1587.] CITIZENSHIP. 537 Condition of who was not a member of some church within its limits. Nothing could so clearly show the character of the people. The test of citizenship was piety; and the test of piety was member- citizenship. ship in the Reformed Church. No surer way could have been devised of excluding all but Puritans, and Puritans of a certain way of thinking, from any share in the government of the colony. But these people had fled from ecclesiastical tyranny at home, and they believed that their only safety lay in a close ecclesiastical corporation of their own, a body corporate in which the adversary could gain no foothold either in the church or in the state. Narrow and illiberal as the policy is, when tried by the standard of later times, it was meant to be a peaceful solution of the problem of that age, the working out of which soon cost England a revolution and the king his head. tan. These men had come into the wilderness to build up a theocracy, and made no pretensions of securing liberty for anybody but themselves. They were quite as intolerant of opinions that were not their own as the most inexorable persecutor that ever "peppered" a PuriThe question is even not yet quite settled in all minds whether intolerance is more lovely and safe in the hands of men who only mean to use it to the glory of God, than in the hands of men who plainly persecute the righteous for unrighteous ends. The line where disinterested devotion fades into worldly motives and the indulgence of the most selfish passions, is so exceedingly fine and so easily passed, that they must needs be much more than common men who can be trusted with intolerance only as a divine attribute. CHAPTER XXI. NEW ENGLAND COLONIES. LAWS, ECCLESIASTICAL AND POLITICAL. - JOHN ELIOT'S WORK AMONG THE INDIANS. - JOHN COTTON ARRIVES IN BOSTON. THE RED CROSS IN THE KING'S BANNER. PERSECUTION AND BANISHMENT OF ROGER WILLIAMS. THE FIRST SETTLEMENT OF RHODE ISLAND. - SETTLERS FROM PLYMOUTH ON THE CONNECTICUT RIVER. JOHN WINTHROP, JR., FIRST GOVERNOR OF CONNECTICUT. HOOKER'S EMIGRATION TO HARTFORD. - ANNE HUTCHINSON AND HER DOCTRINES. MURDER OF JOHN OLDHAM. - BEGINNING OF THE PEQUOD WAR. Gradual the colony. THE accounts that went home for the first year or two from Massachusetts Bay were discouraging, and for a while more returned to England than joined the colony. Yet the progress was steady in spite of all discouragements and hardships; the settlements grew progress of into towns; the towns grew into a consolidated commonwealth. Local affairs soon came to be entrusted to a few select men from a community, though any freeman who chose could assist at their deliberations. The system which for convenience' sake, as numbers increased, took the place of a meeting of all the freemen, when any question arose, such as the making of roads, or the division of lands-begun in one place soon extended to others, till in the course of four or five years town-governments were recognized as the established order. The next step was natural and easy; representatives were sent to the General Court, first to consult with the assistants, and to regulate taxation; next to enact laws, and to take part in the general management of the colony. Step by step the colony grew into a commonwealth-a government of the people. There was no interference with them from the home government. Men of some influence who had been in the country and left it, Ineffectual attempt in England to injure the colony. voluntarily or involuntarily, from various motives, sometimes good and sometimes bad, united to break down the colony. They were so far listened to that the king and the Privy Council looked into the matter, but found nothing which was considered worthy of reprehension. It was considered, apparently, that there was nothing dangerous in Puritanism when so far away; and it is not at all unlikely that Charles felt a generous interest in the first colony established under a patent signed by his 1632.] CLERGYMEN IN MASSACHUSETTS. own hand, and in a country to which he had given a name. 539 There was controversy between them and Sir Ferdinando Gorges and others about patents; the Brownes did not readily forget the first cause of complaint they had against Endicott, and the church at Salem. Morton remembered the prostrate May-pole at Merry Mount, and the stocks in Boston; a mysterious Sir Christopher Gardiner who travelled about the country among the Indians, having with him a pretty young woman, confessedly not his wife, and who was suspected of being a Catholic, with sinister designs on the Western Hemisphere -railed at the tyranny of Winthrop, who had dismissed him without ceremony from Massachusetts; but all these united, with any others. who had, or thought they had grievances, availed nothing in England to provoke interference. The colony was happily left to its own devices. There the most potent influence was the clergy. Though ministers were debarred from holding civil offices, they nevertheless, Influence of in large measure through the church controlled the State. the clergy. The franchise of citizenship could only belong to the church-member; but church-membership was under the control of the ministers. This ecclesiastical government suited the Puritans of Massachusetts and was of their own creation; but the influence of the bishops in England, though exercised in a different way, was never more potent than that of the minister of the parish in New England, who continued for a century and a half to be looked up to by his parishioners with almost as much reverence as is rendered to the Pope, long after the rule of the bishops had ceased to exist. tle Eliot. Not all of them, however, cared for political influence, or were most devoted even to theological questions. Chief among those who had other aims was the Rev. John Eliot of Roxbury, who was The "Aposmade the pastor of its first church, in 1632. His life was largely devoted to converting the Indians to Christianity, and to that end he studied their language with great assiduity.1 Some years later, when he had mastered their difficult tongue, he preached his first sermon to a small company of Indians, in a wigwam at Nonantum near Watertown. The presence of Waban, an Indian chief, suggested the text, which was from Ezekiel xxxvii. 