Part 2

Puritanism, in the presbyterian form, had obtained supremacy in Scotland, while it was still struggling for life in England. In execution of its principle that a system of positive law was to be found in the bible, so absolute and exclusive as to leave no room for things indifferent, it not only established an absolute uniformity of church government and worship, but made itself virtually the sovereign power in the state. Without scruple or disguise it pursued ‘the work of reformation’ by conforming under pains and penalties the manners and opinions of men to a supposed scriptural model. In England, though the theory of puritanism was the same speculatively, its position was happily different. No one who believes that the scriptures are to be looked to, not for a positive moral law, much less for a system of church polity and ceremonial, but for moral impulse and principle, can sympathise with the doctrine, which at first was the ostensible ground of puritan opposition to the church of England, that whatever scripture does not command, it forbids. In contrast with this, the position of the early protestant bishops, that the true rule for matters of church {287} polity is practical expediency, if it fitted less aptly the interest of its maintainers, would seem to represent the higher wisdom that gives the world its due, and recognises the continuity of custom and institution which builds up the being that we are. Compared, indeed, with such pedantry as that of Cartwright, the great puritan controversialist under Elizabeth, the ‘judiciousness’ of Hooker becomes real philosophy. But in the confused currents of the world it is not always the party whose maxims are the more rationally complete which has the truer lesson for the present or the higher promise for the future. The reforming impulse, the effort to emancipate the inward man from ceremonial bondage, was with puritanism rather than with the church. Judaic itself, it yet broke the pillars of Judaism. Its limitations were its own, and happily it had no chance of fixing them finally in an outward church. Its force belonged to a larger agency, which was transforming religion from a sensuous and interested service to a free communion of spirit with spirit, and just for this reason it kept gathering to itself elements which its own earthen vessel could not long contain.

From the puritanism of Cartwright to that of Milton is a long step upwards; it answers to the descent from the anglicanism of Hooker to that of Laud or Heylin. The ‘Polity’ of Hooker, under an appearance of theological artifice, covers a statesmanlike endeavour to reconcile the protestant conscience to the necessities of the state and society. The anglicanism of Laud was simply the catholic reaction under another name. The political change corresponded to the theological. Elizabeth had ruled a nation. James and Charles never rose beyond the conception of developing a royal interest, which religion should at once serve and justify. Thus there arose that combination, by which the catholic reaction had everywhere worked, of a court party and a church party, each using the other for the purpose of silencing the demand for a ‘reason why’ in politics and religion. Charles and Laud alike represent that jesuitical conscience (if I may be allowed the expression) which is fatal to true loyalty. As Milton has it, ‘a private conscience sorts not with a public calling.’ Such a conscience may be true to a cause, as Charles and Laud were doubtless, from whatever reason, both true to the cause of a sacerdotal church. But it dare not look into the law of liberty, or {288} conceive the operation of God except in a system of prescribed institutions, about which no questions are to be asked, and in the maintenance of which cruelty becomes mercy and falsehood truth. Through the policy of the fifteen years which preceded the Long Parliament, a policy sometimes outrageous, sometimes trivial, the same purpose runs. The promulgation of the Book of Sports, the torturing of writers against plays and ceremonies, the persecution of calvinism, the suppression of the lectureships by which the more wealthy puritans sought to maintain a preaching ministry uncontrolled by the bishops, all tend to divert the human spirit from the consciousness of its right and privilege to acquiescence in what is given to it from without. Whether this diversion were effected in the interest of court or sacerdotalism, whether the head of the sacerdotal system were the old pope or ‘my lord of Canterbury,’ ‘lineally descended from St. Peter in a fair and constant manner of succession,’ mattered little. The result, but for puritan resistance, must have been that freedom should yield in England, as it had yielded in Spain and South Germany, and was soon to yield in France, to a despotism under priestly direction, which again could end only in the ruin of civil life, or in its recovery by the process which relegates religion to women and devotees.

