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CHAPTER THE FOURTH.

WEIGHTS AND MEASURES OF CONDUCT.

I.

The aristocratic conception in morals

In recent times the preconception that gives its color to moral judgment is the belief in an equality of rights for all. To do justice to the weak, to defend the helpless, to free the enthralled—this, in a nutshell, is the moral passion of the present age; a passion which sometimes obscures other phases of human duty. But when English settlers first broke ground in the New World the prevalent notions of life and obligation were everywhere monarchical and aristocratic. Primary duties were to those above you—to God, to the king, to the magistrate, to the social superior. Special privileges and exemptions rightfully belonged to the man of high birth and official position; worship and authority were theirs by divine right. “Noble or Gentlemen,” says the author of The Compleat Gentleman, “ought to be prefered in Fees, Honors, Offices, and other dignities of command and government, before the common people.” This was the voice of the age, which even thought that rank exempted its possessor from challenge when he cheated or bore false witness. “We ought to give credit to a Noble or Gentleman before any

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of the inferior sort. He must not be arrested or pleaded against on Cosenage.” The intrusions of gentlefolk with hawk or hound into the fields of poor men were not to be resisted, however ruinous they might be. “They ought to take their recreations of hunting and hawking, etc., freely without controul in all places.” This rather abject reverence for superiors extended to domestic life. The shining virtue of a wife was obedience; resistance to a husband was rebellion against God.[1] The son served his parents in menial subjection; in some houses he was required to attend them at table as a servant. He was often sent to play serving man to some greater kinsman, in order to learn the etiquette of subjection to superiors. When the well-trained lad encountered his father or mother he did them reverence and said, “Sir,”or “Madam, I crave your blessing.” In such an age it was easy for New England lawgivers to revert to the severity of the Mosaic law against disobedient children. Harsh penalties were denounced against “child or servant convict of any stubborne or rebellious caridge against their parents or governors,” and incorrigibleness was “adjudged to be a sin of death” by Puritan lawmakers.[2]

II.

Reverence for rank.

Not only reverence for parents and masters, but the sentiment of reverence for rank was brought to America, and cherished as an inseparable element

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of piety. Subordination to social superiors was accounted the only basis of order. Distinctions were nicely marked; it has been estimated that of the emigrants to New England before 1649, about one in fourteen was entitled to the prefix of “Mr.,” the rest were called simply “Goodman So-and-so.”[1] Harvard students took their place in the catalogue according to the social position of their parents as appraised by the academic authorities, and the lad of humbler birth yielded the baluster side of the stairs to one conventionally his superior. The seats in New England meeting-houses were formally “dignified,” a process by which their relative value as a mark of rank was fixed, and it was then decided by carefully weighing against one another the various offices in town and church and trainband, as well as by comparison of estates, who should sit in the places of honor. Social aspirants seeking to advance themselves by intruding into seats higher than those assigned to them, created disturbance in the meeting-house, and their ambitions had to be repressed by fines. In the Chesapeake colonies emblems of rank were sometimes attached to the pew of a governor or other officer, and the great families of the parish—those from whom justices of the peace and vestrymen were chosen—were wont to lend the countenance of good society to divine worship from exclusive pews perched high in the gallery under the roof, like swallows’ nests, or placed at some point of conspicuity on the floor below. For

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humble people to dress “above their degree” was clearly sinful, because “they that wear soft clothing are in kings’ houses,” according to Scripture. So declared the New England Synod of 1679, which stigmatized the rising of a democratic spirit at that time as “a refusing to be subject to order, according to Divine Appointment.” It was even in accordance with the notions of the time that the scales of justice should slant a little toward a plaintiff or defendant of dignity, and a high-born felon did not lose the benefit of his birth. In Maryland, for example, the criminal of quality was to be beheaded according to English precedent, and not hanged like a vulgar rogue, while Massachusetts politely refused to send “any true gentleman” to the whipping-post.

In the colonies generally the dignity of a ruler was guarded like the ark of the Lord, and a spectacular show of reverence was made to judges and governors by means of escorts of gentlemen or sergeants with halberds. Criticism of magistrates in the early colonial period was little less than blasphemy. Pitiful was the case of a Mrs. Oliver, whose opinions were too large for a narrow time. Publicly whipped for reproaching the Massachusetts magistrates, this brave woman of rare gifts bore her cruel chastisement without binding. Years afterward her animadversions on the clergy were cleverly refuted by pinching her tongue for half an hour between the forks of a cleft stick. A poor devil of a servant, who ventured to reproach

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the magistrates in 1631, had his plebeian ears cropped. “I saw it done,” says Roger Clap with righteous exultation.[1] If Cotton’s scheme had been adopted in 1641, all unpleasant criticisms of God’s appointed would have been strangled outright by the hangman’s rope.

III.

Theocratic ethics

This upward trend of moral obligation was associated with a more fundamental notion. The age summed up its body of ethical doctrine in the compact statement that “the chief end of man is to glorify God.” This doctrine, lisped by babes and sucklings, found its counterpart in the declaration of the famous Westminster Assembly, that the only living and true God “works all things according to the Counsell of his owne . . . Will for his owne glory.” Men were taught to be good, not from any aspiration for honesty or goodness, nor out of any regard for the rights and welfare of others, but solely with reference to the will and pleasure of God. “This Good Pleasure or Will of God is the rule of Righteousness,” says John Norton, the Massachusetts Calvin. The moral law was made moral by divine command; theft would not have been wrong had there been no commandment. “That the moral law should be a constant rule of manners,” says Norton, “is from the Meer Will of God.”

IV.

Submission to the king.

We have intruded here into the region where “reason builds beyond Nature, but into emptiness

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only,” as Schiller has it. But many practical consequences were deduced from the speculative notion of God as a despot who was the arbitrary source of right and wrong and who sought nothing but his own glory. It was the period of emblemism in theology, the period of the doctrine of correspondences in philosophy and of signaturism in medicine. To the mind of the time a clever metaphor was more convincing than an argument, and an analogy was almost irrefutable. Passive obedience to the reigning sovereign was fortified by the prevailing conception of right and wrong as dependent solely on the pleasure of the Deity.[1] But the great leaders of Puritanism, finding their plans opposed by royal authority, cleverly succeeded in making the rule work the other way. From the notion of God’s relation to morals they evolved an ideal of theocracy. Divine sovereignty became a cover for latent disobedience to the king. “The allegiance we owe to our dread sovereign lord King Charles” is the courtly phrase of Cotton, but while he thus doffs his hat to the king with his right hand, he furtively opens a back door of escape with the left, by adding the ambiguous saving clause, “whilst he is pleased to protect us as his loyal subjects.”

V.

The state secondary to the Church.

Puritan theory was strangely akin to ultramontanism in one regard. It made the state secondary and subordinate to the Church. Cartwright, the

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great Puritan of Elizabeth’s reign, had embodied this in the maxim, “No man fashioneth his house to his hangings, but his hangings to his house”; and Hooker, the founder of Connecticut, was fond of repeating the proverb.[1] When he shaped the Constitution of that colony in 1638 he made the government an humble auxiliary of the churches. Cotton found in the Scriptures a complete and infallible platform of politics, and of half a dozen other things besides. By what picking and snipping of texts he succeeded in getting whatever was desirable from the Bible we may see in his proposed code, to many of the provisions of which he appended Scripture references.[2] That a court of law should have a clerk seems clear enough without a proof text, but Cotton must needs bolster this obvious expedient of common sense by citing the fact that there was a scribe’s chamber in the court of the king’s house in the time of the prophet Jeremiah.[3]

VI.

Defense of divine dignity.

The analogy between monarchy and divinity was so strongly felt that one is not surprised to find in the last will of Hooker, the founder of Connecticut, that God is called “His Majestie,”[4] and the same term occurs in more than one local record of the time in England.[5] It was to conciliate this dread potentate that blasphemy was suppressed in laws and military orders, and the prevailing notion of the austere despotism of God had much to do

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with the unrelenting persecution of heretics as his sworn foes. This cringing attitude toward a jealous God appears in the fine-spun inhibitions of constructive idolatry. The success of difficult enterprises was thought to be secured by the suppression of heresy and blasphemy.[1] Captain John Smith undertook to abolish swearing even among the rude and calamity-smitten Jamestown emigrants; but he did it not by Puritan severities, but in a jolly, rough-and-ready way by pouring cold water into the sleeve of the swearer. Varying penalties were denounced against swearing in New England; the profane man was fined and set in the stocks. One Connecticut blasphemer was to have his second whipping in the January following his first, “except the governor judges the weather unseasonable.”[2] In early Virginia records the fines for swearing are from one to three shillings, and in one case, in 1634, the parson is the prosecutor.[3] A Harvard student, who had spoken words regarding the Holy Ghost which were thought blasphemous, was publicly solemnly beaten; the punishment was preceded and followed by prayer, a kind of grace before and after.[4] The student’s offense lay probably in the expression of unorthodox opinions, the most atrocious kind of blasphemy. He was subjected to other indignities after the beating, either to convince him of error or to propitiate an offended Deity. It was an accepted theory with ardent religionists, whether Catholic or Protestant, that heretical opinions regarding God

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should be punished with death. A denial of the divinity of Christ was a capital offense under the early law of Catholic Maryland, and in later Protestant Maryland any objection offered to the doctrine of the Trinity was to be punished by boring the objector’s tongue; for a second offense the Unitarian was branded on the forehead with B for blasphemy; the third time he was to be put to silence forever by the last resort of the law.[1] New York, in its first year under English authority, denounced death against him who should deny “the true God and his attributes.” Inhumanity and injustice were not absent from the colonial codes, but the “rights, immunities, and privileges” of Almighty God were always guarded.[2]

VII.

