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 T ':. 
 
 THE HISTORICAL RELATION 
 
 NEW ENGLAND 
 
 TO THE 
 
 -V 
 
 ENGLISH COMMONWEALTH. 
 
 JOHN WINGATE THORNTON. 
 
 1874. 
 
pxass or 
 
 ALFRED MUIKIS <t BON, B08I0H, u. 
 
 Vcibait. 
 
THE HISTORICAL RELATION OF 'NEW ENGLAND 
 
 TO THE 
 
 ENGLISH COMMONWEALTH. 
 
 " Look now at American Saxondom ; and at that little Fact of the sailing 
 of the Mayflower, two hundred years ago, from Delft Haven, in Holland ! 
 Were we of open sense, as the Greeks were, we had found a Poem here, — 
 one of Nature's own Poems, such as she writes in broad facts over great 
 continents. For it was properly the beginning of America : there were 
 straggling settlers in America before, some material as of a body was there, 
 but the soul of it was first this." — The Hero as Priest, Carlyle, 1840. 
 
 " In ye name of God, Amen. We, whose names are underwritten, . . . 
 haveing undertaken for y* glorie of God, and advancement of y« Christian 
 faith, and honour of our king & countrie, a voyage to plant ye first colo- 
 nie in y« northern parts of Virginia, doe by these presents, solemnly & 
 mutual}', in ye presence of God and one another, covenant & combine 
 ourselves together into a civill body politick, . . . and by vertue hearof, to 
 enacte, constitute, and frame such just & equall lawes, ordinances, acts, 
 constitutions, & offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meete 
 & convenient for ye generall good of ye colonie, unto which we promise 
 all due submission and obedience.'" Cape Cod, Nov. ^, 1620. — Pilgrim 
 Constitutional Convention. 
 
 " The event is without parallel in the history of any country. ... It 
 placed on Massachusetts that mental stamp which is destined to prevail 
 over the whole of North America, and to affect the order of events in the 
 old world." — Senate Doc. Massachusetts, 1852, Charles C. Haze well. 
 
 " Rev. John Cotton, . . . minister of Boston, in Lincolnshire, carried the 
 name across the Ocean with him ; fixed it upon a new small Home he had 
 found there, — which has become a large one since ; the big busy Capital 
 of Massachusetts, Boston, so called. John Cotton, his mark, very curi- 
 ously stamped on the face of this Planet ; likely to continue for some time ! 
 . . . Oracular of high Gospels to New [and Old] England ; who, in his 
 day, was well seen to be connected with the Supreme Powers of this Uni- 
 verse, the word of him being as a live-coal to the hearts of many. ... In 
 fact, there are traceable various small threads of relation, interesting reci- 
 procities and mutualities, connecting the poor young Infant New England 
 with its old Puritan Mother, and her affairs, in those years. Which ought 
 to be disentangled, to be made conspicuous and beautiful, by the Infiajit her- 
 
self, now that she is grown big; the busy old Mother having had to shove 
 them with so much else of the like, hastily out of the way for the present ! 
 ... It is in congratulation on the late high Actings, and glorious Ap- 
 pearances of Providence in Old England, that Cotton has been addressing 
 Oliver." 28 July, Oct. 2, 1651. — CLXXXIV of CromwelPs Letters, etc., 
 Carlyle, 1845. 
 
 " It had been happy for England that Master Cotton had taken longer time 
 for deliberation.'' Dissuasive from the Errors of the Time, 1645 : 56, 59, 
 60, by Robert Baillie, Scottish Commissioner to the Westminster Assembly. 
 
 A FREQUENT recurrence to the fundamental principles of our 
 polity is enjoined upon, us as absolutely necessary to preserve 
 the advantages of liberty and to maintain a free government. 
 The most natural course of this study is in the historical de- 
 velopment of our institutions, tracing their germinal ideas in 
 the old-world conflicts. On the discovery of America it was 
 at once mixed up with the religious and political struggles of 
 Europe. Thus, duly considered, the profusion of Leo X and 
 King James's dissatisfaction with his shabby palace are histor- 
 ical keys to fundamental principles in American organic law. 
 So our own George Downing's suggestion of specific parlia- 
 mentary appropriations, adopted by Charles II against the 
 advice of his whole council, and ending the centuries of dispute 
 between Crown and Commons, may be claimed as an American 
 idea. So, — in the roadstead of what is now Provincetown Har- 
 bor,^ the scene of the Landing of the Pilgrims in New England, 
 and our historical and political beginning, — the cabin of the 
 solitary May Flower, witnessed the pivotal event of modern 
 political history, the compact of November ^|, 1620. This — 
 the first written constitution of popular government originated 
 by the people, the germ of American institutions, civil and reli- 
 gious — marks no less a crisis in the world's history, forcibly 
 illustrating Mr. Guizot's remark, that "great ideas, great men, 
 and great events cannot be measured by the magnitude of their 
 cradles." 
 
 Riding rough November seas, two hundred and fifty years 
 gone by, this strained and weather-beaten ship, freighted with 
 
 1 Bradford's Hist, of Plymouth, p. 89. Dexter's Mourfs Relation, 3-8. Baylies's 
 Hist, of New Plymouth, i, 27. Freeman's Hist, of Capi Cod, i, 60. 
 
5 
 
 Christian families, — greater than the kings and heroes of the 
 Argo, — hovered on this desolate coast, waiting till the dawn 
 for anchorage in less tempestuous waters within Gosnold's Cape 
 Cod.^ No imaginary ills could have urged to so desperate a 
 venture, with wives and children, across a wintry ocean, " to 
 seek out a habitation " in a strange and houseless wilderness, 
 the lair of savages and wild beasts. Who were these refugees ? 
 From what wrongs were they escaping ? In what school of ad- 
 versity had they found the polity that has' furnished the 
 precedent for a continent, if not for the world ? 
 
 These are the questions which invite a review of the polit- 
 ical and ecclesiastical events and their historical interdepen- 
 dence, which culminated in 1620 on the shores of New England, 
 hallowing the Pilgrims' land to all times as the cradle of civil 
 and religious liberty. The present research touches mainly the 
 development of principles, and calls for historical incidents 
 only as they illustrate the spirit of progress and the inertia or 
 hostility of conservatism. 
 
 As dissenters, their offences were rather of omission than of 
 action ; so that 'inquiry as to the occasions and reasons of dis- 
 sent is of necessity in the nature of an indictment, the Protes- 
 tants being complainants ; and my duty is to present their 
 cause and the evidence of record. 
 
 Rome, Geneva, and Canterbury each claimed authority jure 
 divino ; in each heresy and sedition were one ; each kindled 
 the green fagots of persecution, and in bigotry and intolerance ^ 
 they were akin. 
 
 The reformers and their precursors, Waldo, Wicliffe, and 
 Huss, were like skirmishers on the enemies' frontiers, engaged 
 in light combats, at a distance from each other ; but the first 
 to organize hostilities against Rome, the first general in the 
 field to combine the forces in aggressive and systematic war, 
 was John Calvin. Rome never felt a deadlier wound than 
 that inflicted by Calvin's policy of quick and thorough destruc- 
 tion of its ecclesiastical pageantry, imagery, and symbolism.'' 
 
 1 Bradford, pp. 77, 78. 
 
 2 " Toleration — that intolerable term of insult to all who love liberty." — Mot- 
 ley's United A'etlicrlands, iv, 547. 
 
 '"Where images were left there was most contest, but most peace where they 
 were all sheer pulled down, as they were in some places." Strype in Hallum't 
 
It proposed a revolution, sharp and decisive, rather than a halt- 
 ing, lingering reformation like that in England. The pulpit and 
 the Bible in the vernacular superseded the altar with its priestly 
 mediation and anathema, oblations and idols, clouds of incense 
 and glitter of ornament,^ gorgeous vestments, punctilious cere- 
 monies and drawling of dead words.^ Luther burnt the Pope's 
 bull, but Calvin's Institutes razed the tiara and returned the 
 "keys" to the people, theirs by inheritance, though lost in the 
 long night of mediaeval | and antichristian darkness. Where 
 Calvin's polity banished the mitre and its livery of sacerdotal- 
 ism, — what John Knox irreverently called its "laughable 
 fooleries and comical dresses," — men were roused from mental 
 torpor, led to think, to consider, — the preliminary of educa- 
 tion and progress, — and so rose to a simpler and higher rever- 
 ence, to a " worship in spirit and in truth." The pall of Popery 
 was torn, and light shone through the rents ; superstition 
 crumbled, with its ritual and mechanism ; the inward chains 
 fixed on the soul gradually gave way before the light of inquiry ; 
 communities were weaned from mediaeval fiction and heathenish 
 ceremonies ; and the ecclesiastical merchandise of holy water, 
 old bones, and indulgences, of specifics, observances, and other 
 sacerdotal nostrums, excited only aversion and contempt. 
 Wordsworth celebrates 
 
 — " those godly men 
 Who swept from Scotland, in a flame of zeal, 
 Shrine, altar, image, and the massy piles 
 That harbored them . . . 
 In deadly scorn of superstitious rites." 
 
 " The Reformation was,'' says Mr. Carlyle, " a return to Truth 
 and Reality in opposition to Falsehood and Semblance." 
 
 England, i, 86. " Y« ceremonies and servis booke and other Popish and anti- 
 christian stuff, the plague of England to this day," said our Governor Bradford in 1630. 
 " Not daring to eke out what was defective in our light, in matters divine, with 
 human prudence, — the fatal error to reformation, — lest by sewing any piece of 
 the ' old garment ' unto the ' new,' we should make the ' rent ' worse." — An Apolo- 
 getical Narration to Parliament, by Goodwin, Nye, et al., 1643. 
 
 'The vestments "led to erroneous notions among the people, and kept alive a 
 recollection of former superstitions, which render their return to them more easy 
 in the event of another political revolution." Hallam, i, 175. 
 
 ' " The mysteriousness of an unknown dialect served to impose on the vulgar, and 
 to throw an air of wisdom around the priesthood." Hallam's England, 1866, i, 86. 
 
Lord Bacon, in his Controversies of the Church, 1589, 
 says : " They have made it in a manner of the essence of the 
 sacrament of the Lord's Supper to have a sermon precedent. 
 They have, in a sort, annihilated the use of liturgies and divine 
 service." 
 
 The travelled observer. Sir Edwin Sandys, son of the arch- 
 bishop, a man pleasantly associated with the Pilgrim Fathers, 
 and whose books had the honor to be burned in Paul's Church- 
 yard, by order of the High Commission, in 1605, records in 
 his EuropcB SpecuCum, 1599,^ that " the first and chiefe 
 meanes, whereby the Reformers of Religion did prevaile in all 
 places, was . . . preaching, ... at that time . . . out of use, 
 . . . the French Protestants making it an essentiall and chiefe 
 part of the service of God ; whereas the Romanists make the 
 masse only a work of duty, and the going to a sermon but a 
 matter of convenience." 
 
 Hugh Latimer, the martyr, " continued all King Edward's 
 time, preaching for the most part every Sunday two sermons, 
 to the great shame, confusion, and damnation of a great num- 
 ber of our fat-bellied, unpreaching prelates." In his " notable 
 sermon at Paul's Church in London," January 8, 1548, Latimer 
 said, " The preaching of the word of God unto the people is 
 called meat, — Scripture calleth it meat. Not strawberries, that 
 come but once a year, and tarry not long, but are soon gone, 
 but it is meat. It is no dainties. The people must have meat 
 that must Tie familiar and continuall, and daily given unto them 
 to feed upon. Many make a strawberry of it, ministering but 
 once a year ; but such do not the office of good prelates. . . . 
 How many such prelates, how many such bishops . . . are 
 there now in England .' . . . O Lord, whither shall we flee 
 from them \ . . . We have had so many hundred years, so 
 many unpreaching prelates, lording loyterers and idle ministers. 
 . . . The apostles . . . preached and lorded not. And now 
 they lord and preach not, . . . there is no work done, the peo- 
 ple starve." In his " Brief Discourse "of 1581, George Gifforde 
 says, " I know that in our land, let al the people be numbered, 
 and five parts of yee doe not understand so much in the com- 
 mandements, Lord's prayer, and articles of the faith, that it 
 
 ' Sandys' Europa Speculum, p. ;6. 
 
8 
 
 were a greate shame for a godly man to have a child of X years 
 olde for to know no more. " ^ In their abject ignorance and 
 superstition, the people had been like " dumb driven cattle." 
 
 It was like the quiet of paralysis, except as now and then 
 the moral waste was illumined by the bonfire of a Wicliffe's 
 plea for conscience, or of a Tyndale's English New Testament, 
 or the burning of a Huss flashed through the darkness to make 
 a Luther, a Calvin, or a Knox. As Cardinal Pole's fagots 
 bathed Ridley and Latimer in fire, at Oxford, Oct. i6, 155 5, 
 " Be of good comfort, maister Ridley, and play the man," said 
 Latimer : " we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, 
 in England as shall never be put out." 
 
 In the time of Henry VIII, probably nineteen twentieths of 
 the people, blind, wretched, and of too little intelligence to be 
 other than indifferent to the strife of the thoughtful few, — the 
 innovators and agitators, — were obsequious to authority ii 
 wrapped in the old familiar badges of superstition and conse- 
 crated by custom. The murky ignorance slowly yielding to 
 the Gospel light kindled at Lutterworth is hinted by Shake- 
 speare's Jack Cade,^ the rebel, not a century before Queen 
 Elizabeth was born : " Thou hast most traitorously corrupted 
 the youth of the realm, in erecting a grammar-school ; and 
 whereas, before, our fore-fathers had no other books but the 
 score and the tally, thou hast caused printing to be used ; and, 
 contrary to the King, his crown and dignity, thou hast built a 
 paper-mill. It will be proved to thy face, that thou hast men 
 about thee that usually talk of a noun and a verb, and such 
 abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear." 
 
 To which Lord Say answered, like a true disciple of Wic- 
 liffe, — " Ignorance is the curse of God ; knowledge, the wing 
 wherewith we fly to Heaven," — the very opposite of the thesis 
 that " Ignorance is the mother of Piety." ^ 
 
 " When want of learning kept the layman low. 
 And none but priests were authorized to know ; 
 
 1 London, 1581, p 4.3. 
 
 ^ Henry VI, 2d pt., act iv, sc. 7. 
 
 ' "Catholike Priests, who had borne the common sort in hand, that Ignorance was 
 the mother of Devotion, and such ignorant Devotion was the way of Salvation.^' " The 
 Pouring out of the Seven Vials," etc., by John Cotton, 1642, p. 5. See also " yew- 
 ell's Works, Parker Society's Ed.," 799, 800, 1203. Pilkinton, Parker Soc, 6n. 
 
When what small knowledge was in them did dwell, 
 
 And he a God who could but read or spell ; 
 
 Then Mother Church did mightily prevail ; 
 
 She parcelled out tlie Bible by retail, 
 
 But still expounded what she sold or <:;ive. 
 
 To keep it in her power to damn and sava. 
 
 Scriptuie was scarce, and, as the market went, 
 
 I'oor laymen took salvation on content, 
 
 As needy men take money, good or bad ; 
 
 God's word they had not, but the priests' they had. 
 
 At last, a knowing age began to inquire 
 
 If they the Book or that did them inspire ; 
 
 And making narrower search they found, though late, 
 
 That what they thought the priests' was their estate." ' 
 
 Henry VIII — moved, it matters not here whether by per- 
 sonal or political cause, whether vexed by passion, anxiety for 
 the succession, or the farce of papal scruples — cut the knot by 
 putting his own name in place of the Pope's, declaring his own 
 supremacy, and that he no longer held England in vassalage to 
 Rome ; and, as Roger Williams^ said, " With consent and act 
 of Parliament, sate downe himselfe in the Pope's chaire in 
 En2li.ind as since his successors have done," while the pliant 
 " bishops who, though they had renounced the pope, still 
 hugged the popedom, and shared the authority among them- 
 selves, by their six bloody articles persecuting the protestants 
 no slacker than the pope would have done." " 
 
 " The scheme was merely," says Macaulay,* " to rob the Bab- 
 ylonian enchantress of her ornaments, to transfer the full cup of 
 her sorceries to other hands, spilling as little as possible by the 
 way. The [Roman] Catholic rites and doctrines were to be 
 retained in the Church of England." 
 
 The head of the church, though no longer a foreigner, but an 
 Englishman, was still the " Defender of the Faith," with the 
 old hierarchal argument of sword and fagot, burning the Eng- 
 lish New Testament, — that Pandora's box to absolutism, caste, 
 and privilege, whether in church or state, — and strangling its 
 
 iDryden's Religio Laid, l5. 
 
 2 Queries, 1644, in Publications of the Narragansett Club, ii, 259. 
 ' Milton Of the Reformation in England, 1641. Bohn's Ed., ii, 370. 
 * Macaulay's Review of Hallam. 
 
lO 
 
 translator, Tyndale, 1 536, whose dying prayer was, " Lord, open 
 the eyes of the King of England ! " 
 
 The king's eyes were not opened, and as for centuries past, 
 so for centuries to come, the obscure and despised few were to 
 be the forlorn hope of Christian liberty, of human rights. The 
 cathedral, the trappings and pomp of prelacy and its sensuous 
 worship, were retained, and the old rookeries which Tyndale 
 described as " seats and nests for all unclean birds, and for blind 
 owls which hawk in the dark, and dare not come into the light," 
 — these were preserved, ever inviting Rome to its ancient 
 abodes. The " mother " ever regarded the new incumbents as 
 apostates and ecclesiastical poachers, — a cheat in her livery, 
 to be routed from their fat possessions. 
 
 " Panting and pensive now she ranged alone, 
 And wandered in the kingdoms once her own." ' 
 
 The retention of Rome's prelatic polity, ritual, and phraseol- 
 ogy in the Prayer Book embarrassed the reformers at every 
 step, and embroiled them in endless jangling, all of which the 
 far-seeing statesmanship of Calvin swept away like cobwebs. 
 Tyndale said in 1530, " The root you left behind, whence all 
 that they have for a time weeded out will spring again by little 
 and little as before : if they, as their hope is, may stop this light 
 of God's word that is abroad." It was this danger, when Mary 
 ordered a mass in Holyrood, August, 1561, that made John 
 Knox to exclaim from the pulpit, " that one mass was more 
 fearful! unto him, than if ten thousand armed enemies were 
 landed in any part of the realme, of purpose to suppress the hole 
 religion." ^ 
 
 Indeed, the reformation of the Anglo-Catholic Church was so 
 imperfect that to be Romish under Mary, or Anglican under 
 Elizabeth, or either under James, involved so little outward 
 change that after the performances in the royal chapel at the 
 Feast of St. Michael, 1606, the Duke of Lorraine said,^ " I do 
 not see what should hinder the churches of Rome and England 
 to unite. There is nothing of the Mass wanting here but the 
 
 ' Dryden. 
 
 2 McCrie's Knox, Bohn's Ed. 1847, 192. Froude's SKort Studies, 1871, 139. 
 
 'McCrie's MellvilU, Ed. 1856, pp. 252-263. 
 
II 
 
 adoration of the Host." So when, at the suggestion of Laud,^ 
 James I sent his son Charles to Spain in 1623, to secure the 
 Spanish alliance, he ordered two of his chaplains to join the 
 embassy, and " to take with them their dress, caps, surplices, 
 chalices, ornaments, , . . to show by these external forms 
 how little ... is the difference between them and the 
 Roman Church." Think of the " Governor " of the Angb- 
 Catholic Church sending its clergy and insignigi to " His Most 
 Catholic Majesty of Spain," as living witnesses and visible proof 
 of its loving approach to papal orthodoxy in ritual and symbol, 
 and its pliancy, upon occasion. Ten years later the same 
 Laud, chief instigator of the vindictive and remorseless perse- 
 cution of good Protestants, — the founders of New England, — 
 and the denouncer of the "dissenting"' ministers as " the peo- 
 ple's creatures," ^ entered in his diary ,^ August 4, 1633 : " There 
 came to me (one) that vowed ability to perform it and offered 
 me to be a cardinal." It was not resented as an insult, but 
 taken into deliberate consideration, for eleven days later he 
 again wrote ; " I had a serious offer made me to be a cardinal. 
 I was then absent from the court, but as soon as I came hither 
 
 ' Prynn's Canteriuris's Doom. 
 
 ^ " The people's creatures." This priestly contempt for " the people " also dis- 
 tinguished their " missionaries" to " heathen" America, especially in New England 
 and New Jersey. These manipulating " successors " of the Apostles, with dimin- 
 ished heads, flouted at the Mayhews, the Chaunceys, the Edwards and Hopkins, 
 Witherspoons and Burrs, the glory of the American churches, as " dissenters " 
 . . . of y« leather mitten ordination . . . given by }« mob," the people ; 
 and to them the " Canons of Congress " in defence of Liberty and Independence 
 were against " the Canons of the Church." Then they " omitted prayers " for the 
 American cause, as again in 1862 they voted not to pray for " our National Gov- 
 ernment " in our life-struggle against slavery. After the war was over the Na- 
 tional Convention of the Episcopal Church refused to adopt a resolution expressive 
 of " thanks to Almighty God for the triumph of the National Government and for 
 the removal of the great cause of our national Jalienation," — The Episcopal 
 Church in the American Colonies. Clark's History of St. Johii's Churchy Elizabeth- 
 town. New Jersey, 1871, 83, 84, 110^113, 169. Reports of Getural Episcopal Con- 
 ventions, 1862, 1 868. 
 
 " Hallam says : " The new primate made a strange answer to the first applica- 
 tion, which might well encourage a second ; certainly not what might have been 
 expected from a steady Protestant. If we did not read this in his own diary we 
 should not believe it. The offer at lea.st proves that he was suppo.sed capable of 
 accepting it." " To think well of the reformed religion is enough to make the 
 Archbishop an enemy." — Hallam's Const. Hist, of England, Ed. 1855, ii, ch. viii, 
 pp. 58-65. 
 
12 
 
 . . . I acquainted his Majesty with it ; but my answer was 
 that somewhat dealt within me which would not suffer that, till 
 Rome was other than it was." Within one month that king 
 " translated " that prelate to the primacy of the Anglo-Catholic 
 Church. Under this influence the Star Chamber forbade all 
 publication ^ of Protestant books, such as Fox's Book of 
 Martyrs, Luther's Table Talk, and the Willctt's Exposures of 
 Popery, and vn.'xSi^'^ prohibited the escape to New England 
 of " persons ill-affected to the religion established in the Church 
 of England ... of ministers who are inconformable to 
 the ceremonies and discipline of the church," and " all that had 
 already gone forth . . . forthwith to be remanded back." Tbey 
 were " vexed at home and not suffered to seek peace abroad." 
 Milt jn affirmed that the prelates openly " cherish and side 
 with the Papists, and are, as it were, one paity with them." 
 The church canons declared that " the most high and sacred 
 order of Kings is of divine right" ; that there is no limit to the 
 money " due to Kings from their subjects by the law of God," 
 and that if any resist, according to St. Paul, " they shall receive 
 to themselves damnation " ! They also threaten excommuni- 
 cation to " a sect of factious people, sprung up among us, 
 despisers and depravers of the ' Book of Common Prayer,' 
 who will hear sern::ons, and will not say prayers according to 
 Act of Parliament. Such were the conspirators, such the 
 treason against God and man, such the falsehood, which "a 
 sect of factious people," the loyal Christian, manhood of Eng- 
 land, resisted even unto death. 
 
 When they asked, " What is the Anglo-Catholic faith ?" the 
 answer came in the ever-varying acts of Parliament, dogmas, 
 canons, and punctilios under the Tudors or the Stuarts, succes- 
 sively enforced under pains and penalties.^ Such vibrations 
 might not disturb a Vicar of Bray. 
 
 The Puritan ever appealed to Scripture, and paid for his dis- 
 sent and loyalty to conscience in dungeons, at the stake, on 
 the gibbet, or in exile if happily he could escape, thus slowly 
 finding out the right of private judgment, of individual con- 
 
 ' Davids' Nonconformitv in Essex, 1863, p. 181. 
 
 ^ N. E. Historic. andGenl. Reg., viii, 135. 
 
 ' Sydney Smith's " Persecuting Bishops," Ed. Rev., 1822. 
 
13 
 
 science, — the corner-stone of the temple of liberty. A " Come 
 now, let us reason together " would have lowered the dignity 
 of these prelates. Six feet by two, a felon's grave, was the re- 
 sponse of Force to Reason. The Independent John Locke said 
 it is for government " to stamp silver and gold, and thereby 
 make them current money ; yet every man has the liberty 
 to examine even those very pieces . . . the stamp makes it 
 neither good nor current. But ... to coin opinions into 
 truths, and make them current by their authority . . . be- 
 cause this governor or that priest says they are so," ^ is mon- 
 strous. 
 
 Selden's famous syllogism was conclusive : Whether " the 
 convocation, which is questionable, whether jure divino, and 
 parliaments, which out of question are not jure divino, should 
 meddle with religion, which is jure divino, I leave to you, Mr. 
 Speaker ! " 
 
 The murderers of Sir Henry Vane said, " We do not know 
 how to answer him, but we do know what to do with him." 
 
 The questions of Sir Walter Raleigh in the House of Com- 
 mons in 1592 — " If two or three thousand Brownists meet at 
 the sea-side, at whose charge shall they be transported .' or 
 whither will you send them .' I am sorry for it, but I am afraid 
 there is near twenty thousand of them in England ; and when 
 they are gone, who shall maintain their wives and children .' " — 
 were answered by the act of 1593, of indiscriminate banish- 
 ment. Some of them " resolved," says Governor Bradford, in 
 his lately discovered journal,^ " to go into the Low Countries, 
 where they heard was freedom of opinion for all men," free from 
 " ye ceremonies and servis booke, and other popish and anti- 
 Christian stuff, the plague of England to this day . . . which ye 
 better part sought, according to ye puritie of ye Gospel, to route 
 out and utterly to abandon." There, one of the congregations of 
 exiles chartered the " May Flower " ; but their pastor, the 
 venerable Robinson, with a part of his flock, was hindered from 
 
 1 King's Life of Locke, Bohn's Ed, p. 347. 
 
 ^ As to my discovery of the Bradford manuscript ; and its appropriation by Rev. 
 John S. Barry and Mr. Charles Deane, par nobile fratrum, see Barry's History 
 of Massachusetts, i, 79'^ Bradford's History of Plymouth, p. v, and New Engt^-ia 
 Historical and Geitealogical Register, 1855 : 231. 1856 : 353. 
 
H 
 
 coming to Plymouth by the intolerance of the party, which, as 
 we shall see, soon after began the second colony — Massachu- 
 setts. Such was the malice of bigotry against good men of 
 exemplary life and conversation. 
 
 In a letter to the judicious Hooker by George Cranmer, one 
 of his ablest disciples, 1598, he says, " If the positions of the 
 Reformers be true, I cannot see how the main and general con- 
 clusions of Brownism should be false ; for upon these two 
 points, as I conceive, they stand : ist." . . . their right "to 
 sever themselves from us. 2d. That without civil authority 
 they are to erect gi church of their own." ^ 
 
 What must have been the popular intelligence and virtue 
 where such principles could be considered dangerous, and what 
 the character and policy of rulers in church and state who trem- 
 bled at their utterance ! How luminous the wisdom, how grand 
 the spirit of those who came out of that darkness, with loss of 
 all things but conscience, in literal obedience to the apostolic 
 injunction, " Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ 
 hath made us free, and be not entangled again." 
 
 " Assuredly," says Macaulay, " if there be any class of men 
 whom the Protestant non-conformists of England respect more 
 highly than another, if any whose memory they hold in deeper 
 veneration, it is that class of men, of high spirit and unconquer- 
 able principles, who, in the days of Archbishop Laud, preferred 
 leaving their native country and living in the ' savage solitudes 
 of a wilderness,' rather than to live in a land of prosperity and 
 plenty, where they could not enjoy the privilege of worship- 
 ping their Maker freely, according to the dictates of their con- 
 science." 
 
 The virtual transfer of the tiara to Henry VIII was in prin- 
 ciple, as it became in fact, revolutionary ; for with it the funda- 
 mental idea of apostolic succession logically went to the winds, 
 and with it, its authority ; but it also wrought a nobler gain, for 
 it changed the field of contest, and evoked the spirit of patri- 
 otism, the love and pride of country. Besides, to talk of Anglo- 
 Catholicism was no more absurd than of Roman-Catholicism. 
 The genius of the Roman, Anglican, Scottish, or of any hier- 
 archy, is essentially military ; it insists upon unity and consol- 
 
 ^ Appendix lo Walton's Life of Richard Hooker. 
 
15 
 
 idation, at whatever cost of private judgment or of personal 
 conscience. It weaves a net-work of centralization which sti- 
 fles freedom of thought, and establishes the most odious of all 
 despotisms, that over the mind ; it is necessarily hostile to indi- 
 vidualism and self-government ; it must regard democracy as 
 incompatible with its own prosperity, because subversive of that 
 unreasoning subordination, that implicit obedience, which is its 
 only security. 
 
 " If you look upon the government of churches," says Mr. 
 John Cotton,^ " you will find little difference between Episco- 
 pacy and Popery, for they are governed by Popish canons " ; 
 and if parliaments are as the times, we may know that it was 
 the poor, especially, who welcomed the Gospel, for both Houses 
 tendered to Henry VIII a bill taking the reading of the Scrip- 
 tures from most of the laity. Very tedious were the steps 
 leading England to emancipation from Roman thraldom. The 
 cutting loose from Rome involved the loss of her assumed au- 
 thority ; for the Sacerdos, if divine, is a unit, incompatible with 
 any other authority. It was this essential defect, coupled with 
 the likeness of Canterbury to the Vatican, which gave the 
 sting to the taunt of Milton, who, in his abhorrence of hierar- 
 chal arrogance, intolerance, and cruelty, called the new Church 
 " the bastard daughter of Rome." For, still calling itself " the " 
 church, and claiming the old monopoly as the exclusive depos- 
 itory and medium of divine truth and grace, it must be intol- 
 erant of doubt or dissent, and so the rights of manhood — of con- 
 science, of thought, and of private judgment — were again to be 
 fought as vehemently and cruelly by the Anglo-Catholic as they 
 ever had been by the Roman Catholic Church, and to be en- 
 forced by the same arguments, by personal suffering. In blind 
 fear and hatred of liberty, in intolerance, they were one. Bigotry 
 is cruel, — the defect is inherent in the system. " Like mother, 
 like daughter," was the Puritan proverb. The very existence 
 of an established church was a monstrous injustice. 
 
 The intestinal griefs in the Church of England became in 
 young Edward's time a sort of old-clothes quarrel, " a surplice 
 brabble, a tippet scuffle," — ludicrous enough, but for the fear- 
 ful sufferings to the Reformers ; yet it involved the integral 
 
 1 Churclut' Resurrection, 1642, p. 19. 
 
i6 
 
 principle of the whole system — authority. Hooper, -the firet 
 Puritan in the Church of England, refused the proffered See of 
 Gloucester, in 1551, if obliged to wear the superstitious vest- 
 ments of Rome, and preferred a prison with conscience to 
 being " twice a saint in lawn " without it. The Puritan alleged 
 Scripture and reason : the hierarch urged the inventions of 
 councils, authority, precedent, and prudence, — the usual argu- 
 ments of the strong and the timid ; the Puritan stood for prin- 
 ciple, the hierarch consulted expediency ; the Puritan rested on 
 right, the hierarch on usage and policy ; the one pleaded the 
 principles of justice, the other reasons of state. And so it was 
 when " Bloody Mary " assumed the crown, — a part of the Church 
 of England was burned at Smithfieid, a very large part sank 
 sleepily into the " bosom of Rome," while still another portion 
 found a more natural and congenial refuge in the reformed 
 portions of the Continent, especially in the Low Countries. 
 
