USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > History of the First church in Boston, 1630-1880 > Part 3
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discipline and the ecclesiastical practices which it might cover, on the assumption that if we had not explicit scriptural sanctions for them, " primitive" usage warranted the belief that they had the sanction of the Apostles. The Puritans stoutly refused to allow that the Scriptures were thus incomplete and insufficient. They might well have been reminded, when they relied so confidently upon hints and counsels gathered from the Epistles in the New Testa- ment, that those letters were not addressed to the Church at large, but to local communities, as at Rome, Ephesus, Colosse, Thessalonica, and that cach of them implied pre- vious supplementary and oral instruction and direct over- sight from the Apostles who had founded and visited them ; so that the reading of those letters at a long distance of time and by strangers would present some of the same embarrassments which one would meet in perusing a letter from the post-office not addressed to himself, and relating wholly to another person's affairs.
Still nothing but Scripture and nothing beside Scripture had authority for the Puritans in instituting and disposing their church polity. Every element of the ecclesiastical, sacerdotal, and ceremonial system which had been wrought in with faith and observance was subjected to the Scripture test, and if not fortified there, it was rejected. For every principle, injunction, and usage adopted in their system they were ready to produce a Scripture warrant. Any one who has dutifully though wearily read over but a portion of the pages of their manifold little tractates, or of their folio " bodies of divinity," can but "stand amazed at the keen-sightedness, the ingenuity, the acuteness, the marvel- lous industry with which they "searched the Scriptures" for precedents, for guidance, for answers to objections, and for arguments. The Puritans insisted that all priestly functions for Christians to recognize centred in Jesus
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Christ alone. All assumptions of sacerdotal powers, in ordination, in administration, in hearing confessions and.in granting absolution by those who were simply ministers, teachers, were trespasses upon the prerogatives of the one only Chief Priest, Jesus Christ. Keenly and closely was the claim contested against prelacy, that one class of supe- rior clergy, descending in a direct apostolic line, had exclu- sive authority to ordain and commission other clergy, to whom, by " laying on of hands," they conveyed " the gift of the Holy Ghost," which God alone could impart. They read that the chief of the Apostles, Paul, " called by God" to his high work, kept himself aloof from the other Apostles, as if jealous of depending upon their recognition. And as to his ordination by the " laying on of hands," instead of looking to either of the other Apostles for this service, the Puritans read that whatever its significance, the office was discharged by one who is described as " a certain disciple at Damascus, named Ananias" (Acts ix. 10, 17). And again, when Barnabas and Paul were to be " separated " for a special work, the ceremony was performed by " the lay- ing on hands," not of the Apostles, but of " certain prophets and teachers at Antioch" ( Acts xiii. 1, 3). The Saviour had likened the preaching of his gospel to the sowing of seed. Its growth and fertility depended upon its own vitality and upon the nature of the soil which received it, not at all upon a form answering to ordination, which should qualify a particular class of husbandmen to sow the seed. The Puritan did recognize the propriety and dignity of formally greeting the accession of each new candidate in the line of the ministry to the fellowship of his brethren. His qualifications of mind, character, and spirit were be- lieved to come from God alone. " The laying on of hands by the presbytery " was the respectful act of confidence and sympathy by which his ellers, of proved experience
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and esteem in their holy calling, received him to a common ministry.
Very dear to these old Puritans was the privilege of choosing and instituting their own religious teacher, and of regarding him as one of the brethren in their church fold. Among the disapproved usages of their mother church was the one which they thus repudiated, by which " the lord of the manor" or the " patron of a living " was allowed to " present " an incumbent or a vicar, who might be a man of corrupt character, ignorant, incompetent, and immoral, but over whose tenure of office his unwilling parishioners had no power.
