But this substitution of the lay power as represented by King or Queen and the Houses of Parliament for the Papal sway, by no means satisfied the Puritan idea and conviction as to the rightful claims of the laity in their membership of the reconstructed Church. Barrow described in the following sharp sentence the summary way of proceeding so far as the laity were concerned: “All these people, with all their manners, were in one day, with the blast of Queen Elizabeth’s trumpet, of ignorant Papists and gross idolaters, made faithful Christians and true professors.” It was said that the people, divided and classed in local territorial parishes, were there treated like sheep in folds. Illiterate, debauched, incompetent, “dumb” ministers or priests assumed the pastorate in a most promiscuous way over these flocks. Membership in the Church came through infancy in baptism. The Puritans wished to sort out the draught of the Gospel net, which gathered of every kind. They claimed that the laity should themselves be parties in the administration of religion, in testing and approving discipline. They believed, too, that ministers should be supported by their congregations, and that the tithes and the landed privileges of the clergy were bribes and lures to them, making them independent and autocratical. Church lands and endowments, they insisted, should be sequestered, as had been the abbeys, nunneries, and monasteries. As soon as Separatist assemblies were associated in England or among the exiles on the Continent, altercations and divisions occurred among them as to the functions and the powers of the eldership, the responsibility and the authority of pastor and covenanted members in discipline.
Our space will admit here of only a brief recognition, conformed however to its slight intrinsic importance, of an element entering into the Puritan agitation, which at the time introduced into it a glow of excitement and a marvellously effective engagement of popular sympathy. The controversy between the Puritans and the Prelatists had in the main been pursued, however passionately, yet in a most grave and serious spirit, with a profound sense of the dignity and solemnity of its themes and interests. But from the time and occasion when Aristophanes tossed the grotesque trifling of his Clouds around the sage and lofty Socrates, down to this day, when Mr. Punch finds a weekly condiment of mischief and fun for the people of England in their own doings and in their treatment by their governors, it would seem as if no subject of human interest, however exalted its moment, could escape the test of satire, sarcasm, and caricature. Experimental ventures of this sort are naturally ephemeral, but they concentrate their venom or their disdain upon their shrinking victims. Some of Ben Jonson’s plays and Butler’s Hudibras have now alone a currency, and that a by no means extended one, out of a vast mass of the printed ridicule which was turned upon the Puritans. But the matter now in hand is the skill and jollity with which one or more Puritans, with the gift of the comic in his stern make-up, plied that keen blade in his own cause. Erasmus, though he never broke from the communion of the Papal Church, engaged the most stinging power of satire and sarcasm, not only against mean and humble monks, but against all the ranks of the hierarchy, not sparing the loftiest. Helped out with Holbein’s cuts, Erasmus’s Encomium of Folly drew roars of mirth and glee from those who winced under its mocking exposures. Even the grave Beza, in Geneva, tried his hand in this trifling. But the venture of this sort which cunningly and adroitly intruded itself at a peculiarly critical phase of the Puritan agitation, was of the most daring and rasping character. Under the happily chosen pseudonym of “Martin Mar-Prelate,” there appeared in rapid succession, during seven months of the years 1588 and 1589, the same number of little, rudely printed tracts, the products of ambulatory presses, which engaged the full power of satire, caricature, and sarcasm, with fun and rollicking, invective and bitter reproach and exposure against the hierarchy, especially against four of the most odious of the bishops. The daring spirit of these productions was well matched by the devices of caution and secrecy under which they were put in print, and in the sly methods by which they were circulated, to be caught up, concealed, and revelled over by thousands who would find keen enjoyment in them, as in the partaking of the sweets of stolen food and waters. They may be said to have stopped only at the very edge of ribaldry, indecency, and even blasphemy. But they were free and trenchant, coarse and virulent. As such, they testify to the smart under the provocation of which they were written, and to the scorn and contempt entertained for the men and measures to which were committed for the time the transcendent interests of religion and piety. The more dignified and serious of the Puritans, like Greenham and Cartwright, frowned upon and repudiated these weapons of bitter gibe and contumely. But there was a constituency from which they received the heartiest welcome, and, as is usual in such cases, their circulation and efficiency were vastly multiplied by equally bitter and malignant replies to them from the pens or from the instigation of bishops. The whole detective force of the kingdom was put on the search for the writers and the printers. So adroit and cunning was the secret of their authorship and production at the time, that up to this day it has not been positively disclosed. Never has the investigation been so keenly or intelligently pressed for clearing the mystery investing the Martin Mar-Prelate tracts as by the indefatigable researches and the sharpened inquisition of Dr. Dexter. In his Congregationalism he gives his readers an exhaustive sketch and summary, in detail and analysis, of all the facts and documents. His conclusion, which cannot be hopefully contested or invalidated, is that they were written by Barrow, a prisoner in the Fleet, and carried through the press by the agency of Penry. There is abundant evidence in the appearance, publication, and circulation of tracts known to have come from the hands of imprisoned Puritans, that the bars of jails and dungeons offered no sufficient barriers to prevent the secret intercourse and interchange of intelligence between those whom they enclosed and friends outside, who dared all risks in their zeal and fidelity.
