USA > Rhode Island > Providence County > Providence > State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations at the end of the century : a history, Volume 2 > Part 12
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The history of the Friends School has been thus dwelt upon with considerable detail, because it involves so largely the later history of
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the Society itself, and because in recent years it has formed the prin- cipal point of tangency between the venerable body and the commu- nity at large. Thousands of students from among "the world's peo- ple", as well as the youth of the Society, have there been prepared to become a blessing to tens of thousands of others, who have never come within its direct beneficent influence, and thousands more will, with- out doubt, continue in the future to drink at its pure fountain.
The whole State is under an obligation to those men of old time, who, working in faith and love, laid broad the foundations of the Friends School. The citizens of Rhode Island can never be sufficient- ly thankful that the two religious bodies, first established within its borders, held Education in such high esteem that they did not rest in those days of small things until they had founded institutions of good learning, which long have blessed and long will go on blessing this Commonwealth. What Rhode Island would have been or now would be without Brown University and the Friends School it is not pleasant to contemplate.
General Condition of the Rhode Island Quakers in the Nineteenth Century .- The general history of the Friends in Rhode Island during the nineteenth century has been one of alternating advance and de- cline, tending towards the latter. In 1813, when Dr. Benedict pub- lished the History of the Baptists, he recorded that there were in the State eighteen congregations of Quakers, with the same number of meeting-houses, and eleven hundred and fifty members, apparently a considerable increase upon the number prevailing during the pre- ceding century. In 1836 there were three hundred and thirty-three Quaker families. embracing thirteen hundred and thirty-nine indi- viduals. In 1853 Dr. Jackson, in his Churches in Rhode Island, reports a total of nine hundred and fifty members, worshiping in eighteen meeting-houses-one each in Tiverton, Little Compton, Portsmouth, Jamestown, East Greenwich, Warwick, Cumberland, Burrillville, Cranston and Providence and two each in Newport, South Kingstown, Hopkinton and Smithfield. In 1900 there were in Rhode Island Quarterly Meeting, substantially conterminous with the State, twenty-two ministers and nine hundred and fifty-seven members.
The beginning of the nineteenth century witnessed a marked revival of prosperity in the East Greenwich Meeting. In 1804 a new and "more imposing" house of worship was erected on the hill-top, above the village, superseding the Old Meeting House, which had never been disfigured by paint or plaster during its century of existence a mile
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away in the country. Some of the prominent members of this meet- ing in the earlier part of the century were Sylvester Wickes, Paul Greene, Robert Hall and Benjamin and Thomas Howland, while among the approved preachers were John Casey, Daniel Howland, Thomas Anthony and Rowland Greene. The leading families of the surrounding community were attendants upon the worship, the mem- bers of the Society of that day being free and social in their hos- pitality.
At Quarterly Meeting, in each May, it was the custom for the resi- dents to provide entertainment for all who came from a distance, it not being uncommon, on the occasion, for the meeting-house to be com- pletely filled, with as many as a hundred horses and carriages standing in the spacious yard. At present the attendance at the May Meeting, although faithful Friends continue to come by steamer or by rail from Portsmouth, Fall River, Newport and other towns, is much more limited and at ordinary seasons only a little remnant of this once highly favored Meeting continues to worship in the venerable meeting- house.
About 1823 Greenwich Monthly Meeting comprised six Preparative Meetings, or Meetings for Worship, of which now only two remain. The Meeting at Wickford for many years had no speaker and was attended by but two members, Beriah Brown and Howland Vaughan, who were wont to sit together in silence for the usual time and then rise, shake hands and return to their homes. Many years since, the meeting-house there, as in several other places, such as Cranston and Foster, was closed and sold.
The present commodious meeting-house, with its roomy grounds on North Main and Meeting streets in Providence, and its predecessor of a hundred years' standing, have always commanded the respect and affection of the inhabitants of the city. During their long history they have been attended by citizens among the best, socially and mor- ally, in that town, and have for generations enjoyed an added impor- tance from the vicinity of the great Friends School. Such names as those of Moses and Obadiah Brown, William Almy, Annie Jenkins, Dr. Samuel Boyd Tobey and Sarah F. Tobey, Gilbert Congdon and Samuel Austin have enriched the plain structure with pleasant asso- ciations.
