There is nothing in the personal duty of non-resistance of evil, as inculcated in the New Testament, that conflicts with the functions of the civil governor—even the function of bearing the sword as God's minister. Rather, each of these is the complement and counterpart of the other. Among the early colonial governors no man wielded the sword of the ruler more effectively than the Quaker Archdale in the Carolinas. It is when this law of personal duty is assumed as the principle of public government that the order of society is inverted, and the function of the magistrate is inevitably taken up by the individual, and the old wilderness law of blood-revenge is reinstituted. The legislation of William Penn involved no abdication of the power of the sword by the civil governor. The enactment, however sparing, of capital laws conceded by implication every point that is claimed by Christian moralists in justification of war. But it is hardly to be doubted that the tendency of Quaker politics so to conduct civil government as that it shall "resist not evil" is responsible for some of the strange paradoxes in the later history of Pennsylvania. The commonwealth was founded in good faith on principles of mutual good will with the Indians and tender regard for Indian rights, of religious liberty and interconfessional amity, and of a permanent peace policy. Its history has been characterized, beyond that of other States, by foul play toward the Indians and protracted Indian wars, by acrimonious and sometimes bloody sectarian conflicts, by obstinate insurrections against public order,[144:1] and by cruel and exterminating war upon honest settlers, founded on a mere open question of title to territory.[144:2]
The failure of Quakerism is even more conspicuous considered as a church discipline. There is a charm as of apostolic simplicity and beauty in its unassuming hierarchy of weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings, corresponding by epistles and by the visits of traveling evangelists, which realizes the type of the primitive church presented in "The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles." But it was never able to outgrow, in the large and free field to which it was transplanted, the defects incident to its origin in a protest and a schism. It never learned to commend itself to men as a church for all Christians, and never ceased to be, even in its own consciousness, a coterie of specialists. Penn, to be sure, in his youthful overzeal, had claimed exclusive and universal rights for Quakerism as "the alone good way of life and salvation," all religions, faiths, and worships besides being "in the darkness of apostasy."[145:1] But after the abatement of that wonderful first fervor which within a lifetime carried "its line into all the earth, and its words to the ends of the world," it was impossible to hold it to this pitch. Claiming no divine right to all men's allegiance, it felt no duty of opening the door to all men's access. It was free to exclude from the meeting on arbitrary and even on frivolous grounds. As zeal decayed, the energies of the Society were mainly shown in protesting and excluding and expelling. God's husbandry does not prosper when his servants are over-earnest in rooting up tares. The course of the Society of Friends in the eighteenth century was suicidal. It held a noble opportunity of acting as pastor to a great commonwealth. It missed this great opportunity, for which it was perhaps constitutionally disqualified, and devoted itself to edifying its own members and guarding its own purity. So it was that, saving its soul, it lost it. The vineyard must be taken away from it.
And there were no other husbandmen to take the vineyard. The petty German sects, representing so large a part of the population, were isolated by their language and habits. The Lutherans and the Reformed, trained in established churches to the methods and responsibilities of parish work, were not yet represented by any organization. The Scotch-Irish Presbyterian immigration was pouring in at Philadelphia like a flood, sometimes whole parishes at once, each bringing its own pastor; and it left large traces of itself in the eastern counties of Pennsylvania, while it rushed to the western frontier and poured itself like a freshet southwesterly through the valleys of the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies. But the Presbyterian churches of eastern Pennsylvania, even as reinforced from England and New England, were neither many nor strong; the Baptists were feebler yet, although both these bodies were giving signs of the strength they were both about to develop.[147:1] The Episcopalians had one strong and rapidly growing church in Philadelphia, and a few languishing missions in country towns sustained by gifts from England. There were as yet no Methodists.
Crossing the boundary line from Pennsylvania into Maryland—the line destined to become famous in political history as Mason and Dixon's—we come to the four Southern colonies, Maryland, Virginia, and the two Carolinas. Georgia in 1730 has not yet begun to be. All these have strongly marked characteristics in common, which determine in advance the character of their religious history. They are not peculiar in being slave colonies; there is no colony North or South in which slaves are not held under sanction of law. Georgia, in its early years, is to have the solitary honor of being an antislavery and prohibitionist colony. But the four earlier Southern colonies are unlike their Northern neighbors in this, that the institution of slavery dominates their whole social life. The unit of the social organism is not the town, for there are no towns; it is the plantation. In a population thus dispersed over vast tracts of territory, schools and churches are maintained with difficulty, or not maintained at all. Systems of primary and secondary schools are impracticable, and, for want of these, institutions of higher education either languish or are never begun. A consequent tendency, which, happily, there were many influences to resist, was for this townless population to settle down into the condition of those who, in distinction from the early Christians, came to be called pagani, or "men of the hamlets," and Heiden, or "men of the heath."
Another common characteristic of the four Southern colonies is that upon them all was imposed by foreign power a church establishment not acceptable to the people. In the Carolinas the attempted establishment of the English church was an absolute failure. It was a church (with slight exceptions) without parishes, without services, without clergy, without people, but with certain pretensions in law which were hindrances in the way of other Christian work, and which tended to make itself generally odious. In the two older colonies the Established Church was worse than a failure. It had endowments, parsonages, glebes, salaries raised by public tax, and therefore it had a clergy—and such a clergy! Transferring to America the most shameful faults of the English Establishment, it gave the sacred offices of the Christian ministry by "patronage" into the hands of debauched and corrupt adventurers, whose character in general was below the not very lofty standard of the people whom they pretended to serve in the name of Jesus Christ. Both in Virginia and in Maryland the infliction of this rabble of simonists as a burden upon the public treasury was a nuisance under which the people grew more and more restive from year to year. There was no spiritual discipline to which this prêtraille was amenable.[148:1] It was the constant effort of good citizens, in the legislature and in the vestries, if not to starve out the vermin, at least to hold them in some sort of subjection to the power of the purse. The struggle was one of the antecedents of the War of Independence, and the vestries of the Virginia parishes, with their combined ecclesiastical and civil functions, became a training-school for some of the statesmen of the Revolution.
In the general dereliction of churchly care for the people of the Southern colonies, on the part of those who professed the main responsibility for it, the duty was undertaken, in the face of legal hindrances, by earnest Christians of various names, whom the established clergy vainly affected to despise. The Baptists and the Presbyterians, soon to be so powerfully prevalent throughout the South, were represented by a few scattered congregations. But the church of the people of the South at this period seems to have been the Quaker meeting, and the ministry the occasional missionary who, bearing credentials from some yearly meeting, followed in the pioneer footsteps of George Fox, and went from one circle of Friends to another, through those vast expanses of thinly settled territory, to revive and confirm and edify. The early fervors of the Society were soon spent. Its work was strangely unstable. The proved defects of it as a working system were grave. The criticism of George Keith seems justified by the event—its candle needed a candlestick. But no man can truly write the history of the church of Christ in the United States without giving honor to the body which for so long a time and over so vast an area bore the name and testimony of Jesus almost alone; and no man can read the journeys and labors of John Woolman, mystic and ascetic saint, without recognizing that he and others like-minded were nothing less than true apostles of the Lord Jesus.