Intolerance.

a distinct and independent colony. Newhaven, which was afterwards to be associated with it, was founded in 1638, by Theophilus Eaton, who had been British Ambassador in Denmark, and John Davenport, an eminent scholar at Oxford.

In the south also, and in the centre, the work of colonisation proceeded. Some Roman Catholic gentlemen began the settlement of Maryland in 1634, under a patent granted to Lord Baltimore. The Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, on the Hudson, dated from 1629, and Huguenots, who left their country after the destruction of La Rochelle, contributed to its population almost as much as the Dutch themselves, so that in 1656 the acts and notices of the authorities used to be printed in Dutch, French, and English.

The great Gustavus Adolphus early fixed his attention on these shores, that seemed to invite the adventurous, the oppressed, and the distressed, of the Old World to go over and take possession. After his death, Chancellor Oxenstiern began to carry out his plans, and in 1638 the log-houses of a "New Sweden" arose upon the river and bay of Delaware. This settlement was seized by the Dutch in 1655, but during its short existence under the protection of Sweden, it imitated Rhode Island, in refusing, from the very first, to allow of the importation of slaves upon any pretext. It is in singular contrast with this honourable distinction, that of the two states which now occupy this territory, New Jersey is the least anti-slavery state of the North, and Delaware will apparently be the last slave-holding one to renounce the institution.

While most of the future United States were founded by men flying from persecution in Europe, these victims of religious zeal had not the least idea of establishing a reign of univeral toleration in their new home. Nay, those whose coreligionists in Europe were their most remorseless persecutors were led by circumstances to be among the least intolerant on the other side of the waters. Lord Baltimore's Roman Catholics wisely concluded that the safest and surest way of making the profession of their own religion legal, was to proclaim the toleration of all orthodox Christian sects upon the soil of Maryland. Virginia, too, was liberal at first, and though, when the civil war broke out, the colony, in its zeal for the monarchy, prohibited any ministers, except those of the Church of England, from preaching or teaching in public or in private, the measure was enforced for a few years only.

It was otherwise with the first Puritan settlers; and the

close and sagacious analysis with which M. Astié shows how the principle of intolerance was necessarily bound up with all their other convictions, is not the least merit of his book. The Pilgrim Fathers introduced into the foundation of their scheme of ecclesiastical and civil polity the same radical error which in various shapes had been making the world miserable for so many centuries: that is to say, they believed Church and State to be identical de jure, and aimed at making them so de facto, by legally subordinating the civil and political to the ecclesiastical society.

The Romish ideal of the relations of Church and State, set out from the same hypothesis of the identity of the two societies, and involved the same doctrine of the subordination of the latter. It supposed the Church, however, to be represented by and completely concentrated in its hierarchy. The Pilgrim Fathers' ideal was that of a Christian theocracy as much as the Romish, but it made the Church to consist of all its members; it not only repudiated the substitution of a sacerdotal body for the whole religious community, but jealously guarded against the formation of such a body at all. The American Puritans did not aim at the exaltation of a caste; theirs was zeal for God, and not for their own power or self-love. It was an honest and unselfish effort to realise a popular government for religious purposes, according to the type of doctrine and polity which the members of the church held to be the only Scriptural one. They did what in them lay to establish a reign of righteousness, to make the law of God the law of the land, and the will of God the rule of all public and private life.

The ideal that prevailed in the Greek Church, and in all the Established Protestant Churches of the sixteenth century, involved the same common ever-recurring assumption of the identity of Church and State, but, unlike that of the Romanists and the Puritans, it subordinated the ecclesiastical to the political society, represented generally by the prince, and sometimes by republican councils. We do not here enter upon the question of Church and State, as it remains a matter of discussion in these realms. The Church of England is favoured by the State; it has prerogatives as such; its canons and formularies may exhibit traces of the confusion that once reigned between the characters of the citizen and the worshipper; but it is not now treated as the only form of religion that can be tolerated or recognised, and from which a British subject cannot attempt to withdraw without offending against the laws of his country; that state of things

which the Tudors and first Stuarts attempted to establish among us through a century and a half of conflict and countless cruelties has been abandoned for ever. Unfortunately, it is not so everywhere: there exist in parts of Switzerland Protestant States in which no form of Protestant Dissent is tolerated; every citizen belongs, by law, to the Established Church, and, at the same time, the fact of his citizenship gives him a vote in all matters ecclesiastical, in the election of pastors, of deputies to the synod, &c., and the right is frequently exercised by avowed infidels. This system of popular Church government is also at this moment extending itself in Germany.

The Puritans' scheme certainly contrasts favourably with the Erastianism of the Byzantines, and their imitators in the sixteenth century, and in the nineteenth. They took up the idea of Church and State in earnest, and with a single eye to the interests of true religion; they gave the supremacy to the nobler of the two societies, to that which had the highest object in view, making the purposes of the Church their end, and the power of the State only part of the means used to effect that end; whereas the contrary system makes religious agencies to be but the humble instruments for carrying out the prejudices, the caprices, the selfish purposes of the sovereign, whether that sovereign be the multitude, or some individual despot. This is a false and inverted theocracy, body and soul confounded in order that the body may insolently assume the mastery.

