This is a case in which the authorities should be mentioned formally at the outset. They are numerous. They include the Lords and Commons Journals, Lightfoot's Notes of the Assembly, Baillie's Letters, Pamphlets of the timepassim, and even the Registers of the Stationers' Company. Certain particular publications, however (all of the year 1645 or the years immediately following), are of pre-eminent interest, as being attempts at a more or less complete survey of the huge medley or tumult of opinions on religious subjects that had by that time arisen in English society, with some classification of its elements.
The reader will remember Dr. DANIEL FEATLEY, Rector of Lambeth and Acton, the veteran Calvinist who had persisted in attending the Assembly in spite of his disapproval of the Covenant and his adhesion to the theory of a modified Episcopacy, but who had at length (Sept. 30, 1643) been ejected for misdemeanour. His misdemeanour had consisted in maintaining a correspondence with Usher, reflecting on the Assembly and the Parliament, and divulging secrets in the King's interest. For this he had not only been ejected from the Assembly by the Commons, and sequestered from his two livings, but also committed to custody in "the Lord Petre's house in Aldersgate Street," then used by Parliament as a prison for such culprits. To beguile his leisure here, he had occupied himself in revising his notes of a dispute he had held, in Oct. 1642, with a Conventicle of Anabaptists in Southwark, where he had knocked over a certain "Scotchman" and one or two other speakers for the Conventicle. But this revision of his notes of that debate had suggested various extensions and additions; so that, in fact, he had written in prison a complete exposure of Anabaptism. It was ready in January 1644-5, and was published with this title: "The Dippers Dipt; or, The Anabaptists Duck'd and Plung'd over Head and Ears," &c. It is a virulent tractate of about 186 pages, reciting the extravagances and enormities attributed to the German Anabaptists, and trying to involve the English Baptists in the odium of such an original, but containing also notices of the English Baptists themselves, and their varieties and ramifications. It became at once popular, and passed through several editions. [Footnote: Commons Journals, Sept. 30 and Oct 3, 1613; Wood's Athenæ, III. 156et seq.; and Featley's Epistle Dedicatory to his treatise. The copy of the treatise before me at present is one of the sixth edition, published in 1651, six years after the authors death. It contains a portrait of Featley by W. Marshall, and, among other illustrations, a coarsead captandumprint by the same engraver, exhibiting the "dipping" of men and women naked together in a river.]
A well-known personage in London, of humbler pretensions than Featley, was a certain EPHRAIM PAGET (or PAGIT), commonly called "Old Father Ephraim," who had been parson of the church of St. Edmund in Lombard Street since 1601, and might therefore have seen, and been seen by, Shakespeare. Besides other trifles, he had published, in 1635, a book called "Christianographia" or a descriptive enumeration of the various sorts of Christians in the world out of the pale of the Roman Catholic Church. Perhaps because he had thus acquired a fondness for the statistics of religious denominations, it occurred to him to write, by way of sequel, a "Heresiography; or, A Description of the Hereticks and Sectaries of these latter times." It was published in 1645, soon after Featley's book, from which it borrows hints and phrases. There is an Epistle Dedicatory to the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City of London, very senile in its syntax and punctuation, and containing this touching appeal: "I have lived among you almost a jubilee, and seen your great care and provision to keep the city free from infection, in the shutting up the sick and in carrying them to your pest-houses, in setting warders to keep the whole from the sick, in making of fires and perfuming the streets, in resorting to your churches, in pouring out your prayers to Almighty God, with fasting and alms, to be propitious to you. The plague of Heresy is greater, and you are now in more danger than when you buried five thousand a week." Then, after an Epistle to the Reader, signed "Old Ephraim Pagit," there follows the body of the treatise in about 160 pages. The Anabaptists are taken first, and occupy 55 pages; but a great many other sects are subsequently described, some in a few pages, some in a single paragraph. There is an engraved title-page to the volume, containing small caricatures of six of the chief sorts of Sectaries—Anabaptism being represented by one plump naked fellow dipping another, much plumper, who is reluctantly stooping down on all fours. The book, like Featley's, seems to have sold rapidly. In the third edition of it, however, published in 1646, there is a postscript in which the poor old man tells us that it had cost him much trouble. The sectaries among his own parishioners had quarrelled with him on account of it, and refused to pay him his tithes; nay, as he walked in the streets, he was hooted at and reviled, and somebody had actually affirmed "Doctor Featley's devil to be transmigrated into Old Ephraim Paget." This seems to have cut him to the quick, though he avows his sense of inferiority in learning to the great Doctor. In short, we can see Father Ephraim as a good old silly body, of whom people made fun. [Footnote: Wood's Athenæ, III. 210et seq.; and Paget's own treatise.]
Another writer against the Sectaries was the inexhaustible WILLIAMPRYNNE,
That grand scripturient paper-spiller,That endless, needless, margin-filler,So strangely tossed from post to pillar.
There was, indeed, something preternatural in the persistent vitality and industry of this man. Only forty years of age when the Long Parliament released him from his second imprisonment and restored him to society, a ghoul-like creature with a scarred and mutilated face, hiding the loss of his twice-cropped ears under a woollen cowl or nightcap, and mostly sitting alone among his books and papers in his chamber in Lincoln's Inn, taking no regular meals, but occasionally munching bread and refreshing himself with ale, he had at once resumed his polemical habits and mixed himself up as a pamphleteer with all that was going on. As many as thirty fresh publications, to be added to the two-and-twenty or thereabouts already out in his name, had come from his pen between 1640 and 1645, bringing him through about one-fourth part of the series of some 200 books and pamphlets that were to form the long ink-track of his total life. In these recent pamphlets of his he had appeared as a strenuous Parliamentary Presbyterian, an advocate of the Scottish Presbyterianism which was being urged in the Assembly, but with more of Erastianism in his views than might have pleased most of his fellow-Presbyterians. No man more violent against Independency of all sorts, and the idea of Toleration. And so, after various other pamphlets against Independency in general, and this or that Independent in particular, there came from him, in July 1645, [Footnote: Date from my notes from Stationer's Registers.] a quarto of about 50 pages, with this title: "A Fresh Discovery of some Prodigious new Wandering-Blazing-Stars and Firebrands, styling themselves New Lights, firing our Church and State into new Combustions." The pamphlet was dedicated to Parliament; and its purpose was to exhibit all the monstrous things that lay in the bosom of what called itself Independency. Hence "Independency" is used by Prynne as a common name for all the varieties of Sectarians as well as for the Congregationalists proper; and his plan is to shock the public and rouse Parliament to action, by giving a collection of specimens, culled from pamphlets of the day, of the "scurrilous, scandalous, and seditious" views put forth, with impunity hitherto, by some of the "Anabaptistical Independent Sectaries and new-lighted Firebrands," Accordingly his tract contains a jumble of the most wild and extravagant sayings against the Assembly, the Scots, and the Parliament itself, that Prynne could pick out from the contemporary pamphlets of the Anabaptists and other Sectaries.[Footnote: Wood's Athenæ, III. 844et seq.; Aubrey's Lives (for a notice of Prynne's habits); and theFresh Discoveryitself. The edition before me is the second, dated 1646, and swollen by added matter at the end to over 80 pages.]
Much cleverer and more spirited than Featley, old Ephraim Paget, or Prynne, as a describer and opponent of the Sectaries, was our friend, Mr. Thomas Edwards, of theAntapologia(antè, pp. 130-135). That "splendid confutation" of Independency and Tolerationism had so increased Mr. Edwards's fame that the Presbyterians of London had erected a weekly lectureship for him at Christ Church in the heart of the City, that he might "handle these questions and nothing else before all that would come to hear." Thus encouraged, he ranged beyond Independency proper, and employed himself in collecting information respecting the English Sectaries generally; and in about eighteen months, or before the end of 1645, he had ready a treatise (his third in order) entitled "Gangræna: or, a Catalogue and Discovery of many of the Errors, Heresies, Blasphemies, and Pernicious Practices of the Sectaries of this time." This treatise, consisting of more than 60 pages, he dedicated to Parliament, in an Epistle of twelve pages, hinting at the remissness of Parliament in its dealings with the Sectaries up to that time, and reminding it of its duty. There is all Edwards's fluency of language in the pamphlet, and some real literary talent; so that not only was Edwards'sGangrænaa popular Presbyterian book at the time, but it is still valued by bibliographers and antiquarians. As it has come down to us, however, it is not a pamphlet merely, but a concretion of pamphlets. For it was enlarged by the author, in the course of 1646, to eight or nine times its original bulk, by the addition of a Second Part and then a Third Part, containing "New and Farther Discoveries" of the Sectaries, and their opinions and practices. This was because Mr. Edwards had solicited fresh information from all quarters, and it was poured in upon him superabundantly by Presbyterian correspondents. The First Part, as the skimming of the cream by Mr. Edwards himself, is perhaps the richest essentially. The others consist mainly of verifications and additional details, rumours, and anecdotes. Altogether, the Three Parts of Edwards'sGangrænaare a curious Presbyterian repertory of facts and scandals respecting the English Independents and Sectaries in and shortly after the year of Marston Moor. The impression which they leave of Mr. Edwards personally is that he was a fluent, rancorous, indefatigable, inquisitorial, and, on the whole, nasty, kind of Christian. [Footnote: Wood's Fasti, I. 413; Baillie's Letters, II. 180, 193, 201, 215, 251: andGangrænaitself—the copy of which before me consists of the third edition of Parts I. and II. (1646) and the first edition of Part III, (1646) bound in two volumes.]
