The case of the Presbyterian cabal admits of briefer treatment than that of Gorton. There had now come to be many persons in Massachusetts who disapproved of the provision which restricted the suffrage to members of the Independent or Congregational churches of New England, and in 1646 the views of these people were presented in a petition to the General Court. The petitioners asked "that their civil disabilities might be removed, and that all members of the churches of England and Scotland might be admitted to communion with the New England churches. If this could not be granted they prayed to be released from all civil burdens. Should the court refuse to entertain their complaint, they would be obliged to bring their case before Parliament." [23] The leading signers of this menacing petition were William Vassall, Samuel Maverick, and The Presbyterian cabal. Dr. Robert Child. Maverick we have already met. From the day when the ships of the first Puritan settlers had sailed past his log fortress on Noddle's Island, he had been their enemy; "a man of loving and curteous behaviour," says Johnson, "very ready to entertaine strangers, yet an enemy to the reformation in hand, being strong for the lordly prelatical power." Vassall was not a denizen of Massachusetts, but lived in Scituate, in the colony of Plymouth, where there were no such restrictions upon the suffrage. Child was a learned physician who after a good deal of roaming about the world had lately taken it into his head to come and see what sort of a place Massachusetts was. Although these names were therefore not such as to lend weight to such a petition, their request would seem at first sight reasonable enough. At a superficial glance it seems conceived in a modern spirit of liberalism. In reality it was nothing of the sort. In England it was just the critical moment of the struggle between Presbyterians and Independents which had come in to complicate the issues of the great civil war. Vassall, Child, and Maverick seem to have been the leading spirits in a cabal for the establishment of Presbyterianism in New England, and in their petition they simply took advantage of the discontent of the disfranchised citizens in Massachusetts in order to put in an entering wedge. This was thoroughly understood by the legislature of Massachusetts, and accordingly the petition was dismissed and the petitioners were roundly fined. Just as Child was about to start for England with his grievances, the magistrates overhauled his papers and discovered a petition to the parliamentary Board of Commissioners, suggesting that Presbyterianism should be established in New England, and that a viceroy or governor-general should be appointed to rule there. To the men of Massachusetts this last suggestion was a crowning horror. It seemed scarcely less than treason. The signers of this petition were the same who had signed the petition to the General Court. They were now fined still more heavily and imprisoned for six months. By and by they found their way, one after another, to London, while the colonists sent Edward Winslow, of Plymouth, as an advocate to thwart their schemes. Winslow was assailed by Child's brother in a spicy pamphlet entitled "New England's Jonas cast up at London," and replied after the same sort, entitling his pamphlet "New England's Salamander discovered." The cabal accomplished nothing because of the decisive defeat of Presbyterianism in England. "Pride's Purge" settled all that. The petition of Vassall and his friends was the occasion for the meeting of a synod of churches at Cambridge, in order to complete the organization of Congregationalism. In 1648 the work of the synod was embodied in the famous Cambridge Platform, which adopted the Westminster Confession as its creed, carefully defined the powers of the clergy, and declared it to be the duty of magistrates to suppress heresy. In 1649 the General Court laid this platform before the congregations; in 1651 it was adopted; and this event may be regarded as completing the theocratic organization of the Puritan commonwealth in Massachusetts. [Sidenote: The Cambridge Platform; deaths of Winthrop and Cotton]
It was immediately preceded and followed by the deaths of the two foremost men in that commonwealth. John Winthrop died in 1649 and John Cotton in 1652. Both were men of extraordinary power. Of Winthrop it is enough to say that under his skilful guidance Massachusetts had been able to pursue the daring policy which had characterized the first twenty years of her history, and which in weaker hands would almost surely have ended in disaster. Of Cotton it may be said that he was the most eminent among a group of clergymen who for learning and dialectical skill have seldom been surpassed. Neither Winthrop nor Cotton approved of toleration upon principle. Cotton, in his elaborate controversy with Roger Williams, frankly asserted that persecution is not wrong in itself; it is wicked for falsehood to persecute truth, but it is the sacred duty of truth to persecute falsehood. This was the theologian's view. Winthrop's was that of a man of affairs. They had come to New England, he said, in order to make a society after their own model; all who agreed with them might come and join that society; those who disagreed with them might go elsewhere; there was room enough on the American continent. But while neither Winthrop nor Cotton understood the principle of religious liberty, at the same time neither of them had the temperament which persecutes. Both were men of genial disposition, sound common-sense, and exquisite tact. Under their guidance no such tragedy would have been possible as that which was about to leave its ineffaceable stain upon the annals of Massachusetts.