We must now close this narration of the issues raised in the Puritan controversy, whether by Nonconformists in the Church or by Separatists withdrawing from it, that we may note the concentration of forces and witnesses which were drawn together in assemblies or fellowships prepared in Old England to transfer and establish their principles in New England. Many of the clergy whose views and sympathies were warmly engaged in the further work of reform and purification within the Church, and who at the same time were moderate and conciliatory in their spirit, contrived to remain in their parochial fields, perhaps in this way accomplishing the most for all that was reasonable and good in the cause which they had at heart. When occasionally molested or challenged, they might contrive to make their peace. But the crisis and its demands called—as has always been the case in such intense agitations of religious passions—for patient, steadfast, and resolute witnesses in suffering, for those who should be hounded and tracked by judicial processes, who should be deprived of subsistence and liberty, and be ready not only for being hidden away in prisons or exiled beyond the seas, but for public execution as martyrs. The emergency of time and occasion found such as these; and it was of such as these that there were men and women in training for wilderness work on this soil. And the combination of materials and persons was precisely such as would meet the exactions of such an enterprise. There were university men, scholars, doctors in divinity, practised disputants in their cherished lore, and with gifts of zeal, fervor, and tender eloquence in discourse and prayer. There were gentry likewise,—men and women lifted in the social scale, with furnishings of mind and worldly goods. To these were joined, in a fellowship which equalized many distinctions, yeomen, small traders, artisans, and some of every place and grade, save the low or mean or reckless, in the make-up of the population of the realm. Governor Bradford says that the first Separatist or Independent Church in England was that of which John Rough, the minister, and Cuthbert Symson, the deacon, were burned alive by Bonner, in the reign of Queen Mary. The laborious and faithful pages of Dr. Dexter, in his Congregationalism, must be closely studied for the results of the marvellous diligence and keen research by which he has traced every vestige, memorial, and testimony that can throw light on the little assemblies of those outlawed Puritans. It is a curious and engaging occupation in our peaceful and lethargic times of religious ease, to scan the make-up, the spirit, and methods of those humble assemblies in their lurking-places, private houses, barns, or the open fields, frequently changing their appointments under risks from spies and tipstaves, with their secret code of signals for communicating intelligence. Their religious exercises were of the intensest earnestness, and above all things stimulating. Their conferences about order and discipline bristled with individualisms and scruples. Many of these assemblies might soon resolve themselves into constituencies of single members. There was scarce one of those assemblies, either in England or in exile on the Continent, that did not part into two or three. There was a stern necessity which compelled variance and dissension among the members. They had in hand the Bible, and each was trying what he could draw out of it, as an oracle and a rule. They had to devise, discuss, and if possible agree upon and enforce ways of church order and discipline, a form of worship, rules of initiation into church membership, of suspension, expulsion, and restoration. It was brain work, heart work, and soul work with them. It would be difficult to reduce to any exact statements the numbers of persons, or even of what may in a loose sense be called assemblies, of Nonconformists or Separatists who remained in England, or who were in refuge on the Continent at the period just preceding the colonization of New England. What was called the Millenary Petition, which was presented to James I., as he came in from Scotland, was claimed to represent at least eight hundred Nonconforming ministers.
The way is now open for connecting the principles and fortunes of the earnest and proscribed class of religious men, whose course has been thus traced in England and Holland, with the enterprise of colonization in New England. It is but reasonable to suppose that, dating from the time and the incident referred to in the opening of this chapter, such an enterprise was latent in conception or desire in the thoughts of many as a possible alternative for the near future. A resolve or purpose or effort of such a nature as this involves much brooding over by individuals, much private communing, balancing of circumstances, conditions, gains, and losses, and an estimate of means and resources, with an eye towards allowance by a governmental or noble patronage, or at least to security in the venture. We have but fragmentary and scattered information as to all these preliminaries to the emigration. We must trace them backward from the completion to the initiation of the enterprise.
And here is the point at which we should define to ourselves, as intelligently and fairly as we can from our abounding authentic sources of information, precisely what was the influence or agency of religion in the first emigration to New England. We are familiar with the oft-reiterated and positive statement, that the enterprise would neither have been undertaken, nor persisted in, nor led on to success, had not religion furnished its mainspring, its guiding motive, and the end aimed at, to be in degree realized.
