Читать книгу A History of the Episcopal Church (Third Revised Edition) - Robert W. Prichard - Страница 14
ОглавлениеIn the fall of 1740 and the winter of 1741, a shock wave ran through the English colonies in North America. George Whitefield (1714–70), a young English priest who had come to the colonies for the second time in order to support the Bethesda Orphanage in Savannah, ventured north on a preaching tour. He arrived by ship in New England in mid-September. After forty-five days of itinerant preaching, he went on to the middle colonies, where he would spend two months, almost half of them in the cities of New York and Philadelphia.1 From there he headed south, passing through Maryland and Virginia and arriving in Savannah in December of 1740. He devoted a month to preaching in the coastal areas of South Carolina and Georgia and returned to England in January 1741. As he traveled, particularly in New England and the middle colonies, he drew huge crowds, at times as many as fifteen thousand. He became the first true American celebrity, and his death (in the midst of his seventh and final visit to America) was the first to be noted in newspapers throughout the colonies.2 Though a clergyman of the Church of England, he soon established ties of friendship with revivalistic preachers of other denominations—Congregationalist Jonathan Edwards (1703–58), Presbyterian Gilbert Tennant (1703–64), and Reformed pastor Theodore Frelinghuysen (1691–1748)—knitting together their local revivals into a general and “Great Awakening” in the American colonies.
Whitefield’s participation in the Awakening was initially a cause of pride for the colonial Church of England. He was a leading preacher, a magnet for large crowds, who was a member of their denomination. They welcomed him to their pulpits. Yet almost from the moment he began to speak, Church of England clergy had misgivings. They learned that he used extemporaneous prayer, rather than confining himself to the fixed forms of the Book of Common Prayer. In conversations with them, moreover, Whitefield explicitly rejected a central element of high church covenant theology—the necessity of episcopal succession for a validly ordained ministry. In colony after colony, therefore, local clergy of the colonial Church of England began to criticize what they saw as Whitefield’s lack of regard for the basic elements of doctrine and liturgy.
Squabbles with clergy of his church were, therefore, a continuing element of Whitefield’s preaching tour. A meeting between Whitefield and a group of Church of England clergy in Boston that included Timothy Cutler and Commissary Roger Price (1696–1762) resulted in such wide disagreements that Whitefield did not even ask to preach in congregations of the Church of England in that city.3 Hearing of Whitefield’s New England tour, William Vesey (1674–1746), the commissary in New York, declined to invite him to preach at New York City’s Trinity Church. In Philadelphia, clergyman Richard Peters interrupted Whitefield’s preaching at Christ Church in order to point out what he believed to be doctrinal errors; soon afterwards Commissary Archibald Cummings (d. 1741) denied Whitefield any further access to Church of England pulpits in the area.4 In Charleston, Alexander Garden (1685–1756), the bishop’s commissary, refused communion to Whitefield and attempted to suspend him from the ministry. Only in Virginia, where Whitefield accepted James Blair’s invitation to preach at Bruton Parish in Williamsburg, did Whitefield remain on good terms with a commissary. Yet even Commissary Blair wrote to the Bishop of London soon afterwards to say that if, as he had since heard by rumor, Whitefield was “under any censure or prohibition to preach,” he would abide by it on future occasions.5
Whitefield, who always had an eye for the dramatic, discovered a way to use these disagreements to increase interest in his tour. On arriving in a community, he asked to preach at the local Church of England congregation. If given permission, he would then deliver a sermon in which he attacked what most of his fellow clergy regarded as basic doctrine of their denomination. Pamphlets by Whitefield published in 1740 gave some indication of the scope of his criticism; in them, he denounced Bishop Edmund Gibson of London and Archbishop of Canterbury John Tillotson, both highly respected by most eighteenth century members of the Church of England. When the local clergy responded to him with criticism or declined to issue further invitations to preach, Whitefield complained of persecution. The news of the church fight would spread, and Whitefield would soon be preaching to curious crowds, either outdoors or in the Congregational, Reformed, Presbyterian, and Baptist churches, to which he was increasingly invited.
Fig. 10 The portable pulpit that George Whitefield used for outdoor preaching.
Sentimentalist Preaching and the New Birth
Whitefield’s ability to capitalize on church fights may have won publicity in the short run. Taken by itself, however, it could not account for the sustained interest in and the continuing impact of his preaching. There was another cause for his popularity—something new both in his message and in the way in which he delivered it that met the needs of the people of his day. Those critics who detected in Whitefield a departure from the moderate enlightened faith that was the religious inheritance of early eighteenth century Christians were correct; they would have also been correct had they suggested that his new message would influence the form of tradition that would be passed on to later generations.
Most clergy of the colonial Church of England agreed with John Locke’s affirmation in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) that the “Understanding” (i.e., the intellect) was “the most elevated faculty of the soul, … employed with greater and more constant delight than any other.”6 They recognized that short-term human actions were often the result of human passions, but they believed that in the long term it was the intellectual conviction of the wisdom of some courses of action and the folly of others that shaped human choices. The content and form of their sermons—intellectual treatises read from manuscripts without eye contact or dramatic flourish—were shaped, therefore, to educate the mind without exciting the passions.
As Whitefield and others came to recognize, however, logical demonstration did not always bring personal conviction or amendment of life. Indeed, skeptical thinkers, such as John Toland (1670–1722), had begun to suggest that rational argument might disprove, rather than confirm the central truths of the Christian faith. Toland and other skeptics forced more orthodox Christians to reexamine their premises. Some of these more orthodox believers concluded that rational discourse by itself was not a sufficient tool for Christian proclamation. The good news had to touch the affections as well as the mind.7 Those clergy who sought to follow this route could draw on the sentimentalist theories of the third Earl of Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1671–1713) and of Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), in which human affections played a more central role. Accepting the sentimentalist premise that human action did not always arise from dispassionate logic, such clergy abandoned the reading of sermons and adopted extemporaneous styles of delivery and broad dramatic gestures in the hope of reaching their parishioners on a more emotional level.8 When they did so, they found that their new emphasis provided one effective antidote to skepticism. Parishioners awaited their sermons with excitement, traveled long distances to hear particularly noted speakers, and began to express a new seriousness about religion.
