American Heroes (25 page)

In the case of the college church it must also be remembered that, apart from the faculty, members could remain so for only four years at the most. And even among the faculty the post of tutor was a temporary one, seldom held for more than three or four years. The only permanent members of the church had to be drawn from the presidents and professors and their families, and during most of Stiles's presidency there was only one professor. The church was thus constantly facing the threat of extinction by graduation. Commencement day was an annual disaster.

The threat was heightened by the fact that already in the eighteenth century New England churches relied on religious revivals to bring in new members. Such revivals occurred at irregular intervals, separated by periods of quiescence when only occasional members were added. The college church, like other churches, enjoyed revivals, but the effect of them on membership totally disappeared within four years' time.

Still another factor tending to depress the number of members in the college church may be found in the age of the college students. If we examine the age of church members at the time of joining in other churches, it will be found that only a minority joined before the age at which most students graduated. The urge to join a church usually came to eighteenth-century New Englanders, if it came at all, between the ages of twenty-two and forty. For a boy to join while still in his teens was very unusual, and most college students were in their teens. Moreover, if a boy did have the urge to join, he might very well join the church in his own town and never transfer his membership to the college church.

A final factor affecting church membership is one that almost eliminated the very possibility of a college church. The most surprising fact of New England religious behavior in the eighteenth century is that women members of churches usually outnumbered men by about two to one and sometimes by as much as three to one. The figures vary from place to place, but the New Haven First Church may serve as an example. Of 164 members admitted in the twenty years from 1768 to 1787, 115 were women and only 49 were men. There were, of course, no women students at Yale.

From these facts it will be apparent that the college church was bound to be a small and perishing body. Its shifting membership, however, serves as a rough barometer of the condition of religion at Yale from year to year. The number of admissions under Stiles as compared with those before and after will give some clue to the merit of Beecher's judgment of Stiles and Dwight.

The records of admissions are pretty complete from the time of the church's formation in 1757 to about 1774 and again from 1780 to about 1810. What they show is an average of about three admissions a year during the first eighteen years of the church's existence (1757–74). Under Stiles the average was about six admissions a year, double what it had been under his predecessors, and incidentally more than double the rate of admissions of men to the New Haven First Church during this period. During the first fifteen years under Dwight, the average was still higher, almost ten a year. The increase corresponds roughly to the increase in college enrollment during the years concerned.

The average figures are somewhat deceptive, because of the periodic revivals. The first revival in the college church occurred under Stiles in 1784, when twenty-four students joined the church. Under Dwight revivals occurred in 1802, 1808, and 1812. In the 1790s, however, there was no revival under either Stiles or Dwight. In the last four and a half years of Stiles's administration, a total of fifteen students were admitted; in the first four and a half years of Dwight's administration, fourteen. Thus during the years when Lyman Beecher was at Yale, the membership of the college church remained about even. It was nearly extinct when he entered under Stiles, and it was even more nearly extinct when he graduated under Dwight. Near-extinction was, in fact, its normal condition, in which it remained during the early years of Dwight's presidency.

It was not until 1800 that admissions showed a rise, and not until 1802 that a revival can be detected. This was long
after
other Connecticut churches had begun to experience the great revival of that period. The movement that has been called the second Great Awakening struck Connecticut heavily in 1799. Though historians, led perhaps by Beecher's reminiscences, have sometimes given Dwight credit for helping to start it, the fact is that the revival spread from other churches to the college and not vice versa. Religion at Yale, as measured by membership in the college church, did not show any improvement as a result of the change from Stiles to Dwight.

There can be no doubt that infidelity existed at Yale in the 1790s. It existed also in the 1780s and to a lesser degree in earlier and later decades. Adolescence is generally a time for questioning the principles of one's elders, and doubtless many Yale students went through a period of skepticism about Christianity. Ezra Stiles himself did so in the 1740s, and so have many other Yale students before and since; but that Yale was more infidel than the rest of the nation in the eighteenth century is very unlikely. It is true that the 1780s and 1790s saw the rise of deism in Connecticut and in the country at large to a degree never before known. But there is no contemporary evidence to suggest that Yale was a center of this sentiment. On the contrary, the principal criticism leveled against the college until the reform of its charter in 1792 was the fact that it was governed by clergymen, and no one suggested that the clergymen were leading the students toward deism. One might add that the proportion of those students who became ministers was larger under Stiles than under Dwight.

