The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut

by M. Louise Greene

In the religious non-prelatical world of England, the Presbyterian churches were undergoing a transformation, and were, by 1750, prevailingly Arian. The English Congregationalists resisted Arianism, but they, also, felt its influence, as well as that of Arminianism, and they began to attach less importance to creeds, and to develop a broader tolerance of many shades of religious belief. New England sympathized more with the Congregational movement, but, as interest in both was awakened, English thought came to have great influence in the religious development of New England during the next half-century. Broadly speaking of these progressive changes, Connecticut, and Connecticut-trained men in western Massachusetts, developed the so-called New Divinity, while Massachusetts clergy, especially those of her eastern section, favored that liberal theology which, after the Revolutionary period, gave rise to the Unitarian conflict.

The older religious controversies had concerned themselves with church polity, or, popularly speaking, with what men thought concerning their relation to God through his church, in distinction from doctrine, or what men felt should be their attitude towards God and their fellow-men. Pushing aside polity and doctrine, the twentieth century emphasizes action, or man's reflection of the life of Christ. Doctrine came to the front with Jonathan Edwards. In his opposition to the Arminian teaching of the value of a sincere obedience to God's laws and "the efficacy of means of grace," Jonathan Edwards asserted the Calvinistic idea of the sovereignty of God, and maintained that justification was by faith alone; but his idea of justification held within it the duty of personal responsibility in loving and obeying God. Edwards, though defining love as general benevolence, a delight in God's holiness, and the essence of all true virtue, did introduce, as factors in personal religion, the will and the emotions. These characteristics of true, personal religion, as his mind, influenced by the Great Awakening, conceived and elaborated them, he set forth in his "Religious Affections," published in 1746. In his "Qualifications for Full Communion," 1749, he again dwelt upon the same theme; but his main purpose was to uproot the Half-Way Covenant practice and the Stoddardean view of the Lord's supper. He attempted to do this by exposing the inefficiency of "means," and at English Arminianism in particular Edwards leveled his "Freedom of the Will," published in 1754. His friend and disciple, Joseph Bellamy, put forth in 1750 "True Religion Delineated," wherein he advances from Edwards's limited atonement theory to that of a general one. [j] In 1758, Bellamy, in brilliant dialogue, replied to "A Winter's Evening Conversation Upon the Doctrine of Original Sin in which the Notion of our having sinned in Adam and being on that Account only liable to eternal Damnation, is proved to be unscriptural," a book by Rev. Samuel Webster of Salisbury, Massachusetts, and of which a reprint had appeared from the New Haven Press in 1757, the year of its publication. Bellamy took sides with the Rev. Peter Clark of Danvers, Massachusetts, who replied in "A Summer Morning's Conversation." Both men summoned as their authority a work of Edwards, "Original Sin Defended," which was about to appear from the press, and to which Edwards's followers were looking forward as the last work of their master, he having died while its pages were still in press. Edwards had destined the book to be a refutation of English Arianism of the Taylor school, of which Webster was a follower. This same year, 1758, Bellamy discoursed upon "The Wisdom of God in the Permission of Sin," and gave a series of sermons on "The Divinity of Jesus Christ," a defense of the Trinity, which Jonathan Mayhew of Boston had attacked. Bellamy may have felt that this defense was due from a Connecticut man because the colony, strenuously orthodox, had in the revision of the laws in 1750 added the requirement of a belief in the Trinity, and caused the denial thereof to be ranked as felony. Denial of the Trinity, or of the divine inspiration of the Scriptures, was punishable, for the first offense, by ineligibility to office, whether ecclesiastical, civil, or military, and, upon a second conviction, by disability to sue, to act as guardian or as administrator. [148] Though there was never a conviction under the statute, the presence of such a law in the colony code indicates the religious temper of her people at a time when radical changes were creeping into man's conception of religion.

Joseph Bellamy's influence, great as it was as writer and preacher, was even greater as a teacher. His home in Bethlehem from 1738 to 1790 was virtually a divinity school, and it is estimated that at least sixty students, trained in his system of theology and in his antagonism to the Half-Way Covenant, [k] spread through New England an influence counter to that of the Mayhews, Briant, [l] Webster, and other disciples of the Liberal Theology. Upon Bellamy, as a leader, fell Edwards's mantle.

