The History of the Negro ChurchWoodson, Carter Godwin
Religion
The History of the Negro Church
Woodson, Carter Godwin
African Americans -- Religion
Neau died in 1722; but his work was continued by Huddlestone, Whitmore,
Colgan, Auchmutty, and Charlton. The last mentioned had undertaken the
instruction of the blacks while at New Windsor and found it practical
and convenient to throw into one class his white and black catechumens.
Mr. Auchmutty served from 1747 to 1764 and finally reported that there
was among the Negroes an ever-increasing desire for instruction and not
one single black "that had been admitted by him to the holy communion
had turned out bad or been in any way a disgrace to our holy
profession."
This good work done in the city of New York extended into other parts
of the colony. We hear of Rev. Mr. Stoupe in 1737 baptizing four black
children at New Rochelle. At New Windsor, Rev. Charles Taylor, a
school-master, kept a night school for the instruction of the Negroes.
Rev. J. Sayre, of Newburgh, promoted the education of the two races in
four of the churches under his charge. In 1714 Rev. T. Barclay, an
earnest worker among the slaves in Albany, reported a great forwardness
among them to embrace Christianity and a readiness to receive
instruction, although there was much opposition among some of the
masters. Sixty years later Schenectady reported among its members eleven
Negroes who were sober and serious communicants.
These missionaries met with some opposition in New England among the
Puritans, who had no serious objection to seeing the Negroes saved but
did not care to see them incorporated into the church, which then being
connected with the state, would grant them political as well as
religious equality. There had been an academic interest in the
conversion of the Negroes. John Eliot had no particular objection to
slavery but regretted that it precluded the possibility of their
instruction in the Christian doctrine and worked a loss of their souls.
Cotton Mather, taking the task of evangelization seriously, drew up a
set of rules by which masters should be governed in the instruction of
their slaves. He had much fear of the prodigious wickedness of deriding,
neglecting and opposing all due means of bringing the poor Negroes unto
God. He did not believe that Almighty God made so many thousand
reasonable creatures for nothing but "only to serve the lusts of
epicures or the gains of mammonists." In the protest of Jonathan Sewell
set forth in his _Selling of Joseph_, there was an attack on slavery
because the servants differed from those of Abraham, who commanded his
children and his household that they should keep the way of the Lord. In
this they were standing upon the high ground taken by Richard Baxter, an
authority among the Puritans, who, denouncing the use of the slaves as
beasts for their mere commodity, said, that their masters who "betray or
destroy or neglect their souls are fitter to be called incarnate devils
than Christians though they be no Christian whom they so abuse."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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