12
THE PURITAN WAY
Nearly everyone today seems to believe that the Puritans were blue-nosed killjoys in tall black hats, a somber group of sin-obsessed, witch-hunting bigots “whose main occupation was to prevent each other from having any fun and whose sole virtue lay in their furniture.”1
How could such a monstrous misrepresentation have been so widely and so quickly accepted? For the anti-Puritan phenomenon has arisen largely in the last hundred years. Almost no negative bias can be found among nineteenth-century historians; on the contrary, they gladly gave the Puritans the lion’s share of credit for setting the direction of this nation. Why then, the sudden prejudice in so many hearts?
The answer seems to lie in the fact that never before in the four hundred years of our history has the spirit of rebellion gained such a tight hold on the minds and wills of the American people. What could be more of an anathema to such an attitude than the cheerful submission to authority, holy service, and corporate commitment that the Puritans personified? If there is one group of people in the history of the country whose example Satan hates more than any other it is the Puritans. And since rebellion is his specialty, it is no wonder that the Puritans have received such a bad press.
Thus, as social customs that have been acceptable in this country for more than three centuries are vilified and torn down, the usual withering epithet one hears attached to them is puritanical, whether the topic is work ethic, chastity before marriage, modesty in decorum and dress, traditional lifestyles, regulations against obscenity in the media, or legislation against immorality. The list is endless, and societal norms are crumbling under an ever-more determined onslaught.
As we investigated the Puritans, we found these much-maligned Christians to be sinners like ourselves, but we also found them to be warm and human, possessed of remarkable spiritual wisdom and discernment.
But what about their legendary self-righteousness and intolerance? Had they not banished Roger Williams, the founder of the Rhode Island Colony, simply because he spoke his mind and because his doctrine did not happen to agree with theirs? He has certainly become the hero of outspoken anti-establishment academics.
And what of Anne Hutchinson? Had the Puritans not expelled her? She now has a river (and a parkway) named after her and is enormously popular with modern feminists. The dilemma we faced was this: if such narrow-minded self-righteousness was an inevitable by-product of human attempts to establish the Kingdom of God on earth, did that not bring the whole matter of the feasibility of a Bible commonwealth into question? And if the Puritans were attempting the impossible, how much more impossible would it be today?
The scarlet letter—A for adulteress—that Hester Prynne, heroine of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous novel, was forced to wear seared its way into the psyche of nineteenth-century America. A century later Arthur Miller’s play about the Salem witch hunters, The Crucible, reinforced the stereotyped image of the Puritans. And countless other modern novelists and dramatists have presented the Puritans as morbidly preoccupied with sin and guilt. What is the truth?
There is no question that the Puritans took sins seriously—far more seriously than most American Christians today. But they had good reason: they knew that the very success or failure of their Bible commonwealth hung on their willingness to deal strongly with sin—in themselves first, but also in those who had been called with them to build the Kingdom. Indeed, there could be no compromise where the presence of sin was concerned. For an example of the fruit of compromise, all they needed to do was look across the Atlantic at what was happening in England. And so they did not shy away from facing up to sin or dealing with it.
One modern historian consistently exposed the popular Puritan stereotype for the false view that it is: the late Perry Miller, widely regarded as the dean of Puritan historians. For years his works sought to bring about a major revision in the thinking of serious students of American history (a lamentably minute segment of the American public).
Here is what Miller wrote concerning the Puritans’ attitude toward sin:
Puritanism would make every man an expert psychologist, to detect all makeshift “rationalizations,” to shatter without pity the sweet dreams of self-enhancement in which the ego takes refuge from reality. A large quantity of Puritan sermons were devoted to . . . exposing not merely the conscious duplicity of evil men, but the abysmal tricks which the subconscious can play upon the best of men. The duty of the Puritan in this world was to know himself—without sparing himself one bit, without flattering himself in the slightest, without concealing from himself a single unpleasant fact about himself.2
This willingness to look unblinkingly at the worst side of their own natures made them consummate realists. It was also responsible for the extraordinary compassion that became the hallmark of such exceptional leaders among them as John Winthrop, Thomas Hooker, and Cotton Mather. For once you knew how corrupt your own nature was at its core, you would be much more readily inclined to have compassion on the sinfulness of others.
Anyone who searches their church records will find that Puritan discipline, though strict by necessity, was almost always tempered with great mercy. The reason it was strict (and enforced by civil law), was that they felt that the entire fabric of their covenant life together depended on living in proper order and in joint obedience to the laws of God. Thus, when one sinned, it affected them all.
Tryal Pore, a young girl arraigned before the Middlesex County Court in 1656, confessed that “by [my] sin I have not only done what I can to pull down judgment from the Lord on myself, but also upon the place where I live.”3 But Tryal Pore’s tearful confession convinced the magistrates of her repentance, and they were more than ready to forgive her. “I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live” (Ezek. 33:11). Puritan magistrates, whose law book was the Bible, were generally far more anxious to see a sinner come to repentance than to mete out punishment.
