The Beginners of a Nation Part 14

Such rigor fell in with the pa.s.sion of that age for formal observance and with the exigent temper of the Puritans by whom Bownd's views were rapidly and universally accepted. The stricter divines might well be glad of a new lever for reforming the old English Sunday, which was devoted, out of service time, to outdoor games, to the brutally cruel sports of bull and bear baiting, to merry morris-dances, in which the performers were gayly decked and hung with jingling bells in different keys, as well as to coa.r.s.e farces called interludes, which were played on stages under booths and sometimes in the churches. As an austere reaction against frivolity, Puritanism pushed Sabbath-keeping to its extreme, reprobating even the most innocent and domestic recreations, and changing a day of rest and refreshment into one of alternate periods of application to religious devotion and of scrupulous vacuity. Bownd's rather ultra propositions were carried yet further when reproduced by high-strung preachers. It is said that some of these declared that the ringing of more than one bell to call people to church on the Sabbath was as great a sin as murder, adultery, or parricide. The lack of a sense of proportion is the specific distinction of the zealot and the polemic. This lack was not peculiar to the Puritans, however. Joseph Hall, afterward a well-known bishop, could address men so worthy as John Robinson and his colleague in such words as these: "Your souls shall find too late ... that even wh.o.r.edoms and murders shall abide an easier answer than separation."

Perhaps one may rather say that a lack of the sense of proportion in morals was a trait of that age, an age of zealots and polemics.

XX.

[Sidenote: Prevalence of the strict Sabbath.]

[Sidenote: Fuller's Ch. Hist. of Britain, book ix, sect. viii, 20, 21.]

In such a time Dr. Bownd's book easily captivated the religious public, and there arose a pa.s.sion for a stricter Sabbath. According to Fuller, the Lord's Day, especially in towns, "began to be precisely kept, people becoming a law to themselves, forbearing such sports as yet by statute permitted; yea, many rejoicing at their own restraint herein. On this day the stoutest fencer laid down the buckler; the most skillful archer unbent the bow, counting all shooting beside the mark; May-games and morris-dancers grew out of request; and good reason that bells should be silenced from jingling about men's legs, if their very ringing in steeples were adjudged unlawful." Some learned scholars were impressed by Bownd's argument, and others who did not agree with his conclusions thought it best not to gainsay them, "because they tended to the manifest advance of religion." And indeed the new zeal for Sabbath-keeping must have incidentally promoted morals and good order in so licentious an age.

[Sidenote: Opposition to Bownd.]

[Sidenote: Fuller's Church History, book ix, sect. viii, 21.]

[Sidenote: Note 11.]

But a violent opposition quickly arose. Some opposed the book as "galling men's necks with a Jewish yoke against the liberty of Christians," and many of the clergy of the new high-church type resented the doctrine of a Christian Sabbath, a.s.serting that it put "an unequal l.u.s.tre on the Sunday on set purpose to eclipse all other holy days to the derogation of the authority of the church." There were those who a.s.serted that the "brethren," as they styled them, had brought forth Bownd's book, intending by this "attack from an odd corner" to retrieve lost ground. The manifest advantage to Puritanism from the s.h.i.+fting of the ground of debate, aroused Archbishop Whitgift. In 1599 he made the tactical mistake of ordering the book called in, and in 1600 Chief-Justice Popham forbade the reprinting of it. The price of the work was doubled at once, and it was everywhere sought for, books being "more called on when called in," as Fuller says. When it could not be had in print, it was transcribed by enthusiastic admirers and circulated "from friend to friend" in ma.n.u.script. As soon as Whitgift's "head was laid," a new and enlarged edition was published.

[Sidenote: Note 12.]

[Sidenote: 1611.]

[Sidenote: Note 13.]

The theory of a Sunday-Sabbath, which from the first was not confined to the Puritans, permeated English and American thought and life. But from that time forward the Puritans made rigid Sabbath-keeping the very mark and pa.s.sword of the faithful. From England the theory spread northward to Scotland, where it found a congenial soil. The strict observance of Sunday was embodied in those Laws, Divine, Moral, and Martial, under which Sir Thomas Dale oppressed Virginia, years before the earliest Puritan migration carried it to the coast of New England.

On that coast Bownd's Sabbath took on its deepest hue, becoming at last as grievous an evil, perhaps, as the frivolity it had supplanted.

XXI.

[Sidenote: Effect on Puritanism.]