With Featley, Paget, Prynne, and Edwards, as authorities full of detail, though also full of prejudice on the subject of the English Sects and Sectaries of 1644, we may finally name Baillie. We name him now, however, not on account of his "Letters," but on account of two publications of his dealing expressly with this subject. One of these, published in November 1645, in a quarto of 252 pages, was his "Dissuasive from the Errours of the Time: wherein the Tenets of the Principall Sects, especially of the Independents, are drawn together in one Map, for the most part in the words of their own Authors;" the other, published in December 1646, in about 180 pages quarto, and intended as a Second Part of the "Dissuasive," was entitled "Anabaptism, the True Fountain of Independency, Brownisme, Antinomy, &c." In both publications, but especially in the former, we see Baillie's characteristic merits. He writes, of course, polemically and with strong Presbyterian prejudice; but in clearness of arrangement and statement he is greatly superior to either the senile Paget, or the fluent and credulous Edwards. HisDissuasive, indeed, is, in its way, a really instructive book.[Footnote: Both theDissuasiveand its continuation were published in London (by "Samuel Gellebrand at the Brazen Serpent in Paul's Churchyard"), and dedicated to "The Right Honourable the Earle of Lauderdaile, Lord Metellane"—i.e.to Baillie's Scottish colleague in the Assembly, Lord Maitland, then become Earl of Lauderdale.]
The information from these and other sources may be summed up, from thePresbyterian point of view, under two headings, as follows:—
I. MISCELLANEOUS BLASPHEMIES AND ENTHUSIASMS.—The very air of England, it seemed, was full of such. There had broken loose a spirit of inquiry, a spirit of profanity and scoffing, and a spirit of religious ecstasy and dreaming; and the three spirits together were producing a perfect Babel of strange sayings, fancies, and speculations. From a catalogue of no fewer than 176 miscellaneous "errors, heresies, and blasphemies" collected by Edwards, and which he professes to give as nearly as possible in the very words in which they had been broached by their authors in print, or in public or private discourse, take the following samples:—
"That the Scriptures are a dead letter, and no more to be credited than the writings of men."
"That the holy writings and sayings of Moses and the Prophets, of Christ and his Apostles, and the proper names, persons, and things contained therein, are allegories."
"That the Scriptures of the Old Testament do not concern nor bind Christians" (in which belief, says Edwards, some Sectaries had ceased to read the Old Testament, or to bind it with the New).
"That right Reason is the rule of Faith."
"That God is the author not of those actions alone in and with which sin is, but of the very pravity, ataxy, atomy, irregularity, and sinfulness itself, which is in them."
"That the magistrate may not punish for blasphemies, nor for denying theScriptures, nor For denying that there is a God."
"That the soul dies with the body, and all things shall have an end, butGod only."
"That there is but one Person in the Divine Nature."
"That Jesus Christ is not very God: no otherwise may he be called the Son of God but as he was man."
"That we did look for great matters from one crucified at Jerusalem 1600years ago, but that does us no good; it must be a Christ formed in us:Christ came into the world to live 32 years, and do nothing else that he[Thomas Webb, of London, ætat. 20] knew."
"That the Heathen who never heard of Christ by the Word have the Gospel, for every creature, as the sun, moon, and stars, preach the Gospel to men."
"That Christ shall come and live again upon the earth, and for a thousand years reign visibly as an earthly monarch over all the world."
"That the least truth is of more worth than Jesus Christ himself."
"That the Spirit of God dwells not nor works in any; it is but our conceits and mistakes to think so; 'tis no spirit that works but our own."
"That a man baptized with the Holy Ghost knows all things even as God knows all things; which point is a deep mystery and great ocean, where there is no casting anchor, nor sounding the bottom."
"That, if a man by the Spirit knew himself to be in the state of grace, though he did commit murder or drunkenness, God did see no sin in him."
"That the guilt of Adam's sin is imputed to no man."
"That the moral law is of no use at all to believers."
"That there ought to be no fasting days under the Gospel."
"That the soul of man is mortal as the soul of a beast, and dies with the body."
"That Heaven is empty of the Saints till the resurrection of the dead."
"That there is no resurrection at all of the bodies of men after this life, nor no Heaven nor Hell after this life, nor no Devils."
"That there shall be in the last day a resurrection from the dead of all the brute creatures, all beasts and birds that ever lived upon the earth."
"That many Christians in those days have more knowledge than theApostles."
"That there ought to be in these times no making or building of churches, nor use of church-ordinances; but waiting for a church, being in a readiness upon all occasions to take knowledge of any passenger, of any opinion or tenet whatsoever: the Saints, as pilgrims, do wander as in a temple of smoke, not able to find Religion, and therefore should not plant it by gathering or building a pretended supposed House."
"That, in points of Religion, even in the Articles of Faith and principles of Religion, there's nothing certainly to be believed and built on; only that all men ought to have liberty of conscience and liberty of prophesying."
"That 'tis as lawful to baptize a cat, or a dog, or a chicken, as to baptize the infants of believers."
"That the calling and making of ministers are notjure divino, but a minister comes to be so as a merchant, bookseller, carter, and such like."
"That all settled certain maintenance for ministers of the Gospel is unlawful."
"That all days are alike to Christians, and they are bound no more to the observation of the Lord's day, or first day of the week, than of any other."
"That 'tis lawful for women to preach; and why should they not, having gifts as well as men?" ("And some of them," adds Edwards, "do actually preach, having great resort to them.")
"That there is no need of humane learning, nor of reading authors, for preachers; but all books and learning must go down: it comes from the want of the Spirit that men writ such great volumes."
"That 'tis unlawful to preach at all, sent or not sent, but only thus: a man may preach as a waiting disciple,i.e.Christians may not preach in a way of positive asserting and declaring things, but all they may do is to confer, reason together, and dispute out things."
"That all singing of Psalms is unlawful."
"That the gift of miracles is not ceased in these times."
"That all the earth is the Saints', and there ought to be a community of goods."
"That 'tis unlawful to fight at all, or to kill any man, yea to kill any of the creatures for our use, as a chicken, or on any other occasion." [Footnote:Gangræna, Part I. pp. 15-31.]
