Part 5 (1/2)
Such unworthy persons doubtless swelled the ma.s.s of uncovenanted. Yet the historian is apt to think that for many, honest and good men enough, the cold inner temple of the ideal commonwealth must have proved more forbidding than its wind-swept outer courts. To enter its portals was an ordeal which the average man will not readily undergo, involving, as an initial procedure, a confession of faults and a profession of faith, a public revelation of inner spiritual condition, an exposure of soul to the searching and curious inspection of the sanctified. And the covenant itself was found to be no warmed and cloistered retreat, secure from the rude impact and impertinent gaze of the world. Quite the contrary! To enter the covenant was to renounce all private spiritual possessions, to give one's intimate convictions into the keeping of others, to subscribe to a very communism of the emotional life. This un-Roman Church was after all but a public confessional, in which every brother was a confessor, and life itself a penance for constructive sin. The soul that is constantly exposed grows callous or diseased; and the New England covenant provided a regimen well suited to repel the normal mind or induce in its patients a fatal spiritual anaemia.
And with every decade the house of the covenant became at once more difficult to enter and less comfortable to abide in. The Puritan was not necessarily a sad or solemn person. Yet the light heart and the merry mind were not the salient characteristics even of the cheerful Winthrop or the genial Cotton; while the conditions of life in the wilderness--the unrelieved round of exacting labor, the ever present danger from the lurking Indians, the long cold winters with their certain harvest of death from diseases which could be ascribed only to the will of G.o.d and met with resignation instead of skill, the succession of funerals as depressing as they were public and pervading--were well calculated to deepen the somber cast of the Puritan temper and accentuate the critical and introspective tendency of his mind. Inspection of one's own and one's neighbor's conduct was, indeed, always a Puritan duty; shut within the restricted horizon of a New England village, it became a necessity and almost a pleasure. When few stirring events diverted thought from the petty and the personal, when pent-up emotion found little outlet in the graces or amus.e.m.e.nts of social intercourse, observation and introspection fastened upon the minutiae of life and every eccentricity of speech and conduct was weighed and a.s.sessed. Close espionage on conduct was matched by the careful scrutiny accorded every novel opinion. When the weekly sermon was the universal topic of conversation, the refinements of belief were more discussed than essentials; often discussed, they were often questioned--by strict Separatists like Roger Williams; by cavilers at infant baptism like that ”anciently religious woman,” the Lady Deborah Moodie; by fervid emotionalists, such as Anne Hutchinson or the Quaker missionaries: and every discussion of the creed left it more precisely defined, more narrow, and more official. Under the stress of conflicting opinion and the attrition of acrid debate, the covenant of grace steadily hardened into a covenant of barren works, in which an air of sanctimony became an easy subst.i.tute for the sense of sanctification, and the t.i.the of mint and c.u.mmin was allowed to overbalance the weightier matters of the law.
While the covenant became more inelastic, and its rule of life more strictly defined, the call of the world became more insidious and alluring. As the colony became established beyond the fear of failure, and life fell from an artificial and self-conscious venture to be but a natural experience, as wealth increased and opportunities for relaxation and idle amus.e.m.e.nt multiplied, the elemental instincts of human nature, stronger than decrees of state, would not be denied. During the third decade after the founding, the Christmas festival found its way into the colony, and ”dancing in ordinarys upon the marriage of some person” gave occasion for scandal. Extravagance in ”apparill both of men and women”
became the subject of repeated legislation: ”we cannot but to our grief take notice,” so runs the law of 1651, ”that intolerable excesse and bravery have crept in uppon us, and especially amongst people of mean condition, to the dishonor of G.o.d, the scandall of our profession, the coruption of estates, and altogether unsuitable to our povertie.”
Non-attendance at church did not become a problem for the magistrates until 1646, but the fine then imposed proved ineffective; and year by year the desecration of the Sabbath became more marked and more difficult of correction. Many and sundry abuses were committed ”by several persons on the Lord's day, not only by children playing in the streets and other places, but by youthes, maydes, and other persons, both strangers and others, uncivilly walkinge in the streets and fields, travelling from towne to towne, going on s.h.i.+pboard, frequentinge common howses and other places to drinke, sport, and otherwise to misspend that precious time.”
