While we have been so long with Roger Williams, his colleague in the Toleration heresy, John Goodwill, has been waiting. He was fifty-one years of age, or six or seven years older than Williams. Rather late in life, he had begun to find himself a much-abused man in London. For, though he had sided with the Parliamentarians zealously from the first, and had even, it appears, taken the Covenant, [Footnote: That Goodwin had taken the Covenant appears from words of his own in a tract of 1646 quoted in Fletcher's Hist, of Independency, IV. 47.] his theology was thought to be lax, [Footnote: The suspicion of Goodwin's Socinianism was as early as November 1613, when he got into trouble with the Assembly on that and other grounds (see Baillie's Letters, II. III, and Lightfoot's Notes, Nov. 8 and 9, 1643).] and the interpretation he was putting on the Covenant was not the common one. He thought that the oath to seek "reformation of religion" and to "endeavour to bring the Church of God in the three kingdoms to the nearest conjunction and uniformity," did not necessarily imply acceptance of the Presbyterian system which the Assembly were bent upon bringing in. Therefore, when the Five Dissenting Brethren of the Assembly appealed to Parliament in their Apologetical Narration, they found a champion outside in Goodwin. His championship took the form of that answer to "A. S." (i.e. the Scotsman, Adam Steuart, author of the first printed attack on the Apologetic Narration) which we have mentioned as appearing with the brief title M. S. to A. S., and again, in a second edition, with the fuller title A Reply of Two of the Brethren to A. S., &c.; with A Plea for Liberty of Conscience, &c. As the second title implies, Goodwill had associates in the work; but it was principally his, and the part on Toleration wholly his. So far as the tract concerns itself with the question between Presbytery and Congregationalism, Goodwin avows himself a Congregationalist. And yet he was not at one in all points with the five Assembly-men. "I know I am looked upon," he afterwards wrote, "by reason partly of my writings, partly of my practice, as a man very deeply engaged for the Independents' cause against Presbytery. But the truth is, I am neither so whole for the former, nor yet against the latter, as I am, I believe, generally voted in the thoughts of men to be." [Footnote: Quoted, from the Preface to Goodwin's Anapologesiastes Anapologias, by Fletcher, IV. 46.] This was written in 1616; but even in 1644 he fought so much for his own hand that the Independents of the Assembly may have but half liked his partnership. His Toleration doctrine, at all events, though uttered in their behalf, was too strong doctrine even for them. Hear what Baillie writes to his friend Spang, at Campvere, in Holland, just after the appearance of Goodwin's tract for the Independents: "M.S. against A.S., is John Goodwin of Coleman Street: he names you expressly, and professes to censure the letter of Zeeland. He is a bitter enemy to Presbytery, and is openly for a full liberty of conscience of all sects, even Turks, Jews, Papists, and all to be more openly tolerate than with you [i.e. than even in Holland]." [Footnote: Baillie, II. 180, 181. Goodwin's mention of Spang, referred to by Baillie, is as follows:— "There is a Scottish Church, of which one Spang is a very busy agent, at Trevere [Campvere]… whence the Letter [i.e. the Zeeland Letter in favour of Presbytery] came.">[ Baillie's representation of Goodwin's Toleration doctrine is fair enough. It is not so deep, so exceptionless, and so transcendentally reasoned as Roger Williams's; and indeed there was none of the sap and mystic richness of nature in Goodwin that we find in Williams, but chiefly clear courage, and strong cool sense. For most practical purposes, however, Goodwin's Toleration was thorough. He was for tolerating not merely the orthodox Congregationalists and such more heterodox sects as might be thought respectable, but all religions, sects, and schisms whatsoever, if only the professors of them were otherwise peaceable in the State. Not, of course, that they were not to be reasoned with and proved false publicly; or that heretics in congregations were not to be admonished, and, if obdurate, excommunicated; or that a whole church tainted with a great heresy ought not to be put under a ban by all other churches, and communion with it renounced. All this was assumed in the theory of Church-Independency which was common to Goodwin and Williams. True, Williams, now that he had passed beyond the Baptists and saw no true Church anywhere on earth, must have begun to doubt also the efficacy and validity of even spiritual censures, as exercised by the so-called churches, to regard as a mere agency