Boston City (part 28 of 67)

The theocratic principles of these leading Puritans, and the legislative, social, and religious enforcement of them, were vitally dependent upon a form of belief and a rule of living which required perfect individual conviction, and which could not be transferred or imposed upon such as rightly or wrongfully failed to share that conviction. Oppression and intolerance of all their associates who were outside of their covenant, however otherwise concerned for the common security and prosperity, as we shall soon see, were inextricably involved with - in fact were - the natural and necessary results of the Puritan administration. The attempt of the most earnest and austere of the leaders to enforce their own principles upon their servants and others - and indeed upon such of their own chosen fellowship as might falter or seem lukewarm in their constancy - led to manifest injustice, to bigotry, and to cruelty. And this same earnestness and consequent severity of the leaders furnish the occasion of much of the harshness of judgment, the scorn, contempt, and ridicule that have been visited upon them. Not so much by any individual attainments of our own, but by our share in a general enlightenment and enfranchisement, it has come about that what to those Puritan legislators were the most august and solemn realities of belief and conviction are to us the merest superstitions and bugbears. Their harshness, bigotry, and intolerance were the results of what we regard as their false beliefs, their absurd credulity, their conceit that they were "God's elect" Yet their sincerity in their prejudices, convictions.

The Puritan Commonwealth. 1 47

and delusions does not a\ lil with all who criticise or judge them to relieve one whit the limitation of the wisdom of the Puritans, or to palliate the odiousness of their principles when put to trial.

The enterprise of transplanting themselves and establishing a colony in the wilderness involved most grave and exacting conditions. It was costly, and beset by many contingencies and risks. It required all the previous forecast of calculating wisdom, a cautious apprehension of possible discomfitures, and a prudent watchfulness against external and internal foes. They had before them for warning the disastrous failure of like enterprises at Virginia, St. Christopher's, Newfoundland, and on the coast of Maine, with only at that time the qualified success of the poor settlement at Plymouth. Encouragement and security in any like experiment could be looked for only by a watchful caution against the ill agencies which had wrecked all previous ones. The master motive in the minds of the leaders here - those who embarked all their estates and prospects in life ia the undertaking - is admitted to have been a profoundly religious one, however qualified by its elements and limitations that type of religion may have been. But this religious intent was necessarily dependent upon financial or commercial conditions and accessories. It is to be admitted that only the minority of those who came in the first fleet, and who arrived in increasing numbers foi the next score of years, were primarily drawn hither by that master motive of zeal in their peculiar type of religion. Only the minority, too, from the first and onwards, embarked their whole worldly substance and their liferesolve and constancy in the enterprise.

At the meeting of the company in England in which it was resolved to transfer the charter and to set up its local administration here, the religious motive prevailed over merely mercantile or thrifty objects, though the latter were recognized in their place. At that point the enterprise was in the hands, at the charges, and in the direction of its religious leaders. The security and success of the colony would depend primarily upon the condition that these leaders shojid be intelligent, educated, and upright men, thoroughly conscientious and high-minded, sincerely devout, and seeking ends of public good. Th«ise prime conditions would ensure the judicious exercise of the power which rightfully belonged to them, and would qualify the ill consequences of any arbitrary stretch of it. That these conditions were in the main generously and nobly met stands triumphantly certified in the fact that though there were many impediments, mistakes, and discomfitures, many incidental grievances and wrongs, the experiment was never abandoned. No crisis in its trial compelled any radical changes in it, except such as could be allowed without revolution, as in the time and circumstances of them necessary and wise; and the success of it stands to-day a demonstration to the world.

But these leaders, being the few, needed associates and helpers. Servants, " laborers, miners, and engineers," as the record reads, must be engaged, still at the charge of the responsible projectors and the pecuniary resources of the company.

Thomas Foxcroft, the minister of the First Church in Boston, in a sermon preached by him on the first centennial of the settlement, speaks thus of the founders : '* The initial generation of New England was very much a select and a puritanical people in the proper sense of the word. The>- were not (as to the body of them) a promiscuous and heterogeneous assemblage, but in general of a uniform character, agreeing in the most excellent qualities, principles, and tempers ; Christians very much of the primitive stamp. As one of our worthies of the second generation * has aptly expressed it, - God sifted a whole nation that he might send a choice grain over into this wilderness.* It was as little of a mixed generation, in regard of their moral character and religious profession, that came over first to New England, as perhaps was ever known in the earth. They were veiy much a chosen generation, collected from a variety of places, and by a strange conduct of Divine Providence agreeing in the same enterprise, to form a plantation for religion in this distant part of the world. Scarce any of a profane character mingled themselves with the first-comers ; and of those that came hither upon secular views, some were disheartened by the toils and difficulties they met with and soon returned, and others, finding this reformed climate disagreeable to their vitiated inclinations, took their speedy flight away. The body of the first-comers were men in their middle age or declining days, who had been inured to suRerings for righteousness' sake." Foxcroft adds, of his own time, " We are now become a very mixt generation; and may I not add, in consequence thereof, an apostate one?"

The question naturally presents itself, as to what were the measures <y safeguards by which the leaders of the colony, its proprietors and officers sought to protect themselves and their scheme against the intrusion, the intermeddling, or the opposition of uncongenial and mischievous associates or interlopers? They were eager to obtain renewing and reinforcing emigrants. Indeed, it was essential that they should do so. But how did they plan to guard themselves against the wrong sort of comers? Circumstances favored them in this respect better than any protective measures which they did or could enforce. It is understood that tne Corporation held the absolute proprietary right to all the territory covered by their patent, and could also fix the conditions on which new members, freemen, could be admitted to the company, whose votes and action would afterwards imperil or secure all that depended upon that proprietary right. When the Corporation, through its Court, afterwards disposed of parcels of its land to individuals or to townships, it still held, by the right of taxation, a sovereignty over the territory. They found in their Charter this assured privilege, or authority for protecting themselves against all unwelcome or dangerous persons - "That it shall and may be lawful to and for y* cheife commanders, governors, &c., of y« said company, resident in y" said part of New England, for their special defence and safety, to incountcr, cxpulsc, repell, and resist by force of amies, as well by sea as by lande, and by all fit- 1 Mr. Stoughton, in hU EUcthn Sermon.

The Puritan Commonwealth

ting waies and meanes whatsoever, all such person and persons as shall at any time hereafter attempt or enterprise y« destruction, invasion, detriment, or annoyance to y« said plantation or inhabitant." The authorities, in their wisdom, interpreted this positive charter privilege as empowering them to order and banish from their territory any one whose presence in it was not desirable to them. They availed themselves of it from the moment of the first sitting of their Court, and proceeded to clear tlie place of all the squatters, scattered settlers, " old planters," and remnants of former companies of adventurers, who were judged " unmeet to inhabit in this jurisdiction."

Still, there was from the first, from the stress of necessity, a door left op^n by which many persons but in partial sympathy with the aims of the Company, and some secretly or avowedly hostile to it, came in among them. It was essential to the unimpeded success of the Puritan Commonwealth, its firm basis, its fair development, its peace and security, that those who constituted it should be in accord and harmony, their loyalty to and love of it being assured by their "piety," - the piety of the Puritan pattern and spirit. It does not appear that the authorities were sufficiently rigid and watchful in imposing restrictions to an entrance upon their territory, such as would keep out mere adventurers, restless, discontented, and mischievous intruders. So they had to deal with such persons after they had more or less secured a hold by their presence and self-assertion. This was the first occasion of annoyance to them ; and the measures to which they had recourse were such as gradually, under the workings of human nature. Involved severity, bitterness, cruelty, and matured into what we regard as their intolerant and persecuting spirit. It was quite far from their intent to offer a freehold or asylum for all sorts of unsettled, whimsical, and crotchety spirits. Yet a rare variety of such came in upon them. The Planter's Plea^ niade the following somewhat generous, but still guarded invitation as to the sort of persons needed for the colony: " Good Governours, able Ministers, Physitians, Souldiers, Schoolemasters, Mariners, and Mechanicksof all sorts." Men free of ill humours " ought to be willing, constant, industrious, obedient, frugall, lovers of the common good, or at least such as may be easily wrought to this temper." It cannot be expected that all should be such, "but care must be had that y® principalis be so inclined. . . . Mutinies, which one person may kindle, are well nigh as dangerous in a Colony, as in an Armie. . . . Governours and Ministers, especially in New England, must be of piety and blameless life as patterns to y* Heathens." Had the authorities of Massachusetts known what trouble they were to have from Roger Williams, they might from the first have declined to receive him ; for he was not one of those concerned in the enterprise, nor a freeman of the Company. They did not invite him here; but the way was free to him, and he came. It was the attempt of the most earnest and austere of the

1 [This rare tract of John White's, printed the Brinley Catalogue, Nos. 373, 2,704), is rein 1630 (of which Mr. Deane has a copy, and printed in Force's Tracts^ ii., and in part in another is in the Lenox Library, and two are in Young's Chronicles of Mass, - Ed.]

authorities to enforce their principles and standards and tests upon their servants and others, and upon such of their own choicer fellowship as showed lukewarmness, or a failing ** godliness/* that heightened bigotry and prompted all degrees of harshness.

