FOR a quarter-century after the revolution of 1689 English and colonial politics were largely influenced by the conflict of ecclesiastical parties. In England, and at one time or another in most of her colonies, church and state were united, and religion and politics were constantly reacting upon each other. In the ecclesiastical politics of the colonies during this period three phases are of prime historical importance: first, the gradual relaxation of the Puritan system in New England, particularly in Massachusetts; secondly, the effort of the aggressive Anglican party to extend over the colonies the ecclesiastical system of the mother-country, with its financial support of the established church and its discrimination against dissenters; and, finally, the conflict between clergy and laity within the ranks of the established church.

     At the close of the seventeenth century the old Puritan order was still strongly intrenched in New England. Except in Rhode Island, the Congregational churches were generally recognized as entitled

to public support; churches were built and ministers paid by taxes which were exacted from dissenters as well as from adherents or members. The church-membership qualification for voters had, indeed, been superseded by property qualifications, but the Puritan clergy still exerted a strong influence on the conduct of public affairs. Their advice was still asked on questions of policy; and the law, both in its making and in its administration, still expressed in large measure the opinions and ideals of the Puritan founders.

     These general propositions are well illustrated in the history of Massachusetts in the years immediately following the revolution. The most important agent in securing the new charter and in determining the personnel of the new government was Increase Mather, a Congregational minister in active service. Phips, the first governor, had been recently received into a Congregational church. The lieutenant-governor, Stoughton, and most of his associates in the council, were thorough-going Puritans, who, after the recall of Phips, were charged for several years with the administration of the provincial government. The next governor, Bellomont, though himself an Anglican, thought it wise to attend one service weekly in a Congregational church. The Church of England had gained a foothold; but, from the Puritan point of view, it was still a peculiarly odious, dissenting sect.

     One of the most marked characteristics of the

old Puritan life was its strong belief in the presence and concrete manifestation in human affairs of supernatural forces. This intense supernaturalism was, of course, not peculiar to the Puritan; it was equally characteristic of the mediæval church, and in seventeenth-century Europe the conventional acceptance of supernatural theories was almost universal. Yet among the English Protestants of that day it was the Puritan sects with whom the conventional dogma was most likely to become a vital factor in the conduct of life. It was the persistence of this conviction which, at the beginning of the provincial era, made possible that great tragedy of New England history, the Salem witchcraft.¹

     It is not easy to determine the effect which this tragedy and the part taken in it by the conservative leaders may have had upon the religious thought of New England. Yet it is certain that while Massachusetts was being brought into closer commercial and political relations with the outside world the exclusive supremacy of Puritan ideals was being seriously shaken. This can be seen first in lax or liberal movements within the church itself. The conditions of church-membership were relaxed so that the church could be entered without that thorough spiritual examination which the fathers had thought necessary. In Boston the new Brattle Street Church, organized in 1699, though accepting the substance

of the old theology, adopted certain usages which the conservatives regarded as highly objectionable. The Scriptures might be read in the Anglican fashion, without comment; members might be admitted without any public statement of their experiences; and persons who were not full members of the church might be allowed to vote in the choice of a new minister. There was a long controversy between the leaders of this new movement and the conservatives represented by Increase and Cotton Mather.

     Both parties were anxious to control the government of Harvard College, and Cotton Mather, finding that the liberals had gained the upper hand, began to interest himself in the new Connecticut college. Such men as Sewall and the Mathers frequently expressed misgivings regarding religious and social tendencies at variance with the old Puritan standards. In his Magnalia Christi, Cotton Mather recorded his opinion that, “The old spirit of New England hath been sensibly going out of the world, as the old saints in whom it was have gone; and instead thereof the spirit of the world, with a lamentable neglect of strict piety, has crept in upon the rising generation.”¹

     In those times of declining spiritual vigor the established churches of New England had to meet the growing activity of the dissenting bodies. Of

these the most important were the Quakers, the Baptists, and the Anglicans. By the close of the seventeenth century each of these denominations was represented by a regularly organized church in Boston. In Rhode Island the Quakers and Baptists were probably the strongest bodies. Elsewhere in New England their numbers were relatively small, and they had to contend with strong prejudices. During the reign of Queen Anne, both the Connecticut and Massachusetts governments were complained of for unfriendly treatment of the Quakers. When, in 1708, the Quakers of Boston petitioned for leave to build a wooden meeting-house, Sewall opposed it, saying that he “would not have a hand in setting up their Devil Worship.”¹

