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Old Portraits, Modern Sketches, Personal Sketches and Tributes

J >> John Greenleaf Whittier >> Old Portraits, Modern Sketches, Personal Sketches and Tributes




No one can appreciate more highly than myself the noble qualities of the
men and women of the Mayflower. It is not of them that I, a descendant
of the "sect called Quakers," have reason to complain in the matter of
persecution. A generation which came after them, with less piety and
more bigotry, is especially responsible for the little unpleasantness
referred to; and the sufferers from it scarcely need any present
championship. They certainly did not wait altogether for the revenges of
posterity. If they lost their ears, it is satisfactory to remember that
they made those of their mutilators tingle with a rhetoric more sharp
than polite.

A worthy New England deacon once described a brother in the church as a
very good man Godward, but rather hard man-ward. It cannot be denied
that some very satisfactory steps have been taken in the latter
direction, at least, since the days of the Pilgrims. Our age is tolerant
of creed and dogma, broader in its sympathies, more keenly sensitive to
temporal need, and, practically recognizing the brotherhood of the race,
wherever a cry of suffering is heard its response is quick and generous.
It has abolished slavery, and is lifting woman from world-old degradation
to equality with man before the law. Our criminal codes no longer embody
the maxim of barbarism, "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth," but
have regard not only for the safety of the community, but to the reform
and well-being of the criminal. All the more, however, for this amiable
tenderness do we need the counterpoise of a strong sense of justice.
With our sympathy for the wrong-doer we need the old Puritan and Quaker
hatred of wrongdoing; with our just tolerance of men and opinions a
righteous abhorrence of sin. All the more for the sweet humanities and
Christian liberalism which, in drawing men nearer to each other, are
increasing the sum of social influences for good or evil, we need the
bracing atmosphere, healthful, if austere, of the old moralities.
Individual and social duties are quite as imperative now as when they
were minutely specified in statute-books and enforced by penalties no
longer admissible. It is well that stocks, whipping-post, and ducking-
stool are now only matters of tradition; but the honest reprobation of
vice and crime which they symbolized should by no means perish with them.
The true life of a nation is in its personal morality, and no excellence
of constitution and laws can avail much if the people lack purity and
integrity. Culture, art, refinement, care for our own comfort and that
of others, are all well, but truth, honor, reverence, and fidelity to
duty are indispensable.

The Pilgrims were right in affirming the paramount authority of the law
of God. If they erred in seeking that authoritative law, and passed over
the Sermon on the Mount for the stern Hebraisms of Moses; if they
hesitated in view of the largeness of Christian liberty; if they seemed
unwilling to accept the sweetness and light of the good tidings, let us
not forget that it was the mistake of men who feared more than they dared
to hope, whose estimate of the exceeding awfulness of sin caused them to
dwell upon God's vengeance rather than his compassion; and whose dread of
evil was so great that, in shutting their hearts against it, they
sometimes shut out the good. It is well for us if we have learned to
listen to the sweet persuasion of the Beatitudes; but there are crises in
all lives which require also the emphatic "Thou shalt not" or the
Decalogue which the founders wrote on the gate-posts of their
commonwealth.

Let us then be thankful for the assurances which the last few years have
afforded us that:

"The Pilgrim spirit is not dead,
But walks in noon's broad light."

We have seen it in the faith and trust which no circumstances could
shake, in heroic self-sacrifice, in entire consecration to duty. The
fathers have lived in their sons. Have we not all known the Winthrops
and Brewsters, the Saltonstalls and Sewalls, of old times, in
gubernatorial chairs, in legislative halls, around winter camp-fires, in
the slow martyrdoms of prison and hospital? The great struggle through
which we have passed has taught us how much we owe to the men and women
of the Plymouth Colony,--the noblest ancestry that ever a people looked
back to with love and reverence. Honor, then, to the Pilgrims! Let their
memory be green forever!





GOVERNOR ENDICOTT.

I am sorry that I cannot respond in person to the invitation of the Essex
Institute to its commemorative festival on the 18th. I especially regret
it, because, though a member of the Society of Friends, and, as such,
regarding with abhorrence the severe persecution of the sect under the
administration of Governor Endicott, I am not unmindful of the otherwise
noble qualities and worthy record of the great Puritan, whose misfortune
it was to live in an age which regarded religious toleration as a crime.
He was the victim of the merciless logic of his creed. He honestly
thought that every convert to Quakerism became by virtue of that
conversion a child of perdition; and, as the head of the Commonwealth,
responsible for the spiritual as well as temporal welfare of its
inhabitants, he felt it his duty to whip, banish, and hang heretics to
save his people from perilous heresy.

The extravagance of some of the early Quakers has been grossly
exaggerated. Their conduct will compare in this respect favorably with
that of the first Anabaptists and Independents; but it must be admitted
that many of them manifested a good deal of that wild enthusiasm which
has always been the result of persecution and the denial of the rights of
conscience and worship. Their pertinacious defiance of laws enacted
against them, and their fierce denunciations of priests and magistrates,
must have been particularly aggravating to a man as proud and high
tempered as John Endicott. He had that free-tongued neighbor of his,
Edward Wharton, smartly whipped at the cart-tail about once a month, but
it may be questioned whether the governor's ears did not suffer as much
under Wharton's biting sarcasm and "free speech" as the latter's back did
from the magisterial whip.

Time has proved that the Quakers had the best of the controversy; and
their descendants can well afford to forget and forgive an error which
the Puritan governor shared with the generation in which he lived.

WEST OSSIPEE, N. H., 14th 9th Month, 1878.





JOHN WINTHROP.

On the anniversary of his landing at Salem.

I see by the call of the Essex Institute that some probability is
suggested that I may furnish a poem for the occasion of its meeting at
The Willows on the 22d. I would be glad to make the implied probability
a fact, but I find it difficult to put my thoughts into metrical form,
and there will be little need of it, as I understand a lady of Essex
County, who adds to her modern culture and rare poetical gifts the best
spirit of her Puritan ancestry, has lent the interest of her verse to the
occasion.

It was a happy thought of the Institute to select for its first meeting
of the season the day and the place of the landing of the great and good
governor, and permit me to say, as thy father's old friend, that its
choice for orator, of the son of him whose genius, statesmanship, and
eloquence honored the place of his birth, has been equally happy. As I
look over the list of the excellent worthies of the first emigrations, I
find no one who, in all respects, occupies a nobler place in the early
colonial history of Massachusetts than John Winthrop. Like Vane and
Milton, he was a gentleman as well as a Puritan, a cultured and
enlightened statesman as well as a God-fearing Christian. It was not
under his long and wise chief magistracy that religious bigotry and
intolerance hung and tortured their victims, and the terrible delusion of
witchcraft darkened the sun at noonday over Essex. If he had not quite
reached the point where, to use the words of Sir Thomas More, he could
"hear heresies talked and yet let the heretics alone," he was in charity
and forbearance far in advance of his generation.

I am sorry that I must miss an occasion of so much interest. I hope you
will not lack the presence of the distinguished citizen who inherits the
best qualities of his honored ancestor, and who, as a statesman, scholar,
and patriot, has added new lustre to the name of Winthrop.

DANVERS, 6th Month, 19, 1880.

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