“Alexander Blaikie’s Presbyterianism in New England:

Some Nineteenth Century Perspectives on the Decline of the

Reformed Faith in New England”

Presented to the Southern New England Reformed Fellowship

April 20, 1989

Appeared subsequently in the New England Reformed Journal,

Issue 2 [Winter 1997], pages 9 - 20

 

            A book about Presbyterianism in New England reminds one of a remark by Samuel Johnson.  When told that a man who had a ruinously unhappy marriage was about to remarry after his first wife had died, Johnson came up with one of his famous one-liners.  “That represents the triumph of hope over experience.”

 

            It is now 112 years since Alexander Blaikie’s A History of Presbyterianism in New England appeared, printed privately on a Boston press at the expense of the author.  No one has since provided an update. In the intervening years New England Presbyterianism, as a denominational identity, has sunk into even further numerical decline.  Questions abound among those of Presbyterian persuasion in the six states¹: why is it that Presbyterianism has had such difficulties here?  Can it all be blamed on the agreement with the Congregationalists in 1801 that Presbyterians would limit themselves to the area west of the Hudson?  Or is there something basically inhospitable to Presbyterianism in the stony soil of Pilgrims and the Puritans? 

 

            The discussion is more than simply of denominational interest, or of concern to those in New England who call themselves Presbyterian.  There are wider issues that relate to all of us who would identify ourselves as Reformed.  Is it simply resistance to Presbyterianism or is there a wider reluctance for New England to be at all responsive to Reformed life and witness?  (Not, one has to admit, that Presbyterianism necessarily or always reflects Reformed principles.)  In 1987 Iain Murray’s Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography has raised continuing and fascinating questions about the decline of an indigenous New England Reformed life and practice following Edwards’ death in 1755.

           

            Blaikie’s A History of Presbyterianism in New England appears both timely and pertinent to such a discussion.  Not only does his book remain, after 112 years, the only text on the subject.  It has become a virtual classic on the material presented.  Alexander Blaikie, pastor of the First United Presbyterian Church of Boston from 1846 to 1881, lived through many of the events he describes in his book. But his was more than an academic interest in the Reformed faith in New England. He himself individualized and personalized the difficulties a Reformed pastor has in working in the rocky soil of New England. With a keen and active intelligence that throughout his years in Boston wrestled with these very issues, he sought to build a congregation true to the areas historical Puritan heritage.

 

            His commitment to New England Presbyterianism was that of a recent convert. Born October 4, 1804 in Green Hill, Pictou County, Nova Scotia, he was a graduate of Pictou Academy and studied theology in Halifax. He was ordained by the Presbytery of Pictou on October 10, 1831, and served as an evangelist in the western United States until being settled in York, New York from January 16, 1836 - February 10, 1845. He then cast about for further opportunities for service and, perhaps because of the large number of fellow Nova Scotians coming to Boston, started to organize a Presbyterian cause in this city from the Spring of 1846. The congregation, which just celebrated its 150^th anniversary on November 26, was organized that year.

 

            Throughout his years in Boston Blaikie struggled with the challenge of being thoroughly Reformed in a setting when Unitarianism, liberal Protestantism and Roman Catholicism were rapidly plunging his city into a spiritual wilderness.  With the exception of two other congregations² in the area he clung to the regulative principle of worship with a tenacity that stared down all attempts to innovate in his congregation. Blaikie agonized over the Unitarian defection of the early Nineteenth Century and made its reversal almost a personal crusade.  He spent the first twenty-five years of his ministry in Boston attempting to demonstrate in the courts that he and his congregation were the legitimate heirs of all the endowments and property of the Long Lane Church that had been founded in 1730 as “The Congregation of Presbyterian Strangers” and had defaulted, first to Congregationalism in 1786, and then to Unitarianism in 1819 under the ministry of William Ellery Channing.

