SEEKERS:—"Many have wrangled so long about the Church that at last they have quite lost it, and go under the name of Expecters and Seekers, and do deny that there is any Church, or any true minister, or any ordinances; some of them affirm the Church to be in the wilderness, and they are seeking for it there; others say that it is in the smoke of the Temple, and that they are groping for it there—where I leave them praying to God."—So far Old Ephraim; and what he says, combined with one of Edwards's miscellaneous blasphemies already quoted, enables us to fancy the Seekers. They were people, it seems, who had arrived at the conclusion that the Supernatural had never yet been featured forth to man in any propositions or symbols that could be accepted as adequate, and who were waiting, therefore, for a possible "Church of the Future;" content, meanwhile, to dwell in a Temple of smoke, or (for there is the alternative figure) to see visions of the Future Church in the smoke of the present Temple.—"Mr. Erbury, that lived in Wales," (but had come to London, and then settled in Ely, whence he made excursions,) and "one Walwyn, a dangerous man, a strong head," who laboured somewhere else, are mentioned by Edwards as men avowing themselves in this predicament. Baillie mentions also one Laurence Clarkson, who had passed from Anabaptism to Seekerism, and he speaks of Mrs. Attaway, the Baptist woman-preacher, and Mr. Saltmarsh, the Antinomian, as tending the same way.——But the chief of the Seekers, perhaps the original founder of the Sect, and certainly the bravest exponent of their principles, was a person with whom we are already acquainted. "One Mr. Williams," writes Baillie, June 7, 1644, "has drawn a great number after him to a singular Independency, denying any true Church in the world, and will have every man to serve God by himself alone, without any church at all. This man has made a great and bitter schism lately among the Independents." Again, on the 23rd of July, Baillie refers to the same person as "my good acquaintance Mr. Roger Williams, who says there is no church, no sacraments, no pastors, no church-officers or ordinance, in the world, nor has been since a few years after the Apostles." In short, the arch- representative of this new religion of Seekerism on both sides of the Atlantic was no other than our friend Roger Williams, the Tolerationist (Vol. II. 560-3, and antè, pp. 113-120). Through the variations of this man's external adventures we have seen the equally singular series of variations of his mental condition. First an intense Separatist, or Independent of the most resolute type, but conjoining with this Separatism a passion for the most absolute liberty of conscience and the entire dissociation of civil power from matters of religion, then a Baptist and excommunicated on that account by his former friends in America, he had latterly, in his solitude at Providence, outgone Baptism or any known form of Independency, and, still retaining his doctrine of the most absolute liberty of conscience, had worked himself into that state of dissatisfaction with all visible church-forms, and of yearning quest after unattainable truth, for which the name Seekerism was invented by himself or others. Though he did not propose that preaching should be abandoned, he had gradually settled in a notion which he thus expresses: "In the poor small span of my life, I desired to have been a diligent and constant observer, and have been myself many ways engaged, in city, in country, in court, in schools, in universities, in churches, in Old and New England, and yet cannot, in the holy presence of God, bring in the result of a satisfying discovery that either the begetting ministry of the apostles or messengers to the nations, or the feeding and nourishing ministry of pastors and teachers, according to the first institution of the Lord Jesus, are yet restored or extant." It was while he was in this stage of his mental history that Williams came over on his flying visit to England in the matter of the new charter for the Rhode Island plantations. Some whiff of his strange opinions may have preceded him; but it must have been mainly by his intercourse with leading Londoners during his stay in England, which extended over more than a year (June 1643—Sept. 1644), that he diffused the interest in himself and his Seekerism which we certainly find existing in 1644. He can have been no stranger to the chief Divines of the Westminster Assembly. Baillie, we see, was on speaking terms with him; and it is curious to note in Baillie's and other references to him the same vein of personal liking for the man, running through amazement at his heresy, which characterized the criticisms of him by his New England opponents and excommunicants. Incidents of his visit, not less interesting now, were two publications of his in London, his "Key into the Language of America," published in 1643, and his Bloody Tenent of Persecution, published in 1644.—At least the name of the sect of "The Seekers," I may add, had struck Cromwell himself, and had some fascination for him, whether on its own account, or from his acquaintance with Williams. "Your sister Claypole," he wrote to his daughter Mrs. Ireton, some two years after our present date (Oct. 25,1646), "is, I trust in mercy, exercised with some perplexed thoughts. She sees her own vanity and carnal mind, bewailing it: she seeks after (as I hope also) what will satisfy. And thus to be a Seeker is to be of the best sect next after a Finder; and such an one shall every faithful humble Seeker be in the end. Happy Seeker, happy Finder!" [Footnote: Paget, 150; Gangræna, Part I. p. 24, and p. 38; Dissuasive, Part II. pp. 96, 97 and Notes; Baillie's Letters, II. 191-2 and 212; Gammell's Life of Roger Williams (Boston, 1846), and Memoir of Williams, by Edward B. Underhill, prefixed to the republication of William's Bloody Tenent of Persecution, by the "Hanserd Knollys Society" (1848); Carlyle's Cromwell, I. 212.]
