(1776– 1800), and the Didactic Enlightenment (1800–15). More recently, historian Jonathan I. Israel offered an overlapping but slightly different set of categories in his Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001). He combined elements from May’s second and third categories, resulting in a tri-part scheme of moderate, radical, and the counter-Enlightenment. The present chapter focuses on the two historians’ first periods, a time in which leading intellectuals believed the fruits of new scientific discovery were compatible with revealed religion. While the three subsequent chapters do not pick up May’s or Israel’s remaining labels, they deal with issues closely related to them.: Chapter 3 discusses enlightened skepticism as a backdrop to the Great Awakening. Chapter 4 deals with religion in the era of the American Revolution. Chapter 5 uses the term rational orthodoxy to refer to May’s Didactic Enlightenment and Israel’s counter-Enlightenment.
2. Thomas Sprat, quoted in Margaret Purver and E.J. Bowen, The Beginnings of the Royal Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 2.
3. Purver and Bowen, Beginnings of the Royal Society, 2.
4. James R. Jacob, Henry Stubbe: Radical Protestantism and Early Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 3–4. Jacob credits Stubbe with being “the first to point out the character of this alliance between the latitudinarian churchmen and the Royal Society.”
5. Bob Tennant, “John Tillotson and the Voice of Anglicanism,” Religion in the Age of Reason: A Transatlantic Study of the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Kathryn Duncan (New York: AMS Press, 2009), 104.
6. The debate was a logical offshoot of the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone. Protestants agreed that God forgave sinners because of the righteousness of Jesus Christ, rather than because of any righteousness of the sinner’s own. Seventeenth-century Christians went on to ask by what criteria God chose to apply Christ’s righteousness to some and not others. Those of the Calvinist party—a not entirely accurate label since predestination did not play the prominent role in the writing of Genevan Reformer John Calvin that it would in early seventeenth century—argued that no human action could influence God’s choice. Arminians, drawing their name from Dutch Reformed theologian Jacobus Arminius, believed, in contrast, that God took human response into account in selecting recipients of grace. The Calvinist party predominated in the Congregationalist, Presbyterian, and Reformed churches. Both parties were represented in the Church of England.
7. William Fife Troutman, Jr., “Respecting the Establishment of Religion in Colonial America” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1959), 58–62; S. D. McConnell, History of the American Episcopal Church from the Planting of the Colonies to the End of the Civil War, 3d ed. (New York: Thomas Whittaker, 1891), 64–65.
8. Robert Sullivan, “The Transformation of Anglican Political Theology, ca. 1716–1760” (Lecture delivered at the Folger Institute, Washington, D.C., 26 September 1986).
9. Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1982), 120–21. Isaac notes that the religion of colonial Virginia reinforced the social order.
10. Annates (from the Latin for year) were a year’s income from certain church positions that from the 13th century on were expected to be paid to the pope as a thank offering by those nominated to those positions. Henry VIII claimed the income for the English crown in his nationalization of the church in the 1530s.
11. For a discussion of the work of commissaries in seventeenth-century England see Jeffery R. Hankins, “Anglican and East Anglican: The Episcopacy, the Bishop’s Commissary, and the Enforcement of Ecclesiastical Law in Early Seventeenth-Century Essex and Hertfordshire.” Anglican and Episcopal History 75 (September 2006), 340–367. For objections against the institution by English Puritans see “the First Admonition to the Parliament” (1572) in G. R. Elton, The Tudor Constitution: Documents and Commentary, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 449.
12. Edward L. Bond, “John Clayton (1656 or 1657–1725)” in Dictionary of Virginia Biography (Virginia Foundation for the Humanities) http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Clayton_John_1656_or_1657–1725 (accessed February 24, 2014); John K. Nelson, A Blessed Company: Parishes, Parsons, and Parishioners in Anglican Virginia, 1690–1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 107.
13. Edward L. Bond and Joan R. Gundersen, The Episcopal Church in Virginia, 1607–2007 (Richmond: The Episcopal Diocese of Virginia, 2007), 22–23.
14. Park Rouse, Jr., James Blair of Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971), 24.
15. Goetz, Baptism of Early Virginia, 41–42.
16. Nelson, Blessed Company, 107–9.
17. The commissary in Pennsylvania also took responsibility for Delaware, the commissary in New York did so for New Jersey, and a single commissary took responsibility for North and South Carolina. See Gilbert Olsen, “The Commissaries of the Bishop of London in Colonial Politics,” in Anglo-American Political Relations, 1675– 1775, ed. Alison Olsen and Richard M. Brown (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1970), 110.
18. Olsen, “Commissaries,” 110–13.
19. Edgar Legare Pennington, Apostle of New Jersey: John Talbot, 1645–1727 (Philadelphia: Church Historical Society, 1938), 38–39.
20. Arthur Lyon Cross, The Anglican Episcopate and the American Colonies (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902), 101.
21. John Hicklin, Church and State: Historic Facts, Ancient and Modern (London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., 1873), 258–59.
22. Pennington, Apostle, 62–63.
23. Edwin S. Gaustad, George Berkeley in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 8–13.
24. H.P. Thompson, Thomas Bray (London: SPCK, 1954), 52–5.
25. Thompson,
