CHAPTER XXIITHE NEW ZION
There was little reason to fear that the works of Spinoza would ever be popular. They were as amusing as a text-book on trigonometry and few people ever get beyond the first two or three sentences of any given chapter.
It took a different sort of man to spread the new ideas among the mass of the people.
In France the enthusiasm for private speculation and investigation had come to an end as soon as the country had been turned into an absolute monarchy.
In Germany the poverty and the horror which had followed in the wake of the Thirty Years War had killed all personal initiative for at least two hundred years.
During the second half of the seventeenth century, therefore, England was the only one among the larger countries of Europe where further progress along the lines of independent thought was still possible and the prolonged quarrel between the Crown and Parliament was adding an element of instability which proved to be of great help to the cause of personal freedom.
First of all we must consider the English sovereigns. For years these unfortunate monarchs had been between the devil of Catholicism and the deep sea of Puritanism.
Their Catholic subjects (which included a great many faithful Episcopalians with a secret leaning towards Rome)were forever clamoring for a return to that happy era when the British kings had been vassals of the pope.
Their Puritan subjects on the other hand, with one eye firmly glued upon the example of Geneva, dreamed of the day when there should be no king at all and England should be a replica of the happy commonwealth tucked away in a little corner of the Swiss mountains.
But that was not all.
The men who ruled England were also kings of Scotland and their Scottish subjects, when it came to religion, knew exactly what they wanted. And so thoroughly were they convinced that they themselves were right that they were firmly opposed to the idea of liberty of conscience. They thought it wicked that other denominations should be suffered to exist and to worship freely within the confines of their own Protestant land. And they insisted not only that all Catholics and Anabaptists be exiled from the British Isles but furthermore that Socinians, Arminians, Cartesians, in short all those who did not share their own views upon the existence of a living God, be hanged.
This triangle of conflicts, however, produced an unexpected result. It forced the men who were obliged to keep peace between those mutually hostile parties to be much more tolerant than they would have been otherwise.
If both the Stuarts and Cromwell at different times of their careers insisted upon equal rights for all denominations, and history tells us they did, they were most certainly not animated by a love for Presbyterians or High Churchmen, or vice versa. They were merely making the best of a very difficult bargain. The terrible things which happened in the colonies along the Bay of Massachusetts, where one sect finally became all powerful, show us what would have been the fate of England if any one of the many contendingfactions had been able to establish an absolute dictatorship over the entire country.
Cromwell of course reached the point where he was able to do as he liked. But the Lord Protector was a very wise man. He knew that he ruled by the grace of his iron brigade and carefully avoided such extremes of conduct or of legislation as would have forced his opponents to make common cause. Beyond that, however, his ideas concerning tolerance did not go.
As for the abominable “atheists”—the aforementioned Socinians and Arminians and Cartesians and other apostles of the divine right of the individual human being, their lives were just as difficult as before.
Of course, the English “Libertines” enjoyed one enormous advantage. They lived close to the sea. Only thirty-six hours of sickness separated them from the safe asylum of the Dutch cities. As the printing shops of these cities were turning out most of the contraband literature of southern and western Europe, a trip across the North Sea really meant a voyage to one’s publisher and gave the enterprising traveler a chance to gather in his royalties and see what were the latest additions to the literature of intellectual protest.
Among those who at one time or another availed themselves of this convenient opportunity for quiet study and peaceful reflection, no one has gained a more deserving fame than John Locke.
He was born in the same year as Spinoza. And like Spinoza (indeed like most independent thinkers) he was the product of an essentially pious household. The parents of Baruch were orthodox Jews. The parents of John were orthodox Christians. Undoubtedly they both meant well by their children when they trained them in the strict doctrinesof their own respective creeds. But such an education either breaks a boy’s spirit or it turns him into a rebel. Baruch and John, not being the sort that ever surrenders, gritted their teeth, left home and struck out for themselves.
At the age of twenty Locke went to Oxford and there for the first time heard of Descartes. But among the dusty book-stalls of St. Catherine Street he found certain other volumes that were much to his taste. For example, there were the works of Thomas Hobbes.
An interesting figure, this former student of Magdalen College, a restless person who had visited Italy and had held converse with Galileo, who had exchanged letters with the great Descartes himself and who had spent the greater part of his life on the continent, an exile from the fury of the Puritans. Between times he had composed an enormous book which contained all his ideas upon every conceivable subject and which bore the inviting title of “Leviathan, or the Matter, Form and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil.”
