Ten New England leaders

Prefatory Note

HE lectures here presented were delivered on the Southworth Foundation," in Andover Theological Seminary in 1898 and 1899. In the selection of the subjects of these biographical sketches the lecturer aimed to present as varied and as typical representatives of the religious thought of Congregational New England as the number of hours placed at his disposal would permit. Other names that will readily occur to the reader might fittingly have been added; but it is believed that each of the men whose portrait has here been attempted deserves the title of a leader of New England.

Hartford, Conn.,

April 75, igoi.

Contents

I. — William Bradford II. — John Cotton III. — Richard ' Mather .

v'

IV. — John Eliot .

Index

3 49 97 137 175 217 267

313 361 409

L

IN undertaking the Southworth Lectures on Congregationalism, I am reminded that several themes of great importance have been treated, and in a sense made their permanent possession, by those who have stood at this desk before me. Our learned and beloved Dr. Henry Martyn Dexter, than whom none is more deserving of honored remembrance by all interested in Congregational history, here sketched out those marvellously patient studies on the bcc^innings of our religious story, afterward gathered into a stately volume under the title of The Congregationalism of the last Three Hundred Years as Seen in its Literature, — a volume which, though now eighteen years old, leaves to those who follow him but scanty gleanings of new facts to gather from his well-reaped field. Here, too, our honored Dr. A. Hastings Ross set forth, under the descriptive title of The Clmrch- Kingdom, the most elaborate and, in some respects, the most suggestive presentation of our polity made in recent years. As incumbent of this lectureship, also, Dr. Amory H. Bradford has lately outlined the development of the churches of our order in England, and shown the spiritual and institutional kinship of the Congregational body on both sides of the Atlantic.

Barred thus from the selection of certain topics which master hands have wrought upon, the present lecturer has deemed it alike the part of modesty and of wisdom to choose a simpler theme. Instead of trying to unfold before you the development of a great religious movement as a whole, or attempting to outline the proper organization of the Body of Christ, he has thought it best to present to you a brief series of biographical sketches of men prominent in various epochs of Congregational history. In connection with these lives something of the story of Congregationalism as a whole will necessarily be glanced at ; but the individual, human element will be kept as prominent as is consistent with a recollection that the prescribed theme of these lectures is " Congregationalism."

In selecting the subjects of our studies one is embarrassed by the number of those who have almost equal claim to a place in our consideration. Congregationalism has never produced a single leader of overshadowing influence, as has Lutheranism, or Methodism, or Moravianism. As befits a polity essentially democratic, it has enjoyed in all periods of its history many guides of strong individuality, forceful character, and high moral worth. And, therefore, as a selection is imperatively demanded by the limitations of a course of lectures, I shall present to you a series of men, all of them prominent in their times, but not the only, or exclusively the ablest, leaders of Congregationalism. I desire rather that they should be, as far as possible, typical not only of the periods in which they lived, but of a wide variety of Congregational life and thought. It is with this purpose in view that I have chosen William Bradford as the subject of this first lecture. Not a minister, not a holder, apparently, at any time of any churchly office, he was nevertheless so identified with the inception, the exile, and the transplanting of the Pilgrim Church that his experiences are an epitome of its history.

It is always difficult to picture to ourselves an era different from our own. We are, most of us, so much the creatures of the age in which we live that any appreciation of the thought, or even of the material surroundings, of a bygone generation is difficult; and even those of antiquarian tastes more often know a number of facts of interest regarding a past epoch than enter into its spirit. The past to us is like some strange country across the sea, from which explorers bring reports of customs and of interests which strike us as quaint or amusing because of their want of conformity to what we see about us ; of heated excitement about questions which seem trivial because they do not happen to be the questions which concern us; — a land in which men move as in a haze, unreal, nebulous.

6 ^^ILLIA'M B'RADFOkD

not flesh and blood as men and women whoni our riiorn. ing newspaper brings to our acquaintance. It is, therefore, no easy task to transport ourselves in fancy back more than three hundred years to the little Yorkshire farming hamlet of Austerfield, where Bradford was baptized on March 19, 1590, probably very shortly after his birth. What life may have been in such a rural townlet for an orphaned boy, brought up by a grandfather's and then by an uncle's care, only vigorous imagination will enable us to conjecture from the few hints that have come down to us.