It will be observed that in the extracts made from the records of the church, in connection with the pastorates of the successive ministers, distinct notice is taken of the num- ber of baptisms, and of those admitted to partake of the Lord's Supper as members in full communion. Though in the course of years and in the gradual changes of opin- ion and belief, the relative importance of these especial tests of the fidelity of the ministers and the sympathetic response of the people was largely reduced, yet those lists of the baptized and the covenanted were among the most significant entries on the record of the first Puritan churches. This suggests a statement on which, as an historical point, it would be difficult to lay undue stress. Among the most distinctive elements of the Puritan Church polity, as depart- ing from that of the English Church, was one which was vastly more efficient in its practical working than was even the rejection of prelacy and the disuse of the ritual cere- monial in worship. It was the Puritan view of the intent, and the proper subjects of the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper. A stern fidelity to their own convic- tions and to what they believed to be the scriptural doctrine concerning these ordinances was in fact the occasion, after
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full trial and experiment, of some of their most serious annoyances and difficulties. Their attempt to enforce a rigid adherence to their carly rule in the administration of the sacraments, taken in connection with the provision that only church members could exercise the civil franchise, was in fact the leading cause of the discomfiture of the Puritan polity in Church and State. All the more just, therefore, is it that we should clearly apprehend the grounds of their radical and intense alienation from the old church usages in the sacraments, and of their earnest and tenacious preference of their own till experience had exposed their impracticable and indeed alarming results.
In the English Church the rite of baptism was freely administered to every new-born infant. What might in exceptional cases be an assurance and aid of the subse- quent Christian nurture of the baptized child, but what in the vast majority of cases was necessarily a perfectly futile and empty pretence, was the provision of "godparents," or sponsors, to represent, to reinforce, or to be a substitute for the parental care and duty for a child admitted to the Christian fold. The formal, perfunctory, and often per- fectly heartless way in which this ceremonial was performed, entailing in practice no consequent obligations, did not need to be viewed with the keenest Puritan scruples to show itself as a painful mockery of a real solemnity. Then at any time after the age of early childhood, the baptized boy or girl, after some preparatory catechetical instruction, which might or might not have engaged heart or con- science, was, by " confirmation, when the bishop made his visit," received into full communion of the church, with the privilege of partaking of the Lord's Supper, hence- forward a Christian for life and death, to be buried in assured hope of a blissful immortality.
If these easy terms of securing membership of the Chris-
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tian fold, with an implied pledge of salvation, had not been sufficient of themselves to engage the protest of the Puri- tans, pleading for a more thorough reformation of Romish practices in the English Church, the lightness, formality, and promiscuous method of the observances, and the in- difference, heedlessness, and laxity with which solemn sacra- ments, " the seals of a holy covenant," were administered to persons of a notoriously corrupt life and " unregenerate," were of a character to shock them. There was not only an indulgent liberty, but a compulsory requisition con- nected with the observance of these ordinances, which the Puritans believed to be an irreligious, indeed, a scandalous offence. They were well aware that men of deep shades of impiety and without concealment of their vices, as a condition of place, privilege, or office, knelt at the altar rail unabashed in manner and seemingly with untroubled con- sciences. Far more effort and discipline were enforced in the English Church in exacting a regular observance of the ordinances than in testing the fitness of partakers in them.