This learned tome made its appearance when Locke was in his Sophomore year. It was so outspoken upon the nature of princes, their rights and most especially their duties, that even the most thorough going Cromwellian must approve of it, and that many of Cromwell’s partisans felt inclined to pardon this doubting Thomas who was a full-fledged royalist yet exposed the royalist pretensions in a volume that weighed not less than five pounds. Of course Hobbes was the sort of person whom it has never been easy to classify. His contemporaries called him a Latitudinarian. That meant that he was more interested in the ethics of the Christian religion than in the discipline and the dogmas of the Christian church and believed in allowing people a fair degreeof “latitude” in their attitude upon those questions which they regarded as non-essential.
Locke had the same temperament as Hobbes. He too remained within the Church until the end of his life but he was heartily in favor of a most generous interpretation both of life and of faith. What was the use, Locke and his friends argued, of ridding the country of one tyrant (who wore a golden crown) if it only led up to a fresh abuse of power by another tyrant (who wore a black slouch hat)? Why renounce allegiance to one set of priests and then the next day accept the rule of another set of priests who were fully as overbearing and arrogant as their predecessors? Logic undoubtedly was on their side but such a point of view could not possibly be popular among those who would have lost their livelihood if the “latitude men” had been successful and had changed a rigid social system into an ethical debating society?
And although Locke, who seems to have been a man of great personal charm, had influential friends who could protect him against the curiosity of the sheriffs, the day was soon to come when he would no longer be able to escape the suspicion of being an atheist.
That happened in the fall of the year 1683, and Locke thereupon went to Amsterdam. Spinoza had been dead for half a dozen years, but the intellectual atmosphere of the Dutch capital continued to be decidedly liberal and Locke was given a chance to study and write without the slightest interference on the part of the authorities. He was an industrious fellow and during the four years of his exile he composed that famous “Letter on Tolerance” which makes him one of the heroes of our little history. In this letter (which under the criticism of his opponents grew into three letters) he flatly denied that the state had the right to interferewith religion. The state, as Locke saw it (and in this he was borne out by a fellow exile, a Frenchman by the name of Pierre Bayle, who was living in Rotterdam at that time composing his incredibly learned one-man encyclopedia), the state was merely a sort of protective organization which a certain number of people had created and continued to maintain for their mutual benefit and safety. Why such an organization should presume to dictate what the individual citizens should believe and what not—that was something which Locke and his disciples failed to understand. The state did not undertake to tell them what to eat or drink. Why should it force them to visit one church and keep away from another?
The seventeenth century, as a result of the half-hearted victory of Protestantism, was an era of strange religious compromises.
The peace of Westphalia which was supposed to make an end to all religious warfare had laid down the principle that “all subjects shall follow the religion of their ruler.” Hence in one six-by-nine principality all citizens were Lutherans (because the local grand duke was a Lutheran) and in the next they were all Catholics (because the local baron happened to be a Catholic).
“If,” so Locke reasoned, “the State has the right to dictate to the people concerning the future weal of their souls, then one-half of the people are foreordained to perdition, for since both religions cannot possibly be true (according to article I of their own catechisms) it follows that those who are born on one side of a boundary line are bound for Heaven and those who are born on the other side are bound for Hell and in this way the geographical accident of birth decides one’s future salvation.”
That Locke did not include Catholics in his scheme oftolerance is regrettable, but understandable. To the average Britisher of the seventeenth century Catholicism was not a form of religious conviction but a political party which had never ceased to plot against the safety of the English state, which had built Armadas and had bought barrels of gun-powder with which to destroy the parliament of a supposedly friendly nation.
Hence Locke refused to his Catholic opponents those rights which he was willing to grant to the heathen in his colonies and asked that they continue to be excluded from His Majesty’s domains, but solely on the ground of their dangerous political activities and not because they professed a different faith.
One had to go back almost sixteen centuries to hear such sentiments. Then a Roman emperor had laid down the famous principle that religion was an affair between the individual man and his God and that God was quite capable of taking care of himself whenever he felt that his dignity had been injured.
The English people who had lived and prospered through four changes of government within less than sixty years were inclined to see the fundamental truth of such an ideal of tolerance based upon common sense.
When William of Orange crossed the North Sea in the year 1688, Locke followed him on the next ship, which carried the new Queen of England. Henceforth he lived a quiet and uneventful existence and when he died at the ripe old age of seventy-two he was known as a respectable author and no longer feared as a heretic.
Civil war is a terrible thing but it has one great advantage. It clears the atmosphere.
