"What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun." ––Ecclesiastes 1:9

On May 5, the Reverend Jeffrey Miller’s exciting announcement that St. Philip’s Church is planning a Classical Christian School contingent upon successful completion of the Shine the Light Campaign was met with exclamations of “What a great idea!” “Good News indeed!” That this was a splendid, much needed, innovation was the widespread consensus rippling through the large curious crowd in the Parish Hall. That the school would be located in the Church’s somewhat mysterious adjacent State Street property (once it was renovated) also sounded intriguing. But then the larger question settled in. What exactly is a Classical Christian School?  

Our dream is a school dedicated to raising up students to be ambassadors of Christ steeped in the best traditional and classical learning. The object is to teach students how to think and how to learn. We will strive for the three-fold ideal of the Christian church, family, and school working in harmony.

Rather than an innovation, our proposed classical Christian school is actually the flowering of a seed planted over three hundred years ago. Around 1710, about the time that the colonial Assembly first took up the question of building a new brick church to house the expanding congregation of St. Philip’s parish, the need for a school to provide religious and moral instruction for children also emerged as “a source of great solicitude” among Charleston’s inhabitants. Many believed that given the nature of the raucous port city “leaving the young to their own pursuits and to the influence of evil example” would inevitably lead to “the decay of piety and morals.”

Appeals for assistance were sent to the London-based Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) that had been founded to bring the saving grace of Anglicanism to the diaspora of Europeans scattered to the remote ends of the earth, such as Carolina then seemed. In 1680, when the colony was about a decade old, the SPG had founded St. Philip’s as a mission church and sponsored British ministers to preach the gospel to a motley population. As literacy was key to understanding the Bible and following the liturgy, the SPG also sponsored schools. A “Gentleman of the Province” of Carolina requested their help establishing a school in Charleston and described the desperate situation facing children growing up in that “ignorant, uneducated community, [that was] but a small remove from the habits and feelings of savage life.” The writer confirmed that the “virtuous and good” of the community had pledged their support if the SPG would help. In the end, the significant bequests and generous donations from “charitable and well-disposed Christians” underwrote the success of the proposed St. Philip’s school.

The SPG ultimately agreed to send a trained school master, as well as donate a small library of improving religious books. According to the Society’s guidelines, a teacher’s primary goal would be “instructing and disposing Children, to believe and live as Christians.” Students were encouraged to master a clear writing hand, basic arithmetic, and simple accounting practices that they might be able to support themselves. Special care and attention were directed to children’s manners, in school and out, so that they would learn to “abhor Lying, Falsehood and to avoid all sorts of Evil-speaking.” School masters were encouraged to use “all kind and gentle Methods in the government of their Scholars.”   

The SPG maintained that the truth of the gospel laid out the pathway for a good life and that access to religion not only offered personal salvation, but also provided a cultural framework for colonies with fragile social structures. Their parent organization, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) had been founded in 1668 by an Anglican minister desperate to find a remedy for the appalling brutality and immorality generated during Britain’s civil wars.

The benefits of St. Philip’s little academy that embraced both a classical as well as Christian approach to learning were so immediately apparent that the colonial Commons House of Assembly incorporated it into its provincial system when they enacted the Free School Acts of 1710 and 1712. The proposed schools were only “free” in that they were open to all the children of the province. Tuition was charged, but fees for twelve deserving scholars a year would be waived. The Act dictated that students would study “Grammar, and other Arts and Sciences and useful Learning,” as well as “the Principles of the Christian Religion.” Since the Anglican Church was the “established” or tax-supported denomination, the Assembly mandated that the school master “must be of the religion of the Church of England, and conform to the same,” be capable of teaching “the learned languages” of Latin and Greek, and qualified to catechize and instruct the young in the principles of Christianity. William Guy was the first sent from England by the SPG to be school master and assistant to the rector. The school was initially known locally by a variety of names such as “the Free Province School,” “Mr. Guy’s School,” and “Saint Philip’s School” (which had a nice ring to it).  

