A History of American Christianity
by Leonard Woolsey Bacon · English · Gutenberg #20160 · 845,227 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: A History of American Christianity
Author: Leonard Woolsey Bacon
Release date: December 22, 2006 [eBook #20160]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20160
Credits: E-text prepared by Dave Morgan, Daniel J. Mount, Lisa Reigel, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net/c/) from digital material generously made available by the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (http://www.ccel.org/)
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E-text prepared by Dave Morgan, Daniel J. Mount, Lisa Reigel, and the
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(http://www.pgdp.net/c/) from digital material generously made available
by the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (http://www.ccel.org/)
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Transcriber's notes:
Greek words in this text have been transliterated and placed
between +marks+.
Words in italics are surrounded with underscores.
A list of corrections made is at the end of the text.
The American Church History Series
Consisting of a Series of Denominational Histories Published Under the
Auspices of the American Society of Church History
General Editors
REV. PHILIP SCHAFF, D. D., LL. D.
RT. REV. H. C. POTTER, D. D., LL. D.
REV GEO. P. FISHER, D. D., LL. D.
BISHOP JOHN F. HURST, D. D., LL. D.
REV. E. J. WOLF, D. D.
HENRY C. VEDDER, M. A.
REV. SAMUEL M. JACKSON, D. D., LL. D.
Volume XIII
American Church History
A HISTORY OF AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY
by
LEONARD WOOLSEY BACON
New York
The Christian Literature Co.
MDCCCXCVII
Copyright, 1897, by
The Christian Literature Co.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
CHAP. I.--PROVIDENTIAL PREPARATION FOR THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA 1-5
Purpose of the long concealment of America, 1. A medieval
church in America, 2. Revival of the Catholic Church, 3,
especially in Spain, 4, 5.
CHAP. II.--SPANISH CHRISTIANITY IN AMERICA 6-15
Vastness and swiftness of the Spanish conquests, 6. Conversion
by the sword, 7. Rapid success and sudden downfall of missions
in Florida, 9. The like story in New Mexico, 12, and in
California, 14.
CHAP. III.--FRENCH CHRISTIANITY IN AMERICA 16-29
Magnificence of the French scheme of western empire, 16.
Superior dignity of the French missions, 19. Swift expansion
of them, 20. Collision with the English colonies, and triumph
of France, 21. Sudden and complete failure of the French
church, 23. Causes of failure: (1) Dependence on royal
patronage, 24. (2) Implication in Indian feuds, 25. (3)
Instability of Jesuit efforts, 26. (4) Scantiness of French
population, 27. Political aspect of French missions, 28.
Recent French Catholic immigration, 29.
CHAP. IV.--ANTECEDENTS OF PERMANENT CHRISTIAN COLONIZATION 30-37
Controversies and parties in Europe, 31, and especially in
England, 32. Disintegration of Christendom, 34. New experiment
of church life, 35. Persecutions promote emigration, 36, 37.
CHAP. V.--PURITAN BEGINNINGS OF THE CHURCH IN VIRGINIA 38-53
The Rev. Robert Hunt, chaplain to the Virginia colony, 38.
Base quality of the emigration, 39. Assiduity in religious
duties, 41. Rev. Richard Buck, chaplain, 42. Strict Puritan
régime of Sir T. Dale and Rev. A. Whitaker, 43. Brightening
prospects extinguished by massacre, 48. Dissolution of the
Puritan "Virginia Company" by the king, 48. Puritan ministers
silenced by the royal governor, Berkeley, 49. The governor's
chaplain, Harrison, is converted to Puritan principles, 49.
Visit of the Rev. Patrick Copland, 50. Degradation of church
and clergy, 51. Commissary Blair attempts reform, 52.
Huguenots and Scotch-Irish, 53.
CHAP. VI.--MARYLAND AND THE CAROLINAS 54-67
George Calvert, Lord Baltimore, 54; secures grant of Maryland,
55. The second Lord Baltimore organizes a colony on the basis
of religious liberty, 56. Success of the two Jesuit priests,
57. Baltimore restrains the Jesuits, 58, and encourages the
Puritans, 59. Attempt at an Anglican establishment, 61.
Commissary Bray, 61. Tardy settlement of the Carolinas, 62. A
mixed population, 63. Success of Quakerism, 65. American
origin of English missionary societies, 66.
CHAP. VII.--DUTCH CALVINISTS AND SWEDISH LUTHERANS 68-81
Faint traces of religious life in the Dutch settlements, 69.
Pastors Michaelius, Bogardus, and Megapolensis, 70. Religious
liberty, diversity, and bigotry, 72. The Quakers persecuted,
73. Low vitality of the Dutch colony, 75. Swedish colony on
the Delaware, 76; subjugated by the Dutch, 77. The Dutch
evicted by England, 78. The Dutch church languishes, 79.
Attempts to establish Anglicanism, 79. The S. P. G., 80.
CHAP. VIII.--THE CHURCH IN NEW ENGLAND 82-108
Puritan and Separatist, 82. The Separatists of Scrooby, 83.
Mutual animosity of the two parties, 84. Spirit of John
Robinson, 85. The "social compact" of the Pilgrims, in state,
87; and in church, 88. Feebleness of the Plymouth colony, 89.
The Puritan colony at Salem, 90. Purpose of the colonists, 91.
Their right to pick their own company, 92. Fellowship with the
Pilgrims, 93. Constituting the Salem church, and ordination of
its ministers, 95. Expulsion of schismatics, 97. Coming of the
great Massachusetts colony bringing the charter, 98. The New
England church polity, 99. Nationalism of the Puritans, 100.
Dealings with Roger Williams, Mrs. Hutchinson, and the
Quakers, 101. Diversities among the colonies, 102. Divergences
of opinion and practice in the churches, 103. Variety of sects
in Rhode Island, 106, with mutual good will, 107. Lapse of the
Puritan church-state, 108.
CHAP. IX.--THE MIDDLE COLONIES AND GEORGIA 109-126
Dutch, Puritan, Scotch, and Quaker settlers in New Jersey,
109. Quaker corporation and government, 110. Quaker reaction
from Puritanism, 113. Extravagance and discipline, 114.
Quakerism in continental Europe, 115. Penn's "Holy
Experiment," 116. Philadelphia founded, 117. German sects,
118. Keith's schism, and the mission of the "S. P. G.," 119.
Lutheran and Reformed Germans, 120. Scotch-Irish, 121.
Georgia, 122. Oglethorpe's charitable scheme, 123. The
Salzburgers, the Moravians, and the Wesleys, 124. George
Whitefield, 126.
CHAP. X.--THE EVE OF THE GREAT AWAKENING 127-154
Fall of the New England theocracy, 128. Dissent from the
"Standing Order": Baptist, 130; Episcopalian, 131. In New
York: the Dutch church, 134; the English, 135; the
Presbyterian, 136. New Englanders moving west, 137. Quakers,
Huguenots, and Palatines, 139. New Jersey: Frelinghuysen and
the Tennents, 141. Pennsylvania: successes and failures of
Quakerism, 143. The southern colonies: their established
churches, 148; the mission of the Quakers, 149. The gospel
among the Indians, 150. The church and slavery, 151.
CHAP. XI.--THE GREAT AWAKENING 155-180
Jonathan Edwards at Northampton, 156. An Awakening, 157.
Edwards's "Narrative" in America and England, 159. Revivals in
New Jersey and Pennsylvania, 160. Apostolate of Whitefield,
163. Schism of the Presbyterian Church, 166. Whitefield in New
England, 168. Faults and excesses of the evangelists, 169.
Good fruits of the revival, 173. Diffusion of Baptist
principles, 173. National religious unity, 175. Attitude of
the Episcopal Church, 177. Zeal for missions, 179.
CHAP. XII.--CLOSE OF THE COLONIAL ERA 181-207
Growth of the New England theology, 181. Watts's Psalms, 182.
Warlike agitations, 184. The Scotch-Irish immigration, 186.
The German immigration, 187. Spiritual destitution, 188.
Zinzendorf, 189. Attempt at union among the Germans, 190.
Alarm of the sects, 191. Mühlenberg and the Lutherans, 191.
Zinzendorf and the Moravians, 192. Schlatter and the Reformed,
195. Schism made permanent, 197. Wesleyan Methodism, 198.
Francis Asbury, 200. Methodism gravitates southward and grows
apace, 201. Opposition of the church to slavery, 203; and to
intemperance, 205. Project to introduce bishops from England,
resisted in the interest of liberty, 206.
CHAP. XIII.--RECONSTRUCTION 208-229
Distraction and depression after the War of Independence, 208.
Forlorn condition of the Episcopalians, 210. Their republican
constitution, 211. Episcopal consecration secured in Scotland
and in England, 212. Feebleness of American Catholicism, 214.
Bishop Carroll, 215. "Trusteeism," 216. Methodism becomes a
church, 217. Westward movement of Christianity, 219. Severance
of church from state, 221. Doctrinal divisions; Calvinist and
Arminian, 222. Unitarianism, 224. Universalism, 225. Some
minor sects, 228.
CHAP. XIV.--THE SECOND AWAKENING 230-245
Ebb-tide of spiritual life, 230. Depravity and revival at the
West, 232. The first camp-meetings, 233. Good fruits, 237.
Nervous epidemics, 239. The Cumberland Presbyterians, 241. The
antisectarian sect of The Disciples, 242. Revival at the East,
242. President Dwight, 243.
CHAP. XV.--ORGANIZED BENEFICENCE 246-260
Missionary spirit of the revival, 246. Religious earnestness
in the colleges, 247. Mills and his friends at Williamstown,
248; and at Andover, 249. The Unitarian schism in
Massachusetts, 249. New era of theological seminaries, 251.
Founding of the A. B. C. F. M., 252; of the Baptist Missionary
Convention, 253. Other missionary boards, 255. The American
Bible Society, 256. Mills, and his work for the West and for
Africa, 256. Other societies, 258. Glowing hopes of the
church, 259.
CHAP. XVI.--CONFLICTS WITH PUBLIC WRONGS 261-291
Working of the voluntary system of church support, 261.
Dueling, 263. Crime of the State of Georgia against the
Cherokee nation, implicating the federal government, 264.
Jeremiah Evarts and Theodore Frelinghuysen, 267. Unanimity of
the church, North and South, against slavery, 268. The
Missouri Compromise, 270. Antislavery activity of the church,
at the East, 271; at the West, 273; at the South, 274.
Difficulty of antislavery church discipline, 275. The southern
apostasy, 277. Causes of the sudden revolution of sentiment,
279. Defections at the North, and rise of a pro-slavery party,
282. The Kansas-Nebraska Bill; solemn and unanimous protest of
the clergy of New England and New York, 284. Primeval
temperance legislation, 285. Prevalence of drunkenness, 286.
Temperance reformation a religious movement, 286. Development
of "the saloon," 288. The Washingtonian movement and its
drawbacks, 289. The Prohibition period, 290.
CHAP. XVII.--A DECADE OF CONTROVERSIES AND SCHISMS 292-314
Dissensions in the Presbyterian Church, 292. Growing strength
of the New England element, 293. Impeachments of heresy, 294.
Benevolent societies, 295. Sudden excommunication of nearly
one half of the church by the other half, 296. Heresy and
schism among Unitarians: Emerson, 298; and Parker, 300.
Disruption, on the slavery question, of the Methodists, 301;
and of the Baptists, 303. Resuscitation of the Episcopal
Church, 304. Bishop Hobart and a High-church party, 306. Rapid
growth of this church, 308. Controversies in the Roman
Catholic Church, 310. Contention against Protestant
fanaticism, 312.
CHAP. XVIII.--THE GREAT IMMIGRATION 315-339
Expansion of territory and increase of population in the early
part of the nineteenth century, 315. Great volume of
immigration from 1840 on, 316. How drawn and how driven, 316.
At first principally Irish, then German, then Scandinavian,
318. The Catholic clergy overtasked, 320. Losses of the
Catholic Church, 321. Liberalized tone of American
Catholicism, 323. Planting the church in the West, 327.
Sectarian competitions, 328. Protestant sects and Catholic
orders, 329. Mormonism, 335. Millerism, 336. Spiritualism,
337.
CHAP. XIX.--THE CIVIL WAR 340-350
Material prosperity, 340. The Kansas Crusade, 341. The revival
of 1857, 342. Deepening of the slavery conflict, 345. Threats
of war, 347. Religious sincerity of both sides, 348. The
church in war-time, 349.
CHAP. XX.--AFTER THE CIVIL WAR 351-373
Reconstructions, 351. The Catholic Church, 352. The Episcopal
Church, 352. Persistent divisions among Methodists, Baptists,
and Presbyterians, 353. Healing of Presbyterian schisms, 355.
Missions at the South, 355. Vast expansion of church
activities, 357. Great religious and educational endowments,
359. The enlisting of personal service: The Sunday-school,
362. Chautauqua, 363. Y. M. C. A., 364. Y. W. C. A., 366. W.
C. T. U., 367. Women's missionary boards, 367. Nursing orders
and schools, 368. Y. P. S. C. E., and like associations, 368.
"The Institutional Church," 369. The Salvation Army, 370. Loss
of "the American Sabbath," 371.
CHAP. XXI.--THE CHURCH IN THEOLOGY AND LITERATURE 374-397
Unfolding of the Edwardean theology, 374. Horace Bushnell,
375. The Mercersburg theology, 377. "Bodies of divinity," 378.
Biblical science, 378. Princeton's new dogma, 380. Church
history, 381. The American pulpit, 382. "Applied
Christianity," 385. Liturgics, 386. Hymns, 387. Other
liturgical studies, 388. Church music, 391. The Moravian
liturgies, 394. Meager productiveness of the Catholic Church,
394. The Americanizing of the Roman Church, 396.
CHAP. XXII.--TENDENCIES TOWARD A MANIFESTATION OF UNITY 398-420
Growth of the nation and national union, 398. Parallel growth
of the church, 399; and ecclesiastical division, 400. No
predominant sect, 401. Schism acceptable to politicians, 402;
and to some Christians, 403. Compensations of schism, 404.
_Nisus_ toward manifest union, 405. Early efforts at
fellowship among sects, 406. High-church protests against
union, 407. The Evangelical Alliance, 408. Fellowship in
non-sectarian associations, 409. Cooperation of leading sects
in Maine, 410. Various unpromising projects of union: I. Union
on sectarian basis, 411. II. Ecumenical sects, 412. III.
Consolidation of sects, 413. The hope of manifested unity,
416. Conclusion, 419.
A HISTORY OF AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY.
CHAPTER I.
PROVIDENTIAL PREPARATIONS FOR THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA--SPIRITUAL
REVIVAL THROUGHOUT CHRISTENDOM, AND ESPECIALLY IN THE CHURCH OF SPAIN.
The heroic discovery of America, at the close of the fifteenth century
after Christ, has compelled the generous and just admiration of the
world; but the grandeur of human enterprise and achievement in the
discovery of the western hemisphere has a less claim on our admiration
than that divine wisdom and controlling providence which, for reasons
now manifested, kept the secret hidden through so many millenniums, in
spite of continual chances of disclosure, until the fullness of time.
How near, to "speak as a fool," the plans of God came to being defeated
by human enterprise is illustrated by unquestioned facts. The fact of
medieval exploration, colonization, and even evangelization in North
America seems now to have emerged from the region of fanciful conjecture
into that of history. That for four centuries, ending with the
fifteenth, the church of Iceland maintained its bishops and other
missionaries and built its churches and monasteries on the frozen coast
of Greenland is abundantly proved by documents and monuments. Dim but
seemingly unmistakable traces are now discovered of enterprises, not
only of exploration and trade, but also of evangelization, reaching
along the mainland southward to the shores of New England. There are
vague indications that these beginnings of Christian civilization were
extinguished, as in so many later instances, by savage massacre. With
impressive coincidence, the latest vestige of this primeval American
Christianity fades out in the very year of the discovery of America by
Columbus.[2:1]
By a prodigy of divine providence, the secret of the ages had been kept
from premature disclosure during the centuries in which, without knowing
it, the Old World was actually in communication with the New. That was
high strategy in the warfare for the advancement of the kingdom of God
in the earth. What possibilities, even yet only beginning to be
accomplished, were thus saved to both hemispheres! If the discovery of
America had been achieved four centuries or even a single century
earlier, the Christianity to be transplanted to the western world would
have been that of the church of Europe at its lowest stage of decadence.
The period closing with the fifteenth century was that of the dense
darkness that goes before the dawn. It was a period in which the
lingering life of the church was chiefly manifested in feverish
complaints of the widespread corruption and outcries for "reformation of
the church in head and members." The degeneracy of the clergy was
nowhere more manifest than in the monastic orders, that had been
originally established for the express purpose of reviving and purifying
the church. That ancient word was fulfilled, "Like people, like priest."
But it was especially in the person of the foremost official
representative of the religion of Jesus Christ that that religion was
most dishonored. The fifteenth century was the era of the infamous
popes. By another coincidence which arrests the attention of the reader
of history, that same year of the discovery by Columbus witnessed the
accession of the most infamous of the series, the Borgia, Alexander VI.,
to his short and shameful pontificate.
