The Leonard Library (KUpcliffe College Toronto Shelf Register No .\.....f.... OTHER VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES EDITED BY RUFUS M. JONES. STUDIES IN MYSTICAL RELIGION (190%. By RUFUS M. JONES. J BOEHME AND OTHER MYSTICAL INFLUENCES. By RUFUS M. JONES. [/ Preparation. THE BEGINNINGS OF QUAKERISM. By WILLIAM CHARLES BRAITHWAITE. [/ Press. THE PERIOD OF QUIETISM. By JOAN M. FRY. [/ Preparation. THE QUAKERS IN THE AMERICAN COLONIES MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED LONDON BOMBAY CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO ATLANTA SAN FRANCISCO THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. TORONTO THE QUAKERS IN THE AMERICAN COLONIES BY RUFUS M. JONES, M.A., D.Lrrr. PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY, HAVERFORB COLLEGE, U.S.A. ASSISTED BY ISAAC SHARPLESS, D.Sc. PRESIDENT OF HAVERFORD COLLEGE AND AMELIA M. GUMMERE AUTHOR OF THE QUAKER A STUDY IN COSTUME* o>| *-, MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN S STREET, LONDON 1911 PREFACE THE story of the Quaker invasion of the Colonies in the New World has often been told in fragmentary fashion, but no adequate study of the entire Quaker movement in colonial times has yet been made from original sources, free from partisan or sectarian prejudice and in historical perspective. By far the most important history of American Quakerism covering our period is Bowden s History of Friends in America (London, vol. i. 1850, vol. ii. 1854), but it is plainly written from the Quaker point of view and does not furnish a critical investigation of Quakerism and its work in the New World. Thomas s History of the Society of Friends in America (written originally for the American Church History Series, and published separately in 1895) is an excellent piece of work, done in an impartial and historical spirit, though too brief to allow of much detail. Weeks s Southern Quakers and Slavery (Baltimore, 1896) is scholarly and judicial, and is the best work in existence for the section covered. There have been many accounts written from the anti-Quaker point of view, but they are for the most part one-sided and coloured by prejudice, and they are obviously lacking in penetration into the inner meaning of the type of religion which they undertake to present. Bancroft has given considerable space to the Quakers in his History of the United States. His account is sympathetic, but it is largely an abstract treatment of their religious principles rather than a truly historical picture. vi QUAKERS IN AMERICAN COLONIES This volume is an attempt to study historically and critically the religious movement inaugurated in the New World by the Quakers, a movement important both for the history of the development of religion and for the history of the American Colonies, and to present it not only in its external setting but also in the light of its inner meaning. It has been written as a contribution toward the completion of a plan to write a full history of the Quaker movement on the two continents, conceived by my beloved friend, John Wilhelm Rowntree, and interrupted by his death. No one can now accomplish precisely what he was conceiving Ah ! who shall lift the wand of magic-power And the lost clew regain ? But a group of his friends have resolved that, as far as possible, his work shall go forward, and we hope that eventually the projected series may be brought to completion. I have been assisted in the present volume by Isaac Sharpless, who has written the section on Pennsylvania, and by Amelia M. Gummere, who has written the section on New Jersey. I have received valuable suggestions and help from William Charles Braithwaite, of Banbury, England ; Norman Penney, of London ; Augustine Jones, of Newton Highlands, Massachusetts ; Professor Allen C. Thomas, of Haverford, Pennsylvania ; and John Cox, jun., of New York City. I have, with permission, made use of the map in Weeks s Southern Quakers and Slavery in locating some of the places on my map of the southern colonies. My wife has read the proofs and prepared the Index, and has in many other ways assisted in my work on this volume. HAVERFORD, PENNSYLVANIA, March 191 1. CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION . xiii BOOK I THE QUAKERS IN NEW ENGLAND CHAPTER I A PRE-QUAKER MOVEMENT 3 CHAPTER II THE QUAKERS AT THE GATES ..... 26 45 CHAPTER IV THE MARTYRS . . . ...... -. . ... . 63 CHAPTER V THE KING S MISSIVE . . ; ... . . . 90 viii QUAKERS IN AMERICAN COLONIES CHAPTER VI LATER EXPANSIONS IN NEW ENGLAND CHAPTER VII A NEW TYPE OF SOCIAL RELIGION. .. . . .136 CHAPTER VIII NEW ENGLAND QUAKERS IN POLITICS . . . .171 BOOK II QUAKERISM IN THE COLONY OF NEW YORK CHAPTER I THE PLANTING OF QUAKERISM IN NEW YORK . .215 CHAPTER II NEW YORK QUAKERISM ITS MEETINGS AND ACTIVITIES 242 BOOK III THE QUAKERS IN THE SOUTHERN COLONIES CHAPTER I THE PLANTING OF QUAKERISM IN THE SOUTHERN COLONIES 265 CONTENTS ix CHAPTER II PAGE THE GROUP LIFE AND WORK OF SOUTHERN FRIENDS . 302 CHAPTER III SOUTHERN QUAKERS IN PUBLIC LIFE . . . -329 CHAPTER I THE SETTLEMENT OF THE JERSEYS 357 CHAPTER II MEETINGS AND SOCIAL LIFE . . . . .372 CHAPTER III JOHN WOOLMAN : THE NEGROES . . . . . 391 CHAPTER IV JOHN WOOLMAN : THE INDIANS . . . . .401 BOOK V THE QUAKERS IN PENNSYLVANIA CHAPTER I THE SETTLEMENT . . .^ . . . .417 x QUAKERS IN AMERICAN COLONIES CHAPTER II 1 A..h WILLIAM PENN IN PENNSYLVANIA . . . .423 CHAPTER III EARLY DAYS THE KEITH CONTROVERSY . . 437 CHAPTER IV GOVERNMENT . ; . . . . 459 CHAPTER V THE FRIENDS AS POLITICIANS . ... . .475 CHAPTER VI FRIENDS AND THE INDIANS 495 CHAPTER VII FRIENDS AND SLAVERY . 509 CHAPTER VIII GENERAL CONDITIONS, 1700-1775 522 CHAPTER IX THE FRIENDS IN THE REVOLUTION . . . . .556 INDEX . . -. 581 MAPS (At end of Volume) I. MAP OF QUAKER LOCALITIES IN EASTERN NEW YORK. II. A MAP OF QUAKER LOCALITIES IN THE SOUTHERN COLONIES. III. A MAP OF THE PHILADELPHIA YEARLY MEETING, 1838. IV. A MAP OF THE YEARLY MEETING OF FRIENDS FOR NEW ENGLAND, A.D. 1833. "THE WORLD OF THE WORLD" Be of good cheer, brave spirit ; steadfastly Serve that low whisper thou hast served ; for know, God hath a select family of sons Now scattered wide thro earth and each alone, Who are thy spiritual kindred, and each one, By constant service to that inward law, Is weaving the sublime proportions Of a true monarch s soul. Beauty and strength, The riches of a spotless memory, The eloquence of truth, the wisdom got By searching of a clear and loving eye That seeth as God seeth. These are their gifts, And Time, who keeps God s word, brings on the day To seal the marriage of these minds with thine, Thine everlasting lovers. Ye shall be The salt of all the elements, world of the world. RALPH WALDO EMERSON. xii INTRODUCTION AMERICAN Quakerism is closely bound up in origin and history with the wider religious movement which had its rise in the English Commonwealth, under the leadership of George Fox. 1 This type of religion, which took root in the American Colonies in 1657, and which grew to be a significant and far-reaching influence in at least ten Colonies, had already for ten years been powerfully stirring the middle classes, and had rapidly gathered numbers in the English counties. When the volunteers went forth for " the mighty work in the nations beyond the seas," as they expressed their mission, they were the representatives of an expanding body of believers at home, the executives of a matured policy of spiritual conquest, and they went forth to their " hardships and hazards " with an organised financial support behind them. 2 They felt, as their own testimony plainly shows, that they were not solitary adventurers, but that God was pushing them out to be the bearers of a new and mighty word of Life which was to remake the world, and that the whole group behind 1 The history of the rise of Quakerism has been written for this series by William Charles Braithwaite in the volume The Beginnings of Quakerism. 3 At a great General Meeting held at Scalehouse, near Skipton, in England, in 1658, an Epistle was issued which called for funds to push the work in the Western world. The following extract indicates the spirit of the document : " Having heard of the great things done by the mighty power of God in many nations beyond the seas, whither He hath called forth many of our dear brethren and sisters to preach the everlasting gospel . . . our bowels yearn for them and our hearts are filled with tender love to those precious ones of God who so freely have given up for the Seed s sake their friends, their near relations, their country and worldly estates, yea and their lives also. We, therefore, with one consent freely and liberally offer up our earthly substance, according as God hath blessed every one to be speedily sent up to London as a freewill offering for the Seed s sake." (The MS. of this Epistle is in the Library at Devonshire House, London, in Portfolio, 16-1.) xiv QUAKERS IN AMERICAN COLONIES them was in some sense embodied in them. Throughout all the years during which the campaign of spiritual conquest was being pushed forward, the entire Society in England was pledged to the task of carrying its " truth " into the life of the New World, and even as early as 1 660 George Fox was planning for the founding of a Colony in America, where Quakers could try their faith and work out their ideals unmolested. 1 A study of Fox s printed Epistles will convince any one that the " Seed in America " was always prominent in his thought and in his plans. 2 In fact no other religious body in the Old World more completely identified itself with the fortunes of its apostles in the New World than did the Quakers, then in the youth and vigour of their career. Throughout the entire period covered by this history 1656 to 1780 Quakerism was an expanding force in the Colonies, and there were times within this period when it seemed destined to become one of the foremost religious factors in the life and development of America. It is clearly evident from their own writings that at the opening of the eighteenth century the Quaker leaders expected to make their type of religion prevail on the Western continent. They believed, in fact, that their " Principle " was universally true and would make its way through the race, and that their experiment was only the beginning of a world - religion of the Spirit. The New World seemed to them a providential field to be won for their truth. It was in the New World alone that favour able opportunities offered in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for the application of Quaker ideals to public life, and the opportunities were quickly seized. In Great Britain there were insuperable bars which kept Quakers out of public service to the state and forced them to adopt a life apart from the main currents. One famous Quaker, John Archdale, who took a prominent part in the making of three American Colonies Maine, North Carolina and South Carolina was elected to the English 1 Letter of Josiah Coale to George Fox from Maryland, January 1661. A. R. Barclay CoL of MSS. in Devonshire House, No. 53. a Fox s Epistles (first ed. 1698 ; American ed. 1831, 2 vols. ). INTRODUCTION xv Parliament in 1698, but his refusal to take an oath cost him his seat, and ended all attempts on the part of Quakers to enter the field of politics. In America the situation was quite different. In the Puritan Colonies of New England, Quakers were, of course, without the privileges of franchise or office -holding, and in Episco palian Colonies like Virginia, where uniformity was insisted upon, the way to influence in the government was tightly closed to them ; but in Rhode Island the only obstacle to position in Government affairs which the Quakers met was the difficulty of bearing responsibility for war- preparation. In that Colony for more than a hundred years Quakers were continually in office, and for thirty- six terms the Governorship of the colony was occupied by members of the Society. In Pennsylvania they had one of the largest and most influential Colonies of the New World in their own hands. They came into possession of West Jersey in 1674, and five years later East Jersey also passed into their hands, so that they had the govern mental control of New Jersey until it became a royal Colony. Until 1701 they were the only organised religious denomination in North Carolina, and the administration of the Quaker, John Archdale, profoundly shaped the history of both Carolinas. Naturally Quakers in the Old World looked to the New as a land of promise, and no pains were spared to spread the " Seed " in the favourable regions along the Atlantic coast, so that by the middle of the eighteenth century there were more Quakers in the Western hemisphere than in Great Britain. They formed half the population of Newport in 1700 and for many years after, and down to the middle of the eighteenth century they were a majority of the popula tion of the South Narragansett shore of Rhode Island, now Washington County. There were at this period three thousand Quakers in the southern section of Massachusetts, once the territory of the Pilgrim Fathers. About one-third of the inhabitants in the Piscataqua region of Maine and New Hampshire were Quakers. xvi QUAKERS IN AMERICAN COLONIES Lynn, Salem, Newbury, and Hampton had large Meetings, and many of the inland rural districts of Massachusetts and Rhode Island were predominantly Quaker. They formed a large proportion of the Long Island towns and the towns of Westchester County on the mainland, and by the middle of the century they constituted an influential body in New York City. There were not less than twenty-five thousand Quakers in Pennsylvania before the end of our period, and probably not far from six thousand in New Jersey. There were by official figures three thousand in Maryland, probably four or five thousand in Virginia, and about the same number in the Carolinas. They were thrifty, prosperous, and quiet in their modes of life, but contributing their share of the hard labour which turned the dense forests into flourishing fields, and their share also of those subtler formative forces which prepared the way in the wilderness for a great national life, then hardly dreamed of. It is no doubt a home-spun narrative, but history is no longer aristocratic. It does not confine its purview to selected heroes and purple-tinted events. It has become interested in the common man and in plain every-day happenings, and this story, though modest, is a contribution to the real life of America. The extent of the Quaker influence in the political life of the Colonies has not been generally realised. The " holy experiment " of Penn had striking and dramatic features which have always impressed the imagination, but the quieter work of New England and Carolina Quakers has received much less notice and has waited long for a historian. But while emphasising this neglected field of Quaker activity, we must not lose our perspective and balance. The Quakers supreme passion was the cultivation of inward religion and an outward life con sistent with the vision of their souls. " Experiments in government " whether successful or unsuccessful, whether wise or unwise, were never their primary aim. Beneath these ventures, there always existed a deeper purpose to make a fresh experiment in spiritual religion as the INTRODUCTION xvii living pulse of all Quaker aspiration, and by this central aim the movement must be finally estimated and judged. These American Quakers of the period here studied believed, with a white-hot intensity, that they had dis covered, or rediscovered, a new spiritual Principle which they thought was destined to revolutionise life, society, civil government, and religion. The Principle (and they always spelled it with a capital P) which they claimed to have discovered was the presence of a Divine Light in man, a radiance from the central Light of the spiritual universe, penetrating the deeps of every soul, which if responded to, obeyed, and accepted as a guiding star, would lead into all truth and into all kinds of truth. They thought that they had found a way to the direct discovery of the Will of God and that they could thereby put the Kingdom of God into actual operation here in the world. The whole momentous issue of life, they insisted, is settled by personal obedience or disobedience to the inward Divine revelation. The wisdom of the infinite God is within reach of the feeblest human spirit ; the will of the Eternal is voiced in the soul of every man ; it is life to hear and obey ; it is death to follow other voices. This underlying conception forms the spring and motive of all the distinctive activities of the colonial Quakers. They risked everything they had on the truth of this Principle, and they must be judged by the way in which they worked out their experiment in religion. They were champions of causes which seemed new and dangerous to those who heard them, but behind all their propaganda there was one live central faith from which everything radiated the faith that God speaks directly to the human spirit, and that religion, to be true and genuine, must be a reality of first-hand experience. There have been many individuals in the Christian Church who have been exponents of this mystical idea that God manifests Himself inwardly to the soul of man and that His real presence can be directly, immediately, experienced. The testimony of such mystics has pro- xviii QUAKERS IN AMERICAN COLONIES foundly interested our generation and their experiences have received searching psychological examination at the hands of experts. 