Part 4 (1/2)

Ideal constructions are doubtless the psychic precipitates of social experience, and the Protestant theory was but the reasoned expression of the middle-cla.s.s state of mind. Thwarted by the existing world of fact, the leaders employed their practical and dexterous intelligence to create a new world of semblance, a world of the spirit, in which the way was illumined by the light of reason, and the individual rather than the social conscience gave the sense of right direction. Material for such a philosophy was ready to hand. The practice and the thinking of the apostolic churches had been newly discovered by the study of the secular and the sacred past; and the essence of all Protestant thinking was implied in the phrase in which Luther embodied the teaching of St.

Paul: ”Good works do not make the good man, but the good man does good works.” Not the conventional judgments of society, expressed through the commands of Church or State, but the individual conscience, justified by faith in G.o.d's purpose, determines a man's merit. St. Augustine's ideal City of G.o.d was thus once more set over against the visible secular world of man. Into this intangible community, a house not made with hands, the elect and the select withdrew themselves, abiding there as in a refuge, untouched by the corruptions of a spotted world, seeking with humility the will of G.o.d and submitting with all the pride of conscious merit to law.

As the middle-cla.s.s experience implied the Protestant theory of religion, it implied the Puritan conception of morals and conduct.

Puritanism originated in the towns for the same reason that it lingers in the country; it was formerly the townsman rather than the countryman whose ideas and manner of living stamped him as peculiar. The spiritual and social isolation of the townsman is therefore the source of the outward impa.s.siveness of the Puritan, as well as of the intensity of his inner experience: the continued impact of n.o.ble or priestly contempt had crusted his nature with a manner that was rigid and resistant and undemonstrative, beneath which smouldered the explosive forces of thwarted ambition and the sense of unrecognized intellectual and moral excellence. Conscious of a worth which society ignored, he transformed his qualities into virtues, and erected his virtues into social standards of value. Prudence and economy, restraint of manner, denial of the sensuous and the sensual appeal, reserve of soul, the unmoved endurance of the p.r.i.c.ks of fortune--these became the virtues of the Puritan because they were not the virtues of the world which despised him: by these self-erected standards he justified himself and pa.s.sed judgment on the society in which he felt himself an alien and a stranger.

Opposition was therefore but fuel to the Puritan flame. Every persecution of society or obstacle of nature encountered in the endeavor to withdraw from the world was a confirmation of its corruption, a device of the devil to tempt him astray, or G.o.d's wise method of testing his faith. To persevere was the very proof of his election, the sure evidence of right thinking. The doctrine of eternal torment in h.e.l.l, said Jonathan Edwards, used to appear ”like a horrible doctrine to me. I remember very well when I seemed convinced, and fully satisfied, but never could give an account how, or by what means I was thus convinced.”

The very painfulness of the idea was doubtless what induced him to accept it. It was not the truth of the doctrine convincing his intellect, but the discipline of the will involved in vanquis.h.i.+ng the horror of it, that gave him peace; so that in the end it seemed to him, not so much true, but ”exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet.” St.

Augustine furnished us one of the keys to Puritanism when he said: ”No man loves what he endures, but he may love to endure.” The Puritan loved to endure. To expect resistance and to meet it unmoved; to welcome calumny and reviling with a steadfast mind; to transform a hostile verdict of the majority into an unconscious award of merit:--such was the Puritan temper in its most distinguished representatives.

III

In England the Puritan temper was given its effective edge during the latter years of Elizabeth and the reigns of the first Stuarts. The Armada was scarcely destroyed before the queen a.s.sumed a less complaisant att.i.tude toward dissent. James I warned the clergy at Hampden Court that he would make them conform or harry them out of the land. The third decade of the century witnessed the triumph of Anti-Christ on every hand: in Germany the success of imperial arms was crowned by the Edict of Rest.i.tution; with the capture of Roch.e.l.le, the Huguenots in France lost their towns of refuge and found themselves at the mercy of the state; and in England itself the first Charles, more absolutist and more Catholic than his father, was thought to aim at nothing less than the ruin of Parliament and the restoration of the Roman religion. Under the stress of opposition there was accordingly a marked accentuation of the Puritan and the Separatist spirit. To Nonconformist and Independent alike the truth became more clear the more it was traduced and maligned. Year by year there was a deepening sense of being in the world but not of it; and to those who were already spiritual exiles, the idea of removing to America came to seem but the outward expression of an inner fact: ”All the churches of Europe have been brought under desolation; it maybe feared that the like judgements are coming upon us; and who knows but G.o.d hath provided this place to be a refuge for many, whom he meanes to save out of the generall callamitie.”

