USA > Connecticut > Contributions to the ecclesiastical history of Connecticut > Part 6
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" Whereas there has of late years been many errors in doctrine, and disorders in practice, prevailing in the churches of this land, which seem to have a threatening aspect upon these churches-and whereas Mr. George Whitefield has been the promoter, or at least the faulty occasion of many of these errors and disorders, this asso- ciation think it needful for them to declare that if the said Mr. Whitefield should make his progress through this government, it would by no means be advisable for any of our ministers to admit him into their pulpits, or for any of our people to attend upon his preaching and administrations."
This seems like a harsh judgment. We honor the name of Whitefield. Doubtless,
" the tear
That fell upon his Bible was sincere."
But let us remember that the Whitefield of history, is not ex- actly the Whitefield of popular traditions. The famous evan- gelist, whose first visit to New England was coincident in time with the religious revival of 1740, had been received by the pastors and churches of Connecticut with an almost unanimous welcome, as if he were an angel of God. He deserved such a welcome ; for he was a true evangelist, earnest, faithful, fervent, self-sacrificing, eloquent as if gifted with a tongue of fire. But after all, he was only a man with more zeal than judgment,
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better fitted to rouse and agitate, than to guide and instruct ; and in the few years between his first visit and his second, a thick growth of mischievous enthusiasms and disorganizing ex- travagances had sprung up in his track, and were unquestion- ably the result, in part, of his unbalanced and unguarded teach- ing. Against those enthusiastic and destructive practices, and against the erroneous opinions and beliefs with which they were identified, Edwards, and all the New England pastors who were known as sharing in the great revival, had freely and boldly testified. But Whitefield had never offered one word that could be construed as retracting any of the mischievous words or actions which had proceeded from his ill informed and inconsiderate zeal ; nor one word of caution against the principles or the proceedings of those frantic admirers of his who were spreading around them confusion and every evil work, and were bringing not the great revival only but religion itself into contempt. Every word alleged against him by that General Association of 1745 was literally true. Yet it must be confess- ed that in thus denouncing one who, with all his rashness, and with all the shallowness of his views, and with all the inci- dental mischiefs that attended his ministry, was nevertheless most manifestly a chosen instrument of God for a blessed service, both in Britain and in America, they committed an error as grave perhaps, and as likely to be mischievous, as any error of his.
It is quite in keeping with the spirit then predominating in church and state, that the fulmination against Whitefield, on the record of 1745, is immediately followed by votes about the revival and keeping up of ecclesiastical discipline. The next year we find questions about ecclesiastical discipline again. In 1747, one question about discipline is answered ; and, the scarcity of copies of the Saybrook Platform being noticed, a member is appointed to procure and distribute a number of copies which are understood to be in the custody of the secretary of the colony. The next year, Joseph Bellamy
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being again a member, the importance of catechising is the first theme, and Watts's catechisms are commended, though not as a substitute for the Assembly's shorter catechism ; another attempt is made to obtain from the secretary those re- ported copies of the Saybrook Platform ; and, in view of " the great prevalence of vice and profaneness," and of " a lamen- table indifference in spiritual concerns among the people," ministers are earnestly entreated to deal with the people of their charge by personal private addresses. For the two years next following, no business was transacted ; the records seem as if the General Association was dying if not already dead. But from 1751 onward, there are new signs of life. Soon after- wards a great alarm at the progress of doctrinal errors, Socin- ian, Arian, Arminian and Pelagian, begins to show itself. The minutes for 1758 are wanting. But in 1759, the record is alive with references to the Wallingford case. It is the begin- ning of the second half-century.
