Читать книгу A History of the Episcopal Church (Third Revised Edition) - Robert W. Prichard - Страница 13
ОглавлениеThe Age of Reason andthe American Colonies(1688–1740)
In 1688, the Parliament invited James II’s Protestant son-in-law and daughter from Holland to assume jointly the British throne as King (1688–1702) William III and Queen (1688–94) Mary II. Mary’s younger sister Anne supported their accession and succeeded them as monarch (1702–14). Collectively, the reign of the three marked an important turning point in the religious life of England and her colonies. Well aware of the turmoil that preceded them, the monarchs sought to quiet the tempers of English subjects by adopting a series of practical compromises (retention of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty-nine Articles; adoption of an Act of Toleration for Protestant dissenters; and granting of broader authority to Parliament). In Scotland (a separate kingdom with a shared monarch until united with England in 1707), they abandoned their predecessors’ attempt to conform the church to that in England; the Church of Scotland would thereafter be Presbyterian. These measures were successful in maintaining the peace; the Glorious Revolution was the last revolution of the English people.
The peace in England was due not only to specific legislation but also to those who advanced new ways of thinking about English religion and society. The impact of this shift would be felt by English colonists in the New World. While it is impossible to point to all those involved in bringing the “Moderate Enlightenment” to England following the Glorious Revolution, it is possible to single out two important groups: the Royal Society and the latitudinarian bishops.1
In 1649, a group of scholars at Oxford University began to meet informally in order to gain what one member called “the satisfaction of breathing a freer air, and of conversing in quiet with one another, without being ingag’d in the passions, and the madness of that dismal age.”2 In the midst of civil war and dogmatic debates, members of the group sought only the opportunity to discuss issues of common interest. At the Restoration, Charles II gave the group a charter (1662) and a name (the Royal Society). During the remainder of the seventeenth century, the society’s membership would include both prominent church figures and the leading intellectual lights of England: chemist Robert Boyle (1627–91), astronomer Edmund Halley (1656–1742), philosopher John Locke (1632–1704), mathematician Isaac Newton (1642–1727), Bishop of Rochester Thomas Sprat (1635–1713), Bishop of Salisbury Seth Ward (1617–89), Bishop of Chester John Wilkins (1614–1712), and architect Christopher Wren (1632–1723).3
Members of the society shared a bold vision—that a marriage of reason and faith provided a truly pious alternative to the violence that English Christians had experienced early in the century. They believed, moreover, that this vision would not only bring peace to the church but would also bring progress and prosperity to their nation. The same minds that solved religious controversies with patient application of reason could also solve scientific and mathematical problems, providing a basis for the continuing expansion of English industry, navigation, and trade. In the early eighteenth century, society president (1703–27) Isaac Newton presided over a transition in the society’s focus; church leaders played a declining role, and members focused more narrowly on scientific investigation. By that time, however, a broad spectrum of English Christians had accepted the vision of the society’s first generation as normative.
John Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) was a classic statement of the faith of the society’s first generation. In his work, Locke attempted to escape from the intense theological argumentation, which had divided English Christians for most of his century, by characterizing the message of the New Testament with a few simple and logical propositions. Others, who were not themselves members of the society, supplemented Locke’s exposition. In The Analogy of Religion (1736), Bishop Joseph Butler (1692–1752) explained that this reasonable Christianity was consonant with the laws of nature. Catherine Cockburn (1679–1749), a playwright who turned to theological writing, echoed similar themes. Christian belief—and most particularly the Church of England’s understanding of it—was a reasonable faith, whose propagation went hand in hand with domestic peace, scientific advancement, and the success of the British Empire. This vision deeply influenced English and colonial Christians of all denominations.
When William III and Mary II came to the throne, all of the Scottish bishops and seven English bishops, including Archbishop of Canterbury William Sancroft, refused to swear allegiance to the new king and queen. These nonjuring bishops (i.e., bishops who refused to swear allegiance) would provide the episcopal succession for a dissenting church that would continue as a separate institution into the nineteenth century. It would be particularly strong in Scotland, where William and Mary agreed to a Church of Scotland with presbyterian polity. It would be nonjuring bishops from Scotland who would consecrate American Samuel Seabury to the episcopate in 1784.
The new monarchs and the Parliament removed the seven English bishops from office and replaced them with popular London clergy who had supported the Glorious Revolution. Among the new appointees were Gilbert Burnet (1643–1715), who became Bishop of Salisbury; John Tillotson (1630–94), who became Archbishop of Canterbury; Simon Patrick (1627– 1701), who became Bishop of Ely; and Edward Stillingfleet (1635–99), who became the Bishop of Worcester. Three of the four men had studied at Cambridge and the fourth (Burnet) admitted that he was deeply influenced by a group of teachers there, popularly known as the Cambridge Platonists. Ralph Cudworth (1617–88) was the most influential of these teachers. Drawing on the work of third-century Neoplatonic Egyptian philosopher Plotinus, they characterized religious faith as a mystery that could never be entirely reduced to logical propositions.
The bishops who studied with the Platonists saw no conflict between this more mystical approach to theology and scientific investigation of the sort advocated by the members of the Royal Society. Burnet, a historian and an amateur chemist, joined the Royal Society in 1664. Patrick was the probable author of A Brief Account of the New Sect of Latitude Men (1662), which explained that the Platonists encouraged science by freeing it from the metaphysical categories of Aristotelian thought.
The bishops’ approach dovetailed nicely with the Royal Society’s vision of a reasonable faith in a second way.4 If one stressed practical morality, clear discourse, and philanthropy rather than the difficult points of doctrine, it was far easier to show the reasonableness of the Christian faith. Archbishop Tillotson, for example, cooperated with Royal Society member John “Wilkins’s project of creating a clear and plain style of discourse,” and became one of the most popular preachers of the era.5 Gilbert Burnet wrote an Exposition of the Thirty-nine Articles (1699) in which he questioned the need for the heated debate over predestination that divided English Protestants of their day into competing Calvinist and Arminian camps.6 Burnet suggested that either position was in keeping with a reasonable understanding of the English Thirty-nine Articles. This advocacy for toleration soon earned the bishops the title latitudinarian, a label that had also been used of their Cambridge teachers.
Like the members of the Royal Society, the latitudinarian bishops recognized the importance of the English colonies in America. They were a rich resource whose scientific management would bring prosperity to England. They were also diverse and divided religious communities to which a moderate enlightened faith of the Church of England could offer a unifying vision.
