Other characteristic instances of religious and moral legislation appear in the statute book for the year 1650. By virtue of an Act passed the 19th of April, penalties were to be levied for the desecration of the Sabbath, and for the non-observance of thanksgiving and humiliation days. Seasons of both kinds were put on a level, which was a position of things not at all consistent with puritan ideas of the Divine authority of the Lord's Day, Goods carried in the streets at such times were liable to seizure; travellers and waggoners, if they performed a journey during the hours of holy rest, were to be fined ten shillings. Writs and warrants executed on a Sunday were to lose their effect, and persons serving them were exposed to the payment of a fine of five pounds. Nobody was to use a boat, a horse, a coach, or a sedan, except for going to church, upon pain of forfeiting ten shillings. The like penalty was to fall on those who visited taverns and alehouses. Authority was given to officers to search for offenders, and justices and constables were made liable to penalties if they neglected their duties. The Act was to be read in all the churches yearly upon the first Lord's Day in the month of March.[18]
1650.
Profane cursing and swearing were prohibited by an Act passed the 28th of June, with a curiously graduated scale of penalties, arranged according to the rank of the offender. A lord was to be fined thirty shillings; a baronet or knight, twenty; an esquire, ten; a simple gentleman was to pay six and eight-pence, and people of inferior quality, three and fourpence. A double fine followed a second offence; and after a tenth instance of transgression the culprit was to give a bond for good behaviour. The law made no distinction between men and women, and gave charge to all constables vigilantly to hunt out all offenders.[19]
There followed, on the 9th of August, a statute against certain atheistical, blasphemous, and execrable opinions derogatory to the honour of God, and destructive to human society, the enumeration of which includes the most monstrous opinions, such even as the following:—that a human being might proclaim himself to be God, to be infinite, to be almighty; that the blasphemy of the Most High, and other horrible acts are not in themselves shameful; that murder, adultery, and the like, are in their own nature as righteous as the duties of prayer; that happiness consists in sensual indulgence; that there is no such thing as sin, or salvation, or damnation, or heaven, or hell. Persons holding such opinions were to be punished by six months' imprisonment, or, on a second conviction, by banishment out of the Commonwealth. A return without licence incurred the consequences attendant on felony.[20]
Moral Legislation.
We have given this specification of opinions as we find it in the Act, because no general description of it could convey an idea of the extraordinary vagaries of thought to which it points. Taken as they nakedly appear in this unique schedule, they must have been of an ultra-fanatical kind, such as we should suppose only madmen would entertain. But, upon a little reflection, it appears not unlikely that some of the opinions pronounced execrable were, by those charged with holding them, expressed in a different form of words from that given in the Act, and that they really consisted only in those wild pantheistic speculations to which transcendental thinkers of a certain description have always been addicted. Amidst excitements which moved human nature to the loftiest heights and the lowest depths, which brought out conspicuously what was in man, both of good and evil, it was not strange that the ignorant should bluntly say some of the same absurd things which the learned have been wont to convey in specious phrase and polished diction. At all events, there must have been a large amount of very objectionable, and even monstrous teaching in those days, to have called forth such minute notice and such terrible denunciation.
1650.
Private morals likewise were scanned and marked by these vigilant legislators.[21] Their policy, as we have said before, was intended to supply a defect consequent upon the abolition of the old Church courts, proceeding as it did upon the idea handed down for ages, that penal laws sufficed to extinguish individual vice, as well as to suppress social crime—an idea now, after an uninterrupted continuance of failures, almost universally regarded as utterly delusive. The Long Parliament in these, its last days, threatened incest with death without benefit of clergy; it marked adultery as felonious, and it punished fornication with three months' imprisonment. A common bawd was to be whipped, set in the pillory, branded with a hot iron, and committed to the House of Correction for three years: a repetition of the offence was to be treated as a capital crime. Henry Marten, looking at the subject from what was then the common point of view, justly observed, in the course of the debate to which the measure gave rise, that such severity only served to increase transgression, inasmuch as merciful people would shrink from bringing offenders to justice, and offenders escaping with impunity would be encouraged in sin.
The laws which we have just enumerated were passed in the spring and summer of 1650; and it was about that time, indeed shortly before the speech just noticed, that the influence of Marten passed its zenith, and he descended from the high position he had occupied in the rule of the Commonwealth. The cause of that event, partly political and partly personal, is to be found in his stern republicanism, and in his disputes with Oliver Cromwell. An enquiry into that subject does not come within the scope of our history, nor do the consequences of it concern us further than this, that they indirectly touched the state of ecclesiastical affairs: for Marten's exclusion from the Council of State in February, 1650, and the inconsiderable part which he took in public business after his re-admission, amounted, according to the view which we have taken, to the dismissal or the withdrawal of one of the memorable triumvirate who had wielded for a time supreme authority in the Church as well as the State. Vane's power was of longer duration, but his disappearance from the lofty sphere he had occupied is an event which we shall speedily have to notice—an event which will be found to have left the government of England in the hands of that one man, who, as the greatest general and statesman of his age, was alone competent to rule his country in the hour of its peril, and the crisis of its fate.
Moral Legislation.