Though of a yeoman family, the best-to-do of any in the little community, Bradford's early life must have been outwardly the monotonous and laborious round of an agricultural toiler in that unpicturesque but fertile section of England, in days when farm machinery beyond the rudest implements was yet unthought of. To be sure, the great North Road from London to York ran, an unfenced horse-track, through the village of Bawtry, a mile away; yet Austerfield must have heard little of what went on in the world at large. Doubtless the defeat of the Spanish Armada, nearly two years before Bradford was born, brought rejoicing to Austerfield, but travellers of the yeoman class were few, and news from the great world outside filtered slowly among those who, as Bradford himself says, were " used to plaine countrie life."

Yet in that outer world it was a time of marked events. The splendid reign of Elizabeth was drawing to its brilliant close. Relieved of fear of overthrow from without by the death of Mary, Queen of Scots, and the discomfiture of the avenging Spanish fleet, the English mind bloomed in a wealth and beauty of literature such as no other epoch of English story has displayed. The year of Bradford's birth witnessed the publication Of Spenser's Faerie Qiieene ; in 1593, when Bradford was perhaps learning his letters at his grandfather's knee, came that *' first heir of [his] invention," the Venus and Adonis of Shakespeare. In 1597, the year after the orphaned Austerfield boy was transferred by the death of his grandfather to an uncle's care, Bacon's Essays first awoke the admiration of English readers. Of all these things of such vast moment in English letters little Austerfield knew nothing, and of any subsequent knowledge of them the boy who grew to youth while they were happening showed no trace.

But there was a concern which, more than any other, touched all men in England at that day, and that was religion. No feature of the great national drama which had been played before the eyes of two generations of Englishmen before Bradford's birth had so immediate and visible an interest to a young man of Austerfield, or of any other English village, as that which concerned the Church. The wars with Spain, the voyages of a Raleigh or of a Drake, were at best distant and shadowy compared with the changes that had been witnessed in the hamlet place of worship, the gift of John de Builli to the Benedictines of Blyth more than four hundred years ' before Bradford was brought to its font for baptism. Perhaps the first evidence of the royal revolt from Rome which Austerfield had seen had been in the youth of Bradford's grandfather, when, in 1536,^ King Henry VIII. , whom an obsequious Parliament had two years before declared to be " the only supreme Head in earth of the Church of England," had suppressed the monastery of Blyth. to which little Austerfield and the neighboring Bawtry looked for the appointment of their curates. The King ultimately transferred the monastic right of appointment at Blyth and consequently the determination of what spiritual oversight Austerfield should enjoy, to the newly founded Trinity College of Cam. bridge University. This suppression was itself only an incident in the general abolition of monasticism throughout England; but the stir occasioned in the minds of the Austerfield dwellers was doubtless very considerable, for the region had possessed a larger proportion of these monastic establishments than most parts of the realm. Cistercians, Carthusians, Gilbertines, Augustinians, Premonstratensians, and Benedic-

' See Raine, History and Antiquities of the Parish of Blyth, passim. Westminster, i860.

■■* Raine, ibid., 72, says 1535, ^"-^t ht^ is evidently confused between Old and New Style.

WILLI AM BRADFORD g

tines had all dwelt in the near vicinity.' The region had fiercely resented this royal invasion of ancient rights; Lincolnshire and Yorkshircmen, perhaps some from Austerfield itself, had risen in revolt in the interest of the older institutions in 1536, but the iron will of the sovereign had prevailed here as elsewhere. Almost immediately after the dissolution of the monastery of Blyth, if the royal mandates were enforced, as there is every reason to believe that they were, a copy of the Bible in English was placed in Austerfield church, as in every other church in the kingdom.^ Still the service continued almost entirely in Latin and substantially unaltered in doctrinal purport. Then, in 1549, Austerfield in all probability witnessed the introduction of the English Prayer Book, only to have a revised form substituted in 1552 ; to see this swept away in 1553 in favor of the ritual of the closing days of Henry VIIL, and substantially restored in 1559. As late as 1569, after Bradford's father had grown to manhood, a great wave of insurrection directed against these changes rolled from the north almost to Austerfield; and so strongly had the old faith entrenched itself, that, even after Bradford's birth, several of the neighboring county families,^ in-

' Joseph \l\xniex, Collections concerning . . . the Founders of New Plymouth, pp. 24, 25. London, 1854.

