IN his Narrative of Surprising Conversions, Edwards wrote: “About this time began the great noise that was in this part of the country, about Arminianism.” The context shows that the time in mind was about 1734. On the basis of this and similar allusions and because of Serena Dwight’s comments and Whitefield’s invectives, it has been believed that before the Great Awakening the Congregational churches and ministers had to some degree adopted Arminian views. An investigation of this matter may contribute to the spiritual history of New England.

     To come by a knowledge of Arminianism did not require much historical erudition. “The Person inclined to Arminianism—and who is there but by Nature is inclined to error?” wrote Experience Mayhew (Grace Defended, p. 195.) Yet there was historical knowledge as well as the temptation of nature. John Robinson’s controversy lingered long in memory (Prince’s Chronology, pp. 36, 38) and the Arminian suspect Benjamin Kent, in 1733, was closely examined upon the articles of faith “chiefly relating to the controversy with the Remonstrants” (Records of the Marlborough Association, Oct., 1733; An Historical Sketch of. the First

Congregational Church in Marlborough, Mass., Worcester, 1859). The use of the Half-Way Covenant must have kept alive the distinction of special regenerating grace as the sole condition of salvation, and the omission of spiritual relations in the Brattle Close Church meant no relaxation in this demand. The rule was that the pastor must be satisfied, and the pastor, Colman, spurned Arminian views of the way of salvation. The Stoddardean practice, opening the communion to the unregenerate, sacrificed no Calvinistic doctrine. Pace Jonathan Edwards, there was no Arminianism in Jonathan Ashley, who said: “The Church of Deerfield never pretended to exclude unregenerate Persons from the Church” (An Humble Attempt, etc., 1753, p. 19). Edwards fortified his exposition of conversion by appeals to Stoddard, and under Stoddard himself Northampton had seasons of revival conversions.

     Harvard College is supposed to have been an agent in the relaxation of orthodoxy. True, the anxious Mathers in 1700 were narrowly watching an interest of students in the matter of “English orders” (Foote’s Annals of King’s Chapel, i., 251), but there is nothing to indicate that the interest extended to Arminian views. In 1724, Cotton Mather had fresh anxiety over the fact that Harvard students were reading books “which may truly be called Satan’s library” (Quincy, Hist. Harv. Univ., i., 341), but the context implies that Satan’s library meant secular works. The criticism which he made of the teachers at that time attributes to them not heresy, but a lack of strenuousness in having the doctrines of grace espoused by the students (Quincy, ibid., i., 559). An inquiry incited by Mather revealed only that Tillotson, Sherlock, Lucas, and Scott were the authors most consulted (ibid., i., 319) and it is clear that not much damage was being done; for, in 1726, Mather knew of no Congregational pastor guilty of Arminianism and rejoiced that the contentions of English Nonconformists about justification “have not yet straggled

over the Atlantic to disturb this happy People” (Ratio Disciplinæ, p. 197). In fact the catalogue of the college library in 1723 shows that no work of eighteenth century date was on hand (Pierce, Hist. Harv. College, p. 109). About 1737, unwittingly or as a concession to modernity, Locke’s Human Understanding was made a text-book, but the upper classes continued long after that to be drilled in Ames’s Medulla and Wolleb’s Compendium of Theology. The introduction of Wolleb, shortly before 1723, shows no disposition to break with the Calvinism of 1626. Teachers who used such textbooks could hardly be lax, and the Board of Overseers was far from lax. Though Hollis stipulated that Scripture should be the only test for the chair founded by him, Wigglesworth, the first incumbent, appointed in 1721, was tested by Ames’s Medulla and the Westminster Catechism, the examiners being Colman and Leverett whom Quincy would fain count as liberals. Colman had a certain liberalism. He could tolerate the presence of other denominations, as indeed he must under the new charter of Massachusetts, and with this urbanity he spoke of “the free and Catholick air we breathe at our Cambridge where Protestants of every Denomination may have their children educated, and graduated in our College, if they behave with Sobriety and Virtue” (Turell’s Life of Colman, p. 117). But he was no latitudinarian in theology. In violation of the intentions of Hollis, he joined in the examination of Wigglesworth’s orthodoxy, and, in 1732, he begged a New London clergyman to inquire “concerning the bruit of the prevalence of Arminianism in Yale College” and “to vindicate the college from the aspersion” (Turell, p. 62). The rigor of the Harvard government was shown in 1735 by the dismissal of the French teacher, Longloissorie, for dangerous errors, although he had not expressed them to students. In the same year, provoked by the refusal of Tutor Rogers to answer questions, the Overseers asserted a right to examine the theology of teachers “upon any just suspicion of their

