THE NEW ZION
There was little reason to fear that the works of Spinoza would ever be
popular. They were as amusing as a text-book on trigonometry and few
people ever get beyond the first two or three sentences of any given
chapter.
It took a different sort of man to spread the new ideas among the mass of
the people.
In France the enthusiasm for private speculation and investigation had
come to an end as soon as the country had been turned into an absolute
monarchy.
In Germany the poverty and the horror which had followed in the wake of
the Thirty Years War had killed all personal initiative for at least two
hundred years.
During the second half of the seventeenth century, therefore, England was
the only one among the larger countries of Europe where further progress
along the lines of independent thought was still possible and the
prolonged quarrel between the Crown and Parliament was adding an element
of instability which proved to be of great help to the cause of personal
freedom.
First of all we must consider the English sovereigns. For years these
unfortunate monarchs had been between the devil of Catholicism and the
deep sea of Puritanism.
Their Catholic subjects (which included a great many faithful
Episcopalians with a secret leaning towards Rome) were forever clamoring
for a return to that happy era when the British kings had been vassals of
the pope.
Their Puritan subjects on the other hand, with one eye firmly glued upon
the example of Geneva, dreamed of the day when there should be no king at
all and England should be a replica of the happy commonwealth tucked away
in a little corner of the Swiss mountains.
But that was not all.
The men who ruled England were also kings of Scotland and their Scottish
subjects, when it came to religion, knew exactly what they wanted. And so
thoroughly were they convinced that they themselves were right that they
were firmly opposed to the idea of liberty of conscience. They thought
it wicked that other denominations should be suffered to exist and to
worship freely within the confines of their own Protestant land. And they
insisted not only that all Catholics and Anabaptists be exiled from the
British Isles but furthermore that Socinians, Arminians, Cartesians, in
short all those who did not share their own views upon the existence of a
living God, be hanged.
This triangle of conflicts, however, produced an unexpected result. It
forced the men who were obliged to keep peace between those mutually
hostile parties to be much more tolerant than they would have been
otherwise.
If both the Stuarts and Cromwell at different times of their careers
insisted upon equal rights for all denominations, and history tells
us they did, they were most certainly not animated by a love for
Presbyterians or High Churchmen, or vice versa. They were merely making
the best of a very difficult bargain. The terrible things which happened
in the colonies along the Bay of Massachusetts, where one sect finally
became all powerful, show us what would have been the fate of England if
any one of the many contending factions had been able to establish an
absolute dictatorship over the entire country.
Cromwell of course reached the point where he was able to do as he liked.
But the Lord Protector was a very wise man. He knew that he ruled by the
grace of his iron brigade and carefully avoided such extremes of conduct
or of legislation as would have forced his opponents to make common
cause. Beyond that, however, his ideas concerning tolerance did not go.
As for the abominable “atheists”—the aforementioned Socinians and
Arminians and Cartesians and other apostles of the divine right of the
individual human being, their lives were just as difficult as before.
Of course, the English “Libertines” enjoyed one enormous advantage. They
lived close to the sea. Only thirty-six hours of sickness separated them
from the safe asylum of the Dutch cities. As the printing shops of these
cities were turning out most of the contraband literature of southern
and western Europe, a trip across the North Sea really meant a voyage to
one’s publisher and gave the enterprising traveler a chance to gather in
his royalties and see what were the latest additions to the literature of
intellectual protest.
Among those who at one time or another availed themselves of this
convenient opportunity for quiet study and peaceful reflection, no one
has gained a more deserving fame than John Locke.
He was born in the same year as Spinoza. And like Spinoza (indeed like
most independent thinkers) he was the product of an essentially pious
household. The parents of Baruch were orthodox Jews. The parents of John
were orthodox Christians. Undoubtedly they both meant well by their
children when they trained them in the strict doctrines of their own
respective creeds. But such an education either breaks a boy’s spirit or
it turns him into a rebel. Baruch and John, not being the sort that ever
surrenders, gritted their teeth, left home and struck out for themselves.
At the age of twenty Locke went to Oxford and there for the first time
heard of Descartes. But among the dusty book-stalls of St. Catherine
Street he found certain other volumes that were much to his taste. For
example, there were the works of Thomas Hobbes.
An interesting figure, this former student of Magdalen College, a
restless person who had visited Italy and had held converse with Galileo,
who had exchanged letters with the great Descartes himself and who had
spent the greater part of his life on the continent, an exile from the
fury of the Puritans. Between times he had composed an enormous book
which contained all his ideas upon every conceivable subject and which
bore the inviting title of “Leviathan, or the Matter, Form and Power of a
Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil.”
