USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Woburn > Proceedings 1892 at the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the incorporation of the town of Woburn, Massachusetts > Part 6
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Rev. HENRY C. PARKER.
October 2.]
Rev. Dr. Crawford pronounced the benediction, and with Mr. Hall's exquisite rendering of Lemmens' " Scherzo Symphonique " as a postlude, the First Congregational Church of Woburn closed its two hundred and fiftieth anniversary.
UNITARIAN CHURCH.
At the Unitarian Church, the music for the ser- vice of the forenoon was of an appropriate character, and the pastor, Rev. Henry C. Parker, chose for his theme " Religion in New England Two Hundred and Fifty Years Ago." He said :
This is to be for us a week of backward looking, a time when we are to tell over to ourselves and others the story of the strug- gles and achievements, the sayings and doings of those who were the first of our race to take up their abode on this soil where we now have a habitation and a home. It seems fitting that, on this first day of this jubilee week, we should give our attention to the religion of that elder day for, as Carlyle said, and I think he had the spirit of the Lord when he wrote it, "The chief fact with regard to a man, now and always, is his religion. Not merely what he professes or asserts, but the thing he practically lays to heart; the thing he thinks that he knows for certain con- cerning his vital relations to this mysterious universe, and his duty and destiny there ; this is in all cases the primary thing for him, and creatively determines all the rest. Tell me what a man's religion is, and you tell me to a very great extent what the man is, what the kind of things he will do is. Of a man or a nation we inquire, therefore, first of all, what religion they had." This was certainly true with regard to the Puritans. Religion was the one thing which dominated their thought and life, reaching to the minutest details of their daily experience. With them it was first, last, and always supreme. It was their religion that brought them to this country, and nerved them for the heroic
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task of establishing themselves in their wilderness home. I know it is claimed by some that a trading, mercenary temper mingled largely, and even overpoweringly in their bold enterprise ; but the hypothesis is against human nature, and against the facts of history ; commerce and trade have their splendid triumphs, but no enterprise requiring such courage and trust as theirs was ever yet animated by any less dignified and exalting motives than those of piety or patriotism.
I make no doubt that the spirit of adventure and discovery, of traffic and land speculation was a moving force in the minds of some ; and various influences wrought upon them even as they play upon us, shaping our lives to the courses which we pursue. I have no doubt that they mixed their worldly ambitions with their spiritual aspirations, just as pious people are inclined to do now. They were not above the temptations common to man, and did not always rise to the level of their highest thought, any more than we always live up to the measure of our noblest ideal. But that the main motive of their life, the thing that worked most powerfully in their character and their career, was their religious faith, does not seem to me to admit of intelligent question. His acts as well as his profession show that the typical Puritan put loyalty to his God above every other consideration, and such as he conceived his God to be, such he tried to become. It was because he could not have his own way of worship unmolested in his own country that he cut himself off from the advantages of the civilization of the old world, for a home in the forest of the new, which, in the opinion of Matthew Arnold, was altogether too high a price to pay for the liberties which he gained. The English settlers began to come to New England in 1620. Dur- ing the subsequent ten years, the immigration was slow and slight ; but between 1630 and 1640 they came in great numbers, throng- ing every ship whose prow pointed to the new continent. At the end of this latter year, they had twelve independent groups of colonists, fifty towns, a total population of about twenty thou- sand souls. During the next one hundred and twenty-five years it is estimated that more people went back from here to England than came from there here. Why this change? Why did the year 1640 mark such a change in the fortunes of New England ? Capt. Johnson, in his "Wonder-Working Providence of Zion's Sav-
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iour," says : "This year proved the last of the years of transporta- tion of God's people, only for the enjoyment of exercising the ordinances of Christ, and the enlargement of his kingdom, there being hopes of great good opportunity that way at home." These " hopes of great good opportunity at home,"-on what were they based? On the downfall of Bishop Laud and the tyranny of Charles I., and the opening of the Long Parliament. There was then no further need of the Puritans coming here, since the way was open for them to "cure the ills in Church and State which they had suffered at home." The facts of history, regardless of anything they said of themselves, indicate very clearly, it seems to me, that the main purpose and inspiration of their lives was their religious faith. They came through the "zeal of a godly wor- ship " to plant what they believed to be the true church of Christ, to set up a visible kingdom of God on earth. They did not at- tempt to combine the sacred and the secular ; they simply abol- ished the secular, leaving only the sacred. The State was the Church ; politics, a department of theology; citizenship, the privilege of the " elect," of those only who had received baptism and the Lord's Supper. Religion, they said, was the chief thing, and they meant it, and acted according to their belief. "Let it never be forgotten," said one of the Fathers, " that our New England was originally a plantation of religion, and not of trade. And if there be a man among you who counts religion as twelve, and the world as thirteen, let such an one remember that he hath neither the spirit of a true New England man, nor yet of a sin- cere Christian." The place it occupied in their thought is shown by the fact that the founders of this town took pains, even before they had their town incorporated, to build a meeting-house and a parsonage, choose a minister, and fix the arrangements for his support, the foremost man among them saying : "It is as un- natural for a right New England man to live without an able min- istry, as for a smith to work his iron without a fire."
