USA > Massachusetts > Massachusetts Episcopalians 1607-1957 > Part 2
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We likewise know little of the life of Samuel Myles. According to various contemporaries he was "a very worthy pastor," a "worthy and pious man and an acceptable preacher, prudent and energetic." Myles was the son of a Baptist minister who had come to New Eng- land from Wales about 1662. He graduated from Harvard in 1684, and received an M.A. from Oxford. The Bishop of London ordained him and licensed him to become minister of King's Chapel. His rectorship lasted from June 29, 1689, to March 4, 1728.
The next rector was Roger Price, a veritable pluralist in ecclesiastical benefices. He had already been presented to the rectory of Leigh in Essex, a cure he held for many years without per- forming any particular duties and which he doubtless sublet to some "Vicar." In addition, he possessed the rectorship of Durrington, another at Wiltshire, as well as an entailed estate at Beckley. All this, beside the rectorship for seventeen years of King's Chapel. No wonder that Price, after 1744, was able to purchase extensive lands in the town of Hopkinton, where he built a church for a few faithful people, endowing the little parish with a glebe of 180 acres. When he returned to England after 1753, he became the active incumbent of the parish in Leigh and the archdeacon of St. Alban's.
Roger Price had been formally inducted into the rectorship of King's Chapel on June 25, 1729, and in 1730 was appointed by the Bishop of London, whose jurisdiction extended to all the Colonies, as his Commissary for New England. Price's seventeen-year rector-
*Batchelder, I, p. 388.
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ship was not unmarked by troubles. Thus, for instance, in 1734, he actually sailed in disgust for England, but the ship became becalmed when just out of the harbor. Returning to Boston, Price made a settlement with his critics by agreeing to relinquish any pretensions to the right of choosing a church warden, as well as for any monies paid for burials under the Church. Other agreements were to abandon any claims to ownership of the church library or church "stock," to preach on Sunday afternoons, and to make due entries, in the book provided, of Church marriages, christenings and burials. Evidently, Price was so used to the idea of absentee rectorship that he was failing in some of the regular obligations due to the parish of his residence.
It was in the same year of 1734 that Trinity parish was split off from King's Chapel. Its first rector, from 1740, was Addington Davenport, for several years Price's assistant. How far the troubles which started Price on a journey to England were responsible for this step, is now uncertain. Suffice it to say, Boston soon found room for a third Anglican parish. A fourth was not added till long after the Revolution.
In 1746, Roger Price relinquished his rectorship of King's Chapel and went to live at Hopkinton, where he acted as pastor to the little congregation and as Commissary to New England, until his return to England in 1753.
As their next rector the parish of King's Chapel chose Henry Caner of Fairfield, Connecticut, who had labored there for twenty years, adding Stamford and Norwalk to the chain of coastal parishes which were constantly sending their sons and daughters north. Caner was born in England, but was educated at Yale, and studied theology under Samuel Johnson, rector at Startford.
Before coming to Massachusetts, Caner had written to the S. P. G. asking the Society to dispense him from his post in Fairfield. Constant travel under the hard conditions of the day was impairing his health. For he ministered not only at Fairfield, Norwalk and Stamford, but tried to serve his parishioners as they migrated north. The Society consented and Caner, for thirty years, carried on an effective ministry in the town of Boston. Such missionary openings as came along were taken care of by others, including several able assistants.
One of the immediate pressing needs of the parish was a new church building. One of stone was begun on the same site in 1739, although the edifice was not completed and paid for until some years later. Shurtliff's History of Boston (pp. 249-250) adds this little touch of information: "Some more of the burying ground was taken by consent of the town, the bodies buried therein being removed to other parts of the ground. The east part of the present Chapel stands on ground first occupied by the schoolhouse of Master Phile- mon Pormorst, the first master of a free school in Boston, in 1635. There were twenty tombs built under this church. Governor Shirley
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and his wife, Mr. William Bollan, Mr. Samuel Vassall, Mr. William Price, and others of note in their day were buried in these vaults." William Price, here mentioned, was the founder of the endowed "Price Lectures," a series still maintained, and now under the aegis of Trinity Church.
Peace and prosperity were the lot of King's Chapel until the shadows of the Revolution lengthened. Governors and royal officers frequented the house of worship, drawing others in their train. In 1776, however, the scene suddenly changed. Caner, at short notice, withdrew with the royal forces to Halifax, losing all his property. The S. P. G. took him on as a missionary and even appointed him to the vacancy in Bristol, Rhode Island, where John Usher, a graduate of Harvard, had passed away after an illustrious ministry of fifty years. Conditions, however, prevented Caner from occupying this or any other post in the Colonies.
During the Revolution, King's Chapel remained largely unused. Some years later, James Freeman was chosen as lay reader and still later as pastor of the church. The flight of many of the pew-holders from Boston enabled those who had stayed behind to declare the pews of the absentees forfeited. These were sold to non-churchmen, many of them under the rising Unitarian influence. James Freeman became an early leader of the movement, then relatively conserva- tive. He approached both Bishop Seabury of Connecticut and Provoost of New York with reference to Episcopal ordination, but was rejected, conditions which he imposed being totally unaccept- able. However, he was duly "ordained" on Sunday, November 18, 1787, by vote of the congregation and by the on-laid hands of the warden, Thomas Bullfinch, M.D. The ordination was publicly re- jected by the rector of Trinity Church, Samuel Parker; of Christ Church, William Montague; of St. Paul's, Newburyport, Edward Bass; and of St. John's, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, John C. Ogden. The rift was complete. When, a year later, Bishop Seabury had an ordination in Boston, many of the Chapel folk attended. Wrote Freeman: "They were shocked with the services-particular- ly that part where the Bishop pretended to communicate the Holy Ghost and the power of forgiving sins. I shudder when I reflect to what moral danger I exposed myself in soliciting ordination of the American bishops; for I certainly never believed that they had the power of conveying the Holy Spirit."
Thus King's Chapel has become a Unitarian shrine. It might also be called a shrine of memory for Massachusetts Churchmen, for here was their first parish, and here some few of the early traditions are preserved, including liturgical usages. One, at least, of its ministers has even worn a clerical collar.
We may now turn to the varied fortunes of Christ Church at the North End, the church where the lantern was hung out for Paul Revere. The building erected was a "handsome Brick Church, 70 feet long, and 50 wide, 35 high, the walls 2 feet and a half thick, and
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the steeple's area is 24 feet square. As soon as it was fitted to have Divine Service performed in it, a numerous Congregation of People, both from Boston, and neighboring towns, attended the Public Worship there, particularly from Charlestown which is separated from Boston by a considerable River. At the opening of this Church, the usual audience was about 400 persons, but they in- creased continually." At this time Boston supposedly had about 20,000 people. Cutler thought that a sixth or seventh of these, some 3,000 people, could be reckoned as Churchmen.
This "handsome Brick Church" is much the same outwardly as it was in 1723. The changes have been in the interior and in the surrounding neighborhood. Only recently, the steeple blown down by the hurricane of 1954, was restored by an international sub- scription. The neighborhood for many years has been that of the poor. The Old North Church still maintains regular services, its small constituency swelled by many visitors.
Timothy Cutler, convert from Congregationalism and ex-rector of Yale College, was the first pastor. His reports to the S. P. G. indicate full congregations and numerous accessions by baptism and admittance to Holy Communion, Confirmation then being possible only by a visit to England. The prosperity of the parish, however, was matched by the poverty of its rector, who had great difficulty, with seven children, in keeping his head above water.
In his 1734 report, Cutler speaks of having preached at Ded- ham, where he baptized "5 children of a man and wife, sober persons." Twice also he had been invited to preach at Mendon (later to be a coach stop on the way to New York), a town "38 miles more inland than any in New England where the Service of the Church of England had been performed." In Mendon he baptized one child and had "an Audience of about 100 grown Persons; among whom were several of distinction, and Quakers as well as others, who gave them the liberty of assembling for worship in their House, and treated them (himself in particular) with remarkable civility and Respect afterwards." In the intervening 225 years no Episcopal congregation has arisen in fair Mendon, Unitarians, Baptists and Roman Catholics dividing the field. However, strong Episcopal parishes or missions exist in the neighboring towns of Milford, Whitinsville and Millville in Massachusetts, and in Woonsocket, Rhode Island.
