When
the Rev. Jonathan Mayhew died in Boston on July 9, 1766 his moral, religious, and political legacy was far from
accomplished. Indeed years and decades
would unfold before the depth of his influence became apparent in a new nation
and in a new faith. Mayhew, then only 46
years old, was the minister of Old West
Church, and much beloved by his congregation
and admired by the hot heads and
radicals being rallied by Samuel Adams who would soon become the Sons of Liberty. He was decidedly unpopular among the
majority of his ministerial peers, conservative civic leaders, and with the Royal Governor of Massachusetts and his
Council.
Mayhew
was born on Martha’s Vineyard on
October 8, 1720, a fifth generation descendent of Thomas Mayhew, the Elder who first arrived in the New World with
the Great Migration fleet of Puritan settlers in 1631. Ten years later the original Mayhew secured
a proprietary colony grant for Martha's
Vineyard, Nantucket, the Elizabeth Islands, and other small islands. Installing himself as governor he began populating his grant with new immigrants and also
established his own farm and whaling operations. Thomas, his son, and grandson also were missionaries among the local Wampanoag and established such fair and
friendly relations with the natives.
They made clear that religion and governance were separate. The tribe was welcome to embrace
Christianity, but Mayhew was at pains to assure them that their governance and
lands were secure on their own.
Relations were so good that despite vastly outnumbering the settlers the
local Wampanoag did not join the general uprising known as King Philips War that almost wiped out the Massachusetts Bay Colony of 1675-76.
Although
the small proprietary colony was absorbed by Massachusetts after 1688, the
family, or much of it, remained on the island in relative isolation from the
mainstream of Puritan society. Devoutly
religious, their local version of the Congregationalist
New England Standing Order drifted from the harsh and rigid Calvinism of the main land.
Young
Jonathan, noted for his scholarly bent, left the island to pursue the Lord’s work as a student of the factory
of divines, Harvard College. Upon graduation
Mayhew he found New England in a religious upheaval. The Connecticut
minister and Theologian Jonathan
Edwards had helped inaugurate the first round of revival meetings in the 1730’s. In 1841 he scared the hell out New
England with his fiery sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God which
quickly became the first big best seller
in the Colonies in pamphlet
form. Mayhew rejected Edwards view declaring that “total
depravity both dishonourable to the character of God and a libel on human
nature.” He likewise rejected the five points of Calvinism including the
doctrine of irresistible grace and the
doctrine of the Trinity as taught by
the Athanasian and Nicene Creeds.
At
the same time Mayhew also rejected the Great
Awakening—the first of a series of huge revival movements that have periodically swept Americans up into a
religious frenzy. Mayhew had seen the
principle mover of the Awakening, the English
preacher and revivalist George
Whitefield, an Anglican preacher who became a founding figure in Methodism, at camp meetings in what is
now Maine. He was repulsed by the mindless
emotionalism he witnessed which he suspected would burn brightly but soon
extinguish itself. He found Whitefield’s
followers, ‘of the more illiterate sort,” and the preaching “confused,
conceited and enthusiastic.” He was
repelled by the “extravagance and fanaticism, and violent gestures and shrieks”
of people in the throes of religious ecstasy.
Mayhew
made his views publicly know. He
proposed a third path based on religious rationalism
and a view of a loving, but firm God as father as revealed in a careful
reading and analysis of the Bible. These view made it difficult for the
young minister to find a parish. But in
1747 West Church in Boston, one of the city’s nine Congregational Churches—and the
least prosperous—called him to be their minister. Only two of the other ministers in the city
would even agree, as was customary, to be at the service of installation and ordination for the customary laying
on of hands, symbolizing a welcome into the ministerial community. One prominent minister is known to have
scolded his barber when the man
expressed interest in hearing Mayhew warning him not to go hear “that heretic.”
