THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION ON THE CONTINENT
(1500-1625)
In analyzing the forces which affected the colonization of America, the
depth of the impression made upon Europe by the Protestant Reformation
can hardly be overestimated. Although the direct and immediate
influence of this great movement upon the fortunes of America was
great, its indirect and remote effects have been still more important.
One of these effects was the creation of a religious motive for
emigration which, in conjunction with other incentives, was one of the
earliest and most constant causes for the peopling of America.
It is true that the desire for religious freedom was only one among
many such impelling forces. The desire to better their fortunes was
perhaps the most fundamental and enduring consideration that influenced
emigrants. Many settlers came because at home they had failed or were
burdened with debt, or had become involved in ill repute or crime, and
hoped to make a new start in a new land. Many sought the New World as
many still press to the frontier, from sheer restlessness and
recklessness, from the love of adventure, the hope that luck will do
better for them than labor. Many came as a result of urgent inducements
offered by projectors of colonies or agents of shipmasters, as in the
case of the early "company servants" or the later "redemptioners" or
"indentured servants."
No inconsiderable number came because they were forced to come: the
earlier planters of colonies and patentees of lands received permission
to seize for their uses men and women of the lower classes, much as men
were pressed into naval service; paupers were handed over to the
colonizing companies to be shipped to their settlements; repeatedly the
prisons were emptied to provide colonists, and commissions were
appointed, as in England in 1633, "to reprieve able-bodied persons
convicted of certain felonies, and to bestow them to be used in
discoveries and other foreign employments." [Footnote: Cal. of State
Pap, Domestic, 1631-1633, p. 547.]
Somewhat later, transportation to the colonies to labor for a fixed
number of years became a familiar form of commutation of the death
penalty, and after 1662 it was made the statutory penalty for certain
offences.
Yet among this multiplicity of motives for emigration to the colonies
religion held a peculiar place. Many men for whom the dominant
inducement was a more material one were partly led by religious
motives; many of the changes in Europe that unsettled men and made them
more ready to leave their old homes were results of the Reformation.
Religious motives were the earliest to send any really large body of
settlers to the English colonies, and they remained for more than a
century probably the most effective motives.
During the first twenty years of the settlement of Virginia, where the
religious incentive was least strong, less than six thousand settlers
came over; during the first twenty years of the settlement of New
England, where it was strongest, there were more than twenty thousand.
The later churchmen of Virginia and the Carolinas, the Catholics of
Maryland, the Quakers of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and a great body
of Presbyterians, Huguenots, Mennonites, Moravians, and adherents of
other sects which were products of the Reformation, sought tinder the
more liberal laws of the colonies the religious liberty which they
could not find at home.
The working of this influence in England will appear in a later chapter
on the religious history of that country during this period; its
peculiar development in Germany seems to demand a further word of
explanation here. Three forms of reformed doctrine and organization--
Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Zwinglianism--grew up on German soil in the
years between 1517 and 1555, and obtained more or less extensive
recognition and power from imperial, princely, or city authorities.
Lutheranism, the most moderate and widely accepted form of
Protestantism, was officially established in most of the central and
northern and in some of the southern states and cities; Calvinism, less
widely extended but more strictly organized, held a similar position in
the southwest; while the doctrines of Zwingli, which had been adopted
and were enforced in the greater part of Switzerland, spread to a
number of those southern regions of Germany from which Switzerland was
as yet indistinctly separated. [Footnote: Armstrong, The Emperor
Charles V., I., 228-231.]
A vast number of earnest souls were not satisfied with any of these
forms of official religion, and even in the earliest days of the
Reformation, preachers arose who went beyond the moderate reforms of
Luther, Zwingli, or Calvin, and whose teachings gained a ready
acceptance. In Saxony, in Hesse, in South Germany, and in Moravia; in
the cities of Constance, Strasburg, Augsburg, and Nuremberg; in the
Netherlands and in Switzerland, there was much preaching and formation
of independent religious communities quite apart from, and indeed in
opposition to, the official Reformation. [Footnote: Moeller, Hist, of
the Christian Church (English trans.), III., 36, 64, 88, 94.] These
radical preachers and their followers represented very different
beliefs and practices. That which was common to them all was an
acceptance of the Bible literally interpreted as a guide both to
doctrine and to church organization. The effort to return to the
apostolic organization of the church led them to reject any but an
unpaid ministry, and to insist that none should be members of their
congregations except such as were personally converted and who
conformed their lives to the teachings of the Bible.
