The Beginners of a Nation Part 15

[Sidenote: Note 10, page 129.]

Dr. Bownd's Sabathum Veteris et Novi Testamenti is exceedingly rare.

There is a copy in the Prince Collection of the Boston Public Library.

It is the only one in this country, so far as I can learn. I am under obligations in several matters to c.o.x's Literature of the Sabbath Question, to the same author's Sabbath Laws and Sabbath Duties, and to Hessey's Bampton Lectures for 1860.

[Sidenote: Note 11, page 131.]

It is Thomas Rogers, the earliest opponent of the doctrine of Greenham and Bownd, who sees a deep-laid plot in the publication of their books. "What the brethren wanted in strength they had in wiliness," he says. "For while these worthies of our church were employing their engines and forces partly in defending the present government ecclesiastical, partly in a.s.saulting the presbytery and new discipline, even at that very instant the brethren ... abandoned quite the bulwarks which they had raised and gave out were impregnable: suffering us to beat them down, without any or very small resistance, and yet not careless of affairs, left not the wars for all that, but from an odd corner, and after a new fas.h.i.+on which we little thought of (such was their cunning), set upon us afresh again by dispersing in printed books (which for ten years' s.p.a.ce before they had been in hammering among themselves to make them complete) their Sabbath speculations and presbyterian (that is more than kingly or popely) directions for the observance of the Lord's Day." Preface to Thirty-nine Articles, paragraph 20. He also says, with some wit, "They set up a new idol, their Saint Sabbath."

[Sidenote: Note 12, page 132.]

The doctrine of a strict Sabbath appears to have made no impression in Scotland until the seventeenth century was well advanced. In the printed Burgh Records of Aberdeen from 1570 to 1625 there is no sabbatarian legislation in the proper sense; but there are efforts to compel the people to suspend buying and selling fish and flesh in the market, the playing of outdoor games and ninepins, and the selling of liquors during sermon time only. Take as an example the following ordinance--as curious for its language as its subject--dated 4th October, 1598, twenty-four years after Knox's death:

"Item, The prouest, bailleis, and counsall ratefeis and approves the statute maid obefoir, bering that na mercatt, nather of fische nor flesche salbe on the Sabboth day in tyme c.u.mming, in tyme of sermone, vnder the pane of confiscatioun of the same; and lykvayes ratefeis the statute maid aganis the playeris in the linkis, and at the kyillis, during the time of the sermones; ... and that na tavernar sell nor went any wyne nor aill in tyme c.u.mming in tyme of sermone, ather on the Sabboth day or vlk dayes, under the pane of ane vnlaw of fourtie s., to be vplift.i.t of the contravenar als oft as they be convict."

[Sidenote: Note 13, page 132.]

New England Puritanism took a position more ultra even than that of Bownd. Thomas Shepard, of Cambridge, Ma.s.s., developed from some Sermons on the Subject a work with the t.i.tle, Theses Sabbaticae, or the Doctrine of the Sabbath. After a considerable circulation in ma.n.u.script among New England students of divinity, it was printed at London in 1650 by request of all the elders of New England. From the time of Augustine the prevailing theory of advocates of a Sunday-Sabbath has been that the fourth commandment is partly moral, partly ceremonial; but Shepard, who does not stick at small logical or historical difficulties, will have it wholly moral, by which means he avoids any option regarding the day. The rest of the Sabbath, according to this authoritative New England treatise, is to be as strict as it ever was under Jewish law, and is to be rigidly enforced on the unwilling by parents and magistrates. In the spirit of a thoroughpaced literalist Shepard argues through fifty pages that the Sabbath begins in the evening. He admits that only "servile labour" is forbidden, but he reasons that as "sports and pastimes" are ordained "to whet on worldly labour," they therefore partake of its servile character and are not tolerable on the Sabbath. It appears from his preface that there were Puritans in his time who denied the sabbatical character of Sunday and spiritualized the commandment.

CHAPTER THE SECOND.

_SEPARATISM AND THE SCROOBY CHURCH._

I.

[Sidenote: Importance of the Separatists.]

To the great brotherhood of Puritans who formed a party within the church there was added a little fringe of Separatists or "Brownists,"

as they were commonly called, who did not stop with rejecting certain traits of the Anglican service, but spurned the church itself. Upon these ultraists fell the merciless hand of persecution. They were imprisoned, hanged, exiled. They were mostly humble people, and were never numerous; but by their superior boldness in speech and writing, by their attempts to realize actual church organizations on apostolic models, they rendered themselves considerable if not formidable. From this advance guard and forlorn hope of Puritanism, inured to hards.h.i.+p and the battle front, came at length the little band of New England pioneers who made a way into the wilderness over the dead bodies of half their company. The example of these contemned Brownists led to the Puritan settlement of New England. Their type of ecclesiastical organization ultimately dominated the Congregationalism of New England and the nonconformity of the mother country. For these reasons, if for no other, Brownism, however obscure it may have been, is not a negligible element in history.

II.

[Sidenote: Nonconformity in the Church.]

The great body of the Puritans seem to have agreed with Bishop Hall that it was "better to swallow a ceremony than to rend a church," and they agreed with him in regarding Separatism as criminal. They were, indeed, too intent on reforming the Church of England to think of leaving it. They made no scruple of defying ecclesiastical regulations when they could, but in the moral code of that day schism was the deadliest of sins.

[Sidenote: Scrambler, Bishop of Peterborough, to Burghley, 13th April, 1573, in Wright's Elizabeth and her Times.]

[Sidenote: Rogers's Preface to Articles. Parker Soc. ed., p. 10.]

In the early part of Elizabeth's reign, before the beginning of the rule of Whitgift and the High Commission Courts, Puritan divines slighted or omitted the liturgy in many parishes. This became more common after the rise of Cartwright and the Presbyterian movement, about 1570. For example, in the town of Overston, in 1573, there was no divine service according to the Book of Common Prayer, "but insteade thereof two sermons be preached" by men whom the bishop had refused to license. The village of Whiston was also a place of Puritan a.s.semblage, "where it is their joye," writes the Bishop of Peterborough, "to have manie owte of divers parishes, princ.i.p.allie owte of Northampton towne and Overston aforesaid, with other townes thereaboute, there to receive the sacramentes with preachers and ministers to their owne liking, and contrarie to the forme prescribed by the publique order of the realme." Thomas Rogers says, "The brethren (for so did they style them-selves) would neither pray, nor say service, nor baptize, nor celebrate the Lord's Supper, nor marry, nor bury, nor do any other ecclesiastical duty according to law."

At this time some of the Puritan divines held high positions in the church. Whittingham, who had been on the Puritan side of the quarrels in Frankfort, and who had received only a Genevan ordination, succeeded in holding his deanery of Durham until his death, in 1579.

In 1563 Dr. Turner was sneering at bishops as "white coats" and "tippett gentlemen," while himself Dean of Durham.

[Sidenote: The Semi-Separatists.]

[Sidenote: Bancroft in Barlowe's Svmme and Svbstance.]

[Sidenote: Heresiography, p. 82.]

But Elizabeth after a while filled the bishoprics with men to her liking, whose heavy hands made the lot of Puritans in the church harder and harder. Many ministers were silenced, but there were many who, by evasion or by straining their consciences, held their benefices. Some Puritan clergymen, when they were to preach, preferred "to walk in the church-yard until sermon time rather than to be present at public prayer." Some Puritan laymen had their own way of conforming to the church. "There is a sort of Semi-Separatist," says Pagitt, as late as 1646, "that will heare our Sermons but not our Common-prayers; and of these you may see every Sunday in our streets sitting and standing about our doores; who, when Prayers are done, rush into our Churches to hear our Sermons."

III.

[Sidenote: Causes of Separatism.]

[Sidenote: Thomas Scott in Pagitt, 80.]

[Sidenote: Plimoth Plantation, p. 8.]

The growth of Separatist churches was due to two causes. An almost incredible reverence for the letter of the Scriptures had taken the place of older superst.i.tions. There was a strong tendency to revert to the stern spirit of the Old Testament and to adopt the external forms of the New. Religious idealists saw a striking contrast between the discipline of the primitive and almost isolated bands of enthusiastic believers in the apostolic time and the all-inclusive parishes of the hierarchical state church. And in that age of externalism the difference in organic form between the Anglican church and the little synagogues of Christian seceders founded by Paul in the Levant weighed heavily upon the minds of earnest people. It did not occur to them that this primitive organization was probably brought over from the neighboring Jewish congregations from which the converts had withdrawn, and that there might not be any obligation to imitate it under different skies and in a remote age. The Separatist was an idealist. "He lives by the aire," said an opponent, "and there he builds Castles and Churches; none on earth will please him; ... he must finde out Sir Thomas More's Utopia, or rather Plato's Community, and bee an Elder there." But Separatism was undoubtedly promoted by persecution. Bradford says that the sufferings inflicted on them by the bishops helped some of the Puritans "to see further into things by the light of the word of G.o.d. How not only these base and beggerly ceremonies were unlawfull, but also that the lordly and tiranous power of the prelats ought not to be submitted unto." Drawn thus by the letter of the biblical record, while stung by cruel oppression and galled by the opposition of the const.i.tuted authorities to what they deemed the truth divine, it is not strange that religious enthusiasts began to long for societies organized like those of the apostolic age, from which the profane should be excluded by a strict discipline.

IV.

[Sidenote: Robert Browne and Brownism.]

[Sidenote: 1581 to 1586.]

[Sidenote: Note 1.]

The beginning of Separatism has been commonly attributed to Robert Browne, a contentious and able advocate of Separatist doctrines. After a brief and erratic career as an advocate of these opinions, and after suffering the penalty of his zeal and proving the sincerity of his belief in thirty-two different prisons, in some of which he could not see his hand at noonday, Browne at length began to waver--now inclined to return to the church, now recoiling toward dissent. Worn out in nerves by controversy and persecution, this eccentric man was so alarmed by a solemn sentence of excommunication from a bishop, that he repented and made peace with the English church. He accepted a benefice, but employed a curate to preach for him. Browne lingered on to an unhonored age, imperious and contentious, not able to live with his wife, and held in no reverence by churchmen, while he was despised by Separatists. He died at eighty, in Northampton jail, to which he had been carried on a feather bed laid in a cart. The old man had been committed to prison this thirty-third time in his life for striking a constable who sought to collect a rate.

[Sidenote: Rise of Separatism.]

[Sidenote: Barclay's Inner Life, pp. 13, 53.]

[Sidenote: Dialogue of 1593 quo. by Waddington.]

[Sidenote: Bradford's Dialogue.]

[Sidenote: Note 2.]

[Sidenote: Josias Nichols, The Plea for the Innocent, 1602, in Hanbury, i. 3.]

[Sidenote: Stephen Breadwell, 1588, in Dexter, 255.]

Separatism in some form existed before Browne's zeal made it a thorn in the side of the bishops. Something like a separation existed in 1567. In 1571 there was an independent church of which we know little but the pastor's name. Bradford even dates independency back to the reign of Mary. In truth, the rise of this sect, from which came the earliest New England colony, appears to be lost in obscurity.