Read The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 Online

Authors: Robert Middlekauff

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The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (21 page)

BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
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Page 109
a pure Church, but his children demonstrated their identity with all previous generations of ungrateful children. A thread of faith survived, however, which Jacob spun into a national Church.
28
When the Church achieved national status after being joined so long to a family, the problems intensified. The expansion of the Church permitted men to sin with impunity, Mather explained, and the old dreary cycle of reform and decline persisted. So, of course, did the slow and steady downward progress of the life of religion. The godly of each passing generation never quite managed to equal their fathers' grace. "Solomon," Increase Mather once observed, "was a good man and his Soul is now in Heaven, yet he was not like David his Father as to measure of grace and faithfulness."
29
The absolute low point in this tale of decline came twenty years after the death of Josiah who had wrought "a great Reformation" but who had fathered offspring so graceless that ''the Jewish State both Civil and Ecclesiastical" was quite overthrown.
30
Sent into the captivity, Israel learned nothing from its suffering and when it was released, fell again into its self-serving habits. Despite the warnings of the prophets, apostasy proceeded. The generation that went into captivity had been guilty of idolatry; the one emerging from it was guilty of covetousness, a kind of spiritual idolatry. To bring them to their senses, the Lord afflicted them as He had afflicted previous generations. As before, these judgments of the Lord had failed to yield a permanent change, and when Christ appeared, the Jews were once more in a degenerate state.
31
This was one interpretation of Israel and its carnal History. In measuring New England's unfolding history against the record of natural Israel, the Lord's first chosen people, Increase Mather never found reassurance. If Israel was a type of New England, as Increase assumed, should Puritans expect that their history would parallel Israel's exactly? Since there were no clear rules for controlling the typological method when it was applied to history, as there were when it was applied to Scriptures, divergences between type and antitype could be expected. But such departures from the model remained possibilities, and over the years what impressed Increase Mather was the dreadful faithfulness in which New England followed Israel's road to destruction.
32
The beginnings of the two covenanted people appeared strik-
 
Page 110
ingly alike. Just as the Lord led the children of Israel out of tyrannical Egypt into the wilderness, so he also carried the Puritans out of persecuting England into the wild New World. Like the children of Israel, New England's people remained true to the Lord's purposes in the first generation when they possessed gifted leaders. Apostasy did not begin until the great men of the founders passed from the scene, and then the godly leaders in the second generation took up the burden of directing a degenerating people back up the hill of purity. When Increase carne of age he did not at first grasp how steep this hill would be nor how difficult it would be to persuade New England to scale its top. He may not even have understood that reform was needed. His first comments on the problems of the unbaptized children of his generation were uncomprehending. With John Davenport he insisted that the old rules furnished clear guides to action, or in this case as his opponents pointed out, to inaction. As he came to see the disaster that impended should the children fail to convert, he changed his mind about the Half-Way Covenant and became one of its leading advocates. But children, the rising generation, remained one of his concerns throughout his life.
33
King Philip's War, which began in 1675, provided the next great shock following the Half-Way Covenant, and prompted a response in the familiar historical terms. By sending the war, God notified His people of His disappointment and anger with their growing defection from the covenant. So great was His wrath that He refused to be propitiated by the Day of Humiliation which the General Court called on June 29, 1675, sending on that day more dreadful scourges. Conventional ritualistic replies to His anger would not be enough, Increase noted: the Lord expected reformation. When the war ended with a victory, good men could take heart. A partial reform had been achieved under the lash of the Lord's afflictions, and New England appeared to have recovered a measure of holiness, but a full reformation awaited the future, if it was to occur at all.
34
Strictly speaking, there was nothing in historical Israel's past comparable to the series of shocks that buffeted New England in the years following the war with the Indians. The Crown stripped the Bay Colony of its charter in 1684 and sent out in the person of Sir Edmund Andros a governor who was bent on following his instructions to centralize the government of New England.
 
Page 111
Political struggles of a new magnitude occurred until revolution erupted in 1689. At this time Increase Mather and those around him dreamed of the old way which would be capped by the restoration of the charter of their fathers. But though they got rid of the detested Andros, they also got a new charter and with it a state in which political privilege rested no longer on Church membership but instead on property. They also received another innovation of doubtful benefit, a royal governor and a new method of selecting his council, the upper house of the legislature. A reconstituted state appeared even more shocking when it became known that it was committed to religious toleration.
35
Israel's state had also endured transformations; it had suffered under foreign rulers; it had connived in the propensity of its subjects to worship false gods (and what else did toleration, the equivalent in New England, involve?). The parallels could be drawn for all their unevenness; but if Increase did not feel obligated to etch the differences precisely, neither did he seize the opportunity to insist that the experiences of the New England people conformed exactly to Israel's.
36
The prophets had branded the children of Israel a stiff-necked people and in so doing expressed the Lord's displeasure at the pride of His chosen. Much of the anger of the Lord and the despair of the prophets arose in fact from the psychological perverseness of the chosen people. Brought out of Egypt by the Lord and spared the anger of Pharaoh and his people, they persisted in their complaints and grumbling. Receiving the manna rained down from Heaven to ease their hunger, they ignored the injunction to take their supply a day at a time. Warned not to worship false gods and images, they constrained Aaron to cast the molten calf of gold. These sad beginnings became a pattern, the sordid outlines sketched by the backbiting, stealing, divisions among themselves, and the uncleanness of the children of Israel. And so it went again and again even in defiance of repeated warnings and in violation of their covenant with God. Assured of the Lord's blessing and protection, were they to hold fast to His law, the children of Israel swelled themselves up and broke His Covenant.
37
Increase detected the same cast of mind in New England and pronounced it more disturbing than any of the external shocks the society received. Israel's history suggested that a decline was
 
