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

The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (42 page)

 
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lives and fortunes outwardly, but more often by denying them the blessed peace of a soul that knew it had gracious qualities.
21
These cases produced unhappiness in men; fortunately most men who had saving faith did not require the correctives of such afflictions. Most indeed could be "infallibly certain" of their conversions. Mather did not mean to imply by this declaration of belief in the infallibility of assurance that one's assurance would be "infallibly" clear to others. He always insisted on a distinction between what he called "subjective" assurance and "objective" assurance, the first type referring to self-knowledge (which could be certain) and the second to the demonstration of an inner state to others in the Church (which would always be open to challenge).
22
Cotton Mather did his thinking about the doctrine of assurance in a tradition especially congenial to him: one that suggested that only the active would find peace. The crisis of Antinomianism had produced this conviction in New England's divines. You should not except to receive comfort from God in your laziness, Richard Mather had told the Dorchester Church. A man who lies around waiting for visions and raptures will get neither. Even John Cotton, whose views of human abilities had raised much suspicion in New England, agreed that only in striving after assurance was one likely to find it.
23
Although Cotton Mather repeated the demand to look for Christ, he knew that this seemingly simple imperative had failed to keep the churches of New England filled with converted people. The churches by his day did not act to keep people out; the people kept themselves out, for the most part because they distrusted themselves. The people were unable to find the "signs" or "fruits" of faith in themselves that ministers had recommended as evidence of faith. And if the signs appeared, they were distrusted. Self-examination, traditionally encouraged as a means of producing peace of conscience, had yielded only paralysis of will.
24
The theories, and preaching, of the founders had given the paralyzed little aid, and had, perhaps, contributed to their incapacity. At first sight the tests proposed by divines such as Thomas Hooker and John Cotton seemed so promising; presumably any man who hoped that he was saved could examine himself for the signs and fruits of faitha peaceable conscience yet
 
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one full of grief for its sins, a love of God, and a hatred of evil. Hooker's suggestion that the application of general promises to the believer's particular condition would give assurance was repeated many times, both before he made it and long afterwards. The trouble with all these proposals of method lay in the context in which they were offered. An examination of the self that turned up the promising signs lost its promise when the person making it rememberd how deceitful his own will was. How could he trust the results, however gratifying they seemed? And those who, after the survey of the self detected no feeling at all could not have found much assistance in John Cotton's injunction to live in the "faith" and not by "sense." Cotton's command, doctrinally sound though it was, ignored the fact that inability to detect faith denied the soul the possibility of feeling anything save hopelessness or despair.
25
When Mather came to take up these problems the need was greater than ever before to establish some means by which the individual could test himself. This need of course involved more than the fate of individuals; the perpetuation of the churches themselves depended to some degree on techniques which would allow the elect to discover their election. Should they continue in their uncertainty, they would also remain properly hesitant about offering themselves to the churches.
Mather's theory of conversion has been seen by some historians as embodying an invitation to salvation to any who strove after the Lord. One of these historians describes Mather as an avid preparationist who "at the beginning of his career . . . was so far heedless of first principles as to represent his brother Nathanael entering into a covenant which became "an influence unto his Conversion afterwards."
26
What Mather actually said was that his brother entered the covenant which became "an influence unto his Conversation afterwards," meaning of course an influence on his behavior.
27
To be sure, on occasions Mather did urge men to try to believe, assuring them that if they did they were probably saved. Such statements were not offered as descriptions of the early stages of the conversion process, say, of the first passage of man from nature to grace. Rather they prescribed a technique by which a man could obtain assurance. Historians who have been deceived into assuming that he was urging preparation neglect to note that Mather also invariably adds
 
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that one's trial is not by one's own strength. And they fail to see that the trial he urges has a psychological dimension which included several underlying premises about assurance.
When he urged men to try to believe in Christ"Now make a TRIAL"and then told them that if they succeeded in trying, they probably would be saved, he did not intend to imply that they could coerce God into giving them grace. Nor did he mean that they could save themselves by the force of their own wills. He meantand stated explicitlythat their attempt to believe argued the presence of grace before they made the trial. God's grace, he explained, "enabled" them to try to believe. What their attempt involved was a process of raising into their consciousness their true internal state. Presumably they had, previous to this attempt, emptied themselves and pied their inability, their abasement, and their total dependence upon Christ.
28
To recognize his inner condition, a man must examine himself not simply for the content of his beliefs and feelings, but for the manner in which he held them. Other Puritan intellectuals had made this point long before Cotton Mather, of course, by reminding their people that even the Devil believed in Christ yet no one supposed that he would be saved. The Devil lacked grace, as did those hypocrites who claimed to believe but inwardly remained unregenerate. How then could they discover their miserable conditions and how could men who were apparently unable to believe and unable even to feel guilt or fear in their unbelief? The first sort of such men in Puritan parlance were suffering from security; the second from deadness. The answer that Mather gave demonstrated again the importance of the psychological framework of his theory with its emphasis on the importance of genuine self-awareness.
29
Those self-aware enough to recognize their inability to feel guilty, and who regretted their inability should take heart, Mather argued. "Do you
Mourn
because you don't Mourn?" he asked. "This is the
Truest Mourning
in the World." To those who felt fear because they felt no regret at their corruption, he said, "
A Spirit with much Fear
argues . . .
a Spirit without Guile.
" The fleshy, the secure, the hardhearted experienced no doubts about themselves. But the fearful, who did, gave "no little token of a
Soft Heart.
" At times the Devil inspired such fears; he was envious, Mather explained, of the chosen of God.
 
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He knew that he would never enjoy the delights of Heaven and so he determined to torture those who would. Secure men and hypocritical men rarely received his barbs. Satan already possessed their hearts and should he buffet them he risked awakening them to their carnal conditions. A dead-hearted man who despised himself for his coldness should take comfort then: only "a
Living
Heart" lamented its "own Deadness." And: "'Tis in some Degree an
Humble
Heart, that complains of its own
Pride
. What can it be, but an
Holy Heart
, that complains of its own Earthliness, and
Selfishness
and
Slothfulness?
What but a
Sincere, Honest, Upright Heart
, that complains of its own
Formality
and
Hypocrisy?
"
30
In Mather's psychological system, the truly introspective man would examine the "fruits," or results, of faith as well as these tokens or signs of the process of conversion itself. The critical feature of self-awareness was not to leave any faculty of the soul unexamined. Hence every idea and every feeling, including dead-ness and security, carried meaning that a self-conscious person must extract. Attitude and behavior weighed in the psychological scales too. There was much in the Puritan tradition that justified this assumptionRichard Mather, for one, had asserted flatly that sanctification gave evidence of justification. He had not defined sanctification as mere external performance, of course, but had rehearsed the conventional arguments about the attitudes that informed action. His grandson had learned even greater caution, preferring to limit the value of worksor fruitsto the judgment of "objective" assurance. A church must rely heavily on works, along with the person's testimony as to inner experience, but the individual himself must not be content to judge himself only by his actions in the world. Still, no man should ignore his life in the world; if his attitude was right, if he desperately desired to be saved, he should know that if he had grace it would affect every motion of his passage through life. He should know, Cotton Mather put it pithily, that a "workless faith was a worthless faith."
31
Cotton Mather adopted this line of thought about assurance while still a young man. He had heard it expounded as a youth and would continue to hear it throughout his life. English divines had developed a theory of the works of faith in the sixteenth century and would honor it in treatises and sermons in
 
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the seventeenth. Mather never entirely discarded it, but by the early eighteenth century he had to face its imperfection: it failed in application to persuade men who were presumably regenerate, of their regeneracy.
32
This traditional version of the doctrine of the signs had held that the causes, or "antecedents," of faith should be scrutinized as closely as the fruits which revealed themselves in a sanctified life. How one came to get faith could be as revealing as what one did after attaining it. On this point Mather agreed with the preparationists, though he believed that they had erred in attribuing merit to acts performed before justification. In his own preaching about the signs of faith, Mather gave the conventional encouragement that the weakest sign could be taken as mark of faith. But like most who made this point he had to admit that it was better to have all the signs dimly present than a few strongly and others not at all. And he shrank from saying, as John Rogers once did, that where the signs could not be found, "there is no Faith," though that conclusion was unmistakable.
33
The complexity of the theory made its application difficult for most men, Mather gradually recognized. The marks of faith themselves, whether they were antecedents or fruits, baffled ordinary men. Some were "graces" or "virtues"knowledge, patience, temperance, godliness, brotherly kindness, charity, as Richard Mather often had listed themand could be trusted if they appeared in a self that denied its own righteousness. Judging the moral makeup in which they showed themselves was no easy task, and men who had been bludgeoned with the fact of their depravity shook with fear and despair rather than pronounce themselves faithful. Ministers who could not even agree on the origin of these signs, as Richard Mather (who said they were innate) and Increase Mather (who said they were inserted by God) could not, offered little aid. Other marks were feelings"affections" or "passions" in Christian terminology, love, desire, humility, sorrowand offered treacherous grounds on which to make a decision about oneself because pride crept into the process of evaluation, and the right emotions obviously served the self.
34
As Cotton Mather became aware of the difficulties that his people experienced in applying the traditional tests, he began to simplify the doctrine, to insist that one of the tokens of faith took precedence over the others. He did not scrap the entire the-
 
Page 245
ory and occasionally repeated it in all its ramifications. But to persuade men that they had become overly scrupulous, that in practice they could trust their own good intentions, he began to suggest that they should require no more of themselves than the Lord did. All the Lord required, of course, was gracious faith in Christ. If men desired grace, if they desperately desired to believe, they were doubtless saved, for as Cotton Mather triumphantly explained, ''
The Desire for Grace argues the Presence of Grace.
'' He repeated this contention frequently, emphasizing all the while that if a man desired to love Christ, if he desired saving faith, he had doubtless come by it through the enabling action of God.
35
In revising the theory of the signs, Mather did not choose to depart from orthodoxy, though he just managed to skirt theological disaster. The difficulty in his revision was that in it he placed his reliance almost entirely on the affections, long considered the most unreliable of the faculties. And for good reasons, desireto cite onewas thought by some to have its physical location in the bowels. The question every commentator who trusted desire faced was of testing its earnestness, its saving character, a problem of course that inhered too in the traditional conception of the signs.
36
The problem had intrigued Puritans for years. The first generation in New England had approached it cautiously and had decided that the character of desire could not be accurately assessed. Thus Thomas Shepard intoned that "the desires of sons in Christ by faith, are accepted ever; but the desires of servants, men that work only for the wayes out of Christ, are not." Increase Mather, the father of Cotton, pronounced the same verdict for the second generation: "A Man may Desire and Wish for Grace in his Soul to Save him, and yet not be Saved." But just as Shepard left the door ajar for earnest desire to enter as reputable evidence, so also did Increase concede that "sincere" desire might be admitted as trustworthy. Cotton Mather knew the risks as well as anyone but, pushing the door until its hinges squeaked, he insisted that the "Desires of Grace are Grace."
37
By claiming that a believer could discover so much about himself through his "desire" for grace, Cotton Mather used the faculty psychology in an unconventional way but certainly did not violate its basic tenets. As one of the affections, desire was

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