by George Leon Walker

VI.

HOOKER IN CONNECTICUT.

SECTION III.

If any to this Platform can reply
With better reason, let this volume die:
But better argument if none can give,
Then Thomas Hookers Policy shall live.
SAMUAL STONE’S Elegy.

THE turmoiled condition of affairs in England was felt in New England in relation to other than political matters only. The ecclesiastical ground-swell in the home-land had its answering motions here. Puritanism had been taking possession more and more of the popular mind in the old country, and with the assembling of the Long Parliament in 1640 the downfall of the hierarchical system, whose arbitrary administration by Laud had been the main cause of the population of the new settlements in America, was assured.

But the course of Puritanism in England and in New England had been different. In England the progress of dissent from the Establishment had taken main direction toward Presbyterianism. In New England it had been almost exclusively toward Independency. The churches of the new settlements modelled themselves more or less intentionally after that of Plymouth and of the exiles who had brought Congregationalism over with them from Scrooby and Leyden.

This adoption of principles of ecclesiastical procedure divergent to some considerable extent from those of the majority who in England were generally sympathetic with the American colonists in their Puritan views, had been the occasion already of much correspondence between the leading men of the Puritan party there and here. In 1636 or 1637 "many ministers in Old England" sent inquiries to their "Reverend Brethren in New-England concerning Nine Positions" supposed to be taken by the churches of the New England colonies on important points of ecclesiastical usage. This inquiry was followed up in 1638 or 1639 by "two and thirty Questions" of similar character from the same source. Answers to these interrogations were forwarded, - to the first by Rev. John Davenport, of New Haven, and to the second by Rev. Richard Mather, of Dorchester.

The points covered by these inquiries and answers embraced the whole scope of church organization, terms of membership, fellowship with English parishes, office and responsibility of the ministry, power of the laity, doctrinal standards, and authority of councils. It was in reference to the last point - the authority of councils, or synods, as they were then commonly called - that divergence of views here and in English Puritanism most loudly manifested itself, though there was perhaps almost equal difference of judgment concerning the right of each church to institute its own ministry.

But as the conflict in England between the king and Parliament progressed, the tendency of English Puritanism toward Presbyterianism strengthened. It was deemed best to secure the aid of an ecclesiastical synod to settle the religious order of things on that basis. As early as 1641 the London ministers proposed to Parliament the calling of an Assembly, and in December of that year the Commons mentioned the matter as one of their desires in the Grand Remonstrance. (1) A bill was passed for the purpose in 1642, but failed for want of the royal assent. The final order for it, without the king’s concurrence, was June 12, 1643. The king, by proclamation, forbade the meeting, and threatened to deprive of their livings those who disobeyed. This substantially prevented the "loyal" portion of the Episcopalians from attending, and added to the certainty of the Presbyterian character of the result.

But an Assembly being determined on, the American divines were not forgotten. A letter from the Earl of Warwick, - Mr. Hooker’s old Chelmsford friend and protector, - Lord Say and Sele, Oliver Cromwell, and some thirty other minority members of Parliament, "who stood for the independency of churches," was sent to New England, inviting Mr. Cotton, Mr. Hooker, and Mr. Davenport to "assist in the synod there appointed to consider and advise about the settling of church government." (2) Mr. Cotton and Mr. Davenport were inclined to go; the former the more because in the course of his Scripture expositions at that time he happened to come upon a passage in the Acts which "led him to deliver that doctrine of the interest all churches have in each other’s members for mutual helpfulness." Mr. Hooker, with characteristic sagacity, saw the possible complications that might arise from participation in a synod where the views of the New England churches were certain of rejection; and he sent word by the messengers who came on from Boston with the invitation that he "liked not the business, nor thought it any sufficient call for them to go 3000 miles to agree with three men." (3) The "three men" in the Assembly who "stood for independency" were in fact five from the outset, - Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, Jeremiah Burroughs, William Bridge, and Sydrach Simpson. As the sessions went on, their numbers doubled; but they were in a hopeless minority.

The wisdom of Mr. Hooker’s judgment was soon affirmed by letters from Hugh Peter and others "out of England," advising the invited American divines "to stay till they heard further; so this care came to an end." (4) This assembly, which has passed into history as the Westminster Assembly, was preponderantly Presbyterian; and that party grew stronger in it as its eleven hundred and sixty-three sessions advanced.

