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^p Cl^atleji iFranctEi i^Dams. 
 
 RICHARD HENRY DANA. A Biography. With 
 Portraits. Revised Edition. 2 vols, crown 8vo, 
 gilt top, $4.00. 
 
 THREE EPISODES OF MASSACHUSETTS 
 HISTORY. With two Maps. 2 vols, crown 
 Svo, gilt top, $4.00. 
 
 MASSACHUSETTS : Its Historians and its His- 
 tory. Crown Svo. 
 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY, 
 Boston and New York. 
 
MASSACHUSETTS 
 
 ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS 
 HISTORY 
 
 AN OBJECT LESSON 
 
 BY : i I / 
 
 CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS 
 
 § 
 pj 
 
 
 i 
 
 p,f,iaiigfpiiiEia] 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
 
 (Jtfte Bttierjsibe fixsAi, STambtiboc 
 
 1893 
 
Copyright, 1893, 
 Bt CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS. 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
 The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U, 5. A, 
 Mectrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton and Company. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 QuiNCT, September 29, 1893. 
 
 My dear Peofessob Channing: — 
 
 "While occupied last winter on historical work in 
 connection with a forthcoming publication of the 
 Prince Societt on Antinomianism in the Colony 
 OP Massachusetts Bay, 1636-1638, I found my- 
 self led into an investigation the results of which 
 were, in character, generally radical and somewhat 
 iconoclastic. As I went on I became curious to see 
 how those results would impress a class of students 
 just entering upon history as a study. 
 
 You were kind enough to offer me, being an Over- 
 seer of the College, one of your classes to experiment 
 on ; and, as you remember, in April I occupied your 
 desk for two morning hours. What I wished to say 
 had to be greatly compressed to get it within the 
 allotted time ; but my audience, I thought, took rather 
 kindly to views, general and particular, which would 
 hardly have been encouraged in the Cambridge of 
 forty years ago. 
 
 The four lectures, then condensed into two, I now 
 publish entire ; and ask for them your consideration, 
 as well as that of the members of the class I ad- 
 dressed. 
 
 Believe me, etc., 
 
 Charles Francis Adams. 
 
 Prof. Edwakd Channing, Cambridg-e, Mass. 
 
MASSACHUSETTS : 
 ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 
 
 On corresponding panels of the inner front of the 
 Water-Gate at the Chicago World's Fair are these 
 two inscriptions, prepared by President Eliot of Har- 
 vard, — at the left, as one faces to the east, " Civil 
 Liberty The Means of Building up Personal and 
 National Character;" at the right, "Toleration in 
 Religion The Best Fruit of the last Four Centuries." 
 Obviously, the last is the stronger, much the more 
 comprehensive legend. But, in fact, the causes were, 
 and are, equal as well as inseparable ; and it is the 
 struggle for them — for Freedom of Conscience on 
 the one hand, and the Equality of Man before the 
 Law on the other — which constitutes the theme of 
 modern history. Nor does it make much difference 
 where or when or how or by whom the course of that 
 struggle, is studied, — though it cannot be studied in 
 too many phases or under too varied conditions, — 
 it is an aspect, and the last great aspect, of human 
 development. One writer of books of history, and 
 one such writer only, so far as I know, has addressed 
 himself to the subject in a comprehensive spirit ; and 
 he fell by the way, even as he crossed the threshold. 
 Henry Thomas Buckle died more than thirty years 
 
2 MASS A CHUSETTS : 
 
 ago, at the age of forty-one, leaving behind him the 
 " Introduction " only of a great historical conception. 
 
 We are now drawing towards the close of the nine- 
 teenth century, and the struggle, or rather the phase 
 of development to which I have referred, is just four 
 hundred years old; nor is it yet ended. It may be 
 said to have begun with the discovery of America; 
 and before it ends it will witness the settlement of 
 innermost Africa. During all that period it has been 
 one long stage of warfare, — a warfare carried on in 
 many countries, and under conditions leading to dif- 
 ferent results, but always to one end ; just as it is 
 said all roads lead to Rome, so the story of that war- 
 fare, though told in a polyglot of many parts, is only 
 one long refrain. We of the Anglo-Saxon race are 
 most familiar with the circumstances and incidents of 
 the struggle as it took place in England ; though, as I 
 shall presently show, we do now and again get glimpses 
 of other phases and episodes of the great epic as it 
 worked its slow way along in Germany, France, Italy, 
 Spain, Holland, and finally here in America ; and, as 
 we get those glimpses, we note that the underlying 
 thesis is always the same, though the historians have 
 seemed to have but a dim conception of the fact, — no 
 matter where, or in what mood or language they wrote, 
 they were but engaged in developing some scene, or 
 at most some act, in the one great drama, — the Eman- 
 cipation of Man from Superstition and Caste. 
 
 I have said that it does not make much difference 
 where the phases of this drama are studied, whether 
 in England, or Scotland, or the Netherlands, or Ger- 
 many, or France, or Spain ; so now I propose to study 
 them in our own home history, that of New Eng- 
 land and more especially of Massachusetts, — I might 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 3 
 
 almost say of Cambridge, — for here, on Cambridge 
 Common on the 27th of May, 1637, and again in 
 the first meeting-house which stood on Mt. Auburn 
 Street, in November of that same year, and yet again 
 under the Washington Elm one hundred and thirty- 
 eight years later, events occurred, the influence of 
 which on the great struggle were world-wide, and 
 lasted and wiU yet last through centuries. 
 
 Approached in any other than this wide spirit, his- 
 tory is little more than what Macaulay termed it in 
 one of his spirited metrical pieces, — "a nurse's 
 tale ; " — the stories of the separate epochs, eras and 
 countries, told for themselves and by themselves, be- 
 come so many narratives more or less dull or interest- 
 ing according to the author's skill in dealing with the 
 incidents or characters which may chance to come in 
 his way ; and of little more philosophical and result- 
 ing value than so many romances or poems. But if 
 any phase of the subject is approached in the broad, 
 catholic spirit, the result cannot fail to work in the 
 end into the great whole. The underlying plot, let me 
 repeat, is always the same, — it is merely a question 
 of scene and role. Referring only to some of those 
 using our own language, it is now Fronde who tells a 
 part of the story from the English point of view ; and 
 Henry VIII., Mary of Scotland and Elizabeth are the 
 actors, while PhUip II. stands in the background and 
 the great Armada moves across the stage : — then 
 Gardiner takes the same story up an act later on, and 
 Charles II., Strafford and Cromwell, — the Cavaliers 
 and the Roundheads, — play their parts : finally Ma- 
 caulay opens the next act with that revolution of 1688 
 which proved to be the crisis in the English phase of 
 the drama. Or, if we go to the continent of Europe, we 
 
4 MASSACHUSETTS: 
 
 can study the wholly different aspect and outcome o£ 
 the Spanish side of the evolution in the pages of 
 Robertson, Buckle and Prescott, with Ferdinand the 
 Catholic and Isabella of Castille, the Emperor Charles 
 and Philip II., — Columbus, Torquemada and Alva, 
 
 — holding the leading parts. ■ But the play and the 
 plot are the same, — the scene only is shifted. Carlyle 
 gives us two other scenes, — one in Germany, known 
 as the wars of Silesia, and the other the final climax 
 of the third Act in the catastrophe of the French 
 Revolution, with its Rights of Man and "Worship of 
 Reason. Then, if we go back for a couple of cen- 
 turies, and once more shift the scene, we can study the 
 development of the plot in Holland through the pages 
 of Motley, while the great figure of William the Silent 
 looms up before us. 
 
 But the drama was not confined to Europe. Scenes, 
 and not unimportant nor uninteresting scenes in it, 
 were laid here in America, in New England, in Mas- 
 sachusetts, and these scenes are my present subject, — 
 only let it be always remembered they were scenes, — 
 and to this fact they owe their whole value in history, 
 
 — they were scenes in the world-drama. 
 
 So far as Emancipation from Caste, or the Equality 
 of Man before the Law, is concerned, this much must 
 be said of it as compared with Religious Toleration, — 
 it is exclusively and wholly an outcome of the last 
 four centuries, — their offspring ; whereas Religious 
 Toleration is, in a way, only a revival. For, though it 
 may sound like a paradox, it is historically well settled 
 that religious persecution followed in the wake of 
 Christianity, — followed it, indeed, as a logical neces- 
 sity. There is no utterance of Christ more sadly pro- 
 phetic than when, declaring that his mission was not 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 5 
 
 to send peace on the earth, but a sword, he added, — 
 " I come to set a man at variance against his ,father, 
 and the daughter against her mother." 
 
 Before Christ preached, or Christians either were 
 persecuted or themselves persecuted others and each 
 other, the pagan systems unquestionably had their 
 sacrifices ; and those sacrifices, as every one knows, not 
 infrequently included human victims : but the cause 
 of sacrifice was rarely difference of faith. The offer- 
 ing was, on the contrary, merely a blood-offering ; and, 
 as in the cases of Abraham and Isaac, of Agamemnon 
 and Iphigenia, and of "the daughter of the warrior 
 Gileadite," the victim was quite as likely to be one of 
 the family and the faith as an alien and an unbeliever. 
 In Greece and Rome forms of worship infinite in vari- 
 ety were tolerated; for, as Gibbon characteristically 
 remarks, they " were all considered by the people as 
 equally true ; by the philosopher as equally false ; and 
 by the magistrate as equally useful. And thus tolera- 
 tion produced not only mutual indulgence, but even 
 religious concord." Even the Jew — the Hebrew, 
 who tolerated no one — was by the Greeks and Ro- 
 mans tolerated ; a fact to which Paul bore evidence 
 when in his famous sermon on Mars Hill to the Athen- 
 ians he said, — "As I passed by, and beheld your 
 devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, ' to 
 the Unknown God ' ; " and, in the beginning of the 
 fourth century, the Emperor Galerius, in his famous 
 edict as respects the Christians, enunciated the whole 
 principle of Religious Toleration, saying, — " We per- 
 mit them, therefore, freely to profess their private 
 opinions, and to assemble in their conventicles with- 
 out fear of molestation, provided always that they 
 preserve a due respect to the established laws and 
 
6 MASSACHUSETTS: 
 
 government." And it will be well to note here the 
 words " freely to profess their private opinions " and 
 " assemble in their conventicles," for the permission 
 in these words accorded constitute the essence of Re- 
 ligious Toleration. 
 
 But in Christianity there was, and for that matter 
 still is, a large infusion of Judaism ; and the funda- 
 mental claim of Judaism was The One True Faith, 
 with the angry and the jealous God behind it. So, 
 almost at once, the very different path trod by the 
 Saviour turned into the straight and narrow way 
 which alone led to that gate of which Saint Peter held 
 the keys ; and, as the life on earth became a mere 
 brief prelude to the everlasting life to come, — as 
 Salvation awaited the True Believer and Eternal Per- 
 dition the Unbeliever, — as these tenets — the tenets 
 of all the earlier, and most later, Christians — obtained 
 foothold, intolerance and persecution followed. So 
 Christ brought the sword ! 
 
 The world moves slowly. The easy-going toleration 
 of Greece and Rome disappeared in presence of Judar 
 ism, and the time came when Hebraized Christianity 
 superseded the mythologies as the religion of the 
 state ; until, about eight hundred years ago, the rule 
 of uniformity was established. Thereafter, as Gibbon 
 asserts, a spiritual empire acquired by fraud was de- 
 fended by violence. Universal conformity was ex- 
 acted, and toleration, becoming a thing extinct, was 
 in process of time forgotten ; or, worse than forgotten, 
 remembered and loathed as a feature of paganism. 
 The One True Faith knew it not ; nor, indeed, could 
 know it. 
 
 This rule of religious conformity prevailed from the 
 beginning of the eleventh to the beginning of the six- 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 7 
 
 teenth century, and was enforced both then and later 
 by all necessary measures, whether Catholic or Cal- 
 vinistic, including excommunication, persecution, cru- 
 sades, the Inquisition and other agencies, whether 
 civil, — numbering the block, the gallows, the wheel 
 and the fagot, — or spiritual, stimulated by terror of 
 the rack in this world and hell-fire in the next. But 
 now, as the nineteenth century is drawing to a close, 
 there are quite as many phases of religious belief in 
 communities not, like Spain, still meSiseval, as there 
 were altars in Athens ; and they are treated with 
 much the same forbearance. Thus in the matter of 
 Religious Toleration the world has struggled painfully 
 back to where it was when Paul preached on Mars 
 Hill. So, as I said, Religious Toleration is in a way 
 a revival ; not a discovery. 
 
 Nor does this statement of historical facts imply 
 that the persecutions and bloodshed which made ter- 
 rible centuries of European existence were, however 
 unnecessary, otherwise than inevitable. On the con- 
 trary, they were the logical outcome of existing con- 
 ditions, and as such in no way to be avoided. The 
 impelling power of an unquestioning, fanatical faith 
 was necessary for the work in hand and then to be 
 done. That sufficed, and nothing less would have 
 sufficed, to lift civilization to a higher plane. Among 
 phases of religious belief it was a plain case of 
 the survival of the fittest. Fanaticism implies in- 
 tolerance ; and intolerance persecution. The world 
 struggled through ten centuries of both to attain the 
 Religious Toleration of to-day ; and the mature Chris- 
 tian Religious Toleration of to-day is on a plane vastly 
 more lofty than the crude, indifferent Pagan toleration 
 of the earlier time. The two are merely akin. 
 
8 MASSACHUSETTS: 
 
 But with the principle of Human Equality before 
 the Law nothing worthy to claim even kinship can be 
 found in the past. It is the creation of the last four 
 centuries. More than that, the battle over it has only 
 recently been fought out here in America ; and, else- 
 where, is not yet wholly fought out even in Europe. 
 Caste and slavery die hard. 
 
 Taking then this drama of modern history, — this 
 Emancipation from Superstition and Caste, with its 
 two underlying principles of Religious Toleration and 
 Equality before the Law, — what part has America 
 played in it ? So far as Equality before the Law is 
 concerned, — personal, civil liberty, — the record of 
 no community seems to me more creditable, more con- 
 sistent, nor, indeed, more important than that of the 
 community composing the Commonwealth of Massa- 
 chusetts. The idea was the offspring of the English 
 Commonwealth. Its godfathers were Hampden and 
 Milton and Cromwell. It found inarticulate expres- 
 sion in the death of King Charles. No portion of the 
 world was, however, then ready to accept so startling 
 a paradox. All existing habits, traditions, institutions, 
 — social, political, religious, — recoiled from it. It 
 seemed like an absurdity on its face, to assert that the 
 peasant who turned the clod was, before the law, or 
 anywhere else, the equal of the lord at whose castle's 
 gate he lived, or of the priest who represented God. 
 Such an idea no more found acceptance with the peas- 
 ant than it did with the lord or the priest. Indeed, 
 the first, no long time before, had been a serf-, — an 
 adjunct to the soil and inseparable from it.' Though 
 a protest against human inequality, the English Com- 
 monwealth was, accordingly, only a passing protest. 
 Law, usage, tradition, were forces too powerful to be 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 9 
 
 at once overcome ; and the hereditary, privileged-class 
 principle reasserted itself. But meanwhile the germi- 
 nal idea of the Commonwealth had been transferred 
 across the Atlantic. It was there planted in Massa- 
 chusetts, where it slowly developed under the most 
 favoring of possible conditions. At first it was ac- 
 cepted here hardly more than it had been in England. 
 The magistrates talked of the " common people ; " and 
 one code of criminal law applied to them, while an- 
 other applied to the gentry. But there was no king 
 and no noble in the land, and in the church and the 
 town-meeting all stood upon a footing of absolute 
 equality. Slavery also existed for a time ; but it was 
 only in its least objectionable form. No large gangs 
 of bondsmen ever worked under overseers. Never 
 organized, the system died a natural death. Thus 
 when the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 went 
 into effect, all the opposing forces had disappeared, 
 and the principle of human equality before the law, 
 theoretically enunciated in the Declaration, was a 
 thing in practice in New England. The country, as 
 a whole, accepted it only subject to limitations. It 
 applied but to white men. Then in due course of 
 time followed the long slavery struggle, in which Mas- 
 sachusetts was arrayed against Virginia, the Puritan 
 idea against the idea of caste. Not until April, 1865, 
 was the question definitely settled. 
 *^ The history of Massachusetts is, therefore, the record 
 of the gradual and practical development of a social 
 and political truth of the first importance. Viewed in 
 this light, the passage of the Eed Sea was not a more 
 momentous event than the voyage of the Mayflower ; 
 and the founding of Boston was fraught with conse- 
 quences hardly less important than those which re- 
 
10 MASSA CHUSETTS : 
 
 suited from the founding of Rome. Hence, too much 
 labor cannot be devoted to the history of Massachu- 
 setts. Its every detail merits the closest scrutiny ; for, 
 from the days of the settlement, through the revolu- 
 tionary troubles, dov?n to the fall of slavery, so far as 
 the principles of civil liberty and human rights are 
 concerned, Massachusetts has always been at the front. 
 In one century, acting from Philadelphia, through the 
 Continental Congress and the Declaration, on the 
 French Assembly in Paris, and, in another, through 
 the broken Confederacy, on Spain and Brazil, her in- 
 fluence has been world-wide. The backbone of the 
 movement which preceded the Prench Revolution, she 
 inspired the agitation which ended in the fall of Afri- 
 can slavery. 
 
 Such has been the Massachusetts record as respects 
 Equality before the Law ; as respects Religious Tol- 
 eration it has been of a character wholly different. 
 Upon that issue, indeed, not only has Massachusetts 
 failed to make herself felt, but her record as a whole, 
 and until a comparatively recent period, has been 
 scarcely even creditable. This, too, was the case from 
 the beginning. 
 
 The story opens with the contested charter election 
 of 1637, as a result of which Governor John Win- 
 throp replaced Governor Sir Harry Vane as chief 
 executive of the colony. This election took place in 
 the open air upon what is now Cambridge Common, 
 on the 27th day of May.i Four months later it was 
 
 1 The scope of the present study does not admit of a statement of 
 details, and an acquaintance with the leading facts in New England 
 history is assumed. I hare narrated the events which led up to the 
 momentous election of 1637, and deserihed what then occurred, in the 
 second of my Three Episodes of Massachusetts History. The present 
 puhlication is an outgrowth of that work, and, to be read intelli- 
 gently, should be read in connection with it. 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 11 
 
 followed by the gathering of the first Synod of Mas- 
 sachusetts churches ; which again, meeting here in 
 Cambridge, doubtless held its sessions in the original 
 meeting-house standing on what is now called Mount 
 Auburn Street.^ The Synod sat through twenty-four 
 days, during which it busied itself unearthing heter- 
 odox opinions and making the situation uncomfortable 
 for those suspected of heresy, until it had spread upon 
 its record no less than eighty-two such " opinions, some 
 blasphemous, others erroneous, and all unsafe," besides 
 " nine unwholesome expressions," all alleged to be rife 
 in the infant community. Having performed this feat, 
 it broke up amid general congratulations "that matters 
 had been carried on so peaceably, and concluded so 
 comfortablj"- in all love." Finally, here in Cambridge, 
 also, and without doubt in the same meeting-house, 
 took place the trial of the archheretic Mistress Anne 
 Hutchinson, and on the 18th of November, 1637, she 
 was condemned to banishment. 
 
 As the twig is bent, the tree inclines. The Massa- 
 chusetts twig was here and then bent ; and, as it was 
 bent, it during hard upon two centuries inclined. The 
 question of Religious Toleration was, so far as Massa- 
 chusetts could decide it, decided in 1637 in the nega- 
 tive. On that issue Massachusetts then definitely and 
 finally renounced all claim or desire to head the ad- 
 vancing column, or even to be near the head of the 
 column ; it did not go to the rear, but it went well to- 
 
 ^ The original meeting-house of Cambridge stood on the comer of 
 what are now known as Mt. Auburn and Dunster streets. It was, 
 probably, a primitive, temporary structure of hewn logs, covered with 
 thatch, and was replaced in 1649 by the second meeting-house, which 
 stood within the limits of the present college yard, nearly opposite 
 Holyoke Street and close to the site of Dane Hall. Three Episodes, 
 vol. i. p. 484. 
 
12 MASSACHUSETTS: 
 
 wards it, and there it remained until the issue was de- 
 cided. But it is curious to note from that day to this 
 how the exponents of Massachusetts polity and thought, 
 whether religious or historical, have, so to speak, wrig- 
 gled and squirmed in the presence of the record. 
 " Shuffling," as George Bishop, the Quaker writer, 
 expressed it in 1703, " and endeavoring to Evade the 
 Guilt of it, being ashamed to own it : So that they 
 seldom mention to any purpose, even in their His- 
 tories." They did so in 1637, when they were making 
 the record up ; they have done so ever since. There 
 was almost no form of sophistry to which the founders 
 of Massachusetts did not have recourse then, — for 
 they sinned against light, though they deceived them- 
 selves while sinning ; and there is almost no form of 
 sophistry to which the historians of Massachusetts 
 have not had recourse since, — really deceiving them- 
 selves in their attempt to deceive others. And it is 
 to this aspect of the case — what may perhaps be not 
 unfitly described as the filio-pietistic historical aspect 
 of it — that I propose to address myself. For in the 
 study of history there should be but one law for all. 
 Patriotism, piety and filial duty have nothing to do 
 with it ; — they are, indeed, mere snares and sources 
 of delusion. The rules and canons of criticism applied 
 in one case and to one character, must be sternly and 
 scrupulously applied in all other similar cases and to 
 all other characters ; and, while surrounding circum- 
 stances should, and, indeed, must be taken into careful 
 consideration, they must be taken into equal consider- 
 ation, no matter who is concerned. Patriotism in the 
 study of history is but another name for provincialism. 
 To see history truly and correctly, it must be viewed 
 as a whole. 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 13 
 
 On its face, the Massachusetts record from Novem- 
 ber, 1637, when those of the faction which followed 
 Anne Hutchinson were disarmed, disfranchised and 
 exiled, down through the Baptist and Quaker persecu- 
 tions to the culmination of the witchcraft craze at the 
 close of the seventeenth century, does not seem to 
 admit of evasion. The first decision, and the policy 
 subsequently pursued in accordance with it, were dis- 
 tinct, authoritative and final, — against Religious 
 Toleration. The policy assumed definite form after 
 the political defeat of Vane in May, 1637. The sub- 
 sequent banishment of John Wheelwright and Anne 
 Hutchinson, together with the body of their active ad- 
 herents, was, as a proceeding, indisputably inquisitorial 
 and extra-judicial. The offence, as well as the policy 
 to be pursued by the government, was explicitly and 
 unmistakably set forth by the chief executive and the 
 presiding official at the trial of Mrs. Hutchinson, when 
 Governor Winthrop said to her, — " Your course is 
 not to be suffered ; ... we see not that any should 
 have authority to set up any other exercises besides 
 what authority hath already set up." Note here again 
 the words " set up any other exercises." Then it was 
 maintained, and it has since been maintained, that the 
 persecution in this case was " not for opinion's sake," 
 that the magistrates did not "challenge power over 
 men's consciences," that " the government never 
 claimed any power over men's private opinions ; " 
 and, indeed, only the Inquisition, as the Holy Office 
 of Catholicism, has gone to this length. But where 
 was the right so distinctly set forth in the edict of 
 Galerius, and which is of the essence of Religious 
 Toleration, — the right " freely to profess private 
 opinions " and to " assemble in conventicles without 
 
14 MA SSA CHU SETTS : 
 
 fear of molestation " ? The privilege of holding opin- 
 ions in secret, without ever disclosing them, is of lim- 
 ited value, and one a denial of which it is difficult to 
 enforce. 
 
 But Winthrop's words speak for themselves ; and 
 in the subsequent history of Massachusetts the policy- 
 set forth in them was maintained and rigorously en- 
 forced by frequent infliction of the penalties of banish- 
 ment and death. The public sentiment behind the 
 policy, and which insured its enforcement, expressed 
 itself in many forms. Now it was in the well known 
 verses found in Governor Dudley's pocket after his 
 death : — 
 
 " Let men of God in courts and churches watch 
 O'er such as do a toleration hatch, 
 Lest that ill egg hring forth a cockatrice 
 To poison all with heresie and yice." 
 
