The development of the Young People's movement

Front matter

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE YOUNG PEOPLE'S MOVEMENT

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND LITERATURE IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

(the graduate divinity school: religious education)

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Period of Preparation, to 1844: The Forces in Operation 1

The development of democracy. The invention of steam-driven machinery. Resulting moral, social, and religious conditions, in America; in England; in Germany. The religious revival.

Chapter I The Period Of Preparation, To 1844: The Forces In

OPERATION

The period covering the last half of the eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth century was emphatically one of transition. It witnessed the breaking up of old habits of living, working, and thinking by new ideas and new ways of life and labor.

In this change three factors are of especial importance: the first, political — the development of democracy; the second, industrial— the invention of steam-driven machinery; and the third, moral and religious — the great revival of the eighteenth century.

The first is marked by three great revolutions: the English of 1688, finding its apologist and philosopher in John Locke; the French of 1789, being but the application of Rousseau's Social Contract, and this in turn being largely a popularization of Locke; and the American of 1776, which in the opening sentences of its Declaration speaks for them all.

In addition to this political aspect, the democratic spirit led a revolt against absolutism everywhere, religion and intellect not excluded. The final and authoritative doctrines of the church were fiercely assailed by Voltaire and his friends, not least because they were final and authoritative, and those who held them were denounced as ignorant, superstitious, or hypocritical. Freedom of thought was not only demanded but asserted. In England and Germany similar assaults were made, but not so effectively. The doctrinal foundation of the church having been swept away, an age that identified religion with the church was left without religion. This was less keenly felt because of the prevailing immorality of many of the priesthood in France, and because of the character of the drinking, fighting, swearing clergymen of the Church of England. The loss of a religion which had no power over its exponents could scarcely be regarded as serious. The church, however, was felt to be a necessity to government, and outward respect was paid to its worship on ceremonial occasions.

Voltaire and his immediate circle went only part of the way in this democratic movement. They had little knowledge of, or interest in, the masses of the population. It remained for Rousseau to become the spokesman of the dumb and distressed multitude. The French Revolution resulted. The ideas of Voltaire, Rousseau, and company spread to Germany and America, wheat and chaff together, and for the time democracy and atheism were inseparable.

The invention of steam-driven machinery led directly to the rise of the factory system with its beneficent and maleficent effects. The old system of home manufacture, in which personal skill was so large a factor, in which the master and his family were on friendliest terms with journeyman and apprentice, in which the children of the household early made their contribution of labor under the parental eye, and so learned the family trade, was swept away. In its place came largely increased production and the crowding of people about the factories. A second result of the invention of steam-driven machinery was the development of transportation by land and sea. This interlocked with the factory system, bringing food and raw materials to the factories and distributing the finished product. These two elements in large measure explain the growth of the city. The rapid development of the city is shown by the fact that the number of people in cities in the United States, compared with the total population, was 3 . 4 per cent in 1790; 4. 93 per cent in 18 10; 6.72 per cent in 1830; 12.5 per cent in 1850; and 33 . 1 per cent in 1900. In this same period in the United States the number of cities of 8,000 population and upward had grown from 6 in 1790 to 11 in 1810, 26 in 1830, 85 in 1850, and 545 in 1900.

The new conditions of labor entailed many serious consequences. The factories and houses were ill-constructed and insanitary sheds ; the work was exhausting and the hours long; woman and child labor was exploited almost beyond belief; large numbers of young men and women were left virtually without moral oversight. This enables us to understand the violent reaction of the idle hours, with their drinking, fighting, gambling, licentiousness, and related evils.

THE PERIOD OF PREPARATION

In the American colonies, there was a steady decline of both morals and religion after the first generation. Lechford in Plain Dealing, in 1641, says that not more than one-quarter of the population were members of the church. Thomas Prince declares: "A little after 1660, there began to appear a Decay : And this increased in 1670, when it grew very visible and threatening and was generally complained of and bewailed bitterly by the Pious among them: And yet more to 1680 when but few of the first generation remained." In 1678 Increase Mather stated that "many are profane, drunkards, lascivious, scoffers at the power of Godliness."1