This learned tome made its appearance when Locke was in his Sophomore
year. It was so outspoken upon the nature of princes, their rights
and most especially their duties, that even the most thorough going
Cromwellian must approve of it, and that many of Cromwell’s partisans
felt inclined to pardon this doubting Thomas who was a full-fledged
royalist yet exposed the royalist pretensions in a volume that weighed
not less than five pounds. Of course Hobbes was the sort of person whom
it has never been easy to classify. His contemporaries called him a
Latitudinarian. That meant that he was more interested in the ethics
of the Christian religion than in the discipline and the dogmas of the
Christian church and believed in allowing people a fair degree of
“latitude” in their attitude upon those questions which they regarded as
non-essential.
Locke had the same temperament as Hobbes. He too remained within the
Church until the end of his life but he was heartily in favor of a most
generous interpretation both of life and of faith. What was the use,
Locke and his friends argued, of ridding the country of one tyrant (who
wore a golden crown) if it only led up to a fresh abuse of power by
another tyrant (who wore a black slouch hat)? Why renounce allegiance
to one set of priests and then the next day accept the rule of another
set of priests who were fully as overbearing and arrogant as their
predecessors? Logic undoubtedly was on their side but such a point of
view could not possibly be popular among those who would have lost their
livelihood if the “latitude men” had been successful and had changed a
rigid social system into an ethical debating society?
And although Locke, who seems to have been a man of great personal charm,
had influential friends who could protect him against the curiosity of
the sheriffs, the day was soon to come when he would no longer be able to
escape the suspicion of being an atheist.
That happened in the fall of the year 1683, and Locke thereupon went
to Amsterdam. Spinoza had been dead for half a dozen years, but the
intellectual atmosphere of the Dutch capital continued to be decidedly
liberal and Locke was given a chance to study and write without the
slightest interference on the part of the authorities. He was an
industrious fellow and during the four years of his exile he composed
that famous “Letter on Tolerance” which makes him one of the heroes of
our little history. In this letter (which under the criticism of his
opponents grew into three letters) he flatly denied that the state had
the right to interfere with religion. The state, as Locke saw it (and
in this he was borne out by a fellow exile, a Frenchman by the name of
Pierre Bayle, who was living in Rotterdam at that time composing his
incredibly learned one-man encyclopedia), the state was merely a sort
of protective organization which a certain number of people had created
and continued to maintain for their mutual benefit and safety. Why such
an organization should presume to dictate what the individual citizens
should believe and what not—that was something which Locke and his
disciples failed to understand. The state did not undertake to tell them
what to eat or drink. Why should it force them to visit one church and
keep away from another?
The seventeenth century, as a result of the half-hearted victory of
Protestantism, was an era of strange religious compromises.
The peace of Westphalia which was supposed to make an end to all
religious warfare had laid down the principle that “all subjects
shall follow the religion of their ruler.” Hence in one six-by-nine
principality all citizens were Lutherans (because the local grand duke
was a Lutheran) and in the next they were all Catholics (because the
local baron happened to be a Catholic).
“If,” so Locke reasoned, “the State has the right to dictate to the
people concerning the future weal of their souls, then one-half of the
people are foreordained to perdition, for since both religions cannot
possibly be true (according to article I of their own catechisms) it
follows that those who are born on one side of a boundary line are bound
for Heaven and those who are born on the other side are bound for Hell
and in this way the geographical accident of birth decides one’s future
salvation.”
That Locke did not include Catholics in his scheme of tolerance is
regrettable, but understandable. To the average Britisher of the
seventeenth century Catholicism was not a form of religious conviction
but a political party which had never ceased to plot against the safety
of the English state, which had built Armadas and had bought barrels of
gun-powder with which to destroy the parliament of a supposedly friendly
nation.
Hence Locke refused to his Catholic opponents those rights which he was
willing to grant to the heathen in his colonies and asked that they
continue to be excluded from His Majesty’s domains, but solely on the
ground of their dangerous political activities and not because they
professed a different faith.
One had to go back almost sixteen centuries to hear such sentiments. Then
a Roman emperor had laid down the famous principle that religion was an
affair between the individual man and his God and that God was quite
capable of taking care of himself whenever he felt that his dignity had
been injured.
The English people who had lived and prospered through four changes
of government within less than sixty years were inclined to see the
fundamental truth of such an ideal of tolerance based upon common sense.
When William of Orange crossed the North Sea in the year 1688, Locke
followed him on the next ship, which carried the new Queen of England.
Henceforth he lived a quiet and uneventful existence and when he died at
the ripe old age of seventy-two he was known as a respectable author and
no longer feared as a heretic.
Civil war is a terrible thing but it has one great advantage. It clears
the atmosphere.