Let it not be thought, as some of us might be prone to think, that the
timeliness of the discovery of the western hemisphere, in its relation
to church history, is summed up in this, that it coincided with the
Protestant Reformation, so that the New World might be planted with a
Protestant Christianity. For a hundred years the colonization and
evangelization of America were, in the narrowest sense of that large
word, Catholic, not Protestant. But the Catholicism brought hither was
that of the sixteenth century, not of the fifteenth. It is a most
one-sided reading of the history of that illustrious age which fails to
recognize that the great Reformation was a reformation _of_ the church
as well as a reformation _from_ the church. It was in Spain itself, in
which the corruption of the church had been foulest, but from which all
symptoms of "heretical pravity" were purged away with the fiercest zeal
as fast as they appeared,--in Spain under the reign of Ferdinand and
Isabella the Catholic,--that the demand for a Catholic reformation made
itself earliest and most effectually felt. The highest ecclesiastical
dignitary of the realm, Ximenes, confessor to the queen, Archbishop of
Toledo, and cardinal, was himself the leader of reform. No changes in
the rest of Christendom were destined for many years to have so great
an influence on the course of evangelization in North America as those
which affected the church of Spain; and of these by far the most
important in their bearing on the early course of Christianity in
America were, first, the purifying and quickening of the miserably
decayed and corrupted mendicant orders,--ever the most effective arm in
the missionary service of the Latin Church,--and, a little later, the
founding of the Society of Jesus, with its immense potency for good and
for evil. At the same time the court of Rome, sobered in some measure,
by the perilous crisis that confronted it, from its long orgy of simony,
nepotism, and sensuality, began to find time and thought for spiritual
duties. The establishment of the "congregations" or administrative
boards, and especially of the _Congregatio de Propaganda Fide_, or board
of missions, dates chiefly from the sixteenth century. The revived
interest in theological study incident to the general spiritual
quickening gave the church, as the result of the labors of the Council
of Trent, a well-defined body of doctrine, which nevertheless was not so
narrowly defined as to preclude differences and debates among the
diverse sects of the clergy, by whose competitions and antagonisms the
progress of missions both in Christian and in heathen lands was destined
to be so seriously affected.
An incident of the Catholic Reformation of the sixteenth
century--inevitable incident, doubtless, in that age, but none the less
deplorable--was the engendering or intensifying of that cruel and
ferocious form of fanaticism which is defined as the combination of
religious emotion with the malignant passions. The tendency to
fanaticism is one of the perils attendant on the deep stirring of
religious feeling at any time; it was especially attendant on the
religious agitations of that period; but most of all it was in Spain,
where, of all the Catholic nations, corruption had gone deepest and
spiritual revival was most earnest and sincere, that the manifestations
of fanaticism were most shocking. Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic
were distinguished alike by their piety and their part in the promotion
of civilization, and by the horrors of bloody cruelty perpetrated by
their authority and that of the church, at the instigation of the
sincere and devout reformer Ximenes. In the memorable year 1492 was
inaugurated the fiercest work of the Spanish Inquisition, concerning
which, speaking of her own part in it, the pious Isabella was able
afterward to say, "For the love of Christ and of his virgin mother I
have caused great misery, and have depopulated towns and districts,
provinces and kingdoms."
The earlier pages of American church history will not be intelligently
read unless it is well understood that the Christianity first to be
transplanted to the soil of the New World was the Christianity of
Spain--the Spain of Isabella and Ximenes, of Loyola and Francis Xavier
and St. Theresa, the Spain also of Torquemada and St. Peter Arbues and
the zealous and orthodox Duke of Alva.
FOOTNOTES:
[2:1] See the account of the Greenland church and its missions in
Professor O'Gorman's "History of the Roman Catholic Church in the United
States" (vol. ix. of the American Church History Series), pp. 3-12.
CHAPTER II.
SPANISH CONQUEST--THE PROPAGATION, DECAY, AND DOWNFALL OF SPANISH
CHRISTIANITY.
It is a striking fact that the earliest monuments of colonial and
ecclesiastical antiquity within the present domain of the United States,
after the early Spanish remains in Florida, are to be found in those
remotely interior and inaccessible highlands of New Mexico, which have
only now begun to be reached in the westward progress of migration.
Before the beginnings of permanent English colonization at Plymouth and
at Jamestown, before the French beginnings on the St. Lawrence, before
the close of the sixteenth century, there had been laid by Spanish
soldiers, adventurers, and missionaries, in those far recesses of the
continent, the foundations of Christian towns and churches, the stately
walls and towers of which still invite the admiration of the traveler.
The fact is not more impressive than it is instructive. It illustrates
the prodigious impetuosity of that tide of conquest which within so few
years from the discovery of the American continents not only swept over
the regions of South and Central America and the great plateau of
Mexico, but actually occupied with military posts, with extensive and
successful missions, and with a colonization which seemed to show every
sign of stability and future expansion, by far the greater part of the
present domain of the United States exclusive of Alaska--an
ecclesiastico-military empire stretching its vast diameter from the
southernmost cape of Florida across twenty-five parallels of latitude
and forty-five meridians of longitude to the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The
lessons taught by this amazingly swift extension of the empire and the
church, and its arrest and almost extinction, are legible on the surface
of the history. It is a strange, but not unparalleled, story of
attempted coöperation in the common service of God and Mammon and
Moloch--of endeavors after concord between Christ and Belial.
There is no reason to question the sincerity with which the rulers of
Spain believed themselves to be actuated by the highest motives of
Christian charity in their terrible and fatal American policy. "The
conversion of the Indians is the principal foundation of the
conquest--that which ought principally to be attended to." So wrote the
king in a correspondence in which a most cold-blooded authorization is
given for the enslaving of the Indians.[7:1] After the very first voyage
of Columbus every expedition of discovery or invasion was equipped with
its contingent of clergy--secular priests as chaplains to the Spaniards,
and friars of the regular orders for mission work among the Indians--at
cost of the royal treasury or as a charge upon the new conquests.
This subsidizing of the church was the least serious of the injuries
inflicted on the cause of the gospel by the piety of the Spanish
government. That such subsidizing is in the long run an injury is a
lesson illustrated not only in this case, but in many parallel cases in
the course of this history. A far more dreadful wrong was the
identifying of the religion of Jesus Christ with a system of war and
slavery, well-nigh the most atrocious in recorded history. For such a
policy the Spanish nation had just received a peculiar training. It is
one of the commonplaces of history to remark that the barbarian invaders
of the Roman empire were themselves vanquished by their own victims,
being converted by them to the Christian faith. In like manner the
Spanish nation, triumphing over its Moslem subjects in the expulsion of
the Moors, seemed in its American conquests to have been converted to
the worst of the tenets of Islam. The propagation of the gospel in the
western hemisphere, under the Spanish rule, illustrated in its public
and official aspects far more the principles of Mohammed than those of
Jesus. The triple alternative offered by the Saracen or the
Turk--conversion or tribute or the sword--was renewed with aggravations
by the Christian conquerors of America. In a form deliberately drawn up
and prescribed by the civil and ecclesiastical counselors at Madrid, the
invader of a new province was to summon the rulers and people to
acknowledge the church and the pope and the king of Spain; and in case
of refusal or delay to comply with this summons, the invader was to
notify them of the consequences in these terms: "If you refuse, by the
help of God we shall enter with force into your land, and shall make war
against you in all ways and manners that we can, and subject you to the
yoke and obedience of the church and of their Highnesses; we shall take
you and your wives and your children and make slaves of them, and sell
and dispose of them as their Highnesses may command; and we shall take
away your goods, and do you all the mischief and damage that we can, as
to vassals who do not obey and refuse to receive their lord; and we
protest that the deaths and losses that shall accrue from this are your
own fault."[8:1]
While the church was thus implicated in crimes against humanity which
history shudders to record, it is a grateful duty to remember that it
was from the church also and in the name of Christ that bold protests
and strenuous efforts were put forth in behalf of the oppressed and
wronged. Such names as Las Casas and Montesinos shine with a beautiful
luster in the darkness of that age; and the Dominican order, identified
on the other side of the sea with the fiercest cruelties of the Spanish
Inquisition, is honorable in American church history for its fearless
championship of liberty and justice.
The first entrance of Spanish Christianity upon the soil of the United
States was wholly characteristic. In quest of the Fountain of Youth,
Ponce de Leon sailed for the coast of Florida equipped with forces both
for the carnal and for the spiritual warfare. Besides his colonists and
his men-at-arms, he brought his secular priests as chaplains and his
monks as missionaries; and his instructions from the crown required him
to summon the natives, as in the famous "Requerimiento," to submit
themselves to the Catholic faith and to the king of Spain, under threat
of the sword and slavery. The invaders found a different temper in the
natives from what was encountered in Mexico and Peru, where the
populations were miserably subjugated, or in the islands, where they
were first enslaved and presently completely exterminated. The insolent
invasion was met, as it deserved, by effective volleys of arrows, and
its chivalrous leader was driven back to Cuba, to die there of his
wounds.
It is needless to recount the successive failures of Spanish
civilization and Christianity to get foothold on the domain now
included in the United States. Not until more than forty years after the
attempt of Ponce de Leon did the expedition of the ferocious Menendez
effect a permanent establishment on the coast of Florida. In September,
1565, the foundations of the oldest city in the United States, St.
Augustine, were laid with solemn religious rites by the toil of the
first negro slaves; and the event was signalized by one of the most
horrible massacres in recorded history, the cold-blooded and perfidious
extermination, almost to the last man, woman, and child, of a colony of
French Protestants that had been planted a few months before at the
mouth of the St. John's River.
The colony thus inaugurated seemed to give every promise of permanent
success as a center of religious influence. The spiritual work was
naturally and wisely divided into the pastoral care of the Spanish
garrisons and settlements, which was taken in charge by "secular"
priests, and the mission work among the Indians, committed to friars of
those "regular" orders whose solid organization and independence of the
episcopal hierarchy, and whose keen emulation in enterprises of
self-denial, toil, and peril, have been so large an element of strength,
and sometimes of weakness, in the Roman system. In turn, the mission
field of the Floridas was occupied by the Dominicans, the Jesuits, and
the Franciscans. Before the end of seventy years from the founding of
St. Augustine the number of Christian Indians was reckoned at
twenty-five or thirty thousand, distributed among forty-four missions,
under the direction of thirty-five Franciscan missionaries, while the
city of St. Augustine was fully equipped with religious institutions and
organizations. Grave complaints are on record, which indicate that the
great number of the Indian converts was out of all proportion to their
meager advancement in Christian grace and knowledge; but with these
indications of shortcoming in the missionaries there are honorable
proofs of diligent devotion to duty in the creating of a literature of
instruction in the barbarous languages of the peninsula.
For one hundred and fifteen years Spain and the Spanish missionaries had
exclusive possession in Florida, and it was during this period that
these imposing results were achieved. In 1680 a settlement of Scotch
Presbyterians at Port Royal in South Carolina seemed like a menace to
the Spanish domination. It was wholly characteristic of the Spanish
colony to seize the sword at once and destroy its nearest Christian
neighbor. It took the sword, and perished by the sword. The war of races
and sects thus inaugurated went on, with intervals of quiet, until the
Treaty of Paris, in 1763, transferred Florida to the British crown. No
longer sustained by the terror of the Spanish arms and by subsidies from
the Spanish treasury, the whole fabric of Spanish civilization and
Christianization, at the end of a history of almost two centuries,
tumbled at once to complete ruin and extinction.
The story of the planting of Christian institutions in New Mexico runs
parallel with the early history of Florida. Omitting from this brief
summary the first discovery of these regions by fugitives from one of
the disastrous early attempts to effect a settlement on the Florida
coast, omitting (what we would fain narrate) the stories of heroic
adventure and apostolic zeal and martyrdom which antedate the permanent
occupation of the country, we note the arrival, in 1598, of a strong,
numerous, and splendidly equipped colony, and the founding of a
Christian city in the heart of the American continent. As usual in such
Spanish enterprises, the missionary work was undertaken by a body of
Franciscan friars. After the first months of hardship and
discouragement, the work of the Christian colony, and especially the
work of evangelization among the Indians, went forward at a marvelous
rate. Reinforcements both of priests and of soldiers were received from
Mexico; by the end of ten years baptisms were reported to the number of
eight thousand; the entire population of the province was reckoned as
being within the pale of the church; not less than sixty Franciscan
friars at once were engaged in the double service of pastors and
missionaries. The triumph of the gospel and of Spanish arms seemed
complete and permanent.
Fourscore years after the founding of the colony and mission the sudden
explosion of a conspiracy, which for a long time had been secretly
preparing, revealed the true value of the allegiance of the Indians to
the Spanish government and of their conversion to Christ. Confounding in
a common hatred the missionaries and the tyrannous conquerors, who had
been associated in a common policy, the Christian Indians turned upon
their rulers and their pastors alike with undiscriminating warfare. "In
a few weeks no Spaniard was in New Mexico north of El Paso. Christianity
and civilization were swept away at one blow." The successful rebels
bettered the instruction that they had received from their rejected
pastors. The measures of compulsion that had been used to stamp out
every vestige of the old religion were put into use against the new.
The cause of Catholic Christianity in New Mexico never recovered from
this stunning blow. After twenty years the Spanish power, taking
advantage of the anarchy and depopulation of the province, had
reoccupied its former posts by military force, the missionaries were
brought back under armed protection, the practice of the ancient
religion was suppressed by the strong hand, and efforts, too often
unsuccessful, were made to win back the apostate tribes to something
more than a sullen submission to the government and the religion of
their conquerors. The later history of Spanish Christianity in New
Mexico is a history of decline and decay, enlivened by the usual
contentions between the "regular" clergy and the episcopal government.
The white population increased, the Indian population dwindled. Religion
as set forth by an exotic clergy became an object of indifference when
it was not an object of hatred. In 1845 the Bishop of Durango, visiting
the province, found an Indian population of twenty thousand in a total
of eighty thousand. The clergy numbered only seventeen priests. Three
years later the province became part of the United States.
To complete the story of the planting of Spanish Christianity within the
present boundaries of the United States, it is necessary to depart from
the merely chronological order of American church history; for, although
the immense adventurousness of Spanish explorers by sea and land had,
early in the sixteenth century, made known to Christendom the coasts and
harbors of the Californias, the beginnings of settlement and missions on
that Pacific coast date from so late as 1769. At this period the method
of such work had become settled into a system. The organization was
threefold, including (1) the garrison town, (2) the Spanish settlement,
and (3) the mission, at which the Indian neophytes were gathered under
the tutelage and strict government of the convent of Franciscan friars.
The whole system was sustained by the authority and the lavish
subventions of the Spanish government, and herein lay its strength and,
as the event speedily proved, its fatal weakness. The inert and feeble
character of the Indians of that region offered little excuse for the
atrocious cruelties that had elsewhere marked the Spanish occupation;
but the paternal kindness of the stronger race was hardly less hurtful.
The natives were easily persuaded to become by thousands the dependents
and servants of the missions. Conversion went on apace. At the end of
sixty-five years from the founding of the missions their twenty-one
stations numbered a Christian native population of more than thirty
thousand, and were possessed of magnificent wealth, agricultural and
commercial. In that very year (1834) the long-intended purpose of the
government to release the Indians from their almost slavery under the
missions, and to distribute the vast property in severalty, was put in
force. In eight years the more than thirty thousand Catholic Indians had
dwindled to less than five thousand; the enormous estates of the
missions were dissipated; the converts lapsed into savagery and
paganism.
Meanwhile the Spanish population had gone on slowly increasing. In the
year 1840, seventy years from the Spanish occupancy, it had risen to
nearly six thousand; but it was a population the spiritual character of
which gave little occasion of boasting to the Spanish church. Tardy and
feeble efforts had been instituted to provide it with an organized
parish ministry, when the supreme and exclusive control of that country
ceased from the hands that so long had held it. "The vineyard was taken
away, and given to other husbandmen." In the year 1848 California was
annexed to the United States.
This condensed story of Spanish Christianity within the present
boundaries of the United States is absurdly brief compared with the vast
extent of space, the three centuries of time, and what seemed at one
time the grandeur of results involved in it. But in truth it has
strangely little connection with the extant Christianity of our country.
It is almost as completely severed from historical relation with the
church of the present day as the missions of the Greenlanders in the
centuries before Columbus. If we distinguish justly between the
Christian work and its unchristian and almost satanic admixtures, we can
join without reserve both in the eulogy and in the lament with which the
Catholic historian sums up his review: "It was a glorious work, and the
recital of it impresses us by the vastness and success of the toil. Yet,
as we look around to-day, we can find nothing of it that remains. Names
of saints in melodious Spanish stand out from maps in all that section
where the Spanish monk trod, toiled, and died. A few thousand Christian
Indians, descendants of those they converted and civilized, still
survive in New Mexico and Arizona, and that is all."[15:1]
FOOTNOTES:
[7:1] Helps, "Spanish Conquest in America," vol. i., p. 234, American
edition.
[8:1] Helps, "Spanish Conquest in America," vol. i., p. 235; also p.
355, where the grotesquely horrible document is given in full.
In the practical prosecution of this scheme of evangelization, it was
found necessary to the due training of the Indians in the holy faith
that they should be enslaved, whether or no. It was on this religious
consideration, clearly laid down in a report of the king's chaplains,
that the atrocious system of _encomiendas_ was founded.
[15:1] "The Roman Catholic Church in the United States," by Professor
Thomas O'Gorman (vol. ix., American Church History Series), p. 112.
CHAPTER III.
THE PROJECT OF FRENCH EMPIRE AND EVANGELIZATION--ITS WIDE AND RAPID
SUCCESS--ITS SUDDEN EXTINCTION.
For a full century, from the discovery of the New World until the first
effective effort at occupation by any other European people, the Spanish
church and nation had held exclusive occupancy of the North American
continent. The Spanish enterprises of conquest and colonization had been
carried forward with enormous and unscrupulous energy, and alongside of
them and involved with them had been borne the Spanish chaplaincies and
missions, sustained from the same treasury, in some honorable instances
bravely protesting against the atrocities they were compelled to
witness, in other instances implicated in them and sharing the bloody
profits of them. But, unquestionable as was the martial prowess of the
Spanish soldier and adventurer, and the fearless devotion of the Spanish
missionary, there appears nothing like systematic planning in all these
immense operations. The tide of conquest flowed in capricious courses,
according as it was invited by hopes of gold or of a passage to China,
or of some phantom of a Fountain of Youth or a city of Quivira or a
Gilded Man; and it seemed in general to the missionary that he could not
do else than follow in the course of conquest.
