The Dream of Ezra Stiles: Bishop Berkeley's Haunting of New England
1982; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 11; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/sec.1982.0011
ISSN1938-6133
Autores Tópico(s)American Environmental and Regional History
ResumoThe Dream of Ezra Stiles: Bishop Berkeley's Haunting of New England WILLIAM H. McGOWAN [T]he arts ... in the end matter more to future generations than anything else; for it is largely by their buildings, pictures, music, and books that we judge our ancestors. Noel Annan, "Victorian Swish" Berkeley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. On another January day twenty-one years earlier, in 1753, the bish op's body had been interred across the ocean in the chapel at Christ Church, Oxford; and nine months later Stiles himself had delivered the funeral oration at Yale College.1 Stiles had never laid eyes on Berkeley, but there is no doubt that Berkeley was dead. This must be distinctly un derstood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to re late. For it is a ghost story. Once upon a time, in 1774, on the eve of the American Revolution, a New England Puritan's dreams of glory were invaded by a British bishop — who was dead. The story of this invasion of American privacy is not widely known, yet it cannot fail to delight anyone interested in the larger story of how arts and learning crossed the Atlantic to take root in the English colonies. When I mention the English colonies I mean Rhode Island, and not only Rhode Island but Newport, and not only Newport but the church on Clarke Street, the Second Congregational Church. For when I mention the church I emphatically do not mean the Church of England. This is not to deny that the Episcopal Trinity Church stands a block or two to the south. Indeed, it is in the Anglicans' churchyard that a forty-six-year-old visiting minister named George Berkeley had buried his infant daughter 181 182 / MCGOWAN on the first Sunday in September 1731 before taking leave of Newport a few days later with his wife and American-born son. Then Dean of Derry, this noted philosopher had gone on to become Bishop of Cloyne in his na tive Ireland before dying in England at the age of sixty-seven. But in Janu ary 1774 the forty-six-year-old minister in Newport with dreams of glory was not that long-departed Episcopalian. Rather it was the Puritan Ezra Stiles, who had been only a young child in his native Connecticut during Berkeleys Rhode Island sojourn of less than three years. The Reverend Stiles's remarkable encounter with the dead bishop took place, as I say, not among the Episcopal tombstones but in his own parsonage on Clarke Street. Not long after this encounter (which I shall relate in a moment) the middle-aged Stiles, like the middle-aged Berkeley before him, was to be gin a retreat from Newport to his original home. The steps in this pilgrim age toward his ultimate vocation would take but a few years: enrolling his son Ezra at his alma mater, the Congregationalist Yale College in New Haven, Connecticut; mourning his wife's death; learning that British war ships were training their guns on his Newport church; reluctantly with drawing with his children to the relative safety of a secondary ministry in Dighton, Massachusetts, and there proclaiming the Declaration of Inde pendence; offering prayers upon the request of the field officers at an American regimental muster in nearby Berkley, Massachusetts (perhaps named after Dean Berkeley); and briefly occupying a ministerial post in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. At last Yale College would call for the re turn of the native at the age of fifty as her seventh president from 1778 un til his death in 1795 at the same age as Bishop Berkeley. But I must tell you what occurred at the parsonage across the street from Newport's Second Congregational Church. The Reverend Stiles was especially receptive that Monday night in January. A weekend illness had detained him from Sunday public worship, only the second time during his nearly nineteen years as Newport minister. But something else hap pened which was even more "singular." That experience he recorded in his diary the next day. Tho' of a volatile make, yet I am perhaps least...
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