The political dissensions of the seventeenth century had completely
consumed the superfluous energy of the English nation and while the
citizens of other countries continued to kill each other for the sake
of the Trinity and prenatal damnation, religious persecution in Great
Britain came to an end. Now and then a too presumptuous critic of the
established church, like Daniel Defoe, might come into unpleasant contact
with the law, but the author of “Robinson Crusoe” was pilloried because
he was a humorist rather than an amateur theologian and because the
Anglo-Saxon race, since time immemorial, has felt an inborn suspicion of
irony. Had Defoe written a serious defense of tolerance, he would have
escaped with a reprimand. When he turned his attack upon the tyranny of
the church into a semi-humorous pamphlet entitled “The Shortest Way with
Dissenters,” he showed that he was a vulgar person without a decent sense
of the proprieties and one who deserved no better than the companionship
of the pickpockets of Newgate Prison.
Even then Defoe was fortunate that he had never extended his travels
beyond the confines of the British Isles. For intolerance having been
driven from the mother country had found a most welcome refuge in certain
of the colonies on the other side of the ocean. And this was due not so
much to the character of the people who had moved into these recently
discovered regions as to the fact that the new world offered infinitely
greater economic advantages than the old one.
In England itself, a small island so densely populated that it offered
standing room only to the majority of her people, all business would soon
have come to an end if the people had not been willing to practice the
ancient and honorable rule of “give and take.” But in America, a country
of unknown extent and unbelievable riches, a continent inhabited by a
mere handful of farmers and workmen, no such compromise was necessary.
And so it happened that a small communist settlement on the shores of
Massachusetts Bay could develop into such a stronghold of self-righteous
orthodoxy that the like of it had not been seen since the happy days
when Calvin exercised the functions of Chief of Police and Lord High
Executioner in western Switzerland.
The credit for the first permanent settlement in the chilly regions
of the Charles River usually goes to a small group of people who are
referred to as the Pilgrim Fathers. A Pilgrim, in the usual sense of
the word, is one who “journeys to a sacred place as an act of religious
devotion.” The passengers of the _Mayflower_ were not pilgrims in
that sense of the word. They were English bricklayers and tailors and
cord-wainers and blacksmiths and wheelwrights who had left their country
to escape certain of those hated “poperies” which continued to cling to
the worship in most of the churches around them.
First they had crossed the North Sea and had gone to Holland
where they arrived at a moment of great economic depression. Our
school-books continue to ascribe their desire for further travel to
their unwillingness to let their children learn the Dutch language and
otherwise to see them absorbed by the country of their adoption. It
seems very unlikely, however, that those simple folk were guilty of such
shocking ingratitude and purposely followed a most reprehensible course
of hyphenation. The truth is that most of the time they were forced to
live in the slums, that they found it very difficult to make a living
in an already over-populated country, and that they expected a better
revenue from tobacco planting in America than from wool-carding in
Leiden. Hence to Virginia they sailed, but having been thrown by adverse
currents and bad seamanship upon the shores of Massachusetts, they
decided to stay where they were rather than risk the horrors of another
voyage in their leaky tub.
But although they had now escaped the dangers of drowning and
seasickness, they were still in a highly perilous position. Most of them
came from small cities in the heart of England and had little aptitude
for a life of pioneering. Their communistic ideas were shattered by
the cold, their civic enthusiasm was chilled by the endless gales and
their wives and children were killed by an absence of decent food. And,
finally, the few who survived the first three winters, good-natured
people accustomed to the rough and ready tolerance of the home country,
were entirely swamped by the arrival of thousands of new colonists who
without exception belonged to a sterner and less compromising variety
of Puritan faith and who made Massachusetts what it was to remain for
several centuries, the Geneva on the Charles River.
Hanging on for dear life to their small stretch of land, forever on
the verge of disaster, they felt more than ever inclined to find an
excuse for everything they thought and did within the pages of the Old
Testament. Cut off from polite human society and books, they began to
develop a strange religious psyche of their own. In their own eyes they
had fallen heir to the traditions of Moses and Gideon and soon became
veritable Maccabees to their Indian neighbors of the west. They had
nothing to reconcile them to their lives of hardship and drudgery except
the conviction that they were suffering for the sake of the only true
faith. Hence their conclusion (easily arrived at) that all other people
must be wrong. Hence the brutal treatment of those who failed to share
their own views, who suggested by implication that the Puritan way of
doing and thinking was not the only right way. Hence the exclusion from
their country of all harmless dissenters who were either unmercifully
flogged and then driven into the wilderness or suffered the loss of their
ears and tongues unless they were fortunate enough to find a refuge in
one of the neighboring colonies which belonged to the Swedes and the
Dutch.
No, for the cause of religious freedom or tolerance, this colony
achieved nothing except in that roundabout and involuntary fashion
which is so common in the history of human progress. The very violence
of their religious despotism brought about a reaction in favor of a
more liberal policy. After almost two centuries of ministerial tyranny,
there arose a new generation which was the open and avowed enemy of all
forms of priest-rule, which believed profoundly in the desirability of
the separation of state and church and which looked askance upon the
ancestral admixture of religion and politics.