And yet the fundamental error of the Puritans is betrayed by the simple fact that they were fatally constrained by it to try to make men religious by law, and to punish both the irreligious and those who religiously and conscientiously differed from them. John Robinson asserted that the Church of England was no church at all, because it consisted of all the members of the nation indiscriminately, instead of serious professors; but he and his followers remained convinced that the civil magistrate should as such wield the sword in behalf of the Church, and that political power should wait upon religious profession. They did not merely seek an asylum where they might serve God in peace; their aspirations were more ambitious, amounting to nothing less than the exhibition of the ecclesiastico-civil polity, for want of which they thought the world was going wrong. They wanted, in a word, to give their ideal of social Christianity a fair trial.

Men so disposed could not trifle with their principles; the very earnestness which was their strength where they con

stituted an oppressed minority, became their temptation and their weakness where they in their turn possessed power to constrain, and believed themselves under obligation to use it. In formal antithesis to our modern continental radicals, who make ecclesiastical rights depend upon political qualifications, they ordained that members of the churches only should enjoy political rights, and participate in either the local or the general government. Attendance at divine service was made obligatory on the whole adult population. In Connecticut the absenting oneself from church for a single Sunday without sufficient reasons was punishable by a fine of ten shillings; and the householder who neglected family prayers was amenable to the grand jury. The description of a Sunday at Plymouth, by a Dutch officer who visited it at an early period, when there was continual danger from the Indians, shows that it must have presented the aspect of a barrack of one of the old monastic military orders. The men. were assembled by beat of drum, and fell into files three abreast, with their musquets on their shoulders, before the captain's house. There the drum ceased beating, but a sergeant led the march towards the meeting house; behind him walked the governor, on the right of the latter the minister in his gown, on the left the captain, with his military cloak, sword, and a cane in his hand. When they reached the church, each took his seat, grounding his weapon beside him, nor could he then taste the luxury that Cowper has since celebrated

"Sweet sleep enjoys the curate at his desk,

The drowsy rector drawling o'er his head,
And sweet the clerk below...."

The first generation was probably not much troubled by the temptation to sleep in church, but at a later period a beadle was frequently employed to supplement the awakening powers of the preacher by a long stick, with a knob at one end, and a tuft of feathers at the other. The harder end of the monitory wand was intended for the sconces of such of the stronger sex as should forget their cares, the attention of frailer offenders was solicited by gently passing the tuft of feathers over their faces.

The Puritans were led to dwell upon the Old Testament rather than the New, observes M. Astié, by the simple fact that the writings of the New Testament were addressed to believers dispersed in the midst of a society they had not founded, nor as yet modified; whereas the Old presented the historical realisation of a society such as they aspired towards, and a whole theocratic legislation in detail. Hence, the

The "Blue Laws" of Newhaven.

13

severity of some of their laws; adultery, atheism, and blasphemy, were to be punished by death. It does not appear that capital punishment was ever really inflicted for offences under either of the first two heads; but the cruel persecution of the Quakers, and the unfortunate witch-panic somewhat later, left two dark and indelible stains on the legislation of the New England theocrats.

It is not to be supposed, however, that humanity, on the whole, was a loser by the tendency to substitute laws taken, or supposed to be taken, from the Old Testament for those that were then in force in England. On the contrary, the English legislation of the epoch inflicted the punishment of death in more than thirty cases, those of Massachusetts only in ten. The neighbourhood of every capital in Europe at that time was rendered hideous by gibbets, upon which the putrifying bodies of malefactors hung, tainting the air of heaven, an outrage upon human nature, accustoming all eyes and hearts to sights of cruelty and horror. The Puritans learned, from what Moses had commanded thirty centuries before, that God's sun should never rise upon such a spectacle, lest the land He gave them for an inheritance should be defiled (Deut. xxi. 22, 23). One of their earliest laws, moreover, was one against cruelty to animals; and the scrupulous strictness with which they gave the few negroes introduced among them the benefit of the precautions prescribed by the law of Moses for the protection of slaves, was one of the reasons why the odious institution, which has been the curse of the South, never took deep root among them.

The famous blue laws of Newhaven, which, for a time, used to be gravely quoted as a real code by writers hostile to the memory of the Puritans, were but the invention of a Dr. Peters, a fugitive royalist, in 1781. No prohibition was ever issued against minced pies, or mothers kissing their children on the Sabbath-day, or making beds, or shaving on the Sabbath, nor against the use of musical instruments with an exception in favour of the Jews'-harp. But the extreme views and regulations of the New Englanders certainly left them open to this species of misrepresentation: the caricature, like every clever one, was a likeness, however exaggerated the features. Parish officers were really ordered to watch that there should be no bathing in the river on the Lord's Day, and no long walks without necessity. Newhaven, in particular, was slow to adopt the institution of trial by jury, because it was not to be found in the letter of the Old Testament.

Calvin succeeded in establishing Puritanical manners for