The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 03, No. 18, April, 1859: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 03, No. 18, April, 1859: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
Mr. Arnold, as we have said, is more sharply guarded in his statement of
the aim of the founders of the Bay Colony in this respect; and it is
all the more remarkable that he does not give them the benefit of the
recognized limitation. He defines for them a restricted object, but he
judges them by a standard before which they never measured themselves,
and then condemns them for short-comings. He tells us distinctly that
the motives of the exiles "were certainly not those assigned them by
Charles I., 'the freedom of liberty of conscience'" (p. 10); that
"they looked for a home in the New World where they might erect an
establishment in accordance with their peculiar theological views. 'They
sought a faith's pure shrine,' based on what they held to be a purer
system of worship, and a discipline more in unison with their notions
of a church. Here they proceeded to organize a state, whose civil code
followed close on the track of the Mosaic Law, and whose ecclesiastical
polity, like that of the Jews, and of all those [Christian governments?]
then existing, was identified with the civil power. They thus secured,
what was denied them in England, the right to pursue their own form of
religion without molestation, and in this the object of their exile was
attained." (p. 11.) And again, Mr. Arnold says,--"They founded a colony
for their own faith, without any idea of tolerating others." (p. 44.) All
this is admirably said. It is precisely what the exiles would wish might
be said of them in all the histories of them; for it is what they said
of themselves, in defining their own object; it was, further, what they
felt in their hearts to be their object, more intensely than they could
give it utterance. But the object is at once seen to be limited within
the fearful license of religious freedom. The Scriptural and legislative
fetters on such liberty were too repressive not to amount to an
essential qualification of it. "The Simple Cobbler of Agawam," Ward of
Ipswich, made a clean breast for himself and his contemporaries, when he
numbered among the "foure things which my heart hath naturally detested:
Tolerations of diverse Religions, or of one Religion in segregant
shapes. He that willingly assents to this, if he examines his heart by
daylight, his conscience will tell him he is either an Atheist, or
an Heretigal, or an Hypocrite, or at best a captive to some lust.
Poly-piety is the greatest impiety in the world." With such frank
avowals on the part of those who had borne so much in the attempt to
make themselves comfortable in their exile to these hard regions, that
they might here try to work out their harder problem, it is a great deal
too severe a standard for judging their acts which is set up for them in
the fancied principle of religious liberty. We wonder that Mr. Arnold
withholds from them the benefit of his and their own clear limitation of
the principle,--a limitation so severe, as, in fact, to constitute quite
another principle.
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