Scottish Pastor Teaches Liberty Tactics

America’s Founding Fathers had many traits in common with each other and with all men who do great things. They were activists for their cause and did not sit back wringing their hands or idle their time away while. They were men who had energy, principles of life and tenacity to stand and defend those principles against all men even by putting their own lives in danger.

If America is to throw off the death of socialism and communism that invaded our land long ago and was errantly allowed to flourish, we must remember the stock of people from whence most Americans have sprung. John Knox Witherspoon was one of those men. — Michael Reed

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American Founding Father of the United States, John Knox Witherspoon (1723 – 1794) was a Scottish-American Presbyterian minister and social activist in his day. Witherspoon was a staunch Protestant and nationalist and his work in the United States helped develop the national character of the country. He was born at Gifford, Scotland, a parish of Yester, at East Lothian and was the eldest child of the Rev. James Alexander Witherspoon and Anne Walker. His mother being a descendant of John Welsh of Ayr and John Knox.

Witherspoon was raised in an orthodox Calvinist Scottish family, and this formed his deeply held religious convictions that helped call him into the ministry. His father, James Witherspoon, served as a chaplain for King George II near Edinburgh, Scotland, in Yester parish. Witherspoon began ministering in the Church of Scotland (Presbyterian) at age twenty-one and soon thereafter married Elizabeth Montgomery. They would have ten children.

The Christian call into the ministry would be the driving force for his life when he became a  minister. The debate in the Church of Scotland at that time was centered on whether the Church should focus on the abstract rights of the personal conscience or for a communal focus on the enduring reality of Biblical Law. Witherspoon stood for the Biblical Law and became a leading spokesman for the evangelical Populist Party. He became prominent within the Church as an Evangelical opponent of the Moderate Party. During his two pastorates he wrote three well-known works on theology, notably the satire “Ecclesiastical Characteristics” (1753), which opposed the philosophical influence of Francis Hutcheson. He was awarded a Master of Arts, Bachelor of Divinity, and Doctorate of Divinity from the University of St Andrews, Fife.

He was so unyielding a Calvinist as to win the monikers “Scotch Granite” and “John Knox redivivus,” Witherspoon was a solemn and graceful preacher so gifted with memory that he did not take notes into the pulpit.

Despite his numerous accomplishments in ministry, Witherspoon was no mere preacher. At the urging of Benjamin Rush and Richard Stockton, whom he met in Paisley, Witherspoon finally accepted another invitation (he had earlier turned one down in 1766) to become President and head professor of the small Presbyterian College of New Jersey in Princeton. He and his family emigrated to New Jersey in 1768 when he was age 45. He served as the President of the College of New Jersey (Princeton University) as the College’s sixth president.

He used his tremendous intellect heavily revising its curriculum and building up its resources. Upon his arrival in 1768, he found many of the students ill-prepared for university studies. Witherspoon’s consultations with friends of the College followed, as well as a visit to the College of William and Mary, where his itinerant preaching would reap a contingent of southern students for the College. With only two or three tutors to help, Witherspoon himself undertook the teaching in moral philosophy, divinity, rhetoric, history, and French, believing that the Christian liberal arts could guide a student to virtue. Of his courses, none was more important than Moral Philosophy (a required course). He considered Moral Philosophy as vital for ministers, lawyers, and those holding positions in government (magistrates).

Upon his arrival at the College, Witherspoon found the school in debt, instruction had become weak, and the library collection deficient. He immediately began fund-raising locally and back home in Scotland, added three hundred of his own books to the library, began the purchase of scientific equipment and firmed up entrance requirements. These things helped the school be more on par with Harvard and Yale.

Witherspoon instituted a number of reforms, including modelling the syllabus and university structure after that used at the University of St Andrews and other Scottish universities. Witherspoon was very popular among both faculty and students, among them James Madison and Aaron Burr. He also brought ideas from the Scottish Enlightenment, including John Locke’s conceptions of the liberty and natural rights of man and the notion of representative democracy. His work would transform Princeton College, founded to train clergymen, into a school that would equip the leaders of a new Protestant national generation and himself into a major leader of the early Presbyterian Church in America.

Even as president of the College of New Jersey, Witherspoon advanced the cause of the Gospel, for he wanted to cause the knowledge of God to cover the earth as the waters cover the seas. He strengthened the College’s programs in English and rhetoric so that it might be better at educating clergy. He helped to unite the different Church of Scotland groups into the Presbyterian Church of the U.S.A., whose first General Assembly he moderated in 1785. It was this assembly that provided the church with a confession, a catechism, and laws of governance. In 1789 he was convening moderator of the First General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America.

Witherspoon’s work helped develop the national character of the United States as a political activist, as a delegate from New Jersey to the Second Continental Congress, and as a signatory to the Declaration of Independence. He was the only active clergyman and the only college president to sign the Declaration, he later signed the Articles of Confederation and supported ratification of the U.S. Constitution.

Contrary to modern distinctions of morality, Witherspoon saw morality as having two distinct components: Spiritual and Temporal. Civil government owed more to the latter than the former in Witherspoon’s Presbyterian doctrine. Thus, public morality owed more to the natural moral laws of the Enlightenment than traditional sources of Christian ethics. However, as a Christian, Witherspoon saw the impossibility of maintaining public morality or virtue in the citizenry without an effective religion. In this sense, the temporal principles of morality required a religious component which derived its authority from the spiritual.

Witherspoon knew public religion was a vital necessity in maintaining the public morals. He reasoned that, while “public morals” were derived from natural virtue, its ultimate source lay in the public religion of Christianity. He knew it was not incongruent for non-Christian societies to have virtue, which by his definition, could be found in natural law. Witherspoon, in accordance with the Scottish moral sense philosophy, taught that all human beings—Christian or otherwise—could be virtuous.

In keeping with the direction of destiny taught by the English Reformation, Scottish Reformation, and Irish Reformation colonial founders, he saw the new American national leaders, guided by their Christian religious belief and practice, natural virtues, and republican sense of government, would be the most Protestant, Christian, Free, and therefore noble nation–a light to the world. Many of his students, including James Madison, Aaron Burr, Philip Freneau, William Bradford, and Hugh Henry Brackenridge, played prominent roles in the development of the new and independent American nation.

Witherspoon sought to train students for ministry, farming, and public affairs alike. He introduced them to Locke and Berkeley, along with classical philosophers and other Enlightenment thinkers, but some of the most inspiring ideas he taught were those he himself held. He did not conceive of truth as abstract and ethereal but argued that it is inherent in the concrete reality of the natural world. For him, faith and reason never clashed but converged and, joined to a common sense philosophy, helped to guide a life of virtue.

These ideas, along with Witherspoon’s conception of a just government, inspired many men. Under his tutelage would be formed twelve future Continental Congress members, forty-nine U.S. representatives, twenty-eight senators, three Supreme Court justices, and a secretary of state. Foremost among them was James Madison, who learned of the English dissenting tradition while he attended the College. Under Witherspoon’s direction, Madison also came to hold a view of human nature that emphasized both human dignity and human depravity; this understanding would later inform The Federalist. Witherspoon warned him of the evils of a tyrannical society ruled by demagogues and introduced him to the idea of a government of checks and balances. Madison also learned the lesson of prudence and the importance of admitting mistakes. Most fundamentally, nonetheless, Madison came to think that the state–when governed not merely by the will of the majority but by the higher authorities of natural and divine law–may support the life of virtue.

In addition to educating revolutionaries, Witherspoon himself was one. He signed the Declaration of Independence which was as good as defying the king to his face, and a capital crime to incite rebellion against the monarch. He also participated in the Continental Congress to create a new government in opposition to the king of England. He saw that British policy conflicted with British liberty as expressed by the constitutional limitations of the Magna Carta, and he fought for that liberty, winning the respect of his colleagues through his own exercise of prudence.

As a native Scotsman, long wary of the power of the power British Crown, Witherspoon saw the growing centralization of government, progressive ideology of colonial authorities, and establishment of Episcopacy authority as a threat to the Liberties of the colonies. Of particular interest to Witherspoon was the crown’s growing interference in the local and colonial affairs which previously had been the perogatives and rights of the American authorities. When the crown began to give additional authority to its appointed Episcopacy over Church affairs, British authorities hit a nerve in the Presbyterian Scot, who saw such events in the same lense as his Scottish Covenanters. Soon, Witherspoon came to support the Revolution, joining the Committee of Correspondence and Safety in early 1774.

On May 17, 1776, the same day the Continental Congress declared a National Day of Fasting, Humiliation and Prayer, Reverend John Witherspoon delivered a sermon at Princeton University entitled “The Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Men.” In it, he said,

“While we give praise to God, the Supreme Disposer of all events, for His interposition on our behalf, let us guard against the dangerous error of trusting in, or boasting of, an arm of flesh.

“If your cause is just, if your principles are pure, and if your conduct is prudent, you need not fear the multitude of opposing hosts. What follows from this? That he is the best friend to American liberty, who is most sincere and active in promoting true and undefiled religion, and who sets himself with the greatest firmness to bear down profanity and immorality of every kind. Whoever is an avowed enemy of God, I scruple not to call him an enemy of his country. It is in the man of piety and inward principle, that we may expect to find the uncorrupted patriot, the useful citizen, and the invincible soldier.

“God grant that in America true religion and civil liberty may be inseparable and that the unjust attempts to destroy the one, may in the issue tend to the support and establishment of both.”

A man of many talents and gifts, Witherspoon made his days rich as a statesman, professor, and minister. He devoted himself to his wife, children, and farming. Witherspoon’s purpose during his seventy-one years had been to organize and unite the Presbyterian church. During that time he served as a member of the convention that ratified the Constitution. As he proclaimed to a congregation in New Jersey in 1776, “I beseech you to make a wise improvement of the present threatening aspect of public affairs and to remember that your duty to God, to your country, to your families, and to yourselves, is the same.” Witherspoon embodied his words by fulfilling the many duties of his different callings while striving for a unified and ordered life.

 

Michael Reed is Editor of The Standard. Material for this article was gathered from a variety of sources and is not solely the work of the editor.