One of the most famous beginnings of any American text comes in the opening sentence of New England’s First Fruits:[1]

After God had carried us safe to New England, and wee had builded our houses, provided necessaries for our livelihood, rear'd convenient places for Gods worship, and setled the Civill Government: One of the next things we longed for, and looked after was to advance Learning, and perpetuate it to Posterity, dreading to leave an illiterate Ministry to the Churches, when our present Ministers shall lie in the Dust.

That single sentence has long been a favorite American quotation. Although the authors of New England’s First Fruits had nothing more in mind than the care of Harvard College in its early years, successive generations have discerned larger meanings reverberating through those few words. So, for instance, various historians have used this well-wrought sentence to mark the start of higher education in this country. Or many a seminary leader has taken comfort in this quote as a justification for the establishment of American theological schools.

Amidst all these celebratory uses of that classic snippet of Puritan prose, it is easy to lose sight of its authors' true intent. Its appearance in 1643 signaled, in fact, the beginning of another characteristic American literature—a body of writings hardly honored or even acknowledged by scholars, but one that is nevertheless laden with historical meaning. New England’s First Fruits was the harbinger of a distinctive genre of writing that would eventually become familiar to church-going Protestants in every generation during the last one hundred and seventy years.

Samuel Eliot Morison, Harvard College's most famous interpreter of its history, has given a jaunty, twentieth century twist to the story of the first American effort in this genre. New England’s First Fruits was designed, he wrote in the 1930s, to aid “the first concerted 'drive' to obtain income and endowment” for Harvard College. In 1641 the authorities in the Massachusetts Bay Colony dispatched three ministers to England on what Morison termed a “begging mission.” “In order to secure really big contributions, they wanted ‘literature' to play up the best ‘selling points’ of New England.” Out of that need came this piece. New England’s First Fruits really was a promotion pamphlet, Morison declared. “One half-expects to find in it a return postcard, on receipt of which ‘our representative will call.’”[2]

But no matter how contemporary Morison's light touch makes this work seem, New England’s First Fruits is very much a document of its own time and place. It belongs to seventeenth century America in all sorts of ways. I will comment on just one of its ties to the period of its origin.

In a recent work,[3] E. Brooks Holifield described the years from 1521 to 1685 as an “era of persuasion.” “One can hardly understand early American thought,” Holifield stated, “without recognizing the extent to which persuasive speech and writing permeated its forms.”  As he noted:

The notion of persuasion assumes a thinker who is engaged as a partisan rather one whose only goal is to understand and interpret. It is a practical mode of thought, aimed at forming or altering public behavior rather than merely creating pleasure or eliciting conviction, though its practical intent need not imply an absence of either sophistication or complexity. Its aim is not simply to convince people to accept an idea but to lure them into acting, to change not merely convictions but also behavior. [4]

This carefully nuanced definition is helpful here for several reasons. First, it nicely describes the spirit that animated the creators of New England’s First Fruits.[5] They were intent upon arousing their supporters in England to action or, as Holified says, to “change not merely convictions but also behavior.” And the most relevant form of “public behavior” in this instance was a gift of money to the fledgling college in Cambridge. 

Second, and more important, Holifield's sketch of “persuasion” helps us understand the course of American Protestant history long after that first generation of Puritan ministers lay “in the Dust.” That same kind of persuasive power became even more necessary in a nation which no longer allowed churches to rely upon the coercive force of the state as a way of raising funds. Today we celebrate the transition from coercion to persuasion as the birth of the American experiment in voluntarism.

Of all the forms of persuasion, perhaps the most challenging one is the task of persuading others to give money. A change in “convictions”—to make Holifield's point in a different way—is necessary but not sufficient. What finally matters is a change in “public behavior.” The full weight of that challenge came tumbling in upon a remarkable group of Protestant leaders in the 1820s and 1830s.

A Republic of Benevolence

In the fall of 1832 Lyman Beecher and most members of his large family left Boston and began the long trek to Cincinnati, the “Queen City” of the West, where supporters of Lane Seminary eagerly awaited his arrival as the infant Seminary's first president and its great hope for the future. One member of this caravan was his young daughter, a witty and perceptive observer of the Beecher scene and who one day would be famous as the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Harriet Beecher sent letters to friends in New England about the westward journey of “Noah, and his wife, and his sons, and daughters, with the cattle and creeping things.”[6]

Among other pieces of news she reported on her father's “ups” and “downs” as a fundraiser. In New York, for instance, Harriet wrote - “I don't know, I'm sure, as we shall ever get to Pittsburg. Father is staying here begging money for the Biblical Literature Professorship.”[7] He enjoyed success and “really quite an affecting time” with one New York donor. A few days later, she wrote: “Father begged $2000 yesterday, and now the good people are praying him to abide certain days, as he succeeds so well.”[8] But later in Philadelphia Harriett noted that “Father does not succeed very well in opening purses here.”[9]

The work of “opening purses” proved to be a relentlessly demanding taskmaster. Lyman Beecher and his generation of Protestant leaders spent a considerable amount of time looking for donors. One of his compatriots - Jeremiah Evarts, first executive of the leading foreign mission agency - wrote  a confidant that “half our time and care and anxiety at the Rooms [the headquarters of The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions] is expended upon raising funds.”[10]  “You can hardly be aware of the serious embarrassment with which our Treasury is threatened,” he wrote in 1820 to another colleague. “There is an amazing pressure for money throughout the country; many Christians are weak and faint in their missionary feelings and exertions; others of a like kind with ours are springing up.”[11]

Other executives felt the same “amazing pressure.” The quickening pace exhausted leaders like Elias Cornelius, head of the American Education Society. Wherever he went, he was always looking for money. While visiting in Philadelphia, for instance, he “began his solicitations one morning at the head of the principal commercial streets, and went into every counting-house, down on one side of the street, and up on the other, in a day, presenting the claims of the Indians.”[12] Cornelius lamented “the utter violation of my habits of study and reflection for seven years past.” In a letter to a friend, he went on to speak of his “difficulty . . . in reconciling myself to the business of charitable solicitations, for which I have a great and increasing aversion. The poor opportunity which it leaves for mental improvement, the continual solicitude which it induces, and the dissipation of heart which it is apt to bring along with it, makes me to dread it more and more."[13]

But however much they dreaded it, this “business of charitable solicitations” proved an inescapable necessity to Beecher and company. For they had taken upon themselves the burden of creating major new institutions in a time of astonishing change. The old colonial order was rapidly disappearing. By 1820 only one state, Massachusetts held on even to the outward form of the established church. Governmental subsidies for parishes belonged to a fading past, and there was no doubt from now on about who would be paying the ministers and taking care of church expenses.

Meanwhile evangelical leaders such as Evarts, Cornelius and Beecher were encouraging the churches to embrace new - and often very expensive - causes. The romance of foreign missions sometimes obscured the hard reality of just how costly it was to send missionaries to Burma and other distant lands. In addition to the mission abroad, the “home missions” movement called for missionaries to be dispatched to the far reaches of the West or the “waste places of Zion.” And then there were Bibles and tracts to be distributed, Sunday Schools to start, ministers to educate and moral reforms to inaugurate across the immense spaces of a growing country.

Few American generations, before the 1820s or after the Civil War, have been so ambitious for themselves, their churches and their nation. Their drive propelled them into a search for more money. How much would be enough? That proved to be a painful and bedeviling question to many American Protestants in the years between 1820 and 1840. A restless people, these folk usually discovered that there never seemed to be enough, no matter how much last year's fund-raising activities had netted. Their “booster” spirit pushed them constantly beyond the apparent limits of their resources. Debt could become a way of life for congregations [14] and mission societies. Expansion was the order of the day. In the midst of these adventures in risk-taking, where institutions lived on the edge of both great accomplishments and potential disasters, tomorrow could be glorious or terrible.

Their consequent anxiety about money pushed them into contention for every available dollar. And there were plenty of others contenders also hard at work. From the beginning of the nineteenth century onward, those Americans engaged in persuading others to give were keenly aware of an intense competition for money. No institution—not even Harvard with all its connections to Boston wealth - could escape this discomforting truth.

It is no wonder, then, that the roving financial “agent” (or fundraiser) became a new fixture on the American scene, along with the itinerant peddler and the evangelist. In the religious sector most of the emerging national denominations found themselves embroiled in a grueling race for a “place in the sun” of this new country. The inescapable reality of that fact helped to shape the Protestant teachings about giving in the nineteenth century. For better or worse, our ancestors were constantly pressing their claims amidst the clamor of the American religious marketplace. Therefore it is not surprising that we can hear the “background noise” of the marketplace in the writings collected in this anthology.

The reader will occasionally encounter in these documents the kind of emphatic speech that gives rhetoric its dismal reputation. The extravagant claims, the indulgence in sentimentality, and the easy certainties - these were the habits of speech formed on the rhetorical battlefield where one is struggling to be heard above the din of loud voices. Some church folk found these excesses wearing and self-defeating, as we shall soon see. But even their idealistic efforts to find alternatives to the shouting matches only proved how difficult it was to change the ways of the religious marketplace.

One of the most intriguing contests in the marketplace was the fight to win the loyalties of a rising class of business leaders. During the period from the 1820s to the 1840s, America was living through what present-day historians call a “market revolution.” [15] “Those were the peak years of the market revolution,” according to two historians, “that took the country from the fringe of the world economy to the brink of commercial greatness.” [16] This transformation required enormous infusions of investment funds on the part of Americans as well as foreign investors. Every American dollar earned and saved could serve as capital for future economic expansion and growth.

Of course, Lyman Beecher and his colleagues had different purposes in mind for those funds. In this vein, Beecher declared in an 1827 sermon included here in Resource 4.2  - “There is at this moment, in the hands of Christians, capital enough to evangelize the world in a short period.” This extravagant announcement contained at least a kernel of truth. The expanding American economy was beginning to generate profits and possible investment capital. Other ante-bellum church leaders noted the same trend and, like Beecher, relished the possibility that one day these funds would serve as a seedbed for future evangelical expansion.

But the task of diverting even a rivulet of this new money into the stream of church income posed a tough teaching challenge to early nineteenth century Protestant leaders. Consider the obstacles.

First, the “market revolution” was more than just an economic juggernaut. Its burgeoning presence also created a powerful cultural center of meaning. The revolution enabled a growing number of white middle class Americans to fulfill at least one-half of the emerging American dream—the making of money. In his brilliant book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Gordon S. Wood describes the practical meaning of the eighteenth century inheritance for most Americans living in the early nineteenth century: "In concrete day-to-day terms invocations of the Constitution meant the freedom to be left alone, and in turn that freedom meant the ability to make money and pursue happiness."[17]  

That down-to-earth interpretation of the American Revolution had all sorts of consequences. The "economic miracle" of the early republic happened, Woods declares, because "ordinary people, hundreds of thousands of them, began working harder to make money and 'get ahead.' Americans seemed to be a people totally absorbed in the individual pursuit of money."[18]  In these circumstances any insistence upon giving money as well as making it did not automatically make cultural sense. It was not an integral part of the American destiny, unless one tried to interpret the act of giving money as part of the pursuit of happiness. But the Protestant leaders of the early nineteenth century ignored that option. Consequently their call for middle class folk to give money - especially savings that could be invested and thereby make more money - became counter-cultural, or at least faintly subversive of common sense.

Beecher and his counterparts confronted a second problem. By what authority could they ask for these funds? While most Protestant ministers in ante-bellum America enjoyed considerable prestige, their sway in money matters was distinctly limited. For the most part, they did not believe that the authority of their office or their own personal authority would alone be persuasive in making the case for major support for evangelical expansion.

In addition, many ministers were sometimes so worried about receiving their own pay on time that they were loath to take on this battle without substantial arguments at their disposal. One shrewd clerical observer of his fellow ministers put it ever so gently: “From motives of delicacy, religious teachers [ministers] who receive their support from the voluntary subscriptions of their people may have shrunk from the same degree of explicitness upon this subject which they have felt to be necessary in respect to other Christian duties. And the difficulty which some pastors have experienced in securing the full amount of their support, or the consciousness that when received it was inadequate for this purpose, has increased the embarrassment."[19]  A lay church member made the same point in a more direct fashion: “A large part of the expense of religion is for the support of ministers. When those expenses are met by the subscribing system [church members sign a publicly circulated list], the tendency is almost invariably to depress and embarrass the minister.”[20]

The clergy might have turned to the authority of the past as a source of possible arguments for giving. After all, Christians in every era since the early church had worked on developing persuasive appeals for giving. For a variety of reasons, however, the long tradition of the church seemed strangely barren of meaning to many Protestants in early nineteenth century America. Such terms as “almsgiving” no longer carried much weight. More important, the word “charity” appeared worn-out and stale after decades of constant repetition. While they continued to invoke it in their teachings, they were also looking for a different notion that would serve as the new key concept in a fresh language about giving.

Benevolence and the Future

Some of these Protestant leaders turned in an unusual direction in their search for an authority that would give power and meaning to their teaching on giving. Instead of relying solely upon the past and the claims of church tradition, they invoked the power of a vision of the future. That vision opened up both a way of understanding America's role in the coming years and also a way of claiming authority for their efforts in persuading others to give. Their authority resided in the claim of a brilliant future and the movements that faithfully served that unfolding drama.

The envisioned future emboldened Beecher and others to issue a call to arms. The evangelical movement was, in their view, the army of the Lord who now summoned Christians to prepare for battle. A sense of emergency pervaded their prose. “Sacrifice,” especially of money and time, would become the ordinary daily routine. This army lived in anticipation of what was to come. The discomforts and sacrifices of the present counted for little when compared to the prospect of on-coming triumph.

Implicit in these martial metaphors was the dominating image of war and the clash of large contending forces. So, one finds in some of the ante-bellum teachings about giving more allusions to enemies than to comrade in arms. The identity of those foes became vividly clear whenever the rhetoricians vented their fears. That should come as no surprise to anyone who has examined the tactics implicit in those fund-raising letters that arrive in our mailboxes with appalling frequency. Fear often looms large in American appeals for money.

Some Protestant leaders, especially those in the early nineteenth century, were skilled practitioners of that craft. Their list of enemies included, first and foremost, Roman Catholics, other religious opponents, opposing ecclesiastical parties and of course “infidels” of various persuasions. They also invoked political fears - worries about America's decline, if not its disintegration, the power of its enemies abroad and at home, or even a fear about the demise of civilization.

But while people give out of fear, they also give to an embodied future. Some of the ante-bellum writers represented in the following readings knew the power of hope as a stimulus to generosity. Their hopes and yearnings often became embodied in a vision of a corporate, shared future. The most common and powerful expectation centered upon the destiny of America[21] as a religious force in the world. Christendom's future, so they asserted, depended upon what happened in this nation. The reader will soon be encountering the refrain, stated in various ways - a Christian America will lead the way toward Christianizing the world. Christendom will prevail. But that could only happen if Protestantism (particularly their brand of it) triumphs over its enemies within and without the household of faith. The drama of America involved nothing less than the beginning of the climax of history. 

That heady thought was seldom stated in any explicit way, but it actually constituted the logic of the argument in some ante-bellum works on giving. For instance, Lyman Beecher in his 1827 sermon (included here as Resources 4.2) centered most of his attention on strategies for making America a Christian nation. Make certain of that accomplishment, so he intimated, and the evangelization of the world will follow soon thereafter. In short, the work of revival, reform and education in this country represents the true beginning of the future. The Beecher sermon was the work of a revivalist who was calling a people to accept its destiny.

Indeed, that glorious future already seemed in sight. It appeared to be coming almost faster than anyone had imagined possible. Nearly every early nineteenth century writer included in this history celebrated the apparently providential convergence of historical trends and technological innovations in the nineteenth century. The timely emergence of a world missionary movement, the translation of the Scriptures into various languages, the appearance of steamships and commercial traffic across the globe—these coincidences added up to an apparent God-given opportunity. The time was ripe.  In the words of Abel Stevens in Resource 4.6: 

Not even in the age chosen by God for the introduction of the Christian religion, because of the general sway and peace of the Roman Empire, was the whole world more amply thrown open for the march of the Church.  There is now passing over her a day of opportunity such as the history of our fallen race has never before seen. Apostles themselves, it may be soberly said, saw no such day. What is the providential meaning of these facts? What but that the Church is summoned to labors, and liberality [his euphemism for giving money generously], and victories such as her history has never before recorded.” [22]

Those “victories” would require sacrificial giving from Christians in this country. The coming triumph is so close that now - not tomorrow or next year - is the moment in which we were being called to give everything for the cause. The imperious needs of the movement require a total gift, or at the very least, something far beyond the limits of the usual contribution. These are not the usual times, and so they demand heroic givers. The message is clear: forget those rational calculations by which we carefully measure the sum we will give. Give all that you have. Out of this stream of thinking has emerged a characteristic phrase that one still occasionally hears in high-pressured capital campaigns—the “sacrificial gift.”

In this historic moment of opportunity, Protestantism must accept its new calling as a teacher and exemplar of generosity. All church members can participate in the great act of giving. No longer was philanthropy a monopoly of the upper classes. Now everyone—women as well as men, the poor alongside the rich, day laborers and merchants–could become a giver. The most eloquent version of this democratic view of giving came from a young Congregational pastor from New Haven. In 1824 Leonard Bacon gave a Fourth of July sermon that captured both the sense of an extraordinary future breaking in upon the churches and the vision of American Protestants as a giving people:

The time has been when a man might weep over the wrongs of Africa . . .. [A]nd yet his tears would be all that he could give her. He might relieve the beggar at his door, but he could do nothing for a dying continent. He might provide for his children, but he could do nothing for the nations that were yet to be born to an inheritance of utter wretchedness. Then the privilege of engaging in schemes of magnificent benevolence belonged only to princes and to men of princely possessions. But now the progress of improvement has brought down this privilege to the reach of every individual. The institutions of our age are a republic of benevolence, and all may share in the unrestrained and equal democracy. This privilege is ours.[23]

In splicing together two such popular and fluid words as “republic” and “benevolence” into one phrase, Bacon risked vagueness in an otherwise clear and dramatic embrace of a new era in American life. The tantalizing phrase, “republic of benevolence,” could have conjured up different meanings in the mind of his audience.

“Benevolence” was a particularly slippery notion. In recent years historians have frequently called attention to the various definitions assigned to this word. The historians of American religious thought remind us of Jonathan Edwards' rigorous theological interpretation of benevolence as a form of love.[24] Gordon S. Wood has noted that some Enlightenment thinkers in the eighteenth century looked upon benevolence as the bond that helps a republican society hold together.[25] According to Christopher Lasch, the “cosmopolitan ideal articulated by the Enlightenment” presents benevolence to us “as a singularly bloodless form of goodwill, founded more on indifference than devotion.”[26] Whatever its meaning, Perry Miller once wrote, the notion of benevolence was so celebrated in the early nineteenth century that “A man could no more safely, in America of 1820, publicly come out against benevolence, . . . than he could advocate sexual promiscuity.”[27] “In those innocent years,” as Miller noted, “it seemed not only plausible but a decided advantage to bless” the new national Protestant mission agencies with the “weighty adjective” of “benevolent.”[28]

But when Leonard Bacon invoked the phrase – “a republic of benevolence” – he did indeed intend to ascribe a new and fairly specific meaning to the notion of “benevolence.”[29]  By this word, he meant the act of giving. That definition took hold in the 1820s and would become increasingly popular in the following years. Two decades later, for example, Protestants were referring to “systematic benevolence,” a phrase that we will explore shortly. “Systematic benevolence” almost invariably signified systematic giving. Over the last one hundred and fifty years, this equation of benevolence with the act of giving has become a regular feature of Protestant church life. Even today in congregations one hears the word used in this fashion.

In Bacon's “republic” Christians would become good citizens by learning how to give in a responsible fashion. But who would teach them about giving? Therein lay the difficulty. The pastors, as I have already indicated, were not always eager volunteers for this duty. Almost by default, therefore, the benevolent agencies took the lead in teaching American Protestants about giving in the ante-bellum era. A brief word about these institutions is in order.

The American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions was the first in a cluster of interdenominational mission societies that quickly became familiar features of the American landscape during the first third of the nineteenth century. In a relatively short period many of these agencies grew into substantial organizations. By the mid-1840s, for example, the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions had a larger budget than Harvard College.[30]  Each association had its own distinctive cause. To name just a few: the American Tract Society, the American Bible Society, the American Sunday School Union or the American Home Missionary Society.

In the course of championing their respective causes, the more vital of these agencies become the nerve centers for movements that inspired enthusiasm and commitment from Protestant lay folk. “Foreign missions,” for example, became a matter of passionate concern. Some of its boosters thought of it as the most powerful movement in the modern world. Eventually its consequences, they believed, would make the heroes of the missionary movement far better known than even the greatest political leaders of recent decades. And so it was even possible to expect that someday the Baptist missionary to Burma, Adoniram Judson, would be more famous than Napoleon Bonaparte.[31]

In the meantime, however, the societies had to teach American Protestants how to give as they had never given before. Most of that burden fell upon the staffs of these agencies–first upon the heads of these organizations, and then upon their roving “agents.” Earlier I noted that such outstanding leaders as Jeremiah Evarts of the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions and Elias Cornelius of the American Education Society constantly felt the pressure of this responsibility. In addition they also spent considerable time working with the field agents whom they sent out to organize local branch societies and to raise money. For better or worse, the public's understanding of each of the many “movements” and their causes depended mostly upon this new brand of circuit riders.

During the 1820s and early 1830s scores of agents traversed the settled states in search of funds. Often young and inexperienced, these folk frequently encountered indifference, resentment and hostility. In due time the societies’ reliance upon this strategy aroused a storm of protest and thoughtful criticism. Out of that reaction came a call for shaping new visions of giving.

A Call for Reform

While the best benevolent agents were often romantics about the movements they represented, they were hardly romantic about the life they led in service of those causes. In 1833 a former agent described this work as “a fatiguing, arduous, and in many respects, thankless office.”[32] It was a lonely life. The immensity of the country sometimes made for vast distances between stops. An agent could be on the hustings for months at a time.

Moreover the work itself was demanding. Once the agents arrived at their destinations, they had much to accomplish in a few days. The American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions expected an agent “to assist in forming auxiliary societies; otherwise to excite the attention of the public to the objects of the Board and to use their exertions in obtaining funds.”[33] The imperative “to excite the attention of the public” through a sermon or lecture on benevolence was all-important. Any premature effort to engage in fundraising could be disastrous, for as one anti-slavery agent found out, “the people had to be first awakened” because “collecting money destroyed their curiosity.”[34]

The pressure of time and the requirement of eliciting as many commitments and pledges as possible forced the agent to preach simple sermons with a mass appeal. “His time is limited to a single sermon or a single Sabbath,” wrote one observer. “He cannot of course stop to portray those aspects of his subject, which are most interesting to his own mind. He must bring the old things out of his treasures, almost exclusively.”[35] One of the marks of the good agent is the willingness to repeat the same arguments and facts in place after place.[36] In the judgment of the same commentator, “This is probably one of the severest sacrifices which an agent is called to make. It must be exceedingly irksome to an aspiring mind, to trace the same weary round from year to year.”[37]

The benevolent sermon represented an extraordinary challenge. In an age renowned for the powers of its patriotic orators and revivalists, the agents had to measure up to high standards if they hoped to move their audiences toward benevolent action. The speeches of politicians such as Daniel Webster became favorite texts for school children to read and memorize. Likewise the appeals of revivalists like Charles Finney and Lyman Beecher echoed across the country as their youthful disciples tried to imitate their ways. (For instance, admirers of Beecher probably preached versions of his 1827 sermon on numerous occasions.) In short, oratory was a serious and demanding art in ante-bellum America. A friend of Beecher in Cincinnati, physician Daniel Drake, used all the flourishes so admired in that speech-conscious time to describe what an aspiring speaker must do:

Would you rouse men to voluntary action, on great public objects, you must make their fancy and feelings glow under your presentations; you must not merely carry forward their reason, but their desires and their will; the utility and loveliness of every object must be displayed to their admiration; the temperature of the heart must be raised, and its cold selfishness melted away, as the snows when buried up the fields when acted on by an April sun; then–like the budding herb which shoots up from the soil–good and great acts of  patriotism will appear.[38]

But the day-after-day round of activity involved in rousing people “to voluntary action” in support of the benevolent societies eventually led to a condition that threatened both the agents and the causes they represented. The life force of these movements was enthusiasm–the enthusiasm of thousands of individuals scattered across the country as well as the verve of the agents. Sooner or later came the problem of aging movements. The routinization of enthusiasm made it continuously harder for the agents to keep the message fresh and the audiences from drifting into boredom.

By the late 1830s there were unmistakable signs of boredom even among supporters of foreign missions. One person in 1836 summed up the situation in the following fashion: “The churches have listened often to the recital of the miseries and crimes of heathenism. They witnessed the embarkation of one missionary band after another, till the spectacle has ceased to be strange.”[39]

Boredom is a dreadful affliction for any movement. It can be a fatal affliction for a cause which depends upon the contagious excitement that can ripple through an audience or gathered congregation and inspire people to pledge sums of money that they might not otherwise contemplate giving if that decision were made in solitude. Sometimes any hint of apathy tempted agents to resort to callous manipulation.

The ensuing results were self-defeating, as Pharcellus Church made vividly clear in his book, The Philosophy of Benevolence. (I have included several excerpts from that book in this collection as Resource 4.3) “At such an appeal for money,” Church declared, “infidelity sits in the pulpit, and the devil laughs in the gallery. The consequence is that the people, not being instructed in the duty of giving, and having no principle of action, feel like a man after a fit of intoxication, vexed at their own excitement, and hence they begrudge the money which it has caused them to bestow.” The legacies of such hangovers could linger for years. These experiences strengthened a growing perception of benevolent agents as hucksters. Their apparently incessant importunings for money aroused resentment and resistance.

In these circumstances the more responsible agents searched even harder for the right balance between avoiding offense and yet being direct enough to elicit firm pledges. Jeremiah Evarts of the American Board confided to a friend that “the most difficult part of his job was persuasion. ‘Not to say any thing which shall let down the standard of missionary feeling  . . . or which shall by its boldness and apparently severe requisitions, offend some of the real friends of the cause, is a delicate and difficult point.’”[40]  “Do not be too bold in asking for a contribution. All the feelings associated with missions must be pleasant,”[41] one executive declared. Yet somehow the money must be raised. In the play of these conflicting admonitions one senses the beginnings of a list of "do's" and "don'ts" that became conventional wisdom among Protestant leaders in the twentieth century.

Along with these vexing constraints came another specter. The threat of competition between agents grew year by year. In an 1830 letter to an aspiring agent for a western seminary, Elias Cornelius warned him: “Agents are exceedingly numerous, and they all go with one accord to New York and Boston; and it is more difficult to succeed now, than it was five years ago.”[42]  One critic of the spirit of “Protestant Jesuitism,” which he found at work in the benevolent societies, made the same point in far more dramatic language. An Episcopal priest, Calvin Colton, interpreted the growing presence of agents as the advent of a plague. “Most extraordinary measures are devised to obtain funds; itinerating mendicants are flying in all directions, traversing the country from east to west, and from north to south.” “Their agents,” he concluded, “swarm over the land in clouds, like the locusts of Egypt.”[43]

Even worse was their overblown teaching about giving, according to Colton. He charged that “the highly-coloured and overstrained statements employed as arguments and appeals to the public, the promises of immediate and great results, and other artifices of the kind, have made it indispensable to follow them up with corresponding exaggerations, which often amount to a violation of truth.”[44] Exaggeration invites further exaggeration, he wrote, and soon the benevolent agencies will need the ministrations of a “’Society-Reforming Society,’ whose object shall be to correct the morals of these institutions." [45]

In the mid-1830s the cries of protests against this “swarm” of agents and their rhetorical “morals” began to be heard more frequently. The most compelling indictment came from Pharcellus Church, a Baptist minister and later a journalist. (See Resource 4.3) Church complained about the distraction and disorder inherent in the agent system. Is all of this frenetic activity and high-pressured rhetoric necessary, he seemed to be asking. Others joined him in that lament. Parsons Cooke, a New England pastor, observed that “we are wont to wait to be lashed up to our duty by the periodical visits of the agents of the several benevolent societies.”[46]

A few idealists even wanted to uproot the agent system and thereby end the “periodical visits of the agents.” That suggestion was hardly new. In the 1820s, for instance, Elias Cornelius had dismissed it as wistful utopianism. He understood the yearning for the day “when the spontaneous movements of the church will supply all necessary funds for doing good,” but he then went on to warn his colleagues that “it is as clear as the light of the sun, that that day is yet future.”[47] Only a decade later, however, various folk found themselves wondering if that "day" had arrived.  While no one ventured so far as to claim that giving would ever be “spontaneous,” such reformers as Pharcellus Church were clearly looking for an alternative to the fate of being “lashed up to our duty.”

In the 1840s one alternative became available in the thought of another member of the Beecher clan, Catharine Beecher. (A chapter from her how-to-do-it manual, A Treatise on Domestic Economy, is included here as Resource 4.4) Her approach to the “duty” of giving differed markedly from any of the other ante-bellum writings in this collection. There is, she wrote, “no other topic of investigation so beset with difficulty, so absolutely without the range of definite rules which can apply to all in all circumstances.” Since there is no single or universal “rule,” Christians should be chary about making absolute judgments about what others should give. In effect, Beecher quietly questioned the right of any Christian–whether an agent or not–to “lash” another Christian into giving.

For various reasons Beecher's low-keyed teachings about giving hardly registered beyond the readers of the Treatise. The first reason reminds us of the power of social perceptions of gender. The word “domestic” in the title provides the clue to the character of this book. Here was a book written for women. “Catharine's Treatise,” her leading twentieth century interpreter has written, “explained every aspect of domestic life from the building of a house to the setting of a table.”[48] The quandaries about giving represented another problem to be addressed along with the other challenges involved in managing a household. But as a matter of fact, women in middle class families often had little power over family's decisions about giving. Her major sphere of influence was restricted to the “second gift,” or the sacrificial gift that she squeezed out of household accounts or else earned by making salable items.

For the most part decisions about the first gift–or the family's primary contribution–remained in the hands of men, since they largely controlled the purse strings of the household. Few of them would have even noticed, much less responded to Beecher's arguments. The enterprise of teaching about giving remained almost entirely a male sanctuary throughout the nineteenth century. It would have been very difficult for any women, even one so accomplished as Beecher, to breach that barrier.

Second, her approach did not suit the ideological necessities of the benevolent societies. The wearing strain of competition and the hopes for expansion prompted them to look for simple, forceful arguments that would move busy lay folk to respond generously. In contrast Beecher pointed to the complexities of knowing how much to give to whom. Her call for reflective thought seemed irrelevant and perhaps even unsettling. The benevolent societies and their agents needed the cloak of authority, the right to say, in one form or another, “Thou shalt give.” And so the search for an answer to the question – By what authority? – continued into the second half of the nineteenth century.