This seems to be the fitting place to notice, by anticipation, the measure to which the legislators here had so soon a recourse in restricting the franchise to " Church-Members." In the lack of, or in the doubtful efficacy, of other securities, their first reliance was upon this. As has been already stated, their charter left them at full liberty to define the conditions on which, by making new members " freemen," they should admit to the company those who, as voters and candidates for office among them, should thus accede to influence and authority in disposing their affairs, their proprietary rights, and property. Our modern democracy makes quite easy the terms for the naturalization among us of foreigners who cast in their lot here, and who soon acquire the right to vote and to ask votes for themselves in all matters concerning our institutions and the property of the community. The franchise, on those easy terms, would have wrecked our colonial enterprise in its very start. It would soon have numbered among its full partners a heterogeneous multitude who would have had little idea of what ** the public good " required, and less ability and will to labor and suffer for it. Sedition, dissension, the strong assertion of individual variances of judgment believed to endanger the fabric of government or to provoke a party spirit, were evils which they had most reason to apprehend, and against these the leaders were most anxious to protect their enterprise, especially in its stage of uncertainty and peril. They would naturally, therefore, seek to hold new partners by some solemn pledge of fidelity, and to put this pledge into terms by which they might ever after challenge those who had voluntarily entered into it. So the condition on which they granted the franchise was not one dependent upon social rank, nor upon pecuniary means, but upon hearty sympathy and accord in the religious intent of the enterprise, - that which consecrated it and, as they believed, could alone insure its success. They required that all who wished to share the civil franchise with them should enter into covenant with one of their churches. This rigid Puritan restriction of full civil rights to " church members " has furnished the occasion of the sharpest censure and reproach against those who imposed the condition. Waiving for a moment the rightfulness or expediency of the condition, it is enough to say that, having in view the chief intent of the founders of the Puritan Commonwealth, they would have stultified themselves and confounded their scheme had they failed to impose it. There was no alternative open to theni. Nor can the ingenuity of any censor of theirs in our own days propose any other condition of the franchise which would consist with the model of a Theocracy. None the less, however, the condition proved on trial to work simply results of gross injustice and various forms of mischief and trouble. It was especially faulty and vicious in each of two evil consequences. First, the condition excluded from the full rights of citizens a steadily increasing number of excellent, upright, and conscientious persons, who, for reasons satisfactory to themselves, could not and would not come into covenant relations with a church by the prescribed methods. Either lack of belief, or self-distrust, or scruples of conscience, restrained them from subjecting themselves to the ordeal of standing before a mixed congregation and revealing their innermost religious exercises and experience, with a profession that they had reached a certain stage in their conviction, and would henceforward put themselves under the watch and ward of the men and women under covenant. But as a second ill-working of this condition, while it excluded from citizenship some of the best persons, it afforded no adequate security against the inclusion of the worst. A hypocrite might easily pass the ordeal under the lure of the consideration and privilege of which it was made the condition. One of the earliest and one of the most vexatious causes of strife and complaint, and a whole series of perplexities and embarrassments relieved only by the positive demand of Charles 11. for the free allowance of the franchise, came from the imposition of this covenant condition. Persons who challenged scrutiny for the rectitude of their characters and lives in vain petitioned for the rights of citizenship, as they shared all the public burdens. As the rite of baptism was allowed only to the children of parents who were under covenant, there was soon a generation of those born on the soil who neither were baptized themselves nor could obtain baptism for their children. The question became to them a pertinent one, whether they were Christians or Heathen. Such then was the quandary in which the Puritan leaders found themselves. To yield the franchise to the " uncovenanted " and the " unregenerate *' was to subvert their Theocracy. To enforce the covenant condition was to risk the sure ruin of their Commonwealth.

These preliminary suggestions, which present the aims and purposes of the responsible leaders in the enterprise that planted the town of Boston, - the germ of the State, - have been here advanced as setting forth that enterprise, the spirit and the method of it, as it reveals itself to us in the retrospect of history, with more of clearness and fulness than may have been enjoyed by those who planned and guided it. The writer of these pages, from as thorough a study of the original sources of information in our colonial history as was within his reach, has become convinced that a deep religious design in the purpose of the leaders is the key to the enterprise. We have to trace the process - one of arbitrary acts on the part of the leaders, and of obstructions and arrests on the side of opponents who stood for a more lawful authority - by which, through the temporary experiment of the Puritan Commonwealth, the corporation of the Massachusetts Bay Company became, by anticipation, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Our starting point is from the obvious and undeniable fact that the charter was made to serve a use for which it was not designed or intended.*

* [Cf. Joel Parker's lecture on the charter the Lowell Lectures, Massachusetts and its Earl) . and religious legislation in Massachusetts, in History, - Ed.]

Whatever, then, was found necessary, by forced construction, adaptation, ot supplementary provisions, to fit it for the purposes to which it was turned, involved, of course, trespass, disloyalty, and a breach of law. The charter was in this way perverted as a basis and medium for all such acts and measures and stretch of authority as it was made to sanction. Notwithstanding this, and the fact that the astute leaders must have been perfectly well aware that they had, so to speak, stolen a march upon their monarch by the transfer of the charter, and by the setting up, under their way of construing it, such a government as they instituted here, they still clung to that charter, and professed to find in it their sufficient warrant They seem to have persuaded themselves - indeed they boldly insisted - that there was a pledge and potency in a quality which it derived from its seal of royalty, its kingly grace and covenant, that neutralized, or at least was not invalidated by, any strain or stretch of use of which, as they pleaded, they had found it absolutely necessary to avail themselves. The Chancery process, which in 1684 vacated and revoked the charter, was a decisive judgment of the authorities at home that the charter had been unlawfully perverted. This, however, was only a final and effectual disposal of a controversy which had been from the. first continuously in agitation. As soon as the royal councillors had knowledge of what was going on here under the assumed authority of the charter, a commission was instituted for examining and recalling it. More and more inquisitive and stringent measures by royal mandate and by later commissioners followed up the same attempt to bring the recusant Massachusetts legislators to a reckoning. Yet they still insisted upon that transcendent royal quality in the pledge of their patent just referred to. And they might well heighten its value to them by the plea which they more and more cogently and even piteously urged, about the sincerity of their reliance upon the royal covenant in the stern enterprise of coming over as " a poor distressed flock " into a desolate wilderness, at their own charges, among brute men and wild beasts, to found a civil State, and " to extend the bounds of the Gospel." It is evident, also, that the more of added value they had with pains and toil put into the venture, the more cogent would be their plea that the original covenant of their enterprise should hold, inviolable. Nothing but the all-engrossing troubles and convulsions of the mother country, and the sympathy of the temporary Puritan Parliament and Protectorate of Cromwell, would have availed, however, to secure to the exiles in Massachusetts time and opportunity for the rooting of their enterprise under the first charter. Whoever chooses by curious study to inform himself of all the particulars incident to this lively episode in our history, about the challenging of the charter and the struggle to keep it, will find the story at least an entertaining one. He will find much that he may appreciate in the resolute, sturdy pluck and defiant obstinacy of the Puritan magistracy; and he must be left free to form his own judgment of the casuistry and the strategy, and - to use plain words - the artifice and adroit trickery by which the charter administration was maintained till the catastrophe of its fall ; while the instrument itself was never wrenched away to cross the ocean on its return, but still hangs with its royal seal attached in the office of the Secretar>' of the Commonwealth. The King himself had no power, nor could he by prerogative have usurped or exercised it, to confer by charter on any sect or party of his subjects such an independency and such legislative functions as were actually assumed by the corporation of Massachusetts Bay when transferred here. Having transported themselves with their charter, the leaders of the enterprise seem to have taken for granted that they might extend and supplement their rightful authority under it so as to adjust it to the change of place and circumstances.^

It is, however, a curious fact, having a significance which each reader is at liberty to assign to it, that whatever may have been, consciously or unconsciously, the intent of the leaders of the Boston colony as to the setting up in Church and State an original and arbitrary pattern of their own, what they actually wrought out of this sort had been suspected of them and charged upon them as their real but covert design before their feet rested on the new territory for their experiment. Some persons in England whose attention had been drawn to the project before it was effected, and who were more or less informed of its preliminary measures, had expressed jealous misgivings lest the prime movers had secretly in view the actual scheme of separation and faction which was soon realized here. The anonymous Planter's Plea, written by that stanch friend and promoter of the enterprise, the patriarch and vicar of Dorchester, John White, was published in London in 1630, afler Endicott had been heard from at Salem, and while Winthrop*s company was on the ocean. One of the " objections " to the enterprise, which Mr. White tries to set aside, is thus expressed : " That religion indeede and y* colour thereof is y* cloake of this work, but under it is secretly harboured faction and separation from y* Church. Men of ill affected mindes (some conceive), unwilling to join any longer with our assemblies, meane to draw themselves apart, and to unite into a body of their owne, and to make that place a nursery of faction and rebellion, disclaiming and renouncing our Church as a limbe of Antichrist." This objection Mr. White meets by referring to the affectionate and tender parting address of the governor and his associates, to ** their dear mother, y* Church of England," and to the known ''carriage of these persons in their owne country in former times, as not men of turbulent or factious dispositions, impatient of y" present government, who have separated from our Assemblies, refused our Ministery,&c. . . . And yet, if some one or two, or ten of them should be factiously inclined, it were hard measure to condemn a whole Society, &c. ... I persuade myself there is no one Separatist knowne unto y* Governours, or if there be any, that it is as far from their purpose as it is from their safety to continue him among them." Yet the candid pleader, doubtless well knowing more than he cared to communicate, adds,

** I conceive we doe and ought to put a great difference between Separation and Non-Conformity. There is great oddes between peaceable men, who out of tendernesse of heart forbeare y* use of some ceremonies of y* Church, and men of fiery and turbulent spirits that walke in a crosse way out of distemper of minde. I should be very unwilling to hide anything I think might be fit to discover y* uttermost of y* intentions of our Planters, and therefore shall make bold to manifest not only what I know, but what I guesse concerning their purpose." Necessity, novelty, love of gain may draw some, "but that y* most and most sincere and godly part have y* advancement of y"" Gospel for their main scope I am confident. That of them some may entertain hope and expectation of enjoying greater libertie there than here in y' use of some orders and Ceremonies of our Church, it seemes very probable. Nay, I see not how we can expect from them a correspondence in all things to our State, civill or Ecclesiasticall. Wants and necessities cannot but cause many changes. But y* men are far enough from projecting the erecting of this Colony for a Nursery of Schismatickes** Mr. White concludes " that y* suspicious and scandalous reports raysed upon these gentlemen and their friends (as if under y* colour of planting a Colony they intended to rayse and erect a seminary of faction and separation) are nothing else but y* fruits of jealousie of some distempered minde, &c." It is admitted that the wise and good of the company would naturally be followed **by a mixed multitude, as were y* children of Israel out of Egypt;" and Mr. White forebodes that such** would prove refractory to Government, expecting all libertie in an unsettled body," and that the restraint of authority would cross their discontented humors, so that they would revenge themselves by being " ready to blemish y* Government with such scandalous reports as their malicious spirits can devise and utter." He anticipates that such will return or be sent back to England, revengeful and malignant with ill reports ; and he asks that they be not listened to till the authorities in New England shall send home true information.

These frank pleadings, disclosures, and anticipations, made public while the adventuring company with whose motives, plans, and fortunes they were concerned were on their ocean passage, are certainly very noteworthy. Had Mr. White deferred writing till the experiment had been on practical trial for ten or twenty years, he could not better have described its real working as to the separation effected, the "novelties" reduced to practice, and the complaints carried back to England, which he endeavored to deal with by anticipation. It is needless to ask by what prescience or ** jealousie " some in England found occasion to advance the objections, which proved to be so well grounded, to the schemes of the planters. Doubtless it was in part from some shrewd observation of the spirits and inclinations of the prime movers in the enterprise, and in part from inferences drawn from the characteristics of the previous similar experiments at Plymouth.

The zealous pleading of the good patriarch White in his anticipatory defence of the colonists then on their passage to the Bay, taken in connec- tion with the fact that on their arrival they immediately pursued the course the suspicion and intent of which he so boldly repudiated, present to readers of this generation a curious theme on which they are at liberty to exercise their own judgment as to the integrity or crookedness of the leaders of the enterprise. Sharp censures have been pronounced upon them, involving the imputation of gross hypocrisy in their tender and yearning address from the deck of their vessel as they left the shores of their native land. In this they said : ** We esteem it our honor to call the Church of England, from whence we rise, our dear mother, and cannot part from our native country where she specially resideth, without much sadness of heart and many tears in our eyes, ever acknowledging that such hope and part as we have obtained in y' common salvation, we have received in her bosom and sucked it from her breasts." They ask the prayers of their brethren, and promise their own for them, - " wishing our heads and hearts may be as fountains of tears for your everlasting welfare when we shall be in our poor cottages in the wilderness, &c." What then, it is asked, is to be said of the high-minded sincerity of men who, after uttering this pathetic strain, proceeded at once to lay the foundations in separation and schism of the Puritan Commonwealth? Something, doubtless, might be urged on their side by any one who should assume their defence or championship. What was to them the Church of England ? It represented to them a lineage and communion of discipleship, in an organized institution, then in process of reformation and purification from its late corruption under Popery. They had had part in zeal and suffering in advancing tha^ needful reforming work to the stage which it had reached. For themselves, they hoped and expected that the purifying work would go on, as they believed there was need of it. They had a common interest in its membership. They had no idea that they were about to heathenize themselves by passing the ocean to another shore. They ever after maintained that they were seeking to advance an arrested process of reformation. They soon found that this involved for them separation, which none the less they regarded as an enforced exclusion. When on the first year after the planting of their church in Boston they invited Roger Williams to be their teacher, the demand which he made on them as a condition of his acceptance, that they should renounce communion with the Church of England, met their decided refusal. And, further, any one who assumes their defence might proceed to urge that they departed only from the discipline of the Church of England, not at all from its doctrine; that changes in the mode of institution and discipline were inevitable, to meet the circumstances and exigences of their wilderness condition ; that they had the example of the mother country to justify the connection of Church and State, and that they simply followed the leadings of Providence and the teaching of the Bible in adjusting their policy.

We proceed now to trace the development of that policy in the organization of the Puritan Commonwealth. The written charter was made its basis, but the limitations and deficiencies which at once showed that it was to be put to uses not intended or provided for were recognized only to be neutralized by such devices as seemed necessary or available. By that charter a governor, deputy-governor, and eighteen assistants were annually to be chosen out of their own number by all who, as ** freemen," had the franchise in the Company. Any seven of the Assistants, with either the Governor or the Deputy, meeting once a month, made a quorum, as an executive, for the transaction of business. Four Great or General Courts were to be held annually, to elect and commission the officers and to vote upon the admission of new members, or ** freemen." As soon as the company was established here, the Assistants obtained a unanimous vote allowing them to choose the Governor and Deputy out of their own body ; but when the Assistants were to be chosen, all the freemen were electors. Instead of the full number of eighteen, only eleven or twelve of the Assistants came over, and the number was never afterwards filled up. The Assistants soon assumed the name of " Magistrates," with all the requisite and implied functions. They quietly kept their office, without re-election, for two years, and made the first laws for the colony. In the first year one hundred new freemen, many of them not members of a church, took the prescribed oath. But in 163 1 church membership was made a condition of the franchise. It may be noted here, that as late as 1676 five-sixths of the men in the colony were non-voters, because not church members. In 1632 the freemen insisted on and secured their right to choose the Governor and Deputy; and the " Magistrates" so graciously, though grimly, yielded the point that they were re-chosen.

The wide scattering of the colonists into different settlements helped for a while the centralization of power. As it became inconvenient for all the freemen to assemble at the courts, each local settlement, the nucleus of a town, delegated two persons to represent it. Meeting in Boston in 1634, these Deputies, early watchful against arbitrary power, demanded " a sight of the patent," and then, seeming for the first time to come to a full knowledge of their rights, they " confronted " the Governor. After parrying their complaints, he told them that so large a number of freemen in the company had not been anticipated ; that their numbers and lack of qualifications unfitted them for making laws; but that at the next Court some of them, summoned by the Governor, might come and judge of the taxes and revise the laws, though they could make no new ones, but might submit their grievances to the magistrates.

The next month. May, 1634, twenty-four principal inhabitants appeared in Boston as representatives of the people, and disrupted the arbitrary exercise of power, and by exercising their deputed authority through the rights recognized in the Charter, they chose, as a new Governor, Thomas Dudley. They gained the point that the whole body of freemen should attend at the General Election, while being represented by their deputies at the three other Courts. The vigorous struggle in the next year was between those who stood respectively for ** strict discipline " or for lenity in the management of ** infant plantations." The decision was in favor of the rigid party. The Assistants or magistrates, in their tenacity of purpose to maintain an ahnost exchisive authority in disposing each successive measure which the expanding interests and the needful protection of their enterprise seemed to make essential, acted on the assumption that they had the same governing power over all their associates and subordinates on the spot as they would have had if they had been exercising their administrative rights in England over the employes which they had sent here. Up to 1644 the magistrates and the deputies of the people, meeting together, had

1 [The death of Cotton, near the end of 1652, was, after the death of Winthrop, the loss that most closely affected the town. The superstition of the day found alanning portents in tlie heavens while his body lay ready for burial. Norton, Life and Death of Cotton^ reissued with notes by Enoch Pond in 1834; Samuel Clarke, Z/Vrj of Ten Emuient Divines^ London, 1662 ; Mather, Magnalia ; Emerson, First Church ; Snow, Boston, p. 133. Cotton's house stood not far from the southerly corner of Tremont Street and the entrance to Pemberton Square. The estate ran back up the hill. Vane lived on it two years, and, at a later day, Judge Sewall. A portrait, said to be of Cotton, from which our cut is taken, belonged to the late John Eliot acted jointly. In that year, as the result of another severe struggle as to the people's right to a negative voice, it was decided that each branch should meet by itself, and that a concurrent vote should be requisite in legislation. This was another stage in the process by which the business management of a mercantile corporation was transformed into an administration leading on to the constitutional provisions of our existing Commonwealth. It was obvious from the first that the reduction of the paramount authority of the magistrates, or even the participation in it to any great extent by the people at large, would imperil the rigid principles of Puritanism, so far as they were relied upon for bringing civil affairs under the absolute sway of the Church. It is observable that in all their pleas on their own behalf the magistrates emphasize their religious motives.

