irginia and
to the Englishman of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. They were joint
heirs of the Reformation, children of that waxing and puissant England
which was a nation of one book, the Bible; a book whose phrases color
alike the _Faerie Queen_ of Spenser and the essays of Francis Bacon; a
book rich beyond all others in human experience; full of poetry,
history, drama; the test of conduct; the manual of devotion; and above
all, and blinding all other considerations by the very splendor of the
thought, a book believed to be the veritable Word of the unseen God.
For these colonists in the wilderness, as for the Protestant Europe
which they had left irrevocably behind them, the Bible was the plainest
of all symbols of idealism: it was the first of the "Reverences."

The Church was a symbol likewise, but to the greater portion of
colonial America the Church meant chiefly the tangible band of
militant believers within the limits of a certain township or parish,
rather than the mystical Bride of Christ. Except in Maryland and
Virginia, whither the older forms of Church worship were early
transplanted, there was scanty reverence for the Establishment. There
was neither clergyman nor minister on board the Mayflower. In Rufus
Choate's oration on the Pilgrims before the New England Society of New
York in 1843, occurred the famous sentence about "a church without a
bishop and a state without a King"; to which Dr. Wainwright, rector of
St. John's, replied wittily at the dinner following the oration that
there "can be no church without a bishop." This is perhaps a question
for experts; but Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepard, and John Cotton would
have sided with Rufus Choate. The awe which had once been paid to the
Establishment was transferred, in the seventeenth-century New England,
to the minister. The minister imposed himself upon the popular
imagination, partly through sheer force of personal ascendency, and
partly as a symbol of the theocracy,--the actual governing of the
Commonwealth by the laws and spirit of the sterner Scriptures. The
minister dwelt apart as upon an awful Sinai. It was no mere romantic
fancy of Hawthorne that shadowed his countenance with a black veil. The
church organization, too,--though it may have lacked its bishop,--had a
despotic power over its communicants; to be cast out of its fellowship
involved social and political consequences comparable to those
following excommunication by the Church of Rome. Haw