 Again, in 1647, while the battle for Toleration was 
 waxing hot in England, the Simple Cohler of Agga- 
 wam in America thus delivered himself : — 
 
 " My heart hath naturally detested foure things : . . . 
 Tolerations of divers Religions, or of one Religion in segre- 
 gant shapes : He that willingly assents to the last, if he ex- 
 amines his heart by day-light, his conscience will tell him, 
 he is either an Atheist, or an Heretique, or an Hypocrite, 
 or at best a captive to some lust : Poly-piety is the greatest 
 impiety in the world. ... I lived in a City, where a Papist 
 preached in one Church, a Lutheran in another, a Calvinist 
 in a third ; a Lutheran one part of the day, a Calvinist the 
 other, in the same pulpit : the Religion of that place was 
 but motley and meagre, their affections Leopardlike. . . . 
 Concerning Tolerations I may further assert. That Perse- 
 cution of True Religion, and Toleration of false, are the 
 Jannes and Jambres ^ to the Kingdom of Christ, whereof 
 
 1 " And like as Jannes and Jamhres withstood Moses, so do these 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 15 
 
 the last is farre the worst. ... It is said that Men ought 
 to have Liberty of their Conscience, and that it is Persecu- 
 tion to debarre them of it : I can rather stand amazed than 
 reply to this : it is an astonishment to think that the brains 
 of men should be parboyl'd in such impious ignorance." 
 
 More than thirty years after the Rev. Natlianiel 
 Ward thus expressed himself, the Rev. William Hub- 
 bard, the first historian of Massachusetts, a man of 
 whom it was said he was " equal to any of his con- 
 temporaries in learning and candor, and superior to 
 all as a writer," preached the Election Sermon (1676) 
 at the inauguration of Governor Leverett. In it he 
 said, — 
 
 " I shall not entertain you with any sharp invective, or 
 declaiming against a boundless toleration of all Religions, 
 lest it should be an insinuation that some here present are 
 inclined that way," which I believe there was never any oc- 
 casion given to suspect. . . . Such opinions in Doctrine, or 
 professions and practices in Religion, as are attended with 
 any foul practical evils, as most Heresies have been, ought 
 to be prohibited by publick Authority, and the broachers or 
 fomenters of them punished by penal laws, according to the 
 nature of the offence, like other fruits of the flesh. God 
 never appointed a Sanctuary for Satan, nor City of Refuge 
 for presumptuous offenders. As Joab was taken from the 
 Horns of the Altar, whither he was fled, so let all such 
 heretical transgressors, that fly for refuge to the Altar of 
 their Consciences, seeing their practices and opinions are 
 rather fearedness, than tenderness of Conscience, and there- 
 fore such weeds justly deserve the exercise of his power to 
 root them up that bears not the Sword in vain." 
 
 Let me now put on the stand two ministers of the 
 church of Cambridge here, Urian Oakes, afterwards 
 
 also withstand the truth ; men corrupted in mind, reprobate eoneem- 
 ing the faith." — 2 Timothy, iii. 8. 
 
16 MASSACHUSETTS: 
 
 President of the College, and Thomas Shepard, second 
 of the name. In his Election Sermon delivered in 
 1673, Urian Oakes said, — "I profess I am heartily 
 for all due moderation. Nevertheless I must add, 
 that I look upon an unbounded toleration as the first 
 born of all abominations ; " while the year before 
 Thomas Shepard had declared, — " To tolerate all 
 things, and to tolerate nothing (its an old and true 
 maxim), both are intolerable. . . . Yet I would hope 
 none of the Lords husbandmen will be so foolish as to 
 Sow Tares, or plead for the Saving of them, I mean 
 in the way of Toleration aforesaid, when as it may 
 be prevented: the light of Nature and right Reason 
 would cry out against such a thing." So much for 
 Thomas Shepard the son ; but I come now to Thomas 
 Shepard the father, first pastor of the Cambridge 
 church. Thomas Shepard is handed down to us by 
 tradition as a divine of gentle character ; — • pro- 
 nounced shortly after his death " a silver trumpet " 
 of the faith. Cotton Mather also declared that " his 
 daily conversation was a trembling walk with God." 
 The mind of this man would naturally incline to tol- 
 eration; — he surely on this issue should have been 
 in advance of his contemporaries. Yet in his New 
 England Lamentations for Old England's Errors, 
 printed in London in 1645, he expressed himself 
 thus : — 
 
 " To cut off the hand of the Magistrate from touching 
 men for their consciences will certainly in time (if it get 
 ground) be the utter overthrow, as it is the undermining, of 
 the Eeformation begun. This opinion is but one of the for- 
 tresses and strongholds of Sathan, to keep his head from 
 crushing by Christ's heele, who (forsooth) because he is 
 krept into mens consciences, and because conscience is a 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 17 
 
 tender thing, no man must here meddle with him, as if con- 
 sciences were made to be the safeguard of sin and errour, 
 and Sathan himself, if once they can creep into them." 
 
 I have cited Uriau Oakes, President of Harvard 
 College from 1675 to 1681. He was succeeded by- 
 Increase Mather, who was President from 1685 to 
 1701 ; and in 1685 Increase Mather thus delivered 
 himself on the subject of religious liberty : — 
 
 " Moreover, sinful Toleration is an evil of exceeding 
 dangerous consequence : Men of Corrupt minds though 
 they may plead for Toleration, and Cry up Liberty of Con- 
 science etc. yet if once they should become numerous and 
 get power into their hands, none would persecute more than 
 they. . . . And indeed the Toleration of all Religions and 
 Perswasions, is the way to have no true Religion at all left. 
 ... I do believe that Antichrist hath not at this day a 
 more probable way to advance his Kingdom of Darkness, 
 than by a Toleration of all Religions and Perswasions." ^ 
 
 But it is useless to multiply citations where all are 
 to the same effect. If in the somewhat arid as well as 
 meagre record of Massachusetts seventeenth-century 
 utterances there are any which, subsequent to 1637, 
 favor religious toleration, or breathe the spirit of 
 toleration, I am not familiar with them, and would 
 much like to have my attention called to them.^ For, 
 in dealing with such a subject and making general 
 statements in regard to it, the tendency always is to 
 an appearance at least of exaggeration. It is attack 
 and defence; not a holding of equal scales. So in this 
 connection I can only say that, while my investigations 
 in the field referred to have brought to light many ex- 
 pressions on the subject of toleration such as those I 
 
 1 A Call to the Rising Generation (1685), pp. 107, 108. 
 
 2 But see Magnolia, B. VII. chap. iv. § 5. 
 
18 MASSACHUSETTS: 
 
 have quoted, I fail to remember any of an opposite 
 character. The record is sufficiently full; but it is 
 all one way. And, in the full light of that record, 
 judicially examined and compared with the records of 
 other lands during the same epoch, it is difficult to 
 detect any flaw in the following indictment by George 
 Bishop in his New-England Judged, — 
 
 " For, this let me say, That tho' more Blood hath been 
 shed, and with greater Executions, and in some sense more 
 cruel, by those who have not pretended to Religion, at least 
 to Liberty of Conscience, from whom no other thing could 
 be expected ; . . . yet, from Men pretending to Religion 
 and to Conscience ; who suffered for Religion and their 
 Consciences ; who left their Native Country, Friends and 
 Relatives, to dwell in a Wilderness for to enjoy their Con- 
 science and Religion ; from Professors, who have made so 
 much a do about Religion, and for their Conscience, and set 
 themselves up as the Height of all Profession of Religion, 
 and the most Zealous Assertors of Liberty of Conscience ; 
 and for that Cause have expected to be bad in regard, viz. : 
 because of Conscience and Religion, for Men . . . thus to 
 Exceed all Bounds and Limits of Moderation, Law, Human- 
 ity and Justice, upon a People, barely for their Conscience, 
 and the Exercise of their Religion . . . and for you to do 
 it, who yourselves are the Men (not another Generation) 
 which so fled, which so suffered, is beyond a Parallel." ^ 
 
 This indictment was framed in 1661 ; the only pos- 
 sible plea in answer to it was that made by Samuel 
 Willard in a wholly different connection, exactly 
 twenty years later. It was in these words, — "I per- 
 ceive they are mistaken in the design of our first 
 Planters, whose business was not Toleration ; but 
 were professed Enemies of it, and could leave the 
 
 ^ New-England Judged, p, 139. 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 19 
 
 World professing they died no Libertines. Their 
 business was to settle, and (as much as in them, lay) 
 secure Religion to Posterity, according to that way 
 which they believed was of God." ' This is true ; but 
 the question then arises, — Wherein did they differ in 
 this respect from those of the established churches of 
 the Old World against whose persecutions they so 
 loudly and so properly bore witness ? 
 
 But the difficulty with this portion of the early 
 record of Massachusetts — that of the Founders and 
 those prior, we will say, to 1660 — is not merely that 
 it is all one way ; but, unhappily, in addition to breath- 
 ing a strong spirit of intolerance, there runs through 
 it a vein of apology and sophistical excuse, or implied 
 denial, which shows that the fathers of Massachusetts 
 in saying and doing what they did say and do failed 
 to act wholly according to their lights. In other 
 words, they knew better. They once had been sub- 
 jected to persecution, — they were themselves the vic- 
 tims of religious intolerance ; and, as is usual with 
 those so situated, they had in that school made rapid 
 advance in the lessons of toleration. Now they were 
 in power and authority ; and, being so, they proved 
 themselves no less intolerant than those from whose 
 intolerance they had fled. They were not unaware of 
 the fact. Conscience troubled them, as those who 
 suffered from their intolerance wrote down words like 
 these,^ — 
 
 '•But that which most of all may be the Astonishment 
 and Detestation of Mankind is. That [the Spirit of Persecu- 
 tion, Cruelty and Malice] should predominate in those, who 
 had Loudly Cried out of the Tyranny and Oppression of the 
 
 1 Brief Animadversions, p. 4. 
 
 2 New-England Judged, preface. 
 
20 MASSACHUSETTS: 
 
 Bishops in Old England, and from whom they fled ; but 
 when they settled in a place, where they had liberty to 
 Govern, made their little Finger of Cruelty bigger than 
 ever they found the Loyns of the Bishops." ' 
 
 I have given Winthrop's emphatic words, uttered 
 from his seat as the presiding officer of the General 
 Court, wherein he laid down for Massachusetts the 
 rule of rigid conformity, pronouncing against " any 
 other exercises besides what authority hath already 
 set up," and declaring his readiness as a magistrate to 
 " restrain " any " from maintaining this course." But, 
 when in his imagination he heard the ugly echo of 
 these words coming back from across the Atlantic, 
 
 ^ Roger Williams makes this point effectively on Cotton in The 
 Jiloudy Tenent. Writing in 1635 Cotton had in his Answer to Argils 
 ments against Persecution for Cause of Conscience referred to the argu- 
 ments of the English Roman Catholic writers in favor of toleration, 
 dismissing them contemptuously with the remark that " they speake 
 for toleration of Religion, where themselves are under Hatches, when 
 they come to sit at Stem they judge and practise quite contrary." 
 To this Williams replied in his JBloudy Tenent (1644) aa follows : — 
 " If this practice he so abominahle in his [Cotton's] eyes from the 
 Papists, viz. that they are so partial as to persecute when they sit 
 at Helm, and yet cry out against persecution when they are under 
 the Hatches, I shall heseech the righteous judge of the whole world 
 to present as in a water or glass (where face answereth to face) the 
 faces of the Papist to the Protestant, answering to each other in the 
 sameness of partiality, both of this doctrine and practise. 
 
 " When Mr. Cotton and others have formerly been under hatches, 
 what sad and true complaints have they abundantly poured forth 
 against persecution ? 
 
 " But coming to the Helm (as he speaks of the Papists) how, both 
 by preaching, writing, printing, practice, do they themselves unnatu- 
 rally and partially express toward others, the cruel nature, etc. 
 
 " that the God of Heaven might j^lease to tell them how abomi- 
 nable in his eyes are a waight and a waiyht, a stone and a stone in the 
 bag of waights! one waight for themselves when they are under 
 Hatches, and another for others when they come to Helm." — The 
 Bloudy Tenent, chap. Ixxiv. 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 21 
 
 the same John Winthrop, governor of Massachusetts, 
 hastened in anticipation tacitly to deny himself, assert- 
 ing over and over that the Court had not censured doc- 
 trine, but only " declared it to tend to sedition ; " and 
 " we do not challenge power over mens consciences, 
 but when seditious speeches and practices discover such 
 a corrupt conscience, it is our duty to use authority to 
 reforme both ; " i and finally, Mistress Hutchinson's 
 "case was not matter of conscience, but of a civill 
 nature." In the same way, and echoing the very 
 language of the Holy Office, the Rev. Thomas Welde, 
 writing in England seven years after the event,^ de- 
 clared in regard to the adherents of Mrs. Hutchinson 
 that, when the magistrates of Massachusetts, " driven 
 with sad hearts to give them up to Satan," these mag- 
 istrates did " not simply for their Opinions (for which 
 I find wee have been slanderously traduced) but the 
 chiefest cause of their censure was their miscarriages 
 persisted in with great obstinacy." ^ At about the time 
 
 1 Short Story, p. 28. 
 
 ^ Preface to the Slwrt Story. 
 
 ' It is curious to note the similarity of language and expression of 
 the apologists for religious persecution. The text contains the state- 
 ments of Governor Winthrop and Rev. Thomas Welde. During the 
 same half century James I., referring to Queen Elizabeth, said, — " The 
 trewth is, according to my owne knowledge, the late queene of famous 
 memory never punished any Papist for religion ; " and Charles I. said 
 of James I., — "I am informed, neither Queen Elizabeth nor my 
 father did ever avow that any priest in their times was executed 
 merely for religion." Which statements with all others of like, char- 
 acter, whether emanating from Archbishop Laud, Governor Winthrop, 
 or Thomas Welde, are thus contemptuously disposed of by an able 
 English writer : — " This is the stale pretence of the clergy in all 
 countries, after they have solicited the government to make penal 
 laws against those they call heretics or schismatics, and prompted the 
 magistrates to a vigorous execution, then they lay all the odium on 
 the civil power ; for whom they have no excuse, but that such men 
 suffered, not for religion, but for disobedience to law." (Buckle, His- 
 
22 MASSACHUSETTS: 
 
 Thomas Welde penned these words, " Baillie, the Cove- 
 nanter," as Carlyle calls him, was writing in London, 
 — " Only they in New England are more strict and 
 rigid than we, or any church, to suppress, by the power 
 of the magistrate, all who are not of their way, to ban- 
 ishment ordinarily and presently even to death lately, 
 or perpetual slavery." Thus the friendly Presbyterian 
 divine ; on the other hand, still at the same time, the 
 even more friendly Sir Richard Saltonstall wrote 
 from England to Wilson and Cotton, " preachers of 
 the church which is at Boston," remonstrating at 
 the things " reported dayly of your tyranny and per- 
 secution in New England, as that you fyne, whip and 
 imprison men for their consciences ; " and while writ- 
 ing these words. Sir Richard set forth the true prin- 
 ciples of Religious Toleration in such language and 
 spirit as sufficed to show conclusively that those prin- 
 ciples were then well understood. When this letter 
 was received in Boston, John Cotton, shutting his eyes 
 against the light, replied, — " You thinke to compell 
 men in matter of worship is to make men sinne. If 
 the worship be lawful in itselfe, the magistrate com- 
 pelling him to come in to it compelleth him not to 
 sinne, but the sinne is in his will that needs to be 
 compelled to a christian duty. . . . You know not, if 
 you thinke wee come into this wildernesse to practise 
 
 tory of Ctvilhation, vol. i. pp. 338, 339, notes.) And thus the General 
 Court of Massachusetts at its Novemher session in 1646 {Records, ii. 
 179) declared, — ' ' Though no human power he Lord oyer the faith 
 and consciences of men, and therefore may not constrain them to he- 
 lieve, or profess against their conscience, yet because such as bring in 
 damnable heresies tending to the subversion of the Christian faith 
 . . . ought duly to be restrained from such notorious impiety, if any 
 Christian . . . shall go about to subvert . . . the Christian faith, by 
 broaching " etc. ; and then follow the usual penalties for seditious 
 utterances. 
 
n^S HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 23 
 
 those courses here which wee fled from in England. 
 We believe there is a vast difference betweene mens 
 inventions and Gods institutions ; ^ we fled from mens 
 inventions ; to which wee else should have been com- 
 pelled ; wee compell none to mens inventions." And 
 there John Cotton stopped ! ^ 
 
 In exactly the same line, and at about the same time, 
 Thomas Shepard, minister of the Cambridge church, 
 wrote, — " As for New England, we never banished 
 any for their consciences, but for sinning against con- 
 science, after due means of conviction." 
 
 ^ The "whole distinction hetween Papist and Calvinist, — so far as 
 enforced conformity was concerned, — lay in this distinction "be- 
 tweene mens inventions and Gods institutions." Both sides to the 
 controversy were intolerant and persecuted ; hut the one did it hy the 
 authority of the Church and the Popes, while the other found its war- 
 rant in the Bible, — God's word. The subject is discussed in the 
 preface (pp. vii., viii.) to Ellis' Puritan Age in Massachusetts, and more 
 fully in Adams' Three Episodes of Massachusetts History, pp. 382-9. 
 
 ^ " But to exeommunieate an Heretick, is not to persecute ; that is, 
 it is not to punish an innocent, but a culpable and damnable person, 
 and that not for conscience, but for persisting in error against light of 
 conscience, whereof it hath been convinced." — Cotton's Answer to Wil- 
 liams, Narragansett Club Publications, vol. iii. pp. 48, 49. Also, vol. 
 ii. p. 27. 
 
 " We humbly conceive men that are not prejudiced will easily dis- 
 cern that suppressing with all gentleness and tenderness a dangerous 
 error and of bad tendency, and the enforcing of Ceremonies in Religion, 
 which are neither directly, nor by any good consequent required, in or 
 by the word of God, do difEer toto ccelo." — Samuel WiUard's Bn'e/" 
 Animadversions (1681), p. 6. 
 
24 MASSACHUSETTS: 
 
 II. 
 
 I CLAIM descent from both Thomas Shepard and 
 John Cotton, — my father was among the offspring of 
 the former, my mother among those of the latter. I 
 am, therefore, not free from the usual inducement to 
 palliate and excuse their utterances and course ; and, 
 influenced by that inducement, reference might now 
 be made to " the prevailing bigotry of the age," and 
 the claim put in on their behalf that the situation 
 should be looked at from a seventeenth-century point 
 of view, etc. Though a descendant, I find myself un- 
 able to see the facts in that light for them and not for 
 others. One light for all ! — Those men were not 
 uneducated, nor in any way lacking in perspicuity or 
 logic. Of Shepard I have already spoken. Of Cotton 
 it remains to be said that, the friend, preceptor and 
 guide of Vane, he had not only been taught tolerance 
 by persecution, but, by nature, he was a tolerant man ; 
 
 — as was said in the funeral discourse of John Norton, 
 
 — " No man did more placidly bear a dissentient." 
 Even more than Shepard, therefore. Cotton should have 
 seen the coming light and borne witness to it; and when, 
 instead of so doing, these two preached conformity, 
 they could not plead in their own behalf, as could Arch- 
 bishop Laud in his behalf, that, naturally prone to con- 
 form, they had, having always been in authority, re- 
 ceived no teaching in the school of persecution. None 
 the less, they wandered into the maze of sophistry 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 25 
 
 revealed in the language just quoted ; and they wan- 
 dered, not because they did not have light, but because 
 they shut their eyes to the light. If they did not know 
 better, they had no excuse for not knowing better. 
 They were men of mind ; they were not John Wilsons 
 or Thomas Dudleys ! 
 
 Nevertheless, in saying what they said they ex- 
 pressed the best thought of their day in Massachu- 
 setts, — the most advanced thought as respects Re- 
 ligious Toleration ; and it remained such for half a 
 century, daring which the battle was going on else- 
 where. The Synod of 1G37 set the step by which the 
 Puritan Commonwealth inarched through the lives of 
 two generations ; those who voiced the Commonwealth 
 prided themselves on it at the time : and, curiously 
 enough, their descendants have prided themselves on 
 it since — even to this day ! 
 
 But, in reality, Massachusetts missed a great des- 
 tiny, — -and missed it narrowly though wilfully, — it, 
 " like the base Judean, threw a pearl away, richer 
 than all his tribe ; " for, both Roger Williams and 
 young Sir Harry Vane were once part of the Com- 
 monwealth, — they had lain, as it were, in its hand. 
 
 Roger Williams, as all know, was the prophet of 
 complete religious toleration in America. Into the 
 causes of his banishment from Massachusetts, and the 
 circumstances attending it, I do not propose now to 
 enter. That as a man he was " conscientiously con- 
 tentious " I should naturally be among the last to 
 deny; most men who contribute materially towards 
 bringing about great changes, religious or moral, are 
 " conscientiously contentious." Were they not so they 
 would not accomplish the work they are here to do. 
 Such men are an essential element in the economy of 
 
26 MASSACHUSETTS: 
 
 nature ; and the logic which defends the expulsion of 
 Roger Williams from Massachusetts in 1635 is only- 
 consistent when it expresses regret that William Lloyd 
 Garrison was not banished from the United States, 
 exactly two centuries later, instead of being dragged 
 through the streets of Boston with a rope aroimd his 
 neck ! ^ The situations were much the same ; nor 
 were the two men unlike. 
 
 So also as respects Sir Harry Vane. He is a very 
 considerable historic figure ; but I will say at once 
 that, Milton's great sonnet to the contrary notwith- 
 standing, I am no ardent admirer of the first titled 
 governor of Massachusetts. I have never been able 
 to get over his course in the House of Commons dur- 
 ing the trial of Strafford. It was, in my judgment, 
 simply dastardly, — the course of an eaves-dropper 
 and a spy ; — the transaction was one of which no 
 man innately high-toned could have been guilty, — a 
 memory neither to be outlived by him nor forgotten 
 of him. Later in life he seems to have developed to 
 a marked degree in his political course the qualities 
 commonly described as adroit ; — a sincere man, he 
 was likewise an astute politician. I should, in fine, 
 be inclined to believe that Cromwell, to use a familiar 
 but expressive figure of speech, " sized him " correctly, 
 and I accordingly feel a certain sympathy with the 
 great Protector's famous cry of " Good Lord, deliver 
 me," etc. There is, none the less, such a thing as his- 
 torical justice ; and historical justice exacts the ad- 
 mission that Vane, more than any other man in the 
 England of his day, understood and voiced Religious 
 Toleration. He imbibed the principle early, and 
 he imbibed it while in daily intercourse with John 
 
 ^ Rev. J. A. Vinton, Aniinomian Controversy of 1637, pp. 84, 85. 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 27 
 
 Cottou, here in Massachusetts: — but he did not find 
 the Massachusetts soil a kindly one ; and John Cotton 
 fell away from his teachings. The idea germinated, 
 but failed to fructify. The seed fell in a stony place. 
 Vane preached the new doctrine in his controversy 
 with Winthrop during the winter of 1636, and later in 
 England he "declared," as Burnet tells us, "for an 
 unbounded liberty of conscience," propounding and 
 defending this thesis consistently, persistently and 
 fearlessly. Young Henry Vane, like Roger Williams, 
 was in advance of the fathers of Massachusetts, and 
 they rudely displaced him and drove him away ; and, 
 again, the stones which the builders refused became 
 the head-stones of the corner ! 
 
