Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
_universal scholar_, and a _living system_ of the liberal arts, and a
_walking library_.” His intellectual equipment was so highly regarded
that many excellent persons “believed that God would not suffer Mr.
Cotton to err”; and that “if ever there be any considerable blow given
to the Devil’s kingdom,” Master Cotton was the man for the business.
No other New England champion was so renowned for “beating out the
truth in controversie”; and when he turned to the work of answering
Roger Williams, the latter exclaimed: “I rejoice it hath pleased [God]
to appoint so able, and excellent, and conscionable an Instrument to
bolt the Truth to the bran.” But though he was bred in Elizabethan
days and entered college in the year when Shakespeare’s _Henry IV_
and Jonson’s _Every Man in his Humour_ first appeared on the stage,
there is no touch of Renaissance splendor in his crabbed style and
ascetic reasoning. That was early washed out of him by the rising
tide of Hebraism which was slowly submerging the England of poets and
playwrights.
But however much he loved cloistered scholarship, the immediate source
of his great influence was the spoken rather than the written word.
By the universal testimony of his generation he was “a soul-melting
preacher,” whose reasoned eloquence swayed congregations trained to
solid argumentative discourse. When he ascended the pulpit on Sundays
and lecture days, he spoke as a prophet in Israel; and on occasions
of public ceremonial, or when dissensions arose touching the polity
of church or state, he was summoned by the magistrates to convince
with his logic and persuade with his eloquence. The strong-minded Anne
Hutchinson was but one of many who chose exile in New England rather
than lose the edification of Mr. Cotton’s preaching. Good men were
drawn to him by his sweetness of temper, and evil men were overawed
by his venerable aspect. He seems to have been an altogether lovable
person, with white hair framing a face that must have been nobly
chiseled, gentle-voiced, courteous, tactful, by nature “a tolerant man”
who placidly bore with a dissentient and gladly discovered a friend in
an antagonist. If his quiet yielding before opposition suggests that he
may have been given to opportunism, or his fondness for intellectual
subtleties drew from his grandson the comment “a most excellent
casuist,” we must not too hastily conclude that he served the cause of
truth less devotedly than the cause of party.
For a score of years before his coming over, his position in the
rising Puritan party had been honorable. Few among the dissenting
ministers were better known, none more esteemed. He had shone as an
intellectual light at the university, he had long been pastor of one of
the loveliest churches in England, he counted among his friends some of
the ablest contemporary Englishmen. To Cromwell he was one “whom I love
and honour in the Lord”; to Lord Say and Sele, to the Earl of Warwick,
the Earl of Lincoln, and a notable company of Puritan gentlemen, he
was a trusted friend and lieutenant; to thousands of the substantial
burgesses who were drawing together to form the new Puritan-Whig party,
he was “a fixed and conscionable light.” That such a leader should
have been received with thanksgiving by the Boston congregation was to
be expected; that he should have taken high place at once among the
members of the Massachusetts oligarchy was equally to be expected.
Thenceforth his busy career was no more than a reflection of the
ambitions of the theocracy.
Unfortunately his daily contact with narrow-minded and intolerant men
gave an unhappy bias to his later career. Cotton seems to have been
something of a Puritan intellectual, with an open-minded curiosity that
made him receptive to new ideas and tempted him to play with doctrines
that were intolerable to his bigoted associates. It was possibly this
native sympathy with free speculation that drew him into the camp of
Mistress Hutchinson with her doctrine of the inner light. When the
schism became serious, dividing the commonwealth into warring camps,
Cotton seems to have become frightened and broke with the Boston
Antinomians. In this matter he came near to being a shuffler. The
Hutchinson trial with its resulting banishments was the turning point
of his career in America as it was a crisis in the history of early
New England. He was not a man to persecute and harry, nor was he one
to stand in isolated opposition to associates whom he respected, and
he allowed himself to be coerced by narrower-minded men like Endicott
and Dudley. After 1637 the better nature of John Cotton was submerged
by the rising intolerance, and “the most tolerant, as he was the ablest
of the Massachusetts divines,” was brought so low as to defend the
meanest and crudest acts of the oligarchy. He descended to disgraceful
casuistry in defense of the first whippings of the Quakers, and he
urged the death penalty upon King Philip’s son and the enslavement of
the remnant of Philip’s tribe, against the plea of John Eliot that “to
sell soules for mony seemeth to me a dangerous merchandize.” The sins
of the oligarchy rest in large measure on the head of John Cotton, and
the judgment of the most recent historian of New England must stand:
With a broader mind and wider vision than any of the other clergy
of the colony, he had not the courage to stand alone, beyond a
certain point, against their unanimity in intolerance. The higher
promptings of his nature were crushed by the united voice of the
priesthood, as Winthrop’s had been so short a time before, and the
noblest of the colony’s leaders, lay and clerical, from that time
tended to sink to the lower level of their fellows.[7]
An apologist--and whoever has felt the charm of John Cotton’s
personality easily becomes an apologist--will perhaps find some grounds
of excuse for his later conduct. He was in an unhappy position. He
was ill at ease in his mind, and his frequent tacking in the face of
adverse winds was characteristic of the intellectual who sees all
sides of a question. He heartily approved of the theocratic ends that
his associates were seeking, and his influential position made him
the defender of acts which his better nature must have disapproved.
