USA > Connecticut > The history of the Episcopal Church in Connecticut, from the settlement of the colony to the death of Bishop Seabury > Part 10
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Writing again in May of the next year to Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, and referring to the influence of his donations to Yale, he adds : "I am very sorry to tell your Lordship how ungrateful New-Haven people have been to the Church, after so many benefactions their College hath received from that quarter, in rais- ing a mob and keeping Mr. Arnold vi et armis from taking possession of the land (which, as I told your Lordship in my last) one Mr. Gregson of London had given him (in trust) to build a church on near the College."
In a letter to a friend in London, (Mr. Sandford,) dated September 12, 1739, he says: "I am obliged to you for your kind offer of your good offices to Mr. Arnold. That gentleman was disappointed of his design of going last Fall, and now he seems to decline it on account of the prospect of war, so that it is un- certain when he will go." The clergy of Connecticut, previous to the date of this letter, had united in a representation of their grievances, and sent home the complaint to the Society; and Mr. Johnson, writing to the Secretary April 5th, 1740, refers to the docu- ment thus : "We laid before the Society a complaint last spring, of the difficulties we sustained from the government here, and Mr. Arnold had leave to come home to support our complaint, which he neglected to do, partly by reason of the unsteadiness of his own disposition and the uncertainty of his continuance in the mission here, and partly because we were flattered by some of the members of our Assembly that they would yet do something for our relief. This they still give us some hopes of, and we have concluded to wait till their next session in May, in hopes that we shall
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not have occasion to trouble the Society any further about it; after which, if nothing be done in our favor, we shall, at least, send to the Society the proper mate- rials for the support of our complaint. But since Mr. Arnold has left us, being removed to Staten Island, it is very uncertain whether any of us shall incline to go home on this affair. This gentleman's leaving his people will cast a great additional burden upon me, on whom they will depend to administer to them till they are supplied again ; on which account I beg the Society will favorably consider their address sent last fall, and still think of continuing that Mission."
Twelve days later, in a communication to his friend in London, he notes: "Mr. Arnold has been in a very unsteady disposition of late, and is now about moving to Staten Island, N. Y., so that I ques- tion whether he will go home at all." He certainly did not go home from his mission in the Colony of Connecticut; for Mr. Johnson, in another letter to Dr. Bearcroft, written in the autumn of this same year, after referring to the old annoyances and diffi- culties, says: "The unsettled condition of some of our churches with respect to their ministers is also a great disadvantage to us. There is now a proposal that Mr. Beach should change with Mr. Arnold and go to Staten Island and Newark. He is indeed a very worthy and useful man, and nobody could do more good there than he, but then the loss of him would be an unspeakable damage to us here. Mr. Morris is in many respects a gentleman of good accomplishments, but it does not seem likely that he will suit or be suited with the disposition of this country people, so that I much doubt whether he will be happy in them
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or they in him; and I wish that he were better pro- vided for, and that some young man previously ac- quainted with the country, or that could suit his dis- position to it, were provided for them."
The Rev. Theophilus Morris, here mentioned, was an English clergyman who succeeded Mr. Arnold in the Mission, and had his residence at West Haven. In his first report made to the Society, September 13, 1740, he says : "I was received by the church-people with no small pleasure, for, upon Mr. Arnold leaving them, they seemed to despair of having another to succeed him; beside, the Dissenters used to boast and affirm confidently that the Society would never send here another Missionary, which was some mor- tification to them, who are a people not to be despised, and are ready enough to express their gratitude." And farther on in the same letter he writes: "Should I give you an account of the Geography of my mis- sion, you would find it large enough for a Diocese ; but I would not be understood to mean this by way of complaint of the difficulty and length of the roads; and if I may be allowed to complain of anything, it must be of the wretched fanaticism that runs so high in this country, and a body would be apt to think higher than it did in England in Cromwell's time, which does not so well suit one of my complexion ; yet I have been serviceable in the Church, and will endeavor to be more so."
