USA > Connecticut > The story of the Diocese of Connecticut : a new branch of the vine (Espiscopal Church) > Part 15
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When the General Convention met in Philadelphia, the delegates were confronted by a document intended to force the issue of union. It was a proposal by the clergy in Massachusetts and New Hampshire that White and Provoost should join Seabury in consecrating Edward Bass of Newbury as their bishop. The delegates probably received this with real relief, as the way out of a painful dilemma. After hearing Seabury's letters expressing willingness to attend, the Convention resolved that "it is the opinion of this Convention, that the consecration of the Right Rev. Dr. Seabury to the Episcopal office is valid,"17 and that the Church in the United States had a complete and competent order of bishops in the English and Scottish successions. They requested the three bishops to consecrate Bass, and proposed that Seabury and the New England delegates should attend an adjourned session in September, to agree upon articles of union and discipline.
To remove any possible objections to this plan, an address was mailed to the English archbishops. A committee was ap- pointed to expedite the meeting and Bishop White mailed a letter to Seabury, assuming that he would come and rejoicing in the prospect of a speedy union. It would be hard to conceive a more diplomatic epistle than the one he wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury, explaining the complicated proceeding.
Doctor Smith assumed the task of giving Seabury full details of the Convention's action and invitation, and assured him of White's friendship and willingness to recognize his consecration. Smith invited the prelate to stay at his home in Philadelphia, with Doctor Moore, who would accompany Seabury from New York to the Quaker City. Upon White's recommendation, the College of Philadelphia would confer D.D. degrees upon Bass, Parker, and Leaming. In short, the New Englanders would walk to the
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Convention upon a red carpet. And as if all this were not enough, the committee informed Bishop Seabury that the second article of the constitution had been amended to allow New England to omit lay delegates.
When Seabury received the official invitation and other communications in August, he at once decided to go, and wrote to Parker expressing a hope to meet him in Philadelphia. On the following day he accepted the invitation in a letter to White, pledging his efforts to secure representation from Connecticut. With Parker, Jarvis, Bela Hubbard, and Doctor Moore, he ap- peared at Philadelphia. On October 2, along with the New Eng- land delegates, he signed an agreement to the constitution, as modified acceptably to them on that very day. That half sheet of paper marked the Church's return to peace and unity. The modi- fication declared the right of the House of Bishops to originate and propose acts for the concurrence of the House of Deputies, and to veto acts proposed by them, if not accepted by a four-fifths vote. It was resolved that the next Convention would consider a full veto by the bishops.
The New Englanders were further pleased by a decision to ignore the "Proposed Book," and to use the English Prayer Book as the model for the new one. Seabury was requested to preach the opening sermon at the next meeting. Most gratifying of all, the Convention adopted a report recommending that, during recess, the Standing Committee should approve the consecration by the three bishops of anyone duly elected and qualified, if it should be agreeable to the English archbishops. Thus Connecticut entered into complete union to perpetuate the Episcopal Church in America, and Bishop Seabury received a full acknowledgment of his rights. After all his trials and sacrifices, he could indeed say that he had won a great triumph. The Church's next battle would be for the achievement of full religious liberty for Episco- palians and all other dissenters from Connecticut's established church.
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CHAPTER TWELVE
CHRISTIAN LIBERALISM AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY
THE RISE OF LIBERALISM
T THE generation after the Revolution was unfavorable to religion. The long war brought confusion, devastation, plunder, corruption, and relaxed moral standards. Many desperate people readily yielded to irreligious appeals, and endorsed the cynicism of the newspaper rhyme -
"Let the gulled fools the toils of war subdue,
Where bleed the many to enrich the few."
They knew that profiteers had feathered their nests and politicians had battened on confiscated Loyalist estates, while American soldiers were suffering inhuman privations.
The moral climate also favored a growth of crass materialism and infidelity. The pious, of course, blamed it upon French free- thinkers whose polish, wit, and superficial learning seduced callow collegians and the young military set. Doubt quietly undermined authority and raised a questioning eyebrow at revealed religion. It was said that in Yale College "an aspiring, ambitious youth hardly dared avow his belief in the Christian religion."1 Few students made a serious profession of faith at the time when Timothy Dwight left his rural parish of Greenfield Hill in 1795 to become president of the college. He arrived with a quiet determination to shake Yale and Connecticut from the prevailing religious torpor. He succeeded by harping upon the inevitable tendency of religious infidelity to undermine, and of Christianity to support, morals, religion, and government.
