The second evil principle in their government was the union of church and state, or rather the subjection of the state to the church, a church moreover in which the people had no rights except by favor of the ministers, a church that was a close corporation and imbued with the spirit of the law of Moses rather than that of the gospel of Christ. In church, as well as in state, there was a consciousness that their existence was illegal and illegitimate; that, in spite of their protests to the contrary, they had separated from their fellow-Christians in England and had formed a polity for themselves; hence, just as they felt it necessary to manifest their political authority by acts of severity upon any who questioned it, so they deemed it necessary to maintain their orthodoxy by persecuting those who differed from them in religion. They were ill at ease both politically and religiously, and they sought to disguise the fact from themselves, by making proof of all the power that they possessed. Hence it was that the conflict arose which has stained with innocent blood the early history of the land. It is not to be wondered that the Quakers should see, in the horrible death of Endicott and the miserable end of Norton,[49] the hand of an avenging Providence, or that they should believe that for a distance of twenty miles from Boston the ground was cursed so that no wheat could ripen because of a blood-red blight that fastened upon it.[50] But we, who live at a time when we can view the history of the struggle with calmness and impartiality, may respect the grim determination of the severe magistrates who felt it their duty, at whatever cost, to keep that which was committed to their trust free from the poison of heresy and fanaticism, while we sorrow at the blindness which hid from their eyes the folly and the cruelty of their proceedings. We may sympathize with the tortured Quakers, whom we now know to be harmless enthusiasts, yet without approving or extenuating their mad actions, their abusive language, or their grotesque indecencies; and we may hope that, though at enmity in this life, yet, as Browning wrote of Strafford and Pym,
“in that world
Where great hearts led astray are turned again,”
both now are able to respect each other’s loyalty of purpose and fidelity to their respective conceptions of truth.
NOTES.
[1] Vide infra, Note 6.
[2] George Fox, Journal. It is well to notice that of the ministers mentioned by Fox by name or parish, Nath. Stevens, the rector of Fenny Drayton, was a Presbyterian of some eminence, and was ejected for non-conformity in 1662. So also was Matthew Cradock, the “priest of Coventry,” who was a distinguished non-conformist divine. The priest at Mansetter, who advised tobacco and psalm-singing, kept his living during the whole period of the Commonwealth, and so may be presumed not to have been a “Churchman” in the commonly received sense of the term. “One Macham,” of whom Fox speaks, and who seems to have treated him with more sympathetic kindness than any of the others, was a loyal Churchman and was sequestered in 1645, as a penalty for his adherence to the bishop and the king to whom he had sworn allegiance. It is rather surprising to find historians in general, even those who should be better informed, assuming that, because these men were filling the parishes of the Church of England, they were, therefore, Church of England clergymen.
[3] Bishop, George, New England Judged, London, 1661, pp. 14–25.
[4] Geo. E. Ellis, Memorial History of Boston, vol. i. p. 181.
[5] Hubbard’s History of New England, p. 553.