"May it please your Majesty and Parliament to understand that by fire and sword to constrain princes and peoples to receive that one true religion of the Gospel is wholly against the mind and merciful law of Christ." "Persecution is a work well pleasing to all false prophets and bishops, but it is contrary to the mind of Christ, who came not to judge and destroy men's lives, but to save them. And, though some men and women believe not at the first hour, yet may they at the eleventh hour, if they be not persecuted to death before. And no king nor bishop can or is able to command faith. That is the gift of God, who worketh in us both the will and the deed of his own good pleasure. Set him not a day, therefore, in which, if his creature hear not and believe not, you will imprison and burn him…. As kings and bishops cannot command the wind, so they cannot command faith; and, as the wind bloweth where it listeth, so is every man that is born of the Spirit. You may force men to church against their consciences, but they will believe as they did before when they come there."
"Kings and magistrates are to rule temporal affairs by the swords of their temporal kingdoms, and bishops and ministers are to rule spiritual affairs by the word and Spirit of God, the sword of Christ's temporal kingdom, and not to intermeddle one with another's authority, office, and function."
"I read that Jews, Christians, and Turks are tolerated in Constantinople, and yet are peaceable, though so contrary the one to the other. If this be so, how much more ought Christians not to force one another to religion! And how much more ought Christians to tolerate Christians, whenas the Turks do tolerate them! Shall we be less merciful than the Turks? or shall we learn the Turks to persecute Christians? It is not only unmerciful, but unnatural and abominable, yea monstrous, for one Christian to vex and destroy another for difference and questions of religion."
Busher's tract of 1614 was not the only utterance in the same strain that came from Helwisse's conventicle of London Baptists. In 1615 there appeared in print "Objections answered by way of Dialogue, wherein is proved, by the Law of God, by the Law of our Land, and by His Majesty's many testimonies, that no man ought to be persecuted for his Religion, so he testifie his allegeance by the oath appointed by Law." The author, or one of the authors, of this Dialogue, which is even more explicit in some respects than Busher's tract, is pretty clearly ascertained to have been John Murton, Helwisse's assistant (Vol. II. 544,581). Helwisse himself is not heard of after 1614, and appears to have died about that time. But his Baptist congregation maintained itself in London side by side with Jacob's congregation of Independents, established in 1616 (Vol. II. 544). As if to signalize still farther the discrepancy of the two sets of Sectaries on the Toleration point, there was put forth, as we saw, in that very year, by Jacob and the Independents, a Confession of Faith, containing this article: "We believe that we, and all true visible churches, ought to be overseen and kept in good order and peace, and ought to be governed, under Christ, both supremely and also subordinately, by the civil magistrate; yea, in causes of religion, when need is."
The year 1616 was the year of Shakespeare's death. Who that has read his Sonnet LXVI. can doubt that he had carried in his mind while alive some profound and peculiar form of the idea of Toleration? In Bacon's brain, too, one may detect some smothered tenet of the kind; and even in the talk of the shambling King James himself there had been such occasional spurts about Liberty of Conscience that, though he had burnt two of his subjects for Arianism, Helwisse's poor people were fain, as we have just seen, to cite "His Majesty's many testimonies" for the Toleration they craved. And yet not to any such celebrity as the king, the philosopher, or the poet, had the task of vindicating for England the idea of Liberty of Conscience been practically appointed. To all intents and purposes that honour had fallen to two of the most extreme and despised sects of the Puritans. The despised Independents, or semi-Separatists of the school of Robinson and Jacob, and the still more despised Baptists, or thorough Separatists of the school of Smyth and Helwisse, were groping for the pearl between them; and, what is strangest at first sight, it was the more intensely Separatist of these two sects that was groping with most success. How is this to be explained? Partly it may have been that the Baptists were the sect that had been most persecuted—that they were the ultimate sect, in the English world, in respect of the necessary qualification of pain and suffering accumulated in their own experience, while the Hobinsonian Independents might rank as only the penultimate sect in this respect. But there is a deeper reason. Paradoxical as the statement may seem, there was a logical connexion between the extreme Separatism of the Baptists, the tightness and exclusiveness of their own terms of communion, and their passion for religious freedom, This requires elucidation:—It was on the subject of the Baptism of Infants that the ordinary Congregationalists and the Baptist Congregationalists most evidently stood aloof from each other. There had been vehement controversies between them on the subject. Independent congregations had ejected and excommunicated such of their members as had taken to the doctrine of Antipædobaptism; and Smyth's rigid Baptists, in turn, would not hold communion with Pædobaptist Independents. We are apt now to dwell on the narrow-mindedness, the unseemliness, of those bickerings of the two sects over the one doctrine on which they differed. It is to be observed, however, that even here they illustrated their faith in the principle which was the essence of their common Congregationalism: to wit, that the true security for sound faith and good government in the Church of Christ lay in the power lodged in every particular congregation of judging who were fit to belong to it, and of constant spiritual supervision of each of the members of it by all, so that the erring might be admonished, and the unfit ejected. It was the supreme virtue, the all- sufficient efficacy, of this power of merely spiritual censure, as it might be exercised by congregations or particular churches, each within itself, that both sects were continually trying to demonstrate to Prelatists and Presbyterians. Their very argument was that truth and piety would prosper best in a system of Church-government which trusted all to the vigilance of the members of every particular congregation over each other, their reasonings among themselves, their practice of mutual admonition, and, in last resort, their power of excommunicating the unworthy. Hence perhaps even the excess of the controversial activity of the two sects against each other, and the frequency of their mutual excommunications, are not without a favourable significance. Here, however, it was the Baptists, rather than the Independents collectively, that had pushed their theory of the all-sufficiency of congregational censure to its finest issue. To both sects the world or civil society presented itself as a medium in which there might be Christian vortices, concourses of true Christian souls, that should constitute, when numbered together and catalogued unerringly in the books of heaven, the Church or Kingdom of Jesus. To both sects it seemed a thing to be striven for that as much of civil society as possible should be brought into these vortices or concourses; nay, the aspiration of both was that the whole world should be Christianized. But, looking about them, they knew, in fact, that the vortices or concourses did and could involve but a small proportion of the society in which they occurred. They knew that there must be large tracts of unbelief, profanity, and false worship in every so-called Christian nation, left utterly unaffected by any of the true associations of Christ's real people; besides the huge wilderness of heathenism and idolatry lying all round in the dark lands of the world. It was on the platform of this contemplation that the Independents generally and the Baptist section of them had parted company. The Independents generally held that it was the duty of the civil power in a State to promote the formation of churches in that State, and to see, in some general way, that the churches formed were not wrong in doctrine or in practice. They held that the civil authority might lawfully compel all its subjects to some sort of hearing of the Gospel with a view to their belonging to churches or congregations, and might even assist the preacher by some whip of penalties on those who remained obstinate after a due amount of hearing. They held, in fact, that every State is bound to use its power towards Christianizing all its subjects, and may also institute missions for the propagation of true Christianity in idolatrous or heathen lands. To all this the Baptists, or some of their leaders, had learnt to oppose an emphatic "No." They held that the world, or civil society, and the Church of Christ, were distinct and immiscible. They held that the sword of the Temporal Power must never, under any circumstances, aid the sword of the Spirit. They held that the formation of churches in any State must be a process of the purest spontaneity. They held that, while every person in a civilized State is a subject of that State in all matters of civil order, it ought to be at the option of that person, and of those with whom he or she might voluntarily consort, to determine whether he or she should superadd to this general character of subject the farther character of being a Christian and a member of some particular church. The churches formed spontaneously in any State were to be self-subsisting associations of like-minded units, believing and worshiping, arid inflicting spiritual censures among themselves, without State-interference; and Christianity was to propagate itself throughout the world by its own spiritual might and the missionary zeal of apostolic individuals. [Footnote: Among my authorities for this sketch of the history of the idea of Toleration as far as 1616, I ought to mention Hanbury'sHistorical Memorials relating to the Independents, Vol. I., and more particularly Chapters XIII,—XV.; Fletcher'sHistory of Independency in England(1848), Vol. III., Chapters I. and II.; and the Reprint of Old Tracts onLiberty of Conscienceby the Hanserd Knollys (Baptist) Society, with the Introductory Notices there prefixed to Busher's tract and Murton's by Mr. Edward Bean Underhill.]