The chief sins were impurity and intemperance. In the church at Andover the principal causes of discipline for a century and a quarter were " fornication and drunkenness."2 One church of two hundred members included sixty-six who had confessed to improper sexual relations.3 While this was probably a larger number than was usual, one finds a similar state of affairs wherever records exist. The custom of bundling, sanctioned by the community, was largely responsible for this condition.4

Virtually everyone drank intoxicating liquors upon occasion. Theodore Parker declares :

It is recorded in the probate office that in 1678 at the funeral of Mrs. Mary Norton, widow of one of the ministers of the First Church in Boston, fifty-one gallons and a half of the best Malaga wine were consumed by the mourners. In 1685, at the funeral of the Rev. Thomas Cobbett, minister of Ipswich, there were consumed one barrel of wine and two barrels of cider. .... Towns provided intoxicating drinks at the funerals of their paupers.5

In 1775, an old minister in a Fast Day sermon said: "Vast numbers, young and old, male and female, are given to intemperance, so that it is a common thing to see drunken women as well as drunken men."6 In the archives of the First Baptist Church of Boston is a bill for liquors drunk at the ordination of Rev. Joseph McKean, at Beverley, Massachusetts, in 1785. It includes 30

1 Dakin, unpublished thesis for the degree of D.B., University of Chicago.

3 Dorchester, Christianity in the United States, p. 218.

3Holtz, unpublished paper on "Religious Education in New England."

* Howard, Matrimonial Institutions.

s Parker, Speeches and Addresses, pp. 341 ff.

6 Dorchester, op. cit., pp. 212 f.

bowls of punch before meeting, 10 bottles of wine, 44 bowls of punch at dinner, 18 bottles of wine, 8 bottles of brandy, cherry rum, and concludes, "6 people drank tea."1

Lyman Beecher describes an ordination he attended in 18 10: "At this ordination the preparation for our creature comforts — besides food, was a broad sideboard covered with decanters and bottles and sugar and pitchers of water. There we found all the kinds of liquor then in vogue. The drinking was apparently universal. This preparation was made by the society as a matter of course."2 Indeed, liquor was used on all occasions, at births, marriages, and deaths, at the raising of a barn, house, or church, at the harvesting of hay, at communion, at ordinations and other religious gatherings, and in most homes regularly.

Gambling in all forms was common. Most astonishing to us, perhaps, is the warm approval of the lottery by people at large. After the fire of 1 76 1 , Faneuil Hall was rebuilt by a lottery. Funds for Harvard, Yale, and other college buildings were so raised. The United States Congress passed at least seventy acts authorizing lotteries before 1820. "In the U.S., .... colleges have been founded, churches built or repaired, roads made, bridges built, ferries improved and hospitals erected by the aid of lotteries."

A writer speaking of the period from 1815 to 1851 says of the West:

In the west, while government and order were being established, gambling, drunkenness, licentiousness, robbery and sometimes murder, threatened to overturn the new States before they could be formed. The steamboats which plied the Great Lakes, the Mississippi river and the Ohio, were the haunts of gamblers and thieves, who were as ruthless as the highwaymen in the days of Robin Hood. Slavery in the South, Indian warfare and the hardly less demoralizing Indian trading in the North, and with it all the isolation of pioneer life, stifled the religious aspiration of the people.3

This decay of religion was a source of great distress to the remnant of religious folk. In 1724 Cotton Mather put forth a pamphlet entitled Proposals for the Revival of Dying Religion. The next year he presented to the Massachusetts legislature, in the

1 Wood, History of First Baptist Church of Boston.

2 Quoted in Blair, The Temperance Movement, p. 475.

3 Doggett, History of the Young Men's Christian Association, I, 97.

THE PERIOD OF PREPARATION name of the general commission of ministers, a petition for a synod to be called to remedy the great and visible decline of piety. The Revolutionary War was brutalizing in itself, and in addition the American gratitude toward and admiration for the French led them to adopt the French infidelity so rife at the time. One writer in 1836 says : "I knew a party formed more than fifty years ago for the avowed purpose of destroying Christianity and religious government. All these men died violent deaths." Lyman Beecher declares :

That was the day of the infidelity of the Tom Paine school. Boys that

dressed flax in the barn read Tom Paine and believed him Most of the

class before me [at Yale] were infidels, and called each other Voltaire, Rousseau, D'Alembert, etc. They thought the faculty were afraid of free discussion.1