That Wallingford case-the ordination of James Dana, from Harvard College, (afterwards Dr. Dana, ) by an old light coun- cil, against the protest of a respectable minority, and against a positive prohibition from the consociation of New Haven coun- ty, which had been convened to forbid the ordination of a can- didate suspected of doctrinal unsoundness-marks the com- plete and final overthrow of the " old lights" as a dominant party. Their great fortress, " our ecclesiastical constitution," had been seized, and all its guns were turned upon them. A new generation of ministers, trained under the influences of the great awakening, and indoctrinated to some extent by the writings of Edwards and Bellamy, had come. The era of the New England theology was opening. While the new lights were in the minority, their respect for the ecclesiastical constitu- tion had not been very profound, and on the whole, they can hardly be said to have had much reason to think well of it. But now they found it an exceedingly useful arrangement ;-
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though some of the churches which they had formed, irregu- larly, still stood out against it .* Those ministers in New Ha- ven county, who had so exaggerated and perverted the powers of association and of consociation, found those powers no longer under their control. They, in their turn, were cen- sured and excluded for disorderly proceedings, with singular poetic justice ; and in their turn they found that as long as their churches and parishes stood by them, such censure and exclusion was not very hard to bear.
The second half century of our ecclesiastical confederation, from 1758 to 1808, has its memorable features. During that half century our missionary work began, under the guidance of the General Association. In 1774 the first notice of mis- sions to the new settlements appears upon our records ; and a system of operations was begun which, though often modified according to the lessons of experience and the changes in the work, has never been relinquished. In the year 1800, the first attempt was made by our churches, through the same or- ganization, to send a missionary far hence to the heathen of the wilderness .; But of this topic a special statement has already been given in another form.
* One of these was the White IIaven Church in New IIaven, now commonly known as the North Church. See Dr. Dutton's Historieal Discourses.
t The author of this discourse may be allowed to say that his father, the Reverend David Bacon, was the missionary. Nor will it be impertinent to copy here a few sen- tences concerning him, from a Ilistorical Discourse pronounced at Tallmadge, Ohio, June 24, 1857.
In early life-I know not at what age-he had been the subject of a deep and thor- ough religions experience ; and through his spiritual conflicts and deliverances he had been brought into a special sympathy with the self-sacrificing spirit of Brainerd, that saintly New England missionary who wore his young life out among the Indians of New Jersey and Pennsylvania long ago, and whose biography, written by Jonathan Edwards, has wakened in later ages, and in other lands, such minds as Henry Mar- tyn, to a holy emulation. Thus, at a period when missions to the heathen were little thought of, he cherished in his solitary bosom the fire that is now glowing, less in- tensely indeed, but with a vital warmth, in millions of Christian hearts. He longed for that self-denying service ; but there were none to send him forth. Disappoint- ments in his worldly business inflamed, instead of discouraging, his desire of a ser- vice so self-denying, and to worldly minds so uninviting. With limited opportunities and means, he devoted himself to study in preparation for that work. At last the
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That date, 1774, which marks the beginning of our mis- sions, is suggestive of another topic. In 1769, the General Association was assembled in this town of Norwich ; and then, for the first time, " the dark and threatening aspect of Divine Providence upon our nation and land, in regard to their civil liberties and public interest," is noticed on the record. In 1774, a spirited and patriotic " letter of condolence" is prepared and sent " to the ministers of Boston, under the present melan- choly circumstances of that town," "suffering the severe resentment of the British Parliament." In 1775, the General Association, " taking into serious consideration the distressing and melancholy state of public affairs in the British American col- onies, and the dangers they are now threatened with from the oppressive measures of the British Court," summon themselves and their brethren, and the churches, to the religious duties of so great a crisis, and especially to devout humiliation and earnest prayer. In 1776, the " General Association of the pas-
