THE RELIGIOUS ELEMENT IN THE SETTLEMENT OF NEW ENGLAND.—PURITANS AND
SEPARATISTS IN ENGLAND.
BY GEORGE EDWARD ELLIS,
_Vice-President of the Massachusetts Historical Society._
THERE is no occasion to offer any elaborate plea for making this theme
the subject of a chapter of American history, however extended into
detail or compressed in its dealing with general themes that history
might be. In the origin and development, the strengthening and the
triumph, of those agencies which transferred from the Old World to the
New the trial of fresh ideas and the experiment with free institutions,
the colonists of New England had the leading part. The influence and
the institutions which have gone forth from them have had a prevailing
sway on the northern half of this continent. Their enterprise—in
its seemingly feeble, but from the first earnest and resolute,
purpose—took its spring from religious dissension following upon the
earlier stages of the Protestant Reformation in England. The grounds,
occasions, and results of that dissension thus become the proper
subject of a chapter in American history. It is certain that in tracing
the early assertion in England of what may be called the principles of
dissent from ecclesiastical authority, we are dealing with forces which
have wrought effectively on this continent.
The well-established and familiar fact, that the first successful and
effective colonial enterprises of Englishmen in New England found their
motive and purpose in religious variances within the English communion,
is illustrated by an incident anticipatory by several years of the
period which realized that result. A scheme was devised and entered
upon in England in the interest of substantially the same class of
men known as Separatists and Nonconformists, who twenty-three years
afterward established themselves at Plymouth, and ten years later in
Massachusetts Bay. In the year 1597, there were confined in London
prisons a considerable number of men known confusedly as Barrowists or
Brownists, who had been seized in the conventicles of the Separatists,
or had made themselves obnoxious by disaffection with the government,
the forms, or the discipline of the English hierarchy. In that year a
scheme was proposed, apparently by the Government, for planting some
permanent colonists somewhere in the northern parts of North America.
Some of these Separatists petitioned the Council for leave to transport
themselves for this purpose, promising fidelity to the Queen and her
realm. Three merchants at the time were planning a voyage for fishing
and discovery, with a view to a settlement on an island variously
called Rainea, Rainée, and Ramees, in a group of the Magdalen Islands,
in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and they were to furnish two ships for the
enterprise. Reinforcing the petition of the Separatists, they asked
permission to transport with them “divers artificers and other persons
that are noted to be Sectaries, whose minds are continually in an
ecclesiastical ferment.” Permission was granted for the removal of two
such persons in each of the two ships, the merchants giving bonds that
the exiles should not return unless willing to obey the ecclesiastical
laws. The four prisoners who embarked for the voyage, April 8, 1597,
were Francis and George Johnson, brothers, who had been educated at
Cambridge, and Daniel Studley and John Clarke, who shared with them
their Separatist principles. One of the vessels was wrecked when near
its destination, and the company took refuge on the other, which,
proving unseaworthy and scantily provisioned, returned to England,
arriving in the Channel, September 1. The four exiles found their way
stealthily to a hiding-place in London, and by the middle of the month
were in Amsterdam. Their history there connects with the subsequent
fortunes of the Separatists in England, and with those of the Pilgrims
at Plymouth.[443]
The facts, persons, and incidents with which we have to deal in
treating of this special matter of religious contention within the
English Church, give us simply the opening in series and course of
what under various modifications is known as the history of Dissent.
The strife then engendered has continued essentially the same down to
our own times, turning upon the same points of controversy and upon
contested principles, rights, and methods. The present relations of
the parties to this entailed dissension may throw some light back upon
the working of the elements in it when it was first opened. The result
which has been reached, after the processes engaged in it for nearly
four centuries, shows itself to us in a still existing National Church
establishment in England, with authority and vested rights, privileges,
and prerogatives, yet nevertheless repudiated by nearly, if not quite,
half of the subjects of the realm. The reason or the right, the
grounds or the justification, of the original workings of Dissent have
certainly been suspended long enough for discussion and judgment upon
their merits to help us to reach a fair decision upon them.
The indifference, even the strong distaste, which writers and readers
alike feel to a rehearsal in our days of the embittered and aggravated
strife,—often concerned too, with what seem to us petty, trivial,
and perverse elements of scruple, temper, and passion,—in the early
Puritan controversy in the Church of England, may be sensibly relieved
by the spirit of fairness and consideration in which the subject is
treated in the most recent dealing with it by able and judicious
writers. There are even now in the utterances of pulpit and platform,
and in the voluminous pages of pamphlet, essay, and so-called history,
survivals and renewals of all the sharpness and acrimoniousness of
the original passions of the controversy. And where this spirit has
license, the lengthening lapse of time will more or less falsify
the truth of the relation of either side of the strife. One whose
sympathies are with either party may rightly claim that it be fairly
presented, its limitations, excesses, and even its perversities being
excused or palliated, where reasons can be shown. Nor is one who for
any fair purpose undertakes a statement or exposition of the views
and course of either of those parties to be regarded as also its
champion and vindicator. But no rehearsal of the controversy will
have much value or interest for readers of our day which does assume
such championship of one party. As the Puritans, Nonconformists, or
Dissenters, from the beginning up to this day, were substantially
defeated, disabled, and made the losers of the object for which they
contended, they may fairly claim the allowance of making the best
possible statement of their cause.
Those who at this distance of time accede in their lineage and
principles to the heritage of the first Dissenters from the English
Church system, might naturally eulogize them for their noble service
in laying the foundations of religious and civil liberty in the realm.
But there are not lacking in these days Royalists and Churchmen alike
who in the pages of history and in essays equally extol the English
Nonconformists as the foremost champions, the most effective agents,
in bringing to trial and triumph the free institutions of the realm.
Making the fullest allowances for all the perversities and fanaticisms
wrought in with the separating tenets and principles of individuals and
sects, their protests and assertions, their sufferings and constancy
under disabilities, all wrought together at last to insure a grand
result. Boldly is the assertion now maintained, that the Church of
England at several critical periods would have been unable to withstand
the recuperative forces of the Roman Church, had it not been for the
persistent action of the Nonconformists in holding the ground won
by the Reformation, and in demanding advance in the same line. The
partial schemes of toleration and comprehension which were hopefully or
mockingly entertained by parties in the Government down to the period
of the Revolution, were avowedly designed “to strengthen the Protestant
interest.” The strength of Dissent, in all its forms and stages, lay in
its demanding for the laity voice and influence in all ecclesiastical
affairs. It was this that restrained the dominance of priestly power.
