On January 6, 1755, William Robertson preached a sermon at the High Church in Edinburgh before the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK). Recognized as “one of the leading intellectual figures of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment,”Footnote 1 Robertson stood in a long line of distinguished enlightenment ministers who had addressed the SSPCK over the previous half-century: figures including Hugh Blair, William Hamilton, and William Wishart.Footnote 2 In Scotland, as throughout the British Atlantic world, reason and virtue were essential planks under girding the discourse over enlightenment, benevolence, and reform.Footnote 3 But, according to Robertson, neither reason nor even virtue could invoke true reform, because “unenlightened reason often errs” and “undirected virtue always deviates from the right path.”Footnote 4 Robertson emphasized that both reason and revelation were essential to true Christianity. Furthermore, it was the promotion of Christian knowledge that could direct virtue and reason towards the path of charity, enlightenment, and improvement: both of self and of society. Robertson insisted that the efforts to “erect” virtue should be based “upon the eternal and immovable basis” of Christianity and Christian knowledge rather than the “insecure foundation of civil government.”Footnote 5 It was societies such as the SSPCK who were accomplishing this task: “What they have already done . . . encourages the most sanguine hopes of farther success.”Footnote 6
Robertson's message of reform through the means of promoting Christian knowledge was not new. Rather, his clarion call to the SSPCK for enlightened piety was in continuity with a sermonic tradition that began institutionally and rhetorically over half a century prior in Scotland. Moreover, this Scottish tradition of institutionally and rhetorically promoting enlightened piety was tied inextricably to the “Anglican revival” in England that predated and informed the Revolutionary Settlement. As Brent Sirota has recently demonstrated, this Anglican revival was premised upon “a pursuit of virtue” and the “common good.”Footnote 7 These religious reform measures in England and Scotland were far from being disparate and inchoate parts of a fragmented culture. Rather, as Eamon Duffy has persuasively argued, “a mass of evidence” confirms that “an intimate connection” existed between various efforts of benevolence and reform.Footnote 8 While Duffy centered his attention on the close ties between religious and reformation societies in England, strong evidence clearly demonstrates that the purview of these intimate connections extended far and wide throughout the British Atlantic world.
Indeed, a web of relations in the Atlantic world existed during the first half of the century that bound reform movements in Edinburgh to other urban centers such as London. Furthermore, these religious networks of benevolence, reform, and evangelism extended across the Atlantic and into colonial America to include not only urban areas such as Boston, New York, and Savannah but also the rural Southern Lowlands and the hinterlands of New England. They also wove together a wide range of traditions within British protestantism such as Anglican latitudinarians, English nonconformists, Scottish liberals, and “catholick” clergy in America. Such unparalleled ecumenism in the British Atlantic world was particularly significant, because it established a paradigm of cooperation that extended beyond the church walls; indeed, it informed the very “social role of the eighteenth century Church.”Footnote 9
Through an examination of a historiographically neglected period of the SSPCK,Footnote 10 this article investigates the coherent and robust effort towards Christian renewal and reform that began around the turn of the eighteenth century in the British Atlantic world.Footnote 11 Using a term from the period, this essay recognizes a distinct Christian knowledge movement that emerged during the late seventeenth century and that included extensive and interconnected religious networks stretching throughout Europe and on both sides of the Atlantic. Throughout the British Atlantic world, enlightened piety was promoted as the panacea for the myriad social ills that were plaguing society. Out of necessity, such a mammoth task of reform and enlightenment demanded cooperation among disparate religious persons and institutions. To be sure, fierce religious conflict and opposition existed throughout the British Atlantic, and it would be misleading and erroneous to characterize British protestantism as achieving a state of perfect harmony. Nonetheless, in spite of deep divisions and intense opposition, religious enlightenment figures led the way towards an ecumenical solution that had the backing of many clergy along with faithful parishioners. Therefore, as this article demonstrates, the Christian knowledge movement is a central narrative to any discussion of eighteenth century enlightenment, benevolence, and reform in the Atlantic world.
