History of American Christianity — Chapter XVII A Decade of Controversies and Schisms, Part 2

* * * * * Two important orders in the American church, which for a time had almost faded out from our field of vision, come back, from about this epoch of debate and division, into continually growing conspicuousness and strength.

Neither of them was implicated in that great debate involving the fundamental principles of the kingdom of heaven,--the principles of righteousness and love to men,--by which other parts of the church had been agitated and sometimes divided.

Whether to their discredit or to their honor, it is part of history that neither the Protestant Episcopal Church nor the Roman Catholic Church took any important part, either corporately or through its representative men, in the agonizing struggle of the American church to maintain justice and humanity in public law and policy.

But standing thus aloof from the great ethical questions that agitated the conscience of the nation, they were both of them disturbed by controversies internal or external, which demand mention at least in this chapter.

The beginning of the resuscitation of the Protestant Episcopal Church from the dead-and-alive condition in which it had so long been languishing is dated from the year 1811. [304:1] This year was marked by the accession to the episcopate of two eminent men, representing two strongly divergent parties in that church--Bishop Griswold, of Massachusetts, Evangelical, and Bishop Hobart, of New York, High-churchman.

A quorum of three bishops having been gotten together, not without great difficulty, the two were consecrated in Trinity Church, New York, May 29, 1811. The time was opportune and the conjuncture of circumstances singularly favorable.

The stigma of Toryism, which had marked the church from long before the War of Independence, was now more than erased.

In New England the Episcopal Church was of necessity committed to that political party which favored the abolition of the privileges of the standing order; and this was the anti-English party, which, under the lead of Jefferson, was fast forcing the country into war with England.

The Episcopalians were now in a position to retort the charge of disloyalty under which they had not unjustly suffered.

At the same time their church lost nothing of the social prestige incidental to its relation to the established Church of England.

Politicians of the Democratic party, including some men of well-deserved credit and influence, naturally attached themselves to a religious party having many points of congeniality.

[305:1] In another sense, also, the time was opportune for an advance of the Episcopal Church.

In the person of Bishop Hobart it had now a bold, energetic, and able representative of principles hitherto not much in favor in America--the thoroughgoing High-church principles of Archbishop Laud.

Before this time the Episcopal Church had had very little to contribute by way of enriching the diversity of the American sects.

It was simply the feeblest of the communions bearing the common family traits of the Great Awakening, with the not unimportant _differentia_ of its settled ritual of worship and its traditions of order and decorum.

But when Bishop Hobart put the trumpet to his lips and prepared himself to sound, the public heard a very different note, and no uncertain one.

The church (meaning his own fragment of the church) the one channel of saving grace; the vehicles of that grace, the sacraments, valid only when ministered by a priesthood with the right pedigree of ordination;

submission to the constituted authorities of the church absolutely unlimited, except by clear divine requirements; abstinence from prayer-meetings; firm opposition to revivals of religion; refusal of all coöperation with Christians outside of his own sect in endeavors for the general advancement of religion--such were some of the principles and duties inculcated by this bishop of the new era as of binding force.

[306:1] The courage of this attitude was splendid and captivating.

It requires, even at the present time, not a little force of conviction to sustain one in publicly enunciating such views; but at the time of the accession of Hobart, when the Episcopal Church was just beginning to lift up its head out of the dust of despair, it needed the heroism of a martyr.

It was not only the vast multitude of American Christians outside of the Episcopal Church, comprising almost all the learning, the evangelistic zeal, and the charitable activity and self-denial of the American church of that time, that heard these unwonted pretensions with indignation or with ridicule; in the Episcopal Church itself they were disclaimed, scouted, and denounced with (if possible) greater indignation still.

But the new party had elements of growth for which its adversaries did not sufficiently reckon.

The experience of other orders in the church confirms this principle: that steady persistence and iteration in assuring any body of believers that they are in some special sense the favorites of Heaven, and in assuring any body of clergy that they are endued from on high with some special and exceptional powers, will by and by make an impression on the mind.

The flattering assurance may be coyly waived aside; it may even be indignantly repelled; but in the long run there will be a growing number of the brethren who become convinced that there is something in it.

It was in harmony with human nature that the party of high pretensions to distinguished privileges for the church and prerogatives for the "priesthood" should in a few years become a formidable contestant for the control of the denomination.

The controversy between the two parties rose to its height of exacerbation during the prevalence of that strange epidemic of controversy which ran simultaneously through so many of the great religious organizations of the country at once.

No denomination had it in a more malignant form than the Episcopalians.

The war of pamphlets and newspapers was fiercely waged, and the election of bishops sometimes became a bitter party contest, with the unpleasant incidents of such competitions.

In the midst of the controversy at home the publication of the Oxford Tracts added new asperity to it.

A distressing episode of the controversy was the arraignment of no less than four of the twenty bishops on charges affecting their personal character.

In the morbid condition of the body ecclesiastic every such hurt festered.

The highest febrile temperature was reached when, at an ordination in 1843, two of the leading presbyters in the diocese of New York rose in their places, and, reading each one his solemn protest against the ordaining of one of the candidates on the ground of his Romanizing opinions, left the church.

The result of the long conflict was not immediately apparent.

It was not only that "high" opinions, even the highest of the Tractarian school, were to be tolerated within the church, but that the High-church party was to be the dominant party.

The Episcopal Church was to stand before the public as representing, not that which it held in common with the other churches of the country, but that which was most distinctive.

From this time forth the "Evangelical" party continued relatively to decline, down to the time, thirty years later, when it was represented in the inconsiderable secession of the "Reformed Episcopal Church."

The combination of circumstances and influences by which this party supremacy was brought about is an interesting study, for which, however, there is no room in this brief compendium of history.

A more important fact is this: that in spite of these agitating internal strifes, and even by reason of them, the growth of the denomination was wonderfully rapid and strong.

No fact in the external history of the American church at this period is more imposing than this growth of the Episcopal Church from nothing to a really commanding stature.

It is easy to enumerate minor influences tending to this result, some of which are not of high spiritual dignity; but these must not be overestimated.

The nature of this growth, as well as the numerical amount of it, requires to be considered.

This strongly distinguished order in the American church has been aggrandized, not, to any great degree, by immigration, nor by conquest from the ranks of the irreligious, but by a continual stream of accessions both to its laity and to its clergy from other sects of the church.

These accessions have of course been variable in quality, but they have included many such as no denomination could afford to lose, and such as any would be proud to receive.

Without judging of individual cases, it is natural and reasonable to explain so considerable a current setting so steadily for two generations toward the Episcopal Church as being attracted by the distinctive characteristics of that church.

Foremost among these we may reckon the study of the dignity and beauty of public worship, and the tradition and use of forms of devotion of singular excellence and value.

A tendency to revert to the ancient Calvinist doctrine of the sacraments has prepossessed some in favor of that sect in which the old Calvinism is still cherished.

Some have rejoiced to find a door of access to the communion of the church not beset with revivalist exactions of examination and scrutiny of the sacred interior experiences of the soul.

Some have reacted from an excessive or inquisitive or arbitrary church discipline, toward a default of discipline.

Some, worthily weary of sectarian division and of the "evangelical" doctrine that schism is the normal condition of the church of Christ, have found real comfort in taking refuge in a sect in which, closing their eyes, they can say, "There are no schisms in the church; the church is one and undivided, and we are it."

These and other like considerations, mingled in varying proportions, have been honorable motives impelling toward the Episcopal denomination; and few that have felt the force of them have felt constrained stubbornly to resist the gentle assurances offered by the "apostolic succession" theory of a superior authority and prerogative with which they had become invested.

The numerous accessions to the Episcopal Church from other communions have, of course, been in large part reinforcements to the already dominant party.

In the Roman Catholic Church of the United States, during this stormy period, there was by no means a perfect calm.

The ineradicable feeling of the American citizen--however recent his naturalization--that he has a right to do what he will with his own, had kept asserting itself in that plausible but untenable claim of the laity to manage the church property acquired by their own contributions, which is known to Catholic writers as "trusteeism."

Through the whole breadth of the country, from Buffalo to New Orleans, sharp conflicts over this question between clergy and laity had continued to vex the peace of the church, and the victory of the clergy had not been unvarying and complete.

When, in 1837, Bishop John Hughes took the reins of spiritual power in New York, he resolved to try conclusions with the trustees who attempted to overrule his authority in his own cathedral.

Sharply threatening to put the church under interdict, if necessary, he brought the recalcitrants to terms at last by a less formidable process.

