L

PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS.

Importance of this discussion at the present day. Misconceptions concerning the Puritans. Views of Hume. Principles not to be measured by the occasion which calls them into debate. Principles of the Puritans not to be appreciated without some knowledge of their times. Plan of this work. England before the times of Wickliffe.

THE PURITANS AND THEIR PRINCIPLES :-the permanent importance of those Principles to Freedom, to true Religion, to the present and the eternal interests of Mankind! To those who dwell amid the graves of a Puritan ancestry, these are subjects which can never be devoid of interest. Nor can I feel-believing as I do that to the principles and labors of these ancestors, under God, we owe our dearest privileges-that the memory of such fathers ought ever to go to decay among their children. I would that no one of our sons or daughters might ever be able to visit our ancient burying grounds, without feeling the blood of the Puritans coursing through their veins with honest exultation; and their souls rising to God with heartfelt gratitude for the heritage bestowed upon them, through the faith and toils of such an ancestry.

Such a discussion is the more important at the present day, when so many seem scarcely to know what freedom is; and so many more seem not to know what freedom cost; and still more, as if unconscious of the principles from which freedom sprung, are ready to think lightly of the motives and wisdom of that noble race of men, by whom, amid so many perils, the civil and religious rights of mankind were so nobly asserted and maintained.

There is further occasion for such a discussion at the present day, when the character of the Puritans is, in certain quarters, so studiously misrepresented, and their principles so perseveringly assailed; while a system of doctrine, in all essential respects identical with that of Popery, is so fast rising and spreading in certain quarters of the Protestant world; and while the system of Prelacy which, for a thousand years, and on so broad a scale, has proved itself so uncongenial to the pure Gospel and to reli

gious freedom, is now putting forth its claims with unwonted boldness, and in the most exclusive and supercilious form;-denouncing us and our Puritan Fathers as rebels and schismatics; our churches as no churches; our ministers as sons of Korah Dathan and Abiram; and all people who do not submit to some Prelatical Hierarchy, as out of the pale of Gospel grace, and given over, like heathen, to the uncovenanted mercies of God.

The principles of our fathers are the principles of truth and freedom as important now as they were in the days of primitive Puritanism. They are to be maintained,—if either religious truth or religious freedom is worthy to be maintained among men. The conflicts of principle at the present day are simply the old conflicts revived. He who would find the matters now in debate, most fully set forth, and most amply as well as most ably discussed, has only to review the productions of those ancient times. The system now known as OXFORDISM, or PuSEYISM, which many advocates of Prelacy affect to regard as one of "THE NOVELTIES WHICH DISTURB OUR PEACE,"*-is in reality no new thing: it is nothing more nor less than that compound of Arminianism and Popery into which the English Church was fast declining in the days of " the judicious Hooker;" which had attained its maturity, and begun to develope its fruits under the auspices of the persecuting Laud; and which was again rife and rampant in the days of Queen Anne and George I. It is indeed the genuine Episcopacy of the English Church in its palmiest days, as finally fixed and established under Queen Elizabeth; and thereunto agree the Offices, though not the Articles of the English Establishment. If there is any difference between the system of those days and modern Puseyism, it is not in fundamental principles, but mainly in the more eager reaching forth of Puseyism towards Rome; and in the more loving tones of endearment, in which its advocates hail as a true Sister, and even as a Mother, that "MYSTERY OF BABYLON THE GREAT," which the early British Reformers, as well as the Puritans and the Bible, abhorred as the " MOTHER OF Harlots, and abOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH."

Some have conceived of the old Puritans as ignorant, turbulent, bigoted fanatics. Others have conceived of them as men of lofty attachment to principle, but of narrow and intolerant views: men of truth and daring; men who feared God, and who had tasted deeply of the powers of the world to come,— but unsocial, all made up of sternness and gloom; men whose austere minds were never unbent in hilarity, and whose countenances were never lighted up by a smile. Those who thus conceive of them have formed their conceptions not from the

• The Pamphlets of Bishop Hopkins.

true likeness but from a caricature. Of this no one needs anything more to convince him, than to take up what writings are left us of John Robinson, the Pastor of the Pilgrim Church; of Cotton, of Owen; or to take the journals of Bradford, or Winthrop; or the works of John Howe, the favorite chaplain of Oliver Cromwell: that Howe, from whose works Robert Hall declared that he had learned more than from any other man. These are not the productions of ignorant illiberal men. Such is not the food that ignorance, or fanaticism, or bigotry feeds upon.