1 The novel and interesting thing about this Quaker experiment is that it furnishes an opportunity to study inward mystical religion embodied in a group and worked out through a long span of historical develop ment. We shall here see the intense personal faith of one or a few fusing an entire group and creating an atmo sphere, a climate, into which children were born and through which they formed their lives ; we shall be able to study the effect of the cooling processes of time on this faith so intense at its origin ; we shall discover how this startlingly bold Principle met the slow siftings and testings of history ; and we shall find out how any merely inward and mystical facts must be supplemented and corrected by the wider concrete and objective experience of the race. It is true, no doubt, that religion is in the last analysis a personal matter, but it is also true that nobody cut apart from social interests and isolated from the purposes and strivings of a group of fellows could become a person at all, or could exhibit what we mean by religion. And, therefore, while we go to biography for our most definite accounts of religious experience, it is through the unfolding of history that we can trace out the full signi ficance of a first-hand faith like the one here in question, and only in the vast laboratory of history, where every hypothesis must submit to a stern test, can it be fairly verified or transcended. The following chapters as they unfold will present the Quaker Principle in sufficient detail, will exhibit it in sharp collision with other views, and will show its points of strength and weakness ; but a few clues indicated here in the Introduction will perhaps help the reader to find his way more easily and more intelligently. 1 James, Varieties of Religious Experience ; Coe, Spiritual Life ; Granger, The Soul of a Christian; Pratt, The Psychology of Religious Belief; Ames, The Psychology of Religious Experience ; Delacroix, Les Grands Mystiques. Chretiens ; Inge, Christian Mysticism ; Von Hiigel, The Mystical Element in Religion ; Evelyn Underbill, Mysticism ; Jones, Studies in Mystical Religion. INTRODUCTION xix i. One point which this volume will clearly settle is the fact that there existed in the Colonies, before the arrival of the Quaker missionaries, a large number of persons, in some instances more or less defined groups of persons, who were seeking after a freer and more inward type of religion than that which prevailed in any of the established Churches. The period of the English Commonwealth witnessed an extraordinary revival of faith in man s power to dis cover the inward way to God, and mystical sects, some of them wise and sane, some of them foolish and fanatical, swarmed almost faster than they could be named. These mystical sectaries had one idea in common : they believed that God was in man and that revelation was not closed. They were waiting for the dawn of a fresh Light from heaven. 1 Wherever English Colonists of this period went these sectaries went too. They were a constant annoyance to New England Puritans, to Dutch Calvinists, and to Virginia Churchmen. They generally gathered kindred spirits around them and quietly or sometimes noisily propagated their mystical faith. They exalted personal experience, direct intercourse with God, and so put much less stress than their neighbours did upon the forms and doctrines which had come to be regarded as essential elements of a sound and stable faith. This was the prepared soil in which Quakerism spread at its first appearing, and without which the efforts of the propagators, however valiant, would almost certainly have been futile. The Quaker missionaries simply gave positive direction to tendencies already powerfully underway. They brought to clear focus ideas which were before vague and indefinite, and they fused into white heat spirits that were feeling after and dimly seeking what they now heard in their own tongue. The first " Quaker Churches " in America were formed out of this sort of material ; and so too were many of the Meetings which came into being at later periods of expansion. 1 See chapters xiv. -xx. of my Studies in Mystical Religion. xx QUAKERS IN AMERICAN COLONIES 2. One of the first tasks which confronts the historian who proposes to deal with the religious life of the Colonies especially of the New England Colonies is to understand and fairly estimate the collision between the Puritans and the Quakers. In many respects they were both the product of a common movement, the spiritual offspring of the same epoch. They both possessed a passion for righteousness a moral earnestness that hardly has a historical parallel except in the great Hebrew prophets. They both took a very pro nounced stand against " natural pleasures," enjoyments of " the world " and of " the flesh," in fact against actions of any kind along the line of least resistance. They were both opposed to fashions and customs which fostered, in any way, looseness of life, or which ministered, in any degree, to personal pride and selfishness. In short, they were both " puritan," in the ancient sense of the word, in their moral basis and in their conception of social proprieties. They both hated tyranny with an intense hatred, though they took very different ways of destroying it ; and they both abhorred sacerdotalism in religion, though they drew the line where sacerdotalism began at very different points. But if they were allied in spirit in some common elemental aspects ; they were nevertheless exponents of very antagonistic types of religion which, seen from the different angles of vision and perspective, were absolutely irreconcilable, and it was still the fashion then to count it sin to be weak in infallibility. Our generation is so open-minded and hospitable ; so weaned of the taste of finality-doctrines, that we look almost with amazement at these exponents of the fiery positive ; these tournaments to settle which " infallible truth " really was infallible. We must, however, always bear in mind that religious indifference is a distinctly modern trait. The testimony of the Rev. Mr. Ward of Ipswich, Massachusetts, in 1645, might be paralleled in almost any ecclesiastical writing of that period : " It is said that men ought to have liberty of conscience and that it is persecution to INTRODUCTION xxi debar them of it. I can rather stand amazed than reply to this. It is an astonishment that the brains of a man should be parboiled in such impious ignorance." John Callender, writing of the freedom established in the little Colony on the island of Rhode Island says with much truth : " In reality the true Grounds of Liberty of Conscience were not then [1637] known, or embraced by any Sect or Party of Christians ; all parties seemed to think that as they only were in possession of the Truth, so they alone had a right to restrain and crush all other opinions, which they respectively called Error and Heresy, where they were the most numerous and powerful." * Here in the same field were two exponents of the " fiery positive," both profoundly, sincerely conscious of the infallible truth of their convictions, and with their lives staked upon divergent and irreconcilable conceptions of Divine revelation. For the Puritan, revelation was a miraculous projection of God s Word and Will from the supernatural world into this world. This " miraculous projection " had been made only in a distinct " dispensa tion," through a limited number of Divinely chosen, specially prepared " instruments," who received and transmitted the pure Word of God. When the "dis pensation " ended, revelation came to a definite close. No word more could be added, as also none could be subtracted. All spiritual truth for the race for all ages was now unveiled ; the only legitimate function which the man of God could henceforth exercise was that of interpretation. He could declare what the Word of God meant and how it was to be applied to the complicated affairs of human society. Only a specialist in theology could, from the nature of the case, be a minister under this system. The minister thus became invested with an extraordinary dignity and possessed of an influence quite sui generis. For the Quaker, revelation was confined to no " dis pensation " it had never been closed. If any period 1 John Callender s Historical Discourse (Boston, 1739). xxii QUAKERS IN AMERICAN COLONIES was peculiarly " the dispensation of the Holy Spirit," the Quaker believed that it was the present in which he was living. Instead of limiting the revelation of the Word of God to a few miraculous " instruments," who had lived in a remote " dispensation," he insisted that God enlightens every soul that comes into the world, communes by His Holy Spirit with all men everywhere, illuminates the conscience with a clear sense of the right and the wrong course in moral issues, and reveals His Will in definite and concrete matters to those who are sensitive recipients of it. The true minister, for the Quaker of that period, was a prophet who spoke under a moving and by a power beyond his human powers, and so was, in fresh and living ways, a revealer of present truth, and not a mere interpreter of a past revelation. The Quaker " meeting " was, in theory at least, a continuation of Pentecost an occasion for the free blowing of the Spirit of God on men. It was plainly impossible in the seventeenth century for those two types of Christianity to live peaceably side by side. A tragic collision was inevitable. 3. There is another problem in Quaker history no less urgent than the problem of collision with divergent conceptions of truth, and that is the strange fact that a movement so full of vitality and power at its origin ceased to expand with the expanding life of America. So long as the " tragic collisions " lasted, the Quakers flourished and seemed sure of a significant future in the unfolding spiritual life of America ; as soon as they were free and unopposed there occurred a slowing-down and a loss of dynamic impact on the world. No treatment of colonial Quakerism can be adequate which fails to face this somewhat depressing fact, for the historian who presents the assets and achievements of a movement is under obligation to deal squarely as well with its liabilities, weaknesses, and failures. The thing which above everything else doomed the movement to a limited and subordinate r61e was the early adoption of the ideal that Quakers were to form INTRODUCTION xxiii a "peculiar people." In the creative stage of the movement the leaders were profoundly conscious that they had discovered a universal truth which was to permeate humanity, and form, by its inherent demonstra tion and power, a World-Church the Church of the living God. It was in that faith and in the inspiration of that great idea that the pioneer missionaries went forth. Then gradually, at first unconsciously, in the face of a very stubborn world that not only was not persuaded, but further went positively to work to suppress the alleged "fresh revelation," the movement underwent a radical change of ideal. The aim slowly narrowed down to the formation of a " spiritual remnant," set apart to guard and preserve " the truth " in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation that would not see and believe. The world-vision faded out, and the attention focused on " Quakerism " as an end-in-itself. The transformation which occurred in this case has many striking parallels in the history of other spiritual experiments. The living idea organises a definite Society for the propaga tion of it, and lo, the Society unconsciously smothers the original idea and becomes absorbed in itself! It is a very ancient tragedy, and that tragedy happened again here in this movement. The transformation is written large on the Records of the meetings and in the Journals of the leaders. " Truth " soon came to be a definite, static thing. No creed was made and no declaration of faith was adopted, but a well-defined body of Quaker conceptions soon came into shape, and came also into habitual use. Not only did the ideas of the Society crystallise into static concepts of truth, the form of worship too became fixed and well-nigh unalterable. There was no " programme " of service and no positive prearrangement, but it was soon settled that silence was the essential " form " for true worship, and that spiritual ministry must be spontaneous, unpremeditated, and of the " prophetic " type. The primitive aim at simplicity and the desire to escape from slavery to fashion underwent a corresponding xxiv QUAKERS IN AMERICAN COLONIES change and dropped to the easy substitute of a fixed form of dress and speech, which soon became itself a kind of slavery. A definite attitude toward music and art and " diversions " in general was adopted so that individuals might be relieved of the difficulty, and incidentally of the danger, of personal decision. Marriage with " the world s people " was made as difficult as it possibly could be made. In short, a Quaker became a well-marked and definitely-labelled individual quite as rigidly set as any of the " religious orders " of Church history and quite as bent on preserving the peculiar type. Men spent their precious lives, not in propagating the living principles of spiritual religion in the great life of the world, but in perfecting and transmitting a " system " within the circle of the Society, and the heart burnings and tragedies which mark the lives of the consecrated men and women who, in these days, bore the ark, were too often concerned with the secondary rather than with the primary things of spiritual warfare. The martyrdoms for the world-cause were heroic, dramatic, and of universal interest ; these later travails and tragedies often seem petty, trivial, and unnecessary, and they make a very limited appeal to human interest. The movement was hampered from the start, and in every stage of its history during the period of this volume by the imperfect conception of the inward Light, and of the whole relation between the Divine and the human, which was consciously or unconsciously adopted. This was perhaps inevitable, as every movement is necessarily more or less bound up with the prevailing ideas, the intellectual climate, of the age in which it takes its rise. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries a dualistic universe was taken for granted. There was a sharp distinction, a wide chasm, between the " natural " and the " supernatural." The urgent question with every body was not how the entire universe from material husk to spiritual core could be unified and comprehended as an organic whole, but how the chasm which sundered the two worlds could be miraculously bridged. It is not our INTRODUCTION xxv problem to-day, but it was the one the Quaker was facing. His opponents said that the chasm was bridged by a miraculous communication of the Word of God in a definite and finished Revelation. He said that it was bridged by the communication of a supernatural Light given to each soul. The trouble was that he never could succeed in bringing into unity the two things assumed to be sundered. On the one hand there was the " mere man," whom he assumed, as everybody else did, to be, in his natural condition, non-spiritual and incapable of doing anything toward his own salvation ; and on the other a Divine Light, or Seed of God, projected into this " natural man " as the illuminating, saving, and revealing Principle in him. The Light was distinctly conceived as something supernatural and foreign to man as man something added to him as a gift. With this basal conception for his working theory, the Quaker naturally and logically looked upon the true minister as a passive and oracular "instrument" of the Holy Spirit. His message, in so far as it was " spiritual," was believed to come " through him and from beyond him." He was not a teacher or an interpreter, he was a " revealer " through whom Divine truth was " opened." The direct result of such a view, of course, was that human powers were lightly esteemed and quite distrusted. Instead of having a principle which brought the finite being, with all his potential powers, into organic union with the self- revealing, co-operating God, thus producing a spiritual, developing, autonomous personality, with an incentive to expand all its capacities ; he had a fundamental con ception which tended toward a distrust and suppression of the native powers. Spiritual messages, instead of being thought of as the contribution which a person himself makes when he is raised to his highest and best by co-operation with the Divine Spirit in whom his finite life is rooted, were thought of as messages oracu larly " given " to him his part being simply that of a transmitter. The human element in man s spiritual activities was xxvi QUAKERS IN AMERICAN COLONIES discounted and almost eliminated in order to heighten the Divine aspect, as in an earlier theology the human element in Christ had been suppressed to exalt His divinity. That this unpsychological theory worked out badly in practice there can be no question in the mind of anybody who studies the movement historically ; but it only means that they were unsuccessful and unhappy in their way of formulating their theory of Divine and human intercourse. What they wanted to say was that God and men were in direct correspondence, and that man at his best could lay hold of life and light and wisdom and truth which ordin arily transcends his narrow finite self. Of such heightened correspondence there is plenty of evidence. The only pity is that their wrongly -formulated theory so often stood in their way and hampered them and prevented them from a normal use of all their capacities. Their failure to appreciate the importance of the fullest expansion of human personality by education is the primary cause of their larger failure to win the command ing place in American civilisation of which their early history gave promise. Their central Principle, properly understood, called for a fearless education, for there is no safety in individualism, in personal responsibility, or in democracy, whether in civil or religious matters, unless every individual is given a chance to correct his narrow individualism in the light of the experience of larger groups of men. If a man is to be called upon to follow " his Light," he must be helped to correct his subjective seemings by the gathered objective wisdom of the race, as expressed in scientific truth, in historical knowledge, in established institutions, and in the sifted literature of the world. The Quaker ideal of ministry, too, calls for a broad and expansive education even more than does that of any other religious body. If the particular sermon is not to be definitely prepared, then the person who is to minister must himself be prepared. If he is to avoid the repetition of his own petty notions and commonplace thoughts he must form a richer and more comprehensive experience from which to draw, INTRODUCTION xxvii For every fiery prophet in old times, And all the sacred madness of the bard, When God made music thro him, could but speak His music by the framework and the chord. 1 George Fox had moments of insight into the import ance of this objective element, and in a great sentence he urged the founding of educational institutions for teaching " everything civil and useful in creation " ; but institutions of such scope unfortunately did not get founded. If there could have been established, in the northern, central, and southern sections of the Atlantic coast line, institutions adapted to the right education of Quaker youth, as Har vard and Yale were to the education of the Puritan youth, there would be quite another story to tell. As the problem was worked out, no adequate education for Quaker youth was available. They soon found themselves largely cut off from the great currents of culture, and they thus missed the personal enlargement which comes when one is forced to make his own ideals fit into larger systems of thought, and is compelled to reshape them in the light of facts. The absence of constructive leaders, the later tendency to withdraw from civic tasks, the relaxing of the idea of reshaping the world, which this history reveals, were due, in the main, to the lack of expansive education. The beautiful old-fashioned home passed on to the child who came into it the stock of truth and the definite ideals which were alive in it ; it fed the growing mind with the litera ture which its people had produced, and the Meetings furnished a spiritual climate that was sweet and whole some to breathe, but there was nothing to lift the youth up to a sight of new horizons. He was more or less doomed to the level of the past. The denominations that were training the fittest of their sons to become thinkers and leaders were sure sooner or later to win the birthright and to take away the blessing from the Quakers. With the Revolutionary War there came a great awakening, which showed itself most definitely in a determination to provide larger opportunities for Quaker 1 Tennyson s " Holy Grail." xxviii QUAKERS IN AMERICAN COLONIES education. Steps were taken in each section of the country to provide for the education of the new genera tion. It was a fortunate awakening and it has led to great results, but it came too late to enable the Quakers to achieve the place in the civilisation of the Western world which their early history prognosticated. They were already being left behind, and were already accepting the view that they were to be a small and isolated sect " a remnant " of God s people. The fateful years which were selecting the dominating religious forces of America were the years of colonial development, and during those eventful years the Quakers were not awake to the chance that was going by. Then, too, when the awakening did come, there was still a long period during which contracted ideals of education prevailed. Nobody seemed able to get beyond the narrow plan of " guarded education," which is not, in the true sense of the word, education at all. It is still only the transmission of certain well-defined and " safe " ideas and tends to pro duce uncreative and unconstructive minds. It is a well- meant plan for the propagation of an existing body of ideas, but it does not and cannot make large and force ful leaders and creators of fresh ideals. 1 The whole trend of the century before had been toward the pre servation of a definite type and had fostered the timid attitude. It was not to be expected, when the awakening came, that there would be men ready for the bold ex periment of a broad and fearless education which set the youth free, with open mind, to study " everything civil iand useful in creation," and which left him to make his own selection of what was to be truth for him. The Quaker has slowly found the road to that genuine type of education, but he has come to it late. Whether he now has recovering power enough to repair the damages of the past and can still realise the destiny which seemed his in the last half of the seventeenth century, is not a question to be answered here, but it is a fact that his 1 "Guarded" is often used in another sense, namely, that young and tender children, while being educated, are to be shielded from immoral influences, which is, of course, highly commendable. INTRODUCTION xxix failure to provide for an adequate education during the formative years lies at the base of his larger failure to arrived 4. In one particular respect the colonial Quakers made a very important contribution to religion they produced saints, and these saints were and remain Ihe finest and most fragrant bloom of American Quakerism. Sainte-Beuve has given, in his Port Royal, a penetrat ing account of persons who have been transformed into saintly life through the reception of Divine grace. " Such souls," he says, " arrive at a certain fixed and invincible state, a state which is genuinely heroic, and from out of which the greatest deeds are performed. . . . They have an inner state which before all things is one of love and humility, of infinite confidence in God, and of severity to themselves, accompanied with tenderness for others." This is an accurate account of the colonial Quaker saint invincibly fixed in purpose, genuinely heroic, ready for great deeds, possessed of infinite con fidence in God, and withal tender in love and humility. I am not sure that our busy and commercial age would call these saints " efficient " they were not trained and equipped as modern social workers are but they were triumphantly beautiful spirits, and the world still needs beautiful lives as much as it needs " efficient " ones, and the beautiful life in the long run is dynamic and does inherit the earth. 2 These rare and beautiful souls, like great artistic creations of beauty, are not capable of explanation in utilitarian terms, nor can their origin be traced in terms of cause and effect, but it can safely be said that they never come except among people consecrated to the Invisible Church. It requires a pure and fervid devotion to the Pattern in the mount, a loyalty to the holy Jerusalem the Urbs Sion mystica to fashion a Christian 1 It must not be concluded because Quakerism did not flourish under these conditions and limitations that therefore its spiritual ideal has broken down. On the contrary, it has hardly yet been given an adequate trial. 2 John Woolman is the consummate flower of the type I have in mind. It was a saying of his that some glances of real beauty may be seen in their faces who dwell in true meekness." xxx QUAKERS IN AMERICAN COLONIES saint, whether Catholic or Quaker. No one can be wholly absorbed in the affairs of an actual earthly church without being marred by the politics of it, and without becoming small and narrow and provincial by reason of the limitations of locality and temporal climate. The saint belongs to an actual church, to be sure, loves it and serves it, but he keeps his soul set on the vision of the Church Invisible in which the saints of all ages are members with him, and in that vision he lives. There must also be a loosening of the hold on " the world " to prepare a saint of this type. There must at least be no rivalry to disturb the concentration of soul on eternal Realities. The very rigour of renunciation, the stern demands of a religion which cuts its adherents off from primrose paths of life, seem almost essential to the creation of this kind of saintliness. It is only by strict parallelism with celestial currents, only by drawing on invisible and inexhaustible resources of Grace, only by the cultivation of a finer spiritual perception than most possess that inward grace and central calm are achieved ; only by stillness and communion that spiritual poise and power are won. There were, in the days of which I am writing, many Friends who had found the secret inner way into a real Holy of Holies. They had learned how to live from within outward, how to be refreshed with inward bubblings, how to walk their hard straight path with shining faces, though they wist not their faces did shine. The Quakers have no " calendar," no bead roll, and they have always been shy and cautious even of the word "saint," but almost every Meeting from Maine to South Carolina had during the period under review some persons who through help from Above refined and sub limated their nature and all unconsciously grew sweet and fragrant with the odour of saintly life. 5. One other positive contribution which they made to genuine spiritual religion remains to be catalogued their contribution to the spread of lay-religion, by which I mean a form of religion dissociated from ecclesiasticism, and penetrating the life and activities of ordinary men. INTRODUCTION xxxi The real power of Quakerism lay in the quality of life produced in the rank and file of the membership. This history is weak, no doubt, in biographies of luminous leaders who rose far above the group and stood out as distinct peaks. Colonial Quakerism would have proved a barren field for a Carlyle, who assumed that history is the biography of heroes, raised by their genius head and shoulders above the level of their contemporaries. The real glory of this movement was the " levelling up " of an entire people. Farmers, with hands made rough by the plough-handle, in hundreds of rural localities not only preached messages of spiritual power on meeting -days, but, what is more to the point, lived daily lives of radiant goodness in simple neighbourhood service. Women who had slight chances for culture, and who had to do the hard work of pioneer housewifery, by some subtle spiritual alchemy, were transformed into a virile saint hood which made its power felt both in the Sunday gathering and in the unordained care of souls through out the community. It was a real experiment in the " priesthood of believers," and it was an incipient stage of what has become one of the most powerful spiritualis ing forces in our country the unordained lay ministry of a vast multitude of men and women who have attacked every form of entrenched evil, and who, in city and country, are taking up the " cure of souls " with insight and efficiency. It will be obvious to the reader that this book is not written from the point of view of the antiquarian. The historical facts have been carefully gathered, sifted, and verified, and they are as accurate as research could make them, but the central interest from first to last has been to discover how a group of men and women wrought out their souls faith in an earlier century. They were persons who believed that within the deeps of themselves they touched the Infinite, that within their own spirits they could hear the living word of the Eternal. They believed this mighty thing, and they tried to make their belief real in life and word and deed. It is worth while xxxii QUAKERS IN AMERICAN COLONIES perhaps even in this busy age to stop amid the din of commercial activity to see how plain people, raised to a kind of grandeur by their faith, tried to bring to the world once again a religion of life, and endeavoured to show that God is, as of old, an Immanuel God with us and in us, the Life of our lives. BOOK I THE QUAKERS IN NEW ENGLAND B CHAPTER I A PRE-QUAKER MOVEMENT THE beginnings of our American colonies are, for the most part, inextricably bound up with the history of the differentiation and development of great religious move ments in England and on the continent of Europe. The tiny commonwealths, brought hither in sailing vessels of the seventeenth century, were begotten in religious faith, and were formed and shaped by zealous men to whom some peculiar type of religion was dearer than country, more precious even than life itself. The story of colonial America can no more be told with religion left out than it could be told with the economic aspects of soil and forests and food-stuffs omitted, or with the fact of Indian neighbours neglected. As it was religion that was in most cases the creative spring which pushed these colonists to sea in their venturous ships, so too it was for many years religion which shaped the policies, supplied the controlling ideas, and furnished the fundamental interests of these forefathers of our national life. I am not here undertaking the large task of studying the religious development of colonial America, but I shall be quite satisfied if I can well perform the simpler task of telling the story surely complex and intricate enough of one single religious movement which pro foundly influenced the course of American history, and powerfully affected the personal lives of the citizens in nearly all the original colonies, I mean the coming of the Quakers. The first Quakers to land on American soil were two 3 4 QUAKERS IN AMERICAN COLONIES BK. i women, named Mary Fisher and Ann Austin, 1 who came from England by way of Barbadoes, and who landed in the city of Boston on the I ith of July 1656, to the consterna tion of the magistrates of this Puritan town, then twenty-six years old. George Bishop s statement, addressed to the magistrates in 1 660, is hardly an exaggeration : " Two poor women arriving in your harbour, so shook ye, to the everlasting shame of you, and of your established peace and order, as if a formidable army had invaded your borders." 