How Did Harvard College Respond to the Great Awakening?

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By the Rev. Dr. George J. Gatgounis, Esq.

© 2014 George Gatgounis Publications LLC/Trust

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Introduction

Protruding in the history of colonial America is the religious phenomenon called “the Great Awakening.”  This continental divide distinguishes an old order — New England under a firm clutch of scholastic, but degenerating Calvinism — and a new order — a perestroika into a new Pietism and Evangelicalism. [1]  The clearest mark of the Great Awakening’s beginning is the remarkable response to Jonathan Edward’s sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” in 1735.  Historians tend to view the end of the Awakening as the death of its single most driving, even seraphic force, the evangelist George Whitefield in 1770.

The spark generated through Edwards’ preaching in 1735, more than embyronic, effervesced under the Whitefieldian animus.  This New England spiritual renaissance eclipsed concurrent (between 1730 and 1760) religious resurgence in Western Europe, including Germany, Holland, Switzerland, and France.   Shadowing zephyrs of spiritual awakening in Protestant circles, stirrings in Roman Catholic circles, called “Quietism,” appeared as an aftershock. [2]  A religious flourish pinnacled on both sides of the Atlantic, especially in the circles first resurrected by the sermonizing of Whitefield, upon whose heels the two Wesley’s closely followed.

Scope and Statement of Thesis 

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Delimitations

The burden of this study is explication of points of contact between Harvard College and the Great Awakening, with a view of exposing the stimulus/response, point/counter-point, and action/reaction relationship between the institution and the movement.  Accordingly, a theological evaluation of mid-eighteenth century Harvard and a theological evaluation of the Great Awakening are outside the scope of this study.  Rather, this study involves description, not critique.

Thesis Stated

The Great Awakening did not engender more latitudinarian trends at Harvard College, but rather exposed and exacerbated latitudinarian fixtures already in place.  The tug-of-war between the conservatism of the Awakening and the latitudinarianism of the College displayed itself in theological, legal, and sociological arenas.

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The Great Awakening and Harvard College: The Theological Dimension of Their Inter-Relation:

Harvard College’s Theological Underpinnings

An appreciation of the theological underpinnings of the Harvard community before the Great Awakening involves an accurate sense of the legacy of her founders and their hope of a universal “latter-day” eschatological utopia, which would commence, allegedly, in America, probably New England.

The Theological Aura Imbibed from the Original New England Colonists

The original colonists’ legacy consists of a communal sense of calling, newly-inaugurated covenant, and theological continuity.  Although the founding vision would evolve, fragment, distort, and modify by the time of the Great Awakening, the driving ideals of the Puritan framers would never entirely extinguish.

A Binding Sense of a Common  Divine Call

Inter-weaving the Massachusetts Bay Colony was the saturating force of a sense of divine call.  Hearkening to the decree of their Sovereign, they boldly embarked to where no subject of the Sovereign had gone before — an “errand in the wilderness” of the New World.  After Bay colonists established their own dwellings, meeting places for worship, and provided for their common defense, they established Harvard College to train their own ministers, lest they leave to their progeny the curse of an untrained ministry.  Indispensable to their spiritual and communal survival, responding to the voice of God required mouthpieces that did not distort the pristine message — learned ministers of integrity were an imperative commodity of highest priority.

Governor John Winthrop, basking in the common sense of divine calling, expressed that all are of one body in Christ, and therefore:

All the partes [3] of this body being thus united are made so contiguous in a special relation as they must needs partake of each others’ strength and infirmity, joy, and sorrowe, weale and woe . . . This sensibleness and Sympathy of each others’ Conditions will necessarily infuse into each parte a native desire and endeavour, to strengthen defend, preserve, and comfort the other. [4]

An intensity of belief, both individually and corporately, in the call of the Christian Gospel, forwarded the Puritan venture. [5]

A Binding Sense of a Common, Newly-Inaugurated Covenant

Governor Winthrop’s sermon aboard the Arabella, delivered en route to the Bay, includes passages analogizing the colonists to the ancient founders of the Israelite state.  Intense conviction embraced the vision of a new Israel.  The colonists believed that God had extracted them out their sordid persecuted past to implant them into a new Israel — an Eden reconquered.  God, with his new bride, had inaugurated:

“more neare [6] bond of marriage      . . . wherein he hath taken us to be his after a most strict and peculiar manner which will make him the more Jealous of our love and obedience since he tells the people of Israel, ‘you only have I known of all the families of the Earth, therefore will I punish you for your Transgressions.’” [7]

All spiritual, social, legal, and political dimensions of life subsumed in the all-encompassing covenant.  The totality of a church-state complex was bound together “by a holy covenant, for the public worship of God, and the mutual edification one of another, in the Fellowship of the Lord Jesus.” [8]

A Sense of Theological Continuity 

Denominational continuity characterizes the New England scene before 1740.  Solid, entrenched Congregationalism rested on the prongs of state maintenance through taxation, a consolidated organization of geographical parishes, a learned clergy trained at Harvard and Yale, and a clear standard of orthodoxy articulated in the Cambridge and Saybrook Platforms.  The “denominationalism” of New England was rather uniform, “solidly and irrevocably rooted in the doctrines of Calvinism classically expressed in the Westminster Confession of Faith.” [9]

The Eschatological Hope for Future “Latter-Day” Glory

Prescript — Eschatological Hope a Ground of the Puritan Experiment

An early work commonly read by the New England divines was John White’s The Planter’s Plea (1630).  In this work, White explained that the dispersion of God’s people results in the carrying of the Gospel into the whole world, so that all quarters of the earth might sound with God’s praise.  According to White, a consensus of the great men of the Church believe that God’s scheme for the propagation of religion from the beginning “falles [10]  in this last age, upon the Westerne parts of the world.” [11]

White’s conclusion, even phraseology, is reminiscent of Bartholomew Keckermann of Danzig’s work Manuductio to Theologie (1621), a Protestant effort to systematize the arts and sciences into compendia acceptable to Puritan scholars, which resulted in its use as a textbook for Harvard College students.  In 1624 T. Vickars translated the work into English, which included a variety of interpretations of providence, including the view that the English running second to the Spanish was God’s plan, because a “little popish light” here and there prepared the way for “further truths,” the full light of Puritanism, as led by “true and faithful Ministers of the Gospel.”  Manuductio predicted that “toward the end of the world the true religion shall be in America” so that Christ’s prophecies of latter-day glory will be fulfilled. [12]

Postscript — Eschatological Hope of Latter-Day Glory After the Death of Whitefield

The vision of eschatological utopia did not diminish after the revival fires died down to a simmer, however.  The hope of latter-day glory would persist after the theological polarization sparred by the revival’s stirrings.  Samuel Hopkins, [13] for instance, a student of Edwards’, begins his Treatise on the Millennium (1793) with the words “to the People who shall live in the Days of the Millennium, hail, ye happy people, highly favoured of the Lord!” [14]