I. Christian Knowledge and Religious Awakening in England
By the 1670s, Anglican reformers in London such as Anthony Horneck, William Smythies, and William Beveridge were responding to an increasingly common perception that society was becoming intellectually precarious, spiritually cold, and morally dissolute.Footnote 12 Horneck, in particular, is recognized as a “spiritual adviser” and “an early and zealous promoter . . . of Religious Societies and Societies for Reformation.”Footnote 13 Other significant leaders included Robert Nelson and Thomas Firmin.Footnote 14 As fiercely opposed to puritanism as to “Popery” and skepticism,Footnote 15 these reformers believed that ignorance, irreligion, and vice were crippling all ranks, races, and socioeconomic groups.Footnote 16 In response, they attempted to revive Christian knowledge in all of its forms: intellectual, devotional, and practical or useful. Their ambitious agenda included prison reform and relief, the construction and circulation of libraries, instruction in basic education and the catechism, daily services, prayers, and special lectures. At least forty-two of these societies were founded in London alone by 1710,Footnote 17 and many more existed in towns throughout England.Footnote 18 Far from a top-down attempt to accrue power, these religious societies reflected most directly the laity's ever-increasing concern for piety, reform, and both personal and social improvement.Footnote 19
By the 1690s this movement had gained coherence and further organizational maturity including new types of societies specifically for reforming manners and morals, words which were coterminous during the period.Footnote 20 Moreover, from this same energy sprang benevolent ventures such as the founding of hospitalsFootnote 21 along with what has been called “the most impressive social experiment of the age, the charity school movement.”Footnote 22 Religious societies contributed to the erection of 100 charity schools in London alone and many more throughout the country. But the work of charity schools stood alongside an extraordinarily wide range of projects used to promote Christian knowledge during this period.Footnote 23
One defining feature of the Christian knowledge movement was the marked increase in collaboration between Anglicans and nonconformists.Footnote 24 Horneck himself hoped that “peace and love might prevail amongst all protestants,” believing that people “could not be the children of a God of peace” if they “employed themselves in fomenting discord and heightening animosities amongst christians.”Footnote 25 The efforts for conciliation were bolstered by a keen spirit of moderation and tolerance that came into its own with the appointment of John Tillotson as the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1691.Footnote 26
At this point, nothing short of a “great religious awakening” was transpiring among both Anglicans and Dissenters throughout England as well as protestants in Ireland, Scotland, and colonial America.Footnote 27 This was the “age of benevolence,” and it was defined first and foremost by what David Owen called the “philanthropy of piety”Footnote 28 that sprang from both the “religious impulse” of the masses as well as the organized “practice of religion.”Footnote 29 Thomas Tenison, Tillotson's successor as Archbishop in 1695, perhaps saw clearer than anyone else that a new age had emerged, and that “any increase in spiritual effectiveness would have to come from voluntary action.”Footnote 30 Tenison's perspective implied that cooperation—between individuals, laity, clergy, and various religious communities—was not just desirable but necessary for the survival and progress of British protestant religion.
In the 1690s, and indeed past even the first quarter of the eighteenth century, Thomas Bray stood at the helm of the Christian knowledge movement. Bray first gained notoriety for his collaboration with the Bishop of London over ways to improve education in England and to strengthen the Church of England in America. His solution, which the Bishop accepted and encouraged, was the establishment of both missionaries and libraries projected to be placed in all of the American colonies—a backwater understood to be filled with “desperate intellectual poverty”Footnote 31—as well as throughout England and Wales.Footnote 32 Bray envisioned libraries that met the spiritual and practical needs of clergy and parishioners alike, and he actively promoted “useful knowledge, as well as natural and divine.” As early as the 1690s, he was looking to complement these libraries with schools.Footnote 33
Bray was central to organizing the Church of England's Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) as well as the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG). He also helped to form the body that would become known as the Associates of the Late Rev. Dr. Bray.Footnote 34 According to John Van Horne, these societies “began to carry the message of Anglicanism to the outer reaches of the British Empire.”Footnote 35 Ostensibly, these transatlantic efforts were enacted in an attempt to aid African Americans, Native Americans, and white Britons and Europeans who did not have the proper education, training, and means to live virtuous, productive, and godly lives.Footnote 36 Too often, however, these reformers defined these terms in very English ways, viewing the rich and diverse tapestry of cultures within English “dominions” as inferior, static, and one-dimensional.Footnote 37
While the SPG and SPCK receive the lion's share of scholarly attention, Dr. Bray's Associates were extremely active and vital to the development of the Christian knowledge movement. They achieved success in their relief efforts for the poor and their assistance to religious refugees,Footnote 38 but they remained particularly interested in “the conversion and education of blacks, both slave and free in the American colonies” as well as the establishment and circulation of books in colonial America and throughout the British Isles.Footnote 39 The Associates were also instrumental in the settlement of Georgia as they “formed the nidus of the Georgia board” and were also “the parent organization” of the Georgia Trust.Footnote 40
Julie Anne Sweet rightly recognized that, despite recent historiographical interpretations that often dismiss “the essential role of religion in the founding of Georgia,” “the religious intentions of the colony” were dominant from the beginning and formed an “underlying theme” of the project. The activities and motivations behind the Associates of Dr. Bray substantiate soundly this argument made by Sweet.Footnote 41 Indeed, the Associates followed Bray himself who stated that his efforts toward settling Georgia came “out of the same charitable regard to the bodies and Souls of Men” as his other efforts had in previous decades.Footnote 42 The sentiments and actions of Dr. Bray's Associates and other societies should serve as a corrective to a common historiographical misconception that the “rise of humanitarian movements” began in colonial America in the 1750s with the Society of Friends. On the contrary, many other societies, mostly connected with the established churches of Great Britain or the colonies, had initiated and begun to make significant strides in humanitarian efforts during the early decades of the eighteenth century.Footnote 43
During sermons at joint meetings of the Associates of Dr. Bray and the Trustees of Georgia, leading Anglican Divines repeatedly encouraged them to remain committed to the ideals of enlightened piety that first sparked Georgia's settlement: these ideals included the prohibition of slavery, restriction of rum, and the benevolent treatment of Native Americans.Footnote 44 Indeed, Anglican Divines saw the Georgia project as part of the larger Christian knowledge movement where—as William Crowe boldly proclaimed in his sermon to the Trustees and Associates—the “English Church” was “‘to be the support and bulwark of the reformation’” [his italics] that was transpiring within protestant Christianity. According to this commonly-held rationale, the Georgia project was in continuity not only with the Christian knowledge movement of the past forty years. These pious efforts of reform were also part of a new era of enlightenment that was in continuity with and an extension of the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century and the unification of protestants was a key indicator of this reformation.Footnote 45 It is within this context that the “Georgia experiment . . . caught the imagination of the English public as no colonial matter had since the establishment of Pennsylvania fifty years earlier.”Footnote 46
Nonetheless, Dr. Bray's Associates backed away from the Georgia project after a few years. A major reason for this loss of interest was no doubt due to the fact that the basic ideals of the colony were being compromised. As Georgia began looking less like a benevolent venture and more like one that fit other colonial realities, the Associates realized that the ends to which they aspired would be best attained elsewhere. Despite distancing themselves formally from the colonial project, the Associates continued to provide support for the expansion of the Christian knowledge movement in the Southern Lowcountry, the New England hinterlands, and throughout colonial America. They also maintained and sustained their commitment both to African American education and the circulation of libraries on both sides of the Atlantic.Footnote 47 The Associates’ efforts to expand to colonial America serve as an important example both of the strength of the Christian knowledge movement in England as well as its broader implications on both sides of the Atlantic.
