaving traces of themselves in family names scattered here and there, and in certain local names, like that of Palatine Bridge.

The general impression left on the mind by this survey of the Christian people of New York in 1730 is of a mass of almost hopelessly incongruous materials, out of which the brooding Spirit of God shall by and by bring forth the unity of a new creation.

* * * * *

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 the colony of New York became pastor of the Presbyterian church at Neshaminy, in Pennsylvania, twenty miles north of Philadelphia. Here his zeal for Christian education moved him to begin a school, which, called from the humble building in which it was held, became famous in American Presbyterian history as the Log College. Here were educated many men who became eminent in the ministry of the gospel, and among them the four boys who had come with their father from Ireland. Gilbert, the eldest and most distinguished of them, came in 1727, from his temporary position as tutor in the Log College, to be pastor to the Presbyterian church in New Brunswick, where Frelinghuysen, in the face of opposition from his own brethren in the ministry, had for seven years pursued his deeply spiritual and fruitful work as pastor to the Dutch church. Whatever debate there may be over the question of an official and tactual succession in the church, the existence of a vital and spiritual succession, binding "the generations each to each," need not be disputed by any. Sometimes, as here, the succession is distinctly traceable. Gilbert Tennent was own son in the ministry to Theodore Frelinghuysen as truly as Timothy to Paul, but he became spiritual father to a great multitude.

* * * * *

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 preferment.[143:1] The religious influence of the Society of Friends continued to be potent and in many respects most salutary. But the exceptional growth and prosperity of the colony was attended with a vast "unearned increment" of wealth to the first settlers, and the maxim, "Religio peperit divitias, et mater devorata est a prole,"[143:2] received one of the most striking illustrations in all history. So speedily the Society had entered on its Middle Age;[143:3] the most violent of protests against formalism had begun to congeal into a precise and sometimes frivolous system of formalities. But the lasting impress made on the legislation of the colony by Penn and his contemporaries is a monument of their wise and Christian statesmanship. Up to their time the most humane penal codes in Christendom were those of New England, founded on the Mosaic law. But even in these, and still more in the application of them, there were traces of that widely prevalent feeling that punishment is society's bitter and malignant revenge on the criminal. The penal code and the prison discipline of Pennsylvania became an object of admiring study for social reformers the world over, and marked a long stage in the advancement of the kingdom of God. The city of Philadelphia early took the lead of American towns, not only in size, but in its public charities and its cultivation of humane arts.