Harvard graduate the Reverend Charles Coffin (class of 1793), wrote a letter in 1793, arguing for the vision of New England Christianity as the New Israel on an errand into the wilderness.  Because of the rise of international commerce, Coffin emphasized that New England was founded not for commerce but for religion.  Further, he argues for Edwards’ view that revivals are the chief mechanism by which God advances his redemptive purposes and are thus the key to church history.  Accordingly, Coffin articulated a vision of light at the end of the wilderness tunnel:

The American church should realize her duty, till a pure and general revival shall spread its blessing over the inhabited globe.  Never was there any other country settled, since Canaan itself, so much for the sacred purposes of religion, as our own.  Never did any other ancestry, since the days of inspiration, send up so many prayers and lay such ample foundations for the religious prosperity of their descendants, as did our godly forefathers.  It is a fact, therefore, in perfect analogy with the course of Providence, that there never has been any other country so distinguished for religious revivals as our own. [15]

Coffin believed that revivals, sprouting on American soil, would eventually spread their boughs over all the earth.  America would become a Christian republic first, then other countries would follow suit:

Our Bible, missionary education, Sabbath-school, temperance and colonization societies, the supply of our own people with a sufficient number of able and faithful ministers of the New Testament and with pious and benevolent characters for the thousand other spheres of responsible action, the diffusion of the light of life, and the joys of the gospel salvation, throughout all our numerous habitations; the preservation of our invaluable liberties and free institutions and all the happy prospects of our most favored country, depend greatly on God and upon those pure and recent spreading revivals of religion, for which all American Christians, of whatever name, should pray and labor and strive and live, with one heart and one soul; and, so far as they possess the mind and spirit of their Master, most certainly will. [16]

Revival therefore, was to most in the New England Christian community not a self-contained, “here today, gone tomorrow” phenomenon, but rather a stepping stone to higher, wider, and deeper religiosity — a Christian religiosity that would engulf the whole earth.

Evangelical and Non-evangelical Polarization Before the Great Awakening

The Half-Way Covenant

In 1657 thirteen teaching elders with four delegates from Connecticut joined to address the problem of an unregenerate second generation.  They adopted for a solution the same mode used in the Old World — the Half-way Covenant, allowing unregenerate parents to have their children baptized — that is, to hold visible church membership without the right to celebrate communion. [17]  Conservatives at the time of the Half-way Covenant opposed the compromise measure, among them Charles Chauncy, President of Harvard. [18]

Later conservatives after the Half-way Covenant, however, in the eighteenth century, would support the measure.  In defense of the “Half-way” measure, Moses Hemmenway, who graduated from Harvard in 1755, wrote in 1767 “Seven Sermons on the Obligation and Encouragement of the Unregenerate to Labour for the Meat Which Endureth to Everlasting Life.”  This brisk series begged the unconverted to expose themselves to the things of God, in anticipation of their conversion, in the context of the Half-way covenant.  The result of this series of sermons included an increase of attendance by the unconverted to the means of grace. [19]  In a similar vein, Joseph Bellamy, Jonathan Edwards’ most devoted pupil, would defend the Half-Way or “external” covenant in 1769. [20]

The “Reforming Synod” of 1679

The Move Toward Presbyterianism as a Solution to Religious Decline

The historical line between Puritan Congregationalism and Puritan Presbyterianism is not always bright — at times it is blurred, even dotted.  Generally, Congregationalists distinguished themselves by allowing congregations to chose their own ministers, own their own property, and liberty on frequency of synodical meetings.  Conversely, Presbyterians usually (but not always) allowed the Presbyteries to chose ministers for their congregations and Presbyteries to own the local assemblies’ property.  Further, Presbyterians practiced regular meetings of presbyterial and synodical governing bodies “for the better government of the church.”

Doctrinally, the two traditions tightly parallel.  In 1648, for instance, the New England Congregationalists approved the Westminster Confession of Faith in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Congregationalists in England modified the Confession at the Savoy Palace in London in 1658, the New England Congregationalists following suit in 1680.  In 1708, the Synod of Saybrook in Connecticut approved the Boston Confession in 1680, and provided that the Connecticut churches be governed by “consociations” comprised of ministers and “messengers” of the churches. [21]

Although a Congregationalist, Increase Mather, President of Harvard (1685-1701), argued for presbyterial bodies of “consociations” to meet at regular times.  Mather, in his work The First Principles of New-England, cites John Cotten:

that the elders and brethren of the churches, would meet together in convenient Numbers, at Set Times, (which may be left unto the Wisdom of each Society of the Churches) and thus to enjoy and practice Church-Communion.  And there are added many Directions elaborated by him for the most edifying Management of such stated Councils.

Mather, therefore did not object to the regular gathering of councils comprised of representative elders of particular assemblies. [22]  Mather commends a “constant Actual Communion of the Churches within the Limits of the same Supreme Civil Government, in Councils.”  Citing Owen to substantiate, Mather quotes Owen’s treatise on a Gospel Church:

I cannot see how any other of their Rights, which they hold by Divine Institution, if through more constant Lesser Synods for Advice, there be a Communication of their mutual Concerns, unto those that are Greater, until Occasion require, and it be expedient, there be a General Assembly of them all, to advise about anything wherein they are, all concerned.

To Mather, the stated councils should consist of ministers and elected delegates, “chosen once a year at least,” for the purpose of consulting and advising “upon such affairs as might be a proper matter for the consideration of an ecclesiastical council.” [23]  Mather proposed council meetings at least per annum. [24]

As moral decline intensified, Congregationalist conservatives, posturing themselves as centrists, desired expanded executive power to bring the deteriorating fringe into line.  The “Reforming Synod” of 1679 in Boston, for instance, addressed itself to problems of spiritual decline but was largely ignored.  Convening in 1679, the “Reforming Synod” enumerated the judgments God was inflicting on New England because of its sins:

Heavy calamities by sea and shore, shipwrecks, droughts, conflagrations, fightings, pestilential sicknesses, and commercial disasters.  These evils are considered as punishments for abounding pride, neglect of church-fellowship and other divine institutions, oaths and imprecations in ordinary discourse, Sabbath-breaking, remissness in family government and family worship, intemperance, promise-breaking, immodest dress and mixed dancing. [25]

The same concerns led to the Proposals of 1705, which included the effort for greater inter-church discipline among “Consociated Churches.” [26]

Harvard’s Reaction

A more latitudinarian faction, centering around Harvard, successfully thwarted a coup d’eglise of “Consociated Churches” moving toward greater central executive authority to discipline error.  The conservative faction of Congregationalists, moving toward Presbyterianism, urged the particular churches “in all holy Watchfulness and helpfulness towards each other” to withdraw communion from a church that refuses to be healed of “such gross disorders as plainly hurt the common Interest.” [27]  Harvard’s influence in 1679 weighed against the Presbyterial remedy to heteropraxis.  Harvard’s reaction, however, may not have derived solely or even primarily from infidelity.  Rather, the Harvard establishment maintained a stringent fear of ecclesiastical tyranny.

