XVII
Character of Williams. His scruples. In this less scrupulous but more serious age it is easy to hold Williams up to ridicule. Never was a noble and sweet-spirited man bedeviled by a scrupulosity more trivial. New England Firebrand Quenched, 246. Cotton aptly dubbed him "a haberdasher of small questions." His extant letters are many of them vibrant with latent heroism; there is manifest in them an exquisite charity and a pathetic magnanimity, but in the midst of it all the writer is unable to rid himself of a swarm of scruples as pertinacious as the buzzing mosquitoes in the primitive forest about him. In dating his letters, where he ventures to date at all, he never writes the ordinary name of the day of the week or the name of the month, lest he should be guilty of etymological heathenism. He often avoids writing the year, and when he does insert it he commits himself to the last two figures only and adds a saving clause. Thus 1652 appears as "52 (so called)," and other years are tagged with the same doubting words, or with the Latin "ut vulgo." What quarrel the tender conscience had with the Christian era it is hard to guess. So, too, he writes to Winthrop, who had taken part in his banishment, letters full of reverential tenderness and hearty friendship. But his conscience does not allow him even to seem to hold ecclesiastical fellowship with the man he honors as a ruler and loves as a friend. Williams to Winthrop, 1637, Narr. Club, vi. Once at least he guards the point directly by subscribing himself "Your worship's faithful and affectionate in all civil bonds." It would be sad to think of a great spirit so enthralled by the scrupulosity of his time and his party if these minute restrictions had been a source of annoyance to him. But the cheerful observance of little scruples seems rather to have taken the place of a recreation in his life; they were to him perhaps what bric-a-brac is to a collector, what a well-arranged altar and candlesticks are to a ritualist. Note 23.
Williams becomes a Seeker. Two fundamental notions supplied the motive power of every ecclesiastical agitation of that age. The notion of a succession of churchly order and ordinance from the time of the apostles was the mainspring of the High-church movement. Apostolic primitivism was the aim of the Puritan and still more the goal of the Separatist. One party rejoiced in a belief that a mysterious apostolic virtue had trickled down through generations of bishops and priests to its own age; the other rejoiced in the destruction of institutions that had grown up in the ages and in getting back to the primitive nakedness of the early Christian conventicle. True to the law of his nature, Roger Williams pushed this latter principle to its ultimate possibilities. If we may believe the accounts, he and his followers at Providence became Baptists that they might receive the rite of baptism in its most ancient Oriental form. But in an age when the fountains of the great deep were utterly broken up he could find no rest for the soles of his feet. It was not enough that he should be troubled by the Puritan spirit of apostolic primitivism; he had now swung round to where this spirit joined hands with its twin, the aspiration for apostolic succession. He renounced his baptism because it was without apostolic sanction, and announced himself of that sect which was the last reduction of Separatism. He became a Seeker. 114
The Seekers. Here again is a probable influence from Holland. The Seekers had appeared there long before. Many Baptists had found that their search for primitivism, if persisted in, carried them to this negative result; for it seemed not enough to have apostolic rites in apostolic form unless they were sanctioned by the "gifts" of the apostolic time. The Seekers appeared in England as early as 1617, and during the religious turmoils of the Commonwealth period the sect afforded a resting place for many a weatherbeaten soul. As the miraculous gifts were lost, the Seekers dared not preach, baptize, or teach; they merely waited, and in their mysticism they believed their waiting to be an "upper room" to which Christ would come. It is interesting to know that Williams, the most romantic figure of the whole Puritan movement, at last found a sort of relief from the austere externalism and ceaseless dogmatism of his age by traveling the road of literalism until he had passed out on the other side into the region of devout and contented uncertainty.
XVIII
Moral elevation of Williams In all this Williams was the child of his age, and sometimes more childish than his age. But there were regions of thought and sentiment in which he was wholly disentangled from the meshes of his time, and that not because of intellectual superiority – for he had no large philosophical views – but by reason of elevation of spirit. Even the authority of Moses could not prevent him from condemning the harsh severity of the New England capital laws. He had no sentimental delusions about the character of the savages – he styles them "wolves endued with men's brains"; but he constantly pleads for a humane treatment of them. All the bloody precedents of Joshua could not make him look without repulsion on the slaughter of women and children in the Pequot war, nor could he tolerate dismemberment of the dead or the selling of Indian captives into perpetual slavery. From bigotry and resentment he was singularly free. On many occasions he joyfully used his ascendency over the natives to protect those who kept in force against him a sentence of perpetual banishment. And this ultra-Separatist, almost alone of the men of his time, could use such words of catholic charity as those in which he speaks of "the people of God wheresoever scattered about Babel's banks either in Rome or England."
