The Beginners of a Nation Part 16

Significant movements are usually cradled in rustic mangers, to which no learned magi think it worth their while to journey. The beginning of Separatism was probably in the little conventicles held by devout Puritans who, in the words of one of their own writers, "met together to sing a psalm or to talk of G.o.d's word." But Browne, so far as we know, was one of the earliest to organize independent churches, with officers named and cla.s.sified after those of the petty hierarchies of the early Christian congregations, or rather according to such deductions regarding them as he was able to make from the Epistles of Paul. Separatism, though it owed something to Browne's activity, was not founded by him. Browne's labors began about 1581, and his fiery career as a Brownist had lasted only four or five years when he began to vacillate. A great part of this time was spent in exile, much of it in prison, and very little of it about London. But before 1587 London seems to have been the center of the Separatists, from which they had "spa.r.s.ed their companies into severall partes of the Realme."

[Sidenote: H. M. Dexter's Congregationalism, 255-257.]

It seems that their rise in London came from the devout meetings of those who had begun to repudiate the Church of England as antichristian. Without any officers or organization apparently, these people, when we first get sight of them, were wont to a.s.semble in the summer time in the fields about London, sitting down upon a bank while the Bible was expounded now by one and now by another of the company.

In the winter it was their custom to spend the whole Sunday together from five o'clock in the morning, eating dinner in company and paying for it by a collection. They responded in prayer only by spontaneous groans or sobs, much after the fas.h.i.+on of the early Quakers, Methodists, and other enthusiasts of a later time. If one of their members returned to a parish a.s.sembly, they p.r.o.nounced him an apostate and solemnly delivered him over to Satan until he should repent.

V.

[Sidenote: Barrowism.]

When they began to organize themselves formally into a church the London Separatists in their turn resorted to the apostolic epistles.

These had already been treated like the magician's bottle that is made to yield white wine or red at pleasure. From them whatsoever form of discipline was desired by Anglican, Presbyterian, or Brownist had been derived, and now a still different discipline was deduced, a mean betwixt Presbyterian and Brownist theories. This is known now as Barrowism. It was the form of church government brought by the Pilgrims to Plymouth, and substantially that which prevailed in New England throughout the seventeenth century.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The cradle of the Pilgrims.]

[Sidenote: Separatists in Amsterdam, 1593.]

The London Separatists suffered miserably from persecution. Many of them languished and died in prison. Barrow and Greenwood, their leaders, were hanged at Tyburn. A part of them migrated to Amsterdam, while the rest maintained a furtive church in London. Those in Amsterdam, having no lingering abuses of the English church to reform, set every man's conscience to watch his neighbor's conduct. Having seceded from the communion of the Church of England on account of scandals, they were scandalized with the least variation from their rigorous standard by any of their own church members, and they were soon torn asunder with dissensions as the result of this vicariousness of conscience. The innocent vanity of the pastor's wife who could never forego a "toppish" hat and high-heeled shoes was the princ.i.p.al stumbling-block.

Though Separatism had been almost extirpated from England by the close of Elizabeth's reign, there remained even yet one vigorous society in the north which was destined to exert a remarkable influence on the course of history.

VI.

[Sidenote: The cradle of the Pilgrims.]

On the southern margin of Yorks.h.i.+re the traveler alights to-day at the station of Bawtry. It is an uninteresting village, with a rustic inn.

More than a mile to the southward, in Nottinghams.h.i.+re, lies the pleasant but commonplace village of Scrooby. About a mile to the north of Bawtry is Austerfield, a hamlet of brick cottages crowded together along the road. It has a picturesque little church built in the middle ages, the walls of which are three feet thick. This church will seat something more than a hundred people nowadays by the aid of a rather modern extension. In the seventeenth century it was smaller, and there was no ceiling. Then one could see the rafters of the roof while shuddering with cold in the grottolike interior. The country around is level and unpicturesque.

[Sidenote: Hunter's Founders of New Plymouth, 24, 25.]

But one is here in the cradle of great religious movements. In Scrooby and in Austerfield were born the Pilgrims who made the first successful settlement in New England. A little to the east lies Gainsborough, from which migrated to Holland in 1606 the saintly Separatist John Smyth, who gave form to a great Baptist movement of modern times. A few miles to the northeast of Bawtry, in Lincolns.h.i.+re, lies Epworth, the nest from which the Wesleys issued more than a hundred years later to spread Methodism over the world. Religious zeal seems to have characterized the people of this region even before the Reformation, for the country round about Scrooby was occupied at that time by an unusual number of religious houses.

The little Austerfield church and the old church at Scrooby are the only picturesque or romantic elements of the environment, and on these churches the Pilgrims turned their backs as though they had been temples of Baal. In the single street of Austerfield the traveler meets the cottagers of to-day, and essays to talk with them. They are heavy and somewhat stolid, like most other rustic people in the north country, and an accent to which their ears are not accustomed amuses and puzzles them. No tradition of the Pilgrims lingers among them.

They have never heard that anybody ever went out of Austerfield to do anything historical. They listen with a bovine surprise if you speak to them of this exodus, and they refer you to the old clerk of the parish, who will know about it. The venerable clerk is a striking figure, not unlike that parish clerk painted by Gainsborough. This oracle of the hamlet knows that Americans come here as on a pilgrimage, and he tells you that one of them, a descendant of Governor Bradford, offered a considerable sum for the disused stone font at which Bradford the Pilgrim was baptized. But the traveler turns away at length from the rustic folk of Austerfield and the beer-drinkers over their mugs in the inn at Bawtry, and the villagers at Scrooby, benumbed by that sense of utter common-placeness which is left on the mind of a stranger by such an agricultural community. The Pilgrims, then, concerning whom poems have been written, and in whose honor orations without number have been made, were just common country folk like these, trudging through wheat fields and along the muddy clay highways of the days of Elizabeth and James. They were just such men as these and they were not. They were such as these would be if they were vivified by enthusiasm. We may laugh at superfluous scruples in rustic minds, but none will smile at brave and stubborn loyalty to an idea when it produces such steadfast courage as that of the Pilgrims.

[Sidenote: Magnalia, Book II, chap. i, p. 2.]

And yet, when the traveler has resumed his journey, and recalls Scrooby and Bawtry and Austerfield, the stolid men and gossiping women, the narrow pursuits of the plowman and the reaper, and remembers the flat, naked, and depressing landscape, he is beset by the old skepticism about the coming of anything good out of Nazareth.

Nor is he helped by remembering that at the time of Bradford's christening at the old stone font the inhabitants of Austerfield are said to have been "a most ignorant and licentious people," and that earlier in that same century John Leland speaks of "the meane townlet of Scrooby."

VIII.

[Sidenote: Elder Brewster.]

But Leland's description of the village suggests the influence that caused Scrooby and the wheat fields thereabout to send forth, in the beginning of the seventeenth century and of a new reign, men capable of courage and fort.i.tude sufficient to make them memorable, and to make these three townlets places of pilgrimage in following centuries.

[Sidenote: Itinerary, i, 36, in Hunter's Founders, p. 20.]

[Sidenote: Bradford, 410.]

[Sidenote: _Supra_, Book I, chap. ii, iii.]

[Sidenote: Plimoth Plantations, 411.]

"In the meane townlet of Scrooby, I marked two things"--it is Leland who writes--"the parish church not big but very well builded; the second was a great manor-place, standing within a moat, and longing to the Archbishop of York." This large old manor-place he describes with its outer and inner court. In this manor-place, about half a century after Leland saw it, there lived William Brewster. He was a man of education, who had been for a short time in residence at Cambridge; he had served as one of the under secretaries of state for years; had been trusted beyond all others by Secretary Davison, his patron; and, when Elizabeth disgraced Davison, in order to avoid responsibility for the death of Mary of Scotland, Brewster had been the one friend who clung to the fallen secretary as long as there was opportunity to do him service. Making no further effort to establish himself at court, Brewster went after a while "to live in the country in good esteeme amongst his freinds and the good gentle-men of those parts, espetially the G.o.dly and religious." His abode after his retirement was the old manor-place now destroyed, but then the most conspicuous building at Scrooby. It belonged in his time to Sir Samuel Sandys, the elder brother of Sir Edwin Sandys, whose work as the master spirit in the later history of the Virginia Company has already been recounted. At Scrooby Brewster succeeded his father in the office of "Post," an office that obliged him to receive and deliver letters for a wide district of country, to keep relays of horses for travelers by post on the great route to the north, and to furnish inn accommodations. In the master of the post at Scrooby we have the first of those influences that lifted a group of people from this rustic region into historic importance. He had been acquainted with the great world, and had borne a responsible if not a conspicuous part in delicate diplomatic affairs in the Netherlands. At court, as at Scrooby, he was a Puritan, and now in his retirement his energies were devoted to the promotion of religion. He secured earnest ministers for many of the neighboring parishes. But that which he builded the authorities tore down. Whitgift was archbishop, and the High Commission Courts were proceeding against Puritans with the energy of the Spanish Inquisition. "The G.o.dly preachers" about him were silenced. The people who followed them were proscribed, and all the pains and expense of Brewster and his Puritan friends in establis.h.i.+ng religion as they understood it were likely to be rendered futile by the governors of the church. "He and many more of those times begane to looke further into things," says Bradford. Persecution begot Separatism. The theory was the result of conditions, as new theories are wont to be.