■•^ J. A. Froude, History of England, iii., p. 80. Books \vere to be provided before August I, 1537.

3 Hunter, Collections, pp. 25, loS.

lO WILLIAM BRADFXDRD

eluding that from which his uncle-guardian leased part of the acres that young Bradford tilled, were still its adherents.

There is no reason to suppose, however, that these changes of institutions and forms of worship were accompanied by any material alteration in the character of the Austerfield ministry, or any very strenuous insistance on vital religion. The curate of Bawtry, a mile away from Austerfield and, like it, a spiritual dependency of Blyth, is described in the visitation of 1548 as" unlerned." ' What degree of ignorance this may have implied may be surmised perhaps from the contemporary statement of Bishop Hooper of Gloucester, that of the priests of that diocese under the Edwardine Reformation " one hundred and sixty-eight could not say the Ten Commandments." "^ Nor had matters grown much better twenty years later under Elizabeth, when, in 1569, a report from the diocese of Chichester,^ a region in which the Reformation had made much more progress than in Yorkshire, affirmed that " in many churches they have no sermons, not one in seven years, and some not one in twelve years . . . few churches have their quarter sermons " \i. e., the four yearly discourses, then the legal minimum of ministerial pulpit effort] ;

' Raine, ibid., p. 177.

2 William Clark, llie Anglican Reformation, p. iSi. 1897.

'' Froude, His (ojy of England, ix., p. 512.

WILLIAM BRADFORD II

Cotton Mather affirms that the inhabitants of Austerfield in Bradford's boyhood were " a most ignorant and licentious people, and like unto their priest."' Happily there is reason to believe the description exaggerated. The curate of the little church, Henry Fletcher, certainly had the clerical merit, then by no means universal, of residing in the community of which he was the accredited spiritual leader; but the judgment of the antiquary, the Rev. Joseph Hunter, expressed more than forty years ago, is doubtless correct, that Bradford owed little to Fletcher's ministry;' and as to the widely prevalent unspirituality and ignorance of the ministry and people of England at the close of Elizabeth's reign there is abundant evidence.

That this state of affairs existed so generally was due to the peculiar character of the English Reformation. That movement, more than any corresponding development on the Continent, was checked and controlled by political considerations. National independence from foreign control was the one thought to which the English people, as a whole, readily responded ; but, for many years after the papal authority had been rejected, nothing like a majority of the inhabitants of England could be counted as favorers of Protestant doctrine. A church essentially unchanged in organization and discipline, and largely Roman in ritual and belief, while English in language and gov-

^ Magna lia, ed. 1853, i., p. icx). - Collections, pp. 112, 113.

eminent, was the preference not only of Elizabeth, but, certainly, till the defeat of the Armada, of a majority of Englishmen. Yet side by side with this conservative tendency ran the strong current of intense Protestant conviction, led especially by those who had come into contact with the Calvinistic divines of the Continent during the Marian persecutions, — a current sweeping into its control an ever increasing proportion of the people as Elizabeth's reign went on. These two antagonistic elements the great Queen kept from such civil conflict as France contemporaneously witnessed ; but at the expense of a compromise policy that preserved the ancient ministry largely undisturbed by inquiry as to belief or fitness, and repressed severely the more strenuous desires of the Protestants. The latter sought the abandonment of such remaining Roman vestments and practices as they deemed superstitious; the maintenance of an educated, spiritually enlightened, earnest ministry, which should preach the intenser doctrines of Calvinistic Protestantism with soul-searching force; and the purification of each parish by the enforcement of rigorous discipline. To their thinking, the maintenance by the Queen of the half-reformed, unstrenuous, lax-disciplined, nonpreaching clergy who so largely filled the land, was a deprivation of the people of the means of grace. In the view of the Queen, to have permitted the extremer Protestants, or, as they were usually nicknamed, the

Puritans," to have their way would have been to throw the county into civil discord, to limit the royal supremacy, and to go counter to her own religious preferences, which were all anti-Protestant save on the question of her own supremacy. And so it came about that the Queen and the bishops whom she appointed everywhere repressed the Puritans, and insisted that they be held in conformity to the ritual prescribed by law; so it came about, also, that, while little Austerfield had a Bible, at least in its church, and enjoyed a ritual in the English tongue from which the more obnoxious features of Romanism had been purged away, its pulpit was silent, its minister ignorant and easy-going, and its discipline lax.