 Among these a " little congregation " found a generous 
 shelter at Frankfort-on-the-Main. In that hospitable city in a 
 " strange land," free from the thrall of despotic authority, and 
 thrown upon their natural rights, self-government was the spon- 
 taneous outgrowth of the situation. They tasted the sweets of 
 liberty. "What greater treasure," they wrote, in 1554, "or 
 sweeter comfort could be desired by a Christian man than 
 to have a church wherein he may serve God in purity of faith 
 and integrity of life. . . . Where we would, we could not there 
 obtain it. . . . Before, we have reasoned together in hope to 
 obtain a church . . . free from all dregs of superstitious 
 ceremonies, ... we had fully determined to have our church 
 served by ministers of our own choosing, and of equal authority. 
 We do not wish a chief superintendent (or bishop), and should 
 we, he would be elected by ourselves." ^ 
 
 The congregation by common consent used the order of 
 worship of the church of Geneva, of which Calvin was pastor, 
 ... as most godly, and fartherest off from superstition." 
 So naturally did the principle and practice of independency, 
 a self-organized, self-governing congregation, assert itself, with 
 the Bible as its guide and Reason as its interpreter. Seventy 
 years later the principle will reassert itself, under more favora- 
 
 1 Hopkins's Puritans and Queen Elizabeth, i, pp. 76-88. 
 
17 
 
 ble conditions, and give the law to a continent, for under, it and 
 in it to-day we live and move and have our being ; it is the 
 fundamental idea of free government and is the glory of our 
 Constitution. John Knox, in his forty-eighth year, then at 
 Geneva, accepted their call to preach to them " the most lively 
 Word of God," and arrived at Frankfort the next Nove.nber 6. 
 
 There were joy and concord in that " little congregation " till 
 a company of other English refugees, intent on profound mat- 
 ters of church forms and ceremonies, mere incendiaries, who 
 got admission under pretence of brotherly love, broke up the 
 congregation. " The troubles at Frankfort " under the lead of 
 the graceless bigot. Dr. Cox, were remembered by Knox and 
 not forgotten by the Puritans. 
 
 Others of the Marian exiles, unbiassed by the presence or 
 influence of an established system, or state religion, were led 
 by a study of the Scriptures to question the superiority of 
 bishops, were alienated from Episcopacy, and strongly inclined 
 to the more popular Genevan polity. On the accession of 
 Elizabeth they found little favor at her hands. The violent and 
 unscrupulous adherents of the old vestments and ritualism 
 of the Papal worship — the very party which, in a foreign land, 
 had traitorously entered the "little congregation" at Frankfort 
 — were repossessed of the old abodes of superstition, the 
 cathedrals and rituals, and, under the authority of the Crown, — 
 intent, as Tyndale foretold and Milton described it, on their 
 " surplice brabble and tippet scuffle, ... to force on their 
 fellow subjects . . . the skeleton of a mass book," — renewed the 
 old persecution. The story of their wrongs and oppression, 
 revolting to justice and humanity, and of their loyalty to con- 
 science, is the subject of Mr. Hopkins's admirable work, Tlie 
 Puritans and Queen Elizabeth} Yet this very hierarchy had 
 acknowledged and, even then, recognized the foreign reformed 
 clergy, the Presbytery in Geneva, in Scotland, France, Germany, 
 " even Presbytery of foreigners in their own streets, to be of 
 the true Church of Christ." ^ 
 
 The Romish touch-stone of fidelity was in a rigid adherence 
 to ritualistic ceremonies and observances. Calvin saw this, 
 
 1 See also Punchard's Congregationalism, ii, ch. xi. 
 ' Hopkins, i, p. 455. 
 3 
 
i8 
 
 and on this one point Calvin and the Pope thought ahke. 
 So long as this stronghold of superstition remained intact, 
 Rome might hope to regain England. 
 
 The weak consciences of her subjects were more tender of 
 offences against the priest than against the Decalogue. Eliza- 
 beth, inspired by policy rather than by piety, Romish or Protes- 
 tant as affairs prompted, reconstructed the Church of Henry 
 VIII, refusing the title of Supreme Head but taking that of 
 " Governor of the Church of England," banished the crucifix 
 from the altar, substituted the Liturgy for the Mass, and filled 
 the Episcopal Sees with her creatures,^ who ruled like tyrants. 
 
 But even these slight concessions to the Puritan spirit of in- 
 novation roused Pius V, the ex-Grand Inquisitois who, March 
 28, 1569, excommunicated Elizabeth, with the usual ecclesias- 
 tical pomp of words, proclaimed her " a heretic and favorer of 
 heretics," and absolved all her subjects from their oaths of 
 allegiance, and made all who should obey her liable to excom- 
 munication, — all this because she had," ordered impious rites 
 and ceremonies according to Calvin's " Institutes." ^ 
 
 This fulmination of the papal curse was not then a solemn 
 drollery, but a high warrant for conspiracy and assassination ; 
 it invoked the diabolism conceivable only under an institution 
 which held that the " end justified the means," and consecrated 
 perjury and violence in its service as acceptable to God, and to 
 be rewarded with a heavenly crown. The massacre at Vassy, 
 of St. Bartholomew's, the assassination of William of Orange, 
 of Henry III and of Henry IV, all contemporary, were the 
 work of the Jesuits, that brotherhood of the dagger and the 
 bowl.^ 
 
 Elizabeth was in peril ; and so at a later date, 161 8, it was a 
 
 1 The " bishops did not blush to call themselves the creatures of James Stuart, 
 dependant on him as the breath of their nostrils." McCrie's Life of Andrew 
 Melville, Ed. 1856, pp. 252-263. 
 
 ■■' Camden's Elizabeth, in Kennett, ii, pp. 427. 
 
 'One of the deeds of this Pius V, when Grand Inquisitor, which "passed in 
 atrocity the common atrociousness " of that church, was the murder of two 
 thousand Vaudois peasants. Eighty men, women, and children were led out of a 
 house, one by one, where stood a brawny ruffian with naked arms, red with blood, 
 who cut the throat of each man as he passed out. Milman's St. Paul, p 294. Mr. 
 Motley says that when it was not in the power of man's ingenuity to add any fresh 
 features of horror to the religious persecution under wliich the Dutch were groan- 
 
19 
 
 delicate intimation of Gondomar to King James, " that if the 
 Pope and Catholic princes had no hope of a remedy, both his 
 person and crown would be in danger of a violent taking off." 
 
 The fathers of New England and the statesmen of the Com- 
 monwealth alike regarded the papal church as organized treason, 
 ever waiting its opportunity. John Pym said in the Parliament 
 of 1640, " The principles of poperie are such as are incompatible 
 with any other religion. There may be a suspension of vio- 
 lence for some time, by certain respects, but the ultimate end 
 even of that moderation is that they may with more advantage 
 extirpate that which is opposite to them. Lawes will not re- 
 strain them, oathes will not." Our fathers deemed it not a 
 speculative but a practical question, whether an organization, 
 under whatever mask or pretence, secret in council, its priest- 
 hood cut off from all ties of state, society, and family, native to 
 the church and alien to the country, without national senti- 
 ment or local attachment, and in all interests and events 
 whatsoever bound to absolute submission to a foreign poten- 
 tate, — whether such an organization is compatible with any 
 other government.^ 
 
 In our own day the chieftain of this gliding, vermicular 
 army renews the declarations of open war upon our free insti- 
 tutions, even upon that fundamental principle which distinguishes 
 our American polity from that of Europe, whose debasing and 
 deadening influences are illustrated in Spain, France, and Italy. 
 
 The doctrine ^ that " Liberty of conscience and of worship is 
 the right of every man, a right which ought to be proclaimed 
 and established by law in every well-established State," he, 
 with brazen effrontery, denounces as " a liberty of perdition . . . 
 destructive to all virtue and justice . . . depressing to all hearts 
 and minds . . . against sound reason . . . impious and absurd . . . 
 
 ing, the Pope sent the fiendish Alva a jewelled hat and sword, with an autograph 
 letter " to remember, when he put the hat upon his head, that he was guarded with 
 it as with a helmet of righteousness, and with the shield of God's help, indicating 
 the heavenly crown which was ready for all princes who support the Holy Church 
 and the Roman Catholic faith." Dutch Republic, ii, 282-284. 
 
 1 "Amsterdam admits of all religions but I'apists, . . . who, where'er they live, 
 have another king at Rome ; all other religions are subject to the present State, . 
 and have no prince elsewhere." Selden's Taile Talk, 1650. 
 
 2 Pius IX's Encyclical, Dec 8, 1864. 
 
20 
 
 false, perverse, and detestable . . . epecially as they tend 
 to shackle 'his' church . . . not only with regard to each 
 individual man, but with regard to nations, peoples, and 
 their rulers," all of whom, he demands, shall be " compelled 
 to inflict the penalties of law upon violators of 'his' religion "; 
 and so, with distinct declaration of war on our political institu- 
 tions, as " a horrible plague," and this explicit purpose of using 
 the sword, this infallible vicegerent " re-animates . . . warns and 
 exhorts " all his hierarchal celibates, who have neither country 
 nor home nor personal conscience, and all his " dear children " 
 in his " church to repel and absolutely avoid the contagion " of 
 " liberty of conscience," and to destroy the very basis of 
 American freedom. 
 
 Whether such an organization was compatible with the safety 
 of the Commonwealth, and whether its loyal and consistent 
 members could also be " good citizens " thereof, was and is 
 now a practical question.' The irreverent may smile, but this 
 same authority prohibits and condemns all books or teachings 
 which " endeavor to prove that the doctrine of the immobility 
 of the sun in the centre of the world and the mobility of the 
 earth is consonant to truth and not adverse to holy Scriptures."^ 
 
 It will not be deemed irrelevant here to remember that the 
 significant limitation of our constitutional guarantee to denomi- 
 nations and sects is to those who " demean themselves peaceably, 
 and as good citizens of the Commonwealth"; but must a Com- 
 monwealth wait till the foundations are honey-combed, till 
 treason has laid the train of ignorance, superstition, and pas- 
 sion, — wait till the explosion of bestial force in popular violence 
 and anarchy t or anticipate the danger and save the republic .' 
 A wise man defined history as " philosophy teaching by exam- 
 ple," and wise men may profit by the e.xperience of all countries 
 
 J So the Presbyterian " setting up a spiritual tyranny by a secular power, to the 
 advancing of their own authority above the magistrate, whom they would have made 
 their executive to punish church delinquencies, whereof civil laws have no coirni- 
 zance." Milton's Description of the Westminster Assembly, in Ilarleian Miscel- 
 lany, X, 39. 
 
 ^ Papal bull of 1664, cited in North British Review, ]n\y, 1870, p. 282. Tune 
 16, 1633, Urban VIII, ex cathedra, ordered the sentence against Galileo's astro- 
 nomical theory to be officially sent to all apostolic nuncios. Macmillan's Magazine 
 Dec. 1873. 
 
21 
 
 against their common enemy. Mr. Webster's monitory words 
 were " not to wait till great public mischiefs come, till the gov- 
 ernment is overthrown, or liberty itself put in extreme jeop- 
 ardy. We should not be worthy sons of our fathers, were we 
 so to regard great questions affecting the general freedom." 
 
 Despite infallible interpretation of prophets and psalms that 
 a round world and antipodes would be unscriptural and heret- 
 ical, a rebellion of nature against " the Church," Columbus 
 sailed on his voyage of discovery ; but no sooner was the fact 
 known than the Pope divided this newly discovered portion of 
 his estate among willing vassal princes, with a title good " to 
 all eternity," as his bull reads. May 4, 1493. 
 
 Fearfully and intimately did European theologies, ethics, 
 and politics affect American colonization : for example, the 
 Huguenot colony in Brazil, 1556, projected by the illustrious 
 Coligni as a refuge from papal persecution, was ruined by the 
 treachery of the leader, and his defection to Rome. The Span- 
 iard, Melendez, destroyed the Huguenot colony in Florida, in 
 1565, because they were heretics ; " not," he said, " as French- 
 men, but as Lutherans " ; and Dominique de Gourges, the 
 avenger of that massacre, fitly inscribed on a tablet, " I do not 
 this as to Spaniards, but as to traitors, robbers, and murder- 
 ers." It was this which, fifty years later, deterred the Pilgrims 
 from Spanish America ; for, said Bradford,^ " If they should 
 ther live & doe well, the jealous Spaniard . . . would displante 
 or overthrow them, as he did y" French in Florida." James I 
 murdered Sir Walter Raleigh as a peace-offering to Spanish 
 colonial jealousy at the time the Pilgrims — preferring exile 
 in America rather than in Holland — were pleading, by their 
 friends of " good rank and quality," " that he would be pleased 
 to grant them freedom of religion " in that desert ; but so dead 
 to shame, so eagerly servile was he to the imperious Philip's 
 purpose of Romanizing Great Britain, that he would not " tolerate 
 them by his public authoritie under his seal," but at the most, 
 and that reluctantly, would " connive at them." 
 
 The Pilgrims upon reflection felt that " a seale as broad as 
 y* house floor " would be useless, and so without it " they must 
 
 Hist. Plym., pp. 2S-30. 
 
22 
 
 rest ... in God's providence, as they had done in other things," 
 and prepared for their mission. 
 
 The colonization of South Carolina grew out of the Revoca- 
 tion of the Edict of Nantes, which cost France 50,000 Protes- 
 tant families fleeing from the papal syord and fagot. New 
 York was colonized by the liberty-loving and valorous Dutch, 
 whose commercial enterprise baffled Spain. 
 
 Virginia, an " emunctory " for the waste of England, was 
 colonized by a corporation whose laws exacted of " every man 
 and woman " a rigid observance of the established religion, 
 under penalty of the galleys, whipping-post, and even death.^ 
 It was this Anglo-Catholic mode of conversion that decided 
 the Pilgrims " to live as a distincte body by themselves, . . . 
 for it was objected, that if they lived among y" English wh. 
 wear ther planted, or so near to them as to be under their gov- 
 ernment, they should be in as great danger to be troubled and 
 persecuted for the cause of religion, as if they lived in England', 
 and it might be worse." ^ The spirit of those laws and of the 
 church which invoked them remained. Despite their rigor, a 
 few Puritans ventured into Virginia. In answer to their earn- 
 est call, New England sent ministers to preach the Gospel there, 
 — the first in our missionary annals. This was an aggression 
 not to be endured, and so Virginia exiled her non-conformists, 
 among whom were some of her best and ablest men, one at 
 least of whom Massachusetts especially welcomed and honored.^ 
 Some of these Puritan exiles from Virginia went to Roman 
 Catholic Maryland and were potent in its affairs for good. In 
 his admirable address, Maryland Two Hundred Years Ago, 
 Mr. Streeter says that the principal credit due to the proprie- 
 tary and the people is, that having seen the need of the articles 
 of toleration, " they acquiesced in them when presented to their 
 
 1 Benedict's Beginning of America, i860, p. 60. 
 
 2 Bradford, 28. 
 
 ' " Some honest minded people in Virginia . . . sent earnest letters, and one or 
 more messengers to the elders of these churches here for some of our ministers ; " 
 and .Mr. KnoUes of Watertown, Mr. Tomson of Braintree, and Mr. James of 
 New Haven, were sent. . . . " What entertainment they found from the major part 
 of the government there, I forbere to speak." Cotton's Way Cleared, 1648-76. 
 Mather's Magnalia, B. iii, ch. xvii. Winthrop's Journal, ii, 78-95. Hubbard's 
 New England, 410-522. New England Hist, and Gen. Register, \, 348. 
 
23 
 
 consideration," and that the articles " originated from no con- 
 genial principle at that day recognized either in the Catholic 
 or Protestant divisions of the church," but were drawn up in 
 England in 1649, ^^ deference to the progressive doctrines of 
 the Independents." ^ 
 
 Mr. Streeter speaks by the record. Plymouth, New Eng- 
 land, had germinated those doctrines, and through Henry 
 Vane and Cromwell they ruled England ; and thus Plymouth 
 dictated that Act which secured liberty of conscience, even in 
 Roman Catholic Maryland. 
 
 That their assertion of their right to choose their own min- 
 isters was the only avowed reason for refusing the formal royal 
 assent to the removal of the Pilgrim exiles to America, shows 
 that the Crown was ruled by the Mitre, even in remotest 
 things.^ 
 
 From this, the line of contrasts between Jamestown and 
 Plymouth will show two conflicting civilizations. The James- 
 town colonists, rank and file, were sent out by a corpora- 
 tion, under the royal seal, for gain, more as if criminals than 
 volunteers, to be governed by a code of Draconian severity, 
 more like that of an army or a penitentiary than of civil life ; 
 their religion was reduced to a manual of mechanical routine, 
 under a detective surveillance fatal to spontaneity, — the very 
 essence of spiritual hfe, — under officers whose functions were 
 more those of a police than of the civil magistracy of an 
 orderly community ; in brief, as dependants under rules and 
 authority external to themselves, to which their a.ssent was 
 neither asked nor given, and to which their only relation was 
 that of enforced obedience. For example, " Every man and 
 woman duly twice a day, upon the first tolling of the bell, shall, 
 upon the working days, repair unto the church to hear divine 
 service" (" according to the doctrine, rites, and religion now 
 professed and established within our realms of England"), 
 " upon pain of losing his or her day's allowance for the first 
 omission, for the second to be whipt, for the third to be con- 
 demned to the galleys for six months. . . . And also every 
 man and woman shall repair in the morning to the divine 
 
 1 Before the Maryland Historical Society, May 20, 1852, p. 41. 
 
 2 Bradford, 29, 35. 
 
24 
 
 service, and sermons preached upon the Sabbath day- ; and in 
 the afternoon to divine service and catechising, upon pain for 
 the first fault to lose their provision and allowance for the 
 whole week following ; for the second, to lose the said allowance 
 and also to be whipped, and also for the third to suffer death." ^ 
 
 " There is not one man nor woman in this colony now pres- 
 ent, or hereafter to arrive, ... if they shall refuse ... to give 
 an account of their faith . . . unto the minister, . . . the 
 governor shall cause the offender, for the first time of re- 
 fusal, to be whipt, for the second time to be whipt twice, and 
 to acknowledge the fault upon the Sabbath day in the assembly 
 of the congregation ; and for the third time, to be whipt every 
 day until he should submit to the priestly inquisition." 
 
 " Not an element of popular liberty," says Bancroft, " was in- 
 troduced into the form of government." Evidently, the state 
 was auxiliary to " church " missionary work, its chief appeals to 
 conscience and means to conversion being the whipping-post 
 and gallows. True it is, " the priest of superstition rides an 
 ass, but the priest of fanaticism a tiger." ^ Thus the Virgin- 
 ians were driven to 
 
 — " love the Church that claims our awe 
 Tow'rd holy Truth, by force of Statute Law. 
 And helps free grace to gain the Soul's assent. 
 And cleanse our sins, by Act of Parliament." 
 
 Now for the contrast : The Plymouth colonists were " not a 
 corporation, but knit together by a voluntary combination." * 
 Without the royal seal, they were volunteers, free 
 
 " To ask what's reason," not " proclaim what's writ " by despots, 
 
 Self-dependent, self-reliant, self-governing, under their own laws 
 and their own officers, under a constitution adopted and signed 
 in a convention of " the people, in whom," said Mr. John Cotton 
 in 1640,* " fundamentally all power lyes." 
 
 In this compact, the theme of philosophers and statesmen 
 and the model for all times, they covenant as follows : — 
 
 1 Mr. Benedict's The Beginning of America, 1863, p. 58. Force's Tracts, i. 
 
 2 Isaac Taylor's Natural History of Enthusiasm. 
 
 ' Smith's History, 247. Bradford's Plymouth, 2, 4-26-32. 
 * Trumbull's Lechford, note 34. 
 
25 
 
 " We, ... in y" presence of God, and one of another, covenant & 
 combine ourselves togeather into a civill body politick — ... and by vertue 
 hearof to enacte, constitute, and frame such just & equall lawes, ordi- 
 nances, & offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meete and 
 convenient for y° generall good, . . . unto which we promise all due sub- 
 mission and obedience." ^ 
 
 It was an easy process ; its controlling influence went through 
 the successive New England colonies. 
 
 As early as 1636, in the feebleness of feudal authority under 
 Gorges, the Saco planters, thrown upon their natural rights, 
 entered into a like popular combination, under whose authority 
 even Bonythoh's co-patentee, Thomas Lewis, was cited to answer 
 for contempt.2 The next year, 1636, Rhode Island presents 
 this remarkable document ^ : — 
 
 " We, whose names are hereunder, desirous to inhabit in the town of 
 Providence, do promise to subject ourselves in active or passive obedience 
 to all such orders or agreements as shall be made for public good of the 
 body, in an orderly way, by the major assent of the present inhabitants, 
 masters of families, incorporated together into a town fellowship, and such 
 others whom they shall admit unto them, only in civil things ; " and thus, 
 as Mr. Arnold says, " ignoring any power in the body politic to interfere 
 with those matters that concern alone man and his Maker." 
 
 So the Connecticut planters, under their leader, Mr. Thomas 
 Hooker, the old London friend of the Pilgrims, Jan. 14, i639> 
 formed a constitution " to maintain peace and union " by " an 
 orderly and decent government, established according to God, 
 to order and dispose of the affairs of the people at all seasons, 
 as occasion shall require, do therefore," say they " associate and 
 conjoin ourselves to be as one public State or Common- 
 wealth." * 
 
 And " on the 4th day of the 4th month called June," of the 
 same year, " all " the New Haven planters, — Eaton, Goodwin, 
 Hopkins, and the rest, — under the lead of their pastor, Mr. 
 John Davenport,* " assembled together in a general meet- 
 
 1 Bradford's Plymouth, pp. 66, 89. 
 
 ^ Folsom's Saco and Biddeford, p. 49. 
 
 8 Arnold's Rhode Island, i, pp. 102-103. 
 
 * Trumbull's Hist, of Connecticut, 1797. pp. 47-48-95. Trumbull's Col. Rec. of 
 Connecticut, i, 20-26. 
 
 'Hoadly's New Haven Col. Rec, i, II-19. Trumbull's Hist, of Connecticut, 
 Ed. 1797, i, p. 533. 
 4 
 
26 
 
 ing to consult about settling a civil government, according to 
 God, . . . seeing they were free to cast themselves into that 
 mould and form of Commonwealth which appeareth best for 
 them."i 
 
 So in 1639 the Exeter planters, "destitute ... of whole- 
 some laws and civil government, ... in the name of Christ 
 and in the sight of God," say we, " combine ourselves together 
 to erect and set up among us such government as shall be to 
 our best discerning agreeable to the will of God " ; and a year 
 later the Dover planters, Larkham, the Waldernes, and thirty- 
 eight others, " whose names are underwritten, . . . have volun- 
 tarily agreed to combine ourselves into a body politic," to be 
 governed by " such laws as shall be concluded by a major part 
 of the freemen. "2 Again, in 1643,^ articles of confederation 
 betwixt the plantations under the " several governments of 
 Massachusetts, Plimouth, Connecticut, and of New Haven, 
 with the plantations in combination therewith," were entered 
 into under the name of " The United Colonies of New Eng- 
 land." * The preamble recites that " whereas, we all came into 
 these parts of America with one and the same end and ayme, 
 . . . are encompassed with people of several nations and 
 strange languages, . . . and . . . seeing the sad distractions 
 in England, . . . enter into a present consociation amongst our- 
 selves for mutual help and strength in all our future concern- 
 ments." They neither call themselves "subjects," nor even al- 
 lude to a " king." It was an international league of Indepen- 
 dent Commonwealths, without the baubles of a . crown or a 
 mitre. 
 
 1 Trumbull's Hist, of Conmcticiit, Ed. 1818, i, pp. 502, 504. 
 
 2 Farmer's Belknap, 432-433. Among them were Wheeler, Mr. Wheelwright, 
 the minister, one of Winthrop's Exiles, Rishworth, Dearborn, Wentworth, Lam- 
 son, and Purmot, the schoolmaster. 
 
 ' Hoadly's New Haven Col. Rec, 161, 562. 
 
 * " It originated," says Chalmers, Annals, ch. 8, " with Massachusetts, always 
 fruitful in projects of independence. No patent legalized the confederacy, which 
 continued until the dissolution of the charters in 1686. Neither the. consent nor 
 approbation of the governing powers in England was ever applied for or given. 
 The principles upon which this famous association was formed were altogether 
 those of self-government, of absolute sovereignty." As to why Rhode Island and 
 " Agamenticus, a poor village, lately made a corporation," did not join, see Arnold's 
 History of Rhode Island, i, 115, 156-158, 340. 
 
27 
 
 Thus it appears that at Jamestown the colonist was a ser- 
 vant, in Plymouth, a citizen ; one was an agent, the other a 
 principal ; the one obeyed implicitly, without reason, the 
 other obeyed with reason : in brief, one lived by rule, the other 
 by law, — they were " a law unto themselves." 
 
 Force and fear were essential to the first, intelligence and 
 virtue to the other ; and these were their respective bases. 
 
 In exact accord with these contrasts, there was still another 
 rudimental difference between Jamestown and Plymouth, which 
 ended in the conflict that so lately convulsed the nation. In 
 one was cherished the feudal sentiment of contempt for labor, 
 and a social degradation of the workingman, ever fruitful of 
 ignorance, indolence, barbarism, woe, and general decay ; in 
 the other, labor was honorable and honored, making the 
 North a field of intelligent industry, virtue, temperance, and 
 frugaHty, where free institutions — the school, meeting-house, 
 and college — were the fruits and the stay of Christian civil- 
 ization. 
 
 In England the Pilgrims " had only been used to a plaine 
 countrie life and y° innocent trade of husbandrie," and in exile 
 in Holland, " they fell to such trades and employments as they 
 best could, valuing peace & their spirituall comforte above 
 any other riches whatever. At length," says Bradford, " they 
 came to raise a competence & comfortable living, but with 
 hard and continual labor." 
 
 Governor Carver died from overwork in the field in seed- 
 time ; and Governor Winthrop, the successor of Conant and 
 Endicott, was " in plaine apparel assisting in any ordinary 
 labor." ' 
 
 " Thus to men cast in that heroic mould 
 Came Empire, such as Spaniard never Icnew, — 
 Such Empire as beseems the just and true ; 
 
 And, at the last, almost unsought, came gold." " 
 
 In Virginia the church maintained its legal position, yet it 
 seems the atmosphere was not wholly congenial, since its 
 
 ^Historical Magazine, iii, 261-263, 358-359, iv, 4-6 ; Punchard's Hist, of Con- 
 gregationalism, iii, chap, xii, xv, as to the occupations of the Pilgrims ; Bradford's 
 Plymouth, 100 ; Sainsbury's Col. Papers, 1574-1660, 156, 632. 
 
 ^ Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton. 
 
28 
 
 stanch defender, Governor Berkeley, passionately wished his 
 clergy would "pray oftener and preach less," for, said he, 
 " learning has brought disobedience, heresy, and sects into the 
 world, and printing has divulged them. Thank God, here are 
 no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall have none 
 these hundred years." Whether the Governor's thanks were 
 due heavenward, some may doubt ; but certain it is his pious 
 ejaculations rested on Virginia near two hundred years, till, in 
 the course of human events, freedmen and free schools invaded 
 her sacred soil. Yet sects, like sin, will intrude, and it is said 
 that Virginia Baptists gave to Patrick Henry and Thomas 
 Jefferson useful ideas in government, much talked about since 
 July 4th, 1776. Canada, in the mean time colonized by the 
 French, was absolutist, — had no people : there was only priest 
 and king. 
 
 But the New England colonies represented other shades of 
 opinions in Old England, and there again we must search for 
 their incunabula and study their origin. 
 
 Wicliffe's vernacular Bible disturbed Rome by exciting 
 doubt, irreverence, and endless disputes ; and Tyndale followed 
 up the assault by printing the New Testament in English, to 
 the dismay of all true churchmen. In 1525 he published an 
 address to the people denouncing the prelates as " so bedlam 
 as to affirm that good is the natural cause of evil, and darkness 
 to proceed out of light, and that lying should be grounded in 
 truth and verity ; and not rather clear contrary that light 
 destroyeth the darkness, and verity reproveth all manner of 
 lying." It was the old fight between darkness and light. 
 The one, resting on force, was established in Virginia, followed 
 by centuries of popular ignorance : the other, resting on Scrip- 
 ture and reason, — " the God within the mind," — found refuge 
 at Plymouth, established free schools and printing, and the 
 result is before us. 
 
 In the intense awakening that came of the labors of Wicliffe 
 and Tyndale, the conception of the relation of religion and law, 
 of conscience and the state, was gained by slow and painful 
 steps. The present order of ideas was inverted, and under 
 " the enormous faith of many made for one ". ; there was no 
 
29 
 
 society, no public opinion, no people, but a crowd,^ — the popu- 
 lace, a herd, whose owners were the bishop and the king. 
 These institutions were not considered as means to the com- 
 mon welfare, but only to the benefit of the few. 
 
 Our American principles of government would have been 
 considered as worthy of pandemonium. The rights of con- 
 science, recognized and protected by our constitutional law, so 
 that no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification 
 for any office or public trust ; freedom of speech and freedom 
 of the press ; the free exercise of any religion without any " es- 
 tablishment " ; that all religious societies, sects, and denomina- 
 tions shall ever have the right to elect their pastors and teach- 
 ers, and shall be equally under the protection of the law, and 
 have no legal preference of one over anotheir, axioms in our 
 politics.would, even if dreamed of, have been held as the vagaries 
 of enthusiasts, fatally subversive of all order and private or 
 public safety.. 
 
 Within memory, the Declaration of Independence, which is 
 declared in the able commentary of Dr. Farrar ^ to be " the law 
 of the land," has been called a declaration of " sounding and 
 glittering generalities " ; but the defeat of " our misguided 
 brethren " in the late Rebellion has vindicated and established 
 that great charter. It was in that faith the great contest was 
 waged and won. The pioneers of the forlorn hope of freedom 
 die in dungeons or on the scaffold ; but after ages build monu- 
 ments to them as to the friends of humanity. 
 
 To the crouching timidity of the conservatives of his time, 
 
 1 The Statutes of Clarendon, 1164, Jan. 25, the murder of Becket, 11 70, Dec. 29, 
 the demand of the archbishop and barons at St. Edmonsbury, 1214, Nov. 20, and 
 their compact with the king at Runnymede, Magna Charta, 1215, Jan. 15 — tell 01 
 temporary resistance to papal avarice, and the enormous claim of the Roman Church 
 to supremacy above all human authority, to the exclusive power of defining her 
 jurisdiction as to where her own province ends and the state's begins, — more than 
 an imperium in imperio, an imperium super imperium, — a claim as insolently made 
 now and here as then and there. The relief was to the " clergy " and the barons, 
 not to the multitude, who had no conscious life : there were no people ; there were 
 villeins without voice or lot in the matter. Prof Stubbs' Constitutional History of 
 England, § 132. So it continued, not much for the better in law or in fact, till the 
 first popular constitutional convention was convened in New England, November 
 \\, 1620. 
 