A Turn Inward

One of the most familiar refrains in the Protestant teachings about giving involves a mournful recital of statistics. This lament centers upon the gap between what Protestants can and should give and what they actually contribute. Sometimes the piece will compare the totals of church contribution to the startling sums of money that Americans spend on what is considered frivolous or even self-destructive entertainment. But interestingly enough, the deeper message of these jeremiads lies not in the statistics themselves but in the conclusions the authors reach after rehearsing the figures. Quite often the negative judgments serve as a way of gaining attention for the positive conclusion, or as a prelude to an announcement about “the” solution.

Pharcellus Church (the author of Resource 4.3) was among the earliest practitioners of this artful introduction of a solution. While surveying the state of the churches in 1836, he noted:

How small is the aggregate of all that is annually given in this country, for benevolent purposes, compared with the number in it, who profess religion! If it were equally divided among them, how small would be the amount of each! Probably a tax of a cent to the dollar, upon all the property in the hands of the American church, would furnish an aggregate of ten times the value of our annual charities, even in this proud age of benevolence!

But, besides that portion of our charities which come from persons out of the church (and it is considerable), how large a deduction must be made for those who give merely on the spur of the moment, without any conception of its being their duty to act upon system![49]

The key phrase in Church's explosion of indignation comes at the very end–“their duty to act upon system.” “System” was the magical word, the passport into a better future. The use of systems in American business was transforming the country's economy. For example, British visitors came to observe what they called “the American system of manufactures”[50] or the innovative use of interchangeable parts in building guns and machines. That turn of mind was also evident in the housing industry. The new system of building “balloon-frame” houses allowed constructors in the 1830s to reduce the normal time between commissioning and completing a house to one week.[51]

But when those same manufacturers and builders came to church and heard a sermon on benevolence, they seldom thought about systematic giving, according to Church and other observers. Whatever they gave, they usually did in response to the “lash” treatment of an agent or as a result of a decision made in “the spur of the moment.” Sometimes the business leaders who valued order and discipline in their work life turned out to be casual, impulse givers in their church life.

The ironies implicit in this contradiction attracted the attention of a few keen critics. Foremost among them was Samuel Harris, a Massachusetts pastor. In his provocative essay, “Zaccheus or the Scriptural Plan of Benevolence” (portions of which are excerpted in Resource 4.5), Harris offered a sharply drawn portrait of the church-going businessmen of his acquaintance. He found them “full of forethought and anxious calculation to realize the utmost of worldly acquisition; deliberate and far-sighted in planning, cautious in executing, lynx-eyed to discern an opportunity to gain, exact to the last fraction in their accounts, but heedless and planless in all they do for charity."

The import of Harris' analysis cut in two directions. First and most obvious, he was acknowledging the potency of the “market revolution” as a cultural force in American life. The attributes Harris noted–“deliberate and far-sighted in planning, cautious in executing, lynx-eyed to discern an opportunity to gain, exact to the last fraction in their accounts”–were, as a matter of fact, some of the necessary habits acquired in the brutal contests in the economic marketplace. Yet why was there no evidence of the habits involved in the act of giving? That question lay at the heart of his concern.

Second and more significant, Harris was criticizing Protestantism for its teaching failures in a cultural situation where the economic marketplace was such a dominant force in shaping attitudes toward money. As I have already indicated, pastors had largely proved to be ineffective teachers about the art of giving. Likewise congregations and denominations had been strangely silent about the relation between faith and money. Take, for instance, the matter of church discipline. Churches were often quick to chastise delinquent members for sexual sins. Yet when the lapses in Christian behavior involved money problems, the church hardly seemed to notice. “It is no easy matter to be a drunkard, or profane . . . and maintain a respectable standing among Christians,” wrote one mid-nineteenth century commentator. “[B]ut one may indulge his supreme love of the world in the form of covetousness and yet maintain . . . a fair standing in the church.”[52]

Revivalism represented the most conspicuous of those teaching failures. For all of its vaunted power in the early American republic, the revival seldom brought about what we might call the third conversion. According to a common interpretation of the Protestant traditions, human beings stand in need of three conversions–the heart, the mind and the purse. The ante-bellum Protestants found the third conversion to be the toughest and most demanding of all three. Here God's grace apparently worked slowly or apparently not at all on some occasions. The power of the first two conversions, no matter how dramatic, did not always prepare church folk for the third transformation. “If I mistake not,” Pharcellus Church declared, “the cases are rare, in which the adoption of the Christian faith leads to new modes of procedure, in regard to the use of money. It is not so with time, the gift of speech or any other earthly blessing."

That perplexing lapse troubled the writers on “benevolence” in the ante-bellum era. Many of the evangelicals expressed dismay and even anger at the parsimonious ways of supposedly “converted” Christians. The devout church member who diligently searches for ways to make the smallest possible contribution appears every now and then in the literature on benevolence as a disturbing character. Note, for example, how severely Pharcellus Church treats “Deacon Brooks” in Resource 4.3.

The “Deacon Brooks” of America posed a fundamental theological question as well as a pedagogical challenge. Why do Christians have such a difficult time giving money?  What accounts for this peculiar form of Christian double-minded behavior? The nineteenth century theologians answered those questions by invoking a tongue-twisting word, “covetousness.” The nature of this disease, they believed, reflected the deepest powers of sin. If selfishness was the primary form of sin, then covetousness was the primary form of selfishness.

Of all the mid-nineteenth century interpreters of Protestant teachings about giving, Samuel Harris offered the most acute diagnosis of this malign spiritual condition. By “covetousness” Harris meant the love of money as the source of power and security. He made it clear that he was not just talking about the occasional miser whom polite society would shun as an oddity. “Misers,” he wrote, “are the rarest specimens of this disease.” Covetousness is likely to take on “the more respectable form of worldliness, keeping within the limits of honesty but swallowing all the energies in money-making, deadening the benevolent susceptibilities, pinching and shriveling the soul, living only to ‘buy and sell and get gain.’” Harris aimed right at the heart of his middle-class audience.

In these psychological explorations the Massachusetts pastor was also indirectly calling for a different understanding of giving. Up until the 1850s, most Protestant fund-raisers had focused attention upon some large, compelling cause beyond the individual giver–the “foreign missions” movement, for instance, or the spread of the Gospel in the unsettled portions of the United States. Now, however, Samuel Harris wanted to turn his audience's gaze inward and there to confront the divided souls of American Protestants caught in the contradictions of covetousness. In reading his essay one can discern the shift from an external focus upon a common mission to an internal preoccupation with the struggles within the lives of individuals. While he never would have denied the importance of missions, he was clearly more intent upon understanding the fierce heat of temptations in the lives of middle-class believers and their need for the counter-weight of a strong inner discipline.

The “principalities and powers” portrayed here appear on the battlefield of the solitary believer's conscience. There one wrestles with a horde of vagrant culture-bound impulses. Obedience begins in unsparing, introspective self-examination and comes only after adherence to rigorous discipline. What was necessary, in short, was a new means of grace powerful enough to contain the appetites of a covetous people.

Like several of his contemporaries, Harris found the solution in “systematic benevolence.” Benevolence, by itself, could evaporate into sentiment or turn out to be little more than its original Latin meaning suggested–“good wishing.” But the transforming presence of a system could provide not only order but also endurance and staying power against the temptations of money. Systematic benevolence could be that rarest of spiritual cures, an “antidote to covetousness.”

Yet the phrase, “systematic benevolence,” was also a singularly stark and abstract notion, especially for a Bible-reading audience. It did not conjure up any immediate connections to Scripture (as did the later talk about “stewardship.”) Without proper Biblical garb, “systematic benevolence” remained a naked and unappealing assertion. It lacked the authority that would help one Christian persuade another to give money.