In case after case, the mercy, forgiveness, and pastoral concern for the defendant stand out. Yet to any modern writer with a streak of rebellion, the discipline is all that he or she sees, and any mention of discipline these days is like waving the proverbial red flag. Rebellion, in fact, has been so romanticized in recent years that church discipline is literally unheard of. Today, if anyone were threatened with dismissal from a local church, he or she would probably shrug, laugh, and leave.
It was a different matter three centuries ago. A church was gathered together first, and then a town formed around it. Under those circumstances, excommunication was a matter of the utmost gravity. It meant that the local body of Christ, after repeatedly trying to bring a sinner to repentance so he or she could receive God’s forgiveness, would finally have no choice but to break fellowship with the individual and turn the person over to his or her sin. This meant that person would be under Satan’s influence, and for those who knew the reality of the devil, this was a fearsome turn of events.
That the fruit of compassion was being worked into the hearts of the Puritan elders, magistrates, and pastors is amply evidenced in the case of Ann Hibbens. Mrs. Hibbens was the wife of one of the elders of the First Church of Boston, where John Cotton was the pastor. She had accused a woodworker named Davis (also a member of the church) of overcharging her for some decorative carving that he had done at her request. He insisted that his price had been fair, and finally the church had to step in. Impartial woodworkers from another town were summoned to assess the work, and they judged that Davis’s price was fair, perhaps even low. This had humbled Mrs. Hibbens for a season, and she had confessed her error with tears.
But then, like a dog worrying a bone, she started in again. Now the church strongly censured her, and she quieted down again—for a while. But she could not simply be wrong and accept her correction; she began once more to berate Davis, both to his face and behind his back. Finally, the church had no alternative left but to hold an excommunication hearing.
The purpose of the hearing was to give her one last opportunity to humble herself and admit her error, but Mrs. Hibbens airily refused, not deigning to answer more than the first few questions put to her. Finally, Pastor Cotton addressed the congregation:
It grows now very late, and we must [ascertain whether] . . . it be the mind of the church that we shall proceed to pass the sentence of excommunication upon this Sister. We shall take our silence for your consent and approbation thereto; if any of the church be of another mind, he hath liberty to express himself. [silence] We perceive by the universal silence of the church that with one consent it is your mind [that] we should proceed. And therefore let us first seek unto God for His direction and for a sanctified use of this His ordinance, [in order] that we may proceed not out of bitterness or envy but out of tender love to her soul, and that God would give her a sight of her great and many evils and break her heart by kindly repentance [so] that she may the more speedily return to God and the church again, as now she is cast out.4
Following the prayer Mr. Cotton proceeded to reluctantly pronounce the dread sentence of excommunication:
. . . for slandering . . . for raising up an evil report . . . for several lies and untruths . . . for your stopping your ears and hardening your heart against the former admonition of the church . . . for your sowing discord and jealousies . . . for these and many more foul and sinful transgressions . . . I do here, in the name of the whole church and in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and by virtue of that power and authority which He hath given to His church . . . cast you out and cut you off from the enjoyment of all those blessed privileges and ordinances which God hath entrusted His church withal, which you have so long abused . . . I do from this time forward pronounce you an excommunicated person from God and His people.
Ten years later Mrs. Hibbens would be the defendant in another trial, a civil one this time. The charge: witchcraft. The sentence: the only one worse than excommunication—death by hanging. This must have brought to many minds the reminder that “Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft” (1 Sam. 15:23 KJV).
As Pastor Cotton indicated, the purpose of excommunication was not to condemn sinners but to let the pressure of their sin bring them to repentance. In the case of Captain John Underhill, who was excommunicated for adultery, being expelled was the very thing that finally brought him to repentance. He begged to be reinstated, and at length he was given leave to speak before the congregation. Winthrop recorded the occasion as follows:
He came in his worst clothes (being accustomed to take great pride in his bravery and neatness), and standing upon a form, he did with many sighs and abundance of tears, lay open his wicked course—his adultery, his hypocrisy, his persecution of God’s people here, and especially his pride (as the root of all, which caused God to give him over to his other sinful courses) and contempt of magistrates. He (then) justified God and the church and the court in all that had been inflicted on him.
Many fearful temptations he met with beside, and in all these, his heart shut up in hardness and impenitency as the bondslave of Satan, till the Lord, after a long time and great afflictions, had broken his heart, and brought him to humble himself before Him night and day with prayers and tears . . . in the end, he earnestly and humbly besought the church to have compassion on him, and deliver him out of the hands of Satan. So accordingly he was received into the church again.5
The skeptical reader might be inclined to wonder how sincere Underhill’s repentance was, but the fact is that he did go on to become a successful military captain and hold many positions of responsibility.
The Puritans were willing to face the reality of their own sinful natures and the harm that sin caused their covenant life. And this willingness produced not only compassion for one another but also a remarkable maturity when it came to meeting the realities of life and death.