While Bellamy was the great exponent of Jonathan Edwards's teachings in Connecticut, another friend and famous pupil of the great divine's, Samuel Hopkins, taught at Great Barrington, Massachusetts, 1743-69, and in Newport, Ehode Island, 1770-1803, urging an extension of his master's principles—especially of that of "benevolence." Hopkins, however, attributed a certain value to "means of grace," while teaching that sin and virtue consist in exercise of the will, or in definite acts. [m] Consequently, he included in his theology a denial of man's responsibility for Adam's sin, which Edwards had maintained. Hopkins advocated also a willing and disinterested submission to'God's will, the Hopkinsian "to be saved or damned," since God, in his wisdom, will do that which is best for his universe. These characteristic doctrines, both of Bellamy and Hopkins, were modified by the younger generation of students, notably by Stephen West, John Smalley, Jonathan Edwards, Jr., and—greatest of all—Nathaniel Emmons, who, together with the first Timothy Dwight, were to introduce two sub-schools of the New Divinity. [n] Emmons, following Hopkins, developed extreme views of sin, even in little children; held the theories of reprobation and election; and was most intensely Calvinistic. Dwight developed a more conciliatory and benign system of theology, but his influence, as founder of a school of religious thought, belongs to the post-Revolutionary era. Emmons held one long pastorate at Franklin, Massachusetts, 1773-1827, [o] where, as a trainer of youth for the ministry, his influence was greatest, and his powers at their best. Nearly a hundred ministers passed to their pulpits from his tutelage.

Such were the teachings that fashioned a generation of preachers, of ministers, wielding a tremendous influence over the men and measures of pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary days. The clergy were then the close friends of their parishioners; their counselors in all matters, spiritual or worldly; and frequently their arbitrators in disputed rights, for the legal class was still small, and its services costly. The pastor knew intimately every soul in his parish. He was the State's moral guardian. He was the intellectual leader and more, for, in the scarcity of books and newspapers, not alone in his Sunday sermon but in those on fast days and thanksgivings, and on all public and semi-public occasions, he talked to his people upon current events. The story is told of a clergyman who in his Sunday prayer recounted the life of his parish during the preceding week, making personal mention of its actors; who then passed, still praying, from local history to the welfare of the nation, including a tribute to Washington and a description of a battle; and who did not end his hour-long prayer until he had anathematized the enemy, and circled the globe for recent examples of divine wrath and benevolence. Such a clergyman is by no means a myth. Each pastor made his own contribution, inconspicuous or notable as it might be, to the broadening of thought, and contributed his part to the development among his people of ideas of personal liberty, even as the colonial wars were developing confidence in the ability to defend that liberty should it be endangered. A voluntary theocracy may uphold a faith which teaches that only a very limited number are of the "elect," but, under the ordinary conditions of life, such a belief is discouraging, deadening, and as men threw off this idea of spiritual bondage, they advanced to a larger conception of personal responsibility, dignity, and freedom. Such enlargement of ideas necessitated a mutual tolerance of diverse opinions. It also tended to create revolt against infractions of civil liberty or violations of political justice. The colonists were not so badly taxed—as colonial policy went—when they made their stand for "no taxation without representation," when they exhausted their resources in a long war because of acts of Parliament that, had they submitted to them, would have offered a precedent for still more repressive measures and for the overthrow of the Englishman's right to determine, through the representatives of the people, how the people's money should be spent.

