Chapter XIV: The Church

The Pilgrims brought with them to Plymouth a faith that had already removed mountains. It supported the Scrooby band through the troublous days of their persecution in England; it pointed out for them the way to Holland and freedom; it fortified them against the dishonesty of the Merchant Adventurers; walked the waters of the Atlantic by their side, and remained their only comfort through that first terrible winter in the little clearing in the Plymouth woods. Our own age, that vaunts its toleration, can know nothing of such faith as that. Whatever we may say of the Pilgrims’ too rigid righteousness, whatever we may think of their theology, we must remember that their righteousness and their theology were real, hammered out at the forge of suffering and sacrifice. If their form was not graceful and the marks of the hammer were still upon them, yet were they as near to Christ as the polished spirals of our own attenuated doctrines. We shall criticize the Pilgrims and some phases of their religion in the following pages, but we shall do so on our knees.

Persecution had united the Pilgrims long before they left England. Certain independent spirits had begun in the first half-dozen years of the seventeenth century to take strong exception to the ritual of the Church of England. They saw, to quote Bradford, ‘how not only these base and beggarly ceremonies were unlawful; but also that the lordly and tyranous power of the prelates ought not to be submitted unto.’ They consequently withdrew from the Established Church and by degrees, joining with other malcontents whose views were similar to their own, they formed themselves, in 1606, into a new Church at Scrooby and held services in the houses of one or another of their members. Their pastor was Mr. Richard Clifton, and his assistant was Mr. John Robinson. In the course of their wanderings from England to Amsterdam and from Amsterdam to Leyden, Clifton vanished, and Robinson was in charge.

Robinson was one of the sanest progressives in ecclesiastical history. Convinced though he was that his church was an improvement over the Episcopal Church, he did not for a moment believe that it was the last word in organized religion. ‘I profess myself,’ he writes, ‘always one of them who still desire to learn further what the good will of God is.’ Though he believed in the infallibility of the Scriptures, he did not believe in the infallibility of man’s interpretation of them. ‘It is not possible,’ says he, ‘the Christian world should come so lately out of such thick Antichristian darknesse, and that full perfection of knowledge should break forth at once.’ His quarrel was not with the doctrine of the Church of England, but with its government by the Bishops; and for this government he substituted an almost perfect democracy. His church was ruled by Elders, chosen by the congregation and authorized to serve only with the consent of the brethren, ‘Who,’ he says, ‘ought not in contempt to be called the laity, but to be treated as men and brethren in Christ, not as slaves or minors.’

Such was the doctrine which the founders of the Congregational Church in New England brought with them when they came. How far they succeeded in following it will appear anon. ‘We must apply ourselves to God’s present dealing, not to his wonted dealing,’ was a maxim which they knew to be true in theory and which they did their best to put in practice. If Robinson had been able to go with them to Plymouth, their best would have been a good deal better. But he died in Leyden, thwarted in his greatest desire, which was to tend his flock in their new pastures. Their Covenant was couched in general terms, and so sounds broader than it really was:

In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and in obedience to his holy
will and divine ordinances, we, being by the most wise and good
providence of God brought together in this place, and desirous to
unite ourselves into one congregation or church under the Lord Jesus
our Head, that it may be in such sort as becometh all those whom he
hath redeemed and sanctified to himself, we do hereby solemnly and
religiously, as in his most holy presence, vouch the Lord Jehovah the
only true God to be our God and the God of ours, and do promise and
bind ourselves to walk in all our ways according to the rule of the
Gospel, and in all sincere conformity to his holy ordinances, and in
mutual love to and watchfulness over one another, depending wholly
and only upon the Lord our God to enable us by his Grace hereunto.

This Constitution was framed by men who, unlike Robinson, were convinced that they had found the one true faith and so were quick to resent any deviation from it. When settlements began to appear at Sandwich, Yarmouth, and Barnstable, the Court stipulated that each new group should have an _Orthodox_ minister, or should be near enough to a town that had one, to go to church on Sunday. If the preaching was in any way irregular--‘weak and unsafe’ were the stock adjectives--the minister’s record was examined, his doctrines scrutinized, and if he got off with a warning, he was lucky. What Artemus Ward says of the Puritans is, unfortunately, about as true of the Plymouth men: ‘I believe we are descended from the Puritans,’ he writes, ‘who nobly fled from a land of despitism to a land of freedim, where they could not only enjoy their own religion, but prevent everybody else from enjoying _his_.’

One minister who was broader than most in his doctrine and who did as much for religion and civilization on the Cape as any man has ever done, was John Lothrop, who came from Scituate with his flock and settled in Barnstable in 1639. Mr. Lothrop was a marked man even before he came to Scituate. The record of his trial in 1632 for holding a conventicle in the house of a brewer’s clerk in Blackfriars, shows clearly enough what the Bishops thought of Congregationalist morals. The custom at such trials was to hurl three or four questions at the defendant before giving him a chance to answer. Lothrop was asked by what authority he preached at the conventicle, and at the same time ‘How manie woemen sate crosse legged upon the bedd, whilest you sate on one side and preached and prayed most devoutlie?’ (This from the Bishop of London.) Lothrop replied, ‘I keepe noe such evill companie, they were not such woemen.’ Thereupon the Bishop of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury demanded in chorus, ‘Are you a minister?’ and the Bishop of Saint David’s asked, ‘Were you not Dr. King, the Bishop of London’s, Sizer in Oxford? I take it you were; and you shew your thankfullness by this.’ Lothrop answered that he was a Minister. ‘How and by whom qualified?’ asked the Bishop of London; ‘Where are your orders?’ ‘I am a Minister of the gospell of Christ,’ replied Lothrop; ‘and the Lord hath qualified me.’ He then refused the oath and was sent back to prison.

Like Robinson, Lothrop was a Congregationalist of the wisest sort. He even admitted to Christian fellowship the persecuted Anabaptists, who not only in England but in the Massachusetts Bay Colony as well, knew the meaning of prison and stocks and banishment. Their method of immersion, to be sure, Lothrop regarded as unnecessarily thorough--‘Whole rivers,’ he writes, ‘show not forth Christ’s suffering, pouring him out like water, besprinkling all his raiment.’ But if the Anabaptists preferred extensive immersion, they were welcome to their belief and to fellowship in his Church. Lothrop took no stock in creeds or particularized confessions of faith, for they seemed to him narrow. He substituted the whole Bible for them, and gladly admitted to membership in his church any one who professed faith in God and promised to do his best to keep the Ten Commandments. Though his writings show him to be a student of theology, and though this subject was to him one of great intellectual interest, he wisely realized that to fill sermons with it was to put congregations to sleep; so he chose his texts with a view to the immediate temporal and spiritual needs of his flock, and read theology at his own fireside.

