divine rule and celestial destiny, and a high and fixed moral
purpose,--these appear in full strength in men of Shakspere's time, the
men of religion; but in their minds inextricably blent with a scheme of
the universe which it is plain was to Shakspere as unreal as the
mythology of the Greeks, and which he treats in much the same way, merely
borrowing it for a dramatic purpose. The men of religion had no such
consummate expression in literature as Shakspere, though they had their
Taylor and Herbert and Milton; but to appreciate them we must look at
them in action, and we may take the Puritan as their type.
But first let us note that in Catholicism as early as in Protestantism
appeared the sharp rift between intellect and belief. Montaigne, a man
of the world, is outwardly a conformist, but a real skeptic. A nominal
Catholic, he corresponds to Shakspere, a nominal Protestant. Montaigne
reveals the world of one personality as, frankly as Shakspere pictures a
world of humanity, and in each the purely religious element is almost
totally absent.
Shakspere shows the widest reach of the mind apart from a definite
religious purpose or a strong religious faith. In contrast with him is
the Puritan effort to apprehend and follow a divine rule and achieve a
divine destiny. The typical Puritan addressed himself to man's
foes,--all griefs and sufferings culminating in Death; all wrong-doing,
as Sin; and the retribution and woe hereafter, as Hell. To escape from
these was his supreme object, and to win what he as firmly believed
in--Holiness, Life, and Heaven.
The creed was accepted as the form of this truth, but the earnest men
sought to know its truths experimentally,--to take home the full sense of
them. This was found in the consciousness of man's supreme need; and,
responding to that, a divine command, an invitation, and a threat. The
result of this was to set man upon a struggle so intense that it was
indeed a warfare,--first, against his own lusts, then against the evils
in the world around him. These evils were to him embodied--in the Pope,
the head of a false religion, the oppressor of God's people; in the
imitation and approach to Popery in the church of England; in all false
belief and error, all wrong-doers, and Satan himself.
The Puritan believed that the sublimest possibility was open to man, and
purposed at every cost to achieve it. "Man's chief end is to glorify God
and enjoy him forever." There was also the most dreadful possibility to
be shunned. All earthly pleasure he held in suspicion, as a bait of the
great adversary of souls.
The belief of serious men in the seventeenth century was that theology
was the guide to heaven. They believed this as modern men believe that
science is the guide to human life. Hence, an infinite diversity of
sects, and hence the attempts to enforce each by authority.
The Bible fed the deeper substratum of the Puritan life. It touched and
fired the imagination of the common people. The dominant idea on which
the English Puritan laid hold was the Old Testament idea of God's chosen
people,--separate from the rest of the world, given a code of written
laws, led by a divinely appointed priesthood and prophets, disciplined by
a constant intervention of rewards and punishments. This conception they
transferred to the faithful of their own time; and against them was
Antichrist, in the Roman church, to which the English prelates seemed
traitorously to incline. They proposed to purify and maintain the church
in England, or, failing there, to transplant it to America.
The typical Puritan character, as most fully worked out in Scotland and
New England, was a mixture of intense idealism and sternest practicality.
The idealism aimed to control every action of life, and to base itself on
the ultimate reality. It renounced the aid of art and embodied
imagination; it renounced human authority; it had no aid from material
beauty, none from knowledge of nature.
This religion had an appalling side. Foremost among its teachings was
man's depravity and the terrible wrath of God. The worst cruelty of the
Iroquois was mercy compared to God's dealing with sinners. This was an
inheritance from an older religion. But the condition of salvation in
the Catholic church--and in all high church religion--was practically
obedience to the church. But the Puritan required a conscious change of
heart, which to many was impossible. The utmost pains were taken that
the most laborious right-doing should count for nothing, unless
accompanied by this mystic experience.
Catholicism put man under guardianship through the hierarchy, the
confessional, the whole church system. Calvinism threw him on his own
resources,--set him face to face with God. It, too, set a church to help
him, but even the minister of the church exhorted him to make his own
peace with God. This responsibility weighted men heavily, and made them
sombre. It crushed the feeble, but made strong men stronger.
