USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Metropolitan Boston; a modern history; Volume I > Part 19
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The First Professional Men-The Company sent over a barber-sur- geon, Robert Morley, under contract to serve the colony for three years. With him came Lambert Wilson, a "chirurgeon" who evidently was in- tended to practice mainly on the Indians. He was also an instructor. The ministers often practiced the simple medicine of the day, the Gov- ernor himself being not unskilled in this direction.
The public interest, the learning, the culture, and most assuredly the power of the colonial Boston rested in its clergy. Only the magistrates compared with them, and often the minister was both clergyman and magistrate. In social position, the minister and magistrate were equal, both, and only these, received the title Mr., and their wives Mrs. Those lower down on the scale were "Goodman" and "Goodwife" until one reached the servant who was simply called by name. It is an odd fact that marriages were not performed by the clergy, nor did they conduct funeral services. Lechford says: "At burials nothing is read, nor any funeral sermon made ; but all the neighborhood, or a goodly company of them, come together by the tolling of the bell, and carry the dead sol- emnly to the grave and there stand by while he is buried." Even when Winthrop died, all that is told of his funeral is: "His body was, with great solemnity and honor buried at Boston, in New England, the third of April, 1649."
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It may have been that the minister had too many other important duties to be troubled with marriages and funerals; what is probably the truth is, marriage was considered a civil contract, and the custom of religious funeral services had not yet risen. In most of the Colonial life and affairs, the church came first, and the minister was the prime minister of the church. The first records of the Massachusetts Bay Company concern the building of houses for the minister, Mr. Wilson, the first of Boston's and Mr. Phillips, and the furnishing of them with supplies. That most remarkable governmental contribution of New England, the town was based on a church and grew up about it. Towns were organ- ized to care for a church, and the town's business was conducted in the meeting-houses for many years. And conversely, towns gathered the money and paid it to the minister, some of them as late as two centuries after the founding of Boston. The first church of Boston was organized in Charlestown before the settlers had moved to Shawmut, and a meet- ing-house was erected before all the townsfolk had been housed safely.
Religion the Foundation of Boston-One can never get away from the religious motif in a study of early Colonial times. A religiously oppressed people left their country to worship God as they pleased. In doing it they often over-rode the desires of other people, but it was not freedom for other people that they sought. Criticize the Puritans as we will, con- demn them as much as we like for their persecution of others, they had their own ideas and were not bothering to help others set up theirs. The early legislation is full of acts looking toward a conformity, by those who cared to live in the colony, to the Puritan church. It was but a short while, little more than a year, before it was "ordered and agreed that, for time to come, no man shall be admitted to the freedom of the body politic, but such as are members of some of the churches within the limits of the same." Mary Caroline Crawford, writing of this, says : "To them such an ordinance seemed the one and only way of forming a Christian republic towards which their hearts yearned, a community in which the laws of Moses should constitute the rules of civil life and in which the godly clergy should be the interpreters of those rules." She goes on further to state, "the weakness of the system lay in the fact that the clergy were only men. And being men, of like passion with our- selves, brew, by the very deference they fed upon, into creatures insati- ate for power."