There is a very important consideration to be had in view when we aim
to form a fair and impartial judgment of the spirit and course of those
earnest, if contentious, men, scholars, divines, heads and fellows
of universities, who in their Nonconforming or Separatist principles
originated dissensions in the English Church, and withdrew from it,
bearing various pains and penalties. Even in the calmer dealing with
them in the religious literature of our own times coming from Episcopal
writers, we find traces of the irritation, reproach, and contempt felt
and expressed for these original Dissenters when they first came into
notice, to be dealt with as mischief-makers and culprits. They were
then generally regarded as unreasonable, perverse, and contentious
spirits, exaggerating trifling matters, obtruding morbid scruples,
and keeping the realm in a ferment of petty squabbles on subjects in
themselves utterly indifferent. They withstood the hearty, harmonious
engagement of the rulers and the mass of the people of the realm in the
difficult task of securing the general principles and interests of the
Reformation, when perils and treacheries of a most formidable character
from the Papacy and from internal and external enemies threatened every
form of disaster. To this charge it might be replied, that the Puritans
believed that a thorough and consistent work of reformation within the
realm would be the best security for loyalty, internal harmony, and
protection from the plottings of all outside enemies.
The most interesting and significant fact underlying the origin and the
principles alike of Nonconformity and of Separatism in England at the
period of the Reformation, is this: the facility and acquiescence with
which changes were made in the English ecclesiastical system up to a
certain point, while further modifications in the same direction were
so stiffly resisted. It would seem as if it had been assumed at once
that there was a well-defined line of division which should sharply
distinguish between what must necessarily or might reasonably be made
a part of the new order of things when the Papacy was renounced, and
what must be conserved against all further innovation. The pivot of
all subsequent controversy, dissension, and alienation turned upon the
question whether this sharply drawn line was not wholly an arbitrary
one, not adjusted by a principle of consistency, but of the nature of
a compromise. This question was followed by another: Why should the
process of reformation in the Church, so resolute and revolutionary in
changing its institution and discipline and ritual, stop at the stage
which it has already reached? Could any other answer be given than that
the majority, or those who in office or prerogative had the power to
enforce a decision, had decided that the right point had been reached,
and that an arrest must be made there?
We must indicate in a summary way the stage which the Reformation had
reached in England when Puritanism, in its various forms, made itself
intrusive and obnoxious in demanding further changes. We need not open
and deal with the controverted point, about which English Churchmen are
by no means in accord, as to whether their Church had or did not have
an origin and jurisdiction independently of all agency, intrusion, or
intervention of the Bishop of Rome, or the Pope. It is enough to start
with the fact, that up to the reign of Henry VIII. the Pope asserted
and exercised a supremacy both in civil and in ecclesiastical affairs
in the realm. If there was a Church in England, it was allowed that
that Church must have a head. The Pope was acknowledged to be that
head. Henry VIII., with the support of his Parliament, renounced the
Papal supremacy, and himself acceded to that august dignity. The
year 600 is assigned as the date when Pope Gregory I. put Augustin,
or Austin, over the British Church. The headship of the Pope was
acknowledged in the line of monarchs till Henry VIII. became the
substitute of Clement VII. In the twenty-sixth year of Henry’s reign
his Parliament enacted that “whatsoever his Majesty should enjoin in
matters of religion should be obeyed by all his subjects.” Some of the
clergy, being startled at this exaltation of a layman to the highest
ecclesiastical office, demanded the insertion of the qualifying words
“as far as is agreeable to the laws of Christ.” The King for a time
accepted this qualification, but afterward obtained the consent of
Parliament for its omission. Whatever may be granted or denied to the
well-worn plea that the King’s reformatory zeal was inspired by his
feud with the Pope about his matrimonial infelicities, it is evident
that, notwithstanding the unrestrained royal prerogative, the monarch
could not have struck at the very basis of all ecclesiastical rule and
order in his kingdom, had there not been not only in his Council and
Parliament, but also working among all orders of the people, a spirit
and resolve against the Papal rule and discipline, ready to enter upon
the unsounded and perilous ventures of radical reformation. None as
yet knew where the opened way would lead them. The initiatory and each
onward step might yet have to be retraced. Not for many years afterward
did the threat and dread of the full restoration of the Papal power
cease to appal the people of the realm. The final and the impotent blow
which severed the Papacy from the realm came in the Bull of Pope Pius
V. in 1571, which denounced Elizabeth as a heretic, and, under pain of
curse, forbade her subjects to obey her laws. The measures of reform
under Henry were tentative and arbitrary on his part. They made no
recognition of any defined aim and stage to be reached. We must keep
this fact in view as showing that while the realm was ready for change,
it was as yet a process, not a mark.
It is necessary to start with a definition of terms which are
often confounded in their use. “Puritans,” “Separatists,” and
“Nonconformists” might in fact be terms equally applicable to many
individuals, but none the less they were distinctive, and in many cases
indicated very broad divergencies and characteristics in opinion,
belief, and conduct. Nonconformists and Separatists were alike
Puritans,—the latter intensively such. Puritanism developed alike
into Nonconformity and Separatism. The earliest Puritans came to be
Nonconformists, after trying in vain to retain a ministry and communion
in the English Church as established by royal and civil authority, and
after being driven from it because of their persistent demands for
further reform in it. As heartily as did those who remained in its
communion, they believed in the fitness of an established nationalized
Church. They wished to be members of such a Church themselves; and
not only so, but also to force upon others such membership. It was
not to destroy, but to purify; not to deny to the civil authority
a legislative and disciplinary power in religious matters, but to
limit the exercise of that right within Scriptural rules and methods.
They had sympathized in the processes of reform so far as these had
advanced, but complained that the work had been arbitrarily arrested,
was incomplete, was inconsistently pursued, was insecure in the stage
which it had reached, and so left without the warrant which Scripture
alone could furnish as a substitute for repudiated Rome.
Who were the Separatists, whose utterances, scruples, and conduct
seemed so whimsical, pertinacious, disloyal, and refractory in Old
England, and whose enterprise has been so successful and honorable in
its development in New England? When the unity of the Roman Church
was sundered at the Reformation, all those once in its communion who
parted from it were Separatists. It is an intricate but interesting
story, which has been often told, wearisomely and indeed exhaustively,
in explanation of the fact that this epithet came to designate a
comparatively small number of individuals in a nation to the mass
of whose population it equally belonged. The term “separatist” or
“sectary” carries with it a changing significance and association,
according to the circumstances of its application. It was first
used to designate the Christians. The Apostle Paul was called “a
ringleader of the _sect_ of the Nazarenes” (Acts xxiv. 5). The Roman
Jews described the Christians as a “_sect_” that was “everywhere
spoken against” (Acts xxviii. 22). The civil power gave a distinctive
limitation to the epithet. It is always to be remembered that every
national-church establishment existing among Protestants is the
creation of the civil authority. Its inclusion and its exclusion,
the privileges and disabilities which it gives or imposes, its
titles of honor or reproach, are the awards of secular magistrates.