If more men of Lothrop’s caliber had been ministers on the Cape, the ugly period of Quaker persecution would have worn a fairer face. Though he died before the Quaker troubles began, yet it was in great measure owing to his tolerant teachings that his own town of Barnstable escaped almost untouched by the tar brush that so thoroughly bespattered the neighboring town of Sandwich. Sandwich, in fact, was the Friends’ Headquarters and the scene of most of the trouble. In 1658, eighteen families there belonged to the new sect. Some said, indeed, that almost the whole town had turned Quaker. One reason why the authorities dealt so harshly with Quakers was that this sect was the first to rebel against the standing order of worship. By the middle of the seventeenth century they had established themselves in Sandwich and were enjoying persecution. The following item from the Aspinwall Papers under the date of 1659 is of interest:

I. I. and W. Leddra went ... to a place called Sandwich where there
are many friends, who suffer much in the spoiling of their goods;
after that they had been there some time, they were taken prisoners
at A Towne called Plymouth. Dearly Beloved C. Holder ... is passed
towards Sandwitch againe, as I have been told, where he had fine
service among friends since I. I. and W. L. were Imprisoned.

But the fine service referred to was not without unpleasant interruptions, for on June 23, 1658, Christopher Holder and John Copeland, the first Quaker ministers on the Cape, were arrested on their way to Sandwich, and a little later were sent out of the jurisdiction.

The authorities sometimes tried other tactics before resorting to pains and penalties. In 1659, they made an attempt--apparently sincere but comically ineffectual--to bring the erring brethren back to the Orthodox fold. John Smith, of Barnstable, together with Isaac Robinson of Falmouth, and two Plymouth men, was permitted to attend Quaker meetings with a view to persuading the Friends to abandon their ways. So far from succeeding, the experiment resulted in the conversion of both Robinson and Smith, and three years later Smith was one of a group that broke away from the Barnstable church and formed a Quaker meeting of their own. A joint council of clergy and laymen was called to recommend what measures should be taken in this alarming state of affairs. Their verdict was sufficiently explicit and harsh enough to suit the most vindictive. The gist of it was that other churches might not hold communion with the Quakers, nor the Quakers among themselves.

But neither excommunication nor the disfranchisement that went with it disturbed the Quakers in the least, for they believed that their own consciences were better guides than the decrees of orthodoxy. The authorities, however, did not stop with decrees. They, too, had consciences which drove them to carry on vigorously the war that they had declared. When the Quakers persisted in absenting themselves from church and holding meetings of their own, they were fined. Since they usually had not money enough to pay the fine, their goods were seized, and this, in frontier settlements, where axes and kettles were scarce and horses and cattle indispensable, was hardship, indeed. The marshal whose duty it was thus to plunder the houses of recalcitrant Quakers, had, one would suppose, an unpleasant task. But whether by accident or design, a man had been selected as marshal of the three towns of Sandwich, Barnstable, and Yarmouth, who was as ruthless as the laws he was called upon to enforce. George Barlow, ‘the Quaker Terror,’ had, so far as can be discovered from contemporary authorities, not a single good trait. A bully, a drunkard, and a hypocrite, he took malicious pleasure in tyrannizing over a sect from whom he was in no danger of suffering physical injury.

There is no need of reciting the long list of Barlow’s brutalities. He had no imagination, and his technique never varied. It was his habit to take not what would be most valuable to the authorities, but what would be most poignantly missed by the Quaker families. The story of his visit to the house of William Allen in Sandwich, which has become a local tradition, will serve to illustrate his methods. Allen’s thrift and industry had made him prosperous, but his subsequent adherence to the Quaker doctrine made him poor. His house was a rendezvous for Friends; he was therefore a marked man in the eye of the law, and during 1658 and 1659, so much of his property was seized that nothing remained but his house and land, and a single cow. He had himself been driven from town and was, at the time of Barlow’s final visit, lying in a Boston jail. His wife Priscilla and the children were alone in the house. The marshal first took the cow, all the corn in the house, and a bag of meal that had been given to Mrs. Allen by the neighbors. Not content with this, he annexed the only copper kettle she had, and said with a leer, ‘Now, Priscilla, how will thee cook for thy family and friends? Thee has no kettle.’ ‘George,’ replied Mrs. Allen, ‘that God who hears the young ravens when they cry will provide for them. I trust in that God, and I verily believe the time will come when thy necessity will be greater than mine.’ Barlow, so the story goes, lived to see Priscilla’s prophecy fulfilled.

It is easy enough in this day of toleration, or indifference, in matters of doctrine, to criticize the authorities who harried the Society of Friends. Those dignitaries could see no sense in the reason which the Quakers gave for refusing to contribute to the Orthodox Church, though a sounder reason would be far to seek. They had Biblical precedent, they said, for not giving support to those from whom they had received no benefit. Most of the magistrates, it is true, from Governor Hinckley down to the humblest office-holder, were blind to the inconsistency of an attitude wherein they felt justified in refusing to contribute to the Church of England, but refused to acknowledge that the Quakers were justified in refusing to contribute to the Congregational Church. One should reflect, however, before censuring Hinckley and his assistants too severely, that they were convinced that theirs was the one true church, and that any who refused its doctrine, whether Episcopalians or Quakers, were heretics. The casual citizen had little fault to find with Quakers. He found them, except when expressing their views on the government, agreeable and peace-loving neighbors, temperate, industrious, and helpful. He was never shocked, as citizens in other parts of New England occasionally were, by the spectacle of naked Quakers rushing through village streets, to the glory of God and of the Society of Friends. So he was far from sharing the Court’s views that all Quakers should either recant or move away. More than once, in fact, Orthodox citizens, in trying to act as buffers between the Quakers and the authorities, were badly bruised between the rolling side of the Quaker ship and the granite pier of the Government. In 1658, nine citizens of Sandwich were disfranchised for being, or sympathizing with, Quakers. There was danger even for a deputy who lifted up his voice in behalf of the persecuted sect. James Cudworth, for a time a citizen of Barnstable and deputy to the General Court, writes as follows in November, 1658:

Last election Mr. Hatherly, and my Self, left off the Bench, and
myself Discharged of my Captainship because I had entertained some of
the Quakers at my house (thereby that I might be better acquainted
with their Principles). I thought it better so to do, than with the
blind World, to Censure, Condem, Rail at, and Revile them, when they
neither saw their Persons, nor knew any of their Principles. But the
Quakers and my self cannot close in divers things; and so I signified
to the Court, I was no Quaker, but must bear my Testimony against
sundry things that they held, as I had Occasion and Opportunity:
But withal I told them, that as I was no Quaker, so I would be no
Persecutor.