From this little enumeration it will be seen that we have not, even in the nineteenth century, advanced so far as perhaps we had thought beyond English notions of the seventeenth. But there must be added a recollection of the scurrilities against the Covenant, the Assembly as a body, its chief Presbyterian members, and the whole Scottish nation and its agents. These had not reached their height at the time with which we are at present concerned (Aug. 1644); so that the richest specimens of them have to be postponed. But already there were popular jokes about "Jack Presbyter" the "black coats" of the Assembly, and their four shillings a day each for doing what nobody wanted; and already a very rude phrase was in circulation, expressing the growing feeling among the English Independents and Sectaries that England might have managed her Reformation better without the aid of the Scots and their Covenant. Had England come to such a pass, it was asked, that it was necessary to set up a Synod in her, to be "guided by the Holy Ghost sent in a cloak-bag from Scotland"? The author of this profanity, according to Prynne, was a pamphleteer named Henry Robinson. It was, in fact, an old joke, originally applied to one of the Councils of the Catholic Church; and Robinson had stolen it. [Footnote: Prynne'sFresh Discovery, p.27 and p.9; andGangræna, Part I. p.32]
II. RECOGNISED SECTS AND THEIR LEADERS.—In the general welter or anarchy of opinion there were, of course, vortices round particular centres, forming sects that either had, or might receive, definite names. Edwards, when systematizing his chaos of miscellaneous errors and blasphemies, apportions them among sixteen recognisable sorts of Sectaries; but old Ephraim Paget, who had preceded Edwards had been much more hazy. By jumbling the English Sectaries with all he could recollect of the German Sectaries of the Reformation and all he could hear of the Sects of New England, he had made his list of Sects and subdivisions of Sects mount up to two or three scores. Using Edwards and old Ephraim, with hints from Featley, Prynne, and Baillie, but trying to ascertain the facts for ourselves, we venture on the following synoptical view of English Sects and Sectaries in 1644-5:—
BAPTISTS, OR ANABAPTISTS:—These were by far the most numerous of the Sectaries. Their enemies (Featley, Paget, Edwards, Baillie, &c.) were fond of tracing them to the anarchical German Anabaptists of the Reformation; but they themselves claimed a higher origin. They maintained, as Baptists do still, that in the primitive or Apostolic Church the only baptism practised or heard of was that of adult believers, and that the form of the rite for such was immersion in water; and they maintained farther that the Baptism of Infants was one of those corruptions of Christianity against which there had been a continued protest by pure and forward spirits in different countries, in ages prior to Luther's Reformation, including some of the English Wycliffites, although the protest may have been repeated in a louder manner, and with wild admixtures, by the German Anabaptists who gave Luther so much trouble. Without going back, however, upon the Wycliffites, or even on the Anabaptists that were scattered through England in the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth, one may date the Baptists as we have now to do with them from the reign of James.——The first London congregation ofGeneral Baptists, or Baptists who favoured an Arminian theology, had been formed, as we have seen (Vol. II. p. 544), in 1611 out of the wrecks of John Smyth's English congregation of Amsterdam or Leyden, brought back into their native land by Smyth's successor Thomas Helwisse, assisted by John Murton. Although there are traces of this congregation for several years after that date, it seems to have melted away, or to have been crushed into extinction by the persecution of its members individually; so that the Baptists of whom we hear as existing in London, or dispersed through England, after the opening of the Long Parliament, appear to have been rather of the kind known asParticular Baptists, holding a Calvinistic theology, and generated out of the Independent congregations that had been established in London and elsewhere after Helwisse's and on different principles (Vol. II. pp. 544 and 585). In some of these congregations, including that taught by a certain very popular Samuel Howe, called "Cobbler Howe" from his trade, who died in prison and excommunicated some time before 1640, Pædobaptism appears to have become an open question, on which the members agreed to differ among themselves. On the whole, however, the tendency was to the secession of Antipædobaptists from congregations of ordinary Independents, and to the formation of the seceders into distinct societies. Thus we hear of a Baptist congregation in Wapping formed in 1633 by a John Spilsbury, with whom were afterwards associated William Kiffin and Thomas Wilson; of another formed in Crutched Friars in 1639 by Mr. Green, Paul Hobson, and Captain Spencer; and of a third, formed in Fleet Street, in 1640, by the afterwards famous Praise-God Barebone: these three congregations being all detachments from Henry Jacob's original Independent congregation of 1616 during the ministries of his successors, Lathorp and Henry Jessey. In spite of much persecution, continued even after the Long Parliament met, the Baptists of these congregations propagated their opinions with such zeal that by 1644 the sect had attained considerably larger dimensions. In that year they counted seven leading congregations in London, and forty-seven in the rest of England; besides which they had many adherents in the Army. Although all sorts of impieties were attributed to them on hearsay, they differed in reality from the Independents mainly on the one subject of Baptism. They objected to the baptism of infants, and they thought immersion, or dipping under water, the proper mode of baptism: except in these points, and what they might involve, they were substantially at one with the Congregationalists, This they made clear by the publication, in 1644, of a Confession of their Faith in 52 Articles—a document which, by its orthodoxy in all essential matters, seems to have shamed the more candid of their opponents. Even Featley was struck by it, and called it "a little ratsbane in a great quantity of sugar," and became somewhat more civil in consequence. It was signed for the seven Baptist congregations of London by these seven couples of persons—Thomas Gunn and John Mabbit; John Spilsbury and Samuel Richardson; Paul Hobson and Thomas Goare; Benjamin Cox and Thomas Kilcop; Thomas Munden and George Tipping; William Kiffin and Thomas Patience; Hanserd Knollys (Vol. II. 557 and 586) and Thomas Holmes. These fourteen, accordingly, with Praise- God Barebone, were in 1644 the Baptist leaders or chief Baptist preachers in London. We hear, however, of other Baptist preachers and pamphleteers —John Tombes, B.D. (accounted the most learned champion of the sect, and its intellectual head), Francis Cornwall, M.A., Henry Jessey, M.A. (a convert to baptism at last), William Dell, M.A., Henry Denne, Edward Barber, Vavasour Powell, John Sims, Andrew Wyke, Christopher Blackwood, Samuel Oates, &c. Several of these leading Baptists—such as Tombes, Cornwall, Jessey, Cox, and Denne—were University men, who had taken orders regularly; one or two, such as Patience and Knollys, had been preachers in New England; but some were laymen who had recently assumed the preaching office, or been called to it by congregations, on account of their natural gifts. The Presbyterians laid great stress on the illiteracy of some of the Baptist preachers and their mean origin. Barebone was a leather-seller in Fleet Street; and, according to Edwards or his informants, Paul Hobson was a tailor from Buckinghamshire, who had become a captain in the Parliamentary Army; Kiffin had been servant to a brewer; Oates was a young weaver; and so on. The information may be correct in some cases, but is to be received with general caution; as also Edwards's stories of the extravagant practices of the Baptists in their conventicles and at their river-dippings. Any story of the kind was welcome to Edwards, especially if it made a scandal out of some dipping of women-converts by a Baptist preacher. Baillie, who took more trouble in sifting his information, and who distinctly allows that the Anabaptists, like other people, ought to have the benefit of the principle "Let no error be charged upon any man which he truly disclaims," and that the errors of some of the sect ought not to be charged upon all, yet maintains that the Confession of the seven Baptist Churches of London was but an imperfect and ambiguous declaration of the opinions of the English Baptists. He attributes to them collectively the following tenets, in addition to those of mere Antipædobaptism and rigid Separatism:—"They put all church-power in the hand of the people;" "They give the power of preaching and celebrating the sacraments to any of their gifted members, out of all office;" "All churches must be demolished: they are glad of so large and public a preaching place as they can purchase, but of a steeple-house they must not hear;" "All tithes and all set stipends are unlawful; their preachers must work with their own hands, and may not go in black clothes." According to Baillie, also, the Baptists outwent even the Brownists in the power in church matters they gave to women. There were many women-preachers among them; of whom a Mrs. Attaway, "the mistress of all the she-preachers in Coleman Street," was the chief. [Footnote: Crosby'sHistory of the English Baptists(1738), Vol. I. pp. 215-382; Ivimey'sBaptists, I. 113et seq.; Featley'sDippers Dipt, andAnimadversions on the Anabaptists' Confession;Gangræna passim; Baillie'sDissuasive, Part II. p. 47et seq.; Neal's Puritans, III. 147-152, with Toulmin's Supplement to that Vol., 517-530. The Confession of the Baptists is given in Neal; Appendix to the whole work; also in Crosby, Appendix to Vol. I]
OLD BROWNISTS:—By this name may be called certain adherents of that vehement Independency, more extreme than mere Congregationalism, which had been propagated in Elizabeth's reign by Robert Brown himself. Brown's writings, we learn from Baillie, had totally disappeared in England; so that the so-calledBrownistscan hardly have been his direct disciples, but must have been persons who had arrived at some of his opinions over again for themselves. Briefly, without being Baptists, they were more violent Separatists, more fierce in their rejection of the discipline, worship, and ordination of the Church of England than the Independents proper. Henry Burton, minister of Friday Street church, now between fifty and sixty years of age, was one of the chief of them, and hisProtestation Protested(Vol. II. 591-2) may be regarded as a manifesto of their views. Even the Independents of the Assembly disowned these views. Mr. Nye had said of the book that "there was in that book gross Brownism which he nor his brethren no way agreed with him in;" and Edwards had heard stories of queer goings-on in Mr. Burton's church, and his quarrel with "a butcher and some others of his church" about prophesying. Among the Brownists, besides Burton, Edwards names prominently "Katherine Chidley, an old Brownist, and her son, a young Brownist, a pragmatical fellow," who preached in London, and occasionally went on circuit into the country. Edwards characterizes Mrs. Chidley as "a brazen-faced audacious old woman;" but we know the motive. He had not forgotten the thrashing in print he had received from Mrs. Chidley in 1641 (Vol. II. 595). [Footnote: Paget'sHeresiography, pp. 55-82 (a great deal about the Brownists; but with next to no real information); Edwards'sGangræna, Part I. pp. 62-64 and Part III. 242-248 (gossip about Burton); and Part III. 170, 171 (about Chidley); Baillie's Letters, II. 184 and 192; Hanbury's Historical Memorials, II. 108et seq.]
