Part 9 (1/2)

and in March was again on his way northward on a tour of preaching and solicitation of funds. Touching at Charleston, where the bishop's commissary, Dr. Garden, was at open controversy with him, he preached five times and received seventy pounds for his charitable work. Landing at New Castle on a Sunday morning, he preached morning and evening.

Monday morning he preached at Wilmington to a vast a.s.semblage. Tuesday evening he preached on Society Hill, in Philadelphia, ”to about eight thousand,” and at the same place Wednesday morning and evening. Then once more he made the tour to New York and back, preaching at every halting-place. A contemporary newspaper contains the following item:

”New Castle, May 15th. This evening Mr. Whitefield went on board his sloop here in order to sail for Georgia. On Sunday he preached twice in Philadelphia, and in the evening, when he preached his farewell sermon, it is supposed he had twenty thousand hearers. On Monday he preached at Darby and Chester; on Tuesday at Wilmington and Whiteclay Creek; on Wednesday, twice at Nottingham; on Thursday at Fog's Manor and New Castle. The congregations were much increased since his being here last. The presence of G.o.d was much seen in the a.s.semblies, especially at Nottingham and Fog's Manor, where the people were under such deep soul-distress that their cries almost drowned his voice. He has collected in this and the neighboring provinces about four hundred and fifty pounds sterling for his orphans in Georgia.”

Into the feeble but rapidly growing presbyteries and the one synod of the American Presbyterian Church the revival had brought, not peace, but a sword. The collision was inevitable between the fervor and unrestrained zeal of the evangelists and the sense of order and decorum, and of the importance of organization and method, into which men are trained in the ministry of an established church. No man, even at this day, can read the ”standards” of the Presbyterian Church without seeing that they have had to be strained to admit those ”revival methods” which ever since the days of Whitefield have prevailed in that body. The conflict that arose was not unlike that which from the beginning of New England history had subsisted between Separatist and Nationalist. In the Presbyterian conflict, as so often in religious controversies, disciplinary and doctrinal questions were complicated with a difference of race. The ”Old Side” was the Scotch and Irish party; the ”New Side”

was the New England party, to which many of the old-country ministers adhered. For successive years the mutual opposition had shown itself in the synod; and in 1740, at the synod meeting at Philadelphia, soon after the departure of Whitefield, the real gravamen of the controversy appeared, in the implied and even express impeachment of the spiritual character of the Old Side ministers. The impeachment had been implied in the coming of the evangelists uninvited into other men's parishes, as if these were mission ground. And now it was expressed in papers read before the synod by Blair and Gilbert Tennent. The action of the synod went so far toward sustaining the men of the New Side as to repeal the rule restraining ministers from preaching outside of their own parishes, and as to put on record a thanksgiving for the work of G.o.d in the land.

Through all the days of the synod's meeting, daily throngs on Society Hill were addressed by the Tennents and other ”hot gospelers” of the revival, and churches and private houses were resounding with revival hymns and exhortations. Already the preaching and printing of Gilbert Tennent's ”Nottingham Sermon” had made further fellows.h.i.+p between the two parties for the time impossible. The sermon flagrantly ill.u.s.trated the worst characteristic of the revivalists--their censoriousness. It was a violent invective on ”The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry,”

which so favorable a critic as Dr. Alexander has characterized as ”one of the most severely abusive sermons which was ever penned.” The answer to it came in a form that might have been expected. At the opening of the synod of 1741 a solemn protestation was presented containing an indictment in seven grave counts against the men of the New Side, and declaring them to ”have at present no right to sit and vote as members of this synod, and that if they should sit and vote, the doings of the synod would be of no force or obligation.” The protestation was adopted by the synod by a bare majority of a small attendance. The presbytery of New Brunswick found itself exscinded by this short and easy process of discipline; the presbytery of New York joined with it in organizing a new synod, and the schism was complete.