Such was the attitude that cost Cudworth his captaincy and his position as deputy.

It would, of course, be an error to suppose that all the punishments the Quakers received were unjust. They were more than exasperating in their ‘holier than thou’ attitude. Morton says truly that ‘they placed their justification upon their patience and suffering for their opinions, and on their righteous life and retired demurity, and affected singularity both in word and gesture.’ Furthermore, contempt of court was quite as often the cause of their being punished as their ‘corrupt and damnable doctrines.’ Governors and magistrates were to them no more than farmers or tanners. Nor did the Quakers always adhere to that ‘retired demurity’ of life on which they so much prided themselves. Robert Harper undoubtedly got what he deserved when he was whipped for ‘intolerably insolent conduct at Barnstable in railing against Mr. Wally and at Sandwich against Mr. Wiswall.’ Even to-day there would be a sensation if a high official were called in public ‘an impudent man and a pitiful governor.’ Yet that is the language that a Sandwich Quaker used toward his chief magistrate; and he went on to taunt the Governor, asking him ‘why he did not send him to gaol since his back had long itched to be whipped.’ But the limit in abusive language was reached when Humphrey Norton, addressing Governor Prince before the assembled Court, said, ‘Thomas, thou liest; Prince, thou art a malicious man.’ And again, ‘Thy clamorous tongue I regard no more than the dust under my feet.’ ‘Thou art like a scolding woman.’ Imprisonment or whipping for such silly insolence was just enough.

By quick stages the persecution of Quakers began to cease. They first appeared on the Cape about 1656. King Charles’s letter of 1661, enjoining all Colonial Governors to cease persecuting them, was followed three years later by a commission which arrived in New England in response to repeated Quaker appeals, to look the situation over, try certain cases, and recommend toleration. The commissioners were respectfully greeted by representatives from Plymouth; the King’s men felt no real enthusiasm about the Quaker question; the Plymouth men felt no interest in enlightening them. They talked pleasantly but vaguely; the commissioners began to sigh for the fleshpots of London, and soon sailed back home to the satisfaction of every one but the Quakers. It cannot be asserted, therefore, that either the King’s letter or his commission put an end to the persecutions, but they undoubtedly gave the authorities pause. If the Quakers had the royal ear, it might be as well to walk circumspectly. The death of Governor Prince in 1673 and the succession of Josiah Winslow was another step toward peace, for Winslow was far more tolerant than his predecessor. From this date the policy of leniency grew, in spite of Hinckley’s uncompromising attitude, until, in 1717, we find Yarmouth voting in a town meeting that no Quaker need contribute to the support of the Orthodox minister.

Why, it may be asked, was the Court and not the Church the power that punished the Quakers? The answer is twofold. In the first place, Quaker demonstrations were almost always breaches of the peace rather than heresy, and as such they came under the jurisdiction of the Court. In the second place, the worst penalty the Church could inflict was excommunication, which was no punishment at all to the Friends. Furthermore, for a long time there was almost no distinction between the Church and the civil government--certainly nothing like the gulf that separates them to-day. And this was natural, for the Bible in the minds of the Pilgrims was an adequate source of government; they consulted the Mosaic Law, it will be remembered, for the answers to knotty questions in jurisprudence. More often than not new settlements were made by churches, not by scattered individuals. It was Lothrop’s church that came with him and settled Barnstable; it was half the Plymouth church that made the town of Eastham. Membership in the church was a requisite for civil distinction and even for the right to vote. The personnel of the parish and of the civil government was identical. It is not surprising, therefore, that for many years parish business was transacted in town meetings. In 1703, when Falmouth decided to dispense with the preaching of Mr. Shiverick, the action was taken in a town meeting because every man at the meeting was necessarily a member of the church. Another Falmouth minister, Mr. Isaiah Mann, died in 1789, and the town voted a supply of wood and rye for his widow. All the early town records are full of ministers’ salaries and other church affairs.

The Church, nevertheless, maintained disciplinary powers quite distinct from the Court and held the right to excommunicate brethren who refused to follow what it decreed even in regard to purely civil controversies. Excommunication, though it held no terrors for the Quakers, was a calamity to the Orthodox citizen, for with his loss of membership in the Church came automatically the loss of his vote in town and Colony elections. His only resource lay in his right to appeal to a higher ecclesiastical council.

An interesting case of this sort of Church discipline--and one that is the more striking because it occurred as late as 1868--was the incident of Joseph Bodfish, of West Barnstable, and the pasture bars. Mr. Bodfish, an elderly and respected member of the Congregational Church, had for years, in getting out his winter’s wood, been in the habit of crossing a piece of meadow that belonged to another member of the family. At the owner’s death, the meadow went to Joseph’s cousin, Sylvanus, also a member of the church. Sylvanus promptly warned Joseph not to cross that way any more, and nailed bars across the gap in the fence. Joseph consulted Judge Marston, who told him that he had a clearly established right of way to the swamp and advised him to pull down the bars himself if Sylvanus wouldn’t. Joseph--obviously a lover of peace--asked one of the deacons to try his luck at persuading Sylvanus to remove the bars. The deacon refused and recommended instead that the matter be laid before the church. This Joseph did, but unfortunately intimated that if the church did not decide in his favor, he would take the dispute to Court, and rely on Judge Marston to see him through.

