Over the years of writing on Yale Apostasy Day on this blog, my interpretation of the event has changed. I initially regarded it as the arrival of 'Laudianism' in New England. Leaving aside the fact that I now believe the term 'Laudian' to be meaningless, it was opponents - not New England Church of England ministers and their congregations - who viewed the Yale Apostasy and its consequences in such a way. In more recent times, I have moved to emphasising what Church of England ministers and laity in colonial New England shared with their Congregationalist neighbours.
This year's Yale Apostasy Day post returns to another theme I have previously identified: that of colonial New England Anglicanism as alternative both to the narrow confines of Puritan orthodoxy and the irrational disorder of the Great Awakening. To illustrate this, I turn to a 1767 sermon by the leading Yale Apostate, Samuel Johnson.
The sermon was preached in Christ Church, Stratford, Connecticut, the oldest Church of England church in the province. It was built in 1724, just two years after the Yale Apostasy, and, appropriately, had it first service on Christmas Day that year - quite the statement in Puritan New England. It was in this significant Anglican church that Samuel Johnson entered the pulpit on 24th June 1767, preaching on the text I Timothy 1.5: "Now the End of the Commandment is Charity, out of a pure Heart, and of a good Conscience, and of Faith unfeigned".
The sermon sets forth, I think, how the Church of England in colonial New England understood itself to represents something quite different to the Puritan heritage which shaped the churches of the 'New England Way'. Something of this can be heard early in the sermon, as Johnson introduces the key theme of the sermon, a theme which would have been instantly familiar to 18th century Anglican congregations in the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland - that "the design of heaven is", as Cambridge Platonist George Rust had said at Jeremy Taylor's funeral, "not to fill men's heads, and feed their Curiosities, but to better their Hearts". Thus Johnson stated at the outset of his sermon:
The Apostle here tells Timothy that he had desired him to take up his Residence at Ephesus, i. e. as the Bishop of that Church (as all Antiquity witnesseth) it being a City of large Extent and great Importance, that he might build on the Foundation he had laid; & particularly that he might guard them against the Insinuations of corrupt Teachers, and charge or denounce to them that they should not teach any other Doctrine, than the pure Doctrine of the Gospel, which he had taught them; that they should not turn aside to endless Genealogies and Fables which were apt to create Disputes and Contentions, and so to occasion Divisions, and Separations, and so frustrate the very Intention of the Gospel, which was to promote universal Love and Charity; for, says he, the very End of the Gospel, and consequently of the Charge Timothy was to give them, was Charity out of a pure Heart and a good Conscience and Faith unfeigned.
The "pure doctrine of the Gospel", a phrase which defined the purpose of Puritan New England, was here employed for a radically different purpose. It was not the theological distinctives of the 'New England Way' which was "the pure doctrine of the Gospel" but, rather, the moral character of Christianity. And at the heart of this moral character was the virtue of charity:
The Commandment then which the Apostle here means is the whole gospel Dispensation, implying that entire System of Christian Doctrine, which St. Paul had preached during the two Years that he had resided there, and which Timothy was to charge them to adhere to, and the End of this he tells us is Charity, and this is the same as to say, that Charity is the Perfection of Christianity, for a Thing is then perfected, when its End or Intention is answered. This therefore teacheth us that Christianity without Charity is but an empty Name, and an unmeaning Thing.
Here Johnson was echoing a significant anti-solifidian tradition amongst Church of England divines, a tradition which had been prominent post-1660 and which came to define the character of 18th century Anglicanism. As Tillotson had declared in a sermon:
in those Scriptures where it is said we are justified by faith, we may not think that we be justified by faith, as it is a separate virtue from hope and charity, the fear of God and repentance; but by it is meant faith, neither only nor alone, but with the aforesaid virtues, containing an engagement of obedience to the whole doctrine and religion of Christ ... the design of Christianity is to renew and reform the hearts and lives of men.
By defining "the pure doctrine of the Gospel" as the moral character of Christianity, Johnson was also then able to implicitly challenge the claim of the 'New England Way' that it was closest to the apostolic and primitive church:
But alas! if this be Charity, where is she fled? where shall we seek to find her? Time was when she dwelt on Earth, when Christianity was in its greatest Vigour and Purity, and in its primitive Glory and Simplicity. But if we look on the present Condition of Things, one would be apt to think, she is long since fled to Heaven! She is hardly now to be found on Earth, unless in a few humble and holy Men of Heart. Certainly the very best of us are extremely deficient, and fall sadly short of coming up to this amiable Character, wherein the true Beauty, and Glory of Christianity consists.
It was, again, "this amiable Character" - a phrase which rather beautifully encapsulates the heart of 18th century Anglicanism - rather than Puritan orthodoxy which was the "primitive ... simplicity" of Christianity. We might regard this of an echo of a theme highlighted by Taylor in his 1661 Rules and Advices for his clergy:
Let the business of your Sermons be to preach holy Life, Obedience, Peace, Love among neighbours, hearty love, to live as the old Christians did, and the new should; to do hurt to no man, to do good to every man: For in these things the honour of God consists, and the Kingdom of the Lord Jesus.
This leads Johnson to then define the church's primary vocation to be the fellowship of charity:
For this End are we by our Baptism admitted into the Family of God, which is the Family of Love, and made his Children by Adoption and Grace, and thereby obliged to consider all Christians as our Brethren and Sisters, and to treat them accordingly, to be pitiful and courteous, kind and obliging in all our Deportment one towards another; to avoid all harsh Constructions, and to put the kindest Constructions we can upon what every One says and does. And for this End are we required once every Week to join together in the same public Worship, in paying our common Homage and Adoration as Children to our one common heavenly Father, lifting up holy Hands, without Wrath & doubting, and to delight in his Worship & Service: and as often as may be, to partake together at his holy Table, the common heavenly Banquet; the holy Feast of Love, where we have set before us a lively Representation of the most astonishing Instance of Love that ever the Sun beheld, in the Death of Christ, who spilt his precious Blood alike for us all; than which surely nothing can be imagined more effectual to unite us to God, and to knit our Hearts together in the holy Bands of universal Love and Charity. Thus you see how every Thing in Christianity drives at this single Point!
Public worship, Baptism, and the Lord's Supper are all defined by Johnson as shaping the church as the fellowship of charity. This in itself is quite striking, particularly in the understanding of the Communion as "the holy feast of Love", mindful that Article XXII begins by stating that the Sacrament "is not only a sign of the love that Christians ought to have among themselves one to another".
What may, however, be the most significant phrase in this excerpt, indeed, perhaps in the whole sermon, is Johnson's use of the phrase "Family of Love". Readers of Diarmaid MacCulloch will immediately recognise it. The Family of Love were a very unusual expression of the Radical Reformation, emerging from the Low Countries in mid-16th century. MacCulloch describes them as "a small mystical sect". What brought them to a certain prominence, however, was becoming "unobtrusively established" in England in the 1550s. Through "quiet conversations and unobtrustive pamphlets", the influence of the Family of Love spread in elite and clerical circles in England. While, at parish level, Familists "served as parish officers", it was their influence amongst the elite that was most controversial. In the 1580s, "Puritans raged" when "some of the Yeomen of the Guard, the Queen's personal security force, turned out to be Familists".
With the Family of Love part of the Puritan heresiography, Johnson's use of the term is highly unlikely to have been unintentional. Evoking the quiet, calm, tolerant ethos of the Family of Love, a quietism that was conformist and obedient to authority, prizing the imitation of Christ over doctrinal dispute, Johnson was here contrasting a vision of peaceable, quietest Anglicanism with both the original doctrinal precision and Great Awakening Enthusiasm in the 'New England Way'.
At the conclusion of the sermon, Johnson pointed to the virtue of charity as that which fits us for heaven:
Thus I have explained to you the amiable Nature and genuine Principles of true Christian Charity, and shewn you how this is the End of the Commandment, & the Perfection of Christianity. Let it therefore be the great Concern of our Lives to prove ourselves Christians indeed, by abounding in all the Fruits of Charity, out of a pure Heart a good Conscience and Faith unfeigned; for this is the blessed Disposition that will in the Nature of it directly qualify us for Heaven, and make us meet to be Partakers of the Inheritance of the Saints in Light, where nothing but Truth and Charity will for ever prevail.
Again, it could have been a sermon in many an 18th century Anglican church. Indeed, we can compare Johnson's sermon with a sermon by one of the best known of 18th century Anglican parsons, Gilbert White. In a 1765 sermon on I Corinthians 13, White stated:
[Without charity] I am nothing: I do not answer the ends for which I was made; but am fallen from the divine Image which I was created-in; retain no similitude of my ever-blessed Maker, whose essence is Love.
Charity as "the Perfection of Christianity", the church as the Family of Love: it was a vision that contrasted with both the older New England Puritanism and the Great Awakening - defined neither by doctrinal precision nor the experience of Enthusiasm. There were, of course, a range of reasons why colonial New Englanders left Congregationalism for Anglicanism. They were embracing the King's church. They were attracted to the liturgy. They understood the episcopal order to be less invasive that congregational polity. Then there were the prosaic reasons: marriage, business, family ties.
a Soul that is intirely devoted, as far as human Frailty can go, to be governed by that Wisdom which is from above, which is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, easy to be entreated, full of Mercy and good Fruits, without Partiality and without Hypocrisy.
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