In 1781, the Tory Peter Oliver indicted the clergy of Massachusetts on the charge of bad manners:

Oliver named Charles Chauncy (1705–87), pastor of First Church in Boston, and Jonathan Mayhew (1720–66), former pastor of Boston's West Church, as two of the worst offenders. Chauncy “was of a very resentfull, unforgiving Temper; & when he was in the Excess of his Passion, a Bystander would naturally judge that he had been educated in the Purlieus of Bedlam.” Mayhew “had too great a Share of Pride for an humble Disciple of so divine a Master, & looked with too contemptuous an Eye on all around him.” Such impropriety, claimed Oliver, spilled over into matters of religion: Chauncy made statements that “bordered too near upon Blasphemy,” and Mayhew, “in his extempore Pulpit Effusions,” proposed ideas “so unharmonious and discordant, that they always grated upon the Ears of his Auditors.”

In the middle of the eighteenth century, Americans reinvented the porch. Sometime between 1745 and 1755, they focused their attention on the doorways of their homes and businesses and began to ornament and enlarge them. Doorways were framed with delicate woodworking and elaborate, time-consuming carpentry. Doorway facades became works of art. Low-relief columns, pilasters, moldings, festoons, and richly ornamented transoms appeared over and around the threshold. Classical columns, extended roofs, wooden railings of every sort, and smooth stone steps were added to building entrances. Colonial builders, in fact, spent a disproportionate amount of time crafting the doorway. Architecture critic Joseph Jackson, commenting on the sudden and intense interest in doorways in New England, wrote: “Here again, proportion seems to have been forgotten, for many of the doorways and doors are excellent in themselves, but they are appended to houses that are unfitted for them by design and general character.”

Colonists were suddenly fascinated with the threshold of a building. The porch that drew attention to this threshold was not inside the house, nor could it properly be said to stand outside the house. It was, in a sense, “in-between.” Moreover, it may have been precisely the expression of this in-betweenness that appealed to colonial builders of this period, for the world in which they lived at mid century was itself a world in between. In religious, political, and socioeconomic aspects of colonial life, new ideas and events were challenging the old ways and traditions.

Charles Chauncy and Jonathan Mayhew believed that society, like the universe, was a coherent whole. Just as the oftentimes hidden hand of God arranged and connected things on a cosmic scale, so also did humanity arrange itself into a workable social order, under the influence of an impulse to unite that was itself fundamental and irreducible and, indeed, somewhat mysterious. The social theories of Chauncy and Mayhew were characterized by faith in cohesion, in the union of individuals in the social body. As Chauncy wrote, such union was a cosmic principle applicable to all species: “There is a certain bond of union established between the individuals of every species.” Mayhew illustrated the matter more simply: “Men have a natural propensity towards society. They love to combine and unite as much as Beer.”

God's creation was a coherent whole, but that did not mean that death, disease and natural catastrophe could not occur. Similarly, the existence in persons of an impulse to unite did not ensure that society would function smoothly at all times. Chauncy and Mayhew understood that social relations were a complicated and delicate matter, and warned that the slightest disturbance in the social order, if left unattended, could bring tragic consequences. Society was, as Samuel Davies suggested, a fine-tuned instrument, and if the tension between its parts was upset in even the smallest measure, the resulting imbalance could quickly tip society into an extreme condition.

Political deference to individuals with property, as a practical policy, was the corollary of a more general principle of colonial society, namely, that society was divided into fixed, clearly recognizable ranks or orders. The division of society into three broad groups – the “better sort,” the “middling sort,” and the “lower sort” – was partly the result of the opportunity for the accumulation of land and profits in a newly settled part of the world, and partly, as Clinton Rossiter has pointed out, the product of “the inheritance from England and Europe of a tradition of social stratification.” This consciousness of class distinctions is graphically illustrated in an excerpt from the autobiography of Devereux Jarratt:

The fact that there was general agreement among colonists of a hierarchy of social rank is interestingly illustrated, again, in an incident recorded in the diary of Samuel Sewall, in the early eighteenth century.