ANTINOMIANS:—The origin of this heresy is attributed to Luther contemporary and fellow townsman, John Agricola, of Eisleben in Saxony (1492-1566); but the Antinomians of New England, and their chief Mrs. Hutchinson, had recently been more heard of. The story of poor Mrs. Hutchinson, the chief of these New England Antinomians, has already been told by us (Vol. II.371-7), as far as to the beginning of 1643, when we left her, a widow with a family of children, including a married daughter and that daughter's husband, beyond the bounds of New England altogether, and seeking rest for her wearied mind, and a home for her little ones, in the Dutch plantations somewhere near what is now New York. The sad end has now to be told. The Indians and the Dutch of those parts were then at feud; and in September 1643, in an inroad of the Indians into the plantation where Mrs. Hutchinson was, she and all her family were murdered, with the exception of a little daughter eight years of age, who was carried into captivity among the Indians, and not recovered till four years afterwards. The news of this tragic end of Mrs. Hutchinson had been brought across the Atlantic, and had added to the interest of pious horror with which her previous career of heresy in Massachusetts had been heard of by the orthodox in England. Mrs. Hutchinson and her Antinomianism, in fact, were already the subjects of a dreadful popular myth. Here, for example, is old Father Ephraim's account of the New England Antinomians, as he had compiled it from information received direct from America:—"Some persons among those that went hence to New England being freighted with many loose and unsound opinions, which they durst not here, they there began to vent them … working first upon women, traducing godly ministers to be and preach under Covenant of Works, dropping their baits by little and little and angling yet further when they saw them take, and fathering their opinions on those of the best quality in the country; and, by means of Mrs. Hutchinson's double weekly lecture at Boston, under pretence of repeating Mr. Cotton's sermons, these opinions were quickly dispersed before authority was aware." But at length, when the infant church in America had been thus "almost ruinated," the judgments of God overtook the prime fomenters of the heresy in a notorious manner. "As, first, Mistress Hutchinson, the Generalissimo, the high-priestess of the new religion, was delivered at one time of 30 monstrous births, or thereabouts, much about the number of her monstrous opinions; some were bigger, some less, none of them having human shape, but shaped like her opinions: Mistress Dyer also, another of the same crew, was delivered of a large—" [here follows a minute description of a feminine monster that would have made the fortune of any travelling showman, so complexly-horrible was its physiology]. Thus God punished those monstrous "wretches," But the civil authorities of New England, as we know, had punished them too. "God put it into the hearts of the civil magistrates to convent the chief leaders of them; and, after fruitless admonitions given, they proceeded to sentence: some they disfranchised, others they excommunicated, and some they banished. A seditious minister, one Mr. Wheelwright, was one, and Mrs. Hutchinson another; who, going to plant herself on an island, called Rhode Island, under the Dutch, where they could not agree, but were miserably divided into sundry sects, removed from thence to an island calledHell- gate[Hebgate, according to Cotton Mather], where the Indians set upon her, and slew her and her daughter, and her daughter's husband, children, and family."—Notwithstanding this dreadful fate of the Antinomians in America, the heresy had broken out in England. Nothing was publicly said of the younger Sir Henry Vane in connexion with it; though, on his return from his Massachusetts governorship, he may have brought back in his speculative head some of the Hutchinsonian ideas. According to Paget, the first Antinomian in London had been "one Master John Eaton," who had been a scholar of his own (i.e.at Trinity College, Oxford), and was afterwards curate of a parish near Aldgate. In fact, as we learn from Wood, he became a minister in Suffolk, was "accounted by all the neighbouring ministers a grand Antinomian," and suffered trouble accordingly. But this Eaton had died in 1641, aged about 66, and leaving but an Antinomian book or two, including "The Honeycomb of Free Justification;" and the leading Antinomians were new men. One of them was Mr. John Saltmarsh, a Cambridge graduate, and minister in Kent, afterwards well-known as an, army-preacher and pamphleteer; another was "one Randall who preaches about Spittal Yard."—The nature of the Antinomian doctrines, "opening such a fair and easy way to heaven," made them very popular, it appears, in London and elsewhere. Many ran after their preachers, "crowding the churches and filling the doors and windows," for "Oh, it pleaseth people well," adds old Father Ephraim, "to have heaven and their lusts too." Notwithstanding this imputation, and illustrative scandals in Edwards, it really appears that Antinomianism took itself out in high mystic preaching of justification by faith, the doctrine of assurance, and the privileges of saintship. The wild phrases that came in such preaching were the chief offence. [Footnote: Cotton Mather'sMagnalia, Book VII. p. 19; Palfrey's Hist. of New England, I. 609, Note; Paget, 105-118; Wood's Athenæ, III. 21 (for more about Eaton);Gangrænain several places, for references to Saltmarsh and Randall. Baillie in hisDissuasive(pp. 57-64) has much the same story as Paget about Mrs. Hutchinson and the New England Antinomians, and attributes the rise of that heresy to the evil influence of Independency.—The idiotic and disgusting myth of the monstrousaccouchementsof the two Antinomian women seems to have found great favour with the orthodox: and it figures in many pious books of the time and afterwards. It seems actually to have originated in America, and to have been widely believed there, while Mrs. Hutchinson was alive; for Cotton Mather, repeating it, with the most abject good faith, and in great detail, as late as 1702 (Magnalia, VII. 20), quotes a letter of Mr. Thomas Hooker, to the effect that at the very time of one of the diabolicaccouchements, Mrs. Dyer's (Oct. 17, 1637), the house in which her and his wife were sitting was violently shaken, as if by an earthquake, for the space of seven or eight minutes. Mather also avers that there was an investigation of the affair by the magistrates at the time.]
FAMILISTS:—Probably because there had been a continental sect of this name in the sixteenth century, founded by a David George of Delft, Edwards includesFamilistsamong his leading English sorts of Sectaries, and Paget devotes ten pages to them. Paget, however, admits that they were "so close and cunning that ye shall hardly ever find them out." If there really was such an English sect, their main principle probably was that every society of Christians should be a kind of family- party, jolly within itself in confidential love-feasts and exchanges of sentiment, and letting the general world and its creeds roar around unquestioned and unheeded. Baillie, however, in an incidental notice of Familism in the Second Part of hisDissuasive, gives a somewhat different account. It was, according to him, a wild development of Anabaptism, of which not a few once "counted zealous and gracious" were suspected—including "a great man, a peer of the land." It had a public representative in Mr. Randall, who had "for some years preached peaceably in the Spital" (already mentioned among the Antinomians), and of whom Baillie had heard that he entertained such ideas as these, though reserving them probably as esoteric mysteries for the highest class of the Family of Love—"that all the resurrection and glory which Scripture promises is past already, and no other coming of Christ to judgment, or life eternal, is to be expected than what presently in this earth the saints do enjoy; that the most clear historic passages of Scripture are mere allegories; that in all things, Angels, Devils, Men, Women, there is but one spirit and life, which absolutely and essentially is God; that nothing is everlasting but the life and essence of God which now is in all creatures;" &c. We should now call this a kind of Pantheism; but probably it was coupled with that disposition to privacy, and indifference to creeds and controversies, which has been mentioned as the peculiarity of Familism. Even theFamilists, however, it seems, had their subdivisions. One John Hetherington, a box-maker, had been a kind of Familist, but had recanted. [Footnote: Paget, 92 102, and 137,138;Gangræna, Part I. 13; Baillie'sDissuasivePart II. pp. 99-104]
MILLENARIES OR CHILIASTS:—"An Heresy," says old Father Ephraim, "frequent at this time. This sect look for a temporary [temporal] kingdom of Christ, that must begin presently and last 1,000 years. Of this opinion are many of our Apocalyptical men, that study more future events than their present only." This is substantially all we have from Paget. In fact, however, the Chiliasts or Millenarians were hardly a mere sect. The expectation of a Millennium near at hand was very prevalent, or was becoming very prevalent, among the English Divines of the Assembly itself. "Many of the Divines here," wrote Baillie, September 5, 1645, "not only Independents, but others, such as Twisse, Marshall, Palmer, and many more, are express Chiliasts." In hisDissuasive, however, where he devotes an entire chapter to this heresy of Chiliasm, he attributes the grosser form of the heresy chiefly to the Independents. A kind of Chiliasm or Millenarianism, he says, had been held by some former English Divines, including Joseph Meade; but it had been reserved for two Independents—"Mr. Archer and his colleague at Arnheim, T. G." (i.e.Thomas Goodwin)—to invent new dreams on the subject; and these had recently been adopted by Mr. Burroughs. The purport of their doctrine was that in the year 1650, or, at the furthest, 1695, Christ was to reappear in human form at Jerusalem, destroy the existing fabric of things in a conflagration, collect the scattered Jews, raise martyrs and saints from their graves, and begin his glorious reign of a thousand years. [Footnote: Paget, 136, 137; Baillie's Letters, II. 313, andDissuasive, 224-252.]