It is needless further to follow in detail the amazing career of Whitefield, ”posting o'er land and ocean without rest,” and attended at every movement by such storms of religious agitation as have been already described. In August, 1740, he made his first visit to New England. He met with a cordial welcome. At Boston all pulpits were opened to him, and churches were thronged with eager and excited hearers.[168:1] He preached on the common in the open air, and the crowds were doubled. All the surrounding towns, and the coast eastward to Maine, and the interior as far as Northampton, and the Connecticut towns along the road to New York, were wonderfully aroused by the preaching, which, according to the testimony of two nations and all grades of society, must have been of unequaled power over the feelings.

Not only the clergy, including the few Church of England missionaries, but the colleges and the magistrates delighted to honor him. Belcher, the royal governor at Boston, fairly s...o...b..red over him, with tears and embraces and kisses; and the devout Governor Talcott, at New Haven, gave G.o.d thanks, after listening to the great preacher, ”for such refres.h.i.+ngs on the way to our rest.” So he was sped on his way back to the South.

Relieved thus of the glamor of his presence, the New England people began, some of them, to recognize in what an earthen vessel their treasure had been borne. Already, in his earlier youth, when his vast powers had been suddenly revealed to him and to the world, he had had wise counsel from such men as Watts and Doddridge against some of his perils. Watts warned him against his superst.i.tion of trusting to ”impressions” a.s.sumed to be divine; and Doddridge p.r.o.nounced him ”an honest man, but weak, and a little intoxicated with popularity.”[169:1]

But no human strength could stand against the adulation that everywhere attended him. His vain conceit was continually betraying him into indiscretions, which he was ever quick to expiate by humble acknowledgment. At Northampton he was deeply impressed with the beauty of holiness in Edwards and his wife; and he listened with deference to the cautions of that wise counselor against his faith in ”impressions”

and against his censorious judgments of other men as ”unconverted”; but it seemed to the pastor that his guest ”liked him not so well for opposing these things.”

The faults of Whitefield were intensified to a hateful degree in some of his a.s.sociates and followers. Leaving Boston, he sent, to succeed to his work, Gilbert Tennent, then glowing with the heat of his noted Nottingham sermon on ”An Unconverted Ministry.” At once men's minds began to be divided. On the one hand, so wise and sober a critic as Thomas Prince, listening with severe attention, gave his strong and unreserved approval to the preaching and demeanor of Tennent.[169:2] At the other extreme, we have such testimony as this from Dr. Timothy Cutler, the former rector of Yale College, now the Episcopalian minister of Boston:

”It would be an endless attempt to describe that scene of confusion and disturbance occasioned by him [Whitefield]: the division of families, neighborhoods, and towns, the contrariety of husbands and wives, the undutifulness of children and servants, the quarrels among teachers, the disorders of the night, the intermission of labor and business, the neglect of husbandry and of gathering the harvest.... In many conventicles and places of rendezvous there has been checkered work indeed, several preaching and several exhorting and praying at the same time, the rest crying or laughing, yelping, sprawling, fainting, and this revel maintained in some places many days and nights together without intermission; and then there were the blessed outpourings of the Spirit!... After him came one Tennent, a monster! impudent and noisy, and told them they were all d.a.m.n'd, d.a.m.n'd, d.a.m.n'd; this charmed them, and in the most dreadful winter I ever saw people wallowed in the snow night and day for the benefit of his beastly brayings, and many ended their days under these fatigues. Both of them carried more money out of these parts than the poor could be thankful for.”[170:1]

This is in a tone of bitter sectarian railing. But, after all, the main allegations in it are sustained by the ample evidence produced by Dr.

Charles Chauncy, pastor of the First Church in Boston, in his serious and weighty volume of ”Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England,” published in 1743, as he sincerely says, ”to serve the interests of Christ's kingdom,” and ”faithfully pointing out the things of a bad and dangerous tendency in the late and present religious appearance in the land.” Dr. Chauncy was doubtless included in the sweeping denunciation of the Christian ministry in general as ”unconverted,” ”Pharisees,” ”hypocrites.” And yet it does not appear in historical evidence that Chauncy was not every whit as good a Christian as Tennent or Whitefield.

