"That the gift of miracles is not ceased in these times."
"That all the earth is the Saints', and there ought to be a community of goods."
"That 'tis unlawful to fight at all, or to kill any man, yea to kill any of the creatures for our use, as a chicken, or on any other occasion." [Footnote: Gangræna, Part I. pp. 15-31.]
From this little enumeration it will be seen that we have not, even in the nineteenth century, advanced so far as perhaps we had thought beyond English notions of the seventeenth. But there must be added a recollection of the scurrilities against the Covenant, the Assembly as a body, its chief Presbyterian members, and the whole Scottish nation and its agents. These had not reached their height at the time with which we are at present concerned (Aug. 1644); so that the richest specimens of them have to be postponed. But already there were popular jokes about "Jack Presbyter" the "black coats" of the Assembly, and their four shillings a day each for doing what nobody wanted; and already a very rude phrase was in circulation, expressing the growing feeling among the English Independents and Sectaries that England might have managed her Reformation better without the aid of the Scots and their Covenant. Had England come to such a pass, it was asked, that it was necessary to set up a Synod in her, to be "guided by the Holy Ghost sent in a cloak-bag from Scotland"? The author of this profanity, according to Prynne, was a pamphleteer named Henry Robinson. It was, in fact, an old joke, originally applied to one of the Councils of the Catholic Church; and Robinson had stolen it. [Footnote: Prynne's Fresh Discovery, p.27 and p.9; and Gangræna, Part I. p.32]
II. RECOGNISED SECTS AND THEIR LEADERS.—In the general welter or anarchy of opinion there were, of course, vortices round particular centres, forming sects that either had, or might receive, definite names. Edwards, when systematizing his chaos of miscellaneous errors and blasphemies, apportions them among sixteen recognisable sorts of Sectaries; but old Ephraim Paget, who had preceded Edwards had been much more hazy. By jumbling the English Sectaries with all he could recollect of the German Sectaries of the Reformation and all he could hear of the Sects of New England, he had made his list of Sects and subdivisions of Sects mount up to two or three scores. Using Edwards and old Ephraim, with hints from Featley, Prynne, and Baillie, but trying to ascertain the facts for ourselves, we venture on the following synoptical view of English Sects and Sectaries in 1644-5:—
BAPTISTS, OR ANABAPTISTS:—These were by far the most numerous of the Sectaries. Their enemies (Featley, Paget, Edwards, Baillie, &c.) were fond of tracing them to the anarchical German Anabaptists of the Reformation; but they themselves claimed a higher origin. They maintained, as Baptists do still, that in the primitive or Apostolic Church the only baptism practised or heard of was that of adult believers, and that the form of the rite for such was immersion in water; and they maintained farther that the Baptism of Infants was one of those corruptions of Christianity against which there had been a continued protest by pure and forward spirits in different countries, in ages prior to Luther's Reformation, including some of the English Wycliffites, although the protest may have been repeated in a louder manner, and with wild admixtures, by the German Anabaptists who gave Luther so much trouble. Without going back, however, upon the Wycliffites, or even on the Anabaptists that were scattered through England in the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth, one may date the Baptists as we have now to do with them from the reign of James.——The first London congregation of General Baptists, or Baptists who favoured an Arminian theology, had been formed, as we have seen (Vol. II. p. 544), in 1611 out of the wrecks of John Smyth's English congregation of Amsterdam or Leyden, brought back into their native land by Smyth's successor Thomas Helwisse, assisted by John Murton. Although there are traces of this congregation for several years after that date, it seems to have melted away, or to have been crushed into extinction by the persecution of its members individually; so that the Baptists of whom we hear as existing in London, or dispersed through England, after the opening of the Long Parliament, appear to have been rather of the kind known as Particular Baptists, holding a Calvinistic theology, and generated out of the Independent congregations that had been established in London and elsewhere after Helwisse's and on different principles (Vol. II. pp. 544 and 585). In some of these congregations, including that taught by a certain very popular Samuel Howe, called "Cobbler Howe" from his trade, who died in prison and excommunicated some time before 1640, Pædobaptism appears to have become an open question, on which the members agreed to differ among themselves. On the whole, however, the tendency was to the secession of Antipædobaptists from congregations of ordinary Independents, and to the formation of the seceders into distinct societies. Thus we hear of a Baptist congregation in Wapping formed in 1633 by a John Spilsbury, with whom were afterwards associated William Kiffin and Thomas Wilson; of another formed in Crutched Friars in 1639 by Mr. Green, Paul Hobson, and Captain Spencer; and of a third, formed in Fleet Street, in 1640, by the afterwards famous Praise-God Barebone: these three congregations being all detachments from Henry Jacob's original Independent congregation of 1616 during the ministries of his successors, Lathorp and Henry Jessey. In spite of much persecution, continued even after the Long Parliament met, the Baptists of these congregations propagated their opinions with such zeal that by 1644 the sect had attained considerably larger dimensions. In that year they counted seven leading congregations in London, and forty-seven in the rest of England; besides which they had many adherents in the Army. Although all sorts of impieties were attributed to them on hearsay, they differed in reality from the Independents mainly on the one subject of Baptism. They objected to the baptism of infants, and they thought immersion, or dipping under water, the proper mode of baptism: except in these points, and what they might involve, they were substantially at one with the Congregationalists, This they made clear by the publication, in 1644, of a Confession of their Faith in 52 Articles—a document which, by its orthodoxy in all essential matters, seems to have shamed the more candid of their opponents. Even Featley was struck by it, and called it "a little ratsbane in a great quantity of sugar," and became somewhat more civil in consequence. It was signed for the seven Baptist congregations of London by these seven couples of persons—Thomas Gunn and John Mabbit; John Spilsbury and Samuel Richardson; Paul Hobson and Thomas Goare; Benjamin Cox and Thomas Kilcop; Thomas Munden and George Tipping; William Kiffin and Thomas Patience; Hanserd Knollys (Vol. II. 557 and 586) and Thomas Holmes. These fourteen, accordingly, with Praise- God Barebone, were in 1644 the Baptist leaders or chief Baptist preachers in London. We hear, however, of other Baptist preachers and pamphleteers —John Tombes, B.D. (accounted the most learned champion of the sect, and its intellectual head), Francis Cornwall, M.A., Henry Jessey, M.A. (a convert to baptism at last), William Dell, M.A., Henry Denne, Edward Barber, Vavasour Powell, John Sims, Andrew Wyke, Christopher Blackwood, Samuel Oates, &c. Several of these leading Baptists—such as Tombes, Cornwall, Jessey, Cox, and Denne—were University men, who had taken orders regularly; one or two, such as Patience and Knollys, had been preachers in New England; but some were laymen who had recently assumed the preaching office, or been called to it by congregations, on account of their natural gifts. The Presbyterians laid great stress on the illiteracy of some of the Baptist preachers and their mean origin. Barebone was a leather-seller in Fleet Street; and, according to Edwards or his informants, Paul Hobson was a tailor from Buckinghamshire, who had become a captain in the Parliamentary