1842.]

Opinion of various Sects.

7

organ and a choir of singers, went all the afternoon, except sermontime. And the assembly chanted most sweetly and exquisitely. Here is every thing which can lay hold of the eye, ear, and imagination. Every thing which can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant. I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell." Vol. i., p. 35.*

This may seem very absurd and exaggerated at this time of day, when good Protestants can sometimes go to chapel without regarding the ceremonial ("entertainment," Mr. Adams calls it) as "most awful and affecting," but it was not unnatural that a New England Puritan should feel and write thus. Let any Protestant of our times, however free from prejudice, visit Rome, or, take a stronger case, visit Spanish America, and witness a religious festival there, such as St. Antony's day, when the dogs, and horses, and geese, and cows, and children, are blessed and promised a long life; or that of the Mexican patron saint, San Felipe, canonized, we believe, by act of congress before the papal recognition, and he will find himself not a whit less disturbed than was Mr. Adams when, with his puritan opinions about him, he visited "the grand-mother church" in Philadelphia. The truth is, and it is to the fact that we point attention now, Mr. Adams was then a sturdy rebel at every thing like ceremony and ecclesiastical authority, and as very a Roundhead as ever 1640 saw, for, in the same letter from which we have just made an extract, he thus (we beg pardon for using a prostituted phrase) "defines his position:"

"This day I went to Dr. Allison's meeting in the forenoon and heard the Doctor; a good discourse upon the Lord's Supper. This is a Presbyterian meeting. I confess I am not fond of the Presbyterian meetings in this town. I had rather go to Church. We have better sermons, better prayers, better music, and genteeler company. And, I must confess, that the Episcopal Church is quite as agreeable to my taste as the Presbyterian. They are both slaves to the domination of the priesthood. I like the Congregational way best; next to that, the Independent."

* Mr. Adams seems to have been much impressed with the spectacle of this day, for we find him writing to Mr. Tudor: "Mr. Revere will give you all the news. I have this day been to a Romish chapel. My imagination is so full of holy water, crossings, bowings and genuflexions, images, paintings, crucifixes, velvet, gold, but above all, music; I am amazed that Luther and Calvin were ever able to break the charm and dissolve the spell."-Mass. Hist. Coll., second series, vol. viii., 313.

Yet, with all this strong feeling or prejudice, not confined to his breast, but characteristic of his New England countrymen generally, and perhaps, a large majority of the public men of the colonies, how instructive a lesson of tolerant practice do we find in their acts and public conduct! Did any one of the great conclave which met in Philadelphia in 1774, ever give utterance there to a thought inconsistent with the true spirit of Christian charity, or proclaim opinions kindred to those which are now habitually asserted? Do we find any manifestation of that narrow sectarianism which, fostered by artful and hot-headed men of these times of arrogant self-sufficiency, makes Churchman look scornfully on Dissenter, and forbids the Roman Catholic school-boy from sitting at the same form with his Protestant fellow? Is there any authority in the politics of those times for the new party divisions with which we are now threatened? Is there not rather an emphatic dissuasive from all such principles of action, in the conduct and example of the public men of the revolution?

The strong and extreme puritanism of Mr. Adams was, as we have said, not peculiar to him. His New England colleagues no doubt felt as he did, yet when the first national council met, at the outbreak of the Revolution, the motion for opening its deliberations with prayer, made by Mr. Cushing, was opposed by Mr. Rutledge and Mr. Jay on the ground that offence might be given to sectarian feeling in the choice of the clergyman, and it was Samuel Adams-who certainly, unless tradition has strangely misdescribed him, was quite as much of a Puritan as his namesake-that nominated an Episcopal clergyman to officiate " in full pontificals," and to read an appointed service from the liturgy. John Adams's narrative of this, in a letter to his wife, of the eighteenth September, 1774, is curiously characteristic:

"When the congress met, Mr. Cushing made a motion that it should be opened with prayer. It was opposed by Mr. Jay of New York, and Mr. Rutledge of South Carolina, because we were so divided in religious sentiments, some Episcopalians, some Quakers, some Anabaptists, some Presbyterians, and some Congregationalists, that we could not join in the same act of worship. Mr. Samuel Adams arose and said, 'that he was no bigot, and could hear a prayer from a gentleman of piety and virtue who was at the same time a friend to his country. He was a stranger in Philadelphia, but had heard that Mr. Duchè (Dushay they pronounce it)

1842.]

Opening of the Congress of 1774.

9

deserved that character, and therefore he moved that Mr. Duchè, an Episcopal clergyman, might be desired to read prayers to the Congress to-morrow morning.' The motion was seconded, and passed in the affirmative. Mr. Randolph, our president, waited on Mr. Duchè, and received for answer, that if his health would permit he certainly would. Accordingly, next morning he appeared with his clerk, and in his pontificals, and read several prayers in the established form, and then read the collect for the seventh day of September, which was the thirty-fifth psalm. You must remember, this was the next morning after we had heard the horrible rumor of the cannonade of Boston. It seemed as if heaven had ordained that psalm to be read on that morning.

"After this, Mr. Duchè, unexpectedly to every body, struck out into an extemporary prayer which filled the bosom of every man present. I must confess I never heard a better prayer, or one so well pronounced. Episcopalian as he is, Dr. Cooper himself never prayed with such fervor, such ardor, such correctness and pathos, and in language so elegant and sublime, for America, for congress, for the province of Massachusetts Bay, and especially the town of Boston. It has had an excellent effect upon every body here. I must beg you to read that psalm. If there is any faith in the sortes Virgiliane, or sortes Homerica, or especially the sortes Biblica, it would be thought providential.

