A History of American Christianity

by Leonard Woolsey Bacon

CHAPTER VIII.

THE PLANTING OF THE CHURCH IN NEW ENGLAND—PILGRIM AND PURITAN.

The attitude of the Church of England Puritans toward the Separatists from that church was the attitude of the earnest, patient, hopeful reformer toiling for the removal of public abuses, toward the restless "come-outer" who quits the conflict in despair of succeeding, and, "without tarrying for any," sets up his little model of good order outside. Such defection seemed to them not only of the nature of a military desertion and a weakening of the right side, but also an implied assertion of superior righteousness which provoked invidious comparison and mutual irritation of feeling. The comparison must not be pressed too far if we cite in illustration the feeling of the great mass of earnest, practical antislavery men in the American conflict with slavery toward the faction of "come-outer" abolitionists, who, despairing of success within the church and the state, seceded from both, thenceforth predicting failure for every practical enterprise of reform on the part of their former workfellows, and at every defeat chuckling, "I told you so."

If we should compare the English Separatist of the seventeenth century with this American Separatist of the nineteenth, we should be in still greater danger of misleading. Certainly there were those among the Separatists from the Church of England who, in the violence of their alienation and the bitterness of their sufferings, did not refrain from sour and acrid censoriousness toward the men who were nearest them in religious conviction and pursuing like ends by another course. One does not read far in the history of New England without encountering reformers of this extreme type. But not such were the company of true worshipers who, at peril of liberty and life, were wont to assemble each Lord's day in a room of the old manor-house of Scrooby, of which William Brewster was lessee, for Christian fellowship and worship, and for instruction in Christian truth and duty from the saintly lips of John Robinson. The extreme radicals of their day, they seem to have been divinely preserved from the besetting sins of radicalism—its narrowness, its self-righteousness, its censoriousness and intolerance. Those who read the copious records of the early New England colonization are again and again surprised at finding that the impoverished little company of Separatists at Leyden and Plymouth, who were so sharply reprobated by their Puritan brethren of the Church of England for their schismatic attitude, their over-righteousness and exclusiveness, do really excel, in liberality and patient tolerance and catholic and comprehensive love toward all good men, those who sat in judgment on them. Something of this is due to the native nobleness of the men themselves, of whom the world was not worthy; something of it to their long discipline in the passive virtues under bitter persecution in their native land and in exile in Holland and in the wilderness; much of it certainly to the incomparably wise and Christ-like teaching of Robinson both at Scrooby and at Leyden, and afterward through the tender and faithful epistles with which he followed them across the sea; and all of it to the grace of God working in their hearts and glorified in their living and their dying.

It would be incompatible with the limits of this volume to recite in detail the story of the Pilgrims; it has been told more amply and with fuller repetition than almost any other chapter of human history, and is never to be told or heard without awakening that thrill with which the heartstrings respond to the sufferings and triumphs of Christ's blessed martyrs and confessors. But, more dispassionately studied with reference to its position and relations in ecclesiastical history, it cannot be understood unless the sharp and sometimes exasperated antagonism is kept in view that existed between the inconsiderable faction, as it was esteemed, of the Separatists, and the great and growing Puritan party at that time in disfavor with king and court and hierarchy, but soon to become the dominant party not only in the Church of England, but in the nation. It is not strange that the antagonism between the two parties should be lost sight of. The two are identified in their theological convictions, in their spiritual sympathies, and, for the most part, in their judgment on questions concerning the externals of the church; and presently their respective colonies, planted side by side, not without mutual doubts and suspicions, are to grow together, leaving no visible seam of juncture,

Like kindred drops commingling into one.[84:1]

To the Puritan reformer within the Church of England, the act of the Pilgrims at Scrooby in separating themselves from the general mass of English Christians, mingled though that mass might be with a multitude of unworthy was nothing less than the sin of schism. One effect of the act was to reflect odium upon the whole party of Puritans, and involve them in the suspicion of that sedition which was so unjustly, but with such fatal success, imputed to the Separatists. It was a hard and doubtful warfare that the Puritans were waging against spiritual wickedness in high places; the defection of the Separatists doubly weakened them in the conflict. It is not strange, however it may seem so, that the animosity of Puritan toward Separatist was sometimes acrimonious, nor that the public reproaches hurled at the unpopular little party should have provoked recriminations upon the assailants as being involved in the defilements and the plagues of Babylon, and should have driven the Separatists into a narrower exclusiveness of separation, cutting themselves off not only from communion with abuses and corruptions in the Church of England, but even from fellowship with good and holy men in the national church who did not find it a duty to secede.

Nothing of this bitterness and narrowness is found in Robinson. Strenuously as he maintained the right and duty of separation from the Establishment, he was, especially in his later years, no less earnest in condemning the "Separatists who carried their separation too far and had gone beyond the true landmarks in matters of Christian doctrine or of Christian fellowship."[85:1] His latest work, "found in his studie after his decease," was "A Treatise of the Lawfulness of Hearing of the Ministers in the Church of England."

The moderateness of Robinson's position, and the brotherly kindness of his temper, could not save him and his people from the prevailing odium that rested upon the Separatist. Many and grave were the sorrows through which the Pilgrim church had to pass in its way from the little hamlet of Scrooby to the bleak hill of Plymouth. They were in peril from the persecutor at home and in peril in the attempt to escape; in peril from greedy speculators and malignant politicians; in peril from the sea and from cold and from starvation; in peril from the savages and from false brethren privily sent among them to spy out their liberties; but an added bitterness to all their tribulations lay in this, that, for the course which they were constrained in conscience to pursue, they were subject to the reprobation of those whom they most highly honored as their brethren in the faith of Christ. Some of the most heartbreaking of their trials arose directly from the unwillingness of English Puritans to sustain, or even countenance, the Pilgrim colony.