            A whole lifetime of pastoral ministry was thus distilled into the almost five hundred pages of his A History of Presbyterianism in New England.  From his arrival in Boston in 1846, when he founded the first Presbyterian witness in the city of Boston for sixty years, to 1880 when he reluctantly left the pulpit of the First United Presbyterian Church of Boston, Blaikie wrestled with an issue that has perplexed many: Why was it that a hundred years after the first generation of Puritans the Reformed faith that they cherished was languishing, and within a hundred and fifty years it had been overwhelmed by Unitarian Transcendentalists?

 

            The question has broader implications for our ministry in what could, applying the word usually referring to Western New York state in the wake of the Finney revivals, likewise be called “the burnt over district.”  One traces the lineage of the 2000 who left the Church of England for conscience’s sake in 1662 directly on to the Salter’s Hall Convention of 1719 when Presbyterianism in England became Socinian/Unitarian.  Likewise, in New England, is there a cause and effect relationship that progresses beyond Unitarianism to Emerson and the Transcendentalists to Mary Baker Eddy or Liberal Protestantism and that makes the Boston area one of the most secular in the country today?

 

            One thing that being Reformed required - and requires - in such a milieu is stamina.  Alexander Blaikie had a great deal of that quality.  Congregational records, housed with the Newton Presbyterian Church which is the successor of a congregation that began in 1846 as the First Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, indicate that he was a feisty, opinionated, and scholarly minister who spent his whole time Boston battling Unitarians, Roman Catholics, and even Congregationalists.  Annual congregational meetings, as the minutes attest, show continuous haggling, resignations, and recriminations.  To be a Presbyterian church planter in Boston in the mid-Nineteenth Century required tenacity, courage, and perhaps even a willingness to allow hope to triumph over experience.

 

            So at the conclusion of his ministry, in retirement, in 1881, Blaikie set down (one suspects as the result of a lifetime of research and a closeness to the events which permitted oral history traditions as well as having access to records now lost) his lengthy (admittedly often opinionated) recollections of what had transpired in 150 years of attempting to establish both Reformed teaching but also distinctively Presbyterian denominational identity in an inhospitable soil.  In a sense the subtitle of History of Presbyterianism in New England says it all: Its Introduction, Growth, Decay, Revival and Present Mission.

 

            Among the many points he makes in this chronicle of the incredible difficulties Reformed witness faced in New England, three are summarized here.  They take us across the spectrum of the Eighteenth Century colonial period, the troubled Federal Period leading up to the Unitarian defection of 1819, and the Nineteenth Century struggle to reestablish Presbyterianism and an indigenous Reformed witness in New England.

 

I.  THE MIXED LEGACY OF THE GREAT AWAKENING

 

            The Great Awakening ranks, by universal consent, as the most significant event in the religious history of Eighteenth Century New England.  As such it had a vital effect on the revival of a spiritually vital Reformed faith, and on the fortunes of Presbyterianism in the four New England colonies.

 

            The Great Awakening came just a decade after the establishment of the first Presbyterian presbytery, and indeed only some twenty years after the first Presbyterian congregations were allowed in New England: the Huguenot church in Boston (1719) and several congregations in outlying areas.  The Presbytery of Londonderry was established sometime immediately prior to 1729³.  Immediately afterwards, in 1730, the so-called “church of the Presbyterian strangers” was organized in Boston by an Irish minister, James Moorhead.  The infant Presbytery had no sooner gotten underway than in 1736 it split over the delicate issue of whether to allow a disbarred Congregationalist, Rev. Gilmore, to join their ranks.  Presbytery then compounded the acrimony by denying status to a remarkable young man, Rev. David McGregore, son of the illustrious clergy founder of Presbyterianism in New Hampshire and minister of the East Church, Londonderry, NH.

            Thus disbarred, McGregore and Moorhead were thrust together in a common spiritual concern for a vital and warm Christianity which reflected the wider split in American Presbyterianism about to erupt between the Old Side and the New Side: those favoring the revival methods of Wesley and Tennent and most particularly Whitefield and those opposed to enthusiasm⁴.  McGregore first and then Moorhead capitalized on the visit of Whitefield to New England, and were among the reputed sixth of the clergy in New England who favored the Awakening and whose ministries and congregations were shaped by it.

 

            The story of Whitefield’s first arrival in Boston on that momentous Thursday evening, September 18, 1740, is well-known.  Met four miles out of town by the son of the governor and a party of well wishers, he made his way to the home of the brother-in-law of the minister of the Brattle St. meeting, Dr. Colman. There he was to preach the following Sabbath to a gathering of over 4000.  The day after arrival a delegation of local clergy visited, and immediately (in their attempt to discover whether they could support him) threw him into immediate issues of Presbyterian controversy.  Could he endorse Gilbert Tennent and his “alarm about an unconverted ministry”?  He was challenged “for calling that Tennent and his brethren faithful ministers of Christ” and criticized for his statement accepting the validity of Presbyterian ordination.⁵

 

            We do not know whether Moorhead, his church still worshiping in a barn off Milk St. on Long Lane, was there that Thursday morning.  Initially he seems to have misgivings about Whitefield, but with the encouragement of McGregore, by the time Gilbert Tennent continued the Whitefield meetings into 1741 he threw himself into the revival with enthusiasm.  As a result of McGregore-Moorhead cooperation in the Whitefield/Tennent meetings the Presbytery of Boston was organized in 1745 and that Presbytery “threw itself with zeal into the measures of the Great Awakening⁶,” while the earlier Presbytery of Londonderry, from which they had been expelled, hardening in its opposition to the Awakening, withered and died.  As recently as 1967, in their collection The Great Awakening, Perry Miller and Alan Heimert recognized the importance of New England Presbyterian David McGregore to the success of the Awakening in Boston through his sermon The Spirits of the Present Day Tried, preached at Benjamin Colman’s Brattle St. Church on November 3, 1741.⁷

 

            Blaikie, in his History, as he did throughout his time in Boston, very much identified with Moorhead.  He traced the First United Presbyterian Church of Boston back to those who gathered in the Long Lane barn purchased by John Little for worship.  When he organized the congregation in 1846, he was at pains to emphasize that it was a reorganization.  He describes the impact of the Great Awakening on the Boston Long Lane Church as well as McGregore’s East Church in Londonderry, New Hampshire, as altogether positive.  Immediately after the meetings the Long Lane congregation built its first edifice, and shortly thereafter expanded the premises with an east and west transept.  “Family worship and domestic disciples were attended to.  Having entered warmly into the spirit of Whitefield, and being in the prime of ministerial usefulness, they were each extensively prospered in their Master’s work.”⁸

 

            Nonetheless, Blaikie sees the ultimate impact of the Awakening as hostile both to the growth of Presbyterianism in New England and the revival of Reformed theology.  Whitefield was to die in 1770 at the Manse of a Presbyterian church in Newburyport, MA, and lies buried under its pulpit.  Ironically his death coincided with the collapse of any possible Presbyterian “takeover” in New England.  To Blaikie, the ultimate impact of the movement was ultimately to contribute to a loss of Presbyterian and Reformed distinctiveness, and the introduction of hymns - not so much Wesley’s as Watts’! - and the ‘mongrelization’ of Reformed distinctives (“the commingling of English, Welsh and New England, as well as Scotch and Irish teachings”) they further introduced Trustees rather than deacons.  (Is it coincidental that the records of the congregation Blaikie was to serve a hundred years later are filled with references to Trustee attempts to keep down the pastor’s salary?)  He adds elliptically⁹ that “The development and influence of this fibre of Congregationalism will appear a century hence.”

