that "as for anabaptists they are now [1682] subject to no other penal statutes than those of the Congregational order." This statement, though probably true of Boston, would give a very wrong impression if understood of the Massachusetts Colony generally. For a hundred years Baptists had to struggle against religious oppression. Not till 1834 could Massachusetts be said to have taken the ground of full religious freedom, proclaimed and established in Rhode Island almost two hundred years before.

Dr. Palfrey's general view then is that the early fathers of the Massachusetts Bay had right ideas and feelings on the subject of religious liberty, and would gladly have accorded it to all if they could have done so safely, but were in fact under the necessity of being intolerant in order to save the state for liberty in subsequent periods. Their intolerance in fact is unquestioned history. Their tolerance in thought and desire lacks evidence. There were truly liberal souls among them, like John Winthrop, who was one of nature's noblemen; but as a people and as a government their idea of liberty did not include the idea of granting others the choice which they demanded for themselves. That appears on the very day of the adoption of the church covenant at Salem. "Because," says Morton, 'they saw that this wilderness might be looked upon as a place of liberty, and therefore might in time be troubled with erroneous spirits, therefore they did put in an article into the confession of faith about the duty and power of the magistrate in matters of religion." When Governor Dudley died, twenty-four years after, the following summary of the current feeling of the day was found in his pocket, a poem of twenty lines, of which the following couplet is a specimen. Let men of God in courts and churches watch O'er such as do a toleration hatch.

Whether it was his composition or not the sentiment was his. We might make almost numberless quotations of the same character. The spirit of the ruling men of the colony is fully and fairly shown in the article of the Cambridge platform, approved by the churches. and the General Court in 1649, which declares that the magistrate should punish heresy, and "if any church grow schismatical the magistrate is to put forth his coercive power as the case may require." (Chapter xvii.) In 1679 this platform was reaffirmed by a synod in Boston, on which occasion, "both elders and brethren did lift up their hands in the affirmative."

It is a common saying that "we must judge men by the age in which they lived." That is what we have in part been doing; and

we regret to find that our Puritan forefathers were not much, if at all, in advance of their age. Even the Pilgrims of Plymouth, who were practically more tolerant than the Massachusetts Bay, never declared religious liberty the right of all. Their adored pastor Robinson printed furiously in favor of the duty of the magistrate to enforce religion as well as morality.

It is very commonly said that "in that day nobody had the right idea of the relation of the civil power to the ecclesiastical." The frequent repetition of this mistake does not make it a truth. There were men and bodies of men, Baptists especially, who before the settlement of New England preached and printed and published the true view in England and on the continent. The complete and now accepted view was fully set forth in this very colony, and deliberately rejected with its advocates. The authorities of the Bay supposed that they were judging Williams and Clarke; but Williams and Clarke judged them rather, and pronounced on them a heavy but just sentence, which we deeply regret, but can never reverse.

Dr. Palfrey calls the ideal which the forefathers attempted to realize "a generous dream." It was dreamy enough, but most ungenerous; nor was it an original idea with them. A hundred years before Calvin and the Genevans had tried the same experiment with the same spirit, the same conscientious zeal, and the same sickening and shameful results. Our forefathers were not men of such wonderful sagacity as is often ascribed to them. They seem not to have discovered that their plan of government offered a premium to formalism and hypocrisy, or else they had such spiritual pride that they thought of themselves as did a preacher of the third generation following, who said that "the Lord sifted all Europe and brought the best of the grain to the New England Plantations." In intelligence and sense of right they were inferior to those who knew enough of history and human-nature to oppose the union of church and state. In heroism they were not superior to those who thought it ignoble to enjoy peace in Holland, and therefore returned to struggle and suffer with their brethren in England. All honor to those who fled to New England from episcopal persecution in Old England. All honor to those who staid in Old England and contended for true freedom. All honor to those who fought the same good fight in New England, who besides doing with others the pioneer-work of material civilization, introduced into the organic structure of a state the principle of soul-liberty, who not only dared be free but also welcomed all who would to come and share the priceless boon.

"It is impossible," says Palfrey, "to estimate too highly the

strength of that devotion to liberty, civil and religious," which brought the Puritans to Massachusetts. It was not devotion to liberty that brought them. It was devotion to what they thought truth and duty. In that they were saints and heroes; but there were some souls in New England who were devoted to truth and duty, and also to liberty. They knew how to contend with error without strangling the errorist.

