"In the meane townlet of Scrooby, I marked two things," -it is Leland who writes,-" the parish church not big but very well builded; the second was a great manor-place, standing within a moat, and longing to the Archbishop of York." This large old manor-place he describes with its outer and inner court. In this manor-place, about half a century after Leland saw it, there lived William Brewster. He was a man of education who had been for a short time in residence at Cambridge; he had served as one of the under secretaries of state for years; had been intrusted beyond all others by Secretary Davison, his patron; and, when Elizabeth disgraced Davison in order to avoid responsibility for the death of Mary of Scotland, Brewster had been the one friend who clung to the fallen secretary as long as there was opportunity to do him service. Making no further effort to establish himself at court, Brewster went after a while "to live in the country in good esteeme amongst his friends and the good gentle-men of those parts, espetially the godly and religious." His abode after his retirement was the old manor-place now destroyed, but then the most conspicuous building at Scrooby. It belonged in his time to Sir Samuel Sandys, the elder brother of Sir Edwin Sandys, whose work as the master spirit in the later history of the Virginia Company of London has already been recounted. At Scrooby, Brewster succeeded his father in the office of "Post," an office that obliged him to receive and deliver letters for a wide district of country, to keep relays of horses for travelers by post on the great route to the north, and to furnish inn accommodations. In the master of the post at Scrooby we have the first of those influences that lifted a group of people from this rustic region into historic importance. He had been acquainted with the great world, and had borne a responsible if not a conspicuous part in delicate diplomatic affairs in the Netherlands. At court, as at Scrooby, he was a Puritan, and now in his retirement his energies were devoted to the promotion of religion. He secured

earnest ministers for many of the neighboring parishes. But that which he builded the authorities tore down. Whitgift was archbishop, and the High Commission Courts were proceeding against Puritans with the energy of the Spanish Inquisition. "The godly preachers" about him were silenced. The people who followed them were proscribed, and all the pains and expense of Brewster and his Puritan friends in establishing religion as they understood it were likely to be rendered futile by the governors of the church. "He and many more of those times begane to look further into things," says Bradford. Persecution begot Separatism. The theory was the result of conditions. as new theories are wont to be.

Here, as elsewhere, the secession appears to have begun with meetings for devotion. By this supposition we may reconcile two dates which have been supposed to conflict, conjecturing that in 1602, when Brewster had lived about fifteen years in the old manor-house, his neighbors, who did not care to attend the ministry of ignorant and licentious priests, began to spend whole Sundays together, now in one place and now in another, but most frequently in the old manor-house builded within a moat, and reached by ascending a flight of stone steps. Here Brewster's hospitality was dispensed to them freely. They may or may not have been members of the Separatist church at Gainsborough, as some have supposed. It was not until 1606 that these people formed the fully organized Separatist church of Scrooby. It was organized after the Barrowist1 pattern that had originated in London- it was after

1 Modeled after the plan of church government of William Barrow, who like Browne, lived in the time of Queen Elizabeth and died in her time, too, for he was executed in 1593. Barrow's plan differed probably from the system of church government devised by Robert Browne in vesting more authority in the officers of the church. Browne and Barrow were alike Separatists in holding that it was the duty of the godly to give up their membership in the Church of England and to become members of little congregations, each one in itself an independent church. The Separatists

a divine pattern, according to their belief. Brewster, the nucleus of the church, became their ruling elder.

It was in these all-day meetings that the Separatist rustics of Scrooby were molded for suffering and endeavor. The humble, modest, conscientious Brewster was the kingpost of the new church- the first and longest enduring of the influences that shaped the character of these people in England, Holland, and America. Brewster could probably have returned to the court under other auspices after Davison's fall, but as master of the post at Scrooby, then as a teacher and founder of a printing office of prohibited books in Leyden, and finally as a settler in the wilderness, inuring his soft hands to rude toils, until he died in his cabin an octogenarian, he led a life strangely different from that of a courtier. But no career possible to him at court could have been so useful or so long remembered.

