Education, Empire and George Berkeley

The eighteenth-century Anglican Atlantic networks of the SPG and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (the SPCK, also founded by Thomas Bray just before the SPG in 1698) were marked by their strongly educational instincts. After all, if the Restoration church’s new baptism service for those of riper years were to be employed on English plantations in the Americas and Indies, then schooling and books were requisite preliminaries.Footnote ⁹ The ambitions of George Berkeley in the mid-1720s were in this vein. As a young Irish Anglican who had been a distinguished fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, Berkeley’s instincts to serve the New World were in large part prompted by his anxieties about the old: ‘We have made a jest of public spirit and cancelled all respect for whatever our laws and religion repute sacred’.Footnote ¹⁰ When he returned to England in 1720 after a continental tour as private tutor to St George Ashe, he encountered a society that he had come to believe was mired in sin. By the spring of 1724, he had secured preferment to the deanery of Derry, but its handsome income was no inducement to settle; rather, it spurred him to greater zeal in his desire to effect moral and religious reform. In the summer of 1722, he had already written to his great friend John Percival, an Irish nobleman, of his vision:

A few months later, Berkeley published a tract, A Proposal For the better Supplying of Churches in our Foreign Plantations, and for Converting the Savage American to Christianity (1725), which further outlined his reasoning. In common with earlier calls to missionary zeal, Berkeley presented his scheme as a means of renewing the faith at home as much as securing Protestant influence abroad, noting that ‘the protestant religion hath of late years considerably lost ground, and America seems the likeliest of place, wherein to make up for what hath been lost in Europe, provided the proper methods are taken’.Footnote ¹²

The choice of Bermuda was misguided. Berkeley believed the American mainland to have ‘little sense of religion’, with Anglican clergymen there being ‘very meanly qualified both in learning and morals’. They have, he continued, ‘quit their native country on no other motive, than that they are not able to procure a livelihood in it’.Footnote ¹³ Drawing on out-of-date travelers’ reports, Berkeley thought Bermuda was a moral, climatic, geographical and economic idyll, the inhabitants having ‘the greatest simplicity of manners, more innocence, honesty, and good nature.’Footnote ¹⁴ Berkeley’s second edition of the Proposal, published several months later (having acquired a royal charter for the proposed college) was moderated only insomuch as it stressed that ‘gospel liberty’ did not require the emancipation of the enslaved (no doubt to placate commercial and mercantile anxiety); further, it asserted that the needs of the English settlers, ‘themselves degenerated into Heathens’, had not been forgotten.Footnote ¹⁵

Berkeley paid no attention to the colleges already present on the mainland, having decided that Harvard and Yale ‘subsisted to little or no purpose’ and supplied evidence that ‘where Ignorance or ill Manners once take place in a Seminary, they are sure to be handed down in a Succession of illiterate or worthless Men’.Footnote ¹⁶ Making no reference to the Codrington bequest or even to the College of William and Mary (a 1693 Church of England foundation in Williamsburg, Virginia), Berkeley pursued his project zealously, gaining funds and parliamentary support.Footnote ¹⁷ He seemed willfully ignorant of those who questioned it, not least Thomas Bray who published in 1727 a dossier on his societies’ missionary activity across the Atlantic – his Missionalia – that was quietly devastating of Berkeley’s casual assumptions about the usefulness of the American clergy (whom Bray robustly defended). Nor was Bray impressed by Berkeley’s suggestion of transporting native American children to Bermuda to be educated (‘the most Unchristian, or rather the most Anti-Christian Method, to propagate the Gospel’, he wrote).Footnote ¹⁸ Whether it was Berkeley’s unwillingness to engage with those ‘who would be more ready and Capable to Assist him’ from ‘our Religious Societies’ (the SPG and SPCK, the latter to which Berkeley had been elected in 1725),Footnote ¹⁹ or just fury at what he considered sheer naivety, Bray was evidently anxious that Berkeley’s highly publicized and well-funded scheme would undermine the endeavours of the church societies.