From 1616 onwards this Baptist form of the idea of Liberty of Conscience had been slumbering somewhere in the English heart. Even through the dreadful time of the Laudian terrorism it might be possible for research to discover half-stifled expressions of it. Other and less extreme forms of the Toleration idea, however, were making themselves heard. Holland had worked out the speculation, or was working it out, through the struggle of her own Arminians for equal rights with the prevailing Calvinists; and it was the singular honour of that country to have, at all events, been the first in Europe to exhibit something like a practical solution of the problem, by the refuge and freedom of worship it afforded to the religious outcasts of other nations. Then among the so-called Latitudinarian Divines of the Church of England—Hales, Chillingworth, and their associates—there is evidence of the growth, even while their friend Laud was in power, of an idea or sentiment of Toleration which might have made that Prelate pause and wonder. Not, of course, the Baptist idea; but one which might have had a greater chance practically in the then existing conditions of English life. Might there not be a Tolerationwithan Established or State Church? While it might be the duty of the civil magistrate, or at least a State- convenience, to set up one Church as the Church of the nation, and so to afford to all the subjects the means of instruction in that theology and of participation in that worship which the State thought the best, might not State-interference with religion stop there, and might not those who refused to conform be permitted to hold their conventicles freely outside the Established Church, and to believe and worship in their own way? Some such idea of Toleration, but still with perplexing limitations as to theamountof deviation that should be tolerated, was, I believe, the idea that had dawned on the minds of men like the loveable Hales and the hardy Chillingworth. It is much the sort of Toleration that accredits itself to the average British mind yet. But how greatly the history of the Church of England might have been altered had such a Toleration been then adopted by the Church itself! As it was, it remained the half- utteredireniconof a few speculative spirits. Nowhere on earth prior to 1640, unless it were in Holland, was Toleration in any effective form whatsoever anything more than the dream of a few poor persecuted sectaries or deep private thinkers. Less even than in the Church of England is there a trace of the idea in the Scottish Presbyterianism that had then re-established itself, or in the English Presbyterianism that longed to establish itself. Scottish Presbyterianism might indeed plead, and it did plead, that it was so satisfactory a system, kept the souls of its subjects in such a strong grip, and yet without needing to resort, except in extreme cases, to any very penal procedure, that whereveritexisted Toleration would be unnecessary, inasmuch as there would be preciously little error to tolerate. Personally, I believe, Henderson was as moderate and tolerant a man as any British ecclesiastic of his time. In no Church where he bore rule could there, by possibility, have been any approach to the tetchy repressiveness, or the callous indifference to suffering for the sake of conscience, that characterized the English Church-rule of Laud. But Henderson, though the best of the Presbyterians, was still,par excellence,a Presbyterian; and therefore the Toleration that lay in his disposition had not translated itself into a theoretical principle. As for the English Presbyterians, whattheywanted was toleration for themselves, or the liberty of being in the English Church, or in England out of the Church, without conforming; or, if some of them went farther, whattheywanted was the substitution of Presbytery for Prelacy as the system established with the right to be intolerant. Finally, even in the New England colonies, where Congregationalism was the rule, there were not only spiritual censures and excommunications of heretics, but whippings, banishments, and other punishments of them, by the civil power. [Footnote: Hallam's account of the rise and progress of the Toleration idea in England (Hist, of Europe, 6th ed. II. 442, &c.) is very unsatisfactory. He actually makes Jeremy Taylor's "Liberty of Prophesying" (1647), the first substantial assertion of Liberty of Conscience in England—an injustice to a score or two of preceding champions of it, and to one or two entire corporate denominations.]
And so we arrive at 1640. Then, immediately after the meeting of the Long Parliament, Toleration rushed into the air. Everywhere the word "Toleration" was heard, and with all varieties of meanings. A certain boom of the general principle runs through Milton's Anti-Episcopal pamphlets, and through other pamphlets on the same side. But this is not all. The principle was expressly argued in certain pamphlets set forth in the interest of the Independents and the Sectaries generally, and it was argued so well that the Presbyterians caught the alarm, foresaw the coming battle between them and the Independents on this subject of Toleration, and declared themselves Anti-Tolerationists by anticipation. It was in May 1641, for example, that Henry Burton published his anonymous pamphlet calledThe Protestation Protested(Vol. II. 591-2). The main purpose of the pamphlet was to propound Independency in its extreme Brownist form, as refusing any National or State Church whatever; but, on the supposition that this theory was too much in advance of the opinion of the time, and that some National Church must inevitably be set up, a toleration of dissent from that Church was prayed for. "The Parliament now being about a Reformation," wrote Burton, "what government shall be set up in this National Church, the Lord strengthen and direct the Parliament in so great and glorious a work. But let it be what it will, so as still a due respect be paid to those congregations and churches which desire an exemption, and liberty of enjoying Christ's ordinances in such purity as a National Church is not capable of." This is the Toleration principle as it had been transmitted among the Independents generally, or perhaps it is an advance on that. Such as it was, however, Burton's plea for Toleration roused vehement opposition. It was attacked ferociously, as we saw, by an anonymous Episcopal antagonist, believed to be Bishop Hall (Vol. II. p. 593). It was attacked also by Presbyterians, and notably by their champion, Mr. Thomas Edwards, in his maiden pamphlet called "Reasons against the Independent Government of particular Congregations" (Vol. II. p. 594). But Edwards did not go unpunished. His pamphlet drew upon him that thrashing from the lady-Brownist, Katharine Chidley, which the reader may remember (Vol. II. p. 595). This brave old lady's idea of Toleration outwent even Burton's, and corresponded more with that absolute idea of Toleration which had been worked out among the Baptists. For example, Edwards having upbraided the Independents with the fact that their Toleration principle had broken down even in their own Paradise of New England, what is Mrs. Chidley's answer? "If they have banished any out of their Patents that were neither disturbers of the peace of the land, nor the worship practised in the land, I am persuaded it was their weakness, and I hope they will never attempt to do the like." Clearly, from whomsoever in 1641 the Parliament and the people of England heard a stinted doctrine of Toleration, they heard the full doctrine from Mrs. Chidley. The Parliament, however, was very slow to be convinced. Petitions of Independent congregations for toleration to themselves were coolly received and neglected; the Presbyterians more and more saw the importance of making Anti-Toleration their rallying dogma; more and more the call to be wary against this insidious notion of Toleration rang through the pulpits of England and Scotland. [Footnote: Hanbury'sHistorical Memorials relating to the Independents, Vol. II. pp. 68-ll7; where ample extracts from the pamphlets mentioned in this paragraph are given. Fletcher gives a good selection of them in hisHistory of Independency, Vol. III. Chap. VI.]