Self-interest in morals.

This apparent excess of reverence has ever a basis of self-interest, quite cold-blooded and undisguised. The very buccaneers of that age went to prayer and confessed their sins whenever a rich prize hove in sight;[3] and early Virginians sent expeditions against the Indians with general orders which usually began with a prohibition of profanity, or some other precaution for securing the favor of Heaven. The Virginia Company thought the Indian massacre of 1622 due to the “sins of drunkenness and excess of apparell”[4] in the colony. The Massachusetts Company in London wrote to Endecott, in charge of their pioneer settlement, to “make good laws for the punishing of swearers”[5]

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and other offenders “if you ever expect a comfort or blessing of God upon our plantation.” The first church was organized in Massachusetts during an epidemic, “to pacify the Lord’s wrath.”[1] Winthrop, in his journal, is able to point out the particular sin that provoked almost every calamity of fire, illness, death, and financial loss that befell any individual. One man, for example, ventured to work too late on Saturday evening, the beginning of the Puritan Sabbath, and his child forthwith fell into a cistern on Sunday night and was drowned.[2] In the time of King Philip’s Indian war the obliteration of a town by firebrand and tomahawk was traced, not to the lack of a blockhouse and a vigilant garrison, but to the doomed town’s neglect to secure “an able, faithfull dispenser of the word of God.”[3] The blight of 1665 that extinguished all hope of wealth from the growth of wheat in Massachusetts was attributed by the common people to the execution of the Quaker martyrs, and the Indian wars of 1676 and 1677 were thought a punishment for persecuting laws.[4] But the conservative party proceeded in the latter year to make the laws against Quakers more stringent. Archdale, the tolerant Quaker Governor of South Carolina, thought that a pestilential fever in that colony was due to the persecution of dissenters.[5]

VIII.

Scruples about idolatry.

In the seventeenth century there was much fear of lapsing into idolatry by inadvertence. Lord

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Bacon recommends the pouring of wine into newly dug earth for the remedial effect of the vapor, but he adds the caution “that it be not taken for a heathen sacrifice or libation to the earth.”[1] The clause in the Massachusetts Body of Liberties of 1641 which made it a capital offense to have “any other god but the Lord God,”[2] could have had no practical aim unless it was the suppression of constructive idolatry. Many members of the train-bands in that colony regarded the English ensign as a gross idol, and refused to march behind it, because it had a cross in it.[3] Endecott, the New England Jehu, thinking three fourths of a cross no cross at all, cut off one arm of it in the Salem colors. Hooker wrote a paper to prove the ensign harmless; but the rising zeal against idolatry obliterated the cross of St. George from the colors of the train-bands in 1635.[4] After this reformation the red flag had only a white field in the upper corner for a union.[5] For similar reasons the early Puritan settlers omitted the prefix “Saint” from familiar geographical names. For long generations Englishmen had paid rents and wages on the penultimate day of September, when the harvest was fully in hand. For such purposes it had been the habit for ages to count the year from Michaelmas to Michaelmas, and the term could hardly be spared. In Connecticut it was Protestantized into Miheltide, so that neither mass nor archangel might get any good of it.[6] In the first half of the seventeenth century, and later, there were scruples

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against using the ordinary names of months and days of the week on account of their pagan derivation. Ordinal numbers were introduced instead to avoid etymological idolatry.[1] “In Boston,” said the royal commissioners of Charles II, “neither days, months, seasons, churches, nor inns are known by their English names.” The practice of numbering the days gradually passed out of fashion, after it became a badge of Quakerism.[2] Efforts to revive it in the last years of the century were vain. The pinch of the inconvenient scruple was got over by a trick of words: the names of the days were purified from idolatry by being called “planetary names”; but colonial New England continued to refuse to speak of “the Lord’s Day” as Sunday.[3] Puritan refugees from Protestant persecution in Virginia refused to take an oath of fidelity to the government of Maryland, because the officers of Maryland had sworn not to molest Roman Catholics, and what was that but swearing to countenance and uphold Anti-Christ? And so by many links, through their oaths to the government and Church and through the governors and their oaths, and through the unmolested Catholics with their saints and images, these tender consciences would at last be drawn into a long-distance paganism.[4]

Not only was there danger in those perilous times that the individual might fall into damnable idolatry without knowing it, but the Puritan governments were ever on the alert to keep the land

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from being polluted by heathenism. Soon after the earliest settlement of Massachusetts, Governor Endecott cut down one false god, the maypole at Merrymount. A few years later, in 1633, the Massachusetts General Court went further and prohibited the natives from practicing their ancient custom of powwowing in the land of their forefathers. Weird dances, accompanied by gourd rattles and punctuated with grunts and inarticulate cries, were naturally taken for worship of a false god or of a devil. The Virginia Company had much earlier proposed to capture the Indian medicine men and thus put an end to such heathen mysteries. The ancient maxim that “dominion hath its foundation in grace” was accepted in the earliest colonies, and hence Christians dominated pagans by right divine. One writer intimates that some of the Virginia planters, about the middle of the century, carried their Christianity so far as to believe that a pagan had no right to property for which a Christian might have use.[1]

IX.

Trifling offenses magnified.

The sense of moral proportion was obscured and confused in a reverent dread of offending God. The prevalent English custom of drinking healths was deemed “an abominable practice,” and put under ban in New England, and later in Pennsylvania,[2] not for the promotion of temperance alone, but mainly because it was a profane mixing

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of prayer and drinking and “a vain custom.” It was also “an occation of the wasting of the good creature” at which the Creator might take umbrage. In 1643 the Virginia law made the evil of “the loathsome sinne of drunkennesse” to consist partly “in the abuse of God’s good creatures,”[1] and this pious phrase has left its trace down to our time in a cant name for strong drink, “the creature.” In modern times the objections urged against gaming turn upon the supposed danger of falling into the vice of gambling. The Puritans were at much pains to explain that the chief sin in games of chance was one of profanity. The lot was “an appeal unto God,” and games of chance were therefore declared by the Connecticut General Court to be “altogether unlawful in the very nature of them,” since in cards and dice “that great and sollemne ordinance of a Lott is expressly and directly abused and prophaned.”[2] Cotton even unlimbered his scholastic logic to prove that the merry nonsense of choosing mates on Valentine’s day by drawing papers from a hat was an appeal to God’s “immediate providence for dispensing these ludicra,” and hence “a taking God’s name in vain.”[3] To check “the great dishonor of God” that was wrought by games, the Massachusetts Legislature, in 1670, excluded cards and dice from the colony as things pernicious in their very nature.[4] The observing of Christmas was objectionable because it was an occasion for the profanity of playing games. But Christmas observance

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was iniquitous on its own account, for all honoring of times and seasons other than the Sabbath seemed to the finespun Puritan mind a masked idolatry. It was ordained in Massachusetts, in 1670, that the mere abstaining from labor on the 25th of December should be a penal offense.[1] By this system of far-fetched deduction innocent acts were made technically superstitious, while intolerance and superstition, with consequent cruelty to “heretics” and “witches,” walked abroad unabashed in garments of sanctity.

X.

Sunday in pioneer Virginia.

When the early English settlements were made in America, the observance of a strict Sabbath was a newly discovered virtue brought to light in the later Reformation period.[1] Never before was a new obligation so swiftly and widely accepted as was strict Sabbath keeping in England and Scotland.[3] Several things had prepared for this acceptance; nothing had done more than the recoil of religious people from the coarse and brutal amusements that made the English Sunday of Elizabeth’s reign a school of frivolity and cruelty.[4] From morris dancing, from intolerably coarse interludes, and from the pitiless baiting of bulls and bears, the reaction to severe restraint was natural. Like all other novelties of the new century Sabbath keeping was impatiently exported to be tried in the virgin communities of the New World. A severe

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Sabbath was imposed on the infant Virginia colony in the relentless military code under which De la Warr, Gates, Dale, and Argall ruled. Argall, though a tyrant, a semi-pirate, and a finished despoiler of other men’s estates, was religious none the less; the combination was not uncommon in that time.[1] Under this versatile master of rapine the colonists were required to be religious willy nilly. He who did not go to church on Sunday must “lye neck and heels”—that is, with chin and knees drawn close together—“on the corps du gard” the following night and be reduced to slavery for a week.[2] If this did not take the atheism out of the culprit, a harsher penalty was visited on succeeding offenses. The sub-colony sent to Virginia in 1619 by the estimable Smith of Nibley and his associates was provided with instructions which required that “vain sports bee refrained” on the Lord’s Day, which was to be observed with “divine exercises according to the common prayer.”[3] James I had tried to check the tide of Sabbatarianism, but his so-called Book of Sports had precisely as much effect as the memorable command of his remote predecessor Knut against the incoming sea.[4] He never learned that great lesson of statesmanship that once Humpty Dumpty is down the king himself can not replace him. James tried to compel Englishmen to amuse themselves on Sunday as in former times, but we find this company of good churchmen spurning his “vain sports” in their general orders, and sending copies of the

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“Practice of Piety” along with the prayer book to teach the emigrant subjects of the king an opposite doctrine. Bishop Bayly’s Practice of Piety was much read in Virginia during the seventeenth century, and it gives seventy-five pages of its small bulk to enforcing the duty of sanctifying the first day of the week.[1] Beside the forbidding of all business and burden carrying, it is particularly severe on the “trimming, painting, and pampering” of one’s self on Sunday, which is “doing the divel’s work vpon God’s Day.” Bayly also forbids “Studying any Bookes of Science but the holy Scripture and Divinitie,” and “all recreations and Sports which at other times are lawful,” with “all grosse feeding” and “all talking about worldly things.” This view of duty was enforced by arraying the very same horrible examples that had served in Bownd’s famous treatise on the Sabbath.[2] Did not the scaffolding fall like the tower in Siloam and kill the people at a Sunday bear baiting in London? And this not at all on account of their inhumanity to the bear, but solely because they were enjoying “carnall Sports on the Lord’s Day.” Dr. Bownd’s nobleman whose hunting on Sunday caused his child to come into the world with a dog’s face reappears in Bayly. A disastrous conflagration in Stratford-on-Avon and a peculiar combustibility in other towns with Sunday fairs were also edifying examples of the danger of obeying King James in this regard. But whatever effect such dire examples may have had on the serious

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minds of pious men and women, the great majority of early Virginians took their Sundays without fear of divine judgments and without regard to the Sabbath law of the colony passed in 1643. Many of them spent the day in gregarious and demoralizing idleness.