The committee, not unnaturally, were angry at this veiled threat, which reminded them of the unpleasant truth that the Court was a more powerful body than they. So they refused to remonstrate with Sylvanus, but said that they would examine the lot and see whether the wood could not be taken out some other way. This they did and declared that Joseph had no right of way across Sylvanus’s pasture and that they ‘could not justify a further prosecution of the claim’; they further _required_ Joseph to leave the matter for the whole church to decide. He refused, and was promptly suspended from membership for one year, ‘to give him opportunity of fully reflecting on the matter.’ His wife Asenath and his son Benjamin were likewise suspended. All three appealed in vain for a hearing; their appeal for a Mutual Council to decide the matter was equally vain, the parish taking the ground that ‘the church is the highest earthly tribunal to deal with disorderly members.’ The year of suspension ended on May 3, 1868, and Joseph wrote to the committee on July 28, that he was ‘willing to right the wrong, but not to wrong the right.’ This smart remark failed to please the authorities, and three days later he and his wife and son were excommunicated for ‘violation of the church covenant.’

Here was Church discipline with a vengeance. The unhappy family again appealed in vain for a hearing before a Mutual Council, and as a last resort proceeded to call a council _ex-parte_ composed of the Reverend Henry Dexter, of Boston, and eight other clergymen. This Council found that the action of the West Barnstable church was contrary to the law of Christ and the fundamental principles and usages of the Congregational Church; declared that, as such, it ought to be null and void; and recommended that the three excommunicated members be readmitted to good standing.

Other and earlier troubles had arisen to disturb the serenity of the Church. The question of baptism--always an ecclesiastical battle-ground--claimed the attention of the pious in the intervals between Quaker demonstrations. The subject had been raised in Plymouth as far back as 1638, and cropped up again in Yarmouth during the ministry of Mr. Thomas Thornton, about 1670. Thornton was a liberal and fearlessly adopted the so-called Half-Way Covenant. Up to this time only the baptized could be church members, and only the children of church members could be baptized. But the Half-Way Covenant authorized the baptism of the children of any pious persons professing Orthodoxy, even though they had never been baptized. This reasonable measure raised a few ominous clouds in the conservative half of the heavens, and resulted in some rumblings as of an approaching storm. But Thornton forged ahead without shortening sail, and came through safely. The Half-Way Covenant flourished in the free air of the New World, and spread to one town after another up and down the Cape.

The fact is that, as their numbers grew and their prosperity increased, the settlers began to feel less interest in the minutiæ of formalized worship, if not in religion itself. The Mayflower band, with winter knocking at the door of their unwarmed houses, had found comfort in religion when no other comfort could be had. So was it with the pioneers on the Cape. But when the first sharp struggle with the wilderness had been won, and the settlers began to build adequate houses with wide hearths, religion came to be less a crying need and more an extra-curriculum activity. This is doubtless one reason why there was not a greater storm when Thornton adopted the Half-Way Covenant. Goodness knows men still read their Bibles and still went to Church. The Reverend John Simpkins, of Brewster, writing as late as 1809, says, ‘It is still, even at the present day, considered quite unfashionable not to attend the public worship.’ But the motive--the impulse--which is revealed by the word ‘unfashionable’--was very different from the old motive, and the change had already begun. Of course this state of affairs did not arrive until long after Thornton had gone to a well-earned rest, and his children’s children, if such there were, as well. But the ball had begun to roll, and though its momentum was as yet hardly perceptible, it was headed for a steep slope and a straight track toward the toleration that comes from indifference.

The old clergy were much concerned at the state of affairs. Not only was interest in religion waning, but ministers were becoming scarce. Barnstable went for five years, 1678-83, without any settled pastor. In 1678, the Reverend John Cotton, writing from Plymouth to Governor Hinckley at Barnstable, says that it is a ‘dying time with preachers’--a lament that is by no means foreign to the ears of our own generation. Another and important development, which the Old Guard interpreted as a sign of disintegration, was the tendency of the Cape towns to split into two parishes, ostensibly because the outlying houses were too far from the church, but perhaps also, if the truth were known, because some disliked the teachings of the settled minister and wanted a new church and a new minister of their own. The geographical reason was a good one, however, and no real objection could be raised by any one against such separations.

Sandwich made two parishes out of one in 1735, though for several years the members of the new church were compelled to contribute to the support of the old parish as well as bear the expenses of their own. Barnstable began to show signs of restlessness as early as 1712, and in spite of considerable opposition, a new parish was formed the same year. The new meetinghouse was not built until four years later; but in 1716 it was well under way on Cobb’s Hill in the easterly part of the town. It is interesting to note Cotton Mather’s distress when he learned of the proceedings. ‘Poor Barnstable,’ he writes; ‘what shall be done for thee? Give the best Advice that may be, to the afflicted and oppressed young Minister there.’ The ‘afflicted and oppressed’ young minister was the Reverend Jonathan Russell, Jr., who had recently been called to the original Church, in the West Precinct. No doubt it was hard for him to see half his parishioners walk out to serve new gods, it might be, to the eastward. But the path of progress is ever wet with the tears of conservatism or selfishness. In 1721, Yarmouth followed suit by setting off the East Precinct as a new parish, which later became the town of Dennis, and sooner or later Eastham, Harwich, and other Cape towns did likewise, sometimes in the teeth of fierce opposition from the Mother Church; sometimes with her blessing. The fact that almost always the new parishes were in time incorporated as independent towns suggests what may have been another motive for their desire to separate. The fathers of the new church would be the fathers of the new town; and independence was in the air. Thus, with mixed motives and half or quite unconsciously, our ancestors used religion as a means to civil independence.

The new parishes had plenty to think about besides their church. Some were already angling for incorporation; others devoted their energies to acquiring broader acres, neglecting God in the service of mammon. War is never good for morals or religion, and the long French and Indian Wars were playing their part in loosening the bonds that had held men to the Church. The clergy volleyed and thundered as loud as ever, but the spirits of their congregations were not so eager as of yore. The time was ripe for revival, and revival came about 1740 with the dynamic George Whitefield and the Great Awakening, the effects of which were violent and on the whole beneficial.

Whitefield was a young Episcopal clergyman who, like Mark Antony, possessed the ‘power of speech to move men’s souls.’ If he had appeared in New England a hundred years earlier, he would have been jailed as a Papist and a corrupter of the true faith. But the century and a quarter that had passed since the Pilgrims landed had gone far toward obliterating the old hatred of the Church of England. So he was permitted to travel the length and breadth of the Colonies, preaching sometimes in churches but quite as often in the open air. He never visited the Cape, but his disciples did, and the citizens listened at first with interest and then with excitement to the exhortations of the inspired young itinerants. Theirs was the doctrine of hope. Salvation, they said, was waiting for penitent sinners. Such teaching was music to the ears of men who were used to hell-fire sermons like those of Treat. Here were preachers who told them that though their sins were as scarlet, they could be as white as snow. They left the old churches by the score and were again dubbed separatists by the stand-patters, as their grandfathers had been before them. Sometimes they called themselves ‘Come-Outers’; sometimes ‘New Lights.’

