A History of American Christianity

by Leonard Woolsey Bacon

Crossing the recently settled boundary line into New York, not yet risen to rank with the foremost colonies, we find in 1730 a deepening of the early character, which had marked that colony, of wide diversity among the Christian people in point of race, language, doctrinal opinion, and ecclesiastical connection.

The ancient Dutch church, rallying from its almost asphyxia, had begun not only to receive new life, but, under the fervid spiritual influence of Domine Frelinghuysen, to "have it more abundantly" and to become a means of quickening to other communions. It was bearing fruit, but its fruit had not seed within itself after its kind. It continued to suffer, in common with some other imported church systems, from depending on a transatlantic hierarchy for the succession of its ministry. The supply of imported ministers continued to be miserably inadequate to the need. In the first four decades of the century the number of its congregations more than doubled, rising to a total of sixty-five in New York and New Jersey; and for these sixty-five congregations there were nineteen ministers, almost all of them from Europe. This body of churches, so inadequately manned, was still further limited in its activities by the continually contracting barrier of the Dutch language.

The English church, enjoying "the prestige of royal favor and princely munificence," suffered also the drawbacks incidental to these advantages—the odium attending the unjust and despotic measures resorted to for its advancement, the vile character of royal officials, who condoned their private vices by a more ostentatious zeal for their official church, and the well-founded popular suspicion of its pervading disloyalty to the interests and the liberties of the colonies in their antagonism to the encroachments of the British government. It was represented by one congregation in the city of New York, and perhaps a dozen others throughout the colony.[135:1] It is to the honor of the ministers of this church that it succeeded in so good a measure in triumphing over its "advantages." The early pastors of Trinity Church adorned their doctrine and their confession, and one such example as that of the Rev. Thoroughgood Moor did much to redeem the character of the church from the disgrace cast upon it by the lives of its patrons. This faithful missionary had the signal honor of being imprisoned by the dirty but zealous Lord Cornbury (own cousin to her Majesty the Queen, and afterward Earl of Clarendon), of whom he had said, what everybody knew, that he "deserved to be excommunicated"; and he had further offended by refusing the communion to the lieutenant-governor, "upon the account of some debauch and abominable swearing."[135:2] There was surely some vigorous spiritual vitality in a religious body which could survive the patronizing of a succession of such creatures as Cornbury and his crew of extortioners and profligates.

A third element in the early Christianity of New York was the Presbyterians. These were represented, at the opening of the eighteenth century, by that forerunner of the Scotch-Irish immigration, Francis Makemie. The arrest and imprisonment of Makemie in 1706, under the authority of Lord Cornbury, for the offense of preaching the gospel without a license from the government, his sturdy defense and his acquittal, make an epoch in the history of religious liberty in America, and a perceptible step in the direction of American political liberty and independence.

The immense volume and strength of the Scotch-Irish immigration had hardly begun to be perceptible in New York as early as 1730. The total strength of the Presbyterian Church in 1705 was organized in Philadelphia into a solitary presbytery containing six ministers. In 1717, the number having grown to seventeen, the one presbytery was divided into four, which constituted a synod; and one of the four was the presbytery of New York and New Jersey. But it was observed, at least it might have been observed, that the growing Presbyterianism of this northernmost region was recruited mainly from old England and from New England—a fact on which were to depend important consequences in later ecclesiastical history.

The chief increment of the presbytery of New York and New Jersey was in three parts, each of them planted from New England. The churches founded from New Haven Colony in the neighborhood of Newark and Elizabethtown, and the churches founded by Connecticut settlers on Long Island when this was included in the jurisdiction of Connecticut, easily and without serious objection conformed their organization to the Presbyterian order. The first wave of the perennial westward migration of the New Englanders, as it flowed over the hills from the valley of the Housatonic into the valley of the Hudson, was observed by Domine Selyns, away back in 1696, to be attended by many preachers educated at Harvard College.[137:1] But the churches which they founded grew into the type, not of Cambridge nor of Saybrook, but of Westminster.

The facility with which the New England Christians, moving westward or southwestward from their cold northeastern corner of the country, have commonly consented to forego their cherished usages and traditions of church order and accept those in use in their new homes, and especially their readiness in conforming to the Presbyterian polity, has been a subject of undue lamentation and regret to many who have lacked the faculty of recognizing in it one of the highest honors of the New England church. But whether approved or condemned, a fact so unusual in church history, and especially in the history of the American church, is entitled to some study. 1. It is to be explained in part, but not altogether, by the high motive of a willingness to sacrifice personal preferences, habits, and convictions of judgment, on matters not of primary importance, to the greater general good of the community. 2. The Presbyterian polity is the logical expression of that Nationalist principle which was cherished by many of the Puritan fathers, which contended at the birth of New England with the mere Independency of the Pilgrims, and which found an imperfect embodiment in the platforms of Cambridge and Saybrook. The New England fathers in general, before their views suffered a sea-change in the course of their migrations, were Episcopalians and Presbyterians rather than Congregationalists; and if, in the course of this history, we shall find many in their later generations conforming to a mitigated form of the Westminster polity, or to a liberalized and Americanized Episcopal Church, instead of finding this to be a degeneration, we shall do well to ask whether it is not rather a reversion to type. 3. Those who grow up in a solidly united Christian community are in a fair way to be trained in the simplicity of the gospel, and not in any specialties of controversy with contending or competing sects. Members of the parish churches of New England going west had an advantage above most others, in that they could go simply as representatives of the church of Christ, and not of a sect of the church, or of one side of some controversy in which they had never had occasion to interest themselves. 4. The principle of congregational independency, not so much inculcated as acted on in New England, carries with it the corollary that a congregation may be Presbyterian or Episcopalian or Methodist, if it judges best, without thereby giving the individual Christian any justification for secession or schism. 5. The change, in the westward movement of Christian civilization, from the congregational order to the classical, coincides with the change in the frame of civil polity from town government to county government. In the beginning the civil state in New England was framed after the model of the church.[138:1] It is in accordance with the common course of church history that when the people were transported from the midst of pure democracies to the midst of representative republics their church institutions should take on the character of the environment.

The other factors of the religious life of New York require only brief mention.

There were considerable Quaker communities, especially on western Long Island, in Flushing and its neighborhood. But before the year 1730 the fervid and violent and wonderfully brief early enthusiasm of this Society had long been waning, and the Society, winning no accessions and suffering frequent losses in its membership, was lapsing into that "middle age of Quakerism"[139:1] in which it made itself felt in the life of the people through its almost passive, but yet effective, protests against popular wrongs.

Inconsiderable in number, but of the noblest quality, was the immigration of French Huguenots, which just before and just after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes brought to New York and its neighborhood a half-dozen congregations, accompanied by pastors whose learning, piety, and devotion to the work of Christ were worthy of that school of martyrdom in which they had been trained. They were not numerous enough, nor compactly enough settled, to maintain their own language in use, and soon became merged, some in the Dutch church and some in the English. Some of their leading pastors accepted salaries from the Propagation Society, tendered to them on condition of their accepting the ordination and conforming to the ritual of the English church. The French Reformed Church does not appear organically in the later history of the colony, but the history of the State and of the nation is never largely written without commemorating, by the record of family names made illustrious in every department of honorable activity, the rich contribution made to the American church and nation by the cruel bigotry and the political fatuity of Louis XIV.[139:2]