It was not the Puritan Nonconformists who first sought refuge on American sh.o.r.es, but a less aggressive people, who were called Brownists in derision, but who called themselves Separatists. Robert Browne first formulated the doctrines of the sect; but its origin, and the reasons for its persistence in the face of bitter persecution, are not altogether clear. Poor in purse and feeble in numbers, Separatism found adherents chiefly in London and Norfolk, and among the lower cla.s.ses of artisans and countrymen. It was in London and Norfolk that many thousand Dutch refugees found homes during the reign of Elizabeth; and it was in Norfolk that a kind of unofficial, lay religion had been for many decades a marked feature of craft gild activities. Dutch influence and the practice of the gilds may have furnished a fruitful soil for the propagation of Separatism; but the leaders who formulated its doctrines and ideals were mainly educated Englishmen, graduates of Cambridge many of them, whose deliberate thinking carried them from Anglicanism to Nonconformity, and from Nonconformity to Separatism. Such was Robert Browne the founder, John Greenwood, Henry Barrowe, and John Penry; and such were the later leaders, William Brewster and John Robinson. These men, like the Puritans, were Calvinistic in doctrine; like the Puritans, they held that true Christians formed an ideal commonwealth, whose ruler Christ was, and whose law was the Bible; like the Puritans, they believed that the test of the true Christian was an inner spiritual condition bearing fruit in right living, rather than external conformity to established custom. But the Separatist was at once less aggressive and more radical than the Puritan Nonconformist. Desiring toleration for himself, he accorded it to others; submitting to persecution, he refused to practice it; and convinced that no purification of the Established Church could make it the true house of G.o.d, his cardinal doctrine was the separation of the spiritual and the temporal commonwealths. It was the merit of the Separatist to have caught that inspiring vision which was denied to most Protestant sects--the vision of the day when it belongeth not to the magistrate ”to compell religion, to plant churches by power, and to force a submission to Ecclesiasticall Government by lawes and penalties.”

When the seventeenth century opened, exile for opinion's sake was no new thing for this despised and persecuted sect; and the little Separatist congregation of Scrooby which John Robin son led out of England in 1608 had doubtless read in Foxe's _Book of Martyrs_ of the many early Protestants who had removed in the days of Mary to live unmolested at Basel or Geneva. They themselves could endure persecution with a steadfast heart. But they were unable to prevail against the ”errors, heresies, and wonderful dissentions” which the devil had begun to sow even among the elect, and so crossed to Holland and settled in Amsterdam. In Amsterdam they were, indeed, free from persecution; but the conditions of life were unfamiliar there, and the dissensions more bitter even than in England. Therefore they moved on to Leyden, where they were joined by other English congregations, and where they remained, ”knit together as a body in the most strict and sacred bond and covenant of the Lord.” Yet even there the world compa.s.sed them about and was not to be resisted. Of the grinding toil which made them old before their time they could not complain; but their children, a.s.sociating with foreigners and disposed to marry with them, were losing their language and departing from their early instruction; while the renewal of the war with Spain threatened the liberty they enjoyed in their new home. To preserve the true faith intact, it was necessary to withdraw still more completely from the world; and they turned to America where they would be as isolated in fact as they were in idea.

And so they ”left that goodly and pleasant citie, which had been their resting place near 12 years; but they knew they were pilgrimes, and looked not much upon these things, but lift up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest countrie, and quieted their spirits.”

