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I take this autobiographical way of referring to these things, in the order in which they came before my mind, for the sake of illustration. The net result of the whole is to put evolution in harmony with religious thought, – not necessarily in harmony with particular religious dogmas or theories, but in harmony with the great religious drift, so that the antagonism which used to appear to exist between religion and science is likely to disappear. So I think it will before a great while. If you take the case of some evolutionist like Professor Haeckel, who is perfectly sure that materialism accounts for everything (he has got it all cut and dried and settled; he knows all about it, so that there is really no need of discussing the subject!); if you ask the question whether it was his scientific study of evolution that really led him to such a dogmatic conclusion, or whether it was that he started from some purely arbitrary assumption, like the French materialists of the eighteenth century, I have no doubt the latter would be the true explanation. There are a good many people who start on their theories of evolution with these ultimate questions all settled to begin with. It was the most natural thing in the world that after the first assaults of science upon old beliefs, after a certain number of Bible stories and a certain number of church doctrines had been discredited, there should be a school of men who in sheer weariness should settle down to scientific researches, and say, "We content ourselves with what we can prove by the methods of physical science, and we will throw everything else overboard." That was very much the state of mind of the famous French atheists of the last century. But only think how chaotic nature was to their minds compared to what she is to our minds to-day. Just think how we have in the present century arrived where we can see the bearings of one set of facts in nature as collated with another set of facts, and contrast it with the view which even the greatest of those scientific French materialists could take. Consider how fragmentary and how lacking in arrangement was the universe they saw compared with the universe we can see to-day, and it is not strange that to them it could be an atheistic world. That hostility between science and religion continued as long as religion was linked hand in hand with the ancient doctrine of special creation. But now that the religious world has unmoored itself, now that it is beginning to see the truth and beauty of natural science and to look with friendship upon conceptions of evolution, I suspect that this temporary antagonism, which we have fallen into a careless way of regarding as an everlasting antagonism, will come to an end perhaps quicker than we realize.

There is one point that is of great interest in this connection, although I can only hint at it. Among the things that happened in that dim past when man was coming into existence was the increase of his powers of manipulation; and that was a factor of immense importance. Anaxagoras, it is said, wrote a treatise in which he maintained that the human race would never have become human if it had not been for the hand. I do not know that there was so very much exaggeration about that. It was certainly of great significance that the particular race of mammals whose intelligence increased far enough to make it worth while for natural selection to work upon intelligence alone was the race which had developed hands and could manipulate things. It was a wonderful era in the history of creation when that creature could take a club and use it for a hammer, or could pry up a stone with a stake, thus adding one more lever to the levers that made up his arm. From that day to this, the career of man has been that of a person who has operated upon his environment in a different way from any animal before him. An era of similar importance came probably somewhat later, when man learned how to build a fire and cook his food; thus initiating that course of culinary development of which we have seen the climax in our dainty dinner this evening. Here was another means of acting upon the environment. Here was the beginning of the working of endless physical and chemical changes through the application of heat, just as the first use of the club or the crowbar was the beginning of an enormous development in the mechanical arts.

Now, at the same time, to go back once more into that dim past, when ethics and religion, manual art and scientific thought, found expression in the crudest form of myths, the æsthetic sense was germinating likewise. Away back in the glacial period you find pictures drawn and scratched upon the reindeer's antler, portraitures of mammoths and primitive pictures of the chase; you see the trinkets, the personal decorations, proving beyond question that the æsthetic sense was there. There has been an immense æsthetic development since then. And I believe that in the future it is going to mean far more to us than we have yet begun to realize. I refer to the kind of training that comes to mankind through direct operation upon his environment, the incarnation of his thought, the putting of his ideas into new material relations. This is going to exert powerful effects of a civilizing kind. There is something strongly educational and disciplinary in the mere dealing with matter, whether it be in the manual training school, whether it be in carpentry, in overcoming the inherent and total depravity of inanimate things, shaping them to your will, and also in learning to subject yourself to their will (for sometimes you must do that in order to achieve your conquests; in other words, you must humour their habits and proclivities). In all this there is a priceless discipline, moral as well as mental, let alone the fact that, in whatever kind of artistic work a man does, he is doing that which in the very working has in it an element of something outside of egoism; even if he is doing it for motives not very altruistic, he is working toward a result the end of which is the gratification or the benefit of other persons than himself; he is working toward some result which in a measure depends upon their approval, and to that extent tends to bring him into closer relations to his fellow man.