By a stroke of good luck this development came about very slowly and the
crisis did not occur until the period immediately before the outbreak of
hostilities between Great Britain and her American colonies. As a result,
the Constitution of the United States was written by men who were either
freethinkers or secret enemies of the old-fashioned Calvinism and who
incorporated into this document certain highly modern principles which
have proved of the greatest value in maintaining the peaceful balance of
our republic.
But ere this happened, the new world had experienced a most unexpected
development in the field of tolerance and curiously enough it took place
in a Catholic community, in that part of America now covered by the free
state of Maryland.
The Calverts, who were responsible for this interesting experiment, were
of Flemish origin, but the father had moved to England and had rendered
very distinguished services to the house of Stuart. Originally they had
been Protestants, but George Calvert, private secretary and general
utility man to King James I, had become so utterly disgusted with the
futile theological haggling of his contemporaries that he returned to the
old faith. Good, bad or indifferent, it called black, black and white,
white and did not leave the final settlement of every point of doctrine
to the discretion of a board of semi-literate deacons.
This George Calvert, so it seems, was a man of parts. His back-sliding (a
very serious offense in those days!) did not lose him the favor of his
royal master. On the contrary, he was made Baron Baltimore of Baltimore
and was promised every sort of assistance when he planned to establish a
little colony of his own for the benefit of persecuted Catholics. First,
he tried his luck in Newfoundland. But his settlers were frozen out of
house and home and his Lordship then asked for a few thousand square
miles in Virginia. The Virginians, however, staunchly Episcopalian, would
have naught of such dangerous neighbors and Baltimore then asked for a
slice of that wilderness which lay between Virginia and the Dutch and
Swedish possessions of the north. Ere he received his charter he died.
His son Cecil, however, continued the good work, and in the winter of
1633-1634 two little ships, the _Ark_ and the _Dove_, under command of
Leonard Calvert, brother to George, crossed the ocean, and in March of
1634 they safely landed their passengers on the shores of the Chesapeake
Bay. The new country was called Maryland. This was done in honor of Mary,
daughter of that French king, Henri IV, whose plans for a European League
of Nations had been cut short by the dagger of a crazy monk, and wife
to that English monarch who soon afterwards was to lose his head at the
hands of his Puritan subjects.
This extraordinary colony which did not exterminate its Indian neighbors
and offered equal opportunities to both Catholics and Protestants
passed through many difficult years. First of all it was overrun by
Episcopalians who tried to escape the fierce intolerance of the Puritans
in Massachusetts. Next it was invaded by Puritans who tried to escape the
fierce intolerance of the Episcopalians in Virginia. And the two groups
of fugitives, with the usual arrogance of that sort of people, tried hard
to introduce their own “correct form of worship” into the commonwealth
that had just offered them refuge. As “all disputes which might give rise
to religious passions” were expressly forbidden on Maryland territory,
the older colonists were entirely within their right when they bade both
Episcopalians and Puritans to keep the peace. But soon afterwards war
broke out in the home country between the Cavaliers and the Roundheads
and the Marylanders feared that, no matter who should win, they would
lose their old freedom. Hence, in April of the year 1649 and shortly
after news of the execution of Charles I had reached them, and at the
direct suggestion of Cecil Calvert, they passed their famous Act of
Tolerance which, among other things, contained this excellent passage:
“That since the coercion of conscience in the matter of religion has
often produced very harmful results in those communities in which it
was exercised, for the more tranquil and pacific government in this
province and for the better preservation of mutual love and unity among
its inhabitants, it is hereby decided that nobody in this province
who professes faith in Jesus Christ shall be disturbed, molested or
persecuted in any way for reasons respecting his religion or the free
exercise thereof.”
That such an act could be passed in a country in which the Jesuits
occupied a favorite position shows that the Baltimore family was
possessed of remarkable political ability and of more than ordinary
courage. How profoundly this generous spirit was appreciated by some of
their guests was shown in the same year when a number of Puritan exiles
overthrew the government of Maryland, abolished the Act of Tolerance and
replaced it by an “Act Concerning Religion” of their own which granted
full religious liberty to all those who declared themselves Christians
“with the exception of Catholics and Episcopalians.”
This period of reaction fortunately did not last long. In the year 1660
the Stuarts returned to power and once more the Baltimores reigned in
Maryland.
The next attack upon their policy came from the other side. The
Episcopalians gained a complete victory in the mother country and they
insisted that henceforth their church should be the official church of
all the colonies. The Calverts continued to fight but they found it
impossible to attract new colonists. And so, after a struggle which
lasted another generation, the experiment came to an end.
Protestantism triumphed.
So did intolerance.