The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (13 page)

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

Authors: Robert Middlekauff

Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #Historical, #United States, #Leaders & Notable People, #Religious, #Christian Books & Bibles, #History, #Americas, #State & Local, #Christianity, #Religion & Spirituality, #test

 
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able of the foolish virgins suggested as muchthose without will, without faith, will be excluded from the glorious marriage chamber, that is, from Heaven, at the end.
59
Yet he remained certain that the Church would endure if it could be protected from the over-zealous within. The covenant that gave it form continued as always, though ways of qualifying for membership varied. A child born into a family was not less a member than his parent, Richard once pointed out, even though he had done nothing himself to earn his place. The same principle applied to elect societies, states, and churches, all of which had been chosen without regard to their merit. The Church must remain as pure as possible, but it must also recognize that while some of its members would be able to demonstrate their graciousness, others would not. Some would possess qualifications for the Lord's Supper; others would not. Some would be truly holy, though men would never be able to identify them with absolute certainty; others, whatever evidence they gave or withheld, would be unregenerate. But as long as holiness existed, as long as the churches held fast to their covenant, they could serve the Lord. And glory was promised by God to His Church at the end of the world.
 
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4
The Word
The struggle between the forces of light and darkness, between the Church and the Antichrist, gave meaning to history. But this conflict not only explained the past, it also cast its lines into the future. Of course not even the prophets could make out the pattern of the future distinctly, but they could predict that its end would arrive in the triumph of Christ. Although there were other certain reference points in human historythe beginning in Eden, the fall into the hands of the Devil, the birth of Christnone offered more reassurance than the knowledge that at the end of the world the glorious Christ awaited His own.
Richard Mather received comfort from this grand schema, though he no more than anyone else could rest complacently in it. He knew that much was required of men in this divine drama. Did not Christ command that men should make their calling sure? Like every man, Richard had to consider the state of his soul; unlike most, he had, as a minister, to concern himself with the souls of others. The salvation of the soul reproduced on a small scale the cosmic struggle of good and evil. For within history, as within the soul, the fundamental forces of the universe were arrayed.
 
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A minister who was convinced, as Richard Mather was, that the earth had entered its last days, might be expected to connect the fate of the soul to cosmic history. Mather made the connectionnot just in formal treatises on the Church in historybut in the ordinary course of his preaching to the people of Dorchester, who heard from his lips of the ''miserys'' of the Protestant Church all over Europe, and of the "warre and bloodshed in England."
1
Richard found a moral in these grim events for New Englandclose adherence to the true religion was necessary if New England were not to feel similar torments. Like most Puritan ministers, Richard could never resist the suggestion that pain and affliction would bring good results if only the warning of sin they carried were heeded. In examining the upheaval all over Europe, and the distresses of the Church, Richard discerned the "day-light of the Gospel" breaking.
2
Good men should use the light to examine themselves and practice the virtues in preparation for the glorious end. No reform was too small to be made, as he pointed out in 1647. "It is also a Tyme that is the latter age of the world and for the coming of the Lord draweth neere, and for this cause we should be temperate and sober."
3
Although Richard Mather rarely missed an opportunity to link the fate of souls to the destiny of the cosmos, he usually dealt with his church in less dramatic ways. The conventional tasks of the minister were to convert sinners and to strengthen and support those who had been saved. A minister in a culture that defined man's relation to God in terms of the determinism of Calvin faced, as Richard Mather and his colleagues discovered, an extraordinary set of problems. One revolved around the apparent inflexibility of the Lord's choice. On considering the rigidity of God, the question we might ask is, "If a man was predestined to salvation or damnation without regard to his merit, why would he exert himself to come to God and to lead a life according to the moral law?" Some men must have put the question this way, perhaps more often to themselves than to their ministers. But one suspects that such a question occurred to men more often in the eighteenth century than in the sixteenth or seventeenth. It is a question born of an indifference and a logic that do not comport well with the anxiety of the seventeenth century. Puritan laymen undoubtedly felt despair more often than indifference; the questions they asked themselves and their
 
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ministers reveal a kind of paralysis of will, rather than a logical indifference. The problem that obsessed them was why should God choose the likes of me for eternal bliss? Following it came the accusations of self: I am too evil even for a merciful God to accept; no one soaked in sin as I am can hope to experience conversion. Apparently there was a darkness greater even than such black desperation, for a second kind of response reveals that some complained of an inability to feel anything. I want to believe, such men said, but I do not, in fact I cannot believe. God has not given me grace and I can do nothing for myself. I am dead and all that I can experience is deadness.
4
Richard Mather, like every other Puritan divine, failed to recognize these plaints for what they werethe expression of psychological rather than moral scruples. In Richard's mind the causes were obvious: the despairing ones who bewailed their sins really loved them and did not give them up because they did not want to forego their filthy pleasures; and those who professed their inability to believe refused to admit that their "cannot" was a willful "cannot." Christ was available to all; the Lord's promise of everlasting life to those who believed in Christ was "general, excluding none but such as by unbelief do exclude themselves." The conclusion was clear to Mather: since God's grace was free, requiring no ''money," no "price,'' "no man may say, I know not whether I be elected"; only his own willful unbelief deprived him of the Lord's gift of grace and assurance. Nor would he concede the legitimacy of the denial of ability to believe. Fallen manhe contendedhad not sought out God; rather the Lord provided mercy out of His own free grace: "Which may answer the objection the soul is wont to make against believing, from its own unworthiness."
5
When he told his flock about God's mercy, Mather sometimes spoke of the covenant of grace. The term described for him, as for most in New England, an agreement, or a contract, in which God gave His elect saving grace in return for belief in Christ. All ministers agreed that God provided the strength with which man believed and thereby fulfilled the terms for salvation.
Modern historians have in examining this language argued that in time it came to constitute a separate theology. Puritans, these historians hold, enamored of the covenant conception, with its implications of bargaining, terms, conditions, promises, and
 
