IV.
Robert Browne and Brownism. The beginning of Separatism has been commonly attributed to Robert Browne, a contentious and able advocate of Separatist doctrines. 1581 to 1586. After a brief and erratic career as an advocate of these opinions, and after suffering the penalty of his zeal and proving the sincerity of his belief in thirty-two different prisons, in some of which he could not see his hand at noonday, Browne at length began to waver—now inclined to return to the church, now recoiling toward dissent. Worn out in nerves by controversy and persecution, this eccentric man was so alarmed by a solemn sentence of excommunication from a bishop, that he repented and made peace with the English church. He accepted a benefice, but employed a curate to preach for him. Browne lingered on to an unhonored age, imperious and contentious, not able to live with his wife, and held in no reverence by churchmen, while he was despised by Separatists. He died at eighty, in Northampton jail, to which he had been carried on a feather bed laid in a cart. The old man had been committed to prison this thirty-third time in his life for striking a constable who sought to collect a rate. [Note 1.]
Rise of Separatism. Separatism in some form existed before Browne's zeal made it a thorn in the side of the bishops. Something like a separation existed in 1567. Barclay's Inner Life, pp. 13, 53. In 1571 there was an independent church of which we know little but the pastor's name. Dialogue of 1593 quo. by Waddington. Bradford even dates independency back to the reign of Mary. In truth, the rise of this sect, from which came the earliest New England colony, appears to be lost in obscurity. Bradford's Dialogue. Significant movements are usually cradled in rustic mangers, to which no learned magi think it worth their while to journey. [Note 2.] The beginning of Separatism was probably in the little conventicles held by devout Puritans who, in the words of one of their own writers, "met together to sing a psalm or to talk of God's word." Josias Nichols, The Plea for the Innocent, 1602, in Hanbury, i. 3. But Browne, so far as we know, was one of the earliest to organize independent churches, with officers named and classified after those of the petty hierarchies of the early Christian congregations, or rather according to such deductions regarding them as he was able to make from the Epistles of Paul. Separatism, though it owed something to Browne's activity, was not founded by him. Browne's labors began about 1581, and his fiery career as a Brownist had lasted only four or five years when he began to vacillate. A great part of this time was spent in exile, much of it in prison, and very little of it about London. Stephen Breadwell, 1588, in Dexter, 255. But before 1587 London seems to have been the center of the Separatists, from which they had "sparsed their companies into severall partes of the Realme."
It seems that their rise in London came from the devout meetings of those who had begun to repudiate the Church of England as antichristian. Without any officers or organization apparently, these people, when we first get sight of them, were wont to assemble in the summer time in the fields about London, sitting down upon a bank while the Bible was expounded now by one and now by another of the company. In the winter it was their custom to spend the whole Sunday together from five o'clock in the morning, eating dinner in company and paying for it by a collection. They responded in prayer only by spontaneous groans or sobs, much after the fashion of the early Quakers, Methodists, and other enthusiasts of a later time. H. M. Dexter's Congregationalism, 255-257. If one of their members returned to a parish assembly, they pronounced him an apostate and solemnly delivered him over to Satan until he should repent.
V.
Barrowism. When they began to organize themselves formally into a church the London Separatists in their turn resorted to the apostolic epistles. These had already been treated like the magician's bottle that is made to yield white wine or red at pleasure. From them whatsoever form of discipline was desired by Anglican, Presbyterian, or Brownist had been derived, and now a still different discipline was deduced, a mean betwixt Presbyterian and Brownist theories. This is known now as Barrowism. It was the form of church government brought by the Pilgrims to Plymouth, and substantially that which prevailed in New England throughout the seventeenth century.
The London Separatists suffered miserably from persecution. Many of them languished and died in prison. Barrow and Greenwood, their leaders, were hanged at Tyburn. A part of them migrated to Amsterdam, while the rest maintained a furtive church in London. Separatists in Amsterdam, 1593. Those in Amsterdam, having no lingering abuses of the English church to reform, set every man's conscience to watch his neighbor's conduct. Having seceded from the communion of the Church of England on account of scandals, they were scandalized with the least variation from their rigorous standard by any of their own church members, and they were soon torn asunder with dissensions as the result of this vicariousness of conscience. The innocent vanity of the pastor's wife who could never forego a "toppish" hat and high-heeled shoes was the principal stumbling-block.
Though Separatism had been almost extirpated from England by the close of Elizabeth's reign, there remained even yet one vigorous society in the north which was destined to exert a remarkable influence on the course of history.