Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v1.djvu/61

Rh year, when the main body of Puritans came over with Winthrop, they fell in with the Salem example and set up the new churches on the Congregational principle, as seeming to provide the most suitable form for the development of a theocracy. The inconsistency of an arrangement by which an aristocratic leadership accepted a democratic church organization was obscured for the moment by the unanimity of ministers and congregation; but it was clearly perceived by the Presbyterians of the old country, and it was to prove the source of much contention in later years.

Out of this fundamental inconsistency sprang a large part of the literature with which we are concerned in the present chapter. The ministers, as the spokesmen of New England, soon found themselves embroiled in controversy. During the first ten years or more the controversy lay between New England and old England Puritans, and the burden upon the former was to prove to the satisfaction of English Presbyterianism that the “Congregational way” was not democratic Separatism, with its low stigma of Brownism, but aristocratic Presbyterianism. During the later years, when Presbyterianism had been definitely overthrown in England, the controversy lay between the theocratic hierarchy—which after the year 1637 was the dominant power—and the dissenting democracy; the former seeking to Presbyterianize the church away from its primitive Congregationalism, the latter seeking to maintain the purity of the Plymouth ideal. In dealing with the several ministers, therefore, we shall divide them into the emigrant generation and the native generations, and set the aristocratic Presbyterians over against the democratic Congregationalists, endeavouring to understand the chief points at issue between them.

The most authoritative representative of the ideals of the middle period of Puritanism—its aristocratic conservatism in the guise of theocratic polities—was the celebrated John Cotton, first Teacher to the church at Boston. Of good family and sound university training, he was both a notable theologian and a courteous gentleman. “Twelve hours in a day he commonly studied, and would call that a scholar's day,” his grandson reported of him; and his learned eloquence was universally admired by a generation devoted to solid argumentative