Incidental to, or we should rather say as a most needful and vital element of, the fundamentals of the Puritan theocratic Commonwealth, was the habit of appealing to and of relying upon the ministers of the churches for advice and guidance, outside of their own special functions. The clergy constituted, so to speak, a body of spiritual peers in the Puritan parliament, only they had relatively a far more exalted and stringent professional influence than has been yielded to the bishops of the English realm since the era of the Reformation. ** The reverend elders " - ''our brethren the elders " - constituted a body which, either in consultation by themselves or as called into the meetings of the Court, was appealed to for counsel and advice on all perplexed or critical matters. As pastors of the churches, whose members alone exercised the franchise, they would have had their full share of influence in preaching from their pulpits, and in their disciplinary visits from house to house. That they should have been recognized as jointly composing a fellowship qualified and entitled to have referred to them, impliedly for ultimate disposal, matters upon which the civil rulers were divided in judgment, is certainly the most significant token of the identity between the Puritan Church and State. It would have been consistently within the range of their clerical functions if questions of casuistry in religion, or of the interpretation and explication of Bible texts by whose guidance the people were generally disposed to be directed, were referred to them. But such questions as the interpretation of the Charter, and how the continual attempts of the authorities at home to subvert and reclaim the administration set up under it were to be parried and thwarted, could be regarded as of fit reference to a clerical body only under a theocracy. But these and like questions,

Thayer, Esq., and now hangs in the residence of the old St. Botolph's Church in Boston, Linof the Hon. Robert C Winthrop at Brookline. colnshire, where Cotton preached before his

Hist, and Geneal, Reg, i. 164; also an account p. 15. A paper on Boston, England, and Cotof his ancestry in the Heraldic Journal^ iv. 49^ ton's career there, by the Rev. G. B. Blenkin, which we should regard as strictly secular and related to civil polity, were seldom disposed of, in the first three decades of the Colony, till "our honored Magistrates," or ** the Court," had sought the advice of the "reverend elders." In fact, John Cotton, in discourses at the Thursday Lecture, was ever ready, not only to give decided counsels on secular matters when his advice was asked, but, when some critical point was in contest before the Court, he would adjudicate on the subject, ostensibly of course, through his '* exposition of the word of God."

The early stages of the conflict between the magistrates for retaining their own legitimate and their constructive and usurped authority, on the one side, and the inhabitants at large on the other, tended in many incidental matters to unite the non-voters with the freemen as an opposing party. So far, however, as this union was effective, it would prejudice the theocratical principles of the government. The records of the Court and many of the contemporary documents that are now extant reveal to us the fevered state of anxiety and agitation which grave questionings and sharp bickerings induced. Nor is it strange that there should have very soon begun a weeding-out process, not only in the forced exclusion of those whose presence proved objectionable, but in the voluntary withdrawal of others who conceived a strong distaste or disgust for the atmosphere and influences of the place. Some of these last are referred to in that vefy interesting pamphlet published in London as early as 1643, entitled New England's First Fmits} While the general account of prosperity and hopefulness in these pages is almost roseate, we read the following: "As some went thither upon sudden undigested grounds, and saw not God's leading them in their way, but were carried by an unstayed spirit, so have they returned upon as sleight, headlesse, unworthy reasons as they went Others must have elbow-roome, and cannot abide to be so pinioned with the strict government in the Commonwealth, or discipline in the Church." Very tersely and aptly did one of the wiser of the Puritan company express the fervid working of the enterprise, in writing the brief sentence, " While the liquor is boiling, it must needs have a scumming." When we come to take note of the rigid proceedings of the Puritan legislators against those who " disturbed their peace," we shall have to recognize the fact, which to a moderate extent may be taken as palliating their harshness, that the victims of it were not members of their company, partners and freemen of the Commonwealth, but were, with rare exceptions, intruders among them, who themselves had nothing at stake in the enterprise.

But little more than ten years had passed since the settlement of Boston and of the towns which were offshoots from it, before the Colony, in all the elements that constituted it, and in all its prospects for the future, passed through some experiences of gloom and darkness, the dismal impression

^ [This tract is reprinted in Mass, Hist, CdL original edition is rare, but there are copies in i., and there is a separate modem reprint by the Harvard College Library and in the Prince Sabin, published in New York in 1865. The Library. - Ed.| from which is most vividly presented on the pages of Winthrop. Though, he nobly held to his constancy of purpose through the trying experience, it is evident that his hope faltered under the apprehension of the threatened failure and abandonment of the Colonial enterprise. It was not, however, mainly from the dissensions and discontents that had been developed among the struggling exiles here, but rather from the agitations and revolutionary throes of the mother country at that critical period, that Winthrop was compelled to face the appalling disaster to the fond venture in which he had staked his all. The tyrant monarch of England was at bay ; his subjects were winning the mastery over him ; the Parliament was above the throne ; and a work was brewing in which not only some restless spirits, but some heroic and earnest men who were fired by a holy and generous ardor, wished to have a part. Old England was then more attractive to such as these, than even the new Commonwealth rising in the free wilderness. The tide of immigration, which up to that time had set strongly hitherwards, was at once stayed.^ There was almost a tidal wave of return homewards. There were many of those who embarked, - hardly, however, the majority, - of whom the magistrates and elders might be glad to be well rid. But magistrates and elders, as well as some men of weight, value, and high service, were among the returning company, not alleging that they were going merely for a visit, but intent upon remaining that they might have part and lot in the stir of affairs. It is of these that Winthrop, in his Journal, utters himself in touching pathos, as abandoning by a broken covenant those to whom, for good or for evil fortune, they had pledged joint endeavor and holy fellowship. The interests of the Colony were also temporarily prostrated from the suspension of foreign trade, the value of all products of the Colony depreciated, and debtors could not meet their obligations. It did, for the time, look as if the forests must be left to grow again over our clearings, and one more colonial failure be added to the melancholy list. Winthrop records not only the darkness of the surroundings, but also the spirit of resolve and trust which brought with it cheer and hope. He would abide in his lot and be the stay of others. Only after long and divided counsels did the Court resolve, under the depression of their fortunes, to send three agents to England to have in view the interests of the Colony. With the dignity of a noble pride the agents were strictly cautioned, thus, "that they should not seek supply of our wants in any dishonorable way, as by begging or the like, for we were resolved to wait upon the Lord in the use of all means which were lawful and honorable."

The reader must look to the numerous and fuller sources of historical information, if he wishes to trace out all the stages and processes of the development in the minds and measures of the more responsible leaders of the scheme of the Puritan Commonwealth. Puritan ideas and institutions are

^ [Dr. Palfrey, ///>/. ofNiw EnglanJ^ Preface, this immfgration ceased, are the ancestors of considers that the 20^000 persons which coiisti- the great body of our New England stock. - tuted the population of New England when Ed.)

.to be studied both through the kind of influence which they exercised and the strength of that influence. It contained in itself elements and agencies corrective of its own mistakes and ill workings. We may compare it in some respects to those fruits and berries which in their unripe and maturing stages are very acrid, but healthful and grateful after passing through the later processes. It is denied by no one, and with rightful boasting it is proudly maintained by the wisest and most candid philosophical historians, that the heritage assured to later generations by Puritanism, as softened and modified by the working of its own self-developed forces, is eminently fruitful in civil, social, and domestic virtues and prosperities. The awful sincerity of its stern disciples, and the lofty sanctity of the aims and motives which they avowed as having committed themselves in all things to a holy covenant with God and each other, secured them against the worst forms of disaster from selfseeking and corruption which would inevitably have fallen upon them. The Puritan Commonwealth may ever claim the honor of having trained the spirit and fostered the virtues which redeemed it from its own limitations and errors.

A democracy was the product or result, not by any means the intent, of the enterprise when it was put on trial. On the first intimation or alarm of a tendency in that direction, John Cotton, the clerical oracle of the theocracy, wrote, '* Democracy I do not conceive that God ever did ordain as a fit Government either for Church or Commonwealth." But, none the less, how democracy developed and cst.iblishcd itself is not only traceable in every stage of its growth, in spite of the shock and the purposed resistance to it, but is also to be accounted to the natural and inevitable conditions of the experiment here on trial. The objects had in view involved democracy, and were consistent only with democracy. The air of the sea and the wilderness, the atmosphere of exile, the withdrawal from the scenes, habits, restraints, and safeguards of the old home, the essential equality of condition to which gentlemen and servants were alike reduced in exposures, straits, and occupations, levelled distinctions and compelled familiarity in intercourse. After the arrival of the colonists here, not one of them, however gentle his degree in England, was free from the necessity of manual labor in the field, the forest, and in building and providing for a home. The Governor's wife made and baked her own batch of bread, and from her dwelling, near the site of the Old South Church, would take pail in hand and go down to fill it from the spring that still flows under the basement of the new Post Office.

