laudable Practice

To celebrate Yale Apostasy Day, the day in 1722 when seven sons of Puritan New England - all Congregationalist ministers - declared that they were convinced on the need for episcopal ordination, we hear from one of the Yale Converts , James Wetmore . Wetmore received episcopal orders, alongside his fellow converts Timothy Cutler and Samuel Johnson, in England in 1723, before returning to the colonies, appointed by the SPG to be rector of Rye Church, New York.  In 1747, he responded to an attack on episcopal orders by Connecticut Congregationalist minister Noah Hobart. Hobart declared that because the Church of England was an episcopal church, claiming only for its bishops succession to the apostles, its presbyters lacked apostolic commission: "They to whom it does not belong, are no Ministers of Christ, nor do they derive any Authority from him". Apostolic ministry in New England, therefore, was to be found in the presbyters of the Congregationalist establishment, claiming an...

13th September was  Yale Apostasy Day .  On that day in 1722 - the day after commencement at Yale - that seven Congregationalist ministers shocked Puritan New England by publicly declaring they doubted the validity of their presbyterian ordination and would seek episcopal orders in the Church of England. Three of the seven - Timothy Cutler, who had been rector of Yale,  Samuel Johnson, and James Wetmore - received episcopal orders in England and returned to minister in the American colonies, Cutler and Johnson in New England, Wetmore in New York.   While Puritan New England may have been considered unlikely ground in which the Church of Laud might take root, the decades following the Yale Apostasy did see this happen.  (And it was a distinctly Laudian, High Church vision which animated the 'Yale Apostates' and their successors.) As Jeremy Gregory has said, "Up until the early 1760s [when the political context became fraught], the progress of the Churc...

To celebrate the anniversary of the Yale Apostasy , words from one of those sons of Puritan New England who embraced Anglicanism, Samuel Johnson (pictured, from a 1761 portrait).  We see in Johnson confirmation of the thoroughly Laudian nature of this event, an articulation of the identity of the Church of England in deep continuity with Laudian thought.  On episcopacy, the superiority of the Formularies, and the liturgy, Johnson points to those involved in the Yale Apostasy - and who then received orders in the Church of England, before returning to minister in New England - as embracing the Laudian vision in the land of the Pilgrim Fathers. Episcopacy as the right and apostolic ordering of the Church lay at the heart of the Yale Apostasy.  Some weeks after the event, Johnson "set down the motives" for his participation in the original declaration: Sundry texts of Scripture there are which seem to me plainly to intimate that Episcopacy is of apostolical appointment, whi...