All ecclesiastical polity, outside of Scriptural rule and sanction,
receives its authority, for those who accept and for those who reject
it, from the extension of the temporal power into the province of
religion. When King Henry VIII. and the English Parliament assumed the
ecclesiastical headship and prerogative previously exercised by Pope
Clement VII., all the loyal people of the realm became Separatists. All
the Reformed bodies of the Continent substantially regarded themselves
as coming under that designation, which might have been applied and
assumed with equal propriety as the epithet “protestants.” The Curia
of the hierarchy at Rome from the first until now regards English and
all other Protestants as Separatists. An archbishop or bishop of the
English Church is ranked by the Church of Rome in the same category of
unauthorized intruders upon sacred functions with the second-advent
exhorter and the field-preacher. The pages of English history, so
diligently wrought, and the developments of ecclesiastical polity in
the realm must be studied and traced by one who would fully understand
the occasion, the grounds, and the justice of the restriction which
confined the title of “separatists” to the outlawed and persecuted
and exiled class of persons, many of them graduates of English
universities, ordained and serving in the pulpits of the Church, who
were represented in and out of English jails by the four men whose
abortive scheme of planting a colony in North America has just been
referred to. However, justly or unjustly, the epithet “separatists”
came to be applied and accepted as designating those who would not only
not conform to the discipline of the Church, as still members of it,
but who utterly renounced all connection with it, kept away from it,
and organized assemblies, conventicles, or fellowships, subject only to
such discipline as they might agree upon among themselves.
A suggestion presents itself here, to which a candid view of facts
must attach much weight. Nonconformity, Separatism, Dissent, are not
to be regarded as factiously obtruding themselves upon a peaceful,
orderly, and well-established system, already tried and approved in
its general workings. The Reformation in England was then but in
progress, in its early stages; everything had been shaken, all was
still unsettled, unadjusted, not reduced to permanence and order. There
was an experiment to be tried, an institution to be recreated and
remodelled, a substitute Church to be provided for a repudiated Church.
The early Dissenters regarded themselves as simply taking part in an
unfinished reform. The Church in England, under entanglements of civil
policy and complications of State, gave tokens of stopping at a stage
in reform quite different from that reached, and allowed progressive
advance and unfettered conditions among Protestants on the Continent.
There the course was free. The French, Dutch, and Italian systems,
though not accordant, were all unlike the English ecclesiastical
system. In England it was impeded, leading to a kind of establishment
and institution in hierarchical and ritual administration which had
more regard for the old Church, and looked to more compromise with
it. It was not as if yielding to their own crotchets, self-willed
idiosyncrasies, and petty fancies that those who opened the line of
the Dissenters obtruded their variances, scruples, and contentions in
assailing what was already established and perfected. They meant to
come in at the beginning, at the first stage, the initiation of what
was to be the new order of things in the Church, which was then, as
they viewed it, in a state of formation and organization for time to
come. They took alarm at the simulation of the system and ritual of the
Roman Church, which the English, alone of all the Reformed Churches,
in their view evidently favored. They wished to have hand and voice
in initiating and planning the ecclesiastical institutions under
which they were to live as Christians. Individual conscience, too,
which heretofore had been a nullity, was thenceforward to stand for
something. It remained to be proved how much and what was to be allowed
to it, but it was not to be scornfully slighted. Then, also, with the
first manifestations of a Nonconforming and Separatist spirit, we note
the agitation of the question, which steadily strengthened in its
persistency and emphasis of treatment, as to what were to be the rights
and functions of lay people in the administration of a Christian
Church. Were they to continue, as under the Roman system, simply to
be led, governed, and disciplined, as sheep in a fold, by a clerical
order? Hallam gives it as his conclusion, that the party in the realm
during Elizabeth’s reign “adverse to any species of ecclesiastical
change,” was less numerous than either of the other parties, Catholic
or Puritan. According to this view, if one third of the people of the
realm would have consented to the restoration of the Roman system,
and less than one third were in accord with the Protestant prelatical
establishment, certainly the other third, the Puritanical party, might
assert their right to a hearing.
While claiming and pleading that the strict rule and example of
Scripture precedent and model should alone be followed in the
institution and discipline of the Christian Church, there was a
second very comprehensive and positive demand made by the Puritans,
which,—as we shall calmly view it in the retrospect, as taking its
impulse and purpose either from substantial and valid reasons of good
sense, discretion, and practical wisdom, or as starting from narrow
conceits, perversity, and eccentric judgments leading it on into
fanaticism,—put the Puritans into antagonism with the Church party.
From the first token of the breach with Rome under Henry VIII. through
the reigns of his three children and the four Stuarts, the Reformation
was neither accomplished in its process, nor secure of abiding in
the stage which it had reached. More than once during that period of
one and a half centuries there were not only reasonable fears, but
actual evidences, that a renewed subjection to the perfectly restored
thraldom of Rome might, in what seemed to be merely the cast of a
die, befall the distracted realm of England. The Court, Council, and
Parliament pulsated in regular or irregular beats between Romanism
and Protestantism. Henry VIII. left the work of reform embittered in
its spirit for both parties, unaccomplished, insecure, and with no
settlement by fixed principles. His three children, coming successively
to the crown, pursued each a policy which had all the elements of
confusion, antagonism, inconsistency, and extreme methods.
The spirit which vivified Puritanism had been working in England, and
had been defining and certifying its animating and leading principles,
before any formal measures of King and Parliament had opened the breach
with Rome. The elemental ferment began with the circulation and reading
of parts or the whole of the Scriptures in the English tongue. The
surprises and perils which accompanied the enjoyment of this fearful
privilege by private persons of acute intelligence and hearts sensitive
to the deepest religious emotions, were followed by profound effects.
The book was to them a direct, intelligible, and most authoritative
communication from God. To its first readers it did not seem to need
any help from an interpreter or commentator. It is a suggestive fact,
that for English readers the now mountainous heaps of literature
devoted to the exposition, illustration, and extended and comparative
elucidation of Scripture were produced only at a later period. The
first Scripture readers, antedating the actual era of the English
Reformation and the formal national rupture with the Roman Church, were
content with the simple text. They were impatient with any glosses or
criticisms. When afterward, in the interests of psalmody in worship,
the first attempts were made in constructing metrical versions of the
Psalms, the intensest opposition was raised against the introduction of
a single expletive word for which there was no answering original in
the text.
