This article was taken from our archives. It first appeared in the Fall 2010 issue of The Bermudian. It appears here exactly as it did originally.
He had once been, by his own account, “a hare-brained sailor…thoughtless of eternity.” “Levity and mischief” were his “delight,” “a song, a joke and a frolic” his pleasures. When his ship wrecked on the French coast, he acknowledged no amazing grace. He instead celebrated his survival with “dancing, riot and drunkenness.” Yet by the time he came ashore in St. George in May 1808, Joshua Marsden was a changed man, a Methodist determined “to preach the gospel to every creature.”
His “vineyard” would be Bermuda, an island he found steeped in “three formidable evils: prejudice, ignorance and bigotry.” By the time he sailed away from the colony in 1812, “a seed had been sown.” Two centuries later that seed of public education and racial equality still bears fruit. Marsden cannot be said to have singlehandedly brought about the end of slavery in Bermuda, but his Methodist values of egalitarianism and social activism powerfully pushed the colony in that direction.
Bermuda’s initial religious foundation rested on Anglicanism. The Church of England was the “established” religion, although Puritanism and Presbyterianism challenged its authority. In reality, Bermuda was an isolated mid-Atlantic colony so consumed with survival that it drifted away from the prim practice of Anglicanism. By the 1790s, the Church of England in Bermuda was, in the words of its historian Archie Hallett, in “a moribund state.” It was understaffed. There were not enough churches. Services were offered only intermittently. And the ministers themselves hardly inspired devotion. On his arrival in 1808, Marsden would note with dismay that only 150 of St. George’s 2,500 inhabitants observed the Sabbath. St. George’s Anglican rector, he scornfully noted, was “a sot, a gambler, a blasphemer, a spendthrift,” who would soon flee the colony to escape his creditors.
The Church of England had lost touch with the social and religious sensibilities of the colony. In 1790, Governor Hamilton, for example, had complained to the Bishop of London that Bermuda’s slaves had been “sadly neglected” by the established church. The stage was thus set for a religious revival in the colony, one that corrected the indolence and exclusivity of the established church and at the same time connected faith with social necessity. Presbyterianism pioneered this dissent in Bermuda, achieving a degree of latitude over its affairs by aligning itself with the Church of Scotland in Edinburgh. (Christ Church Warwick today prides itself in being the oldest Presbyterian church in the hemisphere.) But it was Methodism that would most formidably nurture Bermuda’s great awakening in the early nineteenth century.
Methodism emerged in England in the same tumultuous century as the Industrial Revolution. And, like the output of the dark satanic mills, it was soon exported. In the 1730s, the Church of England came under criticism for its spiritual staleness, its rigid hierarchy and its detachment from a population that increasingly drew its livelihood from the mill and the mine rather than the field. Anglicanism needed revival from within. This was certainly the instinct in 1729 when a group of young Anglicans formed the Holy Club at Lincoln College, Oxford. Prominent in the circle were John and Charles Wesley (whose tuneful and emotionally rousing hymns still fill hymnbooks) and George Whitefield (who would soon make the movement transatlantic). The Holy Club insisted that Anglicanism rededicate itself to unflinching, or “methodical,” study of the Bible, and that this dedication be projected into the daily life of every adherent. The established Church of England regarded Wesley and his band warily, soon branding them “Methodists.”
It was probably inevitable that, in the 1790s, Methodism would break away from Anglicanism. Methodism was an activist faith. It advocated “new birth,” the notion that no matter what sins lay behind a person one could embrace God and be saved. Having found such redemption, a Methodist daily demonstrated his or her faith through actions that reached out to his worldly neighbours. Methodists did not smugly wait for the preordained reward of heaven; instead, they sought to build heaven on earth.
Its preachers did exactly that: they rode “circuits” broadcasting their message in fields, humble homes and in the streets. When they built churches, they more resembled circular meeting halls than places of orthodox religious ritual. Methodist services were revivals, weekly festivals of galvanic preaching and lusty hymn singing. There was something empowering about Methodism, especially because of its decentralized structure and its invitation to individual action. Methodism reached out to the margins of English society, to the country labourer and the growing industrial proletariat. Methodists quickly understood that the young were the hope of the future and that education—beginning with simple literacy—was the key to spirituality. Put a Bible in a person’s hands and faith will blossom.