SEEKERS:—"Many have wrangled so long about the Church that at last they have quite lost it, and go under the name ofExpectersandSeekers, and do deny that there is any Church, or any true minister, or any ordinances; some of them affirm the Church to be in the wilderness, and they are seeking for it there; others say that it is in the smoke of the Temple, and that they are groping for it there—where I leave them praying to God."—So far Old Ephraim; and what he says, combined with one of Edwards's miscellaneous blasphemies already quoted, enables us to fancy theSeekers. They were people, it seems, who had arrived at the conclusion that the Supernatural had never yet been featured forth to man in any propositions or symbols that could be accepted as adequate, and who were waiting, therefore, for a possible "Church of the Future;" content, meanwhile, to dwell in a Temple of smoke, or (for there is the alternative figure) to see visions of the Future Church in the smoke of the present Temple.—"Mr. Erbury, that lived in Wales," (but had come to London, and then settled in Ely, whence he made excursions,) and "one Walwyn, a dangerous man, a strong head," who laboured somewhere else, are mentioned by Edwards as men avowing themselves in this predicament. Baillie mentions also one Laurence Clarkson, who had passed from Anabaptism to Seekerism, and he speaks of Mrs. Attaway, the Baptist woman-preacher, and Mr. Saltmarsh, the Antinomian, as tending the same way.——But the chief of theSeekers, perhaps the original founder of the Sect, and certainly the bravest exponent of their principles, was a person with whom we are already acquainted. "One Mr. Williams," writes Baillie, June 7, 1644, "has drawn a great number after him to a singular Independency, denying any true Church in the world, and will have every man to serve God by himself alone, without any church at all. This man has made a great and bitter schism lately among the Independents." Again, on the 23rd of July, Baillie refers to the same person as "my good acquaintance Mr. Roger Williams, who says there is no church, no sacraments, no pastors, no church-officers or ordinance, in the world, nor has been since a few years after the Apostles." In short, the arch- representative of this new religion of Seekerism on both sides of the Atlantic was no other than our friend Roger Williams, the Tolerationist (Vol. II. 560-3, andantè, pp. 113-120). Through the variations of this man's external adventures we have seen the equally singular series of variations of his mental condition. First an intense Separatist, or Independent of the most resolute type, but conjoining with this Separatism a passion for the most absolute liberty of conscience and the entire dissociation of civil power from matters of religion, then a Baptist and excommunicated on that account by his former friends in America, he had latterly, in his solitude at Providence, outgone Baptism or any known form of Independency, and, still retaining his doctrine of the most absolute liberty of conscience, had worked himself into that state of dissatisfaction with all visible church-forms, and of yearning quest after unattainable truth, for which the nameSeekerismwas invented by himself or others. Though he did not propose that preaching should be abandoned, he had gradually settled in a notion which he thus expresses: "In the poor small span of my life, I desired to have been a diligent and constant observer, and have been myself many ways engaged, in city, in country, in court, in schools, in universities, in churches, in Old and New England, and yet cannot, in the holy presence of God, bring in the result of a satisfying discovery that either the begetting ministry of the apostles or messengers to the nations, or the feeding and nourishing ministry of pastors and teachers, according to the first institution of the Lord Jesus, are yet restored or extant." It was while he was in this stage of his mental history that Williams came over on his flying visit to England in the matter of the new charter for the Rhode Island plantations. Some whiff of his strange opinions may have preceded him; but it must have been mainly by his intercourse with leading Londoners during his stay in England, which extended over more than a year (June 1643—Sept. 1644), that he diffused the interest in himself and his Seekerism which we certainly find existing in 1644. He can have been no stranger to the chief Divines of the Westminster Assembly. Baillie, we see, was on speaking terms with him; and it is curious to note in Baillie's and other references to him the same vein of personal liking for the man, running through amazement at his heresy, which characterized the criticisms of him by his New England opponents and excommunicants. Incidents of his visit, not less interesting now, were two publications of his in London, his "Key into the Language of America," published in 1643, and hisBloody Tenent of Persecution, published in 1644.—At least the name of the sect of "The Seekers," I may add, had struck Cromwell himself, and had some fascination for him, whether on its own account, or from his acquaintance with Williams. "Your sister Claypole," he wrote to his daughter Mrs. Ireton, some two years after our present date (Oct. 25,1646), "is, I trust in mercy, exercised with some perplexed thoughts. She sees her own vanity and carnal mind, bewailing it: she seeks after (as I hope also) what will satisfy. And thus to be a Seeker is to be of the best sect next after a Finder; and such an one shall every faithful humble Seeker be in the end. Happy Seeker, happy Finder!" [Footnote: Paget, 150;Gangræna, Part I. p. 24, and p. 38;Dissuasive, Part II. pp. 96, 97 and Notes; Baillie's Letters, II. 191-2 and 212; Gammell'sLife of Roger Williams(Boston, 1846), and Memoir of Williams, by Edward B. Underhill, prefixed to the republication of William'sBloody Tenent of Persecution, by the "Hanserd Knollys Society" (1848); Carlyle's Cromwell, I. 212.]
DIVORCERS:—"These I termDivorcers" says Old Ephraim, "that would be quit of their wives for slight occasions;" and he goes on to speak of MILTON as the representative of the sect. Featley had previously mentioned Milton's Divorce Tract as one of the proofs of the tendency of the age to Antinomianism, Familism, and general anarchy; and Edwards and Baillie followed in the same strain. Milton's Doctrine of Divorce, it thus appears, had attracted attention, and had perhaps gained some following. Among the six caricatures of notable sects on the title-page of Paget'sHeresiographyis one of "THE DIVORCER"—i.e.a man, in an admonishing attitude, and without his hat, dismissing or pushing away his wife, who has her hat on, as if ready for a journey, and is putting her handkerchief to her eyes. We shall have more to say of Milton in this connexion. [Footnote: Paget, pp. 150, 151, p. 87, and Epistle Dedicatory, p. 4; Fentley'sDippers Dipt, Epistle Dedicatory, p. 3; Edward'sGangræna, Part I. p. 29.]
ANTI-SABBATARIANS, AND TRASKITES:—These sects, though distinct, may be named together. TheAnti-Sabbatarianswere those who denied the obligation of any Lord's Day or Sabbath: they were pretty numerous, but were distributed through the other sects. TheTraskites, on the other hand, denied the obligation of the Christian Sunday or Lord's Day, but maintained the perpetual obligation of the Jewish Sabbath on the seventh day of the week. They were the followers of one John Traske, a poor eccentric who had been well known to Paget, but was now dead, and remembered only for his heresy, for which he had been whipt, pilloried, and imprisoned, about 1618. His opinions had been revived more ably in certain treatises and discourses, published in 1628 and 1632, by Theophilus Brabourne, a Puritan minister in Norfolk. Both Brabourne and Traske had been obliged to recant their opinions and return to orthodoxy; and indeed Traske had done so in a Tract written against himself, though he again relapsed. Nevertheless the heresy had taken root, and one heard in 1644 of Traskites or Sabbatarians dispersed through England. The sect is continued still in the so-called "Seventh Day Baptists." [Footnote: Paget, pp. 138-141; with more accurate particulars in Cox'sLiterature of the Sabbath Question, I. 153-5, 157-8, and 162.]
