USA > Massachusetts > The Puritans versus the Quakers : a review of the persecutions of the early Quakers and Baptists in Massachusetts, with notices of those persecuted and of some of their descendants and tributes to Roger Williams and William Penn > Part 4
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the Massachusetts General Court declared that opinions which would not allow the magistrate to intermeddle to restrain a church or individual from heresy or apostacy were not to be tolerated, Williams on the other hand maintained with inflexible rigor the absolute and eternal distinction between the respective spheres of the civil government and the church. He was very strenuous in the position that " the civil magistrate's power extends only to the bodies, goods, and outward state of men, never to their religious views." Immediately after his landing at Providence, Williams announced as the basis of the new government he and those with him were about to establish : " Having made covenant of peacea- ble neighborhood with all the Sachems and nations round about us, and having, of a sense of God's merciful Provi- dence unto me in my distress, called the place Provi- dence, I desire it may be for a shelter for persons dis- tressed for conscience." His cardinal point, for which he was banished, was, " that the civil magistrate is bound to afford equal protection to every denomination of Christians." He believed that "no human power had the right to intermeddle in matters of conscience ; that neither church, nor state, neither bishop, nor priest, nor king, may prescribe the smallest iota of religious faith. For this, he maintained, that a man is responsible to God alone. This principle was entirely at variance with the then whole structure of society in the colony of Massa- chusetts," which seemed to be based on the Romish as well as Calvanistic policy of the subordination of the in- dividual conscience to established church authority. As a contrast, in the fundamental statutes of the colony founded by Williams and others like him, it was provid-
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ed in reference to matters of religion, that "all men may walk as their consciences persuade them, every one in the name of his God."
Subsequently to the banishment of Williams, a law was passed in Massachusetts, Nov. 13, 1644, banishing all Baptists for their religious opinions, in pursuance of which law the new colony of Williams, Coddington, and others, in Rhode Island, was rapidly recruited. By this law it was :
" Ordered, That if any person or persons, within this ju- risdiction, shall either openly condemn or oppose the baptising of infants, or go about to induce others from the approbation or use thereof, or shall purposely depart the congregation at the administration of the ordinance, or shall deny the authori- ty of the magistracy to enforce this order, every such person or persons shall be sentenced to banishment."
Two hundred and fifty-seven years ago, Dec. 1, 1630, Roger Williams, then 31 years of age, embarked with his wife Mary, at Bristol, Eng., in the ship Lion, Capt. Pierce, master, for the new world, and arrived at Boston, Feb. 6, 1631, after a tempestuous voyage of 66 days. Four years later, for no offence but that of dif- ference of religious views, he was exiled from the spot where he had officiated as a minister of Christ. It was not pretended, says his biographer, that he had violated any law, that he had been guilty of any immoral act, or even that he had proved faithless to any trust, either as a minister or a citizen ; his opinions were his only crimes, and for these, and these alone, did the General Court of Massachusetts decide to send him from their juris- diction. "It was in January, 1636, the sternest month of a New England winter, when Roger Williams was
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obliged to leave his residence in Salem in order to escape the legal warrant that would have conduct- ed him back to the ship then waiting to bear him to England. He went forth an exiled man to trust his life and fortunes to the rough chances in the wilderness that then skirted the colonies of Plymouth and Massa- chusetts Bay, and to encounter the severest necessities and most crushing privations as an outcast from a pro- fessed Christian community."
The succeeding history of his life for nearly half a century till his decease in 1683, is the history of the noble colony which he founded. He "was buried with all the solemnity the colony was able to show," in his family burying ground in Providence, near the spot where he landed, and where a monument, recently erect- ed, marks his last resting place. The first Baptist church in America was founded by him and others act- ing with him in March 1630, on what is now Main street in the city of his naming.
The fundamental views so strenuously maintained by Roger Williams and the Quakers, for which they were so persecuted, " the right of every man to wor- ship God according to the dictates of his own con- science, untrammeled by written articles of faith, and unawed by the civil power," implies a degree of ad- vancement in moral science and political philosophy far in advance of that persecuting age, and so much the greater credit is due to those pioneers of the right who first put these glorious truths into practice in the in- stitutions and governments they established.