By the summer of 1728, however, considerable sums had been promised by Parliament (£20,000) despite the questions raised by both sceptical merchants and those who argued funds should be preserved for the founding of Georgia. Furthermore, it was unclear whether George II would sustain his father’s financial commitment to the college.Footnote ²⁰ In a bid to keep the project alive and encourage ministers to provide the promised money, Berkeley set out from Gravesend to Rhode Island via Williamsburg, Virginia, with his family and future tutors.

Arriving in January 1729, and expecting to stay for a period, Berkeley bought a farm in Middletown – staffed by enslaved Africans – just outside Newport, which he expanded in the Palladian style and renamed Whitehall. It was an architectural expression of the learned society that Berkeley hoped to bring to both Newport and, in due course, the wider colonies through his plans for St Paul’s College.

Colonial Clergy and the ‘New Learning’

However, far from discovering a clergy ‘very meanly qualified both in learning and morals’, Berkeley was soon visited by Samuel Johnson, the rector of Christ Church, Stratford, with whom he established a friendship. Johnson had read Berkeley already and, in him, Berkeley encountered the fruit of what, by the third decade of the eighteenth century, was a growing appetite among the New England clergy for what Johnson called the ‘New Learning’. Johnson himself had been something of a prodigy. The son of a Congregationalist Connecticut farmer, able to read and write by the age of four and to understand Hebrew by the age of five, he went to the Collegiate School (the original name of Yale University) in 1714, there composing ‘A Synopsis of Natural Philosophy’, which he duly expanded into ‘An Encyclopedia of Philosophy’. In 1716, he became a tutor at Yale, whereupon he lectured on Locke, Copernican astronomy, medicine and algebra.Footnote ²¹ Ordained as a Congregationalist pastor for West Haven in 1720, Johnson had been developing doubts about his ministry as he continued to digest the 800 or so books which had been donated to Yale by the American-born colonial agent for Connecticut and Massachusetts, Jeremiah Dummer, in 1714.

Dummer had been the first American to gain a European degree (at Utrecht) having proved himself at Harvard and – through his study of mathematics as a preliminary to his continental theology – he exhibited the growing influence of Newtonian rationality on American theology, much to the unhappiness of some Massachusetts Calvinists. Reflecting on the importance of Dummer’s gift to Yale, Johnson in his Autobiography (1771) reflected that, in the early part of the century, ‘there was no such thing as any books of learning to be had in those times under a 100 or 150 years old such as the first settlers … brought with them’ and the value of lighting upon Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, in particular, reshaped Johnson’s approach to intellectual endeavour. In his Autobiography, Johnson wrote how, aged eighteen:

Johnson’s ‘enlightenment’ was not limited to his exposure of late Stuart and Williamite logic and mathematics, but was also enabled through his reading of works by Richard Hooker, Thomas Ken, Robert Nelson, William Laud, John Pearson and Jeremy Taylor in Dummer’s collection. Reading these in the company of some of his Yale colleagues, a small group that included the rector of Yale, Timothy Cutler, fellow tutors Daniel Browne, George Pigot and another Congregational minister James Wetmore, they became anxious about the validity of their own orders. With them, Johnson renounced his Congregationalist orders in 1722 – an event sometimes referred to in the denominational historiography as the ‘great apostasy’ – and travelled to England, whereupon they were ordained in the Church of England.Footnote ²³

While Johnson returned to America with clearly more defined views about the significance of the sacraments and episcopacy, his high churchmanship was nonetheless coupled with a theology shaped by his reading of John Tillotson, Benjamin Hoadly, William Beveridge and John Locke inter alia during 1719–22, that was increasingly anti-determinist in its understanding of salvation and practical in its focus on virtue and piety.Footnote ²⁴ In this sense, he was emblematic of the SPG’s mission, as articulated by Bray, to establish ‘natural Religion’ as the foundation to all theological engagement before proceeding to the necessity of revelation.Footnote ²⁵