The excesses of the revival went on from bad to worse. They culminated, at last, in the frenzy of poor James Davenport, great-grandson of the venerable founder of New Haven, who, under the control of ”impressions”

and ”impulses” and texts of Scripture ”borne in upon his mind,”

abandoned his Long Island parish, a true _allotrio-episcopos_, to thrust himself uninvited into the parishes of other ministers, denouncing the pastor as ”unconverted” and adjuring the people to desert both pastor and church. Like some other self-appointed itinerants and exhorters of the time, he seemed bent upon schism, as if this were the great end of preaching. Being invited to New London to a.s.sist in organizing a Separatist church, he ”published the messages which he said he received from the Spirit in dreams and otherwise, importing the great necessity of mortification and contempt of the world; and made them believe that they must put away from them everything that they delighted in, to avoid the heinous sin of idolatry--that wigs, cloaks and breeches, hoods, gowns, rings, jewels, and necklaces, must be all brought together into one heap into his chamber, that they might by his solemn decree be committed to the flames.” On the Sabbath afternoon the pile was publicly burned amid songs and shouts. In the pile were many favorite books of devotion, including works of Flavel, Beveridge, Henry, and like venerated names, and the sentence was announced with a loud voice, ”that the smoke of the torments of such of the authors of the above-said books as died in the same belief as when they set them out was now ascending in h.e.l.l, in like manner as they saw the smoke of these books arise.”[171:1] The public fever and delirium was pa.s.sing its crisis. A little more than a year from this time, Davenport, who had been treated by his brethren with much forbearance and had twice been released from public process as _non compos mentis_, recovered his reason at the same time with his bodily health, and published an unreserved and affectionate acknowledgment of the wrong that he had done under the influence of a spirit of delusion which he had mistaken for the Spirit of truth. Those who had gone furthest with him in his excesses returned to a more sober and brotherly mind, and soon no visible trace remained of the wild storm of enthusiasm that had swept over New England, except a few languis.h.i.+ng schisms in country towns of Connecticut.

As in the middle colonies, the revival had brought division in New England. But, after the New England fas.h.i.+on, it was division merely into ways of thinking, not into sects. Central in the agitated scene is the calm figure of Edwards, uniting the faith and zeal of an apostle with the acuteness of a philosopher, and applying the exquisite powers of his intellect to discriminate between a divine work and its human or Satanic admixtures, and between true and spurious religious affections. He won the blessing of the peacemaker. When half a generation had pa.s.sed there had not ceased, indeed, to be differences of opinion, but there was none left to defend the wild extravagances which the very authors of them lamented, and there was none to deny, in face of the rich and enduring fruits of the revival, that the power of G.o.d had been present in it. In the twenty years ending in 1760 the number of the New England churches had been increased by one hundred and fifty.[172:1]

In the middle colonies there had been like progress. The Presbyterian ministry had increased from forty-five to more than a hundred; and the increase had been wholly on the ”New Side.” An early move of the conservative party, to require a degree from a British or a New England college as a condition of license to preach, was promptly recognized as intended to exclude the fervid students from the Log College. It was met by the organization of Princeton College, whose influence, more New Englandish than New England, directed by a succession of ill.u.s.trious Yale graduates in full sympathy with the advanced theology of the revival, was counted on to withstand the more cautious orthodoxy of Yale. In this and other ways the Presbyterian schism fell out to the furtherance of the gospel.

In Virginia the quickening was as when the wind breathed in the valley of dry bones. The story of Samuel Morris and his unconscious mission, although authentic fact, belongs with the very romance of evangelism.[173:1] Whitefield and ”One-eyed Robinson,” and at last Samuel Davies, came to his aid. The deadly exclusiveness of the inert Virginia establishment was broken up, and the gospel had free course.