the Trustees of the Connecticut Missionary Society, two years after the institution of that Board, were persuaded to attempt, on a very small scale, a mission to the In- dians; and he was commissioned, for six months, to perform a journey of exploration and experiment among the Indian tribes in that unknown wilderness beyond Lake Erie. On the eighth of August, 1800, he set forth from Hartford ; and the scale of liberality on which that mission was to be supported may be estimated from the fact that the missionary went his way, not only alone, but on foot, and with his lug- gage on his baek, to rejoice in whatever opportunities he might find of being helped along by any charitable traveler with a spare seat in his wagon. Having acquired such information as seemed sufficient to determine the location of the mission, he im- mediately returned, and on the first of January, 1801, having been in the meantime solemnly consecrated to his work by ordination, he set his face towards the wilder- ness again, with his young wife, and her younger brother, a boy of fourteen years, [Beaumont Parks, Esq., now of Springfield, Illinois, ] to encounter the hardships, not of the long journey only, but of that new home to which their journey would conduet them. Of their perils and privations there-of their disappointments and diseour- agements-I might speak, if the time and the occasion would permit. I will only say that as soon as the inevitable expenses of a mission so far remote from all civilized communities, and involving the necessity of an outlay for schools and for industrial operations, began to confound the limited expectations with which the work had been attempted, the Trustees, frightened by unexpected drafts on their treasury, abandoned the enterprise ; and the missionary was ordered to New Connecticut. In the month of August, he left the isle of Mackinaw, with his wife and their two chil- dren, the youngest less than six weeks old ; and after a weary and dangerous voyage, some part of which was performed in an open eanoe, they arrived safe on the soil of the Western Reserve .- Tallmadge Semi-centennial Commemoration, pp. 47 48. 9
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tors of the consociated churches of the Colony of Connecti- cut " sends out, for the first time, a printed document. That publication contains, among other matters, a formal address to the pastors and the churches, portraying the necessity of re- pentance and general reformation, and of seeking God's favor and help at such a crisis. In 1777, the quiet change of a sin- gle word in the customary heading of the minutes, intimates that a great event in the world's history, had taken place : "At a meeting of the General Association of the STATE of Connecticut." The Colony of Connecticut had ceased to be.
Another significant fact records itself upon the minutes for 1788. " On motion made by the Association of the western district of New Haven county, the Association voted that the slave-trade is UNJUST, and that every justifiable measure ought to be taken to suppress it. Voted also that Drs. Goodrich, Ed- wards and Wales be a committee to draw up an address and petition to the General Assembly, that some effectual laws may be made for the abolition of the slave- trade." A reference to the records of the State will show that at the next session of the legislature the slave-trade was prohibited, and heavy penal- ties denounced against it. This action, however, in the Gen- eral Association of 1788, was by no means the beginning of agitation by the pastors of Connecticut against the slave-trade, or against slavery. Long before that date, the pulpit had given an unequivocal testimony against the injustice of converting human beings into merchandize. For example, I have before me here a printed copy of " a sermon preached to the Corpora- tion of Freemen in Farmington, at their meeting on Tuesday, September 20, 1774, and published at their desire." The occa- sion of the meeting was the semi-annual election of repre- sentatives to the legislature. The preacher was Levi Hart a native of Farmington, but then, and for a long time after- wards the honored " pastor of a church in Preston."* Lib-
* Dr. Hart's parish in Preston is now the town of Griswold.
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erty is the subject of the sermon ; and on the title-page is that holy motto, " The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because he hath annointed me-to proclaim liberty to the captives." Treating of liberty, the preacher could not but treat of slavery. In the preface to his pamphlet, he offers it as his reason for consenting to publish his discourse, " that the subject and oc- casion gave him opportunity to cast in his mite for the oppress- ed and injured Africans whose canse he thought himself bound to plead, and to bear his testimony against the cruel and bar- barous slave-trade." He " pretends not to pronounce on the impropriety of the slave-trade in a political view-this would be out of his province ; but he would submit to the gentlemen of the law, whether the admission of slavery in a government so democratical as that of the colony of Connecticut, doth not tend to the subversion of its happy constitution." He adds, " Be this as it may, if the slave-trade is contrary to the law of nature, which is the law of God, it is more than time it was ef- fectually prohibited." He professes himself " fully convinced that there is no more reason or justice in our enslaving the Af- ricans than there would be in their enslaving us." In the ser- mon itself, he says, " Of all the enjoyments of the present life, that of liberty is the most precious and valuable, and a state of slavery the most gloomy to a generous mind ; to enslave men, therefore, who have not forfeited their liberty, is a most atro- cious violation of one of the first laws of nature." He pro- nounces " the horrible slave-trade, carried on by numbers, and tolerated by authority in this country," "a flagrant violation of the law of nature, of the natural rights of mankind." Such preaching was orthodox before the Declaration of Indepen- dence, and however it may be elsewhere, such preaching has never ceased to be orthodox in Connecticut. In that very year, 1774, the doctrine of that sermon began to take effect upon the legislation of the Colony that had not yet become a state. The bringing of another slave into Connecticut was thence-