Along with some of his colleagues, Samuel Harris discovered that authority in a single verse of the New Testament. One of the most popular Biblical statements about giving in mid-nineteenth century America was I Corinthians 16:2. This one sentence, according to Harris and others, contained the system writ large.

When twenty-first century readers encounter I Corinthians 16:2 in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), they might well wonder how such a slender sliver of Scripture could have once been considered the decisive revelation about the “law” of systematic benevolence. The NRSV text: “On the first day of the week, each of you is to put aside and save whatever extra you earn, so that collections need not be taken when I come.” In this version the contemporary reader encounters Paul's matter-of-fact injunction to the congregations in Corinth about the proper way of collecting money for the “saints” in Jerusalem.

Yet several generations of American church leaders in the nineteenth century paid far more attention to this incidental note of instruction than to Paul's profound writings about grace and money elsewhere in his letters to the Corinthians.[53] Their preoccupation with I Corinthians 16: 2 is one of those minor historical puzzles that can be revealing once it is solved. The answer, I suspect, lies not alone in the Scripture but also in their own situation in the middle decades of the last century.

In reflecting upon American “mid-nineteenth century patterns of thought,” historian Ralph Henry Gabriel years ago noted that our ancestors took great comfort in the notion of a fundamental moral order. “The chief function of law,” he wrote, was “not to settle isolated disputes . . . but to lay the basis for a feeling of security in daily living.”[54] Just as this country had a “government of ‘laws, and not of men,’”[55] so Americans tended to believe that God had established a divine government whose character was revealed in self-evident laws known to all mortals. The presumably absolute and immutable nature of those laws was all the more reassuring to a people who were increasingly aware of living in a nation bitterly divided over slavery. A divided nation, as well as divided souls, could find succor in the sane demands of the law. If people could know the truth, then they could obey it. In short, the idea of the “law” could be a symbol of safety and certainty.

Therefore, there must be a “law” that governs our giving. A Bible-reading people, so they believed, could turn toward the Scriptures and find the answer in Paul's injunction in the King James version of I Corinthians 16:2: “Upon the first day of the week let every one of you lay by him in store, as God hath prospered him, that there be no gatherings when I come.” There was the law written in a language anyone could understand. Long before we arrived on the scene, this one verse described the divinely inspired yardstick by which we can measure the adequacies of our gifts. These decisions do not depend upon any historical circumstances such as a funding crisis in a mission movement or even our nearness to the dawn of the millennial age. What ultimately counts is whether Christians are ready to recognize the authority of the “law.”

This text matched the concerns of Harris and other reformers in a second way. They were intrigued with the notion of proportionate giving. One should give according to one's means, they thought. The tithe[56], for instance, could put too much pressure on the very poor, yet not nearly enough upon the rich. Although the notion of a tithe apparently never disturbed the conscience of a “Deacon Brooks,” even that distant ideal would have allowed him to escape giving less than his fair share. At the very least, proportionate giving seemed to open the way toward a discussion about fairness and justice in giving. The practice of that ideal could help church folk avoid flattering the well-to-do for contributing their fair share and coercing the poor into making lavish and unrealistic pledges. The King James translation, “as God hath prospered him,” proved indispensable in their efforts to make that case.

Third, the reformers looked for ways of encouraging the habit of contributing in regular fashion rather than just succumbing to the vagaries of impulse giving after a particularly moving charity sermon. If church members put aside the same amount every Sunday as an installment on an annual pledge, then Protestant institutions–mission agencies as well as congregations–could count on a steady flow of income. Once again, I Corinthians 16:2 fit their circumstance. The phrase–“Upon the first day of the week let every one of you–seemed to require gifts every Sunday to the church. The Corinthian verse pointed to the importance of the rhythms of practice. It required, he wrote, “frequent and stated appropriations.”[57] While Harris did not insist that gifts must be offered on every “first day of the week,” he believed that the practice of benevolence would never develop apart from a public commitment to a rhythm of giving. Otherwise church members would lapse into convenient forgetfulness.

In that connection, Samuel Harris also recommended another regular exercise. Christians should keep records of their gifts as a way of struggling against the considerable powers of self-deception in matters of money. Nowhere is our hypocrisy more apparent than in our exaggerated estimates of our virtues as generous givers. In that vein, he commended the realism of one “systematic” giver. After this man's death, his family discovered among his papers a note to himself about why he scrupulously recorded all his contributions. “I keep this memorandum,” he wrote, “lest I should think I give more than I do.”[58]

Finally the reformers yearned for the day when church members would give without waiting to be solicited. The right locus for any decision about giving, so they believed, was the “closet” or the individual's place of prayer. In the privacy of the closet, the individual would make the decision after “prayer and deliberation, according to the rules of the Bible.”[59] No longer would it be necessary for agents to prey upon the emotions of their audiences. No longer would fund-raising be a collision of wills, a battle between the aggressive agent and the reluctant giver. “Let this system be adopted,” Samuel Harris wrote, “and the funds of the benevolent societies would flow in unsolicited, and the expense of collecting agencies would cease.”

And so it was that this verse became the revelation of the “law” of systematic benevolence for a handful of mid-nineteenth century reformers. Here was the essence of what one needed to know about the act of giving. I Corinthians 16:2, rightly interpreted, embodied a compelling vision of giving. They thought that vision could make a major difference in American church life. Once that fresh teaching seized the consciences of individual believers, Protestantism would gradually make three discoveries.

The Coming Reformation

The first anticipated discovery involved, in fact, a re-discovery of an ancient theme in church history. Over the centuries Christians had embraced different versions of the belief that the act of giving can be a means of grace. That notion came alive again in mid-nineteenth century America when such writers as Parsons Cooke made it a prominent motif in their efforts to reform the Protestant rhetoric. Indeed Cooke claimed that giving was “one of the most important means of grace”[60] since it provides the only possible protection against the ravages of covetousness. He described the love of money as “our giant enemy.”[61] “It comports with the economy of grace,” he wrote, “that our giant enemy shall not die by a single blow; his destruction must be the work of time, of our whole life.”[62] Systematic benevolence gives us the strength to defeat the enemy of our soul. While that inner victory is the work of “our whole life,” it is a struggle in which constant progress is possible through this means of grace.

The reformers of the teachings about giving foresaw even more dramatic progress as American Protestantism made its second discovery about the shape of the future. If the first expected discovery reflected a skeptical view of human nature grounded in the Christian doctrine of sin, the second prediction mirrored a heady confidence in the power of a system and its beneficent touch. The reformers held on to both ways of thinking without any sense that these futuristic scenarios might have contradicted one another.

Previous generations of divines had warned their congregations about the corrosive effects of affluence. The perils of prosperity also worried these mid-nineteenth century ministers. At the same time, however, their enthusiasm for systematic benevolence led them to make bold claims for its revolutionary power. This new mode of giving would help Protestant lay folk become both prosperous and also masters of the considerable spiritual challenges inherent in prosperity. Here in skeletal form is the four-point argument for this audacious prediction.

• The “system” in systematic benevolence will promote efficiency in the life of givers. “System always promotes efficiency,” Samuel Harris declared. Once givers commit themselves to the law of proportionate giving, they will have to keep accurate records of income and benevolent expenditures. The careful maintenance of those records will help the giver become more efficient in family bookkeeping. (The image of the “Christian as bookkeeper” appears occasionally in the literature on systematic benevolence.)
• Such efficiency makes possible greater thrift. Systematic benevolence and thrift are natural partners, according to the reformers. So Parsons Cooke noted: “Habits of giving favor the formation of other habits that tend to thrift.” The giver “has inserted into his mind a better regulator [the system], and so saves what without it he would have wasted upon his vices. And not only his economy, but his industry, and indeed the whole sisterhood of thrifty virtues, are fostered by his habits of charity.”[63]
• Thrift begets prosperity. Saving becomes a possibility. Benjamin Franklin made that sort of maxim an American commonplace in his Poor Richard's Alamanack. There are echoes of Poor Richard in the literature on benevolence. Of all the reformers, Samuel Harris had much the most complicated view of this matter.

