USA > Massachusetts > Massachusetts Episcopalians 1607-1957 > Part 3
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*Humphreys, pp. 328, 329.
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that he had constantly a full audience who are in general devout in their worship and exemplary in their lives." Bours passed away on February 24, 1762, after a rectorship lasting nine years. At last, the parish was able to bury a rector, aged only thirty-six at that!
John Barnard has this to say about Bours: "Their fifth minister was the worthy Mr. Bours of Rhode Island, bred at our college - a man of excellent temper, good learning and great piety, whose good carriage gained more to the Church of England than all the years that preceded him. My people were fond of him and kind to him, insomuch that the Church minister has told me, he received more presents from my people than from his own." Evidently in Marble- head, denominational relations were more harmonius than in many other parts of the Colony.
The last pre-Revolutionary rector of St. Michael's was Joshua Wingate Weeks, born in Hampton, New Hampshire, and a graduate of Harvard in 1758. He was ordained in 1763 in England, the Marblehead parish contributing thirty pounds toward the expenses of the journey. Week's incumbency was successful enough, till the Revolutionary troubles began. Unlike Bass, of Newburyport, to whose dismissal by the S. P. G. he seems to have contributed, he re- fused to budge on the issue of omitting prayers for the King. In 1775, he was obliged to flee for refuge, with his family, to the house of his brother-in-law, the Rev. Jacob Bailey in Pownalborough in Maine. In 1776, he returned to Marblehead and officiated for a time. In 1778, he sailed from New York for England, leaving his family dependent on charity.
We may now turn to the story of St. Peter's Church, Salem. George Pigot of Marblehead reported nine communicants there and six baptisms in 1733. In that same year the parish was organized, Mr. Philip English and his family giving the land, valued at 120 pounds, for a Church edifice. A minister, however, was long in coming. Finally, in 1739, the Rev. Charles Brockwell, an English- man, who was much discontented with the "little service" he felt he could render at Scituate, was transferred to Salem. He continued in faithful and successful performance of his duties until he became, seven years later in 1746, assistant minister at King's Chapel in Boston. His successor was the Rev. William McGilchrist, born in 1703 in Scotland and a graduate of Oxford. Before coming to Salem, he had had a four year term in South Carolina until ill health sent him home. In 1747 .he began a thirty-year ministry in Salem, clos- ing the Church in 1777, rather than to omit the prayers for the King. Three years later he died, bequeathing three-years' back salary to the parish, and his library to his successor. Services were continued sporadically by a lay reader until the Rev. Nathaniel Fisher, born in Dedham, a graduate of Harvard in 1763, became rector in 1782. Fisher had been the last New England colonial to go over to England for ordination. The Bishop of London ordained him in 1777 for work in Nova Scotia.
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Turning to the parishes of the South Shore, we may begin with the earliest, that in Braintree, founded in 1702, when the first mis- sionary, the Rev. William Barclay, was appointed by the S. P. G. He stayed just two years. After seven years of vacancy, Thomas Eager officiated during 1711 and 1712. In 1713, he asked Sir Francis Nicholson, who had then general supervision of the missions in the North, to get for him the arrears of his salary and to grant him a dismissal. This was done. Eager was succeeded for a short time by Henry Lucas, who six years later died in Newbury. For ten years the parish had no missionary until the Rev. Ebenezer Miller began a long and fruitful ministry in 1727. In the meantime, a church building had been erected, the land being given by the father and uncle of the Rev. William Vesey, the first rector of Trinity Church, New York.
St. Paul's, Dedham, originally called Christ Church, had its origin in occasional services conducted by Dr. Cutler of Christ Church, Boston, in 1732-33. In 1733, an effort was made to build a church in the village, but subscribers were too few. The most that the good Church people could do was to attend services in Boston, bringing back a certificate to this effect from the minister. Other- wise they were liable to prosecution as Sabbath-breakers.
In the years from 1734 to 1736, the town of Dedham was in- duced to free Church folk from taxes for the support of the local Congregational minister. Even then, plans for a church building seemed premature, and the Rev. Ebenezer Miller of Braintree for some years officiated in Dedham, as often as his other duties per- mitted. Thus: "1758, Jan. 8 Doct. Miller carried on the Church Sarvis in the Meeting House and preached to a great number."*
Shortly thereafter, by the provisions of the will of Samuel Colburn, who had lost his life in the French-Indian War, a church building was begun, and finished in 1760. This was located across the street from the present St. Paul's. Services were conducted there by Dr. Miller, by his successor Edward Winslow and by a new S. P. G. mis- sionary to Dedham and Stoughton, the Rev. William Clark, from 1768 on.
