24
January 1722 A.D. Edward
Wigglesworth—Appointed Thomas Hollis Chair of Divinity, Harvard College; Opponent of George Whitefield’s Enthusiasms
& Low Itinerancy
No
author. “Charles Chauncey; Edward Wigglesworth.” The
Cambridge History of English and American Literature. N.d. http://www.bartleby.com/225/0503.html. Accessed 10 Jul 2014.
The
Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
VOLUME XV. Colonial and Revolutionary Literature; Early National Literature, Part I.
V. Philosophers and Divines, 1720–1789.
§ 3. Charles Chauncy; Edward Wigglesworth.
VOLUME XV. Colonial and Revolutionary Literature; Early National Literature, Part I.
V. Philosophers and Divines, 1720–1789.
§ 3. Charles Chauncy; Edward Wigglesworth.
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Whitefield decidedly made a tactical blunder when he
brought railing accusations against divines like Charles Chauncy (1705–1787),
pastor of the First Church in Boston, and Edward Wigglesworth (1693–1765),
professor of divinity in Harvard College. On his first visit to the colonies,
Whitefield had made some unhappy remarks about the provincial universities as
“abodes of darkness, a darkness which could be felt,” and about the
collegians at Cambridge as “close Pharisees, resting on head knowledge.” On
his second visit, he added insult to injury by saying that on account of
these “unguarded expressions” a few “mistaken, misinformed, good old men were
publishing half-penny testimonials against the Lord’s Anointed.”
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The reference here is, among others, to
Wigglesworth. The latter, in his reply, does not deign to defend the college
against the charge of being a seminary of paganism, but proceeds to attack
its defamer: first, because of his manners, next, because of his ways of
making money, and lastly, because of the evil fruits of enthusiasm. He grants
that an itinerant, who frequently moves from place to place, may have a
considerable use in awakening his hearers from a dead and carnal frame. But
while such an exhorter may have a manner which is very taking with the
people, and a power to raise them to any degree of warmth he pleases, yet in
thrusting himself into towns and parishes he destroys peace and order,
extorts money from the people, and arouses that pernicious thing—enthusiasm.
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This attack was to be expected. The New
England clergy, as chosen members of a close corporation, abhorred the
disturbers of their professional etiqutte and were alarmed at poachers upon
their clerical preserves. It not only threatened their social pedestals but
it touched their pockets to have these “new lights” taking the people from
their work and business and leading them to despise their own ministers.
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This aspect of the Whitefield controversy
shows that the causes of the opposition were largely social and economic, the
same causes which worked—though in the other direction—in the opposition to
the establishment of English episcopacy in the land. When the New England
fathers had both “pence and power,” as Tom Paine would say, it was natural
that they should not relish the loss of either, at the expense of high
churchmen or low itinerants. But a cause deeper than the economic lay in this
outraging of the spirit of the times. This was the age of reason, and the
leaders of church and college prided themselves on being of a cool and
logical temperament. Hence Wigglesworth’s most serious charge against
Whitefield is that of irrationality. Enthusiasm, he explains, is a charge of
a higher nature than perhaps people are generally aware of. The nature of
enthusiasm is to make a man imagine that almost any thought which bears
strongly upon his mind is from the Spirit of God, when at the same time he
has no proof that it is. In short, to be of an enthusiastic turn is no such
innocent weakness as people imagine.
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This was Wigglesworth’s caveat to the public.
