The Beginners of a Nation Part 31

The real and sufficient extenuation for the conduct of the Ma.s.sachusetts leaders is found in the character and standards of the age. A few obscure and contemned sectaries--Brownists, Anabaptists, and despised Familists--in Holland and England had spoken more or less clearly in favor of religious liberty before the rise of Roger Williams, but n.o.body of weight or respectable standing in the whole world had befriended it. All the great authorities in church and state, Catholic and Protestant, prelatical and Puritan, agreed in their detestation of it. Even Robinson, the moderate pastor of the Leyden Pilgrims, ventured to hold only to the "toleration of tolerable opinions." This was the toleration found at Amsterdam and in some other parts of the Low Countries. Even this religious sufferance which did not amount to liberty was sufficiently despicable in the eyes of that intolerant age to bring upon the Dutch the contempt of Christendom. It was a very qualified and limited toleration, and one from which Catholics and Arminians were excluded. It seems to have been that practical amelioration of law which is produced more effectually by commerce than by learning or religion. Outside of some parts of the Low Countries, and oddly enough of the Turkish Empire, all the world worth counting decried toleration as a great crime. It would have been wonderful indeed if Ma.s.sachusetts had been superior to the age. "I dare aver," says Nathaniel Ward, the New England lawyer-minister, "that G.o.d doth no where in his word tolerate Christian States to give tolerations to such adversaries of his Truth, if they have power in their hands to suppress them." To set up toleration was "to build a sconce against the walls of heaven to batter G.o.d out of his chair," in Ward's opinion.

XVI.

[Sidenote: The casuistry of Cotton.]

[Sidenote: Note 20.]

[Sidenote: Hutchinson Papers, 496.]

[Sidenote: Note 21.]

[Sidenote: Controversie concerning Liberty of Conscience.]

[Sidenote: Character of Puritanism.]

[Sidenote: Note 22.]

[Sidenote: Savage's Winthrop, i, 211-214.]

This doctrine of intolerance was sanctioned by many refinements of logic, such as Cotton's delicious sophistry that if a man refused to be convinced of the truth, he was sinning against conscience, and therefore it was not against the liberty of conscience to coerce him.

Cotton's moral intuitions were fairly suffocated by logic. He declared that men should be compelled to attend religious service, because it was "better to be hypocrites than profane persons. Hypocrites give G.o.d part of his due, the outward man, but the profane person giveth G.o.d neither outward nor inward man." To reason thus is to put subtlety into the _cathedra_ of common sense, to bewilder vision by legerdemain. Notwithstanding his natural gift for devoutness and his almost immodest G.o.dliness, Cotton was incapable of high sincerity. He would not specifically advise Williams's banishment, but having labored with him round a corner according to his most approved ecclesiastical formula, he said, "We have no more to say in his behalf, but must sit down"; by which expression of pa.s.sivity he gave the signal to the "secular arm" to do its worst, while he washed his hands in innocent self-complacency. When one scrupulous magistrate consulted him as to his obligation in Williams's case, Cotton answered his hesitation by saying, "You know they are so much incensed against his course that it is not your voice nor the voice of two or three more that can suspend the sentence." By such s.h.i.+fty phrases he s.h.i.+rked responsibility for the results of his own teaching. Of the temper that stands alone for the right, Nature had given him not a jot. Williams may be a little too severe, but he has some truth when he describes Cotton on this occasion as "swimming with the stream of outward credit and profit," though nothing was further from Cotton's conscious purpose than such worldliness. Cotton's intolerance was not like that of Dudley and Endecott, the offspring of an austere temper; it was rather the outgrowth of his logic and his reverence for authority. He sheltered himself behind the examples of Elizabeth and James I, and took refuge in the shadow of Calvin, whose burning of Servetus he cites as an example, without any recoil of heart or conscience. But the consideration of the character of the age forbids us to condemn the conscientious men who put Williams out of the Ma.s.sachusetts theocracy as they would have driven the devil out of the garden of Eden. When, however, it comes to judging the age itself, and especially to judging the Puritanism of the age, these false and harsh ideals are its sufficient condemnation. Its government and its very religion were barbarous; its Bible, except for mystical and ecclesiastical uses, might as well have closed with the story of the Hebrew judges and the imprecatory Psalms. The Apocalypse of John, grotesquely interpreted, was the one book of the New Testament that received hearty consideration, aside from those other New Testament pa.s.sages supposed to relate to a divinely appointed ecclesiasticism.

