INTRODUCTION TO PART 2 The controversies which have so long agitated the Presbyterian Church have, at length, resulted in separation. It would not be easy to state, in a manner satisfactory to both parties, the points of difference between them. It may, however, be said, without offence, that the one party is in favour of a stricter adherence to the standards of the church, as to doctrine and order, than the other.
Charles Hodge (1839)(1)
In 1839, Charles Hodge's two-volume Constitutional History of the Presbyterian Church was published. He completed it in the year following the 1837-38 break-up of the Presbyterian Church into two denominations. Old School Presbyterians had taken control of the General Assembly of the original denomination in 1837. They ejected four New School synods. The split came a year later when the four synods and sympathizing congregations seceded to start a new denomination. This was not the first time the American Presbyterians had divided. In 1741, Old Side and New Side Presbyterians separated along similar lines as they did in 1838, reuniting in 1758.
These controversies had originated outside of American Presbyterianism. They originated in American Congregationalism and, to a lesser extent, English Presbyterianism. Puritan Congregationalism had begun to break up in the 1720's as a result of a 50-year debate over the legitimate basis of Church membership, and therefore also over what constitutes a legitimate Church. This conflict had not been resolved when it spread into Presbyterianism as early as 1722. The debate, first and foremost, was a debate over the proper role of confession, both personal and ecclesiastical. A similar debate over the role of ecclesiastical confession came to a head in English Presbyterianism in 1719.
The retreat from Puritanism in England began with the restoration of Charles II to the throne in 1660. In 1662, the King imposed the Act of Uniformity that mandated conformity to the Church of England. Some 2,000 pastors refused to sign; they were then ejected from their pulpits and Church schools.(2)
English Presbyterianism also suffered from the Act of Uniformity. Its ministers lost their ecclesiastical positions. In response, they abandoned the Westminster Confession and its catechisms, which they regarded subsequently as the symbols of oppressive Scottish Presbyterianism. As one historian has put it, "Creeds had become detestable. . . ."(3) In the mid-1670's, the Unitarian controversy began. It continued for the next generation. In 1719, at a combined meeting of Baptists, Independents, and Presbyterians, the Church voted against adopting the Westminster Confession by a vote of 57 to 53, with the Presbyterians voting with the majority. The feeling of the time was expressed by this slogan: "The Bible won by a majority of four."(4) No; the Unitarians had won, and they soon took over the Church.
The Bible vs. the creeds: the sentiment exhibited by this slogan was to become the theological foundation of the anti-creedalists in all subsequent battles over orthodoxy until the Presbyterian Church suspended Machen and his clerical supporters in 1936. The theological Unitarians and their evangelical supporters always defended themselves in the name of the Bible. This defense was taken at face value by the Presbyterian majority for the next two centuries, and the victories went, step by step, to the Unitarians and the creed-minimizing evangelicals who made the way straight before them.
Calvinism, Experientialism, and Secularism The history of the secularization of the American republic is the history of a process of substitution: personal experience in place of judicial confession as the basis of Church membership. This began in Puritan New England, probably by 1636, when the churches began requiring candidates for membership to relate the experience of their salvation. Without this confirming experience, the candidate's request was denied.
The second generation of Puritans, unlike their parents, had been baptized in Calvinist churches. They had not run Archbishop Laud's Arminian gauntlet, nor had they fled to New England. They could not easily identify such an emotional point of conversion in their lives. They could therefore not become local church members. This created a problem: Should their children be baptized? If so, on what legal basis? New England theologians invented a new theology in order to authorize the baptism of the children of the baptized but non-communicant children of the first generation: the halfway covenant.(5) But these baptized grandchildren of the founders were not authorized to take communion. Then when could they take communion, and on what basis? Only after they became full-covenant members: experiential confession. The halfway covenant's solution was in fact only a one-generation deferral of the problems raised by experientialism.
The great irony--rarely if ever mentioned in monographs on the halfway covenant--is that the 1662 Synod's standards for halfway covenant membership were the same as those for full membership in European Calvinist churches: profession of faith in Christ and an outwardly obedient life. Calvin had declared that "we recognize as members of the church those who, by confession of faith, by example of life, and by partaking of the sacraments, profess the same God and Christ with us."(6) The Synod declared: "Church members who were admitted in minority, understanding the Doctrine of Faith, and publickly professing their assent thereto; not scandalous in life, and solemnly owning the Covenant before the Church, wherein they give up themselves and their children to the Lord, and subject themselves to the Government of Christ in the Church, their Children are to be baptized."(7) In any Continental Calvinist church, this would have entitled New England's halfway covenant, non-communing members and their children to access to the communion table. But not many churches in New England accepted this theological solution until 1675, nor did most of those people outside the local churches, who continued to refuse to join even as halfway (non-communing) members. Only after the one-year Indian war known as King Philip's War broke out in 1675 did Church membership grow.(8)
Stoddard and the Lord's Supper
This theological anomaly could not persist indefinitely. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Solomon Stoddard, Jonathan Edwards' maternal grandfather, popularized the reversal of the Calvinist conception of closed communion--Church members only. He adopted open communion in 1677 as a means of bringing into the Church those excluded by the halfway covenant's ban. Several ministers in Connecticut had already pioneered this practice.(9) Because exclusion from the communion table is the meaning of excommunication, open communion undermines Church discipline by removing the Church's primary negative sanction. Stoddard was consistent: he opposed formal Church discipline.(10) He had to; he opposed the very doctrine of a Church covenant.(11) A somewhat less intense opposition to Church discipline subsequently characterized his spiritual heirs: New Light Congregationalists, New Side Presbyterians, and New School Presbyterian evangelists.(12) Where he differed with them was in his rejection of the requirement that members give evidence of an experiential conversion. "No man can look into the heart of another, and see the workings of a gracious spirit."(13)
Those confessors who had been lawfully entitled to the Lord's Supper by Calvin's standards, but not New England's, now gained access, but only at the expense of the judicial character of this sacrament. Stoddard believed that the communion meal could increase a sinner's receptivity toward the gospel. Stoddard's rejection of Calvinism's doctrine of the Church covenant was coupled with a judicial downgrading of the Lord's Supper from a rite of covenant renewal and a mark of full Church membership to a technique of evangelism with no threatened supernatural sanctions attached to it.
The First Great Awakening In the experientialist Puritanism of Cotton Mather, we can see the origins of the split between Confessionalists and experientialists during the First Great Awakening.(14) This familiar Christian dualism had long been present in New England, ready to divide into rival forms of religion.(15) Stoddard became the first American revivalist,(16) but he would not be the last.
The arrival of Dutch Reformed pastor Theodore Frelinghuysen in 1720 in the New Jersey area is generally assumed by historians to mark the beginning of the First Great Awakening. It spread from him to Presbyterian Gilbert Tennent in the mid-1720's. Jonathan Edwards, beginning in 1734, became part of the Awakening.(17) It accelerated rapidly after 1740.(18) Revivals and revivalists fanned out across the land. The theology of revivalism retained the New England Puritan assumption that a unique experience is the mark of salvation and the basis for assessing one's status as a saint. The ecclesiastical implications of this theology now became clear: it divided congregations into saints and non-saints professing a formally sound theology but supposedly without a work of salvation in their lives.
Itinerant preachers--George Whitefield was the most capable--would come into a town, preach in the open air, gain converts out of local congregations, and leave behind divided congregations. In 1741, the Presbyterian Church split into two branches, Old Side (ecclesiastical traditionalists) vs. New Side (revivalists). This breach was not healed until 1758, after the Great Awakening had cooled. Congregationalists also split: Old Lights vs. New Lights. The "old" and "new" terminology continued into the nineteenth century.
But New England's theocratic order had more than one oath-bound covenant. There was also the civil covenant. Fragmenting ecclesiastical structures undermined the Puritan concept of the Trinitarian, oath-bound holy commonwealth, including Christian politics. The older theocratic order of New England began to erode in the face of this new experiential theology.(19)
Old Side, New Side The erosion of the older Puritan Calvinism raised a new question: If not biblical law, then what? Casuistry--the application of biblical moral principles to personal decision-making and ecclesiastical judgments--died out as a discipline after 1700.(20) Newtonianism replaced it as an ideal. Paralleling revivalism was the universal acceptance of Newtonian natural law philosophy in the name of Christianity. This theologically unstable amalgam of the Bible and Arian-Socianian-Unitarianism had been baptized by Cotton Mather as early as 1721 in his book, The Christian Philosopher. The vision of a world under God's law was powerful; that this law-order could be known without any appeal to the Bible seemed even more powerful because it was more universal in its appeal. The Unitarian implications of such a universe were not recognized by the Christians who adopted it. That a Unitarian had discovered it was one of the secrets Newton and his circle kept suppressed. (So was Newton's extensive pursuit of alchemy.)(21) Newtonianism seemed to make possible a common-ground physical science, which hinted of a common-ground political science. The holy commonwealth ideal was replaced in New England within one generation by a secular imitation.
