An unpublished journal of Rev. George Whitefield, detailing his life from October 17th, 1744, to some time in the spring of 1745, has been in the Princeton Theological Seminary Library since June, 1816. It bears an inscription showing that it was given to the seminary by Dr. John R. B. Rodgers, the famous pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of New York. Probably it was a part of the papers which Dr. Rodgers is said to have guarded and carried about in a trunk during the Revolutionary War.

Although for two and a half centuries of our American history slavery was a legal institution and for much of that time a significant factor in our life and although throughout that long period there were opponents to it, moral and religious opposition was not strong until a late date. Much of the opposition in the colonial period was from an economic point of view: the returns would not justify the institution; the initial cost of the slaves was great; their labor was unwillingly given; the system promoted the idleness of the rich and robbed the poor of opportunity and prevented the immigration of industrious laborers. Benjamin Franklin thought that slavery retarded population and industry, and Dr. Benjamin Rush observed that small farms with free labor returned greater profits than slave economy. Here there was no question as to whether slavery was morally right or wrong, only “did it pay?” There was also, in this early period, opposition to slavery from a political point of view in that security was endangered. But in all the thirteen colonies slavery existed and everywhere respectable people owned slaves and clergymen of the major churches, if they had the price, owned them as well dressed clergymen today own automobiles. Here and there a lone voice was raised in opposition on moral or religious grounds, but only the Quakers, as a religious group, made slave-keeping a bar to fellowship. John Woolman, their anti-slavery apostle, made it his life work to go about the country and argue against slavery, because it was contrary to Christianity and because “liberty was the right of all men equally.”

In his equally delightful and informative book, The Dutch and Swedes on the Delaware, Christopher Ward suggests that American history might have turned out differently if stormy weather had not driven the Mayflower off its course and thus landed the Pilgrims north of Cape Cod instead of in Delaware Bay. “Speculations,” Ward writes, “as to the effect of a kindlier climate, a more generous soil, upon the character of the English immigrants, of the Puritans, who followed them, and of their descendants—could lead to divers conclusions. One thing is certain however; if the Pilgrim Fathers had spent that first winter in Delaware Bay, they would have had a better time.”

William Ellery Channing was an American Schleiermacher, standing at the turning point from the Enlightenment to Transcendentalism, and, like Schleiermacher, he has been treated by historians as the initiator of a movement. He is understood in terms of what followed him. According to Mr. Van Wyck Brooks, he represents the budding of New England. I wish to reverse the perspective and to present Channing as the culmination of the American Enlightenment. In the Revolutionary generation three distinct systems of thought, three historically separate faiths were flourishing; for want of better terms I shall call them rationalism, pietism, and republicanism. Channing, as I shall attempt to show, inherited each of these faiths, understood the issues at stake, felt the struggle intimately, and attempted to formulate a synthesis of all three. His humanitarianism may therefore fittingly be studied as the summation of the ideals of the American Enlightenment. If I had time, I would follow up the negative side of the argument and show that Channing participated only slightly in the thought of the coming generation, the generation from 1830 to 1860, and that he was, on the whole, not willingly a prophet of Transcendentalism. In his last years, when he saw dimly what was to come, he was repelled by much of it and looked back almost wistfully to the faith of his fathers.

The last generation of the ante-bellum South devoted its best thought to the integration of a plantation culture whose economic base was chattel slavery. Every aspect of its civilization had to make its peace with slavery or be rejected. Long before the guns fired on Fort Sumpter, southern civilization had wrought out an ideology that was as dogmatic as Marxism has ever dared to be. Those who rejected this ideology were promptly silenced or ushered into a cooler climate. The liberalism of an older revolutionary South had long ago been smothered in the atmosphere of cultural fascism.

The Plan of Union adopted in 1801 by the General Association of Connecticut and the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church was a memorable expression of the spirit of Christian unity in the face of a great missionary task. But its particular provisions for the working together of the Congregational and Presbyterian polities were little utilized. The “Accommodation Plan” adopted in 1808 was the main instrument of organization in the spirit of the Plan of Union. According to this a Congregational church, remaining such internally, might join a presbytery and be represented in the presbytery by its minister and a lay delegate. Such churches received the nickname “Presbygational”, or were called “Plan of Union churches.”

The Negro church presents an important field of investigation to students of American social history. Many slaves found in Christianity a substitute for primitive African religious beliefs and practices and a source for the satisfaction of their religious longings. The churches offered to the American Negro his first opportunities for participation in organized group life in a new environment. Experience in church organization and activity trained thousands of slaves for the larger fields of effort which were opened to them after emancipation. Approximately one-tenth of the present total membership of the American churches belongs to this race. For more than three centuries the church has served as the most important factor in typing the institutions and ideals of our largest minority racial group.

The theory of toleration, often the child of indifference or of sectarian interest, is most difficult to analyse, whatever the issues. It may derive from indifference to the “rights” of conscience, while hiding behind an interested manner. The advocate frequently tolerates religious differences and hysterically cries “Crusade” against an economic heresy; or he shows charity toward one sect and simultaneously invokes the wrath of God and the power of Parliament against another which he considers in error. Often the plea proceeds from a minority whose very existence depends on toleration, but which on becoming a majority, demands conformity from others. Moreover, some men who have evoked a positive philosophy of toleration express only an intellectual interest. Yet whatever the basis— sectarian interest, intellectual sympathy, indifference, or a passionate love of freedom—toleration has always aroused sympathy and devotion.

The sixth century in the Eastern Roman Empire saw the appointment to high ecclesiastical offices of several laymen chosen from the upper ranks of the army and the civil service. Apollinaris, patriarch of Alexandria from 551 to 570, had been before his appointment a high military officer, and his successor John had likewise passed the whole of his previous career in the army. It was evidently their marked executive ability which was responsible for the sudden translation of such men from the government service to the church, and in their new careers their energy and their mastery of administrative detail no doubt outweighed any previous lack of training in theological affairs.