If the town-meeting, the sermon, the religious or political pamphlet, and the newspaper did each its part in developing a people, there was also another factor that, starting as part of a discussion of ecclesiastical polity, brought before all men important questions of civil, political, and personal liberty, and of constitutional rights. However unnecessary the severe anguish of Jonathan Mayhew's spirit, due to his exaggerated fear of the American episcopate, he did but express "the sincere thought of a multitude of his most rational contemporaries." [l49] A review of events will show some reason for the antagonism and horror that filled New England when the project of the episcopate was revived. After the death of Queen Anne in 1714, the Crown took no interest in the project of an American episcopate until Thomas Sherlock became Bishop of London in 1748. The Connecticut clergy of the Church of England, together with others of New England and the Middle colonies, had, however, never ceased their efforts to secure an American bishop; and now, in Bishop Sherlock, their Metropolitan in London, they had one who firmly believed in the necessity of colonial bishops, who deliberately refused to exercise the traditional powers of his office, or to obtain a legal renewal of them (in so far as they applied to the colonies), because he had determined that by such a policy he would force the English government to appoint one—or preferably several—American bishops. He defined his scheme for the episcopate as one in which the Bishop was: (1) to have no coercive power over the laity, only regulative over the clergy; (2) to have no share in the temporal government; (3) to be of no expense to the colonists; (4) and to have no authority, except to ordain the clergy, in any of the colonies where the government was in the hands of dissenters from the Church of England. This plan was essentially the same as that advocated later by Bishops Secker and Butler, and by succeeding bishops to the time of the Revolution. Bishop Sherlock obtained the King's permission to submit his plan to the English ministers of state. So great was the dread inspired in America by the rumors of a revival of active measures for a colonial episcopate, that a deputation, sent to England in 1749, appointed a committee of two to wait upon those nearest to the King and to advise them that the appointment would be "highly Prejudicial to the Interests of Several of the Colonies." [150] This committee redoubled its energies in 1750, and it was due to its watchfulness as well as to the clearer foresight of the King's ministers that Bishop Sherlock's plan was frustrated. The chief advisers of the government objected to it on the ground that it would be repugnant to the dissenting colonies, to the dissenters of all sorts in England, and would also rouse in the home-land party-differences that had slumbered since the overthrow of the Pretender in 1745.

Despite the English opposition to Bishop Sherlock's scheme, its discussion in England and the journey of the bishop's agent through the several American colonies to sound their sentiment had created so much apprehension that the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel enjoined its missionaries, in 1753, "that they take special care to give no offence to the civil government by intermeddling with affairt, not relating to their calling or function." Even Bishop Seeker of Oxford, a strong adherent of Bishop Sherlock, saw fit, in 1754, to suppress Dr. Johnson of Stratford, Connecticut, bidding his enthusiasm wait until a more propitious season, and advising him, and the rest of his clergy, to conciliate the dissenters. Bishop Sherlock, himself, in 1752, withdrew sufficiently from his first position to assume the ecclesiastical oversight of the colonies, although he would not take out a commission to renew that which had expired by the death of Bishop Gibson. Meanwhile, Sherlock's demonstration that the Bishop of London had little authority in law, or in fact, over the American colonies created two parties. One [p] held that the colonies were a part of the English nation and consequently were subject to the civil and religious laws existing in the home country, and that the authority of the Church of England extending to the colonies had been reinforced by the Gibson patent of 1727-28. The other party maintained that the colonists were not members of the Church of England, nor subject to its rules. They quoted the Lord Chief Justice, who declared to Governor Dummer, in 1725, that "there was no regular establishment of any national or provincial church in these plantations" (of New England), and that Bishop Gilman, in his letter of May 24, 1735, to Dr. Colman had written, "My opinion has always been that the religious state of New England is founded on an equal liberty to all Protestants, none of which can claim the name of a national establishment, or of any kind of superiority over the rest." This party further maintained that no acts of Parliament, passed after the founding of the colonies, were binding upon them, unless such acts were specially extended to the colonies. Here again was the old contention that had appeared in the earlier controversy over the Connecticut Intestacy Act.

An American controversy, parallel in time with the attempt to establish the episcopate, roused the always latent New England hostility to the Episcopal church as one contrary to gospel teaching. This controversy of 1747-51 [q] broke out over the validity of Presbyterian ordination versus Episcopal. The battle surged about the contingent questions of (1) whether the Church of England extended to the colonies; (2) whether it was prudent for the long established New England churches to go over to the English communion; and (3) whether it would be lawful. In debating the last two, incidental matters of expense, of unwise ecclesiastical dependence, and of the consequent decay of practical godliness in the land, were discussed by the Rev. Noah Hobart of Stratford, Conn., who represented the Consociated churches, while Episcopacy was defended by Rev. James Wetmore of Rye, N. Y., Dr. Johnson of Stratford, Conn., Rev. John Beach of Reading, Conn., and by the Rev. Henry Caner of Boston.

