THE CHURCH
The Pilgrims brought with them to Plymouth a faith that had already
removed mountains. It supported the Scrooby band through the troublous
days of their persecution in England; it pointed out for them the way
to Holland and freedom; it fortified them against the dishonesty of the
Merchant Adventurers; walked the waters of the Atlantic by their side,
and remained their only comfort through that first terrible winter in
the little clearing in the Plymouth woods. Our own age, that vaunts its
toleration, can know nothing of such faith as that. Whatever we may say
of the Pilgrims’ too rigid righteousness, whatever we may think of their
theology, we must remember that their righteousness and their theology
were real, hammered out at the forge of suffering and sacrifice. If
their form was not graceful and the marks of the hammer were still
upon them, yet were they as near to Christ as the polished spirals of
our own attenuated doctrines. We shall criticize the Pilgrims and some
phases of their religion in the following pages, but we shall do so on
our knees.
Persecution had united the Pilgrims long before they left England.
Certain independent spirits had begun in the first half-dozen years of
the seventeenth century to take strong exception to the ritual of the
Church of England. They saw, to quote Bradford, ‘how not only these
base and beggarly ceremonies were unlawful; but also that the lordly
and tyranous power of the prelates ought not to be submitted unto.’
They consequently withdrew from the Established Church and by degrees,
joining with other malcontents whose views were similar to their own,
they formed themselves, in 1606, into a new Church at Scrooby and held
services in the houses of one or another of their members. Their pastor
was Mr. Richard Clifton, and his assistant was Mr. John Robinson. In
the course of their wanderings from England to Amsterdam and from
Amsterdam to Leyden, Clifton vanished, and Robinson was in charge.
Robinson was one of the sanest progressives in ecclesiastical history.
Convinced though he was that his church was an improvement over the
Episcopal Church, he did not for a moment believe that it was the last
word in organized religion. ‘I profess myself,’ he writes, ‘always one
of them who still desire to learn further what the good will of God
is.’ Though he believed in the infallibility of the Scriptures, he did
not believe in the infallibility of man’s interpretation of them. ‘It
is not possible,’ says he, ‘the Christian world should come so lately
out of such thick Antichristian darknesse, and that full perfection
of knowledge should break forth at once.’ His quarrel was not with
the doctrine of the Church of England, but with its government by the
Bishops; and for this government he substituted an almost perfect
democracy. His church was ruled by Elders, chosen by the congregation
and authorized to serve only with the consent of the brethren, ‘Who,’
he says, ‘ought not in contempt to be called the laity, but to be
treated as men and brethren in Christ, not as slaves or minors.’
Such was the doctrine which the founders of the Congregational Church
in New England brought with them when they came. How far they succeeded
in following it will appear anon. ‘We must apply ourselves to God’s
present dealing, not to his wonted dealing,’ was a maxim which they
knew to be true in theory and which they did their best to put in
practice. If Robinson had been able to go with them to Plymouth,
their best would have been a good deal better. But he died in Leyden,
thwarted in his greatest desire, which was to tend his flock in their
new pastures. Their Covenant was couched in general terms, and so
sounds broader than it really was:
In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and in obedience to his holy
will and divine ordinances, we, being by the most wise and good
providence of God brought together in this place, and desirous to
unite ourselves into one congregation or church under the Lord Jesus
our Head, that it may be in such sort as becometh all those whom he
hath redeemed and sanctified to himself, we do hereby solemnly and
religiously, as in his most holy presence, vouch the Lord Jehovah the
only true God to be our God and the God of ours, and do promise and
bind ourselves to walk in all our ways according to the rule of the
Gospel, and in all sincere conformity to his holy ordinances, and in
mutual love to and watchfulness over one another, depending wholly
and only upon the Lord our God to enable us by his Grace hereunto.
This Constitution was framed by men who, unlike Robinson, were
convinced that they had found the one true faith and so were quick
to resent any deviation from it. When settlements began to appear at
Sandwich, Yarmouth, and Barnstable, the Court stipulated that each new
group should have an _Orthodox_ minister, or should be near enough to
a town that had one, to go to church on Sunday. If the preaching was
in any way irregular--‘weak and unsafe’ were the stock adjectives--the
minister’s record was examined, his doctrines scrutinized, and if he
got off with a warning, he was lucky. What Artemus Ward says of the
Puritans is, unfortunately, about as true of the Plymouth men: ‘I
believe we are descended from the Puritans,’ he writes, ‘who nobly fled
from a land of despitism to a land of freedim, where they could not
only enjoy their own religion, but prevent everybody else from enjoying
_his_.’
One minister who was broader than most in his doctrine and who did as
much for religion and civilization on the Cape as any man has ever
done, was John Lothrop, who came from Scituate with his flock and
settled in Barnstable in 1639. Mr. Lothrop was a marked man even before
he came to Scituate. The record of his trial in 1632 for holding a
conventicle in the house of a brewer’s clerk in Blackfriars, shows
clearly enough what the Bishops thought of Congregationalist morals.
The custom at such trials was to hurl three or four questions at the
defendant before giving him a chance to answer. Lothrop was asked by
what authority he preached at the conventicle, and at the same time
‘How manie woemen sate crosse legged upon the bedd, whilest you sate
on one side and preached and prayed most devoutlie?’ (This from the
Bishop of London.) Lothrop replied, ‘I keepe noe such evill companie,
they were not such woemen.’ Thereupon the Bishop of London and the
Archbishop of Canterbury demanded in chorus, ‘Are you a minister?’ and
the Bishop of Saint David’s asked, ‘Were you not Dr. King, the Bishop
of London’s, Sizer in Oxford? I take it you were; and you shew your
thankfullness by this.’ Lothrop answered that he was a Minister. ‘How
and by whom qualified?’ asked the Bishop of London; ‘Where are your
orders?’ ‘I am a Minister of the gospell of Christ,’ replied Lothrop;
‘and the Lord hath qualified me.’ He then refused the oath and was sent
back to prison.
Like Robinson, Lothrop was a Congregationalist of the wisest sort.
He even admitted to Christian fellowship the persecuted Anabaptists,
who not only in England but in the Massachusetts Bay Colony as
well, knew the meaning of prison and stocks and banishment. Their
method of immersion, to be sure, Lothrop regarded as unnecessarily
thorough--‘Whole rivers,’ he writes, ‘show not forth Christ’s
suffering, pouring him out like water, besprinkling all his raiment.’
