A History of American Christianity

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It need not be denied that government patronage, even when dispensed by
the dirty hands of such scurvy nursing fathers as Fletcher and Lord
Cornbury, may give strength of a certain sort to a religious
organization. Whatever could be done in the way of endowment or of
social preferment in behalf of the English church was done eagerly. But
happily this church had a better resource than royal governors in the
well-equipped and sustained, and generally well-chosen, army of
missionaries of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Not fewer
than fifty-eight of them were placed by the society in this single
province. And if among them there were those who seemed to "preach
Christ of envy and strife," as if the great aim of the preacher of the
gospel were to get a man out of one Christian sect into another, there
were others who showed a more Pauline and more Christian conception of
their work, taking their full share of the task of bringing the
knowledge of Christ to the unevangelized, whether white, red, or
black.[80:2]

The diversity of organization which was destined to characterize the
church in the province of New York was increased by the inflow of
population from New England. The settlement of Long Island was from the
beginning Puritan English. The Hudson Valley began early to be occupied
by New Englanders bringing with them their pastors. In 1696 Domine
Selyns, the only Dutch pastor in New York City, in his annual report
congratulates himself, "Our number is now full," meaning that there are
four Dutch ministers in the whole province of New York, and adds: "In
the country places here there are many English preachers, mostly from
New England. They were ordained there, having been in a large measure
supplied by the University of Cambridge [Mass.]." The same letter gives
the names of the three eminent French pastors ministering to the
communities of Huguenot refugees at New Rochelle and New York and
elsewhere in the neighborhood. The Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, more
important to the history of the opening century than any of the rest,
were yet to enter.

The spectacle of the ancient Dutch church thus dwindling, and seemingly
content to dwindle, to one of the least of the tribes, is not a cheerful
one, nor one easy to understand. But out of this little and dilapidated
Bethlehem was to come forth a leader. Domine Frelinghuysen, arriving in
America in 1720, was to begin a work of training for the ministry, which
would result, in 1784, in the establishment of the first American
professorship of theology;[81:1] and by the fervor of his preaching he
was to win the signal glory of bringing in the Great Awakening.

FOOTNOTES:

[69:1] Dr. E. T. Corwin, "History of the Reformed (Dutch) Church in
America" (in the American Church History Series), pp. 28-32.

[70:1] "The province, under the long years of Dutch supremacy, had
gathered only some seven thousand inhabitants, against the hundred and
twenty thousand of their New England neighbors" (Lodge, "English
Colonies," p. 297).

[71:1] See Corwin, p. 37; but compare the claim made in behalf of the
Puritan Whitaker, "apostle to the Indians" thirty years earlier
(Tiffany, "Protestant Episcopal Church," p. 18); compare also the work
of the Lutheran Campanius in New Sweden (Jacobs, "The Lutherans," p.
83).

[74:1] "The Puritans in Holland, England, and America" (New York, 1892).

[76:1] The king's noble conceptions of what such a colony should be and
should accomplish are quoted in Bancroft, vol. ii., pp. 284, 285.

[78:1] Corwin, p. 54.

[79:1] Corwin, pp. 105, 121.

[80:1] Corwin, p. 105.

[80:2] "Digest of S. P. G. Records," pp. 57-79. That the sectarian
proselyting zeal manifested in some of the missionaries' reports made an
unfavorable impression on the society is indicated by the peremptory
terms of a resolution adopted in 1710: "That a stop be put to the
sending any more missionaries among Christians, except to such places
whose ministers are, or shall be, dead or removed" (_ibid._, p. 69). A
good resolution, but not well kept.

[81:1] Corwin, p. 207. Undue stress should not be laid upon this formal
fact. The early New England colleges were primarily and mainly
theological seminaries and training-schools for the ministry. Their
professors were all theological professors. It is stated in Dwight's
"Life of Edwards" that James Pierpont, of New Haven, Edwards's
father-in-law, who died in 1714, lectured to the students of Yale
College, as professor of moral philosophy.