 2 Manual ef the Constitution, %% 231-232. 
 
30 
 
 Milton answered, " We must not run, they say, into sudden ex- 
 tremes. ... If it be found that those two extremes be vice and 
 virtue, falsehood and truth, the greater the extremity of virtue 
 and superlative truth we run into the more virtuous and the 
 more wise we become ; and he that, flying from degenerate and 
 traditional corruption, fears to shoot himself far into the meet- 
 ing embraces of a divinely warranted Reformation, had better 
 not have run at all. And for the suddenness it cannot be feared. 
 Who should oppose it ? The papists ? They dare not. The 
 protestants otherwise affected.? They were mad. . . . Our 
 brethren of the reformed churches abroad ventured (God being 
 their guide) out of rigid popery into that which we in mock- 
 ery call precise puritaiiism, and yet we see no inconvenience 
 befell them. Had it not been the obstinate perverseness of 
 our prelates against the divine and admirable spirit of Wic- 
 liffe, to suppress him as a schismatic and innovator, perhaps 
 neither the Bohemian Husse and Jerome, no, ngr the name of 
 Luther or of Calvin, had ever been known : the glory of 
 reforming all our neighbors had been completely ours. But 
 now, as our obdurate .clergy have with violence demeaned 
 the matter, we are become hitherto the latest and the back- 
 wardest scholars of whom God offered to have made us the 
 teachers." 
 
 As the basis of a hierarchy is dogma and authority, it is in- 
 compatible with the spirit of inquiry, freedom of thought, and 
 intellectual progress ; it is intolerant, and therefore cruel. As 
 established in England, the spirit of bigotry, of despotism, 
 asserted itself The reaction was soon felt. The movement 
 was retrogressive towards Rome. The Church of England was 
 sliding back into the depths. 
 
 As early as 1589, Lord Bacon noted that "some indiscreet 
 persons have been bold ... to use dishonorable and derogatory 
 speeches and censure of the churches abroad, and that so far, 
 some of our men [as I have heard] ordained in foreign parts, 
 have been pronounced to be no lawful ministers," and he also 
 censures the wrongs of the established hierarchy towards them 
 as not to " be dissembled or excused." ^ So narrow had they 
 become that Laud opposed aid to the banished ministers of the 
 
 1 tVoris of Lord Bacon. Spedding's edition, i, 84-89. 
 
31 
 
 palatinate because they were Calvinists and Presbyterians 
 and called Rome antichristian, for if Rome could not " con- 
 fer sacerdotal power in ordination, and the English Church had 
 no orders but what she derives from Rome," what must follow ? 
 Had the prelate forgotten the irresistible argument of Chil- 
 lingworth, that the chance of true ordination in the Church of 
 Rome is " even cousin-german to impossible," and that it is 
 " plainly impossible that any man should be so much as morally 
 certain either of his own priesthood or any other man's " ? ^ 
 
 — " Whatever link you strike, 
 Tenth or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike." 
 
 But there was in the strife the new element already allud- 
 ed to, — the political aspects of the Reformation. When the 
 same head, virtually, wore the mitre and the crown, and the 
 same hand wielded the crozier and the sword, then, by neces- 
 sity, the laity, the people, became , a political power, the 
 party of reform, of progress, if need be, of revolution, and 
 steadily gained till Independency — manhood — abolished the 
 mitre and the crown, and placed Cromwell at the head of the 
 Commonwealth. With what rapture did Milton witness the 
 resurrection ! " Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puis- 
 sant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and 
 shaking her invincible locks ; methinks I see her an eagle re- 
 viving her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at 
 the full mid-day beam ; purging and unsealing her long-abused 
 sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance ; while the 
 whole noise of timorous and flocking birds, with those also that 
 love the twilight, flutter about amazed at what she means, and 
 in their envious gabble would prognosticate a year of sects and 
 schisms." 
 
 " ' Shorn hypocrites, the psalm-singers, gloomy bigots,' " such 
 were the names," says Taine, by which men who reformed 
 the manners and renewed the constitution of England were 
 insulted. But oppressed and insulted as they were, their work 
 [Reformation] continued of itself . . . and under the insensible 
 progress of national sympathy, as well as under the incessant 
 
 1 Neal's Puritans, i, ch. v. The Religion of Protestants, Bohn's Ed. 1846, pp. 
 114-116, 448. 
 
32 
 
 . effort of public reflection, parties and doctrines were to rally 
 around a free and moral Protestantism." ^ 
 
 But for the Puritans, the Inquisition would have sunk Eng- 
 land to a level with Spain and Italy. Listen to Milton again : 
 " If to bring a numb and chill stupidity of soul, an inactive 
 blindness of mind upon the people, by their leaden doctrine or 
 no doctrine at all ; if to prosecute all knowing and zealous 
 Christians by the violence of their courts, be to keep away 
 schism indeed ; and by this kind of discipline, all Italy and 
 Spain is as purely and practically kept from schism as England 
 hath been of them. With as good plea might the dead palsy 
 boast to a man. It is I that free you from stitches and pains, 
 and the troublesome feelings of cold and heat, of wounds and 
 strokes ; if I were gone, all these would molest you. . . . 
 Where are those schismatics [Puritans] with whom the prelates 
 hold such hot skirmish ? Show us your acts, those obvious 
 annals, which your [High Commission and Star Chamber] 
 courts of loathed memory, lately deceased, have left us. . . . 
 They are only such ... as are offended with your lawless gov- 
 ernment, your ceremonies, your liturgy, an extract of the mass 
 book translated. But that they should be contemners of pub- 
 lic prayer, and churches used without superstition, I trust God 
 will manifest ere long to be a false slander ... A tympanum 
 of Spaniolized bishops swaggering in the foretop of the State 
 ... no marvel though they think it as unsafe to commit reli- 
 gion and liberty to their care as to a synagogue of Jesuits." 
 
 Thus was evoked the spirit which culminated in the glori- 
 ous Commonwealth. Macaulay places the Parliament of 1640 
 among " the great eras in the history of the civilized world," 
 and adds, "whatever of political freedom exists either in Eu- 
 rope or in America has sprung,, directly or indirectly, from 
 those institutions which they secured or reformed ; " and adds, 
 " We never turn to the annals of those times without feeling 
 increased admiration of the patriotism, the energy, the deci- 
 sion, the consummate wisdom which marked the measures of 
 that great Parliament, from the day on which it met to the 
 commencement of civil hostilities. Every reason which can be 
 
 ^ Areofiagilica, Bohn's Ed. ii, 94. The Renaissance, Milton. Taine's English 
 Literature, New York Ed. 1872, i, 408. 
 
33 
 
 urged in favor of the revolution of 1688 may be urged with at 
 least equal force in favor of what is called the great rebellion." 
 Even Robert Southey says, " I have more respect for the Inde- 
 pendents than for any other body of Christians, the Quakers 
 excepted ; their English history is without a blot." Be it re- 
 membered, all the while, that this Independency, till then vague, 
 only a dream, as a tangible thing and a successful experiment, 
 and the Commonwealth as its daughter, must date from Ply- 
 mouth.^ 
 
 The same power which, with characteristic treachery to the 
 spirit of the Reformation, lifted Laud to authority as the expo- 
 nent, the very soul of the Episcopal movement, persisted in a 
 scheme whose purpose was equally treasonable to the state. 
 Our limits permit only a brief review of the course of events ; 
 but recently published documents open the secrets of the times, 
 and vindicate the sagacity and statesmanship that saved Eng- 
 land and the world from a relapse into mediaeval darkness. 
 
 It was as early as 1604 — the advent of the quarrel between 
 the hierarchy and the people — that James I denounced the 
 Puritans, saying, " The revolt in the Low Countries, which had 
 lasted ever since he was born, and whereof he never expected 
 to see an end, began first by a petition for matters of religion. 
 That he and his mother, from their cradles, had been haunted 
 with a Puritan devil, which he feared would not leave him to 
 
 1 " The church, if a convention of clergymen making canons must be called by 
 that name," is the concise definition of the hierarchal church, given by John Locke, 
 the Independent, and pupil of John Owen, in his letter on toleration, written in 
 exile, but published in England in the year of the second Revolution. The very 
 opposite of this is the theory of Independency, Congregationalism, voluntary com- 
 bination. " The principle of religious liberty is almost logically bound up with 
 the theory of the independency of particular churches," says Mr. Masson (in his 
 Life of Milton and his Times, iii, 99), and it is the fundamental principle of Ameri- 
 can government. 
 
 This polity of the strong men — Goodwin, Owen, Peter, Vane, Milton, Cromwell, 
 and their fellows — to whom, under God, was confided the immediate future of Eng- 
 land, as well as a permanent influence on the spirit of her laws and government, 
 was moulded in the freer life and thought of New England by their correspondents 
 and fellow-workers. Cotton, Williams, Hooker, and the like, — a fresh field of in- 
 quiry for one who would relish the duty suggested by Mr. Carlyle, to hunt up " the 
 interesting reciprocities and mutualities between New England and her old mother, 
 which ought to be disentangled, to be made conspicuous and beautiful," — a work 
 which these pages may initiate. 
 
34 
 
 nis grave.^ That he would hazard his crown, but he would 
 suppress their malicious spirits." The unequal contest de- 
 throned the Stuarts, and did cost two of his family the crown 
 and one of them his head. 
 
 For years the fate of New England was as that of a shuttle- 
 cock. An intermarriage with the family that had blasted Spain 
 with the Inquisition and drenched the Netherlands with Chris- 
 tian blood, was the ambition of James Stuart, to secure which 
 he made eager proffer of personal and national servitude. The 
 bigot, Philip, hoped to gain by the weakness and treachery of 
 Stuart and his court what the Armada had failed to win by 
 force, — the extension over Great Britain of the Roman Cath- 
 olic sway which had palsied his own subjects. This was his 
 sole thought, and for this he would barter his own daughter ; 
 but the Puritan forbade the banns. In his despatch from the 
 English Court, March Jl, 1620, to his Spanish master, the as- 
 siduous Gondomar ^ wrote, " The King remembered very well 
 that I had told him three or four years ago that his secretary 
 Winwood was a Puritan, an enemy of Spain, and a Dutchman, 
 and that he had tried to verify what I had said, and found that 
 I had spoken the truth in this, as I always did ; and that from 
 that time he had taken his favor from Winwood, so that he 
 died of sorrow. Yet he must tell me that after I was gone the 
 malice of these people (the Puritans) so increased that he had 
 now three hundred Winwoods in his court and palace," and so 
 he " wiped the sweat from his forehead " ! 
 
 And we have, too, the ambassador's report of a conversation 
 of about the same date with Prince Charles and Lord Digby : 
 " We talked about the Puritans and of the great number of 
 
 1 It began with the " Request " of the Low Countries that the Spanish Inquisi- 
 tion might not be established on their territory, and ended forty-three years after- 
 ward in the vindication of man's prerogative of thought, his rescue from moral 
 death, and the Independence of the Dutch .States. — Motley's Netherlands. This 
 revolting levity at the fiendish bigotry of Rome and Spain in the Netherlands, the 
 story of whose deeds makes man to blush for his race, thus eariy disclosed the 
 moral penury of James I. He had not even the apology of bigotry, sincerity, 
 for he sat on a Protestant throne. Cowardice and cruelty distinguished this king' 
 who was true neither to his country nor his God. The Puritan resisted his mis- 
 rule and treachery, and that of his successors, who were worthy of their lineage 
 
 2 ne Spanish Match. Camden Society, 1869, 135, 148, 160, 170, 175, 177, 186, 
 212, 277, 280, 307, 316, 322, 327. 
 
35 
 
 them there were in his household, not at all to his satisfaction. 
 He laughed very much when I told him that his father had 
 lately said the same thing to me." " Lord Digby affirmed that 
 " the King's intentions were very good in all matters relating to 
 Spain, but that he found himself so solitary and so encircled 
 by Puritans and by our enemies, that he had neither means nor 
 power to do good," and that " at last he and the King were 
 left alone in England " on the Spanish side. 
 
 During this dalliance of Stuart weakness and the court 
 soldiers of fortune with Spanish ambassadors and Papal in- 
 trigue, Puritanism led off in opposition and became the party 
 of constitutional freedom, the aggressive party for parliament- 
 ary government against prelatic and royal despotism under 
 pretence of " divine right." 
 
 It was at this time that a party of John Robinson's exiles at 
 Leyden sought, pleaded for, permission to colonize in America. 
 
 It is natural that we should speak fondly of England as our 
 mother, yet our fathers thought she showed little love and less 
 wisdom when with prelatic madness she drove her best children 
 off the island because they did not relish the spiritual nostrums 
 which the Anglican prelates — " frocked " by the King and not 
 by pope " infallible " — would force on all alike. They could 
 not withhold what we took with us, the best portion of our 
 birthright, our Teutonic blood and our English Bible. 
 
 The escape from the Inquisitorial terrors of England to the 
 Netherlands, where the grand basis of civil liberty — freedom 
 of conscience — was more nearly realized than in any other coun- 
 try, taught the Pilgrims a lesson of contrasts. Abiding long 
 enough with our liberty-loving and hospitable cousins — the 
 drama of whose glorious struggle for manhood in the brilliant 
 pages of our own Motley should be as a hand-book in every 
 family — to study their institutions, especially to observe their 
 " schools everywhere provided at the public expense," ' the 
 Pilgrims hoisted sail, and with the three essentials, good blood, 
 
 I " Schools everywhere provided at the public expense " ; but, at the suggestion 
 of Dr. Henry Barnard, looking at Mr. Brodhead's authority (Davies' Holland, ii, 
 202, 203), I find that it was a church institution, not <i public free school. The 
 enor stands corrected. 
 
36 
 
 the open Bible, and a public school,^ began life in New 
 England, Nov. 21, 1620. 
 
 Wise in council, holy in thought, heroic in temper, of indus- 
 trious and blameless life, yet as asserters of the principle of 
 popular constitutional government, the broad foundation of that 
 common freedom in which we, their heirs, rejoice, — viz. the 
 rights of conscience, thought, and speech, — these people were in 
 legal and social outlawry. For them to be banished was to be 
 set free. " No rabble, sir priest," said Milton, " but . . . good 
 Protestants ... at first by those of your tribe they were called 
 Lollards and Hussites, so now by you be termed Puritans 
 and Brownists . . . But my hope is, that the people of England 
 will not suffer themselves to be juggled thus out of their faith 
 and religion by a mist of names cast before their eyes, but will 
 search wisely by the Scriptures . . . knowing that the primitive 
 Christians in their times were accounted such as are now 
 called Familists and Adamites, or worse . . . Forsooth if they 
 [the prelates] be put down, a deluge of innumerable sects will 
 follow ; we shall be all Brownists, Familists, Anabaptists. For 
 the word Puritan seems to be quashed, and all that heretofore 
 were counted such are now Brownists." ^ 
 
 At home, hunted by ecclesiastical catch-poles, the Pilgrims 
 had been accustomed to ask, " What will the government do 
 with us ? " but within a few weeks, even before they left the 
 cabin of the May- Flower, a very different question, before un- 
 heard of, "What shall we do with the government.'" was 
 solved in their constitutional convention of Nov. 21, 1620. 
 Passive subjects in England, by a mere transfer to a trans- 
 atlantic shore, they at once took practical lesson in self- 
 government, adopted a constitution, made laws, and elected 
 officers. Wife and mother — the family — were there. There 
 were the integrals of a nation. They had been subjects, abject, 
 if no worse ; they were now citizens, freeholders. 
 
 This transfer of power was revolutionary, not wrung, as in 
 
 > Early in 1624 Gov. Bradford wrote : " We have no commone schoole for want 
 of a fitt person, or hithertoo means to maintaine one ; though we desire now to 
 begine." Hist, oj Plymouth, 162. 
 
 2 The Reason of Church Government Urged Against Prelaty. 1641.. Prose 
 Works. Bohn's Ed., ii, 462, 464. "Both ways [Brownism and Independency] 
 really are one and the same." Baylies' Dissuasive. 1645. P- S8- 
 
37 
 
 Europe, after infinite delays, from the king, the aristocracy, 
 and middle classes, but returning directly to the people, the 
 working men, for there were none other at Plymouth. While 
 in England, for claiming what are to us rights as free and 
 unquestioned as the air we breathe, they were a reproach 
 and a by-word among the "faithful," whose quiet was still 
 to be troubled even unto dissolution with radical ideas from 
 New England, as little to be controlled as the winds from 
 heaven. 
 
 Breathing the more bracing air of absolute independence, 
 thinking and acting in their own democratic way, with no 
 room for crown or mitre, they were in a position for that free 
 inquiry which is of the essence, the verity of Christianity, ever 
 tending to the highest type of manhood. 
 
 What higher guarantee can there be for the detection of error 
 and the conservation of truth than the ingenuous and eager 
 readiness for more light displayed in these radiant sentences .' 
 " The Lord hath more truth and light yet to break forth from 
 his Holy Word," in John Robinson's farewell to the Pilgrims 
 at Leyden in 1620 ; and in 1624, when " church" bigotry would 
 still deprive the Pilgrims of their pastor, Mr. Robinson, " unless 
 he and they will reconcile themselves to our church " of Eng- 
 land, they answered, " We may erre, and other churches may 
 erre, and doubtless doe in many circumstances. That honour, 
 therefore belongs only to y" infallible Word of God, and pure 
 Testamente of Christ, to be propounded and followed as y° only 
 rule and pattern for direction herein to all churches and Chris- 
 tians. And it is too great arrogancie for any man or church 
 to thinke y' he or they have so sounded y* Word of God to y" 
 bottome, as precislie to sett downe y° churches discipline, with- 
 out error in substance or circumstance, as y' no other without 
 blame may digress or differ in anything from y* same." ^ 
 
 Or consider this, from Mr. John Cotton's letter to Archbishop 
 Usher, May 31, 1626: "You shall find me . . . glad to re- 
 ceive such light, as God shall be pleased to impart to me by 
 you." 2 Or yet again, his words to Mr. Roger Williams, in 
 1637 : " Be ready in preparation of heart as you shall see more 
 
 1 Bradford's History of Plymouth, 198. 
 s N. E. Hist, and Gen. Reg. 1S70, 356, 
 
38 
 
 light, so to hate more and more every false way " ; artd, again, 
 five years later, " The Word hath promised more and more light 
 shall breake forth in these times, ... we shall sinne against 
 the Grace and Word of truth if we confine our truth either 
 to the Divines of present or former ages." ^ 
 
 John Davenport came to New England " resolved," he said, 
 " to drive things ... as near to the precept and pattern of 
 Scripture as they could be driven." In his public letter of 
 1646, Mr. Hugh Peter said, " Keep a window open to more 
 light and truth." " Yea, one Scripture in the mouth of a 
 mechanic before any decree of the whole council," said Mr. 
 Roger Williams in his "Queries" to Parliament, in 1643,^ 
 and he quotes a letter from Mr. Cotton, ^ " professing to expect 
 a far greater light than yet shines." 
 
 I said that the intolerance which deprived the Pilgrims of 
 their pastor, Mr. John Robinson, is at the historical foundation 
 of Massachusetts. After their violation of contract with Mr. 
 Robinson and his church had compelled the separation of 
 pastor and people at Leyden, — the farewell so dear to the 
 lovers of the brave, true, and beautiful, illustrated by history, 
 poetry, and art, — some of the " most religious "' of those 
 " merchant adventurers " began to think they " should sin 
 against God in keeping plighted faith and word with Mr. 
 Robinson and his company," unless they would first " recon- 
 cile themselves to our church," of England, "by a written 
 recantation." Some of these "bitter professed adversaries," 
 " plotted " against the Pilgrims, " against their peace both in 
 respecte of their civill and church state." It is "by these 
 men's means," says Governor Bradford, "our pastor [Robin- 
 son] is kept from us, and then (they) reproach us with it." * 
 
 A reverend conspirator, employed by the " partners in trade," 
 John Lyford,^ wrote to them from Plymouth " that y Leyden 
 
 ' Of Set Forms of Prayer, 1642, p. 45. 
 
 ''When Charles II expressed his surprise to Dr. Owen at his practice of 
 hearing a tinker (Bunyan) preach, the Dr. replied : " Had I the tinker's abilities, 
 please your Majesty, I would most gladly relinquish my learning." 
 
 » Cotton's letter was printed in 1643, Peter's in 1646, Robinson's in 1647. See 
 page 1 10 of Mr. John Ward Dean's Memoir of Nathaniel Ward, a model of arrange- 
 ment and thoroughness of research. 
 
 * BrsLdioxA's History of Plymouth, pp. 43, 118, 197, 166, 175. 
 
 " The historical parallel of the "troubles at Frankfort" with^yford's treachery 
 at Plymouth is noteworthy. 
 
39 
 
 company (Mr. Robinson & y" rest) must still be kepte back, Or 
 els all wil be spoyled. And least any of them should be taken 
 in privatly somewher on y coast of England (as it was feared 
 might be done), they must chaing the mr. of y ship (Mr. Wil- 
 liam Peirce), and put another allso in Winslow's stead, for mar- 
 chante, or els it would not be prevented," but if they failed " to 
 cary & over-bear things, it will be best for them to plant els 
 wher." After the detection and defeat of the plot, Mr. John 
 Oldham, also prominent in the conspiracy at Plymouth, confessed 
 his evil deeds and promised that " those in England " should 
 not " use him as an instrumente any longer against them [the 
 Pilgrims] in any thing." ^ 
 
 With steadfast purpose, patient endurance, and Christian 
 magnanimity, the Pilgrims maintained their integrity and posi- 
 tion over inveterate prejudice, and despite false friends, violated 
 contract, and priestly conspiracy. Their " most religious " ad- 
 versaries did " plant els wher," and that new colony under the 
 more magnanimous Roger Conant, was the political beginning 
 of Massachusetts. 
 
 At a later date, November 15, 1626, a compromise or agree- 
 ment between the " adventurers " and Pilgrims discloses the 
 names of several of the " most religious " gentlemen who had 
 formed the New Dorchester Company. We have the names of 
 two ecclesiastics — priest and prelate — who were busy in this 
 movement, — Mr. White, of Dorchester, the " Father" of Massa- 
 chusetts, and Mr. Lake, successor of Laud as Bishop of Bath 
 and Wells. 
 
 In conversation with his friend, Mr. Hugh Peter, years after, 
 Mr. White referred to Bishop Lake's zeal in his sermon, July 
 2, 1625, in which he contrasts English apathy with Romish 
 proselytism in America, and to his declaration to White that 
 '• he would go himself, but for his age." " Yea," said Mr. Peter, 
 White and Lake " occasioned, yea, founded that work, and much 
 in reference to the Indians." Lake was a moderate man, like 
 Mr. Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, who, more like a Christian than 
 a Churchman, was wisely blind for many years to the non-con- 
 formity of Mr. Cotton, Rector of St. Botolph's, Boston, and was 
 also honored by the fierce hatred of Laud the bigot. Bishop 
 
 1 Bradford's History of Plymouth, 172, 179, 180. 
 
40 
 
 Lake died May 4, 1626, before Governor Conant removed the 
 colonial seat from Cape Ann to Salem.^ 
 
 The " occasion " for this new colony, then, was the Pilgrims' 
 inflexible fidelity to conviction. If they had faltered, if Robin- 
 son had wavered, and the Hierarchy had captured Plymouth, 
 how different had been the current of history ! 
 
 Thus we trace the course and results of the prelatic " dislike " 
 to Plymouth " Independency," and their movements, just in their 
 embryonic state, prefatory to organization and formal record, 
 as the rival colony of Massachusetts and still within the " estab- 
 lishment." But the labor was in vain ; the " plot " failed ; for 
 we have it from the lips oi Mr. Winslow, of Plymouth, that 
 they " came at [the] first to them at Plimmouth, to crave their 
 direction in church courses and made them their pattern."^ 
 
 The new colony, at once leavened by Plymouth ideas and in- 
 fluence, adopted the principles and practice of what is known as 
 Massachusetts " Congregationalism " ; and Massachusetts was 
 soon reputed in England to be "a nursery of schismatics . . . 
 faction and rebellion " against " religion," that is, against Laud 
 and the Church of England. Mr. White of Dorchester was 
 himself oblig-ed to record the fact.^ Fourteen years later, 1644 
 the Presbyterian, Mr. Rathband, noted that the Plymouth polity 
 was " much commended by Mr. John Cotton" and adopted by 
 the successive colonies, and — deprecating the liking of " many" 
 in England, " especially " in London, for the " popular synods " 
 — he asks, " How will our late solemn league with God and one 
 another stand with the opinion of many of them that hold the 
 magistrate hath nothing to do in matter of religion . . . and 
 cannot lawfully compel men to enter into covenant with 
 God .? " * 
 
 1 Mr. Haven on the Massachusetts Company. Arch. Americana, iii. Brad- 
 ford's History of riymouth, 172, 179, 180, sub anno. Thornton's Landing at Cafe 
 '*»». 39. and Pulpit of the American Revolution, i860, xvi, xx. Anderson's 
 Col. Church, xiv. 
 
 ■■^ Rathband's Narrative. 1644. 
 
 8 White's Planters' Plea, in Force's Tracts, vols, ii, iii. Rathband's Narrative, 
 1644, i, 33. Mass. Ii. C, 13 : 66-75. 
 
 * The mooted point whether or not they had fixed on a form of church govern- 
 ment before leaving England is settled by the following : "Mr. Hildcrshjm did 
 much grieve when he understood that the brethren in New England did depart 
 from the Presbyterian government ; and he said this mischief had been prevented, 
 
41 
 
 In a letter to Governor Bradford,^ June 4, 1634, Governor 
 Dudley mentions rumors from England " of some trials which 
 are shortly like to fall upon us," on which Bradford remarks, 
 " ther was cause enough of these fearcs, which arise by y un- 
 derworking of some enemies to y' churches here." Archbishop 
 Laud had procured a royal commission, April 28, 1634, which 
 gave the colonies and colonists, body and soul, life and limb, 
 in absolute ownership and slavery to the mere discretion and 
 lawless, irresponsible will of the primate and his associates. 
 It would have satisfied a Caraffa or an Alva ; but it was futile, 
 impossible. 
 
 if my counsel at Mr. Higginson's going over [1628] had been taken ; which was, 
 that brethren driven thither by Episcopalian persecution should agree upon the 
 Church Government before they depart from hence. And it is well known that 
 many Presbyterian non-conformists, did, by a letter sent unto New England, be- 
 waile their departing in practice from Presbyterians . . . who, the world know- 
 eth, are Antagonists to Independency. ... Is it not probable, that if Mr. Cotton 
 and Mr. Hooker had stayd in their native country, they would not have been at 
 such a distance from church fellowship with their Presbyterian brethren, as Old 
 England Independents are . . . who boast of these worthies [of New England] as 
 their predecessors in Wayes of Independency . . . superlatively famous . . . there- 
 fore their judgment is most frequently insisted upon." Irenicum, London, 1659, 
 X, xi. 
 
 1 " There was cause enough." Bradford, pp. 320, 456. The Commission is at 
 length in Hubbard's Hist, of N, E., chap. xxxvL 
 
 Heylin, in his Life of Laud, says, " It was once under consultation of the physi- 
 cians [Laud & Co.] ... to send a bishop over to them for their better govern- 
 ment, and to back him with some forces to compel, if he were not otherwise able 
 to persuade obedience ; but this design was strangled in the first conception, by the 
 violent breaking out of the troubles in Scotland." . . . He adds, " The principal 
 bellwethers of these flocks were Cotton, Chauncey, Wells [Thomas Weld], Hooker, 
 and perhaps Hugh Peters." 
 
 We have another account of the matter by Sir Simon D'Ewes, who says, the 
 "Episcopal enemies of New England had at several times given out reports that a 
 bishop and a governor should be sent amongst them to force upon them the yoke 
 of our ceremonies and intermixtures, so to deter others from going. And, indeed, 
 at this time [1634], the same report was more likely to be fulfilled than ever before 
 or since ; for one. Sir Ferdinando Gorges, was nominated for governor, and there 
 was a consultation had to send him thither with a thousand soldiers : a ship was now 
 in building, and near finished to transport him by sea, and much fear there was 
 amongst the Godly lest that infant Commonwealth and Church should have been 
 ruined by him ; when God, that had carried so many weak and crazy ships thither, 
 so provided it, that this strong, new-built ship in the very launching fell in pieces, 
 and so preserved his dear children there at this present time, from that fatal 
 design." 
 
 Ceaseless, ever imminent danger from Episcopal machinations and hatred, and 
 
42 
 
 Thus the spirit of intolerance ever defeated itself. It exiled 
 the Puritans to Holland, where they prayed, and studied the 
 Scriptures undisturbed ; it followed them to Plymouth, and was 
 foiled there ; it planned and planted Massachusetts as a hostile 
 colony, and was foiled there ; it got a commission of more ter- 
 rible power than ever Islam could endure, and again it was 
 foiled ; then the Pilgrim, turning upon the aggressor, led both 
 bishop and king to their own scaffold, and created the English 
 Commonwealth.^ 
 
 The civil war in England grew mainly out of questions of 
 property as between crown and subject. Hampden, impris- 
 oned in 1626 for resistance to the forced loan which Laud 
 taught the "faithful" was rebellion against God, again in 1636 
 would not pay twenty shillings to the tyrant, Charles Stuart, 
 and by public discussion would rouse the people from apathy 
 
 the instinct and duty of self-preservation, fully justified the colonial limitation of 
 the franchise, and we wonder at their moderation in this hour of extreme peril. 
 Mr. Cotton says, the "magistrates, and other members of the Generall Court upon 
 Intelligence of some Episcopall, and malignant practises against the Countrey, they 
 made an order of Court to take tryall of the fidelitie of the People (not by imposing 
 upon them, but) by offering to them an Oath of Fidelitie : that in case any should 
 refuse to take it, they might not betrust them with place of publick charge and 
 command." 
 
 What Layd was, what he intended, is disclosed in the following story : " One 
 Price, Superior to the Benedictine monkes, was very familiar, private, and secret 
 with the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud." At Rome Laud was " highly 
 praised " by the Jesuites for his " daily demonstrations of his great affection to this 
 our Court and Church ; which he shewed not long since in sending a Common 
 Prayer Booke (which he had composed for the church of Scotland ), to be first 
 viewed and approved of by our Pope and Cardinals, who perusing it liked it very 
 well for Protestants to be trained in a Form of Prayer and service ; yet considering 
 the State of Scotland, and the temper and tenents of that people, the Cardinals 
 (first giving him thanks for his respect and dutiful compliance with them) sent him 
 word that they thought that form of prayer was not fitting for Scotland, but would 
 breed some stir and unquietness there." Game's " New Survey." 1648. ch. xxii, 
 fol. 207-209. Jenny Gedde's footstool put an end to that. Rome was more wary 
 than Laud. Was not this Price the " one " who offered the red hat to Laud ? 
 Cotton's Answer to Mr. Williams. 1647. PP- 4- 28, 29. 
 D'Ewes' Autobiography, II, ch. v. p. 118. 
 
 1 Robert Baylie traces " their pedigree in this clear line : Master Robinson did 
 derive his way to his separate congregation at Leyden ; a part of them did carry 
 it over to Plymouth, in New-England ; here Master Cotton did take it up and 
 transmit it from thence to Master Goodwin, who did help to propagate it to sundry 
 others in Old-England first, and after to more in Holland, till now by many hands 
 it is sown thick in divers parts of this kingdom." Dissuasive. 1645. P- S4- 
 
43 
 
 to consider their rights and liberties : but when New England 
 introduced, however imperfectly and crudely, a new element, 
 the broader, deeper question, the Rights of Conscience, she 
 ennobled the contest, inasmuch as the Rights of Conscience 
 are higher than the Rights of Property, as man is greater than 
 his possessions, and popularized it, inasmuch as religion was 
 of the many, while property was only of the few. " If a man 
 shall gain the whole world, and lose himself" ! Contrast 
 the great-hearted freeman, John Carver, the first governor 
 of the new Commonwealth, just landed on Plymouth Rock, 
 erect in manhood, with face lifted reverently to heaven, and 
 Buckingham, the consummate courtier of England with his 
 tags and laces : which of the two was the man ? ^ 
 
 " the citizen 
 You lost for conscience' sake, he was your noblest." 
 