The political dissensions of the seventeenth century had completely consumed the superfluous energy of the Englishnation and while the citizens of other countries continued to kill each other for the sake of the Trinity and prenatal damnation, religious persecution in Great Britain came to an end. Now and then a too presumptuous critic of the established church, like Daniel Defoe, might come into unpleasant contact with the law, but the author of “Robinson Crusoe” was pilloried because he was a humorist rather than an amateur theologian and because the Anglo-Saxon race, since time immemorial, has felt an inborn suspicion of irony. Had Defoe written a serious defense of tolerance, he would have escaped with a reprimand. When he turned his attack upon the tyranny of the church into a semi-humorous pamphlet entitled “The Shortest Way with Dissenters,” he showed that he was a vulgar person without a decent sense of the proprieties and one who deserved no better than the companionship of the pickpockets of Newgate Prison.
Even then Defoe was fortunate that he had never extended his travels beyond the confines of the British Isles. For intolerance having been driven from the mother country had found a most welcome refuge in certain of the colonies on the other side of the ocean. And this was due not so much to the character of the people who had moved into these recently discovered regions as to the fact that the new world offered infinitely greater economic advantages than the old one.
In England itself, a small island so densely populated that it offered standing room only to the majority of her people, all business would soon have come to an end if the people had not been willing to practice the ancient and honorable rule of “give and take.” But in America, a country of unknown extent and unbelievable riches, a continentinhabited by a mere handful of farmers and workmen, no such compromise was necessary.
And so it happened that a small communist settlement on the shores of Massachusetts Bay could develop into such a stronghold of self-righteous orthodoxy that the like of it had not been seen since the happy days when Calvin exercised the functions of Chief of Police and Lord High Executioner in western Switzerland.
The credit for the first permanent settlement in the chilly regions of the Charles River usually goes to a small group of people who are referred to as the Pilgrim Fathers. A Pilgrim, in the usual sense of the word, is one who “journeys to a sacred place as an act of religious devotion.” The passengers of theMayflowerwere not pilgrims in that sense of the word. They were English bricklayers and tailors and cord-wainers and blacksmiths and wheelwrights who had left their country to escape certain of those hated “poperies” which continued to cling to the worship in most of the churches around them.
First they had crossed the North Sea and had gone to Holland where they arrived at a moment of great economic depression. Our school-books continue to ascribe their desire for further travel to their unwillingness to let their children learn the Dutch language and otherwise to see them absorbed by the country of their adoption. It seems very unlikely, however, that those simple folk were guilty of such shocking ingratitude and purposely followed a most reprehensible course of hyphenation. The truth is that most of the time they were forced to live in the slums, that they found it very difficult to make a living in an already over-populated country, and that they expected a better revenue from tobacco planting in America than from wool-carding in Leiden. Hence to Virginia they sailed,but having been thrown by adverse currents and bad seamanship upon the shores of Massachusetts, they decided to stay where they were rather than risk the horrors of another voyage in their leaky tub.
But although they had now escaped the dangers of drowning and seasickness, they were still in a highly perilous position. Most of them came from small cities in the heart of England and had little aptitude for a life of pioneering. Their communistic ideas were shattered by the cold, their civic enthusiasm was chilled by the endless gales and their wives and children were killed by an absence of decent food. And, finally, the few who survived the first three winters, good-natured people accustomed to the rough and ready tolerance of the home country, were entirely swamped by the arrival of thousands of new colonists who without exception belonged to a sterner and less compromising variety of Puritan faith and who made Massachusetts what it was to remain for several centuries, the Geneva on the Charles River.
Hanging on for dear life to their small stretch of land, forever on the verge of disaster, they felt more than ever inclined to find an excuse for everything they thought and did within the pages of the Old Testament. Cut off from polite human society and books, they began to develop a strange religious psyche of their own. In their own eyes they had fallen heir to the traditions of Moses and Gideon and soon became veritable Maccabees to their Indian neighbors of the west. They had nothing to reconcile them to their lives of hardship and drudgery except the conviction that they were suffering for the sake of the only true faith. Hence their conclusion (easily arrived at) that all other people must be wrong. Hence the brutal treatment of those who failed to share their own views, who suggestedby implication that the Puritan way of doing and thinking was not the only right way. Hence the exclusion from their country of all harmless dissenters who were either unmercifully flogged and then driven into the wilderness or suffered the loss of their ears and tongues unless they were fortunate enough to find a refuge in one of the neighboring colonies which belonged to the Swedes and the Dutch.
No, for the cause of religious freedom or tolerance, this colony achieved nothing except in that roundabout and involuntary fashion which is so common in the history of human progress. The very violence of their religious despotism brought about a reaction in favor of a more liberal policy. After almost two centuries of ministerial tyranny, there arose a new generation which was the open and avowed enemy of all forms of priest-rule, which believed profoundly in the desirability of the separation of state and church and which looked askance upon the ancestral admixture of religion and politics.