While Anglicans were a religious minority in New England, Johnson’s ethical and theological writings – many of which were irenic defences of Anglican doctrine and polity – were emblematic of a post-Newtonian philosophy that was finding a ready audience in Harvard and Yale, as John Corrigan and Norman Fiering have identified.Footnote ²⁶ Henry Newman (who matriculated at Harvard in 1687) noted how tutors like John Leverett and the college treasurer Thomas Brattle had encouraged such engagement, and that there were twenty times more friends to the Church of England in America ‘since these gentlemen governed the College’. Indeed, they recommended ‘the reading of episcopal authors as the best books to form our minds in religious matters, and preserve us from those narrow principles that kept us at a distance from the church of England’.Footnote ²⁷

As Harry Stout has explored in The New England Soul, for tutors like Leverett who had hitherto contended with a very restrictive Calvinist mindset, such writers were increasingly revered. The new century, informed by the different tenor of politics and religion that followed the accession of William and Mary, had, Stout asserts, inaugurated a process of ‘anglicization’ in New England in which ties with the mother country were increasingly valued, and English authors – theological and otherwise – treasured:

The transmission of books and missionaries by the Church of England, not least those that Johnson oversaw extending their reach into New England, were symptomatic of what Rusty Roberson (with a view to the Scottish missionary groups, in particular) describes as a broader ‘Christian knowledge movement’ that was traversing the Atlantic. Like the Society for the Reformation of Manners and other civic groups in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the leading moral reformer Josiah Woodward viewed ‘in our Northern plantations in America … a more remarkable Reformation’ than was evident in ‘either of Her Majesty’s Kingdoms’. Pan-Protestant, valuing moderation and rejecting narrow principle, Woodward identified the efforts of the transatlantic societies as effecting a reformation just as significant for Christianity as that which had transpired in the sixteenth century, not least through its influence upon third-generation Congregationalists like Leverett.Footnote ²⁹ This was echoed south of the Scottish border among those who supported the work of Bray’s societies, with White Kennett writing to Colman of his hopes ‘for the Union of all Protestants in some future Age, when Charity and Peace shall prevail above Interest and Passion’, underlining to Colman that the SPG missionaries were sent to bring Christian knowledge, rather than ‘only contending for Rites and Ceremonies, or for Powers and Privileges.’Footnote ³⁰

Institutionalizing Enlightened Anglicanism

In effecting this ‘reformation’, the dispatch of books from Oxford or London by Anglicans, both by the missionary societies and by individuals, was a crucial element in the development of the eastern seaboard’s intellectual stimulation. In their study of eighteen colonial libraries before 1750, entitled The Enlightened Reader in America, David Lundberg and Henry May identified John Locke as being by far the most popular author, whose An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) was the most frequently held item and continued to be throughout the century, even as more radical voices entered the American sphere after 1760. Alongside Locke as popular items in libraries can be identified John Tillotson’s Sermons (1682), Joseph Addison’s Evidences of the Christian Religion (1721) and George Berkeley’s Alciphron (written while he was in America, and published in 1732). As Stout has written,

Perhaps most emblematic of the new learning in the realm of epistemology was the reading of Locke. He had been the subject of censure in Oxford in 1703, but by the mid-eighteenth century, Locke and the other latitudinarian pragmatists were required reading at the university as the Aristotelian method and the Laudian curriculum were being questioned.Footnote ³² As Nathan Guy has observed, Locke was read in continuity with Hooker and the Great Tew circle and, as Brian Young has noted, this ‘Anglophone new logic became the accepted means of intellectual engagement in eighteenth-century England’ and endured in a manner unlike the more radical Newtonian physico-theology of Samuel Clarke.Footnote ³³ Moreover, the likes of Locke and Tillotson were also influential in shaping institutional expression in the colonies: Locke’s broad and inclusive form of political philosophy was well suited to a religiously plural environment (in which there was constant watchfulness for what was perceived as theocratic tyranny), and Tillotson’s advocacy of practical charity found broad receptivity in those seeking to cultivate public virtue in the colonies as much as in London.Footnote ³⁴

Gillian Brown argues that, apart from his political treatises, Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) was ‘probably the most widely instituted pedagogical theory in eighteenth-century Anglo-American culture’, with his notions of consent increasingly shaping conceptions of household authority; in particular, how children consenting to the authority of their parents was the means by which citizens were formed in their relationship to the state.Footnote ³⁵ All of this was the cultural background that was informing the changing curriculum of America’s education – both that which was established and seeking to break free of a rigid Calvinism and those, as with Berkeley’s planned institution, that were being fostered in the imagination.