Whitefield’s influence was twofold, for the ministers of other denominations copied his custom of traveling from place to place in evangelical fashion. Elisha Paine, for example, a Connecticut Baptist of Cape ancestry, made a flying visit to Harwich in 1744 in the course of a peripatetic career, and held a series of open-air meetings in which he rallied many to the Baptist standard. He writes to his wife in an exultant strain: ‘The pine woods of Harwich ring with Hallelujahs and hosannas, even from babes!’ and again, ‘I felt the spirit of the Lord come upon me. I rose up and exhorted and persuaded them to come to Christ, and immediately there was a screeching and groaning all over the multitude and hath been very powerful ever since.’ No doubt reaction followed the screeches and the groans, but the converts were the better for some religious emotion, at least, and a good many of them adhered to the new doctrine.

The Old Guard Congregational ministers, meanwhile, were at their wits’ end. No power that they could exercise, no denunciations that they could compose, had any force in checking the stream of separatists that flowed from the churches. The only response that occurred to them was to hold a meeting and draft a document which should explain why itinerant preaching in general, and Whitefield’s in particular, was pernicious. Accordingly, in February, 1745, ten of them, representing the seven principal towns, met at Harwich, which had become the center of religious unrest on the Cape. They set about their task with an earnestness born of despair. They composed a pamphlet in which the ‘many sad consequents’ of itinerant preaching were ‘discovered.’ If the itinerants wish to wander about preaching, they argued, let them go where the Word of God is not already adequately preached; let them go among the heathen. As for their plea that they have received an ‘extraordinary call,’ we shall not believe it until we see results commensurate with such a call. All impostors and enthusiasts have pretended to such extraordinary calls. We admit that the itinerants have done some good, but not enough to justify their practice; for ‘a sovereign God can and ofttimes doth bring Good out of Evil, but this in no wise excuseth the Evil-Doer.’ Furthermore, the chief result of itinerant preaching has been to substitute schism and discord for peace and unity in the established churches, and we do not believe, as the itinerants are reported to declare, that ‘Contention is a sign of the Work of God.’ Therefore, in conclusion, ‘We cannot in Faithfulness to Christ or his People under our several charges, give any Encouragement or Countenance to the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield as an Itinerant Preacher.’

This serious appeal to reason stood no chance against the revivalist’s sensational appeals to the emotions. The old Congregational clergy had to content itself with ministering to the staid and cautious, while the nimbler spirits enlisted under the flag of the schismatics. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of the ministers who drew up the indictment against the itinerants. They believed that unity was the keystone of religion, and that if unity was destroyed, the whole structure would fall in ruins. The fact that their own livelihoods were involved in the crash was naturally present to their minds, for they were human; but it served only to strengthen, not to create, their conviction. The days of ecclesiastical monopoly were at an end. The Quakers were exempt from supporting the Old Church; the Separatists and New Lights were on the highroad to the same goal. So were the Baptists. No wonder the Reverend Edward Pell, minister of the Congregational Church in the South Parish of Brewster, remarked in 1752 on his deathbed that he would prefer not to be buried in that parish, for fear ‘that the Lord would never think to look in such an ungodly place for a righteous man.’

Religious affairs remained in pretty much this posture until after the Revolution. Then, about 1795, came the Methodists, the last new sect to meet with any appreciable opposition. The scene of Quaker troubles had centered, as we have seen, at Sandwich; the principal activity of the New Lights and Baptists had taken place halfway down the Cape, at Harwich and Chatham. The Methodists began at the tip end of the Cape among the shifting sands and scrubby hills of Provincetown and Truro. Tradition says that a certain Captain William Humbert, a Methodist, whose vessel was becalmed in Provincetown Harbor, came ashore and preached to the fishermen. As nearly as can be discovered, this happened in 1793. The Captain’s words seem to have found favor with the Provincetowners, for within two years plans were under way to build a Methodist meeting-house there, and in 1795, according to Dr. Coggswell, ‘the house at last went up; the second Methodist Church in New England.’

Coggswell might well say ‘at last,’ for the opposition to the new sect was so strong that the town meeting voted that any who would not pay the standing minister’s rate should have his interest ‘sesed,’ and ‘that there shall not be a Methodist meeting-house built in this town.’ Hardly had the vote been recorded when a vessel-load of lumber for the new church arrived at the wharf and was wheeled up to the beach. Provincetown men have always been direct-actionists; a group of determined Orthodox citizens went to the beach by night, cut the lumber into convenient sizes and dragged it to the top of High Pole Hill, where they burned it with an effigy of the Reverend Jesse Lee, the Methodist minister. This gentleman was on hand to watch the performance, which seems not to have been altogether unexpected, for he writes, ‘I went to see the timber destroyed by the mob and felt astonished at the conduct of the people, considering that we live in a free country. However, I expect this will be for the good of the little Society.’ Nothing daunted, the Methodists got another load of lumber and, with armed men guarding it day and night, built their meeting-house.

This victory gave the opposition its death-blow. Further objections were but whistles against the hurricane. The town fathers were finally forced to yield, for the number of Methodists grew so fast, not only in Provincetown but in Truro and Wellfleet, that in 1830 the Provincetown Congregational Church closed its doors for want of supporters.

It is not hard to see why Methodism made so strong an appeal to the whalemen and cod-fishermen of the lower Cape. A modified form of itineracy which the new denomination practiced provided that no minister should preach in the same town for more than two years and sometimes only for one. There was, therefore, no danger that a congregation should suffer long from the harangues of a dull preacher. But variety of another sort is what made most converts. The Methodist preachers were often men of little education and no religious training. Zeal and ‘a call’ with them took the place of theological schools. The consequence was a breezy informality in their discourses. They never hesitated to employ startling tricks to keep their hearers awake. On one occasion a Methodist minister in Truro interrupted his sermon by the remark, ‘Brethren, your stove pipe is so confoundedly crooked, that I can’t preach a straight sermon.’ Another whose subject was ‘the World, the Flesh, and the Devil,’ prefaced his remarks by saying, ‘I shall touch lightly upon the World, hasten to the Flesh, and pass on to the Devil, when I will give it to you hot as you can sup it.’ It is a consolation, if we are to get the Devil, to be given him in a language that we can understand. There was, in fact, little danger that a Methodist preacher would shoot over the heads of his hearers. This--with a pleasant smattering of rugged wit--went far toward making Methodism popular, for no men appreciate wit more keenly than Cape-Codders. The Reverend Edgar Clark, one of the early Methodist ministers in Provincetown, showed adroitness and much sense when a pharisaic whaleman of his congregation asked him what to do if, after cruising for months without filling a cask, he sighted a hundred-barrel whale on Sunday. ‘I think,’ said Mr. Clark, ‘I should call all hands together and ask the Lord to bless us. Then I would go and get the whale.’

Another pleasant practice of the Methodists was Camp Meeting Week, which began at Wellfleet in 1819 and after a few years moved to Truro. Camp meetings were, and continue to be, not merely religious assemblies, but social outings as well. The women find a few days in camp a pleasant change from the drudgery of their kitchens; the men do not confine their conversation to ecclesiastical topics. The early camp meetings were thronged with enthusiastic citizens of every denomination from all over the Cape:

‘We saw great gatherings in a grove,
A grove near Pamet Bay,
Where thousands heard the preacher’s word,
And dozens knelt to pray.’

Eastham was the next camp meeting town. Here they began in 1828 and were so successful that the Methodists bought a ten-acre lot called Millennium Grove, and put up a big frame building to house the ministers. The congregations lived in tents. Sometimes--especially on Sundays--as many as five thousand persons attended, some of them, it must be confessed, inspired by no loftier motive than curiosity or mischief. Here men and women arose to give testimony as to their religious experiences, and no doubt some who came to scoff remained to pray. Camp meetings are still held every summer in the woods between Yarmouth and Hyannis.

So, before long, for this reason and that, the Methodists out-numbered any other denomination in most of the Cape towns; and as soon as this happened, all question of their being obliged to support the standing order vanished. Town meetings were parish meetings no longer. Religious freedom became a fact, not by any one grand proclamation, but by years of persistent work by Quakers, Itinerants, Baptists, and Methodists. No two towns struck off the shackles at exactly the same time, but in general by 1816, when Wellfleet exempted Methodists from supporting the Orthodox Church, religion on the Cape might take what form it would.

All this was mighty hard on the devout old Congregationalist ministers, whose lot, even in the palmiest days of orthodoxy, had been no easy one. No picture of early ecclesiastical days in the Plymouth Colony would be complete without at least a few words of tribute to these stalwart pillars of a stalwart faith. Taken by and large, no finer or more influential men ever ministered to a nation’s welfare. It is no accident that the towns of Bourne, Dennis, and Brewster were named for their pastors. Such men as John Lothrop, Richard Bourne, Timothy Alden, Josiah Dennis, and Samuel Treat are titanic figures in the history of the Cape. Theirs was the task of setting a spiritual and intellectual standard that should permeate every phase of life. Righteous themselves, they demanded righteousness in their followers, and within the limitations of human nature, they got it. Their example gave strength to the weak and courage to the faint-hearted. As often as not they were physicians as well as pastors, ministering to ills of the body with the same rugged energy they employed with the ills of the soul. The Reverend Thomas Thornton was the only doctor in Yarmouth from 1670 until old age forced him to retire. Fifty years later Mr. Greenleaf was both minister and physician for the same town. The Reverend Hugh Adams, who was called to the pulpit in Chatham in 1711, is said to have had an extensive medical practice, even outside his own parish. The tombstone of the Reverend Benjamin Fessenden, who died in Sandwich later in the same century, bears among other eulogistic remarks the following: ‘not only as a divine was he useful, but as a discreet and successful physician.’

These early men of God had to be men of fine parts to get their positions in the first place; before they were officially called to a church, they were often required to prove their mettle by a long series of sermons before congregations as critical and as potentially hostile as school boys. Timothy Alden preached sixteen times to the Yarmouth Parish before they were satisfied that he would do; and Mr. Joseph Green, who antedated him by a few years, worked for fifty-two Sundays to earn the same position. Sandwich was still more candid. Unable to decide whether Thomas Tupper or Richard Bourne was the better man, the congregation asked them to preach in competition, and he who had the fuller house was named ‘minister for the day.’

The ministers needed ready tact and large sympathies, if they were to cope successfully with such troublesome parishioners as Sunday fishermen, many of whom were for nine months of the year exemplary Christians. What, for example, was the Truro parson to say to a certain noted skipper who used to assert with commendable candor that ‘there was no hope for him if he died during the fishing season, but in winter he was all right?’ Such questions wanted nice handling. Lack of tact cost the Reverend Charles Boyter his pulpit in Truro. He arrived there about a hundred years ago and decided one day to swell the numbers of his congregation by announcing that his next discourse would be a sermon on Luck. Sunday morning found the church filled with interested fishermen, who knew more about luck than any other class of men in the world. But Mr. Boyter proclaimed that there was no such thing as luck; industry and hard work, not luck, were what brought full fares of fish. ‘Bait your hooks with red flannel,’ he told them; ‘then if you don’t catch codfish, it will be because you don’t try.’ And he compared the rigors of the Grand Banks to ‘trouting in the brooks of Vermont with a fly and pole.’ Shortly after this sermon, Mr. Boyter left Truro to try his luck in Orange, New Jersey.

Then there was the ticklish question of church music; that, too, craved wary walking. The Old Church fell heir to Calvin’s prejudice against instrumental music, though one may properly ask whether their peculiar antipathy to organs was not owing to their cost and the difficulty of getting them, quite as much as to any more pious objection. In 1726, the West Parish of Barnstable was split wide open on the question of music, and had to call in civil authority to decide it. But two years later the progressives won, and the church voted to sing ‘the regular or new way,’ that is, with the accompaniment of instruments. The Orleans church had no music, other than vocal, until 1810; then a bass viol made its appearance, probably in the face of strong opposition from a conservative minority.

