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."Declensionfrom the primitive foundation work, innovation in doctrine and worship"--this, according to a committee ofthe deputies, was the true cause."A spirit of division, persecuting and oppressing of God's ministers andprecious saints," said Mr.Flint of Dorchester, "is the sin that is unseen." And not a few maintained that alltheir troubles were but well-merited punishments for having dealt too leniently with the Quakers.And yet, in the year 1679, such explanations as these were falling to the level of the conventional for many ofthe magistrates and even for some of the clergy.After forty years few of the original leaders were still alive.Winthrop died in 1649, Cotton in 1652, Thomas Dudley in 1653, John Wilson in 1667, Richard Mather in1669.The days of persecution and exile influenced the thinking of the second generation, indeed, not so muchas an experience, but rather as a tradition or a tale that is told.Liberal influences, which were to oust theMathers from control of Harvard College, were already gaining ground in Cambridge, while Boston hadCHAPTER III 46become the center of powerful material interests which were to prove incompatible with the rigid ideals of thefounders."The merchants seem to be rich men," writes Mr.Harris in 1675, "and their houses as handsomelyfurnished as most in London." In 1680 more than one hundred ships traded at the Bay, carrying fish,provisions, and lumber to southern Europe, to the Madeiras, and to the English sugar colonies in the WestIndies.Many men who rose to prominence in the third quarter of the century were more concerned for thetemporal than for the spiritual commonwealth; and when material interests thus came into competition withthe interests of religion, not a few were prepared to compromise with the world, and so a secular and moderatespirit crept in to corrupt the counsels of government.The rise of the moderate party and the divergence between clergy and magistrate is therefore a notable featureof the last years of Massachusetts history under the charter.In 1679, after the death of Leverett, Bradstreetwas elected governor.He was the leader of the party of conciliation, one of many who, renouncing the rigidand uncompromising policy of the clergy, were ready to coöperate with Randolph in the hope of securing theessential interests of the colony by a timely submission to the English Government.And it is significant of thegrowing influence of the property interests that the moderates were stronger in the upper than in the lowerchamber.In 1682 the governor and a majority of the assistants, "upon a serious consideration of his Majesty'sintimation that his purpose is only to regulate our charter, in such a manner as shall be for his service and thegood of this his colony," announced themselves willing to surrender the bulwark of the Puritan liberties.Butthe House of Deputies voted to "adhere to their former bills," preferring with the clergy rather to "die by thehand of others, than by their own."The event reveals the opposition of the material and the ideal interests which was a prime cause in the defeatof the great Puritan experiment.The assistants were "men of the best estates," says Randolph, while thedeputies were "mostly an inferior sort of planters." Randolph was a prejudiced observer; but it is undoubtedlytrue that the upper chamber spoke for the shipbuilders and traders of Boston.Forty years earlier, when Laudwas preparing to annul the charter, both magistrates and clergy made ready for forcible resistance.It was nolonger possible.Massachusetts had ceased to be a wilderness community cut off from contact with the outsideworld.Her rapidly growing trade depended upon English markets.The base of the fisheries was shiftingnorthward, and a French company at Nova Scotia was already seizing New England ships.Without Englishprotection trade would be ruined and the colony itself fall a prey to France.Forcible resistance was thereforenot to be thought of [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]