By a stroke of good luck this development came about very slowly and the crisis did not occur until the period immediately before the outbreak of hostilities between Great Britain and her American colonies. As a result, the Constitution of the United States was written by men who were either freethinkers or secret enemies of the old-fashioned Calvinism and who incorporated into this document certain highly modern principles which have proved of the greatest value in maintaining the peaceful balance of our republic.
But ere this happened, the new world had experienced a most unexpected development in the field of tolerance and curiously enough it took place in a Catholic community, in that part of America now covered by the free state of Maryland.
The Calverts, who were responsible for this interesting experiment, were of Flemish origin, but the father had moved to England and had rendered very distinguished services to the house of Stuart. Originally they had been Protestants, but George Calvert, private secretary and general utility man to King James I, had become so utterly disgusted with the futile theological haggling of his contemporaries that he returned to the old faith. Good, bad or indifferent, it called black, black and white, white and did not leave the final settlement of every point of doctrine to the discretion of a board of semi-literate deacons.
This George Calvert, so it seems, was a man of parts. His back-sliding (a very serious offense in those days!) did not lose him the favor of his royal master. On the contrary, he was made Baron Baltimore of Baltimore and was promised every sort of assistance when he planned to establish a little colony of his own for the benefit of persecuted Catholics. First, he tried his luck in Newfoundland. But his settlers were frozen out of house and home and his Lordship then asked for a few thousand square miles in Virginia. The Virginians, however, staunchly Episcopalian, would have naught of such dangerous neighbors and Baltimore then asked for a slice of that wilderness which lay between Virginia and the Dutch and Swedish possessions of the north. Ere he received his charter he died. His son Cecil, however, continued the good work, and in the winter of 1633-1634 two little ships, theArkand theDove, under command of Leonard Calvert, brother to George, crossed the ocean, and in March of 1634 they safely landed their passengers on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. The new country was called Maryland. This was done in honor of Mary, daughter of that French king, Henri IV, whose plans for a European League of Nations had been cutshort by the dagger of a crazy monk, and wife to that English monarch who soon afterwards was to lose his head at the hands of his Puritan subjects.
This extraordinary colony which did not exterminate its Indian neighbors and offered equal opportunities to both Catholics and Protestants passed through many difficult years. First of all it was overrun by Episcopalians who tried to escape the fierce intolerance of the Puritans in Massachusetts. Next it was invaded by Puritans who tried to escape the fierce intolerance of the Episcopalians in Virginia. And the two groups of fugitives, with the usual arrogance of that sort of people, tried hard to introduce their own “correct form of worship” into the commonwealth that had just offered them refuge. As “all disputes which might give rise to religious passions” were expressly forbidden on Maryland territory, the older colonists were entirely within their right when they bade both Episcopalians and Puritans to keep the peace. But soon afterwards war broke out in the home country between the Cavaliers and the Roundheads and the Marylanders feared that, no matter who should win, they would lose their old freedom. Hence, in April of the year 1649 and shortly after news of the execution of Charles I had reached them, and at the direct suggestion of Cecil Calvert, they passed their famous Act of Tolerance which, among other things, contained this excellent passage:
“That since the coercion of conscience in the matter of religion has often produced very harmful results in those communities in which it was exercised, for the more tranquil and pacific government in this province and for the better preservation of mutual love and unity among its inhabitants, it is hereby decided that nobody in this province who professes faith in Jesus Christ shall be disturbed, molestedor persecuted in any way for reasons respecting his religion or the free exercise thereof.”
That such an act could be passed in a country in which the Jesuits occupied a favorite position shows that the Baltimore family was possessed of remarkable political ability and of more than ordinary courage. How profoundly this generous spirit was appreciated by some of their guests was shown in the same year when a number of Puritan exiles overthrew the government of Maryland, abolished the Act of Tolerance and replaced it by an “Act Concerning Religion” of their own which granted full religious liberty to all those who declared themselves Christians “with the exception of Catholics and Episcopalians.”
This period of reaction fortunately did not last long. In the year 1660 the Stuarts returned to power and once more the Baltimores reigned in Maryland.
The next attack upon their policy came from the other side. The Episcopalians gained a complete victory in the mother country and they insisted that henceforth their church should be the official church of all the colonies. The Calverts continued to fight but they found it impossible to attract new colonists. And so, after a struggle which lasted another generation, the experiment came to an end.
Protestantism triumphed.
So did intolerance.