The debates in 1643 and 1644 between the five Independent or Dissenting Brethren of the Westminster Assembly and the Presbyterian majority of the Assembly brought on a new stage of the Toleration controversy. A notion which might be scorned or ridiculed while it was lurking in Anabaptist conventicles, or ventilated by a she-Brownist like Mrs. Chidley, or by poor old Mr. Burton of Friday Street, could compel a hearing when maintained by men so respectable as Messrs. Goodwin, Burroughs, Bridge, Simpson, and Nye, whom the Parliament itself had sent into the Assembly. The demand for Toleration which these men addressed to the Parliament in their famousApologetical Narrationof January 1643-4 gave sudden dignity and precision to what till then had been vulgar and vague. It put the question in this form, "What amount of Nonconformity is to be allowed in the new Presbyterian Church which is to be the National Church of England?"; and it distinctly intimated that on the answer to this question it would depend whether the Apologists and their adherents could remain in England or should be driven again into exile. Care must be taken, however, not to credit the Apologists at this period with any notion of absolute or universal Toleration. They were far behind Mrs. Chidley or the old Baptists in their views. They were as yet but learners in the school of Toleration. Indulgence forthemselves"in some lesser differences," and perhaps also for some of the more reputable of the other sects intheirdifferent "lesser differences," was the sum of their published demand. They too, no less than the Presbyterians, professed disgust at the extravagances of the Sectaries. It was not so much, therefore, the Toleration expressly claimed by the Five Dissenting Brethren for themselves, as the larger Toleration to which it would inevitably lead, that the Presbyterians continued to oppose and denounce. As far as the Five Brethren and other such respectable Dissentients were concerned, the Presbyterians would have stretched a point. They would have made arrangements. They would have patted the Five Dissenting Brethren on the back, and said, "It shall be made easy foryou; we will yield all the accommodationyoucan possibly need; only don't call it Toleration." The Dissenting Brethren were honest enough and clear-headed enough not to be content with this personal compliment. Nor, in fact, could the policy have been successful. For there were now champions of the larger Toleration with voices that resounded through the land and were heard over those of the Five Apologists. Precisely that middle of the year 1644 at which we have stopped in our narrative was the time when the principle of absolute Liberty of Conscience was proclaimed, for the benefit of all opinions whatsoever, in tones that could never more be silenced.
About the middle of 1644 there appeared in London at least three pamphlets or books in the same strain. One of these, "The Compassionate Samaritan unbinding the Conscience," need be remembered by its name only; but the other two must be associated with their authors. One bore the striking title "The Bloudy Tenent[i. e.Bloody Tenet] of Persecution for cause of Conscience, discussed in a Conference between Truth and Peace," (pp. 247); the other bore, in its first edition, the simple title, "M. S. to A.S.," and, in its second edition, in the same year, this fuller title "A Reply of Two of the Brethren to A.S., &c.; with a Plea for Liberty of Conscience for the Apologists' Church-way, against the Cavils of the said A. S." Though both were anonymous, the authors were known at the time. The author of the first was that Americanized Welshman, ROGER WILLIAMS, whose strange previous career, from his first arrival in New England in 1631, on to his settlement among the Narraganset Bay Indians in 1638, and his subsequent vagaries of opinion and of action, has already been sketched (Vol. II. 560-563, and 600-602). He had been over in England, it will be remembered, since June 1643, in the capacity of envoy or commissioner from the Rhode Island people, to obtain a charter for erecting Rhode Island and the adjacent Providence Plantation into a distinct and independent colony. He had been going about England a good deal, but had been mostly in London, in the society of the younger Vane, and in frequent contact with other leading men in Parliament and in the Westminster Assembly. TheBloody Tenentwas an expression, in printed form, of opinions he had been ventilating frankly enough in conversation, and was intended as a parting-gift to England before his return to America. The title must have at once attracted attention to it and given it an advantage over the other tract. The author of that other tract was our other well-known friend Mr. JOHN GOODWIN, Vicar of St. Stephen's, Coleman Street, whom the Presbyterians had put in their black books as an Arminian, Socinian, and what not (Vol. II. 582-584). Goodwill's piece may have been out first, for it is heard of as in circulation in May 1644, while Williams's book is not heard of, I think, till June or July. But, on all grounds, Williams deserves the priority. [Footnote: For statements in this paragraph authorities are—Apologetic Narration(1644); Hanbury's Historical Memorials, II. 341et seq.; Reprint ofThe Bloody Tenentby the Hanserd Knollys Society (1848), with Mr. Underhill's "Biographical Introduction," pp. xxiii.-iv.; Jackson'sLife of John Goodwin, p. 114et seq.; Baillie's Letters, II. 180,181, and 211, 212, and Commons Journals, Aug. 9, 1644.]
Well may the Americans be proud of Roger Williams. HisBloody Tenentis of a piece with all his previous career. It is a rapid, hurried book, written, as it tells us, during the author's stay in England, "in change of rooms and corners, yea sometimes in variety of strange houses, sometimes in the fields in the midst of travel." One particularly notes the frequent "&c." in its sentences, as if much crowded on the writer's mind from moment to moment which he could indicate only by a contraction. But there is dash in the book, the keenest earnestness and evidence of a mind made up, and every now and then a mystic softness and richness of pity, yearning towards a voluptuous imagery like that of the Song of Solomon. The plan is straggling. First there is a list of twelve positions which the book proves, or heads under which its contents may be distributed. Then there is an address or dedication to "the Right Honourable Both Houses of the High Court of Parliament," followed by a separate address "To every Courteous Reader." Then there comes a copy of" Scriptures and Reasons written long since by a Witness of Jesus Christ, close prisoner in Newgate, against Persecution in cause of Conscience"—in fact, an extract from a tract on Liberty of Conscience by Murton, or some other London Baptist, in 1620. A copy of those Scriptures and Reasons against Persecution had, it seems, been submitted in 1635 to Mr. Cotton of Boston for his consideration; and Mr. Cotton had drawn up a Reply, defending from Scripture, past universal practice, and the authority of Calvin, Beza, and others of the Reformers, the right of the civil magistrate to prosecute and punish religious error. This Reply of Cotton's in favour of persecution is printed at length by Williams; and the first part of the real body of his own book consists of a Dialogue between Truth and Peace over the doctrine which so respectable a New England minister had thus espoused. When this Dialogue is over; there ensues a second Dialogue of Truth and Peace over another New England document in which the same "bloody tenet" of persecution had been defended-to wit a certain "Model of Church and Civil Power" drawn up by some New England ministers in concert, and in which Mr. Cotton had had a hand, though Mr. Richard Mather appears to have been the chief author. [Footnote: Some particulars in this description of the treatise are from Mr. Underhill's Introduction to the Hanserd Knolly's Society's Reprint of it, but the description in the main is from theBloody Treatmentitself.]
The texture of Williams's treatise, it will be thus seen, is loose and composite. But a singular unity of purpose and spirit runs through it. Here is the opening of the first Dialogue:—
Truth. In what dark corner of the world, sweet Peace, are we two met? How hath this present evil world banished me from all the coasts and corners of it! And how hath the righteous God in judgment taken thee from the earth: Rev. vi. 4.
Peace. It is lamentably true, blessed Truth: the foundations of the world have long been out of course; the gates of Earth and Hell have conspired together to intercept our joyful meeting and our holy kisses. With what a wearied, tired wing have I flown over nations, kingdoms, cities, towns, to find out precious Truth!
Truth. The like inquiries in my flights and travels have I made for Peace, and still am told she hath left the Earth and fled to Heaven.
Peace. Dear Truth, what is the Earth but a dungeon of darkness, where Truth is not?
Truth. And what is the Peace thereof but a fleeting dream, thine ape and counterfeit?
Peace. Oh! where is the promise of the God of Heaven, that Righteousness and Peace shall kiss each other?
Truth. Patience, sweet Peace! These Heavens and Earth are growing old, and shall be changed like a garment: Psalm cii. They shall melt away, and be burnt up with all the works that are therein; and the Most High Eternal Creator shall gloriously create new Heavens and new Earth, wherein dwells righteousness: 2 Pet. iii. Our kisses then shall have their endless date of pure and sweetest joys. Till then both thou and I must hope, and wait, and bear the fury of the Dragon's wrath, whose monstrous lies and furies shall with himself be cast into the lake of fire, the second death: Rev. xx.
Peace. Most precious Truth, thou knowest we are both pursued and laid for. Mine heart is full of sighs, mine eyes with tears. Where can I better vent my full oppressed bosom than into thine, whose faithful lips may for these few hours revive my drooping, wandering spirits, and here begin to wipe tears from mine eyes, and the eyes of my dearest children.
Truth. Sweet daughter of the God of peace, begin.
