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 (24 page)

 
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dard made the appropriate obeisance to the commemorative import of the Supper and he noted that it should provide comfort to those who received it. But these gestures, while carrying conviction, did not carry intensity of feeling. As long as Stoddard's army mustered in the proper ranks, and marched to the beat of duty and law, he was content. He approved when the soldiers found joy in their discipline, but he did not concern himself overly about their morale at the Communion Table, or away from it, as long as they did their duty in coming.
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At the same time, he imputed an unusual power to the Supper. He recognized that not all the Church members who took it were filled with saving faith. The Supper, however, might fill them, might regenerate them. Here Stoddard changed the meaning of Holy Communion. For the fathers of New England and their orthodox sons, the Supper was an ordinance intended to nourish the faith of those already converted. It sealed their covenant and gave them the strength to grow in grace. Stoddard did not deny this function to the Supper but he made it something more, an instrument by which saving faith might be induced in a sinner. Hence in his sacramental theory, Church membersnot the profane outside the Churchshould come to the Supper even though they know that internally they lack grace. God commands them to come just as he commands them to perform any act of worship, "as no Man may neglect Prayer, or hearing the word, because he cannot do it in Faith, so he may not neglect the Lord's Supper."
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Such a practice would benefit those men who were uncertain about their conditions too; some saints after all could not discern their own graciousness even though they examined themselves. If they stayed away in their uncertainty, "Days of comfort," which was what Communion Sabbaths were to be, would instead become ''Days of Torment."
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Stoddard proposed this sacramental practice and instituted it in his own church knowing that Increase Mather and many eastern colleagues despised it. Like every Puritan divine who suggested changes in doctrine or worship, he knew that he urged the wishes of the Lord. Stoddard read Increase Mather's work, and he agreed that the Church of his day had "better ordinances" and "a more glorious dispensation" than the Church of the Old Testament. He declared periodically that the typical laws of Israel no longer governed, but in this case of the Supper, he could
 
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not refrain from pointing to the old model. The Lord had required that all of Israel take the Passover, the type of the Supper, even though Israel contained ungodly as well as godly men.
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If Stoddard inconsistently cited Israel's experience after he denied that experience any contemporary meaning, he proved himself perfectly consistent in the next step of his reasoning: though unregenerate members of the Church could lawfully take the Supper, their participation could never be acceptable to the Lord. The distinction between "lawful" and "acceptable" worship had appeared in Puritan divinity for generations.
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Every Puritan intellectual recognized its validity, but Stoddard's application of these categories to sacramental practice marked a daring extension of the traditional theory. All Puritan divines agreed that the Lord required all men to pray whatever their internal condition; He required that they listen to the Word in His temples; He required that they fast when His representatives on earth demanded. But the sacraments were something apart; they had been reserved according to all tenets of Puritan thinking to those graciously qualified. Here was Solomon Stoddard proclaiming that it was lawful for carnal men to take the Supper, even when they knew themselves lacking in grace. And the Church should acquiesce, indeed it should welcome such men. It must because, as Stoddard never tired of pointing out, it could not get inside men's minds and hearts. It should take men's professions at face value except when scandalous behavior gave these professions the lie. God would reject unregenerate men when they appeared at the Communion Table but the Church on earth would never know it. The Church should concern itself with the visible; the invisible belongs to God.
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These propositions prompted Increase Mather to express his disgust and horror at their character so often that he has been accused of defining his own position on the Church and the sacraments as a reponse to them. In fact, while Increase felt compelled to answer Stoddard, he maintained those essentials of his own position which he first discovered at the time of the Half-Way Covenant. At that time he had praised the seamless continuity of the Church which extended from the models of the Old Testament. He had argued too that types provided a guide for the ordinances of the evangelical churches; they would not go out of date until the Church militant became the Church tri-
 
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umphantin other words, until the Lord gathered to Himself in Heaven all the chosen from the earth. Mather persisted in these assertions throughout the dispute with Stoddard.
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However, Mather was not one of those grave Puritans who serenely pursued the Lord's way oblivious to what anyone else did or said. The strait gate to his mind and heart did not admit serenity until the last years of his life. He remained extraordinarily sensitive to any challenge to his views, and he reacted with extraordinary quickness and energy. In his sensitivity, in his eagerness to set things right, in his frantic desire to see his own formulations accepted by others, he forced his own ideas to the outermost limit of their application.
Typological interpretation demonstrated to Increase Mather the persistence of the Church as an institution reserved for the saints. That, he believed, was the great use of typology as a device for understanding Scripture. Ranging over that story Increase asserted repeatedly that the ceremonial holiness required of the Israelites was "typical" of the real holiness expected of New Testament churches. In David's time, the Israelites regulated admissions to the temple lest any enter not out of love of God, but out of fear; and in Solomon's time, they enforced the same strictness lest unworthy men enter in order to enjoy the great prosperity then obtaining in Israel. Later in the post-exilic temple they appointed porters to exclude the unclean. The Israelites' Passover, a type of the Supper, made a similar case for purity; as Mather noted, the paschal lamb was reserved for the clean. In Mather's account of ancient practice, the Israelites are shown searching their houses for any leaven, a symbol of the malice and hatred that believers must purge themselves of before enjoying Passover. Only saints could perform such a scrutiny. If the premise that Israel forecast New Testament experience were accepted, there was nothing startling in Increase's argument. His method was old; and others besides Stoddard insisted that it could not be made to yield truth about evangelical Church practices.
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The central issue between Increase Mather and Solomon Stoddard, the purity of the Church on earth, took its origins in their different understandings of religious psychology and the meaning of the sacraments. Assuming that the saints could not be separated from sinners by devices available to mere men, Stod-
 