 

            Blaikie would, one suspects, concur with the opinion of Iain Murray: “...the truth is that the Great Awakening has accelerated a readiness for doctrinal change among those who were basically unsympathetic, and even some who were at first sympathetic now distanced themselves from the position of Edwards and Whitefield.”¹⁰

 

II.  CONGREGATIONAL POLITY

 

            James Moorhead served as the first minister to the Long Lane congregation for forty-three years, ministering until three years before the War of Independence, tumultuous times in the life of America’s first city.  It is said of this man that he “had strong traits of character ... Severe, perhaps, in manner, and inclined to an exercise of clerical authority which in our loose times would not be tolerated, he secured the warm respect of his people by his interest in their concerns, temporal and spiritual, his plain and affectionate remonstrance in every case of delinquency, his solicitude for their religious welfare, his impartial treatment of all classes, and his unquestioned personal worth.  In his preaching he relied on the solidity of his matter, rather than on any grace of style ... conscientiously attached to the Presbyterian Church, and decidedly Calvinistic in his faith, he nearly filled out a half century of professional service.”¹¹

 

            James Moorhead died in December 1773.  After an abortive attempt in 1776 to secure the service of the charismatic John Murray (from the Presbytery of the Eastward in Maine), the congregation remained vacant throughout the Revolutionary War.  Finally, “having quarreled and broken away from several New England Presbyteries, (which at that time were loosely organized and lacking in administration) they turned to New York where, particularly in the western part of the state, was a stronghold of Presbyterianism.”¹²  In an appeal to be received by the Associate Presbyterian Presbytery (six weeks later after a union to become the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church) meeting in New York dated September 11, 1782¹³, the settlement of the Rev.  Robert Annan was requested.  Presbytery concurred but his ministry was marked by tactlessness and insensitivity.  Within three years he was called to a congregation in Philadelphia.  Shortly after the church left the Presbyterian fold, became Unitarian, and began its progress towards Unitarianism.

 

            Blaikie’s description of the failure of Robert Annan’s ministry is perhaps the warmest and most sympathetic of his book.¹⁴  “He was doubtless,” Blaikie notes, “glad to be removed from them in an orderly manner and by a providential way.”  “He was by no means the only Presbyterian minister who has realized the same bitter experience in New England.  Where the divine hedges of government and disciple are not kept ‘entire,’ other ‘fruits’ than those ‘of righteousness, which are by Jesus Christ, to the glory of God,’ speedily grow.  So it was in Long Lane in 1786.”¹⁵

 

            On August 4, 1786, The Long Lane Church “Voted unanimously that this church and congregation do embrace the Congregational mode of government, and that all difficulties in the church hereafter be settled by the ministers or male members of the church.”  Hence the seismic shift from the Federal Street Church (as it was soon to be known) to the Arlington St. Church, from Moorhead the Calvinist to Channing the Unitarian.

 

            Blaikie attributes the spiritual decline of the church to the disruptive effects of the Revolutionary War on the eldership.  The former elders, “men of understanding” had either left as Loyalists to the Crown or had died.  “So long had ‘the faces of the elder’ not been ‘honored,’ that the office became despised, and the saying became law, that ‘the elders were only good to settle quarrels, and that the minister and the old men could do that.’”

 

            For the first twenty-five years of his ministry, from 1846 to the final erection of a church at Chandler and Berkeley Streets in 1870, Blaikie was to attempt to establish the rights of the First (A. R. P.) United Presbyterian Church of Boston to be the legal successor of the trust of John Little, who bought the first property for the Long Lane congregation in 1729.  While his sniping at the Congregationalists throughout the rest of the book does have some unfortunate connotations of denominational rivalry, he is on stronger ground when he attributes the ultimate failure of Presbyterianism - and by inference the ascendancy of the Reformed faith of the Puritan settlers - to a breakdown in church polity.

