The Beginners of a Nation Part 32

[Sidenote: Note 7, page 278.]

David Pieterzen de Vries, in his Voyages, reports this feeling of superiority as freely expressed at Hartford in 1639. There is a quaint humor in what he says of it that is enhanced by the nave Dutch phrase in which it is set down: "Dit Volck gaven haer uyt det sy Israeliten waren, ende dat wy aen onse colonie Egyptenaren waren, end' Engelsen inde Vergienies waren mede Egyptenaren," p. 151.

[Sidenote: Note 8, page 279.]

"And such was the authority ... Mr. Cotton had in the hearts of the people, that whatever he delivered in the pulpit was soon put into an Order of Court, if of a civil, or set up as a practice in the church, if of an ecclesiastical concernment." Hubbard, History of Ma.s.sachusetts, 182.

[Sidenote: Note 9, page 281.]

Knowles's Life of Williams, 58, note, quotes from a letter of Coddington's appended to Fox's reply to Williams, in which Coddington, who was one of the magistrates that examined the treatise, charges Williams with having "written a quarto against the King's patent and authority."

[Sidenote: Note 10, page 288.]

Cotton's Answer to Williams's Examination, 38. I have followed Cotton implicitly here, but without feeling sure that his memory can ever be depended on where his polemical feeling is concerned. On the next page he is guilty of a flagrant but no doubt unconscious suppression of an important fact. "It pleased the Lord to open the hearts of the Church to a.s.sist us," etc., he says, putting out of sight the sharp dealing by which the Salem church was brought to ignominious subjection.

[Sidenote: Note 11, page 289.]

Cotton's Answer to Williams, 29. Compare also Ma.s.sachusetts Records of 4th March, 1633, where a mercenary inducement to take the oath is offered by making the regulations for recording the lands of freemen apply also to the lands of "residents" presumably not church members and ineligible to the franchise, but only to the residents "that had taken or shall hereafter take their oathes." Backus supposes that Williams saw some incidental result from the oath that would be prejudicial to religious freedom. This is to suppose that Williams needed a practical consideration to stir him to action--it is to suppose that Williams was not Williams. Practical men were afraid the independence of Ma.s.sachusetts would be lost; Roger Williams was only afraid that Ma.s.sachusetts would commit a public sin in trying to escape the impending evil. A conscience undefiled was his objective point in private and public life; safety, public or private, was secondary.

[Sidenote: Note 12, page 292.]

There has been much ingenious and rather uncandid effort by Cotton first of all, and by other defenders of the General Court since, to prove that Williams's views on toleration were not a cause of his banishment. If those views had been the sole cause, the decree would have been more comprehensible and defensible in view of the opinions of the age. But the question about the validity of the patent, the question of the protest written against the course of the magistrates in blackmailing Salem into a refusal to support him, the question of the freeman's oath, and, what seems to have been deemed of capital importance, the question of grace after meat, are all involved at one time or another. The formal charges in what may be considered the beginning of the banishment proceedings, the trial in July, as given by Winthrop, our most trustworthy authority, are: 1. That the magistrates ought not to punish for a religious offense--"the breach of the first table"--except where it disturbed the civil peace. 2.

That the magistrate ought not to tender an oath to an unregenerate man. 3. That a man ought not to pray with an unregenerate person. 4.

That thanks were not to be given after the sacrament and after meat.

Savage's Winthrop, i, 193, 194. In the final proceedings in October, the letters growing out of the refusal to confirm to Salem its outlying land entered into and embittered the controversy. Winthrop, i, 204. The recorded verdict makes the divulging "of dyvers newe and dangerous opinions against the aucthoritie of the magistrate" the first offense, and the "letter of defamacion" the second. Williams says that a magistrate, who appears to have been Haynes, the governor, summed up his offenses at the conclusion of the trial under four heads: 1. The denial of the authority of the patent. 2. The denial of the lawfulness of requiring a wicked person to take an oath or pray.

3. The denial of the lawfulness of hearing the parish ministers in England. 4. The doctrine "that the Civill Magistrates' power extends only to the Bodies and Goods and outward State of men." Against the evidence of Williams, Winthrop, and the records, I can not attach any importance to the halting accounts given years afterward, for controversial purposes, by Cotton, from what he thought was his memory.

[Sidenote: Note 13, page 292.]

"Whereas Mr. Roger Williams, one of the elders of the church at Salem, hath broached and dyvulged dyvers newe and dangerous opinions, against the aucthoritie of magistrates, as also writt letters of defamacion both of the magistrates & Churches here, & that before any conviccion, & yet maintaineth the same without retraccion, it is therefore ordered that the said Mr. Williams shall departe out of this jurisdiccion within sixe weekes now nexte ensueing, which if hee neglect to performe it shall be lawfull for the Gouernour & two of the magistrates to send him to some place out of this jurisdiccion, not to returne any more without license from the Court." Ma.s.sachusetts Records, i, 161.

[Sidenote: Note 14, page 293.]

Neal's History of New England, i, 143. "Sentence of banishment being read against Mr. Williams, the whole town of Salem was in an uproar; for such was the Popularity of the Man and such the Compa.s.sion of the People ... that he would have carried off the greatest part of the Inhabitants of the Town if the Ministers of Boston had not interposed." Neal appears to derive these facts, which wear a countenance of probability, from an authority not now known.

[Sidenote: Note 15, page 293.]

The phrase occurs in Williams's n.o.ble letter to Major Mason, 1st Ma.s.sachusetts Historical Society Collections, i, 275 and following.

The magnanimity shown toward those opposed to him in this letter is probably without a parallel in his age; it has few in any age.

[Sidenote: Note 16, page 294.]

"The increase of the concourse of people to him on the Lord's days in private, to the neglect or deserting of publick Ordinances and to the spreading of the Leaven of his corrupt imaginations, provoked the Magistrates rather than to breed a winters Spirituale plague in the Countrey, to put upon him a winter's journey out of the Countrey."

Master John Cotton's Answer to Master Roger Williams, 57.

[Sidenote: Note 17, page 297.]

The main original authorities on the banishment of Williams are Winthrop's Journal and the Ma.s.sachusetts Records of the period. Some facts can be gathered from the writings of Williams, whose autobiographical pa.s.sages always have an air of truth while they are sometimes vague and often flushed by his enthusiastic temper.

Cotton's memory is less to be trusted; some of his statements are in conflict with better authorities. He no doubt believed himself to be truthful, but his ingenious mind was unable to be precise without unconscious sophistication. Hubbard was of Presbyterian tendencies and totally opposed to all forms of Separatism. He appears to have recorded every exaggerated rumor cherished by Williams's antagonists to his discredit. Neither in this nor in other matters can we rely much on Hubbard's testimony. No critical student of history puts unquestioning confidence in Cotton Mather. His strange mind could never utter truth unvarnished. In a case like this, where family pride, local feeling, and sectarian prejudice were all on one side, and where he had a chance to embroider upon traditions already two generations old, it is better to disregard the author of the Magnalia entirely. Bentley's Historical Account of Salem, in 1st Ma.s.sachusetts Historical Society Collections, vi, is a paper that excites admiration for its broadmindedness. It contains information not elsewhere to be found, but it is impossible to tell how far Bentley depended upon sources not now accessible and how far he relied on ingenious inferences drawn from his large knowledge of local history. The publications of the Narragansett Club contain the whole controversy between Cotton and Williams and all the letters of the latter now known to be extant. I have in some cases referred to the originals, in others I have used these careful reprints. Williams has been rather fortunate in his biographers. Mr. Oscar S. Straus, approaching the subject from a fresh standpoint, has produced the latest Life of Williams, written in a judicial temper and evincing a rare sympathy with its subject. The character of Williams has never been better drawn than by Mr. Straus, pp. 231-233. The life by T. D. Knowles is perhaps the best of the older biographies, Arnold's History of Rhode Island contains a sketch of Williams, and Elton's brief biography has a value of its own. Gammell's Life in Sparks's Biography is generally fair. "As to Roger Williams," by the late Dr. Henry Martyn Dexter, is, what it pretends to be, a partisan statement of the case against Williams. It shows characteristic thoroughness of research, it clears up many minor points, and is as erudite as it is one-sided.

[Sidenote: Note 18, page 298.]

Baylie's Sermon before the House of Lords, on Errours and Induration, accuses the Dutch of mere worldly policy in toleration. Williams alludes to the charge, Bloudy Tenent yet more Bloudy, p. 8. But the toleration of Holland may rather be traced to that decay of bigotry and that widening of view which are beneficent results of an extended trade. Williams in the Bloudy Tenent yet more Bloudy, p. 10, complains of the exclusion of Catholics and Arminians from toleration in the Netherlands. It would carry us beyond the range of the present work to inquire how far the toleration of Amsterdam was related to that "meridian glory" which Antwerp reached as early as 1550 by making itself a place of refuge for the persecuted of England, France, and Germany. The Articles of Union, adopted at Utrecht in 1579, which have been often called the Magna Charta of the Dutch, go to show that political and commercial considerations counted in favor of toleration, but they also show that some notion of the sacredness of the free conscience had been adopted among the Dutch. Article XIII of the Union provides that the states of Holland and Zealand shall conduct their religious affairs as they think good. More qualified arrangements are made for the other states, as that they may restrict religious liberty as they shall find needful for the repose and welfare of the country. But this significant provision is added, that every man shall have freedom of private belief without arrest or inquisition: "Midts dat een yder particulier in syn Religie vry zal moghen blyven, ende dat men niemandt, ter cause van de Religie, zal moghen achterhalen, ofte ondersoecken." Pieter Paulus Verklaring der Unie van Utrecht, i, 229, 230. Compare Van Meteren, Nederlandsche Historie etc., iii, 254, 255, and Hooft Nederlandsche Historie, etc., Book IX, where the full text of Article XIII is given.

