The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (9 page)

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Authors: Robert Middlekauff

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snatch the Indians from Satan. What impressed Richard was the fact that the Indians had resisted all attempts to convert them before. The English had preached without avail for almost thirty years; and not until 1650 did their message begin to take hold. And if the Indians could be brought out of the wasteland of America after all this time, he asked, was not there hope for the Jews? Perhaps the Lord had selected this means to give impetus to further attempts to salvage them.
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Whatever their hopes for the future, Richard Mather and his colleagues who led the migration to New England did not ever expect that the Congregational Church polity would serve as a model for others; nor did they expect that, as Perry Miller contends, "ultimately all Europe would imitate New England."
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The first generation had no such conception of history; and they did not even begin to think of what they were doing as an errand. (In fact, they did not ever use the word "errand" to describe their purposes; its first use came in the next generation.)
An interpretation of their mission in such terms simplifies their conception of the historical process. It fails to concede their psychological subtletythey did not believe that men followed rational modelsand it strips from the historical process the power they attributed to conflict as a determinant in human affairs. It also discovers in them a pride they did not possess. Richard Mather, John Cotton, Thomas Hooker, and most of the great figures of the first generation continued to follow English events after their removal to America. Their interest, however, was not marked by a feeling of superiority, or a belief that the truth resided in New England and nowhere else. Ten years after Richard Mather arrived in Boston, he joined William Thompson, an old friend from England and then minister to the Braintree Church, in writing a long letter of advice to their old congregations in England. The two presumed to offer advice, yet their mood as they wrote was humble: they were out of touch with events in England, they admitted, and they hesitated to give suggestions to their friends. The result was that what they wrote was more in the nature of consolation than advice to people distressed by war. They loved their old countrymen, they explained, and wanted only the best for them. Most of all, they did not want to be understood as posing as the representatives of a morally superior culture: "We doe not think our selves to be the
 
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only Prophets, nor that we only are able to give a word of counsel or comfort to our countrymen: . . . such arrogant apprehensions are far from us."
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These Puritans began by thinking of themselves in exile. Richard Mather was only one of many who had been deprived of pulpits. Unable to practice the true religion, surrounded by Antichristian practices, and banished from their homes, they held out little hope for the country of their birth. Though there were good men there, and a few true churches, it belonged to the Kingdom of Darkness. Hence they fled to the only Kingdom they valued, the Kingdom of Light. It would be more accurate to say they took the Kingdom of Light with them to New England. It was this Kingdom that concerned them, not New England. While still in England Richard Mather thought of escaping to New Englandor, as he said in a revealing phrase, "some like place." And once safe in the New World, these Puritans continued to think in terms of the old abstractions: the conflict between the forces of light and darkness and the grand development of history towards the ultimate end.
Place did not preoccupy them in these years of beginning; and it lost even what initial importance it had when the great conflict between Parliament and the King broke out. Though at first cautious in attributing meaning to this struggle, many Puritans soon invested the war with cosmic significance: if the war did not bring down the Beast, it would inaugurate a greater effort which eventually would destroy him. Their part in New England in these grand events was clear: they had preserved a saving remnant; they had worked out Christ's ideas of the true Church polity; now they had the opportunity to join the faithful called by God to the climactic war. What could they do: watch and wait, strive to perfect themselves, and pray for their brethren in England.
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They could help in the struggle in still another way: since the Lord had not revealed all His light even to them on matters of Church polity, they must continue to probe into the meaning of Christ's word. When the Antichrist was brought low, they would have something to contribute to the new order of things. In the New Jerusalem they would help fashion true institutions, according to the Word of Christ; in this effort they could join their victorious brothers in England.
 
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Obviously such a view of historyand their own role in itcould not provide a definition of New England, nor did it in fact prescribe a dramatic role for New England conceived separately from Europe. When these Puritans thought of place, in the 1630's and 1640's, they thought of the Kingdom of Light extending all over the Western World, linking the people of Godthe saving remnantwherever they might be. Richard Mather, and his kind, were not Americans and never would be; they did not think of history in terms of America. Their vision was greater, extending to the godly to the ends of the earth.
 
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3
The Church
Richard Mather's expectation that the Lord would again soon strike the Antichrist evoked a jubilation that was touched with sadness and foreboding. England, shrouded in Antichristian darkness, seemed headed for afflictionsblows landed on the Antichrist, he feared, would leave her reeling. In the New World Mather's feeling for England was one of nostalgia, though not of sentimentality. Not only had he grown and matured there, he had left behind friends he would never forget. Fifteen years after his departure he was still gently instructing his old church in Lancashire.
1
Two of his sons, Nathanael and Samuel, returned to spend their adult lives in England and Ireland; and Increase took an M.A. at Trinity College, Dublin, after he was graduated from Harvard. His father watched him go, fully expecting never to see him again; Increase, he supposed, would make his career abroad.
2
Mather felt his mind and heart pulled towards England by other considerations too. England figured in his understanding of Biblical prophecies about the Church and the end of the world. And, of course, the Church, even more than the Antichrist, dominated his thought.
 
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At the time Richard went to New England there was a good deal to ponder about the Church. It, of course, had been the occasion for the first appearance of the Puritans. When Henry VIII broke with Rome he did not reform the Church wholesalehis was a reformation at the top supported at the bottom by men who helped themselves to the riches of the Church. The old doctrine and the traditional Church hierarchy satisfied Henry, who thought the bishops needed English direction, not Roman; and he knew none better than himself to supply it.
Reformers with visions of a new purity and simplicity and with a greater respect for Scripture, especially their own reading of it, did not like Henry's notions. They thought that they had a chance to alter things when he died, but Henry's young son, Edward VI, who came to the throne in 1547, lived only six more years. During those six years a satisfactory beginning was madesatisfactory to some at leastbut the changes under Edward were repealed by Mary Tudor, who craved the opportunity to return the English Church to Rome. She did her best (her worst, the Puritans said), restoring bishops friendly to her plans, reinvigorating the old doctrine, and driving non-conforming ministers from their pulpits. At least eight hundred fled England, their departure warmed by pyres on which martyrs burned.
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The Puritans greeted Mary's successor, Elizabeth, with great hope. But however much the middle way of the Elizabethan Church satisfiedor left undisturbedmost men, it did not please Puritans. They were gratified at the elimination of the Mass and of the Pope's authority, but were appalled by the Popish remnants which were left untouchedbishops, corrupt ministers, to say nothing of pluralities and sinecures, and favors and fees. Moreover, the Queen's Church retained a system of ecclesiastical justice including the Commissary's Court which was probably the most corrupt, and therefore most detested, institution in the entire arrangement. All these vestiges of the old order offended men who valued godliness above everything else.
Although the Puritans, uneasy in this sloppy and comfortable structure, attacked it on all fronts, they could not make the Church over in the face of the Queen's desire for the middle way. Elizabeth stopped their attempt to discard vestments and
 
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ceremonies in the Convocations of 1563. To be sure, individual ministers modified the liturgy and refused to wear the surplice; but individual practice, fearless as it sometimes was, could not alter policy. And dissent took casualties as it always does. Thomas Sampson, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, for example, lost his post when he refused to conform. The challenge to the surplice and the liturgy soon broadened as the Puritans took on the bishops who enforced practice in vestments and ceremonies. The Queen saw the ultimate threat in these attacksher own authority as Supreme Governor of the Church was clearly called in question by the attack on her appointees, the bishops.
4
The climax to this phase of the Puritan struggle came in the Admonition Controversy of the 1570's. This engagement, which took its name from two Puritan appeals, the Admonitions to Parliament, followed soon after the expulsion of Thomas Cartwright from Cambridge in 1570, by Dean Whitgift, Vice Chancellor of the University and the future Archbishop of Canterbury. But Commons provided the main arena for this contest and Parliament, encouraged by the Queen, rejected all the Puritan demands for reform of doctrine and ecclesiastical polity.
5
The Commons contained Puritans and men sympathetic to their cause. One, William Strickland, in 1571, made the mistake of introducing a bill to reform the Prayer Book, and was temporarily barred from the House at the order of the Council for his temerity. The Queen also squelched other attempts to modify the established religion in the next year.
6
The Puritans could not stop trying to make the Church godly but they couldand didgive up most of their attempts to work through Parliament. When they realized that they could not make Parliament serve reform, they began to work from within the Church, first by holding "prophesyings," weekly discussion meetings which brought clerics and laymen together to open the Scriptures. Elizabeth recognized that such devices threatened her control of the Church, and when in 1577 Archbishop Grindal refused to halt them she suspended him from his administrative duties. His successor, John Whitgift, despised Puritans and took on the task of stopping these meetings without any hesitation. Whitgift invigorated the Court of High Commission and set it after clergymen who refused to subscribe to key articles. In particular the Court demanded that they accept Royal Supremacy,
 
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the Thirty-nine Articles, the Prayer Book, and the Ordinal. He also presecuted the leaders of the "Classical Movement," so named after the Presbyterian "classis," or synod, which had as its objective the transformation of episcopal polity into Presbyterian organization. By the early 1590's Whitgift had succeeded: Puritanism had not been killed, but it was stifled as Presbyterian leaders, including Cartwright, were jailed and their oganization smashed. Spurred on by the disdainful laughter of Martin Marprelate, who directed his scorn at the bishops, Whitgift pushed his inquisition as far as he could. For the remainder of the reign, the Puritans were in flight.
7
Their hopes for James I in 1603 were touchingly like those they held fifty years before at the accession of Elizabeth. James had been bred on Calvinism and might prove receptive to their appeals for modest reformand for a toleration of their differences. James denied their appeals at the Hampton Court Conference and thereafter their way was rough. Most Puritan clergy conformed but hundreds did not. James's bishops drove them from their pulpits, suppressed their meetings, and rejected their suggestions that pluralities be abolished and the clergy be educated. But the worst was to come under Charles I, a pious but dull and vindictive man who left them no hope at all.
So matters stood in England before the Puritan migration. Events had settled very little as far as the critics of the established Church were concerned. In fact they disagreed with the orthodox on the meaning of the events themselves. They also disagreed among themselves. These disagreements were important, for how the Church's history was understood determined in part the attitude held toward the Church as it was presently constituted.
Anglican divines traced the founding of the Church to the time of the Apostles when, they said the Church of Christ was established in England. But though they argued for the Apostolic founding, they denied that the polity of the Church must be identical with that of the primitive Church. They dismissed such a view as one of the many delusions of the Puritans. Nor did they see any reason to discard any practice just because it had fallen into corruption under the Pope. The Puritans were much too rigid: GodJohn Whitgift asserteddid not impose any particular Church organization on men, but rather left it to be

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