The Beginners of a Nation

Austerity in morals. From denouncing constructive idolatry in organ music, litanies, and May-poles, the transition to attack on the more real and substantial evils in ordinary conduct was inevitable. History has many examples of this pervasiveness of scrupulosity. The Puritan conscience had been let loose to tear in pieces the remnants of old superstitions. It was certain to break over into the field of conduct. Having set out to reform the church, it took the world by the way.

As early as 1583 Philip Stubbes, a Puritan lawyer, issued his hot little book, The Anatomie of Abuses. It deals with the immoralities and extravagances of the time. Stubbes repeats the early Puritan objection to the May-pole: it is a "stinckyng idol," he declares, which the people bring from the woods, "followyng it with greate devotion." And when they have set it up they "leape and daunce aboute it, as the heathen people did at the dedication of their idolles." But Stubbes takes a step forward and objects to the all-night May frolics on account of their immorality. He says, "I have heard it credibly reported by men of great gravitie, credite and reputation, that of fourtie, three score, or a hundred maides goyng to the woods over night, there have scarcely the third parte of them returned home againe undefiled." Pickering's ed., p. 172. As men of "great gravitie, credite and reputation" were not likely to know the facts in this case, some of the immorality with which Stubbes charges the young people may have been as fanciful as the heathenism attributed to them. Imputed unrighteousness was a part of the Puritan system. He denounces the wild excesses in dress and the other follies of the time with a lack of a sense of proportion which already foreshadows later Puritanism.

This secondary development of Puritanism by which its energies were turned toward the regulation of conduct, as the disputes of the Reformation period lost their violence, gave to the name Puritan a new and higher sense. It is a phase of its history more important than all its primary contentions over gowns and liturgies and hierarchies, or its later debates about the five points of Calvinism and a sabbatical Sunday. One may easily forget its austerity and extravagance, for by the reform of manners this movement made the English race its debtor. In no succeeding reaction have English morals reverted to the ante-Puritan level. It is only by the religious ferments infused successively by new sects and movements, of preaching friars, Lollards, Puritans, Quakers, Methodists, Salvationists, that the great unleavened mass of men is rendered gradually less sodden.

XII

Puritan decline. The last years of Elizabeth's long reign were years of apparent Puritan decline. The old bugbear of popery was receding into the past, and a new generation had come on the stage that had no memory of the struggles of the reigns of Henry and Edward and Mary. The danger from the Armada had brought English patriotism to the point of fusion. Even the persecuted Catholics rallied to the support of the queen against Philip. The government of Elizabeth rose to the zenith of its popularity on the overthrow of the Armada. It was just at this inopportune moment, when the nation had come to feel that the England of Elizabeth was the greatest England the ages had known, that there came forth from a small coterie of the oppressed ultra-Puritans the Martin Marprelate tracts. Supra, page 115. However effective these may have been at first in making the bishops ridiculous, there followed a swift reaction. The Puritans were dubbed Martinists, and henceforth had to bear the odium of the boisterous vulgarity and libelous exaggeration of the Marprelate lampoons. The queen's government, stronger now than ever in the affection of the people, put in force severe ecclesiastical measures against nonconformists in the church, and sent Brownists, or Separatists, to die by the score in loathsome prisons. Half a dozen of their leaders were dispatched by the shorter road of the gallows. The long reign of the queen had by this time discouraged those who hoped for a change of policy at her death. Hooker's masterful and delightful prose, informed by a spirit of winning moderation, was arrayed on the side of the Anglicans by the publication of parts of his Ecclesiastical Polity in 1594 and 1597. But Puritanism suffered most from the persistence of Archbishop Whitgift and others in efforts to suppress all nonconformity in the church. Rogers's Pref. to the 39 Articles. These champions of Anglicanism, in the swaggering words of one of them, "defended the prelacy, stood for the power of the state, put the new doctors to the foil, profligated the elders, set upon the presbytery, and so battered the new discipline as hitherto they could never nor hereafter shall ever fortify and repair the decay thereof." The presbyteries which Cartwright and his friends had formed within the Church of England were swept out utterly by the archbishop's broom. The Puritan movement which had begun almost simultaneously with Elizabeth's reign seemed to be doomed to languish and die with the old queen who had been its resolute and lifelong antagonist.

