Beginnings of the American People

by Carl L. Becker

The origin of New England is inseparably connected with the Protestant Reformation, that many-sided movement of which no formula is adequate to convey the full meaning. From one point of view it was the nationalization of the Church, the subjection of the ecclesiastical to the lay power. In the end the principle of territorial sovereignty everywhere prevailed, in Catholic no less than in Protestant countries: whether Lutheran or Gallican or Anglican, whether completely separated from Rome or retaining a spiritual communion with it, the Church submitted to the principle of cujus regio ejus religio, and became an instrument in the hands of kings for erecting the lay and territorial absolutism on the ruins of the universal church-state. James I spoke for all his kind when he cried out, "No Bishop no King!" The lay prince wished not to destroy the Church, but to use it; the sum of his purpose was to transfer the ultimate authority in conduct and thought from the divinely appointed priest to the divinely appointed king.

But the Reformation was far more than resistance to Rome. It did not cease when the king triumphed over the Pope. The "dissidence of dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion" was as incompatible with royal as with priestly authority. In this "reformation of the Reformation" the strength of the movement was everywhere in the towns. It was generally true, and nowhere more so than in England, that Protestantism was the result of a middle-class revolt against the existing régime, a denial of established standards in politics and morality, the determined attempt to effect a transvaluation of all customary values.

The quarrel of the middle-class man with the world as he found it was of long standing. In the feudal-ecclesiastical structure, fairly complete in the eleventh century and to outward seeming still intact in the fifteenth, there was no prepared niche for the bourgeois. The peasant to obey and serve; the noble to fight and rule; the priest to instruct and pray:—these, all in their different ways respected and respectable careers, completed the sum of God's purpose in arranging the occupations of men. Yet into this trinity the bourgeois had intruded his unwelcome presence. The secret of his rise was the skill of his hand to fashion material things, and his practical intelligence to care for them. Neither personal service nor personal prowess was the source of his power. Untouched by the principle of homage or of noblesse oblige, he commanded, or was himself commanded, through the medium of material values. He put money in his purse because it was the measure of his independence, the symbol of his worth; and he kept it there, guarding it as the priest guarded his faith or the noble his honor. Long occupation with the concrete world of affairs had given his mind a peculiar quality; his intelligence was direct and firm, his thinking clear and dry, without atmosphere, unrelieved by poetic imagination or the play of fancy.

Set apart by occupation and temperament, the middle-class man had little in common with either the servile or the ruling class; little in common with the noble who despised his birth, ridiculed his manners, envied his wealth; little with the priest who found him too rigid, too intelligent, too reserved with his money and his soul to be a good son of the Church; little with the peasant who renounced him as a renegade or ignored him as a parvenu. All these benefits the bourgeois returned in full measure, despising the peasant for his ignorance and servility resenting the inquisitiveness of the clergy and the condescension of the nobility, at the same time that he aspired to the power of the one and the superior position of the other. And from the outside world the bourgeois had secured a measure of protection. With his money he had purchased corporate independence and enfranchisement from feudal obligation. The gild, at once an industrial enterprise, a religious association, and a charitable foundation, bound him to his fellows and rounded out his life.

At the close of the fifteenth century many circumstances had contributed to identify the interests of the small country gentry with those of the moderately well-to-do townsman, and to set them both in opposition to the higher nobility and the wealthier merchants and promoters. The control of trade was passing from the master merchant to the capitalist, from the city to the state. Powerful financial monopolists like the Fuggers and the Welsers, in alliance with the territorial prince or the national government, were undermining the industrial independence of town and gild. Exactions of State and Church were increasing. The growing extravagance and immorality of the wealthy, both burgher and noble, was matched by the worldliness of the upper clergy, and accompanied by the decay of spiritual interests, the accentuation of ritual and ceremony, and increased reliance upon external and formal works as sufficient for salvation. From this world of the high-placed favorites of fortune, where corruption flourished unashamed and power was too often exercised without a redeeming sense of obligation, the middle class was already withdrawing at the close of the fifteenth century. The townsmen in Germany found satisfaction for their spiritual and intellectual interests in reviving the religious activities of the gilds, and in the formation of lay religious societies in which a simplified form of worship was accompanied by study of the Bible and the preaching of the unworldly virtues of upright living. It was this separation of the bourgeois from the world in which he lived that constitutes the first protest, the beginning of the Protestant movement.

