Those who at this distance of time accede in their lineage and principles to the heritage of the first Dissenters from the English Church system, might naturally eulogize them for their noble service in laying the foundations of religious and civil liberty in the realm. But there are not lacking in these days Royalists and Churchmen alike who in the pages of history and in essays equally extol the English Nonconformists as the foremost champions, the most effective agents, in bringing to trial and triumph the free institutions of the realm. Making the fullest allowances for all the perversities and fanaticisms wrought in with the separating tenets and principles of individuals and sects, their protests and assertions, their sufferings and constancy under disabilities, all wrought together at last to insure a grand result. Boldly is the assertion now maintained, that the Church of England at several critical periods would have been unable to withstand the recuperative forces of the Roman Church, had it not been for the persistent action of the Nonconformists in holding the ground won by the Reformation, and in demanding advance in the same line. The partial schemes of toleration and comprehension which were hopefully or mockingly entertained by parties in the Government down to the period of the Revolution, were avowedly designed “to strengthen the Protestant interest.” The strength of Dissent, in all its forms and stages, lay in its demanding for the laity voice and influence in all ecclesiastical affairs. It was this that restrained the dominance of priestly power.
There is a very important consideration to be had in view when we aim to form a fair and impartial judgment of the spirit and course of those earnest, if contentious, men, scholars, divines, heads and fellows of universities, who in their Nonconforming or Separatist principles originated dissensions in the English Church, and withdrew from it, bearing various pains and penalties. Even in the calmer dealing with them in the religious literature of our own times coming from Episcopal writers, we find traces of the irritation, reproach, and contempt felt and expressed for these original Dissenters when they first came into notice, to be dealt with as mischief-makers and culprits. They were then generally regarded as unreasonable, perverse, and contentious spirits, exaggerating trifling matters, obtruding morbid scruples, and keeping the realm in a ferment of petty squabbles on subjects in themselves utterly indifferent. They withstood the hearty, harmonious engagement of the rulers and the mass of the people of the realm in the difficult task of securing the general principles and interests of the Reformation, when perils and treacheries of a most formidable character from the Papacy and from internal and external enemies threatened every form of disaster. To this charge it might be replied, that the Puritans believed that a thorough and consistent work of reformation within the realm would be the best security for loyalty, internal harmony, and protection from the plottings of all outside enemies.
The most interesting and significant fact underlying the origin and the principles alike of Nonconformity and of Separatism in England at the period of the Reformation, is this: the facility and acquiescence with which changes were made in the English ecclesiastical system up to a certain point, while further modifications in the same direction were so stiffly resisted. It would seem as if it had been assumed at once that there was a well-defined line of division which should sharply distinguish between what must necessarily or might reasonably be made a part of the new order of things when the Papacy was renounced, and what must be conserved against all further innovation. The pivot of all subsequent controversy, dissension, and alienation turned upon the question whether this sharply drawn line was not wholly an arbitrary one, not adjusted by a principle of consistency, but of the nature of a compromise. This question was followed by another: Why should the process of reformation in the Church, so resolute and revolutionary in changing its institution and discipline and ritual, stop at the stage which it has already reached? Could any other answer be given than that the majority, or those who in office or prerogative had the power to enforce a decision, had decided that the right point had been reached, and that an arrest must be made there?
We must indicate in a summary way the stage which the Reformation had reached in England when Puritanism, in its various forms, made itself intrusive and obnoxious in demanding further changes. We need not open and deal with the controverted point, about which English Churchmen are by no means in accord, as to whether their Church had or did not have an origin and jurisdiction independently of all agency, intrusion, or intervention of the Bishop of Rome, or the Pope. It is enough to start with the fact, that up to the reign of Henry VIII. the Pope asserted and exercised a supremacy both in civil and in ecclesiastical affairs in the realm. If there was a Church in England, it was allowed that that Church must have a head. The Pope was acknowledged to be that head. Henry VIII., with the support of his Parliament, renounced the Papal supremacy, and himself acceded to that august dignity. The year 600 is assigned as the date when Pope Gregory I. put Augustin, or Austin, over the British Church. The headship of the Pope was acknowledged in the line of monarchs till Henry VIII. became the substitute of Clement VII. In the twenty-sixth year of Henry’s reign his Parliament enacted that “whatsoever his Majesty should enjoin in matters of religion should be obeyed by all his subjects.” Some of the clergy, being startled at this exaltation of a layman to the highest ecclesiastical office, demanded the insertion of the qualifying words “as far as is agreeable to the laws of Christ.” The King for a time accepted this qualification, but afterward obtained the consent of Parliament for its omission. Whatever may be granted or denied to the well-worn plea that the King’s reformatory zeal was inspired by his feud with the Pope about his matrimonial infelicities, it is evident that, notwithstanding the unrestrained royal prerogative, the monarch could not have struck at the very basis of all ecclesiastical rule and order in his kingdom, had there not been not only in his Council and Parliament, but also working among all orders of the people, a spirit and resolve against the Papal rule and discipline, ready to enter upon the unsounded and perilous ventures of radical reformation. None as yet knew where the opened way would lead them. The initiatory and each onward step might yet have to be retraced. Not for many years afterward did the threat and dread of the full restoration of the Papal power cease to appal the people of the realm. The final and the impotent blow which severed the Papacy from the realm came in the Bull of Pope Pius V. in 1571, which denounced Elizabeth as a heretic, and, under pain of curse, forbade her subjects to obey her laws. The measures of reform under Henry were tentative and arbitrary on his part. They made no recognition of any defined aim and stage to be reached. We must keep this fact in view as showing that while the realm was ready for change, it was as yet a process, not a mark.
