CALEB FIELD.
A Tale of the Puritans.
BY THE AUTHOR OF
“PASSAGES IN THE LIFE OF MRS. MARGARET MAITLAND,”
“MERKLAND,” &c.
“Heaven doth with us, as we with torches do;
Not light them for ourselves: for if our virtues
Did not go forth of us, ’twere all alike
As if we had them not. Spirits are not finely touch’d,
But to fine issues: nor Nature never lends
The smallest scruple of her excellence,
But like a thrifty goddess, she determines
Herself the glory of a creditor,
Both thanks and use.”—Measure for Measure.
NEW YORK:
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS,
82 CLIFF STREET. 1851.
TO
ROBERT BARBOUR, ESQ.,
MANCHESTER,
AS ONE OF THE MOST LIBERAL AND WISE SUPPORTERS
OF THAT CHURCH IN ENGLAND
WHICH CLAIMS TO REPRESENT
THE BRAVE AND GENTLE PRESBYTERIANS OF 1665,
THIS TALE
OF THE TRUE CHIVALRY OF THOSE TIMES
Is respectfully Inscribed.
PREFACE.
On no period of English history has so much been written, as on that singular age in which this kingdom acknowledged the sway of the Stuarts. Rife with controversies, which still are alive and strong, its every inch of ground contested, as vehemently almost by modern pens, as when the chivalry of England were met by the only army which could meet their high-born courage—the godly soldiers of Cromwell—the party feeling of its civil wars exists still among us. But we fight no longer with rapier and dagger; when death is braved, there is always a certain dignity in the warfare; but in these days we fall upon a safer mode of carrying on the struggle. We are not called upon to measure swords with the fiery Royalist, or the stern Ironside: so we betake ourselves to more ignoble weapons, which they did not at all times scorn to use—we call names.
And whereas the Royalist forces had decidedly the advantage of their graver antagonists in the use of these offensive weapons, it is perfectly natural, and in keeping, that this superiority should continue; and that as we find the hosts of epithets applied to the rulers of the Commonwealth and their followers, with all the accumulation of adjectives naturally conjoined to these, met only by the one stern word “malignant,” so by legitimate succession, the inheritors of Royalist opinions bring out the old projectiles still in all their original abundance, while those who represent the Roundheads, and fanatics of those days, not choosing to retain their own epithet of reproach, find little in the ancestral armory to meet these arrows withal. The more pacific mode is, perhaps, in this case the better policy, for there is little profit, and less honor, in maintaining a war of retaliation.
The Cavaliers! they have retained as advocates and special pleaders, the most gifted of modern writers; high birth, high courage, and the still more potent spell of misfortune has thrown magic over their names. Let us say no evil of the dead—
“The knights are dust,
And their good swords rust,
Their souls are with the saints, we trust.”
We will call them no names; but their honor stands in no need of vindication; they have had ample justice done them. Let the generous world look gently on another picture, and say to whom belongs the purest renown of chivalry:—to those who fighting for their King’s crown, fought also for their own inheritance, and for the dazzling chance of greater rank and riches; or to those, who, following the banners of a higher King, encountered poverty, reproach, and hardship for the sake of One who offered them no tangible reward, nor any visible glory on this side death.
When the reign of Charles II. began, the Church of England, with a fate which seems to pursue her like her shadow, contained within her ample breast the greatest variety of opinions. The High Church clergy were at the head of the greater bulk, which softened down, as it does still, into the indifferent mass who take color and fashion from the times; and on the opposite side were a body of Presbyterians, who, during the reign of the Commonwealth, had been able to set up their peculiar ecclesiastical organization, and to rule themselves in tolerable quietness. A floating background of individuals holding other views, Independents and Baptists, completed the tale; and, singular enough, when we leave the political histories of the time, and come to the story of these separate men, we find a strange amount of good-will and gentleness subsisting among the differing divines. The very noticeable national feature, the individuality or sectarianism—for the words come to be nearly identical—which set these men afloat, each on his several voyage, can not fail forcibly to strike any one who studies the history of this great Church in England. A careful student, we should almost fancy, must find himself compelled to conclude, that there is wisdom in the latitude which leaves so wide a space between the “high” and the “low” of English churchmanship, and gives the genius of the people so much room to develop itself, while still within the consecrated bounds.
On the other side of the Border we find divisions enough. Churches separate from each other, and bearing separate names; but all cling with like tenacity to the same standards, the same forms, the same doctrine, and the same discipline. There is nothing in which the national characteristics are more clearly displayed. The intense Scottish mind moves on strongly in one direction—unanimous in all the greater points—aiming always when it marches to march as a nation. The English mind asserts its individuality, and strikes out alone, breaking into sections even in the one Church which professes to be undivided; and out of that pale, in the freer regions of Dissent, multiplying in constant diversity.
It was thus with the church when the Restoration intoxicated the kingdoms with its brief joy. Among the best friends of Charles were the Presbyterians. The death of his father had shocked and horrified them, and none had shown themselves more eager to celebrate his return. Holding London as their stronghold, they were scattered in very considerable numbers throughout the whole country, were held in much esteem by the people, and dwelt quietly among their brethren, holding their diverse views in peace and charity, protected, as they thought, by the royal proclamation, and strong in the King’s promise of religious liberty to all.
Their dream of safety was destined to have but a short existence. Two years after the memorable Restoration, the Act of Uniformity expelled from the Church two thousand of her most exemplary clergymen; not bigots—not fanatics—not the bold, strong, uncompromising men, who in Scotland denounced their successors as hirelings, and proclaimed themselves lawful pastors still of the parishes from which they had been driven. The English Nonconformists did not so; meekly they laid down their arms, uncomplainingly withdrew themselves, with their last words bidding their parishioners receive in all honor and respect those appointed to succeed them, and retaliating no otherwise than by quiet good works, and an occasional sigh or lament, upon their persecutors.
One almost marvels at the romance of conscientiousness which displays itself in the lives of these quaint divines. Many of them could receive and approve of the greater part of the service-book enforced upon them; many remained as lay members and communicants, in the churches which they could no longer serve as pastors; many used voluntarily the Liturgy which caused their expulsion; and yet, with all worldly benefits and comforts weighing down the scale, the delicate conscience which, while it approved of much, could not “assent and consent” to all, asserted its superior importance, and triumphed. It is a singular history. We can understand—intensely distasteful as these observances of the Episcopal Church were to Scotland—how the men who strongly resisted them all, should have been able to cast away every thing earthly, rather than submit to their imposition; but when we look upon these milder men—when we see Philip Henry leading his family to worship in the little church at Worthenbury, which so lately had been his own—and hear Wesley’s gentle self-defense before the not unfriendly Bishop, and observe the reluctance which they had to do any thing that looked like resistance—it becomes a matter more difficult to understand. Yet they did it—peaceful, unobtrusive, gentle men, on whom the bitter nicknames of their adversary fall so strangely inappropriate.
The consequences of this English Bartholomew’s Day were hard upon those ministers. Some forsook the high vocation, in which they could no longer have the simple maintenance they needed; some fell upon the usual resource of poor clergymen, and taught schools; while very many were received into the households of gentlemen who favored their views, or honored their piety, and a very comfortable number retired to the happier provision of their own private resources. But no attempt was made to organize a church, no resistance offered to the acknowledged law. The good men, prohibited from addressing a greater audience than five individuals in addition to their own households, preached three or four times in a day within their houses, to congregations of that scanty number, laboring with simple painstaking to make the frequent repetition of their teachings atone for the limited assembly to which each sermon was delivered. So straightforward in their obedience, so devout in their simplicity, so charitable in their diversities of opinion, one can not help but smile at the singular blindness which upbraids these gentle men with the name of fanatic.
This state of matters continued until the great scourge, known as the Plague of London, had come and gone. As it is endeavored in the following chapters to sketch something of that singular calamity, we do not need to do more than mention it here. It has been often painted, but few have cared to look under the noisome vail of it for the heroisms of the time, though these were not wanting. The visitation passed away; the panic abated. The Nonconformists who had ventured forth in the heat of the day, to bear the burden which many of their successors feared to bear, were cast out from the city for which they had labored in the utmost peril; and a still more severe enactment sent the ejected ministers wandering over the face of the country in which there seemed no rest for them. The Five-Mile Act of Oxford made it penal for any of the silenced preachers to be found within five miles of any corporate town, or of any parish in which they had formerly officiated—a law most hard for the competent, most miserable for the poor.
And then there began to be resistances and imprisonments, the bolder spirits being roused to courage; but still the many submitted. Quietly they left their homes; with touching gentleness refused to be persuaded into rebellion by the voice of their oppressor; and so in their meekness lived on, at war with no man, until indulgences were grudgingly granted to them, and until the Stuarts, with their hereditary aptitude for persecution, had in their turn succumbed.
