CHAPTER XXIX
TOM PAINE
Somewhere or other there is a poem to the effect that God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform.
The truth of this statement is most apparent to those who have studied the history of the Atlantic seaboard.
During the first half of the seventeenth century the northern part of the American continent was settled by people who had gone so far in their devotion to the ideals of the Old Testament that an unsuspecting visitor might have taken them for followers of Moses, rather than disciples of the words of Christ. Cut off from the rest of Europe by a very wide and very stormy and very cold expanse of ocean, these pioneers had set up a spiritual reign of terror which had culminated in the witch-hunting orgies of the Mather family.
Now at first sight it seems not very likely that those two reverend gentlemen could in any way be held responsible for the very tolerant tendencies which we find expounded with such able vigor in the Constitution of the United States and in the many documents that were written immediately before the outbreak of hostilities between England and her former colonies. Yet such is undoubtedly the case, for the period of repression of the seventeenth century was so terrible that it was bound to create a furious reaction in favor of a more liberal point of view.
This does not mean that all the colonists suddenly sent for the collected works of Socinius and ceased to frighten little children with stories about Sodom and Gomorrah. But their leaders were almost without exception representatives of the new school of thought and with great ability and tact they infused their own conceptions of tolerance into the parchment platform upon which the edifice of their new and independent nation was to be erected.
They might not have been quite so successful if they had been obliged to deal with one united country. But colonization in the northern part of America had always been a complicated business. The Swedish Lutherans had explored part of the territory. The French had sent over some of their Huguenots. The Dutch Arminians had occupied a large share of the land. While almost every sort and variety of English sect had at one time or another tried to found a little Paradise of its own in the wilderness between the Hudson Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.
This had made for a variety of religious expression and so well had the different denominations been balanced that in several of the colonies a crude and rudimentary form of mutual forbearance had been forced upon a people who under ordinary circumstances would have been forever at each other’s throats.
This development had been very unwelcome to the reverend gentlemen who prospered where others quarreled. For years after the advent of the new spirit of charity they had continued their struggle for the maintenance of the old ideal of rectitude. They had achieved very little but they had successfully estranged many of the younger men from a creed which seemed to have borrowed its conceptions of mercy and kindliness from some of its more ferocious Indian neighbors.
Fortunately for our country, the men who bore the brunt of battle in the long struggle for freedom belonged to this small but courageous group of dissenters.