SOUL-SLEEPERS OR MORTALISTS:—Such was the odd name given to a sect, or supposed sect, represented by the anonymous author of a, Tract calledMan's Mortality. The Tract is now very scarce, if not utterly forgotten; but, as it made a great stir at the time, and as we shall hear of it and its author rather particularly again in connexion with Milton's life, I may here give some account of it from a copy which I have managed to see. The title in full is as follows: "Man's Mortallitie: or a Treatise wherein 'tis proved, both Theologically and Phylosophically, that whole Man (as a rationall creature) is a compound wholy mortall, contrary to that common distinction of Soule and Body; and that the present going of the Soule into Heaven or Hell is a meer fiction; and that at the Resurrection is the beginning of our immortallity, and then actual Condemnation and Salvation, and not before: With all doubtes and objections answered and resolved both by Scripture and Reason; discovering the multitude of Blasphemies and Absurdities that arise from the fancie of the Soule: Also divers other mysteries, as of Heaven, Hell, Christ's humane residence, the Extent of the Resurrection, the New Creation, &c.: opened and presented to the tryall of better judgments, By R. O. Amsterdam: Printed by John Canne, Anno Dom. 1643." In the British Museum copy, which is the one I have seen, the word "Amsterdam" is erased by the collector's pen, and "London" substituted, with the date "Jan. 19" added; whence I infer that, whatever Canne at Amsterdam had to do with the printing of the tract, it was virtually a London publication, and out in January, 1643-4. On the title-page is quoted the text Ecclesiastes iii. 19, thus—"That which befalleth the sonnes of men befalleth Beasts; even one thing befalleth them all: as the one dyeth so dyeth the other; yea they have all one breath, so that man hath no preheminence above a Beast; for all is vanity." This gives so far the key-note to the 57 pages of matter of the Tract itself. It is a queer mixture of a sort of physiological reasoning, such as we should now call Materialism, with a mystical metaphysics, and with odd whimsies of the author's own—such as that Christ had ascended into the Sun. The leading tenet, however, is that the notion of a soul, or supernatural and immortal essence, in man, distinct from his bodily organism, is a sheer delusion, contradicted both by Scripture and correct physiological thinking, and that from this notion have arisen all kinds of superstitions and practical mischiefs. "The most grand and blasphemous heresies that are in the world, the mystery of iniquity and the kingdom of Antichrist, depend upon it." So says the Tract itself; and in the first of two pieces of verse prefixed to it by an admirer, and entitled "To His worthy Friend the Author, upon his Booke," there occur these lines:—
"The hell-hatched doctrine of th' immortal soulDiscovered makes the hungry Furies howl,And teare their snakey haire, with grief appaledTo see their error-leading doctrine quailed,Hell undermined and Purgatory blownUp in the air."
There are Latin quotations in the Tract; and some of the physiological arguments by which the author seeks to refute the opinion of "the Soulites," as he calls them, are rather nauseous. On the whole, were it not for the appended concession of a Resurrection, or New Creation, and an Immortality somehow to ensue thence, the doctrine of the Tract might be described as out-and-out Materialism. Possibly, in spite of the concession, this is what the author meant to drive at. Among some of his followers, however, a milder version of his doctrine seems to have been in favour, not quite denying the existence of a soul, but asserting that the soul goes into sleep or temporary extinction at death, to be re- awakened at the Resurrection. [Footnote: Paget, pp. 148, 149;Gangræna, Part I. pp. 22, 23; Baillie'sDissuasive, Part II. 99 and 121; but mainly the Tract cited.]
ARIANS, SOCINIANS, AND OTHER ANTI-TRINITARIANS:—Since 1614, when Legate and Wightman had been burnt for Arianism (Vol. I. p. 46), this and other forms of the Anti-Trinitarian heresy had been little heard of in England. But in the ferment of the Civil War they were reappearing. A Thomas Webb, a young fellow of twenty years of age, had been shocking people in London and in country-places by awful expressions against the Trinity; one Clarke had been, doing the same; one Paul Best had been circulating manuscripts in which there were "most horrid blasphemies of the Trinity, of Christ, and of the Holy Ghost;" and John Biddle, of Gloucester, master of the school there, and of whom, from his career at Oxford, high hopes had been formed, had begun to be "free of his discourses in a Socinian direction." Baillie adds Mr. Samuel Richardson, one of the Baptist ministers of London, to the number of those whose Trinitarianism was questionable, and charges the Baptists generally with laxity on that point. In short, there was an alarm of Arianism, and other forms of Anti- Trinitarianism, as again abroad in England. Mr. Nye, the Independent, had been heard to say that "to his knowledge the denying of the Divinity of Christ was a growing opinion, and that there was a company of them met about Coleman Street, a Welshman being their chief, who held this opinion." Coleman Street appears, indeed, to have been a very hotbed of heresy. For here it was that JOHN GOODWIN (Vol. II. 582-4, andantè, pp. 120-122) had his congregation. He had not revealed himself fully; but the public had had a taste of him in recent pamphlets. Baillie, on rumour, reports him as a Socinian; and Edwards, who came into conflict with him in due time, and devotes many consecutive pages of Billingsgate to him in the Second Part of hisGangræna, tells us that he held "many wicked opinions," being "an Hermaphrodite and a compound of an Arminian, Socinian, Libertine, Anabaptist, & c." From the same authority we learn that the Presbyterians had nicknamed him "the great Red Dragon of Coleman Street." What he really was we have already seen in part for ourselves, and shall yet see more fully.[Footnote: Paget, 132—136;Gangræna, Part I. pp. 21, 22, 26, 33, Part II 19- 39, and Part III. 111 and 87; Baillie'sDissuasive, Part II. p. 98; also Wood's Athenæ, III. 593 (for Biddle); Baillie's Letters, II. 192, and Jackson'sLife of John Goodwin(1822), pp. 3 and 14.]
ANTI-SCRIPTURISTS:—"One wicked sect," says Old Ephraim, "denieth the Scriptures both of the Old and New Testament, and account them as things of nought; yea, as I am credibly informed, in public congregations they vent these their damnable opinions." He gives no names; but Edwards mentions "one Marshal, a bricklayer, a young man, living at Hackney," who made a mock of the Scriptures in his harangues, and asserted that he himself "knew the mystery of God in Christ better than St. Paul." A companion of this Marshal's told the people that "the Scripture was their golden calf and they danced round it." A Priscilla Miles had been speaking very shockingly of the Scriptures at Norwich. But the most noted Anti-Scripturist seems to have been a Clement Wrighter, a Worcester man, living in London, of whom Edwards gives this terrible character— "Sometimes a professor of religion and judged to have been godly, who is now an arch-heretic and fearful apostate, an old wolf, and a subtle man, who goes about corrupting, and venting his errors; he is often in Westminster Hall and on the Exchange; he comes into public meetings of the Sectaries upon occasions of meeting to draw up petitions for the Parliament or other businesses. This man about seven or eight years ago (i.e.about 1638) fell off from the communion of our churches to Independency and Brownism; from that he fell to Anabaptism and Arminianism, and to Mortalism, holding the soul mortal (he is judged to be the author, or at least to have had a great hand in the Book of theMortality of the Soul). After that he fell to be Seeker, and is now an Anti-Scripturist, a Questionist and Sceptick, and I fear an Atheist." Specimens of his sayings about the Bible are given; and altogether one has to fancy Wrighter as an oldish man, sneaking about in public places in London on soft-soled shoes, and with bundles of papers under his arm. I have seen a little thing printed by him in Feb. 1615-6, under the title of "The Sad Case of Clement Writer," in which he complains of injustice, to the extent of 1,500_l_., done him by the late Lord Keeper Coventry and other judges in some suit that had lasted for twelve years. [Footnote: Paget, 149;Gangræna, Part I. pp. 26- -28; Baillie'sDissuasive, Part II. 121.]
SCEPTICS, OR QUESTIONISTS:—They were those who, according to Edwards, "questioned everything in matters of religion, holding nothing positively nor certainly, saving the doctrine of pretended liberty of conscience for all, and liberty of prophesying." Many besides Wrighter had reached this stage through their anti-Scripturism, and were free-thinkers of the cold or merely rational order, distinct from the devout and enthusiastic Seekers. [Footnote:Gangræna, Part I. p. 13.]