We must assign to this early engagedness of love and devoted regard
and fond estimate of the Bible the mainspring and the whole guiding
inspiration of all the protests and demands which animated the Puritan
movements. The degree in which afterward any individual within the
communion of the English Church was prompted to pursue what he regarded
as the work of reformation, whether he were prelate, noble, gentleman,
scholar, husbandman, or artisan, and whether it drove him to conformity
or to any phase of Puritanism, or even Separatism, depended mainly upon
the estimate which he assigned to the Scriptures, whether as the sole
or only the co-ordinate authority for the institution and discipline of
the Christian Church. The free and devout reading of the Scriptures,
when engaging the fresh curiosity and zeal of thoroughly earnest
men and women, roused them to an amazed surprise at the enormous
discordance between the matter and spirit of the sacred book and the
ecclesiastical institutions and discipline under which they had been
living,—“the simplicity that was in Christ,” constrasted with the
towering corruptions and the monstrous tyranny and thraldom of the
Papacy! This first surprise developed into all shades and degrees of
protest, resentment, indignation, and almost blinding passion. Those
who are conversant with the writings of either class of the Puritans
know well with what paramount distinctness and emphasis they use the
term, “the Word.” The significance attached to the expression gives
us the key to Puritanism. For its most forcible use was when, in a
representative championship, it was made to stand in bold antagonism
with the term “the Church,” as inclusive of what it carried with
it alike under the Roman or the English prelatical system. “The
Church,” “the Scriptures,” are the word-symbols of the issue between
Conformity and Puritanism. Christ did not leave Scriptures behind him,
said one party, but he did leave a Church. Yes, replied the other
party; he left apostles who both wrote the Scriptures and planted and
administered the Church. The extreme to which the famous “Se-Baptist,”
John Smyth, carried this insistency upon the sole authority of the
Scriptures, led him to repudiate the use of the English Bible in
worship, and to require that the originals in Greek and Hebrew should
be substituted.[444] The fundamental distinguishing principle which is
common to all the phases of Puritanism, Dissent, and Separatism in the
English Church is this,—of giving to the Scriptures sole authority,
especially over matters in which the Church claimed control and
jurisdiction. There was in the earlier stage of the struggle little,
if any, discordance as to doctrine. Discipline and ritual were the
matters in controversy. The rule and text of Scripture were to displace
canon law and the Church courts. The first representatives of the
sect of Baptists resolved, “by the grace of God, not to receive or
practise any piece of positive worship which had not precept or example
in the Word.”[445] Nor were the Baptists in this respect singular or
emphatic beyond any others of the Dissenting company. None of them
had any misgiving as to the resources and sole authority of Scripture
to furnish them with model, guide, and rule. It is remarkable that
in view of the positive and reiterated avowal of this principle by
all the Puritans, there should have been in recent times, as there
was not in the first era of the controversy, any misapprehension of
their frank adoption of it, their resolute standing by it. Archbishop
Whately repeatedly marked it as evidence of the inspired wisdom of the
New Testament writers, that they do not define the form or pattern
of a church institution for government, worship, or discipline. The
Puritans, however, believed that those writers did this very thing,
and had a purpose in doing it. It was to strike at the very roots
of this exclusive Scriptural theory of the Puritans that Hooker
wrought out his famous and noble classical production, _The Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity_. He admitted in this elegant and elaborate work
that Scripture furnished the sole rule for doctrine, but argued with
consummate ability that it was not such an exclusive and sufficient
guide for government or discipline. The apostles did not, he said,
fix a rule for their successors. The Church was a divinely instituted
society; and, like every society, it had a full prerogative to make
laws for its government, ceremonial, and discipline. He argued that
a true Church polity must be taken not only from what the Scriptures
affirm distinctly, but also “from what the general rules and principles
of Scripture potentially contain.” Starting with his grand basis of
the sanctity and majesty of Law, as founded in natural order, he
insisted that the Church should establish such order in laws, rites,
and ceremonies within its fold, and that all who have been baptized
into it are bound to conform to its ecclesiastical laws. He would not
concede to the Puritans their position of denial, but he insisted that
Episcopacy was of apostolic institution. He was, however, at fault
in affirming that the Puritans admitted that they could not find all
the parts of the discipline which they stood for in the Scriptures.
Dean Stanley comes nearer to the truth, in what is for him a sharp
judgment, when he writes: “The Puritan idea that there was a Biblical
counterpart to every—the most trivial—incident or institution of
modern ecclesiastical life, has met with an unsparing criticism from
the hand of Hooker.”[446] Indeed, it was keenly argued as against these
Puritan sticklers for adhesion to Scripture rule and model, that they
by no means conformed rigidly to the pattern, as they dropped from
observance such matters as a community of goods, the love feast, the
kiss of peace, the Lord’s Supper in upper chambers, and baptism by
immersion.
It is, in fact, to this attempt of all Nonconformists to make the
Scriptures the sole and rigid guide alike in Church discipline as in
doctrine, that we are to trace their divergencies and dissensions
among themselves, their heated controversies, their discordant
factions, their constant parting up of their small conventicles
into smaller ones, even of only two or three members, and the real
origin of all modern sects. This was the common experience of such
Dissenters from the Church, alike in England before their exile and
then in all the places of their exile,—Holland, Frankfort, Geneva,
and elsewhere. It could not but follow on their keen, acute, and
concentrated searching and scanning of every sentence and word of
Scripture as bearing upon their contest with prelacy, that they should
be led beyond matters of mere discipline into those of doctrine. A
very small point was enough to open a new issue. It is vexing to the
spirit, while winning sometimes our admiration for the intense and
awful sincerity of the self-inflicting victims of their own scruples,
magnified into compunctions of conscience, to trace the quarrels and
leave-takings of those poor exiles on the Continent, struggling in
toil and sacrifice for a bare subsistence, but finding compensation
if not solace in their endless and ever-sharpening altercations. But
while all this saddens and oppresses us, we have to allow that it was
natural and inevitable. The Bible, the Holy Scriptures, will never
henceforward to any generation, in any part of the globe, be, or stand
for, to individuals or groups of men and women, what it was to the
early English Puritans. To it was intrusted all the honor, reverence,
obedience, and transcendent responsibility in the life, the hope,
and the salvation of men, which had but recently been given, in awe
and dread, to a now dishonored and repudiated Church, against which
scorn and contempt and hate could hardly enough embitter reproach and
invective. With that Book in hand, men and women, than whom there
have never lived those more earnest and sincere, sat down in absorbed
soul-devotion, to exercise their own thinking on the highest subjects,
to decide each for himself what he could make of it. Those who have
lived under a democracy, or a full civil, mental, and religious freedom
like our own, well know the crudity, the perversity, the persistency,
the conceits and idiosyncrasies into which individualism will run on
civil, social, and political matters of private and public interest.