The missionary spirit which led Williams while a resi- dent of Massachusetts, to devote his energies to the
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good of the Indians, gave him that hold upon their af- fection and esteem which enabled him to dwell securely among them and to acquire that ascendency in their councils which afterwards made him the averter of war, and the virtual protector of New England.
The exceptional instance, in which Rhode Island soil was made the scene of Indian conflict, in the terri- ble Narraganset fight of Dec. 1675, during King Philip's war, a war which might have been peaceably averted had the counsels of those friends of the red men, Eliot, Gookin, and others, in Massachusetts, been followed, is thus alluded to by Gov. Arnold in his history of Rhode Island :
"Strange to say, this enterprise was undertaken by the other United Colonies without consulting the government of Rhode Island, although the express command of the King, em- bodied in the royal charter, was in these words : 'It shall not be lawful for the rest of the colonies to invade or molest the native Indians, or any other inhabitants, dwelling within the bounds and limits hereafter mentioned (they having sub- jected themselves unto us and being by us taken into our spe- cial protection,) without the knowledge and consent of the Governor and Company of our Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.' The Narragansets had always been friendly to Rhode Island, and although portions of the tribe might engage in the war, the greater part were still subject to her restraint; and whether they were so or not, the attack now made upon them contrary to the advice and without the con- sent of Rhode Island, was a direct violation of the royal order, an unscrupulous disregard of the rights, and a wanton act of indifference to the welfare of a sister colony, which no exigen- cy of state could excuse, since the remedy was easy, involving only a simple act of courtesy or friendship. But these feel. ings were strangers to the confederated Puritans, by whom
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heathens and heretics were classed together as beneath the re- gard of Christian fellowship. The invasion of the Narragan- sets was kindred in spirit with the desertion of Rhode Island after the battle, leaving Providence a prey to the fury of the savages, without a garrison to protect her from enemies whom they had roused against her."
THE QUAKER FOUNDERS OF PENNSYLVANIA.
Having spoken of the founders of Rhode Island, a still more conspicuous contrast with the "Puritan" spirit of the Massachusetts colony, may be seen in the govern- ment established in Pennsylvania by the Quakers, under the lead of William Penn, the contemplation of which is like a dream of Paradise, after a recital of the inhuman barbarities perpetrated in Massachusetts. Although the son of a British Admiral, William Penn was one of the early converts of George Fox to the sublime faith of the Quakers, that the light of God is in every conscience, il- luminating every human soul. At a time of Protestant bigotry he had exerted himself in behalf of universal liberty of conscience in England, and appeared before a committee of the House of Commons to plead for that cause against the wrongs then practiced. More Christ- like than the Puritans, whose toleration of others on coming here was limited to those of the same religious belief with themselves, Penn sought to extend to others, " whether Catholic or Protestant, Puritan or Quaker, Christian or heretic," the same freedom of views he la- bored to extend to his friends in England. "We must give to others the same liberty we ask for ourselves," was the sublime motto of the Quakers, in all their action and influence, whether in the governments in the old 8
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world, or in the founding of the new states in the new. Such were the kind of men banished from Massachu- setts soil 230 years ago, and forbidden to remain here on the penalty of having their ears cut off, their tongues bored through with red hot irons, and being executed If
upon the gallows for their "heretical " opinions.