The Massachusetts minister did not want his views confused with those of Franklin. There is no connection between the “proverbs of ‘Poor Richard,’” and “the precepts of Jesus Christ.”[64]  “It is not to be supposed,” Harris stated emphatically, “that systematic benevolence will ensure wealth. Wealth is, in God's judgment, too cheap a gift to be made the reward of the servants.”[65]  Christians must not give in order to get. While systematic benevolence can be a means of grace, it must never be considered just as a means to prosperity.[66]

Nevertheless, the adoption of “the” system can lead to prosperity. The discipline of serious giving requires thrift, and that habit, in turn, could eventually lead to saving more money. So Harris declared: “There are various ways in which systematic beneficence tends to promote prosperity. It promotes industry, energy and enterprise. The man has placed before himself a lofty subject, suited to draw out all his energies.”[67]  Out of that devotion and loyalty could come the habits which have been so long been considered the distinctive marks of the “Protestant ethic”–sobriety, economy, frugality, abhorrence of luxury and wasteful expenditures[68] as well as the discipline of planning and unremitting work.

• The final link in this chain of consequences is the most important. Just as a system increases efficiency and efficiency leads to thrift and thrift contributes to prosperity, so prosperity makes it possible for the Protestant to be even more generous in giving. Giving is both the origin and the goal of Protestant economic activity. It provides the beginning and the end of a cycle of energy that gains strength with each completed sweep through the various stages.

But these cycles of energy also represent a perilous spiritual journey, for “the energies, which are so effective in aiding the acquisition of wealth, are scarcely less effective in stimulating the love of it.”[69] “We cannot blind ourselves to the danger,” Harris went on to say, “that the love of money will become more and more the ruling influence, absorbing into itself even that powerful passion, ambition.”[70] In the 1850s the market economy – or the “spirit of trade,”[71] as he liked to call it – affected every sector of American life. The “gigantic, spirit-serving achievements of business” drew the “church into the current of the world” and made “its members indistinguishable in their pursuit of money from worldlings.”[72] In the midst of this maelstrom, the demanding practice of proportionate giving could remind church folk–if no one else–that they lived according to a different set of loyalties. Disciplined giving, in sum, helps remind them of who they are and what they have been called to do.

It is instructive to compare this four-fold argument with the outline of John Wesley's famous sermon on “The Use of Money,” a mid-eighteenth century document. Wesley's classic three points–“Gain all you can,” “Save all you can” and “Give all you can”[73] – reverberated throughout American culture in the nineteenth century. In his own way Samuel Harris embraced the last two affirmations, while largely ignoring the first. (The American business class, he seemed to assume, needed no reminder of the first imperative–“Gain all you can.”)

There is another difference worthy of note. Harris responded to prosperity as an inevitable fact of life in middle class America and therefore embraced it as a challenge to be fought and conquered. Wesley, on the other hand, wondered how many of his followers would remain Christians once they became prosperous. The contrast between the two underscores the depth of Harris's confidence in “the” system.

Samuel Harris was not alone in making strong claims for systematic benevolence. Others in the middle decades of the nineteenth century were even more flamboyant in their expectations of what might happen if only Protestants would heed their message. The hope often took the form of an “If . . .then” statement. To wit: “If” all our people obey the law of proportionate giving, “then” we could–and here followed a variety of claims about what might happen. At the very least, they claimed, here is a practical, realistic way of providing constantly growing support for the churches and all their needs. Once this practice is implanted in the lives of American Protestantism, it will free the churches from the indignities of frenetic fund-raising. Other advocates of the "If . . . then" reasoning ventured even further. The blessings of “systematic giving” would bring order, serenity and even prosperity into the lives of givers. Missions would grow and so would the churches.

One of these enthusiasts was the author of Resource 4.6, Abel Stevens. Shortly before the Civil War this Methodist journalist predicted that Protestants would soon be making yet another discovery. A new Reformation was just beginning. This monumental work would complete what Luther and Calvin had begun in the sixteenth century.

The earliest Reformation eventually led to the “'Revival Epoch’ under Edwards, Wesley and Whitefield in the eighteenth century.”  That second Reformation, in turn, spawned the various missionary societies and benevolent causes of the early nineteenth century. The reforming impulses at work in those powerful movements set the stage for what Stevens called “the great reform.”[74] The “next great idea to be brought out, and made prominent in the Church, is its true standard of pecuniary liberality.” In other words, systematic benevolence would be the animating idea for the coming Reformation.

In offering these large-scale visions of a grand future, Abel Stevens came close to matching the millennial expectations of Lyman Beecher. Stevens did not see why “the mission of Christianity in our world could not proceed on to its consummation, if this one condition were secured. The great obstruction now laid before its chariot-wheel is Mammon.”[75]  But the removal of that “obstruction” was now likely, thanks to the advent of systematic benevolence. The promise of that triumphant future would make it easier for American Protestants to accept the rigorous “Scriptural” demands of the new way of giving.

But as a matter of fact, there were numerous other obstructions cluttering the path into the future. None of these advocates had dealt with the inevitable tactical problems of a more immediate sort. How was this vast process of change going to occur? Who would be its midwives? Where were the teachers? What was the first step toward “the next great idea?”

The answers to those questions were not at all clear, particularly to some pastors of Protestant churches in mid-nineteenth century America. Their attention centered more on the present and less on making plans for the future. Money and the raising of money continued to be vexing issues in various congregations across the country. Indeed, money could be a major battleground for parish fights. To illustrate that point, I have included Resource 4.7, excerpts from the anonymously written account entitled A Voice from the Parsonage. This autobiographical recital of life in one congregation demonstrates the power of money-related tensions in local churches.

Those tensions complicated the already demanding task of advancing the cause of systematic benevolence. “The republic of benevolence” remained a remote ideal–praised in a few quarters, yet enormously difficult to embody in the life of American Protestantism. Samuel Harris, Abel Stevens and the others could not claim any notable successes, at least in their own lifetimes.

Perhaps their greatest accomplishment lay in the distant future. They had no way of knowing that fifty or sixty years later a new generation of Establishment leaders would adopt their work, give it a different name and thereby create the most important theme in twentieth century Protestant teachings about giving. Systematic benevolence, or the principle of self-initiated giving on a regular basis, would soon be called “stewardship.”

So the following Resources, when considered together, tell the story of the distant origins of that notion. “The next great idea” was coming over the horizon.

[1] Samuel E. Morison, The Founding of Harvard College (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935), p. 432.  [I have slightly changed the spelling.]

[2] Morison, p. 303, p. 304.

[3] E. Brooks Holifield, Era of Persuasion: American Thought and Culture, 1521-1680 (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988).

[4] Holifield, p. 2.

[5] It is worth noting that Holifield does not treat New England’s First Fruits in his book.  In the course of attempting to understand New England’s First Fruits, I read Era of Persuasion and found that it offered a context within which one could interpret the document.

[6] The Autobiography of Lyman Beecher, edited by Barbara M. Cross, Vol. II (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1961), p. 208.

[7] Cross, p. 207.

[8] Cross, p. 207.

[9] Cross, p. 208.

[10] E. C. Tracy, Memoir of the Life of Jeremiah Evarts, Esq. (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1845), p. 308.

[11] Tracy, p. 133. 

[12] B.B. Edwards, Memoir of the Rev. Elias Cornelius (Boston: Perkins and Perkins, 1833), p. 60.

[13] Edwards, p. 224.

[14] See William Ramsey, Church Debts: Origins, Evils and Cures (Philadelphia: Robert E. Peterson, 1851), for an exploration of this tendency. Among other consequences, debts – Ramsey contended – force congregations to choose a popular preacher with “polished manners,” someone who is “apt to draw money out of the purses of the saints.” Consult p. 19 in particular.

