USA > New York > Nassau County > Long Island; a history of two great counties, Nassau and Suffolk, Volume II > Part 7
USA > New York > Suffolk County > Long Island; a history of two great counties, Nassau and Suffolk, Volume II > Part 7
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On this supposedly insular terrane the churches were in contact with every form of social structure ever known to man except the matriarchate and the totalitarian state-tribal life of aborigines, feudalism, the purest democracy that ever existed anywhere, a theocracy never seen anywhere else but under Moses in the wilderness and under Calvin at Geneva, communism in a "Fourier" colony, "Shakerism" and the beginnings of modern industrialism; and the churches absorbed all of some of them and parts of all of them. Not only so; the Island was no more exposed to ocean breezes than were the churches to every wind of doctrine, from orthodoxy to Hicksite "unorthodoxy", from complacent post-millennialism to the extreme crochets of pre-millennialism.
After 150 years of rigid Puritanisin an "Infidel Club" was organ- ized in Easthampton, of all places, and there spread its beliefs that the Bible was largely "a fable". Because some of the leaders were active in local affairs their propaganda turned the town upside down, but in a matter of thirty years not a vestige of this aberration could be found there. Hardly would infidelism be out of the running before one Gammage would have Patchogue by the ears with the Millerite prediction that the world would come to an end April 23, 1844. Stores closed out, properties were sold, people put their affairs in order and fabricated ascension robes. But the Lord didn't come. Only those Congregationalists affected were disappointed. The Presbyterians, if they refrained from gloating, nevertheless commented that when the delusion had been branded by divine providence as a lie the honesty of those who failed to admit their error was seriously in question. But soon the Presbyterians would be divided by a schism involving every Presbytery in the United States, the result of the Old School- New School theological controversy.
This upheaval was largely the issue of differences between New England English Presbyterians and Middle States Scottish Presby-
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terians, arising from the latter's suspicion of New England deviations from the strict standards of Calvinism, as represented in the Con- fession and Catechisms, becoming at length a fight to control the
(From watercolor by Cyril A. Lewis)
Christ's First Presbyterian Church, Hempstead
Church. Without delving into all this, suffice it to say that at its climax the schism split the Presbyteries of Long Island. Then in two Old School Presbyteries there were 22 ministers, 23 churches and 4105 communicants; in two New School Presbyteries 16 ministers, 10 ,churches and 2179 communicants (Prime). In the whole country "the Old School defended pure Presbyterianism by cutting off 533
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churches and a hundred thousand communicants" (R. F. Weld), the forcing out of the New School churches, and the forming of New School Presbyteries, perpetuating the struggle for power until the "Reunion" in 1869. In one of his charming religious essays Boreham, a famed Australian preacher, remarks that "the trouble with most controversies is that both sides are wrong", meaning probably that often the very essence of the commonweal is compromise, and that when controversialists leave off their contention, to find on higher ground than that of acrimonious debate a synthesis of their dif- ferences, it is there for the seeking. Presbyterianism, as we shall see, was learning slowly and by bitter experience how to make room for much divergence of theological opinion, within a constitution broad enough to permit considerable freedom of religious thinking and a degree of encouragement to an intellectual honesty at variance with more. conservative interpretations.
In the Old School-New School melee it was a sometime Long Island Presbyterian minister who became one of the principal storm centers. That was at Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, where its Old School Trustees were engaged in ouster proceedings against their President, newly called from Boston and shortly suspected of the New England theological taint. This was the already legendary Lyman Beecher, a big ecclesiastical potato shaken to the top over a road that led through Easthampton, Long Island, and Litchfield, Con- necticut. Even at Easthampton he had manifested as a youth char- acteristics that would keep him always in the spotlight. A gusty personality, whether leading a revival or hunting rabbits or, as Forrest Wilson (Crusader in Crinoline, a Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe) has it, raging at his migratory pigs, Lyman Beecher moved in an aura of excitement. Easthampton paid a meagre salary and he lived beyond it. His remarkable wife, Roxana Foote, eked out with teaching in her own private school for girls not enough for a com- petence. The congregation liquidated his debts but declined to raise his salary, and he accepted a call to Litchfield where his great and good friend, Judge Tapping Reeve, a native Long Islander and one of the ablest jurists of the time, would counsel and encourage him. Lyman Beecher's was "the best theological brain in America" and his masterful logic is possibly to be credited with forefending East- hamptonites against the curiously egregious "free-thinking" which would follow the departure of their most famous minister and find itself doomed to failure.