The well-known Hicksite schism, which rent in twain the Friends in the Middle States, about 1829, is, happily, not known to have per- ceptibly affected the Society in Rhode Island. But another event, from which the most beneficent results might have been anticipated, worked rather for its injury.
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About 1838 John Joseph Gurney, a minister of the London Yearly Meeting, visited and preached in Rhode Island. He appears to have been an advocate of a more liberal interpretation of the doctrines and usages of the Society than had been previously prevailing here.
Hence arose a controversy, one party claiming that the orthodox traditions of the Society had been invaded and the other maintaining that there was no cause for alarm. Painful personal jealousies and animosities were aroused which, in 1844-5, led to actual division. John Wilbur, of Hopkinton, R. I., thought that he had discovered a spirit of worldliness among Friends, inconsistent with the history of the Society. Not being able to convince the majority, he led off a considerable number, who formed what came to be styled "the smaller body".
The schism turned rather upon differences in practices, dress and usages commonly deemed non-essential, than in doctrine. So far did the discussion proceed towards proving that even quiet and peaceable Friends are still human, that some of them attempted the forcible exclusion of the other party from houses of public worship. At Greenwich two bodies, each claiming to be the Rhode Island Quarterly Meeting, were in session at once, one in the regular meeting-house and other in the Methodist house of worship. The results of such conten- tion could not but be prejudicial to the welfare of the Society.
Especially did the Friends School feel the shock of the conflict, the average number of students, which had been one hundred and seventy- two in 1833, falling, in 1844, to fifty-five and in 1845, so low that it is not recorded. But by 1849 the average had risen to one hundred and seventeen and the wounds of the schism appear to have been largely healed.
At the opening of the new century many signs of activity still dis- tinguish the ancient Society. There is a marked interest in foreign missions, there being sustained, among other efforts, a vigorous and most useful mission at Ramallah, in Palestine. Work among the Freedmen represents the sustained concern which used to manifest itself in the form of anti-slavery exertion. Missions among the West- ern Indians, at some ten different stations, are supported by the New England Yearly Meeting, with its center of effort at Newport. Per- haps no man in the country has been more honorably identified with the cause of justice to the Red Man than Albert K. Smiley, at whose hotel in the Shawangunk Hills annual national conferences of the friends of the Indian, of various Christian names, have long been held. Nor are the efforts of Friends in behalf of Peace, in connection
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with the Peace Association of the Friends in America, and for the suppression of the liquor traffic suspended in Rhode Island.
Notable changes, in contrast with a few years since, are seen to have occurred. The quaint costume which used to characterize the mem- bers of the Society, has almost utterly disappeared. The plain language is rarely heard. Hymns are sung and Scriptural selections are read at the Quarterly Meeting. Bible schools, corresponding to Sunday schools in other bodies, are now connected with several Meet- ings. There is, also, a general Young People's Society of Christian Endeavor, as in some other denominations, with a branch in the Friends School. As in the past, the Quakers are still found on the side of every great reform, civil or political, moral or religious, seeking to accomplish it in a peaceful manner. In them the enslaved African, the wronged Indian, the prisoner condemned to barbarous treatment, oppressed womanhood and the victim of unrighteous war found almost their earliest friends and to them similar unfortunates yet look, nor do they look in vain, for sympathy and help.
In many respects the primitive members of the Society were in advance of their-age. They were looking forward while most other Christians still stood facing the past. The conflicts in Massachusetts Bay, attended by such shocking cruelty on the part of the Puritans, were largely due to the fact that those good people got their practices from bygone ages, while the Friends were, at times somewhat fanat- ically it is true, anticipating the spirit of the future. It took man- kind centuries to grope its way to complete freedom of thought and the Quakers were often far in the van. Says Governor Arnold, the historian of the State : "The spirit of civil and religious liberty, for which Rhode Island has been so distinguished, is due, in no small degree, to the influence which the Quakers exerted in shaping the politics, as well as the religion of the Colony, in which they had sought refuge, and where, for many years, they were its lawgivers".