In quite as literal a sense as ever did the ancient Hebrews, they felt themselves to be "the chosen people of God," and believed that he was ever at hand and more than willing to inter- fere in their behalf, in the smallest affairs.
For God away off in the distant heavens, ruling the constella- tions and galaxies, they had no thought nor care, but for the
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patron deity always busy counting the hairs of their head, jogging their elbows, manipulating their fingers and toes, besetting them behind and before with his providential care, they had hearts full of allegiance and fear. In nothing were they more constant than in their belief in the particular and special providences whereby God looked after the interests of his chosen people, leading them forth by the hand to make their wilderness a habi- tation for the Lord fit and glorious. If the Hebrews, in the day of their deliverance, represented their God as entering into part- nership with hornets, and making flies and frogs the ministers of his wrath, and mice and locusts the executors of his will, not less did the Puritans learn the mind of the Lord in the doings of such humble creatures, - frogs and mice, caterpillars and mosquitoes.
John Winthrop tells us, in his history, that one season the crops were imperilled by the caterpillars ; the Lord had evidently sent them for the trial of the people's faith. What was to be done? There was but one answer : they must go to the Lord in prayer, confess their sins, promise a more strict obedience, and ask him to remove the curse. So all the people got together in their churches and spent several hours in earnest prayer and sup- plication. And presently afterwards, adds the historian, the caterpillars vanished away.
ยท In the village of Watertown, there occurred one day, in view of many witnesses, " a great and notable combat between a mouse and a snake ; and after a long fight the mouse prevailed and killed the snake." The Rev. Mr. Wilson, of Boston, a very sincere and holy man, thus interpreted this grave event : "The snake," he said, "was undoubtedly the devil; the mouse, the poor people whom the Lord had brought hither to overcome Satan and dispossess him of his kingdom forever."
Gov. Winthrop also tells us that his son had in a chamber a a large number of books, among them one wherein the Greek Testament, the Psalms, and the Common Prayer were bound together. He found the Common Prayer " eaten with the mice, every leaf of it, and not any of the two others touched, nor any other of his books, though there were above a thousand." In the mind of the Governor, this extraordinary proceeding on the part of the mice in singling out the Episcopal prayer-book for destruction was, indeed, an ominous fact in which he saw clearly
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October 2.]
the divine disapprobation of this very objectionable book. A modern friend of the Prayer-book has suggested a different inter- pretation. He thinks it quite probable that "the mice, not liking psalmody, and not understanding Greek, took their food from another part of the volume." I mention these things sim- ply as samples of the special providences in which the fathers believed.
They believed in the immediate answers to prayer as fully as they believed in their own existence. One relates how, when certain of them were at sea, they were carried by a violent storm among rocks where they could find no place to get out; but " they went to prayer, and presently there came a great sea and heaved their vessel over into a clear place." So one named Anthony Thacher, being shipwrecked along the coast, was cast upon a rock. He thus relates the event : " As I was sliding off the rock into the sea, the Lord directed my toes into a joint in the rock's side, as also the tops of some of my fingers, by means, whereof, the waves leaving me, I remained so, hanging on the rock, only my head above the water."
Probably some of you have read that very curious compound of theology and history, common sense and superstition, "The Wonder-Working Providence of Zion's Saviour in New England," by one of the seven founders of this town. If you want to know what Puritanism in New England was two hundred and fifty years ago, that is the book for you to read. I know of no other that will give you a better illustration of the religion of that time ; of its pettiness and its greatness, its terrible grimness and its soul-sustaining power. It lets you into the mind and heart of the age, so that you can see how they reasoned, talked, thought, believed, and lived. It has the same kind of inspiration as many of the books of the Bible, that is, it is a theological treatise with a set purpose in mind. The author of the Fourth Gospel wrote with the avowed purpose of setting forth his belief that the Christ was identical with the divine Logos of the Neo-Platonic philosophy. Milton wrote his great epic for the purpose of " jus- tifying the ways of God to man." Capt. Johnson wrote his " Wonder-Working Providence of Zion's Saviour in New Eng- land," to justify the ways of the New England colonists to their brethren on the other side of the "big ditch," as he in an
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unwonted frame of humor, facetiously calls the Atlantic Ocean. Certain ill-natured people, especially Sir Christopher Gardiner, Philip Ratcliff, and Thomas Morton, and others who had either been sent back for misbehavior or had returned of their own accord, not liking the new country, had spread abroad in Eng- land all manner of false and damaging reports respecting the people over here. It was necessary that some one should put down these falsehoods by the truth, otherwise the tide of emigra- tion to this new Zion of the Lord would be abated. Being a typical Puritan, Capt. Johnson had the courage of his convic- tions ; and though he was only an ex-ship-carpenter and a farmer, a plain unlettered man with no literary skill, wielding the pen very much as he did the beetle or the broad-axe, leaving his sen- tences rough-hewn and defiant of grammatical rules, he laid his hand to this very important task.
The one thing he was most assured of was that God was the prime mover in this whole matter of planting a church and state in this " howling wilderness "; that He was directly respon- sible for the movement, and so it was only necessary to give a history of his wonderful providences in the care of his " chosen people " to make all good Christians see that it was a divine privilege to live in this new land. He begins by setting forth the sad condition of the "faithful " in England at the time the Lord began to rescue his chosen ones. While they were in great dis- tress and darkness, Christ, the glorious King of his churches, coming to their deliverance, began to stir up his heralds to make this proclamation : "All ye, the people of Christ, that are op- pressed, imprisoned, and scurrilously derided, gather yourselves together, your wives, and little ones, and answer to your several names, as you shall be shipped for his service in the Western World, and more especially for planting the united colonies of New England, where you are to attend the service of the King of kings." Then he proceeds to tell how the Lord was with his people on the " dreadful and terrible ocean "; how their leaving home was not a secular but a sacred act ; how he prepared for their life here by killing off a great number of the Indians by disease ; how he aided them in their labors, answered their prayers, sent an abundance of good fish to their nets and hooks, and to the hands of such as were not provided with these, and
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October 2.]
how year by year Christ brought new soldiers to carry forward this great "battle of the wilderness." He spoke of the year 1632 as a year of sad distress, ending with a terribly cold winter, congealing Charles River insomuch that men might pass from one side to the other on the ice, and then adds, " Here, reader, thou must be reminded of another admirable act of Christ, in changing the very nature of the seasons, moderating the winter's cold very much of late, which some impute to cutting down the woods and breaking up the land, but let Christ have the praise of all his glorious works." The following summer was very hot, and when they saw their fields scorched by the sun, beholding therein the hand of the Lord stretched out against them, " like tender-hearted children," he says, "they fell down on their knees, begging mercy of the Lord, for their Saviour's sake, urging this as a chief argument that the malignant adversary would rejoice in their destruction and blaspheme the pure ordinances of Christ, trampling down his kingly commands with their own inventions, and in uttering these words their eyes dropped down many tears, their feelings prevailing so strong that they could not refrain in the church assembly. ... For as they poured out water before the Lord, that very instant the Lord showered down water on their gardens and fields which with great indus- try they had planted ; then to think God was so near their prayers, as the drops from heaven fell thicker and faster, so the tears came from their eyes by reason of the sudden mixture of joy and sorrow ; and verily they were exceedingly stirred in their affections, being unable to resolve themselves which mercy was greater,- to have a humble, begging heart given them of God, or to have their request so speedily answered." He further adds that the Indians "seeing the sweet rain that fell were much taken with the Englishman's God."
