A History of American Christianity

by Leonard Woolsey Bacon

In the year 1607, when the ships of the Virginia Company were about landing their freight of emigrants and supplies at Jamestown, the first and unsuccessful attempt of the Pilgrims was made to escape from their native land to Holland. Before the end of 1608 the greater part of them, in scattering parties, had effected the passage of the North Sea, and the church was reunited in a land of religious freedom. With what a blameless, diligent, and peaceful life they adorned the name of disciple through all the twelve years of their sojourn, how honored and beloved they were among the churches and in the University of Leyden, there are abundant testimonies. The twelve years of seclusion in an alien land among a people of strange language was not too long a discipline of preparation for that work for which the Head of the church had set them apart. This was the period of Robinson's activity as author. In erudite studies, in grave debate with gainsayers at home and with fellow-exiles in Holland, he was maturing in his own mind, and in the minds of the church, those large and liberal yet definite views of church organization and duty which were destined for coming ages so profoundly to influence the American church in all its orders and divisions. "He became a reformer of the Separation."[87:1]

We pass by the heroic and pathetic story of the consultations and correspondences, the negotiations and disappointments, the embarkation and voyage, and come to that memorable date, November 11 (= 21), 1620, when, arrived off the shore of Cape Cod, the little company, without charter or warrant of any kind from any government on earth, about to land on a savage continent in quest of a home, gathered in the cabin of the "Mayflower," and after a method quite in analogy with that in which, sixteen years before, they had constituted the church at Scrooby, entered into formal and solemn compact "in the presence of God and one of another, covenanting and combining themselves together into a civil body politic."

It is difficult, in reading the instrument then subscribed, to avoid the conviction that the theory of the origin of the powers of civil government in a social compact, which had long floated in literature before it came to be distinctly articulated in the "Contrat Social" of Jean Jacques Rousseau, was familiar to the minds of those by whom the paper was drawn. Thoughtful men at the present day universally recognize the fallacy of this plausible hypothesis, which once had such wide currency and so serious an influence on the course of political history in America. But whether or not they were affected by the theory, the practical good sense of the men and their deference to the teachings of the Bible secured them from the vicious and absurd consequences deducible from it. Not all the names of the colonists were subscribed to the compact,—a clear indication of the freedom of individual judgment in that company,—but it was never for a moment held that the dissentients were any the less bound by it. When worthless John Billington, who had somehow got "shuffled into their company," was sentenced for disrespect and disobedience to Captain Myles Standish "to have his neck and heels tied together," it does not seem to have occurred to him to plead that he had never entered into the social compact; nor yet when the same wretched man, ten years later, was by a jury convicted of willful murder, and sentenced to death and executed. Logically, under the social-compact theory, it would have been competent for those dissenting from this compact to enter into another, and set up a competing civil government on the same ground; but what would have been the practical value of this line of argument might have been learned from Mr. Thomas Morton, of Furnivall's Inn, after he had been haled out of his disorderly house at Merry Mount by Captain Standish, and convented before the authorities at Plymouth.

The social-compact theory as applied to the church, implying that the mutual duties of Christian disciples in society are derived solely from mutual stipulations, is quite as transparently fallacious as when it is applied to civil polity, and the consequences deducible from it are not less absurd. But it cannot be claimed for the Plymouth men, and still less for their spiritual successors, that they have wholly escaped the evil consequences of their theory in its practical applications. The notion that a church of Christ is a club, having no authority or limitations but what it derives from club rules agreed on among the members, would have been scouted by the Pilgrims; among those who now claim to sit in their seats there are some who would hesitate to admit it, and many who would frankly avow it with all its mischievous implications. Planted in the soil of Plymouth, it spread at once through New England, and has become widely rooted in distant and diverse regions of the American church.[89:1]

The church of Plymouth, though deprived of its pastor, continued to be rich in faith and in all spiritual gifts, and most of all in the excellent gift of charity. The history of it year after year is a beautiful illustration of brotherly kindness and mutual self-sacrifice among themselves and of forgiving patience toward enemies. But the colony, beginning in extreme feebleness and penury, never became either strong or rich. One hundred and two souls embarked in the "Mayflower," of whom nearly one half were dead before the end of four months. At the end of four years the number had increased to one hundred and eighty. At the end of ten years the settlement numbered three hundred persons.