That Charleston was slow in developing a school system compared to other colonies was due in part to the widespread sentiment that the family was the primary social unit and that parents, rather than the government, should determine what sort of training, if any, their children received. Another stumbling block was that the town actually had no municipal government until after the American Revolution. The parochial or church officers in each of the ten parishes were responsible for both the civil and religious life of their people. Our hardworking Vestry members and Wardens of today can well appreciate the burden carried by their colonial predecessors who learned in 1712 that in addition to bearing the onus of assessing and collecting taxes, distributing poor relief, maintaining public order, and enforcing the Sabbatarian Laws, they must also  oversee the education of the growing population of unchurched children, whose “deplorable” behavior, according to some sources, might well have made even angels weep.

The first years of St. Philip’s School were disrupted by the Yemassee Indian Wars which kept the colony in varying states of alarm from 1714 to 1718. In 1719, the year that the settlers threw themselves “at the foot of the throne” and South Carolina became a royal colony, the Reverend Alexander Garden was sent by the SPG to St. Philip’s and brought some order out of the lingering chaos. A graduate of the University of Aberdeen, he became a keen supporter of the school. He conducted Sunday classes in Scripture and Theology for the young scholars and would, from time to time, visit classrooms to pelt anxious students with difficult questions to sharpen their wits. Garden possibly saved the entire school project by soothing Charleston’s powerful Dissenters (non-Anglicans, such as Huguenots or Congregationalists), who resented the teaching of the Church of England’s theology in the tax-supported school. A number of the objectors ultimately came to regard the school as such a force for the good in the town that they enrolled their own children and left generous, and much-needed bequests to the Anglican academy in their wills.

By 1723, St. Philip’s School was operating at capacity with forty-five boys, including two of mixed race, as well as one from Philadelphia and another from the Bahamas. Students ranged in abilities from a handful of alphabetarians just learning to read to twenty budding scholars deeply immersed in classical languages with the ambitious goal of translating the New Testament from English to Latin. Class readings included texts from Erasmus and Ovid. As the wealth of the town grew with the profitable trade in rice and indigo, so too did the school operate on a firmer footing through increased charitable giving.

Also in 1723, after many delays, the second St. Philip’s Church building was finally completed and towered over the humble town in solemn beauty at its new location at the head of “New Church Street.” The awe-inspiring structure was a melding together of classical architectural elements and ancient Christian symbols, an outward and visible mirroring of the union of Athens and Jerusalem found in the curriculum of the Church school.  

The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel also had a special heart for bringing the blessings of faith in God and Jesus Christ to enslaved and native peoples in the colonies. In 1742, with the SPG’s encouragement and support from St. Philip’s congregation, the Reverend Alexander Garden inaugurated the first school in the American colonies to educate black people so they might “read the scriptures and understand the nature of Redemption.” The school continued for twenty years and blessed several generations, enslaved and free.

The St. Philip’s Provincial school survived only until the American Revolution when support from England ceased and the Anglican Church was disestablished. The irony was that the leaders of the Revolution had learned their lessons well and were motivated by the ideals of liberty and rule of law formulated by the great minds among the ancient Greeks and Romans––learn more about that in the next inSPIRE!

Won’t the “virtuous and good”, the “charitable and well-disposed Christians” of St. Philip’s Church once again band together to support our Shine the Light Campaign, which includes a new classical Christian school to meet the pressing needs of the young children of our city. We have almost all the components in place to achieve our goal. We have the experienced wisdom of the Reverend Jeff Miller. We have a clergy team always up for a challenge and a cadre of efficient and conscientious Vestry members and Wardens. And we are blessed with our ever-growing number of church members who possess a dazzling array of needed skills they are ready to share.

But to achieve this ambitious goal, we need full participation of our congregation contributing whatever they can. The most valuable inheritance that we can leave our children and grandchildren is an education that honors the treasured traditions of the past and prepares them to navigate the challenges of their future. What better way to “Shine Our Light” than by sending forth into the world a new generation of learned good citizens wise in the ways of the Lord.

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Sources:

*Frederick Dalcho, M.D. - An Historical Account of the Protestant Episcopal Church in South Carolina: From the First Settlement of the Province to the War of the Revolution, 1820 p. 92-96.

*Helen E. Livingston, “Thomas Morritt, School Master of the Charleston Free School, 1723-1728,  Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, 14 (June 1945), 151-57.

*Edward McCrady, A Sketch of St. Philip’s Church, Charleston, S.C.: From the Establishment of the Church of England Under the Royal Charter of 1665 to July 1897. passim.