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forward prohibited ; and heavy penalties were laid upon the importer and the purchaser. The continued agitation of the great wrong, continued to have its effect upon our legislation. Slavery and the slave-trade, being persistently denounced as wrong, were persistently discouraged by the state. Four years before the date of that memorial from the General Association, slavery itself had been prospectively abolished by an act provi- ding for the freedom of all persons born thereafter. The memo- rial then, from the General Association in 1788, was not a me- morial against the importation of slaves into Connecticut ; for that sort of slave-trade was already effectually prohibited. The law which that memorial asked for, and which was enacted accordingly, was a law making it penal for any citizen of Con- necticut to have any concern in the African slave-trade any- where, " as master, factor, supercargo, owner or hirer, in whole, or in part, of any vessel." It ought not to be forgotten, on such an occasion as this, that the abolition of slavery in this State, and in every state in which it has been abolished as yet, is due in no small measure to the testimony which the min- isters of God's word have given against the moral wrong of slavery.
It was not found in those days, nor was it pretended, that a fearless holding forth of God's word against the wickedness of oppressing the poor, and of buying and selling men for gain, was inconsistent with the prosperity of spiritual religion. The transition is easy, then, to another feature in the history of our second half-century. It deserves our thankful commemoration that while this period began in the depth of the religious de- clension which followed the revival of 1740,-and while the first five and twenty years of the half-century [1758-1783] are dark with signs of growing demoralization, and with the progressive decay of godliness under the influence of war, of political agitation and revolution, of universal insolvency, and of every temptation which comes with the fluctuations of a
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paper currency and with a general failure to fulfill commercial engagements-the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, mark the blessed era of the re- newed and continued influence of God's Holy Spirit in the reviving of religion. From that time forward the blessing has never been entirely withdrawn from our churches. The steady prosperity and progress of religion in the form of a manifested work of God's grace within the soul,-our increa- sed familiarity with the phenomena of conversion as developed in the consciousness and in the life,-and our habit of distin- guishing and teaching our people to distinguish, more carefully and exactly, after the manner of Edwards, between what are and what are not the tests of religious experience-have reac- ted, perhaps, on our theology in some particulars ; and on the other hand, our theology, coming out of its scholastic formu- las, and laying aside, to some extent, in our public minis- trations, the costume of technical phrases, brings forth the ancient and immutable truth with more simplicity, and with less danger of its being perverted to enthusiastic or fanatical ex- travagance, if not with greater power of impression on the conscience and the emotions. May we not say with humility that we have learned, better than our fathers knew-nay that we have learned by their experience and by our own-how to deal with the irregularities and extravagances that frightened them ? By the favor of God, the religious awakenings of the present century, in the field of our immediate care and labor, have been followed with less and less of such reaction and de- pression as followed the great awakening of 1740, and caused it to stand the glorious but lonely landmark of that age.
There are many here to whom the most memorable changes of the last half-century, beginning in 1808, are matters of personal remembrance. Who of us, for example, needs to be reminded that the missionary aspiration and effort which made its little mark upon our records in 1774, and which, from that
:
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time forward, began to mingle itself with all the sympathies and yearnings of devotion in our churches, was only the inti- mation, or the faintly dawning light of a new era of evangel- ism, which in 1808 had not yet begun ? At that date, the only organization which our churches had, through which to act for the propagation of the gospel at home or abroad, was the old Connecticut Missionary Society with its annual contribution in the month of May, taken in all the congregations by virtue of a " brief " from the Governor, and in conformity with a leg- islative order. The entire system of those arrangements by which we are now acting on all the extent of our country, from ocean to ocean, and from the head springs of the Missis- sippi to the Southern Gulf-the entire system by which we . are sending out the knowledge of God in Christ, not only to the waste places and wildernesses of our own broad Union, but to the ends of the earth,-was yet to be developed, and has been the growth of our last half-century.