of troublesome moonshine that incessant watchfulness of each other's errors on which Independency relied, and so to luxuriate in a mood of large charity, sighing over all, and hoping more from prayer and longing and pious well-doing all round than from censures and disputations. To Goodwin, on the other hand, troubled with no such visionary ideas, and fully convinced that a very good model of a Church had been set up in Coleman Street, the right and efficacy of disputation against error, and of ministerial vigilance against error in particular churches, seemed more important, or at least more worth insisting on in a public plea for Toleration. Williams and Goodwill did not differ theoretically, but only practically, over this item in the exposition of their doctrine. The sole difference, of theoretical import, was that Goodwin, in dwelling on the duty of disputation by Christian ministers against false religions and dangerous opinions in society round about them, and of vigilance against minor heresies in their own congregations, talked vaguely of a right on the part of the civil magistrate to admonish ministers in this respect should they be negligent or forgetful of their duty. This, as we know, would have grated on Williams. Perhaps, however, Goodwin, even here, was only throwing a sop to Cerberus. At all events, he comes out finally a thorough Tolerationist. Whatever minister or magistrate may do towards confuting and diminishing error, there is a point at which they must both stop. There is not to be a suppression of false religions, sects and schisms, by fining, imprisoning, disfranchising, banishment, death, or any civil punishment whatsoever; and, when it comes to that, they are all to be tolerated. [Footnote: Jackson's Life of Goodwin. pp. 110, 117; Hanbury's Memorials, II. 341- 365.]
We are now prepared to classify the various forms in which the Toleration Doctrine was urged on the English mind in the year 1644. There were three grades of the doctrine:—
I. Absolute Liberty of Conscience, and No National Church, or State- interference with Religion, of any kind whatsoever. This was, in fact, more than Toleration, and Toleration is hardly the fit name for it. The advocates of this idea were Roger Williams, perhaps the Baptists generally, also Burton in a certain way; but, above all, Roger Williams. He did not think there could be Liberty of Conscience, in the perfect and absolute sense, where there was a National Church, even if free dissent were allowed from that Church. For, by the establishment of a Church, he held, a substantial worldly premium was put on certain religious beliefs, and an advantage conferred on a portion of the community at the expense of all; and to be compelled to pay for, or even to acknowledge politically, a Church which one did not approve, was in itself inconsistent with true Liberty of Conscience, whatever freedom of nonconformity might be left to individuals. Accordingly, if Roger Williams, at that crisis, had been a statesman of England, instead of a mere commissioner from an infant colony in America, his advice would have been in this strain:—"It is agreed that the Episcopal or Prelatic Church, called hitherto the Reformed Church of England, is no longer to exist. That is settled; and the question is, What Church Reformation shall there now be? My answer is sweeping and simple. Let there be no National Church, no Church of England, at all, of any kind or form whatsoever. Let England henceforth be a civil State only, in which Christianity shall take care of itself, and all forms of Christianity and all other religions shall have equal rights to protection by the police. Confiscate for the use of the State all the existing revenues of the defunct Church and its belongings, giving such compensation for life- interests therein as may seem reasonable; but create no new Church, nor stump of a Church, round which new interests may gather. Do not even implicate the State so far in the future of Religion as to indicate to the subjects any form of Church as esteemed the best, or any range of option among Churches as presumably the safest. Leave the formation and the sustentation of Christ's Church in the English realm, and everywhere else, entirely to the unseen power of the Spirit, and the free action of those whom the Spirit may make its instruments."—For nothing like this was the Long Parliament, or any other legislature in the world, then prepared; and Williams knew it. But he had faith in the future of his speculation. In America, whither he was to carry it back, he hoped to be able to exhibit it in practice on a small scale in the new colony he was founding; and there could be no harm, he thought, in leaving the leaven to ferment in the denser society of England.
