great hammer; smiting at the mind and heart. "Others because they have
felt the heavy hand of God... upon these grounds they build their hopes:
'I have had my hell in this life, and I hope to have heaven in the world
to come; I hope the worst is over.'" Not so, thunders the preacher in
reply: "Sodom and Gomorrah they burnt in brimstone and they shall burn
in hell." One of Hooker's successors has called him "a son of thunder
and a son of consolation by turns." The same may be said of Thomas
Shepard, another graduate of Emmanuel College in the old Cambridge,
who became the "soul-melting preacher" of the newer Cambridge by
the Charles. Pure, ravishing notes of spiritual devotion still sing
themselves in his pages. He is wholly Calvinist. He thinks "the truth
is a poor mean thing in itself" and that the human reason cannot be "the
last resolution of all doubts," which must be sought only in the written
Word of God. He holds it "a tough work, a wonderful hard matter to be
saved." "Jesus Christ is not got with a wet finger." Yet, like so many
mystics, he yearns to be "covered with God, as with a cloud," to be
"drowned, plunged, and swallowed up with God." One hundred years later
we shall find this same rhapsodic ecstasy in the meditations of Jonathan
Edwards.

John Cotton, the third of the mighty men in the early Colonial pulpit,
owes his fame more to his social and political influence than to his
literary power. Yet even that was thought commanding. Trained, like
Hooker and Shepard, at Emmanuel College, and fresh from the rectorship
of St. Botolph's in the Lincolnshire Boston, John Cotton dominated
that new Boston which was named in his honor. He became the Pope of
the theocracy; a clever Pope and not an unkindly one. He seems to have
shared some of the opinions of Anne Hutchinson, though he "pronounced
the sentence of admonition" against her, says Winthrop, with much zeal
and detestation of her errors. Hawthorne, in one of his ironic moods,
might have done justice to this scene. Cotton was at heart too liberal
for his role of Primate, and fate led him to persecute a man whose very
name has become a symbol of victorious tolerance, Roger Williams.

Williams, known today as a friend of Cromwell, Milton, and Sir Harry
Vane, had been exiled from Massachusetts for maintaining that the civil
power had no jurisdiction over conscience. This doctrine was fatal to
the existence of a theocratic state dominated by the church. John Cotto