That annual rescript from the Governor, authorizing a con- tribution in the churches of our order for missions to the new settlements, reminds us of another and most conspicuous fact in the history of the last fifty years. The legal establish- ment of the Saybrook Platform-always an equivocal thing, and more of a burthen than a dignity or immunity to the churches that did not distinctly dissent from the system-was silently but finally repealed in 1784, in a revision of the stat- ute book. The churches and parishes were by that repeal left to adopt whatever scheme of doctrine or of discipline they might severally choose, and to change the same at their disere- tion. But still ours was, in some vague sense, " the standing order. " The adherents of every other religious or ecclesias- tical system had been freed from every burthen or shadow of a burthen ; but public worship in some form was still presu- med, by law, to be the duty of every citizen, and those who did not prefer to be enrolled elsewhere were members of
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our parishes./ Forty-two years ago, this last vestige of the ancient union of our churches with the civil order of the com- monwealth was swept away, and we were placed fairly and unequivocally on that basis of absolute religious liberty which Roger Williams invented as a " permanent establishment " for Rhode Island. That slight change was, in fact, the completed emancipation of our churches./
At the same time, though not wholly by the same process, our churches have recovered their original Congregationalism ; and perhaps I may say without offense, they value it so much the more for their having had some experience of what it is to be without it. Our ancient Congregationalism began to be re- covered in the great awakening of 1740, and in those sharp and strong discussions by which first the Stoddardean Sacramental- ism, and then the half-way covenant were demolished. When that leaven of a national church, and of what John Davenport called a " parish way," had been purged out by sounder doc- trine and by the wide revival of religion as a personal experi- ence, there began to be of course a yearning and a half-con- scious endeavor after the old Congregational way. A natural reaction against the enthusiastic errors of the Separates, made the name of Congregationalism, to some extent obnoxious to ministers and even to churches, of the "standing order ;" and the struggle against the already incipient rationalism of the following age, increased in the clergy at least, a sense of the value of some controlling power over the churches. About sixty years ago, several of the most honored pastors in Con- necticut, gave a public certificate to the effect that the system of church order here was Presbyterianism. I myself remem- ber when the name "Congregational " was not ordinarily known as the proper and distinctive designation of our churches; and when the honored successor of Thomas Hooker and imme- diate predecessor of Dr. Hawes, wrote himself, and printed
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himself "Pastor of the North* Presbyterian Church in Hart- ford. " An alliance with the Americanized Presbyterians of the Middle and Southern States was begun in the common resistance to the proposed establishment of an American Epis- copate by the British government before the revolution, and was renewed after the war of independence, in the expectation, doubtless, that both parties would be gradually assimilated to each other, and would ultimately become one great and powerful body. The events of the last thirty years have taught us most effectually, that the idea once so widely cher- ished, is purely chimerical. We have learned that nothing on earth is more impracticable than the scheme of an organic Pres- byterian unity, extending its jurisdiction over the whole terri- tory of our common country, and binding together the Chris- tian sympathies and co-operative efforts of all who hold our evangelical faith, and who reject, on the one hand, the prelat- ical theory of church government, yet accept, on the other hand, that view of the church and of God's covenant with his people, which regards the children of the church as subjects of baptism. Our exclusive alliance with the Scoto-American Presbyterianism in distinction from the Dutch, the German Re- formed, the Lutheran, and all other organizations of like princi- ples and spirit, may have been wise and useful in its day ; but it has answered its purpose, and has passed away, leaving no trace of its former importance, save the ceremonious but pleasant interchange of single delegates with one fraction of the now broken organization with which our fathers concerted their " plan of union. " Our churches and our ministers, deliv- ered from what had become an "entangling alliance," are content, and more than content with the simple and Scriptural policy which rejects all ecumenical, national, provincial, and classical judicatures ruling the churches of Christ, and recogni-
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