9, 10: "Then said he unto them, Prophesy unto the wind;"-Waban, the chief's name, The Praying meaning wind. The sermon was effectual, and Waban be- Indians. came a Christian. A sect grew up, among whom he was a man 1 Elliot's Indian Bible - a few copies of which are still in existence and sell at almost fabulous sums, though in a now unknown tongue- was published in 1663. The Psalms in Metre, the first book published in America - 1640- was composed partly by him and partly by his colleague, Weld, and by Richard Mather. of influence, called the " Praying Indians," and who became so obnoxious to the unconverted savage that, at a later period in time of war, it was necessary to place them upon an island in the harbor, for protection, although their own town, Natick "the place of hills" — was well fortified.1 But Eliot's heroic work was beset with monstrous difficulties. The Indian's ethical condition was derived from the exigencies of the wilderness, and seldom rose above them into a nobler behavior. This spiritual condition was limited to a vague reference to an overruling Manito, a decided belief in Hobomock, the Evil Spirit, and an unfaltering trust in the medicine-man. Into this structure of natural theology he soon learned to infuse a love of rum so strong that it confused his perception of the white man's religion, as it well might do. When the Bible and the puncheon came over to him in the same ship, the remark of one of their chiefs was not irrelevant: "Let me see that your religion makes you better than us and then we may try it." This keen appreciation of the difference between the Englishman's preaching and his practice; the love of fighting which can hardly be assuaged in the breast of an Indian; the thirst for the new liquors ; the reluctance to form settled towns and to labor, were formidable obstacles in Eliot's way; while the lukewarmness of the colonists, who thought the converts were poor for Christians and spoiled for Indians, constantly dogged his manly and courageous steps as he went to and fro with incessant ministering of religious truths and inculcation of the arts of civilization to the people whose darkness he so commiserated. Difficulties in Eliot's way. Arrival of There were other clergymen not less identified, though in a different way, with the infancy of the Commonwealth. In 1633 large additions were made to the colony, and among them came John Cotton, Thomas Hooker, and Samuel Stone. Hooker and Stone went to Newtown as pastor and teacher; Cotton remained in Boston as teacher over the church of which Wilson was pastor. The Rev. William Phillips of Watertown had already labored to mould the churches into that form of Congregationalism which afterwards prevailed, but the work was completed by Cotton. He had, it is said, "such an insinuating and melting way in his preaching, that he would usually carry his very adversary captive after the triumphant chariot of his rhetoric;" and such was 1 Some of the converts were made magistrates and constables in the towns of Praying Indians. Here is a warrant addressed to a constable: "1. I, Hidondi. 2. You, Peter Waterman. 3. Jeremy Wicket. 4. Quick you take him. 5. Fast you hold him. 6. Straight you bring him. 7. Before me, Hidondi." The New England History, by Charles W. Elliot, vol. i., p. 326. John Cotton / Signature of John Cotton. 1633.] ROGER WILLIAMS. 541 an too his authority "that whatever he delivered in the pulpit was soon put into an order of court, if of a civil, or set up as a practice in the church, if of an ecclesiastical concernment." 1 He was able and a learned man, already distinguished before coming to New England, as rector of St. Botolph's church in Boston, Lincolnshire, where his non-conforming opinions were boldly and ably expressed to escape the notice of the authorities. The hostile attention of Laud, the archbishop of Canterbury, was directed toward him, and he was suspected of an intention to emigrate so soon as an attempt should be made to deal with him for non-conformity. He and Hooker were closely watched. Cotton lay concealed in London for some time, and they only got out of St. Botolph's Church, Boston, Eng. the kingdom by the feint of embarking at the Isle of Wight and going on board in the Downs. Roger Wil turns to Salem. Within a month of these arrivals, Roger Williams returned from Plymouth to Salem, and returned not to peace but to much tribulation. Some controversy had at length arisen between liams rehim and the church at Plymouth, his views savoring, Elder Brewster thought, of Anabaptism; he falling, Bradford said, "into strange opinions, and from opinions to practice." Some were desirous of retaining him, but he asked a dismission, and they let him go with a warning to the church at Salem, some of the Plymouth people, however, going with him. But the church at Salem would heed no warning, and welcomed him back. For months he exercised his gift "by way of prophecy," -a desultory preacher without special charge. But he prophesied so much to the satisfaction of the Salem people, that when Mr. Skelton died the next summer, Williams was called to his place. He was, no doubt, watched narrowly, even before his settlement; but for a while his utterances were so void of offence, that the governor and assistants took up for consideration the treatise he had written while in 1 Hubbard's History, pp. 175, 182. |