 In fine, then, after Roger Williams, young Sir Harry 
 Vane and Mistress Anne Hutchinson were banished, 
 or abandoned the field, it is putting the case none 
 too strongly to say that for nearly half a century, 
 until 1680, religious conformity of a rigid character 
 was in Massachusetts enforced by all necessary eccle- 
 siastical and civil compulsion. During that period the 
 clergy were inquisitorial, the magistrates severe. In- 
 tensity of theological conviction secured a firm control, 
 and with the results which invariably thereon ensue. 
 The strong original tendency to a broader view of 
 things was relentlessly suppressed, and in a short time 
 ceased to make itself felt. It died out in the persons 
 of Winthrop and Cotton. Of the latter, and the 
 " placidity " of his bearing to the " dissentient," I 
 have just spoken ; while Bishop, the Quaker martyr- 
 ologist, referring to the former twelve years after his 
 death, speaks of him kindly and with respectful re- 
 straint as " an honest man " who had some hand in 
 the persecutions, "being drawn to it by your priests." 
 
28 MASSACHUSETTS: 
 
 These men had in spirit caught a glimpse of the com- 
 ing light ; and, again applying the accepted rules of 
 historical criticism, it will not do to pass a harsh, judg- 
 ment upon them because they did not proclaim that 
 light, and, if need be, suffer martyrdom for it. That, 
 if they had proclaimed it, they would in all human 
 probability have been compelled to suffer the martyr- 
 dom must be admitted ; and it is hardly worth while 
 here further to argue the question discussed by Buckle 
 whether men are bound to be martyrs, or to jeopardize 
 their personal and family interests, unless, by so doing, 
 they clearly see their way to some immediate public 
 good.^ Suffice it to say, Winthrop and Cotton were 
 not made of the same stuff as the younger Vane and 
 Roger Williams. They were men of calmer, less tur- 
 bulent disposition. They could bear to be suppressed ; 
 and they were suppressed.^ 
 
 When a man thus submits to be suppressed, — con- 
 forms outwardly to tenets in which he does not wholly 
 believe, — the verdict of the moralist and the historian 
 is adverse to him. He is held to have been derelict, 
 — unequal to the test ; and his course in life is com- 
 pared with that of the martyr, who bore fearless evi- 
 dence regardless of consequences, whether imprison- 
 ment, exile or death. Especially is this true of the 
 non-conformist who later becomes, as did Cotton, a 
 
 1 History of Civilization, vol. iii. p. 469. 
 
 2 Hubbard, the historian, "who was himself a contemporary of Cot- 
 ton's, says that Cotton, notwithstanding- " he was persuaded to an 
 amicable compliance with the other ministers . . . did still retain his 
 own sense and enjoy his own apprehension in all or most of the things 
 then controverted." But it also appears that, in the words of Win- 
 throp in another connection, he " kept his Judgement to himselfe," 
 and it subsequently became known only " by some expressions of his 
 . . . since that time published." 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 29 
 
 conformist. In such case, the inference is inevitable 
 that, as the man grew older his courage failed him, — 
 the desire for peace and the comfort of an accustomed 
 life prevailed over the love of testifying to the truth ; 
 and then follow the words, " It was not so with Roger 
 Williams ! " That is all true ; and posterity has most 
 properly taken cognizance of the fact. John Cotton 
 does not stand on an equal pedestal with Roger Wil- 
 liams. 
 
 None the less, there is in justice something to be 
 said on the other side. Material of every description 
 is worked into the woof and warp of human develop- 
 ment, and is essential to the fabric. 
 
 " They also serve who only stand and wait." 
 
 Roger Williams had a call to go out into the wilder- 
 ness, and bear testimony. He went ; and it was well. 
 John Cotton deemed it better to remain in Boston, 
 and there bide his time. He did so. His time, it is 
 true, never came : but, none the less, he worked his 
 life into that Massachusetts fabric ; and it is there 
 now. AU men cannot be martyrs ; nor would it be 
 good that all men should be martyrs, or yet the stuff 
 of which martyrs are made. The fabric calls for only 
 a certain proportion of that material. Every man 
 subjected to the crucial test must look into his own 
 make-up, and, at his peril, judge of it, correctly un- 
 derstanding himself. If he makes a mistake he must 
 accept the consequences ; but, if he judges correctly, — 
 appreciates his own capability and limitations, — it 
 makes little difference in the grand result where he puts 
 in his work. For instance, John Winthrop's proper 
 place was in Massachusetts. There, in spite of tempo- 
 rary fluctuations of influence and estimation, he could 
 
30 MASS A CHUSETTS : 
 
 and did in the long run and final result do the best 
 work of which in all probability he was capable. In 
 like manner, John Cotton, taking his own qualities 
 and confessed shortcomings into the estimate, witb the 
 influence he might hope to exert and the conditions by 
 which he was surrounded, might fairly have concluded 
 that he could produce the largest results of good 
 through silence and patience, — through a waiting 
 and expectant policy. That, if he did so think, he 
 misjudged the situation and the permanence of the 
 forces at work, is now apparent ; for, in the result, he 
 underwent permanent suppression. 'But, none the 
 less, it may well have been an honest error of judg- 
 ment on a point admitting at the moment of infinite 
 question ; and he and what he thought, said and wrote 
 went into the great resultant fabric all the same : only 
 his thread was not destined to shine through the som- 
 bre woof, a gleam of gold ! 
 
 Winthrop was more fortunate ; but AVinthrop was 
 a man of different mental mould. His force lay in 
 character. With high moral sense, calm judgment, 
 fair intellectual capacity and sufficient courage for the 
 occasion, he had not a questioning spirit or a hungry 
 mind, — on the contrary, he was almost childish in his 
 superstition and credulity. He was a well-balanced, 
 high-minded administrator ; in no respect a prophet. 
 He uniformly accepted the situation, and, if it was 
 other than he would have wished, patiently bided his 
 time. With his limitations, he was right in so doing. 
 By nature tolerant in all things, Winthrop in obedi- 
 ence to the behests of the clergy did in his capacity as 
 magistrate many things from which his own judgment 
 and better nature recoiled ; and history has recorded 
 them against him. Nevertheless, though we might 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 31 
 
 wish that on more than one occasion he had entered 
 a firmer and clearer protest, and conducted himself 
 otherwise than as he did ; yet his life, too, was worked 
 into the fabric which without his life would at this 
 day be essentially other and poorer than it is. It 
 would not have been well, had he, being other than 
 he was, felt a call to martyrdom. As I have just 
 said, the world stands in need of a due proportion of 
 martyrs, and to them posterity at least is not nig- 
 gardly of crowns ; but a world made up wholly of 
 martyrs, or of those having in them a call to martyr- 
 dom, would not be a world to be commended. In the 
 economy of nature there is also room for, as well as 
 need of, observers, philosophers and administrators, 
 — for patience as well as zeal, — for silent meditation 
 as well as the voice crying in the wilderness. 
 
 It was so in New England in the seventeenth cen- 
 tury. There was a place for Johu Winthrop, as well 
 as for Roger Williams ; and both did the work they 
 were there to do. There was no place for Sir Harry 
 Vane, and it was well he withdrew. For John Cotton 
 there was a place, and a great place ; but he miscalcu- 
 lated his surroundings and missed half his destiny. He 
 bided his time ; and only the night came. 
 
 Governor Winthrop died in 1649, lamenting on his 
 death-bed the acts of persecution to which he had been 
 compelled ; the Eev. John Cotton followed him three 
 years later, to the last a silenced man : and with them 
 vanished the last faint glow of that light which had 
 shone strong in Vane and Williams. A deep night of 
 conventional, old-time theology ensued,— a night which 
 the filio-pietistic historians of the present century are 
 wont to dwell upon with self-satisfied complacency as 
 a period during which peace and quiet reigned in the 
 
32 MASSA CHUSETTS : 
 
 land. It was in fact a century of intellectual torpor, 
 • — a torpor the completeness of which can only be 
 appreciated by those who have passed long hours toil- 
 ing through the sermons, discourses and theological 
 treatises which bear incontrovertible witness to it. 
 
 During the forty years which immediately followed 
 the Synod of 1637, dissentients and intruders were ac- 
 cordingly punished in the colony, or expelled from the 
 colony under j)enalty of death in case of their return. 
 Nor was the threat of this penalty an empty one. In 
 the language of an historian whg_it is impossible to 
 accuse of any lack of the spirit of filial piety in deal- 
 ing with the founders of Massachusetts, — " The pro- 
 vision which threatened with death persons returning 
 after being banished was no novelty in Massachusetts 
 legislation. It had been resorted to over and over 
 again, through a course of years, and had never once 
 failed of ,its intended effect." ^ After 1680 a certain 
 degree of formal toleration existed, but it was a tol- 
 eration compelled from without ; and how reluctantly 
 and grudgingly it was conceded the pages of Sewall's 
 diary bear witness. Until after the close of the first 
 century of colonial and provincial history, the Congre- 
 gational Calvinist of Massachusetts tolerated after a 
 fashion the presence of communicants of the Church of 
 England, for he could not help so doing ; but the char- 
 acter of that toleration may be inferred from the fol- 
 lowing extract from a discourse by the Rev. Samuel 
 Mather, a graduate of Harvard in the class of 1643 : — 
 
 " If you do but wear a Surplice for peace sake, why not as 
 
 well admit the sign of the Cross in Baptism, or bow to an 
 
 Altar, and in a little time you will find that the same Reason 
 
 is as strong for bowing to an Image, to a Crucifix, and why 
 
 1 Palfrey, vol. ii. p. 471. 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 33 
 
 not as well say Mass too, for the peace of the Chui-ch, and 
 then at last swallow down every thing, Submit to the Pope, 
 worship the Beast, and so be damned and go to Hell, and all 
 for the peace of the Church." 
 
 And when in 1686 the newly arrived royal governor 
 of New England, not unreasonably, as it now seems, 
 asked that a religious edifice might be assigned in 
 which services could be held according to the Church 
 of England ceremonial, a modern and sympathiz- 
 ing historian asserts that the people were not less 
 " shocked " by the proposition than " if the demand 
 had been for the use of the building for a mass, or for 
 a carriage-house for Juggernaut." ^ He describes the 
 demand as the " intrusion of episcopacy." A similar 
 view as to the establishment of places of Protestant 
 worship in Madrid and other papistical localities 
 has, both then and since, prevailed ; but those com- 
 posing the Massachusetts school of historians have 
 not expressed themselves in regard to it with the 
 same leniency of language. 
 
 While the presence of the communicants of the state 
 church of the mother country was thus tolerated, all 
 other dissidence was frowned down ; and that, too, in 
 a way which, as matter of fact and practically, made 
 its existence impossible. Throughout the first half of 
 the eighteenth century Massachusetts was an arena 
 of theological conflict ; and though a modified form of 
 toleration was in 1780 grudgingly admitted into the 
 first constitution of the State, it was not until 1838, — 
 when the third century of its history was already 
 entered upon, that complete liberty of conscience was 
 made part of the fundamental law. The battle of 
 Religious Toleration had then been elsewhere fought 
 
 1 Palfrey, toI. iii. p. 521. 
 
34 MASSACHUSETTS: 
 
 and won ; Massachusetts reluctantly accepted the re- 
 sult. So far from winning laurels in that struggle, her 
 record in it is in degree only less discreditable than that 
 of Spain. 
 
 But, again, this judgment, assuming it to be correct, 
 does not necessarily carry with it the stigma now com- 
 monly supposed. The trouble with the historical wri- 
 ters who have taken upon themselves the defence of 
 the founders of Massachusetts is that they have tried to 
 sophisticate away the facts. In so doing they have of 
 necessity had recourse to lines of argument which they 
 would not for an instant accept in defence or extenua- 
 tion of those who in the Old World pursued the policy 
 with which they find themselves confronted in the early 
 record of the New. But there that record is : and it 
 will not out. Eoger Williams, John Wheelwright and 
 Anne Hutchinson come back from their banishment, 
 and stand there as witnesses ; the Quakers and Bap- 
 tists, with eyes that forever glare, swing from the 
 gallows or turn about at the cart's tail. In Spain it 
 was the dungeon, the rack and the fagot ; in Massa- 
 chusetts it was banishment, the whip and the gibbet. 
 In neither case can the records be obliterated. Be- 
 tween them it is only a question of degree, — one may 
 in color be a dark drab, while the other is unmistakably 
 a jetty black. The difficulty is with those who, while 
 expatiating with great force of language on the sooty 
 aspect of the one, turn and twist the other in the light, 
 and then solemnly asseverate its resemblance to driven 
 snow. Unfortunately for those who advocate this view 
 of the respective Old and New World records, the facts 
 do not justify it. On the contrary, while the course 
 in the matter of persecution pursued by those in au- 
 thority in the Old World was logical and does admit of 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 36 
 
 defence, the course pursued by the founders of Massa- 
 chusetts was illogical, and does not admit of more than 
 partial extenuation. 
 
 In the first case, the argument is conclusive and the 
 logic of the situation plain ; a modern analogy will 
 illustrate it. During the last few years what is termed 
 in medicine the germ theory has been scientifically 
 developed. We now know to a certain extent how 
 given forms of epidemic originate and spread, — we 
 more or less understand infection and contagion ; and 
 we take sanitary precautions accordingly. Those pre- 
 cautions are sometimes of a very drastic and severe 
 description, — as the expression goes, the disease is 
 stamped out. If cholera, typhus, small-pox, scarlet 
 fever, diphtheria, or even measles are apprehended, or 
 appear in an epidemic form, we take the measures 
 deemed necessary, and the well are carefully segregated 
 from the sick. That a child from a house infected 
 with small-pox or diphtheria should attend a school, or 
 in any way mix with other children, would not be tol- 
 erated. Formerly it was the same with religious here- 
 sies, — they were poisonous opinions. Indeed, Cotton 
 in one of his controversial writings makes use of this 
 very illustration, saying, — " What if a child of God 
 were infected with a plague-sore, or some other con- 
 tagious disease, may not their Brethren exclude them 
 the common ayre . . . ? Truely there be some unsound 
 and corrupt opinions and practises which are more in- 
 fectious and contagious than any plague-sore." ^ 
 
 1 Answer to Roger Williams, Narragansett Club, toI. ii. p. 27, also 
 lb. vol. iii. p. 53. 
 
 " Old" Ephraim Pagett, as he is called, in the epistle dedicatory to 
 his Heresiogrdphy, published in 1645, uses the same simile, — "The 
 plague is of all diseases most infectious : I have lived [in London] 
 among you almost a Jubile, and seen your great care and provision 
 
36 MA SSA CHUSE TTS : 
 
 Those people believed. They never for one instant 
 questioned. Their belief was, perhaps, a phase of 
 immature development ; and we certainly have out- 
 grown it. None the less they entertained it, and it 
 possessed them wholly. Such being the case, they had 
 to live up to their faith ; — indeed they could not do 
 otherwise. That faith was realistic ; — it included God 
 and the Devil, — Heaven and Hell, — a brief period 
 of probation here, and a whole eternity of rewards or 
 punishments hereafter. The devout Catholic or the 
 elect Calvinist only would be saved ; the rest must 
 burn. And who were the elect and the devout ? — 
 Practically, those who believed as the professors of the 
 faith believed. The heretic was with them what a per- 
 son infected with cholera or small-pox is with us, — a 
 source of contagion, — something to be put away, — in 
 no degree, great or little, to be tolerated. 
 
 We look after the life that now is ; they regarded 
 the life to come as of infinitely greater moment. In- 
 fection was even more to be guarded against in matters 
 of faith than in those of health. These facts once 
 firmly grasped, the same mantle of charity must cover 
 Old -World Calvinist and Old -World Catholic,— 
 Scotchman and Spaniard. To each Religious Tolera- 
 tion meant, not what it means to us, — far otherwise, 
 it meant a license to infect ! " Heresy was an unclean 
 thing ; the presence of the misbeliever was a danger 
 
 to keep the City from infection, in the shutting up the sicke, and in 
 carrying them to your pest-houses, in setting warders to keep the 
 whole from the sicke, in making of fires and perfuming the streets, in 
 resorting to your Churches, in pouring out your prayers to Almighty 
 God "with fasting and alnies to be propitious to you. The plague of 
 heresies is greater, aqd you are now in more danger than when you 
 buried five thousand a week : Yon have power to keep these Hereticks 
 and Sectaries from sholing together to infect one another." 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 37 
 
 like that of the secret sinner in the Jewish camp, like 
 the house under a hereditary curse in the Greek com- 
 monwealth." 1 This being so, the rest followed. 
 
 James Anthony Froude, dealing with this topic, puts 
 the case well : — 
 
 " Persecution has ceased among ourselves, because we do 
 not any more believe that want of theoretic orthodoxy in 
 matters of faith is necessarily fraught with the tremendous 
 consequences which once were supposed to be attached to 
 it. If, however, a school of Thugs were to rise among us, 
 making murder a religious service ; if they gained proselytes, 
 and the proselytes put their teaching in execution, we should 
 speedily begin again to persecute opinion. What teachers 
 of Thugism would appear to ourselves, the teachers of heresy 
 actually appeared to Sir Thomas More [and John Eudicott], 
 only being as much more hateful as the eternal death of the 
 soul is more terrible than the single and momentary separa- 
 tion of it from the body. There is, I think, no just ground 
 on which to condemn conscientious Catholics [or Calvinists or 
 Puritans] on the score of persecution, except only this : that 
 as we are now convinced of the injustice of the persecuting 
 laws, so among those who beheved them to be just, there 
 were some who were led by an instinctive protest of human 
 feeling to be lenient in the execution of those laws ; while 
 others of harder nature and more narrow sympathies enforced 
 them without reluctance, and even with exultation . . . And 
 thus, and thus only, are we justified in censuring those whose 
 names figure largely in the persecuting lists. Their defence 
 is impregnable to logic." ^ 
 
 The position of the founders of Massachusetts would 
 therefore be impregnable, were it not that it is illogical ; 
 for the trouble is that, in Massachusetts, they refused 
 to see a light which they had seen clearly enough in 
 
 1 Doyle, English in Amerir.a ; Puritan Colonies, vol. ii. p. 90. 
 
 2 History of England [Cabinet Ed.], vol. i. pp. 171, 172. 
 
38 MASSA CHUSETTS : 
 
 England. It will not do for a notorious and persistent 
 non-conformist on the east coast of the Atlantic to go 
 about to enforce a rigid system of conformity on the 
 west coast of that ocean. The man who has suffered 
 from those in authority for opinion's sake must not, 
 when in his turn clothed with authority, inflict for 
 opinion's sake suffering on others ; and, if he does do 
 so, he and his posterity must accept the consequences. 
 The position of that man is not logical. Nor is it true 
 to assert that in so judging we are applying nineteenth- 
 century truths to seventeenth-century facts. On the 
 contrary we apply now only the rule that Cromwell 
 applied then. " Had not they labored but lately under 
 the weight of persecution ? And was it fit for them 
 to sit heavy upon others ? Is it ingenuous to ask lib- 
 erty and not to give it ? What greater hypocrisy than 
 for those who were oppressed by the bishops to become 
 the greatest oppressors themselves, so soon as their 
 yoke was removed? " ^ And in like manner the con- 
 temporaneous remonstrances of Saltonstall ^ and the 
 formal recorded protest of all the more eminent Eng- 
 lish divines of their own way of thinking,^ judging 
 them by seventeenth-century standards, constitute no- 
 thing less than a seventeenth-century indictment of the 
 early polity of Massachusetts at the bar of history ; 
 and the sophistry to which the representative Massa- 
 chusetts divines had recourse in reply was no less 
 sophistry then and to them, than it is to us now. On 
 the pleadings they stand convicted. So much for the 
 early clergy. As to the magistrates, in the mouths of 
 James I. and Charles I., — of Philip II. of Spain or 
 
 ^ Carlyle's Cromwell, Part viii. Speech iv. 
 
 ^ Hutcliinson's State Papers [Prince Soc. Ed.], vol. ii. pp. 127-9. 
 
 * Magnolia, B. vii. chap. iv. 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 39 
 
 Louis XIV. of France, the words — " We see not that 
 any should have authority to set up any other exercises 
 besides what authority had aheady setup," — these 
 words in those mouths would have had a familiar as 
 well as an ominous sound. To certain of those who 
 listened to them, they must have had a sound no less 
 ominous when uttered by Governor John Winthrop in 
 the Cambridge meeting-house on the 17th of November, 
 1637. In them was definitely formulated and clearly 
 announced the policy thereafter to be pursued in Mas- 
 sachusetts. It was thereafter pursued in Massachu- 
 setts. John Winthrop, John Endicott and Thomas 
 Dudley were all English Puritans. As such they had 
 sought refuge from authority in Massachusetts. On 
 what ground can the impartial historian withhold from 
 them the judgment he visits on James and Philip and 
 Charles and Louis ? The fact would seem to be that 
 the position of the latter was logical though cruel ; 
 while the position of the former was cruel and illogical. 
 
 With the next generation of clergy and magistrates 
 the case was different. Never persecuted themselves, 
 they had been brought up in the school of intolerance. 
 They accordingly were merely true to the lessons of 
 their youth. They did not sin against light. They 
 were in the position of the Catholics of Spain, and the 
 same mantle of logical charity which is conceded to 
 these last must be conceded to the others. 
 
 In one of the foot-notes to his Discovery of Amer- 
 ica, John Fiske, referring to the way in which some 
 unpleasing event had been ignored in local Spanish 
 archives, exclaims with a tinge of cynicism — " That 
 is the way history has too often been written. With 
 most people it is only a kind of ancestor worship." 
 What may be called the cosmopolitan school of his- 
 
40 MASSA CHUSETTS : 
 
 tory is, perhaps, a thing yet to be developed ; for the 
 fact is, our histories are all Catholic or Protestant, — 
 European or American, — English, French, Spanish 
 or German, — Whig or Tory, — Federalist, Democi-at 
 or Republican. The historian invariably scrutinizes 
 the record through ej'^es jaundiced by faith or patriot- 
 ism or filial affection or partisan zeal ; and he is even 
 lauded for so doing ! He dilates on the blood-sealed 
 devotion of the martyrs to the faith he professes, and 
 the valor of the soldiers and the sailors of the land of 
 his birth ; he execrates those who oppressed the one, 
 and depreciates those who fought against the other. 
 And so it has come about that we Americans are only 
 just beginning to read the record, at once long and 
 obscure, through eyes neither necessarily English nor 
 Protestant nor republican. In the literature of our 
 mother tongue there is one great example of the 
 opposite method of historical treatment; and just a 
 century ago, in illustration, as it were, of the truth of 
 what I say, the President of the college here felt called 
 upon to make public a denial of the rumored use 
 made of that example as a text-book for the stu- 
 dents.^ But the world does move, and the History 
 of the Decline aiid Fall of the Roman JEmpire still 
 
 1 For the Centinsl. 
 Mr. Russell : — 
 
 A writer in tlie Centinel of the last Saturday, under the signature 
 of Christianus, says " that an ahridgement of Gibbon's history (if his 
 information be true) is directed to make a part of the studies of the 
 young gentlemen at our University." I now beg leave through the 
 channel of your paper, to acquaint the -writer, as also the publick, 
 that his information is not true. The system taught is Millot's Ele- 
 ments of General History, ancient and modern, and Gibbon's history 
 was never thought of for the purpose. 
 
 Joseph Willakd, President. 
 
 Cambkidge, Nov. 14, 1791. 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 41 
 
 remains the most delightful, instructive and refreshing 
 of all works of the kind, simply because the man who 
 ■wrote it — -a scholar, an investigator and a thinker 
 — chanced, also, to be nothing else, — not even what is 
 known in common parlance as a Christian ! Conse- 
 quently, undeterred by a storm of theological and now 
 forgotten obloquy, he dealt with the fall of the old faith 
 and the rise of the new as a philosopher, not as a par- 
 tisan. On the other hand, there is Macaulay's magnifi- 
 cent epic, with William of Orange its JEneas and 
 Ulysses, — - almost professedly a Whig account of " the 
 Glorious Revolution of '88 " ! An incomparable politi- 
 cal pamphlet, no one can read it without delight ; and 
 no one should read it as history. Interesting as a 
 novel, unhappily it also resembles a novel in other 
 respects. 
 