In a striking article, Dr. C. F. Dole sums up the whole situation at the close of the century. There were only four professing Christians among the students at Yale, church attendance was small universally, many churches had no settled ministers, the preaching was lifeless and mechanical, drunkenness was common even among ministers and deacons, and the general level of morals was low.2

Nor was it otherwise in the South. Bishop Meade says:

As late as 1 810, infidelity was rife in the State, and the College of William and Mary was regarded as the hotbed of French politics and religion. I can truly say that then and for some years after, in every educated young man in Virginia whom I met I expected to find a skeptic, if not an avowed unbeliever. .... The clergy for the most part were a laughing stock, or objects of disgust.3

In England the conditions were even worse. Hours of labor were excessively long. George Hitchcock, speaking in 1853, described the drapery trade of 1836:

Young men in the larger houses were herded together, ten to fifteen in a room at night. They were literally driven from the shops to their beds and from their beds to the shop by a person called a shop- walker. There was no sitting-room, no social comfort, no library; they remained until they were taken ill, then they were discharged at a moment's notice; away they went, many of them to the workhouse and numbers of them used to die prematurely.4

1 Lyman Beecher, Autobiography, I, 43.

2 New England Magazine, N.S., XII, 535 ff.

3 Meade, Old Families and Churches in Virginia, I, 29, 52. 4Doggett, op. ciL, I, 79.

Drinking, gambling, vulgarity, and vice were common among these men.

The industrial revolution was well under way by the end of the century. The factories had drawn together by hundreds the families dispossessed by the sheep-farmers. Their houses were mere sheds, built without reference to health, comfort, or decency. Both sexes were frequently herded together promiscuously, so that " factory girl" was a term of abuse. The labor of women was exploited, as regards hours, intensity, and insanitary conditions of work, almost beyond belief. The labor of the children of workingmen was in demand, and children from poorhouses were farmed out by the manufacturers and then worked to death. The first English Factory Act, 1802, limited in its application to children, provided that the latter should not work more than twelve hours a day, and that these hours must be between six o'clock in the morning and nine o'clock in the evening. In this Act no limit was fixed as to the age below which children must not work; such legislation would not have passed. The second Factory Act, in 18 19, set an age limit of nine years, with a twelve-hour day exclusive of time for meals, for children under sixteen. Under such conditions the great mass of the people were ignorant, degraded, unreligious.

What was true of the masses was true also of the classes. The long-continued wars were most disastrous to English morals and religion. Infidelity was rife. Gambling was found everywhere. Up to 1830 drunkenness was widespread and increasing. A Doctor of Divinity at Oxford was discovered going home intoxicated one night, walking round and round the rotunda of the Radcliffe Library and wondering why he did not reach his destination.1

In 1803 Bishop Burgess wrote of the. Welsh see of St. David: "'The church and ecclesiastical buildings are in a ruinous condition. Many of the clergy are incompetently educated and disgrace their profession by inebriety and other degrading vices.' .... Clergymen of ten occupied several livings and neglected them all."2 The interest of the church in the people being at so low an

1 Watson, Fifty Years of the Sunday School, chap. ii. aDoggett, op. cit., I, 17.

THE PERIOD OF PREPARATION ebb, it is not surprising that the interest of the people in the church was in a corresponding state.

In Germany somewhat the same condition existed. The old system, under which the apprentice lived in the family of the employer, went to church with him on Sunday, and was under his constant supervision, broke down between 1800 and 1820. The young workingmen drifted hither and yon. The cheap lodging house, unspeakable in its accommodations and in its moral character, sprang into being. Beer-gardens multiplied. The democracy and atheism of the French philosophers were seized upon with avidity. The church, moreover, was regarded as the bulwark of things as they were. Two prevailing sentiments characterized the young German workingman: unbelief in God, and indifference or hostility to the church. As late as 1848, Pastor Durselen could say: " We hear how hundreds of societies of young men have been formed from which comes forth the challenge, ' We hate Christianity. God must be discarded. We will never rest until every comrade has personally renounced God.'"

