"The true Center of repose": the Yale Apostasy and Anglicanism in colonial New England
13th September was Yale Apostasy Day . On that day in 1722 - the day after commencement at Yale - that seven Congregationalist ministers shocked Puritan New England by publicly declaring they doubted the validity of their presbyterian ordination and would seek episcopal orders in the Church of England. Three of the seven - Timothy Cutler, who had been rector of Yale, Samuel Johnson, and James Wetmore - received episcopal orders in England and returned to minister in the American colonies, Cutler and Johnson in New England, Wetmore in New York. While Puritan New England may have been considered unlikely ground in which the Church of Laud might take root, the decades following the Yale Apostasy did see this happen. (And it was a distinctly Laudian, High Church vision which animated the 'Yale Apostates' and their successors.) As Jeremy Gregory has said, "Up until the early 1760s [when the political context became fraught], the progress of the Churc...