A History of American Christianity

by Leonard Woolsey Bacon

But presently there were searchings of heart over the anterior question as to the constituency of the church. Were all the population of Salem to be reckoned as of the church of Salem? and if not, who should "discern between the righteous and the wicked"? The result of study of this question, in the light of the New Testament, was this—that it was "necessary for those who intended to be of the church solemnly to enter into a covenant engagement one with another, in the presence of God, to walk together before him according to his Word." Thirty persons were chosen to be the first members of the church, who in a set form of words made public vows of faithfulness to each other and to Christ. By the church thus constituted the pastor and teacher, already installed in office in the parish, were instituted as ministers of the church.[96:1]

Before the solemnities of that notable day were concluded, a belated vessel that had been eagerly awaited landed on the beach at Salem the "messengers of the church at Plymouth." They came into the assembly, Governor Bradford at the head, and in the name of the Pilgrim church declared their "approbation and concurrence," and greeted the new church, the first-born in America, with "the right hand of fellowship." A thoughtful and devoted student declares this day's proceedings to be "the beginning of a distinctively American church history."[97:1]

The immediate sequel of this transaction is characteristic and instructive. Two brothers, John and Samuel Browne, members of the council of the colony, took grave offense at this departure from the ways of the Church of England, and, joining to themselves others like-minded, set up separate worship according to the Book of Common Prayer. Being called to account before the governor for their schismatic procedure, they took an aggressive tone and declared that the ministers, "were Separatists, and would be Anabaptists." The two brothers were illogical. The ministers had not departed from the Nationalist and anti-Separatist principles enunciated by Higginson from the quarter-deck of the "Talbot." What they had just done was to lay the foundations of a national church for the commonwealth that was in building. And the two brothers, trying to draw off a part of the people into their schism-shop, were Separatists, although they were doubtless surprised to discover it. There was not the slightest hesitation on the governor's part as to the proper course to be pursued. "Finding those two brothers to be of high spirits, and their speeches and practices tending to mutiny and faction, the governor told them that New England was no place for such as they, and therefore he sent them both back for England at the return of the ships the same year."[98:1] Neither then nor afterward was there any trace of doubt in the minds of the New England settlers, in going three thousand miles away into the seclusion of the wilderness, of their indefeasible moral right to pick their own company. There was abundant opportunity for mistake and temptation to wrong-doing in the exercise of this right, but the right itself is so nearly self-evident as to need no argument.

While the civil and ecclesiastical foundations of the Salem community are thus being laid, there is preparing on the other side of the sea that great coup d'état which is to create, almost in a day, a practically independent American republic. Until this is accomplished the colonial organization is according to a common pattern, a settlement on a distant shore, equipped, sustained, and governed with authority all but sovereign by a commercial company at the metropolis, within the reach, and thus under the control, of the supreme power. Suppose, now, that the shareholders in the commercial company take their charter conferring all but sovereign authority, and transport themselves and it across the sea to the heart of the settlement, there to admit other planters, at their discretion, to the franchise of the Company, what then? This was the question pondered and decided in those dark days of English liberty, when the triumph of despotism, civil and spiritual, over the rights of Englishmen seemed almost achieved. The old officers of the Company resigned; their places were filled by Winthrop and Dudley and others, who had undertaken to emigrate; and that memorable season of 1630 not less than seventeen ships, carrying about one thousand passengers, sailed from English ports for Massachusetts Bay. It was the beginning of the great Puritan exodus. Attempts were made by the king and the archbishop to stay the flow of emigration, but with only transient success. "At the end of ten years from Winthrop's arrival about twenty-one thousand Englishmen, or four thousand families, including the few hundreds who were here before him, had come over in three hundred vessels, at a cost of two hundred thousand pounds sterling."[99:1] What could not be done by despotism was accomplished by the triumph of the people over the court. The meeting of the Long Parliament in 1640 made it safe for Puritans to stay in England; and the Puritans stayed. The current of migration was not only checked, but turned backward. It is reckoned that within four generations from that time more persons went to old England than originally came thence. The beginnings of this return were of high importance. Among the home-going companies were men who were destined to render eminent service in the reconstruction of English society, both in the state and in the army, and especially in the church. The example of the New England churches, voluminously set forth in response to written inquiries from England, had great influence in saving the mother country from suffering the imposition of a Presbyterian hierarchy that threatened to be as intolerant and as intolerable as the tyranny of Laud.

For the order of the New England churches crystallized rapidly into a systematic and definite church polity, far removed from mere Separatism even in the temperate form in which this had been illustrated by Robinson and the Pilgrim church. The successive companies of emigrants as they arrived, ship-load after ship-load, each with its minister or college of ministers, followed with almost monotonous exactness the method adopted in the organization of the church in Salem. A small company of the best Christians entered into mutual covenant as a church of Christ, and this number, growing by well-considered accessions, added to itself from time to time other believers on the evidence and confession of their faith in Christ. The ministers, all or nearly all of whom had been clergymen in the orders of the Church of England, were of one mind in declining to consider their episcopal ordination in England as conferring on them any spiritual authority in a church newly gathered in America. They found rather in the free choice of the brotherhood the sign of a divine call to spiritual functions in the church, and were inducted into office by the primitive form of the laying on of hands.

In many ways, but especially in the systematized relations of the churches with one another and in their common relations with the civil government, the settled Nationalism of the great Puritan migration was illustrated. With the least possible constraint on the individual or on the church, they were clear in their purpose that their young state should have its established church.