 

            In his The Constitutional History of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, Charles Hodge in a fascinating footnote attributes the orthodoxy of the Presbyterian Church in the middle states (“there has never been any open and avowed departure from Calvinistic doctrines in the Presbyterian Church” - a statement no one could make today!) and the heterodoxy of the Congregationalists in New England to their differences in polity.  His remarks reflect those of Blaikie:

“The obvious decline in religious character of the people, and the extensive prevalence, at different periods, of fanaticism and antinomianism, Arminianism, and Pelagianism, is, as we believe, to be mainly attributed to an unhappy and unscriptural ecclesiastical organization.  Had New England, with her compact and homogenous population, and all her other advantages, enjoyed the benefit of a regular Presbyterian government in the church, it would in all human probability, have been the noblest ecclesiastical community in the world.”¹⁶

 

He goes on to cite Jonathan Edwards, in a letter to Erskine, as supporting his contention.

 

III.  THE LACK OF AN INDIGENOUS NEW ENGLAND REFORMED TRADITION

 

            In the rebuilding of Reformed life and doctrine after the Unitarian defection following Channing’s Baltimore sermon in 1819, those who loved the doctrines of grace faced enormous struggles.

 

            The second volume of Blaikie’s History describes the attempt in the mid Nineteenth Century to reestablish Presbyterianism in New England.  What remained of Congregationalism after the Unitarian exodus was becoming increasingly theologically suspect, he maintains.  And there follows region by region, town by town, congregation by congregation, a chronicle of the attempt to establish presbyterian churches in various New England communities roughly during the period of his ministry in Boston, 1846 - 1881.

 

            The details of such attempts at church planting seem only of antiquarian interest today but in looking at the wider canvas a common theme repeats itself: most New England Presbyterian churches in the Nineteenth Century faced an uphill battle, and that all were conscious of being an alien import into an area inhospitable to Reformed distinctives.  Admittedly, in much of this volume he seems to have harsh things to say about other denominations, and his comments are often more denominational and polemical, than objective and factual.  The only Congregationalist for whom he has a good word is Andrew Leete Stone, who came to Park St. Church three years (1849) after Blaikie had started the First United Presbyterian Church of Boston.  Ironically Stone was one of the few Park St. Church ministers without a strong Presbyterian background.

 

            Interspersed among the history of other churches, Blaikie makes reference to his own difficult, painstaking and frequently unappreciated efforts as a church planter with Reformed convictions in Boston.  The story told of the First A. R. P., after 1858, the First United Presbyterian Church of Boston in his History is reflected in the congregational records now extant.  The early minutes of the congregation he pastored are full of references emphasizing the alien nature of Presbyterianism in New England. 

 

            A paragraph from the Sixth Annual Meeting, held in January of 1852, supports Blaikie’s later History. Presbyterians have a sacred mission (as the subtitle suggests) but they work in New England under tremendous odds. The Treasurer reports that “few spectacles more noble can be presented to the mind, than that of a handful of individuals as we are, in the lower walk of life, struggling to maintain, despite of poverty, and opposition, and reproach, those ordinances which they love, honorably exerting themselves up to their power and beyond ....  And I am convinced that ... did we have the willing mind, and that unity of sentiment, of purpose, and of determination ....  Then might we expect to see that church to which are so much attached, yet lengthen her cords and strengthen her stakes, and planting this land yet more densely with those watchtowers from which the light of sacred truth emanates, on which the watchmen of Zion lift up together the voice, and over which the banner of salvation floats.  Then would our church become yet a greater blessing to the land in which she exists and be able to spread more extensively the blessings of heaven’s benign salvation over the dry and arid, and tangle wastes, and deserts of heathenism.”¹⁷

 

 

            In the eighteenth century Presbyterians had struggled with class distinctions but had gradually worked their way out of them.  In 1718-9 the first boatload of Presbyterians to arrive from Ireland had been the object of Boston town selectmen taking measures to clear the town of these “passengers lately arrived from Ireland.”  In 1718 Presbyterians in Worcester had started to build a church but the locals had “gathered by night, hewed down and demolished the structure” and “persons of consideration and respectability aided in the riotous work.”¹⁸  The Huguenot congregation in Boston was allowed to exist as a concession to humanitarian concern for refugees on the part of the city fathers.  As we have seen, it took over a decade for the Long Lane congregation to be allowed to build.