During his ministry and that of his successor, and of course chiefly under their direction, the present house of worship in West Haven was carried on to completion. It was reported to the Society as almost finished in May, 1745, and it is remarkable among the
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Episcopal churches of this State as being the oldest, and, except the edifice at Brooklyn, the only one now standing, of those which were erected in the lifetime of him who has been styled the "Father of Episcopacy in Connecticut." It is a fair specimen, without the mod- ern improvements, of the architecture of the smaller churches built in colonial times, and it stands in the village on that very spot where the piety of the early churchmen placed it, surrounded by their graves, and by the graves of their "children unto the third and fourth generation." The members and professors of the Church of England, living in New Haven, went out there to attend the public services on Sunday and at other times, and thus honored their Divine Master, and nurtured their conscientious principles, until they succeeded in building here a church of their own.
During the period covered by this and the preced- ing chapter, churches have been erected or com- menced in North Groton, Hebron, Norwalk, Derby, and West Haven, besides the second and larger edi- fice at Fairfield, and two Missionaries have been added to the list of the clergy, making the whole number six. We look now into the stormy times of Whit- field, but the Church has become a power in the colony, and a fearless vindicator, as all along she had been, of a pure and Apostolic faith. The clergy kept their eyes upon every spot where fam- ilies indicated a preference for Episcopacy, and they visited them, and preached and baptized in their houses, when no public or "upper rooms" could be secured. In this way those feelings of attachment to the Church, which had been revived in the hearts of many of the intelligent and thoughtful laymen of
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Connecticut, were extended to their neighbors; and as the months rolled on, new demands were made upon the services and ministrations of the clergy, and they were called into distant towns and villages to cross some child in Baptism, or to read over a de- parted Christian the beautiful Office for "the Burial of the Dead." The penal laws of the colony were enforced with the utmost rigor, in order to check this growth of feeling in favor of the Church; but neither fines nor imprisonments were of any avail, for the consciences of men were inwrought with their religion, and they would believe and worship in the light of reason and truth and Scripture. No mantle is so broad as that of charity, and let us confess that what was done by the constituted authorities of the land was not always done in obedience to the wishes of the people. The reaction of public sentiment in many places proved this, and from the first the Missionaries and the Congregational ministers often maintained a familiar intercourse with each other in private life, and showed on various occasions a mutual respect. It was quite evident that a feeble reverence for the Church of England lingered in the breasts of the de- scendants of some of the sternest Puritans. In spite of the political dissensions of the past, they could not altogether forget the land of their ancestors, and the common salvation which was there as well as here. They sympathized with the sentiment of the excel- lent Higginson of Salem, when he saw the shores of his native country receding from view, and called his children around him on the deck of the vessel to utter these truthful and touching words: "We will not say, as the separatists were wont to say at their leaving
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of England,-Farewell, Babylon ! Farewell, Rome ! But we will say, Farewell, dear England! Farewell the Church of God in England, and all the Christian friends there. We do not go to New England as sep- aratists from the Church of England; though we can- not but separate from the corruptions in it; but we go to practise the positive part of Church reforma- tion, and propagate the Gospel in America."1
1 Mather's Magnaliu, Vol. I. p. 362.
CHRIST CHURCHI, WEST HAVEN, Erected in 1740.
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CHAPTER IX.
ARRIVAL OF WHITEFIELD IN NEW ENGLAND, AND RELIGIOUS ENTHUSIASM.
