In 1646, soon after the presentation of the Child petition, some of the Elders presented a bill to the General Court, asking that body to call a synod at the end of the summer, to consider these various problems. The bill was promptly passed by the magistrates; but the deputies demurred, denying that the civil authorities had power over the ecclesiastical. It was conceded, however, that the call might go out as a request and not as a command.[[640]] According to the notice, the synod was to agree “upon one forme of government and discipline,” and to consider whether “more liberty and latitude” might be yielded in the matters of church membership and baptism.[[641]] When their labors should be finished, the result was to be submitted to the General Court, to receive “such approbation as is meete.”[[642]] When the synod met, the churches of Boston and Salem refused to join, partly because they believed that it was intended to bind the liberty of churches by the passage of ecclesiastical laws by the General Court, “whereby men should be forced under penalty to submit to them.” In view of a point to be discussed later in the chapter, Winthrop's account of the origin of the objections is interesting. The principal men who raised them, he wrote, were some “who came lately from England, where such a vast liberty was allowed, and sought for by all that went under the name of Independents, not only the anabaptists, antinomians, familists, seekers, etc., but even the most godly and orthodox, as Mr. Goodwin, Mr. Nye, Mr. Burrows, etc., who in the assembly there had stood in opposition to the presbytery, and also the greater part of the house of commons, who by their commissioners had sent order to all English plantations in the West Indies and Summers Islands, that all men should enjoy their liberty of conscience, and had by letters intimated the same to us.”[[643]] Some weeks were consumed in endeavors to change the opinions of the two churches, and when, after much difficulty, that was finally accomplished, there was little time left for the work of the synod, which adjourned in September, to meet the following June. It was not until midsummer, 1648, however, that, after another adjournment, it finally completed its labors.
During the two years which it had been in session, Cromwell and the Independents in England had removed all fear for Massachusetts of Presbyterian or other interference from that country, and the temporary alarm of the leaders had subsided. The question of a more liberal policy, therefore, fell into the background, and the synod occupied itself with the formulation of a strict polity by which innovation might be resisted. Agreement with the recent declaration of Parliament in matters of doctrine was voted by adopting, with certain reservations, the Westminster Confession of Faith; but the suggested religious toleration was, of course, denied.[[644]] Quite on the contrary, in fact, the Cambridge Platform, as the order of discipline adopted has always been called, provided that the full power of the state should be used to enforce obedience and conformity to the rule and decisions of the priesthood. “Idolatry, Blasphemy, Heresy, Venting corrupt and pernicious opinions,” the Platform read, “are to be restrayned and punished by civil authority. If any church one or more shall grow schismaticall, rending it self from the communion of other churches, or shall walke incorrigibly or obstinately in any corrupt way of their own, contrary to the rule of the word; in such case, the Magistrate is to put forth his coercive power, as the matter shall require.”[[645]] What these early American persecutors, drunk with their own conceit, were to think the “matter shall require,” when other men refused to accept their personal interpretation of the mind and ways of Almighty God as infallible, will be only too clearly shown in the course of this chapter.
When the Platform was presented for ratification by the General Court, through the towns, it seems to have met with considerable opposition on the part of the deputies. The magistrates, owing to their customary close working agreement with the ministers, approved of it unanimously; but the deputies, representing public opinion rather than the oligarchy, repeated their opposition of several years earlier. When, in 1645, new laws had been proposed for the punishment of heretics, a brief entry in the records tells of the struggle at that time. “The Howse of Deputies,” so it reads, “cannot concur with our honored magistrates in their bill to punish excommunicate persons.”[[646]] They were defeated, however, and the next year a long act was passed for the purpose.[[647]] Although the Cambridge Platform had been adopted by the synod in 1648, and had been considered several times by the General Court, the deputies of many of the towns, even three years later, still professed themselves unable to “see light to impose any forms as necessary to be observed by the churches as a bindinge rule.”[[648]] When it was finally passed by the Court, in October, 1651, fourteen of the deputies still refused to concur, and their names, an honored roll, are inscribed in the margin of the records.[[649]] The towns they represented were Boston, Salem, Braintree, Watertown, Roxbury, Wenham, Reading, Sudbury, Weymouth, and Hingham, in Massachusetts, and Hampton in New Hampshire.[[650]]
The Platform represented no mere abstract doctrine. The whole history of the oligarchy, thus far, indicated that the clauses regarding heresy and schism were not intended to remain dead letters. The new relations of the churches to one another, and the strengthened combination of the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, mark the high point attained by the theocracy in its organized opposition to liberty of thought. It had been growing steadily narrower and more intolerant, more insistent upon the extirpation of every idea, religious or political, that disturbed its own control over the minds and lives of men. Unfortunately, at the very time when new power for evil was thus being placed in its hands by the action of the synod and the General Court, the more conservative leaders, both of Massachusetts and Connecticut, were lost to their communities by death, and the dangerous weapons were to be wielded by two of the most bigoted and blood-thirsty fanatics whom either Old or New England had produced.