When Beecher was beginning to win wide attention, Rev. Joshua Hartt, hardly a national figure, though famed as a patriot preacher imprisoned by the British, and endeared to innumerable people of the Island, was approaching the close of his more modest career. During the Revolution Hartt, born in Huntington in 1738 and gradu- ated from Princeton in 1770, was the minister at Smithtown. After the war he lived at Fort Salonga and, though never again settled as a pastor, became an uninstalled minister to the whole adjacent country- side, where countless "intending" couples doubted they would be "properly married unless 'Priest Hartt', as he was generally known, had officiated". "A huge, kindly man", he miraculously survived an
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almost fatal attack of "prison fever" in the Provost Jail in New York. His cellmate was Ethan Allen, hero of Fort Ticonderoga. Freed before Ethan, Hartt went home and, as Simon Cooper, long- time Long Island Editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, observes, forever disposed of the canard that Ethan Allen was an unbeliever, quoting him as saying: "Mr. Hartt, you are soon to be given your freedom. When you are once more with your family, tell them that you were sick and in prison and nigh unto death, and that Ethan Allen, a servant of the Most High God, prayed over you and you recovered". He certainly recovered, lived to the age of 91 and died at Freshpond in 1829.
Incredible as it may seem, to those who now can think of Long Island only as the outlet, market-garden and playground of the great- est metropolis on earthı, and of Brooklyn as "an intervening hell of jerry-built houses and unmarked streets", until well into the 18th century the eastern part of Long Island was, as Prime says, no mere "fag end" but the most consequential part of the Province of New York. Brooklyn was but a village and New York was scarcely more. But there were five great manors in what is now Suffolk County, four more on nearby islands. These manors were first-rank social centers in the New World. It has been said that no European of note, coming to this part of America in that period, failed to visit the Sylvesters on Shelter Island. Between the inanors and the Old World there was constant though irregular communication. Daughters of the Manor married prominent ministers and freeholders of the Island. Whaling ships brought cargoes from innumerable ports to Cold Spring and Sag Harbor. Ships were always a-building. Proprietors like Ichabod Brush were making fortunes in South America, banking in London, but coming home to Long Island to live as country gentle- men, with horses, boats and books-ves, books! This Ichabod had col- lected and housed at the head of Huntington Harbor a library that would have looked well in any home in New Haven; excepting per- haps for such tomes, of the "boots and spurs" type, as were more lively than pious. His will was probated in 1809, disposing of an estate of upwards of $80,000, a considerable sum for those days, for a "commoner". The Island of that day was no hinterland. But its relegation to comparative insignificance was not far distant in time.
Steam and the industrial revolution would be the agents to effect this change. By 1844, Greenport, Riverhead and Jamaica would be way-stations on a rail-and-water route connecting Boston and New York. Enterprising citizens would be moving to Brooklyn and New York to avail themselves of expected gains. Whitman would soon tire of liis Long-Islander and be off to the East River waterfront and the enchantments of a new kind of workaway world. The "Forty- Niners" by the hundreds would be on their precarious way to Cali- fornia. More germane to the theme, the Storrs would be leaving Southold, one of their sons to become a peer of peers in leadership of the religious life of a previously sprawling collection of villages shortly to be known as the "City of Churches". There in less than half a century the Presbyterian churches would multiply in number unequaled except in such centers as Philadelphia, New York and
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Chicago. And there, too, in no long time, the strongest churches on the Island would be found, much larger in membership and of greater wealth than any eastward of Kings County.
