THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY

SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

DIRECTOR 1969-1973 SENIOR HISTORIAN 1973-1975

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\^^'] (American C^urc^ ^isforg

A ^HISTORY

OF THE

CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES

IN THE UNITED STATES,

BY

WILLISTON WALKER ^igu-n^^

"PROFESSOR IN HARTPORD THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY

mew l^orf? C^fttfes ^crifincr's ^ons

MDCCCXCIX

Copyright, 1894, By The Christian Literature CoMP.\iRfo

CONTENTS.

Bibliography ix

CHAP. I. — The Beginnings of Congregationalism. — The Refor- mation and the Bible. — The Reformation Incomplete. — Calvin's Work. — The Anabaptists. — Anabaptist Principles. — The English Reformation. — The Early Puritans. — Thomas Cartwright. — Limita- tions of Puritanism. — Advance of Anglicanism. — Diverse Political Theories. — Congregational Beginnings 1

CHAP. II. — Early English Congregationalism. — Robert Browne. — Browne's Spiritual Development. — Browne's Church. — Browne's Congregationalism. — The London Church.- — Greenwood and Bar- rowe. — Expositions of Congregationalism. — John Penry. — Francis Johnson. — Exiles in Amsterdam 31

CHAP. III. — Congregationalism Carried to America. — The Pil- grim Church. — John Smyth. — Pilgrims at Leyden. — The Emi- gration.— Arrival in America. — Early Struggles. — Robinson and Brewster. — The Plymouth Church 56

CHAP. IV. — The Puritan Settlement of New England — Puri- tanism Congregationalized. — Puritanism not Separatism. — - Puritan Hopes. — ^James and the Puritans. — James and Parliament. — The Policy of Charles. — Rise of Arminianism. — William Laud. — Laud and the Puritans. — Beginnings of Massachusetts. — Character of Immigration. — Influenced by Plymouth. — The Salem Church. — The Dorchester Church. — Charlestown and Watertown. — A State Church. — Settlement of Connecticut. — Settlement of New Haven. — Milford and Guilford 76

CHAP. V. — The Development of Fellowship. — A Difficult Situa- tion.— Roger Williams. — Effects of the Discussion. — The " Anti- nomians." — The First Synod. — Fate of the Antinomians. — Baptists and Quakers. — Puritanism not Alone Severe. — Investigation and Education. — Their Effect. — Congregational Treatises. — Vassall and Child. — The Cambridge Synod. — The " Cambridge Platform." .... 125

CHAP. VI. — Congregationalism from 1650 to 1725. — Indian Mis- sions.— The Half- Way Covenant. — Convention of 1657. — Synod of 1662. — Res^Uts of the Dispute. — " Stoddardeanism." — Half-Way

VI CONTENTS.

PAGE

Covenant Abandoned. — Increase Mather. — The " Reforming Syn- od."— The Confession of 1680. — Loss of the Charter.— The Andros Episode. — The New Charter. — Salem Witchcraft. — Ministerial As- sociations.— Brattle Church. — The Proposals of 1705. — Causes of Friction. — The " Saybrook Platform." — John Wise and his Theo- ries.— A Synod Forbidden 164

CHAP. VII. — Early Theories and Usages. — Little Doctrinal Dis- cussion.— Theory of the Church. — Covenants and Confessions. — Choice of Officers. — Ordination of Officers. — Duties of Officers. — Duties and Support. — Ministerial Support. — Exemption of Dis- senters.— Separation of Church and State. — The Meeting-house and Services. — Sunday Services. — The Sacrament. — Other Services, — Communion of Churches. — Legislative Supervision 214

CHAP. VIII. — The Great Awakening and the Rise of Theo- logical Parties. — Spiritual Decline. — Edwards and the Revivals. — George Whitefield. — The Great Awakening. — New England Di- vided.— Connecticut Separatists. — Criticisms and Replies. — Rise of Doctrinal Schools. — The Liberals. — Mayhew and Briant. — Briant's Opponents. — Discussion on Original Sin. — Jonathan Mayhew. — Arian Views. — Jonathan Edwards. — Edwards's Writings. — Joseph Bellamy. — Samuel Hopkins. — Smalley, West, and Edwards. — Early Universalism. — The Atonement. — Nathanael Emmons. — Timothy Dwight. — EfTects of the Discussions. — Development of Polity .... 251

CHAP. IX. — The Evangelical Revival. — Westward Emigration. — Missionary Societies. — Presbyterians and Congregationalists. — The " Plan of Union." — Spiritual Quickening. — Foreign Missions. — The American Board. — The " Education Society." — ^The " Home Missionary Society." — The Unitarian Separation. — Theological Ed- ucation.— Andover Seminary. — Yale Divinity School. — Nathaniel W. Taylor. — Bennet Tyler. — Hartford Seminary. — Oberlin Semi- nary.— Finney and Bushnell. — Bushnell's Views 309

CHAP. X. — The Denominational Awakening — Modern Con- greg.\tionalism. — Formation of Associations. — Churches in Illi- nois and Iowa. — Wisconsin and Minnesota. — Missouri and Oregon. — California^ — Bacon, Thompson, and Clark. — The " Albany Con- vention."— New Societies. — Plenry M. Dexter. — Chicago Seminary. — In the New West. — A. Hastings Ross. — Ministerial Standing. — The "National Council" of 1865.— The "Burial Hill Declara- tion."— A Statement of Polity. — "American Missionary Associa- tion."— Woman's Missionary Societies. — The Triennial National Council. — The "Creed of 1883." — Recent Tendencies. — The An- dover Controversy. — The American Board. — Novel Methods of Work. — Employment of Women 370

CHAP. XI. — Congregational F.a.cts and Tr.\its. — Congregational

Statistics. — Congregational Principles 427

A HISTORY OF THE CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES IN THE UNITED STATES.

WILLISTON WALKER,

Professor in Hartford Theological Seminary.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

Congregationalism has always inclined to publication, and the number of works really germane to the history of the denomination is enormous and constantly increasing. The connection of the body with the settlement of New England and the opening up of the West has led to some treatment of the features of this story by almost every writer on the beginnings of the northern United States, and the intimacy which marked the relationship of the Congregational churches to the civil governments during much of their American life renders town and colonial histories, legislative records, and even personal journals scarcely less sources of religious than of secular history. Fortunately for the student of Congregationalism, a bibliography of works in any way related to the theme was prepared by the late Rev. Dr. Henry M. Dexter, and published in his " Congregationalism of the last Three Hundred Years " (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1880). This magnificent list, the result of years of investigation, extends from 1546 to 1879, and embraces 7250 titles. Yet even this is not exhaustive, and a complete bibliography, brought down to 1894, would probably include at least 8000 works which might justly be claimed to illustrate the story of Congregationalism more or less directly. The present writer, in his " Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism " (New York, Charles Scrib- ner's Sons, 1893), has given extended bibliographies of the leading Congregational symbols and of the discussions out of which they have grown.

No one library includes all Congregational literature ; but the student will find large collections in the possession of the Congregational Library at Boston, of Yale University (Dr. Dexter's own library), of the Massachusetts Historical Society or of the Public Library (Prince Library) at Boston, and of the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester. Smaller collections of value are those of the Connecticut Historical Society at Hartford, of Andover Theological Seminary, and of Union Theological Seminary.

The following list is presented merely as suggestive of works of special importance for Congregational History.

Declarations on Faith and Polity.

A Trve Description ovt of tJie Word of God, of the Visible Church. [Dort], 1589. (The first Declaration of the London-Amsterdam Church.)

A Trve Confession of the Fuith, and Hvmble Acknovvledgtiient oe the Alegeance, which wee hir Maie sties Subjects, falsely called Brownists, doo hoicld towards God, aiid yeild to hir Majestic and all other that are ouer vs in the Lord. [Amsterdam], 1596. (The second Declaration of the London-Amsterdam Church.)

X BIBLIOGRAPHY.

A Platfortii of Church Discipline gathered out of the Word of God\ and agreed upon by the Eldej's and Messengers of the Churches assembled in the Synod at Ca/nbridge in Neto England. Cambridge, 1649. (The Cambridge Platform. )

Propositions concerning the Subject of Baptism and Consociation of Chiijxhes, Collected and Confirmed out of the lVo7'd of God, by a Synod of Elders and Messengers of the Churches in Massachnsets-Colony iji New- Englatid. Assembled at Boston . . . In the Year 1662. Cambridge, 1662. (The Half- Way Covenant Synod.)

A Confession of Faith Ozvned and Consented unto by the Elders and Messen- gers of the Churches Assembled at Boston in A'eiu-England, May 12, 1680. Boston, 1680. (The " Confession of 1680.")

A Confession of Faith Oivned and Consented to by the Elders and Messen- gers of the Churches in the Colony of Connecticut. , . . The Heads of Agreement, Assented to by the United Ministers, formerly called Presby- terian and Congregational. And also Articles for the Administration of Church Discipline Unanimously agreed upon arid consented to by the Elders and Messengers of the Churches in the Colony of Connecticut i7t New-England. Assembled by Delegation at Say-Brook September gth, 1708. New London, 1710. (The Saybrook Platform.)

The '' Plati of Union." Minutes of the General Assembly of the Presby- terian Church, etc., 1789 to 1820, Philadelphia [1847], pp. 224, 225.

The "Burial Hill Declaration." Congregational Quarterly, vol. x., pp.

377, 378.

Ecclesiastical Polity. The Government and Communion Practised by the Congregational Churches in the United States of America. Boston, Congregational Publishing Society, 1872. (The Boston Platform.)

The " Commission Creed of 188 j." Congregationalist, March 6, 1884.

All of the above, except the " Boston Platform," are reprinted in full in Walker, Williston, The Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism. New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1893.

Besides these official declarations, the various state bodies publish Minutes of their meetings, and the following National Assemblies have published records, viz. : (i) Proceedings of the General Convention of Cong. Alinisters and Delegates in the United States, held at Albany, N^.Y., on the ^th, 6th, yth, and 8th of Oct., 18^2. New York, S. W. Benedict, 1852. (2) De- bates and Proceedings of the National Council of Congregational Churches, Held at Boston, Mass., June 14-24, 1865. Boston, American Congrega- tional Association, 1866. (3) Minutes of the N'ational Council of the Congregational Churches of the United States of America. (Issued triennially since 1871 by the Congregational Publishing Society, Boston.) (4) A Year- book of statistics, ministerial lists, etc., has been published in some form since 1854, and is now issued by the Publishing Committee of the National Council and printed by the Congregational Publishing Society, Boston.

Treatises on Congregational Polity.

Browne, Robert, A Booke luhich She^oeth the life and manners of all true Christians, etc. Middelburg, imprinted by Richarde Painter, 1582. (Extracts reprinted in \Yalker's " Creeds and Platforms.")

BIBLIOGRAPHY. xi

Barrowe, Henry, A Brief Discoturie of the false Church. [Dort], 1590.

Robinson, John, Various treatises written between 1610 and 1625, and collected by Robert Ashton, IVoj-ks of John Robinson. 3 vols. London, John Snow, 185 1.

[Mather, Richard], Church-Government and Chujrh-Covenant Discussed, in an AnsT.ver of the Elders of the severall Churches in New-E^tgland to two and thirty Questions. London, printed by R. O. and G. D. for Benjamin Allen, 1643.

Cotton, John, The Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven. London, 1644. Reprinted, Boston, Tappan & Dennet, 1843 ; and Boston, S. R. Whipple & Co., 1852.

Hooker, Thomas, Sji7xiey of the Summe of Church-Discipline. London, printed by A. M. for John Bellamy, 1648.

"Wise, John, The Chtcrches Quarrel Espoused. Boston, 1710. — A Vin- dication of the Government of New England Churches. Boston, \']^.'^. Both reprinted in one volume. Boston, Congregational Board of Publica- tion (now Congregational Sunday-School and Publishing Society), i860.

Mather, Cotton, Ratio Disciplines Fratruni N'ov-Anglorum. Boston, S. Gerrish, 1726.

XJpham, Thomas C, Ratio Disciplince ; or, The Constitution of the Con- gregational Churches. Portland [Me.], Shirley & Hyde, 1829.

CummingS, Preston, A Dictionary of Congregational Usages and Principles. Boston, 1852. Sixth edition, Boston, S. K. Whipple & Co., 1855.

Buck, Edward, Massachusetts Ecclesiastical Law. Boston, Congrega- tional Publishing Society, [1865].

Davis, Woodbury, Congregational Polity, Usages, and Law. Boston, Proprietors of " Boston Review," 1865.

Dexter, Henry M., Congregationalisni : What it is ; Whence it is ; How it works. Boston, Nichols & Noyes, 1865.

Roy, Joseph E., A Manual of the Principles, Doctrines, and Usages of the Congregational Churches. Chicago, 1869.

Dexter, Henry M., A Hand-Book of Congregationalism. Boston, Con- gregational Publishing Society, [1880].

-Ross, A. Hastings, A Pocket Manual of Congregationalism. Chicago, E. J. Alden, 1883.

Boardman, George Nye, Congregationalism. Chicago, Advance Pub- lishing Company, [if ~

Sources and Histories.

The Colonial Records of the several colonies of Plymouth, Massachusetts,

Connecticut, and New Haven. Now largely printed, and to be found in

any well-equipped historical or public library. Bradford, William, History of Plymouth Plantation (Gov. Bradford's

Journal). Boston, Little, Brown & Co., 1856. Winthrop, John, History of New England from i6jo to i64<p (Gov.

Winthrop's Journal). Best edition that of James Savage, Boston,

Little, Brown & Co., 1853. Mather, Cotton, Magnalia Christi Americana. London, 1702. Other

editions, Hartford, Silas Andrus, 1820; and Hartford, Silas Andrus &

Son, 1853-55.

Xll BIBLIOGRAPHY.

Young, Alexander, Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers. Boston, Little & Brown, 1841 and 1844. — Chronicles of the First Planters of the Colony of Mass. Bay. Boston, Little & Brown, 1846.

Hanbury, Benjamin, Historical Memorials relating to the Independents, or Congregationalists : from their Rise to the Restoration of the Mon- archy, A.D. MDCLX. 3 vols. London, printed for the Congrega- tional Union of England and Wales ; Fisher, Son & Co., and Jackson & Walford, 1839-44. (An ill-arranged work, but filled with reprints and abstracts of great value.)

Felt, Joseph B., The Ecclesiastical History of New England [to 1678].

2 vols. Boston, Cong. Board of Publication, 1855-62.

Sprague, William B., Annals of the Ame7-ican Pitlpit, vols. i. and ii.

New York, Robert Carter & Bros., 1857. (Biographies.) Punchard, George, History of Congregatiojtalism. 5 vols, in revised

edition. New York and Boston, first by Hurd & Houghton, and then

by the Congregational Publishing Society, 1865-81. Waddington, John, Congregational History. 5 vols. London, Simmons

& Botten, 1869-78. (Valuable, but not always accurate in quotations.) Dexter, Henry M,, The Cotigregationalism of the last joo Years, as seen

m its Literature. New York, Harper & Brothers, 1880. (An in- dispensable work.) 'Huntington, George, Outlines of Congregational History. Boston, Cong.

Pub. Soc, 1885.

The following Histories will also be found of great value :

Hutchinson, Thomas, History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay.

3 vols. Boston, Thomas and John Fleet, 1764-69.

Palfrey, John G., History of N'ew England. 5 vols. Boston, Little,

Brown & Co., 1859-90. Doyle, J. A., The English in America : The Puritan Colonies. 2 vols.

London, Longmans, Green & Co., 1887. jj'iske, John, The Beginnings of N'ew England. Boston, Houghton,

Mifflin & Co., 1889.

Special Themes.

Adams, Charles Francis, Three Episodes of Mass. History. Boston,

Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1892. Bacon, Leonard, Thirteen Historical Discourses, on the Completion of 200

Years from the Begitifiing of the First Church in New Haven. New

Haven, Durrie & Peck, 1839. Bacon, Leonard, The Genesis of the New Engla^id Churches. New York,

Harper & Brothers, 1874. Clark, Joseph S., Historical Sketch of the Congregational Churches in

Massachusetts. Boston, Cong. Board of Publication, 1858. Congregational Quarterly. 20 vols. Boston, 1859-78. Contributions to the Ecclesiastical History of Cotmecticut ; prepared under

the Direction of the General Association. New Haven, William L.

Kingsley, 1861. (Of great value.) Contributions to the Ecclesiastical History of Essex County, Mass. Boston,

Cong. Board of Publication, 1865. Ellis, Arthur B., History of the First Church in Boston. Boston, Hall &

Whitini:, iSSi.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. xiii

Xiliis, George E., The Puritan Age and Ride in the Colony of Massachu- setts Bay, i62g-i68j. Boston, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1888.

Goodwin, Jolm A., The Pilgrim Republic : An Historical Revieza of the Colony of A^ew Plymouth. Boston, Ticknor & Co., 1888.

Hill, Hamilton A., History of the Old South Church, Boston. 2 vols. Boston, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1890.

Lawrence, Robert F., The Nnu Hampshire Churches. Claremont, published for the Author, 1856.

Ohio Church History Society, Papers. Oberlin, printed for the Society, 1889-93.

Parker, Edwin P., History of the Second Church of Christ in Hartford. Hartford, Belknap & Warfield, 1892.

Robbins, Chandler, History of the Second C/nirch in Boston. Boston, John Wilson & Son, 1852.

Tracy, Joseph, The Great Awakening : A History of the Revival of Religion in the Time of Edwards and Whitefield. Boston, Tappan & Dennet, 1842.

Trumbull, Benjamin, A Complete History of Connecticzit, Civil and Ecclesiastical. 2 vols. New Haven, Maltby, Goldsmith & Co., 1818.

Walker, George Leon, History of the First Church in Hartford. Hart- ford, Brown & Gross, 1884.

"White, Daniel A., New England Congregationalism. Salem, no pub- lisher given; printed at Salem Gazette Office, 1861.

THE CONGREGATIONALISTS.

CHAPTER I.

THE BEGINNINGS OF CONGREGATIONALISM.

It has been said that the Bible is the religion of Protest- antism. With even more truth it might be affirmed that the Word of God is the historic basis of Congregation- alism. Yet neither of these statements is exclusive of similar claims for other branches of the Christian Church. In a real sense all are founded upon the Bible. But as Protestantism in general has made a peculiar use of the Scriptures and attached to them a unique authority in all matters of doctrine, so Congregationalism, at least in all its earlier history, has attributed a regulative importance to the directions of the New Testament writers regarding church administration, and has given a normal value even to their most incidental narratives of church usages, more fully than any other system of ecclesiastical polity. What- ever stress is now properly laid, in any estimate of the claims of Congregationalism to general recognition, on its democratic simplicity, on its independence of state control, its voluntariness of association, or its ready adaptation to new surroundings, is but incidental to the one merit which its modern founders claimed for it — that it represented the pattern of the primitive and apostolic church, as laid

2 THE CONGREGA TIONALISTS. [Chap. i.

down in the New Testament. To understand how this claim came to be made, and how the Congregational sys- tem came to be what it is, it is necessary to glance at the attitude of the Reformation toward the Scriptures and toward church polity.

The great teachers of the medieval church had uniformly held that the Bible is the ultimate source of religious au- thority. But it was not the Bible interpreted by the in- dividual. No thought fundamental to the Roman Empire had been more impressed on the minds of men than that of visible, external unity — a unity finding expression in a uniform system of government, a uniform body of law, and a visible, earthly head. This great Roman imperial con- ception had produced the medieval papacy ; it produced also in the political world the far less efficient, but no less assertive. Holy Roman Empire. For such a body, char- acterized by such external marks of unity, an authorita- tive exposition of that which it claimed as its fundamental law, the Bible, was imperatively necessary. That expo- sition was believed to be set forth by the church itself, speaking through tradition, the consensus of its fathers and doctors, the decrees of its popes, and especially through general councils. All these made a mass of authority which, though professedly subordinate to the Word of God and merely interpretative of it, really, if not theoret- ically, put it in the background; and substituted for a direct appeal to its prescriptions, a mass of exposition, the slow growth of centuries, which buttressed an elaborate sys- tem of doctrine, polity, and ceremonial, itself the result of gradual accretion through nearly a millennium and a half of years.

Naturally, with such a sense of the necessity of unity and such claims to continuity in its explanation of the divine message, the position of the medieval church was

THE REFORMATION AND THE BIBLE. 3

equally clear that for an ordinary uneducated layman to attempt the interpretation of the Scriptures was a matter of exceeding peril. The medieval church felt that it had some justification for this position. The sects with which it had struggled, sometimes with very carnal weapons, had claimed to base their departures from Roman obedience on the warrant of the Scriptures. The Waldenses and the Cathari had been the source of infinite trouble to the medieval church, and the Roman leaders felt that much in their beliefs could be traced to erroneous interpreta- tions of the Bible by ignorant laymen, a danger which they thought could only be avoided by a careful restric- tion of its use wherever such errors were prevalent. So it came about that when the great revolt against medieval authority which is called the Reformation took place, it found the Bible bound about with a web of authoritative interpretation which explained its meaning in conformity with the system against which the Reformation rebelled and asserted that any other interpretation was illegitimate. The explanation had grown to be more practically impor- tant than the Scripture itself.