How much more then will all exorbitant and eccentric, as well as all
ingenious and rational, manifestations of like sort present themselves,
when, instead of dealing with ballots, fashions, and social issues, men
and women take in hand a book which, so to speak, they have just seized
out of a descending cloud, as from the very hand of God. It was easy to
claim the right of private judgment; but to learn how wisely to use it
was quite a different matter. It was, however, in those earnest, keen
studies, those brooding musings, those searching and subtle processes
of speculation and dialectic argument engaged upon the Bible and upon
institutional religion, that the wit, the wisdom, the logic, and the
vigor of the understanding powers of people of the English race were
sharpened to an edge and a toughness known elsewhere in no other. The
aim of Prelatists, Conformists, and clerical and civil magistrates in
religion, to bring all into a common belief and ritual, was hopeless
from the start. It made no allowance for the rooted varieties and
divergencies in nature, taste, sensibility, judgment, and conscience
in individuals who were anything more than animated clods. How was it
possible for one born and furnished in the inner man to be a Quaker,
to be manufactured into a Churchman? It soon became very evident
that bringing such a people as the English into accord in belief and
observance under a hierarchical and parochial system would be no
work of dictation or persuasion, but would require authority, force,
penalties touching spiritual, mental, and bodily freedom, and resorting
to fines, violence, and prisons.
The consumptive boy-king, Edward VI., dying when sixteen years of age,
through his advisers, advanced the Reformation in some of its details
beyond the stage at which it was left by his father, and put the work
in the direction of further progress. But “Bloody Mary,” with her
spectral Spanish consort, Philip II., overset what had by no means
become a Protestant realm, and made it over to cardinal and pope.
Nearly three hundred martyrs, including an archbishop and four bishops,
perished at the stake, besides the uncounted victims in the dungeons.
No one had suffered to the death for religion in the preceding reign.
After her accession, Elizabeth stiffly held back from accepting even
that stage of reform reached by Edward. In the Convocation of 1562,
only a single vote, on a division, withstood the proposal to clear the
ritual of nearly every ceremony objectionable to the Puritans. The two
statutes of supremacy and uniformity, passed in the first year of the
reign of Elizabeth, brought the English Church under that subjection to
the temporal or civil jurisdiction which has continued to this day. The
firmness, not to say the obstinacy, with which the Queen stood for her
prerogative in this matter has been entailed upon Parliament; and the
ecclesiastical Convocation has in vain struggled to assert independency
of it. Elizabeth exhibited about an equal measure of zeal against
Catholics and Puritans. She frankly gave out her resolution that if
she should marry a Catholic prince, she should not allow him a private
chapel in her palace. About two hundred Catholics suffered death in her
reign.
An important episode in the development of Puritanism and Separatism
in the English Church brings to our notice the share which different
parties came to have in both those forms of dissent during a period of
temporary exile on the Continent in the reigns of Henry VIII. and Mary,
and afterward of Elizabeth. The results reached by the two classes
of those exiles were manifested respectively in the colonization,
first by Separatists, at Plymouth, and next by Nonconformists in the
Massachusetts Bay, and by other New England colonists.
In the thirty-first year of Henry’s reign, 1539, while the monarch was
vacillating between the old religion and the new, was enacted what
was called “The Bloody Statute.” This was of “six articles.” These
articles enforced the dogmas of Transubstantiation, of Communion in
One Element, of the Celibacy of the Clergy, of the Vows of Chastity,
of Private Masses, and of Auricular Confession. An infraction of these
articles in act or speech or writing was to be punished either by
burning, as heresy, or by execution, as felony. The articles were to
be publicly read by all the clergy quarterly. To escape the operation
of this statute, many of the clergy went to Geneva. Returning on the
accession of Edward, they had to exile themselves again when Mary came
to the throne, to venture home once more under Elizabeth, in 1559. As
early as 1528, there had been a small but earnest religious fellowship
of devout scholars in Cambridge, meeting for exercises of prayer and
reading. Three of its members—Bilney, Latimer, and Bradford—were
burned under Mary. Afterward Travers and Cartwright, both of them men
of eminent ability and religious fervor, had found refuge in Geneva;
and to them, on their return, is to be ascribed the strength and
prevalence of the spirit of Puritanism in Cambridge. The fact that so
many men of parts and scholarship and distinguished position were thus
principal agents in the first working of Puritanism, should qualify
the common notion that Nonconformity in England had its rise through
obscure and ordinary men. Some of the most eminent Puritans, and even
Separatists, were noted university men and scholars,—like Cartwright,
Perkins, Ames, Bradshaw, and Jacob, the last being of Oxford. Robinson,
the pastor at Leyden, has been pronounced to have been among the first
men of his time in learning and comprehensiveness of mind.[447] It
was really in the churches of the English exiles in Holland that the
ultimate principles of Independency and Congregationalism were wrought
out, to be asserted and so manfully stood for both in Old and in New
England. Indeed, the essential principles of largest toleration and
of equality, save in civil functions, had been established in Holland
in 1572, before the coming of the English exiles. Almost as real as
ideal was the recognition there of the one all-comprehensive church
represented by a multitude of independent elements. Greenwood and his
fellow-student at Cambridge,—Barrow, a layman,—joined the Separatists
in 1586. The Separatists in England might well, as they did, complain
to King James that he did not allow the same liberty to them, his own
subjects, as was enjoyed by the French and Walloon churches in London
and elsewhere in England.
On the accession of Queen Mary, who was crowned in 1553, more than
eight hundred of the English Reformers took refuge on the Continent.
Among them were five bishops, five deans, four archdeacons, fifty
doctors of divinity and famous preachers, with nobles, merchants,
traders, mechanics, etc. Among the “sundrie godly men” who went to
Frankfort, the Lutheran system gained much influence. Those who
found a refuge in Zurich and Geneva were more affected towards the
Calvinistic. Soon after a flourishing and harmonious church, with the
favor of the magistrates, had been established at Frankfort, dissension
about matters of discipline and the use of the Prayer-book of King
Edward VI., with or without a revision, was opened by some new-comers.
The advice of Knox, Calvin, and others, which was asked, did not
prevent an acrimonious strife, which ended in division.[448] Carrying
back their differences to England, we find them contributing to deepen
the alienation and the variances between Conformists, Nonconformists,
and Separatists. The intimacy and sympathy with Reformers on the
Continent naturally induced the exiles, even the English bishops
who had been among them, to lay but little stress on the exclusive
prerogatives of Episcopacy, including the theory of Apostolic
Succession.