It is wholly characteristic of the French people that its entering at
last upon enterprises of colonization and missions should be with large
forecasting of the future and with the methods of a grand strategy.
We can easily believe that the famous "Bull of Partition" of Pope
Alexander VI. was not one of the hindrances that so long delayed the
beginnings of a New France in the West. Incessant dynastic wars with
near neighbors, the final throes of the long struggle between the crown
and the great vassals, and finally the religious wars that culminated in
the awful slaughter of St. Bartholomew's, and ended at the close of the
century with the politic conversion and the coronation of Henry
IV.--these were among the causes that had held back the great nation
from distant undertakings. But thoughts of great things to be achieved
in the New World had never for long at a time been absent from the minds
of Frenchmen. The annual visits of the Breton fishing-fleets to the
banks of Newfoundland kept in mind such rights of discovery as were
alleged by France, and kept attention fixed in the direction of the
great gulf and river of St. Lawrence. Long before the middle of the
sixteenth century Jacques Cartier had explored the St. Lawrence beyond
the commanding position which he named Montreal, and a royal commission
had issued, under which he was to undertake an enterprise of "discovery,
settlement, and the conversion of the Indians." But it was not till the
year 1608 that the first permanent French settlement was effected. With
the _coup d'oeil_ of a general or the foresight of a prophet,
Champlain, the illustrious first founder of French empire in America, in
1608 fixed the starting-point of it at the natural fortress of Quebec.
How early the great project had begun to take shape in the leading minds
of the nation it may not be easy to determine. It was only after the
adventurous explorations of the French pioneers, traders, and
friars--men of like boundless enthusiasm and courage--had been crowned
by the achievement of La Salle, who first of men traversed the two great
waterways of the continent from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Gulf of
Mexico, that the amazing possibilities of it were fully revealed. But,
whosesoever scheme it was, a more magnificent project of empire, secular
and spiritual, has never entered into the heart of man. It seems to have
been native to the American soil, springing up in the hearts of the
French pioneer explorers themselves;[18:1] but by its grandeur, and at
the same time its unity, it was of a sort to delight the souls of Sully
and Richelieu and of their masters. Under thin and dubious claims by
right of discovery, through the immense energy and daring of her
explorers, the heroic zeal of her missionaries, and not so much by the
prowess of her soldiers as by her craft in diplomacy with savage tribes,
France was to assert and make good her title to the basin of the St.
Lawrence and the lakes, and the basin of the Mississippi and the Gulf of
Mexico. From the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the
Mississippi, through the core of the continent, was to be drawn a cordon
of posts, military, commercial, and religious, with other outlying
stations at strategic points both eastward and westward. The only
external interference with this scheme that could be apprehended at its
inception was from the Spanish colonies, already decaying and shrinking
within their boundaries to the west and to the southeast, and from a
puny little English settlement started only a year before, with a
doubtful hold on life, on the bank of the James River. A dozen years
later a pitiably feeble company of Pilgrims shall make their landing at
Plymouth to try the not hopeful experiment of living in the wilderness,
and a settlement of Swedes in Delaware and of Hollanders on the Hudson
shall be added to the incongruous, unconcerted, mutually jealous
plantations that begin to take root along the Atlantic seaboard. Not
only grandeur and sagacity of conception, but success in achievement, is
illustrated by the comparative area occupied by the three great European
powers on the continent of North America at the end of a century and a
half from the founding of Quebec in 1608. Dividing the continent into
twenty-five equal parts, the French claimed and seemed to hold firmly in
possession twenty parts, the Spanish four parts, and the English one
part.[19:1]
The comparison between the Spanish and the French methods of
colonization and missions in America is at almost every point honorable
to the French. Instead of a greedy scramble after other men's property
in gold and silver, the business basis of the French enterprises was to
consist in a widely organized and laboriously prosecuted traffic in
furs. Instead of a series of desultory and savage campaigns of conquest,
the ferocity of which was aggravated by the show of zeal for the kingdom
of righteousness and peace, was a large-minded and far-sighted scheme of
empire, under which remote and hostile tribes were to be combined by
ties of mutual interest and common advantage. And the missions, instead
of following servilely in the track of bloody conquest to assume the
tutelage of subjugated and enslaved races, were to share with the
soldier and the trader the perilous adventures of exploration, and not
so much to be supported and defended as to be themselves the support and
protection of the settlements, through the influence of Christian love
and self-sacrifice over the savage heart. Such elements of moral
dignity, as well as of imperial grandeur, marked the plans for the
French occupation of North America.
To a wonderful extent those charged with this enterprise were worthy of
the task. Among the military and civil leaders of it, from Champlain to
Montcalm, were men that would have honored the best days of French
chivalry. The energy and daring of the French explorers, whether traders
or missionaries, have not been equaled in the pioneer work of other
races. And the annals of Christian martyrdom may be searched in vain for
more heroic examples of devotion to the work of the gospel than those
which adorn the history of the French missions in North America. What
magnificent results might not be expected from such an enterprise, in
the hands of such men, sustained by the resources of the most powerful
nation and national church in Christendom!
From the founding of Quebec, in 1608, the expansion of the French
enterprise was swift and vast. By the end of fifty years Quebec had been
equipped with hospital, nunnery, seminary for the education of priests,
all affluently endowed from the wealth of zealous courtiers, and served
in a noble spirit of self-devotion by the choicest men and women that
the French church could furnish; besides these institutions, the
admirable plan of a training colony, at which converted Indians should
be trained to civilized life, was realized at Sillery, in the
neighborhood. The sacred city of Montreal had been established as a base
for missions to the remoter west. Long in advance of the settlement at
Plymouth, French Christianity was actively and beneficently busy among
the savages of eastern Maine, among the so-called "neutral nations" by
the Niagara, among the fiercely hostile Iroquois of northern New York,
by Lake Huron and Lake Nipissing, and, with wonderful tokens of success,
by the Falls of St. Mary. "Thus did the religious zeal of the French
bear the cross to the banks of the St. Mary and the confines of Lake
Superior, and look wistfully toward the homes of the Sioux in the valley
of the Mississippi, five years before the New England Eliot had
addressed the tribe of Indians that dwelt within six miles of Boston
harbor."[21:1]
Thirty years more passed, bringing the story down to the memorable year
1688. The French posts, military, commercial, and religious, had been
pushed westward to the head of Lake Superior. The Mississippi had been
discovered and explored, and the colonies planted from Canada along its
banks and the banks of its tributaries had been met by the expeditions
proceeding direct from France through the Gulf of Mexico. The claims of
France in America included not only the vast domain of Canada, but a
half of Maine, a half of Vermont, more than a half of New York, the
entire valley of the Mississippi, and Texas as far as the Rio Bravo del
Norte.[21:2] And these claims were asserted by actual and almost
undisputed occupancy.
The seventy years that followed were years of "storm and stress" for the
French colonies and missions. The widening areas occupied by the French
and by the English settlers brought the rival establishments into nearer
neighborhood, into sharper competition, and into bloody collision.
Successive European wars--King William's War, Queen Anne's War (of the
Spanish succession), King George's War (of the Austrian
succession)--involved the dependencies of France and those of England in
the conflicts of their sovereigns. These were the years of terror along
the exposed northern frontier of English settlements in New England and
New York, when massacre and burning by bands of savages, under French
instigation and leadership, made the names of Haverhill and Deerfield
and Schenectady memorable in American history, and when, in desperate
campaigns against the Canadian strongholds, the colonists vainly sought
to protect themselves from the savages by attacking the centers from
which the murderous forays were directed. But each successive treaty of
peace between England and France confirmed and reconfirmed the French
claims to the main part of her American domain. The advances of French
missions and settlements continued southward and westward, in spite of
jealousy in European cabinets as the imposing magnitude of the plans of
French empire became more distinctly disclosed, and in spite of the
struggles of the English colonies both North and South. When, on the 4th
of July, 1754, Colonel George Washington surrendered Fort Necessity,
near the fork of the Ohio, to the French, "in the whole valley of the
Mississippi, to its headsprings in the Alleghanies, no standard floated
but that of France."[22:1]
There seemed little reason to doubt that the French empire in America,
which for a century and a half had gone on expanding and strengthening,
would continue to expand and strengthen for centuries to come. Sudden as
lightning, in August, 1756, the Seven Years' War broke out on the other
side of the globe. The treaty with which it ended, in February, 1763,
transferred to Great Britain, together with the Spanish territory of
Florida, all the French possessions in America, from the Arctic Ocean to
the Gulf of Mexico. "As a dream when one awaketh," the magnificent
vision of empire, spiritual and secular, which for so many generations
had occupied the imagination of French statesmen and churchmen, was
rudely and forever dispelled. Of the princely wealth, the brilliant
talents, the unsurpassed audacity of adventure, the unequaled heroism of
toil and martyrdom expended on the great project, how strangely meager
and evanescent the results! In the districts of Lower Canada there
remain, indeed, the institutions of a French Catholic population; and
the aspect of those districts, in which the pledge of full liberty to
the dominant church has been scrupulously fulfilled by the British
government, may reasonably be regarded as an indication of what France
would have done for the continent in general. But within the present
domain of the United States the entire results of a century and a half
of French Catholic colonization and evangelization may be summed up as
follows: In Maine, a thousand Catholic Indians still remain, to remind
one of the time when, as it is boldly claimed, the whole Indian
population of that province were either converted or under Jesuit
training.[23:1] In like manner, a scanty score of thousands of Catholic
Indians on various reservations in the remote West represent the time
when, at the end of the French domination, "all the North American
Indians were more or less extensively converted" to Catholic
Christianity, "all had the gospel preached to them."[23:2] The splendid
fruits of the missions among the Iroquois, from soil watered by the
blood of martyrs, were wasted to nothing in savage intertribal wars.
Among the Choctaws and Chickasaws of the South and Southwest, among whom
the gospel was by and by to win some of its fairest trophies, the French
missionaries achieved no great success.[23:3] The French colonies from
Canada, planted so prosperously along the Western rivers, dispersed,
leaving behind them some straggling families. The abundant later growth
of the Catholic Church in that region was to be from other seed and
stock. The region of Louisiana alone, destined a generation later to be
included within the boundaries of the great republic, retained
organized communities of French descent and language; but, living as
they were in utter unbelief and contempt of religion and morality, it
would be an unjust reproach on Catholicism to call them Catholic. The
work of the gospel had got to be begun from the foundation. Nevertheless
it is not to be doubted that remote memories or lingering traditions of
a better age survived to aid the work of those who by and by should
enter in to rebuild the waste places.[24:1]
There are not a few of us, wise after the event, who recognize a final
cause of this surprising and almost dramatic failure, in the manifest
intent of divine Providence that the field of the next great empire in
the world's history should not become the exclusive domain of an
old-world monarchy and hierarchy; but the immediate efficient causes of
it are not so obvious. This, however, may justly be said: some of the
seeming elements of strength in the French colonization proved to be
fatal elements of weakness.
1. The French colonies had the advantage of royal patronage,
endowment,[24:2] and protection, and of unity of counsel and direction.
They were all parts of one system, under one control. And their centers
of vitality, head and heart, were on the other side of the sea.
Subsisting upon the strength of the great monarchy, they must needs
share its fortunes, evil as well as good. When, after the reverses of
France in the Seven Years' War, it became necessary to accept hard terms
of peace, the superb framework of empire in the West fell to the
disposal of the victors. "America," said Pitt, "was conquered in
Germany."
2. The business basis of the French colonies, being that of trade with
the Indians rather than a self-supporting agriculture, favored the swift
expansion of these colonies and their wide influence among the Indians.
Scattered companies of fur-traders would be found here and there,
wherever were favorable points for traffic, penetrating deeply into the
wilderness and establishing friendly business relations with the
savages. It has been observed that the Romanic races show an alacrity
for intermarriage with barbarous tribes that is not to be found in the
Teutonic. The result of such relations is ordinarily less the elevating
of the lower race than the dragging down of the higher; but it tends for
the time to give great advantage in maintaining a powerful political
influence over the barbarians. Thus it was that the French, few in
number, covered almost the breadth of the continent with their
formidable alliances; and these alliances were the offensive and
defensive armor in which they trusted, but they were also their peril.
Close alliance with one savage clan involved war with its enemies. It
was an early misfortune of the French settlers that their close friendly
relations with their Huron neighbors embattled against them the
fiercest, bravest, and ablest of the Indian tribes, the confederacy of
the Six Nations, which held, with full appreciation of its strategic
importance, the command of the exits southward from the valley of the
St. Lawrence. The fierce jealousy of the Iroquois toward the allies of
their hereditary antagonists, rather than any good will toward white
settlers of other races, made them an effectual check upon French
encroachments upon the slender line of English, Dutch, and Swedish
settlements that stretched southward from Maine along the Atlantic
coast.
3. In one aspect it was doubtless an advantage to the French missions in
America that the sharp sectarian competitions between the different
clerical orders resulted finally in the missions coming almost
exclusively under the control of the Jesuit society. This result insured
to the missions the highest ability in administration and direction,
ample resources of various sorts, and a force of missionaries whose
personal virtues have won for them unstinted eulogy even from unfriendly
sources--men the ardor of whose zeal was rigorously controlled by a more
than martial severity of religious discipline. But it would be uncandid
in us to refuse attention to those grave charges against the society
brought by Catholic authorities and Catholic orders, and so enforced as,
after long and acrimonious controversy, to result in the expulsion of
the society from almost every nation of Catholic Europe, in its being
stigmatized by Pope Benedict XIV., in 1741, as made up of "disobedient,
contumacious, captious, and reprobate persons," and at last in its being
suppressed and abolished by Pope Clement XIV., in 1773, as a nuisance to
Christendom. We need, indeed, to make allowance for the intense
animosity of sectarian strife among the various Catholic orders in which
the charges against the society were engendered and unrelentingly
prosecuted; but after all deductions it is not credible that the almost
universal odium in which it was held was provoked solely by its virtues.
Among the accusations against the society which seem most clearly
substantiated these two are likely to be concerned in that "brand of
ultimate failure which has invariably been stamped on all its most
promising schemes and efforts":[26:1] first, a disposition to compromise
the essential principles of Christianity by politic concessions to
heathenism, so that the successes of the Jesuit missions are magnified
by reports of alleged conversions that are conversions only in name and
outward form; second, a constantly besetting propensity to political
intrigue.[27:1] It is hardly to be doubted that both had their part in
the prodigious failure of the French Catholic missions and settlements
within the present boundaries of the United States.
4. The conditions which favored the swift and magnificent expansion of
the French occupation were unfavorable to the healthy natural growth of
permanent settlements. A post of soldiers, a group of cabins of trappers
and fur-traders, and a mission of nuns and celibate priests, all
together give small promise of rapid increase of population. It is
rather to the fact that the French settlements, except at the seaboard,
were constituted so largely of these elements, than to any alleged
sterility of the French stock, that the fatal weakness of the French
occupation is to be ascribed. The lack of French America was men. The
population of Canada in 1759, according to census, was about eighty-two
thousand;[27:2] that of New England in 1754 is estimated at four hundred
and twenty-five thousand. "The white population of five, or perhaps even
of six, of the American provinces was greater singly than that of all
Canada, and the aggregate in America exceeded that in Canada
fourteenfold."[27:3] The same sign of weakness is recognized at the
other extremity of the cordon of French settlements. The vast region of
Louisiana is estimated, at fifty years from its colonization, at one
tenth of the strength of the coeval province of Pennsylvania.[27:4]
Under these hopeless conditions the French colonies had not even the
alternative of keeping the peace. The state of war was forced by the
mother countries. There was no recourse for Canada except to her savage
allies, won for her through the influence of the missionaries.
It is justly claimed that in the mind of such early leaders as Champlain
the dominant motive of the French colonization was religious; but in the
cruel position into which the colony was forced it was almost inevitable
that the missions should become political. It was boasted in their
behalf that they had taught the Indians "to mingle Jesus Christ and
France together in their affections."[28:1] The cross and the lilies
were blazoned together as the sign of French dominion. The missionary
became frequently, and sometimes quite undisguisedly, a political agent.
It was from the missions that the horrible murderous forays upon
defenseless villages proceeded, which so often marked the frontier line
of New England and New York with fire and blood. It is one of the most
unhappy of the results of that savage warfare that in the minds of the
communities that suffered from it the Jesuit missionary came to be
looked upon as accessory to these abhorrent crimes. Deeply is it to be
lamented that men with such eminent claims on our admiration and
reverence should not be triumphantly clear of all suspicion of such
complicity. We gladly concede the claim[28:2] that the proof of the
complicity is not complete; we could welcome some clear evidence in
disproof of it--some sign of a bold and indignant protest against these
crimes; we could wish that the Jesuit historian had not boasted of these
atrocities as proceeding from the fine work of his brethren,[29:1] and
that the antecedents of the Jesuits as a body, and their declared
principles of "moral theology," were such as raise no presumption
against them even in unfriendly minds. But we must be content with
thankfully acknowledging that divine change which has made it impossible
longer to boast of or even justify such deeds, and which leaves no
ground among neighbor Christians of the present day for harboring mutual
suspicions which, to the Christian ministers of French and English
America of two hundred years ago and less, it was impossible to repress.
