HISTORIANS HAVE LONG SINCE DISCOVERED that the Puritans were much more human than we had once supposed. They ate and drank and fought and loved and even occasionally laughed a little. Perhaps, then, they were (like us) hearty, warmhearted creatures after all. Perhaps. When we begin to think of the Puritans this way, we sooner or later have to reckon with a man like Michael Wigglesworth. The grim pages of his Day of Doom have long been familiar to students of American literature. His diary is even more challenging than his verse to any liberal view of the Puritans. For the man who emerges here calls to mind those stern figures in steeple-crowned hats who represent Puritanism in popular cartoons. So closely does Michael Wigglesworth approximate the unhappy popular conception of our seventeenth-century forebears that he seems more plausible as a satirical reconstruction than as a human being. His very name, to anyone not familiar with its illustrious history, must suggest a caricature, and the suggestion is sadly borne out by the diary and supported by all that can be ascertained about him.
His biography, as we know it from other sources than the diary, is appropriate. He was one of the first settlers of New England; he attended Harvard, the Puritan college, and taught there for several years; he became a minister and spent the greater part of his life preaching Puritanism to the people of Malden, Massachusetts. He wrote a poem that his fellow Puritans bought by the thousands in order to read in vivid figures about the Day of Judgment. In keeping with the crabbed figure of the cartoon, he was a sickly man, always complaining of ill health; throughout a large part of his life he was an invalid. Yet he fathered eight children, outlived two wives, and had married a third when he died in 1705, in his seventy-fourth year.
This pattern was not an uncommon one among the first generation of New Englanders: Harvard, the ministry, the ripe and respected old age. Against this familiar backdrop his diary fills in the lines of the caricature with heavy strokes, until the Puritan emerges as his worst enemies would have him, a man with great capacity for survival—but with small reason for wanting to survive. Was the Puritan a killjoy? Wigglesworth thought that all pleasure apart from delight in God’s grace was dangerous. His heart was “sunk with sorrow” when he found his students at Harvard indulging in merriment. Thus he wrote on June 25, 1653,
I set my self again this day to wrestle with the Lord for my self and then for my pupils and the Lord did pretty much inlarge my heart in crying to him. But still I see the Lord shutting out my prayers and refusing to hear for he whom in special I pray’d for, I heard in the forenoon with ill company playing musick, though I had so solemly warn’d him but yesterday of letting his spirit go after pleasures.
Since the students at Harvard could not fail to display a certain amount of animal spirits, this type of experience continued to sadden the teacher’s heart. On one occasion he gave a delinquent student a long lecture on the dangers of pleasure, and yet “that very evening,” Wigglesworth confided to the diary, “he was again at play…and when he saw me coming he slinked home and left his game whereby I gather that he is more afraid of me a poor sinful worm than of God and I am sorry that so solemn a warning and so efficacious for the present should have lost its power so soon.” Wigglesworth had no appreciation for the humor in situations of this kind, and he suffered the most innocuous pranks of his students with a ludicrous air of mourning. When he heard some of his admonitions “with derision reiterated among the scolars,” he solemnly sought comfort in his Maker. And when the students displayed a not incomprehensible reluctance to study Hebrew, he saw in their intractability “A spirit of unbridled licentiousness,” and exclaimed, “Lord in mercy heal, or I know not what wil become of New England.”
If worrying would have saved New England, Wigglesworth would have saved it. One of the most revealing passages in the diary is the one where he records his almost ridiculously painful deliberations about a neighbor’s door swinging back and forth in the wind.
The wise god who knoweth how to tame and take down proud and wanton hearts, suffereth me to be sorely buffeted with the like temptation as formerly about seeing some dores blow to and fro with the wind in some danger to break, as I think; I cannot tel whether it were my duty to giue them some hint that owe them. When I think ’tis a common thing, and that ’tis impossible but that the owners should haue oft seen them in that case, and heard them blow to and fro, and that it is but a trivial matter, and that I haue given a hint to one that dwels in the hous, and he maketh light of it; and that it would rather be a seeming to check others mindlesness of their own affairs, and lastly that there may be special reasons for it that I know not; why the case seemeth clear that ’tis not my duty. yet I am sorely affraid I should regard iniquity in my heart, and god upon this ecclypseth the sweet beam’s of his love, he hideth his face and I am troubled.
