Religious Origin of the Settlement of America. 119 orator, himself descended from a Pilgrim Father, has said, "it was no mere physical rest. The day before had sufficed for that. But alone, upon a desert island, in the depth of a stormy winter; well-nigh without food, wholly without shelter; after a week of such experiences, such exposure and hardship and suffering, that the bare recital at this hour almost freezes our blood; without an idea that the morrow should be other or better than the day before; with every conceivable motive, on their own account, and on account of those whom they had left in the ship, to lose not an instant of time, but to hasten and hurry forward to the completion of the work of exploration which they had undertaken they still remembered the Sabbath Day to keep it holy;"" and asserted practically, in the most emphatic manner, the religious origin of that permanent settlement of America by a civilised race, which mere ordinary secular motives had failed to effect. What was waiting for these men to do while they were observing the Sabbath is recorded in the words of one of their number, who tells us that “on Monday we sounded the harbour, and found it a very good harbour for our shipping; we marched also into the land, and found divers cornfields and little running brooks, a place very good for situation; so we returned to our ship again with good news to the rest of our people, which did much comfort their hearts." To seek a greatly artistic literature as the offspring of such a temper as the temper of these men would be somewhat like looking for roses on an oak-tree; but that the needs of their being found a certain literary expression and left a record of permanent interest and value, many able and laborious men of the present day have been at pains to show. Carrying with them many gifts, both good and evil, as a spiritual heritage from the Old World,-carrying among other things the language of Shakespeare and Milton,-these earnest religionists passed into a sphere where it was not specifically their part to found a new literature, but where they had to provide, first of all, for their material wants, and, these being provided for, to devote themselves to the foundation of a new social and political order, and the fusion, in due time, of certain nationalities into one new nationality; and if the literature which they and their descendants yet found time to produce was for a long time chiefly of a theological and controversial kind, that fact was the natural outcome of the antecedent fact of the New World having been sought out by the Puritans from religious motives. Indeed, to them any rhetorical delicacy must in the nature of things have stood in the light of worldly adornment to be eschewed; and yet within thirty years of the sailing of the Mayflower we find a New England literature sprung up, and of very considerable dimensions, both of prose and of verse. He Of this mixed literature, the prose preponderates in importance, as showing most distinctly that notable historic fact, that these men had not learnt the lesson of tolerance which the history of the origin of their colony might well have taught them. Rancour and bitterness and bigotry abound in the curious records of the spiritual state of the times; and religious persecution was a tradition that they had not seen fit to leave to the Old World as an uncontested heritage. Roger Williams put the tolerance of the colony to the proof very soon after its foundation; for he emigrated to Massachusetts as early as 1631, and, settling at Salem, became the beloved and admired of a numerous flock. sought, as others had sought, that spiritual liberty not to be got in the Old World; but he soon learnt the lesson that, if he wished to be free to worship God in his own way, he must adjust his views to those of his fellow colonists at large. Summoned before the General Court at Boston, to answer for certain of his views, he was formally tried, and ordered to leave the colony, and this with the approval of all the ministers of the Court but one. He went with some followers to Rhode Island, founded the colony of Providence, and set up in it the first example of complete tolerance which the Christian world had seen. It was to this tendency of his to tolerate all religious sects that he owed his expulsion from Massachusetts; and, of course, the principles that guided his new colony were a mark for prophecies of evil; and yet, as Gervinus says, in his Introduction to the History of the Nineteenth Century, "these institutions have not only maintained themselves here, but have spread over the whole Union. They have superseded the aristocratic commencements of Carolina and of New York, the High Church party in Virginia, the theocracy in Massachusetts, and the monarchy throughout America; they have given laws to one quarter of the globe, and, dreaded for their moral influence, they stand in the background of every democratic struggle in Europe." The same principle of tolerance that Williams set a-going in Providence, Lord Baltimore and the other Catholics, who founded Maryland, adopted there; but while the literature of the Williams Controversy is considerable, the free act of the Maryland Catholics gave rise to no literature. The Williams Controversy. 121 Pitted against Williams, who has been described as "an apostle of civil and religious liberty," was the Rev. John Cotton, described in Mr. Carlyle's Cromwell as "a painful preacher, oracular of high gospels to New England; who in his day was well seen to be connected with the supreme powers of the universe;" and who, zealous and honest, was as much an apostle of bigotry as Williams was of the reverse. Williams embarked in 1643 for England (writing, by-the-bye, on his voyage, a curious volume concerning the Naragansett dialect, and called A Key into the Language of America); and while he was in England there appeared A Letter of Mr. John Cotton's, Father of the Church in Boston, in New England, to Mr. Williams, a Preacher there. In reply, Williams published a pamphlet called Mr. Cotton's Letter lately Printed, Examined and Answered, and a more important work under the title of Bloody Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience, in a Conference between Truth and Peace. The fierceness of the contest that raged before the principles of toleration were fairly