DIVORCERS:—"These I term Divorcers" says Old Ephraim, "that would be quit of their wives for slight occasions;" and he goes on to speak of MILTON as the representative of the sect. Featley had previously mentioned Milton's Divorce Tract as one of the proofs of the tendency of the age to Antinomianism, Familism, and general anarchy; and Edwards and Baillie followed in the same strain. Milton's Doctrine of Divorce, it thus appears, had attracted attention, and had perhaps gained some following. Among the six caricatures of notable sects on the title-page of Paget's Heresiography is one of "THE DIVORCER"—i.e. a man, in an admonishing attitude, and without his hat, dismissing or pushing away his wife, who has her hat on, as if ready for a journey, and is putting her handkerchief to her eyes. We shall have more to say of Milton in this connexion. [Footnote: Paget, pp. 150, 151, p. 87, and Epistle Dedicatory, p. 4; Fentley's Dippers Dipt, Epistle Dedicatory, p. 3; Edward's Gangræna, Part I. p. 29.]
ANTI-SABBATARIANS, AND TRASKITES:—These sects, though distinct, may be named together. The Anti-Sabbatarians were those who denied the obligation of any Lord's Day or Sabbath: they were pretty numerous, but were distributed through the other sects. The Traskites, on the other hand, denied the obligation of the Christian Sunday or Lord's Day, but maintained the perpetual obligation of the Jewish Sabbath on the seventh day of the week. They were the followers of one John Traske, a poor eccentric who had been well known to Paget, but was now dead, and remembered only for his heresy, for which he had been whipt, pilloried, and imprisoned, about 1618. His opinions had been revived more ably in certain treatises and discourses, published in 1628 and 1632, by Theophilus Brabourne, a Puritan minister in Norfolk. Both Brabourne and Traske had been obliged to recant their opinions and return to orthodoxy; and indeed Traske had done so in a Tract written against himself, though he again relapsed. Nevertheless the heresy had taken root, and one heard in 1644 of Traskites or Sabbatarians dispersed through England. The sect is continued still in the so-called "Seventh Day Baptists." [Footnote: Paget, pp. 138-141; with more accurate particulars in Cox's Literature of the Sabbath Question, I. 153-5, 157-8, and 162.]