holding dangerous tenets, although no express charges be laid against them.” It was therefore a striking innovation when on December 7, 1738, the Overseers voted not to appoint a committee to examine John Winthrop on the principles of religion. The records of the Board of Overseers, which I have personally examined, state the fact without explanation. We are left to our surmises. Winthrop, a layman, was to teach mathematics and natural philosophy and was to have no share in the inculcation of Ames and Wolleb. It is difficult to suppose that the Board would appoint a theological suspect. Quincy, indeed, suggests heresy. “Winthrop’s intimacy with Dr. Chauncy and his co-operation with him in the investigation of ‘certain particular truths’ probably strengthened, perhaps justified, the fears existing among the stricter sect of Calvinists, that his religious views did not coincide with their standard of faith, and caused the pertinacity with which the examination was pressed”¹ (Hist. Harv. Univ., ii., 26). But there is no evidence that at that date Chauncy was viewed with suspicion and would be a compromising friend. Quincy’s evidence is found in a letter which thirty years later (1768) Chauncy wrote to Ezra Stiles. “He [Winthrop] went along with me in a particular study for nearly two years. I had many written communications from him and he from me, not so much by way of dispute, as by joining our forces in order to the investigation of some certain truths. But . this is an anecdote which I must not be more particular in opening to you” (Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., 1st series, x., 159), If thirty years after Winthrop’s appointment Chauncy is restrained by delicacy from explaining what the matter was, we may be sure that it had no publicity in 1738.²

     The theological instruction of Harvard youths was in charge of Wigglesworth, Professor of Divinity until his death in 1765; Henry Flynt, tutor, 1705-1760, and President Holyoke, 1737-1769. All were orthodox. Wigglesworth championed the Great Awakening and enjoyed the confidence of Edwards. Flynt as a young man was desired for the office of Rector of Yale and never fell under suspicion. In 1737, Governor Belcher considered Calvinism a sine qua non for the Harvard presidency, and Holyoke’s qualifications were endorsed by his very orthodox friend and neighbor, John Barnard of Marblehead. “If more than thirty years’ intimacy and more than twenty years’ living with him and scores of times having heard him preach, can lead me into the knowledge of a man’s principles, I think Mr. Holyoke as orthodox a Calvinist as any man; though I look upon him as too much of a gentleman and of too catholic a temper to cram his principles down another man’s throat.” The last characterization had its value. The old coercive system had passed away forever. Men in college office must meet respected neighbors of Baptist or Episcopalian views and even Episcopalian governors of the province. Cotton Mather’s Ratio Disciplinæ has also the “Catholick,” i.e., tolerant attitude. To be orthodox one did not need to be fanatic or disrespectful, and certainly politeness is no sure proof of theological laxity. Such were the men who, with old-fashioned text-books of the strictest Calvinist logic, were training the clergy in the middle of the century and were unassailed, save by Whitefield, in a time and in a society that were very conscious and sensitive about theological distinctions. The sensitiveness may be measured by the case of William Hooper, who preceded Jonathan Mayhew in the West Church of. Boston. In 1739 Hooper was taken to

task by his brethren for a difference of language, which might seem to be the expression of an Arminian protesting against a too severe Calvinism. However, Hooper claimed full agreement with his clerical brethren and explained his difference of language as due to his education in a Scotch university and to the use of other books than were used in Harvard (Sprague’s Annals, v. [Episc.], 124). The fact that later (1747) he quietly withdrew and entered the Episcopal Church would seem to show that his mild difference from the prevailing orthodoxy of terminology could only be comfortably maintained by leaving the Congregational ministry. His letter proves that Harvard training produced a Calvinist expression more rigorous than his and that Harvard teaching was wholly free from Arminianism.

