048. ANABAPTISTS IN ENGLAND

ANABAPTISTS IN ENGLAND But now we find that the obscure sect of Anabaptists which was ruthlessly suppressed in Switzerland, and afterward was persecuted in the Netherlands, had made its way to the east of England, and had begun to exercise a leavening influence upon the British nation. In 1540 they refused to act as magistrates, because the magistrate had to enforce laws against dissenters. In 1550 Joan Boucher, of Kent, one of these Anabaptists, was burned at the stake; and in 1575 another of them, Terwoort by name, a Fleming by birth, suffered the same fate, leaving this testimony: "They who have the one true gospel doctrine and faith will persecute no one, but will themselves be persecuted." As early as 1560, indeed, John Knox quotes an English Anabaptist as claiming entire freedom of conscience, and threatens him with prosecution. It is probable that Robert Browne, the first advocate of Congregational doctrine, got originally from the Anabaptists of Norwich those Separatist ideas whose propagation resulted ultimately in the exodus of the Pilgrim Fathers first to Holland, and then to New England. It is certain that he was by no means the first to advocate in Britain the doctrine of soul-liberty,—this honor belongs to the Anabaptists.

Robert Browne’s Confession bears the date of 1582. The Confession of John Smyth, an indubitable Baptist, in 1611, declares the absolute separation of Church and State to be the law of Christ. And since this Confession is so important a part of the history of Church and State, I quote these significant words of it: The magistrate, by virtue of his office, is not to meddle with religion or matters of conscience, nor to compel men to this or that form of religion ; but to leave the Christian religion to the free conscience of any one, and to meddle only with political matters. Christ alone is the king and law-giver of the Church and the conscience.

It has sometimes been said that Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, printed in 1516, was the first public advocacy of religious liberty. "It should be lawful," he says, "for every man to favor and follow what religion he would, and that he might do the best he could to bring others to his opinion, so that he did it peaceably, gently, quietly, and soberly, without hasty and contentious rebuking and inveighing against others." But we must remember that all this was in Utopia, the land of Nowhere. It was not the profession of a creed, nor did Sir Thomas More’s practice answer to it. When he was Lord Chancellor, he himself persecuted and defended persecution. Our Baptist claim must still stand, that the people whom we represent made the first serious and combined effort in human history to establish entire freedom of conscience. But ah! the long struggle that was required to make that principle operative. The Church of England did not accept even the idea of toleration until 1688, seventy-seven years after John Smyth’s Confession. And what were the chances, when that Confession was published in 1611, that its contention would be granted, may be sufficiently known from the reply of King James I. to the Presbyterians:

"I will make them conform, or I will harry them out of England." Well did the contemporary Duke of Sully call King James "the wisest fool in Christendom."