I have spoken of the complete extinction within the present domain of
the United States of the magnificent beginnings of the projected French
Catholic Church and empire. It is only in the most recent years, since
the Civil War, that the results of the work inaugurated in America by
Champlain begin to reappear in the field of the ecclesiastical history
of the United States. The immigration of Canadian French Catholics into
the northern tier of States has already grown to considerable volume,
and is still growing in numbers and in stability and strength, and adds
a new and interesting element to the many factors that go to make up the
American church.
FOOTNOTES:
[18:1] So Parkman.
[19:1] Bancroft's "United States," vol. iv., p. 267.
[21:1] Bancroft's "United States," vol. iii., p. 131.
[21:2] _Ibid._, p. 175.
[22:1] Bancroft, vol. iii., p. 121.
[23:1] Bishop O'Gorman, "The Roman Catholic Church in the United
States," p. 136.
[23:2] _Ibid._, pp. 191-193.
[23:3] _Ibid._, p. 211.
[24:1] See O'Gorman, chaps. ix.-xiv., xx.
[24:2] Mr. Bancroft, describing the "sad condition" of La Salle's colony
at Matagorda after the wreck of his richly laden store-ship, adds that
"even now this colony possessed, from the bounty of Louis XIV., more
than was contributed by all the English monarchs together for the twelve
English colonies on the Atlantic. Its number still exceeded that of the
colony of Smith in Virginia, or of those who embarked in the
'Mayflower'" (vol. iii., p. 171).
[26:1] Dr. R. F. Littledale, in "Encyclopædia Britannica," vol. xiii.,
pp. 649-652.
[27:1] Both these charges are solemnly affirmed by the pope in the bull
of suppression of the society (Dr. R. F. Littledale, in "Encyclopædia
Britannica," vol. xiii., p. 655).
[27:2] Bancroft, vol. iii., p. 320.
[27:3] _Ibid._, pp. 128, 129.
[27:4] The contrast is vigorously emphasized by Mr. Bancroft: "Such was
Louisiana more than a half-century after the first attempt at
colonization by La Salle. Its population may have been five thousand
whites and half that number of blacks. Louis XIV. had fostered it with
pride and liberal expenditures; an opulent merchant, famed for his
successful enterprise, assumed its direction; the Company of the
Mississippi, aided by boundless but transient credit, had made it the
foundation of their hopes; and, again, Fleury and Louis XV. had sought
to advance its fortunes. Priests and friars, dispersed through nations
from Biloxi to the Dahcotas, propitiated the favor of the savages; but
still the valley of the Mississippi was nearly a wilderness. All its
patrons--though among them it counted kings and ministers of state--had
not accomplished for it in half a century a tithe of the prosperity
which within the same period sprang naturally from the benevolence of
William Penn to the peaceful settlers on the Delaware" (vol. iii., p.
369).
[28:1] "Encyclopædia Britannica," vol. xiii., p. 654.
[28:2] Bishop O'Gorman, pp. 137-142.
[29:1] Bancroft, vol. iii., pp. 187, 188.
CHAPTER IV.
ANTECEDENTS OF PERMANENT CHRISTIAN COLONIZATION--THE DISINTEGRATION OF
CHRISTENDOM--CONTROVERSIES--PERSECUTIONS.
We have briefly reviewed the history of two magnificent schemes of
secular and spiritual empire, which, conceived in the minds of great
statesmen and churchmen, sustained by the resources of the mightiest
kingdoms of that age, inaugurated by soldiers of admirable prowess,
explorers of unsurpassed boldness and persistence, and missionaries
whose heroic faith has canonized them in the veneration of Christendom,
have nevertheless come to naught.
We turn now to observe the beginnings, coinciding in time with those of
the French enterprise, of a series of disconnected plantations along the
Atlantic seaboard, established as if at haphazard, without plan or
mutual preconcert, of different languages and widely diverse Christian
creeds, depending on scanty private resources, unsustained by
governmental arms or treasuries, but destined, in a course of events
which no human foresight could have calculated, to come under the
plastic influence of a single European power, to be molded according to
the general type of English polity, and to become heir to English
traditions, literature, and language. These mutually alien and even
antagonistic communities were to be constrained, by forces superior to
human control, first into confederation and then into union, and to
occupy the breadth of the new continent as a solid and independent
nation. The history reads like a fulfillment of the apocalyptic imagery
of a rock hewn from the mountain without hands, moving on to fill the
earth.
Looking back after the event, we find it easy to trace the providential
preparations for this great result. There were few important events in
the course of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that did not
have to do with it; but the most obvious of these antecedents are to be
found in _controversies_ and _persecutions_.
The protest of northern Europe against the abuses and corruptions
prevailing in the Roman Church was articulated in the Augsburg
Confession. Over against it were framed the decrees of the Council of
Trent. Thus the lines were distinctly drawn and the warfare between
contending principles was joined. Those who fondly dreamed of a
permanently united and solid Protestantism to withstand its powerful
antagonist were destined to speedy and inevitable disappointment. There
have been many to deplore that so soon after the protest of Augsburg was
set forth as embodying the common belief of Protestants new parties
should have arisen protesting against the protest. The ordinance of the
Lord's Supper, instituted as a sacrament of universal Christian
fellowship, became (as so often before and since) the center of
contention and the badge of mutual alienation. It was on this point that
Zwingli and the Swiss parted from Luther and the Lutherans; on the same
point, in the next generation of Reformers, John Calvin, attempting to
mediate between the two contending parties, became the founder of still
a third party, strong not only in the lucid and logical doctrinal
statements in which it delighted, but also in the possession of a
definite scheme of republican church government which became as
distinctive of the Calvinistic or "Reformed" churches as their doctrine
of the Supper. It was at a later epoch still that those insoluble
questions which press most inexorably for consideration when theological
thought and study are most serious and earnest--the questions that
concern the divine sovereignty in its relation to human freedom and
responsibility--arose in the Catholic Church to divide Jesuit from
Dominican and Franciscan, and in the Reformed churches to divide the
Arminians from the disciples of Gomar and Turretin. All these divisions
among the European Christians of the seventeenth century were to have
their important bearing on the planting of the Christian church in
America.
In view of the destined predominance of English influence in the
seaboard colonies of America, the history of the divisions of the
Christian people of England is of preëminent importance to the
beginnings of the American church. The curiously diverse elements that
entered into the English Reformation, and the violent vicissitudes that
marked the course of it, were all represented in the parties existing
among English Christians at the period of the planting of the colonies.
The political and dynastic character of the movements that detached the
English hierarchy from the Roman see had for one inevitable result to
leaven the English church as a lump with the leaven of Herod. That
considerable part of the clergy and people that moved to and fro,
without so much as the resistance of any very formidable _vis inertiæ_,
with the change of the monarch or of the monarch's caprice, might leave
the student of the history of those times in doubt as to whether they
belonged to the kingdom of heaven or to the kingdom of this world. But,
however severe the judgment that any may pass upon the character and
motives of Henry VIII. and of the councilors of Edward, there will
hardly be any seriously to question that the movements directed by these
men soon came to be infused with more serious and spiritual influences.
The Lollardy of Wycliffe and his fellows in the fourteenth century had
been severely repressed and driven into "occult conventicles," but had
not been extinguished; the Bible in English, many times retouched after
Wycliffe's days, and perfected by the refugees at Geneva from the Marian
persecutions, had become a common household book; and those exiles
themselves, returning from the various centers of fervid religious
thought and feeling in Holland and Germany and Switzerland, had brought
with them an augmented spiritual faith, as well as intensified and
sharply defined convictions on the questions of theology and church
order that were debated by the scholars of the Continent. It was
impossible that the diverse and antagonist elements thus assembled
should not work on one another with violent reactions. By the beginning
of the seventeenth century not less than four categories would suffice
to classify the people of England according to their religious
differences. First, there were those who still continued to adhere to
the Roman see. Secondly, those who, either from conviction or from
expediency or from indifference, were content with the state church of
England in the shape in which Elizabeth and her parliaments had left it;
this class naturally included the general multitude of Englishmen,
religious, irreligious, and non-religious. Thirdly, there were those
who, not refusing their adhesion to the national church as by law
established, nevertheless earnestly desired to see it more completely
purified from doctrinal errors and practical corruptions, and who
qualified their conformity to it accordingly. Fourthly, there were the
few who distinctly repudiated the national church as a false church,
coming out from her as from Babylon, determined upon "reformation
without tarrying for any." Finally, following upon these, more radical,
not to say more logical, than the rest, came a fifth party, the
followers of George Fox. Not one of these five parties but has valid
claims, both in its principles and in its membership, on the respect of
history; not one but can point to its saints and martyrs; not one but
was destined to play a quite separate and distinct and highly important
part in the planting of the church of Christ in America. They are
designated, for convenience' sake, as the Catholics, the Conformists,
the Puritans or Reformists, the Separatists (of whom were the Pilgrims),
and the Quakers.
Such a Christendom was it, so disorganized, divided, and subdivided into
parties and sects, which was to furnish the materials for the peopling
of the new continent with a Christian population. It would seem that the
same "somewhat not ourselves," which had defeated in succession the
plans of two mighty nations to subject the New World to a single
hierarchy, had also provided that no one form or organization of
Christianity should be exclusive or even dominant in the occupation of
the American soil. From one point of view the American colonies will
present a sorry aspect. Schism, mutual alienation, antagonism,
competition, are uncongenial to the spirit of the gospel, which seeks
"that they all may be one." And yet the history of the church has
demonstrated by many a sad example that this offense "must needs come."
No widely extended organization of church discipline in exclusive
occupation of any country has ever long avoided the intolerable
mischiefs attendant on spiritual despotism. It was a shock to the hopes
and the generous sentiments of those who had looked to see one undivided
body of a reformed church erected over against the medieval church,
from the corruptions of which they had revolted, when they saw
Protestantism go asunder into the several churches of the Lutheran and
the Reformed confessions; there are many even now to deplore it as a
disastrous set-back to the progress of the kingdom of Christ. But in the
calmness of our long retrospect it is easy for us to recognize that
whatever jurisdiction should have been established over an undivided
Protestant church would inevitably have proved itself, in no long time,
just such a yoke as neither the men of that time nor their fathers had
been able to bear. Fifteen centuries of church history have not been
wasted if thereby the Christian people have learned that the pursuit of
Christian unity through administrative or corporate or diplomatic union
is following the wrong road, and that the one Holy Catholic Church is
not the corporation of saints, but their communion.
The new experiment of church life that was initiated in the colonization
of America is still in progress. The new States were to be planted not
only with diverse companies from the Old World, but with all the
definitely organized sects by which the map of Christendom was at that
time variegated, to which should be added others of native origin.
Notwithstanding successive "booms" now of one and then of another, it
was soon to become obvious to all that no one of these mutually jealous
sects was to have any exclusive predominance, even over narrow precincts
of territory. The old-world state churches, which under the rule, _cujus
regio ejus religio_, had been supreme and exclusive each in its
jurisdiction, were to find themselves side by side and mingled through
the community on equal terms with those over whom in the old country
they had domineered as dissenters, or whom perhaps they had even
persecuted as heretics or as Antichrist. Thus placed, they were to be
trained by the discipline of divine Providence and by the grace of the
Holy Spirit from persecution to toleration, from toleration to mutual
respect, and to coöperation in matters of common concern in the
advancement of the kingdom of Christ. What further remains to be tried
is the question whether, if not the sects, then the Christian hearts in
each sect, can be brought to take the final step from mutual respect to
mutual love, "that we henceforth, speaking truth in love, may grow up in
all things into him, which is the head, even Christ; from whom all the
body fitly framed and knit together through that which every joint
supplieth, according to the working in due measure of each several part,
shall make the increase of the body unto the building up of itself in
love." Unless we must submit to those philosophers who forbid us to find
in history the evidences of final cause and providential design, we may
surely look upon this as a worthy possible solution of the mystery of
Providence in the planting of the church in America in almost its
ultimate stage of schism--that it is the purpose of its Head, out of the
mutual attrition of the sects, their disintegration and comminution, to
bring forth such a demonstration of the unity and liberty of the
children of God as the past ages of church history have failed to show.
That mutual intolerance of differences in religious belief which, in the
seventeenth century, was, throughout Christendom, coextensive with
religious earnestness had its important part to play in the colonization
of America. Of the persecutions and oppressions which gave direct
impulse to the earliest colonization of America, the most notable are
the following: (1) the persecution of the English Puritans in the reigns
of James I. and Charles I., ending with the outbreak of the civil war in
1642; (2) the persecution of the English Roman Catholics during the same
period; (3) the persecution of the English Quakers during the
twenty-five years of Charles II. (1660-85); (4) the persecution of the
French Huguenots after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685); (5)
the disabilities suffered by the Presbyterians of the north of Ireland
after the English Revolution (1688); (6) the ferocious ravaging of the
region of the Rhenish Palatinate by the armies of Louis XIV. in the
early years of the seventeenth century; (7) the cruel expulsion of the
Protestants of the archiepiscopal duchy of Salzburg (1731).
Beyond dispute, the best and most potent elements in the settlement of
the seaboard colonies were the companies of earnestly religious people
who from time to time, under severe compulsion for conscience' sake,
came forth from the Old World as involuntary emigrants. Cruel wars and
persecutions accomplished a result in the advancement of the kingdom of
Christ which the authors of them never intended. But not these agencies
alone promoted the great work. Peace, prosperity, wealth, and the hope
of wealth had their part in it. The earliest successful enterprises of
colonization were indeed marked with the badge of Christianity, and
among their promoters were men whose language and deeds nobly evince the
Christian spirit; but the enterprises were impelled and directed by
commercial or patriotic considerations. The immense advantages that were
to accrue from them to the world through the wider propagation of the
gospel of Christ were not lost sight of in the projecting and organizing
of the expeditions, nor were provisions for church and ministry omitted;
but these were incidental, not primary.
This story of the divine preparations carried forward through
unconscious human agencies in different lands and ages for the founding
of the American church is a necessary preamble to our history. The scene
of the story is now to be shifted to the other side of the sea.
CHAPTER V.
THE PURITAN BEGINNINGS OF THE CHURCH IN VIRGINIA--ITS DECLINE ALMOST TO
EXTINCTION.
There is sufficient evidence that the three little vessels which on the
13th of May, 1607, were moored to the trees on the bank of the James
River brought to the soil of America the germ of a Christian church. We
may feel constrained to accept only at a large discount the pious
official professions of King James I., and critically to scrutinize many
of the statements of that brilliant and fascinating adventurer, Captain
John Smith, whether concerning his friends or concerning his enemies or
concerning himself. But the beauty and dignity of the Christian
character shine unmistakable in the life of the chaplain to the
expedition, the Rev. Robert Hunt, and all the more radiantly for the
dark and discouraging surroundings in which his ministry was to be
exercised.
For the company which Captain Smith and that famous mariner, Captain
Bartholomew Gosnold, had by many months of labor and "many a forgotten
pound" of expense succeeded in recruiting for the enterprise was made up
of most unhopeful material for the founding of a Christian colony. Those
were the years of ignoble peace with which the reign of James began; and
the glittering hopes of gold might well attract some of the brave men
who had served by sea or land in the wars of Elizabeth. But the last
thirty years had furnished no instance of success, and many of
disastrous and sometimes tragical failure, in like attempts--the
enterprises of Humphrey Gilbert, of Raleigh, of John White, of Gosnold
himself, and of Popham and Gorges. Even brave men might hesitate to
volunteer for the forlorn hope of another experiment at colonizing.
The little squadron had hardly set sail when the unfitness of the
emigrants for their work began to discover itself. Lying weather-bound
within sight of home, "some few, little better than atheists, of the
greatest rank among them," were busying themselves with scandalous
imputations upon the chaplain, then lying dangerously ill in his berth.
All through the four months' passage by way of the Canaries and the West
India Islands discontents and dissensions prevailed. Wingfield, who had
been named president of the colony, had Smith in irons, and at the
island of Nevis had the gallows set up for his execution on a charge of
conspiracy, when milder counsels prevailed, and he was brought to
Virginia, where he was tried and acquitted and his adversary mulcted in
damages.
Arrived at the place of settlement, the colonists set about the work of
building their houses, but found that their total number of one hundred
and five was made up in the proportion of four carpenters to forty-eight
"gentlemen." Not inadequately provisioned for their work, they came
repeatedly almost to perishing through their sheer incapacity and
unthrift, and their needless quarrels with one another and with the
Indians. In five months one half of the company were dead. In January,
1608, eight months from the landing, when the second expedition arrived
with reinforcements and supplies, only thirty-eight were surviving out
of the one hundred and five, and of these the strongest were conspiring
to seize the pinnace and desert the settlement.
The newcomers were no better than the first. They were chiefly
"gentlemen" again, and goldsmiths, whose duty was to discover and refine
the quantities of gold that the stockholders in the enterprise were
resolved should be found in Virginia, whether it was there or not. The
ship took back on her return trip a full cargo of worthless dirt.
