USA > Connecticut > The story of the Diocese of Connecticut : a new branch of the vine (Espiscopal Church) > Part 9
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These were the only official Society charity schools in Con- necticut, but they were far from representing the Church's whole contribution to elementary religious and secular education. Other schools were taught by Churchmen who never received any aid from the Society, and depended upon the voluntary support of their friends and neighbors. Many left no trace in the parish rec- ords but were not the less Church schools. Hutchinson once re- ported that in his neighborhood there were two schools taught by Episcopalians in Groton, and one in Preston.
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A few farsighted Churchmen set their aims higher than the parochial school. They even caught a distant vision of the day when the Church in Connecticut would have its own college or seminary. Doctor Johnson hoped to establish in Stratford an academy for young Episcopal graduates of Yale, who could teach in the parish school while studying for the ministry. The good doc- tor cherished that ideal to the end of his life, and after his retire- ment conducted a small academy in his home. With a course in the Greek and Latin classics, Hebrew, and theology, it led to a master's degree from King's College in New York. He promised the Society to continue the school as long as he lived, assisted by the mission- ary at Stratford, Mr. Kneeland. One of his pupils was John Rutgers Marshall, who became the rector of St. Paul's Church in Wood- bury and was host to the historic meeting of the clergy that elected the first Bishop of Connecticut.
Several other priests from time to time conducted small pri- vate preparatory schools in their homes, or supervised divinity students. Matthew Graves of New London found living in a sea- port very expensive and so tried to increase his income by keeping a school, boarding and clothing young gentlemen from the West Indian plantation colonies.
LITERATURE
Such schools were for the gifted few and raised a standard of learning that was unattainable by the masses. The parish charity schools reached many children and illiterate Indians and Negroes. But what of the mass of poor adult white people? There the clergy encountered a formidable bulk of religious illiteracy and prejudice, due to an almost complete lack of books, especially Prayer Books and simple, popularly written religious tracts. Such ignorance was a persistent obstacle to the Church's progress. It was obvious to the very first missionary, George Muirson, who begged the Society to send him Prayer Books and copies of some "small treatise" defending the Church.
The Society was happy to comply as far as it could afford. Shipping books to the colonies was one of its original aims, and was emphasized by Bishop Gilbert Burnet's annual sermon to the members in 1704. During its first forty years, the Society sent across the Atlantic about 10,000 Bibles and Prayer Books and 100,-
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000 short tracts, sermons, and addresses to be distributed by the missionaries. The Bibles included big folios for reading the lessons in churches, and among the tracts were some in Indian languages and others written specially for literate Negroes.
The Church's literary invasion of the Puritan citadel began with the earliest missionaries, George Muirson, John Talbot, and George Pigot. Talbot scattered Church books far and wide on his travels in New York and Connecticut. Their influence soon began to alarm the Congregational ministers, who declared that Talbot's efforts would "convert the colony," if they did not soon get some convincing books on their own side. Pigot was appalled by the lack of religious reading, and constantly distributed all the books he could lay his hands on. Together with James Labarie, the faith- ful lay-reader in Fairfield, he sent to the Society a stream of requests for Prayer Books, catechisms, and Psalters.
The demand for books never ceased and the missionaries seldom wrote a report to the Society without begging for more, and still more. The almost frenzied upheavals of the Great Awak- ening and of later revivals drove home the necessity of books to answer the attacks upon the Church. Ebenezer Punderson of North Groton wrote, "There never was more pressing need of good books among us than in this astonishing season, in which the wildest enthusiasm and superstitution prevail . . . "23
Answering objections was one of the chief services of books. Roger Viets pleaded for tracts on the nature and necessity of the sacraments, and for something to explain the use of the cross in baptism and the responses of sponsors, which appeared to be "stumbling blocks to some," because the dissenting teachers es- teemed the sacraments too lightly. Many appeared only to need information to conform to the Church, and for his personal use in discussion with them Viets wanted explanations and defenses of the Articles of Religion, and of the canons, liturgy, offices, rites, ceremonies, and injunctions.
The clergy were especially anxious to have literature to help them in dealing with certain doctrines that were widespread in the colonies. Matthew Graves in New London was surrounded by ministers who heavily stressed the predestination of man to salva- tion or damnation as against free will, or rejected infant baptism. He wanted good essays on universal redemption and Wesley's tract
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defending infant baptism. Later he reported that the influence of Church books was so pervasive that some dissenting ministers publicly forbade their people to borrow, hear or read them.
Today, when many churches have a well-filled literature rack in the vestibule, it is almost impossible to conceive how much the arrival of a package of books meant to a parson and his people. The poor were pathetically thankful, and took the books so fast that soon the pastor was begging for more. It must have been a real pleasure to see the father of a family carrying a Bible from the church to a home that had never had one before, or to hear the tearful thanks of a poor widow when she received a little Prayer Book or a tract. Into tradesmen's shops in New London and Strat- ford, and to farmhouses in the Litchfield hills, went the books from across the ocean, to be read often by the great fireplace at night before going to bed in the cold chambers upstairs. John Beach of Newtown, writing in 1771 to acknowledge a gift of books, sent the sincere thanks of his poorest parishioners. "It has given me no small pleasure to observe, that some of them received this charity with as much gladness and satisfaction, as many would have received an estate, which unexpectedly befell them."24
What were the books which the people so joyfully wel- comed? Of course, Bibles and Prayer Books headed the list, and there were never nearly enough. Among the favorite volumes was Ostervald's catechism, for which Doctor Johnson said the poorer people fairly "thirsted." They also admired Lewis's or Sing's Exposition of the catechism, and The Whole Duty of Man. Tate and Brady's rhymed version of the Psalms was in great demand and in the early eighteenth century was the only one used in Con- necticut. Later in the century there were persistent calls for The Blacksmith's Letters, a tract defending the Church, which Matthew Graves called an "incomparable, unanswerable piece."25 Other widely-read books were Wesley's tract on infant baptism, Bishop Ken's Retired Christian, Dr. Berryman's sermons, Smith's essays on universal redemption, and the Companion to the Altar, containing prayers and meditations in preparation for Holy Communion. For the less learned the clergy used to import The Poor Man's Help and The Young Man's Friend.
Such literature was frankly intended for popular consump- tion, while the more highly educated clergy and laymen drew upon
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the deeper resources of parish libraries donated by the Society. The idea of shipping libraries to the American colonies originated in 1696, in the mind of that tireless missionary, scholar, and propa- gandist, the Rev. Thomas Bray. He believed that the clergyman and the eminent layman should have a full head as well as a kind heart. But as the average missionary or parish was too poor to pur- chase an adequate library, and there were very few colonial pub- lic libraries, he induced the S. P. C. K. to send them. He accepted the office of Commissary of the Bishop of London in Maryland only on condition that the Church would assist his plans for parochial libraries.
Of course, the libraries were largely religious, including Bibles, Prayer Books, The Whole Duty of Man, Bishop Gilbert Burnet's History of the Reformation, and Bishop Edward Stilling- fleet's Vindication of the Trinity. But Bray accorded notable recog- nition to what that age called "human knowledge," such as secular history, travel, geography, mathematics, dictionaries, natural his- tory, biography, heraldry, law, the Greek and Roman classics, grammar, linguistics, sports, medicine, mythology, and poetry.
Bishops and other eminent preachers at the S. P. G. annual meeting threw their influence behind the library movement, and gave generously to support it. With their help the libraries wrought a vast work in America that is only now beginning to be appreci- ated. Through them the S. P. G. and the S. P. C. K. became cul- tural agents, stimulating and extending the intellectual develop- ment of the colonies. They were the humane and benevolent as- pects of British imperial expansion, which was not a mere machine of commercial exploitation.
Connecticut began to reap the benefit of Dr. Bray's fore- sight almost as soon as the Church sprang up in Stratford. A li- brary came during the short-lived ministry of the Rev. Francis Phillips, about 1713. Next year the wardens and other parishioners complained that he had taken away the books when he deserted them for apparently greener pastures in Philadelphia. Undismayed, the Society sent another library with the second missionary, George Pigot, and as he was an honest fellow it was still there when Doctor Johnson came to enjoy it.
When the parish erected its second church in 1743, the plan included a library room on one side of the chancel. Johnson hinted
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to the Society's secretary that the parishioners would be thankful for gifts of books which, he added, would be eagerly read by many who were "very inquisitive after Christian knowledge."26
Libraries existed in other parishes, and apparently were deeply appreciated by both parson and people. Although the So- ciety gave careful instructions for their preservation and manage- ment, the books often became scattered and lost. The clergy lent them to parishioners, and sometimes would have agreed with Sir Walter Scott, who moaned that his friends were poor mathema- ticians but good book-keepers.
At Norwalk one of the missionaries (not Jeremiah Leaming) calmly sold the parish library and pocketed the proceeds. A few parishes still have books that once belonged to the colonial library. The library sent to Simsbury was still in existence in the early 1900's, each volume bearing the bookplate of the S. P. G. Who can ever know how many people used and appreciated them, how many literally read themselves into the Church? Their reading also brought them into more or less sympathetic contact with the secular and religious culture of Great Britain, and with some of the broader currents of thought in Western civilization.
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CHRIST CHURCH, STRATFORD, Erected în 1743, demolished in 1858.
This was the second and a typical Early Georgian church. The third was constructed in 1858. (From E. E. Beardsley, The His- tory of the Episcopal Church in Connecticut, Vol. I.)
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St. Andrew's Church, Aberdeen, is now the Cathedral. The chancel was provided by American Churchmen and was dedi- cated in 1948. Bishop Skinner's house (shown in lower section ) has been demolished.
CHAPTER SEVEN
WINDS OF POLITICS AND DOCTRINE
HIGH CHURCHMANSHIP
W HILE they inhabited a remote province, Connecticut Churchmen by no means lived in a stagnant, provincial atmosphere. They breathed an intellectual and spiritual air stirred up by currents of thought that arose in Great Britain and Ireland in the years around 1700. While Samuel Johnson and other fathers of the Connecticut Church were still in school, the mother country was seething with political and religious controversies. They were the result of the revolution of 1688 against the effort of King James II to return England to the Church of Rome, and from the newly arisen tendency to make religion "practical" and "reasonable."
The revolution brought on a gradual decrease of royal au- thority, and in a sense was a prelude to the American Revolution. It helped to create the two great English political parties - royal- ists or Tories, and parliamentarians or Whigs. The Tories were closely allied with the legally established Church of England and were often called the High Church party. The Whigs had heavy support among Protestant Dissenters and were sometimes called the Low or Broad Church party.
It was inevitable that the English political and religious contests would influence the American Colonies, and the Church in Connecticut was deeply affected. The exile of King James II and the succession of his son-in-law, Prince William of Orange (as William III) gravely divided the Church in England and Scotland. A respectable minority of Churchmen in England, including sev- eral bishops and hundreds of priests, abhorred James II's Roman Catholicism, but reverenced the Stuart royal family and the doc- trine of the divine right of kingly rule. That party therefore de- clined to take the oath of allegiance to William III and Mary II, and so the clergy were deprived of their offices. These clergymen were known as Nonjurors or High Churchmen and had their own
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churches, bishops, and priests. Although always a small minority, they included men of deep piety and brilliant intellectual and scholarly attainments.
The schism was to last for more than a century, or through- out the American Colonial period. By the end of Queen Anne's reign in 1714, the English Nonjurors were definitely estranged from the established church, and many also were politically estranged, if they followed James II's son, the "Pretender." The religious schism became fixed as early as 1693, when English Nonjuring bishops consecrated Bishop Hickes. He prolonged it by joining two Scottish Nonjurors in consecrating three more bishops. The bond between the two Nonjuring churches thus helped to preserve the Scottish Episcopal Church and its doctrinal and liturgical tradi- tions, until they were transmitted to the Church in America by the consecration of Bishop Seabury of Connecticut.
Of necessity the Nonjurors lived, as did Connecticut Church- men, in an atmosphere of repression, and were compelled to be furtive, especially in Scotland. When Seabury was a medical stu- dent in Edinburgh in the 1750's, he was escorted secretly to a serv- ice of the Scottish Church. The secretive note sounds in a satirical couplet about an English Nonjuring leader, by the poetaster Colley Cibber:
In close back rooms his routed flocks he rallies,
And reigns the patriarch of blind lanes and alleys.
The Scottish Church agonized through generations of re- pression. Few Christians have sacrified so much for religious princi- ples which, in their case, were linked to a noble but mistaken po- litical loyalty. In 1690 the episcopate was abolished in Scotland and Presbyterianism was legally established. King William III at first was willing to tolerate the Episcopalians, but when they declined to take the oath of allegiance he changed his mind.
In spite of royal disfavor, the Scottish Church remained strong, especially above the Tay River. In the early 1700's the people in some places would not receive a Presbyterian minister, while Episcopalian priests who refused the oath were persecuted and silenced. After the death of Queen Anne, Episcopalians be- came identified with the Stuart "Pretender," but even after the rising in his favor in 1715 they were not severely molested. The rising of 1745 in favor of his son was, however, nearly ruinous. The
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English government suppressed Episcopalians as disaffected, and declared Scottish ordinations null and void. After nearly forty years of persecution, the Church had declined to four bishops and a few thousand laymen. But loyalty to the "Pretender" gradually became merely romantic, and after the accession of George III in 1760 it was understood that Episcopal services would not be molested.
Scottish and English Nonjurors had long been associated in loyalty to "the king over the water." As that faded into the mist of hopeless causes, they were united by the more lasting bonds of liturgy, doctrine, and church government. Their many virtuous and learned leaders discussed together the question of "usages" in the Communion. Some followed the English Church, while others anticipated modern liturgical thought by advocating customs au- thorized by the first Prayer Book of King Edward VI in 1549, but later omitted. These were the mixed chalice (wine and water), the prayer for the dead, the invocation of the Holy Spirit upon the bread and wine, and the prayer of oblation to express the sacri- ficial character of the Eucharist. Many leaders even of the Church of England favored the "usages" and pleaded for their revival. By the 1730's nearly all English Nonjurors practiced them.
The same tendency gradually triumphed in the Scottish Church. While episcopacy prevailed in 1660-85, the old liturgy was nearly always used, but in Queen Anne's time (1702-14) the English rite gradually replaced it, and was favored by the upper classes, who wanted to cement the bond with England in the Act of Union of 1707. But many zealous and active men favored the old "usages," mostly included in the Scottish Prayer Book of 1637. By the 1740's the "usages" prevailed in northern Scotland, even though the Diocese of Edinburgh chiefly used the English rite, and at that time there was a declaration of full union and com- munion with the Church of England. In 1764 the Scottish Church published a revised edition of the Communion Office, which be- came generally recognized as authoritative, and eventually was used by Bishop Seabury.
The Church in Scotland grew in importance far out of pro- portion to its numbers because of the influence of Seabury upon the Church in America. With him there came to the United States a purely churchly episcopate derived from the united successions of the English and Scottish Nonjurors. Through him the "usages"
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were transmitted to the American Book of Common Prayer, in the edition of 1789 and later revisions. Another and less commonly recognized inheritance - transmitted partly by Connecticut Church- men - was a friendly relationship with other episcopal churches not in communion with Rome. The Nonjurors strongly opposed Roman claims to be the only true Catholic church, and as early as 1716-1723 tried to establish friendship with the Eastern Orthodox churches. Those efforts led eventually to the founding of the Angli- can-Orthodox Fellowship. Present-day intercommunion with the Old Catholic Church in Western Europe and with the Polish Catholic Church is an expression of the catholic spirit of the Nonjurors.
RATIONALISM
While Nonjurors struggled to transmit the doctrines and practices of the primitive Church, Connecticut Episcopalians strove to maintain sound doctrine in an unfriendly environment. Their faith had grown by acquaintance with the great divines of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, from whom Nonjurors also derived their doctrines. But while their Church revived and flourished, it was increasingly beset by the winds of new doctrine. Sometimes the atmosphere was stirred by the gentle breezes of ra- tionalism, sometimes by the whirlwinds of revivalist "Enthusiasm." Both arose from the intellectual ferment and the popular religious movements in Great Britain.