But if the Anabaptists preferred extensive immersion, they were welcome
to their belief and to fellowship in his Church. Lothrop took no stock
in creeds or particularized confessions of faith, for they seemed
to him narrow. He substituted the whole Bible for them, and gladly
admitted to membership in his church any one who professed faith in God
and promised to do his best to keep the Ten Commandments. Though his
writings show him to be a student of theology, and though this subject
was to him one of great intellectual interest, he wisely realized that
to fill sermons with it was to put congregations to sleep; so he chose
his texts with a view to the immediate temporal and spiritual needs of
his flock, and read theology at his own fireside.
If more men of Lothrop’s caliber had been ministers on the Cape, the
ugly period of Quaker persecution would have worn a fairer face. Though
he died before the Quaker troubles began, yet it was in great measure
owing to his tolerant teachings that his own town of Barnstable escaped
almost untouched by the tar brush that so thoroughly bespattered the
neighboring town of Sandwich. Sandwich, in fact, was the Friends’
Headquarters and the scene of most of the trouble. In 1658, eighteen
families there belonged to the new sect. Some said, indeed, that almost
the whole town had turned Quaker. One reason why the authorities dealt
so harshly with Quakers was that this sect was the first to rebel
against the standing order of worship. By the middle of the seventeenth
century they had established themselves in Sandwich and were enjoying
persecution. The following item from the Aspinwall Papers under the
date of 1659 is of interest:
I. I. and W. Leddra went ... to a place called Sandwich where there
are many friends, who suffer much in the spoiling of their goods;
after that they had been there some time, they were taken prisoners
at A Towne called Plymouth. Dearly Beloved C. Holder ... is passed
towards Sandwitch againe, as I have been told, where he had fine
service among friends since I. I. and W. L. were Imprisoned.
But the fine service referred to was not without unpleasant
interruptions, for on June 23, 1658, Christopher Holder and John
Copeland, the first Quaker ministers on the Cape, were arrested
on their way to Sandwich, and a little later were sent out of the
jurisdiction.
The authorities sometimes tried other tactics before resorting to
pains and penalties. In 1659, they made an attempt--apparently sincere
but comically ineffectual--to bring the erring brethren back to the
Orthodox fold. John Smith, of Barnstable, together with Isaac Robinson
of Falmouth, and two Plymouth men, was permitted to attend Quaker
meetings with a view to persuading the Friends to abandon their ways.
So far from succeeding, the experiment resulted in the conversion of
both Robinson and Smith, and three years later Smith was one of a
group that broke away from the Barnstable church and formed a Quaker
meeting of their own. A joint council of clergy and laymen was called
to recommend what measures should be taken in this alarming state of
affairs. Their verdict was sufficiently explicit and harsh enough to
suit the most vindictive. The gist of it was that other churches might
not hold communion with the Quakers, nor the Quakers among themselves.
But neither excommunication nor the disfranchisement that went with
it disturbed the Quakers in the least, for they believed that their
own consciences were better guides than the decrees of orthodoxy.
The authorities, however, did not stop with decrees. They, too, had
consciences which drove them to carry on vigorously the war that they
had declared. When the Quakers persisted in absenting themselves from
church and holding meetings of their own, they were fined. Since they
usually had not money enough to pay the fine, their goods were seized,
and this, in frontier settlements, where axes and kettles were scarce
and horses and cattle indispensable, was hardship, indeed. The marshal
whose duty it was thus to plunder the houses of recalcitrant Quakers,
had, one would suppose, an unpleasant task. But whether by accident
or design, a man had been selected as marshal of the three towns of
Sandwich, Barnstable, and Yarmouth, who was as ruthless as the laws he
was called upon to enforce. George Barlow, ‘the Quaker Terror,’ had, so
far as can be discovered from contemporary authorities, not a single
good trait. A bully, a drunkard, and a hypocrite, he took malicious
pleasure in tyrannizing over a sect from whom he was in no danger of
suffering physical injury.
There is no need of reciting the long list of Barlow’s brutalities. He
had no imagination, and his technique never varied. It was his habit
to take not what would be most valuable to the authorities, but what
would be most poignantly missed by the Quaker families. The story of
his visit to the house of William Allen in Sandwich, which has become a
local tradition, will serve to illustrate his methods. Allen’s thrift
and industry had made him prosperous, but his subsequent adherence
to the Quaker doctrine made him poor. His house was a rendezvous for
Friends; he was therefore a marked man in the eye of the law, and
during 1658 and 1659, so much of his property was seized that nothing
remained but his house and land, and a single cow. He had himself been
driven from town and was, at the time of Barlow’s final visit, lying in
a Boston jail. His wife Priscilla and the children were alone in the
house. The marshal first took the cow, all the corn in the house, and
a bag of meal that had been given to Mrs. Allen by the neighbors. Not
content with this, he annexed the only copper kettle she had, and said
with a leer, ‘Now, Priscilla, how will thee cook for thy family and
friends? Thee has no kettle.’ ‘George,’ replied Mrs. Allen, ‘that God
who hears the young ravens when they cry will provide for them. I trust
in that God, and I verily believe the time will come when thy necessity
will be greater than mine.’ Barlow, so the story goes, lived to see
Priscilla’s prophecy fulfilled.
It is easy enough in this day of toleration, or indifference, in
matters of doctrine, to criticize the authorities who harried the
Society of Friends. Those dignitaries could see no sense in the reason
which the Quakers gave for refusing to contribute to the Orthodox
Church, though a sounder reason would be far to seek. They had Biblical
precedent, they said, for not giving support to those from whom they
had received no benefit. Most of the magistrates, it is true, from
Governor Hinckley down to the humblest office-holder, were blind
to the inconsistency of an attitude wherein they felt justified in
refusing to contribute to the Church of England, but refused to
acknowledge that the Quakers were justified in refusing to contribute
to the Congregational Church. One should reflect, however, before
censuring Hinckley and his assistants too severely, that they were
convinced that theirs was the one true church, and that any who refused
its doctrine, whether Episcopalians or Quakers, were heretics. The
casual citizen had little fault to find with Quakers. He found them,
except when expressing their views on the government, agreeable and
peace-loving neighbors, temperate, industrious, and helpful. He was
never shocked, as citizens in other parts of New England occasionally
were, by the spectacle of naked Quakers rushing through village
streets, to the glory of God and of the Society of Friends. So he was
far from sharing the Court’s views that all Quakers should either
recant or move away. More than once, in fact, Orthodox citizens, in
trying to act as buffers between the Quakers and the authorities, were
badly bruised between the rolling side of the Quaker ship and the
granite pier of the Government. In 1658, nine citizens of Sandwich
were disfranchised for being, or sympathizing with, Quakers. There
was danger even for a deputy who lifted up his voice in behalf of the
persecuted sect. James Cudworth, for a time a citizen of Barnstable and
deputy to the General Court, writes as follows in November, 1658:
Last election Mr. Hatherly, and my Self, left off the Bench, and
myself Discharged of my Captainship because I had entertained some of
the Quakers at my house (thereby that I might be better acquainted
with their Principles). I thought it better so to do, than with the
blind World, to Censure, Condem, Rail at, and Revile them, when they
neither saw their Persons, nor knew any of their Principles. But the
Quakers and my self cannot close in divers things; and so I signified
to the Court, I was no Quaker, but must bear my Testimony against
sundry things that they held, as I had Occasion and Opportunity:
But withal I told them, that as I was no Quaker, so I would be no
Persecutor.
