Antiques

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 2003 by Wendell Garrett

Every Town ought to have a Minister[.] New York has first a Chaplain belonging to the Fort of the Church of England; Secondly, a Dutch Calvinist, thirdly a French Calvinist, fourthly a Dutch Lutheran--Here bee not many of the Church of England; few Roman Catholics; abundance of Quakers preachers ... Women especially; Singing Quakers, Ranting Quakers; Sabbatarians; Antisabbatarians; Some Anabaptists[;] some Independents; some Jews; in short[,] of all sorts of opinions there are some, and the most part [are] of none at all.

Governor Thomas Dongan, "Report to the Committee of Trade on the province of New York," February 22, 1687

Between 1687 and the Revolution, religion in America became fay move varied than even Governor Dongan, himself a Catholic, might have imagined. In those years new church buildings and newly organized congregations outpaced the colonies' population growth. The result was a religious pluralism far more extensive than any found in Europe. As Hector Saint John de Crevecoeur wrote in Letters from an American Farmer in the 1780s, in America "all sects are mixed, as well as all nations."

Larger urban churches emulated British styles most closely, sometimes following English design books such as James Gibbs's Book of Architecture of 1728. Congregational meetinghouses reflected Old World elements but with New World details imposed by the craftsmen who built them. New England Congregationalists often painted their meetinghouses vibrant colors rather than the ubiquitous white used in the nineteenth century. In 1762, for example, in Pomfret, Connecticut, it was decreed that "The new meeting-house should be colored on the outside of an orange color--the doors and bottom boards of a chocolate color--the windows, jets [projections], corner boards and weather boards, colored white."

The meetinghouse contributed a new aesthetic to colonial New England to complement the rise of the artisan in secular life. The hand-crafted wooden pews and pulpits, the hanging lamps and church bells, and the silver communion chalices and patens brought the material glory of Christianity home to the worshipers in the wilderness.

No Puritan imagined that in seeing the communion cup filled with wine he was literally seeing Christ, or even a likeness of Christ. But because Christ himself had established the metaphorical equivalence between his body and blood and the bread and wine, the visual performance of the sacrament was an orthodox way of viewing Christ's spiritual presence. Visual images played a surprisingly powerful vole in the development of the Puritan sensibility.

In the pages of his extraordinary diary, the Boston merchant, magistrate, and judge Samuel Sewall described his own religious experience in terms that illuminate the meanings of communion silver and gold in Puritan spirituality. As the son-in-law of John Hull, a silversmith and mint master, Sewall lived his adult life surrounded by such objects. The metaphors through which he expressed his relationship to God converge on the precious objects used in the communion ritual. These silver and gold vessels symbolize not only what Christ spent to save mankind, but what man must spend to have Christ. They represent the price of redemption measured from both ends of the bargain. Communion cups taught Puritans to think of themselves as flawed vessels in need of refinement in order to be worthy recipients of God's grace. In his notes on a sermon he heard in Newbury, Massachusetts, on May 16, 1714, Sewall wrote: "Christians of the greatest excellency ave compar'd to Vessels of Gold. Are pure, precious, will endure the Fire. Ave fill'd with all the Graces of God's Spirit. Christians that do not excel are compar'd to Silver; persons of Lesser piety, though truly piety. Use. Labour to be Vessels of Gold, or at least of Silver."