John Fiske enlarges upon this thought.[156] The “greater hospitality of Cambridge [University, England] toward new ideas” is proverbial, and the very names, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex, Cambridge and Huntingdon, familiar in the geography of New England, are telling a story of Protestant education.
Radical and Conservative Puritans
Strong as the Puritans seemed in denouncing the Church of Rome, and in accepting Protestantism, which, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, more than ever before, meant separation from the established church and the established forms of government, they were not united in thought. There were two classes: Puritans, and a class of this class represented by such men as Richard Hooker. Of the Puritans, Fiske says: “Some would have stopped short with Presbyterianism, while others held that ‘new presbyter was but old priest writ large,’ and so pressed on to Independency.”[157] This difference of opinion on religious matters is discernible when representatives of both classes, mingling in the society about Boston, started the educational work of America. Those inclined to remain under the banner of Presbyterianism taunted the others, who were known as Brownists, or Separatists, and who followed William Brewster to America, with anarchy, merely because they believed in carrying out fully the principles for which all were ready to fight.
Thus from the first has our educational work fallen into the hands of two classes of men,—a class willing to compromise in order to keep peace, and a bold, daring class, who advocated stepping out on truth regardless of what might follow.
Congregationalism and education
There was a mighty educational problem before the church. The Episcopalians had failed to take up that work in England; it was from their midst that Wm. Brewster, a Cambridge graduate, John Robinson, who also was graduated from Cambridge in 1600, and William Bradford, afterward governor of Plymouth for thirty years, withdrew to form the nucleus of the Congregational Church, which had its origin at Scrooby, England, and ended in Plymouth. What Episcopalianism had overlooked in the matter of education in England it now became the duty and privilege of the new church to begin on the virgin soil of America.
The New England theocracy
The reader is familiar with the fact that the Puritans, leaving England because of civil and religious oppression, the result of a union of church and state, came to America for freedom, and, contrary to what one would expect, especially at a casual glance, they here developed a theocracy. “The aim of Winthrop and his friends in coming to Massachusetts was the construction of a theocratic state which should be to Christians ... all that the theocracy of Moses and Joshua and Samuel had been to the Jews.... In such a scheme there was no room for religious liberty.... The state they were to found was to consist of a united body of believers; citizenship itself was to be co-extensive with church membership.”[158]
Educational work breaks the theocracy