have seen, give no quarter whatever.

Like Milton, he was a fanatic for liberty, and if he could have heard the great Puritan poet declaiming his famous words, he would have hailed them with vociferous applause: "And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?"

In the course of what has been said concerning the American Puritans, no attempt has been made to minimise, still less to excuse or justify, the spirit of intolerance which broke out in New England, and especially in Massachusetts, in connection with the persecution of Baptists and Quakers. This it is impossible to defend. But it is possible only too easily to fall into the error of imputing to the people generally the criminality of that which lies almost exclusively at the door of their leaders and rulers. "One might almost say that it was not the people of Massachusetts after all that shed the blood of the Quakers; it was Endicott and the clergy." Nor must it be forgotten, as Mr. Bancroft reminds us, that the age in which these cruelties were practised was an age of intolerance. For four centuries Europe had maintained that heresy should be punished by death. In Spain more persons have been burnt for their opinions than Massachusetts then contained inhabitants. Under Charles V., in the Netherlands alone, the number of those who were hanged, beheaded, buried alive, or burnt for religious opinion, was fifty thousand, says

1 Fiske's Beginnings of New England, p. 187.

Father Paul; the whole carnage amounted, says Grotius, to not less than one hundred thousand. America was guilty of the death of four individuals; and they fell victims rather to the contest of will than to the opinion that Quakerism was a capital crime." 1

NOTE

DOES CALVINISM PROMOTE INTOLERANCE?

It has been a charge not infrequently brought against the Puritan Separatists, that they were cruel and intolerant because they were Calvinists in religion and Republicans in politics. Reasoning on à priori grounds, it is not, perhaps, unnatural to conclude that Calvinism should make men intolerant, for it will be admitted by friends and foes alike that Calvinism is a stern and uncompromising creed. Did not Calvin himself defend the lawfulness of persecution; and was not his burning of the heretic Servetus an act applauded by all sections of Protestants? Nevertheless, the charge is one which history most persistently refuses to sustain. To all à priori conclusions it opposes the stern logic of facts, a body of facts so hostile and so conclusive that no theory can stand against it. It is not, of course, to be denied that many of the Puritans were intolerant. This has been admitted already; but the question to be determined is, was it their Calvinism that made them so? This, we hold, history disproves. It is disproved, in the first place, by the history of the Puritans in Holland. No one can impugn their zeal as Calvinists, nor call in question their love of liberty. Much as they suffered from persecution, they were never goaded into retaliation, even when they had the power, and their annals are (with the exception of those of the Quakers or Friends) most free from the stain of persecution. But the best answer to the charge that Calvinism tends to promote intolerance is the history of Puritanism itself. It will not be denied that the Puritans were ever found in the vanguard of the struggle for religious and civil freedom, and the Puritans were (at least up

1 Bancroft's History, vol. i. p. 341. See Lecky's History of Rationalism in Europe, "History of Persecution," vol. ii. pp. 32, 33.

to the middle of the seventeenth century) all Calvinists.1 The Reformers, and those who, like Hooper, resisted the imposition of the vestments, were Calvinists. The Separatists were Calvinists; Browne, Barrowe, Greenwood, Penry, Robinson, Johnson, Jacob were all Calvinists. The Pilgrim Fathers, not less than the first colonists of Massachusetts, were all Calvinists. Roger Williams was a Calvinist of the most thoroughgoing type.2 "In Boston," says Mr. Bancroft (vol. ii. p. 692, revised edition, p. 184), "with Henry Vane and Anne Hutchinson, ‘Calvinism ran to seed'; and the seed was 'incorruptible.' . . . The exiled doctrine, which established conscience as the highest court of appeal, fled to the island gift of Miantonomoh ; and the records of Rhode Island, like the beautiful career of Henry Vane, are the commentary on the true import of the creed."

"It is an interesting fact that the doctrines which in England are. called Calvinistic have been always connected with a democratic spirit, while those of Arminianism have found most favour among the aristocratic or protective party. In the republics of Switzerland, of North America, and of Holland, Calvinism was always the popular creed. On the other hand, in those evil days, immediately after the death of Elizabeth, when our liberties were in imminent peril; when the Church of England, aided by the Crown, attempted to subjugate the consciences of men; and when the monstrous claim of the divine right of Episcopacy was first put forward ;-then it was that Arminianism became the cherished doctrine of the ablest and most ambitious of the ecclesiastical party. And in the sharp retribution which followed, the Puritans and Independents, by whom the punishment was inflicted, were, with scarcely an exception, Calvinists; nor should we forget that the first open movement against Charles proceeded from Scotland, where the principles of Calvin had long been in the ascendant."-Buckle's History of Civilisation in England, vol. ii. pp. 339, 340.

"Nothing is more remarkable in the history of the sixteenth century than the effect of Calvinism in levelling distinctions of rank, and in steeling and ennobling the character of common men. In Scotland, in the Low Countries, and in France there

1 The only exception we can think of were the Baptists of Amsterdam, whose "Confession or Declaration of Faith," promulgated in 1611 (see ante, p. 370), is as anti-Calvinistic as it is advanced in its doctrine of religious liberty.

2 "His theology was severely Calvinistic, typical of his generation, not in advance of it."-Roger Williams, by Oscar S. Straus, p. 232.

was the same phenomenon.

In Scotland the Kirk was the creation of the preachers and the people, and peasants and workmen dared to stand in the field against belted knights and barons, who had trampled on their fathers for centuries. The artisans of the Low Countries had for twenty years defied the whole power of Spain. The Huguenots were not a fifth part of the French nation, yet defeat could never dishearten them. Again and again they forced Crown and nobles to make terms with them. It was the same in England." -Froude's English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century, p. 127.

See also what Mr. Bancroft says on Calvinism and predestination, History of the United States, vol. ii. pp. 689-692, revised edition, pp. 182-185.

Let those who would realise the debt of freedom which the world owes to Calvin and Puritanism read an article by Principal Fairbairn in the Contemporary Review for November 1888, on "The Genesis of the Puritan Ideal": "The influence of Geneva had penetrated Germany, and, even where provoking resistance, had quickened the whole body Protestant; had converted almost the half of France, and enlisted her noblest sons in the army of reform, with the royal Condé and the gallant Coligny at their head; had gone like iron drops into the blood of the Netherland Churches, and made the heroes that broke the mighty power of Spain; it had reached England, created the Puritan spirit, the faith that was to determine her political constitution, condition her religious development, and create her most fruitful and characteristic colony; had sent Knox into Scotland with a theology that was to nurse a brawny race, civilise a people, and with a polity that was to effect the completest and happiest revolution any nation ever experienced. Without Calvin and Geneva these things would not have been; and without these things Europe and America would not have been as they are to-day-not so good, so well-ordered, or so free."

CALVINISM AND PURITANISM NOT IDENTICAL

It would be a great mistake, however, to infer from what has just been said that Calvinism and Puritanism are indissolubly bound up together. As we have previously had occasion to maintain, Puritanism was not a creed, but a spirit, an ethical force or power making for righteousness, rather than a reasoned system of belief. It allied itself with Calvinism in order that it might thereby more effectually promote the ends and righteousness of the kingdom of God; but when its ethical significance and force could be

maintained unimpaired by its centre of gravity being shifted from the side of Calvinism to that of Arminianism or to that of a greatly modified Calvinism, the history of religion in our nineteenth century shows that it has exhibited the utmost readiness to enter into this new alliance. It is a favourite device with those who wish to discredit Puritanism to represent it as being identical with the most rigid and extreme form of Calvinism. But the necessity of any such identity, if it ever existed (and we cannot allow that the existence of the identity ever demonstrated its necessity), has long since passed away. The subsequent developments of Puritanism, the changes it underwent after the Commonwealth and has undergone since, show conclusively that Calvinism is no necessary integral part of it. "It cannot be too often repeated that those who use the word Puritanism merely to define a supposed temporary mood of English sanctimoniousness, or even to define the domination of Calvinist theology for a time in the British Islands, know nothing whatever of what Puritanism was historically and included intellectually. Puritanism was a revolt from authority, clothing itself at first in whatever doctrines of a fervid theology or ideas of popular Church discipline were at hand to suit, but passing on, by the usual law of development, into a multiplicity of forms and phrases, with abundant inclusion of the most abstruse scientific inquisitiveness, and the coolest philosophical freethinking." ."-Masson's Milton and his Time, vol. vi. p. 393.

But the supposed monopoly in the Calvinistic creed and system which Puritanism is represented as possessing, is refuted by the fact, which no one who has any acquaintance with the ecclesiastical history of England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries will venture to deny, that up to the time of James 1. Calvinism was no more peculiar to Puritanism than it was to Prelacy. Nearly all the divines of the Elizabethan age were Calvinists. "It is a question which has been keenly discussed between Calvinists and Arminians, which side could claim Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer, and Hooper. If the question were to be determined by the general tone and spirit of their writings, there can be no doubt that they were Calvinists."-See entire note, p. 33, Hunt's Religious Thought in England, vol. i. "It is evident to every unbiassed person," says Mr. Hunt (vol. i. p. 131, note), "that all the Reformers were Calvinists in doctrine. The denial of this is the most daring thing in all ecclesiastical history." Both Parker and Grindal were Calvinists; while Archbishop Whitgift, the bitter enemy and relentless persecutor of the Puritans, was an ardent and thoroughgoing Calvinist,