DE PROFUNDIS.
“We have strict statutes and most biting laws,
The needful bits and curbs to headstrong steeds.”
SHAKSPEARE.
The Pilgrim Fathers were not students of Godefridus de Valle’s odd
book, “_De Arte Nihil Credendi_”—The Art of believing Nothing. They
did believe, from the bottom of their hearts; and, in obedience to
Paul, they strove to “hold fast” that which they esteemed “good.”
They had two passions, devotion to the common weal as citizens,
and to the interests of the church as Christians. “They regarded
themselves, not as individual fugitives from trans-Atlantic
persecution, but rather as confederates in a political association
for religious purposes.”[966] From this idea their mixed government
naturally evolved; and this, in its turn, gave birth to the principle
that the magistrate was armed with power to suppress all phases of
internal opposition to the theocracy; because that type of authority
logically carried in its train the necessary conditions of its
perpetuity.
They neither invited nor desired the intrusion of elements at
variance with their ideas; and to such they said, pointing to the
broad continent, “There is room; leave us in peace.” And to secure
themselves from molestation, it was enacted, in 1637, that “none
should be received into the jurisdiction of Massachusetts Bay but
such as should be welcomed by the magistrates”[967]—a provision
somewhat analogous to the alien law of England and to the European
policy of passports.[968]
Singularly enough, Massachusetts Bay, spite of its exclusive policy,
possessed from the very outset a strong charm in the eyes of those
who dissented from its formulas. Like the _Petit Monsieur_ who found
himself left out of the tapestry which exhibited the story of the
Spanish invasion, they longed to work themselves in the hangings
of colonial history. They soon swarmed in Boston and Salem; and
notwithstanding the banishment of Roger Williams, the “heretics”
continued to thrive.
Ere long the public mind “was excited to intense activity on
questions which the nicest subtlety only could have devised, and
which none but those experienced in the shades of theological opinion
could long comprehend; for it goes with these opinions as with
colors, of which the artist who works in mosaic easily and regularly
discriminates many thousand varieties, where the common eye can
discern a difference only on the closest comparison.”[969]
From this fermentation there bubbled up a profound and bitter
struggle. The strife filled the interstices of the Pequod war, whose
prosecution it sadly crippled; and indeed, at one time it threatened
to rend the colony by civil war.[970]
Two distinct parties were early developed. One was composed chiefly
of the older colonists, headed by Dudley, and Phillips, and Wilson,
and Winthrop, an able coalition of clergymen and politicians. These
were earnest to preserve the state as it was. They discountenanced
innovation, and “dreaded freedom of opinion as the parent of various
divisions.” They said, “These cracks and flaws in the new building of
the Reformation portend a fall.”[971] They were anxious “to confirm
and build up the colony, child of their prayers and sorrows; and
for that they desired patriotism, union, and a common heart.” They
dreaded change, because they knew that,
“Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well.”
The other party was iconoclastic. It was “composed of men and women
who had arrived in New England after the civil government and
religious discipline of the Pilgrims had been established.”[972]
They felt cramped under the theocracy; and having come self-banished
to the wilderness to enjoy toleration, they resisted every form of
despotism over the human mind, and “sustained with intense fanaticism
the paramount authority of private judgment.” “They came,” observes
Bancroft, “fresh from the study of the tenets of Geneva, and their
pride consisted in following the principles of the Reformation with
logical precision to all their consequences. Their eyes were not
primarily directed to the institutions of Massachusetts, but to the
doctrines of its religious system; so to them the colonial clergy
seemed ‘the ushers of a new persecution,’ ‘a popish faction,’ who had
not imbibed the principles of Christian reform; and they applied to
the influence of the Pilgrim ministers the doctrine which Luther and
Calvin had employed against the observances and pretensions of the
Roman church.”[973]
There is an old Latin proverb,
“Nulla fere causa est, in quâ non fæmina litem
Moverit.”[974]
The life and soul of the crusade against the theocracy was Anne
Hutchinson, whom Johnson styled, “the chiefest masterpiece of woman’s
wit.”[975] Antedating the Cordays, the Rolands, and the De Staels by
more than a dozen decades, she was the equal, in tact, and zeal, and
honest conviction, of the best of those brilliant women who, in the
_salons_ of the French capital, inspired the revolution of 1793.
