The Puritan did not separate from the Church of England on the principle of liberty of dissent, or because he wished to establish what liberals now understand by religious liberty. The principle of his separation was the Catholic principle, that the magistrate has no authority in spirituals, and no right to prescribe any forms or ceremonies to be used in worship. It was a solemn protest not against the doctrines of the Anglican Church, but against the authority it conceded in spiritual matters to the civil power—or the civil magistrate, as they said then. The Puritan was logical; he had a good major, and his conclusion would have been just, if his minor had only been true; and we are, in our opinion, indebted to him far more than to Lord Baltimore or to Governor Dongan of New York for the freedom of conscience secured by our institutions. Lord Baltimore and Governor Dongan sought the free exercise of their own religion for their co-religionists, and asserted, and in their situation could assert, only toleration. Neither could assert the principle of true religious liberty, the incompetency of the state in spirituals, holding, as they did, their power from the king of England and head of the Anglican Church. The Puritan abominated toleration, called it the devil's doctrine, and proved himself little disposed to practise it; but in asserting the absolute independence of the church or religion before the civil magistrate, he asserted the true principle of religious liberty, which the Catholic Church always and everywhere asserts, and laid in the American mind the foundation of that religious freedom of which our religion, which they hated, now enjoys the benefit.
We have nothing to say of the virtues of the Puritans in relation to the world to come; but they certainly had great and rare civil virtues, and they have had the leading share in founding and shaping the American state. They were grave, earnest—too much so, if you will; but however short they fell in practice, they always asserted the independence and supremacy of the moral order in relation to civil government, and the obligation of every man to obey God rather than men, and to live always in reference to the end for which God makes him. Their moral standard was high, and they set an example of as moral a people as can be looked for outside of the church. They had only a faulty religion, and perhaps were Stoics rather than Christians in their temper; but they always put religion in its right place, and gave the precedence to its ministers. They placed education under charge of the church, and the system of common schools which they originated or adopted was really a system of parochial schools, under the supervision of the pastor, and supported by a tax on the parish, imposed by the parishioners, in public meetings, on themselves. The centralized system of godless schools, borrowed from the Convention that decreed the death of Louis XVI., generally adopted by the Middle and Western States, is hardly yet fully adopted in Massachusetts, though since 1835 it has been gradually gaining the ascendency; and Cambridge University, founded for God and the church, has only this very year thrown off its religious character, dispensed with morning prayers,[84] and become a purely secular institution—an inevitable but a lamentable change.
The Puritans not only adopted a high moral standard, but they lived as nearly up to it as is possible for human nature alone since the fall, and few examples of a more rigidly moral people can be found than were the New England people for a century and a half after the landing of the Pilgrims, and to them, in no small measure, the whole Union is indebted for its moral character as well as for the greater part of its higher institutions of learning. There have been as learned, as gifted, as great men, found in other States, and perhaps even more learned, gifted, and greater; but there is no part of the Union where the intellectual tone of society is so high, or intellectual culture so general as in New England, especially in the States founded by the Puritans, as were Massachusetts and Connecticut. New York leads in trade and commerce; Pennsylvania latterly, Virginia formerly, in politics; but the New England mind has led in law, jurisprudence, literature, art, science, and philosophy; though since Puritanism has been lapsing into liberalism its preëminence is passing away. We speak of New England as it was thirty or forty years ago, or a little earlier, when the majority of the supreme judges, and two thirds of the members of the legislature of New York were Connecticut or, at least, New England men. New England, we fear, is no longer what she was when we were young, and she appears only the shadow of her former self. She is attempting to do, from sheer calculation, and purely secular motives, what even in the heyday of Puritanism was more than she could effect, aided by strong religious convictions and motives. Still, if the substance is wanting, she keeps up the appearance of her old moral character, and in no part of the Union will you hear finer moral sentences, or better reasoned orations on the beauty of virtue and the necessity of religion to the commonwealth. Even New England infidelity is obliged to assume a moral garb, to express itself in Christian phrases, and affect to be more Christian than Christianity itself.
The author of Norwood does not do justice to the intellectual character of New England life, to the thought, the reflection, and movements of a New England village of five thousand inhabitants. His village philosopher, Dr. Wentworth, is very shallow, being very narrow and very prosy. We could easily find any number of farmers in the valley of the Connecticut able to see through his paganism at a glance, and refute it with a word. Especially is the author unjust to New England women. No doubt such women as Polly Marble, Rachel Cathcart, Agate Bissell, and Mother Taft can be found in a New England village, but they are not representative characters. New England Puritanism was never so stiff, or so annoying to one's self or to others, as it appears in these exceptional characters. The women of New England are in general remarkable for their intellectual culture, their gentleness, their refinement, their grace and dignity of manners, the elevation and breadth of their minds, and the extent and variety of their information, no less than for their domestic tastes and habits, or superior faculty as housekeepers. There are, no doubt, blue stockings in Yankeeland which their wearers' skirts are too short to conceal; no doubt, also, there are women there who encroach on the rights and prerogatives of the other sex, and aspire to be men; but your leading woman's rights women and men are not New Englanders. Our old friend, Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, is a New Yorker, and Susan B. Anthony, if born in Nantucket, is a Quakeress, and the Quakers are of no country, or simply are their own country.