II. Unlimited Toleration round an Established National Church. So we may express a form of Tolerationism in which there was a concurrence of persons, and perhaps of bodies of persons, who yet differed from each other in the motives for their concurrence. Williams, of course, accepted this form of Tolerationism, as next best to his own absolute Voluntaryism, Individualism, and universal Liberty of Conscience. "If there is to be in England a National or State Church of some kind (which I think wrong, and so wrong that I will take no part in the debate what kind of National Church would be best, whether a Prelatic, Presbyterian, or any other), at least, when you have set up such a Church, let there be a perfect toleration for all subjects of the realm round about that Church, no compulsion on any of them to belong to that Church, no pains and penalties for any profession of belief or disbelief, or any form of worship or no-worship, out of that Church." These are not Williams's own words, but they exactly express his meaning; and, in fact, he intended his Bloody Tenent to be a plea for toleration in this practical sense, if it should fail in winning people to his higher and more peculiar idea of real Liberty of Conscience. And a most eloquent plea it was. He insists again and again on the necessity that there should be no limits to the toleration of Religious Difference in a state. He argues expressly that not only orthodox or slightly heterodox dissenters should have the benefit of such toleration, but all kinds of dissentients without exception, Papists, Jews, Mohammedans, Pagans, or Infidels. He knew what a hard battle lie was fighting. "I confess I have little hope," he said, "till those flames are over, that this discourse against the doctrine of persecution for cause of conscience should pass current, I say not amongst the wolves and lions, but even amongst the sheep of Christ themselves. Yet, liberavi animam meam: I have not hid within my breast my soul's belief." He trusted, doubtless, that his treatise might have some effect, if not for its highest purpose, at least as a practical plea for unlimited toleration round the new National Church of England that was to be. And here most of the Baptists were in the same predicament with Williams. They would have preferred no National Church at all; but, as there was to be a National Church, they wanted the amplest toleration round it. Burton also was pretty nearly in the same category. He too doubted the lawfulness of a State Church of any kind, but was earnest that, if such must be established, it should not be coercive. He did not formally demand unlimited toleration, and indeed conceded something in words to the effect that in cases of "known heresy, or blasphemy, or idolatry," offenders would have to be "obnoxious to the Civil Power;" but I rather think that the concession was prudential, and that his heart did not go with it. I will retain him therefore among the Unlimited Tolerationists. Far outshining him in this class, however, was John Goodwin.—Well, but were the advocates of unlimited toleration in connexion with an Established Church exclusively persons who would have prevented the formation of such a Church if they could, or doubted its righteousness and propriety, and who only insisted on Toleration with such a Church as a practical necessity to which they were driven? Were there no theorists in that time who positively desired an Established Church on its own account, and for the general good of the community, but who had worked out the conclusion that such a Church might consist, and ought to consist, with universal Religious Toleration, or the freest liberty of Nonconformity and Dissent? In view of the fact that this is the theory of Establishments evolved by some of the best ecclesiastical spirits in our own later times, the question is interesting. My researches do not enable me to give a very precise answer to it applicable to the exact year 1644. If there were such theorists, however, they were, I should say, among those wiser and younger sons of the Episcopal Church of England who would fain have preserved that Episcopal Church, but had privately made up their minds that Laud's basis for that Church was untenable, and that a very different basis must be substituted. One thinks of Chillingworth, Hales, and the rest of that "Latitudinarian" brotherhood; one thinks of Jeremy Taylor; one thinks of the candid Fuller; one thinks even of the Calvinistic Usher. Chillingworth had died at Chichester, Jan. 30, 1643-4, at the age of forty-one, an avowed Royalist, and indeed a Royalist prisoner-at-war, tended on his death-bed by Presbyterians. [Footnote: Wood's Ath. III. 93, 94; and Life of Chillingworth prefixed to the Oxford edition of his Works.] Whatever hardy cogitations had been in his mind, pointing to a revived Episcopal Church of England with an ample toleration within it and round about it, had gone prematurely to the grave. The others were still alive, also pronounced Royalists, and acting or suffering more or less on that side; and whatever thoughts they had in the direction under notice were irrelevant to their immediate duty and opportunities, and had to wait for utterance at a more convenient season. [Footnote: Yet there had been one recent utterance of Hales relating to the idea of Toleration. It was in the form of A Tract concerning Schism and Schismatics, which he had prepared in 1636, partly for the use of his friend Chillingworth then engaged on his "Religion of Protestants," but which, in deference to Laud's private objections and remonstrances, he had kept unpublished. In 1642, when Laud was in prison and the state of things wholly changed, the Tract was brought out at the Oxford University Press. It is vague in its conception and expression; but that it is decidedly in favour of toleration and free inquiry will appear from the opening sentences: "Heresy and Schism, as they are in common use, are two theological [Greek: Mosmos], or scarecrows, which they who uphold a party in religion use to fright away such as, making inquiry into it, are ready to relinquish and oppose it if it appear either erroneous or suspicious. For, as Plutarch reports of a painter who, having unskilfully painted a cock, chased away all cocks and hens, that so the imperfection of his art might not appear by comparison with nature, so men, willing for ends to admit of no fancy but their own, endeavour to hinder an inquiry into it, by way of comparison of somewhat with it, peradventure truer, that so the deformity of their own might not appear." Wood's Ath. III. 413, 414, and Tract itself with letter to Laud, Vol. I. pp. 114-144 of "The Works of the ever memorable Mr. John Hales," Glasgow, 1765.] On the whole, however, I judge that any such thoughts in their minds (even in Jeremy Taylor's as yet) fell considerably short of the Unlimited Toleration advocated by Williams and John Goodwin, and, if they could have been ascertained and measured, would have referred their owners rather to the next category than to the present.
III. A Limited Toleration round an Established National Church. This would probably have sufficed the thoughtful Anglicans of whom we have just been speaking. Their ideal probably was a revived Episcopal Church of England, liberally constituted within itself, and with a toleration of all respectable forms of Dissent round about itself, but still with a right reserved for the Civil Power of preventing and punishing gross errors and schisms. We are more concerned, however, with another set of Limited Tolerationists, then much more conspicuous in England. They were those who had given up all thoughts of the retention of a Prelatic Establishment, and who indeed regarded the deliverance of England from such an Establishment as the noblest accomplished fact of the time. What they were anxious about was the nature of the new National Church, if any, that was to be substituted, and especially the degree of conformity to that Church that was to be required. The chief representatives of this state of feeling in its more moderate form were the Five Independent Divines of the Assembly, Messrs. Thomas Goodwin, Bridge, Nye, Simpson, and Burroughs. They were not, I think, distinctly adverse to a National Church on theoretical grounds, as Williams and Burton were; and probably what they would have liked best would have been a National Church on the Congregationalist principle, like that of New England. For, though Congregationalism and a National Establishment of Religion may seem radically a contradiction in terms, yet in fact the case had not been quite so in America. There may be a State Church without public endowments, or rather there may be endowments and privileges that are not pecuniary. The New England Church, though consisting of a few scores of congregations, mutually independent, self- supporting, and scattered stragglingly over an extensive territory, was really a kind of State Church collectively, inasmuch as the State required, by rule or by custom, membership of some congregation as a qualification for suffrage and office, and also kept some watch and control over the congregations, so as to be sure that none were formed of a very heretical kind, and that none already formed lapsed into decided heresy. How had Mr. Cotton of Boston, the great light of the New England Church, expounded its principle in respect of the power of the civil magistrate in matters of Religion? "We readily grant you," he had written, "liberty of conscience is to be granted to men that fear God indeed, as knowing they will not persist in heresy or turbulent schism when they are convinced in conscience of the sinfulness thereof. But the question is whether an heretic, after once or twice admonition, and so after conviction, or any other scandalous and heinous offender, may be tolerated, either in the Church without excommunication, or in the Commonwealth without such punishment as may preserve others from dangerous and damnable infection." [Footnote: From Cotton's Answer to the old Tract of "Scriptures and Reasons against Persecution" (see antè, p. 114). The Answer is printed by Williams in his Bloody Tenent: See Hanserd Knollys Society edition (1848), p. 30.]