And so Truth and Peace hold their long discourse, evolving very much that doctrine of the absolute Liberty of Conscience, as derivable from, or radically identical with, the idea of the utter distinctness of the Church of Christ from the world or civil society, which had been propounded first by the Brownists and Baptists, and had come down as a tradition from them. But it is evolved by Williams more boldly and passionately than by any before him. There is a fine union throughout of warmth of personal Christian feeling with intellectual resoluteness in accepting every possible consequence of his main principle. Here are a few phrases from the marginal summaries which give the substance of the Dialogue, page after page:—"The Church and civil State confusedly made all one"; "The civil magistrates bound to preserve the bodies of their subjects, and not to destroy them for conscience sake"; "The civil sword may make a nation of hypocrites and anti-Christians, but not one Christian"; "Evil is always evil, yet permission of it may in case be good"; "Christ Jesus the deepest politician that ever was, and yet he commands a toleration of anti-Christians"; "Seducing teachers, either Pagan, Jewish, Turkish, or anti-Christian, may yet be obedient subjects to the civil laws"; "Christ's lilies may flourish in his Church, notwithstanding the abundance of weeds in the world permitted"; "The absolute sufficiency of the sword of the Spirit"; "A National Church not instituted by Christ Jesus"; "The civil commonweal and the spiritual commonweal, the Church, not inconsistent, though independent the one on the other"; "Forcing of men to godliness or God's worship the greatest cause of breach of civil peace"; "Master of a family under the Gospel not charged to force all under him from their consciences to his"; "Few magistrates, few men, spiritually and Christianly good: yet divers sorts of goodness, natural, artificial, civil, &c."; "Persons may with less sin be forced to marry whom they cannot love than to worship where they cannot believe"; "Christ Jesus never appointed a maintenance of ministers from the unconverted and unbelieving: [but] they that compel men to hear compel men also to pay for their hearing and conversion"; "The civil power owesthreethings to the true Church of Christ—(l) Approbation, (2) Submission [i.e. interpreted in the text to be personal submission of the civil magistrate to church-membership, if he himself believes], (3) Protection"; "The civil magistrate owestwothings to false worshippers—(1) Permission, (2) Protection."—Whoever has read this string of phrases possesses the marrow of Williams's treatise. At the end of it there is an interesting discussion of the question whether only church-members, or "godly persons in a particular church-estate," ought to be eligible to be magistrates. To Williams, who was a pure democrat in politics, and was founding the new State of Rhode Island on the basis of the equal suffrages of all the colonists, this was an important practical question. He decides it with great good sense, and clearly in the negative. Without denying that the appointment of godly persons to civil offices was a thing to be prayed for, and, wherever possible, peaceably endeavoured, he points out that the principle that only Christian persons should be entrusted with civil rule is practically preposterous. Five-sixths of the world had never heard of Christ, and yet there were lawful enough civil states in those parts of the world. Then, in a Christian monarchy, what a convulsion, what a throwing away of the benefits of hereditary succession, if it had to be inquired, whenever the throne became vacant, whether the next heir was of the right sort religiously. Finally, in any Christian colony or town, would it not be a turning of everything upside down, and a premium upon hypocrisy, to make church-membership a necessary qualification for magistracy, and so, when a magistrate lapsed into what was thought religious error, and had to be excommunicated by his church, to have to turn him out of his civil office also?
Williams, it is to be remembered, had held these views while he was yet only a Congregationalist generally, and before he had become a Baptist. Though he found them among the Baptists, therefore, he may be said to have recovered them for Independency at large, and to have been the first to impregnate modern "Independency" with them through and through. Nay, as he had himself gone out of the camp of the mere Baptist Congregationalists when he published his treatise,—as he had begun to question whether there was any true Visible Church in the world at all, any perfect pastorate in any nation, anything else under the sun of a Christian kind than a chance-medley of various preaching and effort into which God might sooner or later send new shafts of light and direction from heaven—in the view of all this, Williams has to be regarded as the father of a speculation that cannot be contained within the name of Independency, even at its broadest. If we were forced to adopt a modern designation for him, we should call him. the father of all that, since his time, has figured, anywhere in Great Britain, or in the United States, or in the British Colonies, under the name ofVoluntaryism. This involves a restriction on the one hand. Since his time, there has been an abundance of speculation in the world as to the true duties and limits of the power of a State even in civil matters; and the prevailing effect of these speculations has been to hand over more and more of the care of human well-being and human destinies, in everything whatsoever, to the liberty of individuals, the pressure of their competing desires, and their powers of voluntary association, and so to reduce the function of the magistrate or any power of corporate rule to a thing becoming small by degrees and beautifully less. Of late, this tendency, victorious already in many matters, has tried to assert itself in the question of Education. It has been maintained that there should be no attention on the part of the State to the education of the citizens, but that, in the matter of learning to read and write and of all farther learning or mental training, the individuals horn into a community should be left to their hereditary chances, the discretion or kindness of those about them, and their own power of gradually finding out what they need, and buying it or begging it. Now with this direction of modern speculation the intentions of Roger Williams had nothing to do. He was a democrat in politics, and, as such, he might have gone on to new definitions of what, in secular matters, should be left to the individual, and what should be still regulated by the majority; but what these definitions would have been must be left to inference from the records of his farther political life in Rhode Island. Respecting Schools and Universities he did, indeed, hold that they were not to be regarded as the nurseries of a clergy, the appendages of a Church, or the depositaries and supports of any religious creed. "For any depending of the Church of Christ on such schools," he wrote, "I find not a tittle in the Testament of Christ Jesus." He would certainly, therefore, have been for no expenditure of public money on thereligiouseducation of the young, and he would have been for the extraction of all theological teaching out of existing schools and universities. But he "honoured schools," he says," for tongues and arts," and I have found no trace in him of a notion that State support of schools and universities for such secular learning is illegitimate. HisVoluntaryism, so far as it was declared, or, I believe, intended, was wholly Voluntaryism in the matter of Church and Religion. In that sphere, however, his Voluntaryism was absolute, and went as far as anything calling itself Voluntaryism that has since been heard of in the English- speaking world.
Williams'sBloody Tenent, as I have said, was his parting gift to the English nation before his return to America. It was out in June or July 1644; and in September of the same year Williams, after a stay of about fifteen months in and near London, was on his way back to New England. He had succeeded in the immediate object of his mission. For, during his stay in England, the management of the Colonies, till then in the hands of Commissioners under the Crown, was transferred (Nov. 2, 1643) to a Parliamentary Commission of Lords and Commoners, at the head of which was the Earl of Warwick as Lord High Admiral, and among the members of which were Lord Saye and Sele, Pym, the younger Vane, Sir Arthur Haselrig, and Oliver Cromwell. Before such Commissioners, with Vane as his personal friend. Williams had had little difficulty in making out his case; and he had obtained from them a Patent, dated March 14, 1643-4, associating "the towns of Providence, Portsmouth, and Newport," into one body-politic by the name of "the Incorporation of Providence Plantations in Narraganset Bay in New England." This Patent gave acarte blancheto the colonists to settle their own form of government by voluntary consent, or vote, among themselves; and, having it in his pocket, Williams might hope, on his return to America, to set up, in the polity of Rhode Island and its adjacencies, such an example of complete civil democracy combined with absolute religious individualism as the world had never yet seen. TheBloody Tenentmight be left in England as an exposition of his theory in the sphere of Religion until this practical Transatlantic example of it should be ready! He had shrewdly taken care, however, to have the Patent in his pocket before issuing theBloody Tenent. Had that book been out first, he might have had some difficulty in obtaining the Patent even from such Commissioners for the Colonies as he had to deal with. Possibly, however, they granted it with full knowledge of Williams, and were willing, through him, to try a bolder experiment in the American wilds than it was possible to promote or to announce in England. [Footnote: Palfrey's New England, I. 633-4, and II. 215; and Gammell's Life of Williams, 119, 120.]
