such as Jonathan Mayhew, and the emotional and pietistic sermons of most Yale-trained pastors. His style, in other words, was closer to a Jonathan Edwards—studious, carefully prepared, well argued, but seeking to arouse an emotional response from the audience. Jacob carefully stated his thesis or argument based on the day’s biblical text (in fact, in his daybook, he stressed that the minister should select the text first and the discourse second), and he proceeded to defend it in clear, at times compelling prose, backing up his main points with everyday metaphors that his listeners could easily grasp.45
Green was remarkably consistent in his message. He wanted to change people’s behavior and get them to reform their ways. For him, that was the key to bringing them into the invisible church. He had little use for millennial themes. Nor, unlike many evangelical preachers and itinerants (especially Methodists on the frontier), did he discuss his own trials: his struggles to achieve a rebirth and avoid backsliding remained private. Instead, out of the hundreds of sermons that he delivered in the prewar years, one theme predominated: the importance of moral responsibility and the need for sinners to recognize the imminent dangers. In 1768, in Morristown, Green took to the pulpit at the Presbyterian church there. He drew his inspiration from the gospel of John and John’s warnings about arrogance—“You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life,” with his main point coming from chapter 5, verse 40: “But you are not willing to come to Me that you may have life.” From that key line, Green delivered his sermon lesson, expounding on the threats from unregeneracy. “Unregenerate sinners,” he told his listeners, “are loath to believe that they are so bad, so wicked & blamable as they really are. They are willing to believe & at length do believe that they are not so very bad.” Jacob’s purpose in these sermons was to get people to understand the nature of sinning and the offensiveness of sinners’ behavior. “Light & happiness are to be obtained by coming to him or complying with the terms of salvation,” he told his listeners. In a line that reflected his views of an unregenerate’s spiritual inability, he added, “But sinners will not come, they are unwilling to comply.” They are, in other words, blind to the saving grace of Jesus Christ.46
Green believed he was delivering an effective sermon if he acted as “an advocate for Virtue & Religion; to attain that improvement of Understanding, that purity of heart, dignity & even severity of Character.” And he could do that only if he spoke from the heart and with a deep knowledge of his subject. “The authority of the speaker does not arise from superior station; or power annexed to the office,” he noted in his daybook. “But it is of a more sacred kind, founded in superior wisdom & Virtue. An uncommon Eloquence gives a superiority over the Minds of Men: but wisdom seen & acknowledged gives a greater & stronger superiority than Eloquence can give.”47
Week after week, he tried to get Presbyterians and other attendees to understand what was at stake. Hell awaited the unregenerate and “the fallen race of Adam.” Green constructed one such sermon around a passage from Mark 9:47–48: “And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye, rather than having two eyes, to be cast into hell fire.” From that text, Green delivered his stark warning. “Hell is a place with a real material Fire,” he explained. “Sinners will receive the greatest punishment they are capable of both in body & Soul.” The punishment was so severe that they faced something akin to torture—their bodies would “be kept alive in the midst of a burning fire.”48
Heaven or hell? It was up to God. “You are in God’s hands,” Green declared in a 1769 sermon. He alone will determine when you die and whether you will receive a spiritual pardon. “Consider what poor brittle clay you are in the hand of an angry God. You are but as clay in the hand of him the potter who can make you the vessel of his wrath whenever he pleases. Your life . . . is in his hand.” God’s wrath, Green continued, “is very terrible; when he riseth up none can stand before him.”49
Some of this language, especially references to an angry God, echoed Edwards’s teachings. Yet Green’s intent was more than to scare people. He also described the joys of heaven that awaited the elect. But upstanding Christian behavior was essential if someone was to demonstrate that she was among the saved. Many a sermon began by describing the dangers awaiting the sinner before segueing to the eternal rewards available to the repentant; the wrathful God was also a loving God. The 1769 sermon warning of God’s terrible vengeance concluded by urging people to open their hearts to him—“God is willing to be reconciled to you,” Green stated plainly. The Lord, he continued, “has endowed man with a rational & spiritual substances. . . . He has given us passion of love & hatred, hope & fear, joy & sorrow. . . . And all these things God has appointed to work to getting for our Good.” The happy conclusion: “God has told us if we are obedient all is glorious & perfection.”50
Green’s weekly sermons thus softened Calvinism’s hard edges and appealed to the enlightened rationalist among his audience. Yes, God decided all, and, yes, hell awaited the unsaved, but there was much the good Christian could do to avoid such an awful fate. As Green explained in one sermon, “Mankind has Reason & Understanding & Understanding & Light . . . the Fall has not destroyed man’s Reason & Understanding . . . mankind are capable by these to know & discover the Faith respecting God & his Perfections as is clear from Roman 1:20–21”—a passage that emphasized “since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen.”51
Subtle, Jacob Green’s views were not. The indecision of the late 1740s and early 1750s was gone, replaced by the 1760s by a clear, forceful expression of his religious beliefs.
The Loyalist Down the Road:
Thomas Bradbury Chandler, Anglican Convert
Unlike in the case of Jacob Green, there was little doubt that Thomas would attend college, and there was no need for him to wait on tables once he got there. He enrolled at Yale and, based on the Chandler pedigree, was ranked seventh in the incoming class of twenty-seven students. Like Jacob, Thomas was a natural student, becoming known at college for his piety and learning. Although Yale and Harvard had their peculiarities (Harvard was far more “liberal” and latitudinarian than was its Connecticut rival), Thomas’s course of study differed little from Jacob’s. Thomas studied the ancient languages, logic, natural philosophy, metaphysics, ethics, and all the other things a young gentleman needed to become a minister. He graduated from Yale in 1745, a year after Green left Cambridge.
He was nineteen.
Chandler thus knew at a far younger age than did Green that he wanted to be a minister, and he suffered from none of the insecurities that beset his Presbyterian counterpart. Chandler was raised a Congregationalist and hailed from a family with deep roots in the Puritan church. But Congregationalism was not a good fit for this fifth-generation Chandler. He studied theology under someone more congenial to his tastes and proclivities—Samuel Johnson, an Anglican and the future president of King’s College in New York City. Johnson and Chandler developed deep bonds of affection, with the former serving as Thomas’s mentor. (Thomas later wrote a reverential memoir of Johnson’s life.) Johnson, for his part, recognized how gifted Chandler was, praising him as “a truly valuable person, of good parts and competent learning . . . and of good morals and virtuous behavior.”
From Johnson, Thomas learned the ways of the king’s church. The Church of England was a state-established institution that had, following the reforms of King Henry VIII, become an arm of the government. The monarch was the church’s supreme earthly leader who appointed the bishops who ran the church. In Puritan New England, the state wanted each congregation to encourage people to turn to Jesus Christ. In England and its foreign domains, the state wanted its church to produce two things—good Christians and good citizens. It saw the two goals as complementary. Devout Christians attending church regularly would make for orderly, loyal subjects of the king. For the state, the church was to reinforce the government’s power, and the state was to reinforce the church’s power. Samuel Johnson was a good High Church Anglican who was wholeheartedly devoted to the Henrician legacy. He backed the state church and all