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 (41 page)

BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
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Page 234
as Mather often suggested, they could not even begin to look by themselvesthe first step that man should take, indeed the only one he could take by himself, was to pray for the power to "be enabled to Look." Only God could give this power: one can "as easily make Iron swim" as to look to Christ ''by any abilities of your own."
7
Mather's distaste extended even to the terminology preparationists commonly used"humilitation," "contrition," and the word "prepared" itself. Far better, he said repeatedly, to think of yourself as a "perishing'' sinner than as a prepared one.
8
Mather announced his disenchantment with the language of preparation in order to point out the dangers he saw in the entire conception. Believing that preparation had yielded "inconceivable prejudice" to the attempts of the Lord to save the souls of men, he did not hesitate to scrap the whole scheme from its psychological assumptions to its vocabulary of stages and steps. Its danger lay in its tendency to encourage men to believe that they would be saved because of some merit of their ownor worse, to believe that they might even save themselves. The "
propensity
" of men to wish to be justified by their own efforts was "innate," he said, in his treatise on
The Everlasting Gospel . . . of Justification
. The Lord says "come without money" but those emboldened by preparation want to come with "the money of vertuous dispositions."
9
Cotton Mather recognized proud men when he saw them. As a young man he learned to face the pride in many of his own appeals to the Lord. And so when an anguished parishioner told him that "The Lord has no reason to save the likes of me," pride and self-righteousness echoed in Mather's ears. He told such men what really prompted their cravings and how desperate their conditions were. Every man secretly harbored a desire to save himself at some time in his life, and a man who did not fear such thoughts in himself was probably under their control. The world was full of proud men who sinned, felt contrition, even terror, and then mended their ways and began to feel themselves saved. But they had not received grace; they had attained nothing more than a damning self-righteousness.
10
Just as this argument set Cotton Mather apart from the preparationists so also did his charge that they treated "knowledge,"
 
Page 235
"contrition," and "humiliation" almost as works. As far as Mather was concerned this was a natural tendency, and he never expressed surprise at it. He expected men to overreach themselves: the civil moral man who mobilized his faculties by himself and then presumed to take up the covenant promises without the aid of grace was a familiar figure. As Increase Mather had long complained, ministers themselves made this error in their sermons which neglected Christ and His redemptive sacrifice. And ministers and laymen alike confused psychological ''works," accomplished by the self, with grace, given only by God. Cotton Mather saw disaster in such confusion: "In making your Addresses to your Saviour for His Favours, you must not suppose, that you must arrive to such and such Degrees of
Humiliation
, before you may
presume
to come unto Him. You must not suppose That you must be Recommended by such and such
Contritions
, unto the
Compassions
of your Saviour, if you would not be charged with a
Presumption
, in coming unto Him. This is to bring the
Covenant of Work
into the Covenant of Grace." In the proper address to God, according to Mather's acrid view, sinners approached God ''Unworthy as Dogs." But they should know that God was less likely to reject them because of their detestable condition than because of their refusal to admit to it.
Mather's psychological discussions generally departed from those of his peers in yet another way: so strong was his sense of the demonic in the world that he could not resist pointing out the stake of the Devil in the doctrine of preparation. The Devil, Mather insisted, recognized that preparation implies the worth of the self and attempts to convince men that they are in fact unworthy to be chosen by God. They must feel greater penitence and greater humility; they must feel an alteration in their lives before they dare trust Christ. Thus the Devil worked to wean men from a reliance on grace to a trust in their own efforts.
11
Every minister in seventeenth-century New England must have encountered men who flung the doctrine of God's omnipotence back into his face as a justification for remaining passive despite all calls to convert. Since Christ is "
All
" and the self is "
Nothing,
" as Cotton Mather sometimes phrased the divine equation, these men seemed to have good cause for refusing to do anything for themselves. Mather despised this "Grand Excuse" which made
 
Page 236
the nature of things an argument for inactivity and dismissed it with the classic but unhelpful rejoinder that the hearts of such men were bad, hence their inability to come to the Lord.
12
Yet in his steadfast rejection of the doctrine of preparation, he seems to leave men with neither a reason to exert themselves nor any basis in psychology which would indicate that they could. But he demands that they try their best to come to Christ! What did he think that a man unassisted by grace could do? The answers he gave both linked his theory to, and separated it from, the traditional version of the conversion process. Like the preparationists, he described the soul that received grace as one that had been purged from much of its egowhich he called "pride." Unlike the preparationists who believed that preparation accomplished the reduction of the self, Cotton Mather feared that preparation implied the importance of the self and its works. Hence he prescribed a psychological state in which a man would become a "perishing"not a preparedsinner. The frame of mind which Mather recommended involved the "annihilation" of the self. But in urging men to cultivate the feeling that Christ was all and they themselves were nothing, Mather did not mean to suggest that men should feeling nothing, but rather that they should loathe themselves and love only Christ. In effect, Mather compressed the stages of preparation into the most intense sort of humiliation. And the method he proposed for the destruction of the self constituted a type of preparation, but one which discarded the usual stages of knowledge, humiliation, contrition in favor of an acute self-consciousness and a complete abasement. In conventional theory, self-awareness, feelings of abasement, and dependency were expected to accompany preparation of course. What Cotton Mather did was to shift them to the center of good attitudes. Presumably the soul that was totally aware of its own sinful, self-serving propensities would be more likely to see the need to depend wholly upon Christ. Therefore Mather urged that the soul should regard every thought and feeling with suspicion. Only in this way could pride be purged. Preparation involved stages of feelingdegrees of guilt, repentance, humility, sorrowit described a contest within the soul between good and evil. Cotton Mather's "method" was not intended to produce feelingif guilt, sorrow, humility, repentance, contrition are all sorts of feelingbut rather to yield abasement and dependence.
 