II. The Christian Knowledge Movement in Scotland and America
In Scotland, the foremost leader of the movement for enlightened piety through the promotion of Christian knowledge was the Scottish Episcopal minister, James Kirkwood. A native Scot, Kirkwood had relocated by 1685 to become rector in Bedfordshire, England. Nonetheless, from 1702 onwards, the minister's status as a non-juror prevented him from serving in a parish. Despite such formal exclusions, Kirkwood was in close contact both with the Anglican SPCK and Scottish Presbyterian leaders such as Sir Francis Grant, Lord Cullen. Even more, the Anglican SPCK asked Kirkwood to be its correspondent in Scotland, and he subsequently returned to Scotland by the end of 1704.Footnote 48
Kirkwood's appointment to Scotland by the Anglican SPCK, along with his efforts in the Scottish Highlands, is indicative of the energy found within the larger Christian knowledge movement. He insisted, for example, that Highlanders should be given a Bible in their native language, because depriving them of a Gaelic Bible was “a contradiction of Protestant values.”Footnote 49 Similarly, Kirkwood worked intimately with the Presbyterian General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, and he served as the liaison between the Scottish Assembly and the Anglican SPCK in common efforts of literacy and libraries in the Highlands. Thus, despite Presbyterian fears over Episcopal Jacobitism and heterodoxy, and despite Episcopal fears over Presbyterian dogmatism and heresy, the Christian knowledge movement forged a path whereby Kirkwood—a Scottish Episcopal minister—worked with Presbyterians in Scotland to install libraries in Presbyterian parishes throughout the Highlands: libraries that were dominated by Anglican authors though infused with some Presbyterian preferences, as well. The possibility of this collaboration seems unlikely, at best. But by 1704 the General Assembly had approved of the alliance.Footnote 50 Such alliances in the Scottish Highlands reflected the paradoxical nature of reform efforts. As demonstrated with Kirkwood, these genuine efforts for expanded literacy, numeracy, and spiritual instruction in the Highlands brought unprecedented ecumenism and tolerance in one sense; but this movement's expansion and success came at the expense of Highland culture itself. A renaissance of ideas, values, and knowledge was being released but was simultaneously catalyzing the decay of established cultural norms and rhythms of life.
