Chapter I (4)

OLD BROWNISTS:--By this name may be called certain adherents of that vehement Independency, more extreme than mere Congregationalism, which had been propagated in Elizabeth's reign by Robert Brown himself. Brown's writings, we learn from Baillie, had totally disappeared in England; so that the so-called _Brownists_ can hardly have been his direct disciples, but must have been persons who had arrived at some of his opinions over again for themselves. Briefly, without being Baptists, they were more violent Separatists, more fierce in their rejection of the discipline, worship, and ordination of the Church of England than the Independents proper. Henry Burton, minister of Friday Street church, now between fifty and sixty years of age, was one of the chief of them, and his _Protestation Protested_ (Vol. II. 591-2) may be regarded as a manifesto of their views. Even the Independents of the Assembly disowned these views. Mr. Nye had said of the book that "there was in that book gross Brownism which he nor his brethren no way agreed with him in;" and Edwards had heard stories of queer goings-on in Mr. Burton's church, and his quarrel with "a butcher and some others of his church" about prophesying. Among the Brownists, besides Burton, Edwards names prominently "Katherine Chidley, an old Brownist, and her son, a young Brownist, a pragmatical fellow," who preached in London, and occasionally went on circuit into the country. Edwards characterizes Mrs. Chidley as "a brazen-faced audacious old woman;" but we know the motive. He had not forgotten the thrashing in print he had received from Mrs. Chidley in 1641 (Vol. II. 595). [Footnote: Paget's _Heresiography_, pp. 55-82 (a great deal about the Brownists; but with next to no real information); Edwards's _Gangræna_, Part I. pp. 62-64 and Part III. 242-248 (gossip about Burton); and Part III. 170, 171 (about Chidley); Baillie's Letters, II. 184 and 192; Hanbury's Historical Memorials, II. 108 _et seq._]