Such was the attitude that cost Cudworth his captaincy and his position
as deputy.
It would, of course, be an error to suppose that all the punishments
the Quakers received were unjust. They were more than exasperating
in their ‘holier than thou’ attitude. Morton says truly that ‘they
placed their justification upon their patience and suffering for
their opinions, and on their righteous life and retired demurity, and
affected singularity both in word and gesture.’ Furthermore, contempt
of court was quite as often the cause of their being punished as their
‘corrupt and damnable doctrines.’ Governors and magistrates were to
them no more than farmers or tanners. Nor did the Quakers always
adhere to that ‘retired demurity’ of life on which they so much prided
themselves. Robert Harper undoubtedly got what he deserved when he was
whipped for ‘intolerably insolent conduct at Barnstable in railing
against Mr. Wally and at Sandwich against Mr. Wiswall.’ Even to-day
there would be a sensation if a high official were called in public
‘an impudent man and a pitiful governor.’ Yet that is the language
that a Sandwich Quaker used toward his chief magistrate; and he went
on to taunt the Governor, asking him ‘why he did not send him to gaol
since his back had long itched to be whipped.’ But the limit in abusive
language was reached when Humphrey Norton, addressing Governor Prince
before the assembled Court, said, ‘Thomas, thou liest; Prince, thou
art a malicious man.’ And again, ‘Thy clamorous tongue I regard no
more than the dust under my feet.’ ‘Thou art like a scolding woman.’
Imprisonment or whipping for such silly insolence was just enough.
By quick stages the persecution of Quakers began to cease. They
first appeared on the Cape about 1656. King Charles’s letter of
1661, enjoining all Colonial Governors to cease persecuting them,
was followed three years later by a commission which arrived in New
England in response to repeated Quaker appeals, to look the situation
over, try certain cases, and recommend toleration. The commissioners
were respectfully greeted by representatives from Plymouth; the King’s
men felt no real enthusiasm about the Quaker question; the Plymouth
men felt no interest in enlightening them. They talked pleasantly but
vaguely; the commissioners began to sigh for the fleshpots of London,
and soon sailed back home to the satisfaction of every one but the
Quakers. It cannot be asserted, therefore, that either the King’s
letter or his commission put an end to the persecutions, but they
undoubtedly gave the authorities pause. If the Quakers had the royal
ear, it might be as well to walk circumspectly. The death of Governor
Prince in 1673 and the succession of Josiah Winslow was another step
toward peace, for Winslow was far more tolerant than his predecessor.
From this date the policy of leniency grew, in spite of Hinckley’s
uncompromising attitude, until, in 1717, we find Yarmouth voting in
a town meeting that no Quaker need contribute to the support of the
Orthodox minister.
Why, it may be asked, was the Court and not the Church the power that
punished the Quakers? The answer is twofold. In the first place,
Quaker demonstrations were almost always breaches of the peace rather
than heresy, and as such they came under the jurisdiction of the
Court. In the second place, the worst penalty the Church could inflict
was excommunication, which was no punishment at all to the Friends.
Furthermore, for a long time there was almost no distinction between
the Church and the civil government--certainly nothing like the gulf
that separates them to-day. And this was natural, for the Bible in
the minds of the Pilgrims was an adequate source of government; they
consulted the Mosaic Law, it will be remembered, for the answers to
knotty questions in jurisprudence. More often than not new settlements
were made by churches, not by scattered individuals. It was Lothrop’s
church that came with him and settled Barnstable; it was half the
Plymouth church that made the town of Eastham. Membership in the church
was a requisite for civil distinction and even for the right to vote.
The personnel of the parish and of the civil government was identical.
It is not surprising, therefore, that for many years parish business
was transacted in town meetings. In 1703, when Falmouth decided to
dispense with the preaching of Mr. Shiverick, the action was taken in a
town meeting because every man at the meeting was necessarily a member
of the church. Another Falmouth minister, Mr. Isaiah Mann, died in
1789, and the town voted a supply of wood and rye for his widow. All
the early town records are full of ministers’ salaries and other church
affairs.
The Church, nevertheless, maintained disciplinary powers quite
distinct from the Court and held the right to excommunicate brethren
who refused to follow what it decreed even in regard to purely civil
controversies. Excommunication, though it held no terrors for the
Quakers, was a calamity to the Orthodox citizen, for with his loss of
membership in the Church came automatically the loss of his vote in
town and Colony elections. His only resource lay in his right to appeal
to a higher ecclesiastical council.
An interesting case of this sort of Church discipline--and one that
is the more striking because it occurred as late as 1868--was the
incident of Joseph Bodfish, of West Barnstable, and the pasture bars.
Mr. Bodfish, an elderly and respected member of the Congregational
Church, had for years, in getting out his winter’s wood, been in the
habit of crossing a piece of meadow that belonged to another member of
the family. At the owner’s death, the meadow went to Joseph’s cousin,
Sylvanus, also a member of the church. Sylvanus promptly warned Joseph
not to cross that way any more, and nailed bars across the gap in
the fence. Joseph consulted Judge Marston, who told him that he had
a clearly established right of way to the swamp and advised him to
pull down the bars himself if Sylvanus wouldn’t. Joseph--obviously a
lover of peace--asked one of the deacons to try his luck at persuading
Sylvanus to remove the bars. The deacon refused and recommended instead
that the matter be laid before the church. This Joseph did, but
unfortunately intimated that if the church did not decide in his favor,
he would take the dispute to Court, and rely on Judge Marston to see
him through.