Infant mortality was a grim specter in the seventeenth century. There was no cure for smallpox, and even measles was a dread killer—of adults as well as children. Death was an ominous and ever-present possibility. And as with everything else in a Puritan’s life, there were two ways to handle it: in Christ or in self.
Perhaps the most famous Puritan was Cotton Mather, whose image has been especially maligned and distorted out of any resemblance to reality. He has been painted as a witch-hunting, sadistic monster, a sort of Puritan Torquemada, when nothing could be further from the truth. Mather was an ordinary sinner and was the first to admit it, but his warm humanness made him one of the most popular preachers of his age.
True, he could be self-righteous, and he was not above playing pulpit politics. But Mather fearlessly proclaimed God’s Word, and he truly hungered after God’s righteousness and holiness. He also had a pastor’s heart, for which his parishioners loved him.
The son of Increase Mather, the most prominent clergyman in New England (for many years president of Harvard College and later New England’s special ambassador to the King), Cotton Mather was also the grandson of John Cotton and Richard Mather, two of the strongest ministers in the first generation of American Puritans. Such was his upbringing that when personal tragedy came to his family—and it came repeatedly—he instinctively turned to Christ.
There was shock and grieving, fasting and praying. But there was no self-pity, no long drawn-out remorse or bitterness, no hatred of God. Each time tragedy struck, a further work was done in him, increasing his capacity for mercy and compassion. So that toward the end of his life, his prayers and counsel were highly sought by those facing a recent or impending loss in their families. Despite all his writing (and he authored more than 450 books, tracts, and treatises), he made a point of always being available to anyone in need, and he instituted what was to become an American pastoral tradition: regular calls on his aged and ailing parishioners, as well as prisoners.
It is possible to follow his spiritual growth at key points, because starting in his nineteenth year (1681) he kept a diary, as was the custom among educated men of his time. (He had already received his B.A. and M.A. from Harvard and had begun to preach.) His first entry is a long devotional passage, full of good resolutions and signed “by Cotton Mather, feeble and worthless, yet (Lord, by thy grace) desirous to approve himself a sincere and faithful servant of Jesus Christ.”6
Mather was to have more than a dozen children, but only two would survive him. The first to fall ill was his four-year-old daughter Mary. On October 3, 1695, as he prayed for her, “I was unaccountably assured, not only that this child shall be happy forever, but that I should never have any child, except what should be an everlasting temple to the Spirit of God; yea, that I and mine should be together in the Kingdom of God, world without end.” Three days later the Lord took her. Her epitaph: GONE BUT NOT LOST.
In 1702 he began a seven-month-long struggle in prayer for the life of his wife, whom he referred to as his beloved consort.
In the forenoon, while I was at prayer with my dying wife in her chamber, I began to feel the blessed breezes of a particular faith, blowing from Heaven upon my mind. . . . In the afternoon, when I was alone in my study, crying unto the Lord, my particular faith was again renewed, and with a flood of tears I thought I received an assurance from Heaven that she should recover. Whereupon, I begged the Lord that He would, by His good Spirit, incline me to be exemplarily wise and chaste and holy, in my whole conversation, when I should again obtain such favor of the Lord.
She did recover, only to fall ill again before her strength could be regained, and again her demise called for an all-night bedside vigil.
But in this extremity, when I renew my visits unto Heaven, a strange irradiation comes from Heaven upon my spirit, that her life shall not as yet come unto an end.
But still she hovered near death, and six weeks later Mather wrote:
I suspect I have been too unattentive unto the meaning of the Holy Spirit . . . about my consort’s being restored to me. When she has been several times on or near the last agonies of death, I cry to the Lord, that He will yet spare her. He tells me that He will yet do it. . . . But it may be, after the Lord has given me admirable demonstrations of His being loathe to deny me anything that I importunately ask of Him, and therefore does delay one month after another, the thing which I fear, yet I must at last encounter.
On October 30 in the midst of concern for his wife he wrote:
On this day my little daughter Nibby began to fall sick of the small-pox. The dreadful disease, which is raging in the neighborhood, is now got to my family. God prepare me, God prepare me for what is coming upon me.
The pestilence grew worse, and toward the end of November his small son, Increase, was stricken down.
The little creatures keep calling for me so often to pray with them that I can scarce do it less than ten or a dozen times in a day, besides what I do with my neighbors.
Two days later, his beloved wife died.
At last the black day arrives. I [have] never yet seen such a black day, in all the time of my pilgrimage. The desire of my eyes is this day to be taken from me. All the forenoon, she lies in pangs of death, sensible until the last minute or two before her final expiration. I cannot remember the discourses that passed between us, only [that] her devout soul was full of satisfaction about her going to a state of blessedness with the Lord Jesus Christ, and as far as my distress would permit me, I studied how to confirm her satisfaction and consolation. . . .
When I saw to what point of resignation I was now called of the Lord, I resolved, with His help therein, to glorify Him. So, two hours before my lovely consort expired, I kneeled by her bedside, and I took into my two hands a dear hand, the dearest in the world. With her thus in my hands, I solemnly and sincerely gave her up to the Lord. . . . When she was expired, I . . . prayed with her father and the other weeping people in the chamber, for the grace to carry it well.
And he did carry it well.
When it came to their closest relationships, the Puritans were realists in life as well as in death. They believed that their covenant relationship with God included their children, and because they loved them, they were no more tolerant of sin in their children’s lives than in their own. They would deal with sinfulness in their children as strongly as the situation required, regardless of how the children might respond at the moment.
One has to ask: how many modern-day parents are willing to risk losing the “love” in their relationship with their children by persevering with them in matters of discipline? One important cause of the breakdown of the modern American family is that so much of what we call love, the Puritans had another name for: idolatry.
According to God’s first commandment (“Thou shalt have no other gods before me”), any person, any thing, any relationship that is exalted above the Lord in one’s life can be said to be an idol. Taking that one step further: any love that does not emanate from God (for God is love) by definition is idolatrous. No matter how noble the sentiments or how seemingly sacrificial, if it does not begin with God and have Him as its end, it is, in reality, nothing more than a subtle extension of our limitless capacity to love ourselves and to entice others to do likewise.
Unlike most modern parents, the Puritans knew that their children did not belong to them; they belonged to God. Consequently, they did not possess them but considered that their children had been entrusted into their care by God. Parents were to protect them, raise them, and teach them, training them up in the way that He would have them go. In other words, parenthood was a sacred responsibility in Christ, and if they failed to live up to it, they would be directly accountable to Him.
This did not prevent them from loving their children; they loved them very much indeed, as we have seen from the brief glimpse into Cotton Mather’s heart. But they were aware that their love should originate in the heart of God. His love abounds with tenderness and compassion and joy, but it also contains discipline. “For the Lord disciplines him whom he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives” (Heb. 12:6). God loves his children too much to permit them to stay in a sin that could harm their development or to allow them to persist in willfulness when they need to learn how to submit their wills to His.
It was in this area of having one’s will crossed that Puritan children (just like ours) had the hardest time understanding that this was God’s love for them. Many did not make the connection until their teenage years, and some never did. Often the turning point came during the whole business of courtship. This area of Puritan life affords a classic example of how God’s will-crossing love can come through parents who are willing to risk their children’s anger in order to be obedient to the guidance that they feel God has given them.
As in the rest of their living patterns, Puritan courtship gradually evolved into a code of conduct that they felt was pleasing to God and that, when adhered to, resulted in stable, fulfilling marriages. Certain evenings were set aside for “calling”—and there were strict ordinances against “night-walking”—couples wandering down inviting country lanes. As a result, the premarital birthrate was negligible, and sensual temptations were kept to a minimum. Modern writers have made this constraint a point of ridicule, but when one stops to think about it, nothing clouds the wisdom and clear discernment of two people beginning to consider marriage more than the pink haze of imminent sexual gratification.
Contrary to popular opinion, the Puritans did not arrange marriages between their children; they did, however, exercise their veto. If either set of parents felt that the marriage was out of the will of God, they had no compunction about withholding their permission. From hard experience they knew that if the marriage was not in God’s will and the couple went ahead and got married anyway, they could be in for a great deal of misery and suffering. Sometimes the parents simply felt that the couple was ahead of God’s timing, in which case the betrothal might last several years—while the boy and/or girl matured to the point at which they were ready to take on the responsibility of raising a family.
Puritan parents were also well aware that they could never be entirely sure of always hearing the Lord’s will. And so, on such an important decision as whether to permit their children to marry, they were grateful for counsel from their brothers and sisters in Christ. And because each marriage had a deep and long-lasting effect on the covenanted community as a whole, it was a matter of importance to every member.
Instead of resenting the counsel of their fellow Christians, the parents welcomed it because they were a big family. As God intended, this was one of the fruits of the horizontal aspect of the covenant. As hard as that is to imagine today, that was the way they chose, and they would not have wanted it any other way. For example, in 1636 the church in Boston renewed its covenant in the following terms:
We do give up our selves unto that God whose name is Jehovah, Father, Son and Holy Spirit . . . and unto our blessed Lord Jesus Christ . . . promising (by the help of His Spirit and grace) to cleave unto [Him] . . . by faith in a way of Gospel obedience, as becometh His covenant people forever.
We do also give up our offspring unto God in Jesus Christ, avouching the Lord to be our God, and the God of our children, and our selves, with our children to be His people, humbly adoring this grace of God, that we and our offspring with us, may be looked upon as the Lord’s.
We do also give up our selves one unto another in the Lord, and according to the will of God, freely covenanting and binding our selves to walk together as a right ordered congregation and church of Christ, in all ways of His worship, according to the holy rules of the Word of God, promising in brotherly love, faithfully to watch over one another’s souls.7
Imagine the reaction that most Americans today would have at the thought that their neighbors might be watching over their souls. Even among those of us in the Body of Christ, when we say, “How are you?” and smile, we are inwardly relieved when the reply is limited to the obligatory “fine.” Many of our churches are congregations of private people, surrounded by private personal spaces and wrapped up in private thought, until it is time to smile and shake the minister’s hand and get into private cars.