While Stout and Corrigan note the receptivity of Congregationalists and Presbyterians to Anglican learning, what they do not delineate to the same degree is how Anglicans in colonial England were themselves propagators of such theology and homiletics, or the significance of Anglican library deposits in shaping this ‘ecumenical’ embrace of the ‘New Learning’. While Berkeley had been dismissive of Dissenters, he encountered in Johnson (who remained close to Yale) a pre-existing shared conception of education, and an absence of formal Church of England institutions in New England. This allowed for a readier collaboration between Protestants of various stripes in the early to mid-century than would have been encountered in England or Ireland. Not only was there a pan-Protestant commitment to outmanoeuvring ‘popery’ that shaped the American religious mind, as documented by Carla Gardina Pestana, but there was also a shared dissemination of what Roberson and Stout term a practical ‘enlightened piety’ which was shaped by a Lockean liberalism and around which a consensus was forming, not only among the younger faculty at Harvard or Yale, but through active propagation by a new generation of colonial Anglicans.Footnote ³⁶

Such intellectual collaboration was perhaps not surprising: in the context of Whig political dominance in England and anxiety about Roman Catholicism, Locke’s epistemic minimalism (‘everyone is orthodox to himself’) chimed with the language of liberty in Hanoverian propaganda and a broader resistance to ‘priestcraft’ in a variety of colonies under threat from French and Indian enemies (the latter often equated with Roman Catholics for their ‘superstitions’). In Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), as well as in A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), both staples of colonial libraries, the inward persuasion of the mind took precedence over the ‘creeds and profitable inventions’, the ‘lustrations’ and ‘expiations’ of their ‘pompous, fantastical, cumbersome ceremonies’; likewise, against their ‘systems of divinity’, ‘vain philosophy’, ‘foolish metaphysics’, and those ‘speculations and niceties, obscure terms, and abstract notions’ of the ‘holy tribe’ of the priests.Footnote ³⁷ Building on the pragmatism of Hooker and the epistemic breadth of the latitudinarians, this not only chimed with the tenor of New England politics but, interestingly, also with Johnson’s Anglicanism – episcopal yet learned, sacramental and enlightened – and consequently acted as a catalyst for the Church of England’s cultural and political influence in New England society in a way that few might have expected in the late seventeenth century.Footnote ³⁸

Despite his initial dismissal of the colonial colleges, it is indicative of a shared philosophy of learning that, through his connection to Johnson, Berkeley decided to endow Yale with both books and property. He had already given books to the college via Johnson in September 1731, writing from Rhode Island of how he prayed ‘God’s blessing on you and your endeavours to promote religion and learning in this uncultivated part of the world’.Footnote ³⁹ Having returned to London in the autumn of 1731, having accepted no further funds were going to be forthcoming from the metropolis, Berkeley wrote to Johnson in July 1732 offering his Rhode Island estate to Yale:

Building upon the legacy of Dummer, it was a remarkable gift to a Dissenting college by the dean of Londonderry. As Johnson reflected to the bishop of London in 1732, while Berkeley’s college would:

Berkeley’s donation did indeed energize Johnson’s mission to spread the Church of England’s influence in New England, and despite not having its own college, the church proved remarkably agile as a minority institution. Operating outside of a parochial system, without a local episcopate, and engaging in formal education largely in the Congregationalist colleges, greater emphasis was thus laid upon ideas and theological convictions as a means of influence. As has been noted of the SPCK in America by Brent Sirota, who views the Society as emblematic of an ‘Anglican revival’ that shaped the church after the Glorious Revolution, it was ‘improvisational … with its peculiar status as an unincorporated entity possessed of the favor but not the official mandate of episcopal superiors’:

Indeed, when seeking the support of bishops and Parliament, it was perhaps inevitable that these extra-diocesan Anglican societies would soon be aligning themselves with the requisite sources of influence and power, namely the Whig establishment, rather than the agitators for the sacerdotal interest in Convocation. As Sirota has argued, far from being a monolithic instrument of the Crown and hierarchy, the church had its own ‘blue-water policy’ akin to the entrepreneurial instincts of Britain’s maritime and commercial empire; institutions like the SPG or even Berkeley’s Bermuda project were ‘all manifestations of an established church struggling with its own insularity’ and ‘might be better understood as efforts at the de-territorialization of Anglicanism, a process of rendering the established church less dependent on the political, diocesan, and parochial structures that had proved difficult if not impossible to reproduce abroad.’Footnote ⁴³

Institutionalizing the New Learning

However, this is not to suggest that the failure of Berkeley to establish his college in either Bermuda or in New England diminished the appetite of Anglicans to set up their own institutions of learning, even while they bolstered the libraries of Yale and Harvard and catalyzed a pan-continental appetite for Anglican authors. Berkeley’s vision of education was ‘to ground these young Americans thoroughly in Religion and Morality, and to give them a good Tincture of other Learning; particularly of Eloquence, History and practical Mathematics; to which it may not be improper to add some skill in Physics.’Footnote ⁴⁴ Such aspirations did not dissipate as he sailed back to London from Boston.

Following Francis Bacon, Berkeley would not be alone in rethinking the categories of knowledge and the structure of learning within the colonies, and he could do so with a freedom that was harder to procure through the collegiate structure of Oxford or Cambridge. This ‘free and catholick air’ was, as David Hall has shown, already being expressed in the organization of college libraries. The donations of Dummer and Berkeley to Yale, for example, indicate how early efforts to endow American libraries produced collections that contained contributions other than biblical commentaries and extensive discourses on predestination. Rather than the medieval divisions of the arts into the trivium and quadrivium, libraries now began to arrange their collections around Baconian schemes. Samuel Johnson himself would write An Introduction to the Study of Philosophy in 1743, which aimed to give to students ‘a General Idea or Scheme of all the Arts and Sciences and the several things which are to be known and learnt’, organizing knowledge in such a way as to stress its unity: a scheme that Thomas Clap would use to reorganize the library at Yale in the same year.Footnote ⁴⁵

Enlightened Anglican ideals would also be influential in the founding of new colleges from the 1740s onwards. When Johnson became instrumental in the foundation of King’s College in New York, the first Anglican establishment in the northern colonies, he sought Berkeley’s advice and established a college that aimed to embed the ‘new learning’. Although Johnson, Berkeley and others referred to King’s as a ‘seminary’, it was not a theological college in any real sense. Divinity was not the predominant discipline, and there was no prospect of there being a professorship in divinity (despite initial promises to the Dutch Reformed that they would have their own theological professorship). George Berkeley, offering Samuel Johnson advice in 1749, suggested that teachers be secured from the seminaries of New England, for ‘none can be got in Old England (who are willing to go) worth sending’; that ‘Greek and Latin classics be well taught’ even if ‘the principal care must be good life and morals’; that the terms should be the same as those of Oxford and Cambridge, so as to ‘give credit to the College’; and that there was a need to recommend ‘this nascent seminary to an English bishop’.Footnote ⁴⁶

Johnson had mirrored Oxford in insisting upon a four-year course of study, in the preponderance of classics in the education of undergraduates, but with moral philosophy rather than theology being the pinnacle of this liberal education. As David Humphrey has indicated, Johnson’s curriculum ‘reflected his debt to the ideal of gentlemanly education – ‘polite learning’ – which the Renaissance had added to the medieval curriculum.’Footnote ⁴⁷ Humphrey suggested that Johnson’s model of making moral philosophy, rather than theology, the final-year discipline was ‘to synthesize and rationalize for seniors the intellectual experience of the previous three and a half years’ and was emblematic of an educational program with ‘more recent origins’. This was reflective of his own conversion in 1715 at Yale when, after having prepared in Latin the mandatory ‘System of Arts’ or ‘Encyclopedia’, he became ‘wholly changed to the New Learning’.Footnote ⁴⁸

