Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
of absolutism by accepting a divine sovereign will. But this divine
sovereignty was a blow struck at all temporal absolutisms, for it spoke
through no vicegerent of pope, bishop, presbytery or magistrate, but
only through the voice of the individual subject. It is the priesthood
of all believers. “The _Supreme_ and _Monarchicall_ power resides onely
in our Saviour, can onely be given and attributed to him, and to none
other.” There remained, then, the difficult business of determining
how the sovereign will of Christ is to be wrought on earth, and into
this Hooker delved with such convincing thoroughness that, in his own
words, “no man that hath supped on Logick, hath a forehead to gainsay”
his conclusions. He was bold in innovation--“a cause is not the lesse
true, because of late discovered”; but after quieting “the stomachs of
such, whose expectations are not answered in any opinion, unless it
be moldy with age,” he proceeds to explain the true nature of church
organization thus:
But whether all Ecclesiasticall power be impaled, impropriated,
and rightly taken in to the Presbytery alone: Or that the people
of the Particular Churches should come in for a share, according
to their places and proportions; This is left as the subject of
the inquiry of this age, and that which occasions great thought of
heart of all hands: Great thoughts of hearts in the Presbytery, as
being very loth to part with that so chief privilege, and of which
they have taken possession so many years. Great Thoughts of heart
amongst the Churches, how they may clear their right, and claim
it in such pious sobriety and moderation, as becomes the Saints:
being unwilling to loose their cause and comfort, meerly upon a
_nihil dicit_: or forever to be deprived of so precious a legacy,
as they conceive this is, though it hath been withheld from them,
by the tyranny of the Pope, and prescription of times. Nor can they
conceive it lesse, then a heedlesse betraying of their speciall
liberties, and not selling but casting away their inheritance, and
right, by a careless silence, when the course of providence, as
the juncture of times now present themselves, allows them a writt
_Ad melius inquirendum_.... These are the times when people shall
be fitted for such priviledges, fit I say to obtain them, and fit
to use them.... And whereas it hath been charged upon the people,
that through their ignorance and unskilfulnesse, they are not able
to wield such priviledges, and therefore not fit to share in any
such power, The Lord hath promised: To take away the vail from all
faces in the mountain, the _weak_ shall be as David, and David as
an Angel of God.[46]
The church of Visible Saints confederating together to walk in the
fellowship of the faith ... is _Totum essentiale_.... Election
of the People rightly ordered by the rule of Christ, gives the
essentials to an Officer, or leaves the impression of a true
outward Call, and so an Office-power upon a Pastor ... _there is a
communicating of Power_ by Voluntary Subjection when, though there
be _no Office-power, formaliter_ in the people, yet they willingly
yeelding themselves to be ruled by another, desiring and calling of
him to take that rule; he accepting of what they yeeld, possessing
that right which they put upon him, by free consent; _hence
ariseth_ this Relation and authority of Office-rule.[47]
It is crabbed prose, not altogether worthy of a man who kept the
thorns crackling under the pot when he stood face to face with his
congregation, and though we may feel inclined to accept the challenge
of a certain old Puritan, and “lay a _caveat_ against the author’s
sweet and solid handling” of his matter, we shall be little inclined
to lay a _caveat_ against his doctrine. Here is no casuistry like John
Cotton’s, denying Congregationalism while ostensibly defending it; but
a frank acceptance of the supreme power of the people. “The Lord hath
promised to take away the veil from all faces”--in this faith Thomas
Hooker walked all his days, and what he could himself do to remove
the veil from the faces of the common people, he did heartily as unto
the Lord, thereby proving his right to be remembered among the early
stewards of our American democracy.
III • Roger Williams • Seeker
The gods, it would seem, were pleased to have their jest with Roger
Williams by sending him to earth before his time. In manner and speech
a seventeenth-century Puritan controversialist, in intellectual
interests he was contemporary with successive generations of prophets
from his own days to ours. His hospitable mind anticipated a surprising
number of the idealisms of the future. As a transcendental mystic he
was a forerunner of Emerson and the Concord school, discovering an
indwelling God of love in a world of material things; as a speculative
Seeker he was a forerunner of Channing and the Unitarians, discovering
the hope of a more liberal society in the practice of the open mind;
as a political philosopher he was a forerunner of Paine and the French
romantic school, discovering the end of government in concern for the
_res publica_, and the cohesive social tie in the principle of good
will. Democrat and Christian, the generation to which he belongs is not
yet born, and all his life he remained a stranger amongst men. Things
natural and right to John Cotton were no better than anachronisms to
him. He lived and dreamed in a future he was not to see, impatient
to bring to men a heaven they were unready for. And because they
were unready they could not understand the grounds of his hope, and
not understanding they were puzzled and angry and cast him out to
dream his dreams in the wilderness. There was abundant reason for his
banishment. A child of light, he came bringing not peace but the sword.
A humane and liberal spirit, he was groping for a social order more
generous than any theocracy--that should satisfy the aspirations of
men for a catholic fellowship, greater than sect or church, village or
nation, embracing all races and creeds, bringing together the sundered
societies of men in a common spirit of good will.
Roger Williams was the most provocative figure thrown upon the
Massachusetts shores by the upheaval in England, the one original
thinker amongst a number of capable social architects. An intellectual
barometer, fluctuating with every change in the rising storm of
revolution, he came transporting hither the new and disturbant
doctrines of the Leveler, loosing wild foxes with fire-brands to ravage
the snug fields of the Presbyterian Utopia. He was the “_first rebel_
against the divine _church-order_ established in the wilderness,” as
Cotton Mather rightly reported. But he was very much more than that;
he was a rebel against all the stupidities that interposed a barrier
betwixt men and the fellowship of their dreams. Those who found such
stupidities serviceable to their ends, naturally disliked Roger
Williams and believed they were serving God by undoing his work. There
is a naïve passage in the _Magnalia_ that suggests how incomprehensible
to the theocratic mind was this stormy petrel that came out of England
to flutter and clamor about Boston and Salem, until he was driven forth
to find such resting place as he might, there to bring forth after his
kind.
In the year 1654, a certain windmill in the Low Countries, whirling
round with extraordinary violence, by reason of a violent storm
then blowing, the stone at length by its rapid motion became so
intensely hot as to fire the mill, from whence the flames, being
dispersed by the high winds, did set a whole Town on fire. But I
can tell my reader that, above twenty years before this, there was
a whole country in America like to be set on fire by the rapid
motion of a Windmill in the head of one particular man.[48]
And John Cotton, worsted in his bout with his brilliant antagonist,
and perhaps frightened at the latter’s free speculation, found
such satisfaction as he could in epithets. Roger Williams was an
“evill-worker”; his “head runneth round”; “it would weary a sober
minde to pursue such windy fancies,” such “offensive and disturbant
doctrines”; when “a man is delivered up to Satan ... no marvell if he
cast forth fire-brands, and arrows, and mortall-things”; “it is such a
transcendent light, as putteth out all the lights in the world besides.”
The open facts of Roger Williams’ life are known to everybody. Born
in the year 1603,[49] he became a protégé of the great Coke, was
educated at Cambridge, and destined for the law, but forsook it for the
ministry. He was well advanced in his studies and coming to conclusions
that must have disturbed his conservative friends, at the time of the
Great Migration. Beginning as an Anglican, then turning Separatist,
then Baptist, and finally Seeker,[50] he is perhaps more adequately
described as a Puritan intellectual who became a Christian freethinker,
more concerned with social commonwealths than with theological dogmas.
He passed rapidly through successive phases of current thought
to end as a Leveler. Before quitting England he had embraced the
principle of Separatism, and on his first coming over he refused the
teachership of the Boston church--the position given to Cotton two
years later--because it had not broken wholly with Anglicanism. He went
to the more liberal Salem, where his inconvenient questioning of land
titles and his views on the charter brought him into conflict with the
Boston authorities. Refusing to be silenced he was banished and made
his way to Rhode Island--“sorely tossed for one fourteen weeks, in a
bitter winter season, not knowing what bread or bed did mean”--there to
found a commonwealth on democratic principles.
Yet how inadequately do such meager facts reveal the deeper sources
of his militancy! He lived in the realm of ideas, of inquiry and
discussion; and his actions were creatively determined by principles
the bases of which he examined with critical insight. Instead of being
a weather vane, blown about by every wind of doctrine, he was an
adventurous pioneer, surveying the new fields of thought laid open
by the Reformation, and marking out the several spheres of church and
state in the ordering of a true commonwealth. He was the incarnation of
Protestant individualism, seeking new social ties to take the place of
those that were loosening; and as a child of a great age of political
speculation his religion issued in political theory rather than in
theological dogma. Like other Separatist-Levelers he had penetrated
to the foundations of the New Testament and had taken to heart the
revolutionary ideals that underlie its teachings. It was the spirit of
love that served as teacher to him; love that exalted the meanest to
equality with the highest in the divine republic of Jesus, and gave
an exalted sanction to the conception of a Christian commonwealth. He
regarded his fellow men literally as the children of God and brothers
in Christ; and from this primary conception of the fatherhood of God
and the brotherhood of man, he deduced his political philosophy. Like
Channing two hundred years later, he sought to adjust his social
program to the determining fact that human worth knows neither Jew nor
Gentile, rank nor caste; and following the example of his Master he
went forth into a hostile world, seeking to make it over.
With this spirit of Christian fellowship, warm and human and lovable,
repudiating all coercion, there was joined an eager mysticism--a
yearning for intimate personal union with Christ as symbolized in the
parable of the vine and the branches, a union as close as that of the
bride and her husband. Running through his writings is a recurrent echo