A Puritan Sabbath-Since the church was so essentially a part of the State, the source of citizenship, attendance upon its services was the prime duty of all. The Lord's Day was guarded by the most stringent regulations. It would seem that the only lawful place for anyone to be on the Sabbath was in the meeting-house, and certain it is that the Lord's
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Day services were well attended come what might. What these services were like is well described by Horace E. Scudder in the "Memorial His- tory of Boston." He wrote :
At first there was no bell to call the people together, but a drum was beaten. It is probable that the first use of a bell was at the hands of the bellman going about the town as the hour for worship drew near. The families were divided, as one sometimes now sees them in New England country villages,-the men on one side, the women and girls on the other, and the boys, who made a third class, by themselves, with the tithing-man to supervise them. The ruling elders had a seat immediately below the pulpit, facing the congregation. They were raised apparently upon a platform; and in front of them, upon a lower plane, yet still often above the people, sat the deacons in similar position. The dignity and social rank of the families was indicated in the places severally assigned to them. The first service was at about nine o'clock in the morning. The pastor began with extemporaneous prayer, lasting about a quarter of an hour. After prayer, either the pastor or a teaching elder read a chapter in the Bible and expounded it. A Psalm was then sung, lined out by one of the ruling elders. The Psalm were something of a stumbling-block to the people. The Psalter, as used in the English church, was adapted to chanting, and moreover the associations with it were of prelacy. The Puri- tans, by the same instinct which led them to reprehend the reading of the Bible without comment as savoring of idolatry and the surrender of reason, wished to use the Psalms in a metrical version; and in the early years of Massachusetts Bay used either that of Sternhold and Hopkins, or that made by Ainsworth, of Amsterdam. The "Bay Psalm Book" superseded these in Boston in 1640. For a long time a very small number of tunes-of which York, Hackney, Windsor, St. Mary's, and Martyrs were the chief- were in use by congregations. Instrumental music was proscribed. There is little refer- ence to the singing in churches in the early records, and the darkness is made more dense by this unexplained passage in the records of the General Court, under date of June I, 1641: "Mr. Edward Tomlins, retracting his opinions against singing in the churches, was discharged." There is nothing to enlighten us as to the ground of Mr. Tomlins' objections ; he may have murmured against the quality of the music, as people do today who are not arrested; or he may have had painful doubts as to the propriety of sing- ing at all.
After the singing came the sermon, which was the piece de resistance. When there was an affluence of ministry, one expounded the Word while another preached. The sermon was rarely written out in those days; it was measured, not by the number of pages upon which it was written, but by the hour-glass which stood at the preacher's side. The minimum or regulation length seems to have been an hour, but Johnson speaks of a listener to Mr. Shepard, of Cambridge, seeing the glass turned up twice; and on a special occasion,-the planting of a church at Woburn,-he relates that the Rev. Mr. Syms continued in preaching and prayer about the space of four or five hours. Follow- ing the sermon was a prayer by the teaching elder and the blessing. Sometimes another Psalm also was sung after the sermon. A second service, substantially the same in char- acter, was at two o'clock in the afternoon.
What Boston was to Winthrop-It is difficult to catch the flavor of the Winthrop period despite all that has been written concerning it, but this description by Scudder of a Puritan Sabbath day gives, at least, a breath of it. Religion was the vital thing then ; all else was but subordi- nate. One may recount tales of hardship and plenty, of meagre culture
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and limited outlook, of political dissensions, of swift rising prosperity ; but if one forgets the religious motif of the story, there can be little understanding of the early Puritan folk, and less sympathy. The Win- throp era stands out among the landmarks of Boston's history, not be- cause it was the first, but because it was so completely one of religion. We may quarrel with the faith of the Puritans, condemn its ideas and practices, but there is no getting away from the fact that it was the foundation upon which Boston was built. It is easy to see now, that the theocratic Utopia which the Puritans hoped to create was a mistaken ideal, one impossible of realization ; nevertheless it was the ideal to which Winthrop gave the best years of his life, and the one which held sway in the direction of the town life for the three decades of that life, and per- sisted for many years after his death. Unlikely, as it may seem, out of this narrow ideal came many of the better things of which we are now so proud, and to it may be traced those higher stages of culture, education, literature and the like which is so precious an inheritance of the present. If Boston be "different," if it be true that it has a culture and a character that is unlike other cities, it is not too much to insist that the principal reason for this uniqueness lies in its having been founded in religion, the religion of which the Godly Winthrop, during the crucial beginning period was the main leader and exponent.
