Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Briant's essay led to a wave of Arminian liberalism, soon called the
"Liberal Theology," among the Congregational churches, especially in the
vicinity of Boston. The Reverend Ebenezer Gay of Hingham advanced
liberalism still further to a virtual deism and anticipation of Unitarianism.
In a lecture at Harvard College in 1759, Gay, a staunch believer in free
inquiry, called for "Natural Religion as Distinguished from Revealed." Natural
religion was to be discovered by reason alone and consisted in worshipping
God and His natural laws. If Christianity was inconsistent with natural
law, Gay boldly proclaimed, then the former must be discarded. Yet Gay,
in common with the other English and American deists of the period, did
not launch any open attack on the Christian religion; instead they held that
Christianity is necessary to supplement the sadly deficient reason of the
masses and to inculcate proper moral principles amongst them. The veteran
leader of Massachusetts liberalism, Charles Chauncy, pressed even further
into deism. God being the epitome of love, declared Chauncy, He would not
damn sinners eternally; furthermore, man using his reason was capable of
pursuing the good and obtaining happiness.
One of the great leaders of the deist movement in Massachusetts and
indeed the last of the mighty and influential colonial preachers in America
was the brilliant Boston minister Jonathan Mayhew.* Son of the Reverend
Experience Mayhew, Jonathan had a good start in developing his liberal
views. He spent his formative years at Harvard College, which had become
increasingly more advanced, and studied there under the great liberal teacher
Edward ("Guts") Holyoke, for three decades a thorn in the side of orthodox
Calvinism. At Harvard, young Mayhew eagerly imbibed the political philosophy
of John Locke and the religious views of the English deist Samuel
Clarke, and then went on to complete his development under the Reverend
Ebenezer Gay of Hingham.
What emerged was a man who by 1755 was the first New England minister
explicitly to reject the Trinity. Rejecting Calvinist determinism and
pessimism, Mayhew's rationalist philosophical outlook rested squarely on a
belief in natural law and a natural-law morality: "Truth and moral rectitude
are things fixed, stable, and uniform, having their foundation in the nature
of things." And it is rooted in the nature of man that each person is endowed
with reason and with free will—and that he is able to use free will to employ
his reason in order to discover the natural law of what is good or bad for
man's happiness. Furthermore, he is then able to use that free will to choose
the good. And since each individual's choices rest on the convictions of his
mind, each man has the right and duty of private judgment over his own
•It is not surprising that this great liberal figure, highly important in the religious
and political development in America, lacked a modern biographer until very recently,
while such fanatics as Mather and Edwards have drawn the fascinated attention of
numerous historians.
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