USA > Pennsylvania > Philadelphia County > Philadelphia > The historical relations of Christ church, Philadelphia, with the province of Pennsylvania; an address delivered at the two hundredth anniversary of Christ church, November 19, 1895 > Part 1
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REYNOLDS HISTORICAL GENEALOGY COLLECTION
ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 02232 6711
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THE
HISTORICAL RELATIONS
OF
CHRIST CHURCH, PHILADELPHIA,
WITH THE
PROVINCE OF PENNSYLVANIA.
AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE TWO HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF CHRIST CHURCH, NOVEMBER 19, 1895,
BY
CHARLES J. STILLÉ, LL.D.
PHILADELPHIA : PRESS OF P. C. STOCKHAUSEN, 55 N. 7TH ST. 1895.
0
1667611
CHRIST CHURCH, PHILADELPHIA,
AND THE
PROVINCE OF PENNSYLVANIA.
HE history of the indirect influence of Christ Church upon the lay element in Pennsylvania, in the pro- vincial era, is not as interesting nor as attractive a topic as the ecclesiastical history proper of the Church. The most conspicuous examples of such influence are to be found in the repeated but unsuccessful efforts made by members of this congregation to persuade the King to sub- vert the Proprietary government, the administration and policy of which they alleged tended to destroy the exercise of their rights and privileges, civil and religious, as free- born Englishmen. On four different occasions at least in seventy years, its members were the leaders of such a movement, and I propose in treating of the topic which has been assigned to me to explain why they adopted such revolutionary measures to destroy the government under which they lived.
The lay element in Philadelphia society in provincial days belonging to the dominant religious sect, may be said to have been for many years unfriendly to the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England, and it watched the growth in strength and power of Christ Church with suspi- cion and jealousy. From the beginning there were two parties here: the Church party and the Quaker party. The former contended that its opponent had usurped power not granted by the Charter of the Province, to the mani-
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fest injury of the civil and religious rights of other free- born Englishmen. Strange to say, Christ Church although flourishing for more than seventy years in a peaceful com- munity, with absolute freedom of worship, the right to which had never even been questioned by the Quaker rulers of the Province nor by anyone else, was in a very important sense a Church Militant. Indeed, I do not think it is going too far to say that in no American Colony were the Church and those who dissented from it during many years placed in more open and violent antagonism. The Quakers formed for a long time the dominant party in the Province, and Churchmen alleged that it exercised at times its power in such a way as to conflict with the traditional religious beliefs and practices of the members of the Established Church. The latter, feeble in number, con- stantly resorted to the Imperial power in England to main- tain what they claimed to be their civil and their religious rights and privileges. They petitioned the King to force the Quaker magistrates to take such oaths of office as were customary and obligatory in England, and to which alone they attributed any binding legal force here. They asked that the juries and witnesses in the courts should come under the same formal obligation, that the right of petition, which they alleged the Quakers had set at naught, should be maintained as sacred, and that they should be forced to place the Province in a state of defence against the pirates and Indians, by whose incursions they were threatened. Feeling that there was little prospect of compelling the Quakers to adopt any such measures of legislation in the Provincial Assembly as the emergency required, they earnestly urged the King to dispossess the Proprietor, to dissolve the existing government, and to govern Pennsyl- vania henceforth as a Royal Province.
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There is a popular opinion that the Provincial Régime in Pennsylvania was marked not only by religious tolera- tion, but by absolute religious freedom; that there was, during this provincial era, a kind of idyllic tranquility and harmony here, resulting from non-interference with the religious rights and opinions of those who did not agree with the ruling party. Those who hold such opinions for- get that although William Penn, our founder, was the most enlightened political philosopher of his time, and one of the earliest advocates, since the days of the Emperor Con- stantine, of absolute religious freedom, none of his succes- sors in office held the same opinions as he. There was not a Quaker among them. They and their Deputy Governors during the whole Provincial Régime were strong adherents of the English Church, as by law established, and in an important sense special patrons of Christ Church. Their notion of other people's religious rights did not extend beyond the protection vouchsafed to Dissenters by the English Toleration Act (so called) of 1689. They held that the Quakers had no special power in this Province to enlarge the indulgence granted by that Act. The history, therefore, of the comparatively small body of Episcopalians here, or of the members of Christ Church (for I use in this paper the terms as equivalent), is a history of strife for objects which we may now think trivial, but which both parties, two hundred years ago, looked upon as fundamental. It is, of course, not pleasant to recall the history of more than seventy years of religious discords but I trust that we are now far enough away from the battle-field to describe its scenes with impartiality and truth. If I am forced to " rake up the ashes of our fathers," I trust that it will not be necessary to disturb them further than to throw light upon the scenes in which they were such conspicuous actors.
