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We must always remember that the ice was cracking under the feet of the Puritan divines during the life of Cotton Mather. In every direction the old ascendancy was being threatened. The Baptists and Presbyterians were extending their influence, and the Church of England itself was establishing a solid footing in sacrosanct New England. It was a reasonable complaint of the doings of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel that they were too often more interested in endeavouring to make converts of Congregationalists than to bring the heathen into the fold of Christianity. Still, even according to Mather himself, all was not well within the orthodox Church. He proposes to write to one or two of the principal ministers in Connecticut concerning the fearful circumstances into which the love of rum had brought several even of their principal ministers and by consequence very many of the miserable people. He understood that even amongst the communicants of his own church were several wicked people, some that frequently drank to excess, and some that had enticed if not seduced others to adulteries. Yet such things seem to have shocked him less than the apostasy of a famous French confessor at New York who had actually presumed to join the Church of England.

In this state of things there was ample room for the great awakening which took place soon after Mather's death. If reform was to come about, it could hardly be by the influence of the Church of England as represented at its best by such a man as Samuel Johnson. Johnson was the friend and disciple of Berkeley, a man of unblemished character and singularly tactful in his dealings with other men. But he disliked to the full "enthusiasm" in all its manifestations, especially when it took the form of physical contortions. His attitude towards the movement was simply one of puzzled disgust; and whatever sect profited by the great awakening, it was assuredly not the Church of England. The two protagonists of the movement were George Whitefield and Samuel Edwards. In all ways except in that of platform oratory the latter was by far the greater man. Whitefield's command over the emotions of his audience was marvellous, but the intellectual quality of his oratory was otherwise low, and he travelled again and again over a few favourite subjects, sin, regeneration and the new birth. Whitefield had been a clergyman of the Church of England, but his contempt of the canons for established authority soon placed him in open opposition and he became a virtual dissenter. It must be remembered that Whitefield was an Englishman and that so far as the great awakening was due to him it was not indigenous to the American soil.

Edwards's nature was much more difficult to understand. Graduating at Yale in 1720 and becoming for a time a tutor there he devoted his time largely to the study of philosophy. The reading of Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding gave him a delight "greater than

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the most greedy miser finds when gathering up handfuls of silver and gold from some new discovered treasury". But Edwards's reading never led him in the direction of deism. The mystical and poetical element in his nature was strong, helping to realise for him a sense of the immediate divine presence and influence. Unfortunately the logical and formal system of Calvinism adopted by him necessitated a view of the Godhead which profoundly shocks the ideas of most people in the twentieth century. In any case this powerful intellect and inspiring character could not in those degenerate days have his way even with his own congregation. His proposed denunciation of young men belonging to influential families for the possession of obscene literature aroused great indignation amongst his Northampton congregation, which was redoubled by his attempt to keep unconverted people from taking the sacrament. The consequence was that he was dismissed by a large majority of the congregation, and the most distinguished of living American divines had to content himself with the tenure of an obscure mission station. It is true that in 1738 he was appointed President of New Jersey College, Princeton, but he died within a few days of his appointment.

The effects of the great awakening were, as is always the case, to some extent ephemeral with regard to its converts; but there can be no question of the permanence of the blow it inflicted on the policy of the established Churches, whether Congregational or Episcopalian. With regard to the latter it became clear that the establishment must remain the Church of a cultivated minority, and that the full breath of a national outpouring must seek some other channel for its outcome. It was the misfortune of American history that questions which should have remained purely religious found themselves whirled into the maelstrom of party politics. The Church of England represents a type of temperament no less than a body of doctrine. It might have been necessary in its beginning for the safety of the Congregational Churches that they should surround themselves with battlements that could not be scaled. But, when once it was manifest that New England could never be absorbed by the English established Church, it was wisdom no less than justice to tolerate the individual expression of opinion within reasonable limits. Again, it was obvious that there were grave inconveniences in American candidates for orders finding it necessary to cross the ocean before they could obtain ordination; and something more was needed than the powers of a commissary to maintain due order and discipline within the fold of the Church. It is significant that when once the American colonies achieved their independence, the appointment of an American bishop was obtained without friction or controversy. Very different had been the past history of the question. No doubt there were men like the saintly Berkeley who approached the subject merely from the point of view of one zealous for the well-being of the

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Church; but from the correspondence of the time it is pretty clear that there were others who were playing for political stakes in their advocacy of the measure. What politicians on either side failed to realise was the resisting force of Whig Erastianism which was not going to burn its fingers for a denominational crusade. Moreover, the movement in favour of an Anglican bishop had no very general support amongst American churchmen. Many an idle and remiss clergyman in the south dreaded the presence of a bishop who could keep him in due order. It was impossible to make the colonists believe that the powers entrusted to the bishops would not be greater than those enjoyed by the commissaries. Such enthusiasm as there was, was mainly confined to New England, and here, as has already been hinted, the political argument, even when subconscious, was not without its influence. It is doubtful how far John Adams deliberately exaggerated the importance of the question as coming within the domain of practical politics. What is certain, however, is that where men such as Walpole and Newcastle were concerned, there was little risk of a change being effected which would neither be popular nor produce benefit to the British revenue. For us the significance of the movement lies in the fact that it embittered social antagonisms and strengthened the hold of party upon the members of the various denominations. It was certainly a success for the cause of toleration that the high-handed Congregational Churches found themselves compelled to give a grudging assent to measures excusing from taxation for Church purposes Baptists and Anglicans who were already maintaining their own places of worship. The bitterness of men like Mayhew on the one hand and Seabrooke on the other was due to political as well as religious antagonisms. When the great disruption came, the members of the Church of England were almost to a man convinced Loyalists, and independence in religion was followed inevitably by independence in politics. For it must be remembered the quarrel was no longer between differing members of the same Church. Immigration, as we have seen, had completely altered the whole character of Virginia. The men who flocked to the West cared nothing for forms of Church government, so that even Virginia had to come under the new influence. More dangerous to Puritan orthodoxy than the growth of Baptists or even of members of the Church of England was the development of Unitarianism which began to show its head in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, becoming more and more a powerful factor in New England life.

In New York the Church of England was formally established by law, but its position was from the first a very precarious one, having no popular support behind its enactment. In 1714, out of a population of 45,000, not more than 1200 attended the English service and not more than 450 were communicants. The position of the clergy

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was well stated by a clergyman writing to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (11 April 1711): "My great business is to plant the Church of England among prejudiced, poor and irreligious people, who are more apt to receive than to give, who think it a hardship to pay their dues; and we dare not use the law for fear of bringing odium on the Church".1 Heathcote was an enthusiastic churchman, who sought with much courage, if with little success, to make converts to the Church of England among the people of Connecticut, but he fully realised the weakness of the position of the Church in New York.

Between the northern and the southern colonies, which stood out in every way differentiated from each other, lay the middle colonies. In 1692 the population of New York was still Dutch to the extent of about a half. The English came next in numbers; but already there was a considerable population of Protestant Flemings, of French, Iberian Jews, Danes, Norwegians, Swedes, Irishmen and Germans. What stood in the way of the colony's advance were the dealings in land which showed how speculation taking advantage of a lenient Government could debauch a land system. It must be remembered that before the Revolution the English system of large estates prevailed throughout all the colonies with the exception of New England. In Pennsylvania and Maryland as well as in New York there were estates containing thousands of acres. The manorial grants in New York included more than 2,500,000 acres. In 1769 it was reckoned that at least five-sixths of the inhabitants of Westchester County lived within the confines of its great manors-and the Van Rensselaer Manor, a hundred miles farther up the Hudson, covered an area of twenty-four miles by twenty-eight, being two-thirds the size of Rhode Island.2

The proprietary governors had disposed of land with discretion and restraint and usually made grants only to those who could settle and improve and who would pay a proper quit-rent. But with the arrival of Benjamin Fletcher the business took on a brisk and at times a scandalous activity. The most extraordinary favours of former governors were but petty grants in comparison to his. He was a generous man and gave the King's lands by parcels of upwards of 100,000 acres, and to some particular favourites four or five times that quantity.3

The Governors who granted these large tracts, if they knew their extent, were guilty of a notorious breach of trust; and as it cannot be supposed that they did this merely in the gaiety of their hearts they must have had some temptation and this must be supposed to proceed from those that had the benefit from it. That therefore the grantees were equally guilty with the Governor in deceiving the King is evident, and likewise in defrauding all the adventurers or settlers in the colony

1 Fox, D. R., Caleb Heathcote, p. 209.

2 Jameson, J. Franklin, The American Revolution considered as a social movement, p. 47. Cadwallader Colden, "The state of the lands in the Province of New York in 1732” in New York Doc. Hist. 1, 375, 390.

of their equal chance of obtaining the most improvable and convenient lands, and preventing the improvement and settling of the colony, for which purpose only the lands are suffered to be granted.1

Nor was there any readiness to break these up. In these circumstances the immigrants naturally refrained from occupying the position of dependents and preferred to settle in other colonies where they could buy good freeholds amongst neighbours equally independent and self-reliant. The climate and soil were generally good, yet New York failed to compete with Pennsylvania, which, though started sixty years after New York, contained more than two and a half times its population at the beginning of the last French and Indian War. Still in spite of drawbacks New York increased its population. New York harbour was an open door for all Europe, and so there grew up a wide mixture of nationalities, a varied society, a varied economic life and many religious sects. As the historian of the frontier in American history has pointed out, New York embodied that composite nationality which is represented by the United States of to-day. It was democratic and unsectional, easy, tolerant and contented. This absence of political bitterness accounts for the fact which would otherwise be puzzling that in the Revolution, New York, by no means a specially British colony, contained the greatest number of Loyalists and did more than any other State to make the War of Independence a genuine civil war. In Pennsylvania the coming of foreign immigrants in great numbers caused much anxiety. It was seriously feared that the colony might not be able to preserve its English language.

Viewing the matter as a whole and estimating the social tendencies that were at work, it was not so much the difference between colony and colony upon which one should insist, as upon that continuous cleavage between the different portions of the same colony that was everywhere preparing the ground for a revolutionary change. Everywhere the individualism of the frontier was promoting democracy, and everywhere democracy was unable to find a comfortable dwelling place under the aristocratic system of government prevailing in the England of the eighteenth century. In colonies like Connecticut and Rhode Island, where there was no English Government to arouse antagonism, the old quarrel still went on between the rich and the poor which in the end generally resolved itself into a contest between the coast and the frontier. Thus the social conditions show New England moving surely if slowly to an inevitable goal.

It remains now to consider what was the intellectual level of the colonies when the first British Empire in America came to its inglorious end. We have seen that theology was on the wane, though in 1717 the publication by F. Wise of his Vindication of the New England Churches, a powerful defence of democratic government in

1 New York Col. Docs. IV, 391.

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