The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut by M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.

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The General Court, relieved from the oversight of the churches, had
bent itself to preserving the colony's charter rights from its enemies
abroad, and to the material interests involved in a conservative,
wise, and energetic home development. The people's thoughts were with
the Court more than with the clergy, who had fallen from a healthy
enthusiasm in their profession into a sort of spiritual deadness and
dull acceptance of circumstances. [96] As a sort of corollary to
Stoddard's teaching that the Lord's Supper was itself a means toward
attaining salvation, it followed that clergymen, though they felt no
special call to their ministry, were nevertheless believed to be
worthy of their office. The older theology of New England had tended
to morbid introspection. Stoddard, in avoiding that danger, had thrown
the doors of the Church too widely open, and the result was a gradual
undermining of its spiritual power. The continued acceptance of the
Half-Way Covenant, "laxative rather than astringent in its nature,"
helped to produce a low estimate of religion. The tenderness that the
Cambridge Platform had encouraged towards "the weakest measure of
faith" had broadened into such laxity that, in many cases, ministers
were willing to receive accounts of conversions which had been written
to order for the applicants for church membership. The Church,
moreover, had come directly under the control of politics, a condition
never conducive to its purity. The law of 1717, "for the better
ordering and regulating parishes or societies," had made the minister
the choice of the majority of the townsmen who were voters. This
reversed the early condition of the town, merged by membership into
the church, to a church merged into the town. [97] There was still
another factor, often the last and least willingly recognized in times
of religious excitement, namely, the commercial depression throughout
the country, resulting from years of a fluctuating currency. This
depression contributed largely to the revival movement, and helped to
spread the enthusiasm of the Great Awakening. Connecticut's currency
had been freer from inflation than that of other New England
colonies. But her paper money experiments in the years from 1714 to
1749 grew more and more demoralizing. Up to 1740, Connecticut had
issued L156,000 in paper currency. At the time of the Great Awakening
she had still outstanding L39,000 for which the colony was
responsible. Of this, all but L6000 had been covered by special
taxation. There still remained, however, about L33,000 which had been
lent to the various counties. Taxation was heavy, wages low and
prices high, and there was not a man in the colony who did not feel
the effect of the rapidly depreciating currency.[98] This general
depression fell upon a generation of New Englanders whose minds no
longer dwelt preeminently upon religious matters, but who were, on the
contrary, preeminently commercial in their interests.

Such were the general conditions throughout New England and such the
low state of religion in Connecticut, when, in the Northampton church,
Solomon Stoddard's grandson, the great Jonathan Edwards, in December,
1734, preached the sermons which created the initial wave of a great
religious movement. This religious revival spread slowly through
generally lax New England, and through the no less lax Jerseys, and
through the backwoods settlements of Pennsylvania, until it finally
swept the southern colonies. At the time, 1738, the Rev. George
Whitefield was preaching in Carolina, and acceptably so to his
superior, Alexander Garden, the Episcopal commissary to that
colony. Touched by the enthusiasm of the onflowing religious movement,
Whitefield's zeal and consequent radicalism, as he swayed toward the
Congregational teaching and practices, soon put him in disfavor with
his fellow Churchmen. Such disfavor only raised the priest still
higher in the opinion of the dissenters, and they flocked to hear his
eloquent sermons. Whitefield soon decided to return to England. There
he encountered the great revival movement which was being conducted,
principally by the Wesleys, and he at once threw himself into the
work. Meanwhile, he had conceived a plan for a home for orphans in
Georgia, and, a little later, he determined upon a visit to New
England in its behalf. Upon his arrival in Boston in 1740, the
Rev. George Whitefield was welcomed with open arms. Great honor was
paid him. Crowds flocked to hear him, and he was sped with money and
good-will throughout New England as he journeyed, preaching the
gospel, and seeking alms for the southern orphanage. His advent
coincided in time with the reviving interest in religion, especially
in Connecticut. Interest over the revival of 1735 had centred on that
colony the eyes of the whole non-liturgical English-speaking
world. Whitefield's preaching was to this awakening religious
enthusiasm as match to tinder.