The American Revolution
Two decades after the 1758 reunion, the Presbyterians were overwhelmingly supporters of the American Revolution. An agent of the Earl of Dartmouth, the Lord Privy Seal, informed him that "Presbyterianism is really at the bottom of this whole conspiracy."(22) Horace Walpole put it even more memorably: "Cousin America has eloped with a Presbyterian parson."(23) The Presbyterians became political Whigs, and they remained so after the war ended.(24) The supreme representative of their resistance to England was Rev. John Witherspoon, the president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University), who signed the Declaration of Independence and who served in the Continental Congress.(25)
In 1787-88, American Presbyterians revised the Westminster Confession of Faith in order to make it conform to the political pluralism that also lay behind the U.S. Constitution,(26) which was being ratified at the same time that the presbyteries were voting for the revision of the Confession. The Presbyterians removed that clause in Chapter XXIII:3 which had authorized the civil magistrate to call a synod for advice.(27) This was one of the last traces of the theocratic Calvinism of the Scottish Covenanters--or Calvin's theocratic Calvinism, for that matter. (The final trace was the Confession's assertion that the failure to take an oath to a lawful authority is a sin [XXII:3]. That provision was abandoned in the 1903 revision, and Machen's Orthodox Presbyterian Church did not restore it in 1936.) From that time on, Presbyterians became defenders of a secularized republican order. They believed that God's civil covenant could be made on a common-ground confessional basis, without a mandatory covenantal civil oath, operating under a providential natural law order that did not mandate Trinitarian confession. Obedience to this natural order, they believed, would bring national prosperity.(28) This was the liberal worldview of English Whig politics, and no group in America was more dedicated to defending it than the Presbyterians.(29)
A Shortage of Presbyterian Ministers Let me remind the reader: the word "shortage" should not be used without considering its necessary analytical corollary: "at the price offered."
After the Revolutionary War, the Presbyterians began to lose their direct influence in American society, although they retained special influence among the educated elite. In the seven years before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, the College of New Jersey had sent 75 men into the ministry. Over the next eighteen years, it sent only 39, an average of two men per year. At the same time, the population of the middle and southern states, where Presbyterianism was strongest, rose from 1.75 million in 1783 to 2.75 million in 1790.(30) Two new pastors per year could hardly be expected to keep pace with this population growth, let alone carry the gospel to other regions, especially the Western territories, which were growing even faster. As members moved west or south, older congregations gradually died off.(31) Yet W. W. Sweet began his 1936 collection of Presbyterian Church primary sources with this observation: "No church in America, at the close of the War for Independence, was in a better position for immediate expansion than was the Presbyterian."(32)
What went wrong? From the point of view of Presbyterian tradition, nothing. From the point of view of maintaining the Church's dominant position in the United States, everything. The problem was the Presbyterian tradition of an academically certified ministry. It was restricting the supply of ministers. During the War, there had been a growing demand for Presbyterian ministers. In 1783, the Synod refused to permit the licensing of men who had not received a liberal arts education, which meant the Latin classics. In 1785, the Synod even went so far as to recommend a two-year divinity degree beyond the four-year liberal arts degree. This was postponed for a year and the rejected in 1786.(33) Nevertheless, it indicates what the commitment of the denomination was.
A related problem was that a growing number of graduates of the College of New Jersey ceased to go into the ministry. In the 1770's, nearly half of the college's graduates went into the ministry. It fell to 21 percent during the Revolutionary War and 13 percent in President John Witherspoon's final decade, 1784-94. From 1803 to 1806, it was nine percent.(34) Ashbel Green, who drew up the plan for Princeton Seminary in 1811 and who became the president of the College in 1812, pled before the General Assembly in 1805: "Give us ministers."(35) On the supply side of the economic equation, this shortage was the institutional price of the old Presbyterian tradition of a formally educated, institutionally certified pastorate. This price grew ever-higher over the next century until the Presbyterian seminaries all fell to the humanists and modernists, and Machen was de-frocked. The Northern Presbyterian pastorate was very well educated in 1936; it just wasn't Calvinist.