Reinforcements continued to arrive every few months, the quality of
which it might be unfair to judge simply from the disgusted complaints
of Captain Smith. He begs the Company to send but thirty honest laborers
and artisans, "rather than a thousand such as we have," and reports the
next ship-load as "fitter to breed a riot than to found a colony." The
wretched settlement became an object of derision to the wits of London,
and of sympathetic interest to serious minds. The Company, reorganized
under a new charter, was strengthened by the accession of some of the
foremost men in England, including four bishops, the Earl of
Southampton, and Sir Francis Bacon. Appeals were made to the Christian
public in behalf of an enterprise so full of promise of the furtherance
of the gospel. A fleet of nine ships was fitted out, carrying more than
five hundred emigrants, with ample supplies. Captain Smith, representing
what there was of civil authority in the colony, had a brief struggle
with their turbulence, and recognized them as of the same sort with the
former companies, for the most part "poor gentlemen, tradesmen,
serving-men, libertines, and such like, ten times more fit to spoil a
commonwealth than either begin one or help to maintain one." When only
part of this expedition had arrived, Captain Smith departed for England,
disabled by an accidental wound, leaving a settlement of nearly five
hundred men, abundantly provisioned. "It was not the will of God that
the new state should be formed of these materials."[41:1] In six months
the number of the colonists was reduced to sixty, and when relief
arrived it was reckoned that in ten days' longer delay they would have
perished to the last man. With one accord the wretched remnant of the
colony, together with the latest comers, deserted, without a tear of
regret, the scene of their misery. But their retreating vessels were met
and turned back from the mouth of the river by the approaching ships of
Lord de la Warr with emigrants and supplies. Such were the first three
unhappy and unhonored years of the first Christian colony on the soil of
the United States.
One almost shrinks from being assured that this worthless crew, through
all these years of suicidal crime and folly, had been assiduous in
religious duties. First under an awning made of an old sail, seated upon
logs, with a rail nailed to two trees for a pulpit, afterward in a poor
shanty of a church, "that could neither well defend wind nor rain," they
"had daily common prayer morning and evening, every Sunday two sermons,
and every three months the holy communion, till their minister died";
and after that "prayers daily, with an homily on Sundays, two or three
years, till more preachers came." The sturdy and terrible resolution of
Captain Smith, who in his marches through the wilderness was wont to
begin the day with prayer and psalm, and was not unequal to the duty,
when it was laid on him, of giving Christian exhortation as well as
righteous punishment, and the gentle Christian influence of the Rev.
Robert Hunt, were the salt that saved the colony from utterly perishing
of its vices. It was not many months before the frail body of the
chaplain sank under the hardships of pioneer life; he is commemorated by
his comrade, the captain, as "an honest, religious, and courageous
divine, during whose life our factions were oft qualified, our wants and
greatest extremities so comforted that they seemed easy in comparison of
what we endured after his memorable death." When, in 1609, in a nobler
spirit than that of mere commercial enterprise, the reorganized Company,
under the new charter, was preparing the great reinforcement of five
hundred to go out under Lord de la Warr as governor of the colony,
counsel was taken with Abbot, the Puritan Bishop of London, himself a
member of the Virginia Company, and Richard Buck was selected as a
worthy successor to Robert Hunt in the office of chaplain. Such he
proved himself. Sailing in advance of the governor, in the ship with Sir
Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers, and wrecked with them off the
Bermudas, he did not forget his duty in the "plenty, peace, and ease" of
that paradise. The ship's bell was rescued from the wreck to ring for
morning and evening prayer, and for the two sermons every Sunday. There
were births and funerals and a marriage in the shipwrecked company, and
at length, when their makeshift vessel was ready, they embarked for
their desired haven, there to find only the starving threescore
survivors of the colony. They gathered together, a pitiable remnant, in
the church, where Master Buck "made a zealous and sorrowful prayer"; and
at once, without losing a day, they embarked for a last departure from
Virginia, but were met at the mouth of the river by the tardy ships of
Lord de la Warr. The next morning, Sunday, June 10, 1610, Lord de la
Warr landed at the fort, where Gates had drawn up his forlorn platoon of
starving men to receive him. The governor fell on his knees in prayer,
then led the way to the church, and, after service and a sermon from
the chaplain, made an address, assuming command of the colony.
Armed, under the new charter, with adequate authority, the new governor
was not slow in putting on the state of a viceroy. Among his first cares
was to provide for the external dignity of worship. The church, a
building sixty feet by twenty-four, built long enough before to be now
in need of repairs, was put into good condition, and a brave sight it
was on Sundays to see the Governor, with the Privy Council and the
Lieutenant-General and the Admiral and the Vice-Admiral and the Master
of the Horse, together with the body-guard of fifty halberdiers in fair
red cloaks, commanded by Captain Edward Brewster, assembled for worship,
the governor seated in the choir in a green velvet chair, with a velvet
cushion on a table before him. Few things could have been better adapted
to convince the peculiar public of Jamestown that divine worship was
indeed a serious matter. There was something more than the parade of
government manifested by his lordship in the few months of his reign;
but the inauguration of strong and effective control over the lazy,
disorderly, and seditious crowd to be dealt with at Jamestown was
reserved for his successor, Sir Thomas Dale, who arrived in May, 1611,
in company with the Rev. Alexander Whitaker, the "apostle of Virginia."
It will not be possible for any to understand the relations of this
colony to the state of parties in England without distinctly recognizing
that the Puritans were not a party _against_ the Church of England, but
a party _in_ the Church of England. The Puritan party was the party of
reform, and was strong in a deep fervor of religious conviction widely
diffused among people and clergy, and extending to the highest places of
the nobility and the episcopate. The anti-Puritan party was the
conservative or reactionary party, strong in the _vis inertiæ_, and in
the king's pig-headed prejudices and his monstrous conceit of
theological ability and supremacy in the church; strong also in a
considerable adhesion and zealous coöperation from among his nominees,
the bishops. The religious division was also a political one, the
Puritans being known as the party of the people, their antagonists as
the court party. The struggle of the Puritans (as distinguished from the
inconsiderable number of the Separatists) was for the maintenance of
their rights within the church; the effort of their adversaries, with
the aid of the king's prerogative, was to drive or harry them out of the
church. It is not to be understood that the two parties were as yet
organized as such and distinctly bounded; but the two tendencies were
plainly recognized, and the sympathies of leading men in church or state
were no secret.
The Virginia Company was a Puritan corporation.[44:1] As such, its
meetings and debates were the object of popular interest and of the
royal jealousy. Among its corporators were the brothers Sandys, sons of
the Puritan Archbishop of York, one of whom held the manor of Scrooby.
Others of the corporation were William Brewster, of Scrooby, and his son
Edward. In the fleet of Sir Thomas Gates, May, 1609, were noted
Puritans, one of whom, Stephen Hopkins, "who had much knowledge in the
Scriptures and could reason well therein," was clerk to that "painful
preacher," but not strict conformist, Master Richard Buck. The intimate
and sometimes official relations of the Virginia Company not only with
leading representatives of the Puritan party, but with the Pilgrims of
Leyden, whom they would gladly have received into their own colony, are
matter of history and of record. It admits of proof that there was a
steady purpose in the Company, so far as it was not thwarted by the king
and the bishops of the court party, to hold their unruly and
ill-assorted colony under Puritan influences both of church and
government.[45:1] The fact throws light on the remoter as well as the
nearer history of Virginia. Especially it throws light on the memorable
administration of Sir Thomas Dale, which followed hard upon the
departure of Lord de la Warr and his body-guard in red cloaks.
The Company had picked their man with care--"a man of good conscience
and knowledge in divinity," and a soldier and disciplinarian proved in
the wars of the Low Countries--a very prototype of the great Cromwell.
He understood what manner of task he had undertaken, and executed it
without flinching. As a matter of course--it was the way in that
colony--there was a conspiracy against his authority. There was no
second conspiracy under him. Punishment was inflicted on the ringleaders
so swift, so terrible, as to paralyze all future sedition. He put in
force, in the name of the Company, a code of "Laws, Divine, Moral, and
Martial," to which no parallel can be found in the severest legislation
of New England. An invaluable service to the colony was the abolition of
that demoralizing socialism that had been enforced on the colonists, by
which all their labor was to be devoted to the common stock. He gave out
land in severalty, and the laborer enjoyed the fruits of his own
industry and thrift, or suffered the consequences of his laziness. The
culture of tobacco gave the colony a currency and a staple of export.
With Dale was associated as chaplain Alexander Whitaker, son of the
author of the Calvinistic Lambeth Articles, and brother of a Separatist
preacher of London. What was his position in relation to church parties
is shown by his letter to his cousin, the "arch-Puritan," William Gouge,
written after three years' residence in Virginia, urging that
nonconformist clergymen should come over to Virginia, where no question
would be raised on the subject of subscription or the surplice. What
manner of man and minister he was is proved by a noble record of
faithful work. He found a true workfellow in Dale. When this
statesmanlike and soldierly governor founded his new city of Henrico up
the river, and laid out across the stream the suburb of Hope-in-Faith,
defended by Fort Charity and Fort Patience, he built there in sight from
his official residence the parsonage of the "apostle of Virginia." The
course of Whitaker's ministry is described by himself in a letter to a
friend: "Every Sabbath day we preach in the forenoon and catechise in
the afternoon. Every Saturday, at night, I exercise in Sir Thomas Dale's
house." But he and his fellow-clergymen did not labor without aid, even
in word and doctrine. When Mr. John Rolfe was perplexed with questions
of duty touching his love for Pocahontas, it was to the old soldier,
Dale, that he brought his burden, seeking spiritual counsel. And it was
this "religious and valiant governor," as Whitaker calls him, this "man
of great knowledge in divinity, and of a good conscience in all things,"
that "labored long to ground the faith of Jesus Christ" in the Indian
maiden, and wrote concerning her, "Were it but for the gaining of this
one soul, I will think my time, toils, and present stay well spent."
The progress of the gospel in reclaiming the unhappy colony to
Christian civilization varies with the varying fortunes of contending
parties in England. Energetic efforts were made by the Company under
Sandys, the friend of Brewster, to send out worthy colonists; and the
delicate task of finding young women of good character to be shipped as
wives to the settlers was undertaken conscientiously and successfully.
Generous gifts of money and land were contributed (although little came
from them) for the endowment of schools and a college for the promotion
of Christ's work among the white people and the red. But the course of
events on both sides of the sea may be best illustrated by a narrative
of personal incidents.
In the year 1621, an East India Company's chaplain, the Rev. Patrick
Copland, who perhaps deserves the title of the first English missionary
in India, on his way back from India met, probably at the Canaries, with
ships bound for Virginia with emigrants. Learning from these something
of the needs of the plantation, he stirred up his fellow-passengers on
the "Royal James," and raised the sum of seventy pounds, which was paid
to the treasurer of the Virginia Company; and, being increased by other
gifts to one hundred and twenty-five pounds, was, in consultation with
Mr. Copland, appropriated for a free school to be called the "East India
School."
The affairs of the colony were most promising. It was growing in
population and in wealth and in the institutions of a Christian
commonwealth. The territory was divided into parishes for the work of
church and clergy. The stupid obstinacy of the king, against the
remonstrances of the Company, perpetrated the crime of sending out a
hundred convicts into the young community, extorting from Captain Smith
the protest that this act "hath laid one of the finest countries of
America under the just scandal of being a mere hell upon earth." The
sweepings of the London and Bristol streets were exported for servants.
Of darker portent, though men perceived it not, was the landing of the
first cargo of negro slaves. But so grateful was the Company for the
general prosperity of the colony that it appointed a thanksgiving sermon
to be preached at Bow Church, April 17, 1622, by Mr. Copland, which was
printed under the title, "Virginia's God Be Thanked." In July, 1622, the
Company, proceeding to the execution of a long-cherished plan, chose Mr.
Copland rector of the college to be built at Henrico from the endowments
already provided, when news arrived of the massacre which, in March of
that year, swept away one half of the four thousand colonists. All such
enterprises were at once arrested.
In 1624 the long contest of the king and the court party against the
Virginia Company was ended by a violent exercise of the prerogative
dissolving the Company, but not until it had established free
representative government in the colony. The revocation of the charter
was one of the last acts of James's ignoble reign. In 1625 he died, and
Charles I. became king. In 1628 "the most hot-headed and hard-hearted of
prelates," William Laud, became Bishop of London, and in 1633 Archbishop
of Canterbury. But the Puritan principles of duty and liberty already
planted in Virginia were not destined to be eradicated.
From the year 1619, a settlement at Nansemond, near Norfolk, had
prospered, and had been in relations of trade with New England. In 1642
Philip Bennett, of Nansemond, visiting Boston in his coasting vessel,
bore with him a letter to the Boston church, signed by seventy-four
names, stating the needs of their great county, now without a pastor,
and offering a maintenance to three good ministers if they could be
found. A little later William Durand, of the same county, wrote for
himself and his neighbors to John Davenport, of New Haven, to whom some
of them had listened gladly in London (perhaps it was when he preached
the first annual sermon before the Virginia Company in 1621), speaking
of "a revival of piety" among them, and urging the request that had been
sent to the church in Boston. As result of this correspondence, three
eminently learned and faithful ministers of New England came to
Virginia, bringing letters of commendation from Governor Winthrop. But
they found that Virginia, now become a royal colony, had no welcome for
them. The newly arrived royal governor, Sir William Berkeley, a man
after Laud's own heart, forbade their preaching; but the Catholic
governor of Maryland sent them a free invitation, and one of them,
removing to Annapolis with some of the Virginia Puritans, so labored in
the gospel as to draw forth the public thanks of the legislative
assembly.
The sequel of this story is a strange one. There must have been somewhat
in the character and bearing of these silenced and banished ministers
that touched the heart of Thomas Harrison, the governor's chaplain. He
made a confession of his insincere dealings toward them: that while he
had been showing them "a fair face" he had privately used his influence
to have them silenced. He himself began to preach in that earnest way of
righteousness, temperance, and judgment, which is fitted to make
governors tremble, until Berkeley cast him out as a Puritan, saying that
he did not wish so grave a chaplain; whereupon Harrison crossed the
river to Nansemond, became pastor of the church, and mightily built up
the cause which he had sought to destroy.
A few months later the Nansemond people had the opportunity of giving
succor and hospitality to a shipwrecked company of nine people, who had
been cast away, with loss of all their goods, in sailing from the
Bermudas to found a new settlement on one of the Bahamas. Among the
party was an aged and venerable man, that same Patrick Copland who
twenty-five years before had interested himself in the passing party of
emigrants. This was indeed entertaining an angel. Mr. Copland had long
been a nonconformist minister at the Bermudas, and he listened to the
complaints that were made to him of the persecution to which the people
were subjected by the malignant Berkeley. A free invitation was given to
the Nansemond church to go with their guests to the new settlement of
Eleuthera, in which freedom of conscience and non-interference of the
magistrate with the church were secured by charter.[50:1] Mr. Harrison
proceeded to Boston to take counsel of the churches over this
proposition. The people were advised by their Boston brethren to remain
in their lot until their case should become intolerable. Mr. Harrison
went on to London, where a number of things had happened since
Berkeley's appointment. The king had ceased to be; but an order from the
Council of State was sent to Berkeley, sharply reprimanding him for his
course, and directing him to restore Mr. Harrison to his parish. But Mr.
Harrison did not return. He fulfilled an honorable career as incumbent
of a London parish, as chaplain to Henry Cromwell, viceroy of Ireland,
and as a hunted and persecuted preacher in the evil days after the
Restoration. But the "poetic justice" with which this curious dramatic
episode should conclude is not reached until Berkeley is compelled to
surrender his jurisdiction to the Commonwealth, and Richard Bennett, one
of the banished Puritans of Nansemond, is chosen by the Assembly of
Burgesses to be governor in his stead.[51:1]
Of course this is a brief triumph. With the restoration of the Stuarts,
Berkeley comes back into power as royal governor, and for many years
afflicts the colony with his malignant Toryism. The last state is worse
than the first; for during the days of the Commonwealth old soldiers of
the king's army had come to Virginia in such numbers as to form an
appreciable and not wholly admirable element in the population.
Surrounded by such society, the governor was encouraged to indulge his
natural disposition to bigotry and tyranny. Under such a nursing father
the interests of the kingdom of Christ fared as might have been
expected. Rigorous measures were instituted for the suppression of
nonconformity, Quaker preachers were severely dealt with, and clergymen,
such as they were, were imposed upon the more or less reluctant
parishes. But though the governor held the right of presentation, the
vestry of each parish asserted and maintained the right of induction or
of refusing to induct. Without the consent of these representatives of
the people the candidate could secure for himself no more than the
people should from year to year consent to allow him. It was the only
protection of the people from absolute spiritual despotism. The power
might be used to repel a too faithful pastor, but if there was sometimes
a temptation to this, the occasion was far more frequent for putting the
people's reprobation upon the unfaithful and unfit. The colony, growing
in wealth and population, soon became infested with a rabble of
worthless and scandalous priests. In a report which has been often
quoted, Governor Berkeley, after giving account of the material
prosperity of the colony, sums up, under date of 1671, the results of
his fostering care over its spiritual interests in these words: "There
are forty-eight parishes, and the ministers well paid. The clergy by my
consent would be better if they would pray oftener and preach less. But
of all other commodities, so of this, the worst are sent us. But I thank
God there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not
have, these hundred years."
The scandal of the Virginia clergy went on from bad to worse. Whatever
could be done by the courage and earnestness of one man was done by Dr.
Blair, who arrived in 1689 with limited powers as commissary of the
Bishop of London, and for more than fifty years struggled against
adverse influences to recover the church from its degradation. He
succeeded in getting a charter for William and Mary College, but the
generous endowments of the institution were wasted, and the college
languished in doing the work of a grammar school. Something was
accomplished in the way of discipline, though the cane of Governor
Nicholson over the back of an insolent priest was doubtless more
effective than the commissary's admonitions. But discipline, while it
may do something toward abating scandals, cannot create life from the
dead; and the church established in Virginia had hardly more than a name
to live. Its best estate is described by Spotswood, the best of the
royal governors, when, looking on the outward appearance, he reported:
"This government is in perfect peace and tranquillity, under a due
obedience to the royal authority and a gentlemanly conformity to the
Church of England." The poor man was soon to find how uncertain is the
peace and tranquillity that is founded on "a gentlemanly conformity."
The most honorable page in his record is the story of his effort for
the education of Indian children. His honest attempt at reformation in
the church brought him into collision not only with the worthless among
the clergy, but also on the one hand with the parish vestries, and on
the other hand with Commissary Blair. But all along the "gentlemanly
conformity" was undisturbed. A parish of French Huguenots was early
established in Henrico County, and in 1713 a parish of German exiles on
the Rappahannock, and these were expressly excepted from the Act of
Uniformity. Aside from these, the chief departures from the enforced
uniformity of worship throughout the colony in the early years of the
eighteenth century were found in a few meetings of persecuted and
vilified Quakers and Baptists. The government and clergy had little
notion of the significance of a slender stream of Scotch-Irish
emigration which, as early as 1720, began to flow into the valley of the
Shenandoah. So cheap a defense against the perils that threatened from
the western frontier it would have been folly to discourage by odious
religious proscription. The reasonable anxiety of the clergy as to what
might come of this invasion of a sturdy and uncompromising Puritanism
struggled without permanent success against the obvious interest of the
commonwealth. The addition of this new and potent element to the
Christian population of the seaboard colonies was part of the
unrecognized preparation for the Great Awakening.
FOOTNOTES:
[41:1] Bancroft, vol. i., p. 138.
[44:1] See the interesting demonstration of this point in articles by E.
D. Neill in "Hours at Home," vol. vi., pp. 22, 201.
Mr. Neill's various publications on the colonial history of Virginia and
Maryland are of the highest value and authority. They include: "The
English Colonization of America During the Seventeenth Century";
"History of the Virginia Company"; "Virginia Vetusta"; "Virginia
Carolorum"; "Terra Mariæ; or, Threads of Maryland Colonial History";
"The Founders of Maryland"; "Life of Patrick Copland."
[45:1] It was customary for the Company, when a candidate was proposed
for a chaplaincy in the colony, to select a text for him and appoint a
Sunday and a church for a "trial sermon" from which they might judge of
his qualifications.
[50:1] The project of Eleuthera is entitled to honorable mention in the
history of religious liberty.
[51:1] For fuller details concerning the Puritan character of the
Virginia Company and of the early ministers of Virginia, see the
articles of E. D. Neill, above referred to, in "Hours at Home," vol. vi.
CHAPTER VI.
THE NEIGHBOR COLONIES TO VIRGINIA--MARYLAND AND THE CAROLINAS.
The chronological order would require us at this point to turn to the
Dutch settlements on the Hudson River; but the close relations of
Virginia with its neighbor colonies of Maryland and the Carolinas are a
reason for taking up the brief history of these settlements in advance
of their turn.
The occupation of Maryland dates from the year 1634. The period of bold
and half-desperate adventure in making plantations along the coast was
past. To men of sanguine temper and sufficient fortune and influence at
court, it was now a matter of very promising and not too risky
speculation. To George Calvert, Lord Baltimore, one of the most
interesting characters at the court of James I., the business had
peculiar fascination. He was in both the New England Company and the
Virginia Company, and after the charter of the latter was revoked he was
one of the Provisional Council for the government of Virginia. Nothing
daunted by the ill luck of these companies, he tried colonizing on his
account in 1620, in what was represented to him as the genial soil and
climate of Newfoundland. Sending good money after bad, he was glad to
get out of this venture at the end of nine years with a loss of thirty
thousand pounds. In 1629 he sent home his children, and with a lady and
servants and forty of his surviving colonists sailed for Jamestown,
where his reception at the hands of the council and of his old Oxford
fellow-student, Governor Pott, was not cordial. He could hardly have
expected that it would be. He was a recent convert to the Roman Catholic
Church, with a convert's zeal for proselyting, and he was of the court
party. Thus he was in antagonism to the Puritan colony both in politics
and in religion. A formidable disturbing element he and his company
would have been in the already unquiet community. The authorities of the
colony were equal to the emergency. In answer to his lordship's
announcement of his purpose "to plant and dwell," they gave him welcome
to do so on the same terms with themselves, and proceeded to tender him
the oath of supremacy, the taking of which was flatly against his Roman
principles. Baltimore suggested a mitigated form of the oath, which he
was willing to take; but the authorities "could not imagine that so much
latitude was left for them to decline from the prescribed form"; and his
lordship sailed back to England, leaving in Virginia, in token of his
intention to return, his servants and "his lady," who, by the way, was
not the lawful wife of this conscientious and religious gentleman.
Returned to London, he at once set in motion the powerful influences at
his command to secure a charter for a tract of land south of the James
River, and when this was defeated by the energetic opposition of the
friends of Virginia, he succeeded in securing a grant of land north and
east of the Potomac, with a charter bestowing on him and his heirs "the
most ample rights and privileges ever conferred by a sovereign of
England."[55:1] The protest of Virginia that it was an invasion of the
former grant to that colony was unavailing. The free-handed generosity
with which the Stuarts were in the habit of giving away what did not
belong to them rarely allowed itself to be embarrassed by the fear of
giving the same thing twice over to different parties.
The first Lord Baltimore died three months before the charter of
Maryland received the great seal, but his son Cecilius took up the
business with energy and great liberality of investment. The cost of
fitting out the first emigration was estimated at not less than forty
thousand pounds. The company consisted of "three hundred laboring men,
well provided in all things," headed by Leonard and George Calvert,
brothers of the lord proprietor, "with very near twenty other gentlemen
of very good fashion." Two earnest Jesuit priests were quietly added to
the expedition as it passed the Isle of Wight, but in general it was a
Protestant emigration under Catholic patronage. It was stipulated in the
charter that all liege subjects of the English king might freely
transport themselves and their families to Maryland. To discriminate
against any religious body in England would have been for the proprietor
to limit his hope of rapid colonization and revenue and to embroil
himself with political enemies at home. His own and his father's
intimate acquaintance with failure in the planting of Virginia and of
Newfoundland had taught him what not to do in such enterprises. If the
proprietor meant to succeed (and he _did_ mean to) he was shut up
without alternative to the policy of impartial non-interference with
religious differences among his colonists, and the promotion of mutual
forbearance among sects. Lord Baltimore may not have been a profound
political philosopher nor a prophet of the coming era of religious
liberty, but he was an adroit courtier, like his father before him, and
he was a man of practical good sense engaged in an enormous land
speculation in which his whole fortune was embarked, and he was not in
the least disposed to allow his religious predilections to interfere
with business. Nothing would have brought speedier ruin to his
enterprise than to have it suspected, as his enemies were always ready
to allege, that it was governed in the interest of the Roman Catholic
Church. Such a suspicion he took the most effective means of averting.
He kept his promises to his colonists in this matter in good faith, and
had his reward in the notable prosperity of his colony.[57:1]
The two priests of the first Maryland company began their work with
characteristic earnestness and diligence. Finding no immediate access to
the Indians, they gave the more constant attention to their own
countrymen, both Catholic and Protestant, and were soon able to give
thanks that by God's blessing on their labors almost all the Protestants
of that year's arrival had been converted, besides many others. In 1640
the first-fruits of their mission work among the savages were gathered
in; the chief of an Indian village on the Potomac nearly opposite Mount
Vernon, and his wife and child, were baptized with solemn pomp, in
which the governor and secretary of the colony took part.
The first start of the Maryland colony was of a sort to give promise of
feuds and border strifes with the neighbor colony of Virginia, and the
promise was abundantly fulfilled. The conflict over boundary questions
came to bloody collisions by land and sea. It is needless to say that
religious differences were at once drawn into the dispute. The vigorous
proselytism of the Jesuit fathers, the only Christian ministers in the
colony, under the patronage of the lord proprietor was of course
reported to London by the Virginians; and in December, 1641, the House
of Commons, then on the brink of open rupture with the king, presented a
remonstrance to Charles at Hampton Court, complaining that he had
permitted "another state, molded within this state, independent in
government, contrary in interest and affection, secretly corrupting the
ignorant or negligent professors of religion, and clearly uniting
themselves against such." Lord Baltimore, perceiving that his property
rights were coming into jeopardy, wrote to the too zealous priests,
warning them that they were under English law and were not to expect
from him "any more or other privileges, exemptions, or immunities for
their lands, persons, or goods than is allowed by his Majesty or
officers to like persons in England." He annulled the grants of land
made to the missionaries by certain Indian chiefs, which they affected
to hold as the property of their order, and confirmed for his colony the
law of mortmain. In his not unreasonable anxiety for the tenure of his
estate, he went further still; he had the Jesuits removed from the
charge of the missions, to be replaced by seculars, and only receded
from this severe measure when the Jesuit order acceded to his terms. The
pious and venerable Father White records in his journal that "occasion
of suffering has not been wanting from those from whom rather it was
proper to expect aid and protection, who, too intent upon their own
affairs, have not feared to violate the immunities of the church."[59:1]
But the zeal of the Calverts for religious liberty and equality was
manifested not only by curbing the Jesuits, but by encouraging their
most strenuous opponents. It was in the year 1643, when the strength of
Puritanism both in England and in New England was proved, that the
Calverts made overtures, although in vain, to secure an immigration from
Massachusetts. A few years later the opportunity occurred of
strengthening their own colony with an accession of Puritans, and at the
same time of weakening Virginia. The sturdy and prosperous Puritan
colony on the Nansemond River were driven by the churlish behavior of
Governor Berkeley to seek a more congenial residence, and were induced
to settle on the Severn at a place which they called Providence, but
which was destined, under the name of Annapolis, to become the capital
of the future State. It was manifestly not merely a coincidence that
Lord Baltimore appointed a Protestant governor, William Stone, and
commended to the Maryland Assembly, in 1649, the enacting of "an Act
concerning Religion," drawn upon the lines of the Ordinance of
Toleration adopted by the Puritan House of Commons at the height of its
authority, in 1647.[59:2] How potent was the influence of this
transplanted Nansemond church is largely shown in the eventful civil
history of the colony. When, in 1655, the lord proprietor's governor was
so imprudent as to set an armed force in the field, under the colors of
Lord Baltimore, in opposition to the parliamentary commissioners, it
was the planters of the Severn who marched under the flag of the
commonwealth of England, and put them to rout, and executed some of
their leaders for treason. When at last articles of agreement were
signed between the commissioners and Lord Baltimore, one of the
conditions exacted from his lordship was a pledge that he would never
consent to the repeal of the Act of Toleration adopted in 1649 under the
influence of the Puritan colony and its pastor, Thomas Harrison.
In the turbulence of the colony during and after the civil wars of
England, there becomes more and more manifest a growing spirit of
fanaticism, especially in the form of antipopery crusading. While
Jacobite intrigues or wars with France were in progress it was easy for
demagogues to cast upon the Catholics the suspicion of disloyalty and of
complicity with the public enemy. The numerical unimportance of the
Catholics of Maryland was insufficient to guard them from such
suspicions; for it had soon become obvious that the colony of the
Catholic lord was to be anything but a Catholic colony. The Jesuit
mission had languished; the progress of settlement, and what there had
been of religious life and teaching, had brought no strength to the
Catholic cause. In 1676 a Church of England minister, John Yeo, writes
to the Archbishop of Canterbury of the craving lack of ministers,
excepting among the Catholics and the Quakers, "not doubting but his
Grace may so prevail with Lord Baltimore that a maintenance for a
Protestant ministry may be established." The Bishop of London, echoing
this complaint, speaks of the "total want of ministers and divine
worship, except among those of the Romish belief, who, 'tis conjectured,
does not amount to one of a hundred of the people." To which his
lordship replies that all sects are tolerated and protected, but that
it would be impossible to induce the Assembly to consent to a law that
shall oblige any sect to maintain other ministers than its own. The
bishop's figures were doubtless at fault; but Lord Baltimore himself
writes that the nonconformists outnumber the Catholics and those of the
Church of England together about three to one, and that the churchmen
are much more numerous than the Catholics.
After the Revolution of 1688 it is not strange that a like movement was
set on foot in Maryland. The "beneficent despotism" of the Calverts,
notwithstanding every concession on their part, was ended for the time
by the efforts of an "Association for the Defense of the Protestant
Religion," and Maryland became a royal colony. Under the new régime it
was easier to inflict annoyances and disabilities on the petty minority
of the Roman Catholics than to confer the privileges of an established
church on the hardly more considerable minority of Episcopalians. The
Church of England became in name the official church of the colony, but
two parties so remotely unlike as the Catholics and the Quakers combined
successfully to defeat more serious encroachments on religious liberty.
The attempt to maintain the church of a small minority by taxes extorted
by a foreign government from the whole people had the same effect in
Maryland as in Ireland: it tended to make both church and government
odious. The efforts of Dr. Thomas Bray, commissary of the Bishop of
London, a man of true apostolic fervor, accomplished little in
withstanding the downward tendency of the provincial establishment. The
demoralized and undisciplined clergy resisted the attempt of the
provincial government to abate the scandal of their lives, and the
people resisted the attempt to introduce a bishop. The body thus set
before the people as the official representative of the religion of
Christ "was perhaps as contemptible an ecclesiastical organization as
history can show," having "all the vices of the Virginian church,
without one of its safeguards or redeeming qualities."[62:1] The most
hopeful sign in the morning sky of the eighteenth century was to be
found in the growth of the Society of Friends and the swelling of the
current of the Scotch-Irish immigration. And yet we shall have proof
that the life-work of Commissary Bray, although he went back discouraged
from his labors in Maryland and although this colony took little direct
benefit from his efforts in England, was destined to have great results
in the advancement of the kingdom of Christ in America; for he was the
founder of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign
Parts.
The Carolinas, North and South, had been the scene of the earliest
attempts at Protestant colonization in America. The Huguenot enterprise
at Beaufort, on Port Royal harbor, was planted in 1562 under the
auspices of Coligny, and came to a speedy and unhappy end. The costly
and disastrous experiment of Sir Walter Raleigh was begun in 1584 on
Roanoke Island, and lasted not many months. But the actual occupation of
the region was late and slow. When, after the Restoration, Charles II.
took up the idea of paying his political debts with free and easy
cessions of American lands, Clarendon, Albemarle, and Shaftesbury were
among the first and luckiest in the scramble. When the representatives
of themselves and their partners arrived in Carolina in 1670, bringing
with them that pompous and preposterous anachronism, the "Fundamental
Constitutions," contrived by the combined wisdom of Shaftesbury and John
Locke to impose a feudal government upon an immense domain of
wilderness, they found the ground already occupied with a scanty and
curiously mixed population, which had taken on a simple form of polity
and was growing into a state. The region adjoining Virginia was peopled
by Puritans from the Nansemond country, vexed with the paltry
persecutions of Governor Berkeley, and later by fugitives from the
bloody revenge which he delighted to inflict on those who had been
involved in the righteous rebellion led by Nathaniel Bacon. These had
been joined by insolvent debtors not a few. Adventurers from New England
settled on the Cape Fear River for a lumber trade, and kept the various
plantations in communication with the rest of the world by their
coasting craft plying to Boston. Dissatisfied companies from Barbadoes
seeking a less torrid climate next arrived. Thus the region was settled
in the first instance at second hand from older colonies. To these came
settlers direct from England, such emigrants as the proprietors could
persuade to the undertaking, and such as were impelled by the evil state
of England in the last days of the Stuarts, or drawn by the promise of
religious liberty.
South Carolina, on the other hand, was settled direct from Europe, first
by cargoes of emigrants shipped on speculation by the great real-estate
"operators" who had at heart not only the creation of a gorgeous
aristocracy in the West, but also the realization of fat dividends on
their heavy ventures. Members of the dominant politico-religious party
in England were attracted to a country in which they were still to be
regarded before the law as of the "only true and orthodox" church; and
religious dissenters gladly accepted the offer of toleration and
freedom, even without the assurance of equality. One of the most notable
contributions to the new colony was a company of dissenters from
Somersetshire, led by Joseph Blake, brother to Cromwell's illustrious
admiral. Among these were some of the earliest American Baptists; and
there is clear evidence of connection between their arrival and the
coming, in 1684, of a Baptist church from the Massachusetts Colony,
under the pastorate of William Screven. This planting was destined to
have an important influence both on the religious and on the civil
history of the colony. Very early there came two ship-loads of Dutch
Calvinists from New York, dissatisfied with the domineering of their
English victors. But more important than the rest was that sudden
outflow of French Huguenots, representing not only religious fidelity
and devotion, but all those personal and social virtues that most
strengthen the foundations of a state, which set westward upon the
revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. This, with the later influx
of the Scotch-Irish, profoundly marked the character of South Carolina.
The great names in her history are generally either French or Scotch.
It ought to have been plain to the proprietors, in their monstrous
conceit of political wisdom, that communities so constituted should have
been the last on which to impose the uniformity of an established
church. John Locke did see this, but was overruled. The Church of
England was established in name, but for long years had only this shadow
of existence. We need not, however, infer from the absence of organized
church and official clergy among the rude and turbulent pioneers of
North Carolina that the kingdom of God was not among them, even from the
beginning. But not until the year 1672 do we find manifestation of it
such as history can recognize. In that year came William Edmundson, "the
voice of one crying in the wilderness," bringing his testimony of the
light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. The honest
man, who had not thought it reasonable in the Christians of
Massachusetts to be offended at one's sitting in the steeple-house with
his hat on, found it an evidence that "they had little or no religion"
when the rough woodsmen of Carolina beguiled the silent moments of the
Friends' devotions by smoking their pipes; and yet he declares that he
found them "a tender people." Converts were won to the society, and a
quarterly meeting was established. Within a few months followed George
Fox, uttering his deep convictions in a voice of singular persuasiveness
and power, that reached the hearts of both high and low. And he too
declared that he had found the people "generally tender and open," and
rejoiced to have made among them "a little entrance for truth." The
church of Christ had been begun. As yet there had been neither baptism
nor sacramental supper; these outward and visible signs were absent; but
inward and spiritual grace was there, and the thing signified is greater
than the sign. The influence diffused itself like leaven. Within a
decade the society was extended through both the Carolinas and became
the principal form of organized Christianity. It was reckoned in 1710 to
include one seventh of the population of North Carolina.[65:1]
The attempt of a foreign proprietary government to establish by law the
church of an inconsiderable and not preëminently respectable minority
had little effect except to exasperate and alienate the settlers. Down
to the end of the seventeenth century the official church in North
Carolina gave no sign of life. In South Carolina almost twenty years
passed before it was represented by a single clergyman. The first
manifestation of church life seems to have been in the meetings on the
banks of the Cooper and the Santee, in which the French refugees
worshiped their fathers' God with the psalms of Marot and Beza.
