The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (12 page)

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

Authors: Robert Middlekauff

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1636, less than a year after the
James
entered the port of Boston, he agreed to serve the Dorchester group which was just gathering itself into a church. Ministers and magistrates from nearby communities appeared on the appointed day to examine the company that was seeking to establish itself. To the distress of everyone concerned, the faith of some of the candidates proved hard to discern, and the examiners withheld their permission. Thinking on this episode a few days later, Richard Mather, whose own grace had not been challenged, regretted that he had agreed to sponsor the Dorchester group. "They pressed me into it with much importunity," he explained to Thomas Shepard, who among the examiners had been least satisfied that the Dorchester candidates possessed the requisite qualifications. Richard was "ashamed" not to yieldif he did not "a tribe . . . should perish out of Israel." Not wishing that to happen and not wanting to be considered "stubborn and of a stiff spirit," he gave in to the people of Dorchesterwith unhappy results.
39
This episode marked the last and perhaps the only time that Mather allowed himself to apply less than rigorous standards in assessing the fitness of an adult company. Later in 1636 he and the Dorchester faithful succeeded in gathering a regenerate group out of the world and into a church. A few months before they did so, a chastened Richard Mather was writing friends in England that hypocrites must be kept out of the Church and that the fitness of all who applied must be searched. Mather must have succeeded in impressing his own sense of rigor on his church; for years afterwards they resisted his belief that the children of unconverted members should be baptized. Perhaps they knew of his own doubts in the 1640's, doubts that weakened his plea that the Church extend baptism to such children.
40
The resolve to keep out "counterfeit Christians," in Mather's pungent phrase, did not weaken.
41
He meant the term to refer to adults only, of course; there was no way of telling about an infant, or a small child, until reason and knowledge were attained with maturity. But those adults in the community who presented themselves for membership were another matter. While the least spark of faith ought to bring their acceptance by the Church, they must be examined carefully beforehand. Mather made the conventional bow to the need for conducting this scrutiny with "rational charity," a phrase that echoed through
 
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three generations of Puritan writing on Church polity. The question that the modern must ask is what he, and other divines of the seventeenth century, meant by the term. How rational was it, and more to the point, how far did this charity extend into a corrupt world? Richard Mather impressed his own generation as a kind and sympathetic man, a view that justifiably persists in our own century. He was not one of the eager tormenters of Anne Hutchinson; he did not sniff heresy behind every bushand he looked at children with far more hope than many of his age. Yet probably because he had been burned in the first attempt to draw the Dorchester men into a church, and certainly because he despised impurity in God's house, he proved himself more dedicated than most to keeping the counterfeit out. Although he often went to William Ames, John Ball, Paul Baynes, and even Cartwright for guidance in his thought about the Church, on this matter of examination none of the scholars gave him his lead. Rather it was Calvin he found most persuasiveCalvin who counted it "foolish credulity" to accept "meer verball acknowledgments" as satisfying the requirements of faith.
42
Nothing ought to be taken at face valueor so Richard Mather read Calvin. The Church must "search and examine" into men's hearts, otherwise sinful men, hypocrites, liars, designing men would find their way into the Lord's house.
43
Calvin carried great authority but Scripture even more, and Mather went to the Old and New Testament for proof of the need for preventing charity from developing into foolishness. The second book of Kings told the melancholy story of Gedaliah who lost his life for being "over charitable" to the treacherous Ishmaeleven after a warning against such weakness was delivered to him.
44
Other holy passages reported the results of examinations, however, of Philip searching the heart of the eunuch, of John The Baptist who "sifted the very thought of them that came to his Baptisme," and most gloriously of the Angel of Ephesus who earned Christ's praise for trying those claiming to be Apostles and discovering them to be liars. As Mather read Revelations, Christ "commended" the Angel for "suspiciousness," and provided a standard that His Church must honor.
45
Rational charity for Mather clearly implied a willingness to accept weak Christians but to receive none without suspicion that they might be fraudulent. He might well have
 
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substituted "suspicious" for rational. In any event, he summed up his views by urging that charity not be suspicious without cause yet it must "not trust all faire pretences too farre."
46
Mather's colleagues in the pulpits of New England, and his son Increase, and his grandson Cotton, all were to agree that rational charity should be exercised so as not to exclude any Christian. Better to admit ten hypocrites, John Cotton once wrote, than keep out a single Christian.
47
Richard Mather heard this argument often and rejected it specificallybetter keep out many Christians, he urged, than admit a single hypocrite. The "hurt" in denying membership to one with saving faith, he explained, was "negative"; the Church would miss the good that the saint had in him, but it would not receive the evil that a hypocrite carried in his soul.
48
In the history of the Church what impressed Richard was how much wickedness a single corrupt person might do, as Satan's desire to sow the tares among the wheat demonstrated. And Ecclesiastes reported that "one sinner destroyeth much good."
49
If Scriptural history and his own experience made Mather wary of unexamined avowals of graciousness, they did not dampen his confidence that the Church could judge accurately the experience of applicants. We can see today that among the effects of much preaching about predestination and the process of conversion was the appearance of a large number of laymen uncertain of their inner states. Perhaps some were over-scrupulous, at any rate they hesitated to claim that their private experience revealed the working of grace. Others simply said that they had not undergone conversion, but the pattern of their lives seemed to suggest that they might entertain hopes. In the 1640's Richard Mather was still full of confidence, and he urged them all to trust the churches by telling the elders how things stood within their minds and souls at the moment. Those knowledgeable in such matters would decide whether their experience was gracious. The Church would make mistakes, but Mather did not consider those errors sinful, even when they resulted in the admission of hypocrites. An unregenerate man sinned when he entered the Church, but the Church, in acting honestly on the evidence, did not.
50
What all this implied for the character of the Church is clear: it would contain hypocrites. Mather recognized this, admitted it
 