If the ancient Hebrews believed that they were fighting the Lord's battles when driving the Canaanites and other tribes from the "promised land," even so did the Puritans believe that they were doing the Lord's will when exterminating the Indians who possessed the land at their coming. And in cruelty and blood-thirs- tiness of warfare they were not a whit behind those old-time soldiers of Jehovah. The typical Puritan delighted in war as his native element, and the scalp of an Indian, or better still, of a
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heretic, was a trophy that would put a bright star in his crown of rejoicing. After describing the famous war of extermination against the Pequots, Capt. Johnson concludes thus : "The Lord in mercy toward his poor churches, having thus destroyed those bloody, barbarous Indians, he returns his people in safety to their vessels, where they take account of their prisoners. The squaws and some young youths they brought home with them, and find- ing the men to be deeply guilty of the crimes they undertook the war for, they brought away only their heads." For grimness you will hardly find anything in the Hebrew war record that surpasses that.
A very large part of this first book written in Woburn is given to denunciations of the different heresies and heretics that appeared, from time to time, to harass the Lord's anointed, and to eulogies of the ministers that came over to fight the Lord's bat- tles. "There are those blasphemous Gortonists," he says, "who believe themselves to be Christ, and so have no use for churches and ordinances. Then there are those who divide between the Word and the Word, accusing the regular clergy of preaching a legal gospel, taking their texts and arguments almost entirely from the Old Testament, never preaching gospel sermons, whereas these new lights would keep to the New Testament, as if Christ and his Apostles did not preach good gospel out of the Law and the Prophets. There are some who separate Christ and his graces, pretending that the indwelling spirit of Christ is more important than the outward commands and observances. Others there are who divide between the Word of God and the Spirit of God, or the letter and the spirit, professing themselves to inspir- ations and revelations such as came to the inspired penman of the Bible. 'Come along with me,' says one of them, 'I'll bring you to a woman that preaches better gospel than any of your black-coats that have been at the Ninneversity, a woman of another spirit, who hath had many revelations of things to come.'" This woman was Anne Hutchinson, who was, in the mind of Johnson, the epitome of all that was odious in the unsanctioned preachers, sectaries, and heretics, who thrust their ugly and satanic faces into the presence of the holy and elect of Heaven. He rarely condescends to mention her by name, but points at her with scornful allusions as that " masterpiece of woman's wit, backed
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Ker'scky.
FLOAT -"FORTY-FOUR STATES."
October 2.]
by the sorcery of a second, who had much converse with the devil, the grand mistress of them all who ordinarily prated every Sabbath Day."
The Puritan believed in a personal devil quite as firmly as he believed in a personal God ; and the author of "Wonder-Work- ing Providence" tells how Satan, perceiving that Christ was building up a kingdom here that was to be the light of the whole world, came across the ocean, and employed all these sectaries and heretics to defeat the better purpose of God in Heaven. Any doctrine that differed from the Puritan was regarded as the direct inspiration of his Satanic majesty, and so to fight that doc- trine and the promoters of it was to wage war against the arch enemy of man. "Unworthy the name of a ruling elder," said Johnson, " is he who loses his lionlike courage when sound and wholesome doctrines, declared by pastor or teacher, are spoken against by any. Christ's soldiers should store themselves with all sorts of weapons of war, furbish up their swords, rapiers, and all other piercing weapons, for the Lord Christ intends to achieve greater things by his army in the wilderness than the world is aware of."
