Bishop William White (1747-1836)
The other
prominent member of the Pennsylvania Prison Society (PPS) whose
thought influenced the development of the penitentiary prison discipline
was
William
White. White was an Episcopalian Bishop of
Pennsylvania, a man active in many
social reform societies, and president of PPS until his death.
An often overlooked but seemingly telltale and significant "small
matter" concerning White speaks volumes about how religious
activists like him valued the work they did to reform society.
When signing the Society's various Memorials he
did so as William White, without using
his religious title, Bishop.
What to make of this intentional act?
It seemed to have two meanings. 1) White was cautious about directly involving
his religious with his
political
status. 2) He felt comfortable that when he acted as a citizen that
he was also acting as a Christian. It must be that his peers understood
the meaning of this small gesture. It indicates an ease of moving between
his identity as a Christian and as a democratic social reformer.
White was, indeed, opposed to making religion
serve politics. While a chaplain in the Patriot's cause,
he stated that, "Although possessed
of those sentiment, I never beat the ecclesiastical drum." His
biographer stated it this way: “he never would condescend to
become an active political partisan; much less to make religious
profession an instrument of policy. He was decidedly opposed to the
combination
of religion with politics, and desired that the members of the Episcopal
church should harmoniously unite without regard to their differences
in political opinions; and he used his influence among them to effect
that desirable object.”
This view of White's throws some light upon what he
thought counted as a "political" association. It must be
that he saw the many voluntary societies to which
he belonged as
not of a political nature.
Whatever were the nature of his own perceptions, it is clear that
he did not mix his religious language with his political expressions.
Though White’s early 19th century biographer,
Bird Wilson, does not mention White's theological writings, he was
quite prolific
on this score. Sydney Temple sought to do justice to White as a theologian
in his work, The Common Sense Theology of Bishop William White (1946).
Here, Temple shows how White carried on the tradition of Scottish
Common Sense philosophy, and how he developed with and within Philadelphia
Liberalism.
White picked up his theology from the education offered
at the College of Philadelphia, whose first doctorate of divinity
he received. This
College was "the first institution of its kind in the country
in which daily chapel was not required and in which no revealed religion was taught." The "religion" taught there was that influenced
by Franklin, a religion of "utility and benevolence proven by
history with religion as a sort of after thought." It was an education
geared to train citizens "for the important and practical vocation
of citizenship." As influenced by Rev. William Smith, “the
natural religion of the Deists may truly be said to have been the
inspiration for the school.”
White’s reading lists for three years at the
College is replete with Locke, Bacon, Newton, Hutcheson, Watt, Hooker
and Puffendorf,
among others. This was a groundwork for his adoption of the common
sense philosophy and of a development of a full common sense theological
system. For, as Temple shows, White dealt with all the traditional
theological problems, ranging from metaphysics to ecclesiology.
He remained a traditional thinker in his content, as well as in his
concerns,
as noted in his persistent defense of the necessity of
Divine Revelation.
He held that "by reasoning power alone men
do not come upon religious
truths either individually or as organized societies. Further, "Evidence
for revelation is needed and the task of reason is an instrumental
one." Thus, White moves out against the thought of Deists, atheists
and even the more radical rationalism. White rejects the Quaker
belief in immediate revelation. For him the Quakers were as amiss
in this belief as were
the Calvinists who also held to a direct, personal assurance of salvation
from God. Why did White differ from these Quakers and Calvinists?
White’s Notion of “Will”
The
key to White thought system is his notion of will. For him not only
is the mind a tabula rasa but so is the will. White
holds this
belief since he sees in Scripture that "God made men upright,
but they have sought out many inventions." This meant to him that
Original Sin was not an act of man's willing against God, that is,
an act of immorality. Rather, the Fall is a loss of immortality
not morality. The fact of the Fall is this loss of mortality, such a loss
is not the result of the Fall. Thus, White rejects those who hold a
belief in the total depravity of Man. As Temple interprets White, he
held that "Man, as born in Adam, has a mere animal life in that
he inherits this diseased human nature, but does not have a natural
hatred of God." Consequently, the will is a faculty
to be educated,
to be drawn towards the Good and away from Evil. This will is not
innately perverted from God.
When he expounded upon the immediate effects of Original
Sin, White moved towards the importance of educating the will by,
first, noting
that the mortality of the body made it liable "to all the violence
and to all the other injuries on the body which may be cause of it." Second,
Original sin caused earthly sterility, therefore, man labors. Third, "Equally
unknown were these weaknesses, those wants which are necessary accompaniments
of the change wrought on our bodies, and which open avenues to temptation
in a great variety of forms. These are causes sufficient to account
for all the wickedness in the world." Thus, the faculties
affected by Original Sin, namely, Will, Understanding, Senses, were
not the
origins of wickedness, but became susceptible of temptation and thus
could become evil. "Under this circumstance those faculties
may be put into action either on the one hand by religious and moral
culture,
or on the other by temptation combining with the weaknesses and the
wants of human nature."
For White, then, all the faculties of mankind are dormant. They must
be aroused. And they are only properly aroused by the truths of Divine
Revelation. These divine truths are, further, understood by exercising
the concerned human faculties, that is, by confronting them with the
truths of the Scripture, and moving them into practical application
of those truths, As he saw it, White argued,
If to a mind in the beginning of the exercise of intelligence
there
should be prudently and seasonably stated the excellency and the
advantages
of justice, of truth, and of other virtues, with the baseness and the
bad consequences of their contraries, it would be inconsistent with
our observation of human nature to deny that the
preference would be
correctly bestowed; whatever deviation might
afterwards occur owing
to the seduction of the world and the
rule of passion over the judgment.
This theological approach would seem to make White
a kin of his fellow penal reformer, Benjamin Rush, insofar
as each placed heavy emphasis on the influence of external
agents or stimuli upon the development of the moral faculties. White’s
theology, like Rush’s thought, is, as Temple suggests, "not
a collection of doctrine but a set of hypotheses based on religious
fact." For both, religious experience was realized in an
embrace of the everyday world, and in an effort to control the environmental
influences through educative methods.
Unlike Rush, White did not write an essay on any of
the many aspects of crime and punishment. Among his writings there
is not a title dealing
with the issues the Prison Society considered during his forty seven
years as President. This is, from one perspective, a remarkable comment
upon White's faithfulness in keeping his theology and politics separate,
though it is an unhappy finding for any researcher.
White’s theology lacks those direct connections
between theological reflection and public punishment which the sermonic
literature of the
New England ministers read in Charles Evans collection bore.
However, in the latter at least it was known that they preached at
executions
and that they were involved, as ministers, in tending to the needs
of the jailed and the condemned. It is less certain in what light
White saw himself as he presided over the Prison Society meetings
and went
with the Acting Committee of that Society to visit the jails. Possibly,
the seemingly trifling detail of his dropping the title, "Bishop," when
signing the Memorials bears a great weight of interpretation. It
appears that the Bishop was a citizen when he engaged in penal reform,
but
that he hoped that the social institution of the penitentiary would
be one stimuli which would draw the prisoner’s mind and will towards religious truths.