Established British society fretted that Methodism was a dangerous doctrine, one that egged the humble to take their destiny into their own hands, to question the status quo. Certainly, Methodism’s emphasis on education of the lower orders and the cultivation of the young had a seditious tinge to those in a society that extolled “the rich man in his castle, the poor man by his gate.”
Zeal transmitted Methodism around the world. In 1738, George Whitefield, a poor boy who had gone to Oxford and been drawn into the Wesleys’ Holy Club, carried the Methodist message across the Atlantic. Still attesting his adherence to the Anglican Church, Whitefield became a parish priest in Georgia and soon found himself in what American history now calls “the Great Awakening.” His energy was boundless. Travelling on horseback, he moved from Georgia as far north as New York, preaching his message—“Come poor, lost, undone sinner, come just as you are to Christ”—to huge open-air gatherings. Whitefield’s Methodist conscience led him to establish an orphanage in Bethesda, Georgia, for which he raised money in England. It is now said to be the oldest charity in America. Whitefield shuttled back and forth across the Atlantic, transporting his Methodist message as far afield as Gibraltar. But America became his home and there, in Massachusetts, he died in 1770.
Methodism faced a dilemma in America: slavery. Although slavery was banned in early colonial Georgia, colonial America’s homes and plantations elsewhere depended fundamentally on slave labour. What was a Methodist to do? Preach against the evil of the institution? The danger was that Methodism might easily be construed by white colonialists as instigating blacks to insubordination. Such a perception would powerfully undermine Methodism’s appeal to its target white constituency. Or was a Methodist best advised to preach for the soul of the slave, arguing that a convert had been won for Christ and that worldly arrangements were best left undisturbed?
Whitefield wavered on slavery, sensing that too fervent a stance might jeopardize his mission in America. When Georgia legalized slavery in 1751, Whitefield concurred, arguing that slaves were the necessary fuel of a colonial economy. Indeed, he owned slaves himself. His sermons urged blacks to reform their souls and not to agitate against their masters. He mustered Biblical authority for such worldly passivity: “Everything is beautiful in its season.”
On the other hand, Whitefield preached that slave owners ought to treat their slaves benevolently. “Your dogs are caress’d and fondled at your Tables: But your slaves, who are frequently stiled [styled] Dogs and Beasts, have not an equal Privilege.” God, he warned, would judge such behaviour. Historians have noticed Whitefield’s equivocation. Professor Stephen Stein wrote in Church History that Whitefield “propped the institution of slavery with evangelical braces.” But Whitefield found himself in a delicate position: the prodding of the black minority into worldly emancipation would undoubtedly have brought harsh reaction from would-be white Methodists. Therefore, Whitefield averted his eyes to heaven.
In Savannah, Whitefield befriended merchants with close ties to Bermuda. When, in 1748, he fell ill, they urged him to resort to the salubrious colony to repair his health—and do a little preaching. Whitefield was warmly received in Bermuda. He was, after all, an ordained Anglican minister. The governor, conscious of Methodism’s vigorous preaching, assured Whitefield that he could avail himself of any venue he wished in the colony, even the colonial courthouse. Bermuda’s Presbyterians were particularly welcoming, and it was at Mr. Paul’s Meeting House in Warwick that Whitefield first preached. White Bermudians packed the place, eager to experience the vitality of Methodism. But Whitefield also drew black Bermudians, who, unwelcome in the precinct of a white church, crowded in the vestry nearby, outside on the porch and around the walls of the church. It was a dramatic moment—white and black Bermudians gathered, in effect, under one roof to worship.
Whitefield preached a cautious line. A Methodist missionary in Bermuda, he remarked, needed “the wisdom of a serpent” and “the harmlessness of the dove.” He disabused his black listeners of any hint that he was there to lead them to earthly freedom. “I found that some of the negroes,” he wrote in his diary, “did not like my preaching, because I told them of their cursing, swearing, thieving and lying…. I said that their hearts were as black as their faces…. They expected, they said, to hear me speak against their masters.” At the same time, Whitefield shied away from castigating Bermuda’s slave owners for their neglect of their slave property; he feared that it might lead to “bad consequences.” By the time he sailed away from Bermuda, Whitefield had, however, made a toehold for Methodism in Bermuda, He had also collected £100 for his Georgia orphanage and had, he believed, left the right message with Bermuda’s slaves: they could be called to Christ as long as they did not challenge the preordained order of things.