XI.

Secular culture in Virginia.

Here we come upon those forces that made the culture of Virginia as distinctively secular as that of New England was dominantly theological. There were physical difficulties obstructing religious observance in the Chesapeake region, where habitations were thinly strung out along the estuaries, rivers, and tributary creeks—mere sinuous lines of water side settlement with only forest behind. There were plantations that had never an entrance or exit by land. Some parishes were thirty miles and more in shore length, and when the web-footed pioneers would attend church they must commonly do it by sailing in their sloops or by laborious paddling in dugouts. After the passing of Hunt and Whittaker and other brave missionaries of the first generation there came a different race of clergymen, “such as wore Black Coats, and could babble in a Pulpet, roar in a Tavern, . . . and rather, by their dissolutenesse, destroy then feed their Flocks.”[1] The church was far away, the parson contemptible, but no doubt some of the isolated settlers resorted to service to meet their neighbors and relieve the tedium of loneliness.

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But many of the younger Virginians, and those of the rougher class, generally preferred to spend the idle day of the week at the nearest Indian village in rude amusements and intercourse with the barbarians. There was a considerable betterment of manners in the times of the English Commonwealth, when exiled Cavaliers brought in a more dignified way of living and a better regulated Sunday. Throughout the colonial period the Virginia Sunday was never a rigorous Sabbath, but mainly a day of leisure, of sport, and of social enjoyment, with resort to the Church service when convenient. The typical country squire of the Chesapeake region treated religion as a mere propriety, by no means to be taken too seriously; there were many in the eighteenth century who rejected it altogether. It came to pass, thus, that the Virginia mind was coolly secular and unspeculative—an intellect trained to affairs, and above all to politics and social intercourse. Virginia’s early contribution to the intellectual life of the country was naturally a political one. The difference between the outcome of colonial Virginia and that of colonial New England might almost be anticipated by observing the wide difference between the early Virginia Sunday and the Puritan Sabbath. New England was cradled in religious enthusiasms that gave tone to life in the whole northern belt of the United States. If Virginia and the States of her planting have lacked that reformatory zeal which has made New England so generally serviceable,

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and sometimes so tedious, it is probably because Virginia was almost untouched by any strong religious sentiment, until it was at length stirred by the evangelical movement in the middle of the eighteenth century.[1]

XII.

The New England Sabbath.

Although the keeping of Sunday with sabbatical strictness began soon after the Reformation in some parts of England, the doctrine made no great stir until Dr. Bownd’s elaborate work on the Sabbath of the Old and New Testament burst upon an astonished public in 1595, and by its boldness brought down upon itself condemnation to the flames and the prohibition of further issue. Ecclesiastical and governmental interference helped to make a painfully rigorous repose on Sunday a distinctive badge of Puritanism. The Sabbath in the superlative degree crossed the high seas with the Puritan migration. In New England it was argued that, as the Sabbath was the principal outward means of honoring God, it stood for the whole duty of man toward God.[2] And a right divine reverence was paid to it. Contrary to English custom, the greatest Puritan divines, Cotton and Hooker, maintained with consistent literalness that the consecrated time began at sunset on Saturday evening, because the Jewish Sabbath began on Friday, and the evening and the morning made a day in the first chapter of Genesis. Judaism sat hard on the Puritan conscience in many ways;

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even the Jewish preparation for the Sabbath was imposed on the people in the first years of New England. “All that inhabit the Plantation” were ordered, in 1629, to “surcease their labors every Saturday throughout the year at three o’clock.” The rest of the day was given to catechising and other painful preparations of the soul for the irksome austerities of the Sabbath.[1] In mediæval times mortifications of the flesh were sometimes savagely severe, but they were voluntary and affected only the individual inflicting them upon himself. Puritan austerities were imposed by family authority on servants and little children, and enforced with ruthless severity on a whole community by the magistrate. On the Sabbath cattle might not be pastured in the common field where they would have to be watched, food must not be prepared, nor must one pay a visit or walk in the streets or the fields except to meeting, nor might one stay at home from meeting without danger of fine or whipping-post. In New Haven, and probably elsewhere, indulgence in eating an apple or cracking a nut was accounted reprehensible. [2] . In solemn awe of the Sabbath the innocent gambols of the children were repressed as something particularly heinous. “We should rest from labor, much more from play,” says Cotton in a catechism ludicrously entitled Milk for Babes. [3] The aged Increase Mather, as late as 1712, urged that children must not be suffered to play on the Lord’s Day. [4] Of rest the Puritan mind had no

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conception; it was a technical term that included the attending to public prayers, stretching sometimes to a full hour in length, and to sermons of yet greater prolixity, interspersed with home exercises to fill up the time and banish repose. The leaders were generally sincere enthusiasts bent on pleasing God and not even comprehending what a huge burden of unbearable Pharisaism they were binding on the backs of men. Probably nothing else in Puritanism, not even its hatred of heretics and its horror of witches, caused so much human unhappiness in the aggregate as did its effort to transform the Christian Sunday into a punctilious Hebrew Sabbath. For the attainment of this end almost every sort of outrage on personal liberty was perpetrated by the magistrates and by domestic authority. Even foreigners presumably ignorant of the law were liable to arrest and other indignities, if caught strolling in the streets of Boston on Saturday evening after sunset. [1] Ambassadors from a French Catholic colony were shut into Winthrop’s house the entire Sunday for fear of collision with public opinion and the constables. This polite incarceration was mitigated by “the liberty of a private walk in the garden.” In New Haven, in 1647, a young man was sent to the whipping-post on Monday for not going to meeting on Sunday, and two brothers were beaten by their father for visiting young women on Saturday after sunset. They lived unmarried to their deaths from mortification. [2] Much of the

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torture proceeding from the Puritan Sabbath was self-inflicted. There is a pitiful story of Wigglesworth, the author of the popular Day of Doom, sitting long on a windy Sunday in an agony of scrupulous uncertainty, unable to decide whether he might with a good conscience venture to go and shut a neighbor’s swinging stable door and so save it from wreck.[1] He ended by leaving the door to its fate for the Lord’s sake.

The yoke of bondage enforced by law galled the necks of those who were less religious or who held to the easier habits of the Church of England. There were many in the first generation who “accounted it their happiness to live in the wast howling wilderness” to escape this unblinking supervision, giving up many advantages to preserve that liberty so dear to men not broken by oppression.[2] Later in the century there was a party that denied the right of the colonial government to enforce the Sabbath and prescribe modes of worship. An election sermon was leveled at this uprising,[3] and the Synod of 1679 even shakes at it the old superstition used by Dr. Bownd in 1595, and later in the Practice of Piety, that conflagrations are intimately connected with lax Sabbath observance.[4] And indeed the New England Sabbath, though almost too much for flesh and blood, had by this time become a fixed tradition, good for yet more than a hundred years of survival before it should begin to show signs of decline.[5] In 1740 we find it still the custom to shut the gates of the Boston peninsula and to put

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a guard at the ferry, that no one might go forth on Sunday. And the traveler who gives us this account of the state of siege in which Boston put itself once a week adds that if “they could escape out of the town, it wouldn’t answer their end; for the same care is taken, all the country over, to prevent travelling on Sundays . . . They will not suffer any one to walk down to the water side, though some of the houses are adjoining to the several wharfs, nor even in the hottest days of summer will they admit any one to take the air on the Common. . . . The justices, attended with a posse of constables, go about every week to compel obedience to this law.”[1] Even a group of two or three might not talk together in the street on Sunday. Thus uneasily with wearisome diligence and infinite watchfulness did the New England metropolis take its rest. There is a reverse to this picture of strait-laced government that is more agreeable. The traveler just quoted tells us “it is a rare thing to meet with any drunken people, or to hear an oath sworn, in their streets.”

XIII.

Sunday in Maryland.

In Maryland the early law regarding Sunday was Catholic in tone; work was forbidden on “the Lord’s Day or other holy days.” This modest prohibition may have been tolerably well observed, for the roistering settlers were ready enough to abstain from work on any day of the week when

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excitement could be found. But the law probably bound them little; certainly they freely disregarded the act passed at the same time against “drinking to a notable perturbation of any organ of sense or motion.” There were pious Catholics who spent their Sundays becomingly, no doubt, and there were many Puritans in Maryland whose Sabbaths were characteristically strict.[1]

In the Dutch colony.

