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Updated: May 29, 2025
Ah! the poor, sad people, who were yet so childish, kept in the ignorance and credulity of a savage race by centuries of theocracy, so habituated to mental night and bodily suffering that even to-day they remained apart from the social awakening, simply desirous of enjoying their pride, indolence, and sunlight in peace!
But worthless as Mather's statements are, in describing the views of the Quakers, they are valuable as indicating the temper in which these disturbers of the Puritan theocracy were regarded. In accusing them of rejecting the Bible and making a law unto themselves, Mather simply put on record a general belief which he shared.
Since under the theocracy there was no department of human affairs in which the clergy did not meddle, they undertook as a matter of course to interfere with the militia, and the following curious letter written to the magistrates by the ministers of Rowley shows how far they carried their supervision even so late as 1689. ROWLEY, July 24th, 1689. May it please your honors,
But in the savage and bloody struggle that was now at hand there was no place for leaders capable of pity or remorse, and the theocracy found supremely gifted chieftains in John Norton and John Endicott. Norton approaches the ideal of the sterner orders of the priesthood.
The Jewish State is enlarged in Philo's vision from a national theocracy into a world-city inspired by the two ideas of love of God and love of humanity. In this conception, no doubt, the influence of Greek philosophy is to be seen; the Jewish interpreter keeps before him the "Republic" of Plato, and the "Polity" of Aristotle.
The Republican State secretly encouraged the sacred espionage of these mendicant friars and Jesuits of Reason, who terrorized the army, the University, and every branch of the State: and it was never noticed that while they pretended to serve the State, they were all the time aiming at supplanting it, and that the country was slowly moving towards an atheistic theocracy; very little, if anything, different from that of the Jesuits of Paraguay.
It was from Leyden that the chief opposition came to a synod, by which a great attempt was to be made towards subjecting the new commonwealth to a masked theocracy; a scheme which the States of Holland had resisted with might and main.
What was this new-fangled aristocratic man, he asked, but the ideal of Confucius, the superior person, "the son of the King"? There you had the very essence of Benham, the idea of self-examination, self-preparation under a vague Theocracy. Benham interrupted and protested with heat. And this Confucian idea of the son of the King, Prothero insisted, had been the cause of China's paralysis.
"To him be glory in the church ... throughout all ages, world without end. Thus, the general nature of church government was an absolute monarchy, or, to use a better term, a theocracy. Christ was king and lawgiver, governor and administrator.
Those malecontents who petitioned to enlarge the suffrage were fined and imprisoned in 1646, and even in 1664 the only amendment was by permitting non-church-members to vote on a formal certificate to their orthodoxy from the minister. The government they aimed at was not democracy, but theocracy: "God never did ordain democracy as a fit government," said Cotton.
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