But statistics are cold and tricky. They may fail to reveal the spirit that pervades a place. What about the strikingly different way that Stiles and Dwight handled infidelity? Under Stiles, Beecher tells us, the students “thought the Faculty were afraid of free discussion,” while Dwight dumbfounded them by letting them discuss the question “Is the Bible the word of God?”

That Dwight presided over such a discussion is highly probable, for reasons that will become apparent. That this discussion surprised the students is highly improbable.

The episode Beecher described was a formal disputation, and he did not mean, I am sure, to imply that disputations were novel. They had been in use since the Middle Ages and were still a regular and important part of the curriculum throughout the eighteenth century. In their junior and senior years students at Yale (as in other American colleges) were required to apply their learning to the defense of various assigned propositions. Half the class took the negative, half the affirmative, and the tutor (for the juniors) or the president (for the seniors) presided, awarding the decision to the side that marshaled its arguments the more skillfully. This was a weekly exercise, in which Stiles had participated as a student in the 1740s and Dwight in the 1760s.

The disputations were of two kinds, forensic and syllogistic. The latter were in Latin, intended as exercises in formal logic; the forensic disputations were in English and designed to develop rhetorical abilities as well as to train the student in clear thinking. Before Stiles's time the propositions for both types of debate tended to be universal questions of philosophy or religion: whether the mind always thinks, whether polygamy is lawful, whether virtue would be eligible if there were no life hereafter, whether miracles in themselves prove a divine revelation, whether human laws bind the conscience, whether deception is ever lawful. Propositions such as these were debated year in and year out. When Stiles became president, he continued to assign them as syllogistic topics and occasionally as forensic ones, but he generally reserved forensic debates for subjects of more immediate and compelling public interest.

Since public events continually suggested new issues, the subjects of forensic debates under Stiles frequently changed from year to year. He recorded many of them in his diaries. Unfortunately he failed to do so in the last years of his life, while Beecher was a student, but the notebook of Thomas Robbins, a junior, containing forensic topics for 1794–95, has survived. It reveals how fearful the faculty may have been during Stiles's last year of allowing students to discuss controversial issues. The propositions debated forensically by the junior class, from December 1, 1794, to April 21, 1795, were as follows:

The particular proposition that is supposed to have astounded the class half a year later under Dwight is not here; but that proposition, in one form or another, had actually been debated at Yale for at least forty-five years. It was one of the old, standard topics, and is in one of the first student notebooks of disputations at Yale that I have been able to discover, that of Eleazar May in the class of 1752. May debated it on December 31, 1750; and as it happened, the instructor who presided over the argument was young Ezra Stiles, then serving as a college tutor. Ammi Robbins, father of the boy who recorded the topics listed above for 1794–95, debated the proposition in 1758. Stiles noted it in his diary as a subject for the seniors in 1778, 1780, 1781, 1787, and 1788. Eli Whitney debated it in 1790 and 1791 and Thomas Robbins's notebooks show it as the subject of an English composition for the juniors on April 19, 1795, less than a month before Stiles's death. When Dwight selected it as a topic for disputation by the same class some six months later, the students could scarcely have been surprised, except perhaps at being allowed to worry that same old topic once again.

Thus Beecher's recollections on these two matters, the state of the college church and the subject of the seniors' first disputation under Dwight, though probably correct as to facts, are wholly misleading about the significance of the facts. How, then, does it happen that Beecher's general impression was supported by so many other witnesses?

The strongest corroborative testimony is that of the students' letters written in 1795 and 1796. These are inescapable, contemporary sources, and they speak so highly of Dwight that they inevitably cast his predecessor in the shade. At least one deliberately contrasts the two men, much to the detriment of Stiles. Was Beecher right, after all, in his general impression? Though the letters actually say nothing and imply nothing about infidelity under Stiles, they do give a glowing picture of the improved student morale, not to say morals, under Dwight.