XIII

Seeking a positive ground. For the first thirty years or more of its existence Puritanism was mainly a bundle of negations, and no bundle of mere negations is a sufficient reason for maintaining a party. [42 - 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 assertion 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 titles, 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.] No vestments, no ceremonies, no bishops, were effective cries in the hot Reformation period. But the new generation had ceased to abhor these left-overs of Romanism. Bishops, gowns, prayer books, had become Protestant to most of the people by association. To find additional reasons for differing from Anglican opponents was a party necessity. The new debates which sprang up in the last years of the sixteenth century were not deliberately planned by the Puritans, as some of their opponents asserted. They came by a process of evolution. But a period of temporary decline in a movement of this sort hastens its natural unfolding. The leaders are forced to seek the advantage of such new issues as offer when the old ones fail. In the last years of Elizabeth, Puritanism was molting, not dying.

XIV

The Puritan Sabbath. The great reformers of the sixteenth century had sought to strip from the Christianity of their time what they deemed the second-hand garments of Judaism. Along with the theory of a priesthood they declared also against a doctrine known in the church at least from the fifth century, that the fourth commandment enforced on Christians the keeping sacred in some sense of Sundays and other church holy days. Luther maintained that a commandment to keep the Sabbath "literally understood does not apply to Christians, for it is entirely outward, like other ordinances of the Old Testament." He thought a festival day important for rest and for attending religious worship; but with characteristic oppugnancy he says: "If anywhere the day is made holy for the mere day's sake, … then I order you to dance on it, and feast on it, to do anything that shall remove this encroachment on Christian liberty." The Augsburg Confession makes a similar statement of the Protestant position. Calvin considered the fourth commandment binding on Christians only in a sense mystical and highly Calvinistic. It signified that "we should rest from our own works" under the Christian dispensation. He even suggested that some other day of the week might be chosen as a day of rest and worship at Geneva for an exhibition of Christian liberty in this regard. His practice was conformed to his theory. It is incidentally related that when John Knox once visited the Genevan reformer on Sunday, he found him playing at bowls. Knox was not more a sabbatarian than Calvin.

XV

Rise of the strict Sabbath. Writers on this subject have generally agreed in dating the rise of the Puritan Sabbath from the appearance, in 1595, of Dr. Bownd's book on The Sabbath of the Old and of the New Testament. But the doctrine of the strict keeping of Sunday may be traced farther back. In truth, the difference between the English and the Continental Sunday dates from the Reformation. [43 - 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 Coxe on Sabbath Laws and Sabbath Duties, 284, note, and Cook's Historical and General View of Christianity, ii, 301, cited by Coxe. 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 document 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 assert that Christians should work and hold fairs on Sunday, while Saturday was the proper day for rest. He showed no document 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 principal festivals except four Sundays in harvest. In 4 Edward IV a statute was passed forbidding the sale of shoes on Sundays and certain festivals.] The protests of Luther and Calvin go to show that Sunday had in the church before the Reformation, theoretically if not in practice, the sanctity of a church feast. Compare Marsden's Early Puritans (1850) page 242, where Becon's Catechism and Coverdale are quoted. The English Reformation was conservative, like all other English revolutions. English reformers retained the Catholic Sunday, as they did the vestments and national hierarchy of the old church. Thomas Hancock has been styled "the Luther of the southwest of England." He was the great preacher of Poole in the days of Edward VI. That he, like other English reformers, did not agree with Luther in rejecting the obligation to rest on Sunday is shown by the record, for the voice of Poole was the voice of Hancock. Robert's Social Hist. of the Southern Counties, p. 239. About 1550 the juries in the Admiralty Court of Poole were charged to inquire into Sunday fishing; and so advanced was the premature Puritanism of Edward's time that even the leaving of nets in the sea over Sunday was to be investigated. Here was a strictness unknown in Catholic times. [44 - 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: "God 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 Parishioners, 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 God hath sent. And if for any scrupulosity, or grudge of conscience, men should superstitiously abstain from working upon those days, that then they should grievously offend and displease God." 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.]

XVI

The word Sabbath does not occur in these early entries. But in the troubles among the Marian exiles at Frankfort, where so many other traits of Puritanism first came above the horizon, it is significant that one finds Sunday called the Sabbath. Sabbath as applied to Sunday occurs first in literature, perhaps, in 1573, and then it is considered necessary to explain it. Bullein's Dialogue against the Fever Pestilence, a work of considerable popularity, first appeared as early as 1564. In the edition of 1573 there was inserted a new passage not found in the earlier issue. Supra, page 16. Mendax is relating incredible tales of travel in lands unknown, after the manner of David Ingram and other returned adventurers. Up to this point all is pure lying merely for the fun of the thing, or perhaps to ridicule the exaggerations of travelers. But the interpolated passage is not of a piece with the old garment into which it is patched. It is less grotesque and humorous, and it smacks of incipient Puritanism in several flavors. It treats first of all of the "Kepyng of the Saboth Daie," "whiche is the seventh daie, that is sondaie," in the imaginary city of "Nodnol," an anagram of London. The gates are shut, and nobody is allowed to "goe, neither ride forth of the Citie duryng that daie, except it be after the euenyng praier; then to walke honestlie into the sweete fieldes, and at every gate in the time of service there are warders." "What so ever hee be he muste kepe hollie the Sabboth daie, and come to the churche both man, woman, young and olde." Early English Text Society Reprint, 106, 107, 108. "There were no people walking abroad in the service tyme; no, not a Dogge or catte in the streate, neither any Taverne doore open that daie, nor wine bibbyng in them, but onely almose, fasting and praier." This is perhaps the oldest extant statement of an early Puritan ideal of Sabbath-keeping.

XVII

Cox's Literature of the Sabbath Question, sub anno. Scruples regarding recreations on Sunday come distinctly into view in the title of a sermon preached at Paul's Cross in 1576. In 1580 the magistrates of London secured from the queen a prohibition of the performance of plays within the limits of the city on Sundays. Robert's Southern Counties, pp. 238, 239. In other municipalities – Brighton, Yarmouth, and Lyme – ordinances were made about this time against such offenses as the prosecution on Sunday of the herring fisheries, cloth working, and other labors, and even against the Sunday practice of archery, formerly thought a patriotic exercise. There are other evidences of a movement, especially in the south of England, in favor of a stricter Sabbath in these and the following years. 1583. Stubbes does not fail to denounce "heathnicall exercises upon the Sabbaoth day, which the Lorde would have consecrated to holy uses." The Puritan mode of Sabbath-keeping already existed among the chosen few. "The Sabboth daie of some is well observed," says Stubbes, "namely, in hearing the blessed worde of God read, preached, and interpreted; in private and publique praiers; in reading of godly psalmes; in celebrating the sacraments; and in collecting for the poore and indigent, which are the true uses and endes whereto the Sabbaoth was ordained." He records the opposite belief of his opponents that Sunday was ordained "onely to use what kinde of exercises they thinke good themselves." In practice this was the rule of the English people at large. 1588. These opposite opinions come into view when Martin Marprelate a few years later berates the Bishop of London for playing at bowls on Sunday.

XVIII

Bownd on the Sabbath. 1595. Dr. Bownd's book on The Sabbath of the Old and the New Testament, which, if we may believe its opponents, was nearly ten years "in the hammering," was the outcome of a sentiment already rising among the Puritans, and not wholly confined to that party. 1592. It was preceded by a little work of Richard Greenham which seems to have been circulated for some years in manuscript after a fashion of that time, and to have had at first more influence on practice than Bownd's formal treatise. Greenham was Bownd's stepfather, and his work was the parent of Bownd's, which is distinctly more extreme. But Dr. Bownd's book is none the less memorable as a point of departure, because in it the opinions on this subject which have since prevailed so generally in all English-speaking lands "were for the first time broadly and prominently asserted in Christendom"; at least, they were here first systematically propounded and defended. Bownd held that the fourth commandment is partly moral, in the phrase of the casuists. He shifted the obligation to the first day of the week by arguments now familiar, and he laid down rules for the observance of the day. Honest recreations and lawful delights he flatly forbids on Sundays, but he rather obsequiously makes some allowance for the "feasts of noblemen and great personages on this day." People of rank do not wholly escape him, however, for he points a moral with the story of a nobleman whose child was born with a face like that of a dog, because the father had hunted on the Lord's Day. [45 - 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 Cox's Literature of the Sabbath Question, to the same author's Sabbath Laws and Sabbath Duties, and to Hessey's Bampton Lectures for 1860.] He allows the ringing of only one bell to call the people to church on Sunday. Chimes were quite too pleasing to accord with a severe Sabbath.