Page 237
Hence he simply told men to recognize their need of Christ and to try to induce themselves to give up everything for Him. What Mather proposed involved neither an emotional nor an intellectual process, but a fusion of the two which begins with an act of intellect and ends with a rejection of all that pertains to the autonomy of the self. The self should be given over temporarily in favor of an expected infusion of grace (or power) which will permithe expecteda renewed affective process drawing the believer to God in love.
13
Historians have made a good deal of the social implications of preparation. They note that a conception of conversion that broke its process into identifiable stages permitted ministers to demand moral behavior from men before saving faith passed into their souls. As far as the needs of social order were concerned, no matter that not everyone who underwent preparatory pangs would continue in the Spirit until he was born again: fearful men could be depended upon to observe the law. And for a society that conceived of itself in a national covenant with God, such observance held extraordinary value. External performance after all guaranteed external prosperity.
14
Cotton Mather admired social order as much as any man. He made the case for the just price long after there was any hope that New England's merchants could be restrained; he criticized their usurious practices; and he urged laborers to curb their demands. Social mobility alarmed himno man should give up a calling just to make more money, he told his unheeding people. Concern for order of another sort is clear in many of his sermons, which periodically go down the list of crimes provided by the Synod of 1679, warning the people that drunkenness, fornication, and other immoderate indulgences of the flesh could only bring down the wrath of God upon New England.
15
When Puritan divines first began to work out their theory of conversion, they undoubtedly had nothing more in mind than the problem of how God transformed the souls of His chosen. The individual occupied their attention, not society. The focus shifted as the second generation succeeded the first, and the utility of preparation in keeping a people true to covenant obligations became clear. By Cotton Mather's day, this use was openly discussed. In one of the few accounts he wrote in the conventional language of preparation, Mather conceded that "preparatory corn-
 
Page 238
mon works, . . . such as Conviction of sin and misery by the law, and
the terrours of the Lord
that make men affraid, . . . may put a stop to their lewd courses, yea, and work a reformation in many things, and make a natural Conscience to act more strongly than before."
16
As socially useful as these works were, he added in a phrase that hinted at his reservations about the whole scheme, they did not always produce the beginning of conversion. Grace, he explained elsewhere, might work on men and yet not suffuse their beings. It sometimes operated externally, pushing the faculties of the soul this way or that, instructing the understanding in virtuous behavior, filling the will and the affections with fear when they countenanced sin, and yet leaving their nature unrenewed. Sometimes the natural conscience of the reprobate, without the assistance of common grace, aroused itself. Good preaching could do the job, and a man temporarily affected by his sins could mend his ways. At death, though the soul had achieved an outward reformation and no longer sinned so far as the eyes of the world could observe, the creature was plunged into Hell by a Lord who could see that internally nothing had really changed.
17
A society in the national covenant did not have to interest itself in the true inner being of a man. If he behaved it could rest securely. But, of course, a man could not take his condition so lightly; he faced eternal damnation if he settled for anything less than saving faith. It was precisely on this point that the concept of preparation proved of "inconceivable prejudice" to the souls of men, as far as Cotton Mather could see. His analysis of the religious situation in New England always came back to one issue. At the heart of the decline of piety lay the pride of men. Not only did they cherish their own concerns, the flesh and the world, over the Lord's, they wanted to go to Him under their own power. What else was involvedhe askedin the satisfactions felt by the secure and the anxieties experienced by the fearful? The secure, made temporarily "sick" by a sermon or uneasy by their consciences, took up the life of the moral and believed themselves saved. At that point complacency had set in. The anxious, protesting their lack of merit, denied that the Lord would reprieve the likes of them and therefore remained in a natural condition. As different as these two types of men seemed, they were essentially alike: both preferred their own righteousness to Christ. Both indeed were unavowed Arminians. Unfortunately, as
 
Page 239
preparation was preached in New England it seemed to confirm both sorts in this delusion. It encouraged the secure to confuse works and grace, and the fearful to remain paralyzed and proud.
18
For all Cotton Mather's concern about stability and his uneasiness at the direction of social change in New England, his primary interest was not the preservation of the order of this world, but its transformation in the expectation of Christ's imminent return. The possibilities of a redefinition of the social order by a league of the faithful of all Protestant churches fascinated him. If sectarianism could be submerged, if toleration could be continued, and if the elect could be convertedand unitedthen the society might consider itself prepared for the Second Coming of Christ. None of this made him a utopianhe did not expect the reformed society to refine human nature, and he did not suppose that it could continue long without divine assistance.
19
If any holy reformation were to be attained, the faithful would first have to identify themselves. The hope for Christian Union, after all, lay solely with them. Hence, "how may I know that I am saved," always an important question, took on an extraordinarily, portentous character in Mather's mind.
Cotton Mather never doubted that most men who received God's grace would discover it in themselves. Some good men would never learn of their good fortune, however. A number who had holy educations from an early age might prove unable to discern the first workings of the Spirit in themselves. Such men rarely fell into terrible sins and therefore rarely experienced the guilt that distressed evil men. To be sure, they were evil men before their conversions, but their evil was not so great as most. After they were joined to Christ they sometimes had difficulty knowing it because the peace they had always felt simply continued, though it ripened and gave them even greater joy.
20
Still another sort might not share the joy of the assurance that they were Christ's. They experienced the pangs of the new birth, but not the comfort that a new creature should expect. The flaw in their conversions lay in themselvestheir dreadfully imperfect sanctification, and their tendency to persist in their sins. Because they continued in their sinful ways despite the presence of grace, God afflicted them, sometimes by blasting their
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