Their idea was, therefore, the formation of little companies separated
from the surrounding people of the world rather than the Lutheran or
Zwinglian plan of a reorganization of the national church on Protestant
lines en masse. An austere piety, the wearing of plain clothes, the
avoidance of forms of social respect, the refusal to take an oath or to
hold civil office, an assertion of the sinfulness of paying or
receiving tithes or interest, an approach to communistic practice in
matters of property--some or all of these were widely disseminated
among the lower classes of the people to whom such teachings
principally appealed.
The doctrine which came nearest to being a point of uniformity and a
possible bond of union among these reformers was their objection to
infant baptism. To them baptism was the mark of a personally attained
relation to Christ, and was, therefore, meaningless when administered
to an unconscious infant. Certain "prophets" who came to Wittenberg
from Zwickau confronted Luther and Melancthon with this principle as
early as 1521; and radical reformers proclaimed it in opposition to
Zwingli at Zurich in 1523. Everywhere advocacy of an exact adherence to
the verbal teaching of Holy Writ and a rejection of the claims of an
established church, were accompanied by opposition to infant baptism.
In 1525 for the first time the logical deduction from their premises
was made; those baptized only in their infancy were asserted not to
have been effectively baptized at all, and were rebaptized as a sign of
their conversion. [Footnote: Moeller, Hist, of the Christian Church
(English trans.), III., 65.] From this time onward re-baptism, or, from
the point of view of its advocates, the first valid baptism, became the
test and mark of adoption into many communities of true believers.
Those who practised this rite were, therefore, called "Anabaptists"--
that is to say, those who baptized a second time--or, more frequently,
merely "Baptists."
The rebaptism of a person who had been already once baptized was not
only in the eyes of the established church an impiety, it was in the
eyes of the established law a capital crime, and the history of
Anabaptism in Germany is the history of a long martyrdom. In Catholic
and Protestant countries alike these radicals were persecuted. From
Strasburg and Nuremberg they were expelled, in Zurich their leaders
were drowned, in Augsburg they were beheaded, in Austria, Wittenberg,
Bavaria, and the Palatinate they were burned at the stake.
In 1534 their sect was brought into sudden and fatal prominence by the
revolt in Munster and its vicinity. Here a body of adherents of radical
religious doctrines added to their creed a tenet not common to the
general body of Anabaptists--that is to say, the duty of taking up
temporal arms to overthrow the existing powers and to introduce the New
Jerusalem. The old episcopal city was seized by the Anabaptist leaders,
bloody battles were fought, and after a six months' orgy of fanaticism,
libertinism, and violence the rebels were defeated by the united troops
of Catholic and Lutheran powers and a terrible vengeance taken.
Anabaptists everywhere, no matter how peaceable and moderate their
principles, suffered under the imputation of holding such doctrines as
had led to the terrible excesses at Munster, as they had long before
been held to sympathize with the Peasants' Revolt; and their
persecutions became correspondingly harsher. Nevertheless, they
continued to form communities and to spread through Germany, the
Netherlands, and Switzerland. The attractiveness of the teachings of
wandering Anabaptist preachers long continued unabated, and their
regularly organized congregations or communities, because of their
thrift, honesty, and plainness of life, survived and flourished,
wherever they could obtain even the barest and most temporary
toleration.
They were necessarily a people without a national home. Seldom for a
whole generation did any considerable body of Anabaptists or Pietists
remain undisturbed in any one locality. Expelled by imperial edict from
Bohemia, they made their way to Hungary and Transylvania; fined,
imprisoned, and in danger of death in Protestant Switzerland, they
migrated to the Tyrol, to the Palatinate, and to the south German
cities, only soon to be visited there with still worse persecution.