One of these churches, being more than a century old and reflect- ing more than most the social and theological changes of the age, at the same time taking a leading role, must receive proportionate atten- tion in this necessarily condensed account. It is the First Presby- terian Church of Brooklyn, founded in 1822. Its distinctive service is fittingly memorialized in the pages of A Tower On The Heights, written with skill and understanding by Ralph Foster Weld and pub- lished by Columbia University Press in 1946. Upon its representa- tions the author of this chapter must lean, as he has upon Prime, Winans and sundry.
The succession of ministers-Hall, Clarke, Morgan Noves and Phillips Elliott-that formed and maintained in the First Church a tradition of liberalism, began with the pastorate of Samuel Hanson Cox who, after two years as professor of rhetoric and pastoral theology in Auburn Seminary, came to Brooklyn in 1837, at the age of thirty-five. He took charge at a time when the Old School-New School controversy had been mounting, through the thirties, to its peak of effectiveness in dividing churches, presbyteries and synods. Cox was no extremist. He would have welcomed compromises, being of an ironic disposition and "a little to the left of center". But com- promises were impossible. Much as he would have liked to invoke the aegis of the constitution of the Presbyterian Church to settle difficul- ties by the inclusion of contenders of both sides, pleas of such a sort were bound to fall on deaf ears, and did. There was nothing for it but to join the lists, lower his lance and charge. He was a mighty man of valor, yet did not scorn to handle his weapon adroitly. When a minister "packs the court" (Weld), procuring the election of four New School Elders to his Session, and when, after the majority of the Session and congregation have gone over to the New School, two Old School Elders appeal to an Old School presbytery, to retain for themselves and their constituency the name of First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn, and are sustained in their appeal, news of the "man bites dog" significance is about to be spread over every front page in America. It was sufficiently spread. Then the Old School First Church found in another building a place of worship, but the rallying of the people was to the New School First Church that had the ablest and most brilliant preacher in the city, then of some 25,000. Thus this church, in a decade and a half after its founding, moved into the company of those liberals who were beginning to suspect that "the love of God is broader than the measure of man's mind".
Nobody now debates whether salvation is for "the elect only". or whether the grace of God abounds for all. It isn't even an academic question. But in those days the latter assumption was heterodoxy. Now it is orthodoxy. "Time makes ancient good uncouth", but often not until a proposed change of emphasis has separated the ecclesiastical world into two belligerent camps and pro- voked a conflict that might have been avoided if the foresight of men had been as good as their hindsight.
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To a great degree the history of the First Church epitomizes the outstanding events of a century of theological transition. Not that others were unaffected, but that most of the ministers of the First Church were on the side of progressive ideas and liberal interpreta- tions and they could not as a rule keep silence when the whole church was writhing in growing pains, or fail to take their congregations with them in attempts to understand such situations. "Gay Nineties" was not a term to describe that decade in respect to the state of the church. It was a time of theological upheaval such as was never known in America before, nor since.
In those rather Sad Nineties it was a heresy trial that shook the continent. A conservative scholar, Charles Augustus Briggs, of Union Theological Seminary, interpreting the Presbyterian "stand- ards" which were formulated by the Westminster Assembly (1643- 1649), had stated that that convocation had not bound the church to a doctrine of absolute inerrancy of the Scriptures-had not intended to. Rather, had intended not to. This statement of fact aroused defenders of the Bible to feverish attack. His Presbytery acquitted Briggs of heresy but the General Assembly reversed the Presbytery and Briggs went over to the Episcopal Church, where apparently there was then more respect for scholarship.
In the excitement that accompanied the Briggs trial the next minister on the list of liberals that served the First Church of Brooklyn took no part. He was the properly famed Charles Cuthbert Hall. A peaceable man, devoted to a constructive program for build- ing up his church, faithfully ministering to the people and greatly endearing himself to them, he did not enter the "hustings" of debate on Biblical interpretation.