ATHEISTS:—Although Edwards charitably hints his fear that Mr. Wrighter had at last sunk into this extreme category, it is remarkable that neither he nor Paget ventures to reckonAtheistsamong the existing Sects. Probably, therefore, there was no body of persons to whom, with any pretext of plausibility, the name could be applied. But we are advised of individuals here and there whom their neighbours suspected of Atheism; and, if Edwards is to be believed, there was alive a certain John Boggis, an apprentice to an apothecary in London, who, though at present only a young Anabaptist preacher, and disciple of Captain Hobson, was to go within a year or two to such unheard-of lengths about Great Yarmouth that even Wrighter must have disowned him. [Footnote: Ibid. Part II. 133, 134; and Baillie'sDissuasive, Part II. 99.]
Such were the English Sects and Sectaries that had begun to be talked of in 1644. Not that they were bounded off strictly from each other in divisions according with their names. On the contrary, they shaded off into each other; and there were mixtures and combinations of some of them. Moreover, as the chief of them held by the Congregationalist principle in some form, and hoped to flourish by taking advantage of that principle, it was not unusual for Presbyterian writers to include these along with the Congregationalists proper in the one lax designation of Independents. At all events, the Sects hung on to the Independents through that principle of Toleration or Liberty of Conscience which the Independents had propounded, at first mildly, but with a tendency to less and less of limitation. All the Sects, less or more, were TOLERATIONISTS; the heresy of heresies in which they all agreed with each other, and with the Independents, was LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE.
The foregoing survey of English Sects and Sectaries and of the state of the Toleration Controversy in 1644 has been our employment, the reader must be reminded, during the fortnight's vacation of the Westminster Assembly from July 23 to August 7 in that year. Something of the same kind was the vacation-employment of the members of that Assembly too, and especially of the Presbyterian majority. For they had been driven out of their previous calculations by the battle of Marston Moor (July 2). That battle had been won mainly by Cromwell, the head of the Army- Independents, and it went to the credit of Independency. All the more necessary was it for the Presbyterians of the Assembly to bethink themselves of indirect means of argument against the Independents. The means were not far to seek. Let this horrible Hydra of Sects, all bred out of Independency, be dragged into light; and would not respectable Independency itself stand aghast at her offspring? The wordTolerationhad been mumbled cautiously within the Assembly, and had made itself heard with some larger liking in Parliament, and still greater applause among the hasty thousands of the Parliamentary soldiers and the populace! Let it be shown what this monstrous notion really meant, what herds of strange creatures and shoals even of vermin it would permit in England; and would England ratify the monstrosity, or the Independency consociated with it, even for twenty Cromwells, or ten Marston Moors? So, in the fort-night's vacation, reasoned Messrs. Marshall, Lightfoot, Calamy, Palmer, Vines, Spurstow, Newcomen, Herle, Burges, and other English Presbyterians, incited rather than repressed by the Scottish anxiety of Rutherford, Gillespie, Baillie, and (I am afraid) Henderson.
Accordingly, when the Assembly resumed its sittings (Wednesday, Aug. 7, 1644), its first work was to fall passionately on the Sects and the arch- heresy of Toleration. "The first day of our sitting, after our vacance," says Baillie, "a number of complaints were given in against the Anabaptists' and Antinomians' huge increase and insolencies intolerable. Notwithstanding Mr. Nye's and others' opposition, it was carried that the Assembly should remonstrate it to the Parliament." [Footnote: Baillie's Letters, II. 218; corroborated by Lightfoot's Notes on the very day (p. 299).] And they did remonstrate it, without a day's delay. Friday, May 9, as we learn from the Lords Journals, it was represented to the House of Lords, through Mr. Marshall, by order of the Assembly, "That they have been informed of the great growth and increase of Anabaptists and Antinomians and other Sects; and that some Anabaptists have delivered in private houses some blasphemous passages and dangerous opinions: They have acquainted the House of Commons therewith; and, &c." [Footnote: Lords Journals, Aug. 9, 1644.] Turning to the Commons Journals of the same day we find, accordingly, a column and a half on the same subject, with many details. Dr. Burges and Mr. Marshall had appeared before the Commons on the same errand from the Assembly: had told the Honourable House that many ministers and gentry all through England had long desired to petition it "to prevent the spreading opinions of Anabaptism and Antinomianism;" that they had been persuaded to forbear; but that now "these men have cast off all affection and are so imbitterated" that farther forbearance would be wrong, and the Assembly cannot but represent to the House that "it is high time to suppress them." That the Commons might not be left in the vague, a Mr. Picot in Guernsey, and a Mr. Knolles, recently in Cornwall (Hanserd Knollys?), of the Anabaptist sort, with a Mr. Randall, a Mr. Penrose, and a Mr. Simson, as of a worse sort still (see Randall among the Antinomians and Familists in our synopsis), were denounced by name as proper culprits to begin with. What could the poor House of Commons do? Agreeing with the Lords, they promised to do what they could. They would take the whole subject into their grave consideration; they empowered the Committee for Plundered Ministers, with a certain addition to their number, to arrest and examine the particular culprits named; and, to prove their heartiness meanwhile, they resolved, on that very day, "That Mr. White do give order for the public burning of one Mr. Williams his book, intituled, &c., concerning the Tolerating of all sorts of Religion." [Footnote: Commons Journals, Aug. 9, 1644.] This "one Mr. Williams," as the reader will be aware, was Roger Williams, then on his way back to America; and "his book" wasThe Bloody Tenent. There must have been much hypocrisy, and much cowardice, in the English House of Commons on that day. Where was the younger Sir Harry Vane? Probably he was in the House while they passed the order, and wondering how far Roger Williams had got on his voyage, and meditatively twirling his thumbs.
A good stroke of business by the Westminster Assembly in two days after their vacation! But they followed it up. There were frequent Solemn Fasts, by Parliamentary order, in those days, when all London was expected to go to church and listen to sermons by divines from the Westminster Assembly. Tuesday, the 13th of August, 1644, was one of those Solemn Fast-days—an "Extraordinary Day of Humiliation;" and the ministers appointed by the Assembly to preach in chief—i.e.to preach before the two Houses of Parliament, and the Assembly itself, in St. Margaret's, Westminster—were Mr. Thomas Hill and Mr. Herbert Palmer. These two gentlemen, it seems, did their duty: They satisfied even Baillie. "Mr. Palmer and Mr. Hill," he says, "did preach that day to the Assembly two of the most Scottish and free sermons that ever I heard anywhere. The way here of all preachers, even the best, has been to speak before the Parliament with so profound a reverence as truly took all edge from their exhortations, and made all applications of them toothless and adulatorious. That style is much changed, however: these two good men laid well about them, and charged public and Parliamentary sins strictly on the backs of the guilty." [Footnote: Baillie's Letters, II. 220, 221.] As the sermons themselves remain in print, we have the means of verifying Baillie's description. It is quite correct. Not only in the "Epistle Dedicatory" to his sermon when it was printed did Mr. Hill denounce the Toleration doctrine, and make a marginal reference to Roger Williams's "Bloody Tenent" as a book not too soon burnt; but in the sermon itself, the subject of which was the duty of "advancing Temple-work" (Haggai i. 7, 8), he openly attacked two classes of persons as the chief "underminers of Temple-work." First, he said, there were those who would allow nothing to bejure divinoin the Church, but held that all matters of Church-constitution were to be settled by mere prudence and State-convenience—in other words, the Erastians,Theyare lectured, but are let off more easily than the second sort of underminers: viz. "such who would have a toleration of all ways of Religion in this Church." Parliament is reminded that all tendency to this way of thinking is unfaithfulness to the Covenant, and is told that "to set the door so wide open as to tolerate all religions" would be to "make London an Amsterdam," and would lead to—in fact, would certainly lead to— Amsterdamnation! So far Mr. Hill; but Mr. Palmer was even more bold. Preaching on Psalm xcix. 8, this delicate little creature laid about him most manfully. Parliament are rebuked for eluding the Covenant, for too great tenderness in their dealings with delinquents, and for remissness in the prevention and punishment of false doctrine. They are exhorted to extirpate heresy and schism, especially Antinomianism and Anabaptism, and, are warned at some length against the snare of Toleration. "Hearken not—I earnestly exhort every one that intends to have any regard at all to his solemn Covenant and oath in this second article—to those that offer to plead for Tolerations; which I wonder how any one dare write or speak for as they do that have themselves taken the Covenant, or know thatyouhave. The arguments that are used in some books, well worthy to be burnt, plead for Popery, Judaism, Turcism, Paganism, and all manner of false religions, under pretence of Liberty of Conscience." This is clearly an allusion to John Goodwin; and in the sequel Mr. Palmer makes another personal allusion of still greater interest. In order to show what a social chaos would result from toleration of error on the plea of Liberty of Conscience, he gives instances of some of the horrible opinions that would claim the benefit of the plea, and among these he names Milton's Divorce doctrine, then circulating in a book which the author had been shameless enough to dedicate openly to Parliament itself. The particulars will be given, and the passage quoted, in due time; the fact is enough at present. [Footnote: The title of Hill's sermon is "The Season for England's Selfe-Reflection and Advancing Temple-work; discovered in a Sermon preached to the two Houses of Parliament at Margaret's, Westminster, Aug. 13, 1614; being an extraordinary day of Humiliation. By, &c., London: Printed by Richard Cotes, for John Bellamy and Philerion Stephens1644."—The title of Palmer's is "The Glasse of God's Providence towards his Faithful Ones; Held forth in a Sermon,&c. [occasion and date as in Hill's];wherein is discovered the great failings that the best are liable unto, upon which God is provoked sometimes to take vengeance. The whole is applyed specially to a more carefull observance of our late Convenant, and particularly against the ungodly Toleration pleaded for under pretence of Liberty of Conscience. By, &c., London: Printed by G.M. for Th. Underhill at the Bible in Wood Street,1644." Neither sermon impresses one now very favourably in respect of either spirit or ability. I expected Palmer's to be better.]