Wigglesworth worried not only about his neighbors’ doors but also, of course, about their souls. He found his spirit “quite discouraged and soul and body both ready to quail, because of my sorrows for what mine eyes daly behould in others sins and mispense of their precious hours.” He resolved “to do more for christ than I haue done by reproveing lightness and mad mirth on Sabbath Evenings and by visitings.” He even became so concerned with saving the souls of others that he found it necessary to reprimand himself for having, as he said, “a greater desire of others finding christ than of my own.”
In strange company with this solicitude went an unrestrained selfishness, which is revealed in a remarkable series of reflections on marriage. Wigglesworth evidently believed that he was suffering from gonorrhea and accordingly had some doubts about whether or not he should marry. His doubts arose, however, not from any concern for his bride-to-be, but from an apprehension that marriage might impair his own health. The factor that finally determined him to marry was the advice of a physician that marriage might prove beneficial, instead of detrimental. He accordingly resolved “to redeem the spring time for marrying or taking physick or both.” The sad sequel is that his bride died four years after her marriage, from what cause is unknown.
His crass behavior in this episode never gave Wigglesworth any pangs of conscience, but he was by no means free from a morbid feeling of guilt for other offenses that we should probably consider entirely innocuous. Guilt, in fact, seems to have been a necessary feeling to Wigglesworth. The diary served as a kind of account book in which he rendered up the assets and liabilities of his soul, with the debit side of the ledger receiving almost all the entries. It was not that he ever behaved in a scandalous fashion outwardly; his outward behavior was doubtless exemplary. But Wigglesworth knew that man never achieves righteousness in this world. He knew that within him lay all the guilt of Adam, and he took pleasure in abasing himself for his sinful heart, for his pride, his overvaluing of creature comforts, his neglect of God. The automatic result of the daily examination of his soul was the conclusion that he was a vile worm, indeed the “chief of sinners.”
The modern reader will rightly discount Wigglesworth’s claim to preeminence in sin, but his frequent protestations of guilt were more than a pose. Wigglesworth was obsessed with guilt. It is perhaps significant that one of the accusations that he most frequently leveled against himself was a lack of natural affection for his father. At one point he confessed himself secretly glad at his father’s death.
We should scarcely exaggerate, I think, if we described Michael Wigglesworth as a morbid, humorless, selfish busybody. In him the ugly and somewhat absurd, somewhat pathetic figure of the caricature comes to life, a Roundhead to confirm the last prejudice of the Cavalier. And yet historians have been at some pains to erase this very caricature. The popular picture of the Puritans, it has been shown, is grossly overdrawn, for Puritanism did not exclude the enjoyment of the good things of life. The Puritans read books, wrote verses, and had their pictures painted. They were unashamedly fond of beer and wine and even of more ardent spirits. They liked to eat well and live well and made no pretensions to asceticism. They were not prudish; they made no attempt to stifle natural passions in celibacy. They were men of the world, able to deal equally well with an Indian, a Royalist, or a seidel of beer.
How, then, are we to interpret Michael Wigglesworth? Was he simply an anomaly, one of those eccentric killjoys who can be found in any society? There are surely good reasons for regarding Wigglesworth as exceptional: he never enjoyed good health, and his bodily weaknesses may have been responsible in large measure for his morbid state of mind; furthermore, his preoccupation with his father’s death suggests that he may have had some psychological disorder. But to dismiss Wigglesworth as an unhealthy anomaly is to condemn him without a trial. He did, after all, teach at Harvard College; he did serve as minister to a Puritan congregation; and he did write for New England the most popular book of his time. In his own day no one accused him of heresy or eccentricity. Grant that he was exceptional, which he certainly was, did his singularity constitute a denial, or an intensification, of Puritan values? Was he exceptionally Puritan or exceptionally unpuritan? Puritanism unquestionably made rigorous demands on those who subscribed to it. The fact that Michael Wigglesworth, as revealed in the diary, does not look like the average New Englander of the seventeenth century may mean simply that he accepted the demands of Puritanism more wholeheartedly than most of his countrymen.
To affirm, then, that Wigglesworth was exceptionally and emphatically Puritan is not to cast doubt on what historians have been saying about the Puritans, but it is to suggest that the popular caricature may be closer to the central meaning of Puritanism than the friends of New England sometimes like to suppose. Although the popular view fails to do justice to the Puritan; although it neglects the strength of his conviction, the integrity of his purpose, and the breadth and subtlety of intellect with which he defended himself; although it overlooks the fact that he was, after all, a human being—nevertheless, it does emphasize the distinctive features of Puritanism as they now appear to a hedonist world. If the cartoonist could study and understand Puritanism in all its complexity, he would probably still draw the same cartoon. For the mark of the Puritan was not his human warmth but his zeal, his suspicion of pleasure, his sense of guilt; and it is these qualities that are satirized in the popular caricature. Michael Wigglesworth, who appears to be a living embodiment of the caricature, was distinctly and thoroughly a Puritan. If we measure him by the precepts of the Puritan preachers, it will be apparent, I think, that his sense of guilt, his hostility to pleasure, and even his minding of other people’s business were not the anomalies of a diseased mind but simply the qualities demanded of a good Puritan.
To consider the last, most objectionable quality first, did Wigglesworth’s concern with other people’s sins represent merely the tedious petulance of a busybody, or was it the expression of some fundamental part of Puritan belief? In the light of the social and political theory expressed by virtually every articulate Puritan, one cannot escape the conclusion that Puritanism invited, or rather demanded, active cooperation from every member of society in the eradication of sin. It was held up as a sign of regeneration that a man should reform his friends and neighbors. The true convert, Thomas Hooker explained, was one who sought to destroy all sins. “What ever sins come within his reach, he labors the removal of them, out of the familyes where he dwels, out of the plantations where he lives, out of the companies and occasions, with whom he hath occasion to meet and meddle at any time.” The obligation of the convert to reform those around him was grounded in the covenant by which God sealed the salvation of his elect. “If God make a Covenant, to be a God to thee and thine,” John Cotton pointed out, “then it is thy part to see it, that thy children and servants be Gods people.” And again, “when we undertake to be obedient to him [God],” we undertake not only “in our owne names, and for our owne parts, but in the behalfe of every soule that belongs to us,…our wives, and children, and servants, and kindred, and acquaintance, and all that are under our reach, either by way of subordination, or coordination.”
In a place where every serious person was engaged in persuading himself of his own conversion such doctrine was probably sufficient in itself to create a community of busybodies. But the desire to produce evidence of one’s own conversion was not the only ground of zeal for the morality of others: The Puritan believed that the outward prosperity of every social group rested upon the prevention of sin among the members. Quite apart from his individual relationship to God through the covenant of grace, every Puritan partook of a more external, social relationship with Him through the societies to which he belonged, through family, church, state, and in Wigglesworth’s case, the college. Every social institution existed for the Puritan by virtue of a special covenant with God in which the members had promised obedience to the laws of God. Consequently every Puritan was bound to obey God not merely as a sanctified man (in order to prove to himself that he was saved) but as a member of every group to which he belonged. If he failed, he not only demonstrated his own damnation but brought the temporal wrath of God upon his family, upon his church, and upon his state. Thus we find Wigglesworth exclaiming over his sins, “ah Lord! I pul down evils upon others as wel as my self. Sicknesses, death of godly ones, wants, divisions have not my sins a hand in these miserys? oh Lord I am affraid of thy judgements upon my self and others.” These ideas penetrated to every level of society in New England. In 1656, the year in which Wigglesworth accepted a call to preach at Malden, a miserable girl, laboring under the name of Tryal Pore, who had committed the sin of fornication, confessed to the Middlesex County Court, “By this my sinn I haue not only donn what I can to Poull doune Jugmente from the lord on my selue but allso apon the place where I liue.”
In view of these beliefs Wigglesworth’s zeal for correcting sin is entirely understandable and entirely in accordance with the strictest Puritan doctrine. Since the whole group had promised obedience to God, the whole group would suffer at the hands of God for the sins of any delinquent member. Manifestly every member must cooperate in avoiding such a fate. Incessant and universal vigilance was the price of prosperity. It was as if a district occupied by a military force were given notice that for any disorder the whole community—innocent and guilty alike—would be penalized. Every Christian society had received such a notice from God, and its effect upon the godly members, of whom we may account Wigglesworth one, was an extraordinary zeal for bringing others into the paths of righteousness.
A thorough selfishness was by no means inconsistent with this kind of zeal. When the Puritan sought to reform his neighbor, he had no altruistic, humanitarian goal in sight, but simply the fulfillment of his own personal promise to his Creator and the prevention of public calamities in which he himself would be involved. Even Wigglesworth’s selfishness in the matter of marriage does not set him off from his contemporaries. All the evidence indicates that marriage in the seventeenth century was a business transaction to which the haggling over dowries and settlements gave more the air of an economic merger than of a psychological union. The Puritans, to be sure, regarded the relationship of husband and wife as one in which love should predominate, but the love was a duty that came after marriage, not a spontaneous passion that preceded it.
In his sense of guilt Wigglesworth likewise exhibited the frame of mind that was expected of a good Puritan. When Anne Hutchinson lost her sense of guilt and declared that God had cast her loose from the bonds of sin, the orthodox members of the Massachusetts government banished her in 1637. No one, they felt, could escape from sin in this world, not even in Massachusetts; and anyone who thought such a thing possible was either insane or in the hands of the devil or both. Thomas Hooker, sometimes considered more liberal than other Puritans, advised his readers that “we must look wisely and steddily upon our distempers, look sin in the face, and discern it to the full.” The man who could take such a full view of sin could hardly be a happy human being, for according to Hooker he would be one who
hath seen what sin is, and what it hath done, how it hath made havock of his peace and comfort, ruinated and laid wast the very Principles of Reason and Nature, and Morality, and made him a terror to himself, when he hath looked over the loathsom abominations that lie in his bosom, that he is afraid to approach the presence of the Lord to bewail his sins, and to crave pardon, lest he should be confounded for them, while he is but confessing of them; afraid and ashamed lest any man living should know but the least part of that which he knows by himself, and could count it happy that himself was not, that the remembrance of those hideous evils of his might be no more.
Few persons in any time could exhibit a feeling of guilt as strong as that which Hooker here demands. That Wigglesworth did attain something like it is a sign not of eccentricity but of orthodoxy.
If we examine, finally, the sins of which Wigglesworth most often finds himself guilty, we arrive at the origin of his hostility to pleasure and at the central meaning of Puritanism as Wigglesworth exemplifies it: the belief that fallen man inevitably estimates too highly the creatures and things of this world, including himself. Pride and the overvaluing of “the creature,” these are the sins of which Wigglesworth accused himself almost daily, and these are the sins involved in enjoyment of the senses. The Puritan was not exactly hostile to pleasure, but his suspicion was so close to hostility that it often amounted to the same thing. A man might enjoy the things of this world, provided that he did so in proportion to their absolute value, but since their absolute value was insignificant when placed beside the value of their Creator, the amount of pleasure that might lawfully be drawn from them was small indeed. It is not surprising, therefore, that Wigglesworth seldom recorded specific actions in which he had displayed too high a sense of his own or of the creature’s value. The sin did not lie in the action itself, but in the estimate that was placed upon it, as when he found himself too happy with having one of his sermons well received. His sins were sins of attitude, sins of judgment, sins of a will that had been debilitated and corrupted by the original fall of man. They were not particular sins but the essence of sin itself. For sin to the Puritan was not simply the breach of a commandment; it was a breach of the order that God had ordained throughout all creation, an order that was inverted by sin and restored by grace. The Puritan God had created the universe to serve His own glory, but He had directed that all parts of that universe, except man, should serve him only indirectly—through serving man. As long as man remained innocent in the Garden of Eden, so long did man enjoy dominion over the creatures and direct communication with his Maker. But sin had inverted the order of things and turned the whole creation topsy-turvy. As one Puritan minister put it, “Man is dethroned, and become a servant and slave to those things that were made to serve him, and he puts those things in his heart, that God hath put under his feet.” The only remedy was return to God through Christ, a return that would be completed at the last day and that would be partially consummated here and now through the operation of saving grace. “If sin be (as it is) an aversion or turning away of the soul from God to something else besides him…then in the work of grace there is a conversion and turning of the soul towards God again, as to the best and cheifest good of all.” Again and again Puritan ministers warned their listeners that “the onely sutable adequate ultimate object of the soul of man is god himselfe,” that “all true christians have Christ as the scope and End of their lives,” that “no creature that is finite, can be the end of the Soul nor give satisfaction to it.” Thus, in recognizing that he placed too high a value on the creatures, Wigglesworth was recognizing that in him the divine order was still inverted. No matter how often he told himself that God was the supreme good to which all else must be subordinated, no matter how loudly he called upon God to make him believe, he could not help overestimating himself and the world.
In this undeviating scrutiny of his own corruption, Wigglesworth was probably not a typical Puritan, as he was not a typical human being; but he was closer to the ideals of Puritanism than were his more warm-blooded contemporaries who indulged the flesh and enjoyed the creatures.