The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (20 page)

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Authors: Robert Middlekauff

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BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
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and as a return felt the barbs of the Lord. But if afflictions punishing the people came in abundance, they produced nothing more than temporary correction. The course of New England led downward; in the depth of his despair in 1697, Increase Mather suggested that his land served the Lord as a type of Hell, an emblem for the edification of other nations still capable of profiting by its dismal example.
15
Out of this extended study covering almost forty years, one conclusion emerged. The land housed a people in decline, but the Lord still claimed the land to be His own, though He must soon blast it should New England fail to reform. In these years before the new century opened, Increase plotted New England's course as anxiously as a navigator trying to steer his ship out of the shoals. When the controversy over the Half-Way Covenant first broke into print, he denied that anything was seriously amiss. The Apostolic Church had survived disagreements, he pointed out, and so presumably would New England's. His reassurance masked uneasiness at being in the position of opposing the new baptismal covenant and seemingly incurring responsibility for the outcry. When a few years later he joined the majority and began insisting that the extension of baptism comported well with the first principles of New England, he admitted that the land suffered in its sins. From that time on he concealed neither his despair nor his hope. The situation looked darkest in King Philip's war, but with victory Increase decided that a partial reformation had been achievedhow else could the defeat of the Indians be explained but as a reward for repentance? New England at this moment, he said, was in the position of Israel under Samuel, a partial reformation had occurred but the land awaited a David to pull it back to its original goodness. David did not appear, and in a few years Increase was ready to admit that affairs were at a pass as bad as ever. Both the regenerate and the unregenerate were failing to live up to their obligations: the first group growing in worldliness to the point where their behavior almost proved indistinguishable from the second; and the second steadily showing its determination to go its own sinful way.
16
There is, in Increase's assessments and those of his colleagues, an inability to regard change in any but moral terms. To his eyes, deviations from the norm appeared as decay, not as behavior
 
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based on a perception of reality different from his own. What made change so frightening was that its basis was concealed from ordinary observation; apostasyhe knewalways began in the heart which the outsider could not study. Heart idolatry preceded the better known variety that carried men into a worship of false gods. How could a minister tell when his flock began to yearn after such things as money, business, fashion, rather than the worship of Christ? We "slide back by degrees insensible," the younger Thomas Shepard said in 1672, an observation that echoed through the sermons of second-generation divines.
17
These men knew that they could rally their churches outwardlythey could warn backsliders and excommuncate them if warnings failed; they could exhort them to renew the Church covenant; they could force them to observe days of fasting and thanksgiving. But what of the hearts of ordinary men?
18
The fear in these lamentations fed on still another developmentthe restoration of Charles II and the subsequent persecution of nonconformists in England. These New Englanders watched English events with despair and an increasing sense that they were isolated in the world. They heard periodically from friends in England about the silencing of dissenters under the Act of Uniformity; they heard too of the "drunken beastes" who replaced their friends in English pulpits. The stories of persecution and immorality discouraged them from whatever lingering hopes they may have had about returning to England. Increase of course could confirm these reports from his own experience; he had been driven back home in 1661.
19
There were other sorts of stories too that arrived from across the seareports of ridicule of Puritan ideas and practice. William Hooke wrote to John Davenport of a scene in a play by Ben Jonson, enjoying a revival in Restoration England, which represented "the Puritan put in the stockes for stealing a pigg, and the stockes found by him unlockt, which he admires at as a wonderfull providence and fruite of prayer, upon which he consults about his call, whether he should come forth or not, and at last perceived it was his way, and forth he comes, lifting up his eyes to heaven, and falls to praye and thanksgiving."
20
After this sort of thing, they could not have been surprised by news in 1670 that the Archbishop's chaplain now insisted that grace must not be distinguished from virtue. Were that contention
 
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forced on them, they knew that they would have to discard their entire basis of Church membership. And that would render their land, already in decline, as vicious as old England. With news of all these English disasters arriving with depressing frequency, little wonder that they turned inward to study themselves.
21
The results of this study of their own experience, the perceived declension from the way of the fathers, probably contributed more than anything else to their definition of New England.
But the history of another chosen people also affected the second generation's understanding of themselves and a method of interpreting Scripture also played its part. The history was the story of Old Testament Israel and the method was the ancient one of typology.
Frequently the history of the first chosen people, the children of Israel, was told with the obvious parallel drawn to New England. The Lord had not broken His covenant with Israel, the Puritan ministers insisted; Israel had rejected the Lord despite afflictions and warnings which forecast its eventual disgrace. Surely New England would not permit itself to follow Israel's example; it need not; the time for reform still existed. And all that the Lord required of His people was reformation and repentance. New England-Israel could still save itself.
Perhaps more than anyone else in New England, Increase studied the history of Israel. His sermons brim with references to it, and he wrote one book and long passages in other works about it. Israel fascinated him all his life because of its past and because of what he took to be its future. Israel's history as the people of God had relevance for the Puritans of New England, he was certain. Israel's future promised to be important in the end of the world: Christ's Second Coming and the destruction of Antichrist would be signalized by the salvation of the exiled Jews who would be gathered from the four corners of the world. Obviously New England would be affected by these last climactic events, and in the meantime she could profit much by Israel's example.
22
The problem for all such interpreters was in deciding what was meant by Israel in the Scriptures. Puritans, devoted to literal interpretation except where another sort served their purposes better, began with the assumption that most Biblical passages described historical Israel, but they conceded that in many cases
 
