The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (19 page)

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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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to cast off inherited conceptions of themselves. They revealed the bent of their minds in a number of ways: they referred to England as home, and when they spoke of their nation it was England they meant, not the outpost in North America. Their churches, of course, were a part of the Church of England and their struggle with Antichrist was a continuation of struggle that the English had taken up in earnest under Edward and, more forcibly, under Elizabeth.
The founders demonstrated repeatedly that they had a well-developed historical sense. They pored over the historical books of the Bible and the glosses that churchmen had been turning out for centuries. As rewarding as Biblical history was, it never sated their appetites, and they devoured the pagan historians along with the Pentateuch and the prophets. And finally there was Church history which they relished because in it they saw reflected much of their own experience; for their own experiences fitted neatly into others and were cast easily into epics describing their struggles with Antichrist as a part of the oldest experience of man, the conflict between good and evil. Their historical consciousness, then, was universalistic not particularisticnot especially time-orientated, and certainly not rooted in place.
The second generation shared their fathers' apocalyptic conception of history, but they held it with a different temper. Fresh from Europe, the fathers had a sense of the Reformation which they could not pass along to their children. The struggles of Luther and Calvin and their successors retained an immediacy for the first generation that the second could not quite recapture. The fathers' expectations of the end of the world had a concreteness that they could see and feel in the events and actions of their time. Henry VIII and his children, Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth, the Gunpowder Plot, the convulsions of the English Civil War gave reality to the theory of final things. The fathers were disappointed, of course, when the end did not come, and their children shared their disappointment but did not abandon their version of history. The timing was off, the second generation said, and the prophecies were cloudy, but their fathers' intuition remained sound: the end was coming. But they could not think about the end in their father's terms. Disappointment bred caution in drawing the line of time; it was pre-
 
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sumptuous, they admitted, for mere men to claim to be able to chart precisely God's plans for men. But disappointment also bred frustration and out of it came a temperament prone to hope extravagantly for the future and to despair about the present. The second generation was divided within itself; in its hopes and fears it came to new conceptions of what history in the new land would be. Unfortunately for its ease of mind, these conceptions could never be wholly reconciled with the facts of its experience.
More than a sense of history contributed to the divergence of the second generation from the first. The second had to face changes in its society that the first generation had failed to anticipate. The founders conceived of their mission as one of preserving the Church of Christ in the form they found prescribed in the New Testament, and they bent their energies to defining the Church organization they called the Congregational way. They were not naive; historythey knewafforded countless examples of unrealized expectations. Plans failed, good intentions miscarried, purity turned into corruption. Perhaps they expected disappointments in New England, though there is evidence that they expected the world to end before their hopes would be disappointed in the normal course of things. Time did not cease, and the normal course of things followed much sooner than they anticipated. Happily for their peace of mind, most did not live to see the full extent of the disaster that overtook their plans, but their children did and had to do something about it. The problem, as the second generation saw it, was to explain the decline of New England and to prevent the decline from becoming a fall. Somehow the inability of the third generation to undergo conversion had to be accounted for and so did the divisions in the community and what was understood to be the surprising moral decay.
2
In rehearsing these desperate problems, the children of the first generation referred to the founders with veneration for not only establishing New England but for defining its ends as well. This respect was merited; the achievements of the first generation were remarkable. And yet, in a sense, the second generation credited their fathers too much and themselves too little: the fathers may have founded the colonies, but the sons invented New England.
 
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The process of invention was not deliberate, nor even conscious. It arose in the agony of the knowledge that the Lord was not being served in New England and that they, the sons, were letting down the fathers. The great radical apostasy of New England lay, as Increase Mather said, in the fact that ''the Interest of
New England
is now changed, from a Religious to a Wordly Interest."
3
New England had changed, it had shifted its concern from religion to trade, from God's business to Man's. In their evocation of their fathers' greatness, these intellectuals of the second generation formulated the idea of the mission of New England, the notion in Jonathan Mitchell's impressive phrasing that "it is our Errand Into the Wilderness to study and practice true Scripture-Reformation."
4
The founders had spoken in similar terms, but with a different understanding of history. They had come to New England because they had been banished from the old land. Their purpose in coming was to preserve the Church for the final climactic moments of history. Despite Winthrop's incantation "we must be as a city set upon a hill," they harbored no illusions that their practice would strike answering chords in Europe.
5
They were the Church in exile and destined to remain outside the English pale until the end of things. Their obligation was to preserve the Churchnot to convert the world, which in any case would resist conversion until the proper point was reached on the line of time.
6
In its essence, the founders' thought remained always anchored to the Church. The Church in history, its form and membership and government, almost totally preoccupied them. They conceded that it existed in other places as well as in Old and New England. Their particular churches were a part of a larger institution and their purpose was to keep thereand itpure.
The sons no less than the fathers thought of the Church but in their hopes and fears for it, and for themselves, born of a generation of bitter experience, the Church in their minds became inextricably identified with New England as a people. While the first generation explained its coming to America as an effort to preserve the true Church, the second extended this purpose to include the preservation, at least temporarily, of an entire people. Strictly speakingas they understood their fathers' stories of the migrationthe Lord had not just dispatched the
 
