The body of protestant resistance, however, had no organic unity but that of a common antagonism. Already there was in existence a sect, not yet directly opposed to presbyterianism, but created by the demand for a more free spiritual movement than that system allowed of. The men commonly reckoned as the authors of independency or congregationalism, an influence which more than any other has ennobled the plebeian elements of English life, bore the fitting names of Brown and Robinson. That the brownists were a well-known sect as early as 1600 is shown by the healthy hatred of Sir Andrew Aguecheek, who ‘would as lief be a brownist as a politician.’ It was in 1582, when the puritans were discussing the propriety of temporary conformity, that Brown wrote his treatise on ‘Reformation, without tarrying for any,’ and by way of not tarrying for any in his own case, took to preaching nonconformity up and down the country. After seeing the inside of thirty-two prisons as the reward of his zeal, he betook himself to Holland, carrying a congregation with him. This he afterwards left, and it does not seem {289} certain whether the subsequent brownist congregations were directly affiliated to it. Certain views of church polity, however, were current among them, which formed the principles of independency in later years. The chief of those were the doctrine of the absolute autonomy of the individual congregation, and the rejection of a special order of priests or presbyters. Each congregation was to elect or depose its own officers, the officer who should preach and administer the sacraments among the rest. When tho number of communicants in a congregation became too large to meet in any one place, a new one was to be formed, but no congregation or sum of congregations was to have any control in regard to doctrine or discipline over another.
Such a system of church government may not in itself be of more interest than others. As giving room for a liberty of prophecy which the rule of bishops or a presbytery denies, its importance was immense. This appears already in Robinson’s disavowal of the pretension to theological finality. Robinson, driven from England by episcopal persecution, had formed a congregation at Leyden. Here, in regard at least to the reformed churches of the continent, he gave up the strict separatist doctrine of the original brownists, ‘holding communion with these churches as far as possible.’ In 1620 the younger part of his congregation transferred itself to America, where it founded the colony of New Plymouth. His well-known exhortation to them at parting breathes a higher spirit of christian freedom than anything that had been heard since christianity fixed itself in creeds and churches.
‘If God reveal anything to you by any other instrument of his, be as ready to receive it as ever you were to receive any truth by my ministry; for I am verily persuaded the Lord has more truth yet to break forth out of his holy word. For my part, I cannot sufficiently bewail the condition of the reformed churches, who are come to a period in religion, and will go at present no farther than the instruments of their reformation. The lutherans cannot be drawn to go beyond what Luther saw; whatever part of his will God has revealed to Calvin, they will rather die than embrace it; and the calvinists, you see, stick fast where they were left by that great man of God, who yet saw not all things. This is a misery much to be lamented, for though they were burning and shining lights in their time, yet they penetrated {290} not into the whole counsel of God, but were they now living, would be as willing to embrace farther light as that which they first received. I beseech you remember, it is an article of your church covenant, that you be ready to receive whatever truth shall be made known to you from the written word of God. Remember that … for it is not possible the christian world should come so lately out of such thick anti-christian darkness, and that perfection of knowledge should break forth at once.’ [1]
[1] [Neal, Puritans, i. p. 477, Ed. 1837.]
It is as giving freer scope than any other form of church to this conviction, that God’s spirit is not bound, that independency has its historical interest.
During the period of Laud’s persecution the difference between the presbyterian and independent order of ideas could not come prominently to view. The court and sacerdotal party would recognise no distinction but a greater or less violence of opposition to the ceremonies enforced by the High Commission, and to the arminianism and Sunday sport, which were the great means, one inward, the other outward, of evaporating the consciousness of spiritual privilege and strength. The so-called puritans were mostly of presbyterian sympathies, but their ministers, though under frequent suspensions, adhered to their benefices. They were obliged, indeed, by statute to use no other than the established liturgy, but no statute then existed, like that passed after the Restoration, requiring absolute agreement of opinion with everything contained in the liturgy. The attitude of temporary conformity under protest might therefore be a legitimate one for a puritan minister; at any rate it was the one commonly held. A certain number, however, insisting like the original Brown on a nonconformity that would tarry for no man, formed separate congregations, and these were known as Brownists. Their only chance, however, under Laud, was either to keep in absolute hiding or withdraw to Holland or New England. If there were many of them in England at the meeting of the Long Parliament, their presence was due to an order in council of 1634, a strange instance of the blindness of persecution, which prohibited emigration to New England without royal licence.
In the Long Parliament, at the time of its meeting, the only recognised representative of independency was young Sir Harry Vane. He was not, indeed, properly of the {291} independent or any other sect. Baxter, who hated him as a despiser of ordinances, gives him a sect to himself; but he represented that current of thought which flowed through independence, but could not be contained by it. His ideas are worth studying, for they are the best expression of the spirit which struggled into brief and imperfect realisation during the commonwealth. In his extant treatises, entitled a ‘Retired Man’s Meditations’ and a ‘Healing Question,’ and in extracts from other writings preserved by his contemporary biographer Sikes, we find, under a most involved phraseology and an allegorising interpretation of scripture, a strange intensity of intellectual aspiration, which, if his secondary gifts had been those of a poet instead of a politician, might have made him the rival of Milton. The account of him by Baxter, who, with all his saintliness, was never able to rise above the clerical point of view, may be taken to express the result, rather than the spirit, of his doctrines.
‘His unhappiness lay in this, that his doctrines were so cloudily formed and expressed, that few could understand them, and therefore he had but few true disciples. Mr. Sterry is thought to be of his mind, but he hath not opened himself in writing, and was so famous for obscurity in preaching (being, said Sir Benjamin Rudyard, too high for this world and too low for the other) that he thereby proved almost barren also, and vanity and sterility were never more happily conjoined’ (a clerical pun). ‘This obscurity was by some imputed to his not understanding himself; but by others to design, because he could speak plainly when he listed. The two courses in which he had most success, and spake most plainly, were his earnest plea for universal liberty of conscience, and against the magistrate’s intermeddling with religion, and his teaching his followers to revile the ministry, calling them blackcoats, priests, and other names which then savoured of reproach.’ [1]
[1] [Reliquiae Baxterianae, p. 76.]
His zeal for liberty of conscience and disrespect for ministers were early called into play by his experience as governor of Massachusetts. The eldest son of one of the most successful courtiers of the time, he had, when a boy, shown a soul that would not fit his position.