The committee, not unnaturally, were angry at this veiled threat,
which reminded them of the unpleasant truth that the Court was a more
powerful body than they. So they refused to remonstrate with Sylvanus,
but said that they would examine the lot and see whether the wood could
not be taken out some other way. This they did and declared that Joseph
had no right of way across Sylvanus’s pasture and that they ‘could not
justify a further prosecution of the claim’; they further _required_
Joseph to leave the matter for the whole church to decide. He refused,
and was promptly suspended from membership for one year, ‘to give him
opportunity of fully reflecting on the matter.’ His wife Asenath and
his son Benjamin were likewise suspended. All three appealed in vain
for a hearing; their appeal for a Mutual Council to decide the matter
was equally vain, the parish taking the ground that ‘the church is the
highest earthly tribunal to deal with disorderly members.’ The year of
suspension ended on May 3, 1868, and Joseph wrote to the committee on
July 28, that he was ‘willing to right the wrong, but not to wrong the
right.’ This smart remark failed to please the authorities, and three
days later he and his wife and son were excommunicated for ‘violation
of the church covenant.’
Here was Church discipline with a vengeance. The unhappy family again
appealed in vain for a hearing before a Mutual Council, and as a last
resort proceeded to call a council _ex-parte_ composed of the Reverend
Henry Dexter, of Boston, and eight other clergymen. This Council
found that the action of the West Barnstable church was contrary to
the law of Christ and the fundamental principles and usages of the
Congregational Church; declared that, as such, it ought to be null
and void; and recommended that the three excommunicated members be
readmitted to good standing.
Other and earlier troubles had arisen to disturb the serenity of
the Church. The question of baptism--always an ecclesiastical
battle-ground--claimed the attention of the pious in the intervals
between Quaker demonstrations. The subject had been raised in Plymouth
as far back as 1638, and cropped up again in Yarmouth during the
ministry of Mr. Thomas Thornton, about 1670. Thornton was a liberal and
fearlessly adopted the so-called Half-Way Covenant. Up to this time
only the baptized could be church members, and only the children of
church members could be baptized. But the Half-Way Covenant authorized
the baptism of the children of any pious persons professing Orthodoxy,
even though they had never been baptized. This reasonable measure
raised a few ominous clouds in the conservative half of the heavens,
and resulted in some rumblings as of an approaching storm. But Thornton
forged ahead without shortening sail, and came through safely. The
Half-Way Covenant flourished in the free air of the New World, and
spread to one town after another up and down the Cape.
The fact is that, as their numbers grew and their prosperity increased,
the settlers began to feel less interest in the minutiæ of formalized
worship, if not in religion itself. The Mayflower band, with winter
knocking at the door of their unwarmed houses, had found comfort
in religion when no other comfort could be had. So was it with the
pioneers on the Cape. But when the first sharp struggle with the
wilderness had been won, and the settlers began to build adequate
houses with wide hearths, religion came to be less a crying need and
more an extra-curriculum activity. This is doubtless one reason why
there was not a greater storm when Thornton adopted the Half-Way
Covenant. Goodness knows men still read their Bibles and still went to
Church. The Reverend John Simpkins, of Brewster, writing as late as
1809, says, ‘It is still, even at the present day, considered quite
unfashionable not to attend the public worship.’ But the motive--the
impulse--which is revealed by the word ‘unfashionable’--was very
different from the old motive, and the change had already begun. Of
course this state of affairs did not arrive until long after Thornton
had gone to a well-earned rest, and his children’s children, if such
there were, as well. But the ball had begun to roll, and though its
momentum was as yet hardly perceptible, it was headed for a steep slope
and a straight track toward the toleration that comes from indifference.
The old clergy were much concerned at the state of affairs. Not
only was interest in religion waning, but ministers were becoming
scarce. Barnstable went for five years, 1678-83, without any settled
pastor. In 1678, the Reverend John Cotton, writing from Plymouth to
Governor Hinckley at Barnstable, says that it is a ‘dying time with
preachers’--a lament that is by no means foreign to the ears of our
own generation. Another and important development, which the Old
Guard interpreted as a sign of disintegration, was the tendency of
the Cape towns to split into two parishes, ostensibly because the
outlying houses were too far from the church, but perhaps also, if the
truth were known, because some disliked the teachings of the settled
minister and wanted a new church and a new minister of their own. The
geographical reason was a good one, however, and no real objection
could be raised by any one against such separations.
Sandwich made two parishes out of one in 1735, though for several years
the members of the new church were compelled to contribute to the
support of the old parish as well as bear the expenses of their own.
Barnstable began to show signs of restlessness as early as 1712, and
in spite of considerable opposition, a new parish was formed the same
year. The new meetinghouse was not built until four years later; but
in 1716 it was well under way on Cobb’s Hill in the easterly part of
the town. It is interesting to note Cotton Mather’s distress when he
learned of the proceedings. ‘Poor Barnstable,’ he writes; ‘what shall
be done for thee? Give the best Advice that may be, to the afflicted
and oppressed young Minister there.’ The ‘afflicted and oppressed’
young minister was the Reverend Jonathan Russell, Jr., who had recently
been called to the original Church, in the West Precinct. No doubt it
was hard for him to see half his parishioners walk out to serve new
gods, it might be, to the eastward. But the path of progress is ever
wet with the tears of conservatism or selfishness. In 1721, Yarmouth
followed suit by setting off the East Precinct as a new parish, which
later became the town of Dennis, and sooner or later Eastham, Harwich,
and other Cape towns did likewise, sometimes in the teeth of fierce
opposition from the Mother Church; sometimes with her blessing. The
fact that almost always the new parishes were in time incorporated as
independent towns suggests what may have been another motive for their
desire to separate. The fathers of the new church would be the fathers
of the new town; and independence was in the air. Thus, with mixed
motives and half or quite unconsciously, our ancestors used religion as
a means to civil independence.
[Illustration: WEST BARNSTABLE CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, BUILT 1717-18]
The new parishes had plenty to think about besides their church. Some
were already angling for incorporation; others devoted their energies
to acquiring broader acres, neglecting God in the service of mammon.
War is never good for morals or religion, and the long French and
Indian Wars were playing their part in loosening the bonds that had
held men to the Church. The clergy volleyed and thundered as loud as
ever, but the spirits of their congregations were not so eager as of
yore. The time was ripe for revival, and revival came about 1740 with
the dynamic George Whitefield and the Great Awakening, the effects of
which were violent and on the whole beneficial.
Whitefield was a young Episcopal clergyman who, like Mark Antony,
possessed the ‘power of speech to move men’s souls.’ If he had appeared
in New England a hundred years earlier, he would have been jailed
as a Papist and a corrupter of the true faith. But the century and
a quarter that had passed since the Pilgrims landed had gone far
toward obliterating the old hatred of the Church of England. So he was
permitted to travel the length and breadth of the Colonies, preaching
sometimes in churches but quite as often in the open air. He never
visited the Cape, but his disciples did, and the citizens listened at
first with interest and then with excitement to the exhortations of the
inspired young itinerants. Theirs was the doctrine of hope. Salvation,
they said, was waiting for penitent sinners. Such teaching was music
to the ears of men who were used to hell-fire sermons like those of
Treat. Here were preachers who told them that though their sins were
as scarlet, they could be as white as snow. They left the old churches
by the score and were again dubbed separatists by the stand-patters,
as their grandfathers had been before them. Sometimes they called
themselves ‘Come-Outers’; sometimes ‘New Lights.’