Henry Compton (1632–1713), the Bishop of London who, like the latitudinarians, was a Cambridge graduate, was also an important figure in regard to the colonies in America. Before appointment to the see of London in 1675, Compton had served as Charles II’s chaplain of the Chapel Royal. In that capacity he had been responsible for the religious education of both Mary and Anne. He was an active supporter of the Glorious Revolution, and after it he was a trusted adviser who was able to encourage royal patronage for religious and benevolent projects in the colonies.
In the last two decades of the seventeenth century, English monarchs gradually expanded the authority they exercised over the American colonies. In 1684 Charles II cancelled the proprietary charters of Massachusetts and Bermuda, making the territories royal colonies. As Duke of York, James Stuart was himself the proprietor of New York (1664), but after following his brother to the throne as James II (1685), he added New York to the number of royal colonies. In 1691 William III and Mary II designated Maryland as a royal colony as well.
With a larger number of the colonies directly under royal control it became possible for sympathetic monarchs to follow policies favorable to the Church of England. William and Mary, and Anne chose just such a course of action. They instructed their royal governors to lobby the colonial legislatures for the establishment of the Church of England (an action that required subsequent approval by the English Privy Council). The policy was successful in Maryland (establishment in 1702) and South Carolina (1706), and partially successful in New York. (In 1693 the royal governor of New York persuaded the state assembly to adopt an act providing for “Protestant” clergy in New York City and in Richmond, West Chester, and Queen’s counties; the governor equated “Protestant” with the Church of England, but the majority in the assembly disagreed, making the system largely unworkable.) It was unsuccessful in New Jersey. Queen Anne’s successors would, however, later expand establishment to Nova Scotia (1758), Georgia (1758), and North Carolina (definitive legislation in 1765).7
The colonial governments in these territories had the responsibility of founding and providing support for parishes of the Church of England. They fulfilled this responsibility most consistently in Maryland, a former Roman Catholic colony in which a large percentage of the populace had always been sympathetic to the Church of England, and in South Carolina. The colonial religious establishment was less successful in North Carolina and Georgia, both because of the late date of enactment and because of the presence of those who had chosen to settle there precisely because of dissatisfaction with the religious situation in Virginia and South Carolina. The late date of establishment would prove less detrimental in Nova Scotia, because the church’s favored status would not end with the American Revolution.
While members of the Church of England in England were not in complete agreement about the wisdom of the church-state alliance that the English government expanded in America after 1688, many of them shared a common conception that was quite different from the dream for world evangelism of the first generation of colonists. Bishop of Gloucester William Warburton (1698–1779) would later explain this new understanding of the relationship of religion and nationhood in his Alliance between Church and State (1736). For him, the church was the soul of the state; it taught a natural religion to individuals who, as a result, became better citizens.8 Residents of the colonies in which the Church of England was established came to share a similar opinion; for them, the Church of England and civic responsibility became increasingly intertwined.9 This integrated view would, however, create problems when the American Revolution severed the ties between church and state.
The Church of England would not be able to expand its establishment to include all of the American colonies. With the exception of the partial establishment in New York, no colony between Maryland and Nova Scotia would have an established Church of England; Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and members of other denominations were too firmly entrenched. The monarchs were, however, able to take steps to encourage and support individual Church of England congregations in those areas. Queen Anne, at the urging of the latitudinarian bishops, designated certain annates and tithes, which had been diverted to the state by Henry VIII, as a fund for the support of low-income clergy.10 From this fund—the so-called Queen Anne’s Bounty—she also authorized gifts to clergy willing to travel to the colonies as missionaries. In addition, the queen made gifts to individual congregations.
During this period, supporters of the colonial Church of England founded their first parishes in Massachusetts (King’s Chapel, Boston, 1688), Pennsylvania (Christ Church, Philadelphia, 1694), New York (Trinity, New York City, 1697), Rhode Island (Trinity, Newport, 1698), New Jersey (St. Mary’s, Burlington, 1703), and Connecticut (Christ Church, Stratford, 1707).
In England, bishops appointed representatives, called commissaries, to perform functions in distant portions of their dioceses.11 In 1684 Henry Compton, the Bishop of London (1685–1715) decided that he would use this system in the American colonies. Though the colonies were not formally a part of his diocese, governmental offices and commercial houses in his diocese controlled the commerce and government of the colonies. Finding no other provision for the supervision of colonial religion, Compton adapted the commissary system to provide some leadership for the Church of England in the colonies.
In 1684 Compton appointed John Clayton (1656 or 1657– 1725) as his first commissary. Clayton was a graduate of Oxford; in the eighteenth century such graduates would come to outnumber the Cambridge graduates who had been more numerous among the clergy in the seventeenth century. At the time of his appointment, he was already in Virginia, where he would serve.12 Clayton’s term as a commissary was brief; he left the colony in May of 1686. He did make one claim to have introduced significant change during his tenure; he believed himself to “have been the first minister at his Jamestown parish to wear the surplice.”13 In 1689 Compton appointed the first long-term commissary, James Blair (1656–1743). Like his predecessor, Blair was already in Virginia. A Scot who had come to England with the support of latitudinarian Gilbert Burnet, Blair had escaped the uncomfortable reign of James II by volunteering for the mission field. He had quickly established roots in the colony, gaining an entry into the local gentry by marrying Sarah Harrison.14
As commissary in Virginia, Blair began to establish some order in the church. He set up a convocation system, sought to enforce morality laws, called annual conferences, proposed—but did not receive—ecclesiastical courts, and attempted to standardize the value of the tobacco in which clergy were paid. In 1693, Blair founded the College of William and Mary—second in age among colonial schools of higher education only to Congregationalist Harvard (1636). The Virginia House of Burgesses agreed to the idea, and English contributors, whose number included Gilbert Burnet, John Tillotson, and Robert Boyle, provided needed financial resources. Blair planned for his school to educate both future clergy and Native Americans.