The change in the form of preaching was accompanied by a corresponding change in content. Moderate enlightened clergy sought intellectual conviction on the part of their auditors (the eighteenth-century term for as those who listened to preaching). Sentimentalist clergy, in contrast, looked for signs of change in the affections; it was not enough to understand intellectually the basic Reformation doctrine of justification by faith; one had to “feel” that doctrine on a personal level. As sentimentalist clergy explained it, this usually involved despair at the realization that all human efforts ended in damnation, followed by a “new birth” in which the individual turned to a reliance on Jesus Christ.9
Whitefield was a particularly successful proponent of both the form and content of this new sentimentalist approach to preaching. His own life, about which he would write in a widely published journal, provided, moreover, a striking, concrete example of the new birth. He was the son of a widow who ran a tavern in Gloucester, England. As a child, he confessed, he had been addicted to “lying, filthy talking, and foolish jesting.” He stole from his mother, broke the Sabbath, played cards, read romances, and dropped out of school at fifteen. His mother remarried, however, and Whitefield was able to return to his studies. It was the beginning of a new chapter in his life. He completed grammar school and was admitted to Oxford as a scholarship student.10
At the university, Whitefield joined a prayer and study group led by John (1703–91) and Charles (1707–88) Wesley. Other university students referred to the group as the “the Reforming Club,” “the Holy Club,” or, for their systematic method of pursuing piety, “the Methodists.” Though, as his participation in the group indicated, Whitefield was concerned about the Christian faith and life, he was unable to overcome his own doubts until a dramatic and emotional conversion left him prostrate and weeping.11 On a doctor’s suggestion, he withdrew from school for a time, but he never after doubted his Christian faith.
The events of the following years reinforced Whitefield’s conviction that the conversion had been a turning point in his life. The Bishop of Gloucester, Martin Benson (1689–1752), sought him out, gave him a small scholarship for the purchase of books, and offered to ordain him before the canonical age of twenty-three. Once he began preaching, Whitefield found that people responded to his message, whether he spoke in London churches, in the American colonies (which, on the advice of the Wesleys, he first visited in 1737), or in fields (as he began to do in 1739).12 Before his life ended, he would deliver an approximate total of eighteen thousand sermons in England, Scotland (fourteen visits), Ireland (two visits), and America (seven visits). Supporters said that his voice was so rich that he could bring people to tears with the mere saying of the word Mesopotamia. He could be heard by thirty thousand and yet speak intimately to a small prayer group.13
While he recognized that not all would have—or needed—conversion experiences as dramatic as his own, he was absolutely convinced that, without some experience of new birth, salvation was impossible. That experience had to involve, moreover, real personal struggle:
My dear friends, there must be a principle wrought in the heart by the Spirit of the Living God. … If I were to ask how long it is since you loved God, you would say, As long as you can remember; you never hated God, you know no time when there was enmity in your heart against God. Then, unless you were sanctified very early, you never loved God in your life. My dear friends, I am more particular in this, because it is a most deceitful delusion, whereby so many people are carried away, that they believe already. … It is the peculiar work of the Spirit of God to convince us of our unbelief—that we have got no faith. … Now, my dear friends, did God ever show to you that you have no faith? Were you ever made to bewail a hard heart of unbelief? Was it ever the language of your heart, Lord, enable me to call thee my Lord and my God? Did Jesus Christ ever convince you in this manner? Did he ever convince you of your inability to be close with Christ, and make you to cry out to God to give you faith? If not, do not speak peace to your heart.14
Fig. 11 John Wesley and his Friends at Oxford
Whitefield’s reference to peace was an allusion to Jeremiah 6:14 (“They have healed the wounds of my people lightly, saying ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace.”).15 Converted Christians could not find peace until after they had first experienced what supporters of the Awakening came to call “legal fear”—the knowledge that one’s own efforts always fell short of fulfilling the Law of God.16
Whitefield had even stronger words for those “false doctors” who suggested that the New Testament concept of the new birth did not imply personal conversion:
Suppose any of these doctors were to come to any woman when her travailing pains were upon her, and she were crying out, and labour pains came on faster and faster, and they should stand preaching at the door, and say, Good woman, these are only metaphorical pains, this is only a bold expression of the Easterns, it is only metaphorical; I question whether the woman would not wish the doctor some of these metaphorical pains for talking so, which he would find real ones. … I am of an odd temper, and of such a temper, that I heartily wish they may be put under the pangs of the new birth, and know what it is by their own experience, know that there is nothing in nature more real than the new birth.17
Whitefield explained that the new birth created “a new understanding, a new will, … new affections, a renewed conscience, a renewed memory, [and] a renewed body.”18
Whitefield had rejected the high church argument that a valid ministry required ordination by a bishop in episcopal succession. His stress on a new birth that was often marked by dramatic conversion meant that he also departed from the covenant teaching of many of his coreligionists in another way. In Catechetical Lectures, Thomas Bray had equated renewal of the covenant with baptism and the Eucharist; Whitefield connected it with personal conversion.
After a not particularly successful missionary stint in Georgia and conversion experiences of their own, John and Charles Wesley followed Whitefield on the preaching circuit in England. Never quite as dramatic in the pulpit as Whitefield, they had other gifts that Whitefield lacked. In particular, they had a gift at organization and were able to create a network of societies that sustained the revival between visits of the great preachers.