The first half of the seventeenth century was full of religious
enthusiasms, which carried high expectations. Milton looked for a
wonderful advance in truth. The Puritan sought to build a church simple
in forms, austere in morals and manners, exacting personal holiness of
its members, and subjecting the ungodly to a rule of the saints. Charles
the First and Archbishop Laud believed in a religious monarchy; that the
king should be chief in church and state; that beauty of ritual should go
along with the encouragement of festivity and joyousness; and that the
ultimate aim was a reunited Christendom.
The wave passed, and these expectations had failed. But the force of the
Puritan movement had accomplished certain things. It had turned the tide
of the English civil war, it had leavened the more serious portion of the
nation, and it had planted the New England colonies.
In England the Puritan zeal gave force to overthrow despotism, but it
then plunged the nation into chaos; it could not rule or harmonize the
composite forces of national life; constitutional monarchy was
established at last under William of Orange, by men of less fervent and
lofty temper than the Puritans, but better conversant with the wants and
possibilities of the actual world.
Milton was a man of heroic mould. He governed himself by a deliberate
and lofty moral purpose. The thirst for "moral perfection" inspired and
ruled his life. He was far from the narrowness of the typical Puritan.
He was open on all sides to the noblest influences. The heroic antique
temper, the beauty and richness of the Greek, the religious seriousness
of the Puritan, the English love of freedom, all met in him. He was at
heart a poet and scholar, but he threw himself into the active life of
his time.
Yet his genius was cramped by his theology. He could not fuse the
conflicting elements of thought,--just as the heroes of the Revolution,
Pym and Hampden and Cromwell and Falkland, could not blend the elements
of English political society. He is like his own lion "struggling to get
free." His epic is a story of disaster. His deity is undivine. There
is more that touches sympathy and admiration in his Satan than in his
Jehovah or Adam.
The best thing he gives us is his own noble personality, imbuing the
majestic rhythm with a kind of moral power. Servant and friend of
Cromwell, sacrificing all scholarly delight to his country's need,
champion of freedom, worshiper of truth, building in neglected solitude
his epic,--his works are less than Shakspere's, but _he_ is greater than
the imaginary Hamlet, Othello, or Brutus.
Cromwell is in action the counterpart of Milton in thought,--a heroic
nature struggling with irreconcilable elements. Each is confronted by a
situation as difficult as Hamlet's; but though they cannot fully master
it, they deal with it like men.
Here is the true advantage of the men of religion over Shakspere and his
creations,--here is the greater world than Shakspere saw,--men grappling
with their fate and in the struggle working out heroic lives.
The finest type of the New England colonists is seen in the Winthrops,
father and son. When the migration is determined on, the son writes:
"For myself, I have seen so much of the variety of the world that I
esteem no more of the diversities of countries than as so many inns,
whereof the traveler that hath lodged in the best or the worst findeth no
difference when he cometh to his journey's end; and I shall call that my
country where I may most glorify God and enjoy the presence of my dearest
friends. Therefore herein I submit myself to God's will and yours, and,
with your leave, do dedicate myself (laying by all desire of other
employments whatsoever) to the service of God and the company herein,
with the whole endeavors both of body and mind."
The elder Winthrop is shown to us in the Journal or chronicle of the
Massachusetts colony, a sombre record of seemingly petty events; in his
religious diary of an earlier period; and in his domestic letters, which
are full of manly strength and sweetness. He combined some of the chief
elements of greatness,--loftiness of aim; a character disinterested,
patient, modest, brave; deep religious experience; and personal
tenderness.
To a man like Winthrop, the heart of his creed was that man's true aim is
moral perfection and a living relation with a Divine Lover. The sense of
a Divine Presence--inspiring, ruling, gladdening--is what his religion
means to him. In this quiet country gentleman, portrayed in his private
diary, is an intense play of feeling and imagination, concentrated on the
attainment of a personal and social ideal.
