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 (22 page)

BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
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Page 116
Thirty-five years later Increase would oppose giving synods such powers, and he would stand as the defender of the autonomy of the particular church. But in 1679, when he still retained faith in the State, having given up on mere exhortations, he proved willing to invest it with authority far beyond anything his father would have approved. New England's case seemed desperate to him; and the magistrates, for the moment, seemed the only hope for it. The danger was that they would tolerate new practices. They could do nothing about Stoddard, except to attempt to restrain his influence, but they could stamp out error. They could resist toleration. Their fathers' example should remind them of their duty, and he invoked the great earthly trinity once more, Winthrop, Dudley, and Endecott. Increase must have suspected that even this appeal would fail, that the younger Winthrops and Dudleys and Endecotts were not the men their fathers were. And so, once more, in his hopelessness he threatenedif they failed"God will
change
either
you
, or your Government
ere
long."
6
The failure of the State to suppress competing faiths, which was clear to everyone by 1700, deprived Increase of much of his hope for New England as a people in covenant with God. His confidence in the external covenant which the Lord had made with the tares as well as with the choice seed had been diminishing for years. The loss of piety, the changes in sacramental practice, the lowering of standards for Church membership, all had shaken him. Afflictions would be understoodthe blasting of crops, the incursions of the Indians, even the loss of the charter were occurrences which made sense within the rationale of the outward covenant of God. But when the State finally proved unreliable, no basis for recovery of the entire people appeared possible.
7
Increase's hope that the State might prove capable of producing a reformation had survived almost until the beginning of the eighteenth century. When hope died, he believed that one resource remained to New England, the expectation that the saints, the people of God, might through their faithfulness rescue the entire land. The conception of New England as a people had grown slowly in Increase's mind. While the idea was taking form, his attachment to his father's notion of the true Church in New England as a saving remnant, holding itself in readiness for
 
Page 117
the final drama, remained strong. But he could not help but feel differently about the people and the land. He was a child of America, the son of an immigrant, born and reared in Dorchester and Cambridge. And for the first thirty years of his ministry, he had found himself placing his hopes in all the people, sinners as well as saints, though he knew in his heart he could do nothing for the sinners.
8
But he seemed to assume that the sinners could do something for New England; they might help maintain its churches despite their own black sin and thereby ward off the blows from the Lord. How could they do these things? By external conformity, by obeying the law, by avoiding visible sins, they could give outward testimony to the value of its mission.
Yet he conceded that by themselves the unregenerate could save neither the land nor the churches. The protection of the land lay in the hands of the Lord's own chosen ones. For this premise Increase drew upon the theory of John Cotton, first expounded in
The Way of Life
, which Cotton had not written with New England in mind and had in fact phrased rather abstractly.
9
Cotton argued in this work that sinners would always follow their hearts' lead: they would sin and they would prove incapable of true repentance. By all standards of human justice they deserved destruction, but so wonderful was the mercy of the Lord that they might escape temporal judgment through the intervention of the saints. The saints might "mourn" for "the whole land," in Cotton's fine phrase; God loved them and He would spare the sinners on earth as long as His own people stood "in the gap."
10
To be effective the saints must not participate in the sins of the land; only by holding themselves aloof from the prevailing crimes of the unregenerate could they stay the Lord's hand. If they should join the multitude in its evil, they too could expect afflictions and even temporal destruction, though in the end they would share in God's eternal mercy. Cotton meant that saints could redeem New England's people on earth but not in Heaven. And the mass of people themselves could advance their own prosperity on earth. They could also damage themselves and, in the process, the saints as well. Though sinners were incapable of attaining the virtue of the regenerate, they owed saints an elementary kind of respect. If they could not bring themselves to follow the examples of the godly, at least
 
Page 118
they could restrain their impulses to persecute them. Not only must the saints not be persecuted by the State, they must direct it and see that it at least externally recognize the true religion. Should the sinners indulge the worst in themselves, and neglect the directions provided by the regenerate, or worse, persecute them, they would feel God's wrath. Unfortunately, the saints too would suffer as the Lord blasted the whole land.
11
These assumptions guided Increase Mather's anxious reflections on New England until the turn of the new century. He began his ministry thinking in his father's terms about the Church, a pure institution transferred to the new world awaiting its destiny at the end of the world. But while he shared his father's vision, Increase and his generation insensibly tended to identify the Church with New England. Somehow in the period before 1700, the fate of the Church proved hard to separate from the fate of the people, saints and sinners alike. The warnings he issued, the trouble he predicted, the decline he charted in these years were directed to the society as much as to the people of God, the company of the faithful gathered out of the world.
12
Increase Mather's ideas about the Church changed little throughout his life. The Church was an institution of the chosen of God; it had always been so; it would remain so until the end of the world. Hypocrites had always polluted it, and probably always would at least until the millennium dawned. But the gracious should deny hypocrites entrance whenever they were recognized and drive them out when they were unmasked. The Church belonged to the pure.
The theory of Congregational polity held by his father satisfied Increase in every respect after he changed his mind on the Half-Way Covenant. The covenant gave the Church its form; the minister ruled it with the aid and consent of laymen. Each particular church governed itself, though loving communion with others often provided necessary guidance on doctrine and worship. Like Richard, Increase felt no desire to take the Church out of the world; perfection was denied to men even in Christ's institution, and renunciation of the world would not secure sanctity or purity. But men should use all lawful means to make the Church holy. The best means, according to the experience of the fathers of New England, lay in restricting the sacraments to those in the covenant and in applying tests of saving faith to
 