The rapid decay of the sense of loyalty to the English monarch, of dependence upon or deference to his authority, which followed upon the breathing of this free air, and which antedated Independence long previous to its declaration, was also a direct influence for fostering democracy. The only substitute for allegiance to the King was obedience to laws of their own enactment. In their secret persuasion, the first colonists here probably regarded the claims of dominion of the English monarch over these wild realms as quite unsubstantial and visionary. The possession and subjection of them at their own charges, with that shrewd and scrupulous avoidance from the first of asking or receiving any help or protection from the monarch, gave them rights which they persuaded tiiemselves overrode his. One who is keen in his search and reading in the more minute details of our history will meet some curious tokens of a seeming arrest of the democratic tendency here, and a temporary show of the revival of loyalty after the substitution of the provincial for the colonial charter. Self-governed by native magistrates of our own choice, we had become, to all intents and purposes, independents of the democratic pattern. The name of the monarch had been dropped from statutes and writs and legal processes. We had no courtly representatives here, except nominal ones with popular titles and indorsements. Royal birthdays were not aniong our holidays. But when crown officers were put in authority over us, and came with their commissions, functions, and ceremonials, sometimes with a show of state, in robings, symbols, and equipages, the effect, perceptibly, on a class of the less sturdy among us was a little dazing and beguiling. The reminder came rudely and unwelcome to the majority, that rank and privilege and prerogative might still exert themselves against a pure democracy. A striking illustration of the collision between the intruding of a revived loyalty and the habit attending its previous decay here is presented in the jealousy and distrust - and even contempt on the part of many - for those two of the Royal Governors of the Province who made the most trouble for the people. These were Governor Joseph Dudley and Governor Thomas Hutchinson, both of them natives of the soil, of the strictest Puritan stock and lineage, baptized and nurtured in the Puritan Church, and pledged by its covenant, and graduates of its college: they were none the less courtiers, and hated - perhaps unduly or unjustly - as recreant to their own heritage. These retrospects and revivals of a specious loyalty, after the change in the charter, attract notice by contrast only, as showing how firmly the spirit of independence and democracy had strengthened under the Puritan Commonwealth. The discomfitures which the theocratic system encountered, and the concessions which it was compelled to make to this same democratic spirit were the occasions of the modifications just referred to. Puritanism, like every other moral and religious system, had to deal with human nature.

Five years after the colony was planted, a paper was received by the authorities, entitled ** Certain proposals made by Lord Say, Lord Brooke, and other persons of quality, as conditions of their removing to New England." The object of those who made these proposals was to secure encouragement in a proposed coming hither, from the assurance that in the government to be here established the hereditary privileges above " the common sort " should be secured to those of gentle blood. Though the accession of such person3 was very desirable, the authorities evidently felt embarrassed in the matter, and the answers exhibit a gingerly caution and a shrewd sagacity. They were ready to accord " hereditary honors; " but '* hereditary authority" was quite another matter. Nor could the magistrates admit that the freeholders, or voters, should be those who owned a certain personal estate, for the condition of the franchise must be membership of some church. The only magistrates they could set in office must be " men fearing God " (Exodus xviii. 21), and these must be "chosen out of tlieir brethren" (Deut. xvii. 15) "by saints" (i. Cor. vi. i).

This frank and emphatic avowal that the Puritan State was founded on and was identical with the Puritan Church brings us back to tlie original intent in the minds of the chief spirits in the enterprise. The Puritan Commonwealth, as a theocracy, must be administered by "God's people" in church covenant.

What was the material and constitution of the Puritan Church ? Seven or more professing Christians, associating themselves together in covenant, constitute a Church for all the uses of Christian edification and enjoyment of ordinances ; nothing being between them and Christ. The Bible is their sole sufficient sanction, guide, and statute-book. In the sacred volume are to be found divine directions for the administration and discipline of the Church, a commission and instructions for its teachers and officers, the matter of their teaching, the rule of believing and living for members, and the method of discipline. Men receive their authority and functions as ministers directly from God ; their qualifications of heart, mind, and spirit are from Him, in nowise dependent upon any allowance or transmitted privilege from their fellow-men. Such ministers, however, obtain an official position, opportunity to teach and temporal support, from the free choice of a congregation desiring their services. God commissions the man, but the people set him in his place over or among them. The Puritans found a vast and sublime confirmation of their fundamental idea in the grand assertion by St Paul, that the Gospel made each Christian to represent to himself the two highest offices, - those of ** a King and a Priest unto God." The Protestantism of various communions has in later years certified and followed these principles of church institution, and has found no bar to the adoption of them, even when under methods of fellowship freely accepted among themselves very many individual churches have been united in a larger brotherhood. But the Puritan discipline proved, on trial, to be impracticable, as crude, incomplete, inconsistent, and hopelessly embarassed by collision with the civil rights of men. Had all the accepted freemen in - the colony been members of one single all-inclusive Church, there might, for a time at least, have been a degree of harmony and success in the trial of the theory. But there were many churches soon organized after the Puritan pattern. The theory was that each of them was independent in choosing its pastor, in administering discipline, and in its relations to the civil power. All these assumptions proved misleading and fallacious under the Puritan Commonwealth. A church could not be constituted, and a pastor set over it, without deference to the Court or magistracy. It was found necessary that each and all the churches should be mutually answerable, that they should come into accord in doctrine and discipline, and should recognize each other through councils and synods, the authority claimed by or yielded to these representative combinations being undecided and always likely to be contested. It would be neither interesting nor edifying to the general reader to follow the rehearsal of the discomfitures and contentions, the controversies and the alienations between brethren, and of the measures of offence and of opposition employed by those not of the brethren, which thwarted the experiment of a theocracy. The asserted right of private judgment did not then, any more than now, carry with it the wise exercise and use of it. Puritanism proved to be a nebulous fire-mist with marvellous potencies in it, requiring, in the processes of evolution from it, time and space and modifying conditions. The development of the theocratical experiment does not engage sympathetic or amiable feelings as we read it. Every session of the Court,. every meeting of the Magistrates, the planting of each new Church, the arrival of each new group of men and women of independent or " nimble " spirit, the ever restless inquisitions and searchings of thoroughly honest seekers for truth in the " Word," and the curious conceits and notions of all sorts of erratic and mystical idealists continually opened matter of contention, and the fissure was ever enlarging and deepening. The ingenious and acrimonious strifes which ensued from the conflict of opinions, and the disputations about civil and religious poHty stand illustrated to us in a marvellous wealth of technical terms, constituting a jargon, antique and comical in its quaintness, not found in the literature of the old English divines outside of the Puritan fold. The series of severe proceedings which were instituted by the Puritan authorities against the representatives of the more alarming heresies and seditious theories must be noticed by and by. It is enough here to dismiss with the slightest recognition the active workings of the causes already presented in proving how impracticable was the experiment of the Puritan Commonwealth. The Court records testify to the endless complications of the attempt to commingle civil and ecclesiastical legislation, with their multiplying statutes and penalties against undefinable heresies, moaning laments about "the decay of religion," with judgments of fines, imprisonment, and banishment. Under the first Charter, five "Synods" of the Churches, - respectively in 1637, 1648, 1662, 1679, and 1680, - were held in the vain attempt to harmonize variances and to construct a platform of discipline.^ Not gradually, but rapidly, the habits and feelings which had been identified with the religious and ecclesiastical associations of their old home yielded under the stress of changed circumstances and fresh elements of thought. Mr. Cotton divested himself of all that once characterized him as the vicar of a prelate with book-services and rites, and was prepared to " clear the Way of Congregational churches." Only that ** Way " was constantly obstructed by being coursed in every direction by by-paths and foot-tracks, by misleading signboards, and by travellers in all sorts of conveyances, very few of whom seemed to enjoy each other's company. Seven years after his arrival, Win- throp wrote this distinct averment : "Whereas the way of God hath always been to gather his churches out of y world, now y* world, or civill state, must be raised out of y* churches."

It would on some accounts be desirable, in the writing of fresh pages for the perusal of the present generation, if the painful and darker incidents in the development of the Puritan Commonwealth could be passed without mention, or dismissed with a sentence in general terms of regret and preferred oblivion. But one constraining reason, to say nothing of others, for pursuing a different course presents itself in the consideration that some of the most essential principles and elements of the stern system here set on trial were made to appear only in the sharp encounters with its opponents and assailants. Only when the Puritan Commonwealth was driven into selfdefence against those who struck at its vitality, through denying its authority, insulting its dignity, and in successfully breaking its thraldom, can we understand it for what it was. Intolerance and bigotry might be regarded as allowable in defence of a form of Puritanism which held its disciples to lofly aims and found them cheerfully meeting pains and penalties in fidelity to it. But pitiless severity, running at last, by provocation and passionate indulgence, into acts of direful cruelty, brought humiliation upon our ancient magistrates, left sad and dark stains on a few years of their record, and finally confounded and subverted the original scheme of their government. Yet that austerity of intolerance, that ruthlessness in punitive methods, could alone consist with sincerity and stern fidelity to the Puritan scheme and rule.

Doubtless the odiousness of the Puritan discipline and legislation may be heightened by a trifling and scornful rehearsal of the follies and errors consequent upon it, especially in the outrages visited by it on individuals and classes who, however offensive in their heresies, were upright and pure in life. All harshness of censure, all contempt and ridicule poured upon the Puritan magistrates, is utterly unjust when it proceeds, as it generally does, upon the implication that the sort of persons whom they are charged with persecuting were in spirit and conduct then what the sort of persons are who are known among us now under the same names and as holding the same opinions. And those sharp criticisms are also equally unjust, when they transfer the standard of intelligence and judgment, and the social securities of our times, to the past of two hundred years. Nor, on the other hand, would any candid person be willing to set up a plea in justification of the Puritan magistrates, and so make himself a party to their harsh policy. It IS the simple facts of history that we want, and essential parts of those facts are to be found in the atmosphere of the times, the modes of thinking and believing, and the relations between men, as they then differed widely from what they are in these days. Anything that mitigates or relieves the severity of the proceedings against those who voluntarily courted the austere discipline of the Puritan magistracy may be alleged in the interest of both the sufferers and the inflictors of the wrong.

planting itself in Boston has been fully set forth, both as it was conceived by those who planned and guided it, and as the practical trial of it developed its elements and conditions somewhat more clearly than the founders had apprehended them. Having insufficiently secured themselves at the start against the intrusion of uncongenial and obnoxious strangers, they would need to devise most stringent measures in dealing with them as they presented themselves. It is important to keep in mind the fact that the repressive and punitive measures adopted against a succession of individuals and classes of persons who made protests and assaults against the civil or religious policy of the Commonwealth were all of them, in the full severity of their infliction, confined to the first thirty years of the colony. After that brief term there was a sensible relaxation of austerity, and an increase of allowance and tolerance. It is observable, likewise, that as the severe dealing with heretics and dissentients was mitigated, their zeal and fervor and offensiveness were sensibly reduced, and they ceased to present themselves so obnoxiously. Here we note a very natural relation between the spirit of persecution and the spirit which obstinately and even wantonly or perversely provoked it. The fathers were anxiously, we say morbidly and timidly, dreading lest their bold venture in the wilderness should be prostrated before it could strike root. Their first years were the years of its darkest uncertainty and its severest trial. Saving the slender colony at Plymouth, all other like enterprises presented to them only warnings, without a gleam of encouragement The risk which they had most to dread was that from seditions and dissensions among themselves, coming from an assault upon their fundamental principles, - "godliness" and harmony. Their troublers came precisely in the form and shape in which they apprehended them, - in the form and in the sturdy and persistent protests of men and women against their civil and religious principles, and in the shape of active and irrepressible assailants of, and offenders against, their laws. As will soon appear, there was something extraordinary in the odd variety, the grotesque characteristics, and the specially irritating and exasperating course of that strange succession of men and women, of all sorts of odd opinions and notions, who presented themselves during a period of thirty years, seeming to have in common no other object than to grieve and exasperate the Puritan magistrates. We, indeed, can see that they had a higher and nobler mission. But those to whom they were so mischievous and hateful regarded them only as reckless and wanton disturbers of their peace. No sooner had one nuisance of this sort been disposed of, fined, banished, pilloried, whipped, and, in the last dread alternative, swung from the gallows, than another, with a slight variation in the hue of heresy and the attitude of daring, presented himself. As travellers through the woods and bushes from Boston to Rhode Island in midsummer would then have been vexed by the whole brood of snakes and stinging insects, so that harborage of ** conscientious contentious heretics " seemed to furnish an endless variety of the troublers of our Israel. Cotton Mather said that Roger Williams '* had a wind-mill in his head," and that if anybody had lost his conscience, he might find one of a sort to suit him in Rhode Island. A rich variety of specimens was certainly offered from that source to Boston.

A reader of the old strange annals of those times may be moved to conceive what would have been the fate and fortune of the Puritan Commonwealth had it been put to the test of quite another set of spirits than those who tried it. Suppose that a party had been developed among them who simply intensified Puritanism, as moping ascetics, devotees, exceeding in austerity and rigidness the tone and ways of their associates, rebuking their regard for worldly thrift, and exacting a piety even sterner than theirs : possibly their history might then have read somewhat differently. But if we would rightly read their history as it is written, we must now recognize the fact that those who experienced the most ruthless dealing from the Puritan magistrates presented themselves as representing opinions, notions, and practices which were at the same time most odious and alarming to the Puritans. The latter welcomed - indeed they perfectly revelled in - disputations confined to the exposition and interpretation of the Bible. They were ready on all occasions to entertain either with approval or assault anything offered to them as exposition or interpretation of Holy Writ. Texts were to them a legal tender in the currency of beliefs and obligations. But when assertion and argument took them outside of the Bible, either in the direction of ecclesiastical traditions and ** Papistical claims," or of the asserting of special illuminations or ** revelations," they were taken at a disadvantage ; variances then became embittered ; there was no recognized umpire for adjusting the issues opened, and they had recourse to other weapons and methods than those of argument. Identifying civil order and security with the foundation and safeguards of their Commonwealth which they had drawn from and, as they believed, had squared by the Bible, all "heady notions," all eccentric individualisms, all mystical speculations, became, in their apprehensions, fomentings of sedition and revolution. Even in our own secure State, with all the interests and excitements of our heterogeneous population, we are not without experiences and memories of rancors and dreads caused by the wild vagaries and the fancied plottings of mischief of men and women who shock convictions or defy the laws, or threaten, instead of ** prophesying," woes and calamities to the community.

The range of life and the materials for mental occupation and excitement were exceedingly meagre for the hard-worked and anxious exiles of the Puritan colony. They were enthralled by all the superstitions of their own time, and additional clouds of gloom and fear came over them from their wilderness experiences. They became morbid, excitable, and apprehensive, so that they persuaded themselves that an attitude of watchfulness for self-defence should keep them ever on their guard against visible and invisible foes, - fiendish powers of the air; Indians who, if not victims of Satan, seemed to be in league with him; and evil men, disturbers and fomenters of mischief. The magistrates and elders, with their fuller intelligence and a sense of their enhanced responsibility, realized that they had in charge many of "y* weaker sort" among the common people, who might easily be drawn away by the craft or subtilty of " erratic spirits," and they felt bound to guard them from the risks of contact with heretics. It is to be remembered, also, that in the mother country, where there seemed less reason for dreading the influence of fanaticism and the ingenuities of heresy, the authorities anticipated the course pursued in this colony in dealing with the same classes of offenders. The penalties of fining, imprisonment, scourging, and mutilations of the person inflicted here were in strict imitation of those inflicted in England on the strange fellowships of Ranters, Seekers, Anabaptists, Quakers, Muggletonians, Fifth-Monarchy men, &c., - saving only that Boston brought four of its most insuflerable tormenters to the gallows. The wit of man in sanity or mildly crazed, working upon all the fancies and whimseys of the human brain, might well be challenged, even in these days so fertile in speculation and individual theories and crotchets, to match the productiveness of the enthusiastic and fanatical spirits of England just preceding and extending through the Commonwealth period of its history. Given the two chief factors or sources of material to be wrought with, - the Bible under each one's private interpretation to test what he could make of it, whether he could himself read it, or was dependent upon listening to it from others' lips; and the fathomless chaos and medley creations of an overwrought, uninstructed mind, believed in each case to be illuminated and inspired by special divine communications, - and we cease to marvel over the efiervescing products of the combination. Human ingenuity, conceit, credulity, and self-delusion may be said to have exhausted their resources and capacities in the products of the time, which were wrought out by the abounding forms of eccentric sectarism and heresy. Out of the mountain heaps of pamphlets and tractates of the period, with which the busy presses teemed, enough are extant in these days to constitute in themselves a portent to be marvelled over. Indeed these extraordinary productions are now sought for and gathered up at large cost by curious collectors, fascinated by their quaint titles, their mystic dreamings, their extravagant vagaries, their intensity of conviction which would have made their disciples ready to bear the rack or the stake.

One of the most profoundly engaging exercises in the study of the life of Milton, as illustrated by his times, is to note how his noble soul, in working out the grand immunity of the private conscience in its exercises of thinking and believing, was tormented by ** the buzz and gabble," so noisy and teazing all around him. The effervescences and extravagances of what we call the religious spirit, working its wonderful manifestations among large numbers of ignorant and illiterate persons in that period, engaged many pens in the mere effort to catalogue and classify them, as one arranges strange specimens of Nature's productions in a cabinet. But these broods of sectaries were by no means in a fossil or inert condition.