In the future, to an even greater extent than in the recent past, crude labour will be replaced by mechanical contrivances. The kind of labour which can command its price is the kind which has trained intelligence behind it. One of the great needs of our time is the multiplication of skilled and special labour. The demand for the products of intelligence is far greater than that for mere crude products of labour, and it will be more and more so. For there comes a time when the latter products have satisfied the limit to which a man can consume food and drink and shelter, – those things which merely keep the animal alive. But to those things which minister to the requirements of the spiritual side of a man there is almost no limit. The demand one can conceive is well-nigh infinite. One of the philosophical things that have been said, in discriminating man from the lower animals, is that he is the one creature who is never satisfied. It is well for him that he is so, that there is always something more for which he craves. To my mind, this fact most strongly hints that man is infinitely more than a mere animate machine.

May, 1895.

V
THE ORIGINS OF LIBERAL THOUGHT IN AMERICA ¹⁷

In approaching the subject of the origins of liberal thought in America, one cannot help remembering that the discovery of the new continent was itself such a stimulus to free thinking as the world had never before witnessed. From time immemorial, the trade between Europe and the remote parts of Asia had followed certain customary routes. From ancient days, long before Olympiads were heard of, when Assyrian kings with curly beards commemorated their victories in arrow-headed inscriptions, men had used those same routes. Up the Red Sea, in the early prime of hundred-gated Thebes, came ships from the Indian Ocean, with gems and spices to exchange for Egyptian fine linens and amulets of amber from the Baltic; and five thousand years later Venetian argosies at Alexandria were laden with just such gems and spices to distribute to the merchants of Augsburg, the royal household at Paris, the lords and ladies of Haddon Hall. Empires rose and fell, creeds and pantheons came and went, stately temples reared their heads for centuries and slowly crumbled in ruins, and still amid all the secular change the world's great stream of trade flowed through the same unshifting channels, and there was nothing to show that this state of things, to which men's ideas and habits had always been adjusted, was not to endure forever. So it was in that recent time when Henry V. of England was smiting the French chivalry at Agincourt, and his cousin Prince Henry of Portugal was beginning the search for an ocean route to the Indies. Never did the human mind get such a wrench out of its ancient grooves, never were such vistas of new possibilities laid open, never was beheld such glorious hardihood, such startling romance, as in the time when Columbus sailed westward to find the East, and Cortes met warriors of the Stone Age face to face. The men of Europe suddenly found themselves placed in new and unsuspected relations to the planet on which they lived; worlds of barbarism and savagery, unheard of and unspeakably bizarre, were brought to their notice; strange constellations arose in the firmament; strange beasts and birds were encountered amid outlandish trees and shrubs in new climates beyond unknown seas. The old familiarity with nature's aspects received an abrupt shock. On every side loomed up new questions to be answered, new practical problems to be solved. All man's inventive faculty, all his patient inquisitiveness, all the courage he could summon, were forthwith called into play. The dreams of boundless riches, the eager thirst for new knowledge, the superhuman bravery, which characterized the epoch of maritime discovery, are symptoms that reveal to us the highly wrought condition of the European mind at the time. A study of contemporary chronicles and letters cannot fail to bring home to us the singular intensity with which the thrill of venturesome romance was felt in every fibre of man's being.

