Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
[34] _Letter of Lord Say and Sele_, in _ibid._, Vol. II, p. 426.
[35] _History of New England_, Vol. II, pp. 279-282.
[36] Hutchinson, _History of Massachusetts Bay Colony_, Vol. II, pp.
482-520.
Chapter IV • The Contributions of Independency
I
Other ideals than those of Winthrop and Cotton, fruitful or feculent
according to the special bias of whoever judges them, came out of
England in the teeming days of the Puritan revolution to agitate
the little settlements. A Hebraized theocracy could not satisfy the
aspirations of advanced English liberals who were exploring all the
avenues to freedom, and who, now that the old feudal bonds were
loosening, were projecting a more generous basis for the reorganization
of society. The democratic elements were beginning to make their voices
heard in England; the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers was
bearing fruit in the minds of obscure Independents; and the eventual
outcome would be the shouldering aside of a snug Presbyterian order,
and the clarification of a program for a democratic commonwealth. In
those excellent words commonweal and commonwealth--words much on men’s
tongues in the creative later years of the Puritan revolution--was
fittingly summed up the political ideal of Independency. English
liberalism had come to believe that social conformity, established in
the practice of coercion, with its monarchical state and hierarchical
church, must give way to an order founded in good will, that conceived
of the political state as a public-service corporation, concerned
solely with the _res publica_, or public thing, careful of the
well-being of all, allowing special rights or grants to none. The
state, it was coming to be argued freely, rightly understood, was
no other than society organized to further the great end of the
commonweal; no longer must it remain a private preserve for gentlemen
to hunt over.
But before that should come about a great battle must be fought, in
New England as well as in old England. The principle of individual
freedom must first be established securely in the public mind, and
to that business the party of Independents devoted its energies. In
the theory and practice of Independency two fundamental rights were
implied: the right of the individual to determine his own belief,
uncoerced by external authority; and the right to join freely with his
fellows in the institutional expression and spread of such belief.
In order to realize the first, it was a necessary preliminary to
establish the right of free inquiry on a firm constitutional basis--the
principle that the state shall safeguard the citizen in the exercise
of such right, and not hinder or thwart him; and in order to realize
the second, it was necessary to establish in social practice a much
more fiercely disputed principle, namely, the right to proselytize,
to spread one’s views freely, to endeavor to make them prevail over
contrary views. Certainly neither right would be freely granted; they
must be won in the teeth of supposedly divine sanctions to conformity.
However intimately the two are related, it is over the second that the
long fierce battle has been waged in modern history. Liberalism faces
no severer test than in its attitude towards the right of unpopular
minority propaganda. The broad principle of toleration of differences,
so vital to a democratic society, searches out and lays bare every
insincerity of liberal professions. The will to power is so universal
in appeal, it is so quick to attack every threatening nonconformity,
that no other social right has traveled so arduous a road, or lags so
far in the rear of the liberal advance. The principle of religious
toleration that was involved in the movement of Independency was the
ecclesiastical form of a struggle, which, shifting later to the field
of politics and then to economics, is still raging about us. The long
battle is still far from being won. In few countries today do more than
a small minority regard the principle of toleration otherwise than as a
social luxury to be indulged in only when times are settled.
It was in the nature of things that a clash should soon come in
Massachusetts Bay. There Independency would certainly be looked
upon as no better than a weed from the devil’s wilderness, and in
the name of God and the theocracy it would be trampled under foot.
Liberalism and the Cambridge Platform would no more mix than oil and
water. But the more immediate and narrower question of religious
toleration was only incidental to the broader divergencies that lay
in antagonistic principles of church and state, and that brought on
the clash. A general engagement was preparing between the principles
of Presbyterianism and Independency, and the real issue at stake
was the future form of society in New England--whether it was to be
aristocratic or democratic. The free environment was a strong stimulus
to idealists who looked upon the new field as a heaven-sent opportunity
for their own special Utopias to take root, and who would bitterly
resent any intrusion by a rival. Commonwealth building is a great
adventure, and the Independents with their carefully elaborated plans
would not sit quietly by and permit the Saints to preëmpt the land for
their inhospitable theocracy without a struggle. In such a contest the
more liberal party was fortunate in its leaders. Thomas Hooker and
Roger Williams were men of creative ability, of inflexible purpose,
of fine idealism, the ablest amongst the entire group of Puritan
immigrants, in whom the great principles of Independency found worthy
stewards; and the long struggle they carried on, each in his own way,
with the theocratic leaders of Massachusetts was to affect profoundly
the later development of New England. In the end the Presbyterianism
of Boston was to surrender to the Congregationalism of Hartford. From
Connecticut and Rhode Island, it must be recalled, rather than from the
Bay colony, came those democratic principles and institutions that were
to spread widely in later years, and create the New England that after
generations have liked to remember.