It was most unfortunate that at this moment the places of these two men should have been taken by two as arrant fanatics as ever drew breath. For thirteen out of the fifteen years following Winthrop's death, the governor of Massachusetts was John Endicott, a sturdy pioneer, whose services to the colony had been great. He was honest and conscientious, but passionate, domineering, and very deficient in tact. At the same time Cotton's successor in position and influence was John Norton, a man of pungent wit, unyielding temper, and melancholy mood. He was possessed by a morbid fear of Satan, whose hirelings he thought were walking up and down over the earth in the visible semblance of heretics and schismatics. Under such leaders the bigotry latent in the Puritan commonwealth might easily break out in acts of deadly persecution. [Sidenote: Endicott and Norton take the lead] [Sidenote: The Quakers and their views]
The occasion was not long in coming. Already the preaching of George Fox had borne fruit, and the noble sect of Quakers was an object of scorn and loathing to all such as had not gone so far as they toward learning the true lesson of Protestantism. Of all Protestant sects the Quakers went furthest in stripping off from Christianity its non-essential features of doctrine and ceremonial. Their ideal was not a theocracy but a separation between church and state. They would abolish all distinction between clergy and laity, and could not be coaxed or bullied into paying tithes. They also refused to render military service, or to take the oath of allegiance. In these ways they came at once into antagonism both with church and with state. In doctrine their chief peculiarity was the assertion of an "Inward Light" by which every individual is to be guided in his conduct of life. They did not believe that men ceased to be divinely inspired when the apostolic ages came to an end, but held that at all times and places the human soul may be enlightened by direct communion with its Heavenly Father. Such views involved the most absolute assertion of the right of private judgment; and when it is added that in the exercise of this right many Quakers were found to reject the dogmas of original sin and the resurrection of the body, to doubt the efficacy of baptism, and to call in question the propriety of Christians turning the Lord's Day into a Jewish Sabbath, we see that they had in some respects gone far on the road toward modern rationalism. It was not to be expected that such opinions should be treated by the Puritans in any other spirit than one of extreme abhorrence and dread. The doctrine of the "Inward Light," or of private inspiration, was something especially hateful to the Puritan. To the modern rationalist, looking at things in the dry light of history, it may seem that this doctrine was only the Puritan's own appeal to individual judgment, stated in different form; but the Puritan could not so regard it. To such a fanatic as Norton this inward light was but a reflection from the glare of the bottomless pit, this private inspiration was the beguiling voice of the Devil. As it led the Quakers to strange and novel conclusions, this inward light seemed to array itself in hostility to that final court of appeal for all good Protestants, the sacred text of the Bible. The Quakers were accordingly regarded as infidels who sought to deprive Protestantism of its only firm support. They were wrongly accused of blasphemy in their treatment of the Scriptures. Cotton Mather says that the Quakers were in the habit of alluding to the Bible as the Word of the Devil. Such charges, from passionate and uncritical enemies, are worthless except as they serve to explain the bitter prejudice with which the Quakers were regarded. They remind one of the silly accusation brought against Wyclif two centuries earlier, that he taught his disciples that God ought to obey the Devil; [24] and they are not altogether unlike the assumptions of some modern theologians who take it for granted that any writer who accepts the Darwinian theory must be a materialist. [Sidenote: Endicott and Norton take the lead] [Sidenote: The Quakers and their views]
But worthless as Mather's statements are, in describing the views of the Quakers, they are valuable as indicating the temper in which these disturbers of the Puritan theocracy were regarded. In accusing them of rejecting the Bible and making a law unto themselves, Mather simply put on record a general belief which he shared. Nor can it be doubted that the demeanour of the Quaker enthusiasts was sometimes such as to seem to warrant the belief that their anarchical doctrines entailed, as a natural consequence, disorderly and disreputable conduct. In those days all manifestations of dissent were apt to be violent, and the persecution which they encountered was likely to call forth strange and unseemly vagaries. When we remember how the Quakers, in their scorn of earthly magistrates and princes, would hoot at the governor as he walked up the street; how they used to rush into church on Sundays and interrupt the sermon with untimely remarks; how Thomas Newhouse once came into the Old South Meeting-House with a glass bottle in each hand, and, holding them up before the astonished congregation, knocked them together and smashed them, with the remark, "Thus will the Lord break you all in pieces"; how Lydia Wardwell and Deborah Wilson ran about the streets in the primitive costume of Eve before the fall, and called their conduct "testifying before the Lord"; we can hardly wonder that people should have been reminded of the wretched scenes enacted at Munster by the Anabaptists of the preceding century. [Sidenote: Violent manifestations of dissent]