established, is fitly typified in the titles of the next two works in this series. On the side of persecution we have Cotton's Bloody Tenent of Persecution made White in the Blood of the Lamb; and on the side of tolerance Williams's rejoinder, The Bloody Tenent, yet more Bloody by Mr. Cotton's Endeavour to Wash it White in the Blood of the Lamb! In the meantime, John Winthrop, founder of Boston, and first Governor of Massachusetts, who had come to Salem in 1630, had been diligently preserving a less warlike record, in his MS. Journal of the affairs of the colony, which was eventually published as a History of New England from 1630 to 1649; and Nathaniel Ward, the author of The Simple Cobbler of Agawam, a book treating of toleration, had prepared his Body of Liberties-a code of laws adopted in 1641 as the earliest statutes of New England. While history and jurisprudence were thus represented, a place was also being found in this literature for philology, psalmody, and mission work. John Eliot, founder of Natick, translated, in the course of his missionary labours among the Aborigines, the whole of the Bible into the Indian language, and, with Richard Mather and Welde as collaborateurs, prepared the Old Bay Psalm Book, published in 1640-the earliest American book of the kind, and long a standard work in New England. The earliest collection of original poetry published in New England was from the pen of Mrs. Anne Bradstreet, daughter of Thomas Dudley; and, in the young days of the colony, the productions of this lady were matter of no small pride to her fellow-colonists,- presumably by reason of the great dearth of productions in verse belonging to that time and place. It must have been no easy matter for the vanity of writing verse to have found a pardon among those stern and realistic Puritans; and for a long time verse was but little in use among them, except for the purpose of psalmody, and the quasi-religious purpose of elegy writing. Indeed, the fact that Mrs. Bradstreet was so early able to attain to a considerable popularity speaks volumes as to the innate love of poetry, or at all events rhythmic utterance, in the human species. Her earliest work was called The Tenth Muse lately sprung up in America, a somewhat ambitious and not very highly poetic title, and was published in 1650. She affected subjects in zoology and natural science generally, so far as they came within her ken, and was wont to set them forth in a simple, unaffected manner, and with much circumstance of detail. Without soaring into high latitudes for which her powers were unfitted, she managed to display a fair amount of genuine poetic enthusiasm, and showed that she really loved the external universe for its own sake. The following little piece of description would not discredit a more ambitious muse than this "Tenth sprung up in America," in the middle of the seventeenth century: "The primrose pale and azure violet Among the verduous grass hath nature set, And when the sun (on's love) the earth doth shine, In trees and walls, in cities and in fields; It is not to be supposed that her verses have any high poetic character; but they have certain honest, common-sense, healthy qualities, expressive of her real life, that of a sensible, conscientious wife and mother, who did not let her everyday duties suffer from her cultivation of letters. Still more popular, as a wielder of the lyric pen, was the Rev. Michael Wigglesworth, the author of The Day of Doom and Meat out of the Eater. Indeed it is doubtful whether any volume produced by the New England colony up to the date of the appearance of The Day of Doom was as widely read as that was; and it is partly because the popularity of that curious book is eminently characteristic of the puritanic intolerance then still triumphant in the new Exodus of the Wigglesworths. 123 colony, partly because the man's life was as eminently characteristic in its earnestness, that we have selected him specially for the purposes of the present sketch. We might indeed have found a more notable subject in the life and writings of Cotton Mather, who is comparatively well known to English readers; but an additional reason for choosing the Rev. Michael Wigglesworth exists in the fact that, notwithstanding the extensive popularity of his books up to a century back, he is at present quite unknown to the reading public in England,-while his books are not familiar even by their exterior to more than a few of the most miscellaneously informed of bibliographical adepts. Wigglesworth has been made the subject of a handsome monograph, whereof fifty copies were recently issued by subscription in the United States; but a glance at the list of subscribers shows that only one of them is in England, and suggests a probability that barely more than one copy can have found its way across the Atlantic; but one more certainly has, and of that one we shall proceed to avail ourselves. Michael Wigglesworth was born on the 18th of October, 1631 his father was Edward Wigglesworth; but the place of his birth is not ascertained. In an autobiographic sketch in his own handwriting, still preserved, he calls it an ungodly place, and states that most people there rather derided than imitated the piety of his parents. This, however, is altogether indistinctive, and probably means that the Puritans were a minority in that place. Cotton Mather says the parents of Wigglesworth had been "great sufferers for that which was then the cause of God and of New England;" and Wigglesworth says that they "feared the Lord greatly from their youth," but were opposed and persecuted "because they went from their own parish church to hear the Word and receive the Lord's Supper," insomuch that they determined to pluck up their stakes and remove themselves to New England.' And, accordingly, they did so, leaving dear relations, friends, and acquaintance; a new-built house, a flourishing trade; to expose themselves to the hazard of the seas, and to the distressing difficulties of a howling wilderness, that they might enjoy liberty of conscience and Christ in His ordinances. They arrived at Charlestown in August or September, 1638, Michael being then in his seventh year; and in October they left to settle in New Haven. In the following year Michael was sent to the school of Master Ezekiel Cheever, where he studied a year or two, and "began 66 |