The impulse thus given to free thinking must have been extremely powerful. It is customary to attribute the brilliant efflorescence of the human mind in the sixteenth century to the revival of Greek learning. Without seeking to diminish the respect due to that mighty cause, it may be contended that the influence of maritime discovery was equally important. While the Greek renaissance brought men into wholesome and stimulating intercourse with the highest achievements of literature, art, and philosophy, the discovery of the New World impressed upon them, as nothing had ever done before, the feasibleness of doing things in novel ways. With the wholesale displacement of commercial relations, the European mind burst the bounds of the snug little world to which its habits and theories, its politics civil and ecclesiastical, its science and its theology, had been adapted. The sudden and unprecedented widening of the environment soon set up a general fermentation of ideas. There was nothing accidental in Martin Luther's coming in the next generation after Columbus. Nor was it strange that in the following age the English mind, wrought to its highest tension under the combined influences of Renaissance, Reformation, and maritime adventure, should have put forth a literature the boldest and grandest that had ever appeared; that the era of Raleigh and Frobisher and the early Puritans should have seen even the highest mark of Greek achievement surpassed by Shakespeare. The gigantic revolution set on foot by Copernicus was already in full progress, the era of Descartes was just arriving, and the next century was to see modern scientific method receive its supreme illustration at the hands of Newton, while the principles of freedom in thought and speech were to find invincible champions in Milton and Locke.

Such was the age in which the work of English colonization in America was beginning. In looking for the origins of liberal thought in America, it is chiefly with English-speaking America that we are concerned. The Spanish mind, indeed, felt strongly the stimulus of the maritime discoveries and the contact with strange races of men, until an age of chivalrous enterprise bloomed forth in the literature of Calderon and Lope de Vega and Cervantes; but the new spirit was not strong enough to prevail over an ecclesiastical organization that had been growing in power since the Visigothic times. The higher intellectual life of Spain perished in the fires of the Inquisition, and art and song failed to lead the way to science and free thought; no Spanish Locke or Newton followed in the train of a Lope and a Murillo, but so lately as the year 1771 the University of Salamanca prohibited the teaching of the law of gravitation as discordant with revealed religion.¹⁸ With such a state of things in the mother country, liberal thought in the Spanish colonies was a plant of very slow growth. As for France at the end of the sixteenth century, there was a sturdy intellectual life there which no efforts of tyranny could more than partially repress; but circumstances threw the work of colonization into the hands of the Jesuits, and accordingly the history of New France, while eminent for devoted bravery and heroic endurance, shows scarcely a trace of liberal thinking either in politics or in matters pertaining to religion. Not with the French and Spanish portions of America, therefore, but with the colonies that developed into the United States, is our inquiry concerned.

The first and most obvious consideration which strikes us is that while the two centuries following the discovery of America witnessed an unprecedented awakening of the European mind, yet it was only with those nations that had retained self-government that this intellectual awakening was to come to prompt and full fruition. From the British islands and the Netherlands came the kind of public policy that allowed free thinking to take deep root and send up a thrifty tree of liberty. The planting of such seed in the spacious virgin soil of the New World was doubtless the greatest of all the manifold unforeseen results for which Columbus opened the way. It made political freedom the strongest power on earth, and thus favoured the attainment of that equable flexibility of mind which allows the thought to play freely about the facts which are laid before it. Not in a moment was such a grand result achieved; its complete realization has not yet come, and none of us may live to see it, yet toward that goal the whole impetus of men's civilizing work is tending, and there is no power that can prevent the consummation. Year by year, no matter how grave the questions with which we have to deal, we are becoming more and more able to let our minds play freely with them, to turn them hither and thither till all sides be seen and all aspects duly considered.