     Nevertheless the social attitude of Colman, Barnard, and Holyoke has been construed as a relaxation of orthodox conviction. Quincy, writing the history of Harvard University in a time of theological conflict (1836-1840), imputes a too modern liberalism to the urbane conservatives of the past. It was liberalism, according to Quincy, that in 1717 elected Colman to the corporation and rejected Sewall, but Colman’s liberality was not what the Unitarian historian thinks, and Sewall was later offered the presidency itself. The liberalism which he imputes to President Leverett (1707-1724) is grounded on justice Sewall’s vexation with him, but Sewall’s grievance was the failure of the President to expound the Bible in Hall, and Sewall had had the same grievance in 1701 against Increase Mather (Quincy, Hist. Harv. Univ., i., 491). The antagonism to Leverett and Colman more evidently came from the disaffection of those whose personal interests were not satisfied and from political feeling unrelated to theology (Quincy, i., 215; Pierce, pp. 126, 129, 131, 133; Palfrey, A Sermon Preached to the Church in Brattle Square, July 18, 1824, p. 47).

     A more glaring misconception is found in the pages of I. Woodbridge Riley, who declares that “veritable deistic

principles were taught towards the middle of the century in the Dudleian lectures on natural religion” (American Journal of Theology, July, 1905, p. 474). Waiving an inaccuracy of date, since the first Dudleian lecture was given five years after the middle of the century, one soon discovers a more serious error in this diagnosis. In his American Philosophy, Riley begins the story of Deism in America with Cotton Mather himself, and it is apparent that on Riley’s terms the Apostle Paul was the first Deist. To believe that reason can discern the eternal power and godhead was certainly not Deism unless the Epistle to the Romans is veritable Deism. One of Riley’s Deists is President Langdon (1775) who was arguing for the need of revelation and who represented himself to Ezra Stiles in 1777 as a defender of orthodoxy against “Deists, Arians, Arminians, and Socinians,” his Christology in fact being Apollinarian (Stiles’s Diary, ii., 190, 191). It is safe to say that either deism or Arminianism in Harvard College before the Revolution is a myth. The myth of Arminianism among the Congregational clergy began with Whitefield’s rash and unwarranted aspersions. In 1740 he brought with him suspicions of Harvard College based on his knowledge of English seats of learning. “Tillotson and Clarke are read instead of Shepard and Stoddard . . . therefore I chose to preach on these words, ‘We are not as many who corrupt the word of God.’” The censure rankled and was repeated. Nearly five years later (April, 1745), Dr. Wigglesworth answered for the college that for almost nine years prior to June 22, 1741, Tillotson’s works had not been taken out of the library by any undergraduate and Clarke’s works not for two years, while evangelical authors were in such demand “as scarcely ever to be in the library” (Pierce, Hist. Harv. Coll., App., 144; Quincy, ii., 48). This sensitiveness on the part of men who, like Wigglesworth and Colman, defended the Great Revival made it clear that Whitefield’s suspicions were unfounded. He wisely retracted them, but it was he who raised the general

