History of American Christianity — Chapter XII Close of the Colonial Era, Part 1

CLOSE OF THE COLONIAL ERA--THE GERMAN CHURCHES--THE BEGINNINGS OF THE METHODIST CHURCH.

The quickening of religious feeling, the deepening of religious conviction, the clearing and defining of theological opinions, that were incidental to the Great Awakening, were a preparation for more than thirty years of intense political and warlike agitation.

The churches suffered from the long distraction of the public mind, and at the end of it were faint and exhausted.

But for the infusion of a "more abundant life" which they had received, it would seem that they could hardly have survived the stress of that stormy and revolutionary period.

The religious life of this period was manifested in part in the growth of the New England theology.

The great leader of this school of theological inquiry, the elder Edwards, was born at the opening of the eighteenth century.

The oldest and most eminent of his disciples and successors, Bellamy and Hopkins, were born respectively in 1719 and 1721, and entered into the work of the Awakening in the flush of their earliest manhood.

A long dynasty of acute and strenuous argumentators has continued, through successive generations to the present day, this distinctly American school of theological thought.

This is not the place for tracing the intricate history of their discussions,[182:1] but the story of the Awakening could not be told without some mention of this its attendant and sequel.

Not less notable than the new theology of the revival was the new psalmody.

In general it may be said that every flood-tide of spiritual emotion in the church leaves its high-water mark in the form of "new songs to the Lord" that remain after the tide of feeling has assuaged.

In this instance the new songs were not produced by the revival, but only adopted by it.

It is not easy for us at this day to conceive the effect that must have been produced in the Christian communities of America by the advent of Isaac Watts's marvelous poetic work, "The Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament."

Important religious results have more than once followed in the church on the publication of religious poems--notably, in our own century, on the publication of "The Christian Year."

But no other instance of the kind is comparable with the publication in America of Watts's Psalms.

When we remember how scanty were the resources of religious poetry in American homes in the early eighteenth century, and especially how rude and even grotesque the rhymes that served in the various churches as a vehicle of worship, it seems that the coming of those melodious stanzas, in which the meaning of one poet is largely interpreted by the sympathetic insight of another poet, and the fervid devotion of the Old Testament is informed with the life and transfigured in the language of the New, must have been like a glow of sunlight breaking in upon a gray and cloudy day.

Few pages of biography can be found more vividly illustrative of the times and the men than the page in which Samuel Hopkins recites the story of the sufferings of his own somber and ponderous mind under the rebuke of his college friend David Brainerd.

He walked his solitary room in tears, and (he says) "took up Watts's version of the Psalms, and opened it at the Fifty-first Psalm, and read the first, second, and third parts in long meter with strong affections, and made it all my own language, and thought it was the language of my heart to God."

There was more than the experience of a great and simple soul, there was the germ of a future system of theology, in the penitential confession which the young student "made his own language," and in the exquisite lines which, under the figure of a frightened bird, became the utterance of his first tremulous and faltering faith: Lord, should thy judgment grow severe, I am condemned, but thou art clear.

Should sudden vengeance seize my breath, I must pronounce thee just in death;

And if my soul were sent to hell, Thy righteous law approves it well.

Yet save a trembling sinner, Lord, Whose hope, still hovering round thy word, Would light on some sweet promise there, Some sure support against despair.

The introduction of the new psalmody was not accomplished all at once, nor without a struggle.

But we gravely mistake if we look upon the controversy that resulted in the adoption of Watts's Psalms as a mere conflict between enlightened good taste and stubborn conservatism.

The action proposed was revolutionary.

It involved the surrender of a long-settled principle of Puritanism.

At the present day the objection to the use of "human composures" in public worship is unintelligible, except to Scotchmen.

In the later Puritan age such use was reckoned an infringement on the entire and exclusive authority and sufficiency of the Scriptures, and a constructive violation of the second commandment.

By the adoption of the new psalmody the Puritan and Presbyterian churches, perhaps not consciously, but none the less actually, yielded the major premiss of the only argument by which liturgical worship was condemned on principle.

Thereafter the question of the use of liturgical forms became a mere question of expediency.

It is remarkable that the logical consequences of this important step have been so tardy and hesitating.

* * * * * It was not in the common course of church history that the period under consideration should be a period of vigorous internal activity and development in the old settled churches of America.

The deep, often excessive, excitements of the Awakening had not only ceased, but had been succeeded by intense agitations of another sort.