While we have been so long with Roger Williams, his colleague in the Toleration heresy, John Goodwill, has been waiting. He was fifty-one years of age, or six or seven years older than Williams. Rather late in life, he had begun to find himself a much-abused man in London. For, though he had sided with the Parliamentarians zealously from the first, and had even, it appears, taken the Covenant, [Footnote: That Goodwin had taken the Covenant appears from words of his own in a tract of 1646 quoted in Fletcher's Hist, of Independency, IV. 47.] his theology was thought to be lax, [Footnote: The suspicion of Goodwin's Socinianism was as early as November 1613, when he got into trouble with the Assembly on that and other grounds (see Baillie's Letters, II. III, and Lightfoot's Notes, Nov. 8 and 9, 1643).] and the interpretation he was putting on the Covenant was not the common one. He thought that the oath to seek "reformation of religion" and to "endeavour to bring the Church of God in the three kingdoms to the nearest conjunction and uniformity," did not necessarily imply acceptance of the Presbyterian system which the Assembly were bent upon bringing in. Therefore, when the Five Dissenting Brethren of the Assembly appealed to Parliament in theirApologetical Narration, they found a champion outside in Goodwin. His championship took the form of that answer to "A. S." (i.e.the Scotsman, Adam Steuart, author of the first printed attack on theApologetic Narration) which we have mentioned as appearing with the brief titleM. S. to A. S., and again, in a second edition, with the fuller titleA Reply of Two of the Brethren to A. S., &c.; with A Plea for Liberty of Conscience, &c. As the second title implies, Goodwill had associates in the work; but it was principally his, and the part on Toleration wholly his. So far as the tract concerns itself with the question between Presbytery and Congregationalism, Goodwin avows himself a Congregationalist. And yet he was not at one in all points with the five Assembly-men. "I know I am looked upon," he afterwards wrote, "by reason partly of my writings, partly of my practice, as a man very deeply engaged for the Independents' cause against Presbytery. But the truth is, I am neither so whole for the former, nor yet against the latter, as I am, I believe, generally voted in the thoughts of men to be." [Footnote: Quoted, from the Preface to Goodwin'sAnapologesiastes Anapologias, by Fletcher, IV. 46.] This was written in 1616; but even in 1644 he fought so much for his own hand that the Independents of the Assembly may have but half liked his partnership. His Toleration doctrine, at all events, though uttered in their behalf, was too strong doctrine even for them. Hear what Baillie writes to his friend Spang, at Campvere, in Holland, just after the appearance of Goodwin's tract for the Independents: "M.S. against A.S., is John Goodwin of Coleman Street: he names you expressly, and professes to censure the letter of Zeeland. He is a bitter enemy to Presbytery, and is openly for a full liberty of conscience of all sects, even Turks, Jews, Papists, and all to be more openly tolerate than with you [i.e.than even in Holland]." [Footnote: Baillie, II. 180, 181. Goodwin's mention of Spang, referred to by Baillie, is as follows:— "There is a Scottish Church, of which one Spang is a very busy agent, at Trevere [Campvere]… whence the Letter [i.e.the Zeeland Letter in favour of Presbytery] came."] Baillie's representation of Goodwin's Toleration doctrine is fair enough. It is not so deep, so exceptionless, and so transcendentally reasoned as Roger Williams's; and indeed there was none of the sap and mystic richness of nature in Goodwin that we find in Williams, but chiefly clear courage, and strong cool sense. For most practical purposes, however, Goodwin's Toleration was thorough. He was for tolerating not merely the orthodox Congregationalists and such more heterodox sects as might be thought respectable, but all religions, sects, and schisms whatsoever, if only the professors of them were otherwise peaceable in the State. Not, of course, that they were not to be reasoned with and proved false publicly; or that heretics in congregations were not to be admonished, and, if obdurate, excommunicated; or that a whole church tainted with a great heresy ought not to be put under a ban by all other churches, and communion with it renounced. All this was assumed in the theory of Church-Independency which was common to Goodwin and Williams. True, Williams, now that he had passed beyond the Baptists and saw no true Church anywhere on earth, must have begun to doubt also the efficacy and validity of even spiritual censures, as exercised by the so-called churches, to regard as a mere agency of troublesome moonshine that incessant watchfulness of each other's errors on which Independency relied, and so to luxuriate in a mood of large charity, sighing over all, and hoping more from prayer and longing and pious well-doing all round than from censures and disputations. To Goodwin, on the other hand, troubled with no such visionary ideas, and fully convinced that a very good model of a Church had been set up in Coleman Street, the right and efficacy of disputation against error, and of ministerial vigilance against error in particular churches, seemed more important, or at least more worth insisting on in a public plea for Toleration. Williams and Goodwill did not differ theoretically, but only practically, over this item in the exposition of their doctrine. The sole difference, of theoretical import, was that Goodwin, in dwelling on the duty of disputation by Christian ministers against false religions and dangerous opinions in society round about them, and of vigilance against minor heresies in their own congregations, talked vaguely of a right on the part of the civil magistrate to admonish ministers in this respect should they be negligent or forgetful of their duty. This, as we know, would have grated on Williams. Perhaps, however, Goodwin, even here, was only throwing a sop to Cerberus. At all events, he comes out finally a thorough Tolerationist. Whatever minister or magistrate may do towards confuting and diminishing error, there is a point at which they must both stop. There is not to be a suppression of false religions, sects and schisms, by fining, imprisoning, disfranchising, banishment, death, or any civil punishment whatsoever; and, when it comes to that, they are all to be tolerated. [Footnote: Jackson's Life of Goodwin. pp. 110, 117; Hanbury's Memorials, II. 341- 365.]
We are now prepared to classify the various forms in which the Toleration Doctrine was urged on the English mind in the year 1644. There were three grades of the doctrine:—
I.Absolute Liberty of Conscience, and No National Church, or State- interference with Religion, of any kind whatsoever.This was, in fact, more than Toleration, and Toleration is hardly the fit name for it. The advocates of this idea were Roger Williams, perhaps the Baptists generally, also Burton in a certain way; but, above all, Roger Williams. He did not think there could be Liberty of Conscience, in the perfect and absolute sense, where there was a National Church, even if free dissent were allowed from that Church. For, by the establishment of a Church, he held, a substantial worldly premium was put on certain religious beliefs, and an advantage conferred on a portion of the community at the expense of all; and to be compelled to pay for, or even to acknowledge politically, a Church which one did not approve, was in itself inconsistent with true Liberty of Conscience, whatever freedom of nonconformity might be left to individuals. Accordingly, if Roger Williams, at that crisis, had been a statesman of England, instead of a mere commissioner from an infant colony in America, his advice would have been in this strain:—"It is agreed that the Episcopal or Prelatic Church, called hitherto the Reformed Church of England, is no longer to exist. That is settled; and the question is, What Church Reformation shall there now be? My answer is sweeping and simple. Let there be no National Church, no Church of England, at all, of any kind or form whatsoever. Let England henceforth be a civil State only, in which Christianity shall take care of itself, and all forms of Christianity and all other religions shall have equal rights to protection by the police. Confiscate for the use of the State all the existing revenues of the defunct Church and its belongings, giving such compensation for life- interests therein as may seem reasonable; but create no new Church, nor stump of a Church, round which new interests may gather. Do not even implicate the State so far in the future of Religion as to indicate to the subjects any form of Church as esteemed the best, or any range of option among Churches as presumably the safest. Leave the formation and the sustentation of Christ's Church in the English realm, and everywhere else, entirely to the unseen power of the Spirit, and the free action of those whom the Spirit may make its instruments."—For nothing like this was the Long Parliament, or any other legislature in the world, then prepared; and Williams knew it. But he had faith in the future of his speculation. In America, whither he was to carry it back, he hoped to be able to exhibit it in practice on a small scale in the new colony he was founding; and there could be no harm, he thought, in leaving the leaven to ferment in the denser society of England.