Of many attempts to withdraw from the corruptions of a complex world of fact in order to dwell in spiritual peace according to the simple law of G.o.d or nature, few are more interesting than that which issued in the little colony of Plymouth. But in point of numbers, and in respect to the storm and stress of conflicting ideals which produce great events, Plymouth was soon eclipsed by Ma.s.sachusetts Bay. The repressive measures of Elizabeth and James I bore less heavily on the Nonconformist than on the Separatist; but during the early years of Charles the activities of the former became the special object of royal displeasure. And from the point of view of the king the Nonconformist who wished to remain in the Church was, indeed, more dangerous than the Separatist who wished to get out of it. The great majority of the Puritans were still of the former type. Men like Cotton and Winthrop, less spiritual and more practical, less unworldly and more resistant, than men like Robinson and Bradford, were not prepared to renounce the land of their birth without a struggle. They wished rather to get control of the Government in order that their own ideas might prevail, and were more disposed to purify a corrupt society by act of Parliament than by pa.s.sive renunciation and un.o.btrusive example.

And in the third decade of the century the Puritans were well on the way to the control of Church and Parliament. All over England they were sending to Westminster men of their own stubborn temper for whom political and religious liberty were but two sides of the same s.h.i.+eld.

They were buying up impropriated t.i.thes and gaining control of appointments to livings. In hundreds of parishes the congregations remained outside while the official reader intoned the service from the Prayer Book, and then entered to hear their chosen minister preach doctrines that boded ill to the cause of royal authority. To the over-sanguine it might have seemed that episcopacy was beginning to break down into congregationalism, and congregationalism laying the foundation for control of Parliament, when Charles I, in March, 1629, p.r.o.nounced the famous dissolution that marked the beginning of his personal rule. It was then that many Nonconformists, despairing of success at home, began to look to America as G.o.d's appointed refuge ”from the generall callamitie”; and the ten years from 1630 to 1640, during which the king endeavored with the aid of Wentworth to dispense with Parliament, and with the aid of Laud to crush out Nonconformity, is precisely the period of the great Puritan migration to New England.

In the summer of that very year 1629 a group of Nonconformists, under the lead of John Winthrop, a gentleman of Suffolk whose estate was becoming inadequate to his customary manner of living, convinced themselves that they could best serve G.o.d by renouncing the struggle against king and bishop in order to set up in America a ”due form of Government both civil and ecclesiastical.” And for such an enterprise it seemed that the way had been miraculously prepared. In March, 1628, John Endicott and five a.s.sociates had obtained from the New England Council a grant of land extending from a point three miles north of the Merrimac River to three miles south of the Charles, and westward from the Atlantic as far as the South Sea. The enterprise had in the mean time been joined by many Nonconformists, and in 1629 the a.s.sociates obtained from the king a charter which confirmed their rights to the land, and in addition authorized them, under the t.i.tle of ”The Governor and Company of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay,” to establish and govern colonies within the limits of their jurisdiction. All the powers of the company were intrusted to a governor, deputy-governor, and board of eighteen a.s.sistants, with the final authority in the freemen a.s.sembled in general court. The officers were elected by the freemen of the company, and freemen were admitted to the company by the officers. The charter originally provided for the ”election of the Governor and officers here in England”; but before it pa.s.sed the seals the phrase was omitted: ”With much difficulty,” says Winthrop, ”we got it rescinded.” The change was of vital importance for those who were preparing to set up, as free as possible from all outside authority, a ”due form of Government both civil and ecclesiastical.” Since the charter did not require the company's elections to be held in England, the freemen and officers had but to remove to America to transform a commercial corporation into a self-governing colony.

With this end in view, the offices of the company were transferred to those who signified their intention of removing. In March, 1630, all arrangements were completed, and over a thousand people, including the governor and officers of the company, left England. When they landed at Salem in June the prospect was so disheartening that some two hundred returned in the s.h.i.+ps that brought them out; and of those who went on to Boston Harbor two hundred died before December. The unfavorable reports of those who returned discouraged migration for many months; but for ten years after 1632 the repressive measures of Laud and Wentworth produced a veritable exodus, so that in 1643 the population of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay is estimated to have been not less than sixteen thousand.

The leaders of the migration were substantial and hard-headed laymen like Winthrop and Dudley, and able and conscientious clergymen such as Cotton, Norton and Wilson, Davenport, Thomas Hooker, and Richard Mather.

