History of American Christianity — Chapter X The Eve of the Great Awakening, Part 2

* * * * * 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.

Notwithstanding these eminent honors, there is much in the later history of the great commonwealth in which Quakerism held dominion for the greater part of a century to reflect doubt on the fitness of that form of Christianity for conducting the affairs, either civil or religious, of a great community.

There is nothing in the personal duty of non-resistance of evil, as inculcated in the New Testament, that conflicts with the functions of the civil governor--even the function of bearing the sword as God's minister.

Rather, each of these is the complement and counterpart of the other.

Among the early colonial governors no man wielded the sword of the ruler more effectively than the Quaker Archdale in the Carolinas.

It is when this law of personal duty is assumed as the principle of public government that the order of society is inverted, and the function of the magistrate is inevitably taken up by the individual, and the old wilderness law of blood-revenge is reinstituted.

The legislation of William Penn involved no abdication of the power of the sword by the civil governor.

The enactment, however sparing, of capital laws conceded by implication every point that is claimed by Christian moralists in justification of war.

But it is hardly to be doubted that the tendency of Quaker politics so to conduct civil government as that it shall "resist not evil" is responsible for some of the strange paradoxes in the later history of Pennsylvania.

The commonwealth was founded in good faith on principles of mutual good will with the Indians and tender regard for Indian rights, of religious liberty and interconfessional amity, and of a permanent peace policy.

Its history has been characterized, beyond that of other States, by foul play toward the Indians and protracted Indian wars, by acrimonious and sometimes bloody sectarian conflicts, by obstinate insurrections against public order,[144:1] and by cruel and exterminating war upon honest settlers, founded on a mere open question of title to territory.

[144:2] The failure of Quakerism is even more conspicuous considered as a church discipline.

There is a charm as of apostolic simplicity and beauty in its unassuming hierarchy of weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings, corresponding by epistles and by the visits of traveling evangelists, which realizes the type of the primitive church presented in "The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles."

But it was never able to outgrow, in the large and free field to which it was transplanted, the defects incident to its origin in a protest and a schism.

It never learned to commend itself to men as a church for all Christians, and never ceased to be, even in its own consciousness, a coterie of specialists.

Penn, to be sure, in his youthful overzeal, had claimed exclusive and universal rights for Quakerism as "the alone good way of life and salvation," all religions, faiths, and worships besides being "in the darkness of apostasy."

[145:1] But after the abatement of that wonderful first fervor which within a lifetime carried "its line into all the earth, and its words to the ends of the world," it was impossible to hold it to this pitch.

Claiming no divine right to all men's allegiance, it felt no duty of opening the door to all men's access.

It was free to exclude from the meeting on arbitrary and even on frivolous grounds.

As zeal decayed, the energies of the Society were mainly shown in protesting and excluding and expelling.

God's husbandry does not prosper when his servants are over-earnest in rooting up tares.

The course of the Society of Friends in the eighteenth century was suicidal.

It held a noble opportunity of acting as pastor to a great commonwealth.

It missed this great opportunity, for which it was perhaps constitutionally disqualified, and devoted itself to edifying its own members and guarding its own purity.

So it was that, saving its soul, it lost it.

The vineyard must be taken away from it.

And there were no other husbandmen to take the vineyard.

The petty German sects, representing so large a part of the population, were isolated by their language and habits.

The Lutherans and the Reformed, trained in established churches to the methods and responsibilities of parish work, were not yet represented by any organization.

The Scotch-Irish Presbyterian immigration was pouring in at Philadelphia like a flood, sometimes whole parishes at once, each bringing its own pastor; and it left large traces of itself in the eastern counties of Pennsylvania, while it rushed to the western frontier and poured itself like a freshet southwesterly through the valleys of the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies.

But the Presbyterian churches of eastern Pennsylvania, even as reinforced from England and New England, were neither many nor strong; the Baptists were feebler yet, although both these bodies were giving signs of the strength they were both about to develop.

[147:1] The Episcopalians had one strong and rapidly growing church in Philadelphia, and a few languishing missions in country towns sustained by gifts from England.

There were as yet no Methodists.