This growing, though temporary, dominance of Presbyterianism in England was not without its effect in this country. It gave new vigour and encouragement to a few ministers in the Massachusetts Colony, whose views were more in accordance with that polity than with the Congregational Way around them. The two excellent ministers of Newbury - Thomas Parker, the Pastor, and James Noyes, the Teacher - strongly sympathized with most of the Presbyterian principles; and their church was much disquieted by their advocacy of them. (5) Fearful of the spread of these dissensions, it was deemed best to hold a meeting of the ministers of the churches at Cambridge to emphasize Congregational principles. This assembly, sometimes erroneously called a synod, - which character, however, it lacked, being a meeting of ministers only, and these non-delegated in their gathering, (6) - met in September, 1643, and was composed of "all the elders in the country, (about 50 in all,) such of the ruling elders as would were present also, but none else." (7) Here, again, as in the Hutchinsonian Council, Mr. Hooker was one of the moderators; his associate at this time being Mr. Cotton. "They sat in the college, and had their diet there after the manner of scholar’s commons, but somewhat better, yet so ordered as it came not to above sixpence the meal for a person. . . The assembly concluded against some parts of the presbyterial way, and the Newbury ministers took time to consider the arguments." (8)

Consideration of the "arguments" was a chief part of the industry of the time on both sides of the Atlantic. A musketry-fire of pamphlets and a heavier cannonade of bulkier volumes answered one another on both sides of the controversy and of the sea. Two or three lesser tractates by Mr. Cotton, published in 1641 and 1642, were followed about the latter date by the circulation in manuscript form of his "Way of the Churches of Christ in New England." To these was added, from the same ever-ready pen, in 1644, Mr. Cotton’s celebrated treatise on the "Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven." This was at once introduced to the English public by Thomas Goodwin and Philip Nye - members of the Westminster Assembly then in session - as setting forth that "very Middle-way . . . between that which is called Brownisme and the Presbyteriall-government" which they had contended for in the Assembly.(9) To such of these American tractates as were extant at the time of his writing, Professor Samuel Rutherford, also a member of the Assembly, - and according to John Cotton a "chief part" of it, - undertook a reply from the Presbyterian point of view. He directed his answer mainly against Cotton’s "Way;" Mather’s Reply to the "XXXII Questions;." Mather’s answer to Herle; and certain treatises of John Robinson’s. Mr. Rutherford was an able, courteous, and learned man, and one of the great lights of the Scottish church. He was familiar with a wide range of the literature of the controversy, and was the most competent man of the Presbyterian party to put the argument for that polity into cogent as well as conciliatory form. His book of nearly eight hundred pages, entitled "The Due right of Presbyteries," (10) and a volume by Rev. John Paget, "A Defence of Chvrch Government exercised in Presbyteriall, Classicall & Synodical Assemblies," were deemed by our New England Congregationalists deserving of answer; and notwithstanding Cotton’s "Keyes" came out about contemporaneously with Rutherford’s volume, a more explicit rejoinder to the Presbyterian treatises was deemed expedient. The task of replying to Rutherford appears to have been assigned to Mr. Hooker, and the answer to Paget to Mr. Davenport. The result of this partition of labor was the production of the two volumes, - Davenport’s "Power of Congregational Churches," and Mr. Hooker’s "Survey of the Summe of Church-Discipline."

These books had a curious history. At a meeting held at Cambridge, July 1, 1645, "the elders of the churches through all the United Colonies. . . conferred their councils and examined the writings which some of them had prepared," - these of Hooker and Davenport among the number, - "which being agreed and perfected were sent over into England to be printed." (11)

This is Winthrop’s contemporaneous account of what the meeting concluded upon. The books of Hooker and Davenport were not however apparently fully completed, and in point of fact were not sent till the January following. They were then despatched in a vessel sailing from New Haven, which was lost at sea and was never heard of after; save in that spectral phantom of a ship which two years and five months later appeared sailing into New Haven harbor, and which presently, in the sight of a crowd of witnesses, vanished into smoke. This vision Mr. Davenport declared had been given for the quieting of the hearts of those who wondered where the lost vessel and its precious conveyance of passengers had gone.(12) Convinced of the loss of their manuscripts, the two authors, Hooker and Davenport, re-wrote them; though Hooker his very reluctantly, - as he had indeed reluctantly composed it at the first, -leaving it at last unfinished, to be sent over and printed only after his death. An "Epistle to the Reader," by the hand of his Hartford friends Edward Hopkins and William Goodwin accompanies the reproduced treatise, and explains the circumstances of its origin.