Many movements are accredited to New England which originated elsewhere, and are simply taken up by a certain class of New Englanders in easy circumstances, as a diversion or a dissipation, instead of whist, balls, routs, and plays. Yet they are only a class. The Massachusetts legislature voted down, by a large majority, the proposition to give the elective franchise to women, and the legislation of the Old Bay State continues far more masculine and conservative than that of the State of New York.
Norwood leaves the impression on the reader that the Puritans were a set of gloomy fanatics, austere and unbending, harsh and cruel, minding every body's business but their own, and seeking, in season and out of season, to cram their horrible doctrines down every neighbor's throat, and that the only sociable and agreeable people to be found among them were precisely those who had broken away from the Puritan thraldom, and returned to the cultivation and worship of nature. The wish is father to the thought. More social, neighborly, genial, kind-hearted, hospitable people it would be difficult to find in the Union than were the great body of these New England Puritans, than perhaps they are still; though they have by no means improved since they have abolished the dinner-table, as they suppose in the interest of temperance, and substituted opium for Santa Cruz rum and old Jamaica spirits, as they have philanthropy for devotion. Intellect, morals, and sociality seem to us to have sadly deteriorated under the misdirected efforts to advance them.
But Henry Ward Beecher has had a far other purpose in Norwood than to produce a work of art, to construct a story, or to sketch New England village life. He is willing enough to correct some of the misapprehensions which Southerners have, or had, of New England character; but his book, after all, has a serious purpose, and is intended to be a death-blow to New England theological and moral doctrines.
The author, though nominally a Christian, and professedly a Congregational preacher, is really a pagan, and wishes to abolish Puritanism for the worship of nature. But it is less the Puritan than the Christian he wars against; and if he understands himself, which is doubtful, his thought is, that a child, taken as born, without baptism or regeneration, may be trained up by the influence of flowers and close communion with nature, beasts, birds, and fishes, reptiles and insects, to be a Christian of the first water. Dr. Wentworth represents this theory, and reduces it to practice in the training of his daughter Rose, whose chief educator is the half-idiot negro, Pete, "no great things in the intellects, but with a heart as big as that of an ox." The theory recognizes Christ only in nature, and really identifies him with nature, and resolves the Christian law of perfection into the natural laws of the physicists. The author holds, if any thing, that heaven, the crown of life, is in the order of generation, and is attainable as the result of natural development.
The theory, of course, rejects the very fundamental principle of Christianity, which declares that "except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God." The author, indeed, does not deny in words the new birth; nay, asserts it, but resolves it into a natural operation, a sort of mental and physical crisis, and recognizes nothing supernatural, or any infusion of grace in it; which is in reality to deny it. We have as hearty a dislike of Calvinism as any one can have, and we know it passably well by our own early experience; but we confess that we have no wish to see old-fashioned Puritanism exchanged for pure rationalism or mere naturalism, and as against Henry Ward Beecher, we are strongly tempted to defend it. Any one who knows New England at all, knows that its morals have deteriorated just in proportion as its old Puritanism has declined, or been liberalized. The fact, whatever the explanation, is undeniable. In our judgment, it is the natural result of loosening the restraints which Puritanism undoubtedly imposed on the passions and conduct, and leaving people to their natural passions, instincts, and propensities, without any restraint at all. Despotism is bad enough; but it is better than no government, better than anarchy. As it affects the question of conversion to the church, we see no gain in the change. We think a sincere, earnest-minded Puritan a less hopeless subject than a liberal, like an Emerson, a John Weis, a John Stuart Mill, a Mr. Lecky, a Herbert Spencer, or such men as were the late Mr. Buckle and the late Sir William Hamilton, who despise Christianity too much to offer any direct opposition to it. The honest Puritan is prejudiced indeed, and unwilling to hear a word in favor of the church; yet he believes in Christian morals, and has some conception of the Christian plan of salvation, and therefore really something for the missionary to work on; but men who have resolved Christianity into naturalism, and measure reality or even the knowable by their own narrow and superficial understandings, are beyond his reach. Their case is hopeless.
Puritanism keeps alive in the community a certain Christian habit of thought, a belief in the necessity of grace, and more or less of a Christian conscience. The greater part of the common people gathered into the sects in seasons of revivals, if our missionaries were present, could just as easily be gathered into the church, and be saved. We suffer terribly in this country for the want of missionary priests, who can go wherever their services are needed by those who know not yet "the faith once delivered to the saints." Our priests are too few for the wants even of our old Catholic population, and what with hearing confessions, and attending sick calls, building churches and school-houses, and providing for the most pressing wants of a Catholic people, are over-worked, and soon exhausted. The great majority of our priests die young, from excessive labor. There is with us a vast missionary field, not indeed among the sects, but among the so-called Nothingarians, who comprise the majority of the American people, and who, though without any specific belief, are yet far from being confirmed unbelievers. But let the Beechers and their associates succeed in reducing Christianity to naturalism, and you soon make this whole class downright infidels. We can have, therefore, no sympathy with Beecherism, or pleasure in seeing its success against even old-fashioned New England Puritanism.