2 To understand why the arrival of these " two poor women " of the Quaker faith produced such consternation in the peaceful town, we must go back and pass in review a very famous and important religious movement in Massachusetts history. It is important here for two reasons : first because it illustrates admirably the way in which the Puritan colonists dealt with persons who laid claim to a present revelation, an immediate experience of Divine communications ; and secondly, because it was a direct preparation for the spread and propagation of Quakerism. I refer to the story of Anne Hutchinson and her " party " often called, though unfairly, the " Antinomian controversy." This controversy, as all our primary authorities admit, came near disrupting the colony even while it was in its swaddling clothes, and it seriously threatened to frustrate the plans of the founders. It was the most dangerous storm the nascent Puritan commonwealth weathered, for Pequots and Narragansetts never brought the Colony to such a close strait as did this woman s tongue and wit. The whole controversy arose over the nature and extent of the Divine influence on the human soul. Anne Hutchinson, the chief actor in this somewhat tragic drama, was born about 1590, being the daughter of Francis Marbury, a well-known London preacher. She was married to William Hutchinson about 1612, and 1 Elizabeth Harris came to Maryland the same year, but apparently slightly later. See chapter on "The Planting of Quakerism in the Southern Colonies." 8 Bishop s New England Judged (edition of 1703), p. 7. The first edition was published in 1661, but this is extremely rare. CH. i A PRE-QUAKER MOVEMENT 5 passed the next twenty years of her married life quietly at Alford in Lincolnshire, where she listened, as occasion offered, with great satisfaction and admiration to the preaching of John Cotton, minister of St Botolph s church in English Boston. He migrated to Boston in New England in 1633, and William Hutchinson and his wife followed him to the New World in the autumn of the next year, their oldest son, Edward, having already accompanied John Cotton. John Winthrop tells us that Mrs. Hutchinson was " a woman of a ready wit and bold spirit." l John Wheel wright, her brother-in-law and fellow-sufferer, says : " As for Mrs. Hutchinson, she was a woman of good wit, and not only so, but naturally of good judgment too, as appeared in her civil occasions. In spirituals, indeed, she gave her understanding over into the power of [inward] suggestion and immediate dictates." 2 Cotton Mather, imitating an earlier account, sets her down as possessing " an haughty carriage, busie spirit, competent wit, and a voluble tongue " " a non-such among the people." 3 Thomas Welde, her most unrelenting and ingenious foe, informs us that she had " a haughty and fierce carriage, a nimble wit and active spirit, and was more bold than a man, the breeder and nourisher of all distempers," and he does not neglect to mention her " voluble tongue " and he thinks that her " understanding and judgment " were " inferior to those of many women." 4 Johnson declares that she was "the masterpiece of women s wit ! " 5 There is also a like consensus of opinion upon her social helpfulness and sympathetic spirit. She was a gifted nurse and peculiarly skilful in dealing with "ailments peculiar to her sex." She was the person 1 Winthrop s History of New England from i6jo to 1649, edited by James Savage (Boston, 1853), vol. i. p. 239. 2 Mercurius Americanus, printed in Bell s John Wheelwright, Prince Soc. Pub. (Boston, 1876), p. 197. 3 Mather s Magnalia (Hartford, 1853), vol. ii. pp. 516 and 517. Mather is here following Welde. 4 Welde s Rise, Reign, and Ruin of Antinomians, etc., ist ed. 1644, p. 31. 6 Johnson s Wonder-working Providence, lib. i. c. 42. 6 QUAKERS IN AMERICAN COLONIES BK. i instinctively sent for at times of childbirth, and she knew how to penetrate into the mysteries of morbid states and mental and spiritual troubles which abounded under the new and hard conditions of frontier life. Even Welde, for whom she is " the American Jezebel," admits that she was " a woman very helpful in time of child birth and other occasions of bodily disease, and well furnished with means for those purposes." 1 She had thus a natural entree to women s hearts, and possessed as she was of sympathy, kindliness, manifold interests, and withal of that indescribable trait which we name " magnetism," she was destined to play an important rdle in the new settlement. 2 This gentlewoman, admitted by all authorities to have possessed a brilliant mind and kindly nature, and as certainly possessed of a genuine passion for a religion of vital reality and inward power, hit upon the plan of holding a "women s meeting" at her house each week, for the primary purpose of presenting the substance of the previous Sunday sermon to the women of the com munity who had been prevented from attending the original service. This meeting opened to her exactly the career for which her talents and gifts fitted her, and she very quickly became " a burning and a shining light " in this little circle of women. We can hardly imagine, with our crowded, complex lives, how monotonous and limited were the lives of the women in those primitive days. The absorbing interests for them were the neigh bourhood " news," and the affairs of the Church, even down to the details of the " headings " of the last Sunday sermon, or the last Thursday " lecture " ! There is little ground for assuming, as so many writers have done, that Anne Hutchinson was insatiably "ambitious" and "light-headed." She simply had the wit to start a movement which struck a line of native interest in the community and which peculiarly suited her own gifts and genius, and the natural results followed. 1 Welde, op. cit. p. 31. 2 See. for a sketch of her character, G. E. Ellis s Puritan Age in Massachusetts, pp. 307 seq. CH. i A PRE-QUAKER MOVEMENT 7 The " women s meeting " proved to be as popular as the modern fads which sweep like a contagion through our present-day social circles, and, almost before she knew it, she found herself a person to be reckoned with throughout the little commonwealth, and the leading influence in the town of Boston. 1 The Hutchinson " meeting," by an almost unconscious propulsion, soon passed beyond its original scope, which was to review and comment upon the sermon of the preceding Sunday. The leader began to compare sermons, and to mark off one type of religious teaching which they heard from the Rev. John Cotton as higher than another type which they heard from the Rev. John Wilson ; and little by little she herself became the prophet and expounder of the " higher type," with the imminent danger of brewing ecclesiastical jealousies. The important point now is to get before us a clear conception of these two types of religion upon which the community was cleaving into two parties. Most modern writers give up the distinction as hopeless, and tell us that the whole controversy was a notorious instance of " confused theological jargon," out of which nobody, either then or now, could, or can, make any clear sense. It is true that Winthrop s account is full of confusion, and that he himself says : " No man could tell (except some few, who knew the bottom of the matter) where any difference was." 2 And yet as soon as we go for light to the actual words of the main actors themselves, we find that those of the Hutchinson party were champions of a type of religion sharply differentiated from that expounded and exhibited by the clergymen of the Colony, excepting only John Cotton, with whom Anne Hutchinson was well pleased, and John Wheelwright, her brother-in-law. The two types were named respectively " a covenant of Grace," and "a covenant of Works." The foremost exponents of the former type were Anne Hutchinson herself; her brother-in-law the Rev. John Wheelwright, 1 Winthrop says : " All the congregation of Boston, except four or five, closed with [her] opinions. " Op. cit. vol. i. p. 252. 3 Op. cit. vol. i. p. 255- 8 QUAKERS IN AMERICAN COLONIES BK . i pastor of the little congregation at Mount Wollaston (now Braintree) ; Sir Harry Vane, then Governor of the Colony ; and the Rev. John Cotton, the most shining intellectual light at that time on the American continent. He, how ever, drew back when the movement reached the perilous edge, and took his place, whether honourably or dishonour ably, among the opposers of the " new opinions." There were many prominent persons, besides the " exponents," who were warm sympathisers with the " new opinions," and who shared the opprobrium and penalties which were meted out to those who dared to think for themselves and to diverge from the beaten track of the prevailing theology. The most noted of these sympathisers were William Coddington, John Coggeshall, William Aspinwall, Nicholas Easton, Mary Dyer, and Captain John Underhill (a somewhat serio-comic actor in the drama), some of whom, with many more here unnamed, will reappear in the Quaker ranks. The leaders of the opposition forces were John Winthrop, the loftiest figure in that colonial commonwealth, though for the moment superseded in the governorship ; Rev. John Wilson, pastor of Boston ; Rev. Hugh Peters, pastor of Salem, and later prominent in the greater drama of the Civil War in England ; John Endicott, and Thomas Dudley, both of large fame in the governorship ; Rev. Thomas Welde, the ungentle historian of the controversy, and all the other ministers of the Colony. The real issue, as I see it in the fragments that are preserved, was an issue between what we nowadays call " religion of the first-hand type," and " religion of the second-hand type," that is to say, a religion on the one hand which insists on " knowledge of acquaintance " through immediate experience, and a religion on the other hand which magnifies the importance and sufficiency of " knowledge about." Anne Hutchinson precipitated the controversy by an assertion under the existing circumstances as certain to produce a furious controversy as a flaming firebrand in dry prairie grass is sure to produce a conflagration that John Cotton preached a CH. i A PRE-QUAKER MOVEMENT 9 covenant of Grace, and that the other ministers of the Colony preached a covenant of Works. 1 This latter phrase, which was a coinage of the Reform ation, had come to mean a legal system of religion, or what St. Paul branded as " a religion of the letter " a thing of " beggarly elements." Those who used the phrase intended it to characterise a form of religion which consisted essentially in a system of correct views, in the acceptance of a set of Divine commandments and sacred ceremonies, and the aim to live a life of strict obedience to this elaborate, divinely communicated system. Worship under this system is based on the commands of the covenant ; it is not something springing out of the inward disposition of the worshipper. It was one of the central features of this " system " that the relation between God and man was a relation of covenant. By the " fall," the direct fellowship-relation with God had been broken and annulled. God was no longer Friend but just Judge. This Judge, instead of destroying the sinful race, made a covenant, in which He showed His mercy and opened the way of escape for man. This covenant, set forth in the Holy Scriptures, contains a full, complete, and final expression of God s will and requirements all that pertains to life and salvation. Man s part is, not to question why, not to pry into the inscrutable will, but to comply strictly with the terms of the covenant. Under this covenant the " minister," by whatever name he may be called, is an exalted personage, quite in a class apart. He is the official interpreter of the terms and the meaning of the covenant. He is the mouthpiece of the covenant- maker, the highest spokesman of the will revealed in the covenant. The simple point for us is this, that Anne Hutchinson did not like that type of religion it was to her mind only " legalism," mere " letter," and it left the inward life unchanged and untransformed, however 1 The proceedings of the " Examination of Mrs. Hutchinson " are given in an Appendix to Hutchinson s Massachusetts Bay, ii. 482-520. My statement is founded on Hugh Peters s testimony (p. 491). Mrs. Hutchinson claimed that Peters did not report her fairly. But the evidence is clear that she did make these two classes : those in the covenant of Grace and those in the covenant of Works. io QUAKERS IN AMERICAN COLONIES BK. i correct the outward conformity might be ; and she boldly announced this type of religion to be actually existing in the Colony, and to be supported by all the ministers except John Wheelwright, her brother-in-law, and John Cotton, " teacher " in the Boston church. Against this legalistic religion of rules and command ments, with its remote, absentee God, she set what she called the " covenant of Grace." By this she meant, and so did her contemporaries, a religion grounded in a direct experience of God s grace and redeeming love, a religion not of pious performances, of solemn fasts and sombre faces, of painful search after the exact requirements of the law, but a religion which began and ended in triumphant certainty of Divine forgiveness, Divine fellow ship, and present Divine illumination. Winthrop tells us that " Mrs. Hutchinson brought over with her two dangerous errors: (i) That the Person of the Holy Ghost dwells in a justified person. (2) That no sanctification can help to evidence our justification." I I admit that this second " error " sounds like " theological jargon," but it is only a seventeenth - century way of saying that no deeds however holy, no acts however saintly, are in themselves a sufficient evidence of a restored and vital relation with God ; or as John Wheelwright put it in his famous fast - day sermon : " There is nothing under heaven may justify any but the revelation of the Lord Jesus Christ [in him]." Out of these " errors," Winthrop says, there sprang the view that the Christian the true Christian is united with the Holy Ghost, and of himself becomes dead and " hath no gifts and graces, nor other sanctification, but the Holy Ghost Himself." 