Not all in a moment, I say, has such a desirable result been achieved. So far is it, moreover, from having been brought about by conscious human effort that mankind have in general struggled desperately against it. Compared with the mass of men, it is only a few minds that have learned to regard absolute freedom of thought as something to be desired. Though the colonization of America came at a time when men's minds were stirred by novel ideas as never before, though the men of that generation were moving irrepressibly toward liberality of thought, yet there were very few who had any liking for liberal thought, or any good word to bestow upon it. There were few who doubted that absolute truth was attainable concerning the most abstruse questions of philosophy and religion, and an exactly true belief on minute points of theology was deemed necessary for one's personal salvation. Changes in opinion simply wrought a transfer of allegiance from one orthodoxy to another, and the new orthodoxy felt bound as much as the old one to persecute all who refused such allegiance. From this point of view the history of the progress of liberal thought becomes curiously interesting, for it shows how one of the most momentous revolutions in human life has steadily gone on in spite of the inveterate antagonism of the very men concerned in bringing it about! To a considerable extent, the history has been the same over a large part of the globe. The causes which have been at work in America have also been at work in Europe, and even beyond; and the liberal thought with which we are familiar is characteristic not so much of America as of the latter part of the nineteenth century. But along with the general causes there have been local causes which have especially concerned the New World, and a clear account of the matter requires us to indicate both the one and the other.

From the revolt of Henry VIII. against the Papacy down to the Revolution of 1688, there was in England a progressive movement toward liberal thought. It was at first a crude unconscious movement in the direction of toleration, which is a necessary condition for the development of free thinking. When we have arrived at a truly cordial toleration of opinions, allowing to all free play to stand or fall, just as hypotheses in science are suffered to stand or fall, then is men's thought for the first time really untrammelled. Whatever, therefore, tended toward toleration of diverse forms of creed or worship was a step in the path that led to free thinking; and whatever tended to democratize the church and relieve it from state control was a step toward toleration. The revolt of Henry VIII. at first but realized what the prœmunire statutes of Edward I. and Edward III. had threatened. But by breaking up the religious orders, expelling abbots from Parliament, and making the headship of the church a subject of fierce dispute, it contributed immensely to weaken and relax the bonds of conservatism, and it afforded a rare opportunity for the thoughts of laymen and small preachers to assert themselves. Thus the Lollardism which had been partially suppressed for more than a century now reared its head again defiantly, and, after learning lessons in democracy from Calvin, came forth as Puritanism, clad in full panoply for one of the world's most fateful contests.

In the course of Elizabeth's reign we find this Puritanism taking three different shapes. There were the moderate reformers, whose wish was simply to trim and prune the tree of Episcopacy; and secondly, those who were afterward known as "root and branch" men, whose name is descriptive enough. Instead of pruning they would uproot the tree and cast it away. To these Presbyterians the royal supremacy was no more than the papal a part of the living growth of Christ's church; it was but stubble fit for burning. Kings looked with horror upon such views, which threatened political danger no less than ecclesiastical. "A Scottish presbytery," cried James I., "agreeth as well with a monarchy as God and the Devil. Then Jack and Tom and Will and Dick shall meet, and at their pleasures censure me and my council and all our proceedings." The case could not have been more pithily stated, yet even Presbyterianism stopped short of full-fledged democracy. For Jack and his friends, by means of synods and general assemblies, could create a governing body with power of enforcing conformity upon unwilling congregations. In protest against this somewhat oligarchical method, Puritanism assumed its third form, that of Independency. The beginnings of Independency are to be sought among the Brownists of Elizabeth's reign, though their day of glory first came with the Civil War. In the theory of the Independents, as fully developed, any group of persons wishing to worship God in common might come together and organize themselves into a Congregational church, existing by as good a warrant as any other church, and entirely free from the control of any bishop, or synod, or council. No outside power could prescribe its creed or interfere with its ceremonial. Each church became, therefore, a little self-governing republic, as completely autonomous as an ancient Greek city, and the union of such churches was based solely upon the spirit of spontaneous Christian fellowship. Such was the theory of Independency.