The prospect for all the churches apparently was threatening. Congregationalism was establishing very few new parishes and the Episcopalians did little better. Baptists and Methodists made some headway against indifference, largely at the expense of the older churches. But no period in the epic of American religion ever has been wholly a "lost generation." Certain currents in the
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postwar years eventually swelled into the flood of revival around 1800, and inspired a mighty effort to spread Connecticut's religious influence into new states.
Episcopalians, cast upon their own resources, rallied around Bishop Seabury. Congregationalists promoted revivals, and in 1798 founded the Missionary Society of Connecticut to convert the Indians and send missionaries to Western settlements. Baptists established associations which supplied vacant pulpits and planned missions. Meanwhile, the state was swiftly covered by a network of Methodist circuits. These movements all con- verged into a renewal of the religious spirit, the "Second Great Awakening", in the 1820's, and encouraged missions, and Bible, tract and education societies, as well as Sunday Schools.
A peculiar feature of this era was the appearance of "liberal Christians," valiant fighters in the cause of religious free- dom. They were the spiritual heirs of the deep unrest left by the preaching of Whitefield, which had shaken the old foundations more than most people suspected. Every observant traveler in New England noted the religious seeking. John Ettwein, a Moravian missionary from Pennsylvania, wrote in his diary that nowhere had he seen "such fantastic beliefs and so many unstable spirits."
The Awakening had contrary effects. Some people returned to primitive Congregationalism and some became Episcopalians. Others became disgusted sceptics and discerned a symbol of re- ligious decline when Whitefield's candle flickered out as he preached in the doorway of his lodging just before his death. Many intelligent people recoiled from revivalist preaching and sought to make religion liberal and humane. Like the minister who interrupted one of Jonathan Edwards's sermons, they cried, "Is not God a god of mercy?" They accepted the doctrine of free will and the ideal of man's inborn goodness and capacity for moral perfection. Some Episcopalians quietly cherished a belief in uni- versal salvation, and joined other people in seeking new com- munions with liberal doctrine.
Even before 1750 many New England Congregational minis- ters were said to be "liberals." Their type of Christianity streamed from several fountains. Radical theology stressed the unity rather than the trinity of God. German idealism influenced many New
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England theologians and philosophers. The humanitarian passion of the Revolutionary period favored social and political reform. These elements blended with Puritan moral seriousness and Ameri- can love of individual liberty. The resulting spiritual ferment freed the churches from stagnant ideas, humanized society, and promoted social justice.
Liberal Christianity became the faith of a determined band of social reformers, led mostly by middle-class intellectuals. They inspired New England's crusades for better schools, prison reform, factory laws, abolition of slavery, women's rights, and other causes. Their idealism eventually penetrated the conservative Episcopal Church and inspired some of its priests to preach a social gospel (See Chapter Twenty-Three, The Social Gospel).
The new thought appealed to some wide-awake ministers and laymen in Connecticut. Repelled by Puritan orthodoxy, ap- palled by religious indifference, and doubtful of Deistic belief in an impersonal divinity, they turned hopefully toward the liberal ministers of eastern Massachusetts. Those leaders opposed revival- ism and believed in universal "salvation by character," the essen- tial goodness of human nature, the loving fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and religious freedom. Some even proclaimed the purely human nature of Jesus and the natural character of the Bible.
Liberalism came into the open at Episcopalian King's Chapel in Boston, which in the 1780's called James Freeman of Harvard as its minister and adopted a Unitarian liturgy. Unitarians elected the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard in 1805, and in 1825 many churches in eastern Massachusetts organized the American Unitarian Association. Unitarianism developed into a religion of humanity, a social and moral attitude rather than a definite creed. It was too intellectual and cool to appeal to the masses, but was saved from frigidity and exclusiveness by its humane social think- ers, like the Rev. Samuel J. May of Brooklyn, Connecticut. These thinkers helped to inspire a rebirth of philosophy, theology, and literature, humanizing the isolated culture of New England.
