In 1641 the Rev. John Cotton, "teacher of the Boston church," published at London "An Abstract or the Laws of New England as they are now established." The first edition does not mention Cotton's name; this was added only after his death in a second edition, published in 1655 by his friend William Aspinwall. This Abstract by John Cotton does not represent, as its title seems to indicate, the actual law; it is a proposed code of laws for New England. But it has influenced to a great extent, if not the legislation of Massachusetts, at any rate the "Laws for Government, published for the use of New Haven Colony" in 1656. The remarkable feature is that Cotton gives marginal references to the Bible for each one of his rules, for instance: "All magistrates are to be chosen (1) by the free Burgesses—Deut. 1 : 13; (2) out of the free Burgesses—Deut. 17 : 15; (3) out of the ablest men and most approved amongst them—Ex. 18 : 21; (4) out of the rank of Noblemen or Gentlemen amongst them—Eccles. 10 : 17, Jer. 30 : 21," and so on. It is according to the Old Testament rule that the eldest son ought to inherit twice as much as his brothers; it is a true expression of the Old Testament meaning when punishment is extended even to animals which kill a man (cp. Ex. 21 : 28). The spirit of this legislation is almost as severe, not to say cruel, as the spirit of Charlemagne's Saxon law. Twenty-four kinds of trespassing are enumerated which are to be punished with death. It is evidently against the legislator's own view that an exemption is made for simple fornication, "not to be punished with death according to God's own law," as he adds by way of apology. In the second edition the Bible verses are printed at length in the text itself, the margin being devoted to learned remarks on different translations. The motto which expresses the character of this abstract is taken from Isaiah 33 : 22: "The Lord is our Judge, the Lord is our Lawgiver, the Lord is our King; He will save us."
The official Laws of Massachusetts, as established in 1658 and printed in 1660, have no Bible references in the margin; but in the restriction of flogging to the effect that no more than forty stripes should be applied, and in the requirement that sentence of death may be imposed only when two or three witnesses testify to the guilt, the Biblical rules given in Deut. 25 : 5 and 19 : 15 are seen to be at work. Sabbath-breaking is to be punished with a fine of ten shillings, the penalty being doubled in the second case. In 1630 a man had been whipped for shooting on the Sabbath.
In 1647 the General Court passed a law ordering that each township containing over fifty households should appoint a schoolmaster, and if there were more than a hundred families, a grammar-school was to be supported. This care for education is inspired by the desire of securing a true interpretation of the Bible, as is proved by the following statement of motives: "It being the chief project of that old deluder Satan to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures, as in former times by keeping them in an unknown tongue, so in these latter times by persuading from the use of tongues, that so at least the true sense and meaning of the original might be clouded by false glosses of saint-seeming deceivers; that learning may not be buried in the grave of our fathers in the church and commonwealth, therefore ordered," etc.
After the college had been founded in 1636, they chose in 1643 for its seal a shield containing three books with Ve-ri-tas written on them, two open and one seen from the back. Oxford has between three crowns one book with seven clasps. This book evidently is the Bible; it has Dominus illuminatio mea (Psalm 27 : 1) written on it. The seven clasps are said to indicate the seven liberal arts and the three crowns the three modes of philosophy. It is characteristic of the Puritan spirit that their shield had nothing but three Bibles. The meaning of Veritas, of course, is not (as it has been taken in recent times) that the aim of all research is truth. The Puritan fathers were not concerned with research; they believed in revelation, and it was by the revelation laid down in the Bible that truth was transmitted to mankind. The three Bibles may or may not be a symbol of the holy Trinity; the script on the front and on the back recalls the book written within and on the back in Rev. 5 : 1. They meant that the Bible was the fundamental source of all knowledge. Harvard College was founded to be a training-school for ministers, who should know the truth and its source. Christo et ecclesiæ became the second motto of the college. That it has developed into a university, containing, besides a college and the divinity school, schools for law, medicine, applied science, etc., is due to a total change of public opinion at a much later time. The Puritan use of the Bible has disappeared, but something of the Puritan spirit may still be seen in the inscription on the front of the modern building of the Harvard Law School, drawn from Ex. 18 : 20: "Thou shalt teach them ordinances and laws and shalt shew them the way wherein they must walk, and the work that they must do."
VIII
THE BIBLE BECOMES ONCE MORE THE BOOK OF DEVOTION
Having made our way through the centuries, we now approach our own time, and at once we remark two facts: Never before had the Bible such a circulation as it has now gained. On the other hand, it seems to have lost most of its influence. We must look at these two facts before we raise the question what value the Bible has for the civilisation of to-day.
Printing greatly facilitated the circulation of the Bible and, as the result of the Reformation, it had become the book of the Christian family. And yet during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the circulation of the Bible was rather limited. The Bible might be a treasure of the household, but not the personal property of the individual. The first editions, as we have seen, scarcely exceeded one or two hundred copies. In contrast, one of the most assiduous and industrious promoters of Bible reading, Baron von Canstein, who settled at Halle in A. H. Francke's institute, published during the last nine years of his life (d. 1719) forty thousand Bibles and one hundred thousand New Testaments. To-day the British and Foreign Bible Society issues more than five million copies—one million Bibles, one and a half million New Testaments, and two and a half million parts of the Bible—yearly. The progress is due to the invention of the rotary press and other improvements in printing machinery.