In these successive stages of Protestantism we may see the preliminary steps toward general toleration and toward liberal thought. In each stage the strength of the coercive power that could be exercised over men's opinions and expressions of opinion was sensibly diminished. From the coercive power of the universal Church, which had once been able to direct a crusade against the Albigenses, it was a long step downward to the coercive power of Queen Elizabeth, whose will to suppress Puritanism was perpetually held in check by motives of public policy. It was a yet further step downward from the coercive power of a sovereign to that of a synod, and thence again to that of a congregation. So striking is the progress that one who knew nothing of history might easily mistake the theory of Independency as providing practically for something like complete toleration. History tells us that this was far from being the case. Heresy, or dissent from the commonly accepted orthodoxy, has been no more tolerated in Independent churches than elsewhere; and even in the absence of serious differences in dogma, persecution has been visited upon divergences from the customary ritual, as for example in the treatment long accorded to Baptists. In their militant days, neither Presbyterianism nor Independency ever professed to be tolerant. The gravest reproach they could imagine was to be charged with encouraging free thinking. The eminent Scottish divine Rutherford gave expression to the prevailing sentiment when he declared, "We regard toleration of all religions as not far removed from blasphemy." Nevertheless, the movement which gave rise to Presbyterianism and to Independency was sure to advance to the announcement of the principle of universal toleration. That movement was itself the expression of a vast amount of free thinking, and it was not to stop short of recognizing the claims of free thought. The century that witnessed the beginnings of an English-speaking America saw also the genuine principles of toleration laid down by Roger Williams and William Penn, and demonstrated with resistless wealth of learning and logic by Milton and Locke.

In an account of the origins of liberal thought in America this English development is all-important, but it does not cover the whole field. America's inheritance from Europe comes chiefly, but not entirely, from the British islands. In the early days of the Protestant Reformation, there were European countries in which religious toleration had advanced practically much further than in England. The England of Henry VIII. as compared with the Netherlands was in a crude and backward condition. The contrast might be likened to that between rural life with its narrow mental horizon and the varied cosmopolitan life of the city. England politically was a land of unrivalled promise, but she was not quite abreast with the most advanced culture of the time. Her government was mainly in the hands of country gentlemen, who lacked some valuable elements of experience that were possessed by the burghers of commercial Antwerp and Ghent. A careful survey of the Middle Ages shows plainly an abiding antagonism between commerce and the ecclesiastical spirit. A general connection between the predominance of international trade and the secularization of public life is distinctly traceable. On the map of mediæval Europe one may point out peculiar spots where the Papacy never gained complete sway. In some of these, as in Bohemia and southern Gaul, the resistance was due to Manichæan heresies brought in from the Eastern Empire, giving rise to a kind of mediæval Puritanism; in these we do not find a spirit of liberal thought developed, but rather an anti-Catholic fanaticism. The other peculiar spots lie in the great pathway of commerce between the Levant and the northern seas. In the free cities of northern Italy and southern Germany, in the Hansa towns, and in the Netherlands, priestcraft had less sway than elsewhere, and the general tone of thought was more liberal and modern. No city came so completely under the secularizing influences of maritime commerce as Venice; and it is significant that the Papacy, at the very pinnacle of its power and arrogance in the thirteenth century, utterly failed in its attempt to force the Inquisition upon that republic of merchants.

In similar wise, we find the commercial Netherlands in the sixteenth century exhibiting practically such toleration in matters of religion as the British islands attained only much later, and after prolonged and distressing struggle. From the time of Edward III. commercial intercourse with the great Dutch and Flemish cities was one of the most potent civilizing influences at work in England. It was a liberalizing influence in religion and in politics, and must be named among the causes which made the eastern counties preëminent for heresy. In later days, when the Dutch provinces had saved their Protestantism and recovered political freedom, they adopted a policy of toleration so broad as to seem to most contemporaries very eccentric. Their noble country was stigmatized as "the common harbour of all heresies" and a "cage of unclean birds." How it harboured heretics escaping from England is something that no American is ever likely to forget.