 " given bacic to self-dependence, 
 Man awakens to the feeling of his worth. 
 And freedom's proud and lofty virtues blossom." ' 
 
 It was by the warmth and conviction of this new thought, 
 this belief in man as man, in the Rights of Conscience, that 
 the glorious Commonwealth was achieved. 
 
 In the records of the Pilgrims no sentiment is brought into 
 more beautiful relief than their steadfast trust in the provi- 
 dential government of God.* Humboldt states that the flight 
 of a flock of parrots determined the first colonization of the 
 new world, and the original distribution of the -European races 
 on this continent. It guided the Spaniards to the South as the 
 nearest land, thus leaving the North to Germanic and Pro- 
 testant civilization. Was it accident ? 
 
 As early as 1578, Halluyt suggested that America might be 
 
 1 Blackstone says, that "the commons were in a state of great ignorance . . . 
 the particular liberty, the natural equality, and personal independence of individ- 
 uals were little regarded or thought of . . . Our ancestors heard with detestation 
 and horror those sentiments rudely delivered ... by the violence of a Cade and 
 a Tyler . . . since . . . softened and recommended by the eloquence, the modera- 
 tion, and the arguments of a Sidney, a Locke, and a Milton." Commentarits, iv 
 ch. xxxiii, 433 
 
 2 Schiller's Don Carlos, Act iii, sc. x. 
 
 ' Bradford's Plymouth, pp. 26, 38, 41, 67, 78, 80, 99, et ubigue. 
 
44 
 
 a refuge for the persecuted under religious or political, revolu- 
 tions.^ 
 
 In his letter to Mr. Mede, " Newbury, March 2d, 1634," Dr. 
 Twisse says : " Of our English Plantations in the new world — 
 Heretofore I have wondered in my thoughts at the Providence 
 of God concerning that world, not discovered till this old world 
 of ours is almost at an end, and then no'footsteps found of the 
 knowledge of the true God, much less of Christ, and then 
 considering our English Plantations of late, and the opinion 
 of many grave Divines concerning the Gospels fleeting west- 
 ward ; sometimes I have had such thoughts, why may not that 
 be the place of New Jerusalem .' . . . We have heard lately 
 divers ways that our people there have no hope of the con- 
 version of the natives. And the very week after I received 
 your last Letter, I saw a Letter written from New England 
 discoursing of an impossibility of subsisting there, and seems 
 to prefer the confession of God's truth in any condition here 
 in old England, rather than run over to enjoy their liberty 
 there ; yea, and that the Gospel is like to be more deare in 
 New England than in Old" : and April 6, 1635, he refers to 
 Lord Say's "counsels for advancing the plantations of the 
 West," and thinks " it may serve as a chamber to hide many 
 of God's children, till the indignation passe over which hastens 
 upon us more and more." ^ 
 
 Was it accident, that with the opening of the struggle be- 
 tween the Crown and the people, between force and conscience, 
 in the time of James,^ the happy voyage of Gosnold in 1602 
 should revive the spirit of discovery and colonization, and open 
 the refuge for the persecuted ? Was it accidental that the 
 New England coast should be reserved for the Pilgrims by the 
 discouragement of colonization growing out of the Popham 
 failure of 1607 ? 
 
 1 Vvyages. LonA i8i8w iii, 72. 
 
 = Mede's Diatriba, EpisUes. London, 1652. S47-SS6. 
 
 8 Bradford. 70-80. •' May not and ought not the children of these fathers 
 rightly say : Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean and 
 were ready to perish in this wildernes ; but they cried unto ye Lord, and he heard 
 
 their voyce and looked on their adversitie, etc When they wandered in ye 
 
 deserte wilderiies out of ye way, and found no citie to dwell in, both hungrie and 
 thirstie, their sowle was overwhelmed in them." 
 
45 
 
 " There 's a divinity that shapes our ends, 
 Rough hew them how we will." 
 
 I 
 
 Was it accident — the falling among " perilous shoals and 
 breakers" — or the caprice of the winds that guided the 
 "May-Flower," and landed the Pilgrims, not in the genial 
 climate south of Cape Cod, but in a higher latitude, on rough 
 coasts, where harsh winters and doubtful harvests favored 
 habits of provident industry and thrift, the love of 
 in-door life, of home, and moral and intellectual progress ? 
 
 Was it accident that despotism compelled Cromwell and his 
 companions to debark from the New England ship and thus 
 forcibly retained the instruments of its own doom ? ^ Was it 
 accident that divided the force that was to rescue England 
 trom civil and religious thraldom — Cotton and his co-workers 
 in New England — each with its special function and service, 
 but a unit in the common cause of humanity ? 
 
 Like these was another incident, trivial, except in a com- 
 prehensive view of the whole movement : About eighteen miles 
 inland from Boston, the old seaport of Lincolnshire, lies the 
 hamlet of Sempringham, then the seat of the Earl of Lincoln, 
 the fast friend of our John Cotton, vicar of St. Botolph's. It 
 was a day's ride to Sempringham and back to Boston, and 
 three travellers on horseback shortened the time by warm but 
 friendly disputations. Roger Williams, never timid of thought 
 or speech, "presented his argument from Scripture why he 
 durst not joyn with them in their use of Common Prayer." 
 All the answer he received from Master Cotton was that he 
 " selected the good and best prayers in his use of that book," 
 as Sarpi, the historian of the Council of Trent, " was used to 
 do in his using of the masse-book," rejecting what was super- 
 stitious ; 2 and Master Thomas Hooker satisfied his heart with 
 
 1 Lord Say ; I^rd Brooke ; Sir Arthur Haselrigge ; " Hampden, ashamed of a 
 country for whose rights he had fought alone ; Cromwell, panting with energies 
 that he could neither control nor explain, and whose unconquerable fire was still 
 wrapped in smoke to every eye but that of his kinsman, Hampden, were preparing 
 to embark for America, when Laud, for his own and his master's curse, pro- 
 cured an order of council to stop their departure." Hallam's England, Ed. 
 i866, ii, 58. A critical paper on this point in the N. E. Hist. Gen. Register, 1866. 
 113-121. By John Ward Dean. 
 
 ^ The Blmidy Tenent in Pub. of Narragansett Club, iii, 69. 
 
46 
 
 no better reason. The appeal was to Scripture and to its sole 
 interpreter, reason This was the base and logic of inde- 
 pendency. 
 
 Let us briefly review the lives of those men, and then we 
 may ask, Was there, in all England, anything more pregnant 
 than that day's colloquy on the Sempringham Road .■• It may 
 be said that Waldo, Wicliffe, Coverdale, Tyndal had scattered 
 the truth all along the centuries. True ; but that is vague and ' 
 general, while here is- a definite point of departure, a person- 
 ality ; and the sequence of thought and influence may be traced 
 from that day's converse from mind to mind, gathering force 
 and momentum till it abolished the hierarchy of Anglo-Cathol- 
 icism, dethroned a tyrant, and established the Common- 
 wealth. 
 
 In his paper on the philosophical genius of Bacon and Locke, 
 Sir James Mackintosh says, that " by the Independent divines 
 who were his instructors, our philosopher [John Locke] was 
 taught those principles of religious liberty which they were the 
 first to give to the world " ; and, as Lord King counts it " an 
 important fact in the history of toleration that Dr. Owen [the 
 convert and disciple of our John Cotton] was Dean of Christ 
 Church, Oxford, when Locke was admitted a member of that col- 
 lege," " under a fanatical tutor," as Antony Wood calls Owen, so 
 I propose to show, step by step, by exact historical evidence, 
 that the English Commonwealth was the daughter of New 
 England, the reflex of the New on the Old ; for ideas control 
 the world and create institutions, while men are merely players. 
 The political ideas of the Pilgrims have penetrated the thoaght 
 and life of both lands. 
 
 Whether we accept Mr. Buckle's theory, that all movements 
 are determined solely by their antecedents, by the force of 
 circumstances, and that if great men had never existed the 
 flow of events would have occurred as it has (and that is but 
 another form of Lord Macaulay's statement, so profusely illus- 
 trated in his essay on Dryden, that " it is the age that forms 
 man and not man the age " ) ; or adopt Mr. Carlyle's doctrine, that 
 " the history of what man has accomplished is at bottom the 
 history of great men who have worked here" ; or else conclude 
 that the Ruler of events also appoints His agents, and that all 
 
47 
 
 are subordinate to providential designs, — still it gives the charm 
 of life, the zest peculiar to biography, to link ideas and events 
 to personal fortunes. For the lives of great men warm and 
 move mankind far more than the wandering mazes of philo- 
 sophical speculation ; the drama of life is more attractive 
 than its philosophy. To name Galileo, Bacon, Columbus and 
 Humphrey Gilbert, John Cotton and Henry Vane, Roger Wil- 
 liams and John Milton, Fulton and Morse, Cromwell, Wash- 
 ington, and Lincoln, is to epitomize history. Without names, 
 without biography, history would be lifeless. " Nations rise 
 and fall by individuals, not numbers, as I think all history 
 proveth," Thomas Hollis wrote to Dr. Jonathan Mayhew in 
 1766. 
 
 The eldest of the three travellers on the Sempringham Road, 
 of middle age, the eloquent preacher and learned theologian, 
 Mr. John Cotton, was already noted for scholarship, judgment, 
 and oratory, ranking among the ablest ; his correspondence was 
 sought by such thinkers, men of letters, and statesmen, as 
 Archbishop Usher, Lord Say, and others. 
 
 The next, Mr. Thomas Hooker, was Mr. Cotton's junior by 
 a year ; educated at Emmanuel College, a man of increasing 
 influence, and while preaching in the neighborhood of London, 
 the trusted friend of the Pilgrims in their troubles with the 
 treacherous Lyford in 1626. 
 
 Far the youngest of the three was Mr. Roger Williams, z.pro- 
 t^gioi Sir Edward Coke, whose interest had been early won by 
 the youth's skill in reporting the sayings and doings in the Star 
 Chamber, and to whose liberality Williams owed his education. 
 He took the degree of A. B. at Pembroke College in 1626, and 
 studying awhile with Sir Edward, was grounded in the leading 
 principles of law. Turning to the study of divinity with the 
 ardor which characterized his life, and improving the opportu- 
 nity on the Sempringham Road to listen to men of such dis- 
 tinction for learning and wisdom as .Cotton and Hooker, young 
 Williams pressed home his " argument from Scripture why he 
 durst not joyn with them in their use of Common Prayer." 
 Whatever their previous doubtings and scruples h*ad been, the 
 earnest, clear-headed student, fresh in the inquiry, had now 
 brought out the point distinctly, perhaps with legal skill in 
 
48 
 
 statement. They would not evade, they could not answer ; and 
 now what came of it ? 
 
 Almost from the time of his going to Boston, July 4, 1612, 
 Mr. Cotton "forbore all the ceremonies alike at once," but by 
 the love and reverence of his people, his eminence, at home and 
 on the continent, as a theologian and preacher, by the influence 
 of great names, he continued "with not a little disturbance from 
 the Commissary Courts" till 1632, when, to avoid prelatic fury 
 and Star-Chamber hangmen, he planned an escape to Holland 
 in disguise. But several of the ablest divines of London, hoping 
 to win Mr. Cotton to conformity and save so great a man to the 
 Church, provided safe retirement for him in and about Lon- 
 don.^ The result of this intellectual tournament and search- 
 ing debate, during their long conferences, was that Mr. Cotton 
 brought them over to his opinions, and thenceforth they shared 
 with him the obloquy and woes which an angry and powerful 
 hierarchy could inflict, and last, but least of all, exile. Among 
 them, Thomas Goodwin, John Davenport, and Philip Nye were 
 to be his able co-workers in disseminating right opinions in 
 polity, and in fixing the channel of English history .^ Fellow- 
 passengers to New England, one in thought and inspiration, 
 
 1 Doubtless this was in mind when Mr. Cotton, in his answer to Mr. Wil- 
 liams, says, "It is well knowne that any stranger in London, by removing now 
 and then his lodging, may escape not only persecution but observation, for a 
 longer time than any of our hearers are ordinarily wont to sojourne there." Mr. 
 Cotton's Reply to Mr. Williams. 1647. H'- 
 
 * Before Mr. Cotton's departure from England, by conferences from London, he 
 had brought ofi Master Davenport and Master Goodwin from some of the English 
 ceremonies ; ... so soon as he did taste of the New-English air, he fell into so 
 passionate an affection with the Religion be found there, . . . had gotten the assist- 
 ance of Master Hooker, Master Davenport, and sundry other very worthy ministers, 
 beside many thousands of people . . . being there alone, without any enemy." 
 Mr. Cotton's " convert, Master Goodwin, a most fine and dainty Spirit with very 
 little ado, was brought by his Letters from New Englaml, to follow him unto this 
 step also of his progresse, and that with so high an estimation of his new Light, 
 that he was bold to boast of it in termes a little beyond the lines of moderation. 
 It had been happy for England, that Master Cotton had taken longer time for de- 
 liberation." Baylie's Dissuasive. 1645. pp. 56, 59, 60. Thomas Kdwards says, 
 \'a.\:\i. Antapology,^^. 17-32, that he had "seen and perused the arguments that 
 passed betwixt him [Goodwin] and .Master Cotton and some others " ; and " that 
 Master Goodwif was so ingaged in his thoughts of one of the ministers of New 
 England, to wit. Master Cotton, by whom I am sure he was first taken off. that he 
 hath said there was not such another man in the world again." Where are these 
 manuscript "arguments " ? 
 
49 
 
 Cotton and Hooker will soon reach that higher landing-place 
 to which Roger Williams had challenged them on the Sem- 
 pringham road. From his native land to the forests of New 
 England, from the groined arches of St. Botolph's to the "mud- 
 wall meeting-house with wooden chalices '' of Shawmut, was to 
 John Cotton an escape from the gloomy and stifling crypt to 
 empyrean light, from spiritual thraldom to liberty itself. 
 
 Mr. Cotton and Mr. Robinson, the pastor of the Pilgrim 
 Church, had studied at the feet of the same Gamaliel, Robert 
 Parker. From him and Dr. Ames, Robinson early sought 
 counsel and satisfaction in Holland, and Cotton first learned 
 Independency or Congregationalism from his writings, espe- 
 cially his "De Ecclesiastica Politea." — " Yea, he proveth it at 
 large," says Cotton. Mather styles Parker " in some sort the 
 father of all non-conformists in that age." He died in 1614, 
 about two years after Cotton became Vicar of St. Botolph's, 
 Boston. Thus it came that in his farewell sermon to his de- 
 parting friends, Dudley, Winthrop, Bradstreet, and others at 
 Southampton, Mr. Cotton charged them " that they should take 
 advise of them at Plymouth, and should doe nothing to offend 
 them," tidings of which comforted the Pilgrims at Plymouth, 
 who had already found Governor Endecott " a dear friend to us 
 all." ^ Whatever they were while in England, they left no room 
 for doubt after they reached America. 
 
 1 Cotton's Way Cleared. 1648. pp. 13, 24 ; pt. 2d, 12. Trumbull's Lechford's 
 Plain Dealing, iSs". Bradford's Plymouth, 279. Scottow's Narrative. Brook's 
 Puritans, ii, 239. The stigma of semi-separatism rested on the enterprise and its 
 leaders, and the Rev. John White of Dorchester, the father of the enterprise and 
 the correspondent and co-laborer of Roger Conant, the first governor of the Col- 
 ony, published the Planter's Plea, 1630, especially to disprove this charge of " des- 
 perate malice," and that the world might be " well-assured" to the contrary, they 
 had made Winthrop governor, because he " was sufficiently knowne . . . where he 
 had long lived ... as every way regular and conformable in the whole course of 
 his practice " to the established church and religion. Not therefore for exercise or 
 trouble of conscience, but, it appears, for stern prudential reasons, this was to Mr. 
 Winthrop a most welcome opportunity and relief. A lawyer; distressed by the 
 lessening income from the waste of the savings of his grandfather — a thrifty 
 clothier from London — scarcely eked out by a slender and precarious practice ; 
 for years past restless and waiting .for something to turn up ; pressed by the 
 laudable motive daily suggested by res angusta domi ; married at seventeen; 
 in 1623 wishing " oft God would open a way to settle him in Ireland " ; in 1627 
 resolved to remove to London; in January, 1628, owing more already than 
 
50 
 
 The Christian philosopher, Coleridge, finds that " the average 
 result of the press, from Henry VIII to Charles I, was such a 
 diffusion of religious light, as first redeemed, and afterwards 
 secured this nation [Great Britain] from the spiritual and 
 moral death of popery." ^ 
 
 In the second part of this glorious work, especially in that 
 relating to polity. New England had a controlling share. In 
 about twenty years after the Landing of the Pilgrims, " the Con- 
 gregational cause," says Dr. Orme, the able biographer of Dr. 
 John Owen, "had obtained a firm footing in New England, 
 and churches were there growing up and flourishing under its 
 auspices. American pamphlets were imported, which dissemi- 
 nated the sentiments of the churches in that quarter. Thus 
 the heresy which had been expelled from England returned 
 with the increased strength of a transatlantic cultivation, and 
 the publications of Cotton, Hooker, Norton, and Mather were 
 circulated throughout England, and, during this writing and 
 disputing period, produced a mighty effect." 
 
 he was able to pay without sale of his land, and with children unprovided for ; 
 in June, 1629, yet more disheartened by the loss of place as attorney of the Court 
 of Wards, obtained for him a few years before by the influence of his brother Em- 
 manuel Downing of the Inner Temple, — he saw that a crisis was at hand in his 
 own affairs, and was therefore ready for a last cast "in what place or condition 
 soever, in weal or in woe." Then his good genius and ever efficient brother Down- 
 ing again came to the rescue, turned his thoughts suddenly, and for the first time, 
 to New England, July 28, 1629 ; he accepted the situation at once, wrote to his 
 son John of his resolve to emigrate, and so with pressing care and sorrow of 
 heart he prepared for the change. To his wife he wrote : " For my care of thee 
 and thine, I will say nothing. The Lord knows my heart, that it was [the] one 
 great motive to draw me into this course. The Lord prosper me in it, as I desire 
 the prosperity of thee and thine." When they reached New England they found 
 the leaders of the forlorn hope, the Colonial Governors, Bradford, Conant, and 
 Endecott (Carver slept in an honored grave), the pioneers who had made the first 
 movements, secured the several charters, instituted civil government, organized 
 churches, imported cattle, cultivated the earth, planted orchards, and perhaps 
 even then in his own thoughts Endecott had reserved " land for a college." Abra- 
 ham Shurt, " the father of American conveyancing," had been, for years, at 
 the head of the ancient trading post at Pemaquid. Of course, distresses prevailed, 
 but civilization already possessed the land ; here was already a Nno England, and 
 to its shores Governor Endecott welcomed the new.comers at Salem, June 12, 
 1630, where, but two years before, Wiuthrop was loath his son should think of 
 " settling," even as a last alternative. See Winthrop's charming Domestic Corres- 
 pondence, in appendix to Savage's Winthrop ; and in his Life and Letters by Mr. 
 R. C. Winthrop, one of his descendants. 
 * The friend, Essay, ii. 
 
51 
 
 Hume, too, says that the spirit of independency " shone forth 
 in America in its full lustre, and received new accession of 
 strength from the aspiring character of those who, being dis- 
 contented with the established church and monarchy, had 
 sought for freedom amongst those savage deserts." In the 
 latest thorough study of that decisive period of English his- 
 tory. Dr. Masson also finds its root in the transatlantic world. 
 Dr. Masson says that " the effective mass of English-born in- 
 dependency . . . the New England way . . . lay chiefly, and 
 in most assured completeness, both of bulk and of detail, in the 
 incipient transatlantic Commonwealth of New England . . . 
 self-governed and self-organized as it was. . . . Before the end 
 of 1642 the New England church ' independency' had spoken 
 out her sentiments, in what might be called an authoritative 
 manner, through the most eminent of all her ministers, Mr. 
 John Cotton, of Boston . . . from that moment the exponent 
 of moderate independency whom the Presbyterians felt them- 
 selves most bound to answer." ^ 
 
 Only an examination of the mass of New England learning 
 on the fundamental principles of government,* drawn out by 
 the incessant and impatient demands of English inquiry, can 
 show how emphatically New England became the political 
 seminary for republicanism in Old England. In form the con- 
 
 1 Lord Chatham, in his letter to the king, said, " They left their native land in 
 search of freedom and found it in a desert. Divided as they are into a thousand 
 forms of policy and religion, there is one point in which they all agree : they equally 
 detest the pageantry of a king and the supercilious hypocrisy of a bishop." The 
 Colonists said,. "If Parliament could tax us, they could establish the Church of 
 England, with all its creeds, titles, and ceremonies, and prohibit all other churches 
 as conventicles and schism shops." Then came national independence. Antagon- 
 ism to hierarchal pretence is the key to American history from 1620 to 1783. Ap- 
 pendix to Hume's Keign of James I. Thornton's Pulpitofthe American Revolution! 
 i860. liT&smC^ Life of John Milton and History of his Times. 1871. 543-608. 
 This article was written in 1S70, but Dr. Masson's statement carries such weight 
 that I havt placed it in the text, rather than in a note, though of later date. 
 
 2 Nor did they write only on polity. Mr. Baylie's Dissuasive elicited from Mr. 
 Cotton this defence of the Congregationalists, or Independents. After stating the 
 facts, Mr. Cotton adds, " Consider whether, among all the servants of Christ now 
 living in any Reformed Churches (put them altogether) they have published so many 
 treatises of the work of conversion as the ministers of this way have done in New 
 England and London." Way Cleared, p. 75. 
 
52 
 
 test touched the church only, in fact, the state. Freedom in 
 one begat freedom in the other : " No bishop, no king." ^ 
 
 Early in 1644, " in the midst of all the high words on both 
 sides," Thomas Goodwin and Philip Nye, two of Mr Cotton's 
 converts to non -conformity and his assiduous correspondents, 
 published, with their commendation " to the reader," his work 
 called The Keyes, tending to reconcile some present differences 
 " about government . . . a platform . . . not now new unto our 
 thoughts ; yea, it is no other than what our owne apprehensions 
 have been moulded into long since." ^ 
 
 In 1648 Mr. Thomas Goodwin, chief of the independent or 
 " dissenting brethren," in the Westminster Assembly of divines, 
 welcomed with lively satisfaction several able treatises on church 
 polity " now issuing forth, as it were, at once ... to indicate 
 the truth ... in these latter days wherein the light and sun- 
 shine grow hotter and more intense." ^ 
 
 The treatises which so encouraged Dr. Goodwin were all* 
 written by New England divines. Cotton, Norton, Shepherd, 
 Allen, Mather, and second to none, Hooker ; to whose " Sur- 
 vey ... of the way of the churches of New England," Mr. 
 Goodwin's preface was dated April .17, 1648. In this Mr. 
 
 ^ At Hampton Court Conference, 1604, King James said, " I know what would 
 become of my supremacy ; for no Bishop, no King ... I will make them [the Puri- 
 tans] conform, or harrie them out of the land — or else do worse ! " 
 
 2 In his Ansvxr to Dr. Stillingfleet on the Unreasonableness of Separation, Dr. 
 Owen quotes Mr. Cotton as finding in the writings of Cyprian, " the express and 
 lively lineaments of the very body of Congregational discipline." See also Owen's 
 Works. 1852. xiii, 222. 
 
 " Dr. Goodwin left fourteen or fifteen volumes of notes of transactions in the 
 Westminster Assembly. " In 1647, he had invitations from Mr. John Cotton and 
 other worthy ministers, to remove to New England which he was so much inclined 
 to do, as to put a great part of his library on shipboard," but was persuaded 
 to remain in England. Jan. 8, 1649-50, by order of parliament, he was presi- 
 dent of Magdalen College, Oxford, with special privileges, and, being in high 
 favor with Cromwell, was one of a Committee of Divines, 1653, to draw up a 
 catalogue of Fundamentals, to be presented to parliament, and a principal man at 
 the Savoy, 1658, framing a confession of faith for the Independent churches. 
 Wilson's Dissenting Churches, 1808, i, 217, and Life of Goodwin, prefixed to Vol. 
 V of his Works. 
 
 * "The point of Schools and Uarning . . . divers of them have as good a share 
 
 in learning as their neighbors The most of their erudition this day dwels in 
 
 New England ... the Magistrates and the whole Land are at their Devotion." 
 Baylie's Dissuasive. 640, 129. 
 
53 
 
 Goodwin wishes, rather than hopes, that argument with the 
 Presbyterians may be " a sufficient caveat ... to the sword's plea 
 or intermeddling, pendente lite" ... he despondingly adds " as 
 yet depending upon another way of trial." His fears were the 
 better prophet ; for Charles, the tyrant, whose whole life was a 
 lie, lost his head the next January 30th, and the surgery of the 
 sword, civil war, was the only way by which conscience could 
 throw off the cramp of bigotry. 
 
 Of one of these treatises mentioned by Mr. Goodwin, Thomas 
 Fuller, the church historian of England, says, " Of all the au- 
 thors I have perused concerning the opinions of the Dissent- 
 ing Brethren (the Independents), none to me was more inform- 
 ative than Mr. John Norton (one of no less learning than 
 modesty), minister in New England, in his answer to Apol- 
 lonius." ^ This was printed in 1648, with a preface by Cotton, 
 and an address by Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, and John 
 Simpson, it being the first Latin volume from New England.'* 
 Let it be remembered, the while, that, by the reiterated declar- 
 ation of her contemporary enemies, these New England doc- 
 trines, .expounded by New England pens, and illustrated by 
 New England practice, became the political platform in the 
 army and in parliament, and so shaped the history of England. 
 
 In 1645 Mr. Robert Baylie,^ the Glasgow minister and one 
 of the ablest in the Presbyterian ranks in the field of contro- 
 versy, charged Mr. Cotton with being, "if not the author, yet 
 the greatest promoter and patron of Independency ... a man 
 of very excellent parts ... of great wit and learning . . . the 
 great instrument of drawing to it not only the thousand of those 
 
 1 In Dr. Allibone's invaluable Dictionary of Authors. 
 
 2 These treatises were often " published " and circulated in manuscript before being 
 printed. For instance : Mr, Cotton's " Discourse," or " Treatise," sent to Arch- 
 b.shop Usher in 1626 at his desire to know what Mr. Cotton " conceived of the 
 way of God's eternal Predestination, and the Execution of it," seems to have been 
 multiplied in manuscript copies, and was " in hands of many," for more than 
 twenty years, and was finally printed, " together with an examination thereof, written 
 by William Twisse, D. D., Pastor of Newbury." London, 1646, pp. vii, 288.8. 
 See Cotton's letter in Parr's Life of Usher, reprinted in N. E. Hist. Gen. Reg., 
 1870. Oct. Twisse's Epistle unto the Reader, and marginal note on p. 261. 
 Others of Cotton's boolts were " published " in manuscript years before they were 
 printed. Dr. Twisse was President of the Westminster Assembly. 
 
 » Dissuasive, pp. 56-58, 17, 163. 
 
54 
 
 who left England, but many in Old England, by his letters to 
 his friends," Thomas Goodwin, its apostle there, and to others. 
 Mr. Baylie cites Canne, Barrow, and other advocates of Inde- 
 pendency, and speaking of Mr. John Robinson as the " most 
 learned, polished, and modest spirit that that sect ever en- 
 joyed," adds, " The best of the Brownist [or Independent] ar- 
 guments are brought in the greatest lustre and strength " in 
 Mr. Cotton's work. The Way of the Churches ..." acknowledged 
 by our [Independent] brethren as their judgment," with little 
 dissent or doubt. 
 
 But Mr. Cotton himself said, Independency is " of the New 
 Testament ... of the word of God." ^ This work also won to 
 Independency Dr. John Owen, for which we have his own words 
 as follows : — 
 
 " I was then a young man myself, about the age of twenty- 
 six or twenty-seven years. The controversy between Indepen- 
 dency and Presbytery was young also, nor, indeed, by me 
 clearly understood, especially as stated on the Congregational 
 side . . . having looked very little farther into those affairs 
 than I was led by an opposition to Episcopacy and ceremonies 
 . . . my acquaintance lay wholly with ministers and people of 
 the Presbyterian way. But sundry books being published on 
 either side, I perused and compared them with the Scriptures 
 and one another, according as I received ability from God. 
 After a general view of them, as was my manner in other con- 
 troversies, I fixed on one to take under peculiar consideration 
 and examination, which seemed most methodically and strongly 
 to maintain that which was contrary, as I thought, to my pres- 
 ent persuasion. This was Mr. Cotton's book Of the Keyes. 
 The examination and confutation of which, merely for my own 
 
 1 Way Cleared. 1645. 9. 16. " That is ancient which is primitive and to be 
 found in the Scriptures ; neither are the names of these that either have beene of 
 this judgment, or have or doe practise it, of meane and contemptible reputation ; 
 but they have given sufficient testimony to the world of their learning and godli- 
 nesse. as learned Baines, Ames, Cotton, with the many in these times, both in New 
 England, here and other places, men not a jot behinde any of their Predecessors in 
 the knowledge of the mysteries of the Gospel ; yea, anointed with the gifts of the 
 .Spirit above most of their fellows." pp. 22, 23. Henry Burton's "A Moderate 
 Answer to Mr. erm's full Reply to certaine Observatioiis on his first Twelve Ques- 
 tions." London. 1645. 
 
55 
 
 particular satisfaction, with what diligence and sincerity I was 
 able, I engaged in. What progress I made in that undertaking 
 I can manifest unto any by the discourses on that subject and 
 animadversions on that book yet abiding by me. In the pur- 
 suit and management of this work, quite beside and contrary 
 to my expectation, at a time wherein I could expect nothing on 
 that account but ruin in this world, without the knowledge or 
 advice of, or conference with any one person of that judgment, 
 I was prevailed on to receive that and those principles to 
 which I had thought to have set myself in opposition. And 
 indeed this way of impartial examining all things by the Word, 
 comparing causes with causes, and things with things, laying 
 aside all prejudicate respects unto persons or present traditions, 
 is a course that I would admonish all to beware of who would 
 avoid the danger of being made Independents." ^ 
 
 Dr. Owen classed Cotton with Calvin, Zanchius, Beza, Per- 
 kins, Preston, Sibbs, Rogers, and others "whose fame ... is 
 gone out into all the nations about us, and their remembrance 
 is blessed at home and abroad." 
 