One of the questions often asked is, "Why did these people who came here to worship God according to the dictates of their conscience, themselves the subjects of persecution in the mother country, turn round, and immediately begin to persecute those who differed from them?" But the answer is, " The Puritan never came here for any such purpose." The Pilgrim did, and he was always consistent with his ruling idea. He believed in religious liberty, and was ready to grant others what he asked for himself. In the Plymouth colony there was never any punish- ment for heresy, but as Gov. Bradford said, in his history of the Plymouth Plantation, the Pilgrims invited to their communion all "pious minded Episcopalians, Lutherans, Calvinists of various kinds, welcoming them as brethren of one great household. Already there are many among us not of the Separation, and we are glad of their company." But not so with the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Under the reign of James I., the Protestants of England were divided into three classes : first the Conformists, or High Ritu- alists ; second, the Non-Conformists, or Puritans; third, the
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Separatists, commonly called Brownists. The Pilgrims were of this last class, and believed that each congregation should be entirely independent of all others, and that every man should have the liberty of his conscience. And it is to be said that their practice accorded well with their belief. The Puritans, on the other hand, believed in a state religion, differing from the Conformists only as to the kind of religion that should have the sanction of the state. Their ambition was to get the power into their own hands and make the established church Puritan, in- stead of Episcopalian. They wanted to purify the service, not abolish it, and for this were called Puritans ; and never for one moment did they dream of such a thing as granting religious liberty to those who did not think as they did. When they got control of Parliament they were quite as fierce in their persecu- tion of the Brownists as the King's party. Toleration was with them a profligate and scandalous word. "It is so prodigious an impiety," said a leading member of the Westminster Assembly, " that this Parliament cannot but abhor the very meaning of it." It was a current saying in New England that "Anti-Christ was coming in at the back door by a general liberty of conscience." They regarded it, in the words of Thomas Shepard, as "Satan's policy to plead for an indefinite and boundless toleration." Another preacher, Nathaniel Ward, gave it as his opinion that " Every toleration of false religions or opinions hath as many errors and sins in it as all the false religions and opinions it tol- erates." Thomas Dudley, the Lieutenant-Governor, undertook, like Capt. Johnson, to write verse. A typical Puritan could no more write poetry than a horse could sing "America." But there was nothing too great or difficult for him to attempt. Here is a sample of Dudley's genius : -
"Let men of God in courts and churches watch
O'er such as do a toleration hatch."
The author of " Wonder-Working Providence " reminds his fellow- believers that their churches did not flourish under the tolera- tion government of Holland, and tells them that it was the " great hods-podge and mingle-mangle of religion over there that caused the churches of Christ to stand still like corn among weeds." He urges his brethren to purge out all the sour leaven
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of unsound doctrine, and let none wrest the kingdom from them under pretence of liberty of conscience.
The right of private judgment was never any part of the Puri- tan teaching, nor adopted as a principle of action in either civil or ecclesiastical government. It was no part of the purpose of the Puritans in coming here to establish freedom of worship .. The one thing that was uppermost in their minds was the estab- lishment of the true religion and government of Jesus Christ, as: they understood it. To tolerate dissent from their opinions would' be to defeat the supreme purpose of their lives ; hence, it was war to the nail with all who did not think and believe as they did. It was their ruling purpose that made them persecutors ; and the religious liberty which we enjoy to-day is in no part the fruit of any principles or precepts advocated by them.
The contrary of this is often asserted. It is a part of our New England conceit that nearly every wise and good thing incorpo- rated in our national institutions, all our rights and liberties, are traceable to the Puritan settlement here in New England. But when we remember that Massachusetts was the last State in the Union to grant religious liberty, the last to tax the people to sup- port a creed in which they did not believe, while Catholic Mary- land said from the first, "No person within this province, professing to believe in Jesus Christ, shall be in any way troubled, or molested, or discountenanced, for his or her religion, or in the free exercise thereof," and furthermore, remember that Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine the informing mind of the Revolution, and George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Benjamin Rush, James Madison, Patrick Henry, and many another honored name of "the times that tried men's souls," were not New England men, nor of Puritan training, and that John Adams, the foremost man of Massachusetts at the time of the struggle for Independence, was already a Unitarian in religious belief, we shall be rather slow to believe that all our freedom, political and religious, is the direct outcome of Puritan- ism in New England. The Puritan never advocated religious liberty, as I have said, for the good and sufficient reason that they never believed in it; never, at least, believed in it for anybody but themselves. Luther did not believe in the right of private judgment for anybody but himself. He persecuted the Anabap -.
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