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Home , 1630s, 1640s, 1650s

­chapter 1 “Scholarly and Strangely Courteous Controversies”: Firmin’s Ecclesiastical Identity in the and

Hence then that Church which shall deny to the members of other Churches … occasionally desiring communion with the Church, fel- lowship with them in the Sacraments, because they are not of their judgments as to Congregational, Classical, or Episcopal principles, and will hold fellowship onely with those who are of their princi- ples, I charge that Church with Schism in respect of the Catholick Church, by this Act declaring a breach of that bond of union which Christ requires in his Church.1 ∵

In the early 1650s, Giles Firmin was an outsider to the English church.2 He spent much of the and 1640s in New , getting to know inti- mately the polity of the churches and the character of the New England pastors. By the time he began his writing career in 1651, Firmin had returned to England, been ordained by notable Presbyterians, and been set- tled in a living in Shalford, Essex. In these early writings, Firmin consistently notes his outsider status as an observer from New England rather than com- ing down firmly as Presbyterian or Congregationalist, making it clear both that others thought of him in this way and that he thought of himself in such terms. In the preface to his 1652 treatise Separation Examined, for example, in which Firmin vehemently denounces separatism from the parochial churches of England, Firmin notes that that among the Presbyterians, he “was numbred among the Independents (though I am the weakest, and most wor- thy the holy Lord should turne me out of his holy Work)” and that he “resolved to improve the little Talent the Lord had given me, in examining the grounds

1 Giles Firmin, Of Schisme (1658), 25–​6. 2 E. Vaughn, Stephen Marshall: A Forgotten Essex Puritan (London, 1907), 82–​3.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, , 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004430051_003 10 chapter 1 of these practices, and to stand up in the defence of such Ministers, who I saw were deare to Christ, and whom in holinesse, learning, and abilities, the Lord had honoured farre before my selfe.”3 As will become clear in this chapter, Firmin had two goals in these early writings: to advance an approach to polity inclined toward with a few Congregationalist and episcopal accents, and to defend the New England Congregationalists from opprobrium by the English godly.

1 Firmin’s Experience to 1651

Little is known about Firmin’s early life.4 Firmin was born in 1613/14​ in Suffolk, England to Giles Firmin, Sr., who was described as “a godly man, an apothecary of Sudbury, England,” and Martha (Dogget) Firmin. Firmin, Jr. was admitted as a penshioner at Emmanuel College, Cambridge on 24, 1629, but his study was interrupted for an unknown reason to emigrate with his father to the in 1632. Firmin returned to Cambridge in 1633 to study medicine for four years, after which he returned in 1637 to New England and practiced med- icine in Ipswich, MA until his return to England in 1644. His vocation in New England was a source of sorrow to him, as he indicates in one of his tracts: “Be- ing broken from my study in the prime of my years, from eighteen years of age to twenty-​eight, and what time I could get in them years I spent in the study and practise of Physick in that Wildernes til these times changed, and then I changed my studies to Divinity.”5. Firmin, Jr. lived with his father in before acquiring land in Ipswich.6 In Ipswich, he met and married Susannah Ward in 1639, with whom he had seven children. Susannah was the daughter of

3 Giles Firmin, Separation Examined (1652), sig. B2v; see also sig. B4v-r;​ 81; Idem, A Sober Reply (1653), 6, 24. In Of Schism, sig. A3r, Firmin quotes a letter from John Norton approvingly: “I believe the Congregational way to be the truth, yet I think better of many Presbyterians then of many Congregational men.” Firmin consistently distinguishes between Independents and Congregationalists, something not consistently done by partisan Presbyterians in the 1650s, and I follow him in that practice in this chapter. 4 What little is known is primarily recorded in N.H. Keeble, “Firmin, Giles (1613/14–​ ​1697)” in Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: , 2019), http://​www. oxforddnb.com.proxy.library.vanderbilt.edu/​view/​article/​9481?docPos=1; Alumni Cantabri- giensis, s.v. “Firmin, Giles,” http://​venn.lib.cam.ac.uk/​cgi-​bin/​search-​2014.pl?sur=firmin&sur- o=w&fir=giles&firo=c&cit=&cito=c&c=all&tex=&sye=&eye=&col=all&maxcount=50; T.W. Davids, Annals of Evangelical Nonconformity in the County of Essex (1863), 457–​8; John Ward, A Brief Memoir of Giles Firmin (1866). 5 Giles Firmin, A Serious Question Stated (1651), sig. B4r. 6 Giles Firmin, The Real Christian (1670), 314–​15.