Whitefield’s influence was twofold, for the ministers of other
denominations copied his custom of traveling from place to place in
evangelical fashion. Elisha Paine, for example, a Connecticut Baptist
of Cape ancestry, made a flying visit to Harwich in 1744 in the course
of a peripatetic career, and held a series of open-air meetings in
which he rallied many to the Baptist standard. He writes to his wife in
an exultant strain: ‘The pine woods of Harwich ring with Hallelujahs
and hosannas, even from babes!’ and again, ‘I felt the spirit of the
Lord come upon me. I rose up and exhorted and persuaded them to come
to Christ, and immediately there was a screeching and groaning all
over the multitude and hath been very powerful ever since.’ No doubt
reaction followed the screeches and the groans, but the converts were
the better for some religious emotion, at least, and a good many of
them adhered to the new doctrine.
The Old Guard Congregational ministers, meanwhile, were at their wits’
end. No power that they could exercise, no denunciations that they
could compose, had any force in checking the stream of separatists
that flowed from the churches. The only response that occurred to them
was to hold a meeting and draft a document which should explain why
itinerant preaching in general, and Whitefield’s in particular, was
pernicious. Accordingly, in February, 1745, ten of them, representing
the seven principal towns, met at Harwich, which had become the center
of religious unrest on the Cape. They set about their task with an
earnestness born of despair. They composed a pamphlet in which the
‘many sad consequents’ of itinerant preaching were ‘discovered.’ If
the itinerants wish to wander about preaching, they argued, let them
go where the Word of God is not already adequately preached; let them
go among the heathen. As for their plea that they have received an
‘extraordinary call,’ we shall not believe it until we see results
commensurate with such a call. All impostors and enthusiasts have
pretended to such extraordinary calls. We admit that the itinerants
have done some good, but not enough to justify their practice; for ‘a
sovereign God can and ofttimes doth bring Good out of Evil, but this
in no wise excuseth the Evil-Doer.’ Furthermore, the chief result of
itinerant preaching has been to substitute schism and discord for peace
and unity in the established churches, and we do not believe, as the
itinerants are reported to declare, that ‘Contention is a sign of the
Work of God.’ Therefore, in conclusion, ‘We cannot in Faithfulness to
Christ or his People under our several charges, give any Encouragement
or Countenance to the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield as an Itinerant
Preacher.’
This serious appeal to reason stood no chance against the revivalist’s
sensational appeals to the emotions. The old Congregational clergy
had to content itself with ministering to the staid and cautious,
while the nimbler spirits enlisted under the flag of the schismatics.
There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of the ministers who drew up
the indictment against the itinerants. They believed that unity was
the keystone of religion, and that if unity was destroyed, the whole
structure would fall in ruins. The fact that their own livelihoods
were involved in the crash was naturally present to their minds, for
they were human; but it served only to strengthen, not to create,
their conviction. The days of ecclesiastical monopoly were at an
end. The Quakers were exempt from supporting the Old Church; the
Separatists and New Lights were on the highroad to the same goal. So
were the Baptists. No wonder the Reverend Edward Pell, minister of the
Congregational Church in the South Parish of Brewster, remarked in 1752
on his deathbed that he would prefer not to be buried in that parish,
for fear ‘that the Lord would never think to look in such an ungodly
place for a righteous man.’
Religious affairs remained in pretty much this posture until after the
Revolution. Then, about 1795, came the Methodists, the last new sect
to meet with any appreciable opposition. The scene of Quaker troubles
had centered, as we have seen, at Sandwich; the principal activity of
the New Lights and Baptists had taken place halfway down the Cape, at
Harwich and Chatham. The Methodists began at the tip end of the Cape
among the shifting sands and scrubby hills of Provincetown and Truro.
Tradition says that a certain Captain William Humbert, a Methodist,
whose vessel was becalmed in Provincetown Harbor, came ashore and
preached to the fishermen. As nearly as can be discovered, this
happened in 1793. The Captain’s words seem to have found favor with the
Provincetowners, for within two years plans were under way to build a
Methodist meeting-house there, and in 1795, according to Dr. Coggswell,
‘the house at last went up; the second Methodist Church in New England.’
Coggswell might well say ‘at last,’ for the opposition to the new
sect was so strong that the town meeting voted that any who would not
pay the standing minister’s rate should have his interest ‘sesed,’
and ‘that there shall not be a Methodist meeting-house built in this
town.’ Hardly had the vote been recorded when a vessel-load of lumber
for the new church arrived at the wharf and was wheeled up to the
beach. Provincetown men have always been direct-actionists; a group
of determined Orthodox citizens went to the beach by night, cut the
lumber into convenient sizes and dragged it to the top of High Pole
Hill, where they burned it with an effigy of the Reverend Jesse Lee,
the Methodist minister. This gentleman was on hand to watch the
performance, which seems not to have been altogether unexpected, for
he writes, ‘I went to see the timber destroyed by the mob and felt
astonished at the conduct of the people, considering that we live in
a free country. However, I expect this will be for the good of the
little Society.’ Nothing daunted, the Methodists got another load of
lumber and, with armed men guarding it day and night, built their
meeting-house.
This victory gave the opposition its death-blow. Further objections
were but whistles against the hurricane. The town fathers were finally
forced to yield, for the number of Methodists grew so fast, not only in
Provincetown but in Truro and Wellfleet, that in 1830 the Provincetown
Congregational Church closed its doors for want of supporters.
It is not hard to see why Methodism made so strong an appeal to
the whalemen and cod-fishermen of the lower Cape. A modified form
of itineracy which the new denomination practiced provided that no
minister should preach in the same town for more than two years
and sometimes only for one. There was, therefore, no danger that a
congregation should suffer long from the harangues of a dull preacher.
But variety of another sort is what made most converts. The Methodist
preachers were often men of little education and no religious training.
Zeal and ‘a call’ with them took the place of theological schools. The
consequence was a breezy informality in their discourses. They never
hesitated to employ startling tricks to keep their hearers awake. On
one occasion a Methodist minister in Truro interrupted his sermon by
the remark, ‘Brethren, your stove pipe is so confoundedly crooked,
that I can’t preach a straight sermon.’ Another whose subject was ‘the
World, the Flesh, and the Devil,’ prefaced his remarks by saying, ‘I
shall touch lightly upon the World, hasten to the Flesh, and pass on
to the Devil, when I will give it to you hot as you can sup it.’ It
is a consolation, if we are to get the Devil, to be given him in a
language that we can understand. There was, in fact, little danger
that a Methodist preacher would shoot over the heads of his hearers.