2 These " errors " sound at this distance remarkably like some of St. Paul s " truths " ; for example : " I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live ; yet not I, Christ liveth in me." " Christ is made unto us sanctification." " Ye are builded together for a habitation of God through the 1 Winthrop, op. cit. vol. i. p. 239. a Op. cit. vol. i. p. 239. CH. i A PRE-QUAKER MOVEMENT 1 1 Spirit" l John Cotton had, even before his coming to America, been a fervent expounder of this inward religion, and he undoubtedly held the essential principles of Mrs. Hutchinson s teaching. William Coddington, writing to the magistrates of the Colony in 1672 to protest against the persecution of the Quakers, calls upon those in authority to " turn to the Light within you, even Christ in you," and then he (having himself been one of the Boston founders who sailed on the Arbella) adds : " This [teaching of inward Light] was declared unto you by the servant of the Lord, John Cotton, on his lecture day, when the ships were ready to depart for England. He stated the difference ; it was about Grace. He magnified the Grace in us ; the priests [i.e. the other ministers] the Grace without or upon them. All the difference in the country was about Grace, but the difference was as great, he said, as between light and darkness, heaven and hell, life and death." 2 Cotton did not, however, go as far as the other expounders of " the covenant of Grace " did. He held for the " indwelling of the Holy Ghost" but not for a personal union of the believer with the Holy Ghost. 3 Governor Vane went to the far extreme, and held the view that there is a personal union between the believer and the Holy Ghost, so that a divine life is actually begotten in the soul. 4 But the most important document in the controversy for an understanding of the " covenant of Grace " is, beyond question, Wheelwright s " Fast - day sermon." John Wheelwright was born in the Fen country of Lincolnshire, probably in 1592. He matriculated at Cambridge University at about the age of eighteen, receiving his B.A. degree in 1614 and his M.A. in 1618. He was intimately associated with Oliver Cromwell, and the Protector once made the remark : " I remember the time when I was more afraid of meeting Wheelwright 1 Gal. ii. 20 ; i Cor. i. 30 ; Eph. ii. 22. 2 William Coddington s A Demonstration of True Love (1674), p. 17. Com pare Winthrop s account of this sermon, vol. i. p. 254. * Winthrop, op, cit. vol. i. p. 240. 4 Winthrop, op. cit. voL i. p. 246. 12 QUAKERS IN AMERICAN COLONIES BK. i at football, than I have been since of meeting an army in the field, for I was infallibly sure of being tripped up." 1 He had a successful career as vicar of Bilsby, where " he was instrumental in the conversion of many souls, and was highly esteemed among serious Christians." z He was, however, " silenced " for nonconformity, and his vicarage was treated " as though vacant " and his successor appointed in 1633, ten years from the time of his installa tion. 3 He landed in Boston in May 1636, being now married to his second wife, Mary, the daughter of Edward Hutchinson, a sister of William Hutchinson, husband of Anne. There was a strong movement made to appoint Wheelwright a "teacher" in the church of Boston, but this plan was blocked by the vigorous opposition of Winthrop, who questioned his " soundness," asserting that he [Wheelwright] held the views that : ( I ) " a believer was more than a creature," i.e. partook of God in such a way as to be more than "a mere creature," and (2) " that the Person of the Holy Ghost and a believer were united." 4 He was, therefore, settled at Mount Wollaston. On the 2 Qth of January 1636, Wheelwright was invited to preach the fast-day sermon in the Boston church, which sermon led to his banishment from the colony. 5 His text was taken from Matt. ix. 1 5, " Can the children of the bridechamber mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them?" He first points out that the reason for fasting is always the absence of Christ, since the real ground for joy and rejoicing is the presence of Christ It is, he claims, not enough to have the gifts of the Spirit, we must have the Lord Himself; not enough to seek from the Lord " fruits and effects," but we must " see Him with a direct eye of faith and seek His Face." " If we part with Christ we part with our life, for Christ is 1 Bell s John Wheelwright, p. 2. 8 Brooks s Lives of the Puritans, p. 472. * Winthrop calls him " a silenced minister, " vol. i. p. 239. 4 Winthrop, vol. i. p. 241. Wheelwright himself denied holding the views as attributed to him by Winthrop, op. cit. vol. i. p. 242. 8 Winthrop, vol. i. pp. 256-257. The sermon is printed in full in Bell s John Wheelwright. CH. i A PRE-QUAKER MOVEMENT 13 our life " not merely " the author of our lives," but the very root of our being, the very Life of our life. 1 It is not enough to be under a covenant of Works, we must have Christ Himself His very presence. The true Gospel is the revelation of Jesus Christ as our wisdom, our righteousness, our sanctification and redemp tion. We can attain to nothing truly spiritual until He comes into us with His righteousness, and becomes Him self our redemption. He is the Well of life of which the wells in the Old Testament were types. If the Philistines fill the Well with earth the earth of their own inventions the servants of the Lord must open the Well again ! 2 He is the Light that lighteth every one that cometh into the world, and if we expect to keep Christ, we must hold forth this Light. There is nothing under heaven can justify any one but the revelation of the Lord Jesus Christ within him, and when He converts any soul to Himself He reveals, not some Work, but Himself. To look for salvation by anything short of Christ Himself is a covenant of Works, for under the covenant of Grace nothing is revealed for our righteousness but Christ Himself. This experience enables the soul to know that it is justified, for the faith of assurance hath Christ for its object. He gives a new heart through His working in us. This is the covenant of Grace. 3 He admits that those under the covenant of Grace, i.e. those who have the inward, mystical experience, are few in number, " a little flock," while those under the covenant of Works are strong in numbers, but one in the life shall chase a thousand. 4 He admits also that those under a covenant of Works the legalists, or letter Christians are in appearance " a wondrous holy people," but the more " holy " they appear the more dangerous 1 Bell, John Wheelwright, pp. 158-159. 2 Ibid, pp. 161-163. 3 Ibid. pp. 164-167. 4 It is interesting to find that Wm. Dewsbury, who came to see the Wood- house sail for America in 1657 with its load of Quaker apostles, said : " Before one of you that is in the Resurrection and Life in Christ, shall a thousand flee . . . for you in the life are the host of Heaven." Dewsbury s Works, p. 171. 14 QUAKERS IN AMERICAN COLONIES UK. i they are, for when Christ, who is our real sanctification, comes to the soul He makes " the creature nothing." He admits further that this spiritual doctrine will " cause combustion in the Church," but did not Christ come to cast fire upon the earth ! Peace and quietness are not the things to be most sought but the truth of God. " To fight courageously for the Lord and to be meek are not opposites, but stand very well together." If the call for it comes, we must be willing to lay down our lives to make the truth prevail. 1 Those who wish to enjoy the presence of Christ must (i) be faithful in life and word; (2) be full of love; and (3) "live pure and blameless lives and give no occasion for others to say that we are libertines or Antinomians \ " The greatest " friends " of the Church and of the common wealth are those who hold forth Christ Himself, and who labour and endeavour to bring Him to the hearts of the people. The supreme sin is opposition to the Light and persecution of those who bring the Light. Those who have the real presence are in happy estate. If they lose their houses, and lands, and wives, and friends, or even lose religious ordinances, yet they cannot lose the Lord Jesus Christ this is their great comfort. Though they should lose all they have, yet being made one with Christ and He dwelling in their hearts, they cannot be separated from Him. 8 This sermon should leave no doubt in anybody s mind as to what the issue was. It was the old yet ever new issue between a religion of the past and a religion of the present, a religion based on historical facts and promises and a religion based on inward personal experience. At the General Court, which convened on the ipth of March, attended by all the ministers in the Colony, Wheelwright was summoned, proceeded against, and 1 Bell, John Wheelwright, pp. 167-171. z No occasion did appear, except possibly in the case of Captain Underbill, and yet the slanderous epithet of Antinomianism " was fixed upon the movement. Cotton Mather admits that the " opinionists, " as he calls them, "appeared wondrous holy, humble, self-denying, and spiritual." Magnolia (Hartford, 1853), vol. ii. p. 509. * Bell, John Wheelwright, pp. 175-179. CH. i A PRE-QUAKER MOVEMENT 1 5 condemned for having incited sedition and having shown contempt in his fast- day sermon. The action against Wheelwright aroused the citizens of Boston, and they presented a remonstrance signed by " above three score " leading persons in the town, in which petition they respectfully declared that the doctrine by "our brother Wheelwright is no other but the expressions of the Holy Ghost Himself," and they claim that the effect of his sermon has not been to incite sedition, " for wee have not drawn the sword as sometime Peter did rashly, neither have wee rescued our innocent brother as sometime the Israelites did Jonathan, and yet they did not seditiously. The covenant of Grace held forth by our brother hath taught us rather to become humble suppliants to your worships, and if wee should not prevaile, wee should rather with patience give our cheeks to the smiter." l Sentence against Wheelwright was deferred to the next General Court. The case, however, hung on for months, was thoroughly canvassed in a Synod, and finally in November 1637 the Court pronounced sentence of banishment, giving the victim fourteen days " to settle his affairs " and " depart the Patent." 2 Alone and hardly knowing whither he went, the exile made his difficult way to Exeter, New Hampshire, in a weather so intense that, as he humorously writes, " the very extract-spirits of sedition and contempt," had they been in him, " would have been frozen up and indisposed for action." 3 We must go back now to the case of Anne Hutchin- son, for her views come more clearly to light through the proceedings against her, which accompanied and followed those against her brother-in-law. A Synod of all the ministers in the Colony the first ever held in America met at Cambridge, beginning the Qth of September 1637, and lasting twenty-four days, to thresh out the theological differences. All the " opinions " at issue were gone over in minute detail. The result was that "eighty-two opinions " were discovered and declared to be " some blasphemous, others erroneous, and all unsafe," besides 1 Bell, p. 21. 2 Mercurius Americanus, Bell, p. 228. s Ibid. p. 228. 16 QUAKERS IN AMERICAN COLONIES BK. i " nine unwholesome expressions," and " the Scriptures abused." Mrs. Hutchinson s " meetings," being of a " prophetical way," were voted to be a nuisance and " without rule." The further definite results were the sentence against Wheelwright at the following General Court, as we have seen, and the trial at the same Court of Anne Hutchin- son. This Court met, also at Cambridge, on the 1 2th of November 1637. Before it, with John Winthrop pre siding, and with only three sympathisers in the company of men composing it John Coggeshall, Thomas Leverett, and William Coddington Anne Hutchinson appeared to defend herself. The charges brought against her were : (i) "Of having troubled the peace of the commonwealth and churches." (2) " Of having divulged and promoted opinions that cause trouble." (3) "Of having joined in affinity and affection to those upon whom the Court has passed censure " [Wheelwright and others]. (4) " Of having spoken divers things prejudicial to the honour of the Churches and the ministers." (5) "Of having main tained a meeting in your house, not comely in the sight of God, nor fitting your sex." She was further charged, absurdly, with having " broken the law against dishonouring parents " ; the " parents " in this case being the " fathers of the common wealth." She was also charged with " seducing many honest persons " " simple souls " by " opinions known to be different from the Word of God," and with leading such persons to " neglect their families " and to " spend \i,e. waste] much time." To these points, marshalled by Governor Winthrop, the Deputy -Governor Thomas Dudley added other charges which are really " echoes " of Winthrop s. That " all was peace until you came " ; that " by venting strange opinions you have made parties, and now have a potent party in the country " ; and " that you have disparaged our ministers," which was really the sore spot. On all these points Mrs. Hutchinson, calm, clear headed, and straightforward, was more than a match for CH. i A PRE-QUAKER MOVEMENT 17 her accusers, and soon forced the issue deeper. The Court next took up the real matter at issue the question of the two types of religion the covenant of Works and the covenant of Grace. Deputy-governor Dudley raised this point and declared that he could prove that Mrs. Hutchinson had said that " the Gospel in the letter and in words is only a covenant of Works," and that she had claimed that those not holding as she herself did to inward experience were in this lower stage or covenant. 1 Whereupon Hugh Peters, the main witness to prove this point, came forward with the testimony, based on a private conference which the ministers had held with Anne Hutchinson, that she had said that Mr. Cotton alone preached the covenant of Grace, and that all the other ministers preached the covenant of Works, " knowing no more than the apostles did before the resurrection " [i.e. before enduement with the Holy Spirit] and that they did not have " the seal of Christ." Other ministers corroborated this testimony, and Deputy-governor Dudley pushed the charge a little further by insisting that she affirmed that " the Scriptures in the letter held forth only a covenant of Works," or as we should say to-day, are a part of externals, and not the primary matter of religion. She admitted having said so, and supported her point by quoting 2 Cor. iii. 6 : " The letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life." 2 It came out, in a speech of Hugh Peters, at the open ing of the Court on the second day of the proceedings, that " the main thing against her is that she charged us with not being able ministers of the Gospel, and of being preachers of a covenant of Works." 3 A little later he insists again, that she said that " we ministers are not sealed with the spirit of Grace, that we preach in judgment, but not in experience? " She spoke out plump that we were not sealed." 