ANTINOMIANS:--The origin of this heresy is attributed to Luther contemporary and fellow townsman, John Agricola, of Eisleben in Saxony (1492-1566); but the Antinomians of New England, and their chief Mrs. Hutchinson, had recently been more heard of. The story of poor Mrs. Hutchinson, the chief of these New England Antinomians, has already been told by us (Vol. II.371-7), as far as to the beginning of 1643, when we left her, a widow with a family of children, including a married daughter and that daughter's husband, beyond the bounds of New England altogether, and seeking rest for her wearied mind, and a home for her little ones, in the Dutch plantations somewhere near what is now New York. The sad end has now to be told. The Indians and the Dutch of those parts were then at feud; and in September 1643, in an inroad of the Indians into the plantation where Mrs. Hutchinson was, she and all her family were murdered, with the exception of a little daughter eight years of age, who was carried into captivity among the Indians, and not recovered till four years afterwards. The news of this tragic end of Mrs. Hutchinson had been brought across the Atlantic, and had added to the interest of pious horror with which her previous career of heresy in Massachusetts had been heard of by the orthodox in England. Mrs. Hutchinson and her Antinomianism, in fact, were already the subjects of a dreadful popular myth. Here, for example, is old Father Ephraim's account of the New England Antinomians, as he had compiled it from information received direct from America:--"Some persons among those that went hence to New England being freighted with many loose and unsound opinions, which they durst not here, they there began to vent them ... working first upon women, traducing godly ministers to be and preach under Covenant of Works, dropping their baits by little and little and angling yet further when they saw them take, and fathering their opinions on those of the best quality in the country; and, by means of Mrs. Hutchinson's double weekly lecture at Boston, under pretence of repeating Mr. Cotton's sermons, these opinions were quickly dispersed before authority was aware." But at length, when the infant church in America had been thus "almost ruinated," the judgments of God overtook the prime fomenters of the heresy in a notorious manner. "As, first, Mistress Hutchinson, the Generalissimo, the high-priestess of the new religion, was delivered at one time of 30 monstrous births, or thereabouts, much about the number of her monstrous opinions; some were bigger, some less, none of them having human shape, but shaped like her opinions: Mistress Dyer also, another of the same crew, was delivered of a large--" [here follows a minute description of a feminine monster that would have made the fortune of any travelling showman, so complexly-horrible was its physiology]. Thus God punished those monstrous "wretches," But the civil authorities of New England, as we know, had punished them too. "God put it into the hearts of the civil magistrates to convent the chief leaders of them; and, after fruitless admonitions given, they proceeded to sentence: some they disfranchised, others they excommunicated, and some they banished. A seditious minister, one Mr. Wheelwright, was one, and Mrs. Hutchinson another; who, going to plant herself on an island, called Rhode Island, under the Dutch, where they could not agree, but were miserably divided into sundry sects, removed from thence to an island called _Hell- gate_ [_Hebgate_, according to Cotton Mather], where the Indians set upon her, and slew her and her daughter, and her daughter's husband, children, and family."--Notwithstanding this dreadful fate of the Antinomians in America, the heresy had broken out in England. Nothing was publicly said of the younger Sir Henry Vane in connexion with it; though, on his return from his Massachusetts governorship, he may have brought back in his speculative head some of the Hutchinsonian ideas. According to Paget, the first Antinomian in London had been "one Master John Eaton," who had been a scholar of his own (_i.e._ at Trinity College, Oxford), and was afterwards curate of a parish near Aldgate. In fact, as we learn from Wood, he became a minister in Suffolk, was "accounted by all the neighbouring ministers a grand Antinomian," and suffered trouble accordingly. But this Eaton had died in 1641, aged about 66, and leaving but an Antinomian book or two, including "_The Honeycomb of Free Justification_;" and the leading Antinomians were new men. One of them was Mr. John Saltmarsh, a Cambridge graduate, and minister in Kent, afterwards well-known as an, army-preacher and pamphleteer; another was "one Randall who preaches about Spittal Yard."--The nature of the Antinomian doctrines, "opening such a fair and easy way to heaven," made them very popular, it appears, in London and elsewhere. Many ran after their preachers, "crowding the churches and filling the doors and windows," for "Oh, it pleaseth people well," adds old Father Ephraim, "to have heaven and their lusts too." Notwithstanding this imputation, and illustrative scandals in Edwards, it really appears that Antinomianism took itself out in high mystic preaching of justification by faith, the doctrine of assurance, and the privileges of saintship. The wild phrases that came in such preaching were the chief offence. [Footnote: Cotton Mather's _Magnalia_, Book VII. p. 19; Palfrey's Hist. of New England, I. 609, Note; Paget, 105-118; Wood's Athenæ, III. 21 (for more about Eaton); _Gangræna_ in several places, for references to Saltmarsh and Randall. Baillie in his _Dissuasive_ (pp. 57-64) has much the same story as Paget about Mrs. Hutchinson and the New England Antinomians, and attributes the rise of that heresy to the evil influence of Independency.--The idiotic and disgusting myth of the monstrous _accouchements_ of the two Antinomian women seems to have found great favour with the orthodox: and it figures in many pious books of the time and afterwards. It seems actually to have originated in America, and to have been widely believed there, while Mrs. Hutchinson was alive; for Cotton Mather, repeating it, with the most abject good faith, and in great detail, as late as 1702 (_Magnalia_, VII. 20), quotes a letter of Mr. Thomas Hooker, to the effect that at the very time of one of the diabolic _accouchements_, Mrs. Dyer's (Oct. 17, 1637), the house in which her and his wife were sitting was violently shaken, as if by an earthquake, for the space of seven or eight minutes. Mather also avers that there was an investigation of the affair by the magistrates at the time.]

FAMILISTS:--Probably because there had been a continental sect of this name in the sixteenth century, founded by a David George of Delft, Edwards includes _Familists_ among his leading English sorts of Sectaries, and Paget devotes ten pages to them. Paget, however, admits that they were "so close and cunning that ye shall hardly ever find them out." If there really was such an English sect, their main principle probably was that every society of Christians should be a kind of family- party, jolly within itself in confidential love-feasts and exchanges of sentiment, and letting the general world and its creeds roar around unquestioned and unheeded. Baillie, however, in an incidental notice of Familism in the Second Part of his _Dissuasive_, gives a somewhat different account. It was, according to him, a wild development of Anabaptism, of which not a few once "counted zealous and gracious" were suspected--including "a great man, a peer of the land." It had a public representative in Mr. Randall, who had "for some years preached peaceably in the Spital" (already mentioned among the Antinomians), and of whom Baillie had heard that he entertained such ideas as these, though reserving them probably as esoteric mysteries for the highest class of the Family of Love--"that all the resurrection and glory which Scripture promises is past already, and no other coming of Christ to judgment, or life eternal, is to be expected than what presently in this earth the saints do enjoy; that the most clear historic passages of Scripture are mere allegories; that in all things, Angels, Devils, Men, Women, there is but one spirit and life, which absolutely and essentially is God; that nothing is everlasting but the life and essence of God which now is in all creatures;" &c. We should now call this a kind of Pantheism; but probably it was coupled with that disposition to privacy, and indifference to creeds and controversies, which has been mentioned as the peculiarity of Familism. Even the _Familists_, however, it seems, had their subdivisions. One John Hetherington, a box-maker, had been a kind of Familist, but had recanted. [Footnote: Paget, 92 102, and 137,138; _Gangræna_, Part I. 13; Baillie's _Dissuasive_ Part II. pp. 99-104]