hue and cry of Arminianism. At his heels came the irresponsible Davenport, and after that no man’s reputation was safe unless he fell in with the extreme practices of crude revivalism. When Davenport, made a bonfire of pernicious works in New London, March, 1743, it was the literature of Flavel, Increase Mather, Colman, and Sewall that he consigned to perdition. Obviously he could find no more dangerous works in circulation than those of orthodox friends of revivals. The madness of such accusations is instanced in the case of Noyes who had preached with orthodoxy, though not with power, in the New Haven church since 1716. Even allowing the insane Davenport to preach in his pulpit did not save him from denunciation “as a hypocrite, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and a devil incarnate” (Chauncy’s Seasonable Thoughts, p. 157 ff). After that Noyes protested in vain against the word “Arminian.” Whether Chauncy ever developed into an Arminian is a matter of close definition, but he was an honest man and, speaking for himself and his brethren in 1743, he called the accusation “a base slander” (Seasonable Thoughts, pp. 397-9). “Tho’ it was then mighty fashionable to traduce the Clergy as Arminian and heretical,” Stiles, with the aid of a clerical friend, could not find one Arminian in the Connecticut clergy of 1740 (Diary, iii., 361, July 30, 1789), and after a more complete examination (iii., 380) found only a possible six or seven in all the three hundred and sixty-five Congregational pastorates of New England as a whole. Possibly even the six or seven were counted on the strength of later developments in their cases, for the revival experiences of 1740 brought a new demand and test the demand for a sudden and sensible conversion.

     How little justification there was for the popular denunciation is shown by the few isolated examinations for heresy before the Great Awakening. These are the cases of Benjamin Kent in Marlborough, Robert Breck in Springfield, and Samuel Osborn in Eastham.

     Benjamin Kent, a graduate of Harvard in the class of 1727, was ordained in Marlborough in 1733. The expressions of this young man had caused some neighboring ministers to refuse to take part in the ordination and soon afterwards a parishioner charged him with being “a professed Arminian” whose unorthodoxy had made “a great noise almost all over the province” (Charles Hudson, History of Marlborough, Boston, 1862). The same exaggerated note of alarm is found in the record of the Marlborough Association, October 16, 1733, where we read that “great complaint being made, about the world, of his principles,” Mr. Kent was tested on points relating to the “controversy with the Remonstrants.” Mr. Kent, however, made professions of his faith with such assertions of their sincerity that the association had to be satisfied, although the record hints that his professions were not perhaps “his real sentiments” (Joseph Allen, The Worcester Association, p. 15). The suspicious neighbors had him before a council for heresy on February 4, 1735, the heresies including the view of election “conditional on the foresight of good works,” and the council advised suspension until the following May 27th. Kent left the ministry and became a lawyer. Apparently Kent denied these heresies, and we may suppose that he was not aware of the inconsistencies to be found in his expressions. That the inquisitors were severe in their standards may be judged by an examination of the sermon which he printed in 1734 before his trial. Here he maintains “that Jesus Christ or the Word, in his Hypostatical Union, is God-Man; in the one Nature true and proper Man, and in the other true and proper God.” Further, that in his divine nature Christ is infinite in essence, eternal in being, unchangeable, infinite in wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, truth. Nevertheless the council charged him with “dangerous opinions with respect to the great and important Scripture doctrine of the Trinity.” Allowing that the accused man must have given offence

by indiscreet, perhaps unintelligent, expressions, the story illustrates the extraordinary theological sensitiveness of the place and time, and the report of widespread alarm would indicate that Arminianism had no hold on Massachusetts churches.

     With regard to the Breck case, there is no need of narrative after the complete and accurate account in Byington’s The Puritan in England and New England. One count against Breck was Arminianism, for he had publicly said “if the decrees of God were absolute, he saw no encouragement for men to try to do their duty.” Here again the whole story indicates the utter absence of Arminian sympathies in Connecticut and Massachusetts. A raw youth of twenty, beginning to preach without other teaching in theology than he received through the memorizing of Ames and Wolleb before the age of seventeen, indulges in some flighty individual opinions before Connecticut villagers. He finds that originality is dangerous, and candidating in Springfield with the increased sobriety of twenty-one years carefully refrains from all novelties. But the scandal of his past pursues him. Letters from Connecticut bring the gossip of former hearers and the sordid tale of this celebrated case begins. Nothing in the trial indicates anywhere a sympathy with Arminianism. The question was only whether a man might be allowed to repent his sinful and accidental indiscretion.