In the Dutch colony of New Netherlands many laws were made regulating the sale of liquor on Sunday, and in 1663 a bill was passed in favor of a strict Sabbath, but against this New Amsterdam protested, and refused to proclaim the law, as contrary to the freedoms of Holland.[2] It would have been impossible to enforce a strict Sabbath on the mixed population of residents and the yet more varied comers and goers in New Amsterdam.[3] The Dutch, says Sir George Mackenzie, have “few Merchants and Tradesmen who do not sell and work freely on the Sunday.”[4]

XIV.

Zeal without pity.

Religious zeal was abundant in the seventeenth century among devout people of all creeds, but it lacked that touch of generous pity that in more recent times would fain convert men for their own benefit. It was a zeal for church, for party, for faction—a zeal for sound doctrine as each sect understood sound doctrine. There was a disinterested zeal for the glory of God, or, as the devoted Catholic

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missionaries of Maryland phrased it, “for the glory of the Blood of our Redeemer.” But men of all shades of opinion took pleasure in the disasters of obstinate opponents and unbelievers. Roger Clap does not conceal the pleasure it gives him that one of the gainsayers of the Massachusetts theocracy had probably been roasted alive by the Indians; and the same religious but ruthless spirit crops out in all churches and parties of the time in England and America. It was not Laud, but his predecessor and opponent, Archbishop Abbot, who took pains to secure the burning of two heretics by packing the court with judges already pledged to decide against the accused.[1] The undertone of philanthropy that we confidently expect to find in religious feeling in recent times was lacking in the fiercer and, if we must say so, more religious spirit of that day.

XV.

The religious societies.

In order better to mark the distinction between that age and this later time, let us digress to trace, along one of several more or less obscure lines of cause and effect, the evolution of altruistic zeal. When that tide of frivolity and scoffing profligacy that overflowed English life at the fall of the Commonwealth and the return of Charles II to the throne had swelled to the full, there sprang up in some London parishes, about 1679, “religious societies.” By whose agency the first were planted, or whence came the seed-thought, we shall probably

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never know. Intended only to promote devoutness of spirit and seriousness of life in individuals, these little groups of brethren pledged to one another, and, solemnly taking the communion together in their own parishes, offered a warm and sheltered soil in which germinated those ideas that formed the religious life of the eighteenth century. By a gradual modification some of these associations appeared in 1691 as the famous societies for the reformation of manners by appeal to the law. Their most effective work was done in Queen Anne’s time.[1] This tendency to do by means of societies what the half-palsied English Church of that time could not do, resulted in 1699 and the following years in the establishment of societies for religious propagandism—both by printed publications and the sending of missionaries—a device by which Protestantism has sought to supply the loss of the mediæval religious orders.[2] The outgrowth of the devout societies did not weaken their organizations. One of these nurseries of pietism at a much later time bore the nickname of the Holy Club of Oxford, and out of it issued the Wesley-Whitefield revival—a revival that primarily sought not to build up any Church or sect, but to benefit the brutal and neglected by means of religious influences. Thus a zeal for pity’s sake took the place of the old stern and pitiless passion for what was thought to promote the glory of God. White-hot agitations that assume wide proportions are gradually changed by the resistance they encounter, and

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are modified by cross-forces, until their momentum spends itself in achieving what the first promoters did not have in mind.[1] Religious movements in this way become at length political and social forces. The “Great Awakening” in the eighteenth century was presently metamorphosed, in part, at least, into philanthropic and reformatory agitations. The wish to save men’s souls became an aspiration to deliver them from oppression, to educate them, and free them from the hardships of poverty.[2] This outcome of the religious movement coincided with the philosophical and political tendency toward democracy, that played so conspicuous a part in the transformation of ideas that took place in the wonderful eighteenth century.

XVI.

Plan of salvation in the Practice of Piety.

We shall not understand the age of colonization unless we look into its schemes of salvation which are in some sort an index of moral stress. Bishop Bayly’s now forgotten Practice of Piety, “Directing a Christian how to walke that he may please God,” shall inform us, as it instructed nearly all men in that time. Its teaching regarding the Sabbath we have already noted.[3] Editions of this guide to godliness tumbled headlong from the press in a succession so rapid that the booksellers of the time became confused in attempting to number them.[4] A minister complained in 1656 that the “generality of the Plebeians” held its authority to

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be “equal with that of the Scripture.” Bunyan’s watchdog conscience was awakened by it and Ben Jonson’s mocking humor laughs at the veneration for it.[1] Colonists frequently carried it to Virginia and elsewhere, sometimes in company with the Bible, the prayer book, and Barrough’s Method of Phisicke, and throughout the seventeenth century it turns up frequently among heirlooms left to descendants by deceased planters, and in New England it was even translated into the Indian tongue by the apostle Eliot. A Virginian of the early period, while wrestling with the unsubdued wilderness for bread and meat, and trying to decide whether or not his malarial fever was to be treated as an “intermitting tertian” or “a continuing quotidian,” or whether it was both of these combined according to the systematic Barrough, must also pick out in the intervals of business and the pauses between ague fits the proper way of saving his soul. The Practice of Piety explained it in such a fashion that no wayfaring man, be he ever so wise, could by any chance understand it. It was also complicated by a folding diagram. In order to please God the plain man must know “the essence of God in respect of the divers manner of being therein,” and also the “attributes which are either Nominall or Real.”[1] That is to say, he must appreciate the “absoluteness,” “simpleness,” and “infiniteness” of Divine existence, and then must know five “relative attributes” besides. If the acclimating fever has not haply carried him off while he is mastering these

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complexities and perplexities, he finds that he must likewise “competently know and necessarily beleeve” other scholastic propositions, finespun to invisibility all of them, regarding the nature of God.[1] He is also required to know himself—not himself actually, but only himself as John Doe in certain theological relations and in a wholly impersonal way. Having now glorified God by knowing him analytically, he comes to the second branch, which is to glorify God by serving him. One looks for a treatise on moral duties, but we are in the seventeenth century. This service of God begins and ends in acts of devotion performed “privately,” “domestically,” and “publicly,” with remembrance of feasts and a yet more scrupulous observance of fasts, Religious etiquette all! For closing so futile a life there are directions for dying with proper devoutness. Duties to one’s fellows, such as fill the Sermon on the Mount, find no place in the outspread diagram of duties with which the book begins, and it is with difficulty that they find standing room in a few subsidiary parts of the work. The mediæval virtue of almsgiving, with an eye to the welfare of the giver in the next world, appears in traditional form with a Protestant tag to it: “Liberalitie in alms-deeds is our surest foundation that we shall obtaine in eternall life a liberall reward through the Mercie and Merits of Christ.” It was with this end in view no doubt that well-to-do Virginians kept up a custom of leaving exactly ten pounds to the poor of the parish,[2]

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and this was the only bequest that was in every case described not in colonial currency or tobacco, but in sterling money. If we inquire into the reason for the marvelous popularity of Bishop Bayly’s Practice of Piety we shall find it in the fact that the book was the fullest expression of the religious sentiment of the people in an age of transition. It was, besides, written with considerable vigor. So much was it esteemed in England that in some instances at least it was read aloud by those who watched witches as a counter sorcery to confound the devil.[1] A change in the sense of moral proportion, the waning of a belief in diabolism, with a growing notion that the heavens are not wholly unpropitious even to men who do not understand all about divine existence and attributes, and keep fasts, have caused this once utterly popular book to fall into a fathomless oblivion. When with difficulty, after tedious searching of public libraries, one finds by good luck a copy of the Practice of Piety that has escaped the wastebasket, it is worn and torn by seventeenth century thumbing.

XVII.

“Effectual Calling.”

“We han’t glorified God as God,” laments the preacher of the Massachusetts Election Sermon in 1704. In the effort to please an austere God wholly intent on securing his own glory, the age lost in some measure what it could ill spare, the propulsion of religious sentiment in the putting forward

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of civilization and the uplifting of the individual. Puritan writers made holiness merely relative, the result of a mysterious transaction between God and the soul, in which transaction the soul had little part. This holiness, according to Cotton, was so persistent that it might survive much base living. He instances Solomon. On the other hand, uprightness of life, not preceded by “effectual calling,” was mere sin.[1] Wigglesworth in his Day of Doom marshals at the bar of God a company of

But these worthy men, whose like is none too common, are summoned only to be scorned and damned. “The Ninevites and Sodomites,” they are told, had no such sin as theirs. “Their righteousness is sin,” the Judge tells them, “whereas the same deserveth Shame and meriteth Damnation.” Thus the ideal of morality itself is abrogated in order to “glorify God as God” in the damnation of civil honest men. Fortunately for the world, theories that controvert fundamental intuitions are likely to be only speculatively believed. Neither Cotton nor Wigglesworth could have been as bad as his theory; in practice they probably respected honest men and detested scoundrels regardless of theological considerations.[3] But such speculations when they reached weaker natures would serve as pretexts for immorality.

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XVIII.

The God of that age.

“Take heed,” wrote Herbert of Cherbury to a friend, in 1617, “of superstition and blasphemy, and above all that you make not a worse God than yourself.” In these words he touched the weakness of the age: moral judgments were off their center when men adored a God worse than the worshipers. It seems like a paradox, yet it is true, that the more intensely religious a people were in that time the worse was their representation of the Deity. The great and long-continued popularity of Wigglesworth’s Day of Doom in New England makes it good evidence in this case. His damnation scene is mediævally horrible:

There are passages more ghastly than this, but why disfigure white paper with them? God is made the direct ruthless agent of physical torture everlasting, kept up for no conceivable end but his own glory. . . . “God’s direful wrath, their bodies hath forever immortal made . . . And live they must while God is just, that he may Plague them so.” A popular versifier like Wigglesworth, and he bred up among pioneers and Puritans, may be thought to hold views more extreme than those of his age. But Archdeacon Hakewill, much esteemed

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for learning and philosophy, could write the same thing with more dignity of expression: “Our fire hath neede to be fed continually with wood and fewell. . . . that burneth eternally without feed . . . for that the breath of the Lords owne mouth doth blow and nourish it.”[1] The monarchical idea dominates the thought of the time. Hakewill does not shrink from comparing the ingeniously cruel torments which vengeful kings had inflicted on their foes to God’s punishment of sinners, and says that “so terrible is the judge to his enemies that he hath devised a wonderful way how to torment them,” and that his “invention that way is as farre beyond the reach of all mortall wits as his power.”[2] Words of piety these, rank blasphemy none the less.