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By the "great law " adopted by the freemen at Upland in December, 1682, it was provided that "no person now or hereafter living in the Province, who shall confess one Almighty God to be the Creator, Upholder and Ruler of the world, and professeth himself or herself obliged in con- science to live peaceably and justly under civil government, shall in any wise be molested or prejudiced for his or her conscientious persuasion and practices ; nor shall be obliged at any time to frequent or maintain any religious worship, place or ministry, contrary to his mind, but shall fully and freely enjoy his or her liberty in that respect without any interruption or molestation." This provision, it will be observed, establishes religious toleration, not liberty.
Before the Charter was granted by the King, it was sub- mitted to the Bishop of London and an amendment was made to it, at his instance, providing that that Bishop should have power to appoint a chaplain for the service of any congregation, consisting of not less than twenty persons, who might desire such a minister. Out of the different interpretation which was placed by the Quakers and by the Church people on this innocent looking provision, arose all the bitterness of the controversy which characterised the relations of these religious bodies during the Provincial era. There never was, it seems to me, a religious dispute in which each side was more sincere in maintaining oppo- site views. The Quakers insisted that the principal object which Penn had in view in founding the Colony, was to secure a place of refuge and safety for those of his followers who were exposed to persecution in England, and where they might with absolute freedom maintain their creed and practice their profession ; that all acts of the government should be subordinated to carrying out such a scheme, called by its leader "the Holy Experiment," and that any
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act of Government, Imperial or Provincial, which inter- preted the Charter in any other way, was repugnant to its spirit if not to its letter.
The conditions imposed by law on the power of the Legislative Assembly, and to which they all heartily agreed, were that they should not deny liberty of worship to those who differed from them and should not deny to any one the rights of Englishmen. The Quakers had, of course, the entire control of the legislative body, and they practically determined how far the privilege granted by the Charter extended. In their early legislation here they made what turned out to be (as Penn had tried in vain to convince them) a serious mistake, and that was by sometimes acting as if this was a Quaker colony exclusively, possessed of certain privileges to which, as refugees and as Quakers, they considered themselves entitled, and to which all the inhabitants must conform ; and not, as it really was, in law and in intention, a colony of free-born Englishmen, all of whom were entitled to the privileges granted by the Charter, as well as those common law rights of Englishmen which they had not forfeited by crossing the sea, whether they belonged to the Society of Friends or not. In those days a limited toleration, strictly laid down by a formal statute, was the only one which was recognized by English or Provincial law. The natural right to religious liberty, as it is now called, was not asserted, except by a stray philos- opher, until the period of our Revolution. Toleration in that era meant simply an exemption from the penalties which had been imposed upon Dissenters from the Estab- lished Church by various statutes which had been enacted since the Reformation.
The utmost limit of that toleration was reached by a statute of the first year of William and Mary, 1689, com-
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monly called "the Toleration Act," which relieved certain Dissenters, including Quakers who took the Test and made the Declaration against certain Roman Catholic dogmas, from penalties to which at the time they were amenable. The early legislation here of the Assembly, professed to give a wider or freer toleration than that granted in England by that Act. Hinc illae lacrymae.