If, after this glance at European conditions, we cross the Atlantic and observe the group of twelve colonies that were planted during the seventeenth century, we find that five of them were especially notable for pursuing from the outset a policy of toleration, – a policy favourable to liberal thought. These five, naming them in order of seniority, were New Netherland, Maryland, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania, with Delaware. In New Netherland the Dutch simply maintained their traditional secularized policy. On the hospitable island of Manhattan all the varieties of European religion met on terms of equality, – Lutherans and Catholics, Quakers¹⁹ and Puritans, Moravians and Jews. After the English conquest this liberal policy was continued by the bigoted Duke of York, for reasons similar to those which made toleration a necessity in the province of the liberal and sagacious Calverts. The Catholic proprietors of Maryland wished to make their province a desirable home for Catholics who were inclined to leave England, and the only possible way of accomplishing this, without interference from the British government, was to pursue a policy broad enough to include Catholics along with all other kinds of Christians in its benefits. A similar necessity confronted Charles II. and James II. In order to secure as much protection as possible for Catholics without interference from Parliament, it was necessary to pursue a policy broad enough to include Quakers along with Catholics. For such reasons James refrained from disturbing the liberal Dutch policy in New York. For such reasons both Stuart kings supported the schemes of William Penn, in whose proprietary colonies of Pennsylvania and Delaware the principles of toleration were carried out, on the whole, more completely than anywhere else in English-speaking America. It is interesting in this connection to observe that the mother of William Penn was a Dutch lady, though perhaps it is possible to make too much of such a fact. The Quakers, who formed the strength of the colony, represented a phase of Puritanism more liberal than Independency. As contrasted with Independency, Quakerism was a notable advance in the direction of Individualism; it had outgrown the set of notions according to which a civic community ought to consist of a united body of believers. Pennsylvania, therefore, and its appendage Delaware, profited by the late date at which they were founded; they represented a more advanced stage of opinion than the colonies which started in the time of James I. Their proprietary government remained undisturbed until the Declaration of Independence, and in 1776 these two states were the only ones in which all Christians, whether Protestant or Catholic, stood socially and politically on an equal footing. For after the accession of William and Mary had made the Episcopal Church supreme in New York and Maryland, the Catholic inhabitants of those colonies were disfranchised and made the subject of various oppressive enactments. Even the laws of Rhode Island, as first printed, early in the eighteenth century, expressly prohibit Roman Catholics from voting. The date of this statute is not accurately known, but it was certainly between 1688 and 1705,²⁰ and may be due to the strong antagonism aroused by the conduct of James II. and his Jacobites. However that may be, the statute was not repealed until 1784.

The disfranchisement of Catholics was contrary to the spirit of the Rhode Island charter and to the views of Roger Williams, who certainly understood the rational grounds for religious toleration better than any other man of his time, save perhaps Milton and Vane. He represents the Protestant principle of the sacred right of private judgment carried out with unflinching logical consistency. In him the transition from Independency to Individualism is completed. The contrast between the two is illustrated in the controversy between Williams and Cotton which was called forth by the publication in 1644 of Williams's book entitled "The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution." John Cotton was a typical Independent, and by no means a man of persecuting temperament, but his view of the matter is extremely one-sided. He admits that it is wrong for error to persecute truth, but he holds it to be the sacred duty of truth to persecute error! Williams, on the other hand, sees that truth stands in no need of violent or artificial support, and that error contains within itself the seeds of death. He feels, too, that when I venture to persecute what I call error in others, I virtually assume my own infallibility. Thus not until pure Individualism is reached is the fundamental fallacy of Catholicism escaped. In order to protect this sacred Individualism, Williams would have a complete separation between church and state. Under no pretext whatever should the civil government interfere with religious matters. There should be no more statutes against heresy or heretics, no enforced attendance upon public worship, no support of churches by taxation. Roger Williams not only proclaimed such doctrines, but he lived up to them. He never took pains to conceal his dislike of Quaker doctrines; in his seventy-third year he once rowed himself in a boat the whole length of Narragansett Bay, in order to conduct a dispute against three valiant Quaker champions; yet, in spite of vehement pressure from the neighbouring colonies, he resolutely refused to allow the civil power of Rhode Island to be used against Quakers. Massachusetts in fury threatened to cut off the trade of the weaker colony, but nothing could intimidate Williams into what he termed "exercising a civil power over men's consciences." Among the public men of the seventeenth century Roger Williams deserves a preëminent place; he was the first to conceive thoroughly and carry out consistently, in the face of strong opposition, a theory of religious liberty broad enough to win assent and approval from advanced thinkers of the present day.