XIX.

Damnation of unbaptized infants.

Irresponsible infants were condemned to perdition by the ruthlessly systematic theology of the seventeenth century, and this also for the glory of the God who made them. The mediæval churchly doctrine that none could be saved without the sacrament of baptism had carried with it the harsh corollary that many infants were damned, some of them lost through mere accident or inadvertence. Cranmer’s Catechism of 1548 declares that the children of heathen parents will be “damned everlastingly” for want of baptism, and in this he follows the Lutherans of the same period.[3] In the next century Archbishop Laud, while affirming that baptism

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is necessary to salvation, declines to bind God to the sacrament, probably from his habitual dislike of constitutional limitations to sovereign power. But the popular belief remained, after the Reformation as before, that a child dying unbaptized was doomed. In the dark ages of Virginia and Maryland the parishes were very long-suffering in their dealings with tavern-haunting, brawling, and sometimes almost criminal parsons, apparently from fear of having their children grow up nameless heathens or die heirs of perdition for want of baptism. North Carolina had few clergymen even in the eighteenth century, and one finds the settlers plodding many rough miles, each with his covey of offspring, to intercept a wayfaring parson at some wayside spring and thus secure a chance of salvation for the young natives. Governor Eden of that colony wrote to the Propagation Society lamenting especially that “above fourscore” infants had perished unbaptized in the massacre by the Tuscaroras in 1712. This view of the massacre is rendered more picturesque when we remember that Eden was the governor who sheltered Blackbeard the pirate, and almost certainly shared his plunder.

XX.

Damnation of non-elect infants.

The Church of England divines feared that unbaptized infants might be damned because of some one else’s fault, but the Calvinistic portion of the religious world was certain of the damnation

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of non-elect infants, baptized or unbaptized. Even John Robinson, of Leyden, the sweet-hearted pastor of the Pilgrims, could not escape this horrible conclusion, though he seems to accept it with a sore heart and averted face.[1] It was the misery of religion in that day that good men worshiped a God less just and merciful than themselves. As late as 1690 “the ministers of the Gospel in Boston” published a defense of infant damnation in reply to a Quaker who disliked the doctrine.[2] The Boston ministers did not, as the Anglicans did, leave a narrow fringe of uncertainty. They averred, as others of their school of thought had done long before, that an obscure phrase in St. Paul’s most obscure epistle rendered it certain that some infants had already been damned for eating the forbidden fruit by proxy before they were born.[3] On the other hand, Wigglesworth, the doggerel Dante of pioneer New England, reserved the damnation of unlucky babes to make an effective scene at the day of doom.[4] The widespread circulation of his verses must have sown broadcast notions out of which every bereaved mother could build a tabernacle of perdition for her desolate soul. Minds so simply serious failed to see the bouffe grotesqueness of the speeches put into the mouth of the Divine Judge, whom Wigglesworth makes a little lower than a pettifogging country justice. The foredoomed infants argue their case rather cleverly, and, from a modern point of view, they get the best of it. But Christ, the Judge, has

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the last word, and when they remind him that while Adam is saved they are damned for Adam’s sin—

This is followed by a disquisition on original sin, delivered by the Judge for the edification of the lost infants or to clear the minds of the assembled universe. The infants are assured that they are sinners, and can expect only a sinner’s share, “for I do save none but mine own elect.”[2] The colloquy, evidently growing embarrassing, is cut short by a verdict which reverts to the Judge’s only reliance—the sin of Adam:

XXI.

Harsh devotion.

Beautiful and merciful lives have blossomed and borne fruit under the shadow of harsh and repulsive beliefs. It would be easy to fall into the error of exaggerating the evil effects of creeds of iron. At a certain stage of social development the severity of a dominant creed sometimes serves a useful purpose of repression where repression is needed. The seventeenth century had inherited

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most of its harsh doctrines in some shape from the schoolmen or the Church fathers, and it set itself to forge them into formal creeds for its own enthrallment. The welding of doctrines into elaborate and systematic confessions and the writing of concise expressions of the quintessence of dogmatic theology in innumerable catechisms were regarded as a sort of heavenly vocation. Antique doctrines tinged with the barbarism of older ages, when thus formally propounded and authoritatively imposed, served to blur the ideal of even-handed justice and arrest the growth of humane sentiments. The gentler side of Scripture teaching was more or less obscured in an age when master teachers insisted on giving a perpetual divine authority to the sternest laws of the early Hebrews. It was an age that embittered its devotions by singing unsoftened the imprecatory psalms. It was a matter of obligation to sing all the psalms,[1] even such vindictive verses as these in the New England Bay Psalm Book of 1640:

The primitive ferocity of such prayers is not chargeable to Puritanism; the versifiers of the Bay Psalm Book had heard the Sternhold and

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Hopkins version sung in English churches from infancy, and had probably used it for their primary reading book in school. It had accustomed them to such lines as these:

Thus sang the Virginia and the Maryland churchmen, and thus also the New York and Carolina churchmen. The metrical version made by the poet George Sandys, once Secretary of the Virginia Colony, was far more elegant and was “set to new tunes for private devotion.” But even Sandys will have the Christian in his closet pronounce a blessing on the men

This non-Christian commingling of revenge and religion gave force to the hatred for heretics and embittered persecution and religious contests. Hear the bitter words of Ward, a New England minister, against the Irish rebels: “Cursed be he that holdeth back his sword from blood, yea cursed be he that maketh not his sword starke drunk with Irish blood,” and so on breathlessly to the end. These words of Nathaniel Ward were printed in London in 1647; two years later Cromwell translated them into ghastly fact by the pitiless slaughters of Drogheda and Wexford.

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XXII.

Brutality in sports.

The dash of fanaticism in the religion of the time and the narrow and literal adherence to the precedents found in the most ancient Hebrew Scriptures had something to do with the lack of humaneness in the law and its administration.[1] For this reason ecclesiastics of all schools were often more ruthless than laymen; they carried their pitiless severity up to the credit of their piety. Massachusetts clergymen protested in 1635 against Winthrop for a leniency that to the modern man seems severe. In the controversy with the Gortonists the Massachusetts clergy advised that men not properly subject to the colony should be hanged for constructive blasphemy, but the magistrates were wiser or less zealous. The clerical profession, by its very nature, is more dominated by ideal considerations than others, and the severity of clergymen in governmental affairs is not necessarily from harshness of spirit, but rather from devotion to an ideal of conduct. The pressure of religious feeling in former ages was often distinctly opposed to the sentiment of humanity. But the seventeenth century needed no religious persuasion to severity; it was not at all a humane age. Traces of mediæval barbarism are found in the laws, in the customs, and in the brutal sports of the people, as well as in the sermons and other ecclesiastical deliverances. For generations the thoughtless populace had taken a savage delight in seeing bulls and

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bears baited to the death with fierce dogs; in an exceptional case a horse was turned over to be torn by mastiffs for the delight of the people. Bear baiting was the favorite way of spending the Sunday afternoon in Elizabeth’s reign. One finds in a view of London in 1574 two buildings on the Bankside, “The Bowll Baytinge” and “The Bear Baytinge,” carefully indicated as places of chief interest.[1] After the scaffolding fell with fatal results at the bear baiting on Sunday in 1583 the people became superstitiously afraid of such sports on Sunday, but they were enjoyed on week days without suspicion of wrongdoing. Some of the later Puritans argued that as the animosity of animals to one another was the result of man’s sin, men ought not to make sport out of it. The suffering of the animal is rarely alluded to in these debates; theology did not care for bulls and bears.[2] Cockfighting had been for ages a reputable sport, highly praised by such men as Ascham, the tender-hearted school reformer,[3] and it was practiced (annually or oftener) in schoolrooms apparently as a part of education.[4] Against this also some later Puritans protested. As late as 1737 an English traveler says that Continental people were accustomed to complain of the cruelty of “the sports of our vulgar”—the very charge Anglo-Saxons are wont to make against the Spaniards to-day. Bull baiting and the tormenting of tame bears were not imported to America; bulls were too scarce and valuable, and bears were too plentiful and fierce.[5] But the relish for inhumane

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sports remained. Entrapped wolves were made to sell their lives in a bloody fray with mastiffs, or were tied to the tail of a wild horse to be kicked and dragged to death. Josselyn speaks of some large New England bird, which he calls a “cormorant,” as making rare sport when wounded and turned loose to be badgered by dogs. Animals appear to have been preferably put to death by dogs. One finds Archbishop Sandys in Elizabeth’s time trying to recover a “brinded dog,” and complaining that he had never a dog with which to kill some bucks that had lately been given him. Puritanism was reformatory, though it could never go far beyond its age, and did not break the tether by which the great Cartwright in the sixteenth century had tied it to the temporal laws of the Jews. Massachusetts had gone to the limit by its creditable and ungrammatical law of 1641 against “Crueltie to any bruite creature which are usuallie kept for man’s use.”[1] The wild creatures were left without the pale for want of Mosaic precedent, no doubt. In Virginia and Maryland cockfighting was a gentlemanly and Christian amusement throughout the colonial time. The laws of the Puritan colonies show that the reformatory spirit in Puritanism had begun to soften a little the harsh cruelty of law and its administration at the time, but notwithstanding prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishments, burning to death took place in Boston and Cambridge[2] and pressing to death was resorted to in the witchcraft trials in Salem.

