USA > South Carolina > History of the Presbyterian Church in South Carolina, Vol. II pt 1 > Part 2
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JAMES NISBET.
the demands of his persecutors. "Now I have to take my leave of all created comforts here; and I bid farewell to the sweet Scriptures. Farewell reading and praying. Farewell sinning and suffering. Farewell sighing and sorrowing, mourning and weeping. And farewell all Christian friends and relations. Farewell brethren and sisters, and all things in time. And welcome Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Wel- come Heaven and everlasting joy and praise, and innumerable company of Angels and Spirits of just men made perfect. Now into thy hands I commit my spirit for it is thine.
Sic Subscribitur, JAMES NISBET."
It might be doubtful as to the special locality meant by Caro- lina in this address. On the 13th of June, 1665, Clarendon and his associates had obtained a new charter from Charles the Second, granting them all the land from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, between twenty-nine degrees and thirty-six degrees, thirty minutes, north latitude, a charter which never went into effect, being superseded on the south by the charter granted by George the II. on the 9th of June, 1732, to Ogle- thorpe and his associates "in trust for the poor," which erected the country between the Savannah and the Altamaha, and from the headsprings of these rivers due west to the Pacific, into the Province of Georgia.
The first permanent settlement made, in what is known as North Carolina, was in 1663, when William Drummond a Scotchman and a Presbyterian was made its first governor. A general division into North and South Carolina dates as far back as 1693. Yet the dividing line between North and South Carolina was not run till 1738, nor fully completed till afterwards. And as we have shown in our First Volume, Chap. II., pp. 78-86, that Charleston or Port Royal was the destination of those who were banished, or who voluntarily removed for safety from Scotland, this we suppose was the Carolina that was in the mind of the heroic martyr.
All this occurred nearly 200 years ago. Yet it is well for us to remember what our ancestors suffered for the faith we profess. The saying is true that " The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church." It has lived and flourished in the midst of persecution. It is said that the Reformed Church of France in 1751 could count 2,150 Churches. That the Church of Orleans had 7,000 members and 5 ministers. That
"THE BLOOD OF THE MARTYRS." 17
in 1561 there had been 200,000 cut off by martyrdom : From the Church of Caen alone about, 15,000; of Alencon, 5,000; of Paris, 13,000; of Rheims, 12,000 ; of Troye, 12,000 ; of Sens 9,000 ; of Orleans, 8,000 ; of Angiers, 7,500; of Poictiers. 12,000. (Quick's Synodicon, p. lix., Ix., and so on.) Above 200,000 in a few years were cut off for the Gospel, p. lix. And to some, Carolina became a place of refuge.
The few Congregational Churches of our seaboard have been so united with those which were fully Presbyterian in their polity, that their history has been given with equal par- ticularity. The method pursued was adopted from the felt necessity of preserving the facts of the past before they should be lost out of the memories of men, before the various notices of them yet existing in ephemeral contemporaneous literature should utterly perish, and the scattered items that might be gathered out of private correspondence should wholly disap- pear. Much of all this had been lost already by the accidents of fire and flood, and cruel war, and by that decay which is consuming all the works of industry and art. To keep up the sequence of events as to their succession in time was impor- tant, that each congregation might be able to trace back its own history was no less so, and to hold up to view that ante- cedent discipline in the school of adversity through which our ancestors passed, which has moulded their character and ours, was equally important.
It was not unknown to the author that there is a connec- tion of cause and effect which history should disclose; that each event is to be conceived of as both the product of some other that has preceded it, and a potential cause of those which follow ; that there is a development in history, and a progress, answering to that in the ideas of men educated by the circum- stances in which they are placed. Society is ever advancing, but by a movement by no means uniform nor always in one direction. When men of education and refinement migrate from the midst of culture to a wilderness where they must find the means of support, and protect themselves from savage beasts and more savage men, it is natural that they should lapse by degrees from former pursuits into the life of the trapper and the hunter, from this into that of the herdsman, and then into that of the cultivator of the soil. It will be difficult for them and their families to retain all the outward decencies of worship and culture as they were enjoyed in the
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1
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TWO FACTORS IN THE HISTORY OF THE CHURCH.
countries which they left. Their manners will become for a season more rude and simple. As settlements enlarge and wealth increases, and artificial wants, in the progress of socie- ty, are created, these outward customs of social life will" change, and new phases of public and social character must needs appear. New theories of government, too, are ever and
anon arising. Some exalting and some depressing the individual man, the human mind passing, under the ordinary providential government of God, from one extreme towards the other in almost perpetual oscillation. In the history of the Church then are two factors. On the one hand there is God's truth made the object of the mind's contemplation by the word revealed from Heaven and enforced by the opera- tions of the Holy Spirit. There are the depraved will of man on the other, and the mysterious and hostile influences of the powers of darkness. The development of the Church on earth has, under these circumstances, not been a constant and uniform progress. It has often gone backward both in its doctrine and its government. And the only true progress it ever can make is ever to look back to the writings of the New Testament for the form of doctrine given to the Church, when it was enjoined upon it to go forth into all the world preaching the Gospel, and to the entire Scriptures for the system of doctrine to be believed unto salvation.
From the age of Constantine when Christianity ascended the throne of Caesar to this our day, one of the last things the Church has been able rightly to comprehend, is its own inde- pendence of the State. This would seem logically to follow from the doctrine of our Contession, that Christ alone is King and Head of the Church, and that all ordinances of worship and forms of Church government are ordered by him alone ; that there are two Commonwealths equally appointed by God, the civil, whose office is to protect the person and property and promote the well being of men as they are members of civil society ; and the religious, the commonwealth of Israel, whose object it is to train men, as they are sinners, for glory and immortality. Although these exist together in this world, each is independent of the other in its own sphere. In the civil commonwealth there is one and the same civil authority ruling in its own proper sphere over all. The Church of Christ, as it is visible in any country, is divided among many denominations, who act in their appointments
19
TO CASAR THE THINGS THAT ARE CAESARS.
for religious observance independent of each other, each being responsible to Christ their head. It has been in our happy country alone, under its present form of government, that this has obtained a full acknowledgment, though in practice this independence has, alas ! been now and then invaded, and it has been forgotten that unto Cæsar only the things that are Cæsar's are to be rendered and to God alone the things that are God's. Our own Presbyterian Church by its solemn leagues and covenants and by its republican form of govern- ment has done much to destroy the bondage of despotism under which the British nation would have otherwise con- tinued to groan, and has done much to introduce that form of regulated liberty which our own country enjoys. But the solemn league and covenant when attempted by the British Parliament to be imposed upon the nation, looked forward to the establishment by law of an absolute uniformity of reli- gious faith. The contest in England was a contest for civil liberty, in Scotland for religious purity and freedom. In England it was under the guidance of political principles, in Scotland mainly under those which the religion of Christ in- spires, whose fruit is peace. But the close union of Church and State which the Long Parliament, the majority of whom were Presbyterians, still contemplated, would have placed dissen- ters under civil disabilities and have led to oppression, if not absolute persecution of the less numerous sects. The Inde- pendents who were numerous and represented largely in Crom- well's army, being a minority in the Westminster Assembly, were clamorous for liberty of conscience, but it is to be feared that it was liberty of conscience for themselves alone. For when they set up their own government in Massachu- setts, they made membership in the Church a prerequisite to civil office and inflicted penalites and exile upon the Anabap-, tists and Quakers, chiefly, perhaps, because of certain fanatical conduct which disturbed the public peace, but, we fear, also because of alleged error in doctrine. Cromwell approached nearly to the truth when he declared "that all men should be left to the liberty of their own consciences and that the magis- trate could not interfere without ensnaring himself in the guilt of persecution." Yet not even he saw clearly, at all times, the necessity of a complete severance of the union between Church and State, nor realized the inauspicious results which such a union must inevitably produce, the great injustice it
20
THE CHURCH AND THE SCHOOL.
must ever do to dissenters from the religion of the State, and the hypocrisy to which it leads. While, therefore, we can justly point to the earlier history of our fathers as illustrating in their exceeding sufferings, the disinterestedness and earnest- ness of true piety, the power of faith, their own surpassing courage and constancy, their ardent love for civil and reli- gious liberty, the tendency of adversity, encountered nobly by brave and trustful hearts, to develop character and to pro- mote vital godliness-the whole being a grand testimony to the truth of the Christian religion ; we can point to it, on the other hand, as exhibiting chiefly in their opponents the narrow blindness and selfishness of bigotry, the folly of persecution, the evil of Erastianism, the tendency to cruelty and deeds of blood in a dominant Church, the guilt of forcing religion on an unwilling people, the conflicting claims which may arise between Church and State, and the necessity of a complete severance of one from the other, and the power of the volun- tary principle to sustain all the institutions which the Church shall need and authorize.
The severance in this country has been made complete. And though our customs and our common law have arisen under the Christian faith, the Jew. the Mohammedan, the Pagan and the Deist are alike protected in what are the distinctive features of the faith they profess, not because the national belief sanctions their creeds, but because, otherwise, the rights of conscience cannot be maintained. Whatever approaches to an established religion in any of the States of the Federal Union, existed in the colonial period, have disappeared since the Revolution, and the nineteenth century begins without these disturbing influences in our social state.
Under the colonial government the refinements of the higher civilization were kept up in our seaboard country by its constant intercourse with the British Isles, whither the sons and daughters of the wealthy were often sent for their educa- tion. But in the upper country the church and the school, both accommodated at first in the rudest and most primitive structures, were almost inseparably connected, until, as we have seen, in the last fifteen years of the eighteenth century, institutions for the higher learning had almost everywhere arisen, if not in a form and with endowments which rendered them permanent, yet conducted with a becoming energy of purpose, and affording the means of a valuable education to
21
THE HIGHER EDUCATION.
those who were to become the future leaders in the Church and the State.
In his Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, published in 1808 by Dr. Samuel Miller, late of Princeton, the belief is expressed that the learned languages, especially the Greek, were less studied in the Eastern than in the Southern and Middle States, and that while more individuals attended to classica! learning there than here, it was attended to more superficially. The reason he gives is, that owing to the supe- rior wealth of individuals in the latter States, more of their sons were educated in Europe, and brought home with them a more accurate knowledge of the classics and set the example of more thorough study. The most of our clergy, especially, whether educated at home or abroad, were full of labor in the pulpit, or the school, or in missionary work, and few of them, in the period over which we have passed, had leisure, or pecuniary means, to make any important contributions to the literature of the church.
CHAPTER II.
THE INDEPENDENT AND CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES.
1800-1810.
IN resuming our history of individual churches we begin with those which were either strictly. Congregational, or admitted only of the Congregational Presbytery. The first of these is THE INDEPENDENT OR CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH IN THE CITY OF CHARLESTON, for whose preceding history we refer the reader to the pages indicated in the Index to our First Volume. We have there quoted on pp. 459, 460, the general character and polity of this church as set forth from their own records. We have not sufficiently indicated the doctrinal creed they profess, and, to do so, are obliged to revert to the time when these doctrines were prominently set forth.
The inequalities which existed under the Colonial Govern- ment when the Protestant Episcopal Church, the Church of England, was by law the Established Church of the Colony of South Carolina, were removed by the Provisional Consti- tution of 1778, and the permanent State Constitution of 1790. Under the Constitution of 1778, the name of an established
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THE RELIGION OF THE STATE.
[1800-1810
church was retained, but on such a broad basis as to compre- hend all denominations of Protestant Christians, each having equal rights and capacities, and public pecuniary support being withheld from all. The Protestant religion was declared. the established religion of the State, and it was enacted that any society consisting of fifteen persons, or upwards, should be an established church, and entitled to incorporation, on petitioning for it, after they had subscribed, in a book, the five following articles :
I. There is one Eternal God, and a future state of rewards and punishments.
2. God is to be publicly worshipped.
3. The Christian religion is the true religion.
4. The Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament are divinely inspired, and are the rule of faith and practice.