The English Churchman in this Province, and especially the English clergyman sent here by the Bishop of London, regarded all these pretensions of the Quakers as unfounded, illegal and extravagant. The clergyman when ordered here for duty by the Bishop of London might be a poor missionary, but he was a member of what he called the Established Church in America, and he brought with him, in his opinion, the whole power of that Church, with all the rights and immunities with which it was clothed in England. He had a lofty conception of the inherent dig- nity of his office. The Bishop of London was his lawful superior, he alone having jurisdiction over him, and in his church courts alone could he be called upon to account for any offence in which the rights of conscience or his rights as a clergyman were involved. The tenure of his office was life-long ; his congregation and his vestry had no con- trol either in choosing or deposing him. With many of the clergy sent to this country, it was a favorite maxim that vestries were useless bodies, and they held to the old- world doctrine that the clergy should be supported by the State; if not directly by tithes, then by setting apart large tracts of land, the income of which should be reserved for their support. In a word, for many years they held that any action of the Provincial Government which interfered with their status and privileges here, as members of the Established Church of England, as settled by the statutes
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of the realm, should be disallowed by the Privy Council ; hence the frequent appeals on their part to the Imperial Government, asking not merely that such action should be declared illegal and void, but that the Proprietary Govern- ment should be abolished as incurably bent on setting aside their privileges, which they claimed as absolute in English law.
With claims such as these, and with the feeling of supe- riority to their fellow-colonists begotten of those claims, it is not to be wondered at that any act of the Quaker majority of the Assembly, which seemed to dispute their validity, should be severely criticised and opposed by the Episcopal clergy. It is perhaps not too much to say that the Church- men from the beginning, under the lead of Colonel Quarry, the Judge of Admiralty, and the most conspicuous member of the vestry of Christ Church, were anxious to substitute a Royal for a Proprietary Government, but they were ready, before the controversy was closed, to avow that it was their purpose to contend for it. In the meantime, a most uncomfortable feeling existed between the parties, and, any act of the majority which could be construed to con- strain the actions of Churchmen in any way, seemed likely to kindle into a consuming flame the spirit of discord which grew apace with the growth of Christ Church.
But the clergy were not the only complainants ; mur- murs of dissatisfaction were heard among those of the laity, who were not Quakers, that the legislation of the Quaker Provincial Assembly was inconsistant with the Charter and the safety of the Province. No proper pre- paration, it was alleged, was made to protect the inhabitants against the pirates in Delaware Bay, the French and Indians, the Test Oath was made more indulgent in its terms than had been prescribed by Parliament and a general
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disposition, it was said, was shown to govern the Province on Quaker principles, not on those distinctively English.
To those who have looked on William Penn as the apostle of toleration, it seems indeed strange that the very first complaint made by the vestry and congregation of Christ Church against the legislation of the Assembly and the action of the magistrates under it, was that it violated the civil and religious rights of these Englishmen, inhabi- tants of the Province, who were not Quakers. Yet such was the charge brought before the Privy Council. Within ten years after the settlement of the Province, George Keith, at one time a most zealous Quaker and a very learned man, but who afterwards became a very active church missionary, denounced the leaders of his former friends in a manner, which, to put it mildly, constituted the serious offence (as the Quakers considered it and had so declared by a Provin- cial statue), of "speaking evil of dignities." For this offence Keith was brought before the magistrates (many of whom were members of the Ecclesiastical Meeting, a tribunal which had deposed him from his membership in the Society), and being somewhat bullied by them, he lost his temper and abused his judges in his turn. For this he was nominally condemned to pay a fine, but the Churchmen chose to consider his sentence as really that of an apostate, and not merely the punishment meted out to an offender against the statute which prohibited speaking disrespect- fully of the Government or its officers. His friends, and especially Churchmen, took up his cause with zeal, and as they had no hope of relief from the Provincial Govern- ment, they went to the root of the matter and sent a peti- tion to the Imperial Government, begging it to depose that of the Proprietary. They insisted that Keith had been tried by a tribunal which had no legal authority whatever,
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the judges never having been qualified for their office by taking either the oath or affirmation then required of all officials by the Imperial Government. They insisted, too, that Keith had really been condemned for an ecclesiastical, not for a civil offence, and thus that the rights of non- Quakers were put in jeopardy. These charges, which accused the authorities of a flagrant usurpation of power, were formally laid before the Privy Council in England. At the same time it was alleged that the Quakers, owing to their conscientious scruples about war, had taken no measures to protect the shores of Delaware Bay from the incursions of pirates. As William Penn was probably thought by the new sovereigns to be something of a Jacobite, owing to his favor with James II, he was suspended from his government, which was handed over temporarily to Governor Fletcher, of New York. Thus it would appear that the lay element of the Church here, even before the formal organization of Christ Church, was strong enough to induce the English Government to revolutionize the administration, mainly on the ground that the rights of non- Quakers were not adequately protected by the action of the Provincial Assembly which the Quaker majority controlled.