This repression by the constituted authorities induced Puritanism to take increasingly an intenser form. Before Elizabeth's reign had passed far into its second decade, some Puritans had raised the question whether a system of church government wherein the ecclesiastical authorities, particularly the bishops who were the immediate royal agents, had such powers to prevent the execution of what Puritans believed to be essential and Scriptural reforms, could be the right form of church organization. Under the lead of Thomas Cartwright, from 1569 onward, the more advanced Puritans, while clinging to the idea of a national Church of which all baptized inhabitants of England were members, denied the rightfulness of the

Anglican Establishment as tested by the Word of God, and began to agitate for its substantial alteration by governmental authority. To a small radical wing of the advanced Puritans even this seemed too slow a method of approximation to the standard which they thought was set up in the New Testament ; and, beginning with Robert Browne in 1580, they taught that the true method of reform was the separation of Christian men and women from an Establishment which seemed to them so little answering to the apostolic congregations, and their organization by mutual covenant into churches designedly on the model of those of the Acts and the Pauline Epistles. If the Bible is the sole source of doctrine, as all Reformation divines held it to be, why is it not of polity also ? was their argument; and, judged by the Biblical standard, was not the Establishment, which tolerated so much that was worldly and unspiritual and was ruled in a way so different from the churches of the first century, essentially un-Christian and therefore to be abandoned by those earnestly seeking the Kingdom of God ? These were no mere speculative theories, but beliefs for which, within the fifteen years that preceded Bradford's fourth birthday, several hundred men and women from Norwich, Bury St. Edmunds, Gloucester, and London had suffered imprisonment and exile, and which no fewer than six men had sealed with a martyr's death.

But how was it that the youthful Bradford, in the remote country village of Austerfield, came to embrace the most strenuous type of Puritan faith ? The explanation is to be found in the presence, in the near vicinity, of several sympathizers with advanced Puritan views. Of these the most influential were a clergyman and a layman, Rev. Richard Clyfton and Postmaster William Brewster. Both had been students at Cambridge University,' and had there come, if not before, under the dominant impress of Puritanism, then largely influential in that seat of learning. Both began their active work shortly before the time of Bradford's birth; Clyfton having become rector at Babworth,' nine or ten miles south of Austerfield, in July, 1 586, at the age of thirty-three ; and Brewster having begun to assist his invalid father as postmaster at the old archiepiscopal manor of Scrooby, less than three miles from Austerfield on the way to Babworth, early in 1589,^ being then some ten years younger than Clyfton.' Clyfton's vigorous Puritan preaching and catechising ' from his vantage as incumbent of the Babworth living, was ably seconded by Brewster's zeal in securing the services of other Puritan ministers for more temporary labors in the region. For this work

' Edward Arber, Story of the Pilgrim Fathers, pp. 51, 1S9. London, 1897. '/^zV.,p. 52. 3/^/^,^ pp^ yi^ S3.

^ John Brown, The Pilgrim Fathers, p. 54. 1895. He was born in 1566-7.

5 Bradford, Dialogue, in Young's Chronicle of the Pilgrims, p. 453-

Brewster's position as postmaster on the great North Road gave opportunity, and his own purse contributed more largely than that of anyone else to support the preaching that he desired.' The result, as described in Bradford's own words,'' was that

"by the travell & diligence of some godly & zealous preachers, & Gods blessing on their labours, as in other places of y^ land, so in y^ North parts, many became inlightened by y^ word of God, and had their ignorance & sins discovered unto them, and begane by his grace to reforme their lives."

One of those thus spiritually quickened was the youthful Bradford himself. Of a thoughtful turn of mind by reason of illness, he was led by his study of the Bible to desire some more awakening religious instruction than the ministrations, such as they may have been, of Henry Fletcher at Austerfield afforded. And so he began, as a boy of little more than twelve, to make his way, as opportunity offered, down the road and across the fields to Babworth; and, as he grew a little older, was introduced to that company of seekers for a warmer spiritual life who met under Brewster's roof at Scrooby. Such a course must have required no little resolution in the boy, for it had no countenance from his neighbors or his uncles;^ and was sure to involve serious dangers of ecclesiastical

' Bradford, History of Plimoiith Plantation, p. 490. Boston, 1898.