Anne Hutchinson was the wife of a Boston merchant, the daughter of a
Puritan preacher in England, and had been one of John Cotton’s most
devoted parishioners ere he was driven into exile.[976] In 1634
she followed that eminent divine to America, and was received into
his church at Boston,[977] spite of some strange theories which she
had avowed on shipboard.[978] Her active benevolence and unflagging
kindness to the sick soon wedded to her many hearts.[979] She planted
herself deep in the affections of the city.
The male members of the Boston church had a habit of taking notes
of the sermon on Sunday, and then holding week-day meetings for the
recapitulation and discussion of the doctrines advanced[980]—a very
commendable practice. Mrs. Hutchinson, thinking perhaps that woman’s
influence and intellect were not sufficiently recognized in the
church, inaugurated a similar series of week-day conventicles for the
ladies of Boston.[981]
Mrs. Hutchinson’s lectures—for she was ever the chief
speaker—attracted crowds, and they were countenanced by Sir Harry
Vane, who then occupied the gubernatorial chair, and by his host,
John Cotton;[982] below whom stood a crowd of warm adherents, flanked
by John Wheelwright the clerical brother-in-law of the lady speaker,
and by the hearty influence of John Coddington one of the wealthiest
of the colonists.[983] “Thus the women,” says Cotton Mather, “like
their first mother, hooked in the husbands also.”[984]
Soon the vigorous and daring mind of Anne Hutchinson struck off new
watchwords. Much was said of a “Covenant of Works” and a “Covenant of
Grace,” and between these many fine distinctions were made. “Under
these heads she and her friends classified the preachers of the
Bay. Those who were understood to rely upon a methodical and rigid
observance of their religious duties as evidence of acceptance with
God were said to be ‘under a covenant of works.’ Those who held to
certain spiritual tenets were ranged ‘under the covenant of grace.’
These phrases began to be banded to and fro. ‘Justification’ and
‘sanctification’ were in all mouths; even children jeered each other;
and there was no stemming the heady current of discussion as it swept
on.”[985]
Winthrop and his coadjutors looked upon the debate with equal horror
and alarm. Two words, which were then common, expressed to them a
vague but frightful danger; _Antinomianism_ was one, and _Familism_
was the other. The _Antinomians_ were a sect of German extraction,
and their name meant _against the Law_; for they held that “the
gospel of Christ had superseded the law of Moses.”[986] But the word
had been made the shelter of sad excesses and many base acts, so that
it was in bad odor among the Pilgrims, who esteemed Antinomianism to
be a cloak to cover the naked form of license.[987]
_Familism_ had been nursed into vicious life in Holland; where,
in 1555, Henry Nicholas formed a “Family of Love,” who, in their
opinions, “grieved the Comforter, charging all their sins on God’s
Spirit, for not effectually assisting them against themselves.”[988]
The Familists had long been numerous, factious, and dangerous, in
England, and their practice was even worse than their doctrine; for
their laxity of morals made them the sappers of social order.[989]
Anne Hutchinson does not seem to have been inoculated with the
virus of Familism; but she was, of course, an Antinomian, since she
assailed the theocratic law; and therefore, to the heated minds of
the Pilgrims, she might easily appear to be the fleshly tabernacle of
both—the incarnation of heresy.
Meantime the debate grew in bitterness. Mrs. Hutchinson, when taunted
with Familism and Antinomianism, retorted by nicknaming her foes
_Legalists_; “because,” she said, “you are acquainted neither with
the spirit of the gospel nor with Christ himself.”[990] Boston echoed
the phrase with wild delight, and “Legalist! Legalist! Legalist!” was
dinned into the ears of the clergy of the Bay.