During the eclipse of Parliament and the Country party in England, the former found many avenues of advancement closed, while their estates, even when carefully husbanded, would no longer permit them, as Winthrop said, to ”keep sail with their equals.” The latter, excluded by their Puritan and evangelical convictions from the profession for which they were trained, turned to America as the most inviting field for service among the elect of G.o.d. They were men of ability and conviction--”a chosen company of men, picked out ... by no human contrivance, but by a strange contrivance of G.o.d,” to be the leaders of a chosen people.

Yet the Puritan colony was not made up of leaders. In firm intelligence, in clearly realized conceptions of Church and State, in moral fervor and spiritual exaltation, men like Winthrop and Davenport were far removed from the rank and file. The great majority of those who first came to Ma.s.sachusetts were small ”merchants, husbandmen, and artificers”; men with little property or none at all; uneducated and home-keeping men whose outlook was bounded by the parish; Puritans by temperament and habit rather than by reasoned conviction: followers in a very real and literal sense. Few of them would have come as individuals; but they came as families and groups of families from the same community, yielding to the call of a favorite minister or trusted neighbor. And few would have come for religion's sake alone. Persecution was the efficient cause, but straitened circ.u.mstances frequently gave point to the p.r.i.c.ks of conscience. Even Winthrop himself, a man of substantial possessions, tells us that a consideration for his undertaking the New World venture was that ”his meanes heer are soe shortened as he shall not be able to continue in that place and employment where he now is.” How far more persuasive an appeal was this to common folk! ”This lande grows weary of her inhabitants, soe as man is heer of less price amongst us than a horse or sheep. All towns complain of the burthen of their poore though we have taken up many unnecessary, yea unlawfull trades to maintaine them. Children, servants, and neighbors (especially if they be poore) are considered the greatest burthen. We stand heer striving for places of habitation (many men spending as much labour and cost to recover or keep sometimes an acre or two of land as would procure them many hundred as good or better in another country) and in ye mean tyme suffer a whole continent as fruitful and convenient for the use of man to lie waste without any improvement.”

Both in a spiritual and a material sense, it was to preserve and not to dissolve the ties of community life that the Puritans, leaders and followers alike, came to Ma.s.sachusetts. Coming as townsmen seeking land, they settled in towns, to which they often gave the names of the places from which they came--for example, Boston, Plymouth, Dorchester. The town was not originally an industrial center, but a group of agricultural proprietors who procured from the company t.i.tle to the land which they held individually or in common according to custom, and which they cultivated after the manner with which they were familiar. Free and equal access to the soil was the principle upon which the original grants were made: there were no quit-rents or charges; the allotments were small, and so far as possible equal in value. And happily the ideals of the settlers were suited to the environment in which they found themselves. The soil was adapted to the raising of a variety of farm products; corn and fodder and vegetables, swine and cattle and horses; products requiring neither great estates nor servile labor for profitable cultivation. Thus in New England the unit of settlement was a group of small, free proprietors living together in villages and managing their affairs by concerted action. The town and the town meeting were as natural to New England as the plantation and the county were to Virginia and the other Southern colonies.

But the community in New England was a spiritual as well as an industrial enterprise, and the counterpart of the town was the church.

By the leaders especially, settlement was regarded more as a planting of churches than as the founding of towns. In their view the church covenant was the expression of the fundamental social pact, the public confession of members.h.i.+p in the spiritual City of G.o.d, the very basis of ”that Church-State,” that ”due form of Government both civil and ecclesiastical,” which they had come to the New World to establish.

”We covenant with our Lord and with one another”--so runs the Salem covenant, which may be taken as typical--”we avouch the Lord to be our G.o.d, and ourselves to be his people, in the truth and simplicity of our spirits. We promise to walk with our brethren, with all watchfulness and tenderness, avoiding jealousy and suspicion, back-bitings, censurings, provokings, secret risings of spirit against them; but in all offenses to follow the rule of our Lord Jesus, and to bear and forbear, give and forgive, as he hath taught us. We do hereby promise to carry ourselves in all lawful obedience to those that are over us, in church and commonwealth. We resolve to approve ourselves to the Lord in our particular callings; shunning idleness as the bane of any state; nor will we deal hardly or oppressingly with any, wherein we are the Lord's stewards.”

