USA > Connecticut > New Haven County > Guilford > A history of Christ Episcopal Church in Guilford, Connecticut : an address delivered by the Rector, Rev. William G. Andrews, in September, 1894, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the parish > Part 1
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ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY
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GENEALOGY 974.602 694AN
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Andrews
THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
ASTOR, LENDY AND TILDEN FOUNDATIONS L
Eng & by Punderson Crisand & Co
Samuel Johnson
A HISTORY
OF
Christ Episcopal Church
IN
GUILFORD, CONNECTICUT.
.
AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BY THE RECTOR, REV. WILLIAM G. ANDREWS, IN SEPTEMBER, 1894, ON THE OCCASION OF THE 150TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE PARISH.
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FROM THE PRESS OF THE ECHO, GUILFORD, CONN. 1895.
Miss DRISLER
THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. 1899
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INTRODUCTORY.
The following address has been revised and somewhat enlarged, and portions omitted in the delivery are now inserted. A few corrections have been made. It is based to a consider- able extent on early records faithfully preserved by the Rev. David Baldwin, and now courteously transferred to the parish. They were consulted many years ago by the historian of Guil- ford, Hon. Ralph D. Smith, but had long been lost sight of. Other sources of information are mentioned in the notes. I must, however, express more distinctly my obligations to one of Mr. Smith's manuscripts, kindly placed in my hands by his grandson, Bernard C. Steiner, Ph. D., of Baltimore, and to Dr. Talcott's priceless collection of genealogies, made easily accessi- ble to residents of Guilford by the unselfish diligence of the late Mr. Alfred G. Hull and his associates in the task of copying the volume. Guilford is uncommonly fortunate in having had among her citizens two such untiring students of local records as Mr. Smith and Dr. Talcott. It is impossible to name all who have aided me in my work, grateful as I have had reason to be to many friends in Guilford and elsewhere for assistance of various kinds. But I must add to the names given in the notes those of Mr. Charles H. Post of Guilford, the Rev. Wilfred H. Dean and Mr. Jerome Coan of North Guilford, Mr. Eli F. Rogers of Branford, the Rev. J. Frederick Sexton of Cheshire, Miss Eliza- beth M. Beardsley of New Haven, and Mrs. Susan Johnson Hudson and Miss Russell of Stratford. All who may be inter- ested in the story of the parish owe much to the enterprise and historical tastes of Mr. Frederick C. Norton of Guilford for the appearance of the address in its present form.
Some account of our commemorative services ought to be given, though there is space only for an outline. At ten o'clock Bishop Williams (who warmly sympathized with the gladness which his presence so much increased), confirmed two candi- dates (having confirmed a larger class in May), and addressed
6
Introductory.
the congregation. He spoke of the significance of such anniver- saries in their threefold bearing-on the past, the present, and the future. At the second service, held at a quarter before eleven, the Bishop was assisted in the celebration of the Holy Communion by the Rev. Dr. Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, the Rev. Dr. Samuel Hart, and the rector. The sermon was preached by the Rev. Dr. George D. Johnson from I Kings xix. 4 : "Now, O Lord, take away my life; for I am not better than my fathers." The sentiment underlying Elijah's half-despair- ing cry was developed with much force and beauty. As life goes on and we look back over our past, we often seem to our- selves to have failed. But God's work is advancing, and His faithful servants cannot really fail.
Drs. Pynchon, Hart and Johnson are all of Guilford stock. The first, formerly president of Trinity College, is descended from the two Congregational pastors whose name he bears ; the second, also of Trinity College, and secretary of the House of Bishops, is descended from the Rev. John Hart of East Guilford (now Mad- ison), who in 1722 had nearly resolved to apply for episcopal ordination with Timothy Cutler and Samuel Johnson ; the third is descended from the distinguished clergyman last named, a native of Guilford, as also from the great Puritan divine, Jona- than Edwards.
In the evening prayers were read from the old folio Prayer Book, probably brought from England in 1764 by the Rev. Bela Hubbard. The Rev. W. H. Dean, rector of St. John's Church, North Guilford, which was until 1834 generally united in one cure with Guilford, performed this service. His English birth, combined with his American orders, gave his participation addi- tional interest, since the predecessors of the existing congrega- tion, while Americans by birth, not only belonged to the Church of England, but thought of themselves as Englishmen and of England as "home."
