USA > Connecticut > The story of the Diocese of Connecticut : a new branch of the vine (Espiscopal Church) > Part 3
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 | Part 50 | Part 51
THE FIRST PARISH: STRATFORD
The impatient little flock in Stratford was disappointed, and soon sought help from the Bishop of London. In 1705 they ap- pealed again to William Vesey in New York to visit them, but he was unwilling to stay so long away from his growing parish and sent them the S. P. G. missionary at Rye, New York. The Rev. George Muirson (1675-1708) was a fortunate choice. He was a
·[ 17 ].
Scottish university graduate and teacher, who offered his services to the S. P. G. in 1703 and served as schoolmaster in Albany and as head of the New York Latin School. Proposed as an assistant to Vesey, he was ordained by Bishop Compton and in 1705 settled at Rye.
Muirson found a warm and congenial friend in Colonel Caleb Heathcote (1663-1721), first Lord of the Manor of Scars- dale, named for the seat of his family in Derbyshire, England. He made a fortune in trade, but according to tradition was crossed in love by his eldest brother and in 1692 departed for America. He held several high political offices, was a founder of Trinity Church in New York and a member of the S. P. G., and played the coun- try gentleman in his stately brick house on Heathcote Hill in Mamaroneck. He is remembered today as a bountiful giver to the Church and as the ancestor of Bishop Charles P. McIlvaine of Ohio, and of Bishop William Heathcote Delancey of Western New York.
The squire and the parson regarded Connecticut as a chal- lenge. They did not wait long before setting out for Stratford with their saddlebags bulging with Church books. Tradition says that the Colonel acted the Church Militant by riding into the Puritan lion's lair fully armed. During the next three years Muirson made several more visits, sometimes accompanied by Heathcote. Once he came with the Rev. Evan Evans, rector of Christ Church in Philadelphia, whom the congregation requested to petition the Bishop of London to appoint Muirson as their pastor. Disregard- ing Puritan bluster and mighty threats, Muirson preached to "handsome" congregations, baptized many adults and children, ad- ministered the Communion, urged the erection of a church, and held out hope of aid from the S. P. G.
Infuriated by his boldness, the magistrates fairly moved heaven and earth to hinder him and bully his congregation. They curtly refused the use of the meeting house, built partly by taxes wrung from Churchmen, and publicly threatened to jail and fine Muirson and his whole flock. Their fury reached white heat in 1707, when he advised the people to elect wardens and establish a parish, the first one in the colony. There were nineteen organiz- ers, some of whom had come from Guilford. That town had long felt the influence of its first minister, a priest of the Church of Eng-
·[ 18 ].
land who never would submit to Puritan re-ordination. Apparently, few of the founders were recent immigrants, which indicates that the inclination toward the Church was of native origin.
Heathcote's picturesque letters and Muirson's sober reports to the S. P. G. reveal their delighted surprise at the unexpected and widespread sympathy toward the Church. Mr. Reed, the Strat- ford minister, astonished them by his willingness to conform, which brought him black looks and persecution from the Puritan towns- people and several nearby ministers. Some ministers privately as- sured Muirson that they would take episcopal orders if there were an American bishop. Heathcote wrote that the people were "won- derfully surprised" by the Prayer Book liturgy, which belied their ministers' descriptions of its dangerously "popish" tendencies. The prospect was looking bright, when young Muirson died in October, 1708, just as he was setting the new parish on its feet.
For four seemingly interminable years the forlorn Church- men welcomed occasional ministrations. John Talbot made the long and tedious journey from Burlington, New Jersey, and Christopher Bridge, Muirson's successor, rode up from Rye. The people were especially glad to see John Sharpe, chaplain at the fort in New York. He was a Scotsman who ministered from Maryland to Con- necticut, and was a friend of Muirson and Heathcote. In the dead of winter, January 1710, he left Heathcote's house and spent nearly three weeks in Connecticut. He visited Stamford, Norwalk, and Fair- field, but spent most of his time in Stratford. There he preached, administered Communion, baptized, and attended an election of wardens and vestrymen. One of the baptisms was that of Isaac Styles, eighty years old, said to have been the first white male child born in Connecticut. At Long Hill (now in Trumbull) Sharpe preached to two hundred people, most of whom had never heard a Prayer Book service before. In June, 1711 he visited Stratford, Fairfield, and New London. In the early history of the Church in Connecticut, his diary fills a page that otherwise would be almost blank.
Meantime, the Puritan magistrates were trying to destroy the parish by harrassing Churchmen who refused to pay taxes to the established church. Wardens, vestrymen, and others were hustled off on winter nights to the dark, frigid jail in Fairfield, eight miles away, and held until they paid the gaoler's fees. One
·[ 19 ].
was tied across a horse's back. Another protested against the tax to buy a house and land for the Puritan minister, but the clerk of the town meeting refused to record his remarks. The General Court also ignored him. Their neighbors forced some tradesmen and craftsmen to leave town by boycotting them. In 1710 the wardens and vestrymen petitioned the Governor and the General Court for justice to all Churchmen in the colony, claiming that persecution violated the charter and the laws of England. Puritans asserted that the Anglican mission was unnecessary because the colony already had ministers.
The undiscouraged wardens and vestrymen renewed their petition for a missionary, believing that "in a short time the best of churches in the world would flourish even in this government."8 They even appealed to Queen Anne, lamenting their "daily re- proaches, scoffing and mockings, without the advantage of a minis- ter to give us comfortable and ghostly advice, and to administer the bread of life to us."
The answer to their prayers came in 1712 in the unworthy guise of the Rev. Francis Phillips, who had recently been a chap- lain in the Royal Navy. He remained only about a year, and spent much time in New York. Colonel Heathcote disgustedly wrote that Phillips did not relish the plain living of Stratford, and thought of nothing but getting away from there. Phillips broke a promise to stay until a successor was assured and moved to Philadelphia, tak- ing the parish library. Then he tried to squirm out of blame by claiming that the climate had injured his health, and by accusing most of the parishioners of merely escaping church taxes. He wailed that the hostile government and the lack of a bishop for- bade any growth of the Church, and pleaded that he would be more useful as a curate in the Quaker capital. It is hardly surpris- ing that he eventually was degraded from the ministry.
The parish became "a scorn and reproach to the cnemies of the Church," just as several families were about to join it and tim- ber was being gathered for a building. After five years of patient waiting, they again begged for a missionary, claiming one hundred baptized persons, thirty-six communicants, and two or three hun- dred in the congregation. Connecticut was now the only colony without an Episcopal minister; but Stratford, they declared, could have "as flourishing a church as any country church in America."9
·[ 20 ].
Four more years slipped away before the parish joyfully welcomed the Rev. George Pigot, a native of Warwick in Rhode Island, who had been educated in England. He came with a gen- erous salary, a large library and a bundle of tracts, and proved to be a reliable character. The wardens cordially thanked the S. P. G., and the parish set to work willingly to raise the church, although there were only about thirty families to pay for it.
Pigot served only about eighteen months before leaving to establish St. John's Church in Providence, but in that time he set the church upon a solid foundation. He sought money in New York for the building, distributed many books, and begged the Society for Prayer Books and catechisms, which he said would do more good than anything else except a colonial bishop. He made many converts in Newtown and Ripton (now Huntington), also in Fair- field where he recommended for a missionary one Doctor James Labarie, a French Protestant minister and physician.
Such progress inspired Pigot to hope for the Church's rapid growth. "Our cause," he reported, "flourishes mightily in this coun- try, indeed so much, that our neighbors look on with astonish- ment."10 Alarmed Puritan ministers soon were flooding the Con- necticut towns with anti-Church books from Boston. They claimed that there were two Episcopal churches: the "low," which was theirs, and the "high," represented by the missionaries, whom they called "rank papists." The furious Puritan Lieutenant Governor, Nathan Gold, hindered conversions all he could and used his power as a judge to keep Churchmen from voting. He even proposed that the General Court by law should forbid Pigot to minister outside Stratford.
That did not deter him from visiting Norwalk, North Haven, West Haven, Fairfield, Ripton, and especially Newtown, which soon was half Episcopalian. The Fairfield parish flourished under Labarie as reader, and soon had a church "well enclosed." By the summer of 1723 willing hearts and strong arms were ready to raise the massive timber frame of a church in Stratford, even though the people were being kept poor by the established church tax. The wealthy Richard Sackett of Dover, New York, gave two hundred acres to meet the cost of completing it, and four hundred for a "glebe" or land endowment. When he left Stratford, Pigot had gathered about eighty communicants and baptized over sixty per-
·[ 21 ].
sons. He recommended a missionary for Newtown and Ripton, and one for Stratford, Fairfield, and West Haven.
