And yet, notwithstanding these economic disadvantages, this depletion of a population inheriting noble ideals, and the infusion of a class of settlers holding, in many instances, political and religious convictions quite at variance with those of the founders of the colonies, the “type” persists. The New England towns are still unlike, and in some respects superior to, those of other sections of the country. The New England States still lead in reformatory legislation. New England’s approval or disapproval of ideas affecting national destiny still has weight with Congress and Presidents altogether disproportionate to the number of her representatives in Congress or her votes in the Electoral College.
If one will walk about New England towns one will find in each a church, a town-house, and a school, and in most of them a railroad station and a factory. In the majority of them there will also be a public library, small perhaps and usually housed in the town-house, but open to all, and supported from the public funds. In the larger towns, especially in those where manufacturing is a prominent factor in the communal prosperity, a hospital, supported by public taxation, is open to all. In almost every town there is a grass-covered, tree-shaded “common,” which serves as a village or town park, and on it usually stand memorial tablets or statues testifying to the valor of the dead who went forth to fight in the War of the Revolution or in the Civil War.
The church symbolizes that belief in God and that disposition to obey His will and law which the noblest and wisest men of all ages and climes have agreed upon as the sine qua non of civic as well as of individual prosperity, and in this instance it also stands for that separation of Church and State which our national experience – and that of Canada and the Australian Colonies as well – shows to be the ideal relation. That for a time, in the early days of Massachusetts and Connecticut, there was an unsuccessful attempt to preserve a union of State and Church, an attempt which had for some of its least commendable incidents the wholesale hanging of men and women for witchcraft, the expulsion of Quakers, and the ostracism or exclusion of Roman Catholics and Anglicans, is not to be denied.
That the people of New England have been duly conscientious is apparent by the multiplication of churches at home, and by their never-ceasing, overflowing gifts to establish churches, colleges, schools, and Christian missions in the South and West and in foreign lands. It is from the thrifty, prosperous, philanthropic New Englander that the treasuries of the great Protestant missionary and educational societies receive their largest average per-capita gifts, and it is to New England that the steps of the Western and Southern educator still turn for endowments which his State may not, or the people cannot, or do not, give.
Peopled by inhabitants given over to introspection, and as fond of theology as the Scotch, the early New England communities were intensely religious and sectarian. God to them was a Personal Sovereign, intimately concerned with their daily life. They were His chosen people, and, as such, pledged to obedience to His service. The Church was His Bride; the clergyman was His spokesman, and received the deference – social as well as official – which was due to one so augustly commissioned. The social as well as the intellectual life of the community centred almost exclusively in the life of the church and the sermons of its clergy. Sectarian animosities were the inevitable product of a mistaken emphasis put upon the form or utterance of truth, rather than upon truth itself; or, to put it differently, of a provincialism and narrowness of vision that made it impossible for the many to understand that truth is many-sided, that men are different temperamentally, that revelation is continuous and progressive, and that religion is not theology. Communities exist in New England where the old view still obtains, where sectarianism is as rampant as ever, where the clergyman is the social autocrat as well as the shepherd of souls. But such towns are becoming fewer and fewer as the years go by, and of towns of the newer type, where the church is recognized as only one of the many agents which God has for ushering in His Kingdom on earth, New England now has quite as many, probably, as are to be found elsewhere.
To those interested in the theological and religious history of English-speaking peoples, certain New England towns have a peculiar fascination and value as environments which have affected character. Northampton, Massachusetts, will ever be a Mecca because of the identification of Jonathan Edwards with the town. Concord, in the same commonwealth, has not only the unique glory that belongs to a town where national history has been made and the best American literature of its class written by Hawthorne and Thoreau, but also it is the town where Emerson’s ministerial ancestors lived, where he flowered out and became
that grey-eyed seer
Who in pastoral Concord ways
With Plato and Hafiz walked.
Newport, Rhode Island, with all its present pre-eminence as a place where “Fashion is a potency … making it hard to judge between the temporary and the lasting,” will ever remain most worthy of resort because it was the birthplace of William Ellery Channing, and, for thirty years, was the home of the Rev. Dr. Samuel Hopkins, both eminent as theologians and as brave pioneer antagonists of human slavery. Dr. Hopkins was the model for the New England pastor described by Harriet Beecher Stowe in The Minister’s Wooing. Northfield, Massachusetts, is known to thousands of Christians the world over, who have never seen its rare beauty of river and landscape, because a boy, one Dwight L. Moody, was born and bred there, and has become the greatest evangelist of modern times. Litchfield, Connecticut, is famous as the birthplace of Henry Ward Beecher, and if one wishes flash-light pictures of New England ecclesiastical and social life at the beginning of this century, let one read the autobiographic records of Lyman, Henry Ward, Harriet, and Catherine E. Beecher.
Portland, Maine, is known to thousands throughout the English-speaking world, who are ignorant of every other fact in its long and honorable history, because Francis E. Clark there conceived and began that movement to enlist young people in active Christian service, which is now known as the International Young People’s Society of Christian Endeavor, with 54,191 local societies, and more than three and one quarter million adherents enrolled, Russia alone, of the nations of the earth, being without a society now. Hartford, Connecticut, with a discernment and gratitude not always displayed by municipalities, has named its beautiful municipal park after Horace Bushnell, for many years its most eminent divine and “first citizen.”
Salem, fascinating as it is because of its connection with the witchcraft delusion and the early Puritan theocracy; because of its being for a time the home of Hawthorne, who has preserved its ancient local color and atmosphere in his fiction; and because of its ancient glory as a seaport town, whence departed a fleet of sailing craft that made Salem known throughout the world, in places where Boston and New York were then unknown, nevertheless derives its chief glory from the fact that it was the town where Roger Williams, the Welsh statesman and prophet, found a church willing to sit at his feet. The church’s loyalty, however, gave way at last to the resistless pressure of the civil authorities and the zealous ecclesiastical tyrants of the Puritan commonwealth, and it permitted him to depart, to establish in Rhode Island a community based upon the principle of entire liberty of conscience, and majority rule in secular affairs. Massachusetts’ loss and the world’s gain are thus summed up by Gervinus the German historian:
“The theories of freedom in Church and State, taught in the schools of philosophy in Europe, were here [Rhode Island] brought into practice in the government of a small community. It was prophesied that the democratic attempts to obtain universal suffrage, a general elective franchise, annual parliaments, entire religious freedom, and the Miltonian right of schism would be of short duration. But these institutions have not only maintained themselves here, but have spread over the whole Union. They have superseded the aristocratic commencements of Carolina and of New York, the High-Church party in Virginia, the theocracy in Massachusetts, and the monarchy throughout America; they have given laws to one quarter of the globe, and, dreaded for their moral influence, they stand in the background of every democratic struggle