This--with a pleasant smattering of rugged wit--went far toward
making Methodism popular, for no men appreciate wit more keenly than
Cape-Codders. The Reverend Edgar Clark, one of the early Methodist
ministers in Provincetown, showed adroitness and much sense when a
pharisaic whaleman of his congregation asked him what to do if, after
cruising for months without filling a cask, he sighted a hundred-barrel
whale on Sunday. ‘I think,’ said Mr. Clark, ‘I should call all hands
together and ask the Lord to bless us. Then I would go and get the
whale.’
Another pleasant practice of the Methodists was Camp Meeting Week,
which began at Wellfleet in 1819 and after a few years moved to
Truro. Camp meetings were, and continue to be, not merely religious
assemblies, but social outings as well. The women find a few days in
camp a pleasant change from the drudgery of their kitchens; the men do
not confine their conversation to ecclesiastical topics. The early camp
meetings were thronged with enthusiastic citizens of every denomination
from all over the Cape:
‘We saw great gatherings in a grove,
A grove near Pamet Bay,
Where thousands heard the preacher’s word,
And dozens knelt to pray.’
Eastham was the next camp meeting town. Here they began in 1828 and
were so successful that the Methodists bought a ten-acre lot called
Millennium Grove, and put up a big frame building to house the
ministers. The congregations lived in tents. Sometimes--especially
on Sundays--as many as five thousand persons attended, some of them,
it must be confessed, inspired by no loftier motive than curiosity
or mischief. Here men and women arose to give testimony as to their
religious experiences, and no doubt some who came to scoff remained to
pray. Camp meetings are still held every summer in the woods between
Yarmouth and Hyannis.
So, before long, for this reason and that, the Methodists out-numbered
any other denomination in most of the Cape towns; and as soon as this
happened, all question of their being obliged to support the standing
order vanished. Town meetings were parish meetings no longer. Religious
freedom became a fact, not by any one grand proclamation, but by years
of persistent work by Quakers, Itinerants, Baptists, and Methodists.
No two towns struck off the shackles at exactly the same time, but in
general by 1816, when Wellfleet exempted Methodists from supporting the
Orthodox Church, religion on the Cape might take what form it would.
All this was mighty hard on the devout old Congregationalist ministers,
whose lot, even in the palmiest days of orthodoxy, had been no easy
one. No picture of early ecclesiastical days in the Plymouth Colony
would be complete without at least a few words of tribute to these
stalwart pillars of a stalwart faith. Taken by and large, no finer
or more influential men ever ministered to a nation’s welfare. It
is no accident that the towns of Bourne, Dennis, and Brewster were
named for their pastors. Such men as John Lothrop, Richard Bourne,
Timothy Alden, Josiah Dennis, and Samuel Treat are titanic figures in
the history of the Cape. Theirs was the task of setting a spiritual
and intellectual standard that should permeate every phase of life.
Righteous themselves, they demanded righteousness in their followers,
and within the limitations of human nature, they got it. Their example
gave strength to the weak and courage to the faint-hearted. As often
as not they were physicians as well as pastors, ministering to ills of
the body with the same rugged energy they employed with the ills of
the soul. The Reverend Thomas Thornton was the only doctor in Yarmouth
from 1670 until old age forced him to retire. Fifty years later Mr.
Greenleaf was both minister and physician for the same town. The
Reverend Hugh Adams, who was called to the pulpit in Chatham in 1711,
is said to have had an extensive medical practice, even outside his
own parish. The tombstone of the Reverend Benjamin Fessenden, who died
in Sandwich later in the same century, bears among other eulogistic
remarks the following: ‘not only as a divine was he useful, but as a
discreet and successful physician.’
These early men of God had to be men of fine parts to get their
positions in the first place; before they were officially called to a
church, they were often required to prove their mettle by a long series
of sermons before congregations as critical and as potentially hostile
as school boys. Timothy Alden preached sixteen times to the Yarmouth
Parish before they were satisfied that he would do; and Mr. Joseph
Green, who antedated him by a few years, worked for fifty-two Sundays
to earn the same position. Sandwich was still more candid. Unable to
decide whether Thomas Tupper or Richard Bourne was the better man, the
congregation asked them to preach in competition, and he who had the
fuller house was named ‘minister for the day.’
The ministers needed ready tact and large sympathies, if they were
to cope successfully with such troublesome parishioners as Sunday
fishermen, many of whom were for nine months of the year exemplary
Christians. What, for example, was the Truro parson to say to a certain
noted skipper who used to assert with commendable candor that ‘there
was no hope for him if he died during the fishing season, but in winter
he was all right?’ Such questions wanted nice handling. Lack of tact
cost the Reverend Charles Boyter his pulpit in Truro. He arrived there
about a hundred years ago and decided one day to swell the numbers
of his congregation by announcing that his next discourse would be a
sermon on Luck. Sunday morning found the church filled with interested
fishermen, who knew more about luck than any other class of men in the
world. But Mr. Boyter proclaimed that there was no such thing as luck;
industry and hard work, not luck, were what brought full fares of fish.
‘Bait your hooks with red flannel,’ he told them; ‘then if you don’t
catch codfish, it will be because you don’t try.’ And he compared the
rigors of the Grand Banks to ‘trouting in the brooks of Vermont with a
fly and pole.’ Shortly after this sermon, Mr. Boyter left Truro to try
his luck in Orange, New Jersey.
Then there was the ticklish question of church music; that, too, craved
wary walking. The Old Church fell heir to Calvin’s prejudice against
instrumental music, though one may properly ask whether their peculiar
antipathy to organs was not owing to their cost and the difficulty of
getting them, quite as much as to any more pious objection. In 1726,
the West Parish of Barnstable was split wide open on the question of
music, and had to call in civil authority to decide it. But two years
later the progressives won, and the church voted to sing ‘the regular
or new way,’ that is, with the accompaniment of instruments. The
Orleans church had no music, other than vocal, until 1810; then a bass
viol made its appearance, probably in the face of strong opposition
from a conservative minority.
Through quicksands such as these the parson had to pick his way with
care, guided by his conscience on the one hand and expediency on
the other. But the greatest trials of the ministers arose from the
very ardor and attentiveness of the congregations. The Reverend John
Robinson’s principle that every member should feel responsible for the
church’s welfare and should have a voice in all its proceedings, was
undoubtedly a fine thing; but it made endless trouble for the pastor.
Any one felt justified in falling foul of his doctrine. Mr. Marmaduke
Matthews, who occupied the pulpit in Yarmouth about 1640, was hauled
over the coals for ‘weak and unsafe’ remarks in his sermons; and this
in spite of the fact that he has been characterized as ‘able, zealous
and devoted.’ Mr. Matthews humbly apologized, confessing that ‘he
might have expressed and delivered himself in terms more free from
exception,’ and he was allowed to continue his labors.
Yarmouth, in fact, was early a hotbed of trouble for ministers. In
1651, Mr. John Miller, the pastor of the town, was haled before the
Plymouth Court for alleged aspersions against the Government. What
these aspersions were is not stated. Doubtless they were as chimerical
as Mr. Matthews’s heresies. The citizens of Falmouth in 1702 voted that
they would not employ Samuel Shiverick any more to preach to them, and
chose Joseph Parker to tell him of it. What it was in Mr. Shiverick’s
preaching that offended his hearers one is left to conjecture.
Another celebrated row occurred in Eastham, where the Reverend Samuel
Osborn, after preaching from 1718 to 1738, was dismissed by a vote of
an ecclesiastical council. The judgment of this august gathering is no
surprise, for Osborn had forsaken Calvin for Arminius, and had been
indiscreet enough to assert a universal negative, by saying that there
were no promises in the Bible but what were conditional. Few Yankees,
even to-day, would let this statement pass without thumbing their
Bibles for evidence against it. Yet Osborn, aside from being a powerful
preacher, had done much for the temporal welfare of Eastham; he had
taught the citizens better ways of growing crops and had showed them
how the peat, of which there was a great quantity in the town, might be
used for fuel.
While Mr. Osborn was in doctrinal difficulties at Eastham, the Reverend
Joseph Metcalfe found himself in sartorial trouble in Falmouth. With
no previous warning, he appeared one Sunday in the pulpit sporting
a new wig, which, though ‘not expressed in fancy, neat, not gaudy,’
was yet a sufficient improvement over the old one to set the Falmouth
ladies’ tongues wagging about vanity and the preacher. The next day
he stepped, perhaps by accident, into a house where several prominent
ladies were discussing the absorbing topic. Mr. Metcalfe, the soul of
urbanity, suggested that they might be better pleased if he gave up
wearing a wig altogether? No, that would never do, they declared in
scandalized tones. Perhaps they would like the old one reinstated? By
no means! ‘Then let us alter the new one until it ceases to offend,’
said the patient pastor, wherewith he presented it to one of the ladies
after another, each of whom clipped from it what she regarded as the
sinful lock. The last lady declared that to wear a wig at all was to
break the Second Commandment, but Mr. Metcalfe pointed out that the wig
in its present condition ‘was so unlike anything in the heaven above or
on the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth,’ that it was
surely exempt from any possible censure.
Quarrels of one sort or another between clergymen and their
congregations became so much matters of course that one canny divine,
Mr. Hugh Adams, who was called to Chatham in 1711, took precautionary
measures. He accepted the call on condition that if any difference
arose between him and his parish (‘which we should both humbly pray
there may never be’), a committee of clergymen should decide on the
rights and wrongs of the disagreement; that if the whole blame was
found to rest on the people, Adams and his heirs should still be
entitled to his salary forever, whether he was dismissed or not. If
neither party was found to blame, or if the blame was equally divided,
the salary, too, should be equally divided. Mr. Adams’s fears were
prophetic. After five years, the trouble came, and he was dismissed,
stoutly asserting that he did not care, for ‘he had a better call
elsewhere.’ It would be interesting to know whether the town lived up
to its agreement regarding his salary. Perhaps, though, he was found
_wholly_ to blame!
Any treasures which the old clergy laid up for themselves must have
been in heaven; certainly they got few enough of them on earth,
for ministers in colonial times were paid proportionally no better
than they are now; but it does seem hard that for a time they were
obliged to collect their own salaries. How they did it, one can only
conjecture; perhaps by a door-to-door canvas, hat in hand; perhaps,
if they were more discreet, by a fervid reference to the soaring
price of beef in the course of a parish call. At any rate, it was a
miserable arrangement, which in the words of the Reverend Enoch Pratt
‘was attended with much trouble [to the minister] and often impaired
his usefulness.’ After one generation had suffered under it, the method
was changed; but even so, not much actual cash found its way into the
parsonage. The fact that parishioners counted on drift whales to pay
part of the minister’s salary shows that installments must have arrived
with some irregularity. In 1659, some of the Yarmouth men refused
to contribute anything to the support of Mr. Miller, and were very
properly taken to task by the Court.
Sometimes the parishioners tried to dock the ministerial stipend, as
the Wellfleeters did with the Reverend Mr. Lewis in 1747. Times were
hard, and the rapid depreciation of currency threw all old standards
to the winds. His parishioners waited on Mr. Lewis with the suggestion
that he accept the sum of sixty pounds, new tenor, as his salary from
then on. But Mr. Lewis was a business man and no doubt had a large
and hungry family; it is a pleasure to record that he held out for
seventy-five pounds, and got it.
A good part of the pastor’s pay took the form of wood and salt hay.
Just after the Revolution, the Reverend Jude Damon of Truro received a
salary of seventy-five pounds in cash besides the use of the parsonage,
eighteen cords of wood cut and delivered at his door, and five tons of
salt hay. In 1749, Mr. Stephen Emery, the Chatham minister, received a
similar allowance of wood. So, taken all in all, and considering the
simplicity of the times, the early Cape clergymen lived comfortably
enough. If the flock sometimes grew careless and were late with the
winter’s wood, they were sure to turn up with it sooner or later.
Timothy Alden, the beloved pastor of Yarmouth, had this experience on
one occasion and chose for his next Sunday’s text, ‘Where no wood is
there the fire goeth out.’ Mr. Joseph Green, the Barnstable minister,
started the pleasant custom of asking the boys in to a hearty dinner
washed down with a glass of flip when the wood was unloaded.
As time went on, freedom of speech, which grew with the progress of
civilization, became gall and wormwood to the preacher. No divinity
hedged him; he was fair game for earnest conservative and godless
scoffer:
‘A learned Treat, a pious Webb,
And Cheever--all no more;
Mr. Shaw then took the helm
And run the ship ashore.’
So sang Peter Walker, the unregenerate blacksmith of Eastham, when
the Reverend Philander Shaw, after more than forty years of service,
retired from the old Congregational Church, which had grown as weak and
infirm as its pastor.
