The Beginners of a Nation Part 13

As early as 1583 Philip Stubbes, a Puritan lawyer, issued his hot little book, The Anatomie of Abuses. It deals with the immoralities and extravagances of the time. Stubbes repeats the early Puritan objection to the May-pole: it is a "stinckyng idol," he declares, which the people bring from the woods, "followyng it with greate devotion." And when they have set it up they "leape and daunce aboute it, as the heathen people did at the dedication of their idolles." But Stubbes takes a step forward and objects to the all-night May frolics on account of their immorality. He says, "I have heard it credibly reported by men of great gravitie, credite and reputation, that of fourtie, three score, or a hundred maides goyng to the woods over night, there have scarcely the third parte of them returned home againe undefiled." As men of "great gravitie, credite and reputation"

were not likely to know the facts in this case, some of the immorality with which Stubbes charges the young people may have been as fanciful as the heathenism attributed to them. Imputed unrighteousness was a part of the Puritan system. He denounces the wild excesses in dress and the other follies of the time with a lack of a sense of proportion which already foreshadows later Puritanism.

This secondary development of Puritanism by which its energies were turned toward the regulation of conduct, as the disputes of the Reformation period lost their violence, gave to the name Puritan a new and higher sense. It is a phase of its history more important than all its primary contentions over gowns and liturgies and hierarchies, or its later debates about the five points of Calvinism and a sabbatical Sunday. One may easily forget its austerity and extravagance, for by the reform of manners this movement made the English race its debtor.

In no succeeding reaction have English morals reverted to the ante-Puritan level. It is only by the religious ferments infused successively by new sects and movements, of preaching friars, Lollards, Puritans, Quakers, Methodists, Salvationists, that the great unleavened ma.s.s of men is rendered gradually less sodden.

XII.

[Sidenote: Puritan decline.]

[Sidenote: _Supra_, page 115.]

[Sidenote: Rogers's Pref. to the 39 Articles.]

The last years of Elizabeth's long reign were years of apparent Puritan decline. The old bugbear of popery was receding into the past, and a new generation had come on the stage that had no memory of the struggles of the reigns of Henry and Edward and Mary. The danger from the Armada had brought English patriotism to the point of fusion. Even the persecuted Catholics rallied to the support of the queen against Philip. The government of Elizabeth rose to the zenith of its popularity on the overthrow of the Armada. It was just at this inopportune moment, when the nation had come to feel that the England of Elizabeth was the greatest England the ages had known, that there came forth from a small coterie of the oppressed ultra-Puritans the Martin Marprelate tracts. However effective these may have been at first in making the bishops ridiculous, there followed a swift reaction. The Puritans were dubbed Martinists, and henceforth had to bear the odium of the boisterous vulgarity and libelous exaggeration of the Marprelate lampoons. The queen's government, stronger now than ever in the affection of the people, put in force severe ecclesiastical measures against nonconformists in the church, and sent Brownists, or Separatists, to die by the score in loathsome prisons.

Half a dozen of their leaders were dispatched by the shorter road of the gallows. The long reign of the queen had by this time discouraged those who hoped for a change of policy at her death. Hooker's masterful and delightful prose, informed by a spirit of winning moderation, was arrayed on the side of the Anglicans by the publication of parts of his Ecclesiastical Polity in 1594 and 1597.

But Puritanism suffered most from the persistence of Archbishop Whitgift and others in efforts to suppress all nonconformity in the church. These champions of Anglicanism, in the swaggering words of one of them, "defended the prelacy, stood for the power of the state, put the new doctors to the foil, profligated the elders, set upon the presbytery, and so battered the new discipline as. .h.i.therto they could never nor hereafter shall ever fortify and repair the decay thereof."

The presbyteries which Cartwright and his friends had formed within the Church of England were swept out utterly by the archbishop's broom. The Puritan movement which had begun almost simultaneously with Elizabeth's reign seemed to be doomed to languish and die with the old queen who had been its resolute and lifelong antagonist.

XIII.

[Sidenote: Seeking a positive ground.]

[Sidenote: Note 7.]