Two successive "French and Indian" wars kept the long frontier, at a time when there was little besides frontier to the British colonies, in continual peril of fire and scalping-knife.

[184:1] The astonishingly sudden and complete extinction of the French politico-religious empire in Canada and the West made possible, and at no remote time inevitable, the separation of the British colonies from the mother country and the contentions and debates that led into the Revolutionary War began at once.

Another consequence of the prostrating of the French power in America has been less noticed by historians, but the course of this narrative will not be followed far without its becoming manifest as not less momentous in its bearing on the future history of the church.

The extinction of the French-Catholic power in America made possible the later plantation and large and free development of the Catholic Church in the territory of the United States.

After that event the Catholic resident or citizen was no longer subject to the suspicion of being a sympathizer with a hostile neighboring power, and the Jesuit missionary was no longer liable to be regarded as a political intriguer and a conspirator with savage assassins against the lives of innocent settlers and their families.

If there are those who, reading the earlier pages of this volume, have mourned over the disappointment and annihilation of two magnificent schemes of Catholic domination on the North American continent as being among the painful mysteries of divine providence, they may find compensation for these catastrophes in later advances of Catholicism, which without these antecedents would seem to have been hardly possible.

Although the spiritual development of the awakened American churches, after the Awakening until the independence of the States was established and acknowledged, was limited by these great hindrances, this period was one of momentous influences from abroad upon American Christianity.

* * * * * The Scotch-Irish immigration kept gathering volume and force.

The great stream of immigrants entering at the port of Philadelphia and flowing westward and southwestward was joined by a tributary stream entering at Charleston.

Not only the numbers of this people, occupying in force the hill-country from Pennsylvania to Georgia, but still more its extraordinary qualities and the discipline of its history, made it a factor of prime importance in the events of the times just before and just after the achievement of the national independence.

For generations it had been schooled to the apprehension and acceptance of an elaborately articulated system of theology and church order as of divine authority.

Its prejudices and animosities were quite as potent as its principles.

Its fixed hereditary aversion to the English government and the English church was the natural fruit of long memories and traditions of outrages inflicted by both these; its influence was now about to be powerfully manifested in the overthrow of the English power and its feeble church establishments in the colonies.

At the opening of the War of Independence the Presbyterian Church, reunited since the schism of 1741, numbered one hundred and seventy ministers in seventeen presbyteries; but its weight of influence was out of all proportion to its numbers, and this entire force, not altogether at unity with itself on ecclesiastical questions, was united as one man in the maintenance of American rights.

The great German immigration begins to flow in earnest in this period.

Three successive tides of migration have set from Germany to America.

The first was the movement of the petty sects under the invitation and patronage of William Penn, quartering themselves in the eastern parts of Pennsylvania.

The second was the transportation of "the Palatines," expatriated by stress of persecution and war, not from the Rhenish Palatinate only, but from the archduchy of Salzburg and from other parts of Germany and Switzerland, gathered up and removed to America, some of them directly, some by way of England, as an act of political charity by Queen Anne's government, with the idea of strengthening the colonies by planting Protestant settlers for a safeguard against Spanish or French aggressions.

The third tide continues flowing, with variable volume, to this day.

It is the voluntary flow of companies of individual emigrants seeking to better the fortunes of themselves or their families.

But this voluntary migration has been unhealthily and sometimes dishonestly stimulated, from the beginning of it, by the selfish interests of those concerned in the business of transportation or in the sale of land.

It seems to have been mainly the greed of shipping merchants, at first, that spread abroad in the German states florid announcements of the charms and riches of America, decoying multitudes of ignorant persons to risk everything on these representations, and to mortgage themselves into a term of slavery until they should have paid the cost of their passage by their labor.

This class of bondmen, called "redemptioners," made no inconsiderable part of the population of the middle colonies;

and it seems to have been a worthy part.

The trade of "trepanning" the unfortunates and transporting them and selling their term of service was not by several degrees as bad as the African slave-trade; but it was of the same sort, and the deadly horrors of its "middle passage" were hardly less.

In one way and another the German immigration had grown by the middle of the eighteenth century to great dimensions.

In the year 1749 twelve thousand Germans landed at the port of Philadelphia.

In general they were as sheep having no shepherd.

Their deplorable religious condition was owing less to poverty than to diversity of sects.

[188:1] In many places the number of sects rendered concerted action impossible, and the people remained destitute of religious instruction.

The famine of the word was sorely felt.

In 1733 three great Lutheran congregations in Pennsylvania, numbering five hundred families each, sent messengers with an imploring petition to their coreligionists at London and Halle, representing their "state of the greatest destitution."

"Our own means" (they say) "are utterly insufficient to effect the necessary relief, unless God in his mercy may send us help from abroad.

It is truly lamentable to think of the large numbers of the rising generation who know not their right hand from their left; and, unless help be promptly afforded, the danger is great that, in consequence of the great lack of churches and schools, the most of them will be led into the ways of destructive error."

This urgent appeal bore fruit like the apples of Sodom.

It resulted in a painful and pitiable correspondence with the chiefs of the mother church, these haggling for months and years over stipulations of salary, and refusing to send a minister until the salary should be pledged in cash; and their correspondents pleading their poverty and need.

[188:2] The few and feeble churches of the Reformed confession were equally needy and ill befriended.

It seems to us, as we read the story after the lapse of a hundred and fifty years, as if the man expressly designed and equipped by the providence of God for this exigency in the progress of his kingdom had arrived when Zinzendorf, the Moravian, made his appearance at Philadelphia, December 10, 1741. The American church, in all its history, can point to no fairer representative of the charity that "seeketh not her own" than this Saxon nobleman, who, for the true love that he bore to Christ and all Christ's brethren, was willing to give up his home, his ancestral estates, his fortune, his title of nobility, his patrician family name, his office of bishop in the ancient Moravian church, and even (last infirmity of zealous spirits) his interest in promoting specially that order of consecrated men and women in the church catholic which he had done and sacrificed so much to save from extinction, and to which his "cares and toils were given."

He hastened first up the Lehigh Valley to spend Christmas at Bethlehem, where the foundations had already been laid on which have been built up the half-monastic institutions of charity and education and missions which have done and are still doing so much to bless the world in both its hemispheres.

It was in commemoration of this Christmas visit of Bishop Zinzendorf that the mother house of the Moravian communities in America received its name of Bethlehem.

Returning to Philadelphia, he took this city as the base of his unselfish and unpartisan labors in behalf of the great and multiplying population from his fatherland, which through its sectarian divisions had become so helpless and spiritually needy.

Already for twenty years there had been a few scattering churches of the Reformed confession, and for half that time a few Lutheran congregations had been gathered or had gathered themselves.

But both the sects had been overcome by the paralysis resulting from habitual dependence on paternal governments, and the two were borne asunder, while every right motive was urging to coöperation and fellowship, by the almost spent momentum of old controversies.

In Philadelphia two starveling congregations representing the two competing sects occupied the same rude meeting-place each by itself on alternate Sundays.

The Lutherans made shift without a pastor, for the only Lutheran minister in Pennsylvania lived at Lancaster, sixty miles away.

To the scattered, distracted, and demoralized flocks of his German fellow-Christians in the middle colonies came Zinzendorf, knowing Jesus Christ crucified, knowing no man according to the flesh; and at once "the neglected congregations were made to feel the thrill of a strong religious life."

"Aglow with zeal for Christ, throwing all emphasis in his teaching upon the one doctrine of redemption through the blood shed on Calvary, all the social advantages and influence and wealth which his position gave him were made subservient to the work of preaching Christ, and him crucified, to the rich and the poor, the learned and the ignorant."

[190:1] The Lutherans of Philadelphia heard him gladly and entreated him to preach to them regularly; to which he consented, but not until he had assured himself that this would be acceptable to the pastor of the Reformed congregation.

But his mission was to the sheep scattered abroad, of whom he reckoned (an extravagant overestimate) not less than one hundred thousand of the Lutheran party in Pennsylvania alone.

Others, as he soon found, had been feeling, like himself, the hurt of the daughter of Zion.

A series of conferences was held from month to month, in which men of the various German sects took counsel together over the dissensions of their people, and over the question how the ruinous effects of these dissensions could be avoided.

The plan was, not to attempt a merger of the sects, nor to alienate men from their habitual affiliations, but to draw together in coöperation and common worship the German Christians, of whatever sect, in a fellowship to be called, in imitation of a Pauline phrase (Eph.

ii.

22), "the Congregation of God in the Spirit."

The plan seemed so right and reasonable and promising of beneficent results as to win general approval.

