A History of the Episcopal Church (Third Revised Edition). Robert W. Prichard
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and college. The school was not on strong footing until William Smith (1727–1803) joined the faculty. Smith, who had studied at the University of Aberdeen and immigrated to America to serve as a tutor for a family on Long Island, had written an essay on the appropriate way to organize a college (A General Idea of the College of Mirania, 1753). It impressed Franklin, who persuaded others to invite Smith to join the faculty. He did so in 1754 and traveled to England for ordination in the Church of England.29 (At the time most college faculty members were clergy.) Smith became the College of Philadelphia’s first provost in the following year, reorganizing the curriculum and securing a revised charter. Smith attempted to give the school a religious character similar to that at King’s College in New York. With the support of the trustees, two-thirds of whom were lay members of the Church of England, he introduced Morning and Evening Prayer, and regular instruction in the Church of England’s catechism.30 Like his counterparts at King’s College, he was deeply suspicious of the Awakening.
Members of the Church of England made gains in other educational circles as well. Between 1725 and 1748, two percent of Harvard graduates and five percent of Yale graduates entered the ordained ministry of the Church of England, figures that undoubtedly reflected the proselytizing of Samuel Johnson in New Haven and of his fellow convert Timothy Cutler in Boston. In 1754, Yale president Thomas Clap (1703–67) attempted to stem the tide of converts by forbidding students to attend Trinity Church, the Church of England parish that constructed a building in the green adjoining Yale College in 1752–53. Any success on Clap’s part was, however, short-lived. By the 1770s, members of the Church of England were numerous and confident enough to designate a chaplain for students at Yale.31
Virginia and Maryland, where the Church of England was numerically the strongest, were largely untouched by either the revivalist excitement of 1739 and 1740 or by the surge of growth resulting from opposition to it. Commissary Cummings of Pennsylvania attributed the lower interest to the established position of the Church of England; Whitefield suspected it was due to unfaith. He described Maryland, for example, as an area “yet unwatered with the true Gospel of Christ.” The lack of large urban centers in which Whitefield could attract large crowds may, however, have been as much a cause of indifference to the Awakening as anything else. The end result was, however, clear enough. With the exception of the coastal area from Savannah to Charleston, inhabitants of the southern colonies had little interest in Whitefield’s 1739–40 tour.32
Whitefield’s third (1744–47) and fourth (1751–52) visits to the colonies did little to alter this basic pattern: Most members of the Church of England opposed the Awakening or were indifferent to it. Baptists favored it and Presbyterians and Congregationalists divided into competing factions.
The Awakening in the Colonial Church of England
In the years between Whitefield’s fifth (May 1754-March 1755) and sixth visits (August 1763-June 1765), attitudes began to change, however. While many remained skeptical about Whitefield and his methods, a significant number in the colonial Church of England began to think otherwise.
Often it was younger clergy who led the way in this rethinking of the Awakening. For them, Whitefield would have been a fixture on the theological landscape rather than the new phenomenon that he had been in 1739. Whitefield’s specific criticism of the Church of England’s ministry and theology had, moreover, blunted over time. It was possible for the younger clergy to adopt Whitefield’s doctrine of new birth and his advocacy of small group worship without accepting his earlier criticism of the liturgy and ministry.
In Philadelphia, it was William McClenachan (Macclenachan or Macclenaghan, ordained in 1755 and died in 1766 or 1767), a recently ordained Irish clergyman with evangelical leanings, that triggered interest in the Awakening. McClenachan arrived in Philadelphia in 1759 after a brief term as an SPG missionary in Massachusetts. While assisting Robert Jenney (1687–1762), the aging commissary and rector of Christ Church, McClenachan preached about conversion and established a religious society. When Jenney attempted to silence him, McClenachan and his supporters withdrew and began to meet at the state capitol. They formed the new congregation of St. Paul’s and by December 1761 had completed a building, which they claimed to be “the largest in this City or Province.”33
By 1763 Jacob Duché (1737–98), the young assistant rector at Christ Church, Philadelphia was speaking publicly in favor of Whitefield’s preaching. He then joined with a Lutheran minister, Carl Magnus Wrangel (1727–86), to organize a series of Bible study classes. The classes met from the fall of 1763 to the spring of 1764 in Duché’s home, that of his wife’s widowed mother Mary Hopkinson, and that of a warden of Christ Church. Duché and Wrangle called the group a “Colloquium Biblicus.” Hugh Neill (ca. 1725–81), a Church of England clergyman less sympathetic to Whitefield, referred to the same study groups as “private meetings according to the Whitfilian mode.”34
When Whitefield arrived in Philadelphia in the fall of 1763, even his old adversary Richard Peters, who had succeeded Jenney at Christ Church (linked from 1760 to 1836 with St. Peter’s as the United Parish), welcomed him. After consulting Duché and other clergy, Peters decided that it would be preferable to invite Whitefield to preach than to have “further disunion among the members, who might when displeased go over to” McClenachan. Whitefield accepted the invitation and preached on four occasions. Peters reflected afterward that his decision to extend the invitation had been a correct one. The evangelist preached, he felt, “with a greater moderation of sentiment” than he believed had been the case on earlier visits.35
Many younger clergy in other colonies shared a similar interest in Whitefield. Samuel Peters (1735–1826), who took charge of the Church of England congregation in Hebron, Connecticut, in 1758; Charles Inglis (1734–1816), who served Christ Church in Dover, Delaware, beginning in 1759; and Samuel Magaw (1740–1812), who succeeded him in 1767, all supported the Awakening to varying degrees.36
Interest in this spreading Awakening in the colonial Church of England was also evident in Virginia, where Whitefield had finally succeeded in lighting the fire of revival during his fifth visit to the colonies. By the 1760s William Douglas (ordained 1749, 1708–98), Archibald McRoberts (licensed to serve in Virginia in 1761), Devereux Jarratt (1733–1801), and Charles Clay (ordained 1768) actively supported the Awakening. They would soon be joined by Samuel Shield (ca. 1743–1803). Four others may have shared their sentiments, and three further clergy, including Robert McLaurine (ordained 1750, d. 1773), were willing to recommend evangelical candidates for ordination.37 Of the group in Virginia, Jarratt was to be the best known. Touched by the stirrings of awakening that began in the Presbyterian Church in Virginia during Whitefield’s fifth visit, Jarratt traveled to England for ordination in the Church of England in 1762. While there he heard both Whitefield and John Wesley preach. Returning to Virginia to serve as the rector of Bath Parish in Dinwiddie County, Jarratt began to call for personal conversion and to establish small religious societies in his parish and in neighboring areas.
In his parish William Douglas bridged the gulf between a pre-Awakening understanding of reception of the Eucharist as an owning of the covenant and Whitefield’s stress on New Birth by exhorting young people who had completed their study of the catechism and were preparing to receive the Eucharist. In his sermons to the future communicants he touched upon some of Whitefield’s favorite themes: a warning that the unconverted were “poor, blind, miserable & naked without God, without hope … upon the very brink of ruin,” a caution against “speaking peace to yourselves without foundation,” and a promise that “there would