George B. Cheever and “God’s Hand in America”, 1841
Miles Smith
“Education A Divine Thing”: George Washington Doane and the Divine Foundations of Education, 1854
In 1854, George Washington Doane, Episcopal bishop of New Jersey, addressed the students, faculty, and friends of Burlington College, adjacent to the Episcopal parish church in Burlington, New Jersey. He took as his subject the divine roots of education. “Education”...
A Review of *Reformed Theology*, by Jonathan Master
Humans, argues Rev. Dr. Jonathan Master, “need clear answers to the biggest questions in life and the most consequential matters of eternity.” This is because “knowing what we believe about God, humanity, worship, and salvation is important.” These two simple...
William Mercer Green, *The Influence of Christianity Upon the Welfare of Nations*
In 1831 William Mercer Green, an Episcopal clergymen and later bishop of Mississippi, used a lecture at the University of North Carolina to extol what he argued was the near total affects of public Christianity on the development of Western social progress. For Green,...
John Henry Hobart on Exoticism and Patriotism, 1825
It was, declared the bishop, the United States’ “civil and religious institutions that we may, without the imputation of vainglory, boast the preeminence.”
Patriotic Jesus: Bishop Theodore Dehon on the Duty of Patriotism in the Early Republic
Christopher Edwards Gadsden, rector of St Philip’s Church in Charleston, South Carolina and later bishop of South Carolina, published a comprehensive biography of Theodore Dehon in 1833. Dehon served as the second Episcopal bishop of South Carolina. When he died in...
Napoleon’s Defeat and Thomas Chalmers’ Post-millennial Nationalism
“Were such a government as this to be swept from its base, either by the violence of foreign hostility, or by the hands of her own misled and infatuated children-I should never cease to deplore it as the deadliest interruption which ever had been given to the interests of human virtue, and arm, to the march of human improvement.”
“Impious and Fearful”: Early Republic Episcopalians Against the Social Contract
In an 1848 election sermon to the Massachusetts legislature, Alexander H. Vinton, rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Boston, told the state legislators the state had a divinely ordained function in moral government. Interestingly, Vinton rejected Locke and the...
“This Combined Secular and Religious Training”: Charles Hodge on Public Education in the Early Republic
Early Republic Protestant divines saw the implementation of a public educational system as a necessity for a healthy republican order. Charles Hodge, principle of Princeton Seminary and perhaps the most prestigious Protestant intellectual in the United States in 1850,...
Hierarchy, Not Binary: Early Republic Episcopal Conceptions of Sacred and Secular in the Civil Order
Early Republic and Early National Protestant conceptions of the sacred-secular distinction in some ways were less a binary or a distinction than values in a single divine hierarchy. Few religious leaders in the United States denied that the government was secular, but...