 Thus the advanced thought of New England won to the side 
 of popular government John Owen and Thomas Goodwin, 
 whom Antony Wood styled "the Atlases and Patriarchs of 
 Independency." Dr. Owen, chaplain to Fairfax and Cromwell, 
 and preacher to Parliament on great occasions, had a decisive 
 influence with the republican leaders. He was especially inti- 
 mate with Cromwell, to whom he became personally known 
 after the death of the King. He preached before the House 
 of Commons on the day after the execution of Charles, the ty- 
 rant. Vice Chancellor of Oxford when Cromwell was Chancel- 
 lor, " as much beloved by the Churchmen as by his own party," 
 he promptly declined Clarendon's proffers of immediate prefer- 
 ment. His affinities would lead him to New England. On 
 the death of Mr. Cotton's successor, — the hardly less distin- 
 guished Mr. Norton, — Governor Endicott, by appointment of 
 the General Court, Oct. 20, 1663, entreated Mr. Owen^ to be- 
 come teacher of the church in Boston, nor was the mutual hope 
 
 1 Owen's Works. 1654. Ed. 1853. xi, 487. Ormes' Owen, 1820: 39, 75, 76. 
 
 2 A portrait of Dr. Owen prefaces VoL IV of the 1870 edition of Carlyle's Crom- 
 weWs Letters, etc. 
 
56 
 
 relinquished for some years ; for so late as July, u6$6, Mr. 
 Daniel Gookin of Massachusetts, then in England, wrote that 
 Dr. Owen and " some choice ones who intended to come with 
 him are diverted." 
 
 "The Great Dissenter" died in 1683, and was laid in his 
 humble grave at Bunhill Fields, " the Puritan Necropolis," fol- 
 lowed, says Dr. Allibone, by " more than sixty of the nobility 
 of the realm " ; and there he sleeps with John Bunyan, Thomas 
 Goodwin, Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, George Fox, and others 
 excluded by " the Church " from " Christian " burial in " con- 
 secrated " ground — unless their ashes hallow it. 
 
 Of Dr. Owen's illustrious disciple, John Locke, Sir James 
 Mackintosh says : " Educated amongst English dissenters dur- 
 ing the short period of their political ascendancy, he early 
 imbibed that deep piety and ardent spirit of liberty which 
 characterized that body of men. ... By the Independent 
 divines who were his instructors, our philosopher was taught 
 those principles of religious liberty which they were the first to 
 disclose to the world " ; " which we owe," says Lord King, 
 " not in the least degree to what is called the Church of Eng- 
 land. On the contrary, we owe all these to the Independents 
 in the time of the Commonwealth, and to Locke, their most 
 illustrious and enlightened disciple." 
 
 Another important fact in the history of the Commonwealth 
 was the residence in New England for some years of Milton's 
 hero, 
 
 "Vane, young in years, but in sage counsel old : 
 to know 
 
 Both spiritual power and civil, what each means. 
 
 What severs each, thou hast learned, which few have done : 
 
 Therefore on thy firm hand Religion leans 
 
 In peace, and reckons thee her eldest son." 
 
 In the family of Mr. Cotton, and admitted to closest inti- 
 macy with the great divine in his study, young Vane' was there 
 
 1 In his will, Dec. 1652, Mr. Cotton says, '-And because yt South part of my 
 house wch Sr Henry Vane built whilst he sojourned with me, Me by a deed gave 
 it (at his departure) to my son, Seab-jrne, I doe, yrfor, leave it unto him as his by 
 right." Quoted in Sibley's Harvard Graduates, 1873, P- 286. 
 
 Fitly, a legislative commiitee on the reorganization of the Courts, held its ses- 
 sions in this Cotton- Vane house in 1804. p. 43, Sullivan's Address Suffolk Bar, 
 1824. Samuel Adams Drake's Landmarks of Boston, 1873, 50, 51. 
 
57 
 
 grounded in Scripture principles, and in the storms of bigotry 
 which drove him from Massachusetts received the training 
 peculiarly preparatory to his career as the great leader of the 
 House of Commons against the hosts of intolerance. 
 
 So violent were the times that Mr. Roger Williams told Mr. 
 Robert Baylie that he " was employed to buy from the savages, 
 for the late governor [Vane] and Master Cotton with their fol- 
 lowers, . . . land without the English plantation, where they 
 might retire and live, according to their own minds, exempt 
 from the jurisdiction, civil and ecclesiastick, of all others." ^ 
 
 But the Ruler of Nations had yet other work for Cotton and 
 Vane and Williams. It is a very probable suggestion that a 
 code of laws^ found in Mr. Cotton's study, after his death, 
 " was their joint work." 
 
 Mr. Cotton seems to have studied political science from the 
 first. It was the " wisdom of his words and spirit," in a sermon 
 on " Civil Government," that won the fast friendship of the 
 Earl of Dorchester,^ who ever after favored Mr. Cotton in his 
 troubles from prelatic bigotry. His "love followed the young 
 man, Mr. Vane," on his return to England, " and it is well it doth 
 so," said Lord Say and Seal in his correspondence with Cotton.* 
 
 Governor Vane was ever a magnanimous friend to New Eng- 
 land. He emphatically declared " that Misstresse Hutchinson 
 was much mistaken and wronged, that she was a most pious 
 woman, and that her tenets, if well understood, were all true, 
 at least very tolerable " ;^ and certainly Mr. Wheelwright's ser- 
 mon, which set the colony on fire under the influence of Win- 
 throp, seems harmless enough.® Mr. Vane's letter of June lO, 
 1645, to Governor Winthrop, "desiring patience and forbear- 
 ance, one with another . . . though there be difference in 
 opinions," was, says Hutchinson, " in a good spirit, and the 
 
 1 Baylie's Dissuasive. 1645. P- ^3- 
 
 2 Dean's Memoir of Nath. Ward, Index, Body of Liberties and Laws of Massa- 
 chusetts, where the subject is critically and fully examined. 
 
 8 Life by Korton. Ed. 1658. p. 18. Sir Dudley Carlton, the able diplomatist 
 and polished statesman, afterward Viscount Dorchester, died 1631. Burke's Ex- 
 tinct Peerage, 112. 
 * ♦ Hutchinson's Hist, of Mass., i, p. 66. 
 
 6 Dissuasive, p. 64. 
 
 6 First published by Mr. Dawson, Hist. Mag., April, 1867. 
 8 
 
58 
 
 reproof was decent as well as seasonable." At last, reason 
 came ; when the magistrates sent for his signature to a paper 
 for the banishment of another minister, the dying Winthrop 
 exclaimed, with remorse, " I have had my hand too much in 
 such things already." ^ 
 
 Mr. Upham says " of Mrs. Hutchinson, one of the most re- 
 markable persons of her age and sex, learned, accomplished, 
 and of an heroic spirit," that " immediately after her exile from 
 Massachusetts the flood-gates of slander were opened against 
 her. Every'species of abuse and defamation was resorted to, 
 and tales of calumny were put into circulation so extravagant, 
 disgusting, loathsome, and shocking, that nothing but the 
 blackest malignity could have fabricated, or the most infuri- 
 ated and blinded bigotry have credited them." The original 
 source of this offensive matter is Winthrop's Journal. 
 
 As the prelates, Whitgift and Bancroft, logic failing them, 
 hired the witty Tom Nash to ridicule the Puritans, and as Mr. 
 Wood, in 1634, resented the " many scandalous and false re- 
 ports upon New England, even from the sulphurious breath of 
 every base ballad-monger,"^ so now, when argument failed 
 Rutherford, Baylie, an^ their fellows, Mr. Winthrop's unfortu- 
 nate psimphlet about Antifiomiaiis anil Famziisis^ supplied their 
 batteries with unsavory charges of public and private scandal, 
 of monstrous births and Gorgons dire. Yet not till 1644, seven 
 years after the foul storm of bigotry that well-nigh wrecked 
 the colony, — full time for calmer thoughts, — was this unhappy 
 " Siory " published in print. Contrast with this Mr. Gorton's 
 spirit and conduct. He said, " Such as endeavored the healing 
 of those distempers did seeme to me to be transported with 
 more jealousies, and heates, and paroxysms of spirit, than would 
 well stand with brotherly love or the rule of the Gospel ... the 
 bitter fruits whereof doe remaine to this day, in the Letters sent 
 
 1 In Moore's Materials for American History, in Dawson's Historical Magazine, 
 Jan. 186S. 29. Tiisho]i's A^ew England Judged. 1703. 226. 
 
 '^ N. E. Prospect. 1634. iv. 
 
 8 The later editions were under the title of the Skort Story. Mr. Savage well 
 says the author's "judgment is so blinded by passion that he seenrs an unforlunata 
 advocate rather than an impartial reporter." Savage's Winthrofs yournal, 1S53, 
 I, vi, 284, 293-298, 310-316. Historical Magazine. 1857 p. 321, 1858, pp. 22, 170' 
 
59 
 
 over that year, from hence to England . . . Some simple-hearted, 
 honest men, and some truths of God fared the worse." ^ 
 
 In his dedication of Mr. Cotton's Gospel Conversion, 1645 — 
 " To the honorable and true-hearted lover of his country, Sir 
 Henry Vane, junior. Knight, sometime Governor of New Eng- 
 land, Treasurer of the Navie Royall, and a member of the 
 House of Commons " — Francis Corn well says, " You left your 
 native soil in the persecuting times of the prelates, chusiiig 
 rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, according to 
 the light they had received . . . and in that dawning light . . . 
 freed from the yoke of . . . the Bishops that kept you in bond- 
 age, you had liberty there to debate those questions which the 
 naming only of therii here would have rendered a man odious 
 ... a thorough Reformation agreeable to the Word of God." 
 
 "We claim a right of property in the glory of Sir Henry 
 Vane," says Mr. Upham, in his excellent memoir of that states- 
 man, "because his name is enrolled as a citizen of Massachu- 
 setts and adorns the list of her governors, and still more be- 
 cause his whole life was devoted to the illustration and defence 
 of American principles, and finally sacrificed in their cause. 
 ... In the colony of Massachusetts he had his preparation for 
 the great work of liberty, and had become imbued with the 
 inflexible and stern spirit of freedom and virtue, which, in that 
 early age, as much as at any subsequent period, pervaded New 
 England ; and now, on a larger and more conspicuous theatre, 
 he was to unfold and vindicate what are justly termed ' the 
 American principles.' " " They are not kings who sit on 
 thrones, but they who know how to govern." 
 
 In the time of Governor Vane's administration, 1636,^ Mr. 
 Cotton wrote to Mr. Davenport that the order of the Churches 
 
 1 The Way . . . Cleared. 1648. p. 63. Mr. Hutchinson relates {Hist, of Mass., 
 Ed. 1795, i, 165), that " Mr. Cotton upon his death-bed ordered his son to burn 
 all his papers relative to the religious disputes begun in the time of Sir Henry 
 Vane's year. He had bundled them up with an intention to do it himself, but 
 death prevented his going into his study for that purpose. His son [Seaborne] loth 
 to destroy what appeared to him valuable, made a case of conscience to Mr. Nor- 
 ton, whether he was bound to comply. Mr. Norton determined against them. " 
 
 2 His education in Mr. Cotton's study, never forgotten by friend or foe, was often 
 referred to ; for instance, in the Mercurius Aulicus, Dr. Heylin writes : " It was 
 advertised this day, that on the death of Mr. Hampden [after Charlgrove field, 
 June 24, 1643], whom the lower house had joyned as a coadjutor with the Earle of 
 
6o 
 
 and the Commonwealth was now so settled in New Eng- 
 land, by common consent, that it brought into his mind the 
 New Heaven and the New Earth wherein dwells Righteousness.^ 
 
 Some of the best in the coming Revolution and Common- 
 wealth were openly interested in Puritan New England colo- 
 nization. Laud was disturbed by " such an universal running 
 to New England, and God knows whither ; but this it is, when 
 Men think nothing is their advantage but to run from Govern- 
 ment." 2 Yet so still was the work, and so quiet their influ- 
 ence, that the Independents, as a party, were so obscure in 
 1640 as to escape special mention among the " Anabaptists, 
 Brownists, Separatists, Familists or other sect or sects " in the 
 Episcopal convocation of that June.^ This peace was but the 
 calm before the storm ; for the growing unity of the two Eng- 
 lands, and their antagonism too, needed but the opportunity for 
 expression. The lifeless forms and conventionalisms of centu- 
 ries, the old walls of partition, undermined, gave way before the 
 force of reason and the light of Scripture. The slow current 
 quickened with its volume. England was " at the confluence 
 of two civilizations." * New England formulated the principles 
 which secure freedom and stability without anarchy and des- 
 potism. 
 
 The keen looker-on and admirable letter-writer, Robert 
 Baillie, notes the progress of Independency ; on the 1 5 th March, 
 1641, he writes, " All the English ministers of Holland who 
 are for [the] New England way, are now here [London] : how 
 
 Essex, or rather placed as a superintendent over him, to give them an account of 
 his proceedings, they had made choice of Sir Henry Vane, the younger, to attend 
 that service, who, having had a good part of his breeding under the holy ministers of 
 New England, was thought to be provided of sufficient zeale not only to inflame 
 his Excellencie's cold affection, but to kindle a more fiery spirit of rebellion in his 
 wavering souldiers," [quoted in Forster's Statesmen of the Commonwealth. Harper's 
 Ed. 1846, 253.] 
 
 1 Mather's Magnolia, 1702 ; Book iii, ch. iv, § 7. Life of Davenport. 
 Letter to Wentworth cited in Forster's British Statesmen, Life of Pym. New 
 York, 1846. i6i. Strafforde's Letters, 1740, ii, 149, 169. 
 
 ' The distinction originated in 1612. ii, 49. Hanhmy's Independents. 1.2. Dr. 
 Heylin says : " Not long after the beginning of this everlasting Parliament, the 
 Puritan faction became subdivided into Presbyterians and Independents." Dr. 
 Peter Heylin's Hist, of the Presbyterians. 1536-1647. Lib. xiii, §§ 45, 61. 
 
 * Milton " found himself at the confluence of two civilizations." Taine's English 
 Lit., Book ii, ch. vi, § i. 
 
6i 
 
 strong their party will be here is diversely reported ; they are 
 all in good terms with us. . . . Our questions with them of 
 the new way, we hope to get determined to our mutual satisfac- 
 tion, if we were rid of bishops ; and till then, we have agreed to 
 speak nothing of any thing wherein we differ. Mr. Goodwin, 
 Mr. Hooker, Mr. Baronds, Mr. Simonds ... all of them are 
 learned, discreet and zealous men. . . . They and we differ 
 ... in that one thing . , . very small in speculation, yet in 
 practice of very huge consequence, for making every congrega- 
 tion an absolute and independent churchy Even so, Mr. Baillie. 
 In December preceding " Sey and Brook in the higher house, 
 and these alone, and some leading men in the lower, were sus- 
 pected by their inclination to the separatists, would divide from 
 the Presbyterians . . . ; but so far as yet can be perceived, 
 that party inclinable to separation will not be considerable ; and 
 whatever it be, these and the rest who are for the Scots disci- 
 pline, does amicably conspire in one, to overthrow the bishops 
 and ceremonies." 
 
 At this critical period influential men solicited Mr. Cotton's 
 return to England, tendering " a ship on purpose to fetch him 
 over,' ^ but instead, Mr. Cotton " transmitted certain of his 
 manuscripts adapted to existing exigences," which were pub- 
 lished with the title " The True Constitution of a Particular 
 Visible Church, proved by Scripture. ... By that Reverend 
 Learned Divine, Mr. John Cotton, b. d., and pastor of Boston 
 in New England. . . . London, 1642";^ and The New Eng- 
 land Way from that moment almost exclusively busied the 
 Presbyterian pens and tacticians, till, says Dr. Heylin, in 1647, 
 " they [the Scots] were stripped of all command by the Inde- 
 pendents ... so easily, with so little noise, that the loss of 
 their exorbitant power did not cost so much as a broken head 
 or a bloody nose." ^ So early and effectually had the New 
 England " Commonwealth " reacted on Old England. 
 
 " The English were for a civil league, we [the Scots] for a 
 religious covenant," says Baillie in his account of the visit of 
 
 ' Mather's Magnalia, Book iii, ch. i, § 23. 
 
 2 Hanbury's Historical Memorials, ii, ch. xliii, ISS- This was reprinted " accord- 
 ing to a more exact copy," with the title The Doctrine of the Church, 1643. 
 
 ^ Hist, of the Presiyterians, I $36-1647. Lib. xiii, §61. Masson's Milton and 
 History of his limes, ii, 598. 
 
62 
 
 the English committee^ to Scotland for help after the Parlia- 
 mentary reverses in 1643. "They were, more than we could 
 assent to, for keeping of a door open in England to Indepen- 
 dency. Against this we wei^e peremptory." He saw with a 
 prophetic eye. " This seems to be a new period and crisis of 
 the most great affair which these hundred years has exercised 
 the dominions. What shall follow from this new principle, 
 [the New. England way of independent self-government] you 
 shall hear as time shall discover." I now quote the memora- 
 ble words of the House of Commons, March 10, 1642 : — 
 
 That " the plantations in New England have by the blessjng of the 
 Almighty had good and prosperous success without any public ^ charge 
 to this state, and one now likely to prove very happy for the propagation 
 of the gospel in those parts, and very beneficial and commodious to this 
 kingdom and nation." ' 
 
 Then came the following eloquent document, memorable in 
 the history of both Englands : — 
 
 " The expression of the desires of those honorable and worthy person- 
 ages of both houses of parlament who call and wish the presence of Mr. 
 Cotton, Mr. Hooker and Mr. Davenport to come over with all possi- 
 ble speed, all or any of them, if all cannot. The condytion whearein the 
 state of things in this kingdom doth now stand wee suppose you have 
 from the relations of others, wheareby you cannot but understand how 
 greate need there is of the healp of prayer and improvement of all good 
 meanes from all parts for the seatlinge and composeing the affaires of the 
 church. Wee therefore present unto you our earnest desires of you all. 
 To.sbewe whearein or howe many wayes you may be useful would easely 
 bee done by us and fownd by you weare you present with us. In all likely- 
 
 1 On this committee with Sir Henry Vane, " one of the gravest and ablest of that 
 nation," were the ministers Nye and Marshall, and Sir Wm. Armyne, of Osgodby, 
 Lincolnshire, to whom William Wood dedicated his New Englands Prospect, 1634. 
 Mr. Wood, the Countess Warwick, Sir Wm. and his lady, Mar)', daughter of Henry 
 Talbot, 4th Earl of Shrewsbury, were zealous friends of New England. — Savage's 
 Winthrop, ii, 212. Massachusetts Col. Rec, i, 128. Baillie's Letters, No. 36. Sir 
 William's baronetcie, Nov. 25, 1619, cost ;f 1095, but he could have bought 
 soon after for ;^200. — Cal. State Papers, 1619-1623. pp. 97, gS, 196, 410. 
 
 s " New France was colonized by a government. New England by a people. . . 
 The French crown founded a State in Canada, a handful of Puritan refugees 
 founded a people in New England."— 7»^ Conquest 0/ Canada, Harper's Ed., 1850, 
 I, ui, v. So Virginia was colonized by a corporation : but New England, after 
 the happy failure of Popham, 1607, was planted by refugees from the mitre and 
 sceptre, mdependent in thought and self-reliant in resources. 
 
 "Hutchinson's A'/j/. Massachusetts, 1795, '. 110-112. 
 
6;^ 
 
 hood you will finde opportunity enough to draw forth all that healpefullness 
 that God shall affoard by you. And wee doubt not these advantages will 
 be sutch as will fully answer all inconveniences yoursealves, churches or 
 plantations may sustaine in this your voyage and short absence from them. 
 Onely the sooner you come the bettar. Warwick. 
 
 W. Say & Seale. Ph. Wharton. 
 Mandeville. , 
 Rob. Brooke. 
 
 Nath. Fiennes. Wm. Stricland. Tho. Hoyle. 
 
 GiLBT. Gerrard. Henry Darley. Cor. Holland. 
 
 Tho. Barrington. Valentine Walton. Anth. Stapley. 
 
 Richard Bkowne. Willm. Cawleys. Humfrey Salway. 
 
 Henry Martin. John Gordon. William Hay. 
 
 Oliver Cromwell. John Blackiston. J. Wastill. 
 
 A. Haselrig. Godfrey Rossevile. 
 
 Wm. Masham. H. Ruthin. Gilbert Pickering. Alex. Bence. 
 
 Mart. Lumley. Ro. Cooke. Ol. St. John. 
 
 Nath. Barnardiston. Sam. Luke. Isaac Pennington. 
 Ar. Goodwin. John Fkancklyn. Miles Corbett. Wm. Spurstowe." 
 
 Happily, neither Cotton, Hooker, nor Davenport complied 
 with the request ; for, as Hutchinson, to whom we are indebted 
 for this great state paper, remarks : " Had the churches of New 
 England appeared there by their representatives, or any of the 
 principal divines appeared as members of the [Westminster] 
 assembly, greater exception might have been taken to their 
 building after a model of their own framing." They did better, 
 they sent written " constitutions," and examples of their prac- 
 tical workings. • 
 
 December 7, 1643, Baillie writes, there are ten or eleven 
 Independents in the Assembly, " many of them very able men," 
 as Goodwin, Nye, Burroughs, Bridges, and others. With Inde- 
 pendency " we purpose not to meddle in haste, till it please 
 God to advance our [Scots] array,^ which we expect will much 
 assist our arguments " ! A little later he writes, " The Indepen- 
 dent party grows ; but the Anabaptists more ; and the Antino- 
 
 1 Baillie's hope was in the army. Jan. 3, 1644, he writes : " Yet we hope in 
 our God that our [Scots] army in England shall break the neck of all these wicked 
 designs." July 8, 1645 : "If our army were in good case, by God's blessing, all 
 would settle quickly in peace." July 15 : "Our army . . . would be ^ pregnant 
 mean ... to settle all these dominions according to our mind." With "our 
 army here this last year successful, we should have had few debates." The 
 weakness of our army makes " the sects and their friends bold and very insolent. 
 The King's party here is brought almost to nothing." 
 
64 
 
 mians most. The Independents being most able meo, and of 
 great credit, fearing no less than banishment from their native 
 country if presbyteries were erected, are watchful that no con- 
 clusions be taken for their prejudice. It was my advice, which 
 Mr. Henderson presently applauded, and gave me thanks for it, 
 to eschew a publick rupture with the Independents, till we were 
 more able for them. . . . We indeed did not much care for 
 delays till the breath of our [Scots] army might blow upon us 
 some more favour and strength." Feb. 1 8, 1 644, " The Indepen- 
 dents put out in print, on a sudden, an apologetical narration of 
 their way, which long had lien ready beside them, wherein they 
 petition the Parliament, in a most sly and cunning way, for a 
 toleration, and withal lend too bold wipes to all the Reformed 
 churches, as imperfect yet in their reformation, while their 
 new model be embraced. . . . This piete abruptly they presented 
 to the assembly, giving to every member a copy : also they gave 
 books to some of either House. That same day they invited 
 us, and some principal men of the assembly, to a very great 
 feast, when we had not read their book, so no word of that 
 matter was betwixt us ; " and the excited Baillie exclaims : 
 " God, who overpowers both devils and men, I hope shall turn 
 that engine upon the face of its crafty contrivers, and make it 
 advantageous for our cause." 
 
 The full title of this quarto pamphlet is "An | Apologetical 
 Narration \ Humbly Submitted | To the \ Honotirable Houses 
 \ Of Parliament \ By \ TJiomas Goodwin \ Phillip Nye \ 
 William Bridge \ Jer. Burroughs \ Sidrach Simpson \ Lon- 
 don I Printed for Robert Dawlman \ M.DC.XL.HI." 
 
 Its authors, "the five dissenters" or Independents of the 
 Assembly, pay this noble tribute to New England : " We 
 had the advantage of all that light which conflicts of our owne 
 Divines (the good old Non-conformists) had struck forth in 
 their times. Last of all we had the recent and later example 
 of the wayes and practices (and those improved to a better edi- 
 tion and greater refinement by all the fore-mentioned helps) of 
 those multitudes of godly men of our own Nation, almost to the 
 number of another Nation [New England] and among them some 
 as holy and judicious Divines as this kingdom hath bred ; whose 
 sincerity in their way hath beene testified before all the world, 
 
65 
 
 and wil be unto all generations to come, by the greatest under- 
 taking (but that of our father Abraham out of his own countrey 
 and his seed after him), a transplanting themselves many thou- 
 sand miles distance and that by sea, into a Wildernes, meerly 
 to worship God more purely, whither to allure them there could 
 be no other invitement." 
 
 In 1647 the Independents had help^ from an unexpected 
 quarter. Soon after the repeal of the Acts of Edward VI and 
 of Elizabeth, abolishing the Book of Common Prayer and sub- 
 stituting the Presbyterian Directory, January, 1645, the Presby- 
 terians got an Act prohibiting the use of the Book of Common 
 Prayer, under penalty of five pounds for the first offence, ten 
 pounds for the second, and a year's imprisonment for the third. 
 The flood of New England influence prevented any severe 
 enforcement of this law, it not being " according to the law of 
 Go4," — the limitation which the cautious Sir Henry Vane 
 had put into the Scotch League, as understood by him and 
 the New Englanders, — " according to the Word of God." 
 
 Exposed to penalties as an Episcopal Dissenter, under the 
 Presbyterian Jure Divino, Mr. Jeremy Taylor ^ published his 
 Liberty of Prophesying ; showing the unreasonableness of per- 
 secuting differing opinions, in which, as in Chillingworth's 
 
 ' Orme's Memoirs of Dr. Owen, pp. 101, 102. 
 
 '^ Coleridge says that as soon as the church gained power Taylor " most basely 
 disclaimed and disavowed the principle of toleration, and apologized for the publica- 
 tion by declaring it to have been a ruse de guerre, currying pardon for his past 
 liberality by charging and most probably slandering himself with the guilt of false- 
 hood, treachery, and hypocrisy." (Literary Semains, iii, pp. 204,250, with more 
 quoted in Mr. Caldwell's preface to " The Bloudy Tetunt," Pub. of Narragansett 
 Club, iii, xii.) He was the son of a Cambridge barber, and in "splendid alliance " 
 with the throne, having married " Mrs. Bridge," an illegitimate daughter of the 
 "Saint and Martyr" Charles I; in filial duty "chaplain in ordinary" to the 
 king and then chaplain in his army ; a favorite of Laud and an enthusiast 
 for monarchy and prelacy : yet after the defeat of royalty and while a prisoner 
 he used the safety bestowed by " the gentleness and mercy of a noble enemy " to 
 write his eloquent Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying (preaching). If we 
 believe his apologist, Antony Wood, he was plied only by personal persuasion " in 
 this great storm which hath dashed the vessel of the [National] Church all in 
 pieces " and by which he lost his " living," when he solemnly declared, " I ear- 
 nestly contend that another man's opinion shall be no rule to mine." However this 
 may have been, the highest admiration for his genius can only be equalled by our 
 wonder at the facile temper and insensibility of the great preacher who so sud- 
 denly and with his grand argument for Liberty before him, could utter the servile 
 9 
 
66 
 
 great argument,^ the oracular utterances of the fathers, coun- 
 cils, and popes sink and fade into mere private opinions, leaving 
 the Churches of Canterbury and Rome with a footing as airy 
 as that of the tortoise in Hindoo mythology. 
 
 But it is nowhere recorded that after Mr. Taylor was " conse- 
 crated " as a bishop " by the grace of God " and of the unclean 
 Charles II, any of the victims under the Act of Uniformity — 
 some of whom found refuge in New England^ — ever received 
 from his Lordship a copy of his Liberty of Prophesying. 
 
 and debasing sentiments in his sermons of January 27, 1660, in the Cathedral 
 Church of Dublin and before the Parliament of Ireland, May 3, 1661. He 
 darkened the light of reason and conscience and bartered his convictions for pre- 
 ferment from the polluted hands of his brother, Charles II, and so became 
 "Jeremy, Bishop, etc." His glory is his shame. The Independent, John Milton, 
 "preferring Queen Truth to King Charles,' could say, "I am not one who 
 ever disgraced beauty of sentiment by deformity of conduct, or the maxims of a 
 freeman by the actions of a slave." ( The Second Defence of the People of England, 
 1654. Prose Works, Bohn's Ed. i, 254.) " Skilful to discern the signs of the times, 
 and eager to improve every opportunity, and to employ all their art and eloquence 
 to extend the prerogative and smooth the approaches of arbitrary power." (Rob- 
 ert Hall's Christianity consistent with a Icrve of Freedom. Miscellaneous Woris, 
 132, Bohn's Ed. Read Orme's Memoirs of Owen, 101-102.) 
 
 ' Chillingworth, " the most exact, the most penetrating, and the most con- 
 vincing of controversialists, first Protestant, then Catholic, then Protestant again and 
 forever " (Taine's English Literature, B. ii, ch. v, § 4) framed his indictment against 
 the Romish Church and its apes, on the principles, though without the name, of 
 Independency. He proves the impossibility of " Succession," of certainty as to a 
 " true priest " or a " true pope." (Religion of Protestants, 1637. Answer to Chap. II, 
 §§ 63-70, 108, 109, Answer to Chap. VI, §§ 39-41.) He ever appeals to Scripture 
 and Reason, thus : " This vain conceit that we can speak of the things of God 
 better than in the words of God ; this deifying our own interpretations, and tyran- 
 nous enforcing them upon others ; this restraining of the Word of God from that 
 latitude and generality, and the understandings of men from that liberty, wherein 
 Christ and the apostles left them ; is and hath been the only fountain of all the 
 schisms of the Church, and that which makes them immortal ; the common incen- 
 diary of Christendom. . . . Take away these walls of separation and all will 
 quickly be one. . . . Let them that in their words disclaim tyranny, disclaim it like- 
 wise in their actions . . . and restore Christians to their just and full liberty of 
 captivating their understanding to Scripture only." (Answer to Chap. IV, § i6. 
 Life of Chillingworth by Maizeaux, 1725, iij, 141). 
 
 There can be no better service for Truth than an accessible and attractive 
 edition of Chillingworth ; a preface, cross-references, and a thorough index are 
 among the essentials. 
 
 2 Mather's Magnolia, Book iii, De Viris Illustribus, " of such ministers as came 
 over to New England after the Re-establishment of the Episcopal Church govern- 
 ment in England and the Persecution," etc. 
 
67 
 
 There are considerations ' in extenuation of early New Eng- 
 land days on this point. For the colonists to admit Laud and 
 his minions to the colonial franchise would have been suicidal, 
 fatal to colonial existence : to exclude them was the only way 
 of safety ; and self-preservation is the first law. It is difficult 
 to see how else the dilemma could have been met. The other 
 course would have been to swing wide the gates of the very 
 citadel to the enemy. 
 
 Again, not only was religious equality unknown to any code, 
 but tolerance was held to be not only a s\.n,perse, but the prolific 
 mother of all evil, the unchaining of the Evil One. We can 
 hardly conceive at this day of the clear head and steady nerve 
 requisite to the avowal, much more the maintenance, of the 
 then odious doctrine of religious equality. John Robinson and 
 Roger Williams were brave men, and their disciples were 
 heroes. " Not until we have fully reflected upon the action of 
 the Pilgrims," says Mr. Hazewell, " and have compared it with 
 the prevailing sentiment of their age, can we clearly appreciate 
 the distance between their opinions and those, of the rest of 
 the world." 
 