It is necessary to start with a definition of terms which are often confounded in their use. “Puritans,” “Separatists,” and “Nonconformists” might in fact be terms equally applicable to many individuals, but none the less they were distinctive, and in many cases indicated very broad divergencies and characteristics in opinion, belief, and conduct. Nonconformists and Separatists were alike Puritans,—the latter intensively such. Puritanism developed alike into Nonconformity and Separatism. The earliest Puritans came to be Nonconformists, after trying in vain to retain a ministry and communion in the English Church as established by royal and civil authority, and after being driven from it because of their persistent demands for further reform in it. As heartily as did those who remained in its communion, they believed in the fitness of an established nationalized Church. They wished to be members of such a Church themselves; and not only so, but also to force upon others such membership. It was not to destroy, but to purify; not to deny to the civil authority a legislative and disciplinary power in religious matters, but to limit the exercise of that right within Scriptural rules and methods. They had sympathized in the processes of reform so far as these had advanced, but complained that the work had been arbitrarily arrested, was incomplete, was inconsistently pursued, was insecure in the stage which it had reached, and so left without the warrant which Scripture alone could furnish as a substitute for repudiated Rome.
Who were the Separatists, whose utterances, scruples, and conduct seemed so whimsical, pertinacious, disloyal, and refractory in Old England, and whose enterprise has been so successful and honorable in its development in New England? When the unity of the Roman Church was sundered at the Reformation, all those once in its communion who parted from it were Separatists. It is an intricate but interesting story, which has been often told, wearisomely and indeed exhaustively, in explanation of the fact that this epithet came to designate a comparatively small number of individuals in a nation to the mass of whose population it equally belonged. The term “separatist” or “sectary” carries with it a changing significance and association, according to the circumstances of its application. It was first used to designate the Christians. The Apostle Paul was called “a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes” (Acts xxiv. 5). The Roman Jews described the Christians as a “sect” that was “everywhere spoken against” (Acts xxviii. 22). The civil power gave a distinctive limitation to the epithet. It is always to be remembered that every national-church establishment existing among Protestants is the creation of the civil authority. Its inclusion and its exclusion, the privileges and disabilities which it gives or imposes, its titles of honor or reproach, are the awards of secular magistrates. All ecclesiastical polity, outside of Scriptural rule and sanction, receives its authority, for those who accept and for those who reject it, from the extension of the temporal power into the province of religion. When King Henry VIII. and the English Parliament assumed the ecclesiastical headship and prerogative previously exercised by Pope Clement VII., all the loyal people of the realm became Separatists. All the Reformed bodies of the Continent substantially regarded themselves as coming under that designation, which might have been applied and assumed with equal propriety as the epithet “protestants.” The Curia of the hierarchy at Rome from the first until now regards English and all other Protestants as Separatists. An archbishop or bishop of the English Church is ranked by the Church of Rome in the same category of unauthorized intruders upon sacred functions with the second-advent exhorter and the field-preacher. The pages of English history, so diligently wrought, and the developments of ecclesiastical polity in the realm must be studied and traced by one who would fully understand the occasion, the grounds, and the justice of the restriction which confined the title of “separatists” to the outlawed and persecuted and exiled class of persons, many of them graduates of English universities, ordained and serving in the pulpits of the Church, who were represented in and out of English jails by the four men whose abortive scheme of planting a colony in North America has just been referred to. However, justly or unjustly, the epithet “separatists” came to be applied and accepted as designating those who would not only not conform to the discipline of the Church, as still members of it, but who utterly renounced all connection with it, kept away from it, and organized assemblies, conventicles, or fellowships, subject only to such discipline as they might agree upon among themselves.
A suggestion presents itself here, to which a candid view of facts must attach much weight. Nonconformity, Separatism, Dissent, are not to be regarded as factiously obtruding themselves upon a peaceful, orderly, and well-established system, already tried and approved in its general workings. The Reformation in England was then but in progress, in its early stages; everything had been shaken, all was still unsettled, unadjusted, not reduced to permanence and order. There was an experiment to be tried, an institution to be recreated and remodelled, a substitute Church to be provided for a repudiated Church. The early Dissenters regarded themselves as simply taking part in an unfinished reform. The Church in England, under entanglements of civil policy and complications of State, gave tokens of stopping at a stage in reform quite different from that reached, and allowed progressive advance and unfettered conditions among Protestants on the Continent. There the course was free. The French, Dutch, and Italian systems, though not accordant, were all unlike the English ecclesiastical system. In England it was impeded, leading to a kind of establishment and institution in hierarchical and ritual administration which had more regard for the old Church, and looked to more compromise with it. It was not as if yielding to their own crotchets, self-willed idiosyncrasies, and petty fancies that those who opened the line of the Dissenters obtruded their variances, scruples, and contentions in assailing what was already established and perfected. They meant to come in at the beginning, at the first stage, the initiation of what was to be the new order of things in the Church, which was then, as they viewed it, in a state of formation and organization for time to come. They took alarm at the simulation of the system and ritual of the Roman Church, which the English, alone of all the Reformed Churches, in their view evidently favored. They wished to have hand and voice in initiating and planning the ecclesiastical institutions under which they were to live as Christians. Individual conscience, too, which heretofore had been a nullity, was thenceforward to stand for something. It remained to be proved how much and what was to be allowed to it, but it was not to be scornfully slighted. Then, also, with the first manifestations of a Nonconforming and Separatist spirit, we note the agitation of the question, which steadily strengthened in its persistency and emphasis of treatment, as to what were to be the rights and functions of lay people in the administration of a Christian Church. Were they to continue, as under the Roman system, simply to be led, governed, and disciplined, as sheep in a fold, by a clerical order? Hallam gives it as his conclusion, that the party in the realm during Elizabeth’s reign “adverse to any species of ecclesiastical change,” was less numerous than either of the other parties, Catholic or Puritan. According to this view, if one third of the people of the realm would have consented to the restoration of the Roman system, and less than one third were in accord with the Protestant prelatical establishment, certainly the other third, the Puritanical party, might assert their right to a hearing.
While claiming and pleading that the strict rule and example of Scripture precedent and model should alone be followed in the institution and discipline of the Christian Church, there was a second very comprehensive and positive demand made by the Puritans, which,—as we shall calmly view it in the retrospect, as taking its impulse and purpose either from substantial and valid reasons of good sense, discretion, and practical wisdom, or as starting from narrow conceits, perversity, and eccentric judgments leading it on into fanaticism,—put the Puritans into antagonism with the Church party. From the first token of the breach with Rome under Henry VIII. through the reigns of his three children and the four Stuarts, the Reformation was neither accomplished in its process, nor secure of abiding in the stage which it had reached. More than once during that period of one and a half centuries there were not only reasonable fears, but actual evidences, that a renewed subjection to the perfectly restored thraldom of Rome might, in what seemed to be merely the cast of a die, befall the distracted realm of England. The Court, Council, and Parliament pulsated in regular or irregular beats between Romanism and Protestantism. Henry VIII. left the work of reform embittered in its spirit for both parties, unaccomplished, insecure, and with no settlement by fixed principles. His three children, coming successively to the crown, pursued each a policy which had all the elements of confusion, antagonism, inconsistency, and extreme methods.
The spirit which vivified Puritanism had been working in England, and had been defining and certifying its animating and leading principles, before any formal measures of King and Parliament had opened the breach with Rome. The elemental ferment began with the circulation and reading of parts or the whole of the Scriptures in the English tongue. The surprises and perils which accompanied the enjoyment of this fearful privilege by private persons of acute intelligence and hearts sensitive to the deepest religious emotions, were followed by profound effects. The book was to them a direct, intelligible, and most authoritative communication from God. To its first readers it did not seem to need any help from an interpreter or commentator. It is a suggestive fact, that for English readers the now mountainous heaps of literature devoted to the exposition, illustration, and extended and comparative elucidation of Scripture were produced only at a later period. The first Scripture readers, antedating the actual era of the English Reformation and the formal national rupture with the Roman Church, were content with the simple text. They were impatient with any glosses or criticisms. When afterward, in the interests of psalmody in worship, the first attempts were made in constructing metrical versions of the Psalms, the intensest opposition was raised against the introduction of a single expletive word for which there was no answering original in the text.