SOUL-SLEEPERS OR MORTALISTS:—Such was the odd name given to a sect, or supposed sect, represented by the anonymous author of a, Tract called Man's Mortality. The Tract is now very scarce, if not utterly forgotten; but, as it made a great stir at the time, and as we shall hear of it and its author rather particularly again in connexion with Milton's life, I may here give some account of it from a copy which I have managed to see. The title in full is as follows: "Man's Mortallitie: or a Treatise wherein 'tis proved, both Theologically and Phylosophically, that whole Man (as a rationall creature) is a compound wholy mortall, contrary to that common distinction of Soule and Body; and that the present going of the Soule into Heaven or Hell is a meer fiction; and that at the Resurrection is the beginning of our immortallity, and then actual Condemnation and Salvation, and not before: With all doubtes and objections answered and resolved both by Scripture and Reason; discovering the multitude of Blasphemies and Absurdities that arise from the fancie of the Soule: Also divers other mysteries, as of Heaven, Hell, Christ's humane residence, the Extent of the Resurrection, the New Creation, &c.: opened and presented to the tryall of better judgments, By R. O. Amsterdam: Printed by John Canne, Anno Dom. 1643." In the British Museum copy, which is the one I have seen, the word "Amsterdam" is erased by the collector's pen, and "London" substituted, with the date "Jan. 19" added; whence I infer that, whatever Canne at Amsterdam had to do with the printing of the tract, it was virtually a London publication, and out in January, 1643-4. On the title-page is quoted the text Ecclesiastes iii. 19, thus—"That which befalleth the sonnes of men befalleth Beasts; even one thing befalleth them all: as the one dyeth so dyeth the other; yea they have all one breath, so that man hath no preheminence above a Beast; for all is vanity." This gives so far the key-note to the 57 pages of matter of the Tract itself. It is a queer mixture of a sort of physiological reasoning, such as we should now call Materialism, with a mystical metaphysics, and with odd whimsies of the author's own—such as that Christ had ascended into the Sun. The leading tenet, however, is that the notion of a soul, or supernatural and immortal essence, in man, distinct from his bodily organism, is a sheer delusion, contradicted both by Scripture and correct physiological thinking, and that from this notion have arisen all kinds of superstitions and practical mischiefs. "The most grand and blasphemous heresies that are in the world, the mystery of iniquity and the kingdom of Antichrist, depend upon it." So says the Tract itself; and in the first of two pieces of verse prefixed to it by an admirer, and entitled "To His worthy Friend the Author, upon his Booke," there occur these lines:—
"The hell-hatched doctrine of th' immortal soul
Discovered makes the hungry Furies howl,
And teare their snakey haire, with grief appaled
To see their error-leading doctrine quailed,
Hell undermined and Purgatory blown
Up in the air."
There are Latin quotations in the Tract; and some of the physiological arguments by which the author seeks to refute the opinion of "the Soulites," as he calls them, are rather nauseous. On the whole, were it not for the appended concession of a Resurrection, or New Creation, and an Immortality somehow to ensue thence, the doctrine of the Tract might be described as out-and-out Materialism. Possibly, in spite of the concession, this is what the author meant to drive at. Among some of his followers, however, a milder version of his doctrine seems to have been in favour, not quite denying the existence of a soul, but asserting that the soul goes into sleep or temporary extinction at death, to be re- awakened at the Resurrection. [Footnote: Paget, pp. 148, 149; Gangræna, Part I. pp. 22, 23; Baillie's Dissuasive, Part II. 99 and 121; but mainly the Tract cited.]
ARIANS, SOCINIANS, AND OTHER ANTI-TRINITARIANS:—Since 1614, when Legate and Wightman had been burnt for Arianism (Vol. I. p. 46), this and other forms of the Anti-Trinitarian heresy had been little heard of in England. But in the ferment of the Civil War they were reappearing. A Thomas Webb, a young fellow of twenty years of age, had been shocking people in London and in country-places by awful expressions against the Trinity; one Clarke had been, doing the same; one Paul Best had been circulating manuscripts in which there were "most horrid blasphemies of the Trinity, of Christ, and of the Holy Ghost;" and John Biddle, of Gloucester, master of the school there, and of whom, from his career at Oxford, high hopes had been formed, had begun to be "free of his discourses in a Socinian direction." Baillie adds Mr. Samuel Richardson, one of the Baptist ministers of London, to the number of those whose Trinitarianism was questionable, and charges the Baptists generally with laxity on that point. In short, there was an alarm of Arianism, and other forms of Anti- Trinitarianism, as again abroad in England. Mr. Nye, the Independent, had been heard to say that "to his knowledge the denying of the Divinity of Christ was a growing opinion, and that there was a company of them met about Coleman Street, a Welshman being their chief, who held this opinion." Coleman Street appears, indeed, to have been a very hotbed of heresy. For here it was that JOHN GOODWIN (Vol. II. 582-4, and antè, pp. 120-122) had his congregation. He had not revealed himself fully; but the public had had a taste of him in recent pamphlets. Baillie, on rumour, reports him as a Socinian; and Edwards, who came into conflict with him in due time, and devotes many consecutive pages of Billingsgate to him in the Second Part of his Gangræna, tells us that he held "many wicked opinions," being "an Hermaphrodite and a compound of an Arminian, Socinian, Libertine, Anabaptist, & c." From the same authority we learn that the Presbyterians had nicknamed him "the great Red Dragon of Coleman Street." What he really was we have already seen in part for ourselves, and shall yet see more fully.[Footnote: Paget, 132—136; Gangræna, Part I. pp. 21, 22, 26, 33, Part II 19- 39, and Part III. 111 and 87; Baillie's Dissuasive, Part II. p. 98; also Wood's Athenæ, III. 593 (for Biddle); Baillie's Letters, II. 192, and Jackson's Life of John Goodwin (1822), pp. 3 and 14.]