CHAPTER VIII.

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

The attitude of the Church of England Puritans toward the Separatists
from that church was the attitude of the earnest, patient, hopeful
reformer toiling for the removal of public abuses, toward the restless
"come-outer" who quits the conflict in despair of succeeding, and,
"without tarrying for any," sets up his little model of good order
outside. Such defection seemed to them not only of the nature of a
military desertion and a weakening of the right side, but also an
implied assertion of superior righteousness which provoked invidious
comparison and mutual irritation of feeling. The comparison must not be
pressed too far if we cite in illustration the feeling of the great mass
of earnest, practical antislavery men in the American conflict with
slavery toward the faction of "come-outer" abolitionists, who,
despairing of success within the church and the state, seceded from
both, thenceforth predicting failure for every practical enterprise of
reform on the part of their former workfellows, and at every defeat
chuckling, "I told you so."

If we should compare the English Separatist of the seventeenth century
with this American Separatist of the nineteenth, we should be in still
greater danger of misleading. Certainly there were those among the
Separatists from the Church of England who, in the violence of their
alienation and the bitterness of their sufferings, did not refrain from
sour and acrid censoriousness toward the men who were nearest them in
religious conviction and pursuing like ends by another course. One does
not read far in the history of New England without encountering
reformers of this extreme type. But not such were the company of true
worshipers who, at peril of liberty and life, were wont to assemble each
Lord's day in a room of the old manor-house of Scrooby, of which William
Brewster was lessee, for Christian fellowship and worship, and for
instruction in Christian truth and duty from the saintly lips of John
Robinson. The extreme radicals of their day, they seem to have been
divinely preserved from the besetting sins of radicalism--its
narrowness, its self-righteousness, its censoriousness and intolerance.
Those who read the copious records of the early New England colonization
are again and again surprised at finding that the impoverished little
company of Separatists at Leyden and Plymouth, who were so sharply
reprobated by their Puritan brethren of the Church of England for their
schismatic attitude, their over-righteousness and exclusiveness, do
really excel, in liberality and patient tolerance and catholic and
comprehensive love toward all good men, those who sat in judgment on
them. Something of this is due to the native nobleness of the men
themselves, of whom the world was not worthy; something of it to their
long discipline in the passive virtues under bitter persecution in their
native land and in exile in Holland and in the wilderness; much of it
certainly to the incomparably wise and Christ-like teaching of Robinson
both at Scrooby and at Leyden, and afterward through the tender and
faithful epistles with which he followed them across the sea; and all of
it to the grace of God working in their hearts and glorified in their
living and their dying.

It would be incompatible with the limits of this volume to recite in
detail the story of the Pilgrims; it has been told more amply and with
fuller repetition than almost any other chapter of human history, and is
never to be told or heard without awakening that thrill with which the
heartstrings respond to the sufferings and triumphs of Christ's blessed
martyrs and confessors. But, more dispassionately studied with reference
to its position and relations in ecclesiastical history, it cannot be
understood unless the sharp and sometimes exasperated antagonism is kept
in view that existed between the inconsiderable faction, as it was
esteemed, of the Separatists, and the great and growing Puritan party at
that time in disfavor with king and court and hierarchy, but soon to
become the dominant party not only in the Church of England, but in the
nation. It is not strange that the antagonism between the two parties
should be lost sight of. The two are identified in their theological
convictions, in their spiritual sympathies, and, for the most part, in
their judgment on questions concerning the externals of the church; and
presently their respective colonies, planted side by side, not without
mutual doubts and suspicions, are to grow together, leaving no visible
seam of juncture,

Like kindred drops commingling into one.[84:1]