In fact, for many of us Americans, privacy has become our religion, with the home as the foremost place of worship. As a result of increasingly temporary and artificial friendships, frequent uprootings, and growing insecurity in the world, we turn more and more for the fulfillment of our needs to family relationships. We place increasing demands on husband, wife, son, daughter, mother, father, sister, brother, or whomever the person or persons might be. They become the focal point for all our hopes, our dreams, and our thwarted ambitions.
This other person is now expected to provide the love that we are so desperate for, and we begin to draw more and more heavily on that love. To ensure no interruption in its flow, we lavish undue attention, gifts, and advice on the other persons, believing that we are really loving them. When they do not love us back to the degree or in the way that we think they should (which is humanly impossible), we feel hurt and angry—and one way or another, we let them know it.
This is what always happens with idolatry sooner or later, because it is a spiritual law that natural love, when crossed, turns to hate. For example, when we Americans exalt our children, they start to rebel against the role into which they have been cast—as love generators and love objects. With increasing resentment they come to see that what their parents regard as love is in reality a kind of smothering, possessive control, vicarious reliving, or ego projection.
Or possibly the children do not even know what it is, except that they dread going home and feel as if they are suffocating while they are there. We all know about the alarming number of teenagers who are running away from so-called nice homes because their parents are so self-loving that they do not have any time for them. But what does not make the headlines are the numbers of teenagers who flee homes where they get too much of the wrong kind of attention—idolatrous attention.
Some children are willing to play the game for the sake of their own ego gratification, even into their middle years. Their parents “lovingly” try to shield and protect them from all the knocks of life and by so doing, wind up crippling them—to the point where they can no longer make it socially on their own. It is just easier to stay home and take shelter with one’s parents. For example, in a recent survey, administrators at Smith College discovered that one-third of the school’s graduates were still living with their parents ten years after receiving their diplomas.
In such cases, the “love” cycle may appear to be working—for a while. But God help the future mate of such a spoiled and self-loving person, should he or she ever decide to leave home and marry. For unless the mate is willing to be enfolded and totally absorbed into that cycle, the results will be unending conflicts, divorce, and broken hearts.
The American family does indeed seem to be unraveling because of the almost universal ignorance of the idolatrous nature of godless “love.” In the face of this fact, it is ironic that the larger community—which privacy so effectively seals out—is the very thing that can restore and ensure wholesome, open, and honest family relationships, provided that community is Christ-centered and covenanted.
This understanding of the corporate nature of their call—now almost forgotten—was built into the foundation of the new spiritual houses that God began to build some four centuries ago in America. As the Boston church’s covenant reveals, it was at the heart of their daily life together—to the Puritan, it was so normal, such a matter of course, that no one even thought about it.
The Puritans were glad that they had been called together, and they liked nothing better than to work together as a large family. Usually a good deal got accomplished at such get-togethers. For there were certain things that a person simply could not do alone, such as raising a roof , pulling stumps, or going to a town meeting. When outdoor work was needed and the weather was decent, the womenfolk would do the cooking and make a festive occasion of it. Frequently in the evenings there would be quilting or sewing or baking or husking bees, and for the children, spelling bees.
John Winthrop pointed out that, just as the community was a large family, so each family was a small community. And the Puritans put great stock in that community being an orderly one, with the parents in undisputed authority. “If God make a covenant to be a God to thee and thine,” said John Cotton, “then it is thy part to see to it that thy children and servants be God’s people.”8 This was also the tone he set in his famous catechism on the Ten Commandments, which Puritan children had to memorize and recite on Saturday afternoons in preparation for the Sabbath: “Who are meant here by [Honor thy] Father and Mother?” The correct answer was: “All our superiors, whether in family, school, church, or Commonwealth.”
The Puritans saw very clearly that authority—whether spiritual or temporal—invariably began in the home. “Well-ordered families naturally produce a good order in society,” said Cotton Mather succinctly, and James Fitch echoed him: “Such as families are, such at last the Church and Commonwealth must be.” Obviously this is every bit as true today, but in Puritan New England, the people took care to make sure that discipline and authority in the homes was all that it should be. For in the end, a lax or loose home hurt them all, being a sin against God’s plan, to say nothing of a social menace. Thus, if parents ever reached the point where they were drinking heavily, or whoring, or abusing their children, the children would be taken out of their homes and put into homes where they would receive the love (including correction) that they needed.
A great deal of emphasis was put on this matter of parental responsibility. Parents of stable families were expected to take in single men and women and to raise them as part of their families, with the newcomers submitting to the heads of the house as if they were their own parents. There was even a law requiring any single person who could not afford to support a home in proper order to live with one of the town families. In almost all cases this proved to be a great blessing, providing a warm family environment that the single person did not have and sometimes had never experienced.
