History of American Christianity — Chapter VIII The Church in New England, Part 1

CHAPTER VIII.

THE PLANTING OF THE CHURCH IN NEW ENGLAND--PILGRIM AND PURITAN.

The attitude of the Church of England Puritans toward the Separatists from that church was the attitude of the earnest, patient, hopeful reformer toiling for the removal of public abuses, toward the restless "come-outer" who quits the conflict in despair of succeeding, and, "without tarrying for any," sets up his little model of good order outside.

Such defection seemed to them not only of the nature of a military desertion and a weakening of the right side, but also an implied assertion of superior righteousness which provoked invidious comparison and mutual irritation of feeling.

The comparison must not be pressed too far if we cite in illustration the feeling of the great mass of earnest, practical antislavery men in the American conflict with slavery toward the faction of "come-outer" abolitionists, who, despairing of success within the church and the state, seceded from both, thenceforth predicting failure for every practical enterprise of reform on the part of their former workfellows, and at every defeat chuckling, "I told you so."

If we should compare the English Separatist of the seventeenth century with this American Separatist of the nineteenth, we should be in still greater danger of misleading.

Certainly there were those among the Separatists from the Church of England who, in the violence of their alienation and the bitterness of their sufferings, did not refrain from sour and acrid censoriousness toward the men who were nearest them in religious conviction and pursuing like ends by another course.

One does not read far in the history of New England without encountering reformers of this extreme type.

But not such were the company of true worshipers who, at peril of liberty and life, were wont to assemble each Lord's day in a room of the old manor-house of Scrooby, of which William Brewster was lessee, for Christian fellowship and worship, and for instruction in Christian truth and duty from the saintly lips of John Robinson.

The extreme radicals of their day, they seem to have been divinely preserved from the besetting sins of radicalism--its narrowness, its self-righteousness, its censoriousness and intolerance.

Those who read the copious records of the early New England colonization are again and again surprised at finding that the impoverished little company of Separatists at Leyden and Plymouth, who were so sharply reprobated by their Puritan brethren of the Church of England for their schismatic attitude, their over-righteousness and exclusiveness, do really excel, in liberality and patient tolerance and catholic and comprehensive love toward all good men, those who sat in judgment on them.

Something of this is due to the native nobleness of the men themselves, of whom the world was not worthy; something of it to their long discipline in the passive virtues under bitter persecution in their native land and in exile in Holland and in the wilderness; much of it certainly to the incomparably wise and Christ-like teaching of Robinson both at Scrooby and at Leyden, and afterward through the tender and faithful epistles with which he followed them across the sea; and all of it to the grace of God working in their hearts and glorified in their living and their dying.

It would be incompatible with the limits of this volume to recite in detail the story of the Pilgrims; it has been told more amply and with fuller repetition than almost any other chapter of human history, and is never to be told or heard without awakening that thrill with which the heartstrings respond to the sufferings and triumphs of Christ's blessed martyrs and confessors.

But, more dispassionately studied with reference to its position and relations in ecclesiastical history, it cannot be understood unless the sharp and sometimes exasperated antagonism is kept in view that existed between the inconsiderable faction, as it was esteemed, of the Separatists, and the great and growing Puritan party at that time in disfavor with king and court and hierarchy, but soon to become the dominant party not only in the Church of England, but in the nation.

It is not strange that the antagonism between the two parties should be lost sight of.

The two are identified in their theological convictions, in their spiritual sympathies, and, for the most part, in their judgment on questions concerning the externals of the church; and presently their respective colonies, planted side by side, not without mutual doubts and suspicions, are to grow together, leaving no visible seam of juncture, Like kindred drops commingling into one.

[84:1] To the Puritan reformer within the Church of England, the act of the Pilgrims at Scrooby in separating themselves from the general mass of English Christians, mingled though that mass might be with a multitude of unworthy was nothing less than the sin of schism.

One effect of the act was to reflect odium upon the whole party of Puritans, and involve them in the suspicion of that sedition which was so unjustly, but with such fatal success, imputed to the Separatists.

It was a hard and doubtful warfare that the Puritans were waging against spiritual wickedness in high places; the defection of the Separatists doubly weakened them in the conflict.

It is not strange, however it may seem so, that the animosity of Puritan toward Separatist was sometimes acrimonious, nor that the public reproaches hurled at the unpopular little party should have provoked recriminations upon the assailants as being involved in the defilements and the plagues of Babylon, and should have driven the Separatists into a narrower exclusiveness of separation, cutting themselves off not only from communion with abuses and corruptions in the Church of England, but even from fellowship with good and holy men in the national church who did not find it a duty to secede.