Such incidents, however, do not afford the slightest excuse for the cruel treatment which the Quakers received in Boston, nor do they go far toward explaining it. Persecution began immediately, before the new-comers had a chance to behave themselves well or ill. Their mere coming to Boston was taken as an act of invasion. It was indeed an attack upon the Puritan theocratic idea. Of all the sectaries of that age of sects, the Quakers were the most aggressive. There were at one time more than four thousand of them in English jails; yet when any of them left England, it was less to escape persecution than to preach their doctrines far and wide over the earth. Their missionaries found their way to Paris, to Vienna; even to Rome, where they testified under the very roof of the Vatican. In this dauntless spirit they came to New England to convert its inhabitants, or at any rate to establish the principle that in whatever community it might please them to stay, there they would stay in spite of judge or hangman. At first they came to Barbadoes, whence two of their number, Anne Austin and Mary Fisher, sailed for Boston. When they landed, on a May morning in 1656, Endicott happened to be away from Boston, but the deputy-governor, Richard Bellingham, was equal to the occasion. He arrested the two women and locked them up in jail, where, for fear they might proclaim their heresies to the crowd gathered outside, the windows were boarded up. There was no law as yet enacted against Quakers, but a council summoned for the occasion pronounced their doctrines blasphemous and devilish. The books which the poor women had with them were seized and publicly burned, and the women themselves were kept in prison half-starved for five weeks until the ship they had come in was ready to return to Barbadoes. Soon after their departure Endicott came home. He found fault with Bellingham's conduct as too gentle; if he had been there he would have had the hussies flogged. [Sidenote: Anne Austin and Mary Fisher]
Five years afterward Mary Fisher went to Adrianople and tried to convert the Grand Turk, who treated her with grave courtesy and allowed her to prophesy unmolested. This is one of the numerous incidents that, on a superficial view of history, might be cited in support of the opinion that there has been on the whole more tolerance in the Mussulman than in the Christian world. Rightly interpreted, however, the fact has no such implication. In Massachusetts the preaching of Quaker doctrines might (and did) lead to a revolution; in Turkey it was as harmless as the barking of dogs. Governor Endicott was afraid of Mary Fisher; Mahomet III. was not.
No sooner had the two women been shipped from Boston than eight other Quakers arrived from London. They were at once arrested. While they were lying in jail the Federal Commissioners, then in session at Plymouth, recommended that laws be forthwith enacted to keep these dreaded heretics out of the land. Next year they stooped so far as to seek the aid of Rhode Island, the colony which they had refused to admit into their confederacy. "They sent a letter to the authorities of that colony, signing themselves their loving friends and neighbours, and beseeching them to preserve the whole body of colonies against 'such a pest' by banishing and excluding all Quakers, a measure to which 'the rule of charity did oblige them.'" Roger Williams was then president of Rhode Island, and in full accord with his noble spirit was the reply of the assembly. "We have no law amongst us whereby to punish any for only declaring by words their minds and understandings concerning the things and ways of God as to salvation and our eternal condition." As for these Quakers we find that where they are "most of all suffered to declare themselves freely and only opposed by arguments in discourse, there they least of all desire to come." Any breach of the civil law shall be punished, but the "freedom of different consciences shall be respected." This reply enraged the confederated colonies, and Massachusetts, as the strongest and most overbearing, threatened to cut off the trade of Rhode Island, which forthwith appealed to Cromwell for protection. The language of the appeal is as touching as its broad Christian spirit is grand. It recognizes that by stopping trade the men of Massachusetts will injure themselves, yet, it goes on to say, "for the safeguard of their religion they may seem to neglect themselves in that respect; for what will not men do for their God?" But whatever fortune may befall, "let us not be compelled to exercise any civil power over men's consciences." [25] [Sidenote: Noble conduct of Rhode Island]
There could never, of course, be a doubt as to who drew up this state paper. During his last visit to England, three years before, Roger Williams had spent several weeks at Sir Harry Vane's country house in Lincolnshire, and he had also been intimately associated with Cromwell and Milton. The views of these great men were the most advanced of that age. They were coming to understand the true principle upon which toleration should be based. (See my Excursions of an Evolutionist, pp. 247, 289-293.) Vane had said in Parliament, "Why should the labours of any be suppressed, if sober, though never so different? We now profess to seek God, we desire to see light!" [Sidenote: Roger Williams appeals to Cromwell]
This Williams called a "heavenly speech." The sentiment it expressed was in accordance with the practical policy of Cromwell, and in the appeal of the president of Rhode Island to the Lord Protector one hears the tone with which friend speaks to friend.