 So far as America is concerned, it is greatly to be 
 feared that we in the matter of historical work are yet 
 in the filio-pietistic and patriotic stage of development. 
 " Ancestor worship " is the rule,^ and an excellent 
 illustration of the results to which that worship leads 
 those given to it is afforded in the treatment which 
 has been accorded to that portion of the Massachusetts 
 record which relates to religious toleration. It is not 
 too much to say that the resources of sophistry and 
 special pleading have been exhausted in the attempt 
 to extenuate it or explain it away. On its face it 
 presents difficulties of an obvious nature : — wholesale 
 
 ^ It is not pleasant to have such remarks made, but tiere is a cer- 
 tain justice in Sir Henry Maine's reference to " the nauseous grandilo- 
 quence of the American panegyrical historian " (Popular Government, 
 p. 222) ; and J. A. Doyle might have extended his criticism of the 
 early New England chroniclers, — that in reading their writings " we 
 are reading not a history but a hagiology," — so as to include not a 
 few later investigators. 
 
42 MASSACHUSETTS: 
 
 proscription ; frequent banishment under penalty of 
 death in case of return ; the infliction of punishments 
 both cruel and degrading, amounting to torture, and 
 that regardless of the sex of those punished ; the sys- 
 tematic enforcement of rigid conformity through long 
 periods of time ; — all these things are part of the 
 record : — and in these bad respects it is not at once 
 apparent how the Massachusetts record differs from 
 those of Spain or France or England. But the Mas- 
 sachusetts school of historians, undismayed by the dif- 
 ficulties which confronted it, has addressed itself to 
 the task in such a blind sense of filial devotion that 
 the self-deception of many, and not the least eminent, 
 of those composing the school has been complete. 
 
 And, in venturing on this criticism, as broad as it 
 is outspoken, I have not lost sight of the personal 
 relations I have had with not a few of those I thus 
 classify, and the profound respect I entertain for their 
 character, their industry and their attainments. But 
 in this matter they and I belong to different schools ; 
 and, belonging to different schools, it is incumbent on 
 me, as well as upon them, to set forth the facts, each 
 from his own point of view, as forcibly as may be. I 
 would see Massachusetts men and events exactly as 
 I see Spanish or French or English men and events; 
 applying to them the same rules of criticism and the 
 same leniency or severity of judgment. 
 
 Take, for instance, in the case of Massachusetts, the 
 first undisputed proposition, — that of the proscription 
 and banishment of the so-called Antinomians in 1637. 
 It included an entire faction in the state ; — true, the 
 state was small, but the proportion was not. In the 
 words of Winthrop, those of one party, composing a 
 large majority of the dwellers in the principal town 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 43 
 
 of the colony, " were so divided from the rest of the 
 country in their judgment and practice, as it could 
 not stand with the public peace that they should con- 
 tinue amongst us. So, by the example of Lot in 
 Abraham's family, and after Hagar and Ishmael, he 
 saw they must be sent away." And they were sent 
 away ! This was more than two centuries and a half 
 ago ; but only recently it has been ingeniously argued, 
 not in extenuation but in full and coinplete defence of 
 this proceeding, that Massachusetts was not a state, — 
 a community, — it was merely a commercial planta- 
 tion ; and the right to exclude at their pleasure dan- 
 gerous or disagreeable persons from their domain was 
 never regarded by the early Massachusetts magistrates 
 as any more questionable than the right of any house- 
 holder to determine who should be the inmates of his 
 home.-' Accordingly these magistrates said to the 
 dissentients, — " The world is wide . . . there is no 
 place for you among us." Banishment, the historian 
 then admits, is a word of ill sound; but, after all, 
 there was little hardship in leaving unattractive Mas- 
 sachusetts for a residence on the beautiful shore of 
 Narragansett Bay.'-* And so Massachusetts not only 
 acted within her right, but, in the action taken, was 
 right. 
 
 Admitting the legal soundness of this position in its 
 construction of the rights and powers conferred by the 
 Massachusetts patent, — a large admission and one 
 which has not passed unchallenged,^ — but admitting 
 
 1 Palfrey, vol. i. p. 299. 
 
 ^ lb. p. 419. See, also, Dexter, As to Roger Williams, pp. 17, 18; 
 Vinton, The Antinomian Controversy, pp. 84-87. 
 
 ^ Adams, Emancipation of Massachusetts, pp. 58, 59; Hallowell, 
 Quaker Invasion, pp. 38, 70. 
 
44 MASSACHUSETTS: 
 
 it in its whole extent for the purposes of the present 
 discussion, — the question at once suggests itself, — 
 In what way did the position of Massachusetts and its 
 magistrates differ in these respects from that of other 
 countries then and now ? — All great bodies politic 
 claim the power of exclusion and banishment. Philip 
 II. claimed it in the case of Spain ; — and exercised 
 it in the cases of the Jews and the Moriscoes. Louis 
 XIV. claimed it when he revoked the edict of Nantes, 
 and proceeded to drive the Huguenots out of France. 
 The Russians are claiming it to-day in the case of the 
 Jews ; the United States in the case of the Chinese. 
 The position of the founders of Massachusetts was, 
 therefore, in this respect in no way peculiar. They 
 stood on what they regarded well-considered principles 
 of state. But did not Philip II. and Louis XIV. do 
 the same? — Was not Archbishop Laud a prelate of 
 undoubted honesty and singleness of purpose ? — Why 
 is it that acts of proscription and general banishment 
 for opinion's sake are held up to execration when por- 
 trayed in one scene of the great drama, but in another 
 scene of it are extenuated and made to conform to the 
 precepts of wise statesmanship and lofty morality ? 
 
 Again, approaching a yet larger question, — the 
 question of Toleration. Confronted with the record on 
 that matter, the Massachusetts historian, so free and 
 frank in his denunciation of English and Italian and 
 Spanish ecclesiastical bigotry and intolerance, proceeds 
 to argue that, after all, "religious intolerance, like 
 every other public restraint, is criminal wherever it is 
 not needful for the public safety : it is simply self- 
 defence whenever tolerance would be public ruin." ^ 
 
 Palfrey, -vol. i. p. 300. The general pvoposition here set forth is 
 ar^ed at length by Palfrey ; it has since been discussed in a most 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 45 
 
 These -words from the latest and most elaborate history 
 of New England sound like an echo, — loud-reverberat- 
 ing, close at hand, — of the utterances of two centuries 
 before. Thus Increase Mather, later president of Har- 
 vard College, expressed himself in 1681, — " the place 
 may sometimes make a great alteration, as to indul- 
 gence to be expected. It is evident, that that Tolera- 
 tion is in one place, not only lawful, but a necessary 
 duty, which in another place would be destructive ; 
 and the expectation of it irrational." ^ The door to 
 extenuation and sophistry is thus cautiously opened, 
 and, when the archbishop of an established church sits 
 at the head of the council-board, intolerance is de- 
 nounced as " cruelty," — the prelate riots in barbai'- 
 ities ; ^ when a Governor of Massachusetts sits there, it 
 is self-defence, or at worst a wholesome and necessary 
 restraint.^ Another modern authority asserts that 
 " had our early ancestors adopted the course we at this 
 day are apt to deem so easy and obvious, and placed 
 their government on the basis of liberty for all sorts of 
 consciences, it would have been, in that age, a certain 
 
 elaborate manner, and with great subtlety of thought and logic, 
 by J. S. Mill in his essay On Libirti/ ; and, more recently stUl, by 
 Leslie Stephen in the paper entitled Poisonous Opinions, published in 
 his Agnostic's Apology (pp. 242-257). The last of these treatises is 
 peculiarly interesting and suggestive. 
 
 1 Preface to Samuel WHlard's Brief Animadversions. 
 
 2 Adams, Three Episodes, vol. i. pp. 248 n., 2G2 n. 
 
 ^ "If men will eaU unjustifiable Practices by the name of their 
 Opinion : and, when their evils are borne witness against, make out 
 cries that they suffer for their Opinion, and for their Conscience : How 
 is it possible for those to help them, who desire to keep their own 
 Consciences pure, and without offence towards God, by being faithful 
 according to that capacity the Lord hath set them in ; and giving a 
 due testimony against those things, which they believe provoke him 
 to jealousie ? " — Increase Mather's Preface to Samuel WUlaxd's Brief 
 Animadversiojis (16S1). 
 
46 MA SSA CHUSE TTS : 
 
 introduction of anarchy. It cannot be questioned, that 
 all the fond hopes they had cherished from emigration 
 would have been lost. . . . The non-toleration which 
 characterized our early ancestors, from whatever 
 source it may have originated, had undoubtedly the 
 effect they intended and wished." ^ Here, in regard to 
 one of the most disputed points in the process of 
 modern development, — the effect of repression on a 
 natural movement of the human mind towards diver- 
 sity of opinion, — we are informed that a given result 
 of pernicious character was " certain," — that " it 
 cannot be questioned," — that a desired and most 
 salutary effect was " undoubtedly " produced by re- 
 pression. These are the usual forms of speech in " an- 
 cestor worship ; " and yet the very same language and 
 line of argument if applied in the case of Spain and 
 England would absolutely justify the course pursued 
 by Philip II., who certainly prevented the " introduc- 
 tion of anarchy" into his dominions, and would ex- 
 cuse the policy of Archbishop Laud, who tried to 
 prevent its introduction into the land of which he was 
 primate : — the vastly more probable fact being that 
 in all these cases, whether in Spain, France or Massa- 
 chusetts, the policy of repression worked incalculable 
 misery, mischief and ruin. Yet another authority, 
 going over the same ground in the same spirit, sees in 
 the record of Massachusetts nothing to condemn, no- 
 thing to regret. The civil policy which certain investi- 
 gators have characterized as intolerant and exclusive 
 this investigator declares " arose wholly from the ne- 
 cessity of the case, and was the dictate of that instinct 
 of self-preservation which has justly been called ' the 
 first law of nature.' Our fathers acted merely on the 
 
 ^ Memorial Hist, of Boston, vol. i. p. 127. 
 
ITS- HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 47 
 
 defensive. . . . The authorities had the right to send 
 [dissentients] away, and this right they were deter- 
 mined to exercise. This is the conclusion of the whole 
 matter. . . . Toleration, as the word is now understood, 
 would not have been safe. ' The Puritan fathers of 
 New England did not profess toleration ; it would have 
 been suicidal.' " ^ In reply to this somewhat summary 
 disposal of the question at issue, it might be urged 
 that, if " the Puritan fathers ' did not profess toler- 
 ation,' " quite a number of them, like John Daven- 
 port, Hugh Peter and the " Simple Cobbler of 
 Agawam," went to HoUand to obtain it ; and there 
 enjoyed an object lesson in that religious forbearance 
 which, harmless on the Zuyder Zee, it is " certain " 
 woidd on Massachusetts Bay have been "suicidal."^ 
 It is indeed strange how many things of doubtful out- 
 ward aspect are in the eyes of the filio-pietistic historian 
 " certain," " undoubted " and in no way open to ques- 
 tion. — One thing indeed is "certain," — Archbishop 
 Laud entertained exactly the views here set forth as 
 respects toleration: it was "suicidal," and, "acting 
 in self-defence " he waged war upon it, — not success- 
 fully, it is true, as did Philip II. and the early magis- 
 trates of Massachusetts, though to the best of his 
 ability; — but "Canterbury," as they loved to call 
 him, was, we are told by these same authorities, an 
 " execrable prelate," " rioting in barbarities ! " 
 
 A little further on the same student of history says, 
 speaking of the results of the so-called Antinomian 
 
 ' Rev. J. A. Vinton, The Antinomian Controversy, pp. 16, 17, 23, 86. 
 
 ^ " Thirdly, let conscience and experience apeak how in the not 
 cutting ofE their many religions, it hath pleased God not only not 
 to he provoked, hut to prosper the state of the United Provinces our 
 next neighhors, and that to admiration." — The Bloudy Tenent (1644), 
 p. 160. 
 
48 MASS A CHUSETTS : 
 
 controversy in the wholesale expulsion of the adherents 
 of Mrs. Hutchinson, — " Banishment is a word which 
 grates harshly on the ear.^ . . . The sending away 
 these men, we allow, has prima facie an aspect of rigor 
 and harshness. But the charter gave the right and 
 the power." Advocates " concede " and " allow " and 
 " admit ; " the historian should be judicial : but the 
 climax of the filio-pietistic school is reached when the 
 authority I have quoted from, having proved that 
 toleration did not and could not safely and, therefore, 
 should not have existed in New England, suddenly 
 remembers that, after all. Religious Toleration, like 
 Civil Liberty, was a great cause, and that it might be 
 unbecoming in a devout worshipper of ancestry to cut 
 that ancestry off from all claim to participation in 
 the struggle for that cause, — remembering this, and 
 having just defended and excused unreservedly their 
 intolerance, he exclaims — " Our fathers should not be 
 blamed for not acting in all respects according to the 
 light we now enjoy; . . . they were actually far in 
 advance of their contemporaries." ^ 
 
 So also in speaking of results. " When two scores of 
 years passed before the recurrence of any serious inter- 
 nal dissension in Massachusetts, the substantial wis- 
 dom of the course now pursued may be deemed to be 
 vindicated by the event. If the treatment was harsh 
 it was effective ; . . . the defeat of Mrs. Hutchinson's 
 party introduced a long term of tranquillity." ^ Thus 
 one authority. To the same effect another of the school 
 remarks of " non-toleration," — " It is unquestionable, 
 that it was chiefly instrumental in forming the homo- 
 geneous and exclusively republican character for which 
 
 ^ Also, Palfrey, vol. i. p. 419. 
 "■ Vinton, p. 24. 3 Palfrey, vol. i. p. 509. 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 49 
 
 the people of New England have, in all times, been 
 distinguished." ^ Finally a third, echoing the utter- 
 ances and conclusions of him first quoted, says of the 
 events of 1637, — " the strong policy of repression, at 
 all events, answered its purpose, and peace, quiet and 
 safety were restored." So much for the historians of 
 the Massachusetts filio-pietistic school, echoing with 
 approval, though two hundred years of progress and 
 education had intervened, the exulting boast of him 
 who in 1643 wrote to England from Massachusetts 
 that, since the suppression of the Hutchinsonian heresy, 
 "not any unsound, unsavorie and giddie fancie have 
 dared to lift up his head, or abide the light amongst 
 us." ^ Optimistic conclusions of like character, both of 
 the earlier and later periods, might easily be multiplied. 
 Turning now to Spain and the conclusions of the Span- 
 ish historians of the same filio-pietistic school on the 
 expulsion of the Moriscoes, John Fiske says that " the 
 eminent historian Lafuente, writing in 1856, freely 
 confessed that the destriiction of Moorish industries 
 was economically a disaster of the first magnitude ; but 
 after all, he says, just think what an ' immense advan- 
 tage ' it was to establish ' religious unity ' throughout 
 the nation and get rid of differences of opinion. . . . 
 It was a terrible delusion," Fiske goes on to add, in 
 words curiously though unintentionally apposite to the 
 present discussion, — 
 
 " It was a terrible delusion, but perhaps we are not entitled 
 to blame the Spaniards too severely when we I'eflect that 
 even among ourselves, in spite of all the liberalizing influences 
 to which the English race has so long been subjected, the 
 lesson is only just beginning to be learned that variety in 
 
 1 Quinoy, 206fS Anniversary of Boston, p. 29. 
 ^ I. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. i. p. 247. 
 
50 MASSACHUSETTS: 
 
 religious beliefs is not an evil, but a positive benefit to a 
 civilized community, whereas uniformity of belief should be 
 dreaded as tending toward Chinese narrowness and stagnar 
 tiou. This is the true lesson of Protestantism, and it is 
 through this lesson, however imperfectly learned, that Prot- 
 estantism has done so much to save the world from torpor 
 and paralysis." 
 
 It does, indeed, seem at times as if a certain class of 
 delusions were fixed and immovable in the human 
 mind. Accepted from time immemorial as truisms, 
 reason and experience alike, no matter how clear the 
 teachings of the one may be or how bitter those of 
 the other, produce no real impression. The thing is 
 repeated over and over again in words slightly varied, 
 but always when analyzed reducible to the same re- 
 siduum. Fixity and uniformity of belief are good in 
 themselves ; and unlimited freedom of thought and 
 discussion, no matter how decently exercised, have a 
 dangerous tendency to unsettle ! In other words, faith is 
 not generally felt that the truth is only made stronger 
 and clearer by discussion, and that error only has to 
 fear from it. The average historical writer, like the 
 average man, instinctively clings tp his delusions, — 
 hence the cant with which so-called histories are re- 
 plete. 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 51 
 
 III. 
 
 Eetukning to our thesis, the simple fact is that in 
 the seventeenth century, as in the centuries which pre- 
 ceded as well as those that have followed, — in Massa- 
 chusetts just as much as in Spain, — discussion, the 
 antagonisms of thought and idea were no less neces- 
 sary to mental activity and development than was 
 atmospheric movement to air purity. " There is al- 
 ways hope when people are forced to listen to both 
 sides ; it is when they attend only to one that errors 
 harden into prejudices, and truth itself ceases to have 
 the effect of truth, by being exaggerated into false- 
 hood. And since there are few mental attributes more 
 rare than that judicial faculty which can sit in intelli- 
 gent judgment between two sides of a question, of 
 which only one is represented by an advocate before 
 it, truth has no chance but in proportion as every side 
 of it, every opinion which embodies any fraction of 
 the truth, not only finds advocates, but is so advocated 
 as to be listened to." ^ In thus stating this law of in- 
 tellectual progress John Stuart Mill did but reecho 
 in our day and to us the more majestic language of 
 Milton two full centuries before : — 
 
 " Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity 
 win be much arguing, much writing, many opinions, for 
 opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making. Un- 
 der these fantastic terrors of sect and schism we wrong the 
 
 1 Mill, On Liberty, p. 101. 
 
52 MASSACHUSETTS: 
 
 earnest and zealous thirst after knowledge and understand- 
 ing which God hath stirred up in this city. What some 
 lament of, we rather should rejoice at, should rather praise 
 this pious forwardness among men to reassume the ill-de- 
 puted care of their religion into their own heads again. 
 A little generous prudence, a little forbearance of one an- 
 other, and some grain of charity might win aU these dili- 
 gences to join and unite into one general and brotherly 
 search after truth ; could we but f oregoe this prelatical 
 tradition of crowding free consciences and Christian liber- 
 ties into canons and precepts of men." ' 
 
 This is now accepted as the fundamental law in the 
 slow evolution of truth, — the friction of mind against 
 mind, — the testing of thought against thought in the 
 crucible of discussion. And in the working of this 
 fundamental law the Quakers and the Baptists, so far 
 as early Massachusetts was concerned, performed a ser- 
 vice of inestimable value. Banished, persecuted, put 
 to death, they still compelled discussion. Under the 
 undisturbed theoretic regime the community along 
 the New England coast, cut off from intercourse with 
 Europe by the ocean on the one side and hemmed in 
 by an unexplored wilderness on the other, stood in im- 
 minent danger of intellectual atrophy. That result the 
 clergy, — the dominant influence, — courted. They, 
 as men are apt to do under such circumstances, looked 
 on change with suspicion and dreaded innovation as 
 concealed heresy. Like nearly all communities so 
 placed, Massachusetts was threatened with a lasting 
 plague of self-sufficient provincialism. 
 
 That the earlier generations — those occupying the 
 soil between 1640 and 1700 — did not see this, is no 
 cause for surprise. That they persecuted and drove 
 
 1 Areopagetica (1644). 
 
IT^ HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 53 
 
 out those who broke in on the deathly torpor which 
 was stealing over the little isolated community was 
 natural. They did not wish to be disturbed ; no one 
 falling into that condition ever does wish to be dis- 
 turbed : and, uniformly, those so circumstanced an- 
 grily repel and seek to put away whoever and what- 
 ever distracts them. They are wedded to their idols. 
 The matter for astonishment is, — not that the seven- 
 teenth century Massachusetts minister and magistrate 
 took this view and failed to see in the " intruders " a 
 healthy stimulant and restorant at a period of moral 
 and intellectual torpor, — this was merely in the order 
 of nature, — the occasion for wonder is that the 
 Massachusetts historians have as a rule never been 
 able to see it since. That Antinomian and Quaker 
 and Baptist were the best friends the New England 
 Puritan had, — the acrid salt which saved him from 
 corruption, — this elementary truth has never dawned 
 on the mind of the filio-pietistic investigator. As his 
 pages show, he has been intent only on defence, or, if 
 defence was impossible, on extenuation. He has failed 
 to see that, in the wonderful economy of nature, the 
 Puritan was as much indebted to the Quaker and 
 Baptist, as is the man, sinking into frigid torpor, to 
 the dog that worries him into activity; he was as 
 wrong in driving away the "intruder" as is the man 
 in striking at the dog. The fact that the Massachu- 
 setts Puritan was unaware of his danger and the " in- 
 truder " did not realize the service he was performing, 
 had nothing to do with the operation of the natural 
 economic law. That the actors were blind to it then, 
 is no reason why the historian should shut his eyes 
 to it now, and see in the " intruder " only " a coarse, 
 blustering, conceited, disagreeable, impudent fanatic," 
 
54 MASSACHUSETTS: 
 
 who " in all strictness and honesty " persecuted the 
 Puritan founders — not they him ; and who, then and 
 now, was no more entitled to sympathy than one " who 
 persistently intrudes his bad manners and pestering 
 presence upon some private company, making himself, 
 upon pretence of conscience, a nuisance there." ^ 
 
 That the " intruders " were offensive to the Puritans 
 is of course, — that they were exasperating in their 
 bearing and acted in disregard both of law and de- 
 cency may or may. not be true, for, when looked at 
 from the philosophical point of view, its truth or false- 
 ness is immaterial. Members of sects that believe in- 
 tensely, and are persecuted on account of their belief, 
 always run into- excesses. That they should is, again, 
 a law of nature ; and the historians who dilate and ex- 
 pand on this subject in connection with Quaker and 
 Baptist would find a no less fruitful field of investiga- 
 tion in the iconoclastic record of those early Christians 
 and Protestants, who bore witness to the truth as they 
 saw it in defiance of law and in utter disregard of 
 what Pagan and Catholic accepted as decency. What 
 did Quaker or Baptist more than defile the idols and 
 trample on the host? Yet the Massachusetts histori- 
 ans have failed to mete out the same stern justice to 
 Christian and Protestant which they award to Anti- 
 nomian, Quaker and Baptist. They do not have one 
 law for all. 
 
 And yet in all the records of Protestantism, it would 
 not be easy to find an utterance breathing a loftier 
 and purer spirit of broad Christianity than the letter 
 of the humble Quaker, Daniel Gould, addressed to 
 the magistrates and people of Boston from " rod Hand 
 the 3 month 1660." Bunyan himself used not better 
 English. 
 
 1 Dexter, As to Soger Williams, pp. 90, 13S. 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 55 
 
 " Concerning religion let every one be fully persuaded in 
 his own mind and worship according as God shall persuade 
 his own heart, and if any worship not God as they ought to 
 do and yet liveth quietly and peaceably with their neighbors 
 and countrymen and doeth them no wrong, is it not safer 
 for you to let them alone to receive their reward from him 
 who said, I will render vengeance to mine enemies and re- 
 ward them that hate me. . . . Let God alone be Lord of 
 the conscience, and not men, and let us have the same lib- 
 ertj' and freedom amongst you, as other Englishmen have, 
 to come and visit our friends and kindred and do that which 
 is honest and lawful to be done in buying and selling ; and 
 if any have a mind to reason or speak concerning the way 
 and worship of God, that they may not be put in prison or 
 punished for it ; and so let people have liberty to try all 
 things and hold fast to that which is good." ^ 
 
 Yet the man who wrote these words was persecuted 
 and maltreated in Massachusetts in the seventeenth 
 century of the Christian era, in much the same way as 
 the man who delivered the Sermon on the Mount was 
 persecuted and maltreated in Judea when that era 
 had hardly yet begun. Why not one rule for all? 
 Why, condemning the Jew, defend the Puritan? 
 