MILLENARIES OR CHILIASTS:--"An Heresy," says old Father Ephraim, "frequent at this time. This sect look for a temporary [temporal] kingdom of Christ, that must begin presently and last 1,000 years. Of this opinion are many of our Apocalyptical men, that study more future events than their present only." This is substantially all we have from Paget. In fact, however, the Chiliasts or Millenarians were hardly a mere sect. The expectation of a Millennium near at hand was very prevalent, or was becoming very prevalent, among the English Divines of the Assembly itself. "Many of the Divines here," wrote Baillie, September 5, 1645, "not only Independents, but others, such as Twisse, Marshall, Palmer, and many more, are express Chiliasts." In his _Dissuasive_, however, where he devotes an entire chapter to this heresy of Chiliasm, he attributes the grosser form of the heresy chiefly to the Independents. A kind of Chiliasm or Millenarianism, he says, had been held by some former English Divines, including Joseph Meade; but it had been reserved for two Independents--"Mr. Archer and his colleague at Arnheim, T. G." (_i.e._ Thomas Goodwin)--to invent new dreams on the subject; and these had recently been adopted by Mr. Burroughs. The purport of their doctrine was that in the year 1650, or, at the furthest, 1695, Christ was to reappear in human form at Jerusalem, destroy the existing fabric of things in a conflagration, collect the scattered Jews, raise martyrs and saints from their graves, and begin his glorious reign of a thousand years. [Footnote: Paget, 136, 137; Baillie's Letters, II. 313, and _Dissuasive_, 224-252.]

