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Then for the truth's sake goe."

There were also traces, in the emigration, of that love of wandering, of athletic sports and woodcraft, that still sends young men of English race to the far corners of the earth. In the Virginia colonization this element was large, but it also entered into the composition of the Northern colonies. The sister of Governor Winthrop wrote from England in 1637 of her son, afterward Sir George Downing, that the boy was anxious to go to New England, and she spoke of the hazard that he was in "by reson of both his father's and his owne strange inclination to the plantation sports." Upham accordingly describes this same youth in Harvard College, where he graduated in 1642, as shooting birds in the wild woods of Salem, and setting duck-decoys in the ponds. Life in the earlier days of the emigration was essentially a border life, a forest life, a frontier life-differing from such life in Australia or Canada mainly in one wild dream which certainly added to its romance— the dream that Satan still ruled the forest, and that the Indians were his agents.

Whatever else may be said of the Puritan emigration, it represented socially and intellectually much of what was best in the mother country. Men whose life in England would have been that of the higher class of gentry might have been seen in New England taking with their own hands from the barrel their last measure of corn, and perhaps interrupted by

the sight of a vessel arriving in the harbor with supplies. These men, who ploughed their own fields and shot their own venison, were men who had paced the halls of Emanuel College at Cambridge, who quoted Seneca in their journals of travel, and who brought with them books of classic literature among their works of theology. The library bequeathed by Rev. John Harvard to the infant college at Cambridge included Homer, Pliny, Sallust, Terence, Juvenal, and Horace. The library bought by the commissioners from Rev. Mr. Welde, for Rev. Mr. Eliot, had in it Plutarch's Morals and the plays of Aristophanes. In its early poverty the colony voted £400 to found Harvard College, and that institution had for its second president a man so learned, after the fashion of those days, that he had the Hebrew Bible read to the students in the morning, and the Greek Testament in the afternoon, commenting on both extemporaneously in Latin. The curriculum of the institution was undoubtedly devised rather with a view to making learned theologians than elegant men of letters-thus much may be conceded to Mr. Matthew Arnold-but this was quite as much the case, as Mr. Mullinger has shown, in the English Cambridge of the seventeenth century.

The year 1650 may be roughly taken as closing the first generation of the American colonists. Virginia had then been settled forty-three years, New York thirty-six, Plymouth thirty, Massachusetts Bay twenty-two, Maryland nineteen, Connecticut seventeen, Rhode Island fourteen, New Haven twelve, and Delaware twelve. A variety of industries had already been introduced, especially in the New England colonies. Boat-building had there begun, according to Colonel C. D. Wright, in 1624; brick-making, tanning, and windmills were introduced in 1629; shoemaking and saw-mills in 1635; cloth mills in 1638; printing the year after; and iron foundries in 1644. In Virginia the colony had come near to extinction in 1624, and had revived under wholly new leadership. In New England, Brewster, Winthrop, Higginson, Skelton, Shepard, and Hooker had all died; Bradford, Endicott, Standish, Winslow, Eliot, and Roger Williams were still living, but past their prime. Church and state were already beginning to be possessed by a younger race, who had either been born in America or been brought as young chil

dren to its shores. also, the traditions of learning prevailed; the reading of Cotton Mather, for instance, was as marvellous as his powers of memory. When he entered Harvard College, at eleven, he had read Cicero, Terence, Ovid, Virgil, and the Greek Testament; wrote Latin with ease; was reading Homer, and had begun the Hebrew grammar. But the influences around these men were stern and even gloomy, though tempered by scholarship, by the sweet charities of home, and by some semblance of relaxation. We can hardly say that there was nothing but sternness when we find Rev. Peter Thacher at Barnstable, Massachusetts-a man of high standing in the churches mitigating the care of souls, in 1679, by the erection of a private nine-pin alley on his own premises. Still there was for a time a distinct deepening of shadow around the lives of the Puritans, whether in the Northern or Southern colonies, after they were left wholly to themselves upon the soil of the New World. The persecutions and the delusions belong generally to this later epoch. In the earlier colonial period there would have been no time for them, and hardly inclination. In the later or provincial period society was undergoing a change, and wealth and aristocratic ways of liv-theless remained more liberal than most ing were being introduced. But it was in the intermediate time that religious rigor had its height.

