Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v1.djvu/63

Rh democracy equally with the Brownist tendencies of Plymouth Congregationalism, it was because they smacked too much of popular sovereignty to please him. And when he found himself confronted by signs of democratic unrest in Boston his course of action seemed to him clear. The desire for liberty he regarded as the sinful prompting of the natural man, a godless denial of the righteous authority of the divinely appointed rulers. If democracy were indeed a Christian form of government, was it not strange that divine wisdom should have overlooked so significant a fact? In all the history of the chosen people nowhere did God designate the democratic as the perfect type, but the theocratic; was He now to be set right by sinful men who courted popularity by stirring the dirt in the bottom of depraved hearts? To a scripturist the logic of his argument was convincing:

It is better that the commonwealth be fashioned to the setting forth of God's house, which is his church: than to accomodate the church frame to the civill state. Democracy, I do not conceyve that ever God did ordeyne as a fit government eyther for church or commonwealth. If the people be governors, who shall be governed? As for monarchy, and aristocracy, they are both of them clearely approoved, and directed in scripture, yet so as referreth the soveraigntie to himselfe, and setteth up Theocracy in both, as the best forme of government in the coromonwealth, as well as in the church.

Holding to such views, the duty devolving upon him was plain—to check in every way the drift towards a more democratic organization, and to prove to old-world critics that the evil reports of the growing Brownism in New England, which were spreading among the English Presbyterians, were without foundation. The first he sought to accomplish by the strengthening of the theocratic principle in practice, busying himself in a thousand practical ways to induce the people to accept the patriarchal rulership of the ministers and elders, in accordance with the “law of Moses, his Judidals”; the second he sought to accomplish by proving, under sound scriptural authority, the orthodoxy of the New England way. His chief effort in this latter field was his celebrated work, The Way of the