1

liberal, as we understand the meaning of the term in this day of enlightened liberality. They purposed no asylum for the persecuted of other sects. They had not made themselves exiles, that they might prepare an arena where all kinds of beliefs might disport themselves. They had come three thousand miles, at a great cost of money and of feeling, that they might here make a better England according to their own convictions of that which was true and right. They were fanatics, if you please, at a time when the world was either fanatical or full of scoffing doubt, and it was a time when the fanatic was more useful and played a greater part than the Laodicean. They stand accused of becoming more royalist than the king in their religious bigotry, and after having escaped from persecution they persecuted with even greater ferocity those who had the courage to disagree with their theology. Those historians who have built on this false premise must naturally reach an erroneous conclusion in their attempts to judge the character of the Puritans, but this error is to be attributed largely to the confusion of Pilgrim and Puritan. The former separated from the Established Church because their consciences led them to a form of worship that seemed more in keeping with divine commandments, and they could not, unless they were hypocrites, claim liberty

1 McKenzie: Introduction to Byington: The Puritan in England and New England.

for themselves and deny it to all others. They asked religious liberty, and in equal measure they were prepared to grant it. The vagaries of the Quakers were to be sorrowed over rather than to be corrected in anger. Although the Quakers fell under the Pilgrim lash just as later they did under the Puritan, and although it was applied in a spirit of charity rather than vengeance, it scarred naked backs as much in the one case as in the other. The belief in witchcraft was universal, and the Pilgrims were no more superior to the teachings of their day than were the Puritans, but their natural benevolence stayed the hand of the executioner. With the Puritan it was different. He who was not of their faith was an evil-disposed person who was an enemy to the theocratic state, and there was no place for such in the community. There was no more room for heretics in Massachusetts than there was in Rome or Madrid, Fiske says. It was a day of swift trial and stern punishment. The heretic must recant or die for his heresy. Heresy was treason, and treason was death.

Bear in mind another fact. The Pilgrim had separated from the Church of England; the Puritan, at the time of his migration, when he laid the foundation of empire, was a member of the Church, and he resented the imputation that he was a schismatic. As the shores of England were fast receding, Higginson called his little band about him and thus addressed them:

"We will not say as the Separatists were wont to say at their leaving of England, Farewell Babylon! Farewell Rome! but we will say, Farewell, dear England, farewell, the Church of God in England and all the Christian friends there. We do not go to New England as Separatists from the Church of England, though we cannot but separate from the corruptions of it; but we go to practice the positive part of church reformation, and propagate the Gospel in America.” 1

Typical of this same feeling, which finds its expression in numerous addresses and records, is the letter from Dudley, the deputy governor of Massachusetts, to the Countess of Lincoln; he writes in February, 1631:

"Also, to increase the heap of our sorrows, we received advisement by letters from our friends in England, and by the reports of those who came hither in this ship to abide with us, (who were about twenty-six) that they who went discontentedly from us the last year, out of their evil affections towards us, have raised many false and scandalous reports against us, affirming us to be Brownists in religion, and ill affected to our State at home, and that those vile reports have won credit with some who formerly wished us well. But we desire, and cannot but hope, that wise and impartial men will at length consider that such malcontents have ever pursued this manner of casting dirt, to make

1 Bacon: Genesis of the New England Churches, p. 467.

others seem as foul as themselves, and that our goodly friends, to whom we are known, will not easily believe that we are so soon turned from the profession we so long have made in our native country. . . . We are not like those which have dispensation to lie; but as we were free enough in Old England to turn our insides outward, sometimes to our disadvantage, very unlikely is it that now, being procul a fulmine, we should be so unlike ourselves. Let therefore this be sufficient for us to say, and others to hear in this matter."1

The Puritan has been called a fanatic, and fanatic he undoubtedly was, and yet his was a fanaticism unlike that the world had ever before known, and therefore it produced results different from other religious persecution. In an attempt to make men conform to a particular creed or form of worship, pope and king had claimed divine authority which men might not challenge, and so long as the creed they preached was accepted they cared little for the sincerity of professed belief. With the Puritan it was different. He would tolerate no mere lip service. Puritanism, as I shall show in the next chapter, was a polity as well as a religion; it was not only the life of the people but it was also the life of the state; it was a new trinity — the guide to morality, the guide to temporal obedience, the guide to the achievement of material welfare. Until the time when the Puritans settled in Massachusetts

1 Force, vol. ii, 4. 16.

creeds were to be savagely defended and fought for, but they were always exotic; they were always something outside of men themselves, the meaning of which men only dimly comprehended.

"The passionately precise idealism” of Calvinism was the basis of the Puritan character. His theodicy was to him real. Forever tortured by doubt, forever striving to reach a higher spiritual plane, he must forever be vainly searching, struggling, asking; engaged in a perpetual conflict with himself; endeavoring with all his strength to overthrow the enemy and rise triumphant over sin. He was always questioning. The Puritan has been represented as a man of little and narrow imagination, but this misreads him. No man is unimaginative whose whole life is a spiritual conflict such as the Puritan was always engaged in; the struggle for freedom vividly awakens the imagination. The man who accepts everything as fait accompli, to whom the things of heaven and earth are a finality, who has never been moved to question the meaning of life or the mystery of death, who accepts whatever is, moves with narrowed vision and is deaf to the power of impression. The Puritan's whole training, his intense idealism, quickened the imagination, for had he not been gifted with the divine power of imagination, life would have lost many of its terrors and death promised fewer rewards.1

1 "Those people believed. They never for one instant questioned"; thus Charles Francis Adams in Massachusetts, its Historians and its History (p. 36). They believed, yes; it was inseparable from their lives; but they