     Sewall and his contemporaries watched with particular anxiety the growth of the Anglican congregation worshipping at King’s Chapel. This church had gained a foothold in Boston after the overthrow of the first charter; and after the revolution it grew pretty steadily, until during the first quarter of the eighteenth century it came to number several hundred adherents and a second church became necessary. Some of the rectors of King’s Chapel were prominent figures in Boston life, and it gained some prestige from the special patronage of the crown. Lord Bellomont was a member of this congregation; and his successor, Dudley, though maintaining some relationship with the Congregationalists,

also frequented the Anglican services, and for a time at least was thought to be in special sympathy with them. From time to time there were funerals of prominent social personages, at which Puritan sensibilities were disturbed by the use of the English burial service. The religious observance of Christmas was another Anglican usage against which Sewall repeatedly recorded his protest. In Rhode Island, especially in Newport, the Episcopal church gained considerable strength, and Connecticut had a small but aggressive Episcopal element, especially in the western counties.

     One of the most dramatic incidents in the long-drawn-out struggle between Puritans and Anglicans in New England was the libel case of John Checkley, an Anglican bookseller in Boston, who in 1724 was tried by the superior court of Massachusetts, convicted of seditious libel, and sentenced to pay a heavy fine for an argumentative publication asserting the exclusive Episcopal authority as against Congregational ordination. This seems to have been the last attempt to check dissenting publications by legal process.

     The most serious practical grievance of the dissenters in New England was the obligation imposed upon them of paying the town taxes for the support of the Congregational worship. This was the general rule outside of Rhode Island at the beginning of the eighteenth century; but some concessions had been made by Massachusetts. In the

town of Swansea, annexed to Massachusetts in 1691 with other towns of the Plymouth Colony, the Baptists were in control and continued as before to appropriate their church taxes to the support of their own minister: this course was, however, distinctly exceptional. During Queen Anne’s reign efforts were made by Anglicans to secure exemption from this obligation to support another communion, and they seem to have had some encouragement from Governor Dudley. In 1713 one of the Puritan ministers of Boston spoke “very fiercely against the Govr. and Council’s meddling with suspension of Laws, respecting Church of England men not paying Taxes to the dissenting Ministers.” In this particular instance, an Episcopal resident of Braintree had refused to pay his church tax, and the matter ended by the levy of an execution on his property. The Quakers also presented repeated complaints of the injustice done them in New England by “priest’s rates.” In 1723 the Privy Council took action upon a case in which Quaker town officers had been imprisoned because of their refusal to collect taxes for a Congregational minister; the decision of the Massachusetts authorities was reversed, and it was ordered that the tax should be remitted and the assessors released.¹ During this decade a number of events contributed

to enhance the prestige of the Anglican party. In 1722, Timothy Cutler, president of Yale College, and some other prominent Congregational ministers of Connecticut, announced their conversion to the Church of England, and soon after Cutler became the rector of one of the Episcopal churches in Boston. In 1725, when the Massachusetts Congregationalists proposed to hold a synod, they met with a protest from the Anglican party, which was sustained by the bishop of London and by the law-officers of the crown. By the close of the decade special acts were passed, both in Massachusetts and Connecticut, partially relieving the Anglicans, Quakers, and Baptists from the necessity of contributing to the Congregational churches. The obligation still continued for Anglicans who had no local church of their own; but wherever an Episcopal church had been organized those who attended its services were entitled to reclaim for their minister their share of the local church taxes. The separation of church and state and the equal rights of all religious bodies did not receive complete recognition until long after the War of Independence, but the old Puritan ideal of a single church imposing its fixed standards upon the community had been hopelessly broken down.¹

     Once fairly established, the Anglican clergy and

laity became an important factor in New England politics. In Connecticut and Massachusetts they formed a small but aggressive loyalist group, who, as members of the state Church of England, valued also their political connection with the mother-country. When hard pressed by the dominant church of their new home, they looked for encouragement and support to the crown and its official representatives in America, with whom they felt it their duty to stand for order in church and state. In 1724 the Anglicans of Newport united in a declaration to the king which, though perhaps too extreme to be wholly representative, does fairly illustrate the political tendencies of their fellowchurchmen in New England. They assured the king that, “The religious and loyal principles of obedience and non-resistance are upon all suitable occasions strongly asserted and inculcated upon your Majesty’s good subjects of this Church.”¹

     Nowhere except in New England did the established Church of England have to struggle for bare tolerance or equal rights at the hands of a rival church supported by colonial law. Elsewhere the Anglicans were more ambitious in their demands; their ideal was the legal establishment of their church in the various provinces, and, ultimately, the close adjustment of this provincial church to the English diocesan system.