     The case of Samuel Osborn of Eastham is of similar significance. An Irishman, a graduate of the University of Dublin, he found himself a plain misfit in a Cape Cod village. There was a squalid church quarrel over his settlement in 1718, the objections being petty local matters save one, which was his lack of learning in theology. The quarrels continued. In 1729, two parishioners printed a pamphlet accusing him of lying and fornication, saying nothing of doctrinal aberrations. In 1738 (June 27th), a council of ten ministers and churches had him suspended from

the ministry on the ground of views which show that his study of the Bible had impaired his Calvinism. Having then preached to some persons in his own house, he was indicted by the Grand jury at Barnstable and fined, since “the Law knew of no such assemblies as mine was.” In the autumn of 1742 he had a prospect of settlement in Brunswick, where the church was made up largely of Scotch-Irish Presbyterians. This prospect was ended by a protest from Colman, Thomas Prince, William Cooper, and Joseph Gee, representing him as refusing to subscribe to the Confession of Faith, denying original sin, the doctrines of the Trinity, and justification by faith alone. In a letter to Colman intended for the Massachusetts Convention, Osborn denied these accusations save the first, and yet maintained some propositions inconsistent with justification by faith alone. That there was some difficulty in determining the exact value of his expressions is clear, not only from the conclusions of the council in 1738, but from the opinion, signed by eleven clergymen in Salem, June 9, 1740, that Osborn had been harshly treated, and that, as to his four articles, “we can’t find that said Articles necessarily couch or include in them any dangerous Errors. But taking them with a Christian, candid, and charitable Construction, to us it appears that they well accord with the Truths laid down in the Gospel, and the Doctrine generally received by these churches” (signed by Ebenezer Gay, Daniel Lewis, Joseph Dorr, William Hobby, Samuel Mather, Benjamin Prescott, John Chipman, Peter Clark, Nathanael Henchman, Charles Chauncy, John Gardner).¹

     In the trial at Eastham in 1738, Obsorn had been represented as attacking a sermon by Peter Clark of Salem

Village on the efficacy of the grace of God as necessary in the conversion of a sinner, but as Osborn stood for the necessary “influence of the Spirit of God” in the same sense, the charge was withdrawn. Examination of Clark’s Boston lecture (A Sinner’s Prayer for Converting Grace, etc., Feb. 13, 1734) suggests that this discourse may have encouraged Osborn to preach that the promise of grace was conditional. The first part of it, on the necessity of grace, is orthodox enough, but going on to urge the duty of the unconverted to pray, Clark fell into a very indiscreet utterance: “that none that ever set themselves in good earnest to seek the grace of God, and continued importunate, at the door of mercy, have been rejected, but have obtained their suit; for every one that asketh receiveth” (p. 40). Inasmuch as afterward Clark was regarded as strictly orthodox (Dwight, Life of Edwards, 310), we may suppose that he meant only the elect capable of such good earnestness and importunity, and he may well have remembered this unguarded passage when he joined with others in asking for a charitable construction of Osborn’s articles. Comparison with the opening part of the lecture shows that it could not have been intended as an avowal of Arminianism, yet as it stands unmodified it is the only published Arminian declaration save Osborn’s from a Congregational source prior to 1740. Dr. Williston Walker, indeed, supposed that another was to be found in The Orthodox Christian of Samuel Phillips of Andover, 1738 (New England Leaders, p. 232). The passage quoted is: “I can’t suppose that any one under the Gospel, who, from Time to Time, and at all Times, faithfully improves the common Grace he has, that is to say, is diligent in attending on the appointed Means of Grace with a Desire to profit thereby;—and, in a Word, who walks up to his Light, to the utmost of his Power, shall perish for want of a special and saving Grace.” The work of Phillips is a dialogue between minister and child, and it is the child, not the minister, who falls into this Arminianism. Phillips

allows the child to do so only in order that it may arrive at a further conclusion, the conclusion, namely, that the non-elect does not “improve his Time and other Talents to the utmost of his Power” and hence is justly condemned. Phillips was only building up the idea that the sinner is justly condemned even if he be non-elect.