The Arrival of New Notables-Because emphasis has been given to the Winthrop name and dominance in the account of the crucial first period of the Boston settlement, it does not mean that there were no other or even few notables who arrived in Boston during the height of the Puritan emigration. The signers of the Cambridge compact have already been mentioned. In early November of the second year, 1631, the truly remarkable Margaret, wife of the Governor, came accompanied by the eldest son, the second John Winthrop, who made a name for himself as the Governor of Connecticut. On the same good ship "Lyon," was John Eliot, who was ordained the next year as the minister of the Roxbury congregation. Of this church Eliot remained the revered pastor until his death in 1690; but he is better known to the world at large as the "Apos- tle to the Indians." The needs of the aboriginal dwellers in New Eng- land made such an appeal to him, and he gave himself, as did no other, to the betterment and especially the Christianizing of the Indians. He traveled far and wide gathering them in groups and preaching to and teach- ing them. The town of Natick in nearby Middlesex County, was founded by him as an Indian settlement, and was the most elaborate attempt made by the Puritans to improve the condition of the race they found in possession of the land. Eliot not only studied the Indian tongue, but gave them a written language. His grammar and Bible in the dialect are
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among the greatest of the pieces of literature produced by the early Puri- tans in this country. In June, 1632, the "William and Francis," making her second trip to the Bay, brought, among other "honest men," John Welde, who became John Eliot's colleague in the Roxbury church after Eliot began to make Boston the headquarters of his Indian work.
The great event of the year 1663 was the arrival of the ship "Griffin" with a truly great acquisition to the Boston colony. Winthrop chron- icles the event in his Journal :
"September 4. The Griffin, a ship of three hundred tons, arrived (hav- ing been eight weeks from the Downs). This ship was brought in by John Gallop a new way by Lovell's Island, at low water, now called Griffin's Gap. She brought 200 passengers. . .. In this ship came Mr. Cotton, Mr. Hooker, and Mr. Stone, ministers, and Mr. Peirce, Mr. Haynes (a gentleman of great estate), Mr. Hoffe, and many other men of good estates. They got out of England with much difficulty all places being belaid to have taken Mr. Cotton and Mr. Hooker, who had been long sought for to have been brought into the High Commission; but the master being bound to touch at the Wight, the pursuivants attended there, and, in the meantime, the said ministers were taken in at the Downs. Mr. Hooker and Mr. Stone went presently to Newtowne, where they were to be entertained, and Mr. Cotton stayed at Boston." The Governor's list, had he been able to look into the future, would have men- tioned several others of the "Griffin's" passengers whose names were to become well known in Boston. Thomas Leverett, for example, became one of Boston's most esteemed citizens, as he had been in old Boston where he had been an influential supporter of John Cotton. Hoffe, as he pronounced it, was Atherton Hough, a former mayor of Old Boston ; Edmund Quincy, another passenger, was the progenitor of the Quincy family, three representatives of which have been mayors of New Eng- land Boston. The Hutchinsons, Anne, the first "woman's rights" ex- ponent in America, and her husband, with the minister John Wheel- wright, brother-in-law, who when banished founded Exeter, New Hamp- shire.
John Haynes was elected Governor in 1635 ; Hooker and Stone quickly dropped out of Boston's life. Winthrop's Journal gives a significant picture of the migratory spirit of our forefathers, a picture whose counter- part has been reproduced a thousand times in the history of New Eng- land. "Mr. Hooker, pastor of the church at New Town, and most of his congregation went to Connecticut. His wife was carried on a horse lit- ter, and they drove an hundred and sixty cattle and fed of their milk by the way." The Puritans were born pioneers ; their coming to Massachu- setts was but the first step on the westward journey continued in this country until two centuries later it had reached the Pacific Coast. One
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now finds New England towns, New England character and culture in many parts of that vast territory stretching due west from Massachusetts and her neighboring Puritan founded States.
A "Shining Light"-Was it intuition that made John Winthrop repeat Cotton's name and place it at the end of the account in his Journal? Cotton was, indeed, an acquisition to Boston; he was to be a "Shining Light." For twenty years he had been the vicar of St. Botolph's Church of Boston, England, but falling under the ban of John Laud, had to put the ocean between them. He was ordained the year of his arrival, as colleague and teacher of the church in Boston and soon became one of the religious leaders of the colony. He brought with him certain views of civil government which reacted to the disadvantage of Winthrop. He held, and tried to enforce his notion, "that a magistrate ought not to be turned into the condition of a private man without just cause." The Governor, under the necessity of expressing his opinion concurred with Cotton, and the practical answer of the Court was to elect another man in his place.
