Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
absolutism of the hierarchy, it turned to the system newly brought
over from Geneva, a system that retained the principle of a state
church, but which yielded control of the parish to the eldership, a
select body of the best and wisest chosen by the laity, with final
authority in doctrine and discipline vested in the synod. It drew its
support largely from the London burgesses, but with a considerable
following of country gentlemen. As the party developed it tended to
merge with the nascent capitalism, restricted the doctrine of natural
rights to property rights, and prepared the way for the later Whiggery
of Pitt, or capitalistic imperialism. The third party was more or
less consciously democratic in spirit and purpose, the expression of
the newly-awakened aspirations of the social underling. Numbers of
rebellious individualists appeared who wanted to be ruled neither by
bishop nor elder, but who preferred to club with the like-minded and
set up an independent church on a local, self-governing basis. They
took literally the command of Paul, “Come out from among them, and
be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing.”
That only was the true church, they asserted, which withdrew from all
communion with sinners and rejected the authority of a sinful state;
and so they called themselves Separatists.
Separatism, quite evidently, was the extreme left wing of the total
Puritan movement, concerned to explore all the logical deductions
from the revolutionary premise of the Reformation. It was the final
expression of the disintegrating gospel of individualism implicit
in the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Its unworldly
sincerity was as uncompromising as its unworldly scripturism. Not
finding sanction for them in the Bible, it rejected the established
ecclesiastical authorities, and laid rude hands on the garments of
Mother Church. Counsels of social expediency were accounted as dust in
the balance against the explicit commandment of the Lord to separate
from the sins of the world; and clinging to the text of the Scripture
the Separatist was led straight to the conception of a Christian
democracy. If the true church was a Congregation of the Saints, and
if the Saints were equal in the sight of God, why should not the
principle of equality prevail in the rule of the congregation? And
if it were a brotherhood in Christ, owning allegiance to the King
of Kings, by what Scriptural right did profane authorities exercise
control over the tender consciences of the brethren? The autonomy
of the congregation was a fruitful conception, certain to appeal to
vigorous natures; and out of the loins of Separatism came a numerous
and often ungainly progeny that greatly scandalized the conservative
Carolinian: Anabaptist, Digger, Fifth-Monarchy man, Quaker, Seeker,
Congregationalist--to name only a few--each following his particular
path to his divinely sanctioned Utopia, regardless of social ties,
denying the worth of social conformity. Imperious individualists, the
Separatists were certain to prove an offense to all respectable folk,
who demanded in the name of common sense that they be put down.
It was the doctrines of Separatism, quite as much as the principle
of the independency of the congregation, that aroused the fierce
antagonism of Presbyterians equally with Anglicans. In the main those
doctrines did not derive from John Calvin; they go back rather to
Wittenberg than to Geneva, to the principles of Luther and certain
German sects. The Anabaptist and the Digger, clearly, were of German
descent and of somewhat ancient lineage, offspring of late medieval
communism and other primitive enthusiasms. The Quaker was a mystic,
sprung from the New Testament, who denied the Scriptural validity of
a Hebraized Calvinism and a hireling priesthood, and accepted the
Holy Spirit as the sole guide to his feet. The Seeker, on the other
hand, who may perhaps be regarded as the completest expression of
Puritan radicalism, was an open-minded questioner who professed to
have found no satisfactory answer to his inquiry concerning the nature
of the true church, and was awaiting further light. The Seekers were
individuals rather than a sect, few in numbers yet greatly influential,
men like Roger Williams, Sir Harry Vane, Cromwell, and perhaps Milton,
outstanding figures of a great age, who embodied the final results of
Puritan idealism before it was submerged by the Restoration.
During the long years of rule by divine right under the first Stuarts,
the Anglicans held the Puritan unrest in strict control. Nevertheless a
hundred years of debate and changing economic conditions had rendered
the attempt to erect in England a counterpart of the French centralized
state, no better than an anachronism. The Presbyterian opposition
grew rapidly in numbers and prestige, and the early years of the Long
Parliament marked the culmination of Presbyterian power. The bishops
were overthrown and the elders were in a fair way to seize control of
England. But unfortunately for Presbyterian hopes, the radical sects
thrown up out of the war clashed with the moderates and finally broke
with them; whereupon followed the “root and branch” revolution that
had been long preparing. The left-wing Independents secured control of
the army and set about the work of erecting a government that should
be a real commonwealth of free citizens. The voice of the underling,
for the first time in English history, was listened to in the national
councils, for the excellent reason that his sword was drawn to enforce
his demands. But they were too small a minority to leaven the sodden
mass of a people long subject to absolutist rule. The psychology of
custom was against them. They could strike down their armed enemies in
the field, but they could not liberate the minds of men unfit to be
free. Militant Puritanism was overthrown and its idealisms became the
jest of every drunken tapster in London. But fortunately, not before
its political principles, long obscured by theology, were sufficiently
clarified to be laid open to the common understanding of Englishmen.
