Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

LECTURE VII.

John Robinson and Leyden

Congregationalism.

Our spiritual forefathers may not have been perfect men, but my impression is that, take them for all in all, neither the world nor the church has seen such men elsewhere in modern times. Dr. Robert Vaughan, English Nonconformity, iv.

Niet slechts die van zijne partij waren, roemen hem [Jan Robinson] hoog, maar ook die tegen haar waren ingenomen, prijzen even zeer zijn karakter en zijne gaven, als de reinheid zijner bedoelingen. N. C. Kist, Nederlandsch Archief., etc., viii: 375.

Secutus est Johannes Robinsonus, Leidensium Separatistarum Minister, vir moderatus, quique suis concessit Communionem cum Reformatis reliquis in verbo sive frequentatione concionum & precibus publicis, quin Reformatos Belgas ad S. Coenam admittebat, ast Arminianorum hostis acerrimus. Casparis Calvörii, Fissuræ Sionis, etc. (1700), 504.

To him [J. R.] is the honor due of having introduced into Congregationalism that more catholic spirit, those broader views of the kingdom of Christ, and that more conservative tendency, by which it is distinguished from the strict Independency which held no sort of religious communion with any who had not renounced and forsaken the national churches. Dr. L. Bacon, Genesis of N. E. Chhs., 245.

A vertuous and a good man, reuezent in behauiour, and of lober convz¿lation, well(poken, and one that had bene exercised in all poynts of godlinelle from a childe, holding up his hands toward heauen, and praying for the whole people. 2 Maccabees, xv: 12 (Gene van version).

[graphic][ocr errors][merged small]
[graphic]

ENUINE greatness is very apt to lack self-recognition. It keeps steadily at its work-lofty or lowly, as the case may be-with the least possible consciousness that it is making history, or thought that any future is to care for details

of its goings-out, or comings-in. Specially may this be true in exigent times, when reticence, if not concealment, easily passes from the stage of convenience to that of duty, and thence, in time, becomes the habit of the man. Serious difficulties of course under any circumstances attend the endeavor after three centuries to exhume from the debris of the past, the minute details of any human life; yet it does seem a little remarkable that of the seven prominent leaders of the Scrooby-Leyden-Plymouth movement, we are actually ignorant of the birth-place of four, while Bradford and Winslow are the only ones whose baptismal records have been as yet identified. It looks as if John Robinson were born in Lincolnshire, and there is some probability that it was in the thrifty seaport and market town of Gainsborough-upon-Trent,' in the latter

The place is indicated by two considerations: (1) the Corpus Christi register, which

notes the matriculation in 1592 of a John Robinson (supposed to be our John), puts him

portion of 1575, or the early portion of 1576. Of his childhood we know literally nothing, although we may easily conjecture that he was speaking from his own loving memories when in his maturity he said:

"Children, in their first dayes, have the greater benefit of good mothers, not onely because they suck their milk, but in a sort, their manners also, by being continually with them, and receaving their first impressions from them. But afterwards, when they come to riper years, good fathers are more behooffull for their forming in vertue, and good manners, by their greater wisdom and authoritie and oft times also, by correcting the fruits of their mothers indulgencie, by their severitie." 2

Or was he heaving a sigh out of the receding sorrows of his own youth, when as he was nearing fifty, he wrote:

"Children brought up with their grandfathers, or grandmothers, seldom do well; but are usually corrupted by their too great indulgencie." 3

He must have been in the close neighborhood of seventeen years of age, when, in 1592, he went to Cambridge to become a member of Corpus Christi (or Benet) College. Let us spend a few moments in trying to put ourselves into his position then

down as of Lincolnshire [Masters's Hist. Corp. Christ., s. d.]; while Mr. Hunter [Collections concerg. the Chh. at Scrooby, etc. (ed. 1854), 93] conjectures that he was "originally of Gainsborough, where in the reign of Charles II. Robinsons were chief persons among the Dissenters of that town." The time is indicated by the registers of the University of Leyden where [p. 325] is the following entry:

Sept. 5, 1615. Coss. permissu [after leave by the magistrates] JOANNES ROBINTS[ONUSevidently subsequently added]; Anglus, an. xxxix. Stud. Theol. alit familiam [i. e.: he has a family.]

But if he were thirty-nine years of age 5 September, 1615, he must have been born at some time between 6 September, 1575, and 6 September, 1576.

It must be added as another element of doubt, that Dr. Lamb in his reprint of Masters's work (1831) substitutes—without any reason given for the change-Nottinghamshire for Lincolnshire; but on the other hand, it is to be said that as the narrow Trent here separates the two countries, the mere crossing of a bridge is all that lies between them.

The Gainsborough parish records go back

[blocks in formation]

4 It curiously adds to the combination of uncertainties which throngs around this subject, that in the spring of this same year of 1592, a John Robinson entered Emanuel College, Cambridge, as sizar, who took his M. A. in 1600. An additional item as to him, is however given, which makes it to the last degree improbable that he could have been the Leyden pastor, viz.: that he took the degree of B. D. in 1607. We have every reason to think that the young man in whom our interest centers, had left the Establishment at least three years before that date, so that this record could not be true of him. Inattention to this consideration led so careful a writer as Dr. Young [Chron. Plym., 452] into error.

and there; for, in some important respects, there was never such an England before, or since.

Elizabeth is about entering on the sixtieth year of her life, and the thirty-fifth of her reign. It is four years since the signal destruction of the Spanish Armada had liberated the country from its thirty years' fear, and established it upon sea and land as a great Protestant power. All things conspire together to awaken a new national life. To this date the queen's reign has been brilliant in material achievements, but among the throng of Cecils and Walsinghams and Leicesters and Greshams and Drakes and Frobishers, great in state-craft and commerce and arms and adventure, there has been but one Philip Sidney, and he has fallen gloriously as a chivalric warrior, almost before the world had had time to recognize him as a man of letters. And now, six years only after Sidney's death,— as when a Swiss railway train emerges from the damp, chill, stifling gloom of an interminable tunnel, at once upon the splendor of summer sunshine, and the grandeur of the Helvetian Alps - behold the "golden age of merrie England!" Historians are busy conserving her past. John Stow, at the age of sixty-seven, is impoverishing himself in completing his "Survey of London," and perfecting his great "Chronicle of England." William Camden, prebend at Salisbury, at forty-one, is polishing his "Britannia." Richard Hakluyt, at thirty-nine, is digesting the story of English prowess upon all the seas, for the waiting shelves of the world's great libraries; and Samuel Purchas, born at Thaxtead in Essex, the year after Robinson—to be known to all the wise for his " Pilgrims"—is just matriculating at St. John's College, down the Trumpington road, a little way on the other side from Corpus Christi. In the bookshops of Cambridge, Robinson will find in 1592, fresh from the press, the maiden volumes of three poets whose names—if not in the highest rank of song-writers have come down to our time, viz.: Samuel Daniel and Michael Drayton, each about thirty years of age; and Henry Constable, who is thirty-seven. George Chapman, at thirty-five, is preparing in London for the work which he did so well, of introducing Homer to the English-reading world.

[ocr errors]

The sudden impulse which had stimulated the intellectual

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »