“And then we’ll raise, on these wild shores,A structure of wise government, and showIn our New World a glorious spectacleOf social order.â€Mrs. Hale’sOrmond Grosvenor.
“And then we’ll raise, on these wild shores,A structure of wise government, and showIn our New World a glorious spectacleOf social order.â€Mrs. Hale’sOrmond Grosvenor.
“And then we’ll raise, on these wild shores,
A structure of wise government, and show
In our New World a glorious spectacle
Of social order.â€
Mrs. Hale’sOrmond Grosvenor.
The fundamental law of the colonies of Massachusetts Bay was the charter, which bore the crown seal. The old parchment contained a permit and a fiat. It gave the corporation the right to enlarge or decrease its numbers at its option, and to establish the terms on which new members should be admitted to its franchises. It decreed that the governor and his assistants should be elected by the suffrages of the Company at large. Every freeman, as the members of the corporation were called, was entitled to vote.[713]
On the 3d of August, 1630, at Charlestown, Winthrop convened his assistants, and held the first court under the transferred charter.[714]It was the earliest baby-cry of the provincial government. Administrative functions were at once assumed. Measures were initiated which looked to the support of ministers; the question of wages was adjusted; and an order was issued for the arrest ofThomas Morton,[715]who, through the carelessness of Allerton, the Plymouth agent, had returned to New England, and once more “hied to his old nest†at Merry-mount, only to renew his godless pranks.[716]
“Such was the first colonial legislation, and such the first legislative body. No heralds, no wigs, no cannon, no gilding, were necessary to impose upon the senses or give majesty and authority to law.â€
Two months later,[717]a general assembly of the freemen of the colony was convened at Boston.[718]In the Assembly the charter vested the fundamental legislative authority.[719]It was the colonial Parliament. At this session more than a hundred planters were admitted to the franchises of the corporation;[720]and since this accession increased the preëxisting inconvenience of gathering the whole Company for purposes of legislation, the freemen ceded to the governor and his assistants the whole political power, reserving only the right to supply vacancies.[721]The tenure of office was unlimited;[722]perhaps it was tacitly understood to be, as in the old English law, “during good behaviorâ€â€”quamdiu se bene gesserint. For a season the government was an elective aristocracy. It was oligarchical, like that of Venice.
This endured but little more than a twelvemonth.In May, 1631, the freemen met again, “after corn was set,†and revoked a part of the authority of which they had been too lavish. The government was curbed by a reservation to the commons of the right to make such annual changes as the majority should desire.[723]
“At this same time a law was established pregnant with evil, and with good. ‘To the end that the body of the commons may be preserved of honest and good men’—so runs the old text—‘it is ordered and agreed that, for the time to come, no man shall be admitted to the freedom of this body politic but such as are members of some of the churches within the corporate limit.’ This rule stood unchanged until after the Restoration. Thus was the elective franchise narrowed. The polity was a sort of theocracy; God himself, speaking through the lips of his elect, was to govern his people. An aristocracy was founded; but not on wealth, or blood, or rank. The servant, the bondman, might be a member of the church, and therefore a freeman of the Company. Other states have limited the possession of political rights to the opulent, to freeholders, to the first-born. The colonists of Massachusetts, scrupulously refusing to the clergy the least shadow of political power, established the reign of the visible church, a commonwealth of the chosen people in covenant with God.â€[724]
But we must not let the boldness and presumptionof this act blind us to its inconsistency and its evil tendency. If men might enjoy the franchise only by uniting with the church, ambitious men, wicked men, might become hypocrites, that they might get power. When church-membership became the road to political authority, there was danger that audacious and unchastened interlopers might usurp the government, as they did in England under Whitgift, and Williams, and Laud.
This law was an inconsistency, because it was a radical departure from the primal principle of Massachusetts ecclesiasticism, the separation of church and state, and the complete independence of the individual churches.[725]Now it was affirmed that the state must unfold within the church.[726]Indeed, a kind of state church was developed.[727]This is evident from two facts. The clergy were to be supported, not merely by the contributions of actual church-members, but it was decreed that “all who are instructed in the word of God must contribute for those by whom they are taught in all good things.â€[728]The government was empowered to curb ecclesiastical errorists; and “if any church should grow schismatical, rending itself from the communion of other churches, or should walk incorrigibly and obstinately in any corrupt way, contrary to the word of God, in such case the civilmagistrate was directed to put forth his coercive power.â€[729]
Thus individual religious independence, child of the Protestant principle, was strangled. Our fathers honestly erred. Purity of religious worship was their goal; and in order to that, they desired the unclogged enjoyment of what they esteemed the divinely-appointed means of grace. Their model was the Mosaic code. They did not remember that God had superseded it by a new dispensation.
The Pilgrims were wise and devout men, and in most respects they were a century in advance of their generation; but as a body, they did not understand the golden rule of toleration. Divorcing church and state in theory, in practice they married them.
“It is folly,†remarks an English scholar who has himself rehearsed the story of the Pilgrims, “for either British or American encomiasts to seek to disguise this fact. It is on record. All may read it. Impartial history is compelled to acknowledge that very few, even of the foremost thinkers and moralists of the seventeenth century, had any just conception of that grand principle, the outgrowth of the New Testament, which acknowledges God as the sole Judge of human faith, and interferes with opinions or creeds only when they run toseed in riot, and develope consequences inimical to social virtue and political order.â€[730]
But notwithstanding the fact that the Pilgrims erected a theocracy, and by conferring upon the civil arm jurisdiction in religion, opened the way to unjust persecution, it is also true that they “builded better than they knew;†for the principles they professed eventually forced their children to a broader platform. They secured the future. They were the acorn; let the nineteenth century be the oak.
“For we doubt not, through the agesOne increasing purpose runs;And the thoughts of men are widenedWith the process of the suns.â€
“For we doubt not, through the agesOne increasing purpose runs;And the thoughts of men are widenedWith the process of the suns.â€
“For we doubt not, through the ages
One increasing purpose runs;
And the thoughts of men are widened
With the process of the suns.â€