The two sacraments were to the Puritan " seals of the covenant," of the most precious, solemn, and awe-inspiring character. One who, from these remote years and amid these changed surroundings, could be carried backward to stand as an observer of either of the Christian rites in the first wilderness church here, would have witnessed the working of emotions and convictions which it is more than difficult to realize now. The form of the rites stood for little, if for anything, with the Puritan. Any mummery, costume, attitude, or pretence of magical efficacy con- nected with them, the sign of the cross, or the putting words into the mouth of an infant by a proxy, was odions to them. The parent was to be the one to renounce the devil and all the sinful vanities of the world for the child's
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sake. The Puritan would not lay the baptismal water upon the brow of an infant unless both the parents had been previously pledged, by their own vows, to keep it in the fold of Christ. Instead of godparents the whole fellowship of the church were to share with father and mother in all-loving covenant fidelity in the nurture of the child. At any after age till its death, an open account was kept with and for that child on the church book. Yet it was only so far a Christian as privilege, expectation, and obligation prepared the way for a renewal of the covenant by coming to the Lord's table. That table, the Supper of the Lord, was guarded in the approach to it, and in the relations of watch and ward into which partakers of it were brought with each other, as of the utmost sanctity. The Puritans very soon gave over the intense zeal with which, at an early stage of the Reformation, they contended against the Roman doctrine of transubstantiation. The faith of the Romanist required that in the holy wafer he should receive, through his lips, a portion of the real body of the Lord. The Puritan was concerned that the saving grace of Christ should be livingly appropriated by his heart. It was his aim and solemn purpose that in every assembly gathered for Christian worship, instruction, and edification, and testifying so far, by their presence and sup- port of religious observances, that they had some regard for sacred things, there should be an elect fellowship of such men and women as had been individually and sol- emnly pledged and covenanted to a Christian testimony and discipleship. Such was the membership, by indi- vidual conversion, by regenerating experience, and by solemn personal vows, of the local churches of Christ, as related in the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles of the New Testament. Churches were to be constituted of " saints"; that was the Puritan belief. But how was the
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assurance of saintship to be reached and certified ? What were its tests, and who were to be judges of its reality? The Puritans found their guidance on this matter, where alone they looked for it, in the pregnant examples of the offering of candidates and the initiation of individual men and women 'into church fellowship under the Apostles. We have read of certain secret societies, from the Middle Ages downward, -of templars, craftsmen, revolutionists, nihilists, and others, - in which, at the initiation of mem- bers, in hidden resorts, at midnight hours, some horrifying or blood-curdling rites of ceremony, with oaths and impre- cations, have been engaged to strike terror and to secure fidelity. Bating all that was dramatic, uncanny, or impious in these initiatory rites, one may safely affirm that their power over the feelings of candidates, their searching inqui- sition into motives, purposes, and resolves, did not exceed that of the Puritan ordeal in receiving to church communion new members as regenerate and sealed witnesses for Christ and heirs of his salvation. Instead of seeking the shadow of secrecy or withdrawal from public gaze and scrutiny, the Puritan process, which was too bare and severe to be called a ceremony, sought the most free and open observ- ance. The candidate, previous and up to the moment of admission, was one of a mixed and miscellaneous congre- gation. Before that congregation, in connection with an occasion for public worship, the man or woman who sought to be received into the elect fold rose when called up by name. The momentous and perfectly voluntary character of the transaction was safely relied upon to deprive it of all ostentation, to insure modesty and propriety, and to furnish audible and fit speech even to the most shrinking in delicacy or reserve. Then, in the phrase of the time, testimony was given by the candidate to a certain experi- mental and converting work of the Holy Spirit upon heart
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and conscience, with searching exercises, with compunc- tions, conflicts, rebukings, and penitential motions, - the disclosed history of a soul and life under God's hand, and the expression of a humble hope, after a passage through a dark way, of having attained through trembling and weakness to a joyful light. Any one in the whole congre- gation, listening to this testimony, not only had the liberty, but as of right and duty was expected to use the privilege, of challenging the candidate, of exposing any blemish, infirmity, or inconsistency in the character or " walk" of the candidate, any bad habit, any unconfessed error, any manifestation of spirit, in public or in private, which made the claimant for church membership unworthy of full con- fidence. The ordeal must have been most severe and painful to many, whether only from diffidence or tender- ness of conscience. Jealousies, grudges, suspicions, and alienations between persons whose whole daily lives and intercourse were so open to eye and tongue, had a free range for their exercise. Only the consciousness of seri- ousness and sincerity of purpose would seem to have forti- fied a candidate, man or woman, to meet that ordeal. The exaction of it must at least certify to us the lofty standard and aim of the Puritan style of piety. The whole method and process by which church membership was thus guarded and attained among them, are subject, in our retro- spective judgment at least, to the drawback and suspicion that, while even hypocrites and self-seekers might pass the ordeal, in the condition that the civil franchise was made dependent for men upon this church relation, there would always be room for distrust as to perfect singleness of pur- pose. We know as an undisputed fact that this union of church and civil privilege wrought mischievous conse- quences in two directions. It kept out of coveted religions fellowship many scrupulous, conscientious, and diffident
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persons who could not sincerely, or who would not, disclose the privacies of their religious experience in a way to sat- isfy the requisitions of the case; and it admitted some to full standing whose verbal professions and pledges were all too easy terms for securing civil rights.