To the Puritan reformer within the Church of England, the act of the
Pilgrims at Scrooby in separating themselves from the general mass of
English Christians, mingled though that mass might be with a multitude
of unworthy was nothing less than the sin of schism. One effect of the
act was to reflect odium upon the whole party of Puritans, and involve
them in the suspicion of that sedition which was so unjustly, but with
such fatal success, imputed to the Separatists. It was a hard and
doubtful warfare that the Puritans were waging against spiritual
wickedness in high places; the defection of the Separatists doubly
weakened them in the conflict. It is not strange, however it may seem
so, that the animosity of Puritan toward Separatist was sometimes
acrimonious, nor that the public reproaches hurled at the unpopular
little party should have provoked recriminations upon the assailants as
being involved in the defilements and the plagues of Babylon, and should
have driven the Separatists into a narrower exclusiveness of separation,
cutting themselves off not only from communion with abuses and
corruptions in the Church of England, but even from fellowship with good
and holy men in the national church who did not find it a duty to
secede.

Nothing of this bitterness and narrowness is found in Robinson.
Strenuously as he maintained the right and duty of separation from the
Establishment, he was, especially in his later years, no less earnest in
condemning the "Separatists who carried their separation too far and had
gone beyond the true landmarks in matters of Christian doctrine or of
Christian fellowship."[85:1] His latest work, "found in his studie after
his decease," was "A Treatise of the Lawfulness of Hearing of the
Ministers in the Church of England."

The moderateness of Robinson's position, and the brotherly kindness of
his temper, could not save him and his people from the prevailing odium
that rested upon the Separatist. Many and grave were the sorrows through
which the Pilgrim church had to pass in its way from the little hamlet
of Scrooby to the bleak hill of Plymouth. They were in peril from the
persecutor at home and in peril in the attempt to escape; in peril from
greedy speculators and malignant politicians; in peril from the sea and
from cold and from starvation; in peril from the savages and from false
brethren privily sent among them to spy out their liberties; but an
added bitterness to all their tribulations lay in this, that, for the
course which they were constrained in conscience to pursue, they were
subject to the reprobation of those whom they most highly honored as
their brethren in the faith of Christ. Some of the most heartbreaking of
their trials arose directly from the unwillingness of English Puritans
to sustain, or even countenance, the Pilgrim colony.

In the year 1607, when the ships of the Virginia Company were about
landing their freight of emigrants and supplies at Jamestown, the first
and unsuccessful attempt of the Pilgrims was made to escape from their
native land to Holland. Before the end of 1608 the greater part of them,
in scattering parties, had effected the passage of the North Sea, and
the church was reunited in a land of religious freedom. With what a
blameless, diligent, and peaceful life they adorned the name of disciple
through all the twelve years of their sojourn, how honored and beloved
they were among the churches and in the University of Leyden, there are
abundant testimonies. The twelve years of seclusion in an alien land
among a people of strange language was not too long a discipline of
preparation for that work for which the Head of the church had set them
apart. This was the period of Robinson's activity as author. In erudite
studies, in grave debate with gainsayers at home and with fellow-exiles
in Holland, he was maturing in his own mind, and in the minds of the
church, those large and liberal yet definite views of church
organization and duty which were destined for coming ages so profoundly
to influence the American church in all its orders and divisions. "He
became a reformer of the Separation."[87:1]

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

It is difficult, in reading the instrument then subscribed, to avoid the
conviction that the theory of the origin of the powers of civil
government in a social compact, which had long floated in literature
before it came to be distinctly articulated in the "Contrat Social" of
Jean Jacques Rousseau, was familiar to the minds of those by whom the
paper was drawn. Thoughtful men at the present day universally recognize
the fallacy of this plausible hypothesis, which once had such wide
currency and so serious an influence on the course of political history
in America. But whether or not they were affected by the theory, the
practical good sense of the men and their deference to the teachings of
the Bible secured them from the vicious and absurd consequences
deducible from it. Not all the names of the colonists were subscribed to
the compact,--a clear indication of the freedom of individual judgment
in that company,--but it was never for a moment held that the
dissentients were any the less bound by it. When worthless John
Billington, who had somehow got "shuffled into their company," was
sentenced for disrespect and disobedience to Captain Myles Standish "to
have his neck and heels tied together," it does not seem to have
occurred to him to plead that he had never entered into the social
compact; nor yet when the same wretched man, ten years later, was by a
jury convicted of willful murder, and sentenced to death and executed.
Logically, under the social-compact theory, it would have been competent
for those dissenting from this compact to enter into another, and set up
a competing civil government on the same ground; but what would have
been the practical value of this line of argument might have been
learned from Mr. Thomas Morton, of Furnivall's Inn, after he had been
haled out of his disorderly house at Merry Mount by Captain Standish,
and convented before the authorities at Plymouth.