Dr. Hall's successor, Dr. L. Mason Clarke, whose pastorate was the longest in the First Church's history, though approaching the end of his active ministry, was still continuing in power and effectiveness when controversy, threatening to be as divisive as that of the 1830s, swept the country in the portentous days that followed World War I, Dr. Clarke's position was well known, but he could not be indifferent in the face of a recrudescent obscurantism. He charged the "Funda- mentalists", and a "Fundamentalist" Assembly, with being "afraid of the light", with "intolerance in its pathetic audacity in attempt- ing to compel submission to its defiance of the scientific method, * * * with being false to the spirit of the revelation, through try- ing to bind upon the church the thought-forms of an age that has gone". In other words, Dr. Clarke did not believe in "a static faith", but in "a continuous and progressive revelation". He reviewed the acts of General Assemblies in America that had broadly construed the constitution of the Presbyterian church and had defended freedom of interpretation, and in answer to an Assembly that had forgotten itself and had insisted that it was necessary for a Presbyterian minister to believe in a certain "five points" of doctrine, he declared with complete candor that he did not believe . in one of them. And Dr. Clarke was not put on trial for heresy! Nor was he the first or only one who prior to 1920 had been equally outspoken in defense of constitutional provisions for latitude in belief.
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It is not to be supposed that only from strong city churches were voices heard pleading for a more liberal theology and for a cessation of attacks upon good men who differed with their brethren on the rightness of rigid Calvinism. Back in 1900-1903, the Rev. Samuel T. Carter, pastor for thirty-five years of Old First at Hunt- ington had spoken out more than once on the subject. In 1900, the Presbytery of New York, in an Overture to General Assembly, requested that, "in the interest of the peace of the whole church, the Presbytery of New York be supported in declining to try Dr. McGiffert (of Union Theological Seminary) for heresy". Dr. Carter drew up that overture. Also in 1900, this same Nassau Presbytery, Dr. Carter taking the lead, overtured the Assembly for "the adoption of a statement of Presbyterian belief acceptable to those who recognize the validity of modern scholarship in the interpretation of Scripture". Nassau Presbytery was said to be the first to send such an overture. The Assembly adopted, as a result, a Brief Statement of the Reformed Faith and published it in the church hymnals where it has been in use ever since. But soon Dr. Carter himself was the subject of reprisals.
Dr. Carter had resigned his pastorate in Huntington that he might not involve his congregation in the conflict which would ensue. However, when the blow came, they stood by him to the last member, while his narrowly averted trial for heresy became a matter of nation-wide interest and elicited many expressions of approval of his forthrightness and courage, and also, no doubt, cries of alarm because he had said: "The Westminster Confession presents for the worship and allegiance of men a God who, according to the good pleasure of His will, assigned millions of the human race to endless torment before they were born or had done any good or ill" and "of this company a large number died in infancy and committed no personal transgression. The Confession, in fact, says that God is a monster. Modern theology says He is not."
The name of Dr. Carter was not dropped from the roll of Presby- tery. It was not merely because the members had no heart to remove from the ministry of the Presbyterian Church a greatly loved man who had served the church so long and so effectively. Changes in theological statement were overdue. They knew it. The more radical Dr. Clarke also remained a member of the Presbytery. He was not brought to trial. For by this time another situation had arisen. The Church had been losing possible candidates for the ministry. Able and devoted young men were turning away from a Church which they feared was incurably reactionary. Dr. Clarke's boldness encour- aged them. If there were men like Dr. Clarke in Presbyteries there might be some chance of passing an examination for ordination with- out making mental reservations they thought dishonorable.
The outcome was in a measure an example of giving people what they want, only to find that they do not want it. Young men encouraged to enter seminaries sometimes learned that the old forms had not lost their content. Something indispensable was enshrined therein; but they would blaze toward it their own trails. So they did. They came before Presbyteries with theological statements so
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fresh in viewpoint and expression that, while sometimes avoiding the use of the conventional terms, they completely satisfied even the conservatives that they had the root of the matter in them.
In the meantime, as through the centuries, many still found the received forms rich, suggestive and rewarding. In deep feeling there is always much that escapes language, and a symbol is needed to stand for more than one can say or even think. At the corner of Clinton and Remsen Streets, two or three blocks from "A Tower On The Heights", stands a church which has continuously repre- sented the conservative wing. It is "Spencer Memorial", founded October 25, 1831, as the Second Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn. Its first pastor, Rev. Ichabod Spencer, D.D., was there installed in 1832. This church has always been a solid bulwark of traditional belief, strong in its evangelical message, an inspiration to large num- bers of the faithful. In its position it is undoubtedly representative of a large part of the some 120 Presbyterian churches, 180 ministers and the 40,000 communicants now enrolled in the Island's two Presby- teries, Brooklyn-Nassau and Long Island. Its pastor, Dr. Frank E. Simmons, ably sustains its character. Dr. Henry Van Dyke's father served this church as pastor from 1875 to 1891.
