A History of the Episcopal Church (Third Revised Edition). Robert W. Prichard
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coincided with the Great Awakening.
Thus during the Awakening, the Church of England laid the groundwork for an expansion of the role of blacks and women that would take place in the years following the American Revolution. The formation of independent black congregations at the close of the eighteenth century and the growing women’s movement in the nineteenth century were both built upon that foundation.
The membership of the colonial Church of England was affected in another way as well. Prior to the Great Awakening, American denominations were arranged in a roughly geographical pattern; the Congregational Church predominated in New England, the Church of England in the South, and the Presbyterian Church in certain areas of the middle colonies. The Awakening shattered this pattern. It brought Presbyterians and Baptists to Virginia and contributed to the growth of the Church of England in New England and the middle colonies. The religious enclaves of the first half of the century gave way to a more heterogeneous pattern.
Provincial Assemblies and the Call for the Episcopate
The Awakening also sparked a renewed call for a colonial episcopate. Whitefield’s confrontations with colonial clergy in 1739 and 1740 demonstrated the weakness of the commissary system. Commissaries could complain about Whitefield’s preaching, but they lacked the clear authority over him that a colonial bishop would have been able to exercise. Moreover, as members of the Church of England had pointed out earlier in the century, a colonial bishop would provide a more satisfactory supply of clergy and would avoid the inevitable loss of life of some who took the dangerous trip to England for ordination. Yale convert Samuel Johnson was well aware of the danger; his son had died on such a trip.
Johnson’s fellow Yale convert Timothy Cutler was a leading advocate of the establishment of a colonial episcopate. Another vocal figure was Thomas B. Chandler (1726–90), a New Jersey clergyman whose An Appeal to the Public, on Behalf of the Church of England in America (1767) sought to rally popular support for the idea. In England, Bishop Joseph Butler (1692– 1752), a critic of John Wesley, took up the call for a colonial episcopate, and Bishop of London (1748–61) Thomas Sherlock stopped appointing commissaries in every colony except Virginia in order to pressure the Parliament to take action.54
Those who were not members of the Church of England reacted negatively to the campaign for a colonial episcopate. In the tense political climate of the 1760s, any proposal for a new British institution in the colonies was suspect. For Congregationalists and Presbyterians, a bishop of the Church of England, one who might exercise the political authority of his episcopal counterparts in the House of Lords, was particularly odious.
In Massachusetts, Congregational clergy Noah Welles (1718–76), Jonathan Mayhew (1720–66), and Charles Chauncy (1705–87) were fierce critics of the colonial Church of England. In an anonymous pamphlet titled The Real Advantage (1762), Welles claimed to have joined the Church of England for purely social reasons. Mayhew’s Observations on the … S.P.G. (1763) both criticized Church of England clergyman East Apthorp (1732 or 1733–1816) and suggested that SPG missionaries violated their own charter by preaching to those who were already active Christians.55 Chauncy challenged Chandler’s Appeal with his own Appeal to the Public (1769), to which Chandler responded with The Appeal Farther Defended (1771). The Welles-Mayhew-Chauncy characterization of the Church of England as wealthy was hardly accurate; nationally, the church represented roughly the same economic group as the Congregational Church, and in New England its membership was decidedly less well off.
The charge did become, nonetheless, a lasting element in American religious imagery. Later Episcopalians could, however, appreciate the historical irony involved when Mayhew’s grandson, Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright (1792–1854), was elected an Episcopal bishop.
In New York, Presbyterians William Livingston (1723–90) and Francis Alison (1705–79) penned the American Whig papers in which they were similarly critical of plans for a bishop for the colonial Church of England. Their opposition, combined with that from New England, proved strong enough to prevent the introduction of bishops. Cutler, Chandler, and Butler were able to interest Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Seeker (archbishop, 1758–68), but they could not convince the English Parliament to send bishops against the vocal opposition of colonial Congregationalists and Presbyterians.
While the attempt to deal with the effects of Awakening did not result in the immediate sending of a colonial bishop, it did lead to the creation of the colonial institutions that would in time play a vital role in the procuring of episcopal ministry. In May 1760 the clergy of the Church of England in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey decided to meet in Philadelphia. William Smith of the College of Philadelphia presided at the gathering. William McClenachan’s religious society and the need for a colonial bishop were the major topics of conversation. Smith thought the convention a good idea and wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury the following year suggesting that the other colonies form provinces, just as New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania had done. Smith was not, however, impressed by a suggestion advanced by the convention of 1766. College duties kept him from attending that year, and in his absence a majority of the clergy voted in favor of what he characterized as “a kind of Presbyterian or Synodical self delegated Government by Conventions.”56
New York clergy also met regularly. They invited Church of English clerics from neighboring colonies to a series of conventions (1765, 1766, and 1767) that were largely preoccupied with the campaign for a colonial episcopate. Samuel Seabury (1729–96), a native of Connecticut who served churches in Long Island and Westchester, was the secretary of two of those sessions. In 1767 the New York clergy joined with those in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware to found the Society for Relief of Widows and Orphans of Clergymen.57 These three organizations—the two regional conventions and the one united charitable society—would provide the framework and leadership for the reorganization of the colonial Church of England following the American Revolution.
The Awakening also affected the interior design of churches. Many earlier Church of England buildings had had two-foci designs with pulpits and altars on adjacent walls. By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, the new style of building introduced in England by James Gibbs was becoming popular. The exteriors of the new buildings incorporated elements of classical Greek architecture that accorded with a Moderate Enlightened view of the relationship of religion and science. Interiors of the building were, however, often arranged in ways that suited the Great Awakening emphasis on sentimental preaching. Large central pulpits dominated structures laid out on a single central axis.58 Indeed, as early nineteenth-century Episcopalians would complain, many of these pulpits were so placed that they hid the holy table from the view of the congregation.59
Similarly, the musical innovations of the Wesleys made a permanent mark on worship. Prior to the Awakening, many members of the Church of England resisted the use of hymns of recent composition. Christians should, they believed, sing only biblical material or texts like the Te Deum that were hallowed by centuries of use. In the early years after the Awakening, some members of the colonial Church of England continued to look upon the singing of modern hymns with great suspicion. In Virginia, Awakening supporter Archibald McRoberts was tried for the singing of unauthorized hymns sometime around 1779.60 In Maryland, critics charged William Briscoe, Jr., of Shrewsbury Parish of the same offense in 1808.61
Yet even such charges did not prevent the inroads of hymn singing. Following the American Revolution, Episcopal General Conventions would authorize hymnals in 1789 (27 texts), 1808 (57 texts), and 1826 (212 texts). Two of the