Kirkwood helped initiate the Scottish societies for the reformation of manners and he laid the groundwork for the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK). His efforts in Scotland pioneered the establishment of charity schools, of libraries in every parish, and the attempts for translation of the Bible into Gaelic as early as the 1680s. Borrowing from the methods of Bray and other reformers in England, Kirkwood was central to the development of Scotland's early attempts to participate in the Christian knowledge movement.Footnote 51
Institutionally, Scots had been establishing praying communities since the Restoration in response to their perception of an increasingly assertive Anglican Church and monarchy. By 1683 there were eighty praying societies in Scotland with a membership of 7,000. However, after the so-called Glorious Revolution, and with the recognition of Presbyterianism as the polity of the Established Church of Scotland, these praying societies were transformed and integrated into the church's understanding of piety. In 1698 several men, including some “of weight and distinction,” formed one of these praying societies in Edinburgh.Footnote 52 These men were already corresponding with societies for the reformation of manners in England and, just as in England, what began as a praying society transitioned by September of 1700 into two Scottish societies for the reformation of manners.Footnote 53 Within five months there were eleven of these societies with each one typically focused on a particular parish.Footnote 54
The Presbyterian Church of Scotland was assuming a leading institutional role in the movement for reform through Christian knowledge that was spreading throughout Ireland and the entire British Isles, western and central Europe, and across the Atlantic. Scottish religious leaders, too, were struck by what they perceived as the sharp decline of intellectual, practical, and devotional knowledge. They were deeply moved towards pious-centered reform as a result of two volumes written about two dimensions of the Christian knowledge movement: reformation societies and the growth of religious societies.Footnote 55 Soon, formal pronouncements rang out from commissioners of the Church of Scotland, calling on Scots to “imitate the laudable zeal of these worthy Societies” that were proving so successful in England and Ireland, though these efforts should only go “so far as may be suitable to the circumstances and laws of this nation, and the constitutions of this Church.” The commissioners believed that a reform movement was “absolutely necessary to the prosperity and welfare” of Scotland along with the glory “of Church and State.” By 1700, the church itself had extended the efforts of Edinburgh's informal praying society in an effort to promote ecclesiastical, civil, and personal reform.Footnote 56
Outside of London, Georgian Edinburgh established the most numerous and sophisticated culture of clubs and societies than anywhere in Britain.Footnote 57 Even further, it was religious societies bent on enlightened piety and reform that initiated clubs and societies in Scotland and that fueled reform efforts during this period. Indeed, as early as 1704, Josiah Woodward, a leading Anglican minister and Doctor of Divinity, reported that thirteen of these religious societies existed in Edinburgh alone, and that the magistrates of the city “lately erected a new court against immorality.” According to Woodward, Edinburgh was a model for this new wave of reform: “‘tis hop'd that, with God's blessing, a great part of the Christian World will be influenced hereby.” Recordings of these activities were already translated into Latin, French, and High Dutch for “propagating the same glorious design in other nations, by which means a great part of the world will be soon acquainted with this undertaking and the success of it, and, it may reasonably be expected, will be excited to an imitation.”Footnote 58
By 1709 this burst of energy in the name of reform and improvement spawned the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK), which emphasized “educational improvement” as part of the larger effort to curb ignorance and immorality.Footnote 59 Leading literary and political figures such as Daniel Defoe effused praise for Edinburgh's reformation society, especially for its efforts towards establishing a society for the promotion of Christian knowledge as the central apparatus by which reform would be achieved. Defoe was a liaison between London and Edinburgh, and in 1707 helped to procure literature and advice from England to Edinburgh.Footnote 60 Of course, in the process towards educational improvement, the Scottish Society was attempting to crush what it perceived as an inferior Jacobite culture in the Highlands that not only was uncivilized but was also a potential portal for French Catholic insurrection and terror: a sentiment that allowed for the disregard and dismantling of Highland cultural life. Nonetheless, in the midst of deep conflict and divisiveness, important links of comity were being forged. For example, leaders in Scotland such as William Carstares—who has been recognized as a forerunner of Scottish moderatism and liberalism—were helping to create unprecedented institutional collaboration between protestants in England and Scotland.Footnote 61
In colonial America, the Christian knowledge movement was also taking shape by the turn of the eighteenth century. As Woodward stated in 1704, societies “for promoting a Reformation, by these methods” were spreading “in our Northern Plantations in America.” With great aplomb, Woodward reported that “a more remarkable Reformation” was transpiring in America “than is in either of Her Majesty's Kingdoms.” Particularly in Boston, reform societies were making great strides using the English methods that Edinburgh had so successfully appropriated. Like many during this period, Woodward believed that the Christian knowledge movement was bringing forth a second reformation that was just as important as the reformation of the sixteenth century.Footnote 62
Just as in England and Scotland, the first colonial American leaders of the enlightenment were engaged in all aspects of the religious revival at the turn of the century. “Catholick” clergymen such as Benjamin Colman serve as prime examples of the transatlantic dimension of the new movement to promote Christian knowledge. Colman studied at Harvard during the 1690sFootnote 63 under the distinguished tutor, John LeverettFootnote 64 who, according to Richard Bushman, “encouraged Episcopal works as the best books to form the pupils’ minds.” Leverett was hopeful that new Anglican writings would moderate nonconformists and “preserve us from those narrow principles that kept us at a distance from the Church of England.”Footnote 65 According to E. Brooks Holifield, Harvard's tutors, “encouraged Harvard students to read the Cambridge Platonists, English Latitudinarians, and natural philosophers:” all of which caused puritans such as the Mathers to level the accusation that these works were not only “rank poison” but were also promoting heresies such as Pelagianism and Arminianism.Footnote 66
But Colman believed otherwise. Writing to his close friend White Kennett, the later Anglican Bishop of Peterborough, Colman lauded Harvard College as a beacon of that moderate sentiment that was captured in the Christian knowledge movement itself, what Colman called that “catholick spirit” and “catholick air.”Footnote 67 Kennett, too, stated passionately his vision to Colman “for the Union of all Protestants in some future Age, when Charity and Peace shall prevail above Interest and Passion.” Kennett believed that the “good Design” of the Christian knowledge movement was helping to bring that future age ever nearer. He further contended that SPG missionaries were meant to promote Christian knowledge rather than “only contending for Rites and Ceremonies, or for Powers and Privileges” or “disputing with the Vestry” in local parishes or “even with the Civil Government of every Province.” What would promote unification, reform, and enlightenment was the Christian knowledge movement.Footnote 68
Colman embraced the works of Anglican Divines and particularly venerated John Tillotson. He would later recount how such men had led the crusade for a revival of true and moderate Christianity around the turn of the eighteenth century. Although the reputations of men such as Tillotson and Burnett (the latter of which supported protestant reconciliation “not in episcopacy alone but in a synodical authority”Footnote 69) were “sullied” in later decades by polemicists, Colman affectionately stated that “the Age was not worthy” of these men: “their Names must needs live in the History of the Church . . . if Truth do not perish from the Earth.”Footnote 70 Norman Fiering called John Tillotson a “literary phenomenon whose sermons were probably the most widely read works of religious literature in America between 1690 and 1750.” Interestingly, by 1740 it was Tillotson who became the symbolic arch-enemy of evangelical puritan revivalists such as George Whitefield.Footnote 71 Harvard College also became the institutional nemesis of Whitefield and his colleagues by 1740.Footnote 72 Nonetheless, fifty years prior, religious enlightenment leaders such as Colman were heralding Tillotson and others as helping to usher in the next phase of the Reformation.