The Reformation had released the mind of Western Europe from slavish obedience to authority, but liberty of thought was not yet fully realized. At first only the learned inquired, but late in the seventeenth century the English philosopher, John Locke, popu- larized philosophy and taught educated people to use the power of reason. His popular book, The Reasonableness of Christianity, began a new era by bringing reason to bear upon doctrines that had been regarded as too sacred to investigate. The result some- times was a superficial and fashionable "free-thinking," with more reason than Christianity. But in the long run, guided by wise and solid scholarship, English Protestantism became established as firmly upon reasoned conviction as upon emotion and free will. The defense of Christianity upon the grounds of both reason and reve- lation appealed powerfully to the Father of the Church in Con-
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necticut, Samuel Johnson. Of course, he grew up and was educated at Yale College when Locke's influence was prevalent.
Another potent influence was that of the Deists, who thought of God as a "Supreme Being" rather than a personal Savior, and practically equated religion with a worldly morality based upon reason. Their high priest was John Toland, who in 1696 published his Christianity Not Mysterious. This work became a dominant influence in English theology for several decades, and deeply colored the religious mentality of many educated people. Toland never concealed his contempt for traditional authority and repudiated all evidence but that of simple reason. Many intelligent people felt that he tended to strip religion of its most impressive elements, and reduce it to a bare intellectual moralism.
Rational Deism tended to run to this extreme. If people would only obey the "practical" and moral precepts of the Gospel, and not worry about "mysterious doctrines," all would be well. This became practically the gentleman's religion and it dominated much Episcopalian preaching. Emphasis upon practical morality pene- trated the colonies and explains the comment that the Connecticut clergy preached practical rather than doctrinal sermons. It explains also the accusation hurled at them by the evangelists of the Great Awakening, that they were too formal and unemotional.
And indeed the natural result of exclusive emphasis upon reason and reliance upon inborn goodness was a superficial opti- mism that frequently became worldly smugness. As the poet Alexander Pope put it in one of his polished couplets, "whatever is, is right." Such an easy-going doctrine encouraged quiet indiffer- ence to deeper religious concerns, which the Anglican clergy found widespread even in Puritan Connecticut.
It was far from easy for the Anglican Church to steer be- tween rational Deism and emotional revivalism, and it was truly tested by attacks from both camps. Especially in the period from 1713 to 1753, Deism exerted a powerful appeal through the literary charm of brilliant and persuasive books that were extensively read in the colonies. Among them were Collins's Discourse of Free- Thinking, Wollaston's Religion of Nature, Tindal's Christianity as Old as Creation, Morgan's Moral Philosopher, and Annet's Free- Thinking the Great Duty of Religion.
Even more dangerous and annoying was the elegant ridicule
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of aristocratic intellectuals like the Earl of Shaftesbury, whose Characteristics appeared in 1708. He mocked positive doctrine and scored "Enthusiasm" as "that greatest incendiary of the earth." But like many sophisticated people, he bowed with cold politeness to the "established rites of worship" and received Communion once a year "at least for example's sake, on the account of our stations in Parliament."1 Occasional conformity for the sake of office ap- peared also in the colonies, to the disgust and distress of the Con- necticut clergy. It placed the Church in the embarrassing position of appearing to countenance official hypocrisy, and gave enthusi- astic evangelists an excuse to call it a merely polite religion for "respectable" men of the world.
Deistic attacks did not stop at Shaftesbury's elegant raillery. A small army of lesser writers joined in the cry and often de- scended to coarse abuse. They regarded the clergy as enemies, and gave no quarter in such bitter invectives as Tindal's Rights of the Church Vindicated against Romish and All Other Priests, and Collins's Priestcraft in Perfection.
Such extreme accusations seemed absurd to the average British or Colonial Englishman, who really knew the often under- paid parsons and curates. He saw them as mostly kind and honest men who baptized his children, visited the sick, gave advice, and preached sermons containing sound morals and fair doctrine. The parson might not be a scintillating intellectual, but he could be relied upon as a friend with ordinary interests like those of his neighbors. No doubt his humdrum and unexciting ministry seemed dull and stuffy to the zealous Methodist preachers, who challenged the Church to a deeper sense of duty to the unchurched masses. The criticism was repeated by the apostles of the Great Awak- ening against the Connecticut clergy, whom they dismissed as "unconverted."
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