The parish in Stratford marked the end of Puritan exclusive- ness and indicated that the Episcopal Church had come to stay. Its growing strength made it impossible for the government to re- sist the insistent demand for toleration. As early as 1708 the Gen- eral Court bowed to the inevitable by permitting "sober" dissenters, on formal declaration of faith, to support their own public wor- ship, even though they were still obliged to pay taxes to the es- tablished parishes. Many people no longer regarded the Church as the "monster" depicted by some embittered Puritan leaders. The most favorable trend was the attitude of a few of the ministers, who made no secret of their Episcopalian sympathies.
·[ 22 ].
CHAPTER THREE
MR. DUMMER'S BOOKS
B Y 1722 the whole colony was full of rumors of an impending sensational announcement. The expected event came in a typical Anglican way, from a college - as Methodism did a few years later, and as the Oxford High Church Revival would in the 1830's. This college had been founded at Saybrook in 1701 to train ministers and confer upon Connecticut the blessing of sound learn- ing. In 1718 it was moved to New Haven - dangerously near the Episcopalian trend in Fairfield County - and renamed for its bene- factor, Elihu Yale. He was a New England Puritan who went "home" for his education and became an Episcopalian. Yale doubted whether, as a Churchman, he should "promote an academy of dissenters," since the trustees tolerated only the Puritan the- ology. On second thought, he decided that "if the discipline of the Church of England be most agreeable to Scripture and primitive practice, there's no better way to make men sensible of it than by giving them good learning."1
Jeremiah Dummer, Connecticut's agent in England, reported these words to Governor Saltonstall, who had welcomed George Keith in New London and might have shared Yale's thoughts. Dummer also, unwittingly, had helped to set the scene for dramatic events. At the request of the General Assembly, in 1716 he shipped to the college a collection of eight hundred books. Included were works by defenders of the Anglican Church, among them George Berkeley, who later (1729-1731) would visit Rhode Island and patronize Yale. There was no room for the library in Saybrook and it was kept in boxes, but after the removal to New Haven space was provided. The boxes were then opened, and, like the famous box of Pandora, made abundant trouble - for the Puritan estab- lished church. The books invited students to browse, and thereafter persuaded about ten per cent of each class to join the Episcopal Church.
·[ 23 ]·
One of the browsers was the young Congregational pastor in West Haven, Samuel Johnson, born in 1696 at Guilford. His father and grandfather were deacons in the Congregational church, but one of their neighbors, a Mr. Smithson, had a Prayer Book which young Johnson read. The boy received his bachelor's degree in 1714 from the little college in Saybrook, and four years later be- came one of its tutors in New Haven. His associate was his class- mate Daniel Brown, who had previously been a teacher and rector at the Hopkins Grammar School in New Haven.
The two youthful tutors worked congenially with the col- lege's rector, Timothy Cutler. He was a Harvard alumnus and had gone to school with Samuel Myles, who was to become rector of King's Chapel in Boston. Many years later Myles laid the first stone of Christ Church, Boston, of which Cutler was to be rector for forty-two years. The Puritan clergy believed that Cutler's high cul- ture and firm will would check the Anglican current in Connecti- cut. In 1708 he was called as pastor to Stratford, to succeed the episcopally-inclined Reed. In 1719 he became rector of Yale as the most able exponent of Congregational orthodoxy.
The ill-fated city of Troy had only one Trojan horse within its walls. Yale College had two quite innocent ones - Cutler's learned eloquence and Jeremiah Dummer's books. The dismayed Puritan ministers later pretended to discern a diabolical conspiracy, and one openly accused Cutler of deliberately accepting the rec- torship to "blow up the Churches which he appeared a friend unto."2 In reality the supposed plot was only the normal intel- lectual curiosity of scholars exposed to a collection of books that interested them. Almost before they realized it, they had read themselves into the Church of England.
Samuel Johnson meticulously kept "A Catalog Of Books read by me from year to year since I left Yale College."3 The en- tries from 1719 to 1722 include many treatises in defense of the Church. As early as December 1719, his Present Thoughts of Episcopacy clearly indicated that he was practically convinced. It is one of the most significant documents in the history of the American Church and had a bearing on his eventual decision. For the time being, however, he hesitated to take the final step, because of family influence and a characteristic doubt of his own mental and social culture. He feared to injure his church and the college,
·[ 24 ].
and naturally shrank from the perils of a voyage to England for ordination.