Nothing of this bitterness and narrowness is found in Robinson.

Strenuously as he maintained the right and duty of separation from the Establishment, he was, especially in his later years, no less earnest in condemning the "Separatists who carried their separation too far and had gone beyond the true landmarks in matters of Christian doctrine or of Christian fellowship."

[85:1] His latest work, "found in his studie after his decease," was "A Treatise of the Lawfulness of Hearing of the Ministers in the Church of England."

The moderateness of Robinson's position, and the brotherly kindness of his temper, could not save him and his people from the prevailing odium that rested upon the Separatist.

Many and grave were the sorrows through which the Pilgrim church had to pass in its way from the little hamlet of Scrooby to the bleak hill of Plymouth.

They were in peril from the persecutor at home and in peril in the attempt to escape; in peril from greedy speculators and malignant politicians; in peril from the sea and from cold and from starvation; in peril from the savages and from false brethren privily sent among them to spy out their liberties; but an added bitterness to all their tribulations lay in this, that, for the course which they were constrained in conscience to pursue, they were subject to the reprobation of those whom they most highly honored as their brethren in the faith of Christ.

Some of the most heartbreaking of their trials arose directly from the unwillingness of English Puritans to sustain, or even countenance, the Pilgrim colony.

In the year 1607, when the ships of the Virginia Company were about landing their freight of emigrants and supplies at Jamestown, the first and unsuccessful attempt of the Pilgrims was made to escape from their native land to Holland.

Before the end of 1608 the greater part of them, in scattering parties, had effected the passage of the North Sea, and the church was reunited in a land of religious freedom.

With what a blameless, diligent, and peaceful life they adorned the name of disciple through all the twelve years of their sojourn, how honored and beloved they were among the churches and in the University of Leyden, there are abundant testimonies.

The twelve years of seclusion in an alien land among a people of strange language was not too long a discipline of preparation for that work for which the Head of the church had set them apart.

This was the period of Robinson's activity as author.

In erudite studies, in grave debate with gainsayers at home and with fellow-exiles in Holland, he was maturing in his own mind, and in the minds of the church, those large and liberal yet definite views of church organization and duty which were destined for coming ages so profoundly to influence the American church in all its orders and divisions.

"He became a reformer of the Separation."

[87:1] We pass by the heroic and pathetic story of the consultations and correspondences, the negotiations and disappointments, the embarkation and voyage, and come to that memorable date, November 11 (= 21), 1620, when, arrived off the shore of Cape Cod, the little company, without charter or warrant of any kind from any government on earth, about to land on a savage continent in quest of a home, gathered in the cabin of the "Mayflower," and after a method quite in analogy with that in which, sixteen years before, they had constituted the church at Scrooby, entered into formal and solemn compact "in the presence of God and one of another, covenanting and combining themselves together into a civil body politic."

It is difficult, in reading the instrument then subscribed, to avoid the conviction that the theory of the origin of the powers of civil government in a social compact, which had long floated in literature before it came to be distinctly articulated in the "Contrat Social" of Jean Jacques Rousseau, was familiar to the minds of those by whom the paper was drawn.

Thoughtful men at the present day universally recognize the fallacy of this plausible hypothesis, which once had such wide currency and so serious an influence on the course of political history in America.

But whether or not they were affected by the theory, the practical good sense of the men and their deference to the teachings of the Bible secured them from the vicious and absurd consequences deducible from it.

Not all the names of the colonists were subscribed to the compact,--a clear indication of the freedom of individual judgment in that company,--but it was never for a moment held that the dissentients were any the less bound by it.

When worthless John Billington, who had somehow got "shuffled into their company," was sentenced for disrespect and disobedience to Captain Myles Standish "to have his neck and heels tied together," it does not seem to have occurred to him to plead that he had never entered into the social compact; nor yet when the same wretched man, ten years later, was by a jury convicted of willful murder, and sentenced to death and executed.

Logically, under the social-compact theory, it would have been competent for those dissenting from this compact to enter into another, and set up a competing civil government on the same ground; but what would have been the practical value of this line of argument might have been learned from Mr. Thomas Morton, of Furnivall's Inn, after he had been haled out of his disorderly house at Merry Mount by Captain Standish, and convented before the authorities at Plymouth.

The social-compact theory as applied to the church, implying that the mutual duties of Christian disciples in society are derived solely from mutual stipulations, is quite as transparently fallacious as when it is applied to civil polity, and the consequences deducible from it are not less absurd.

But it cannot be claimed for the Plymouth men, and still less for their spiritual successors, that they have wholly escaped the evil consequences of their theory in its practical applications.

