But veils were the least of the problems. The clerical establishment challenged Williams on all the major points, summoned him again and again to defend himself before the General Court, and finally, in 1635, banished him from the colony and ordered him to return to England. But he eluded the colony’s agents, and after spending a bitter winter in an Indian camp, he drew together his family and a small group of followers and with them opened a new settlement on the shores of Narragansett Bay.
Williams’s radicalism, emerging from his critical separatist views, continued to deepen and to be the center of fierce debate. By 1638 he had embraced Anabaptism, the baptism not of infants but of adults, which he insisted followed logically from the Puritans’ own belief that that sacrament should be enjoyed only by those who consciously experienced and fully understood the experience of saving grace. Associated with the “German” upheavals and anathema to the Bay Colony authorities, Anabaptism spread throughout the Narragansett area and beyond, into Massachusetts, where by 1644 it was considered so great a threat that its advocates were banished from the land. Who could doubt the dangers of the spread of this contamination? Not only had Anabaptists long been known as “incendiaries of Common-wealths & the Infectors of … religion & the Troubles of Churches,” but they “usually held other errors or heresies” which they hid “until they espied a fit advantage.” There was no knowing how far this infection might spread: it could reach to challenges to constituted law, to the right to make war, to the enforcement of the first table of the Decalogue. No one, it seemed, was immune. In 1654 the president of Harvard College resigned his post when, after deep and troubled study of the subject and despite labored discussions with his fellow ministers, he decided he could no longer deny the logic of the Baptists’ position. By then, despite the fact that Anabaptism had been banned by law for a decade, there were at least twenty-six known cases of Baptist conversion in the Bay Colony.22
But even Anabaptism proved to be but a transition for Williams in his relentless and fiercely logical pursuit of the ultimate form of apostolic Puritanism. Leaving both separatism and Anabaptism behind, he swept on to the absolute resolution of his struggle against impediments to true religion. In the end he abandoned all institutional worship, however simple, prayed alone, or privately with his wife, and immersed himself in the primitive world around him—the “natural” world of the Narragansett Indians, his closest neighbors. Contrary to almost all other observers, he found among these “wild Americans … a savor of civilitie” superior to the ways of the “civiliz’d world,” a discovery that became the source of the extended meditations on the Indians’ natural humanity, the common nature of all mankind, and the sinfulness of ostensible Christians which he included in the “observations” in his Indian phrasebook, A Key into the Language of America (1643).
Yet while Williams—sympathetic to the Indians’ civility, ruthlessly logical, incapable of compromise with his vision of the primitive church—was forever the subject of bitter condemnation, he was always personally respected. Winthrop himself had assisted him in his escape from Massachusetts, and in his trips to England to gain legal protection for Rhode Island he immediately became a consultant to the heads of the Commonwealth government, and entered into discussion with John Milton and his associates. In fact it was his respectability, his dignified “carriage,” and his skill in debate that made him so menacing to the Puritan establishment. Had he been crude, ignorant, or deliberately bent on the destruction of the Bible Commonwealth he might have been easier to deal with. Even his ultimate, most heretical argument, for full liberty of conscience and the free practice of religious professions—a position for which posterity would honor him but for which contemporaries almost universally condemned him—deserved and received formal debate. For however subversive of the Puritan leaders’ vision Williams may have been, however “divinely mad” he may have been considered and “beside himself” from too much zeal and learning, he was one of them—well educated, well connected, and rational. No such feelings were extended to most of the other Rhode Island factionalists who challenged the Bay Colony’s principles and practices, least of all Samuel Gorton.23
A CLOTHIER BY TRADE, without formal education but steeped in the half-mystical, fiercely antiauthoritarian, and recondite theology of London’s underground extremists, Gorton arrived in Boston in 1637 and immediately began his contemptuous challenge to the colony’s establishment. “Warm-hearted, hot-tempered, energetic, irrepressibly cocksure and jaunty, pugnacious, endowed with a scathing humor and political horse sense, capable of attracting passionate disciples … and given to spending hours in meditation and religious ecstasy,” he was no rational explorer of Puritanism’s inner logic and of the Bible’s dicta. For him the Puritans’ delicate theory of nonseparating Congregationalism was the duplicitous invention of an overeducated social elite intent on enhancing its power and wealth at the expense of ordinary souls. What mattered were none of the bookish clerisy’s subtle deductions and complicated institutions but the pulsations of Christ’s animating presence within every believing being. “We are complete in Christ,” Gorton declared: through Christ’s indwelling presence we hear God’s voice daily; we are bound not to any law or any magistrate’s rule but only to the Holy Spirit within. There could be no differences between saints and sinners: the concept of “sin” itself was but a link in the chain of oppression imposed by those in power. All the niggling restrictions designed by learned priests should be eliminated. Anyone—male or female, ignorant or informed—could properly preach; a learned ministry was superfluous, and parochial boundaries meaningless. All that mattered was that “God is all in all in every one of the Saints,” and those who disagreed were consumed by the Antichrist, chief among whom were the colony’s leading magistrates. Winthrop himself was but an “Idol General.”24
This, the authorities agreed, was blatant anarchy drawn from the dark, submerged recesses of Puritan lore. Not merely defiant of everything that was holy, Gorton’s views were destructive of civil order. A priesthood of all believers each “complete in Christ” would surely be a jungle where “every Christian … must be King, and Judge, and Sheriffe, and Captaine.” A literal equality of men? Everyone knew the obvious good sense of Winthrop’s words, that God had ordained that “some must be rich some poore, some highe and eminent in power and dignitie, others meane and in subieccion.” There would be no mercy for Gorton and his anarchic band of like-minded spiritists.
Within a year he was hounded out of Plymouth for encouraging lay preaching, defying the authorities, and proclaiming the universality of the indwelling Holy Spirit. He fled first to Aquidneck (Portsmouth), one of Rhode Island’s multiplying settlements of Bay Colony refugees. But the dissidents there, while rebellious too in their ultra-Puritanism, were led by William Coddington, a Lincolnshire gentleman versed in law and practiced in commerce, who had been a magistrate in Massachusetts and the colony’s treasurer. For Coddington’s respectable if radical villagers, Gorton, the self-styled “professor of the mysteries of Christ,” in direct communion with the Holy Spirit, was a dangerous crank capable of creating anarchy within dissent. For his seditious behavior he was whipped and banished from the town. He and his small, faithful band, still enthralled by their leader’s charismatic ecstasies, then fled to Williams’s tolerant Providence, but they found no welcome there either once they began their “bewitching and bemadding” of the local population. In the end the Gortonites—full-blown spiritists determined to live by their leader’s passionate teachings—settled in a primitive clearing on a tract called Shawomet, which they purchased from the Indians.25
But there was no peace for such as they. The Indians challenged the zealots’ claim to the land, and the nearby settlers, themselves exiles from ordered society but intolerant of strange and quarrelsome neighbors, were so disturbed by Gorton’s preaching and bizarre behavior that they called on Boston’s authorities for help. A military guard was forthwith sent to disarm and capture the troublesome ba
nd. Its members were brought to trial in Boston and convicted of “horrible and detestable blasphemies against God, and all Magistracie.” Some were dismissed with warnings, but Gorton and his chief associates were distributed among the towns to work in shackles at hard labor. There they remained, committed to wear “an iron chaine upon one leg,” and not “by word or writing to maintaine any of their blasphemous or wicked errours upon paine of death.” After four months, however, concern for their wives and children, and even more for reactions at home, led to the commutation of their sentences to banishment. Shipped off to England, they were warned that if they ever returned they would suffer “death by course of lawe.”26
But there would be no riddance of this bristling spiritist and his notorious troop. England in the mid-1640s was no longer the world Winthrop had left. Puritan reformers of one sort or another were now in charge, and in its triumph the defiant movement that the New Englanders had once shared at their peril had produced strange, exotic fruit. For four years Gorton immersed himself in London’s perfervid sectarian underground, preaching universal salvation to the General Baptists in the Bell Alley conventicle of the Leveller Thomas Lamb and sharing the pulpit with inspired enthusiasts, male and female. By the time he returned to New England in 1648, he was a veteran exhorter of “illiterate mechanicks” and a fiery pamphleteer; his antiauthoritarianism and his hatred of book learning and of an educated, ordained ministry had been heightened by his encounters with London’s Levellers and Ranters. Bearing a letter from the Earl of Warwick that gave him safe passage through Massachusetts, he rejoined his parishioners in his Rhode Island village, now called Warwick, and there he remained, firing off blistering pamphlets for publication in London and preaching, as an instrument of the Holy Spirit, “such a luminous understanding of God as to pass beyond human comprehension.”