In this coming race, | lives, like all lives, were tempered and moulded by much that was quite apart from theology-hard work in the woods, fights with the Indians, and less perilous field-sports. They were unlike modern men when they were at church, but not so unlike when they went on a bear-hunt. In order to understand the course of Puritan life in America we must bear in mind that the first-comers in the most strictly Puritan colonies were more and not less liberal than their immediate descendants. The Plymouth colony was more tolerant than the later colony of Massachusetts Bay, and the first church of the Massachusetts Bay colony was freer than those which followed it. The covenant drawn up for this Salem church in 1629 has seldom been surpassed in benignant comprehensiveness; it is thought that the following words constituted the whole of it: "We covenant with the Lord and one with another, and do bind ourselves in the presence of God, to walk together in all His ways, according as He is pleased to reveal Himself to us in His blessed word of truth." This was drawn up, according to Mather, by the first minister of Salem; and even when this covenant was enlarged into a confession of faith by his son and successor, some years later, it never

Modern men habitually exaggerate the difference between themselves and the Puritans. The points of difference are so great and so picturesque, we forget that the points of resemblance must necessarily outweigh them. We seem more remote from them than is really the case, because we dwell too much on secondary matters -a garment, a phrase, a form of service. Theologian and historian are alike overcome by this; as soon as they touch the Puritans all is sombre, there is no sunshine, no bird sings. Yet the birds filled the woods with their music then as now; children played; mothers talked pretty nonsense to their babies; Governor Winthrop wrote tender messages to his third wife in a way that could only have come of long and reiterated practice. We can not associate a gloomy temperament with Miles Standish's doughty defiances, or with Francis Higginson's assertion that "a draught of New England air is better than a flagon of Old English ale.” Their

later documents of the same kind. The trouble was that the tendency was to narrow instead of to widen. The isolation and severity of the colonial life produced its just effect, and this tendency grew as the new generation developed.

But it must be noticed that this greater early liberality never went so far as to lay down any high-sounding general principles of religious liberty, or to announce that as the corner-stone of the new enterprise. Here it is that the great and constant injustice comes in-to attribute to these Puritans a principle of toleration which they never set up, and then to reproach them with being false to it. Even Mr. Francis Parkman, who seems to me to be, within his own domain, unquestionably the first of American historians, loses his habit of justice when he quits his Frenchmen and his Indians and deals with the Puritans. "At the outset," he says, in his Pioneers of France, "New England was unfaithful to the principles of her existence. Seldom has religious toleration assumed a form more oppressive than among the Puritan exiles. New England Prot

estantism appealed to liberty; then closed the doors against her. On a stock of freedom she grafted a scion of despotism." Surely this is the old misstatement often made, often refuted. When were those colonists unfaithful to their own principle? When did they appeal to liberty? They appealed to truth. It would have been far better and nobler had they aimed at both, but in this imperfect world we have often to praise and venerate men for a single virtue. Anything but the largest toleration would have been inconsistency in Roger Williams, or perhaps for this is less clearly established-in Lord Baltimore; but in order to show that the Puritans were false to religious liberty it must be shown that they had proclaimed it. On the contrary, what they sought to proclaim was religious truth. They lost the expansive influence of freedom, but they gained the propelling force of a high though gloomy faith. They lost the variety that exists in a liberal community where each man has his own opinion, but they gained the concentrated power of a homogeneous and well-ordered people.

was compelled to indict him as a nuisance in the same year, on this count, among others, "that Samuel Gorton contumeliously reproached the magistrates, calling them Just-asses." Nevertheless, all these, and such as these, were at last disarmed and made harmless by the wise policy of Rhode Island, guided by Roger Williams, after he had outgrown the superfluous antagonisms of his youth, and learned to be conciliatory in action as well as comprehensive in doctrine. Yet even he had so much to undergo in keeping the peace with all these heterogeneous materials that he recoiled at last from "such an infinite liberty of conscience," and declared that in the case of Quakers "a due and moderate restraint and punishment of these incivilities" was not only no persecution, but was "a duty and command of God."

Maryland has shared with Rhode Island the honor of having established religious freedom, and this claim is largely based upon the noble decree passed by its General Assembly in 1649:

"No person whatsoever in this province professing to believe in Jesus Christ shall from henceforth be any way troubled or molested for his or her religion, or in the free exercise thereof, or any way compelled to the belief or exercise of any other religion against his or her consent."

But it is never hard to evade a statute that seems to secure religious liberty, and this decree did not prevent the Maryland colony from afterward enacting that if any person should deny the Holy Trinity he should first be bored through the tongue and fined or imprisoned; then, for the second offense, should be branded as a blasphemer, the letter "B" being stamped on his forehead; and for the third offense should die. This was certainly a very limited toleration; and granting that it has a partial value, it remains an interesting question who secured it. Cardinal Man