Cutler's subsequent reports to the S. P. G. abound in references to numerous baptisms, including not a few slave Negroes and an Indian or two, and also to other visits to places as far as 25 miles from Boston. Among them were Sudbury, Gloucester, Dedham, Woburn, and a "place called 'Billericay'" (Billerica). There he preached to 200 adults "who attended with great Decency, and treat- ed Dr. Cutler with great Civility, and conferred with him on religious subjects, which gave him an opportunity of introducing the Church of England more to their knowledge and esteem."
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The Church in Massachusetts survived the assaults which Whitefield and his followers made against it and gained the respect of many Dissenters who were appalled by the results of the pre- vailing "Enthusiasm." In 1742, Cutler wrote to the home Society that "many illiterate Tradesmen, pretending to a Call to the publick exercise of their Gifts of Praying and Preaching, were helping for- ward the strange Work begun . . Our Churches, though not free from trouble, are comparatively in a good degree of Quiet, inso- much that many of the Dissenters have observed our Happiness in it." In 1742, Cutler received nineteen new communicants, many of them from the Dissenters. In 1744, he reported with reference to the Christmas service, that he had a crowded congregation, "the Dissenters attending in great numbers, who generally think the better of our Church under Mr. Whitefield's Invectives against it, and many of them take it as a Refuge from those corrupt principles and those disorders which he has spread among them" (a one-sided view of Whitefield) .
An evil of which Cutler several times complained was the flood of "bad books," chiefly of an infidel character, which came in from Europe, one consignment paying as much as forty-five pounds in customs duties. These dissertations were much more heavily im- ported than their refutations by Divines of the Church. Among these "infidel" publications were some of a "Socinian" nature. Boston was being intellectually prepared to be the future capital of American Unitarianism.
The spiritual prosperity of Christ Church was matched by material acquisitions of various sorts. Royal gifts of Communion plate and silver flagons alternated with the gift of an organ in 1736 procured from Newport, Rhode Island, and another built in 1759 and rebuilt some seventy years later.
In January, 1756, Cutler, in his last letter to the Society, report- ed that since July he had baptized 38 infants and "one Negro Slave of exceeding good character." There were "three large Episcopal Congregations in Boston, ten independent ones (Congregational), one small congregation of Methodists, two small Anabaptist ones, which sensibly diminish ; the Papists keep much out of Sight, nor do they increase; and the Church hath Accessions from Dissenters of all Denominations."
Soon after this was written, Cutler was smitten by a paralytic stroke, and was crippled for the remaining nine years of his life. For three years the parish services were maintained by the help of neighboring clergy. Then, in 1760, James Greaton went over to England to be ordained as curate for Christ Church, with the ex- pectation of succeeding Cutler as rector. Cutler managed to live for another five years, his counsel in parish matters being invaluable. However, there were objections to Greaton acceding to the rector- ship. So, after two years of locum tenency, he resigned and left the place open for Mather Byles, Jr., of New London, who forsook the
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Congregational ministry and sailed for ordination to England in 1768.
Byles, like Cutler, was born in Boston and graduated from Harvard. He was thirty-three when he was ordained by the Bishop of London. Oxford University gave him a degree of D. D. after ordination.
Byles' rectorship lasted only six and a half years. He was an exuberant Tory, which did not add to his popularity in town and parish, and he was likewise involved in a salary dispute with his Vestry. Both Byles and the S. P. G. had expected that his salary was to be one hundred pounds plus forty granted by the Society. The Vestry maintained that the hundred pounds they had promised included the forty provided by the S. P. G. When the Society ruled otherwise, the Vestry made a compromise offer of 80 pounds, which Byles accepted under protest. The near approach of the Revolution ended Byles' not untroubled rectorship. In April, 1775, he resigned his charge and served a while as a chaplain to the British forces in Boston, and later in Nova Scotia, dying in 1814. For three years, until 1778, Christ Church remained closed. Then the Rev. Stephen C. Lewis, who had been a chaplain in Burgoyne's captured army, officiated for seven years, until the post-Revolutionary organization of the Diocese of Massachusetts. Christ Church was formally in- corporated in June, 1787, under the Rev. William Montague.