Colman received his ministerial ordination in England, and he lived there until 1699. For much of his life he would remain in correspondence with latitudinarian friends he had made in England as a young man. He returned to Boston in order to accept an appointment as the first minister of the Brattle Street Church, which was “recon'd midway between the Church of England and Dissenters”: a very important and telling example was that Anglicans could take communion at Brattle Street.Footnote 73 To the consternation of his puritan colleagues, Colman also admitted people into the church without “a narrative of conversion.” These same critics believed that Colman was perpetuating “the Apostasy” through his promotion of Presbyterian polity, his “Episcopalian gentility,” and other anti-puritan acts such as “powdering his hair.” Nonetheless, Colman welcomed with open arms the new spirit of compromise, unity, and moderation he had experienced at Harvard, in England, and now at Brattle Street Church, which were all places where he felt the “free air” and “enlarged Catholic Spirit” were flourishing.Footnote 74
Invigorated by the religious awakening in England during the 1690s, the catholick clergy—many of whom came from rigid puritan upbringings—were determined to transform the stale and divisive New England puritanism through a “blending of English methods and Anglican philosophical premises.” Nonetheless, as John Corrigan has demonstrated, “new ideas were embraced, but old ideas were not abandoned.” Many leaders of the Christian knowledge movement on both sides of the Atlantic came from religious traditions that maintained at least some vestiges of reformed theology. These leaders were seeking to preserve what they believed to be the necessary and orthodox threads of their traditions while infusing them with the new forms, philosophy, and theology of latitude that was ushering in an age of enlightenment.Footnote 75 These catholick clergymen of New England were engaged in a larger network that was seeking to promote and cultivate enlightened piety as a means to further achieve what they perceived as a much-needed Reformation.Footnote 76 This ecumenical collaboration of ideas, individuals, and institutions proved to be fertile soil that allowed Scottish and English societies for promoting Christian knowledge to expand to colonial America.
Thus, on both sides of the Atlantic, the revival and promotion of Christian knowledge was the organizing concept from which emerged greater consensus, cooperation, and tolerance in the British Atlantic world around the turn of the eighteenth century. These religious communities remained firmly rooted in their respective British protestant traditions.Footnote 77 Nonetheless, they were working with one another like never before in an effort to educate all of British society including those with least access to education and financial assistance. Although they took their doctrinal differences very seriously,Footnote 78 these British protestant communities were in solidarity over the need to prevent the poor from being further alienated through ignorance, vice, and crime. They also stood united over fighting puritanism, “Popery,” and irreligion, which they believed were all reflections of the radicalism and fanaticism that plagued British society. Therefore, they collaborated together to assist refugees, establish libraries and basic education (both spiritual and useful), renew architecture, and provide other outlets of intellectual, social, and practical knowledge to every rank of society. All of these efforts pointed towards the overarching goal of the Christian knowledge movement as stated clearly in correspondence between Kennett and Colman: that is, nothing less than “laying a foundation” for the eventual unification of all protestants.Footnote 79
III. The Institutional Formation of Transatlantic Bonds
By the first decade of the eighteenth century, both established churches of Great Britain—the Church of England and the Church of Scotland—had directed their attention towards the promotion of Christian knowledge in colonial America. The Church of England had never sufficiently provided clerical, administrative, or structural support in America,Footnote 80 and non-Anglican protestants had made only narrow efforts in the colonies, though certainly with some success by ministers such as John Eliot and generations of the Mather family.Footnote 81 Thus the SPG, along with other Anglican societies such as Dr. Bray's Associates, strove to meet the administrative, sacramental, and even architectural needs in the colonies. These societies also focused upon education. They emphasized the circulation of literature and libraries along with the establishment of schools used to educate and evangelize “heathens” and African Americans as well as Anglicans and white Dissenters.Footnote 82 These projects for enlightenment and improvement through education and evangelism in America insisted that being “civilized” was a process most purely manifested in the cityscapes of Edinburgh, London, and Boston. In the hinterlands of colonial America, just as in regions like the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, the Christian knowledge movement was instituted typically with a refined British accent.Footnote 83
