CHAPTER II. THE RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT OF THE COLONIES. VIRGINIA The com EPISCOPALIANISM in Virginia and Maryland reminds us of what we have seen of its condition in the eighteenth century, or even after the Restoration. As a rule its clergy were careless of all the obligations of their office when they were not positively immoral. A contemporary describes them as "so basely educated, so little acquainted with the excellency of their charge and duty, that their lives and conversations are more fitted to make heathens than Christians."1 missioners of the bishop of London, Bray and Blair, came over and tried to correct abuses and silence the most scandalous of the clergy, but neither succeeded. It was not until the War of Independence had swept away all State support and weeded out the worthless clergy that Episcopalianism lifted up its head in the South. The labors of Whitefield and the great awakening had also a marked influence toward this purification. They helped also in giving an evangelical tone to the Episcopal Church in Virginia which it never lost. Its theological seminary there is the only evangelical school in the whole Church. Blair threw himself with indomitable perseverance into the discouraging task of interesting the people of Virginia in a college, solicited funds for it, and by the aid of English contributions was at last able to see its walls arise at Williamsburg in 1693. William and WILLIAM AND Mary College did a great work in helping forward the MARY COL redemption of the Virginian Church. And when we ask the reason of the prominence of Virginia in the Revolutionary times we must not forget the services of that little college on the James River in the oldest incorporated town in the State. LEGE. The colony of Massachusetts Bay was in effect a private corporation having its own regulations, and those who sought its privileges were supposed to abide by these. Roger Williams, an earnest, sincere, self-opinionated minister at Salem, was a Sep 'Perry, Historical Collections, Virginia, p. 30. 'Much interesting information concerning the early history of religion and education in Virginia will be found in H. B. Adams, Hist. of William and Mary College, pub. by the Bureau of Education, Washington, D. C., 1887. MASSACHU- WILLIAMS. aratist of the Separatists, and greatly annoyed the colony by denying its right to punish Sabbath breaking and other offenses of the first table, and its right to swear worldly persons. For these and other opinions he was banished in 1635. In midwinter he proceeded to Narragansett Bay, where he bought lands from the Indians, and in 1636 founded Providence and established a pure democracy. Others in sympathy with his advanced view on toleration followed him, and in 1639 they founded the first Baptist church in the new world, Williams receiving baptism by immersion from Holliman, a layman, and then baptizing Holliman and several others. There can be no doubt that from the standpoint of the colonists the banishment of Williams was justifiable, as they sincerely believed that his opinions would subvert their foundations. On the other hand it is easy to see that they were mistaken as to this, inasmuch as the peace and order of his own colony, founded on those opinions, were never disturbed. Milton calls Williams "that noble confessor of religious liberty," and he deserves eternal honor as being the first man in America to grasp the principle of toleration. But he deserves a greater honor because he had the daring faith to venture to apply that principle in the government of a commonwealth when he had no precedents to guide him. Catholics have objected that he excluded them from toleration.' This is not so. Later a clause to that effect was added to the statutes, probably interpolated by the committee collating the laws about 1699, though later still the interpolated clause received recognition by the legislature, and so stood until it was rescinded in 1783. But no Catholic suffered in Rhode Island on account of religion, and even Quakers were exempted from service in the local militia. The banishment of Mrs. Ann Hutchinson and her friends in 1638 was less justifiable, as it arose from a purely theological conANN HUTCH- troversy, and a controversy in which it is quite likely that strong-minded and noble-hearted woman was in the right.' It appears that the Puritan preachers had been un INSON. "Rhode Island boasts of having established religious toleration; but her founder was an Anti-Catholic fanatic, and one of the earliest laws pointedly excluded Catholics from civil rights."-De Courcy and Shea, Hist. of the Cath. Church in the United States, p. 524. Arnold, Hist. of Rhode Island, ii, 490-497; Sheldon, Church History, iv, 188. 3 Walker, Hist. of the Congregational Churches in the United States, p. 138, and Bacon, Hist. of American Christianity, p. 101, give quite different portraitures of Mrs. Hutchinson. Unfortunately, we have no contemporary account except from her enemies. duly cold and ethical in their preaching, and Mrs. Hutchinson called them back to the biblical doctrines of grace and the witness of the Spirit. She held meetings of women which were seasons of spiritual refreshing. At these meetings the sermons of the preceding Sunday would sometimes be criticised. Unfortunately, instead of the ministers taking all this in a large-minded way as an indication that there might be a lack in their preaching, and by tact and love conciliating the dissentient element, they proceeded by discipline, censure, council, and excommunication. Whether Mrs. Hutchinson really anticipated Methodist testimony as to the witness of the Spirit and holiness we cannot positively affirm, as we have no authoritative record of her words. But it is evident that she was a believer in a more inward and mystical piety than that allowed by the logical externalism of Calvinism. Her large following by many of the best and most mature minds of the town makes it probable that there was really nothing heretical or dangerous in her teachings, though the honesty of her opponents in believing the contrary need not be questioned. Her real offense was in challenging the standing of the clerical rulers of the colony.' CONNECTICUT The pastor of the church at Cambridge (1633), then called Newtown, was one of the most broad-minded and statesmanlike of all the Puritans. This man, Thomas Hooker, was out of sympathy in some measure with the theocratic and somewhat high-handed government