The humane pity of Jesus was unknown not only to the laws, but to the sermons of the time. About the time of Williams's banishment the lenity of John Winthrop was solemnly rebuked by some of the clergy and rulers as a lax imperiling of the safety of the gospel; and Winthrop, overborne by authority, confessed, explained, apologized, and promised amendment. The Puritans subst.i.tuted an unformulated belief in the infallibility of "G.o.dly" elders acting with the magistrates for the ancient doctrine of an infallible church.

XVII.

[Sidenote: Character of Williams. His scruples.]

[Sidenote: New England Firebrand Quenched, 246.]

[Sidenote: Williams to Winthrop, 1637, Narr. Club, vi.]

[Sidenote: Note 23.]

In this less scrupulous but more serious age it is easy to hold Williams up to ridicule. Never was a n.o.ble and sweet-spirited man bedeviled by a scrupulosity more trivial. Cotton aptly dubbed him "a haberdasher of small questions." His extant letters are many of them vibrant with latent heroism; there is manifest in them an exquisite charity and a pathetic magnanimity, but in the midst of it all the writer is unable to rid himself of a swarm of scruples as pertinacious as the buzzing mosquitoes in the primitive forest about him. In dating his letters, where he ventures to date at all, he never writes the ordinary name of the day of the week or the name of the month, lest he should be guilty of etymological heathenism. He often avoids writing the year, and when he does insert it he commits himself to the last two figures only and adds a saving clause. Thus 1652 appears as "52 (so called)," and other years are tagged with the same doubting words, or with the Latin "_ut vulgo_." What quarrel the tender conscience had with the Christian era it is hard to guess. So, too, he writes to Winthrop, who had taken part in his banishment, letters full of reverential tenderness and hearty friends.h.i.+p. But his conscience does not allow him even to seem to hold ecclesiastical fellows.h.i.+p with the man he honors as a ruler and loves as a friend. Once at least he guards the point directly by subscribing himself "Your wors.h.i.+p's faithful and affectionate in all _civil_ bonds." It would be sad to think of a great spirit so enthralled by the scrupulosity of his time and his party if these minute restrictions had been a source of annoyance to him. But the cheerful observance of little scruples seems rather to have taken the place of a recreation in his life; they were to him perhaps what bric-a-brac is to a collector, what a well-arranged altar and candlesticks are to a ritualist.

[Sidenote: Williams becomes a Seeker.]

[Sidenote: Note 24.]

Two fundamental notions supplied the motive power of every ecclesiastical agitation of that age. The notion of a succession of churchly order and ordinance from the time of the apostles was the mainspring of the High-church movement. Apostolic primitivism was the aim of the Puritan and still more the goal of the Separatist. One party rejoiced in a belief that a mysterious apostolic virtue had trickled down through generations of bishops and priests to its own age; the other rejoiced in the destruction of inst.i.tutions that had grown up in the ages and in getting back to the primitive nakedness of the early Christian conventicle. True to the law of his nature, Roger Williams pushed this latter principle to its ultimate possibilities.

If we may believe the accounts, he and his followers at Providence became Baptists that they might receive the rite of baptism in its most ancient Oriental form. But in an age when the fountains of the great deep were utterly broken up he could find no rest for the soles of his feet. It was not enough that he should be troubled by the Puritan spirit of apostolic primitivism; he had now swung round to where this spirit joined hands with its twin, the aspiration for apostolic succession. He renounced his baptism because it was without apostolic sanction, and announced himself of that sect which was the last reduction of Separatism. He became a Seeker.

[Sidenote: The Seekers.]

Here again is a probable influence from Holland. The Seekers had appeared there long before. Many Baptists had found that their search for primitivism, if persisted in, carried them to this negative result; for it seemed not enough to have apostolic rites in apostolic form unless they were sanctioned by the "gifts" of the apostolic time. The Seekers appeared in England as early as 1617, and during the religious turmoils of the Commonwealth period the sect afforded a resting place for many a weatherbeaten soul. As the miraculous gifts were lost, the Seekers dared not preach, baptize, or teach; they merely waited, and in their mysticism they believed their waiting to be an "upper room" to which Christ would come. It is interesting to know that Williams, the most romantic figure of the whole Puritan movement, at last found a sort of relief from the austere externalism and ceaseless dogmatism of his age by traveling the road of literalism until he had pa.s.sed out on the other side into the region of devout and contented uncertainty.

XVIII.

[Sidenote: Moral elevation of Williams]

In all this Williams was the child of his age, and sometimes more childish than his age. But there were regions of thought and sentiment in which he was wholly disentangled from the meshes of his time, and that not because of intellectual superiority--for he had no large philosophical views--but by reason of elevation of spirit. Even the authority of Moses could not prevent him from condemning the harsh severity of the New England capital laws. He had no sentimental delusions about the character of the savages--he styles them "wolves endued with men's brains"; but he constantly pleads for a humane treatment of them. All the b.l.o.o.d.y precedents of Joshua could not make him look without repulsion on the slaughter of women and children in the Pequot war, nor could he tolerate dismemberment of the dead or the selling of Indian captives into perpetual slavery. From bigotry and resentment he was singularly free. On many occasions he joyfully used his ascendency over the natives to protect those who kept in force against him a sentence of perpetual banishment. And this ultra-Separatist, almost alone of the men of his time, could use such words of catholic charity as those in which he speaks of "the people of G.o.d wheresoever scattered about Babel's banks either in Rome or England."

[Sidenote: Superior to the age.]

Of his incapacity for organization or administration we shall have to speak hereafter. But his spiritual intuitions, his moral insight, his genius for justice, lent a curious modernness to many of his convictions. In a generation of creed-builders which detested schism he became an individualist. Individualist in thought, altruist in spirit, secularist in governmental theory, he was the herald of a time yet more modern than this laggard age of ours. If ever a soul saw a clear-s.h.i.+ning inward light not to be dimmed by prejudices or obscured by the deft logic of a disputatious age, it was the soul of Williams.

In all the region of petty scrupulosity the time-spirit had enthralled him; but in the higher region of moral decision he was utterly emanc.i.p.ated from it. His conclusions belong to ages yet to come.

[Sidenote: His prophetic character.]

This union of moral aspiration with a certain disengagedness const.i.tutes what we may call the prophetic temperament. Bradford and Winthrop were men of high aspiration, but of another cla.s.s. The reach of their spirits was restrained by practical wisdom, which compelled them to take into account the limits of the attainable. Not that they consciously refused to follow their logic to its end, but that, like other prudent men of affairs, they were, without their own knowledge or consent, turned aside by the logic of the impossible. Precisely here the prophet departs from the reformer. The prophet recks nothing of impossibility; he is ravished with truth disembodied. From Elijah the Tishbite to Socrates, from Socrates to the latest and perhaps yet unrecognized voice of our own time, the prophetic temperament has ever shown an inability to enter into treaty with its environment. In the seventeenth century there was no place but the wilderness for such a John Baptist of the distant future as Roger Williams. He did not belong among the diplomatic builders of churches, like Cotton, or the politic founders of states, like Winthrop. He was but a babbler to his own time, but the prophetic voice rings clear and far, and ever clearer as the ages go on.

ELUCIDATIONS.

[Sidenote: Note 1, page 268.]

Sir William Martin, an early friend of Williams, describes him as pa.s.sionate and precipitate, but with integrity and good intentions.

Hutchinson Papers, 106. See also, for example, the two letters of Williams to Lady Barrington, in New England Genealogical Register, July, 1889, pp. 316 and following.

[Sidenote: Note 2, page 269.]

Letter to John Cotton the younger, 25th March, 1671. "He knows what gains and preferments I have refused in universities, city, country and court," etc. Williams's enthusiastic nature gave a flush of color to his statement of ordinary fact, the general correctness of which, however, there is never reason to doubt.

[Sidenote: Note 3, page 270.]

Letter to John Cotton the younger, Narragansett Club Publications, vi, 356. There is no account of this event elsewhere, but the church records of that early date are imperfect, and there is every reason to accept the circ.u.mstantial statement of Williams. That he refused to enter into members.h.i.+p with the church is confirmed by Winthrop's Journal, 12th April, 1631, and such refusal must have had some such occasion.

[Sidenote: Note 4, page 271.]

"We have often tried your patience, but could never conquer it," were Winthrop's words to Williams, who gave to Ma.s.sachusetts lifelong service in return for its lifelong severity toward him. The sentence is quoted in Williams's letter to the younger Cotton, cited above, which is itself a fine example of his magnanimity of spirit.

Narragansett Club Publications, vi, 351-357.

[Sidenote: Note 5, page 272.]

There is difference of opinion on this point, but certain words of Williams himself seem to bear on it. After his retirement from Salem to Plymouth he received a letter from Winthrop, which appears to have intimated that no man under twenty-five ought to be ordained. Williams explains in reply that he is "nearer upwards of thirty than twenty-five," but avers, "I am no elder in any church ... nor ever shall be, if the Lord please to grant my desires that I may intend what I long after, the natives souls." Williams's Letter, Narragansett Club Publications, vi, 2. Of course, these words might have been written if he had resigned the elders.h.i.+p before leaving Salem, but they would have had much less pertinency.

[Sidenote: Note 6, page 276.]

Mr. Straus, in his Life of Roger Williams, says aptly that Ma.s.sachusetts was under a government of congregations rather than of towns, since only church members could vote. A fuller discussion of the source and evolution of the town system is deferred to a later volume of this series.