Initial Studies in American Letters | Page 7

into their precincts and
troubled the churches with "prophesyings" and novel opinions. Some of
those were banished, others were flogged or imprisoned, and a few
were put to death. Of the exiles the most noteworthy was Roger
Williams, an impetuous, warm-hearted man, who was so far in advance
of his age as to deny the power of the civil magistrate in cases of
conscience, or who, in other words, maintained the modern doctrine of
the separation of Church and State. Williams was driven away from the
Massachusetts colony--where he had been minister of the church at
Salem--and with a few followers fled into the southern wilderness and
settled at Providence. There, and in the neighboring plantation of
Rhode Island, for which he obtained a charter, he established his

patriarchal rule and gave freedom of worship to all comers. Williams
was a prolific writer on theological subjects, the most important of his
writings being, perhaps, his Bloody Tenent of Persecution, 1644, and a
supplement to the same called out by a reply to the former work from
the pen of Mr. John Cotton, minister of the First Church at Boston,
entitled The Bloody Tenent Washed and made White in the Blood of the
Lamb. Williams was also a friend to the Indians, whose lands, he
thought, should not be taken from them without payment, and he
anticipated Eliot by writing, in 1643, a Key into the Language of
America. Although at odds with the theology of Massachusetts Bay,
Williams remained in correspondence with Winthrop and others in
Boston, by whom he was highly esteemed. He visited England in 1643
and 1652, and made the acquaintance of John Milton.
Besides the threat of an Indian war and their anxious concern for the
purity of the Gospel in their churches, the colonists were haunted by
superstitious forebodings of the darkest kind. It seemed to them that
Satan, angered by the setting up of the kingdom of the saints in
America, had "come down in great wrath," and was present among
them, sometimes even in visible shape, to terrify and tempt. Special
providences and unusual phenomena, like earth quakes, mirages, and
the northern lights, are gravely recorded by Winthrop and Mather and
others as portents of supernatural persecutions. Thus Mrs. Anne
Hutchinson, the celebrated leader of the Familists, having, according to
rumor, been delivered of a monstrous birth, the Rev. John Cotton, in
open assembly, at Boston, upon a lecture day, "thereupon gathered that
it might signify her error in denying inherent righteousness." "There
will be an unusual range of the devil among us," wrote Mather, "a little
before the second coming of our Lord. The evening wolves will be
much abroad when we are near the evening of the world." This belief
culminated in the horrible witchcraft delusion at Salem in 1692, that
"spectral puppet play," which, beginning with the malicious pranks of a
few children who accused certain uncanny old women and other
persons of mean condition and suspected lives of having tormented
them with magic, gradually drew into its vortex victims of the highest
character, and resulted in the judicial murder of over nineteen people.
Many of the possessed pretended to have been visited by the apparition

of a little black man, who urged them to inscribe their names in a red
book which he carried--a sort of muster-roll of those who had forsworn
God's service for the devil's. Others testified to having been present at
meetings of witches in the forest. It is difficult now to read without
contempt the "evidence" which grave justices and learned divines
considered sufficient to condemn to death men and women of
unblemished lives. It is true that the belief in witchcraft was general at
that time all over the civilized world, and that sporadic cases of
witch-burnings had occurred in different parts of America and Europe.
Sir Thomas Browne, in his Religio Medici, 1635, affirmed his belief in
witches, and pronounced those who doubted of them "a sort of atheist."
But the superstition came to a head in the Salem trials and executions,
and was the more shocking from the general high level of intelligence
in the community in which these were held. It would be well if those
who lament the decay of "faith" would remember what things were
done in New England in the name of faith less than two hundred years
ago. It is not wonderful that, to the Massachusetts Puritans of the
seventeenth century, the mysterious forest held no beautiful suggestion;
to them it was simply a grim and hideous wilderness, whose dark aisles
were the ambush of prowling savages and the rendezvous of those other
"devil-worshipers" who celebrated there a kind of vulgar Walpurgis
night.
The most important of original sources for the history of the settlement
of New England are