Page 112
almost inevitable; that a backsliding generation followed a good one seemed in the nature of things. But perhaps history could be reversed in New England; perhaps New England could escape the awful destruction that had befallen the first chosen people. Increase retained his hopes in the 1690's though the State seemed to be slipping out of orthodox hands. Happily the Church of the pure, though hard-pressed to keep its graciousness, still survived. If it could be kept undefiled it could save the land.
38
 
Page 113
7
The Church of the Pure
What preserved hope for Increase Mather and his colleagues in the pulpit in these years, what kept them assiduously preaching to saints and sinners alike, was a confidence that the normal institutional order could be depended upon to work the Lord's will on the land. More particularly Increase relied upon the State; his bitterest jeremiads are efforts to compel the State to act or expressions of despair at its lethargy.
The first jeremiads were election sermons, preached at the invitation of the General Court, and addressed to the people's rulers. But though, in a formal sense, the ministers delivering these sermons addressed the magistrates, they used the occasion to speak to the entire people. Only a small proportion of the people of New England attended, of course, but the ministers knew that the magistrates and representatives would transmit their messages and if they should neglect this obligation, the many other ministers in attendance could be depended upon. The final resort of the ministers lay in the printing presses of Boston and Cambridge, which produced hundreds of copies of the sermons year after year. And so ministers seized their advantage, a magnificent pulpit from which an entire society might be exhorted, and me-
 
Page 114
thodically reminded New England of what God expected of it. The early efforts of the ministers summoned the whole community to reform, impartially denouncing all the people for their departures from the true way. God's controversy was with New England in Wigglesworth's epic poem and in these early jeremiads. John Higginson warned ''Merchants and such as are increasing
Cent per Cent
" to remember that the Lord had planted the land for religion, not trade, but he reserved his gravest threats for "any man who made Religion as Twelve, and the world as Thirteen." William Stoughton preferred analogies from the family to those of trade and likened New England's people to the disobedient children of a mighty father. Jonathan Mitchell's majestic
Nehemiah on the Wall
, preached in 1667, attempted to evoke a "publick Spirit" among all. All erred, he insisted, all incurred the Lord's wrath for unbelief and idolatry. Samuel Danforth, who borrowed Jonathan Mitchell's metaphor of the errand into the wilderness in his election sermon of 1670, also persisted in calling on the body of the people as a whole. And Increase Mather himself in his first ventures into this melancholy form followed the example of his senior colleagues in, for example,
The Day of Trouble Is Near
(1674).
1
By the end of the decade of the 1670's, the jeremiad began to change: as in the old form, ministers continued to summon the people as a body to reformation, but now specific groups and interests were singled out for exhortation, ministers, merchants, schoolmasters, fathers, children, servants, and, in particular, magistrates. The change of address marked a recognition of the fragmentation of the community. The people could still be appealed to as a body, and a minister ought to continue to remind them of the public interest. But private concerns demanded recognition too and perhaps if appeals to the group failed, approaches to men in their private capacities would not.
2
Increase pioneered in the new form of the jeremiad. Its beginnings are clear in his great
Discourse Concerning the Danger of Apostasy
.
3
In this sermon as in others he directed the most feverish of his appeals to the magistrates. It was very well to remind a people of their duty, but fifteen or twenty years of that had proved of little value. The facts were, as he saw them, that the people had no inclination to reform, that sin would abound unless the State acted more vigorously. The magistrates were
 
Page 115
the "cornerstone" of New England Societyhe told them in 1679. If they failed to act, New England's people would fail the Lord. The magistrates could do much, and he provided a list of recommendations. They should encourage the keeping of the record the founders had achieved in New England. A book of chronicles of New England was what he had in mind, comparable to the chronicles of the Old Testament. The State should also authorize the collection of the history of God's special providences towards New England. The record in marble in Geneva ought to inspire emulation, he said. And the magistrates should attempt to do what magistrates had always done in a Christian societyenforce the law. They would not convert men by insisting upon obedience to statutes, but at least they might effect an external reformation which would secure outward blessings and prevent judgments on the external affairs of men. You cannot stop "pride in the heart" Increase told them, but you can stop "pride in apparel." You cannot stop drunkenness in the sight of the Lord, but you can punish drunkenness in the sight of men.
4
Increase's central recommendation, which he would regret making years later, concerned the organization of churches. At the time Increase preached the
Discourse
, he faced the prospect of further defections from the Congregational way in the West. There in the Connecticut Valley of Solomon Stoddard the old basis for admission to the churches had been discarded. To Increase, Stoddard appeared in the guise of the destroyer of the Church as an institution of the pure. Stoddard baptized indiscriminately, it seemed, and he was about to open Communion to the profane. His practice caught on and spread from Northampton throughout the West. Only the State could stop himand it would not. But it might insert itself into the process of the selection of ministers, or so Increase urged. He paid his respects to the old idea of congregational autonomy in a sentence that betrayed his uneasiness at the disaster it threatened to bring to New England: "Though the just liberties of Churches should not be infringed, yet that every Plantation in the Country should have allowance to chuse, whom they please to labour in the publick dispensation of the word, may be in time a great inlet to ignorance, error, and profaneness." Increase proposed that the General Court find some "expedient" to ensure that only the qualified served in the churches of New England.
5
BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
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