The Second Great Awakening Even before the Constitution and the revised Westminster Confession were ratified, sparks of the Second Great Awakening had begun.(36) A decade later, it began in earnest. For the next half century or more, revivals again swept the nation.(37) So did the demand for pastors. Calvinist churches could not respond fast enough to this demand. Their educational requirements for ordination to the ministry were too high. Methodists and Baptists did not labor under equally tight constraints. They could more easily meet the new demand. Arminianism became the dominant theology of the nation by 1860.
Arminianism Takes Over
Church historian Winthrop S. Hudson has estimated that in 1776, at least 90 percent of the churches in the colonies were in the Puritan-Calvinist-Reformed tradition.(38) A century later, this was no longer even remotely the case. Edwin Scott Gaustad's detailed study of the geography of American denominationalism reveals just how overwhelming this transition was. In 1780, in the middle of the Revolutionary War, there were slightly under 495 Presbyterian congregations in the United States.(39) In that year, there were 457 Baptist congregations. There were also 749 Congregational churches and 406 Anglican congregations.(40) There were so few Methodist congregations that Gaustad does not list them. The nation was predominately Calvinist in 1780, especially since most Baptists accepted the Philadelphia Confession of Faith, a version of the Westminster Confession. The Philadelphia Association of Baptists had adopted it in 1742.(41) This was the most important Baptist association in the colonies prior to the Revolution.(42) But after the Revolution, more and more Baptists adopted Arminianism.
In 1820, there were 2,700 Baptist congregations, 2,700 Methodist congregations, 1,110 Congregational, 600 Episcopal, and 1,700 Presbyterian.(43) Many of these Presbyterian congregations were Cumberland Presbyterians, which were more Arminian in perspective. Hudson writes that "the Calvinism of the other denominations was becoming so diluted as to be unrecognizable."(44) By 1860, there were 12,150 Baptist congregations, 19,883 Methodist congregations, 6,406 Presbyterian, 2,145 Episcopal, and 2,234 Congregational. To this must be added 2,100 Disciples of Christ congregations, the Arminian Campbellites.(45) The nation had become Arminian. By 1900, there were almost 50,000 Baptist congregations, almost 54,000 Methodist congregations, 15,452 Presbyterian, 5,604 Congregational (now liberal), 6,264 Episcopal (now liberal). There were over 10,298 Disciples congregations: two-thirds of the number of Presbyterians.(46)
As the revival spread, the Methodists expanded in number, while Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Episcopalians for the most part remained on the Eastern seaboard, still hampered by their requirements of formal education and unable to supply the ministers needed to consolidate institutionally the fires of the revivals. Those who did venture west were often sponsored by some missionary society, not a denomination or association.(47) The camp meetings had become almost the exclusive property of the Methodists: 400 in 1811 alone.(48) One Presbyterian missionary in Kentucky put it this way: "I at length became ambitious to find a family whose cabin had not been entered by a Methodist preacher. In several days I traveled from settlement to settlement on my errand of good, but into every hovel I entered I learned that a Methodist missionary had been there before me."(49)
The Roots of Revivalism
The great irony of this development was that the revival that preceded the Great Awakening had broken out in 1787 at two Presbyterian colleges in Virginia, Hampden-Sydney and Washington. These revivals led about three dozen men into the Presbyterian ministry. They fanned out into the Western Carolinas, Kentucky, and Tennessee for a decade.
Some historians date the Second Great Awakening in 1797. No one argues that it began any later than the camp-meeting revival in Logan County, Kentucky, in 1800.(50) It spread eastward and northward, continuing for at least the next four decades. It reached Yale College in 1802, when President Timothy Dwight preached a series of chapel sermons. One-third of the student body professed a conversion. This led the "Old Calvinists" in New England Congregationalism to accept revivalism.(51) In 1801, Presbyterians and Congregationalists agreed to a Plan of Union which made possible cooperative evangelism and church-planting efforts in the West.
