USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > The memorial history of Boston : including Suffolk County, Massachusetts, 1630-1880. Vol. I > Part 24
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said that Roger Williams " had a wind-mill in his head," and that if any- body had lost his conscience, he might find one of a sort to suit him in Rhode Island. A rich variety of specimens was certainly offered from that source to Boston.
A reader of the old strange annals of those times may be moved to conceive what would have been the fate and fortune of the Puritan Common- wealth had it been put to the test of quite another set of spirits than those who tried it. Suppose that a party had been developed among them who simply intensified Puritanism, as moping ascetics, devotees, exceeding in austerity and rigidness the tone and ways of their associates, rebuking their regard for worldly thrift, and exacting a piety even sterner than theirs: possibly their history might then have read somewhat differently. But if we would rightly read their history as it is written, we must now re- cognize the fact that those who experienced the most ruthless dealing from the Puritan magistrates presented themselves as representing opinions, no- tions, and practices which were at the same time most odious and alarming to the Puritans. The latter welcomed -indeed they perfectly revelled in- disputations confined to the exposition and interpretation of the Bible. They were ready on all occasions to entertain either with approval or assault anything offered to them as exposition or interpretation of Holy Writ. Texts were to them a legal tender in the currency of beliefs and obligations. But when assertion and argument took them outside of the Bible, either in the direction of ecclesiastical traditions and "Papistical claims," or of the asserting of special illuminations or " revelations," they were taken at a disadvantage ; variances then became embittered; there was no recognized umpire for adjusting the issues opened, and they had recourse to other weapons and methods than those of argument. Identifying civil order and security with the foundation and safeguards of their Commonwealth which they had drawn from and, as they believed, had squared by the Bible, all " heady notions," all eccentric individualisms, all mystical speculations, became, in their apprehensions, fomentings of sedition and revolution. Even in our own secure State, with all the interests and excitements of our heterogeneous population, we are not without experiences and memories of rancors and dreads caused by the wild vagaries and the fancied plottings of mischief of men and women who shock convictions or defy the laws, or threaten, instead of " prophesying," woes and calamities to the community.
The range of life and the materials for mental occupation and excitement were exceedingly meagre for the hard-worked and anxious exiles of the Puritan colony. They were enthralled by all the superstitions of their own time, and additional clouds of gloom and fear came over them from their wilderness experiences. They became morbid, exeitable, and apprehen- sive, so that they persuaded themselves that an attitude of watchfulness for self-defence should keep them ever on their guard against visible and invisible foes, - fiendish powers of the air; Indians who, if not victims of Satan, seemed to be in league with him; and evil men, disturbers and
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fomenters of mischief. The magistrates and elders, with their fuller intelli- gence and a sense of their enhanced responsibility, realized that they had in charge many of "y" weaker sort" among the common people, who might easily be drawn away by the craft or subtilty of " erratic spirits," and they felt bound to guard them from the risks of contact with heretics. It is to be remembered, also, that in the mother country, where there secmed less reason for dreading the influence of fanaticism and the ingenuities of heresy, the authorities anticipated the course pursued in this colony in dealing with the same classes of offenders. The penalties of fining, imprisonment, scourging, and mutilations of the person inflicted here were in strict imitation of those inflicted in England on the strange fellowships of Ranters, Scekers, Anabaptists, Quakers, Muggletonians, Fifth-Monarchy men, &c.,- saving only that Boston brought four of its most insufferable tormenters to the gallows. The wit of man in sanity or mildly crazed, working upon all the fancies and whimseys of the human brain, might well be challenged, even in these days so fertile in speculation and individual theories and crotchets, to match the productiveness of the enthusiastic and fanatical spirits of England just preceding and extending through the Commonwealth period of its history. Given the two chief factors or sources of material to be wrought with, - the Bible under cach one's private inter- pretation to test what he could make of it, whether he could himself read it, or was dependent upon listening to it from others' lips; and the fathomless chaos and medley creations of an overwrought, uninstructed mind, believed in each case to be illuminated and inspired by special divine communica- tions, - and we ccase to marvel over the effervescing products of the com- bination. Human ingenuity, conceit, credulity, and self-delusion may be said to have exhausted their resources and capacities in the products of the time, which were wrought out by the abounding forms of eccentric sectarism and heresy. Out of the mountain heaps of pamphlets and tractates of the period, with which the busy presses teemcd, enough are extant in these days to constitute in themselves a portent to be marvelled over. Indeed these extraordinary productions are now sought for and gathered up at large cost by curious collectors, fascinated by their quaint titles, their mystic dreamings, their extravagant vagaries, their intensity of conviction which would have made their disciples ready to bear the rack or the stake.
