Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/746

726 726 INDEPENDENTS winter on the North American coast, and there laid the foundations of the New England States, with all they were to be and to create. Jacob had been all through his exile anxiously looking towards England. In 1609 he had addressed to King James &quot; An Humble Supplication for Toleration,&quot; 1 in which he begs that &quot; each particular church may be allowed to partake in the benefit of the said toleration, may have, enjoy, and put in execution and practice this her right and privilege,&quot; viz., &quot;to elect, ordain, and deprive her own ministers, and to exercise all the other points of lawful ecclesiastical jurisdiction under Christ.&quot; This may be regarded as a clear and explicit statement of the early Independent position, its claim for toleration based on its conception of the Christian church, its plea for liberty of worship based on its principle of individualism and the rights of the individual conscience. With what was here asked it would at any time in the 17th century have been satisfied, but the Anglican policy of Elizabeth, and James, and Charles I. proceeded on this principle, that to allow diversity was to destroy unity, to permit the growth of elements that would prove fatal to the church, involve the denial of the royal authority and the break-up of the state. Yet the very severity of the Anglican policy strengthened Independency. It helped to identify the struggle for liberty of conscience with the struggle for English liberty. Up to 1640 little formal progress was made. Churches did not multiply ; Laud was too active, and the Star Chamber too vigorous. But the real progress was immense. Statesmen were persuaded that a system which required so harsh a policy could not be right. Religious men who could not conform went to live in lands and under laws where obedience to conscience was possible. There was a double emigration, to the Continent and to New England. In Arnheim, Thomas Goodwin and Philip Nye ministered to a small congregation ; in Rotterdam, Hugh Peters and William Ames, the most skilled, scholastic, and disputatious theologian of the early Independents, who came from, his professorial chair at Franeker in 1682 to die at Rotterdam a year later. Here, too, when Ames was dead and Peters gone to New England, came Jeremiah Burroughs, William Bridge, and Sidrach Simpson, all of them names that were to be conspicuous and influential in days to come. But the emigration to New England was much the more important alike as regards its influence on Independency and English history. It has been calculated that in the period 1620-1640 upwards of 22,000 Puritan emigrants (the figures have been placed as high as 50,000) sailed from English and Dutch ports. The reasons that compelled their departure determined their quality ; they were all men of rigorous consciences, who loved their fatherland much, but religion more, not driven from home by mercan tile necessities or ambitions, but solely by their determina tion to be free to worship God. They were, as Milton 1 An HumJjle Supplication for Tokration, and Liberty to enjoy and observe the Ordinances of Jesus Christ in the Administration of his Churches in lieu of Human Constitutions (1609 ; no place or printer). In the following year Jacob published a work on The Divine Beginning ami Institution of Christ s true Visible or Ministerial Church ; and in 1612 a sequel to the above, A Declaration and Plainer Opening of certain Points (published at Middleburg). This latter is remarkable as coLt^ining the earliest use, in the ecclesiastical sense, of the word &quot;Independent.&quot; &quot;Where each ordinary congregation giveth their free consent in their own government, there certainly each is an entire and indepe ideut body-politic, and endued with power immediately under and f om Christ, as every proper Church is, and ought to be,&quot; p. 13. It is interesting to note that the above Supplication is the earliest plea for toleration in the English language, but a few years later appeared a much more thoroughgoing work, Religious Peace, or a Plea for Liberty of Conscience (1614). This was by Leonard Busher, a Baptist, and to this body belongs the honour of being the first to de velop the liberty implied in Independency. See Busher s and other tracts on &quot;Liberty of Conscience&quot; in publications of Hauaerd Knoll ys Society. said, 2 &quot; faithful and freeborn Englishmen and good Christians constrained to forsake their dearest home, their friends, and kindred, whom nothing but the wide ocean and the savage deserts of America could hide and shelter from the fury of the bishops.&quot; Men so moved so to act could hardly be commonplace ; and so among them we find characters strong and marked, with equal ability to rule and to obey, as Bradford and Brewster, Winslow and Standish, Winthrop and Dr Samuel Fuller, and men so inflexible in their love of liberty and faith in man as Roger Williams and young Harry Vane. And as were the people so were their ministers. Of these it is enough to name John Cotton, able both as a divine and as a statesman, potent in England by his expositions and apologies of the &quot; New England way,&quot; potent in America for his organizing and administrative power ; Thomas Hooker, also famed as an exponent and apologist of the &quot; New England way,&quot; whose book was commended to theologians at home by Thomas Goodwin, and whose early death was lamented by Cotton in lines which told how &quot; Zion s beauty did most clearly shine In Hooker s rule and doctrine, Loth divine ;&quot; John Eliot, famous as the &quot; apostle of the Indians,&quot; first of Protestant missionaries to the heathen ; Richard Mather, whose influence and work were carried on by his distin guished son, and his still more distinguished grandson, Cotton Mather. The motives and circumstances of the emigrants determined their polity; they went out as churches and settled as church states. They were all Puritans, but not all Independents indeed, at first only the men from Leyden were, and they were throughout more enlightened and tolerant than the men of the other settlements. Winthrop s company were nonconformists but not separat ists, esteemed it &quot; an honour to call the Church of England, from whence we rise, our dear mother,&quot; emigrated that they might be divided from her corruptions, not from herself. 3 But the new conditions, backed by the special influence of the Plymouth settlement, were too much for them ; they became Independent, first, perhaps, of necessity, then of conviction and choice. Only so could they guard their ecclesiastical and their civil liberties. These, indeed, were at first formally as well as really identical. In 1631 the general court of the Massachusetts colony resolved, &quot; that no man shall be admitted to the freedom of this body politic, but such as are members of some of the churches within the limits of the same.&quot; 4 Church and state, citizenship in the one and membership in the other, thus, became identical, and the foundation was laid for those troubles and consequent severities that vexed and shamed the early history of Independency in New England, natural enough when all their circumstances are fairly considered, indefensible when we regard their idea of the relation of the civil power to the conscience and religion, but explicable when their church idea alone is regarded. And this latter was their own standpoint ; their acts were more acts of church discipline than those of civil penalty. Meanwhile, the growth of the New England States and their Independency in religion exercised extraordinary influence in England. It encouraged the Puritans, opened to them a refuge from the Anglican tyranny, showed them an English state where the bishop had ceased to trouble and where their own principles were active and realized. Laud thoroughly comprehended the situation, saw that Independency in the colonies must be struck down if Anglican policy was to succeed at home. They were o. 2 &quot; Of Reformation in England,&quot; bk. ii., Works, p. 14 (ed. 1834). 3 &quot; The Humble Request of His Majesties Loyall Subjects, the Gover- nour and the Company late gone for New England,&quot; 1630 ; referred to in Young s Chron. Massach., pp. 295-299 (1846). 4 Dexter, Congregationalism of the Last Three Hundred Years, p. 420.