This last parson ran into great trouble in 1778 and 1779. A mob ransacked his house one night. "He was taken on a warrant, denied bail, carried to a public house, thence hurried to Boston on a hot day, and had only half an hour allowed him to procure two bondsmen - Upon his trial he was denied counsel, and was not per- mitted to know what was alledged against him, which through his deafness he could not hear. The consequence was, he was sentenced to banishment and confiscation of estate, and sent on board a guard- ship, in order to be transported to the West Indies, or to some port in Europe. But his asthma having much increased by his confine- ment, he obtained leave to return home a prisoner (having but one
*Batchelder, II, p. 65.
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mile excursion) under bonds of 500 L. penalty. - He was induced to get leave to go to some place under the King's protection for the benefit of his health. He got to Newport (by the kind intervention of Fisher Ames) where he remained for some time, with little to support him but the kind hand of charity. At length, by the liber- ality of Sir H. Clinton (who has much tender regard for the distresses of the clergy) he was ordered a passage, and furnished by his Excellency with provisions and money for the voyage, and is since come to England, depending chiefly, as many others, on bounty of the Society for support."* The Dedham parish remained without a minister until 1790. Today St. Paul's counts 500 communicants and the parish of the Good Shepherd 300, as of 1957.
St. Andrew's Church, Scituate, began with the occasional ministrations of Ebenezer Miller of Braintree. In 1731, a church building was erected on Church Hill. In 1732-33, the Rev. Adding- ton Davenport, later first regular rector of Trinity Church, Boston, was appointed missionary at Scituate, and did good work for several years. His successor was Charles Brockwell, who soon secured a transfer to Salem. The next regular missionary was Ebenezer Thompson, who served with success from 1749 to his death in December 1775, due to bodily infirmities, aggravated by harsh treat- ment at the hands of the Patriots. (The church in Scituate has re- cently been revived.) Thompson was responsible for the rise of the little church in Marshfield. He also officiated in Bridgewater and Plymouth.
So much for the parishes to the south of Boston. We turn to those which arose to the west, beginning with the nearest, Christ Church, Cambridge.
This great parish - as it now is - was launched on its vicis- situdinous career at the intellectual center of Puritanism in 1759, with the appointment of East Apthorp, a fellow of the University of Cambridge, who on a visit to Boston, was induced to labor at the Cambridge across the seas. A structure "useful and durable, as well as decently elegant" and suited to enlargement, was planned. Old Christ Church is the architectural result.
The building was formally opened on October 15, 1761, Apthorp contributing his first two years' salary toward the considerable cost of construction. In 1764, he resigned, partly because of the violent attack which the Rev. Jonathan Mayhew of Boston made on the S. P. G. The burden of these attacks was that the S. P. G. was exceed- ing its chartered mission, and had no business to intrude into an already Christian land.
In 1766, the Rev. Winwood Serjeant was transferred by the S. P. G. from South Carolina to the mission at Cambridge. Soon after, he wrote: "My duty lies within a narrow circle." Six years later,
*7th S. P. G. Anniversary Sermon 1778-79, quoted from Batchelder, II, p. 69.
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he was able to write: "My communicants make a superior figure to most in the country." Two years after that, on March 12, 1774, he informed the S. P. G .: "There are between fifteen and twenty families, six of them possessed of ample fortunes, the rest in very easy circumstances, who have retired from business. The income of the Church seldom exceeds 70 L per annum. The populace are engaged almost daily in riots and tumults. On the 7th inst. they made a second destruction of thirty chests of tea. Political com- motions run extremely high in Boston; if not suppressed soon, the whole province is in danger of being thrown into anarchy and con- fusion."
Soon thereafter the parish broke up. Many of the well-to-do members dwelling on Brattle Street, then known as "Tory Row," had fled north for safety. Serjeant was soon compelled to follow them. Wrote Henry Caner from the security of British-held Boston: "Mr. Serjeant of Cambridge has been obliged with his family to flee for the safety of their lives, nor can I learn where he is concealed. His fine church is turned into a barracks by the rebels, and a beautiful organ that was in it broke to pieces."*
With the coming of Washington, such use of the church build- ing was discontinued. Later, with the arrival of his wife, services were held there. Still later, when captured prisoners of Burgoyne's army were quartered in Cambridge, one of their chaplains, Stephen C. Lewis, conducted services. Lewis, subsequently, officiated for seven years in Christ Church, Boston. Christ Church, Cambridge, remained in disuse and disrepair until 1790.