Both those in government and friends of Harvard College were alarmed, for instance, about the design of some of the Episcopal church to obtain official influence in the institutions’ concerns. [28]  The Episcopal Society for Propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts established a mission and set up a church in Cambridge, approximately a quarter mile from the College.  Various clergy in the area viewed the encroachment as a “formal design to carry on a spiritual siege of our churches, with the hope that they will one day submit to a spiritual sovereign.” [29]  To remaining first generation Puritans, still with the bitter taste of ecclesiastical tyranny in their mouths, a return to “top-down” ecclesiastical bureaucracies was ghastly unthinkable.

Reaction through Jeremiads

As Puritan ministers perceived intensifying and accelerating moral and theological declension, they resorted to the homiletic device of a Jeremiad, a sermon calling the populace back to God in the manner and spirit of the prophet Jeremiah (cf.  ch. 7). [30]  At the inception of the colony, ministers were not only, so to speak, on the playing field, but were quarterbacking.  As time passed, their centrality dimmed to be societally somewhat like those coaching from the sidelines.  Their hegemony, however, continued to spiral downward to where they were relegated to an honored front row at the fifty-yard line.  They would eventually, in the later generations, be consigned to the back row.  Perhaps the day will come when they are not allowed into the stadium at all.  The Jeremiad became not only a plea for change of belief and behavior among the people, but a social restructuring device, where the ministers made their case of why the colony would be better served with them at its helm.

Increase Mather, president of Harvard (1685-1701), for instance, in 1678 lamented the degeneration of the people’s morals:  “the body of the rising generation is a poor, perishing, unconverted and (except the Lord pour down his spirit) undone generation!” [31]  Mather saw that the time of trouble for New England was near, as testified by a variety of signs, including “great security” among the people:  “you are asleep and your Judgment is slumbering too, when as it’s waiting ready to take hold of you.” [32] Mather pulled no punches: “the present Generation in New-England is lamentably degenerate.  As sometimes Moses spake to the Children of Israel, Numb. 32:14.  ‘Behold ye are risen up in your Fathers stead an increase of sinful men.’  So may we say, the first Generation of Christians in New-England, in a manner gone off the Stage, and there is another more sinful Generation risen up in their stead.” [33]  Mather underscored his declamation: “It is an apt similitude which some use, that as the heat of the Sun in Summer breeds a multitude of Insects, so doth the warmth of prosperity a multitude of apostates.” [34]  For correction, Mather urged reformation of the particular sins of the day:

 . . . in order to Serving our Generation, we should consider what are the Special Sins of the Age wherein we Live, and Endeavour the Reformation of them; and what are the more peculiar Truths and Duties of the Times, so as to fall in them.  There are some Evils which are Errores Seculi, the more special Errors of that Age, either Practical or Doctrinal: Sometimes one Evil breaks forth, sometimes another.  As any Scandal appears, we shall do a good Service in our Generation, to give a faithful Testimony against it, if it be indeed a Sin. [35]

Summarily, Jeremiads were, from the conservatives’ perspective, the colony’s last best hope.

The Conservatives’ Move to Establish Another, New Light, Orthodox Harvard — the Founding of Yale in 1700-1701

Unorthodoxy in Boston Motivating a Move to Establish Another Calvinistic Bastion

The traditional Calvinistic leaders at the turn of the century, alarmed that the parties of most powerful influence favored the new winds blowing, looked away from Boston to establish a new academic bastion of Calvinistic faith in 1700-01. [36]  As the years passed, so did the liberalizing tendencies.  As a result, in the year 1752, the clergy of Connecticut with the Calvinistic sect in Massachusetts, sedulously began the task [37]  of “settling and securing orthodoxy in the College of New Haven, and to preserve it, in all the governors thereof, upon the best foundation that human wisdom, directed by the general rules of God’s word, could devise.” [38]  In November 1753, the President and Fellows of Yale voted for strict orthodox observance:

[T]he students should be established in the principles of religion, according to the Assembly’s Catechism, Dr. Ames’ ‘Medulla’ and ‘Cases of Conscience,’ and should not be suffered to be instructed in any different principles or doctrines . . . that the Assembly’s Catechism, and the Confession of Faith, received and established in the churches of this colony, (which is an abridgment of the Westminster Confession,) contain a true and just summary of the most important doctrines of the Christian religion, and that the true sense of the sacred Scriptures is justly collected and summed up, in these positions, and all expositions of Scripture pretending to deduce any doctrines or positions contrary to the doctrines laid down in these composures, we are of the opinion, are wrong and erroneous; and that every President, Fellow, Professor of Divinity, or Tutor in said College shall, before he enter upon the execution of his office, publicly consent to the said Catechism and Confession of Faith, as containing a just summary of the Christian religion, and renounce all doctrines and principles contrary thereto, and shall pass through such examination, as the Corporation shall think proper, in order to their being fully satisfied that he should do it truly, and without any evasion or equivocation. [39]

The year after the resolution the number of students acceding to Yale exceeded those attending Harvard, the number being viewed as a providential smile upon the undertaking, that strict adherence to Calvinistic doctrine was the path to prosperity. [40]

Networking Among Evangelical Ministers on Both Sides of the Atlantic

Early eighteenth century networking of evangelically-oriented ministers, as opposed to those tending to liberalize, included circles in the colonies and Britain. [41]  J. Nelson quips in regard to the evangelicals’ cohesion, “evangelicals . . . found their gushing fount of authority in the Bible, and they made little of creeds.”  Isaac Watts and Benjamen Colman, for instance,  became an axis of networking for evangelically oriented ministers on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1720s.  Watts’ poems, sermons, and hymns were studied at Harvard and Yale, where Edwards was among those who masticated Watts’ contributions.  Colman (1673-1747) spent the late 1690s in England, then served as the original pastor of Boston’s Brattle Street Church, although the liberal membership at the Brattle church distressed the Mathers.  Colman, in gratitude to English dissenting evangelical Thomas Hollis, dedicated to him a series of discourses called “Some Glories of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” [42]  Through the introduction of Cotton Mather, Robert Wodrow and Colman maintained steady correspondence on the decay of religion in Scotland and New England, respectively.  Wodrow also communicated with friends of Colman, including Edward Wigglesworth, Hollis Professor at Harvard College, as well as eight or nine ministers in his neighborhood. [43]

Latent Unitarianism During the Mid-Eighteenth Century 

Unitarianism, though latent in the early eighteenth century, was not openly professed or publicly advocated in New England during the mid-eighteenth century.  The appearance of Samuel Mather’ s tract of 1718, “Necessity of Believing the Doctrine of the Trinity” implies, however,  the latent growth of Unitarianism.  In 1758 Joseph Bellamy printed an exegetical treatise, Treatise on the Divinity of Christ [44]  and in 1768 Hopkins preached a sermon defending the divinity of Christ, “under a conviction that the doctrine was much neglected, if not disbelieved by a number of ministers in Boston.” [45]