If, as seems true, the numbers of this venerable Society are declin- ing, at least a partial explanation may be found in the fact that the principles for which they so long stood have extended themselves gen- erally and permeated other Christian bodies in the Commonwealth. Even folding the hands is by no means an ignoble posture for those whose work is done. If the world has overtaken the Quakers, they can regard with equanimity the fact that if it has not become just what they were, it has, largely, become as they were. The memory of a host of saintly Quakers of old time will long linger over Rhode Island like a benediction.
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The last of the Sect to his fathers may go, Leaving only his coat for some Barnum to show; But the truths which he taught will expand with the years, Till the false dies away and the wrong disappears." -Whittier.
THE CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH.
Introduction .- From the nature of the case there were, in the first period of the Colony, no Congregational churches in Rhode Island. While the principles of religious liberty, advanced by Roger Williams and his fellow colonists and applied by them with unimpeachable impartiality, in no manner excluded the Puritan order, yet it was quite natural that those who had banished the founder of the Colony from Massachusetts Bay could not calculate upon a very warm wel- come, had they attempted to introduce the system into the territory over which he presided.
It was not, however, without significance that vigorous Puritan churches were, very early, founded in Plymouth Colony, just outside the boundary of Providence Plantations, at Rehoboth, Barrington and Bristol, the two latter towns not then belonging, as they did after 1746, to the Colony of Rhode Island. Nor did these border churches seem very unlike the first line of earthworks sometimes thrown up by an ad- vancing army in front of a city to which it is about to lay siege. Doubt- less among the numerous colonists, who soon followed Williams to the head of Narragansett Bay, there was a considerable proportion of those who, without relishing the uncompromising spirit of the Puritan magistrates, in heart still clung to the familiar institutions they had left behind.
It is supposed, with an appearance of probability, that these were accustomed, on the approach of the Lord's Day, frequently to cross the Seekonk and repair for worship to the neighboring "Newman Church", founded in 1643 at Rehoboth, or to that established some twenty years later at Barrington. It was not until, apparently, near the close of the seventeenth century that a movement was set on foot for the introduction of Puritan preachers into Newport and the Nar- ragansett Country, nor until well on into the eighteenth century, when Providence had been settled little short of a hundred years, that a like effort was successfully made in that town.
It will be well to sketch first the early history of the three ancient congregations, which, originally planted on the friendly soil of Ply- mouth Colony, have long been included within the limits of Rhode Island and then to proceed to examine the quite different methods by
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which the Congregational polity was later introduced into places included from the first in the Colony around Narragansett Bay.
The Churches of Barrington, Bristol and Little Compton .- It would be interesting to investigate the origin of the parish at Relio- both, established, as it was, by Newman, in the tracks of Roger Wil- liams, only seven years after his passing through that then uninhabited wilderness, during the first winter of his exile, and to discover the degree in which its founding may have been expedited by its prox- imity to that recalcitrant Puritan. But as this town was not trans- ferred with the others to Rhode Island, we must not tarry for that purpose. The earliest Puritan organization within the present limits of the State was formed at Barrington between the years 1650 and 1660 and still lives, after two and a half centuries, in the truth and order of the gospel. Very little is known about the founding of this parish, as no record belonging to the period of organization exists. There is a tradition that the first house of worship stood on Tyler's Point, many years before there was any meeting-house of any kind in Providence. The earliest edifice, however, concerning which there remains any record was erected on the main road and was, in 1734, taken down and rebuilt on the site of the present church. The third house of worship, still standing, was built in 1805-6 and remodeled in 1861.
The first minister in Barrington is said to have been the Rev. James Wilson, the date of his settlement, the duration of his ministry and the time of his death being unrecorded. The first minister after the original incorporation of the town by Massachusetts, in 1718, was the Rev. Samuel Torrey, who was called in that year, signified his accept- ance at a town meeting and was dismissed in 1726. The successor of Mr. Torrey was the Rev. Peleg Heath, elected pastor of the town of Barrington in 1728 and dismissed in 1740. It is related that Mr. Heath preached in the dwelling-house of Mr. Edward Bosworth, prob- ably during the time when, as above narrated, the meeting-house was being removed from its original site.