Turning farther west, we may glance at St. Paul's, Hopkinton, which, after nearly two centuries of vicissitude, now numbers 132 communicants. This little parish, so often despaired of, began as a sort of summer-resort church for wealthy members of King's Chapel. Roger Price founded it and left it a considerable endow- ment in land, building also a small church. After his return to England, the place languished for many years, its endowment largely dissipated. Only recently, has it been placed on sure founda- tions.
It is far cry from Hopkinton, a bare twenty-five miles from Boston, to Lanesborough and Great Barrington in the Berkshires. The interior territory beyond was not opened up for Churchmen until two generations after the Revolutionary War, not till cotton manufacturing reached the watercourses of central Massachusetts. Then, small mill parishes grew up at Clappville-now Rochdale; and at Wilkinsonville, so named after a Pawtucket manufacturer, a cum- municant of newy-founded St. Paul's in that city.
*Batchelder, II, pp. 46-48.
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Great Barrington and Lanesborough had their beginnings in people and pastors of Connecticut origin. The second generation of Churchmen in Connecticut gradually settled in towns north of the original coastal parishes. Their sons and daughters, if not they themselves, paddled up the Naugatuck and Housatonic to western Massachusetts. The tide was not long in reaching southern Ver- mont. Not a few Tories settled in northwest Vermont, supposing it to be a part of Canada. Church people in eastern Vermont and western New Hampshire came mostly from the towns near the Connecticut river. The next century even saw a line of packet boats plying between Hartford and Bellows Falls, Vermont.
The two colonial parishes of western Masachusetts are another gift from Connecticut. St. James, Great Barrington, was the first to be organized. Its formation was due to the dissatisfac- tion of the Lutheran settlers from New York and of some of English and Connecticut extraction with the rigid Calvinism of the Rev. Samuel Hopkins, the author of the so-called Hopkinsian system of Divinity. About 1760, a number of dissidents, seceded from the Congregational Church and, under the leadership of the Rev. Solomon Palmer, an S. P. G. missionary in Connecticut, organized "the Society of St. James." The Rev. Thomas Davies of New Mil- ford, Connecticut, visited the group the following year. In a report to the S. P. G. he writes: "They informed me that many of them had long been dissatisfied with their dissenting instructions, being con- stantly taught rigid calvinism, and that sin is an infinite advantage, and advanced happiness greatly in the world; that if the church was introduced there they must pay tithes; that the Church was just like the papists ; that the Service Book was taken from the Mass Book. I chose a clerk - a very regular and pious man, long acquainted with the Church to read prayers with them, as they in conscience could not go to meeting. One of the most steady among them was imprisoned last summer for non-attendance; and they all would be if they did not meet among themselves.
"There are near 40 families, conformists, in this town; people of worth and fame."*
In 1762, Ebenezer Punderson, the ex-Congregational minister of Groton, Connecticut, who had conformed to the Church in 1734, twice visited the parish, "where I spent some time and preached on Sundays and lectured to crowded auditories, and administered the two sacraments of Baptism and the Lord's Supper. I took a great deal of pains with that people to instruct them in the principles, doctrines and government of the Church of England." Punderson also preached to a large congregation in Sheffield.
From 1763 to 1766, Solomon Palmer of Litchfield, Connecticut, left his parish to do missionary work in western Massachusetts, re- turning to Litchfield after three years.
*Batchelder, II, p. 73-75. He quotes from two church documents (Conn.).
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His successor was Gideon Bostwick, a Yale graduate, who was schoolmaster and lay reader in Great Barrington. Finally, in 1769, partly by the intervention of Samuel Johnson at Stratford, he was enabled to go to England, and be ordained by the Bishop of London. The next year he returned to Great Barrington.
