Again, it is to be noted that no American colony ever reached the position in which it could provide a positively secure refuge to Catholics. Maryland wavered from toleration to Catholicism, then to Anglicanism and to Puritanism, and then back to toleration; but never at any time was it a Catholic settlement in the sense in which Massachusetts belonged to the Puritans or Pennsylvania was the special home of the Quakers. English Catholics, hesitating between emigration and the further endurance of their ills at home, would feel no irresistible attraction in the dubious toleration of any of the colonies. [Footnote: Tyler, England in America, chaps, vii., viii.]
Lastly, it is to be noticed that the great proportion of the English Catholics were not of the emigrating classes. Many of them were of the nobility and gentry, and therefore not of the ordinary stuff of which colonists were made. It is quite possible that the same conservative tendencies which held them to the old church held them to their old homes. If they had been as easily detached from their native soil as the Puritans and Quakers, one cannot doubt that some great migration comparable to that of those two bodies would have taken place.
CHAPTER XII
THE ENGLISH PURITANS AND THE SECTS (1550-1689)
The multitude of Englishmen other than Catholics, who, at the opening of the seventeenth century, were dissatisfied with the church of England as by law established, may be grouped under the general name of Puritans; although as time passed on various newly organized religious bodies formed themselves from among them, so that two more religious classes, at least, have to be differentiated. The roots of Puritanism are to be found in the characteristics of human temperament. Conservatives and radicals will always exist; the Puritans were those who carried or tried to carry the principles and ideas of the Reformation to their logical and rigorous conclusion. Such men as Latimer, Cranmer, and many of the theologians of the reign of Edward VI., were already steadily approaching the fundamental position of the Puritans, as their thought developed, long before the foreign influence of the reign of Queen Mary became effective and the modified Protestantism of Elizabeth was introduced.
If the government had kept its hands off, England would have divided into two camps, that of the Catholics and that of a Puritanically reformed church. The Anglican system was an artificial one, a compromise established under the influence of the crown and kept in power by royal determination till it eventually won the devotion, the loyalty, or at least the deliberate acceptance of the great body of moderate and conservative Englishmen. Catholics and Puritans were the logical opposites, and not Catholics and Anglicans, nor yet Anglicans and Puritans.
Yet in a more immediate sense Mary gave occasion to the rise of Puritanism by driving into banishment many of the more devout Protestants of her day. At Frankfort, Strasburg, Basel, Zurich, and Geneva groups of these English exiles gathered, formed congregations worshipping together; developed, apart from the restrictions of government, the logical tendencies of their religious ideas; and in many cases came under the powerful influence of continental reformers. Especially at Frankfort [Footnote: Hinds, The England of Elizabeth, 12- 67.] and at Geneva was the religious life of these Protestant communities at white heat; and controversies were then begun and principles adopted which dominated all the later life of these Englishmen, and were handed down to their successors in England and America as party cries through more than a century. When the ordeal of Mary's reign was over, the exiled for conscience' sake returned to England, but they formed already a body divergent from the church as it was then established.
During Elizabeth's reign three stages of the development of Puritanism gave occasion for corresponding conflicts with the crown and for making more clear the differences between Anglican and Puritan. During the first decade of the reign, Puritanism meant a protest against certain of the ceremonies and formulas and vestments required of clergymen by the law. The sign of the cross on the child's forehead in baptism, the celebration of saints' days, insistence on kneeling to receive the communion, the use of church organs, the changing of robes during the service, and even the wearing of a surplice or a square cap, were to many earnest souls survivals of "popery" and temptations to superstition. The clergy who held such beliefs tried by resolutions in convocation to change the practices of the church: but notwithstanding the large votes in their favor they were still in the minority and were defeated. [Footnote: Strype, Annals, I., 500-505.]
Then individual ministers began to disregard the law, and either to neglect the use of certain requirements of the prayer-book altogether or to change the forms there laid down. The archbishop and the Court of High Commission issued detailed instructions insisting on observance of the authorized form of worship; [Footnote: Prothero, Statutes and Constitutional Documents, 191-194.] but the ministers declared that they owed obedience to God rather than to man, and either resigned their pastorates or, encouraged by their congregations, continued to disobey the law and the archiepiscopal injunctions. It was at this time and in this connection that the word "Puritan" came into use, as a term of reproach for those who insisted on an ultra-pure ritual, purged from all traces of the old religion. "Puritan" was used as "Pharisee" might have been. [Footnote: Camden, Annals, year 1568.]
From 1570 onward Puritanism entered upon a second stage, in the form of a contest for changes in the organization of the established church. In the main the same men who were dissatisfied with the liturgy of the church began to oppose the system of its government by bishops and archbishops. [Footnote: Letter from Sampson, formerly dean of Christ Church, to Lord Burleigh, March 8, 1574, in Strype, Annals, III., 373.] The "Admonition to Parliament" of 1572 declares that "as the names of archbishops, archdeacons, lord bishops, chancellors, etc., are drawn out of the pope's shop, together with their offices, so the government which they use … is anti-Christian and devilish and contrary to the Scriptures. And as safely may we, by the warrant of God's words, subscribe to allow the dominion of the pope universally to rule over the word of God as an archbishop over a whole province or a lord bishop over a diocese which containeth many shires and parishes. For the dominion that they exercise … is unlawful and expressly forbidden by the word of God." [Footnote: Prothero, Statutes and Constitutional Documents, 199.]