Town and church were thus the basis of settlement; but whatever measure of self-direction either might enjoy, neither was regarded as independent. All legal authority was vested in the company and exercised by the officers and freemen a.s.sembled in general court. Yet of the two thousand settlers who came over in 1630, less than a score were members of the company. Authority so narrowly confined could not long remain unquestioned in a primitive community. In October, 1630, one hundred and nine persons pet.i.tioned to be admitted to the freedom of the corporation. It was a critical moment in the history of this ”due form of Government.” Without numbers, the colony could not thrive; without restriction of authority, it would be in danger of falling away from the ideals of its founders. The circ.u.mstance was one of many to reveal the essential difference, in respect to primary motive, between leaders and followers. The ma.s.s of the settlers had migrated primarily to secure economic enfranchis.e.m.e.nt: too great restraint would drive them to the north, where colonists were desired by Mason and Gorges, or to Plymouth, where the tolerant Pilgrims would welcome them perhaps on easier terms.

But Winthrop and his a.s.sociates had migrated primarily to establish a community that should live by G.o.d's law; and to admit all freeholders to share in its direction would end in the defeat of that high purpose.

Weight of numbers prevailed at last; and the history of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay in the seventeenth century is the story of the vain and pathetic effort of single-minded men to identify the temporal and the spiritual commonwealths. The compromise presently made was the first step in the final surrender. The one hundred and nine pet.i.tioners were admitted; but it was shortly voted, in plain violation of the charter, that the rights of the freemen should be confined to the election of the a.s.sistants; and, ”to the end that the body of the commons may be preserved of honest and good men, it was likewise ordered that for time to come no man shall be admitted to the freedom of this body polliticke but such as are members of some of the churches within the lymitts of the same.” In order to preserve the purity of the state still more effectively, it was voted, in 1636, that even church members should be excluded unless the churches to which they belonged had secured the approbation both of the magistrates and of a majority of the churches already established.

The suffrage remained thus restricted until 1684, although a nominal modification was made in 1664. But the freemen were not long content to see their privileges confined to the election of a.s.sistants and magistrates. The first protest was characteristically English. In 1632 the minister of Watertown Church, George Phillips, more independent in his manner of thinking than the majority of the clergy, induced his congregation to pa.s.s the first resolution in America against taxation without representation: ”It was not safe,” they contended, ”to pay money after that sort for fear of bringing their posterity into bondage.” A magisterial reprimand from Governor Winthrop reduced the protestants to the level of an apology; but in 1634 the freemen demanded to see the charter, and when it became generally known that supreme authority was vested in the freemen a.s.sembled in general court, rather than in the board of a.s.sistants, the latter was forced to concede to the former a share in the business of lawmaking. Since it was inconvenient for all the freemen to attend the sessions of the general court in person, they adopted the custom of sending two deputies from each town to represent them. The a.s.sistants, thus overbalanced by the deputies, demanded the privilege of the negative voice, a contention which the deputies were inclined to deny, but which resulted, in 1644, in the separation of the general court into two houses, the board of a.s.sistants const.i.tuting the upper chamber and the deputies the lower. During the same period the discretionary powers of the magistrates in administering the laws gave the deputies much concern; and their constant protests were not without effect, although the victory was mainly to the magistrates. The results of the first decade of conflict between leaders and followers over the distribution of political power are registered in the famous Body of Liberties which was promulgated in 1641.

In spite of concessions to the freemen, political privilege remained narrowly limited. Between 1631 and 1674 the total number of freemen admitted was 2527, about one fifth of the adult male residents. The suffrage was thus far more exclusive than a freehold test would have made it. In town meeting, voting was not always restricted to freemen; but in deciding important matters non-freemen were usually excluded. And yet the formal restriction of political privilege, narrow as it was, gives no true measure of the real concentration of political power.

Deference to the magistrate, no less than the habit of protest against illegal action, was an English tradition. The circ.u.mstances of the migration had tremendously accentuated the force of the religious appeal, and the freemen, being church members, were of all the settlers precisely that part most disposed to defer to the wishes of the clergy, and to select for magistrates those whom they approved.

”They daily direct their choice to make use of such men as mainly endeavor to keepe the truths of Christ unspotted, neither will any christian of sound judgment vote for any but such as earnestly contend for the faith, although the increase of trade and traffique may be a great inducement to some.”