The English bishops who were most earnest in the early measures of
reform,—such as Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer,—realizing that in the
minds of the common people the strong ties of association connected
with the emblems, forms, and vestments of the repudiated Church of
Rome would encourage lingering superstitions in their continued use,
would have had them wholly set aside. Especially would they have had
substituted in the chancels of churches tables instead of altars, as
the latter would always be identified with the Mass. The people also
associated the validity of clerical administrations with priestly
garments. The starting point of the Puritan agitation and protest as
to these matters may well be found, therefore, in the refusal of Dr.
Hooper to wear the clerical vestments for his consecration as Bishop of
Gloucester in 1550. Having exiled himself at Zurich during the latter
part of the reign of Henry VIII., Hooper had become more thoroughly
imbued with Reforming principles, and withstood the compromising
compliances which some of the Continental Reformers yielded. Even
Ridley insisted upon his putting on the vestments for his consecration;
and after being imprisoned for his recusancy, he was forced to a
partial concession. This matter of habits, tippets, caps, etc., may
be viewed either as a bugbear, or as representative of a very serious
principle.
In an early stage of the Puritan movement as working in the progress of
the Reformation in England, it thus appeared that what, as represented
in men and principles, might be called a third party, was to assert
itself. As the event proved, in the struggle for the years following,
and in the accomplished result still triumphant, this third party was
to hold the balance of power. There was a general accord in dispensing
with the Pope, renouncing his sway, and retaining within the realm the
exercise of all ecclesiastical jurisdiction. A Romanizing party was
still in strength, with its hopes temporarily reviving, its agencies,
open and secret, on the alert, and its threats bold, if opportunity
should favor the execution of them. This Romanizing faction may
represent one extreme; the Puritans may represent another. A third, and
for a considerable space of time weaker, as already stated, than either
of them, intervened, to win at last the victory. In ridding themselves
of Rome, the Puritans aimed to rid the Church of everything that had
come into it from that source,—hierarchy, ceremonial, superstition,
discipline, and assumption of ecclesiastical prerogative,—reducing
the whole Church fabric to what they called gospel simplicity in rule
and order; the apostolic model. This, as we have noticed, was to be
sought full, sufficient, and authoritative in the Scriptures. But
neither of the Reforming monarchs, nor the majority of the prelates
successively exercising ecclesiastical jurisdiction, were prepared
for this reversion to so-called first principles. They would not
allow the sufficiency nor the sole authority of the Scriptural model;
nor would they admit that all that was wrought into the hierarchy,
the ceremonial, the institution, and the discipline of the English
Church came into it through Popery, and had the taint or blemish of
Popery. The English Church now represents the principles then argued
out, maintained, and adopted. It followed a principle of selection,
sometimes called compromise, to some seeming arbitrary, to others
reasonable and right. It proceeded upon the recognition of an interval
between the close of the ministry of the apostles and the rise of the
Papacy, with its superstitious innovations and impositions, during
which certain principles and usages in the government and ceremonial
of the Church came into observance. Though these might not have the
express warrant of Scripture, they were in nowise inconsistent with
Scripture. They might claim to have the real warrant and approval of
the apostles, because they were “primitive,” and might even be regarded
as essential, as Hooker so earnestly tried to show, to the good order,
dignity, and efficiency of the Church of Christ. With exceeding ability
did the Puritan and the Church parties deal with this vital issue. The
Puritans brought to it no less of keen acumen, learning, and logic than
did their opponents. They thoroughly comprehended what the controversy
involved. When, fifty years ago, substantially the same issue was under
vigorous discussion in the Oxford or Tractarian agitation, so far were
the “Puseyites,” so-called, from bringing into it any new matter, that
the old arsenal was drawn upon largely for fresh use.
The Puritans held loyally to the fundamental position asserted by
their sturdy champion. Cartwright, in his _Admonition_, etc.,—“The
discipline of Christ’s Church that is necessary for all time is
delivered by Christ, and set down in the Holy Scripture.” The
objection, fatal in the eyes of the Puritans, to receiving, as
authoritative, customs and vouchers of the so-called “Primitive” Church
and of the Fathers, was that it compelled to the practice of a sort
of eclecticism in choosing or rejecting, by individual preference or
judgment, out of that mass of heterogeneous gathering which Milton
scornfully described as “the drag-net of antiquity.” Though the
pleaders on both sides of the controversy succeeded in showing that
“patristic” authority, and the usages and institutions which might be
traced out and verified in the dim past, were by no means in accord or
harmony as to what was “primitive,” both parties seem to have consented
to hide, gloss over, or palliate very much of the crudity, folly,
superstition, conceit, and discordancy so abounding in the writings of
the Fathers. Nothing could be more positive than the teaching of St.
Augustine,—not drawn from the New Testament, in which the rite was
for adults, but from the then universal practice of the Church,—that
baptism was to be for infants, and by immersion. That Father taught
that an unbaptized infant is forever lost; and that, besides baptism,
the infant’s salvation depends upon its receiving the Eucharist. Yet
this has not hindered but that the vast majority of Christians, Roman
Catholic and Protestant, save a single sect, administer the rite by
sprinkling infants. How, too, could the Prelatists approve a quotation
from Tertullian:[449] “Where there are only three, and they laics,
there is a church”?