If it be asked, Why blame the forefathers now? we answer, Why praise them now? Some of them were right and some of them were wrong in their views of church and state. Indiscriminate eulogy does them no good, and may do us much harm. We wish to know the truth of their history for our own guidance in a world a large portion of which neither has religious liberty nor knows what it is. We cannot think correctly of the violation of the rights of man in other lands and in other periods of history if we cannot think rightly of Endicott and the Brownes, of Haynes and Mary Dyer, of Dudley and Mrs. Hutchinson. "The lords brethren may be no better than the lords bishops." When a man stands as Dr. Sturtevant did in 1865 before the Congregational Council in Boston, calling his brethren to "inquire for the old paths," i. e., for the primitive ways of Congregationalism in New England, he of course includes ecclesiastical domination over the state, unless he expressly disclaims this, and laments, as Dr. Sturtevant did, that the Puritans did "persecute." It is astonishing that Dr. Palfrey sympathizes so largely with the intolerant majority, and so little with the wronged and suffering minority. It is hard to believe that his heart is where he seems to have put his head. How he got it there is a curious problem, with our solution of which we are not fully satisfied. There must have been running through his head some such refrain as this:

Great is New England;

But Massachusetts is New England,

And Palfrey is her historian.

We are not a little proud of his scholarship, his liberal politics, and of the enterprise and research manifest in his history; but the fear grows upon us that as a historian he is too much influenced by local pride, ancestral pride, and pride of authorship. He is a citizen of Massachusetts, and what is more gratifying still, of Boston or Cambridge. His ancestors on both sides were among the earliest settlers. His religious convictions and connections remove him beyond suspicion of sympathy with the Calvinism and theoretical intolerance of the early government. He reminds us that he could

not have taught his present views of religion without having been banished. His state pride struggles with his sense of right. The latter is overborne. His magnanimity toward those in power interferes with his sense of justice toward those who were made to feel the power unrighteously. In forgiving the rulers for the sentence of banishment which they would have pronounced upon him, his magnanimity becomes abnormal, and he becomes too decidedly an apologist for the wrongs actually inflicted on others. He imagines worthy motives for the fathers, of which they themselves give no plain indication. It would seem that getting into position as their apologist must have cost him a harder effort than that which Roger Williams put forth when he "made his old bones ache" rowing his boat all the way from Providence to Newport to debate with Fox; but once well into his work of justifying wrong legislation, he finds it difficult to stop, and so he keeps on justifying and apologizing, just as Nero perhaps kept on fiddling because it had been so hard to learn how. Such narrowness we expect to find in some of the ecclesiastical successors of the Cottons and the Dudleys; but we were surprised to find it in such a liberal historian as Dr. Palfrey. In them it is honest pride and bigotry. In him it seems historical immorality. It is a very large and very offensive dead fly in an otherwise most excellent ointment. It is unworthy of his great work, as the persecution itself was unworthy of the men by whom it was inflicted.

B. F. BRONSON.

SOUTHBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS.

JEWISH PROSELYTE-BAPTISM.

THE

HE question as to the origin of the Jewish initiatory immersion of proselytes has a threefold interest, historical, exegetical, and polemical. The historical aspect of the question, which seems to have been that which first attracted the attention of scholars, is important in itself, independently of polemical results, but it gradually yielded to the warm discussions which ensued on the bearing of the Jewish rite on Christian baptism. At present all three grounds of interest seem to be recognized. Those who regard the rite as in existence in our Lord's time, use it to explain the origin of Christian baptism, to defend infant baptism, and to interpret certain passages, especially in the first and third chapters of the gospel of John. But whenever it may have come into use, the investigation of its origin must be of interest for the student of religious history, because it was intimately connected with the religious development of the most remarkable people (religiously considered) in the world.

At the outset we may dispose of one or two connected questions. It has been urged by some of the opponents of a prechristian origin of the rite, that a derivation of the Christian ordinance of baptism from a purely human rite (and one with which, as will be hereafter shown, very gross ideas were connected) would be unworthy of Christ and the ordinance, and that this constitutes a strong à priori argument

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