[This article is No. 27 in the series entitled "A Review of Sunday Legislation in Century Nineteen," but it will be of equal interest to those who have not read preceding numbers. —ED. S. OF T.]
WITH most people history is only a kind of ancestor worship. —John Fiske.
I have now reached the closing argument which I intend to produce against the conclusion arrived at by Justice Brewer, of the Supreme Court of the United States, in his famous decision in the case of "The Rector," etc., of the Holy Trinity, Plaintiffs in Error, vs. the United States. In that epoch-making document the learned judge quoted the fundamental laws of Massachusetts to prove "that this is a Christian nation." His language is as follows:—
Or like that in the constitution of Massachusetts, 1780: "It is the right as well as the duty of all men in society publicly and at stated seasons to worship the Supreme Being, the great Creator and Preserver of the universe. . . . As the happiness of a people and the good order and preservation of civil government essentially depend upon piety, religion, and morality, and as these cannot be generally diffused through a community, but by the institution of the public worship of God and of public instructions in piety, religion, and morality, therefore, to promote their happiness and to secure the good order and preservation of their government, the people of this commonwealth have a right to invest their Legislature with power to authorize and require, and the Legislature shall, from time to time, authorize and require, the several towns, parishes, precincts, and other bodies politic, or religious societies, to make suitable provision, at their own expense, for the institution of the public worship of God and for the support and maintenance of public Protestant teachers of piety, religion, and morality in all cases where such provision shall not be made voluntarily."631
It was John Adams, the second President of the United States, who denominated himself, along with all the other men of New England, as a "church-going animal." His language is certainly quaint; it may be termed homespun; but by it, nevertheless, the true status of the case is, perhaps, more clearly revealed than would be possible through the medium of a more dignified expression.
That the Puritan of Massachusetts was "church going," historians of every school agree. That he was an "animal," and in some ways an unpleasant "animal," a bigoted, cruel, narrow-minded "animal," it is the painful duty of the cosmopolitan historian to aver. The distinguishing trait of this "church-going animal" was not only that no one could stop him from going to his own church, but all the plaintive cries of Mistress Ann Hutchinson, the fervid eloquence of Roger Williams, and the lessons which the tenacity of the Quakers must have riveted upon his mind, were not potent enough to prevent him from compelling everybody to go also to his own church. Indeed, Roger Williams' poet declares that the founder of Providence preferred the wild animals of the forest—the wolf and the wild cat—to the "church-going," persecuting "animals" of Boston Bay.
"Growling they come, and in dark groups they stand,
Show the white fang, and roll the brightening eye,
Till, urged by famine's rage, the shaggy band
Seemed e'en the flame's bright terrors to defy.
Then mid the group he hurled the blazing brand;
Swift they disperse, and raise the scattered cry;
But, rallying, soon back to the siege they came,
And scarce their rage paused at the mounting flame.
"Yet Williams deemed that persecution took
A form in them less odious than in men;
He on their dreary solitude had broke—
Ay, and had trespassed on their native glen;
His human shape they scantily too might brook,
For it had been an enemy to them;
But bigot man did into conscience look,
And for the secret thought his brother struck."
The historians who have written upon the Puritans may be divided into two schools. First, there are those to whom every Puritan was a saint. They defend these rugged settlers in everything they did. They almost advocate the worship of the ground upon which they trod. They defend them in deeds for which they did not defend themselves. They are ready to anathematize as a blasphemer anyone who dares assert that the Puritan may possibly have been a little lower than the angels of light. They gloss into good acts crimes of the deepest hue, and then call themselves historians, which sacred office they have polluted, whilst in truth they are "ancestor worshipers," as verily as is the most benighted Japanese devotee to Shintoism.
The second class may be more quickly dismissed. They are those who regard the Puritans as little better than impersonations of the evil one, and as worse than papists of the Loyola or Duke of Alva type.
I find it impossible to state my own rating of the case in one brief paragraph. It is, in fact, necessary to consume the greater part of this article in order to set forth the matter fairly.
It is commonly asserted that the Puritans of New England came over to America to found an asylum where the religiously oppressed of every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people, might find a Wequetonsing, or haven of quiet rest. This is the ordinary filio-pietistic theory. It is frequently canted in Fourth of July orations. It may often be heard in speeches at Thanksgiving dinners. The fact of the matter is, nevertheless, that there is not a shade of a shadow of truth in it. Indeed, it is an unmitigated falsehood of the worst sort.
To begin with, and to put the matter bluntly, Winthrop and Dudley, and the men following them to the shores of New England, came hither to establish a theocracy—an iniquitous despotism. They came here to establish their own religion, to establish it by civil law, and to make all men conform to it, or else get outside of the boundaries of Massachusetts. All of this is admirably stated by John Fiske in a single paragraph:—
"The aim of Winthrop in coming to Massachusetts was the construction of a theocratic state which should be to Christians, under the New Testament dispensation, all that the theocracy of Moses, and Joshua, and Samuel had been to the Jews in Old Testament days. They should be to all intents and purposes freed from the jurisdiction of the Stuart king, and, so far as possible, the text of the Holy Scriptures should be their guide both in weighty matters of general legislation, and in the shaping of the smallest details of daily life. In such a scheme there was no room for religious liberty, as we understand it. No doubt the text of the Scriptures may be interpreted in many ways, but among these men there was a substantial agreement as to the important points, and nothing could have been further from their thoughts than to found a colony which should afford a field for new experiments in the art of right living. The State they were to found was to consist of a united body of believers; citizenship itself was to be coextensive with church membership; and in such a state there was apparently no more room for heretics than there was in Rome or Madrid."
These words state, in a nutshell, the general idea of the scheme. In the charter granted to the Massachusetts Bay Company by King Charles, which gave them the right to "plant" New England, nothing was said about religious liberty. There were two very good reasons for this: First, King Charles belonged to the Church of England, and it was his intention that the tenets of no creed should be practiced anywhere in his domains, save that of the Church of England. So, on this score, if they had asked for religious liberty, or, rather, for leave to set up a body politic which would equally protect all beliefs, and favor none, the request would most surely not have been granted. In the second place, religious liberty was not what the Puritans wanted.
There was, however, one statement in the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company, issued by King Charles I, in 1629, which deserves notice in this connection. The officers of the company were empowered
"To make Lawes and Ordinances for the Good and Welfare of the saide Company, and for the Government and ordering of the saide Landes and Plantacon, and the People inhabiting and to inhabite the same, as to them from tyme to tyme shalbe thought meete, soe as such Lawes and Ordinances be not contrarie or repugnant to the Lawes and Statuts of this our Realme of England."
Now Charles I. belonged, of course, to the Church of England. He was one of the most ardent advocates of that system. Archbishop Laud was his right-hand man in everything; and it was in part, at least, on account of his Church of England policy that he lost his head in the struggle with the Puritans. No argument is needed here to prove that the laws of the realm of England were all intended to enforce the doctrines of the Church of England upon the people of England. Then when the charter members of the Massachusetts Bay Company accepted the charter from King Charles, they agreed to make no laws or ordinances contrary to the laws and ordinances of the realm of England. But this is the very thing which they at once set about to do. And in doing it they manifested rank dishonesty.
Their whole theocratic scheme was entirely contrary to the laws and ordinances of England, and they knew it. They could not help but know it. Had they not lived in England all their lives? Had they not lived there under the rule of Charles I, when the whole country was in a ferment over this very question of the rights of the English Church and the rights of dissenters?—To be sure they had. And, therefore, when they accepted that charter, which prohibited them from making any laws contrary to the laws of England, and at the same time cherished a plan that was diametrically opposed to all the laws of England, they acted in bad faith, and no honest man on earth can make anything else out of it.
The Puritans even went so far as to tax the members of the Church of England in Massachusetts for the support of the preachers of the Puritan faith. In the town of Braintree, not very far from Boston, there was a communion of the Church of England people. In 1713 the Rev. Thomas Eager was sent out from England to visit the church at Braintree, and he returned the following information to the authorities in England, from which I draw my information on this point:—
"The whole province has been very much disturbed on the account of my coming to this place, and, accordingly, have not failed to affront and abuse me whenever they meet me,—"atheist and papist," the best language I can get from them. The people are Independents, and have a perfect odium to those of our communion. These few which adhere to our church are taxed and rated most extravagantly to support the dissenting clergy. Had this province been called New Crete [Titus 1 : 12], instead of New England, it had better suited, for the people are very great strangers to truth, and I do really believe that I have not passed one day since my arrival without one false report or other raised upon me."
And all this, we are asked to believe, was "not contrarie or repugnant to the Lawes and Statuts of this our Realme of England." By no possible reasoning can the Puritans ever be acquitted on the charge of bad faith in the matter of the charter. Moreover, in the New Haven colony none but church members, that is, members of the Independent, or Puritan, faith, were allowed to vote. This measure in the very start-off disfranchised about one-half of the settlers in the town of New Haven, about the same proportion in Guilford, and in the neighborhood of one-fifth in Milford.