     Before 1689 the Church of England was not definitely

established by law in any of the continental colonies, except Virginia, though there were some Anglican churches in Maryland and a strong Anglican element in South Carolina. In North Carolina and the northern proprietary provinces, the field was almost exclusively occupied by various sects of Protestant dissenters. During the next twenty-five years, however, there was a marked extension of Anglican influence in all of these colonies.

     One of the important leaders in this movement was Henry Compton, who was bishop of London for nearly forty years, beginning his official career under Charles II. and dying near the close of Queen Anne’s reign. At his accession to office there was a well-recognized tradition that the colonies were under the special guardianship of the bishop of London, and in the royal province of Virginia no minister could be preferred to any benefice without his certificate. This responsibility for the colonies was expressly asserted by Compton soon after his accession; and in 1685 he secured a modification of the instructions to the royal governors by which his episcopal authority was to take effect “as far as conveniently may be,” reserving to the governor the rights of collation to benefices, issuing of marriage licenses, and the probate of wills. Henceforth, also, no school-master coming from England was to keep a school without the bishop’s license.¹

     During the reign of James II., Compton’s independent course in English affairs led to his suspension; but after the revolution he resumed his office and at once became a member of the Committee of Trade and Plantations. In the same year he inaugurated an important new policy by appointing James Blair as his representative or commissary in Virginia. The commissary had a small part of the episcopal authority; he was to act as counsellor for the clergy of the province and to hold visitations or inquiries into the conduct of ministers, and in rare instances he might suspend a delinquent clergyman. Blair was an aggressive Scotchman of some ability and learning, who had already been in Virginia for several years. He took an active interest in politics as well as in religion, and quarrelled with the successive governors of the province. Yet he undoubtedly advanced the interests of the church by working for reform in the manners of the clergy, though he was conservative in the exercise of disciplinary authority, making only two suspensions in thirty-five years. Under his influence the supply of ministers was increased also, so that vacancies became much less common. Blair’s greatest work was the founding, in 1693, of William and Mary College, which he looked upon as an important agency for the religious as well as the intellectual welfare of the province.¹

     A more important figure than Blair in the annals of the colonial church was Thomas Bray, appointed by Compton as commissary for Maryland on the request of the provincial clergy. Before assuming the duties of this office Bray interested himself in the establishment of parochial libraries for the colonies, and though he made only a short visit to Maryland he had an important influence in securing the legal establishment of the Church of England in that province.¹

     During the eighteenth century commissaries were sent to several of the colonies, but none of them deserve to rank with these first two holders of that office. They frequently became involved in serious conflicts with the civil authorities, and were rarely able to maintain an effective discipline over the clergy.

     Probably the most important and best-known single agency for promoting the interests of the Anglican church in America was the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. This organization came into existence largely through the efforts of Dr. Bray, who had previously been interested in a similar organization known as the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, often called the Venerable Society, was chartered in 1701, with the patronage and active co-operation of the bishop of London and other prominent prelates.

The new organization entered at once upon active missionary work in America. During the years 1702-1704 two of its agents, George Keith, a former Quaker, and John Talbot, made a long tour of the colonies, beginning at Boston and going as far south as North Carolina. The missionaries sent out by the society varied greatly in character and efficiency. Some of them were lacking in tact, and some brought scandal upon the church by gross personal misconduct, as, for instance, in North Carolina. Others were men of marked ability and fine Christian spirit.¹

     Another important influence at work for the Church of England in the colonies was that of the provincial governors and other royal officers in the colonies. The aggressive royal governors of this period—such men as Nicholson, Fletcher, Bellomont, and Spotswood—were also strong churchmen. Nicholson in particular was widely known as a zealous and disinterested friend of the church, to which he contributed considerable sums of money. The same thing was true of such royal agents as Randolph and Quarry. Conversely, the aggressive churchmen were usually advocates of closer imperial control.

     Under these favoring circumstances, there was naturally a decided increase in the number of

Anglican churches and adherents in nearly all the colonies. For the first time there appeared regularly organized Episcopal churches in New York and New Jersey. In 1695 the first Episcopal church was built in Philadelphia, and soon assumed an important place in the life of the Quaker colony. In North Carolina there had been no Episcopal ministers or churches before 1700, but in the next decade the Anglican party was able for a time to shape the ecclesiastical policy of the province.¹

     With increased numbers and a growing sense of power, there came in several colonies a strong movement for the legal establishment of the English church. The movement was least successful in the middle colonies where the dissenting Protestant sects were in a large majority. In New York, however, Governor Fletcher secured from the assembly an act under which a few Episcopal churches were supported by public taxation.²