The Puritan way may seem foreign to our modern American family ways, but the quality of genuine Christian love and caring for one another’s souls that so characterized the family lives of our ancestors may well contain the beginnings of answers to our own family problems.
“Gather my saints together unto me; those that have made a covenant with me by sacrifice” (Ps. 50:5 KJV) was one of the Puritans’ favorite texts, for it referred directly to the sacrifice required of each of them by the covenant into which they had entered.
No one was more cognizant of the need for personal sacrifice than John Winthrop—nor was anyone more ready to give as generously and cheerfully. Winthrop understood clearly that to belong to Christ was to belong to one another, and their situation in the fall and winter of 1630–31 would test their covenant commitment to the utmost.
In many of the new towns the inhabitants were still living in tents and wigwams. And all the while, shiploads of impoverished would-be settlers kept arriving—often with no supplies at all. This meant that while the winter might have started off with ample supplies, food stocks soon dwindled to the point where only emergency rations were left. According to Charlestown’s records, “the people were compelled to live on clams and mussels, ground nuts and acorns, and these got with much difficulty in the winter time.”9 Once again shellfish became an emergency staple, as it had in Jamestown. Cotton Mather relates that one man, “inviting his friends to a dish of clams, at the table gave thanks to Heaven, who ‘had given them to suck the abundance of the seas and the treasures of the sands.’”10
Winthrop now had two boats fishing at all times, setting up a competition between the crews. At low tide the women went out to dig at the clam banks. Edward Johnson reports a conversation among them. One woman said, “My husband hath travailed so far as Plymouth . . . and hath with great toil brought a little corn home with him.”
A second responded, “Our last peck of meal is now in the oven at home a-baking, and many of our godly neighbors have quite spent all, and we owe one loaf of what little we have.”
A third added, “My husband hath ventured himself among the Indians for corn and can get none, as also our honored Governor has distributed his so far, that a day or two will put an end to his store.”11
Winthrop turned out to be a superb teacher when it came to bartering for corn with the Indians. “His solemnity of manner was precisely the attitude to win their respect, and he took care that relations should be on his terms, not theirs.”12
Eventually the local Indians had only enough corn left to get themselves through the winter, so the governor dispatched a pinnace to trade with the Narragansetts. It came back with a hundred bushels, but such were their numbers that this did not last very long.
Winthrop, however, was also graced by God with an unusual gift of wisdom. As far back as September he had foreseen that their supplies would give out long before spring. He had sent the Lyon home to Bristol with their most reliable ship captain, William Pierce, and a long shopping list of vital supplies, accompanied by a letter to John Jr., requesting that he sell land, if necessary, to provide the necessary funds. This kind of sacrifice was to become a pattern with Winthrop, whose personal interpretation of the horizontal aspect of the covenant meant that one committed everything to the cause, even the last of one’s personal funds.
When disillusioned would-be settlers (who had quit and gone back to England) began to circulate negative reports around London, the Bay Colony’s sources of funds began to dry up, just as Jamestown’s and Plymouth’s had before them. Time and again Winthrop would dig deeper into his own coffers to pay for desperately needed supplies. During this period he was supporting the colony almost single-handedly, and he was rapidly exhausting what remained of his own wealth to do so. But never once did he make the slightest complaint, not even in his private journal.
Finally, in the middle of that winter, they declared February 6 a day of fasting and humiliation, to search their hearts for any reasons why God might be withholding his providence and to pray for a miracle. There was nothing else they could do: the corn was gone, the ground nuts had long been scavenged, and the clam banks were exhausted. The Lyon was so long overdue that they could only assume that she had been shipwrecked.
On the morning before the day of fasting was scheduled, “when Winthrop was distributing the last handful of meal in the barrel unto a poor man distressed by the wolf at the door,” reported Mather, “at that instant they spied a ship arrived at the harbor’s mouth, laden with provisions for them all.”13
It was the Lyon. She had come across a dismasted ship on her way home and had towed her to port, which accounted for the long delay. Her cargo consisted of wheat, meal, peas, oatmeal, beef, pork, cheese, butter, and suet, and what was of most importance to many of the sick, casks of lemon juice. “Circumstances no longer being appropriate for a fast, the Governor and council ordered a day of Thanksgiving . . . such was the deliverance which made a profound impression on the minds of that distressed people. It was recognized as a signal providence of God. About their firesides its story was told by fathers to their children for many a day in praise of the goodness of God and His guardianship over the colony.”
Winthrop’s love of his neighbors, exemplary in any age, and his commitment to them rank second to none in the annals of this nation’s history. One of the chroniclers of his own era summed him up: “His justice was impartial, his wisdom excellently tempered . . . his courage made him dare to do right. . . . Accordingly, when the noble design of carrying a colony of Chosen People into an American wilderness was by some eminent persons undertaken, this eminent person was, by the consent of all, chosen for the Moses.”14
A historian from the early nineteenth century ranks him second only to Washington in terms of stature among the founders of America, and we would agree.
