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Updated: June 29, 2025
In September, 1633, the theocracy of Massachusetts were reinforced by three eminent ministers, John Cotton, Thomas Hooker, and Thomas Shepard; and so many other persons accompanied and followed them that by the end of 1634 the population was not far short of four thousand. The clergy, now thirteen or fourteen in number, were nearly all graduates of Oxford or Cambridge.
Thus the theocracy fell at a single blow; and it is worthy of remark that thenceforward prosecutions for sedition became unknown among the people of the Province of Massachusetts Bay. Yet, though the clerical oligarchy was no longer absolute, the ministers still exerted a prodigious influence upon opinion.
At its birth it encountered alien and hostile influences; Alexandrian theosophy, Oriental asceticism, Byzantine imperialism. Later it encountered the worst influence of all, that of theocracy engendered by the ambition of the monk Hildebrand.
In short, it may be taken as a fact, that, until the period of the French invasion, the true government of the Spanish nation had been a theocracy in the hands of forty or fifty thousand individuals, freed from all responsibility with respect to the civil power, united among themselves by the bonds of a common interest, and forming a privileged caste, considered generally as the depositaries of divine power.
All true Reformers are by nature of them Priests, and strive for a Theocracy. Historical critics take widely differing views of the conduct and character of the Queen of Scots, both in her individual life and her relation to public affairs.
And, says another critic, "he is the inventor of epic painting, in that sublime circle of the Sistine Chapel which exhibits the origin, progress, and final dispensation of the theocracy.
After the court of assistants resumed their meetings in March, 1631, the upbuilding of the theocracy was rapidly pushed. Various people deemed inimical to the accepted state of affairs were punished with banishment from the colony, and in some cases the penalties of whipping, cropping of ears, and confiscation of estate were added.
Their first endeavors, no doubt, are very awkward. Yet absolute right is the first governor; or, every government is an impure theocracy. The idea after which each community is aiming to make and mend its law, is the will of the wise man.
It was there that priestly authority most clearly asserted itself in such oppressive acts as are always witnessed when too much power is left in the hands of men whose primary allegiance is to a kingdom not of this world. Much as we owe to the theocracy for warding off the encroachments of the crown, we cannot be sorry that it was itself crushed in the process.
But a theocracy was only a means, and a means that was never greatly emphasized in the best days of the papacy. It was the end that mattered; and the end was the moulding of human life into conformity with divine truth. The end may appear fantastic, unless one remembers the plenitude of means which stood at the command of the mediaeval Church.
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