[Sidenote: Note 19, page 298.]

Barclay, in his Inner Life of the Religious Societies of the Commonwealth, p. 97, cites Peter John Zwisck, a Mennonite of West Frisia, as the author, in 1609, of The Liberty of Religion, in which he maintains that men are not to be converted by force. In 1614 one Leonard Busher pet.i.tioned James I in favor of liberty of conscience, and Barclay conjectures that he was a member of that Separatist or General Baptist church returned from Holland, of which Helwyss had been pastor. In 1615 this obscure and proscribed congregation professed a great truth, yet hidden from the wise and prudent, namely, that "earthly authority belonged to earthly kings, but spiritual authority belonged to that one Spiritual king who is king of kings."

In more than one matter Roger Williams showed himself attracted to the doctrines of the Mennonites and their offshoot the English General Baptist body. Whether directly through his reading of Dutch theological works or indirectly through English followers of Dutch writers, Williams probably derived his broadest principles, in germ at least, from the Mennonites or Anabaptists of the gentler sort, as he did also some of his minor scruples. For the connection between the Mennonites of the Continent and the English cognate sects the reader is referred to Barclay's Inner Life, a valuable work of much research.

See also the pet.i.tion of the Brownists, 1641, cited in Barclay, p.

476, from British Museum, E 34-178, tenth pamphlet.

[Sidenote: Note 20, page 299.]

Another delightful example of the far-fetchedness of Cotton's logic is his justification of the sentence of banishment against Williams by citing Proverbs xi, 26: "He that withholdeth corn, the people shall curse him." This text, says Cotton, "I alledged to prove that the people had much more cause to separate such from amongst them (whether by Civill or church-censure) as doe withhold or separate them from the Ordinances or the Ordinances from them, which are the bread of life."

Reply to Williams's Examination, 40. The reference in the text is to the same work, 37. "Much lesse to persecute him with the Civill Sword till it may appeare, even by just and full conviction, that he sinneth not out of conscience but against the very light of his own conscience." But in Cotton's practice those who labored with the heretic were judges of how much argument const.i.tuted "just and full conviction." This logic would have amply sheltered the Spanish Inquisition.

[Sidenote: Note 21, page 300.]

Cotton's Answer to Williams's Examination, 38, 39. Cotton confesses to having had further conversation of a nature unfavorable to Williams, but he is able to deny that he counseled his banishment. Even Cotton could hardly have prevented it, and he confesses that he approved the sentence. The only interest in the question is the exhibition of Cotton's habitual shrinking from responsibility and his curious sinuosity of conscience.

[Sidenote: Note 22, page 301.]

In an unpublished work by Mr. Lindsay Swift, of the Boston Public Library, which I have been kindly permitted to read, and which is a treatise on the election sermons mostly existing only in ma.n.u.script, the author says: "The early discourses were full of ecclesiasticism, a great deal of theology, some politics; ... but of humanity, brotherly kindness, and what we understand by Christianity in the human relations, I have been able to discern very little."

[Sidenote: Note 23, page 302.]

Many of Roger Williams's scruples were peculiar, but his scrupulosity was not. Cotton takes pains to call pulpits "scaffolds," to show that they had no sacredness. The scruple about the heathen names of days of the week was felt by many other Puritans. It is evident in Winthrop, and it did not wholly disappear from Puritan use until about the end of the seventeenth century.

[Sidenote: Note 24, page 303.]

Barclay, Inner Life, etc., 410, 411, cites Sebastian Franck's Chronica of 1536, from which it appears that the Seekers in fact if not in name existed about a century before Williams adopted their views. "Some desire to allow Baptism and other ceremonies to remain in abeyance till G.o.d gives another command--sends out true laborers into the harvest.... Some others agree with those who think the ceremonies since the death of the Apostles, are equally departed, laid waste and fallen--that G.o.d no longer heeds them, and also does not desire that they should be longer kept, on which account they will never again be set up but now are to proceed entirely in Spirit and in Truth and now in an outward manner." The relation of Seekerism to Quakerism is manifest. "To be a Seeker is to be of the best Sect next to a finder,"

wrote Cromwell in 1646.