Blair’s early efforts to educate Native Americans had the support of Governor Alexander Spotswood (1676–1740), who established and financed a Native American feeder school at Fort Christanna. By 1712 there were twenty Native Americans at William and Mary, and three years later the student body at Fort Christanna had risen to seventy. The Members of the House of Burgesses opposed the schools, however, and tried to ban all attempts to evangelize Native Americans. By 1717 both efforts at educating Native Americans had collapsed. A contemporaneous effort by Francis Le Jau (d. 1717) to educate and evangelize Creek and Yamasee children in South Carolina by inviting their families to live with him also was short-lived.15
The College of William and Mary proved more successful in the education of future clergy. By the 1720s a number of those who had studied at the institution were entering the ordained ministry of the Church of England. At least thirty-one would serve in colonial Virginia, with eleven others serving in other colonies.16
Blair’s success convinced Bishop Compton of the usefulness of the commissary system in the colonies. Compton and his successors not only appointed commissaries for Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas, in which the Church of England was established, but also for Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania. The commissary system reached its apogee during the episcopate of Edmund Gibson (Bishop of London, 1724–49). By the 1740s, commissaries were supervising Church of England clergy in nine of the colonies.17
The commissary system had certain inherent weaknesses, however. So long as the colonial clergy were in relative agreement, the commissaries were effective spokesmen. In a number of circumstances, they were able to lobby effectively for the removal of colonial governors with whose policies they disagreed. They lacked, however, the canonical authority of a bishop, could not ordain new candidates for the ministry, and were able to discipline errant clergy with only the greatest of difficulty.18
Within a few years of the introduction of the first commissaries, therefore, some members of the colonial Church of England were already calling for resident bishops. In 1706, for example, fourteen New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania clergy sent one of their number to England to plead for a colonial episcopate.19 By 1713, such advocates had caught the attention of Queen Anne. She instructed her chief minister to prepare legislation that would have authorized consecration of bishops for the colonies. Unfortunately, she died before any action could be taken.20
With Anne’s death in 1714, any real possibility for a colonial episcopate was lost. Anne’s successor, George I, had a limited knowledge of either the English language or the English church. He delegated his right to appoint bishops to his prime minister and left other issues of religious policy to the Parliament. When the clergy convocation began in 1717 to discuss the legitimacy of George’s accession to the throne, Parliament suspended meetings of the body. The Whig party, which gained a majority in Parliament in the following year, advised the king to make that decision permanent. No further royal licenses would be issued for the assembly of the convocation until the middle of the nineteenth century, though there were informal meetings, and bishops continued to sit in the House of Lords.21
Some individuals continued, however, the campaign for a bishop after 1714. In 1718, for example, a number of clergy from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland signed a petition to the English bishops and archbishops requesting the appointment of a prelate.22 Six years later, a call by New England clergy for a bishop brought philosopher and later bishop George Berkeley (1685–1753) to Rhode Island as part of an unsuccessful effort to create a second Church of England college and, the New England clergy hoped, a resident episcopate.23 Others on both sides of the Atlantic would sound similar calls throughout the remainder of the colonial period. It would only be after the American Revolution, however, that the Whigs in the English Parliament reversed their opposition to resident bishops. So long as the American colonies were part of the British Empire, they feared that an expanded episcopate would only support the authoritarian policies of the Tory party. An episcopate in a separate nation, however, would present no challenge to liberties back at home.
| Table 1. A Partial List of Colonial Commissaries | ||
| Virginia | ||
| John Clayton | 1684–86 | (Rector, James City Parish) |
| James Blair | 1689–1743 | (Pres. W & M, 1693–1743) |
| William Dawson | 1743–52 | (Pres. W & M, 1743–52) |
| Thomas Dawson | 1752–61 | (Pres. W & M, 1755–61) |
| William Robinson | 1761–68 | (Visitor W & M, 1759–68) |
| James Horrocks | 1771–71 | (Pres. W & M, 1764–71) |
| John Carum | 1772–77 | (Pres. W & M, 1771–77) |
| (W & M=the College of William and Mary). | ||
| Maryland | ||
| Thomas Bray | 1695–1704 | |
| Christopher Wilkinson | 1716–29 | (Eastern shore only) |
| Jacob Henderson | 1716–30 | (Western shore only) |
| 1730–34 | (All of Maryland) | |
| North and South Carolina | ||
| Gideon Johnson | 1707–11 | St. Philip’s, Charleston |
| William T. Bull | 1716–23 | St. Paul’s, Colleton, S.C. |
| Alexander Garden | 1725–49 | St. Philip’s, Charleston |
| New York | ||
| William Vesey | 1715–46 | Trinity Church, New York |
| Pennsylvania (and Delaware) | ||
| Archibald Cummings | 1726–41 | Christ Church, Philadelphia |
| Robert Jenney | 1742–62 | Christ Church, Philadelphia |
| Massachusetts | ||
| Roger Price | 1730–62 | King’s Chapel, Boston |
| The Bishop of London did not appoint commissaries for New Hampshire, Georgia, Connecticut, or Rhode Island. The commissary system fell into disuse in every colony except Virginia during the episcopate of Thomas Sherlock (1748–61). Sherlock hoped that his refusal to appoint commissaries would pressure the English government to send a colonial bishop. | ||
| Sources: The Fulham Papers in the Lambeth Palace Library, ed. William Wilson Manross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965); Classified Digest of the Record of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1701–1892, 4th ed. (London: S.P.G., 1894); Edward L. Bond and Joan R. Gundersen, The Episcopal Church in Virginia, 1607–2007 (Richmond: The Episcopal Diocese of Virginia, 2007), 22–23; Olsen, “Commissaries”; Cross, The Anglican Episcopate; Joan Rezner Gundersen, “The Anglican Ministry in Virginia 1723– 1776: A Study of a Social Class,” (Ph.D. diss., Notre Dame, 1972); Carl Bridenbaugh, Mitre And Sceptre (New York: Oxford, 1962); The Episcopal Church in North Carolina 1701– 1959, ed. Lawrence Foushee London and Sarah McCulloh Lemmon (Raleigh: Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina), 87; and Frederick Lewis Weis, The Colonial Clergy of Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina (Baltimore: Genealogical Pub Co., 1955). Because of the time needed to communicate from England to the colonies, there is often a discrepancy of a year in the dates in various sources. |
James Blair served in Virginia as commissary for fifty-seven years. Bishop Compton’s first appointee in Maryland, Thomas Bray (1656–1730), followed a very different course of action. Though chosen in 1696, Bray did not actually visit the colony itself until 1700. His initial efforts in Maryland were much like those of Blair in Virginia. He summoned a convocation of the clergy, charged them to teach the catechism to their parishioners, and cautioned one of their number about his scandalous conduct. He urged vestries to help in the suppression of evil conduct, and he raised an offering for the assistance of the Church of England in Pennsylvania.24 The establishment was new in Maryland, and the legislative act for which Bray successfully lobbied did not include any funds for his own salary. After less than three months in the colony, he sailed for England. He would not return to Maryland.