ANTI-SCRIPTURISTS:—"One wicked sect," says Old Ephraim, "denieth the Scriptures both of the Old and New Testament, and account them as things of nought; yea, as I am credibly informed, in public congregations they vent these their damnable opinions." He gives no names; but Edwards mentions "one Marshal, a bricklayer, a young man, living at Hackney," who made a mock of the Scriptures in his harangues, and asserted that he himself "knew the mystery of God in Christ better than St. Paul." A companion of this Marshal's told the people that "the Scripture was their golden calf and they danced round it." A Priscilla Miles had been speaking very shockingly of the Scriptures at Norwich. But the most noted Anti-Scripturist seems to have been a Clement Wrighter, a Worcester man, living in London, of whom Edwards gives this terrible character— "Sometimes a professor of religion and judged to have been godly, who is now an arch-heretic and fearful apostate, an old wolf, and a subtle man, who goes about corrupting, and venting his errors; he is often in Westminster Hall and on the Exchange; he comes into public meetings of the Sectaries upon occasions of meeting to draw up petitions for the Parliament or other businesses. This man about seven or eight years ago (i.e. about 1638) fell off from the communion of our churches to Independency and Brownism; from that he fell to Anabaptism and Arminianism, and to Mortalism, holding the soul mortal (he is judged to be the author, or at least to have had a great hand in the Book of the Mortality of the Soul). After that he fell to be Seeker, and is now an Anti-Scripturist, a Questionist and Sceptick, and I fear an Atheist." Specimens of his sayings about the Bible are given; and altogether one has to fancy Wrighter as an oldish man, sneaking about in public places in London on soft-soled shoes, and with bundles of papers under his arm. I have seen a little thing printed by him in Feb. 1615-6, under the title of "The Sad Case of Clement Writer," in which he complains of injustice, to the extent of 1,500_l_., done him by the late Lord Keeper Coventry and other judges in some suit that had lasted for twelve years. [Footnote: Paget, 149; Gangræna, Part I. pp. 26- -28; Baillie's Dissuasive, Part II. 121.]
SCEPTICS, OR QUESTIONISTS:—They were those who, according to Edwards, "questioned everything in matters of religion, holding nothing positively nor certainly, saving the doctrine of pretended liberty of conscience for all, and liberty of prophesying." Many besides Wrighter had reached this stage through their anti-Scripturism, and were free-thinkers of the cold or merely rational order, distinct from the devout and enthusiastic Seekers. [Footnote: Gangræna, Part I. p. 13.]
ATHEISTS:—Although Edwards charitably hints his fear that Mr. Wrighter had at last sunk into this extreme category, it is remarkable that neither he nor Paget ventures to reckon Atheists among the existing Sects. Probably, therefore, there was no body of persons to whom, with any pretext of plausibility, the name could be applied. But we are advised of individuals here and there whom their neighbours suspected of Atheism; and, if Edwards is to be believed, there was alive a certain John Boggis, an apprentice to an apothecary in London, who, though at present only a young Anabaptist preacher, and disciple of Captain Hobson, was to go within a year or two to such unheard-of lengths about Great Yarmouth that even Wrighter must have disowned him. [Footnote: Ibid. Part II. 133, 134; and Baillie's Dissuasive, Part II. 99.]