The early Reformers broke with this theory of interpre- tation altogether. In throwing off the sacerdotal system of the Roman Church, they asserted the right of immedi- ate access of every believing soul to God, and its capacity to comprehend the divine message. They attacked the whole medieval hierarchy as a growth of middle-men be- tween the- Divine Spirit and the human soul, where God intended there should be none. They rejected the whole fabric of tradition and conciliar definition by which the medieval polity had been supported as something man- made and fallible. But some final authority they felt there must be, some test of religious truth ; and that they found where the church had always asserted that it lay,

4 THE CONGREGATIONALISTS. [Chap. i.

in the Word of God. Yet just as the medieval system, by emphasizing tradition and churchly authority in inter- pretation, had really, though not nominally, minified the Bible, so now the Reformers, by rejecting the testimony of the church and the traditional views of truth, and assert- ing the self-explanatory nature of the Scriptures, actually raised the Bible to an authority in the church, which, what- ever the theory, it had never before possessed, not even in the earliest centuries. Whether this extreme assertion of biblical authority was undue or not is not here the ques- tion ; but no one can understand the early history of Con- gregationalism without recognizing clearly the emphasis which the Reformers put upon the Scriptures as the infal- lible, complete, and self-interpretative expression of the will of God and the nature of his relations to men — a record to which no tradition could add anything, and which by its fullness excluded the necessity of any further revelation.

Two principles plainly flowed from these views of the Reformers, though not recognized in their fullness of ap- plication by the leaders in the reform movement. It is evident that if the Bible is a complete revelation, then all that is really essential, whether in belief or in practice, must be contained in it, and all that cannot be found there delineated is at best a matter of human judgment or con- venience, that, however useful, is in no way essential to the faith, organization, or ordering of the church. The Bible must be the only final test of that which God de- signed his church to be or to know. It is no less clear, that, granting the correctness of the Reformers' principles, it is always right for a man, or a body of men, to apply this test to the actual condition of any organization claim- ing to be the church, and if it be found wanting, to attempt its alteration into conformity with the prescriptions of that divine standard.

THE REFORMATION INCOMPLETE. 5

But though these principles were involved in the asser- tions of the Reformers, their full logical sweep was not at first evident. No great movement is wholly radical. The past is not swept away in a moment. And tremendous as were the changes which the Reformers introduced, that which they left unchanged in the doctrine and organization of the church far exceeded that which was altered. In the field of Christian belief, while the battle raged with fierceness over the problems of the method of salvation and the nature of the sacraments, the Reformers as a whole accepted the faith of the ancient church regarding the nature of God, the person and work of Christ, and even the state of man, without serious discussion. Even more was this true regarding church polity. If the Reformers altered that which was chiefly political in the administra- tion of the church, or those offices which seemed most intimately associated with the sacerdotal system against which they revolted, they left untouched the medieval theory that all baptized inhabitants of a Christian country were church-members unless formally excommunicate, and they preserved enough of the ancient conception of visible unity to hold that but one form of faith and worship was to be allowed within a given territory.

Other causes than these operated also to make the ques- tion of the proper polity of the church a subordinate one for the early Reformers. The brunt of the struggle was at first chiefly doctrinal, and naturally so, for purification of doctrine was more important even than the right organ- ization of the church. Then, too, the early German and Swiss Reformers, Luther, Melanchthon, and Zwingli, were not organizers ; and though Luther at least caught a glimpse of a system very like Congregationalism in the pages of the New Testament, they all felt the need of the aid of civil authority in their struggle with Rome ; and,

6 THE CONGREGATIONALTSrS. [Chap. i.

partly because they could in no other way enlist the ser- vices of princes and city magistrates, partly because they feared the fanatics whom the Reformation drew in its train and who threatened to bring the cause into discredit if they became dominant," these leaders in the struggle allowed their churches to be remodeled and ruled by the authority of the state. ' This condition of affairs, which they hoped would be temporary, became the universal rule in Europe, and has continued to the present day. Whatever may have been its merits or its seeming necessity in a time of transition, when tested by the standard of the New Testament it is at least as unwarranted as the system which it supplanted.

If the German and Swiss Reformers of the first genera- tion failed thus to apply the same Scriptural test to the organization that they did, in part at least, to the doctrine of the church, this was even more the case in England. There the Reformation was undisguisedly political in its character at first, and even doctrinal reform had to win its way slowly. Under the reigns of successive sovereigns of the house of Tudor the Church of England became in turn Anglican, Protestant, Catholic, and again Anglican; and at each alteration of the constitution the transition to the new form was made as easy as possible for clergy and people by the retention of offices and much of ceremonial which had marked the organization of the English Church for a thousand years. At each transition, too, clergy and people were expected by the government to acquiesce in the new revolution at least outwardly ; and that this ac- quiescence should be more easily obtained, little strenuous inquiry was made as to the spiritual character or actual beliefs of the ministers and members of the Establishment. In doctrines the English Church at last came to be fully Protestant, but its terms of membership were unchanged

CALVIN'S WORK. 7

and its offices remained substantially and intentionally un- altered, save that their holders now looked with Erastian servility to the king as the sole source of ecclesiastical ap- pointment with even greater dependence than they had before manifested toward the pope. Certainly no one could justly claim that Henry VIII., or the government that ruled in the name of Edward VI., or Elizabeth, in giving a constitution to the church, was moved by a con- sideration of any pattern which might be laid down in the Word of God. Yet if the Reformation principle that the Bible is the sole rule of faith and conduct was once admitted, there could be no logical halting-point either on the continent of Europe or in England before the inquiry had been diligently made whether the organization of the church and its forms of worship were not matters of divine revelation as truly as its doctrine. The Reformation could not be stopped at the point where political expediency tried to limit it,'

This tendency of the Reformation to go further in the direction of a logical carrying out of its principles than the position taken by its first leaders was manifested in the guiding spirit of its second stage — Calvin ; though he too failed to apply the Reformation test in its fullness to the organization and membership of the church. But Calvin went far beyond Luther and Zwingli. He was an organ- izer by nature ; his personality dominated the small com- munity, Geneva, in which his work was done, so that he had freer scope to carry his views into practice than Luther would have enjoyed had Luther possessed his or- ganizing ability. And Calvin, too, felt strongly that the Bible should be regulative of the pattern and order of the church in a general way, even if he did not make it ex- clusively formative. His Genevan church thus approxi- mated far more nearly to the New Testament conception

8 THE CONGREGATIONALISTS. [Chap. i.

than that of the English political reformers or of Luther, while it did not fully or exclusively submit itself to the biblical test. Thus Calvin went a long way toward the position of Congregationalism when he held that ministers were to be approved by the congregations whom they were to serve, instead of being appointed by spiritual superiors, sovereigns, or patrons ; and when he committed the government of churches not to a clerical order but to elderships, composed of ministers and laymen. These were long steps in the direction of a more logical applica- tion of the Reformation test, and they w^ere to be pro- foundly influential in the ecclesiastical development of English Puritanism, out of which most of the early Con- gregationalists were to come. But Calvin admitted that certain features of his system were based primarily on expediency, and he retained the conception of the church as an institution practically coterminous with the state, though independent in government, having all baptized citizens of respectable lives as its members, and whose discipline is to be enforced by state authority.

But while the chief of the early leaders of the Refor- mation thus only partially carried out their principles, and the churches which they founded thus took up into their organization, in greater or less degree, elements foreign to the New Testament, or at least not illustrated in the New Testament churches, some who were touched by the Reformation at its beginning were more radical and con- sistent. Whether it be true, as Ludwig Keller has asserted but hardly proved, that these completer Reformers were representatives of the more evangelical medieval sects, like the Waldenses, which had continuously opposed Roman claims, it is certain that the movements initiated in Ger- many and in Switzerland by Luther and Zwingli were speedily disturbed by the preaching of a class of teachers

THE ANABAPTISTS. g

nicknamed the " Anabaptists," from their limitation of the baptismal rite to believers of adult years — a doc- trine which seemed to the Lutherans and Zwinglians an insistence on " re-baptism," since they, in common with all others born under the rule of the medieval church, had been baptized in infancy. Doubtless the fanatical exhorters of Wittenberg and Zwickau, whose words and deeds induced Luther to leave the protection of the Wart- burg castle in 1522 to preach against them, were repre- sentatives of the same radical tendency ; but the " Ana- baptist " tenets were more fully and more nobly developed in Zurich, the scene of the activities of the Swiss Reformer. Here, under the lead of Grebel, Blaurock, Hiibmaier, and others, a party of considerable size developed, which in- sisted that the close connection of church and state en- couraged by the leading Reformers was wholly wrong, and which attacked the reformations of Luther and Zwingli as but half-hearted and incomplete. These men were as obnoxious to the Protestant as to the Catholic civil au- thorities, and were at once objects of persecution in every quarter. Attacked by the government of Ziirich in 1525, the effect of this attempt at their suppression was the rapid diffusion of their sentiments throughout Switzer- land, Germany, and the Netherlands, while by 1535 they had extended to England and soon after appeared in Italy. By the Catholics and the Anglicans they were burned, by the continental Protestants they were drowned. There was indeed a degree of explanation, though not of excuse, for this universal severity of treatment in the fanaticism which characterized many of the Anabaptists, and which led them into wild and sometimes dangerous and immoral attempts to alter the foundations of society, of which the fantastic misrule so bloodily brought to an end at Miinster in 1535 is the most notorious example. Like the rad-

lO THE CONGREGATIONALISTS. [Chap. i.

ical party in all movements which profoundly stir men, the Anabaptists gathered to themselves extremists of all shades. To the Catholics they seemed odious as the most pronounced illustrations of the tendencies which were lead- ing multitudes away from the ancient communion ; to the moderate Protestants they appeared a peculiar menace as likely to bring into contempt the Reformation cause and forfeit the support of those worldly powers whose aid seemed to the leading Reformers well-nigh indispensable.

But though the fanatical Anabaptists caught the public eye, they were but a small proportion of the party. The vast majority were earnest, sober, God-fearing rnen and women, who came chiefly from the lower ranks of society, and whose prevailing ignorance led them to many diverse and fanciful interpretations of Scripture, and much over- confidence in direct illuminations of the Holy Spirit ; but who sincerely sought to pattern life and worship upon the Word of God. Especially was this true of those of the Anabaptists who came under the influence of Menno Simons, and who bore from their discipleship the popular name of Mennonites — a body which was strongly repre- sented in Holland, where it obtained from William the Silent in 1575-77 the first toleration granted to Anabap- tists by any European government.

Though the Anabaptists, unlike the Lutherans, Angli- cans, and Calvinists, had no creeds that were generally recognized as binding on all local congregations, and though there was necessarily great variety in opinion among them, their main principles are readily discernible. First of all they drew a broad line of distinction between those who were experimental Christians and those who were not. Instead of the general inclusiveness which swept all the inhabitants of a city or a state into the church — an in- clusiveness which characterized the systems of the great

ANABAPTIST PRINCIPLES. 1 1

Reformers as well as that of Rome — they held that only Christian believers constitute the church. Of that church and of all religious life the Bible is the only ultimate law. Human enactments have their value for the maintenance of unregenerate civil society and the control of the vicious, but the supreme test of every man-made statute is its conformity to the Word of God. Only when his com- mands are not contrary to the precepts of Scripture is obedience due to the civil magistrate. That magistrate has no right to interfere with the church, for the rule of its spiritual communion is the Word of God, and not his law ; nor should Christians hold civil office, since such worldly posts of power, though divinely permitted for the best good of a society still consisting in large measure of unregenerate persons, are not appointed as part of the government of the church, nor are the laws of their ad- ministration the statutes of Christ's kingdom. God alone, and not the civil ruler, appoints what the Christian is to believe and practice in all spiritual concerns.

This church, they affirmed, consists of the congregations of professed disciples of Christ scattered throughout the world. __ Admission to it is obtained by baptism, conse- quent upon repentance and faith ; and hence the Anabap- tists maintained, like their spiritual offspring, the modern Baptists, that this rite was designed exclusively for adults — a contention in which English and American Congrega- tionalism, with a keener sense of the covenant relation of the Christian family in the kingdom of God, has been unable to follow them. Of this church the Lord Jesus is the only head ; and its congregations enjoy the ministry, sacraments, doctrines, and discipline which he has ap- pointed. Its officers are to be chosen by the congregation to whom they minister, and ordained at the hands of its elders, with confidence that the Holy Spirit will guide his

12 THE CONGREGATIONALISTS. [Chap. i.

people in the selection, if made with fasting and prayer. The offenses of its membership are to be redressed by ad- monition and excommunication by the congregation. An uncritical literalness of interpretation of the commands of Christ induced the Anabaptists in general to forbid judicial oaths, the bearing of arms, or recompense for ministerial services.

Here was a conception of the organization, duties, and ministry of the church very different from that enter- tained in the state establishments founded by the leading Reformers, and characterized, in spite of all oddities and local differences, by a sincere desire to pattern its organi- zation and government on the Word of God. Further- more, we find this attempt leading everywhere to the thought of the church as a collection of local bodies of Christian people in some sense separate from the world, ruled by divinely appointed laws, capable of choosing their own officers, and administering their own affairs without interference from the state. It was a conception naturally repugnant to the mass of men in the sixteenth century, for they had not outgrown the idea ingrained into thought by over a thousand years of teaching that the church is a body marked by external unity — if not the unity of an undivided Christendom which the Reformation had de- stroyed, at least by uniformity of creed and worship within a given territory — a uniformity maintained by the state, and binding on all its citizens as members of the state church. It was repugnant also to governments, since it denied to them a much-cherished prerogative and markedly limited their powers, while it encouraged dem- ocratic tendencies at variance with the prevailing spirit of sixteenth-century political theories. Hence, had the radical Reformers been less feared for their frequent doc- trinal vagaries than they really were, their views would

THE ENGLISH REFORMATION. 13

have been slow in winning favor during the Reformation period.

The influences and parties which have just been con- sidered were continental, not English. But the same divergent tendencies were to be apparent in the English Reformation, and the influence of some of these conti- nental parties was to be largely formative in that move- ment. Owing in part to the caution with which the English mind accepts changes, whether in religion or in politics ; to its Mdllingness to adopt compromise even if compromise is not wholly logical ; and in part also to the political char- acter of the early history of the English Reformation and the opposition of the sovereigns to its more radical as- pects, the movement advanced far more slowly in England than on the Continent. It was in a true sense a period of reHgious education, as well as of change, for the Enghsh people. This slowness had its advantages both politically and religiously. The nation as a whole had hardly been removed from Catholicism under Henry VIII., save that it preferred English autonomy to submission to a foreign pope. It had learned something under the rule of the counselors of Edward VI., though the people in general regarded their violently Protestantizing measures with aversion. But it viewed the equally arbitrary Catholic rule of Mary with yet greater dislike, and by the accession of Elizabeth it was convinced that Protestantism was more desirable than Catholicism. The cautious and intentionally compromising policy of Elizabeth's early reign had one merit at least — it continued the development of the English people toward Protestantism without serious risk of violent Catholic reaction ; it was not till the Protestantism of the nation had passed the half-way position of the queen that she became a drag on English religious growth. This slow development saved England the bitter civil conflicts

14 THE CONGREGATIONALISTS. [Chap. i.

which desolated some of the continental lands during the Reformation period, and it also had an effect upon the religious life of the nation which was ultimately, though not immediately, beneficial. A generation passed away before the transition of the land from the Roman obedience of the early years of Henry VIII. to the very moderate Protestantism of Elizabeth had been accomplished. All this time English religious institutions were in flux, doc- trinal standards were being established looking first in one direction and then in the other, the thoughts of men were exercised with religious problems without long being cast in the mold of any one governmentally imposed system. At the same time no single leader, such as dominated the Reformation of Germany, Switzerland, or even Scotland, arose in the English Church. The result was that the people of England came — in a dim way, it is true — to think for themselves on religious problems more generally than the inhabitants of those countries of the Continent where the Reformation was more rapid in its introduction. Though the real spiritual awakening of the people was not manifest till Puritanism had carried its work well into the reign of Elizabeth, the hold which that movement took upon the English people was in no small measure due to the fact that for the first three decades of the English Reformation the Bible was studied by widening circles of thoughtful men, while the government spoke with chang- ing voice.

But while this delay and change which marked the prog- ress of the English Reformation doubtless worked good in the outcome in that it made a wider and deeper and freer religious life eventually possible than would have been the case had the people passed through a less tedious education, this slowness of development was a source of profound grief to the leaders in the Protestant movement

THE EARLY PURITANS. 1 5

in that land. From the first they labored to bring the Church of England to the degree of Protestantism illus- trated in the state churches of the Continent. In the early days of the English Reformation the German theolo- gians of the school of Luther had the sympathy of English Protestants, but by the time that the second prayer-book of Edward VI. was issued, in 1552, the influence of Calvin had become more powerful in the doctrinal thought of the English Reformers than that of the Lutherans. Thence- forward, till the incoming of Arminian theories in the reign of James I., all parties among English Protestants were Calvinists in theology. This desire to conform the Church of England to the Genevan model, which was already felt under the nominal rule of Edward VI., was greatly, though indirectly, stimulated by the persecutions of Mary. The more earnest Protestants fled from England to the Conti- nent, preferring exile to conformity to Catholicism. There they found a welcome in Switzerland and in the Calvinis- tic portions of Germany, though not much favor from the Lutherans ; and on the death of Mary they returned to England filled with admiration not only for the doctrine but for the polity and forms of worship of Calvinism, which they wished to introduce into their home land in Genevan fullness. Elizabeth had no sympathy with this aim ; but she needed men for places of prominence in her ecclesias- tical Establishment who could be trusted to oppose Catholic plots and strengthen Protestantism, and of such men the Marian exiles were the most conspicuous. So it came about that, in spite of her own preferences, Elizabeth was forced to give prominence in the English Church, at the beginning of her reign, to men who desired a much more radical Protestantizing of the ceremonials and liturgy of that body than found favor in her eyes.

To these Protestants of the more earnest type, the most

16 THE CONGREGATIONALISTS, [Chap. I.

serious objection to the Church of England at the beginning of EHzabeth's reign was not any fault in doctrine ; they agreed fully in its prevailing Calvinism. Nor did they at first oppose its retention of bishops. In fact, the Reformers as a whole had no dislike to an episcopal rank in the ministry, at least as administrators of church government, though cir- cumstances prevented its retention in most of the churches which they founded on the Continent. Even Calvin ad- vised the King of Poland to continue the episcopal ofifice in that land. Melanchthon thought bishops desirable as a means of establishing good order in the church. But none of the Reformers conceived of bishops as possessed of spiritual powers superior to those of other ministers. It was as administrative posts that the Protestants of the early reign of Elizabeth were willing to see the episcopal office continued. Nor did these Protestants at first object to the control of the state over the church — they accepted office from the hand of government without reluctance. Their opposition was directed in the beginning against none of these things, but against the retention of certain vestments and ceremonies which seemed to them to savor of the Roman liturgy. Thus, the cap and surplice were reminders of the old priestly garb which had seemed to make broad the line of distinction between the clergyman and the layman. So, too, the use of the cross as a sym- bol, the employment of the ring in marriage, and kneeling at the reception of the sacrament, seemed to these Prot- estants acts fitted to perpetuate the misuse of the sign of the Saviour's passion, to encourage the thought of marriage as a sacrament, and the conception of the Supper as a transubstantiation of the elements into the very body and blood of Christ, against which all Protestants of the Cal- vinistic school set their faces. These were in themselves acts of little moment — the battle-flag is seldom of much

THE EARLY PURITANS. I 7

intrinsic importance — but they symbolized much, and no one recognized their significance more clearly than Eliza- beth. Their retention meant the continuance of that policy by which the admission of Catholics into the Church of England was rendered easy — a policy which had so much politically to commend it. Their abolition would signify the full Protestantizing of the Anglican body, as Protest- antism was understood in the Calvinistic churches of the Continent, and the abandonment of the policy which made it a half-way house on the roadway of reform. As early as 1550, under the reign of Edward VI., Hooper, the bishop-elect of Gloucester, had denounced the prescribed vestments. The more earnest Protestants at the begin- ning of Elizabeth's reign, like Grindal, Sandys, and Jewel of the high clergy, and Burghley and Walsingham of the statesmen, were also their opponents. But Elizabeth was determined in her ecclesiastical policy; and on this point she had the sympathy of that large party in the kingdom whose affection for the abolished Catholic worship contin- ued, and who wished to make as few departures from it as were consistent with obedience to the law. In opposi- tion to the desires of the more earnest Protestants, she insisted on the enforcement of her ecclesiastical regulations. Thus there arose in the hosom of the Church of England, at the commencement of the reign of Elizabeth, two pari- ties, one of which, from its desire to purify the church from remnants of Roman usage, was nicknamed " Puri- tan " ; and the other of which, marked by a wish to main- tain churchly usages in the compromise condition in which they were, and to support the royal supremacy in order to that end, may, for want of a more descriptive title, be styled "Anglican."

The problem with which the Church of England was confronted at this juncture was of the most serious char-

l8 THE CONGREGATIONALISTS. [Chap. i.

acter. A mass of clergy and people, swept five years before by government edict out of nominal Protestant- ism back to their original Catholicism, had now been car- ried over to Protestantism again. The incumbents of the higher offices of the church had been generally changed ; but the overwhelming majority of the parish ministers of the new order of affairs were the same who had served under Mary ; and they were generally ignorant, unable to preach, often incapable of setting a worthy example of Christian living to their congregations. In place of this in- efficient body of clergy the Puritans were anxious to estab- lish an educated, spiritually-minded, and zealous ministry. It is no unjust criticism of the Anglicans to say that they were not so alive to the spiritual necessities of the land ; they were themselves very largely the ministry against whose inefficiency the Puritans protested. As far as a geographical division of England between the two parties may be made, the south and east, especially the vicinity of London and the counties along the North Sea from the Thames to the Humber, may be said to have favored Puri- tanism. This was the region of England which had most welcomed Wiclif and his laborers, and where the Reforma- tion had found most ready lodgment at its beginning. It was the region also from which the strength of the opposi- tion to the tyranny of the Stuarts was to come, and where no small share of the future settlers of New England had their home. It was no accident, therefore, that made the more eastern of the two English universities, that of Cam- bridge, the home of Puritanism almost from the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, and the training-school not only of the most strenuous Protestantism of the home land, but of most of the early New England divines.

The opposition of the authorities of the English Church, under the impulse of the queen, to the modifications de-

THOMAS CARTWRIGHT. 1 9

sired by the Puritans, led to a second stage in Puritan development, and one much more radical in its departure from the polity of the Establishment than that just con- sidered. The forcible retention of vestments and cere- monies which the growing Protestantism of the reform party increasingly condemned soon led to questionings as to whether the system itself which permitted their reten- tion was that divinely intended as the normal polity of the church ; some Puritans no longer criticised rites and gar- ments, they began to examine the constitution of the English Establishment in its fundamental principles. Naturally, the test by which they judged it was largely borrowed from Geneva. The leader in this second stage of Puritanism was Thomas Cartwright. Born in 1535, he was identified with the University of Cambridge from the year 1547, and as student, fellow, and teacher contributed more than any other Englishman toward making that seminary a strong- hold of Calvinism. His greatest prominence came in 1569, when he became Lady Margaret professor of divinity in his university ; but this post of influence exposed him to the immediate attack of the Anglicans, of whom the most prominent was John Whitgift, the later Archbishop of Can- terbury. By this opposition Cartwright was compelled to abandon his professorship in December, 1570, and in Sep- tember, 15 7 1, he was driven from his fellowship; thence- forward, till his death, in 1603, to be a sufTerer for his belief.

This dispute, centering in the university which best rep- resented the advancing Protestantism of the nation, made Cartwright the leader of the Puritan party, and impressed his views on his followers. He had gained from Calvin the conception of the church as independent of the state in administration — a theory toward which governmental opposition had been forcing the whole Puritan party. He

20 THE CONGREGA TIONALISTS. [Chap. i.

had come to the conclusion that church poHty is taught authoritatively in the Scriptures, and that no church could be truly reformed till its government was adjusted to the biblical model. He had learned from Geneva also a faith in the efificacy of discipline to remedy the spiritual imper- fections with which the unquestioning retention of the whole Catholic population of England in Elizabeth's Es- tablishment had filled the membership of the church. He had come to the belief that the system of diocesan episco- pacy was no part of the divine model, and ought at least to be essentially modified. He was convinced that the people of each parish should have a share in the selection of its ministers. These principles were in radical contra- vention of the Elizabethan theory of the government of the church by officers of royal appointment and by laws imposed by the sovereign ; no real compromise between them and the Anglican theory was possible. Elizabeth and the Anglican party generally saw their threatening character, and the power of the government was there- fore set in yet more determined opposition to the Puritan cause.

But though Cartwright moved thus with firm tread in the direction in which Calvin had led the way, and per- haps went a little further than Calvin, he retained most of Calvin's limitations also, and in his merits and shortcom- ings alike he represented the whole Puritan movement in which he was so conspicuous a leader. From the time of his expulsion from Cambridge down to the civil war that party largely walked in his footsteps — the Presbyterian Puritans, always a majority of the body, did so always. Like Calvin, Cartwright held to the conception of a National Church, of which all baptized and non-excommunicate inhabitants of England were members. Like Calvin, he

LIMITATIONS OF PURITANISM. 2 1

believed that this vast assemblage of the good and bad was to be trained and purified by the labors of ministers of the Scripture designation and the enforcement of an active, searching discipline by the officers of each congre- gation and district. Like Calvin, he believed it the duty of the magistrate to aid the church by repressing heresy and compelling uniformity, though it was only in the path designated in the Word of God that the magistrate could rightfully compel men to go. That that path should not appear the same to all really good men was a thought which the Puritan did not readily entertain. The national Church of England seemed to Cartwright too sacred an institution for men to separate from without peril of schism, and he relied on the civil government, which had already carried it over from Catholicism to Anglicanism, to effect its alteration, as a whole, once again into Presbyterian Puri- tanism. Therefore, in Cartwright's view, the work of a Christian man desirous of bringing the English Church into conformity to the Scripture model was to agitate, labor, argue, and try to move the government to effect the change ; to introduce, as far as he was able and the government would permit, the worship and discipline of Geneva, in order to raise the inert mass of the all-inclusive membership of the Establishment ; to encourage earnest, educated, spiritual-minded ministers ; but on no account to withdraw from the national religious body. It was a theory that required for its successful establishment the conversion of the dominant forces of England to its sup- port, and though that conversion seemed in Cartwright's time exceedingly probable, and under the concurrent influ- ence of opposition to the tyranny of the Stuart sovereigns was temporarily brought about during the parliamentary struggles of the seventeenth century, it was never per-

22 THE C0NGREGATI0AL4LISTS. [Chap. i.

manently accomplished. Moreover, the views which Cart- wright impressed on the Puritan party, Hke those of Calvin, had the two great defects of an unspiritual theory of church- membership and an unscriptural intimacy of relation to the state. As Elizabethan Anglicanism was a half-way house between Catholicism and full Protestantism, so Puritanism was a halting-place between Anglicanism and Congrega- tionalism. It was to be the training-school of early Eng- lish Congregationalists ; but it could not be permanent, for it was intermingled with elements inconsistent with a logical application of its own principles.

The Puritan movement grew rapidly in strength as Elizabeth's reign advanced; especially after the death of Mary of Scotland, in 1587, and the defeat of the Spanish Armada, in 1588, relieved the fear of Catholic interven- tion, which had united, in a measure, all opponents of the papacy. The one great book of Englisli reading became the Bible, and to hundreds and thousands of the more earnest Protestants the Bible taught the Puritan lesson. Men full of new enthusiasm for the unfettered Word of God cared little for the writings of the fathers, the opin- ions of the councils of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centu- ries, or what is now called the " historic continuity " of the church. To their thinking, God had made a plain revela- tion of his will, and all that did not evidently conform to that message, however ancient or of whatever generality of usage, was an insult to the divine Law-giver.

But as Puritanism advanced and became more dogmatic, Anglicanism advanced also. The Anglicans of the open- ing years of Elizabeth's reign had found the chief warrant for the existence of diocesan episcopacy in the preference of the sovereign for that form of church government. They were willing freely to admit the true churchly char- acter of an ecclesiastical organization unprovided with

ADVANCE OF ANGLICANISM. 23

bishops. But the growing Puritan criticism of prelacy led the Anglicans more and more into its defense. Whitgift, Cartwright's opponent at Cambridge, and from 1583 to 1604 Archbishop of Canterbury, and always one of the most violent of opponents of Puritanism, did not venture to assert more than that episcopacy was the most ancient and desirable type of organization. He used language that certainly allowed the inference that possibly other forms of government were more accordant with the New Testament intimations. But by 1589, in his sermon at Paul's Cross, Richard Bancroft, afterward to be Whitgift's successor in the see of Canterbury, declared — a little ob- scurely, it is true — that episcopacy is of divine authority. This theory was elaborated by Thomas Bilson, later Bishop of Worcester, in 1593, and episcopacy and apostolic suc- cession were asserted to be essential to the existence of the church. The careful Richard Hooker, in his " Eccle- siasticall Politie " of 1593, did not indeed go further than to affirm the superior antiquity and scripturalness of epis- copacy, while denying its absolute necessity ; but the Anglican party as a whole moved in the direction pointed out hy Bancroft and Bilson — a direction which found its complete exponent in William Laud, Archbishop of Can- terbury from 1633 to 1645, ^i^d which was the radical an- tithesis of Puritanism, not only in the stress which it laid on episcopacy, but in its attitude toward those features of worship against which the Puritans protested. Puritan- ism thus stimulated its opposite tendency in the English Church. The hostility between the two parties thus be- came more pronounced, as their divergence became more extreme throughout Elizabeth's reign ; and the queen's mighty influence, controlling appointments to high eccle- siastical office, and largely determining the strictness or laxity of the enforcement of uniformity, was thrown fully

24 THE CONGREGATIONALISTS. [Chap. i.

on the side of the Anglicans, a little, it may be, because their growing high-churchism appealed to her religious taste, but chiefly because the views of the Anglican party best comported with her theories of the royal supremacy. This largely political character of Elizabeth's opposition to Puritan views marked the whole Anglican party. It was not merely religious opposition that embittered the discussion. It was also the perception, dim at first, but growing clearer all through Elizabeth's reign, of the fact which became so patent in the time of the Stuarts, that the differing principles of the two parties regarding church government led also to radically divergent conceptions of the relation of the ruler to the state. In the Anglican view the clergyman was either the representative of the sovereign in the religious administration of the kingdom, or, as with the high-churchmen who gradually arose in the Anglican party, a member of a divinely appointed order o\-er which the sovereign had a regulative control. In neither phase of the Anglican theory was the clergy- man in any way responsible to the people to whom he ministered. He looked to his sovereign, his ecclesiastical superior, or to God, as the only authority that could take cognizance of his acts. In actual practice the Anglican saw in the king the ultimate source of ecclesiastical power. Now this conception of clerical responsibility not only greatly aided that dependence on the sovereign of all the ecclesiastical interests of the land which was dear to the Tudors and Stuarts, it gave to the sovereign himself a sta- tion which accorded him a divine right to rule. A ruler who was the " supreme governor" of a church whose minis- ters owed no responsibility for their actions to their flocks, was not likely to be held answerable to his people for his deeds. If he rightfully appointed and controlled those who were members of a divinely constituted order, his

DIVERSE POLITICAL THEORIES. 25

own power must be of divine appointment. The tendency of men to think in political affairs as they do in questions of church poHty — a tendency always illustrated in the his- tory of the church — made the Anglican naturally a sup- porter of that Tudor and Stuart view of the royal author- ity, which held the king answerable to God but not to his people.

On the other hand, the Puritan learned from Calvinism that the minister should serve his congregation with their consent. The Puritan believed that to the people, in some measure at least, belonged the right to select their spiritual guides. Such right of choice implied responsibility to the choosing power. The preacher was not a royal agent or a member of a sacred order set over a parish whose in- habitants had no voice in his selection ; he was a minister whose leadership had been sought by those whom he served. Such a relation implied responsibility to his peo- ple— a certain measure of control on their part over him, even if wholly undefined. Then, too, the statute-book which the Puritan insisted should be the ultimate rule of ecclesiastical administration was something other than the laws of the realm. No ceremony or office " by law estab- lished " was right till it accorded with the Word of God. And though the Puritan held that the Bible was so plain that all who sincerely read its teachings must understand them in the same way, what he really did was to subject the ecclesiastical statutes of the realm of England to revi- sion in accordance with his individual understanding of the divine revelation. This habit of testing by the Word of God taught the Puritan, as no man of his time was taught, to think for himself. He might be slow in carrying his principles from the realm of the church to the field of poli- tics ; but the Puritan could no more avoid applying them equally in both directions than the Anglican. It was no

26 THE CONGREGATIONALISTS. [Chap. i.

accident that made the Puritan query whether a sovereign was not responsible to his subjects, for his administration of their interests, or whether the royal acts and enact- ments should not be justified by some standard higher than the kingly will. It was a perception of this tendency that, quite as much as any religious antipathy, roused the hostility of the supporters of the royal authority against the Puritan.

The influence of continental Calvinism in developing one of the two great parties within the English Establishment has thus been seen to have been profound. But the de- gree in which the more radical movements which are now to be considered were dependent on impulses traceable to the Anabaptists of the Continent is far less certain. These movements, springing up on a soil made ready by Puritan- ism, were the source of modern Congregationalism. In many respects — in their abandonment of the State Church, in their direct appeal to the Word of God for every detail of administration, in their organization and officers — their likeness to those of the radical Reformers of the Continent is so striking that some affiliation seems almost certain. Nor is the geographical argument for probable connection with continental movements less weighty. These radical Eng- lish efforts for a complete reformation had their chief sup- port in the eastern counties, especially in the vicinity of Norwich and of London. These regions had long been the recipient of Dutch immigration ; and the influx from the Netherlands had vastly increased during the early reign of Elizabeth, owing to the tyranny of Philip II. In 1562 the Dutch and Walloons settled in England num- bered 30,000. By 1568 some 5225 of the people of Lon- don were of this immigration; and by 1587 they consti- tuted more than half of the population of Norwich, while they were largely present in other coast towns. Now these

CONGREGATIONAL BEGINNINGS. 27

immigrants were chiefly artisans, and among the workmen of Holland Anabaptist views were widely disseminated ; and while it would be unjustifiable to claim that these exiles on English soil were chiefly, or largely, Anabaptists, there were Anabaptists among them, and an Anabaptist way of thinking may not improbably have been widely induced among those who may have been entirely uncon- scious of the source from which their impulse came. Cer- tainly the resemblances between the Anabaptist move- ments of the Continent and English Congregationalism in theories of church polity, and the geographical possibil- ities of contact between the two, are sufficiently manifest to make a denial of relationship exceedingly difficult.

But the points of dissimilarity between these extreme English Protestants and the continental radicals are also conspicuous. They rejected doctrines much prized by the Anabaptists, like believers' baptism ; they retained oaths ; they recognized it as the duty of a Christian, if so re- quired, to serve the state as a magistrate or a soldier. These diversities, combined with the absence from their writings of any sense of indebtedness to continental teach- ers, and the purely English character of their names as far as known, show that whatever they may have gained from the thought of the Continent was indirect and unconscious, and that their own work was in a large measure inde- pendent.

The first traces of a movement in England which insisted on a separation from the Establishment in order to a fuller reformation, and which thus went beyond Puritanism in the direction of early CongregationaHsm, are found in Lon- don in the year 1567. Attempts have indeed been made to demonstrate the existence of Separatist churches under the reign of Mary, but the secret congregations of her time seem to have been simply persecuted Protestants of the

28 THE CONGREGATIONALISTS. [Chap. i.

Establishment as it had been in the days of Edward VI. On June 19, 1567, however, the authorities brolce up an as- sembly of another character. A body of men and women had gathered at Plumbers' Hall in London on that day, ostensibly to celebrate a wedding, and really with the added purpose of holding worship in what they deemed a purer manner than that of the Church of England. The inruption of the officers of the law into their little meeting was followed by the arrest of some fifteen of those pres- ent, their committal to prison, and their examination by Edmund Grindal, then the bishop of the London diocese. By this examination it appeared that this little body re- garded the ceremonies and canon law of the Establishment as evil, and had therefore organized for its own worship apart from the constituted parishes of the land. Other papers, especially a petition to Queen Elizabeth, prepared in 1 571 after their pastor and deacon had died in prison, show their views and procedure more clearly. In this document they style themselves " a poor congregation whom God hath separated from the churches of England, and from the mingled and false worshiping therein used." As a church assembly, it furthermore appears that they had at least two officers of their own selection, " our min- ister, Richard Fitz, Thomas Rowland, deacon " ; and that they " do serve the Lord every Sabbath-day in houses, and on the fourth day in the week we meet or come to- gether weekly to use prayer and exercise discipline on them which do deserve it, by the strength and sure war- rant of the Lord's good Word, as in Matt, xviii. 15-18."

Here was a very rudimentary type of Congregation- alism ; but its advance beyond Puritanism was decided. These men and women had evidently cut loose from the idea of a national church. They had come to the conclu- sion that they themselves could constitute a church on the

CONGREGATIONAL BEGINNINGS. 29

Scripture model. They had chosen their officers; and they had administered discipline apparently as the work of the whole congregation, though in regard to this most important particular the petition, as just quoted, is not as definite as could be wished. These acts, taken together, certainly show that this persecuted body at Plumbers' Hall was groping after the Congregational ideal. They were indeed far from its full realization. They were a com- pany of poor, ignorant Christians, trying to carry out a complete reformation. They had seen only a little way on the road thither; but they had caught a glimpse, im- perfect though it was, of the New Testament pattern of the church.

This little London church of which Fitz was minister had no lasting influence and arrived at no greater definite- ness of view. The strong hand of government was heavy upon it, its worship was broken up, and after a period of suffering in the various prisons of London which cost its leaders their lives, it disappeared from human sight. Pos- sibly its scattered members maintained worship for years in London — we get occasional glimpses of illegal assem- blies, the nature of which is not very clear, meeting from time to time in and about London, and attracting the oc- casional notice of the government. Possibly it contributed to the formation of the London church which, twenty-one years after the petition that has been quoted, chose Francis Johnson for its pastor and John Greenwood for its teacher, and which had Henry Barrowe for its leading member. But though perhaps probable, this continued existence of Fitz's church is only conjectural. Had it been the sole witness to a completer reformation, Congregationalism would never have come into being. The work which the London church of 1567 apparently began to do was really accomplished, and the Congregational system really set

30 THE CONGREGA TIONALISTS. [Chap. i.

forth so as first to claim any considerable degree of atten- tion, through the labors and writings of Robert Browne — to whom this polity is so indebted, in spite of any be- ginnings made by Richard Fitz and his associates, that he deserves the title of the father of modern Congrega- tionalism.

CHAPTER II.

EARLY ENGLISH CONGREGATIONALISM.

Robert Browne, whose writings contain the first definite statement of Congregational principles from an English pen, was neither in fixity of character nor in sa- gacity of method a man to win admiration or to command personal respect. His ultimate conformity to the Church of England caused early Congregationalists to resent the application of his name to their churches, and still leads occasional writers on Congregational history to disparage his services or discredit his leadership. Nor have histo- rians of the Establishment forgotten, in spite of his recon- ciliation to the English Church, the fierceness of the attack which he made for a time upon that body. His personal qualifications were not those of a leader in an enterprise demanding patience. He had little capacity to give peace or permanency to the congregations which he. founded, and small faculty for holding continuous fellowship with his associates. He was a man of rash impulsiveness of temperament always.

Yet when all detractions have been made from his per- sonal worth, there can be no question that he was, at least during the portion of his career with which we have to do, a man of sincerity and of warm Christian faith ; and the probability seems strong, as Dr. Dexter has pointed out, that the abandonment of his Congregational professions, which has cost him the respect due to a confessor, was the result of mental break-down consequent upon disappoint-

31

32 THE CONGREGATIONALISTS. [Chap. ii.

ments and imprisonments rather than any real denial of the beliefs for which he had proved himself ready to suffer. Whatever his defects may have been, he enjoys the dis- tinction not only of being the first to formulate Congrega- tional polity, but the earliest Englishman also to proclaim the doctrine that church and state should be mutually independent. A man of such clearness of insight, and who made such large contributions to Congregational develop- ment, cannot be denied a prominent place in the history of Congregational beginnings.

Browne came of a family of considerable local, promi- nence in Rutlandshire, which had an estate at Tolethorpe, and was connected with that of Lord Burghley, who was from the neighboring county of Lincoln. Here at Tole- thorpe Browne was born about the year 1550, though the exact date is still undiscovered. No details of his early life have been preserved ; if we may judge by his early manhood, he must have been a youth of feeble health but of eager impulsiveness. By 1570 he was a student at Corpus Christi College in the University of Cambridge, and in 1572 he recei\-ed there his degree of bachelor of arts. The university at the time was turmoiled by the great controversy between Cartwright and Whitgift — a contest which cost Cartwright his professorship in Decem- ber, 1570, and his fellowship at Trinity College in Sep- tember, 1 57 1, but which made him more conspicuously than ever the champion of the Puritan cause. No atmos- phere more adapted to excite an eager young student could well be imagined ; and Browne was doubtless now awakened, if he had not been before, to the importance of a further reformation of the English Church. Evidences of his own pronounced attitude in sympathy with the radical party are soon apparent. Unless the historian Strype has confused him with a man of similar name, as is

ROBERT BROWNE. 33

not impossibly the case, Browne was in 1 5 7 1, a year before his graduation, a chaplain in the household of the Duke of Norfolk, and of opinions so obnoxious to his churchly superiors that the duke was moved to plead in his be- half that his position was a privileged station, in order to save him from citation. However this may have been, for some three years after his graduation he taught school, probably in Southwark ; and during this period he preached occasionally, at considerable peril, to unlawful gatherings of Christian people met together for divine worship in gravel-pits about Islington. His teaching being inter- rupted by the plague, he was soon back in Cambridge ; but more important for him than any course of study undertaken at the university was his entrance into the family and under the theological instruction of Rev. Rich- ard Greenham of the neighboring village of Dry Drayton. Introduced into this strenuous Puritan home, Browne's good qualities won speedy recognition from its head, and though Greenham had little sympathy with Separatist ideas, Browne was encouraged by him to preach in Puri- tan pulpits, apparently without the license of a bishop. Nor were Browne's ministrations in any way unacceptable. An urgent request from a congregation in Cambridge, probably that of Benet Church, induced him to labor for half a year in that town, and his hearers would gladly have secured his ministrations more permanently had not a change in his own views rendered his continuance even in the Puritan wing of the Church of England impossible. This momentous change, which transformed the zealous young preacher from a Puritan, waiting like thousands of others for the further reform of the EngHsh Establishment by the slow process of agitation and the hand of civil authority, into a Separatist, attacking the Church of Eng- land as an unchristian body and insisting on the segre-

34 THE CONGREGATIONALISTS. [Chap. li.

gation of religious men and women from its fellowship, occurred during this Cambridge ministry, and probably in 1579. As Browne looked upon the condition of the Establishment, with its all-inclusive membership and its too frequent toleration of unfit men in the ministry, he felt, as every Puritan did, a burning desire for its reforma- tion. But he felt now, what the Puritan did not, that the only way that this reformation was to be brought about was by separation from a body where such unworthy per- sons were tolerated. Most of all he was convinced that any dependence upon the licensure of bishops for minis- terial authority was a sin, since to the bishops more than to any other class of church officers it seemed to him that the hindrance of the necessary reformation of the cliurch was due. They prevented the exercise of discipline desired by the Puritans, they silenced the preachers most eager for reform, they kept the church in much the state in which it had been when it came out of its papal subjection at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign. Browne therefore now proclaimed to his Cambridge hearers that their own reformation was incomplete ; and, though it seems almost certain that he must already have received episcopal ordi- nation, he now repudiated all dependence on the author- ization of bishops, and denounced the whole order. The consequence was that he was speedily silenced.

