USA > Connecticut > The story of the Diocese of Connecticut : a new branch of the vine (Espiscopal Church) > Part 4
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As Samuel Seabury learned when he came for consecration very many years later, business moved at a leisurely pace in a country governed by "gentlemen of figure." Not until June 26 did the Bishop of London issue the missionary licenses - to Cutler for Christ Church in Boston, to Johnson for Stratford. Wetmore was licensed later for Rye, New York. Another month slipped away be- fore Cutler and Johnson started for Gravesend on the Thames, to sail for America. Storms buffeted the ship and they did not land until September 23, at Piscataqua, New Hampshire. The next stop was Boston, where both preached in King's Chapel. Johnson chose the appropriate text, "Only let your conversation be as becometh the Gospel of Christ." It was a hint of his own tactful approach to the Puritan commonwealth of Connecticut.
The sojourn in England had been a revelation to all con- cerned. Prejudice against the Church in Connecticut began to soften, as the converts' letters related the kind reception accorded to the young scholars. Brown wrote to his brother: "We have been treated with all possible Kindness by the Bishops and other min- isters of the Church of England, who we find are not such frightfull People, as You in that Country are made to believe."10 They took
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home with them a profound sense of the Church's historic mission. And they impressed upon all they met the disadvantage to the Church in America from the lack of a resident bishop. Probably the most convincing evidences were their very presence, and the death of Brown, the first (but alas, not the last!) candidate from Connecticut to suffer that fate.
THE CHURCH GROWS: 1723-1740
Johnson's ministry of over thirty years began as the autumn colors of 1723 faded into winter. But for the Church it brought a springtime of growth that ripened into a harvest of over forty churches and thousands of communicants in the next fifty years. It seemed like a symbol of a new era when Johnson dedicated Christ Church, Stratford, in 1724 - at Christmas, a day long ignored in the Puritan calendar.
For several years the Doctor worked alone, and although his ministry was thinly spread over many towns, its fruits astounded the colony. Converts appeared by the hundreds, as if they had been merely waiting for him. Within fifteen years he performed nearly four hundred baptisms, reclaimed many persons from practical heathenism, and gathered about one fifth of Stratford into his flock. In 1727-1728 his burden was lightened by the coming to Fairfield of the Rev. Henry Caner. He soon had a congregation of five hun- dred, packing the church so full that the parish had to build gal- leries. Puritan ministers gaped in astonishment and alarm as large congregations gathered in Ripton (Huntington and Shelton), Stratfield (Bridgeport), Unity (Trumbull), Danbury, Ridgefield, West Haven, Derby, Norwalk, Stamford, Greenwich, Milford, Waterbury, Redding, and Newtown.
Newtown sparked the greatest shock of all. John Beach, its young Puritan minister, had been called there to stem the Episco- palian tide, but it soon swept him out of his pulpit. To the conster- nation of his former ministerial colleagues, he sailed to England for ordination in 1732. He returned with a missionary's license, a library, and a package of books that soon made many more con- verts. Beach's almost incredible energy and his rare ability to win popular devotion firmly rooted the Church throughout northern Fairfield County. The three missionaries worked together as fra- ternally as Paul and Luke. By incessant travels, preaching, pastoral
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calls, personal counsel, and help from Wetmore of Rye, they made Fairfield and New Haven Counties the Episcopalian strongholds they are today.
While Johnson and Caner jogged on horseback over miser- able roads, their example inspired Samuel Seabury, the Puritan minister of North Groton. He was a Harvard graduate but was troubled by doubts about Puritan ordination, and one day astound- ed the established church by resigning his ministry to seek episcopal ordination in England. When he sailed, he left behind him a little son, named Samuel, who more than fifty years later took ship for England to seek consecration as a bishop. Seabury's ministry quickened the seeds planted thirty years before by Keith in New London, and rooted them firmly in a few eastern towns. The congre- gation in New London doubled within a year, crowding the little wooden church, and the parish in North Groton (now Poquetanuck) also flourished. The tireless Seabury was soon preaching in Nor- wich, also in Windham, the future birthplace of Bishop Chauncey B. Brewster. Over rough trails he rode to Hebron, where a large congregation heard the service "with great Seriousness." They begged for a missionary and fairly compelled him to promise them four visits a year. The pleas of those forlorn Churchmen were the beginning of St. Peter's parish, which for over a century was the lone Episcopalian outpost in Tolland County.