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Punishments more barbarous, if possible, were inflicted in other colonies. Legal torture to produce confession was in use in New Netherlands under Dutch rule. In Pennsylvania a gradual translation of Quaker theories of non-resistance into milder laws took place, and the administration of the law was less severe than the law.

XXIII.

Obligation of worship.

The obligation of worship, as we have seen, was thought to be infinitely greater than moral duty. “The languishing and improsperous condition” of the Virginians after the Restoration was not attributed to the strangling of their commerce by the enforcement of the Navigation Act, but to the neglect of the people, mainly on account of physical impediments, to render to God with regularity “that publicke Worship and Service which is a Homage due to his great name.”[1] For this “sacriledge” the people were believed to be under a curse.[2] In 1677 the Bishop of London took Virginia in hand and set about reforming a colony that by all accounts needed attention. He proposed that the thinly settled planters should be compelled to renounce the “profane custom of burying in their gardens and orchards,” and forced to give up their habit of accepting such marriage as they could get from men not ordained,[3] in a land where men in orders were exceedingly few, often dissolute, and frequently so far away as to be

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reached only by a tedious sloop voyage, down one river and up another. There were things in the colony infinitely worse than the Virginia graveyard at the back of the garden to preserve it from prowling wolves, and the conservation of social order by marriage at the hands of clerks and lay readers, failing a better. But to Bishop Compton, as to others in that antique world, ecclesiastical impropriety, even when well-nigh unavoidable, was a sin more heinous than the oppression of bondsmen and unregulated morals.[1]

Virginia had been settled when no hard-and-fast line had yet been drawn between Puritan and non-Puritan churchmen, and its church cherished both, retaining down to the Revolution the party-color of the transition period in which it was planted.[2] Its clergy wore no surplices for more than a hundred years after the settlement, and in some parishes the eucharist was taken in a sitting posture.[3] In New England the sacraments were hard to come by; in some parts of Virginia they could not be refused. One Virginian, in 1645, was threatened for refusing to go to communion in his parish church and required to bring to the next session of the court a certificate that he had reformed in this particular. In New England the baptism of babes was not always to be had for the asking; Virginians who declined baptism for their children were sometimes dealt with.[4]

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XXIV.

Eccentricities of Church government.

In the Puritan attempt to reconstruct the Church on a scriptural model, all sorts of scruples had an opportunity to crystallize. The coupling of pastors and teachers in Paul’s writings was a source of trouble and debate. The notion that the pastoral office was dual appeared in the ferments among the excited English Protestants at Frankfort before the accession of Elizabeth, it was a trait of the Dutch church life in the seventeenth century, and it was elaborated among the English Separatists before 1582. In New England each church undertook to sustain two ministers in the hard conditions of pioneer life where the burden of one might have been thought too much.[] A ruling elder and several deacons shared authority with the “pastor” and the “teacher”; to complete the hierarchy, “ancient widows” were concluded to be church officers from their position in the Pauline epistles. This system in five tiers, originally separatist, was brought to America, in theory at least, by the Pilgrims, and, after discussion, came to be adopted by most of the Massachusetts churches. No plan could well have suited less with frontier conditions. The support of two ministers was an irksome financial burden; a double leadership promoted factions; ministers in the second generation were scarce; and the dual system, unsuited to the environment, went into swift obsolescence in spite of the lament of idealists

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and the futile efforts of the Synod of 1679 to restore the double pastorate of the founders.[1] The unnecessary ruling elder went out more gradually, and the proposed ecclesiastical widows were found impossible from the first, in a new country where every woman not decrepit was sure to be sought in marriage.[2]

XXV.

Scruples about psalm singing.

John Cotton says Satan has “mightily bestirred himself” in suggesting doubts about psalm singing. It was a question whether psalm singing was to be allowed at all. It was held that Scripture psalms were not to be sung, but only songs “indited by some personall spirituall gift of some officer or member of the church.”[3] Then there were other scruple-breeders who thought that one should sing and all the rest content themselves with saying “Amen.” It was a question whether women should be suffered to sing, and it was proposed to confine vocal music to godly men regardless of their voices, not allowing “carnall men and Pagans” to join in public singing. There were other propositions of the sort, but as Cotton opposed them and attributed them to Satan, we need not drag them out of their centuries of oblivion. One that Cotton does not mention was that of the saintly Separatist and master scruple-monger, Smyth, of Amsterdam, who regarded it as “unlawful to have the book before the eve in the time of singing a psalm.”[4] The Pilgrims of Leyden, on the

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other hand, would not read the psalm line by line as sung, until at length they adopted the common mode of the time out of regard for a brother who could not read. To such extremes did anti-ritualism go. A scruple against using music books in service time caused musical notation to be forgotten almost throughout New England in the seventeenth century. The number of tunes in general use was about eight or ten, and in certain congregations but half that number. In some places the worship was without singing, failing any one who could “take the run of the tune,” as the phrase was. Familiar tunes were corrupted in oral transmission; the same tune varied essentially in congregations a few miles apart; in some places the name of an old tune was all that could be recognized, the music having been “miserably tortured and twisted and quavered into a horrible medley of confused and disorderly noises.” A writer of 1721 declares that the music was so “dragged” that it was necessary sometimes to take breath twice in one note. Psalm singing in the other colonies was probably not better than that in New England.[1] In the Anglican churches, as in Puritan worship, the psalm to be sung was read off line by line before the several lines were sung. One of the reforms advocated by Commissary Bray during his brief dash into Maryland in 1700 was the teaching of catechumens to sing the psalm “artificially.” Even at the beginning of the Revolution Boucher declares that the psalmody was everywhere “ordinary and mean.”

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There were not six organs in Maryland and Virginia, and there were churches in which there was no singing at all. Scruples aside, the obsolescence of music in New England was probably inevitable. But when soon after 1700 efforts were made to introduce music books into Puritan meeting-houses a sol-fa controversy arose, the conservative mind imagining that devotion itself would perish if written music displaced the barbarous discord that harmonized with bare and square architecture.[1] In the preface to the New England Psalm Book the versifiers wind their logic through a sinuous argument to prove that the use of instrumental music in Jewish worship was “ceremoniall,” while the psalm singing itself was “morall” and of perpetual obligation. The preface makes a merit of the rough-hewn literalness of the version urging that “God’s altar needs not our pollietys.”[2] Beneath this ostensible argument lay an element of all austere systems of morality, a notion that pleasure had something reprehensible about it. People opposed church music on this ground, accusing it of “bewitching the mind with syrenes sound.”[3] But colonial psalm singing could hardly be charged with such perilous seductions.

XXVI.

The multitude of scruples.

New England did not stop with forbidding music books; in spite of Cotton’s judgment to the contrary, the Bible itself was excluded from the

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service for fear of ritualism, except where the reading was for immediate exposition. In 1699, when Puritanism was fast losing its vigor, the new Brattle Street Church in Boston took the bold step of having passages from the Bible read as a part of public worship.[1] Colman, the Brattle Street pastor, was so bold a ritualist as to repeat the Lord’s Prayer after his own.[2] Very slowly these new decencies of worship made their way. A church organ was too “ceremonial” even for the innovating Brattle Street Church, which refused a proffered gift of one. Not only must music be sung by rote and prayers not be read, but sermons must be given without notes. Warham, the first to use notes in the pulpit, was “much faulted for it.” Puritanism habitually regarded religion and beauty as antagonists. Its leaders in England condemned the use of rhetorical ornaments, particularly those drawn from heathen sources.[3] The bare hardness of expression and the absence of anything like style in early New England sermons was probably voluntary at first. Little conventional decorums, like the ring in marriage and marriage by a minister, and receiving the eucharist without gloves on, were the butt of scruples.[4] At their first coming the New-Englanders called their places of worship churches, but here was a fine opening for scrupulosity. In order not to ascribe sacredness to a building, the merely descriptive term meeting-house was substituted, that being wholly free from any pleasant or decorous association.

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A minister might not pray over a new-made grave; it would grow into prayer for the dead. As there was no axe or hammer heard in the Jewish temple work, the Plymouth Pilgrims refused to take the negative in asking the assent of the church to a conclusion of the elders,[1] and perhaps for the same reason the early Massachusetts churches formally confirmed the choice of a pastor by “silent votes” of some sort in the presence of the magistrates. Strangest of all was the scruple generally accepted at first that obliged women to wear veils during public worship.[2] After Cotton’s arrival and opposition, it was only in Salem, where Endecott was the chief upholder of the practice, that all the women went to meeting veiled, as if to deprive public worship of its last element of extraneous interest.

XXVII.

Minor scruples.