The notification of his inhibition from preaching Browne received with scorn, and he seems to have been impelled by it to a yet firmer conviction that it was his duty to leave a church where episcopal authority could be, as he thought, so abused, and where full Christian life seemed to him so hedged about with hindrances. Having heard that in the adjacent county of Norfolk there were those who were seeking a purified church, he now determined to join them ; but at this juncture a former acquaintance.

BROWNE'S SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT. 35

Robert Harrison, came to Cambridge from Norwich, the chief city of Norfolk, and it was to this friend's house at Norwich that Browne went when he took his departure from Cam- bridge, probably in 1580. Harrison, who for several years was to be the companion and associate of Browne, was of maturer age, though his seems to have been the less mas- terful mind. He had graduated at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in 1567, and had already had difficulties with the ecclesiastical authorities owing to pronounced Puritan scruples regarding certain portions of the service. A man less erratic in his tendencies than Browne, and less fruit- ful also in his reasoning, he added an element of stability for a time to the congregation which Browne gathered, and his pecuniary assistance apparently made possible the publication of Browne's books. But his connection with the Congregational movement was brief; by about 1585 he was no longer of the living.

It was in study and discussion with Harrison at Norwich that Browne fully worked out his theories of church polity. Evidently his investigation of the scattered hints contained in the pages of the New Testament was profound ; and to his thinking the Scriptures were the direct source of his system. But it is not impossible that some indirect in- fluence of Anabaptist thought may have aided in shaping Browne's views. He had been attracted to Norfolk by the presence there of persons desirous for a radical refor- mation of the Establishment as well as by his friendship for Harrison. Who these persons were it is hard to tell. But Norfolk was a county whose towns contained a large admixture of Dutch handicraftsmen, and the suggestion seems a probable one that Anabaptist modes of thought, imported with these Hollanders into their new English home, may have borne some fruitage, and may have un- consciously affected Browne himself in his conceptions of

36 THE CONGREGATIONALISTS. [Chap. ii.

the church. Though no trace of a recognition of indebt- edness to Anabaptist thought can be found in Browne's writings, and though we discover no Dutch names among the small number of his followers whom we know by name at all, the similarity of the system which he now worked out to that of the Anabaptists is so great in many respects that the conclusion is hard to avoid that the resemblance is more than accidental. At the same time, its unlikeness in other important features, as, for instance, the doctrine of baptism, is so marked that we may be sure that Browne did not borrow directly or consciously; and that if influ- enced by the Anabaptist movement at all, as it seems de- cidedly probable that he was, it must have been in conse- quence of an Anabaptist way of thinking in the regions of eastern England, where Dutch immigrants were numerous, rather than by contact with avowed Anabaptists.

Browne was, in early life at least, a man in whom belief was coupled with action ; and the development of his sys- tem during the first months of his residence at Norwich was followed by the formation, on Congregational lines, of a church in that city some time in 1580 or 1581. But though Browne was the pastor of this little flock, his mis- sionary efforts extended beyond the borders of Norfolk certainly as far as Bury St. Edmunds, where his preach- ing was received with much appreciation by the humbler classes, and where he possibly established a church, and certainly made disciples who ultimately suffered death for distributing his books. This activity brought upon Browne the hand of ecclesiastical restraint, though his relationship to Lord Burghley and that nobleman's interest in him — an interest which involved no sympathy with his views — prevented the degree of severity that would have been measured out to a less powerfully connected innovator. But the opposition of the Bishop of Norwich, and soon

BROWNE'S CHURCH. 37

that also of the Archbishop of Canterbury, convinced the major part of the Httle Norwich church that it was useless to attempt to carry on its work in England ; and there- fore, after some debate in which Scotland and the Channel Islands were considered, it emigrated, probably late in 1 58 1, to Middelburg, a little city in the Dutch province of Zeland, which had long had extensive trade relations with the eastern towns of England, and where resident English merchants maintained a congregation of strongly Puritan tendencies, now under the pastoral charge of the exiled Cartwright. A portion of the church, it seems certain, re- mained at Norwich and continued in some humble fashion its organization.

Arrived on Dutch soil, Browne and Harrison still con- tinued their interest in their English home. The congre- gation under their care preserved its independence, it appears, as long as Browne remained. Indeed, Browne deemed that Puritanism, even of the strenuous type rep- resented by Cartwright, was unworthy of fellowship, since it continued in the national church, from which he thought it the duty of a Christian to come out; and this feeling of dishke was repaid by the aversion of the Puritans to the whole Separatist movement. To influence the people of the land which he had left, Browne, with the aid of Har- rison, sent forth from Middelburg three tracts during the year 1582, of which two are of the utmost importance in early Congregational literature. One, named " A Treatise of Reformation without Tarying for anie, and of the wickednesse of those Preachers, which will not reforme till the Magistrate commaunde or compell them," carries its burden on its title. It is a strenuous argument for instant separation from the Establishment, and a special attack upon the position of the Puritans who were waiting within the Church of England for its reform by civil authority.

38 THE CONGREGATIONALISrS. [Chap. ii.

The other, entitled " A Booke which Sheweth the life and manners of all true Christians, and howe vnlike they are vnto Turkes and Papistes, and Heathen folke," is the first systematic exposition of its principles which Congrega- tionalism produced. In it, under an elaborate and some- what mechanical form of questions, counter-questions, and definitions, Browne outlined his system as he read it in the Word of God. To his thinking a Christian church is a body of professed believers in Christ, united to one another and to their Lord by a voluntary covenant. This covenant is the constitutive element which transforms an assembly of Christians into a church. Its members are not all the baptized inhabitants of a kingdom, but only those possessed of Christian character. Such a church is under the immediate headship of Christ, and is to be ruled only by laws and officers of his appointment. To each church Christ has intrusted its own government, discipline, and choice of officers ; and the abiding officers are those designated in the New Testament, the pastor, teacher, elders, deacons, and widows, whom the church is to select and set apart for their various duties. But the presence of these officers does not relieve the ordinary member of responsibility for the welfare of the church to which he belongs. On the contrary, Christ is the immediate Lord not only of the church but of every member of it, and each member is responsible to him for the stewardship of the graces with which he has been intrusted. This direct- ness of connection between Christ and all the members of his church made Browne's polity practically democratic, and rendered it more prophetic of what Congregationalism has become in our century than were the more aristocratic theories of Barrowe and of the settlers of New England.

But while Browne thus asserted the full autonomy of the local church and the full responsibility of each member for

BROWNE'S CONGREGAriONALISM. 39

its good order, he held also that churches have obligations one toward another which bind them to mutual watch and brotherly helpfulness. Here, then, in germ at least, Browne set forth that conception of mutual accountability which is one of the distinguishing features of Congregationalism, and which renders his system something more than bald Independency.

In one other matter also Browne's views were prophetic. To his thinking the civil authorities have no right to exer- cise lordship over spiritual concerns, or to enforce submis- sion to any ecclesiastical system. It was an opinion already advanced by the Anabaptists of the Continent, but which no Englishman had yet proclaimed, and it found little echo even among his immediate disciples. Harrison did not share it, the London- Amsterdam church of Johnson and Ainsworth did not sympathize with it, and we shall find that early New England had no place for it. But in this, as in many other directions, Browne saw more clearly than men of his century of far greater stability and personal worth than he.

The opinions advanced in these tracts by Brovxue from his safe retreat in Holland were far too revolutionary to meet with toleration in England, and it was for circulation in England that the pamphlets were designed. Soon they were sent in considerable numbers, apparently in unbound sheets, to those places in his native island where Browne had labored, and on June 30, 1583, they called forth a proclamation in the name of Queen Elizabeth, in which they are described as " sundry seditious, scismaticall, and erronious printed Bookes and libelles, tending to the de- prauing of the Ecclesiastical gouernment established within this Realme " ; and all persons possessing them are ordered to give them up, while all who distribute them are threat- ened with the penalties of sedition. But even before this

40 THE CONGREGATIONALISTS. [Chap, ii,

proclamation had been put forth, on June 4 and 5, 1583, two men, John Coppin and EHas Thacker, were hanged at Bury St. Edmunds on the dual charge of heresy and the circulation of the works of Browne and Harrison — some forty of the confiscated books being burned at the exe- cutions.

But by the time that these martyrs to Congregational- ism were giving up their lives, Browne's flock in Middel- burg were in serious division. His own disposition un- fitted him to unite or conciliate discordant elements. He disagreed with his friend Harrison, he felt that his pres- ence with the congregation which he had led into exile had become irksome; and therefore, late in 1583, Browne and four or five of his followers, with their families, went from Holland to Scotland. But in Scotland Browne met with nothing but opposition, extending even to imprison- ment, from the ecclesiastical authorities of that Presbyte- rian land. Here he not only utterly failed to secure any following of importance, he came to the conclusion that the church government of Scotland was more overbearing and less tolerable than even the Episcopacy of England.

Browne's work as a reformer was now nearly over. By the summer of 1584 he was apparently once more in Eng- land, where he seems to have met with imprisonment, from which he was relieved by Lord Burghley. One more at- tempt to proclaim the truths for which he had witnessed — this time at Northampton, it is probable — led to his ex- communication by the Bishop of Peterborough in 1586. He might well be discouraged over his successive failures, and there is reason to believe that his health, never robust, had been shattered by his trials. The conjecture advanced by Dr. Dexter, that he was worn out mentally and physi- cally, seems probable. At all events, he became head of a grammar school at South wark, in November, 1586, on

THE LONDON CHURCH. 41

terms which bound him to keep peace with the Establish- ment and submit to its rites. In September, 1591, he re- ceived the rectorship of Achurch-cum-Thorpe — no doubt as the gift of Lord Burghley — and as rector of that ob- scure village he lived for forty years, dying, however, some time between June, 1631, and November, 1633, in North- ampton jail, where he was confined owing to his violent resistance to the collection of a debt or a tax by an officer of his parish.

The seed which Browne had sowed in so many places, and which he had not the qualities long to cultivate, bore a harvest that was better than the sower. At Norwich a portion of the church which Browne had gathered con- tinued the organization after he and a majority of its fel- lowship had gone to Holland ; and in other places, Con- gregational views, spread we know not how, took root and bore fruit. The preface to the Confession put forth by the London- Amsterdam church in 1596 speaks of wit- nesses to Congregational principles in Bury St. Edmunds, in Gloucester, and in London ; while other hints are given us of Separatist associations in Chatham and in the west of England. But of all these obscure adherents to what they believed to be the polity taught by the Word of God, only those of London formed a church of any prominence or influenced the development of Congregational thought. Possibly some continuous religious organization had been maintained by the London Separatists from the time of Richard Fitz and his fellow-prisoners of 1567; but it is not till 1586 or 1587 that the existence of the Separatist gatherings from which the London church was to be de- veloped is clearly manifest. The early history of that church is closely bound up with the stories of three men of high character — Henry Barrowe, John Greenwood, and John Penry — all of whom gave their lives for the cause

42 THE COhTGREGATIONALISTS. [Chap. it.

which they advocated, and one of whom, Barrowe, turned Congregational thought in a direction considerably differ- ent from that imparted to it by Browne, so that his work constitutes a second stage in the growth of the system. Neither of these men can be affirmed to have been the founder of London Separatism, however, nor do they seem to have been the only proclaimers of Separatist doctrines in that city. On the contrary, hints of occasional meetings in private houses and in secluded spots in and near Lon- don, and of the ministrations of a dozen leaders of these petty assemblies, show that the Separatist leaven was con- siderably widespread during the four or five years previous to 1592. But the first event of importance in the history of London Congregationalism as now known to us is the arrest of Greenwood in the autumn of 1586.

John Greenwood was a young clergyman of the Estab- lishment, who had studied from March, 1578, to his grad- uation in 1580-81 at Cambridge, where he had been a sizar, or pecuniarily assisted student, of Corpus Christi Col- lege. His graduation had been followed by his ordination ; but Puritan scruples, possibly imbibed at Cambridge, led Greenwood to become a chaplain in the household of Lord Rich, a Puritan nobleman of Essex. By what further pro- cesses he advanced from Puritanism to Separatism we do not know — not improbably Browne's books may have awakened his thought — but certainly in the autumn of 1586 he was preaching to illegal assemblies in London, and at one of these gatherings, held at a house in that city, he was seized and thence transferred to the Clink prison.

On news of his arrest. Greenwood was visited in his prison by his friend and fellow-laborer, Henry Barrowe, a man of higher social rank, of maturer years, and far greater abilities. Barrowe's teaching had already incurred the displeasure of Archbishop Whitgift ; and therefore the

GREENWOOD AND BARROWE. 43

jailer,, without legal warrant, but well knowing that his arrest would be gratifying to the ecclesiastical authorities, detained Greenwood's visitor as a prisoner. Thencefor- ward till their death on a common scaffold, Barrowe and Greenwood were imprisoned, save for brief periods of re- lease on bail ; and during most of this time they shared the same sufferings and labors.

Henry Barrowe was a man of much more than ordinary talents and advantages. He was of a Norfolk family of some prominence, and his education had been at Clare Hall, in the University of Cambridge, where he was a student from 1566 to 1569-70. Though brought thus into a Puritan atmosphere, no thought of personal religion, much less of ministerial service, was apparently entertained by him during his student days, or for some years there- after. He came to London, becoming a lawyer of Gray's Inn in 1576, and was of sufficient prominence to have access to the royal presence ; but he was a man of im- moral life, and might have so continued to the end of his days had not a chance sermon been the means of his spirit- ual awakening. A man of impetuous temper always, he passed at once from his former profligacy to extreme Puri- tanism. And from Puritanism he was led onward — there is some reason to think through the agency of Greenwood — to a type of Congregational Separatism, which, if not quite so extreme as that of Browne, nevertheless viewed the English Establishment as unscriptural and therefore unchristian.

The two prisoners were speedily and repeatedly brought before Archbishop Whitgift, John Aylmer, Bishop of London, and other ecclesiastical dignitaries; and also ex- amined by a commission, embracing, besides these high officials of the church, the chief-justices. Lord Burghley, and other prominent civilians. Before all these examiners

44 THE CONGREGA TIONALISTS. [Chap. ii.

they maintained firmly their conviction that the govern- ment, rites, and sacraments of the Estabhshment were not ordered as Christ designed ; and that its all-inclusive membership made it no true church. They as firmly as- serted their belief that the queen was sovereign in all civil affairs, but they denied to her any power over the church, of which Christ is the sufficient head. In these harassing interrogations Greenwood was the more self-controlled ; the impetuous spirit of Barrowe met the browbeatings of the bishops more often with anger and invective. Lord Burghley, when he appeared on the scene, manifested much of his usual gravity ; but the impression left on the mind is that the bishops in these examinations showed little charity and less courtesy. All attempts to shake the constancy of the prisoners were unavailing.

Having failed thus by judicial examination to bring the two Separatists to an acknowledgment that their teach- ings were erroneous, Whitgift and Aylmer, with the counsel of the two chief-justices of the realm, after Barrowe and Greenwood had been for more than two years in confine- ment, commissioned a number of the clergy of the vicinity of London to visit these and similar prisoners at least twice a week and attempt their recovery to conformity. The visits were useless ; but they provoked a desire on the part of the chief prisoners to set their case before the reading public, which bore notable fruit. Under the most dis- advantageous circumstances, unable, as Barrowe himself declared, to keep one sheet at hand while a second was written, compelled to smuggle their writings out of prison page by page, and to have them carried surreptitiously to Dort in Holland by friendly hands for printing, Barrowe and Greenwood produced no less than eight controversial and expository treatises, containing over nine hundred printed pages. Chief in imoortance perhaps is the " Trve

EXPOSITIONS OF CONGREGATIONALISM. 45

Description ovt of the Word of God, of the visible Church," of 1589, a brief sketch in which the writers set forth their conception of what God designed his church should be, and which, though somewhat ideal in tone, is evidently a document which the yet imperfectly organized congrega- tion at London looked upon as in some sense its creed. But almost equally valuable, and far more voluminous, are Barrowe's " Brief Discouerie of the False Church," of 1590 — a cogent criticism of the existing condition of the Establishment — and Barrowe and Greenwood's " Plaine Refutation of M. Gififards Booke, intituled, A short trea- tise gainst the Donatistes of England," printed in 1591, which was not only a vigorous reply to the censures of an able Puritan critic, but was to be in a most remarkable way the means of the conversion of Francis Johnson, the first regular pastor of this London church of which Bar- rowe and Greenwood were so conspicuous members. Here, then, was an activity which must, greatly have annoyed the supporters of existing ecclesiastical institu- tions, while it aided much in the spread of Separatist views.

In these tracts Barrowe and Greenwood presented a theory of the church in most points identical with that of Browne. With him they hold that a true church is a company of " faithful and holie people," having as its officers pastors, teachers, elders, deacons, and widows, who obtain their offxce " by the holy & free election of the Lordes holie and free people." To this church, as a whole, the power of discipline has been intrusted, and of it Christ is the immediate head. But while the London prisoners thus agree for the most part with Browne, they were not as democratic as he. The execution of government they shut up, practically, in the hands of the church officers. It is the duty of the ordinary membership to be " a most

46 THE CONGREGATIONALISTS. [Chap. ii.

humble, meek, obedient, faithfull, and loving people." And this semi-Presbyterian conception of the internal government of the church, instead of the democracy of Browne, dominated all early English and American Con- gregationalism. As Rev. Samuel Stone, of Hartford, epi- grammatically expressed this theory two generations after Barrowe's death, it placed the officers as " a speaking aris- tocracy in the face of a silent democracy." That in mod- ern Congregationalism this democracy is no longer silent is evidence that in this particular Browne saw more clearly than Barrowe ; but, for a century after Barrowe wrote, his view was the generally accepted Congregational theory of the relations of officers and people.

These writings from the London prisons, and the efforts of humbler members of the Separatist company, gained converts. Barrowe and Greenwood, if the most promi- nent, were by no means the only Separatists now under confinement. At the time when certain of the London clergy were deputed to attempt the conversion of the Nonconformists in 1589 there were fifty-two persons under arrest, and though it is too much to affirm that all were Congregational Separatists, it is probable that most of them were of Barrowe's way of thinking. A petition pre- served by Strype, and probably of the year 1592, has ap- pended to it the names of fifty-nine surviving prisoners who besought the favor of Lord Burghley, and in this case there seems little doubt that all the signers were Sepa- ratists. Whether this petition had any influence on the government or not, it is certain that the treatment of these prisoners for a few months in 1592 was less severe than it had been, and that Greenwood, if not Barrowe, was oc- casionally allowed to go beyond his prison walls. This lull in the storm, if such it deserves to be called, was marked by two events of importance, the addition of John

JOHN PENRY. . 47

Penry and of Francis Johnson to the Separatist company, and the completion of its organization by the London church.

John Penry, one of the martyrs of Congregationalism, and one to whom youth and purity of character lend a touch of romance, was of Welsh birth and Roman Catholic training. In 1580 he entered the college of Peterhouse, at Cambridge, when about twenty-one years old, and be- fore his graduation in 1583-84 had abandoned Catholicism and embraced an ardent type of Puritanism. His ready pen was soon busied with tracts advocating the claims of Wales on missionary effort, and urging at the same time the Puritan cause. Besides a voluminous series of contro- versial tractates of which he was the acknowledged author, he appears to have been connected with the publication, though not probably with the composition, of the remark- able series of satirical attacks upon the Establishment issued in 1588 and 1589, and known as the Martin Mar- prelate pamphlets, the moral worth of which is still dis- puted in some quarters, but which are confessedly among the most effective pasquinades ever written in the English tongue.

Penry's acknowledged writings speedily called down upon him the censure of Archbishop Whitgift and the High Commission ; but it was not till the pursuit after all suspected of connection with the Mar-prelate tracts had become keen that he fled from England to Scotland in 1589. Here he found so much sympathy for his Puritan views, that, in spite of an autograph letter of Elizabeth re- questing his extradition, and a proclamation of James VI. against him, he enjoyed protection till 1592. He now came to London, and whether he had advanced from Puritanism to Separatism during his stay in Scotland, and was so attracted to the congregation of which Barrowe

48 THE COiVGREGATIOXA LISTS. [Chap. ii.

and Greenwood were members, or whether he was won to their principles after his return to English soil, Penry joined the Separatist communion in the autumn of the year of his arrival.

Like Greenwood and Penry, Francis Johnson, the sec- ond of the notable additions to the London Separatists, was a clergyman of the Church of England. Of Yorkshire birth, he had, like them, enjoyed the training of Cam- bridge, where he had graduated in 1581. It was while enjoying a fellowship in Christ's College that a sermon of strong Puritan flavor preached by him led to his imprison- ment, and ultimately to his expulsion from the university in 1589 and his self-exile to Middelburg, where he be- came pastor of the English church which had enjoyed the services of Cartwright. Johnson had no more sympathy than other Puritans for the Separatists, and on learning that Barrowe and Greenwood's " Plaine Refutation " of his fellow-Puritan Gifford's attack upon Separatism was being printed in 1591 either at Dort or at Middelburg, he noti- fied the English ambassador of the proposed publication, and was charged to see the books burned. This he did most thoroughly ; but as a memento of his exploit John- son preserved two copies from the flames. He had not yet read the works which he had condemned, and the perusal of this volume carried conviction to him. He re- signed his position at Middelburg, sought out Barrowe in the London prison, and was soon one of the most promi- nent of the London Separatist church.