All this introspective fervor merged into a public enterprise,--the
transplanting of a church and colony to Massachusetts Bay. The last half
of his life was spent in the most assiduous, minute, exacting labors.
The self-watchful diary gives place to a public chronicle, prosaic as a
ship's log-book--and, like the log-book, the shorthand record of
adventures, heroisms, and sublimities.
In the Puritan of Winthrop's type the flame of spiritual emotion was
harnessed and made to serve. The drudgery of founding New England was
done by men whose hearts were touched with fire,--men such as Lowell
sings of:--
"Who, dowered with every gift of passion,
In that fierce flame can forge and fashion
Of self and sin the anchor strong;
Can thence compel the driving force
Of daily life's mechanic course."
Winthrop set out with a great ideal--shown with statesmanlike breadth in
the "Considerations," and with apostolic fervor in the "Model of
Christian Charity." His conception was cramped into conformity with the
far narrower views of the ministers who were the leaders in the colony.
Yet it was his ideal and his personality which gave most to success.
The letters between Winthrop and his wife are an example of human love
perfected by a higher love. He writes to her: "Neither can the sea drown
thy husband, nor enemies destroy, nor any adversity deprive thee of thy
husband." Shakspere has no note like that. Margaret writes from her
country home to her husband in London: "My good husband, cheer up thy
heart in the expectation of God's goodness to us, and let nothing dismay
or discourage thee; if the Lord be with us, who can be against us? My
grief is the fear of staying behind thee, but I must leave all to the
good providence of God." She was obliged to stay behind in England,
awaiting the birth of a child. On the eve of sailing he writes her: "I
purpose, if God will, to be with thee upon Thursday come sen'night, and
then I must take my leave of thee for a summer's day and a winter's day.
The Lord our good God will (I hope) send us a happy meeting again in his
good time. Amen! Being now ready to send away my letters, I received
thine; the reading of it has dissolved my head into tears. Can write no
more. If I live, I will see thee ere I go. I shall part from thee with
sorrow enough; be comfortable, my most sweet wife, our God will be with
thee. Farewell."
A few months later, across the pages of the Journal, full of the cares
and anxieties of the struggling colony, shines a ray of pure joy.
Margaret has come! And the whole community rejoices and makes cheer,
with homely and hearty feasting, for the happiness of their good governor.
The actual conditions nourished homely virtues,--industry, thrift,
self-reliance, family affection, civic responsibility. The greatness of
early New England is partly measured by the fact that there were
comparatively no dregs, no mass of ignorance and vice. It was not the
individuals who rise into sight at this distance who were superior to the
prominent men of England or France,--it was the lower stratum which was
above that elsewhere. Two prime causes worked to this elevation,--the
spiritual estimate of man and the economic conditions which offered
independence to every one on the condition "work and save." The social
and political conditions were largely shaped by these underlying facts.
The wrestle for a livelihood under stern material conditions was a prime
factor in the making of New England. Whatever the creed might say, in
practice Work was the equal partner of Faith in building manhood and the
state. The soil was to their bodies what Calvinism was to their
souls,--yielding nourishment, but only through a hard struggle. Its
sterility drove them to the sea for a livelihood; they became fishermen;
then, carrying their fish and lumber abroad, they grew into commerce.
They traded along the coast, to the West Indies, to Europe, and so into
their little province came the winds of the larger world. They learned
the sailor's virtues,--his courage, his mingled awe and mastery of
elemental forces, his sense of lands beyond the horizon. Well might
Winthrop name the first ship he launched "The Blessing of the Bay."
The austere land had small room for slaves, dependent and incapable. One
of the first large companies included some scores of bondmen; they landed
to face a fierce and hungry winter, and straightway the bondmen were set
free,--as slaves they would be an incumbrance; as freemen they could get
their own living. The thrifty colonists of a later generation did a
driving business in African slaves for their southern neighbors, but they
had small use for them at home.