This discussion at once suggested to a few far-sighted men that the bishops recently proposed, and which at the end of the Seven Years' War, in 1763, were again earnestly advocated by Bishop Seeker (who had become Archbishop of Canterbury) should not acquire any powers in addition to those suggested by Bishop Sherlock. The growing fear of such increased authority flamed out again in the Mayhew controversy of 1763-65, when all the inherited Puritan dislike to the Church of England as a religious body, and all the terror of such a hierarchy, as a part of the English state, hurled itself into argument, and threw to the front the discussion of the American episcopate as a measure of English policy,—an attempt to transplant the Church as an arm of the State; an attempt to "episcopize," to proselyte the colonies, and eventually to overturn the New England ecclesiastical and civil governments.[r] "It was known," wrote John Adams fifty years later, "that neither the king nor ministry nor archbishop could appoint bishops in America without Act of Parliament, and if Parliament could tax us, it could establish the Church of England with all its creeds, articles, ceremonies, and prohibit all other churches as conventicles and schism-shops." Therefore, when England declared her right to tax the colonies, and followed it by Sugar Act and Stamp Act, the political situation threw a lurid light about the Chandler-Chauncy controversy [t] of 1767-71 as it rehearsed the pros and cons of the proposed episcopate. The New England colonies were greatly excited, and others shared the unrest, for, even where the Church of England was strongest, the laity as a body preferred the greater freedom accorded them under commissaries as sub-officers of the Bishop of London. The indifference of the American laity as a whole to the project of the episcopate; the impotence of the English bishop to attain it, thwarted as he was by the threefold opposition of the ministry, the colonial agents, and the great body of English dissenters, did not lessen the prevailing suspicion and fear among the colonists, especially among those of New England. They felt no confidence in the profession that authority purely ecclesiastical would alone be accorded to the bishop, or that American churchmen themselves would long be satisfied with a bishopric so shorn of power. And already, on November 1, 1766, the Episcopalians of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut had met together in their first annual convention at Elizabethtown. [v] The avowed object of their conference was the defense of the liberties of the Church of England, and "to diffuse union and harmony, and to keep up a correspondence throughout the united body and with their friends abroad." [151]

It was a time of drawing together, whether of the colonies as political bodies, or of their people as groups of individuals affiliating with similar groups beyond the local boundaries. Upon November 5, 1766, also at Elizabethtown, the Consociated Churches of Connecticut had united with the Presbyterian Synod of New York and Philadelphia in their first annual convention, which was composed of Presbyterian delegates to the Synod and of representatives from the Associations in Connecticut. While the general object was the promotion of Christian friendship between the two religious bodies, the spread of the gospel, and the preservation of the liberties of their respective churches, the conventions of 1769-75 determined to prosecute measures for preserving these same liberties, threatened "by the attempt made by the friends of Episcopacy in the Colonies and Great Britain, for the establishment of Diocesan Bishops in America." [152] Accordingly this representative body at once entered into correspondence with the Committee of Dissenters in England. In recalling these movements towards combination, one remembers that, among the dissenters, the Quakers had long held to their system of Monthly, Quarterly, and Annual Meetings, to their correspondence with the London Annual Meeting, and to the frequent interchange of traveling preachers. In the years 1767-69, the scattered Baptists of New England had united in the Warren (Rhode Island) Association. It was a council for advice only, yet its approval lent multiple weight to the influence of any Baptist preacher. It urged the collection of all authentic reports of oppression or persecution, and a firm, united resistance on the part of the weaker churches. [w] The founding of Brown University, Rhode Island, as a Baptist College in 1764, gave the sect prestige by marking their approval of education and of a "learned ministry."