Mr. Hooker’s "Survey" is a very able presentation of the early New England view of the church and its administration, as opposed to the Presbyterian conception advocated by his distinguished opponent the Professor of Divinity at St. Andrews, as well as by Samuel Hudson, whose writings are also traversed in Mr. Hooker’s reply. The "Survey" suffers, however, in comparison with such a book as the reader easily sees might have been the product of the same pen, by the necessity the author’s task seemed to impose upon him, rather to reply to Rutherford in minute detail than to set forth a direct treatise of his own on the subject.

It was perhaps this controversial aspect of the matter which made him so reluctant to undertake the work at first. He says in the Preface of the book, which from various indications seems to have been also the preface of the book which was lost as well, - "I can professe in a word of truth that against mine own inclination and affection, I was haled by importunity to this so hard a task." And his friends Hopkins and Goodwin remark in their Epistle accompanying the published work: "Some of you are not ignorant with what strength of importunity he was drawn to this present service, and with what fear and care he attended it. The weight and difficultie of the work was duly apprehended by him, and he lookt upon it, as somewhat unsutable to a Pastor, whose head and heart and hands, were full of the imploiments of his proper place." It is matter for regret that the task to which Mr. Hooker was thus "haled by importunity" involved to such an extent the following the track of another’s argument, instead of formulating - somewhat after the model of Cotton’s "Keyes," for example - a treatise of church polity untrammelled by the necessity of polemic analysis and rejoinder; for that in that case we might have had a document unsurpassed and probably unequalled in clear and vigorous statement of early Congregational principles by any other of New England origin, this treatise as it stands, and especially the Preface, abundantly shows.

In this Preface occurs a kind of summary of the principles set forth in the body of the book. It is a paragraph of importance in more ways than one. It not only gives as succinct a presentation of Congregational principles then entertained as was ever given, but it has the additional interest and value of being a statement of positions concerning which Mr. Hooker says,-

" In all these I have leave to professe the joint judgement of all the Elders upon the river: Of New-haven, Guilford, Milford, Stratford, Fairfield: and of most of the Elders of the Churches in the Bay, to whom I did send in particular, and did receive approbation from them, under their hands: Of the rest (to whom I could not send) I cannot so affirm; but this I can say, That at a common meeting (13*) I was desired by them all, to publish what now I do."

On all grounds, therefore, this brief statement of Congregational principles formulated by Mr. Hooker and assented to by the "elders of the Churches through all the United Colonies," (14) requires a place here.

"If the Reader shall demand how far this way of Church-proceeding receives approbation by any common concurrence amongst us: I shall plainly and punctually expresse my self in a word of truth, in these following points, viz.,

Visible Saints are the only true and meet matter, whereof a visible Church should be gathered, and confederation is the form.

The Church as Totum essentiale, is, and may be, before Officers.

A Church Congregationall is the first subject of the keys.

Each Congregation compleatly constituted of all Officers, hath sufficient power in her self, to exercise the power of the keyes, and all Church discipline, in all the censures thereof.

Ordination is not before election.

There ought to be no ordination of a Minister at large, Namely, such as should make him Pastour without a People.

Ordination is only a solemn installing of an Officer into the Office, unto which he was formerly called.

Children of such, who are members of Congregations, ought only to be baptized.

The consent of the people gives a causall vertue to the compleating of the sentence of excommunication.

Whilst the Church remains a true Church of Christ, it doth not loose this power, nor can it lawfully be taken away.

Consociation of Churches should be used, as occasion doth require.

Such consociations and Synods have allowance to counsell and admonish other Churches, as the case may require.

And if they grow obstinate in errour or sinfull miscarriages, they should renounce the right hand of fellowship with them.

But they have no power to excommunicate.