As mentioned above, the Church of Scotland's equivalent to the Church of England's SPG and SPCK was the SSPCK. From its inception, the Scottish Society sought to promote and disseminate Christian knowledge both at home and abroad. The SSPCK's opening session in 1709 reported “sad complaints that in diverse of the plantations in America, there is great want of the means of knowledge and pastors to teach them.” The Society then lamented that “so great a part of the world is to this day living in ignorance and without the knowledge of the true God . . . perishing for lack of knowledge.” But the minutes conveyed optimism due to the striking success of charity schools, libraries, and missions in England and Ireland and indeed throughout Europe, particularly in Holland. All of these activities led the Scottish Society to “see ground to hope for better and greater things to come.”Footnote 84
Due to financial pressures, the SSPCK extended its operations to colonial America only after the support of Daniel Williams, a leading English Presbyterian living in London. Williams was one of the most significant non-Anglican patrons for promoting Christian knowledge throughout the British Atlantic world. He gave generously to various causes that supported education (including libraries) and evangelism. Williams eagerly agreed to generate support for the SSPCK by way of subscriptions, and he coordinated a sub-committee of diverse dissenters in England to help raise funds for the new Society.Footnote 85
Williams promised personally a payment of £100, and was already sending the Society the interest by way of William Carstares, the above-mentioned Scotsman of King William's court and later the prominent Principal of the University of Edinburgh and well-known moderator of the General Assembly. The SSPCK asked Williams to be a correspondent and to find others in London who were also willing to participate. These correspondents would shape policy in important ways. Besides raising support by way of subscriptions, the Society was working with a London bookseller to distribute 500 copies of its charter as a way to advertise and increase revenue.Footnote 86 The SSPCK's hopes of propagating Christian knowledge in colonial America inched closer to reality after Williams bequeathed one of his estates to the Scottish Society with restrictions that the funds be used explicitly for “qualify'd Ministers” who were attempting “the Conversions of Infidel Countries.”Footnote 87 This prescription by the Williams bequest was recognized as an operation functioning in tandem with other aspects of the Christian knowledge movement.
Indeed, both of the SSPCK's major colonial expeditions in the 1730s that included evangelism to Native Americans took place explicitly within a larger framework of the Christian knowledge movement that involved chaplains, schools, teachers, community leaders, catechists, churches, and libraries. The Scottish Society's work during the 1730s cannot be understood properly outside of the larger Christian knowledge movement that had first fueled the desire to promote benevolence and piety in colonial America.Footnote 88 Christian knowledge was understood to be the method by which a new generation would realize reformation and enlightenment, and this new era was ushered in through the spread of Christian knowledge to all parts of the world. Though taking many different forms, the organizing principle was the promotion and propagation of Christian knowledge, and it took ecumenical and institutional collaboration to achieve these goals. Daniel Williams's bequest exemplifies the broad scope of the Christian knowledge movement as well as the practical need for ecumenism that stood alongside the more idealistic goals of unity.
Williams's bequest to the SSPCK as stated in his Last Will and Testament of 1717 was mired for years both in legal issues surrounding his estate and in the SSPCK's own uncertainty about the bequest. However, the Society was able to make a breakthrough in the late 1720s due to significant collaborative efforts between leading Anglicans, English nonconformists in London, and Scots both in London and in Edinburgh.Footnote 89 By 1727, the Edinburgh Directors—Presbyterian leaders who formed the major decision-making body of the SSPCK—were in close communication with the Anglican SPCK in London. These two societies printed school lists together and sent books in support of each other in efforts that were linked to the Irish charity school movement of the 1720s.Footnote 90
Things accelerated in 1728 with the official establishment of a Board of Correspondents in London that included English Presbyterian leaders such as Daniel Williams but also other religious leaders such as the Independent, Isaac Watts.Footnote 91 As London Secretary of the SSPCK Henry Hunter noted in 1795, the London Board had learned how to tap into “the two great principles of human nature, religion and sociality.”Footnote 92 As a result, by 1729 the London-Edinburgh correspondence between Anglicans, English non-conformists, and Scottish Presbyterians was thriving. Thomas Bray's correspondence and gifts of sermons, catechisms, and books to the Scottish SocietyFootnote 93 was a striking representation of the bonds that were ever-strengthening between British protestants in England and Scotland.Footnote 94