* * * * * Crossing the boundary line from Pennsylvania into Maryland--the line destined to become famous in political history as Mason and Dixon's--we come to the four Southern colonies, Maryland, Virginia, and the two Carolinas.

Georgia in 1730 has not yet begun to be.

All these have strongly marked characteristics in common, which determine in advance the character of their religious history.

They are not peculiar in being slave colonies; there is no colony North or South in which slaves are not held under sanction of law.

Georgia, in its early years, is to have the solitary honor of being an antislavery and prohibitionist colony.

But the four earlier Southern colonies are unlike their Northern neighbors in this, that the institution of slavery dominates their whole social life.

The unit of the social organism is not the town, for there are no towns; it is the plantation.

In a population thus dispersed over vast tracts of territory, schools and churches are maintained with difficulty, or not maintained at all.

Systems of primary and secondary schools are impracticable, and, for want of these, institutions of higher education either languish or are never begun.

A consequent tendency, which, happily, there were many influences to resist, was for this townless population to settle down into the condition of those who, in distinction from the early Christians, came to be called _pagani_, or "men of the hamlets," and _Heiden_, or "men of the heath."

Another common characteristic of the four Southern colonies is that upon them all was imposed by foreign power a church establishment not acceptable to the people.

In the Carolinas the attempted establishment of the English church was an absolute failure.

It was a church (with slight exceptions) without parishes, without services, without clergy, without people, but with certain pretensions in law which were hindrances in the way of other Christian work, and which tended to make itself generally odious.

In the two older colonies the Established Church was worse than a failure.

It had endowments, parsonages, glebes, salaries raised by public tax, and therefore it had a clergy--and _such_ a clergy!

Transferring to America the most shameful faults of the English Establishment, it gave the sacred offices of the Christian ministry by "patronage" into the hands of debauched and corrupt adventurers, whose character in general was below the not very lofty standard of the people whom they pretended to serve in the name of Jesus Christ.

Both in Virginia and in Maryland the infliction of this rabble of simonists as a burden upon the public treasury was a nuisance under which the people grew more and more restive from year to year.

There was no spiritual discipline to which this _prêtraille_ was amenable.

[148:1] It was the constant effort of good citizens, in the legislature and in the vestries, if not to starve out the vermin, at least to hold them in some sort of subjection to the power of the purse.

The struggle was one of the antecedents of the War of Independence, and the vestries of the Virginia parishes, with their combined ecclesiastical and civil functions, became a training-school for some of the statesmen of the Revolution.

In the general dereliction of churchly care for the people of the Southern colonies, on the part of those who professed the main responsibility for it, the duty was undertaken, in the face of legal hindrances, by earnest Christians of various names, whom the established clergy vainly affected to despise.

The Baptists and the Presbyterians, soon to be so powerfully prevalent throughout the South, were represented by a few scattered congregations.

But the church of the people of the South at this period seems to have been the Quaker meeting, and the ministry the occasional missionary who, bearing credentials from some yearly meeting, followed in the pioneer footsteps of George Fox, and went from one circle of Friends to another, through those vast expanses of thinly settled territory, to revive and confirm and edify.

The early fervors of the Society were soon spent.

Its work was strangely unstable.

The proved defects of it as a working system were grave.

The criticism of George Keith seems justified by the event--its candle needed a candlestick.

But no man can truly write the history of the church of Christ in the United States without giving honor to the body which for so long a time and over so vast an area bore the name and testimony of Jesus almost alone; and no man can read the journeys and labors of John Woolman, mystic and ascetic saint, without recognizing that he and others like-minded were nothing less than true apostles of the Lord Jesus.

* * * * * One impression made by this general survey of the colonies is that of the absence of any sign of unity among the various Christian bodies in occupation.

One corner of the great domain, New England, was thickly planted with homogeneous churches in mutual fellowship.

One order of Christians, the Quakers, had at least a framework of organization conterminous with the country.

In general there were only scattered members of a Christian community, awaiting the inbreathing of some quickening spiritual influence that should bring bone to its bone and erect the whole into a living church.

Another and very gratifying impression from the story thus far is the general fidelity of the Christian colonists in the work of the gospel among the heathen Indians.