Ideal constructions are doubtless the psychic precipitates of social experience, and the Protestant theory was but the reasoned expression of the middle-class state of mind. Thwarted by the existing world of fact, the leaders employed their practical and dexterous intelligence to create a new world of semblance, a world of the spirit, in which the way was illumined by the light of reason, and the individual rather than the social conscience gave the sense of right direction. Material for such a philosophy was ready to hand. The practice and the thinking of the apostolic churches had been newly discovered by the study of the secular and the sacred past; and the essence of all Protestant thinking was implied in the phrase in which Luther embodied the teaching of St. Paul: "Good works do not make the good man, but the good man does good works." Not the conventional judgments of society, expressed through the commands of Church or State, but the individual conscience, justified by faith in God's purpose, determines a man's merit. St. Augustine's ideal City of God was thus once more set over against the visible secular world of man. Into this intangible community, a house not made with hands, the elect and the select withdrew themselves, abiding there as in a refuge, untouched by the corruptions of a spotted world, seeking with humility the will of God and submitting with all the pride of conscious merit to law.

As the middle-class experience implied the Protestant theory of religion, it implied the Puritan conception of morals and conduct. Puritanism originated in the towns for the same reason that it lingers in the country; it was formerly the townsman rather than the countryman whose ideas and manner of living stamped him as peculiar. The spiritual and social isolation of the townsman is therefore the source of the outward impassiveness of the Puritan, as well as of the intensity of his inner experience: the continued impact of noble or priestly contempt had crusted his nature with a manner that was rigid and resistant and undemonstrative, beneath which smouldered the explosive forces of thwarted ambition and the sense of unrecognized intellectual and moral excellence. Conscious of a worth which society ignored, he transformed his qualities into virtues, and erected his virtues into social standards of value. Prudence and economy, restraint of manner, denial of the sensuous and the sensual appeal, reserve of soul, the unmoved endurance of the pricks of fortune—these became the virtues of the Puritan because they were not the virtues of the world which despised him: by these self-erected standards he justified himself and passed judgment on the society in which he felt himself an alien and a stranger.

Opposition was therefore but fuel to the Puritan flame. Every persecution of society or obstacle of nature encountered in the endeavor to withdraw from the world was a confirmation of its corruption, a device of the devil to tempt him astray, or God's wise method of testing his faith. To persevere was the very proof of his election, the sure evidence of right thinking. The doctrine of eternal torment in hell, said Jonathan Edwards, used to appear "like a horrible doctrine to me. I remember very well when I seemed convinced, and fully satisfied, but never could give an account how, or by what means I was thus convinced." The very painfulness of the idea was doubtless what induced him to accept it. It was not the truth of the doctrine convincing his intellect, but the discipline of the will involved in vanquishing the horror of it, that gave him peace; so that in the end it seemed to him, not so much true, but "exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet." St. Augustine furnished us one of the keys to Puritanism when he said: "No man loves what he endures, but he may love to endure." The Puritan loved to endure. To expect resistance and to meet it unmoved; to welcome calumny and reviling with a steadfast mind; to transform a hostile verdict of the majority into an unconscious award of merit:—such was the Puritan temper in its most distinguished representatives.

III

In England the Puritan temper was given its effective edge during the latter years of Elizabeth and the reigns of the first Stuarts. The Armada was scarcely destroyed before the queen assumed a less complaisant attitude toward dissent. James I warned the clergy at Hampden Court that he would make them conform or harry them out of the land. The third decade of the century witnessed the triumph of Anti-Christ on every hand: in Germany the success of imperial arms was crowned by the Edict of Restitution; with the capture of Rochelle, the Huguenots in France lost their towns of refuge and found themselves at the mercy of the state; and in England itself the first Charles, more absolutist and more Catholic than his father, was thought to aim at nothing less than the ruin of Parliament and the restoration of the Roman religion. Under the stress of opposition there was accordingly a marked accentuation of the Puritan and the Separatist spirit. To Nonconformist and Independent alike the truth became more clear the more it was traduced and maligned. Year by year there was a deepening sense of being in the world but not of it; and to those who were already spiritual exiles, the idea of removing to America came to seem but the outward expression of an inner fact: "All the churches of Europe have been brought under desolation; it maybe feared that the like judgements are coming upon us; and who knows but God hath provided this place to be a refuge for many, whom he meanes to save out of the generall callamitie."