Army; Kiffin had been servant to a brewer; Oates was a young weaver; and so on. The information may be correct in some cases, but is to be received with general caution; as also Edwards's stories of the extravagant practices of the Baptists in their conventicles and at their river-dippings. Any story of the kind was welcome to Edwards, especially if it made a scandal out of some dipping of women-converts by a Baptist preacher. Baillie, who took more trouble in sifting his information, and who distinctly allows that the Anabaptists, like other people, ought to have the benefit of the principle "Let no error be charged upon any man which he truly disclaims," and that the errors of some of the sect ought not to be charged upon all, yet maintains that the Confession of the seven Baptist Churches of London was but an imperfect and ambiguous declaration of the opinions of the English Baptists. He attributes to them collectively the following tenets, in addition to those of mere Antipædobaptism and rigid Separatism:—"They put all church-power in the hand of the people;" "They give the power of preaching and celebrating the sacraments to any of their gifted members, out of all office;" "All churches must be demolished: they are glad of so large and public a preaching place as they can purchase, but of a steeple-house they must not hear;" "All tithes and all set stipends are unlawful; their preachers must work with their own hands, and may not go in black clothes." According to Baillie, also, the Baptists outwent even the Brownists in the power in church matters they gave to women. There were many women-preachers among them; of whom a Mrs. Attaway, "the mistress of all the she-preachers in Coleman Street," was the chief. [Footnote: Crosby's History of the English Baptists (1738), Vol. I. pp. 215-382; Ivimey's Baptists, I. 113 et seq.; Featley's Dippers Dipt, and Animadversions on the Anabaptists' Confession; Gangræna passim; Baillie's Dissuasive, Part II. p. 47 et seq.; Neal's Puritans, III. 147-152, with Toulmin's Supplement to that Vol., 517-530. The Confession of the Baptists is given in Neal; Appendix to the whole work; also in Crosby, Appendix to Vol. I]
OLD BROWNISTS:—By this name may be called certain adherents of that vehement Independency, more extreme than mere Congregationalism, which had been propagated in Elizabeth's reign by Robert Brown himself. Brown's writings, we learn from Baillie, had totally disappeared in England; so that the so-called Brownists can hardly have been his direct disciples, but must have been persons who had arrived at some of his opinions over again for themselves. Briefly, without being Baptists, they were more violent Separatists, more fierce in their rejection of the discipline, worship, and ordination of the Church of England than the Independents proper. Henry Burton, minister of Friday Street church, now between fifty and sixty years of age, was one of the chief of them, and his Protestation Protested (Vol. II. 591-2) may be regarded as a manifesto of their views. Even the Independents of the Assembly disowned these views. Mr. Nye had said of the book that "there was in that book gross Brownism which he nor his brethren no way agreed with him in;" and Edwards had heard stories of queer goings-on in Mr. Burton's church, and his quarrel with "a butcher and some others of his church" about prophesying. Among the Brownists, besides Burton, Edwards names prominently "Katherine Chidley, an old Brownist, and her son, a young Brownist, a pragmatical fellow," who preached in London, and occasionally went on circuit into the country. Edwards characterizes Mrs. Chidley as "a brazen-faced audacious old woman;" but we know the motive. He had not forgotten the thrashing in print he had received from Mrs. Chidley in 1641 (Vol. II. 595). [Footnote: Paget's Heresiography, pp. 55-82 (a great deal about the Brownists; but with next to no real information); Edwards's Gangræna, Part I. pp. 62-64 and Part III. 242-248 (gossip about Burton); and Part III. 170, 171 (about Chidley); Baillie's Letters, II. 184 and 192; Hanbury's Historical Memorials, II. 108 et seq.]
ANTINOMIANS:—The origin of this heresy is attributed to Luther contemporary and fellow townsman, John Agricola, of Eisleben in Saxony (1492-1566); but the Antinomians of New England, and their chief Mrs. Hutchinson, had recently been more heard of. The story of poor Mrs. Hutchinson, the chief of these New England Antinomians, has already been told by us (Vol. II.371-7), as far as to the beginning of 1643, when we left her, a widow with a family of children, including a married daughter and that daughter's husband, beyond the bounds of New England altogether, and seeking rest for her wearied mind, and a home for her little ones, in the Dutch plantations somewhere near what is now New York. The sad end has now to be told. The Indians and the Dutch of those parts were then at feud; and in September 1643, in an inroad of the Indians into the plantation where Mrs. Hutchinson was, she and all her family were murdered, with the exception of a little daughter eight years of age, who was carried into captivity among the Indians, and not recovered till four years afterwards. The news of this tragic end of Mrs. Hutchinson had been brought across the Atlantic, and had added to the interest of pious horror with which her previous career of heresy in Massachusetts had been heard of by the orthodox in England. Mrs. Hutchinson and her Antinomianism, in fact, were already the subjects of a dreadful popular myth. Here, for example, is old Father Ephraim's account of the New England Antinomians, as he had compiled it from information received direct from America:—"Some persons among those that went hence to New England being freighted with many loose and unsound opinions, which they durst not here, they there began to vent them … working first upon women, traducing godly ministers to be and preach under Covenant of Works, dropping their baits by little and little and angling yet further when they saw them take, and fathering their opinions on those of the best quality in the country; and, by means of Mrs. Hutchinson's double weekly lecture at Boston, under pretence of repeating Mr. Cotton's sermons, these opinions were quickly dispersed before authority was aware." But at length, when the infant church in America had been thus "almost ruinated," the judgments of God overtook the prime fomenters of the heresy in a notorious manner. "As, first, Mistress Hutchinson, the Generalissimo, the high-priestess of the new religion, was delivered at one time of 30 monstrous births, or thereabouts, much about the number of her monstrous opinions; some were bigger, some less, none of them having human shape, but shaped like her opinions: Mistress Dyer also, another of the same crew, was delivered of a large—" [here follows a minute description of a feminine monster that would have made the fortune of any travelling showman, so complexly-horrible was its physiology]. Thus God punished those monstrous "wretches," But the civil authorities of New England, as we know, had punished them too. "God put it into the hearts of the civil magistrates to convent the chief leaders of them; and, after fruitless admonitions given, they proceeded to sentence: some they disfranchised, others they excommunicated, and some they banished. A seditious minister, one Mr. Wheelwright, was one, and Mrs. Hutchinson another; who, going to plant herself on an island, called Rhode Island, under the Dutch, where they could not agree, but were miserably divided into sundry sects, removed from thence to an island called Hell- gate [Hebgate, according to Cotton Mather], where the Indians set upon her, and slew her and her daughter, and her daughter's husband, children, and family."—Notwithstanding this dreadful fate of the Antinomians in America, the heresy had broken out in England. Nothing was publicly said of the younger Sir Henry Vane in connexion with it; though, on his return from his Massachusetts governorship, he may have brought back in his speculative head some of the Hutchinsonian ideas. According to Paget, the first Antinomian in London had been "one Master John Eaton," who had been a scholar of his own (i.e. at Trinity College, Oxford), and was afterwards curate of a parish near Aldgate. In fact, as we learn from Wood, he became a minister in Suffolk, was "accounted by all the neighbouring ministers a grand Antinomian," and suffered trouble accordingly. But this Eaton had died in 1641, aged about 66, and leaving but an Antinomian book or two, including "The Honeycomb of Free Justification;" and the leading Antinomians were new men. One of them was Mr. John Saltmarsh, a Cambridge graduate, and minister in Kent, afterwards well-known as an, army-preacher and pamphleteer; another was "one Randall who preaches about Spittal Yard."—The nature of the Antinomian doctrines, "opening such a fair and easy way to heaven," made them very popular, it appears, in London and elsewhere. Many ran after their preachers, "crowding the churches and filling the doors and windows," for "Oh, it pleaseth people well," adds old Father Ephraim, "to have heaven and their lusts too." Notwithstanding this imputation, and illustrative scandals in Edwards, it really appears that Antinomianism took itself out in high mystic preaching of justification by faith, the doctrine of assurance, and the privileges of saintship. The wild phrases that came in such preaching were the chief offence. [Footnote: Cotton Mather's Magnalia, Book VII. p. 19; Palfrey's Hist. of New England, I. 609, Note; Paget, 105-118; Wood's Athenæ, III. 21 (for more about Eaton); Gangræna in several places, for references to Saltmarsh and Randall. Baillie in his Dissuasive (pp. 57-64) has much the same story as Paget about Mrs. Hutchinson and the New England Antinomians, and attributes the rise of that heresy to the evil influence of Independency.—The idiotic and disgusting myth of the monstrous accouchements of the two Antinomian women seems to have found great favour with the orthodox: and it figures in many pious books of the time and afterwards. It seems actually to have originated in America, and to have been widely believed there, while Mrs. Hutchinson was alive; for Cotton Mather, repeating it, with the most abject good faith, and in great detail, as late as 1702 (Magnalia, VII. 20), quotes a letter of Mr. Thomas Hooker, to the effect that at the very time of one of the diabolic accouchements, Mrs. Dyer's (Oct. 17, 1637), the house in which her and his wife were sitting was violently shaken, as if by an earthquake, for the space of seven or eight minutes. Mather also avers that there was an investigation of the affair by the magistrates at the time.]