 Having thus freely expressed myself in regard to 
 those who have heretofore rendered the history of 
 Massachusetts, it remains for me briefly to outline it 
 in accordance with the general principles here laid 
 down, — applying to it the same canons of criticism, 
 — those and none others, — which we apply to the 
 history of corresponding development in Spain or 
 France or Great Britain, — viewing it always in the 
 full, strong light of subsequent events. 
 
 Thus regarded, one thing in the history of Massa- 
 
 1 Hallowell, Quaker Invasion, pp. 90, 210. 
 
56 MASSA CHU SETTS : 
 
 chusetts development stands out in striking relief. In 
 his review of the condition of Scotland in the seven- 
 teenth and eighteenth centuries and his examination 
 of the Scotch intellect daring the eighteenth cen- 
 tury, Buckle more than once calls attention to what 
 he terms the " paradox " and " difficulty " of Scotch 
 history " that the people should constantly withstand 
 their kings, and as constantly succumb to their clergy ; 
 that while they are liberal in politics, they should be 
 illiberal in religion ; and that, as a natural conse- 
 quence of all this, men who, in the visible and external 
 department of facts and of practical life, display a 
 shrewdness and a boldness rarely equalled, should 
 nevertheless, in speculative life, and in matters of 
 theory, tremble like sheep before their pastors, and 
 yield assent to every absurdity they hear, provided 
 their church has sanctioned it." And, calling atten- 
 tion to the fact that this singular anomaly had been 
 completely neglected even by those who had written 
 most fully on the history of the Scottish nation, 
 Buckle proceeds to consider it as " surely a phenom- 
 enon worthy of our careful study." ^ Precisely the 
 same anomaly and apparent contradiction runs through 
 the history of Massachusetts during the two centuries 
 which followed the settlement, — the same " love of 
 independence and hatred of tyranny " which " saved 
 the country from the yoke of a cruel despotism," and 
 the same " religious servitude " which encouraged 
 superstition, "prolonged the reign of ignorance and 
 stopped the march of society." This, indeed, consti- 
 tutes to my mind the key-note of Massachiisetts, as it 
 did with Buckle of Scotch, history, and yet, so far as 
 1 am aware, a single writer only has even alluded to 
 
 1 History, vol. iii. pp. 5, 191, 102. 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 57 
 
 ■ >. 
 
 it, and that one, a writer not to the manor born.^" 
 In his book entitled The English in America, J. A. 
 Doyle remarks that, "The spiritual growth of Mas- 
 sachusetts withered under the shadow of dominant 
 orthodoxy ; the colony was only saved from mental 
 atrophy by its vigorous political life ; " and he adds of 
 the established church of Massachusetts, that while, 
 by forcibly suppressing free speech through the action 
 of the civil magistrates, the church cut the community 
 off from all hopes of intellectual progress, " her rule 
 so long as it endured was a rule of terror, not of love ; 
 her ways were never ways of pleasantness, her paths 
 were never peace." ^ As one of its mouthpieces 
 proclaimed. New England Congregationalism " was a 
 speaking Aristocracy in the face of a silent Demo- 
 cracy." ^ 
 
 To describe in detail the action and counter-action 
 of these two forces, — the vigorous political life on 
 the one side and the shadow of spiritual orthodoxy on 
 the other, — would be to re-write the history of Mas- 
 sachusetts. For that there is neither present space 
 nor time ; nor yet, indeed, occasion. A brief outline 
 will suffice ; but that outline must of necessity cover 
 the leading events, and the principal characters who 
 figured in those events, through two centuries and a 
 half. 
 
 The turning point in the history of early Massachu- 
 setts was the Cambridge Synod of September, 1637, 
 
 1 " Casting aside all but ecclesiastical considerations, the clergy 
 consistently rejected any compromise with the crown which threat- 
 ened to touch the church. Almost from the first they had recognized 
 that substantial independence was necessary in order to maintain the 
 theocracy." — Brooks Adams, Emancipation of Massachusetts, 205. 
 
 2 The English in America; the Puritan Colonies, vol. i. pp. 187, 188. 
 2 The Rev. Samuel Stone, of Hartford. Quoted in Mignalia, B. 
 
 III. chap. xtI. 
 
58 MASSACHUSETTS: 
 
 — the first convocation of the kind ever held in Amer- 
 ica, — that already referred to as " carried on so 
 peaceably, and concluded so comfortably in all love," 
 which succeeded in spreading on its record, as then 
 prevailing in the infant settlement, eighty-two " opin- 
 ions, some blasphemous, others erroneous and all un- 
 safe," besides "nine unwholesome expressions," the 
 whole mighty mass of which was then incontinently dis- 
 missed, in the language of one of the leading divines 
 who figured in that Assembly, " to the devil of hell, 
 from whence they came." 
 
 The mere enumeration of this long list of heresies 
 as then somewhere prevailing is strong evidence of 
 intellectual activity in early Massachusetts, — an ac- 
 tivity which found ready expression through such men 
 as Eoger Williams, John Cotton, John Wheelwright 
 and Sir Henry Vane, to say nothing of Mrs. Hutchin- 
 son, while" the receptive condition of the mental soil is 
 likewise seen in the hold the new opinions took. It 
 was plainly a period of intellectual quickening, — a 
 dawn of promise. Of this there can no doubt exist. 
 It was freely acknowledged at the time ; it has been 
 stated as one of the conditions of that period by all 
 writers on it since. The body of those who listened 
 to him stood by Roger Williams ; and the magistrates 
 drove him away for that reason.^ Anne Hutchinson 
 so held the ear of the whole Boston community that 
 she had " some of all sorts and quality, in all places to 
 defend and patronize " her opinions ; " some of the mag- 
 istrates, some gentlemen, some scholars and men of 
 learning, some Burgesses of our General Court, some 
 of our captains and soldiers, some chief men in towns, 
 
 ' Savage's Winthrop, vol. i. p. 175 ; Cotton's Answer (in Publica- 
 tions of Narragansett Club, vol. ii. p. 93). 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 69 
 
 and some men eminent for religion, parts and wit." i 
 These words of a leader of the clerical faction, — one 
 of those most active in the work of repression, — de- 
 scribe to the life an active-minded, intelligent commu- 
 nity quick to receive and ready to assimilate that which 
 is new. Then came the Synod. It was a premoni- 
 tion. It was as if the fresh new sap, — ^the young 
 budding leaves, — the possible, incipient flowers, had 
 felt the chill of an approaching glacier. And that was 
 exactly what it was ; — a theological glacier then slowly 
 settled down upon Massachusetts, — a glacier lasting 
 through a period of nearly one hundred and fifty years, 
 the single redeeming feature in which was that beneath 
 the chilling and killing superincumbent mass of the- 
 ology, superstition and intolerance ran the strong, 
 vivifying current of political opposition and life. 
 
 That, like most phases of historical development, 
 this was all inevitable, the logical outcome of what 
 had gone before, is to us apparent ; but it in no way 
 alters the fact. It was natural that in the mass of 
 self-exiled men who sought refuge in Massachusetts 
 between 1630 and 1637, there should be many of ac- 
 tive, inquiring mind. Indeed it could not have been 
 otherwise. On the other hand, the fundamental idea 
 of the settlement was a theocracy, — an Israel in the 
 New World, a reproduction of Bible history. A 
 struggle was inevitable, for theocracy was incompat- 
 ible with mental activity, — just as incompatible as is 
 superstition vrith a spirit of investigation and doubt. 
 Mere brute instinct sufficed to make this plain. The 
 struggle took place in 1637, and was as decisive as it 
 was short. The orthodox theological spirit gained an 
 easy and complete ascendency ; and the glacial period 
 
 1 Thomas Welde, Preface to Short Story. 
 
60 MASSA CHUSETTS : 
 
 began. There was no further contest. It was a mere 
 question thereafter of maintaining au undisputed as- 
 cendency. This ruthlessly asserted itself in 1646, 
 nine years later, in the case of the Robert Child peti- 
 tioners — au obscure episode in colonial history, no 
 accurate account of which has yet been prepared. 
 The first organized movement in direction of healthy 
 political reform, it also included the widest possible 
 religious freedom, for "the sum of it was, to allow 
 and maintain full and free tolerance of religion to all 
 men that would preserve the civil peace and submit 
 unto government ; and there was no limitation or ex- 
 ception against Turk, Jew, Papist, Arian, Socinian, 
 Nicholayton, Familist, or any otber." ^ Bearing 
 freshly in mind the peril of 1637, the Massachusetts 
 magistrates in dealing with the movement stretched 
 forth a vigorous hand. It was summarily supjjressed, 
 and is since referred to by the filio-pietistic school of 
 historians as a " plot " and those concerned in the move- 
 ment as " conspirators." ^ Next followed the Synod 
 of 1647, which formulated what is known as the Cam- 
 bridge platform of faith, — a declaration of orthodox 
 belief which maintained a fixed hold and benumbing 
 influence on Massachusetts for more than a century. 
 The principle of state control, already invoked in 1637, 
 was formally sanctioned, and the punishment of heresy 
 was devolved on the civil magistrate. " Without a 
 protest the rulers and divines of Massachusetts were 
 suffered to block every loophole through which free 
 speech could make its voice heard." ^ Then ensued 
 the legislation against the Baptists, the record of 
 
 ^ Hutchinson, State Papers, Prince Soc. Ed. vol. i. p. 174. 
 
 2 Palfrey, toI. ii. pp. 175, 177. 
 
 * Doyle, Puritan Colonies, toI. ii. p. 94. 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 61 
 
 which covers the • life-time of a generation, extending 
 as it does from 1644 to 1678 ; and running side by 
 side with it through the same period was the persecu- 
 tion of the Quakers. In 1678, the intolerance habitu- 
 ally practised in Massachusetts, and the strict con- 
 formity then enforced in an English colony against 
 the members even of the Church of England, had long 
 attracted the attention and censure of the home gov- 
 ernment. The founders of the colony had also one by 
 one passed away, and with them had died out even 
 the tradition of a wider education and a more tolerant 
 spirit. As I have already said, Cotton was buried in 
 1652, and with him smouldered out the last spark of 
 a broader, a more liberal theology.^ 
 
 The generation then on the stage was born and had 
 grown up under the benumbing influence of a provin- 
 cial life and teaching. Those composing that genera- 
 tion, as well as those composing the generations which 
 succeeded, could not under the circumstances be other 
 than they were. The conditions which anteceded them 
 and surrounded them shaped their existence. They 
 were between the upper and the nether millstones, — 
 the theological glacier and the material wilderness ; 
 and each exercised its influence upon them. Nor was 
 this all. So far as religious tolerance and intellectual 
 activity were concerned, they had always before their 
 eyes an object lesson of the most unfortunate char- 
 acter in the neighboring colony of Rhode Island, — 
 an object lesson which was made to do active service 
 with the Massachusetts theologians then, as it has 
 with the Massachusetts historians since. 
 
 It does not need to be said that anything taken in 
 
 ' " A Man of a Better Spirit, in his Day." New England Judged, 
 p. 124, n. 
 
62 MASSA CHUSETTS : 
 
 excess acts as a poison. No matter how good or 
 healthful it may be in itself and in proper quantities, 
 — too much milk or bread or broth even will disorder 
 even the adult system, while the infant stomach rejects 
 the excess almost at once. The stronger and more 
 stimulating the food, the sooner any undue qiiantity 
 of it is felt ; until, iu the case of wine, while a care- 
 fully measured use may stimulate the healthy and 
 nourish the sick, excess brings on fever and delirium. 
 Rhode Island went through this experience in its early 
 days. It was, so to speak, the dumping-ground for the 
 surplus intellectual activity of New England. The 
 born agitator, the controversialist, the generally " other- 
 wise-minded," — every type of thinker, whether crude 
 and half crazy like Samuel Gorton, or only advanced 
 like Roger Williams, there found refuge. Thus what 
 was a good and most necessary element in the economy 
 of nature and the process of human development, was 
 in excess in Rhode Island ; and the natural result fol- 
 lowed, — a disordered community. Again, it could 
 not have been otherwise ; it was inevitable. But it by 
 no means followed that what disordered infant Rhode 
 Island would have proved more than a healthy stimu- 
 lant for larger and more matured Massachusetts. In 
 its spirit of rigid conformity Massachusetts rejected 
 and expelled whatever did not immediately assimilate ; 
 and so did Spain. Indeed, Spain regarded Holland 
 much as Massachusetts regarded Rhode Island — both 
 were of the species "coUuvies," or cess-pool, — the 
 Gerizim and Sichem, the common receptacle and 
 sanctuary of offenders, — places where, in the sneering 
 words of Cotton Mather, " if a man had lost his reli- 
 gion, he might find it at the general muster of opin- 
 ionists." 1 But in the seventeenth century intellectual 
 
 1 Magnolia, B. VII. chap. iii. 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 68 
 
 activity and the friction of minds througli variety in 
 opinion was just as good and necessary to a healthy 
 condition as it is now ; the only trouble was that while 
 Massachusetts did not have enough of the stimulant, 
 Rhode Island had too much.^ The tonic was unduly 
 apportioned. 
 
 But, as I have observed, this fact the inhabitants of 
 Massachusetts could not see then, and the Massachu- 
 setts school of historians has refused to see it since. 
 Those composing that school have systematically nar- 
 rowed their vision ; and, denouncing the rulers of Spain 
 and France and England for bigotry, intolerance and 
 cruelty, — shutting their eyes to Holland, where Bur- 
 net, as a result of his own observation, tells us that at 
 this very time "toleration made all people easy and 
 happy," — seeing only what they wanted to see and 
 ignoring whatever might be inconvenient to admit, 
 they have pointed to Rhode Island as an example of 
 what must inevitably have ensued had the rulers of 
 Massachusetts in its formative period not pursued that 
 policy of which Philip II. was the great and only 
 wholly successful expositor. In other words they insist 
 that in the seventeenth century toleration meant chaos, 
 — " had our early ancestors . . . placed their govern- 
 ment on the basis of liberty for all sorts of consciences, 
 it would have been in that age a certain introduction of 
 anarchy ; " ^ and, in proof of this, they point to Rhode 
 
 1 " Between the range of diversity in utterance and deed there in- 
 dulged and allowed, and the strict uniformity labored for in Massa- 
 chusetts, one is reminded of the difEerence between attempting to cord 
 np into a symmetrical pile and range straight sticks of wood of the 
 same length, and assaying the same object with a heap of stumps 
 drawn from the eaith, with their roots and prongs projecting at all 
 angles in every direction." — Dr. Geo. E. Ellis, va. Mem. History of 
 Boston, vol. i. p. 172. 
 
 2 Mem. Hist, of Boston, vol. i. p. 127. 
 
64 MASSACHUSETTS: 
 
 Island. They might with equal propriety adduce the 
 case of Botany Bay to prove that immigration having 
 led to a dangerous development of the criminal class 
 in one port of Australia was a certain introduction to 
 crime everywhere. But, admitting the argument thus 
 advanced, why could not Philip II. and Louis XIV. 
 and Archbishop Laud, as well as Endicott and Cotton 
 Mather, point to that " colluvies " of Rhode Island ? 
 How can Massachusetts claim a monopoly in this line 
 of argument ? — It cannot ; but as an argument it has 
 been abandoned by students of history except in Mas- 
 sachusetts and Spain. 
 
 So much for Rhode Island in contrast with Massa- 
 chusetts ; but two centuries ago the presence of the 
 younger and smaller community was a potent factor 
 for ill. It was a conclusive object lesson against any 
 tendency to increased liberality. Its very existence 
 proved orthodoxy's case ; and so orthodoxy ruled su- 
 preme. This state of affairs continued through an 
 entire century, and until the growing difficulties with 
 the mother country stirred the colonies into a condition 
 of mental as well as political activity. The theologico- 
 glacial period of Massachusetts may, therefore, be con- 
 sidered as lasting from the meeting of the Cambridge 
 Synod in September, 1637, to the agitation over the 
 Writs of Assistance in February, 1761, culminating in 
 what is known as " the Great Awakening " of 1740-5. 
 As a period, it was singularly barren, — almost incon- 
 ceivably sombre. It has left behind it a not inconsid- 
 erable residuum of printed matter, mainly theological, 
 but of little, if indeed of any literary, value. Than this 
 residuum there can, indeed, " be no better proof how 
 fully Puritanism bad done its destructive work. Bid 
 the New Englander teU the great things which God 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 65 
 
 had wrought by him and his countrymen, his deep and 
 overpowering faith raised him to noble thoughts, his 
 scriptural learning clothed them in noble language ; 
 bring him to a lower range, to the sphere of the dis- 
 putant, the critic, or the essayist, and all sense of grace, 
 of proportion or humor has vanished." ^ In the 
 mother-country that period was a fruitful season, for 
 it began with Milton and closed with Johnson ; while 
 Clarendon and Burnet, Dryden, Pope and Goldsmith, 
 Bunyan, Swift, Addison, Steele and Defoe, Locke, 
 Bolingbroke and Newton were included in it. In Mas- 
 sachusetts, of writers or thinkers whose names are still 
 remembered, though their works have passed into 
 oblivion, Cotton Mather and Jonatlian Edwards can 
 alone be named. They were, indeed, typical of the 
 time, — strange products of a period at once provincial 
 and glacial, — huge literary boulders deposited by the 
 receding ice. 
 
 "The grave humorists, who call themselves histo- 
 rians of philosophy, seem to be at times under the im- 
 pression that the development of the world has been 
 affected by the last new feat of some great man in the 
 art of logical hair-splitting." ^ In other words, the 
 writer, — the thinker, — the typical man in philosophy 
 as in every other branch of human development, is 
 not a cause, — or, if a cause at all, only such in a very 
 minor degree, — but the conditions of development 
 must be sought in the " environment " as well as in 
 the new expression. " We can only explain the spread 
 of the organism by showing how and why the soil was 
 congenial." Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards 
 were the ripe fruit of the theological period of Mas- 
 
 1 Doyle, The Puritan Colonies, vol. ii. p. 103. 
 
 2 Stephen, An Agnostic's Apology, p. 309. 
 
66 MASSACHUSETTS: 
 
 sachusetfcs ; its outcome was " the Great Awakening." 
 In the writings of the first and in the history of the 
 last that period can best be studied. By its fruits it 
 must be judged ! 
 
 The strange story of the religious revival which 
 swept over New England about the year 1742 — that 
 frenzied epidemic of superstitious excitement, — has 
 been told in sufficient detail by Palfrey.^ Presently 
 I shall have occasion to refer to it in detail ; suffice it 
 now to say that the more its details are studied the 
 more incredible they seem. It was an exaggerated 
 case of mania, — at once emotional and devotional, — - 
 not unlike the similar mania vrhich spread over Europe 
 six hundred and fifty years before in the days of Peter 
 the Hermit, — though, of course, on a greatly reduced 
 scale. As to the Eev. Cotton Mather and his literary 
 productions, two biographies of this most typical Mas- 
 sachusetts colonial divine have been issued from the 
 press within the last eighteen months. In their pages 
 he can be studied ; though, to obtain any realizing sense 
 of the man and of the community in which he lived 
 and for which he wrote, recourse must be had to the 
 Magnolia itself. Considered purely as a literary char- 
 acter and one of the most prolific of authors. Cotton 
 Mather's career was, in point of time, nearly identical 
 with that of Daniel Defoe ; for, born two years later 
 than his English contemporary, he died three years 
 earlier, and the 3Iagnalia was printed in London at 
 about the same time as that famous tract entitled The 
 Shortest Way with Dissenters, which at once elevated 
 Defoe to literary fame and to the pillory. Of Mather 
 it has recently been said that 
 
 " He was the last, the most vigorous, and, therefore, the 
 ' History, vol. t. pp. 3-41. 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 67 
 
 most disagreeable representation of the Fantastic school in 
 literature. . . . The expulsion of the beautiful from thought, 
 from sentiment, from language ; a lawless and a merciless 
 fury for the odd, the disorderly, the grotesque, the violent ; 
 strained analogies, unexpected images, pedantries, indelica^ 
 cies, freaks of allusion, monstrosities of phrase ; — these are 
 the traits of Cotton Mather's writing, even as they are the 
 traits common to that perverse and detestable literary mood 
 that held sway in different countries of Christendom during 
 the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its birthplace was 
 Italy ; New England was its grave ; Cotton Mather was its 
 last great apostle." -"^ 
 
 But it is a fact worthy of note that the Magnolia 
 stands to-day the one single literary landmark in a 
 century and a half of colonial and provincial life, 
 — a geological relic of a glacial period, — a period 
 ■which in pure letters produced, so far as Massachu- 
 setts was concerned, absolutely nothing else, — not a 
 poem, nor an essay, nor a memoir, nor a work of fancy 
 or fiction of which the world has cared to take note.^ 
 
 1 Tyler, American Literature, vol. ii. pp. 87, 88. 
 
 ^ The foUowing, from one of his tetter literary efforts, are not un- 
 fair specimens of Cotton Mather's method of thought and quaintness of 
 expression : — ■ ■ 
 
 IX. " I would he Sollicitous to have my Children Expert, not only 
 at Reading handsomely, hut also at Writing a fair Hand. I will then 
 assign them such Rooks to Read, as I may judge most agreeable and 
 profitable ; obliging them to give me some Account of what they Read ; 
 but keep a Strict Eye upon them, that they don't Stumble on the Devils 
 Library, and poison themselves with foolish Romances, or Novels, or 
 Playes, or Songs, or Jests that are not convenient. I will set them also, 
 to Write out such things, as may be of the greatest Benefit unto them ; 
 and they shall have their Blank Books, neatly kept on purpose, to En- 
 ter such Passages as I advise them to. I will particularly require them 
 now and then, to Write a Prayer of their own Composing, and bring 
 it unto me ; that so I may discern, what sense they have of their own 
 Everlasting Interests." — Essays to do Good, p. 58. 
 
 "Nero took it very ill, that Vespasian Slept, at his Musick\ It is 
 
68 MASSA CHUSETTS : 
 
 But Cotton Mather I have considered only as a 
 man of letters, and the period was theological ; — 
 Jonathan Edwards was as a theologian infinitely greater 
 than Mather, incomparably the greatest theologian 
 America has produced. Jonathan Edwards deserves 
 consideration therefore as the most perfect specimen 
 of the Massachusetts theological period. As such he, 
 also, is a curiosity, — a vast glacial boulder ! He, 
 too, is the legitimate, logical outcome of orthodoxy — 
 the system inaugurated by the Cambridge Synod of 
 1637 — that convocation which imposed on Massachu- 
 setts rigid conformity; — or, as the Massachusetts his- 
 torians prefer to express it, the inestimable boons of 
 rest and stability. 
 
 With an intellect so powerful and acute that not 
 even the monotony of colonial life in a frontier village 
 could make it provincial, Jonathan Edwards was a 
 man of pure life and gentle, kindly nature. Nor was 
 he, as his writings show, by any means devoid of 
 imagination, though pitiless logic was his forte. Edu- 
 cated wholly in that deductive method of reasoning 
 to which the theologian naturally has recourse, and 
 
 very much, very much to be Wished, That the Sin of Sleeping at Ser- 
 mons, TPere more Watoh'd against, and more Wam'd against. Your 
 Sleepy Hearers, if, alas, the Catechresis may be allow'd that calla them 
 Hearers, do miserably lose the Good of your Ministry ; and the Good 
 which you might, perhaps, have particularly design'd for them, whom 
 at the Time of your Speaking what you prepar'd for them, you see 
 Siezed with an horrible Spirit of Slumber before your Eyes. Will no 
 Vinegar help against the Narr.otidcs, that Satan has given to your 
 Poor JEutychus's ? Or, Can't you bring that Civility into Fashion 
 among your Hearers, To wake one another ?" — J6. p. 103. 
 
