the simplicity, democracy, and egalitarian spirit of the Quakers, not to mention the enthusiasm and disorder of the First Great Awakening. Obedient to God, king, and the “proper” ordering of church and society, the colonial Church of England provided American colonists with close ties to English culture, customs, and Enlightenment ideals.105
The agreement to worship in Anglican churches and listen to Anglican clerics on Saint John’s Day suggests that many members of the colonial brotherhood were also members of the established church.106 Trinity Church in Boston, Christ Church in Philadelphia, and the other new, grand Anglican churches, with their high steeples, organs, and rich interior decorations, were the favored sites for Masonic services. Samuel Seabury, the first American bishop, and William Smith, a rector of Christ Church, were among the many Anglican Masonic clerics who extolled the virtues of the lodge. Some, such as the Reverend Samuel Howard of Maryland, delivered the Saint John’s Day sermon while serving as a lodge grand master. Others, such as Charles Inglis of New York, never joined a lodge but willingly addressed Masonic audiences.
The Saint John’s Day sermons continued the medieval heritage of divine worship on patron saint’s days and the Anglican custom of the charity sermon. In Britain the charity sermon was a well-established institution by the middle of the eighteenth century. Freemasons and other benevolent organizations set aside a day for these festivities, selected a popular preacher (when one could be induced to undertake the task), and supported the event by assuring a large congregation of members—and a consequently large offering for the poor, the needy, and the sick. The well-known evangelist George Whitefield preached the first American Masonic charity sermon, on June 24, 1738. “I was enabled to read prayers and preach with power before the Freemasons,” he wrote in his diary, “with whom I afterward dined.” Whitefield preached at Solomon’s Lodge at Savannah to raise funds for an orphanage. The earliest printed Masonic sermon was Reverend Charles Brockwell’s Brotherly Love Recommended, delivered at Christ Church, Boston, on the Festival of Saint John the Evangelist in 1749 and published the following year.107 Brockwell, who served as “His Majesty’s Chaplain in Boston,” had been a Mason since 1740 and rose to senior grand warden by 1753.
The fifteen Saint John’s Day sermons published prior to 1780 have a similar structure and content, emphasizing mutual love, charity, and the need for virtuous behavior. According to their preachers, the purpose of Freemasonry is to encourage human beings’ innate love for others so that it extends outward in circles of mutual benevolence, transcending divisions, like those of religion, and ultimately including all of humanity. The intention of the society, Rev. Brockwell stated, is “the uniting of men in the stricter bands of love; for men, considered as social creatures, must derive their happiness from each other.” Preaching after the enthusiasms of the Great Awakening, Brockwell cautioned that this love should not grow “hot or cold in our inclinations” but proceed “upon the steady principles of Reason and Religion.”108 Moreover, in contrast with those whose affections diminish according to proximity, extending to family and neighbor but rarely further afield, Freemasons enlarge the operation of their sympathy through mutual bonds. As another orator put it, “Friend, parent, neighbor first it will embrace, / Our country next, and next all human race.”109 Latitudinarian clerics of the seventeenth century also well knew this model of extending social harmony. What distinguished the society of Freemasonry was that it went beyond Christianity in joining all humanity in mutual benevolence. This “blessing of universal love” was especially needed, said the latitudinarian cleric Thomas Pollen of Newport, Rhode Island, to overcome “a monstrous diversity of religious tenets . . . a furious clashing in worldly interests, and an unchristian enmity between rival families, [that] are rending the very bowels of a society in pieces.”110
Banding together in a brotherhood of cosmopolitan and respected gentlemen, Freemasons presented themselves as a cultivated elite coming together for the common good. Charity flowed from this benevolence and could follow an expansive path. Though the fraternity’s charity was intended particularly for its members, on Saint John’s Days and in times of community distress Masons extended financial aid to those in greatest need. In 1740, the Charleston fraternity gave two hundred and fifty dollars to assist the survivors of a citywide fire; on Saint John’s Day in 1767, a single lodge gave one hundred pounds for the relief of New York City’s poor.111
To differing degrees, all of the Saint John’s Day ministers believed that Freemasonry was a Christian organization. John Rodgers of Berkshire County, Massachusetts, prefaced his remarks by saying that he did not know a great deal about the Masons, yet from what he had read he “presumed” they were Christians. Others, such as Brockwell, saw Jesus as the “Patron of our Society.” Or, as Pollen put it: “This society . . . follows the steps of their master Christ, whose design was in that blessed society himself instituted.”112 The common assumption was that to be a good Mason one must be a good Christian. “For what duties are mentioned in the Gospel, are not adopted in your Book of Constitutions?” argued Zabdiel Adams of Lancaster, Massachusetts. “There you are required to fear God . . . love the brotherhood, honour all men, and to submit to the government under which you live.”113
Masons demonstrated their commitment to Christianity by carrying Bibles on gilt cushions in their processions and, on occasion, refusing to celebrate the Saint John’s Day festivities without a clergyman present.114 Moreover, virtuous action for Christians and Masons appeared to be one and the same. As “children of the same God, candidates for the same Heaven,” Masons were told that it was their duty to “enlarge the narrowness of men’s understandings, to smooth the roughness of their wills, and to level the unevenness of their passions.”115 Such actions measured their growth in Christ. Nevertheless, what it meant to be a Christian and what it meant to be a Mason was not always clear in colonial society, reflecting not only a confusion in the relationship between moderate Anglicanism and Freemasonry but a larger difficulty in the “polite” society in which both parties participated.
One way of investigating this confusion is to look at the tensions and accommodations between the two kinds of courtesy books that began to appear in colonial libraries and bookshops in the early eighteenth century. These widely read manuals are another indication of the spread of polite society among the elite. Instructions for youth are part of a vast literature in Western civilizations going back to classical times.116 Books on manners and the equally popular books on morals had different origins and intents. Manners books were copies of older English and, before that, French instruction books, which were imbued with instructions for proper behavior in the courts of medieval royalty. Their purpose was to provide instruction in the cultural practices of aristocratic European society.117 The Earl of Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son, one of the first and most popular of these books—published in eighteen American versions prior to 1800—devoted whole chapters to such topics as “the perils of bad enunciation” and “the policy of discreet reserve” as steps in a young man’s minute instruction in proper behavior in polite society. In his book, Chesterfield says little about divine punishment or God as the final judge of bad behavior, rather threatening his son with the hell of exclusion from “what is agreeable and pleasing in society.”118 In contrast, books on morals have a Christian heritage. Richard Allestree’s The Whole Duty of Man, which went through one hundred editions in as many years, is divided into chapters to be read aloud every Sunday.119 It taught young people the virtues associated with a proper Christian upbringing: submission to God, obedience to parents, pure thoughts, continual acts of piety and charity. Acting in a manner pleasing to society and the danger of ridicule for not doing so have no place in it. As Richard Bushman has argued, these two types of guidebooks “stood apart from one another,” leaving the reader to resolve the disparities. In practice, the eighteenth-century elite appear to have created a common moral system from them. At times, as with The School of Good Manners, the two approaches were literally bound together into a single book.120 For the colonial gentry, good manners expressed a Christian regard for the happiness of others. At the same time, as polite Christians, they regulated their piety as carefully as their bodies, to restrain, for example, the emotional excesses of evangelical