The founding of the Congregational (or as it is frequently called, Presbyterian) church at Bristol illustrates very well, as is shown in Munro's History of the town, the mode of establishing religion under the theocratic government of the Colonies of Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth, where the town and the parish came into existence practi- cally together. At the first town meeting, after the organization of the town of Bristol, in 1680, a vote was passed appropriating money for building a house for the minister, religious questions continuing
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for a period to be decided by the whole body of the citizens. Before the year was over or the settlement of the territory had been more than begun, Mr. Benjamin Woodbridge, a son of the Rev. John Wood- bridge, the first pastor at Andover, Massachusetts, was secured as minister. During the residence of Mr. Woodbridge, from 1680 to 1686, the first meeting-house was built, in 1684, upon the spot where the county court-house now stands, the timber for it being cut on the adjacent common. The church was not, however, organized until 1687, the first regularly settled pastor being the Rev. Samuel Lee, born in London, England, in 1625, and at one time a proctor of the Univer- sity of Oxford. After serving several Independent churches in Eng- land, he was constrained by the strong opposition aroused against Puritanism in that country to sail for Boston, in the summer of 1686.
As Bristol had, by that time, become the most important town in Plymouth Colony, the need of a strong man of liberal education to build up a vigorous church there was generally apparent. Attention was accordingly called to the new immigrant, as a man of learning and eloquence, and, having been induced to visit the town, he was received with enthusiasm. So acceptable did he prove, that he was immediately and unanimously chosen pastor, the entire town meeting going in a body to present the call.
Mr. Lee entered upon his pastorate in April, 1687, and, being a man of independent fortune, proceeded at once to build himself a spacious and handsome house. A little later in the same year, under the title of the Church of Christ in Bristol, the church was organized, with a membership of eight males, Major John Walley, Capt. Nathaniel By- field, Capt. Benjamin Church, Nathaniel Reynolds, John Cary, Hugh Woodbury, Goodman Throop and Nathaniel Bosworth. The ministry of Mr. Lee, although very successful and harmonious, was quite brief. Upon the accession of King William III, who was supposed to be more favorable to the Puritans than had been his predecessor, he determined to return to England and, in 1691, resigned his post in Bristol, and sailed with his family on the ship Dolphin. After a stormy voyage the vessel was seized by a French privateer, it being a time of war, and carried into a port of France, where Mr. Lee was imprisoned and died of fever before the end of the year.
The first pastor of Bristol must have been a much more than ordi- nary man. Dr. Stiles spoke of him as "the light and glory of the church in Bristol", and Cotton Mather called him "the light of both Englands".
For two years, until a call was extended to the Rev. Jolin Sparhawk,
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a graduate of Harvard College, Bristol was without any regular min- ister.
Mr. Sparhawk was not installed as the second pastor until 1695. He served the church for almost twenty-three years and died in the har- ness 1718, after a conscientious and arduous pastorate, during which a strong congregation had been gathered. After the death of Mr. Sparhawk, Mr. James MacSparran, a graduate of Glasgow University, then a young licentiate of the Scottish Presbytery, but subsequently a clergyman of the Church of England and for thirty-six years a rector of St. Paul's Church, Narragansett, acted as pastor for nearly a year.
On the one hundredth anniversary of the Landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, December 22, 1720, the church at Bristol elected the Rev. Nathaniel Cotton to be its pastor, the town no longer taking the initiative in the case, but contenting itself with the prerogative of ratifying the choice.
Mr. Cotton was a great-grandson of the celebrated Rev. John Cotton of Boston and a graduate of Harvard College, being but twenty-two years of age at the time of his election. The youthful pastor-elect was ordained in August, 1721, and survived less than eight years.
Notwithstanding its brevity his pastorate was eminently fruitful, more than a hundred baptisms being reported in the course of it and the meeting-house being renovated and improved. Mr. Cotton is characterized by a succeeding pastor as "a man of flaming zeal and undissembled piety, and for the cause of Truth and Right- eousness, bold as a lion".
After the pastorate of the Rev. Barnabas Taylor, also a graduate of Harvard College, from 1729 to 1740, the Rev. John Burt was ordained, in 1741, as the fifth pastor of the church at Bristol. He, too, was a graduate of Harvard College, like all his predecessors except Mr. Lee, who was a graduate of Oxford University, even the two temporary ministers having been graduated at Harvard and Glasgow.