Little is known about John Cotton, for it was as a preacher that he shone, and his brilliancy in this line is not manifest in his published sermons. Boston is said by some to have been named in his honor, but Boston was named as such two years before his arrival on these shores. He was a learned man, deeply versed in the ancient languages. Edward Everett wrote what is inscribed on the memorial tablet in the Cotton Chapel of St. Botolph's, Old England : "In perpetual memory of John Cotton, for many years a grave, skilful and laborious vicar of this church. . He sought a new settlement in a new world, and remained even to the end of his life a pastor and teacher of great reputation and of the greatest authority in the first church of Boston . . "
Before Winthrop was returned to office as the chief magistrate, Dud- ley, who had replaced him, was in turn superseded by John Haynes. Then came to Boston Sir Henry Vane, son of the Comptroller of the King's household, a handsome, brilliant young man of twenty-five. Red tape was cut to give him the right hand of fellowship and make him one of the innermost circle of the colony, and a member of John Cotton's church. Within a year he was elected Governor, and upon his youthful shoulders were thrust the governmental and religious burdens of the town and colony. Of his wisdom, his after life is evidence, his diplomacy was manifest in his handling of most of the civil affairs of the colony. But all this availed him but little when he tried to settle the controversy that arose over Anne Hutchinson, and the ideas she held. This difficulty, known later as the Antinomian Controversy, was the first violent com- bined religious and civil trouble in the history of the colony. Vane, as
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true a Puritan as any, but cosmopolitan by training and naturally broad minded, inclined towards a liberal attitude in the "little Boston tempest." The amiable Winthrop, as a colonist who had given greatly for peace in religion and state, could consider only the preservation of that peace and state. It was liberal against conservative, with Vane as the leader of one faction and Winthrop of the other. The conservative element won; Vane was defeated for Governor and returned to England, there to con- tinue his remarkable career which ended in his execution. Winthrop stayed with the colony he led and suffered for the peace he so desired but was unable to secure. When he passed on, and Endicott resigned as the chief magistrate, the colony was deep into one of the most disgraceful epochs of its early history.
The Antinomian Controversy-The Antinomian Controversy, which began this era of repression, seems, to the modern mind, but a theological squabble. The phrases bandied back and forth, "Covenant of Grace" and "Covenant of Works," "justification and sanctification" now have lost all meaning. One sees the picture of a woman teaching that the religion that is in man's heart is of more import than his outward piety, and one is inclined to agree. If the definition of Antinomianism is taken as it is, "The belief that faith frees the Christian from conformity to the moral law," one begins to see the possibilities for argument. But that so tremendous a struggle should arise over such a matter, that the intel- lectuals of that day should take such violent stands on one side or the other of the controversy, and push their prosecution of them to such ex- treme measures is, today, difficult of understanding. The importance of the Anne Hutchinson affair, and of the persecutions which followed of other religious exponents, lies in the very fact that just such things could and did occur, and play an important rôle in the development of the early New Englander.
"The so-called 'Antinomian' episode," writes M. A. De Wolfe Howe, "was one of the significant events of the first decade in Boston, and as such deserves some special scrutiny." "Boston never wanted a good prin- ciple of rebellion in it," said Emerson, "from the planting until now. The rebellion led by Mrs. Anne Hutchinson was against a blind following of the ruling clergy. It has well been described as 'New England's earliest protest against formulas.' Its leader stands head and shoulders above the transcendental women of all periods of Boston history in her suc- cess in putting the whole machinery of the church and state out of run- ning order." The significant phrase in this quotation is that which tells of the rebellion against the "ruling clergy," for to understand it even a little, it must not be forgotten that, not only was there a large propor- tionate number of ministers among the founders of Boston, but that these
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were men of unusual gifts and education, and for several decades were the ruling class in the Puritan Commonwealth. Even the magistrates were ecclesiastically inclined when not ordained, and however sincere, all were relentless in their endeavors to conserve their powers and rule.
John Cotton and Anne Hutchinson-Anne Hutchinson, whose name was the synonym for Antinomianism was a thoroughly good woman, "to whose person and conduct there attaches no stain." A former member of John Cotton's St. Botolph Church, upon her arrival in Boston in 1634, made application for membership in the congregation of which Cotton was the associate pastor. Reports of her extravagant religious opinions had preceded her, but after a searching examination, she was admitted into fellowship in the church. Brilliant, naturally gifted in argument, magnetic, critical perhaps, she soon had a following among the women of Boston who delighted to meet with her and listen to her discussion of the sermon preached the Sunday just gone. Into these talks were in- jected her personal ideas and faith. Often her recapitulation of the ser- mon was little more than a preachment of her own, the gist of which was, that there were "elect" folk in the world, who although unordained and no part of the clergy, were equal to or above the ministry. Certain preach- ers in the colony were under this "Covenant of Grace," Cotton for one, but most were not. To the "elect" were given direct revelations of the will of God, the recipients of which were by this very fact lifted above any civil or religious law, and no longer to be judged or controlled by them. Such revelations as she professed to receive were, for the most part, condemnatory of the clergy and decidedly subversive of all autho- rity in the colony, ecclesiastical or other.
Such teaching could neither go unnoticed nor unchecked, or the very foundations of the colony would be undermined and the whole structure fall in ruins. The clergy gathered, and, calling upon Cotton to explain where he stood, managed to get the lady to meet them in private confer- ence to thrash the whole matter out. Traps were set for Mrs. Hutchin- son, into which she was too clever to fall. Finally she was begged to deal openly and speak her mind. It may be that the atmosphere of the meeting had changed ; perhaps it was with the feeling that she was speak- ing in confidence to honorable men. At any rate, she frankly told them she believed that there was a difference between the ministry of John Cotton, and some of the other ministers, and that the reason for it was that he had "the seal of the Spirit" which the others had not.
The Trial of Anne Hutchinson-Her words sealed her doom, although her punishment was to come later. She had spoken against the clergy, and as a man they joined against her. Even John Cotton left her and came to the defense of his profession. There was far more to the con-
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troversy than clerical resentment, for the colony had taken up the fight and was in danger of a division which would bring about its destruction. Many of the principal inhabitants of Boston ranged themselves on the side of Mrs. Hutchinson. There were real signs of lawlessness as the dispute spread among "the common sort of people." No fewer than seventy-six residents of Boston were disarmed because of their sympathy with her. There is no need of going into the charges and counter-charges, the hearings, Synod and trials. The Synod found eighty-two charges of heresy against the lady, besides a variety of other things.
Mrs. Crawford says of the trial, in the course of which Mrs. Hutchin- son was condemned and sentenced to banishment, that it "is one of the ghastliest things in the history of the colony." In her "St. Botolph's Town" she goes on to say: "The prisoner, who was about to become a mother, was made to stand until she was exhausted, the while those in whom she had confided as friends plied her with endless questions about her theological beliefs. Through two long weary days of hunger and cold she defended herself as well as she could before these 'men of God,' but her able words availed her nothing; she had disparaged the ministers and they were resolved to be avenged. Though Coddington pointed out that 'No law of man or God' had been broken by the woman before them, she was none the less banished 'as unfit for our society.' So there was driven out of the city she had adopted the most remarkable intellect Boston ever made historic by misunderstanding." The Reverend Mr. Wilson pronounced her sentence of excommunication: "Therefore in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the name of the church, I do not only pronounce you worthy to be cast out, but I do cast you out ; and in the name of Christ I do deliver you up to Satan, that you may learn no more to blaspheme, to seduce and to lie; and I do account you from this time forth to be a Heathen and a Publican, and so to be held of all the Brethren and Sisters of this congregation and of others; therefore I command you in the name of Christ Jesus and this church as a Leper to withdraw yourself out of this congregation." Whether Mrs. Hutchinson went to Satan and learned no more "to blaspheme, seduce and lie" under his tuition is unknown. We do know that she with her loyal husband and a few friends went to Rhode Island, and that later, just outside New York, the whole family except one child was massacred by Indians.
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