The austere and watchful guardians over the purity of their church fold, well aware of the risks of shortcoming and of the lapse from covenant vows which might follow after the supposed crisis in the religious life had been reached, fortified themselves as well as they might against them. The method by which a candidate was admitted to the church, exacting as it was, was but the initiatory step in a continuous and keenly intrusive oversight and scrutiny which were thenceforward brought to bear upon each mem- ber, as to the tenor of his life and the constancy and fervor of his piety. The members were pledged in covenant to mutual "watch and ward," to help each other, alike by sympathy and encouragement and by inquisition and re- buke, to full fidelity.
The records of the carly New England churches - those of the First Church of Boston, however, not being so largely and in detail marked as are those of many of its sister churches for such entries - afford abundant evidence of the fidelity, at least, with which church " discipline" was enforced. Such contents on these records are fitly left where they are, perhaps in the interests of historical fidelity claiming a right to be preserved in manuscript, but with no warrant to be reproduced in print. They certify the fact that if that Puritan age with all its austerity was troubled and stained by scandalous tokens of the infirmi- ties and vices of human nature, there were some who were so . confident and stable in their own integrity as not to shrink from throwing stones at bold offenders. We may marvel at the disregard of all delicate sensibility, and the
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risks of corrupting those who were still unconscious of some evil ways, in the method of Puritan discipline, when before a whole listening congregation men and women were compelled to expose and confess their grievous lapses from decorum and morality. Nor will all be ready to admit that the sternness and unrelenting pressure of the inquisitors, or the awe-stricken horror of the auditors, indicated any unfamiliar yielding of the culprit to the adversary of souls. But we have to recognize a fidelity to an accepted standard. And who that is well informed in the case will venture to deny that these severe methods of church discipline, with the disrepute and the penalties which attended them, indi- cated a .general conformity, in social and neighborly rela- tions, in domestic life, and in private individual habits, to rules of virtue, to responsibilities of example, and to pre- cious safeguards which help to keep pure the springs of human life? Though, as has been said, the records of the First Church do not relatively contain so much matter of the sort that has been referred to, as do those of many of its sister churches, there are in them entries sufficient in number and in tenor to expose to us the fidelity with which cove- nant relations were enforced and exacted, and with which breaches of them,- private or public, were visited. The charging of excessive prices for needful commodities; the use of intemperate speech, reproaching, scolding, and pro- fanity ; the neglect of family worship or discipline, or of the due catechising of children; irregular attendance at wor- ship or the ordinances; excesses of apparel or luxurious living, - such as these are what we should call the minor and less flagrant occasions of church discipline, in open congregation, for the sake of warning the listening flock. Of the graver offences, more or less scandalous, no men- tion need be made. The penalties were, a free confession of failings, apologies and proffers of satisfaction to the
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aggrieved, admonition, and, in extreme cases, excommuni- cation. Nor can we fail to remark on these records, not only on occasion a spirit of gentleness and forbearance, but also the lack of any token of vengefulness or cruelty. An easy and kindly way was always left open for the re- covery and restoration to full communion of the most grievous culprits, on their solicitation and full avowal of repentance and renewed purposes of fidelity. Indeed, in turning over these records a reader will hardly fail of an occasional hesitation as to whether some very grievous offender-for instance, like the sly, but serviceable Cap- tain Underhill - did not dupe his grave brethren -Win- throp among them - with an unctuous self-humiliation.