In consistency with this their vital principle of the sole sufficiency
of the Scripture institution and pattern for a church, the work of
purification led its resolute asserters to press their protests and
demands against not only such superstitions and innovations as could
be traced directly to the Roman corruption and innovation, but to a
more thorough expurgation. Incident to the rupture with the Papacy,
and in the purpose to repel what seemed to be its vengeful and
spiteful devices for recovering its sway, there was developed among
the most impassioned of the Reformers an intense and scornful hate, a
bitter heaping of invectives, objurgations, and all-wrathful epithets
against the old Church as simply blasphemous,—the personification of
Antichrist. So they were resolute to rid themselves of all “the marks
of the Beast.” The scrapings, rags, tatters of Popery, and everything
left of such remnants, especially provoked their contempt. Having
adopted the conviction that the “Mass” was an idolatrous performance,
all its paraphernalia, associated in the minds of the common people
with it as a magical rite, the priestly and altar habits, the cap,
the tippet, the rochet, etc., were denounced and condemned. The very
word “priest,” with all the functionary and mediatorial offices going
with it, was repudiated. The New Testament knew only of ministers,
pastors, teachers. While, of course, recognizing that the apostles
exercised special and peculiar prerogatives in planting the Church,
the Puritans maintained that they had no successors in their full
authority. The Christian Church assembly they found to be based upon
and started from the Synagogue, with its free, popular methods, and
not upon the Temple, with its altar, priests, and ritual. It is an
interesting and significant fact, that while the Reformation in its
ferment was working as if all the elements of Church institution
were perfectly free for new combinations, the edition of the English
Bible called Cranmer’s, in 1539, translated the word _ecclesia_
by “congregation,” not “church,”—thus providing for that Puritan
principle of the province of the laity. Doctrine, discipline, and
ritual, or ceremony, being the natural order in which ecclesiastical
affairs should receive regard, there being at first an accord among
the Reformers as to doctrine, the other essentials engrossed all
minds. The equality of the ministers of religion, all of whom were
brethren, with no longer a master upon earth, struck at the very roots
of all hierarchical order. What would have been simply natural in
the objections of the Puritans when they saw that Rome was to leave
the prelatical element of its system fastened upon the realm, was
intensified by the assumption of dangerous and, as they believed,
unchristian and unscriptural power and sway by a class of the clergy
of lordly rank exercising functions in Church and State, and taking
titles from their baronial tenure of land. These lordly prelates had
recently been filling some of the highest administrative and executive
offices under the Crown, and holding places in diplomacy. In an early
stage of the Reformation, the mitred abbots had been dropped out of
the upper house of Parliament. While they were in it, they, with the
twenty-one “Lord Bishops,” preponderated over the temporal peers. As
their exclusion weakened the ecclesiastical power in the government,
the prelates who remained seemed to believe and to act as if it fell to
them to represent and exercise the full prerogative of sway which had
belonged to the old hierarchy. Very marked is the new phase assumed by
the spirit and course of the Nonconformists under this changed aspect
of the controversy. The Puritans had begun by objecting and protesting
against certain usages; they now set themselves resolutely against
the authority of those who enforced such usages. To a great extent,
the Roman Catholic prelates on those parts of the Continent where the
Reformation established itself, deserted their sees. This left the way
clear in those places for a church polity independent of prelacy. The
retention of their sees and functions by the English bishops, and the
addition to their number by the consecration of others as selected
by the Crown, thus made the struggle which the Puritans maintained
in England quite unlike that of their sympathizers on the Continent.
The issue thus raised on the single question of the Divine right and
the apostolic authority and succession of bishops was continuously in
agitation through the whole contention maintained by Dissenters. In
other elements of it, the controversy exhibited changing phases, as the
process of the reform seemed at intervals to be advanced or impeded,
while the kingdom, as we have noted, was pulsating between the old and
the new _régime_,—as Henry VIII. and his three children, in their
succession to his throne, sought to modify, to arrest, or to limit it.
The distribution among the people of the Scriptures in the English
tongue was favored and brought about by Thomas Cromwell and Cranmer.
The privilege, however, was soon revoked, as the people were thus
helped to take the matter of religion into their own hands. The mother
tongue was first used in worship with the translated litany in 1542,
which was revised in 1549. The new prayer-book, canons, and homilies
were brought into use. It was by royal authority, and not either by
Convocation or Parliament, that the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion
were imposed. On Elizabeth’s accession there were nine thousand four
hundred priests in England. About two hundred of these abandoned their
posts rather than comply with the conditions exacted by the stage in
innovation already reached. The more pronounced champions of the Church
of England are earnest in pleading that the rupture with Rome was not
the act of the King, but of what might be called the Church itself. The
as yet unreformed bishops, we are told, had in Convocation, in 1531,
denied the Papal supremacy; then Parliament, the universities, the
cathedral bodies, and the monastic societies had confirmed the denial.
But on all these points there are still open and contested questions of
fact and argument not requiring discussion here.
Another radical question concerned the rights and province of the laity
in all that entered into the institutional part of religion, and the
oversight and administration of discipline in religious assemblies.
There certainly could be no complaint that lay or civil power as
represented by the monarch had not exhibited sufficient potency in
fettering the ecclesiastical or clerical usurpation. An already quoted
Act in the twenty-sixth year of Henry’s reign affirmed that “whatsoever
his Majesty should enjoin in matters of religion should be obeyed by
all his subjects.” The Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity in the first
year of Elizabeth made the Church subordinate to, and dependent upon,
the civil power. Thus ecclesiastical authority was restrained by the
prerogative of the Crown, while ceremonial and discipline, as approved
by the monarch, were left at the dictation of Parliament.
But this substitution of the lay power as represented by King or Queen
and the Houses of Parliament for the Papal sway, by no means satisfied
the Puritan idea and conviction as to the rightful claims of the laity
in their membership of the reconstructed Church. Barrow described in
the following sharp sentence the summary way of proceeding so far as
the laity were concerned: “All these people, with all their manners,
were in one day, with the blast of Queen Elizabeth’s trumpet, of
ignorant Papists and gross idolaters, made faithful Christians and
true professors.” It was said that the people, divided and classed in
local territorial parishes, were there treated like sheep in folds.
Illiterate, debauched, incompetent, “dumb” ministers or priests assumed
the pastorate in a most promiscuous way over these flocks. Membership
in the Church came through infancy in baptism. The Puritans wished
to sort out the draught of the Gospel net, which gathered of every
kind. They claimed that the laity should themselves be parties in
the administration of religion, in testing and approving discipline.
They believed, too, that ministers should be supported by their
congregations, and that the tithes and the landed privileges of the
clergy were bribes and lures to them, making them independent and
autocratical. Church lands and endowments, they insisted, should be
sequestered, as had been the abbeys, nunneries, and monasteries. As
soon as Separatist assemblies were associated in England or among the
exiles on the Continent, altercations and divisions occurred among them
as to the functions and the powers of the eldership, the responsibility
and the authority of pastor and covenanted members in discipline.