But with the eighteenth century begins a better era for the English
church in the Carolinas. The story of the founding and the work of the
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, taken in
connection with its antecedents and its results, belongs to this
history, not only as showing the influence of European Christianity upon
America, but also as indicating the reaction of America upon Europe.
In an important sense the organization of religious societies which is
characteristic of modern Christendom is of American origin. The labors
of John Eliot among the Indians of New England stirred so deep an
interest in the hearts of English Christians that in 1649 an ordinance
was passed by the Long Parliament creating a corporation to be called
"The President and Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New
England"; and a general collection made under Cromwell's direction
produced nearly twelve thousand pounds, from the income of which
missionaries were maintained among some of the Northern tribes of
Indians. With the downfall of the Commonwealth the corporation became
defunct; but through the influence of the saintly Richard Baxter, whose
tender interest in the work of Eliot is witnessed by a touching passage
in his writings, the charter was revived in 1662, with Robert Boyle for
president and patron. It was largely through his generosity that Eliot
was enabled to publish his Indian Bible. This society, "The New England
Company," as it is called, is still extant--the oldest of Protestant
missionary societies.[66:1]
It is to that Dr. Thomas Bray who returned in 1700 to England from his
thankless and discouraging work as commissary in Maryland of the Bishop
of London, that the Church of England owes a large debt of gratitude for
having taken away the reproach of her barrenness. Already his zeal had
laid the foundations on which was reared the Society for the Promotion
of Christian Knowledge. In 1701 he had the satisfaction of attending the
first meeting of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in
Foreign Parts, which for nearly three quarters of a century, sometimes
in the spirit of a narrow sectarianism, but not seldom in a more
excellent way, devoted its main strength to missions in the American
colonies. Its missionaries, men of a far different character from the
miserable incumbents of parishes in Maryland and Virginia, were among
the first preachers of the gospel in the Carolinas. Within the years
1702-40 there served under the commission of this society in North
Carolina nine missionaries, in South Carolina thirty-five.[67:1]
But the zeal of these good men was sorely encumbered with the armor of
Saul. Too much favorable legislation and patronizing from a foreign
proprietary government, too arrogant a tone of superiority on the part
of official friends, attempts to enforce conformity by imposing
disabilities on other sects--these were among the chief occasions of the
continual collision between the people and the colonial governments,
which culminated in the struggle for independence. By the time that
struggle began the established church in the Carolinas was ready to
vanish away.
FOOTNOTES:
[55:1] W. H. Browne, "Maryland" (in American Commonwealths), p. 18.
[57:1] This seems to be the whole explanation of the curious paradox
that the first experiment of religious liberty and equality before the
law among all Christian sects should have been made apparently under the
auspices of that denomination which alone at the present day continues
to maintain in theory that it is the duty of civil government to enforce
sound doctrine by pains and penalties. We would not grudge the amplest
recognition of Lord Baltimore's faith or magnanimity or political
wisdom; but we have failed to find evidence of his rising above the
plane of the smart real-estate speculator, willing to be all things to
all men, if so he might realize on his investments. Happily, he was
clear-sighted enough to perceive that his own interest was involved in
the liberty, contentment, and prosperity of his colonists.
Mr. E. D. Neill, who has excelled other writers in patient and exact
study of the original sources of this part of colonial history,
characterizes Cecilius, second Lord Baltimore, as "one whose whole life
was passed in self-aggrandizement, first deserting Father White, then
Charles I., and making friends of Puritans and republicans to secure the
rentals of the province of Maryland, and never contributing a penny for
a church or school-house" ("English Colonization of America," p. 258).
[59:1] Browne, pp. 54-57; Neill, _op. cit._, pp. 270-274.
[59:2] The act of Parliament provided full religious liberty for
dissenters from the established order, save only "so as nothing be done
by them to the disturbance of the peace of the kingdom."
[62:1] H. C. Lodge, "British Colonies in America," pp. 119-124, with
authorities cited. The severe characterization seems to be sustained by
the evidence.
[65:1] Tiffany, "Protestant Episcopal Church," p. 237.
[66:1] "Digest of S. P. G. Records," pp. 2, 3; "Encyclopædia
Britannica," vol. xvi., p. 514.
[67:1] "Digest of S. P. G. Records," pp. 849, 850.
CHAPTER VII.
THE DUTCH CALVINIST COLONY ON THE HUDSON AND THE SWEDISH LUTHERAN COLONY
ON THE DELAWARE--THEY BOTH FALL UNDER THE SHADOW OF GREAT BRITAIN.
When the Englishman Henry Hudson, in the Dutch East India Company's
ship, the "Half-moon," in September, 1609, sailed up "the River of
Mountains" as far as the site of Albany, looking for the northwest
passage to China, the English settlement at Jamestown was in the third
year of its half-perishing existence. More than thirteen years were yet
to pass before the Pilgrims from England by way of Holland should make
their landing on Plymouth Rock.
But we are not at liberty to assign so early a date to the Dutch
settlement of New York, and still less to the church. There was a prompt
reaching out, on the part of the immensely enterprising Dutch merchants,
after the lucrative trade in peltries; there was a plying to and fro of
trading-vessels, and there were trading-posts established on Manhattan
Island and at the head of navigation on the Hudson, or North River, and
on the South River, or Delaware. Not until the great Dutch West India
Company had secured its monopoly of trade and perfected its
organization, in 1623, was there a beginning of colonization. In that
year a company of Walloons, or French-speaking Hollanders, was planted
near Albany, and later arrivals were settled on the Delaware, on Long
Island, and on Manhattan. At length, in 1626, came Peter Minuit with an
ample commission from the all-powerful Company, who organized something
like a system of civil government comprehending all the settlements.
Evidences of prosperity and growing wealth began to multiply. But one is
impressed with the merely secular and commercial character of the
enterprise and with the tardy and feeble signs of religious life in the
colony. In 1626, when the settlement of Manhattan had grown to a village
of thirty houses and two hundred souls, there arrived two official
"sick-visitors," who undertook some of the public duties of a pastor. On
Sundays, in the loft over the horse-mill, they would read from the
Scriptures and the creeds. And two years later, in 1628, the village,
numbering now about two hundred and seventy souls, gave a grateful
welcome to Jonas Michaelius, minister of the gospel. He rejoiced to
gather no less than fifty communicants at the first celebration of the
Lord's Supper, and to organize them into a church according to the
Reformed discipline. The two elders were the governor and the Company's
storekeeper, men of honest report who had served in like functions in
churches of the fatherland. The records of this period are scanty; the
very fact of this beginning of a church and the presence of a minister
in the colony had faded out of history until restored by the recent
discovery of a letter of the forgotten Michaelius.[69:1]
The sagacious men in control of the Dutch West India Company were quick
to recognize that weakness in their enterprise which in the splendid
colonial attempt of the French proved ultimately to be fatal. Their
settlements were almost exclusively devoted to the lucrative trade with
the Indians and were not taking root in the soil. With all its
advantages, the Dutch colony could not compete with New England.[70:1]
To meet this difficulty an expedient was adopted which was not long in
beginning to plague the inventors. A vast tract of territory, with
feudal rights and privileges, was offered to any man settling a colony
of fifty persons. The disputes which soon arose between these powerful
vassals and the sovereign Company had for one effect the recall of Peter
Minuit from his position of governor. Never again was the unlucky colony
to have so competent and worthy a head as this discarded elder of the
church. Nevertheless the scheme was not altogether a failure.
In 1633 arrived a new pastor, Everard Bogardus, in the same ship with a
schoolmaster--the first in the colony--and the new governor, Van
Twiller. The governor was incompetent and corrupt, and the minister was
faithful and plain-spoken; what could result but conflict? During Van
Twiller's five years of mismanagement, nevertheless, the church emerged
from the mill-loft and was installed in a barn-like meeting-house of
wood. During the equally wretched administration of Kieft, the governor,
listening to the reproaches of a guest, who quoted the example of New
England, where the people were wont to build a fine church as soon as
they had houses for themselves, was incited to build a stone church
within the fort. There seems to have been little else that he did for
the kingdom of heaven. Pastor Bogardus is entitled to the respect of
later ages for the chronic quarrel that he kept up with the worthless
representatives of the Company. At length his righteous rebuke of an
atrociously wicked massacre of neighboring Indians perpetrated by Kieft
brought matters to a head. The two antagonists sailed in the same ship,
in 1647, to lay their dispute before the authorities in Holland, the
Company and the classis. The case went to a higher court. The ship was
cast away and both the parties were drowned.
Meanwhile the patroon Van Rensselaer, on his great manor near Albany,
showed some sense of his duty to the souls of the people whom he had
brought out into the wilderness. He built a church and put into the
pastoral charge over his subjects one who, under his travestied name of
Megapolensis, has obtained a good report as a faithful minister of Jesus
Christ. It was he who saved Father Jogues, the Jesuit missionary, from
imminent torture and death among the Mohawks, and befriended him, and
saw him safely off for Europe. This is one honorable instance, out of
not a few, of personal respect and kindness shown to members of the
Roman clergy and the Jesuit society by men who held these organizations
in the severest reprobation. To his Jesuit brother he was drawn by a
peculiarly strong bond of fellowship, for the two were fellow-laborers
in the gospel to the red men. For Domine Megapolensis is claimed[71:1]
the high honor of being the first Protestant missionary to the Indians.
In 1647, to the joy of all the colonists, arrived a new governor, Peter
Stuyvesant, not too late to save from utter ruin the colony that had
suffered everything short of ruin from the incompetency and wickedness
of Kieft. About the time that immigration into New England ceased with
the triumph of the Puritan party in England, there began to be a
distinct current of population setting toward the Hudson River colony.
The West India Company had been among the first of the speculators in
American lands to discover that a system of narrow monopoly is not the
best nurse for a colony; too late to save itself from ultimate
bankruptcy, it removed some of the barriers of trade, and at once
population began to flow in from other colonies, Virginia and New
England. Besides those who were attracted by the great business
advantages of the Dutch colony, there came some from Massachusetts,
driven thence by the policy of exclusiveness in religious opinion
deliberately adopted there. Ordinances were set forth assuring to
several such companies "liberty of conscience, according to the custom
and manner of Holland." Growing prosperously in numbers, the colony grew
in that cosmopolitan diversity of sects and races which went on
increasing with its years. As early as 1644 Father Jogues was told by
the governor that there were persons of eighteen different languages at
Manhattan, including Calvinists, Catholics, English Puritans, Lutherans,
Anabaptists (here called Mennonists), etc. No jealousy seems to have
arisen over this multiplication of sects until, in 1652, the Dutch
Lutherans, who had been attendants at the Dutch Reformed Church,
presented a respectful petition that they might be permitted to have
their own pastor and church. Denied by Governor Stuyvesant, the request
was presented to the Company and to the States-General. The two Reformed
pastors used the most strenuous endeavors through the classis of
Amsterdam to defeat the petition, under the fear that the concession of
this privilege would tend to the diminution of their congregation. This
resistance was successfully maintained until at last the petitioners
were able to obtain from the Roman Catholic Duke of York the religious
freedom which Dutch Calvinism had failed to give them.
Started thus in the wrong direction, it was easy for the colonial
government to go from bad to worse. At a time when the entire force of
Dutch clergy in the colony numbered only four, they were most
unapostolically zealous to prevent any good from being done by
"unauthorized conventicles and the preaching of unqualified persons,"
and procured the passing of an ordinance forbidding these under penalty
of fine and imprisonment. The mild remonstrances of the Company, which
was eager to get settlers without nice inquiries as to their religious
opinions, had little effect to restrain the enterprising orthodoxy of
Peter Stuyvesant. The activity of the Quakers among the Long Island
towns stirred him to new energy. Not only visiting missionaries, but
quiet dwellers at home, were subjected to severe and ignominious
punishments. The persecution was kept up until one of the banished
Friends, John Bowne, reached Amsterdam and laid the case before the
Company. This enlightened body promptly shortened the days of
tribulation by a letter to the superserviceable Stuyvesant, conceived in
a most commercial spirit. It suggested to him that it was doubtful
whether further persecution was expedient, unless it was desired to
check the growth of population, which at that stage of the enterprise
ought rather to be encouraged. No man, they said, ought to be molested
so long as he disturbed neither his neighbors nor the government. "This
maxim has always been the guide of the magistrates of this city, and the
consequence has been that from every land people have flocked to this
asylum. Tread thus in their steps, and we doubt not you will be
blessed."
The stewardship of the interests of the kingdom of Christ in the New
Netherlands was about to be taken away from the Dutch West India
Company and the classis of Amsterdam. It will hardly be claimed by any
that the account of their stewardship was a glorious one. The supply of
ministers of the gospel had been tardy, inconstant, and scanty. At the
time when the Dutch ministers were most active in hindering the work of
others, there were only four of themselves in a vast territory with a
rapidly increasing population. The clearest sign of spiritual life in
the first generation of the colony is to be found in the righteous
quarrel of Domine Bogardus with the malignant Kieft, and the large
Christian brotherly kindness, the laborious mission work among the
Indians, and the long-sustained pastoral faithfulness of Domine
Megapolensis.
Doubtless there is a record in heaven of faithful living and serving of
many true disciples among this people, whose names are unknown on earth;
but in writing history it is only with earthly memorials that we have to
do. The records of the Dutch régime present few indications of such
religious activity on the part of the colonists as would show that they
regarded religion otherwise than as something to be imported from
Holland at the expense of the Company.
A studious and elegant writer, Mr. Douglas Campbell, has presented in
two ample and interesting volumes[74:1] the evidence in favor of his
thesis that the characteristic institutions established by the Puritans
in New England were derived, directly or indirectly, not from England,
but from Holland. One of the gravest answers to an argument which
contains so much to command respect is found in the history of the New
Netherlands. In the early records of no one of the American colonies is
there less manifestation of the Puritan characteristics than in the
records of the colony that was absolutely and exclusively under Dutch
control and made up chiefly of Dutch settlers. Nineteen years from the
beginning of the colony there was only one church in the whole extent of
it; at the end of thirty years there were only two churches. After ten
years of settlement the first schoolmaster arrived; and after thirty-six
years a Latin school was begun, for want of which up to that time young
men seeking a classical education had had to go to Boston for it. In no
colony does there appear less of local self-government or of central
representative government, less of civil liberty, or even of the
aspiration for it. The contrast between the character of this colony and
the heroic antecedents of the Dutch in Holland is astonishing and
inexplicable. The sordid government of a trading corporation doubtless
tended to depress the moral tone of the community, but this was an evil
common to many of the colonies. Ordinances, frequently renewed, for the
prevention of disorder and brawling on Sunday and for restricting the
sale of strong drinks, show how prevalent and obstinate were these
evils. In 1648 it is boldly asserted in the preamble to a new law that
one fourth of the houses in New Amsterdam were devoted to the sale of
strong drink. Not a hopeful beginning for a young commonwealth.
* * * * *
Before bidding a willing good-bye to the Dutch régime of the New
Netherlands, it remains to tell the story of another colony, begun under
happy auspices, but so short-lived that its rise and fall are a mere
episode in the history of the Dutch colony.
As early as 1630, under the feudal concessions of the Dutch West India
Company, extensive tracts had been taken on the South River, or
Delaware, and, after purchase from the Indians, settled by a colony
under the conduct of the best of all the Dutch leaders, De Vries.
Quarrels with the Indians arose, and at the end of a twelvemonth the
colony was extinguished in blood. The land seemed to be left free for
other occupants.
Years before, the great Gustavus Adolphus had pondered and decided on an
enterprise of colonization in America.[76:1] The exigencies of the
Thirty Years' War delayed the execution of his plan, but after the fatal
day of Lützen the project resumed by the fit successor of Gustavus in
the government of Sweden, the Chancellor Oxenstiern. Peter Minuit, who
had been rejected from his place as the first governor of New Amsterdam,
tendered to the Swedes the aid of his experience and approved wisdom;
and in the end of the year 1637, against the protest of Governor Kieft,
the strong foundations of a Swedish Lutheran colony were laid on the
banks of the Delaware. A new purchase was made of the Indians (who had
as little scruple as the Stuart kings about disposing of the same land
twice over to different parties), including the lands from the mouth of
the bay to the falls near Trenton. A fort was built where now stands the
city of Wilmington, and under the protection of its walls Christian
worship was begun by the first pastor, Torkillus. Strong reinforcements
arrived in 1643, with the energetic Governor Printz and that man of
"unwearied zeal in always propagating the love of God," the Rev. John
Campanius, who through faith has obtained a good report by his brief
most laborious ministry both to his fellow-countrymen and to the
Delaware Indians.
The governor fixed his residence at Tinicum, now almost included within
the vast circumference of Philadelphia, and there, forty years before
the arrival of William Penn, Campanius preached the gospel of peace in
two languages, to the red men and to the white.