A. D. 1740-1742.
IN the autumn of 1740 the Rev. George Whitefield arrived in New England direct from Charleston, and produced an excitement never before known in our religious history. He was a clergyman of the Church of England, ordained, when he was in the 22d year of his age, a Deacon by the Bishop of Gloucester. By his faithful and affectionate ministrations to those who were sick or in prison, he so won the heart of that amiable prelate, that, besides ordination, he gave him " friendly counsel from his lips, and money from his purse." In the lowest grade of the ministry, he vis- ited America, and landed at Savannah in May, 1738, -having been attracted to Georgia by the account which the Wesleys had given of its great destitution of spiritual privileges. His wonderful powers as a preacher drew multitudes to hear him; and because the Bishop of London and the Archbishop of Canter- bury had approved his zealous labors, he was at first received as an Episcopal clergyman, and encouraged in his benevolent enterprise of establishing an Orphan House in Georgia, ostensibly upon the model of that founded by the celebrated Professor Francke in Ger. many. Four months after his arrival in this country
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he felt himself " obliged," to use his own words, "to return to England, to receive Priest's orders, and make a beginning towards laying a foundation for the Or- phan House." But he was not greeted upon his re- turn with the cordiality which he anticipated. His erratic course had already begun to reveal itself; and the extravagance which marked his movements, and the manner in which he spoke of the Church, whose doctrines, worship, and discipline he was ordained to defend, excited the just suspicions of the Bishops and clergy in England, and many of them not only refused him their sympathy and support, but openly opposed his enthusiasm and irregularities. Remon- strances and prohibitions, however, availed not to check him in the path which he had chosen. He was finally advanced to the Priesthood by his personal friend, (Dr. Benson,) - the same Bishop who had admitted him to the Diaconate; and returning to America, he travelled backwards and forwards be- tween New York and Philadelphia, and Philadelphia and Charleston, preaching, when he was not allowed the use of a church or meeting-house, in the open air, - a practice which he had inaugurated in England, and justified by saying, "I thought it might be doing the service of my Creator, who had a mountain for his pulpit and the heavens for a sounding-board, and who, when his Gospel was refused by the Jews, sent his servants into the highways and hedges." The arrival of Whitefield in Rhode Island was followed by an enthusiasm which spread like a flame of fire through the cities and villages of New England. Growing more bold under the impulse of his successes and excited feelings, he threw aside, as an oppressive
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yoke, all reverence for the authority and teaching of the Church ; and thereupon the Independent or Congregational ministers opened wide their arms to embrace him, and their sanctuaries to admit him, that he might be heard by the vast throngs which every- where crowded to their portals. With few exceptions they invited him into their pulpits, - and they could not well do otherwise, for leading divines of Massa- chusetts had solicited his visit, - and people of all de- nominations attended his preaching, some from curi- osity, but more from an awakened interest in religious concerns. As he approached Boston, he was met on the road by the son of the governor and several minis- ters and other distinguished gentlemen, who escorted him to the city, and " hailed him as a special messen- ger from Heaven, sent to awaken, alarm, and convert." Here his voice was lifted in all the meeting-houses, and sometimes on the Common ; and day after day his congregations still increased, and numerous instances of remarkable conversion, through his instrumentality, were reported. "It was Puritanism revived," said the venerable Walker of Roxbury ; and Dr. Colman pro- nounced the Sunday on which he officiated in his own pulpit " the happiest day he ever saw in his life." At Cambridge, the seat of Harvard University, as else- where, the weak and timid were excited and terrified, and tutors and students shared in the effects of his bold theology and extraordinary eloquence. When he took his leave of Boston, it was supposed that twenty thousand persons assembled to listen to his fare- well sermon.
He had heard in England of Jonathan Edwards; and having read his narrative of the religious interest
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awakened in Northampton five years before, he ear- nestly desired an interview with that eminent divine, and proceeded to visit him, leaving behind, in the towns through which he passed, those surprising re- sults which had attended his ministrations in Boston and its vicinity. Late in October of the same year he reached New Haven, and was affectionately wel- comed and entertained at the house of Mr. James Pierpont, a brother-in-law of Edwards, and a sympa- thizer with his religious views. The General Assem- bly was then in session, and Whitefield improved the occasion to fulfil his office of an itinerant preacher, and meet the constant demands upon him for services and sermons. People came in from the country a distance of twenty miles to hear him, and many neighboring ministers also sought the opportunity of personal intercourse with a clergyman whose zeal and elo- quence were so widely known .- It is reported that numbers, to his joy, were daily impressed; and tarrying over the Sunday, he waited with courteous attention upon Talcott, the Governor, who encouraged him with the cheerful gratulation, "Thanks be to God, for such refreshings in our way to heaven."
On Monday morning he set out upon his journey southward, and preached with his usual attraction in all the " sea-side towns" between New Haven and New York. Writing from Charleston, in December, whither he had returned, he thus remarked : "It is now the seventy-fifth day since I arrived at Rhode Island. My body was then weak, but the Lord hath much re- newed its strength. I have been enabled to preach, I think, an hundred and seventy-five times in public, besides exhorting frequently in private. I have trav-
-
.
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elled upwards of eight hundred miles, and have gotten upwards of seven hundred pounds sterling, in goods, provisions, and money, for the orphans. Never did I perform my journey with so little fatigue, or see such a continuance of the divine presence in the con- gregations to whom I have preached."
In this whole account of the earliest visit of White- field to New England we have inserted not a line as evidence of any public or ecclesiastical disapproba- tion. Cautious divines of the standing order, with calm judgment and sober reflection, might have looked anxiously on and doubted the full propriety of his course, but no voice of censure was raised, and it hardly would have been heard amid the excitements of the hour, and the transports of popular enthusiasm. The sparks of religious discord, however, had been kindled, and they soon burst forth into a flame which burnt with prodigious fury. At first the strange and vehement invectives of Whitefield against the Bishops and clergy of the Church of England were welcomed and encouraged by the Independent ministers of Con- necticut, as calculated to check among their own people the growing attachment to her worship and doctrines. But the extravagant demonstrations which ensued, and the sobbings and swoonings under the preaching of Gilbert Tennent; the many lay exhorters who sprang up, especially in the eastern part of the colony, and propagated the most "horrid notions of God and the Gospel"; the imprudences and irregu- larities of James Davenport, the bodily agitations and outcries which he pronounced "tokens of divine favor," his attempt to examine his brethren in the ministry as to their spiritual state, and publicly to decide whether
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they were converted or not; the controversies that arose upon doctrinal points, upon Calvinism and Ar- minianism, dividing the people into two great parties, called the New Lights and the Old Lights; the itiner- ant preachers, who, without any charge of their own, or without special invitation, left their appropriate spheres of duty, and went up and down in the land, promoting the popular excitement and casting "as- persion on the schools of the prophets"; the "hideous doings" at the night meetings of these revivalists, their pretended power of reaching the human heart by some spiritual process peculiar to themselves, and their severe denunciation of those who opposed them; all these things turned the religious assemblies into scenes of disgraceful uproar, generated strife in every quarter, and bade defiance to the most assiduous efforts of spiritual or secular authority to restrain them, so that the regularly constituted pastors soon began to tremble for the strength and security of their own prevailing order. In the midst of such religious delirium, confusion, and peril, the ministra- tions of the Church of England were continued with unabated zeal and steadfastness, and many repaired with gratitude to her communion, as to the ark which could alone carry them in safety over the raging floods.
The prudence, the watchfulness, and piety of the clergy, and the personal influence of Johnson, still the most distinguished among them, helped largely to produce these gains and advance the cause of Epis- copacy. "The duties and labors of my mission," said Punderson, writing from North Groton to the Bishop of London, towards the end of 1741, "are exceedingly
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increased by the surprising enthusiasms that rage among us, the centre of which is the place of my resi- dence." And in the same letter he added: "The most astonishing effects attend the night meetings; screech- ings, faintings, convulsions, visions, apparent death for twenty or thirty hours, actual possession with evil spirits, as they own themselves. The spirit in all is remarkably bitter against the Church of England." The labors of that Missionary became so incessant in consequence of the popular frenzy, that at one period he was scarcely allowed the privilege of spending a whole day in his study or with his family. Fruits of uncharitableness and spiritual pride naturally thrive in such a season, and the new-light preacher and his followers in Groton declared Punderson and all those under him to be "unconverted, and going straight down to hell." A like condemnation fell upon the Missionaries of the Church in other quarters. Even so earnest and good a Christian as Johnson did not escape the harsh judgment of Hezekiah Gold, the Congregational minister at Stratford, who pronounced him and his people unconverted, and not only so, but intruders and workers of all manner of mischief. In midsummer, 1741, after waiting "a considerable time" for a plain, personal admonition from the author of these charges, promised through a friend, Johnson ad- dressed to him a letter, in which these words occur: "I thought it my duty to write a few lines to you in the spirit of Christian meekness on this subject. And I assure you I am nothing exasperated at these hard censures, much less will I return them upon you. No, sir! God forbid I should censure you as you censure me! I have not so learned Christ! I will rather use
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the words of my dear Saviour concerning those that censure so, and say, 'Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.'" He closed the letter by asking for the evidence of his not being converted, saying, "Bad as I am, I hope I am open to conviction, and earnestly desirous not to be mistaken in an affair of so great importance; and the rather because I have not only my own, but many other souls to answer for, whom I shall doubtless mislead if I am misled myself. In compassion, therefore, to them and me, pray be so kind as to give us your reasons why you think us in such a deplorable condition." People with their eyes open could see that the fruits of faith, or the constant and beautiful exemplification of Christi- anity, was better than any mere theories of conver- sion; and hence the increase of the Missionary's pas- toral charge in Stratford was a very natural result of the unhappy spirit of his restless opponent. The anecdote is well authenticated, that, meeting a parish- ioner one day, he was inquired of by him, whether his Church was increasing. "Yes," replied Johnson, "it is increasing. I am a feeble instrument in the hands of God; but thanks be to him, he has placed my left-handed brother Gold here, who makes six churchmen while I can make one."
By this time the rapid growth of Episcopacy was visible in several of the interior towns of Connecticut, and the erection of houses of worship was soon com- menced. The Rev. Mr. Morris, writing to the Secre- tary of the Society from Derby, June 20, 1741, says: "I have lately been at Simsbury, where I found about thirty families of our communion ; they are in hopes of having a minister at last, and have accordingly
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prepared some timber to build a church. I remitted their rates, which amount to about fifty pounds of this currency, to help them forward with the build- ing." And in the same letter he speaks of having "taken another church into his care at Wallingford, which consists of twelve families. I engaged to at- tend them once a quarter, which they seem to be satisfied with, for they know it is as much as I can do for them." Three months before this letter was written, the members of the Church of England “in- habiting in Wallingford and the adjacent parts," North Haven and Cheshire, (the latter place was a society within the limits of Wallingford until 1780,) united and formed a parish by the name of Union Church; and in the appeal which they sent over to the Bishop of London for assistance they stated: "With melan- choly hearts we crave your Lordship's patience, while we recite that divers of us have been imprisoned, and our goods from year to year distrained from us for taxes, levied for the building and supporting meeting- houses ; and divers actions are now depending in our courts of law in the like cases. And when we have petitioned our governor for redress, notifying to him the repugnance of such actions to the laws of England, he has proved a strong opponent to us; but when the other party has applied to him for advice how to proceed against us, he has lately given his sentence ' to enlarge the gaol and fill it with them.'"
The demand for more Missionaries in the Colony of Connecticut was urgent at this period. Caner early wrote, that while the religious enthusiasm had made no progress at Fairfield, it had spread at Norwalk, Stamford, Ridgefield, and other places, and the effects
9
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of it had been the means of "reconciling many sober, considerate people to the communion of the Church." At Ridgefield an edifice for public worship was built as early as 1744.
In the autumn of 1741, Mr. Richard Caner, his brother, who has already been mentioned as doing good service for the Church at Norwalk in the capa- city of a lay reader, went over to England for ordina- tion, and among the letters which he bore with him was one from Johnson, recommending him to the favor of Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, and in which he took occasion to speak of "the accession of the new Rector" of Yale College, Mr. Clap, and to compliment him as "a solid, rational gentleman, much freer from bigotry than his predecessor." Referring to the enthusiasm consequent upon the preaching of Whitefield and his disciples, he added: "Many of the scholars have been possessed of it, and two of this year's candidates de- nied their degrees for their disorderly and restless endeavors to propagate it. Indeed, Whitefield's dis- ciples in this country have much improved upon the foundation which he laid; so that we have now pre- vailing among us the most odd and unaccountable enthusiasm that ever obtained in any age or nation."
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