The sight of lonely Churchmen tearfully begging for pas- tors suggested to the clergy the usefulness of a traveling mission- ary in the eastern towns. They found the right man in Ebenezer Punderson, Seabury's Puritan successor in North Groton, who fol- lowed him into the Church. Upon his return from England in 1734, he began a roving ministry that continued for many years and planted parishes from Rhode Island to Middletown and New Haven. The Church in America has had few missionaries to match this now almost forgotton circuit-rider, who never was quite at ease out of the saddle.
In 1736 the western towns began to know another traveling parson, the Rev. Jonathan Arnold, who "settled" in West Haven. Arnold, however, never knew what settlement meant while he stayed in Connecticut. He once told the S. P. G. that his parish was big enough for a diocese, and he was always worn out by travel and kept poor by chronic illness in his family. Hardship and sorrow
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contributed to his pitiful collapse into intemperance - a painful blow to his patron, Doctor Johnson. The religious illiteracy he uncovered raises doubts about the supposed superiority of Puritan religious education. In Milford he was aghast to find that the people had never heard the Bible, the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, or the Ten Commandments read at worship. No wonder that his large congregation was "most Attentive, and desirous to be Instructed."11
The established church which permitted such neglect bitter- ly accused the missionaries of forcing themselves upon an unwill- ing people. Nothing could have been more untruthful. On the contrary, the clergy came in response to repeated, urgent, and sometimes pathetic petitions to the S. P. G., signed by many per- sons. They often declared their love for the Church's doctrine, government and liturgy, and their eagerness to receive the Holy Communion. They had made a purely voluntary choice, in the full knowledge that it would bring upon them the wrath of their neigh- bors and perhaps a visit by the sheriff, a term in jail, or a heavy fine.
There were others who dreaded to face ostracism and the law's hard visage. Caner discovered in Fairfield many secret friends, who came to him privately but did not openly declare their inter- est. The professed Churchmen would not frighten them by reveal- ing all the hardship they suffered, and continued to bear the re- sultant greater burden of supporting the church. Many scattered Episcopalians rode long distances to service, taught their children the Prayer Book at home, and bore the exaction of state-church taxes for the meeting-houses and ministers' salaries. Some built tiny churches and rectories, pledged contributions, and bought glebe lands, and then waited for years for a resident pastor.
The Church's every advance encountered bitter hostility from the established parishes, which had the law on their side. Petitions to be excused from the church tax often were rejected. Doctor Johnson vainly complained to Governor Talcott, who even ignored for months a letter from the Bishop of London. He then falsely replied that Episcopalians were not compelled to support any but their own minister, and that some claimed exemption "to appear singular, or to be freed from a small tax."12
The exactions and persecutions continued. Churchmen in
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A PASTOR COMES TO STRATFORD
JO
Gentlemen, I take this Opportunity by your own. Jownoman of informing you of the Society's great Care of you, who have been pleased to appoint Me, a mean yet willing Watchman, over you for the ford. I chose to settle among you, because my Family might be more easily transported from Road-Island (where They now reside) to your Town, than to any other vacant Mission in America. It is expected from you, that you will make some Provision for the & Mine; that I may not be necessitated to settle elsewhere, as the Society have promised, if you do not take Care accordingly. I am now waiting for a Pafrage to Road-Island, from whence, after Settlement of my Affairs, you may expect your hitherto Unknown And very Stumble Servant
New - York Apr: 23. 1722 George Bigot
1722, May 20 (Trinity Sunday) : " ... it was not till Trinity Sunday ... that the mission [at Stratford ] received its priest .... A few weeks later he was able not only to ad- minister the holy communion to thirty, and to baptize twenty-seven infants, but also to record his 'expectations of a glorious revolution of the ecclesiastics of this country, t the 'President of Yale College, and five more, ' having had a conference with him, and be- ing determined to declare themselves professors of the Church of England. "105
David Humphreys, in An Historical Account of the Incorporated> Society for the Propaga- tion of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, London, 1730, 334-345 and 337-338, supplies details of the parish at the time of George Pigot's arrival-details that deserve to be pre- served in a historical sketch like this one.
(Letter of the Reverend George Pigot to the Parish of Christ Church, 1722)
STRATFORD WARDENS AND VESTRYMEN PROTEST AGAINST THE STATE CHURCH TAX, 1710.
