A History Of American Christianity - free ebook by Leonard Woolsey Bacon

The American Church History Series

CONSISTING OF A SERIES OF DENOMINATIONAL HISTORIES PUBLISHED UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CHURCH HISTORY Volume XIII...

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New York The Christian Literature Co.

MDCCCXCVII Copyright, 1897, by The Christian Literature Co....

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PROVIDENTIAL PREPARATIONS FOR THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA—SPIRITUAL REVIVAL THROUGHOUT CHRISTENDOM, AND ESPECIALLY IN THE CHURCH OF SPAIN.

The heroic discovery of America, at the close of the fifteenth century after Christ, has compelled the generous and just admiration of the world; but the grandeur of human enterprise and achievement in the discovery of the western hemisphere has a less claim on our admiration than that divine wisdom and controlling providence which, for reasons now manifested, kept the secret hidden through so many millenniums, in spite of continual chances of disclosure, until the fullness of time. How near, to

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SPANISH CONQUEST—THE PROPAGATION, DECAY, AND DOWNFALL OF SPANISH CHRISTIANITY.

It is a striking fact that the earliest monuments of colonial and ecclesiastical antiquity within the present domain of the United States, after the early Spanish remains in Florida, are to be found in those remotely interior and inaccessible highlands of New Mexico, which have only now begun to be reached in the westward progress of migration. Before the beginnings of permanent English colonization at Plymouth and at Jamestown, before the French beginnings on the St. Lawrence, before the close

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THE PROJECT OF FRENCH EMPIRE AND EVANGELIZATION—ITS WIDE AND RAPID SUCCESS—ITS SUDDEN EXTINCTION.

For a full century, from the discovery of the New World until the first effective effort at occupation by any other European people, the Spanish church and nation had held exclusive occupancy of the North American continent. The Spanish enterprises of conquest and colonization had been carried forward with enormous and unscrupulous energy, and alongside of them and involved with them had been borne the Spanish chaplaincies and missions, sustained from the same treasury, in some honorable instanc

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ANTECEDENTS OF PERMANENT CHRISTIAN COLONIZATION—THE DISINTEGRATION OF CHRISTENDOM—CONTROVERSIES—PERSECUTIONS.

We have briefly reviewed the history of two magnificent schemes of secular and spiritual empire, which, conceived in the minds of great statesmen and churchmen, sustained by the resources of the mightiest kingdoms of that age, inaugurated by soldiers of admirable prowess, explorers of unsurpassed boldness and persistence, and missionaries whose heroic faith has canonized them in the veneration of Christendom, have nevertheless come to naught. We turn now to observe the beginnings, coinciding in

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THE PURITAN BEGINNINGS OF THE CHURCH IN VIRGINIA—ITS DECLINE ALMOST TO EXTINCTION.

There is sufficient evidence that the three little vessels which on the 13th of May, 1607, were moored to the trees on the bank of the James River brought to the soil of America the germ of a Christian church. We may feel constrained to accept only at a large discount the pious official professions of King James I., and critically to scrutinize many of the statements of that brilliant and fascinating adventurer, Captain John Smith, whether concerning his friends or concerning his enemies or conc

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THE NEIGHBOR COLONIES TO VIRGINIA—MARYLAND AND THE CAROLINAS.

The chronological order would require us at this point to turn to the Dutch settlements on the Hudson River; but the close relations of Virginia with its neighbor colonies of Maryland and the Carolinas are a reason for taking up the brief history of these settlements in advance of their turn. The occupation of Maryland dates from the year 1634. The period of bold and half-desperate adventure in making plantations along the coast was past. To men of sanguine temper and sufficient fortune and infl

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THE DUTCH CALVINIST COLONY ON THE HUDSON AND THE SWEDISH LUTHERAN COLONY ON THE DELAWARE—THEY BOTH FALL UNDER THE SHADOW OF GREAT BRITAIN.

When the Englishman Henry Hudson, in the Dutch East India Company's ship, the "Half-moon," in September, 1609, sailed up "the River of Mountains" as far as the site of Albany, looking for the northwest passage to China, the English settlement at Jamestown was in the third year of its half-perishing existence. More than thirteen years were yet to pass before the Pilgrims from England by way of Holland should make their landing on Plymouth Rock. But we are not at liberty to assign so early a date

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THE PLANTING OF THE CHURCH IN NEW ENGLAND—PILGRIM AND PURITAN.

The attitude of the Church of England Puritans toward the Separatists from that church was the attitude of the earnest, patient, hopeful reformer toiling for the removal of public abuses, toward the restless "come-outer" who quits the conflict in despair of succeeding, and, "without tarrying for any," sets up his little model of good order outside. Such defection seemed to them not only of the nature of a military desertion and a weakening of the right side, but also an implied assertion of supe

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THE MIDDLE COLONIES: THE JERSEYS, DELAWARE, AND PENNSYLVANIA—THE QUAKER COLONIZATION—GEORGIA.

The bargainings and conveyancings, the confirmations and reclamations, the setting up and overturning, which, after the conquest of the New Netherlands, had the effect to detach the peninsula of New Jersey from the jurisdiction of New York, and to divide it for a time into two governments, belong to political history; but they had, of course, an important influence on the planting of the church in that territory. One result of them was a wide diversity of materials in the early growth of the chu

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THE AMERICAN CHURCH ON THE EVE OF THE GREAT AWAKENING—A GENERAL VIEW.