of the Bay PORT. colony, and for that and other reasons led his flock in 1636 to the valley of the Connecticut and founded Hartford. Others preceded and followed him, especially pastor Warham, of Dorchester, with his flock. Hooker made his colony more democratic, and imitated Plymouth in not requiring church membership as a qualification for voting. Thomas Hooker is a statesman and founder worthy to be compared with the heroes of mankind. Not long after (1638) a Puritan vicar in London, John Davenport, brought a band of pious, intelligent people-some of them men of wealth-from London to "The ministers were the privileged classes in that community-' God's unworthy prophets,' as they phrased it. Living in the full odor of sanctity among God's people-his chosen people whom he 'preserved and prospered beyond ordinary ways of Providence '—they constituted a powerful governing order. And now, suddenly, a woman came and calmly and persistently intimated that, as a class, God's prophets in New England were not what they seemed."-Charles Francis Adams, Three Episodes of Massachusetts History, Bost., 1892, i, 392. Adams writes as a Unitarian, with no belief in the religious principles of either party, but with full knowledge of the history and with fascinating interest. what is now known as New Haven, and founded a new colony, though on stanchly theocratic principles. EDUCATIONAL Only second in importance to the founding of a State is the founding of a school. Lord Macaulay in Parliament held up to the admiration of England the noble document in which the poor, struggling colony of Massachusetts Bay outlined in 1647 a system of common and grammar schools. This document said: "That learning may not be buried in the grave of our fathers in the Church and commonwealth, the Lord assisting our endeavors, It is therefore ordered that every township in this jurisdiction, after the Lord hath increased them to the number of fifty householders, shall then forthwith appoint one within their town to teach all such children as shall resort to him to write and read; . . . and it is further ordered that where any town shall increase to the number of one hundred families or householders they shall set up a grammar school, the master thereof being able to instruct youth so far as they may be fitted for the university." Even earlier than this, Salem had a free school in 1640, Boston in 1642, and Cambridge about the same time.' HARVARD Contrast with this the narrow obscurantism of Virginia's Anglican governor, Sir William Berkeley, who said, in 1671: "I thank God there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these hundred years." The freer colonies, with their more heterogeneous and irresponsible population, had to take the price of their freedom in the want of settled institutions imposed by authority. Maryland had no public-school system until 1728, and Rhode Island until 1800. The young Charlestown pastor, John Harvard, bequeathed to the grammar school at Cambridge his library and £779, which, supplemented by the gift of the colony AND YALE. of £400 out of its poverty, proved the foundation of the greatest university on the continent, and founded for the avowed purpose of "educating English and Indian youth in knowledge and godliness." In 1641 the New Haven colony ordered that a "free school shall be set up in this town, and our pastor, together with the magistrates, shall consider what yearly allowance shall be given to it out of the common stock of the town, and also what rules or laws are meet to be observed in and about the same." The New Haven people wanted to found a college also, but Cambridge protested with the solid reason that New England was too poor to support more than one college. But in 1698 the Churches of the New Haven colony decided to proceed, and in 1701 opened their 1 Higginson, Larger Hist. of the United States, p. 201. college at Saybrook, removed to New Haven in 1716, and named Yale College after one of its benefactors. The Puritan clergy of New England made the corner stone of the nation knowledge, righteousness, and religion.' 2 THE BAPTISTS SETTS. The establishment of a Christian State in Massachusetts according to the Puritan doctrine bore hard upon the dissenters. The Baptists came into the colony, and suffered hardships as good soldiers of Jesus Christ, unto stripes and IN MASSACHUimprisonment, though not unto death. The theocracy had Münster before its eyes, and was always fearful of some terrible consequence hidden beneath an apparently innocent heresy. Then all the Puritan literature against the Baptists with which they were familiar breathed the spirit of uncompromising hostility as against a revolutionary and antichristian religion. The fact that some of the continental Baptists disowned magistracy, oaths, and the State establishment of religion, gave color to Puritan fears. On the other hand, the Massachusetts Baptists were not of this stripe, but were as law-abiding in all matters outside of their worship as the Puritans themselves were, and the latter knew this, or ought to have known it. The Congregational harrying, therefore, of their Baptist brethren in 1651 and thereabouts can hardly be taken out of the category of simple persecution for religious opinion. However, in 1718 the State Church made generous amends in three of their foremost pastors assisting in the ordination of a minister to the Baptist Church at which Cotton Mather preached a sermon, "Good Men United." For the persecution of the Quakers, 1656–60, by Massachusetts something more can be said; but even here the repressive measures went to unwarranted lengths. There was nothing PERSECUTION whatever in the persistency in testimony, or in the OF QUAKERS. very rare exhibitions of fanatical indecency "for a sign" made by some Quaker woman partially or wholly demented from brooding over the shameful and cruel treatment of her sisters by the officers, which gave valid reason for the colony to enact severer laws than England, and to carry them out to the extent of hanging three men and one woman-true martyrs for the cross of Christ. Then the whipping of inoffensive women, stripped to the waist and tied to a cart, from town to town, for no other crime than being Quakers, is a stain on the laws of the Congregational theocracy which no apology touches. In 1728 the anti-Quaker laws were swept 1 Higginson's Larger Hist. of the United States, p. 194. 2 Cf. A. H. Newman, Hist. of the Baptist Churches in the United States, p. 123. |