The religious passion, kindled in 1735 by Edwards, and hardly less by
his devoted and spiritually-minded wife, had in Connecticut swept over
Windsor, East Windsor, Coventry, Lebanon, Durham, Stratford, Ripton,
New Haven, Guilford, Mansfield, Tolland, Hebron, Bolton, Preston,
Groton, and Woodbury. [99] The period of this first "harvest" was
short. The revival had swept onward, and indifference seemed once more
to settle down upon the land. But the news of the revival in
Connecticut had reached England through letters of Dr. Benjamin
Coleman of Boston. His account of it had created so much interest that
Jonathan Edwards was persuaded to write for English readers his
"Narrative of the Surprising Work of God." Editions of this book
appeared in 1737-38 in both England and America, and all Anglo-Saxon
non-prelatical circles pored over the account of the recent revival in
Connecticut. Religious enthusiasm revived, and was roused to a high
pitch by Whitefield's itinerant preaching, as well as by that of
Jonathan Edwards, and by the visit to New England of the Rev. Gilbert
Tennant, one of two brothers who had created widespread interest by
their revival work in New Jersey. A religious furor, almost mania,
spread through New England, and the "Great Awakening" came in earnest.

The Rev. George Whitefield reached Newport, Rhode Island, in
September, 1740. Crowds flocked to hear him during his brief visit
there. In October, he proceeded to Boston, where he preached to
enthusiastic audiences, including all the high dignitaries of Church
and State. During his ten days' sojourn in the city, no praise was too
fulsome, no honor too great. Whitefield next went to Northampton,
drawn by his desire to visit Edwards. After a week of conference with
the great divine, Whitefield passed on through Connecticut, preaching
as he went, and devoted the rest of the year to itinerating through
the other colonies. Already his popularity had been too much for him,
and he frequently took it upon himself to upbraid, in no measured
terms, the settled ministry for lack of earnestness in their calling
and lack of Christian character. This visit of Whitefield was followed
by one from the Rev. Gilbert Tennant, who arrived in Boston in
December, and spent his time, until the following March, preaching in
Massachusetts and Connecticut. Tennant was also outspoken in his
denunciations, and both men, while sometimes justified in their
criticisms, were frequently hasty and censorious in their judgments of
those who differed from them.

Ministers throughout New England were quick to support or to oppose
the revival movement, and a goodly number of them, as itinerants, took
up the evangelical work. Dr. Colman and Dr. Sewall of Boston, Jonathan
Edwards and Dr. Bellamy of Connecticut, were among the most
influential divines to support the Great Awakening,--to call the
revival by the name by which it was to go down in
history. Unfortunately, among the aroused people, there were many who
pressed their zeal beyond the reverent bounds set by these
leaders. The religious enthusiasm rushed into wild ecstasies during
the preaching of the almost fanatic Rev. James Davenport of Southold,
and of those itinerant preachers who, ignorant and carried away by
emotions beyond their control, attempted to follow his example.

During this religious fever there were times when all business was
suspended. Whole communities gave themselves up to conversion and to
passing through the three or more distinct stages of religious
experience which Jonathan Edwards, as well as the more ignorant
itinerants, accepted as signs of the Lord's compassion. Briefly
stated, these stages were, first, a heart-rending misery over one's
sinfulness; a state of complete submissiveness, expressing itself in
those days of intense belief both in heaven and in a most realistic
hell, as complete willingness "to be saved or damned,"[c] whichever
the Lord in his great wisdom saw would fit best into His eternal
scheme. Finally, there was the blessed state of ecstatic happiness,
when it was borne in upon one that he or she was, indeed, one of the
few of "God's elect." [100] The revival meetings were marked by
shouting, sobbing, sometimes by fainting, or by bodily contortions.
All these, in the fever of excitement, were believed by many persons
to be special marks of supernatural power, and, if they followed the
words of some ignorant and rash exhorter, they were even more likely
to be considered tokens of divine favor,--illustrations of God's
choice of the simple and lowly to confound the wisdom of the
world. The strong emotional character of the religious meetings of our
southern negroes, as well as their frequent sentimental rather than
practical or moral expression of religion, has been credited in large
measure to the hold over them which this great religious revival of
the eighteenth century gained, when its enthusiasm rolled over the
southern colonies. Be that as it may, any adequate appreciation of the
frequent daily occurrences in New England during the Great Awakening
would be best realized by one of this twentieth century were it
possible to form a composite picture, having the unbridled
emotionalism of our negro camp-meetings superimposed upon the solid
respectability and grave reasonableness of the men of that earlier
day. As the lines of one and the other constituent of this composite
picture blend, the momentary feeling of impatience and disgust
vanishes in a wave of compassion as the irresistible earnestness and
the pitiless logic of those days press, for recognition, and we
realize the awful sufferings of many an ignorant or sensitive soul. It
was not until the religious revival had passed its height that the
people began to realize the folly and dangers of the hysteria that had
accompanied it. It was not until long afterward that many of its
characteristics, which had been interpreted as supernatural signs,
were known and understood, and correctly diagnosticated as outward
evidence of physical and nervous exhaustion.