Thus strengthened in membership, and enjoying a little respite from the severer forms of persecution, the London church felt encouraged to perfect its organization by the appointment of the officers designated, as it beUeved, in the Bible. The church had, indeed, for several years ex- ercised certain ecclesiastical acts. It had admitted mem-

FRANCIS JOHNSON. 49

bers as early as 1588 by a formal covenant that they " wold walke with the rest ; & yt so longe as they did walke in the way of the Lorde, & as farr as might be warranted by the word of God." It had also exercised the discipline of excommunication ; though, owing to its want of officers, it does not appear to have administered the Lord's Supper. That it had so long remained un- officered was doubtless due to the hope that those who were the church's recognized leaders would be released from imprisonment ; and now that Greenwood was allowed to go beyond his prison walls and Penry and Johnson had been added to the company, the time seemed ripe for action. Barrowe was ineligible, we may believe, by reason of his continued confinement, and Penry refused an elec- tion, since he still hoped to spend his life in Wales rather than in London; but in September, 1592, the London church, gathered in the house of a Mr. Fox, in Nicholas Lane, elected Johnson as its pastor and Greenwood as its teacher; and associated with them as elders Daniel Stud- ley, who had helped to smuggle Barrowe's manuscripts out of the prison, and George Kniston or Knyveton. At the same time Christopher Bowman and Nicholas Lee were chosen deacons, and the sacraments of baptism and the eucharist were administered.

This evident growth of the Separatist Church in London renewed the alarm of the ecclesiastical authorities. In December following Johnson and Greenwood were both lodged in prison; Penry avoided arrest for a' few weeks longer, but in March, 1593, he was captured, and the same month saw the arrest of fifty-six of the humbler members of the persecuted communion. It was deter- mined to make an example of the leaders. Accordingly, after examination before Chief- Justice Popham, Barrowe and Greenwood were tried on March 23, 1593. Their

50 THE CONGREGATIONALISTS. [Chap. ii.

accusation was based distinctly on the law of the twenty- third year of Elizabeth, making it a capital offense to write any book maliciously attacking the authority of the queen or inciting to rebellion. On this charge, in spite of their protests of loyalty in all civil matters, they were convicted ; but it was not until an attempt had been made to induce them to recant by the labors of certain clergy- men, and they had once been reprieved on the gallows itself, that they were hanged, on April 6, 1593. Their martyrdom was followed on May 21st by the condemnation of Penry — the conclusive evidence in his case being an unfinished draught of a petition to the queen, in which he complained that she and her government prevented the due service of God as enjoined in his Word. This pri vate paper was held to be a seditious attack upon the sov- ereign, and on May 29th Penry joined that company who have not counted their lives dear unto themselves that they might testify to what they believed to be the gospel of the grace of God.

These executions had the warm approval of the bishops, but they were not . regarded with satisfaction by many in England who were far enough from sharing Separatist opinions. While these witnesses for their faith had been under trial Parliament had been discussing a bill introduced by the bishops designed to strengthen the action of the courts in dealing with critics of the Establishment. In the discussion of this bill Sir Walter Raleigh had uttered his absurdly exaggerated estimate that the Brownists of England numbered more than twenty thousand. But the bishops had found the Commons unsubmissive, and the law as finally passed made the penalty for the denial of the queen's supremacv, or attendance on illegal meetings, forfeiture of goods and banishment, instead of death. It was under this new law that the government now began

EXILES IN AMSTERDAM. 5 i

to treat its numerous Separatist prisoners in a manner well calculated to destroy their feeble organization. While their more prominent survivors, like Johnson, were kept in confinement, the less important prisoners were com- pelled to go into exile. These poor artisans, aided in part by a little property left for their use by Barrowe, made their way within the year of his execution to Holland ; and there after a few months settled in Amsterdam, living in the direst poverty, and still looking to their officers in the London prisons for leadership and advice.

It was in the first year or two of this Dutch exile, how- ever, that a young man of whose early history we know little joined himself to this company — Henry Ainsworth ; a man who probably never enjoyed a university educa- tion, but who had few superiors as a Hebraist in his own day and whose expositions of the Old Testament are still held in esteem. The most learned of early Congregation- alists, he was also one of the most deserving; and his sweet-tempered love of peace made him an excellent counselor for the struggling church in the years of inter- nal turmoil which it passed through at Amsterdam. Ains- worth had been born in 1570 or 15 71 at Swanton, prob- ably a village of that name near Norwich, the city where Browne established his church ; but of the means of his conversion to Separatist views or of the circumstances which brought him to Amsterdam we know nothing, save that he probably came by way of Ireland, and gained his livelihood after his arrival in the Dutch city as a porter in a bookseller's shop. And here, in some way unknown to us, these London Separatists found him, living, if Roger Williams was correctly informed, on boiled roots at nine- pence a week, and eagerly pursuing every opportunit}^ to increase his learning. This was the man whom the exiled church now chose, at some uncertain date, but clearly

52 THE CONGREGATIONALISTS. [Chap. ii.

within two or three years of its coming to Amsterdam, to the teachership made vacant by the death of Green- wood.

Having thus in some measure made good their loss by martyrdom, this divided church, part of whose members were still in the London prisons and part in exile, put forth in 1596 a statement of its faith and polity and of the reasons which had led it to separation from the English Estabhshment, under the title of " A Trve Confession of the Faith, and Hvmble acknowledgment oe the Alegeance, which wee hir Maiesties Subjects, falsely called Brownists, doo hould towards God, and yeild to hir Majestic and all other that are ouer vs in the Lord." Its execrable typog- raphy attested the poverty of its publishers, but its spirit was one of confident persuasion of the justice of its cause. In doctrine it did not differ from the current Calvinism of the age, while in polity it set forth the main principles of Congregationalism as already expounded by Barrowe. As was natural from men who had suffered so much for their beliefs as to the polity which the Bible enjoined, it was severe in its denunciations of the English Church, holding that " all that will bee saued, must with speed come forth of this Antichristian estate, lea\-ing the sup- pression of it vnto the Magistrate to whom it belongeth." These poor prisoners and exiles were ready enough to affirm that the magistrate had no power to prescribe any other order than that established by our Lord, but they appealed to the same hand which had dealt out exile and death to them to abolish an ecclesiastical organization the unscripturalness of which they believed that they had demonstrated.

How long this di\ision of the church between London and Amsterdam might ha\-e continued it is impossible to say, but it was brought to an end at last by the Eng-

EXILES IN AMSTERDAM. 53

lish Government itself, which, early in 1597, allowed the greater part of the still imprisoned members to join their associates in Holland, while it permitted Johnson and three others to join in an abortive enterprise for planting a colony on the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Law- rence, an expedition from which Johnson returned in time to join the waiting church at Amsterdam before the end of the year.

But unhappily the coming together of these separated elements was not altogether a union of peace. On no feature of church administration did Puritans and Separa- tists alike lay more stress than on discipline ; and it must be confessed that those Congregationalists gathered by Browne at Norwich and these exiles from London carried the duties of brotherly watchfulness to a degree of minute- ness that was captious and irritating in the extreme. The quarrel which was to turmoil the early Amsterdam life of this little communion had its beginnings in London in the objections of the pastor's brother to the fashion of the garments worn by the pastor's wife. It was pro- tracted, dreary, personal ; and it illustrated the fact, so often exemplified, that leadership in a great enterprise is no guarantee of exemption from pettiness and unchari- tableness.

The story of this London church to its full gathering on alien soil has thus been followed with some minuteness ; a glance at its later history will be sufficient. On the ac- cession of James I. to the English throne in 1603, in com- mon with reformers of all shades, its members cherished the hope of a change from the ecclesiastical policy of Elizabeth — a hope that was bitterly disappointed. A vain attempt to secure permission from the new sovereign to be allowed to worship God in England on the same terms as congregations of French and Dutch Protestants enjoyed

54 THE CONGREGAriOKALISTS. [Chap. ii. ,

in that island persuaded them that their only safety was in continued exile. But that exile was stormy. Johnson and others of the company were men of strong opinions. Divisions rent the church, especially after the arrival of the erratic John Smyth and his Gainsborough congrega- tion in Amsterdam about 1606. Diversity of opinion as to the extent of the duties of church officers and the amount of power to be allowed to the ordinary members in church government separated Ainsworth and Johnson, and divided the flock under their charge into two congre- gations in 1610. Johnson died in Amsterdam in January, 16 1 8, and Ainsworth followed him, not, as has sometimes been alleged, by poison, but by that plague of seventeenth- century scholars, the stone, in 1622 or 1623. With their departure from the scene the vitality of this much-divided organization seems to have been nearly spent, though there is reason to believe that it continued a feeble exist- ence till 1 701, when the remnant was received into the English Reformed Church of Amsterdam — a Puritan or- ganization conformed in government to the Calvinistic Established Church of Holland, which had always enjoyed the approval of the Dutch authorities.

It is with mingled feelings that a modern Congregation- alist looks back upon the attempts to establish the Congre- gational polity which have been narrated in this chapter. The story is one of strength and courage, of suffering will- ingly undergone, of heroism and martyrdom. But it is a story also of weakness and division and failure. ' The men whom it presents to our view had their full share of human infirmities ; but they had a faith in God and a simple desire to do his will that is worthy of all praise. Yet had Browne and Barrowe and Greenwood and John- son and Penr}^ and Ainsworth been all the leaders that early Congregationalism produced, the system which they

EXILES IN AMSTERDAM. 55

loved would scarcely have survived them. They did a noble and an indispensable work; but it was well that other workmen, more patient, more united, if less gifted, entered into their labors and reaped the harvest which they had sowed, but which they were not fitted to earner.

CHAPTER III.

CONGREGATIONALISM CARRIED TO AMERICA.

The qualities of permanency, which were lacking In the Separatist churches thus far considered, were possessed by a Separatist congregation in the north of England, itself apj^arently the fruit of the labors of one of the most un- stable men ever associated with the story of Congrega- tionalism. John Smyth, the founder of this church, is first known to us as a student at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1575—76, and where he enjoyed a fellowship. What he did immediately after leaving Cam- bridge is not clear, but he seems after a time to have ob- tained a living as a clergyman of the Establishment at Gainsborough-on-Trent. How long his connection with the Church of England continued we do not know, but a period of nine months of mental struggle brought him to the Separatist position ; he renounced the Establishment, and gathering a little flock of like-minded people, most probably in the year 1602, he became its pastor. Though this Congregational church had its origin and seat at Gainsborough, it soon gained adherents in the farming district outside the town, especially in the region where the borders of Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire, and York- shire adjoin. Chief among these out-of-town converts to Separatism was William Brewster, the postmaster at Scrooby, on the main road from London to York. The ample, though dilapidated, " manor-house " which he oc- cupied gave room for the gathering for worship of Sepa-

56

THE PILGRIM CHURCH. 57

ratist sympathizers like the youthful William Bradford of the neighboring hamlet of Austerfield, and others from other villages in the vicinity. Brewster was, at the time of the gathering of the Gainsborough church, a man nearly or quite forty years of age, of fair classical education, and of a good deal of knowledge of the world, gained in the employ of William Davison during that unfortunate states- man's embassy to Holland. A man of maturity, sound judgment, and stability, Brewster was a natural leader, though not in the pastoral office, for that section of the Gainsborough church that had its center at his house. But even more important for its development was the addition to the little company, apparently in 1604, though the exact time is a little uncertain, of John Robinson, on the whole the best-known minister connected with early Separatist Congregationalism. There seems some reason to believe that Robinson was by birth from the Gainsbor- ough region, and that his union with Smyth and Brewster and their associates was in some sense a home-coming. However this may have been, he had entered Corpus Christi College, in Cambridge, in 1592, when about seven- teen years of age ; and after passing through the ordinary course of a student's life, became a minister of the Estab- lishment and a fellow of his college. From about 1600 he labored, probably as a curate, either in Norwich or its vicinity. Here, in the neighborhood where Browne had taught, and where some traces of his work still continued, Robinson's thought advanced from Puritanism to Separa- tism, and his teachings became so marked as to lead to his suspension by the Bishop of Norwich ; in consequence of which inhibition, and after a good deal of mental conflict, he now removed to the vicinity of Gainsborough and joined himself to the church there. It was at some uncertain date in 1605 or 1606, not long after his coming, that

58 THE CONGREGATIONALISTS. [Chap. m.

the Gainsborough church amicably dixdded, for safety and convenience, one portion continuing to meet under the guidance of Smyth for a httle longer in its old home, and the other having its simple services at Scrooby and en- joying the ministry of Robinson and of the venerable Richard Clyfton, who had been rector at Babworth, a village near Scrooby.

The two branches of the original Gainsborough church were destined to experiences in some respects alike, but in other features singularly diverse. Both were speedily objects of governmental persecution. To escape this in- terference Smyth and the Gainsborough flock emigrated to Amsterdam, probably in 1606; while the Scrooby con- gregation was moved by similar reasons to try the same exiles' road in 1607 and 1608. But in HoHand the differ- ing qualities of the leaders of the two congregations had much to do in giving them different destinies. On their arrival in Amsterdam the impetuous Smyth and his as- sociates settled as a second church side by side with the London- Amsterdam church of which Johnson and Ains- worth were the leaders, the stormy experiences of which have been mentioned in the preceding chapter. But with this older church Smyth soon quarreled. To his thinking the congregation of Johnson and Ainsworth was in error, since it used the English version of the Scriptures in public worship, instead of translating t'zV^ voce, and in 1608 he called on his church to have no fellowship with their neigh- bors until they should reform. The same prohibition of written or printed helps he extended to preaching and the singing of psalms. It was after this step had been taken, but probably in the next year, 1609, that Smyth, led thereto by contact with the Mennonites of Amsterdam, adopted Baptist views, and reorganizing his church, bap- tized himself and his associates. But even here Smyth

JOHN SMYTH. 59

did not rest. Doubt as to the rightfulness of the step which he had taken seems • to have entered his mind, and some changes in other directions seem to have mod- ified his theology, so that he and his sympathizers were next cast out, by his associates Helwys and Murton, from the congregation which he had led through so many changes. Smyth then made a vain attempt, in 1609,. to enter the communion of the Amsterdam Mennonites ; but failing in this, he remained outside of formal church fellow- ship till his death, in 161 2. It was probably in the year of his death that his associates till the quarrel of 1609, Helwys and Murton, established in London the first of Baptist churches on English soil ; and thus the Baptist fellowship of England and America traces its direct sources back to the same fountain at Gainsborough from which Plymouth Congregationalism flowed forth.

If Smyth thus gave to the exiles whom he led from Gainsborough a stormy experience at Amsterdam, the story of the Scrooby congregation under Robinson was healthful and peaceful. Their transfer to Amsterdam in 1607 and 1608 was effected in the face of much govern- mental opposition and many hardships, and, once arrived in the chief commercial city of Holland, they were de- barred from permanent settlement by the well-grounded fear entertained by the leading members of the company that they would become involved in the disputes distract- ing the churches of Ainsworth and Johnson and of Smyth. Accordingly, in 1609, they took up their abode in Leyden, under the pastoral care of Robinson, and with Brewster as their ruling elder. Here they dwelt, working at such trades as they were able to learn, at peace with them- selves, and earning the respect of their Dutch neighbors by their unswerving honesty. Here, too, Robinson and other prominent members purchased a large house, oppo-

6o THE CONGREGATIONALISTS. [Chap. hi.

site St. Peter's church, for the use of the exiled congrega- tion. Here Brewster printed books for such as desired to publish what was forbidden in England ; and here, after a time, Robinson's unusual powers of debate won him recog- nition as a disputant against the Arminian champion Epis- copius in one of the minor episodes of the great struggle over Calvinism then convulsing Holland.

But life was hard at the best for the exiles, though their church grew largely, and though some of their most valu- able material, like young Edward Winslow, was added during this Leyden sojourn. It was difficult to keep the children free from the temptations of an alien city ; it w'as above all distressing for those who were English in feeling and sympathy to see no prospect but that of gradual absorption in a foreign population ; and for Christian men such as these not the least element of dissatisfaction with their lot was that it afforded so few opportunities to ex- tend the knowledge of the gospel in its purity beyond their own circle. So it was, that, as time went on, the Scrooby- Leyden church began to debate more and more strenuously the possibility of emigration. Guiana, just then much talked of in English circles as a promising region for colonization, was discussed ; but happily for the future of the United States, the decision finally reached was to apply to the London branch of the Virginia Com- pany— a sub-organization having authority from King James L to establish colonies on the American coast be- tween the thirty-fourth and the forty-first degrees of latitude — for permission to emigrate under its auspices. There, on soil yet unbroken by the plowshares of civiliza- tion, but nevertheless in a real sense English, they hoped to plant the institutions of the gospel for which they had gone into the exile in Holland, and live as Englishmen, though free from the ecclesiastical Establishment which

. - PILGRIMS AT LEYDEN. 6 1

enforced uniformity in every hamlet of their native island. It was a momentous decision, far surpassing in its boldness any proposition of emigration in these days when the world is brought close together by steam ; but the Leyden Christians had the example of the settlers of Virginia be- fore them to show that it was not impossible of accomplish- ment. Yet it was not easy to carry the resolution into execution. The Virginia Company was willing enough to receive promising emigrants to open up its territories ; but the Leyden congregation desired permission from the king, if possible, for the free exercise of their worship on the soil of the new settlement. That privilege was the real difficulty. In hope of securing it Robinson and Brewster provided their two commissioners to the English authorities in 1617 with a statement of the position of the Leyden church drawn up in seven remarkable articles, and intended to make the utmost possible concession to English prejudice. There is much reason to think that Robinson's type of Separatism was less strenuous and more tolerant than that of Browne or Barrowe, but in these articles the Leyden pastor and ruling elder declare their willingness to admit the authority of the king to appoint bishops, and his supremacy in all causes and over all persons, as well as the duty of yielding at least passive obedience to all his commands. They even were willing to admit the author- ity of the existing bishops as royal representatives, though they were careful not to ascribe any spiritual authority unto them. It was the utmost extreme of concession to which these exiles could go ; and it is noteworthy in that while it preserved the most essential elements of the beliefs for which its writers had suffered, they were willing to give full toleration to the religious institutions established by law in England. Perhaps this readiness was the prod- uct merely of the strong desire to secure the privileges

62 THE CONGREGA TIONALISTS. [Chap. hi.

of toleration in return ; but the London-Amsterdam church had shown itself wholly intolerant of the Establishment when in circumstances even more necessitous, and a large degree of toleration of others — when judged by Anglican or Puritan standards — was ever characteristic of the Plym- outh colony, which had its germ in this Leyden church.

Conciliatory as this presentation was, the king, supported by the English ecclesiastical authorities, would give no guarantee of toleration to the suppliants. The utmost that could be obtained from James was a verbal under- standing that as long as they behaved peaceably in their new home they would be unmolested. Encouraged by this promise, a patent was obtained from the company in June, 1 619, in the name of an English friend of the strug- gling church — John Wincob — a patent of which they ulti- mately made no use. But in spite of the granting of the patent, the arrangements for the transfer of the exiles to America dragged; and at this juncture, early in 1620, negotiations were begun by merchants of Amsterdam looking for their settlement in New York, then the Dutch territory of the New Netherlands. It was while these new discussions were in progress that the London merchants, whom they had already approached, made definite terms with tlie Leyden emigrants. As finally agreed, the colo- nists and merchant-contributors were made into a stock company, in which the labor of each emigrant over six- teen years of age for seven years was considered equal to a contribution of ;^io by the merchants. During the first seven years all profits and results of labor and trade as developed in the colony should go to the common stock, from which food, clothing, and tools for the colo- nists should come ; and at the end of the period all should be divided among the stockholders. That the Leyden emigrants should be willing to enter into a bargain which

THE EMIGRATION. 63

valued their labor at so little in proportion to the financial contributions of the moneyed members of the partnership shows in the clearest light, as Palfrey has expressed it, " the slenderness of their means and the constancy of their purpose."

Yet even the conclusion of this hard bargain did not relieve the emigrants of their difficulties. Their scanty means, the uncertainty of the enterprise, and the inabil- ity or unwillingness of some of their number to under- take the journey even had their pecuniary resources been greater than was the case, had already made it evident that not quite half of the church could embark upon the expedition. With the majority Robinson was constrained to remain, though with a hope on his part to follow his friends later; and it may be that the wishes of the majority in this matter were aided by the opposition of the English contributing merchants, who probably were glad to avoid the notoriety of the presence in a colony, for the religious aspects of which they cared little, of so redoubtable an exponent of Separatism as Robinson. So it was agreed that the minority, who were to undertake the voyage, should be under the spiritual guidance of Elder William Brewster, and that while each body — those who went and those who remained — should be sufficiently independent ecclesiastically to administer its own aff"airs, yet they were to be still sufficiently one to receive members one from the other without question or testimonial. As a matter of fact, Brewster, who was an effective preacher, though retaining his position as elder, was practically pastor of the colonists, save in the administration of the sacraments, for nearly ten years after the settlement at Plymouth — the emigrant church looking upon the absent Robinson as in some sense their pastor as long as he lived, and finding no satisfactory successor for several years after his death.