Nor do their constitutions binde formalitèr & juridicè."

The elaborate volume from whose preface the above extract is quoted was finally published in 1648, and remains a monument of its author’s most remarkable learning and great dialectic skill. The first two of the Parts into which the treatise is divided - " Ecclesiasticall Policie Defined," and "The Church considered as it is corpus Organicum" - are wrought out probably with about the fulness of the copy lost at sea. The other two - "Of the Government of the Church," and "Concerning Synods," - and especially the latter of them, are wholly incomplete, and would doubtless have been much amplified and illustrated had the author lived to finish the re-writing of his book. The argument, however, is clear throughout, and the subtlety and strength of the presentation of the case for the Congregational Way, as held by the early fathers of New England, entitle the "Survey" to all, at least, of the honour it has ever received as an authoritative exposition of the views in church government which it learnedly and powerfully maintains.

Before the re-writing of the books of Hooker and Davenport was attempted, however, - and indeed perhaps before their authors were perfectly assured of the loss of the first copies made, - the danger of the subversion of the ecclesiastical usages of the colonies seemed so imminent that the Court of Massachusetts, in May, 1646, moved for a general synod, "to discusse, dispute & cleare up by the word of God, such questions of Church governmt & discipline" as had been before spoken of, and others, "as they shall thinke needful & meete;" and invited the ministers and churches of "Plimoth, Connecticott & NeweHaven," on the same terms of "lib’ty & powr of disputing and voting" as the Massachusetts ministers and messengers.(15) The proposition was received with general acceptance, though with demurrer on the part of the Boston, Salem, and Hingham churches, as a trespass of the civil authority upon the ecclesiastical domain.(16) But most of them finally withdrew opposition, and the 1^st of September found all but four of the Massachusetts churches, and a considerable number of those from the other colonies, in session at Cambridge, in what. is now called, by way of pre-eminence, the Cambridge Synod, - the best remembered of all the early New England assemblies, and from which the well-known Platform of church-polity receives its name. Mr. Hooker, however, was not there. His colleague, Mr. Stone the Teacher, was present, and Deacon Edward Stebbins, a delegate of the church; but the Pastor was absent. He had written his son-in-law, Thomas Shepard, the month before: -

"My yeares and infirmityes grow so fast vpon me, yt wholly disenable me to so long a journey; and because I cannot come myself, I provoke as many elders as I can to lend their help and presence. The Lord Christ be in the midest among you by his guidance and blessing."

Mr. Hooker had made the journey from Hartford to Boston on public business four times certainly, and probably more. (17*) It was still a roadless wilderness, to be traversed only on horseback, with a nightly encampment on the ground, under the open skies, by the way. It is not strange that though interested in the synod, he shrank from the repeated pilgrimages.

The synod continued in session at its first gathering only a fortnight. It appointed three of its members to draw up a Scriptural Model of Church-government, and adjourned to June 8 of the following year. Mr. Shepard wrote to his father-in-law, giving account of discussions arising in the synod about the extent of synodical authority, and the power of magistrates in summoning such assemblies.

The report received from his correspondent induced the ever democratically-inclined author of the "Survey" to write concerning the first of the two points: -

"I renew thanks for the letter and copy of the passages at the synod. I wish ther be not a misunderstanding of some things by some, or that the bynding power of synods be not pressed too much: for, I speake it only to yourself, he that adventures far in that business will fynd hott and hard work, or else my perspective may fayle, which I confesse it may be." .

A comparison of these expressions with the Result (18) of this preliminary session, agreed to "thus far onely, That they should be commended unto more serious consideration against the next Meeting," may perhaps indicate that some jealousy as to synodical authority was justifiable.

On the other point, however, - of the magistrate’s power in calling a synod, - Mr. Hooker writes to Shepard: -

" I fynd Mr. Rutherford and Apollonius to give somewhat sparingly to the place of the magistrate, to putt forth power in the calling of synods, wherein I perceive they goe crosse to some of our most serious and iudicious writers. "

This implies the same view which Mr. Hooker maintained in his" Survey" on this matter, where he advocates the right of civil authority in summoning ecclesiastical assemblies. Democratic as Mr. Hooker was, he had not, nevertheless, arrived at the modern conception of the separate prerogatives of Church and State; and his doctrines on this matter of magisterial power in ecclesiastical affairs might have been, and probably were, a few years after his death quoted in justification of a long series of meddlesome interferences of the General Court of the colony with the concerns of his own distracted church.