     An examination of Evans’s American Bibliography will confirm the conclusion that no advocacy of Arminian views by New England Congregationalists had appeared before the Awakening. The anonymous Faithful Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings with a Person Lately Recovered from the Dangerous Errors of Arminius, printed in 1737, shows that dangerous books were to be bought: “I went into a Stationer’s Shop . . . and there I espy’d some of the Arminian Books . . . and the Bookseller told me of what esteem they were in England.” Clearly they were English, not American, publications. Prior indeed to 1749, the only American publication from a Congregational author which can be called Arminian is Experience Mayhew’s Grace Defended in 1744. In 1749, Edwards objected to the membership of certain ministers in the council dealing with his troubles: “It is well known that four or five of them have heretofore had the reputation of Arminians” (Dwight’s Life, 336). This is a cautious statement. After 1740 many ministers had the reputation in spite of earnest denials. Literary avowal is certainly excluded by the form of the statement. There were, as I shall indicate, publications by Arminian Episcopalians, but Edwards does not deign to mention them in his controversial works. The Arminian literature which he combats is wholly foreign in origin. Suspicion therefore falls on Dwight’s editing of Edwards’s letter to Rev. John Erskine, August 31, 1748 (Life, p. 251). Thanking Erskine for the gift of the Arminian Taylor’s works, Edwards wrote, according to Dwight: “It might be of particular advantage to me, here in this remote part of the world, to be better informed what books there are, that are published

on the other side of the Atlantic; and especially if there be anything that comes out, that is very remarkable. I have seen many notable things, that have been written in this country against the truth, but nothing very notable on our side of the controversies of the present day, at least of the Arminian controversy.”

     Since the notable things written in America against the truth are not discoverable, and since Edwards is speaking of transatlantic books, I entertained doubts as to the reading. My colleague, Professor C. R. Bowen, suggested the admirable emendation of “in this century” for “in this country.” Through the kindness of Professor William L. Ropes, Librarian Emeritus of the Andover Seminary, I ascertain that the letter in possession of that library, while marked “copied,” is unquestionably in Edwards’s own penmanship and is a copy made by himself. It is a satisfaction to learn further from Professor Ropes that the letter “confirms indubitably your impression that the true reading is century and not country.” With this emendation we are free to dismiss the view that Edwards was writing against American controversialists.

     What then explains “the great noise about Arminianism in this part of the country” in 1734? Echoing this sentence of Edwards, Sereno Dwight says: “There was a prevailing tendency, in the county, and in the province, towards Arminianism.” This is one of the instances where we are obliged to distinguish between the biographer’s understanding and that of the man of whom he wrote. Dwight sees Arminianism on the slightest temptation. Not only has he this notion of widespread heresy, but in particular he seems to think that opposition to Edwards’s views on the terms of church membership came from Arminian sympathy. But Edwards himself, after finishing his answer to Solomon Williams in that controversy, speaks of now proceeding to take up the subject of Arminianism as if it were a thing distinct (Letter to Erskine, Dwight’s Life, 497), and in

the Letter to the Northampton Parish (iv., 598) he recognizes the soundness of Williams’s theology. He fears that Williams’s argument has dangerous consequences but he holds Williams to be unaware of them. Edwards himself is sparing in the suggestion of Arminianism in others. Four or five ministers of the county named for the council in his case are objected to because they “have heretofore had the reputation of Arminianism” (Life, p. 336). This was in 1749, when such reputations were easily acquired by objection to revival methods. Edwards styled his cousin, Joseph Hawley, “a man of lax principles in religion, falling in, in some essential things, with Arminianism” (Life, 410). This is a qualified statement and applies to a young layman who graduated from Yale two years after Whitefeld’s advent had driven many into the heresy. Hawley’s intimacy with another cousin may account for the leaning to error, for Dwight—not Edwards—speaks of Israel Williams as strongly biassed in favor of Arminianism as early as 1734.¹ In 1749, Edwards speaks of the heresy as prevailing in another large town which he does not name and possibly he means Hatfield, where the all-powerful cousin, Israel Williams, reigned supreme until the arrival of Rev. Joseph Lyman. In this farewell sermon (Life, 649 ff.), Edwards speaks of the heresy as not actually present in his own parish, though there is danger that the rising generation may be affected. The error has made rapid progress in the country since 1742, while in 1734, when some of his hearers were alarmed about it, the danger was small. The other allusion to conditions in 1734 is in the Narrative of Surprizing Conversions (iv., 21): “About this time began the great noise that was in this part of the country about Arminianism.” Many of the unconverted feared “that Cod was about to withdraw from the land, and that we should be given up to heterodoxy and