In addition, however, to the political and industrial forces, with their immediate effects as described, a constructive force of increasing power was also at work, namely, the great revivals of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The great awakening in America began under Jonathan Edwards' ministry at Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1734, and spread rapidly over the whole country. It was greatly reinforced by the preaching of Whitefield, and despite the opposition to revivals on the part of the faculties of Yale and Harvard, and of many of the leading Congregational clergymen of Massachusetts, it affected profoundly the religious life of the colonies, producing the conviction that the immediate conversion of sinners actually does take place, and that every person ought to have an inner assurance of salvation.

The Revolution with its paralyzing effect upon religious life set back this movement for a time, but toward the close of the century the tide began to rise again. In 1795 Dr. D wight came to Yale, and for six months preached on the Bible as the Word of God. These sermons constituted a powerful offset to the infidelity of the time.

It was the day of the concert of prayer for the advance of religion. In 1746, at the request of a group of Scottish ministers that the Christians of America unite with them in prayer for the spread of the gospel, Jonathan Edwards wrote a pamphlet entitled A Humble Attempt to Promote Agreement and Visible Union of God's People in Extraordinary Prayer for the Revival of Religion and the Advancement of Christ's Kingdom on Earth. This work was widely read in England, and as a result, in 1784, the " monthly concert of prayer" was instituted by the Baptist ministers of Northamptonshire. It speedily crossed the Atlantic, and covenants were entered into to spend certain periods each week in prayer and a certain day each month in fasting and prayer. In 1798, the New York Missionary Society adopted the concert of prayer, and the members met on the second Wednesday of each month in the respective churches in turn. Out of this concert of prayer, which became nearly universal, grew the weekly prayer-meeting of the churches, and also the missionary, Sunday school, and other phases of church concert so common until recently. It should be added that the Methodists had had their class-meeting since 1743,1 but took up the concert of prayer in addition. This increasing religious enthusiasm soon superseded conditions represented by such statements as these: " Meetings for prayer among the brethren of the Church [Braintree, Massachusetts] had been unknown during the life of its members." "Rev. John Fiske, of New Braintree, Mass., .... stated that he had been eleven years pastor of the Church before he heard the first word of prayer from any of his members."

In 1799, two brothers named McGee, one a Methodist, the other a Presbyterian, started on a preaching tour through Tennessee and Kentucky. A remarkable revival with extraordinary features resulted. People came long distances to attend these meetings in the open air, and thus the camp-meeting was born.2 Itinerant Methodist preachers followed up this revival by organizing classes for weekly meetings under the leaders, and visiting them every few weeks. As a result, the Methodists, who had numbered 14,000 in 1773, numbered 40,000 in 1800, and 196,000 in 181 2.

1 Epworth Herald, September 7, 1890, p. 1.

2 Methodist Magazine, 182 1, pp. 189 ff.

THE PERIOD OF PREPARATION

The work of Finney must also be mentioned. He was licensed to preach in 1822, and preached until i860. Great revivals everywhere resulted from his work. His books carried his message to thousands who never saw him. In particular, his Lectures on Revivals (1835) and Lectures to Professing Christians (1836), profoundly influenced George Williams in England, and determined the character of the Y.M.C.A. from the start.

The colleges were not insulated from the great revival movement. Revivals occurred at Yale in 1802, 1808, 1812, 1823, 1827, 183 1, 1835. Dartmouth, Amherst, Williams, and others were similarly affected.

In England the Wesleyan revival took place in the eighteenth century. At Oxford in 1829, four young men, including Charles and John Wesley, joined in a society for the promotion of earnest religious life. The evangelist George Whitefield, with others, joined the group a little later. They met on three or four evenings a week for the study of the Greek Testament and certain ancient classics. Through prayer and religious conversation they sought to reach the ideal of Christian experience. They received the communion weekly and fasted twice each week. They practiced rigid economy and devoted generous portions of their time, ability, and money to the care of the poor, the sick, and the imprisoned. Because of their methodical way of living they were called " Methodists." From this little group arose the Wesleyan revival which shook England to its foundations. One of the most significant features of the movement was the extended use of laymen in religious work, arising from necessity, and proving a mighty force in the development and consolidation of Methodism. The lay preacher, the class-leader, the Sunday-school teacher, were the forerunners of the modern "personal workers." From the Wesleyan revival as the chief cause came the zealously evangelistic Methodist churches of various names; a new spirit of evangelism in the free churches ; a new moral earnestness and religious power in the Church of England; a flood tide of philanthropic zeal; and, finally, the foreign missionary enterprise.