It is difficult, I confess, to understand with our present notions of religious liberty, how the Churchmen, possessing, as they did, freedom of worship and the absolute control of the property belonging to their Church, could have made any complaint on that score of a violation of the religious rights of those who were non-Quakers. However this may be, it was evident that the Provincial Assembly did not learn wisdom from experience. In 1698, after the Proprie- tary Government had been restored, the magistrates con- tinued their prosecutions against those who attacked the Provincial Government, and their opponents asked that the
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King should take them under his special care. A petition to the Crown requesting that such a change should be made was denounced by the Provincial Magistrates as seditious, and its supposed author was arrested and condemned for violating the statute making it a penal offence to speak disrespectfully of the Government and its officers. To this was added by the non-Quakers a protest against a statute passed in 1700, substituting a new form of test in the room of that which had heretofore been in force by virtue of the Toleration Act, by which the Quakers here were granted a toleration which did not exist in England. All these measures were protested against by the vestry of Christ Church as an invasion of what they called their religious rights as members of the Church of England. They sent a second time a petition to the Privy Council by Colonel Quarry, asking that some remedy for their griev- ances should be found. So great was the influence of this then feeble Church with the Imperial authorities, that they were again led to interpose, and orders were sent out here in 1702 requiring that hereafter all persons who wished to celebrate their worship publicly or to hold any office under the Provincial Government without exposing themselves to the law against non-conformity, should be obliged to make a declaration of fidelity and allegiance to the sovereign and to take the Test; that is, make a declaration of their dis- belief in certain Roman Catholic Dogmas in the exact form provided by the Toleration Act. There was at first considerable hesitation here in taking this Test, not that there was any objection to the doctrines it avowed, but the objections were as to the form of the affirmation required. The Assembly was induced in 1705, by what influence I have never have been able clearly to understand, to embody in a statute provisions requiring all persons in the Province
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to qualify themselves for taking any office by taking and subscribing the Test and affirming their belief in tlie Decla- ration as an indispensable qualification before assuming its duties. This Act, which is simply a copy of the English Toleration Act, remained in force up to the time of tlie Revolution, and it seems to have settled the vexed question how far any one could go astray from the orthodoxy required by the Imperial Government and yet hold office, by pleading that another standard had been set up by the Assembly of the Province. The policy which provided that these Tests should prevail in Pennsylvania was in strict imitation of the widest form of toleration then known in England. If we wish to trace the influence of Christ Church on the lay element during the Provincial era, not only here but in England, we cannot do better than consider carefully the part that she took in this other- wise profitless controversy, and for that reason I have called attention to these long-forgotten quarrels. I have alluded to them here only because they jeopardized the existence of the Proprietary Government.
At this time (1705) the congregation consisted of about five hundred members, and the number of persons in the Province who were Episcopalians was constantly increas- ing. Mission Churches were established at Chester, Oxford, Radnor, New Castle and Dover, which were served by clergymen sent out by the Venerable Society. And as they secured a firmer footing in the Province, the fear which had oppressed the earliest members of the Church that they would perish from their own weakness, gave way to a more hopeful spirit. Still, as late as 1718, the friends of the Church, both here and in England, endeavored to per- suade Sir William Keith, the most popular of the Proprie- tary Governors, and the one least inclined to stretch his
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prerogative, to make an effort to secure permanent legal support for the Church. His answer tells the whole story in a single sentence. "I agree with you," he says, "that the Church should be endowed by the Province, but what can I do for such an object with an Assembly composed of twenty-five Quakers and three Churchmen."