The historian, however, will seek a more adequate explanation in the
roots of his environment. The idealism of John Cotton was the fruit of
his training, and his theocratic dreams were conditioned by the facts
that he was both a Calvinist and a Carolinian gentleman. The fusion
of these two influences resulted in the unique political theory of an
ethical aristocracy, consecrated to moral stewardship in the state. A
lifelong student of Calvin’s _Institutes_, he found there a system of
social organization that responded to every demand of the theologian
and the aristocrat. The very texture and pattern of Cotton’s political
philosophy is exemplified in such a passage as this, over which he must
have brooded much:
When these three forms of government of which philosophers treat,
are considered in themselves, I, for my part, am far from denying
that the form which greatly surpasses the other is aristocracy,
either pure or modified by popular government; not indeed in
itself, but because it very rarely happens that kings so rule
themselves as never to dissent from what is just and right, or
are possessed of so much acuteness and prudence as always to see
correctly. Owing therefore to the vices or defects of men, it is
safer and more tolerable when several bear rule, that they may thus
mutually assist, instruct, and admonish each other, and should
any he disposed to go too far, the others are censors and masters
to curb his excess. This has already been proved by experience,
and confirmed also by the authority of the Lord himself, when he
established an aristocracy bordering on popular government among
the Israelites, keeping them under that as the best form, until He
exhibited an image of the Messiah in David.[8]
As a Carolinian gentleman, this was as far as Cotton would go on
the path of liberalism. The elders were responsible to God for the
spiritual well-being of the people, and the state must aid and not
hinder them in their leadership. The doctrine of unlimited popular
sovereignty was for him no other than a thistle in the garden of the
Lord. The desire for liberty he regarded as the sinful prompting of
the natural man, a denial of the righteous authority of God’s chosen
rulers. If democracy were indeed the best form of government, was it
not strange that divine wisdom should have failed to discover the
fact? In the history of the chosen people nowhere does God approve
the democratic as the best form, but the theocratic; was He now to be
set right by sinful men who courted popularity by appealing to the
selfishness of depraved hearts? To the scripturist the logic of his
argument was convincing:
It is better that the commonwealth be fashioned to the setting
forth of God’s house, which is his church: than to accommodate the
church frame to the civill state. Democracy, I do not conceyve
that ever God did ordeyne as a fit government eyther for church or
commonwealth. If the people be governors, who shall be governed?
As for monarchy, and aristocracy, they are both of them clearely
approoved, and directed in scripture, yet so as referreth the
soveraigntie to himselfe, and setteth up Theocracy in both, as the
best forme of government in the commonwealth, as well as in the
church.[9]
If John Cotton, like other Carolinian gentlemen, was a confirmed
aristocrat, he was at the same time a social revolutionary, who would
substitute an aristocracy of the Saints for the landed aristocracy, and
refashion society upon ethical rather than economic lines. At what time
the ideal of a Presbyterian Bible commonwealth took shape in his mind,
it is impossible to determine; but it was a natural outcome of his most
cherished beliefs. A devout scripturist, he accepted the Bible as a
rule of universal application, perfect and final. The sufficiency of
the Scriptures to all social needs was axiomatic with him; “the more
any law smells of man the more unprofitable,” he asserted in his draft
of laws offered for acceptance by the commonwealth; and at another
time he exclaimed, “_Scripturae plenitudinem adoro._” He chose exile
rather than yield to what he regarded as the unscriptural practices of
Laud, and now that he was come to a new land where a fresh beginning
was to be made, was it not his Christian duty to “endeavour after
a _theocracy_, as near as might be, to that which was the glory of
Israel, the ‘peculiar people’”? The old Common Law must be superseded
by the Mosaic dispensation; the citizen of the commonwealth must become
the subject of Jehovah; the sovereignty of temporal authorities must
serve the higher sovereignty of God.
Holding to such views the duty devolving upon him was plain: to assist
the magistrates in checking the dangerous drift towards a democratic
organization of church and state, which the new environment encouraged;
and to defend the theocratic ideal against all critics. The first he
sought to accomplish by creating a more perfect theocratic machinery.
As we catch glimpses of him moving tactfully back and forth through
the brisk little scenes, he seems always to have a finger in some
magisterial affair. Three months after his arrival in Boston he
preached a sermon, the purport of which Winthrop noted in his _Journal_:
After much deliberation and serious advice the Lord directed the
teacher Mr. Cotton, to make clear by the scripture, that the
minister’s maintenance, as well as all other charges of the church,
should be defrayed out of a stock, or treasury, which was to be