By then Rhode Island was confirmed in the Puritans’ mind as “a cesspool of vile heresies and irreligion” whose foul waters were seeping constantly northward. Williams and Gorton, united, if in nothing else, in their dissociation of church and state, had long since been joined by other dissident bands—William Aspinwall’s Biblicist utopia in Aquidneck, and John Clarke’s “Particular” Baptists in Newport, convinced that only some would ever be saved. Like Coddington’s people, they were refugees from, victims of, the explosive struggle to establish and secure the Bay Colony’s moderate Congregationalism.27
3
In its origins that great effort, inflamed by its involvement with a genocidal racial war, arose in effect from the basic differences in theological and ecclesiastical principles between John Cotton’s and Thomas Hooker’s approaches to Puritan theology, which had been developing latently in the years before their emigration. Once released in New England, the disagreements quickly escalated and acquired hard, abrasive lines. Before the controversy had run its course, it would split Boston’s small community and much of the rest of New England into warring factions, disrupt congregations and alienate them from their pastors, and generate bitter personal confrontations.
That these disagreements would become conflicts that would dominate religious life in New England might have been predicted, but the savagery of the struggle, the bitterness of the main contenders, and the deep stain it left on the region’s collective memory could not have been. For the Antinomian Controversy evoked elemental fears peculiar to what was experienced as a barbarous environment—fears of what could happen to civilized people in an unimaginable wilderness and fears of racial conflicts in which God’s children were fated to struggle with pitiless agents of Satan, pagan Antichrists swarming in the world around them.28 The two were one: threats from within merged with threats from without to form a heated atmosphere of apocalyptic danger.
AT THE START Cotton was the major figure in the emerging conflict. Famous as he was, he quickly became a leader in the new Boston, and as teacher of the town’s First Church, he began in sermons to expound his views. Neither a relentless theo-logician like Williams nor a passionate spiritist like Gorton but a mild-tempered, left-leaning moderate, he was more responsive than most to the belief in the unmediated grace of God, to the idea of Christ as the gentle bridegroom who would of his own benevolence shed “the seeds of his grace” into passive, receptive hearts. Slowly, as Cotton found his authentic voice in New England’s unconfined environment, the peculiar slant of his views became more pronounced, and some began to detect disturbing implications in his preaching. Was he not suggesting an immediacy of God’s presence that might bypass both the church’s mediation and the necessary labor of preparation, the personal striving for sanctity appropriate for one’s redemption? Did this renowned preacher mean to trivialize the Bible’s Word and destroy the efficacy of both church and clergy? Was his preaching not implicitly antinomian, even potentially anarchic? Preparationists like Hooker and his future son-in-law Thomas Shepard, who were devoted to an elaborately articulated, multistage process of conversion and the clergy’s powerful role in it, sensed danger below the surface of Cotton’s sermons and cautiously began an inquiry.29
It started privately, early in 1636, with a tightly written, probing letter from Shepard to Cotton. Was Cotton, Shepard asked, not separating the inner assurance of redemption from the outward signs of piety and behavioral sanctity? Was not the personal revelation he extolled “a thing beyond and above the woord [of the Bible]”? Even the Familists, Shepard pointed out, those devilish Dutch mystics “Godded with God,” whose “glorious estate of perfection” had once attracted Shepard himself—even they respected the Bible as a necessary guide to redemption. A quick reply to these queries, Shepard wrote, would be important, for while he, Shepard, had no intention of beginning a quarrel with the revered Cotton, there were others whose secret suspicions “I feare will flame out unles they be quenched in time.”30
Cotton lost no time in replying. He hoped to avoid all “differences, and jarres,” he wrote, “especially with Brethren,” but in fact he saw none in what Shepard had written. It was simply “misexpression” on his part, he wrote, or “misconstruction, or misreport” by others. Some of the views attributed to him he had in fact actively opposed. Redemption, he wrote, was indeed beyond human striving, beyond institutions, works, or sheer effort. What was essential and only essential was to “close with Christ.” Did true redemption therefore nullify the importance of pious behavior? Not quite: sanctified behavior was necessary too, but it was secondary evidence of redemption. Could the redeemed not sin? They could, but if God’s true children fell into “divers grosse, and scandalous sinnes” while claiming God’s fatherly love, surely the effect would be to renew the doubts of these “gracious” people about the state of their souls.
I would not wish christians to build the signes of their Adoption upon [any] sanctification but such as floweth from faith in christ jesus; for all other holynesse and righteousnes … may be … a [mere] mortall seede and fall short of perseverance: whereas the least seede of fayth, and of that holynes which floweth from it, abideth for ever.
Have no fear, Cotton concluded. So long as we understand each other it will be clear that there are no real differences between us. And if he were truly in error, “God forbid I should shutt mine eyes against it.”31
It was a vigorous reply, but subtle—for some, too subtle. The distinctions were fine and the metaphors elegant, but Cotton’s meaning remained elusive. Where would his beliefs lead? Were there no steps to the altar? How might such ideas affect less scrupulous thinkers than he? Perhaps, given the shadings and complexities of his thought, he himself might maintain a “semi-Familist” position without falling into antinomianism or worse, but could others, his disciples, maintain the same discipline? Doubts grew, and deepened.
In May, with Cotton still under suspicion, Wheelwright arrived in the colony. A vigorous, bold, uncompromising man whose athleticism was remarked on, he was proposed for appointment as coteacher with Cotton in the Boston church. But was his theology sound? There were serious doubts. His “spirit
,” Winthrop recorded, “they knew not,” and what was known of his technical views—that, for example, a true believer actually unites with the Holy Ghost and becomes, like Christ, more than a simple creature—was disturbing. Was this not a doctrine that excluded the church and ethical striving? Wheelwright’s appointment failed.32
At the same time another of Cotton’s zealous followers, Anne Hutchinson, came under deep suspicion. She had arrived in 1634 carrying with her a passion for Cotton’s teachings and the reputation of a busy “lay prophesier.” Supremely self-confident, worldly wise, and learned in theological discourse, she suffered, Winthrop wrote, from “two dangerous errors: 1. That the person of the Holy Ghost dwells in a justified person. 2. That no sanctification [behavior, piety, zeal] can help to evidence to us our justification.” Together these views could form a node of malignancy that Winthrop and the clerical establishment feared might spread wildly and with deadly effect.33
By the fall of 1636 their fears seemed to be realized as Hutchinson, inspired and oblivious to external authority, cultivated the familiar practice of gathering together groups of women to discuss recent sermons, she presiding “(gravely) sitting in the chaire” and commenting freely. At first these meetings could be excused as an extension of her role as midwife and herbalist, and her opinions did not appear to be dangerous. But soon her constituency broadened to include men, and as Winthrop noted with alarm, she was presiding over two “public lectures” each week attended by sixty to eighty devotees who appeared to support her increasingly strident condemnation of all the clergy but Cotton for preaching a covenant of works, not grace.
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 Page 54
