Unquestionably honest minds might differ in this policy. “But certainly the doctrine of the Puritans concerning the connection and mutual influence between forms and opinions, so far from being fanciful or fastidious, had foundations as deep as any thing in moral truth or in human nature. A sentiment determined their course; but it was more cogent than all the learned argument which they lavished in its defence. A man of honor will not be bribed to display himself in a fool’s cap; yet why not in a fool’s cap as readily as in any apparel associated in his mind, and in the minds of those whom he respects, whether correctly or not is immaterial, with the shame of mummery and falsehood? To these men the cope and surplice seemed the livery of Rome. They would not put on the uniform of that hated power, while they were marshalling an array of battle against its ranks. An officer, French, American, or English, would feel outraged by a proposal to be seen in the garb of a foreign service. The respective wearers of the white and tricolor cockades would be more willing to receive each other’s swords into their bosoms than to exchange their decorations. A national flag is a few square yards of coarse bunting; but associations invest it which touch whatever is strongest and deepest in national character. Its presence commands an homage as reverential as that which salutes an Indian idol. Torrents of blood have been poured out age after age to save it from affront. The rejection of the cope and mitre was as much the fruit and the sign of the great reality of a religious revolution, as a political revolution was betokened and effected when the cross of St. George came down from over the fortresses along fifteen degrees of the North American coast”[10] in ’76.
The contest which ensued between nascent Puritanism and the entrenched Conformists was prolonged and bitter. It deeply scarred the history of the contemporaneous actors; and it has shaped the ethics and the politics of two centuries; nor is its force yet spent. Indeed, it may be fitly called the epic of our Saxon annals.
“On the one side, in the outset, were statesmen desiring first and mainly the order and quiet of the realm. On the other side were religious men desiring that, at all hazards, God might be worshipped in purity and served with simplicity and zeal. It is easy to understand the perplexities and alarms of the former class; but the persistency of their opponents is not therefore to be accounted whimsical and perverse. It is impossible to blame them for saying, ‘If a man believes marriage to be a sacrament in the sense of the popes and the councils, let him symbolize it by the giving of a ring; if he believes in exorcism by the signing of the cross, let him have it impressed on his infant’s brow in baptism; if he believes the bread of the Eucharist to be God, let him go down on his knees before it. But we do not believe these things, and as honest men we will not profess so to believe by act or sign any more than by word.’ Theirs was no struggle against the church, but against the state’s control over it.”[11]
The fatal error of the church-and-state reformers was, that they strove to coerce unwilling consciences into exact conformity with a prescribed formula of worship by penal legislation. No latitude was even winked at. It was a new edition of the old story of Procrustes and his iron bed. Britain, emancipated from the pope, still hugged the popedom. The rulers of the island clutched the weapons and enacted the rôle of the Hildebrandes, the Gregorys, and the Innocents of ecclesiastical history. Dissent was “rank heresy.” Liberty was “license.” The measure of a conscience was the length of a prelate’s foot.
“An act was passed in 1593,” says Hoyt, “for punishing all who refused to attend the Established Church, or frequented conventicles or unauthorized assemblies. The penalty was, imprisonment until the convicted person made declaration of his conformity; and if that was not done within three months after arrest, he was to quit the realm, and go into perpetual banishment. In case he did not depart within the specified time, or returned without license, he was to suffer death.”[12]
In 1603, when James I. came down from Scotland to ascend the English throne, so stood the law. Nor did it rest idle in the statute-book. The parchment fiat was instinct with vicious life. Hecatombs of victims suffered under it.[13] “Toleration,” remarks Goodrich, “was a virtue then unknown on British ground. In exile alone was security found from the pains and penalties of non-conformity to the Church of England.”[14]
During the pendency of the dissension between the Puritans and the Conformists within the bosom of the church, many honest thinkers, feeling hopeless of success in that unequal conflict, broke from their old communion, and set up a separate Ebenezer.[15] Even so early as 1592, Sir Walter Raleigh, speaking in the House of Commons, affirmed that these “Come-outers” numbered upwards of twenty thousand.[16] Since that date, every year had added new recruits to their ranks, until, in 1603, they had expanded into a wealthy, influential, and puissant party in the state.[17]
Though socially tabooed and politically ostracised—though shackled by fierce prohibitory legislation and by governmental ill-will, the Separatists, as they were called, still prayed and hoped, walking through persecution with faith in their right hand and with patience in their left. At one time they thought they could discern a ray of light on the sullen horizon which gloomed upon them. James I. had been educated in Presbyterian Scotland.[18] He had often hymned the praises of the polity of stout John Knox.[19] When he crossed the Tweed, jubilant Puritanism cried, “Amen,” and “All hail.” Ere long, however, the weak and treacherous Stuart deserted his Scottish creed. From that moment he hated his old comrades with the peculiar bitterness of an apostate. No epithet was vile enough by which to paint them. He raked the gutter of the English language for phrases. “These Puritans,” said he, “are pests in the church and commonwealth—greater liars and perjurers than any border thieves.”[20]
At the Hampton Court Conference—an intellectual tournament between the representatives of the opposing religious parties—the royal buffoon affirmed his determination to make the Puritans “conform, or harry them out of the land, or else worse.”[21]
It has been truly said that “the friends of religious reform had never seen so hopeless a time as that which succeeded the period of the most sanguine expectation. In the gloomiest periods of the arbitrary sway of the two daughters of Henry VIII., they could turn their eyes to a probable successor to the throne who would be capable of more reason or more lenity. Now nothing better for them appeared in the future than the long reign of a prince wrong-headed and positive alike from imbecility, prejudice, pique, and self-conceit, to be succeeded by a dynasty born to the inheritance of the same bad blood, and educated in the same pernicious school. It is true that, as history reveals the fact to our age, almost with the reign of the Scottish alien that nobler spirit began to animate the House of Commons which ultimately” checkmated tyranny beneath the scaffold of Charles I. But this astounding blow was then remote. “As yet the steady reaction from old abuses was but dimly apparent, even to the most clear-sighted and hopeful minds; and numbers of devout and brave hearts gave way to the conviction that, for such as they, England had ceased for ever to be a habitable spot.”[22]