Such, outwardly, were the marked features of the Great Awakening. Yet
its incentives to noble living were great and lasting. Its immediate
results were a revolt against conventional religion, a division into
ecclesiastical parties, and a great schism within the Establishment,
which, before the breach was healed, had improved the quality of
religion in every meeting-house and chapel in the land and broadened
the conception of religious liberty throughout the colony.

FOOTNOTES:

[a] At Northampton in 1680, 1684, 1697, 1713, and 1719.

[b] As early even as 1711, the Hartford North Association suggested
some reformation in the Half-Way Covenant practice because it noted
that persons, lax in life, were being admitted under its terms of
church membership.

[c] This "to be saved or damned" was, later, a marked characteristic
of Hokinsianism, or the teaching of the Rev. Samuel Hopkins,
1723-1813.

CHAPTER X

THE GREAT SCHISM

If a house be divided against itself.--Mark iii, 25.

From such a revival as that of the Great Awakening, parties must of
necessity arise. Upon undisciplined fanaticism, the Established church
must frown. But when it undertook to discipline large numbers of
church members or whole churches, recognizedly within its embracing
fold and within their lawful privileges, a great schism resulted, and
the schismatics were sufficiently tenacious of their rights to come
out victorious in their long contest for toleration.

The proviso of the Saybrook Platform had arranged for the continued
existence of churches, Congregational rather than Presbyterian in
their interpretation of that platform; yet, as late as 1730, when but
few remained, the question had arisen whether members of such
churches, "since they were allowed and under the protection of the
laws," ought to qualify according to the Toleration Act. The Court
decided in the negative, [101] arguing that, although they differed
from the majority of the churches in preferring the Cambridge Platform
of church discipline, they had been permitted under the colony law of
May 13, 1669, establishing the Congregational church, and had been
protected by the proviso of 1708. The Court in its decision of 1730
seems also to have included a very few churches that had revolted from
the religious formalism creeping in under the Saybrook system, and
that had returned to the earlier type of Congregationalism. After the
Great Awakening, churches "thus allowed and under the protection of
our laws" were found to increase so rapidly that the movement away
from the Saybrook Platform threatened to undermine the ecclesiastical
system, and to endanger the Establishment. Seeing this, the Court, or
General Assembly,[a] began to enforce the old colony law that with it
alone belonged the power to approve the incorporating of churches. And
shortly after it began to harass these separating churches, and to
enact laws to prevent the farther spread of reinvigorated
Congregationalism unless of the Presbyterian type. Soon after 1741,
the churches that drew away from the Saybrook system of government
became known as Separate churches, and their members as
Separatists. When these people found that the Assembly would no longer
approve their organizing as churches, they attempted, as sober
dissenters from the worship established in the colony, to take the
benefit of the Toleration Act. The Assembly next "resolved that those
commonly called Presbyterians or Congregationalists should not take
the benefit of that Act." [102]

Here was a difficulty indeed. There was no place for the Separatist,
yet there was need of him, and he felt sure there was. Furthermore,
there were others who felt the need to the community of his strong
religious earnestness, though they might deplore his
extravagances. His strong points were his assertion of the need of
regeneration, his reassertion of the old doctrines of justification by
faith and of a personal sense of conversion, including, as a duty
inseparable from church membership, the living of a highly moral
life. The weakness of the Separatist lay in his assertion, first, that
every man had an equal right to exercise any gifts of preaching or
prayer of which he believed himself possessed; secondly, of the value
of visions and trances as proofs of spirituality; and finally, of
every one's freedom to withdraw from the ministry of any pastor who
did not come up to his standard of ability or helpfulness. It followed
that the Separatists insisted upon the right to set up their own
churches and to appoint their own ministers, although the latter might
have only the doubtful qualification of feeling possessed with the
gift of preaching. The Separatists organized between thirty and forty
churches. Some of them endured but a short time, suffering
disintegration through poverty. Others fell to pieces because of the
unrestrained liberty of their members in their exhortations, in their
personal interpretation of the Scriptures, and in their exercise of
the right of private judgment, with the consequent harvest of
confusion, censoriousness, and discord that such practices created. In
years later, many of the Separate churches, tired of the struggle for
recognition and weighed down by their double taxation for the support
of religion, buried themselves under the Baptist name. Indeed they
"agreed upon all points of doctrine, worship, and discipline, save the
mode and subject of baptism." A few Separatist churches, a dozen or
more, continued the struggle for existence until victory and
toleration rewarded them. After the teachings of Jonathan Edwards had
purified the churches and had driven out the Half-Way Covenant,
against which the Separatists uttered their loudest protests, many of
these reformers returned to the Established church.