One of the most important mediators between the London and Edinburgh movement for Christian knowledge was Adam Anderson. Anderson was an Aberdonian Scot who had lived in London since around 1720. He soon became the chief clerk of the South Sea Company,Footnote 95 and he wrote a definitive monograph on commerce that anticipated Adam Smith in significant ways.Footnote 96 While he has received recognition (though not enough) as “one of the first serious historians of commerce,” his vital role in philanthropy and the Christian knowledge movement should not be overlooked or underestimated. With the Scottish population surging in London, Anderson was renowned within the expanding Scottish networks where he served, for example, as a prominent member at the court of the Scottish corporation.Footnote 97 By 1729, Anderson was functioning as the SSPCK's secretary in London. Already at this early date, the new secretary was advertising the Scottish Society's work, collaborating with other societies, and corresponding with Daniel Williams's Trustees in hopes of initiating efforts in colonial America.Footnote 98 Anderson served as the SSPCK's London secretary until January of 1765 when the Edinburgh leadership reported he had deceased.Footnote 99
At precisely the same time that Anderson was assuming his role as secretary of the SSPCK in London, he was also a member of the reorganized Associates of Dr. Bray, which was mentioned above as one of the three major Anglican societies who were expanding more readily into America. Anderson received the distinction of being listed by King George II as one of “The Trustees for establishing the Colony of Georgia in America.”Footnote 100 He played a “great role in the founding of the colony,” and was one of “the most active Georgia Trustees.” As Van Horne has noted, leaders such as Adam Anderson and Thomas Bray, “were deeply involved in securing the charter and administering the new colony” in Georgia specifically because of their desire to promote enlightened piety.Footnote 101
It is deeply significant to point out, however, that Adam Anderson's efforts were not restricted solely to the Scottish Society nor to any other particular denominational interest. Rather, Anderson operated within the transnational and transdenominational networks of the Christian knowledge movement. As a Scot living in London, and as a prominent member of the Anglican-dominated Associates of Dr. Bray, the Presbyterian SSPCK, and the Georgia Trustees, Adam Anderson embodied the Christian knowledge movement and its transatlantic ecumenicity in the Atlantic world between broad constituencies of British protestants in the late 1720s. He was collaborating intimately with leading Anglicans, Scottish Presbyterians, and English Dissenters in order to promote and disseminate enlightened piety and social reform.
Adam Anderson and the other members of the pious faction of the Georgia TrusteesFootnote 102 determined that “persons from the Highlands of Scotland and persecuted German Protestants” should settle in the colony.Footnote 103 Even as late as 1741, both Swiss and German protestants were also appealing to leaders in England for assistance in promoting enlightened piety by obtaining a minister of their own tradition “in order to encourage more of their countrymen to join them, as well as their countrymen who are settled at Saxe Gotha in South Carolina.”Footnote 104 As seen above, these activities were consistent with the wider agenda that had concerned the Christian knowledge movement in England for decades. But it was also in keeping specifically with England's attempts to aid German protestants since the first decade of the century.Footnote 105
By 1734, the Anglican SPCK began funding the immigration of Lutheran Salzburgers to America, which led to the settlement of Ebenezer, Georgia.Footnote 106 To build upon this momentum in America, Adam Anderson mediated one year later between the SSPCK and Dr. Bray's Trustees in an effort to settle a Scottish Highland community in Georgia in a similar way as the Anglican SPCK was settling Salzburgers in the colony. On July 22, 1735, Anderson wrote the Edinburgh leaders of the SSPCK on behalf of the Trustees of Dr. Bray. He requested specifically that the Scottish Society provide a Gaelic-speaking minister to accompany a Highland settlement immigrating to Georgia.Footnote 107
Nicolas Spencer, a Scottish Society leader in Edinburgh, responded to Anderson's request in August. He told Anderson in a letter that the Georgia project was “very liked here” in Edinburgh. Despite limited funding, Spencer continued, the SSPCK believed that the Georgia project was worth the financial burden: “The advantages which probably will follow upon the Society's embracing this opportunity of spreading the gospel in foreign parts has induced them very cheerfully to approve the proposal.” In a very revealing statement that further links this project with the Christian knowledge movement of previous decades, Spencer told Anderson that, in the eyes of the Scottish Society, the Georgia settlement of Scottish Highlanders was “a matter of such moment . . . which tends to answer the design of this Society's erection.” Even more, the Presbyterian Society in Scotland offered to cooperate fully with the Trustees towards finding a proper minister,Footnote 108 and the Edinburgh leaders later added that Adam Anderson would consult with Oglethorpe and other “honourable trustees” to decide who the correspondents in Georgia would be.Footnote 109 Spencer's correspondence with Anderson demonstrates once again the SSPCK's motives for its activities in colonial America.
Thus, by the 1730s, the Anglo-Scottish collaborative efforts for social and personal improvement that had blossomed into an age of benevolence by the turn of the eighteenth century was now institutionally established overseas. For the SSPCK, this decade was a watershed moment in its history of overseas evangelism and education. Moreover, the SSPCK included Native American education and missions as an essential component of the Christian knowledge movement that stood alongside its efforts with other institutions for community settlement and religious education.