4 John Cotton, who was naturally in a most delicate and trying position, bore his testimony with much dignity, 1 Hutchinson, Massachusetts Bay, ii. 489. a Ibid. vol. ii. pp. 495-496. 3 Ibid. vol. ii. p. 501. 4 Ibid. vol. ii. pp. 505-506. C i8 QUAKERS IN AMERICAN COLONIES BK . i insight, and boldness. He said that Mrs. Hutchinson had not made such positive statements as were now being charged against her, that the brethren at the time of the conference had not taken her words " so ill as now," and that there was an actual difference between a religion of works, or letter, and one of the Spirit, pointing out that even the Apostles were for a time in the lower stage, without the witness of the Spirit, and in that stage they had been unable to preach the covenant of Grace a religion of experience. He called to mind that Mrs. Hutchinson had said, " You can preach no more than you know." And he declared that by " the seal of the Spirit " she meant " the full assurance of Divine favour, witnessed by the presence of the Holy Spirit." l Anne Hutchinson herself, in a moment of rashness, now gave her enemies the key to her inner sanctuary, and lost her case by what Hugh Peters would call a " plump confession " that she sometimes received " revela tions," had "openings," and "was given to see spiritual situations." " I bless the Lord," she exclaimed, " that He has let me see which was clear ministry and which was wrong. He hath let me distinguish between the voice of my Beloved and the voice of Moses." " Now," she continued solemnly, "if you do condemn me for speaking what in my conscience I know to be the truth, I must commit myself unto the Lord." This confession led to the following conversation : Mr. Nowel. How do you know that that (which was re vealed to you) was of the Spirit ? Mrs. H. How did Abraham know that it was God that bid him offer his son ? Dep.-Gov. By an immediate voice. Mrs. H. So to me by an immediate revelation. Dep.-Gov. How ! an immediate revelation ? Mrs. H. By the voice of His own Spirit in my soul. 2 Here in this discussion we find the real nerve of the issue. Here was " a mere woman " who claimed direct connection with the fount of Life and Light, who insisted 1 Hutchinson, Massachusetts Bay, vol. ii. pp. 504, 505, 509. 2 Ibid. vol. ii. p. 508. CH. i A PRE-QUAKER MOVEMENT 19 that revelation is not closed, but that she herself has immediate openings like those given to Abraham. To those listening to her the claim sounded, as the wisest of them, Governor Winthrop, said, like the " most desperate enthusiasm in the world." To him, to them all, her " confession " seemed " a marvellous providence of God," a clear " mercy of God " vouchsafed to them. On her own testimony she had showed herself to be " under a devilish delusion," near kin to the worst enthusiasts of history the Anabaptists. 1 It was now a plain and easy matter to move straight toward her condemnation and sentence. Before sentence was pronounced, however, one valiant voice was raised in her behalf. William Coddington, seeing that judgment was about to be pronounced, defended her with what, under the circumstances, was rare boldness. He pointed out that the Court was acting unfairly in the double capacity of judge and accuser, and that the original charges against her had not been proven. He then took up the " special providence " of her own confession : " And now for that other thing which hath fallen from her occasionally by the Spirit of God ; you know that the Spirit of God witnesseth with spirits, and there is no truth in Scripture but God bears witness to it by His Spirit, therefore I would intreat you to consider whether those things alleged against her deserve censure." 2 " But," insisted Peters, conscious all the time of the real sore spot, " I was much grieved that she should say that our ministry was legal." " What wrong was there," asked Coddington, " to say that you were not able ministers of the New Testament or that you were like the apostles methinks the com parison was very good." 3 But Coddington was risking himself in vain ; her fate was already sealed, and Governor Winthrop proceeded to pronounce sentence. " If it be the mind of the Court that Mrs. Hutchinson is unfit for our society, and if it 1 Hutchinson, Massachusetts Bay, vol. ii. p. 514. 2 Ibid. vol. ii. p. 516. 3 Ibid. vol. ii. p. 510. 20 QUAKERS IN AMERICAN COLONIES BK. i be the mind of the Court that she shall be banished out of our liberties and imprisoned until she shall be sent forth, let them hold up their hands." 1 All but three voted in the affirmative. The victim was now separated from her family and condemned to a semi-imprisonment in the house of the Rev. Thomas Welde at Roxbury, where she was hard beset with clerical inquisition, and where she underwent a good deal of mental depression. 2 It is a matter of no importance that under this unbearable strain her clerical inquisitors drew from her certain " errors and heresies." In the spring of 1637 2 5th March the Church of Boston proceeded to " excommunicate " her. All her powerful friends were silenced now. Governor Vane had gone back to England, glad to be out of the theo logical tempest. Wheelwright was eating the hard bread of exile in New Hampshire. Coddington and his sympathisers had been forced out of the government and out of the colony. John Cotton must have passed many silent hours of inward anguish as he halted between the two issues, but he finally deserted his friend, who had singled him out as the one minister in the colony who clearly preached the covenant of Grace, and he swung over, clear over, to the safe side, with the other ministers, and bitterly lamented that he had been " abused and made a stalking-horse of." 3 He was selected to pronounce " admonition " against her, which he did, " with much detestation of her errors," though the awful sentence of excommunication was read by the pastor, Mr. Wilson : " In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the name of the Church, I do not only pronounce you worthy to be cast out, but I do cast you out ; and in the name of Christ I do deliver you up to Satan. I do account you from this time forth to be a heathen and a publican. I command you in the name of Jesus Christ and of this Church as a leper to withdraw yourself out of this congregation." As the outcast slowly found her way 1 Hutchinson, Massachusetts Bay, vol. ii. p. 520. * It is important to note her physical condition she was soon to give birth to a child. 3 Winthrop, vol. i. p. 304. CH. i A PRE-QUAKER MOVEMENT 21 down the aisle, to go out for ever into exile, Mary Dyer stepped forth from her seat, took her place by Anne Hutchinson s side and went out with her one day to come back again ! Mrs. Hutchinson now found her way to the new colony which her friends had gone on ahead to found in the island of " Aquiday " Aquidneck now called the island of Rhode Island. This island was destined to be the shelter and safe nursery of Quakerism in the days of its early stress in the New World, and we must now briefly study the new, strange colony which owed its birth to the " Antinomian " turmoil in Massachusetts Bay. 1 The new colony was founded by persons who were either banished for taking a sympathetic part in the Hutchin son controversy, or who revolted against the heavy hand of authority in Massachusetts Bay. 2 Winthrop says : " At this time the good providence of God so disposed that divers of the congregation, being the chief men of the Antinomian party, were gone to Narragansett to seek out a new place for plantation." 3 The fact was that the Court which banished Wheelwright and con demned Anne Hutchinson, also dealt vigorously with the citizens of Boston who had signed the petition in 1 There were doubtless many things involved in this famous controversy. The subtle political issues between the party of Winthrop and the party of Vane I have not touched upon. The lukewarmness of the citizens of Boston, when the colony was girding itself for the Pequot war, was supposed by Winthrop and others to be due to the prevalence of the " new opinions " in religion. But it is clear, nevertheless, that the central trouble lay in these two points : The leaders of the new party had boldly criticised the ministers of the colony for being legal and not spiritual ; and secondly, they had insisted on the fact of present revelation as against the view that God s Word is found only in a Book. It was for these heresies that Wheelwright was forced to wander through the snow to Exeter, and it was for these heresies that Anne Hutchinson was flung out of the colony as a leper. These exiles had thus already struck the central issues which the Quakers forced to the front a score of years later. 2 The Rhode Island Colony must be carefully distinguished from the Providence Colony, founded by Roger Williams, also an exile from the Massachusetts Colony. Roger Williams has the honour of being one of the brave path-breakers toward the light, and he was undoubtedly the first in the New World to annunciate clearly the doctrine of soul-liberty. I have no desire to detract from the fame which properly belongs to him, but it is a plain fact that the island colony in the southern end of Narragansett quickly out stripped in importance the one founded at Providence, and it was here on this island of Aquidneck that the principle of spiritual freedom got its most impressive exhibition in the primitive stage of American history. 3 Winthrop, vol. i. p. 311. 22 QUAKERS IN AMERICAN COLONIES BK. r favour of Wheelwright. Twenty of the signers in fear " acknowledged their fault " and were forgiven ; the rest were " disarmed," in which list were a number of the founders of the little colony on Aquidneck the persons " disposed by the providence of God to seek out a new place for plantation." 1 The little party sent John Clarke, with two companions, on ahead to locate the place of settlement and, with the advice and assistance of Roger Williams, with whom they took counsel, they decided upon Pocasset (now Portsmouth), on the island then called "Aquiday," now called "Rhode Island." 2 On the 7th of March 1638, nineteen members of the new colony signed in Providence a civil compact for the incorporation of their new " Body Politick," and they proceeded to elect William Coddington, clearly the leader and foremost person in the little group, their Judge. The simple form of government, which was here initiated, was slightly modified in January 1639, when a plan was drafted which provided for " three elders " to assist the Judge, and they were to report their acts every quarter to the assembled freemen with this curious arrangement for veto : " If by the Body [of freemen] or any of them, the Lord shall be pleased to dispense light to the contrary of what by the Judge and Elders hath been determined formerly, that then and there it shall be repealed as the act of the Body." 3 In April 1639 tne little colonial hive at Pocasset " swarmed " and formed a new town, which was named Newport, on the other edge of the island. 4 At first it was an independent settlement under a separate govern ment, with Coddington for "Judge," Nicholas Easton, John Coggeshall, and William Brenton as " Elders," while the settlement at Pocasset chose William Hutchin- 1 Of the "founders" William Aspinwall was banished, John Coggeshall was disarmed and disfranchised, William Coddington and nine others were given leave to depart within three months, and were afterwards hurried off. 8 See John Clarke s " 111 Newes from New England," printed in 4 Mass. Hist. Soc. Col. ii. The name was changed from Aquidneck to Rhode Island 1 3th March 1644. 3 Rhode Island Colony Records, i. p. 63. 4 Nicholas Easton built the first house in Newport. (See Narr. Hist. Reg. vol. viii. p. 240. ) CH. i A PRE-QUAKER MOVEMENT 23 son, husband of Anne, for Judge. The two settlements were united under one government in March 1640 with William Coddington of Newport as Governor, and William Brenton of Pocasset (at this time changed to Portsmouth) as Deputy-governor. A year later, namely in May 1641, the assembled citizens unanimously declared that " this Body Politick is a Democracie ; that is to say, it is in the Power of the Body of Freemen, orderly assembled, or the major part of them, to make Just Lawes by which they will be regulated." l Under the same date this memorable act was passed : " It is ordered that none bee accounted a delinqtient for doctrine z In November of the same year it was decreed that the " Law of the last Court, made concerning Libertie of Conscience in Point of Doctrine be perpetuated." 3 And this colony, in the face of severe tests and difficulties, maintained this principle in practice. 4 In 1641 the persons who composed the Newport settlement seem to have arranged themselves into two religious groups. One party, with Coddington, Cogges- hall, and Nicholas Easton as leaders, formulated views which seem extraordinarily akin to those later held by the Society of Friends ; while the other group, led by John Clarke, formed a Baptist Church. It is extremely difficult now to get the facts on these important points. Winthrop says, under date of 1641 : " Mrs. Hutchinson and those of Aquiday Island broached new heresies every year. Divers of them turned professed Ana baptist, 3 and would not wear any arms, 6 and denied all 1 Rhode Island Colony Records, i. 112. 2 Ibid. p. 113. 3 Ibid. p. 118. 4 Cotton Mather gives this account of freedom of faith in the Rhode Island Colony : "I believe there never was held such a variety of religions together on as small a spot of ground as have been in that colony. " " If a man had lost his religion he might find it at the general muster of the opinionists. " Rhode Island hath usually been the Gerizzim of New England." Magnalia, ii. 520-521. * The term "Anabaptist," used in such an account, hardly means more than that the person was a dissenter from the established faith and held strongly for inward experience in religion. See my Studies in Mystical Religion, chapter on " The Anabaptists " (London, 1909). 6 Nicholas Easton was fined five shillings in 1639, for coming to meeting without his weapons. Rhode Island Colony Records, i. 95. 24 QUAKERS IN AMERICAN COLONIES BK. i magistracy among Christians, and maintained that there were no churches since those founded by the apostles and evangelists, nor could any be, nor any pastors ordained, nor seals adminis tered, but by such, and that the church was to want these all the time she continued in the wilderness, as yet she was." 1 It is not probable from what we know that any of the persons prominent in this " spiritual circle " denied magistracy or were opposed to settled social order. It is probable that they did insist that religion must be an affair of experience and that a true church could not be established or maintained by persons who were "out of the life " and only externally religious. The real situation comes out somewhat clearer in another passage in Winthrop : " Other troubles arose in the island of Aquiday by reason of one Nicholas Easton, a tanner, a man very bold, though ignorant. 2 He using to teach [i.e. taking upon himself to teach] where Mr. Coddington their Governor lived, maintained that man hath no power or will in himself, but as he is acted [upon] by God, and that a Christian is united to the essence of God." 3 Winthrop undertakes to show, by inference, that this view of Easton s makes God the author of sin, and has blasphemous consequences. But Easton did not push his view to dangerous lengths and apparently held, exactly what Friends later held, that there is something of God in man, and that man becomes a truly " spiritual being" by reason of this Divine connection. Winthrop further says that Mr. Coddington, Mr. Coggeshall, and some others joined with Nicholas Easton, " while Mr. Clark [John Clarke], Mr. Lenthall and some others dissented, and publicly opposed, whereby it grew to such heat of contention that it made a schism." 