64 THE CONGREGATION ALISTS. [Chaf. in.

In the smaller of the two vessels which had been obtained for the expedition — the "Speedwell" — the emigrants, or, as Bradford styles them, the Pilgrims, left Delftshaven, the port most convenient to Leyden, not far from the middle of July, 1620, encouraged on their way, either at the time of sailing or more probably at a fast just before leaving Leyden, by Robinson in a memorable and elo- quent address urging upon them the duty of open-mind- edness to the leadings of the Divine Spirit, and voicing the remarkable prediction that should English Puritans leave their island home and come to the New World no essential difference in church administration between them and the Pilgrims w^ould be found. It detracts ■ nothing from the sweetness and charity of this noble utterance that the " further light " from the " written Word " which Robinson exhorted his disciples to be ready to receive was, to his thinking, light on church polity rather than on doctrine. The declaration is in advance of the spirit of the speaker's age, and it shovvs the breadth of sym- pathy, that, combined as it was with firmness of convic- tion on those matters which he deemed fundamental, made him the best beloved and the most influential of the Sep- aratist ministers.

From Delftshaven the " Speedwell " made her way to Southampton, England, where the "Mayflower" awaited them with some additions to the colony drawn directly from English sources. On August 5th-i5th both vessels set sail, but soon put into Dartmouth for repairs ; and the start was made afresh. But again the " Speedwell " proved unseaworthy, or, as the Pilgrims afterward believed, her captain and crew repented of the voyage ; and back they turned, a hundred leagues beyond Land's End, for the English Plymouth. Here it was decided to abandon the

THE EMIGRATION. 65

misnamed " Speedwell," and here too the courage of some gave out, as well it might in view of all the diffi- culties of what must have seemed an almost hopeless en- terprise. But at last, on September 6th-i6th, the " May- flower" sailed from Plymouth on her lonely voyage, freighted with one hundred and two colonists, of whom twenty-two were hired servants. Most of the independ- ent members of the expedition had been of the Leyden congregation, though as the younger men naturally were more largely represented in the enterprise than the older, a considerable proportion of the Leyden emigrants had not been long of Robinson's fellowship. Brewster and Brad- ford had shared the fortunes of the church since its begin- nings at Scrooby ; John Carver, the first governor of the little colony, Deacon-Doctor Samuel Fuller, its physician and the man who was more than any other to be the means of transforming New England Puritanism into Con- gregationalism, Edward Winslow, its able man of affairs, Isaac Allerton, its unsatisfactory agent, had all been promi- nent in the congregation at Leyden ; while John Alden, more famous in romance than conspicuous in the beginnings of the colony, had been engaged as a cooper at South- ampton after the long journey had been begun. Quick- tempered and brave Myles Standish had come with the Leyden emigrants from Holland, but though he was to do much for the colony, he hardly sympathized with the religious aspirations which animated most of the company, for he was not a member of the church, and may have been by family inclined to Catholicism ; but his heart was in the success of the enterprise for which his military abil- ity had probably caused him to be chosen. This was the company, of somewhat diverse elements, but dominated by the men of Leyden training who constituted the majority

66 THE CONGREGA TIONALISTS. [Chap. hi.

of its adult membership, that sailed from the English Plym- outh, and which, after a tedious voyage of no special eventfulness, found itself off the end of Cape Cod on November 9-19, 1620.

But here a serious embarrassment presented itself to the voyagers. The patent under which the company proposed to make its settlement was issued by the London branch of the Virginia Company — a body having no claim to juris- diction north, of forty-one degrees, a little northward of the present city of New York. They were clearly where they had no legal authority to be ; and in this condition, finding it impossible to go to any place within the limits of their charter owing to the opposition of the sailors who had brought them over, they determined to settle in the region where Providence had cast them, and to provide for the good order of the little community by the organi- zation of civil government. There is reason to believe that this step had been planned before leaving Leyden, but the form in which it was carried out must have been, due to the unforeseen exigencies of the situation. It is strikingly illustrative of the indirect effects of Congrega- tional training that these charterless exiles now proceeded, on November i ith-2ist, to provide the basis of their state by a covenant, just as they would have organized a church. This document, drawn up and signed in the cabin of the " Mayflower," is as follows :

" In the name of God, Amen. We whose names are vnderwritten, the loyall Subiects of our dread soveraigne Lord King Iames, by the grace of God of Great Britaine, France, and Ireland King, Defender of the Faith, &c.

" Having vnder-taken for the glory of God, and ad- vancement of the Christian Faith, and honour of our King and Countrey, a Voyage to plant the first Colony in the Northerne parts of Virginia, doe b}- these presents sol •

ARRIVAL IN AMERICA. 67

emnly & mutually in the presence of God and one of an- other, covenant, and combine our selues together into a civill body politike, for our better ordering and preserva- tion, and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by vertue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame such iust and equall Lawes, Ordinances, acts, constitutions, offices from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the generall good of the Colony : vnto which we promise all due submission and obedience. In witnesse whereof we haue here-vnder subscribed our names. Cape Cod ii. of November in the yeare of the raigne of our soveraigne Lord King Iames, of England, France, and Ireland 18. and of Scotland 54. Anno Domino 1620."

Thus erected into a civil community, they chose a gov- ernor in the person of John Carver, and proceeded to look about for a place of settlement. After a month of explo- ration, on Monday, December iith— 21st, the investigating party landed at the place where Plymouth was afterward to stand, and finding it suitable for their purpose, the greater part of the ship's company were set to work within a few days preparing dwellings for shelter during the winter season already upon them. It is illustrative of their strong religious antipathy to what they deemed the improper observance of unscriptural festival days in the countries of their birth and exile that on their first Christmas in the New World " no man rested." They had kept " ye Sabath " with scrupulous care even in the most pressing season of their exploration, and they equally scrupulously endeav- ored to make Christmas as if it were not by going " on shore, some to fell timber, some to saw, some to rive, and some to carry."

Yet winter, even an exceedingly mild winter as this was, is a sober time at best to be house-building on the New England coast, and its exposures were rendered more de-

68 THE CONGREGATIONALISTS. [Chap. m.

structive by the long use of ship's food; so that the settle- ment had hardly begun before its scanty numbers fell ill. By the ist of April forty- four of the little company had died; but the few survivors were determined to push on, and when the " Mayflower" sailed for England on April 5, 1 62 1, she took back with her- only her own sailors. The prospect was indeed gloomy enough ; scarcely, had the "Mayflower" sailed when Governor Carver's name was added to the list of those no longer living, and with his death the little colony's tale of loss counted up twenty- eight of its forty-eight adult males. By the following autumn the attempt had cost the lives of exactly half of those who had come over in the " Mayflower" as' settlers. Such a bare statement of facts shows better than any rhe- torical picture, however brilliant, the sincerity and single- ness of the attachment of the members of this little band to the principles of church government which they believed to be divinely appointed ; and the intense satisfaction which they felt in being at last where they could combine freedom and self-government with life on English soil. However tolerable, as compared with a persecuted exist- ence in their native island, their Holland sojourn may have been, the most eloquent testimony to the hardness of their lot in Leyden is the willingness of these Pilgrims to continue their adventure in New England.

These qualities of courage, patience, and steadfastness were general rather than exceptional in the company, but the}- have no better illustration than in the person of Will- iam Bradford, now chosen to succeed Carver in the gov- ernorship from which he had been removed by death. Thirty-one years of age, he was in the full vigor of man- hood, but he had behind him certainly fifteen years of tried fidelity to the interests of the community of which he was. now made the head, and before him till his honored death

EARLY STRUGGLES. 69

thirty-six years of continuous service as the leader of its affairs and for the greater part of that time its governor. A man of education for one who had not the privileges of a university, a natural leader, his modesty was as con- spicuous as his devotion to the concerns of the colony was entire. No one can read the " History" in which he has recorded the chief events in which he was so conspicuous an actor without feeling that we have to do with a man who commanded affection as well as respect, a strong, sweet, self- forgetful Christian character; and it is the presence of such men as Bradford that best shows us why the enterprise at Plymouth did not die.

The enterprise thus inaugurated slowly grew. In No- vember, 1 62 1, just a year after the arrival of the first set- tlers, the "Fortune" brought thirty-five new colonists — a welcome addition — among them a son of Elder Brewster and a brother of Edward Winslow, but most of them ap- parently picked up by the merchant-partners in England, and, as Bradford describes them, " wild enough." In July, 1623, about sixty additions were brought to the colony by the " Anne," '' some of them being very usefull persons, , . . and some were so bad, as they were faine to be at charge to send them home againe y^ next year." That these less desirable elements came with the better was due to the somewhat discordant aims of the partners in the Plymouth undertaking. On the one hand, the Leyden Pilgrims de- sired first of all the maintenance of Congregational institu- tions and the preservation of the moral tone of the com- munity ; on the other hand, the merchants of London, who had furnished the chief part of the money for the advent- ure, cared little save for a flourishing trading colony which should yield satisfactory profits. A divergence of wishes speedily manifested itself. The Pilgrims desired to bring over their Leyden associates as speedily as possible, but

70 THE CONGREGATIONA LISTS. [Chap. hi.

bound as they were to their partners, they could not well raise the money for such an end. On the contrary, the merchant-partners preferred to send active young men, picked up where they could get them, who might make good hunters, fishers, and tillers of the soil. They looked askance at the Separatists still at Leyden, most of all at Robinson, wl^om the Pilgrims desired above all others should come to them. They felt that if something could be done to minimize the Separatist characteristics of the colony it would grow more rapidly. And so, in 1624, instead of Robinson, the merchant-partners sent over a certain John Lyford to minister to the church, which was led in its worship by Elder Brewster, and still regarded Robinson as its pastor.

Lyford was profuse in his expressions of admiration for the institutions of the colony on his arrival, and joined the church as if he had been at heart a Separatist instead of a very unworthy member of the Puritan party ; but it was not long before his real character appeared. Certain elements of discontent, as has been seen, were to be found in the composition of the colony ; and of the discontented faction perhaps the most conspicuous was John Oldham, a man of headstrong temper, who, as a late arrival come at his own charges and not bound by the general agreement for com- mon labor under which the original settlers and most of their successors had made the journey, was displeased with the limitations placed on trade by the Plymouth government — limitations designed to secure as much as possible for the payment of the debt for which so many in the com- munity were jointly liable. In company with Oldham and a few others, possibly among them Roger Conant, the future founder of Salem, Lyford now " set up a publick meeting aparte, on ye Lord's day," for worship as a Puri- tan minister of the Church of England. A rather high-

EARLY STRCGGLES. J I

handed seizure of letters from these malcontents to the mer- chant-partners in London by Governor Bradford showed that they were actively attempting the overthrow of the supremacy of the Leyden Pilgrims, and were anxious to prevent the arrival of those who had been left behind in Holland but who were looking eagerly across the sea. In view of these evident attempts to stir up trouble for the Pilgrims, and certain revelations as to Lyford's previous immoral life, both Lyford and Oldham were expelled from the little community.

The news of the rejection of the unworthy Lyford pre- cipitated a quarrel among the merchant-partners, many of whom were disheartened over the comparatively meager financial prospects of the enterprise ; and after some nego- tiation, to the great joy of the Pilgrims, the London mer- chants, with whom they had been so unsatisfactorily yoked, sold out in 1626 all interest in the colony to the colonial leaders for the onerous sum of ;:^i8oo, to be paid in nine annual installments. Thus at last wholly their own mas- ters, though still burdened with a large debt, the Plym- outh Pilgrims determined to bring over to the colony their former associates who had remained at Leyden and whose coming had been so much desired. As a result, two companies were brought over, one in 1629, the other in 1630, in all about sixty persons, at the expense of those to whom they came.

But the man of all others whom they would have been glad to welcome was no longer of the living : John Robin- son had died at Leyden on March i, 1625 (N. S.). It was no feigned sorrow that the lonely Plymouth settlers felt for him, and it must have been with a feeling of almost filial bereavement that they thought of him as no longer a possible member of their earthly fellowship. For, taken all in all, Robinson was the greatest of the Separatists.

72 THE CONGREGATIONA LISTS. [Chap. in.

His originality as a thinker was not equal to that of Browne, but in every other respect he was the superior of that erratic leader. He was not called to the test of martyrdom as were Barrowe and Greenwood and Penry. But he was vastly better fitted than they to be a guide in a movement requiring patience, forbearance, and union. He was no mean controversialist, his writings made him looked upon as the representative Separatist of his gener- ation ; yet his chief power was his capacity to mold those who came under his personal influence. The Pilgrims who crossed the ocean and founded Plymouth were strong men, of marked indi\'iduality, yet they and their colony bore permanently the stamp of Robinson's forceful train- ing. There was in him a quality of charity and tolerance in marked contrast to the Separatist leaders before him, which led him into kindly relations with the Dutch churches as far as they would permit, and which softened his antip- athy to the Church of England every year that he lived. Nor was his conception of his own powers in his congre- gation autocratic, like that of Francis Johnson. Though he failed to reach the full democracy of Browne, his the- ory of church administration was more democratic than that of any early Congregational leader beside. And these qualities became in a measure the characteristics of the colony of which he was truly one of the founders, though he never set foot upon its soil.

From the coming of the Pilgrims in 1620 to the arrival of the last company of their Leyden associates not quite ten years later, the little colony grew to about three hun- dred members. It had taken firm root, it had maintained its institutions, it had passed through perils of famine, sickness, opposition in England, internal discords, the dan- gers of Indian hostility, and the worse peril of the lawless deeds of the roueh traders and adventurers who settled

ROB/NSON' AND BREWSTER. 73

about Massachusetts Bay under Weston, Gorges, and Mor- ton at various times from 1622 onward. By 1630 the continuance of the colony seemed fairly assured, while the coming of the new forces from Leyden made it more certain than it had been during the early years of struggle that the religious element would permanently dominate the community. But already the great Puritan immigra- tion into Massachusetts had begun which was to leave Plymouth, hampered by its sterile soil and slow- growing population, far behind in the material development of New England; but on which Plymouth was to do its best mis- sionary work in fashioning Puritanism into Congregation- alism.

Through these years of sacrifice and struggle till 1629, when a moderately gifted minister was procured in the person of Ralph Smith, the Pilgrim church had been minis- tered to by Elder Brewster. The merchant-partners had sent the unworthy Lyford in 1624, and the colonial agent, Isaac Allerton, had taken it upon himself to bring over the mentally distracted Rogers in 1628; but the church preferred to listen to Brewster, who, though refraining by Robinson's advice from administering the sacraments, " taught twise every Saboth, and yt both powerfully and profitably, to y^ great contentment of y^ hearers, and their comfortable edification ; yea, many were brought to God by his ministrie." A letter of De Rasieres, the Dutch chief-merchant at Fort Amsterdam, the present New York, describing a visit made by him to Plymouth in 1627, gives us a glimpse of the meeting-house and con- gregation :

" Upon the hill they have a large square house, with a flat roof, made of thick-sawn planks, stayed with oak beams, upon the top of which they have six cannons, which shoot iron balls of four and five pounds, and com-

74 "THE CONGREGATIONALISTS. [Chap. hi.

mand the surrounding country. The lower part they use for their church, where they preach on Sundays and the usual holidays. They assemble by beat of drum, each with his musket or firelock, in front of the captain's [Myles Standish's] door; they have their cloaks on, and place themselves in order, three abreast, and are led by a sergeant without beat of drum. Behind comes the Gover- nor [William Bradford], in a long robe; beside him, on the right hand, comes the preacher [Elder Brewster], with his cloak on, and on the left hand the captain, with his side-arms and cloak on, and with a small cane in his hand ; and so they march in good order, and each sets his arms down near him."

We get an insight into this Plymouth meeting-house also on a later and somewhat special occasion, when Plym- outh enjoyed the residence of two ministers, and was re- ceiving Governor Winthrop and Rev. John Wilson of Bos- ton as its guests. Winthrop records in October, 1632 :

" On the Lord's day there was a sacrament, which they did partake in ; and, in the afternoon, Mr. Roger Williams [then living at Plymouth] (according to their custom) pro- pounded a question, to which the pastor, Mr. [Ralph] Smith, .spake briefly; then Mr. Williams prophesied [i.e., preached] ; and after the governour of Plimouth spake to the question ; after him the elder [Brewster] ; then some two or three more of the congregation. Then the elder desired the governour of Massachusetts and Mr. W^ilson to speak to it, which they did. When this was ended, the deacon, Mr. Fuller, put the congregation in mind of their duty of contribution ; whereupon the governour and all the rest went down to the deacons' seat, and put into the box, and then returned."

On such an occasion the congregation in the rude can- non-topped meeting-house at Plymouth might well feel

THE PLYMOUTH CHURCH. 75'

that in the liberty to practice the polity and worship in which they believed they had their reward for fidelity to their covenant promise " to walke in all his wayes . . . w^hatsoever it should cost them " ; and what it had cost, the wind-swept graveyard and the rude street of hewn- plank houses bore mute witness.

CHAPTER IV.

THE PURITAN SETTLEMENT OF NEW ENGLAND. — PURI TANISM CONGREGATIONALIZED.

In the preceding chapter the struggles and sacrifices by which Congregationahsts of the Separatist type brought their institutions from England through Holland to the American wilderness have been passed in rapid • review. It has been seen that the Plymouth colony, after ten years of contest with perils within and without, was possessed of a population of about three hundred, and had arrived at a condition of stability which promised the continuance of its institutions in church and state, unless disturbed by influences from outside. But had Plymouth been left to its slow development such disturbance must almost cer- tainly have come. Its supply of immigrants from the Leyden congregation was at best small, and by 1630 had practically reached its limit ; it could hope for little direct increase from English Separatists, for they were few and poor ; and though the sobriety and industry of the Pilgrim colony had enabled it to make head against the ill-managed attempts of Weston, Gorges, and Morton to found inimical settlements about Massachusetts Bay, it could be only a matter of time when the more fertile lands about the Charles and the superior fishing privileges of Cape Ann would people those regions with Englishmen more in number than those of Plymouth, who would inevitably force the Separatist colony into conformity with their wishes, should the principles of Plymouth be obnoxious

76

PURITANISM NOT SEPARATISM. ^'J

to them. That the work of Plymouth was preserved, and that the larger English settlements, when they came to be erected on New England soil, were friendly rather than hostile, was due to the fact that, owing to causes the work- ing of which was unforeseen when the Pilgrims crossed the ocean, the great Puritan party of England, within less than ten years after the landing at Plymouth, had begun the occupation of Massachusetts Bay in force, and, in spite of its opposition to Separatism in England, had come into essential ecclesiastical harmony with the Separatists of the New World.

Throughout the later years of Elizabeth and the reign of the first of the Stuarts the two types of Puritanism, noticed in the first chapter of this volume, continued with- out any very sharp discrimination, since the opposition of the government was continually driving Puritans of every shade to more and more radical positions. But between even the most advanced Puritan of the school of Cart- wright and the Separatist there was one important point of disagreement. Alike in doctrine, both extreme Calvin- ists, agreeing also that the Bible is the ultimate rule of church polity as well as the final test of faith, both ques- tioning the rightfulness of the ceremonies, liturgy, and government of the Establishment, they differed chiefly in their attitude toward that church itself. To the Separatist of the type of Browne, Barrowe, or Johnson, it was an anti- christian imitation of the true church of God, from which duty should compel a Christian to withdraw himself as speedily as possible. Robinson and Brewster, indeed, as they advanced in years, came to think less harshly of the legal church, but even they regarded it as a body from membership in which a Christian man should hold himself aloof. But to the extremest Puritan the Church of Eng- land was still a true church, though in error. He agreed

78 THE COXGREGATIOXALISTS. [Chap. iv.

largely with the Separatist as to what the officers of the church ought to be ; he felt that its membership ought to be purified, for Puritanism was above all a movement of ethical power anxious that men should live godly lives ; but he clung to the idea of a national church, and hoped that its purification would be brought about by the assist- ance of the government. And if this was true of the ex- treme Puritan, it was even more true of the large wing of the party that continued in the attitude which had been that of all the Puritans before Cartwright, viewing the service as marred by Catholic ceremonies, the Prayer- Book as defaced by superstitious prescriptions, the mem- bership of the church as in sore need of discipline and its ministry of education, objecting to the tyranny of the High Commission and its imposition of vestments and rites, and looking for the abolition of all these evils from the government, without going so far as to join with the extremer Puritans in condemning Episcopacy per sc, or the Prayer- Book as a whole.