RühurkBläcklaif Jon at Pitmany John: Johnson. Iletticon Jeunes. Och, Buntop Flugh Kisbitt
Gostry mon
To the lon, Gurdon Sallonstalo 900" of iter magestion Colony of Connecticut o Potition of the Church wardons & coostry? in banale of them prises & the members of the Pubch of England Inhabitans in the Town of Stratford and see if ione in the Colony.
Clum 6(1) Shurth
That whoiras coborat of us & other profiling ourblog. momfory of the Pinch of England of by law ai Establish: : 00, habe calfly sunified imprisonment of our bodies & district of our goods for not paying such ratos as hatte oron alltsod towards the Support of ministers of a ~ Filefront porination from the Establisht furch 100 nimbly poncrift awfully to Go under no such obligation. neither by the Laws of England nor the Charter grant of the rolling & halt theorigins apprated to the niet general court for their Judgement in our Call. 200 therefore innflyintroat your conour will 60 , barajed to put a stop to all Such pro= Flooding against by till such timo as this determination of the Court- thorton & to gram III the protection of your authority in the free sporcie of our religion; 2 Araljord apr: 25: 1710 und " potitioners phad ober pray &C; simothy filhaxfor) Durch
(From the Diocesan Archives)
Fairfield were packed into jail and insulted by a mob, and were so fleeced that they could not finish their church or pay the rector a decent salary. An old law was revived to prevent Church immi- grants from settling in any town or buying land. Persecution in Stratford compelled some families to move to New York, and fear of enraging the government kept many people from joining the Church. When Episcopalians in Wallingford complained of im- prisonment and the confiscation of their property for taxes, the Governor told the magistrates to enlarge the jail and pack them in.
In 1738 the clergy and over six hundred laymen fruitlessly petitioned the General Assembly for relief. The only concession for many years was a doubtfully worded act of 1727, declaring that where Episcopalians could "conveniently" attend a church with a settled minister, they could be excused from paying to the established parish, and could receive the tax for their own parson and lay an additional tax upon themselves if necessary. The law was so vague that it only caused more quarrels, lawsuits, and hard- ships, and "conveniently" was so narrowly construed that exactions still oppressed distant and scattered parishioners. It was proposed to have missionaries live by turn in several towns, but the S. P. G. attorney warned that such an attempt to evade the law would only get the clergy into deeper hot water.
There were even more troubles. The town schools were controlled by the established parishes. Doctor Johnson complained bitterly about the lack of education and the indoctrination of chil- dren in prejudice against the Church. The clergy were painfully aware of efforts to blacken their reputations. Caner was sharply spied upon in Fairfield, and asked the secretary of the S. P. G. to warn him about covert slanders in letters to England. "I hope," he wrote, "when we are sufficiently sifted and tried, we shall come out purer."13
Worst of all was the lack of a colonial bishop. Doctor John- son had scarcely settled in Stratford, when he began the agitation for an American diocese, which the Connecticut clergy continued for sixty years. To the Bishop of London he wrote, ". .. the foun- tain of all our misery is the want of a Bishop."14 The tragic death of Brown discouraged young men from seeking ordination, and the lack of a bishop led enemies to torment colonial Episcopalians by saying that their mother Church regarded them as outcasts,
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One wonders how the Church could grow at all - but it did. Before 1744, thirteen priests lived and served in Connecticut, and ten of them were native New Englanders who crossed the Atlantic for ordination. By 1740 the Church was becoming too strong to be ignored. There were four settled rectors and two traveling missionaries. Parochial schools flourished in Stratford and Fairfield, with teachers paid by the S. P. G. Churches had been finished in seven towns and were rising in two more, and occasional services were held in many other places. It was a noble record for less than twenty years of work against every conceivable obstacle. And as the clergy rode from one little church to another in 1740, they felt the first tremors of a spiritual revival that was to bring a flood of converts such as the Church had never known.
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CHAPTER FOUR
ENTHUSIASM AND CONFORMITY
RELIGIOUS AWAKENING
T HE tremors detected by the sensibility of the Episcopal clergy soon swelled into an emotional religious earthquake, known in history as the "Great Awakening." It was one among many mani- festations of an international and interdenominational movement that was to create a new religious attitude. Generally it stimulated a spiritual passion that stressed feeling and conversion rather than doctrine and ritual observance. In New England, particularly, it reawakened loyalty to the original Puritan ideal of the church as a company of persons converted by a spiritual rebirth. "Ye must be born again!" This was the principle forsaken by the Halfway Covenant, and by the state church created by the Saybrook Plat- form. The revival preachers of the Awakening insisted that “un- converted" persons must not partake of the Lord's Supper, and that church membership without confession of faith would be unthinkable.