The notion that a church of Christ is a club, having no authority or limitations but what it derives from club rules agreed on among the members, would have been scouted by the Pilgrims; among those who now claim to sit in their seats there are some who would hesitate to admit it, and many who would frankly avow it with all its mischievous implications.

Planted in the soil of Plymouth, it spread at once through New England, and has become widely rooted in distant and diverse regions of the American church.

[89:1] The church of Plymouth, though deprived of its pastor, continued to be rich in faith and in all spiritual gifts, and most of all in the excellent gift of charity.

The history of it year after year is a beautiful illustration of brotherly kindness and mutual self-sacrifice among themselves and of forgiving patience toward enemies.

But the colony, beginning in extreme feebleness and penury, never became either strong or rich.

One hundred and two souls embarked in the "Mayflower," of whom nearly one half were dead before the end of four months.

At the end of four years the number had increased to one hundred and eighty.

At the end of ten years the settlement numbered three hundred persons.

It could not have been with joy wholly unalloyed with misgivings that this feeble folk learned of a powerful movement for planting a Puritan colony close in the neighborhood.

The movement had begun in the heart of the national church, and represented everything that was best in that institution.

The Rev. John White, rector of Dorchester, followed across the sea with pastoral solicitude the young men of his parish, who, in the business of the fisheries, were wont to make long stay on the New England coast, far from home and church.

His thought was to establish a settlement that should be a sort of depot of supplies for the fishing fleets, and a temporary home attended with the comforts and safeguards of Christian influence.

The project was a costly failure; but it was like the corn of wheat falling into the ground to die, and bringing forth much fruit.

A gentleman of energy and dignity, John Endicott, pledged his personal service as leader of a new colony.

In September, 1628, he landed with a pioneering party at Naumkeag, and having happily composed some differences that arose with the earlier comers, they named the place _Salem_, which is, by interpretation, "Peace."

Already, with the newcomers and the old, the well-provided settlement numbered more than fifty persons, busy in preparation for further arrivals.

Meanwhile vigorous work was doing in England.

The organization to sustain the colony represented adequate capital and the highest quality of character and influence.

A royal charter, drawn with sagacious care to secure every privilege the Puritan Company desired, was secured from the fatuity of the reigning Stuart, erecting in the wilderness such a free commonwealth as his poor little soul abhorred; and preparation was made for sending out, in the spring of 1629, a noble fleet of six vessels, carrying three hundred men and a hundred women and children, with ample equipment of provisions, tools and arms, and live stock.

The Company had taken care that there should be "plentiful provision of godly ministers."

Three approved clergymen of the Church of England--Higginson, Skelton, and Bright--had been chosen by the Company to attend the expedition, besides whom one Ralph Smith, a Separatist minister, had been permitted to take passage before the Company "understood of his difference in judgment in some things" from the other ministers.

He was permitted to continue his journey, yet not without a caution to the governor that unless he were found "conformable to the government" he was not to be suffered to remain within the limits of its jurisdiction.

An incident of this departure rests on the sole authority of Cotton Mather, and is best told in his own words: "When they came to the Land's End, Mr. Higginson, calling up his children and other passengers unto the stern of the ship to take their last sight of England, said, 'We will not say, as the Separatists were wont to say at their leaving of England, Farewell, Babylon!

farewell, Rome!

but we will say, Farewell, dear England!

farewell, the church of God in England, and all the Christian friends there!

We do not go to New England as Separatists from the Church of England, though we cannot but separate from the corruptions in it; but we go to practice the positive part of church reformation and propagate the gospel in America.'

" The story ought to be true, for the intrinsic likeliness of it; and it is all the likelier for the fact that among the passengers, kindly and even fraternally treated, and yet the object of grave misgivings, was the honest Separatist minister, Ralph Smith.

[91:1] The ideal of the new colony could hardly have been better expressed than in these possibly apocryphal words ascribed to Mr. Higginson.

These were not fugitives seeking asylum from persecution.

Still less were they planning an asylum for others.

They were intent on the planting of a new commonwealth, in which the church of Christ, not according to the imperfect and perverted pattern of the English Establishment, but according to a fairer pattern, that had been showed them in their mounts of vision, should be both free and dominant.

If this purpose of theirs was wrong; if they had no right to deny themselves the comforts and delights of their native land, and at vast cost of treasure to seclude themselves within a defined tract of wilderness, for the accomplishment of an enterprise which they conceived to be of the highest beneficence to mankind--then doubtless many of the measures which they took in pursuance of this purpose must fall under the same condemnation with the purpose itself.