Unitarianism as a denomination made slight impression upon Connecticut. It flowered in the Harvard Yard but withered in the parishes of Yale graduates, who had been trained under Timothy Dwight. They regarded it as a noxious weed to be rooted out and
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deposed several of their brethren who tried to transplant it. Led by the fiery evangelist, Lyman Beecher, they organized a successful crusade against it. Thus did Unitarianism become largely a quiet current flowing from mind to mind, for few dared to profess it publicly, as did Luther Willson and Samuel J. May of the Congre- gational church in Brooklyn, Connecticut's lone Unitarian outpost.
Unitarianism was surpassed in numbers by more popular liberal movements. The most widespread and militant was Uni- versalism, which gave Connecticut liberals their first great leader - English-born John Murray. In youth he began to preach universal salvation, the fatherhood of God, and the brotherhood of man. In 1770 he resolved to retire from the ministry and live in America. A storm changed his life by driving his ship aground on the lone- some coast of New Jersey at a place appropriately named "Good Luck." There he was welcomed as a long-expected preacher and began a missionary career with few equals in American history. As a Continental Army chaplain, Murray corresponded with Con- necticut patriot leaders and spread his influence all over the state. Throngs rapturously heard his persuasive plea that men should believe in their native goodness and affirm their faith in a fatherly and loving God.
Congregational ministers became alarmed by Murray's inroads, and in 1793 their General Association condemned Uni- versalism as a "censurable heresy." One of Murray's steadfast friends was John Tyler, rector of Christ Church in Norwich, who lent him his pulpit and openly professed his views. The Episcopal church in Southington became Universalist and seceded from the Diocese, after Bishop Jarvis refused to visit it or consecrate the church. The new creed even penetrated the Episcopalian strong- holds in Fairfield County, where one of its most effective preachers was the Churchman Solomon Glover of Newtown. Another was Menzies Rayner of Monroe, formerly the first rector of Christ Church, Hartford. He resigned the priesthood in a dignified letter to Bishop Brownell, which suggests how much sweeter church history would be if all dissenters could behave so charitably.
Like other liberal apostles, Universalists were hounded by the established church ministers, who denounced them as heretics corrupted by revolutionary "enlightenment" and infidelity. Because they opposed the state church and championed religious freedom,
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the Congregational-Federalist oligarchy denounced them, and orthodox ministers refused to appear in public with Universalist preachers.
Episcopalians were pushed into an embarrassing position by the rise of this religious liberalism. Bishops Jarvis and Brownell publicly deplored the "secret vein of Universalism" in some parishes. Yet Episcopalians realized that liberals were their natural friends in the struggle to abolish the state church and win complete religious liberty.
Equally embarrassing was the rise of Methodism, which was a child of the Church and bore evidences of her nurture. Headed by John and Charles Wesley, Methodists revolted against contented worldliness, and reflected the zealous spirit of the previous age and of the better Nonjurors. They regarded society as hardly above sheer paganism, for England had not wholly out- lived the reaction against Puritanism after the Royalist and Episcopal Restoration of 1660, and the Church still leaned upon privilege. Without serious grievances, Protestant Dissent lost fervor after the Toleration Act of 1689, and inclined toward the liberalism of literary and philosophical leaders who intellectualized and rationalized religion.
THE METHODIST CRUSADE
The Methodists preached to a nation that was quietly ripening for the revived idea of a loving God. Modern finance and mechanical invention were making England the factory of the western world. Toiling masses, huddled in "the smoking town with its murky cowl,"2 were spiritually destitute and hungry for a vital religion. They regarded the Church as a preserve of the rich and well-born, and the Dissenting chapel as a sectarian club.
While Wesley and his friends deplored its apathy, they still regarded the Church as their spiritual mother. They shunned mostly the idea of separation, but faced it when barred from pul- pits and thwarted by censure if they tried to reach the masses by "enthusiastic" field preaching. They gradually ceased to be a pious society in the Church, and assumed authority to ordain preachers and administer the sacraments in their own chapels.