Through quicksands such as these the parson had to pick his way with care, guided by his conscience on the one hand and expediency on the other. But the greatest trials of the ministers arose from the very ardor and attentiveness of the congregations. The Reverend John Robinson’s principle that every member should feel responsible for the church’s welfare and should have a voice in all its proceedings, was undoubtedly a fine thing; but it made endless trouble for the pastor. Any one felt justified in falling foul of his doctrine. Mr. Marmaduke Matthews, who occupied the pulpit in Yarmouth about 1640, was hauled over the coals for ‘weak and unsafe’ remarks in his sermons; and this in spite of the fact that he has been characterized as ‘able, zealous and devoted.’ Mr. Matthews humbly apologized, confessing that ‘he might have expressed and delivered himself in terms more free from exception,’ and he was allowed to continue his labors.

Yarmouth, in fact, was early a hotbed of trouble for ministers. In 1651, Mr. John Miller, the pastor of the town, was haled before the Plymouth Court for alleged aspersions against the Government. What these aspersions were is not stated. Doubtless they were as chimerical as Mr. Matthews’s heresies. The citizens of Falmouth in 1702 voted that they would not employ Samuel Shiverick any more to preach to them, and chose Joseph Parker to tell him of it. What it was in Mr. Shiverick’s preaching that offended his hearers one is left to conjecture.

Another celebrated row occurred in Eastham, where the Reverend Samuel Osborn, after preaching from 1718 to 1738, was dismissed by a vote of an ecclesiastical council. The judgment of this august gathering is no surprise, for Osborn had forsaken Calvin for Arminius, and had been indiscreet enough to assert a universal negative, by saying that there were no promises in the Bible but what were conditional. Few Yankees, even to-day, would let this statement pass without thumbing their Bibles for evidence against it. Yet Osborn, aside from being a powerful preacher, had done much for the temporal welfare of Eastham; he had taught the citizens better ways of growing crops and had showed them how the peat, of which there was a great quantity in the town, might be used for fuel.

While Mr. Osborn was in doctrinal difficulties at Eastham, the Reverend Joseph Metcalfe found himself in sartorial trouble in Falmouth. With no previous warning, he appeared one Sunday in the pulpit sporting a new wig, which, though ‘not expressed in fancy, neat, not gaudy,’ was yet a sufficient improvement over the old one to set the Falmouth ladies’ tongues wagging about vanity and the preacher. The next day he stepped, perhaps by accident, into a house where several prominent ladies were discussing the absorbing topic. Mr. Metcalfe, the soul of urbanity, suggested that they might be better pleased if he gave up wearing a wig altogether? No, that would never do, they declared in scandalized tones. Perhaps they would like the old one reinstated? By no means! ‘Then let us alter the new one until it ceases to offend,’ said the patient pastor, wherewith he presented it to one of the ladies after another, each of whom clipped from it what she regarded as the sinful lock. The last lady declared that to wear a wig at all was to break the Second Commandment, but Mr. Metcalfe pointed out that the wig in its present condition ‘was so unlike anything in the heaven above or on the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth,’ that it was surely exempt from any possible censure.

Quarrels of one sort or another between clergymen and their congregations became so much matters of course that one canny divine, Mr. Hugh Adams, who was called to Chatham in 1711, took precautionary measures. He accepted the call on condition that if any difference arose between him and his parish (‘which we should both humbly pray there may never be’), a committee of clergymen should decide on the rights and wrongs of the disagreement; that if the whole blame was found to rest on the people, Adams and his heirs should still be entitled to his salary forever, whether he was dismissed or not. If neither party was found to blame, or if the blame was equally divided, the salary, too, should be equally divided. Mr. Adams’s fears were prophetic. After five years, the trouble came, and he was dismissed, stoutly asserting that he did not care, for ‘he had a better call elsewhere.’ It would be interesting to know whether the town lived up to its agreement regarding his salary. Perhaps, though, he was found _wholly_ to blame!

Any treasures which the old clergy laid up for themselves must have been in heaven; certainly they got few enough of them on earth, for ministers in colonial times were paid proportionally no better than they are now; but it does seem hard that for a time they were obliged to collect their own salaries. How they did it, one can only conjecture; perhaps by a door-to-door canvas, hat in hand; perhaps, if they were more discreet, by a fervid reference to the soaring price of beef in the course of a parish call. At any rate, it was a miserable arrangement, which in the words of the Reverend Enoch Pratt ‘was attended with much trouble [to the minister] and often impaired his usefulness.’ After one generation had suffered under it, the method was changed; but even so, not much actual cash found its way into the parsonage. The fact that parishioners counted on drift whales to pay part of the minister’s salary shows that installments must have arrived with some irregularity. In 1659, some of the Yarmouth men refused to contribute anything to the support of Mr. Miller, and were very properly taken to task by the Court.

Sometimes the parishioners tried to dock the ministerial stipend, as the Wellfleeters did with the Reverend Mr. Lewis in 1747. Times were hard, and the rapid depreciation of currency threw all old standards to the winds. His parishioners waited on Mr. Lewis with the suggestion that he accept the sum of sixty pounds, new tenor, as his salary from then on. But Mr. Lewis was a business man and no doubt had a large and hungry family; it is a pleasure to record that he held out for seventy-five pounds, and got it.

A good part of the pastor’s pay took the form of wood and salt hay. Just after the Revolution, the Reverend Jude Damon of Truro received a salary of seventy-five pounds in cash besides the use of the parsonage, eighteen cords of wood cut and delivered at his door, and five tons of salt hay. In 1749, Mr. Stephen Emery, the Chatham minister, received a similar allowance of wood. So, taken all in all, and considering the simplicity of the times, the early Cape clergymen lived comfortably enough. If the flock sometimes grew careless and were late with the winter’s wood, they were sure to turn up with it sooner or later. Timothy Alden, the beloved pastor of Yarmouth, had this experience on one occasion and chose for his next Sunday’s text, ‘Where no wood is there the fire goeth out.’ Mr. Joseph Green, the Barnstable minister, started the pleasant custom of asking the boys in to a hearty dinner washed down with a glass of flip when the wood was unloaded.

As time went on, freedom of speech, which grew with the progress of civilization, became gall and wormwood to the preacher. No divinity hedged him; he was fair game for earnest conservative and godless scoffer:

‘A learned Treat, a pious Webb,
And Cheever--all no more;
Mr. Shaw then took the helm
And run the ship ashore.’