XIX

Spread of Bownd's opinions. Such rigor fell in with the passion of that age for formal observance and with the exigent temper of the Puritans by whom Bownd's views were rapidly and universally accepted. Cartwright's Admonition to Parliament, 1572. Robert's Southern Counties, pp. 37, 38. 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 coarse 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 whoredoms 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

Prevalence of the strict Sabbath. In such a time Dr. Bownd's book easily captivated the religious public, and there arose a passion 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." Fuller's Ch. Hist. of Britain, book ix, sect. viii, 20, 21. 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.

Opposition to Bownd. 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, asserting that it put "an unequal lustre on the Sunday on set purpose to eclipse all other holy days to the derogation of the authority of the church." Fuller's Church History, book ix, sect. viii, 21. There were those who asserted 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. [46 - 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 assaulting 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 fashion which we little thought of (such was their cunning), set upon us afresh again by dispersing in printed books (which for ten years' space 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."] The manifest advantage to Puritanism from the shifting of the ground of debate, aroused Archbishop Whitgift. In 1599 he made the tactical mistake of ordering the book called in, and in 160 °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 manuscript. As soon as Whitgift's "head was laid," a new and enlarged edition was published.

[47 - 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 cumming, 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 cumming in tyme of sermone, ather on the Sabboth day or vlk dayes, under the pane of ane vnlaw of fourtie s., to be vpliftit of the contravenar als oft as they be convict."] 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 password of the faithful. From England the theory spread northward to Scotland, where it found a congenial soil. 1611. 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. [48 - New England Puritanism took a position more ultra even than that of Bownd. Thomas Shepard, of Cambridge, Mass., developed from some Sermons on the Subject a work with the title, Theses Sabbaticæ, or the Doctrine of the Sabbath. After a considerable circulation in manuscript 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.]

XXI

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 sanctity.

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 mass of the English people, and especially of the middle class. 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.

CHAPTER THE SECOND.

SEPARATISM AND THE SCROOBY CHURCH

I

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 hardship 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

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.

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. Scrambler, Bishop of Peterborough, to Burghley, 13th April, 1573, in Wright's Elizabeth and her Times. 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 assemblage, "where it is their joye," writes the Bishop of Peterborough, "to have manie owte of divers parishes, principallie 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." Rogers's Preface to Articles. Parker Soc. ed., p. 10. 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.

The Semi-Separatists. 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. Bancroft in Barlowe's Svmme and Svbstance. 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. Heresiography, p. 82. "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

Causes of Separatism. 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 superstitions. 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. Thomas Scott in Pagitt, 80. 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 God. Plimoth Plantation, p. 8. 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 constituted 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

Robert Browne and Brownism. The beginning of Separatism has been commonly attributed to Robert Browne, a contentious and able advocate of Separatist doctrines. 1581 to 1586. 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. [49 - The eccentricities, moral and mental, of Browne were a constant resource of those who sought to involve all Separatists in his disgrace. Odium has always been a more effective weapon than argument in a theological controversy. Browne's enemies alleged that even while on the gridiron of persecution his conduct had not been free from moral obliquity. I have not been able to see Bernard's charges on this score, but John Robinson, in his Justification, etc. (1610), parries the thrust in these words: "Now as touching Browne, it is true as Mr. B[ernard] affirmeth, that as he forsook the Lord so the Lord forsook him in his way; … as for the wicked things (which Mr. B. affirmeth) he did in the way it may well be as he sayeth, … as the more like he was to returne to his proper centre the Church of England, where he should be sure to find companie ynough in any wickednesse." Edition of 1639, p. 50. One of the most learned accounts of Browne is to be found in H. M. Dexter's Congregationalism, the lecture on Robert Browne. It is always easy to admire Dr. Dexter's erudition, but not so easy to assent to his conclusions. See also Pagitt's Heresiography, p. 56 and passim; Fuller's Church History, ix, vi, 1-7; and Hanbury's Memorials, p. 18 and following.]