 Speaking of his " thirst for knowledge " as a boy of twelve, Frank- 
 lin, in his Autobiography, refers especially to a " book of De Foe's, 
 called an Essay on Projects, and another of Dr. Mather's, called 
 Essays to do Good, which perhaps gave me a turn of thinking that 
 had an influence on some of the principal future events of my life." 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 69 
 
 ■which therefore is in almost exclusive use in all theo- 
 logical periods and lands, Edwards never flinched 
 from the conclusions to which, granting the postulates, 
 his logic led. A grotesque horror resulted ; and that 
 horror he never ceased to impress upon his people, 
 until in its contemplation, he, the kindest and most 
 domestic of men, grew to take delight. No inquisitor- 
 in-chief ever gloated over the implements of the tor- 
 ture chamber with more morbid interest and pleasure 
 than Edwards gloated over that hell, upon the pro- 
 longed and exquisite torments of which he loved to 
 dilate. His God was a horrible fetich, a demon of 
 injustice, vengeance and wrath; and of a cruelty of 
 disposition at once infinite and insatiable. And this 
 frightful nightmare, this access of morbid supersti- 
 tion, Edwards deduced logically from the Scriptures ; 
 nor did it ever once occur to him that there must 
 be something wrong in the premises which led to 
 such an abhorrent result. In other words, he was 
 the logical outcome of his environment — the system 
 in which he had his being — and he represented it 
 fairly. 
 
 One cannot use such words as I have just used of 
 Edwards, his system of reasoning and its outcomes, 
 — words which, through Edwards, apply to his time 
 and its whole mental development, for than this it 
 had no other development at all, religious or intel- 
 lectual, — one cannot, I say, use such language as that 
 just employed on authority alone. It leaves behind 
 a sense of exaggeration ; it verges on vituperation, 
 and so tends to weaken the force of statement. Ac- 
 cordingly, in this instance, it is necessary to pause 
 and turn to the original documents. 
 
 In his sermons Edwards never wearies of depict- 
 
70 MASSACHUSETTS: 
 
 ing the Deity as being " omniscient, omnipotent, im- 
 mutable," of infinite " power and wrath," " jealous " 
 and " angiy," in no degree " liable to be moved and 
 affected and overcome by seeing a creature in misery," 
 " dreadful in wrath ; " one who " glorifies himself in the 
 eternal damnation of ungodly men " and who possesses 
 an inexhaustible ingenuity in the invention of inde- 
 scribable torments.^ 
 
 This deity, we are then informed, 
 
 "hath undertaken to right himself. He will reckon 
 
 ^ The ingenuity displayed by some of the eig'hteenth-century min- 
 isters in degrading the ideal of a Divinity exceeds belief. Instead 
 of man being made in His image, they reversed the process, and the 
 God they set up for their congregations to worship was made in man's 
 image ; and a very repulsive image it was ! They thus worshipped 
 themselves ; and, in so doing, there was nothing too base, too cruel, 
 too mean to attribute to Him. One of the most instructive examples 
 of this I have come across is the following, from an election sermon 
 delivered before the assembled dignitaries of Massachusetts as late 
 as May, 1Y28, in which a clergyman advanced the singular theory that 
 in permitting the redemption of fallen man the Almighty was proba- 
 bly actuated less by sentiments of mercy and compassion for his 
 creatures, than by a malicious and vindictive desire to spite the devil. 
 Here are the preacher's words : — 
 
 " I know not why it may not be justly supposed, that one great 
 motive with God thus to desire and seek the recovery of Man from 
 hia fallen and miserable State, was to frustrate & disappoint the 
 great Enemy of God and Man, the wicked and malicious Devil, who 
 triumphed over the ruins of the Fall, and blessed himself in having 
 been InstrumentaU to deface the Divine Image impressed on Man, 
 and thereby gratified his aceuised Malice against God and his Grea- 
 ture made in his likeness ; . . . the very thought whereof gave Ease 
 & Satisfaction in the midst of that gloom and horror, that everlast- 
 ingly adheres to the apostate Angels. Then these fallen Stars sang 
 together, and these Sons of Perdition shouted for joy. I say that this 
 may be thought a motive with the Divine Being, to desire, seek and 
 accomplish the restoration of Man, and thereby to frustrate the great 
 expectations the Devil had of the happy success of his Temptation ; 
 and thereby also to add to the punishment of His and our great Ad- 
 versary." — Election Sermon of Robert Breck (1728), p. 19. 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 71 
 
 with [such as will not yield to parents, or to the counsels, 
 warnings or reproofs of ministers] ; he hath undertaken to 
 see that the debts due to him are paid. All their sins are 
 written in his book ; not one of them is forgotten, and every- 
 one must be paid. If God be wise enough, and strong 
 enough, he will have full satisfaction; he will exact the 
 very uttermost farthing. . . . There is no hope of [sinners] 
 escaping without notice when they leave the body. There 
 is no hope that God, by reason of the multiplicity of affairs 
 he hath to mind, will happen to overlook them, and not 
 take notice of them, when they come to die ; and so that 
 their souls will slip away privately, and hide themselves in 
 some secret corner, and so escape divine vengeance. . . . 
 Nor is there any hope that God will alter his mind. . . . 
 Hath he spoken, and will he not make it good ? When did 
 God ever undertake to do anything and fail? " ^ 
 
 We then come to hell, which Edwards describes 
 as " God's prison. It is a strong prison ; it is be- 
 yond any finite power, or the united strength of all 
 wicked men and devils, to unlock, or break open the 
 door of that prison. Christ hath the key of hell ; 
 ' he stands and no man opens ! ' " 2 — The Saviour a 
 turnkey ! 
 
 Having thus laid his foundations, and in so doing 
 disposed of St. Peter and Purgatory, — Rome and Anti- 
 Christ, — Edwards next proceeds to deal with his own 
 particular Hereafter, in its details. I have said that 
 he did not lack imagination ; and it was in this por- 
 tion of his work that his imagination came into play. 
 That which he then wrote reminds one of the Sistine 
 chapel mural efforts in St. Peter's, and those realistic 
 pictures in the cloisters at Pisa wherein the Italian 
 artists of the Middle Ages depicted, the horrors of 
 
 1 Works, vol. iv. Sermon X. ^ lb. 
 
72 MASSACHUSETTS: 
 
 hell and the tortures of the damned. In the same 
 spirit Edwards proceeds : — 
 
 [The wicked will never] " be able to find anything to 
 relieve them in hell. They will never fiiid any resting 
 place there ; any place of respite ; any secret corner, which 
 will be cooler than the rest, where they may have a little 
 respite, a small abatement of the extremity of their torment. 
 They never will he able to find any cooling stream or foun- 
 tain, in any part of that world of torment ; no, nor so much 
 as a drop of water to cool their tongues. They will find no 
 company to give them any comfort, or to do them the least 
 good. They will find no place where they can remain 
 and rest, and take breath for one minute : for they wiR be 
 tormented with fire and brimstone ; and will have no rest 
 day nor night forever and ever. . . . 
 
 "You have often seen a spider, or some other noisome 
 insect, when thrown into the midst of a fierce fire, and 
 have observed how immediately it yields to the force of the 
 flames. There is no long struggle, no fighting against the 
 fire, no strength exerted to oppose the heat, or to fly from 
 it; but it immediately stretches forth itself and yields ; and 
 the fire takes possession of it, and at once It becomes full of 
 fire, and is burned into a bright coal. ■ — Here is a little 
 image of what you will be the subjects of in hell." ^ 
 
 But to all human suffering, — even to the tortures of 
 the Inquisitor, — death brings relief. Annihilation at 
 least is escape. But this does not apply to an omni- 
 potent God, and so, in a whole sermon entitled Eter- 
 nity of Hell Torments, Edwards proceeds to close this 
 door to mercy. From the scripture he irrefutably 
 deduces the perpetuity of suffering, and then proceeds 
 as follows : — 
 
 " Be entreated to consider attentively how great and awful 
 a thing eternity is. Although you cannot comprehend it the 
 1 Works, vol. iv. Sermon X. 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 73 
 
 more by considering, yet you may be made more sensible 
 that it is not a thing to be disregarded. Do but consider 
 what it is to suffer extreme torment forever and ever ; to 
 suffer it day and night, from one day to another, from one 
 year to another, from one age to another, from one thousand 
 ages to another, and so adding age to age, and thousands to 
 thousands, in pain, in wailing and lamenting, groaning and 
 shrieking, and gnashing your teeth ; with your souls full of 
 dreadful grief and amazement, with your bodies and every 
 member full of racking torture, without any possibility of 
 getting ease ; without any possibility of moving God to pity 
 by your cries ; without any possibility of hiding yourselves 
 from him ; without any possibility of diverting your thoughts 
 from your pain ; without any possibility of obtaining any 
 manner of mitigation, or help, or change for the better any 
 way. 
 
 " Do but consider how dreadful despair will be in such 
 torment. How dismal wiU it be, when you are under these 
 racking torments, to know assuredly that you never, never 
 shall be delivered from them ; to have no hope : when you 
 shall wish that you might but be turned into nothing, but 
 shall have no hope of it ; when you shall wish that you 
 might be turned iuto a toad or a serpent, but shall have no 
 hope of it ; when you would rejoice, if you might but have 
 any relief, after you shall have endured these torments 
 millions of ages, but shall have no hope of it ; when after 
 you shall have worn out the age of the sun, moon, and 
 stars, in your dolorous groans and lamentations, without any 
 rest day or night, or one minute's ease, yet you shall have no 
 hope of ever being delivered ; when after you shall have 
 worn out a thousand more such ages, yet you shall have no 
 hope, but shall know that you are not one whit nearer to the 
 end of your torments ; but that still there are the same 
 groans, the same shrieks, the same doleful cries, incessantly 
 to be made by you, and that the smoke of your torment 
 shall stiU ascend up forever and ever ; and that your souls. 
 
74 MA SSA CHUSETTS : 
 
 wliicli shall have been agitated with the wrath of God all 
 this while, yet will stiU exist to bear more wrath ; your 
 bodies, which shall have been burning and roasting all this 
 while in these glowing flames, yet shall not have been con- 
 sumed, but wUl remain to roast through an eternity yet, 
 which will not have been at aU shortened by what shall have 
 been past." 
 
 But naturally, knowing that the great majority of 
 mankind were doomed to this torture, the sympathies 
 of those who were to be saved might be excited for 
 the lost, — they also might be doomed to su£Eer tor- 
 ments in witnessing the suffering of others, — their 
 neighbors, their parents, their children. So Edwards 
 next went on to say that this scene of awful and ever- 
 lasting torture would only serve 
 
 " to give the saints a greater sense of their happiness, and 
 of God's grace to them. . . . When the saints in heaven shall 
 look upon the damned in heU it wiU serve to give them a 
 greater sense of their own happiness, seeing how vastly dif- 
 ferent their case is from their own. The view of the doleful 
 condition of the damned wiU. make them the more prize their 
 own blessedness." * 
 
 " Consider how it wUl be at the day of judgment, when 
 you shall see Christ coming in the clouds of heaven, when 
 you shall begin to wail and cry, as knowing that you are 
 those who are to be condemned ; and perhaps you will be 
 ready to fly to some of your godly friends ; but you wiU 
 obtain no help from them : you will see them unconcerned 
 for you, with joyful countenances ascending to meet the 
 Lord, and not the less joyful for the horror in which they 
 see you. And when you shall stand before the tribunal at 
 the left hand, among devils, trembling and astonished, and 
 shall have the dreadful sentence passed upon you, you will 
 at the same time see the blessed company of saints and 
 
 ' Works, Tol. iv. Sermon XIV. 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 75 
 
 angels at the right hand rejoicing, and shall hear them shout 
 forth the praises of God, while they hear your sentence pro- 
 nounced. You will then see those godly people, with whom 
 you shall have been acquainted, and who shall have been 
 your neighbors, and with whom you now often converse, 
 rejoicing at the pronunciation and execution of your sen- 
 tence." ^ 
 
 " When the saints in glory, therefore, shall see the doleful 
 state of the damned, how will this heighten their sense of 
 the blessedness of their own state so exceedingly difEerent 
 from it ! When they shall see how miserable others of their 
 fellow-creatures are, who were natnrally in the same circum- 
 stances with themselves ; when they shall see the smoke of 
 their torment, and the raging of the flames of their burning, 
 and hear their dolorous shrieks and cries, and consider that 
 they in the mean time are in the most blissful state, and shall 
 surely be in it to all eternity ; how will they rejoice ! " ^ 
 
 " The sight of hell torments will exalt the happiness of 
 the saints forever. It will not only make them more sen- 
 sible of the greatness and freeness of the grace of God in 
 their happiness ; but it will really make their happiness the 
 greater, as it will make them more sensible of their own 
 happiness ; it will give them a more lively relish of it ; it 
 will make them prize it more. When they see others, who 
 were of the same nature, and born under the same circum- 
 stances, plunged in such misery, and they so distinguished, 
 O it wUl make them sensible how happy they are. A sense 
 of the opposite misery, in all cases, greatly increases the rel- 
 ish of any joy or pleasure." ^ 
 
 A modern writer, who combines great research with 
 much acumen, says of a certain class of most devout 
 theological writers that they define " the nature of God 
 Almighty with an accuracy from which modest nat- 
 uralists would shrink in describing the genesis of a 
 
 1 Works, Tol. iv. Sermon XIII. ^ lb. 
 
 2 Works, vol. iv. Sermon XI. 
 
76 MASSA CHUSETTS : 
 
 black-beetle ; " ^ and, in reading last-century sermons 
 the intimate knowledge of the methods and councils 
 of the Almighty therein habitually evinced sounds to 
 modern ears a little strange; indeed, it savors of blas- 
 phemy : but it is not easy to overstate the confidential 
 relations which the Massachusetts clergy of that period 
 were supposed and believed themselves to hold with 
 the Deity. For instance, Edwards, in one case, men- 
 tions his predecessor in the pulpit from which he 
 was preaching, by name, and pictures to his congrega- 
 tion " Mr. Stoddard " in the world to come indicating 
 his entire approval to God, as the latter wrathfully 
 hustled into Hell defunct members of the Northampton 
 church.^ 
 
 Nor was this frightful doctrine preached by Jona^ 
 than "Edwards and his contemporaries alone or during 
 one period ; it was preached through a century and a 
 half and from all the New England pulpits ; nor was it 
 the staple of the ministers only, for those who were 
 regarded and passed current as poets chanted the 
 same refrain. I have quoted from Jonathan Edwards 
 the utterances of 1735 ; here is a specimen of the 
 similar utterances of Thomas Shepard, in 1635, just 
 one century earlier : — 
 
 "God heweth thee by sermons, sickness, losses and 
 crosses, sudden death, mercies and miseries, yet nothing 
 makes thee better. What should God do with thee, but 
 cast thee hence ? O consider of this wrath before you feel 
 it. . . . Thou canst not endure the torments of a litde 
 kitchen fire, on the tip of thy finger, not one half hour 
 together. How wilt thou bear the fury of this infinite, 
 
 ^ Leslie Stepten, An Agnostic's Apology, p. 5. 
 
 '■^ " The End of the Wicked Contemplated by the Righteous," 
 Works, vol. iv. Sermon XII., Section IV. 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 77 
 
 endless, consuming fire, in body and soul, throughout 
 all eternity ? Death ■ cometh hissing . . . like a fiery 
 dragon with the sting of vengeance in the mouth of it. . . . 
 Then shall God surrender up thy forsaken soul into the 
 hands of devils, who, being thy jailers, must keep thee, till 
 the great day of account ; so that as thy friends are scram- 
 bling for thy goods, and worms for thy body, so devils shall 
 scramble for thy soul. . . . Thy forlorn soul shall lie moan- 
 ing for the time past, now it is too late to recall again ; 
 groaning under the intolerable torments of the wrath of God 
 present, and amazed at the eternity of misery and sorrow 
 that is to come ; waiting for that fearful hour, when the last 
 trump shall blow, and body and soul meet to bear that 
 wrath, — that fire that shall never go out." ^ 
 
 But Shepard and Edwards were preachers only. 
 Michael Wigglesworth was a writer of popular verses 
 as well as a preacher, and in 1662 he published his 
 poem entitled The Day of Doom, a book which in 
 popularity exceeded any other work, in prose or verse, 
 produced in America before the Revolution. Of it 
 Prof. Tyler says, — " No narrative of our intellec- 
 tual history during the colonial days can justly fail to 
 record the enormous influence of this terrible poem 
 during all those times. Not only was it largely circu- 
 lated in the form of a book, but it was hawked about 
 the country, in broadsides, as a popular ballad ; . . . 
 its pages were assigned in course to little children, to 
 be learned by heart, along with the catechism ; as late 
 as the present century, there were in New England 
 many aged persons who were able to repeat the whole 
 poem," and men who survived the middle of this 
 century still referred to the excitement and fright 
 with which as lads they had read it. Thus, in versified 
 
 ^ Tyler, History of American Literature, vol. i. p. 209. 
 
78 MASSACHUSETTS: 
 
 jingle, Michael Wigglesworth described those whom 
 " angels stout " had dragged to " the brink of heU " : 
 
 " With Iron bands they bind their hands 
 
 and cursed feet together, 
 And oast them all both great and small, 
 
 into that Lake for ever. 
 Where day and night, without respite, 
 
 they wail, and cry, and howl, 
 For tort'ring pain which they sustain 
 
 in body and in Soul. 
 
 " For day and night, in their despight, 
 
 their torments smoak ascendeth, 
 Their pain and grief have no relief ; 
 
 theii" anguish never endeth. 
 There must they lie and never die, 
 
 though dying every day ; 
 There must they dying ever lie, 
 
 and not consume away. 
 
 " Die fain they would, if die they could, 
 
 but Death will not be had ; 
 God's direful wrath their bodies hath 
 
 for ev'r Immortal made. 
 They live to lie in misery, 
 
 and bear eternal wo ; 
 And live they must whilst God is just, 
 
 that he may plague them so." ^ 
 
 Nor is it as mere matter of literary curiosity that I 
 make these long extracts from forgotten sermons and 
 old-time doggerel. On the contrary, they are essential 
 to my purpose ; — their significance has to be fully 
 grasped if the evolution of Massachusetts history is to 
 be understood, and its proper place in the great whole 
 assigned to it. 
 
 1 Wigglesworth, The Day of Doom, stanzas 209-211. 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 79 
 
 IV. 
 
 The pulpit was the intellectual, moral and religious 
 rostrum of early Massachusetts, and it is not putting it 
 too strongly to say that the pulpit oratory of that 
 period is one long Jeremiade, — an unending, mono- 
 tonous wail over the degeneracy of the present as 
 compared with the past, — over the decay of religious 
 fervor and the neglect of observances, — over the 
 apostacies of the people of God. Here, for instance, 
 is a specimen from a discourse entitled The Glory 
 Departing from New England, delivered by Increase 
 Mather in 1702 : — 
 
 " O New England ! New England ! Look to it, that the 
 Glory be not removed from thee. For it begins to go. . . . 
 The Glory of the Lord seems to be on the wing. Oh ! 
 Tremble for it is going, it is gradually departing. . . . You 
 that are Aged persons, and can remember what New Eng- 
 land was Fifty Years ago, that saw these churches in their 
 first Glory ; Is there not a sad decay and diminution of the 
 Glory ? We may weep to think of it. . . . Ancient men, 
 though they bless God for what they Do see of His Glory 
 remaining in these Churches, they cannot but mourn when 
 they remember what they Have seen, far surpassing what is 
 at present." 
 
 But possibly the climax of Cassandra-like ravings 
 was reached by Dr. Increase Mather when in 1696, 
 being then President of this College, he remarked to 
 the students in a discourse delivered in the college-hall, 
 
 "It is the Judgment of very learned Men, that, in the 
 
80 MASSACHUSETTS: 
 
 glorious Times promised to the Church on Earth, AmeHca 
 will be Hell. And, although there is a Number of the Elect 
 of God to be born here, I am very afraid, that, in Process 
 of Time, New England will be the wofullest place in all 
 America ; as some other Parts of the World, once famous 
 for Religion, are now the dolefullest on Earth, perfect pic- 
 tures and emblems of Hell, when you see this little Academy 
 fallen to the Ground, — then know it is a terrible Thing, 
 which God is about to bring upon this Land." ^ 
 
 The result of this teaching was, of course, a thor- 
 oughly morbid general condition, — no food pleased 
 the moral palate unless highly seasoned. As a con- 
 temporary writer noted, should the people " hear a 
 minister preach in the most evangelical manner upon 
 any moral duty, or recommend the exercise of reason 
 and understanding, they would call him a dry, husky 
 Arminian preacher, and conclude for certain that he 
 was not converted. No sermons please but such as 
 heat the passions, or scare and frighten them. Solid 
 instruction is heathen morality or carnal preaching." ^ 
 
 Accordingly in the arid waste of those pulpit deliv- 
 erances one meets with no occasional gleam of humor 
 or insight, no conception of a spirit of inquiry or ob- 
 servation, no desire to look for a why or a wherefore. 
 The dry husks are fed out, the old straw is thrashed 
 over. Nor did the evil stop here. " Added to all 
 this," it was in Massachusetts as it had been in Europe, 
 " the overwhelming importance attached to theology 
 diverted to it all' those intellects which in another con- 
 dition of society would have been employed in the 
 investigations of science." ■* An utterly false method 
 
 ' Man knows not his Time, p. 37. 
 
 ^ Quoted by Palfrey, vol. v. p. .37. 
 
 ' Leoky, Hist, of Bationalism, toI. i. p. 2S2. 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 81 
 
 of reasoning was in vogue, making any real progress 
 impossible. Recurring for an illustration of this once 
 more to Jonathan Edwards, in a sermon of his entitled 
 Eternity of Hell Torments, from which I have already 
 quoted, he argues against annihilation in the following 
 way: — 
 
 " The state of the future punishment of the wicked is 
 evidently represented to he a state of existence and sensi- 
 bility, when it is said, that they shall be cast into a lake of 
 fire and brimstone. How can this expression with any pro- 
 priety be understood to mean a state of annihilation ? 
 Yea, they are expressly said to have no rest day or night, 
 but to be tormented with fire and brimstone for ever and 
 ever, Rev. xx. 10. But annihilation is a state of rest, a 
 state in which not the least torment can possibly be suffered. 
 The rich man in hell lifted up his eyes being in torment, 
 and saw Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom, and 
 entered into a particular conversation with Abraham ; all 
 which proves that he was not annihilated." 
 
 This is thoroughly characteristic both of Edwards 
 and of the system of teaching in use during the theo- 
 logico-glacial period. Nothing could be more decep- 
 tive or vicious. Starting from the literal construction 
 of a translated version of a text assumed to be in the 
 original inspired, they argued deductively, with piti- 
 less logic, to conclusions which it was impossible to 
 escape from without, by questioning the premises, in- 
 curring a charge of infidelity and atheism. And this 
 system, which, by putting a final stop to any intel- 
 lectual movement, created a universal paralysis, — this 
 system had to be slowly outgrown. 
 
 But in all this there was nothing new, — nothing 
 peculiar to America. Long before, Bacon wrote in 
 England — 
 
82 MASSA CHUSETTS : 
 
 " Nor should we neglect to observe that Natural Phi- 
 losophy has, in every age, met with a troublesome and dif- 
 ficult opponent : I mean Superstition, and a blind and 
 immoderate zeal for Religion. ... In short, you may find 
 aU access to any species of Philosophy, however pure, in- 
 tercepted by the ignorance of Divines. Some, in their sim- 
 plicity, are apprehensive that a too deep inquiry into Nature 
 may penetrate beyond the proper bounds of decorum, trans- 
 ferring and absurdly applying what is said of sacred Myste- 
 ries in Holy Writ against those who pry into divine secrets, to 
 the mysteries of Nature, which are not forbidden by any pro- 
 hibition. Others, with more cunning, imagine and consider 
 that if secondary causes be unknown, everything may more 
 easily be referred to the divine hand and wand ; a matter 
 as they think, of the greatest consequence to Religion, but 
 which can only really mean that God wishes to he gratified 
 hy means of falsehood." ^ 
 
 And so the great originator of inductive reasoning 
 concluded that " an instauration must be made from 
 the very foundations, if we do not wish to revolve for- 
 ever in a circle, making only some slight and contemp- 
 tible progress;" and, as it was in England in the 
 beginning of the seventeenth century, so was it in 
 Massachusetts in the middle of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury. The world moves slowly. But it does move ! 
 