“Gather my saints unto me.” In Puritan New England the saints gathered on the Lord’s Day in the meetinghouse, the hub of their covenant life together. They came to worship the Lord and to be taught from his Word. Such was their hunger for the Word of God and for sound teaching that—surprising as it may seem by today’s standards—the Puritans welcomed sermons lasting two hours or more. When he was in top form, their pastor could be counted on in the course of a sermon for at least two turns of the large hourglass that stood in plain view near the pulpit—and then another turn’s worth of prayers. If a visiting preacher gave out after only three-quarters of an hour or so, they spoke of him as they might of a spavined horse that had given out between the stays.
The man who turned the hourglass was the sergeant-at-arms, the redoubtable tithing-man. In addition to turning the glass, he had other responsibilities. It was he who checked the local inns on Sunday to make sure they stayed closed. And it was he who stopped by the houses of known truants to make certain that they were in their appointed pews. Above all, it was he who was responsible for keeping the saints alert in their pews as their minister went from his thirteenth point to his fourteenth (or, heaven forfend, from his twenty-seventh point to his twenty-eighth, which had been known to happen). Drugged by a lazy summer day, with the sound of crickets mingling with the “howsomesoevers,” even the most zealous Puritan had been known to nod off.
But the tithing-man, ever watchful for the saint who was “only resting his eyes,” was equal to his task. He had a staff to discomfort them, usually with a foxtail or pheasant feather on one end for the ladies and a brass knob on the other for the men. It should be noted that the tithing-man was not imposed upon the congregation by some ecclesiastical or civil authority; rather, he was paid by the church members themselves. For such was their desire to learn from their pastor that they did not want to miss anything due to a betrayal of their flesh. Few Americans have better understood the meaning of Jesus’s admonition to His disciples, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”
Although they were indeed serious about the importance of their spiritual life together, they were not—as the present-day image would have them—taking themselves so seriously that they were incapable of laughing at themselves. The opposite was, in fact, the case. They had a hearty appreciation of the silly incidents our foibles can cause, and laughter was a frequent visitor in their meetinghouses.
The tithing-man in Lynn had a sharp thorn on the end of his staff for those whose sleep was especially sound. We are indebted to the journal of Obadiah Turner for the following eyewitness account of what happened in church on the first Sunday in June 1646:
As he strutted about the meetinghouse, he did spy Mr. Tomlins sleeping with much comfort, his head kept steady by being in the corner, and his hand grasping the rail. And so spying, Allen [the tithing-man] did quickly thrust his staff behind Dame Ballard and given him a grievous prick upon the hand. Whereupon Mr. Tomlins did spring up much above the floor, and with terrible force did strike his hand against the wall, and also, to the great wonder of all, did profanely exclaim, “Curse ye, woodchuck!” he dreaming, so it seemed, that a woodchuck had seized and bit his hand. But on coming to know where he was, and the great scandal he had committed, he seemed much abashed, but did not speak. And I think he will not soon again go to sleep in meeting.15
For the Puritans Sunday was the first day of the week, not the last. There was the morning service, which lasted three to four hours, after which they adjourned for a light lunch and returned for the afternoon teaching, which could run another three hours. Then came Sunday dinner, the heartiest meal of the week. A nap was often in order afterwards, to sleep off the effects of so much good food and preaching.
The Puritans respected their pastor, who was generally a graduate of Oxford or Cambridge and possessed the best classical education available. (Harvard, Yale, and other New England colleges were originally founded to provide such training to American-born ministers).
The townspeople relied on their pastor to keep them apprised of what was going on in the world. Moreover, he was expected to have spiritual insight on the news he passed along, whether it was a natural disaster or a scientific discovery or a distant war. And since the pastor was almost always the most-educated man in the community, he was counted on to bring the sum of human knowledge as well as God’s wisdom into his preaching. He was unquestionably the most influential person in town.
Not all Puritan ministers were regarded with profound respect, and occasionally even those who were found themselves confronting rebellion. Sometimes the rebellion took the form of a willful choir, as in the case of one minister who, glaring at his choir, announced with much vehemence the hymn that began “And are you wretches yet alive? And do you yet rebel?”16
Choirs were vital to the worship service, for most New England congregations had no accompaniment, nor could they remember many tunes. Even the few well-known melodies had become so corrupted that no two individuals sang them alike, or quite together, for that matter. Hence, a congregation singing often sounded like “five hundred different tunes roared out at the same time.”17 This being the case, the main singing was from the Psalms, with an elder or deacon leading with a line and the choir dutifully repeating it.
One Puritan deacon, rising to lead an obedient choir one Sunday, found his eyesight failing him as he started to read and apologized, “My eyes, indeed, are very blind.”
The choir, assuming this was the first line of a common-meter hymn, immediately sang it.
Whereupon the deacon exclaimed, “I cannot see at all!”
This the choir also sang.