Clearly, with such a principle, and with all the particulars of practice which it implied, the Congregationalist Church of New England was, after all, a State Church, and a pretty strict State Church too. Now, it was probably such a National Congregationalist Church, but with an allowance of toleration somewhat larger than Cotton's, that the Five Independents of the Assembly would have liked to see set up in England. That, however, being plainly out of the question, and the whole current of dominant opinion in Parliament and the Assembly being towards a Presbyterian settlement, what remained for the Five? In the first place, to delay the Presbyterian settlement as long as they could, and to criticise its programme at every stage so as to liberalize its provisions as much as possible; in the second place, to put in a plea for Toleration for Dissent under the settlement when it should be enacted. They had performed, and were performing, both duties. They were fighting the propositions of strict Presbytery inch by inch in the Assembly, if not with success, at least so as to impede progress; and in their Apologetical Narration (Jan. 1643-4) they had lodged with Parliament and the country a demand for Toleration under the coming Presbytery. What they had thus expressed in print they had continued to express in speech and in every other possible way. They were, in a certain sense, the most marked Tolerationists of the time; Toleration was identified with them. And yet it was but a limited Toleration, a very limited Toleration, that they demanded. Indulgence for themselves in Congregationalist practices after Presbytery should be established, and indulgence for other respectable sects and persons in "lesser differences:" that was all. Nothing like Williams's or John Goodwill's toleration: no liberty, or at least none avowedly, for such glaring heresies as Antinomianism, Socinianism, and Arianism, not to mention open Infidelity. Here, I believe, they represented the mass of the ordinary Independents. Whatever more a few strong spirits among the Independents, and especially among the lay Independents, desired, the mass of them were content for the present to be Limited Tolerationists.
Such were the three forms of the Toleration Doctrine in England in 1644. They were of unequal strengths and confusedly mixed, but constituted together a powerful and growing force of opinion. And what was the opposition? ANTI-TOLERATION, OR ABSOLUTE AND ENTIRE CONFORMITY OF THE WHOLE NATION TO THE ONE ESTABLISHED CHURCH: this was the category of the opposition.
In this category, now that Prelacy was done with, and it was certain that the new National Church was to be on the Presbyterian model, the Presbyterians had succeeded the Laudians. As a body, the Presbyterians of 1644 and subsequent years were absolute Anti-Tolerationists. The proofs are so abundant, collectively they make such an ocean, that it passes comprehension how the contrary could ever have been asserted. From the first appearance of the Presbyterians in force after the opening of the Long Parliament, it was their anxiety to beat down the rising idea of Toleration; and, after the meeting of the Westminster Assembly, and the publication of the Apologetical Narration of the Independents, the one aim of the Presbyterians was to tie Toleration round the neck of Independency, stuff the two struggling monsters into one sack, and sink them to the bottom of the sea. In all the Presbyterian literature of the time,—Baillie's Letters, Rutherford's and Gillespie's Tracts, the pamphlets of English Presbyterian Divines in the Assembly, the pamphlets of Prynne, Bastwick, and other miscellaneous Presbyterian controversialists out of the Assembly,—this antipathy to Toleration, limited or unlimited, this desire to pinion Independency and Toleration together in one common death, appears overwhelmingly. Out of scores of such Presbyterian manifestoes, let us select one, interesting to us for certain reasons apart.
Of all the Divines in London, not members of the Assembly, none had come to be better known for his Presbyterian acrimony than the veteran Mr. Thomas Edwards, of whose maiden pamphlet of 1641, called Reasons against the Independent Government, with Mrs. Chidley's Reply to the same, we have had occasion to take notice (antè, p. 110). The spirited verbosity, as we called it, of that pamphlet of Edwards had procured him a reputation among the Presbyterians, which he felt himself bound to justify by farther efforts. The appearance of the Apologetical Narration of the Five Independents in Jan. 1643-4 gave him a famous opportunity. Various answers were at once or quickly published to that Independent manifesto—not only that by A. S. or Adam Steuart (antè, p. 25), but various others. When it became known, however, that Mr. Edwards also was preparing an Answer, it was expected to beat them all. There was a flutter of anticipation of it among the Presbyterians; but it was rather slow in coming. "There is a piece of 26 sheets, of Mr. Edwards, against the Apologetick Narration, near printed, which will paint that faction [the Independents] in clearer colours than yet they have appeared," writes Baillie, June 7, 1644; in a later letter, July 5, he says it is expected "within two or three days," but "excresced to near 40 sheets;" and it is not till Aug. 7 that he speaks of it as fairly out: "Mr. Edwards has written a splendid confutation of all the Independents' Apology." [Footnote: Baillie, II. 190, 201-2, and 215.] In fact, it appeared in the end of July, just at the time when the Assembly adjourned for their fortnight's vacation, and almost contemporaneously with John Goodwin's M. S. to A. S. and Williams's Bloody Tenent. Baillie's measure of "sheets" must have been different from ours, or he had been under some mistake; for the treatise, though long enough, consisted but of 367 small quarto pages, with this title: "Antapologia: or, A Full Answer to the Apologetical Narration of Mr. Goodwin, Mr. Nye, Mr. Simpson, Mr. Burroughs, Mr. Bridge, members of the Assembly of Divines. Wherein many of the controversies of these times are handled: viz. [&c.]. Humbly also submitted to the Honourable Houses of Parliament. By Thomas Edwards, Minister of the Gospel." [Footnote: Hanbury's Memorials, II. 366. Mr. Hanbury gives a summary of the Antapologia with extracts (366- 385); but I have before me the book itself in a reprint, of 1646, "by T.R. and E.M. for Ralph Smith, at the signe of the Bible in Cornhill neer the Royall Exchange." It consists of 259 pages of text, besides introductory epistle, and table of contents at the end.]