John and Charles Wesley had loosely patterned the Holy Club at Oxford, which Whitefield had joined, on the English religious society Anthony Horneck (1641–97) had introduced in 1687. Horneck’s society, based on German pietistic models, had been an exclusively male group devoted to prayer, Bible study, and conversation about practical piety. John and Charles Wesley’s father, Church of England clergyman Samuel Wesley (1662–1735), had introduced one such group in his Epworth parish. Samuel, however, dissolved the organization when his wife Susanna (1669/70–1742) insisted on active participation.19
Whitefield and the Wesleys worked with existing religious societies and also helped to form new ones. They began, however, to change the Horneck model in significant ways, in part to conform to what they had learned from Moravian pietists. (John Wesley had been deeply impressed by the Moravians he met on the ship to Georgia in 1735, had joined their Fetter Lane Society organized by Peter Böhler in London, and had visited the Moravian community in Germany in 1738.) The newer religious societies segregated those who had not yet experienced the new birth from those converted Christians who were seeking holiness of life. The Wesleys opened membership to women, and introduced the singing of hymns, the lyrics of many of which were written by Charles Wesley.20
While Whitefield and the Wesleys both made use of such societies, the Wesleys would develop a structure with which to coordinate and connect them. By 1746, John Wesley had established a hierarchy with “class leaders” presiding over “classes” or “bands” of a dozen or so and “lay preachers” leading societies composed of several such classes. The societies were, in turn, grouped into circuits led by “superintendents.” The lay preachers and superintendents (some of whom were clergy of the Church of England) then met together in “annual conferences.”21 Thus, while Whitefield’s visits produced more immediate effect, the long-term influence of the Wesleys would be greater.
Whitefield’s tour of 1739–40 left a permanent mark on the churches in the American colonies. The call for revival was so strong that it was impossible for American Christians to ignore. They had either to align themselves with it or become outside critics of the movement. Congregationalists who approved of the Awakening formed “New Light” congregations. Presbyterian clergy and congregations created a separate “New Side” synod (1741–58). Other supporters of the Awakening came to see adult baptism as an appropriate sign of the awakening of adult faith. They left Presbyterian and Congregational churches altogether and formed Baptist congregations. A small denomination prior to the Awakening, the Baptist Church would grow rapidly and by the nineteenth century become larger in size than either the Congregational or the Presbyterian Church.
Not all were happy with the preaching of George Whitefield and the increasing religious fervor of the American religious scene, however. Sizeable portions of the Presbyterian and Congregational churches feared that zeal for personal experience compromised traditional Reformed theological formulations. These “Old Light” Congregationalists and “Old Side” Presbyterians insisted on strict adherence to the Westminster Confession of Faith and continued to support the communal implications of covenant theology.22
With the exception of Lewis Jones (ca. 1700–44) and Thomas Thompson (fl. 1740) of South Carolina, most Church of England clergy outside of Virginia and Maryland rejected Whitefield by the end of his 1739–40 tour. He was not consistent in his use of the Book of Common Prayer for public worship, he didn’t subscribe to the high church version of covenant theology with its emphasis on episcopal succession, and he questioned the salvation of those who could not attest to conversion. Timothy Cutler, one of the Yale converts, summed up the opinion of many when he wrote to the Bishop of London about Whitefield’s theology: “He contradicted himself, the Church, and whatever Your Lordship has delivered. …”23 Thus, while Congregationalists and Presbyterians were divided by the Awakening, New England members of the Church of England were united in their opposition to it.
That opposition in New England had an unexpected result. While some did leave the Church of England to follow the revival, as a whole the church grew rapidly in numbers. Timothy Cutler, writing to the secretary of the SPG on behalf of laypersons in Simsbury, Connecticut, shortly before Whitefield’s third visit to the colonies (1744–47), explained his understanding of the phenomenon in this way: “Enthusiasm has had a long Run … so that many are tired of it, and if the Door were open would take Refuge in our Church from Error and Disorder.”24
In the middle colonies, the Awakening contributed to a rapid growth of the Presbyterian Church, which was already expanding as a result of Scotch-Irish immigration. The number of Presbyterian congregations in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, which stood at one hundred twenty-five in 1740, doubled in the thirty-five years after Whitefield’s first visit. Many Church of England clergy in the middle colonies shared their New England counterparts’ negative estimation of Whitefield, but some of the laity, especially in Delaware and along the Pennsylvania-Maryland border, were touched by the Awakening. Delaware clergymen John Pugh (d. 1745) and William Beckett (d. 1743) complained of losing parishioners in 1740 and 1741 to an awakened religious society. In Pennsylvania, William Currie of Radnor and Alexander Howie of Oxford made similar complaints.25 Yet, as in New England, Church of England congregations grew as well. In New Jersey, for example, the number of parishes increased from ten to twenty-one in the years between 1740 and 176526
One indirect result of this anti-Awakening growth was a rising concern for education. Members of the Church of England, believing that sound education could refute what they saw as the errors of the Awakening, became acutely aware of the lack of educational institutions in New England and the middle colonies. The diverse religious climate in the middle colonies made the establishment of colleges that were solely linked to the Church of England unlikely and probably unwise. Members of the Church of England therefore cooperated with Old Side Presbyterians and other who shared some of their misgiving about the Great Awakening.27 In New York, a group of interested persons secured a charter in 1753 for the establishment of King’s College (renamed Columbia during the Revolution). Church of England members were prominent in the leadership, providing two-thirds of the governors (i.e., trustees) of the school and many of the faculty. Trinity Church contributed the land.28 Samuel Johnson, one of the Yale converts, served as the school’s first president and was followed in 1763 by a second Church of England cleric, Myles Cooper (1737–85). Neither man had much sympathy for Whitefield or the Awakening.
In order to become president of King’s College, Samuel Johnson had to decline an invitation to head a second institution, the College of Philadelphia. Back in 1740, Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) and other interested persons had secured a charter for an academy and college. The school was not on strong footing until William Smith (1727–1803) joined the faculty. Smith, who had studied at the University of Aberdeen and immigrated to America to serve as a tutor for a family on Long Island, had written an essay on the appropriate way to organize a college (A General Idea of the College of Mirania, 1753). It impressed Franklin, who persuaded others to invite Smith to join the faculty. He did so in 1754 and traveled to England for ordination in the Church of England.29 (At the time most college faculty members were clergy.) Smith became the College of Philadelphia’s first provost in the following year, reorganizing the curriculum and securing a revised charter. Smith attempted to give the school a religious character similar to that at King’s College in New York. With the support of the trustees, two-thirds of whom were lay members of the Church of England, he introduced Morning and Evening Prayer, and regular instruction in the Church of England’s catechism.30 Like his counterparts at King’s College, he was deeply suspicious of the Awakening.
Members of the Church of England made gains in other educational circles as well. Between 1725 and 1748, two percent of Harvard graduates and five percent of Yale graduates entered the ordained ministry of the Church of England, figures that undoubtedly reflected the proselytizing of Samuel Johnson in New Haven and of his fellow convert Timothy Cutler in Boston. In 1754, Yale president Thomas Clap (1703–67) attempted to stem the tide of converts by forbidding students to attend Trinity Church, the Church of England parish that constructed a building in the green adjoining Yale College in 1752–53. Any success on Clap’s part was, however, short-lived. By the 1770s, members of the Church of England were numerous and confident enough to designate a chaplain for students at Yale.31
Virginia and Maryland, where the Church of England was numerically the strongest, were largely untouched by either the revivalist excitement of 1739 and 1740 or by the surge of growth resulting from opposition to it. Commissary Cummings of Pennsylvania attributed the lower interest to the established position of the Church of England; Whitefield suspected it was due to unfaith. He described Maryland, for example, as an area “yet unwatered with the true Gospel of Christ.” The lack of large urban centers in which Whitefield could attract large crowds may, however, have been as much a cause of indifference to the Awakening as anything else. The end result was, however, clear enough. With the exception of the coastal area from Savannah to Charleston, inhabitants of the southern colonies had little interest in Whitefield’s 1739–40 tour.32
Whitefield’s third (1744–47) and fourth (1751–52) visits to the colonies did little to alter this basic pattern: Most members of the Church of England opposed the Awakening or were indifferent to it. Baptists favored it and Presbyterians and Congregationalists divided into competing factions.
The Awakening in the Colonial Church of England
In the years between Whitefield’s fifth (May 1754-March 1755) and sixth visits (August 1763-June 1765), attitudes began to change, however. While many remained skeptical about Whitefield and his methods, a significant number in the colonial Church of England began to think otherwise.
Often it was younger clergy who led the way in this rethinking of the Awakening. For them, Whitefield would have been a fixture on the theological landscape rather than the new phenomenon that he had been in 1739. Whitefield’s specific criticism of the Church of England’s ministry and theology had, moreover, blunted over time. It was possible for the younger clergy to adopt Whitefield’s doctrine of new birth and his advocacy of small group worship without accepting his earlier criticism of the liturgy and ministry.
In Philadelphia, it was William McClenachan (Macclenachan or Macclenaghan, ordained in 1755 and died in 1766 or 1767), a recently ordained Irish clergyman with evangelical leanings, that triggered interest in the Awakening. McClenachan arrived in Philadelphia in 1759 after a brief term as an SPG missionary in Massachusetts. While assisting Robert Jenney (1687–1762), the aging commissary and rector of Christ Church, McClenachan preached about conversion and established a religious society. When Jenney attempted to silence him, McClenachan and his supporters withdrew and began to meet at the state capitol. They formed the new congregation of St. Paul’s and by December 1761 had completed a building, which they claimed to be “the largest in this City or Province.”33
By 1763 Jacob Duché (1737–98), the young assistant rector at Christ Church, Philadelphia was speaking publicly in favor of Whitefield’s preaching. He then joined with a Lutheran minister, Carl Magnus Wrangel (1727–86), to organize a series of Bible study classes. The classes met from the fall of 1763 to the spring of 1764 in Duché’s home, that of his wife’s widowed mother Mary Hopkinson, and that of a warden of Christ Church. Duché and Wrangle called the group a “Colloquium Biblicus.” Hugh Neill (ca. 1725–81), a Church of England clergyman less sympathetic to Whitefield, referred to the same study groups as “private meetings according to the Whitfilian mode.”34
When Whitefield arrived in Philadelphia in the fall of 1763, even his old adversary Richard Peters, who had succeeded Jenney at Christ Church (linked from 1760 to 1836 with St. Peter’s as the United Parish), welcomed him. After consulting Duché and other clergy, Peters decided that it would be preferable to invite Whitefield to preach than to have “further disunion among the members, who might when displeased go over to” McClenachan. Whitefield accepted the invitation and preached on four occasions. Peters reflected afterward that his decision to extend the invitation had been a correct one. The evangelist preached, he felt, “with a greater moderation of sentiment” than he believed had been the case on earlier visits.35
Many younger clergy in other colonies shared a similar interest in Whitefield. Samuel Peters (1735–1826), who took charge of the Church of England congregation in Hebron, Connecticut, in 1758; Charles Inglis (1734–1816), who served Christ Church in Dover, Delaware, beginning in 1759; and Samuel Magaw (1740–1812), who succeeded him in 1767, all supported the Awakening to varying degrees.36
Interest in this spreading Awakening in the colonial Church of England was also evident in Virginia, where Whitefield had finally succeeded in lighting the fire of revival during his fifth visit to the colonies. By the 1760s William Douglas (ordained 1749, 1708–98), Archibald McRoberts (licensed to serve in Virginia in 1761), Devereux Jarratt (1733–1801), and Charles Clay (ordained 1768) actively supported the Awakening. They would soon be joined by Samuel Shield (ca. 1743–1803). Four others may have shared their sentiments, and three further clergy, including Robert McLaurine (ordained 1750, d. 1773), were willing to recommend evangelical candidates for ordination.37 Of the group in Virginia, Jarratt was to be the best known. Touched by the stirrings of awakening that began in the Presbyterian Church in Virginia during Whitefield’s fifth visit, Jarratt traveled to England for ordination in the Church of England in 1762. While there he heard both Whitefield and John Wesley preach. Returning to Virginia to serve as the rector of Bath Parish in Dinwiddie County, Jarratt began to call for personal conversion and to establish small religious societies in his parish and in neighboring areas.
In his parish William Douglas bridged the gulf between a pre-Awakening understanding of reception of the Eucharist as an owning of the covenant and Whitefield’s stress on New Birth by exhorting young people who had completed their study of the catechism and were preparing to receive the Eucharist. In his sermons to the future communicants he touched upon some of Whitefield’s favorite themes: a warning that the unconverted were “poor, blind, miserable & naked without God, without hope … upon the very brink of ruin,” a caution against “speaking peace to yourselves without foundation,” and a promise that “there would be joy in heaven, at your conversion to the divine Majesty.”38
Clergy who were ordained in the 1770s exhibited an interest in the Awakening similar to the ordinands of the 1760s. In North Carolina, clergyman Charles Pettigrew (1744–1807) became an active proponent of the revival after his ordination in 1775. Pettigrew was a second-generation advocate of awakening; his own father had been converted by the preaching of Whitefield in Pennsylvania.39 Uzal Ogden (1744–1822), an SPG catechist (1770–72) and priest in Sussex and other points in New Jersey, and Sydenham Thorne of Delaware, both of whose ordained ministry began in 1774, shared a similar interest.40 Philadelphia clergyman William Stringer, who claimed ordination by an orthodox bishop but who was reordained in England in 1773, also was a clear supporter of the Awakening.41
There was strong lay leadership for the Awakening in the colonial Church of England as well. This came from two directions: from those colonists, like the parishioners of St. Paul’s, Philadelphia, who were touched by the progress of the Awakening in America, and from those recent immigrants who had been touched by the parallel evangelical revival in Britain.
Some of those in the latter category had been active in the methodist movement in England. By the 1760s, some who had experience as class leaders and lay preachers in the hierarchy that John Wesley had created to coordinate British religious societies were immigrating to America. Noticing the lack of any coherent structure to promote the Awakening in the colonial Church of England, they began to introduce the British pattern. Irish immigrant Robert Strawbridge founded methodist societies in Maryland and Pennsylvania beginning in the early 1760s. In the mid-1760s, Barbara Heck (1734–1804) convinced her cousin Philip Embury (1728–73), who had been a lay preacher before his immigration, to form a methodist class in New York. Heck and Embury found the Church of England in New York unconducive to their effort and began attending a Lutheran congregation.42 Others in New York apparently felt differently. In 1764, supporters of the Awakening were influential enough at Trinity Church, New York, for example, to pressure new rector Samuel Auchmuty (1722–77) to hire an assistant who was “a sound Whitfilian.” These lay supporters tried to convince Jacob Duché to leave his position as assistant at Christ Church, Philadelphia, and to come to New York. Duché declined the offer, but recommended Charles Inglis of Dover, who became Auchmuty’s assistant in 1765.43
By the late 1760s, many others had followed Strawbridge, Heck, and Embury’s lead in introducing methodist structures in America. French and Indian War veteran Captain Thomas Webb provided a colorful leadership style for New York methodists. Robert Williams, an Irish lay preacher and itinerant, arrived in Philadelphia in 1769. He traveled widely, appearing, for example, in 1772 or 1773 on Devereux Jarratt’s doorstep in Virginia.44 He and others cooperated with Jarratt, producing a flourishing methodist movement that soon became the largest in the colonies.
In 1769, John Wesley decided to play a more direct role in the expansion of this growing methodist movement in the American colonies. He began to choose lay preachers to send to America. He would eventually send ten, including Joseph Pilmore (or Pilmoor, 1739–1825), Francis Asbury (1745–1816), and Joseph Rankin. Pilmore, one of the first two chosen to go in 1769, settled in Philadelphia. Asbury, who on his arrival in 1771 was only twenty-six, would eventually emerge as the most influential leader of the methodist movement. In the short term, however, it was Rankin, an older and more experienced man who arrived in 1773, that provided leadership. In 1773 he summoned the first of what would become regular annual methodist conferences.45 Those who attended the first meeting adopted the published minutes of Wesley’s English conferences as their rule of order and vowed that they would admit no one to their number who did not agree to do the same.46
Wesley’s appointees were more supportive of the continued link between the methodist societies and the colonial Church of England than were some of the earlier immigrants who had introduced methodist structures on their own initiative. Wesley’s designates encouraged members of the methodist societies to worship in congregations of the Church of England, invited sympathetic Church of England clergy to sessions of annual conference, and tried to restrain preachers like Robert Strawbridge from celebrating the sacraments without episcopal ordination.47 This attitude won the cooperation of many of the Church of England clergy supportive of the Awakening.
The expanding methodist system also filled an important vacuum. Whitefield had provided a personality that linked awakened congregations in the colonies but no lasting structure or institution in the colonies that could endure after his own death in 1770. The methodist system, in contrast, provided a structure that was not dependent on one individual and could, therefore, provide continuity and direction over time. Not all who embraced the Awakening joined the methodist societies, however. Colonial clergy regarded the methodist societies as a lay movement that they should assist, rather than join. Lay supporters of Whitefield might have questions about membership as well, for, though Whitefield and the Wesleys agreed on the importance of new birth and the value of private meetings, they disagreed over the doctrine of predestination. Nonetheless, many did join and by 1775 the societies could boast of 3,148 members.48
The Great Awakening changed the theological character of the colonial Church of England. While advocates of awakening of the 1760s and 1770s never did abandon episcopal succession or the fixed liturgy in the way that Whitefield had been willing to do in 1739, they did adopt sentimentalist styles of preaching and Whitefield’s call for adult conversion. Even critics of the Awakening began to pay greater attention to personal religious experience. The attempt to integrate this new appreciation for affections with the received covenant tradition would, in turn, be a major topic of interest for theologians at the end of the century.
Changes were not only theological, however. Indeed, there were few aspects of church life that were left untouched. The membership, the institutions, and even the architecture and church music of the denomination were affected.
One way in which the Great Awakening changed the membership was by subtly raising the status of women. Female literacy was considerably lower than male literacy in the eighteenth century; by some estimates it was one-half that of men.49 The intellectual religion of the Moderate Enlightenment had, therefore, limited appeal to women. The Awakening, however, with its emphasis on affections and its household prayer meetings, provided new opportunities for female involvement. Martha Laurens Ramsay (1759–1811), the daughter of a prominent South Carolina family that attended St. Philip’s Church in Charleston, found, for example, that her awakened faith opened doors to a world with greater possibilities. She corresponded with such pious Englishwomen as Selina, Countess of Huntingdon (1707–91) and began a personal religious journal, which was published by her husband after her death.50
Similarly, the Awakening would affect the Church of England’s ministry to black Americans. The Church of England had begun to expand that ministry about the time of Whitefield’s tour of 1739–40, in large measure due to rapid increase in slave population.51 In 1741, the SPG purchased the slaves Harry and Andrew to serve as evangelists among blacks in South Carolina. In the mid-1740s, the clergy of Christ Church, Philadelphia, saw such an increase in their ministry among blacks that they asked the SPG to appoint a catechist to oversee the work. The SPG responded with the appointment of William Sturgeon (d. 1772) in 1747. Sturgeon, a Yale graduate who had traveled to England for ordination, carried on that work until 1762. In the early 1750s, Hugh Neill baptized 162 black persons in his Delaware congregation. Between 1758 and 1765, Dr. Bray’s Associates opened schools for blacks in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and New York.52
The fact that the most effective work among blacks was often carried on in the same parishes in which Church of England clergy began to support the Awakening after 1759 may not be entirely coincidental.53 Clergy may have tested the simple message of personal reliance on Christ as a tool for evangelism for blacks before using the message with white parishioners. Whatever the facts of the matter, however, one thing was clear: an expansion in ministry to blacks coincided with the Great Awakening.
Thus during the Awakening, the Church of England laid the groundwork for an expansion of the role of blacks and women that would take place in the years following the American Revolution. The formation of independent black congregations at the close of the eighteenth century and the growing women’s movement in the nineteenth century were both built upon that foundation.
The membership of the colonial Church of England was affected in another way as well. Prior to the Great Awakening, American denominations were arranged in a roughly geographical pattern; the Congregational Church predominated in New England, the Church of England in the South, and the Presbyterian Church in certain areas of the middle colonies. The Awakening shattered this pattern. It brought Presbyterians and Baptists to Virginia and contributed to the growth of the Church of England in New England and the middle colonies. The religious enclaves of the first half of the century gave way to a more heterogeneous pattern.
Provincial Assemblies and the Call for the Episcopate
The Awakening also sparked a renewed call for a colonial episcopate. Whitefield’s confrontations with colonial clergy in 1739 and 1740 demonstrated the weakness of the commissary system. Commissaries could complain about Whitefield’s preaching, but they lacked the clear authority over him that a colonial bishop would have been able to exercise. Moreover, as members of the Church of England had pointed out earlier in the century, a colonial bishop would provide a more satisfactory supply of clergy and would avoid the inevitable loss of life of some who took the dangerous trip to England for ordination. Yale convert Samuel Johnson was well aware of the danger; his son had died on such a trip.
Johnson’s fellow Yale convert Timothy Cutler was a leading advocate of the establishment of a colonial episcopate. Another vocal figure was Thomas B. Chandler (1726–90), a New Jersey clergyman whose An Appeal to the Public, on Behalf of the Church of England in America (1767) sought to rally popular support for the idea. In England, Bishop Joseph Butler (1692– 1752), a critic of John Wesley, took up the call for a colonial episcopate, and Bishop of London (1748–61) Thomas Sherlock stopped appointing commissaries in every colony except Virginia in order to pressure the Parliament to take action.54
Those who were not members of the Church of England reacted negatively to the campaign for a colonial episcopate. In the tense political climate of the 1760s, any proposal for a new British institution in the colonies was suspect. For Congregationalists and Presbyterians, a bishop of the Church of England, one who might exercise the political authority of his episcopal counterparts in the House of Lords, was particularly odious.
In Massachusetts, Congregational clergy Noah Welles (1718–76), Jonathan Mayhew (1720–66), and Charles Chauncy (1705–87) were fierce critics of the colonial Church of England. In an anonymous pamphlet titled The Real Advantage (1762), Welles claimed to have joined the Church of England for purely social reasons. Mayhew’s Observations on the … S.P.G. (1763) both criticized Church of England clergyman East Apthorp (1732 or 1733–1816) and suggested that SPG missionaries violated their own charter by preaching to those who were already active Christians.55 Chauncy challenged Chandler’s Appeal with his own Appeal to the Public (1769), to which Chandler responded with The Appeal Farther Defended (1771). The Welles-Mayhew-Chauncy characterization of the Church of England as wealthy was hardly accurate; nationally, the church represented roughly the same economic group as the Congregational Church, and in New England its membership was decidedly less well off.
The charge did become, nonetheless, a lasting element in American religious imagery. Later Episcopalians could, however, appreciate the historical irony involved when Mayhew’s grandson, Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright (1792–1854), was elected an Episcopal bishop.
In New York, Presbyterians William Livingston (1723–90) and Francis Alison (1705–79) penned the American Whig papers in which they were similarly critical of plans for a bishop for the colonial Church of England. Their opposition, combined with that from New England, proved strong enough to prevent the introduction of bishops. Cutler, Chandler, and Butler were able to interest Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Seeker (archbishop, 1758–68), but they could not convince the English Parliament to send bishops against the vocal opposition of colonial Congregationalists and Presbyterians.
While the attempt to deal with the effects of Awakening did not result in the immediate sending of a colonial bishop, it did lead to the creation of the colonial institutions that would in time play a vital role in the procuring of episcopal ministry. In May 1760 the clergy of the Church of England in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey decided to meet in Philadelphia. William Smith of the College of Philadelphia presided at the gathering. William McClenachan’s religious society and the need for a colonial bishop were the major topics of conversation. Smith thought the convention a good idea and wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury the following year suggesting that the other colonies form provinces, just as New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania had done. Smith was not, however, impressed by a suggestion advanced by the convention of 1766. College duties kept him from attending that year, and in his absence a majority of the clergy voted in favor of what he characterized as “a kind of Presbyterian or Synodical self delegated Government by Conventions.”56
New York clergy also met regularly. They invited Church of English clerics from neighboring colonies to a series of conventions (1765, 1766, and 1767) that were largely preoccupied with the campaign for a colonial episcopate. Samuel Seabury (1729–96), a native of Connecticut who served churches in Long Island and Westchester, was the secretary of two of those sessions. In 1767 the New York clergy joined with those in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware to found the Society for Relief of Widows and Orphans of Clergymen.57 These three organizations—the two regional conventions and the one united charitable society—would provide the framework and leadership for the reorganization of the colonial Church of England following the American Revolution.
The Awakening also affected the interior design of churches. Many earlier Church of England buildings had had two-foci designs with pulpits and altars on adjacent walls. By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, the new style of building introduced in England by James Gibbs was becoming popular. The exteriors of the new buildings incorporated elements of classical Greek architecture that accorded with a Moderate Enlightened view of the relationship of religion and science. Interiors of the building were, however, often arranged in ways that suited the Great Awakening emphasis on sentimental preaching. Large central pulpits dominated structures laid out on a single central axis.58 Indeed, as early nineteenth-century Episcopalians would complain, many of these pulpits were so placed that they hid the holy table from the view of the congregation.59
Similarly, the musical innovations of the Wesleys made a permanent mark on worship. Prior to the Awakening, many members of the Church of England resisted the use of hymns of recent composition. Christians should, they believed, sing only biblical material or texts like the Te Deum that were hallowed by centuries of use. In the early years after the Awakening, some members of the colonial Church of England continued to look upon the singing of modern hymns with great suspicion. In Virginia, Awakening supporter Archibald McRoberts was tried for the singing of unauthorized hymns sometime around 1779.60 In Maryland, critics charged William Briscoe, Jr., of Shrewsbury Parish of the same offense in 1808.61
Yet even such charges did not prevent the inroads of hymn singing. Following the American Revolution, Episcopal General Conventions would authorize hymnals in 1789 (27 texts), 1808 (57 texts), and 1826 (212 texts). Two of the 1808 texts and fourteen of those in the 1826 collection were by Charles Wesley.62 Episcopalians, both supporters and opponents of the Awakening, would soon begin to sing hymns.
As the 1770s approached, members of the Church of England in North America had, on the whole, cause for thanksgiving. The Great Awakening had led to disagreements among church members but (with the formation of a separate Methodist Church still a decade off) to none of the formal divisions that marked the Old-New splits of the Congregational and Presbyterian churches. The established Church of England was losing some ground in the South to the awakened Presbyterian and Baptist congregations, but the church was growing in the middle colonies and New England. Indeed, the church was participating in a spurt of growth that doubled the number of American congregations in the four decades after 1740. Much of that expansion may have been the result of the swelling immigration to America, but it gave members of the colonial Church of England a sense of progress and growth.63 This sense of security would, however, soon be shattered by events of the American Revolution.
NOTES
1. William Howland Kenney, III, “George Whitefield and Colonial Revivalism: The Social Sources of Charismatic Authority, 1737–1770” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1966), 85; Stuart C. Henry, George Whitefield, Wayfaring Witness (New York; Abingdon Press, 1957), 200–10.
2. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 349–50.
3. William Stevens Perry, ed., Massachusetts, vol. 3 of Historical Collections Relating to the American Colonial Church (Hartford, 1873; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1969), 346; George Whitefield, George Whitefield’s Journals, a new edition, ed. Iain Murray (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1965), 457. It was in this conversation that Whitefield rejected the necessity of episcopal succession for a valid ministry.
4. Whitefield, Journals, 356; Kenney, “George Whitefield,” 68–70, 89–91.
5. Perry, Virginia, vol. 1 of Historical Collections, 364.
6. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), 1:5.
7. Eighteenth-century Congregational clergyman Jonathan Edwards defined affections as “the more vigorous and sensible exercises of the inclination and will,” which were “the springs which set us to work in all the affairs of life, and stimulate us in all our pursuits, especially in all affairs pursued with vigor.” While Edwards noted that “all affections have in some respects or degree an effect on the body,” he distinguished the affections from such bodily sensations (pp. 57–61). In contemporary English, “deep personal conviction” conveys something of the same meaning that “affection” conveyed to eighteenth-century English speakers. See Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise on Religious Affections (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1982), 12, 17, 57–61.
8. Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 187.
9. There were multiple intermediate steps between acknowledging one’s inability to gain salvation and “laying hold of Christ,” which generally involved alternation between doubt in the possibility of salvation and increasing confidence in Christ. In the following century Episcopal theologian Daniel R. Goodwin of the Philadelphia Divinity School would list eight different ways of understanding these intermediate steps. See Daniel R. Goodwin, Syllabus of Lectures on Systematic Divinity, on Apologetics, and on the Canon, Inspiration, and Sufficiency of Holy Scripture (Philadelphia: Caxton Press, 1875), 131–32.
10. Whitefield, Journals, 37–38.
11. Henry, George Whitefield, Wayfaring Witness, 24.
12. J.C. Ryle, “George Whitefield and His Ministry,” in Select Sermons of George Whitefield with an account of his life by J.C. Ryle and a summary of his doctrine by R. Elliot (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1985), 13–17.
13. Ryle, “George Whitefield,” 18 and 27.
14. George Whitefield, Select Sermons of George Whitefield, 85.
15. Whitefield used the Jeremiah passage as the basis for his oft delivered sermon titled, “The Method of Grace.” See Whitefield, Select Sermons, 75–95 or John Gillies, Memoirs of the Rev. George Whitefield, rev. and cor. (New Haven: Whitemore and Buckingham, 1934), 473–88.
16. For a discussion of legal fear, see Stephen R. Yarbrough and John C. Adams, Delightful Conviction: Jonathan Edwards and the Rhetoric of Conversion (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1993), 7–10. Yarbrough and Adams note wide agreement among evangelical Americans on the importance of legal fear by the end of the 17th century but suggest that Jonathan Edwards placed less emphasis on the concept than did some other preachers of the era. Charles Wesley recognized the term as descriptive of Whitefield’s teaching and used it as an elegy that he wrote on the death of the evangelist: “Fruits of repentance first, and legal fear/they now the genuine marks of grace appear.” See: George Osborn (ed.), The Poetical Works of John and Charles Wesley, 10 vols. (London: Wesleyan-Methodist Conference Office, 1870), 7:428. [emphasis added].
17. George Whitefield, Sermons on Important Subjects; by the Rev. George Whitefield, A. M. with a memoir of the author by Samuel Drew and a Dissertation on his Character, Preaching, etc. by the Rev. Joseph Smith (London: Thomas Tegg, & Son, 1836), 735–36.
18. Whitefield, Sermons on Important Subjects, 735–36.
19. Howard A. Snyder, The Radical Wesley (Downer’s Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1981), 14–16.
20. Henry D. Rack, Reasonable Enthusiast: John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1989), 85, 186.
21. Williston Walker, Richard Norris, David Lotz, and Robert Handy, A History of the Christian Church, 4th ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985), 602–3.
22. Historian Perry Miller first suggested in a 1935 essay that Jonathan Edwards and other New England New Light clergy rejected covenant theology. That claim has been the subject of a continuing debate. For Miller’s essay, see “The Marrow of Puritan Divinity,” in Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1956). For a discussion of the debate on covenant theology and the Great Awakening, see David D. Hall, “On Common Ground: The Coherence of American Puritan Studies,” William and Mary Quarterly (3rd series) 44 (Apri11987) and Cornelis van der Knijff, Willem van Vlastuin, “The Development in Jonathan Edwards’ Covenant View,” Jonathan Edwards, online journal 3, No. 2 (2013). Presbyterian and Congregational advocates of covenant theology did not, of course, accept the high-church Church of England argument that episcopal ordination was a condition of the covenant.
23. Perry, Historical Collections, 3:346.
24. Perry, Historical Collections, 3:380.
25. John Frederick Woolverton, Colonial Anglicanism in North America (Detroit: Wayne State Press, 1986), 196.
26. Patricia U. Bonomi and Peter R. Eisenstadt, “Church Adherence in the Eighteenth-Century British American Colonies,” William and Mary Quarterly (3d series) 39 (Apri1 1982): 272.
27. Deborah Mathias Gough, “The Colonial Church: Founding the Church, 1695–1775,” This Far by Faith: Tradition and Change in the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania, ed. David R. Contosta (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 35.
28. David C. Humphrey, From King’s College to Columbia, 1746– 1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 34–5, and 77.
29. Gough, “The Colonial Church,” 28.
30. Humphrey, From King’s College to Columbia, 77; Ahlstrom, Religious History, 222–23.
31. Humphrey, King’s College to Columbia, 24–25, and 48; Edwards Beardsley, Life and Correspondence of Samuel Johnson, D.D. (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1874), 200.
32. Kenney, “George Whitefield,” 72, 99–100, 108. In South Carolina and Georgia, Whitefield did attract considerable crowds in 1740. In addition to clergymen Lewis Jones (ca. 1700–1744) of St. Helena Parish in Port Royal, South Carolina, and Thomas Thompson (fl. 1740s) of St. Bartholomew’s Parish, who have been previously mentioned, the vestries of two vacant congregations (Christ Church Parish and St. John’s, Colleton County) were supportive of Whitefield. See Sidney Charles Bolton, “The Anglican Church of Colonial South Carolina, 1704–1754: A Study in Americanization” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1973), 315–16.
33. Perry, ed., Pennsylvania, vol. 2 of Historical Collections, 319–24, 355; Wardens and vestry of Saint Paul’s Church to Bishop Osbaldeston, 22 June 1762, Fulham Papers, Lambeth Palace Library, London, England, vol. 7, 320; Wardens of St. Paul’s to Bishop Terrick, Fulham Papers, vol. 8, 48–51.
34. Perry, Historical Collections, 2:360; Kevin J. Dellape, America’s First Chaplain: The Life and Times of the Reverend Jacob Duché (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2013), 46.
35. Perry, Historical Collections, 2:392–93.