One of the most profoundly engaging exercises in the study of the life of Milton, as illustrated by his times, is to note how his noble soul, in working out the grand immunity of the private conscience in its exercises of thinking and believing, was tormented by "the buzz and gabble," so noisy and teazing all around him. The effervescences and extravagances of what we call the religious spirit, working its wonderful manifestations among large numbers of ignorant and illiterate persons in that period, engaged many pens in the mere effort to catalogue and classify them, as one arranges strange specimens of Nature's productions in a cabinet. But these broods of sectaries were by no means in a fossil or inert condition.
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They were very much alive, and about equally engaged in prophesying their own oracles and assailing other peoples'. Certain names and titles have come down to us, and are in use to-day as designating religious sects, or denominations, or opinions, which were first adopted or assigned when those who bore them are supposed to have first espoused the beliefs or opinions which the words now designate. We read how ruthlessly the Puritan magistrates dealt with Antinomians, Baptists, and Quakers. But there are no persons now living who fully represent those who first bore these names, and carried with them the repute, and made such a manifestation of themselves, as did those who teazed and tormented the old magistrates. We should be greatly misled if we transferred to those who were once dealt with here as Baptists and Quakers the qualities, princi- ples, ways, and demeanor of those who now bear these names, seeing that the latter do not represent in spirit, word, or act the sort of persons of whom we read in our history. It would be enough to set us in the right point of view for secing the real truth on this subject, if we should simply cull out the epithets and phrases for individuals, and for their opinions and behav- ings, which the magistrates and elders used in dealing with the objects of their stern discipline. The emphatic words employed make up a strange category. They are such as these : blasphemous, seditious, unsavory, ex- orbitant, monstrous, diabolical, impious, satanical, with many other sharp, stinging epithets. To say nothing of the absurdity of the supposition that any such terms should be applied to the opinions or practices of those known among us as Baptists and Quakers, it is more to the point to remind ourselves that even the Puritan magistrates themselves would not have used them if under those names they had had to deal only with such as now bear them. The explanation of the matter is not far to seek. While charging upon the intolerance and bigotry of the Puritan magistrates the utmost burden of blame for what there was in their stern principles which drove them to the unrelenting and distressing severity of their penalties, there is quite another element in the case for which candor must make a very large though undefined allowance as palliating their fault.
If we should gather in a series the individuals and the classes of persons who were the victims of Puritan intolerance, we should have to recognize the fact that, with the single exception of the case of Roger Williams, - to be specially referred to in its place, - there were common qualities in those who provoked that intolerance which were peculiarly aggravating and hateful to the magistrates and ministers. There was in all of them a strong and ardent element of enthusiasm and fanaticism, and in most of them a claim to a special divine illumination and guidance in the form of " private revelations," the avowal of which goaded the Puritans to rage, and made those professedly so " inspired " the objects of mingled contempt and dread. A thorough and faithful study of the records of the Court, of the pamphlets and tractates of the time, of the extant manuscripts which preserve the language and fervor of the sharp conflicts, and a perusal of the historical VOL. 1-22.
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digests whose writers, in their earnest championship of the respective par- ties to the strife, have taken care that either side shall have a fair and full hearing, - while it may or may not be regarded as rewarding the labor of the inquirer, will teach him a useful wisdom. He will find himself gradu- ally but sensibly taken into a very different range for thought, belief, and mental occupation from that in which we move and live. He will meet with no need or use for that sort of tolerance which consists with indiffer- ence. While wondering how human beings could work themselves into such fervors and fevers of zeal and passion about fancies and notions to us so remote from the range of reasonable and healthful interest, we often find ourselves admiring them for their manifest sincerity and constancy. Nor are there lacking among them the evidences of a rich ingenuity and ideality in fashioning out of misty speculations the shapings of some august truths. We are not infrequently awed by catching from the lips of illiterate persons, in their seeming delirium from their oracles, the proof of a marvel- lous insight in the region of elevated ideas. We are led, perhaps, to a better appreciation of the cautious sagacity of Erasmus in protesting against Lu- ther's resolve to offer the Bible in the vernacular to the free perusal of the common people. But we are also impressed with a sense of the inner fecun- dity and the quickening spirit of the Bible for earnest and restless minds, who received it as if passed to them in a cloud from the hand of God, to be read and brooded over as a private message, direct and sufficient.
