The Beginnings of New England eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 276 pages of information about The Beginnings of New England.

The Beginnings of New England eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 276 pages of information about The Beginnings of New England.

It was immediately preceded and followed by the deaths of the two foremost men in that commonwealth.  John Winthrop died in 1649 and John Cotton in 1652.  Both were men of extraordinary power.  Of Winthrop it is enough to say that under his skilful guidance Massachusetts had been able to pursue the daring policy which had characterized the first twenty years of her history, and which in weaker hands would almost surely have ended in disaster.  Of Cotton it may be said that he was the most eminent among a group of clergymen who for learning and dialectical skill have seldom been surpassed.  Neither Winthrop nor Cotton approved of toleration upon principle.  Cotton, in his elaborate controversy with Roger Williams, frankly asserted that persecution is not wrong in itself; it is wicked for falsehood to persecute truth, but it is the sacred duty of truth to persecute falsehood.  This was the theologian’s view.  Winthrop’s was that of a man of affairs.  They had come to New England, he said, in order to make a society after their own model; all who agreed with them might come and join that society; those who disagreed with them might go elsewhere; there was room enough on the American continent.  But while neither Winthrop nor Cotton understood the principle of religious liberty, at the same time neither of them had the temperament which persecutes.  Both were men of genial disposition, sound common-sense, and exquisite tact.  Under their guidance no such tragedy would have been possible as that which was about to leave its ineffaceable stain upon the annals of Massachusetts.

It was most unfortunate that at this moment the places of these two men should have been taken by two as arrant fanatics as ever drew breath.  For thirteen out of the fifteen years following Winthrop’s death, the governor of Massachusetts was John Endicott, a sturdy pioneer, whose services to the colony had been great.  He was honest and conscientious, but passionate, domineering, and very deficient in tact.  At the same time Cotton’s successor in position and influence was John Norton, a man of pungent wit, unyielding temper, and melancholy mood.  He was possessed by a morbid fear of Satan, whose hirelings he thought were walking up and down over the earth in the visible semblance of heretics and schismatics.  Under such leaders the bigotry latent in the Puritan commonwealth might easily break out in acts of deadly persecution. [Sidenote:  Endicott and Norton take the lead] [Sidenote:  The Quakers and their views]

The occasion was not long in coming.  Already the preaching of George Fox had borne fruit, and the noble sect of Quakers was an object of scorn and loathing to all such as had not gone so far as they toward learning the true lesson of Protestantism.  Of all Protestant sects the Quakers went furthest in stripping off from Christianity its non-essential features of doctrine and ceremonial.  Their ideal was not a theocracy but a separation between church and state.  They

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The Beginnings of New England from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.