Bray’s major contribution, however, was not pastoral; it was organizational and educational. Bray had come to the attention of Bishop Compton because of his intellectual ability. He had been a scholarship student at Oxford whose studies had advanced so quickly that he had graduated before the canonical age for ordination. He had written a popular set of Catechetical Lectures that was already in print in 1697. Once appointed by Compton, he immediately recognized the need for educational materials in the colonies. In 1698, he organized the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), to which Princess Anne contributed forty-four pounds and Bishop Burnet fifty, to purchase books for colonial libraries.25 In keeping with the Enlightenment marriage of science and religion, the titles included both works in theology and the natural sciences. Bray hoped that these SPCK libraries, which would eventually number almost forty, would be both tools for parish clergy and effective evangelical materials. Dissenters or non-Christians who read the books would learn of the reasonableness of the Church of England.
Bray’s inability to gain a stipend from the Maryland legislature convinced him that a missionary organization to support colonial clergy was also needed. He began to campaign for such a body. His A General View of the English Colonies in America with Respect to Religion, written before his visit to Maryland (1698), had detailed the woeful condition of the Church of England in North America. In all of New England, there was only one Church of England parish, the newly founded King’s Chapel. Long Island had thirteen dissenting churches but none for the Church of England. East New Jersey had no Church of England parish; and Pennsylvania had only one. The Carolinas boasted only one church in Charleston. The situation was better in Bermuda (three ministers in nine parishes), Jamaica (eight ministers in fifteen parishes), Barbados (fourteen ministers in fourteen parishes), Maryland (sixteen ministers in thirty parishes), and Virginia (thirty ministers in fifty parishes), though Bray had some criticism for the church in those areas as wel1.26 Bray’s account caught the interest of his fellow members of the Church of England, and in 1701 he and others secured a charter from William III to form the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in foreign parts (SPG).27
The SPG’s first missionary was an ex-Quaker named George Keith (1638–1716). While on his voyage to America, Keith convinced ship’s chaplain John Talbot (1645–1727) to join him. In 1702 the two began a grand tour of the colonies, traveling more than eight hundred miles from Maine to the Carolinas. Keith was a Scot who had taught at a Friend’s school in Philadelphia before his conversion to the Church England. He brought the certainty of a new convert and a willingness to engage in controversy that would mark many of the SPG missionaries who would venture into dissenting strongholds. In Boston, he criticized the graduates of Harvard University for defending the doctrine of predestination and engaged in a pamphlet war with Congregational patriarch Increase Mather (1639–1723).28
Keith and Talbot’s journey confirmed the information in Bray’s General View. The Church of England was almost unknown in the middle colonies, New England, and the Carolinas. The SPG would send the great preponderance of its missionaries to these areas, though it sent a few to Virginia and Maryland. In the years between 1701 and the American Revolution, the SPG would help support two persons in Virginia, five in Maryland, thirteen in Georgia, thirty-three in North Carolina, forty-four in New Jersey, forty-seven in Pennsylvania, fifty-four in South Carolina, fifty-eight in New York, and eighty-four in New England. Missionaries went both to the English colonists and to blacks, Indians, and immigrants from other European nations. The society’s records indicate that the missionaries ministered in six European and fourteen Indian languages.29 Most, but not all, of the SPG’s support went to white male clergy. Exceptions to the rule included society support for Harry and Andrew, black evangelists in midcentury South Carolina.30
In addition to their efforts in the colonies that would later become the United States, SPG missionaries also went to other British holdings in the Western Hemisphere: Newfoundland (1703), Jamaica (1710), Barbados (1712), Nova Scotia (1728), the Bahamas (1733), and Honduras (1733). In the second half of the eighteenth century, the SPG would also begin work in Africa and the Pacific.31
The society’s instructions to the early missionaries conveyed the reasonable tone of an enlightened Protestantism. “Missionaries to heathens and infidels” were to begin their instruction “with the principles of natural Religion, appealing to their Reason and conscience; and thence proceed to shew them the Necessity of Revelation, and Certainty of that contained in the Holy Scripture, by plain and most obvious Arguments.”32 SPG missionaries were to employ both natural reason and revelation in order to bring others to the Christian faith.
Logical arguments were not, however, the only tools that members of Church of England used to portray the alliance of reason and revelation. Even the design of their churches bore witness to the relationship. In the first half of the eighteenth century, many of the buildings used by the colonial Church of England had two foci—the pulpit and lectern on one wall and the altar on another—with two entrances and box pews that allowed facing in either direction.33 (Most other Protestants met in rectangular meetinghouses with the entrance on one of the long walls.) By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, James Gibbs (1682–1754) was introducing a new design for church buildings in England. By replacing free-standing bell towers with steeples that rose from roof tops, Gibbs was able to construct churches with unobstructed facades. To these he introduced columns reminiscent of classical Roman and Greek designs. The resultant pattern was a marriage of Christianity and classical thought, the architectural incarnation of the hopes of Christians of the Moderate Enlightenment. Members of the Church of England introduced the design in the colonies and other denominations soon imitated it.34
Fig. 6 St. Michael’s Church, Charleston, South Carolina, 1752–58
Not all the colonists were receptive, however, to the influence of the SPG missionaries. The society recognized this fact, warning missionaries that they would need to defend the distinctive principles of the Church of England against “the attempts of such Gainsayers as are mixt among them.”35 The major point of controversy, one about which George Keith and Increase Mather were already debating in 1702, was the episcopacy. SPG missionaries defended the institution from the criticism of Protestants of denominations that had rejected episcopal succession. George Keith and others sent to America relied upon a well-laid argument that Thomas Bray had already advanced in his Catechetical Lectures. English Protestants of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries explained the gospel by comparing it to an Old Testament covenant, a contract in which both God and the believer agreed to fulfill certain responsibilities. In the new covenant of the gospel, God promised forgiveness of sin and everlasting life, and the believer promised repentance and faith in Christ. Bray was one of a number of post-Restoration authors who suggested that baptism by a priest in episcopal succession was the appropriate way to accept this covenant agreement. Episcopacy was, therefore, a necessary element of the covenant. This episcopal version of covenant theology would prove extremely useful to generations of Church of England clergy.