The Presbyterian Church, which had at first been looked on as an exotic sect that might be tolerated out on the western frontier, after a brief struggle with the Act of Uniformity maintained its right to live and struck vigorous root in the soil. The effect of the Awakening was felt in the establishment itself. Devereux Jarratt, a convert of the revival, went to England for ordination, and returned to labor for the resuscitation of the Episcopal Church in his native State. ”To him, and such as he, the first workings of the renewed energy of the church in Virginia are to be traced.”[173:2]

An even more important result of the Awakening was the swift and wide extension of Baptist principles and churches. This was altogether logical. The revival had come, not so much in the spirit and power of Elijah, turning to each other the hearts of fathers and of children, as in the spirit of Ezekiel, the preacher of individual responsibility and duty. The temper of the revival was wholly congenial with the strong individualism of the Baptist churches. The Separatist churches formed in New England by the withdrawal of revival enthusiasts from the parish churches in many instances became Baptist. Cases of individual conversion to Baptist views were frequent, and the earnestness with which the new opinion was held approved itself not only by debating and proselyting, but by strenuous and useful evangelizing. Especially at the South, from Virginia to Georgia, the new preachers, entering into the labors of the annoyed and persecuted pioneers of their communion, won mult.i.tudes of converts to the Christian faith, from the neglected populations, both black and white, and gave to the Baptist churches a lasting preeminence in numbers among the churches of the South.

Throughout the country the effect of this vigorous propagation of rival sects openly, in the face of whatever there was of church establishment, settled this point: that the law of American States, by whomsoever administered, must sooner or later be the law of liberty and equality among the various religious communions. In the southern colonies, the empty sh.e.l.l of a church establishment had crumbled on contact with the serious earnestness of the young congregations gathered by the Presbyterian and Baptist evangelists. In New England, where establishment was in the form of an attempt by the people of the commonwealth to confirm the people of each town in the maintenance of common wors.h.i.+p according to their conscience and judgment, the ”standing order” had solid strength; but when it was attempted by public authority to curb the liberty of a considerable minority conscientiously intent on secession, the reins were ready to break. It soon came to be recognized that the only preeminence the parish churches could permanently hold was that of being ”servants of all.”

With equal and unlimited liberty, was to follow, as a prevailing characteristic of American Christianity, a large diversity of organization. Not only that men disagreeing in their convictions of truth would be enrolled in different bodies, but that men holding the same views, in the same statement of them, would feel free to go apart from one another, and stay apart. There was not even to be any one generally predominating organization from which minor ones should be reckoned as dissenting. One after another the organizations which should be tempted by some period of exceptional growth and prosperity to pretend to a hegemony among the churches--Catholic, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist--would meet with some set-back as inexorable as ”the law of nature that prevents the trees from growing up into the sky.”

By a curious paradox, the same spiritual agitation which deepened the divisions of the American church aroused in the colonies the consciousness of a national religious unity. We have already seen that in the period before the Awakening the sole organ of fellows.h.i.+p reaching through the whole chain of the British colonies was the correspondence of the Quaker meetings and missionaries. In the glow of the revival the continent awoke to the consciousness of a common spiritual life. Ranging the continent literally from Georgia to Maine, with all his weaknesses and indiscretions, and with his incomparable eloquence, welcomed by every sect, yet refusing an exclusive allegiance to any, Whitefield exercised a true apostolate, bearing daily the care of all the churches, and becoming a messenger of mutual fellows.h.i.+p not only between the ends of the continent, but between the Christians of two hemispheres. Remote churches exchanged offices of service. Tennent came from New Jersey to labor in New England; d.i.c.kinson and Burr and Edwards were the gift of the northern colonies to the college at Princeton. The quickened sense of a common religious life and duty and destiny was no small part of the preparation for the birth of the future nation.

Whether for good or for evil, the few years from 1740 to 1750 were destined to impress upon the American church in its various orders, for a hundred years to come, the character of _Methodism_.[176:1]

In New England, the idea, into which the first pastors had been trained by their experience as parish ministers in the English established church, of the parochial church holding correlative rights and duties toward the community in all its families, succ.u.mbed at last, after a hundred years of more or less conscious antagonism, to the incompatible principle, adopted from the Separatists of Plymouth, of the church formed according to elective affinity by the ”social compact” of persons of the age of discretion who could give account to themselves and to one another of the conscious act and experience of conversion. This view, subject to important mitigations or aggravations in actual administration, held almost unquestioned dominance in the New England churches until boldly challenged by Horace Bushnell, in his ”epoch-making” volume on ”Christian Nurture” (1846), as a departure from the orthodoxy of the fathers.