The body of protestant resistance, however, had no organic unity but that of a common antagonism. Already there was in existence a sect, not yet directly opposed to presbyterianism, but created by the demand for a more free spiritual movement than that system allowed of. The men commonly reckoned as the authors of independency or congregationalism, an influence which more than any other has ennobled the plebeian elements of English life, bore the fitting names of Brown and Robinson. That the brownists were a well-known sect as early as 1600 is shown by the healthy hatred of Sir Andrew Aguecheek, who ‘would as lief be a brownist as a politician.’ It was in 1582, when the puritans were discussing the propriety of temporary conformity, that Brown wrote his treatise on ‘Reformation, without tarrying for any,’ and by way of not tarrying for any in his own case, took to preaching nonconformity up and down the country. After seeing the inside of thirty-two prisons as the reward of his zeal, he betook himself to Holland, carrying a congregation with him. This he afterwards left, and it does not seem {289} certain whether the subsequent brownist congregations were directly affiliated to it. Certain views of church polity, however, were current among them, which formed the principles of independency in later years. The chief of those were the doctrine of the absolute autonomy of the individual congregation, and the rejection of a special order of priests or presbyters. Each congregation was to elect or depose its own officers, the officer who should preach and administer the sacraments among the rest. When tho number of communicants in a congregation became too large to meet in any one place, a new one was to be formed, but no congregation or sum of congregations was to have any control in regard to doctrine or discipline over another.

Such a system of church government may not in itself be of more interest than others. As giving room for a liberty of prophecy which the rule of bishops or a presbytery denies, its importance was immense. This appears already in Robinson’s disavowal of the pretension to theological finality. Robinson, driven from England by episcopal persecution, had formed a congregation at Leyden. Here, in regard at least to the reformed churches of the continent, he gave up the strict separatist doctrine of the original brownists, ‘holding communion with these churches as far as possible.’ In 1620 the younger part of his congregation transferred itself to America, where it founded the colony of New Plymouth. His well-known exhortation to them at parting breathes a higher spirit of christian freedom than anything that had been heard since christianity fixed itself in creeds and churches.

‘If God reveal anything to you by any other instrument of his, be as ready to receive it as ever you were to receive any truth by my ministry; for I am verily persuaded the Lord has more truth yet to break forth out of his holy word. For my part, I cannot sufficiently bewail the condition of the reformed churches, who are come to a period in religion, and will go at present no farther than the instruments of their reformation. The lutherans cannot be drawn to go beyond what Luther saw; whatever part of his will God has revealed to Calvin, they will rather die than embrace it; and the calvinists, you see, stick fast where they were left by that great man of God, who yet saw not all things. This is a misery much to be lamented, for though they were burning and shining lights in their time, yet they penetrated {290} not into the whole counsel of God, but were they now living, would be as willing to embrace farther light as that which they first received. I beseech you remember, it is an article of your church covenant, that you be ready to receive whatever truth shall be made known to you from the written word of God. Remember that ... for it is not possible the christian world should come so lately out of such thick anti-christian darkness, and that perfection of knowledge should break forth at once.’ [1]

[1] [Neal, _Puritans_, i. p. 477, Ed. 1837.]

It is as giving freer scope than any other form of church to this conviction, that God’s spirit is not bound, that independency has its historical interest.

During the period of Laud’s persecution the difference between the presbyterian and independent order of ideas could not come prominently to view. The court and sacerdotal party would recognise no distinction but a greater or less violence of opposition to the ceremonies enforced by the High Commission, and to the arminianism and Sunday sport, which were the great means, one inward, the other outward, of evaporating the consciousness of spiritual privilege and strength. The so-called puritans were mostly of presbyterian sympathies, but their ministers, though under frequent suspensions, adhered to their benefices. They were obliged, indeed, by statute to use no other than the established liturgy, but no statute then existed, like that passed after the Restoration, requiring absolute agreement of opinion with everything contained in the liturgy. The attitude of temporary conformity under protest might therefore be a legitimate one for a puritan minister; at any rate it was the one commonly held. A certain number, however, insisting like the original Brown on a nonconformity that would tarry for no man, formed separate congregations, and these were known as Brownists. Their only chance, however, under Laud, was either to keep in absolute hiding or withdraw to Holland or New England. If there were many of them in England at the meeting of the Long Parliament, their presence was due to an order in council of 1634, a strange instance of the blindness of persecution, which prohibited emigration to New England without royal licence.