     In the south the new movement towards establishment was general and in form at least successful. The first to act was Maryland. Here the proprietary governments had before the revolution been called upon to provide a tax for the support of the Anglican clergy. In reply the proprietor declared that at least three-fourths of the population

were Protestant dissenters of various sects and that a tax on them for the support of another worship would be unfair. The first assembly under the royal government took a different view. By a statute of 1692 the Church of England was established and the vestries were authorized to levy taxes for the support of their ministers. Another act of 1696, which superseded the earlier legislation, having been opposed by the Quakers and Catholics, was disallowed by the crown, ostensibly because it contained some irrelevant matter. During his short visit to the province in 1700, Bray secured the passage of a new establishment act, which, however, contained an extreme clause requiring the use of the common prayer in every place of public worship. This act also was antagonized by the Quakers and Catholics; in anticipation of another royal veto, a new bill, without the objectionable clauses, was accepted by the Maryland assembly and became law in 1702. Under this law the Anglican church retained its position as an establishment until the American Revolution.¹

     The Anglicans of North Carolina had been almost entirely passive until 1699, when Henderson Walker took office as deputy governor of the province. Walker was an aggressive churchman, and under his leadership the church party, by “a great deal of care and management,” secured control of the assembly. In 1701 an act was passed establishing

the church and authorizing the levy of a poll-tax for the support of the clergy, and under its provisions three churches were built; but the next assembly was controlled by the Quakers and their allies, and shortly afterwards the establishment act was disallowed by the proprietors. For the next twelve years there was a constant conflict between churchmen and dissenters, culminating in the petty civil war known as the Cary rebellion. The vestry act of 1715 settled the issue nominally in favor of the establishment; but the results attained were small, and many years later a governor of the province complained to the assembly that there were “but two places where divine service is regularly performed.”¹

     In South Carolina the Anglican influence was stronger than in the northern colony, and as early as 1698 provision was made by the assembly for the support of an Episcopal minister in Charleston. In 1702, Sir Nathaniel Johnson, a former governor of the Leeward Islands, who on the accession of William and Mary had proved his loyalty to the Stuarts by resigning his post, was appointed governor by the proprietors. Like most high Tories of that day, whether in England or America, Johnson was also an extreme churchman, and under his leadership a church act was passed in 1704 which divided the

province into six parishes, and allowed the minister of each parish a salary of £50 out of the public treasury. A provision of this act regarding the discipline of the clergy was objectionable to the bishop of London, and in 1706 it was annulled by the crown; but in the same year a new establishment act was passed without the obnoxious clause and became the permanent law of the province.¹

     The simple establishment of the Anglican church was not enough to satisfy its more zealous adherents. In some instances they followed the example of the English Tories and demanded legislation still further discriminating against the dissenters. Even in the revolution settlement of 1689 the English dissenters had only been granted a bare toleration, and they were still excluded from public offices, except so far as they chose to qualify themselves by occasionally receiving the sacrament according to the Anglican rites. During the reign of Queen Anne the high-church party was particularly aggressive, and after some unsuccessful attempts finally carried, in 1711, the Occasional Conformity Act, imposing heavy penalties on dissenters who attempted to evade the legal tests. Three years later the so-called Schism Act was passed, imposing severe penalties upon any one, with a few clearly defined exceptions, who should keep a school

or engage in teaching without a bishop’s license and an agreement to conform to the Church of England.¹ With this intolerant spirit prevailing in the church at home, it is not strange that similar measures were attempted in the colonies. In 1707, Governor Cornbury, of New York, undertook to punish two Presbyterian ministers for preaching without a license; but in this case the ministers were protected by the jury.¹ The unsuccessful attempt of the Maryland assembly to compel the use of the English prayer-book has already been noted.

     The controversy in the Carolinas took on a much more serious character, and nearly resulted in the overthrow of the proprietary government. In the same year, 1704, in which the first general church act was passed for South Carolina, the high-church party obtained a law providing that no one should sit in the assembly without having received the sacrament according to the Anglican rite. This measure was conceived in the same spirit as the religious tests at home, and it was brought forward in America just at the time when the occasional conformity bill was being urged in Parliament. It is at least possible that a similar measure was enacted in North Carolina, though the evidence is incomplete. At any rate, the dissenters in both the Carolinas were now thoroughly aroused, agents were sent to England, and through the influence of

the House of Lords, where the extreme churchmen were still in the minority, the law was annulled.¹ In the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania the church party was not in a position to secure an establishment and it remained always in a small minority. Yet at times this minority was a decidedly aggressive and important element in provincial politics. At the beginning of the eighteenth century its leaders were hostile to the proprietary government, and did what they could to discredit it by bringing out sharply two points which caused special embarrassment to the responsible Quaker leaders: one was the unwillingness of the Quakers to provide adequate measures for defence; the other was their refusal either to take or administer oaths. Harassed by these attacks, moderate Quakers were even ready to consider the possible advantage of leaving the government in the hands of moderate churchmen. Penn himself held the bishop of London largely responsible for the agitation on the question of oaths, and referred to him as “the great blower-up of these coals.” Thus in the middle as well as in the southern colonies the antagonism of churchmen and dissenters became an important phase of provincial politics.²