Superior to the age. Of his incapacity for organization or administration we shall have to speak hereafter. But his spiritual intuitions, his moral insight, his genius for justice, lent a curious modernness to many of his convictions. In a generation of creed-builders which detested schism he became an individualist. Individualist in thought, altruist in spirit, secularist in governmental theory, he was the herald of a time yet more modern than this laggard age of ours. If ever a soul saw a clear-shining inward light not to be dimmed by prejudices or obscured by the deft logic of a disputatious age, it was the soul of Williams. In all the region of petty scrupulosity the time-spirit had enthralled him; but in the higher region of moral decision he was utterly emancipated from it. His conclusions belong to ages yet to come.
His prophetic character. This union of moral aspiration with a certain disengagedness constitutes what we may call the prophetic temperament. Bradford and Winthrop were men of high aspiration, but of another class. The reach of their spirits was restrained by practical wisdom, which compelled them to take into account the limits of the attainable. Not that they consciously refused to follow their logic to its end, but that, like other prudent men of affairs, they were, without their own knowledge or consent, turned aside by the logic of the impossible. Precisely here the prophet departs from the reformer. The prophet recks nothing of impossibility; he is ravished with truth disembodied. From Elijah the Tishbite to Socrates, from Socrates to the latest and perhaps yet unrecognized voice of our own time, the prophetic temperament has ever shown an inability to enter into treaty with its environment. In the seventeenth century there was no place but the wilderness for such a John Baptist of the distant future as Roger Williams. He did not belong among the diplomatic builders of churches, like Cotton, or the politic founders of states, like Winthrop. He was but a babbler to his own time, but the prophetic voice rings clear and far, and ever clearer as the ages go on.
CHAPTER THE THIRD.
NEW ENGLAND DISPERSIONS
I
Importance of the Rhode Island colony. The removal of Roger Williams and his friends was the beginning of dispersions from the mother colony on Massachusetts Bay. The company that settled Providence was too small in number at first to be of great importance. The emigration of Williams and his followers to the Narragansett country was an example that may have turned the scale with Hooker and his party in favor of a removal to the Connecticut instead of to some place in the Massachusetts wilderness. Williams certainly prepared a harbor for most of the Hutchinsonians, and pointed the way to Gortonists, Baptists, Quakers, and all others of uneasy conscience. Providence Plantation, and at times all Rhode Island, fell into disorders inevitable in a refuge for scruplers and enthusiasts established by one whose energies were centrifugal and disintegrating. But when at length it emerged from its primordial chaos the community on Narragansett Bay became of capital importance as an example of the secularization of the state, and of the congruity of the largest liberty in religion with civil peace. The system which the more highly organized and orderly commonwealths of Massachusetts and Connecticut labored so diligently to establish – a state propping and defending orthodoxy and church uniformity – was early cast into the rubbish heap of the ages. The principle on which the heterogeneous colony of religious outcasts on Narragansett Bay founded itself, was stone rejected that has become the head of the corner.
II
The Connecticut migration. The emigration to the Connecticut River was already incubating when Williams sat down with his radical seceders in the Narragansett woods. The Connecticut settlement was impelled by more various and complicated motives than that of Williams, and its origins are not so easy to disentangle. But it, too, has an epic interest; one dominant personality overtops all others in this second of venturesome westward migrations into the wilderness.
Early life of Hooker. We can trace nothing of Hooker to his birthplace, a little hamlet in Leicestershire, except that the imagery of his discourses in after life sometimes reflected the processes of husbandry he had known in childhood. But that he passed through Emmanuel College, Cambridge, while Chaderton was master, is more significant, for Emmanuel was the cradle of Puritan divines, the hatching-place of Puritan crotchets, the college whose chapel stood north and south that it might have no sacred east end, a chapel in which "riming psalms" were sung instead of the hymns, and where lessons different from those appointed in the calendar were read. Hooker was presented to the living of Chelmsford, in Essex. Here his eloquence attracted wide attention, and unhappily attracted at the same time the notice of his diocesan Laud, then Bishop of London, who drove the preacher from his pulpit. Hooker engaged in teaching a school four miles from Chelmsford, where Eliot, afterward the Indian apostle, became his usher and disciple. But Laud had marked him as one to be brought low. 1630. He was cited before the Court of High Commission, whose penalties he escaped by fleeing to Holland. Thus early in his career Laud unwittingly put in train events that resulted in the founding of a second Puritan colony in New England.