Page 119
discover the regenerate. Some men would offer themselves for membership without saving qualifications; the Church had to find them out in order to protect itself.
13
How to exclude the sinners and discover the saints, how to keep the Church pure were concerns that filled Increase's mind all his life. The Church of Christ, the true Church, had always been holy, and Increase's sense of its continuity increased as he grew older. This Church stretched from Israel to the primitive days in the time of Christ to the evangelical age of the New Testament. The one development which impressed him was the growing perfection of the Church. There had been great men in Israel's day and they had served the Lord well; they had preserved His Church; and God loved them and blessed them with His holy Church. But God loved His Son, Jesus Christ, infinitely more, and He gave His Son's followers a greater light on His ordinances. And now with the end of history approaching, the light shone even brighter and the Reformed churches of the evangelical age took on greater perfection.
14
But though the evangelical Church conformed more closely to Christ's desires, it remained in essence the original Church, the Church of the patriarchs. The one unvarying qualification for the Church, if it were to follow divine prescription, was that it receive only the faithful, those who possessed the grace of God. In Increase's understanding of ecclesiastical history, the greatest reforms in the Church were in its substance, the selection of a holy membership. The contribution of New England had come when tests had been discovered which permitted a more effective separation of sheep from goats, the saved from the damned. This impetus to ecclesiastical progress exceeded even the discovery of the autonomy of particular churches. Congregationalism had made the covenant explicit and had located governance within the particular churches, but as important as these developments were, they would have no meaning should the world succeed in inserting itself into Christ's sanctuary. Hence Increase Mather's concern for purity and his insistence that it was the one unvarying mark of the true Church from Israel's time to his own.
15
This concern led him into opposition to the Half-Way Covenant, an opposition he abandoned only when he became convinced that purity could be maintained under Half-Way terms. His initial view, announced in ''An Apologetical Preface," a
 
Page 120
long introduction to John Davenport's
Another Essay for the Investigation of the Truth
, implied that the covenant with Abraham, which had been extended to his seed, was so fragile a contrivance that it collapsed in cases in which men failed to demonstrate their inner quality to the Church.
16
For God's promise of salvation to the seed of Abraham was interpreted by Puritans in New England to mean that the children of full members were in the covenant. The children claimed membership by their birthright, though presumably they possessed the inherent qualifications which they would demonstrate publicly after their conversion. This was the way Increase Mather first understood New England's system of membership and sacraments.
17
The theory appeared clearer than it actually was. One portion of the New England way dominated all others: the requirement that a candidate for membership in a church describe his conversion experience. The emphasis laid on this test warped the remainder of the system and the sacramental theory had to be adjusted so as to preserve this overruling stipulation. Many Reformed groups had long considered baptism a seal of the covenant signifying the regeneration of the baptized. The problem was always in identifying the gracious; in New England with the requirement that candidates prove their regeneracy to the satisfaction of the church by describing their inner lives, the problem was more complicated than elsewhere. Unbaptized adults who satisfied the church that they had grace were to be baptized because they had proved themselves to be Abraham's seed. Presumably their children, too, were in the covenant, and they were baptized. But when these children succeeded in having children of their own, but failed to experience grace, the entire sacramental theory seem endangered.
18
The Synod of 1662 took advantage of the confusion of the covenant languageit was possible according to the elaborate covenant terminology to be in an external covenant and yet not enjoy saving graceto propose that these children of baptized but unconverted parents also be baptized once their parents had declared that they believed in Christ as far as their natural abilities enable them to believe. These parents still maintained some relationship with God, unregenerate though they might be, and their children should receive this first sacrament in the hope that they might be among the faithful who in time would enjoy a
 
Page 121
recognizable conversion. To refuse baptism to these infants, the Synod pointed out, would be to empty the churches of New England in a generation or two. The founders had not come to New England for such a purpose.
19
The youthful Increasehe was twenty-three in 1662listened to these proposals with scorn. The Church, he said in his introduction to Davenport's tract on the Half-Way Covenant, took its being in the purity of its members. The Church was the institution of Abraham's seed. And how did men prove themselves of the seed in the seventeenth century? By making clear their faith. The literalness of Increase's understanding conveyed his sense of the simplicity of the whole problem: requirements for membership had been established in the 1630's; the technique for working out membership had existed for a generation; the fathers had declared their satisfaction then. Why, he asked, if the system was true in the 1630's wasn't it true in the 1660's? In fact the situation was as old as the Old Testament; all New England had to do was to follow the wisdom of the patriarchs, which was expressed in typology for the instruction of Christian churches.
20
At this point Increase parted company with John Davenport, who denied that Old Testament sacramental practice represented types for the New Testament churches. Circumcision, long considered to be the Jewish analogue of baptism, could be purchased, Davenport sneered. If faith adhered to the moneyed, then so presumably should sacramental practice, a conclusion, Davenport recognized, no one could accept. Increase read Old Testament practice differently: Israel required that parents demonstrate their fitness for Passover before offering their children for circumcision. Passover, which forecast the Lord's Supper according to typological theory, was reserved for the faithful. The Old Testament precedents for New Testament practice seemed abundant to Increase. Men who did not respond to the obligations of their circumcision lost their membership in the Church and with it the privilege of having their children admitted and circumcized. Esau cut himself oil, "dis-Membered himself," Increase reported in a revealing phrase, by his failure to believe.
21
And so did the children of Abraham by Keturah; the Ishmaelites and Edomites, the descendants of Abraham, "were discovenanted by not promising nor performing those duties of Faith and Obedi-
BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
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