Modern Socinian or Unitarians were actually the ancient Ebionites, Samosatenians, Sabellians, Arians, or Photians resurrected.[46]  Among the foremost of forerunners of New England’s Nineteenth Century Unitarian/Universalism was Charles Chauncy (d. 1792), grandson of a Harvard President.  Breaking with “Old Calvinism,” Chauncy later “rejected eternal damnation,” acknowledging that everyone would be saved. [47]  Although Jonathan Mayhew died in 1766, some twenty years before Chauncy, Mayhew had voiced the “nub of Boston’s discontent with Connecticut and western Massachusetts orthodoxy: a disbelief in the divinity of Christ and an emphasis on the supreme and benign glory of God the Father,” to the denuding of the doctrine of His wrath. [48]

The Harvard Library’s Inclusion of Heterodox Material

By the time of Whitefield’s arrival, the Harvard library held the works largely held responsible for ever-enlarging liberalization — Locke, Newton, Clarke, Sydney, Milton, Butler, even Hutcheson and Priestly. [49]  By as early as 1772, President Locke of Harvard argued that “foreign errors are to be met with argument alone, not by crowding down creeds and confessions upon the pain of eternal punishment.” [50]  Responding with alacrity, Jedidiah Morse (1761-1826), aggrieved with Harvard College, declaimed against her:

It is no longer what it once was . . . The lustre [51] of science still shines, but the Sun of Christianity is eclipsed.  Young men leave the place now, not with hosannas in their mouths to the Son of David; but with burning zeal to propagate the new philosophy.  Does the parent who bows the knee to Jesus, wish his son to deny the Lord that bought him?  If not, let him well reflect what destination he gives him, to be taught the principles of religion as well as science. [52]In contradistinction to later tolerances,  Harvard’s past resistance against erroneous theology evidenced its fervor from time to time in Presidential book burnings.  The last [53]  Presidential bonfire of books occurred in 1699, under Mather’s presidency, of the half vellum octavo More Wonders of the Invisible World. [54]  Presidential bookburnings included a fanfare of imprecatory prayer.

Evangelical and Non-evangelical Polarization during the Great Awakening

Polarization as Early as 1735

Although the revival of 1735 was of brief duration, party lines developed into “old lights” and “new lights” — those who would wait for the effect of the means of grace, and those who would take the kingdom of God by violence (cf. Mt. 11:12). [55]  The number of converts in the revival of 1740 numbered in the thousands, perhaps as high as twenty-five, or even fifty thousand. [56]  Fueling the evangelical side of the polarization were “new light” itinerants, which included Edwards and Joseph Bellamy, who itinerated during 1741 and later, being invited to preach in various towns. [57]

The Advent of So-called “Enthusiasm” in the Great Awakening

Edwards’ Role in the Awakening Before the Advent of Whitefield

While Edwards Pincered the New Stirrings, Harvard Remained Cautiously Aloof

Revival fires burned with greater or less intensity until the first visit of Whitefield in 1740. [58]  What Edwards called “revivals” and “extraordinary awakenings,” Josiah Quincy, a Harvard historian, calls “excitements.” [59]  According to Edwards, the Awakening was “the most remarkable outpouring of the Spirit of God, that has ever been in New England, and it may be, in the world, since the days of the Apostles.” [60]  Edwards and the clergy of his party curbed the passions of the city folk, ignited by the revival preaching, into the limits they deemed safe and Scriptural.  They realized however that it was far more easy to enkindle and spread a flame than to quench or control it. [61]  Harvard College, pulled into the vortex of the theological controversies resulting from the initial stirrings, faced the new religious forces with cautious aloofness. [62]

Edwards’ Handling of the New Emotion Stirred by the Awakening

Edwards did not attempt to cast a damper on the fire he attempted to kindle, but clarified that times when the “influences of the Spirit of God abound, are those in which counterfeits also abound . . . the Devil being then abundant in mimicking both the ordinary and extraordinary influences of that Spirit.” [63]  Edwards explained that revival cycles in a two-fold modality — a pro-active movement of God with a reactive response from Satan:

the same persons may be the subjects of much of the influences of the Spirit of God, and yet in some things be led away by the delusions of the Devil; and that this is no more of a paradox than many other things that are true of real saints, in the present state, where grace dwells with so much corruption, and the new man and the old subsist together in the same person, and the kingdom of God and kingdom of the Devil remain for a while together in the same heart. [64]

One of the friends of Edwards, William Cooper, a clergyman of distinction in Boston, published Edwards’ discourse, “The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God,” with a preface of his own, viewing the Awakening in glowing terms, and remarked that the stirrings are

so wonderful, as that the like had not been since the pouring out of the Spirit, immediately after our Lords’ ascension.  The apostolical times seem to have returned upon us, such a display has there been of the power and grace of the divine Spirit in the assemblies of his people. [65]

Cooper interpreted the “prejudices and reproaches cast on this work of God” as the “raging of Satan when his kingdom is shaken, and his subjects desert him.” [66]  By championing revival, however, Edwards at the same time upheld and broke down the traditional Puritan ecclesiastical/political complex because his advocacy polarized “pro” and “anti” factions. [67]

The Advent of Whitefield

“Cambridgeites” responded with life and energy to the extemporaneous effusions of Whitefield, Edwards having prepared the field for Whitefield’s labors. [68] Lay preachers began to multiply and swarm, and surpassed Whitefield in effect and zeal. [69]  Whitefield was the harbinger of a new spiritual tidal wave [70]  — its newness engendering a mingled response of both welcome and cautious curiosity.

“Enthusiasm” and Harvard College Juxtaposed

Enthusiasm Versus the Current Established Institutional Learning

“Enthusiasm,” a derisive term of art, allegedly scoffed at scholarly preaching, “railing against learning,” and encouraging “both ignorant and unlettered Men and Women to preach and teach the multitudes.”  The establishment believed, as expressed by Thomas Story, they must defend the status quo: “what of learning, a respect for reason, the accumulation of knowledge which God directed good Christians to utilize, even Harvard College?” [71]

Perry Miller thinks that the Great Awakening occurred in part because “common people” rose up in declaration that what Harvard and Yale were teaching was “too academic.” [72]    The response, however, may not be so much against learning per se, but what they were learning and that they were learning without the godly disciplines that had been built into Harvard from its founding in 1636.  Students originally had to read the Scriptures for themselves twice a day and report on their devotional reading to a tutor or professor once a day.  Waiving personal devotional requirements such as these prompted Increase Mather to call Harvard “godless Harvard” in 1692.