[15] See, for instance, Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America 1815-1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

[16] Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz, The Kingdom of Matthias (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 6.

[17] Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), p. 336.

[18] Wood, p. 325.

[19] Edward A, Lawrence, Mission of the Church; or, Systematic Beneficence (New York: the American Tract Society, n.d.), pp. 116-117.

[20] L. C. Stevens, Church Finances: or, God's Law Providing for the Public Expenses of Religion (Gardner: Printed at the Fountain Office, 1849), p. 15.

[21] The topic of America loomed large in the ante-bellum teaching about giving. For instance, when Elias Cornelius advised agents for the American Education Society about likely sermon topics for their presentation of the Society's needs, he suggested that they preach on America and its future i.e. “America threatened with spiritual famine,” or “the moral power of America.” See B.B. Edwards, Memoir of the Rev. Elias Cornelius, p. 295.

[22] Abel Stevens, "The Great Reform" in Systematic Beneficence: Three Prize Essays (New York: Carlton and Phillips, 1856), p. 16.

[23] Leonard Bacon, "A Plea for Africa," in the Park Street Church, Boston, July 4, 1824.  Cited in Leonard Woolsey Bacon, A History of American Christianity (London: James Clarke & Co., 1899), pp. 259-260.

[24]  For one convenient reference, see A Jonathan Edwards Reader, edited by John E, Smith, Harry S. Stout and Kenneth P. Minkema, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 247.

[25] Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, pp. 218-219.

[26] Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1991), p. 122.

[27] Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1965), p. 78.

[28] Miller, p. 78.

[29] I would also guess that Bacon had thought through the meaning of the word "republic" in this context.  Later in his career he proved to be a very astute critic of the political life and governance structures of the benevolent associations.  Bacon believed that the benevolent associations should be accountable through their trustees to their public.  His splendid 1847 article is an exploration of the polity of these powerful institutions. See Leonard Bacon, “Responsibility in the Management of Societies,” The New Englander (Vol. 1, pp. 28-41).

[30] Peter Dobkin Hall, "Remedying the Incompleteness of Democracy: An Overview of Board Governance in America," (New Haven: Program on Non-Profit Organizations, 1997), p. 45.

[31] Lois Wendland Banner, "The Protestant Crusade: Religious Missions, Benevolence and Reform in the United States, 1790-1840" (An unpublished dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University, 1970), p. 259.

[32] B.B. Edwards, Memoir of the Rev. Elias Cornelius, p. 322.

[33] Cited in John Lytle Myers, "The Agency System of the Anti-Slavery Movement, 1812-1837, and Its Antecedents in Other Benevolent and Reform Societies"  (An unpublished dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of the Doctor of Philosophy in the University of Michigan, 1960), p. 53.

[34] Myers, p. 111.

[35] B.B. Edwards, Memoir of the Rev. Elias Cornelius, p. 318.

[36] Edwards, p. 317.

[37] Edwards, pp. 317-318.

[38] Cited in Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience,  (New York: Random House, 1965), pp. 307-308.

[39] Lois Wendland Banner, "The Protestant Crusade: Religious Missions, Benevolence and Reform in the United States," p. 360.

[40] E. C. Tracy, Memoir of the Life of Jeremiah Evarts, Esq., p. 324.

[41] Tracy, p. 324.

[42] B.B. Edwards, Memoir of the Rev. Elias Cornelius, p. 294.

[43] A Protestant, Protestant Jesuitism (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1836), p. 108, p. 132.

[44] A Protestant, p. 133.

[45] A Protestant, p. 133.

[46] Parsons Cooke, The Divine Law of Beneficence (New York: the American Tract Society, n.d.), p. 49.

[47] B.B. Edwards, Memoir of the Rev. Elias Cornelius, p. 299.

[48] Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), p. 151.

[49]  Pharcellus Church, The Philosophy of Benevolence (New York: Leavitt, Lord & Co.,1836), p. 36.  This material is not included in Resource 4.3.

[50] James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988), p. 15.

[51] Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The  National Experience, p. 150.

[52]  Parsons Cooke, The Divine Law of Beneficence (New York: The American Tract Society, n.d.), p. 67.  The Social Gospel leader, Walter Rauschenbusch, made much the same observation in turn-of-the-century America: "The New Testament puts lasciviousness and covetousness on an equal footing of guilt.  Does the church do the same?  I have heard of many exclusions from church fellowship for causes of impurity.  But though I have made continued inquiry, I have so far heard of but three cases of exclusion for covetousness."  See Walter Rauschenbusch, Righteousness of the Kingdom (Nashville: Abingdon, 1968) ed. by Max Stackhouse, p. 211.

[53] By way of illustration, I would point to Paul's reflections about the "great collection" in II Corinthians 8-9.  Two Biblical scholars, Jouette Bassler and Dieter Georgi, have explored those texts in ways that open up rich and provocative insights into the meaning of giving. See Jouette Bassler, God & Mammon: Asking for Money in the New Testament. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1991); Dieter Georgi, Remembering the Poor: The History of Paul’s Collection for Jerusalem  (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1992)

[54] Ralph Henry Gabriel, The Course of American Democratic Thought: An Intellectual History Since 1815 (New York: The Ronald Press Company, 1940), p. 17.

[55] Gabriel, p. 17.

[56] Surprisingly enough, at least from the retrospective vantage point of our times, many of the enthusiasts for systematic benevolence rejected tithing as an answer.  Harris wrote: "In the laws regulating the Jewish tithes and offerings, God prescribed precisely what proportion should be given. This was practicable in a system of laws for a single agricultural people."  But the Christian faith offered something different.  According to Harris, "the gospel, designed for all nations and ages, could not with equity fix the precise proportion.  And it fits the entire character of the gospel - free grace from God, free love from man - to leave the decision of this point to the unconstrained love" of each Christian for God.  Samuel Harris, Zaccheus, or the Scriptural Plan of Benevolence), pp. 8-9.

[57] Harris, p. 8.

[58] Harris, p. 7.

[59] Harris, p. 7.

[60] Parson Cooke, The Divine Law of Beneficence, p. 55. Cooke devoted a chapter in his essay to giving as "one of the most important means of grace."  See pp. 55-69.  A Massachusetts minister, Cooke wrote a prize-winning essay that the American Tract Society published along with Harris' piece.

[61] Cooke, p. 64.

[62] Cooke, p. 64.

[63] Cooke, The Divine Law of Beneficence, p. 75. 

[64] Samuel Harris, Zaccheus, or the Scriptural Plan of Benevolence, p. 53.

[65] Harris, p. 37.

[66] Harris struggled with this point in a chapter entitled, "TENDENCY OF SYSTEMATIC BENEVOLENCE TO SECURE GOD'S BLESSING ON BUSINESS, AND TO ENLARGE THE MEANS OF GIVING." (pp. 37-48) As he wrote in the first sentence of this chapter, "This is a subject of difficulty, yet of importance." (p. 37) If treated in isolation from the rest of the text, this chapter could lead the twentieth century reader, already well acquainted with dubious teachings about how "piety pays," to conclude that Harris is in danger of losing the thread of his argument. I would urge the reader to study this chapter and the next one–“The Antidote of Covetousness”–together.

[67] Harris, pp. 37-38.

[68] Harris, p. 39.

[69] Harris, p. 58.

[70] Harris, p. 58.

[71] Harris, p. 58

[72] Harris, p. 58.

[73] See Sermon 50, "The Uses of Money," The Works of John Wesley, Albert C. Outler, ed. (New York: Abingdon Press, 1984), pp. 260 - 280.

[74] This phrase is the title of his 1856 essay from which selections were made for Resource 4.6.  Abel Stevens, "The Great Reform" in Systematic Beneficence: Three Prize Essays (New York: Carlton and Phillipps, 1856).

[75] Abel Stevens, "The Great Reform" in Systematic Beneficence: Three Prize Essays, p. 26.