III
Hooker's company. The persecution of Hooker made a great commotion in Essex, dividing attention with the political struggle between the king and the people about tonnage and poundage. Walker's First Church in Hartford, 40. Dudley's Letter to Countess of Lincoln, Young's Chron. of Mass., 320. While Hooker was an exile in Holland a company of people from Braintree and other parts of Essex, near his old parish of Chelmsford, emigrated to New England, chiefly, one may suppose, for the sake of good gospel, since they came hoping to tempt Hooker to become their pastor. Mass. Records, 14 June, 1631, and 3 February, 1632. This company settled at Newtown, now Cambridge, which had been projected for a fortified capital of the colony, that should be defensible against Indians and out of reach if a sea force should be sent from England to overthrow the government. Holmes's Hist. Cambridge, 1st Mass. Hist. Coll., vii, 6-8. Newtown was palisaded and otherwise improved at the expense of the whole colony. Hooker's company were perhaps ordered to settle there because no place was appropriate to the great divine but the new metropolis.
IV
Failure of Newtown as a metropolis. But a metropolis can not be made at will, as many a new community has discovered. It had been arranged that all the "assistants" or ruling magistrates of Massachusetts should live within the palisades of Newtown, but Winthrop, after the frame of his house was erected, changed his mind and took down the timbers, setting them up again at Boston. Savage's Winthrop, i, 98, 99. 1632. This was the beginning of unhappiness at Newtown, and the discontent had to do, no doubt, with the rivalry between that place and Boston. It is probable that there was a rise in the value of Boston home lots about the time of the removal of the governor's house. Trade runs in the direction of the least resistance, and peninsular Boston was destined by its situation to be the metropolis of New England in spite of the forces that worked for Salem and Newtown.
Wonder-working Providence, ch. xxviii. Newtown, or Cambridge, to call it by its later name, was a long, narrow strip of land, "in forme like a list cut off from the Broad-cloath" of Watertown and Charlestown. Wood's N. E. Prospect, 1634. Young, 402. The village was compactly built, as became an incipient metropolis, and the houses were unusually good for a new country. In one regard it was superior to Boston. No wooden chimneys or thatched roofs were allowed in it. To this town came Hooker, and if it had continued to be the capital, Hooker and not Cotton might have become the leading spirit of the colony. October, 1632. But a capital at a place to which only small vessels could come up, was not practical, and the magistrates in the year before Hooker's arrival decided by general consent that Boston was the fittest place in the bay for public meetings.
Hooker's arrival, 1633. The hopes of Newtown were perhaps not wholly extinct for some time after. The arrival of Hooker must have been a great encouragement to the people. But Boston was on the alert. That town had neither forest nor meadow land. Hay, timber, and firewood were brought to its wharf in boats. Wood's N. E. Prospect. From the absence of wood and marsh came some advantages – it was plagued with neither mosquitoes nor rattlesnakes, and what cattle there were on the bare peninsula were safe from wolves. Young, 397, 398. Not to be behind in evangelical attractions it secured Cotton to balance Newtown's Hooker, when both arrived in the same ship. That Boston was now recognized as the natural metropolis was shown in the abortive movement to pay a part of Cotton's stipend by a levy on the whole colony.