4 There was, it plainly appears, thus differentiated here in Newport, fifteen years 1 Winthrop, ii. 46. Winthrop is here giving a description of what is known as the " Seeker" attitude (see Studies in Mystical Religion). It is likely that some of the group in Newport insisted that only spiritual persons can perform spiritual exercises. There is no evidence that they went further than this. 2 This is an instance of Winthrop s unfairness through prejudice. Easton was a man of high standing and excellent mental parts. He was three times President of the Colony, six times Deputy-Governor, and three times Governor. 8 Winthrop, ii. 48. 4 Winthrop, ii. 49. CH. i A PRE-QUAKER MOVEMENT 25 before the coming of the Quakers, a group of persons who were Quakers in everything but name. 1 Even more striking, if anything, was the situation in Portsmouth. Letchford, who resided in New England "almost the space of four years" prior to 1641, and who spent some time in the Colony on Rhode Island, says, after commenting on the state of religion at Newport : " At the other end of the Island there is another town called Portsmouth, but no church [i.e. no established church] ; there is a meeting of some men who there teach one another and call it prophesie." 2 This looks as though a meeting was being held in Ports mouth at this date in which the members spoke as they felt " moved " (for that is what " in the way of prophesie " means), exactly as the Quaker meeting was held a little later. 3 1 It should be remembered that this was at least six years before George Fox began his religious activity in England. 2 Letchford s Plaine Dealing (Boston reprint, 1868), p. 94. 8 We shall see in later chapters that there were other pre-Quaker circles in the colonies all ready to be merged into the wider Quaker movement as soon as it made itself felt on these shores. The "circles" at Salem and at Sandwich, Mass., were the most important ones. Mrs. Hutchinson did not live long enough to hear of the Quaker movement, for the spread of which she did much to prepare the way. Her husband, William Hutchinson, died in 1642, and soon after she moved with her family into the territory of the Dutch, settling near Hell Gate in West Chester Co. , New York. Here in the autumn of 1643 she was murdered by Indians, who "slew her, and her family, her daughter and her daughter s husband, and all their children," except a little girl who was carried into captivity. This calamity was hailed in the Puritan Colony as a " Divine Judgment." (See Welde s Rise, Reign, and Ruin, and Mather s Afagnalia.) Anne Hutchinson s sister, Catharine Scott, and her family, formed the nucleus of the original group of Friends in Providence. CHAPTER II THE QUAKERS AT THE GATES THE Quaker message had first been heralded in London by women, and the first attempt to win over the Uni versities of England to the " truth," as the early Quakers persistently called their Gospel, was made by women. So too, the first Quakers to reach the American hemisphere were women, who in deep seriousness regarded themselves as apostolic messengers under divine call and direction. They were Mary Fisher and Ann Austin. Their first place of landing and of missionary activity was the island of Barbadoes, where they arrived near the end of the year 1655. The island of Barbadoes was, during the seventeenth century, the great port of entry to the colonies in the western world, and it was during the last half of that century, a veritable "hive" of Quakerism. Friends wishing to reach any part of the American coast, sailed most frequently for Barbadoes and then reshipped for their definite locality. They generally spent some weeks, or months even, propagating their doctrines in " the island " and ordinarily paying visits to Jamaica and often to Antigua, Nevis, and Bermuda. Large Friends meetings rapidly sprang up on all these islands. Barbadoes had been first occupied by the English in 1605, and had submitted to the authority of the commonwealth in 1652. Sugar-making had, as early as 1640, become its great industry, being carried on by negro slaves who had been brought from Africa, and the island enjoyed unrestricted trade. It was just now at the height of its prosperity and large fortunes were being made there. It is estimated 26 27 that there were 25,000 inhabitants, and not less than 10,000 slaves. Of the inhabitants Clarendon said they were principally men " who had retired thither only to be quiet and to be free from noise and oppressions in England." Among these quiet, comfortable, prosperous people, the two " publishers of the truth " as we have seen, came in 1655, and they spent about six months here publishing their message. Mary Fisher was, at the time of her visit, a young, unmarried woman of about twenty-two years of age, adorned with somewhat uncommon " intellectual faculties " and marked by " gravity of deportment." She had been a servant in the home of the Tomlinsons of Selby in Yorkshire, and had been " convinced " of the truth of the Quaker message in the early years of Fox s ministry, and went forth as a minister herself in 1652. The first two years of her ministry were mostly spent in York Castle, where she endured two terms of im prisonment, one of sixteen months and one of six. Between these two imprisonments, Mary Fisher, with a woman companion, undertook the hazardous mission of carrying the Quaker message to the students of Cambridge University. The students jeered and derided, "with froth and levity." The mayor of the city ordered the women to be stripped to the waist and " whipped at the market cross till the blood ran down their bodies," a sentence which was cruelly executed, while the women prayed the Lord to forgive their persecutors. 1 Little is known of the life of Ann Austin, previous to her American visit, except that she was already "stricken in years," the mother of five children, apparently a resident of London, and plainly enough valiant and ready for the perils of her dangerous calling. Their work in Barbadoes seems to have been successful. As they were leaving the island for their hazardous venture in New England, Mary Fisher wrote to her friends in England : " Here is many convinced and many desire to know the way." On their return, after they had been flung out of Boston, 1 Besse, Sufferings of the Quakers (London 1753), vol. i. p. 85. 28 QUAKERS IN AMERICAN COLONIES BK. i they continued the work in Barbadoes, and had their faith and zeal well rewarded. Lieutenant-Colonel Rous, a wealthy sugar-planter, and his son John were the first to identify themselves with Friends and to join the movement. They were in fact the first persons in the West Indies to become Quakers. The son, John Rous, came forward almost immediately in the ministry, and before the year was out had issued a characteristic Quaker tract : " A Warning to the inhabitants who live in pride, drunkenness, etc., also something to the Rulers, that they rule rightly and do justice on the wicked." * In the month of July 1656, Master Simon Kempthorn, in his ship Swallow, sailing from Barbadoes, brought those two women into Boston harbour. Governor Endicott was at that moment absent from the city, and Deputy-governor Richard Bellingham found himself con fronted with an " extraordinary occasion." He seems to have been equal to it. He ordered the women to be kept on the ship while their boxes were searched for books containing " corrupt, heretical, and blasphemous doctrines." One hundred such books were found in their possession. These were seized and burned in the market-place by the common hangman. 2 This being done the women were brought to land and committed to prison on the sole charge of being " Quakers," deprived of light, and of all writing materials, though as yet no law had made it a punishable offence to be a Quaker. A fine of five pounds was laid upon any one who should speak with them, and, to make assurance doubly sure, their prison window was closely boarded up. They were furthermore " stripped stark naked," and searched for "tokens" of witchcraft upon their bodies. 8 There was one bright spot in the dark experience. One man (who was evidently Nicholas Upsall) came to the prison and offered gladly to pay 1 Letter to Margaret Fell. Swarthmore Collection, in Devonshire House, London, i. 66. 2 Snow, in his History of Boston (1825), says that Nicholas Upsall, a citizen of Boston, endeavoured to buy these Quaker books. Snow, op. cit. p. 196. 8 See Bishop s Mew England Judged (London, 1703), p. 12. Henry Fell, in a letter to M. Fell, gives an account of the searching of these women as suspected witches. Swarthmore Collection, i. 66. CH. ii THE QUAKERS AT THE GATES 29 the fine of five pounds if he might be allowed to have conversation with the Quaker prisoners. 1 After they had been kept five weeks in confinement under these extraordinary conditions, the master of the vessel which brought them was put under a bond of one hundred pounds, to see that they were transported to Barbadoes, and he apparently was compelled to pay the costs of their transportation. 2 The Boston jailer had to content himself with their bedding and their Bibles for his prison fees. Governor Endicott, on his return, remarked that if he had been at home they would not have got away without a whipping. George Bishop, whose book is the main source of our information on the details of the New England " invasion " asks of the magistrates the pertinent question : " Why was it that the coming of two women so shook ye, as if a formidable army had invaded your borders." 8 The answer, given at the time, was a string of vague charges and hysterical epithets. A clearer answer can perhaps be given at this distance and from the perspective of historical review. It must be said in the first place that the judgment of the officials, and particularly of the ministers, in the Massachusetts Colony had been seriously prejudiced by rumours and accounts that had preceded the arrival of the two women. Anti-Quaker pamphlets had already come from the press in great numbers, and they were unsparing in their accounts of the new " heresy." Some of these pamphlets were written by ministers who, either before or after the publication of their attack, were settled in New England and were in high repute there. Francis Higginson, the author of A Brief Relation of the Irreligion of the Northern Quaker s> published in 1653, and one of the earliest polemics against Friends, was a New Englander. Thomas Welde, who had been a 1 See Henry Fell s letter to M. Fell. Swarthmore Collection, i. 66. a The master of the vessel which took them to Barbadoes was put under a bond of one hundred pounds to land them there and not to suffer any persons i the Colony to speak with them in the harbour before they sailed. 3 New England Judged, p. 7. 30 QUAKERS IN AMERICAN COLONIES BK. i minister in high favour in Massachusetts, and who had taken a very prominent part in the heresy trials and expulsion of Anne Hutchinson and her friends, was the principal author of two violent anti-Quaker Tracts, The Perfect Pharisee under Monkish Holinesse, and A further Discovery of that Generation of Men called Quakers, issued in 1653 and 1654. Samuel Eaton, author of The Quakers confuted, published in 1654, was brother of Theophilus Eaton, a governor of New Haven, and had been a preacher in New England. Christopher Marshall of Woodkirk, who had been James Nayler s pastor, and who poured forth a torrent of abuse upon George Fox and the Quakers, had intimate associations with Boston, where he had been a member of John Cotton s Church, and had been trained in the ministry by that famous teacher. 1 The writings of trusted leaders such as these had made Quakerism an accursed thing before any Quaker crossed the Atlantic. The Quakers were already catalogued as a new type of religious Enthusiasts, like the sect which for a hundred years had made the name of Miinster a word of terror. 2 In fact one of the Massachusetts " Declarations " against the Quakers traces their pedigree directly to these fanatics of the century before : " The prudence of this Court was exercised in making provision to secure Peace and Order against their Attempts, whose design (we were well-assured by our own experience as well as by the example of their Predecessors in Miinster) was to undermine and ruin the same." 3 The allusion to Miinster comes out also in a Petition sent in 1658 to the General Court for severe laws against the Quakers. The petitioners say : "Their [the Quakers] incorrigibleness, after so much means used both for their conviction and for preserving this place 1 See Transactions of the Cong. Hist. Soc., March 1903, p. 224. For Marshall s attacks on Fox, see Journal, i. 107. 8 A fanatical band of Anabaptists captured the city of Miinster in 1534, and disturbed the world with their strange " Kingdom." 3 New England Judged, p. 3. CH. ii THE QUAKERS AT THE GATES 31 from contagion, being such, as by reason of their malignant obduratices [sic], daily increaseth rather than abateth our fear of the spirit of Muncer [Miinster], or John of Leyden revived." l Nearly all the Massachusetts enactments against the Quakers refer not only to their " horrid opinions " and " diabolical doctrines," but also to their dangerous leaven of " mutiny, sedition and rebellion," their subtle designs to " overthrow the order established in Church and commonwealth." This was, as we in this calm genera tion know, a pure figment of the imagination, but it was, nevertheless, a live and propulsive idea then in the minds of the ministers and magistrates, and must be reckoned with in judging their treatment of the Quakers. 2 There was always hanging over the Puritan colonists, another terror, to us very pale and remote, to them very real and imminent the terror of witchcraft ; the awful power of Satan to transform a human person into a tool of malice and mischief. Bellingham s own sister-in- law had been executed as a witch only a few months before the arrival of these two Quaker women, and the eager search of their naked bodies for " tokens " was very significant ; and if a mark or blemish had been found on their bodies, something besides books might have burned in the market-place. There can be no doubt that these " phobias," these unreasoned and morbid delusions, were potent factors in predisposing the authorities to a sternly hostile attitude toward these harmless women missionaries. But there was a deeper and solider ground for their hostile attitude than these "obsessing ideas" furnish. These women were the bearers of a type of religion sharply at variance, and in fact irreconcilable with that already established in Massachusetts. Feeble as they were, they were the 1 Massachusetts Archives, vol. x. p. 246. * This hysterical fear of " designs to overthrow the established order " was a prominent element in the treatment of the Hutchinson party, though there was not the slightest ground for it. Cotton Mather, even after overwhelming evidence that the Quakers had no designs against established order, still in his day called them "dangerous villains." Magnolia, vol. ii. p. 256. 32 QUAKERS IN AMERICAN COLONIES BK . i vanguard of an army, and they represented a new spiritual empire in array against the spiritual empire which the Puritan in stern consecration was building. There was no delusion in the statement of the Court that " the tenetts and practices of the Quakers are opposite to the orthodoxe received opinions and practices of the godly" i.e. of the Massachusetts ministers. 1 We must try to see fairly and honestly what these " tenetts and practices " were. The central truth on which the Quaker of that period staked his faith and to which he pledged his life, was the presence of a Divine Light in the soul. It is an important historical fact that every Quaker in 1656 held this inward Light in the Soul to be the essential truth of religion. 