In 1676 an anonymous tract made its appearance on the London bookstalls. The title, The Naked Truth: Or, The True State of the Primitive Church, was calculated to appeal to the theologically minded reader, which at that time meant most laymen as well as clergymen. If by posterity the tract has been remembered—when it has been remembered at all —as having inspired Andrew Marvell to create the memorable figure of Mr. Smirke, to its contemporaries it was one of the major events, both from a literary and from a politico-religious standpoint, of its year.

Within the years indicated in the title of this paper, missionary activity in the United States came to be permeated by a spirit of enterprise that was truly remarkable. The enthusiastic outbursts of those years, presently to be noticed, were in truth novel expressions of faith grown militant, but they were not uncharacteristic of the time. Rapid change within a generation had made thoughtful Americans keenly aware of the fact that they were living in a new age, an age distinguished, among other things, for Christian benevolence. As the democratization of American life proceeded, latent energies were released and the mobilization of such energies in associations for the promotion of change was revealing to the common folk of America a new and effective way of social action and was implanting in their consciousness a belief in the idea of progress. By the decade of the 1820's Americans generally were coming to believe that it was possible by united effort to achieve emancipation for the more fortunate many and amelioration of the lot of the less fortunate few. The multiplication of associations revealed an eager striving to attain these aims. In the realm of religious activity the urge to accomplishment took the form of united endeavor for the conversion of the world.

Georgia in the revolutionary period, not unlike many other provinces along the American seaboard, lacked social solidarity and unity. The lack was not the result of great ethnic diversity alone or of the disharmony arising from economic inequalities and political disagreement. To racial variety and divergences attributable to economic and political conditions were added many differences in customs and modes of living and in traditional thought which could be ascribed, in part at least, to the numerous religious sects attracted to the province by the liberal provisions of its charter. The religious conflicts of the period are best seen in the struggle over the establishment of the Church of England and in the relations of the dissenters with the civil government and with the religious establishment. The question of external ecclesiastical control, issues and grievances of a religious nature which appeared in the revolutionary argument, and the alignment of the sects on the question of open conflict with Great Britain, are interesting and important aspects of the whole religious situation. It is with these phases of the religious history of Georgia during two decades that this study is largely concerned.

It was the long-established custom of the Alexandrian patriarch to write each year a paschal letter to the faithful of his province. In the letter of the year 399 the Patriarch Theophilus, an ecclesiastic of great ability but few scruples, inveighed rather severely against those who taught that God was corporeal, or in other words that God had bodily form. This opinion was by no means extraordinary. For over two centuries Alexandria had been the leading center of Christian theology, and for a much longer period a pre-eminent seat of philosophic learning as well. The repudiation of anthropomorphic conceptions of God had long been a matter of common acceptance by pagan and Christian theologians alike who laid any claim to a liberal education.

The Brotherhood of the Kingdom was organized in December, 1892, by a small group of converts to the ideal of the kingdom of God on earth who, not unmindful of the examples of St. Francis and of the Society of Jesus, planned to reestablish the idea of the kingdom “in the thought of the church and to assist in its practical realization in the world.” The year 1892 had witnessed a rising crescendo of social turbulence and political unrest throughout America. In the midwest the populist revolt was growing, while industrial warfare had broken out in the violent Homestead strike at the Carnegie steel plants. Jacob Riis had opened wide the festering tenements of the great cities in his revelation of How the Other Half Lives, while in intellectual circles the younger economists were rebelling against the tenets of the Manchester school. William Jennings Bryan's campaign for free silver was only four years away, and the Spanish–American War but six years in the future. Into such an atmosphere of storm and stress was born the Brotherhood of the Kingdom, dedicated to the realization of a spiritual ideal in the social order.

On the east bank of the St. John River, sixty miles above the city of St. John and eighteen miles below Fredericton, is an attractive white church building of the New England type. Its graceful spire cannot fail to catch the eye and call forth expressions of admiration as travelers pass by motor or river steamer. This houses the oldest Protestant church organization in what is now the Province of New Brunswick, though this building is not the original one. It was a “society” of the Congregational order, now an integral part of The United Church of Canada, and known as Sheffield.

The age of the Reformation, as one of the creative periods in the history of the Western church, was rich in great personalities. The challenge of the time brought some men to heroic heights, while it took scores of lesser men out of their small corners and flung them into the great stream of movement and action which was remaking the world, where they were compelled to assume places of leadership. The names, and often the life stories, of many of the characters of four hundred years ago are still familiar to us today. Some of them are household names. But there are no Anabaptist names among them, even though the Anabaptist movement represents a distinct type of continental Protestantism. Menno Simons, the sturdy leader of Dutch Mennonitism, is perhaps most widely known of the Anabaptist leaders, although the quadricentennial of his conversion from Catholicism to the Anabaptist movement, which was celebrated last year by Mennonites round the world, passed scarcely noticed. But Menno was not the founder of Anabaptism, and ten years before he appeared on the theatre of action most of the original founders and leaders of Anabaptism in its birthland in Switzerland and South Germany were numbered among the martyrs. The careers of these Swiss leaders were so short that even among their present-day Mennonite descendants most of them had been totally forgotten until they were revived in recent years by modern historical research; and today there is no living tradition attached to their names. It is true that as long ago as 1910 Adolph von Harnack could say in his History of Dogma: “Thanks to the research of recent years we have been presented with figures of splendid Christian leaders from among the circles of the Anabaptists, and many of these noble and reverend characters come nearer to us than the figures of an heroic Luther and an iron Calvin.”