Shortly
after assuming the pulpit Mayhew crossed the ocean to pursue his doctorate of divinity at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, an intellectual hot bed of
the Scottish Enlightenment. Although the liberal ideas of the Scottish
Enlightenment were taking hold among a young and rising generation of Virginia Tidewater aristocrats, they
were a novelty in New England where
most ministers who pursued advanced degrees in the mother country did so at
firmly Puritan institutions.
Despite
the cold shoulder of his colleagues, Mayhew perused a ministry that presaged Unitarianism—a theological position
that did not even yet have a name—by more than two decades. His belief in a firm, fair, and loving
God/king led him to believe that even the worst sinners, after a period of
punishment and reflection, could be reconciled and dwell thereafter in Heaven with the saints and the angels. This was a kind of universalism, making Mayhew probably the first North American
preacher to combine the two ideas which became the two streams of modern Unitarian Universalism.
But
Mayhew, however far seeing and a religious pioneer, is best remembered for the
political sermons that helped stir rebellion.
His
most famous and influential sermon was preached on the centennial of the execution of
King Charles I, January 30,
1750. Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the
Higher Powers refuted the
growing opinion that the king was a martyr. It was a long, scholarly history of the
monarchy and the development of the English
constitution and built a Biblical argument against the Devine Right of Kings and in favor of popular resistance to unjust government in answer to a higher law.
He concluded that the execution of Charles was justified when he when
he “too greatly infringed upon British
liberties. It was also a lesson for
any future monarch with inclinations to despotism.
The
sermon was widely printed and circulated as a pamphlet, for a while supplanting
Jonathan Edwards old screed in popularity.
It was also reprinted in London
in 1752 and again in 1767 as relations between the Mother Country and the
Colonies were reaching crisis. Mayhew
became an international celebrity, albeit a highly controversial one. His radicalism was denounced from other
pulpits, and, of course, condemned by authorities.
But
Sam Adams and his boys and a rising generation of patriots did listen. Years later Sam’s cousin John Adams would recall, that Mayhew’s sermon “was read by
everybody.” Some would call it the intellectual
opening salvo in the run-up the American
Revolution.
Mayhew
continued to preach influential, widely circulated sermons including two election day charges in 1750 and 1754
election sermons espousing colonial rights and the civic duty to resist tyranny. He became particularly aroused with the
imposition of the Stamp Act in
1765. The essence of slavery, he argued
in a new sermon, consists in subjection to others—“whether many, few, or but
one, it matters not.” The day after his sermon, a Boston mob attacked and
destroyed Chief Justice Thomas
Hutchinson’s house. Mayhew and his
sermon were held responsible by the “respectable citizens of Boston.”
In
1763 Mayhew rebuked the Anglican Society
for the Propagation of the Gospel for its plans to dispatch missionaries,
priests, and teachers to the Colonies as well as the eminent appointment of an Anglican
Bishop. He regarded all of this as a camel’s nose under the tent meant to
bring the colonies back into conformity with the Crown and its institutions.
In
1765 Mayhew was invited by Harvard to deliver the annual Dudlean Lecture on religion. This was a rare show of approval from
the New England establishment and an acknowledgement of his popular leadership
against the Crown.
The
Snare Broken
was a thanksgiving discourse preached by Mayhew on May 23, 1766 occasioned by
Parliament’s repeal of the Stamp Act. It
was a warning to William Pitt and
others in England who he knew would read it that taking self-government into
private hands in some circumstances must surely proceed from “self-preservation,
being a great and primary law of nature.”
Weeks
after delivering this last famous salvo, Mayhew died. Most of the Boston clergy still avoided his
funeral as did virtually all officeholders.
In
addition to his influence on the Sons of Liberty and the American Revolution, Mayhew’s
religious ideas, except for his proto-universalism, were quietly adopted by a
new generation of Harvard graduates and ministers. In the years following the revolution all
most all Boston churches affiliated with the Standing Order were quietly but
unofficially unitarian. An open break
with the Congregationalists however would not come until William Ellery Channing’s Baltimore
sermon in 1819. Ironically Mayhew’s
old congregation Old West would be one of only two Boston churches to remain
with the orthodox Congregationalists.
