A History of American Christianity

by Leonard Woolsey Bacon

Relieved thus of the glamor of his presence, the New England people began, some of them, to recognize in what an earthen vessel their treasure had been borne. Already, in his earlier youth, when his vast powers had been suddenly revealed to him and to the world, he had had wise counsel from such men as Watts and Doddridge against some of his perils. Watts warned him against his superstition of trusting to "impressions" assumed to be divine; and Doddridge pronounced him "an honest man, but weak, and a little intoxicated with popularity."[169:1] But no human strength could stand against the adulation that everywhere attended him. His vain conceit was continually betraying him into indiscretions, which he was ever quick to expiate by humble acknowledgment. At Northampton he was deeply impressed with the beauty of holiness in Edwards and his wife; and he listened with deference to the cautions of that wise counselor against his faith in "impressions" and against his censorious judgments of other men as "unconverted"; but it seemed to the pastor that his guest "liked him not so well for opposing these things."

The faults of Whitefield were intensified to a hateful degree in some of his associates and followers. Leaving Boston, he sent, to succeed to his work, Gilbert Tennent, then glowing with the heat of his noted Nottingham sermon on "An Unconverted Ministry." At once men's minds began to be divided. On the one hand, so wise and sober a critic as Thomas Prince, listening with severe attention, gave his strong and unreserved approval to the preaching and demeanor of Tennent.[169:2] At the other extreme, we have such testimony as this from Dr. Timothy Cutler, the former rector of Yale College, now the Episcopalian minister of Boston:

"It would be an endless attempt to describe that scene of confusion and disturbance occasioned by him [Whitefield]: the division of families, neighborhoods, and towns, the contrariety of husbands and wives, the undutifulness of children and servants, the quarrels among teachers, the disorders of the night, the intermission of labor and business, the neglect of husbandry and of gathering the harvest.... In many conventicles and places of rendezvous there has been checkered work indeed, several preaching and several exhorting and praying at the same time, the rest crying or laughing, yelping, sprawling, fainting, and this revel maintained in some places many days and nights together without intermission; and then there were the blessed outpourings of the Spirit!... After him came one Tennent, a monster! impudent and noisy, and told them they were all damn'd, damn'd, damn'd; this charmed them, and in the most dreadful winter I ever saw people wallowed in the snow night and day for the benefit of his beastly brayings, and many ended their days under these fatigues. Both of them carried more money out of these parts than the poor could be thankful for."[170:1]

This is in a tone of bitter sectarian railing. But, after all, the main allegations in it are sustained by the ample evidence produced by Dr. Charles Chauncy, pastor of the First Church in Boston, in his serious and weighty volume of "Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England," published in 1743, as he sincerely says, "to serve the interests of Christ's kingdom," and "faithfully pointing out the things of a bad and dangerous tendency in the late and present religious appearance in the land." Dr. Chauncy was doubtless included in the sweeping denunciation of the Christian ministry in general as "unconverted," "Pharisees," "hypocrites." And yet it does not appear in historical evidence that Chauncy was not every whit as good a Christian as Tennent or Whitefield.

The excesses of the revival went on from bad to worse. They culminated, at last, in the frenzy of poor James Davenport, great-grandson of the venerable founder of New Haven, who, under the control of "impressions" and "impulses" and texts of Scripture "borne in upon his mind," abandoned his Long Island parish, a true allotrio-episcopos, to thrust himself uninvited into the parishes of other ministers, denouncing the pastor as "unconverted" and adjuring the people to desert both pastor and church. Like some other self-appointed itinerants and exhorters of the time, he seemed bent upon schism, as if this were the great end of preaching. Being invited to New London to assist in organizing a Separatist church, he "published the messages which he said he received from the Spirit in dreams and otherwise, importing the great necessity of mortification and contempt of the world; and made them believe that they must put away from them everything that they delighted in, to avoid the heinous sin of idolatry—that wigs, cloaks and breeches, hoods, gowns, rings, jewels, and necklaces, must be all brought together into one heap into his chamber, that they might by his solemn decree be committed to the flames." On the Sabbath afternoon the pile was publicly burned amid songs and shouts. In the pile were many favorite books of devotion, including works of Flavel, Beveridge, Henry, and like venerated names, and the sentence was announced with a loud voice, "that the smoke of the torments of such of the authors of the above-said books as died in the same belief as when they set them out was now ascending in hell, in like manner as they saw the smoke of these books arise."[171:1] The public fever and delirium was passing its crisis. A little more than a year from this time, Davenport, who had been treated by his brethren with much forbearance and had twice been released from public process as non compos mentis, recovered his reason at the same time with his bodily health, and published an unreserved and affectionate acknowledgment of the wrong that he had done under the influence of a spirit of delusion which he had mistaken for the Spirit of truth. Those who had gone furthest with him in his excesses returned to a more sober and brotherly mind, and soon no visible trace remained of the wild storm of enthusiasm that had swept over New England, except a few languishing schisms in country towns of Connecticut.