Thomas Hooker died in 1647, as the work of the synod was beginning, and John Winthrop in 1649, as it was ending. There is no comparison in the debt that the political thought of America owes to the two men, whose ideas have already been contrasted on an earlier page. Hooker led the way along which the people of the United States were to follow, while Winthrop was engaged in the attempt to found a state in a politically impossible form. In spite of his inestimable services in the beginnings of the colony, there was no originality in his contribution to thought, and his subservience to the demands of the theocracy had been foreshadowed by his statement in early manhood that he so honored a faithful minister that he “could have kissed his feet.”[[651]] Of high nobility of character, gentle, forgiving, frequently kindest to those from whom he differed most, there was little in his nature of the born persecutor. Led into acts of intolerant zeal by the ministers whom he so devoutly followed, there is considerable probability in the story related by Hutchinson, that when on his death-bed, being pressed by Dudley to sign a warrant for the banishment of a heretic, he refused, saying that “he had done too much of that work already.”[[652]] His portrait depicts a face of gentleness rather than of strength. His unquestioned integrity, his modesty, and his self-sacrificing devotion to the interests of the colony as he saw them, amply fulfilled the high opinion which the original undertakers of the enterprise had formed of him, although, as in the case of most of the leaders, the effect upon mind and character of the transplanting to America was not wholly a happy one. “He was of a more catholic spirit than some of his brethren before he left England,” wrote Hutchinson; “but afterward he grew more contracted, and was disposed to lay too great stress upon indifferent matters.”[[653]]
The same effect had been felt in the case of John Cotton. The most tolerant, as he was one of the ablest, of the Massachusetts divines, we have already seen how he had started upon the true path when, dismayed by the universal ecclesiastical clamor raised by the Antinomian controversy, he drew back, like Winthrop, and ever after submitted to smaller men. Nevertheless, his death, some months after the final adoption of the Cambridge Platform, removed the last of the three men who by inclination and influence might have done something to stay the theocracy from the course into which it was soon to throw itself headlong. In place of Winthrop and Cotton, its leaders became Endicott and Norton. Able, stern, fiercely bigoted, absolutely convinced of their own infallibility in interpreting the word of God, undeterred by doubt, and unrestrained by pity, they were unwittingly to water the seeds of liberty with the blood of their victims.
In the midsummer of the year in which the Platform was finally adopted by the Court, John Clarke[Clarke], one of the ablest citizens of Rhode Island, Obadiah Holmes, and John Crandall, as representatives of the Baptist church of Newport, arrived at Lynn to visit an aged member of that church, who was too infirm to make a journey himself.[[654]] In 1644, a law had been passed punishing with banishment anyone who should openly or secretly speak against the orthodox Massachusetts doctrine regarding baptism; and the three Baptists were at once arrested.[[655]] Clarke[Clarke] was fined £20, Holmes £30, and Crandall £5, in default of which they were to be whipped. The spirit of the court that tried them is vividly shown by two incidents as told by the prisoners themselves. Clarke[Clarke], having asked by what law he was punished, the penalty not being that prescribed by the ordinance of 1644, relates that Endicott “stept up to us, and told us we had denyed Infants Baptism, and being somewhat transported broke forth, and told me I had deserved death, and said he would not have such trash brought into this jurisdiction.”[[656]] Holmes, describing his own trial, wrote that, when receiving sentence, “I exprest myself in these words; I blesse God I am counted worthy to suffer for the name of Jesus; whereupon John Wilson (their pastor as they call him) strook me before the Judgment Seat, and cursed me, saying, the Curse of God, or Jesus goe with thee.”[[657]]
Crandall, who had figured but little in the proceedings, was released on bail; while, without his knowledge, some unknown well-wisher paid Clark's fine. Holmes, however, refused to pay his fine or allow others to pay it for him, and insisted upon the sentence being executed in its full barbarity. Thirty strokes, with a three-corded whip, were laid upon his bare back. Two bystanders who, moved by pity, had the temerity to take the prisoner by the hand as he left the whipping-post, were themselves arrested and sentenced to pay forty shillings or be whipped.[[658]] To one of them, who affirmed to Endicott that he believed Holmes was a godly man and “carried himself as did become a Christian,” the Governor threatened that “we will deal with you as we have dealt with him.” “I am in the hands of God,” the prisoner replied.
The following year, Clark went to England with Williams in regard to the Coddington matter in Rhode Island, and, while there, published his account of the treatment the Baptists had met with in Massachusetts.[[659]] As so often before, the intolerance of the new country was severely criticized by its friends in the old.[[660]] “It doth not a little grieve my spirit,” wrote Saltonstall to Cotton and Wilson, “what sadd things are reported dayly of your tyranny and persecution in New England.... These rigid wayse have layd you very lowe in the hearts of the saynts. I doe assure I have heard them pray in the publique assemblies that the Lord would give you meeke and humble spirits, not to stryve soe much for uniformity as to keepe the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” He warns them “not to practice those courses in a wilderness, which you went so farre to prevent”; and adds, “I hope you doe not assume to yourselves infallibillities of judgment, when the most learned of the Apostles confesseth he knew but in parte.”[[661]]
In Cotton's reply, the ministers defended the acts of the Court, and, speaking of the victims' imprisonment, Cotton even descended so low as to write, “I believe they neither of them fared better at home, and I am sure Holmes had not been so well clad of many years before.” More interesting, however, is his plain enunciation of the doctrine that they alone knew the will of God and should lay it down for the community, which we noted in an earlier chapter as one of the outstanding characteristics of Puritanism in every age. “There is a vast difference,” he wrote, “between men's inventions and God's institutions; we fled from men's inventions, to which we else should have been compelled; we compel none to men's inventions.” The inference was, of course, that, whatever the rest of mankind might think, any institution decreed by the Massachusetts ministers was, ipso facto, God's. Therefore, “if the worship be lawful in itself, the magistrate compelling him to come to it, compelleth him not to sin, but the sin is in his own will that needs to be compelled to a Christian duty.”[[662]] Four fifths of their fellow citizens might refuse to join their churches; the noblest spirits among the Puritan element in England might plead with them; but in vain. The theocracy had now reached such a height of intellectual pride, of intolerable belief in themselves as the sole possessors of the knowledge of God, and as the only legitimate interpreters of his will to the world, that either all freedom of thought in Massachusetts must die, or their power must be destroyed. In that struggle, the ministers and the magistrates were willing to shed unlimited blood. Fortunately, noble men and women were not lacking to offer themselves as victims that the liberty of God might be made manifest.