^ Ibid., pp. II, 12.

=* Mather, Magnalia, i., p. no.

and governmental interference. Yet we may imagine that Bradford's boyish determination was greatly strengthened when, apparently in 1604, John Robinson,' fresh from Cambridge and Norwich, came to the region, not improbably as one of the preachers of Puritan earnestness obtained by Brewster, and speedily added his strong, wise, and generous leadership to the little company of seekers for a fuller reformation. To know Robinson was in itself an education. No nobler figure stands forth in the story of early Congregationalism than that of this moderate, earnest, patient, learned, kindly man, who was for the next sixteen years to be Bradford's friend and guide. Nor shall we be far wrong, I take it, if we attribute to the influence of this one-time fellow of Corpus Christi College, aided perhaps in a less degree by that of Brewster and Clyfton, that love for learning, which in spite of a total lack of all the ordinary early advantages for an education, made Bradford proficient in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, besides the considerable acquaintance with Dutch and French which his exile brought to him.' The coming of a very different, but equally earnest, man, the erratic, energetic, zealous John Smyth," to the

' Dexter, Congregationalism as Seen, pp. 373-376,

'^ Mather, Magna lia, i., p. 113.

2 The date, 1602, usually assigned for the beginning of Smyth's Gainsborough work has been subjected to recent criticism. Dr. Dexter, True Story of John Smyth (1881, p. 2), was inclined to accept it on the strength of Nathaniel Morton's New Englands Memoriall (ii.), though important town of Gainsborough, some eight or nine miles east of Scrooby and Austerfield, probably late in 1605 or early in 1606, undoubtedly added to the general stir and ferment of the region.

It would not appear that Clyfton and Brewster, the spiritual guides of the youthful Bradford, desired or designed at first to separate from the Church of England. They earnestly wished the reform of the Establishment into something more nearly approaching what they deemed the Biblical model, they emphasized preaching, they sought a more strenuous moral discipline ; but they were not as yet Separatists. Yet the opposition of the ecclesiastical authorities forced them ultimately to the Separatist position ; and soon after the coming of Robinson and Smyth to the region, probably in 1606, two churches ' were formed, designedly on the New Testament model. One of these churches was organeven he regarded it as " rather early." But Professor Arber, Story of the Pilgrim Fathers (1897, pp. 133, 134), shows pretty conclusively that Smyth was a "lecturer" in Lincoln as late as March, 1605, and therefore could not have begun his work at Gainsborough till after that time. On the other hand, Arber's identification of him with the John Smith who graduated M.A. at Cambridge in 1593 {ibid., p. 132) rather than with the graduate who received that degree in 1579 (Dexter, etc.) seems less successful. Compare Thompson Cooper in Dictionary of National Biography (liii., p. 68). Since the organization of the Scrooby church, which crossed the Atlantic in the Mayfloiver, seems to have been occasioned by, or at least contemporary with (if not indeed originally in union with), the formation of Smyth's Separatist congregation at Gainsborough, the question of the date of the beginning of his ministry there is of importance in determining the age of the Mayflower church. ' Arber, ibid., p. 54.

WILLIAM BRADFORD I9

ized at Gainsborough, and though destined to encounter much distraction under the leadership of Smyth in the Netherlands, was to be the means of establishing the first Baptist church in England.' The other was gathered at Scrooby, and like that of Gainsborough speedily became an exile under Clyfton and Robinson in Holland, but was privileged to become the mother of the Congregational churches of New England.