He appealed to the congregation to withhold all further contributions from the trustees.

The appeal, for conscience' sake, to refrain from giving has always a double hope of success.

And the bishop succeeded in ousting the trustees, at the serious risk of teaching the people a trick which has since been found equally effective when applied on the opposite side of a dispute between clergyman and congregation.

In Philadelphia the long struggle was not ended without the actual interdicting of the cathedral of St. Mary's, April, 1831. In Buffalo, so late as 1847, even this extreme measure, applied to the largest congregation in the newly erected diocese, did not at once enforce submission.

The conflict with trusteeism was only one out of many conflicts which gave abundant exercise to the administrative abilities of the American bishops.

The mutual jealousies of the various nationalities and races among the laity, and of the various sects of the regular clergy, menaced, and have not wholly ceased to menace, the harmony of the church, if not its unity.

One disturbing element by which the Roman Catholic Church in some European countries has been sorely vexed makes no considerable figure in the corresponding history in America.

There has never been here any "Liberal Catholic" party.

The fact stands in analogy with many like facts.

Visitors to America from the established churches of England or Scotland or Germany have often been surprised to find the temper of the old-country church so much broader and less rigid than that of the daughter church in the new and free republic.

The reason is less recondite than might be supposed.

In the old countries there are retained in connection with the state-church, by constraint of law or of powerful social or family influences, many whose adhesion to its distinctive tenets and rules is slight and superficial.

It is out of such material that the liberal church party grows.

In the migration it is not that the liberal churchman becomes more strict, but that, being released from outside pressure, he becomes less of a churchman.

He easily draws off from his hereditary communion and joins himself to some other, or to none at all.

This process of evaporation leaves behind it a strong residuum in which all characteristic elements are held as in a saturated solution.

A further security of the American Catholic Church against the growth of any "Liberal Catholic" party like those of continental Europe is the absolutist organization of the hierarchy under the personal government of the pope.

In these last few centuries great progress has been made by the Roman see in extinguishing the ancient traditions of local or national independence in the election of bishops.

Nevertheless in Catholic Europe important relics of this independence give an effective check to the absolute power of Rome.

In America no trace of this historic independence has ever existed.

The power of appointing and removing bishops is held absolutely and exclusively by the pope and exercised through the Congregation of the Propaganda.

The power of ordaining and assigning priests is held by the bishop, who also holds or controls the title to the church property in his diocese.

The security against partisan division within the church is as complete as it can be made without gravely increasing the risks of alienating additional multitudes from the fellowship of the church.

[312:1] * * * * * During the whole of this dreary decade there were "fightings without" as well as within for the Catholic Church in the United States.

Its great and sudden growth solely by immigration had made it distinctively a church of foreigners, and chiefly of Irishmen.

The conditions were favorable for the development of a race prejudice aggravated by a religious antipathy.

It was a good time for the impostor, the fanatic, and the demagogue to get in their work.

In Boston, in 1834, the report that a woman was detained against her will in the Ursuline convent at Charlestown, near Boston, led to the burning of the building by a drunken mob.

The Titus Oates of the American no-popery panic, in 1836, was an infamous woman named Maria Monk, whose monstrous stories of secret horrors perpetrated in a convent in Montreal, in which she claimed to have lived as a nun, were published by a respectable house and had immense currency.

A New York pastor of good standing, Dr. Brownlee, made himself sponsor for her character and her stories; and when these had been thoroughly exposed, by Protestant ministers and laymen, for the shameless frauds that they were, there were plenty of zealots to sustain her still.

A "Protestant Society" was organized in New York, and solicited the contributions of the benevolent and pious to promote the dissemination of raw-head-and-bloody-bones literature on the horrors of popery.

The enterprise met with reprobation from sober-minded Protestants, but it was not without its influence for mischief.

The presence of a great foreign vote, easily manipulated and cast in block, was proving a copious source of political corruption.

Large concessions of privilege or of public property to Catholic institutions were reasonably suspected to have been made in consideration of clerical services in partisan politics.

[313:1] The conditions provoked, we might say necessitated, a political reform movement, which took the name and character of "Native American."

In Philadelphia, a city notorious at that time for misgovernment and turbulence, an orderly "American" meeting was attacked and broken up by an Irish mob.