One of the most picturesque characters for us in our early chronicles, though he had quite another aspect and personification for the old magis- Samuel goston trates, was Samuel Gorton. He is described by them as representing "the very dregs of Famil- ism," -an insufficient portraiture for our days. He was a " clothier from London." We first hear of him as appearing in Boston in 1636, and as shortly going to Ply- mouth, whence he was soon expelled for holding some strange and, to us, unintelligible heresies. Next, he was whipped in Rhode Island for calling the magistrates' "just-asses," and found refuge with Roger Williams in Providence. In a controversy with our authorities about the lands on which he and others had settled, he was seized, and with ten of his followers was brought to Boston, where, for his " damnable heresies," he was put in irons, confined to labor, and whipped, and then banished on pain of death if he appeared here again. His heresies were reputed as proving him a disciple of the fanatic David George, of Delft, the founder of the " Family of Love," who called himself the " Messiah." It was said that Gorton could neither write nor read. If the charge had been that what he did write was utterly unintelligible for its mystical and cloudy rhapsodics and dream- ings, it would have been more to the point. On a visit which he made to England, he engaged the countenance of the Earl of Warwick to redress his wrongs; and he wrote, or published, tractates and expositions of his fancies, from which one in these days will hardly succeed in drawing out
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anything but darkness. Yet he founded a seet which bore his name in Rhode Island for a century, and proved in private and civil capacities to be a useful man. Any one who, in these days, may be curious to inform him- self about the opinions of this reputed "Familist" may find them in books bearing his name, such as Simplicitic's Defence against Seven-Headed Policy ; An Incorruptible Key composed of the CX. Psalm, &c. His writings are accessible, but they do not obtrude themselves on the present generation.1
The first serious trouble, engaging severe measures in the action of the Court, was that of Roger Williams. Though he was not and never became a member or freeman of the Company, he was welcomed on his arrival. He came here on his own prompting, and of course could remain only on sufferance, if he should prove a desirable person. Arriving with his wife in Boston, in 1631, while Wilson of the First Church was absent Requer William3 in England, Williams was invited to become its teacher. He says that he refused the invitation because the members of the church would not make humble confession of sin in having communed with the Church of England. He was not then known, as in the after years of his life, for his sweetness of spirit, his breadth of liberality, and his noble magnanimity, but seems to have most impressed those who met him as holding "singular opinions," and being "very unsettled in judgmente." He was more wel- come in Salem, where he first went, than he proved to be at Plymouthı, where he made a short stay, and whence he returned to Salem in 1634. The gentle Elder Brewster, fearing that he would " run a course of rigid Separation and Anabaptistry," was glad to facilitate his removal from Plymouth. There are, of course, two ways of telling the story of his troubles with the Massachusetts authorities.
One, a plea in his defence
1 [The sources of knowledge of the Gorton controversy are Winthrop's New England, Sav- age's edition, ii. 69; documents in Ilazard's Collections ; Johnson's Wonder-working Provi- dence, Poole's edition, 'p. 185, and the several controversial tracts of the time. In 1646 Gor- ton printed his defence of his own conduct in New England, the Simplicitie's Defence, now a rare book, of which there are copies in the Prince collection and in Harvard College Library; but there are reprints of it in Rhode Island Ilist. Coll., ii., and in Force's Tracts, iv. Edward Wins- low, of Plymouth, who had been sent to England to thwart the purposes of the enemies of the confederacy, answered Gorton in his Hypocracie Unmasked (copies in Mr. Deane's and in the Carter Brown Library), which was reissued in 1649 with the title changed to The Danger of tolerating Levellers in a Civill State. Meanwhile, in 1647, on the other side, J. Child's New Eng- land's Jonas cast up at London purports to re- view the proceedings at Boston against "divers honest and godly persons." It has been re-
printed in 2 Mass. Ilist. Coll., iv .; in Force's Tracts, iv., and edited by W. T. R. Marvin, Bos- ton, 1869. Winslow replied in his New Eng- land's Salamander, 1647, of which there is a copy in Harvard College Library; reprinted in 3 Mass. Ilist. Coll , ii. Gorton took exception to some part of Morton's New England's Memorial, and furnished an answer, which Ilenry Stevens printed at London in 1862 from an autograph manuscript. Cf. Force's Tracts, iv. The con- troversy has heen followed with more or less care in Hubbard's New England, ch. xlvii. ; Baylies's Old Colony, i. ch. xii. ; l'alfrey's New England, ii. ch. iii., iv., and v .; Felt's Eccles. Ilist. of New England, i. 512; Arnold's Rhode Island, i. ch. vi. and vii .; Bryant and Gay's United States, ii. ch. iv .; George 11. Moore's paper on Nathaniel Ward in the Hist. Mag., March, 1868. There is a life of Gorton by Mackie in Sparks's American Biography : and Charles Deane in the V. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg, July, 1850, goes over the matter and gives the authorities. - ED.]
THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
against them, represents him as a premature champion of soul-liberty, denying the right of the magistrate beyond civil matters, and pleading for the claims of the savages above the King's patent to the land. The other telling of the story sets him forth as a dangerous enthusiast, broaching opinions which struck at the foundations of all safe authority, and holding principles of such a seditious tendency as would have involved the com- plete wreck of the enterprise for which its projectors had spent and endured so much. The sentence pronounced against him charged that he had " broached and divulged divers new and dangerous opinions against the authority of magistrates, as also writ letters of defamation, both of the magistrates and churches here." The Court forbade his longer stay within its jurisdiction. The " wilderness" into which he was banished was a part of the same sort as the whole country at that time. As far as location, scenery, soil, and surroundings were concerned, he certainly was the gainer in finding a new home in. Providence. He proved to be the first of a series of stragglers, holding all manner of eccentric individualisms of opinion, with " all sorts of consciences," who found a home there and in Rhode Island. Trouble and distraction enough, too, they had in settling any sort of policy and society in their free State. Between the range of diversity in utterance and deed there indulged and allowed, and the strict uniformity labored for in Massachusetts, one is reminded of the difference between attempting to cord up into a symmetrical pile and range straight sticks of wood of the same length, and essaying the same object with a heap of stumps drawn from the earth, with their roots and prongs projecting at all angles in every direction.1
1 [ Roger Williams and his controversies have produced a long list of literary illustrations. The original sources are found in Bradford's New Plymouth ; in Winthrop's New England, and in the latter's papers on the Baptist con- troversy and his argument against Williams's attack on the patent, which are printed in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., February, 1873, with Mr. Deane's examination of the validity of the charter title to the lands, which Williams denied. Also Williams's letters, both as given in the Narra- gansett Club Publications, vi., and in the Win- throp papers in Mass. Hist. Coll., third series, ix. and x., and fourth series, vi. Further, Wil- liams's controversial works, particularly his Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Con- science, London, 1644, two editions, an exposi- tion and defence of his views on toleration. The original print is found in a few libraries (Har- vard, Prince, Historical Society, &c.), and re- prints have been made by the Hansard Knollys Society in 1848, and by the Narragansett Club in 1867. This book elicited from John Cotton, the Boston minister, his rejoinder, The Bloudy Tenent, Washed, And made white in the bloud of the Lambe, and Williams was again prompted to respond in his Bloody Tenent yet more Bloody, by Mr. Cotton's Endevor to wash it white in the Blood