The third parish in Boston began in 1735. After four years of a shifting ministry from without, the Rev. Addington Davenport, assistant minister at King's Chapel, was elected rector of Trinity by the pew holders in 1740, an office he held until his death in 1746, on a trip to England. In 1747, Mr. William Hooper, a Congregational pastor, was then chosen rector and sent to England for ordination by Bishop Benson. He died at his post in 1767. Four years before his death, the Rev. William Walter had been elected assistant minis- ter on the newly established Greene Foundation. He succeeded Hooper, and was in his turn succeeded as assistant minister by Samuel Parker. Parker, elected in 1774, remained on as minister of the parish when Walter withdrew with the British forces. He kept up the church services in peace, by omitting, with the advice and consent of the Vestry, the prayers for the King and Royal Family. Parker's great services to the Church in Massachusetts began before the Revolution and continued till his sudden death thirty years later, shortly after his consecration as the second bishop of Massachusetts.
We may now mention the parishes of the North Shore, of which the earliest was Queen Anne's Chapel in Newbury, dating from 1712. In 1740, St. Paul's, Newburyport, was founded, and eventually absorbed the older chapel. Not much later than Newbury was St. Michael's, Marblehead, dating from 1714. St. Peter's, Salem, came in 1733 and, in 1762, Amesbury, which had no church building. Later these last four all emerged from the woes of the Revolution and formed a strong part of the Massachusetts Diocese in its early days.
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The South Shore parishes began with a congregation in the spreading town of Braintree, in 1702. Christ Church, Quincy, the strong descendant of the Braintree chapel, can thus claim to be the oldest surviving parish of the diocese, King's Chapel having turned Unitarian. Other parishes to the south of Boston were slower in developing, though more numerous than those of the North Shore. St. Andrew's, Scituate, began in 1727, ante-dating Trinity, Boston. St. Thomas, Taunton, now a large parish, came fifteen years later in 1742. In the same year Trinity, Marshfield, now a fair-sized mission, began its two centuries of death and resurrection. In 1747, came Trinity, Bridgewater, still a relatively small parish; in 1756, Christ Church -- now St. Paul's - in Dedham; and in 1755, Stough- ton - now Canton - developing lately as a growing suburban church.
To the four parishes of the North Shore, the three of Boston and the six of the South Shore, we may add five others - St. Michael's, Bristol, founded in 1722 and ceded to Rhode Island in 1748; St. Paul's, Hopkinton, dating from 1738; Christ Church, Cam- bridge (1759) ; St. James, Great Barrington (1761) ; and St. Luke's, Lanesborough (1763). These seventeen parishes (excluding Bristol) survived the Revolution and persist today in smallness or strength. Great Barrington and Lanesborough are the oldest parishes of what is now The Diocese of Western Massachusetts.
Queen Anne's Chapel, Newbury (1712) grew out of a factional dispute among the Congregationalists of the town. For a minority of the residents of Newbury, who had been legally worsted in their attempt to establish a second Congregational Chapel near their homes, were advised to avoid legal complications by making their Chapel a Church of England parish. A petition, accordingly, was presented to Governor Dudley to that effect. It was granted, and Chaplain Lambton was detailed to make a start with the work. In 1715, the Rev. Henry Lucas was transferred to Newbury from Braintree, which was then in a parlous condition. Lucas, evidently a psychopath of some sort, and unnerved by parochial difficulties, died in August, 1720. Wrote Judge Sewall in his Diary: " 'Tis said Mr. Lucas, the Church of England minister, cut his own throat at Newbury. However, the minister of Marblehead set a good face on it, had the corpse carried into the Church and preached a funeral sermon." This Marblehead minister, David Mossom, reported that since Lucas' death, he had officiated frequently at Newbury. "There were present above one hundred people, twenty of which were communicants."
In late 1720, the Rev. Matthias Plant was appointed by the S. P. G. to Newbury. He was kindly welcomed, and church contribu- tions were, this time, cheerfully made. The members of the con- gregation numbered nearly 200, some of them coming four and six miles to the services. The demand of the Congregationalists, that Churchmen continue to pay taxes for the support of the Congrega-
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tional parish, was appealed to Governor Shute, who promptly decided in the Church's favor.