The society’s first parishioners in New England and the middle colonies were emigrants from England who petitioned the SPG for help in the formation of Church of England congregations. There were early Dutch members as well: Dutch settlers in western Massachusetts, who felt unwelcome in the Congregational Church, and Dutch-speaking graduates of the SPG charity school in New York City who had received instruction both in the English language and the Book of Common Prayer from schoolmasters William and Thomas Huddleston.36
Initially, many of these church members were among the poorer and less-privileged inhabitants of the colonies. Eighteenth-century Connecticut tax rolls indicated, for example, that two-thirds of the members of Church of England’s congregations in that colony were residents of rural areas and that the percentage of poor was higher than among Congregationalists.37
In 1722, SPG missionaries made their first inroads into the New England upper class. In September of that year, seven faculty members and recent graduates of Yale College signed a statement for the Yale Board of Trustees indicating “doubt [of] the validity” or persuasion of the “invalidity” of nonepiscopal ordination. The seven, all of whom were Congregational clergy, had met in an informal book club to which they had also invited George Pigot, the SPG missionary in Stratford. Pigot called their doubts on the question of episcopacy “a glorious revolution of the ecclesiastics of this country.”38
Four of the seven—Yale rector Timothy Cutler (1683 or 1684– 1765), tutor Daniel Brown (1698–1723), former tutor Samuel Johnson (1696–1772), and recent graduate James Wetmore (d. 1760)—sailed to England for reordination. Brown died of small pox while in England, but the remaining three were ordained and assigned to American parishes by the SPG: Cutler to Christ (Old North) Church in Boston (1723–64), Wetmore to Rye, New York (1726–60), and Johnson to Stratford, Connecticut, which was left vacant when Pigot moved on to Rhode Island. The contributions of the three men were not limited to the individual parishes they served, however. Native-born and well educated, they provided needed leadership for the small Church of England in New England and New York. Samuel Johnson, for example, served for nine years (1754–63) as the first president of King’s (Columbia) College in New York.
The connection of Yale with the Church of England would not end with the 1722 converts. Yale would go on to provide a total of fifty students and graduates for the ministry of the colonial Church of England, the largest number of any American institution.39
The Congregational Church was the established church in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. As was the case with the Church of England in the South, the Congregational Church in New England was tax supported. As the Church of England made steady gains, however, the New England legislatures made some concessions. In 1727, Connecticut exempted all Church of England parishioners living within five miles of their church buildings from paying state church taxes. Massachusetts passed similar legislation in 1735.
Thomas Bray’s SPG (changed in 1965 to the USPG—“the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel”—as a result of a merger with the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, a name that was shortened in 2012 to the “United Society” or “Us.”) and SPCK continues their activities in the twenty-first century.
In 1724 Thomas Bray secured a charter for a third missionary society, known as Dr. Bray’s Associates.40 The organization’s efforts were directed to the evangelization and education of black Americans. It supported schools for blacks in Philadelphia (1758–75?); New York (1760–74); Williamsburg (1760–74) and Fredericksburg (1765–1770), Virginia; and Newport, Rhode Island (1762–1775?). While male clergy served as superintendents of these schools, most of the actual instruction was given by white school mistresses, such as Anne Wager of Williamsburg. After the American Revolution halted all ongoing projects, the society’s managers devoted its assets to charitable projects within England.41 As the existence of the Dr. Bray’s Associates suggested, some colonial members of the Church of England shared the concern for evangelization of African Americans that critics of slavery, such as Morgan Godwyn, had voiced in the seventeenth century. They were a distinct minority in the first two decades of the eighteenth century, with many slave owners actively resisting directions from England about providing Christian instruction of enslaved persons. They were most opposed to evangelization of the African-born. The General Assembly in Virginia ignored an act of the English Parliament and a declaration of the acting colonial governor (1713) calling for catechizing enslaved persons.42 Attitudes began to change in the 1720s. In the case of Virginia the year 1727 was an apparent tipping point. The accumulated effect of regular calls for action by the English (Bishop of London Edmund Gibson’s inquiry about baptism of enslaved people, 1724; Gibson’s two letters on baptism, 1727; instruction to Governor William Gooch by the Board of Trade on the importance of baptism, 1727; etc.), the growing percentage of enslaved people who had born in the colonies rather than Africa, and a careful political calculation that perhaps Christian slaves might be more easily managed than followers of African traditional religions began to make a difference. The Virginia General Assembly issued its own call for baptism in 1730, and parish clergy began to meet with increasing success in their efforts to convince slave owners to allow their baptism of the enslaved. As the number of baptisms rose, so did church attendance with at least one Virginia parish constructing its first designated pew for enslaved persons in 1732.43 Colonial courts in Virginia and Maryland even extended the curious “right of clergy” to African Americans in the 1720s. Originally a medieval privilege of clergy to be tried in church rather than secular courts, the “right of clergy” had morphed into a plea to be spared the death penalty and given some lesser punishment such as branding that could be made by anyone who could demonstrate the ability to read a portion of the Bible (usually Psalm 51).44
For their own part, enslaved people were not simply passive recipients of instruction in the Christian faith. Many sought baptism for themselves and their children, recognizing “Christianity’s implicit message of freedom.” Long after the passage of colonial laws denying any connection between servitude and baptism, enslaved people continued to hold out hope. Slaves in Virginia, for example, revolted in 1730 as a result of a rumor that colonial authorities had suppressed an opinion from English legal authorities that all enslaved Christians should be set free.45
Clergy who were most deeply involved in the effort to evangelize and teach enslaved people were often those most critical of the institution. Anthony Galvin became a slave owner when he came to Henrico parish in Virginia in 1735. Three years later he had baptized 172 enslaved persons and come to believe that slave ownership was “unlawful for any Christian, and particularly for Clergymen.”46
Some historians have argued that slavery was a primitive traditional agricultural institution to which supporters of a more enlightened, liberal, mercantile economy would object.47 The truth was, however, more complex. In the 1680s some of the enlightened thinkers of England did, to be sure, come to object to slavery. John Locke, for example, moved from supporting slavery in the 1660s (when he coauthored the Fundamental Constitution of Carolina that allowed slavery) and 1670s (when he bought shares in the Royal African Company) to rejecting in his Two Treatises of Government (published 1690) any form of involuntary servitude except for that of prisoners of war.48 Nevertheless, enlightened ideas about human rights worked in the opposite direction as well. As William Pettigrew has demonstrated in Freedom’s Debt (2013), “The ‘rights of man,’ or their more elastic substitute ‘freedom,’ contributed to the escalation of the slave trade. Eighteenth-century Britons believed that the Glorious Revolution would protect their liberties,” and one of those liberties was “the right of all English subjects to trade in the enslaved.”49 It was with appeals to the rights of free citizens that independent slave traders were able in 1712 to convince the British parliament to overturn the monopoly of the Royal African Company and to open the slave trade to independent traders. The result was “a massive expansion of slave trading” and a loss of any regulation of the way in which the enslaved were to be treated.50 While no single private slave company would rival the number of slaves carried by the Royal African Company, collectively the independent traders were able to transport far more enslaved people.