2 God, they said, has placed a Divine principle something of Himself in every man. This Light within condemns every step toward sin and evil, it approves every act of rectitude and every movement in the direction of righteousness. It is, in fact, a continuation now in many lives of that Christ, that Word of God and Light of the World and incorruptible Seed of God that was incarnate in One Life in Galilee and Judea. 3 As fast and as far, they said, as any one obeys this Light it leads him into all truth and into perfection of life, " sets him atop of the devil and all his works." " In this Eternal Life and Power," they said, "you continually grow up in the Life of God the life that never dies." 4 Salvation was, thus, for them not a transaction but a transformation : not a forensic escape from the penalty due for their sins, but an actual deliverance from sin 1 Proceedings of the General Court held in Boston igth of October 1658. 3 Cotton Mather says with much revulsion : They call men to attend to the mystical dispensation of a Light within, as having the whole of religion contained therein." Magnalia, vol. ii. p. 523. Neal in similar vein says : "The Light within they affirmed to be sufficient to salvation without anything else." Hist, of New England, vol. i. p. 322. 3 This Seed and Birth of God in us is a living Principle ; yea, it is a measure of the same Life and Spirit of Jesus Christ." From George Keith s Immediate Revelation, p. 248. "The Quakers believe both in a Christ without and a Christ within, but not as two Christs, but one and the same without as within." John Whiting, The Sword of the Lord Drawn, p. 5. 4 Edward Burrough, Works (1672) p. 75. CH. ii THE QUAKERS AT THE GATES 33 itself. " To witness [i.e. experience] God within you, the Immanuel, the Saviour, God-with-you, is the whole salvation, there is no other to be expected than this. To witness that God dwells in us and walks in us is to be begotten by the Word of God, to be born of the Immortal Seed and to be a New Creature." x Not only did they insist that they possessed within themselves a Principle of moral illumination, a Power at war with sin in them, an Immanuel-God working in them to free them from all sin and to raise them to immortal life, but they claimed still further that they were the recipients of direct revelations. " I have had," said Fox, " a word from the Lord as the prophets and apostles had." They were simple, humble men and women, quite devoid of cheap ambitions, and singularly free from vain desire to gain mastery over their fellows by bold assumptions ; but they believed, with a conviction which no torture could shake, that the infinite God revealed His will in their souls. They held it for certain that they moved under orders from above, and that even in matters of seemingly slight importance they were guided as by a heavenly vision. One of the men who was called to pass through the martyr-baptism on Boston Common has left this simple, straightforward account of his " call " : "In the beginning of the year 1655, I was at the plough in the east part of Yorkshire in Old England, near the place where my outward being began, and as I walked after the plough, I was filled with the Love and the presence of the Living God which did ravish my heart when I felt it ; for it did increase and abound in me like a living stream, and the Love and Life of God ran through me like precious ointment giving a pleasant smell, which made me stand still ; and as I stood a little still, with my heart and mind stayed on the Lord, the Word of the Lord came to me in a still small voice, which I did hear perfectly, saying to me, in the secret of my heart and conscience, I have ordained thee a prophet unto the Nations. " 2 1 Burrough, A General Epistle to the Saints. 2 From a letter of Marmaduke Stephenson written from Boston Prison. New England Judged, pp. 131-133. D 34 QUAKERS IN AMERICAN COLONIES BK . i Similar accounts of experiences, believed to be " open ings " of call and guidance, could be given from almost every Quaker pamphlet of that period, and there can be no question that the leading Friends of that date felt themselves to belong to the order of prophets and apostles. 1 This faith and expectation created the peculiar type of meeting, known as " the meeting for worship," which was one of the most unique features of the Quakerism that was now knocking for admission at the port of Boston. The members sat down in silence, with no ordained minister, with no prearrangements, no preparation for vocal service of any sort. They believed that sensitive souls could become aware of celestial currents, and that no words should be spoken in prayer or ministry until the lips were divinely moved. It was a bold experiment, an attempt to realise the prophetic ideal of Jeremiah that there should be a new Israel, with God s law in their inward parts, and with His will written in their hearts. 2 It meant nothing less than the claim that revelation is continuous, and that by the work of the Divine Spirit there is a true apostolic succession. Another bold feature of this new religion was the absence of all sacraments. The sacraments are " shadows," they said ; Christ came to bring men to realities, and they were satisfied that they had found the realities. " The Spirit of God changes the ground {i.e. nature] of the soul, and transmutes it into His own nature, while all those things which men strive so much about are but shadows." 3 " There is," says another of their leaders, " a spiritual communion which reaches beyond all 1 The inference which their opponents drew was that they denied, or even discarded the Holy Scriptures, and they were almost invariably examined " on this point. As a matter of fact, they never denied or discarded the Scriptures ; they simply denied that they were the only Rule of faith and practice ; since, they insisted, the Light of Christ in the heart in conjunction with the Scriptures is most certainly a guide and rule. They were also supposed to be very unsound on the doctrine of the Trinity, and they were frequently tested " on this article of faith. They generally gave this discreet if somewhat inconclusive answer : "The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit we own [i.e. believe in], but a Trinity of Persons the Scriptures speak not of ! " See Humphrey Norton s Ensign, p. 8. 2 Jer. xxxi. 33-34. 3 Francis Howgil, Works (1676), p. 53. CH. n THE QUAKERS AT THE GATES 35 visibles and is above all mortal and fading things." " The Lord," is the mighty claim of still another, " hath brought me into a life which I live by the springing up of life within me." It was, thus, a religion of first-hand experience, based primarily not on historical happenings but on inward events. Its messengers declared that they had found the perennial springs of Life, and they claimed that these springs were bubbling within their own souls. In the power and joy of this " inward bubbling," the Quaker felt a certainty of his election which the Puritan did not have. " As I was walking in the fields," says Fox, " the Lord said unto me, Thy name is written in the Lamb s book of life, and as the Lord spoke it I believed." l " The Lord said unto me," writes William Robinson just before his execution in Boston, " thy soul shall rest in ever lasting peace and thy life shall enter into rest. " 2 This note of certainty rings through all the writings of the first Friends. " We are raised from the dead, we are born of the Immortal Seed, and we have entered into God s Eternal Life the Life that never dies," is the constantly recurring testimony. John Fiske, who more than any other historian of Colonial America has succeeded in understanding the Quaker position, very truly says : " The ideal of the Quakers was flatly antagonistic to that of the settlers of Massachusetts. The Christianity of the former was freed from Judaism as far as was possible ; the Christianity of the latter was heavily encumbered with Judaism. The Quaker aimed at complete separation between Church and State; the government of Massachusetts was patterned after the ancient Jewish theocracy in which church and state were identified. The Quaker was tolerant of differences in doctrine ; the Calvinist regarded such tolerance as a deadly sin. For these reasons the arrival of a few Quakers in Boston in 1656 was considered an act of invasion and treated as such." 3 Even more obnoxious to the Puritan, certainly to the 1 Journal, voL i. p. 35. 2 Letter fromWm. Robinson written in Boston Prison igthof 8th month 1659. 3 Fiske, Dutch and Quaker Colonies, vol. ii. p. 112. 36 QUAKERS IN AMERICAN COLONIES BK. i Puritan divines, than their ideals or than their theology was the Quakers estimate of official ministers. They could be as tender as a woman toward any types of men who were low down, hard pressed and sore bestead, but they were relentless against what they called " hireling ministry." They used very vivid phrases to describe it, and they were as intolerant of it as the writer of Deuteronomy had been of the idolatry of his day. They hewed at it as fiercely as Samuel had hewed Agag. Quakerism was, one sees, a type of religion at every point in sharp contrast with that which the Puritans had established in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They were, as has been said, two different spiritual empires. The leaders were incapable of understanding each other, and there was foredoomed to be a clash with tragic consequences. We shall dwell as little as possible on the tragedy, and we shall endeavour to understand the attitude of the persecutors as well as undertake to bring to clear light in these pages the mission of the Quakers in the New World and the type of their religion. Two days after Ann Austin and Mary Fisher, without bedding and without Bibles, sailed out of Boston harbour, that is, August 7th, 1656, a ship carrying eight Quakers " pretty hearts, the blessing of the Lord with them and His dread going before them " l sailed in. They were Christopher Holder, a valiant apostle of New England Quakerism, John Copeland, Thomas Thurston, William Brend, Mary Prince, Sarah Gibbons, Mary Wetherhead, and Dorothy Waugh. With them also came from Long Island a man by the name of Richard Smith, of whom we shall hear later. Officers of the Commonwealth were sent on board the ship to search their boxes for " erroneous books and hellish pamphlets," 2 1 Letter of Francis Howgil in Caton Collection of MSS. 2 Humphrey Norton s New England s Ensign, p. 8. The title-page of New England s Ensign reads : It being the account of Cruelty, the professor s pride and the articles of their faith signified in characters written in blood, etc. This being an account of the sufferings sustained by us in New England (with the Dutch) the most part of it in these two last years 1657, 1658. Written at sea by us whom the wicked in scorn call Quakers in the second month of the year 1659. London, 1659. CH. ii THE QUAKERS AT THE GATES 37 and the Friends, after the examination of their views on the Divine Nature and the Scriptures, were lodged in the prison vacated two days before a prison which, Bishop says, addressing the magistrates in 1660, "ye have supplied with the bodies of the saints and servants of Jesus, for the most part ever since : scarce one taken out, but some one or other put into his room." l The examination above referred to gave the prisoners their one chance of delivering the message for which they had come, though the soil on which the seed fell was not likely to be of a very receptive sort. One of the Boston ministers (Humphrey Norton says it was John Norton) during the examination quoted the passage from 2 Peter, " we have a more sure word of prophecy," 2 to prove that the Scriptures are the only rule of faith and sole guide of life. This was the Quaker s master-text and the prisoners at once accepted the challenge. They forced the minister to admit that the passage referred to the Word of God manifested within the soul when the spiritual day dawn has come and the Day Star has risen in the heart. " Where is the dark place of which the text speaks ? " John Norton asked William Brend. " It is under my hand," answered the old Friend, with his hand on his breast. The Friends then turned questioners and asked John Norton whether the Eternal Word was a suffi cient rule and guide or not. He said " Yea." He was then asked whether it was his rule and guide. He replied that it was when he was rightly guided. The magistrates then cried out to know what was the difference between him and the Quakers ! As the examination came to an end Governor Endicott, now home from his journey, made the significant remark : " Take care that you do not break our ecclesiastical laws, for then you are sure to stretch by a halter." 8 They were kept for eleven weeks in close confinement, deprived of all material comforts, and frequently examined by the ministers of the Colony. At the end of this period 1 New England Judged, p. 41. 8 2 Peter i. 19. 8 Ensign, p. 9; New England Judged, p. 10. 38 QUAKERS IN AMERICAN COLONIES BK. i the master of their vessel, though somewhat recalcitrant, and citing his rights as a citizen to convey freeborn Englishmen whithersoever he would, was compelled under a bond of 500 to transport the eight Quakers back to the mother country. One of the most interesting episodes of their imprisonment was the correspondence carried on between them and Samuel Gorton of Warwick, Rhode Island. He himself had endeavoured to expound a mystical religion, and had suffered much for his doctrines. He had been banished from Massachusetts and had founded a tiny colony at Warwick, under the patronage of the Earl of Warwick, where he and his followers found peace, and he seems to have conceived the idea of opening his colony as a base of activity for the Quakers. His first letter is dated i6th September 1656, and is addressed "To the Strangers and out-casts, with respect to carnall Israel, now in prison at Boston, for the name of Christ." He writes : "The report of your demeanour .... as also the errand you come upon hath much taken my heart, so that I cannot withhold my hand from expressing its desires after you. That present habitation of yours ourselves have had a proof of from like grounds and reasons that have possessed you thereof, unto which in some measure we still remain in point of banishment under pain of death, out of these parts. . . . No doubt but the bolts will fly back in the best season, both in regard of your selves and us." Then after some odd and peculiar advice to them, and comments upon his own buried condition " in a corner of the earth grudged even as burying-place," he adds : " But our God may please to send some of his Saints unto us to speak words which the dead hearing them shall live. I may not trouble you further at this time, onely if we knew that you have a mind to stay in these parts after your enlargement (for we hear that you are to be sent back to England) and what time the ship would saile, or could have hope the Master would deliver you, we would endeavour to have a Vessell in readinesse, when the Ship goeth out of harbour, to take you in, and set you where you may enjoy your liberty." . . . "In Spirit cleave unto CH. ii THE QUAKERS AT THE GATES 39 Him (as being in you) who is ever the same all sufficient: In whom I am yours, Samuel Gorton." 1 The Friends wrote a long and appreciative answer to this friendly letter, beginning with the salutation : " In that Measure [of Light] which we have received, which is eternall, we see thee and behold thee and have onenesse with thee." They then declare that their minds are set to stay in Massachusetts "we are unwilling to go out of these parts, if here we could be suffered to stay, but we are willing to mind the Lord, and," they add, " if He in His wisdome shall raise thee up,