In the practice of--their principles, the Separatists, both as
churches and as individuals, were often headstrong, officious,
intermeddling, and censorious. They frequently stirred up ill-feeling
and often just indignation. The rash and heedless among them accused
the conservative and regular clergy of Arminianism, when the latter,
influenced by the Great Awakening, revived the doctrines of original
sin, regeneration, and justification by faith, but were careful to add
to these Calvinistic dogmas admonitions to such practical Christianity
as was taught by Arminian preachers. The Separatists feared lest the
doctrine of works would cause men to stray too far from the doctrine
of justification by faith alone, and they were often very intemperate
in their denunciation of such "false teachers." It was a day of freer
speech than now, and at least two of the great leaders in the revival
had set a very bad example of calling names. Mr. Whitefield considered
Mr. Tennant a "mighty charitable man," yet here are a few of the
latter's descriptive epithets, collected from one of his sermons and
published by the Synod of Philadelphia. Dr. Chauncey of Boston quotes
them in an adverse criticism of the revival movement. Mr. Tennant
speaks of the ministers thus:--hirelings, caterpillars, letter-learned
Pharisees, Hypocrites, Varlets, Seed of the Serpent, foolish Builders
whom the Devil drives into the ministry, dead dogs that cannot bark,
blind men, dead men, men possessed of the devil, rebels and enemies of
God. [103]

Naturally, party lines were soon drawn in New England. There were the
Old Calvinists or Old Lights on the one side, and the Separatists and
New Lights on the other. The New Lights were those within the churches
who were moved by the revival and who desired to return to a more
vital Christianity. In many respects they sympathized with the
Separatists, although disapproving their extravagances. In many
churches, hounded by the opposition of the conservatives, the New
Lights drew off and formed churches of their own. Thus while the
Separatists may be compared to the early English Separatists, the New
Lights would correspond more to the Puritan party that desired reform
within the Establishment. In the eighteenth century movement, in
Connecticut, the Old Lights held the political as well as the
ecclesiastical control until, in the process of time, the New Lights
gained an influential vote in the Assembly. Always, there was a good,
sound stratum of Calvinism in both the Old and the New Light parties,
and also among the Separatists, and the latter were generally included
in the New Light party, especially if spoken of from the point of view
of political affiliations. The idiosyncrasies of the Separatists
softened down and fell away in time. The Calvinism of Old and New
Lights became a rallying ground whereon each, in after years, gathered
about the standard of a reinvigorated church life; and then the terms
Old Light and New, with their suggestions of party meaning, whether
religious, or political, passed away. The term Separatist was retained
for a while longer, merely to distinguish the churches that preferred
to be known as strict Congregationalist rather than as
Presbyterianized Congregationalist, or, for short, Presbyterian.

From the time of the Great Awakening, there were nearly forty years of
party contest over religious privileges, many of which had been
previously accorded but which were speedily denied to the Separatists
by a party dominant in the churches and paramount in the legislature;
by a party which was determined to bring the whole machinery of Church
and State to crush the rising opposition to its control. Accordingly,
it was nearly forty years before the Separatists received the same
measure of toleration as that accorded to Episcopalian, Quaker, and
Baptist. It was ten years before the New Lights in the Assembly
could, as a preliminary step to such toleration, force the omission
from the revised statutes of all persecuting laws passed by the Old
Light party.