If there are minds so constituted as to perceive no moral difference between banishing a man from his native home, for opinion's sake, and declining, on account of difference of opinion, to admit a man to partnership in a difficult and hazardous enterprise organized on a distinctly exclusive basis, such minds will be constrained to condemn the Puritan colonists from the start and all along.

Minds otherwise constituted will be able to discriminate between the righteous following of a justifiable policy and the lapses of the colonial governments from high and Christian motives and righteous courses.

Whether the policy of rigorous exclusiveness, building up communities of picked material, homogeneous in race, language, and religion, is on the whole less wise for the founders of a new commonwealth than a sweepingly comprehensive policy, gathering in people mutually alien in speech and creed and habits, is a fairly open question for historical students.

Much light might be thrown upon it by the comparative history of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, of New England and Pennsylvania.

It is not a question that is answered at once by the mere statement of it.

We do not need to be told that to the little Separatist settlement at Plymouth, still in the first decade of its feeble existence, the founding, within a day's journey, of this powerful colony, on ecclesiastical principles distinctly antagonistic to their own, was a momentous, even a formidable fact.

Critical, nay, vital questions emerged at once, which the subtlest churchcraft might have despaired of answering.

They were answered, solved, harmonized, by the spirit of Christian love.

That great spiritual teacher, John Robinson, besides his more general exhortations to brotherly kindness and charity, had spoken, in the spirit of prophecy, some promises and assurances which came now to a divine fulfillment.

Pondering "sundry weighty and solid reasons" in favor of removal from Holland, the pilgrims put on record that "their pastor would often say that many of those who both wrote and preached against them would practice as they did if they were in a place where they might have liberty and live conformably."

One of the most affectionate of his disciples, Edward Winslow, wrote down some of the precious and memorable words which the pastor, who was to see their face no more, uttered through his tears as they were about to leave him.

"'There will be no difference,' he said, 'between the unconformable ministers and you, when they come to the practice of the ordinances out of the kingdom.'

And so he advised us to close with the godly party of the kingdom of England, and rather to study union than division, viz.

, how near we might possibly without sin close with them, rather than in the least measure to affect division or separation from them."

The solitude of the little starving hamlet by the sea was favorable to the springing and fructifying of this seed in the good and honest hearts into which it had been cast.

Before the great fleet of colonists, with its three unconformable Church of England clergymen, had reached the port of Salem the good seed had been planted anew in other hearts not less honest and good.

It fell on this wise.

The pioneer party at Salem who came with Endicott, "arriving there in an uncultivated desert, many of them, for want of wholesome diet and convenient lodgings, were seized with the scurvy and other distempers, which shortened many of their days, and prevented many of the rest from performing any great matter of labor that year for advancing the work of the plantation."

Whereupon the governor, hearing that at Plymouth lived a physician "that had some skill that way," wrote thither for help, and at once the beloved physician and deacon of the Plymouth church, Dr. Samuel Fuller, hastened to their relief.

On what themes the discourse revolved between the Puritan governor just from England and the Separatist deacon already for so many years an exile, and whither it tended, is manifested in a letter written soon after by Governor Endicott, of Salem, to Governor Bradford, of Plymouth, under date May 11 (= 21), 1629. The letter marks an epoch in the history of American Christianity: "_To the worshipful and my right worthy friend, William Bradford, Esq.

, Governor of New Plymouth, these:_ "RIGHT WORTHY SIR: It is a thing not usual that servants to one Master and of the same household should be strangers.

I

assure you I desire it not; nay, to speak more plainly, I cannot be so to you.

God's people are marked with one and the same mark, and sealed with one and the same seal, and have, for the main, one and the same heart, guided by one and the same Spirit of truth; and where this is there can be no discord--nay, here must needs be sweet harmony.

The same request with you I make unto the Lord, that we may as Christian brethren be united by a heavenly and unfeigned love, bending all our hearts and forces in furthering a work beyond our strength, with reverence and fear fastening our eyes always on him that only is able to direct and prosper all our ways.

"I acknowledge myself much bound to you for your kind love and care in sending Mr. Fuller among us, and I rejoice much that I am by him satisfied touching your judgments of the outward form of God's worship.

[94:1] It is, as far as I can yet gather, no other than is warranted by the evidence of truth, and the same which I have professed and maintained ever since the Lord in mercy revealed himself to me, being very far different from the common report that hath been spread of you touching that particular.

But God's children must not look for less here below, and it is the great mercy of God that he strengthens them to go through with it.

"I shall not need at this time to be tedious unto you, for, God willing, I purpose to see your face shortly.

In the meantime I humbly take my leave of you, committing you to the Lord's blessed protection, and rest "Your assured loving friend and servant,