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 (31 page)

 
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they appeared to the Church and to themselves, all possessed at least a seed of grace. A seed could grow into a mighty faith and so he watered it lovingly.
Growing in grace was never a formal doctrine in Puritan theology, but ministers had long preached as if it were. And none preached it more strenuously than Increase, who elaborated it throughout his sermons on conversion and the Christian life. A man with a particle of grace could do much for himself, and he must. He must pray for more, pray for help in leading a life in God's service. He must live with his attention fastened upon Christ: in every action however smalleating, drinking, sleeping, workinghe must strive to serve Christ first, and himself second. Increase did not imagine that in thriving, bustling New England, men would go around with prayers constantly on their lips or even in their minds. Nor did he believe that a merchant selling a barrel of rum, or a cobbler driving a nail into a shoe, would act with the image of Christ dancing in his head. But there were godly ways of performing ordinary activities at work or at home, and there were ungodly ways too. A godly performance rested finally on the value men placed on the things they did. A merchant might make a sale, a cobbler might finish a shoe without ever a thought of the Lord, and do so in a holy frame of mind, if in his heart he genuinely felt that service to Christ was more important than anything else. It was this perspective that Increase strove to establish as he urged his church to live with their hearts fixed on Christ.
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Men should do much more if they were to grow in grace. They must examine themselves honestly. To attain the truth about oneself, examination of the heart should be conducted secretly, Increase said. Self-scrutiny often turned up sins even in the convertedconversion was always imperfectand to remove them, Mather prescribed a "second conversion." The technique implied by this concept involved recapitulating much of the original process of conversion. But the second conversion did not affect the entire soul, at least not directly, but rather only the sinful part. A second conversion turned the believer away from a specific sin that had somehow survived in the new birth of the creature.
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All this concerned the inner life, assuredly the most important, vital part of any person's being. But the external often affected the internal, and a man must therefore watch his behavior in so-
 
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ciety. Indeed Mather felt the danger of the world so keenly that he preached a kind of moral separatism. The faithfulhe urgedmust isolate themselves from sinners; bad company corrupted good. Bad company fancied the creatures rather than Christ; bad company liked nothing better than to drag good men into the pit.
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But if a man succeeded in avoiding unregenerate men, if he prayed in the closet as well as in the meetinghouse, if he observed the law in all his dealings, if he worshipped, and if he wanted to believe, how could he know for certain that he was saved? Could he ever obtain assurance? Increase repeated the same answer throughout his ministry: a man could gain assurance, for grace was a discernible thing. Yet obtaining it was difficult, for grace was also a mysterious power not easily comprehended in human terms. And men might attain much in religion which would render them hopeful about their internal conditions and still remain in an unregenerate condition. They should recognize the melancholy truth that "There may be great Gifts where there is no grace."
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Knowledge of holy things ranked high among the gifts valued by most men, but as Increase repeatedly reported to his flock, the very Devil knew much about God and the sacrifice of Christ and yet hated the knowledge. Had not the Pharisees achieved a command of the Scriptures? By itself morality was a no more reliable guide to the inward condition of men. After all, a person might reform externally and conduct himself in the scrupulous observance of the law and remain internally a heathen. He might also perform the duties of religion, attending church regularly, keeping the Sabbath holy or at least visibly so; he might pray and take the sacraments. In the eyes of the Church he was a saint, always assuming that his description of his religious experience was taken to be genuine. But God saw into a man and recognized that the natural man had gone far, but not far enough. Hypocrites abounded in many lands, and at least a few survived in every church in New England. All these external signsknowledge, morality, and worshipcould be counterfeited; they could not provide the assurance that men craved.
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Nor could good feelings, or as Puritans said, good affections, give comfort. The "Sermon-Sick"Mather's phraseoften developed strong feelings; even Herod was deeply affected by
 
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John the Baptist for a short time. But a man might "desire" grace and still not be saved. As Increase read the parable, the Foolish Virgins wished for grace when they cried "Give us your Oil, our Lamps are gone out," but they did not receive grace. Such desires, passionate and affective as they were, often arose from unworthy motives, for carnal ends, for service of lusts, for the self, not for the Lord. To be sure, ''Sincere desire is Grace," Increase admitted, but in saying so he was conceding nothing to good affections. This admission simply said that a man with grace would entertain holy affections.
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If behavior did not provide guidance, if good affections could not be trusted, how could a man discover the truth about himself? The answer Increase gave his church provided some comfort but only enough to reduce the tension a regenerate man ought to feel throughout his life. A man had no choice, Increase implied, but to look into himself in order to test his faith for grace at every step. Only his own inner experience could help him. The Church had to judge him by appearances; only he and the Lord could know if the Church judged rightly. A man in doubt about himself was a man who should hope, and more, a man who should strive to enrich his experience, to grow in grace. He should use every means at his disposal, including the instituted worship provided by the Church. A man who knows that he is in the unregenerate state should not come to the Lord's Supper, of course. But, Increase pointed out, there is a difference between a man's knowing that he is unconverted and having some doubts about it. Doubts and all, he should receive the sacrament, an ordinance designed by God to nourish the faith of communicants. And in a peculiar way doubts, Increase believed, and even fears of being a sinner, should give a man some ease. For a natural man did not fear his unholy state, he secretly reveled in it. He loved his indulgences; he loved himself and his sins.
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These themes did not distinguish Increase Mather's ordinary preaching from his father's or from that of most of his late seventeenth-century contemporaries. Richard Mather had never urged the need for a "second conversion," but he had demanded the same growth in grace that the phrase implied. Richard had recommended that "brotherly kindness" be extended to unregenerate men but he, no more than his son after him, intended that the godly should embrace the wicked with the love they gave to
 
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the brethren. And throughout their careers in the pulpit both men sought to help the saints separate themselves ecclesiastically as well as morally from sinners.
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Yet Increase Mather did not simply echo his father. Despite the shared values and spirit, he was different from his father and he expressed the differencewittingly as well as unwittinglyin his approach to his church. Perhaps the most significant difference lay in his psychology of conversion. Unlike Richard Mather, Increase explained what his people must do and what they often did largely in terms of the will. If they succeeded in attaining faith it was because their wills had been broken, and if they remained unconverted it was because their wills had been permanently corrupted by sin. If they claimed they wanted to believe but could not, it was because they willed to remain unregenerate. The will was the center of corruption and had to be purified, and a man who thought he had been saved and wanted assurance would do well to examine itand not to trust mere affections, however strong they seemed. Nor should he ever let his good works lead him into thinking he was saved. He must do them and constantly if he were to grow in grace, but by themselves they could only provide false assurance.
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If all this was explicit in Increase Mather's sermons, his difference from his father was even more a matter of mood, of stylistic and temperamental shading, than of doctrine. These differences arose from his altered perceptions of the world. He began as an American provinciala son of the founderswho defined New England largely in terms of its errand, its redemptive power as a type of the New Jerusalem that would replace the carnal world in the millennium. But over the course of his ministry Increase had to face problems that did not exist for his fatherscientific rationalism and an English State which after the Glorious Revolution required religious toleration in all its dominions. Even more pressing, and frightening, was the decay in piety that Increase, along with most of his generation of divines, perceived. All his impulses galled for resistance to decayfor purity, for reformand what did he face but the accommodations of Solomon Stoddard and the innovations of Brattie Street?
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These challenges and his defeats in meeting them stripped him of his confidence in New England as a redemptive force in his-
 
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tory. To be sure, he admitted his disenchantment only occasionally, but the gradual evaporation of his corporate spirit is clear in the shift in his appeals from New England to the elect, to the mystical Israel of the types. Thus the types that fascinated him in the last twenty years of his ministry were those that anticipated mystical Israel, the chosen of the Lord. He recognized at least partially the change in his own mental framework. In a reflective preface to a collection of sermons issued in 1703, he said that he had learned that attempts to convert the elect were the best way of serving the Lord.
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And from that time on he pledged himself to teaching his people about Christ, the power of His sacrifice, and the need for the faithful to gather in His Church.
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Suffusing all this preaching was an altered moodopenly antirational, obsessed by death, and profoundly alienated from the preoccupations of ordinary life. In these last twenty years of his life, Increase did sometimes make the ancient obeisances before the laws of nature in which he conceded that reason could fathom much about the ordinary workings of the world. He made such statements with conviction, but he also made it clear that he believed that ordinary workings were not very importantexcept, perhaps, for their capacity to lead men to value this world too highly. He continued to argue the willfullness of sinners, but he also began to note the unreliable character of reason as well. Some sinners may think that they love Christ, he said, but in fact they hate Him. The point of this assertion was to question the value of rational consciousness. Increase had never described entering the covenant of grace as a rational transaction but some of his earlier sermons on conversion had dealt with taking up the promises. Knowledge of Christ, he had stated in these early sermons, enable one to wish to believe, even if grace was to be given by God rather than earned by intellection. Such a proposition was not intended to imply that faith was simply an intellectual process; but it did imply that reason was in the process. But in his mood of the new century, he seemed to be most impressed with the unpredictable character of grace. He emphasized that God sometimes gave it to His enemies. The prime example was Paul, who had opposed the Lord with all his might. Still the Lord plucked him out of his corruption by a single gracious act.
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If Increase's preaching dwelt more on the mystery than on
 
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the reasonableness of the covenant, it also concerned itself with death rather than life. Much that he reported about death had been familiar fare for years in Puritan homileticsthe putrefaction of the flesh in the grave and the resurrection of the body on the Day of Judgment, for example. Nor was there anything new in the attitudes he recommended to men approaching the ends of their lives. In one of the hackneyedyet still powerfulfigures of Puritan preaching, Increase reminded these men that they were sojourners in this life, pilgrims passing through the world to a glorious kingdom.
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By this metaphor he meant to suggest a habit of mind Protestant ministers had attempted to inculcate since the sixteenth centuryone fixed on the state of the soul rather than the things of this world. Depending upon one's convictions about one's self, the figure could provide consolation or stimulate anxiety. To the believer who felt assured of his conversion, the notion of life as a pilgrimage brought the comfort that no matter what happened here on earth, his final destination would yield glorious bliss. To the sinner who felt guilt at his unregenerate state, the pilgrimage figure undoubtedly evoked different sentiments, among them the fear that his journey might end before he received grace. Increase Mather hoped these sermons would affect saints and sinners; certainly his sermons of his last years evince a desire to convert as well as to edify. Indeed the second purpose often gave way to the first, or even more commonly, edification was phrased in terms as capable of disturbing as of consoling.
The poor and the mean, for example, heard the happy news that they had as much chance of getting to Heaven as the rich and the well-born. They were also urged to cultivate contentment in their poverty, for had the Lord intended better things for them in this world they surely would have received them. Hard work in an honest calling, they were informed, was all the Lord expected from any man so far as getting a living was concerned. Of course the wicked frequently prospered; Increase Mather, like scores of divines before, was as quick to concede that unhappy situation as he was to sooth the poor with the prediction that justice would finally be done on the Day of Judgment.
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If this "consolation" sounds suspiciously like what the haves always say to the have-nots, it was no more removed from the conditions of ordinary life than his reassurance that the angels

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