 Thus three generations of the children of the soil 
 toiled here in New England painfully across the ever 
 thickening crust of lava which had poured from a 
 volcano, once living, but long since extinct ; and the 
 only thing the teachers seemed greatly to deplore was 
 the creation of a new soil on the black and desolate 
 waste, from which they could anticipate nothing but 
 harvests of poisonous weeds. Superstition and bigotry 
 
 1 Novum Organum, B. I. §§ xxxi., Ixxxix. 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 83 
 
 were thus the trade staples of the educated men of 
 the period. In other words, that people — men and 
 women, old and young, down to the very children in 
 the nursery — were crushed and driven to the verge 
 of insanity, and often over that verge, by a super- 
 stitious terror — the terror of what their teachers de- 
 fined as God's " vindictive justice." If any one doubts 
 this statement, or feels disposed to put it aside as an 
 exaggeration, they have but to turn to Jonathan 
 Edwards's Faithful Narrative and Cotton Mather's 
 Magnolia and there read the piteous stories of little 
 Phebe Bartlett and little Anne Greenough, each aged 
 five, blighted and driven crazy in their nurseries by 
 fear of death and hell ; and for that reason exhib- 
 ited as prodigies of infant piety ! ^ 
 
 Yet, strange to say, there is even now a generally 
 accepted belief that, somehow or in some way, this 
 degrading parody of religion, this burlesque of philo- 
 sophy, — this system worse than that of Dotheboys 
 Hall, which, if in practice upon children to-day, would 
 be indicted by any intelligent commission of lunacy, 
 — the belief, I say, prevails that this system in its day 
 subjected the people of Massachusetts to a most use- 
 ful, though severe discipline, the good results of which 
 their descendants enjoy, though they have themselves 
 fallen away from the strict faith. Nor is this merely 
 a popular belief ; it silently pervades the pages of the 
 historian and the moralist. It is needless to say that 
 for any such belief no ground is disclosed by a closer 
 historical research. The Massachusetts of the time 
 prior to 1760 was, it is true, poorer and simpler and 
 more primitive than the Massachusetts of the later 
 
 1 Edwards's Warlcs (ed. 1855), vol. iii. pp. 265-9 ; Magnalia, B. VI. 
 chap. Tii., Appendix, Ex. iv. 
 
84 MA SSA CHUSETTS : 
 
 period ; but that it was morally any better is unsup- 
 ported by evidence, while it was infinitely less intelli- 
 gent, less charitable and less cleanly. There is also no 
 more reason to suppose that the terrifying theology 
 then sedulously taught was less an injury to the men, 
 women and children composing the generations which 
 lived prior to 1760 than it would be to those living 
 now. It is, indeed, one of the curious phenomena of 
 man's mental make-up, this implicitly accepted belief 
 that a religious practice or creed which has now be- 
 come abhorrent, and is recognized as morbid, should 
 once have produced most beneficent results ; while, on 
 the other hand, it is equally recognized that some 
 Sangrado method of medical treatment, known to be 
 bad now, was equally bad then. The simple fact is 
 that the Calvinistic, orthodox tenets of the seven- 
 teenth and eighteenth centuries constituted nothing- 
 more nor less than an outrage on human nature 
 productive in all probability of no beneficial results 
 whatever. As a phase of immature development it 
 is entitled to about the same scientific respect as the 
 contemporaneous purging, bolusing and bloodletting 
 medical treatment ; the first blighted then and the 
 last killed ; just as both, if in use, would blight and 
 kill now. 
 
 It would have been inconsistent with any accepted 
 theory of human nature that the moral conditions, 
 continually and systematically developed by the treat- 
 ment which has been described, should not periodi- 
 cally have broken out in phases of acute mania. We 
 can view the thing from a cold pathological and sci- 
 entific point of view, observing cause and effect ; at 
 the time it was taken theologically, and a fit of mad- 
 ness was regarded as a manifestation of the immediate 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 85 
 
 presence of the Deity. At first the acute attacks of the 
 mania took the forms of ordinary reUgious persecu- 
 tions, finding vent against Baptists and Quakers ; then 
 it assumed a much more interesting phase in the Salem^ 
 Witchcraft craze of 1691-92. The New England' 
 historians have usually regarded this curious and in- 
 teresting episode as an isolated phenomenon, to be de- 
 scribed as such, and then palliated it by references to 
 the far more ferocious and unthinking maniacal out- 
 breaks of like nature in other lands at about the 
 same time.-' This is simply to ignore its significance. 
 Lecky, in his History of nationalism, sets forth the 
 law as follows : " It may be stated, I believe as an in- 
 vari^le truth, that, whenever a religion which rests 
 in a great measure on a system of terrorism, and which 
 paints in dark and forcible colors the misery of men 
 and the power of evil spirits, is intensely realized, it 
 will engender the belief in witchcraft or magic. The 
 panic which its teachings will create, will overbalance 
 the faculties of multitudes." ^ And, again, referring 
 to the fact that, during the period of the Common- 
 wealth, probably more alleged witches perished in 
 England than in the whole period before and after, 
 the same investigator declares that this " was simply 
 the natural result of Puritanical teaching acting on the 
 mind, predisposing men to see Satanic infiuence in life, 
 and consequently eliciting the phenomena of witch- 
 craft."^ The mania of 1691-92 in Massachusetts was 
 no isolated or inexplicable manifestation ; on the con- 
 trary, it was a most noticeable instance of the operation 
 of law : — given John Winthrop's journal in 1630-40, 
 Salem witchcraft at a somewhat later period might 
 
 1 Palfrey, vol. iv. p. 122 ; Ellis, Puritan Age, pp. 558, 559. 
 ^ Rationalism in Europe, vol. i. p. 37. 
 3 lb. pp. 102, 125, 143, 144. 
 
86 MASSACHUSETTS: 
 
 with safety be predicted. The community was predis- 
 posed to the epidemic ; but, instead of looking at the 
 record with these cold, scientific eyes, the Massachu- 
 setts historian, after narrating the facts, merely goes 
 on to suggest in extenuation of his ancestors that if 
 evil spirits anywhere had power, it might most natu- 
 rally seem to be " where Sabbath bells, till strangers 
 brought them, had never knolled to church ; " ^ but the 
 modern investigator may see reason to suspect that the 
 system of moral terror and apprehension systemati- 
 cally taught in the churches to which those bells 
 knolled the people had far more influence in bring- 
 ing on the maniacal access than any " bestial 
 rites " theretofore practiced in the same localities 
 by " savage men." 
 
 But, on the other hand, there is one aspect of this 
 phase of development, as seen in Massachusetts, which 
 is both unusual and in the highest degree creditable 
 both to people and clergy. Lecky lays it down as 
 another general truth " that when men have come to re- 
 gard a certain class of their fellow-citizens as doomed 
 by the Almighty to eternal and excruciating agonies, 
 and when their theology directs their minds with in- 
 tense and realizing earnestness to the contemplation of 
 such agonies, the result will be an indifference to the 
 sufferings of those whom they deem the enemies of their 
 God, as absolute as it is perhaps possible for human 
 nature to attain." And he adds that, in such commu- 
 nities it is not only towards the heretic that this in- 
 humanity is displayed ; it is reflected more or less in 
 the penal systems. In countries given up to supersti- 
 tion and bigotry those systems are almost invariably 
 reckless of life, and marked by excess of cruelty .^ 
 
 1 Palfrey, vol. iv. p. 129. 
 
 '^ History of Rationalism, vol. i. pp. 150, 3.31, .382. 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 87 
 
 Massachusetts from the very beginning constituted a 
 marked and honorable exception to this rule. Through- 
 out, the moral sense of the people has been opposed to 
 a frequent infliction of the death penalty or cruel cor- 
 poreal punishment, and the penal code has been corre- 
 spondingly humane. The Antinomian excitement of 
 1637 resulted in measures of severe repression ; but, 
 though many were banished, not one was put to death. 
 Subsequently laws of a cruel character were enacted 
 against the Quakers, and certain of the magistrates 
 and divines illustrated by their conduct in the enforce- 
 ment of the penalties provided in those laws the truth 
 of the proposition just formulated; but in every instance 
 public opinion revolted, and magistrate and priest be- 
 came powerless. When, in 1659, under the impulse of 
 Endicott's iron will and John Wilson's stubborn big- 
 otry, two Quakers, William Robinson and Marmaduke 
 Stevenson, were hanged on Boston Common, the popu- 
 lar sympathy was so moved in their behalf that the 
 streets had to be patrolled by an armed force to pre- 
 vent an outbreak ; while in other cases the mob de- 
 manded from the courts justice on those who inflicted 
 cruel punishments in the execution of a sentence, and 
 on more than one occasion freed the prisoners. Vol- 
 umes have been written about the witchcraft craze of 
 1692, and it has had a world-wide notoriety ; it seemed, 
 indeed, to be the one thing connected with the settle- 
 ment of America which impressed itself on the mind 
 of Voltaire.^ Yet the Salem madness was local, and 
 lasted only some six months, resulting in the execu- 
 tion of about twenty persons; the reaction then set 
 in, public opinion revolted, and those responsible for 
 the excesses thereafter did penance or became pariahs. 
 
 1 Parton's Life of Voltaire, vol. ii. p. 406. 
 
88 MASSACHUSETTS: 
 
 At a later day one hundred and sixty capital offences 
 could be enumerated in the penal code of the mother 
 country ; Massachusetts then contented itself with a 
 tenth of that number.^ This was in 1755. In 1794 
 it was asserted that no person had then been hanged 
 in Plymouth County " for above these sixty years 
 past ; " and a century before, in 1686, John Dunton 
 wrote from Boston " there has not (it seems) been an 
 execution here this seven years." ^ 
 
 This historical anomaly, — for anomaly it is, — a 
 mild penal code existing through a long period side 
 by side with a most sulphurous theological creed, — 
 this, I cannot but attribute to that under-current of vig- 
 orous political life, which orthodoxy could not wither 
 and which constitutes the distinctive feature in Massa- 
 chusetts development ; but certain it is that, even while 
 Jonathan Edwards was proclaiming hell and depicting 
 its torments with a clearness and fervor which could 
 not well be surpassed, an English observer was noting 
 the fact that " as to criminal matters, they are very 
 tender in punishing of them ; and very rarely put any 
 to death, unless it be for murder." ^ 
 
 Nature avenges itself in all sorts of ways for out- 
 rages perpetrated upon it. It avenged itself for the 
 undesigned and even well-intended theological out- 
 rages perpetrated on it in Massachusetts through a 
 long series of years, by the witchcraft mania of 1692 ; 
 and, then, when those outrages did not cease, it pres- 
 ently proceeded to avenge itself in another and a wholly 
 different way. The wizard craze was in due time fol- 
 lowed by the religious revivals of the first half of the 
 
 1 Proceedings of Mass. Hist. Soc. vol. xx. pp. 145, 153. 
 ' Letters from New England (Prince Soc. ed.) p. 118. 
 8 Proceedings of Mass. Hist. Soc, 1860-1862, p. 121. 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 89 
 
 eighteenth century. Of these there were a succession, 
 developing, like epidemics, in some one locality and 
 thence spreading far and wide, all conditions being 
 favorable. The last, known in New England history 
 as "the Great Awakening," began in the Northampton 
 church, over which Jonathan Edwards presided, in 
 1734, and it was nearly ten years before it expended 
 its force. 
 
 History has had much to say of the early religious 
 persecutions in Puritan Massachusetts, — Anne Hutch- 
 inson, the Baptists, the Quakers, — and the witchcraft 
 tragedy is as familiar as a twice-told tale ; " the Great 
 Awakening " is a mere name, and few know to what 
 it refers. Yet there is no phase of Massachusetts his- 
 tory more curious, more interesting or more worthy 
 of scientific observation. About it there is a well de- 
 veloped element of the farce as well as the tragedy, 
 and scenes in it are quite as suggestive of the stews 
 as of the mad-house ; for, though it was underlaid 
 by a panic fear of Hell, it found expression, not in 
 fagots, the gibbet and at the whipping-post, but in 
 loud outcries and ludicrous antics. I have set forth 
 in their own words the completely accepted doctrine 
 of a wrathful God and a devouring and insatiable Hell, 
 as depicted by the clergy ; but under the stimulus of 
 Edwards' success among his own people, a class of 
 preachers presently came to the front, — itinerants, 
 veritable Peter the Hermits, who by their wild appeals 
 lashed the community into absolute madness. When 
 Whitfield preached on Boston Common in 1740, though 
 the population of the place was then estimated at less 
 than 20,000, it is said that the people of the neighbor- 
 ing towns so swarmed in to listen to him, that some 
 30,000 human beings were gathered together.^ So 
 
 ^ Palfrey, vol. iv. pp. 9, 10. 
 
90 MASSACHUSETTS: 
 
 absorbed was the whole community in the saving of 
 souls that the necessary work of life was neglected. 
 Religious gatherings were held everywhere and all the 
 time, — in dwelling-houses, in meeting-houses, in the 
 open air, — and the utterances and actions on these 
 occasions exceed belief. They can only be adequately 
 referred to and described in the words of those who 
 witnessed them ; for the frightened and overwrought 
 people, — men, women and children, — crouched 
 trembling in the belief " that this is the last call that 
 ever they are likely to have ; that they are now hang- 
 ing over the Pit of Destruction, and just ready, this 
 Moment, to fall into it; that Hell-fire now flashes 
 in their faces ; and that the Devil now stands ready 
 to seize upon them, and carry them to Hell ; " then 
 the preacher would pause and presently vehemently 
 cry out to his audience, "that he saw Hell-Flames 
 flashing in their Faces, and they were now ! now ! 
 dropping down to Hell ; " and he would add — "Lord, 
 thou knowest, that there are many in that Gallery, 
 and in these Seats, that are now dropping down to 
 Hell ! " Symptoms of agitation and panic would then 
 show themselves : — 
 
 " They often begin with a single person, a child, or woman, 
 or lad, whose shrieks set others a shrieking; and so the 
 shrieks catch from one to another, till the whole Congrega- 
 tion is alarmed, and such an awful scene, many times, 
 open'd, as no imagination can paint to the life. . . . And 
 forty, or fifty, or one hundred of them screaming all to- 
 gether, makes such an awful and hideous noise as will make 
 a man's hair stand on end. Some wiU faint away, fall down 
 upon the floor, wallow and foam. Some women will rend 
 off their caps, Handkerchiefs, and other clothes, tear their 
 hair down about their ears, and seem perfectly bereft of 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 91 
 
 their reason. . . . Many of the young women would go 
 about the House praying and exhorting ; then they would 
 separate themselves from the other people, and get into a 
 corner of the house to sing and rejoice together ; and then 
 they would break forth into as great a laughter as could be, 
 to think, as they exprest it, that they should go hand in hand 
 to Heaven." [During commencement week of 1742] " meet- 
 ings were held every evening at which in the course of two 
 or three hours, there would be, it may be, twenty or thirty 
 distinct exercises carried on by five or ten distinct persons ; 
 some standing in the pulpit, some in the body of the seats, 
 some in the pews, and some up gallery; and oftentimes, 
 several of them would speak together : so that some praying, 
 some exhorting and terrifying, some singing, some scream- 
 ing, some crying, some laughing and some scolding, made 
 the most amazing confusion that ever was heard." [In an- 
 other locality] " they had a public exercise eveiy day and for 
 nine nights successively. Numbers of the people continued 
 the greatest part of the night in the utmost disorder. They 
 were groaning, crying out, fainting, falling down, praying : 
 exhorting, singing, laughing, congratulating each other, 
 which they did by shaking hands and embraces (the latter 
 was commonly practiced by different sexes) and by the fifth 
 night there were almost three hundred thus affected, who 
 were acting their different parts at the same time." * 
 
 It was small matter for wonder, therefore, that 
 the Rev. Charles Chauncy, referring at the time to 
 these gatherings, vprote of the " bitter shriekings and 
 screamings ; convulsion-like tremblings and agitations, 
 stragglings and tremblings, which, in some instances, 
 have been attended with indecencies I shan't mention : 
 None of which effects seem to have been accidental, 
 nor yet peculiar to some particular places or constitu- 
 tions ; but have been common all over the land." 
 
 1 Chauncy, Seasonable Thoughts (1743), pp. 77, 240. 
 
92 MA SSA CHUSETTS : 
 
 It is a curious and interesting fact, illusbrating both 
 the result of the abuse of natural laws and the utter 
 inability of the ordinary historical observer to connect 
 cause and effect, that the period of this acute religious 
 mania, stimulated as it unquestionably was by a clergy 
 of remarkable purity and singleness of purpose, was, 
 as the records show, also a period of pronounced loose- 
 ness of morals, — a period during which, as the minis- 
 ters expressed it, " a tide of immorality rolled " over 
 the land which " not even the bulwark of the church 
 had been able to withstand ; " and they attributed this 
 deplorable condition of affairs, not to that moral and 
 physical condition which naturally resulted from a 
 century of artificial terror and stimulus, but to the 
 influence of the French wars which broke out in 1744 
 and lasted until 1755 ! ^ To us, of course, cause and 
 effect are obvious : there is no paradox, no contra- 
 diction ; all is sequence, all order, all law. 
 
 Of this strange frenzy, which, as I have already said, 
 originated in Jonathan Edwards's congregation, Ed- 
 wards has himself left us by far the best account. 
 His Narrative of Surprising Conversions, though 
 much less dramatic, is scarcely less interesting than De- 
 foe's History of the Plague ; both are nearly contem- 
 poraneous accoimts of the course of epidemics, one 
 physical, the other moral ; the first due to material 
 filth, the last to intellectual superstition. 
 
 By 1745 "the Great Awakening" had run its 
 course. The reaction had then set in ; but it was more 
 than a mere reaction, — it was as if a glacial period 
 had passed its climax, and the superincumbent mass of 
 
 1 See paper entitled " Some Phases of Sexual Morality in Colonial 
 Massachusetts," in Proceedings of Mass. Hist. Soc, June, 1891 ; Series 
 II., vol. vi. pp. 477-516. 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 93 
 
 snow and ice had begun to waste and recede ; and yet 
 the process was slow — it occupied, indeed, the lives 
 of two generations. Leaving this part of the story, — a 
 sterile waste, — it is necessary to turn and study the 
 concurrent course of that political activity, which in 
 Massachusetts had from the very beginning flowed as 
 a stream of living water beneath the thick ice-crust 
 of theology. 
 
 I have referred to the curious but intimate sym- 
 pathy in regard to all political issues which, in Massa- 
 chusetts as in Scotland, existed between the people 
 and the clergy throughout the seventeenth and 
 eighteenth centuries. As a rule, and from the earliest 
 times, the church and the priesthood have been a part 
 of the governmental machinery, and in closest rela- 
 tions with the civil authority. That it was altogether 
 otherwise in Scotland during those two centuries 
 Buckle attributes to the fact that, for a hundred and 
 twenty years after the establishment of Protestantism, 
 the feudal rulers of Scotland either neglected the 
 church or persecuted it, thereby driving the clergy into 
 the arms of the people. Hence an alliance between the 
 two parties; and hence, too, the steady development 
 of that democratic spirit, which the clergy encouraged.^ 
 An exactly similar alliance may be studied in the evo- 
 lutionary processes of Massachusetts.^ From the 
 beginning the ministers preached rigid conformity 
 in religion, and stubborn independence in politics. 
 For instance, the very ministers who met in Cam- 
 
 ^ History, vol. iii. p. 191. 
 
 2 " An established priesthood is naturally the firmest support of 
 despotism ; but the course of events made that of Massachusetts revo- 
 lutionary. . . . Massachusetts became the hot-bed of rebellion because 
 of this unwonted alliance between liberality and sacerdotalism." — 
 Brooks Adams, Emancipation of Massachusetts, pp. 342, 362. 
 
94 MASSACHUSETTS: 
 
 bridge in September, 1637, to crush out once for 
 all religious freedom in Massachusetts, — those same 
 ministers only twenty months before had been sum- 
 moned to Boston to confer with the magistrates as 
 to the course to be pursued if King Charles and Arch- 
 bishop Laud should indeed, as was threatened, com- 
 mission and send out to New England a Governor- 
 General. When this question was referred by the 
 magistrates to the ministers, the answer came back, 
 quick and decisive, — " We ought not to accept him, 
 but defend our lawful possessions, if we are able ! " In 
 that answer there was no superstition about the divine 
 right of kings and obedience to rulers ; no obligation 
 to conformity: and it was prophetic. It struck the 
 key-note which rang true and strong from that Jan- 
 uary, 1635, to April, 1775. 
 
 Of the course of political events in Massachusetts 
 through its theological period and down to the year 
 1760, when at last political predominated over reli- 
 gious life, it is not necessary here to speak in detail ; 
 nor, indeed, is the story an interesting one. It can 
 be read in its dreary details in the pages of the 
 historians : but, after all, perhaps Hawthorne in his 
 True Stories, his Scarlet Letter, and his Twice 
 Told Tales has best embalmed most of its facts 
 with all of its romance. It was a monotonous period 
 of slow, provincial growth, in the course of which the 
 community passed through a series of Indian and 
 then of other wars, — Queen Anne's war, the old 
 French war. King George's war, — holding innumer- 
 able town meetings, governing themselves absolutely 
 in local affairs and practically in colonial, and ever- 
 lastingly bickering over salaries and tenure of office 
 with the governors appointed by the crown to rule 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 95 
 
 over them. The erection of a fort at Pemaquid con- 
 tinually emerges ; while the unfortunate provincials 
 seem never to weary of experimenting upon them- 
 selves with every conceivable form of currency nos- 
 trum. A record less inviting to the general reader 
 could not be found ; and yet with the slow narrative 
 of its details Palfrey fills two cumbrous volumes, nor 
 even then does he complete it. But it was the long 
 period of slow preparation ; and at last in 1760, one 
 hundred and forty years from the founding, the hour 
 struck. 
 
 Into the details of the conflict which then began it 
 is for the purposes of this sketch wholly needless to 
 enter. The story has often been told. It opened 
 with the struggle over writs of assistance in February, 
 1761, and closed with the suppression of Shays' rebel- 
 lion in January, 1787. The single fact about it to 
 which attention needs now to be called, is that it was a 
 period of great political activity, during which all reli- 
 gious and theological issues dropped out of considera- 
 tion. The public mind was intent on other things. 
 Then the frost was coming out of the ground, the sap 
 began to start and the soil blossomed; — the town 
 meeting sprang into activity, the legal profession came 
 to the front, the questioning spirit of scientific re- 
 search manifested itself. As usual, the new move- 
 ment embodied itself in individuals, each of whom 
 was more than any other typical of the environment ; 
 and those men, three in number, were Samuel Adams, 
 the exponent of the town-meeting ; John Adams, the 
 framer of the constitution of 1780 ; and Benjamin 
 Franklin, the pioneer in America of scientific research 
 through inductive reasoning. These three were to 
 the Massachusetts of the political period what Cotton 
 
96 MASSA CHUSETTS : 
 
 Mather and Jonathan Edwards were to its theological 
 period ; and by its fruits each period will be known ! 
 
 Necessarily a mere outline, this sketch implies in 
 those whom it reaches a very considerable knowledge 
 of Massachusetts history. For instance, until the 
 culmination of the theological period in 1740, the law 
 was in Massachusetts hardly looked upon as even a 
 respectable calling. In the early days it was under a 
 positive ban ; and even as late as 1786 the " growing 
 power of Attorneys or Barristers at Law " was alleged 
 as a public grievance. But about the year 1740 the 
 profession, as a profession, began to receive recogni- 
 tion, and in 1760 the course of public events forced it 
 into the lead. The discussions with the mother- 
 country turned on legal and constitutional principles ; 
 prior to that time theology, — sermons, discourses, 
 treatises, discussions of free-will, infant baptism and 
 salvation, — had monopolized the press ; and, then as 
 now, the press produced just what the public called for. 
 But between 1760 and 1775 the bar took the word 
 out of the mouths of the ministry ; nor has it ever 
 reverted. The immediate result was the constitution 
 of 1780, which first fi.xed on philosophical principles 
 the lines and limitations of what has since come to be 
 known as the American written constitution ; and, in 
 so doing, pioneered the way for the federal instrument 
 of eight years later. 
 