Rise of Separatism. 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. Barclay's Inner Life, pp. 13, 53. In 1571 there was an independent church of which we know little but the pastor's name. Dialogue of 1593 quo. by Waddington. 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. Bradford's Dialogue. Significant movements are usually cradled in rustic mangers, to which no learned magi think it worth their while to journey. [50 - John Robinson, in Justification of Separation from the Church of England, p. 50, edition of 1639, says: "It is true that Boulton was (though not the first in that way) an elder of a Separatist church in the beginning of Queen Elizabeth's dayes, and falling from his holy profession recanted the same at Paul's Crosse and afterwards hung himself as Judas did." Compare Cotton's The Way of the Congregationall Churches Cleared, p. 4, and various intimations in Hanbury's Memorials, which imply the existence of Independent congregations in London and elsewhere in the early years of Elizabeth's reign. But Hanbury's handling of the valuable material he collected with commendable assiduity is sometimes so clumsy that the reader is obliged to grope for facts bearing upon most important questions. One gets from Hanbury's notes and some older publications a vague notion that the Flemish Protestants, recently settled in England in great numbers, exerted an influence in favor of Independency. Robert Browne began his secession in Norwich, a place where the people from the Low Countries were nearly half the population, and Browne was even said to have labored among the Dutch first. Fuller, ix, sec. vi, 2.] The beginning of Separatism was probably in the little conventicles held by devout Puritans who, in the words of one of their own writers, "met together to sing a psalm or to talk of God's word." Josias Nichols, The Plea for the Innocent, 1602, in Hanbury, i. 3. But Browne, so far as we know, was one of the earliest to organize independent churches, with officers named and classified after those of the petty hierarchies of the early Christian congregations, or rather according to such deductions regarding them as he was able to make from the Epistles of Paul. Separatism, though it owed something to Browne's activity, was not founded by him. Browne's labors began about 1581, and his fiery career as a Brownist had lasted only four or five years when he began to vacillate. A great part of this time was spent in exile, much of it in prison, and very little of it about London. Stephen Breadwell, 1588, in Dexter, 255. But before 1587 London seems to have been the center of the Separatists, from which they had "sparsed their companies into severall partes of the Realme."

It seems that their rise in London came from the devout meetings of those who had begun to repudiate the Church of England as antichristian. Without any officers or organization apparently, these people, when we first get sight of them, were wont to assemble in the summer time in the fields about London, sitting down upon a bank while the Bible was expounded now by one and now by another of the company. In the winter it was their custom to spend the whole Sunday together from five o'clock in the morning, eating dinner in company and paying for it by a collection. They responded in prayer only by spontaneous groans or sobs, much after the fashion of the early Quakers, Methodists, and other enthusiasts of a later time. H. M. Dexter's Congregationalism, 255-257. If one of their members returned to a parish assembly, they pronounced him an apostate and solemnly delivered him over to Satan until he should repent.

V

Barrowism. When they began to organize themselves formally into a church the London Separatists in their turn resorted to the apostolic epistles. These had already been treated like the magician's bottle that is made to yield white wine or red at pleasure. From them whatsoever form of discipline was desired by Anglican, Presbyterian, or Brownist had been derived, and now a still different discipline was deduced, a mean betwixt Presbyterian and Brownist theories. This is known now as Barrowism. It was the form of church government brought by the Pilgrims to Plymouth, and substantially that which prevailed in New England throughout the seventeenth century.