Through what rude experiences the system and the men were tested has been abundantly told and retold.[100:1] Roger Williams, learned, eloquent, sincere, generous, a man after their own heart, was a very malignant among Separatists, separating himself not only from the English church, but from all who would not separate from it, and from all who would not separate from these, and so on, until he could no longer, for conscience' sake, hold fellowship with his wife in family prayers. After long patience the colonial government deemed it necessary to signify to him that if his conscience would not suffer him to keep quiet, and refrain from stirring up sedition, and embroiling the colony with the English government, he would have to seek freedom for that sort of conscience outside of their jurisdiction; and they put him out accordingly, to the great advantage of both parties and without loss of mutual respect and love. A little later, a clever woman, Mrs. Ann Hutchinson, with a vast conceit of her superior holiness and with the ugly censoriousness which is a usual accompaniment of that grace, demonstrated her genius for mixing a theological controversy with personal jealousies and public anxieties, and involved the whole colony of the Bay in an acrimonious quarrel, such as to give an unpleasant tone of partisanship and ill temper to the proceedings in her case, whether ecclesiastical or civil. She seems clearly to have been a willful and persistent nuisance in the little community, and there were good reasons for wanting to be rid of her, and right ways to that end. They took the wrong way and tried her for heresy. In like manner, when the Quakers came among them,—not of the mild, meek, inoffensive modern variety to which we are accustomed, but of the fierce, aggressive early type,—instead of proceeding against them for their overt offenses against the state, disorderly behavior, public indecency, contempt of court, sedition, they proceeded against them distinctly as Quakers, thus putting themselves in the wrong and conceding to their adversaries that crown of martyrdom for which their souls were hankering and to which they were not fully entitled.

Of course, in maintaining the principle of Nationalism, the New England Puritans did not decline the implications and corollaries of that principle. It was only to a prophetic genius like the Separatist Roger Williams that it was revealed that civil government had no concern to enforce "the laws of the first table." But the historical student might be puzzled to name any other church establishment under which less of molestation was suffered by dissenters, or more of actual encouragement given to rival sects, than under the New England theocracies. The Nationalist principle was exclusive; the men who held it in New England (subject though they were to the temptations of sectarian emulation and fanatic zeal) were large-minded and generous men.

The general uniformity of church organization among the Puritan plantations is the more remarkable in view of the notable independence and originality of the leading men, who represented tendencies of opinion as widely diverging as the quasi-Presbyterianism of John Eliot and the doctrinaire democracy of John Wise. These variations of ecclesiastico-political theory had much to do with the speedy diffusion of the immigrant population. For larger freedom in building his ideal New Jerusalem, the statesmanlike pastor, Thomas Hooker, led forth his flock a second time into the great and terrible wilderness, and with his associates devised what has been declared to be "the first example in history of a written constitution—a distinct organic law constituting a government and defining its powers."[102:1] The like motive determined the choice company under John Davenport and Theophilus Eaton to refuse all inducements and importunities to remain in Massachusetts, choosing rather to build on no other man's foundations at New Haven.[102:2] At the end of a hundred years from the settlement of Boston the shores and river valleys of Massachusetts and Connecticut were planted with towns, each self-governing as a pure democracy, each with its church and educated minister and its system of common schools. The two colleges at Cambridge and New Haven were busy with their appointed work of training young men to the service of God "in church or civil state." And this great and prosperous and intelligent population was, with inconsiderable exceptions, the unmingled progeny of the four thousand English families who, under stress of the tyranny of Charles Stuart and the persecution of William Laud, had crossed the sea in the twelve years from 1628 to 1640.

The traditions of the fathers of New England had been piously cherished down to this third and fourth generation. The model of an ideal state that had been set up had, meanwhile, been more or less deformed, especially in Massachusetts, by the interference of England; the dominance of the established churches had been slightly infringed by the growth here and there of dissenting churches, Baptist, Episcopalian, and Quaker; but the framework both of church and of state was wonderfully little decayed or impaired. The same simplicity in the outward order of worship was maintained; the same form of high Calvinistic theology continued to be cherished as a norm of sound preaching and as a vehicle of instruction to children. All things continued as they had been; and yet it would have been a most superficial observer who had failed to detect signs of approaching change. The disproportions of the Calvinistic system, exaggerated in the popular acceptation, as in the favorite "Day of Doom" of Michael Wigglesworth, forced the effort after practical readjustments. The magnifying of divine sovereignty in the saving of men, to the obscuring of human responsibility, inevitably mitigated the church's reprobation of respectable people who could testify of no experience of conversion, and yet did not wish to relinquish for themselves or their families their relation to the church. Out of the conflict between two aspects of theological truth, and the conflict between the Nationalist and the Separatist conceptions of the church, and especially out of the mistaken policy of restricting the civil franchise to church-members, came forth that device of the "Half-way Covenant" which provided for a hereditary quasi-membership in the church for worthy people whose lives were without scandal, and who, not having been subjects of an experience of conscious conversion, were felt to be not altogether to blame for the fact. From the same causes came forth, and widely prevailed, the tenet of "Stoddardeanism," so called as originating in the pastoral work, and, it is said, in the personal experience, of Solomon Stoddard, the saintly minister of Northampton from 1669 till 1729, when he was succeeded by his colleague and grandson, Jonathan Edwards. It is the view that the Lord's Supper is instituted as a means of regeneration as well as of sanctification, and that those who are consciously "in a natural condition" ought not to be repelled, but rather encouraged to come to it. From the same causes, by natural sequence, came that so-called Arminianism[104:1] which, instead of urging the immediate necessity and duty of conversion, was content with commending a "diligent use of means," which might be the hopeful antecedent of that divine grace.