Winthrop and his friends were exasperated, and they invoked the
courts to interfere. Several of the Antinomians were heavily
fined.[991] Wheelwright, who, in a fast-day sermon, had strenuously
maintained the Antinomian tenets, was formally censured by the
General Court for sedition.[992]
Then the innovators were, in their turn, angered. “The fear of
God and the love of neighbors was laid by;” Mrs. Hutchinson and
her adherents clamored all the louder; and Vane, disgusted and
dispirited, tendered his resignation, and craved permission to return
to England;[993] but “the expostulations of the Boston church finally
turned him from his design,” and kept him at his post.[994]
Meanwhile Wheelwright, provoked at his censure, had appealed
to England. This wrecked Vane’s administration, and ruined the
Antinomian cause; for the patriotic feeling of the colony ran so
high, that “it was accounted perjury and treason to appeal to
the king.”[995] In the elections of 1637 public opinion was made
manifest; Winthrop, with the towns and the churches at his back,
outvoted Vane, whose sole support was Boston, and the fathers of the
colony once more grasped the helm.[996]
Winthrop originated, enacted, and defended the alien law.[997] This
found in Vane an inflexible opponent; and, using the language of the
time, he left a memorial of his dissent. “Scribes and Pharisees,
and such as are confirmed in any way of error”—these are the
remarkable words of the man who soon embarked for England, where he
afterwards pleaded in Parliament for the liberties of all classes of
dissenters—“all such are not to be denied cohabitation, but are to
be pitied and reformed. Ishmael shall dwell in the presence of his
brethren.”[998]
Now that the founders of the colony had emerged from their brief
eclipse and regained their pristine influence, they decided to
initiate measures which should definitely silence the unseemly
“noise about the temple.” An ecclesiastical synod was convened.[999]
Assembling in the summer of 1637, it branded eighty-two opinions then
in vogue as heretical, and summoned Anne Hutchinson, Wheelwright, and
others of that “ilk,” to their bar for examination.[1000]
They appeared; and Cotton, who had satisfied his brother clergymen
of his orthodoxy, tainted for a space by his connection with the
Antinomians, was set to examine Mrs. Hutchinson; “which was hard
for him to do, and bitter for her to endure; for she had been his
_protégé_.”[1001]
This remarkable woman was now in her element. She was calm, and she
was firm, and she was keen; for,
“Spirits are not finely touched
But to fine issues.”
But one bold avowal sealed her doom. “We have,” she said, “a new rule
of practice by immediate revelations; by these we guide our conduct.
Not that we expect any revelation in the way of a miracle; that is a
delusion; but we despise the anathemas of your synods and courts, and
will still follow the whisperings of conscience.”[1002]
This speech caused wide-spread alarm. It seemed to squint towards
anarchy. “The true parents of the brats began to discover
themselves,” quaintly comments old Mather, “when the synod lifted the
sword upon them.”[1003] An insurrection of lawless fanatics, “like a
Munster tragedy,” seemed brewing. The magistrates decided that the
danger was desperate; that Anne Hutchinson was “like Roger Williams,
or worse;”[1004] and so, says Winthrop, “we applied the last remedy,
and that without delay.”[1005]
Anne Hutchinson, Wheelwright, and Aspinwall, were solemnly exiled as
“unfit for the society” of the Pilgrims; and those of their followers
who remained were ordered to deliver up their arms, lest they should,
“upon some revelation, make a sudden insurrection.”[1006]
Thus ended the _ecclesiarum prælia_.[1007] “And thus,” says Cotton
Mather, “was the hydra beheaded—_hydra decapitata_.”[1008] “This
legislation may be reproved for its jealousy, but not for its
cruelty; for it condemned the “heretics” to a banishment not more
severe than many of the best of the Pilgrims had encountered from
choice.” But it is a sad chapter; and perhaps the old divine was
right when he wrote, “What these errors were ’tis needless now to
repeat; they are dead and gone, and buried past resurrection; ’tis a
pity to strive to rake them from their graves.”[1009]
The exiles, followed by great numbers of proselytes, on quitting
Massachusetts Bay, wandered southward, “designing to plant a
settlement on Long Island, or near Delaware Bay. But Roger
Williams welcomed them to his vicinity,” and obtained for them a
resting-place. They colonized Rhode Island, or _Aquitneck_, as it
was then called. “It was not price nor money that got Rhode Island,”
wrote Williams; “it was gotten by _love_; by the love and favor which
that honorable gentleman, Sir Harry Vane, and myself, had with that
great sachem, Miantonomoh.”[1010]
Being thus held by the same tenure that Providence owned, Aquitneck
was based upon the self-same principle of intellectual liberty;
and though the two were not united in one state until after the
Restoration, they clasped hands in equal brotherhood, and were buoyed
by toleration.
Thus the principles of Anne Hutchinson, thrown out of Massachusetts,
sprouted in Rhode Island, and grew a well-ordered, sober state. A
happy result flowed from an unhappy cause.
And now for a season internecine strife was hushed. All eyes were
directed across the water. “The angels of the trans-Atlantic
churches, sounding forth their silver trumpets, heard the sound of
rattling drums” on every European breeze.[1011] Democracy was about
to assert itself in England. The Pilgrim Fathers grasped hands, and
silently marked the lesson; which was, that “courtiers, bishops, and
kings, too, have a joint in their necks.”