II.Unlimited Toleration round an Established National Church.So we may express a form of Tolerationism in which there was a concurrence of persons, and perhaps of bodies of persons, who yet differed from each other in the motives for their concurrence. Williams, of course, accepted this form of Tolerationism, as next best to his own absolute Voluntaryism, Individualism, and universal Liberty of Conscience. "If there is to be in England a National or State Church of some kind (which I think wrong, and so wrong that I will take no part in the debate what kind of National Church would be best, whether a Prelatic, Presbyterian, or any other), at least, when you have set up such a Church, let there be a perfect toleration for all subjects of the realm round about that Church, no compulsion on any of them to belong to that Church, no pains and penalties for any profession of belief or disbelief, or any form of worship or no-worship, out of that Church." These are not Williams's own words, but they exactly express his meaning; and, in fact, he intended hisBloody Tenentto be a plea for toleration in this practical sense, if it should fail in winning people to his higher and more peculiar idea of real Liberty of Conscience. And a most eloquent plea it was. He insists again and again on the necessity that there should be no limits to the toleration of Religious Difference in a state. He argues expressly that not only orthodox or slightly heterodox dissenters should have the benefit of such toleration, but all kinds of dissentients without exception, Papists, Jews, Mohammedans, Pagans, or Infidels. He knew what a hard battle lie was fighting. "I confess I have little hope," he said, "till those flames are over, that this discourse against the doctrine of persecution for cause of conscience should pass current, I say not amongst the wolves and lions, but even amongst the sheep of Christ themselves. Yet,liberavi animam meam: I have not hid within my breast my soul's belief." He trusted, doubtless, that his treatise might have some effect, if not for its highest purpose, at least as a practical plea for unlimited toleration round the new National Church of England that was to be. And here most of the Baptists were in the same predicament with Williams. They would have preferred no National Church at all; but, as there was to be a National Church, they wanted the amplest toleration round it. Burton also was pretty nearly in the same category. He too doubted the lawfulness of a State Church of any kind, but was earnest that, if such must be established, it should not be coercive. He did not formally demand unlimited toleration, and indeed conceded something in words to the effect that in cases of "known heresy, or blasphemy, or idolatry," offenders would have to be "obnoxious to the Civil Power;" but I rather think that the concession was prudential, and that his heart did not go with it. I will retain him therefore among the Unlimited Tolerationists. Far outshining him in this class, however, was John Goodwin.—Well, but were the advocates of unlimited toleration in connexion with an Established Church exclusively persons who would have prevented the formation of such a Church if they could, or doubted its righteousness and propriety, and who only insisted on Tolerationwithsuch a Church as a practical necessity to which they were driven? Were there no theorists in that time who positively desired an Established Church on its own account, and for the general good of the community, but who had worked out the conclusion that such a Church might consist, and ought to consist, with universal Religious Toleration, or the freest liberty of Nonconformity and Dissent? In view of the fact that this is the theory of Establishments evolved by some of the best ecclesiastical spirits in our own later times, the question is interesting. My researches do not enable me to give a very precise answer to it applicable to the exact year 1644. If there were such theorists, however, they were, I should say, among those wiser and younger sons of the Episcopal Church of England who would fain have preserved that Episcopal Church, but had privately made up their minds that Laud's basis for that Church was untenable, and that a very different basis must be substituted. One thinks of Chillingworth, Hales, and the rest of that "Latitudinarian" brotherhood; one thinks of Jeremy Taylor; one thinks of the candid Fuller; one thinks even of the Calvinistic Usher. Chillingworth had died at Chichester, Jan. 30, 1643-4, at the age of forty-one, an avowed Royalist, and indeed a Royalist prisoner-at-war, tended on his death-bed by Presbyterians. [Footnote: Wood's Ath. III. 93, 94; and Life of Chillingworth prefixed to the Oxford edition of his Works.] Whatever hardy cogitations had been in his mind, pointing to a revived Episcopal Church of England with an ample toleration within it and round about it, had gone prematurely to the grave. The others were still alive, also pronounced Royalists, and acting or suffering more or less on that side; and whatever thoughts they had in the direction under notice were irrelevant to their immediate duty and opportunities, and had to wait for utterance at a more convenient season. [Footnote: Yet therehadbeen one recent utterance of Hales relating to the idea of Toleration. It was in the form ofA Tract concerning Schism and Schismatics, which he had prepared in 1636, partly for the use of his friend Chillingworth then engaged on his "Religion of Protestants," but which, in deference to Laud's private objections and remonstrances, he had kept unpublished. In 1642, when Laud was in prison and the state of things wholly changed, the Tract was brought out at the Oxford University Press. It is vague in its conception and expression; but that it is decidedly in favour of toleration and free inquiry will appear from the opening sentences: "Heresy and Schism, as they are in common use, are two theological [Greek: Mosmos], or scarecrows, which they who uphold a party in religion use to fright away such as, making inquiry into it, are ready to relinquish and oppose it if it appear either erroneous or suspicious. For, as Plutarch reports of a painter who, having unskilfully painted a cock, chased away all cocks and hens, that so the imperfection of his art might not appear by comparison with nature, so men, willing for ends to admit of no fancy but their own, endeavour to hinder an inquiry into it, by way of comparison of somewhat with it, peradventure truer, that so the deformity of their own might not appear." Wood's Ath. III. 413, 414, and Tract itself with letter to Laud, Vol. I. pp. 114-144 of "The Works of the ever memorable Mr. John Hales," Glasgow, 1765.] On the whole, however, I judge that any such thoughts in their minds (even in Jeremy Taylor's as yet) fell considerably short of the Unlimited Toleration advocated by Williams and John Goodwin, and, if they could have been ascertained and measured, would have referred their owners rather to the next category than to the present.
III.A Limited Toleration round an Established National Church.This would probably have sufficed the thoughtful Anglicans of whom we have just been speaking. Their ideal probably was a revived Episcopal Church of England, liberally constituted within itself, and with a toleration of all respectable forms of Dissent round about itself, but still with a right reserved for the Civil Power of preventing and punishing gross errors and schisms. We are more concerned, however, with another set of Limited Tolerationists, then much more conspicuous in England. They were those who had given up all thoughts of the retention of a Prelatic Establishment, and who indeed regarded the deliverance of England from such an Establishment as the noblest accomplished fact of the time. What they were anxious about was the nature of the new National Church, if any, that was to be substituted, and especially the degree of conformity to that Church that was to be required. The chief representatives of this state of feeling in its more moderate form were the Five Independent Divines of the Assembly, Messrs. Thomas Goodwin, Bridge, Nye, Simpson, and Burroughs. They were not, I think, distinctly adverse to a National Church on theoretical grounds, as Williams and Burton were; and probably what they would have liked best would have been a National Church on the Congregationalist principle, like that of New England. For, though Congregationalism and a National Establishment of Religion may seem radically a contradiction in terms, yet in fact the case had not been quite so in America. There may be a State Church without public endowments, or rather there may be endowments and privileges that are not pecuniary. The New England Church, though consisting of a few scores of congregations, mutually independent, self- supporting, and scattered stragglingly over an extensive territory, was really a kind of State Church collectively, inasmuch as the State required, by rule or by custom, membership of some congregation as a qualification for suffrage and office, and also kept some watch and control over the congregations, so as to be sure that none were formed of a very heretical kind, and that none already formed lapsed into decided heresy. How had Mr. Cotton of Boston, the great light of the New England Church, expounded its principle in respect of the power of the civil magistrate in matters of Religion? "We readily grant you," he had written, "liberty of conscience is to be granted to men that fear God indeed, as knowing they will not persist in heresy or turbulent schism when they are convinced in conscience of the sinfulness thereof. But the question is whether an heretic, after once or twice admonition, and so after conviction, or any other scandalous and heinous offender, may be tolerated, either in the Church without excommunication, or in the Commonwealth without such punishment as may preserve others from dangerous and damnable infection." [Footnote: From Cotton's Answer to the old Tract of "Scriptures and Reasons against Persecution" (seeantè, p. 114). The Answer is printed by Williams in hisBloody Tenent: See Hanserd Knollys Society edition (1848), p. 30.]