During the two great religious wars they suffered especial hardships,
and in the midst of the Thirty Years' War they were rigorously expelled
by the emperor from all his hereditary dominions, even from Moravia,
where they had been allowed to exist for almost a century. [Footnote:
Moeller, Hist. of the Christian Church (English trans.), III., 437-
442.] Either from original differences of doctrine and personal
influence, or from later divisions and reorganization, grew up those
bodies which, although often, as has been seen, grouped under the
general head of Anabaptists, have become known in Europe and America as
Mennonites, Amish, and Dunkers; and each of these bodies has
experienced various divisions. The Schwenkfelders, Boehmists, and other
mystics or pietists, are habitually grouped with these sects, rather
because of their similar historical origin and attitude to the
established churches than of any identity of religious belief.
By the close of the seventeenth century the condition of these
dissenters from the established churches had become more tolerable; but
they were at best a remnant, narrowed in spirit by persecution,
repeatedly separated from their earlier homes, still under the ban of
ecclesiastical disapproval, and even where tolerated living under
burdensome restrictions. The rising colonies of the New World,
especially those which promised religious liberty, and above all that
one of them whose Quaker founder held doctrines so like their own, must
have exerted, notwithstanding their alien race and tongue, an almost
irresistible attraction upon them. In view of the political and
religious history of Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, it is therefore no wonder that a vast number of Germans
emigrated to America, and that in Pennsylvania were soon to be found
numerous representatives of every religious sect that existed in the
fatherland.
The religious divisions which sprang from the Protestant Reformation
were not restricted to the Old World. In America, also, religion was a
centrifugal influence, splitting up old colonies, and establishing new
centres of population, which in turn attracted other groups of
emigrants from Europe, and brought into existence still other types of
government and society. [Footnote: Eggleston, Beginners of a Nation,
266-346.] The results were shown in the characteristics of Rhode Island
and Connecticut, of Germantown and Bethlehem, in some of the principal
contrasts between New France and New England, and in many of the lesser
diversities that have distinguished different sections of America in
their subsequent history. Many influences combined to give form and
character to each American settlement: its race elements, the
commercial requirements of the controlling chartered company, the
demands of the home government, the theoretical ideas of the founder,
the habitudes of the colonists in the lands from which they came. Among
these influences, as among the motives for emigration, the religious
experiences and desires of the settlers were a prime factor.
The Reformation indirectly affected America by wars which soon led to
the rise of some nations, the fall of others; they pitted Catholic
states against Protestant states, they weakened Germany, France, and
the southern Netherlands by a sanguinary civil struggle, and were
avoided in England only by harsh persecution.
In the Iberian peninsula the progress of Protestantism was so slight
and so quickly crushed out that it played no part in the colonization
of Portuguese or Spanish America. It is true that the somewhat outworn
machinery of the Inquisition was rejuvenated in the sixteenth century,
so as to reach a Protestant movement in Seville, the sailing-point for
the American fleets; and this was made an excuse for the introduction
of a stricter and more vigorous policy of orthodox uniformity in Spain.
The Inquisition also found occupation in looking after heretic foreign
merchants and sailors in Spanish seaports, and Jews and Protestant
Germans in the American colonies; but no Spaniards ever emigrated to
America to escape religious persecution.
As for France, the terrible religious wars of the sixteenth century
weakened her projects of colonization, as they did all her other
activities, and divided her people into two hostile parties, one of
which must ultimately crush out the other. The short-lived colonies
established in the middle years of the sixteenth century in Brazil and
in Florida were due largely to the hope that they might be places of
refuge for oppressed Huguenots. The first French colonies which had any
successful outcome, however, were the creation of the other religious
party; for Richelieu, when he took up the establishment of colonies in
1624, insisted on Catholic orthodoxy in the religion of the colonists.
This precaution was doubtless due to the Huguenot efforts for
independence and their treasonable negotiations in France. In founding
distant colonies as extensions of the power of the home government, a
minister could hardly permit the domination in the new colonies of a
party with which he was in deadly conflict at home. Whatever his
motive, orthodoxy was insisted on; and New France, like New Spain,
became unbrokenly Catholic.
The English colonies, however, ultimately profited by what the French
colonies had lost. After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in
1685, persecution sent a stream of Huguenots to the various English
colonies of America, and added thereby a valuable and interesting
strain to the richly mingled blood of the American race.