American Methodism - organized into a conference in 1773 - steadily drifted toward independence, encouraged especially
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by the Irish preachers who resented English dominance and Wes- ley's conservatism. The Revolution promoted separation by com- pelling Loyalist preachers to leave the country. It came at Christmas, 1784, when the Conference organized the Methodist Episcopal Church, after Wesley had ordained a bishop for America. Samuel Seabury, consecrated in Scotland only a few weeks before, returned to his dioeese to find Methodism already winning some of his people.
Anglican and Puritan Connecticut associated Methodist enthusiasm with unquiet memories of Whitefield. It looked down its nose at people who worshipped in rigging lofts, barraeks, and barns. It did not welcome "wild Irish" preachers named O'Kelley and Moriarty and women exhorters like Barbara Heek. Methodism flew like fire in dry stubble. The popular mind was seething hotly under the erust of Calvinist dogma and social respectability in the state ehureh. Methodist Bishop Asbury, a former Episcopalian, grievously noted the religious formalism in his diary whenever he visited the state. The flame of revival was blown chiefly by the eloquent Virginian, Jesse Lee, another former Churchman. He first eame in 1789 and won the common folk by his attractive personality and homely wit. Repeatedly he traveled over Con- neetieut, singing in the streets and preaching under wayside trees a gospel of redeeming love and spiritual rebirth.
Those visits seattered seeds of faith that were never choked by the thorns of persecution. While the minister, the magistrate, and the tithing-man scowled at them, the fearless eireuit-riders preached in homes, barns, and schoolhouses. Remote hill towns and baek roads they knew well. Everywhere there sprang up plain little chapels with hard benches and box pulpits, and candles and oil lamps for evening services. Simplicity impressed the un- churched masses, who felt that the exhorters intensely believed in something. Their lively meetings appealed to people bored by scholarly diseourses and political harangues in the pulpit. Meth- odists preached from the heart, not a notebook, about free will, good works, and a loving God. The local "elasses," small and neighborly groups, often brought people together for the first time in their homespun, isolated lives. They ceased to mind being fined, imprisoned, locked out of town halls and schools, derided as mere uneouth ranters, socially snubbed, and slandered as hypocrites.
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Persecution stiffened their determination to unite with other dissenters to pull down the state church. The Standing Order was doomed, and revealed its desperation in a bitter anti-Methodist war of ink. After Lee had preached a powerful sermon against Calvinism in Weston, a wag told a wandering tinker that he would find work if he could mend the hole the Methodists were likely to make in the Saybrook Platform. (See Chapter One, pp. 7-8). Methodists soon lined up with Jefferson's rising democratic party to abolish the parish system and the church tax and secure religious freedom. Methodist camp meetings are believed to have suggested the statewide Jeffersonian rallies. Methodist respect for the common people propelled aristocratic Connecticut un- willingly along the road to democracy.
LIBERALS UNITE
The pace of the march was quickened by the evangelistic "Christians," a distinctly American group derived from Methodism and other denominations. They rejected "human creeds" in favor of the reasonably interpreted Bible and the rights of conscience. Although its greatest triumphs were won in the West, New Eng- land welcomed this new liberal faith. By 1815 eastern Connecticut was one of its strongholds. It was a potent champion of religious and political liberty, for its doctrines and government favored primitive democracy. The Christian newspaper, the Herald of Gospel Liberty, had many Connecticut subscribers and joined the Hartford Times and other secular papers in battering the citadels of religious privilege until they cracked and caved in.
A small tributary to the rising liberal flood was a revival of Quakerism, after the purging of nominal members in the Revo- lutionary War. The faithful closed ranks and became concerned for social and moral reform. A new thrill of life pulsed through the small meetings in Connecticut and drew them toward the hosts fighting for religious liberty. All liberal groups voiced the passionate longing of the masses for freedom in the great revo- lutionary era from 1775 to 1815.
Their revered political champion was Thomas Jefferson, the sage of Monticello, author of the Virginia statute for religious freedom. His sympathy for liberal Christianity, expressed in his delightful, friendly letters, was one of the potent influences in
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American religious history. Connecticut's liberal preachers and editors warmly admired him, quoted his opinions, and assailed his Federalist opponents who supported the state church. In his papers in the Library of Congress is an address from "Republican Baptists" in Lebanon, seeking his aid in the struggle for religious liberty.
