persons in Virginia, five in Maryland, thirteen in Georgia, thirty-three in North Carolina, forty-four in New Jersey, forty-seven in Pennsylvania, fifty-four in South Carolina, fifty-eight in New York, and eighty-four in New England. Missionaries went both to the English colonists and to blacks, Indians, and immigrants from other European nations. The society’s records indicate that the missionaries ministered in six European and fourteen Indian languages.29 Most, but not all, of the SPG’s support went to white male clergy. Exceptions to the rule included society support for Harry and Andrew, black evangelists in midcentury South Carolina.30
In addition to their efforts in the colonies that would later become the United States, SPG missionaries also went to other British holdings in the Western Hemisphere: Newfoundland (1703), Jamaica (1710), Barbados (1712), Nova Scotia (1728), the Bahamas (1733), and Honduras (1733). In the second half of the eighteenth century, the SPG would also begin work in Africa and the Pacific.31
The society’s instructions to the early missionaries conveyed the reasonable tone of an enlightened Protestantism. “Missionaries to heathens and infidels” were to begin their instruction “with the principles of natural Religion, appealing to their Reason and conscience; and thence proceed to shew them the Necessity of Revelation, and Certainty of that contained in the Holy Scripture, by plain and most obvious Arguments.”32 SPG missionaries were to employ both natural reason and revelation in order to bring others to the Christian faith.
Logical arguments were not, however, the only tools that members of Church of England used to portray the alliance of reason and revelation. Even the design of their churches bore witness to the relationship. In the first half of the eighteenth century, many of the buildings used by the colonial Church of England had two foci—the pulpit and lectern on one wall and the altar on another—with two entrances and box pews that allowed facing in either direction.33 (Most other Protestants met in rectangular meetinghouses with the entrance on one of the long walls.) By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, James Gibbs (1682–1754) was introducing a new design for church buildings in England. By replacing free-standing bell towers with steeples that rose from roof tops, Gibbs was able to construct churches with unobstructed facades. To these he introduced columns reminiscent of classical Roman and Greek designs. The resultant pattern was a marriage of Christianity and classical thought, the architectural incarnation of the hopes of Christians of the Moderate Enlightenment. Members of the Church of England introduced the design in the colonies and other denominations soon imitated it.34
Fig. 6 St. Michael’s Church, Charleston, South Carolina, 1752–58
Not all the colonists were receptive, however, to the influence of the SPG missionaries. The society recognized this fact, warning missionaries that they would need to defend the distinctive principles of the Church of England against “the attempts of such Gainsayers as are mixt among them.”35 The major point of controversy, one about which George Keith and Increase Mather were already debating in 1702, was the episcopacy. SPG missionaries defended the institution from the criticism of Protestants of denominations that had rejected episcopal succession. George Keith and others sent to America relied upon a well-laid argument that Thomas Bray had already advanced in his Catechetical Lectures. English Protestants of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries explained the gospel by comparing it to an Old Testament covenant, a contract in which both God and the believer agreed to fulfill certain responsibilities. In the new covenant of the gospel, God promised forgiveness of sin and everlasting life, and the believer promised repentance and faith in Christ. Bray was one of a number of post-Restoration authors who suggested that baptism by a priest in episcopal succession was the appropriate way to accept this covenant agreement. Episcopacy was, therefore, a necessary element of the covenant. This episcopal version of covenant theology would prove extremely useful to generations of Church of England clergy.
The society’s first parishioners in New England and the middle colonies were emigrants from England who petitioned the SPG for help in the formation of Church of England congregations. There were early Dutch members as well: Dutch settlers in western Massachusetts, who felt unwelcome in the Congregational Church, and Dutch-speaking graduates of the SPG charity school in New York City who had received instruction both in the English language and the Book of Common Prayer from schoolmasters William and Thomas Huddleston.36
Initially, many of these church members were among the poorer and less-privileged inhabitants of the colonies. Eighteenth-century Connecticut tax rolls indicated, for example, that two-thirds of the members of Church of England’s congregations in that colony were residents of rural areas and that the percentage of poor was higher than among Congregationalists.37
In 1722, SPG missionaries made their first inroads into the New England upper class. In September of that year, seven faculty members and recent graduates of Yale College signed a statement for the Yale Board of Trustees indicating “doubt [of] the validity” or persuasion of the “invalidity” of nonepiscopal ordination. The seven, all of whom were Congregational clergy, had met in an informal book club to which they had also invited George Pigot, the SPG missionary in Stratford. Pigot called their doubts on the question of episcopacy “a glorious revolution of the ecclesiastics of this country.”38
Four of the seven—Yale rector Timothy Cutler (1683 or 1684– 1765), tutor Daniel Brown (1698–1723), former tutor Samuel Johnson (1696–1772), and recent graduate James Wetmore (d. 1760)—sailed to England for reordination. Brown died of small pox while in England, but the remaining three were ordained and assigned to American parishes by the SPG: Cutler to Christ (Old North) Church in Boston (1723–64), Wetmore to Rye, New York (1726–60), and Johnson to Stratford, Connecticut, which was left vacant when Pigot moved on to Rhode Island. The contributions of the three men were not limited to the individual parishes they served, however. Native-born and well educated, they provided needed leadership for the small Church of England in New England and New York. Samuel Johnson, for example, served for nine years (1754–63) as the first president of King’s (Columbia) College in New York.
The connection of Yale with the Church of England would not end with the 1722 converts. Yale would go on to provide a total of fifty students and graduates for the ministry of the colonial Church of England, the largest number of any American institution.39
The Congregational Church was the established church in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. As was the case with the Church of England in the South, the Congregational Church in New England was tax supported. As the Church of England made steady gains, however, the New England legislatures made some concessions. In 1727, Connecticut exempted all Church of England parishioners living within five miles of their church buildings from paying state church taxes. Massachusetts passed similar legislation in 1735.
Thomas Bray’s SPG (changed in 1965 to the USPG—“the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel”—as a result of a merger with the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, a name that was shortened in 2012 to the “United Society” or “Us.”) and SPCK continues their activities in the twenty-first century.
