James Blair served in Virginia as commissary for fifty-seven years. Bishop Compton’s first appointee in Maryland, Thomas Bray (1656–1730), followed a very different course of action. Though chosen in 1696, Bray did not actually visit the colony itself until 1700. His initial efforts in Maryland were much like those of Blair in Virginia. He summoned a convocation of the clergy, charged them to teach the catechism to their parishioners, and cautioned one of their number about his scandalous conduct. He urged vestries to help in the suppression of evil conduct, and he raised an offering for the assistance of the Church of England in Pennsylvania.24 The establishment was new in Maryland, and the legislative act for which Bray successfully lobbied did not include any funds for his own salary. After less than three months in the colony, he sailed for England. He would not return to Maryland.
Bray’s major contribution, however, was not pastoral; it was organizational and educational. Bray had come to the attention of Bishop Compton because of his intellectual ability. He had been a scholarship student at Oxford whose studies had advanced so quickly that he had graduated before the canonical age for ordination. He had written a popular set of Catechetical Lectures that was already in print in 1697. Once appointed by Compton, he immediately recognized the need for educational materials in the colonies. In 1698, he organized the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), to which Princess Anne contributed forty-four pounds and Bishop Burnet fifty, to purchase books for colonial libraries.25 In keeping with the Enlightenment marriage of science and religion, the titles included both works in theology and the natural sciences. Bray hoped that these SPCK libraries, which would eventually number almost forty, would be both tools for parish clergy and effective evangelical materials. Dissenters or non-Christians who read the books would learn of the reasonableness of the Church of England.
Bray’s inability to gain a stipend from the Maryland legislature convinced him that a missionary organization to support colonial clergy was also needed. He began to campaign for such a body. His A General View of the English Colonies in America with Respect to Religion, written before his visit to Maryland (1698), had detailed the woeful condition of the Church of England in North America. In all of New England, there was only one Church of England parish, the newly founded King’s Chapel. Long Island had thirteen dissenting churches but none for the Church of England. East New Jersey had no Church of England parish; and Pennsylvania had only one. The Carolinas boasted only one church in Charleston. The situation was better in Bermuda (three ministers in nine parishes), Jamaica (eight ministers in fifteen parishes), Barbados (fourteen ministers in fourteen parishes), Maryland (sixteen ministers in thirty parishes), and Virginia (thirty ministers in fifty parishes), though Bray had some criticism for the church in those areas as wel1.26 Bray’s account caught the interest of his fellow members of the Church of England, and in 1701 he and others secured a charter from William III to form the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in foreign parts (SPG).27
The SPG’s first missionary was an ex-Quaker named George Keith (1638–1716). While on his voyage to America, Keith convinced ship’s chaplain John Talbot (1645–1727) to join him. In 1702 the two began a grand tour of the colonies, traveling more than eight hundred miles from Maine to the Carolinas. Keith was a Scot who had taught at a Friend’s school in Philadelphia before his conversion to the Church England. He brought the certainty of a new convert and a willingness to engage in controversy that would mark many of the SPG missionaries who would venture into dissenting strongholds. In Boston, he criticized the graduates of Harvard University for defending the doctrine of predestination and engaged in a pamphlet war with Congregational patriarch Increase Mather (1639–1723).28
Keith and Talbot’s journey confirmed the information in Bray’s General View. The Church of England was almost unknown in the middle colonies, New England, and the Carolinas. The SPG would send the great preponderance of its missionaries to these areas, though it sent a few to Virginia and Maryland. In