Germany, also, while experiencing no widespread emotional outburst of religious fervor, saw from the middle of the seventeenth

IO THE YOUNG PEOPLE'S MOVEMENT

century, a turning away from theological disputation, on the part of many evangelicals, to works of mercy and help and to the practice of personal piety. The Pietists, Francke and Spener, founded their orphan institution at Halle in 1695. We note also the beginning of young men's clubs for purely religious purposes, and the rise of the deaconess movement, to both of which we shall return.

In the next chapter we shall see how these three forces began to work out in more or less organized ways. The industrial factor supplied the constituency, inasmuch as it was chiefly responsible for the development of the city. There also resulted conditions which made organization imperative. The democratic element with its watchword, " Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," furnished part of the stimulus which led to the " discovery" of young men, later to the " disco very" of young women, and still later to their harmonious co-operation on equal terms. The religious and moral force, working through its emphasis on the infinite worth of every individual, powerfully reinforced all movements for human betterment, and created enterprises of its own.

Chapter II The Period Of Preparation: Early Organizations

i. The conditions of life and labor brought into existence or intensified by the industrial revolution virtually compelled the organization of workingmen for their own protection. This took form first in the " friendly societies," which were essentially sickand burial-insurance clubs with social features. The trade union is to be distinguished from these by its explicit attempt to improve conditions of living and working. In America it was preceded not only by the friendly society with members from several occupations or social classes, but also by the association of groups of men from a single occupation for political, social, or other purposes, as for instance the Caulker's Club of Boston, formed slightly earlier than 1800, and by unorganized strikes, as when Boston seamen struck in 1802. Soon, however, we find two sorts of labor unions developing. One is the strict trade union, with membership limited to the workers in one trade. The first of these appears to have been the New York Society of Journeymen Shipwrights, incorporated in 1803, but organized somewhat earlier. By 1840, such organizations existed in the principal industrial centers " among masons, marble-cutters, shoe-makers, sadlers, hatters, tailors, printers bricklayers, roofers, painters, carpenters, and shipworkers.'' The second type of labor union, arising in less densely populated districts, embraced members of several trades, or even had an open membership. The New England Association of Farmers, Mechanics and Workingmen, organized in Boston in 1832, is an instance. But none of these early unions limited themselves strictly to improving the conditions of labor. The New England Workingmen's Association, formed in 1845, took up the abolition of slavery, woman's rights, land nationalization, and the withholding of supplies from the American army in Mexico.

In England, the development of the laissez faire doctrine led to the passage of several acts against combinations either of capital or labor. These laws were enforced against labor only, and so severely as to permit only the friendly societies to live. In 1824, however, all the Combination Acts were repealed. Immediately, trade unions sprang into existence with very large membership, and a series of strikes, for the most part as unsuccessful as they were costly, took place. Reactionary legislation was passed in the following year, but workingmen were left free to combine for better wages, hours, and conditions of labor. As a result, local unions were gradually formed nearly everywhere and many federations of unions organized.

While one finds in the history of the trade union an occasional statement of the " youth" of certain members, and their inferred " unreliability, " mention of a young men's union as such is rare. The following statement, therefore, possesses unusual interest: "Such is the rage for union societies that the sea apprentices in Dunderland have actually had regular meetings every day last week, on the moor, and have resolved not to go on board their ships unless the owners will allow them tea and sugar."1 We see from this that the organization of the elders was teaching the apprentices to organize. Furthermore, the union was a school of information, debate, organization, and fraternity, whose advantages the abler young people would not be slow to appreciate.

2. If, however, the spontaneous organization of a young men's union is rare, the increasing needs of the young people of the working classes led to the formation of mechanics' institutions and mutual improvement societies, which, while predominantly educational, possessed large social values as well. These were composed almost entirely of young men and offered classes in practical subjects, lectures, papers by the members, circulating libraries, and reading-rooms. They formed, indeed, a sort of club for ambitious young workingmen. While they never became as common in America as in England, they possessed essentially the same character, and constitute an important link between the trade union, which was essentially a forced organization, and the voluntary union of young people in philanthropic and church societies.