"It will amuse your friends to read this letter, and the thirty-fifth psalm to them. Read it to your father and Mr. Wibird. I wonder what our Braintree churchmen would think of this. Mr. Duchè is one of the most ingenious men, and best characters, and greatest orators in the Episcopal order on this continent, yet a zealous friend of liberty and his country."- Vol. i., pp. 23, 24.

We are irresistibly tempted to step aside from the course of observation we were pursuing, and for an instant to pause on the scene here described. Let those who seek to realize it open their Bible or Prayer-book, and with associations thus aroused read the magnificent strains which then were uttered. There was poetry in the coincidence of the service to the day. It was a scene most worthy of the painter's art- quite as worthy of it as the more deliberate council which decreed Independence. It was in Carpenter's Hall in Philadelphia, a building which still survives in its original condition, though now sacrilegiously converted, we believe, into an auction mart for the sale of chairs and tables, that the forty-four individuals met to whom this service was read. It was an extra session of Congress, convoked by the necessities of impending revolution, and characterized by dignity and decorum

worthy of emulation in more peaceful times. There was no gorgeous tapestry on those rude walls, rich with ancestral deeds to which its orators could appeal. There was no pride of state, no pomp or ceremony, no nobles of high lineage, but there was beyond those walls a people aroused by a quick sense of injury not easily expiated, and there were within, the peers of an humbler and purer realm — American gentlemen, farmers, and lawyers, and divines, who, coming from the extremes of the continent to "a far country,"* had met to deliberate on common danger and common redress. The minister of God was there in his sacred garb. He prayed anxiously and fervently. There were around him those whom the God of righteous council, and of righteous battles, was to direct and guide. Washington was kneeling there, and Henry, and Randolph, and Rutledge, and Lee, and Jay, and by their side there stood, their hearts, if not their persons bowed in reverence, the Puritan patriots of New England, men who at that moment had reason to believe that the foot of an armed soldiery was upon their native soil, and fire and rapine were wasting their humble households. "It was believed that Boston had been bombarded and destroyed." They prayed" for America, for the Congress, for the province of Massachusetts Bay, and especially for the town of Boston ;" and who can realize the emotions which must have been awakened, when, with feelings thus excited by solicitude and justified resentment-fear for their distant, helpless families resentment at the ungrateful tyranny of the mother country, stimulated by the artifices of timid men in the colonies, and a maturing resolution that by arms alone could injury be redressed, the sonorous voice of the preacher unexpectedly uttered the burning words of the psalmist ?"Plead thou my cause, O Lord, with them that strive with me; and fight thou against them that fight against me. Lay hand upon the shield and buckler: and stand up to help me. Bring forth the spear, and stop the way against them that persecute me: say unto my soul, I am thy salvation. Let them be confounded and put to shame that seek after my soul let them be turned back and brought to confusion that imagine mischief for me. Let them be as dust before the wind, and the angel of the Lord scattering them. Let their way be dark and slippery, and let the angel of the Lord per

So Mrs. Adams, writing from Braintree, calls Pennsylvania. (Vol. i., p. 45.)

1842.]

Practical Religious Toleration.

11

secute them. Awake and stand up to judge my quarrel: avenge thou my cause, my God and my Lord!"

It is, we repeat, a scene worthy of illustration by poet and painter too. "It was enough," says Mr. Adams, " to melt a heart of stone. I saw the tears gush into the eyes of the old, grave, pacific Quakers of Philadelphia."

But to return. The tone of Mr. Adams's letter, in which he describes Mr. Duche's officiating as chaplain to Congress, shows not only his strong prejudices against clergymen of the Church of England, but the readiness with which he admitted they were prejudices that should not influence public conduct. He seems to think the discovery will surprise the elders of the Braintree meeting-house as much as it had surprised him. How much greater, we may remark in passing, would have been their surprise, and perhaps their scandal, if they could have realized, what is well known to every student of American ecclesiastical history, that at no very remote period, Mr. Adams was strenuously active in promoting the consecration of Dr. White and Dr. Prevost, as bishops for America, by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and that in the latter part of his life he should use this emphatic language in a letter to the venerable Bishop of Pennsylvania: "There is no part of my life on which I look back and reflect with more satisfaction, than the part I took, bold and hazardous as it was to me and mine, in the introduction of Episcopacy into America."*

Nor was this practical toleration in matters of public conduct this entire disregard of sectarian differences, so far as they could influence public duties and public trusts, confined to impartiality among Protestant denominations. We have seen Mr. Adams's strong repugnance to the Church of Rome. It was a repugnance, as we have said, most natural to the times and the country. Yet in the next Congress, the Congress which decreed Independence, he found himself associated in intimate sympathy and connection with a Roman Catholic patriot, as true as himself to the cause of civil liberty and the rights of man, and voted for the employment by Congress of a Jesuit from St. Omers as one of its representatives on a most delicate mission. We need not say that we refer to Charles Carroll of Carrollton, and to the association with him, Dr. Franklin and Judge Chase, on the mission

Letter of twenty-ninth October, 1814, published in Dr. Wilson's Memoir of Bishop White.