It was a most remarkable treatise, and ran through London at once. For the style, though slovenly, was fluent and popular, and Edwards, having plenty of time on his hands, and having a taste for personalities, had made minute inquiries into the antecedents of the Five Independents in Holland and in England, and had interwoven the results of these inquiries with his arguments against Independency itself. The Five, he tells us in a preliminary epistle, were among his personal acquaintances. "I can truly speak it," he says, "that this present Antapologia is so far from being written out of any malice or ill-will to the Apologists that I love their persons and value them as brethren, yea some of them above brethren; and, besides that love I bear to them as saints, I have a personal love, and a particular love of friendship for some of them; and I can truly speak it, that I writ not this book, nor any part of it, out of any personal quarrel, old grudge, or former difference (for to this day there never was any such difference or unkindness passed between us); but I have writ it with much sorrow, unwillingness, and some kind of conflict." This explanation was certainly necessary; for Mr. Edwards does not spare his friends. He tells all he has found out about them; he quotes their conversations with himself; he gives them the lie direct, and appeals to their consciences whether he is not right in doing so. They martyrs! they poor exiles in Holland, and now whining to Parliament that they would have to go into exile again if Presbyterianism were established without a Toleration! Why, they had been in clover in Holland; they had been living there "in safety, plenty, pomp, and ease," leaving the genuine Puritans at home to fight it out with Prelacy; and, after the battle was won, they had slunk back to claim the rewards they had not earned, to become pets and "grandees" in English society, to secure good appointments and assume leading parts, and to be elected members of the venerable Westminster Assembly! They had not even had the courage to go to New England, though some of them had talked of doing so! And then their prate of this emigration to New England, which they had themselves declined, as the greatest undertaking for the sake of pure Religion, next to Abraham's migration out of his own country, that the world had ever seen! Why, the emigration to New England was no such great affair after all! There had been mixed motives in it; all New England would not make a twentieth part of London; it had but two or three Divines in it worth naming in the same breath with the worthies of Old England, and was on the whole but a kind of outlandish mess; the "Reformation in Church-government and worship" then going on in Old England would be a wonder "to all generations to come far beyond that of New England!" But in Holland, where the cowardly Apologists had preferred to stay, what had they been doing? Quarrelling among themselves, going into all kinds of conceits, anointing people with oil, and the like; respecting all which Edwards had obtained from Rotterdam and Arnheim a budget of information! Then that lie of the Apologists, that they had, since their return to England, been careful not to press their peculiar Congregationalist opinions, or endeavour to make a party, but had waited in patience to see what course affairs would take! Not press their peculiar opinions—not endeavour to make a party! Why, Mr. Edwards could aver (and cite dates, places, and witnesses to prove it) that they had been doing nothing else, since they came to England, than press their peculiar opinions and endeavour to make a party! "Suffer me to deal plainly with you: I am persuaded that, setting aside the Jesuits' acting for themselves and way, you Five have acted for yourselves and way, both by yourselves and by your instruments, both upon the stage and behind the curtain, considering circumstances and laying all things together, more than any five men have done in so short a time this sixty years. And, if it be not so, whence have come all these swarms and troops of Independents in Ministry, Armies, City, Country, Gentry, and amongst the Common People of all sorts, men, women, servants, children?"