The Beginners of a Nation: A History of the Source and Rise of the Earliest English Settlements in America, with Special Reference to the Life and Character of the PeopleEggleston, Edward
History
The Beginners of a Nation: A History of the Source and Rise of the Earliest English Settlements in America, with Special Reference to the Life and Character of the People
Eggleston, Edward
United States -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775
But a violent opposition quickly arose. Some opposed the book as
"galling men's necks with a Jewish yoke against the liberty of
Christians," and many of the clergy of the new high-church type
resented the doctrine of a Christian Sabbath, asserting that it put
"an unequal lustre on the Sunday on set purpose to eclipse all other
holy days to the derogation of the authority of the church." There
were those who asserted that the "brethren," as they styled them, had
brought forth Bownd's book, intending by this "attack from an odd
corner" to retrieve lost ground. The manifest advantage to Puritanism
from the shifting of the ground of debate, aroused Archbishop
Whitgift. In 1599 he made the tactical mistake of ordering the book
called in, and in 1600 Chief-Justice Popham forbade the reprinting of
it. The price of the work was doubled at once, and it was everywhere
sought for, books being "more called on when called in," as Fuller
says. When it could not be had in print, it was transcribed by
enthusiastic admirers and circulated "from friend to friend" in
manuscript. As soon as Whitgift's "head was laid," a new and enlarged
edition was published.
[Sidenote: Note 12.]
[Sidenote: 1611.]
[Sidenote: Note 13.]
The theory of a Sunday-Sabbath, which from the first was not confined
to the Puritans, permeated English and American thought and life. But
from that time forward the Puritans made rigid Sabbath-keeping the
very mark and password of the faithful. From England the theory spread
northward to Scotland, where it found a congenial soil. The strict
observance of Sunday was embodied in those Laws, Divine, Moral, and
Martial, under which Sir Thomas Dale oppressed Virginia, years before
the earliest Puritan migration carried it to the coast of New England.
On that coast Bownd's Sabbath took on its deepest hue, becoming at
last as grievous an evil, perhaps, as the frivolity it had supplanted.
XXI.
[Sidenote: Effect on Puritanism.]
The Puritans protesting against Hebraism in vestments, in priesthood,
in liturgy, and in festivals, fell headlong into the Pharisaism of the
rigid Sabbath. History records many similar phenomena. To escape from
the spirit of one's age is difficult for an individual, impossible
perhaps for a sect or party. Nevertheless, the Sabbath agitation had
given a new impulse to the Puritan movement--had, indeed, given it a
positive party cry, and had furnished it with a visible badge of
superior sanctity.
[Sidenote: The new Puritanism.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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