The social-compact theory as applied to the church, implying that the
mutual duties of Christian disciples in society are derived solely from
mutual stipulations, is quite as transparently fallacious as when it is
applied to civil polity, and the consequences deducible from it are not
less absurd. But it cannot be claimed for the Plymouth men, and still
less for their spiritual successors, that they have wholly escaped the
evil consequences of their theory in its practical applications. The
notion that a church of Christ is a club, having no authority or
limitations but what it derives from club rules agreed on among the
members, would have been scouted by the Pilgrims; among those who now
claim to sit in their seats there are some who would hesitate to admit
it, and many who would frankly avow it with all its mischievous
implications. Planted in the soil of Plymouth, it spread at once through
New England, and has become widely rooted in distant and diverse
regions of the American church.[89:1]

The church of Plymouth, though deprived of its pastor, continued to be
rich in faith and in all spiritual gifts, and most of all in the
excellent gift of charity. The history of it year after year is a
beautiful illustration of brotherly kindness and mutual self-sacrifice
among themselves and of forgiving patience toward enemies. But the
colony, beginning in extreme feebleness and penury, never became either
strong or rich. One hundred and two souls embarked in the "Mayflower,"
of whom nearly one half were dead before the end of four months. At the
end of four years the number had increased to one hundred and eighty. At
the end of ten years the settlement numbered three hundred persons.

It could not have been with joy wholly unalloyed with misgivings that
this feeble folk learned of a powerful movement for planting a Puritan
colony close in the neighborhood. The movement had begun in the heart of
the national church, and represented everything that was best in that
institution. The Rev. John White, rector of Dorchester, followed across
the sea with pastoral solicitude the young men of his parish, who, in
the business of the fisheries, were wont to make long stay on the New
England coast, far from home and church. His thought was to establish a
settlement that should be a sort of depot of supplies for the fishing
fleets, and a temporary home attended with the comforts and safeguards
of Christian influence. The project was a costly failure; but it was
like the corn of wheat falling into the ground to die, and bringing
forth much fruit. A gentleman of energy and dignity, John Endicott,
pledged his personal service as leader of a new colony. In September,
1628, he landed with a pioneering party at Naumkeag, and having happily
composed some differences that arose with the earlier comers, they named
the place _Salem_, which is, by interpretation, "Peace." Already, with
the newcomers and the old, the well-provided settlement numbered more
than fifty persons, busy in preparation for further arrivals. Meanwhile
vigorous work was doing in England. The organization to sustain the
colony represented adequate capital and the highest quality of character
and influence. A royal charter, drawn with sagacious care to secure
every privilege the Puritan Company desired, was secured from the
fatuity of the reigning Stuart, erecting in the wilderness such a free
commonwealth as his poor little soul abhorred; and preparation was made
for sending out, in the spring of 1629, a noble fleet of six vessels,
carrying three hundred men and a hundred women and children, with
ample equipment of provisions, tools and arms, and live stock. The
Company had taken care that there should be "plentiful provision
of godly ministers." Three approved clergymen of the Church of
England--Higginson, Skelton, and Bright--had been chosen by the Company
to attend the expedition, besides whom one Ralph Smith, a Separatist
minister, had been permitted to take passage before the Company
"understood of his difference in judgment in some things" from the other
ministers. He was permitted to continue his journey, yet not without a
caution to the governor that unless he were found "conformable to the
government" he was not to be suffered to remain within the limits of its
jurisdiction. An incident of this departure rests on the sole authority
of Cotton Mather, and is best told in his own words:

"When they came to the Land's End, Mr. Higginson, calling up
his children and other passengers unto the stern of the ship
to take their last sight of England, said, 'We will not say,
as the Separatists were wont to say at their leaving of
England, Farewell, Babylon! farewell, Rome! but we will say,
Farewell, dear England! farewell, the church of God in
England, and all the Christian friends there! We do not go to
New England as Separatists from the Church of England, though
we cannot but separate from the corruptions in it; but we go
to practice the positive part of church reformation and
propagate the gospel in America.'"

The story ought to be true, for the intrinsic likeliness of it; and it
is all the likelier for the fact that among the passengers, kindly and
even fraternally treated, and yet the object of grave misgivings, was
the honest Separatist minister, Ralph Smith.[91:1] The ideal of the new
colony could hardly have been better expressed than in these possibly
apocryphal words ascribed to Mr. Higginson. These were not fugitives
seeking asylum from persecution. Still less were they planning an asylum
for others. They were intent on the planting of a new commonwealth, in
which the church of Christ, not according to the imperfect and perverted
pattern of the English Establishment, but according to a fairer pattern,
that had been showed them in their mounts of vision, should be both free
and dominant. If this purpose of theirs was wrong; if they had no right
to deny themselves the comforts and delights of their native land, and
at vast cost of treasure to seclude themselves within a defined tract of
wilderness, for the accomplishment of an enterprise which they conceived
to be of the highest beneficence to mankind--then doubtless many of the
measures which they took in pursuance of this purpose must fall under
the same condemnation with the purpose itself. If there are minds so
constituted as to perceive no moral difference between banishing a man
from his native home, for opinion's sake, and declining, on account of
difference of opinion, to admit a man to partnership in a difficult and
hazardous enterprise organized on a distinctly exclusive basis, such
minds will be constrained to condemn the Puritan colonists from the
start and all along. Minds otherwise constituted will be able to
discriminate between the righteous following of a justifiable policy and
the lapses of the colonial governments from high and Christian motives
and righteous courses. Whether the policy of rigorous exclusiveness,
building up communities of picked material, homogeneous in race,
language, and religion, is on the whole less wise for the founders of a
new commonwealth than a sweepingly comprehensive policy, gathering in
people mutually alien in speech and creed and habits, is a fairly open
question for historical students. Much light might be thrown upon it by
the comparative history of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, of New
England and Pennsylvania. It is not a question that is answered at once
by the mere statement of it.

We do not need to be told that to the little Separatist settlement at
Plymouth, still in the first decade of its feeble existence, the
founding, within a day's journey, of this powerful colony, on
ecclesiastical principles distinctly antagonistic to their own, was a
momentous, even a formidable fact. Critical, nay, vital questions
emerged at once, which the subtlest churchcraft might have despaired of
answering. They were answered, solved, harmonized, by the spirit of
Christian love.

That great spiritual teacher, John Robinson, besides his more general
exhortations to brotherly kindness and charity, had spoken, in the
spirit of prophecy, some promises and assurances which came now to a
divine fulfillment. Pondering "sundry weighty and solid reasons" in
favor of removal from Holland, the pilgrims put on record that "their
pastor would often say that many of those who both wrote and preached
against them would practice as they did if they were in a place where
they might have liberty and live conformably." One of the most
affectionate of his disciples, Edward Winslow, wrote down some of the
precious and memorable words which the pastor, who was to see their face
no more, uttered through his tears as they were about to leave him.
"'There will be no difference,' he said, 'between the unconformable
ministers and you, when they come to the practice of the ordinances out
of the kingdom.' And so he advised us to close with the godly party of
the kingdom of England, and rather to study union than division, viz.,
how near we might possibly without sin close with them, rather than in
the least measure to affect division or separation from them."

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