Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
that Calvinism was discovered to be the foe of democratic liberalism
and was finally rejected. It is a fruitful suggestion, and in its major
contention that the liberalisms implicit in the Puritan revolution were
ill served by a reactionary theology, it is certainly in harmony with
the facts.
That Calvinism in its primary assumptions was a composite of oriental
despotism and sixteenth-century monarchism, modified by the medieval
conception of a city-state, is clear enough today to anyone who will
take the trouble to translate dogma into political terms. In recasting
the framework of the old theology, Calvin accepted as a sovereign
conception the idea of God as arbitrary and absolute will--an august
_Rex regum_ whose authority is universal and unconditioned; and this
conception he invested with Hebraic borrowings from the Old Testament.
The principle of absolutism, indeed, he could scarcely have escaped.
It came down to him through the Roman Empire and the Roman Church,
from the ancient oriental despotisms, and it was interwoven with all
the institutions and social forms against which the Reformation was
a protest. But unhappily, instead of questioning the principle, he
provided a new sanction for it and broadened its sway, by investing
it with divine authority and erecting upon it a whole cosmology. That
the ancient Hebrew thinkers, in seeking to give concrete form to their
speculations on the nature of Jehovah, should have made use of the
political ideas of primitive Israel, that they should have used all
the wealth of oriental imagery in describing the regal attributes of
their God, was inevitable. They knew only oriental potentates, and so
Jehovah became a greater Ptolemy, with Cherubim and Seraphim, Angels
and Principalities and Powers, duly ranked about the heavenly throne.
So saturated with monarchical and caste ideas is the Old Testament,
that it is almost impossible today to put the old phrasing out of mind,
and we talk as naturally of the Kingdom of God as did the men of that
older world who knew no other political phraseology. Calvin rejected
the individualism of Luther and followed in the footsteps of older
thinkers like Duns Scotus. The monarchical principle was everywhere
gaining ground in Europe. He had a lawyer’s love of law, and law
reposed in the absolute will of the prince. Hebraize this fact, erect a
cosmology upon it, and we have the vital principle of Calvinism.
From this cosmic absolutism, that conceived of God as the stable Will
sustaining the universe, binding together what otherwise would fly
asunder, two important corollaries were derived: the universality of
the moral law, and the necessity of divine judgment. From the former
flowed that curious association of God’s will with natural causes which
induced Cotton Mather, when suffering from toothache, to inquire what
sin he had committed with his teeth, and which left no free spaces
or non-moral impulses in the lives of men. From the latter flowed
the doctrine of theological determinism. If time is embedded in the
eternity of God’s mind, if to Him past and future are here and now,
foreknowledge is an inevitable divine attribute, and predestination is
only a finite way of expressing God’s understanding of how human fate
works itself out. Ally this doctrine of determinism with the Biblical
account of the fall of man, and the doctrine of the elect becomes the
theological complement of the class prejudices of the times. Bred up in
the current aristocratic contempt for the sodden mass of the people,
Calvinist theologians easily came to regard them as stupid, sensual,
veritable children of Adam, born to sin and heirs of damnation. Only
the elect shall be saved. That there was a remnant in Israel whom God
had chosen, Isaiah had long before pointed out; and the doctrine of
the remnant was confirmed for Calvinism by the sinful herd whose daily
actions testified to their lost estate.
According to such a theology, the individual clearly is in no
effective sense a free soul. There is no room for the conception of
human perfectibility. The heritage of natural freedom was long since
cast away by the common forefather; and because of the pre-natal sin
which this act entailed on all mankind, the natural man is shut away
eternally from communion with God. He is no better than an oriental
serf at the mercy of a Sovereign Will that is implacable, inscrutable,
the ruler of a universe predetermined in all its parts and members
from the foundation of the earth. Except for the saving grace of divine
election, which no human righteousness can purchase, all must go down
to the everlasting damnation that awaits the sons of Adam. In the eyes
of such a philosophy it is sheer impertinence to talk of the dignity
and worth of the individual soul. Men are no other than the worms of
the dust. The boon of eternal life is not included in God’s enumeration
of natural rights; it is a special grant from the Lord of the universe
who is pleased to smile on whom he is pleased to smile. In the hard
words of Paul, “Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and
whom he will he hardeneth.” And those on whom he hath had mercy are his
Saints, and they are gathered into his church, as the free city-states
had risen out of the muck of medieval despotism. They are the stewards
of his righteousness and are called to the great work of rulership on
earth that God’s will may be done and righteousness may prevail over
iniquity.
It was an ambitious program, and so long as the Presbyterian party
maintained its ascendency in England it endeavored to thrust its
Calvinism down every throat, no matter how unwelcome; but with the
passing of power from its hands, and the growth of a common-sense
spirit of toleration, Calvinistic dogma lost its authority and the
minds of Englishmen turned to more humane philosophies. In New England,
on the other hand, by virtue of a rigid suppression of free inquiry,
Calvinism long lingered out a harsh existence, grotesque and illiberal
to the last. In banishing the Antinomians and Separatists and Quakers,
the Massachusetts magistrates cast out the spirit of liberalism from
the household of the Saints.
