The Founding of New England. James Truslow Adams

ignorant of the Christian story, to whom the very existence of such a book as the Bible had been unknown, and whose faith and conduct had been regulated for them for centuries. Suddenly they found themselves in possession of the original sources in their own tongues, and were told that the eternal salvation of their souls was no longer in the keeping of the institution upon which they had always leaned with the unconscious confidence of a child upon its parents. Inspired by a new sense of their importance as individuals, and, in the majority of cases, by a self-confidence born of ignorance, earnest men undertook to interpret the scriptures, and to revise the existing ritual, dogma, and government of the Church. Extreme individualism on all these points was the natural result. Sects, often counting only single congregations in their numbers, arose everywhere. Separatism was the logical end of these discontents and strivings; but men are not logical in their actions, and separatism formed but a small element in the Puritan movement. Where it did occur, the disintegrating force did not usually stop there, but continued to plague, with petty and ignoble quarrels, the little groups thus split off. Not only were the Separatists logical, but their action required far more courage than that of the mere Nonconforming Puritans. Not only did the act itself call for a higher degree of intellectual daring, but the penalties attached to it were greater. In many cases, Nonconformity, so far from entailing loss or suffering, possessed a distinct money and social value; but no highly paid cure or easy berth in the household of a Puritan nobleman awaited the Separatist. Misguided as many of the latter may have been, and disappointing as were many of the Separatist movements, it would seem that, on the whole, the Separatists possessed more sincerity and loyalty to their ideas than the Puritans who remained within the Church. This the great majority of them did. The number of Separatists, like the number of Puritans generally, has usually been overstated in the past. The twenty thousand Brownists mentioned by Raleigh in 1593 have dwindled, under the light of modern critical research, to a mere five or six hundred at most.⁶

When the ordinary man gets a new idea, it does not necessarily dislodge the old ones that may be antagonistic to it, or even greatly modify them.⁷ The tendency to cling to the established church was as strong in the minds of most Puritans as was their self-confidence in their own beliefs and superior sanctity, and their desire to alter the Church to suit them, whether in the earlier demands in the matter of vestments, or the later in matters of polity and doctrine. Thus the survival of the mediæval idea of the Church, coupled with the new one of individual judgment and responsibility, led the conservative Puritans to adopt a half-way policy as compared with the Churchmen and the Separatists.

Under Henry VIII there had been little change, save in the single fact of the break with Rome, and the substitution of King for Pope as the head of the Church. The ecclesiastical property had, indeed, been largely confiscated and distributed among the laity so as to create a powerful economic interest in the maintenance of the King’s supremacy. By the fact of that supremacy, religious questions had become political, and important changes would necessarily in time have to be made in church administration and discipline. Otherwise, however, there was little alteration, and apparently but two out of the King’s subjects refused to conform to the new order.⁸ Although further progress was made under Edward, the reign of Mary restored the union with Rome, and sent many exiles to Frankfort, Geneva, and other centres of the Protestant movement on the continent.⁹

On the accession of Elizabeth, the refugees flocked back to London, keen to work into the fabric of the English church the religious ideas which they had imbibed and developed during their exile. The bulk of the clergy, however, were not desirous of innovation, and seem hardly to have been affected by the controversies raging at the time.¹⁰ Of the nine thousand four hundred serving the Church under the Pope in Mary’s reign, fewer than one hundred and eighty, or less than two per cent, refused the Oath of Supremacy under Elizabeth.¹¹ Not only had the parish priests thus accepted with indifference the various changes,¹² but the laity in the country districts, especially in the north, had scarcely been touched by the Reformation. When Elizabeth came to the throne, the distracted country needed, above all else, peace and unity. The fifth of her house to reign in the period of about seventy-five years since the end of the long War of the Roses, she found a nation yet suffering from the severe economic effects of that protracted crisis, and a church rendered unstable in doctrine and almost impotent in discipline by the four alternations between Roman and Protestant allegiance which had occurred in less than a quarter of a century. The question of her own legitimacy, bound up as it was with the question of religious authority, and the extreme delicacy of international political relations, especially with Spain, France, and Scotland, added difficulties to the problem of church settlement.¹³

      An established church was a necessity from all three standpoints, of religion, morals, and politics. Here and there, a few zealots might organize their own congregations and support a preacher; but any sort of congregational church government was out of the question for the overwhelming mass of the people, who were ignorant and indifferent, but still superstitiously devoted to the old Roman forms. The moral sanctions of the time were, moreover, far more closely involved with religion than they are to-day, and the church was far more essential as a prop to a government none too strong. The situation called for the opportunist policy which the Queen always favored in every difficulty. Whatever may have been her own religious beliefs or lack of them, which cannot now be known, she never cared for religious persecution, but she cared everything for a strong and united England. Although conformity was necessary to prevent the disintegration of the national life, the standards to which she required men to conform were purposely left so vague as to permit all but the most advanced of Protestant sectaries and most irreconcilable of Romanists to become members of the Church of England.

      Opportunism may temporarily save a dangerous situation, but cannot be pursued successfully as a permanent policy. The course of events led extreme Catholics to feel that the Church had advanced so far that they could not follow it, and the ultra-Puritans to consider that it had stopped so short that they could not stay for it. To an opposition, all things, theoretically, seem possible. The practical difficulties are for those who have the responsibility of power. By the end of Elizabeth’s reign, the Catholics realized that the most they could hope for would be toleration; and the real struggle for the control of the organization lay between the Puritans and those who wished the Church to continue its middle course. It must be pointed out, that this struggle of the Puritan Nonconformists was in no sense for toleration. They had as little thought of it as the Inquisition itself, nor did they exercise it when in power, either in old or New England In that regard, the Separatist John Robinson, preaching to his little congregation in Leyden, was as far ahead of the Puritan leaders in England, as Roger Williams was of the leaders of Massachusetts.

As has already been seen, only two men failed to conform to the change under Henry in 1534, and less than two per cent were forced from their cures when Elizabeth introduced the Oath of Supremacy. In the great deprivations under James and Archbishop Bancroft, following the adoption of the Canons of 1604, the most careful sifting of all the records indicates that less than three hundred Puritan clergy were deprived of their livings.¹⁴ On the other hand, when the Puritans came into power, out of eighty-six hundred clergy of the Church, the livings of approximately thirty-five hundred, or over forty per cent, were sequestrated.¹⁵ The Nonconformist struggle was not for toleration, but for control. Indeed, the objection of the Puritans to the Court of High Commission itself, to which they sometimes voluntarily carried their own cases, and which had a certain popularity that has largely been lost to sight, was not so much that it was an instrument of oppression, as that at times it was turned against themselves.¹⁶ One of the claims made for them is that they constituted a large percentage of both the clergy and the laity, and embraced a great part of the learned men of the church, and were therefore entitled to guide the organization. This claim does not stand the test of rigid criticism. As exhaustive a list as possible, giving every doubtful name to the Puritans, shows not over three hundred Puritan clergy in the church between 1600 and 1610, or about three per cent of the establishment.¹⁷ There are no figures available for the laity, but computations based on various methods of estimating the numbers yield totals equivalent to from two to six per cent of the population. These figures may be too low, but it must be considered that the common people, particularly in the country districts, were inert