the Bible in its various translations, but particularly in the magnificent new King James version,
passed into the common tongue and script. On Sunday the minister took his congregation
through key passages, in carefully attended sermons which rarely lasted less than an hour. But
authority lay in the Bible, not the minister, and in the last resort every man and woman decided
in the light which Almighty God gave them' what the Bible meant. This direct apprehension of the word of God was a formula for religious excitement and exaltation, for all felt themselves in a close, daily, and fruitful relationship with the deity. It explains why New England religion was so powerful a force in people's lives and of such direct and continuing assistance in building a new society from nothing. They were colonists for God, planting in His name. But it was also a formula for dissent. In its origins, Protestantism itself was protest, against received opinion and the exercise of authority. When the religious monopoly of the Roman Catholic Church began to disintegrate, in the 1520s and 1530s, what replaced it, from the start, was not a single, purified, and reformed faith but a Babel of conflicting voices. In the course of time and often by the use of secular force, several major Protestant bodies emerged: Calvinism in Geneva and Holland; Anglicanism in England; Lutheranism in northern Germany. But many rapidly emerging sects were left outside these state churches, and more emerged in time; and the state churches themselves splintered at the edges. And within each church and sect there were voices of protest, antinomians as they were called-those who refused to accept whatever law was laid down by the duly constituted authorities in the church they belonged to, or who were even against the idea of authority in any form. We come here to the dilemma at the heart of the perfect Protestant society, such as the Pilgrims and those who followed them wished to create. To them, liberty and religion were inseparable, and they came to America to pursue both. To them, the Roman church, or the kind of Anglicanism Charles I and his Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, were creating in England, were the antithesis of liberty, the essence of thraldom. They associated liberty with godliness because without liberty of conscience godliness was unattainable. But how to define liberty? When did the exercise of liberty become lawlessness? At what point did freedom of conscience degenerate into religious anarchy? All the leaders of opinion in New England tackled this point. Most of them made it clear that liberty had, in practice, to be narrowly defined. Nathaniel Ward, who came to Massachusetts Bay in 1634 and became pastor of Ipswich, wrote a tract he entitled The Simple Cobbler of Aggawam in America, and boldly asserted:I dare take it
upon me to be the herald of New England so far as to proclaim to the world, in the name of our
colony, that all Familists, Antinomians, Anabaptists and other enthusiasts shall have free liberty
to keep away from us; and such as will come, to be gone as fast as they can, the sooner the better
... I dare aver that God does nowhere in his world tolerate Christian states to give toleration to
such aversaries of his truth, if they have power in their hands to suppress them.", John Winthrop
himself gave what he termed a `little speech,' on July 3, 1645, on the whole vexed question of the
authority of magistrates and liberty of the people-a statement of view which many found
powerful, so that the words were copied and recopied and eventually anthologized. Man, he laid
down, had:
a liberty to that only which is good, just and honest ... This liberty is maintained and exercised in a
way of subjection to authority, it is of the same kind of liberty whereof Christ hath made us free ...
If you stand for your natural, corrupt liberties, and will do what is good in your own eyes, you will
not endure the least weight of authority ... but if you will be satisfied to enjoy such civil and lawful
liberties, such as Christ allows you, then you will quietly and cheerfully submit under that
authority which is set over you ... for your good.