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dard proposed that membership in a church should be founded on a profession of faith in Christ by men who were "morally sincere." To a generation frustrated by years of trying to separate the gracious from the carnal, this seemed a plausible suggestion. As Stoddard pointed out, the Church cannot get inside a man's skin and examine his conversion experience. What can it really tell of his internal condition? All it can do is require that a man give a sincere statement of his belief in Christianity, and hope that some of the men making such statements have grace as well as historical faith.
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Increase exposed the flaw in Stoddard's reasoning with a few deft thrusts. Stoddard's argument, he said, implies that "there must be a certain Rule whereby it may be discerned what mens inward Sentiments, and the belief of their Hearts is, Whether they do not speak falsely, when they say, That they believe such Articles of the Christian Faith, as They pretend to believe." What Increase meant was that testing sincerity of belief presents the same problems as testing the graciousness of inner experience. Both cases involve assessing the truth of statements made by men. And if there is evidence that men have mistaken the movements of their carnal hearts for the operations of the Holy Spirit, or that some men have lied about their conversion, there is also evidence that men have said they believed in Christ when they did not. To prove this point Increase cited the Emperor Julian, who professed his belief in the articles of Christianity and then, in his apostasy, admitted that he had never believed any of them. And Arius had professed belief in the divinity of Christ in order to enjoy communion with Christian churches though in reality he did not believeas he later admitted. According to Increase, Stoddard's position might be summed up in these terms: ". . . If men are knowing, and Profess they believe the Principles of true Religion, and do not Profess any Error that is inconsistent therewith; the Rule requires that Churches who cannot know the hearts and inward Persuasions of men, should accept of their outward Profession." But Increase asked: "And why then should we not believe, That men that give us an account of Their Conversion, and whose Conversations are outwardly blameless and holy, are really according to what they seem to be?" Mather's point was that a church has to judge an inward state whether it demanded his-
 
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torical or saving faith. In the first case it relied on testimony about beliefs; in the second, testimony about conversion. From its vantage, the difficulty was the same in each case. Why, then, should Stoddard assume he had solved any genuine problem when he required only historical faith? Stoddard never answered this question, and probably never grasped the psychological subtlety that informed it. Increase did answer it, insisting that the Lord comprised His Church from those with saving faith and no others. Typological interpretation suggested that the evangelical churches faced the obligation of sifting the good from the bad, if the Church of Christ was to be as pure as men could make it.
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The obvious method of keeping the Church pure was to examine all candidates for Communion with very high standards required for admission. If this were done, only those believers with full assurance of their faith could enter the Church as full members and take the Lord's Supper. The flaw in requiring complete assurance lay in the fact that grace gripped sinners with varying degrees of strength. As Increase often noted, there were degrees of faith: there were weak believers and strong believers; and there were some with more grace than others. All a man required to be saved was a shred; faith as a grain of mustard seed, Christ had said, would move a mountain. But if so little faith would save a man, discerning it taxed a church which, as both Stoddard and Mather agreed, could not peer inside hearts. A church should expect a seed to grow, Mather noted, and it might look for the same development of faith. Men might strengthen themselves by exercising what little grace they possessed, and they needed the nourishment the Church and the sacraments provided. Therefore, Increase concluded, "rigid severity" in examining candidates for admission ought to be avoided so that the weakest Christian received encouragement.
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A church should test the experience of those who offered themselves, but it should do so with "rational charity." In practice, Increase explained, rational charity meant weighing any evidence of the inner state and, upon detecting a bare sign of grace, admitting the person if his behavior was good and if he possessed knowledge of Christianity. In making decisions about communicants, a church was well advised to act with such charity that
 
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it receive "diverse hypocrites" rather than exclude "one Sincere Child of God."
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The traditional test of one's inner state was a relation of conversion experience. At the time that this requirement was instituted, churches recognized that not every growing person would be able to pass it. Women, for example, frequently could not bring themselves to testify in public; their fathers and husbands did not care to encourage them to talk more than was necessary anyway. Others, men and women alike, proved incapable of identifying the precise moment of their conversion; grace after all sometimes worked itself into the soul gradually and insensibly.
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Increase accepted this analysis of the varieties of religious experience and held that only "capable persons" should give a relation of their conversions. Like divines of his father's generation, he recognized the manifold ways that grace operated. And he noted the existence of men and women of "bashful tempers," who hesitated to speak publicly of their inner lives. He also admitted that conversion took strange courses, which sometimes resisted classification and description. Some conversions should not even be described; those provoked by a sense of a dreadful and secret sin should not find public expression because the sin itself, better left secret, would be exposed.
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If the Church should exercise restraint and charity, so as not to condemn men too easily, men should hesitate before condemning themselves. Increase was convinced that Stoddard had gone too far in urging carnal men, who knew they were still in a natural condition, to come; but a man who has "hopes" about his soul, though he may also have doubts, should come to the Supper. He need not have assurance, Increase insisted; all a man should require of himself is the "hope" that there is a "good work begun in his Soul." Typology offered instruction on this point, as on so many others: just as the Jews were to eat the Passover after they had searched their houses for leaven and found none, so were Christians to take the Supper after they had examined themselves and "cannot find that they are in a State of Hypocrisy, which is Leaven. . . .'' Rational charity exercised upon the self, Mather contended, should prove encouraging to anyone who had hopes for his own salvation.
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