SEEKERS:--"Many have wrangled so long about the Church that at last they have quite lost it, and go under the name of _Expecters_ and _Seekers_, and do deny that there is any Church, or any true minister, or any ordinances; some of them affirm the Church to be in the wilderness, and they are seeking for it there; others say that it is in the smoke of the Temple, and that they are groping for it there--where I leave them praying to God."--So far Old Ephraim; and what he says, combined with one of Edwards's miscellaneous blasphemies already quoted, enables us to fancy the _Seekers_. They were people, it seems, who had arrived at the conclusion that the Supernatural had never yet been featured forth to man in any propositions or symbols that could be accepted as adequate, and who were waiting, therefore, for a possible "Church of the Future;" content, meanwhile, to dwell in a Temple of smoke, or (for there is the alternative figure) to see visions of the Future Church in the smoke of the present Temple.--"Mr. Erbury, that lived in Wales," (but had come to London, and then settled in Ely, whence he made excursions,) and "one Walwyn, a dangerous man, a strong head," who laboured somewhere else, are mentioned by Edwards as men avowing themselves in this predicament. Baillie mentions also one Laurence Clarkson, who had passed from Anabaptism to Seekerism, and he speaks of Mrs. Attaway, the Baptist woman-preacher, and Mr. Saltmarsh, the Antinomian, as tending the same way.----But the chief of the _Seekers_, perhaps the original founder of the Sect, and certainly the bravest exponent of their principles, was a person with whom we are already acquainted. "One Mr. Williams," writes Baillie, June 7, 1644, "has drawn a great number after him to a singular Independency, denying any true Church in the world, and will have every man to serve God by himself alone, without any church at all. This man has made a great and bitter schism lately among the Independents." Again, on the 23rd of July, Baillie refers to the same person as "my good acquaintance Mr. Roger Williams, who says there is no church, no sacraments, no pastors, no church-officers or ordinance, in the world, nor has been since a few years after the Apostles." In short, the arch- representative of this new religion of Seekerism on both sides of the Atlantic was no other than our friend Roger Williams, the Tolerationist (Vol. II. 560-3, and _antè_, pp. 113-120). Through the variations of this man's external adventures we have seen the equally singular series of variations of his mental condition. First an intense Separatist, or Independent of the most resolute type, but conjoining with this Separatism a passion for the most absolute liberty of conscience and the entire dissociation of civil power from matters of religion, then a Baptist and excommunicated on that account by his former friends in America, he had latterly, in his solitude at Providence, outgone Baptism or any known form of Independency, and, still retaining his doctrine of the most absolute liberty of conscience, had worked himself into that state of dissatisfaction with all visible church-forms, and of yearning quest after unattainable truth, for which the name _Seekerism_ was invented by himself or others. Though he did not propose that preaching should be abandoned, he had gradually settled in a notion which he thus expresses: "In the poor small span of my life, I desired to have been a diligent and constant observer, and have been myself many ways engaged, in city, in country, in court, in schools, in universities, in churches, in Old and New England, and yet cannot, in the holy presence of God, bring in the result of a satisfying discovery that either the begetting ministry of the apostles or messengers to the nations, or the feeding and nourishing ministry of pastors and teachers, according to the first institution of the Lord Jesus, are yet restored or extant." It was while he was in this stage of his mental history that Williams came over on his flying visit to England in the matter of the new charter for the Rhode Island plantations. Some whiff of his strange opinions may have preceded him; but it must have been mainly by his intercourse with leading Londoners during his stay in England, which extended over more than a year (June 1643--Sept. 1644), that he diffused the interest in himself and his Seekerism which we certainly find existing in 1644. He can have been no stranger to the chief Divines of the Westminster Assembly. Baillie, we see, was on speaking terms with him; and it is curious to note in Baillie's and other references to him the same vein of personal liking for the man, running through amazement at his heresy, which characterized the criticisms of him by his New England opponents and excommunicants. Incidents of his visit, not less interesting now, were two publications of his in London, his "_Key into the Language of America_," published in 1643, and his _Bloody Tenent of Persecution_, published in 1644.--At least the name of the sect of "The Seekers," I may add, had struck Cromwell himself, and had some fascination for him, whether on its own account, or from his acquaintance with Williams. "Your sister Claypole," he wrote to his daughter Mrs. Ireton, some two years after our present date (Oct. 25,1646), "is, I trust in mercy, exercised with some perplexed thoughts. She sees her own vanity and carnal mind, bewailing it: she seeks after (as I hope also) what will satisfy. And thus to be a Seeker is to be of the best sect next after a Finder; and such an one shall every faithful humble Seeker be in the end. Happy Seeker, happy Finder!" [Footnote: Paget, 150; _Gangræna_, Part I. p. 24, and p. 38; _Dissuasive_, Part II. pp. 96, 97 and Notes; Baillie's Letters, II. 191-2 and 212; Gammell's _Life of Roger Williams_ (Boston, 1846), and Memoir of Williams, by Edward B. Underhill, prefixed to the republication of William's _Bloody Tenent of Persecution_, by the "Hanserd Knollys Society" (1848); Carlyle's Cromwell, I. 212.]

DIVORCERS:--"These I term _Divorcers_" says Old Ephraim, "that would be quit of their wives for slight occasions;" and he goes on to speak of MILTON as the representative of the sect. Featley had previously mentioned Milton's Divorce Tract as one of the proofs of the tendency of the age to Antinomianism, Familism, and general anarchy; and Edwards and Baillie followed in the same strain. Milton's Doctrine of Divorce, it thus appears, had attracted attention, and had perhaps gained some following. Among the six caricatures of notable sects on the title-page of Paget's _Heresiography_ is one of "THE DIVORCER"--_i.e._ a man, in an admonishing attitude, and without his hat, dismissing or pushing away his wife, who has her hat on, as if ready for a journey, and is putting her handkerchief to her eyes. We shall have more to say of Milton in this connexion. [Footnote: Paget, pp. 150, 151, p. 87, and Epistle Dedicatory, p. 4; Fentley's _Dippers Dipt_, Epistle Dedicatory, p. 3; Edward's _Gangræna_, Part I. p. 29.]