By the end of one hundred years from the settlement of Massachusetts important changes had come upon the chain of colonies along the Atlantic seaboard in America. In the older colonies the people had been born on the soil at two or three generations' remove from the original colonists, or belonged to a later stratum of migration superimposed upon the first. The exhausting toil and privations of the pioneer had been succeeded by a good measure of thrift and comfort. There were yet bloody campaign

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THE GREAT AWAKENING

It was not wholly dark in American Christendom before the dawn of the Great Awakening. The censoriousness which was the besetting sin of the evangelists in that great religious movement, the rhetorical temptation to glorify the revival by intensifying the contrast with the antecedent condition, and the exaggerated revivalism ever since so prevalent in the American church,—the tendency to consider religion as consisting mainly in scenes and periods of special fervor, and the intervals between as

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CLOSE OF THE COLONIAL ERA—THE GERMAN CHURCHES—THE BEGINNINGS OF THE METHODIST CHURCH.

The quickening of religious feeling, the deepening of religious conviction, the clearing and defining of theological opinions, that were incidental to the Great Awakening, were a preparation for more than thirty years of intense political and warlike agitation. The churches suffered from the long distraction of the public mind, and at the end of it were faint and exhausted. But for the infusion of a "more abundant life" which they had received, it would seem that they could hardly have survived

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RECONSTRUCTION.

Seven years of war left the American people exhausted, impoverished, disorganized, conscious of having come into possession of a national existence, and stirred with anxious searchings of heart over the question what new institutions should succeed to those overthrown in the struggle for independence. Like questions pervaded the commonwealth of American Christians through all its divisions. The interconfessional divisions of the body ecclesiastic were about to prove themselves a more effectual b

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THE SECOND AWAKENING.

The closing years of the eighteenth century show the lowest low-water mark of the lowest ebb-tide of spiritual life in the history of the American church. The demoralization of army life, the fury of political factions, the catchpenny materialist morality of Franklin, the philosophic deism of men like Jefferson, and the popular ribaldry of Tom Paine, had wrought, together with other untoward influences, to bring about a condition of things which to the eye of little faith seemed almost desperate

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ORGANIZED BENEFICENCE.

When the Presbyterian General Assembly, in 1803, made a studious review of the revivals which for several years had been in progress, especially at the South and West, it included in its "Narrative" the following observations: "The Assembly observe with great pleasure that the desire for spreading the gospel among the blacks and among the savage tribes on our borders has been rapidly increasing during the last year. The Assembly take notice of this circumstance with the more satisfaction, as it

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CONFLICTS OF THE CHURCH WITH PUBLIC WRONGS.

The transition from establishment to the voluntary system for the support of churches was made not without some difficulty, but with surprisingly little. In the South the established churches were practically dead before the laws establishing them were repealed and the endowments disposed of. In New York the Episcopalian churches were indeed depressed and discouraged by the ceasing of State support and official patronage; and inasmuch as these, with the subsidies of the "S. P. G.," had been thei

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A DECADE OF CONTROVERSIES AND SCHISMS.

During the period from 1835 to 1845 the spirit of schism seemed to be in the air. In this period no one of the larger organizations of churches was free from agitating controversies, and some of the most important of them were rent asunder by explosion. At the time when the Presbyterian Church suffered its great schism, in 1837, it was the most influential religious body in the United States. In 120 years its solitary presbytery had grown to 135 presbyteries, including 2140 ministers serving 286

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THE GREAT IMMIGRATION.

At the taking of the first census of the United States, in 1790, the country contained a population of about four millions in its territory of less than one million of square miles. Sixty years later, at the census of 1850, it contained a population of more than twenty-three millions in its territory of about three millions of square miles. The vast expansion of territory to more than threefold the great original domain of the United States had been made by honorable purchase or less honorable c

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THE CIVIL WAR—ANTECEDENTS AND CONSEQUENCES.

It has been observed that for nearly half a generation after the reaction began from the fervid excitement of the Millerite agitation no season of general revival was known in the American church. These were years of immense material prosperity, "the golden age of our history." [340:1] The wealth of the nation in that time far more than doubled; its railroad mileage more than threefolded; population moved westward with rapidity and volume beyond precedent. Between 1845 and 1860 there were admitt

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AFTER THE WAR.

When the five years of rending and tearing had passed, in which slavery was dispossessed of its hold upon the nation, there was much to be done in reconstructing and readjusting the religious institutions of the country. Throughout the seceding States buildings and endowments for religious uses had suffered in the general waste and destruction of property. Colleges and seminaries, in many instances, had seen their entire resources swept away through investment in the hopeless promises of the def

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THE CHURCH IN THEOLOGY AND LITERATURE.

The rapid review of three crowded centuries, which is all that the narrowly prescribed limits of this volume have permitted, has necessarily been mainly restricted to external facts. But looking back over the course of visible events, it is not impossible for acute minds devoted to such study to trace the stream of thought and sentiment that is sometimes hidden from direct view by the overgrowth which itself has nourished. We have seen a profound spiritual change, renewing the face of the land a

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TENDENCIES TOWARD A MANIFESTATION OF THE UNITY OF THE AMERICAN CHURCH.

The three centuries of history which we have passed under rapid review comprise a series of political events of the highest importance to mankind. We have seen, from our side-point of view, the planting, along the western coast of the Atlantic Ocean, without mutual concert or common direction, of many independent germs of civilization. So many of these as survived the perils of infancy we have seen growing to a lusty youth, and becoming drawn each to each by ties of common interest and mutual fe

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