Methodism would not touch Bermuda’s shores again for a half century. In America, a second great spiritual awakening broke over the land in the 1790s. For Methodists, it provoked sharp differences of belief. In the North, many Methodists applied their faith to the abolitionist movement, actively promoting an end to slavery. In the South, Methodism clung to Whitefield-like conservatism, often at the price of fracturing the unity of American Methodism.
News of America’s religious arousal washed across the Gulf Stream, transported by seafaring Bermudians who returned home to a land still dominated by lethargic Anglicanism. In 1798, the Reverend Enoch Matson of Christ Church Warwick and Captain Andrew Mackie of HMS Thetis wrote to Thomas Coke, the secretary of the English Methodist Conference, asking for the appointment of a “judicious and prudent” missionary to Bermuda. Coke, nicknamed “Wesley’s flea” because of his determination to push Methodism to every corner of the globe, responded by appointing John Stephenson to Bermuda.
In some ways, Stephenson was superbly equipped for the mission. His preaching was galvanic. He could sermonize in humble homes, on doorsteps and on wharves—wherever people might gather. He cast his rhetorical net over white and black Bermudians alike. To avoid the brutal daytime heat, he began delivering candlelight sermons in the cool of the evening. Stephenson was giving Bermuda its first semblance of a Methodist community.
But Stephenson soon ruffled feathers. Perhaps his first blemish in the eyes of the colonial elite was the fact that he was Irish and not, unlike Whitefield, an English-born, ordained Anglican minister. Stephenson thus excited every English phobia about Ireland’s supposed inferior civilization and Methodism’s activism. Matters were not helped by the fact that the Irish (aided by the detestable French) had just staged an unsuccessful rebellion against their English masters. Governor George Beckwith felt this suspicion but allowed Stephenson to enter the colony. Nonetheless, the colonial elite and the beleaguered Anglican Church were vigilant.
Stephenson gave them little reason to relax. He possessed a fiery, confrontational personality and was not prepared to make the kind of accommodations on slavery that Whitefield once had. While Stephenson won white converts (some of them in the established mercantile community), he also actively courted blacks. His timing was off. White Bermudians, like their Caribbean counterparts, were on edge after the bloody slave rebellion of 1791 in Santo Domingo. There were also memories of ineffectual slave sedition in Bermuda. And, by now, Methodism in England was openly aligned with the abolitionist movement. Methodism was no longer seen as a friendly renovation of Anglicanism.
Stephenson crossed the line when he preached in the home of a slave in Smith’s. A magistrate hauled him in and accused him of conspiring to topple the established order. Stephenson was inciting blacks to throw off their bonds, the magistrate alleged: “You shook hands with them, and this cannot be allowed.” Preaching to the blacks was “very dangerous…you know what has happened in the Island of St. Domingo.” Stephenson protested. He was only trying to be “polite” to the blacks. He had no political ambitions. He was simply urging the blacks “to become good Christians,” to abandon polygamy and other “evils.” His sermons, he argued, exhorted blacks to “honesty and obedience to please their masters, to be kind and courteous….that their owners might know they were better for coming to the preaching.”
Sensing cockiness in Stephenson’s contrition, the Assembly quickly passed an act in the spring of 1800 prohibiting preaching by anyone “not regularly invested in Holy Orders” by the established churches of the colony. Jail and a £50 fine awaited those who broke this law and those who abetted them. Stephenson bulled ahead. The law, he said, reminded him of the Great Council of Jerusalem’s refusal to let Peter and John preach within the walls of the sacred city. It was “unconstitutional and unchristian.” Stephenson’s white adherents began petitioning for the law’s repeal (it eventually was). But when Stephenson preached in Somerset, he was arrested, fined and jailed for six months. He seemed to relish his persecution: “Though I am bound, the gospel is not bound.” Out the window of his St. George jail cell, Stephenson delivered sermons to the faithful. But upon his release, he departed the colony, never to return.
John Stephenson probably retarded the progress of Methodism in Bermuda. His feisty personality raised the hackles of the colonial elite. Admittedly, 115 white Bermudians summoned the courage to petition against his incarceration, but this small Methodist community was regarded with deep suspicion. The Wesleyan awakening had established only a flimsy beachhead in Bermuda.
A thousand kilometres to the north there was hope. In the hardscrabble British colony of New Brunswick, the Methodists were enjoying better success. A place of lumbering, fishing, winter snow and summer mosquitoes, New Brunswick was an elemental society in which body and soul seemed to have become disconnected. The Methodists sought to awake the soul of this backwater. American Methodists had pushed into the region, but in 1800, Thomas Coke in London received a call for British missionaries. Coke sent four of his most promising. Among them was Joshua Marsden.
Marsden had travelled a bumpy road to Methodism. Born in Cheshire in 1777, he came from what is today called a dysfunctional family. In his 1814 memoir Grace Displayed, he described a youth blighted by an absent father, a pious but ineffectual mother, little education, “wicked companions,” “profane songs” and “intoxicating liquors.” Life in the merchant navy and the Royal Navy did nothing to alter this downward trajectory. A brush with death off the French coast was celebrated with wine, not prayer. Back in England, dodging the press gangs, Marsden happened upon a Methodist revival, where a minister’s preaching brought him into touch with his own wickedness. He fell to the ground in paroxysms of salvation. In 1798, Marsden became a Methodist and joined the church’s Bolton circuit as a local preacher. Then the call came from New Brunswick.
Marsden detested New Brunswick. In the winter, his ink froze. Summer brought “swampy woods” and “damp beds.” The colonial capital of Saint John was a rough-and-tumble place inhabited by rollicking timber workers and incestuous merchants. The whole place, he wrote, was “rocky, barren, and hilly; perhaps the Falkland Islands themselves are not more dismal.” Yet Marsden made converts. Among them was Colonel Samuel Bayard, a Revolutionary War hero and colonial aristocrat who had fallen into a backwoods alcoholic stupor. Marsden rescued Bayard’s “benighted mind” and for the next seven years built a reputation as the Methodist who saved souls and built chapels in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. In 1804, he became a full member of the British Methodist Church.
In April 1814, Marsden, his wife, Mary, and their large family sailed for Bermuda. The tempestuous crossing took 14 days. Arriving in St. George, Marsden knew he was entering the “lion’s den.” The captain of his vessel warned him not to go ashore; “The most scandalous and ill-founded reports” of Stephenson’s visit still lingered. “Here I was a stranger in a strange land,” he recalled later. Methodism was a “hated sound.” “Every avenue of civility” was shut to him.
From the outset, however, Marsden proved resourceful and diplomatic. He requested an interview with the governor, presenting him with a testimonial letter from Colonel Bayard in New Brunswick. The colonial attorney general, John Essen (who had in 1800 stood up for Stephenson’s rights), urged toleration. Now safely ashore with the governor’s blessing, Marsden took humble lodging with a free black family in St. George. He proved an astute observer of the colony: the blacks were “kind, polite and much addicted to dress.” He studied the islands’ history and even read Edmund Waller’s poetic rendering of the colony. Declaring his determination “to walk calmly into the lion’s den,” Marsden delivered his first sermon to a small group of eight to ten people. His theme: “Preach the gospel to every creature.”
From The Narrative of a Mission by Joshua Marsden
In the tradition of Whitefield, Marsden instinctively understood the need to balance evangelical fervour and caution. His approach would be inclusive: both whites and blacks were welcome in his fold. To the established order in the colony, he projected an assurance that he was no leveller, no fomenter of dissent. “I had to measure my steps by the line of prudence,” he wrote in his memoir. He therefore made a point of attending Anglican services, “to shew them that I was not an enemy to the Church of England.” He courted the support of what he called Bermuda’s “respectable people”—men like John Essen, the attorney general, and Vice-Admiral Sir John Warren, the flag officer of the naval dockyard. This led to invitations to preach in their homes and eventually to financial support. But most importantly, it insulated Marsden from the kind of knee-jerk white reaction that toppled Stephenson.