There are but two of the early colonies of which the claim can be seriously made that they were founded on any principle of religious freedom. These two are Rhode Island and Maryland. It was said of the first by Roger Williams, its spiritual founder, that "a permission of the most paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or anti-Christian conscience" should be there granted "to all men of all nations and countries." Accordingly, the colony spread such shelter on a very wide scale. It received Anne Hutchinson after she had set the state as well as church in a turmoil at Boston, and had made popular elections turn on her opinions. It not only sheltered but gave birth to Jemima Wilkinson, prophetess of the "Cumberland Zealots," who might under the stimulus of a less tolerant community have expanded into a Joanna Southcote or a Mo-ning and others have claimed this measure ther Ann Lee. It protected Samuel Gor- of toleration as due to the Roman Catholics, ton, a man of the Savonarola tempera- but Mr. E. D. Neill has conclusively shown ment, of whom his last surviving disciple that the Roman Catholic element was said, in 1771, “My master wrote in hea-originally much smaller than was supven, and none can understand his writings but those who live in heaven while on earth." It cost such an effort to assimilate these exciting ingredients that Roger Williams described Gorton in 1640 as "bewitching and bemadding poor Providence," and the Grand Jury of that city

posed, that the "two hundred Catholic gentlemen" usually claimed as founding the colony were really some twenty gentlemen and three hundred laboring-men; that of the latter twelve died on shipboard, of whom only two confessed to the priests, thus giving a clew to the proba

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Dexter has shown that no less than sixty such men joined the Massachusetts Bay colony within ten years of its origin, while after seventeen years of separate existence the Virginia colony held but two university men, Rev. Hant Wyatt and

results which are apparent to this day. There is nothing more extraordinary in the Massachusetts and Connecticut colonies than the promptness with which they entered on the work of popular education. These little communities, just struggling for existence, marked out an educational | Dr. Pott; and Rhode Island had also but system which had then no parallel in the European world. In the Massachusetts Bay colony, Salem had a free school in 1640, Boston in 1642, or earlier, Cambridge about the same time, and the state, in 1647, marked out an elaborate system of common and grammar schools for every township-a system then without a precedent, so far as I know, in Europe. Thus run the essential sentences of this noble document, held up to the admiration of all England by Lord Macaulay in Parliament:

"Yt learning may not be buried in y grave of or fath's in ye church and comonwealth, the Lord assisting or endeavors-It is therefore ord'ed, yt evry township in this iurisdiction, aftr ye Lord heth increased ym to ye number of 50 household", shall then forthwth appoint one wthin their towne to teach all such children as shall resort to him to write and reade; *** and it is furth' ordered, y' where any towne shall increase to ye numb of 100 families or househould, they shall set up a gramer schoole, ye mr thereof being able to instruct youth so farr as they may be fited for ye university."

The printing-press came with these schools, or before them, and was actively employed, and it is impossible not to recognize the contrast between such institutions and the spirit of that Governor of Virginia (Berkeley) who said, a quarter of a century later, "We have no free schools nor printing, and I hope shall not have these hundred years." In Maryland, convicts and indented servants were sometimes advertised for sale as teachers at an early day, and there was no public system until 1728. In Rhode Island, Newport had a public school in 1640, but it apparently lasted but a year or two, nor was there a general system till the year 1800. These contrasts are mentioned for one sole purpose: to show that no single community unites all virtues, and that it was at that period very hard for religious liberality and a good school system to exist together.

There was a similar disproportion among the colonies in the number of university - trained men. Professor F. B.

two in its early days, Roger Williams and the recluse William Blaxton. No one has more fully recognized the "heavy price paid" for this "great cup of liberty" in Rhode Island than her ablest scholar, Professor Diman, who employs precisely these phrases to describe it in his Bristol address; and who fearlessly points out how much that state lost, even while she gained something, by the absence of that rigorous sway and that lofty public standard which were associated with the stern rule of the Puritan clergy.

In all the early colonies, unless we except Rhode Island, the Puritan spirit made itself distinctly felt, and religious Even in persecution widely prevailed. Maryland, as has been shown, the laws imposed branding and boring through the tongue as a penalty for certain opinions. In Virginia those who refused to attend the Established Church must pay 200 pounds of tobacco for the first offense, 500 for the second, and incur banishment for the third. A fine of 5000 pounds of tobacco was placed upon unauthorized religious meetings. Quakers and Baptists were whipped or pilloried, and any ship-master conveying Nonconformists was fined. Even so late as 1741, after persecution had virtually ceased in New England, severe laws were passed against Presbyterians in Virginia; and the above-named laws of Maryland were re-enacted in 1723. At an earlier period, however, the New England laws, if not severer, were no doubt more rigorously executed. In some cases, to be sure, the so-called laws were a deliberate fabrication, as in the case of the Connecticut "Blue Laws," a code reprinted to this day in the newspapers, but which existed only in the active and malicious imagination of the Tory Dr. Peters.

The spirit of persecution was strongest in the New England colonies, and chiefly in Massachusetts, because of the greater intensity with which men there followed out their convictions. It was less manifest in the banishment of Roger Williams

which was, after all, not so much a religious as a political transaction—than in the Quaker persecutions which took place

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