Overwhelmed by a sense of his “Ultimate End,” the Puritan cannot rest, nevertheless, in reflection upon it. The contemplation of God, which the greatest of the Schoolmen described as the supreme blessedness, is a blessedness too great for sinners, who must not only contemplate God, but glorify him by their work in a world given over to the powers of darkness. “The way to the Celestial City lies just through this town, where this lusty fair is kept; and he that will go to the City, and yet not go through this town, must needs go out of the world.”[[3]] For that awful journey, girt with precipices and beset with fiends, he sheds every encumbrance, and arms himself with every weapon. Amusements, books, even intercourse with friends, must, if need be, be cast aside; for it is better to enter into eternal life halt and maimed than having two eyes to be cast into eternal fire. He scours the country, like Baxter and Fox, to find one who may speak the word of life to his soul. He seeks from his ministers, not absolution, but instruction, exhortation and warning. Prophesyings—that most revealing episode in early Puritanism—were the cry of a famished generation for enlightenment, for education, for a religion of the intellect; and it was because much “preaching breeds faction, but much praying causes devotion”[[4]] that the powers of this world raised their parchment shutters to stem the gale that blew from the Puritan pulpit. He disciplines, rationalizes, systematizes, his life; “method” was a Puritan catchword a century before the world had heard of Methodists. He makes his very business a travail of the spirit, for that too is the Lord’s vineyard, in which he is called to labor.
Feeling in him that which “maketh him more fearful of displeasing God than all the world,”[[5]] he is a natural republican, for there is none on earth that he can own as master. If powers and principalities will hear and obey, well; if not, they must be ground into dust, that on their ruins the elect may build the Kingdom of Christ. And, in the end, all these—prayer, and toil, and discipline, mastery of self and mastery of others, wounds, and death—may be too little for the salvation of a single soul. “Then I saw that there was a way to Hell even from the Gates of Heaven, as well as from the City of Destruction”[[6]]—those dreadful words haunt him as he nears his end. Sometimes they break his heart. More often, for grace abounds even to the chief of sinners, they nerve his will. For it is will—will organized and disciplined and inspired, will quiescent in rapt adoration or straining in violent energy, but always will—which is the essence of Puritanism, and for the intensification and organization of will every instrument in that tremendous arsenal of religious fervour is mobilized. The Puritan is like a steel spring compressed by an inner force, which shatters every obstacle by its rebound. Sometimes the strain is too tense, and, when its imprisoned energy is released, it shatters itself.
The spirit bloweth where it listeth, and men of every social grade had felt their hearts lifted by its breath, from aristocrats and country gentlemen to weavers who, “as they stand in their loom, can set a book before them or edifie one another.”[[7]] But, if religious zeal and moral enthusiasm are not straitened by the vulgar categories of class and income, experience proves, nevertheless, that there are certain kinds of environment in which they burn more bravely than in others, and that, as man is both spirit and body, so different types of religious experience correspond to the varying needs of different social and economic milieux. To contemporaries the chosen seat of the Puritan spirit seemed to be those classes in society which combined economic independence, education and a certain decent pride in their status, revealed at once in a determination to live their own lives, without truckling to earthly superiors, and in a somewhat arrogant contempt for those who, either through weakness of character or through economic helplessness, were less resolute, less vigorous and masterful, than themselves. Such, where the feudal spirit had been weakened by contact with town life and new intellectual currents, were some of the gentry. Such, conspicuously, were the yeomen, “mounted on a high spirit, as being slaves to none,”[[8]] especially in the freeholding counties of the east. Such, above all, were the trading classes of the towns, and of those rural districts which had been partially industrialized by the decentralization of the textile and iron industries.
“The King’s cause and party,” wrote one who described the situation in Bristol in 1645, “were favored by two extremes in that city; the one, the wealthy and powerful men, the other, of the basest and lowest sort; but disgusted by the middle rank, the true and best citizens.”[[9]] That it was everywhere these classes who were the standard-bearers of Puritanism is suggested by Professor Usher’s statistical estimate of the distribution of Puritan ministers in the first decade of the seventeenth century, which shows that, of 281 ministers whose names are known, 35 belonged to London and Middlesex, 96 to the three manufacturing counties of Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, 29 to Northamptonshire, 17 to Lancashire, and only 104 to the whole of the rest of the country.[[10]] The phenomenon was so striking as to evoke the comments of contemporaries absorbed in matters of profounder spiritual import than sociological generalization. “Most of the tenants of these gentlemen,” wrote Baxter, “and also most of the poorest of the people, whom the other called the Rabble, did follow the gentry, and were for the King. On the Parliament’s side were (besides themselves) the smaller part (as some thought) of the gentry in most of the counties, and freeholders, and the middle sort of men; especially in those corporations and counties which depend on cloathing and such manufactures.” He explained the fact by the liberalizing effect of constant correspondence with the greater centers of trade, and cited the example of France, where it was “the merchants and middle sort of men that were Protestants.”[[11]]
The most conspicuous example was, of course, London, which had financed the Parliamentary forces, and which continued down to the Revolution to be par excellence “the rebellious city,” returning four Dissenters to the Royalist Parliament of 1661, sending its mayor and aldermen to accompany Lord Russell when he carried the Exclusion Bill from the Commons to the Lords, patronizing Presbyterian ministers long after Presbyterianism was proscribed, nursing the Whig Party, which stood for tolerance, and sheltering the Whig leaders against the storm which broke in 1681. But almost everywhere the same fact was to be observed. The growth of Puritanism, wrote a hostile critic, was “by meanes of the City of London (the nest and seminary of the seditious faction) and by reason of its universall trade throughout the kingdome, with its commodities conveying and deriving this civill contagion to all our cities and corporations, and thereby poysoning whole counties.”[[12]] In Lancashire, the clothing towns—“the Genevas of Lancashire”—rose like Puritan islands from the surrounding sea of Roman Catholicism. In Yorkshire, Bradford, Leeds and Halifax; in the midlands, Birmingham and Leicester; in the west, Gloucester, Taunton and Exeter, the capital of the west of England textile industry, were all centers of Puritanism.