Frustrated, the deacon cried out, “I really believe you are bewitched!”
And when the choir sang that, too, the deacon loudly added, “The mischief’s in you all!” and sat down in disgust.
For any believer truly committed to Jesus Christ in a covenant life that demands all, humor and laughter become two of God’s most precious gifts. The struggle against sin and self is often difficult. When one is angry, tired, or on the verge of self-pity, the grace and mercy of God’s holy humor provide a balm of healing ointment to the soul. The Puritans appreciated God-given opportunities to relax and perhaps even be a bit foolish with one another.
One such occasion was the dedication of the Old Tunnel Meetinghouse in Lynn in 1682, which coincided with the installation of one Mr. Shepherd as its pastor. It was a double cause for celebration, and ministers from all the churches for miles around were invited as guests of honor. The town clerk recorded the events as follows:
The dedication dinner was had in the great barn of Mr. Hood, which by reason of its goodly size was deemed the most fit place. It was greatly adorned with green bows and other hangings and made very fair to look upon, the wreaths being mostly wrought by the young folk, they meeting together both maids and young men, and having a merry time in doing the work. The rough stalls and unhewed posts being gaily begirt, and all the corners and cubbies being swept clean and well aired, it truly did appear a meet banqueting hall. The scaffolds, too, from which provender had been removed, were swept as clean as broom could make them. Some seats were put up on the scaffolds, whereon might sit such of the ancient women as would see, and the maids and children. The great floor was held for the company which was to partake of the feast of fat things, none others being admitted save them that were there to wait upon the same. The kine [cattle] that were wont to be there were forced to keep holiday in the field.
There follows a detailed account of how the fowls that were accustomed to living in the barn persisted in flying in and roosting over the table, scattering feathers and hay on the august assembly below. Finally, the new pastor’s patience was at an end. Normally the pastor was the soul of dignity and decorum, but this was too much:
Mr. Shepherd’s face did turn very red, and he catched up an apple and hurled it at the birds. But he thereby made a bad matter worse, for the fruit being well aimed, it hit the legs of a fowl and brought him floundering and flopping down on the table, scattering gravy, sauce and divers things upon our garments and in our faces . . . this did not please some, yet with most it was a happening that made great merriment.
Dainty meats were on the table in great plenty, bear-steak, deer-meat, rabbit and fowl, both wild and from the barn-yard. Luscious puddings were likewise had in abundance, mostly apple and berry, but some of corn meal with small bits of suet baked therein, also pies and tarts. We had some pleasant fruits, as apples, nuts, and wild grapes, and to crown all, we had plenty of good cider and the inspiring Barbados drink [rum]. Mr. Shepherd and most of the ministers were grave and prudent at the table [except, of course, when flinging apples at the chickens!], discoursing much upon the great points of the dedication sermon and in silence laboring upon the food before them. But I will not risk to say on which they dwelt with most relish, the discourse or the dinner.
Most of the young members of the council would fain make a jolly time of it. Mr. Gerrish, the Wenham minister, though prudent in his meat and drinks, was yet in a right merry mood. And he did once grievously scandalize Mr. Shepherd, who on suddenly looking up from his dish did spy him, as he thought, winking in an unbecoming way to one of the pretty damsels up on the scaffold. And thereupon bidding the godly Mr. Rogers to labor with him aside of his misbehavior, it turned out that the winking was occasioned by some of the hay seeds that were blowing about, lodging in his eye. Whereat Mr. Shepherd felt greatly relieved.
The new meetinghouse was much discoursed upon at the table. And most thought it as comely a house of worship as can be found in the whole colony, save only three or four. Mr. Gerrish was in such a merry mood that he kept the end of the table where he sat in right jovial humor. Some did loudly laugh and clap their hands. But in the midst of the merriment, a strange disaster did happen unto him. Not having his thoughts about him, he endeavored the dangerous performance of gaping and laughing at the same time, which he now must feel is not so easy or safe a thing. In doing this, he set his jaws open in such wise that it was beyond all his power to bring them together again.
His agony was very great, and his joyful laugh soon turned to grievous groaning. The women in the scaffolds became much distressed for him. We did our utmost to stay the anguish of Mr. Gerrish, but could make out little till Mr. Rogers, who knoweth somewhat of anatomy, did bid the sufferer to sit down on the floor, which being done Mr. Rogers . . . gave a powerful blow and then sudden press which brought the jaws into working order. But Mr. Gerrish did not gape or laugh much more on that occasion, neither did he talk much, for that matter.
No other weighty mishap occurred save one of the Salem delegates, in boastfully essaying to crack a walnut between his teeth did crack, instead of the nut, a most useful double tooth and was thereby forced to appear at the evening with a bandaged face.
There were further interruptions by invading roosters, staved off by barrages of flying nuts and apples, and in the end a few “maudlin songs and much roistering laughter.” The account concludes, “So noble and savory a banquet was never before spread in this noble town, God be praised!”18
So much for the modern image of dour Puritans.