 We have found that the hostility^ to Plymouth Indepen- 
 
 1 Walsh's "Appeal," pp. 50, 55, 435. Orme's Memoir of Dr. John Owen, pp. 
 
 336. 499- 
 
 2 In Plymouth Colony in 1645, "after court and country had duly thought of it," 
 there was a large majority in both branches of the legislature, " to allow and 
 maintaine full and free tolerance of religion to all men that would preserve the 
 civill peace and submit unto government ; and there was no limitation or excep- 
 tion against Turke, Jew, Papist, Arian, Socinian, Nicholaytan, Familist or any 
 other ... yet notwithstanding it was required, according to order, to be voted 
 . . . the Governor would not suffer it to come to vote, as being that indeed it 
 would eat out the power of godliness . . . and make us odious to all Christian 
 common weales." This was written as welcome news to John Winthrop of Boston. 
 As the more enlightened magistrate of Plymouth Colony, James Cudworth, some 
 years later phrased the influence of Massachusetts, " Plimoth-Saddle is on the 
 Bay-Horse." That Plymouth retained its love of freedom, appears in the letter 
 of ^^oodbridge of Killingley, to Richard Baxter, in 1671 : "The first members 
 of the Church of Plymouth, the head town from which the whole colony is de- 
 nominated, were (as it is possible you have heard) a swarm of Mr. Robinson's 
 church in Holland. And they have not yet thoroughly grown out of the catachezy 
 that hung about them when they transported themselves into the country. . . . 
 Many of them hold that the civil magistrate has no power in ecclesiastical mat- 
 ters, neither are churches to give accounts to courts, much less to councils, for any 
 irregular proceedings." — ^»/<:A/»Jo« Papers, td. Prince Soc. ii, 172-175. 
 Buho/sN.£. Judged. 1703. 160-171. 
 
68 
 
 dency was the germ of Massachusetts, and ought to remember 
 that it was not natural or easy at once to be rid of the habits, 
 prejudices, and spirit of the mother country ^ and of the Old 
 World. 
 
 Though in Winthrop's successful state raid on Mrs. Hutchin- 
 son's speculative theology, and in the Westminster Assembly, 
 force and numbers were opposed to argument and checked Inde- 
 pendency, yet the glorious looking for more light of Robinson 
 and Cotton and Williams was passing into the popular mind, and, 
 says Dr. Orme, " making some allowance on the score of ignor- 
 ance and early misconduct, it cannot be doubted that to the 
 principles of the Congregationalists, America owes everything 
 she now enjoys of civil and religious liberty. The strength 
 and excellence of their grand principles survived every danger 
 and surmounted every difficulty ; they planted the germ of 
 freedom which gradually arrived at maturity, and is now cov- 
 ered with foliage and fruit." ^ 
 
 Pursuing his inquiries further, as I have done, Dr. Orme 
 might and would have added, that England, no less than Amer- 
 ica, was indebted under God to the teachings and influence of 
 these same New England men for her own political and reli- 
 gious liberty. As good scholars go beyond their teachers, so 
 Vane, Owen, Milton, Cromwell, and other leaders in council 
 and in camp, sometimes lovingly abided New England for her 
 shortcomings and infirmities. 
 
 In their compact, 1620, the Pilgrims style themselves " loyal 
 subjects," and so they were, but not according to Anglo-Catholic 
 interpretation of servile obedience, of implicit faith in the 
 " divine right '' of kings and of their " creatures" in church and 
 state, nor in passive obedience to lawless will and irresponsi- 
 ble power, such as John Hampden and Algernon Sidney would 
 not endure : they were loyal in all the virtues that pertain to 
 good citizenship ; but they knew what belonged to themselves 
 as Christian men, and preferred exile to its loss. 
 
 They were Englishmen, ^ "resolved not to lose their names 
 
 1 So late as 1813, excommunication from the Anglo-Catholic Church disqualified 
 as juror, witness, or for any act " to be done by one that is 'probus et legalis 
 homo: " Act S3, Geo. Ill, 1813, in Trumbull's Lechford. Note 33. 
 
 " Memoirs of Owen. 499. 
 
 » Winslow's " Hypocrisie Unmasked." 88. 
 
69 
 
 and nationality" ; they loved England, "our Honorable nation 
 of England," but truth and manhood more. 
 
 " There was no corner of the globe," exclaimed Chatham in 
 Parliament, May 26, 1774, to which " the ancestors of our fel- 
 low-subjects in America would not fly with alacrity, rather than 
 submit to the slavish and tyrannical spirit which prevailed at 
 that period in their native country." 
 
 Refused the royal seal, and to that extent thrust out of the 
 national protection and thrown upon their natural rights be- 
 yond the realm, — typical of the political philosophy of Amer- 
 ica, — and 3,000 miles across the seas, the Pilgrims, with 
 Christ's Gospel their only and suflftcient charter, in wintry 
 want and sickness " begune some small cottages for their habi- 
 tation ; as time would admitte, they mette and consulted of 
 lawes & orders, both for their civill & military Governmente, 
 as y° necessitie of their condition did require, still add- 
 ing therunto as urgent occasion in several times, and as 
 cases did require," negotiated written treaties with their neigh- 
 bors, as an independent nation, and thus sprang into existence 
 a " body politic," with the elements of nationality, and its func- 
 tions in healthy action, based upon a system of justice and 
 equality yet unknown in the Old World.^ 
 
 In his letter to the Countess of Lincoln, in 1631, Governor 
 Dudley wrote of them : " After much sickness, famine, poverty, 
 and great mortality (through all which God, by an unwonted 
 Providence, hath carried them) they are now grown upp to a 
 people healthful, wealthy, politique, and religious." ^ 
 
 The successful experiment became a precedent, and roused 
 dissatisfied England, generated new hope and that noble em- 
 
 1 " Neither Patroons, Lords nor Princes are known there ; [in New England] 
 only the People. Each Governor is like a Sovereign in his place, but comports 
 himself most discreetly. They are, and are esteemed, Governors next to God by 
 the people, so long as the latter please ... the People have a new election every 
 year, and have power to make a change and they would make a change in case of 
 improper behavior." — Petition of the Commtnalty of New Netherlands to the States 
 General, July 26, 164^. Documents Col. Hist, of New York, \, 2(A. "Deane's 
 Bradford, 90. 
 
 2 The Countess of Lincoln, Bridgett, daughter of William Fiennes, created Vis- 
 count Say and Sele, July 7, 1624, and wife of Theophilus Clinton, Earl of Lin- 
 coln ; her brother, Nath'l Fiennes, was Colonel in the Pari Army. — AVzw Hamp- 
 shire Hist. Coll. iv, 224, and in Force's Htst. Tracts. Magnolia. Book iii, 135, § 6. 
 
JO 
 
 ulation that led to other free states, each ultimately a- sanctu- 
 ary for that Berean liberty which, under God, is the vindica- 
 tor of Truth and Right. 
 
 Mr. John Davenport,^ one of Mr. Cotton's converts in the 
 London Conference, — one whose charity-money for the minis- 
 try to the poor and destitute had been confiscated by Laud, 
 as prejudicial to the spread of Anglo-Catholicism, and also 
 as without royal or episcopal license, — with his friends Stephen 
 Goodyear and Theophilus Eaton, established the Republic of 
 New Haven. " My arm shall reach him there ! " exclaimed the 
 angry Laud, when he heard of Mr. Davenport's escape to New 
 England. Of the principles of the Republic of Rhode Island, 
 which came into being as a place of refuge in Winthrop's 
 time, Gervinus says, in his Introduction to the History of the 
 Nineteenth Century, " They have given laws to one quarter of 
 the globe, and, dreaded for their moral influence, they stand in 
 the background of every democratic struggle in Europe." 
 
 Mr. Thomas Hooker, one of the Sempringham travellers, 
 who in Holland aided the famous Dr. Ames in his Fresh Suit 
 against the Ceremonies, yielded to Mr. Cotton's suggestion, 
 and, narrowly escaping the hierarchal pursuivants, they became 
 fellow-voyagers to New England. Mather calls them "The 
 Luther and Melancthon of New England." ^ And here Mr. 
 Hooker founded the Republic of Connecticut. He was also a 
 leader in forming the confedei ation of the colonies.' 
 
 Thus within twenty or twenty-five years from 1620, England 
 witnessed the fact of independent commonwealths, sover- 
 eignties in fact, in a league offensive and defensive, " by the 
 name of The United Colonies of New England" (May 19, 
 1643), the model and prototype of the Confederacy of 1774. 
 A combination of free states, an international league, and no 
 
 ' Neal's History of the Puritans, Choules' Ed. 29S, 299, 306, 308 ; Masson's 
 Milton and his Times, Boston Ed. i, 287, 296 ; Bacon's Hist. Disc. 85 ; Brook's 
 Puritans, iii, 449 ; Mather's Magnalia, 1702. Book iii, chap, i, § 18, chap, iv, § 4. 
 
 * Mather's Magnalia, B. iii, 57-68. 
 
 8 In reference to this, Mr. Hooker wrote sharply to Mr. Winthrop in 1638, that 
 his conceit "to refer the decision of a civil question or controversy to whole 
 churches cannot be safe, nor warranted by any rule as you conceive " Found by 
 Mr. Trumbull among the State Papers of Massachusetts, and published in the 
 Connecticut Hist. Coll. i, 10. 
 
71 
 
 king ! A parliament without a mace, a church without a mitre, 
 lands without manorial lords. " Bishop " Morell had left in 
 despair as long ago as 1623 ; ^ the arm of even a Laud was par- 
 alyzed in its reach thither ; ^ feudalism in Maine was smothering 
 in its own weakness ; and the vigor of this Commonwealth had 
 been equal to the severe strain of the civil commotion excited 
 by Winthrop's bigotry and jealousy ^ in 1637, — the great blot 
 in the fair record of general welfare. 
 
 And all this was the work of exiles from oppression in Eng- 
 land, to whom the tyrant's High Commission and Star Cham- 
 ber was but a way to the pillory, the dungeon, or the fagot. 
 New England's practical success in self-government and New 
 England thought reacted with profound effect upon the mother 
 country. England saw the facts, and, in her agony, looked 
 thither for counsel,* got it, and followed it, till she too had a 
 Commonwealth. 
 
 Mr. Masson's reflections on this colonial confederation are 
 much to our purpose, and of great weight, being given after a 
 careful review of the literature of the period ; he says : — 
 
 ' 1623, Gorges "brought over . . . one Mr. Morell, who . . . had . . . power 
 and authority of superintendancie over other churches granted him, and sundrie 
 instructions for that end ; but he never shewed it, or made any use of it (it should 
 seeme he saw it was in vaine) ; he only speake of it to some hear at his going away. " 
 — Bradford's /"/j/woaM, 154. 
 
 ^ In his paper on the Records of Massachusetts under its First Charter, p. 21, Mr. 
 Upham quotes Collier's Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain, that while Arch- 
 bishop Laud's Order in Council, June 1 7, 1634, enjoining the establishment of the 
 National Church was generally obeyed, " New England was somewhat of an excep- 
 tion. The Dissenters who transported themselves thither established their own 
 fancy," — rather than Laud's. The story of the Episcopal machinations against 
 New Kngland (Hubbard's History of New England, 261-273, with Savage's Win- 
 throp, 2d Ed. i, 312, 320, 332, 333, 338, 358, 367) and Scotland equals a game at 
 chess in interest. New England made the last move in the game, — Schactmatt ! 
 the king is dead, at the hands of the Independents, Republicans. 
 
 ' In his admirable Life of Sir Henry Vane (very freely used in Mr. Forster's States- 
 men of the Commonwealth, says Mr. Edward Everett in The National Intelligencer, 
 September 25, 1838), Mr. Upham says that "jealousy and prejudice" organized 
 the opposition to Vane (107, 108), that in its first open manifestation "it is im- 
 possible not to recognize a more liberal and enlightened spirit in Vane and Dudley 
 than was manifested by the other members of the court" (117). " With the sup- 
 port of Governor Vane and John Cotton, Mrs. Hutchinson was, for a time, enabled 
 to protect herself against the persecution with which she was threatened in conse- 
 quence of her theological sentiments. Winthrop ... led the opposition " (142, 
 143, 159, 160). 
 
 * See pages 3, 4. 
 
72 
 
 " An important change in the political system of the New England col- 
 onies was accomplished in May 1643, only a week or two before the con- 
 vention of the Westminster Assembly. This event, the news of which 
 must have reached England just as the Ass-^mbly was beginning its work, 
 does not seem to have excited much attention. Yet not only was it the 
 first step towards the formation of the future Republic of the United 
 States, but even on the English Church questions, which the Westminster 
 Assembly had been called to debate, it was not to be without some imme- 
 diate bearing. The sudden stoppage of the immigration from England, 
 and the commencement even of a return-wave, had strengthened in the 
 New Englanders the sense that they were in fact a distinct commonwealth, 
 depending on themselves for their future, and bound to look after that 
 future [as they ever had done] by wise provisions." ' 
 
 When such statesmen as Henry Vane, Oliver St. John, and 
 Oliver Cromwell, the immediate successors of Hampden and 
 Pym, and the strong men of New England, like Cotton, 
 Hooker, and Davenport, animated with one principle and one 
 hope, were leagued against the common enemy — then the 
 days of absolutism and irresponsible government were num- 
 bered. The Revolutions of 1689 and 1776 must follow. 
 
 Though remote from the great world in the forests of New 
 England, Cotton and his brethren rendered greater service to 
 the good cause than personal presence could afford, for from 
 their studies went forth " words as a hve coal to the hearts of 
 many," the great principles and arguments which fixed tht 
 course of things, and which Fairfax and Cromwell vindicated 
 in the field. The pen moved the sword, and united they won 
 liberty for the world. 
 
 The little that is left of the private correspondence between 
 Hooker, Cotton, and Cromwell affords a glimpse of the goodly 
 fellowship between New and Old England as the glorious work 
 went on. After a careful review of events in his letter to 
 Cromwell, "28th of 6th, 1651," Mr. Cotton says, "These 
 things are so cleare to mine owne apprehension, that I am 
 fully satisfyed that you have all this while fought the Lord's 
 battells, and the Lord hath owned you, and honoured himselfe 
 in you in all your expeditions, which maketh my poor prayers 
 the more serious and faithful and affectionate (as God helpeth) 
 in your behalfe. In like frame (as I conceive) are the spirits 
 
 ' Masson's Life of John Milton and History of Hii Time, ii, 598. 
 
of our brethren (the elders and churches of these parts) car- 
 ried forth, and the Lord accept us, and help you in Christ. 
 ... As for the aspersion of factious men, I hear, by Mr. Des- 
 borough's letter last night, that you have well vindicated your- 
 selfe therefrom by cashiering sundry corrupt spirits out of the 
 army. And truly. Sir, better a few and faithfull, than many 
 and unsound. The army on Christ's side (which he maketh 
 victorious) are called chosen and faithfull, Rev. 17. 14, a 
 verse worthy your Lordship's frequent and deepe medita- 
 tion." J 
 
 And Cromwell, enclosing to Cottort, in a letter of Oct. 2, 
 165 1, a narrative of the defeat of the Scotch invaders, ex- 
 claims, " How shall we behave ourselves after such mercy .' 
 What is the Lord a-doing > What Prophecies are now fulfill- 
 ing .? Who is a God like ours } To know His will, to do His 
 will are both of Him. I took this liberty from business, to sa- 
 lute you thus in a word. Truly I am ready to serve you and 
 the rest of our Brethren and the Churches,'' and concludes, 
 " Pray for me. Salute all Christian friends though unknown. 
 I rest your affectionate friend to serve you, 
 
 " Oliver Cromwell.'' 
 
 About the same time Nathaniel Mather wrote from England, 
 " 'T is incredible what an advantage to preferment it is to have 
 been a New Englishman." 
 
 " It is certain," says Mr. Hallam in his Constitutional History 
 of England, " that the congregational scheme leads to tolera- 
 tion "; 2 but the spirit of Independency, intolerant of all oppres- 
 sion, diffused itself through the whole body of affairs, and 
 showed itself impatient of civil wrongs, though hoary 
 with age, and of oppressions and inconveniences, though so 
 long endured and so venerable for their antiquity that cus- 
 tom had even endeared them. The legislators of 1641 struck 
 at all courts which had become odious or burdensome. The 
 
 1 Hutchinson Papers, Pub. Prince Society, i, 262-267. Carlyle's CronivieWs 
 Letters, clxxxiv. John Desborough married Cromwell's sister. Is his letter to 
 Cotton lost ." The allusions and references in this letter are fully elucidated by 
 Mr. Carlyle. 
 
 2 Murray's Ed. 1855, ii, 202. Dr. Adam Smith regards the Independent 
 polity as " productive of the most philosophical good temper and moderation with 
 regard to every sort of religious principle." 
 
 10 
 
74 
 
 Star Chamber, Requests, High Commission, the ecclesiastical 
 Courts, the Councils of Wales and of the North fell before 
 them ; and great was the wrath thereat. The Presbyterian 
 Edwards '■ denounces the sectaries [Independents] as " guilty 
 of insuiferable Insolencies, horrible affronts to authority, and 
 of strange outrages against . . . the Common Law as coming 
 from the Devill, ... in divers pamphlets within these last two 
 years," and cites in proof A Remonstrance to their owne House 
 of Commons, in which they say, " The greatest mischief of 
 all, and the oppressive bondage of England ... an unfathom- 
 able gulf, is the Law practices in Westminster Hall ; . . . there 
 is neither end nor bottom of them, so many uncertainties, for- 
 malities, punctilios, and what is worse ... all the entries and 
 proceedings in . . . language not one of a thousand of my 
 native countrymen understand. . . . The King's Writ that 
 summons a parliament, implying the establishment of religion, 
 shows that we remain under the Norman yoke of an unlawful 
 power from which we ought to free ourselves. Ye know the 
 laws of this nation are unworthy a free people, and deserve 
 from first to last to be considered, and reduced to an agree- 
 ment with common equity and right reason, which ought to 
 be the form and life of every Government." " 'T is evident, " says 
 Edwards, " the sectaries aim at a total change of the lawes and 
 customs of this kingdom . . . yea, they have pleaded for the 
 King to be deposed and justice to be done upon him as the 
 grand murtherer of England . . . and monarchie turned 
 into a democracie." ^ 
 
 1 Gangraena, 1646, 194. Thomas Edwards, an Episcopal clergyman, and next 
 i Presbyterian, bitterly opposed the Independents and wrote a Treatise against Tol- 
 eration . . . the last ana strongest hold of Satan, 1647. 
 
 Another, Dr. John Bastwick, a captain in the Presbyterian army, who had been 
 released by Pariiament from perpetual imprisonment and a fine of ;^s,ooo, Laud's 
 Star-Chamber punishment for opposing the Anglo-Catholic Claim of Jure Divino, — 
 (his ears, clipped by the Apostolic Laud, could not be repaired), in 1646 denounced 
 " Independency as not God's ordinance . . . brought out from Holland and New 
 England , . . darkening truth and disorganizing all things." 
 
 * " A chaos of Anarchy, Libertinism, and popular confusion . . . nowjcovereth 
 the face of this kingdome, . . . wherein all errors and sects cover their heads under 
 the catholic Buckler of Independency, . . . which all men in all Societies natu- 
 rally love and seek ziiex." — Sermon before the House of Lords, 28 May, 1645, /or 
 solemn and publick Humiliation. By Alexander Henderson, minister at Edinburgh. 
 
75 
 
 Mr. Peters was early and earnest for this Reformation, sug- 
 gested many of the most important reforms, and Cromwell 
 promoted it. In 1651, December 30, Parliament appointed a 
 Committee to consider and present to the House the names of 
 fit persons out of the House to consider the inconveniences, 
 delays, charges, and irregularities in proceedings at law, and 
 " the speediest way to reform the same " ; and on the 20th of 
 January they reported the names of twenty-one, of whom Mr. 
 [Matthew] Hale was the first named. Sir Henry Blunt, Major 
 General Desborough, Mr. Hugh Peters, Mr. Rushworth, Spar- 
 row, and Sir Antony Ashley Cooper, afterwards Lord Shafts- 
 bury, was the last. The main points in their Report related to 
 marriage before magistrates, County Registry of Deeds, wills 
 and administrations, parish registry of births, marriages, and 
 deaths, local, elective magistracy and tables of legal fees. All 
 this had been done, in New England from the outset, and by 
 declaratory statutes in Massachusetts in 1639 ^^^ 1640, with 
 the exception of marriage ; for it was said " to raise up laws by 
 practice and custom had been no transgression [of our colonial 
 charter] as in our church discipline, and in matters of mar- 
 riage. To make a law that marriages should not be solemnized 
 by ministers is repugnant to the laws of England ; but to bring 
 it to a custom by practice for the magistrates to perform it, is 
 no law made repugnant," etc.^ 
 
 New England was distinctively the leader in this Law Re- 
 form and its regenerating influence. In his essay before the 
 Juridical Society, Anticipations under the Commonwealth of 
 Changes in the Law, Mr. Robinson says, "The goodness of 
 the laws of Charles II [of the Commonwealth], contrasted with 
 the badness of his government, has drawn a compliment from 
 Blackstone, epigrams from Burke and Fox, and a paradox from 
 Buckle. An inquiry into the source of these laws may show 
 that the paradox is unreal, the epigrams unfounded, the com- 
 pliment due to the Republicans ; that they, in redressing 
 
 1 Whitelock's Memorials, 519, 520. Somers' Tracts, vi, 177-245- Plymouth Col. 
 Records; Massachusetts Col. Rec, Sept. 9, 1630, Oct. 7, 1640. Winthrop's Jour- 
 nal, 1639 ; i, 389, quoted in Dean's Memoir of Nathaniel Ward, 1868, ch. v. Bur- 
 ton's /?»Vzrj/, 1657-8. Note. ¥tiet's Last Legacy to his Daughter. London, 1660. 
 Boston, 17 1 7, 83-85. 
 
76 
 
 grievances which from the time of James and Bacon had been 
 fostering rebellion, forestalled the law-reformers, not of the 
 Restoration only, but of our own age." ' The tribute is due to 
 New England ; for as early as 1636, May 25, Massachusetts 
 appointed Henry Vane, John Winthrop, Thomas Dudley, 
 John Haynes, and Richard Bellingham, civilians, John Cotton, 
 Hugh Peters, and Thomas Shepard, ministers, a committee " to 
 make a draught of laws agreeable to the Word of God, which 
 may be the Fundamentalls of this Commonwealth." Mr. Cotton 
 prepared " a body of fundamentalls according to the judicial laws 
 of the Jews," submitted to the General Court in the next Octo- 
 ber. This was published in London in 1641, under the title 
 of An Abstract of Lawes of New England as they are now 
 established, possibly ^ by Thomas Lechford, of Clements Inne, 
 who, with Hugh Peter, had just returned from New England, 
 whither he had retired for about four years .after the hazardous 
 service as solicitor for Prynne in his trial before the Star Cham- 
 ber for publishing his Histrio-Mastix, 1633, a " libel " on Laud's 
 ritualistic superstitions and High Church innovations. Soon 
 after, early in 1642, Lechford published further Newes from 
 New England. "A short view of New England's present 
 government, both ecclesiastical and civil, compared with the 
 anciently received and established government of England in 
 some material points fit for the gravest consideration in these 
 times'' Mr. Cotton's "modell" was republished in 1655 as 
 "an abstract of Laws and Government, wherein, as in a mirrour, 
 may be seen the wisdome and perfection of the government 
 of Christ's Kingdome. Accomodable to any State or form of 
 government in the world, that is not Anti Christian or Ty- 
 rannicall." 
 
 " It is fit," said Sir Antony Ashley Cooper, " that laws 
 should be plain for the people," and not in the barbarous jar- 
 gon of the Reports and Year Books ; and the Independent advo- 
 cate, John Coke, Solicitor General at Charles' trial, would 
 retain nothing, " either properly or directly pr collaterally and 
 obliquely repugnant to the lawes of God," — "a method which," 
 says Mr. Robinson, " had been pursued in the Judaized code of 
 
 ' But more likely by some friend in England 
 
77 
 
 New England," and he admits that " even then English Puritan- 
 ism looked to America." Lechford's Newes from New Eng- 
 land" was much in the hands of the Republican jurists. It is 
 cited in Examen legum Angl. 1656, and often referred to.^ 
 
 Two centuries have gone by, and Lord Campbell, Chief Jus- 
 tice of the King's Bench, says, " We ought to be grateful to the 
 enlightened men who then flourished, for they accomplished 
 much, . . . the wise civil measures of the Commonwealth, . . . 
 showed a sound knowledge of the principles of government. 
 . . . Almost the whole of the Commonwealth law reforms 
 have been gradually introduced into our system " ; but among 
 the exceptions is that " for establishing a registry for all deeds 
 affecting real property ; . . . the greatest and most benef- 
 icent of all still remains to confer glory upon the honest and 
 vigorous administration that shall carry it through." This was 
 peculiarly a New England idea.^ Lord Campbell adds : " The 
 people should be taught habitually to do honor to the memory 
 of those by whose wisdom and patriotism such blessings had 
 been achieved, . . . and which if they had been properly 
 appreciated and supported would have conferred unspeakable 
 benefits on the country, anticipating and going beyond most of 
 the salutary amendments which have been adopted in the 
 reigns of William IV and Queen Victoria." * 
 
 The late Prescott Hall declared that " the known defects in 
 the laws and practice of England, pointed out and most strik- 
 ingly stated by Lord Brougham in his great speech upon Law 
 Reforms, delivered in the House of Commons in 1828, were 
 discovered and banished from the New England States while 
 they were yet colonies under the British Crown." * 
 
 1 Massachusetts Colonial Records, sub anno. Trumbull's admirable edition of Lech- 
 ford's JPlaine Dealing, 1867. Introduction, xxxvi, 64, note 91. Papers of the 
 Juridical Society. London, 1871, 567, 589 '^ -601. Among the chief characters in Flat- 
 man's Don Juan Lamberto; or, a Comical History of the Late Times, by " Montelion, 
 Knight of the Orac!e,"in Somers' Tracts of the Commonwealth, vii, 104-155, are 
 " the Arch-Priest Hugo Petros," " Sir Vane, Knight of the mystical Allegories . . . 
 in Nova Anglia," and " Seer [John] Cotton.'' 
 
 2 In his Good Work for a Good Magistrate, Mr. Peters suggests a Registry in 
 every parish, whereby every man may know and enjoy his own whilst he lives, and 
 be sure his will should be performed when he is dead."— Rev. Dr. Felt's elaborate 
 Memoir of Peters in the New England Hist, and Gen. Keg., 1851, 231, 275, 41 5. 
 
 'Campbell's Lord Chan., iii, pp. 91, 94. 
 
 » Lfetter to the author from George H. Moore, ll. d., of the New York Historical 
 
78 
 
 But we must leave this attractive inquiry, fitter for a volume 
 than a page, with the emphatic declaration of one whose opin- 
 ion is authoritative in this department : " Certainly," says Dr. 
 George H. Moore, of New York, "Massachusetts has given 
 the law to the United States more literally than either her 
 friends or enemies have ever cared to claim or acknowledge ; 
 and the diligent student of legal antiquities may recognize in 
 her earliest codes the expression of principles of reformation 
 which have since pervaded the whole realm of English law." 
 
 But not only did New England suggest these beneficent 
 law reforms, but through Sir Geo. Downing she also initiated 
 the system of commercial policy contained in the Navigation 
 Act of Oct. 9, 165 1, which "raised the British naval and colo- 
 nial power, in no very long period, from inconsiderable begin- 
 nings to an unparalleled state of grandeur and power, and laid 
 the foundation for the inevitable spread of the British race and 
 language through every quarter of the habitable globe" ; " per- 
 haps the wisest of all the commercial regulations of England," 
 says Adam Smith ; and Mr. Upham regards it not only as the 
 wisest but as " the boldest, it might almost be said, the most 
 high-handed, legislative proceeding ever passed. It is easier to 
 change the dynasty than it is to change the business of a 
 country. England was fast sinking, and soon would have sunk 
 to rise no more. A strong and violent remedy was needed 
 and it was applied. The nation was shaken and convulsed, 
 but was at last rescued by the operation." The son of Eman- 
 uel Downing of the Inner Temple, early in New England, 
 George's " early youth," says Mr. Upham, " had been passed on 
 the seaboard of New-England, where the spirit of enterprise 
 and trade had from the beginning found its most genial home. 
 His mind was formed and his genius shaped in Salem, where 
 commerce and navigation were then, as they have ever since 
 been, the chief topics of interest among the people. Hugh 
 Peters was his kinsman, pastor, and instructor, at the very time 
 when that enlightened statesman was laying the foundations of 
 
 Society, October 25, 1870. .See also Sir Geo. Bowyer, Bart, D. c. L., on Reform 
 of the Law of Real Property in Papers of the Juridical Society, London, 1 871, Part 
 XIV, and in the same volume Mr. Robinson's Anticipations under the Common- 
 wealth of Changes in the Law, Part XV. 
 
79 
 
 American navigation and commerce, and revealing to the col- 
 onists the relations, and circulations, and mysteries of the 
 coasting and foreign trade, and pointing out to them the value 
 of the fisheries, as contributing to the mercantile and naval 
 strength of a people. . . . As citizens of the new world, we may 
 take a natural and reasonable satisfaction in the thought, that 
 the genius which put forth this mighty energy was kindled by 
 a spark struck out in our American wilderness, and that Old 
 England was rescued from destruction, and placed in the path 
 to power and glory, by one who was reared under a New Eng- 
 land education, and sent forth among the first fruits of our 
 most ancient college. . . . Surely, the credit of the profound- 
 est statesmanship must be ascribed to those who, before it 
 began, were able so wisely to devise the means of preparing 
 for it." 1 
 
 England is indebted to Sir George Downing also for the plan 
 of specific parliamentary appropriations, Oct. 21, 1665, the 
 principle by which the Commons of England hold the purse- 
 strings, control the executive, and practically rule England. 
 Sir George first secured and then held the King's approval 
 against the influence and argument of his chief advisers that 
 it was an encroachment on the royal prerogative. Hallam 
 says, " It drew with it the necessity of estimates regularly 
 laid before the House of Commons; and by exposing the 
 management of the public revenues, has given to Parliament, 
 not only a real and effective control over an essential branch 
 of the executive administration, but, in some measure, ren- 
 dered them partakers in it." " Sir George had brought the 
 idea from New England ; it was the custom there. 
 
 New England gave to the cause of progress and the Common- 
 wealth in England that consummate man of affairs, the capa- 
 cious, resolute, honest, benevolent Hugh Peters, "a man con- 
 
 ^ Blackwooa's Edinburgh Magtmne, Sept 1838, p. 318, cited in the Hon. Charles 
 W. Upham's able and conclusive historical investigation as to the authorship of the 
 British Navigation Act, in Hunt's Merchanes Magazine, May, 1841, 413. •406, 
 40S, 41 1, 405. It was the work of our Sir George Downing. 
 
 2 Memoir in MS. of Sir George Downing, by John P. Prendergast, Esq., of Dub- 
 lin, ray obliging correspondent; Christie's Life of Shaftesbury, 1871,1, 289-291. 
 Hallam's Constitutional Hist, of Eng., Murray, 1853, ii, 356. 357. 
 
8o 
 
 cerning whom we have heard so many falsehoods," ^ says Mr. 
 Carlyle, and whose career — from the time of his imprisonment 
 by Laud, and exile to Holland, "only for praying at Sep- 
 ulchre's Church for Queen Henrietta's conversion to Protes- 
 tantism," 2 till he gave his life in 1662, on the same scaffold 
 with Sir Henry Vane, for the same cause, and with equal soul 
 — is of itself an index to the times. 
 
 " ' Souls leaped to heaven from scaffolds gory ! 
 They passed, nor saw the work they wrought' " 
 
 Educated at Cambridge, subscribing to Conformity, August 
 17, 1627, early led by John Cotton to Non-conformity and Inde- 
 pendency,^ honored and trusted by the wisest and best in every 
 rank, an aggressive man, a leader, ever in the front, potent in 
 council, in the army, in parliament, in the pulpit and with the 
 pen, preferred to delicate and important negotiations, confided 
 in even by Charles Stuart, aptly styled by Prynne, " the Solic- 
 itor-General of the Independent Cause and Party" — Hugh 
 Peters * was a true reflex of New England on the mother coun- 
 try, and second to none of the patriots in the vigorous asser- 
 tion and defence of their great principles. He was an efficient 
 man. In Holland he collected .£30,000 for suffering Protestants 
 in Ireland. In New England he led the way in enterprise. 
 From his going to England in 1642 at the "public request" of 
 Connecticut and Massachusetts, with Mr. Thomas Welde of 
 Roxbury as his associate for Massachusetts, his name constantly 
 occurs in the publications of the time, loved by friends and 
 hated by foes. Dr. Masson says, " There arrived Hugh 
 Peters, Thomas Welde, and others, as the accredited ambas- 
 sadors of the Independency of New England. This thickened 
 the controversy ; and accordingly, through the rest of 1641, 
 
 1 Carlyle's Cromwell, ed. 1870, i, 217, 244, 247, 299 ; ii, 4, 154 ; iii, 183. 
 
 "^ Prynne's " Breviate " of Laud, 1644, P- 421- 
 
 3 " Master Peters, the first planter of that weed [Independency, the New Eng- 
 land way] at Rotterdam . . . which it seemeth he also learned by Master 
 Cotton's Letters from New England." — Baylie's Dissuasive from the Errors of the 
 Time, 1645, 75. 
 
 *Dr. Masson's Life and Times of John Milton, 1871, ii, 543-608, classifies sev- 
 enteen New England men potent in that period. Rev. Dr. Felt's Memoir of Peters 
 in the^. E. Hist., Gen. ^<f., 1855, 236; Felt's Ecclesiastical Hist, of Aew Eng., 
 1855, i, 428-434, 443. 
 
8i 
 
 there is evidence of a growing fear, on the part of the English 
 Presbyterians, of the chances of some success for ' Congrega- 
 tionalism,' or ' Brownism,' or ' The New England Way.' Pres- 
 byterianism availed itself of all its existing resources of reply, 
 and set new pens to work." ^ 
 
 The feeling between the two Englands appears in a sermon : 
 " New I Englands | Teares | for old | Englands Feares. | 
 Preached in a sermon on July 23, | 1640, being a day of Publike 
 Humiliation, | appointed by the Churches in behalf of our | 
 native Countrey in time of | feared dangers. | By William 
 HooKE, Minister of Gods | Word ; sometimes of Axmouth in 
 Devonshire, \ now of Taunton, in New England. \ Sent over to 
 a worthy member of the honourable ] House of Commons, who 
 desires it may be for | publike good. | London | . . . | 1641." 
 
 " There is no Land that claimes our name, but England, wee 
 are distinguished from all the Nations in the World by the 
 name of English. . . . And how have they alwayes listened 
 after our welfare, ebbing and flowing in their affections with us .' 
 How doe they (I meane all this while, multitudes of well- 
 affected persons there) talke of New-England with delight ! 
 How much nearer Heaven doe some of their charities account 
 this Land, then any other place they heare of in the world .' Such 
 is their good opinion of us ! How have some among them de- 
 sired to dye, if they might not be vouchsafed to live in this 
 Land } And when sometimes a New-England man returnes 
 thither, how is he lookt upon, lookt after, received, entertained, 
 the ground he walks upon beloved for his sake, and the house 
 held the better where hee is .> how are his words listened to, 
 laid up, and related frequently when hee is gone } neither is 
 any love or kindnesse held too much for such a man." * 
 
 Another London pamphlet of 1645, showed " New-Englands 
 Sence | of Old England | and Irelands | sorrowes. | A Sermon 
 Preached upon a day of | general Humiliation in the Churches 
 
 1 Masson's Milton and his Times, ii, 593. 
 
 2 Mr. Hooke, born at Southampton, 1601, was of Trinity College, Oxford ; B. A., 
 1620, M. A., 1623 ; near of kin to Whalley and Goffe, the tyrannicides, and to 
 Cromwell, on his return to England in 1656, and as domestic chaplain and confi- 
 dant of the Protector, he was associated with John Owen and John Milton. — Tht 
 Ministry of Taunton, by Samuel Hopkins Emery, Pastor of one of its churches. 
 
 1853. i. 63-73. 92, 96- 
 II 
 
82 
 
 of New-England. In the behalfe of Old Englands and Irelands 
 Sad condition." By Mr. Hooke of Taunton. " Intrusted in the 
 hands of a worthy Member of the Honorable House of Com- 
 mons, who desired it might be printed." He exhorts to " unit- 
 ing the hearts of all the Churches in this Land to one another, 
 and all of them this day to our deare Countrey, in opposing the 
 common Adversary. For what hath England said to us of 
 late .' If the Papists, Prelates, and Atheists be too strong for us, 
 then you shall help us ; and if at any time the enemy be too strong 
 for you, we will help you. O let us all enter into Covenant 
 with England. . . . Beloved ! Christ is this day sensible of all 
 the abuses that have been offered by the Prelates to his mes- 
 sengers. How often hath he cried from heaven, if that poore 
 soule had not been utterly deafe. Laud, Laud, why persecutest 
 thou me? It is hard for thee to kicke against the pricks" 
 
 Archbishop Laud's hatred of Cotton, Hooker, Peter, 
 Davenport, and other chief men of New England, and his 
 personal dread of New England ideas, instigated him to con- 
 tinual plottings against the peace and safety of the colonies, 
 especially of Massachusetts. But New England relieved her- 
 self of these unwelcome visitations by assuming the offensive 
 against the Episcopal " throne " at home. 
 
 There was a grim humor in New England's pressing invita- 
 tion to Archbishop Laud to visit, in New England, his absent 
 friends, whose presence he had so often desired in England. 
 We have the story from the prelate's own diary of March 24, 
 1643, that he had heard of "a plot to send me and Bishop 
 Wren » to New England within fourteen days. Mr. [Thomas] 
 Weld, a minister that came hence offered wagers of it . . . April 
 25, Tuesday. It was moved in the House of Commons to 
 send me to New England, but it was rejected. The plot was 
 laid by Peter, Weld, and others." ^ 
 
 » Tuesday, Jan. 26, 1640. " It was this day reported in the House [of Com- 
 mons] from a committee, that there were above 50 families, of Norwich, that 
 went away to New England, by reason of Bishop Wren's pressing their Con- 
 sciences with illegal Oaths, Ceremonies, and lano\3X\ons,." — RmAworth's Hist 
 Co/. 4, 158. 
 
 ^ Prynne's Canterburies Doom, p. 57. The unhappy prelate was misinformed, 
 at least as to Mr. Peter, who was not at his " troubles or death." - Last Legacy to 
 his Daughter. 1660, 103. 
 
83 
 
 Since Parliament rejected the more lenient proposal that 
 Laud should simply be obliged to reside among his victims, 
 the Independents in New England, the comedy was sjon 
 changed to tragedy. Laud went to the scaffold, January lo, 
 1645, and so perished, at one blow, the providential founder 
 and malignant enemy of New England, — William Laud, 
 Archbishop of Canterbury. Mr. Macaulay thinks " the sever- 
 est punishment which the two Houses could have inflicted on 
 him would have been to set him at liberty, and sent him to 
 Oxford. There he might have stayed, tortured by his own 
 diabolical temper, hungering for Puritans to pillory and man- 
 gle, . . . performing grimaces and antics in the cathedral, 
 continuing that incomparable diary, which we never see with- 
 out forgetting the vices of his heart in the abject imbecility 
 of his intellect, minuting down his dreams, counting the drops 
 of blood which fell from his nose, watching the direction of his 
 salt, and listening for the note of the screech-owl. Con- 
 temptuous mercy was the only vengeance which it became the 
 parliament to take on such a ridiculous old bigot." ^ 
 
 A Yorkshire tribute to Laud, in 1645, shows his efficient, 
 though undesigned agency in the rapid colonization of New 
 England with the choicest men and soundest scholarship of 
 Old England : " Now the Prelate here brings his ' gift ' to the 
 ' altar ' ; he hath a prayer in his hand instead of in his heart, 
 to ' offer,' but he should remember ... all those godly preach- 
 ers and Christians whom his bloody cruelty caused to flee into 
 the deserts of America, as Mr. Cotton, Mr. Hooker, Mr. 
 Davenport, Mr. Peters, with many thousands more."^ Those 
 very men have been charged, directly and indirectly, with the 
 premature exit of that admired and consummate churchman, 
 January 10, 1645. His works have been edited with affection- 
 ate fidelity in the Angio-Cathplic Library.* 
 
 ' Review of Hallam's Constitutional Hist., 1828. 
 
 2 Burton's Grand Impostor, 1645, in Hanbury, ii, 523, 524. — Parker's Life of 
 Laud. 
 
 8 In Dean Milman's Annals of St. PauTs Church, xiii, he speaks of laud's total 
 want of the purest Christian virtues blended with some of the most unchristian 
 vices ... his writings are below contempt, and betray or rather dwell with pride 
 on a feeble superstition and a most debasing view of God. . . . Among his vices 
 were servility to the great, haughtiness to the lowly ; the sternest, most inflexible 
 
84 
 
 In 1643 Mr. Peters prefaced and published Mr, Richard 
 Mather's reply of the New England churches " to two and 
 thirty questions sent over to them by divers ministers of Eng- 
 land" on church government, with two other New England 
 treatises on government, in answer to " divers reverend and 
 godly ministers in England." He was equally vigilant against 
 the state-church ambition of the Scotch. " Is it not an un- 
 godly thing to suffer men to be of any religion ? . . . Ought 
 we not at least to keep our different opinions and religions to 
 ourselves in obedience to the civil magistrate .'' " asked Baylie, 
 the Presbyterian. 1 
 
 Mr. Peters was recognized, in 1656, as " the Father of our 
 Church [of Independency] and Champion of our Reformed 
 Religion." ^ But like a logical and practical man, as he was, 
 he labored for a thorough reformation, and his volume, entitled 
 Good Work for a Good Magistrate, contains practical sugges- 
 tions in affairs of state,* matter of admiration to the legal mind 
 of England to-day. 
 
 intolerance, hard cruelty . . . He commanded, still commands, the desperate 
 admiration o£ those who dwell more on the church than on the religion which 
 that church was founded to promulgate and msuntain." The American admirer of 
 this prelate — for such there is — did not dedicate his " memoir " to the Dean of 
 St Paul's. 
 
 1 Baylie's Dissuasive, ch. v, 95. 
 
 ' It is quoted in JsraeFs Condition . . . Vindication of Mr. Hugh Peter from, 
 the foul aspersions of IV. Prynn, Esq., London. 1656. pp. 80, 90. 
 
 '"Good Work | for a good | Magistrate, | or, [ A Short Cut to great 
 quiet I By | Honest, homely, plain English | Hints given from Scripture, 
 Reason, and Experience, for the regulating | of most cases in this Com- | mon- 
 wealth. I Concerning Keligion ; Mercie ; Justice. \ by H[ugh] P[eters.] Prov. 
 14. 34. RighUousness exalteth a Nation; but Sin is a \ Reproach to anie People. \ 
 London, Printed by William Du Card Printer to the | Council of State, 
 1651." dedicated " To the Supreme Power and all true Patriots under them," 
 His "Model for the Law" proposes Registries for deeds, wills and testa- 
 ments. " Summons may be left at men's houses ; and not such a nest of bailifs 
 maintained, even an Armie of Caterpillars^; the worst of men employed that 
 waie." " Long laying in prison before sentence ; or delaies in justice is great 
 crueltie to men." Petty local courts to settle trifling disputes summarily, all en- 
 tails to be cut off forever, canals for cheap transportation, copyright to authors, 
 hospitals for the insane and the sick, banks for pawn for the poor, are among 
 his suggestions. 
 
 Mr. Peters also thinks that " the civil Fathers of the Fatherless " should teach 
 orphans and the friendless not only to " reai write, &c.," but " when big enough 
 to be set to work, to learn something to live by," and to provide houses where to 
 
85 
 
 The undesigned evidence in the pages of their opponents, 
 especially of the chief Presbyterian writers, affords conclusive 
 proof of the potent agency of Independency in English affairs. 
 They charge and fix on them the responsibility for the doc- 
 trines of Christian liberty and popular government, which 
 triumphed in the English Commonwealth as well as in 
 America, — to them, a cause of 
 
 " Torment, and loud lament, and furious rage " ; 
 
 To the ages, of grateful praise and world-wide benediction. 
 
 Rutherford, one of the chief commissioners of the Church of 
 Scotland, who sat with the Assembly at Westminster, and Pro- 
 fessor of Divinity in the Scotch University of St. Andrews, 
 could not tolerate what he called " the cursed pamphlets that 
 pass press and pulpit ... for [the] abominable, atheistical 
 plague of Liberty of Conscience." ^ 
 
 The National Assembly of Scotland, in 1647, prohibited the 
 importation or reading of all books and pamphlets favoring 
 Independency, and forbidding any harboring of persons in- 
 fected with such errors, and this to be enforced at the sword's 
 point. 
 
 The Presbyterians in Scotland were supreme. " Indepen- 
 dents pray," Rutherford says it with horror, " that God would 
 grant them the grace of liberty of conscience." Cromwell's 
 letter to Parliament, that " in things of the minde we looke for 
 no compulsion but that of light and reason," he pronounces 
 " unsound, and scandalous to me and many others," and adds, 
 " To my knowledge, there is not this day in England any that 
 is a meere Independent, . . . with most of those of New 
 England, which maintaineth nothing but Independencie, that 
 
 "bring them up to all mamier of trades," the children of the State, pp. 26, 27. 
 Does not this wise man here anticipate our Industrial Art Schools, Normal Art 
 Schools, on the principle that compulsory education in skilled labor, to prevent 
 poverty and crime, is wiser than the system of poorhouses and prisons to receive 
 it ? Where there is a Duty there is a Right, and the general adoption of Mr. 
 Peters' suggestions would soon be felt in the annual returns of increasing intelli- 
 gence, industry, an4 wealth, and decreasing ignorance, pauperism, and crime, and 
 their enormous waste in the body politic. 
 
 1 Spiritual Antichrist, 1648, bi, 251-253. ^59 5 a'so RuikwortVs Hist. Col., vii, 
 767-771. 
 
86 
 
 does not hold other unsound and corrupt tenets, especially that 
 of liberty of conscience, which bordereth with atheism, skepti- 
 cism, and with all faiths and no faith." To which he signifi- 
 cantly adds, "They are ordinary preachers to the Generall and 
 the rest of the Commanders." 
 
 Walker's History of Independency, 1648, defines it as the 
 " Genus generalissimum of all Errours, Heresies, Blasphemies 
 and Schisms. A generall name and Title under which they 
 are all united, as Sampsons foxes were by the Tailes. . . . 
 Nye, Goodwin and Hugh Peters are among the chief of their 
 ministers, . . . Cromwell their Don Quixote, . . . and Hugh 
 Peters ^ Chaplaine in ordinary to two great Potentates, LUci- 
 
 1 Mr. Peters was " of great service to Cromwell," says Bishop Burnet, in 
 Anderson's Colonial Church, ch. xiv. 156, ed. 1856. The Rev. John Bathurst Deane, 
 in his memoir of Richard Deane, the tyrannicide, says " that Oliver Cromwell 
 was the life and soul of the regicidal [tyrannicidal] conspiracy. . . . But if we 
 give implicit credit to the Royalists, and judge of their subsequent action upon 
 their own convictions, not Oliver Cromwell but Hugh Peters was the man who 
 first conceived the idea of bringing the King to trial and to death. . . . Hence 
 the especial animosity of the Royalists of the Restoration against Peters ; and the 
 strange irregularities of his trial in :66o as a ' regicide,' and his conviction upon 
 evidence which in our days would be rejected with scorn as no evidence at all, or 
 with indignation as suborned perjury," 364. The reverend author scorns "the 
 notion that all schismatics are rational beings and have a common and honest 
 object, whereas ... it is notorious that the natural repugnance of the human 
 mind to uniformity and conformity is only to be overcome by the force of author- 
 ity, and that left to itself the ' Protestant ' mind has a tendency to run into what," 
 etc. Are, then, " all rational beings " churchmen, and all churchmen " rational 
 beings . . . only by force of authority " ? But as Mr. Deane's " church " is only 
 a creature of Parliament, a reflex of the times, and as " left to itself the Protestant 
 [Parliamentary] mind has a tendency to run into " endless vagaries about candles 
 or no candles, or like questions of Christian life, " human " minds and " rational 
 beings " may be puzzled to keep in line with and to know for a certainty what 
 happens to be, at the time, in " uniformity and conformity " with the national 
 " catholic " church ; and what can "rational minds " do without "force of author- 
 ity " in this dilemma ? Who is " authority " with Mr. Deane ? Newman, Philpot, 
 or Colenso ? " When doctors disagree," etc A notable and painful illustration of 
 this duplicity and dishonor in John Henry Newman's history of his religious 
 opinions shows " what the Protestant mind " of the Church of England " has a 
 tendency to run into " ! When Newman thought of openly avowing his " cath- 
 olic " faith, Keble, the church poet, — whose hymn to " Charles the Martyr " is since 
 obsolete, by Act of Parliament, — urged him to retain his living as if he were not a 
 Romanist but still a " Protestant," whereupon Newman wrote to Keble again, 
 " The following considefations have much reconciled my feelings to your con- 
 clusions : I. I do not think we have yet made fair trial how much the English 
 Church will bear. I know it is a hazardous experiment, like proving cannon. 
 
87 
 
 fer and Oliver^ He calls Milton " a Libertine . . . that 
 (after the Independent fashion) will be tied by no obligation," 
 and describes the Independents as " a complication of all Anti- 
 monarchicall, Anarchicall heresies and schismes, — Anabaptists, 
 Brownists, Barrowists, Adamites, Familists, Libertines of all 
 sorts . . . united under the general Title of Independent; and 
 these were originally the men that by their close insinuations, 
 solicitations, and actings began and carried on the Warre 
 against the King, with an intent (from the beginning) to pull 
 down Monarchy and set up Anarchy." He says they seduced 
 the Presbyterians, who were " not strong enough to hold such 
 subtle Sampsons."! 
 
 After the " crowning mercy " at Worcester, — the defeat of 
 the Scots army on their way to reinstate Charles, with the Kirk 
 as the established religion, — Milton, in his sonnet to Crom- 
 well, says, — 
 
 " Yet much remains 
 To conquer still ; Peace hath her victories 
 No less renowned than War ; new foes arise 
 Threat'ning to bind our souls with secular chains : 
 Help us to save free conscience from the paw 
 Of hireling wolves, whose gospel is their maw." 
 
 Yet we must not take it for granted that the metal will burst in the operation. 
 It has borne at various times, not to say at this time [October, 1840], a great in- 
 fusion of catholic truth without damage. As to the result, viz., whether this pro- 
 cess will not approximate the whole English Church, as a body, to Rome, that is 
 nothing to us. For what we know, it may be the providential means of uniting 
 the whole Church in one, without fresh schismatizing or use of private judgment." 
 Apologia pro vita sua, 1864, 239; 1874, 135. Of course these are not the "blind 
 owls which hawk in the dark and dare not come into the light," predicted by 
 Tyndale in 1530. Here was no betrayal of trust, no perfidy, only "an infusion of 
 Catholic truth" into their charges; and if the alien Church of Rome should 
 reoccupy its former " seats and nests," " that is nothing to us ! " So Keble and 
 Newman honorably retained their Protestant " livings " ! I could hardly dis- 
 tinguish the trappings, ceremonies, and service o£ the English St Alban's, in Lon- 
 don, from the Jesuit ritual. The name of Keble, suppressed in the first edition 
 of Newman's W/«/fl^jjfl, is given in the second. The secret plotting of 1840 is 
 overt and defiant in 1874. "That is nothing to us!" In the Diocesan Synod, 
 Oxford, November, 1850, when Bishop Wilberforce said, " Suppose, pow, that 
 there should be any one in this assembly so false to the Church of Baptism as to 
 be actually in league with the Church of Rome while ministering at our altars,'' 
 the immediate answer was, " My Lord, there are a hundred of them in this [Shel- 
 donian] theatre." But that " is nothing to us " ! 
 1 29, 32. Part ii, 1649, 157, 180, igg, 20a 
 
88 
 
 Hume says, "The Scotch nation plainly discovered, after 
 the Restoration, that their past resistance had proceeded more 
 from ... the bigotry of their ecclesiastics than from any 
 fixed passion toward civil liberty." 
 
 The Presbyterian champion, Robert Baylie, of Glasgow, in 
 1645 laments that "This unhappy love towards liberty, where- 
 into the Independents have lately fallen, makes them to entreat 
 the magistrate to let alone the affaires of religion." ^ 
 
 The mere title of Rutherford's book, in 1648, is an index of 
 the times, and the prejudice which the common-sense of the 
 Independents had to overcome. It is A Survey of the Spiritual 
 Antichrist, opening the secrets of Familisme and Antinontianism 
 in the Antichristian doctrine of John Saltmarsh and William 
 Dell, the present preachers of the army now in England. He 
 devotes a chapter to "the Familists and Antinomians in New 
 England," and he states the appalling fact that " Saltmarsh, 
 chaplain to the Generall, Sir Tho. Fairfax, goes along with the 
 Familists of New England," ^ and draws heavily from Governor 
 Winthrop's Short Story^ about the "first authors" of these 
 
 1 The religion of Him whose message was " Peace on earth and good-will 
 towards men," depends not on constitutional recognition or legal formulas. In 
 all ages Christianity has suffered more from professed or well-meaning friends 
 than from open enemies. Christianity is part and parcel of the law of the land 
 only because Christianity first saturated society, was prior to the law, greater than 
 the law, nay, more, had created it, had infused itself into the feelings and thought, 
 the daily life of the people, because it constituted the civilization of the land, 
 and so crystallized into law. An oath in civil proceedings implies ages of educa- 
 tion in the religious faith of which it is an expression. But if a religion comes to 
 ask for cold mention in the statute, to depend on law, its own creature, as on a 
 crutch for support, it will be a confession of its own decrepitude, — that it has be- 
 come weaker than the law, the outgrowth of itself, and ceases to trust in its own 
 strength. When the spirit of religion has shrunk into rigid formalities and life- 
 
 (t\^ less mechanism and ceremony has withered into costly architecture, — " quarries 
 set to music," — over whose pOTch " The Poor have the Gospel preached to 
 THEM," — the glory of Christianity, — would be a cutting jest, — then scepticism 
 will lift the veil of hypocrisy and find no life there. John Locke well says, " A 
 religion that is of God wants not the assistance of human authority to make it 
 prevail." 
 
 2 " In Old England ' the Independents ' make it a fighting with God to deny a 
 free liberty to Papists, to the worst heresies and schismes, to Judaism, Turcism, 
 Paganism, or if any error can be imagined to bee more pernicious." — Baylie's 
 Dissuasive, 129, also Rushworth's Hist. Col., vii, part iv, 770. 
 
 ' An idiotic story of a monstrous birth at the time of these troubles (October, 
 1637), "certified by John Winthrop, gent, of the Massachusetts, who saw it," 
 found its way into the public archives. — Calendar of State Papers, Colomal, edited 
 by W. Noel Sainsbury, 1577-1660, p. 259. 
 
89 
 
 awful heresies in New England, as Mistress Hutchinson and 
 Mr. Wheelwright, then preaching " seditious railing and foul 
 tenets." With the opponents of Cotton, Vane and Hutchinson, 
 " heresy" and " sedition " were convertible terms. 
 
 When the Independents or Republicans demanded the re- 
 peal of the several acts against " sectaries," the Presbyterian, 
 Walker, exclaims : " What is this but to pray in ayde of Turkes, 
 Jewes, Anabaptists of Munsier, nay the Devill himself to joyne 
 with them ... in this impious Liberty of Conscience to 
 destroy the Protestant religion . . . under the Kingdome of 
 these bloudy cheating Saints." ^ The Spanish inquisition 
 would have been edified by their holy horror at the mere sug- 
 gestion of toleration, or freedom of opinion ; they did not ob- 
 ject at all to persecution, but would enforce the use of their 
 Directory in place of the Common Prayer. 
 
 There is in Mr. Cotton's answer to the criticisms of Mr. 
 Baylie,^ a passage of great interest as to the origin of New 
 England and its reflex on Old England, and also of the highest 
 historical authority as the testimony of a principal character 
 in both lands. He says, " Many thousands in England in all 
 the Quarters of the kingdome, have been awakened to consider 
 of the cause of Church discipline, for which wee have suffered 
 this hazardous and voluntary banishment into this remote Wil- 
 dernesse : and have therefore by letters conferred with us about 
 it, & been (through mercy) so farre enlightened, as to desire 
 an utter subversion of Episcopacy, and conformity, yea, and 
 the Honorable Houses of Parliament, the Lord hath been 
 pleased to helpe them so farre to consider of our sufferings, 
 
 ' Walker's Anarchia Anglicana ; or, the History of Independency. The secona 
 part. 1649, 202. Hopkins' Puritans and Queen Elizabeth, v. 57, chaps, vii, viii. 
 
 ^ Dr. Sanderson, afterward bishop of Lincoln, wrote, April 10, 1649 • " ^ thank 
 you for the loan of your book, Rob. Bailie's Dissuasive from Error. ... I can- 
 not but admire . . . how the author could choose but see that 'most of the as- 
 sertions both of Brownists and Independents are but the natural conclusions and 
 results of their own premises. These \sic\ kind of writings do exceedingly con- 
 firm me in my old opinions, viz., that the grounds of our busy reformers supposed 
 true, either of these ways is infinitely more rational and defensible, and more con- 
 sentaneous to the principles whereon the endeavours of reformation are built than 
 Presbyterians." Nov. 12, 1652, he classifies " Presbyterians, Independents, Ana- 
 baptists, or other by whatsoever name they called," as "Puritan sectaries." 
 Sanderson's Works. Jaeobson. v. 57, vi.' 368. 
 12 
 
90 
 
 and of the causes, thereof, as to conclude a necesstie of refor- 
 mation of the Ecclesiasticall state, (amongst other causes, so), 
 by reason of the necessitie put upon so many English subjects 
 to depart from all our employments, and enjoyments in our 
 Native Countrey, for conscience sake. 
 
 " For the fruits of Congregationall discipline in England, they 
 that walke in that way amongst you, might speak far more 
 particularly, and largely, then I here can doe at such a remote 
 distance. But if Books, and I^etters, and reports doe not too 
 much abuse us with false intelligence, the great, and gratious, 
 and glorious victories, whereby the Lord hath wrought salva- 
 tion for England in these late warres . . . his own right hand 
 hath brought to passe chiefly by such despised instruments as 
 are sirnamed Independents. And are then the witnesses of 
 that way so dangerous to the rest of the world. . . . For the 
 chiefest instruments, which God hath delighted to use herein, 
 have been the Faith and fidelity, the courage and constancy 
 of Independents. And when I say Independents, I mean . . . 
 such as professe the Kingdom of Christ in the government of 
 each holy Congregation of Saints within themselves." 
 
 Acknowledging the great services of Scotland "for the 
 helpe of England against the Common Enemies of Church and 
 State," Mr. Cotton writes, " But yet ^ let the good pleasure of 
 the Lord bee acknowledged, who out of his abundant grace, 
 hath granted the chiefest successes to the English designes by 
 the Forces of the Independents, which may not be denied 
 without too much ingratitude both to God and man. Let all 
 the glory thereof be wholly and solely given to the Lord : but 
 yet let not the instruments be accounted unfruitfull, by whom 
 the Lord hath brought forth such blessed Fruits of victory, and 
 libertie, both from civill servitude, and superstitious thraldome, 
 and withall so great an advancement of Reformation both in 
 Church and State." ^ 
 
 1 Milton says in his Defence of the Feople of England, the Scots " preferred 
 the king before their religion, their liberty, and that very celebrated ecclesiastical 
 covenant of theirs." Frose Works. John's ediiwn, i, 191. " The Independents, 
 as they are called, were the only men that, from first to last, kept to their point,' 
 and knew what use to make of their victory." Jbid. 193. 
 
 2 Tke Way of\ Congregational \ Churches \ cleared: \ In two Treatises. \ In the 
 former \ From the Historical Aspersions- of Mr. \ Robert Baylie, in his Book, \ 
 
91 
 
 Compare with these sober words and tone of modest triumph, 
 Milton's poetic strain : — 
 
 " What numbers of faithful and freeborn Englishmen, and good Chris- 
 tians, have been constrained to forsake their dearest home, their friends 
 and kindred, whom nothing but the wide ocean, and the savage deserts of 
 America, could hide and shelter from the fury of the bishops ? O, sir, if 
 we could but see the shape of our dear motlier England, as poets are wont 
 to give a personal form to what they please, how would she appear, think 
 ye, but in a mourning weed, with ashes upon her head, and tears abun- 
 dantly flowing from her eyes, to behold so many of her children exposed 
 at once, and thrust from things of dearest necessity, because their con- 
 science could not assent to things which the bishops thought indifferent. 
 What more binding than conscience ? What more free than indifferency ? 
 . . . There cannot be a more ill-boding sign to a nation (God turn the 
 omen from us !), than when the inhabitants, to avoid insufferable grievances 
 at home, are enforced by heaps to forsake their native country." * 
 
 Thus the genius of Milton glowingly portrays the birth and 
 exodus of New England from the old home. 
 
 Mr. Carlyle portrays, in his way, the character and achieve- 
 ments of New England's Apostle of Independency : — 
 
 " Reverend John Cotton is a man still held in some remembrance among 
 our New-England friends. He had been Minister of Boston in Lincoln- 
 shire ; carried the name across the Ocean with him ; fixed it upon a new 
 small Home he had found there, — which has become a large one since ; 
 the big busy Capital of Massachusetts, Boston, so called. John Cotton 
 his Mark, very curiously stamped on the face of this Planet ; likely to 
 
 continue for some time ! For the rest, a painful Preacher, oracular of 
 
 high Gospels to New [and old] England ; who in his day was well seen to 
 be connected with the Supreme Powers of this Universe, the word of him 
 being as a live-coal to the hearts of many. He died some years after- 
 wards [1652, Dec. 23] ;— was thought, especially on his death bed, to have 
 manifested gifts even of Prophecy,^— a thing not inconceivable to the 
 human mind that well considers Prophecy and John Cotton." ' 
 
 called [^ I Disswasive from the, Errors of the Tinie.'\ \ In the latter. From some 
 Contradictions \ of \ Vindicae Clavium: \ And from Some Mis-constructions of 
 Learned Mr. | Rutherford in his Book intituled {The \ due Rights of Presbyteries.'] \ 
 By Mr. John Cotton, sometime Preacher at Boston \ in Lincolne-shire, and now 
 Teacher of \ the Church at Boston, in \ New England \ London, | Priiited by Mat- 
 thew Simmons, for John Bellamie, \ at the signe of the three Golden-Lions, | tn 
 Cornhill, 1648. | See pages 102, 22, 103. 
 
 1 Of Reformation in England in Prose Works. Bohn's Ed. ii, 399. 
 
 2ThurIoe,i, 586; inl6S3. 
 
 ^Oliver CromwelVs Letters and Speeches : with Elucidations by Thomas Carlyle. 
 Letter clxxxiv. 
 
92 
 
 Mr. Hutchinson, the historian of Massachusetts, says, 1764: 
 "There came over amongst many others in this year, 1633, 
 Mr. Haynes, of the civil order ; Mr. Cotton, Mr. Hooker, and 
 Mr. Stone, three of the most famous men of the religious 
 order ; " and adds : " Mr. Cotton is supposed to have been 
 more instrumental in the settlement of their civil as well as eccle- 
 siastical polity, than any other person!' On the authority of a 
 MS. letter of Mr. Samuel Whiting, he states that " Mr. Cot- 
 ton's removal was hastened by letters missive which were out 
 against him to convent him before the high commission court 
 for non-conformity. His friends advised him to keep close 
 until he had an opportunity of embarking." 1 
 
 Now listen to the exultation of the Pilgrims : " Full litle did 
 I thinke," writes Bradford, " y' the downfall of y* Bishops, with 
 their courts, cannons, & ceremonies, &c., had been so neare. 
 . . . Doe you not now see y* fruits of your labours, O all yee 
 servants of y' Lord that have suffered for his truth, and have 
 been faithfull witneses of y' same, and yee litle handfuU amongst 
 ' f- rest, y least amongest y^ thousands of Israll } You have 
 not only had a seede time, but many of you have scene y' joye- 
 fuU harvest ; should you not then rejoyse, yea, and againe re- 
 joyce, and say Hallelu-iah, salvation, and glorie, and honour, 
 and power, be to y= Lord our God ; for true and righteous are 
 his judgments. Rev. 19. i, 2. But thou wilte aske what is 
 y' mater } What is done ? Why, art thou a stranger in Israll, 
 that thou shouldest not know what is done } Are not those 
 Jebusites overcome that have vexed the people of Israll so long, 
 . . . those proud Anaikimes are throwne downe, and their glorie 
 laid in y' dust. The tiranous bishops are ejected, their courts 
 dissolved, their cannons forceless, their servise casheired, their 
 ceremonies uselese and despised ; their plots for popery pre- 
 vented, and all their superstitions discarded & returned to 
 Roome from whence they came, and y« monuments of idolatrie 
 rooted out of y' land. And the proud and profane suporters, 
 and cruel defenders of these (as bloody papists & wicked 
 athists, and their malignante consorts) marvelously over- 
 throwne. Are not these great things ? Who can deny it > 
 
 1 Hist, of Massachusetts, Ei 1795, i, 37, 165. Hutchinsmi Papers, 243-249. 
 
93 
 
 "But who hath done it? Who, even he that sitteth on 
 y white horse, who is caled faithful!, & true, and judgeth and 
 fighteth righteously, Rev: 19. ii. . . . The King of Kings, 
 and Lord of Lords, v. 15, 16. Hallelu-iah. Anno Dom : 
 1646." 
 
 The principle of Independency which Cotton stated so 
 clearly, and which Robinson and he defended with so much 
 learning, and of which their disciples were the historical vindi- 
 cators at the cost of everything but manhood, is both the 
 foundation and the key-stone of American civil polity, is em- 
 bodied in every American Constitution, and forms the sub- 
 stance of American protest against European polities. It is 
 the ultimate principle for which Hampden, Russell, and Sidney 
 died, and for which nominal Christendom has blindly endured 
 centuries of fearful strife and bloody anarchy. 
 
 The Plymouth Church was a community of citizens ; that 
 community was a democracy, civil and religious, a town,^ a 
 commonwealth, the mother of like towns and commonwealths 
 which in constitutional union, elected delegates or representa- 
 tives, and so a republic grew up. Plymouth was the germ, the 
 National Republic the fruit. The facts require a stronger 
 statement than that of De Tocqueville, that the democratic 
 and republican polity of the Pilgrims contributed powerfully 
 to the' establishment of a republic and a democracy in public 
 affairs, for it created the republic. 
 
 It was a fatal blunder of the British ministry to attempt to 
 interfere with, to " regulate " the New England town-meeting, 
 and it probably quickened ^ " the Boston movement to unite 
 all the towns in the province, with an ultimate view to a simi- 
 lar union of the colonies." This was approved by the legisla- 
 ture of Virginia and immediately extended over all the colo- 
 
 1 The municipality in New England was the simplest of all municipal forms 
 and the best adapted to develope the republican idea. . . . The rise of this system 
 in the thirteen colonies which became the United States, shows how the republi- 
 can idea, from the first, undermined feudalism at its root ... It was the pri- 
 mordial unit in which the republican idea was embodied at the time of the Declara- 
 tion of Independence. — Hon. Richard Frothingham in Proceedings of the Ameri- 
 can AnHquarian Society. October, 1870, 19, 31, 38. See also Mr. Tudor's admir- 
 able reflections in Life of fames Otis. 1823. 443-4S'- 
 
 2 Arnold's Hist. Rhode Island, ii, 324. 
 
94 
 
 nies. . . . Rhode Island was the first to follow the example of 
 Virginia in electing a committee of correspondence. 
 
 So- the gerininal principle of Pilgrim polity pervades the 
 history of American liberty. Rejecting the proposed consti- 
 tution of 1 778, because it oqly " allowed " and did not affirm 
 the inalienable rights of conscience, and not content with a 
 general statement of the rights of man, the people reiterate 
 with emphasis and in various forms the guarantees of religious 
 freedom. One ^ of them is that " the several religious societies 
 of this Commonwealth, whether corporate or unincorporate . . . 
 shall ever have the right to elect their pastors or religious 
 teachers, to contract with them for their support," etc. This is 
 a crucible for all organic political error, the radix from which 
 springs all other guarantees of the Constitution ; it is the soul 
 of the Constitution. 
 
 We return to the testimony of the enemies of New England. 
 
 Mr. Edwards, the Presbyterian,^ styles " Master Peters,^ the 
 Vicar General and Metropolitan of the Independents, both in 
 New and Old England ... the Solicitor General for the Sec- 
 taries [the Independents] who came out of New England about 
 four years and four months ago, concerning whose preaching 
 . . . and proceedings in city and country I could write a whole 
 book. ... This man is an ubiquitary here and there, in this 
 country and in that country, in the army and at London. 
 Whenever the Independents or some other Sectaries are about 
 any great design or business, he must be sent for though from 
 the army. . . . Now that their design for a toleration hath 
 lately been more vigorously prosecuted ... I am persuaded 
 
 ^ Const, of Mass., Art. XI, Amend' ts. In the Girard case, Mr. Webster de- 
 clared that the American precedent of a voluntary support of religion under free 
 institutions, without any established order, " will in time to come shake all the 
 hierarchies of Europe." 
 
 2 Edwards' Gangraena. 1646, Pt. i, 214; ii, 61. 
 
 ' While this proof is in hand, I have found two signatures of Mr. Peters in 
 Thane's British Autography, ii, 54, one of 1643, and one of 1653, in both of which 
 he uses the final s. Thane's portrait of Mr. Peters "from an original dra.ving" 
 closely resembles the more finished and expressive face in the collection of nine 
 medallions facing a pamphlet of 1715 : " Popery and Schism equally dangerous to 
 the Church of England." The central figure, Ignatius Loyola, with " ConsHtu- 
 tiones Societatis Jesu," in hand, is surrounded by Tho : Heth, F. Commin, J. Knox, 
 Garnet, Parsons, H. Peters, D. BUiin^uis, and Wm. Penn. 
 
95 
 
 Mr. Peters' late coming up from the Army hath to do with 
 
 that He is so bold, daring and active for the sectaries 
 
 . . . that when he had express letters . . . without all excuse 
 or longer delay to come to New England . . . there were meet- 
 ings of several Independent ministers (of the Grandees) to 
 consult and resolve this case of Conscience . . . the result 
 was that Mr. Peters being so useful a man here he should not 
 go, but stay in England , . . if twenty Churches sent for him." 
 Edwards complains that " there is hardly a noted Sectary in 
 the Kingdom or out of New England, Holland," who has not 
 some office or position of respect — and can no way abide the 
 Independency and other opinions which, "first broached in 
 New England, have come over into old." He denounces 
 " Master John Bachiler, Licenser Generall of the Sectaries' 
 books and of all sorts of wicked opinions," of which he has 
 found I "jS, and says " many more might be added," especially 
 for his licensing the reprint of Leonard Busher's^ treatise of 
 1614, pleading that it " may be lawful to write, dispute, confer, 
 print and publish any matter touching religion, either for or 
 against whomsoever," and that Bachiler's " wickedness may the 
 more appear," he had ordered the passages for Toleration should 
 be printed in " great letters." He concludes, " I am afraid that 
 if the Devill himself should make a book, and give it the title, 
 'A Plea for Liberty of Conscience,' with certain reasons 
 against persecution for religion, and bring it to Mr. Bachiler, 
 he would license it, and not only with a bare imprimatur but 
 set before it the commendation of A Useful Treatise, of A 
 sweet and excellent booke, making for love and peace among 
 brethren ; or some such discourse." {Gangraena, Part HI, ii, 
 36, 103, 242.) For example, Mr. Cotton's " Way of Congrega- 
 tional Churches Cleared" bears the following, "The worthy 
 name of the Reverend and Learned Author of this Treatise 
 
 1 In 1609, five years before Busher's tract, Mr. Jacob had published "An Hum- 
 ble Supplication for Toleration, and Liberty to enjoy and observe the Ordinances 
 of Jesus Christ in the administration of His Churches in lieu of human Consti- 
 tutions," and in "A Declaration" written in 161 1, with admirable clearness he 
 says, — "where each ordinary congregation giveth their free consent in their own 
 government, there certainly each congregation is an entire and Independent 
 body-politic, and indued with power immediately under and from Christ, as every 
 proper Church is, and ought to be " ! — Hanbury's Independents, i, 224-231. 
 
96 
 
 (which with delight I have perused) is ai sufficient argument to 
 perswade, not onely to the reading of it, but also to a beliefe 
 and expectation of something Excellent therein. Imprimatur, 
 Jan. 7, 1647 [8]. John Bachiler." 
 
 In the prefatory matter of his " three fold discourse," pub- 
 lished in 165 1, on "The Inconsistencie of the Independent way" 
 Mr. Cawdrey, a member of the Westminster Assembly, says 
 of Mr. Cotton and Mr. Hooker, " It is.some mens happinesse^ 
 . . . that write they (or preach they) . . . they finde some 
 admirers to cry them up, all their words as Oracles, and all 
 their works as Wonders." ... Mr. Cotton's " Way Cleared . . . 
 and other Books of that Way published, were highly esteemed 
 as unanswerable, and very taking with weak and unsetled mindes, 
 to the disturbance of the peace of the [Presbyterian] Church ; 
 . . . especially that Reverend and Learned Mr. Hooker's Survey 
 of Church-Discipline, which I heard most magnified, as the 
 strongest piece of that Way" and Mr. Cawdrey confesses 
 himself "provoked by the importunate and reiterated recog- 
 nition of those Tracts, those Models (as they call them) of the 
 Church- Way." 
 
 He denounce's "the new pretended principle of Christian 
 Liberty or liberty of conscience. . . . under the Name, Shadow, 
 and Shelter of Independency (as another Trojan horse) .... 
 to open a door to as many divisions as there are Churches, 
 none having any power beyond their own Church : whereby all 
 Religion, all Heresies, may be tolerated, and none can hinder it 
 . . . every man hath liberty to propagate his own erroneous 
 notions, and every man takes the License to hear whom he likes 
 best, as most agreeable to his own opinion . . . seeking and 
 trying all the new waies of religion ... all sorts of men . . . 
 like well of and comply with the Independent way, as granting 
 more liberty than the Presbyterian will." He bewails " the 
 miserable rents and divisions, the errors and heresies and blas- 
 phemies broken out in this Church of England, since their way 
 got footing and countenance here . . . the many mischievous 
 consequences of those principles, and sad effects of the prac- 
 
 ' Baylie writes from London, Dec. 7, 1643, " My pamphlets do not sell. Have 
 V bpught up some of my Laudensium and Parallels hither, but for [to] no purpose." 
 — Letter No. 39. 
 
97 
 
 tice of the Independent way in Old England, fully manifested 
 in these last few years "... found to be so dangerous to Pres- 
 byterian rule, and threatening its utter dissolution. 
 
 Mr. Cawdrey addresses his remonstrance particularly " to 
 the Reverend Author . . . Mr. John Cotton ... as a Leader to 
 many (such is the respect to his person) . . . and authority . . . 
 in reputation for learning and holinesse." 
 
 " Happy were it for Old England" exclaims the unhappy 
 Cawdrey, "if our Dissenting Brethren would hearken betimes. 
 . . . Little did we think, that those who outstood the Sabbati- 
 cal profanations of the Prelates, their reproaches and scoffs . . . 
 would have so soon declined upon a new pretended principle 
 of Christian Liberty, or Liberty of Conscience . . . but . . . 
 the Sun (of Toleration) can make the Traveller . . . cast aside 
 his garment, which the stormy windes (of persecution) could 
 not do." 
 
 Such was the work of New England in Old England. The 
 testimony is unimpeachable, the reproach has become a tribute. 
 
 " It had been happy for England" says the dejected Baylie, 
 " that Master Cotton had taken longer time for deliberation 
 before that change of his minde. . . . God in wisedom permits 
 his dearest children to set black marks on their own faces. . . . 
 I would not willingly detract from any man's reputation . . . 
 yet when his gifts are turned into snares ... as his eminent 
 endowments are strong invitations to run after him ; so the 
 mixture of clear weaknesse may be ... a caveat from God, to 
 beware of his wayes, as well as of any other mans." 
 
 Edwards charges Mr. Hugh Peters "with improving his 
 whole time in preaching against the Presbyterian government 
 and for a toleration of all sects." 
 
 And Peter does seem to have been almost everywhere. With 
 the Earl of Warwick at the siege of Lynn, in 1644 ; in 1645, 
 with Lord Fairfax at the capture of Bridgewater, for the news 
 of which and with thanks for his universal services he was 
 rewarded by Parliament, and so he continued in great influence 
 with the generals, and Parliament.^ 
 
 1 The gist of Mr. Thomas Goodwin's sermon before Parliament " at their late 
 solemn/<M/, Feb. 25, 1645," was that "they do and will differ in judgment . . . 
 the Apostles could not prevent it . . . let us not judge one another any more . . . 
 13 
 
98 
 
 In his " Last Report," 1646, he says, " Teach the peasants to 
 understand liberty." " It is one of the greatest interests of 
 the state to keep war at a distance." " Wrangling is none of 
 our proper work." 
 
 Mr. Baylie ' said, " Of all the by-paths wherein the wander- 
 ers of our time are pleased to walk, this [of Independency] is 
 the most considerable. . . . There be few of the noted Sects 
 which are not a great deal more numerous ; but this Way, 
 what it wants in number, supplies by the weight of its follow- 
 ers." After five years endeavours and great industry the In- 
 dependents were less than 1000 in number, men and women 
 included, but " of so eminent a condition, that not any nor all 
 the rest of the Sects are comparable to them ; for they have 
 been so wise as to engage to their party some of chief note, in 
 both Houses of ParUament, in the Assemby of Divines, in the 
 Army, in the City and Countrey-Committees ; all whom they 
 daily manage with such dexterity and diligence, for the benefit 
 of their Cause, that the eyes of the world begin to fall upon 
 them more than upon all their fellows." Lord Clarendon, to 
 the same point, says, " The Independents [Divines] were more 
 learned and rational than the Presbyterians ; and though they 
 had not so great congregations of the common people, yet 
 they affected and were followed by the most substantial and 
 wealthy citizens, as well as by others of better condition." 
 
 Thus it appears that except to the Independents — and they 
 were only a handful — the idea of a State without a Religion, 
 — a state-religion — was a thing incredible, anarchical, and 01 
 such monstrous impiety as to provoke divine wrath and ven- 
 geance. Milton's lines " on the new Forcers of Conscience un- 
 der the Long Parliament," represents the position of things 
 just then : — 
 
 and so end all the quarrels." . . . Christ "will not rest till such time as he hath 
 made us one, if not in judgment, yet in forbearance . . . and we shall be made 
 to do it one way or another." Even so, Mr. Goodwin. In his " Good work for a 
 good magistrate," 1651, p. 34, Mr. Peters puts first among the "Rules of Justice," 
 "None can be free of great injustice, who by persecution for religion take awaie 
 libertie of conscience from anie, whose principles or practises are not dangerous 
 to the government, Peace, Proprietie, and Commonwealth ; if they otherwise 
 live but civilly. For as God himself, so his Vicegerent the Magistrate must cause 
 his Sun to shine, and his rain to fall both upon good and bad." 
 ' '^Dissuasive," chap, iii, pp. 52, 53, 90. 
 
99 
 
 " Because you have thrown off your Prelate lord. 
 And with stiff vows renounced his liturgy, 
 To seize the widow'd whore Plurality 
 From them whose sin ye envied, not abhorr'd. 
 Dare ye for this adjure the civil sword 
 To force our consciences that Christ set free, 
 And ride us with a classic hierarchy 
 Taught ye by mere A. S. and Rotherford ? 
 Men whose life, learning, faith and pure intent, 
 Would have been held in high esteem with Paul, 
 Must now be named and printed Heretics, 
 By shallow Edwards and Scotch what-d'ye-call : 
 But we [Independents] do hope to find out all your tricks, 
 Your plots and packings worse than those of Trent. 
 
 New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ large." 
 
 The two great sects, Presbyterians and Episcopalians, were 
 " a-fighting for the crown," each eager to grasp the sword of 
 the bigot ; yet, out of the usual course in which popular will 
 or apathy is the assumed basis of government, the Indepen- 
 dents, without a party, but energized by the supremacy of a 
 divine idea, took the reins of authority ; and the brief period 
 of their rule, conceded to be the noblest in English history, yet 
 sheds its beneficent influence over the world. Europe studies 
 the lesson to-day. In a letter to the Magistrates of Massa- 
 chusetts in 1671, Dr. John Owen, Philip Nye, and the dissent- 
 ing clergy of London commend Harvard College as a " school 
 of the prophets," some of whom, " God hath used for service 
 to himself in both Englands." Of the twenty graduates prior 
 to 1646, twelve went to Europe, eleven of whom never returned 
 to New England.^ 
 
 George Downing, of the first class, 1642, before mentioned, 
 was chaplain to the regiment of the terrible John Okey, — Car- 
 lyle's "fierce colonel and zealous Anabaptist," — whose "thou- 
 sand dragoons were always counted," says Markham,^ "the 
 best men in the army" of the great Lord Fairfax, and did their 
 full share at Naseby, June 14, 1645. There is a report of his 
 sermon at Hackney, Aug. 16, 1646, in which he is called 
 " Master Downing, Preacher to the Army, alias Hugh Peters, 
 
 1 Quincy's Hist, of Harvard College, i, i6. 
 
 2 Life of Fairfax, p. 148. 
 
lOO 
 
 junior, young Peters he was called," ^ Cromwell's Scout-JVlaster, 
 General head of the intelligence department ; he sat in three 
 of Oliver's parliaments and was a frequent speaker on religious 
 questions. In the House of Commons he confessed he had 
 been a minister, when Major-General Whalley called on him to 
 serve in the casual absence of the morning Chaplain. In the 
 next December he was sent as the Protector's agent to the 
 United Provinces of Holland, to whom Milton commended 
 him as " a person of eminent quality, and after a long trial of 
 his fidelity, probity and diligence in several and various ' nego- 
 tiations, well approved and valued ... in our knowledge and 
 esteem." 
 
 In the Fall of 1643 Mr. Roger Williams revisited England. 
 His companions on the Sempringham Road, Cotton and 
 Hooker, had come up to his position and " durst not join in 
 the use of the Common Prayer." Their correspondence and 
 writings were doing brave work for the truth in England. 
 But as Cotton thought it " no disgrace to change either judg- 
 ment or practice ^ upon better information, so Williams him- 
 self had gone up higher,^ and the old New England friend- 
 ship with Sir Henry Vane was quickened anew in their in- 
 trepid devotion to the great cause, despite opprobrium and 
 obloquy, caring not for " the argument of multitudes and num- 
 bers against one." 
 
 Not long after appeared his Queries of Highest Considera- 
 tion, presented to Parliament, which Dr. Orme ranks with 
 Robinson's Justification of Separation from the Church of 
 England, 1639, as containing " the most accurate statements 
 
 1 Edwards' " Gangraena," iii, 8 1. 
 
 2 Narragamett Club Pub. ii, 40. To Mr. Baylie's " unsavory metaphor of my 
 distaste of Episcopall government," Mr. Cotton replied, "Conscientious judg- 
 ment in matters of religion is not led by taste or distaste : will he say, that both 
 the Parliaments of England and Scotland have abolished Episcopal government 
 upon a distaste?" Way Cleared, p. 19. Mr. Cotton was not of that pliant class 
 which is fertile in expedient and apology, but inquired for principles and funda- 
 mental law. 
 
 ' Prof. Diman's note is conclusive that Mr. Williams laid " no special emphasis 
 on liberty of conscience" while in Massachusetts, but that, "like every great 
 1 eader of opinion, he reached by degrees his owrn conclusion." Preface to Cot- 
 ton's Answer to R. Williams in Publications of the Narragansett Club, ii, 58. 
 
lOI 
 
 on the distinct provinces of civil and spiritual authority." 
 " If," said Williams, " the Honorable Houses . . . shall erect 
 a spirituall court for the judging of spiritual men, and spir- 
 itual causes (although a new name be put upon it, yet), whether 
 or no such a court is not, in the true nature and kind of it, an 
 High Commission." ^ 
 
 At the very same time Milton in his " Areopagitica ; or, A 
 Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing ; addressed to 
 the Parliament of England" 1644, said, " If it come* to inquisi- 
 tioning again, and licensing, and that we are so timorous of 
 ourselves and suspicious of all men, as to fear each book, and 
 the shaking of each leaf, before we know what the contents 
 are ; if some [Presbyterians] who but of late were little better 
 than silenced [by the bishops] from preaching, shall now come 
 to silence us from reading, except what they please, it cannot 
 be guessed what is intended by some, but a second tyranny 
 over learning : and will soon put it out of controversy, that 
 bishops and presbyters are the same to us, both name and 
 thing." Williams and Milton were intimate, and this coinci- 
 dence of thought and language is interesting. 
 
 When Sir Henry Vane secured the alliance of the Scots, in 
 1643, by the League and Covenant, he put in use the lesson 
 learned in Mr. John Cotton's study, and insisted on the inser- 
 tion of the words, " according to the Word of God," which 
 was a reservation of freedom of conscience ^ and opinion, fatal 
 to Presbyterian pretension, but fully appreciated by them only 
 at a later day and to their infinite disgust. For example : 
 "It was not in our thoughts or intentions," Rutherford pro- 
 tested in 1648, — "your Independencies and separations, your 
 Schismes, Atheistical and Epicurean tenets of toleration of all 
 sects, religions, false ways, your Antinomians, Familists, 
 Socinians, Arminians, Arrians, Antitrinitarians, Antiscriptu- 
 arians, Seekers, Anabaptists ; all of which I cannot but judge 
 to bee yours, because you are so farre from writing against 
 them." Poor Mr. Rutherford ! 
 
 1 In the Publications of the Narragansett Club, ii, 241-276. 
 
 2 John Cook of Gray's Inne Barrister, in his tract What the Independents would 
 have, 1647, says that " to be as free to choose their own company, place, and time, 
 with whom, where and when to worship God . . . will satisfie all that go under 
 the name of Independents." p. 2. 
 
'/ 
 
 I02 
 
 But the political pendulum backward swung ; and with 
 beatifications of Charles the Martyr for religion, Nell Gwyn 
 for morals, Rochester for letters, JefTeries and Scroggs for jus- 
 tice, unconditional obedience for the people and divine right 
 for the king and his " creatures," " shop- keeping " ethics for Par- 
 liament, John Bunyan in jail, Russell and Algernon Sidney on 
 the scaifold, Monarchy and Anglo-Catholicism supplanted the 
 Commonwealth, at the cost of all that noble minds hold dear, 
 and England went — on her way to the inevitable Revolution 
 of 168^. 
 
 Though Mr. Godwin, the historian of the Commonwealth,^ 
 limits the sway of the Republican party to the period closing at 
 the Rbstoration, and dated its final extinction at the Revolution 
 of 1688, its spirit flourished with unabated vigor in the Ameri- 
 can colonies, successfully resisting the slavish fanaticism of 
 loyalty which revoked the healthy legislation of the Common- 
 wealth and defaced the statute-book with acts which disgraced 
 the nation, and whose story is one of the darkest in cruelty 
 and shame. 
 
 No duty can be presented to the American historian more 
 agreeable, more a theme for generous exiltation, than that of 
 tracing and illustrating the irrepressible spirit of colonial inde- 
 pendence,* from the day of the contemptuous turning of the 
 Pilgrims from the English court without a royal protection, — 
 typical of the whole political history of the country, — to the 
 admission of the American ambassador at the same court in 
 1785. 
 
 And in the same pages England may read the story of the 
 vindication of her own liberties, the freedom of her own con- 
 stitution, — nay, more : it was Charles James Fox who, in the 
 House of Commons, declared that " the re sistance of the 
 Americans to the oppression of the mother country has im- 
 doubtedly preserved the liberties of mankind." 
 
 In fifty years after the landing at Plymouth, England was in 
 great trepidation about her colonies. Evelyn reports that 
 
 1 Vol. i, p. 6. 
 
 2 Mr. Walsh's Appeal, Sections i, ii, vi, — a work which should be repub- 
 lished with a supplementary volume on the same plan, on the relation of England 
 to the United States in the late civil war, —with an index. 
 
103 
 
 there were long debates in the royal council in 1670 and 1671, 
 whether New England was " of such power, as to be able to 
 resist his Majesty, and declare for themselves as independent 
 of the Crown, . . . appearing to be very independent as to 
 their regard to Old England, or his Majesty, rich and strong 
 as they now were . . . there was fear of their breaking from 
 all dependence upon this nation," and it was deemed prudent 
 not to send, for fear of resistance, " a few of his Majestie's 
 first-class fregats " but a deputy with an open commission and 
 — secret instructions. ^ In his journal of August, 1676, the 
 worthy minister, Mr. Robert Law, says that New England " re- 
 fused to own the King of Britain as their King ; only in com- 
 memoration of their coming out of England, they now and 
 then send him a free gift." ^ 
 
 By temperate life New England so increased, that in 1745, 
 with " Nil Desperandutn, Christo Duce " on her flag, she dealt 
 a fatal blow to French dominion in America, and gave peace 
 to Europe.^ But listen to Colonel Barre in the House of 
 Commons, October 25, 1775 : " To a mind that loves to con- 
 template the glorious spirit of freedom, no spectacle can be 
 more affecting than the action at Bunker Hill . . . inspired by 
 that genius of liberty which is the noblest emotion of the 
 heart, which it is impossible to conquer, impracticable to dis- 
 miss. . . . Who can reflect on such scenes," he exclaimed, " and 
 r.ot adore the constitution of government which could breed 
 such men .' " 
 
 Sir Richard Sutton, in the same House, said, " If you ask an 
 American who is his master, he will tell you he has none ; nor 
 any governor but Jesus Christ," and the Pilgrims of 1620 but 
 echo back the sentiment. 
 
 We have endeavored to show the origin and the mission 01 
 the Mayflower. The feverish ages of ignorance, superstition, 
 and bigotry, of intolerance and persecution, make up the som- 
 bre background for the Pilgrims, who, on the open Bible, 
 hold out to us and to mankind their luminous scroll of consti- 
 tutional liberty, November 21, 1620 : 
 
 " They came not for themselves alone, they came for all mankind." 
 
 1 Diary, 59-61, 68, Ed. 1854, ii, 59-61- 
 
 2 Walsh's Apptal, 54, 75. 
 
 8 Dr. Usher Parsons' Li/e of Pepperdl, 52, 145. Universal History, xxi, 157, 51. 
 
I04 
 
 The Pilgrim heritage is incorporated into the Constitution 
 of the United States of America, in these words : "Article I. 
 Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of 
 religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ; or abridging 
 the freedom of speech, or of the press ; or the right of the 
 people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government 
 for redress of grievances." 
 
 Out of this all the rest comes as naturally as the flower 
 from the calyx. 
 
 " And still their spirit, in their sons, with freedom walks abroad ; 
 The Bible is our only creed, our only sovereign, GOD ! 
 The hand is raised, the word is spoke, the joyful pledge is given, 
 And boldly on our banner floats, in the free air of heaven. 
 The motto of our sainted sires ; and loud we '11 maJce it ring, — 
 A Church without a Bishop, and a State without a King ! " 
 
 The Pilgrim colony — the people living under their system 
 of government — has become a great nation, and time, the 
 test of truth, is giving in its verdict, abroad as well as at home, 
 in official statistics as well as in the more delicate tokens, 
 often 
 
 " strong as proof from Holy Writ." 
 
 Among the historical panels in the House of Lords, one, 
 devoted to " The Pilgrim Fathers Landing in New England," 
 is, we venture to assert, in the light of this investigation, the 
 most appropriate of any in the modern history of England 
 herself 
 
 Expressive of the same revolution in opinion and feeling 
 was the graceful tribute to Mr. John Cotton, — two hundred 
 and twenty-five years after his escape from hierarchal persecu- 
 tion, — in a memorial tablet of brass to his memory, fixed in 
 " Cotton Chapel " in the old Boston Church, " in order that the 
 name of an illustrious man, the love and honor of both worlds, 
 might not any longer be banished from that noble temple." 
 This was in 1857. It was the occasion for the new Bishop of 
 Lincoln's first official act, and Laud's successor, the Bishop of 
 London, joined in the homage. 
 
 Fitly and closely following this, Parliament ordered an 
 
105 
 
 expurgated prayer-book, omitting the statutory worship of 
 " Charles the Martyr," whose " royal blood " till then " cried to 
 heaven every thirtieth of January for judgment, only to be 
 averted by salt fish and egg sauce," and suppressing the annual 
 fast, in which the Tyrant's' death was spoken of as a sort of dei- 
 cide, and compared to the death of our Saviour. Submission 
 and obedience, clean absolute, and without exception, was the 
 " badge " and character of the Church of England. " We can 
 form no adequate conception," says Hallam, " of the jeopardy 
 in which our liberties stood under the Stuarts . . without 
 attending to this spirit of servility." ^ After one hundred and 
 ninety-nine years of this burlesque sacrament of political 
 slavery, it was repealed, as it had been created, by Act of 
 Parliament ; and as if to emphasize the removal of this stigma 
 from the ecclesiastical calendar, by the same authority Crom- 
 well is raised to his own historical niche, and fact triumphs 
 over fiction, truth over falsehood. 
 
 We have not space to allude to the social and material results, 
 the religious, moral, and aesthetic, the origin or rapid develop- ' 
 ment of whicfi the philosophic historian will trace to the in- 
 fluences growing out of the event we celebrate ; but enough has 
 been told of the men of 1620, their doctrines and work, to 
 show that 
 
 " We have need of these 
 Clear beacon stars, to warn and guide our age ; 
 The great traditions of a nation's life, 
 Her children's lustrous deeds, with honor rife. 
 Are her most precious jewels, noblest heritage, 
 Time-polisht jewels in her diadem." 
 
 ' John Bradshaw (a name which will be repeated with applause wherever 
 liberty is cherished or is known) was sprung from a noble family. To a profound 
 knowledge of the law, he added the most comprehensive views, the most generous 
 sentiments, manners the most obliging and the most pure. And his glory is much 
 exalted above that of all other tyrannicides, as it is both more humane, more just, 
 and more strikingly grand, judicially to condemn a tyrant, than to put him to 
 death without a trial." Milton's The Second Defence of the People of Etigland. 
 
 * Macaulay's Rev. of Hallani's Const. Hist, of Eng. Jonathan Mayhew's Dis- 
 course on Charles Firsfs Death, in Pulpit of Am. Revolution.