Nor did this hope of general reform by the ci\'il author- ity, cherished by all types of Puritans, appear to be vain for many years after the Puritan movement had begun. True, the Puritans were frowned upon by Elizabeth and im- prisoned by Whitgift and other bishops under her encour- agement ; but all through the reign of that great queen their numbers steadily increased. It did not require a long memory for the Puritan to recall that Henry VHI. had torn the church from Rome and given it an Eng- lish Bible, while leaving its doctrines essentially Cath- olic ; that the government which ruled in the name of P^dward \''I. had gi\en the same church an English liturgy and Protestant articles ; that ]\Iar\' had led the waj- back to Rome ; that Elizabeth had brought it once more to at least partial Protestantism ; and that all these changes had

PURITAN HOPES. 79

been concurred in by Parliament and extended at once, in theory at least, to the remotest hamlet of the kingdom. Why should not a growing party feel confident that the time would come, if not under Elizabeth, yet speedily, when for a fifth time within a century the sovereign and Parliament would once more undertake the reformation of the often altered Church of England, and make it more fully what the Scriptures taught that a church should be? And this hope seemed the better grounded because Par- liament, while not yet mainly Puritan, had been gaining rapidly in sympathy with Puritanism, and in a sense of its own right to take an increasing share in the government of the nation, during the closing years of Elizabeth's reign. It was with this hope that about seven hundred and fifty Puritan ministers of the Church of England approved the Millenary Petition, with which James I. was met on his way up to London to take possession of the throne vacated by Elizabeth in 1603. This prayer did not ask for ex- tensive changes, it represented the wishes of the moderate rather than the extreme Puritans ; and the petitioners would have been satisfied could they have secured the abolition of the surplice, the sign of the cross, and similar ceremonials, together with non-residence and other grave ministerial faults, and the change of a few passages in the Prayer-Book. They had some reason to hope, in spite of the efforts which James had made in his Scotch king- dom to give real power to the bishops, to whom Scotch law had long allowed a nominal existence, that the well- known Calvinism and the Presbyterian training of the new English sovereign would incline him to grant what they asked. But in this they found themselves grievously dis- appointed. In the Hampton Court Conference of January, 1604, which resulted from this petition, and where these and some other changes desired by the Puritans were de-

8o THE CONGREGATIONALISTS. [Chap. iv.

bated before and by the king, James fully committed him- self to the Anglican side. His great desire was the asser- tion of his own authority, and he was shrewd enough to see that a system which made him the appointer of the bishops, and them the regulators of the church, gave him a power which had never been his in Scotland — a power which would be impaired just in proportion as concessions were made to the Puritans. " No Bishop, no King," was the " short Aphorisme " in which the royalist sympathizer Barlow says James expressed his position at the conference ; and his hostility to all proposed changes in church gov- ernment led him to declare that Scotch Presbyterianism " as wel agreeth with a Monarchy, as God and the Deuill. Then lack & Tom, & Will, & Dick, shall meete, and at their pleasures censure me, and my Councell, and all our proceedinges." To the Puritans, who had treated him with the greatest respect throughout the conference, he an- nounced : " I shall make the conforme themselues, or I wil harrie them out of the land, or else doe worse." No wonder these declarations of their new sovereign were pleasing to the bishops ; but were it not told by the sym- pathetic Dean of Chester, one could hardly believe that any member of that order could have exclaimed, as one did with delighted servility, that ** hee was fully perswaded, his Maiestie spake by the instinct of tJie spirite of God."

This triumph of the High Anglican party was followed by another. The Convocation which met under the presi- denc}^ of Bancroft, then Bishop of London, in the summer following the Conference, passed a series of stringent can- ons enforcing uniformity, and declaring that to question the apostolical character of the Church of England in its existing form, to condemn its Prayer-Book, rites, and cere- monies as superstitions, or its officers — such as archbishops, bishops, deans, or archdeacons — as repugnant to the Word

JAMES AND THE PURITANS. 8 1

of God, or to affirm that any ministers or laymen may make rules for church government without the sanction of the king, is to become ipso facto excommunicate, and incapable of restoration to communion by any officer less in rank than the archbishop himself, and then only after repent- ance and a public revocation. Under the stress of these stringent regulations, which were soon promulgated with the royal approval, a number of ministers, estimated by some at three hundred, were driven from their livings.

Archbishop Whitgift died in February, 1604, and was succeeded in the see of Canterbury by Bancroft, who now brought the jure divino theory of episcopacy to the highest ecclesiastical post In the kingdom. His eleva- tion strengthened, of course, all the forces opposed to Puritanism.

But while Puritanism thus suffered a loss of influence over the administration of the church, rather than a gain, through the accession of James it made a decided advance in another quarter — the English Parliament. Under the Tudors Parliament had reached its lowest ebb of power. The destruction of the old noble families during the War of the Roses had removed from Parliament that which had been Its main strength In the Lancastrian days ; it required several generations for the power of the landed gentry to develop sufficiently to raise the lower House to something of the importance which had once belonged to the upper. It was during the reigns of the five Tudor sovereigns that this transfer of the parliamentary center of gravity took place, and while it was in process parliamentary independ- ence amounted to little. But before the close of Eliza- beth's reign the strength of the Commons was consider- able ; and If it was not much exercised In opposition to the will of a popular sovereign such as the great queen was, the latent forces were there which would be sure to

82 THE CONGREGA TIONALISTS. [Chap. iv.

rise into strengtli when resisted by a king who was un- popular. And James, through his arbitrary assertions of his claims, alienated his first Parliament, that of 1604. He sought to interfere in the election of members, he pressed measures for a union with Scotland which the Commons regarded with suspicion, he quarreled with the Commons as to whether they were a " court of record " or no, and thus roused a high degree of irritation. This opening Parliament of his reign was not predominantly Puritan, but it was sufficiently under Puritan influence to believe that some of the reforms desired by the Puritans might wisely have been granted. And with the begin- nings of parliamentary opposition to the king the religious and the political opponents of the arbitrariness of the crown naturally recognized that they were in a measure fight- ing the same battle ; the Puritan way of thinking inclined, moreover, as truly toward the limitation of royal absolu- tism by precedent and by law as the High Anglican to assert the royal supremacy. As the reign of James went on the Commons came into more and more hearty sympathy with the religious ideas of the Puritans. James's own feeling had been right, that Puritanism, like Scotch Presbyterian- ism, " as wel agreeth with a Monarchy " — as he wished a monarchy to be — " as God and the Deuill."

The reign thus begun in hostility to the Puritans, and to the spirit of constitutional government which soon came into full alliance with Puritanism, went on with increas- ing bitterness, though not always with increasing severity, toward the Puritan party. Under Bancroft the repress- ive policy of Whitgift was continued and strengthened ; but George Abbot, Bancroft's successor in the see of Can- terbury from 161 1 to 1633, was a pronounced Calvinist, in some degree sympathetic with the Puritans, and willing to overlook some departure from the prescribed vestments

JAMES AND PARLIAMENT. 83

and ceremonies. During his early archbishopric, till the rise of Laud and his school, the Puritans felt more encour- agement, though they at no time obtained the favor of the king. With Parliament James fell into more and more hopeless quarrel. The nation as a whole looked upon Spain as its natural enemy; its strong hatred of Catholi- cism feared any alliance with Spanish interests ; but the king hoped to promote the peace of Europe and fill his depleted treasury by effecting a marriage between his son and a Spanish princess — a hope which the diplomacy of Spain used for years to tie the hands of the English Gov- ernment when all England except a few extreme royalists and Catholics were longing to go to the aid of German Protestantism, struggling from 16 18 onward in the death- grapple of the Thirty Years' War. Nor was James's home policy more representative of the best feeling of England than his foreign. "Corruption was less concealed in his court than in that of his immediate predecessors ; succes- sive favorites, Carr and Villiers, with no other claim to elevation than the fancy of the king, dispensed the royal favors ; unusual taxes were imposed by royal order ; and monopolies for manufacture and trade were granted which were popularly supposed to be enormously profitable, and which angered the people against their possessors. Parlia- ment disliked James's administration at home and abroad, in church and state alike, and the quarrel culminated* in 162 1 and 1622 in the royal prohibition that the Commons should discuss affairs of state — a prohibition which was met by the famous declaration that all concerns of church and state were proper subjects of parliamentary debate, and that in their consideration every member should have freedom of speech. James expressed his opinion of this assertion of right by tearing the page on which it was re- corded from the journal of the Commons with his own

84 THE CONGREGA TIONALISTS. [Chap. iv.

hand, declaring, as he did so: "I will govern according to the common weal, but not according to the common will."

All these events, and especially the proposed Spanish marriage and the non-interference in behalf of the hard- pressed Protestants of Germany, strengthened Puritanism and gave it a hold on the national affection which it had never enjoyed under Elizabeth. As the average English- man saw James agree, in 1623, that if his son should marry the Spanish princess the future queen should have public Catholic worship to which every man might have unmo- lested access, that Catholics everywhere in the kingdom should have freedom of worship in private houses, and that the children of the proposed marriage should be under their mother's charge till ten years of age and hence have their early training in the Roman faith, no wonder he felt that the party which maintained the most positive type of Protestantism at home and which would go, if it could, to the aid of oppressed Protestants abroad was the party for him, rather than that which exalted royal absolutism and preached the doctrine of unquestioning obedience to the behests of so unrepresentative a king. Nor was this feeling of the common Englishman lessened when, after his brief period of joy over the failure of the Spanish mar- riage negotiations, he saw the heir to the throne betrothed to the daughter of the king of France under an agreement pledging nearly as great concessions to English Catholics as had been offered to propitiate Spain.

Thus it came about that when James died, in 1625, he left the affairs of his kingdom in a situation which only the wisest and most conciliatory statesmanship could mas- ter, and he left them to an obstinate, self-willed young man — Charles I. — who, though outwardly more dignified than his father had been, had an evil trait not markedly present in the older Stuart king, a capacity to make

THE POLICY OF CHARLES. 85

promises which he never intended to fulfill ; and who was, if anything, more persuaded than James of the divine authority of kings. Such a king could only make matters worse.

The accession of Charles was followed by his marriage to the French Catholic princess ; the establishment of her Catholic chapel, which soon became a popular place of resort ; and the loan of English ships to Richelieu to fight against French Protestants as part of the price — in justice to Charles be it said an unexpected part of the price — of the French marriage. His first Parliament he dissolved after it had sat for less than two months in the first year of his reign because the Commons refused to vote money which they believed would be squandered by the all- powerful favorite, George Villiers, who as Duke of Buck- ingham was Charles's most trusted adviser. His second Parliament he sent home in 1626 to save the favorite from impeachment. His third Parliament wrung from him the famous "Petition of Right" in June, 1628, but was dis- solved in March of the following year because it attempted to enforce the Puritan hatred of Catholicism and Armin- ianism, and to prevent the levying of taxes unauthorized by the Commons. For the next eleven years Charles reigned without Parliaments — a time of oppression which, while it was marked by evidences of commercial prosperity and external good order, was one which made good men despair of the future of English liberty, and so fed the flames of dissatisfaction that when they burst forth once more they destroyed for a time the whole fabric of royal absolutism which had been so laboriously erected.

The hostility to Arminianism displayed by the Parlia- ments of the reign of Charles was a manifestation of Puri- tan opposition to the change in doctrinal position which had been going on among the High Anglicans since the

86 THE CONGREGATIONALISTS. [Chap. iv.

beginning of the reign of James. Arbitrary as their dom- ineering poHcy was, it would be an injustice to the bish- ops and clergy who supported Charles in the opening years of his rule to fail to recognize that they now repre- sented not merely a tyrannous insistence on ceremonial and governmental uniformity in the church, they stood in a measure for doctrinal freedom. The older Anglicans, like Whitgift, had no serious doctrinal dispute with the Puritans — they were alike Calvinists. But there was an intensity in the Calvinism of the Puritans which made them endeavor to strengthen and enforce the Calvinism they found in the Thirty-nine Articles. To Puritan think- ing, right views regarding the divine decrees were. essential to all true Protestantism and all successful resistance to Rome. This feeling had led the Puritans at the Hampton Court Conference vainly to propose the introduction into the Articles of the English Church of the Lambeth Articles of 1595, which, though approved by Whitgift and others of the Anglican party at the time of their composition, are the most extreme statement of Calvinism ever put forth with any show of authority in England. But, con- temporary with the reign of James, the Arminian contro- versy ran its violent course in Holland. That discussion awakened much interest in the English Church, which was represented by commissioners at the Synod of Dort in 1618-19; and though James approved the Calvinistic decisions of that body, the Arminian theories there con- demned impressed a section of the High Anglican clergy- men, and, through the influence of William Laud, it is said, even modified the theology of the old king himself.

Under Charles, Arminianism became increasingly char- acteristic of the High Church party; and Arminianism in England under the Stuarts, whatever it may have signified in Holland or in the Wesleyan revival, while implying an

RISE OF ARMINIANISM. 87

increase of intellectual freedom in doctrinal matters, was characterized also by a less strenuous Protestantism, by a willingness to coquet with some features of Catholicism, and a decreased sympathy with the Calvinistic churches of the Continent, with which the Church of England had thus far held itself in cordial fellowship. During the reign of James, also, the jure divino view of episcopacy, intro- duced by Bancroft and Bilson in the later years of Eliza- beth, had become that of the Anglican party ; and by the accession of Charles to the throne the devotion of that party to the royal absolutism had risen to an absurd height under the stimulus of constant royal favor and increasing opposition from the majority of the nation. The High Church party stood chiefly by the favor of the king, and it is not surprising that its members exalted the hand that upheld them.

Over against this Arminianism and absolutism of the High Anglican party, Puritanism in the church and in Parliament desired absolute uniformity of belief. Neither of the parties favored toleration, but the unity sought by the one was not that looked for by the other. To the Puritan the prime necessity was unity in acceptance and in strengthening of the historic Calvinism of the English Church ; to the Anglican it was a submission to the regu- lations imposed by a divinely authorized king and a God- appointed order. To the Puritan the spiritual and doctri- nal condition of England was the all-important matter; to the Anglican its external uniformity and submission to constituted authority. The Puritan would have men be- lieve alike ; the Anglican would have them worship alike.

This feeling that the Protestantism of England was threatened by doctrinal innovation as well as its liberty imperiled by the assertion of royal absolutism, induced Parliament, now decidedly Puritan, to proceed against

88 THE CONGREGATIONALISTS. [Chap. iv.

some of the High Church party. In 1625 the Commons reproved Dr. Richard Montagu for denying that Calvinism was the doctrine of the Church of England and speaking favorably of Rome — a reproof which they soon carried to the extreme of imprisonment. The king's answer was the appointment of Montagu first to a chaplaincy and later (1628) to the bishopric of Chichester. Nor were the voices of the Anglican royalists less loudly raised in favor of the king's claims, or his recognition of their services less exasperating to the Puritans. In 1627, when Charles was endeavoring to raise taxes without the consent of Parliament, Dr. Robert Sybthorpe, vicar of Brackley, printed a sermon in which he declared that subjects were not authorized to resist even if the royal command was counter to the laws of God or nature, or impossible of fulfillment. These views were too exaggerated for the Puritanism of Archbishop Abbot to approve their publi- cation ; but the Bishop of London did so, and they were so acceptable to the king that Abbot was disgraced for his opposition, and practically set aside. About the same time Rev. Roger Manwaring declared in a sermon before the king that Parliament was a cipher, and that the king's command, without the consent of Parliament, bound the subject to pay any tax imposed, on pain of eternal dam- nation. The royal approval of Manwaring' s theory was expressed by ecclesiastical advancement. In 1628 Charles and his bishops published a declaration, still prefixed to the Articles of the Church of England, affirming that in order that unprofitable discussion should cease these Articles were henceforth to be taken in their literal mean- ing, and no private interpretation should be put upon them. In one sense this declaration tended to theological liberty ; but its real purport was to bar the Puritans from insisting on a Calvinistic interpretation of them as the only

WILLIAM LAUD. 89

admissible one, and thus to aid in the spread of theological views which a majority of the nation deemed inimical to Protestantism.

The most conspicuous illustration of opposition to Puri- tanism and of what was best and worst in High Anglican- ism was William Laud, who was Charles's most trusted clerical adviser from the beginning of his reign, and after the assassination of Buckingham in 1628 Charles's right hand in the ecclesiastical and largely in the civil adminis- tration of the kingdom. Laud was born in 1573, and had his education in St. John's College, Oxford, where he was distinguished for his anti- Puritan sentiments. Preferment came to him slowly at first, but by 16 16, when he be- came Dean of Gloucester, he was one of the most marked and influential of the extreme Anglicans. In 1621 James made him bishop of St. David's; 1624 saw him a member of the High Commission; in 1626 he became Bishop of Bath and Wells ; and now in 1628 he was raised by Charles to the see of London, the most important and most Puri- tanly inclined of the bishoprics of England, and only less in influence than the archiepiscopate of Canterbury, to which Charles advanced him in 1633.

Laud was unquestionably sincere, devout, mentally acute, of indefatigable energy, a lover of learning, and devoted to the interests of the church as he understood them ; but he was also narrow-minded, cruel, and domi- neering. He never learned that conciliation and forbear- ance are sometimes desirable; he believed that the best method of securing uniformity was by crushing opposition by force. He regarded unity in form and worship as of the highest importance, and in his willingness to persecute those who differed from him he resembled the pre- Refor- mation prelates whose ideals of the church were so largely his own. A firm believer in the necessity of the episco-

90 THE CONGREGA TIONALISTS. [Chap. iv.

pate and of apostolic succession, a representative of the anti-Calvinistic theology of the High Church party, and a devoted supporter of the royal absolutism, Laud was more than the chief exponent of the views of his party, he was a leader such as few men in the history of the English Church have been. To his mind there came the pleasing but unhistoric conception that subjection to the papacy and the Reformation were but incidents in the life of the. Church of England ; that that organization had presented substantially the same doctrine at all times in fundamen- tals, and that those fundamentals were better preserved in the Roman Church, in spite of its errors and its subjection to the papacy which he denounced, than in thenon-pre- latical churches of the Continent. A strong sacramenta- rian, though he did not materially differ with Calvin re- garding the nature of Christ's presence in the Supper, he attached greater importance to the sacraments than the Calvinistic Reformers had done. Above all he was a rit- ualist, whose piety craved a showy service, whose mental habit attached great importance to bowings at the name of Jesus, who saw irreverence in placing the communion table in the body of the church as the Puritans did, and de- sired to rail it off at the end as the altar had been in Roman days ; while his martinet-like spirit inclined him to force all that he deemed fitting in worship on clergy and people, to whom these changes seemed nothing but a return to Rome. Laud was the first of Anglo-Catholics ; he was not a Ro- man Catholic. But it is no wonder that neither the Puri- tans nor the Roman Catholics of his age understood him, and that both parties sincerely believed that his object was to lead the Church of England back to Rome — a belief which led to the offer to him on two occasions of a cardi- nal's hat. If it is true that his views of worship and of the sacraments have largely become those of the English

LAUD AND THE PURITANS. 9 1

Church, it is also true, as Gardiner has remarked, that this has been brought about " by a total abandonment of Laud's methods. What had been impossible to effect in a church to the worship of which every person in the land was obliged to conform became possible in a church which any one who pleased was at liberty to abandon."

But to Laud's thinking, the enforcement of conformity seemed not at all impossible, and he set himself to the work, now that he was master of the great diocese of London, with a vigor that made many a Puritan despair of the religious future of England. To the Puritan the spiritual elevation of the people seemed impossible with- out the aid of a learned, preaching ministry, inculcating Scriptural doctrines, reproving sins, and above all setting forth an active type of religious life, of which conversion by the power of the Spirit of God was the source, and a strenuous morality the fruit. In order to secure such a ministry the Puritans had established in many parishes what were known as "lectureships" — that is, pecuniary provision was made by which a preacher of Puritan incli- nations, generally in priests' orders but not always so, could have maintenance and "lecture " on Sunday afternoons in parishes where the incumbent was absent, or incompetent, or obnoxious. This system had been partially tolerated by Abbot, though in 1622 James had issued orders through Abbot that no preacher less in rank than a dean should discuss predestination or grace before a general audience. As these subjects were uppermost in Puritan thought, the aim of the order was distinctly inimical to the lectureship system. To Laud the lectures were intolerable, and he -set himself on entering on his diocese of London, and even more when Archbishop of Canterbury, to their suppression. By Laud's persuasion Charles issued directions that after- noon sermons should be reduced to mere catechising by

92 THE CONG REG A TIONALISTS. [Chap. iv.

question and answer, and that every lecture must be pre- ceded by the service, read by the lecturer in surplice and hood. To the Puritan this hostility of Laud and the king seemed a deprivation of the means of salvation.

Perhaps even more impressive to the ordinary Puritan mind than these general orders was the savage relentless- ness with which Laud pursued men whose only offense was that they spoke what half the nation was thinking, and what the Puritan believed to be the truth of God. A universally notorious illustration is that of Alexander Leighton, father of the celebrated Scotch archbishop. Leighton was an extreme Cartwrightian Puritan, who printed in the "month wherein Rochell was lost" (Octo- ber, 1628) a fierce outburst against the bishops and the Catholic queen, entitled " Sions Plea against the Prelacie." The book was a burning attack upon the influences which had led to a great disaster to the Protestant cause and a great disgrace for English foreign policy. For its writing Leighton* was sentenced by the Star- Chamber Court in June, 1630 — while Laud with uncovered head gave thanks to God for the decree — to degradation from the ministry, to life imprisonment, to the hopelessly exorbitant fine of i^ 10,000, to the pillory, to whipping, to the loss of his ears and the slitting of his nose, and finally to branding on his cheeks as a " sower of sedition."