The revivalists modeled their ministries after the New Light Congregationalists of the previous century. The shining example was Presbyterian Charles Finney's self-conscious imitation of Jonathan Edwards' preaching techniques. But there was this difference: in the earlier awakening, men waited for the movement of the Holy Spirit. In this one, preachers adopted "means" to move men to make decisions for Christ.(52) The Presbyterian congregations that did participate in these frontier revivals were either Cumberland Presbyterians, whose commitment to Calvinism was at best tangential, or those that were part of the New School wing of the denomination, most notably Finney, who left the denomination in 1836 to join the Congregationalists. The mark of the revivalists was the elevation of experientialism at the expense of Calvinist theology, just as it had been a century before. Robert V. Remini, perhaps the leading historian of the Jacksonian era, has described the excesses: "As the revivals grew in number and intensified in enthusiasm, they frequently ended in orgies of excess, with men and women weeping, tearing their hair, crouching on all fours and barking like dogs to `tree the devil,' and rolling on the ground in a display of repentance."(53) The Great Awakening overwhelmed Calvinism in the churches; the public schools overwhelmed it in the classrooms. The pietist-humanist alliance of the First Great Awakening--revivalism plus Newtonian political pluralism--moved to the next stage. This time, Calvinism survived only inside Presbyterian churches.
Political Repercussions Once again, the debate over experientialism vs. judicial confession split the Presbyterian Church. In 1837, the Old School General Assembly ejected four New School (revivalists) synods. The New School established its own denomination in 1838.
Once again, politics experienced a revolutionary transformation, just as it had a century earlier. The major political result of the Second Great Awakening was the abolitionist movement. Abolitionism had become a judicial matter first among the Quakers, prior to the American Revolution.(54) It spread to the Presbyterian Church in 1815 but was then bottled up, as we shall see: the Bourne case. It spread a decade later to the Congregationalists.(55) But the "field grade officers" of the abolitionist movement after 1830 were mostly New England Unitarians, despite the fact that the troops were mostly northern Trinitarians. Because of the Unitarians' emphasis on political action as the ultimate strategy for abolition, the Civil War transferred moral authority to the Unitarians and to politics. (So did the curricula of the public schools, beginning in Massachusetts: Horace Mann's legacy.)(56)
Each time that experientialism was substituted for confession, especially Calvinist confession, as the basis of Church membership, the process of secularization increased. Authority moved, step by step, from Calvinism to Arminianism to Unitarianism to secularism. In no denomination was this transformation more visible than the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A.
Conclusion Hodge's History was not merely a work of history; it was also a work of contemporary polemics. He devoted hundreds of pages to the Old Side-New Side controversy. He had nothing good to say about the New Side's anti-creedalism and its anti-Church authority outlook and actions, although he did acknowledge that the doctrinal profession of the leaders of the New Side was orthodox.(57) But he argued that the result of the revival was the decline of religion after the initial enthusiasm in the early 1740's, according to Jonathan Edwards and other pastors who had been participants.(58) False doctrines abounded.(59) The revival was not all evil, Hodge concluded, but many serious evils accompanied it.(60)
Hodge wrote this book during the Second Great Awakening. Like his Old Side forefathers and Old School brethren, he defended the lawful authority of the courts of the Presbyterian Church to exercise control over both the theological message and the mode of preaching by its ordained officers. The Old School was more "high Church" than "low Church"(61)--liturgically more formal with respect to the boundaries of lawful worship. Formal worship must be conducted within narrow judicial boundaries, the Old School believed, and these boundaries are overwhelmingly Confessional. The subscription statement to the Westminster standards required by faculty members at Princeton Seminary was much more rigorous than the vow taken by ministers.(62) The New School, in contrast, emphasized the importance of the results of worship--the conversion of sinners--even, if necessary (and it usually seemed necessary to their most prominent spokesmen), at the expense of both Confessional rigor and the Church's judicial authority. The Old School emphasized the sovereignty of God and the theocentric nature of worship: "God's work done in God's way for the glory of God." The New School emphasized the salvation of men as the primary goal of the Church's Great Commission (Matt. 28:18-20).
Underlying this dispute was a disagreement over method: the glorification of God primarily through adherence to forms--creedal confession and Church authority--vs. the glorification of God primarily through the harvesting of souls, meaning men's experience and their profession of simple faith in the saving work of Christ. In the New School, experientialism was emphasized above formal worship, good works above precise confession. The New School prevailed; the Old School united with the New School on its terms in 1869. This was a surrender.
The long-term victors were the modernists. The modernists within the Presbyterian Church after 1870 initially emphasized the New School's downgrading of institutional authority, and they used the language of personalism (feeling) in contrast to impersonalism (government). In 1931, they switched. They proposed a new Form of Government to tighten institutional control, which was ratified in 1934. Modernists restructured key features of the New School and Old School traditions, changing them radically. The personalism of the New School became a very different kind of personalism in modernism: the personalism of Confessional indeterminacy. The formalism of the Old School became a very different kind of formalism in modernism after 1930: the formalism of centralized authority.