more of such "heretics " had then abounded, here as well as elsewhere, the world would now be better off. We have seen how it was in Rhode Island, where there was not only free toleration of religious views, but free- dom from those troubles with the Indians in which the colonies of Plymouth and Massachusetts were so often engaged. Compare now, in the words of the historian of the United States, Massachusetts with Pennsylvania in the early times : "In Massachusetts," says Bancroft, " besides internal persecutions for opinions' sake, was strife, contention, and constant affright from Indian alarms. In Pennsylvania, peace and brotherly love, not only among the colonists themselves, but with the Indi- an tribes, because of the more humane and Christian policy pursued, from the first, as long as Quaker coun- sels prevailed." When William Penn came over in 1682 with his shipload of Quaker colonists to found a new commonwealth, on his broad and comprehensive basis of mutual good will and religious and political equality be- fore the law of God and the statutes of man, the first thing he did was to make a treaty with the Indians, whom he recognized as co-subjects of that divine law which should be patterned after by all human laws, and which embraces in its provisions people of all races and conditions and all religious creeds. As has been well said, "William Penn proclaimed to the Indians the same
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message of love and good will which George Fox had professed before Oliver Cromwell in England, and which Mary Fisher had borne to the Grand Sultan in the Turkish dominions." He taught that " The English and the Indian should respect the same moral law, should be alike secure in their pursuits and their possessions, and adjust every difference by a peaceful tribunal composed of an equal number of men from each race." " We meet," said Penn, " on the broad pathway of good faith and good will; no advantage shall be taken on either side, but all shall be openness and love." This treaty of peace and friendship was made under the open sky, by the side of the Delaware, with the sun, and the river, and the forest, for witnesses. " It was," says Voltaire, " the only treaty ever made without an oath, and the only one that never was broken." "It was not ratified by signatures and seals ; no written record of the confer- ence can be found ; and its terms and conditions had no abiding monument but on the heart. There they were written like the law of God, and were never repealed. The simple sons of the wilderness, returning to their wigwams, kept the history of the covenant by strings of wampum, and long afterwards in their cabins, they would recall to their own memory and repeat to their children or to the stranger, the words of William Penn." Other colonies, in and out of New England, which had pursued a different policy toward the red men, suffered terribly from their depredations; the Dutch colony of New York was scarcely ever at peace with the same In- dians with which Penn made his famous treaty; and the history of other colonies is full of Indian hostilities and massacres. "Not a drop of Quaker blood was ever
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shed by an Indian," says Bancroft, but he could not say that of the Puritans of New England, to their shame be it said for their blood-thirstiness toward the most peace- ful sect of Christians on earth. Here is the pen picture which the accomplished and philosophic historian of the United States draws of the scene of the Treaty of Peace and good will between William Penn and the In- dians :
" Imagine the chiefs of the savage communities, of noble shape and grave demeanor, assembled in council without arms ; the old men sit in a half moon upon the ground ; the middle- aged are in a like figure at a little distance behind them ; the young foresters form a third circle in the rear. Before them stands William Penn, graceful in the summer of life, in dress scarce distinguished by a belt, surrounded by a few Friends, chiefly young men, and, like Anaxagoras, whose example he cherished, pointing to the skies as the tranquil home to which not Christians only, but
the souls of heathen go
Who better live than we, though less they know.'
In the following year, 1683, Penn often met the Indians in council, and at their festivals. He visited them in their cabins, shared their hospitable banquet of hominy and roasted acorns, and laughed, and frolicked, and practiced athletic games with the light-hearted, mirthful, confiding red men. He spoke with thein of religion, and found that the tawny skin did not exclude the instinct of a Deity. 'The poor savage peo- ple believed in God and the soul without the aid of metaphys- ics." Penn touched the secret springs of sympathy in the red men, and succeeding generations on the Susquehannah ac- knowledged his loveliness."
William Penn made treaties of peace with nineteen Indian tribes. "We will live," said they, "in love with
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William Penn and his children as long as the sun and moon shall endure."
Contrast this spirit of the Quakers with the perse- cution and bigotry of the early New England Puritans, and we have a sufficiently telling criticism of the faults and errors of the persecutors of the Quakers, both in their treatment of the Indians, and of the people of their own race, because of difference of religious belief.
William Penn, during a series of religious travels before coming to America, paid a visit to Peter the Great, then Czar of Russia, at St. Petersburg, where he was received in a very different manner from the recep- tion his fellow Quakers met in "Puritan " Massachusetts. Afterwards, when Peter went to England, the visit was reciprocated, the Czar holding a friendly conference there with Penn and other Quakers, during which Peter the Great was presented with copies of books explana- tory of the religious views of the Quakers, in answer to inquiries, and the Czar manifested his interest therein by attending one of their religious meetings. Afterwards, when Peter the Great went to Holland, he inquired of one of the burgo-masters whether there were any Quakers there. Upon being told that there were, and that they had a meeting-house in that place, he directed information to be given to them that if they would ap- point a meeting to be held while he was there, he would attend it. Being informed that the meeting-house was just then occupied by thirty of his soldiers, Peter sent positive orders for the soldiers to vacate the house with- out delay and take their baggage with them, and a Friends' meeting was immediately held there by notifi- cation, which the Czar attended, and listened with great
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interest to the preaching, taking occasion, as Penn says, to " commend the doctrines of the gospel as they were professed and declared by ' humble members of the So- ciety of Friends.'" The Czar is reported as attending several other Quaker meetings also, “ conducting entire- ly as a private person."
These references are made to show the difference between so called " Puritanic " and what some call " un- civilized" and "barbaric," if not "heathen," charity in reference to religion.
The poetess, Hannah F. Gould, has the following beautiful and truthful picture of the Quaker state of Pennsylvania, founded by William Penn and his associ- ates :
Her laws were as righteous, pure, and plain, As the warm in heart and the pure in brain, To bind the strong in a silken chain, Could in wisdom and love devise. The tongue needed not the bond of a vow, And man to his fellow worm did not bow, Nor doff the screen o'er his open brow, To any beneath the skies.
The Quaker passed on from land to land, With the lowly heart and the open hand Of one who felt where he soon must stand And his final account give in. For long had he made up his sober mind That he could not depart to leave mankind With the ample field of the earth behind No better than he had been.
And bright was the spot where the Quaker came, To leave it his hat, his drab, and his name, That will sweetly sound from the trump of fame Till his final blast shall die.
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The city he reared from the sylvan shade His beautiful monument now is made ; And long have the rivers their pride displayed In the scenes they are rolling by.
Cotton Mather, author of the "Magnalia" and oth- er literary monstrosities of religious bigotry and super- stition, defending the terrible persecutions and witchcraft delusions of 200 years ago in Massachusetts, described the colony of Rhode Island where no such evils existed, and where all sects in religion stood equal before the law, as " a colluvies of Anabaptists, Quakers, Antinomians, Armenians, Socinians, X * everything in the world but true Christians!" Yet there are some per- sons even at the present day antiquated enough to quote from the " Magnalia" in their stress for the defence of the disgraceful proceedings against the Quakers.
The most charitable light in which we can view the doings of our offending forefathers, above criticised, is that the Puritans exemplified the spirit of the past, while the Quakers and others acting with them, fore. shadowed that of the future. The Puritans we should view in the light of by-gone centuries, the Quakers in that of the present age which has adopted their princi- ples.
The principle of Calvinism was merely a substitu- tion for Popery of Calvin's dogma of church suprema- cy, which required that "civil magistrates must be sub- ordinate to the church, submit to it their sceptres of pow- er, and throw down their crowns before it, yea, as the prophet speaketh, lick the dust of the feet of the church." On this same principle the Pope of Rome, in the height of the papal power, reduced even kings and emperors to the humiliation of having their necks trod-
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den upon and their crowns taken from them by the Pope.
" In haereticos gladio vindicandum est," ("heretics must be punished with the sword,") was a motto of Cal- vin as well as of Rome, and the Calvinistic Puritans of Massachusetts acted too closely on this principle when they sought to extirpate the "heresy " of Quakerism from their midst. The burning at the stake of Servetus at the instigation of Calvin and others, at Geneva, three hundred years ago, Oct. 27, 1553, because Servetus would not retract certain " opinions" held by him re- garding the Trinity, was but a precursor of the hanging of the Quakers in Massachusetts a century later, for their religious views. And it is not strange, that in pur- suance of the light and progress of modern times, the orthodox churches are now gradually becoming ashamed of the name of Calvin, the second oldest or- thodox society in Worcester having within a few years very wisely changed its corporate name, by petition to the General Court, from the "Calvinist Society," to the "Central Society," eradicating the obnoxious name, a step taken soon after the coming here of the present pastor, ten years ago, whose ideas of Christian fellow- ship, and it is believed of most others of his contempo- raries, are too broad to be cooped up within the narrow limits of Calvinism.