The Puritan estimate and observance of the Sabbath, or Lord's day, are to be regarded in connection with their dis- esteem and rejection of all the other occasions on the church calendar for public religious offices. They com- bined the Jewish and the Christian one day in seven in their devout regard, not believing that the substitution and consecration of the latter at all impaired the obligation or sanctity of the mode of observance of the former. It was but a change of days, not a reduction of authority or a diminution of observance. The sanctification of a Sabbath rather than of the Sabbath was for them a divine ordinance of world-wide and permanent obligation. They at once imposed it, so far as they could, even upon the wild Indians of these woods. They found it in the commandments an- ticipating the Jewish polity, which was instituted only for an age and a nation. They saw no reason for limiting or qualifying the command about the Sabbath any more than the command to commit no murder. And the command- ment for the Sabbath had two clauses, the one enjoining that one day in the week should be consecrated to holy rest, while the other six days should be given to secular
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duties and industry. They found the church calendar laden and crowded with holy days and holidays, - wholly without warrant or example in Scripture. A discriminat- ing selection from them, if anything of devout, decorous, consistent, and edifying observance could have been con- nected with some of these days, might perhaps have con- ciliated the prejudices of the Puritans, as some of their descendants of this generation take kindly to two of these "church days," - Christmas and Easter. But the calendar as a whole could not claim their reverence, their respect, or even their tolerance. There were names upon it of doubtful sanctity. " Lying legends," frivolous fables, trivial, demoralizing, and even profane elements of superstition and grovelling credulity and imposition, had for ages been over- laying the simple historic Church of Christ. Pious frauds gave an immense power to those who were skilled in all the arts of priestcraft. Holy wells, roadside shrines, sham rel- ics, beguiled the fond confidence of an ignorant and stolid peasantry, which was availed of for extorting from them no small portion of their frugal means. Priests claimed to have power over the destiny of the soul when it was pass- ing from the body and after its release from mortality. More than all, the austerity and thorough sincerity of the Puritan standard of piety, in contrast with the easy lax- ness of the church system, found cause of grievous scandal in the utter inconsistency between the professed sanctity of the occasions of observance on the church calendar and the unseemly and demoralizing indulgences allowed upon them. " If you are commemorating a saint, or a sad or a grateful event in gospel history," said the Puritan, "let your doings and your rejoicings be in harmony with it. Your revels, mummeries, wassails, and jollities are but a mockery." By returns made to Parliament in the Puritan age, it appeared that all the jails and lock-ups of the king-
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dom on the days following Christmas contained more vic- tims of debauchery, rowdyism, and violence than at any other period of the year. This is the historical reason and warrant for the neglect of church days by the Puritans, while they compressed into their observance of the " Sab- bath " enough of religious solemnity, instruction, and disci- pline to last till the next return of the day. Nor, as it has often been satirically and sharply charged against these Puritans, was there any inconsistency between their rejec- tion of church days and their observance of Fasts and Thanksgivings of their own appointment. They found their full warrant for these, as for all their characteristic tenets and practices, in the Scriptures: Individuals, fam- ilies, and groups of kindred in Puritan households conse- crated Fasts and Thanksgivings on occasions of their own, when deep sorrows or gracious blessings came to them, as of Divine appointment. And in the united and public experiences of the Colonists, from their first year on the soil, there were alternations of visitation or relief which struck so deeply into their dread or gratitude that they could not but come together in their assembly to weep or to rejoice. When starvation stared upon them ; when the blight or the murrain, the drought or the tempest, the con- flagration or the earthquake, the prowling savage, or the foreign enemy, or their own dissensions, struck dismay into all hearts, - what were they to do but to humble them- selves in abstinence and prayer ? And when " seasonable showers," fair, full crops, and laden ingatherings displayed to them the bounty of Heaven, what could they do but make return in their prayers of thanksgiving and in the strains of their rude psalmody? He would need to exercise a most candid and comprehensive judgment who should undertake to pronounce upon the general qualities of good or ill in the distinctive elements of Puritan observance, in household
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