ANTI-SABBATARIANS, AND TRASKITES:--These sects, though distinct, may be named together. The _Anti-Sabbatarians_ were those who denied the obligation of any Lord's Day or Sabbath: they were pretty numerous, but were distributed through the other sects. The _Traskites_, on the other hand, denied the obligation of the Christian Sunday or Lord's Day, but maintained the perpetual obligation of the Jewish Sabbath on the seventh day of the week. They were the followers of one John Traske, a poor eccentric who had been well known to Paget, but was now dead, and remembered only for his heresy, for which he had been whipt, pilloried, and imprisoned, about 1618. His opinions had been revived more ably in certain treatises and discourses, published in 1628 and 1632, by Theophilus Brabourne, a Puritan minister in Norfolk. Both Brabourne and Traske had been obliged to recant their opinions and return to orthodoxy; and indeed Traske had done so in a Tract written against himself, though he again relapsed. Nevertheless the heresy had taken root, and one heard in 1644 of Traskites or Sabbatarians dispersed through England. The sect is continued still in the so-called "Seventh Day Baptists." [Footnote: Paget, pp. 138-141; with more accurate particulars in Cox's _Literature of the Sabbath Question_, I. 153-5, 157-8, and 162.]

SOUL-SLEEPERS OR MORTALISTS:--Such was the odd name given to a sect, or supposed sect, represented by the anonymous author of a, Tract called _Man's Mortality_. The Tract is now very scarce, if not utterly forgotten; but, as it made a great stir at the time, and as we shall hear of it and its author rather particularly again in connexion with Milton's life, I may here give some account of it from a copy which I have managed to see. The title in full is as follows: "Man's Mortallitie: or a Treatise wherein 'tis proved, both Theologically and Phylosophically, that whole Man (as a rationall creature) is a compound wholy mortall, contrary to that common distinction of Soule and Body; and that the present going of the Soule into Heaven or Hell is a meer fiction; and that at the Resurrection is the beginning of our immortallity, and then actual Condemnation and Salvation, and not before: With all doubtes and objections answered and resolved both by Scripture and Reason; discovering the multitude of Blasphemies and Absurdities that arise from the fancie of the Soule: Also divers other mysteries, as of Heaven, Hell, Christ's humane residence, the Extent of the Resurrection, the New Creation, &c.: opened and presented to the tryall of better judgments, By R. O. Amsterdam: Printed by John Canne, Anno Dom. 1643." In the British Museum copy, which is the one I have seen, the word "Amsterdam" is erased by the collector's pen, and "London" substituted, with the date "Jan. 19" added; whence I infer that, whatever Canne at Amsterdam had to do with the printing of the tract, it was virtually a London publication, and out in January, 1643-4. On the title-page is quoted the text Ecclesiastes iii. 19, thus--"That which befalleth the sonnes of men befalleth Beasts; even one thing befalleth them all: as the one dyeth so dyeth the other; yea they have all one breath, so that man hath no preheminence above a Beast; for all is vanity." This gives so far the key-note to the 57 pages of matter of the Tract itself. It is a queer mixture of a sort of physiological reasoning, such as we should now call Materialism, with a mystical metaphysics, and with odd whimsies of the author's own--such as that Christ had ascended into the Sun. The leading tenet, however, is that the notion of a soul, or supernatural and immortal essence, in man, distinct from his bodily organism, is a sheer delusion, contradicted both by Scripture and correct physiological thinking, and that from this notion have arisen all kinds of superstitions and practical mischiefs. "The most grand and blasphemous heresies that are in the world, the mystery of iniquity and the kingdom of Antichrist, depend upon it." So says the Tract itself; and in the first of two pieces of verse prefixed to it by an admirer, and entitled "To His worthy Friend the Author, upon his Booke," there occur these lines:--

"The hell-hatched doctrine of th' immortal soul
Discovered makes the hungry Furies howl,
And teare their snakey haire, with grief appaled
To see their error-leading doctrine quailed,
Hell undermined and Purgatory blown
Up in the air."

There are Latin quotations in the Tract; and some of the physiological arguments by which the author seeks to refute the opinion of "the Soulites," as he calls them, are rather nauseous. On the whole, were it not for the appended concession of a Resurrection, or New Creation, and an Immortality somehow to ensue thence, the doctrine of the Tract might be described as out-and-out Materialism. Possibly, in spite of the concession, this is what the author meant to drive at. Among some of his followers, however, a milder version of his doctrine seems to have been in favour, not quite denying the existence of a soul, but asserting that the soul goes into sleep or temporary extinction at death, to be re- awakened at the Resurrection. [Footnote: Paget, pp. 148, 149; _Gangræna_,