The keynote to the long struggle was sounded at a meeting of the
General Consociation at Guilford, November 24, 1741. This was the
first and only General Consociation ever called. It was convened at
the expense of the colony, to consider her religious condition and the
dangers threatening her from the excitement of the Great Awakening,
from unrestrained converts, from rash exhorters, and from itinerant
preachers, who took possession of the ministers' pulpits with little
deference to their proper occupants. The General Consociation
decided--

that for a minister to enter another minister's parish, and preach
or administer the seals of the Covenant, without the consent of,
or in opposition to the set tied minister of the parish, is
disorderly, notwithstanding if a considerable number of the people
in the parish are desirous to hear another minister preach,
provided the same be orthodox, and sound in the faith and not
notoriously faulty in censuring other persons, or guilty of any
scandal, we think it ordinar rily advisable for the minister of
the parish to gratify them by giving his consent upon their
suitable application to him for it, unless neighboring ministers
advise him to the contrary. [104]

This was not necessarily an intolerant attitude, but it was hostile
rather than friendly to the revival. It left neighboring ministers,
that is, the Associations, if one among their number seemed to be too
free in lending his pulpit to itinerant preachers, to curb his
friendliness. Intolerance might come through this limitation, for the
local Association might be prejudiced. If its advice were disregarded
and disorders arose, the Consociation of the county could step in to
settle difficulties and to condemn progressive men as well as
fanatics. In its phrasing, this ecclesiastical legislation left room
for the ministrations of reputable itinerants, for among many, some of
whom were ignorant and self-called to their vocation, there were
others whose abilities were widely recognized. Foremost among such men
in Connecticut were Jonathan Edwards himself, Dr. Joseph Bellamy of
Bethlem, trainer of many students in theology, Rev. Eleazer Whelock of
Lebanon, Benjamin Pomroy of Hebron, and Jonathan Parsons of
Lyme. Among itinerants coming from other colonies, the most noted,
after Whitefield and Tennant, was Dr. Samuel Finley of New Jersey,
later president of Princeton. Naturally men like these, who felt
strongly the need of a revival and believed in supporting the "Great
Awakening," despite its excitement and errors, did not countenance the
rash proceedings of many of the ignorant preachers, who ran about the
colony seeking audiences for themselves.

The measures of the General Consociation were mild in comparison with
the laws passed by the legislature in the following May. Governor
Talcott, tolerant toward all religious dissenters, had recently died,
and the conservative Jonathan Law of Milford was in the chair of the
chief magistrate. Governor Law had grown up among the traditions of
that narrow ecclesiasticism which had always marked the territory of
the old New Haven Colony. Moreover, the measures of the Consociation
had been futile. One of the chief offenders against them was the
Rev. James Davenport of Southold, Long Island, who not only went
preaching through the colony, stirring up by his fanaticism, his
visions, and his ecstasies, the common people, and finding fault with
the regular clergy as "unconverted men," but who pushed his religious
enthusiasm to great extremes by everywhere urging upon excitable young
men the duty to become preachers like himself. He had introduced a
kind of intoning at public meetings. This tended to create nervous
irritability and hysterical outbursts of religious emotionalism, and
these, Davenport taught his disciples, were the signs of God's
approval of them and their devotion to Him. The government, watching
these tumultuous meetings, concluded that it was time to show its
ancient authority and to save the people from "divisions and
contentions," the ecclesiastical constitution from destruction, and
the ministry from "unqualified persons entering therein." Accordingly,
in May, 1742, the Assembly passed a series of laws, [105] so severe
that even ordained ministers were forbidden to preach outside their
own parishes without an express invitation and under the penalty of
forfeiting all benefits and all support derived from any laws for the
encouragement of religion ever made in the colony. The new enactments
also forbade any Association to license a candidate to preach outside
its own bounds or to settle any disputes beyond its own
territory.[106] These laws also permitted any parish minister to lodge
with the society clerk a certificate charging that a man had entered
his parish and had preached there without first obtaining
permission. Furthermore, there was no provision for confirming the
truth or proving the falsity of such a statement. In connection with
the certificate clause, it was also enacted that no assistant, or
justice of the peace, should sign a warrant for collecting a
minister's rates until he was sure that nowhere in the colony was
there such a certificate lodged against the minister making
application for this mode of collecting his ministerial dues. [107]
Finally, the laws provided that a bond of L100 should be demanded of a
stranger, or visiting minister, who had preached without invitation,
and that he should be treated as a vagrant, and sent by warrant "from
constable to constable, out of the bounds of this Colony."[108]

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