Not content with direct remonstrance to Parliament on the subject of the increase of sects and heresies, nor with the power of exhorting it on the subject through the pulpit, the Presbyterians of the Assembly, I find, resorted to other agencies. They had great influence in the City, and it occurred to them, or to some of them, to stir up the Stationers' Company to activity in the matter. The Stationers, indeed, had a commercial interest, as well as a religious interest, in the suppression of the obnoxious books and pamphlets, most of which were published without the legal formalities of licence and registration. It is without surprise therefore that we find this entry in the Commons Journals for Saturday, Aug. 24, 1644: "Orderedthat the Petition from the Company of Stationers be read on Monday morning next," followed by this other as the minute of the first business (after prayers) at the next sitting, (Monday, Aug. 26): "The humble Petition of the Company of Stationers, consisting of Booksellers, Printers, and Bookbinders, was this day read, and ordered to be referred to the consideration of the Committee for Printing, to hear all parties and to state the business, and to prepare an Ordinance upon the whole matter and to bring it in with all convenient speed; and they are, to this purpose, to peruse the Bill formerly brought in concerning this matter. They are diligently to inquire out the authors, printers, and publishers of the Pamphlets against the Immortality of the Soul andConcerning Divorce." It had been determined, it seems, that Palmer's denunciation of Milton in his sermon a fortnight before should not be abrutum fulmen. To the incident, as it affected Milton himself, we shall have to refer again. Meanwhile it belongs to that stage of the action of the Westminster Assembly on English politics which we are now trying to illustrate.
The Assembly, we have shown, besides still carrying on within itself the main question between Presbyterianism and Congregationalism, had begun a wider war against Schism, Sectarianism, the whole miscellany of English heresies, and especially the all-including heresy of Toleration. They opened the campaign, by private agreement among themselves, in August 1644; and by the end of that month they had succeeded in rousing Parliament to some action on the subject, and had directed attention to at least nine special offenders, deserving to be punished first of all. These were—the Anabaptists, Picot and Hanserd Knollys; the Antinomians, Penrose and Simson; the Antinomian and Familist, Randall; the Seeker and Tolerationist, Roger Williams; the Independent, semi-Socinian, and Tolerationist, John Goodwin; the Anti-Scripturist and Mortalist, Clement Wrighter; and Mr. John Milton of Aldersgate Street, author of a Treatise on Divorce. For, though the Committee of Parliament had been instructed to inquire out the author of the Divorce Treatise, this was but a form. The second edition, dedicated to the Parliament and the Assembly, and with Milton's name to it in full, had been out more than six months. Of the nine persons mentioned, only Clement Wrighter, the Mortalist (if indeed the tract onMan's Mortalitywas from his pen), had to be found out.
Was there to be no check to this Presbyterian inquisitorship? Whence could a check come? The few Independents in the Assembly, just because they were fighting their own particular battle, had to be cautious against too great an extension of their lines. Not fromthem, therefore, but from the freer Independency of the Army, which was in fact by this time a composition of all or many of the sects, could the check be expected. Thence, in fact, it did come. In short, while the Presbyterians in London were in the flush of their first success against the Sectaries and the Tolerationists, in walked Oliver Cromwell.
Events had been qualifying Cromwell more and more for the task. His Independency, or let us call it Tolerationism, had been long known. As early as March 1643-4, when he had just become Lieutenant-general in the Earl of Manchester's army, he had been resolute in seeing that the officers and soldiers in that army should not be troubled or kept down for Anabaptism or the like. This had been the more necessary because the next in command under him, the Scottish Major-general Crawford, was an ardent and pragmatic Presbyterian. "Sir," Cromwell had written to Crawford on one occasion, when an Anabaptist colonel had been put under disgrace, "the State, in choosing men to serve it, takes no notice of their opinions; if they be willing faithfully to serve it, that satisfies. I advised you formerly to bear with men of different minds from yourself: if you had done it when I advised you to it, I think you would not have had so many stumbling-blocks in your way. It may be you judge otherwise; but I tell youmymind." [Footnote: Carlyle, Cromwell (ed. 1857), I. p. 148.] Ever since that time there had been a vital difference between the Presbyterian Major-general Crawford and his superior, the Lieutenant-general. Gradually, according to Baillie, Manchester, who was "a sweet, meek man," and greatly led by Cromwell, had been brought over more to the Presbyterian way by Crawford's reasonings. It had come to be a question, in fact, whether Cromwell and comfort or Crawford and precision should prevail in Manchester's army. Marston Moor (July 2) had settled that. Cromwell, as the hero of Marston Moor, was not a man to be farther opposed or thwarted; the Independents, who had mainly won Marston Moor, were not men to submit longer to Presbyterian ascendancy in the regulation of the army, or to see their large-faced English chief pestered and counterworked by a peevish Scot. Yes, butwasCromwell the hero of Marston Moor, orhadMarston Moor been won mainly by the Independents? These were the questions which Crawford, ever since the battle, had been trying to keep open. He had been trying, as we have seen, to keep them open in London, though with but small success; and in the Army his tongue had, doubtless, been louder and more troublesome. At last Cromwell made up his mind. Either Crawford must cease to be Major-general of Manchester's army, orhemust cease to be Lieutenant-general. It was on this business that, in September 1644, he came up to London. There had been letters on the subject before from both parties in the Army, the Independents pressing for Crawford's dismissal, and the Presbyterians for retaining him. But now Manchester, Cromwell, and Crawford had, all three, come up personally to argue the matter out. Cromwell, it appears, was in one of those moods of ungovernable obstinacy which always came upon him at the right time. "Our labour to reconcile them," writes Baillie, "was vain: Cromwell was peremptor; notwithstanding the kingdom's evident hazard, and the evident displeasure of our [the Scottish] nation, yet, if Crawford were not cashiered, his [Cromwell's] colonels would lay down their commissions." There was a plot in all this, Baillie thought. The real purpose of the Independents was to bring Manchester out of the clutches of Presbyterianism, or, if that could not be done, to get him to resign, so that Cromwell might succeed to the chief command; in which case the Independents would be able to "counterbalance" the Presbyterians, and "overawe the Assembly and Parliament both to their ends."—It was a very proper plot, too, as every day was proving. What was the last news that had reached London? It was that Essex, the General-in-chief, had been totally beaten by the King in Cornwall (Sept. 1)—Essex himself obliged to escape by ship, leaving his army to its fate; the horse, under Sir William Balfour, to fight their way out by desperate exertion; and the foot, under Skippon, to think of doing the same, but at last to surrender miserably. Waller's army, also, was by this time nowhere. It had perished by gradual desertion. Evidently, it had become a question of some moment for the Parliamentarianswhohad won Marston Moor, andwhoshould be chief in Manchester's army. [Footnote: Baillie's Letters, II. 229, 230; Rushworth V. 699et seq.; Whitlocke (ed. 1853), I. 302, 303; Carlyle's Cromwell, (ed., 1857), I. 158.]