One act of violence led to another, the excitement increasing from day to day; deadly shots were exchanged in the streets, houses from which balls had been fired into the crowd were set in flames, which spread to other houses, churches were burned, and the whole city dominated by mobs that were finally suppressed by the State militia.

It was an appropriate climax to the ten years of ecclesiastical and social turmoil.

[314:1] FOOTNOTES:

[296:1] Johnson, "The Southern Presbyterians," p. 359. [297:1] For the close historical parallel to the exscinding acts of 1837 see page 167, above.

A later parallel, it is claimed, is found in the "virtually exscinding act" of the General Assembly of 1861, which was the occasion of the secession of the Southern Presbyterians.

The historian of the Southern Presbyterians, who remarks with entire complacency that the "victory" of 1837 was won "only by virtue of an almost solid South," seems quite unconscious that this kind of victory could have any force as a precedent or as an estoppel (Johnson, "The Southern Presbyterians," pp. 335, 359).

But it is natural, no doubt, that exscinding acts should look different when examined from the muzzle instead of from the breech.

[304:1] Tiffany, chap.

xv.

[305:1] The intense antagonism of the New England Congregationalists to Jefferson and his party as representing French infidelity and Jacobinism admits of many striking illustrations.

The sermon of Nathanael Emmons on "Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin" is characterized by Professor Park as "a curiosity in politico-homiletical literature."

At this distance it is not difficult to see that the course of this clergy was far more honorable to its boldness and independence than to its discretion and sense of fitness.

Both its virtues and its faults had a tendency to strengthen an opposing party.

[306:1] Hobart's sermon at the consecration of Right Rev. H.

U.

Onderdonk, Philadelphia, 1827. [312:1] For a fuller account of the dissensions in the Catholic Church, consult, by index, Bishop O'Gorman's "History."

On the modern organization of the episcopate in complete dependence on the Holy See, consult the learned article on "Episcopal Elections," by Dr. Peries, of the Catholic University at Washington, in the "American Catholic Quarterly Review" for January, 1896; also the remarks of Archbishop Kenrick, of St. Louis, in his "_Concio in Concilio Vaticano Habenda at non Habita_," in "An Inside View of the Vatican Council," by L. W.

Bacon, pp. 61, 121. [313:1] A satirical view of these concessions, in the vast dimensions which they had reached twenty-five years later in the city and county of New York, was published in two articles, "Our Established Church," and "The Unestablished Church," in "Putnam's Magazine" for July and December, 1869. The articles were reissued in a pamphlet, "with an explanatory and exculpatory preface, and sundry notices of the contemporary press."

[314:1] A studiously careful account of the Philadelphia riots of 1844 is given in the "New Englander," vol. ii.

(1844), pp. 470, 624. This account of the schisms of the period is of course not complete.

The American Missionary Association, since distinguished for successful labors chiefly among the freedmen, grew out of dissatisfaction felt by men of advanced antislavery views with the position of the "American Board" and the American Home Missionary Society on the slavery question.

The organization of it was matured in 1846. A very fruitful schism in its results was that which, in 1835, planted a cutting from Lane Seminary at Cincinnati, in the virgin soil at Oberlin, Ohio.

The beginning thus made with a class in theology has grown into a noble and widely beneficent institution, the influence of which has extended to the ends of the land and of the world.

The division of the Society of Friends into the two societies known as Hicksite and Orthodox is of earlier date--1827-28. No attempt is made in this volume to chronicle the interminable splittings and reunitings of the Presbyterian sects of Scottish extraction.

A curious diagram, on page 146 of volume xi.

of the present series, illustrates the sort of task which such a chronicle involves.

An illustration of the way in which the extreme defenders of slavery and the extreme abolitionists sustained each other in illogical statements (see above, pp. 301, 302) is found in Dr. Thornwell's claim (identical with Mr. Garrison's) that if slavery is wrong, then all slave-holders ought to be excommunicated (vol. vi.

, p. 157, note).

Dr. Thornwell may not have been the "mental and moral giant" that he appears to his admirers (see Professor Johnson in vol. xi.

, p. 355), but he was an intelligent and able man, quite too clear-headed to be imposed upon by a palpable "ambiguous middle," except for his excitement in the heat of a desperate controversy with the moral sense of all Christendom.