The identification of the industrial and commercial classes with religious radicalism was, indeed, a constant theme of Anglicans and Royalists, who found in the vices of each an additional reason for distrusting both. Clarendon commented bitterly on the “factious humor which possessed most corporations, and the pride of their wealth”;[[13]] and, after the Civil War, both the politics and the religion of the boroughs were suspect for a generation. The bishop of Oxford warned Charles II’s Government against showing them any favor, on the ground that “trading combinations” were “so many nests of faction and sedition,” and that “our late miserable distractions” were “chiefly hatched in the shops of tradesmen.”[[14]] Pepys commented dryly on the black looks which met the Anglican clergy as they returned to their City churches. It was even alleged that the courtiers hailed with glee the fire of London, as a providential instrument for crippling the center of disaffection.[[15]]
When, after 1660, Political Arithmetic became the fashion, its practitioners were moved by the experience of the last half-century and by the example of Holland—the economic schoolmaster of seventeenth-century Europe—to inquire, in the manner of any modern sociologist, into the relations between economic progress and other aspects of the national genius. Cool, dispassionate, very weary of the drum ecclesiastic, they confirmed, not without some notes of gentle irony, the diagnosis of bishop and presbyterian, but deduced from it different conclusions. The question which gave a topical point to their analysis was the rising issue of religious tolerance. Serenely indifferent to its spiritual significance, they found a practical reason for applauding it in the fact that the classes who were in the van of the Puritan movement, and in whom the Clarendon Code found its most prominent victims, were also those who led commercial and industrial enterprise. The explanation, they thought, was simple. A society of peasants could be homogeneous in its religion, as it was already homogeneous in the simple uniformity of its economic arrangements. A many-sided business community could escape constant friction and obstruction only if it were free to absorb elements drawn from a multitude of different sources, and if each of those elements were free to pursue its own way of life, and—in that age the same thing—to practice its own religion.
Englishmen, as Defoe remarked, improved everything and invented nothing, and English economic organization had long been elastic enough to swallow Flemish weavers flying from Alva, and Huguenots driven from France. But the traditional ecclesiastical system was not equally accommodating. It found not only the alien refugee, but its home-bred sectaries, indigestible. Laud, reversing the policy of Elizabethan Privy Councils, which characteristically thought diversity of trades more important than unity of religion, had harassed the settlements of foreign artisans at Maidstone, Sandwich and Canterbury,[[16]] and the problem recurred in every attempt to enforce conformity down to 1689. “The gaols were crowded with the most substantial tradesmen and inhabitants, the clothiers were forced from their houses, and thousands of workmen and women whom they employed set to starving.”[[17]] The Whig indictment of the disastrous effects of Tory policy recalls the picture drawn by French intendants of the widespread distress which followed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.[[18]]
When the collision between economic interests and the policy of compulsory conformity was so flagrant, it is not surprising that the economists of the age should have enunciated the healing principle that persecution was incompatible with prosperity, since it was on the pioneers of economic progress that persecution principally fell. “Every law of this nature,” wrote the author of a pamphlet on the subject, is not only “expressly against the very principles and rules of the Gospel of Christ,” but is also “destructive to the trade and well-being of our nation by oppressing and driving away the most industrious working hands, and depopulating, and thereby impoverishes our country, which is capable of employing ten times the number of people we now have.”[[19]]
Temple, in his calm and lucid study of the United Netherlands, found one reason of their success in the fact that, Roman Catholicism excepted, every man might practise what religion he pleased.[[20]] De la Court, whose striking book passed under the name of John de Witt, said the same.[[21]] Petty, after pointing out that in England the most thriving towns were those where there was most nonconformity, cited the evidence, not only of Europe, but of India and the Ottoman Empire, to prove that, while economic progress is compatible with any religion, the class which is its vehicle will always consist of the heterodox minority, who “profess opinions different from what are publicly established.”[[22]] “There is a kind of natural unaptness,” wrote a pamphleteer in 1671, “in the Popish religion to business, whereas on the contrary among the Reformed, the greater their zeal, the greater their inclination to trade and industry, as holding idleness unlawful.... The domestic interest of England lieth in the advancement of trade by removing all obstructions both in city and country, and providing such laws as may help it, and make it most easy, especially in giving liberty of conscience to all Protestant Nonconformists, and denying it to Papists.”[[23]]