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Church to the wilderness, He had sent a people. And He expected not only the Church to honor Him, but the people as well, sinners as well as saints.
How this conception took form constitutes an important chapter in the history of American provincialism. The irony in the seventeenth-century development is that, while these sons of the founders proclaimed the universal importance of New England in Christian history, "a part of God's Israel," Jonathan Mitchell intoned, they simultaneously contributed to its isolation from the history of the Western World.
7
To be sure, the sons
felt
isolated in a way their fathers, accustomed to European practices in politics and scholarship, did not. The sons were different from their parents and insensibly confessed their difference, all the while declaring that they were continuing their fathers' divine errand. Richard Mather had never described himself as a "true New England man"; that designation would have had no meaning in the first generation.
8
But in the second generation, when it and similar expressions became common currency, a quarter-century of experience in the American setting had accumulated. Such appellations emphasized New England's difference as a people (incantations to the geography of the New World were still in the future). They implied that a Puritan in this tribe was more than a saint, more than the chosen of God. A true New England man had special obligations, because he was a part of a holy expedition. Having been established by the fathers, the ends of this expedition were fixed and could not be redefined.
9
The sons did not dare to say that a saint in America was dearer to God than one in England, but that was what they believed. They were a peculiar people, and they had an extraordinary history. But they were failing to live up to the greatness of that history. They were unaware that by defining mission in terms of a people's obligations as well as of the Church's, they were imposing a far greater burden upon themselves than their fathers had felt compelled to carry. And hence they began to brand themselves apostates and to fashion a conception of New England as a failure. New England, as a construction of thought and feeling, took its rise in a profound sense of unease.
Increase Mather contributed more than he knew, or intended, to the invention of New England. At the time he came to man-
 
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hood, worried explanations and accompanying warnings about the fate of New England were beginning to issue from its pulpits. The sermons usually began with a reference to the fathers, the the chosen of the Lord, an extraordinary group of the wise, the selfless, the faithful. They had been selected by God to carry His Church to safety out of degenerate England. God had offered them a covenant which promised, in return for service to His cause, blessings, in this world and in the next.
To the second generation, the founders assumed the proportions of the patriarchs of the Old Testament. Increase sometimes conceded that his own day had more knowledge of holy things than the fathers had, but he hastened to point out, only because God had chosen to reveal Himself progressively. Therefore the light that shone on the sons should not produce pride; Increase always insisted that knowledge grew brighter despite anything they did. In any case, the second generation divines agreed among themselves that they were inferior to their fathers in qualities that matteredin the love of God, zeal for His work, and in piety in all its forms. The fathers' age was a "golden" one; theirs, an "Iron Age."
10
Increase summed up these attitudes in
A Discourse Concerning the Danger of Apostasy
, one of the great sermons of this type.
11
The leaders among the founders, he said in this sermon, were "Abrahams." When God called Abraham out of Ur, he followed the Lord's instructions and "built an altar to the Everlasting God." And so did our fathers, Increase said; they moved "out of their own Land, when God called them, and came hither, to build an Altar here to the Everlasting God,'' and "upon its right Basis too." Increase meant that the fathers had placed the Church in a political state that excluded the errors and heresies that disfigured the English scene. Indeed, he explained, "Our Fathers have been
Davids
, that is to say, eminent
Reformers.
'' Increase, in a sentence that appeared in slightly altered form in dozens of sermons by his colleagues, made no effort to suppress the admiration he felt for these men: "Let me speak freely (without offence to any) there never was a Generation that did so perfectly shake off the dust of Babylon, both as to Ecclesiastical and civil Constitution, as the first Generation of Christians, that came into this Land for the Gospels sake, where was there ever a place so like unto new Jerusalem as New England hath been?"
12
 
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Increase always found this theme congenial, and as an example of how God favored this band of His faithful, Increase cited the life of his own father. To Increase, it seemed clear in the circumstances of Richard's childhood that the Lord had selected him for an important role in New England. First of all, Richard, the son of poor parents, could not ordinarily have expected much schooling, but the Lord stirred up his parents to send him to school. Increase detected Providence in this occurrence, a Providence that again came to Richard's aid when his aptitude for books proved almost his undoing through the Catholic merchants from Wales who persuaded his father to apprentice the boy to them. This time the Lord interposed His Providence through the boy's schoolmaster who urged that he be kept at his studies. Finally, in Increase's understanding of his father's life, the Lord's special providence acted later to preserve Richard for the great work in New England, saving him when all seemed lost on the voyage to Boston in 1635.
13
Richard served New England for thirty-four years; despite near blindness in one eye, he remained in his study and in his pulpit turning out solid edification for the Lord's people. In Increase's mind his father and his father's generation deserved veneration for much more than their stay in power: they had brought the true Church organization to New England. They set the pattern for sermons and worship; they discovered a way of examining for membership; they devised tests for the sacraments. In all these ways they made New England, in John Higginson's phrase, a plantation of religion, not of trade; they defined its meaning and established that the public interest should always take precedence over the private.
14
To Increase and his great contemporariesWillard, Higginson, Hubbard, Stoughton Oakes, Danforththe land of their day presented a far different aspect. They painted their pictures in various dark hues for thirty years, and then were joined in their lamentations by their sons and heirs. They complained of their people's growing fascination with the creatures and their neglect of the things of the spirit. The people, they said, either avoided the sacraments or took them indiscriminately without qualifications. Families suffered as much from pollution as the churches: discipline was slack, servants unservile, children disobedient, and order was lacking everywhere. The land wallowed in filth,

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