American Heroes by Edmund S. Morgan Read Free Book Online Page B

Johnson, and James Wetmore, the pastor, now the former pastor, of North Haven, were adamant. The books in the library were more persuasive to them than anything their friends could say. They departed for England, where they were ordained as ministers of the Anglican Church and, with the exception of Browne, who died in England, returned to form the spearhead of a drive to convert the rest of New England to Anglicanism.
    Yale meanwhile set about to recover its dignity. The trustees hired a series of rectors notable for their orthodoxy, culminating in the terrible-tempered Thomas Clap, who in 1745 assumed the title of president and kept the college firmly in the orthodox path. But neither Clap nor the trustees ventured to close the library. In fact, they accepted more books for it from Bishop Berkeley and from Isaac Watts. Seditious volumes lay still available to innocent minds, ready to lure them to new and perhaps still worse heresies.
    The faculty at this time consisted of the president and two or three tutors. The president read lectures on various subjects, and the tutors heard the recitations of the various classes in the assigned reading. One of the tutors whom Clap hired in 1749 appeared to be a safe young man. Ezra Stiles was the son of Isaac Stiles, the North Haven minister who took the place of the Anglicized and departed James Wetmore. Isaac Stiles was a friend of Clap’s, and Isaac’s son Ezra made a good record in college as an undergraduate. After graduation in 1746, Ezra Stiles remained in New Haven, reading in the library and casting about for a career. There was only one thing wrong with this young man: he had an insatiable curiosity. If necessity is the mother of invention, curiosity is surely the father of it, and invention is heresy by another name. It was probably inevitable that Ezra Stiles, placed in reach of the Yale Library, would sooner or later arrive at a number of heretical ideas.
    He had been reading for three years after graduation when Clap hired him; and, though he himself may not have realized it at the time, he was already well launched toward a heresy worse than Cutler’s or Johnson’s. It seems to have begun with a book whose title sounded harmless: Samuel Clarke’s Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God , printed in London in 1705. Clarke was a pious man, and much of his book was directed against the deists, who believed that divine revelation through the Scriptures was not necessary for the discovery and enforcement of moral precepts. Revelation, Clarke insisted, was necessary. You could go a long way with unaided human reason toward discovering God’s will, but you could not go far enough. Clarke’s admonitions had an effect on Stiles similar to that of warning a child not to stuff beans up his nose. His curiosity was whetted rather than satisfied.
    He went on to read Shaftesbury’s Characteristics and Pope’s Essay on Man. He was so impressed with Pope that he committed long passages to memory and entertained himself with recitations as he walked abroad or paced the floor of his room. He did not recognize either of these works as deistic, but he admired in them the same quality that deists admired, their rationality. They were doing for moral philosophy what Newton had done for natural philosophy. Newton’s method, Stiles had learned in college, was “to discard the authority of great names and ingenious Hypotheses in philosophy, and to rely instead wholly upon reason.” Why not do the same in religion? The ethical and religious writings of a Shaftesbury seemed to proceed on this principle; Shaftesbury looked to no scriptural writers for authority but argued his case from pure reason.
    As soon as Ezra Stiles examined his own religious beliefs in the light of these ideas, something had to give. The first thing to go was the Westminster Confession of Faith, a creed drawn up by an assembly of Puritan divines in the 1640s and