Then Marsden turned his ardour on black Bermudians. Preaching in hired rooms, roaming the entire length of the colony and putting in sweaty, twelve-hour days, Marsden reached out. By our modern standards, his perspective was simplistic and ethnocentric. “A black person is formed to feel rather than to reason,” he wrote, “their ideas of religion are generally simple and striking—Dat sermon do me good, Massa….”
Nonetheless, Marsden’s inclination was benevolent. He would not regard them as “beasts of burden.” Instead, he would elevate them through Christianity to civilization. Marsden therefore placed education in the vanguard of his Bermuda crusade. He would teach blacks to read, to engage the Bible with their own minds. Literacy was the guarantee that Methodism would remain in Bermuda long after he departed. Bibles, spelling books and religious tracts were brought from Halifax and distributed. The crowning glory came with the opening of Sunday schools for black children. Sunday schools, he believed, “would be the noblest work of charity.”
Literacy would not “enflame their minds with a desire of freedom”; it would, on the contrary, make them good Christians and stable citizens. To make the point, Marsden brought small groups of his black converts to white homes as a kind of tableau of piety and industry. He wrote in his memoir of his joy at seeing black children sitting on coral walls, their spelling books in hand.
Obviously, Marsden could today be accused of giving black Bermudians a false consciousness, of diverting their energy from the necessity of destroying the edifice of slavery. But Marsden was a shrewd student of his times, one who saw the evil of slavery but understood the entrenched position of its defenders. He battled slavery through gradualism. His Sunday schools were the first institutionalized education offered to black Bermudians. If slavery was about disempowerment, then literacy was a first step toward empowerment.
If Marsden worked to elevate black Bermudians’ sense of self-worth, he also recognized the need for racial harmony. With Methodist sincerity, Marsden believed that all men were created equal. As his congregation grew, he began to contrast the dingy rented rooms in which he drew his flock together with the handsome structures of the established churches. Bermuda Methodists, he concluded, must have their own chapel “where the neglected Africans might be raised to the dignity of worshipping God, without being separated from their fellow men like cattle in a stall.” The “wall of partition” must be taken down and God must be allowed to look down on Bermuda and see white and black gathered together in His name.
Marsden turned fundraiser, collecting $600 “in a few days” from “several men of property.” He then became his own contractor, obtaining a lot from the Corporation of Hamilton and then scooping up a load of lumber at bargain prices from a distressed schooner. Finally, Marsden became his own carpenter, toiling under the sun as the structure rose close to where City Hall stands today. In May 1810, Zion Chapel was ready. Marsden gleefully recorded that his “little society amounted to 136 persons, 30 of whom were whites; the rest black and coloured persons.” Methodism had put down institutional roots in Bermuda, roots that would over the next two centuries entwine themselves with the growth of emancipation, education and the extension of tolerance.
In the winter of 1812, Marsden decided to leave Bermuda. Unlike Stephenson, he took his leave with satisfaction: “…a seed was sown that shall bear fruit unto endless life: the lowering clouds of persecution gradually dispersed, or only muttered at a distance…many of the former persecutors had pews in the chapel.” In a parting gesture of affection to the colony, Marsden penned a long lyrical poem (dedicated to his mentor, Thomas Coke) that ended with a salute: “…Then hail thou lovely, verdant, sunny isle,Where summers bloom, and seasons gaily smile.”
Marsden never returned to Bermuda. He arrived in New York just in time to be trapped by the War of 1812. In 1814, he was able to return to his native England, where he preached until his death in 1837. His last sermon, delivered 11 days before his death at City Roads Chapel in London, was on the theme in Isaiah of early dedication to God.
Bermudians have not forgotten Marsden nor the footprint he left in Bermuda. A Wesleyan Methodist church on the South Shore in Smith’s bears his name. And this May, Methodists gathered one Sunday at a corner of Wesley Square in Hamilton. In good Methodist form, there was singing and sermonizing. A plaque commemorating the 200th anniversary of Zion Chapel was unveiled. Lay preacher Leo Mills suggested that the ceremony represented a “connecting of the dots” in Bermuda history: Marsden’s biracial congregation at Zion Chapel had opened a “new chapter” in the way Bermudians lived together.
Amen.