Johnson opened his mind to Cutler, Brown, and four other Puritan ministers, and occasionally met them for frank discussions. The arrival of George Pigot in Stratford presented an opportunity to consult with a minister of the Church. In June, 1722 Johnson sought him out and invited him to visit the college. There he and his doubting friends expressed their "charity and veneration" for the Church and asked his advice. Pigot was astonished and de- lighted, and promptly informed the secretary of the S. P. G. about the conferences and discussions.
THE "DARK DAY" AT YALE
Rumors of those meetings had already excited suspicion throughout the colony, especially among the Yale College trustees. Many years later (1768-1770), in his autobiography, Johnson re- called that the trustees requested the seven ministers to meet them at the next commencement on September 13, in the library, and to present a written declaration of their views. They were deeply shocked when Cutler read the statement. John Hart of East Guil- ford (Madison) and Samuel Whittelsey of Wallingford doubted the validity of Presbyterian ordination. Jared Eliot of Killingworth and James Wetmore of North Haven admitted the desirability of episcopal government. Cutler, Johnson, and Brown frankly favored episcopal ordination.
The Puritan clergy were struck with consternation by this defection at the very heart of their established church. John Daven- port of Stamford and Stephen Buckingham of Norwalk voiced the general anger and amazement: "How is the gold become dim! and the silver become dross! and the wine mixt with water!"4 The ques- tions raised puzzled the ministers, who had considered their po- sition as settled beyond argument. They had not read enough to defend it ably, and had to appeal for help to the learned Boston minister, Cotton Mather. In a letter to him Joseph Webb of Fair- field bewailed the situation as a "dark day," and his apt expression passed into history as the Puritan description of the event.
Webb's letter pathetically pleaded that the ministers needed "pity, prayers, and counsel." Their real need, however, was knowl- edge, and they cut a rather poor figure at a debate in the college
·[ 25 ].
library, at the suggestion of Governor Saltonstall. Johnson recalled that one of the Puritan ministers rose and began a bitter harangue. The Governor soon cut him off, saying that he had intended the meeting to be only a friendly argument. Perhaps his timely inter- vention was an echo of the favorable view of the Church which he had confessed twenty years before to George Keith in New London.
All New England soon was seething with excitement, and Puritan leaders were dismayed as by a calamity. Judge Samuel Sewall of Boston recorded in his now famous diary a fast kept at the old North Church "to pray for the pouring out of God's Spirit on N(ew) E(ngland)."" Increase and Cotton Mather preached special sermons against the "apostacy," Cotton accusing Johnson and his friends of rashness, subversion of Protestantism, and favor- ing "popery." The appalled and embarrassed trustees dismissed Cutler and required all future rectors and tutors to declare absolute loyalty to the Saybrook Platform. Hart, Eliot, and Whittelsey were permitted to keep their pulpits, but tradition says that they never afterward criticized the Church of England.
The "bitter clamor" of the ministers, as Johnson described it, was an ironic comment upon the true nature of the conversion to episcopacy. The converts derived their idea of church govern- ment from their Puritan education and were perfectly familiar with the Cambridge Platform adopted by the New England churches in 1648. It declared that "the parts of Church Government are all of them exactly described in the Word of God ... so that it is not left in the power of men, officers, Churches, or any State in the world to add or diminish, or alter anything in the least measure therein."6 This doctrine was reaffirmed by the Saybrook Platform. The converts were faithful to this concept of an unalterable gov- ernment established by Holy Scripture, but they conceived the form to be episcopacy, as demonstrated by the Anglican scholars whose works they had read.
The converts and their Connecticut followers, led by John- son, were the founders of the American High Church school of doctrine. It was their conviction that episcopacy is of divine appointment, unalterably established upon Christ's gift to his Apostles, which fixed a particular constitution for His Church. Every other polity really was unlawful and other ecclesiastical so-
·[ 26 ]·
cieties were not churches but sects. American High Churchmanship was not derived from the English Oxford Revival of the 1830's, which had a relatively limited influence in America. It stemmed from High Churchmen of colonial Connecticut, who derived it from the Anglican divines of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- turies. Their intellectual influence and personal connections car- ried it to other colonies, mainly through the friends and pupils of Johnson.
