Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

a proclamation to prohibit all itinerant preachers. At this point the New
Lights of Virginia were saved by the arrival of the young Reverend Samuel
Davies as the first settled Presbyterian minister in the region. The relatively
moderate Davies was able to win a license to preach from Virginia's governor
and General Court.
The Reverend Mr. Davies actually won the hearts of the Virginia authorities
with his fervent warmongering during the French and Indian War.
Davies found it easy to substitute the enemy for the devil in his sermons.
Thus:
Ye that love your country enlist; for honor will follow you in life or death
in such a course. Ye that love your religion enlist; for your religion is in danger.
Can Protestant Christianity expect quarters from heathen savages and
French Papists? Sure in such an alliance the powers of Hell make a third
party. Ye that love your friends and relations enlist; lest ye see them enslaved
and butchered before your eyes.
Shortly after this bit of elegant demagoguery the Reverend Mr. Davies
achieved the pinnacle of his career; like Jonathan Edwards before him, he
became president of the College of New Jersey until his death two years
later in 1761.
Despite their rapid expansion in the South, the New Side Presbyterians
faced two inherent restrictions on their growth among the masses: the
moderation brought to the movement by Samuel Davies, and their stringent
requirements that their ministers be properly educated. The Baptists, however,
labored under no such handicaps, and a fateful shift in the Baptist
creed enabled them to fill this gap after midcentury.
The Baptists had begun in the colonies in mid-seventeenth-century
Rhode Island. There they emerged not only as a liberal but as a radically
individualist group. Their "creed" was individualism not only in religion,
but also in political philosophy, to the point of anarchism. The religious
individualism of the Rhode Island Baptists, however, was not frenzied Calvinist
orthodoxy but a liberal and rationalistic creed that tended toward
Arminianism and deism. It is not surprising that with such a heroically
radical creed the Baptists did not exactly flourish in the colonies. They
managed to grow moderately, however, and to establish centers in Virginia,
North Carolina, South Carolina, and New York early in the eighteenth century,
in addition to their previous membership in New England. Their main
center soon became the new and expanding colony of religious liberty,
Pennsylvania, and the first general organization of American Baptists met as
the Philadelphia Association in 1707.
Ever since the founding of the Baptist sect in early seventeenth-century
England, however, there had been two drastically conflicting and contradictory
strains within Baptism: the "General," that is, those subscribing to the
164