Young men at King’s were expected to read the New Testament in Greek in their early years, as at Oxford and Cambridge, but Johnson also had the intention of providing courses in husbandry, commerce, surveying and navigation. Largely on account of its small staff and lack of resources, such courses were never offered after the college opened in 1754, with gentlemen largely remaining dedicated to the classics and moral philosophy.Footnote ⁴⁹

However, even if the college’s aspirations to be a centre of the ‘new learning’ in New York had limited success in its actual teaching, its broadly latitudinarian instincts were to some degree achieved in its openness to those beyond the Church of England. When the terms of the charter of the college were sealed at the end of October 1754, Anglican influence had been carefully circumscribed, in part due to pressure from Presbyterians and others in the city, who were already resistant to the limited Anglican establishment within the colony and resented further encroachment. The bishop of London was denied authority over the college, and the composition of the board was relatively ecumenical. Ex officio membership was granted to only one of New York’s Anglican ‘established’ rectors – the rector of Trinity Church, upon whose land the college was to be built – and his presence was neutralized by ex officio membership being granted also to the senior ministers of the Dutch Reformed, Lutheran, French and Presbyterian churches in the city.Footnote ⁵⁰ The controversy over the college’s governance had resulted in an institution that was in the end far less denominationally prescriptive than the newly established Presbyterian college in New Jersey (Princeton), Yale or Harvard. Moreover, despite Johnson’s desire that the college should be a source of Anglican influence, he allowed students to worship at the church of their choice on Sundays. Also, unlike Oxford, Cambridge or Dublin, there were no religious tests for tutors or governors.

Indeed, as the Great Awakening and Whitefield’s ‘enthusiasm’ disturbed many across the northern colonies, Johnson continued to hope that people would be drawn to the Church of England through its reasoned and moderate approach to faith and morals, not least as expressed in his institution. In a letter from 1759 to the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Secker (several years after the charter had been secured), Johnson defended the work of the SPG in the northern colonies against those of other denominations who charged the Society and its missionaries with stealing their own congregants. This, Johnson argued, was the result of the migration of Anglicans to the northern colonies from England, and also those who ‘in consequence of Mr. Whitefield’s rambling once and again through the country’ followed:

Anglican commitment to such enlightened moderation would also be in evidence in institutions beyond New England. Philadelphia’s local Philosophical Society, led by Benjamin Franklin, sought to establish a new college in the 1750s, and had already drafted plans for a college in which classical languages were abandoned and academic exchange was conducted in English; they hoped to employ the Scottish Episcopalian William Smith, who had written A General Idea of the College of Mirania in 1753, subtitled ‘a sketch of the method of teaching science and religion’, in the context of New York debates around collegiate education. Informed by the reform of teaching at Aberdeen, he proposed an institution that wished to move beyond the philological and Aristotelian emphases of the medieval curriculum. In his idealized college, students would learn, alongside classics, mathematics, ethics, oratory, chronology, history, ‘the most plain and useful Parts of natural and mechanic Philosophy’, husbandry, chemistry and agriculture.Footnote ⁵² As at King’s, however, limited resources meant that the College of Philadelphia (later the University of Pennsylvania) under William Smith’s aegis was a mixture of both old and new learning.

Even if ambitions for the new colleges in New York and Philadelphia were inevitably restrained by resources, there is strong evidence that it was Anglican clergy and those influenced by its clerical Enlightenment who were instrumental in the pursuit of new institutional schemes that integrated public virtue with public usefulness. Their aspirations for education were far more adventurous than any found in England beyond the Dissenting academies or institutions like the Royal Society (Oxford and Cambridge being largely resistant to any kind of professional education until the later nineteenth century) and would remain lively foundations of enquiry, albeit shorn of royal patronage, after the Revolution.