"Judicio seculari possunt licito occidi," ("Secular justice can legitimately put heretics to death,") is said to be still the motto of the Romish church, and it is high time every vestige of such tyranical doctrine, so subver- sive of every principle of liberty, civil as well as relig- ious, under whatever name it may appear, was obliter-
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ated. The Calvinist John Norton maintained the right of the civil power, as the agent of the church, to use the sword, when necessary, in order to put down " here- sy," a doctrine allied to that of the church of Rome, and on this ground he acted his part in the persecution of the Quakers. Norton taught that "the will of man is an instrument disposed and determined unto its action according unto the decree of God, being as much subor- dinate to it as the axe is to the hand of the hewer; that man, even in violating God's commands, fulfils God's de- cree; that the infallible ordering of the existence of sin for a better end, and the forbidding of sin, are not at all inconsistent, but accord with the volition of God which cannot be resisted or defeated; that God has elected whom in his wisdom and mercy he pleased to eternal life, and others to eternal condemnation." This ridiculous theology blasphemously makes the Almighty a wilful tyrant, responsible for all the iniquity in the world.
Hardly more than 150 years have elapsed since a spirit of persecution similar to what is above criticised, though not so bad, was manifested by those of the Cal- vinistic puritanic faith in the first church of Worcester, towards those of another shade of religious belief, when a company of Scotch Presbyterians organized a society and undertook to build a meeting-house here to worship God in their own way, and the frame-work of the new structure was hardly completed, when such was the predjudice against the new-comers by the adherents of the "established church," that a mob by night tore the structure down and the enterprise was in consequence abandoned. Later still, only 75 years ago, when the movement was being made for the organization of the
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First Baptist Church here, with what bitterness was the project opposed by the then pastor of the Old South Church, Rev. Dr. Austin, he regarding the starters of the new enterprise as " breaking in upon his charge, and as drawing awakened inquirers in his congregation away from the path of duty, and it was to be feared, from the path of salvation." As a consequence, he refused the ordinary courtesies due under such circumstances towards other denominations, and by invitation of good old Dr. Bancroft of the Unitarian Church, the recognition ser- vices of the new church and the installation exercises of its first pastor, Rev. Wm. Bentley, were held in Dr. Bancroft's church, Dec. 9, 1812, and attended by him. Coming down to our own times, in the march of prog- ress, in the contrast with the past, we happily find the present Presbyterian church of Worcester worshipping under the same roof with the successors of their former persecutors, in a building erected by the combined con- tributions of members of all religious denominations.
These references to the past are made to show the progressive advances in religious freedom, and the con- trast of past times with the present, in the grand princi- ples of Christian charity and free religious toleration of which the Quakers and Baptists were the pioneers.
THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE EARLY QUAKERS.
The greatest fault of the early Quakers, was, that they found themselves so far ahead, in views, of the people among whom they first came, but they found themselves more at home in the places to which they afterwards went, and their persecutors here were soon afterwards obliged to recognize their right to a denomi-
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national existence. Wherever they have lived, in the old world or in the new, the Quakers have ever been found on the side of every great reformn, civil and polit- ical, as well as moral and religious, which reforms they have always sought to bring about in a peaceful way, by appeals to the people. They were among the first to espouse the cause of the enslaved African, to plead for the rights of the wronged Indians, and for a more improved and humane system of prison discipline for criminal offenders. They were the first to maintain and put in practice, in all their church relations, as members, officers, and preachers, the equal rights of the sexes ; and it was a Quaker preacher named Cooper, in New Jersey, in 1776, who made the first move in this country for civil suffrage for woman, on an equality with man, and on his motion, as a member of the constitutional con- vention, the principle was incorporated in the first con- stitution of his state, and under it women voted there with men for thirty years, till the party opposed to Quakers (the democratic party) came into power. The voices of the Quakers were loudly raised from the begin- ning in behalf of the philanthropic movement for the abolition of the inhuman institution of negro slavery, in both continents; and long anterior to, and side by side of, Clarkson and Wilberforce in the old world, and Garrison, Phillips, and other anti-slavery pioneers in the new, they urged on the movement till its final ac- complishment. The first memorials presented in Con- gress for action against slavery, soon after the organiza- tion of the government in February, 1790, were from the yearly meetings of the Society of Friends in Penn- sylvania, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland,
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