During the first decades of the eighteenth century, colonies north of Maryland began to adopt comprehensive slave legislation of the sort that colonial governments had pioneered in the Caribbean, Virginia, Maryland, and South Carolina. New York adopted, for example, its first comprehensive slave code in 1702, and New Jersey followed two years later.51
Some colonists began to accept a curious reading of Genesis 9:10–27, the story of Noah’s curse on his grandson Canaan. In the biblical account Noah declared that Canaan, who was one of the four sons of Ham, would be a slave to Ham’s brothers Shem and Japeth. The passage was probably intended in the first instance as a justification for the Jewish conquest of the Canaanite people. Later interpreters, however, reapplied the passages to a variety of convenient targets. Some ninth-century Muslims reinterpreted the passage as a justification for the enslaving of sub-Saharan Africans. An alternative medieval Christian reading was to use the passage to justify treatment of heretics and sinners. The Spanish and Portuguese picked up the sub-Saharan argument from the Muslims, and by the late sixteenth century the English had adopted the argument from them or directly from Muslim sources. A number of seventeenth century supporters of English colonization suggested applying the passage to Native Americans.52 By the eighteenth century, however, it became common for defenders of the slave trade to apply the story exclusively to Africans; they would continue to do so up to the time of the American Civil War.
Having lost its monopoly, the Royal African Company began to remake itself as an advocate for a humane, regulated trade in slaves and a critic of the excesses of the independent slave traders. The company’s new “pro-regulation, humane, disinterested rhetoric” would later provide “much of the inspiration for the political will and some of the political rhetoric of the antislavery cause.”53
The Colonial Church in the Eighteenth Century
In 1724, Bishop of London (1723–48) Edmund Gibson sent a questionnaire to Church of England clergy in the American colonies. He found that the condition of the church had markedly improved since Thomas Bray’s General View (1698). Bray had found approximately eighty-five churches, of which almost all were in Maryland or Virginia. Gibson’s survey, in contrast, noted one hundred sixty-one places of worship, ranging from South Carolina to Massachusetts. The survey included replies from Virginia (sixty places of worship), Maryland (forty-five), New York (seventeen), South Carolina (fourteen), Rhode Island (eight), Pennsylvania (four), New Jersey (seven), Connecticut (three), and Massachusetts (three).54
Respondents reported that their churches were full. In Virginia, Maryland, and South Carolina, parishes for which complete data were available, the majority of the population attended worship regularly in the Church of England, and approximately fifteen percent of the population received communion.55 The latter figure was three times higher than that of parishes in the English Diocese of Oxford.56
This picture of a thriving church runs contrary to a more negative portrayal that has been commonly offered since the nineteenth century. Non-Episcopal authors who were apologists for other religious traditions tended to generalize examples of clergy misbehavior into a portrait of conduct that they contrasted unfavorably with that of clergy of their own denominations.57 Nineteenth-century Episcopal authors were often critical of their eighteenth century coreligionists as well. Both evangelical and high church Episcopal authors noted the lack of the values that were central to their own ways of thinking and concluded that the church must have been in serious decline in the century before their own arrival. For nineteenth-century evangelicals the problem was that Episcopalians had not yet adopted the insights of the Great Awakening; for high church authors the problem was an insufficient appreciation of catholic principles.58 Many later historians have accepted the negative depictions of clergy of the colonial Church of England uncritically.59
A number of recent authors have reached different conclusions. To this point Virginia, where Church of England clergy were the most numerous in the eighteenth century, has been the most studied. Patricia U. Bonomi cited a survey of colonial rectors there from 1723 to 1776 revealed that “at most ten percent of the ministers ever had authentic charges brought against them.”60 John K. Nelson came up with similar figures in his study of the entire period from 1690 to the 1770s.61 Charles Bolton arrived at comparable figures for South Carolina.62 The lack of comprehensive cross-denominational studies for the colonial era or for the contemporary church makes it difficult to say whether this ten percent rate is significantly higher or lower than in other denominations or centuries.63 Bonomi’s observation that “in the modern Episcopal Church about eight percent of the ministers are deposed” is suggestive, however. Misconduct rates in the colonial Church of England may not have been very different from current ones.64 Short of further study, it seems best to remain with Nelson’s positive statement of the evidence: “Nine of every ten priests who served in Virginia between 1690 and 1776 apparently carried out their functions without violating seriously the norms of conduct and belief.”65
The suppression of monastic orders during the Reformation eliminated the major official church roles played by women in the late medieval church. With the notable exception of female monarchs, women had little influence over the governance or liturgical leadership of the Church of England. They could serve neither as clergy nor as members of the vestry. There were, however, a variety of indirect ways in which women influenced the shape of colonial religious life.
Women often served as sextons of colonial parishes. Grace Soward was, for example, the sexton (the person responsible for the care of church property) of the upper church in Stratton Major Parish (King and Queen County, Virginia) from 1730 or earlier until 1763. She was followed as sexton by an Ann Soward, suggesting that in some cases the position was passed down in families.66 Thomas Soward, who was probably Grace’s husband, appeared in the vestry minutes as a processioner (i.e. one who walks the bounds between properties in order to avoid disputes among landowners) and pew holder, which would seem to indicate that the family was trusted and for some periods of time at least moderately prosperous.67 The vestry at Stratton Major understood the washing of the minister’s surplice to be a separate responsibility but at times gave that responsibility to the Grace Soward as well.68
Women played a role in the Christian education and evangelism of children and servants. They taught in schools sponsored by Dr. Bray’s Associates. Enslaved people with female owners were roughly 50 percent more likely to be baptized than those with male owners, another indication of women’s interest in Christian education.69
Women played decisive roles in translating the official feasts and fasts of the church year into household practice. Upper-class women also subverted church teaching by transferring baptisms and weddings from the church to the home—a space over which they had greater control.70 Classic Church of England works on the ministerial life, such as George Herbert’s Country Parson (1652), stressed the need for clergy to have hospitable, godly households that could serve as models of Christian family life, something not easily accomplished without the active cooperation of a spouse.71 Sarah Harrison’s refusal, on three askings in her marriage service, to say that she would obey her husband (Commissary James Blair) may be an indication that clergy spouses did not understand their role in shaping a Christian household to be a subordinate one.72
Women and men contributed to the growth of the Church of England in the American colonies in the first half of the eighteenth century in both numbers and influence. The pace of growth would not continue uninterrupted throughout the century, however. Two important events—the Great Awakening and the American Revolution—would soon leave lasting marks on the denomination.
NOTES
1. In Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford, 1976), Henry F. May distinguished four overlapping periods in the Enlightenment: the Moderate Enlightenment (1699–1787); the Skeptical Enlightenment (1750–89), the Revolutionary Enlightenment (1776– 1800), and the Didactic Enlightenment (1800–15). More recently, historian Jonathan I. Israel offered an overlapping but slightly different set of categories in his Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001). He combined elements from May’s second and third categories, resulting in a tri-part scheme of moderate, radical, and the counter-Enlightenment. The present chapter focuses on the two historians’ first periods, a time in which leading intellectuals believed the fruits of new scientific discovery were compatible with revealed religion. While the three subsequent chapters do not pick up May’s or Israel’s remaining labels, they deal with issues closely related to them.: Chapter 3 discusses enlightened skepticism as a backdrop to the Great Awakening. Chapter 4 deals with religion in the era of the American Revolution. Chapter 5 uses the term rational orthodoxy to refer to May’s Didactic Enlightenment and Israel’s counter-Enlightenment.
2. Thomas Sprat, quoted in Margaret Purver and E.J. Bowen, The Beginnings of the Royal Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 2.
3. Purver and Bowen, Beginnings of the Royal Society, 2.
4. James R. Jacob, Henry Stubbe: Radical Protestantism and Early Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 3–4. Jacob credits Stubbe with being “the first to point out the character of this alliance between the latitudinarian churchmen and the Royal Society.”
5. Bob Tennant, “John Tillotson and the Voice of Anglicanism,” Religion in the Age of Reason: A Transatlantic Study of the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Kathryn Duncan (New York: AMS Press, 2009), 104.
6. The debate was a logical offshoot of the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone. Protestants agreed that God forgave sinners because of the righteousness of Jesus Christ, rather than because of any righteousness of the sinner’s own. Seventeenth-century Christians went on to ask by what criteria God chose to apply Christ’s righteousness to some and not others. Those of the Calvinist party—a not entirely accurate label since predestination did not play the prominent role in the writing of Genevan Reformer John Calvin that it would in early seventeenth century—argued that no human action could influence God’s choice. Arminians, drawing their name from Dutch Reformed theologian Jacobus Arminius, believed, in contrast, that God took human response into account in selecting recipients of grace. The Calvinist party predominated in the Congregationalist, Presbyterian, and Reformed churches. Both parties were represented in the Church of England.
7. William Fife Troutman, Jr., “Respecting the Establishment of Religion in Colonial America” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1959), 58–62; S. D. McConnell, History of the American Episcopal Church from the Planting of the Colonies to the End of the Civil War, 3d ed. (New York: Thomas Whittaker, 1891), 64–65.
8. Robert Sullivan, “The Transformation of Anglican Political Theology, ca. 1716–1760” (Lecture delivered at the Folger Institute, Washington, D.C., 26 September 1986).
9. Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1982), 120–21. Isaac notes that the religion of colonial Virginia reinforced the social order.
10. Annates (from the Latin for year) were a year’s income from certain church positions that from the 13th century on were expected to be paid to the pope as a thank offering by those nominated to those positions. Henry VIII claimed the income for the English crown in his nationalization of the church in the 1530s.
11. For a discussion of the work of commissaries in seventeenth-century England see Jeffery R. Hankins, “Anglican and East Anglican: The Episcopacy, the Bishop’s Commissary, and the Enforcement of Ecclesiastical Law in Early Seventeenth-Century Essex and Hertfordshire.” Anglican and Episcopal History 75 (September 2006), 340–367. For objections against the institution by English Puritans see “the First Admonition to the Parliament” (1572) in G. R. Elton, The Tudor Constitution: Documents and Commentary, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 449.
12. Edward L. Bond, “John Clayton (1656 or 1657–1725)” in Dictionary of Virginia Biography (Virginia Foundation for the Humanities) http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Clayton_John_1656_or_1657–1725 (accessed February 24, 2014); John K. Nelson, A Blessed Company: Parishes, Parsons, and Parishioners in Anglican Virginia, 1690–1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 107.
13. Edward L. Bond and Joan R. Gundersen, The Episcopal Church in Virginia, 1607–2007 (Richmond: The Episcopal Diocese of Virginia, 2007), 22–23.
14. Park Rouse, Jr., James Blair of Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971), 24.
15. Goetz, Baptism of Early Virginia, 41–42.
16. Nelson, Blessed Company, 107–9.
17. The commissary in Pennsylvania also took responsibility for Delaware, the commissary in New York did so for New Jersey, and a single commissary took responsibility for North and South Carolina. See Gilbert Olsen, “The Commissaries of the Bishop of London in Colonial Politics,” in Anglo-American Political Relations, 1675– 1775, ed. Alison Olsen and Richard M. Brown (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1970), 110.
18. Olsen, “Commissaries,” 110–13.
19. Edgar Legare Pennington, Apostle of New Jersey: John Talbot, 1645–1727 (Philadelphia: Church Historical Society, 1938), 38–39.
20. Arthur Lyon Cross, The Anglican Episcopate and the American Colonies (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902), 101.
21. John Hicklin, Church and State: Historic Facts, Ancient and Modern (London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., 1873), 258–59.
22. Pennington, Apostle, 62–63.
23. Edwin S. Gaustad, George Berkeley in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 8–13.
24. H.P. Thompson, Thomas Bray (London: SPCK, 1954), 52–5.
25. Thompson, Bray, 17, 28.
26. Thomas Bray, A General View of the English Colonies in America with Respect to Religion, extracted from the author’s work entitled Apostolic Charity, first printed in London in 1698 (reprinted for the Thomas Bray Club, 1916).
27. Bray was undoubtedly influenced in his choice of name by two earlier bodies: the Roman Catholic “Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith” (1622) and the Congregationalist “New England Company for the Propagation of the Gospel” (1649).
28. Pennington, Apostle, 16–18.
29. Classified Digest, 86.
30. R.E. Hood, “From a Headstart to a Deadstart: The Historical Basis for Black Indifference toward the Episcopal Church, 1800– 1860,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 51 (September 1982): 272.
31. Classified Digest of the Records of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1701–1892, 4th ed. (London: SPG, 1894), xvi, 883–85.
32. Pennington, Apostle, 16–17.
33. See Dell Upton, Holy Things and Profane: Anglican Parish Churches in Colonial Virginia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986) for a description of colonial church architecture in Virginia.
34. Donald Drew Egbert and Charles W. Moore, “Religious Expression in American Architecture,” in Religious Perspective in American Culture, ed. James Ward Smith and A. Leland Jamison, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 2:374–77.
35. Pennington, Apostle, 16.
36. Mary E. Grothe, “Anglican Beginnings in Western Massachusetts: Gideon Bostwick, Missionary to the Berkshires” (M.T.S. thesis, Virginia Seminary, 1984): Joyce D. Goodfriend, “The Social Dimensions of Congregational Life in Colonial New York City,” William and Mary Quarterly (3d series) 46 (April 1989): 269–71.