of the Lambe, 1652, which has also been reprinted by the same club. Further titles appertaining may be found in the Brinley Catalogue, and in H. M. Dexter's Bibliography of Congregation- alism. Professor Tyler, in his Ilist. of American Literature, i. 241, takes a kindly view of Williams this matter: The judgment of him which is taken in Mather's Magnalia, bk. vii. 430, and in Hubbard's New England, ch. xxx., may be con- sidered as emanating from those who derived impressions from a generation that knew him; but the friends of Williams claim that they are prejudiced. Backus's Hist. of New England, being written primarily in the interests of the Baptists, whose faith Williams later embraced, represents the views of the other side. Professor Diman, in his preface to Cotton's reply to Wil- liams as published by the Narragansett Club, is generally, however, considered to have treated the vexed questions at issue between Rhode Island and Massachusetts writers with a good deal of candor. Dr. George E. Ellis, in his lectures on the treatment of intruders and dis- sentients, published in the Ilist. Society's Lowell Institute Lectures, takes the same view as in the text. Dr. H. M. Dexter, in his As to Roger Il'il- liams, makes a very searching collation of the authorities, and contends that the banishment
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More serious still, and, for a short period of embittered and alienating discord between parties in Boston almost equally matched in carnestness and influence, threatening the complete and disastrous overthrow of the colonial enterprise, was what is known in our history as the " Antinomian Controversy." There are some articles on the long list of discovered and branded " Heresies," of which we may say that the worst thing about them is their names, with the ill associations which they have acquired. Among Phese is " Antinomianism." Some of our readers must be saved the trouble of turning to the dictionary to learn what the word means, by being told that it signifies a denial of, or opposition to, legalism, or a subjection to the law of works as the duty of a Christian. " Antinomians" were understood to hold that one who believed himself to be under a " covenant of faith " need not concern himself to regard "the covenant of works." In other words, those who internally and spiritually had the assurance that they were in a state of " justification" might relieve themselves of all anxiety as to their " sanctifi- cation." It is casy to see what possible mischief of dangerous self-delusion and titter recklessness about the demands of strict virtue and even common morality was wrapt up in this beguiling heresy. Some private mystical cx- perience, real or imagined, that one was in a "state of grace," might secure a discharge from scrupulous fidelity of conduct. Thus, that sad reprobate, Captain Underhill, - a member of the Boston Church, and very serviceable in his military capacity, -when detected in gross immorality, had the assurance to tell the pure-hearted Governor Winthrop, " that the Spirit had sent in to him the witness of Free Grace, while he was in the moderate enjoyment of the creature called tobacco," - that is, while he was smoking his pipc.
This dreaded heresy came to the stern Puritans of Boston associated with . grossly licentious professions and indulgences among fanatics in Germany and Holland, and was by no means unknown by such tokens in old England. But allowing for very exceptional cases, like that of Underhill, no such scandals attach to the names and conduct of the Antinomians who were so ruthlessly dealt with in Boston in 1636. The most prominent among the Antinomians here, - the one who "broached the heresy," and whose name is the synonym of it, - was Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, a pure and excellent was for political reasons chiefly; and this is the view in J. A. Vinton's article in the Congre- gational Quarterly, July, 1873. Of the lives of Williams, Knowles's, 1834, is based on authentic material ; Gammell's is briefer and is in Sparks's Amer. Biography ; Elton's, 1852, brings forward new facts, which are also used by Guild in his introduction to the Narragansett Club publica- tions, 1865. The relations of Williams and the Boston authorities are also discussed more or less fully in Bancroft, i. ch. ix. ; Palfrey's New Eng- land, i. ch. x. ; Arnold's Rhode Island : Budding- ton's First Church in Charlestown, p. 200; Felt's Eccles. Ilist. of N. E. i. ch. ix .; Sprague's Annals of the American Pulpit, vi., &c. For foreign views see Gervinus's introduction to his Ilistory of the Nineteenth Century; Uhden's Geschichte der Congregationalisten in New England, and Masson's Life and Times of Milton, iii. S. G. Drake, in the Hist. Mag., December, 1868, ex- amines the question of the authenticity of an alleged portrait of Williams, which first, and properly, did service for Franklin in Watson's Annals of Philadelphia, 1830. The same plate, with Williams's name under it, served some years afterwards as his likeness in the Welsh Magazine, published in New York. Later, a painting was made to match the Franklin head ; and this painting was engraved as a portrait of Williams in Benedict's History of the Bat- tists, 1847. The fraud was first exposed by Charles Deane in the Cambridge Chronicle in 1850. The painting was recently in existence in Roxbury. - ED.]
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