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responsibilities, tended to attribute to it a solid reality in which God voluntarily bound Himself to save men in return for their faith in Christ. According to these historians, the whole paraphernalia enhanced the powers of men; and in time Puritans used it to describe a situation in which man could compel the Lord to save him. A bargain after all had been struck and a man, if he chose to be a party to it, could force the Lord to give him grace in return for his promise to honor the covenant's terms. Over a period of generations, the theory with its subtle Arminianism undermined the determinism of the doctrine of predestination and election.
6
Like almost every minister of the founders' generation, Richard Mather referred to the covenant, he spoke of promises (though he did not always consider them as contractual), and he emphasized the responsibilities of the parties to the transaction. But the covenant did not govern or shape his thought about the relationship of God and the saints. For Mather, as for most Puritan ministers throughout the seventeenth century, the covenant was one of many figures describing a complex arrangement. It provided a language that men, pressed to comprehend an inherently mysteriousbecause supernaturaltransaction, found useful because it somehow reduced the awfulness of what was involved to a comprehensible process. This language had its limitations, however. Its flatness and its concreteness, the power it had of diminishing mystery, also deprived it of an aesthetic and emotional power. Hence, it remained only one of several languages used to move sinners to exert themselves.
In his preaching Mather sometimes told the Dorchester Church that the covenant of grace had replaced the covenant of works; and he extolled the promises of eternal life it held out to believers. But he never suggested that it opened the possibility of bargaining with GodI suspect that the thought never really occurred to himnor did he describe the covenant in the language of commerce. It was a contract but also a gift, and men should be grateful for the opportunities it opened to them. To explain how men might seize these opportunities was the task of the minister.
7
Richard Mather responded to his charge in a way that showed the power of experience in America. At times in his sermons he explicitly acknowledged that some things were different in Amer-
 
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ica. In 1646 he warned the people of Dorchester that they lived in a wilderness where life must be simpler than what they had grown accustomed to in England. John the Baptist after all had lived in a wilderness on nothing more than wild locusts and honey which, Mather suggested, ought to make the people living in the American wilderness "content with playn and wholesome dyett though we have but a few daintyies."
8
He explained his meaning many times in these years: a people deprived of the delicacies of English life ought to prize all the more the wholesome diet in the worship of Christ. If in this sermon he was concerned to teach his listeners something about the special quality of life in New England, a few years later, in 1650, he seemed troubled by their growing attachment to physical place. On this occasion he reminded his church that men must not confuse holiness with geography. Holiness, he said, did not reside in the landscape"neither Jerusalem
nor any other place
" was holy.
9
This theme had undergone an important change when Richard rose to give what he imagined to be his farewell sermon in 1657. By this time he had come to recognize that it was not holiness in the land his people valued but the land itself, and in a warning that was repeated many times later in the seventeenth century he remarked on how "easy'' it was in the midst of worldly business to lose the "power of Religion."
10
American experience shaped Richard Mather's preaching in yet anothermore pervasivemanner. It helped reinforce his emphasis on an affective psychology. Like every Puritan expression of the faculty psychology, Mather's aimed to lay bare the workings of the inner man and thereby help the soul to receive the Holy Spirit. But unlike most, Mather's psychology concentrated on all the faculties, laying particular stress on the affections, as the passions, or emotions, were sometimes called.
Since Mather was a mature man who had preached for almost twenty years when he arrived in New England, he probably did not change the essentials of his theory there. Still, almost immediately after he agreed to lead the Dorchester Church, he had to reckon with the Antinomian crisis in New England. His sermons, like those of his friends, indicate that Antinomianism had spread outside of Boston, where the worst of the affair took place. They also suggest that though the General Court of Massachusetts banished Anne Hutchinson, it did not rid the colony
 
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of her beliefs. Much of what Richard Mather preached about religious experience was directed against Antinomianism. We can see, perhaps even more than he realized, that his sermons were composed as such a response.
11
The issues in the Antinomian affair turned on the questions of what part a man took in his own conversion and how his soul was changed by the process. The Antinomians, invoking the authority of an uneasy John Cotton, proclaimed that men were psychologically helpless. God seized the souls of His elect by surprise. Just as nothing they could do could affect His choice, so nothing could induce Him to work at a particular time or in a particular manner. The other camp, the ministers the Antinomiaris branded as "legalists" and who have since been called "preparationists," did not at first sight seem to disagree with this description. They held that God prepared His elect before He converted themHe humbled them, He broke their sinful dispositions, and finally after purging them of their corruption He drew them to Christ. Conversion in this conception occupied a period of time, taking clearly discernible steps. If in these sermons the preparationists often began with a description of God working to prepare His elect, they sometimes ended by urging men to prepare themselves. They reminded their churches that every man could take advantage of the means of grace; specifically every man could listen to sermons and pray for salvation. After these simple steps, recommending that men repent of their sins and humble themselves did not seem like a giant leap. But as far as divinity was concerned such a suggestion was, because no man could savingly repent without God's aid. Preparationists ordinarily avoided this problem by arguing that "common grace," the working of the Holy Spirit
on
a man's soulnot
within
itmight carry him deep into a sense of humility and repentance, even though it could not save him. And every man, even the worst of sinners, could try to repent, even though he was doomed to fail. In all these arguments the preparationists sought to break down the claims of men that they were unable to believe and to rouse those who said that they were too depressed by their helplessness to do anything for themselves.
12
The preparationists also believed that regenerate men were different from sinful men in their natures: born again, they harbored within themselves a disposition to love God and to live

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