corrupt principles, and that then their opportunity for obtaining salvation would be past; and many who were brought a little to doubt about the truth of the doctrines they had hitherto been taught, seemed to have a kind of trembling fear with their doubts, lest they should be led into by-paths to their eternal undoing; and they seemed with much concern and engagedness of mind to inquire what was indeed the way in which they must come to be accepted with God.” From this account it is quite obvious that the heresy was not propagated in Northampton. Edwards says that he was blamed “by such a person” for meddling with the controversy in the pulpit; and by the account of Dwight (Life, p. 434), the “such a person” was Israel Williams of Hatfield, already autocratic at the age of twenty-five (b.1709). We may credit the fact that Israel Williams was “strongly biassed” in favor of Arminianism, but in view of the language of Edwards himself, Dwight exaggerates in saying “there was a prevailing tendency, in the county, and in the province, towards Arminianism.” All that we are warranted in saying is that in 1734 there were rumor and alarm about the arrival in the country of Arminian heresy, and that some hearing the report were tempted to doubt if orthodoxy were after all truth, yet were afraid to, lest doubt should bring them to perdition. Edwards obviously knows of no “prevailing tendency” to heresy. In another allusion made in 1742—after Whitefield’s hue and cry—he asks those “that have hitherto been something inclining to Arminianism” to see that rejection of the revival will land them logically in Deism. “Something inclining to Arminianism” seems to be aversion to the revival meetings. But after 1742 the progress of the error was rapid. To Erskine, July 5, 1750, he expresses fear “that the younger generation will be carried away as with a flood,” and on the following day, July 6th, probably with the same situation in mind, he wrote to McCulloch: “Arminianism and Pelagianism have made a strange progress within a few years. The Church of

England in New England is, I suppose, treble of what it was seven years ago.” Here I believe is the clew to the whole matter. What Edwards saw and feared was not a spread of Arminianism among the Congregationalists, a desertion of old orthodoxy. It was the rise of Episcopalianism. If this is so, we can readily understand why Edwards reacted so strongly against terms of church membership which were bringing Congregational churches perilously near to the parish system of the Church of England. I believe that this is the true view and that it affords the only possible explanation of the great noise about Arminianism in 1734. Osborn’s Irish eccentricities had not been heard of then. The rumors of aberration in young Breck of Springfield had just been heard of, but his alleged but repudiated Arminianism was a minor detail: the main point was his character. Nor can we suppose that the similar alleged but repudiated indiscretions of Kent in Marlborough made so much stir. On the other hand, we have direct evidence of alarm in Hampshire County about the inroads of the Episcopal propaganda in New England. On September 10, 1734, William Williams, Moderator, and Jonathan Edwards, Scribe, in the name of the Associated Ministers of the County of Hampshire addressed a letter to the Lord Bishop of London, which is found in Perry’s Papers relating to the History of the Church in Massachusetts, p. 299. It is a: protest against the sending of Church of England missionaries. “The missionaries’ attacks on our ministry,” they say, “tend to breed disorder and confusion in our churches, by cherishing a small number of disaffected persons in several places, to the ill example of a whole town, produces wrangling, strifes, ill-names, needless disputations, instead of Godly Edifying, and tends to lead them to place religion rather in some external observations and ceremonies than in love to God and our neighbors, and in a life of Faith, Repentance, and Holiness.” This letter was sent to Colman of Boston, who forwarded it to the Bishop of London with the comment: “My brethren, who live remote from Boston,