The synod re-assembled, according to adjournment, in June, 1647, but was almost immediately forced to adjourn again by reason of an "epidemical sickness" which prevailed over the whole country among Indians and English, French and Dutch.(19*)

Mr. Hooker was one of the victims of the disease. His colleague, Mr. Stone, arrived home from the dispersed synod in season to see him die. He wrote to Mr. Shepard, under date of July 19, 1647:-

DEAREST BROTHER, God brought us safely to Hartford, but when I came hither God presented me a sad spectacle. Mr. Hooker looked like a dying man. God refused to heare our prayers for him, but tooke him from vs July 7 a little before sunne-set. Our sunne is set, our light is eclipsed, our ioy is darkened, we remember now in the daye of our calamitie the pleasant things which we enioyed in former times. His spirits & head were so oppressed with the disease that he was not able to expresse much to vs in his sicknesse, but had exprest to Mr. Goodwin before my returne that his peace was made in heaven & had continued 30 years without alteration, he was aboue Satan. Marke the vpright man for the end of that man is peace! He lived a most blameless life. I thinke his greatest enemies cannot charge him. He hath done much work for Christ, & now rests from his labours & his workes follow him, but our losse is great & bitter. My losse is bitter. . . . Mtrs Hooker was taken with the same sicknesse that night when I came to Hartford, & was very neer death, she is yet weak but I hope recouering. It would haue been a great aggravation of our miserie if God had blotted out all that pleasant familee at once. Little Sam: Shepard is well (20). . .

Mather gathers up and records several more or less authentic incidents of Mr. Hooker’s last hours, which may as well be given here as found in the "Magnalia" : (23)-

" In the time of his sickness he did not say much to the standers by; but being asked, that he would utter his apprehensions about some important things, especially about the state of New-England, he answered, I have not that work now to do; I have already declared the counsel of the Lord: and when one that stood weeping by the bedside said unto him, Sir, you are going to receive the reward of all your labours, he replied, Brother, I am going to receive mercy! At last he closed his own eyes with his own hands, and gently stroaking his own forehead, with a smile in his countenance, he gave a little groan, and so expired his blessed soul into the arms of his fellow servants, the holy angels, on July 7, 1647."

His age was sixty-one years. He died, it is believed, on the anniversary of his birth. He made a will (24) the day he died, in which he left directions for the guidance of his household and for the custody and publication of his manuscripts; intrusting his "beloued frends, Mr. Edward Hopkins and Mr. William Goodwyn" with the care of the "education and dispose" of his children and the management of his estate.

As was natural, the death of so eminent a leader of the little Commonwealth prompted the remembrance by survivors of portents and supernatural tokens of it. The event occurred in the mid-season of a pestilential summer, when languor and oppression in the probably crowded and ill-ventilated meetinghouse might have been expected. But looking back upon it,-

" Some of his most observant hearers observed an astonishing sort of a cloud in his congregation, the last Lord’s day of his publick ministry, when he also administred the Lord’s Supper among them; and a most unaccountable heaviness and sleepiness, even in the most watchful christians of the place, not unlike the drowsiness of the disciples, when our Lord was going to die; for which, one of the elders publickly rebuked them. When those devout people afterwards perceived that this was the last sermon and sacrament wherein they were to have the presence of the pastor with them, ‘t is inexpressible how much they bewailed their unattentiveness unto his farewel dispensations; and some of them could enjoy no peace in their own souls, until they had obtained leave of the elders to confess before the whole congregation with many tears, that inadvertency." (25)

The blow was indeed a great one, and felt not alone in the Connecticut Colony. Some sense of its importance to the whole group of cisatlantic settlements is expressed in the simple, noble language of Governor Winthrop in his account of the pestilence of that disastrous summer: (26) -

"That which made the stroke more sensible and grievous, both to them [of Connecticut] and to all the country, was the death of that faithful servant of the Lord, Mr. Thomas Hooker, pastor of the church in Hartford, who, for piety, prudence, wisdom, zeal, learning, and what else might make him serviceable in the place and time he lived in, might be compared with men of greatest note; and he shall need no other praise: the fruits of his labors in both Englands shall preserve an honorable and happy remembrance of him forever."