“Enthusiasm” Epitomized by the Quakers

Harvard College represented the belief that education and religious insight worked hand in hand, but to this belief Quakers reacted, among them George Fox, who early in his journal argued that study at Oxford and Cambridge did not fit men to be ministers of Christ.  Not “Latine, Greek or Hebrew, that teacheth to understand the Scripture, but it is the Spirit of God.”  Quakers sought to short circuit the path of learning Harvard represented, eliminating the intellectual baggage that bogged down orthodox people. [73] Judge Samuel Sewall, repulsed by Quakerism, declared it a rebellion against the glorious past of New England, calling it a profane heresy, even voting in city council against permitting construction of a new Quaker meeting house in Boston, testifying he “would not have a hand in setting up their Devil Worship.” [74]  Joseph Bellamy (1719-1790), for instance, wrote a work purposed at distinguishing enthusiasm from true religion, True Religion Delineated. [75]  Further, many in the Connecticut Valley requested for clarification of the nature of true religion, asking for publication of Joseph Bellamy’s sermons “Theron, Paulinus, and Aspasio.  Or, Letters and dialogues, upon the nature of love to God, faith in Christ, assurance of a title to eternal life” [76]  and “An essay on the nature and glory of the Gospel of Jesus Christ: as also on the nature and consequences of spiritual blindness: and the nature and effects of Divine illumination.” [77]

Enthusiasm Opposed by the Harvard Leadership

An Example of a Balance of Godliness and Learning Enjoined at Harvard

Sarah Edwards looked askance at the response to Whitefield on the Harvard campus, writing that “the boys at Harvard, received nothing but enthusiasm from Whitefield and Tennant, along with large doses of pride and a “Contempt of their Betters, despite all their holy talk.” [78]  Thomas Story remarked to the Harvard students who gathered around him one afternoon under a “large spreading oak close to Harvard yard,” that human learning could be useful but only when the “spirit of Truth” had subjected the mind.  He warned them not to sin against God, by depending upon what was acquired at the “foundation of human learning,” but drink rather at the “living foundation, the river of living water.” [79]

Thomas Story confessed that he felt at ease among the Harvard boys, whom he found more “solid,” “more like Christians,” than any students he had met at Oxford or Cambridge, Edinburgh, Glasgow, or Aberdeen.”  His comfort was not denuded by his lecturing them on how far New England had strayed from its glorious past when the “Gifted Brethren” dominated. [80]

Personal Associations of President Holyoke — Evangelical and non-evangelically Oriented

President Holyoke, however, appeared to play both the conservative, pro-Yale, and more liberal sides.  The liberal views of Chauncy and Mayhew received no public sanction from the governors of Harvard College, but they enjoyed demonstrable friendship, professional discourse, and interchange of ministerials’ labors. [81]  Demonstrable “hobnobbing” between Holyoke, Chauncy, and Mayhew implies that Holyoke did not openly resist the liberalizing trends.  Holyoke, however, also maintained cordial relations with evangelically oriented ministers, the Rev. Dr. Benjamen Colman, for instance.  President Holyoke in 1748 in a Commencement day address, dilated with eloquence on the contribution of the Colman, who was then a patron to Harvard College. [82]  Colman had previously been of the party of the evangelically oriented ministers who corresponded with Isaac Watts. [83]

Conclusion

By 1748 the “flame” Whitefield had raised in the colonies was about that time subsiding.  As Josiah Quincy concludes, “like a fire in the woods, it had enkindled whatever was light and inflammatory, heated whatever was solid and incombustible, and began now to cease through exhaustion of the materials.” [84]  Harvard College, at first touched by the preaching of Whitefield, gradually hardened into a public denunciation of him, including the more extreme facets of the revival.   Still steering toward center as much as she could, Harvard College never denounced Edwards, perhaps because he was a fellow New Englander, a Yale graduate, not a pure itinerant, and most pointedly, he did not publish lists of ministers he believed were unconverted.

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The Inter-Relation Of Harvard And The Great Awakening:  The Legal Perspective

Legal Beginnings of the Bay Colony

In 1631 the General Court for the Massachusetts Bay Colony adopted a resolution limiting voting status to church members:

To the end the body of the Commons may be preserved of honest and good men, it is likewise preserved and agreed that for time to come, no man shall be admitted to the freedom of the body politic, but such as are members of some of the churches within the limits of the same. [85]

Palfrey called this court “the first cisatlantic General Court for election,” seeing the formation of a new aristocracy of spirituality:

They established a kind of aristocracy hitherto unknown.  Not birth, nor wealth, nor learning, nor skill in war, was to confer political power, but personal character, — goodness of the highest type, — goodness of that purity and force which only the faith of Jesus Christ is competent to create. [86]

Massachusetts enjoyed a new breed of leadership, comprised of an aristocracy of spiritual merit.

Legislation Aimed at Control of the Clergy Through Control of Both Harvard and Yale

Church and state, still wed in New England in the mid-seventeenth century, worked as two hands washing each other to accomplish the will of whoever was in control.  When opposition to the Whitefieldian revival mounted, a legal dimension of opposition solidified.

Connecticut’s General Assembly Legislating to Dampen the Revival

The reaction to the Awakening included clerical discipline aimed at firmer control of the agencies of education.  In Connecticut, for instance, New Light Separates were not allowed to attend the established schools; legislation prevented them from starting their own schools without a license from the state’s General Assembly, which license would be denied.  The same legislation stated “no Person who has not been educated or graduated at Yale College, or at Harvard College in Cambridge, or some Foreign Protestant College or University, shall be allowed the special Privileges of the established Ministers of Government.” [87]

In reaction, Timothy Allen attempted to establish the “Shepherds Tent” to train ministers, which had 14 students but which expired after several months in Rhode Island. [88]  Three institutions, however, successfully broached the early stormy years.  Dartmouth, incorporated in 1769, was an outgrowth of New Light Eleazar Wheelock’s Indian School in Lebanon, founded December 18, 1754. [89]  Stirring in 1739 to found a school in New Jersey comparable to Harvard and Yale revitalized under the initiative of the pro-revivalist Presbyterian Synod of New York.  The college opened at Elizabethtown in May, 1747, as a direct result of the Middle Colony revival.  New Light New Englanders, however, both immediate and remote, in the presbyteries of the New York Synod which were comprised of ministers of demonstrable influence, played a key role.  The College of New Jersey, or Princeton, served as a nursery for piety not only for Middle Colony Presbyterians but also New Light Congregationalists.  Seventeen of its first sixty-nine graduates served as ministers in New England. [90]  James Manning, member of the Princeton class of 1762, was chosen as President of New England’s third college, chartered in 1764, first located at Warren, Rhode Island, which later moved to Providence in 1770, where its name was changed to Brown in 1804. [91]

An Example of New Light Dissent, Legal Repression, and Eventual Autonomy

Samuel Bird is an example of a New Light Harvard scholar whom Harvard marginalized, not allowing him to graduate.  Bird preached to the church of New Haven, first called the “Tolerated Church,” on May 7, 1742, because it successfully claimed the benefits of the Act of Toleration, which allowed for churches independent of the Congregationalist parish.  They later chose the name “White Haven.”  Preaching was difficult to secure after repressive acts passed in 1742, though before the acts numerous sympathetic ministers from other churches in the environs, such as John Graham of Southbury, Joseph Bellamy of Bethlelem, Jedidah Mills of Ripton, Philemon Robbins of Branford, and Nenajah Case of Simbury filled the pulpit.  The first preacher to remain was the an exhorter from New London, John Curtis, who served from October 1748 to October 1750.  Curtis, however, was never ordained.

