"One Soul, tho' not one Soyl"?: International Protestantism and Ecumenism at the Beginning of the Eighteenth Century

"One Soul, tho' not one Soyl"? International Protestantism and Ecumenism at the Beginning of the Eighteenth Century* BRIJRAJ SINGH The recent decision of the Lutheran Church in the United States to enter into communion with the Episcopalians, which is being regarded, rightly, as a great success of the ecumenical movement among Protestant churches, may be a good reason for narrating the little remembered story of the close collaboration that developed in the early years of the eighteenth century between the Pietist wing of the Lutherans in Germany and the Church of England in Britain, and involved certain members of the American Puritan movement and missionaries in India as well. Indeed, what happened between roughly 1707 and 1717 was not only ecumenical in nature but also international in scope; and when the difficulties of maintaining international contacts nearly three hundred years ago are taken into account, as is the fact that the personages involved in the events were as unlikely and, in some cases, prickly a group of individuals as ever collaborated in a common cause, the events that my paper tries to narrate may well appear to have been no less momentous than the recent communion of churches. *An earlier and shorter version of this essay appeared in Topic 51 - A Journal of the Liberal Arts, Washington and Jefferson College, Washington, PA. 2001 61 62 / SINGH There are four protagonists in the story, the Rev. Cotton Mather (16631728 ), Anton Wilhelm Boehm ( 1673-1722), August Hermann Francke (16631727 ), and Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg (1683 7-1719). Each has been the subject of several studies. But because these studies have focused on individuals, the wide scope and international aims of an ecumenical Protestantism appear only in a glimmering, fitful fashion: each study throws certain details into heightened relief, but a sense of the whole remains shadowy. Perhaps the only scholar to address the relationship of the four figures and their collaborative endeavors towards the establishment of an ecumenical Protestantism is Ernst Benz. But his essay "Pietist and Puritan Sources of Early Protestant World Missions," though erudite and compendious, is also disorganized, and some of the bibliographical details are unhelpful.1 It is my hope that my paper will present the story more clearly and cogently than has yet been done and also incorporate the latest findings. My story starts in Boston, where Cotton Mather, the Puritan leader, was minister of the Second Congregational Church. Hot headed, polemical, immoderate and dictatorial, he had scant use for the Church of England. He thought that with its bishops and archbishops it was little better than Papist, and abhorred its attitude towards Dissenters.2 If he did not write the whole of A Brief Discourse Concerning the Unlawfulness of Common Prayer Worship (1686)—and his bibliographer Thomas James Holmes thinks he might have —he certainly penned the introduction and helped to print it, albeit anonymously. The work castigated Anglican practices such as the use of the Book of Common Prayer in church services and kissing the Bible while taking oaths. A Brief Discourse caused a warrant to be issued against him, which he saw as further proof of persecution by the Church of England.4 His antipathy extended to the newly-founded (1701) Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (hereafter SPG), not only because its leadership consisted largely of the British Episcopate, but also because he suspected it of trying to wean Harvard men away from Congregationalism to Anglicanism, and in 1716 he derisively labeled it the Society for the Molestation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.5 Richard F. Lovelace, a recent scholar of Mather's religious thought, believes that this hostility extended to another Anglican society in Britain, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge or SPCK, which was founded in 1699.6 However, though both the SPG and SPCK were firmly within the Anglican fold, they were different in several important respects. The SPCK had fewer bishops as members and was more lay-controlled. It was also, thanks in large part to the influence of Boehm, one of its important members, more tolerant of Dissent and "One Soul, tho' not one Soyl" ? / 63 more international in outlook.7 Mather seems to have sensed this difference...