We may safely commit ourselves to these assertions, that religion was the master-motive and object of the most earnest and ablest leaders of the emigration; that they felt this motive more deeply and with more of singleness of purpose than they always avowed, as their circumstances compelled them to take into view sublunary objects of trade and subsistence which would engage to them needful help and resources; and that some of these secondary objects very soon qualified and impaired the paramount importance of the primary one. I am led to make this allowance of exception as to the occasional reserve in the avowal of an exclusively religious motive, because of a fact which must impress the careful student of their history and fortunes for the first hundred years. That fact is, that in multitudes of occasional utterances, sermons, journals, and historical sketches, many of the descendants of the first comers laid more exclusive and emphatic stress upon the prime agency of religion in the enterprise than did the first movers in it. When ministers and magistrates in after years uttered their frequent and sombre laments over the degeneracy of the times, the decay of zeal and godliness, and the falling from the first love, the refrain always was found in extolling the one, single, supreme aim of the fathers as that of pure piety. The pages of Cotton Mather’s Magnalia and of his tracts of memorial, rebuke, and exhortation, and the Century Sermon of Foxcroft, minister of the First Church, are specimens of masses of such matter in our old cabinets pitched in that tone. Nor need we conclude that, as a general rule, the most fervent of those laments or the most positive of those statements were exaggerated. Only what such writers and speakers recognized as the degeneracy of their own later times, must be traced to seeds and agencies which came in with the most select fellowship of the fathers themselves. We cannot go so far as to claim that the whole aim, the all-including purpose of every member, or of even of a majority of the colonists, was religion, after the pattern of that of the leaders, or of any style of religion. But we have to conclude that the smaller the number of those among whom we concentrate the religious fervor in its supreme sway, the more intensified must have been its power to have enabled them, as it did, to give direction to the whole enterprise. And this was not only true at the first, but proportionately so as the original centre of that enterprise for a long period sent off its radii successively to new settlements in the woods. There were always found men and women enough to copy the original pattern and to keep the motive force in action. Sir Henry Maine does not state the whole of the truth when he writes thus: “The earliest English emigrants to North America, who belonged principally to the class of yeomanry, organized themselves in village communities for purposes of cultivation.”[450]
The stream of exile to New England in the interest of religion was first parted into one small and one large rill, which, however, soon flowed together and assimilated, as it appeared that they started substantially from the same source, with similar elements, and found more that was congenial than discordant in their qualities. The company of exiles whom residence in Holland, with its attendant influences and results, had confirmed and stiffened in their original principles of rigid Separatism, had the start by nearly a decade of years in transferring themselves to Plymouth. Their fortunes are traced in the next chapter.
The colonists in Massachusetts Bay, and those who, in substantial accord with them, struck into several other settlements in the wilderness of New England, were mainly those who in the land of their birth had remained steadfast to their principles of Nonconformity, and who had borne the penalties of them when avowed and put in practice. They had not turned in disdain and temper from the institution which they called their “mother church.” Their divided relation to it they regarded as rather caused by such harsh conditions as excluded them from its privileges than by any wilfulness or hostility of their own. They professed that they still clung to its breast, and wished to be nourished from it. It was not strange, however, that partial alienation should, under favoring opportunities, widen and stiffen into seeming antagonism to it. They regarded themselves as having been subjected to pains and penalties because of their protest against objectionable and harmful, as well as unscriptural, exactions in its discipline and ceremonial. So they were content to be known as Nonconformists, but repelled the charge of being Separatists. They kept alive a lingering tenderness, in a reminder of their early membership and later disturbed affiliation with it. Some few of the sterner spirits among them—and Roger Williams was such, as he appeared here in his youth—demanded a penitential avowal of sin from Winthrop’s company, on account of their having once been in fellowship with the English Church. An agitation also arose upon the question whether the members of the Boston Church, who on visits to the old home occasionally conformed, should not be put under discipline on their return here. Happily the dispute was disposed of by forbearance and charity.
Still, while there was a slight manifestation at first of an antipathy or a jealousy on the part of the Nonconformists at the Bay of being in any way confounded with the Separatists at Plymouth, there never was a breach or even a controversy, beyond that of a friendly discussion, between them; and there is something well-nigh amusing, as well as interesting, in following the quaint narration[451] of the establishment of immediate harmony and accord between their respective church ways. Endicott’s little company at Salem, heralding the great emigration to the Bay, “entered into church estate” in August, 1629, having sought what we should now call the advice, help, and sympathy of their Plymouth brethren. This fellowship was extended through Governor Bradford and other delegates, and the example was afterward followed in like recognition of other churches. The covenanted members of the Salem Church ordained their pastor and teacher, notwithstanding that they had previously been under the hands of a bishop. It soon appeared, however, that the church was to be emphatically Nonconformist. Two brothers Brown, at Salem, set up separate worship by the Common Prayer. On being “convented” before the Governor, his Council and the ministers, and accusing the church of Separatism, they were told that the members did not wish to be Separatists, but were simply Nonconformists with the corruptions of the Church; and that having suffered much for their principles, and being now in a free place, they were determined to be rid of Common Prayer and ceremonial.[452]
The First Boston Church, in 1630, was organized under its covenant, with its appointed and ordained teacher, ruling elder, and deacons. In ten years after the landing at Plymouth there were five churches after this pattern, and in twenty years thirty-five, in New England.