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That Religion in Which All Men Agree. David G. Hackett
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isbn 9780520957626
Автор произведения David G. Hackett
Издательство Ingram
Banding together in a brotherhood of cosmopolitan and respected gentlemen, Freemasons presented themselves as a cultivated elite coming together for the common good. Charity flowed from this benevolence and could follow an expansive path. Though the fraternity’s charity was intended particularly for its members, on Saint John’s Days and in times of community distress Masons extended financial aid to those in greatest need. In 1740, the Charleston fraternity gave two hundred and fifty dollars to assist the survivors of a citywide fire; on Saint John’s Day in 1767, a single lodge gave one hundred pounds for the relief of New York City’s poor.111
To differing degrees, all of the Saint John’s Day ministers believed that Freemasonry was a Christian organization. John Rodgers of Berkshire County, Massachusetts, prefaced his remarks by saying that he did not know a great deal about the Masons, yet from what he had read he “presumed” they were Christians. Others, such as Brockwell, saw Jesus as the “Patron of our Society.” Or, as Pollen put it: “This society . . . follows the steps of their master Christ, whose design was in that blessed society himself instituted.”112 The common assumption was that to be a good Mason one must be a good Christian. “For what duties are mentioned in the Gospel, are not adopted in your Book of Constitutions?” argued Zabdiel Adams of Lancaster, Massachusetts. “There you are required to fear God . . . love the brotherhood, honour all men, and to submit to the government under which you live.”113
Masons demonstrated their commitment to Christianity by carrying Bibles on gilt cushions in their processions and, on occasion, refusing to celebrate the Saint John’s Day festivities without a clergyman present.114 Moreover, virtuous action for Christians and Masons appeared to be one and the same. As “children of the same God, candidates for the same Heaven,” Masons were told that it was their duty to “enlarge the narrowness of men’s understandings, to smooth the roughness of their wills, and to level the unevenness of their passions.”115 Such actions measured their growth in Christ. Nevertheless, what it meant to be a Christian and what it meant to be a Mason was not always clear in colonial society, reflecting not only a confusion in the relationship between moderate Anglicanism and Freemasonry but a larger difficulty in the “polite” society in which both parties participated.
One way of investigating this confusion is to look at the tensions and accommodations between the two kinds of courtesy books that began to appear in colonial libraries and bookshops in the early eighteenth century. These widely read manuals are another indication of the spread of polite society among the elite. Instructions for youth are part of a vast literature in Western civilizations going back to classical times.116 Books on manners and the equally popular books on morals had different origins and intents. Manners books were copies of older English and, before that, French instruction books, which were imbued with instructions for proper behavior in the courts of medieval royalty. Their purpose was to provide instruction in the cultural practices of aristocratic European society.117 The Earl of Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son, one of the first and most popular of these books—published in eighteen American versions prior to 1800—devoted whole chapters to such topics as “the perils of bad enunciation” and “the policy of discreet reserve” as steps in a young man’s minute instruction in proper behavior in polite society. In his book, Chesterfield says little about divine punishment or God as the final judge of bad behavior, rather threatening his son with the hell of exclusion from “what is agreeable and pleasing in society.”118 In contrast, books on morals have a Christian heritage. Richard Allestree’s The Whole Duty of Man, which went through one hundred editions in as many years, is divided into chapters to be read aloud every Sunday.119 It taught young people the virtues associated with a proper Christian upbringing: submission to God, obedience to parents, pure thoughts, continual acts of piety and charity. Acting in a manner pleasing to society and the danger of ridicule for not doing so have no place in it. As Richard Bushman has argued, these two types of guidebooks “stood apart from one another,” leaving the reader to resolve the disparities. In practice, the eighteenth-century elite appear to have created a common moral system from them. At times, as with The School of Good Manners, the two approaches were literally bound together into a single book.120 For the colonial gentry, good manners expressed a Christian regard for the happiness of others. At the same time, as polite Christians, they regulated their piety as carefully as their bodies, to restrain, for example, the emotional excesses of evangelical religion.
In their Saint John’s Day sermons, Anglican clergymen urged this polite model of Christian virtue on the gathered congregations of Freemasons. To them, good breeding entered into the assessment of proper Christian behavior. By cultivating a “courteous, pitiful, and sympathetic temper,” Adams said, you “shall reflect an honour both on your Christian and Masonic profession.” Failure to act in love toward one’s neighbor, another said, was in “contempt of common sense and good breeding” as well as “defiance of the feelings of humanity and the laws of God.” To behave in an “unworthy” manner, Brockwell declared, “casts a reflection” on “the reputation” of not just the individual but the brotherhood as a whole: “People will be very apt to frame their conceptions of it from the conduct and deportment of those who are its members.”121
For the colonial gentleman, to become a Mason was to share in the values and behavior of America’s emerging elite, including a moderate Anglicanism shaped by the courtly manners of polite society. In this period, as affluent people attempted to discipline themselves and their children in the modes of genteel conduct, they divided themselves from all who refused to embrace the new principles. Especially repugnant were those whom Brockwell termed the “vulgar,” who, with their dirty hands, slovenly clothes, and ungainly speech, appeared crude and debauched, a lower order of life. Following the Great Awakening, Brockwell derided the “convulsions into which the whole country is thrown by a set of Enthusiasts . . . [who] strole about haranguing the admiring Vulgar in extempore nonsense.”122 In contrast to these disruptive revivalists, Masonic gentlemen showed polite consideration of their peers and a caring condescension toward their inferiors.
THE RELIGIOUS PUBLIC SPHERE
One early Masonic encounter with the revivals of what came to be known as the Great Awakening occurred in Charleston, South Carolina.123 On December 27, 1739, that city’s lodge held its annual Saint John’s Day celebration, complete with public processions and an evening of balls and entertainments.124 The following Sunday the itinerant evangelist George Whitefield arrived to conduct several days of preaching. Soon thereafter, he pointedly asked Alexander Garden, the Anglican commissary, if the latter had delivered “his soul by exclaiming against” the pompous “assemblies and balls” held for the entertainment of the town’s upper class. Garden was taken aback by the insubordination of the young Whitefield and admonished him, “Must you come to catechize me?”125 He then tartly told the young preacher that there was “no harm” in these entertainments of polite society, especially when compared with the “Mobb-Preachings, and the Assemblies of his Institution,” where “Men and Women” built “up one another in Conceit of their being righteous” while “damning” the morality of “all others.”126
Over the next several months, in pamphlets and in the pages of the South Carolina Gazette, Charleston Protestants waged a battle over the Great Awakening. Whitefield initiated this debate by challenging Garden to a “public exchange” on the doctrinal validity of the Grand Itinerant’s preaching. As Whitefield put it, “It would be endless to enter into . . . a private debate,” where each would repeatedly offer his own point of view. Rather, the “publick” should be informed of their positions through “the press.” Then they could let the “World judge” who was right.127 As Frank Lambert has argued, Whitefield’s successful challenge resulted in moving the arena of religious disputes