The first ordained minister was Samuel Bird.  Bird, who had been preaching at Dunstable, Massachusetts was expelled from Harvard just before graduation in 1744 for New Light sentiments. [92]  Significantly, the White Haven church achieved legal standing from the legislature in 1759, partly because it outnumbered the First Church 179 to 147.  The legalization of the White Haven church was but one milestone of the beginning of the dismantling of the traditional parish pattern in Connecticut. [93]

One Harvard Attorney’s Plea for Lockean Religious Toleration

Responding to the legislation of the Connecticut General Assembly Elisha Williams (1694-1755) wrote anonymously a plea for toleration according to a Lockean apprehension of church-state relations.  A graduate of Harvard, Williams first practiced law, then served on the Connecticut General Assembly, then was ordained in 1721. [94]

Conclusion

The tragic adage “the law is a whore” may have been the heart-cry of sincere, concerned, and activist “New Lights” in the mid-eighteenth century.  Legal repression at first hampered the acceptability of “New Light” ministers by denying them the institutions of the day, Harvard and Yale.  To minister un-ordained was gosh; and to be ordained one must be “Old Light”; and to graduate, as in the case of Samuel Bird, one could be no more than a “closet New Light.”

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The Great Awakening and Harvard College:  The Sociological Dimension of Their Inter-Relation

The Cohesive Social Order Established by Puritan Law

When the Puritans erected their “city upon a hill” in the 1620s, they established a culture somewhat distinct in social texture from that of the other colonies.  Conflicting interest groups in New York and Pennsylvania, for instance, vied for their interests in the political and economic arena. [95]  The southern royal colonies endured class violence and a subsistence crisis.  Further, fear of the growing black population in the south solidified the white aristocracy.   Social unrest, however, was rare in the Bay Colony; rather, Massachusetts was remarkably cohesive socially.  Differences revolved around religious issues, such as the Half-way Covenant, and policy concerns, such as the regulation of navigation to appease the British Crown. [96]  Biblical law provided a social emulsifier for the colony.  Additionally, the comprehensives and severity of biblical law raised the moral concerns of the colonists.

As an emulsifier, biblical law pervaded the school system in Massachusetts.  Since the ideological indoctrination began at an early age for all children, the society developed an ideological commonality that bound the colony together. [97]  Unlike Pennsylvania, where the Dutch Reformed taught their children in Dutch, Quakers taught their children according to their distinctives, and the Swedish Covenant churches taught their children according to their creed and in their language, only a small minority of the Massachusetts colonists differed from the Puritan creed and all spoke English. [98]  Commonality in creed and language was unique to Massachusetts and Connecticut in comparison with the other colonies.

The Great Awakening as the First Major Outbreak of Religious Dissent 

Sectarianism — New to New England

Under, however, the itinerant preaching of George Whitefield and the didactic preaching of Jonathan Edwards, the first major outbreak of religious dissent began.  When the revival spread throughout New England with radical demand for spiritual rebirth, moral purity, and personal engagement with the Gospel, the new wave of the regenerate were advised by Whitefield to shun the unconverted ministers.  Further, Whitefield’s disciple James Davenport called the regenerate wave to come out of established Congregationalism and become a separate organization. [99]

The first native sectarian movement on New England’s soil were the Separate or Strict Congregationalists led by their new Moses, James Davenport.  The Separates maintained the tenets of Calvinism but incorporated the New Light revivalism.  Their key distinctive included ecclesiology and discipline.  The New Light Congregationalists endorsed itineracy, experiential standards for church membership and ministerial vocation, and sought to sever the bond of church and state.  The new establishment was transient however, the nearly 100 new congregations established in the 1740s and 50s suffering an equally meteoric decline, many of the new congregations rejoining the Congregationalist establishment or becoming Baptists. [100]

Miller’s View of a Socio-Political Reason for Polarization

Socio-economic Perspective

Socio-economic classes existed in the Bay Colony from the earliest times; as the colony matured, class structures calcified.  Not only between the “have’s” and “have not’s,” but rifts developed between the commercialists of the port cities of Boston and Salem and farmers of the interior.  Within the port city business complex, a chasm expanded between the merchant class and the small shopkeepers and artisans. [101]  In Boston at around the turn of the century, “the tradition of unemotional religion became well established, and there was developing a ‘free and catholic’ spirit which emphasized practical morality at the same time that it maintained a gentlemanly tolerance of theological differences.” [102]

A “Perestroika” of the Social Order

The dominant figures in and around Boston were the Mathers; in the Connecticut valley Solomon Stoddard was, according to Wright, “a virtual dictator.” [103]  The valley had come to distrust the liberalizing tendencies of Harvard, its “free and catholic tradition” exemplified by Presidents Leverett and Holyoke, Tutor William Brattle, and Professor Edward Wigglesworth.  No clear paradigm shift from orthodoxy had yet flagrantly occurred. [104]  Charles Chauncy’s virtues were, according to Wright, “the prosaic ones — diligence, sobriety, common sense, and devotion to scholarship” [105] — a primitive Boston “Brahmen.”

The wake of Whitefield’s preaching tended to undermine the social order both by weakening the traditional New England parish system and diminishing the prestige of established ministers. [106]  Miller sees the political implications of the revival as stirring the pundits of Cambridge to such rancor.  To Miller, the revival instilled a sense of individual responsibility that ran counter to the enfeebling dependence upon aristocracy, bred or earned, to govern them: “this is one thing they meant: the end of the reign over the New England and American mind of a European and scholastical conception of authority put over men because men were incapable of recognizing their own welfare.”  To Miller, fear fueled the anti-revivalist fervor:

this insight may assist us somewhat in comprehending why the pundits of Boston and Cambridge, all of whom were rational and tolerant and decent, shuddered with a horror that was deeper than mere dislike of the antics of the yokels.  To some extent, they sensed that the religious screaming had implications in the realm of society, and those implications they — being businessmen and speculators, as were the plutocracy of Northampton — did not like.

Accordingly, the politically entrenched, seeing the force of the revival as a potential threat to their hold on power, responded with “hysterical agony.” [107]

Indeed, the revival altered the role the common person, because in the reconstitution of the churches after the revival, the laity gained greater power, evidenced by the greater involvement in choosing ministers and assessing the spiritual character of their fellow citizens. [108]  John Wesley, who would follow on the heels of Whitefield, would also mobilize laity into organizations later to become Methodist societies.  Michael Harrington records that Wesley’s “sober, abstemious reading of the Bible, with its stress on individual righteousness rather than collective action, had a profound impact, political as well as religious, on workers.” [109]

The New Wave of “Awakened” Ministers 

The ministry of Whitefield alone resulted perhaps in the ordination of as many as twenty Massachusetts ministers. [110]  Sterling examples of newly converted, New Light ministers include Daniel Rogers, Andrew Croswell, and Benjamen Randell.  Massachusetts’ most widely traveled itinerant was Daniel Rogers (brother to Nathaniel), a Harvard tutor converted under Whitefield and ordained as evangelist at large in York, Maine, in July 1742.  The Boston Evening Post denounced the ordination of Rogers as unlawful, designating Rogers a “vagrant preacher to the people of God in this land; contrary to the peace of our Lord the King and head of his Church and of the good order and Constitution of the churches in New England as established by the platform.” [111]

Andrew Croswell epitomized the New Light experiential focus.  One of James Davenport’s most vocal partisans, Croswell, focused his ministry on the theme (more than any other) of the Christian’s personal delight in knowing Christ.  Commensurate in this focus is that one must know Christ particularly, not merely generally.  Croswell accordingly assailed Harvard as having fallen into the pit of rationalism, a “New Divinity” which contents itself with a mere intellectual apprehension of Christ’s work for humanity in general — individual conversion through knowing Christ in particular, however, lapsed out of the new Harvard theologues’ purview. [112] The founder of the Freewill Baptist sect, Benjamen Randel, was among Whitefield’s last converts.  Although originally much opposed to the “delusion and enthusiasm” of revivalism, he agreed to the persuasion of friends to hear Whitefield on September 25, 26, 1770 at the meeting house where Harvard’s president, Samuel Langdon, worshipped.  Whitefield died a week later, and Randel later converted after meditating on Whitefield’s words and Hebrews 9:26. [113]

Harvard’s Polarization Against the New Wave 

Harvard At First Brushed by the Great Awakening

The Boston Gazette reported that “even Harvard” was “marvelously wrought upon” during the first visit of Whitefield in 1741. [114]  The apparent stirring of godliness occurred in the context of Harvard’s strict disciplinary system.  From the founding of the College, for instance, stern discipline structured all of student life, enforceable even by corporeal punishment.  Later in May of 1755, Holyoke announced in chapel that thereafter corporeal punishment could no longer be meted out.  Emblematic of the decree, Holyoke broke a brand and birch rod in two, over the posterior of an accused.  The Freshman’s offense had been failure to commit to memory four thousand lines of Ovid for the 7:00 a.m. recitation the morning before. [115]  Discipline even restricted free speech, disallowing criticism of College overseers:

[I]f any Scholar, Graduate or Undergraduate make Resistance to the President or any of the Professor or Tutors such Scholar shall be liable to Degradation or Expulsion.  And it any Scholar offer Violence or any heinous insult to any of the Governors of the College, he shall be forthwith expelled. [116]

A committee appointed by the State in 1723 to investigate the affairs of the College returned the following vivid report:

Although there is a considerable number of virtuous and studious youths in the college, yet there has been a practice of several immoralities, particularly stealing, lying, swearing, idleness, picking of locks, and the frequent use of strong drink . . . that the scholars, many of them, are too long absent from the college . . . that the scholars do generally spend too much of the Saturday evening in one another’s chambers, and that the Freshmen, as well as others, are seen in great numbers going to town on Sabbath mornings to provide breakfasts. [117]

The year before strong liquor was allowed into the student’s rooms. [118]  “Things came to such a pass that the whole Colony began to fear for the good name of Harvard.” [119]

On September 24th, 1741, Whitefield preached at the first church of Cambridge, where the president of the College, many tutors and students heard him preach on the text “we are not as men who corrupt the Word of God.”  Whitefield had been guided by more conservative clergy concerned with the direction of the college. [120]  In his journal he represents himself as having been “treated and entertained very civilly by the President of the College.”  On another occasion, he chronicled, “Being at the College, I preached on the qualifications proper for a true evangelical preacher of Christ’s righteousness.  The Lord opened my mouth, and I spoke very plainly to tutors and pupils.” [121]    Whitefield concluded in his journal that Harvard College was “not far superior to the University of Oxford in piety and godliness.” [122]  Whitefield summarized his concern of the College’s doctrinal and moral development:

The chief College in New England, has one President, four Tutors, and about a hundred students.  It is scarce as big as one of our least Colleges at Oxford, and, as far as I could gather from some, who well knew the state of it, not far superior to our Universities in piety and true godliness.  Tutors neglect to pray with, and examine the hearts of, their pupils.  Discipline is at too low an ebb.  Bad books are become fashionable amongst them.  Tillotson and Clarke are read instead of Shepard and Stoddard, and such like evangelical writers; and therefore I chose to preach on these words, ‘We are not as many who corrupt the word of God. [123]

Gilbert Tennant commented on the after-effect of Whitefield’s ministry upon the undergraduates:

Many Scholars appeared to be in great concern as to their souls.  They prayed together, sung Psalms, and discoursed together 2 or 3 at a time and read good books.  They told eagerly of their visions, convictions, assurances, and consolations.  One ‘pretended to see the devil in shape of a bear coming to his bedside’’ some were ‘ under great terrors’; other ‘had a succession of clouds and Comforts’; some talked of ‘the free grace of God in Election and of the decrees.’

Tennant counseled one of the students that the Almighty’s decrees were above them and they should not much trouble themselves about them at present. [124]  The Boston Gazette, however, reported in April and June of 1741 that the scholars of the College were “in general wonderfully wrought upon” [125]  before Whitefield’s sermon on September 24, 1741.  Whitefield’s initial interaction with Harvard was not entirely a “honeymoon” syndrome.  Wigglesworth of Harvard took Whitefield to task for the mistake to assume the origin of “dream and suggestion, and anything which bears strongly upon the mind, as from the spirit of God. [126]

In 1741 Colman wrote exuberantly to Whitefield about the revival continuing in full swing:  “the Work of God with us goes on greatly . . . our crowded serious Assemblies continue and great Additions are made to our Churches.  Yesterday no less than nineteen . . .”  the next year Colman wrote Whitefield that even Harvard had been touched. [127]  The Harvard archives include the following handwritten report describing the revival of religion on campus dated June 4, 1741:

[T]he committees of the Overseers chosen to make inquiry into the state of the college now makes the following report — now having met this day in the library, I make enquiry into the state of the College, of the President, Fellows, Professors and Tutors, we find that of late extraordinary and happy impressions of a religious nature have been made on the minds of great numbers of the students, by which the College is in better order than usual, and exercises of the President and Tutors better attended. [128]

Whitefield’s Judgment of Harvard in 1741

The day Whitefield left new England in October 1741, he recorded his reflections: “As for the Universities, I believe it maybe said, their Light is become Darkness, Darkness that may be felt, and is complained of by the most godly Ministers.”  Whitefield’s experience in New England overall, however, was pleasant:

In short, I like New England exceeding well; and when a Spirit of Reformation revives, it certainly will prevail more than in any other place, because they are similar in their Worship, less corrupt in their Principles, and consequently easier to be brought over to the Form of sound Words, into which so many of their pious Ancestors were delivered.

Interestingly, the Records of the Overseers of Harvard University do not contain an entry in regard to Whitefield’s visit in September, 1741. [129]  On Whitefield’s second visit to New England, however, he and fellow-exhorters at times  denounced Harvard as a “house of impiety and sin.” [130]  According to Morison “there was just enough notion of academic freedom to give Harvard a bad name among strict Calvinists.” [131]  Although maintaining inspectorial vigilance, during the days of Holyoke, Congregationalism and Harvard College were broadening down from primitive Calvinism toward Unitarian Pelagianism. [132]

Charles Chauncy’s Sermon Against Enthusiasm One Week After Harvard’s 1742 Commencement the Catalyst for Polarization

Ministers who did not support the revival were driven to the brink by the sermon of one David McGregore (1710-177? d. unknown), pastor of a Presbyterian congregation in Londonderry, New Hampshire, delivered to the Brattle Street Church on November 3, 1741.  McGregore identified the core of the revival as a doctrinal and intellectual clean-up of the muddy theology, generically called Arminianism, which blocked divine light from shining upon New England.  Enemies of the revival were enemies of the faith once for all delivered to the Puritan fathers — historic Calvinism.  Enemies of the old paths were traducers of those of the old faith. [133] In rebuttal, the Lord’s Day after Harvard’s commencement in 1742, Charles Chauncy, grandson and namesake of a Harvard president, left center, polarizing himself and his followers as flagrant opponents of the revival.  Chauncy, conspicuously silent on any positive features of the revival, upbraided the then common phenomenon of flocking to hear what his colleague Thomas Foxcroft called  “evangelic preaching.”  This sermon functioned as a catalyst polarizing New England into pro-revivalist and non-revivalist factions.  Chauncy’s prestige immediately propelled him to the height of the faction of all New Englanders who either ignored, feared, resented, or lambasted the revival. [134]  Bacon quipped that “storms in the natural world are more apt to occur about the equinoxia, when the days and nights are equal; so when sects do grow to equality, there is apt to be more rivalry.” [135]  Both pro-revival and anti-revival, pro-Whitefield and anti-Whitefield, and orthodox and heterodox forces formed ideological battle lines.  Whitefield himself, more than any other personage or doctrine, became the “Shibboleth” to distinguish in which “camp” one held residency.

Harvard’s Denunciation of Whitefield in 1744

In April 1741, two consecutive issues of the Boston Gazette were comprised largely of a long letter written by William Brattle, rebuking Whitefield for hasty and unfounded judgments.  In July Whitefield sought to ameliorate the ill feeling in a conciliatory letter, almost but not quite apologetic:  “To the students, &c. under convictions at the colleges of Cambridge and New-Haven, — in New-England and Connecticut.” [136]

Whitefield’s announcement in 1744 of his intent to return to New England, however, further polarized, even mobilized the opposing factions of the populace.  Upon the announcement, parties favorable and unfavorable braced themselves for the new wave of religious fervor certain to attend his visit.  The pinnacle of resistance to the soon return of the evangelist consisted of a testimonial drafted by Edward Holyoke, president of Harvard, with the Harvard faculty.  The testimonial is not against Edwards nor the revival per se; rather, the diatribe assails Whitefield himself. [137]  Ill feeling only grew between 1741 and 1744 and by 1744 Harvard drafted a formal charge. [138]  Yale followed with its own formal testimony the next year. [139]

Harvard College calcified in denunciation of Whitefield, entitling him an “enthusiast, a censorious, uncharitable person, and a deluder of the people.” [140]  Before the formal charge, President Holyoke, in an open letter, joined the chorus of critics, telling Whitefield that “the furious zeal with which you had so fired the passion of the people hath, in many places, burnt up the very vitals of religion; and a censorious, unpeaceable, uncharitable disposition hath, in multitudes, usurped the place of a godly jealousy.” [141]

Harvard accused Whitefield of speaking like a man who believed he had direct communication from God and as much intimacy with him “as any of the Prophets and Apostles.”  Whitefield answered the Harvard community, that he certainly had communion with God, “to a Degree,” and had he not, he never would have become a minister.  “In what other way are saints chosen?” he asked.  “To Talk of . . . having the Spirit of God without feeling it, is really to deny the Thing.”  Whitefield claims no “false spirit” but declared his communion with God to be the real thing. [142]

The Testimony of 1744 is not innuendo, but rather an explication, from its first sentence, that Whitefield himself is a dangerous man.  The Testimony charges him with groundless religious emotion, or enthusiasm, slander, fraud in the use of funds, and extemporaneous itinerant preaching.  The charge of enthusiasm smacks of a disdain for intellectualism.  The Harvard establishment, steeped in the love of reason, [143]  looked down at those so under the sway of their emotions.  The Testimony objects to the naming of ministers whom Whitefield believed to be unconverted, arguing that if Whitefield believed a minister was unconverted he should keep that to himself, not publish his conclusion in his journal.  Further, donations ostensibly for an orphanage required an accounting, according to the Harvard establishment, [144]  especially in that the orphanage had been left to the care of a Quaker.  Not long before, Judge Samuel Sewall even voted against a building permit for the construction of a Quaker meeting house, calling their religion “devil worship.”  Moreover, extemporaneous preaching was dangerous because unguarded statements, even from the most articulate of preachers, were bound to slip out.  The Testimony cites only two examples, however, the statements “God loves sinners as sinners” and “Christ loves unregenerate Sinners with a Love of Complacency.”  Last, the Harvard critics thought that pure itineracy was unbiblical, that is, possessing no normative example in the New Testament.  To be sure, ministers in New England preaching to other congregations was not uncommon (Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” was preached the second time while he visited another congregation in Northhampton), but pure itineracy, a bird without a nest, was unbiblical in their view. [145]

The denunciation of Whitefield, however, was not a universal representation of the entire Harvard community.  Josiah Smith, for instance, the first South Carolinian to be educated at Harvard, defended Whitefield tooth and nail, creed and character, both as a person and a preacher.  Smith pastored in Charleston, South Carolina the Independent Congregational Church. [146]

Harvard Producing the Far Left Wing of the Polarization Against the Awakening

Harvard graduate Jonathan Mayhew (1720-1766), although brushed at first by the Awakening’s wings, reacted almost violently into a “rational religion” too extreme even for most all of the non-revivalists.  He was viewed by his ministerial peers as brilliant as he was unorthodox.  So much so, no Boston minister would participate in his ordination in 1747.  In the 1750s he blurted outright denunciations of Chalcedonian Christianity, opting for at least a latent Unitarianism. [147]  Indeed, Mayhew was a forerunner of more heterodoxy to come. [148]  In the future context of nineteenth century developments, for instance, Mayhew’s contribution was somewhat of a Pandora’s box. [149]

Conclusion

Cultural and socio-economic forces often order societies more than their ostensible religions.  Miller, however, has focused on the sociological dynamics of Harvard’s relation with the Great Awakening to the exclusion of the spiritual and theological developments that motivated the opposing postures of the leaders of each faction.  In the world view of the day, theology bore more of the New England mind than money.  Christ was more of the focus of controversy than cultural/social class rivalry.

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Conclusion

The fulcrum of divergent direction between Harvard and the Great Awakening, at least the Whitefieldian element, is neither cultural, social, economic, or legal.  Theological differences propelled the factions into a collision course.  At root, the way in which either “side” saw the Bible determined how they interpreted religious experience.  Each side claimed to view the revival phenomenon through biblical eyeglasses, both claiming the “legitimacy” of being true heirs of the Puritan founders.  Ultimately, exegetical differences determined doctrinal differences; and doctrinal opinions determined into which faction one would take one’s stand.

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Endnotes