     The adherents of the Anglican church were by no means free from dissensions within their own ranks. In church as well as in state the spirit of local

antagonism asserted itself against external authority, and the Old-World jealousy between laity and clergy appeared also in the American provinces, especially in the colonies where the Church of England was established. Sometimes, on the question of financial support for the clergy, indifferent Anglicans would even join hands with the dissent ers. Two of the most practical of these subjects of controversy were the method of engaging ministers and the maintenance of discipline over the clergy.

     The general rule in an Anglican province like Virginia was that the parishioners had the right of selecting or presenting a minister, who should then be formally inducted into his office. A clergyman once presented and inducted was established for life and could not be removed by his parishioners. This arrangement was unsatisfactory to the people, who preferred to keep the matter under their control; and therefore, instead of regularly presenting a minister, they preferred to enter into yearly agreements with him regarding his service and his compensation. By the end of the seventeenth century this usage had developed into a serious abuse, at least from the clerical point of view.¹

     The question of ecclesiastical discipline, especially in the case of ministers regularly inducted, was peculiarly difficult in the colonies, because there was no resident bishop and the disciplinary authority

of the commissaries was generally ineffective. This led to various efforts on the part of the laity to take the matter into their own hands. Thus, in Virginia, the governor and council were constituted a court for the trial of ecclesiastical offences. Generally, however, proposals of this kind were vigorously and successfully resisted by the clergy. In Maryland there were serious complaints of the immorality of the clergy; and during Queen Anne’s reign the assembly passed a bill establishing a lay court for the trial of delinquent ministers, who, in case of conviction, could be removed from office. The bill was condemned by the clergy as tending to the “Presbyterian form of ministers and lay elders,” and the governor withheld his consent. The project was not, however, abandoned: in 1714 the governor refused the request of the vestries to discipline a delinquent clergyman; a bill to recognize the authority of the bishop’s commissaries was then defeated, and a few years later another bill was introduced for the organization of a lay court. Again, however, the clerical influence prevailed, and no real settlement of the question was reached until near the close of the colonial era. Reference has been made to a similar attempt in South Carolina at the very height of the high-church movement, which was defeated by the opposition of the bishop of London.¹

     By the beginning of the eighteenth century the opinion was widely held both in England and America that the true solution for the problem of the colonial church would be found in the appointment of resident American bishops. There are a few earlier references to the subject, but the most earnest advocates of the plan were the members and missionaries of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, including Thomas Bray. In 1705 a petition from Burlington, New Jersey, signed by fourteen clergymen asked for the appointment of a suffragan bishop, and this proposal was approved by Bishop Compton. Governor Hunter, of New York, was interested in the project, and in 1712 the Society went so far as to provide a house for a bishop of Burlington. At about this time an effort was made to gauge colonial sentiment on the subject. Bishop Kennett, for instance, wrote to Colman, a Congregational minister in Massachusetts, expressing the hope that “your Churches would not be jealous,” “they being out of our Line, and therefore beyond the Cognizance of any Overseers to be sent from hence.”

     At the close of Queen Anne’s reign there seemed some reason to expect that the project might be carried out. The queen expressed her approval, and shortly before her death a bill was draughted for the organization of a colonial episcopate. The new king, George I., was soon asked by the Venerable Society to establish four colonial dioceses, two for

the islands and two for the continental colonies, the seats of the latter to be respectively at Burlington, in New Jersey, and Williamsburg, in Virginia. Nothing came of the proposal, though the general idea of a colonial episcopate was discussed at intervals during the remainder of the colonial era. In the later stages of this discussion, on the eve of the Revolution, there was some anxiety, especially in New England, lest a colonial bishop might not content himself with a purely spiritual jurisdiction over the churches of his own communion. This ecclesiastical controversy became finally one of the minor factors in the alienation of the American colonists from the mother-country.¹

     Thus the period of William and Anne shows, on the whole, a marked relaxation of the old Puritan system in Massachusetts and a general advance on the part of the Anglicans. Nevertheless, the self-governing instinct of the colonists showed itself in the conduct of the church as well as of the state, and the attempt to organize an effective episcopal jurisdiction in America failed, partly, perhaps, because of colonial jealousy, but more probably because of the apathy of the home government.