 

            During the Eighteenth Century this resistance gradually altered.  The socially elite of the prosperous city of Newburyport had two Presbyterian congregations to chose from.  But after the Revolutionary War, first with King’s Chapel and then throughout Massachusetts, the respectable, the Brahmins had generally became Unitarian.  New England Presbyterians were now immigrant, working class, and disenfranchised.  Now Presbyterians were indigent bricklayers, farmers bankrupted by the Irish potato famine (which spread to Ulster as well as the South), and Nova Scotians and Prince Edward Islanders fleeing overpopulated and barren farming areas.  Presbyterians were a despised minority.¹⁹

 

            No one felt this more than Blaikie’s own congregation.  They watched with frustration the Boston “Brahmins” worshiping in their beautiful new building across from the Public Garden, the aristocracy of the city coming down from their mansions on Beacon Hill to hear in Arlington St. Church the polished oratory of Harvard trained clergy.  They heard Dr. Lathrop of the now Unitarian Brattle St. Church declare that “We all know what that property was intended for but by the laws of Massachusetts you (Presbyterians) can never have it.”²⁰  In 1859 the Unitarians offered Blaikie and his congregation $2500 “to quiet the claim and satisfy all parties interested.”²¹  They were impotent to get justice from the courts, dominated as they were by those who had the most to lose if the endowments of the congregation were transferred to those who considered themselves the rightful inheritors of the Long Lane gift of 1729.  The working class people who worshiped under Blaikie’s leadership went from borrowed facility to rented hall, and finally after 24 homeless years built a modest church at Berkeley and Chandler Streets, paid for largely by a mortgage from the Pittsburgh headquarters of the denomination which, after the panic of 1873, they had great difficulty even meeting the interest payments on.

 

            They, like all nineteenth century New England Presbyterians Blaikie describes, generally survived in an ethnic ghetto, being removed from the mainstream of social, cultural and economic life in New England.  The First United Presbyterian Church provided Gaelic services and increasingly its ranks were drawn from, and replenished by, Cape Bretoners. After deposing its second minister (or fourth, if you date the church back to 1730), a John Hood (Two cryptic sentences in the congregational minute book tell it all: “In favor of the pastor 33 votes, against the pastor 59 votes.  Also the salary was voted on with the same ballot reducing it to $100.00 per month.”²²  Factionalism, church splits, clergy scandals, seem to have dominated an alien church without clear precedents, lacking a presbytery large enough to ensure mature leadership and accountability, and the disorientation that comes with the disruptions of those who had recently been forced to emigrate.

 

            As Blaikie’s book comes to its conclusion there is a sense of despair verging on cynicism that reflects the bitterness of an aging minister, forced out of his own pulpit after thirty-three years, to that the cause for which he gave his life, namely, the rebirth of Presbyterian and Reformed theology in New England, had borne any fruit.

 

            He writes with acerbity if not bitterness: “Our modern Congregationalism has so far swept around the circle from the doctrines and morality of the Puritans.”²³  And he continues: “Judging from what is desired and prospers in New England, Presbyterians should retire, for among Congregational forms of thought they can have but little hope, especially as the Bible has not the hold on the modern, which it had on the Puritan mind.”⁰  But he concludes “Presbyterians must show to New England ‘a more excellent way.’  Generations of errorists may flourish on that soul, but the ‘kingdom and dominion, and the greatness of the kingdom under the whole heaven, shall be given to the people of the saints of the Most High, and all shall serve and obey Him.’  Reader, farewell, we must meet and stand each in his ‘lot in the end of the days.’  Let us keep ‘the faith.’”²⁵