Clearly, with such a principle, and with all the particulars of practice which it implied, the Congregationalist Church of New England was, after all, a State Church, and a pretty strict State Church too. Now, it was probably such a National Congregationalist Church, but with an allowance of toleration somewhat larger than Cotton's, that the Five Independents of the Assembly would have liked to see set up in England. That, however, being plainly out of the question, and the whole current of dominant opinion in Parliament and the Assembly being towards a Presbyterian settlement, what remained for the Five? In the first place, to delay the Presbyterian settlement as long as they could, and to criticise its programme at every stage so as to liberalize its provisions as much as possible; in the second place, to put in a plea for Toleration for Dissent under the settlement when it should be enacted. They had performed, and were performing, both duties. They were fighting the propositions of strict Presbytery inch by inch in the Assembly, if not with success, at least so as to impede progress; and in theirApologetical Narration(Jan. 1643-4) they had lodged with Parliament and the country a demand for Toleration under the coming Presbytery. What they had thus expressed in print they had continued to express in speech and in every other possible way. They were, in a certain sense, the most marked Tolerationists of the time; Toleration was identified with them. And yet it was but a limited Toleration, a very limited Toleration, that they demanded. Indulgence for themselves in Congregationalist practices after Presbytery should be established, and indulgence for other respectable sects and persons in "lesser differences:" that was all. Nothing like Williams's or John Goodwill's toleration: no liberty, or at least none avowedly, for such glaring heresies as Antinomianism, Socinianism, and Arianism, not to mention open Infidelity. Here, I believe, they represented the mass of the ordinary Independents. Whatever more a few strong spirits among the Independents, and especially among the lay Independents, desired, the mass of them were content for the present to be Limited Tolerationists.
Such were the three forms of the Toleration Doctrine in England in 1644. They were of unequal strengths and confusedly mixed, but constituted together a powerful and growing force of opinion. And what was the opposition? ANTI-TOLERATION, OR ABSOLUTE AND ENTIRE CONFORMITY OF THE WHOLE NATION TO THE ONE ESTABLISHED CHURCH: this was the category of the opposition.
In this category, now that Prelacy was done with, and it was certain that the new National Church was to be on the Presbyterian model, the Presbyterians had succeeded the Laudians. As a body, the Presbyterians of 1644 and subsequent years were absolute Anti-Tolerationists. The proofs are so abundant, collectively they make such an ocean, that it passes comprehension how the contrary could ever have been asserted. From the first appearance of the Presbyterians in force after the opening of the Long Parliament, it was their anxiety to beat down the rising idea of Toleration; and, after the meeting of the Westminster Assembly, and the publication of theApologetical Narrationof the Independents, the one aim of the Presbyterians was to tie Toleration round the neck of Independency, stuff the two struggling monsters into one sack, and sink them to the bottom of the sea. In all the Presbyterian literature of the time,—Baillie's Letters, Rutherford's and Gillespie's Tracts, the pamphlets of English Presbyterian Divines in the Assembly, the pamphlets of Prynne, Bastwick, and other miscellaneous Presbyterian controversialists out of the Assembly,—this antipathy to Toleration, limited or unlimited, this desire to pinion Independency and Toleration together in one common death, appears overwhelmingly. Out of scores of such Presbyterian manifestoes, let us select one, interesting to us for certain reasons apart.
Of all the Divines in London, not members of the Assembly, none had come to be better known for his Presbyterian acrimony than the veteran Mr. Thomas Edwards, of whose maiden pamphlet of 1641, calledReasons against the Independent Government, with Mrs. Chidley's Reply to the same, we have had occasion to take notice (antè, p. 110). The spirited verbosity, as we called it, of that pamphlet of Edwards had procured him a reputation among the Presbyterians, which he felt himself bound to justify by farther efforts. The appearance of theApologetical Narrationof the Five Independents in Jan. 1643-4 gave him a famous opportunity. Various answers were at once or quickly published to that Independent manifesto—not only that byA. S.or Adam Steuart (antè, p. 25), but various others. When it became known, however, that Mr. Edwards also was preparing an Answer, it was expected to beat them all. There was a flutter of anticipation of it among the Presbyterians; but it was rather slow in coming. "There is a piece of 26 sheets, of Mr. Edwards, against the Apologetick Narration, near printed, which will paint that faction [the Independents] in clearer colours than yet they have appeared," writes Baillie, June 7, 1644; in a later letter, July 5, he says it is expected "within two or three days," but "excresced to near 40 sheets;" and it is not till Aug. 7 that he speaks of it as fairly out: "Mr. Edwards has written a splendid confutation of all the Independents' Apology." [Footnote: Baillie, II. 190, 201-2, and 215.] In fact, it appeared in the end of July, just at the time when the Assembly adjourned for their fortnight's vacation, and almost contemporaneously with John Goodwin'sM. S. to A. S.and Williams'sBloody Tenent. Baillie's measure of "sheets" must have been different from ours, or he had been under some mistake; for the treatise, though long enough, consisted but of 367 small quarto pages, with this title: "Antapologia: or, A Full Answer to the Apologetical Narration of Mr. Goodwin, Mr. Nye, Mr. Simpson, Mr. Burroughs, Mr. Bridge, members of the Assembly of Divines. Wherein many of the controversies of these times are handled: viz. [&c.]. Humbly also submitted to the Honourable Houses of Parliament. By Thomas Edwards, Minister of the Gospel." [Footnote: Hanbury's Memorials, II. 366. Mr. Hanbury gives a summary of theAntapologiawith extracts (366- 385); but I have before me the book itself in a reprint, of 1646, "by T.R. and E.M. for Ralph Smith, at the signe of the Bible in Cornhill neer the Royall Exchange." It consists of 259 pages of text, besides introductory epistle, and table of contents at the end.]
It was a most remarkable treatise, and ran through London at once. For the style, though slovenly, was fluent and popular, and Edwards, having plenty of time on his hands, and having a taste for personalities, had made minute inquiries into the antecedents of the Five Independents in Holland and in England, and had interwoven the results of these inquiries with his arguments against Independency itself. The Five, he tells us in a preliminary epistle, were among his personal acquaintances. "I can truly speak it," he says, "that this presentAntapologiais so far from being written out of any malice or ill-will to the Apologists that I love their persons and value them as brethren, yea some of them above brethren; and, besides that love I bear to them as saints, I have a personal love, and a particular love of friendship for some of them; and I can truly speak it, that I writ not this book, nor any part of it, out of any personal quarrel, old grudge, or former difference (for to this day there never was any such difference or unkindness passed between us); but I have writ it with much sorrow, unwillingness, and some kind of conflict." This explanation was certainly necessary; for Mr. Edwards does not spare his friends. He tells all he has found out about them; he quotes their conversations with himself; he gives them the lie direct, and appeals to their consciences whether he is not right in doing so.Theymartyrs!theypoor exiles in Holland, and now whining to Parliament that they would have to go into exile again if Presbyterianism were established without a Toleration! Why, they had been in clover in Holland; they had been living there "in safety, plenty, pomp, and ease," leaving the genuine Puritans at home to fight it out with Prelacy; and, after the battle was won, they had slunk back to claim the rewards they had not earned, to become pets and "grandees" in English society, to secure good appointments and assume leading parts, and to be elected members of the venerable Westminster Assembly! They had not even had the courage to go to New England, though some of them had talked of doing so! And then their prate of this emigration to New England, which they had themselves declined, as the greatest undertaking for the sake of pure Religion, next to Abraham's migration out of his own country, that the world had ever seen! Why, the emigration to New England was no such great affair after all! There had been mixed motives in it; all New England would not make a twentieth part of London; it had but two or three Divines in it worth naming in the same breath with the worthies of Old England, and was on the whole but a kind of outlandish mess; the "Reformation in Church-government and worship" then going on in Old England would be a wonder "to all generations to come far beyond that of New England!" But in Holland, where the cowardly Apologists had preferred to stay, what had they been doing? Quarrelling among themselves, going into all kinds of conceits, anointing people with oil, and the like; respecting all which Edwards had obtained from Rotterdam and Arnheim a budget of information! Then that lie of the Apologists, that they had, since their return to England, been careful not to press their peculiar Congregationalist opinions, or endeavour to make a party, but had waited in patience to see what course affairs would take! Not press their peculiar opinions—not endeavour to make a party! Why, Mr. Edwards could aver (and cite dates, places, and witnesses to prove it) that they had been doing nothing else, since they came to England, than press their peculiar opinions and endeavour to make a party! "Suffer me to deal plainly with you: I am persuaded that, setting aside the Jesuits' acting for themselves and way, you Five have acted for yourselves and way, both by yourselves and by your instruments, both upon the stage and behind the curtain, considering circumstances and laying all things together, more than any five men have done in so short a time this sixty years. And, if it be not so, whence have come all these swarms and troops of Independents in Ministry, Armies, City, Country, Gentry, and amongst the Common People of all sorts, men, women, servants, children?"