In the Long Parliament, at the time of its meeting, the only recognised representative of independency was young Sir Harry Vane. He was not, indeed, properly of the {291} independent or any other sect. Baxter, who hated him as a despiser of ordinances, gives him a sect to himself; but he represented that current of thought which flowed through independence, but could not be contained by it. His ideas are worth studying, for they are the best expression of the spirit which struggled into brief and imperfect realisation during the commonwealth. In his extant treatises, entitled a ‘Retired Man’s Meditations’ and a ‘Healing Question,’ and in extracts from other writings preserved by his contemporary biographer Sikes, we find, under a most involved phraseology and an allegorising interpretation of scripture, a strange intensity of intellectual aspiration, which, if his secondary gifts had been those of a poet instead of a politician, might have made him the rival of Milton. The account of him by Baxter, who, with all his saintliness, was never able to rise above the clerical point of view, may be taken to express the result, rather than the spirit, of his doctrines.

‘His unhappiness lay in this, that his doctrines were so cloudily formed and expressed, that few could understand them, and therefore he had but few true disciples. Mr. Sterry is thought to be of his mind, but he hath not opened himself in writing, and was so famous for obscurity in preaching (being, said Sir Benjamin Rudyard, too high for this world and too low for the other) that he thereby proved almost barren also, and vanity and sterility were never more happily conjoined’ (a clerical pun). ‘This obscurity was by some imputed to his not understanding himself; but by others to design, because he could speak plainly when he listed. The two courses in which he had most success, and spake most plainly, were his earnest plea for universal liberty of conscience, and against the magistrate’s intermeddling with religion, and his teaching his followers to revile the ministry, calling them blackcoats, priests, and other names which then savoured of reproach.’ [1]

[1] [_Reliquiae Baxterianae_, p. 76.]

His zeal for liberty of conscience and disrespect for ministers were early called into play by his experience as governor of Massachusetts. The eldest son of one of the most successful courtiers of the time, he had, when a boy, shown a soul that would not fit his position.

‘About the fourteenth or fifteenth year of my age,’ he said of himself on the scaffold, ‘God was pleased to lay the foundation or groundwork of repentance {292} in me ... revealing his Son in me, that ... I might, even whilst here in the body, be made partaker of eternal life.’

In this temper he was sent to Oxford, where he would not take the oath of supremacy, and was consequently unable to matriculate. He then spent some time at Geneva. On his return, his nonconformity gave such offence to the people about court, that the powers of Laud were applied in a special conference for the purpose, to bring him to a better mind. The final result is best stated in the words of a court clergyman: [1]

‘Mr. Comptroller Vane’s eldest son hath left his father, his mother, his country, and that fortune which his father would have left him here, and is, for conscience’ sake, gone to New England, there to lead the rest of his life, being but twenty years of age. He had abstained two years from taking the sacrament in England, because he could get no one to administer it to him standing. He was bred up at Leyden; and I hear that Sir Nathaniel Rich and Mr. Pym have done him much hurt in their persuasions this way.’

Already on the voyage he found that he had not left bigotry behind him. He had, according to Clarendon, ‘an unusual aspect, which made men think there was somewhat in him of extraordinary.’ He seems to have had long hair, a lustrous countenance, and the expression of a man looking not with, but through, his eyes. ‘His temper was a strong composition of choler and melancholy.’ These ‘circumstances of his person’ and his honourable birth, ‘rendered his fellow-passengers jealous of him, but he that they thought at first sight to have too little of Christ for their company, did soon after appear to have too much for them.’ [2] It appeared notably enough in the matter of Anne Hutchinson, with whom he had to deal as governor of Massachusetts, having been chosen to that office soon after his arrival, while still only twenty-three. This brought him into direct relation to the spirit which the clergy called sectarian, and of which he became the mouthpiece and vindicator under the commonwealth. Let us consider what that spirit was. I have already ventured to describe faith in the higher lutheran sense as the absorption of all merely finite and relative virtues, as such, in the consciousness of union with the infinite God. From this principle, as extravagances, if we like, but necessary {293} extravagances, are derived the fanatic sects of the seventeenth century, antinomians, familists, seekers, quakers. We live perhaps an age too late for understanding them. The ‘set gray life’ of our interested and calculating world shuts us out from the time when the consciousness of spiritual freedom was first awakened and the bible first placed in the people’s hands. Here was promised a union with, a realisation of, God; immediate, conscious, without stint, barrier, or limitation. Here, on the other hand, were spirits thirsting for such intercourse. Who should say them nay? Who could wonder if they drank so deep of the divine fulness offered them, that the fixed bounds of law and morality seemed to be effaced, and the manifestation of God, which absorbs duty in fruition, to be already complete? The dream of the sectary was the counterpart in minds where feeling ruled instead of thought, of the philosophic vision which views the moving world ‘sub quadam specie aeterni.’ It was the anticipation in moments of ecstasy and assurance of that which must be to us the ever-retreating end of God’s work in the world. Its mischief lay in its attempt to construct a religious life, which is nothing without external realisation, on an inward and momentary intuition. It is needless to investigate the history of Mrs. Hutchinson’s antinomian heresy, which bears the normal type. It expressed the consciousness of the communication of God to the individual soul apart from outward act or sign. Its formula was that sanctification, _i.e._ a holy life, was no evidence of justification; and this again was said to lead to a heresy as to the nature and operation of the Holy Ghost. Practically, perhaps, it was the result of reaction from the rule of outward austerity under which she lived. It must have escaped persecution, had she not employed it (in this, again, anticipating the sectaries of the commonwealth) as a weapon of offence against the puritan ministers. It was the custom in the colony to hold weekly exercises, in which lay people expounded and enforced the sermons heard on Sunday. Mrs. Hutchinson was allowed to hold such an exercise for women, and unhappily soon turned exposition into hostile criticism. This roused the fury of the more rigid professors, who demanded her death as a heretic. Vane protected her, and in consequence, though supported by the Boston people, was superseded by Winthrop in the annual election of governor. This led, soon afterwards, to his return {294} to England; not, however, before Roger Williams had, through Vane’s influence with the Indians, obtained a settlement at Rhode Island, and there, for the first time in Christian history, founded a political society on the basis of perfect freedom of opinion. In Rhode Island Mrs. Hutchinson found shelter, but was pursued by the clergy with hideous stories of her witchcraft and commune with the devil. These Baxter with malignant credulity was not ashamed to accept, and to ascribe her cruel murder by the Indians to the judgment of heaven.