There was none of the colonies that did not make profession of a zealous purpose for the Christianizing of the savages; and it is only just to say, in the face of much unjust and evil talk, that there was none that did not give proof of its sincerity.

In Virginia, the Puritans Whitaker and Thomas Dale; in Maryland, the earliest companies of Jesuit missionaries; Campanius among the Swedish Lutherans; Megapolensis among the Dutchmen, and the Jesuit martyr Jogues in the forests of New York; in New England, not only John Eliot and Roger Williams and the Mayhews, but many a village pastor like Fitch of Norwich and Pierson of Branford, were distinguished in the first generation by their devotion to this duty.

[150:1] The succession of faithful missionaries has never failed from that day to this.

The large expectations of the churches are indicated by the erection of one of the earliest buildings at Harvard College for the use of Indian students.

At William and Mary College not less than seventy Indian students at one time are said to have been gathered for an advanced education.

It was no fault of the colonial churches that these earnest and persistent efforts yielded small results.

"We discover a strange uniformity of feature in the successive failures....

Always, just when the project seemed most hopeful, an indiscriminate massacre of missionaries and converts together swept the enterprise out of existence.

The experience of all was the same."

[151:1] * * * * * It will be a matter of growing interest, as we proceed, to trace the relation of the American church to negro slavery.

It is a curious fact, not without some later analogies, that the introduction into the New World of this "direful spring of woes unnumbered" was promoted, in the first instance, by the good Las Casas, as the hopeful preventive of a worse evil.

Touched by the spectacle of whole tribes and nations of the Indians perishing under the cruel servitude imposed upon them by the Spanish, it seemed to him a less wrong to transfer the infliction of this injustice to shoulders more able to bear it.

But "man's inhumanity to man" needed no pretext of philanthropy.

From the landing of the Dutch ship at Jamestown in 1619, with her small invoice of fourteen negroes, the dismal trade went on increasing, in spite of humane protest and attempted prohibition.

The legislature of Massachusetts, which was the representative of the church, set forth what it conceived to be the biblical ethics on the subject.

Recognizing that "lawful captives taken in just wars" may be held in bondage, it declared among its earliest public acts, in 1641, that, with this exception, no involuntary bond-slavery, villeinage, or captivity should ever be in the colony; and in 1646 it took measures for returning to Africa negroes who had been kidnapped by a slaver.

It is not strange that reflection on the golden rule should soon raise doubts whether the precedents of the Book of Joshua had equal authority with the law of Christ.

In 1675 John Eliot, from the midst of his work among the Indians, warned the governor against the sale of Indians taken in war, on the ground that "the selling of souls is dangerous merchandise," and "with a bleeding and burning passion" remonstrated against "the abject condition of the enslaved Africans."

In 1700 that typical Puritan, Judge Samuel Sewall, published his pamphlet on "The Selling of Joseph," claiming for the negroes the rights of brethren, and predicting that there would be "no progress in gospeling" until slavery should be abolished.

Those were serious days of antislavery agitation, when Cotton Mather, in his "Essays to Do Good," spoke of the injustice of slavery in terms such that his little book had to be expurgated by the American Tract Society to accommodate it to the degenerate conscience of a later day, and when the town of Boston in 1701 took measures "to put a period to negroes being slaves."

Such endeavors after universal justice and freedom, on the part of the Christians of New England, thwarted by the insatiable greed of British traders and politicians, were not to cease until, with the first enlargement of independence, they should bring forth judgment to victory.

The voice of New England was echoed from Pennsylvania.

The Mennonites of Germantown, in 1688, framed in quaint and touching language their petition for the abolition of slavery, and the Quaker yearly meetings responded one to another with unanimous protest.

But the mischief grew and grew.

In the Northern colonies the growth was stunted by the climate.

Elsewhere the institution, beginning with the domestic service of a few bondmen attached to their masters' families, took on a new type of malignity as it expanded.

In proportion as the servile population increases to such numbers as to be formidable, laws of increasing severity are directed to restraining or repressing it.