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something more than the literal sense was intended. Should Moses striking the rock for water be taken simply at face value or did the episode indicate something more? What of manna from Heaven and Jonah in the whale? Such passages had intrigued Christians for centuries, and long before the Reformation a means for understanding them had been developed.
23
Perhaps it was natural to consider such episodes as allegorical. At any rate, men with imagination so construed them, and early in the Christian era they developed typology, a branch of allegory devoted to treating the mysteries of the Scripture. Typology as a method of Scriptural interpretation held that many passages in the Old Testament, whether they dealt broadly with Israel's history, or with specific incidents and characters, should be read as anticipations of Christian history recounted in the New Testament. The history of Israel, then, was not what it appeared to be but should be read figuratively. Thus typologists commonly took Moses as a "type" of Christ who, in theological jargon, became the antitype. Christ, as an antitype, had many types in the Old Testament: over a period of years Christian scholars decided that most of the prophets had been types of Christ. Given the initial assumptions it did not take much effort to decide that Adam, Noah, Joseph, Jacob, the most frequently cited, had forecast Christ. Things too were considered as figures of Christgold, jewels, especially a pearl, were to be considered allegorically. Augustine made the drunkeness of Noah comprehensible by demonstrating that it was "a figure of the death and passion of Christ." The English reformers of the sixteenth century, despite the warning of Luther and Calvin who distrusted the method, proved even more inventive. The water from the rock, they took to be a figure of the blood of Christ; the manna, of His body; the serpent of brass raised on the pole, of the crucifixion; Joshua's overthrowing of material Jericho, of the overthrowing of spiritual Jericho; the dark powers, of evil destroyed by God. Similarly, the pit into which Joseph's brothers cast him was a figure of Hell, or sometimes of the descent of Christ, and the swallowing of Jonah by the whale was a type of the burial of Christ.
24
Although the founders of New England sometimes drew the parallel between Israel's experience and their own, they clung to the literal method of scriptural interpretation more often than
 
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not. They were a sober, practical lot and they had before them a dreadful example of what literary imagination might do in the person of Roger Williams. An enthusiastic typologist in every way, Williams used the method to challenge the most cherished prejudices of his solemn brethren in the Bay. Hence in comparing themselves to Israel, the founders kept their imagination under watch and relegated the bewildering passages the typologists were so eager to take under study to the useful category of the mysteries of the Lord.
25
Increase Mather, like most of the leading intellectuals of his generation, simply ignored his father's fears. Matters that had appeared so clear, so self-evident to the founding generation, had proved extraordinarily murky. Protestants had always looked to the Scriptures, and he could not afford to confine himself to received interpretations. So, very early in his career he began to employ typology. Like scores of divines before him, he discovered that Moses, Solomon, and Samson were all types of Christ; the tabernacle of Israel was a "Type of Christ's humane nature"; the temple, a type of His body. He also understood the redemption of Israel out of Egypt as a type of the salvation of sinners by Christ, and he found in the "ceremonial Holiness of the Jewish Church" a type of the "real Holiness which ought to be in Gospel Churches." And throughout his life he insisted that Israel typified the elect in all times and places.
26
In Increase's hand, typology became more than a technique for penetrating the puzzle of Scripture: it became a method for understanding the history of his own time. But though his use of typology was uninhibited, he never succeeded in reconciling the intellectual strains the method imposed.
Intended to solve so much, typology created an ambiguity that always resisted Mather's best efforts at resolution. The problem arose in the comparison of New England to Israel. Good typologist that he was, Increase insisted that two Israels were referred to in Scriptures, and by an extension of thought easy to make, he was led almost unknowingly to think of two New Englands. By two Israels, Mather meant first historical Israel, or as he sometimes called it, "carnal" or "natural" Israel. This was the Israel of Jacob, national Israel, the covenanted people whose literal history was told in the Old Testament. But there was another Israel as well. This was spiritual Israel. Like most
 
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Puritan divines, Increase believed that the term sometimes served as a kind of shorthand for those chosen for salvation by God. The Scriptures worked back and forth between these two meanings and so, naturally, did he. In the same manner, he sometimes thought of New England as the entire people in covenant with God, and as that small body of saints who had been chosen for salvation.
27
Early in his life carnal Israel drew his attention. Its history, as he read it in the Old Testament, presented a melancholy example of a nation in decline. Punctuating Israel's progressive decay were periodic revivals explicable largely in terms of generational changes. A saintly generation, he pointed out, invariably fathered a backsliding generation. Did not Abraham beget Ishmael and Isaac beget Esau? And was not Joshua's great example wasted on the children who came after him? The Scriptures suggested that it had always been so; the rebellion of the children provided a universal theme in all human history. Consider the beginning of history. The first Church of God resided in Adam's family in godliness, but Cain "foresook the Lord" and had to be excommunicated. Out of the Church, Cain became the father of an evil and corrupt generation. Purified by the expulsion of Cain, the Church "continued in some measure pure" until the time of Seth when once again the children reverted to form. In these years the reforming fathers accomplished their tasks with relative ease. Concentrated in one family, the Church could detect apostates within itself and cast them out. But as the world increased in number so did the multitude of sinners who enjoyed a kind of immunity from punishment because they were so many. At this point the Church separated from the profane in an attempt to secure purity. But corruption haunted almost every generation, and before long, the pure and the profane mingled within the Church. This second great apostasy provoked the Lord who sent the flood to wash evil from the earth. Religion revived in Noah's family, but Cham's apostasy followed about forty years later. Once again the Lord encouraged reform in the Church and once again the builders of Babel, the grandchildren of Noah, rebelled. Within a few generations the world was almost completely overrun by idolatry. By the time of Job, whoIncrease calculatedlived three hundred and fifty years after the flood, religion had almost left the world. Abraham established

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