“I venerate the man whose heart is warm,
Whose hands are pure, whose doctrine and whose life,
Coincident, exhibit lucid proof
That he is honest in the sacred cause.”
Cowper’s Task.
The Pilgrim Fathers were enamoured of the Mosaic code. They esteemed it to be a diamond without a flaw. Their constant, persistent effort was to naturalize the Jewish ritual in New England. For this their statesmen planned and their divines dogmatized. They did not remember that the judicial government which fitted the world in its infancy had been outgrown, and now sat awkwardly upon Christendom twenty-one years of age. They did not remember that Christ had “rung out” the old dispensation and “rung in” a grander and broader one.
Of course, in standing under the Mosaic code they were perfectly sincere; and to their sincerity they wedded a Titanic earnestness. They regarded toleration as a snare and a curse. It was either the badge of indifference or the corslet of Atheism; therefore a vice entitled to no terms. The advocates of toleration in the seventeenth century may be counted on the fingers of one’s two hands. The most advanced thinkers of that epoch scarcely ventured, even in their most generous moments, to hint at a toleration of all creeds—each man responsible alone to God. The Romanist denied it amid the crackling flames of his auto da fé, and held with the Sorbonne and with Bossuét, that the stake is bound to extirpate heresy.[814] The Protestant urged exceptions when he asked for toleration; and, with Cartwright, forsook those who came under his ban, “that they might not corrupt and infect others.”[815]
Tindale appealed not to the Pope, or to councils, or to the king, but to the Bible. So did Latimer; so did the Ridleys; so did Cranmer; so did Bradford: all of whom were blessed martyrs: yet none of these believed in full toleration; they had not yet reached it. They accepted what was behind them; they had a shadowy conception of what was in advance; but they feared, and were tolerant only up to their own position, while they cried “halt!” to a farther progress.
This European wave of sentiment swept in strong eddies to America; and in New England Cotton wrote: “It was toleration that made the world anti-Christian; and the church never took harm by the punishment of heretics.”[816] The cobbler of Agawam[817] responded: “Yes: to authorize an untruth by a toleration of state, is to build a sconce against the walls of heaven, to batter God out of his chair.”[818]
Therefore, the Pilgrim Fathers, backed by the public opinion of Christendom, tabooed toleration, and gave it no place under the theocracy. When Roger Williams landed with his wife at Boston, in 1631, this was the sentiment and so stood the law.