A History of American Christianity

by Leonard Woolsey Bacon

With equal and unlimited liberty, was to follow, as a prevailing characteristic of American Christianity, a large diversity of organization. Not only that men disagreeing in their convictions of truth would be enrolled in different bodies, but that men holding the same views, in the same statement of them, would feel free to go apart from one another, and stay apart. There was not even to be any one generally predominating organization from which minor ones should be reckoned as dissenting. One after another the organizations which should be tempted by some period of exceptional growth and prosperity to pretend to a hegemony among the churches—Catholic, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist—would meet with some set-back as inexorable as "the law of nature that prevents the trees from growing up into the sky."

By a curious paradox, the same spiritual agitation which deepened the divisions of the American church aroused in the colonies the consciousness of a national religious unity. We have already seen that in the period before the Awakening the sole organ of fellowship reaching through the whole chain of the British colonies was the correspondence of the Quaker meetings and missionaries. In the glow of the revival the continent awoke to the consciousness of a common spiritual life. Ranging the continent literally from Georgia to Maine, with all his weaknesses and indiscretions, and with his incomparable eloquence, welcomed by every sect, yet refusing an exclusive allegiance to any, Whitefield exercised a true apostolate, bearing daily the care of all the churches, and becoming a messenger of mutual fellowship not only between the ends of the continent, but between the Christians of two hemispheres. Remote churches exchanged offices of service. Tennent came from New Jersey to labor in New England; Dickinson and Burr and Edwards were the gift of the northern colonies to the college at Princeton. The quickened sense of a common religious life and duty and destiny was no small part of the preparation for the birth of the future nation.

Whether for good or for evil, the few years from 1740 to 1750 were destined to impress upon the American church in its various orders, for a hundred years to come, the character of Methodism.[176:1]

In New England, the idea, into which the first pastors had been trained by their experience as parish ministers in the English established church, of the parochial church holding correlative rights and duties toward the community in all its families, succumbed at last, after a hundred years of more or less conscious antagonism, to the incompatible principle, adopted from the Separatists of Plymouth, of the church formed according to elective affinity by the "social compact" of persons of the age of discretion who could give account to themselves and to one another of the conscious act and experience of conversion. This view, subject to important mitigations or aggravations in actual administration, held almost unquestioned dominance in the New England churches until boldly challenged by Horace Bushnell, in his "epoch-making" volume on "Christian Nurture" (1846), as a departure from the orthodoxy of the fathers.

In the Presbyterian Church, revivalism as a principle of church life had to contend with rules distinctly articulated in its constitutional documents. So exclusively does the Westminster institute contemplate the church as an established parish that its "Directory for Worship" contains no provision for so abnormal an incident as the baptism of an adult, and all baptized children growing up and not being of scandalous life are to be welcomed to the Lord's Supper. It proves the immense power of the Awakening, that this rigid and powerful organization, of a people tenacious of its traditions to the point of obstinacy, should have swung so completely free at this point, not only of its long-settled usages, but of the distinct letter of its standards.

The Episcopal Church of the colonies was almost forced into an attitude of opposition to the revival. The unspeakable folly of the English bishops in denouncing and silencing the most effective preachers in the national church had betrayed Whitefield into his most easily besetting sin, that of censorious judgment, and his sweeping counter-denunciations of the Episcopalian clergy in general as unconverted closed to him many hearts and pulpits that at first had been hospitably open to him. Being human, they came into open antagonism to him and to the revival. From the protest against extravagance and disorder, it was a short and perilously easy step to the rejection of religious fervor and earnestness. The influence of the mother church of that dreary period and the influence of the official rings around every royal governor were all too potent in the same direction. The Propagation Society's missionaries boasted, with reason, of large accessions of proselytes alienated from other churches by their distaste for the methods of the revival. The effect on the Episcopal Church itself was in some respects unhappy. It "lowered a spiritual temperature already too low,"[177:1] and weakened the moral influence of the church, and the value of its testimony to important principles which there were few besides efficiently to represent—the duty of the church not to disown or shut out those of little faith, and the church's duty toward its children. Never in the history of the church have the Lord's husbandmen shown a fiercer zeal for rooting up tares, regardless of damage to the wheat, than was shown by the preachers of the Awakening. Never was there a wider application of the reproach against those who, instead of preaching to men that they should be converted and become as little children, preach to children that they must be converted and become like grown folks.[178:1] The attitude of the Episcopal Church at that period was not altogether admirable; but it is nothing to its dishonor that it bore the reproach of being a friend of publicans and sinners, and offered itself as a refugium peccatorum, thus holding many in some sort of relation to the kingdom of Christ who would otherwise have lapsed into sheer infidelity.

In all this the Episcopal Church was affected by the Awakening only by way of reaction. But it owes a debt to the direct influence of the Awakening which it has not always been careful to acknowledge. We have already seen that the requickening of the asphyxiated church of Virginia was part of the great revival, and this character remains impressed on that church to this day. The best of those traits by which the American Episcopal Church is distinguished from the Church of England, as, for instance, the greater purity of the ministry and of the membership, are family traits of the revival churches; the most venerated of its early bishops, White and Griswold, bore the same family likeness; and the "Evangelical party," for a time so influential in its counsels, was a tardy and mild afterglow from the setting of the Great Awakening.[179:1]

An incident of the revival, failing which it would have lacked an essential token of the presence of the Spirit of Christ, was the kindling of zeal for communicating the gospel to the ignorant, the neglected, and the heathen. Among the first-fruits of Whitefield's preaching at the South was a practical movement among the planters for the instruction of their slaves—devotees, most of them, of the most abject fetich-worship of their native continent. Of the evangelists and pastors most active in the revival, there were few, either North or South, whose letters or journals do not report the drawing into the churches of large numbers of negroes and Indians, whose daily lives witnessed to the sincerity of their profession of repentance and Christian faith. The Indian population of the southeastern corner of Connecticut with such accord received the gospel at the hands of the evangelists that heathenism seemed extinct among them.[179:2]

Among the first trophies of the revival at Norwich was a Mohegan boy named Samson Occum. Wheelock, pastor at Lebanon, one of the most ardent of the revival preachers, took him into his family as a student. This was the beginning of that school for the training of Indian preachers which, endowed in part with funds gathered by Occum in England, grew at last into Dartmouth College. The choicest spiritual gifts at the disposal of the church were freely spent on the missions. Whitefield visited the school and the field, and sped Kirkland on his way to the Oneidas. Edwards, leaving Northampton in sorrow of heart, gave his incomparable powers to the work of the gospel among the Stockbridge Indians until summoned thence to the presidency of Princeton College. When Brainerd fainted under his burden, it was William Tennent who went out into the wilderness to carry on the work of harvest. But the great gift of the American church to the cause of missions was the gift of David Brainerd himself. His life was the typical missionary's life—the scattering of precious seed with tears, the heart-sickness of hope deferred, at last the rejoicing of the harvest-home. His early death enrolled him in the canon of the saints of modern Christendom. The story of his life and death, written by Jonathan Edwards out of that fatherly love with which he had tended the young man's latest days and hours, may not have been an unmixed blessing to the church. The long-protracted introspections, the cherished forebodings and misgivings, as if doubt was to be cultivated as a Christian virtue, may not have been an altogether wholesome example for general imitation. But think what the story of that short life has wrought! To how many hearts it has been an inspiration to self-sacrifice and devotion to the service of God in the service of man, we cannot know. Along one line its influence can be partly traced. The "Life of David Brainerd" made Henry Martyn a missionary to the heathen. As spiritual father to Henry Martyn, Brainerd may be reckoned, in no unimportant sense, to be the father of modern missions to the heathen.