The Puritan Commonwealth

They were very much alive, and about equally engaged In prophesying their own oracles and assailing other peoples'. Certain names and titles have come down to us, and arc in use to-day as designating religious sects, or denominations, or opinions, which were first adopted or assigned when those who bore them are supposed to have first espoused the beliefs or opinions which the words now designate. We read how ruthlessly the Puritan magistrates dealt with Antinomians, Baptists, and Quakers. But there are no persons now living who fully represent those who first bore these names, and carried with them the repute, and made such a manifestation of themselves, as did those who teazed and tormented the old magistrates. We should be greatly misled if we transferred to those who were once dealt with here as Baptists and Quakers the qualities, principles, ways, and demeanor of those who now bear these names, seeing that the latter do not represent in spirit, word, or act the sort of persons of whom we read in our history. It would be enough to set us in the right point of view for seeing the real truth on this subject, if we should simply cull out the epithets and phrases for individuals, and for their opinions and behavings, which the magistrates and elders used in dealing with the objects of their stern discipline. The emphatic words employed make up a strange category. They are such as these : blasphemous, seditious, unsavory, exorbitant, monstrous, diabolical, impious, satanical, with many other sharp, stinging epithets. To say nothing of the absurdity of the supposition that any such terms should be applied to the opinions or practices of those known among us as Baptists and Quakers, it is more to the point to remind ourselves that even the Puritan magistrates themselves would not have used them if under those names they had had to deal only with such as now bear them. The explanation of the matter is not far to seek. While charging upon the intolerance and bigotry of the Puritan magistrates the utmost burden of blame for what there was in their stern principles which drove them to the unrelenting and distressing severity of their penalties, there is quite another element in the case for which candor must make a very large though undefined allowance as palliating their fault.

If we should gather in a series the individuals and the classes of persons who were the victims of Puritan intolerance, we should have to recognize the fact that, with the single exception of the case of Roger Williams, - to be specially referred to in its place, - there were common qualities in those who provoked that intolerance which were peculiarly aggravating and hateful to the magistrates and ministers. There was in all of them a strong and ardent element of enthusiasm and fanaticism, and in most of them a claim to a special divine illumination and guidance in the form of " private revelations,'* the avowal of which goaded the Puritans to rage, and made those professedly so " inspired " the objects of mingled contempt and dread. A thorough and faithful study of the records of the Court, of the pamphlets and tractates of the time, of the extant manuscripts which preserve the language and fervor of the sharp conflicts, and a perusal of the historical digests whose writers, in their earnest championship of the respective parties to the strife, have taken care that either side shall have a fair and.full hearing, - while it may or may not be regarded as rewarding the labor of the inquirer, will teach him a useful wisdom. He will find himself gradually but sensibly taken into a very different range for thought, belief, and mental occupation from that in which we move and live. He will meet with no need or use for that sort of tolerance which consists with indifference. While wondering how human beings could work themselves into such fervors and fevers of zeal and passion about fancies and notions to us so remote from the range of reasonable and healthful interest, we often find ourselves admiring them for their manifest sincerity and constancy. Nor are there lacking among them the evidences of a rich ingenuity and ideality in fashioning out of misty speculations the shapings of some august truths. We are not infrequently awed by catching from the lips of illiterate persons, in their seeming delirium from their oracles, the proof of a marvellous insight in the region of elevated ideas. We are led, perhaps, to a better appreciation of the cautious sagacity of Erasmus in protesting against Luther's resolve to offer the Bible in the vernacular to the free perusal of the common people. But we are also impressed with a sense of the inner fecundity and the quickening spirit of the Bible for earnest and restless minds, who received it as if passed to them in a cloud from the hand of God, to be read and brooded over as a private message, direct and sufficient.

One of the most picturesque characters for us in our early chronicles, though he had quite another aspect and personification for the old magis- ^ trates, was Samuel Gorton. He is described by hear of him as appearing in Boston in 1636, and as shortly going to Plymouth, whence he was soon expelled for holding some strange and, to us, unintelligible heresies. Next, he was whipped in Rhode Island for calling the magistrates "just-asses," and found refuge with Roger Williams in Providence. In a controversy with our authorities about the lands on which he and others had settled, he was seized, and with ten of his followers was brought to Boston, where, for his " damnable heresies," he was put in irons, confined to labor, and whipped, and then banished on pain of death if he appeared here again. His heresies were reputed as proving him a disciple of the fanatic David George, of Delfl, the founder of the " Family of Love," who called himself the " Messiah." It was said that Gorton could neither write nor read. If the charge had been that what he did write was utterly unintelligible for its mystical and cloudy rhapsodies and dreamings, it would have been more to the point. On a visit which he made to England, he engaged the countenance of the Earl of Warwick to redress his wrongs ; and he wrote, or published, tractates and expositions of his fancies, from which one in these days will hardly succeed in drawing out anything but darkness. Yet he founded a sect which bore his name in Rhode Island for a century, and proved in private and civil capacities to be a useful man. Any one who, in these days, may be curious to inform himself about the opinions of this reputed " Familist'* may find them in books bearing his name, such as Simplicities Dcfaue against Srjcn- Headed Policy ; An Incorruptible Key composed of tlie CX, Psalm, &c. His writings are accessible, but they do not obtrude themselves on the present generation.*

The first serious trouble, engaging severe measures in the action of the Court, was that of Roger Williams. Though he was not and never became a member or freeman of the Company, he was welcomed on his arrival. He came here on his own prompting, and of course could remain only on sufferance, if he should prove a desirable person. Arriving with his wife in Boston, in 1631, while Wilson of the First Church was absent in England, Williams was invited to become its teacher. He says that he refused the invitation because the members of the church would not make humble confession of sin in having communed with the Church of England. He was not then known, as in the after years of his life, for his sweetness of spirit, his breadth of liberality, and his noble magnanimity, but seems to have most impressed those who met him as holding " singular opinions," and being " very unsettled in judgmente.'* He was more welcome in Salem, where he first went, than he proved to be at Plymouth, where he made a short stay, and whence he returned to Salem in 1634. The gentle Elder Brewster, fearing that he would " run a course of rigid Separation and Anabaptistry," was glad to facilitate his removal from Plymouth. There are, of course, two ways of telling the story of his troubles with the Massachusetts authorities. One, a plea in his defence

1 [The sources of knowledge of the Gorton controversy are Winthrop's Nrto England^ Savage's edition, ii. 69; documents in Hazard's CoUectiotts ; Johnson's Wouder-uwrkiug Providence, Poole's edition, p. 1S5, and the several controversial tracts of the time. In J646 Gorton printed his defence of his own conduct in New England, the Simplicitic*s Defence^ now a rare book, of which there are copies in the Prince collection and in Harvard College Library; but there arc reprints of It in Rhode Island Hist, Coll., ii., and in Force's Tracts, iv. Edward Winslow, of Plymouth, who had been sent to England to thwart the purposes of the enemies of the confederacy, answered Gorton In his Ifypocracie Unmasked (copies in Mr. Deane's and in the Carter Brown Library), which was reissued in 1649 with the title changed to The Danger of lolerating Levellers in a Civill State. Meanwhile, in 1647, o" tbe other side. J. Child's A^7U England^! Jonas cast np at London j)niports to review the proceedings at Boston against "divers honest and godly persons." It has been reprinted in 2 Mass. Hist, Coll., iv. ; in Force'i Tracts, iv., and edited by W. T. R. Marvin, Boston, j86g. Winslow replied in his PJ^no England's Salamander, 1647, of which there is a copy in Harvard College Library; reprinted in 3 Mass, I fist. Coll , ii. Gorton took exception to some part of Morton's Nc7v England's Memorial, and furnished an answer, which Henry Stevens printed at London in 1S62 from an autograph manuscript. Cf. Force's Tracts, iv. The controversy has l>een followed with more or less care in Hubbard's New England, ch. xlvii. ; Baylies's Old Colony, i. ch. xii.; Palfrey's Nao England^ ii. ch. iii., iv., and v.; Y^\\^% Eccles. Hist, of New England, i. 512; Arnold's Rhode Island, i. ch. vi. and vii.; Bryant and Gay's United States, ii. ch. iv. ; George H. Moore's paper on Nathaniel Ward in the Hist. Mag., March, 1868. There is a life of Gorton by Mackie in Sparks's American Biogi-aphy ; and Charles Deane in the N. E. Hist, and Geneal. R^X y J"'y» '*^5o> P^^^ '^vcr the matter and gives the authorities. - Eu.| against them, represents him as a premature champion of soul-liberty, denying the right of the magistrate beyond civil matters, and pleading for the claims of the savages above the King's patent to the land. The other telling of the story sets him forth as a dangerous enthusiast, broaching opinions which struck at the foundations of all safe authority, and holding principles of such a seditious tendency as would have involved the complete wreck of the enterprise for which its projectors had spent and endured so much. The sentence pronounced against him charged that he had "broached and divulged divers new and dangerous opinions against the authority of magistrates, as also writ letters of defamation, both of the magistrates and churches here." The Court forbade his longer stay within its jurisdiction. The " wilderness " into which he was banished was a part of the same sort as the whole country at that time. As far as location, scenery, soil, and surroundings were concerned, he certainly was the gainer in finding a new home in Providence. He proved to be the first of a series of stragglers, holding all manner-of eccentric individualisms of opinion, with " all sorts of consciences," who found a home there and in Rhode Island. Trouble and distraction enough, too, they had in settling any sort of policy and society in their free State. Between the range of diversity in utterance and deed there indulged and allowed, and the strict uniformity labored for in Massachusetts, one is reminded of the difference between attempting to cord up into a symmetrical pile and range straight sticks of wood of the same length, and essaying the same object with a heap of stumps drawn from the earth, with their roots and prongs projecting at all angles in every direction.*