As time passed on the controversial spirit became less bitter, and indeed differences of opinion grew less marked as people knew each other better. Churchmen became less exclusive and welcomed here in this Church the ministrations of the Swedish Lutheran clergyman who had charge of the Swedish Mission here. For many years the services of the Church were in charge at different times of Rudman, Sandel, Lidman, Hesselius and Lin- denius, who were recognized as in full communion with the Church of England, although they had been ordained by the Archbishop of Upsal and not by the English Bishops. As one remarkable result of this fraternal spirit, and as illustrating how the influence of this Church extended beyond its borders, I may remind you that four churches originally Swedish in this State, one in Delaware and one in New Jersey, became, at different times, by the almost unanimous vote of their congregations, constituent members of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States.
In speaking of the influence of the members of this congregation on public affairs during the Provincial era, I must not forget to claim for some of them the great honor of having been the founders and the early guardians of the College and Academy of Philadelphia. Dr. Franklin, who first conceived the plan of this establishment, and sought with characteristic vigor to organize it by securing money for its endowment and selecting its professors, was a pew-
ignin
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holder in this Church, although he disclaimed any inten- tion of making the College a Church institution. He preferred that in a Province such as this, it should rest upon what was called in those days the "broad bottom," that is, that it should be independent of the control of any Church or denomination. But when he looked around for those who would appreciate and support his project, he was obliged to take from this Congregation mainly the men of education and of means who would aid him. His first choice for Rector or Head Master of the Academy was the Rev. Richard Peters, one of the most scholarly men in the Province, who had long held the important place of Secre- tary of the Land Office and afterwards for nearly ten years was the Rector of Christ Church. Finding it impossible to induce Mr. Peters to accept the place, he made the final choice of Rev. William Smith, a man of indomitable energy, of very considerable learning and of great organ- izing power. Mr. Smith was an Episcopal clergyman of high reputation, and, as far as a man in his position could be, he was a member of this Congregation. He gave life and vigor to the skeleton plan which Dr. Franklin had sketched out. His experience as a teacher and his various learning led him afterwards into paths where Dr. Franklin could not follow him, yet his scheme of college education, in accordance with the universal judgment of scholars, for more than a hundred years formed the true model for the liberal training of young men in this country. He induced the Trustees of the Academy, shortly after his induc- tion, to solicit from the Proprietaries a charter for a Col- lege, and, this obtained, he established as a means of instruction in this institution a curriculum of studies which formed the basis of education afterwards followed by every college in this country professing to give a liberal
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training to young men. The result of the life and vigor which he had infused into the College which he had created, was, in the opinion of the late Dr. George Wood, such, that in a short time this College, founded by two of your members, "was perhaps unrivalled and certainly not surpassed by any seminary at that time existing in the Provinces." And I may add, that had it escaped from the mischievous designs of unscrupulous politicians during the Revolution, and had its affairs since that era always been managed with the same self-sacrificing devotion and fidelity to its interests exhibited by its Trustees before that change, it would doubtless to-day occupy the same proud pre-eminence. Of the Trustees previous to the Revolution nearly four-fifths were members of this Congregation, and this was the period when its work was most active and the demands on their enlightened care incessant. Mr. Peters, the Rector of the Church, was for many years the President of the Board, and the Trustees, agreeing with Dr. Smith as to the plan of education which had been adopted, and disagreeing wholly, much to his chagrin, with that urged by Dr. Franklin, supported fully their Provost, not only in all his efforts for the promotion of higher education here, but in all the various trials and difficulties into which his eager and impetuous temper led him. Dr. Smith was a strict Churchman for those days, as were doubtless the majority of the Trustees of the College, but they ever maintained its original design by selecting as its professors men who represented the various denominations in the city. One of the more immediate good results of the establishment of this College, was the training of men who occupied a prominent position as ministers of Christ Church at the outbreak of the Revolution. William White, Jacob Duche and Thomas Coombe were all gradu-
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