Our space will admit here of only a brief recognition, conformed
however to its slight intrinsic importance, of an element entering
into the Puritan agitation, which at the time introduced into it a
glow of excitement and a marvellously effective engagement of popular
sympathy. The controversy between the Puritans and the Prelatists
had in the main been pursued, however passionately, yet in a most
grave and serious spirit, with a profound sense of the dignity and
solemnity of its themes and interests. But from the time and occasion
when Aristophanes tossed the grotesque trifling of his _Clouds_ around
the sage and lofty Socrates, down to this day, when Mr. Punch finds
a weekly condiment of mischief and fun for the people of England in
their own doings and in their treatment by their governors, it would
seem as if no subject of human interest, however exalted its moment,
could escape the test of satire, sarcasm, and caricature. Experimental
ventures of this sort are naturally ephemeral, but they concentrate
their venom or their disdain upon their shrinking victims. Some of Ben
Jonson’s plays and Butler’s _Hudibras_ have now alone a currency, and
that a by no means extended one, out of a vast mass of the printed
ridicule which was turned upon the Puritans. But the matter now in hand
is the skill and jollity with which one or more Puritans, with the gift
of the comic in his stern make-up, plied that keen blade in his own
cause. Erasmus, though he never broke from the communion of the Papal
Church, engaged the most stinging power of satire and sarcasm, not
only against mean and humble monks, but against all the ranks of the
hierarchy, not sparing the loftiest. Helped out with Holbein’s cuts,
Erasmus’s _Encomium of Folly_ drew roars of mirth and glee from those
who winced under its mocking exposures. Even the grave Beza, in Geneva,
tried his hand in this trifling. But the venture of this sort which
cunningly and adroitly intruded itself at a peculiarly critical phase
of the Puritan agitation, was of the most daring and rasping character.
Under the happily chosen pseudonym of “Martin Mar-Prelate,” there
appeared in rapid succession, during seven months of the years 1588 and
1589, the same number of little, rudely printed tracts, the products of
ambulatory presses, which engaged the full power of satire, caricature,
and sarcasm, with fun and rollicking, invective and bitter reproach and
exposure against the hierarchy, especially against four of the most
odious of the bishops. The daring spirit of these productions was well
matched by the devices of caution and secrecy under which they were
put in print, and in the sly methods by which they were circulated, to
be caught up, concealed, and revelled over by thousands who would find
keen enjoyment in them, as in the partaking of the sweets of stolen
food and waters. They may be said to have stopped only at the very
edge of ribaldry, indecency, and even blasphemy. But they were free
and trenchant, coarse and virulent. As such, they testify to the smart
under the provocation of which they were written, and to the scorn and
contempt entertained for the men and measures to which were committed
for the time the transcendent interests of religion and piety. The more
dignified and serious of the Puritans, like Greenham and Cartwright,
frowned upon and repudiated these weapons of bitter gibe and contumely.
But there was a constituency from which they received the heartiest
welcome, and, as is usual in such cases, their circulation and
efficiency were vastly multiplied by equally bitter and malignant
replies to them from the pens or from the instigation of bishops. The
whole detective force of the kingdom was put on the search for the
writers and the printers. So adroit and cunning was the secret of their
authorship and production at the time, that up to this day it has not
been positively disclosed. Never has the investigation been so keenly
or intelligently pressed for clearing the mystery investing the Martin
Mar-Prelate tracts as by the indefatigable researches and the sharpened
inquisition of Dr. Dexter. In his _Congregationalism_ he gives his
readers an exhaustive sketch and summary, in detail and analysis, of
all the facts and documents. His conclusion, which cannot be hopefully
contested or invalidated, is that they were written by Barrow, a
prisoner in the Fleet, and carried through the press by the agency of
Penry. There is abundant evidence in the appearance, publication, and
circulation of tracts known to have come from the hands of imprisoned
Puritans, that the bars of jails and dungeons offered no sufficient
barriers to prevent the secret intercourse and interchange of
intelligence between those whom they enclosed and friends outside, who
dared all risks in their zeal and fidelity.
* * * * *
We must now close this narration of the issues raised in the Puritan
controversy, whether by Nonconformists in the Church or by Separatists
withdrawing from it, that we may note the concentration of forces
and witnesses which were drawn together in assemblies or fellowships
prepared in Old England to transfer and establish their principles
in New England. Many of the clergy whose views and sympathies were
warmly engaged in the further work of reform and purification within
the Church, and who at the same time were moderate and conciliatory in
their spirit, contrived to remain in their parochial fields, perhaps
in this way accomplishing the most for all that was reasonable and
good in the cause which they had at heart. When occasionally molested
or challenged, they might contrive to make their peace. But the crisis
and its demands called—as has always been the case in such intense
agitations of religious passions—for patient, steadfast, and resolute
witnesses in suffering, for those who should be hounded and tracked by
judicial processes, who should be deprived of subsistence and liberty,
and be ready not only for being hidden away in prisons or exiled
beyond the seas, but for public execution as martyrs. The emergency
of time and occasion found such as these; and it was of such as these
that there were men and women in training for wilderness work on this
soil. And the combination of materials and persons was precisely
such as would meet the exactions of such an enterprise. There were
university men, scholars, doctors in divinity, practised disputants
in their cherished lore, and with gifts of zeal, fervor, and tender
eloquence in discourse and prayer. There were gentry likewise,—men
and women lifted in the social scale, with furnishings of mind and
worldly goods. To these were joined, in a fellowship which equalized
many distinctions, yeomen, small traders, artisans, and some of every
place and grade, save the low or mean or reckless, in the make-up of
the population of the realm. Governor Bradford says that the first
Separatist or Independent Church in England was that of which John
Rough, the minister, and Cuthbert Symson, the deacon, were burned alive
by Bonner, in the reign of Queen Mary. The laborious and faithful
pages of Dr. Dexter, in his _Congregationalism_, must be closely
studied for the results of the marvellous diligence and keen research
by which he has traced every vestige, memorial, and testimony that
can throw light on the little assemblies of those outlawed Puritans.
It is a curious and engaging occupation in our peaceful and lethargic
times of religious ease, to scan the make-up, the spirit, and methods
of those humble assemblies in their lurking-places, private houses,
barns, or the open fields, frequently changing their appointments under
risks from spies and tipstaves, with their secret code of signals
for communicating intelligence. Their religious exercises were of
the intensest earnestness, and above all things stimulating. Their
conferences about order and discipline bristled with individualisms
and scruples. Many of these assemblies might soon resolve themselves
into constituencies of single members. There was scarce one of those
assemblies, either in England or in exile on the Continent, that did
not part into two or three. There was a stern necessity which compelled
variance and dissension among the members. They had in hand the Bible,
and each was trying what he could draw out of it, as an oracle and
a rule. They had to devise, discuss, and if possible agree upon and
enforce ways of church order and discipline, a form of worship, rules
of initiation into church membership, of suspension, expulsion, and
restoration. It was brain work, heart work, and soul work with them.
It would be difficult to reduce to any exact statements the numbers of
persons, or even of what may in a loose sense be called assemblies, of
Nonconformists or Separatists who remained in England, or who were in
refuge on the Continent at the period just preceding the colonization
of New England. What was called the Millenary Petition, which was
presented to James I., as he came in from Scotland, was claimed to
represent at least eight hundred Nonconforming ministers.