Whitefield might have made it out a mere halfpenny testimonial had it not
been succeeded by the formidable work of Charles Chauncy. This was the volume
entitled Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England
(1743). That state, in the eyes of the pastor of the First Church in Boston,
was, in one word, bad. The preaching of “disorderly walkers,” especially
their well advertised preaching in other men’s parishes, it was argued, would
lead, should it become the general practice, to the entire dissolution of our
church state. But besides the evil effect upon the body politic, there was
that upon the human body. With remarkable acumen, Chauncy points out the
abnormalities in the practices of revivalism. The new lights, he recounts,
lay very much stress on the “extraordinaries,” such as agitations, outcries,
swoonings, as though they were some marks of a just conviction of sin. This
is their inference, but the real fact is that the influence of awful words
and fearful gestures is no other than “a mechanical impression on animal
nature.” And the same natural explanation holds for the joy of the new
lights. It may have its rise in the animal nature, for some have made it
evident, by their after lives, that their joy was only a sudden flash, a
spark of their own kindling. And when this is expressed among some sorts of
people by singing through the streets and in ferryboats, from whatever cause
it sprang it is certainly one of the most incongruous ways of expressing
religious joy.
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It must not be inferred from these strictures
that Chauncy was a sour Puritan, averse to people’s happiness. The contrary
was the truth. His objections lay in the superficial and ephemeral character
of the religious emotions among the new lights. Their joy was evidently but
the reaction of relief from the fearsome tenets of their preachers. The
doctrines of total depravity and eternal damnation struck terror into the
heart of the sinner. Now it was by a sort of incantation, by a promise of
immediate assurance of salvation, that the itinerant removed this terror. It
was, then, in a skilful way that Chauncy met such practices. The places where
the revivalists had been at work were called the burnt-over districts. To
prevent future conflagrations it was then necessary to start a back-fire.
This Chauncy did by removing the unreasoning terror of the old doctrines. But
it was necessary to do more. In place of the old faith, which, though a
painful thing to hold, men were loath to abandon, there must be brought a new
and emollient doctrine. New England’s nervous diathesis called for something
to soothe the system. This came to be found in the exchange of pessimism for
optimism; in the replacing of a dread judge by a benevolent deity, belief in
whom would give a steady and lasting satisfaction. By 1784 Chauncy, as
opposer of the new lights, had learned his lesson. The heart must be appealed
to as well as the head. So his argument is built up from below, benevolence
being first defined as “that quality, in the human mind, without which we
could not be the objects of another’s esteem.”
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With this hint taken from the learned English
divine, Samuel Clarke, his American disciple shows how the old doctrines will
dissolve of themselves. Out of the five points of Calvinism two were
obviously inconsistent with benevolence. One of these was irresistible grace,
as the correlate of irresistible power; the other was eternal damnation, as
the correlate of total depravity. One reason, therefore, why Chauncy attacked
the ranters was that they were reactionaries. But the cruel old penal view
was bound to pass away of itself. Men’s minds had entered the deistic drift.
The arguments of rationality became the telling arguments.
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This sort of argumentation reminds one of the
discussion of Square and Thwackum on the eternal fitness of things. But with
the exception of an occasional hack-writer like Thomas Paine, it was the
method generally employed by scholars of the upper class. The method betrays
a certain weakness in the middle of Chauncy’s work, since it must have gone
over the heads of men of the class reached by Whitefield, son of the innkeeper,
or by Tennant, promoter of log-cabin learning.
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Such an optimistic purview, embracing earth,
sun, and moon, dry land and water, became stale, flat and unprofitable. The
argument that things as they are, including disease and death, disclose no
defect of benevolence in the deity, is not helped by the disclaimer that we
“know not the intire plan of heaven and are able to see but a little way into
the design of the Deity.” This was naught but the old argument of a learned
ignorance, much used by the upholders of the scheme of inscrutable decrees.
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The strong part of Chauncy’s work lies in his
attack upon absolute causation. The net of necessity in which the framer of
the Berkshire divinity was caught, was escaped by Chauncy through an appeal
to common sense.
And so would it be with that other prop of Puritanism,
the belief in divine intervention.
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In a life that nearly spanned the eighteenth
century, Chauncy affords an excellent example of the double reaction of the
age of reason against the doctrines of irrationalism. His works had these two
merits; they undermined the harsh doctrines of Calvinism which the new lights
had utilized to strike terror into the hearts of the unthinking; and they
afforded a substitute for sentimentalism, for, in place of violent joy, one
could gain a placid contentment in the ways and works of Providence.
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