V
Discontent at Newtown. "Ground, wood, and medowe" were matters of dispute between Newtown and its neighbors as early as 1632, and the frequent references to questions regarding the boundary of Newtown go to show dissatisfaction in the discarded metropolis, the number of whose people was out of proportion to its resources. Mass. Rec., passim. Cattle were scarce in the colony. Each head was worth about twenty-eight pounds, the equivalent of several hundred dollars of money in our time. Wonder-working Providence, ch. xxxiii. The Newtown people saw no prospect of foreign trade, and found the plowable plains of Cambridge dry and sandy. They had given up trying to coax fortunes from the stony hill land of the town with hand labor, and turned their attention to the more profitable pursuit of cattle-raising. They took unusual pains to protect their valuable herd from the wolves by impaling a common pasture. Compare Holmes's History of Cambridge, 1 Mass. Hist. Coll., vii, pp. 1, 2. Natural meadow was the only resource for hay in the English agriculture of the seventeenth century, and the low grounds of Cambridge yielded a poor grass. 2d Mass., vii, 127. Shrewd men in Newtown already saw that as an agricultural colony Massachusetts was destined to failure, and one Pratt, a surgeon there, was called to account for having written to England that the commonwealth was "builded on rocks, sands, and salt marshes."
VI
Cotton and Hooker. There is good authority for believing that a rivalry between Hooker and Cotton had quite as much to do with the discontent as straitened boundaries and wiry marsh grass. Hooker was the greatest debater, perhaps, in the ranks of the Puritans. His theology was somewhat somber, his theory of Christian experience of the most exigent type. To be saved, according to Hooker, one must become so passive as to be willing to be eternally damned. Compare Walker's First Church of Hartford, 129-132. In other regards he was a Puritan of a rather more primitive type than Cotton. He knew no satisfactory evidence of a man's acceptance with God but his good works. Cotton was less logical but more attractive. His Puritanism grew in a garden of spices. He delighted in allegorical interpretations of the Canticles, his severe doctrines were dulcified with sentiment, and his conception of the inward Christian life was more joyous and mystical and less legal and severe than Hooker's. He was an adept in the windings of non-committal expression, and his intellectual sinuosity was a resource in debate or difficulty. Hooker, on the other hand, had a downrightness not to be mistaken. With an advantage in temperament and the additional advantage of position in the commercial and political center, it is not surprising that Cotton's ideals eloquently and deftly presented soon dominated the colony and that he became the Delphic oracle whose utterances were awaited by the rulers in emergencies.
Theological differences. Theological differences were early apparent in the teachings of the two leaders. Trivial enough to the modern mind are these questions concerning works as an evidence of justification and concerning active and passive faith in justification. Hooker maintained all by himself that there was "a saving preparation in a Christian soule before unyon with Christ." 115 The other ministers pretended to understand what he meant by this, and at first opposed him unanimously. No doubt, too, Hooker and his disciples found some fault with the outer form of the church as shaped by Cotton. Certain it is that Hooker's theories of civil government were more liberal and modern than Cotton's, though like Cotton's they were hung upon texts of Scripture. Hooker lacked Cotton's superfluity of ingenuity; he had less imagination and less poetic sentiment than Cotton, but his intellect was more rugged, practical, and virile. He was not a man to have visions of a political paradise; he did not attempt to limit citizenship to church members when he framed a constitution for the Connecticut towns. Nor did he give so much power and privilege to the magistrate as was given in Massachusetts. 116 He disapproved of Cotton's aristocratic theory of the permanence of the magistrate's office, as he did apparently of the negative vote of the upper house and of the arbitrary decisions which the Massachusetts magistrates assumed the right to make.
VII
Attractions of Connecticut. One other potent motive there was. Stories of the fertility of the "intervale" land on the Connecticut River came by the mouth of every daring adventurer who had sailed or tramped so far. There one might find pasture for the priceless cattle and hay to last the long winter through, and in that valley one might cultivate plains of great fertility.
VIII
Obstacles to removal. There were dangerous Pequots on the Connecticut, it is true, and the Dutch had already planted a trading house and laid claim to the territory. The Plymouth people who traded there were also claimants. And, more than all, leaving Massachusetts in a time of danger from the machinations of Laud would seem desertion. The government of the Massachusetts Bay colony was anomalous; it partook of the character of the commercial company from which it sprang, yet it had traits of a religious or at least a voluntary society. It was the accepted opinion that those who had taken the freeman's oath were "knit" together "in one body," and that none of them ought to leave the colony without permission. Hooker's party gained the consent of a majority of the representative members of the General Court, but not of a majority of the assistants. Savage's Winthrop, i, 167, 168. This precipitated a debate in the colony on the constitutional question of the right of the assistants, or magistrates, to form an upper house and veto a decision of the chosen deputies of the towns.