 It would not be without grounds were this put forth 
 and emphasized as the one great and indisputable con- 
 tribution of Massachusetts to the cause of civil and re- 
 ligious liberty and the political progress of the race. 
 Mr. Gladstone has pronounced the Federal Constitution 
 as " the most wonderful work ever struck ofE at 
 a given time by the brain and purpose of man." We 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 97 
 
 know that it is nothing of the sort. The American 
 written constitution was, like all good things which 
 prove permanent, evolved tentatively ; so far from 
 being struck off at a single effort, it was worked out 
 slowly, and through a century and a half of experiment 
 and failure. Built up little by little, step by step, on 
 the lines of Anglo-Saxon development, it bears every- 
 where the evidence of a careful regard for usage 
 and precedent ; but the distinguishing feature of the 
 Massachusetts constitution of 1780 was that, for the 
 first time, the philosophy of that development was in 
 it correctly divined, and then and there reduced to 
 form and practical working. It was again the egg of 
 Columbus. 
 
 It was not until after the adoption of the Federal 
 Constitution in 1787 that the political agitation which 
 for Massachusetts began in 1760 can be said to have 
 practically subsided. Thus for thirty years it filled 
 the public mind of the Commonwealth to the exclu- 
 sion of all else. During that period, nearly the life- 
 time of a generation, the glacial mass of superstition 
 and terrorism had been gradually but imperceptibly 
 receding and disappearing. It was still potent, but 
 in an inert sort of way. It had lost its aggressive- 
 ness. When the constitution of 1780 was framed, it 
 yielded a grudging and reluctant consent to limited 
 concessions of non-conformity ; but it was then so 
 potent and so rife that the framer of the instrument 
 abandoned in despair the attempt to put his idea of 
 religious freedom in any form of words likely to prove 
 acceptable to those who were to pass upon his work.^ 
 
 This spirit of inert theological quiescence continued 
 for yet thirty years more, and until, on the 5th of 
 
 1 John Adams, Works, vol. iv. p. 222, u. 
 
98 MASSACHUSETTS: 
 
 May, 1819, at the ordination of Jared Sparks in 
 Baltimore, William EUery Channing called into life, 
 in unconscious response to the demand of his en- 
 vironment, New England Unitarianism. The tenets 
 of the new creed were in no way novel. When 
 they were foreshadowed to John Adams in 1815, 
 he simply said that he had been familiar with them 
 for sixty-five years ; that Lemuel Briant, the min- 
 ister of Braintree in his boyhood, had been a Uni- 
 tarian, and created a small theological tempest by 
 enunciating those very doctrines. And this statement 
 illustrated curiously the principle of " environment." 
 It was in every respect literally correct. In 1749 the 
 Rev. Lemuel Briant, then pastor of the North Pre- 
 cinct church of Braintree, had published a discourse 
 on moral virtue, as a ground for soul-salvation, in com- 
 parison with faith in the articles of the catechism. 
 This discourse led to a sharp controversy. In it Mr. 
 Briant unquestionably set forth the fuU religious doc- 
 trines enunciated by Channing nearly seventy years 
 later, — the practice of a Christian life as opposed to 
 the profession of Calvinistic tenets. But the preacher 
 was in advance of his time, and probably declining 
 health alone saved him from being driven from his 
 pulpit. The dominating sentiment of the day was not 
 unfairly expressed by one of his brethren in the clergy 
 who girded himself to the orthodox vindication of 
 " Divers important Gospel - Doctrines " against this 
 new inroad of what he termed " Arminianism," and 
 in so doing did not hesitate to declare that — 
 
 "Whatever Pretences are made to Religion, which are 
 but meerly moral, the most refined Vertues, void of a sav- 
 ing Faith in Christ, and without his imputed Righteous- 
 ness, will be but as filthy Rags, — and can give no more 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 99 
 
 Title to final Justification in the sight of God, than if a 
 Man cut off a Dog's Neck, or offered Swine's Blood in 
 Sacrifice under the Law." ■" 
 
 And in 1743 the Eev. Charles Chauncy wrote: 
 "I have myself been present in a large assembly 
 when the preacher (and he would take it ill not to be 
 thought a first-rate one, too) spoke of good works, 
 with a loud and vehement voice, in that style, ' your 
 dbomindble, filthy, cursed good works,' " ^ curiously 
 illustrating what Channing observed seventy years 
 later, how large a portion of the primitive Orthodox 
 faith consisted " in disparaging good works and 
 human virtue, for the purpose of magnifying the 
 value of Christ's vicarious sufferings." ^ But the 
 whole difference lay merely in the fact that in 1750 
 the seed fell in rocky ground, or rather on a soil still 
 held in the grip of that frost remaining from the 
 glacier which had only begun to recede. Naturally 
 it failed to germinate. In 1819 the broken sod was 
 ripe and warm. 
 
 It is not necessary to trace the remaining develop- 
 ment of Massachusetts religious thought, until, at 
 last, thirty years further on, it flowered in Theodore 
 Parker and Ralph Waldo Emerson.* Two complete 
 centuries had then elapsed since the Synod of 1637 
 and the expulsion of Anne Hutchinson ; yet the 
 continuity in the process of human development was 
 distinct and clearly to be traced, — no less than the 
 break in it, corresponding to what in geology is 
 known as a " fault." Theodore Parker was the theo- 
 
 ' A Vindication, etc., by Samuel Niles (1752), p. 47. 
 ^ Seasonable Thoughts, p. 275. 
 ^ Works, vol. iii. p. 92. 
 
 * See Burgess, Pages from the Ecclesiastical History of New Eng- 
 land, mo-mo. 
 
100 MASSACHUSETTS: 
 
 logical successor of Roger Williams, just as Ralph 
 Waldo Emerson was the intellectual sequence to Sir 
 Harry Vane and Mistress Anne Hutchinson. The 
 Massachusetts veins of liberal theology and transcen- 
 dental thought, suppressed in November, 1637, re- 
 asserted themselves ' in 1837, when in June of that 
 year Theodore Parker was ordained at West Roxbury, 
 while in August Emerson delivered his Phi Beta 
 Kappa oration at Cambridge. The soil was at last 
 prepared. The seed not only fell but germinated ; 
 and the flower came. It told of its environment. 
 
 We no longer hear now of "the learned profes- 
 sions." In fact were the expression made use of in 
 ordinary conversation, it is doubtful if a person born 
 in Massachusetts since the outbreak of the Rebellion 
 would know exactly what was meant by it. But it 
 was otherwise with those who came forward during 
 the first sixty years of the century. It meant then 
 the three callings, — Divinity, Law and Medicine, — 
 it meant those and nothing else. Law and Medicine, 
 also, were decidedly junior members of the trinity. 
 In the early New England days Theology alone was 
 looked upon as a learned calling. The seal of Har- 
 vard College still bears living witness to the fact. 
 Indeed, the Harvard University Medical School did 
 not come into existence until 1783, nor the Law 
 School for yet thirty-four years more. The earlier 
 development of the Law in Massachusetts, as a learned 
 profession as well as a reputable calling, has already 
 been alluded to. Its first fruit was the constitution 
 of 1780 ; but subsequently it flowered profusely as 
 well as resplendently in Parsons and Shaw and Story, 
 in Mason and Webster and Choate. 
 
 Passing rapidly on, and next observing the same 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 101 
 
 process of natural development in response to the 
 change in environment due to altered conditions, it 
 Vfill be observed that medicine had to go through its 
 theological stage before it could reach the scientific 
 stage ; and, indeed, as recent discussions about the 
 desecration of the Sabbath and the spread of the 
 cholera tend to show, the theological stage in respect 
 to medicine, strange to say, has not yet wholly passed 
 away. By Massachusetts members of Congress even,^ 
 epidemics, plagues, contagions, are still looked upon 
 with awe as manifestations of divine wrath, rather 
 than as the result of filth and violations of the laws of 
 health, either because those laws are not understood or 
 because they are ignored. This was of course and still 
 is, in the benighted quarters in which it prevails, an 
 inevitable conclusion from orthodox tenets. The Deity 
 is with such, and must remain, omniscient as well as 
 omnipotent, — a jealous and an angry God, visiting 
 the sins of the fathers on the children. 
 
 In the. last century the small-pox was popularly 
 regarded as a visitation of divine wrath ; and hence 
 one of the most striking and instructive episodes 
 in Massachusetts colonial history. During the first 
 century of the settlement the most terrible of epi- 
 demics had ravaged Massachusetts on an average once 
 in each twenty years ; and, as its periods of visita- 
 tion usually lasted about three years, it might be said 
 
 1 " The awful scourge, known as the Asiatic cholera, is at our door. 
 God only knows what the next twelve months may develop, or who 
 will he its victims. In this presence can we afford to offend the Al- 
 mighty by a national sanction of the desecration of the Lord's day 
 that we were conamanded to observe amid thunderings and lighten- 
 ings from Sinai ? " — Hon. E. A. Morse, M. C, to Bishop Potter of 
 New York, December 9, 1892, On the Question of Opening the Chicago 
 World's Fair on Sundays. 
 
102 MASSACHUSETTS: 
 
 that the community passed at least one sixth of its 
 time in acute dread of pestilence. Not until 1721 did 
 the idea of a preventive siiggest itself ; but, after in- 
 oculation had been introduced into England from the 
 East by Lady Mary Wortley Montague, accounts of 
 this medical innovation reached the two Mathers, — 
 Increase and Cotton, father and son, — and were by 
 them brought to the attention of Dr. Zabdial Boyl- 
 ston, then the leading physician of Boston. Dr. Boyl- 
 ston considered the matter carefully, was impressed 
 favorably, and experimented on his family. At once 
 superstition asserted itself in theological guise. The 
 fear, of course, was that the epidemic would be artifi- 
 cially introduced through efforts at prevention ; the 
 favorite argument was the impiety of any and all 
 efforts to avert the visitations of divine providence. 
 God, in his wisdom and his wrath, let loose the plague 
 on a sinful generation, those composing which might 
 indeed through prostration and supplication, — appeals 
 to pity and mercy, — influence the operation of nat- 
 ural laws ; but to go about to coimteract it was im- 
 piety, and would only stimulate God to new outbursts 
 of anger.-' 
 
 To the everlasting credit of the two Mathers, — one 
 the President of Harvard College, — ministers though 
 they were, — they rose above this grovelling stage of 
 superstition, and faced the storm of popular odium. 
 The excitement was great, and Dr. Boylston sub- 
 sequently bore witness to the fact that, without the 
 great moral support of the Mathers, he would have 
 been obliged to succumb ; even as it was an attempt 
 was made on the life of Cotton Mather, while his 
 father, then 83 years of age, closed his long life of 
 
 1 See Buckle, vol. iii. pp. 248, 249. 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 103 
 
 literary activity by a pamphlet, — probably the most 
 creditable to him of all his writings, — designed to 
 show that inoculation against smaU-pox was, not only 
 scientifically correct, but that it had been, as the title 
 of his pamphlet expressed it, " blessed of God." 
 
 As the theological period passed away, and the age 
 of scientific inquiry gradually replaced it, the study of 
 medicine assumed a new phase. It reflected its en- 
 vironment. The traditional empiric methods, — what 
 might not unfairly be described as the old-fashioned, 
 orthodox treatment, — that deduced from Middle-Age 
 treatises, and largely made up of bleeding, purging, 
 starving, drugging and otherwise impeding or defeat- 
 ing the natural efforts of the human body towards 
 recuperation, — this system remained long in vogue, 
 and was perfectly described by William Douglass in 
 his Summary. Douglass, by birth a Scotchman, 
 established himself as a physician in Boston in 1718, 
 where he says : — 
 
 " When I first arrived in New England, I asked ... a 
 noted, facetious practitioner, what was their general method 
 of practice. He told me their practice was very uniform : 
 bleeding, vomiting, blistering, purging, anodyne, and so 
 forth ; if the illness continued, there was ' repetendi ; ' and 
 finally ' murderandi ; ' nature was never to be consulted or 
 allowed to have any concern in the affair." 
 
 Known as allopathy, this system of medical treat- 
 ment was one superstitious extreme, naturally leading 
 in course of time to a hardly less superstitious extreme 
 of the exactly opposite description, known as homoe- 
 opathy. As usual, the traditional led to the paradox- 
 ical; the truth probably lay between the extremes. 
 At last, in 1835, Dr. Jacob Bigelow, being then 47 
 years of age, delivered before the Massachusetts Med- 
 
104 MASSACHUSETTS: 
 
 ical Society his Discourse on Self Limited Disease 
 which afterwards led to the general introduction into 
 the sick-room of what became known as the Expectant 
 Treatment ; in other words, in medicine the inductive 
 method was quietly substituted for the deductive, — 
 the scientific for the theological, — and nature, no 
 longer brutally and systematically outraged by the 
 physician, was watched and, through careful, intelli- 
 gent nursing, assisted in its struggles to throw off dis- 
 ease. A man of the strong, virile, Benjamin Franklin 
 type, — observing, humorous, skeptical, inquisitive, — 
 Jacob Bigelow again only reflected his environment. 
 Thirteen years after he led the Massachusetts medical 
 profession to true principles in the treatment of dis- 
 ease, Morton and Jackson simultaneously discovered 
 anaesthetics ; and at once both medicine and surgery 
 rose into new regions before impossible of attainment. 
 The ice age had wholly passed away, and in one more 
 direction yet Massachusetts flowered. 
 
 From Cotton Mather to Nathaniel Hawthorne is a 
 long stride, but in Massachusetts literature there is no 
 intermediate stepping-stone. The Magnolia was pub- 
 lished in 1702 ; Twice-Told Tales in 1837, that year 
 of profuse germination : and, between the two, so 
 diflEerent and yet both distinct and unmistakable prod- 
 ucts of the Massachusetts mind, the one a boulder 
 and the other a flower, — between them there is — 
 nothing ! This Hawthorne himself recognized, and to 
 the Magnolia he instinctively went back as to a store- 
 house of material. So also did Longfellow ; for, with 
 the possible exception of Franklin's autobiography, 
 the intermediate 135 years of Massachusetts history 
 between 1702 and 1835 left absolutely nothing to 
 be classified as general literature which posterity has 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 105 
 
 cared to preserve, outside of its rarely opened cabinet 
 of curious antiquities. Then the period of literary- 
 germination set in, and Emerson, Bryant,^ Whittier, 
 Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell, Bancroft, Prescott, Pal- 
 frey, Motley, Thoreau, Hedge and Alcott, — poets, 
 novelists, historians, essayists and philosophers, broke 
 simultaneously into life in every direction. 
 
 The phase of political activity has already been 
 alluded to. In that field Massachusetts was always at 
 home — it enjoyed an easy American supremacy which 
 even its ice age did not wholly arrest. And now, 
 when the struggle against superstition had drawn to a 
 close, that against caste came again to the front, with 
 Massachusetts still in the van. Indeed, on this issue, 
 in 1837 as in 1635, the proper and natural place for 
 the Puritan commonwealth was in the van. It stood 
 there ; indeed it was the van. In 1835, exactly two 
 centuries after the convocation of ministers at Boston 
 had declared in answer to the question of the magis- 
 trates that " we ought to defend our lawful possessions 
 if we are able " against King Charles, — exactly two 
 centuries from that epochal utterance occurred the 
 Garrison riot. One year later, in 1836, Massachusetts 
 championed the Eight of Petition in Congress. The 
 rest of that story does not need to be told. It also is 
 familiar. 
 
 In his History of American Literature ^ Professor 
 Tyler remarks of the New England people that from 
 the outset " the aesthetic sense was crushed down and 
 almost trampled out by the fell tyranny of their 
 creed ; " but, for reasons which he sets forth, he adds 
 that " it is not permitted to us to doubt that in music, 
 
 1 Thanatapsis appeared in 1817. 
 
 2 Pp. 113, 114. 
 
106 MASSACHUSETTS: 
 
 in painting and in sculpture the highest art will be 
 reached, in some epoch of its growth, by the robust and 
 versatile race sprung from those practical idealists of 
 the seventeenth century." The connection between 
 the physical, intellectual and moral conditions of a 
 community and its artistic development is so subtile 
 that no law governing it has yet been traced. As the 
 experience of Spain shows, a period of art effervescence 
 is in no way incompatible with intense religious con- 
 viction ; on the contrary, such a moral and mental con- 
 dition may conduce to it. On the other hand the long 
 political agony of Holland preceded the appearance of 
 the Dutch school of painters. Modern French art 
 culminated amid a people strongly inclined to every 
 description of doubt and infidelity ; while the schools 
 of Italy flourished and died away under conditions so 
 contradictory that they defy classification. Unques- 
 tionably the material and moral circumstances of early 
 New England, — a plain people struggling for exist, 
 enee in a poor wilderness, — were not favorable to any 
 development of the art side of nature. Their lives 
 were to the last degree matter of fact, realistic, hard. 
 Nevertheless the examples of Copley, Stewart, Trum- 
 bull and Powers show that the possibility was there. 
 The trouble seems to have been, and, indeed, it may 
 be added, still seems to be that, while the artistic ele- 
 ment exists in New England in sufficient quantity and 
 there germinates freely enough, it hitherto has not 
 flourished in the home atmosphere. It requires a 
 warmer air, — more genial surroundings. Copley, for 
 instance, was born and did his early work in Boston ; 
 but in 1774, being then thirty-seven, he went to Eu- 
 rope : nor did he ever feel moved to return to his na- 
 tive land. Stuart, born eighteen years after Copley, 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 107 
 
 was of Rhode Island stock and did not until compara- 
 tively late in life come under Massachusetts influence. 
 Not so Washington Allston or William Hunt; of 
 these two the first was a native of South Carolina, 
 the second of Vermont, and both got their inspiration 
 in early life and in Europe ; both came back and 
 settled in Boston, the former at thirty-nine and the 
 latter at thirty-one, but neither underwent further 
 development. Their artistic faculty seemed to pine 
 and lose fruitfulness. Of the New England sculptors, 
 not one has produced his better work at home. They 
 have instinctively sought Italian skies, and clung to 
 them. The cause of this phenomenon, — the existence 
 and germination of a seed which refuses to mature and 
 flourish at home, — cannot be explained, nor its con- 
 tinuance predicted or denied. It is merely apparent 
 that while law, science and literature have in this cen- 
 tury seemed to find a natural soil and to enjoy a vigo- 
 rous life in Massachusetts, art has been an exotic. 
 
 The record, opened at Plymouth in December, 1620, 
 closed as a distinct and independent record in April, 
 1865. That long struggle for the recognition of the 
 Equality of Man before the Law, of which Massachu- 
 setts was the peculiar and acknowledged champion, 
 came to its close at Appomattox. Truly, the war had 
 been carried into Africa ; and, at the cannon's mouth, 
 a mission was fulfilled. Then, the mission being ful- 
 filled, Massachusetts, intellectually as well- as politi- 
 cally, merged in that larger community of which it 
 had always been a part, though ever a distinct part, 
 and, at times, one exercising, and never more than 
 towards the close, a dominating influence. So far as 
 America was concerned, the long struggle against 
 
108 MASSACHUSETTS: 
 
 Caste and Superstition, — the conflict for Religious 
 Toleration and the Equality of Man before the Law, 
 — was over. 
 
 But, as I have endeavored to show, the part borne by 
 Massachusetts in that sustained dual struggle has not 
 yet been fully told ; and the spirit of filio-pietism has 
 perverted the facts and distorted the record even in 
 so far as the story has been told. As I see it, and have 
 sought to set it forth, the record divides itself naturally 
 into four distinct periods : (1) the period of settlement, 
 extending from 1620 to 1637 ; (2) the theological, or 
 glacial, period, extending from 1637 to 1760 ; (3) the 
 period of political activity and organization, extend- 
 ing from 1760 to 1788; and (4), and finally, the sci- 
 entific, or florescent, period, extending from 1788 to 
 1865, at first slow, then rapid, in movement. Those 
 periods cannot properly be considered separate from 
 each other ; for they all merged one with another, ex- 
 actly as geological epochs merge. In spite of " faults," 
 the original strata and deposits traceable before 1637 
 are distinctly recognizable in the upheavals and flo- 
 rescence of 1837. The one period becomes intelli- 
 gible and significant only when observed in the other. 
 When so observed, confusion disappears, all is logical, 
 all is necessary, all is the subject and outcome of law. 
 
 But this the Massachusetts historian has as yet 
 failed to see, or refused to see. In the great, develop- 
 ing drama of Civil and Eeligious Liberty, — the 
 modern phase of human evolution, — Massachusetts 
 played no insignificant part ; but Massachusetts can- 
 not claim for itself the proud guerdon which the ulti- 
 mate verdict of history will concede to Holland, that 
 at one time, and for a long time, it stood forth alone, 
 but erect in desperate bravery, the sole champion on 
 
ITS HISTORIANS AND ITS HISTORY. 109 
 
 earth of both Civil Liberty and Eeligious Toleration. 
 William the Silent is a veritable colossus. John Win- 
 throp, deservedly revered, was not altogether equal to 
 the great occasion. 
 
 But it is time to see things as they are. Massar 
 chusetts had its ice age. That ice age, — sterile, for- 
 bidding, unproductive, its history dotted only with 
 boulders and stunted growth, — was like similar ages 
 in other lands, — as in Spain, for instance, where it has 
 not yet come to its close. Such a period was, more- 
 over, for Massachusetts no more a necessity, or a thing 
 good in itself, than it would have been for Holland or 
 England, had Philip II. or Charles I. prevailed. In- 
 deed, an exactly similar period may by the Massa- 
 chusetts historian be studied, in all its repulsive ob- 
 jectiveness, in the development of Scotland. But why, 
 in the spirit of filial piety, should it be indefinitely 
 urged through every form of iteration and sophistry 
 that what was admittedly bad and only to be endured 
 elsewhere, was desirable, — indeed was of all possible 
 things best, — here? 
 
 If not inspired, the Hebrew annals included in them- 
 selves much of that wisdom which is concentrated ex- 
 perience derived from long contact of mankind with 
 facts ; — and Massachusetts illustrated forcibly the 
 truth of one scripture aphorism, when the fathers 
 sinned in 1637, and the sins of the fathers were visited 
 on the children through three and four generations 
 until 1760. And now in closing I can only repeat 
 what I have elsewhere said : — " That in time the 
 intellect of Massachusetts — schooled by self-govern- 
 ment through a' long struggle with nature and against 
 foreign encroachments — did work itself out from 
 under the incubus of superstition, prejudice and nar- 
 
110 MASSACHUSETTS: ITS HISTORIANS, ETC. 
 
 row conformity imposed upon it by the first generation 
 of magistrates and ministers, cannot be denied; but 
 it is certainly going far to infer therefrom that, in this 
 especial case, superstition, prejudice and narrow con- 
 formity were helps instead of obstacles. It is not easy, 
 indeed, to see how the post ergo propter fallacy could 
 be carried further. It is much like arguing, because a 
 child of robust frame and active mind survives stripes 
 and starvation in infancy, and bad instruction and 
 worse discipline in youth, — struggling through to 
 better things in manhood, — that therefore the stripes 
 and starvation, and bad instruction and worse disci- 
 pline, in his case at least, worked well, and were the 
 cause of his subsequent excellence. It is barely pos- 
 sible that New England, contrary to all principle and 
 precedent, may have profited by the harshness and 
 bigotry which for a time suppressed all freedom of 
 thought in Massachusetts ; but it is far more likely 
 that the slow results afterwards there achieved came 
 notwithstanding that drawback, rather than in conse- 
 quence of the discipline it afforded. Certainly the 
 historians who with such confidence set aside all the 
 lessons of human experience — in order to assert that, 
 in the case of their ancestors, whatever was, was right, 
 as well as best — would be slow to apply the same 
 rules or draw similar conclusions in the case of 
 such as persecuted, banished or suppressed those who 
 thought like their ancestors."