The London Separatists suffered miserably from persecution. Many of them languished and died in prison. Barrow and Greenwood, their leaders, were hanged at Tyburn. A part of them migrated to Amsterdam, while the rest maintained a furtive church in London. Separatists in Amsterdam, 1593. Those in Amsterdam, having no lingering abuses of the English church to reform, set every man's conscience to watch his neighbor's conduct. Having seceded from the communion of the Church of England on account of scandals, they were scandalized with the least variation from their rigorous standard by any of their own church members, and they were soon torn asunder with dissensions as the result of this vicariousness of conscience. The innocent vanity of the pastor's wife who could never forego a "toppish" hat and high-heeled shoes was the principal stumbling-block.

Though Separatism had been almost extirpated from England by the close of Elizabeth's reign, there remained even yet one vigorous society in the north which was destined to exert a remarkable influence on the course of history.

VI

The cradle of the Pilgrims. On the southern margin of Yorkshire the traveler alights to-day at the station of Bawtry. It is an uninteresting village, with a rustic inn. More than a mile to the southward, in Nottinghamshire, lies the pleasant but commonplace village of Scrooby. About a mile to the north of Bawtry is Austerfield, a hamlet of brick cottages crowded together along the road. It has a picturesque little church built in the middle ages, the walls of which are three feet thick. This church will seat something more than a hundred people nowadays by the aid of a rather modern extension. In the seventeenth century it was smaller, and there was no ceiling. Then one could see the rafters of the roof while shuddering with cold in the grottolike interior. The country around is level and unpicturesque.

But one is here in the cradle of great religious movements. In Scrooby and in Austerfield were born the Pilgrims who made the first successful settlement in New England. A little to the east lies Gainsborough, from which migrated to Holland in 1606 the saintly Separatist John Smyth, who gave form to a great Baptist movement of modern times. A few miles to the northeast of Bawtry, in Lincolnshire, lies Epworth, the nest from which the Wesleys issued more than a hundred years later to spread Methodism over the world. Hunter's Founders of New Plymouth, 24, 25. Religious zeal seems to have characterized the people of this region even before the Reformation, for the country round about Scrooby was occupied at that time by an unusual number of religious houses.

The little Austerfield church and the old church at Scrooby are the only picturesque or romantic elements of the environment, and on these churches the Pilgrims turned their backs as though they had been temples of Baal. In the single street of Austerfield the traveler meets the cottagers of to-day, and essays to talk with them. They are heavy and somewhat stolid, like most other rustic people in the north country, and an accent to which their ears are not accustomed amuses and puzzles them. No tradition of the Pilgrims lingers among them. They have never heard that anybody ever went out of Austerfield to do anything historical. They listen with a bovine surprise if you speak to them of this exodus, and they refer you to the old clerk of the parish, who will know about it. The venerable clerk is a striking figure, not unlike that parish clerk painted by Gainsborough. This oracle of the hamlet knows that Americans come here as on a pilgrimage, and he tells you that one of them, a descendant of Governor Bradford, offered a considerable sum for the disused stone font at which Bradford the Pilgrim was baptized. But the traveler turns away at length from the rustic folk of Austerfield and the beer-drinkers over their mugs in the inn at Bawtry, and the villagers at Scrooby, benumbed by that sense of utter common-placeness which is left on the mind of a stranger by such an agricultural community. The Pilgrims, then, concerning whom poems have been written, and in whose honor orations without number have been made, were just common country folk like these, trudging through wheat fields and along the muddy clay highways of the days of Elizabeth and James. They were just such men as these and they were not. They were such as these would be if they were vivified by enthusiasm. We may laugh at superfluous scruples in rustic minds, but none will smile at brave and stubborn loyalty to an idea when it produces such steadfast courage as that of the Pilgrims.

And yet, when the traveler has resumed his journey, and recalls Scrooby and Bawtry and Austerfield, the stolid men and gossiping women, the narrow pursuits of the plowman and the reaper, and remembers the flat, naked, and depressing landscape, he is beset by the old skepticism about the coming of anything good out of Nazareth. Magnalia, Book II, chap. i, p. 2. Nor is he helped by remembering that at the time of Bradford's christening at the old stone font the inhabitants of Austerfield are said to have been "a most ignorant and licentious people," and that earlier in that same century John Leland speaks of "the meane townlet of Scrooby."