Phoebe Moore Wickham, of Mattituck, appears to have been the founder of the first Sunday School in Suffolk County in 1791, pos- sibly the first in New York State. Mrs. Wickham had come as a bride from Southold to Mattituck. Having read of the success of the work of Robert Raikes in London, she enlisted the sympathy of her husband, Joseph P., and set up in her own "parlor" a school for the children of the church. Sunday Schools multiplied. By 1860, they had formed a Suffolk County Sabbath School Association and were regularly issuing a magazine. As early as 1816, there were Sunday Schools in the west end. It was in connection with the revival of such a school then organized that in 1822 the First Church in Brooklyn was founded. There are now some 18,000 members of Presbyterian Sunday Schools on Long Island.
Not only were there "mothers in Israel", like Phoebe Wickham (she had no children of her own), there were mother churches. Mat- tituck and Cutchogue were "set off" from Southold. Islip is a child of Babylon. The Babylon and Melville churches, the Central and Bethany churches of Huntington, are children of Huntington's Old First. Brooklyn's First nurtured City Park Mission. Before 1846, the Third, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth churches of Brooklyn were founded. Hempstead is the mother of Presbyterianism at the Golden Gate; for her sometime pastor, Sylvester Woodbridge, resigning his charge, went with the Forty-Niners, not for gold but for the Gospel's sake, and became the first Presbyterian missionary to San Francisco. From the Long Island churches hundreds of ministers, missionaries and teachers have gone, even to the uttermost parts.
What shall we say more? Time will fail to tell of the strong leaders, lay and clerical, and the great families that have filled niches in the growing structure and have left upon it the marks of their distinctive contributions-of Epher Whitaker, forty years pastor of Southold, prolific author and saintly character; of Charles Craven
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and his Mattituck School; of Dr. Beebe, half a century at Cutchogue ; of the Barretts, not of Wimpole Street but Sagg, and the Coyles, of Westhampton Beach; of John D. and Newell Woolsey Wells, for one of whom a church was named; of Andrew Magill, thirty-five years at Jamaica, and of Frank Kerr, now fifty-three years at Hemp- stead-he is the Dean and Nestor of them all; a beloved pastor, careful historian, honored Presbyter, friend of youth, proponent and exemplar of Christianity-of the Strongs, who for generations, at Strong's Neck on Conscience Bay, have invested their lives in the Setauket church; of the Sands, one of whom served the Islip Sunday School as superintendent for fifty years; of the families Denton, Hedges, Howell, Humphries, Pierpont, Baylis, Sammis, MacDougall, Terry, Ogden and White. These and their ilk are legion, lights in their several stations. "Instead of thy fathers shall be thy children. whom thou mayest make princes in all the earth."
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CHAPTER XXII
The Episcopal Church on Long Island
REV. JOHN H. S. PUTNAM, D.D. Rector, Church of St. Luke and St. Matthew, Brooklyn
LTHOUGH there are few records which lead us to believe that the Church of England had regularly constituted places of wor- ship on Long Island before the end of the seventeenth century, it may be reasonably assumed that if there were English settlers who were not members of the dissenting bodies, at least part of the Serv- ices contained in the Book of Common Prayer were regularly held. From time immemorial the English Church people have maintained that, in private and in well-established homes and even on board ships when no regularly ordained clergyman was present, the offices pro- vided in the Prayer Book should be read at least on Sundays by the head of the household or by the captain of a ship, as the case might be.
Most of the early settlers in Suffolk County and in a large por- tion of Queens, while originally of British citizenship, had because of their religious beliefs disassociated themselves from the Established Church and either had gone to Holland or joined with the dissenting group known as Puritans. Many of these migrated to New England from which they sailed across the Sound to Long Island.
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