IX.

[Sidenote: The Scrooby Church.]

[Sidenote: Magnalia, Book ii, c. i, 2.]

Here, as elsewhere, the secession appears to have begun with meetings for devotion. By this supposition we may reconcile two dates which have been supposed to conflict, conjecturing that in 1602, when Brewster had lived about fifteen years in the old manor-house, his neighbors, who did not care to attend the ministry of ignorant and licentious priests, began to spend whole Sundays together, now in one place and now in another, but most frequently in the old manor-house builded within a moat, and reached by ascending a flight of stone steps. Here, Brewster's hospitality was dispensed to them freely. They may or may not have been members of the Separatist church at Gainsborough, as some have supposed. It was not until 1606 that these people formed the fully organized Separatist church of Scrooby. It was organized after the Barrowist pattern that had originated in London--it was after a divine pattern, according to their belief.

Brewster, the nucleus of the church, became their ruling elder.

[Sidenote: The ruling elder.]

[Sidenote: Bradford's Plimoth Plantation, 408-414.]

[Sidenote: Hunter's Founders, _pa.s.sim_.]

[Sidenote: Winsor's Elder William Brewster, a pamphlet.]

[Sidenote: F. B. Dexter in Narrative and Crit. Hist., iii, 257-282.]

It was in these all-day meetings at the old manor-house that the Separatist rustics of Scrooby were molded for suffering and endeavor.

The humble, modest, and conscientious Brewster was the king-post of the new church--the first and longest enduring of the influences that shaped the character of these people in England, Holland, and America.

Brewster could probably have returned to the court under other auspices after Davison's fall, but as master of the post at Scrooby, then as a teacher and as founder of a printing office of prohibited English books in Leyden, and finally as a settler in the wilderness, inuring his soft hands to rude toils, until he died in his cabin an octogenarian, he led a life strangely different from that of a courtier. But no career possible to him at court could have been so useful or so long remembered.

X.

[Sidenote: John Robinson.]

[Sidenote: Note 3.]

But Brewster was not the master spirit. About the time the Separatists of Scrooby completed their church organization, in 1606, there came to it John Robinson. He had been a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and a beneficed clergyman of Puritan views. He, too, had been slowly propelled to Separatist opinion by persecution. For fourteen years before the final migration he led the Pilgrims at Scrooby and Leyden.

Wise man of affairs, he directed his people even in their hard struggle for bread in a foreign country. He was one of the few men, in that age of debate about husks and sh.e.l.ls, who penetrated to those teachings concerning character and conduct which are the vital and imperishable elements of religion. Even when a.s.sailed most roughly in debate he was magnanimous and forbearing. He avoided the bigotry and bitterness of the early Brownists, and outgrew as years went on the narrowness of rigid Separatism. He lived on the best terms with the Dutch and French churches. He opposed rather the substantial abuses than the ceremonies of the Church of England, and as life advanced he came to extend a hearty fellows.h.i.+p and communion to good men in that church. Had it been his lot to remain in the national church and rise, as did his opponent, Joseph Hall, to the pedestal of a bishopric or to other dignity, he would have been one of the most ill.u.s.trious divines of the age--wanting something of the statesmanly breadth of Hooker, but quite outspreading and overtopping the Whitgifts, Bancrofts, and perhaps even the Halls. Robert Baillie, who could say many hard things against Separatists, is forced to confess that "Robinson was a man of excellent parts, and the most learned, polished, and modest spirit that ever separated from the Church of England"; and long after his death the Dutch theologian Hornbeeck recalls again and again his integrity, learning, and modesty.

Shall we say that when subjected to this great man's influence the rustics of Scrooby and Bawtry and Austerfield were clowns no longer?

Perhaps we shall be truer to the probabilities of human nature if we conclude that Robinson was able to mold a few of the best of them to great uses, and that these became the significant digits which gave value to the ciphers.

ELUCIDATIONS.