and hitherto quite out of the way of the Missions whereof they write in their Address to your Lordship” (Turell’s Life of Colman, p. 141). Colman’s apparent surprise can be easily met. The mission field on which the Hampshire clergy look with fear is not the neighborhood of Boston but Connecticut. Elisha Williams, son of the Hatfield Moderator, was Rector of Yale College and doubtless informed his kinsmen of the rapid and insidious inroads of Episcopalianism in Connecticut. In the rapid-fire controversy opened by John Checkley’s Modest Proof in 1723, the strongest disputant against Episcopacy was Jonathan Dickinson, who was born in Hatfield. The Daniel Dwight (Yale, 1721) who in 1729 went to England for orders and the next year became a priest in South Carolina was a Northampton Dwight and his mother a Hatfield Partridge. Edwards himself had been in his youth acquainted with Samuel Johnson, the chief propagandist of Episcopalianism. The letter in Dwight’s Life, p. 29 ff., shows that the unpopularity of Tutor Johnson was the cause of the withdrawal of Edwards and others from New Haven to Wethersfield. The Hampshire Protest says nothing of Arminianism as related to the Episcopalian invasion, but the association was always present to mind. When Cutler and Johnson left Yale to enter the Church of England, the Trustees of Yale, October 17, 1722, voted to secure from future teachers evidence of sound faith “in Opposition to Arminian and Prelatical Corruptions” (Thos. Clap, History of Yale College, p. 32; Foote, King’s Chapel, i., 314). That the Yale converts were converts to Arminianism is implied in a letter of Joseph Morgan to Cotton Mather, printed in Dexter’s Yale Biographies, i., p. 260. Indeed all the Congregational ministers who took English orders abandoned Calvinism (Slafter, John Checkley or The Evolution of Religious Tolerance in Massachusetts Bay, ii., 152).

     That about 1734 the alarm over defections to Arminian Episcopalianism might be specially acute is evident from the

fact that in 1732 Rev. John Beach left the Congregational ministry in Stratford to take orders, and from Newtown, Conn., was an active missionary over a wide area; that in January, 1734, Rev. Ebenezer Punderson, of Groton, Conn., avowed himself a convert to the Church and returned from London in October as a missionary; that at Easter, 1734, the Rev. Jonathan Arnold of West Haven likewise entered the Church.

     The controversial pamphlets had so far dealt almost entirely with the validity of ministry, but now in 1733 with Johnson’s Letter from a Minister of the Church of England and the reply of John Graham, Some Remarks, etc., the question turns to Arminianism versus Calvinism. Johnson’s Second Letter, etc., 1734, refuses the name “Arminian,” but acknowledges something in common with Arminius and denies that the English articles are strictly Calvinist.

     All these occurrences may well have stirred the Hampshire clergy to their protest, but it is highly probable that they had also been stirred by a recent publication. In 1734, two editions were published of a work by Rev. John White of Gloucester, brother-in-law of Cotton Mather. The title is New England’s Lamentations, under these Three Heads: The Decay of the Power of Godliness, The Danger of Arminian Principles, The Declining State of Our Church Order, Government and Discipline, etc. White aims “to make a vigorous Essay, for the Faith and Order of these Churches of Chirst [sic], at a Time when there is danger of a defection from both.” After a classic lament of prevailing impiety comes a special complaint that young men being educated for the ministry look with favor on the Arminian scheme. Then follows an elaborate explanation of the heresy as if it were unfamiliar to the readers. The third part argues the need of ruling elders (by divine, right) to aid the pastor in discipline. In this connection (p. 40 f.) there is a loud outcry against the cases of persons unwilling to submit to the censures of the churches and taking sanctuary in the Church of England.

Such apostates are warned that they are taking on themselves a yoke of bondage and that in the end they will have to pay “the vast sums expended for the Propagation of the Gospel, that is, for the bringing over our Churches to the Mother Church.” White does not expressly say that the new favor to Arminianism and defection to the English Church go together, but the clergy of Hampshire already had cause to associate these things.