It was in a fair way to draw together the whole miserably divided German population.

[191:1] At once the "drum ecclesiastic" beat to arms.

In view of the impending danger that their scattered fellow-countrymen might come into mutual fellowship on the basis of their common faith in Christ, the Lutheran leaders at Halle, who for years had been dawdling and haggling over the imploring entreaties of the shepherdless Lutheran populations in America, promptly reconsidered their _non possumus_, and found and sent a man admirably qualified for the desired work, Henry Melchior Mühlenberg, a man of eminent ability and judgment, of faith, devotion, and untiring diligence, not illiberal, but a conscientious sectarian.

An earnest preacher of the gospel, he was also earnest that the gospel should be preached according to the Lutheran formularies, to congregations organized according to the Lutheran discipline.

The easier and less worthy part of the appointed task was soon achieved.

The danger that the religious factions that had divided Germany might be laid aside in the New World was effectually dispelled.

Six years later the governor of Pennsylvania was still able to write, "The Germans imported with them all the religious whimsies of their country, and, I believe, have subdivided since their arrival here;" and he estimates their number at three fifths of the population of the province.

The more arduous and noble work of organizing and compacting the Lutherans into their separate congregations, and combining these by synodical assemblies, was prosecuted with wisdom and energy, and at last, in spite of hindrances and discouragements, with beneficent success.

The American Lutheran Church of to-day is the monument of the labors of Mühlenberg.

The brief remainder of Zinzendorf's work in America may be briefly told.

There is no doubt that, like many another eager and hopeful reformer, he overestimated the strength and solidity of the support that was given to his generous and beneficent plans.

At the time of Mühlenberg's arrival Zinzendorf was the elected and installed pastor of the Lutheran congregation in Philadelphia.

The conflict could not be a long one between the man who claimed everything for his commission and his sect and the man who was resolved to insist on nothing for himself.

Notwithstanding the strong love for him among the people, Zinzendorf was easily displaced from his official station.

When dispute arose about the use of the empty carpenter's shop that stood them instead of a church, he waived his own claims and at his own cost built a new house of worship.

But it was no part of his work to stay and persist in maintaining a division.

He retired from the field, leaving it in charge of Mühlenberg, "being satisfied if only Christ were preached," and returned to Europe, having achieved a truly honorable and most Christian failure, more to be esteemed in the sight of God than many a splendid success.

But his brief sojourn in America was not without visible fruit.

He left behind him the Moravian church fully organized under the episcopate of Bishop David Nitschmann, with communities or congregations begun at nine different centers, and schools established in four places.

An extensive itinerancy had been set in operation under careful supervision, and, most characteristic of all, a great beginning had been made of those missions to the heathen Indians, in which the devoted and successful labors of this little society of Christians have put to shame the whole American church besides.

Not all of this is to be ascribed to the activity of Zinzendorf; but in all of it he was a sharer, and his share was a heroic one.

The two years' visit of Count Zinzendorf to America forms a beautiful and quite singular episode in our church history.

Returning to his ancestral estates splendidly impoverished by his free-handed beneficence, he passed many of the later years of his life at Herrnhut, that radiating center from which the light of the gospel was borne by the multitude of humble missionaries to every continent under the whole heaven.

The news that came to him from the "economies" that he had planted in the forests of Pennsylvania was such as to fill his generous soul with joy.

In the communities of Nazareth and Bethlehem was renewed the pentecostal consecration when no man called anything his own.

The prosperous farms and varied industries, in which no towns in Pennsylvania could equal them, were carried on, not for private interest, but for the church.

After three years the community work was not only self-supporting, but sustained about fifty missionaries in the field, and was preparing to send aid to the missions of the mother church in Germany.

The Moravian settlements multiplied at distant points, north and south.

The educational establishments grew strong and famous.

But especially the Indian missions spread far and wide.

The story of these missions is one of the fairest and most radiant pages in the history of the American church, and one of the bloodiest.

Zinzendorf, dying at London in May, 1756, was spared, we may hope, the heartbreaking news of the massacre at Gnadenhütten the year before.

But from that time on, through the French wars, the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and down to the infamy of Georgia and the United States in 1837, the innocent and Christlike Moravian missions have been exposed from every side to the malignity of savage men both white and red.

No order of missionaries or missionary converts can show a nobler roll of martyrs than the Moravians.

[194:1]