When Mr. Burt took charge of the church it numbered seventy-seven members. During his thirty-four years of faithful service, sixty-five were admitted to full communion and one hundred and eighteen to the half way covenant, a provision of the Puritan churches of that period, by means of which, without professing conversion or Christian experi- ence, men secured the right of suffrage in town affairs, through their original baptism as infants-a provision which during the succeeding pastorate was abolished. The ministry of Mr. Burt corresponded in its termination almost exactly with that of the pre-revolutionary
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period. During the bombardment of Bristol by the British fleet, in 1775, having been for a long time ill and feeble, hearing the roar of the cannon and the whistling of the missiles through the air, he wan- dered forth in the night, alone and unnoticed, to flee in his affright to the open country. His dead body was found the next morning in a corn field, fallen upon the face, death not resulting from any wound, but only from the strain of terror and excitement. As if he were pursued by the Fates, Parson Burt's house was the first to be de- stroyed by the British and Hessian troops in the subsequent burning of Bristol, in May, 1778. No wonder it seemed as if the work of a century, in establishing the institutions of Christianity, had been wiped out by war.
Another early church, in the portion of Plymouth Colony after- wards annexed to Rhode Island by royal decree, was that at Little Compton, organized November 30, 1704. It is, however, supposed that for some time previously worship had been maintained in the settlement by various clergymen. The first pastor was the Rev. Richard Billings, ordained on the day of the founding of the church. Mr. Billings was a native of England and a graduate of Harvard College. He continued pastor for forty-four years, dying November, 1748, at the age of seventy-four. During this long pastorate one hundred and ninety-seven were received into the church and five hun- ยท dred and eighty-six children were baptized. A notable later pastor at. Little Compton, although not belonging to the pre-revolutionary period immediately under review, may be mentioned here in passing-the Rev. Mase Shepard. He was educated at Dartmouth College and ordained for this charge, in 1787, at the age of twenty-eight. Mr. Shepard reached the thirty-fifth year of his pastorate and left behind him in the town a vivid impression of his untiring labors and earnest preaching. He was a founder, along with Dr. Samuel Hopkins, of Newport, of the Rhode Island Missionary Society.
The neighboring church, at Tiverton, was organized August 20, 1746, three months after the territory in which it is situated had been transferred to Rhode Island, but without doubt the beginning of the enterprise dates backward to the time when the town was a part of Plymouth Colony. The first pastor was the Rev. Othniel Campbell, a graduate of Harvard College. He was installed in October of the year of organization and died in 1778, after a pastorate of thirty-two years.
The Foundation of the Congregational Churches at Kingstown, Newport and Providence .- The earliest introduction of Congrega-
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tional churches into what was already Rhode Island territory occurred at Kingstown and Newport, it being difficult, if not impossible, to determine to which the credit of precedence belongs. Governor Ar- nold, in his History of Rhode Island, in speaking of the Congregational Church at Kingston Hill, remarks that "this Church and that of New- port are the earliest churches of their order in Rhode Island". There are those who claim that there was Congregational worship in what became, in 1674, "King's Towne", about the middle of the seventeenth century, although the records of the fact are wanting. The begin- nings of the church are said by them to date back to about the settle- ment of the country, in 1641, several of the Pettaquamscutt Purchas- ers having been Boston Congregationalists. The first Congregational minister, of whom an account is extant, in Kingstown, was the Rev. Mr. Woodward, who came from Dedham, Massachusetts, in 1695. It does not seem to have been the policy of the promoters of this enter- prise, or of that at Newport, so much to organize almost at the outset, as was done on Plymouth territory, at Bristol and Little Compton, a permanent church, as to occupy the ground with a missionary. Mr. Woodward was succeeded by Mr. Henry Flint, and he, in 1702, by the subsequently distinguished Samuel Niles, who came under the auspices of the well-known Judge Sewall, of Boston, himself a Congregation- alist and a grandson and heir of one of the Purchasers, Jolin Hull. Mr. Niles was born on Block Island and was the first graduate of Harvard College from Rhode Island. He was only twenty-eight years of age and was unordained when he took charge of the church in Kingstown. He remained eight years and removed, in 1710, to Brain- tree, Massachusetts, where he was ordained pastor, dying in 1762. His best known work, among a large number, is a History of the French and Indian Wars.
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