Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
a Puritan Brother of the Cross, he sought comfort in fasts and vigils
and spiritual castigations, and--it is pleasant to learn--in ways far
more natural and wholesome. Incredible as it may seem, the following
record is authentic, and it falls like a shaft of warm sunshine across
the path of the morbid priest: “Augt, 15. [1716].... Now about Dr.
C. Mather Fishing in Spy-pond, falls into the Water, the boat being
ticklish, but receives no hurt.”[118] The restless minister who had
fished overmuch in troubled waters, sometimes, it would appear,
ventured for perch in Spy Pond.
Footnotes
[96] Kenneth B. Murdock, _Increase Mather_, 1925.
[97] Compare Murdock, _Increase Mather_, pp. 394-395.
[98] Quoted in W. Walker, _A History of Congregational Churches, etc._,
p. 187.
[99] _Ibid._, p. 190. His biographer has overlooked the significance of
this. See Murdock, _Increase Mather_, p. 151.
[100] His biographer has somewhat slurred his account of the
“Proposals.” See p. 282. But his justification is worth noting: “If the
original brand of Puritan piety was worth saving, and Mather believed
it was, an oligarchic church government was the only means of securing
it in an age when men were inclined to change their religious ideas as
they changed their thought on other affairs.”
[101] W. Walker, _A History of the Congregational Churches, etc._, p.
205.
[102] Compare Murdock, _Increase Mather_, pp. 361-363.
[103] Murdock, _Increase Mather_, pp. 138-139.
[104] See pp. 294-295, where he seeks unsuccessfully to refute the
position taken by J. T. Adams.
[105] See Murdock, _Increase Mather_, pp. 125-127.
[106] “The Brattle-Street Church Controversy,” for which see _ibid._,
pp. 258 ff.
[107] _Ibid._, pp. 373-4, note.
[108] _Ibid._, p. 170.
[109] _Cotton Mather, Puritan Priest_, p. 64.
[110] _Diary_, Vol. I, p. 271.
[111] _Ibid._, pp. 325-326.
[112] _Diary_, Vol. I, p. 279.
[113] _A Memorial of the Present Deplorable State of New-England ...
by the Male-Administration of their Present Governour, Joseph Dudley,
Esq., and his Son Paul_, London, 1707, in _Massachusetts Historical
Society Collections_, Fifth Series, Vol. VI.
[114] Vol. II, p. 214.
[115] Wendell, _Cotton Mather, etc._, p. 82.
[116] _Wonders of the Invisible World_, p. 63.
[117] _Literary History of America_, pp. 48-49.
[118] Sewall, _Diary_, Vol. III, p. 98.
Chapter III • Stirrings of Liberalism
I • John Wise • Village Democrat
In the days when Sir Edmund Andros was seeking to fasten upon
Massachusetts Bay the principles and practice of Stuart prerogative,
an event occurred that greatly stirred New England. Taxes having
been arbitrarily assessed in Council, the several towns were bidden
appoint commissioners to collect them. When the order reached Ipswich,
John Wise, minister of the second church, gathered the chief members
of his flock together, and it was agreed by them to choose no such
commissioner at the town meeting--“We have a good God, and a good
king, and shall do well to stand for our privileges,” the minister
is reported to have argued. Soon thereafter John Wise was summoned
before a star-chamber court on the charge of sedition. Upon his plea of
colonial privilege, the president of the court, Dudley, is said to have
retorted, “You shall have no more privileges left you than not to be
sold for slaves.” “Do you believe,” demanded Andros, “Joe and Tom may
tell the King what money he may have?” “Do not think,” put in another
judge, “the laws of England follow you to the ends of the earth.”
Thereupon with five others, John Wise was thrown into Boston jail,
where he lay one and twenty days, and whence he was released only after
payment of fifty pounds, giving bond in a thousand pounds for good
behavior, and suffering suspension from the ministry. “The evidence in
the case,” he remarked afterward, “as to the substance of it, was that
we too boldly endeavored to persuade ourselves we were Englishmen, and
under privileges.”[119] The year following, Andros having been driven
out, John Wise brought suit against Dudley for having denied him a writ
of _habeas corpus_.[120]
Two years later Wise served as chaplain in the ill-managed Quebec
expedition under Sir William Phipps. He bore himself well both in
council and on the field; went ashore with the storming party; and if
he had succeeded in his efforts to instil some of his own force into
the leaders, the grand exploit might not have dwindled to such an
unhappy ending. In a long account which he sent to Increase Mather,
then in London, he did not mince matters, or attempt to throw on
the Lord’s shoulders blame that belonged elsewhere, but charged the
fiasco to the cowardice of Major Walley, in command of the assaulting
troops.[121] Clearly the Ipswich minister was a fighting as well as a
praying parson, whom Cromwell would have delighted in.
Posterity has been too negligent of John Wise hitherto. Although
possessed of the keenest mind and most trenchant pen of his generation
of New Englanders, he was uninfected by the itch of publicity that
attacked so many of his fellow ministers, and so failed to challenge
the attention of later times. Called to serve in an outlying portion
of the Master’s vineyard he discovered little opportunity there and
less inclination to magnify his own importance. He was too honest to
persuade himself that God’s fame was bound up with his own, and he
was never forward to push his claims to priority in righteousness.