So sang Peter Walker, the unregenerate blacksmith of Eastham, when the Reverend Philander Shaw, after more than forty years of service, retired from the old Congregational Church, which had grown as weak and infirm as its pastor.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, a strange kind of religious fanaticism visited many of the towns, attacking with greater or less violence a small number of estimable persons who, as soon as they became infected with the malady, promptly withdrew from whatever church they had belonged to and styled themselves ‘Come-Outers.’ They then indulged in antics that rivaled the antics of the Quakers. Frequently, when under the spell of their mania, they walked along the tops of fences instead of on the sidewalks; affected a strange, springing gait, and conversed by singing instead of by ordinary speech, in the distressing manner of characters in light opera. A favorite tune for the purpose was ‘Old Dan Tucker.’

If the Come-Outers had confined themselves to these eccentricities, they might have been allowed, quite literally, to go their own gait unmolested, for tolerance was pretty well established all over the Cape. But fanatics are never satisfied while they see the rest of the world sane; they must needs turn reformers and usher all mankind along their special route to paradise. So it was with the Come-Outers, and so their troubles began--troubles that bear a striking analogy to the troubles of the Quakers. Certain of them were in the habit of attending Methodist meetings in Barnstable in order to disturb the proceedings by shouts and songs. After repeated warnings, they were finally brought into Court, and Nymphas Marston was employed in their defense. They lost their case and were ordered to pay the expenses of the trial; they refused, whereupon Marston attached the cattle of one of his recalcitrant clients, and the fun began. The animals were put up at auction before a large crowd that had come on the chance that there might be some excitement. They were not disappointed. Most of the Come-Outers in town were there, proclaiming that the sheriff would never dare to sell the cattle, and that no one would dare to buy them, for they belonged to God, and that God’s curse would fall upon all who were concerned in the transaction. They accompanied these announcements with the dances and songs in which they always indulged when angry, and which they called ‘dancing a person down to hell.’ Bidding was slow--perhaps because the citizens were frightened by the threats, perhaps because they were being pleasantly entertained by the performances of the Come-Outers. Finally two of the crowd, Daniel Scudder and Daniel Smith, walked off, bored at the leisurely fashion in which the auction progressed. This gave a fine chance for some improvised lines from the Come-Outers, one of whom burst into the following couplet to the tune of ‘Old Dan Tucker’:

‘I don’t wonder Daniel Smith and
Daniel Scudder flee away!’

But there were hard heads enough in the assemblage to bid on the cattle at last, and run the risk of incurring God’s wrath. So Mr. Marston got his pay.

Wherever money is at stake, it is usually possible to discover a thread of reason in men’s actions. But to account for the behavior of the persons in the following bits of idiocy is not so easy. An enthusiastic Barnstable Come-Outer had a pig. A prophetess of his order told him that he must kill it because the Devil was in it. He killed it, dressed it nicely, and buried it, convinced that he was weakening Satan’s dominion thereby. Not only pigs, but money might be the Devil’s abode. A good woman acted as nurse for a sick friend and was paid a small sum for her services. The friend who gave it to her remarked, with a Come-Outer’s shudder, that the Devil was in it, whereupon the horrified recipient threw it into Great Pond. The happy sequel to this anecdote is not that she ever found the money again, but that she did regain her wits and had many a laugh over the antics of her Come-Outer days.

The strange sect was flourishing during the years just before the Civil War, and became curiously involved in the Abolition Movement which was so active at that time. As has been explained in another chapter, one reason why certain men and women withdrew from the various regular churches was that the churches tolerated slavery. After they had withdrawn, these persons sometimes called themselves Come-Outers, whether or not they joined with those of the same name whose actions have just been described. But Abolition became linked with Come-Outerism, and slavery was strengthened thereby. In other respects this eccentric spasm of religious possession did little harm. Many of its victims recovered after a time; it vanished altogether after the Civil War.

And what of recent religion on the Cape? There is not much to tell. Quakers, Baptists, and Methodists broke down the bars, and at one time or another during the last seventy-five years, every sect that the ingenuity of man can devise has had its fling. Even those two great churches which our ancestors called the harlots of Babylon--the Roman Catholic and the Episcopal--to-day are given the right hand of fellowship by the old-line Congregational parishes. Charles Jenkins, the lively historian of Falmouth, was among the last of the stand-patters when he wrote, in 1843, ‘Already do we hear that motto so offensive to every true son of New England “No Church without a Bishop.”’ But the Episcopal Church has been represented here since the fifties, and the Cape is the better therefor. The shades of Bradford and Lothrop, if they rise from their graves at the sound of the Te Deum, rise to join in the Amen; for in the light of their abode, where all secrets are revealed, they interpret anew the teachings of their old pastor, John Robinson, who ‘still desired to learn further what the good will of God was.’ It should be said, however, that the Episcopal churches even to-day are attended almost exclusively by summer visitors.

The Church of Rome came with the Portuguese fishermen to Provincetown, and spread with the prosperity of these hardy seafarers. Within twenty years the Finns, whose numbers have increased amazingly in the neighborhood of West Barnstable, have presented the Cape with various sorts of Lutheran theology. The Universalists are everywhere prospering. Some of the old Congregational churches, like that of the East Parish in Barnstable, went Unitarian, but retained the name and polity of the old organization. Here and there are Christian Scientists; the Swedenborgians have a number of representatives. The Mormons followed Greenwich Village to Provincetown; a dingy little building in South Yarmouth echoed not long ago to the enthusiastic activities of the Holy Rollers. A group of Dennis men, finding nothing to their taste in existing theology, created for themselves the Free Independent Church of Holiness, and some of their equally dissatisfied neighbors anticipated the Provincetown Mormons by joining the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, wherein, let us hope, they found peace at the last.

‘Divide and conquer’ might well have been the Devil’s doctrine in thus splitting into fragments the remains of a once vigorous piety. To-day as one makes his way through the Cape villages, one sees in each two or three great arks of meetinghouses, each of them big enough to accommodate half the regular church-goers in the county, each of them attended, if it is attended at all, by a handful of the devout, who, like the preacher’s utterances, are lost among the hollow echoings of empty pews. Some have closed their doors for good and stand as bleak monuments to a transient enthusiasm. Truly as far as church-going is concerned, man has divided, and the Devil has conquered. Perhaps, after all, the despairing stanza of a pessimistic poet is close to the truth:

‘I dreamed that I went to the City of Gold,
To Heaven resplendent and fair,
And after I entered the beautiful fold
By one in authority there I was told
That not a Cape-Codder was there.’