”Maydes and youthes!” The words are significant, for by 1653 the first generation of native-born New Englanders had indeed come upon the scene to vex the Puritan fathers. How different from that of the first settlers must have been the outlook of those who had never been in England. They had never been oppressed by bishop or king; had never felt the insidious temptation of a cathedral church, or witnessed the mockery of the ma.s.s, or been repelled by a surpliced priesthood desecrating G.o.d's house with incense and music; had never seen a maypole with its accompaniment of licentious revelry, or witnessed the debauching effects of a holiday festival. They had solemnly sat in unwarmed churches; they had been present at elections; had seen men standing in the pillory or women whipped through the streets; they had diverted themselves at weddings or the husking-bee, or by walking in the woods, or by drinking in a tavern. But no frivolous and superst.i.tious world of Anti-Christ compa.s.sed them about to point the moral of the harsh Puritan tale. Their Puritanism was induced by precept and example rather than by the compelling impact of a corrupt society.
Yet no conventionalized Puritanism, no mere living on the dead level of habitual virtues could satisfy the leaders of the great migration. The founding of Ma.s.sachusetts was preeminently a self-conscious movement, the work of able and resolute men who brought an unquenchable moral enthusiasm to the support of a clearly defined purpose. They had counted the cost and made their choice; and every instinct of proud and self-contained men disposed them to minimize the difficulties which they encountered in the New World and to exaggerate those which they had overcome in the Old. Having staked their judgment on the wisdom of the venture, they were bound to be justified in the event. To admit that life on the physical and moral frontier was less than they had imagined would be a humiliating confession of failure; and worse than a confession of failure; for G.o.d had appointed this refuge for them, and not to abide in it in all contentment would be to cavil at his purpose, to question his decree. With the instinct of true pioneers they therefore idealized the barren wilderness, p.r.o.nouncing its air most healing, its soil most fertile; and with unfailing optimism proving, by the very sufferings they endured, how practicable, how s.p.a.cious and attractive was the habitation which they had set themselves to fas.h.i.+on.
Thus it was that the very influences which relaxed the hold of the Puritan ideal upon the ma.s.s of the people served only to strengthen its hold upon their leaders. With resolution stiffened by every obstacle, magistrates and clergy pressed on to the appointed task, never doubting that they were called upon to justify the ways of G.o.d to man. Drawing their inspiration from Geneva and the ancient Hebrew code, they a.s.sumed, with a courage as sublime as it proved futile, to foster moral and spiritual excellence by decrees of state. Indifference or opposition only called them to a stricter rule; for every physical disaster, every denial of the creed or departure from the straight line of life, was thought to be G.o.d's judgment upon them for some want of faith or failure in the law. And in later years the chastis.e.m.e.nts of the Lord were many:--the desolating King Philip's War; persistent interference with their chartered Liberties; dissensions in the Boston Church and quarrels of magistrates and clergy; the rise of ”an anti-ministerial spirit” and the growth of worldliness and lax living among the people. ”What are the reasons that have provoked the Lord to bring his judgments upon New England?” Such was the primary question which the Synod of 1679 was called upon to answer. ”Declension from the primitive foundation work, innovation in doctrine and wors.h.i.+p”--this, according to a committee of the deputies, was the true cause. ”A spirit of division, persecuting and oppressing of G.o.d's ministers and precious saints,” said Mr. Flint of Dorchester, ”is the sin that is unseen.” And not a few maintained that all their troubles were but well-merited punishments for having dealt too leniently with the Quakers.
And yet, in the year 1679, such explanations as these were falling to the level of the conventional for many of the magistrates and even for some of the clergy. After forty years few of the original leaders were still alive. Winthrop died in 1649, Cotton in 1652, Thomas Dudley in 1653, John Wilson in 1667, Richard Mather in 1669. The days of persecution and exile influenced the thinking of the second generation, indeed, not so much as an experience, but rather as a tradition or a tale that is told. Liberal influences, which were to oust the Mathers from control of Harvard College, were already gaining ground in Cambridge, while Boston had become the center of powerful material interests which were to prove incompatible with the rigid ideals of the founders. ”The merchants seem to be rich men,” writes Mr. Harris in 1675, ”and their houses as handsomely furnished as most in London.” In 1680 more than one hundred s.h.i.+ps traded at the Bay, carrying fish, provisions, and lumber to southern Europe, to the Madeiras, and to the English sugar colonies in the West Indies. Many men who rose to prominence in the third quarter of the century were more concerned for the temporal than for the spiritual commonwealth; and when material interests thus came into compet.i.tion with the interests of religion, not a few were prepared to compromise with the world, and so a secular and moderate spirit crept in to corrupt the counsels of government.
