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From the very Bottom of my heart I forgive all my Enemies, and Earnestly pray God to forgive them all. …

I die in the Possession and Communion of the Church of England. …

My last advice to you is that you, above all other Concerns, prepare yourselves (with God's Assistance) for your future, Eternal State" (The Price of Loyalty, ed. C. S. Crary, McGraw-Hill, 1973, pp. 231; 233, 234).

Anglicans did not suffer in silence as the war approached but countered the patriots' arguments with four general theses: (1) that the English monarchical system was a distinctly better form of government than the democratic republicanism proposed by the patriots; (2) that individuals had a moral, indeed a Christian, obligation to submit to lawful rulers and to obey their laws; (3) that inviolable oaths sworn by Anglican clergymen prevented any tampering with the church's liturgy in order to appease patriotic scruples; and (4) that the Bible explicitly condemned the kind of actions taken by the patriots.

The Loyalists, some of whom did share general Whig conceptions about the nature of governmental power, simply were unable to believe that the threat of "slavery" from Parliament or the established Episcopal Church could at all be compared to the dangers from a popular mob run amuck into unregulated anarchy. Samuel Seabury, who cared for an upstate New York parish during the war and who afterwards became the first bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in America, issued a series of reasoned tracts in which he sought to expose the intrinsic weakness of colonial political aspirations and to remind the colonies of the inherent strengths of the British system that the patriots were rushing to throw over. His tract Free Thoughts on the Proceedings of the Continental Congress suggested that Christian belief itself could very well become a casualty to the spirit of independence sweeping the land.

In its most extreme form, this line of argument held that the Presbyterians and Congregationalists wanted to throw off the rightful sovereignty of the King only in order to foment open rebellion and mob rule. More typically Anglican, however, were the arguments of Charles Inglis, rector of Trinity Church in New York City, who took up his pen against Tom Paine's Common Sense in order to argue that monarchy was the simplest and most stable form of government and that democracy was an untried system subject to unknown disorders.

In a tract directed against Paine, The True Interest of America Stated, Inglis also intimated the positive ideal that Anglicans advanced as a counter to the patriotic vision. More of the specifically Christian content of Anglican social theory emerged in this emphasis than in the strictly political debate. From Inglis's perspective, life in society was to reflect divinely constituted order just as individual life was. The orders of society, the traditional patterns of authority, the very inequalities of place and station, existed not to satisfy base human lusts but to reflect God's plan and purpose for Christian life in society. In a book about the Loyalists, William A. Nelson summarizes well the contrast between the Anglican and the patriot worldviews: Inglis and others like him, writes Nelson, had "seen a vision of a world where society was blessed, and man could be saved, not by seeking his own fulfillment only, but by living in grace with his fellows. The revolutionists, on the other hand, … had little interest in society as such. It was the life of the individual that was sacred to them, and their theories about society were usually mere projections of their concern for the individual" (The American Tory, Oxford, 1961, pp. 186, 187).

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July (Web-Only) 2008, Vol. 52