Although the dissenting groups were sundered by differing theologies, they agreed that the established church must go. The small but vocal liberal groups helped to furnish arguments to dissolve the old order. And as the state emerged from the fight to adopt the Federal Constitution, all dissenters, liberal and conservative, girded themselves to complete what the Revolution had begun.
Reformation of the "Land of Steady Habits" came hard, for political conservatism had been fortified by the battle to ratify the Federal Constitution. William Samuel Johnson, the state's leading Churchman, helped to write and defend it. He and his fellow Episcopalians at first joined the Congregational-Federalist party, and were not disposed to attack it until enraged by its arrogance.
CONSERVATIVE REACTION
The Puritan ruling caste was strengthened temporarily by horror at the anti-religious French Revolutionists, by the religious revival of 1798, and by the reformation of Yale under Timothy Dwight, who resolved to maintain the state church as a bulwark against radicalism. Revived conservatism inspired a spate of pamphlets defending the alliance of church and state. A typical argument - published by Simon Backus at Middletown in 1804 - declared that the civil magistrate was "indispensably bound" by his office to protect and support religion, and that without religious support civil government and society would dissolve.
The reaction appeared in a law of 1791, requiring dissenters to have civil officers sign their certificates of exemption from state-church taxes. A scream of protest soon forced the Assembly to repeal the act and allow dissenters to write their own certificates. A law of 1793 appropriated to various denominations the interest on money from the sale of the state's Western Reserve in Ohio. The dissenters forced its revision to provide funds for schools,
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which remained practically parochial schools of the state church whose ministers dominated their committees.
Still more galling was the social superiority of the established ministers. They were exempt from taxation, delivered election and fast-day sermons, and were conspicuous at political functions. They prolonged their power by an alliance with the aristocratic Federalist "Family Compact," which favored strong government by the rich and well-born, and a limited right to vote. They were the core of the party and controlled Yale College, led by Dwight, whom the irreverent dubbed "the Pope." The Rev. John Ogden, an Episcopal priest who loved to bait the state church, publicly accused Dwight of trying to run the state absolutely. "Con- necticut," he wrote, "is more completely under the administration of a Pope than Italy."3
By 1800 Connecticut was splitting into hostile camps - Congregational Federalists and Jeffersonian Republican Dissenters. The established clergy convinced many good people that Jefferson's election as President would be a catastrophe. Tradition relates that some hid their Bibles when that terrible event seemed certain. In 1800 the Republican or Toleration Party was organized at a meeting in New Haven. The leader was Pierpont Edwards, scion of an old Puritan family. The party's consummate politician was Episcopalian Abraham Bishop, son of the mayor of New Haven. In a campaign circular he sounded the call to war: "Christianity has suffered more by the attempts to unite church and state than by all the deistical writings." The "Feds" hated him and their editors pelted him with abuse, but he had a tough skin and replied in kind.
The Tolerationists had their own newspapers, including Hartford's American Mercury, and the Times, edited by Epis- copalian John M. Niles. His first editorial bluntly demanded death for the state church and long life for political and religious liberty. The cry for reform was sounded also by the Norwich True Re- publican, the Windham Herald, and the unquenchable Herald of Gospel Liberty.
THE RISING TIDE OF REFORM
Reformers shouted that the royal charter of 1662 was a relic, and that Connecticut politically lagged behind the rest of
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the nation and had not honored the Bill of Rights in securing freedom of worship. After 1804 Abraham Bishop demanded a new constitution, and in 1815 Judge Zephaniah Swift, until then a staunch Federalist, assailed the charter. Finding his party opposed to reform, he joined the Republicans, along with Oliver Wolcott, Jr., son of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Critics of the charter made an alliance with the foes of the state church. A characteristic argument against established religion was pub- lished in 1810 by the Rev. Henry Grew of Hartford. He declared that "religious establishments by civil power, are totally in- consistent with the rights of man, and the nature of Christ's kingdom."4
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