It could not have been with joy wholly unalloyed with misgivings that this feeble folk learned of a powerful movement for planting a Puritan colony close in the neighborhood. The movement had begun in the heart of the national church, and represented everything that was best in that institution. The Rev. John White, rector of Dorchester, followed across the sea with pastoral solicitude the young men of his parish, who, in the business of the fisheries, were wont to make long stay on the New England coast, far from home and church. His thought was to establish a settlement that should be a sort of depot of supplies for the fishing fleets, and a temporary home attended with the comforts and safeguards of Christian influence. The project was a costly failure; but it was like the corn of wheat falling into the ground to die, and bringing forth much fruit. A gentleman of energy and dignity, John Endicott, pledged his personal service as leader of a new colony. In September, 1628, he landed with a pioneering party at Naumkeag, and having happily composed some differences that arose with the earlier comers, they named the place Salem, which is, by interpretation, "Peace." Already, with the newcomers and the old, the well-provided settlement numbered more than fifty persons, busy in preparation for further arrivals. Meanwhile vigorous work was doing in England. The organization to sustain the colony represented adequate capital and the highest quality of character and influence. A royal charter, drawn with sagacious care to secure every privilege the Puritan Company desired, was secured from the fatuity of the reigning Stuart, erecting in the wilderness such a free commonwealth as his poor little soul abhorred; and preparation was made for sending out, in the spring of 1629, a noble fleet of six vessels, carrying three hundred men and a hundred women and children, with ample equipment of provisions, tools and arms, and live stock. The Company had taken care that there should be "plentiful provision of godly ministers." Three approved clergymen of the Church of England—Higginson, Skelton, and Bright—had been chosen by the Company to attend the expedition, besides whom one Ralph Smith, a Separatist minister, had been permitted to take passage before the Company "understood of his difference in judgment in some things" from the other ministers. He was permitted to continue his journey, yet not without a caution to the governor that unless he were found "conformable to the government" he was not to be suffered to remain within the limits of its jurisdiction. An incident of this departure rests on the sole authority of Cotton Mather, and is best told in his own words:

"When they came to the Land's End, Mr. Higginson, calling up his children and other passengers unto the stern of the ship to take their last sight of England, said, 'We will not say, as the Separatists were wont to say at their leaving of England, Farewell, Babylon! farewell, Rome! but we will say, Farewell, dear England! farewell, the church of God in England, and all the Christian friends there! We do not go to New England as Separatists from the Church of England, though we cannot but separate from the corruptions in it; but we go to practice the positive part of church reformation and propagate the gospel in America.'"

The story ought to be true, for the intrinsic likeliness of it; and it is all the likelier for the fact that among the passengers, kindly and even fraternally treated, and yet the object of grave misgivings, was the honest Separatist minister, Ralph Smith.[91:1] The ideal of the new colony could hardly have been better expressed than in these possibly apocryphal words ascribed to Mr. Higginson. These were not fugitives seeking asylum from persecution. Still less were they planning an asylum for others. They were intent on the planting of a new commonwealth, in which the church of Christ, not according to the imperfect and perverted pattern of the English Establishment, but according to a fairer pattern, that had been showed them in their mounts of vision, should be both free and dominant. If this purpose of theirs was wrong; if they had no right to deny themselves the comforts and delights of their native land, and at vast cost of treasure to seclude themselves within a defined tract of wilderness, for the accomplishment of an enterprise which they conceived to be of the highest beneficence to mankind—then doubtless many of the measures which they took in pursuance of this purpose must fall under the same condemnation with the purpose itself. If there are minds so constituted as to perceive no moral difference between banishing a man from his native home, for opinion's sake, and declining, on account of difference of opinion, to admit a man to partnership in a difficult and hazardous enterprise organized on a distinctly exclusive basis, such minds will be constrained to condemn the Puritan colonists from the start and all along. Minds otherwise constituted will be able to discriminate between the righteous following of a justifiable policy and the lapses of the colonial governments from high and Christian motives and righteous courses. Whether the policy of rigorous exclusiveness, building up communities of picked material, homogeneous in race, language, and religion, is on the whole less wise for the founders of a new commonwealth than a sweepingly comprehensive policy, gathering in people mutually alien in speech and creed and habits, is a fairly open question for historical students. Much light might be thrown upon it by the comparative history of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, of New England and Pennsylvania. It is not a question that is answered at once by the mere statement of it.

We do not need to be told that to the little Separatist settlement at Plymouth, still in the first decade of its feeble existence, the founding, within a day's journey, of this powerful colony, on ecclesiastical principles distinctly antagonistic to their own, was a momentous, even a formidable fact. Critical, nay, vital questions emerged at once, which the subtlest churchcraft might have despaired of answering. They were answered, solved, harmonized, by the spirit of Christian love.