The first symptoms of insurrection are followed by horrors of bloody vengeance, and "from that time forth the slave laws have but one quality--that of ferocity engendered by fear."

[153:1] It was not from the willful inhumanity of the Southern colonies, but from their terrors, that those slave codes came forth which for nearly two centuries were the shame of America and the scandal of Christendom.

It is a comfort to the heart of humanity to reflect that the people were better than their laws; it was only at the recurring periods of fear of insurrection that they were worse.

In ordinary times human sympathy and Christian principle softened the rigors of the situation.

The first practical fruits of the revival of religion in the Southern colonies were seen in efforts of Christian kindness toward the souls and bodies of the slaves.

FOOTNOTES:

[129:1] One is touched by the plaintive grief of the Rev. Mr. Muirson, who has come from the established church of England to make proselytes from the established churches of Connecticut.

He writes to the "S. P.

G.

," without a thought of casting any reflections upon his patrons: "It would require more time than you would willingly bestow on these Lines, to express how rigidly and severely they treat our People, by taking their Estate by distress when they do not willingly pay to support their Ministers" ("Digest of S. P.

G.

Records," p. 43).

The pathos of the situation is intensified when we bear in mind the relation of this tender-hearted gentleman's own emoluments to the taxes extorted from the Congregationalists in his New York parish.

[130:1] See above, p. 107. [131:1] Newman, "Baptist Churches in the United States," pp. 197, 198, 231. [131:2] Tiffany, "Protestant Episcopal Church," chaps, iv.

, v. ; C.

F.

Adams, "Three Episodes in Massachusetts History," pp. 342, 621. [133:1] "Digest of S. P.

G.

," p. 42. [134:1] Tiffany, chap.

v.

For a full account of these beginnings in Connecticut in their historical relations, see L. Bacon on "The Episcopal Church in Connecticut" ("New Englander," vol. xxv.

, pp. 283-329).

[135:1] There were on duty in New York in 1730, besides the minister of Trinity Church, ten missionaries of the "S. P.

G.

," including several employed specially among the Indians and the negroes.

Fifteen years later there were reported to the "Venerable Society" in New York and New Jersey twenty-two churches ("Digest of S. P.

G.

," pp. 855, 856; Tiffany, p. 178).

[135:2] "Digest of S. P.

G.

," p. 68 and note.

[137:1] Corwin, "Reformed (Dutch) Church," p. 115. [138:1] "Mr. Hooker did often quote a saying out of Mr. Cartwright, that no man fashioneth his house to his hangings, but his hangings to his house.

It is better that the commonwealth be fashioned to the setting forth of God's house, which is his church, than to accommodate the church frame to the civil state" (John Cotton, quoted by L. Bacon, "Historical Discourses," p. 18).

[139:1] Thomas, "The Society of Friends," p. 239. [139:2] Corwin, "Reformed (Dutch) Church," pp. 77, 78, 173. [140:1] Illustrations of the sordid sectarianism of the "Venerable Society's" operations are painfully frequent in the pages of the "digest of the S. P.

G."

See especially on this particular case the action respecting Messrs. Kocherthal, Ehlig, and Beyse (p. 61).

[143:1] S.

G.

Fisher, "The Making of Pennsylvania," p. 125; Thomas, "The Society of Friends," p. 235. [143:2] "Religion gave birth to wealth, and was devoured by her own offspring."

The aphorism is ascribed to Lord Falkland.

[143:3] Thomas, "The Society of Friends," p. 236. [144:1] Fisher, "The Making of Pennsylvania," pp. 166-169, 174. [144:2] It is not easy to define the peculiarity of Penn's Indian policy.

It is vulgarly referred to as if it consisted in just dealing, especially in not taking their land except by fair purchase; and the "Shackamaxon Treaty," of which nothing is known except by vague report and tradition, is spoken of as some thing quite unprecedented in this respect.

The fact is that this measure of virtue was common to the English colonists generally, and eminently to the New England colonists.

A good example of the ordinary cant of historical writers on this subject is found in "The Making of Pennsylvania," p. 238. The writer says of the Connecticut Puritans: "They occupied the land by squatter sovereignty....

It seemed like a pleasant place; they wanted it.

