A History of American Christianity

by Leonard Woolsey Bacon

The providential preparations for this great enterprise—"the Holy Experiment," as Penn delighted to call it—had been visibly in progress in England for not more than the third part of a century. It was not the less divine for being wholly logical and natural, that, just when the Puritan Reformation culminated in the victory of the Commonwealth, the Quaker Reformation should suddenly break forth. Puritanism was the last expression of that appeal from the church to the Scriptures, from existing traditions of Christianity to its authentic original documents, which is the essence of Protestantism. In Puritanism, reverence for the Scriptures is exaggerated to the point of superstition. The doctrine that God of old had spoken by holy men was supplemented by the pretension that God had long ago ceased so to speak and never would so speak again. The claim that the Scriptures contain a sufficient guide to moral duty and religious truth was exorbitantly stretched to include the last details of church organization and worship, and the minute direction of political and other secular affairs. In many a case the Scriptures thus applied did highly ennoble the polity and legislation of the Puritans.[113:1] In other cases, not a few, the Scriptures, perverted from their true purpose and wrested by a vicious and conceited exegesis, were brought into collision with the law written on the heart. The Bible was used to contradict the moral sense. It was high time for the Quaker protest, and it was inevitable that this protest should be extravagant and violent.

In their bold reassertion of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, that his light "lighteth every man who cometh into the world," it is not strange that the first Quakers should sometimes have lost sight of those principles the enunciation of which gives such a character of sober sanity to the apostolic teachings on this subject—that a divine influence on the mind does not discharge one from the duty of self-control, but that "the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets"; that the divine inworking does not suspend nor supersede man's volition and activity, but that it behooves man to "work, because God worketh in him to will and to work." The lapse from these characteristically Christian principles into the enthusiastic, fanatic, or heathen conception of inspiration has been a perpetually recurring incident in the history of the church in all ages, and especially in times of deep and earnest spiritual feeling. But in the case of the Quaker revival it was attended most conspicuously by its evil consequences. Half-crazy or more than half-crazy adventurers and hysterical women, taking up fantastical missions in the name of the Lord, and never so happy as when they felt called of God to some peculiarly outrageous course of behavior, associated themselves with sincere and conscientious reformers, adding to the unpopularity of the new opinions the odium justly due to their own misdemeanors. But the prophet whose life and preaching had begun the Quaker Reformation was not found wanting in the gifts which the case required. Like other great religious founders, George Fox combined with profound religious conviction a high degree of tact and common sense and the faculty of organization. While the gospel of "the Light that lighteth every man" was speeding with wonderful swiftness to the ends of the earth, there was growing in the hands of the founder the framework of a discipline by which the elements of disorder should be controlled.[114:1] The result was a firmly articulated organization compacted by common faith and zeal and mutual love, and by the external pressure of fierce persecution extending throughout the British empire on both sides of the ocean.

Entering into continental Europe, the Quaker Reformation found itself anticipated in the progress of religious history. The protests of the Anabaptists against what they deemed the shortcomings of the Lutheran Reformation had been attended with far wilder extravagances than those of the early Quakers, and had been repressed with ruthless severity. But the political and militant Anabaptists were succeeded by communities of mild and inoffensive non-resistants, governing themselves by a narrow and rigorous discipline, and differing from the order of Quakers mainly at this point, that whereas the Quakers rejected all sacraments, these insisted strenuously on their own views of Baptism and the Supper, and added to them the ordinance of the Washing of Feet. These communities were to be found throughout Protestant Europe, from the Alps to the North Sea, but were best known in Holland and Lower Germany, where they were called Mennonites, from the priest, Menno Simons, who, a hundred years before George Fox, had enunciated the same principles of duty founded on the strict interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount.

The combination of circumstances to promote the "Holy Experiment" of William Penn is something prodigious. How he could be a petted favorite at the shameful court of the last two Stuarts, while his brethren throughout the realm were languishing under persecution, is a fact not in itself honorable, but capable of being honorably explained; and both the persecution and the court favor helped on his enterprise. The time was opportune; the period of tragical uncertainty in colonization was past; emigration had come to be a richly promising enterprise. For leader of the enterprise what endowment was lacking in the elegantly accomplished young courtier, holding as his own the richest domain that could be carved out of a continent, who was at the same time brother, in unaffected humility and unbounded generosity, in a great fraternity bound together by principles of ascetic self-denial and devotion to the kingdom of God?

Penn's address inviting colonists to his new domain announced the outlines of his scheme. His great powers of jurisdiction were held by him only to be transferred to the future inhabitants in a free and righteous government. "I purpose," said he, conscious of the magnanimity of the intention, "for the matters of liberty, I purpose that which is extraordinary—to leave myself and successors no power of doing mischief, that the will of one man may not hinder the good of a whole country;" and added, in language which might have fallen from his intimate friend, Algernon Sidney, but was fully expressive of his own views, "It is the great end of government to support power in reverence with the people, and to secure the people from the abuse of power; for liberty without obedience is confusion, and obedience without liberty is slavery."[116:1] With assurances of universal civil and religious liberty in conformity with these principles, he offered land at forty shillings for a hundred acres, subject to a small quit-rent.

Through the correspondence of the Friends' meetings, these proposals could be brought to the attention of many thousands of people, sifted and culled by persecution, the best stuff for a colony in all the United Kingdom. The response was immediate. Within a year three ship-loads of emigrants went out. The next year Penn himself went with a company of a hundred, and stayed long enough to see the government organized by the free act of the colonists on the principles which he had set forth, and in that brief sojourn of two years to witness the beginnings of a splendid prosperity. His city of Philadelphia consisted in August, 1683, of three or four little cottages. Two years afterward it contained about six hundred houses, and the schoolmaster and the printing-press had begun their work.[117:1] The growth went on accelerating. In one year seven thousand settlers are said to have arrived; before the end of the century the colonists numbered more than twenty thousand, and Philadelphia had become a thriving town.[117:2]

But Great Britain, although the chief source of population, was not the only source. It had been part of the providential equipment of Penn for his great work to endow him with the gift of tongues and bring him into intimate relations with the many congregations of the broken and persecuted sects kindred to his own on the continent of Europe. The summer and autumn of 1678, four years before his coming to Pennsylvania, had been spent by him, in company with George Fox, Robert Barclay, and other eminent Friends, in a mission tour through Holland (where he preached in his mother's own language) and Germany. The fruit of this preaching and of previous missions appeared in an unexpected form. One of the first important accessions to the colony was the company of Mennonites led by Pastorius, the "Pennsylvania Pilgrim," who founded Germantown, now a beautiful suburb of Philadelphia. Group after group of picturesque devotees that had been driven into seclusion and eccentricity by long and cruel persecution—the Tunkers, the Schwenkfelders, the Amish—kept coming and bringing with them their traditions, their customs, their sacred books, their timid and pathetic disposition to hide by themselves, sometimes in quasi-monastic communities like that at Ephrata, sometimes in actual hermitage, as in the ravines of the Wissahickon. But the most important contribution of this kind came from the suffering villages of the Rhenish Palatinate ravaged with fire and sword by the French armies in 1688. So numerous were the fugitives from the Palatinate that the name of Palatine came to be applied in general to German refugees, from whatever region. This migration of the German sects (to be distinguished from the later migration from the established Lutheran and Reformed churches) furnished the material for that curious "Pennsylvania Dutch" population which for more than two centuries has lain encysted, so to speak, in the body politic and ecclesiastic of Pennsylvania, speaking a barbarous jargon of its own, and refusing to assimilate with the surrounding people.

It was the rough estimate of Dr. Franklin that colonial Pennsylvania was made up of one third Quakers, one third Germans, and one third miscellaneous. The largest item under this last head was the Welsh, most of them Quakers, who had been invited by Penn with the promise of a separate tract of forty thousand acres in which to maintain their own language, government, and institutions. Happily, the natural and patriotic longing of these immigrants for a New Wales on this side the sea was not to be realized. The "Welsh Barony" became soon a mere geographical tradition, and the whole strength of this fervid and religious people enriched the commonwealth.[118:1]

Several notable beginnings of church history belong to the later part of the period under consideration.

An interesting line of divergence from the current teachings of the Friends was led, toward the end of the seventeenth century, by George Keith, for thirty years a recognized preacher of the Society. One is impressed, in a superficial glance at the story, with the reasonableness and wisdom of some of Keith's positions, and with the intellectual vigor of the man. But the discussion grew into an acrimonious controversy, and the controversy deepened into a schism, which culminated in the disowning of Keith by the Friends in America, and afterward by the London Yearly Meeting, to which he had appealed. Dropped thus by his old friends, he was taken up by the English Episcopalians and ordained by the Bishop of London, and in 1702 returned to America as the first missionary of the newly organized Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. An active missionary campaign was begun and sustained by the large resources of the Venerable Society until the outbreak of the War of Independence. The movement had great advantages for success. It was next of kin to the expiring Swedish Lutheran Church in the three counties that became afterward the State of Delaware, and heir to its venerable edifices and its good will; it was the official and court church of the royal governors, and after the degenerate sons of William Penn abandoned the simple worship, as well as the clean living, in which their father delighted, it was the church promoted by the proprietary interest; withal it proved itself, both then and afterward, to hold a deposit of truth and of usages of worship peculiarly adapted to supplement the defects of the Quaker system. It is not easy to explain the ill success of the enterprise. In Philadelphia it took strong root, and the building, in 1727, of Christ Church, which survives to this day, a monument of architectural beauty as well as historical interest, marks an important epoch in the progress of Christianity in America. But in the rural districts the work languished. Parishes, seemingly well equipped, fell into a "deplorable condition"; churches were closed and parishes dwindled away. About the year 1724 Governor Keith reported to the Bishop of London that outside the city there were "twelve or thirteen little edifices, at times supplied by one or other of the poor missionaries sent from the society." Nearly all that had been gained by the Episcopal Church in Pennsylvania, where the "Venerable Society" had maintained at times forty-seven missionaries and twenty-four central stations, was wiped out by the Revolutionary War.[120:1]