CHAPTER THE SECOND.
SEPARATISM AND THE SCROOBY CHURCH.
I.
Importance of the Separatists. To the great brotherhood of Puritans who formed a party within the church there was added a little fringe of Separatists or "Brownists," as they were commonly called, who did not stop with rejecting certain traits of the Anglican service, but spurned the church itself. Upon these ultraists fell the merciless hand of persecution. They were imprisoned, hanged, exiled. They were mostly humble people, and were never numerous; but by their superior boldness in speech and writing, by their attempts to realize actual church organizations on apostolic models, they rendered themselves considerable if not formidable. From this advance guard and forlorn hope of Puritanism, inured to hardship and the battle front, came at length the little band of New England pioneers who made a way into the wilderness over the dead bodies of half their company. The example of these contemned Brownists led to the Puritan settlement of New England. Their type of ecclesiastical organization ultimately dominated the Congregationalism of New England and the nonconformity of the mother country. For these reasons, if for no other, Brownism, however obscure it may have been, is not a negligible element in history.
II.
Nonconformity in the Church. The great body of the Puritans seem to have agreed with Bishop Hall that it was "better to swallow a ceremony than to rend a church," and they agreed with him in regarding Separatism as criminal. They were, indeed, too intent on reforming the Church of England to think of leaving it. They made no scruple of defying ecclesiastical regulations when they could, but in the moral code of that day schism was the deadliest of sins.
In the early part of Elizabeth's reign, before the beginning of the rule of Whitgift and the High Commission Courts, Puritan divines slighted or omitted the liturgy in many parishes. This became more common after the rise of Cartwright and the Presbyterian movement, about 1570. Scrambler, Bishop of Peterborough, to Burghley, 13th April, 1573, in Wright's Elizabeth and her Times. For example, in the town of Overston, in 1573, there was no divine service according to the Book of Common Prayer, "but insteade thereof two sermons be preached" by men whom the bishop had refused to license. The village of Whiston was also a place of Puritan assemblage, "where it is their joye," writes the Bishop of Peterborough, "to have manie owte of divers parishes, principallie owte of Northampton towne and Overston aforesaid, with other townes thereaboute, there to receive the sacramentes with preachers and ministers to their owne liking, and contrarie to the forme prescribed by the publique order of the realme." Rogers's Preface to Articles. Parker Soc. ed., p. 10. Thomas Rogers says, "The brethren (for so did they style them-selves) would neither pray, nor say service, nor baptize, nor celebrate the Lord's Supper, nor marry, nor bury, nor do any other ecclesiastical duty according to law."
At this time some of the Puritan divines held high positions in the church. Whittingham, who had been on the Puritan side of the quarrels in Frankfort, and who had received only a Genevan ordination, succeeded in holding his deanery of Durham until his death, in 1579. In 1563 Dr. Turner was sneering at bishops as "white coats" and "tippett gentlemen," while himself Dean of Durham.
The Semi-Separatists. But Elizabeth after a while filled the bishoprics with men to her liking, whose heavy hands made the lot of Puritans in the church harder and harder. Many ministers were silenced, but there were many who, by evasion or by straining their consciences, held their benefices. Bancroft in Barlowe's Svmme and Svbstance. Some Puritan clergymen, when they were to preach, preferred "to walk in the church-yard until sermon time rather than to be present at public prayer." Some Puritan laymen had their own way of conforming to the church. Heresiography, p. 82. "There is a sort of Semi-Separatist," says Pagitt, as late as 1646, "that will heare our Sermons but not our Common-prayers; and of these you may see every Sunday in our streets sitting and standing about our doores; who, when Prayers are done, rush into our Churches to hear our Sermons."
III.
Causes of Separatism. The growth of Separatist churches was due to two causes. An almost incredible reverence for the letter of the Scriptures had taken the place of older superstitions. There was a strong tendency to revert to the stern spirit of the Old Testament and to adopt the external forms of the New. Religious idealists saw a striking contrast between the discipline of the primitive and almost isolated bands of enthusiastic believers in the apostolic time and the all-inclusive parishes of the hierarchical state church. And in that age of externalism the difference in organic form between the Anglican church and the little synagogues of Christian seceders founded by Paul in the Levant weighed heavily upon the minds of earnest people. It did not occur to them that this primitive organization was probably brought over from the neighboring Jewish congregations from which the converts had withdrawn, and that there might not be any obligation to imitate it under different skies and in a remote age. Thomas Scott in Pagitt, 80. The Separatist was an idealist. "He lives by the aire," said an opponent, "and there he builds Castles and Churches; none on earth will please him; ... he must finde out Sir Thomas More's Utopia, or rather Plato's Community, and bee an Elder there." But Separatism was undoubtedly promoted by persecution. Bradford says that the sufferings inflicted on them by the bishops helped some of the Puritans "to see further into things by the light of the word of God. Plimoth Plantation, p. 8. How not only these base and beggerly ceremonies were unlawfull, but also that the lordly and tiranous power of the prelats ought not to be submitted unto." Drawn thus by the letter of the biblical record, while stung by cruel oppression and galled by the opposition of the constituted authorities to what they deemed the truth divine, it is not strange that religious enthusiasts began to long for societies organized like those of the apostolic age, from which the profane should be excluded by a strict discipline.