Footnotes
[1] See “The Babylonian Captivity,” in _Works_, Vol. II, p. 233
(Philadelphia, 1915).
Chapter II • The Transplanting of Ideas
I
The Great Migration, it will be remembered, fell in the time of the
Laudean reaction, when the Presbyterian Utopia seemed remote and the
hopes of the Puritan dreamers were fallen low. The Boston leaders
quitted England ten years before Charles summoned the Long Parliament,
and twelve before the royal standard was unfurled at Nottingham.
The armed struggle for supremacy was far below the horizon, and the
outlandish philosophies that later sectaries were to propagate so
diligently were as yet little known in the land. The generous grain
of liberal thought was still in the milk, its fruitful doctrines
unripened. The immigrant gentlemen who came to Massachusetts Bay were
Puritan Anglicans who professed a hearty love for the mother church and
were no friends to the principle of Separatism. They were potential
Presbyterians who rejected alike the Arminianism of Laud and the
autocracy of the bishops. It is reasonable to suppose that as strict
Calvinists, trained in the ordinances as well as in the doctrine of
the French theologian, they came hither with the conscious purpose of
setting up the complete Genevan discipline in the new world. If such
was their plan--and certainly before their coming over they seem not to
have entertained any thoughts of Separatism--it received a check from
the Plymouth influence and the Puritan experiment was turned aside from
the path of its natural development.
It was a somewhat curious misadventure that was to entail unforeseen
consequences. Except in matters of doctrine Pilgrim and Puritan
consorted ill together. Their social antecedents were as unlike as
their views on political and religious institutions. The intellectual
leaders of Plymouth--whatever may be said of the London adventurers who
joined the Holland group--had been nurtured in Elizabethan radicalism.
They were Brownist-Separatists of plebeian origins, who had arrived
at their conception of the true church from a close study of Biblical
texts, with perhaps some admixture of Anabaptist influence, nearly
a generation before the Stuarts came with their divine-right theory.
During their years on the continent they lived remote from the current
of events in England, and under the guidance of the tolerant Robinson
they had been disciplined in the theory and practice of primitive
Congregationalism. On their removal to America they brought with them
a consciously democratic church order, that met their simple needs and
had taken shape from the experience of daily life. This democratic
model of church government was spontaneously supplemented by the
plantation covenant of civil government drawn up aboard ship, which
was to serve as the organic law of the new commonwealth. Two cardinal
principles--which at bottom were one--thus found their way to New
England in the _Mayflower_: the principle of a democratic church and
the principle of a democratic state. When ten years later the Boston
leaders were faced with the problem of erecting a social order, they
accepted the Plymouth model of Congregationalism, but rejected the
plantation covenant. They saw no need for the latter as they were
already provided with an organic law. The charter which Winthrop was
insistent upon bringing with them out of England was asserted to be the
constitution of the commonwealth and, meticulously interpreted, was to
determine largely the form and scope of the new political state. It was
construed to grant a legal sanction to government; but as the charter
of a Carolinian trading company it quite naturally restricted authority
to the managing heads, and granted powers to its directors that were
useful in managing trade ventures but might easily become intolerable
if interpreted as the organic law of a commonwealth. With such
enlargement of powers the directors of the corporation would constitute
a political oligarchy. There was a striking difference, certainly,
between the covenant of Plymouth and the charter-constitution of
Massachusetts Bay, and a political philosopher could readily enough
have foreseen the course that events would take in the Puritan
commonwealth, given the men and the ideals in control.
II • The Puritan Presbyterian
To make clear what was involved in the attempt to adapt the Plymouth
model of church government to the charter commonwealth, it is necessary
to consider somewhat particularly the body of prejudice and principle
brought to the new world aboard the _Lady Arbella_, as the Puritan
contribution to New England. The capable leaders who created the early
institutions of Massachusetts Bay colony were Jacobean Englishmen of
middle station, halfway between the aristocrat and the burgess, with
certain salient characteristics of both. Fashioned by a caste society,
they transported to the little commonwealth an abundant heritage of
class prejudice. They aspired to be reckoned gentlemen and to live in
the new world as they had lived in the old, in a half feudal state,
surrounded by many servants and with numerous dependents. They honored
rank, were sticklers for precedence, respected class distinctions,
demanded the hereditary rights of the gentry. They had been bred up
in a static order where gentlemen ruled and the people obeyed, and
they could not think in terms of the Plymouth plantation covenant,
subscribed by all heads of families. To the modern reader of his
journal there is something almost childish in Winthrop’s insistence
on public deference to his official position and his grief when the