The Puritans protesting against Hebraism in vestments, in priesthood, in liturgy, and in festivals, fell headlong into the Pharisaism of the rigid Sabbath. History records many similar phenomena. To escape from the spirit of one's age is difficult for an individual, impossible perhaps for a sect or party. Nevertheless, the Sabbath agitation had given a new impulse to the Puritan movement--had, indeed, given it a positive party cry, and had furnished it with a visible badge of superior sanct.i.ty.

[Sidenote: The new Puritanism.]

The Calvinistic controversy which broke out almost simultaneously with that about the Sabbath and prevailed throughout the reign of James I, added yet one more issue, by making Puritanism the party of a stern and conservative orthodoxy, as opposed to the newer Arminianism which spread so quickly among the High-Church clergy.

From all these fresh developments Puritanism gained in power and compactness, if it lost something of simplicity and spirituality.

Standing for ultra-Protestantism, for good morals, for an ascetic Sabbath, for a high dogmatic orthodoxy, Puritanism could not but win the allegiance of the ma.s.s of the English people, and especially of the middle cla.s.s. It was this new, compact, austere, dogmatic, self-confident Puritanism, when it had become a political as well as a religious movement, that obliterated Laud and Charles and set up the Commonwealth. And in studying the evolution of this later Puritanism we have been present at the shaping of New England in Old England.

ELUCIDATIONS.

[Sidenote: Note 1, page 99.]

Evelyn's Diary, pp. 4, 5; date, 1634: "My father was appointed Sheriff for Surrey and Suss.e.x before they were disjoyned. He had 116 servants in liverys, every one livery'd in greene sattin doublets. Divers gentlemen and persons of quality waited on him in the same garbe and habit, which at that time (when 30 or 40 was the usual retinue of a High Sheriff) was esteem'd a great matter.... He could not refuse the civility of his friends and relations who voluntarily came themselves, or sent in their servants." Compare Chamberlain's remarks about Sir George Yeardley, whom he styles "a mean fellow," and says that the king had knighted him when he was appointed Governor of Virginia, "which hath set him up so high that he flaunts it up and down the streets in extraordinary bravery with fourteen or fifteen fair liveries after him." Domestic Correspondence, James I, No. 110, Calendar, p. 598. The propriety of keeping so many idle serving men is sharply called in question in a tract ent.i.tled Cyuile and Vncyuile Life, 1579, and an effort is made to prove the dignity of a serving man's position, while its decline is confessed in A Health to the Gentlemanly Profession of Servingmen, 1598. Both of these tracts are reprinted in Inedited Tracts, etc., Roxburghe Library, 1868. The serving man was not a menial. He rendered personal services to his master or to guests, he could carve on occasion, and as a successor to the military retainers of an earlier time he was ready to fight in any of his master's quarrels; but his princ.i.p.al use was to lend dignity to the mansion and to amuse the master or his guests with conversation during lonely hours in the country house. Among the first Jamestown emigrants were some of these retainers, as we have seen.

[Sidenote: Note 2, page 100.]

The Anatomie of Abuses, by Philip Stubbes, 1583, Pickering's reprint, pages 16, 17: "It is lawfull for the n.o.bilitie, the gentrie and magisterie to weare riche attire, euery one in their callyng. The n.o.bility and gentrie to inn.o.ble, garnish, and set forth birthes, dignities, and estates. The magisterie to dignifie their callynges....

But now there is suche a confuse mingle mangle of apparell, and suche preposterous excesse thereof, as euery one is permitted to flaunt it out in what apparell he l.u.s.teth himself, or can get by any kinde of meanes. So that it is very hard to know who is n.o.ble, who is wors.h.i.+pfull, who is a gentleman, who is not; for you shal haue those which are neither of the n.o.bilitie, gentilitie nor yeomanrie ... go daiely in silkes, veluettes, satens, damaskes, taffaties and suche like; notwithstanding that they be bothe base by birthe, meane by estate, and seruile by callyng. And this I compte a greate confusion, and a generall disorder in a Christian common wealth."

[Sidenote: Note 3, page 106.]