Bostwick was a diligent and efficient worker. He added to his cure the new parish of Lanesborough, officiating there once a month. Not content with that, he also took occasional services at Hudson, New York, and at Manchester and Arlington in Vermont, which places he seems to have regarded as part of his Massachusetts parish. Although a Tory, Bostwick, apparently had little trouble with the Patriots. He continued in active service until 1793, when he died of pneumonia. During his ministry, Bostwick baptized 81 adults and 2,244 children, and officiated at 120 weddings and 84 funerals.
"Mr. Bostwick was always much beloved by his people. He read the service with great propriety, and his sermons were chaste and instructive. In social and domestic life he was cheerful and facetious, and in public his deportment was such as to inspire respect."*
Some of the early inhabitants of Lanesborough were Church- men, mostly from Connecticut. In 1767, the Rev. Samuel Andrews, missionary at Wallingford, Connecticut, made a northward tour as far as Arlington and Sunderland, Vermont, the last 150 miles away from home. He officiated one Sunday in Arlington, presumably in Jehiel Hawley's house, and one Sunday in Lanesborough. There he organized St. Luke's parish. "There are about seventy families in the town of Lanesborough, who have settled a violent, enthusiastic preacher among them, at the absurdity of whose doctrines many of the people are extremely shocked."* A dozen families had already conformed to the Church, having a church meeting by themselves every Sunday. In 1768, the Rev. Richard Mansfield of Derby, Con- necticut, made a similar journey to the northward areas. "I per- formed a long journey to seven or eight towns of the colonies of New York and Massachusetts Bay - who are very desirous of missionaries covering among them. At Lanesborough I found a considerable number of serious and sensible professors of the Church of England who, having been tired out with the rigid doctrines of enthusiastic independent teachers of the town, had em- braced the Church of England, built themselves a church in which they constantly meet and join in our Liturgy, and in reading good sermons."*
*Batchelder, II, p. 80 to 84.
*Batchelder, II, p. 83.
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The first rector of Lanesborough, was Gideon Bostwick of Great Barrington, who officiated there once a month. The other Sunday services were cared for, after 1783, by Daniel Burhans, a local schoolmaster who, in 1793 and 1794, was ordained deacon and priest by Bishop Seabury of Connecticut, this being one of the seventeen ordinations which Bishop Seabury performed for places outside of Connecticut. On Bostwick's death in 1793, Burhans succeeded to the rectorship of the Lanesborough parish, remaining there for six years. From 1799 to 1830 he officiated at Newton, Connecticut, bringing the number of communicants from 160 to 316. He was then seventy. Another fourteen years of varied ministry in smaller places followed. He then retired to Poughkeepsie, New York, dying in full possession of his faculties in 1853, at the age of ninety.
Such, in brief, is the story of the Colonial parishes of Massa- chusetts. They were all prospering and pastorally cared for until the woes of the Revolution broke upon them. For most of them recovery was slow.
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CHAPTER III. Revolution and Reorganization 1776 - 1810
I
When the woes of the Revolution broke over colonial America, the Anglican Church in New England had some sixty-five congre- gations and thirty-five ministers. Twenty of these, all colonials, served the forty parishes of Connecticut. The other fifteen, many of them Englishmen, ministered to the twenty-five congregations of Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Hampshire.
At the end of the war, fourteen of Connecticut's twenty clergy were still about and ready to work. In Massachusetts, only Edward Bass of Newburyport and Samuel Parker of Trinity Church, Boston, had survived the political tempests of the time, by omitting from their services the prayers for the King and Royal Family. In Rhode Island, John Usher, the beloved rector of Bristol for fifty years, had just died. The rectors of Providence, and Newport, both English- men, were excluded from public officiating by their congregations for refusing to omit the prayers for the Royal Family. The rector of Newport left with the British forces when they evacuated that town. In New Hampshire, the rector of Portsmouth had been driven into exile, and Rana Cossit at Claremont was silenced by his fellow citizens.
Inevitably, the revival began first in Connecticut. In 1784, ten of the fourteen remaining clergy of the new State met at Woodbury to elect a bishop. When Joshua Leaming declined the difficult honor, the lot fell on their second choice, Samuel Seabury, son of the former rector at New London. Seabury had been driven by the Patriots from his parish in Westchester, New York, and had served as chap- lain in the British Army. A pension from the British Government helped to finance the long journey to Great Britain and to make easier his lot as rector in New London and Bishop of Connecticut.