5. It is lawful, and the duty of every man, being thereunto lawfully called, to bear witness to truth.
These articles were readily subscribed by the Church, but were not considered by its members as going far enough ; they, therefore, added an explanation of their particular creed, as follows :
" Although we acknowledge that the foregoing articles do not contain anything contrary to truth, yet as they do not dis- criminate truth from error, and are no ways declaratory of those distinguishing truths which this Church has always heretofore acknowledged, and at this time do recognize to be the Scripture doctrines of grace; and, as the foregoing arti- cles are now received, by this Church, merely in compliance with the requisitions of the legislative body of this country, and in order to entitle it to the privileges of establishment and incorporation, lest any person should take occasion, from them, to attempt to introduce any doctrines into this Church, not heretofore received and acknowledged by it as Scripture doctrines, we lay down the following three articles as the fundamental doctrines of this Church :
" I. That there are three distinct persons mentioned in the Scriptures, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost ; to each of whom the name of God is properly given, divine attributes are ascribed and religious worship is due ; that these three, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, are one God, the same in substance, power, and glory.
23
1800-1810.] THE RELIGION OF THE CHURCH.
"2. That the Scriptures reveal and declare man to be a fallen creature ; that, by his transgressions of the law of God, he has lost the divine image in which he was at first created, and incurred the displeasure of God, and subjected himself to the penalties annexed to the breach of His most holy law, and has become so wholly impotent, that he can do nothing meritoriously to atone for his guilt, recover the forfeited favor of God, and restore the divine image in his depraveci soul.
" 3. That the Scriptures reveal a method of recovery for fallen man through the divine interposition, to accomplish which the Eternal Father gave his only begotten Son to become a substitute for man; that the Eternal Son volun- tarily submitted to this appointment and Substitution, and in the fullness of time took upon Him our nature, and was made under the Law. to which he paid a perfect obedience, and died as a sacrifice and attonement for human guilt ; that by his active and passive obedience, he perfected and brought in an everlasting righteousness, by the imputation of which, through faith, mankind are again restored to the lost image and forfeited favor of God, and delivered from the curse of the Law ; that the Holy Ghost, by his enlightening influences and saving operations on the human heart, is the author and efficient of that faith by which we apprehend the righteous- ness of Christ, and through which we are made partakers of the blessings of grace."
"It was never so much the intention of this Church," says Dr. Ramsay, " to build up any one denomination of Christians as to build up Christianity itself. Its members were, there- fore, less attached to names and parties than to a system of doctrines which they believed to be essential to a correct view of the Gospel plan of salvation. These have been generally called the doctrines of the reformation-of free grace-or of the evangelical system. The minister who preached these doctrines, explicitly and unequivocally, was always acceptable, whatever his creed might be in other respects, or to whatsoever denomination he might belong. On the other hand, where these were wanting, no accordance in other points-no splendor of learning-no fascination of eloquence could make up for the defect.
The doctrines above stated have always been the doctrines of this Church, but they were formally adopted as such in its
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REPAIRS OF CHURCH.
[1800-1810.
Constitution ratified on the 20th day of August, 1804, as follows : " It is now further declared, that the view of the . Holy Bible, which is taken, and the construction which is given to its contents, by this Church, is the same as is taken and given in the confession of faith, and the catechisms of the Presbyterian. Church in the United States of America, is that accepted by the General Assembly at their session in May, 1805."