One of those influenced by him was the Rev. Thomas Brad- bury Chandler, a native of Connecticut, who represented the High Church principles in New Jersey, as rector of St. John's Church in Elizabethtown. His daughter, Mary Goodin Chandler, became the wife of John Henry Hobart, Bishop of New York from 1816 until his death in 1830. She was "well instructed in the doctrines of primitive Episcopacy,"7 and exerted great influence upon him. He had already become acquainted with High Church views while serving, in 1794-1798, as a tutor in the College of New Jersey at Princeton, his alma mater. One of his first literary tasks was to edit and publish Chandler's biography of Johnson, which further en- larged his knowledge of Connecticut High Churchmanship.
In the colonial and early national periods, Connecticut stood almost alone in its loyalty to High principles, for Low Churchmen of the type of Archbishop Tillotson of Canterbury had long been predominant in England and America. The Connecticut position was strengthened by Bishop Seabury, who shared the primitive High Church position of his Scottish consecrators regarding the doctrine of the Eucharist and the essential nature of episcopacy. The Connecticut clergy, together with sympathizers in New Eng- land, New York, and New Jersey, successfully fought for retention of their principles in the Church's Prayer Book and the Constitu- tion of 1789. (See Chapter Eleven, Reorganization and Recovery)
Led by Hobart and such other stalwarts as Bishops Brownell of Connecticut and Ravenscroft of North Carolina, the High Churchmen became dominant about 1830, and remained so during the middle years of the nineteenth century. Their influence was potent long before the Oxford Revival of the 1830's, and indeed was familiar to its leaders. The High Churchmen knew Hobart, particularly, as a staunch defender of the threefold ministry of bishops, priests, and deacons as Christ's institution. His combi-
·[ 27 ].
nation of "Evangelical Truth and Apostolic Order" accounted for his success and theirs. His inspiration moulded the native and spon- taneous High Churchmanship of Connecticut, which in the 1850's was regarded as a standard by like-minded men elsewhere in America. The originators of its spirit and convictions were the converts of 1722 at Yale College.
THE CONVERTS ORDAINED
News of their bold stand heartened and delighted Episco- palians throughout the colonies. Governor Francis Nicholson of South Carolina voiced Episcopalian jubilation in a letter to the sec- retary of the S. P. G., hoping that their conversion would encour- age others. Cutler, Johnson, and Brown decided to be ordained, and through Pigot sought aid for the voyage to England. The story of their great adventure is fully told in Johnson's Journal of the Voyage to, Abode at, and Return from England. On November 4, in Boston, he wrote, "Tomorrow we venture upon the great ocean for Great Britain. God Almighty preserve us."8 Armed with numer- ous well-wishes and letters of recommendation, they began the "boisterous and uncomfortable voyage" of over five weeks. They landed about the middle of December at Margate on the Isle of Thanet.
For those young provincial scholars, the sojourn in England was a continual round of delights, marred only by the tragic death of Brown from small-pox soon after his ordination. They lingered for three days in Canterbury, the Church's capital, and worshipped in its awesome cathedral. Dean Stanhope met them with out- stretched hands, and cried: "Come in, gentlemen, you are very welcome, I know you well for we have just been reading your declaration for the Church!"9 London was equally cordial. They met many influential persons through the kindness of John Check- ley, the Boston book-seller, whose shop was a haunt of Churchmen and intellectuals, and were presented at a meeting of the S. P. G. Cutler came down with the small-pox only four days later but re- covered, and the party celebrated his good luck by going to Lincoln's Inn Theatre.
In the meantime events were moving towards their ordina- tion. Johnson, Brown, and Cutler were re-baptized to remove doubt of the validity of their previous baptism. On March 22, 1722
·[ 28 ].
(March 1723, New Style) all were confirmed and ordained as deacons, after Morning Prayer at St. Martin's-in-the-Field. On the 31st, in the same church, Bishop Thomas Green of Norwich raised them to the priesthood.
Like countless young Americans to come, the converts en- joyed all the spectacles in and around London, including the grim Tower, Westminster Abbey, St. James's Palace, Hampton Court, and Windsor. They saw Edmund Gibson consecrated as Bishop of London. They attended the funeral of the great architect, Sir Chris- topher Wren, in St. Paul's Cathedral, his greatest work. Apparent- ly they saw almost every church in London, including those de- signed by Wren, which were to be the models for many soon to rise in America. Lingering into May, the newly-fledged priests post- ed off to Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and lived pleasantly in another round of sight-seeing and a grateful rain of honorary degrees - an S. T. D. for Cutler, and an M. A. for Johnson at each place. Wetmore arrived in London on July 4, and after assistance from Johnson and Cutler in his affairs with the S. P. G., was ordained in their presence.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.