Winthrop's constant effort, as shown in his Journal, is for reason and
right. It is the arguments for and against any course that he
elaborates. Scarce a word of their sufferings or of his own
feelings--but to know and do the right was all-important. The greatness
of his own ideal is shown when he draws with a free hand, in the
"Conclusions" or the "Model." In the Journal, he is laboring toward this
under the iron conditions of actualities. He and his associates had to
be strong-willed and stern; they were warring against tremendous
difficulties--more tremendous to them because interpreted as the work of
Satan, while even their God was an awful being.
Superstition throws a dark shadow over the chronicle. Even Winthrop was
deeply infected by it. Disasters small and great were interpreted, on
the Old Testament idea, as divine judgments. A boy seven years old fell
through the ice and was drowned while his parents were at lecture, and
his sister was drowned in trying to save him. "The parents had no more
sons, and confessed they had been too indulgent towards him, and had set
their hearts overmuch on him." A man working on a milldam kept on for an
hour after nightfall on Saturday to finish it, and next day his child
fell into a well and was drowned. The father confessed it as a judgment
of God for his Sabbath-breaking.
There is not unfrequent mention of some woman driven by religious
brooding to frenzy, sometimes to murder. The awful possibilities of hell
for herself and her children wrought the mother-heart to madness. The
religious guides of the people used unsparingly the appeal to fear. The
belief in witchcraft, which long had scourged Europe, broke out in a
panic of fear and cruelty. It was a tragic culmination of the worst
elements,--superstition, malignity, ministerial tyranny. Then came the
reaction, and with it a triumph of the wiser sense, the cooler temper,
the layman's moderation, which thenceforth were to guide the commonwealth
on a humbler but safer road.
In a dramatic sense the turning-point of the story--and the revelation of
the saving power at the heart of this grim people--was when, after the
witchcraft frenzy had subsided, Samuel Sewall, the chief justice of the
colony, rose in his place in the meeting-house and humbly confessed
before God and man that he had erred and shed innocent blood.
In the more prosaic temper of the next stage, a sturdy manhood sometimes
flashes into poetry. So John Wise, a minister but the leader of the
popular party in church government, strikes the high note of courage: "If
men are trusted with duty, they must trust that, and not events. If men
are placed at the helm to steer in all weather that blows, they must not
be afraid of the waves or a wet coat."
In personal religion there was from the outset the intense struggle for
an inward peace and joy, with tears and groanings,--the victory sometimes
found, sometimes missed. There was a resolute facing of what was held as
truth. The ministers and laymen battled with the problems of the
infinite. The issue after two centuries was an open break from Calvinism
in Channing, and the glad vision of Emerson.
A feature in the story is the New Englander's relation with Nature as he
found her,--first like a terrible power of destruction, by cold and
hunger; this he conquers by endurance. Then for generations he wrings a
hard livelihood out of her. Then by his wits he makes her serve him more
completely. At last her beauty is disclosed to him,--a beauty which has
its roots in the very struggles he has had, and the contrasts they
afford,--no child of the tropics loves Nature as he does.
So of the sea: first he dares it as explorer and voyager; then he makes
it his feeding-ground--catches the cod and chases the whale; in his ships
he does battle against pirate and public foe; he makes the deep the
highway of his commerce; and at last he feels its grandeur, into which
enters the reminiscence of all his combats.
Elements which Puritanism had renounced came in later from other sources.
The fresh contact with truth and reality was given by Franklin. The free
joy of religion, its aggressive love, came in Methodism. Beautiful
ritual returned in Episcopacy. The frank enjoyment of life developed in
the South, transmitted from the country life of the English squire and
mellowed on American soil.