Early in this decade, in consequence of the increasing con- gregation, measures were taken for the enlargement of church accommodations. In 1798 its funds amounted to $18,857, loaned to the State Treasury, and, in common with all other contemporaneous evidences of debt, suffered a depreciation by which, in 1783, they were reduced to $3,515.68. In con - sequence of the war of the Revolution, the Church was temporarily disorganized and dispersed. For six years it remained without a settled . minister, and divine service was discontinued for half that period. When the British Vandals evacuated the city, December 14th, 1782, they left nothing but the shell of the ancient edifice-the pulpit and pews having been taken down and destroyed, and the empty enclosure used, first as a hospital for the sick, and afterwards as a storehouse for provisions for the royal army. Even the right of sepulture in the cemetery was denied to the families of worshippers, who were in Charleston, after her capitula- tion, as prisoners of war. About thirty-eight heads of these families had been exiled, partly to St. Augustine, in 1780, and partly to Philadelphia, in 1781. The exiles in Philadelphia. even while the royal army yet occupied Charleston, anticipating a speedy departure of the foe. took provisional measures for the supply and recognition of their Church as soon as it should be delivered from thraldom. The remnant in Charleston began, from the time of the evacuation, to devise means for the repair of their dilapidated and desecrated temple, and a subscription was opened for that purpose, to which there was a general contribution, even among members of other Christian denomi- nations. The repairs were soon completed, at the cost of $6,000, and the renovated edifice opened and consecrated anew, to Divine worship, December 11, 1773, with an excel- lent and appropriate sermon, from the recently arrived pastor of the Church, the Rev. Wm. Hollinshead, afterwards D. D., on December II. 1783, the very day appointed by Congress,
25
FORM OF NEW EDIFICE.
1800-1810.]
as a Day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God, for the blessings · of peace and independence.
In 1772, the increased numbers and flourishing condition of the congregation, induced them to erect or complete another house of worship, in connexion with the one already established on Meeting Street. This project had originated, as early as 1772, and had made such progress that before the Revolutionary War, the walls of a new house of worship, located in Archdale Street, had been completed, the whole covered, and most of the pews put up; but it remained in this unfinished state during the eight years of the Revolutionary War, and for some time after the termination of that contest. The cost of converting the unfinished shell of the new church into a suitable place of worship, was $6,000; and it was opened for public worship, by the Rev. Dr. Hollingshead, on the 25th October, 1787. The next year the Rev. Isaac Stockton Keith, afterwards D. D., was regularly inducted and settled as co-pastor. Of this we gave an account, Vol. I, p. 458.
The labors of the colleague pastors had been exceedingly blessed, and in fifteen years after divine service began to be performed in the Archdale Street Church, Josiah Smith, the Treasurer, informed the Church that all the pews, in both houses of worship, were taken up, and a number of applicants, for some time past, had been turned off from the want of pews to supply them-whereupon it was resolved " that a committee be appointed to examine into the practicability of making an alteration or addition to the houses of worship, so as to make room for more worshippers." On the 13th of Feb- ruary, 1804, it was resolved to build an entire new brick church, of a circular form, of 88 feet interior diameter. The argument in favor of this form were: that it was the least ex- pensive mode of enclosing any requisite area of a church -- that it admitted of such a location of the pulpit and pews as brought the whole audience more completely in view of the preacher, and the preacher in view of the hearers, than any other of the usual forms of churches-that it required less exertion of the voice of the preacher to be heard than would be necessary in another form of equal area-that it was favora- ble to distinct hearing in the pews most distant from the pulpit. Some of these advantages, with respect to hearers, in some parts of the church, were diminished and an unpleas- ant echo introduced, in consequence of a partial departure
26
ITS ADVANTAGES AND DEFECTS.
[1800-1810.
from the complete circular form, which had been recommended by the original projector, and by Mr. Mills, the ingenious . architect who delineated the plan of the present circular build- ing. The substitution of a right line in place of a segment of a circle, in the front of the church, was adopted by the build- ing committee, to favor the erection of a steeple on the West- ern extremity of the church, opposite to the pulpit, and is supposed to be the cause of the echo. Mr. Mills has since completed a church, in Philadelphia, of a larger area, wholly on the circular form, in which there is no echo. In it a low voice, very little above a whisper, can be distinctly heard at a distance of 90 feet, over the gallery, and distinctly across from the two extreme points of the interior diameter .*
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