The pioneer Puritan Congregationalists cherished this con- viction, which slowly faded after they died, and as frontier hard- ships, political interests, and the commercial spirit awakened more worldly motives. Puritan New England was becoming practical, Yankee New England. The increasing formality in religion paral- leled a general spiritual decline in England, after the collapse of Puritan rule and the royalist and episcopal restoration in 1660. Especially after the Toleration Act of 1689 and the rise of liberal and "rational" theology, did the government and the established Church shun "Enthusiasm," while the Dissenters wanted to enjoy peace and prosperity. Many of the upper classes regarded religion largely as a social function, and as a useful moral police, while the "lower orders" often were left in spiritual destitution. By 1740 England was ripe for a religious revival, which the "enthusiastic" Methodists were eager to inspire.
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Connecticut's ministers deplored the general consideration of church membership as a birthright rather than a pledge of real faith. In 1686 the Rev. John Whiting of Hartford had asked his flock: "Is there not too visible and general a declension; are we not turned (and that quickly too) out of the way wherein our fathers walked? A rain of righteousness and soaking showers of converting, sanctifying grace sent from heaven will do the business for us, and indeed, nothing else."1 A reforming convention of New England ministers in 1679 had deplored neglect of worship, sacra- ments, and family devotion.
Their lamentations were re-echoed for the next fifty years, while English ministers were excoriating the same indifference. John Wesley considered the Episcopal churches and clergy as morally and intellectually flabby, and bluntly said that ungodliness was the prevalent national quality. Isaac Watts, the great hymn- writer, deplored the lack of vital religion. Bishop Burnet of Salisbury castigated the clergy as ignorant of the Bible and too absorbed in politics. The connection between depravity in public and private morals and loss of Christian faith appears in a remark ascribed to Lady Montagu: "They ought to take the not out of the Decalogue and put it in the Creed."2 Higher offices in the Church were regarded as financial plums, or as rewards for deserv- ing Whigs or Tories. Sermons had largely ceased to voice a living faith. Justice William Blackstone wrote that even later, early in George III's reign, it would not have been possible to tell what was the religion of the noted preachers in London. Their sermons seemed to him no more Christian than the philosophical discourses of Cicero.
While lamentations over ungodliness resounded, the rain clouds of revival began to thicken. Mr. Whiting's "soaking showers" fell upon several Connecticut parishes between 1675 and 1721. A change in religious climate had been approaching for many years - on the European continent, in Great Britain, and in America. Ger- man Pietism, a revolt against formalism and in favor of vital faith, deeply affected religion among the Pennsylvania Germans. It in- flamed the Raritan Valley of New Jersey in the 1720's, through the preaching of Theodore Frelinghuysen, the German Pietist pastor of Reformed Dutch churches. He insisted upon real repentance, admission of only the converted to communion, and renewal of
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life, and spread his doctrines on preaching tours. He found sym- pathetic friends in those "Sons of Thunder," the Irish Presbyterian Tennent brothers from Pennsylvania - John, Gilbert, William and Charles.
As these winds of revival whirled through the colonies, they were strengthened by the news of Methodist evangelism in England. Its inspiration was the famous "Holy Club" of the 1730's at Oxford University, led by John and Charles Wesley and George White- field. Ridiculed as "Bible Moths" and "Sacramentarians," they met frequently for prayer and devotional reading, and lived by a methodical discipline, which only hardy souls could endure, and which gave them their name. The club was the spiritual dynamo of a religious crusade that eventually reformed English society.
Tidings of the awakenings blew upon the embers of Puritan zeal in New England. In 1734-1735 they burst into flame in Northampton, Massachusetts, under the vivid preaching of Jonathan Edwards, the greatest American theologian of his time, who was born in 1703 at East Windsor, Connecticut. Connecticut pastors journeyed to Northampton to observe the revival, and returned to kindle the flame in their own parishes.
WHITEFIELD: "WAYFARING WITNESS"
The power that blew the revival into a super-heated tornado was the emotional oratory of a young wayfaring priest of the Church of England, George Whitefield. Soon after his graduation at Oxford in 1736, he outraged the Church's frigid decorum by preaching the Gospel to outcasts of the slums, wharves, and coal pits. The clergy were aghast but many common folk loved it, as they loved preaching friars five centuries before, and the Salvation Army one hundred and fifty years later. As he cried up spiritual rebirth, his fame leaped the ocean, and stirred a hope that he would revive the dessicated remnants of Puritan piety.
Whitefield was predestined to popularity in New England. Unlike the Wesley brothers, he did not consider free-will and good works as the road to salvation. He sympathized with the early Puritan view derived from the French Protestant theologian, John Calvin, that spiritual rebirth comes only by the free grace of God and by faith. A remarkable release from bodily and spiritual op- pression at Oxford convinced him that he had experienced the "new
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birth." That idea became the principal inspiration of his preaching, and struck home to his hearers in the electrifying effect of his voice and presence.
His invasion of New England in 1740 began a new epoch. Newspaper accounts of his triumphs in England had prepared the people for something spectacular, and he did not disappoint them. Highways were clogged as towns and farms poured out their thou- sands, on his journey through Connecticut in the autumn of 1740. His bewitching influence upon the minds of simple folk is described in the diary of a humble farmer, Nathan Cole, who in feverish haste rode twelve miles on horseback with his wife to hear him: "He looked almost angellical a young slim slender youth (Whitefield was 26) before some thousands of people & with a bold undainted countenance ... it solumnized my mind & put me in a trembling fear before he began to preach for he looked as if he was Cloathed with authority from ye great God, & a sweet sollome Solemnity sat upon his brow."3
Supported by Edwards, who brought him from Northampton to his father's home in East Windsor, the amazing evangelist seemed to sweep all before him. The General Assembly adjourned its meeting in New Haven to listen, and Governor Talcott threw his arms around him and thanked God for his "refreshings."4 In- tense emotional raptures swept people into what they sometimes only fancied was conversion. Many wept or fainted as he pictured the bliss of the "saved" and the nameless horror of the lost.
But doubt soon chilled the first ardors of more reasonable people. For them Whitefield soon wore thin; his oratory cast a transient spell. Emotional wizardry was dangerous to unsophisti- cated persons who were not accustomed to such intense appeals. His power to make hell seem physically real showed more dramatic than common sense, and orgies of emotion stirred doubts of the permanence or spiritual wholesomeness of his influence. The natural reaction often was physical exhaustion and spiritual "dry- ness." Disorders in their parishes painfully shocked and embar- rassed some of the clergy. Many ministers, who had prayed earnestly for a revival, were appalled when the excitement struck their parishes. They could start bedlam but not stop it - or, like the sorcerer's apprentice, they could not make the broom stop fetch- ing water. Whitefield's meteoric journey split the Puritan churches
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into warring camps: "New Lights" heartily supported the "awaken- ing," and "Old Lights" scorned it as a mere ecstatic spasm.
Doubtful ministers confided their feelings about Whitefield to their diaries. Daniel Wadsworth of the First Church in Hartford wrote: "Wt to think of the man and his Itinerant preaching I scarce- ly know."5 Scepticism was the mood also of many laymen, like Jared Ingersoll, a student at Yale College, who kept an account of events during the excitement. Describing the uproar caused by Whitefield, Gilbert Tennent, Benjamin Pomeroy, and James Daven- port, he observed that Davenport seemed "to lay too much stress upon inward feelings, and immediate dictates of ye spirit."6
This opinion uncovers an essential point in the conflict that was coming between two radically different views of religious ex- perience: Christian nurture against revivalism, good works and exemplary life against conviction of conversion by special grace. Critics of the Whitefieldians found their spokesman in Charles Chauncy, the liberal pastor of Boston's First Congregational Church. In 1743 he published his Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England, which summarizes the perennial arguments against revivalism. He defended the authority of the Bible against claims to individual inspiration, and declared that the clearest testimony to a regenerate heart should be a good life. Condemning appeals to imagination and fear, he suggested that the joy felt by the "converted" was physical and not spiritual. He vigorously condemned bodily ecstasies, the censoriousness of re- vival preachers toward "unconverted" persons and the established clergy, despising a learned ministry, encouragement of lay "ex- horters," and itinerant preaching.
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