* [Roger Williams and his controversies have produced a long list of literary illustrations. The original sources are found in Bradford's New Plymonih; in Winthrop's New England^ and in the Otter's papers on the Baptist controversy and his argument against Williams's attack on the patent, which are printed in the Afiiss, I fist. Sac. Prof.^ February, 1873, with Mr. Deane's examination of the validity of the charter title to the lands, which Williams denied. Also Williams's letters, both as given in the Narra- ^nsetl Club Publications^ vi., and in the Winthrop papers in Mass, Hist. Coll., third series, ix. and x., and fourth series, vi. Further, Williams's controversial works, particularly his Blottdy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Couscience^ London. 1644, two editions, an exposition and defence of his views on toleration. The original print is found in a few libraries (Harvard, Prince. Historical Society, &c.), and reprints have been made by the Hansard Knollys Society in 1848, and by the Narragansett Club in 1867. This book elicited from John Cotton, the Boston minister, his rejoinder. The Bloudy Tettent, tVasbeil, And fuade white in the bloud of the Lambe, and Williams was again prompted to res|>ond in his Bloody Tenent yet more B hotly, by Mr, Cotton^ s Endevor to wash it white in the Blood of the Lambe, 1652, which has also been reprinted by the same club. Further titles appertaining may be found in the Brinley Catalogue^ and in H. M. Dexter's Bibliography of Congregationalistn. Professor Tyler, in his /list, of American Literature, I 241, takes a kindly view of Williams in this matter. The judgment of him which is taken in Mather's Magnalia, bk. vii. 430, and in Hubbard's Ne7u England, ch. xxx., may be considered as emanating from those who derived impressions from a generation that knew him ; but the friends of Williams claim that they are prejudiced. Back us 's Hist, of New England, being written primarily in the interests of the Baptists, whose faith Williams later embraced, represents the views of the other side. Professor Diman, in his preface to Cotton's reply to Williams as published by the Narragansett Club, is generally, however, considered to' have treated the vexed questions at issue between Rhode Island and Massachusetts writers with a good deal of candor. Dr. («eorge E. Kllis, in his lectures on the treatment of intruders and dissentients, published in the I/ist. Society's Lowell Institute Lectures, takes the same view as in the text. Dr. H. M. Dexter, in his As to Roger IVil- Hams, makes a very searching collation of the authorities, and contends that the banishment

More serious still, and, for a short period of embittered and alienating discord between parties in Boston almost equally matched in earnestness and influence, threatening the complete and disastrous overthrow of the colonial enterprise, was what is known in our history as the " Antinomian Controversy." There are some articles on the long list of discovered and branded " Heresies," of which we may say that the worst thing about them is their names, with the ill asso<^iations which they have acquired. Among these is " Antinomianism." Some of our readers must be saved the trouble of turning to the dictionary to learn what the word means, by being told that it signifies a denial of, or opposition to, legalism, or a subjection to the law of works as the duty of a Christian. " Antinomians " were understood to hold that one who believed himself to be under a " covenant of faith " need not concern himself to regard " the covenant of works." In other words, those who internally and spiritually had the assurance that they were in a state of "justification" might relieve themselves of all anxiety as to their "sanctification." It is easy to see what possible mischief of dangerous self-delusion and utter recklessness about the demands of strict virtue and even common morality was wrapt up in this beguiling heresy. Some private mystical experience, real or imagined, that one was in a " state of grace," might secure a discharge from scrupulous fidelity of conduct. Thus, that sad reprobate. Captain Underbill, - a member of the Boston Church, and very serviceable in his military capacity, - when detected in gross immorality, had the assurance to tell the pure-hearted Governor Winthrop, " that the Spirit had sent in to him the witness of Free Grace, while he was in the moderate enjoyment of tlie creature called tobacco," - that is, while he was smoking his pipe.

This dreaded heresy came to the stern Puritans of Boston associated with grossly licentious professions and indulgences among fanatics in Germany and Holland, and was by no means unknown by such tokens in old England. But allowing for very exceptional cases, like that of Underbill, no such scandals attach to the names and conduct of the Antinomians who were so ruthlessly dealt with in Boston in 1636. The most prominent among the Antinomians here, - the one who ** broached the heresy," and whose name is the synonym of it, - was Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, a pure and excellent was for political reasons chiefly; and this is der Ccngregationalisten in Neu England^ and the view in J. A. Vinton's article in the Congre- Masson's Life and Times of Mittoft^ iii. S. G. gational Qttarterly^ July, 1873. Of the lives of Drake, in the Hist, Afag^^ December, 1868, ex- Williams, Knowles*s, 1834, is based on authentic amines the- question of the authenticity of an material; GammelPs is briefer and is in Sparks's alleged portrait of Williams, which first, and Amer, Biography; Elton's, 1852, brings forward properly, did service for Franklin in Watson's new facts, which are also used by Guild in his Annals of Philadelphia^ 183a The same plate, introduction to the Narragansett Club publica- with Williams's name under it, served some tions, 1865. The relations of Williams and the years afterwards as his likeness in the Welsh Boston authorities are also discussed more or less Magazine^ published in New York. Later, a fully in Bancroft, i. ch. ix. ; Palfrey's New Eng- painting was made to match the Franklin head ; land^ i. ch. x. ; Arnold's Rhode Island; Budding- and this painting was engraved as a portrait ton's First Church in Charlestoivn^ p. 200; Felt's of Williams in Benedict's History of the Bap- Eccles. nist,of H. Pl.i.nh.ix,; Spng\ic*s Annals tistSy 1847. The fraud was first exposed by vf the American Pulpit^ vi., &c. For foreign Charles Deane in the Cambridge Chronicle in views see Gcrvinus's introduction to his History 1850. The painting was recently in rjcistence of the Nineteenth Century; Uhden's Geschichte in Roxbury. - Ed,| woman, to whose person and conduct there attaches no stain. She first became known for her kind and helpful services, friendly and medical, to her own sex in their needs. She is described as a woman of ** nimble wit " and a high spirit, gifted in argument and ready speech. She was inquisitive and critical, - perhaps censorious. But her most alarming quality was that she ** vented her revelations; " i. e., in a form of prophecy sometimes threatening and denunciatory gave utterance to forebodings of judgment and disaster to come upon the Colony, as revealed to her by special divine communications. While no claim to such privileged illumination could for a moment stand with the Puritans as even possible of proof, the assertion of it was of the very essence of fanaticism. Yet the weak and credulous might be ensnared by it, and then there was no setting limit or restraint to the ruin and woe which might come upon them.

Having made herself trusted and esteemed by many of the principal women of the town, Mrs. Hutchinson drew groups of them around her to discuss the sermons delivered by tlie elders.^ It soon appeared that by her judgment most of these preached a " covenant of works." The theme of earnest debate, and the vehicle which it found in tongues not always discreet or charitable, soon made itself a power outside of the women's meetings. The spark was set to inflammable materials. The whole community was in a fever of mutual distrust, jealousy, and dread of impending catastrophe. Had Boston at the time been the only local settlement in the colony, or isolated from connection through the Court with others* it seems as if its goodly birth and hope would have been darkly and dismally succeeded by a most gloomy blight and extinction. It was saved from absolute ruin by its neighbor settlements, which had not been so stirred by the matter of strife. As the dealings of the Court and the Church with Mrs. Hutchinson and her party became more and more embittered and stern, it was found that she had a very strong following. The two associate elders Cotton and Wilson, and the two Governors, Winthrop and Vane, each respectively took different sides in the contest. Many of the principal inhabitants of Boston warmly espoused the views of Mrs. Hutchinson.^ As the dispute came to

1 (Mrs. Hutchinson lived at, or rather her husband's lot formed, the corner of the present Washington and School streets, where the -- Old Corner Book-store " stands, nearly opposite Governor Winthrop*s house, which was on the other side of Washington Street. William Aspinwall, one of her adherents, was a near neighbor, and lived on Washington Street, just south of School Street, his land extending back to the Common. Snow, Boston^ p. ii8. - Ed.| who had come over with Winthrop, and for some years had been a prominent resident and merchant of Boston. He is said to have built the first brick house erected in the town. He was dropped from the government when Winthrop was elected over Vane in their memorable contest, but the freemen immediately returned him as a Deputy. In April, 1638, he, with others, removed to the island of Aquidneck, and founded the State of Rhode Island. A portrait of him hangs in the Council Chamber at Newport, and is engraved in Bryant and Gay's United States^ ii. 44. For Coddington's origin, see N, E, Hist, and Geneal. A^v"-, January, 1874, p. f 3. He was from Lincolnshire, and the Plymouth Or. Fuller, in his letter to Bradford, calls him a ** Boston man," - as Dr. Haven explains in his chapter. - Eu.]

the knowledge of the " common sort of people," it gained new elements of fear and passion, partly because there were real elements of lawlessness involved in it, and for the rest because so many who were heated by the strife had really no intelligent idea of the terms and significance of the controversy, so that they could distinguish between its practical and its panic qualities.