As in the middle colonies, the revival had brought division in New England. But, after the New England fashion, it was division merely into ways of thinking, not into sects. Central in the agitated scene is the calm figure of Edwards, uniting the faith and zeal of an apostle with the acuteness of a philosopher, and applying the exquisite powers of his intellect to discriminate between a divine work and its human or Satanic admixtures, and between true and spurious religious affections. He won the blessing of the peacemaker. When half a generation had passed there had not ceased, indeed, to be differences of opinion, but there was none left to defend the wild extravagances which the very authors of them lamented, and there was none to deny, in face of the rich and enduring fruits of the revival, that the power of God had been present in it. In the twenty years ending in 1760 the number of the New England churches had been increased by one hundred and fifty.[172:1]

In the middle colonies there had been like progress. The Presbyterian ministry had increased from forty-five to more than a hundred; and the increase had been wholly on the "New Side." An early move of the conservative party, to require a degree from a British or a New England college as a condition of license to preach, was promptly recognized as intended to exclude the fervid students from the Log College. It was met by the organization of Princeton College, whose influence, more New Englandish than New England, directed by a succession of illustrious Yale graduates in full sympathy with the advanced theology of the revival, was counted on to withstand the more cautious orthodoxy of Yale. In this and other ways the Presbyterian schism fell out to the furtherance of the gospel.

In Virginia the quickening was as when the wind breathed in the valley of dry bones. The story of Samuel Morris and his unconscious mission, although authentic fact, belongs with the very romance of evangelism.[173:1] Whitefield and "One-eyed Robinson," and at last Samuel Davies, came to his aid. The deadly exclusiveness of the inert Virginia establishment was broken up, and the gospel had free course. The Presbyterian Church, which had at first been looked on as an exotic sect that might be tolerated out on the western frontier, after a brief struggle with the Act of Uniformity maintained its right to live and struck vigorous root in the soil. The effect of the Awakening was felt in the establishment itself. Devereux Jarratt, a convert of the revival, went to England for ordination, and returned to labor for the resuscitation of the Episcopal Church in his native State. "To him, and such as he, the first workings of the renewed energy of the church in Virginia are to be traced."[173:2]

An even more important result of the Awakening was the swift and wide extension of Baptist principles and churches. This was altogether logical. The revival had come, not so much in the spirit and power of Elijah, turning to each other the hearts of fathers and of children, as in the spirit of Ezekiel, the preacher of individual responsibility and duty. The temper of the revival was wholly congenial with the strong individualism of the Baptist churches. The Separatist churches formed in New England by the withdrawal of revival enthusiasts from the parish churches in many instances became Baptist. Cases of individual conversion to Baptist views were frequent, and the earnestness with which the new opinion was held approved itself not only by debating and proselyting, but by strenuous and useful evangelizing. Especially at the South, from Virginia to Georgia, the new preachers, entering into the labors of the annoyed and persecuted pioneers of their communion, won multitudes of converts to the Christian faith, from the neglected populations, both black and white, and gave to the Baptist churches a lasting preëminence in numbers among the churches of the South.

Throughout the country the effect of this vigorous propagation of rival sects openly, in the face of whatever there was of church establishment, settled this point: that the law of American States, by whomsoever administered, must sooner or later be the law of liberty and equality among the various religious communions. In the southern colonies, the empty shell of a church establishment had crumbled on contact with the serious earnestness of the young congregations gathered by the Presbyterian and Baptist evangelists. In New England, where establishment was in the form of an attempt by the people of the commonwealth to confirm the people of each town in the maintenance of common worship according to their conscience and judgment, the "standing order" had solid strength; but when it was attempted by public authority to curb the liberty of a considerable minority conscientiously intent on secession, the reins were ready to break. It soon came to be recognized that the only preëminence the parish churches could permanently hold was that of being "servants of all."