37. Bruce E. Steiner, “New England Anglicanism: A Genteel Faith?” William & Mary Quarterly (3d series) 28 (January 1970): 120–35.
38. Francis L. Hawks and William Stevens Perry, eds., Documentary History of the Protestant Episcopal Church … in Connecticut (New York: James Pott, 1863), 56–57, 65.
39. Nelson, Blessed Company, 109.
40. Dr. Bray’s Associates would be reorganized in 1730; that date was mistakenly given as the date of initial organization in earlier editions of this history. See Anthony S. Parent, Jr., Foul Means: the Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660–1740 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2003), 260.
41. Edgar Legare Pennington, Thomas Bray’s Associates and Their Work Among the Negroes (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1939); Joan R. Gundersen, “The Non-institutional Church: The Religious Role of Women in Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church (December 1982): 352; John Chamberlin Van Horne, “Pious Designs: The American Correspondence of the Associates of Dr. Bray, 1731– 75” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1979), 75–86.
42. Parent, Foul Means, 238–44.
43. Parent, Foul Means, 249–57. 262.
44. Parent, Foul Means, 260–61; Bradley Chapin, Criminal Justice in Colonial America, 1606–1660 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 48; and Jeffrey K. Sawyer, “‘Benefit of Clergy’ in Maryland and Virginia, The American Journal of Legal History 34 (January 1990): 46–68.
45. Parent, Foul Means, 258–60.
46. Anthony Galvin quoted in Parent, Foul Means, 263. [Spelling modernized.]
47. For a critique of this “Whig” view of history, see William A. Pettigrew, Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672–1752 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2013), 3–4, 217–18.
48. Holly Brewer, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority (Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, 2005), 352–53.
49. Pettigrew, Freedom’s Debt, 217.
50. Pettigrew, Freedom’s Debt, 2–5
51. Alan J. Singer, New York and Slavery: Time to Teach the Truth (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 53; Paul Axel-Lute, “The Law of Slavery in New Jersey: An Annotated Bibliography,” The New Jersey Digital Legal Library, (first published January 2005 last revised April 2013) http://njlegallib.rutgers.edu/slavery/bibliog.html (accessed February 27, 2014).
52. The rationale for the curse was that Canaan’s father (Ham) had seen a drunken Noah unclothed. It is unclear, however, why Ham himself received no punishment, why three of the four sons of Ham escaped punishment, or why there was no penalty for Noah, whom the text credits with the first case of drunkenness. For a discussion of the 9th century Muslim roots of the Ham argument and its possible sources see Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East: an Historical Enquiry. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 123–25. For a discussion of English use of the text see Goetz, Baptism of Early Virginia, 13–31.
53. Pettigrew, Freedom’s Debt, 214.
54. Patricia U. Bonomi and Peter R. Eisenstadt, “Church Adherence in the Eighteenth-century British American Colonies,” William and Mary Quarterly (3d series) 39 (April 1982): 245–86.
55. Bonomi and Eisenstadt, ”Church Adherence,” 261.
56. Robert Currie, Alan Gilbert, and Lee Horsley, Churches and Churchgoers: Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles since 1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 22.
57. Pat Bonomi noted that by the middle of the eighteenth century Baptist and Presbyterian authors became critics of the behavior of Church of England clergy. See Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America, updated version (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 45.
58. For a discussion of nineteenth-century Bishop William Meade’s evangelical critique of the eighteenth century see Upton, Holy Things and Profane, xviii-xix. For a nineteenth-century Tractarian critique see Ferdinand C. Ewer, Catholicity in its Relationship to Protestantism and Romanism (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1878), 165.
59. See, for example, Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1982), 189–92.
60. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven, 45.
61. Nelson, Blessed Company, 155.
62. Charles Bolton, Southern Anglicanism: the Church of England in Colonial South Carolina (Westport, Connecticut: ABC-Clio, 1987), 94–97.
63. Nelson noted that others have calculated a 10.5 percentage of “scandalous” behavior among Church of England clergy in South Carolina (1696–1775) and a 3 percent rate of “scandalous episodes” among Congregationalists in New England (1680–1740). Nelson cautioned, however, that “in the absence of valid comparative studies—studies employing uniform definitions, measuring similar conduct, and taking into account the differences in cultural context—no satisfactory comparative conclusions can be hazarded.” See Nelson, Blessed Company, 155–56. The most comprehensive study to date about contemporary behavior of clergy in the United States in any denomination is a John Jay College study of the behavior of Roman Catholic clergy over a fifty year period. It found a uniform “3 to 6 percent of the priests in ministry per diocese accused of sexual abuse against a minor between the years of 1950 and 2002.” The study did not, however, cover other causes of complaint. See Karen J. Terry, et al., “The Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United States, 1950–2010: A Report Presented to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops by the John Jay College Research Team” (2011), 27.
64. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven, 45.
65. Nelson, Blessed Company, 155.
66. Grace Soward may have served as sexton before 1730. The published version of the vestry book begins with 1729 minutes in which the name of the sexton is illegible. Ann Soward first appears as Grace’s replacement in the minutes of 1764. See C. C. Chamberlayne, ed., The Vestry Book of Stratton Major Parish, King and Queen County, Virginia, 1729–1783 (Richmond: the Library Board, 1931), 3, 6, 80, 145, 148, 151.
67. In old age, however, the Sowards became wards of the parish. See Chamberlayne, ed., Vestry Book of Stratton Major Parish, 24, 26, 35, 41, 51, 70, 76, 141, 148, 150, 153, 156, and 171.
68. Note, for example, the difference between the entries for 1730 (when Grace Seward was listed as sexton but not given responsibility for washing the surplice) and 1737 (when her salary was raised and she was given the added responsibility of washing the surplice.) See Chamberlayne, ed., Vestry Book of Stratton Major Parish, 6, 30.
69. Parent, Foul Means, 257.
70. Lauren F. Winner, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith: Anglican Religious Practices in the Elite Households of Eighteenth-century Virginia (New Haven: Yale, 2010), 35–36, 139–40; Joan R. Gundersen, “The Non-institutional Church: The Religious Role of Women in Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church (December 1982): 347–57. See Nelson, Blessed Company, 214–17 on the difficulty of interpreting evidence about the location of baptism.
71. John Wall, ed., George Herbert: the Country Parson, the Temple (New York: Paulist Press, 1981), 66–74.
72. Park Rouse, Jr., James Blair of Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971), 24.
