Hell awaited the unregenerate and “the fallen race of Adam.” Green constructed one such sermon around a passage from Mark 9:47–48: “And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye, rather than having two eyes, to be cast into hell fire.” From that text, Green delivered his stark warning. “Hell is a place with a real material Fire,” he explained. “Sinners will receive the greatest punishment they are capable of both in body & Soul.” The punishment was so severe that they faced something akin to torture—their bodies would “be kept alive in the midst of a burning fire.”48
Heaven or hell? It was up to God. “You are in God’s hands,” Green declared in a 1769 sermon. He alone will determine when you die and whether you will receive a spiritual pardon. “Consider what poor brittle clay you are in the hand of an angry God. You are but as clay in the hand of him the potter who can make you the vessel of his wrath whenever he pleases. Your life . . . is in his hand.” God’s wrath, Green continued, “is very terrible; when he riseth up none can stand before him.”49
Some of this language, especially references to an angry God, echoed Edwards’s teachings. Yet Green’s intent was more than to scare people. He also described the joys of heaven that awaited the elect. But upstanding Christian behavior was essential if someone was to demonstrate that she was among the saved. Many a sermon began by describing the dangers awaiting the sinner before segueing to the eternal rewards available to the repentant; the wrathful God was also a loving God. The 1769 sermon warning of God’s terrible vengeance concluded by urging people to open their hearts to him—“God is willing to be reconciled to you,” Green stated plainly. The Lord, he continued, “has endowed man with a rational & spiritual substances. . . . He has given us passion of love & hatred, hope & fear, joy & sorrow. . . . And all these things God has appointed to work to getting for our Good.” The happy conclusion: “God has told us if we are obedient all is glorious & perfection.”50
Green’s weekly sermons thus softened Calvinism’s hard edges and appealed to the enlightened rationalist among his audience. Yes, God decided all, and, yes, hell awaited the unsaved, but there was much the good Christian could do to avoid such an awful fate. As Green explained in one sermon, “Mankind has Reason & Understanding & Understanding & Light . . . the Fall has not destroyed man’s Reason & Understanding . . . mankind are capable by these to know & discover the Faith respecting God & his Perfections as is clear from Roman 1:20–21”—a passage that emphasized “since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen.”51
Subtle, Jacob Green’s views were not. The indecision of the late 1740s and early 1750s was gone, replaced by the 1760s by a clear, forceful expression of his religious beliefs.
The Loyalist Down the Road:
Thomas Bradbury Chandler, Anglican Convert
Unlike in the case of Jacob Green, there was little doubt that Thomas would attend college, and there was no need for him to wait on tables once he got there. He enrolled at Yale and, based on the Chandler pedigree, was ranked seventh in the incoming class of twenty-seven students. Like Jacob, Thomas was a natural student, becoming known at college for his piety and learning. Although Yale and Harvard had their peculiarities (Harvard was far more “liberal” and latitudinarian than was its Connecticut rival), Thomas’s course of study differed little from Jacob’s. Thomas studied the ancient languages, logic, natural philosophy, metaphysics, ethics, and all the other things a young gentleman needed to become a minister. He graduated from Yale in 1745, a year after Green left Cambridge.
He was nineteen.
Chandler thus knew at a far younger age than did Green that he wanted to be a minister, and he suffered from none of the insecurities that beset his Presbyterian counterpart. Chandler was raised a Congregationalist and hailed from a family with deep roots in the Puritan church. But Congregationalism was not a good fit for this fifth-generation Chandler. He studied theology under someone more congenial to his tastes and proclivities—Samuel Johnson, an Anglican and the future president of King’s College in New York City. Johnson and Chandler developed deep bonds of affection, with the former serving as Thomas’s mentor. (Thomas later wrote a reverential memoir of Johnson’s life.) Johnson, for his part, recognized how gifted Chandler was, praising him as “a truly valuable person, of good parts and competent learning . . . and of good morals and virtuous behavior.”
From Johnson, Thomas learned the ways of the king’s church. The Church of England was a state-established institution that had, following the reforms of King Henry VIII, become an arm of the government. The monarch was the church’s supreme earthly leader who appointed the bishops who ran the church. In Puritan New England, the state wanted each congregation to encourage people to turn to Jesus Christ. In England and its foreign domains, the state wanted its church to produce two things—good Christians and good citizens. It saw the two goals as complementary. Devout Christians attending church regularly would make for orderly, loyal subjects of the king. For the state, the church was to reinforce the government’s power, and the state was to reinforce the church’s power. Samuel Johnson was a good High Church Anglican who was wholeheartedly devoted to the Henrician legacy. He backed the state church and all that it stood for; in an age when Protestantism was expanding and roiled with factionalism, he was dismissive of dissenters, especially of the Puritan variety. Thomas recalled that his mentor had “an early dislike” of Congregationalism because it gave too much power to the people. Johnson found lay exhorters “ignorant” because they uttered “the most horrid expressions concerning God and religion.” He especially disliked Presbyterian Jonathan Dickinson, an early mentor of Jacob Green, because he was “a true zealot against the Church.”
Under Johnson’s guidance, Chandler converted to Anglicanism and was quickly identified as a rising star in the king’s American church. Within two years of leaving Yale, he watched the offers for his services pour in. In 1747, two churches asked him to serve as a catechist; instead, he accepted the advances of St. Peter’s Church in Westchester, New York. He did not remain there long. St. John’s Church in Elizabeth Town, New Jersey, was so impressed with Chandler that it persuaded him to join it in December of that year, despite the fact that he remained too young to be ordained as a minister. Thus, as the winter days shortened and the afternoon shadows lengthened, Thomas Bradbury Chandler packed his bags and headed to East Jersey—dissenter country, bastion of Presbyterianism and Whig radicalism, and the home of that detested “zealot” Jonathan Dickinson and his protégé Jacob Green.52
The center of Jacob Green’s domestic universe was a handsome one-and-a-half-story parsonage on Hanover Neck (fig. 5). It was an unpretentious house befitting the domicile of a Presbyterian pastor ministering to a country church—a residence that was approximately half the size of the mission house that Jonathan Edwards resided at in Stockbridge, Massachusetts—but the parsonage, with its symmetrical windows and centered doorway, did offer up a touch of rustic Georgian elegance. Inside was a mix of the practical and the pious, the simple and the elegant. Green’s growing family attended to their household chores while the patriarch retreated to his book-lined study to write his sermons and peruse his diverse library of theology, philosophy, history, and literature. Jacob may have preached simplicity in his sermons, but his domestic space demonstrated he had a taste for the refined. His family dined on queensware and pewter plates—luxuries few could afford in early America—and for amusement members could play a forte piano.1
Outside