The resolution thus to separate from the Church of their fathers was not quickly or rashly formed by these Christians. It was the outcome of their study of the Word of God under the illumination of the persecutions to which their reformatory efforts within the Establishment subjected them from its constituted authorities. Bradford himself points this out very clearly. Describing the steps which brought him and his associates to the organization of the Scrooby church, he says: ^

" They [the reformers] were both scoffed and scorned by y"" prophane multitude, and y^ ministers urged with y^ yoak of subscription, or els must be silenced; and y^ poore people were so vexed with apparators, & pursuants, & y*" comissarie courts, as truly their affliction was not smale; which, notwithstanding, they bore sundrie years with much patience, till they were occasioned (by y^ continuance & encrease of these troubls, and other means which y^ Lord raised up in those days) to see further into things by the light of y^ word of God. How not only these base and beggerly ceremonies were unlawfull, but also that y" lordly

' A. H, Newman, History of A nti- P tdobaptlsin , p. 391. Philadelphia, 1897. ^Bradford, Hist. Plim, Plant. ^ pp. 12, 13.

& tiranoiis power of y'' prelats ought not to be submitted unto; which thus, contrary to the freedome of the gospell, would load & burden mens consciences, and by their coml)ulsive power make a prophane mixture of persons & things in y^ worship of God. . . . So . . . they shooke of this yoake of antichristian bondage, and as y^ Lords free people, joyned them selves (by a covenant of the Lord) into a church estate, in y^ felowship of y^ gospell, to walke in all his wayes, made known, or to be made known unto them, according to their best endeavours, whatsoever it should cost them, the Lord assisting them."

I have thus dwelt at considerable length on the origin and purpose of this Congregational church, of which Bradford, then entering on his seventeenth year, was one of tiie more youthful organizers; and I have done so, if for no other purpose, to show that it was no headstrong and hasty opposition to salutary authority that here found expression. The separation, when it came, was in this instance but the fruit of a deep conviction that the Church of England as then administered not only failed to be what a Scriptural church should be, but that it was irreformable by any efforts which these men and women of Scrooby, and Austerfield, and Babworth, and Gainsborough could make, and hence the only course open to them was to come out of it.

But to come out of it, as Bradford and those older than he speedily found, was to be subject to increased attack. They were now " hunted & persecuted on every side," ' and, after some hesitation, took the momentous step of leaving home and country for the shelter and toleration of Holland. Yet, as Bradford records, " though they could not stay, yet were y^ not suffered to goe," ' and, attempting to escape in the autumn of 1607,' Bradford found himself in Boston prison. His youth, however, procured him speedy release;* and, in the spring of 1608, he, with his associates in exile, was in Amsterdam. Though released from persecution, life was full enough of difficulties for these poor farmers in their new city home. The strange sights of the new land were not without their impressiveness to the observant young Englishman; but, as he tells us, " though they saw faire & bewtifull cities, flowing with abundance of all sorts of welth & riches, yet it was not longe before they saw the grime & grisly face of povertie coming upon them like an armed man." ^

To battle for his daily bread, Bradford learned the silkweaver's trade of some French refugee,^ perhaps like himself an exile for conscience, though no easy taskmaster to the learner in the unaccustomed art. After the church of which Bradford was a member removed to Leyden in the spring of 1609, Bradford

' Bradford, Hist. Plim. Plant., p. 14.

' On date, see Arber, Pilgrim Fathers, p. 86.

** Mather, Magnalia, i., p. in.

5 Bradford, Hist. Plim. Plant., p. 22.

^ Mather, ibid.

pursued the same general means of livelihood, though now he wro'ught upon the stout cotton cloth then known as fustian. Indeed, it would seem that he invested the small sum that came to him from the sale of his inheritance at Austerfield, in 1611, in an independent business venture, but the enterprise brought him more experience than success, and Cotton Mather believed, probably truly, that he judged his loss " a correction bestowed by God upon him for certain decays of internal piety." ' It was as by occupation a " fustian-maker " that he was entered in the public records^ of Amsterdam, when, on November 30, 1613, at the age of twenty-three, he was married to the sixteen-year-old Dorothy May' of Wisbech in the home land, whose drowning seven years later, as the Mayflozver swung at anchor in the harbor of Cape Cod, was to sadden Bradford's coming to the New World. His young wife was a granddaughter of John May, who had died as Bishop of Carlisle in 1598, and her elder sister had been for four years settled at Amsterdam as the wife of Jean de I'Ecluse, an elder in the Separatist church of which Ainsworth was the head. Certainly Bradford must have been prospered, in some small way at least, as he grew more acquainted with his new home and its business methods, for in April, 1619, he