By novelists and historians the Puritans have been grossly caricatured. How easily such caricatures, and even direct falsehoods, spread and gain credence, may be readily understood from the errors which we have seen spreading, even in New England, concerning the early history of our fathers. How many people in these United States, and even here in our midst, confidently believe that the famous code entitled "The Blue Laws of Connecticut" once had a place among the statutes of this colony? Yet our fathers knew nothing about them. They are a sheer fabrication, for which the world is indebted to "Peters' History of Connecticut;" the work of an Episcopal clergyman of this colony, who, in the beginning of the Revolution, sided with the enemies of his country, and fled from the indignation of his neighbors to England; where he employed his time in writing a history, so full of gross falsehoods, that the greatest charity can imagine nothing better in its defence than to suppose it was not intended to be believed. Yet there were men in New Haven, who, as late as the year 1829, published an edition of that work, "with such affirmation in the preface, as would lead all who are without other sources of information, to believe that what it contains, is irrefragable truth."

To this caricature of the Puritans, no one has contributed more effectually than the historian Hume. He spares no pains to stigmatize them as "zealots," whose "principles" appear "frivolous," and whose "habits were "ridiculous." Yet Hume is compelled to declare,-what the course of history would have developed, even had he not declared it,-that "the precious spark of liberty had been kindled by the Puritans alone," and that it is to them that "the English owe the whole freedom of their constitution." With regard to the particular events,-the secondary causes, which introduced the principles of freedom into the British Constitution,-to which, in spite of the boasted Magna Charta of King John, freedom was an entire stranger up to the dynasty of the Stuarts, with regard to these secondary causes, Hume is a competent judge. But Hume was a cold-blooded *See Kingsley's Historical Discourse, at the two hundredth anniversary of the settlement of New Haven.

Haveny

infidel; peculiarly bitter against Christianity in its evangelical and spiritual form. To judge of the principles of evangelical religion as distinguished from a religion of superstitious forms and splendid rituals, Hume was not competent. He could never appreciate the motives of the Puritans. He could not see how the principle of Justification by faith alone, by bringing every soul for himself directly to God, with no reliance on Priestly interventions, while it made every man feel his responsibilities, made him also aware of his rights; and taught him to shake off the despotism of a priesthood whose claims to divine authority rested in sheer falsehood. He could not see how this discovery and vindication of the right to religious freedom, naturally led to the discovery of man's inalienable civil rights, and gave him the spirit to maintain them. He could not appreciate the principle that wrought in the Puritans; and hence, in his view, their activity was turbulence, their firmness wilfulness, their zeal for the fundamental principles of the oracles of God was fanaticism. Hume saw not what they saw,-freedom, purity, truth, the vindication of the religious and civil rights of man, as the end of their labors aud the reward of their

perseverance. From Hume's sketch of the Reformation, and his delineation of the character of the Puritans, it is most evident, that except the incidental bearing upon civil laws and popular freedom, he saw no difference between the superstitions of Popery, and the Reformed religion. With him religion was but an establishment: the creation of popular ignorance and credulity: an engine of the government, to be moulded by the civil power into such a form as to render it most subservient to purposes of state. Hence he praises the "slow steps by which the reformation was conducted in England;" he extols that human policy by which "the fabric of the hierarchy was maintained entire; and the ancient" (viz. the Papal) "liturgy was preserved, so far as consistent with the new principles:" and by which "many ceremonies become venerable from age, and preceding use, were retained." With him, the only question is that of human expediency. Whether the principles of the Gospel be preserved in their purity; whether impositions inconsistent with the Gospel be laid aside; whether the Church of God shall be severed from the domination of mere worldly politicians; whether the Gospel and its ordinances, given by the toils and blood of the Son of God, shall be left as he gave them, pure and simple, with power to secure the great ends for which they were given, rather than so perverted and disguised as to lull men into a false security;-these are matters for which Hume cares not, and concerning which he makes no inquiry. Concerning the Reformation itself, he rejoices that "the new religion, by mitigating the genius of the ancient