The rise of the moderate party and the divergence between clergy and magistrate is therefore a notable feature of the last years of Ma.s.sachusetts history under the charter. In 1679, after the death of Leverett, Bradstreet was elected governor. He was the leader of the party of conciliation, one of many who, renouncing the rigid and uncompromising policy of the clergy, were ready to cooperate with Randolph in the hope of securing the essential interests of the colony by a timely submission to the English Government. And it is significant of the growing influence of the property interests that the moderates were stronger in the upper than in the lower chamber. In 1682 the governor and a majority of the a.s.sistants, ”upon a serious consideration of his Majesty's intimation that his purpose is only to regulate our charter, in such a manner as shall be for his service and the good of this his colony,” announced themselves willing to surrender the bulwark of the Puritan liberties. But the House of Deputies voted to ”adhere to their former bills,” preferring with the clergy rather to ”die by the hand of others, than by their own.”
The event reveals the opposition of the material and the ideal interests which was a prime cause in the defeat of the great Puritan experiment.
The a.s.sistants were ”men of the best estates,” says Randolph, while the deputies were ”mostly an inferior sort of planters.” Randolph was a prejudiced observer; but it is undoubtedly true that the upper chamber spoke for the s.h.i.+pbuilders and traders of Boston. Forty years earlier, when Laud was preparing to annul the charter, both magistrates and clergy made ready for forcible resistance. It was no longer possible.
Ma.s.sachusetts had ceased to be a wilderness community cut off from contact with the outside world. Her rapidly growing trade depended upon English markets. The base of the fisheries was s.h.i.+fting northward, and a French company at Nova Scotia was already seizing New England s.h.i.+ps.
Without English protection trade would be ruined and the colony itself fall a prey to France. Forcible resistance was therefore not to be thought of. The material interests of Ma.s.sachusetts bound her to the home Government, and practical men were apt to think that even the spiritual City of G.o.d would suffer less under Anglican than under Catholic control.
The recall of the charter but opened free pa.s.sage to the latent forces that were already beginning to transform the life and thought of New England. The theocratic ideal had so far lost its hold that the event to which the clergy and a remnant of the magistrates looked forward as to a cosmic catastrophe was accepted with resignation or indifference by the ma.s.s of the people. Neither disaster nor serious disturbance accompanied the inauguration of the new regime. The extension of the suffrage to the freeholders removed more discontent than it created. A government controlled by property interests approved itself as well as one directed by religious ideas. The colony was no more distracted by the introduction of the Anglican service than by the erection of the second Boston Church; and even the pa.s.sing of Harvard College, that citadel and fortress of the old theocracy, into the hands of Boston and Cambridge liberals, was far less a tragedy to Ma.s.sachusetts than it was to the Mathers.
The life of Cotton Mather was, indeed, a kind of tragedy, for he was the most distinguished of those who grew to manhood under the old order only to witness its fall and live in degenerate days. Not less able than his father, but how much less influential! In early years his voice was a commanding one, but he was destined to see his popularity wane and to live most of his long life in comparative isolation and neglect in the very community where Increase Mather had been a high priest indeed. In such men as Cotton Mather the old spirit lived on, sharply accentuated by defeat; and transformed, in such men as Jonathan Edwards, by dint of morbid introspection and brooding on the sins of a perverse generation, into a kind of disease, or spiritual neurasthenia. Such men could but look back with poignant regret to the golden age that was past. Of that golden age, Cotton Mather himself, ”smitten with a just fear of encroaching and ill-bodied degeneracies,” sat down to write the history, recording in the _Magnalia_ ”the great things done for us by our G.o.d,”
in the hope that he might thereby do something ”to prevent the loss of the primitive principles and the primitive practices.”