How evident it is that the Renaissance, the new birth of the human intellect, and the Reformation, the new birth of the human conscience, needed to be followed by the Revolution, the new birth of the human will! Political centralization confronted the liberty of thought. Absolute monarchy and free inquiry had triumphed at the same time in Europe. The Reformation had broken down the spiritual tyranny of the papacy. The Revolution under Cromwell was needed to break down the tyranny of the civil power. The French Revolution was only the later phase on the Continent of the same general conflict, and our own Revolution in 1776 may be regarded as its sequel also. Guizot has well said that in the English and the French Revolutions the principle of absolute authority was swept away. England was snatched from the side of absolutism to be the most powerful support of civil and religious liberty in Europe. Liberty triumphed in France also, but there were no institutions there to perpetuate it, and the populace became as great a tyrant as the king. Only in our own day is the French nation gradually shaping a system by which liberty can be made permanent. In neither the English nor the French Revolutions, although they established constitutional government, was the Church sundered from the State and made entirely free from its control. The system which gives both State and Church their rights had to be worked out in a land without precedents, and that land is America. As divine Providence had frustrated all the efforts of Spain to gain a foothold in the New World north of the gulf of Mexico, so that same Providence delayed the exodus from England, and kept Englishmen in their native land until that land had been purified by the Reformation. Even then, a hundred and twenty-eight years after the first voyage of Columbus, it was not the common run of Englishmen that were permitted to go, but only those few select spirits in whom suffering for their faith had developed a stalwart manhood. Queen Mary had earned her title of "Bloody" by persecuting to their death more than three hundred of her subjects, and by driving more than eight hundred of them to the Continent. The burning of Archbishop Cranmer, however, was the death-blow of Roman Catholicism in England, and the only result of banishing his sympathizers was that they took refuge with their Protestant friends in Holland and Switzerland, and at length came back stout Calvinists and Presbyterians. So began the Puritan movement, which gathered force under the reigns of Elizabeth and of James, only to pour itself forth from 1620 to 1640 in one determined and heroic effort to establish Christian commonwealths in a land where ritual and prelacy were unknown. The migration to America was marvelously timed, not only as to its beginning, but also as to its end. During those twenty years, a thousand Englishmen a year expatriated themselves and took up their abode on the rocky coast of New England. Among these twenty thousand Englishmen were men of the highest character and education. Of their eighty ministers, half were graduates of Cambridge or of Oxford, and Boston was only six years old when out of its penury the colony of Massachusetts Bay established its new Cambridge on this side of the sea. Well might William Staughton say in his Election Sermon of 1688: "God sifted a whole nation that he might send choice grain into the wilderness." The Puritans and the Pilgrims came just at the time when religious conviction and love of liberty were at white heat. Never was there a migration with which the almighty dollar had less to do. So says a recent historian, and the incalculable hardships, the exalted steadfastness, the spiritual devotion of that migration are "dear to God and famous to all ages." They succeeded in their aim. They transplanted English institutions, the town-meeting, representative government, to American soil. They brought with them the habit of resistance to encroachment upon their liberties which prepared the way for our American Revolution. They brought with them the sense of nationality which prepared the way for our war in defense of the Union. And yet in twenty years the movement was all over. Continuing during just those years when the two currents of civil freedom and of religious faith were strongest in all the history of England, the tide of emigration stopped with the assembling of the Long Parliament. Then Puritan energy had enough to do at home. The tyrant Charles was to be defeated at Naseby, tried at Westminster, and beheaded at Whitehall. Cromwell and the Commonwealth were to give order, and freedom, and power to England. And for nearly a century there was no more emigrating to America. Indeed, after the first Puritan energy had spent itself and the luxurious reaction came under Charles II., England could add but little to the heroic hearts that were working out their problem of government three thousand miles away. Hands off, now! Try your experiment, New England! See whether you can build up a State where there is freedom to worship God!

Ah, we must confess again that these brave colonists were led on by a higher wisdom and to nobler ends than they themselves were conscious of! Freedom to worship God? Yes, they sought a place to worship God themselves, but they had not the slightest notion of giving the same right to other men who desired to worship God in a way different from theirs. They not only had no design of establishing religious liberty, but they would have abhorred the very thought of it. Why, then, had they left their homes in England? Simply because the State religion there did not suit them, and because they wished to establish a new State religion. It was a New England that they sought on this side of the Atlantic. There were, indeed, important differences between the Puritans and the Pilgrims, between the colony of Massachusetts Bay and the colony of Plymouth. The Puritans never renounced their connection with the Episcopal Church as established by law. Their aim was simply reform within the church, reform which should do away with popish vestments and ceremonial, but which should leave the church after Calvin’s fashion, still commanding the civil powers. No ideas of universal suffrage were ever harbored in their minds. They intended that only good men should rule, and theocracy was their ideal of government. They talked of toleration in minor matters; but the toleration of deadly error they regarded with abhorrence,—it was impiety and treason to both God and the State. Whatever menaced theocratic government was deadly error. And so they not only hanged witches, but they banished the Quakers, together with Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams.