The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (7 page)

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Authors: Robert Middlekauff

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2
The Antichrist
Richard Mather arrived in Boston singing the praises of the Lord. The Lord had helped him and his companions escape their persecution in England. The Lord had conducted them safely over the sea without the loss of a man and without the suffering that usually dogged ocean voyages. The Lord had delivered them from a fearsome storm that boiled the sea and snapped anchor cables as if they were string. And so Richard Mather sang, "Praise the Lord, O my soul; and all that is within me, praise his holy name!"
1
Mather had not left England so full of confidence. The two years preceding his departure in 1635 had been marked by uncertainty about his ministry. Sometime between 1618, when he had accepted episcopal ordination at Toxteth Park, and 1633, when he was suspended, he had become convinced that Congregationalism was the true Church polity. His failure to conceal this persuasion had, in August 1633, brought visitors from the bishop who had suspended him, but in November he had been restored to his pulpit. He had returned to his church without promising to conform. The chances are that in 1633 Mather had simply requested action which would return him, and had not been re-
 
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quired to make any declaration of his principles. In the tangle of ecclesiastical politics and the unevenness and inconsistency of Anglican determination to smash dissenting ministers, his case had been favorably decided. The next year Mather had not been so fortunate. The Archbishop of York had dispatched visitors who again suspended him. When Mather's friends had appealed for a lifting of the suspension they were asked how long Mather had been a minister. The answer was "fifteen years." And how often had he worn the surplice? The response was that Mather had never worn it. The visitor's cynical comment had left little room for hope that Mather could return to his church: " '
What
(said the Visitor, swearing as he spake it)
preach Fifteen years and never Wear a Surpless? It hath been better for him that he had gotten Seven Bastards
.' "
2
Mather had been banished but he probably did not immediately consider leaving England. By his principles, though not his bishop's, he was still pastor of his church. His flock needed him and wanted him to continue at its head. The idea of removal to New England may have been planted by John Cotton and Thomas Hooker who wrote him about this time. In any case, he was soon considering leaving. With characteristic respect for balance, Mather began drawing up arguments for removal. These statements, which reveal his indecision, suggest what moved him most in the months before he decided. Most of his "arguments"Mather arranged them in a kind of orderrevolved around the necessity for godly worship to be conducted in purity and freedom. His first proposition, for example, contended that "'To remove from a corrupt Church to a purer, is necessary for them that are not otherwise tyed, but free. . . .'" The Scriptures after all enjoin men to choose "the best gifts." The best gifts included the true Church discipline. In England such discipline no longer existed, if it ever had: ministers were prevented from executing their sacramental functions and their preaching; and, of course, the full enjoyment of the ordinances was vital to a pure Church. England threatened persecution; the Scriptures required men to escape persecution in favor of peaceful enjoyment of worship. Even nature taught one to seek "ones own preservation." Richard Mather's mood in this part of the argument was hardly exalted. Hope was gone, and he was looking for a way out.
3
Mather's feelings about the plight of the faithful received
 
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scant comfort when he turned to the present state of religion in England. As he looked at England, Mather found many signs of "fearful Desolation." His recapitulation of them reads like an indictment presented in court. Degenerate England gloried in its sin and sinners; where sin did not exist, security or indifference prevailed. God had attempted to warn England's stiff-necked people but they persisted in their corrupt ways, impervious to the meaning of afflictions, contemptuous of the warnings delivered by the Lord's faithful ministers, and ungrieving, though the Lord was fast stripping the land of His faithful servants.
4
But why should the Lord manifest such terrible concern for England? Like other commentators of his day, Richard Mather turned to the past for an answer. He began his study with the assumption that England was in covenant with God who valued her above other nations, an assumption which so pervaded Reformed thought in England as to be commonplace. God's extraordinary interest in England had first become clear to men at the time of the Reformation when He began leading the nation out of Antichrist's dreadful clasp. Since then His blessings had been greatHe thwarted Mary's attempts to return the land to Rome's control and in Elizabeth He gave the people a sovereign who continued to pour the vials of God's wrath upon the Antichrist. The list of God's covenant kindnesses could be extended but what especially touched Richard Mather was the shocking return made for them by His nation.
5
Mather was especially impressed by one chronicle of this dismal story, John Brinsley's
The True Watch and Rule of Life
.
6
In it he found an elaborate analysis of the declension of another body of God's chosen, the people of Judah. And as Brinsley hastened to point out to those slow to make the application for themselves, the sins that sent Judah into seventy years of captivity in Babylon abounded in England.
7
Brinsley's tract purported to rest on the ninth chapter of Ezekiel, and in fact its mood of imminent destruction awaiting England is supplied by Ezekiel's vision of the slaughter of the unworthy in Jerusalem. But its substance draws widely on the Old Testament in its account of a people chosen by the Lord who paid the Lord in pride and sin for His protection. The Lord, Brinsley wrote, took the people of Judah to be "his peculiar people of all the earth, plucking them out of the iron furnace.
 
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He gave them his Covenant, and the seales of it, his word and Sacraments, his lawes, ordinances and statutes. He planted them in Canaan the garden of the earth . . ."; and when they proved rebellious He took His vengeance on them.
8
The application of this melancholy history to England should, said Brinsley, send shivers over every Englishman, "for feare of the same denunciation, and desolation to light upon us." For, he continued, "who knoweth not that the Lord did take us to himselfe, as a vine out of Egypt: I mean that he fetched us out of that Romish bondage, by a most high hand and notable overthrow of our oppressors; getting us in our habitation and renewing his covenant with us; as he did Israel from Egypt, planting them in Canaan?"
9
Brinsley's relentless insistence that England must repent and reform or face destruction relied, as all such literature of this type had to, on the figure of the Beast, the Antichrist of Daniel and Revelation. The Book of Daniel portrays four great beasts rising out of the sea, the first "like a lion," the second, "like to a bear," the third, "like a leopard," and the fourth, the ten-horned Beast, "diverse from all the rest." All were dreadful, and unrepentant sinners were assured that at the Day of Judgment should they ''scape the Beare, yet a Lion shall teare them in peeces."
10
At the time Richard Mather was pondering his fate and England's, the interpretations of these scriptures had reached a complexity so tangled as to give them a mystery which rivaled the prophesies themselves. Virtually all Protestant interpreters agreed, however, that the Beast from the sea was the Antichrist and that the Antichrist was the Papacy with its episcopal paraphernalia. For these Protestants, history was a great cosmic drama of the struggle between good and evil, between God's faithful in His Church arrayed against Antichrist and his master, Satan. The ultimate outcome of this conflict was clear: the Book of Revelation forecast it. At the climactic moment the warrior-Christ and His angels would descend in a cloud of fire which would consume Antichrist and his followers. Satan would be bound and eventually consigned to the pit of fire and brimstone. At this point the story became less clear. Some Protestants, inspired by the Book of Revelation, insisted that a millennium followed during which Christ and the faithful reigned on earth. This period would see a restoration of the Edenic paradise
 
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poverty and pain banished, sin and suffering dispelled and happiness and harmony ensuing. But other interpreters offered a view remarkably like Augustine's which held that the millennium has already occurred and that, with the Second Coming of Christ, history ended.
11
Puritans of Richard Mather's generation often disagreed on the question of the periodization of history and the location in time of the millennium. And yet they almost unanimously agreed that the end was approaching. For most, the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century marked the beginning of the end. These reformers believed that by the split in the Roman Catholic Church, the papacy, or Antichrist, suffered the first of a series of blows which would end only when he slid downward into the pit. The popular expression of this apocalyptical history was written in the sixteenth century by John Foxe in the
Book of Martyrs
. This book helped to form Richard Mather's mentality in these years of imminent exile.
Foxe announced near the beginning of his book that he did not intend to show the Church in England as "any new church of our own," but rather as "the renewing of the old ancient church of Christ."
12
As part of the old order of Christ, the English Church experienced the long cycles of purity and decay that supplied the common pattern of history. According to Foxe's calculations, the first period of the Church extended from the year of Christ's death to the victory of Constantine over Maxentius, almost three hundred years later. The following one thousand years marked an era of spiritual prosperity, for the angel of John's vision had appeared with the key to the bottomless pit and had bound Satan. During this epoch the Church enjoyed the freedom of preaching the gospel as the brethren listened without the fear of persecution. But even before this bright day gave way to the inevitable darkness, signs of degeneration appeared. They had been especially clear in England in whose history Foxe found this universal rhythm of purity and corruption.
13
According to Foxe, the spiritual conquest of England had begun during the time of the Apostles. The true faith, in other words, had not come from Rome, though later the Roman church had sent its emissaries. Joseph of Arimathea, sent by Philip the Apostle in the year of the Lord 83, had brought Christianity to pagan England. A little more than one hundred years later King
 
Page 25
Lucius established the Church in Britain: Lucius banished heathenism so far as possible by converting pagan temples into Christian churches, and transforming the "flamins," or head-priests, into bishops and archbishops. Lucius accomplished all this without interference from Rome, which had not yet fallen away from the true religion. Unhappily, Lucius died without issue and soon after the realm began to experience what was to be a familiar pattern: Roman Catholic ambassadors, Saxons and Danes, the forces of darkness intruded themselves to be met by godly kings and faithful people. Christian kingsthe model is Alfreddefend the truth, and ungodly ones betray it; obedient people worship in the faith and disobedient ones desert it. There was, Foxe reported, about a millennium of this history, the period of the binding of Satan during which true Christianity was sustained in England.
14
Difficulties grew, however, in the fourteenth century as Satan gained his release and began persecuting the elect. For the next two centuries the corruption of the faith proceeded, doctrine degenerated, and the Roman overpowered the true Church of Christ. Though scripture and learning disappeared from men's lives in these centuries, replaced by Roman rites, scholastic philosophy, idolatory, and error, God did not choose to abandon England completely. In fact, He raised up Wyclif and though the Antichrist suppressed Wyclif, he did not do so until Wyclif begot Huss. Foxe was as certain of this as he was that Huss begot Luther, and Luther the Truth. With Luther and the Protestant Reformation the long struggle reached its climax, an historical moment which Foxe was convinced would encompass his own lifetime and extend to the final judgment.
15
With this understanding of the course of history, the religious character of England and role assigned to it in the final drama assumed great importance in any calculation of whether one should stay or remove himself. Certain factors in the calculation seemed inescapable to Richard Mather. The reasons for God's wrath abounded in England. A covenanted people now harbored sin that exceeded that which had sent Judah into a seventy-year captivity. Remaining in England held the possibility that even the godly would become corrupt.
The godly had a responsibility to preserve the visible Church. As John Winthrop, the first great civil leader of the Bay Colony,

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