FAMILISTS:—Probably because there had been a continental sect of this name in the sixteenth century, founded by a David George of Delft, Edwards includes Familists among his leading English sorts of Sectaries, and Paget devotes ten pages to them. Paget, however, admits that they were "so close and cunning that ye shall hardly ever find them out." If there really was such an English sect, their main principle probably was that every society of Christians should be a kind of family- party, jolly within itself in confidential love-feasts and exchanges of sentiment, and letting the general world and its creeds roar around unquestioned and unheeded. Baillie, however, in an incidental notice of Familism in the Second Part of his Dissuasive, gives a somewhat different account. It was, according to him, a wild development of Anabaptism, of which not a few once "counted zealous and gracious" were suspected—including "a great man, a peer of the land." It had a public representative in Mr. Randall, who had "for some years preached peaceably in the Spital" (already mentioned among the Antinomians), and of whom Baillie had heard that he entertained such ideas as these, though reserving them probably as esoteric mysteries for the highest class of the Family of Love—"that all the resurrection and glory which Scripture promises is past already, and no other coming of Christ to judgment, or life eternal, is to be expected than what presently in this earth the saints do enjoy; that the most clear historic passages of Scripture are mere allegories; that in all things, Angels, Devils, Men, Women, there is but one spirit and life, which absolutely and essentially is God; that nothing is everlasting but the life and essence of God which now is in all creatures;" &c. We should now call this a kind of Pantheism; but probably it was coupled with that disposition to privacy, and indifference to creeds and controversies, which has been mentioned as the peculiarity of Familism. Even the Familists, however, it seems, had their subdivisions. One John Hetherington, a box-maker, had been a kind of Familist, but had recanted. [Footnote: Paget, 92 102, and 137,138; Gangræna, Part I. 13; Baillie's Dissuasive Part II. pp. 99-104]
MILLENARIES OR CHILIASTS:—"An Heresy," says old Father Ephraim, "frequent at this time. This sect look for a temporary [temporal] kingdom of Christ, that must begin presently and last 1,000 years. Of this opinion are many of our Apocalyptical men, that study more future events than their present only." This is substantially all we have from Paget. In fact, however, the Chiliasts or Millenarians were hardly a mere sect. The expectation of a Millennium near at hand was very prevalent, or was becoming very prevalent, among the English Divines of the Assembly itself. "Many of the Divines here," wrote Baillie, September 5, 1645, "not only Independents, but others, such as Twisse, Marshall, Palmer, and many more, are express Chiliasts." In his Dissuasive, however, where he devotes an entire chapter to this heresy of Chiliasm, he attributes the grosser form of the heresy chiefly to the Independents. A kind of Chiliasm or Millenarianism, he says, had been held by some former English Divines, including Joseph Meade; but it had been reserved for two Independents—"Mr. Archer and his colleague at Arnheim, T. G." (i.e. Thomas Goodwin)—to invent new dreams on the subject; and these had recently been adopted by Mr. Burroughs. The purport of their doctrine was that in the year 1650, or, at the furthest, 1695, Christ was to reappear in human form at Jerusalem, destroy the existing fabric of things in a conflagration, collect the scattered Jews, raise martyrs and saints from their graves, and begin his glorious reign of a thousand years. [Footnote: Paget, 136, 137; Baillie's Letters, II. 313, and Dissuasive, 224-252.]