In making his case for such rigorous standards, first succinctly in the 1764 sermon and then at length in his later tracts, Green fell back on his core Puritan beliefs and the arguments of Jonathan Edwards and Isaac Watts. The Puritans’ covenant of grace defined his understanding of what constituted a “proper profession” by seekers. The covenant represented “a command and a promise” between man and God, Green told his congregants. On man’s part, he is to “acknowledge his sin, the evil he has done, the miserable condition he has brot himself into.” For those who repent, God will then grant “eternal happiness” and “the enjoyment of God himself.” By embracing the covenant of grace, Green stressed, a seeker shows that “we prefer God and Christ to everything else; that we love his will, and take his word for our rule; that we hate sin, and watch against it. Now, persons that can say this, have true religion.”30
In this way, covenantal theory underlay Green’s view of the sacraments and a pure church. It was impossible for God to “enter into covenant with unregenerate men,” he said. Both sides, he reiterated, made promises to each other. Breaking that promise rendered a seeker unfit—“dangerous” even—to partake in the sacraments. God “has appointed his faithful servants to profess their regard to him, & exhibit the evidence of their compliance with his holy Covenant . . . and to seal it in certain Sacraments: And that God on his part has appointed certain sacraments . . . to be signs themselves of the good that shall flow of them that comply with his covenant.” He warned that he could not permit someone to partake of one sacrament (baptism) but not the other (communion): “Such a person cannot act right in one Sacrament, while he is under so great Errors as to the other.” Thus Green concluded that the same demanding standards for baptism should be applied to communion—only the regenerate can come to the Lord’s Table.31
In making these arguments, Green rejected the halfway covenant and everything he once liked about Stoddard’s inclusiveness. Admitting the unregenerate, he explained, “gradually weakens & destroys chh. discipline.” It gives sway to the uncommitted and undermines the purity of the devout. Because of the dangers of admitting the unsaved, it was important for the church to maintain some separation from the world. “The door of the church is not to be opened to take in all the world,” he told his Hanover congregation. “The church and the world are distinct things according to scripture.” If the church let in sinners, it would “flatter” them and “let them build up self-righteousness.” It would also “tend to destroy the peculiar love, union, and communion that ought to be among chh. members.” And it would put the unregenerate in positions of power—they would have a say in the running of the congregation and the choosing of ministers and church officers. Most of all, letting the unregenerate in would lower the barrier between the church and the world, allowing the sins of the outside to infiltrate the church and pollute it. In advocating for a purer church, Green also wanted to head off the threat posed by the regenerate who stray from God’s ways. Stoddardeans and other rationalists cast a forgiving eye on these backsliders, but Green felt they must be dealt with sternly through excommunication, a harsh punishment that most congregations tried to avoid. “What’s so terrible in excommunication?” he wondered. He defended it as the best way “to shew them, & others, that they belong to Satan, & that these sins [if] continued will shut them out of heaven & leave them to go to hell with all the unregenerate.”32
Green began to make concrete changes in Hanover as early as 1757. The most important one was to tighten the standards for baptism and for admittance to communion. From 1747 to 1756, during his Stoddardean phase, Jacob performed an average of eighteen baptisms a year, with a high of twenty-two in 1755 and a low of fourteen in 1748. In the 1760s, he did about seven baptisms a year—less than half of what he had done a decade earlier. To determine whether someone was worthy of admission to the sacraments, Green summoned the applicant to a meeting, where he questioned the person on his or her spiritual state. It was a task, of course, that Green took seriously. He likened the minister’s role to that of a “doorkeeper” who is “under solemn obligations to take care, that those they admit be duly qualified according to the rules of God’s word.” Yet Jacob leavened his tough stance with a touch of humility. “Gospel ministers,” he conceded, could “not pretend to discern the heart [of seekers], or determine who are internally gracious.” Instead, based on these interviews, Jacob admitted to the sacraments those persons “who make an understanding profession of faith, repentance, and new obedience, and whose behaviour and practice gives reason to think their profession is sincere.”33
The tightening of standards created no fissures within the congregation. Quite the opposite. In his autobiography, Green observed that it was his Stoddardean “sentiments” of the 1740s allowing looser admission practices that were unpopular with most members. Implementing tougher standards did not result in any overt protests in Hanover or lead to Green’s ouster, noteworthy outcomes when contrasted with Edwards’s experience in Northampton. When he succeeded his grandfather as congregational pastor, Edwards continued Solomon Stoddard’s liberal (and popular) policies on admission to the church and the sacraments. But, like Green, Edwards was never comfortable with the looser standards, and after intense study he, too, concluded that such permissiveness was false and unbiblical. His decision to abandon the halfway covenant and end Stoddard’s standards caused an uproar in the church. The protests were so virulent that they contributed to Edwards’s dismissal as pastor in 1750.34
Nothing like that occurred in Hanover. Instead, Green pressed on with the task of building a stronger Presbyterian faith. Presbyterianism was a growing force in Morris County in the prerevolutionary years, and the denomination’s strength radiated outward from Hanover. Up to the mid-1750s Hanover Township—a large territory that encompassed Whippany to the south and Dover to the north—had the only Presbyterian church in the area. As the old 1718 meetinghouse deteriorated and the Presbyterian population grew, the presbytery finally agreed in 1755 to build two more meetinghouses, one at Hanover Neck (Green’s home church) and one at Parsippany. Jacob also served as Parsippany’s minister until 1760, when the congregation got its own pastor. By 1775, the Presbyterians had nine congregations in Morris County, the vast majority in Hanover and Morris Townships. By comparison, six other faiths (Baptist, Quaker, Congregationalist, Dutch Reformed, Lutheran, and German Reformed) had only one church in the county each. Thomas Bradbury Chandler’s Church of England had none.35
Green’s contributions to Presbyterianism’s growth in Morris County were both intellectual (he worked out the Calvinistic doctrines that underlay the creation of a purer, stronger church in Hanover) and mundane (he began keeping records and introducing Presbyterian structures to the congregation). During these years, Green matured as a leader. Gone was the nervousness and indecisiveness from his first years on the job. He emerged from his theological studies convinced that he had to act, and his congregation was solidly behind him. It suffered from none of the New Light–Old Light splits that bedeviled other Presbyterian churches.
Ironically, this future champion of laymen’s rights shared the view of his New England compatriots that the minister was the undisputed leader of the congregation. In a Puritan world, the pastor was a highly respected person who was seen as a member of the local aristocracy. Green brought this mind-set with him to New Jersey, and he ruled the congregation for many years strongly, almost haughtily. When he tightened admission standards in the 1760s, he did so without getting the approval of the elders or the presbytery. Green interviewed candidates on his own and decided by himself whether someone should be admitted to the church or the sacraments. When Green concluded that the person was worthy of admission, he passed along his recommendation to the church.36
Hanover, of course, was a Presbyterian church, and this meant that it placed limits on Green’s authority. When he arrived in 1745, Hanover already had deacons in place—but no elders. Green may have seen himself as the congregation’s undisputed leader, but he also well understood in these early years the strengths of the Presbyterian system. To lead effectively, the pastor needed allies among the laity. Without such support, Green could meet the same fate as his two predecessors. Jacob thus moved quickly to get elders in place. In June 1747, a few months after he was formally installed as Hanover’s pastor, five