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Footnotes:
1. Hodge, A Constitutional History of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, [1839] 1851), I:1.
2. Iain Murray, The Puritan Hope: A Study in Revival and the Interpretation of Prophecy (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1971), p. 107. See also Banner of Truth (June 1962), pp. 1-32.
3. Frederick Maurice, The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1884), I:2.
4. Ibid., I:3. The primary source document of this historic debate is An Authentic Account of the Several Things Done and Agreed Upon by the Dissenting Ministers Lately Assembled at Salters' Hall (1719).
5. Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (New York: New York University Press, 1963), pp. 99-105.
6. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), I:IV:8. Ford Lewis Battles, translator (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), II:1022-23.
7. "Result of the Synod of 1662," The Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism, edited by Williston Walker (New York: United Church Press, [1893] 1960), p. 328.
8. Robert G. Pope, "New England versus the New England Mind: The Myth of Declension," in Puritan New England: Essays on Religion, Society, and Culture, edited by Alden T. Vaughan and Francis J. Bremer (New York: St. Martin's, 1977), ch. 18.
9. Robert G. Pope, The Half-Way Covenant (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1969), ch. 4.
10. Paul R. Lucas writes: "Stoddard's complaint went far beyond New England Congregationalism to the whole Protestant Reformation, in which New England represented but one isolated outpost. As he often wrote, he was a soul-winner, and he rejected not only New England's, but also the Reformed tradition's, seventeenth-century preoccupation with church discipline. That was Stoddard's significance for his time, a fact overlooked by most modern scholars." Paul R. Lucas, "`An Appeal to the Learned': The Mind of Solomon Stoddard," in Puritan New England, pp. 326-27.
11. Stoddard, The Doctrine of Instituted Churches Explained and Proved from the Word of God (1700), p. 8.
12. These distinctions will become more clear later in this book. When you read "New," think "experiential."
13. Stoddard, The Falseness of the Hopes of Many Professors (1708), p. 11.
14. Richard F. Lovelace, The American Pietism of Cotton Mather: Origins of American Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Christian University Press, 1979).
15. James W. Jones, The Shattered Synthesis: New England Puritanism Before the Great Awakening (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1973).
16. Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 99-101.
17. H. Shelton Smith, Robert T. Handy, and Lefferts A. Loetscher, eds., American Christianity: An Historical Interpretation With Representative Documents, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1960), I:311-12.
18. Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1966), Part 1; Heimert and Perry Miller, eds., The Great Awakening: Documents Illustrating the Crisis and Its Consequences (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967); Leonard J. Trinterud, The Forming of An American Tradition: A Re-examination of COLONIAL PRESBYTERIANISM (New York: Books for Libraries, [1949] 1978).
19. Richard L. Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 (New York: Norton, [1967] 1970), Part 4.
20. 18. Thomas Wood, English Casuistical Divinity During the Seventeenth Century (London: S.P.C.K., 1952), pp. 32-36.
21. Betty J. T. Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy; Or, "The Hunting of the Green Lyon" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
22. Cited in Trinterud, American Tradition, p. 250.
23. Cited in Martha L. Stohlman, John Witherspoon: Parson, Politician, Patriot (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1976), p. 15. For a case study, see John Murray Smoot, Presbyterianism in Revolutionary Pennsylvania: Constitution and Freedom (Ph.D. dissertation, St. Mary's Seminary and University, 1982).
24. William Livingston, a Presbyterian, was the governor of New Jersey in 1790, when he observed that the American clergy were "almost all universally good Whigs." Livingston, "Observations on the Support of the Clergy," American Museum (1790), p. 254; cited in Heimert, Religion and the American Mind, p. 1. He had been known as "the American Whig" as early as 1768. See Edwin S. Gaustad, A Documentary History of Religion in America to the Civil War (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1982), pp. 247-48.
25. Varnum Lansing Collins, President Witherspoon: A Biography, 2 vols. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1925), I, ch. 6; II, ch. 1. Henry W. Coray, "John Witherspoon," Heroic Colonial Christians, edited by Russell T. Hitt (Philadelphia: Lippencott, 1966).
26. Article VI, Section III makes illegal any religious test to hold Federal Office, which by 1961 had been extended down to the lowest civil office in America: notary public. The Supreme Court case was Torcaso v. Watkins.
27. Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), pp. 543-50; Edwin S. Gaustad, Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and the New Nation (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), p. 113.
28. Fred J. Hood, Presbyterianism and the New American Nation, 1783-1826: A Case Study of Religion and National Life (Ph.D. Dissertation, Princeton University, 1968), ch. 2.
29. The American Whig Party was far less ideological and far more pragmatic than the Whig movement in England.
30. Trinterud, American Tradition, p. 265.
31. Ibid., p. 266.
32. William Warren Sweet, Religion on the American Frontier, 1783-1840, vol. II, The Presbyterians (New York: Cooper Square, [1936] 1964), p. 3.
33. Ibid., pp. 8-9.
34. Mark A. Noll, Princeton and the Republic, 1768-1822 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 172.
35. Ibid., p. 170.
36. The key figure was a New School Presbyterian minister, James McGready, heir of the New Side tradition. See John B. Boles, The Great Revival, 1787-1805: The Origins of the Southern Evangelical Mind (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1972), ch. 4; Ernest Trice Thompson, Presbyterians in the South, 3 vols. (Richmond, Virginia: John Knox Press, 1973), I:130-34.
37. Whitney R. Cross, The Burned-over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800-1850 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, [1950] 1965); Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978); Anne C. Loveland, Southern Evangelicals and the Social Order, 1800-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980); Donald G. Mathews, "The Second Great Awakening as an Organizing Process, 1780-1830," American Quarterly, 21 (1969), pp. 23-43. The second wave of revivals, 1840-58, along with the rise of perfectionism, can be discussed as an extension of this awakening. See Timothy L. Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform: American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War (Gloucester, Massachusetts: Peter Smith, [1957] 1976).
38. Winthrop S. Hudson, The Great Tradition of the American Churches (New York: Harper & Bros., 1953), p. 47.
39. Edwin Scott Gaustad, Historical Atlas of Religion in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 4. See also Figure 17, p. 21.
40. Ibid.
41. Dictionary of Christianity in America, edited by Daniel G. Reid (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1990), p. 895.
42. Edwin Scott Gaustad, A Religious History of America (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 97.
43. Gaustad, Atlas, p. 43, Figure 31.
44. Winthrop S. Hudson, Religion in America (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1965), p. 179.
45. Gaustad, Atlas, p. 43, Figure 32.
46. Ibid., p. 44, Figure 33.
47. Hudson, Religion in America, pp. 146-50.
48. Ibid., p. 140.
49. Ibid., p. 147.
50. Ibid., p. 135. Cf. pp. 137-40.
51. Ibid., pp. 135-36.
52. Ibid., p. 136.
53. Robert V. Remini, "A Prophet Without Honor, a Review of The Kingdom of Matthias, by Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilenz," Atlantic Monthly (Feb. 1995), p. 108.
54. David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 107-108.
55. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery (Cleveland, Ohio: Case Western, 1969).
56. Horace Mann on the Crisis of Education, edited by Louis Filler (Yellow Springs, Ohio: Antioch Press, 1965), parts II, III. Cf. R. J. Rushdoony, The Messianic Character of American Education: Studies in the History of the Philosophy of Education (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1963), ch. 3.
57. Hodge, Constitutional History, II:47.
58. Ibid., II:54-56.
59. Ibid., II:56-58.
60. Ibid., II:100-101.
61. Lefferts A. Loetscher makes the same distinction in The Broadening Church: a study of theological issues in the presbyterian church since 1869 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1954), p. 1. It was made long before Loetscher by the New School, which dismissed the Old School as "the High Church Party." A History of the Division of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America by a Committee of the Synod of New York and New Jersey (New York: Dodd, 1852), p. 80. It was revived by a modernist defender of Charles Briggs and Union Theological Seminary: G. L. Prentiss, The Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York: Its Design and another Decade of its History (Asbury Park, New Jersey: Pennypacker, 1899), p. 214. This distinction undergirds the study by Ki-Hong Kim, Presbyterian Conflict in the Early Twentieth Century: Ecclesiology in the Princeton Tradition and the Emergence of Presbyterian Fundamentalism (Ph.D. dissertation, Drew University, 1983). The premier statement of the Old School's view of the Church is Charles Hodge, Discussions on Church Polity, from the contributions to the "Princeton Review" (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1878), published shortly after his death.
62. Princeton's subscription statement is reprinted in Edwin H. Rian, The Presbyterian Conflict (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1940), pp. 61-62.