[1] [_Strafford’s Letters_, i. p. 463.]

[2] [_The life and Death of Sir Henry Vane_, by George Sikes, p. 8, Ed. 1662.]

I dwell at some length on this story, because it exhibits in little the forces whose strife, tempered but not governed by the practical genius and stern purpose of Cromwell, formed the tragedy of the commonwealth. Here we find the puritan enthusiasm by a necessary process, when freed from worldly restraints, issuing in the sectarian enthusiasm, and then weaning and casting out the child that it has borne. We see the rent which such schism makes in a society founded not on adjustment of interests but on unity of opinion, and may judge how fatal this breach must be when the society so founded, like the republic in England, is but the sudden creation of a minority, and exists, not in a new country with boundless room where the cast-off child may find shelter, but in the presence of ancient interests, which it ignores but can neither suppress nor withdraw from, and in the midst of an old and haughty people, proud in arms, whom it claims to rule but does not represent. In detachment from both parties stands the clear spirit of Vane, strong in a principle which can give its due to both alike, yet weak from its very refusal to obscure its clearness by compromise with either. This principle, which became the better genius of independence in its conflict with presbyterianism, I will endeavour to state as Vane himself conceived it.

The work of creation in time, he held, which did but reflect the process by which the Father begets the eternal Son, involved two elements, the purely spiritual or angelic, represented by heaven or the light, on the one hand, and the material and animal on the other, represented by the earth. Man, as made of dust in the image of God, includes both, and his history was a gradual progress upward from a state which would be merely that of the animals but for the fatal gift of rational will, to a life of pure spirituality, which he {295} represented as angelic, a life which should consist in ‘the exercise of senses merely spiritual and inward, exceeding high, intuitive and comprehensive.’ This process of spiritual sublimation, treating the spirit under the figure of light or of a ‘consuming fire,’ he described as the consuming and dissolving of all objects of outward sense, and a destruction of the earthly tabernacle, while that which is from heaven is being gradually put on. In the conscience of man, the process had three principal stages, called by Vane the natural, legal, and evangelical conscience. The natural conscience was the light of those who, having not the law, were by nature a law unto themselves. It was the source of ordinary right and obligation. ‘The original impressions of just laws are in man’s nature and very constitution of being.’ These impressions were at once the source and the limit of the authority of the magistrate. The legal conscience was the source of the ordinances and dogmas of the christian. It belongs to the champions of the covenant of grace as much as to their adversaries. It represents the stage in which the christian clings to rule, letter, and privilege. It too had its value, but fell short of the evangelical conscience, of the stage in which the human spirit, perfectly conformed to Christ’s death and resurrection, crucified to outward desire and ordinance, holds intercourse ‘high, intuitive and comprehensive’ with the divine.