Seasonable Revolutionary: The Mind of Charles Chauncy by Charles H. LippyReview by: Conrad Edick WrightThe William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Jan., 1983), pp. 147-148Published by: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and CultureStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1919541 .

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REVIEWS OF BOOKS I47

Seasonable Revolutionary: The Mind of Charles Chauncy. By CHARLES H. LIPPY. (Chicago: Nelson-Hall Publishers, i982. Pp. Xii, I79. $i8.95.)

In the last paragraph of this brief investigation of Charles Chauncy and his thought, Charles H. Lippy suggests that history's failure to recognize the achievements of the Boston Arminian clergyman "perhaps stems from the fact that both his words and his works issued as specific responses to particular crises and controversies which marked eighteenth-century American life. In retrospect, they may seem so bound to those crises and controversies that it is easy to overlook their larger significance" (pp. I 30- I31). It is an astute insight, but it ironically epitomizes Professor Lippy's own study. Although Seasonable Revolutionary is subtitled The Mind of Charles Chauncy, a more descriptive subtitle might have been Charles Chauncy, Controversialist, for Lippy has organized his book around Chauncy's many skirmishes. The resulting portrait is effective in its presentation of Chauncy's dislikes, less effective in explaining his positions on specific issues, and least effective in describing the broad principles that guided him throughout his life.

Seasonable Revolutionary's treatment of Chauncy is episodic. Although Lippy pays passing attention to Chauncy's ancestry, youth, education, and pastoral career in Boston's First Church, he is more interested in Charles Chauncy the Old Light, the opponent of stamp taxes and Anglican bishops, the revolutionary, and the universalist. Chauncy speaks for reason and order in opposition to New Light enthusiasm and for New England autonomy in the face of British threats to the right of religious and political self-determination. In Chauncy's view God is characterized by benevolence more than righteousness. The thread that ties these positions together is Chauncy's unyielding faith in the New England Way. Lippy considers Chauncy a thoroughgoing conservative, always ready to protect the traditional order, both religious and political, from challenge or change. Chauncy's opposition to the Great Awakening grew out of his fear that the revival would undermine clerical authority, congregational polity, and the rational elements of New England's theological heritage; his support for the Revolution expressed his whiggish belief that the cause embodied the central elements of the Anglo-American political tradition.

This characterization works to a point, but it does not account for all that one might hope. The Reverend William Emerson, one of Chauncy's successors, remarked after Chauncy's death that he had had a strong attachment to "Taylor, Tillotson, and writers of that stamp" (William B. Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit, VIII [New York, i865], I2). Seasonable Revolutionary's picture of Chauncy's resistance to novelty is not easy to reconcile with his interest in dissenting or latitudinarian theology, innovations in British moral philosophy, or any of the other currents of thought with which intellectual leaders of the day had to come to terms. Chauncy's defense of the congregational polity, threatened by episcopacy, grew directly out of longstanding Puritan opposition to bishops, but his belief in universal salvation had a more complicated ancestry, since it

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I48 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

owed a debt to optimistic eighteenth-century ideas about the benevolence of God and the perfectibility of mankind. As Lippy recognizes, its effect was "to undercut the heart of orthodox theology" (p. I22).

Professor Lippy's special concern for the controversies in Chauncy's life, moreover, colors his description of his subject's personality and leads him to slight or misunderstand a number of issues on which the clergyman was in substantial agreement with most contemporaries. One can point to many different examples. Bezaleel Howard, reminiscing about Chauncy in I 833, recalled that "God gave him a slender, feeble body, a very powerful, vigorous mind, and strong passions; and he managed them all exceedingly well" (Sprague, p. I 2). In Seasonable Revolutionary, however, we see a man often more choleric than self-controlled, less a man of reason than of combative rages. Such a characterization leaves little room for those times when Chauncy did compromise and cooperate with more orthodox colleagues. It is not surprising for this reason that Lippy ignores Chauncy's support of missionary activities among Indians and white pioneers. Nor is it surprising that in contrasting Chauncy's views on the morphology of regeneration with those of Jonathan Edwards, Seasonable Revolutionary overstates the admittedly substantial disagreement between them. Chauncy allowed human initiative a greater role in achieving salvation than Edwards did, but he did not believe, as Lippy implies, that sinners could save themselves (pp. 30-3 I). Chauncy agreed with Edwards that the final decision was always God's and God's alone.

Readers who are interested in Chauncy's role in a specific controversy will want to read the appropriate chapter in Seasonable Revolutionary. Professor Lippy's book, however, has not superseded another recent, more balanced biography of Chauncy, Old Brick: Charles Chauncy of Boston, I 705-I787, by Edward M. Griffin (Minneapolis, Minn., i980).

New-York Historical Society CONRAD EDICK WRIGHT

Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement. Calvinism, the Congrega- tional Ministry, and Reform in New England between the Great Awaken- ings. By JOSEPH A. CONFORTI. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Christian University Press, 198I. Pp. Viii, 24I. $I6.95.)

Joseph A. Conforti's book is a distinguished contribution to a recent movement that might be called the liberation of New England historiogra- phy-liberation geographically from excessive focus on Boston and intellectually from acceptance of the optimistic humanism that formed a large element in Boston Unitarianism. Spending a fair amount of time in the aura of sweetness and light that permeates libraries and faculty meetings, history professors understandably develop a genial view of human nature and see hell-fire preachers as somehow infra dig. But Conforti is open to the darker view of man in Augustine, Sigmund Freud, and Samuel Hopkins.

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