The SSPCK's other major colonial American project in the 1730s occurred in Massachusetts.Footnote 110 It, too, was spearheaded by Adam Anderson.Footnote 111 In Boston, Benjamin Colman, like Anderson in London, was a quintessential mediator between Anglican and non-Anglican British protestants engaged with the Christian knowledge movement.Footnote 112 For example, Colman's close friend mentioned above, White Kennett, was a charter member of the SPG.Footnote 113 According to Frederick Mills, Sr., it was Colman who “likely procured . . . Anglican support” for the SSPCK's first three missionaries to Massachusetts as a result of his intimate connections with Anglican leaders such as Kennett. Further institutional connections include the fact that the SSPCK's New England missionary-ministers received over 200 volumes from Dr. Bray's Associates. These Anglican leaders expressed warm approval of the Scottish Society's continuation of the Christian knowledge movement in Massachusetts.Footnote 114 Mills demonstrates cogently that the SSPCK's missionary efforts in America had a distinctive “cooperative or ecumenical quality” that was fostered by the Society's “acceptance and implementation of the revised church-state relationship created by the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89.”Footnote 115
Similarly, Adam Anderson was corresponding with the SSPCK's leaders in Edinburgh from at least 1729 with advice and options about potential and actual ventures in America.Footnote 116 With both of the SSPCK's colonial efforts in the 1730s, Anderson was triangulating his position as an Associate of Dr. Bray, Trustee of Georgia, and London secretary of the SSPCK in an effort to promote the transatlantic dimension of the Christian knowledge movement. It should come as no surprise, then, that the SSPCK's minutes reported Anderson attending a meeting of the Trustees of Dr. Daniel Williams. Clearly, as this one man demonstrates, the level of engagement within British protestant networks in this Atlantic project was extensive and profound.Footnote 117
The SSPCK's Massachusetts project, like the one in Georgia during the same period, fits squarely within the tradition of the Christian knowledge movement set up decades before by Bray, Kirkwood, and others. They were, first and foremost, deeply ecumenical projects between the Church of England, the Church of Scotland, and various British nonconformists. Here again, Anderson's coordination, administration, and advocacy efforts highlight the web of relations orbiting the movement for enlightened piety in the Atlantic world.Footnote 118 In Massachusetts, institutions such as Harvard College led the movement. Individual religious leaders such as Benjamin Colman and Harvard's Divinity Professor, Edward Wigglesworth,Footnote 119 also stood at the helm, working with Governor Belcher in America as well as other leaders in England and Scotland.Footnote 120 In Edinburgh, leaders such as William Hamilton—Scottish Presbyterian minister, Edinburgh University Principal, and early enlightenment figureFootnote 121—collaborated as an Edinburgh leader of the SSPCK with leading English non-conformists and London SSPCK correspondents such as the renowned English Presbyterian, Edmund Calamy, along with Scots in London such as Adam Anderson and the Dundas family, the latter of which was located both in Edinburgh and London.Footnote 122 In Georgia, as seen above, many of the same leaders were petitioning and working with a broad base of British protestants, as well. In both of the SSPCK's colonial endeavors during the 1730s, the Scottish Society was operating within a broad and deep personal, institutional, and historical matrix of protestant reform efforts that had culminated with the transatlantic Christian knowledge movement.
IV. Conclusion
From the late seventeenth century until the mid-eighteenth century, the Christian knowledge movement captured the imaginations of individuals, communities, and parishes on both sides of the Atlantic. During this period, initiatives for benevolence and educational reform stood alongside other efforts for both social and personal improvement. This wellspring of creative energy was understood to be central to a new and enlightened age that was ushering in the next phase of the Protestant Reformation. Consequently, a broad alliance of British protestants—clerical and lay—collaborated within well-defined institutional establishments in an effort to usher in the next phase of Christian history that was centered on toleration, conscience, and what was believed to be the ultimate goal or end-design of their efforts: charity.Footnote 123
By the 1740s, however, this movement was transformed by a revival narrative that emphasized New Birth theology and puritan-centered understandings of piety, salvation, and sanctification. Donald Meek recognized the nature of this transformation in his contention that during this period the SSPCK shifted its focus from “civilization to salvation.”Footnote 124 Indeed, future icons of evangelical revivalists such as David and John Brainerd, George Whitefield, the brothers Wesley, and Samson Occom were all linked institutionally to the Christian knowledge movement through funding and correspondence;Footnote 125 it was the SSPCK, for example, that first published David Brainerd's famous missionary journal.Footnote 126 Such institutional ties lends credence to the narrative that places the birth of modern missions within the “missionary Anglicanism”Footnote 127 at the turn of the eighteenth century along with the early transatlantic missionary efforts of the SSPCK.Footnote 128 This thesis also supports Meek's suggestion that the SSPCK should be given a more prominent role in the story of modern missions as well as Henry Sefton's argument decades ago that the SSPCK was formative in the Church of Scotland's establishment of and concern for missionary efforts overseas.Footnote 129
As religious efforts of benevolence, reform, and enlightened piety became more fragmented with the Great Awakening, they simultaneously became less reliant upon established churches. The result was a synthesis of competing pious forms that would dominate the landscape of protestant visions of piety and reform for centuries to come.Footnote 130 Institutionally, the Christian knowledge movement established international ties that would shape later efforts of benevolence and reform. It also laid the foundation for missionary efforts that scholars have begun to recognize more fully in recent years.Footnote 131 Nonetheless, though theological and sacramental emphases would change dramatically, the foundation of both evangelism and benevolent reform efforts in the British protestant milieu was rooted in the individuals, networks, and institutions associated with and integral to the Christian knowledge movement.