They were the saints, and the saints, as we all know, shall inherit the earth....

Having originally acquired their land simply by taking it, ...

they naturally grew up with rather liberal views as to their right to any additional territory that pleased their fancy."

No purchase by Penn was made with more scrupulous regard to the rights of the Indians than the purchases by which the settlers of Connecticut acquired title to their lands; but I know of no New England precedent for the somewhat Punic piece of sharp practice by which the metes and bounds of one of the Pennsylvania purchases were laid down.

The long exemption of Pennsylvania from trouble with the Indians seems to be due to the fact that an exceptionally mild, considerate, and conscientious body of settlers was confronted with a tribe of savages thoroughly subdued and cowed in recent conflicts with enemies both red and white.

It seems clear, also, that the exceptional ferocity of the forty years of uninterrupted war with the Indians that ensued was due in part to the long dereliction by the Quaker government of its duty of protecting its citizens and punishing murder, robbery, and arson when committed by its copper-colored subjects.

[145:1] Penn's "Truth Exalted" (quoted in "Encyclopædia Britannica," vol. xviii.

, p. 493).

[147:1] In 1741, after a decade of great activity and growth, the entire clerical strength of the American Presbyterian Church, in its four presbyteries, was forty-seven ministers (Thompson, "Presbyterian Churches," p. 33).

[148:1] It is a subject of unceasing lament on the part of historians of the American Episcopal Church that the mother church, all through the colonial days, should have obstinately refused to the daughter the gift of the episcopate.

There is no denying the grave disadvantages thus inflicted.

But it admits of doubt whether such bishops, with such conditions, as would have been conceded by the English church of the eighteenth century, would, after all, have been so very precious a boon.

We shrink from the imputation upon the colonial church of Maryland and Virginia which is implied in suggesting that it would have been considerably improved by gaining the disciplinary purity of the English church of the Georgian era.

The long fight in Virginia, culminating in Patrick Henry's speech in the Parsons' Case, so far Americanized the Episcopal Church as to make sure that no unwelcome minister was ever to be forced from outside on one of its parishes.

After the Revolution it became possible to set up the episcopate also on American principles.

Those who are burdened with regret over the long delay of the American Protestant episcopate may find no small consolation in pondering the question, what kind of an outfit of bishops, with canons attached, might have been hoped for from Sir Robert Walpole or Lord Bute?

On the whole, at this point the American Episcopal Church is in the habit of pitying itself too much.

It has something to be thankful for.

[150:1] It is a curious exception, if it is indeed an exception, that the one Christian colony that shows no record of early Indian missions should be that of William Penn.

Could this be due to the Quaker faith in the sufficiency of "the Light that lighteneth every man that cometh into the world"?

The type of theology and method of instruction used by some of the earliest laborers in this field left something to be desired in point of adaptedness to the savage mind.

Without irreverence to the great name of Jonathan Edwards, there is room for doubt whether he was just the man for the Stockbridge Indians.

In the case of the Rev. Abraham Pierson, of Branford, in New Haven Colony, afterward founder of Newark, we have an illustration both of his good intentions and of his methods, which were not so good, in "_Some Helps for the Indians: Shewing them how to Improve their Natural Reason, to Know the True God and the Christian Religion_."

This catechism is printed in the Indian language with an English version interlined.

"_Q.

_ How do you prove that there is but one true God?

"_An.

_ Because the reason why singular things of the same kind are multiplied is not to be found in the nature of God; for the reason why such like things are multiplied is from the fruitfulness of their causes: but God hath no cause of his being, but is of himself.

Therefore he is one."

(And so on through _secondly_ and _thirdly_.

) _Per contra_, a sermon to the Stockbridge Indians by the most ponderous of the metaphysical preachers of New England, Samuel Hopkins, is beautifully simple and childlike.

It is given in full in Park's "Life of Hopkins," pp. 46-49. [151:1] McConnell, "History of the American Episcopal Church," p. 7. The statement calls for qualification in detail, but the general fact is unmistakable.

[153:1] H.

C.

Lodge, "English Colonies," p. 67 _et seq.

_ CHAPTER XI.