II • Thomas Hooker • Puritan Liberal
Among the Englishmen who came to Massachusetts were some to whom the
“New England way” seemed to promise a democratic organization of
the church, and who looked with disapproval upon the Presbyterizing
policy of the oligarchy. Of this number the congregations of Newtown,
Dorchester, and Watertown were noteworthy for the quiet determination
with which they seceded from the theocratic commonwealth, and set
up for themselves in the Connecticut wilderness. Their leaders were
liberals who believed that everything should be done decently and
in order, but who were determined that the outcome of such decent
orderliness should be a free church in a free state; and so while Roger
Williams was engaged in erecting the democracy of Rhode Island, Thomas
Hooker was as busily engaged in erecting the democracy of Hartford.
Concerning the “grave and judicious Hooker” surprisingly little is
known, in spite of the important work that he did and the influence
that he wielded during a masterful life. He was evidently a man
regardless of fame, who took small pains to publish his virtues for the
edification of posterity; what record he left behind bears evidence of
being the expression of a man to whom desire for celebrity was nothing
in comparison with the needs of his Master’s work. Unlike his fellow
ministers he was not much given to making books. The works that bore
the name of Thomas Hooker on the title-page were put through the press
usually by other hands than his, and were taken from shorthand notes.
His great contribution, _A Survey of the Summe of Church Discipline_,
published anonymously and in an imperfect form, was written against
his will in consequence of his having been drafted for the service
by his fellow ministers. In removing from Newtown he cut himself off
from the group of diarists who diligently recorded the happenings of
the day, and so failed of being portrayed and praised by divers busy
pens. Lacking exacter information, we are forced to rely mainly upon
such hearsay reports as have come down to us, pieced out by Puritan
tradition; and these reports make Thomas Hooker to have been a strong
and resourceful man, a better democrat than his fellow ministers, the
father of New England Congregationalism as it later came to be when the
Presbyterianizing tendency was checked--a practical leader who rejected
equally the reactionary theocracy of John Cotton, and the leveling
radicalism of Roger Williams.
For the pronounced democratic sympathies of this “light of the western
churches”--a sympathy quite unusual in his day and world--some grounds
will be discovered in his commonplace origin. Unlike John Cotton, who
had a “descent from honourable progenitors,” Hooker was sprung from
a plain yeoman family that had made no stir in the world. His native
hamlet, Marfield in Leicestershire, numbered no more than six houses,
tucked away in a secluded countryside. His schooling was got by the
aid of scholarships: at Market-Bosworth and later at Cambridge, where
he entered as sizar, which meant among other things that he was waiter
on tables in the Hall. When he was settled in a forty-pound living
at Esher, in Surrey, he married a “waiting-woman” to the wife of his
patron; and when he died, after a laborious life spent in the cause
of righteousness, he left an estate appraised at 846 pounds, 15
shillings, exclusive of his books, more than half of which modest sum
was represented by the Hartford homestead.[37] Which scanty information
is sufficient to tell us that Thomas Hooker was a simple man in worldly
ambitions as well as in origin, not given to climbing or feathering his
own nest, with none of the great associates or aristocratic ties of
Winthrop and Ward and Cotton, a churchman more inclined to the ways of
Independency than to Presbyterianism.
In his professional work he was rather the pastor than the teacher,
caring more for experimental religion than for theological disputation.
He was an embodiment of the moral fervor of the Reformation that
protested against the scandal of “dumb priests.” He seems to have been
the most stimulating preacher of early New England, and it was as a
lecturer that he had made a name for himself before he was driven from
his English charge by Laud. The lecturer was a characteristic Puritan
innovation, much hated by the Anglicans. Translated into a modern
equivalent, it meant an agitator who used the pulpit to spread the
new gospel of free judgment in religious matters, and other gospels
displeasing to absolutism. That such men were not liked by Charles
and his Archbishop goes without saying; they were “the people’s
creatures”--a certain Tory churchman complained to the King--and “blew
the bellows of their sedition.” Such being the case it seemed but
common prudence to muzzle them, and as early as 1622 James laid down
an orthodox program, forbidding any of lesser rank than “a bishop or
dean [to] presume to preach in any popular auditory on the deep points
of predestination, election, reprobation, or of the universality,
efficacy, irresistibility of God’s grace,” and restricting Sunday
afternoon sermons to such innocuous themes as the “Catechism, Creed,
or Ten Commandments.”[38] It was an endeavor to stop men’s thinking by
putting the crown of martyrdom on the lovers of truth. To forbid the
Puritan to talk of such things, to shut up the Word of God from him,
was to blow the bellows of his sedition indeed.
That Thomas Hooker was not a man to be muzzled must have been clear
to all who knew his stubborn English will. In his homely vigor he was
not unlike Hugh Latimer, direct and vigorous in speech and action,