Out of the debates around the camp fires of the army had come a new
philosophy that rested on the principle that the individual, both
as Christian and citizen, derives from nature certain inalienable
rights which every church and every state is bound to respect. This
far-reaching doctrine of natural rights, to the formulation of which
many thinkers had contributed and which received later its classic
form from the pen of Locke, was the suggestive contribution of
Puritanism to political theory, with the aid of which later liberals
were to carry forward the struggle.
II
The far-reaching liberalisms implicit in the rejection of a
hierarchical organization of the church were to discover no allies in
the major premises of the system of theology accepted generally by the
English Puritans, and by them transported to New England. Calvinism
was no friend of equalitarianism. It was rooted too deeply in the Old
Testament for that, was too rigidly aristocratic. It saw too little
good in human nature to trust the multitude of the unregenerate;
and this lack of faith was to entail grave consequences upon the
development of New England. That the immigrant Puritans brought
in their intellectual luggage the system of Calvin rather than of
Luther must be reckoned a misfortune, out of which flowed many of the
bickerings and much of the intolerance that left a stain on the pages
of early New England history.
Two divergent systems of theology, it will be remembered, were
spreading through northern Europe during the years of the Reformation,
systems that inevitably differentiated in consequence of certain
variations of emphasis in the teachings of Luther and Calvin. Both
thinkers accepted the adequacy of the Scriptures to all temporal needs,
but Luther was at once more mystical and more practical than Calvin,
deriving his inspiration chiefly from the New Testament, discovering
the creative source of the Christian life in the spiritual union
of the soul with Christ, and inclining to tolerance of differences
of opinion amongst believers; whereas Calvin was ardently Hebraic,
exalting righteousness above love, seeking the law in the Old
Testament and laying emphasis on an authoritarian system. The one
was implicitly individualistic, the other hierarchical in creative
influence. The teachings of Luther, erected on the major principle
of justification by faith, conducted straight to political liberty,
and he refused to compromise or turn away from pursuing the direct
path. If one accepts the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers,
one can scarcely refrain from following Luther in his conception of
Christian liberty. If the mystical union of the soul with Christ has
superseded all lesser loyalties by a higher and more sacred, the
enjoyment of spiritual freedom must be reckoned the inalienable right
of every child of God. Neither the political state nor the official
hierarchy can justly coerce the individual conscience. “One thing and
one thing only,” said Luther in his _Treatise on Christian Liberty_,
“is necessary for Christian life, righteousness and liberty.” And
from this he deduced the conclusion that “neither pope nor bishop nor
any other man has the right to impose a single syllable of law upon a
Christian man without his consent; and if he does, it is done in the
spirit of tyranny.”[1] Clearly, this is the spirit of uncompromising
individualism that would eventually espouse the principle of democracy
in church and state; and it was their native sympathy with such
liberalism that led the radical Separatists to turn more naturally to
Luther than to Calvin. Many of the differences that set Roger Williams
so greatly apart from the New England brethren must be traced to the
Lutheran origins of his thinking.
There was scant room in the rigid system of John Calvin for such
Christian liberty. The Genevan thinker was a logician rather than
a philosopher, a rigorous system-maker and dogmatist who knotted
every argument and tied every strand securely into its fellow, till
there was no escape from the net unless one broke through the mesh.
To the formalist who demanded an exact system, and to the timid
who feared free speculation, the logical consistency of Calvinism
made irresistible appeal; and this perhaps suffices to explain its
extraordinary hold on the rank and file of middle-class English
Presbyterians. More original minds might break with it--men like
Richard Hooker and Roger Williams and Vane and Milton--but academic
thinkers and schoolmen, men whom the free spaces of thought frightened
and who felt safe only behind secure fences, theologians like John
Cotton and his fellows, made a virtue of necessity and fell to
declaiming on the excellence of those chains wherewith they were bound.
How narrow and cold was their prison they seem never to have realized;
but that fact only aggravated the misfortunes that New England was to
suffer from the spiritual guidance of such teachers. In seeking for
an explanation of the unhappy union of a reactionary theology and a
revolutionary political theory, Harriet Beecher Stowe suggested in
_Poganuc People_ that the Puritan immigrants were the children of two
different centuries; that from the sixteenth century they got their
theology, and from the seventeenth their politics, with the result that
an older absolutist dogma snuggled down side by side in their minds
with a later democratic conception of the state and society. In England
the potential hostility between Calvinist dogma and individual freedom
was perceived by the more liberal Separatists, but in America it was
not till the rise of the Revolutionary disputes of the next century