But Brewster was not the master spirit. About the time the Separatists of Scrooby completed their church organization in 1606, there came to it John Robinson. He had been a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and a beneficed clergyman of Puritan views. He, too, had been slowly propelled to Separatist opinion by persecution. For fourteen years before the final migration, he led the Pilgrims at Scrooby and Leyden. Wise man of affairs, he directed his people even in their hard struggle for bread in a foreign country. He was one of the few men, in that age of debate about husks and shells, who penetrated to those teachings concerning character and conduct which are the vital and imperishable elements of religion. Even when assailed most roughly in debate he was magnanimous and forbearing. He avoided the bigotry and bitterness of the early Brownists, and outgrew as years went on the differed as to how far it was right for them to join in religious exercises with those who still remained in the Church of England. The essence of the belief was that any number of people, no matter how small the number, could of themselves, without authority, or direction from above, form a church.

want

narrowness of rigid Separatism. He lived on the best terms with the Dutch and French churches. He opposed rather the substantial abuses than the ceremonies of the church of England, and as life advanced he came to extend a hearty fellowship and communion to good men in that church. Had it been his lot to remain in the national church and rise, as did his opponent, Joseph Hall, to the pedestal of a bishopric or to other dignity, he would have been one of the most illustrious divines of the ageing some of the statesmanly breadth of Hooker, but quite outspreading and overtopping the Whitgifts, Bancrofts, and perhaps even the Halls. Robert Baillie, who could say many hard things against the Separatists, is forced to confess that "Robinson was a man of excellent parts and the most learned, polished and modest spirit that ever separated from the church of England"; and long after his death the Dutch theologian Hornbeeck recalls again and again his integrity, learning, and modesty.

Shall we say that when subjected to this great man's influence the rustics of Scrooby and Bawtry and Austerfield were clowns no longer? Perhaps we shall be truer to the probabilities of human nature if we conclude that Robinson was able to mold a few of the best of them to great uses, and that these became the significant digits which gave value to the ciphers.

Edward Eggleston: The Beginners of a Nation, pp. 149-157. D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1896.

QUESTIONS

66

Explain the statement that in the country around Scrooby, we are in the cradle of great religious movements." Do the people of the "Pilgrim country seem men of the same kind we ordinarily suppose the Pilgrims to have been? Sketch the career of William Brewster. How may the Pilgrims have been transformed by the influence of William Brewster and John Robinson? How did the Separatist Church of the Pilgrims gather around Brewster in the manor house at Scrooby?

VI

WITCHCRAFT

The Puritans of Massachusetts were by no means alone in this dread of the malign and mischievous influences of unfortunate people who had had dealings with Satan; the belief in witchcraft was commonly held in Europe and America. The selection which is here given suggests the elements on which the witchcraft delusion in Salem rested; there was no knowledge then of hysteria or hypnotic suggestion-to use words which we often hear now; the people not only believed, but intensely believed, in the activities of a personal evil spirit, who sought with unending diligence to bring the unwary under his control. Life in one of these small New England towns, between the forest and the hungry sea, was likely to be monotonous and narrow and unrelieved by natural wholesome distractions; it gave the best opportunity for the development of hysterical conditions and for the cherishing of delusions, to which a whole community might fall a ready victim.

The notion of house-haunting demons-a superstition the most nearly a survival from the days of the elves and brownies crossed the sea with the early emigrants. One such spirit in Newbury in New Hampshire, in 1679, threw sticks and stones on the roof of the house, lifted up the bedstead from the floor, threw the bedstaff out the window, threw a cat at the mistress of the house and beat the goodman over the head with a broom, made the pole on which the kettles were hung to dance up and down in the chimney, tossed a potlid into the fire, set a chair in the middle of the table when dinner was served, seasoned the victuals with ashes, filled a pair of shoes with hot ashes, ran away with an inkhorn, threw a ladder against a door, and put an awl into the bed. . . . In Hartford, in 1683, there was a gentle devil with a taste for flinging corncobs through the windows and down the chimney. Stones and sticks were sometimes thrown, but softly so as to do no serious harm.