Samuell Gorton was a man of a profoundly religious nature. His views, have been little studied, and have been greatly misunderstood, both by his contemporaries and the historians of later generations. John Fiske dismisses him with a sentence, in his admirable School History of the United States, as “a man of queer ideas.” The more extended reference of this fair-minded historian, in his “Beginnings of New England,” hardly does justice either to Gorton’s political sagacity, or to the remarkable character of his religious opinions. Charles Francis Adams, in his 83monograph on “Massachusetts, its Historians and its History,” alludes to Samuell Gorton as a “crude and half-crazy thinker.”
His contemporaries in Massachusetts assailed him with a choice collection of opprobrious epithets in the place of arguments: he was an “arch-heretic,” a “beast,” a “miscreant,” a “proud and pestilent seducer,” a “most prodigious minter of exorbitant novelties.”[68]
Edward Rawson, some time Secretary of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, and the ancestor of my own children,—a man capable of making vigorous use of the sturdy Anglo-Saxon of the period, albeit not always grammatically, denounces him as “a man whose spirit was stark drunk with blasphemies and insolences, a corrupter of the truth, a 84disturber of the peace wherever he comes;” and his contemporary, Nathaniel Morton, with whom he conducted an animated correspondence, says he “was deeply leavened with blasphemous and familistical opinions.”
In so far as his religious views have received attention in recent years, they have been mainly studied in their incomplete and incidental expression in some of his published works, “Simplicities Defence Against Seven-Headed Policie,” and “The Incorruptible Key to the CX Psalme,” the main object of which was political and polemical rather than expository of his system of thought. The involved style and quaint and mystical phraseology have repelled the modern student, and prevented a clear understanding of his theological doctrines.
85By far the best and most complete exposition of Samuell Gorton’s religious convictions is to be found in a remarkable manuscript in his own hand-writing which has never been published, but which is preserved in the library of the Rhode Island Historical Society in Providence. I am indebted to the Hon. Amos Perry, the courteous Librarian of the Society, for the opportunity to make a careful study of this paper as well as of other documents relating to Samuell Gorton’s life and work. The manuscript to which I refer is a running commentary on the Lord’s Prayer. Merely as a literary curiosity it merits the attention of the studious and curious. It is in the clear, careful, accurate hand-writing of the scholar rather than of one accustomed to manual industry. The lines are closely 86written, the characters are minute, and almost as accurate as copper-plate impressions. The manuscript averages over two thousand words to a page about the size of our modern legal cap. The character of the writing makes it exceedingly trying to the eyes. The orthography, though in some respects archaic, is more regular and consistent than in most American documents of our Revolutionary era. I have examined many papers of contemporary and more recent dates, but with the exception of those left by his eldest son, Capt. Samuell Gorton, who was evidently instructed by his father, and whose hand-writing resembles his so closely as to be distinguishable from it with difficulty, I have never seen any so clear, systematic, and scholarly in appearance. The literary form, however, is less admirable 87than the clerical execution. The style is involved, the sentences are long, and the punctuation, though systematic, is peculiar. Free use is made of the comma, semi-colon and parenthesis, but periods are most economically distributed, being used literally to indicate a “full stop.” Sentences usually end with a semi-colon, the ensuing clause beginning with a capital. The interrogation point was apparently unknown.
When the reader has searched diligently beneath the quaint and involved phraseology, bristling with scriptural references and illustrations, and come into sympathetic contact with the living thought of the writer, the surprising thing which is discovered is the remarkable modernness of many of Samuell Gorton’s ideas. It goes without saying that he was not “orthodox” according 88to the conventional standards of his time, nor yet, perhaps, of our own; but we everywhere touch the personality of a vigorous and independent thinker, who in many directions foreshadowed the views of the advanced thinkers of a later day.
Some of his enemies denounced Samuell Gorton as an atheist. He was as remote as possible from atheistic leanings. He was not even affiliated with the deism of his own and the succeeding century. His theology was profoundly Christian. It was as Christocentric as that of Swedenborg, with which it has sometimes been compared. Like Swedenborg, he regarded the Infinite and Absolute as per se unknowable. Here both Gorton and Swedenborg are in touch with the modern philosophical agnostic. For both, however, Christianity 89solved the agnostic problem. In Christ they found a perfect expression of the divine nature, and the only rational object of worship.[69]
With regard to the nature of Christ, however, Gorton and Swedenborg were widely separated. Swedenborg’s theology is boldly anthropomorphic; Gorton’s was monistic and impersonal. “The word ‘person’,” he says, “is only borrowed from men and translated to God. * * That doctrine which ties the death of Christ to one perticuler man in one time and age of the world, as being the scope and intent of God’s will concerninge the death of his son in the salvation of the world, that doctrine falsifies the death of Jesus Christ, and 90sets men upon the law of workes in the ground and matter of their salvation, by which law no man is justified.”[70] Here, too, is another radical distinction between his doctrine and that of Swedenborg. The latter turns his most powerful batteries upon Paul’s doctrine of “justification by faith,” while Gorton stands with Luther in its defence.
The “law of works” by which Gorton says no man is justified, he rightly interprets as the conception of salvation through ceremonial observances; not merely the ritual of Pharisaic Judaism denounced by the Master, but the ritual and ordinances as well of his own day and generation. Here he stands with the Friends, as he also did in his opposition 91to a “hireling ministry.” Worship, he taught, is natural to man. Every man is called to seek communion with the divine in Christ directly, and not through priestly mediations. “Prophesie, prayer, and interpretation of the word of God are one,” he says: “where one is there is the other; they are co-insident and co-aparant.” All men are naturally moved to prayer; all men, therefore, may rightfully exhort and interpret. To the conventional interpretations of churches, universities and schools, he preferred “the universitie of humane reason, and reading of the great volume of visible creation.” Mr. Gorton defined prayer as “nothing else but the true breath and spirit of the eternall word, according to God’s intent taken and rained into the soule, concocted and digested in the cauldron of man’s necessities, 92breathing out it selfe unto the fountaine and originall of all suply.”
The spirit of prophecy and inspiration, he taught, is as immediately with man now as in any period of the past. The tenor of............