Let those who are unacquainted with this by-way of history, glance over the somewhat monotonous pages of the Nonconformists’ Memorial. They will find no hard words or denunciations there; the bitterness, so much as there is of it, slumbers innoxiously in the foot-notes of the dissenting editor; the first Dissenters breathed another atmosphere. The tones of the picture are subdued and mellow, the foreground full of quiet figures; smiles about the lips of some of them, tell of the old quaint jesting which, like themselves, is now dead and out of date. Some sit, with thought upon their faces, writing unweariedly, toiling to produce those great volumes which are piled up, like masses of mason-work, behind. Some are going happily, like the sower, about the fields, scattering their winged seed, or by the side of waters, casting forth the bread which many days hence shall return to them. Some with children clambering about their knees, speak to the little ones, with scarce less simplicity than their own, of the Gospel which maketh the simple wise. The sky above them is dim with soft clouds, yet there is sunshine on the picture—the quiet light of peace.
It is pleasant to come into the atmosphere of this old-world devoutness, humility, and quiet—to read how Lord Bishops reasoned with these non-conforming Presbyters, and yet remained no less their very good friends, that their kindly eloquence proved unavailing. How knights and noble gentlemen did honor to the good men in their poverty—how one, whose life was evil, acknowledged that he had no creditable point about him save the love he bore to one of these—and how the little provision they had, like the widow’s cruse of old, seemed to multiply under the blessing of the Master to whom they looked up with so vivid faith. It is true that there was the clang and din of polemic arms abroad in the same England, but the broader, calmer atmosphere does only on that account deserve notice the more.
There were two thousand of them, the greater part being Presbyterians. Where are they now? In their own country there remains little trace of their footsteps: here and there an old scantily endowed chapel, long ago fallen into Socinian hands, marks where they once were; but name and fame of them as a Church have long since departed. The Presbyterianism of England is now an exotic, scarcely yet taking kindly to the soil; and, save in the far away Border counties, there are no ecclesiastical descendants remaining to the Presbyterian Nonconformists of 1662.
For their very virtue and patience made these good men weak. Had they been bigots, as they are called—had they been more fanatical and warlike, more decided in their love, and more capable of hatred, the result we fancy must have been different. As it is, the fact is noticeable. Nearly two thousand devout and able ministers were ejected by the Act of Uniformity. Now, two hundred years later, there scarcely remains, out of the old Whig county of Northumberland, a single native-born Presbyterian preacher, in the whole extent of England.
It is pleasant, we say, to rest the eye upon them, in the midst of those turbulent scenes of history—the quaint, patient, unresistent men, with their voluminous books, and manifold commentaries, and pious pains of working. A different picture waits us if we look over the Border into that heaving, agitated Scotland, fighting for its faith, as for bare life. Bigot, fanatic—the names are not desirable—but it seems that these human spirits of ours can never have a necessary good, without an attendant evil. When we go far enough, the righteous impulse does oftenest carry us a little too far. We must accept the evil with the good; for men are rarely embarked heart and soul in any enterprise, without a little bigotry and prejudice. Too tolerant, too gentle, to leave any “footprint on the sands of time,” the Presbyterian Divines have passed away, leaving behind them only books innumerable, and a memory devout and holy. While the more violent spirits in the northern quarter of the empire have left the stamp of their mind upon their country still.
There is another singular anomaly, as it seems to us, in the times of those Puritans. In scarcely any other age, do we find so great an amount of devotional piety—in scarcely any other age, was vice so rampant. The severe self-examination of the friend of Evelyn, the maid of honor, Mrs. Godolphin, comes strangely to us, out of the impure court of Charles. Mystic and contemplative, this religion of vows and prayers, breathed the same air with the boldest and most daring sin; and abroad in the country, more healthy and life-like, the piety of the time bore still the same guise. Like the Divine charity, hoping and believing all things, esteeming itself little, abounding in fasting, in meditation, and in prayer, it yet seems to have been powerless to restrain the might of evil which possessed the land. The question is a difficult one. It is true that we judge the morality of the time by the standard of the Court, and in that we do wrong; but the fact remains, that even in the Court, and its immediate vicinity, this gentle piety lived and flourished, and that the royal iniquity flourished with it, side by side.
There has been much written on this crisis of the national existence, and there is room, we fancy, for still more. These contradictions that meet us as we venture into the depths—this wayward, changeful, human mood, which seems to make it impossible to have great principles brought into immediate contact without those strange anomalies—he would do well, who should treat of those on a broader ground than that of vindication or reproach of the actors on either side. We ourselves, at this day, are producing contradictions and paradoxes as strange as these; and many combining circumstances point us back to the days of the Stuarts, the climax of the old world—the seed-time of the new.
For the little story subjoined, the Author has nothing to say, unless it were to beg for it that gentle consideration which the lovers of art do sometimes extend to those sketches, which the artist intends only as studies for a larger painting.