At the outset of the story of America stands the Puritan, his heart set
on subduing the infernal element and winning the celestial; regarding
this life as a stern warfare, but the possible pathway to an infinite
happiness beyond; fierce to beat down the emissaries of evil,--heretic,
witch, or devil; yet tender at inmost heart, and valiant for the truth as
he sees it. After a century, behold the Yankee,--the shrewd, toilful,
thrifty occupant of the homely earth; one side of his brain speculating
on the eternities, and the other side devising wealth, comfort, personal
and social good. And to-day, successor of Puritan and Yankee, Cavalier
and Quaker, stands the American, composite of a thousand elements, with a
destiny which seems to hover between heights and abysses, but amid all
whose vicissitudes and faults we still see faith and courage and manly
purpose working toward a kingdom of God on earth and in heaven.
The Protestant way of salvation was through "experimental religion."
This meant the appropriation as a personal experience of the truths of
human guilt and divine mercy. A man must not only believe but intensely
feel that he was wholly guilty before God and in danger of everlasting
damnation. He must then have a vivid appreciation that Christ out of
pure love had died for him, and that on this ground alone God offered him
pardon and salvation. This offer he must consciously accept, with
emotions of profound remorse for his wrong-doing, gratitude for his
deliverance, and absolute dependence upon divine grace for help against
future sin and for final reception to an endless heaven.
To attain this experience was the aim and goal of the religious man,
under all the more strenuous forms of Protestantism. Until it was
reached, all good actions, all fair traits of character, were worthless.
Without it there was no escape from the unquenchable fire. If it came as
a genuine experience, it was the passage from death unto life. But as
there was great possibility of self-deception in the matter, the mind was
constantly thrown back on self-examination, and in sensitive natures
there was often an alternation of terrors and transports.
This experience of saving faith, of experimental religion, must be
translated for us into very different language and symbols from those
which our ancestors used before we can have any sympathy with it.
Perhaps the truest account of the matter for us is something like this:
the Christian theology was a system of myths, which had grown out of
facts of human experience. The initial fact was a good man whose love
went out to bad men, and woke in them a sense of their own wrong along
with a new joy and hope. From this centre the influence spread in
widening circles, and was gradually transformed in the expression,--mixed
too with earlier notions, with crudities, with sophistications,--until
Justice and Love and Punishment and Forgiveness were personified and
dramatized and a whole cloud-world of fancy built up. Already in the age
of the Reformation the human intellect was sapping the foundations of the
structure. But the religious imagination was still intensely
susceptible, and when the moral sense was sharply awakened by the
reformers both within and without the Catholic church, it fell back on
the imagination as its familiar ally, and clothed with new life the
ancient forms. The Catholic turned with fresh ardor to mass and miracle
and holy church. The Protestant fell back on a more personal and inward
experience; he conceived that in each heart and mind the whole drama from
Eden to Calvary and on to the Judgment Day must be realized and
appropriated as the working principle of life.
To the mystical, the sentimental, the self-confident, it was a welcome
and uplifting exercise. To the timid and self-distrustful it was a
terrible ordeal. To the intellectual it was a perpetual challenge to
skepticism. Even Bunyan puts as his first and worst temptation, "to
question the being of God and the truth of his gospel." To the prosaic
and practical minds it made the whole business of religion a dim and
far-away affair.
Experimental religion was the core of Protestantism for more than three
centuries. It was blended with other elements in a series of great
movements. In Puritanism it united with an ascetic and militant temper,
a metaphysical theology, a stern rule of life, and a conception of the
nation as under a divine law like that of ancient Israel.
Then came Quakerism, a religion of the quiet, illumined heart, and the
peaceful life. Next, Methodism, a wave of aggressive love, seeking to
save others where Puritanism had been self-saving, appealing less to the
head and more to the heart. Following this, in England, came
Evangelicalism, a revival of self-conscious experience, but flowing out
now not only as in Methodism into a crusade to save souls, but into
labors for criminals, for slaves, for the poor, under such leaders as
Howard and Wilberforce and Shaftesbury.
These phases are from English and American history. They might largely
be paralleled elsewhere. And along with them, it is to be remembered,
went always not only a party imbued with the Catholic or high church
idea, but also a moderate party, holding a more broadly and simply
religious view.