For the first thirty years or more of its existence Puritanism was mainly a bundle of negations, and no bundle of mere negations is a sufficient reason for maintaining a party. No vestments, no ceremonies, no bishops, were effective cries in the hot Reformation period. But the new generation had ceased to abhor these left-overs of Romanism. Bishops, gowns, prayer books, had become Protestant to most of the people by a.s.sociation. To find additional reasons for differing from Anglican opponents was a party necessity. The new debates which sprang up in the last years of the sixteenth century were not deliberately planned by the Puritans, as some of their opponents a.s.serted. They came by a process of evolution. But a period of temporary decline in a movement of this sort hastens its natural unfolding. The leaders are forced to seek the advantage of such new issues as offer when the old ones fail. In the last years of Elizabeth, Puritanism was molting, not dying.

XIV.

[Sidenote: The Puritan Sabbath.]

The great reformers of the sixteenth century had sought to strip from the Christianity of their time what they deemed the second-hand garments of Judaism. Along with the theory of a priesthood they declared also against a doctrine known in the church at least from the fifth century, that the fourth commandment enforced on Christians the keeping sacred in some sense of Sundays and other church holy days.

Luther maintained that a commandment to keep the Sabbath "literally understood does not apply to Christians, for it is entirely outward, like other ordinances of the Old Testament." He thought a festival day important for rest and for attending religious wors.h.i.+p; but with characteristic oppugnancy he says: "If anywhere the day is made holy for the mere day's sake, ... then I order you to dance on it, and feast on it, to do anything that shall remove this encroachment on Christian liberty." The Augsburg Confession makes a similar statement of the Protestant position. Calvin considered the fourth commandment binding on Christians only in a sense mystical and highly Calvinistic.

It signified that "we should rest from our own works" under the Christian dispensation. He even suggested that some other day of the week might be chosen as a day of rest and wors.h.i.+p at Geneva for an exhibition of Christian liberty in this regard. His practice was conformed to his theory. It is incidentally related that when John Knox once visited the Genevan reformer on Sunday, he found him playing at bowls. Knox was not more a sabbatarian than Calvin.

XV.

[Sidenote: Rise of the strict Sabbath.]

[Sidenote: Note 8.]

[Sidenote: Compare Marsden's Early Puritans (1850) page 242, where Becon's Catechism and Coverdale are quoted.]

[Sidenote: Robert's Social Hist. of the Southern Counties, p. 239.]

[Sidenote: Note 9.]

Writers on this subject have generally agreed in dating the rise of the Puritan Sabbath from the appearance, in 1595, of Dr. Bownd's book on The Sabbath of the Old and of the New Testament. But the doctrine of the strict keeping of Sunday may be traced farther back. In truth, the difference between the English and the Continental Sunday dates from the Reformation. The protests of Luther and Calvin go to show that Sunday had in the church before the Reformation, theoretically if not in practice, the sanct.i.ty of a church feast. The English Reformation was conservative, like all other English revolutions.

English reformers retained the Catholic Sunday, as they did the vestments and national hierarchy of the old church. Thomas Hanc.o.c.k has been styled "the Luther of the southwest of England." He was the great preacher of Poole in the days of Edward VI. That he, like other English reformers, did not agree with Luther in rejecting the obligation to rest on Sunday is shown by the record, for the voice of Poole was the voice of Hanc.o.c.k. About 1550 the juries in the Admiralty Court of Poole were charged to inquire into Sunday fis.h.i.+ng; and so advanced was the premature Puritanism of Edward's time that even the leaving of nets in the sea over Sunday was to be investigated. Here was a strictness unknown in Catholic times.

XVI.

[Sidenote: _Supra_, page 16.]

[Sidenote: Early English Text Society Reprint, 106, 107, 108.]