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freely though he deplored it and wished to preserve the Church from taint whenever possible. Unlike several colleagues, he never claimed that hypocrites had their uses, that indeed their presence in some way strengthened the Church. Such assertions were made by divines who were even more concerned about an orderly society that he. They emphasized the advantage of having unworthy men directly under the watch of the Churchas all of the baptized, of any age, were. The Church could exhort them to live up to the promises of their baptismal covenant, and to observe the law and live decent and moral lives. Mather rarely delivered such exhortations and never rejoiced that unregenerate men within the Church were subject to its supervision.
51
Despite his demand that the Church regard prospective members with suspicion, Mather urged as early as 1644 that the children of unconverted members receive baptism. To many of his peers, such practice guaranteed that the impure would pollute Christ's Church. Despite his harsh, unforgiving attitude towards hypocrites, Richard possessed a gentle side. Certainly he found the grief of parents who dreaded the possibility that their children were unregenerate hard to bear. He spoke several times of the need to give them some comfort. But by itself this desire would not have carried him to his position on baptism. What he had was a profound organic sense, a tendency to see wholesnot just discrete partsand to conceive of the interconnectedness of things. This sense shaped his historical understanding, especially his conception of the covenant and the persistence of the Church. The New Testament, of course, held that Christ's Church would endure until the end of the world. But if all Protestant reformers agreed on the persistence of the Church they did not agree on the unity of the covenant, at best a shadowy device in the New Testament, nor did they agree on the relationship of the Church of the Jews to the Church of the Gentiles. Richard Mather's ideas on these subjects had a starkness and a clarity that gave them great power. The covenant, he was convinced, was one. Beginning with Adam, transferred to Abraham, and to the children of Israel, and extending through the New Testament history to the seventeenth century, the same covenant had endured. He conceded that it varied according to circumstances and accidents, but for substancefor the faithful of all ages within itit was unvarying. It had always contained sinners and hypocrites; no
 
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one could deny that Ishmael and others of Abraham's household who had been sealed into it by circumcision were of the damned. They had been in the covenant externally, he explained: they, like many after them were in it, but unable to keep it, unable to receive grace. Eventually Israel itself arrived at this dreadful condition and the Lord cast Israel off, breaking the everlasting covenant with these unfaithful. When the everlasting covenant was shattered through the apostasy of Israel, the Lord chose a new people for His own, and the reformed saints everywhere in the seventeenth century survived as the chosen.
52
It was the children's being in covenant that qualified them for baptism, Richard always believed, not their parents' fitness for the Lord's Supper. In the 1640's when he first argued for the baptism of children of unregenerate members, he may have expected many of them, and perhaps their parents also, to convert. He preached on the growth of grace in these years, insisting even as he begged men to come to Christ, that grace would show itself in those who had received it. It would grow, revealing itself in the attitude and the behavior of the saint.
53
As the problem of membershipand baptismcame to a head late in the next decade, Mather reluctantly admitted that perhaps he had been mistaken about the visibility of grace. His admission came almost fifteen years after the Cambridge Synod had decided to ignore the entire issue. But in 1657 and 1662, when successive synods took up the question, the time for a reassessment and for candor had arrived. In
Defense of the Answer of the Synod of 1662
, Mather declared that grace might not work itself into men's actions.
54
Still its "being and truth" might be present even though its "exercise" was not.
55
And hence it was simply impossible to decide one way or another about those adults who had been baptized as children, but who had then failed to convert as they reached maturity. Perhaps they had grace, perhaps they did not, but in either event the Church could not attain certainty. All it could know was that they remained in the covenant and in the Church unless they were cast out for some notorious sin. Once these adults declared their belief in Christ and owned their covenant, their children too should receive baptism. Presumably the children of these children too would qualify as they were born.
56
In the 1630's when the founders gave their ecclesiastical theory practical form, they had not realized the implications of having
 
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two methods of qualifying for Church membership. They had assumed that membership itself had its own integrityit was one no matter whether a person qualified through birth to regenerate parents or through a relation of his own conversion experience. This assumption was challenged, first quietly in one church and another as the baptized grew up unconverted but still presented their own infants for baptism. By the time of the Synod of 1662, its opponents were openly arguing that there were not just two methods for qualifying for Church membership, but that there were two kinds of membership. Those who experienced grace and told about it publicly were one kindpersonal, immediate members in John Davenport's phrase; and those who came in by virtue of their parents' sanctity were anothermediate members, Davenport called them.
57
Mediate members faced a great responsibilitythe obligation to experience the Holy Spirit working within themselves, and a dreadful penalty if they did notthe disannulment of their "mediate" covenant. In effect, as Davenport described their plight, they cut themselves off from the Church which did not have to take any formal action against them. And, of course, in cutting themselves off, they did the same for their children who must then go through life unbaptized and without hope, unless they felt and described God's grace working within themselves.
58
Davenport and his leading supporter, the young Increase Mather, son of Richard, possessed a hard streak of perfection-ism that experience had softened in most of the founders. Every Puritan divine of the first generation wished to close the gulf between the invisible and visible Church, but most had learned with Richard that tests of saving faith did not provide the means of closing the breach. Davenport's confidence in the churches' ability to identify the faithful never slackened. The Israelites had required that circumcised children covenant for themselves after they came of age, and so should we, he argued. Richard Mather, denying that such action constituted a new covenant, insisted that it involved only a renewal of the one covenant God had ever extended to men. Davenport hoped that the Church would attain the purity of the New Jerusalem before Christ's Second Coming. Richard shared those hopes but denied that they would be realized. The Church, he said, must be holy at the end of the world, but even then there will be hypocrites. The par-

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