But he had imagined a vain thing. For even as the century drew to its close, the old Bay colony was already drifting from its back-water moorings, out into the main current of the world's thought. None could know to what uncharted seas of political and religious radicalism they were bearing on. None could foresee the time when Calvin's Inst.i.tutes would give way to the Suffolk Resolutions, when Adams would speak in place of Endicott, or the later day when Emerson would preach a new antinomianism more desolating than any known to Winthrop or Bradford.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
This period is fully treated in Channing's _History of the United States_, I, chaps, VIII-XIV; and in Tyler's _England in America_, chaps.
V-VII, IX-XIX. See also Fiske's _Old Virginia and Her Neighbours_, I, chaps. VII-XI, XIV; and Eggleston's _Beginners of a Nation_ and _The Transit of Civilization from England to America_. The const.i.tutional aspects of the colonial settlements are exhaustively treated in Osgood's _The American Colonies in the 17th Century_. For the economic and social history of the colonies, see Bruce's _Social Life in Virginia_ and _The Economic History of Virginia in the 17th Century_, and Weeden's _Economic History of New England_. Contemporary pamphlets relating to the colonies are to be found in Force's _Tracts and Other Papers_, 4 vols. Was.h.i.+ngton, 1838. To understand the motives and ideals of the Separatists and Puritans one must read their own accounts. Of these, the most charming is Bradford's _History of Plymouth Plantation_. This, as well as Governor Winthrop's _Journal_, is printed in Jameson's _Original Narratives of Early American History_. Johnson's _Wonder Working Providence_, in the same collection, is a history from the point of view of a loyal Puritan of average education and intelligence. Morton's _New English Canaan_ (1632) and _The Simple Cobler of Aggawam_ (1647) are printed in Force's _Tracts and Other Papers_, vols. II, III. A hostile account of the Puritan experiment is in Samuel Gorton's _Letter to Nathaniel Morton_, in Force's _Tracts_, etc., vol. IV. About three quarters of a century after the founding of Ma.s.sachusetts, Cotton Mather wrote his _Magnalia Christi Americana, or the Ecclesiastical History of New England_, 2 vols. Hartford, 1855. In Bk. I he gives an account of the founding from the point of view of one who felt that New England was then departing from the ”primitive principles.”
CHAPTER IV
ENGLAND AND HER COLONIES IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES
_Your trade is the mother and nurse of your seamen; your seamen are the life of your fleet; your fleet is the security of your trade, and both together are the wealth, strength, and glory of Britain._
LORD HAVERSHAM.
I
The decay of the old Puritanism in Ma.s.sachusetts, so distressing to Cotton Mather, was but a faint reflection of the change which had come over England since the return of Charles II to Whitehall. With the fall of the Puritan regime moral earnestness and high emotional tension, regarded as contrary to nature and reason, gave way to a rationalizing habit of mind, to seriousness tempered with well-bred common sense or spiced with a pinch of cynical indifference. Religion fell to be a conventional conformity. Theologians, wanting vital faith in G.o.d, were content to balance the probabilities of his existence. Amus.e.m.e.nt became the avocation of a leisure cla.s.s, and the average man was intent like Samuel Pepys to put money in his purse, in order to indulge himself ”a little the more in pleasure, knowing that this is the proper age to do it.” From Milton and the Earl of Clarendon to William Pitt, England was no country of lost causes and impossible enthusiasms. It was a pragmatic age, in which the scientific discoveries of Newton are the highest intellectual achievement, and the conclusion of Pope that ”everything that is is best” gives the quality of poetic insight.
In this ago the direction of English affairs fell to men well suited to the national temper. The first Charles suffered martyrdom for his faith; the second, determined never again to go on his travels, set the standard of public morality by selling himself to France, and with a smile professing the belief that honor in man and virtue in woman were but devices to raise the price of capitulation. And so he often found it; for he was himself served by men who, having renounced their Puritan principles for place and power, were prepared to forswear the Stuarts in order to follow the rising star of William of Orange. William was an able statesman, indeed, but his interest was in the grand alliance; he ”borrowed England on his way to Versailles,” and governed it in the interest of the Dutch Coalition. Queen Anne and the first Georges reigned but did not govern; and in the early eighteenth century power fell to men of supple intelligence and complacent conviction--to Marlborough and little Sidney G.o.dolphin, to Harley and St. John and Sunderland, and at last to Robert Walpole, the very personification of the shrewd curiosity, the easy-going morals, the material ambitions of his generation.