The word Sabbath does not occur in these early entries. But in the troubles among the Marian exiles at Frankfort, where so many other traits of Puritanism first came above the horizon, it is significant that one finds Sunday called the Sabbath. Sabbath as applied to Sunday occurs first in literature, perhaps, in 1573, and then it is considered necessary to explain it. Bullein's Dialogue against the Fever Pestilence, a work of considerable popularity, first appeared as early as 1564. In the edition of 1573 there was inserted a new pa.s.sage not found in the earlier issue. Mendax is relating incredible tales of travel in lands unknown, after the manner of David Ingram and other returned adventurers. Up to this point all is pure lying merely for the fun of the thing, or perhaps to ridicule the exaggerations of travelers. But the interpolated pa.s.sage is not of a piece with the old garment into which it is patched. It is less grotesque and humorous, and it smacks of incipient Puritanism in several flavors. It treats first of all of the "Kepyng of the Saboth Daie," "whiche is the seventh daie, that is sondaie," in the imaginary city of "Nodnol," an anagram of London. The gates are shut, and n.o.body is allowed to "goe, neither ride forth of the Citie duryng that daie, except it be after the euenyng praier; then to walke honestlie into the sweete fieldes, and at every gate in the time of service there are warders." "What so ever hee be he muste kepe hollie the Sabboth daie, and come to the churche both man, woman, young and olde." "There were no people walking abroad in the service tyme; no, not a Dogge or catte in the streate, neither any Taverne doore open that daie, nor wine bibbyng in them, but onely almose, fasting and praier." This is perhaps the oldest extant statement of an early Puritan ideal of Sabbath-keeping.

XVII.

[Sidenote: c.o.x's Literature of the Sabbath Question, _sub anno_.]

[Sidenote: Robert's Southern Counties, pp. 238, 239.]

[Sidenote: 1583.]

[Sidenote: 1588.]

Scruples regarding recreations on Sunday come distinctly into view in the t.i.tle of a sermon preached at Paul's Cross in 1576. In 1580 the magistrates of London secured from the queen a prohibition of the performance of plays within the limits of the city on Sundays. In other munic.i.p.alities--Brighton, Yarmouth, and Lyme--ordinances were made about this time against such offenses as the prosecution on Sunday of the herring fisheries, cloth working, and other labors, and even against the Sunday practice of archery, formerly thought a patriotic exercise. There are other evidences of a movement, especially in the south of England, in favor of a stricter Sabbath in these and the following years. Stubbes does not fail to denounce "heathnicall exercises upon the Sabbaoth day, which the Lorde would have consecrated to holy uses." The Puritan mode of Sabbath-keeping already existed among the chosen few. "The Sabboth daie of some is well observed," says Stubbes, "namely, in hearing the blessed worde of G.o.d read, preached, and interpreted; in private and publique praiers; in reading of G.o.dly psalmes; in celebrating the sacraments; and in collecting for the poore and indigent, which are the true uses and endes whereto the Sabbaoth was ordained." He records the opposite belief of his opponents that Sunday was ordained "onely to use what kinde of exercises they thinke good themselves." In practice this was the rule of the English people at large. These opposite opinions come into view when Martin Marprelate a few years later berates the Bishop of London for playing at bowls on Sunday.

XVIII.

[Sidenote: Bownd on the Sabbath.]

[Sidenote: 1595.]

[Sidenote: 1592.]

[Sidenote: Note 10.]

Dr. Bownd's book on The Sabbath of the Old and the New Testament, which, if we may believe its opponents, was nearly ten years "in the hammering," was the outcome of a sentiment already rising among the Puritans, and not wholly confined to that party. It was preceded by a little work of Richard Greenham which seems to have been circulated for some years in ma.n.u.script after a fas.h.i.+on of that time, and to have had at first more influence on practice than Bownd's formal treatise.

Greenham was Bownd's stepfather, and his work was the parent of Bownd's, which is distinctly more extreme. But Dr. Bownd's book is none the less memorable as a point of departure, because in it the opinions on this subject which have since prevailed so generally in all English-speaking lands "were for the first time broadly and prominently a.s.serted in Christendom"; at least, they were here first systematically propounded and defended. Bownd held that the fourth commandment is partly moral, in the phrase of the casuists. He s.h.i.+fted the obligation to the first day of the week by arguments now familiar, and he laid down rules for the observance of the day. Honest recreations and lawful delights he flatly forbids on Sundays, but he rather obsequiously makes some allowance for the "feasts of n.o.blemen and great personages on this day." People of rank do not wholly escape him, however, for he points a moral with the story of a n.o.bleman whose child was born with a face like that of a dog, because the father had hunted on the Lord's Day. He allows the ringing of only one bell to call the people to church on Sunday. Chimes were quite too pleasing to accord with a severe Sabbath.

XIX.

[Sidenote: Spread of Bownd's opinions.]

[Sidenote: Cartwright's Admonition to Parliament, 1572.]

[Sidenote: Robert's Southern Counties, pp. 37, 38.]