Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
raised out of the weekly contribution: which accordingly was agreed
upon.[10]
In his first election sermon, preached in the May following, he joined
issue with the democratic spirit of the deputies, by supporting a
principle which was flagrantly oligarchical:
That a magistrate ought not to be turned into the condition of a
private man without just cause, & to be publicly convict, no more
than the magistrates may turn a private man out of his freehold,
etc., without like public trial, etc.[11]
Unrebuffed by the rejection of this curious doctrine of the freehold
tenure of magistrates, Cotton made a more ambitious attempt to
theocratize the state, when at the October court of 1636, in response
to the persistent pressure for a fundamental law, he presented his code
for adoption by the commonwealth, the scriptural origin of which is
revealed in the title, “Model of Moses his Judicials.” Cotton Mather
tells of this venture in constitution making, in the following glowing
but inaccurate words:
On Mr. Cotton’s arrival he found the whole country in a perplexed
& a divided state, as to their _civill constitution_.... It was
then requested of Mr. _Cotton_ that he would, from the laws
wherewith God governed his ancient people, form an _abstract_ of
such as were of a moral and a lasting equity; which he performed
as acceptably as judiciously. But inasmuch as very much of an
_Athenian democracy_ was in the mould of the government, by the
royal charter.... Mr. Cotton effectually recommended it unto them
that none should be _electors_, nor _elected_ therein, except such
as were _visible subjects_ of our Lord Jesus Christ, personally
_confederated_ in our churches. In these, and many other ways, he
propounded unto them an endeavour after a theocracy, as near as
might be, to that which was the glory of Israel, the “peculiar
people.”[12]
Cotton’s code was rejected in favor of one, somewhat less Hebraic,
prepared by Nathaniel Ward, but he continued to be the chief guide
and mentor to the magistrates in political as well as theological
matters, and his theocratic philosophy determined in large measure the
policy of the oligarchy. To found an Hebraic state in which political
rights should be subordinate to religious conformity, in which the
magistrates should be chosen from a narrow group, with authority beyond
the reach of the popular will, and with the ministers serving as court
of last resort to interpret the divine law to the citizen-subjects of
Jehovah--this was the great ambition of John Cotton; and the untiring
zeal and learned scriptural authority which he dedicated to that
ambition justify us in regarding him as the greatest of the New England
theocrats. In the categories of the Puritan philosophy of ethical
stewardship there was no recognition of the profane doctrine of natural
rights. Freedom was the prerogative of righteousness; the well-being of
society required that the sinner should remain subject to the Saint.
Nowhere does he lay down this principle more unmistakably than in an
important state paper:
Now if it be a divine truth, that none are to be trusted with
public permanent authority but godly men, who are fit materials
for church membership, then from the same grounds it will appear,
that none are so fit to be trusted with the liberties of the
commonwealth as church members. For, the liberties of this
commonwealth are such, as require men of faithful integrity to God
and the state, to preserve the same.... Now ... these liberties are
such as carry along much power with them, either to establish or
subvert the commonwealth, and therewith the church, which power, if
it be committed to men according to their godliness ... then, in
case worldly men should prove the major part, as soon they might
do, they would readily set over us magistrates like themselves,
such as might ... turn the edge of all authority and laws against
the church and the members thereof, the maintenance of whose
peace is the chief end which God aimed at in the institution of
magistracy.[13]
This, quite evidently, is the negation of democracy, and it has been
freely charged against his reputation by later critics. But in fairness
it must be added, that it is equally the negation of the principle of
hereditary aristocracy; and to reject the latter was a severer test of
his integrity than to deny the former. He wanted neither a democracy
nor an aristocracy to control the church-state. “Hereditary honors
both nature and scripture doth acknowledge,” he argued cautiously in
reply to “Certain Proposals made by Lord Say, Lord Brooke, and other
Persons of quality, as conditions of their removing to New-England.”
“Two distinct ranks we willingly acknowledge ... the one of them called
Princes, or Nobles, or Elders (amongst whom gentlemen have their
place), the other the people.” To the former he willingly accorded the
right of rulership so long as they were of approved godliness, faithful
to their stewardship. But “if God should not delight to furnish some of
their posterity with gifts fit for magistracy, we should expose them
rather to reproach and prejudice, and the commonwealth with them, than
exalt them to honor, if we should call them forth, when God doth not,
to public authority.” It must be set down in John Cotton’s accounts
that he discouraged the transplanting of English aristocracy to the
soil of Massachusetts.