The question of the Swedish title, raised at the outset by the protest
of the Dutch governor, could not long be postponed. It was suddenly
precipitated on the arrival of Governor Rising, in 1654, by his capture
of Fort Casimir, which the Dutch had built for the practical assertion
of their claim. It seems a somewhat grotesque act of piety on the part
of the Swedes, when, having celebrated the festival of Trinity Sunday by
whipping their fellow-Christians out of the fort, they commemorated the
good work by naming it the Fort of the Holy Trinity. It was a fatal
victory. The next year came Governor Stuyvesant with an overpowering
force and demanded and received the surrender of the colony to the
Dutch. Honorable terms of surrender were conceded; among them, against
the protest, alas! of good Domine Megapolensis, was the stipulation of
religious liberty for the Lutherans.
It was the end of the Swedish colony, but not at once of the church. The
Swedish community of some seven hundred souls, cut off from
reinforcement and support from the fatherland, cherished its language
and traditions and the mold of doctrine in which it had been shaped;
after more than forty years the reviving interest of the mother church
was manifested by the sending out of missionaries to seek and succor the
daughter long absent and neglected in the wilderness. Two venerable
buildings, the Gloria Dei Church in the southern part of Philadelphia,
and the Old Swedes' Church at Wilmington, remain as monuments of the
honorable story. The Swedish language ceased to be spoken; the people
became undistinguishably absorbed in the swiftly multiplying population
about them.
* * * * *
It was a short-lived triumph in which the Dutch colony reduced the
Swedish under its jurisdiction. It only prepared a larger domain for it
to surrender, in its turn, to superior force. With perfidy worthy of
the House of Stuart, the newly restored king of England, having granted
to his brother, the Duke of York, territory already plighted to others
and territory already occupied by a friendly power, stretching in all
from the Connecticut to the Delaware, covered his designs with friendly
demonstrations, and in a time of profound peace surprised the quiet town
of New Amsterdam with a hostile fleet and land force and a peremptory
demand for surrender. The only hindrance interposed was a few hours of
vain and angry bluster from Stuyvesant. The indifference of the Dutch
republic, which had from the beginning refused its colony any promise of
protection, and the sordid despotism of the Company, and the arrogant
contempt of popular rights manifested by its governors, seem to have
left no spark of patriotic loyalty alive in the population. With inert
indifference, if not even with satisfaction, the colony transferred its
allegiance to the British crown, henceforth sovereign from Maine to the
Carolinas. The rights of person and property, religious liberty, and
freedom of trade were stipulated in the capitulation.
The British government was happy in the character of Colonel Nicolls,
who came as commandant of the invading expedition and remained as
governor. Not only faithful to the terms of the surrender, but
considerate of the feelings and interests of the conquered province, he
gave the people small reason to regret the change of government. The
established Dutch church not only was not molested, but was continued in
full possession of its exceptional privileges. And it continued to
languish. At the time of the surrender the province contained "three
cities, thirty villages, and ten thousand inhabitants,"[78:1] and for
all these there were six ministers. The six soon dribbled away to
three, and for ten years these three continued without reinforcement.
This extreme feebleness of the clergy, the absence of any vigorous
church life among the laity, and the debilitating notion that the power
and the right to preach the gospel must be imported from Holland, put
the Dutch church at such a disadvantage as to invite aggression. Later
English governors showed no scruple in violating the spirit of the terms
of surrender and using their official power and influence to force the
establishment of the English church against the almost unanimous will of
the people. Property was unjustly taken and legal rights infringed to
this end, but the end was not attained. Colonel Morris, an earnest
Anglican, warned his friends against the folly of taking by force the
salaries of ministers chosen by the people and paying them over to "the
ministers of the church." "It may be a means of subsisting those
ministers, but they won't make many converts among a people who think
themselves very much injured." The pious efforts of Governor Fletcher,
the most zealous of these official propagandists, are even more severely
characterized in a dispatch of his successor, the Earl of Bellomont:
"The late governor, ... under the notion of a Church of England to be
put in opposition to the Dutch and French churches established here,
supported a few rascally English, who are a scandal to their nation and
the Protestant religion."[79:1] Evidently such support would have for
its main effect to make the pretended establishment odious to the
people. Colonel Morris sharply points out the impolicy as well as the
injustice of the course adopted, claiming that his church would have
been in a much better position without this political aid, and citing
the case of the Jerseys and Pennsylvania, where nothing of the kind had
been attempted, and where, nevertheless, "there are four times the
number of churchmen that there are in this province of New York; and
they are so, most of them, upon principle, whereas nine parts in ten of
ours will add no great credit to whatever church they are of."[80:1]
It need not be denied that government patronage, even when dispensed by
the dirty hands of such scurvy nursing fathers as Fletcher and Lord
Cornbury, may give strength of a certain sort to a religious
organization. Whatever could be done in the way of endowment or of
social preferment in behalf of the English church was done eagerly. But
happily this church had a better resource than royal governors in the
well-equipped and sustained, and generally well-chosen, army of
missionaries of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Not fewer
than fifty-eight of them were placed by the society in this single
province. And if among them there were those who seemed to "preach
Christ of envy and strife," as if the great aim of the preacher of the
gospel were to get a man out of one Christian sect into another, there
were others who showed a more Pauline and more Christian conception of
their work, taking their full share of the task of bringing the
knowledge of Christ to the unevangelized, whether white, red, or
black.[80:2]
The diversity of organization which was destined to characterize the
church in the province of New York was increased by the inflow of
population from New England. The settlement of Long Island was from the
beginning Puritan English. The Hudson Valley began early to be occupied
by New Englanders bringing with them their pastors. In 1696 Domine
Selyns, the only Dutch pastor in New York City, in his annual report
congratulates himself, "Our number is now full," meaning that there are
four Dutch ministers in the whole province of New York, and adds: "In
the country places here there are many English preachers, mostly from
New England. They were ordained there, having been in a large measure
supplied by the University of Cambridge [Mass.]." The same letter gives
the names of the three eminent French pastors ministering to the
communities of Huguenot refugees at New Rochelle and New York and
elsewhere in the neighborhood. The Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, more
important to the history of the opening century than any of the rest,
were yet to enter.
The spectacle of the ancient Dutch church thus dwindling, and seemingly
content to dwindle, to one of the least of the tribes, is not a cheerful
one, nor one easy to understand. But out of this little and dilapidated
Bethlehem was to come forth a leader. Domine Frelinghuysen, arriving in
America in 1720, was to begin a work of training for the ministry, which
would result, in 1784, in the establishment of the first American
professorship of theology;[81:1] and by the fervor of his preaching he
was to win the signal glory of bringing in the Great Awakening.
FOOTNOTES:
[69:1] Dr. E. T. Corwin, "History of the Reformed (Dutch) Church in
America" (in the American Church History Series), pp. 28-32.
[70:1] "The province, under the long years of Dutch supremacy, had
gathered only some seven thousand inhabitants, against the hundred and
twenty thousand of their New England neighbors" (Lodge, "English
Colonies," p. 297).
[71:1] See Corwin, p. 37; but compare the claim made in behalf of the
Puritan Whitaker, "apostle to the Indians" thirty years earlier
(Tiffany, "Protestant Episcopal Church," p. 18); compare also the work
of the Lutheran Campanius in New Sweden (Jacobs, "The Lutherans," p.
83).
[74:1] "The Puritans in Holland, England, and America" (New York, 1892).
[76:1] The king's noble conceptions of what such a colony should be and
should accomplish are quoted in Bancroft, vol. ii., pp. 284, 285.
[78:1] Corwin, p. 54.
[79:1] Corwin, pp. 105, 121.
[80:1] Corwin, p. 105.
[80:2] "Digest of S. P. G. Records," pp. 57-79. That the sectarian
proselyting zeal manifested in some of the missionaries' reports made an
unfavorable impression on the society is indicated by the peremptory
terms of a resolution adopted in 1710: "That a stop be put to the
sending any more missionaries among Christians, except to such places
whose ministers are, or shall be, dead or removed" (_ibid._, p. 69). A
good resolution, but not well kept.
[81:1] Corwin, p. 207. Undue stress should not be laid upon this formal
fact. The early New England colleges were primarily and mainly
theological seminaries and training-schools for the ministry. Their
professors were all theological professors. It is stated in Dwight's
"Life of Edwards" that James Pierpont, of New Haven, Edwards's
father-in-law, who died in 1714, lectured to the students of Yale
College, as professor of moral philosophy.
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,
"JOHN ENDICOTT."
"The positive part of church reformation," which Higginson and his
companions had come into the wilderness to practice, appeared in a new
light when studied under the new conditions. The question of separation
from the general fellowship of English Christians, which had lain
heavily on their consciences, was no longer a question; instead of it
arose the question of separation from their beloved and honored
fellow-Christians at Plymouth. The Act of Uniformity and the tyrannous
processes by which it was enforced no longer existed for them. They were
free to build the house of God simply according to the teaching of the
divine Word. What form will the structure take?
One of the first practical questions to emerge was the question by what
authority their ministry was to be exercised. On one point they seem to
have been quite clear. The episcopal ordination, which each of them had
received in England, whatever validity it may have had in English law,
gave them no authority in the church of God in Salem. Further, their
appointment from the Company in London, although it was a regular
commission from the constituted civil government of the colony, could
confer no office in the spiritual house. A day of solemn fasting was
held, by the governor's appointment, for the choice of pastor and
teacher, and after prayer the two recognized candidates for the two
offices, Skelton and Higginson, were called upon to give their views as
to a divine call to the ministry. "They acknowledged there was a twofold
calling: the one, an inward calling, when the Lord moved the heart of a
man to take that calling upon him, and fitted him with gifts for the
same; the second (the outward calling) was from the people, when a
company of believers are joined together in covenant to walk together in
all the ways of God." Thereupon the assembly proceeded to a written
ballot, and its choice fell upon Mr. Skelton and Mr. Higginson. It
remained for the ministers elect to be solemnly inducted into office,
which was done with prayer and the laying on of hands in benediction.
But presently there were searchings of heart over the anterior question
as to the constituency of the church. Were all the population of Salem
to be reckoned as of the church of Salem? and if not, who should
"discern between the righteous and the wicked"? The result of study of
this question, in the light of the New Testament, was this--that it was
"necessary for those who intended to be of the church solemnly to enter
into a covenant engagement one with another, in the presence of God, to
walk together before him according to his Word." Thirty persons were
chosen to be the first members of the church, who in a set form of words
made public vows of faithfulness to each other and to Christ. By the
church thus constituted the pastor and teacher, already installed in
office in the parish, were instituted as ministers of the church.[96:1]
Before the solemnities of that notable day were concluded, a belated
vessel that had been eagerly awaited landed on the beach at Salem the
"messengers of the church at Plymouth." They came into the assembly,
Governor Bradford at the head, and in the name of the Pilgrim church
declared their "approbation and concurrence," and greeted the new
church, the first-born in America, with "the right hand of fellowship."
A thoughtful and devoted student declares this day's proceedings to be
"the beginning of a distinctively American church history."[97:1]
The immediate sequel of this transaction is characteristic and
instructive. Two brothers, John and Samuel Browne, members of the
council of the colony, took grave offense at this departure from the
ways of the Church of England, and, joining to themselves others
like-minded, set up separate worship according to the Book of Common
Prayer. Being called to account before the governor for their schismatic
procedure, they took an aggressive tone and declared that the ministers,
"were Separatists, and would be Anabaptists." The two brothers were
illogical. The ministers had not departed from the Nationalist and
anti-Separatist principles enunciated by Higginson from the quarter-deck
of the "Talbot." What they had just done was to lay the foundations of a
national church for the commonwealth that was in building. And the two
brothers, trying to draw off a part of the people into their
schism-shop, were Separatists, although they were doubtless surprised to
discover it. There was not the slightest hesitation on the governor's
part as to the proper course to be pursued. "Finding those two brothers
to be of high spirits, and their speeches and practices tending to
mutiny and faction, the governor told them that New England was no place
for such as they, and therefore he sent them both back for England at
the return of the ships the same year."[98:1] Neither then nor
afterward was there any trace of doubt in the minds of the New England
settlers, in going three thousand miles away into the seclusion of the
wilderness, of their indefeasible moral right to pick their own company.
There was abundant opportunity for mistake and temptation to wrong-doing
in the exercise of this right, but the right itself is so nearly
self-evident as to need no argument.
While the civil and ecclesiastical foundations of the Salem community
are thus being laid, there is preparing on the other side of the sea
that great _coup d'état_ which is to create, almost in a day, a
practically independent American republic. Until this is accomplished
the colonial organization is according to a common pattern, a settlement
on a distant shore, equipped, sustained, and governed with authority all
but sovereign by a commercial company at the metropolis, within the
reach, and thus under the control, of the supreme power. Suppose, now,
that the shareholders in the commercial company take their charter
conferring all but sovereign authority, and transport themselves and it
across the sea to the heart of the settlement, there to admit other
planters, at their discretion, to the franchise of the Company, what
then? This was the question pondered and decided in those dark days of
English liberty, when the triumph of despotism, civil and spiritual,
over the rights of Englishmen seemed almost achieved. The old officers
of the Company resigned; their places were filled by Winthrop and Dudley
and others, who had undertaken to emigrate; and that memorable season of
1630 not less than seventeen ships, carrying about one thousand
passengers, sailed from English ports for Massachusetts Bay. It was the
beginning of the great Puritan exodus. Attempts were made by the king
and the archbishop to stay the flow of emigration, but with only
transient success. "At the end of ten years from Winthrop's arrival
about twenty-one thousand Englishmen, or four thousand families,
including the few hundreds who were here before him, had come over in
three hundred vessels, at a cost of two hundred thousand pounds
sterling."[99:1] What could not be done by despotism was accomplished by
the triumph of the people over the court. The meeting of the Long
Parliament in 1640 made it safe for Puritans to stay in England; and the
Puritans stayed. The current of migration was not only checked, but
turned backward. It is reckoned that within four generations from that
time more persons went to old England than originally came thence. The
beginnings of this return were of high importance. Among the home-going
companies were men who were destined to render eminent service in the
reconstruction of English society, both in the state and in the army,
and especially in the church. The example of the New England churches,
voluminously set forth in response to written inquiries from England,
had great influence in saving the mother country from suffering the
imposition of a Presbyterian hierarchy that threatened to be as
intolerant and as intolerable as the tyranny of Laud.
For the order of the New England churches crystallized rapidly into a
systematic and definite church polity, far removed from mere Separatism
even in the temperate form in which this had been illustrated by
Robinson and the Pilgrim church. The successive companies of emigrants
as they arrived, ship-load after ship-load, each with its minister or
college of ministers, followed with almost monotonous exactness the
method adopted in the organization of the church in Salem. A small
company of the best Christians entered into mutual covenant as a church
of Christ, and this number, growing by well-considered accessions, added
to itself from time to time other believers on the evidence and
confession of their faith in Christ. The ministers, all or nearly all of
whom had been clergymen in the orders of the Church of England, were of
one mind in declining to consider their episcopal ordination in England
as conferring on them any spiritual authority in a church newly gathered
in America. They found rather in the free choice of the brotherhood the
sign of a divine call to spiritual functions in the church, and were
inducted into office by the primitive form of the laying on of hands.
In many ways, but especially in the systematized relations of the
churches with one another and in their common relations with the civil
government, the settled Nationalism of the great Puritan migration was
illustrated. With the least possible constraint on the individual or on
the church, they were clear in their purpose that their young state
should have its established church.
Through what rude experiences the system and the men were tested has
been abundantly told and retold.[100:1] Roger Williams, learned,
eloquent, sincere, generous, a man after their own heart, was a very
malignant among Separatists, separating himself not only from the
English church, but from all who would not separate from it, and from
all who would not separate from these, and so on, until he could no
longer, for conscience' sake, hold fellowship with his wife in family
prayers. After long patience the colonial government deemed it necessary
to signify to him that if his conscience would not suffer him to keep
quiet, and refrain from stirring up sedition, and embroiling the colony
with the English government, he would have to seek freedom for that
sort of conscience outside of their jurisdiction; and they put him out
accordingly, to the great advantage of both parties and without loss of
mutual respect and love. A little later, a clever woman, Mrs. Ann
Hutchinson, with a vast conceit of her superior holiness and with the
ugly censoriousness which is a usual accompaniment of that grace,
demonstrated her genius for mixing a theological controversy with
personal jealousies and public anxieties, and involved the whole colony
of the Bay in an acrimonious quarrel, such as to give an unpleasant tone
of partisanship and ill temper to the proceedings in her case, whether
ecclesiastical or civil. She seems clearly to have been a willful and
persistent nuisance in the little community, and there were good reasons
for wanting to be rid of her, and right ways to that end. They took the
wrong way and tried her for heresy. In like manner, when the Quakers
came among them,--not of the mild, meek, inoffensive modern variety to
which we are accustomed, but of the fierce, aggressive early
type,--instead of proceeding against them for their overt offenses
against the state, disorderly behavior, public indecency, contempt of
court, sedition, they proceeded against them distinctly as Quakers, thus
putting themselves in the wrong and conceding to their adversaries that
crown of martyrdom for which their souls were hankering and to which
they were not fully entitled.
Of course, in maintaining the principle of Nationalism, the New England
Puritans did not decline the implications and corollaries of that
principle. It was only to a prophetic genius like the Separatist Roger
Williams that it was revealed that civil government had no concern to
enforce "the laws of the first table." But the historical student might
be puzzled to name any other church establishment under which less of
molestation was suffered by dissenters, or more of actual encouragement
given to rival sects, than under the New England theocracies. The
Nationalist principle was exclusive; the men who held it in New England
(subject though they were to the temptations of sectarian emulation and
fanatic zeal) were large-minded and generous men.
The general uniformity of church organization among the Puritan
plantations is the more remarkable in view of the notable in
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