A History of the Episcopal Church (Third Revised Edition). Robert W. Prichard

Fig. 5 The Bermuda Group, John Smibert’s 1729 portrait of George (right) and Anne (seated with child), Berkeley, and other planners of the expedition that eventually reached Rhode Island.

Bray’s major contribution, however, was not pastoral; it was organizational and educational. Bray had come to the attention of Bishop Compton because of his intellectual ability. He had been a scholarship student at Oxford whose studies had advanced so quickly that he had graduated before the canonical age for ordination. He had written a popular set of Catechetical Lectures that was already in print in 1697. Once appointed by Compton, he immediately recognized the need for educational materials in the colonies. In 1698, he organized the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), to which Princess Anne contributed forty-four pounds and Bishop Burnet fifty, to purchase books for colonial libraries.²⁵ In keeping with the Enlightenment marriage of science and religion, the titles included both works in theology and the natural sciences. Bray hoped that these SPCK libraries, which would eventually number almost forty, would be both tools for parish clergy and effective evangelical materials. Dissenters or non-Christians who read the books would learn of the reasonableness of the Church of England.

Bray’s inability to gain a stipend from the Maryland legislature convinced him that a missionary organization to support colonial clergy was also needed. He began to campaign for such a body. His A General View of the English Colonies in America with Respect to Religion, written before his visit to Maryland (1698), had detailed the woeful condition of the Church of England in North America. In all of New England, there was only one Church of England parish, the newly founded King’s Chapel. Long Island had thirteen dissenting churches but none for the Church of England. East New Jersey had no Church of England parish; and Pennsylvania had only one. The Carolinas boasted only one church in Charleston. The situation was better in Bermuda (three ministers in nine parishes), Jamaica (eight ministers in fifteen parishes), Barbados (fourteen ministers in fourteen parishes), Maryland (sixteen ministers in thirty parishes), and Virginia (thirty ministers in fifty parishes), though Bray had some criticism for the church in those areas as wel1.²⁶ Bray’s account caught the interest of his fellow members of the Church of England, and in 1701 he and others secured a charter from William III to form the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in foreign parts (SPG).²⁷

The SPG’s first missionary was an ex-Quaker named George Keith (1638–1716). While on his voyage to America, Keith convinced ship’s chaplain John Talbot (1645–1727) to join him. In 1702 the two began a grand tour of the colonies, traveling more than eight hundred miles from Maine to the Carolinas. Keith was a Scot who had taught at a Friend’s school in Philadelphia before his conversion to the Church England. He brought the certainty of a new convert and a willingness to engage in controversy that would mark many of the SPG missionaries who would venture into dissenting strongholds. In Boston, he criticized the graduates of Harvard University for defending the doctrine of predestination and engaged in a pamphlet war with Congregational patriarch Increase Mather (1639–1723).²⁸

Keith and Talbot’s journey confirmed the information in Bray’s General View. The Church of England was almost unknown in the middle colonies, New England, and the Carolinas. The SPG would send the great preponderance of its missionaries to these areas, though it sent a few to Virginia and Maryland. In the years between 1701 and the American Revolution, the SPG would help support two persons in Virginia, five in Maryland, thirteen in Georgia, thirty-three in North Carolina, forty-four in New Jersey, forty-seven in Pennsylvania, fifty-four in South Carolina, fifty-eight in New York, and eighty-four in New England. Missionaries went both to the English colonists and to blacks, Indians, and immigrants from other European nations. The society’s records indicate that the missionaries ministered in six European and fourteen Indian languages.²⁹ Most, but not all, of the SPG’s support went to white male clergy. Exceptions to the rule included society support for Harry and Andrew, black evangelists in midcentury South Carolina.³⁰

In addition to their efforts in the colonies that would later become the United States, SPG missionaries also went to other British holdings in the Western Hemisphere: Newfoundland (1703), Jamaica (1710), Barbados (1712), Nova Scotia (1728), the Bahamas (1733), and Honduras (1733). In the second half of the eighteenth century, the SPG would also begin work in Africa and the Pacific.³¹

The society’s instructions to the early missionaries conveyed the reasonable tone of an enlightened Protestantism. “Missionaries to heathens and infidels” were to begin their instruction “with the principles of natural Religion, appealing to their Reason and conscience; and thence proceed to shew them the Necessity of Revelation, and Certainty of that contained in the Holy Scripture, by plain and most obvious Arguments.”³² SPG missionaries were to employ both natural reason and revelation in order to bring others to the Christian faith.

Logical arguments were not, however, the only tools that members of Church of England used to portray the alliance of reason and revelation. Even the design of their churches bore witness to the relationship. In the first half of the eighteenth century, many of the buildings used by the colonial Church of England had two foci—the pulpit and lectern on one wall and the altar on another—with two entrances and box pews that allowed facing in either direction.³³ (Most other Protestants met in rectangular meetinghouses with the entrance on one of the long walls.) By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, James Gibbs (1682–1754) was introducing a new design for church buildings in England. By replacing free-standing bell towers with steeples that rose from roof tops, Gibbs was able to construct churches with unobstructed facades. To these he introduced columns reminiscent of classical Roman and Greek designs. The resultant pattern was a marriage of Christianity and classical thought, the architectural incarnation of the hopes of Christians of the Moderate Enlightenment. Members of the Church of England introduced the design in the colonies and other denominations soon imitated it.³⁴

Fig. 6 St. Michael’s Church, Charleston, South Carolina, 1752–58

Not all the colonists were receptive, however, to the influence of the SPG missionaries. The society recognized this fact, warning missionaries that they would need to defend the distinctive principles of the Church of England against “the attempts of such Gainsayers as are mixt among them.”³⁵ The major point of controversy, one about which George Keith and Increase Mather were already debating in 1702, was the episcopacy. SPG missionaries defended the institution from the criticism of Protestants of denominations that had rejected episcopal succession. George Keith and others sent to America relied upon a well-laid argument that Thomas Bray had already advanced in his Catechetical Lectures. English Protestants of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries explained the gospel by comparing it to an Old Testament covenant, a contract in which both God and the believer agreed to fulfill certain responsibilities. In the new covenant of the gospel, God promised forgiveness of sin and everlasting life, and the believer promised repentance and faith in Christ. Bray was one of a number of post-Restoration