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 (15 page)

 
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grace, he trusted more readily than they the evidence of vigorous self-examination. Only the grace of faith came completely from the Lord, Richard Mather believed. The other graces, the disposition to charity, to patience, to godliness, to virtue, all had some natural base. In a natural man they remained as unripened fruit, in a carnal man they withered and died, but in a man watered by grace, they grew and increased. Such was the transforming power of the Holy Spirit.
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Almost all of Richard Mather's sermons to the Dorchester Church contain exhortationsto convert, to grow in grace, to mend wicked behavior. Yet his preaching cannot simply be called hortatory; it offers too much analysis of the psychology of good and evil for that. In fact, like most Puritan ministers of his generation, Mather used psychological analysis as a method of inducing a saving religious experience. Telling men what was right and wrong and what they must do to attain the right was only one part of his technique. He also told them what they must feel, how to achieve the proper feeling, and what happened to their faculties as they succeeded or failed. To a stranger to Puritan homiletics, one of Mather's sermons on the Second Epistle of Peter might well appear to be a short monograph on the faculty psychology.
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Mather contended throughout his ministry that the inner man and the outer were inextricably connected. In other words, what a man was in his soul would affect the face he presented to the world. Of course hypocrites existed and of course some would succeed in deceiving themselves and the world as to their true conditions. But a self-conscious man, one who examined himself, would not find it easy to escape the discovery of his real being. And because the conduct of life could be made to give assurance of one's election, if all its aspects were examinedthoughts, feelings, actions, and the connections among inner dispositions and behaviorit was all the more necessary for a minister to instruct men in the right manner of living.
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In all the varieties of men that a minister facedthe complacent who stood on their own merits, the fearful who protested that they were unworthy of grace, the numb who wished to believe but could not, the anarchic who claimed they learned from an inner light, and even the saints who had received God's graceRichard detected the power of nature. Nature disposed every
 
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man to think not only that he could save himself but also that he could govern himself without any aid from the Lord. So inclined, Mather pointed out, unregenerate men interpreted the law mechanically as involving obligations and rights. They saw the law much as they did a business contract, and claimed everything due them under its terms. They insisted on using the creatures as they chose; meat, drink, and sex, which God provided for man's survival and perpetuation, were often misused. And if through fear of God or from social pressure ordinary men did not transgress the law in the use of any of the creatures, they secretly wanted to. So they compromised and, avoiding fornication and gluttony and drunkenness, they contented themselves by abusing the law while technically staying within its terms. For within the law they acted without restraint in amassing as much wealth as they could; they indulged themselves in fine apparel and fine foods; and they used the marriage bed immoderately. Good men, in Mather's view, would do none of these things but stop short well within the limits of the law. They know, he reminded his church, that one should not always go to the utmost bounds of liberty. Sinning, after all, occurred most commonly in the abuse of lawful things.
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The conviction that men must act against their sins, that they conceive of their daily lives as an opportunity to grow in grace filled Mather's sermons to his flock. For most of his ministry he preached as if he were absolutely convinced that grace would always show itself in discernible ways. A church as a corporate group might experience difficulty in identifying the godly, but each member could know himself by the record of his thought and action in this world. ''There is," Mather said in 1648, "an inseparable connection of the gifts and graces of Christ, so that if he give conversion and justification, he will sanctification also."
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Christ, he explained in a figure often used by Puritan ministers, would not open a man's eyes to see "the things of heaven" without giving him the graces of sanctification. A man, Richard pointed out, should see the meaning of his life: if he proves incapable of living a sanctified life it is "a signe the man is in blindness still."
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Mather often likened grace to "fire" and to "springs of water," a comparison he contended that Scripture made. The "nature" of fire and springs of water, he reminded his church, "is to be ac-
 
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tive and to show forth themselves.''
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His sermons suggest that he was more concerned about the activity of grace than its visibility, a concern perhaps that arose from his conviction that the good activities of men would inevitably make themselves known to others. Translated into the language familiar to both divinity and ordinary discourse, what he was talking about were good works. He denied that one who urged good works was a "legal" preacherhe was not, he said, because he did not claim that works were efficacious by themselves. But they were evidence of what went on in a man's heart, and hence men who pursued them in a right frame of mind could gain assurance that they were saved.
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Moreover, good works were commanded by Goda fact Mather never tired of proving from Scripture. For example, he was especially concerned in his sermons on Second Peter to show that the King James version robbed the eighth verse of the first chapter of its force. James's translators had rendered its declaration about the graces to read:
For if these things be in you, and abound, they make you that ye shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Richard objected to the word "barren," which he argued was tautological because it preceded "unfruitful." The word should be "idle'' rather than "barren," he believed. He was on solid scholarly ground, for the Geneva Bible and, as he noted, Beza, Calvin, Estius, and Piscator all used "idle." The point of this seemingly trivial issue was that the graces all had work to do, or as Mather put it, all have "their actings and operations." To be idle was to admit that one lacked the grace of faith. The most compelling reason, after all, for striving was to "proove" at least to the self that one had received God's spirit. Mather proposed to show that men who have supernatural gifts, such as the servant in the parable who was given five talents, would use them. The spirit worked, it struggled, it fought, it wrestledit struck at evil. This bent towards action inhered within grace itself; just as fire burned, so would grace consume wickedness. Christ furnished the model for every Christian, of course; and as Mather pointed out, the graces in a Christian are the "image" of the graces that were in Christ. His were active; and it followed that theirs must be also.
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These themes which are so directed to making good visible and influential in the conduct of life betray in almost every phrase Mather's persistent fear of Antinomianism. Nowhere does he describe conversion as a rape of the soul; nowhere does he suggest that it is anything but the result of experience over a period of time. A man does not become gracious in a moment, rather he finds his way to God through striving and effort. God draws him of course, but slowly, even painfully, and the process takes time. In these contentions Mather does not seek to confine the spirit in any conventional sense; he does not attempt to persuade his flock that the spirit is dangerous. Rather, he enlarges ordinary claims for grace by arguing that if it has entered into a man it affects his attitude toward the law of God. If it does not give him raptures and visionsMather knows that such psychic events have their origin elsewhereit assists him in living according to the law. Mather despised the common prejudice that placed grace in opposition to the law; in fact grace enabled one to observe God's commands. Not gracious excesses but satanic delusions carried men into Antinomian ecstasies.
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There were men in Dorchester who listened to Richard Mather speak of the transforming power of supernatural grace and then asked, "If grace infused be so active and efficacious, then what needs a Christian to depend on Christ and his assistance?"
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These men were not Antinomians and they deserved a reply. Mather took the opportunity to say that Christ and grace were not "opposites but concurring." And in any case "A man may have money in his purse, bread in his house or other supplies, and yet this needs not, ought not to hinder his dependence upon the providence and blessing of God, even for his daily bread."
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This answer put the matter in concrete terms that bore on the immediate lives of men.
Mather sometimes linked such questions to the ultimate fate of the elect. Their hope finally lay in the Second Coming of Christ, and that coming was near. We live in the daylight of the gospel, he told the Dorchester Church; the end of the world is near. But before it comes, Christ's chosen must be converted; in other words, they must accept the sacrifice of Jesus for their justification.
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Men who were even capable of hinting that they might not need Christ did not quail before a minister's authority. A few in Dorchester evidently expressed resentment at paying a minis-
 
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ter's salary; and others suggested that perhaps they did not need pastors after all. Richard felt their "contempt" and their "reproaches."
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They desperately needed ministers, he told the church. God had chosen to reveal some things to ministers, and to ministers only. Of course, there were some men in every community with talents rivaling those of the pastor, but these men were not the transmitters of the Word. And what could only the ministers pass on? The news about Christ, Richard replied: the full explication of the meaning of His birth and death, His sacrifice and miracles, and finally the news of the imminence of His glorious return.
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Firmly convinced of this magnificent calling of the minister, Richard frequently demanded that his flock "submit" and give obedience to the commands he spoke in the name of the Lord.
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In his swan song, preached when he imagined himself approaching death, he reminded New England of the greatness of a minister's calling. His description of the relationship of the minister and the church was wholly conventional: the church should strive to get "a faithful and able Minister, to be set over you in the Lord"; ministers should be received as "Overseers and Rulers" who are to be obeyed. They deserve obedience; they are not ordinary menindeed, Richard announces, a minister, is a ''rare man," especially fitted for his role by his "learning" and ''understanding." These qualifications are at the center of Richard Mather's recommendation to his flock, for, as he pointed out, it takes brains and learning to explain the truth and to "convince gainsayers." The repetition of this call for submissiveness suggests that convincing gainsayers was no small task even in Dorchester.
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Although there is no evidence that Richard ever flagged in this role, late in his career he conceded that grace did not inevitably show itself. He made this sad concession to reality in the defense he made of the Half-Way Covenant. But his preaching to his flock does not seem ever to have accommodated this reality. Richard indeed, like his generation of Puritan divines, continued to urge men to strive after God while he insisted that only God could draw them. And he continued to urge them to beg for the return of Christ even while he assured them that the Lord could not be coerced or even persuaded. The Lord would as always act according to His own Being, not in response to the imperatives of men.
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