The English bishops, though sympathetic, had no authority from Parliament to ordain foreigners who could not swear an oath of allegiance to the British Crown - authority, however, which was soon granted, after Seabury had obtained consecration in Scotland. That land had a small Anglican Church whose ministers and bishops had refused to swear allegiance to the "usurping" House of Han- over, and so were free to give consecration to the American. On November 14, 1784, in the private chapel of Robert Kilgour, bishop of Aberdeen, Seabury was consecrated a bishop in the Church of God, by Kilgour and two neighboring prelates.
Shortly before this event (in 1784), six clergy of Massachusetts and two from Rhode Island, attended a Convocation in Boston, the main business of which was to issue a call for the clergy and lay delegates from the non-Connecticut parishes to meet a year later. In the meantime, Seabury had returned to Connecticut and had held his own first Convocation, a purely clerical gathering. It was not until 1792 that a Convocation composed of both clerical and lay
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delegates ratified the Constitution, Canons, and Prayer Book put out by the General Convention of 1789. Seabury had yielded to the demands of other dioceses regarding lay representation in Diocesan and General Conventions, but had won General Convention recogni- tion of his own consecration and the right of bishops to sit apart from the clergy and laity, as well as of certain additions to the Com- munion Service of the English Church taken from the Liturgy of the Church in Scotland. In the five years between 1784 and 1789, the American Church had acquired, through consecration in England, three more bishops of its own: White of Pennsylvania, Provoost of New York, and Madison of Virginia. In 1792, Seabury took part in the consecration of Thomas J. Claggett of Maryland.
The year 1790 was a memorable one in New England Episcopalian history. In that year, Bishop Seabury and his clergy accepted pro- visionally the Constitution, Canons and Prayer Book of the 1789 General Convention, and called a convention of both clergy and laity to ratify the same in 1792. In 1790, clergy and laity in Massa- chusetts met for the purpose of more completely organizing the Diocese, with a view eventually of securing a local bishop. This was not to come, however, for another six years. In 1790, two clergy- men and five laymen of Rhode Island organized a diocese in that State and elected Seabury as their diocesan. This election Seabury accepted, attending two diocesan conventions and officiating at four ordinations and several confirmations. In 1790, two clergymen and lay representatives from eight congregations (none of them possess- ing Church buildings of their own) organized the Diocese of Vermont. New Hampshire congregations did not formally get to- gether until 1802, nor those of Maine, until 1820, when it became a State separated from Massachusetts.
II. THE EPISCOPATE OF EDWARD BASS
Edward Bass, on his mother's side, was descended from John Alden and Priscilla Mullens. His paternal ancestor in America was Deacon Samuel Bass, who settled in Roxbury in 1630 and died in 1694. His great-grandson, Edward Bass, was born to Samuel and Elizabeth Bass in Dorchester on November 23, 1726, being baptized four days later in the Old First Church.
Edward, when thirteen, entered the Harvard class of 1744. In his day, the old classical curriculum, with Hebrew added, had just been enriched by elementary offerings in astronomy, physics, geometry and philosophy.
After graduation, Bass continued at Harvard for another three years, earning a Master's degree and getting his livelihood by teach- ing in nearby schools. His Master's thesis, typical of the time, was
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on the subject: "Will the Blessed in the Future World, after the Last Judgement, make use of Articulate Speech, and Will That be Hebrew ?" To both questions his answer was, Yes.
Next, Bass decided to study for the Congregational ministry. He declined a call to Boxford, where the congregation was engaged in trying to get rid of an old minister and to build a new church. Soon after, being favorably impressed by the ways of the Church of England, he accepted an assistantship at St. Paul's, Newburyport, to the aging Matthias Plante. This involved a journey to London for ordination. Bass took with him letters of recommendation from the President and the four professors of Harvard College, and the Rev. Mr. Miller of Braintree. However, the Rev. Charles Brockwell of Boston wrote to the Bishop of London describing Bass as a "forward young man" who had ventured to preach before he was ordained. "How much such proceedings may conduce to the contempt of religion and the Ministry, I humbly submit to your Lordship." Of course, the young man would be duly fortified with testimonials "from their Seminary of Schism" (Harvard).
Bishop Sherlock received the young candidate kindly, and, after examining him, had him translate the Thirty Nine Articles into Latin.
On May 17, 1752, Bass was ordained deacon, and priest a week later. In less than a year, on Plante's death on April 21, 1753, he succeeded to the rectorship at Newburyport, a station still assisted by the S. P. G.
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