Many scruples of that age must pass unnoticed; a few others we may select for their bric-a-brac interest. The giving to children pious and significant names was not primarily a Puritan notion; Bishop Jewell has a whole page of black letter in favor of it, and he derives it from Chrysostom, the Church father. Cartwright, the Puritan leader of Elizabeth’s time, also opposed the giving of pagan names to children. The scruple was too congenial to the Puritan mind not to find a place in New England, and the early Latin canons, already quoted,

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forbade the giving of “barbarous and superstitious names,” and recommended those that are “expressed in sacred letters.”[1] New England accordingly blossomed, not only with Hebrew names whose frequent incongruity with Saxon surnames was not then felt, but also with nouns, verbs, and participles, such as Love, Hope, Unite, Increase, Seaborn, Preserved, Wrastle, Humility, Supply, Hopestill, Waitstill, and other significant and hortatory words, some of them given indifferently to either sex. But the practice did not take deep root, and it was one of the first peculiarities to disappear with the relaxing of Puritanism when New England life began to line up again with English traditions in the second half of the century.[2] The scruple against taking interest on money prevailed widely among religious people generally, and the matter was much debated, but New England seems to have escaped thralldom to a precept so illogical. In a new country where capital is lacking and opportunities for its profitable use are many, the reasonableness of an interest charge is evident, and a scruple about usury is too expensive to be afforded. Under the circumstances, the law forbidding the Jews to lend on interest to one another became ceremonial, on what ground does not appear.

Another instance of this narrow scripturism is found in the aversion to a census. In 1634, when the population of Massachusetts was estimated at four thousand, the magistrates did not dare enumerate them on account of “David’s example,”[3] and

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it is probably owing to this fear that we are without trustworthy information regarding the growth of population in the colonies. In 1712 Hunter, Governor of New York, proposed to ignore David’s example, but the fear of the people defeated his attempt to secure a census of that colony, there having been an epidemic after an earlier count. By numbering the freemen not in the militia, and adding in the already known number of militiamen, he learned the number of men. The women and children were afterward taken separately, and the inquisitive governor found means of counting, probably from tax lists, the white and black bondsmen. Simple addition did the rest, and there was no pestilence.[1] The inhabitants of New Jersey,”being generally of New England extraction, and thereby enthusiasts,” as Governor Hunter said, “were more difficult to count.”[2] In a later census of New York, females above sixty years of age were omitted. This bit of chicane practiced against Omniscience allayed the pious fears of the people. New-Englanders were not the only enthusiasts on this subject. Even after the Revolution, Pennsylvanians attributed an epidemic of yellow fever to the first United States census.

XXVIII.

The supremacy of conscience.

Puritanism made one great contribution to human culture. More emphatically than any other movement of modern times, it taught the supremacy

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of conscience. There were instances of men who slew their natural affections in a sublime devotion to duty as they understood it. A minister felt bound to report the seditious speeches of his son, and a magistrate sentenced his own daughter to the whipping-post.[1] Conscience could not long re-main at high tide, the ebb was inevitable. The last half of the seventeenth century saw a swift declension from primitive Puritan ideals. But through such temporary and aberrant exercises the moral nature of the race is developed; by such efforts to attain a visionary and impossible excellence is the sense of right and wrong made strenuous enough to refuse the bribes of sensuality and of worldly ambition. The successors of those who exercised their consciences on frivolous judgments about apparel, psalm singing, and imaginary idolatries in the names of islands and days, may put their hereditary strenuousness or their traditional preference for ethical considerations into the promotion of substantial social betterments. The ferment may not be pleasant, but the brew is good at the last. The weakness of Puritanism was the weakness of its age. The Virginia justice, like the New England magistrate, toiled at the task of reformation by punishing with fines, and stocks, and branks, and ducking stool, and whipping-post, offenders for lying, swearing, scolding, drunkenness, and other sins. Such was the English method in the Stuart period.[2] Neither among Puritans nor among Anglicans was there any clear vision of the spiritual advantage of

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morality. It was the outside of the cup and platter that got all this rubbing. But Pharisaism is a stage in human progress. More objectionable than the externalism was the absence of humanity. The pitiless penalties, the punishments inflicted on mere children and on half-insane women for hysterical words and acts, the ruthless creeds, the ferocious pursuit of the weak and defenseless accused of witchcraft or heresy, the unreproved delight of the mob in seeing brutes torn to pieces by dogs, provoke something like execration. But condemnation dies upon the lips when we reflect that ages to come may find many things damnable in the civilization of a more modern time.

Elucidations .

Note 1, page 144.

Down to the Revolution class distinctions were sharply marked, especially in New York and Virginia. Compare Castiglioni, Viaggi negli Stati Uniti, passim, Pictet’s Tableau des Etats Unis, ii, 181, and the remarks in Virginia Calender, p. ix, with many other well-known authorities. The maintenance of social distinctions in the assignment of seats in church was of course English. There is an instance of elaborate classification according to the rank in the Assembly Books of the Borough of Eye in 1650, in the Tenth Report of the Royal Historical MSS. Commission, part iv, p. 534, where both the northern and southern colonial ways are exemplified. The twenty-four common council-men of Eye sat together, as the burgesses did at Annapolis in the eighteenth century. On the effect of the aristocratic preconception in law, compare Cotton’s proposed laws of 1641, where three punishments are prescribed for slander. The third is, “By stripes if the slander be gross, or odious against such persons whom a man ought to honor and cherish, whether they be his superiors or in some degree of equality with himself or his wife.” Ward, who wrote the code preferred to Cotton’s, did not

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like the referendum by which his code was sent to be considered in the several towns. “I question,” he writes, “whether it be of God to interest the inferior sort in that which should be reserved inter optimates penes quos est sancire leges.” Whitmore’s Introduction to Code of 1660, p. 19. There have been in every age those who demanded justice for the lowly in the name of religion. In an Anglo-Saxon manuscript of the tenth century a bishop is enjoined not to suffer “any Christian man too greatly to injure another; nor the powerful the weak, nor the higher the lower, . . . not even his thralls, because they and those that are free are equally dear to God.” Institutes Civil and Ecclesiastical, published by the Record Commission.

Note 2, page 145.

The notion expressed in this beginning of the Assembly’s Catechism was perhaps suggested by the first question and answer in Calvin’s Catechism:

M. Quis humanæ vitæ præcipuus est finis?

P. Ut Deum, a quo conditi sunt homines ipsi noverint.

Note 3, page 145.

Compare the Select Cases of Conscience, by Shephard, of Cambridge, Mass., p. 14, and his Treatise on the Sabbath. A more moral theism than that of the Westminster Assembly was held in that time by Sir Kenelm Digby, who says, “Man is governed by God alwaies for the good of Man himself.”

Note 4, page 147.

By the Constitution of 1638 the several plantations in Connecticut agreed to “conjoyne our selves to be one Publike State or Comonwelth,” and entered into “Combination and Confederation together, to mayntayne and presearve the liberty and the purity of the Gospell of our Lord Jesus which we now professe, as also the disciplyne of the churches which, according to the truth of the said gospell, is now practiced amoungst vs.” Connecticut Records, i, 20. On this subordination of the State compare Cotton’s Abstract of Laws, iv, 4.

Note 5, page 147.

Cotton appeals to the favorite casuist of the Puritans, Dr. Perkins, who held that the Scripture contains a “platforme, not onely of theology, but also of other sacred sciences (as he calls them), . . . ethiks, oeconomicks, politicks, church government, prophecy, academy.” It was characteristic of the age that this conclusion was not deduced from the subject-matter of the Bible, but from the fitness of things. “It is very suitable to God’s all-sufficient wisdome,” argues Cotton. Letter written in 1636 to Lord Say and Seal in Hutchinson’s Massachusetts, i, 497. In the same letter Cotton writes: “Democracy, I do not conceyve that ever God did

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ordeyne as a fitt government eyther for church or commonwealth. If the people be governors, who shall be governed? As for monarchy and aristocracy, they are both of them clearly approoved, and directed in scripture, yet so as referreth the soveraigntie to himselfe, and setteth up Theocracy in both, as the best form of government in the commonwealth, as well as in the church.”

Note 6, page 148.

About the same period Samuel Danforth, a student, after-ward a well-known minister and one of the carliest mathematicians in New England, refused to recite the praises of the gods in heathen poetry, but saved the point by amending his classics as he proceeded, to the disgust of his tutor. Cotton Mather adds a marvelous ending to this anecdote, to the effect that the tutor was smitten with convulsions for reproving the lad; but we may in turn take the liberty to revise Mather before believing. Magnalia iv, c. iii, 2.

Note 7, page 149.

Punishment for blaspheming was derived from the mediæval codes. Antonius Matthæus the second, in his De Criminibus, published in 1644, p. 643, says that in Holland the old rubric against blaspheming “the Mother of God, the saints or saintesses (Moeder Gods, oft den sancten, of sanctinnen), was changed at the Reformation to a law against blasphemy of Almighty God or his holy word. But Matthaus quotes Plato’s Minos that it is an indignity to the Deity to speak evil of a “man like himself”—that is, any good man.

Note 8, page 153.

There were those apparently who evaded the law against health drinking by merely drinking to one another. This is condemned in a Massachusetts act of September, 1639, Records, i, 271. Compare the Pennsylvania law of 1682 and that of 1705 “Against Health Drinking,” in which the tendency to intemperance is made the ostensible reason. See also Winthrop’s Journal in various places. Practical reasons, such as the danger of excess, probably lay below all the objections to health drinking, but it was characteristic of the age that the religious reasons were sent to the fore, especially by the earlier objectors. In the “Great Evil of Health Drinking,” published in 1684, the profaneness of the practice and its danger are both urged. Retrospective Review, xii, 322. Health drinking was thought to have been introduced into England at the time of Sir John Norris’s expedition to the Netherlands—that is, after 1585.

Note 9, Page 155.

“Every shred of Gold drawn out of a wedge of Gold is as much Gold as the whole Iumpe and wedge. Whatever is drawn

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out of the scripture by just consequence and deduction is as well the word of God as that which is an expresse Commandment.” Cotton’s Grounds and Ends of the Baptisme of the Children, p. 4.

Note 10, page 155.