The Newbury parish continued to grow, but the emergence of Newburyport as an important shipping center led to the establish- ment of another parish there, which gradually over-shadowed the earlier one. Though the people at the Port invited Plant to conduct their services every other Sunday, it was some years before they were actually ready to elect him rector. His dress, they said, was "not canonical." He wore a gaudy kerchief instead of a sober "band." On June 24, 1751, however, he was inducted as rector. Soon after, Edward Bass, later to be the first bishop of Massa- chusetts, was sent to England to be ordained as Plant's assistant. When Plant died in 1758, Bass succeeded to the rectorship. He carried the little parish successfully through the Revolution by bow- ing to the storm. Like Parker at Trinity, Boston, he omitted from the services the prayers for the King and Royal Family. Conse- quently, in 1779, the S. P. G. dropped Bass from the list of its missionaries. The financial loss, however, was made up in part by some of the parish. Ten years before that, old St. Anne's Chapel, long abandoned, had succumbed to wind and weather. All Saints, West Newbury, a parish of 110 communicants, now takes its place.
In the neighboring seaport of Marblehead, a Church of England parish came into being in 1714, just two years after St. Anne's, Newbury. But long before that there were, evidently, quite a num- ber of people in the town familiar with the old liturgy. "Marblehead is a seaport, the second town in all New England, very considerable for the number of its inhabitants, for its Commerce and especially for the Fishery carried on there. A great number of these People were desirous to have the Church of England service settled there. In the year 1707 they made subscriptions for building a Church amounting to 416 L. They wrote letters to the Bishop of London, and to the Society acquainting them with their Desires of having a Minister of the Church of England, and declaring their intentions of building a Church."*
The next year, John Talbot, on a tour for the S. P. G., preached at Marblehead, but decided not to build any more churches till men could be found to man them. However, the Marblehead people went ahead with their building project, and a Mr. Shaw was sent there as a missionary. Shaw remained only three years (having had differences with his Clerk, Charles Jackson, who had set himself up as a rival preacher), and returned to England. The Marblehead church building is the oldest one in the diocese in continual use.
In 1719, David Mossom, who later was to bury Henry Lucas of Newbury, came to the parish. He did well spiritually, but materially the story was quite different. Salary payments were irregular and a house once provided for Mossom's use was taken away, with the
*Batchelder, I, p. 428.
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result that he had to pay 25 pounds a year, a good part of his income, for rent. So, after several years, Mossom betook himself to Virginia in hopes of bettering his condition.
In the autumn of 1727, George Pigot, who had served at Strat- ford and Providence, was transferred to Marblehead. He began a vigorous ministry, with forty-five to ninety baptisms a year, mostly of children. In 1733, he reported six baptisms in Salem, where there were nine communicants. In that year St. Peter's, Salem, began its career, a century after the banishment of the brothers Brown.
Pigot remained at Marblehead for eleven years, reporting an enormous number of baptisms nearly every year. A fifth of the 6,000 inhabitants of Marblehead, he said, might be counted as ad- herents or favorers of the Church of England. In 1738, a "Pesti- lential distemper" carried off over 400 people in Marblehead, including four of Pigot's children. Pigot himself slipped once on the winter ice and again on the spring grass, each time breaking his arm. In September he wrote and obtained leave to go to England, where, soon after, he was inducted into the rectorship of Chaldon, Surrey. Therewith, his sixteen years of missionary work in America, and the dreams of a barony which he might carve out of his wife's acres, the daughter of a Rhode Island Governor, came to an end.
The next rector was Alexander Malcolm, an ordained school- master in New York, who stayed for nine years. John Barnard, the Congregational minister in Salem, who has left us in his Auto- biography graphic sketches of the Marblehead Church of England ministers, says this of Malcolm: "Their fourth minister was a Scotch gentleman, of great learning, and being originally of the Kirk of Scotland, still retained some fondness for it, and therefore, though true to the Church of England, was yet far from a bigot. With him we lived in close friendship, till upon some prospect and invitation to what he thought better accommodations, he also left his church and went to Maryland - which occasioned their sexton to say 'Their church was the healthiest Church in the Country, for they never buried a minister yet, though they had had four, who all run away'."*
There ensued a four-year vacancy. The S. P. G., before sending the parish anyone else, demanded that a parsonage and glebe, with regular salary, be provided for the minister. The Parish agreed, and Peter Bours, an M.A. of Harvard and a native of Rhode Island, was sent to England for ordination in 1753.
Bours likewise had a great number of baptisms, over 200 in his first three years. How many of these were children who never grew up we can only conjecture. Presumptively, the usual forty or fifty percent ratio of child mortality prevailed. Eight years after his arrival, Bours reported to the S. P. G., in 1761, that "the greatest unanimity reigns among the several denominations in that place,
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