Among those who took part in the commemoration as wor- shipers were descendants of Samuel Smithson, of Nathaniel Johnson, of Bela Hubbard, of Andrew Ward, of Friend Collins, of Thomas Powers, and doubtless of various others who are named in the following pages. In the evening the Methodist and the two Congregational churches were closed, and their
7
Introductory.
pastors, the Rev. Otis J. Range, the Rev. Geo. W. Banks and the Rev. Frederick E. Snow, were present by invitation, with many members of their congregations, to rejoice with us as being all members of one Body. The prayer, "For the Unity of God's People," which Samuel Johnson can hardly have found in Samuel Smithson's Prayer Book, though it had already been set forth in England (1714), is in our venerable folio. Its use on this occasion might have recalled Dr. Johnson's efforts in behalf of comprehension, as well as the belief of Thomas Rug- gles, that the early days, when perhaps not a single Christian in Guilford had consciously separated from the Church of England, still continued.
A beautiful set of communion linen, the gift of Mrs. Aletha C. Graves, was used for the first time in the morning. And the anniversary was a far more joyful one for the knowledge that the effort to signalize it by the extinction of a debt of between eleven and twelve hundred dollars, begun just before Lent, had been entirely successful. Summer parishioners, as well as former members of the congregation or their representatives, had given indispensable aid, but the greater part of the task was performed by those whose homes are here, and at least half of it by the ladies.
EARLY HISTORY
OF
Christ Church Parish, Guilford, Conn.
AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE CELEBRATION OF THE ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE PARISH, SEPTEMBER 16, 1894, BY THE RECTOR, WILLIAM G. ANDREWS.
On the fourth of September, 1744 (old style), or one hun- dred and fifty years ago yesterday, what was then called a "vestry," and would now be called a parish meeting, "was held at the house of William Ward in Gilford. Nathaniel John- son and William Ward were appointed Church Wardens for the year ensueing ; and Samuel Collins appointed Clerk. It was likewise agreed upon that the Professors of the Church of Eng- land meet in order to Carry on worship by reading a form of Prayers & Sermons by themselves." The "Memorandum " which I quote, and which is the oldest of our parish documents (unexpectedly recovered, with others, during the past year), is signed by "James Lyons, minister," and the two wardens. The action which it records was the organization of the parish, as is clearly proved by a statement of two who took part in it, made many years later.1 But although the proper date of our anniversary is thus fixed, the gradual process of which the organ- ization was one result, had begun nearly thirty years before. And we must go even farther into the past than this. The minister of the First (Congregational) Church, Thomas Ruggles the younger, afterwards virtually accused the conformists of commit- ting schism in setting up worship " by themselves." They had, he declared, no sufficient ground for their proceedings, inasmuch as his church was and always had been a congregation of the
I Church Documents, Connecticut, ii. 126-7.
IO
Early History of
Church of England.1 We ought, then, to look back at least two hundred and fifty years in order to ascertain what the national church really was to the Puritan emigrants, and whether they had preserved enough of what most Englishmen valued it for to satisfy reasonable Christians. This will help us to decide whether Nathaniel Johnson and his friends had, in fact, committed schism.
To the larger part of the early Puritans, in New England as in England, the national church was unquestionably their spir- itual mother, communicating to them as they gladly confessed their part "in the common salvation."? It embodied the Chris- tianity of their nation, and in the belief of Puritans, not less than of Anglicans, it was its office as a national church to main- tain the religious unity of English Christians, and, still more, to provide every Englishman, who did not plainly show himself unworthy, with access to all the means of grace, that he might live and die as becomes a Christian. To have such access was a dearly cherished right, though in a national, and especially in an established church, it might be grievously abused. By slow degrees Episcopal government and liturgical worship had be- come, in Puritan eyes, first offensive and then unlawful. But these were regarded as only blemishes on the system, and might be removed without destroying it. And the founders of Guil- ford had hardly finished their first dwelling-houses, and probably had not begun their first meeting-house, when the Long Parlia- ment met (Nov. 3, 1640), with the purpose of reforming the church. And about three months after they had reared their spir- itual house of Christian souls on its seven "pillars"3 (June 19, 1643), the commons of England had sworn to abolish Episcopacy, and, by implication, to abandon the Prayer-Book. (Sept. 25, 1643.) As these and similar changes were accomplished it did not seem to the exiles that the Church of England was disappear- ing, but rather, that she was becoming "all glorious within." And although the English establishment was never fully con-
I " History of Guilford," in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, First Series, iv. 186.
2 "Humble Request," etc., 1630. Quoted from Hutchinson's History of Massachu- setts, i. 431, by Coit, Dexter and others.
3 The word "pillars" does not appear in the Guilford Records, but is likely to have been used here as in New Haven.
II
Christ Church Parish, Guilford, Conn.
formed to the New England model, it grew so attractive to the emigrants that many of them went back to enjoy the fruits of the new reformation. One of these returning pilgrims was Henry Whitfield, the first minister of Guilford, and first of the seven pillars. He is understood to have accepted a living in the city of Winchester, and, if so, he was, during the last years of his life, in his own belief, as truly a minister of the Church of England as when, long before, he had been the conforming rector of Ockley. And in one important particular he must have departed from the New England model. Besides dispens- ing with bishops and a liturgy, the Puritans here, unlike those of England and Scotland, had attempted, not unnaturally, though with some misgivings, to guard the sacraments against the approach of unholy men, by requiring a "relation of experi- ences" from all who desired to be communicants, while only communicants could obtain baptism for their children. This rule excluded a large number of sincere Christians of calm tem- perament from the use of the sacraments, and was at least as serious an invasion of those equal rights which it belongs to the church to maintain as was, for example, the requirement, so offensive to many Puritans, of kneeling at the Lord's table. In Winchester, if he had a parish there, and if the ordinances of Parliament were obeyed, Henry Whitfield could deprive no member of his congregation of full Christian privileges unless he were grossly ignorant or openly wicked, of which matters Parliament was to be the final judge.1
The second of the seven original members of the Guilford church-John Higginson. Whitfield's son-in-law, associate and successor-would have returned to England in 1659, but for a shipwreck which finally fixed his home in Massachusetts. And he doubtless would also have served in the national church while it remained under Puritan control, and would have con- formed to the churchly rule about the administration of the sac- raments which he and Whitfield had helped to set aside here. And we have, I think, sufficient reason for believing that he treasured in his memory to the end of his long life, words which he heard from the lips of his own father, as they looked back
I Neal's History of Puritans. London, 1837; ii. 276, 370-1, 379, 511, 610-II.
I2
Early History of
together, from the deck of the ship which was bearing them westward, on the granite cliffs of Cornwall. Then, as we are told, Francis Higginson utterly repudiated the names which the Separatists gave to the English church, of "Babylon" and " Rome," and cried : "Farewel, dear England ! Farewel, the Church of God in England !
We do not go
as Separatists but to practice the positive Part of Church Reformation."1
It is also highly probable that two more of the seven, Whitfield's other son-in-law, Samuel Desborough, and John Hoadly, who acted for a while as a Puritan minister in Scot- land, both died in the communion of the Church of England, after bishops and Prayer Book had been restored. Whether this was true of Hoadly or not, we know that two of his sons, born near the northwest corner of the Green, took episcopal or- ders. It is practically certain that the first natives of Guil- ford who assumed the ministerial office-the first "ministers raised up," as the phrase is, in the ancient Puritan congregation established here-were Episcopalians. If that congregation was not, in those days, as Mr. Ruggles declared, a congregation of the Church of England, the separation was scarcely felt, and even a return, in England, to the historic order and worship, was not difficult.
And while John Higginson was still pastor of Guilford, that right of access to the sacraments on the part of reputable profes- sors of Christianity which it was characteristic of Congregational Puritanism to limit unwarrantably, and which Whitfield must, and Higginson probably would, have conceded at home, began to be demanded in the colonies (1656, or earlier). The de- mand was soon urged in the name of the Church of England by men, undoubtedly Puritans and nonconformists, who neverthe- less declared themselves members of that church. Some of them, as recent emigrants, must have been members of it under the commonwealth, and all believed that they had not forfeited the right of Christian Englishmen by removing to the English colony of Connecticut. And there was a strong disposition to redress what was evidently felt to be a wrong, though the meas-
1 Magnalia, iii. 74, as quoted in Dexter's Congregationalism as seen in its Literature, 414-5, and note.
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Christ Church Parish, Guilford, Conn.
ures adopted were inadequate, and their inadequacy has much to do with the welcome afterwards given to the Anglican mis- sionaries. 1
One fact more, belonging to the seventeenth century, brings into view an attractive aspect of the relations then existing be- tween Congregationalists and the mother church, while it throws a pleasant light on the origin and primary aims of those missionary labors in the eighteenth century, of which even such tolerant Congregationalists as Thomas Ruggles finally com)- plained as proselytism.
More than once we find the name of William Leete, still another of the seven pillars of the First Church, attached to an account of certain funds received from England for the support of Indian missions. The illustrious John Eliot derived part of his income from this source, and his son Joseph, the third pas- tor of Guilford and ancestor of many members of this congrega- tion, was once, at least, thus paid for work among the Indians of Massachusetts .? Now the contributions which Governor Leete, as from time to time one of the Commissioners of the United Colonies, had a share in administering, came from a society established "for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England and the Parts Adjacent." At the head of it, for about thirty years, stood a famous Anglican layman, Robert Boyle, who, with the support of the Earl of Clarendon and others, had been its preserver and second founder. Yet it was, in fact, a Puritan society, incorporated by the Long Parliament six months after it had beheaded the king (July 27, 1649). It owed its origin largely to the interest aroused by Eliot's earlier labors, an interest which Henry Whitfield, going home in 1651 to share the Puritan triumph, helped, by his writings, to inten- sify. But the Christ-like longing to save the souls of the heathen of North America, which the society embodied, had al- ready moved devout Puritans and Anglicans to work together in imparting what was to both, and must be to all Christians, "the common salvation."
After Boyle's death, his society (or "company" as it was
I Petition, etc., Oct. 17, 1664 ; first printed in American Church Review, April, 1857, pp. 106-7. Trumbull's History of Connecticut, i. 297-9, etc.
2 Hasard's State Papers, ii. 442-3, 496. 1
14
Early History of
then called) doubtless passed under the control of nonconform- ists, who had now secured toleration, and could administer openly their own institutions. But the missionary impulse, neither Puritan nor Anglican, but Christian, was still strong in the national church. Within ten years (1701) it took form in a new society, with one of Boyle's dearest friends, Archbishop Tenison, at its head. It adopted a name so like the old that the two have often been confounded, and borrowed, with no great change, the device on the original seal of Congregational Massachusetts. And it so manifestly perpetuated the life of the Puritan company that the continued existence of the latter seems sometimes to have been overlooked by modern 11011C011- formists. It was, in short, the great institution which American Episcopalians know and thankfully honor as the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.1 It would be im- proper to describe the Anglican society as the successor of the Puritan company, but the latter was, in a real sense, the parent of the former. And the society became the main channel of that stream of Christian feeling and purpose which we can trace back through the joint labors of Anglicans like Robert Boyle, and Puritans like Richard Baxter, and the missionary zeal of fierce revolutionists at the beginning of the commonwealth, to the associated efforts of high church bishops and reforming presbyters to send the Gospel to America in the reign of Charles the First.2 The vast growth of the English settlements here had made the religious wants of the settlers a more pressing burden on the consciences of Christian Englishmen than those of the Indians or the negroes, though the new society did care for all, as ultimately for non-Christian races in the East, but its primary object, as defined by its charter, was to provide "an Orthodox Clergy to live amongst" such of the king's "Loveing
I Collection of Massachusetts Historical Society, i. 211-19; Ed. of 1806; Anderson's His- tory of the Colonial Church, 2d Ed., London, 1856, ii. 10-15, 188-90, 193-4, 208-9, 495-9; Mission- ary World, an Encyclopedia, etc., 84; Brown's History of Missions, Philadelphia, 1820, i. 65-8, and note, ii. 482, 485, 488 ; "Guilford and Madison in Literature. by H. P. Robinson (a descendant of Whitfield) in Proceedings at the Celebration of the 250th Anniversary, etc., II8.
2 Bishop Lake, of Bath and Wells, acted with John White, a conforming Puritan, in promoting the settlement made at Salem in 1629; Robert Sanderson, afterwards Bishop of Lincoln, approved a petition in behalf of Indian missions along with Edmund Calamy of the Presbyterian party ( Hist. of Col. Ch. ii. 10-16, 188 et seq).
1 5
Christ Church Parish, Guilford, Conn.