This wise and eloquent eulogy, written in the pages of a personal diary with no thought of public reproduction in a biography of the man whom the largehearted Massachusetts governor loved and honoured above all differences which had ever risen between them, needs no amplification.

No portrait or even minute description of Mr. Hooker’s physical appearance remains. The impression gained from the various references to him leaves upon the mind, however, the imagination of a figure of dignity and something of command.(27*) He is always spoken of by contemporary and by nearly succeeding writers with marked respect and veneration. He is said (28) to have been "a man of a cholerick disposition," which one can easily conjecture from the fervour of his oratorical temperament and the frequent vehemency of his rhetoric. But the same authority which affirms his possession of a fiery spirit says also (29) that "he had ordinarily as much government of his choler, as a man has of a mastiff dog in a chain; he could let out his dog, and pull in his dog, as he pleased.’" Eulogiums of his benevolence, of his patience, his humility, as well as of his practical sagacity and wisdom in the management of the affairs of his own and of the neighbouring churches, are preserved on various pages of the pedantic writer to whom, with all his faults and not infrequent inaccuracies, we are indebted for so much that would be otherwise unknown, not only of Hooker, but of most of the fathers of our New England history. One interesting and suggestive illustration of this practical and kindly wisdom in the management of the concerns of his own church must conclude our chapter:

"As for ecclesiastical censures, he was very watchful to prevent all proceedures unto them, as far as was consistent with the rules of our Lord; for which cause (except in grosser abominations) when offences happened, he did his utmost, that the notice thereof might be extended no further than it was when they first were laid before him; and having reconciled the offenders with sensible and convenient acknowledgements of their miscarriages, he would let the notice thereof be confined unto such as were aforehand therewith acquainted; and hence there was but one person admonished in, and but one person excommunicated from the church of Hartford, in all the fourteen years, that Mr. Hooker lived there," (30)

1 Forster’s Grand Remonstrance, pp. 268, 269.

2 Winthrop, ii, 91,92.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 Coffin’s History of Newbury. pp. 72, 115.

6 See Richard Mather’s characterization of it, in his "Reply to Rutherford," pp. 77, 78.

7 Winthrop, ii. 165.

8 Winthrop, ii. 165.

9 "Prefatory Letter" to the "Keyes."

10 London, 1644.

11 Winthrop, ii 304.

12 Bacon’s Historical Discourses, p. 107; Atwater’s New Haven Colony, pp. 208, 209, and Appendix III. to that volume.

13 Doubtless the meeting of July 1, 1645, at which the agreement to reply to "many books coming out of England" was entered into at Cambridge. See ante, p. 140.

14 Winthrop, it 304.

15 Mass. Col. Rec., ii. 155.

16 Winthrop, ii. 329-332.

17 In August, 1637; in May, 1639; in September, 1643; and July, 1645. See Winthrop, i. 281, 360; ii. 165, 304. .

18 Result of a Synod at Cambridge in New England, anno 1646, pp. 63-66.

19 The synod gathered for the third time, August 15, 1648, and after a fortnight’s discussion adopted the Platform substantially drafted by one of its three members designated for the purpose at its first meeting, - Rev. Richard Mather, of Dorchester. The principles of the Cambridge Platform are too familiar to need explication here.

20 Mr. Hooker’s grandson by his daughter Susannah, Mr. Shepard’s wife.

21 This was done with more friendship than poetic fire, and verses by Stone, Cotton, and Rogers were printed, with the letter of Hopkins and Goodwin, in the "Survey," which was published in 1648.

22 4 Mass. Hist. Coll., viii. 544-546.

23 Magnalia, i. 317.

24 Appendix I.

25 Magnalia,1. 317.

26 Winthrop, ii. 378.

27 This impression is well realized in the full-length statue ordered by the State of Connecticut for erection in the State Capitol, a representation of which constitutes the frontispiece of this volume.

28 Magnalia, i. 313.

29 Ibid.

30 Magnalia, i. 316, 317.