Leighton's attack upon the authorities of the church had been bitter, and his punishment merciless. He cer- tainly was an extremist. Possibly, therefore. Laud's more usual methods of harassing Puritanism and enforcing uniformity may be better understood from a much less flagrant case, where the minister was no fanatic, but was notably learned, spiritual-mnided, able, and devoted — a man who might well be deemed an ornament to any communion. Thomas Hooker, later one of the founders

LAUD AND THE PURITANS. 93

of Connecticut, had filled for two years, when Laud be- came Bishop of London, a notably successful lectureship at Chelmsford. His opinions on the great problems which agitated the state in those stormy years had no doubt been positive, but his chief activity had been the preaching of the doctrines of grace in a deep, spiritual, searching, and intensely Calvinistic treatment of the relations of the soul to God. A man of profound piety, he had preeminently sought the conversion and upbuilding of his hearers. This preaching, though its themes contravened the orders issued by James in 1622, was received with great popular favor — as one of Laud's agents wrote in 1629: "Our people's pallats grow so out of tast, yt noe food contents them but of M^ Hooker's dressing." But Laud had been less than a year Bishop of London before his hand was stretched out against Hooker, and the Chelmsford lecturer was under bonds for appearance when wanted. Renewed preaching brought him in a few months more again to Laud's attention. But now his beneficed neighbors among the clergy to the number of forty-nine, and, it is interest- ing to note, the rector of Chelmsford, in whose parish he had labored, petitioned for his retention as a man " for doctryne, orthodox, and life and conversation honest, and for Jiis disposition peaceable, no wayes turbulent or fac- tious." A few days later forty-one of the ministers of the county sent in a counter-petition asking that uniformity be enforced. Hooker had to abandon the lectureship, and now taught school for a few months, with John Eliot as his assistant ; but even this change of occupation did not shelter him from Laud. Li July, 1630, he was ordered to appear before the High Commission ; but his friends at Chelmsford paid his forfeited bail, and he escaped with difficulty to Holland. Certainly when such men as Hooker were forced to abandon the pulpit — and his case was neither

94 THE CONGREGATIONALISTS. [Chap. iv.

striking nor exceptional — it was paying pretty dear for cer- emonial uniformity ; and the prohibition of discussion of those doctrines which the Puritans deemed essential to all spiritual growth was a sorry way to advance theological freedom at a time when the chief need of the Establish- ment was an educated and worthy ministry, a better in- structed membership, and a stricter moral life. No won- der Milton cried out in his noble lament for Lycidas, nine years after Laud became Bishop of London and eight years after Charles had put in force his determination to rule without Parliament :

Last came, and last did go,

The pilot of the Galilean lake ;

Two massy keys he bore of metals twain,

(The golden opes, the iron shuts amain,)

He shook his mitered locks, and stern bespake :

" How well could I have spared for thee, young swain,

Enow of such as for their bellies' sake

Creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold?

Of other care they little reckoning make.

Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast,

And shove away the worthy bidden guest :

The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed.

But, swollen with wind and the rank mist they draw.

Rot inwardly and foul contagion spread :

Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw

Daily devours apace, and nothing said."

Under such circumstances of increasing discouragement a few of the more adventurous of the Puritans began to look across the Atlantic with the thought of founding on the shores of a new continent the institutions that were denied them in tlie old. This inclination was doubtless stimulated by the example of the Plymouth Pilgrims, whose experiences, told in Mourt's " Relation " and Wins- low's " Good Newes from New England," were given to

BEGINNINGS OF MASSACHUSETTS. 95

the English public in 1622 and 1624. But religious con- siderations did not exclusively control the first Puritan motions toward the settlement of Massachusetts. That impulse had its apparent beginnings in the south-of- England borough of Dorchester, where Rev. John White, a distinguished Puritan, was rector. From all this coast of England vessels resorted annually to American waters for fishing; and as larger crews could be employed in taking the catch than were required for the homeward voyage, the thought occurred to some of those interested in the trade that a permanent settlement could be formed in New England, where the superfluous fishermen could remain, and where supplies could be raised and stored. For this purpose a Fishing Company was organized at Dorchester through White's influence, and by this company a settle- ment was begun on Cape Ann late in 1623 or early in 1624. To this colony Roger Conant, a vigorous Puritan, came as its superintendent, in 1625, and with him Rev. John Lyford, who had been with him at Plymouth, and whose experiences in the Pilgrim colony have already been noted. But the Cape Ann enterprise was unsuccessful, and when most of its settlers went home to England in 1626, Conant, and a few like-minded men, removed to the more fertile spot which was afterward known by the name of Salem.

As the project had gone on White's thoughts had grown broader, and he now determined to organize, if possible, a Puritan colony, in the formation of which religion rather than trade should be a prime consideration. To this end he now labored to enlist Puritan sympathy and obtain a patent which would give a legal basis for his new enter- prise. In both attempts he was successful. The Plym- outh (England) Council, a body of which Sir Ferdinando Gorges was the leading spirit, and which by a charter of

96 THE CONGREGA TIONALISTS. [Chap. iv.

November, 1620, claimed jurisdiction over New England, granted by a patent of March 19, 1628, such portion of its territories as lay between three miles north of the Mer- rimac and an equal distance south of the Charles rivers to a Puritan land company having John Endicott as one of its members. Under the auspices of this new association Endicott and an advance guard of settlers left England in the summer of 1628, landing at Salem, where Conant had been for about two years a resident, on the 6th of September.

The enterprise thus launched was pushed rapidly on. Through the instrumentality of White and others, Puritans from all over England were interested, and new members of increasing prominence were rapidly added to the com- pany. Influential support was secured at court ; whether Charles I. really seriously concerned himself with what must have seemed to him an insignificant colony in an out-of-the-way part of the world may be doubtful ; pos- sibly he felt that a Puritan exodus might free him of a few of his opponents ; but through the influence of Lord Dor- chester and the Earl of Warwick the king granted a direct charter to this enlarged company — a document which was sealed on March 4, 1629, and which authorized the " Gov- ernor and Company of the Mattachusetts Bay," thuscreated, to elect officers, admit new members, and make laws for the administration of its domain. Thus equipped with a char- ter granting extensive privileges, the company strongly attracted Puritan colonists, so that within a few months after its creation a large reinforcement was sent to Salem, arriving there in June, 1629. Even more important for the future of the enterprise was the agreement entered into by John Winthrop, Sir Richard Saltonstall, Thomas Dudley, Increase Nowell, Isaac Johnson, William Pynchon, and others at Cambridge, August 26, 1629, to go to New

BEGINNINGS OF MASSACHUSETTS. 97

England the next spring, provided the government and charter of the company should be transferred to Massa- chusetts. This gave the undertaking not only the support of men of character and position, it made the new colony practically a semi- independent, self-governing state, instead of an ordinary corporation for the development of a new country administered by a board in England, which was doubtless all that the king had in mind when the charter was granted, if that act caused him any serious thought at all. The decision to make the company wholly domi- ciled in New England led to the election of John Win- throp to the governorship, since Matthew Cradock, the first governor, was unable to emigrate ; and in the spring and summer of 1630 the Puritan exodus ran full tide. Probably at least a thousand persons came from England to Massachusetts in that year alone — more than three times as many as the Plymouth colony numbered after ten years of struggle — and by 1640, when the advent of the Long Parliament and the evident speedy downfall of the tyranny of Charles and Laud checked Puritan emigration, it is estimated that the number who had crossed the ocean had risen to more than twenty thousand. The summer of 1630 saw the settlement of Dorchester by a company organized into church-estate through the influence of Rev. John White before leaving England ; and the same weeks witnessed the beginnings of Winthrop and his immediate following at Charlestown and Boston ; while at the same time settlements were made at Watertown and elsewhere about Massachusetts Bay.

These emigrant companies, like that at Plymouth, all ex- perienced a period of disease and death which robbed them of many of their best members within a few weeks of their landing. But their contrast to the Plymouth Pilgrims in all that goes to make for worldly esteem and probable success

98 THE CONGREGA TIONALISTS. [Chap. iv.

was extreme. Their membership contained men of humble position, it is true, but their leaders were from good station in England, many of them of the country gentry, men of wealth, character, and education. Their ministers, as there will be ample occasion to see, were the peers in learning and ability of any in the Puritan wing of the Church of England ; they were men reverenced and admired not only in the colonial hamlets to which they came, but by wide circles in the home land. Probably no colony in the history of European emigration was superior to that of Massachusetts in wealth, station, or capacity. The relig- ious motive, ever predominant in the beginning of the enterprise, had enabled it to draw on the best elements of a great party in England, and to attract men whom no mean or ordinary aims would have drawn across the sea. Religion had equally animated the Plymouth enterprise ; but Plymouth had no constituency in England from which to draw strength ; its Separatist principles had been de- spised in the home land by Anglican and Puritan alike, and its true-hearted membership had come from the humble Leyden exiles, or the equally humble occasional emigrant sent directly from England by the merchant-partners or self-impelled to cast in his lot with the struggling com- munity. It had a few men of ability, like Brewster and Bradford and Winslow, it had men of character in abun- dance ; but it was wholly deficient in men of wealth or university education, while its pulpit, never conspicuou.-ly strong after Robinson had been left at Leyden, was filled by no higher officer than a ruling elder when the Puritan colonists began their work at Salem.

Nor were these Puritan emigrants men easily impressi- ble by outside influences or tolerant of dissent. Puritan- ism crossed the ocean with no such general intention of seeking civil and religious liberty as has often been at-

CHARACTER OF IMMIGRATION. 99

tributed to it. As compared with the Puritans, the Pil- grims of Plymouth indeed showed a considerable measure of toleration, perhaps because of Dutch example, more probably by reason of the kindly spirit infused into them by Robinson and maintained by Brewster, Bradford, and Winslow — a spirit the more readily cherished on account of the comparative feebleness of the colony. But neither Pilgrims nor Puritans had any thought of establishing lib- erty for men to do as they please ; nor would any general toleration, such as we now justly value, have furnished motives definite enough to have led our ancestors to the New World. The Puritans who settled Massachusetts had little if any more disposition to tolerate dissent from what they believed to be the right path in church and state than had Archbishop Laud to allow departure from the ceremonial observances which he enjoined. They had no intention of separating from the Church of England as the Pilgrims had done. If Mather was correctly in- formed, one of the two ministers of the first Puritan church on Massachusetts soil, Francis Higginson, had exclaimed when the last headlands of their island home faded from the view of his fellow- voyagers :

" We will not say, as the separatists were wont to say at their leaving of England, ' Farewel, Babylon ! ' . . . but . . . 'farewel, the Church of God in England! . . . We do not go to New England as separatists from the Church of England ; though we cannot but separate from the corruptions in it.' "

Certainly, in 1630, Winthrop, Dudley, Johnson, and other of the most prominent of the Massachusetts Com- pany joined in the declaration, as they started on their voyage :

" Wee desire you would be pleased to take Notice of the Principals, and Body of our Company, as those who

lOO THE CONGREGATIONALISTS. [Chap, iv.

esteeme it our honour to call the Church of England, from whence wee rise, our deare Mother. . . . Wee leave it not therefore, as loathing that milk wherewith we were nourished there, but blessing God for the Parentage and Education, as Members of the same Body, shall always rejoice in her good."

And in 1631 the extremely Separatist Roger Williams refused to supply the pulpit of the Boston church because that body still considered itself unseparated from the Church of England.

All the more remarkable is it, then, in view of the worldly and educational superiority of the Puritans over the Pilgrims, and their anti- Separatist feeHngs, that the Puritan churches organized in New England adopted the principles of Separatist Plymouth in their formation and government. No step in the development of Congrega- tionalism is more obscure or more important than this Congregationalizing of English Puritanism. To under- stand it we must go back to the winter of 1628-29, when Endicott and the vanguard of the Puritan emigration were laying the foundations at Salem. Illness had borne hard on the little company, and in their distress Endicott had obtained the ministrations of the only physician then on the coast. Dr. Samuel Fuller, deacon of the church at Plymouth. Before Fuller's coming, Endicott, like most Puritans, had regarded the Plymouth Separatists with sus- picion ; but in conversation with his guest prejudices melted away, and he was able to write to Bradford on May 11, 1629, as follows:

" I acknowledge my selfe much bound to you for your kind love and care in sending M^ Fuller among us, and rejoyce much yt I am by him satisfied touching your judgments of y^ outward forme of Gods worshipe. It is, as farr as I can yet gather, no other then is warrented b)-

INFLUENCED BY PLYMOUTH. lOI

ye evidence of truth, and y^ same which I have proffessed and maintained ever since y^ Lord in mercie revealed him selfe unto me ; being farr from y^ commone reporte that hath been spread of you touching that perticuler."

That Endicott was readily impressed by the expositions of the Plymouth deacon was natural. Puritans and Sep- aratists had never had doctrinal disagreement ; both were pronounced Calvinists. Both alike believed that much of the worship required by the English Establishment was superstitious. Both held that in the Bible God has set forth all his will. Both welcomed preaching on the doc- trinal issues of the day. Both had left their native land to escape High Commission Courts and requirements of uniformity, that they might practice " the positive part of church reformation." Neither could have felt any desire to see the continued rule of bishops ; for, apart from the hostility of the Separatists and extremer Puritans toward the spiritual claims of an episcopal order as unwarranted by Scripture, no Puritan in Endicott's company could have remembered a time when the bishops, as a whole, had not been hostile to the Puritans. Nor was the Prayer-Book likely to have a place in the afifections of a generation of men who had vainly striven to amend what they deemed its evils, and had seen its use required in its entirety as a badge of that spiritual system which the Puritan and the Separatist were alike trying to escape. The more ad- vanced Puritans had held, from the time of Cartwright at least, that there should be no ministers at large, but that every minister ought to be bound to a particular congre- gation, which ought in some way to have a voice in his selection ; and they had been of the opinion also that the local church should be so purified by discipline that prac- tically only persons of Christian character should remain in it. In addition to these characteristics of the extremer

I02 THE CONGREGATIONALISTS. [Chap, i v.

type of Puritanism in general which would incline to a ready acceptance of Plymouth theories, there is reason to think that some of the Puritans associated with White in the initial stages of the Salem undertaking were moving in directions hitherto distinctive only of English Separa- tism. How far this was the case is a question the answer to which is of great obscurity. The use of a distinct cov- enant as the basis of the local church is one of the funda- mental principles of Congregationalism whicli never found acceptance with English Puritanism as a whole, but was typical of the system of Browne, Barrowe, and Robinson. The ordination of its ministers by the local congregation, in addition to their election, was also a distinctly Separatist doctrine. But certain considerations seem to show that the former of these usages, if not also the latter, may have been favorably regarded in the circle from which Endicott came. Rev. Hugh Peter, for example, who was among the earliest members of the Massachusetts Company of

1628, and whom Endicott must have known personally, employed a covenant in the church at Rotterdam of which he became colleague pastor on his flight from England in

1629. Perhaps he may have argued in favor of the prac- tice in Endicott's hearing before the Salem settlers left England ; but more probably Peter's own adoption of the covenant was due to the influence of his associate in the Rotterdam charge, Dr. William Ames, whose Separatist leanings were decided. Of more importance as showing possible inclination toward covenant organization in the circles of southwestern England where White labored is the fact that the church which was organized through White's efforts at Plymouth, England, in March, 1630, and which afterward settled at Dorchester, Mass., seems to have had some more definite uniting pledge than was usual in Puritan parishes, though reasons will be given

INFLUENCED BY PLYMOUTH. 103

when the organization of that church is more minutely described for doubting whether that agreement imphed an exclusively regenerate membership. And if the statement is true, as seems hardly credible, that at the officering of that church the ministers were not only chosen but or- dained by the congregation, it is evident that the Puritans of southwestern England were far more radical than Puri- tanism as a whole.

But while it is thus clear that Endicott and the first emigrants to Salem were nearer to the Plymouth Pilgrims in belief than they at first realized, their conceptions of polity and government were still in the gristle, and we may safely conjecture that the discussions with Fuller embraced four or five features of church life, in regard to all of which general Puritan custom differed from that of Plymouth : the power of a local congregation to ordain its own chosen officers ; the participation or non-participation of the church as a whole in matters of discipline ; the use of a covenant ; the conduct of public worship ; and rela- tionship or non- relationship to a national church whose nearest congregation was three thousand miles away. On all of these points except the last the practice of Plymouth w^onover or confirmed the inclinations of the Puritans at Salem ; the last point was not yielded, and most of the Massachusetts Puritans continued to view themselves for a considerable time as members of the Church of England. But if the soil was thus prepared for the seed which Dr. Fuller sowed, his planting was of the first importance. Agreed as Endicott found that he was with the men of Plymouth, the discovery of that agreement was in no small measure due to the persuasive skill of the Plymouth phy- sician.

The Plymouth advice resulted speedily in the formation at Salem of a Congregational church, the first Puritan

I04 THE CONGREGATIONALISTS. [CHAr. iv.

church, and the second Congregational church in New England. The historians of the latter part of the seven- teenth century, and even Rev. John Higginson, son of the first teacher of the Salem church and himself one of its most honored ministers, dated its formation from August 6, 1629; but a contemporary letter shows that by July 20th of that year a covenanted church on the Plymouth model existed at Salem, which on that day chose and or- dained its pastor and teacher. It is quite possible that this church was organized, at least to the extent of the union of its first members by a covenant, in the late spring of 1629, before the coming of the large immigration in June. Be this as it may, the covenant by which this church was constituted was, like almost all early Congregational cov- enants, extremely simple. As far as its content is now known it was embraced in a single sentence :

" We Covenant with the Lord and one with an other ; and doe bynd our selves in the presence of God, to walke together in all his waies, according as he is pleased to re- veale himself unto us in his Blessed word of truth."

While Endicott had thus been battling with the New England winter and coming into friendly relations with the Separatists of Plymouth, the company in England whose agent he was had been rapidly growing, it had ob- tained its royal charter, and was prepared in the spring of 1629 to send over a numerous body of colonists. Promi- nent among the cares of the company during this busy winter had been its negotiations with clergymen of Puri- tan sentiment to take spiritual charge of its American enterprise and attempt the conversion also of the savage natives of New England. In this search aid was rendered by Rev. John White and by Rev. John Davenport, later to be the first pastor at New Haven, Conn. Three minis- ters were obtained, Francis Bright, Francis Higginson, and

THE SALEM CHURCH. I05

Samuel Skelton, all of whom were ordained clergymen of the Church of England ; and with them came a fourth minister who had obtained passage in the company's ships, Ralph Smith, whose strict Separatist views had not been understood at first by the company ; but how little the enterprise savored of general toleration is manifest from the direction given to Endicott that unless Smith should be " conformable " to the government established at Salem he should not be permitted to remain. Acknowledged fellowship with Separatist Plymouth was still far from the desire of the managers of the enterprise in England, who, aside from their own objections on religious grounds, doubtless feared the hostility of the English Government should the Salem colony become known as "Brownist." By the end of June, 1629, these ministerial reinforcements had crossed the Atlantic.

On July 20th, about three weeks after their arrival, Endicott appointed — so Charles Gott wrote to Bradford, ten days subsequent to the event — " a solemne day of humilliation, for y choyce of a pastor & teacher." The morning of that day was spent in prayer and preaching as a preparation for the main event ; and in the afternoon Higginson and Skelton were asked to express their view as to the proper call to the ministerial office. Both had had episcopal hands laid on them in ordination ; but both now affirmed that a true call embraced two elements, one of which at least was not deemed an essential in their original episcopal vocation — an inward sense of fitness, and an election by the free suffrages of the male members of " a company of beleevers . . . joyned togither in cove- nante." Such a covenant church the Salem congregation evidently felt itself to be, for, the church approving these answers, " every fit member wrote, in a note, his name whom the Lord moved him to think was fit for a pastor,

1 06 THE CONGREGA TIONALISTS. [Chap. iv.

and so likewise, whom they would have for teacher ; so the most voice was for Mr. Skelton to be Pastor, and Mr. Higginson to be Teacher."

This election was followed by an act of great importance — one which would scarcely have been performed save for the influence of Plymouth teaching. As Gott records of the pastor and teacher just elected : " They accepting y*^ choyce, M"" Higgison, with 3. or 4. of y^ gravest members of ye church, laid their hands on M^ Skelton, using prayer therwith. This being done, ther was imposission of hands on Mr Higgison also."

By this laying on of hands Higginson and Skelton broke with the whole system of episcopal succession which Laud maintained, and illustrated the wholly congregational con- ception that it was within the province of every Christian congregation not only to choose but to ordain its own ofhcers — a conception which had been held in its fullness only by Separatists and Anabaptists.

But another Congregational principle was to be illus- trated in the formation of this first New England Puritan church besides that of the autonomy of the congregation. At least one ruling elder and one or more deacons were elected on this memorable 20th of July ; but their ordination was delayed in order that there might be no repentance if the incoming ships should bring immigrants better qualified for these posts, and August 6th was fixed for the comple- tion of the work. News of the events past and to occur was sent to Bradford at Plymouth by a private correspond- ent, though it is hardly probable that the statement of the Plymouth historian Morton is correct, that represent- atives from Plymouth were formally invited by the Salem church. However this may have been, Bradford and some others of the Plymouth church appear to have gone to Salem to welcome the new enterprise, and though the

THE SALEM CHURCH. 107

voyage proved longer than they hoped, they came into the Salem assembly in time to give the first illustration on American soil of that communion of churches which is so important a trait of American Congregationalism by hold- ing out " the right hand of fellowship."

Yet though Endicott and Higginson and Skelton were profoundly influenced by Plymouth example, they wished to steer a narrow course of their own between such a con- formity to the methods of worship of the English Establish- ment as the more moderate Puritans in England practiced, and full Separatism. Not all the inhabitants even of the little Salem community were of their way of thinking. Two of the most prominent of the newcomers of 1629, John and Samuel Browne, were dissatisfied with the form and worship of the nev^ church. To their thinking it was Separatist, and its abandonment of the Prayer-Book was distasteful to them. They gathered a few like-minded spirits and held separate services at which the liturgy of the Establishment was used. The situation was now not unlike that from which Endicott and his friends had fled in England, only the strength of the parties was reversed. The moderate Puritans at Salem who deserted the congre- gation and held their Anglican service were now the non- conformists of the little commonwealth, and as such they were sent back to England by Endicott before the summer of their arrival was past. On the other hand, Endicott desired to have no real Separatists in the colony, much as he inclined to the other features of Plymouth worship and government ; and it was not long before Rev. Ralph Smith, who was apparently a decided Separatist, found it well to leave for desolate Nantasket, whence he was brought to Plymouth by a kindly crew from that place, to meet a more friendly reception than at Salem, and to become for a time the minister of the Plymouth church. Of the

I08 THE CONGREGATlONALISTS. [Chap. iv.