The earliest of these was probably the Society for the Reformation of Manners, started in 1690 with the encouragement of De Foe,

1 Sheffield Iris, July 12, 1825; quoted by Webb, History of Trade Unionism, p. 99.

Dr. Kidder, and others. We find no other similar organization until 1787, when the factory system had massed crowds of people together, and ignorance and vice were becoming alarmingly common. In this year, a reform society was organized at Paisley. Between 1789 and 1796 four societies were started at Birmingham, of which the first artisans' library was one. In 1793, Dr. John Anderson gave a series of popular scientific lectures to tradesmen and mechanics in Glasgow, and out of this grew the whole institute movement, as regards its aspect of technical training. Sadler estimates that in 1850 there were 610 literary and mechanics' institutions in the United Kingdom, with a membership of 102,000, and the Earl of Carlisle in 1846 stated that 1 in 54 of the population of Yorkshire belonged to such an institution. The Society of Useful Knowledge, organized in 1825 for the purpose of providing cheap and good books for popular reading, had chiefly in view the needs of these societies.

Partly because the fees were too high, partly because the classes assumed more preparatory work than many students possessed, the high educational character of the mechanics' institutes declined. In 1830, David Naismith, a* man close to the situation, declared: "In these days when so many of our so-called Mechanics' Institutes are merely cheap reading clubs for the middle classes, and lectures are delivered for the most part merely for a pleasant evening's amusement, it seems to me that we have greatly departed from the original design with which the Mechanics' Institutions were founded."1 Naismith had organized in Glasgow in 1824 the first of a series of "Young Men's Societies for Religious Improvement." He came to America in 1830, and formed some thirty of these societies, with a general supervisory board. In 1839, he resolved to give them up and predicted their speedy termination. In some cases, these Societies became Young Men's Christian Associations. Montreal, Canada, was a notable instance, for here was organized the first Y.M.C.A. in America. The weakness of these earlier societies consisted in their defective organization, their lack of spontaneous development, their failure to emphasize

Quoted by Magnus in Roberts (ed.), Industrial Education in the Nineteenth Century, p. 140.

the need of having young men working for young men, and, from the standpoint of church people, the absence of a predominantly religious character.

3. The adult or senior classes of the Sunday school sought to assist the same class of people, the difference being that in this case the approach was from the side of the church, and that religion and morality were the chief aims. The modern Sunday school originated in the desire to teach the children of the poor to read, and sometimes to write and do arithmetic, on the only day at their disposal. It was intended at first only for children from six or seven to fourteen years of age, and for many years it was the custom to dismiss children at the age of fourteen, with a Bible and good advice publicly bestowed. It began to be felt, however, that the failure to minister to young people was an instance of conspicuous waste. In some cases, ministers conducted Sunday Bible classes for persons over fourteen, but since Sunday was the minister's busy day and the only day of leisure for young people, such classes were relatively rare.

The senior-class or adult-school movement started in 1798 in Nottingham, where William Singleton, assisted by Samuel Fox, gathered a group of working women on Sunday mornings to instruct them in the " three R's." A school for men was begun soon after. Rev. Thomas Charles opened a Sunday school for adults at Bala, Wales, in 181 1. In 1814, William Prust of Bristol wrote to his friend, Dr. Divie Bethune of New York, describing these schools. Dr. Bethune in the next year visited Philadelphia, where the idea took root. In 18 16, there were eight adult schools, and in 18 17 the Philadelphia Sunday and Adult School Union was organized, " to promote among other things, the establishment of these schools in the city and vicinity." As a result they spread rapidly. Two important books, Todd, The Sabbath School Teacher (1837), and Packard, The Teacher Taught (1839), strongly advocated adult schools. The former assumed that young people must be dismissed from the ordinary school to these senior schools, and recommended classes for males and for females under the care of the pastor. Interestingly enough, he based his demand for senior classes, psychologically, upon the slow maturing of the mind. The latter speaks of adult schools for those who need to learn to read, and for domestics, apprentices, etc. "The plan of forming a Bible Class in every school district seems to have many .... advantages." Further, "our adult classes usually .... choose their own teacher."