There remains to consider how he conducted himself in another weighty
matter that was laid upon his shoulders--the defense of the New England
polity against old-world critics. Congregationalism had been somewhat
caustically handled by the English Presbyterians, as smacking both of
democracy and Separatism; and John Cotton was called to justify to them
the apparent innovations. His most notable work in this field was his
celebrated volume, _The Way of the Congregational Churches Cleared_,
a treatise crammed, in the language of a contemporary admirer, with
“most practical Soul-searching, Soul-saving, and Soul-solacing
Divinitie”; “not Magisterially laid down, but friendly debated by
Scripture, and argumentatively disputed out to the utmost inch of
Ground.” Into the subtleties of this learned work we need not enter;
its main thesis alone need detain us, and that thesis was an implied
denial of the democratic tendencies of the “New England way.” Cotton
was greatly concerned over the charge of Joseph Baillie, a vigorous
Scotch Presbyterian, that Congregationalism was only a different form
of lower-class Brownism, “a native branch of Anabaptism”; and that
in resting ecclesiastical sovereignty upon “the particular, visible
Church of the Congregation,” it was Separatist in principle as well as
in practice. The charge was true, but John Cotton was too thoroughly
a Jacobean gentleman to concede it; dishonor would come upon the New
England churches, he believed, if it were conceded. So he was driven
to casuistry: “No marvall, if Independents take it ill to bee called
Brownists.... He separated from Churches and Saints: we, onely from
the world, and that which is of the world”; and then to a categorical
denial, “for New England there is no such church of the Separation at
all that I know of.”[14] From this it was a natural step to a downright
rejection of the democratic principle of Congregationalism:
Neither is it the Scope of my whole Book, to give the people a
share in the Government of the Church.... Nay, further, there be
that blame the Book for the other Extreme, That it placeth the
Government of the Church not at all in the hands of the People, but
of the Presbyterie.[15]
The same note of disingenuous casuistry runs through his well-known
controversy with Roger Williams over the question of toleration. In
seeking to parry the thrust that the Saints, after quitting England
to escape persecution, had themselves turned persecutors, he argued:
“There is a vast difference between men’s inventions and God’s
institutions; we fled from men’s inventions, to which we else should
have been compelled; we compel none to men’s inventions.” From which
it followed, that “if the worship be lawful in itself, the magistrate
compelling him to come to it, compelleth him not to sin, but the
sin is in his own will that needs to be compelled to a Christian
duty.”[16] The brethren of Massachusetts were not singular in believing
that they were very near to God and privy to His will; nor were the
dissenters to their policy singular in their skepticism concerning
such infallibility; and when skepticism blows its cold breath upon it,
the logic of John Cotton turns to ashes. Not freedom to follow the
ways of sin, but freedom to follow the law of God as he expounded that
law--such was Cotton’s restriction upon the “natural liberties” of the
subject of Jehovah. Let there be freedom of conscience if it be under
no error, but not otherwise; for if freedom be permitted to sinful
error, how shall the will of God and John Cotton prevail upon earth?
After the battle has been fought and lost it is easy to see the
strategic mistakes; but it is not so easy to keep one’s head in the
thick of the struggle. As John Cotton looked overseas at the social
revolution then threatening to submerge, not only Presbyterianism, but
the very social order in which he had been nurtured; as he considered
the logical implications of the strange, heretical doctrines that
were bandied about in pamphlet and sermon, he was put almost in a
panic. The solid foundations of church and state were threatened by
mischievous men, not only in England but in the new Canaan which had
cost so much in prayer and sacrifice; should he keep silent while, in
the name of toleration, the gunpowder was being put in place for the
work of destruction? Even today we can feel the anxious concern of John
Cotton’s mind in such a vibrant passage as this:
I confesse we ... have cause to admire, and adore the wisdome, and
dreadfull Justice of God herein, That seeing Mr. _Williams_ hath
been now as a branch cut off from the Church of _Salem_ these many
yeares, he should bring forth no spirituall good fruit: and that
in such a season, when the Spirit of Error is let loose to deceive
so many thousand soules of our English Nation: So that now their
hearts are become as Tinder, ready to catch and kindle at every
sparke of false light. Even so, O Father, because thy good pleasure
is such, to let loose this Spirit of Error in the mouth of this
Backslider, in the very houre and power of darknesse: for these are
the dayes of vengeance: when the Antinomians deny the whole law;
the Anti-sabbatarians deny the Morality of the fourth Commandement;
the Papists deny the Negative part of the second Commandement.
It is a wofull opportunitie that God hath left Mr. _Williams_
to, now to step in.... For, take away (as Mr. _Williams_ doth)
all instituted worship of God, as Churches, Pastors, Teachers,
Elders, Deacons, Members, Publick Ministery of the Word, Covenant,
Seales of the Covenant (Baptisme, and the Lords Supper), the
Censures of the Church, and the like, what is then left of all the
institutions, and Ordinances of God, which the Lord established
in the second Commandement, against the Institutions, Images and
Inventions of men in his worship.[17]
How easy it is for good men, in presence of the new and strange, to
draw back in timid reaction; and failing to understand, or fearing for
their prestige, to charge upon the new and strange a host of evils
that exist only in their panic imaginations! In this great matter of
toleration of conscience, it is quite clear today that the eyes of the
troubled theocrat, “so _piercing_ and _heavenly_ (in other and precious