Subjects" as might "want the Administration of God's Word and Sacraments." This was a legitimate and, indeed, indispen- sable enlargement of the task of the original company, and New England Congregationalists felt that missionaries were needed in almost every colony except Massachusetts and Con- necticut. And in those two colonies the earliest missionaries, in spite of a zeal for Episcopacy not shared by all their succes- sors, were warmly welcomed by some of the Congregational ministers, enjoyed their hospitality, and preached in their pul- pits. 1
We find, then, that from the time when Guilford was settled to the period in which our own parochial history begins, influ- ences had been at work favorable to kind feeling on the part of the settlers and their children towards the Church of England- in England. And of this, Mr. Ruggles's willingness to believe that he and his people were members of the national church is a striking illustration. We also find that the settlers soon wished for and asked for Christian rights, which the Church of England conceded, sometimes quite too easily, and which Con- gregationalism then denied. We even find that not only had the famous society which helped to reproduce in America features of Anglican Christianity least agreeable to our Puritan fathers, received into its life a strong current colored by Puri- tanism, but that as we ascend the stream towards its remoter sources we seem to discover a faint reflection of the thatched meeting-house on Guilford green. What we do not find is proof that the First Church was a congregation of the Church of England in the year 1744. Had it been in England its assem- blies would have become unlawful in 1662 ; after 1689 it would have been a legalized society of dissenters, wholly separated from the establishment. The church was in New England, and whether the Act of Uniformity and the Toleration Bill were law in America or not, it is not quite reasonable to regard the Atlantic Ocean as creating an ecclesiastical union which would not have existed without it. The separation, however accomplished, was a fact, and was accepted as such by both parties. And it follows that those who saw the fact which Mr. Ruggles was disposed
I Keith's "Journal," in Publications of the Protestant Episcopal Historical Society, 1851, pp. 7, 8, 10, 26-7.
I6
Early History of
not to see, and who might have held his half-filial attitude towards the mother church, when they finally desired that as far as they were concerned the separation might be done away, were not cherishing a spirit which he should have thought schismatical. As little was this the case when they also desired to enjoy all the good things which were offered by the Church of England, and could not be obtained at his hands, even if he had been right in thinking himself one of her ministers. When they began to long for the majesty and sacred beauty of her worship, for the pastoral oversight of her historic ministry, as old as Christianity, above all, for the freedom of approach to the ordinances of Christ, which, however sadly abused in Eng- land, was, nevertheless, their right as far as they tried to keep their baptismal covenant-when they longed for these things, and he could promise none of them, he could not wonder if they sought them elsewhere. Why they desired them and how they found them, remains to be told.
Not far from the year 1707, and during the pastorate of the elder Thomas Ruggles, an Englishman named Samuel Smith- son came to Guilford. By the will of his kinsman, Thomas Macock, he became, in that year the possessor of a farm lying just beyond West river, and extending towards the sea at Mul- berry Point. Though a member of the Church of England, he doubtless fell in with the religious usages of his neighbors, and when he died, in 1718, he was, I suppose, the collector of the minister's rate for the First Society.1 His two daughters, Han- nah and Dorothy, married the Congregational pastors of Kil- lingworth (Clinton) and North Guilford, Jared Eliot and Sam- uel Russell, though descendants of the former, are now communicants in this parish. But Samuel Smithson brought to Guilford a love for those good things with which the Church of England enriches her children, and he was able so to transmit it that it has borne fruit, here and elsewhere, a thousand-fold. One of the sixteen volumes (besides his Bible) which formed his library was a Prayer Book. That he lent about two years before he died (1716) to a young man of nineteen or twenty,
I New Haven Probate Records, iii. 108-12; Guilford Book of Terryers, etc., from 1648, pp. 3, 57 ; Guilford Land Records, i. 105-6; Records of Votes and Acts of the West Society, Lib. I., A.
I7
Christ Church Parish, Guilford, Conn.
named Samuel Johnson. He was the son of a deacon of the First Church, and grandson of another, and a recent graduate of the Collegiate School at Saybrook.1 Previous reading had prepared young Johnson to enjoy the Prayer Book, and later studies, prolonged for years, were needed to convince him, after entering the Congregational ministry, that he must seek for valid orders in the Church of England. And, partly in vir- tue of personal temperament, partly through reading which he pursued after his earliest study of the Prayer Book, he attained a type of piety distinctly unlike that of the good men around him, or even of most of his contemporaries in England. It was more filial and joyous than theirs ; it was more sympathetic and charged with a larger hope, because resting on a truer, clearer vision of God than that of the older Puritans. In many re- spects it nearly reproduced the inner life of the Anglican saints of the seventeenth century. Samuel Johnson's personal character, I believe, did more than the labors of other men to promote the growth of the Church of England in this commonwealth, and did more than his talents and learning to make him what the first President Dwight called him, "the father of Episcopacy in Connecticut." And it was such a character as the Book of Common Prayer, intelligently and devoutly used, is better fitted than most human compositions to produce. When that book was placed in his hands, probably the strongest force in his spiritual history was put in action. And we may look back to the good deed of Samuel Smithson, performed more than a quarter of a century before our parish was founded, as its true beginning, and to Mr. Smithson himself, though he had then long been in his grave, as in a real sense its founder.
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