A Brieff Discourse of the Troubles begun at Frankfort, 1564, is the primary authority. It is almost beyond doubt that Whittingham, Dean of Durham, a partic.i.p.ant in the troubles, wrote the book. The Frankfort struggles have been discussed recently in Mr. Hinds's The Making of the England of Elizabeth, but, like all writers on the subject, Hinds is obliged to depend almost solely on Whittingham's account. The several volumes of letters from the archives of Zurich, published by the Parker Society, give a good insight into the forces at work in the English Reformation. See, for example, in the volume ent.i.tled Original Letters, 1537-1558, that of Thomas Sampson to Calvin, dated Strasburgh, February 23, 1555, which shows the Puritan movement half fledged at this early date when Calvin's authoritative advice is invoked. "The flame is lighted up with increased vehemence amongst us English. For a strong controversy has arisen, while some desire the book of reformation of the Church of England to be set aside altogether, others only deem some things in it objectionable, such as kneeling at the Lord's Supper, the linen surplice, and other matters of this kind; but the rest of it, namely, the prayers, scripture lessons and the form of the administration of baptism and the Lord's Supper they wish to be retained."

[Sidenote: Note 4, page 106.]

There are many and conflicting accounts of the origin of the name. In the Narragansett Club Publications, ii, 197-199, there is an interesting statement of some of these by the editor of Cotton's Answer to Roger Williams, in a note.

[Sidenote: Note 5, page 111.]

That the Puritans early made common cause with the suffering tenantry is not a matter of conjecture. Philip Stubbes, in 1583, in the Anatomie of Abuses, pp. 126, 127, writes: "They take in and inclose commons, moores, heathes, and other common pastures, where out the poore commonaltie, were wont to haue all their forrage and feedyng for their cattell, and (whiche is more) corne for themselves to liue vpon; all which are now in most places taken from them, by these greedie puttockes to the great impouerishyng and vtter beggeryng of many whole townes and parishes.... For these inclosures bee the causes why riche men eate vpp poore men, as beastes dooe eate gra.s.se." One might cite recent economic writers on the effect of inclosures, but the conservative laments of the antiquary Aubrey, in his Introduction to the Survey of Wilts.h.i.+re, written about 1663, give us a nearer and more picturesque, if less philosophical, view. He says: "Destroying of Manours began Temp. Hen. VIII., but now common; whereby the mean People live lawless, no body to govern them, they care for no body, having no Dependance on any Body. By this Method, and by the Selling of the Church-Lands, is the Ballance of the Government quite alter'd and put into the Hands of the common People." Writing from what he had heard from his grandfather, he says: "Anciently the Leghs i. e.

Pastures were n.o.ble large Grounds.... So likewise in his Remembrance was all between Kington St. Michael and Dracot-Ferne common Fields.

Then were a world of labouring People maintained by the Plough....

There were no Rates for the Poor in my Grandfather's Days ... the Church-ale at Whitsuntide did the Business.... Since the Reformation and Inclosures aforesaid these Parts have swarm'd with poor People.

The Parish of Caln pays to the Poor 500 _per annum_.... Inclosures are for the private, not for the publick Good. For a Shepherd and his Dog, or a Milk-Maid, can manage Meadow-Land, that upon arable, employ'd the Hands of several Scores of Labourers." Miscellanies on Several Curious Subjects, now first published, etc., 1723, pp. 30-33.

It will fall within the province of another volume of this series to treat of the systems of landholding brought from England, and I shall not go further into the subject of inclosures here. A portion of the agricultural population seemed superfluous in consequence of inclosures, and colonization was promoted as a means of ridding the country of the excess of its population.

[Sidenote: Note 6, page 112.]

In the matter of Church government Puritanism pa.s.sed through three different periods. In the reign of Elizabeth the Church-Puritan was mainly Presbyterian under Cartwright's lead. But there was even then a current that set toward Independency. Separatism was the outward manifestation of this tendency, and according to Ralegh's estimate, cited in the text, there were about twenty thousand declared Separatists in England in 1593. After the suppression of the presbyteries within the Church in the last years of Elizabeth, and the crus.h.i.+ng out of the Separatists by rigorous persecutions, questions of the particular form of Church government fell into abeyance among the Puritans for about forty years. "Indiscriminate anti-prelacy was the prevailing mood of the English people," says Ma.s.son, "and the distinction between Presbyterianism and Independency was yet caviare to the general." Life of Milton, ii, 590. Richard Baxter, the Puritan divine (as quoted by Ma.s.son), confesses in 1641 that until that year he had never thought what Presbytery or Independency was, or ever spoke with a man who seemed to know it. See also Hanbury's Memorials, ii, 69. Writers on this period do not seem to recognize the fact that the two views were in some rivalry among the early Puritans, and that the theory of the independence of the local church seems to have been at least foreshadowed in the opinions at Frankfort. But there was a long generation in which these differences among the Puritans were forgotten in their life-and-death conflict with the Episcopal party.

Then, as Puritanism came into power, the example of other Protestant European countries drew England toward Presbyterianism, while the voice of New England came from over the sea pleading for Congregationalism.

[Sidenote: Note 7, page 123.]

A letter of Sandys, afterward Archbishop of York, to Bullinger, quoted by Marsden, Early Puritans, 57, shows that though Puritanism by 1573 had become something other than it was at Frankfort, it was still mainly negative. Sandys writes: "New orators are rising up from among us; foolish young men who despise authority and admit of no superior.

They are seeking the complete overthrow and uprooting of the whole of our ecclesiastical polity; and striving to shape out for us I know not what new platform of a church." He gives a summary under nine heads.

The a.s.sertion that each parish should have its own "presbytery" and choose its own minister, and that the judicial laws of Moses were binding, are the only positive ones. No authority of the magistrate in ecclesiastical matters, no government of the Church except by ministers, elders, and deacons, the taking away of all t.i.tles, dignities, lands, and revenues of bishops, etc., from the Church, the allowing of no ministers but actual pastors, the refusal of baptism to the children of papists, fill the rest of this summary. One misses from this skeleton the insistence on Sabbath-keeping, church-going, "ordinances," and ascetic austerity in morals that afterward became distinctive traits of the party.

[Sidenote: Note 8, page 125.]

Augustine and other early doctors of the Church held to a Sunday-Sabbath in the fifth century, basing it largely on grounds that now seem mystical. Compare c.o.xe on Sabbath Laws and Sabbath Duties, 284, note, and Cook's Historical and General View of Christianity, ii, 301, cited by c.o.xe. The question was variously treated during the middle ages, St. Thomas Aquinas and other schoolmen taking the prevalent modern view that the fourth commandment was partly moral and partly ceremonial. There is a curious story, for which I do not know the original authority, of Eustachius, Abbot of Hay, in the thirteenth century, who on his return from the Holy Land preached from city to city against buying and selling on Sundays and saints' days. He had with him a copy of a doc.u.ment dropped from heaven and found on the altar of St. Simon, on Mount Golgotha. This paper threatened that if the command were disobeyed it should rain stones and wood and hot water in the night, and, as if such showers were not enough, wild beasts were to devour the Sabbath-breakers. That there was a difference of opinion in that age is shown by the fact that Roger Bacon, later in the thirteenth century, thought it worth while to a.s.sert that Christians should work and hold fairs on Sunday, while Sat.u.r.day was the proper day for rest. He showed no doc.u.ment from heaven, but, like a true philosopher of that time, the learned friar appealed to arguments drawn from astrology. Hearne's Remains, ii, 177, cites Mirandula. Legislation by Parliament regarding Sunday observance was rare before the Reformation. A statute of 28 Edward III incidentally excepts Sunday from the days on which wool may be shorn, and one of 27 Henry VI forbids the keeping of fairs and markets on Sundays, Good Fridays, and princ.i.p.al festivals except four Sundays in harvest. In 4 Edward IV a statute was pa.s.sed forbidding the sale of shoes on Sundays and certain festivals.

[Sidenote: Note 9, page 125.]

In the "Injunctions by King Edward VI," 1547, Bishop Sparrow's Collection, edition of 1671, p. 8, there is a remarkable statement of what may be called the Edwardean view of Sunday as distinguished from the opinions and practice that had come down from times preceding the Reformation: "G.o.d is more offended than pleased, more dishonoured than honoured upon the holy-day because of idleness, pride, drunkenness,"

etc. The religious and moral duties to which the "holy-day," as it is called, should be strictly devoted are there specified. But, true to the position of compromise, halfwayness, and one might add paradox, which the English Reformation took from the beginning, there is added in the same paragraph the following: "Yet notwithstanding all Parsons, Vicars, and Curates, shall teach and declare unto their Paris.h.i.+oners, that they may with a safe and quiet conscience, in the time of Harvest, labour upon the holy and festival days and save that thing which G.o.d hath sent. And if for any scrupulosity, or grudge of conscience, men should superst.i.tiously abstain from working upon those days, that then they should grievously offend and displease G.o.d." See also "Thacte made for thabrogacion of certayne holy-dayes," in the reign of Henry VIII, 1536, in the same black-letter collection, p.

167. In this act "Sabboth-day" occurs, but apparently with reference to the Jewish Sabbath only. "Sonday" is used for Sunday.