We must assign to this early engagedness of love and devoted regard and fond estimate of the Bible the mainspring and the whole guiding inspiration of all the protests and demands which animated the Puritan movements. The degree in which afterward any individual within the communion of the English Church was prompted to pursue what he regarded as the work of reformation, whether he were prelate, noble, gentleman, scholar, husbandman, or artisan, and whether it drove him to conformity or to any phase of Puritanism, or even Separatism, depended mainly upon the estimate which he assigned to the Scriptures, whether as the sole or only the co-ordinate authority for the institution and discipline of the Christian Church. The free and devout reading of the Scriptures, when engaging the fresh curiosity and zeal of thoroughly earnest men and women, roused them to an amazed surprise at the enormous discordance between the matter and spirit of the sacred book and the ecclesiastical institutions and discipline under which they had been living,—“the simplicity that was in Christ,” constrasted with the towering corruptions and the monstrous tyranny and thraldom of the Papacy! This first surprise developed into all shades and degrees of protest, resentment, indignation, and almost blinding passion. Those who are conversant with the writings of either class of the Puritans know well with what paramount distinctness and emphasis they use the term, “the Word.” The significance attached to the expression gives us the key to Puritanism. For its most forcible use was when, in a representative championship, it was made to stand in bold antagonism with the term “the Church,” as inclusive of what it carried with it alike under the Roman or the English prelatical system. “The Church,” “the Scriptures,” are the word-symbols of the issue between Conformity and Puritanism. Christ did not leave Scriptures behind him, said one party, but he did leave a Church. Yes, replied the other party; he left apostles who both wrote the Scriptures and planted and administered the Church. The extreme to which the famous “Se-Baptist,” John Smyth, carried this insistency upon the sole authority of the Scriptures, led him to repudiate the use of the English Bible in worship, and to require that the originals in Greek and Hebrew should be substituted.[444] The fundamental distinguishing principle which is common to all the phases of Puritanism, Dissent, and Separatism in the English Church is this,—of giving to the Scriptures sole authority, especially over matters in which the Church claimed control and jurisdiction. There was in the earlier stage of the struggle little, if any, discordance as to doctrine. Discipline and ritual were the matters in controversy. The rule and text of Scripture were to displace canon law and the Church courts. The first representatives of the sect of Baptists resolved, “by the grace of God, not to receive or practise any piece of positive worship which had not precept or example in the Word.”[445] Nor were the Baptists in this respect singular or emphatic beyond any others of the Dissenting company. None of them had any misgiving as to the resources and sole authority of Scripture to furnish them with model, guide, and rule. It is remarkable that in view of the positive and reiterated avowal of this principle by all the Puritans, there should have been in recent times, as there was not in the first era of the controversy, any misapprehension of their frank adoption of it, their resolute standing by it. Archbishop Whately repeatedly marked it as evidence of the inspired wisdom of the New Testament writers, that they do not define the form or pattern of a church institution for government, worship, or discipline. The Puritans, however, believed that those writers did this very thing, and had a purpose in doing it. It was to strike at the very roots of this exclusive Scriptural theory of the Puritans that Hooker wrought out his famous and noble classical production, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. He admitted in this elegant and elaborate work that Scripture furnished the sole rule for doctrine, but argued with consummate ability that it was not such an exclusive and sufficient guide for government or discipline. The apostles did not, he said, fix a rule for their successors. The Church was a divinely instituted society; and, like every society, it had a full prerogative to make laws for its government, ceremonial, and discipline. He argued that a true Church polity must be taken not only from what the Scriptures affirm distinctly, but also “from what the general rules and principles of Scripture potentially contain.” Starting with his grand basis of the sanctity and majesty of Law, as founded in natural order, he insisted that the Church should establish such order in laws, rites, and ceremonies within its fold, and that all who have been baptized into it are bound to conform to its ecclesiastical laws. He would not concede to the Puritans their position of denial, but he insisted that Episcopacy was of apostolic institution. He was, however, at fault in affirming that the Puritans admitted that they could not find all the parts of the discipline which they stood for in the Scriptures. Dean Stanley comes nearer to the truth, in what is for him a sharp judgment, when he writes: “The Puritan idea that there was a Biblical counterpart to every—the most trivial—incident or institution of modern ecclesiastical life, has met with an unsparing criticism from the hand of Hooker.”[446] Indeed, it was keenly argued as against these Puritan sticklers for adhesion to Scripture rule and model, that they by no means conformed rigidly to the pattern, as they dropped from observance such matters as a community of goods, the love feast, the kiss of peace, the Lord’s Supper in upper chambers, and baptism by immersion.