Nevertheless what little we know of him is to his credit. An
independent man, powerful of body, vigorous of intellect, direct and
outspoken in debate, he seems to have understood the plain people whom
he served, and he sympathized heartily with the democratic ideals then
taking form in the New England villages. Such liberalism as emerged
from the simplicity of village life found intelligent response in
his sympathies, and he dedicated his keen mind and wide reading to
the business of providing it with a philosophical justification.
Some explanation of his democratic leanings may be discovered in
his antecedents. His father was a self-made man who had come over
to Roxbury as an indented servant--most menial of stations in that
aristocratic old Boston world. He must have been of sound and rugged
stock, for in addition to a magnificent physique he endowed his son
with manly independence and democratic self-respect, which stood the
latter in good stead when, after having made his way through Harvard
College, he came to speak for the people against the tax program of
Andros, the reactionary ambitions of the Presbyterians, and the schemes
of the hard-money men. In John Wise, Cotton Mather was to encounter an
antagonist who was more than a match for him.
With the final overthrow of the theocracy and the lessening of the
political power of the clergy, a critical period in the development
of the church was reached, and with it a renewal of the old conflict
between the Presbyterian and Congregational principles. In the year
1705, under the leadership of the Mathers, the Presbyterian party,
which numbered among its adherents most of the ministers of the
larger churches, put forth a series of “Proposals,” looking to a
closer union of the churches, and greater control of the separate
congregations by the ministerial association. This was a challenge to
the Congregationalists which John Wise could not overlook. The question
touched the fundamentals of church organization, and when by way of
preparation he turned to examine critically the work of the fathers, he
found in it quite another meaning than Cotton Mather found. It was as a
liberal that he went back to the past, seeking to recover the original
Congregational principle, which, since the conservative triumph in
the Cambridge Platform of 1648, had been obscured. When he was quite
ready, he published in 1710, his _Churches Quarrel Espoused_, reissued
five years later; and in 1717, his _Vindication of the Government of
the New England Churches_, reissued together with the earlier work in
1772, and again in 1860. The two works were a democratic counterblast
to the Presbyterian propaganda, and they stirred the mind of New
England profoundly. What Edwards did later for the doctrinal side of
Congregationalism, John Wise did for the institutional. His exposition
of the Congregational principle was so luminous and convincing
that it soon came to be regarded as authoritative, and more than a
hundred years after the _Vindication_ appeared the Chief Justice of
Massachusetts cited it in support of a judicial decision.
The significance of John Wise in the history of democratic America
lies in the fact that he followed “an unbeaten path,” justifying the
principle of Congregationalism by analogy from civil polity. Seemingly
alone amongst the New England clergy of his day, he had grounded
himself in political theory; and the doctrine upon which he erected
his argument was the theory of natural rights, derived from a study of
Pufendorf’s _De Jure Naturae et Gentium_, published in 1672. Locke and
the other writers of the English natural-rights school he seems not to
have been acquainted with; but Pufendorf he had read closely, and he
discharged the new theory against his opponents with telling effect.
This was the first effective reply in America to the old theocratic
sneer that if the democratic form of government were indeed divinely
sanctioned, was it not strange that God had overlooked it in providing
a government for his chosen people? Wise was the first New England
minister to break with the literal Hebraism of the old school; like
Roger Williams he was willing to make use of profane philosophies,
basing his argument upon an appeal to history, a method which baffled
the narrow Hebraists, putting them in a quandary.
After examining the three regular forms of civil government, and
showing how each is related to “the many ennobling immunities” of the
subject, Wise turned to the real business in hand, which was to inquire
“whether any of the aforesaid species of regular, unmixed governments,
can with any good show of reason be predicable of the church of Christ
on earth”; whether the monarchical form as exhibited in papacy and
episcopacy, the aristocratic form as exhibited in Presbyterianism, or
the democratic form as exhibited in Congregationalism, is nearest the
divine model as revealed in Scripture and the law of nature?
The gross inadequacy of the monarchical principle appears to him so
certain that he concludes his argument with the comment “that God and
wise nature were never propitious to the birth of this monster.” The
inadequacy of the aristocratic principle seems to him equally clear.
The principle of stewardship, ideal though it may appear in theory, did
not seem to work in practice, and he put his finger shrewdly upon the
weakness of oligarchical rule in Massachusetts. Government by a “select
company of choice persons” might be justified, if--
we could be assured they would make the Scripture, and not their
private will the rule of their personal and ministerial actions;
... but considering how great an interest is embarked, and how
frail a bottom we trust, though we should rely upon the best of
men, especially if we remember what is in the hearts of good
men (namely, much ignorance, abundance of small ends, many times
cloaked with a high pretense in religion; pride skulking and often
breeding revenge upon a small affront, and blown up by a pretended
zeal, yet really and truly by nothing more divine than interest
or ill nature), and also considering how very uncertain we are
of the real goodness of those we esteem good men ... and ... how
Christianity, by the aforesaid principle, had been peeled, robbed