Ninth Report of Royal Commission on Hist. MSS., part i, appendix, p. 155, Records of City of Canterbury, 1554-5; “Rec” of Rich. Orchardson, Shomaker, for openyng his wyndowes on a Sonday in servyce tyme, and for that his chymney was on fyre by nyght, and for that he was very poore he was forgevyn payment for the whole.” This is said to be the first record of indictment for Sabbath breaking.

Note 11, page 155.

Archdeacon Hakewill says in 1627: “Common swearing, simple fornication, prophaning the Lord’s Day and the like, in former times were scarce knowne to be sinnes; but being now by the light of the Gospell discovered to be such, and that in a high degree, as they are straitly forbidden by God’s Law, so is the edge of our Lawes turned against them.” Apologie, 466.

Note 12. page 156.

“Our pleasure likewise is, that the bishop of that diocesse take the like straight order with all the Puritans and Precisians within the same, either constraining them to conform themselves, or to leave the countrey according to the lawes of the kingdome and canons of our church, and so to strike equally on both hands against the contemners of our authority and adversaries of our church. And as for our good people’s lawfull recreation, our pleasure likewise is, that, after the end of divine service, our good people be not disturbed, letted or discouraged from any lawful recreation, such as dancing, either men or women, archerie, for men, leaping, vaulting or any other harmless recreation, nor from having May games, Whitson ales, and Morris dances, and the setting of May-poles and other sports therewith used, so as the same be had in due and convenient time, without impediment or neglect of divine service; and that women shall have leave to carry rushes to the church for the decoring of it, according to their old custom.” The King’s Majesties Declaration to his Subjects concerning lawful Sports to be used.

Note 13, page 160.

The allusions to the early Virginia life in the text are based on the whole literature relating to colonial Virginia in print and manuscript, and the authorities are too numerous for specification. The multitude of documents of all sorts relating to Virginia life in the eighteenth century throw a strong backward light on the earlier and ruder period, but there is no lack of seventeenth

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century writings from which to make up a picture of the times. The period has usually been misapprehended. It is necessary to remember that until the last fifteen years of the seventeenth century negro slavery was an insignificant element of Virginia life. This is one of the great points of difference from the later period.

Note 14, page 160.

The reader is referred to my tracing of this early rise of Sabbathism in The Beginners of a Nation. To the authorities there cited I here add Cranmer’s Catechism, so called, which I had not seen when that work appeared. Its date is about 1548. “And therefore that this Christian libertie maye be kepte and mainteyned, we now kepe no more the saboth on Saturday as the Jews do, but we observe the Sondaye and certayne other daies as the maistrates do iudge it convenient.” This catechism was rendered from a Latin version made by Justus Jonas of a German catechism. The Lutheran catechism adds “the pastors of the churches” to the magistrates in the passage quoted above. In both catechisms these Sabbaths and holy days of human appointment are to be rather strictly devoted to religious duties and not to idleness and “ungodly works.” Compare Catechism of Thomas Becon, chaplain to Cranmer, pp. 82, 83, where the ground is substantially the same.

Note 15, page 163.

Laxity in Sabbath keeping brought “Wrath Fires and other judgments upon a professing people,” declared the Synod of 1679. There are traces of this association of fires with neglect of the Sabbath or divine worship in several places. Compare Plymouth Records, v, 177. Penhallow, writing in 1725 of the eastern Indian wars, says very ambiguously, “It is remarkably observable that among all the settlements and towns of figure and distinction, not one of them have been utterly destroyed wherever a church was gathered.” Perhaps churches were rarely “gathered” in pioneer towns. Compare the “nede and povertie” anciently believed to befall Sabbath breakers, as in Cranmer’s Catechism of 1548 on the “thirde precepte,” Oxford edition, 1829, p. 43, and the corresponding Latin of Justus Jonas, 1539, in the same volume, p. 33.

Note 16, page 165.

During Puritan domination in Maryland a man was arrested in 1656, the charge being “that hee shott and kild a turkey upon Sunday Contrairie to the said Act” of Assembly, but he was allowed to go free on declaring himself “sorie for his Offense.” Hanson’s Old Kent, 212.

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Note 17, page 168.

Something like the principle I have formulated, though not quite the same, may be traced in Beccaria, when in his Dei Delitti e delle Pene, he says that strong emotions, born of enthusiasm, when they become enfeebled and wasted by time, gradually become the wisdom of the age and a useful instrument in strong and expert hands. “Le passioni forti, figle del fanatismo e del entusiasmo indebolite e rose, diro cosi, dal tempo, che riduce tutti i fenomeni fisici e morali all’ equilibrio diventano, a poco a poco, la prudenza del secolo, e lo stromento utile in mono forte e dell’ accorto.”

Note 18, page 168.

Earlier than the change of evangelicalism to philanthropy came the outgrowth of a similar altruism from the enthusiasm of the early Quakers. I have reserved the treatment of this development of the reformatory spirit for a future volume of this series, in which there will be occasion to study the origins and results of Quakerism in examining the rise of the West Jersey and Pennsylvania colonies.

Note 19, page 170.

On pp. 4 and 5 of the Practice of Piety some of the things that must be known are thus set forth for a hair-splitting generation: “In the Vnity of the Godhead there is a plurality which is not accidentall (for God is a most pure act and admits no accidents) nor essentiall (for God is one Essence only) but personall.” There are pages of this ethereal verbalism. In the Select Cases of Conscience, by Shephard, of Cambridge, Mass., there is an abstruse disquisition “Of Conceiving aright of the Holy Trinity,” and another “Of Ordering the thoughts aright in Civil Employments.” From one on “Sinful Distractions” this example of the absence of a discriminating sense of proportion will serve: “You do not onely deserve, but are under the sentence of death and curse of God, immediately after the least hairs-breadth swarving from the Law by the smallest Sinne, and most involuntary accidentall infirmity,” “the least sinne being (ex parte objecti), in respect of God against whom it is committed, as horrible and as great as the greatest.” There were those who maintained that ringing chimes on Sunday was as great an offense as parricide, any sin being, in Shephard’s phrase, “the dishonoring of infinite Majesty,” pp. 13, 14.

Note 20, page 172.

The Westminster Assembly, in trying to avoid the incongruity of condemning a man for good works, takes the dilemma by both horns. “Works done by unregenerate men although for the matter of them . . . they are sinful, . . . yet their neglect

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of them is more sinful and displeasing with God.” The Humble Advice of the Assembly of Divines, etc.

Note 21, Page 174.

Cranmer’s Catechism of 1548, edition of 1829, p. 51, says, “If we should have heathen parents and dye without baptisme, we should be damned everlastingly.” Cranmer here follows closely the Lutheran version, whieh reads: “Quando autem Ethnicos et impios parentes haberemus, et sine baptisme moreremur, in æternum damnaremur.” The phrases of the catechism of Nowell, such as “digni eterna damnative,” as applied to the unbaptized, have the inclusiveness of the church catechism, of which Nowell was probably the author. Thomas Becon, chaplain to Cranmer, in his elaborate catechism, vehemently repudiates the notion that Christian children dying without baptism are damned, but his arguments leave no room for the salvation of the infants of heathen parents. Parker Society edition, p. 22 and following. Bishop Jewell admits the possible salvation of men without the sacrament, and cites the penitent thief, but such cases he treats as exceptional. Works, 1611, p. 261 and following. Anglican theologians in the seventeenth century generally content themselves with ascribing saving virtue to baptism, but they seem to shrink from the converse, that all children unbaptized will be damned, which was yet the general belief. Jeremy Taylor, in his Life of the Holy Jesus, section ix, discourse vi, pt. ii, 24, does not follow the “hard father of the children,” Augustine, in denying salvation to unbaptized infants, but he can not escape from the prevailing ambiguity of his class. He says “well may we lament the death of poor babes” unbaptized, because if it is due to the parents’ neglect “we may weep as those that have no hope.” He throws the matter on God’s goodness, but with much dubiety. This narrow admission of unauthorized hope made the Anglican by so much more modern and humane than such fathers as Ambrose and Augustine on the one hand, and the Calvinist divines of the time on the other. The value attached to baptism by the people is very evident. There is somewhere an anecdote of two scapegrace parsons from Virginia, who paid the expenses of a junketing tour in North Carolina by fees for baptism. Story, the Quaker preacher, in 1699, heard a woman publicly reproach Lillingston, the incumbent of a Maryland parish, with having demanded a hogshead of tobacco for baptizing each of her five children. Story’s Journal, 229. It was believed in Virginia that a son of a chief of the Doegs, who had been “pawewawd” or bewitched, was disenchanted and healed by the administration of

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baptism, and this miracle “was taken for a convincing proof against infidelity.” T. M.’s Beginning, etc., of Bacon’s Rebellion, in Force, i, 9. Traditional notions about the saving efficacy of baptism were not wholly eradicated from the minds of the first generation of New Englanders. “The people begin to complain,” writes Lechford about a dozen years after Winthrop’s migration, that “their children for the most part remain unbaptized: and so have little more priviledge than Heathens.” Plaine Dealing, 89. The exclusion from baptism of the children of parents not in covenant with the church led to much correspondence between New England divines and Puritans in England, and tractates appeared on both sides. An Apologie of the Church in New England, . . . sent over in answer to Mr. Barnard in the year 1639, I saw in the White-Kennett Library in London, and there now lies before me Church Government and Church Covenant Discussed, etc., 1643. This is Richard Mather’s reply to thirty-two questions sent him by ministers known to him in Lancashire and Cheshire. There is also before me a little volume dated 1643, with a long title beginning, “A Letter of Many Ministers in Old Engla