During the first half of the nineteenth century, a strange kind of
religious fanaticism visited many of the towns, attacking with greater
or less violence a small number of estimable persons who, as soon as
they became infected with the malady, promptly withdrew from whatever
church they had belonged to and styled themselves ‘Come-Outers.’
They then indulged in antics that rivaled the antics of the Quakers.
Frequently, when under the spell of their mania, they walked along
the tops of fences instead of on the sidewalks; affected a strange,
springing gait, and conversed by singing instead of by ordinary speech,
in the distressing manner of characters in light opera. A favorite tune
for the purpose was ‘Old Dan Tucker.’
If the Come-Outers had confined themselves to these eccentricities,
they might have been allowed, quite literally, to go their own gait
unmolested, for tolerance was pretty well established all over the
Cape. But fanatics are never satisfied while they see the rest of
the world sane; they must needs turn reformers and usher all mankind
along their special route to paradise. So it was with the Come-Outers,
and so their troubles began--troubles that bear a striking analogy
to the troubles of the Quakers. Certain of them were in the habit of
attending Methodist meetings in Barnstable in order to disturb the
proceedings by shouts and songs. After repeated warnings, they were
finally brought into Court, and Nymphas Marston was employed in their
defense. They lost their case and were ordered to pay the expenses of
the trial; they refused, whereupon Marston attached the cattle of one
of his recalcitrant clients, and the fun began. The animals were put
up at auction before a large crowd that had come on the chance that
there might be some excitement. They were not disappointed. Most
of the Come-Outers in town were there, proclaiming that the sheriff
would never dare to sell the cattle, and that no one would dare to
buy them, for they belonged to God, and that God’s curse would fall
upon all who were concerned in the transaction. They accompanied these
announcements with the dances and songs in which they always indulged
when angry, and which they called ‘dancing a person down to hell.’
Bidding was slow--perhaps because the citizens were frightened by the
threats, perhaps because they were being pleasantly entertained by
the performances of the Come-Outers. Finally two of the crowd, Daniel
Scudder and Daniel Smith, walked off, bored at the leisurely fashion
in which the auction progressed. This gave a fine chance for some
improvised lines from the Come-Outers, one of whom burst into the
following couplet to the tune of ‘Old Dan Tucker’:
‘I don’t wonder Daniel Smith and
Daniel Scudder flee away!’
But there were hard heads enough in the assemblage to bid on the cattle
at last, and run the risk of incurring God’s wrath. So Mr. Marston got
his pay.
Wherever money is at stake, it is usually possible to discover a thread
of reason in men’s actions. But to account for the behavior of the
persons in the following bits of idiocy is not so easy. An enthusiastic
Barnstable Come-Outer had a pig. A prophetess of his order told him
that he must kill it because the Devil was in it. He killed it, dressed
it nicely, and buried it, convinced that he was weakening Satan’s
dominion thereby. Not only pigs, but money might be the Devil’s abode.
A good woman acted as nurse for a sick friend and was paid a small
sum for her services. The friend who gave it to her remarked, with a
Come-Outer’s shudder, that the Devil was in it, whereupon the horrified
recipient threw it into Great Pond. The happy sequel to this anecdote
is not that she ever found the money again, but that she did regain her
wits and had many a laugh over the antics of her Come-Outer days.
The strange sect was flourishing during the years just before the
Civil War, and became curiously involved in the Abolition Movement
which was so active at that time. As has been explained in another
chapter, one reason why certain men and women withdrew from the various
regular churches was that the churches tolerated slavery. After they
had withdrawn, these persons sometimes called themselves Come-Outers,
whether or not they joined with those of the same name whose
actions have just been described. But Abolition became linked with
Come-Outerism, and slavery was strengthened thereby. In other respects
this eccentric spasm of religious possession did little harm. Many of
its victims recovered after a time; it vanished altogether after the
Civil War.
And what of recent religion on the Cape? There is not much to tell.
Quakers, Baptists, and Methodists broke down the bars, and at one
time or another during the last seventy-five years, every sect that
the ingenuity of man can devise has had its fling. Even those two
great churches which our ancestors called the harlots of Babylon--the
Roman Catholic and the Episcopal--to-day are given the right hand
of fellowship by the old-line Congregational parishes. Charles
Jenkins, the lively historian of Falmouth, was among the last of the
stand-patters when he wrote, in 1843, ‘Already do we hear that motto
so offensive to every true son of New England “No Church without a
Bishop.”’ But the Episcopal Church has been represented here since the
fifties, and the Cape is the better therefor. The shades of Bradford
and Lothrop, if they rise from their graves at the sound of the Te
Deum, rise to join in the Amen; for in the light of their abode, where
all secrets are revealed, they interpret anew the teachings of their
old pastor, John Robinson, who ‘still desired to learn further what the
good will of God was.’ It should be said, however, that the Episcopal
churches even to-day are attended almost exclusively by summer visitors.
The Church of Rome came with the Portuguese fishermen to Provincetown,
and spread with the prosperity of these hardy seafarers. Within
twenty years the Finns, whose numbers have increased amazingly in
the neighborhood of West Barnstable, have presented the Cape with
various sorts of Lutheran theology. The Universalists are everywhere
prospering. Some of the old Congregational churches, like that of
the East Parish in Barnstable, went Unitarian, but retained the name
and polity of the old organization. Here and there are Christian
Scientists; the Swedenborgians have a number of representatives. The
Mormons followed Greenwich Village to Provincetown; a dingy little
building in South Yarmouth echoed not long ago to the enthusiastic
activities of the Holy Rollers. A group of Dennis men, finding nothing
to their taste in existing theology, created for themselves the Free
Independent Church of Holiness, and some of their equally dissatisfied
neighbors anticipated the Provincetown Mormons by joining the
Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, wherein, let
us hope, they found peace at the last.
‘Divide and conquer’ might well have been the Devil’s doctrine in
thus splitting into fragments the remains of a once vigorous piety.
To-day as one makes his way through the Cape villages, one sees in each
two or three great arks of meetinghouses, each of them big enough to
accommodate half the regular church-goers in the county, each of them
attended, if it is attended at all, by a handful of the devout, who,
like the preacher’s utterances, are lost among the hollow echoings of
empty pews. Some have closed their doors for good and stand as bleak
monuments to a transient enthusiasm. Truly as far as church-going is
concerned, man has divided, and the Devil has conquered. Perhaps, after
all, the despairing stanza of a pessimistic poet is close to the truth:
‘I dreamed that I went to the City of Gold,
To Heaven resplendent and fair,
And after I entered the beautiful fold
By one in authority there I was told
That not a Cape-Codder was there.’