So, on and on, Edwards goes, decidedly more readable than most pamphleteers of the time, because he writes with some spirit, and mixes a continual pepper of personalities with his arguments against the tenets of the Independents. With these arguments we shall not meddle. Their purpose was to hold up "a true glass to behold the faces of Presbytery and Independency in, with the beauty, order, strength, of the one, and the deformity, disorder, and weakness of the other." In other words, the pamphlet is a digest of everything that could be said against Independency and in favour of Presbyterianism. But the grand tenet of Presbyterianism in which Mr. Edwards revels with most delight, and which he exhibits as the distinguishing honour of that system, and its fitness beyond any other for grappling with the impiety of men in general and the disorderliness of that age in particular, is its uncompromising Anti- Toleration. Throughout the whole pamphlet there runs a vein of declamation to this effect; and at the close some twenty pages are expressly devoted to the subject, in connexion with that claim for a Limited Toleration which the Apologists had advanced. Eight Reasons are stated and expounded why there should not be even this Limited Toleration, why even Congregationalist opinions and practice should not be tolerated in England. It would be against the rule of Scripture as to the duty of the civil magistrate; it would be against the Solemn League and Covenant; it would be against the very nature of a national Reformation, for "a Reformation, and a Toleration are diametrically opposite;" it would be "against the judgment of the greatest lights in the Church, both ancient and modern;" it would be an invitation and temptation to error and "an occasion of many falling who otherwise never would;" &c. &c. Wherever Presbytery and strict Anti-Toleration had prevailed since the Reformation had there not been a marvellous orderliness and freedom from error and heresy? All over the map of Europe would it not be found that error and heresy had been rank precisely in proportion to the deviation of a country from Presbytery or to the relaxation of its grasp where it was nominally professed? What, in particular, had made Scotland the country it was, pure in faith, united in action, and with a Church "terrible as an army with banners"? What but Presbytery and Anti-Toleration? O then let Presbytery and Anti-Toleration reign in England as well! And, while they were proceeding to the great work of establishing Presbytery, let them beware of such an inconsistency as granting the least promise beforehand of a Toleration! On this point Mr. Edwards addresses the Parliament in his own name, telling them that Toleration is the device of the Devil. "I humbly beseech the Parliament," he says, "seriously to consider the depths of Satan in this design of a Toleration; how this is now his last plot and design, and by it would undermine and frustrate the whole work of Reformation intended. 'Tis his masterpiece for England; and, for effecting it, he comes and moves, not in Prelates and Bishops, not in furious Anabaptists, &c., but in holy men, excellent preachers; moderate and fair men, not for a toleration of heresies and gross opinions, but an 'allowance of a latitude to some lesser differences with peaceableness.' This isCandidus ille Diabolus[that White Devil], as Luther speaks, andmeridianus Diabolus[mid-day Devil], as Johannes Gersonius and Beza express it, coming under the merits of much suffering and well-deserving, clad in the white garments of innocency and holiness. In a word, could the Devil effect a Toleration, he would think he had gained well by the Reformation and made a good exchange of the Hierarchy to have a Toleration for it. I am confident of it, upon serious thoughts, and long searching into this point of the evils and mischief of a Toleration, that, if the Devil had his choice whether the Hierarchy, Ceremonies, and Liturgy should be established in this kingdom, or a Toleration granted, he would choose and prefer a Toleration before them."
Did Mr. Thomas Edwards in all this represent the whole body of thePresbyterians of his time? I am afraid he did. Inhisvery sense,with the same vehemency, and to the same extent, they were all Anti-Tolerationists.
Was there no exception? Had no one Presbyterian of that day worked out, in the interest of Presbytery, a conclusion corresponding to that which we have seen reason to think some of the wiser Anglicans then within the Royalist lines were quietly working out in the interest of Episcopacy, in case Episcopacy should ever again have a chance? Was no one Presbyterian prepared to come forth with the proposal of a Toleration in England, either limited or unlimited, round an Established National Church on the Presbyterian model? That there may not have been some such person among those Erastian laymen who favoured Presbytery on the whole for general and political reasons, one would not assert positively. None such, however, is distinctly in historical view; and it is certain that among the real or dominant Presbyterians, thejure divinoPresbyterians, English or Scottish, there was no one upon whom the idea in question had clearly dawned or who dared to divulge it. Perhaps it was the belief in the absolutejus divinumof Presbytery that made the idea impossible to them. Yet why should it have been impossible in consistency even with that belief? It may bejure divinothat the square on the hypothenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the sides, that he is a blockhead who believes otherwise, and that a permanent apparatus should be set up in every land for teaching this mathematical faith; and yet it may be equallyjure divinothat no one shall be compelled to avail himself of that apparatus, or be punished for doubting or denying the proposition. But the Presbyterians of 1644 did not so refine or argue. They stood stoutly to the necessary identity of Presbyterianism and absolute Anti-Toleration. And so Presbyterianism missed the most magnificent opportunity she has had in her history. Had her offer to England been "Presbytery with a Toleration," who knows what a different shaping subsequent events might have assumed? What if Henderson, in whose natural disposition one sees more of room and aptitude for the idea than in that of any other Presbyterian leader, had actually become possessed with the idea and had proclaimed it? Would he have carried the mass of the Presbyterians with him? or would they have deposed him from the leadership? It is useless to inquire. The idea never occurred even to Henderson; and that it did not occur to him constituted his unfitness for leadership, out of Scotland, in the complex crisis which had at last arrived, and was the one weakness of his career near its close.
MULTIPLICATION OF HERESIES: SYNOPSIS OF ENGLISH SECTS AND SECTARIES IN 1644.
It was all very well, the Presbyterians argued, to propound the principle of Toleration in the abstract. Would its advocates be so good as to think of its operation in the concrete? The society of England was no longer composed merely of the traditional PAPISTS, PRELATISTS, PRESBYTERIANS, and CONGREGATIONALISTS or ORTHODOX INDEPENDENTS. Beyond these last, though sheltering themselves under the unfortunate principle of Church- Independency, there was now a vast chaos of SECTS and SECTARIES, some of them maintaining the most dangerous and damnable heresies and blasphemies! Would the Tolerationists, and especially the Limited Tolerationists, take a survey of this chaos, and consider how their principle of Toleration would work when applied toitsghastly bulk and variety?
This matter, of the extraordinary multiplication of Sects and Heresies in England, had been in constant public discussion since the opening of the Long Parliament. It had figured constantly in messages and declarations of the King; who had first charged the fact of the sudden appearance and boldness of the Sects and Sectaries to the abrogation of his Kingly prerogative and Episcopal government by the Parliament, and had then attributed the origin of the Civil War to the lawless machinations of these same Sects and Sectaries. It had figured no less, though with very different interpretations and comments, in the proceedings and appeals of the Parliament. Now, however, the SECTS and SECTARIES had become the objects of a more purely scientific curiosity. Without a survey and study ofthemas well as of the PAPISTS, the PRELATISTS, the PRESBYTERIANS, and the ORTHODOX INDEPENDENTS, there could, it was argued, be no complete Natural History of Religious Opinion in England in the year 1644. The Presbyterians, for reasons of their own, were earnest for such a survey and study; and they recommended it ironically to the Orthodox Independents in their character of Tolerationists. Not the less did the Presbyterians, with some Prelatists among them, undertake it themselves.- -Coming after these authorities, and availing myself of their inquiries, but with other authorities to aid me, and as much of fresh investigation, and of criticism of my authorities, as I can add, I shall attempt what, even for our own forgetful and self-engrossed time, ought to be a not uninteresting portion of the history of bygone English opinion.