Charles Chauncy and Jonathan Mayhew saw coherence and order in the “great whole” of the cosmos, and such vision guided their thinking when they set out to fashion statements on points of religious doctrine. By building on the notion of wholeness, by conceiving of it as the dialectical relation of seeming opposites, both men were able to apply it effectively in treating certain theological problems. This approach eventually produced a complex and sophisticated body of ideas, and it was Chauncy's and Mayhew's inventive use of language that helped to transmit these ideas to the congregations of their Boston churches. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have recently argued that “our ordinary conceptual system, in which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.” Chauncy and Mayhew sought to show how events and forces in the universe “mutually confirmed” each other, and, by capitalizing on their feeling for metaphor and analogy, they injected nuances into the theological vocabulary of the day in order to make their point.

It was Mayhew's ability to demonstrate the mutual dependence of seemingly contradictory concepts that Harrison Gray (a West Church member) may have had in mind when he called Mayhew “such a Brilliant Genius” and, in describing young Jonathan's Harvard years, stated that he was “esteemed by the Governors of the College as the phenix of the Age.” Mayhew himself considered the ability to balance ideas, and to avoid extremes, as being among the most admirable qualities a person could have.

I have included this sketch of the status of members of First Church and West Church because I think that it is useful background to understanding the social world of Chauncy and Mayhew. In the records of First Church and West Church there survive no membership rolls, no lists of names of all the church members for a particular year. The information available consists of records of baptisms, marriages, new admittances, and bequests and limited financial reports. Lists of the names of members must be pieced together from what can be gleaned from these records. The problem is complicated by the fact that there are no lists of departures (not dismissals) to go along with the records of new admittances. Persons left one congregation for another fairly regularly, but there is no way of knowing exactly when such a transfer occurred, unless the name of a member turns up in the records of another church. Sometimes persons left the city altogether. Sometimes they only wanted to be married or to baptize their children. In short, though there are many names in the records, not all of them can be considered regular churchgoers, much less members.

Ezra Stiles has made construction of the membership rolls a little easier. In a letter to Andrew Eliot in 1766, he remarked that First Church, with its one hundred and fifty families, ranked fourth among Boston churches in size of membership.

In spite of the fact that life at mid century was filled with divisions and dichotomies, Charles Chauncy and Jonathan Mayhew believed that the harmony of all reality was the enduring plan of God, and they preached this message continuously from their pulpits. In a discourse occasioned by the earthquakes of 1755, Mayhew thus offered to his congregation the following dictum: “There is a harmony and uniformity of design visible in the works of nature and providence, which shows that all originally proceeds from, and is governed by, ONE.” In Two Sermons on the Nature, Extent and Perfection of Divine Goodness (1763), he likewise applauded “the structure, the admirable order and adjustment of the various parts, nothing superfluous, nothing wanting, from whence results the harmony and beauty of the whole.” In another sermon, taking up the matter of the destruction of the world as predicted in The Revelation to John, Mayhew held that the interdependencies among all that exists dictated that the destruction of the earth would be accompanied by the destruction of all else: “It appears to me most probable that the apostle intends this whole system, inclusive of the sun and the planetary regions, as well as this habitable world, with all its furniture,” to be destroyed.

In many sermons written in the 1750s and 1760s, Mayhew expressed himself on the coherence and uniformity of nature. All creation was under “the Law of Nature, which cannot be repealed by God himself.”

In religion, the mid-eighteenth-century New England mind focused on personal religious experience/private judgment as related to morality/ church leadership. In colonial political thought, the relation of liberty to authority was seen as the critical issue. The Independent Reflector addressed the matter thus in 1753:

Indeed, it might be asked how Americans, overwhelmed by a mass of unsorted political ideas, might even have begun to answer the question posed by the Reflector. Pulled one way in their thinking by a deepening mistrust of power, and pulled another way by their longstanding habit of deference to the “better Sort,” colonists generally shifted uneasily from one position to the other.

Typical is the case of the Independent Reflector. The essay for the week of January 25, 1753, declared: “It is impossible for a Man devoid of Merit, to be elevated to an eminent Post; or, for superior Worth to languish in Obscurity and Indigence.” Commenting in particular on British politics, the Reflector continued: