14
GOD’s CONTROVERSY WITH NEW ENGLAND
One of the mysteries that we faced in our search was this: What finally became of the Puritans? They had seemed to be prospering in every way—the hard times were behind them. There was plenty of good land and plenty to eat. They had a lasting peace with the Indians. Everyone who had been there for any length of time had a roof over their heads, and some of the homes were quite spacious.
Spiritually, most were deeply committed and were fulfilling the terms of the covenant, and God was, in turn, keeping His end of the bargain, blessing them beyond all measure. But all the while, like a fire dying down, the spiritual light was growing dimmer. It happened so gradually that no one seemed to notice it—until by the beginning of the eighteenth century, what had been a blazing white Light of the Gospel of Christ had become only a faint red glow from smoldering embers.
What had gone wrong?
The more reading we did, the more the question plagued us, for our research was beginning to indicate that the Covenant Way was the way God had intended America to go. If that is true, then the answer to the question of where the Puritans went wrong might very well provide the way back to His purpose for the nation today.
We found our answer mostly between the lines of a number of sad accounts of such compromises as the Half-Way Covenant and increasingly vehement sermons that fell on increasingly deaf ears. And we found something else: countless recorded instances of what the Puritans called divine providence—extraordinary interventions of God on behalf of His people when they were in covenant with Him. Time after time God would pour out His grace and mercy on the Puritans and protect them from dangers they could not foresee.
But we also discovered some sobering examples of divine justice, when those who had once been in covenant openly scorned their commitment by word and deed. And we gained a better understanding of the judgments of God—those major and minor calamities that a loving Father permits in order to get the attention of His wayward children and cause them to turn back to Him. For the Puritans saw God’s interventions, for weal or for woe, as distinctly as had their spiritual ancestors in ancient Israel: “Behold, I set before you this day a blessing and a curse: the blessing, if you obey the commandments of the LORD your God . . . and the curse, if you do not obey the commandments of the LORD your God.” (Deut. 11:26–28).
So numerous were the blessings that God showered on the people of New England who were seeking to obey His commandments that Cotton Mather’s Magnalia devotes several hundred pages to chronicling just some of the occurrences of divine providence. One remarkable account of God’s supernatural care for His children occurs in Book II of the Magnalia:
For instance, an honest carpenter being at work upon a house where eight children were sitting in a ring at some childish play on the floor below; he let fall accidentally from an upper story a bulky piece of timber just over these little children. The good man, with inexpressible agony, cried out, “O Lord, direct it!” and the Lord did so direct it, that it fell on end in the midst of the little children and then canted along the floor between two of the children, without touching one of them all. But the instances of such things would be numberless.1
Another instance of God’s taking a personal hand in the saving of Puritan children is described by John Winthrop in his journal. It involved his two daughters, who, in February of 1632 “were sitting under a great heap of logs, plucking of birds, and the wind, driving the feathers into the house, the Governor’s wife caused them to remove away. They were no sooner gone, but the whole heap of logs fell down in the place, and had crushed them to death, if the Lord, in His special providence, had not delivered them.”2 If that wind had sprung up a minute later or been blowing in any other direction, they would have been killed.
“They that go down to the sea in ships . . . these see the works of the LORD and his wonders in the deep” (Ps. 107:23–24 KJV). Thus begins one of the most intriguing sections in the Magnalia: eleven tales of miraculous deliverances at sea. Here are two. On September 10, 1676, Ephraim Howe, his two sons, and three other men set sail from Boston for New Haven. Contrary winds and a storm blew them far out into the Atlantic and held them captive. Their exposure to the elements was lethal, and with little food aboard, one by one they began to die.
First, Ephraim lost his two sons, as had his Biblical namesake before him. But the storm raged on, finally driving them ashore on a desolate island near Cape Sable. The other men died after a few weeks because there was nothing to eat but an occasional fish or gulls that they could shoot (they had rescued some gunpowder). Ephraim survived alone.
Month after month went by, and although he could see fishing vessels on the horizon, none ventured near.
The good man, while thus deserted, kept many days in prayer, with fasting [sic], wherein he confessed and bewailed the many sins which had rendered him worthy of these calamities, and cried out to God for his deliverance. But at last it came into his mind that he ought very solemnly to give thanks unto God for the marvelous preservations which he had hitherto experienced, and accordingly he set apart a day for solemn thanksgiving unto God, his gracious preserver, for the divine favors which had been intermixed with all his troubles. Immediately [italics Mather’s] after this, a vessel belonging to Salem did pass by that island, and seeing this poor servant of God there, they took him in. And so he arrived in Salem, July 18, 1677. [Less than two months shy of a year from the day he had departed!]3
Our favorite of these sea stories involves two ships in distress. The first, under the mastery of William Laiton, was out of Piscataqua and bound for Barbados when, some thousand miles off the coast, she sprang a leak that could not be staunched. Her crew was forced to take refuge in their longboat. It happened that they had a plentiful supply of bread, more than they could possibly eat, but so little water that after eighteen days of drifting, they were down to a teaspoon per man per day.
Meanwhile, another ship, captained by one Samuel Scarlet, was having its own difficulties, being “destitute of provisions, only they had water enough, and to spare.” They spied the drifting longboat, but as Scarlet made ready to take them aboard, his men
desired that he would not go to take the men in, lest they should all die by famine. But the captain was a man of too generous a charity to follow the selfish proposals thus made unto him. He replied, “It may be these distressed creatures are our own countrymen, and [anyway] they are distressed creatures. I am resolved I will take them in, and I’ll trust in God, who is able to deliver us all.” Nor was he a loser by this charitable resolution, for Captain Scarlet had the water which Laiton wanted, and Mr. Laiton had the bread and fish which Scarlet wanted. So they refreshed one another, and in a few days arrived safe to New England.
But it was remarked that the chief of the mariners who urged Captain Scarlet against his taking in these distressed people, did afterwards, in his distress at sea, perish without any to take him in.4
One never tires of hearing accounts of God’s wondrous faithfulness toward those who love and seek to remain faithful to Him. The same psalm with which Mather opens his sea accounts also contains these words: “Oh that men would praise the LORD for His goodness, and for His wonderful works to the children of men!” (Ps. 107:8 KJV).
But for those whose hearts had become so hardened that they had nothing but scorn for the covenant, God’s intervention took the form of judgment. And the Puritans expected no less; as a people chosen to do His work, they knew that He would deal with them more strictly because of their call.
One of the grimmest tales of God’s strict justice is recorded by John Winthrop. It happened in August of 1633.
Two men servants to one Moody of Roxbury, returning in a boat from the windmill, struck upon the oyster bank. They went out to gather oysters, and, not making fast their boat, when the flood [tide] came, it floated away, and they were both drowned, although they might have waded out on either side. But it was an evident judgment of God upon them, for they were wicked persons. One of them, a little before, being reproved for his lewdness and put in mind of Hell, answered that if Hell were ten times hotter, he had rather be there than he would serve his master.5
And so his wish was fulfilled.
An even more pointed example of God’s judgment—and a moving, last-minute gift of repentance—took place in Boston in 1686. A condemned murderer, James Morgan, who in the days before his execution had responded to the spiritual help of Cotton Mather and given his life to Christ, turned on the gallows steps and addressed the crowd:
I pray God that I may be a warning to you all. . . . In the fear of God, I warn you to . . . mind and have a care of that sin of drunkenness, for that sin leads to all manner of sins and wickedness. . . . When a man is in drink, he is ready to commit all manner of sin, till he fill up the cup of the wrath of God, as I have done by committing that sin of murder.
I beg of God, as I am a dying man and to appear before the Lord within a few minutes, that you may take notice of what I say to you. . . . O that I may make improvement of this little, little time, before I go hence and be no more. O let all mind what I am saying now [that] I am going out of this world. O take warning by me, and beg God to keep you from this sin, which has been my ruin.
[And as the noose went round his neck] O Lord, receive my spirit! I come unto thee, O Lord, I come unto thee!6
More than a few people among the onlookers were, no doubt, convicted of the need for a significant amendment of their own lives. Sad to say, the likely response of the majority of those present was one of indifference, for a subtle and dangerous change was taking place in the heart of Puritan New England.
The ministers could see it coming, and Sunday after Sunday they had warned their congregations with such passages from the Word of God as:
Take heed lest you forget the LORD your God, by not keeping his commandments and his ordinances and his statues . . . lest, when you have eaten and are full, and have built goodly houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks multiply, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, then your heart be lifted up, and you forget the LORD your God. . . . Beware lest you say in your heart, “My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.” You shall remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth; that he may confirm his covenant which he swore to our fathers, as at this day. And if you forget the LORD your God and go after other gods and serve them and worship them, I solemnly warn you this day that you shall surely perish.
Deuteronomy 8:11–14; 17–19
This summed up what was beginning to happen in God’s “New Israel” just one generation after the arrival of the first comers. Faith was not something that could be passed on from generation to generation or imparted by baptism or the partaking of Holy Communion. For faith to come to flower, it had to be planted in the soil of gratitude.
Born into comfortable towns instead of having to carve them out of the wilderness, succeeding generations would not know the refining fire of affliction and adversity. They would grow up never knowing what it meant to be persecuted for one’s faith, to be mocked and scorned or even imprisoned merely because they loved God enough to attempt to put Him and His will before all else. The sons of the fathers would never know what it was like to have no land and no work and no say in how they were governed. They would have no indelible memories etched into their minds of ten, twelve, or sixteen weeks of wet misery on the open seas, or of living in tents or holes in the ground, while cold and sickness took the lives of one in two people. They would have no memory of starving times in which they were all on their hands and knees looking for ground nuts or grubbing for mussels to stay alive—and all for the sake of their combined faith in the vision of a Promised Land.
They would, therefore, be disinclined to put all their trust in God. It was by His grace that they and their parents were being blessed. And while they might give lip service to His grace, the truth was that since they had never known anything else, they could hardly share the gratefulness of their parents.
And what of those parents? As their common condition of great need gradually receded and shifted to one of decided affluence, was their commitment to the covenant as absolute as it once had been? Or was having more than enough to eat, more than adequate shelter, and more than enough land beginning to take its toll? How quickly fade the pangs of harder times. Would America’s affluence—the very gifts of a loving Father in response to the obedience of loving children—dim the light of Christ that had seemed so dazzling? As a homestead of three acres became thirty and then three hundred, would greed replace need?
It is also human nature that a generation that has gone through a time of great tribulation will do all in its power to preserve and protect its offspring from the same deprivations. As the Puritan fathers and mothers became wise in the ways of living close to the land, they passed on to their sons and daughters an endless and priceless compendium of frontier knowledge—how to shoe a horse, how to tell when the wheat is ready for harvest, how to know when the herring will run, and the finer points of carding and spinning wool.
And if, before each lesson, they forgot to stress the need to pray first and commit it all to God and to know that His grace was solely responsible for anything turning out well, the golden gift of resourcefulness would transmute itself to the leaden influence of self-reliance: my land, my team of horses, “with the might of my hand. . . .” As the fathers began to think this way, they raised a generation of strong, well-adapted, supremely capable—and self-reliant—Yankees.
When a man can look at his own two hands and know what they are able to do—gripping the handles of a plow or an axe or the stock of a gun—when he knows what they can fashion with an awl or a plane or an adze, when he knows that they can tell by touch how soon a mare will foal or how fertile the soil is. . . . when a man knows these things, he may well think that he does not need God as much. And then it will follow that he does not need other men either.
Thus began one of the strongest and most revered of American traits: independence. The lone pioneer, carving out a homestead with his or her own family—that image occupies a favored place in our cultural heritage. It carries on into the present time, with the glorification of the loner, the easy rider, and the rebel. The media extol that type of hero, the older generation relives youthful illusions through the model, and their children believe in it and leave home to try to be king of the road themselves—often discovering too late that the dream is a nightmare.
It is a nightmare because God did not intend people to live alone. He intended men and women, and especially His children who are called by the name of His Son, to live as a body, to help and support one another. And God does His work of nurturing Christians primarily through other Christians. Indeed, the process of maturation (which the Bible calls sanctification) cannot be accomplished alone.
A number of the earliest Americans forgot this, as did even more of their sons and daughters. They still went to church, but their minds were often back on the spread or the plantation.
Those in church on Sunday were treated to increasingly vehement calls to repentance from the ministers. This type of sermon was preached so often that it would eventually become known as a Jeremiad, in honor of the Old Testament prophet who had thundered at a complacent Israel and from whose writings the Puritan ministers frequently took inspiration. Sunday after Sunday they inveighed from their pulpits across New England, and meetinghouse rafters rang with verses like Jeremiah 8:5–6:
Why then has this people turned away
in perpetual backsliding?
They hold fast to deceit,
they refuse to return.
I have given heed and listened,
but they have not spoken aright;
no man repents of his wickedness,
saying, ‘What have I done?’”
A person can become hardened to such strong words. After all, the preachers had been saying the same thing for years, but the land was still fertile, the climate favorable, the Indians peaceable, and God seemed to help those who helped themselves.
And so their grandsons and granddaughters helped themselves to more land and moved further away to establish their own life on their own land. There was no bothering now to gather a church first, no adherence to the unwritten law that forbade inhabitants to live more than half a mile from the meetinghouse of a settled town, as there once had been. A person was free to go and do as he or she pleased, or as the Book of Judges puts it, “whatever was right in his own eyes.”
Bradford, not surprisingly, had foreseen it before anyone else, and it had broken his heart because he knew what God had intended.
No man now [1632] thought he could live, except he had cattle and a great deal of ground to keep them; all [were] striving to increase their stocks. By which means they were scattered all over the bay quickly, and the town in which they lived compactly till now was left very thin and in a short time almost desolate. And if this had been all, it [would have] been less, though too much. But the church must also be divided, and those that had lived so long together in Christian comfort and fellowship must now part and suffer many divisions. . . . And this, I fear, will be the ruin of New England, at least of the churches of God there, and will provoke the Lord’s displeasure against them.7
A dozen years later, as more Pilgrims were anxious to get out on Cape Cod before all the best land was taken, Bradford would write:
But such as were resolved upon removal . . . went on notwithstanding, neither could the rest hinder them. . . . And thus was this poor church left, like an ancient mother, grown old and forsaken of her children (though not in their affections), yet in regard of their bodily presence and personal helpfulness. Her ancient members being most of them worn away by death, and these of later time like children translated into other families, and she like a widow left only to trust in God. Thus she that had made many rich became herself poor.8
Cotton Mather, writing years later, put it more bitingly: “Religion begat prosperity, and the daughter devoured the mother.”9 And in the same blunt vein, speaking of all New England, Judge Sewall wrote to a friend, “Prosperity is too fulsome a diet for any man . . . unless seasoned with some grains of adversity.”10
Was God wrong, then, to honor the obedience of His beloved children with blessings? Of course not. But as John Danforth preached, “to turn blessings into idols is the way to have them clapped under a blast. If the Lord loves His people, He will deliver the weapons out of their hands, that they are obstinately resolved to fight Him with. . . . Better is it that Israel be saved and prosperity lost, than that prosperity be saved and Israel lost!”
God would clap them under a blast, as events would shortly demonstrate. But with all His heart, He was reluctant to do so, being patient far beyond the patience of human beings. And meanwhile, those people who knew the heart of God tried to alert their neighbors of the dire peril that they were surely bringing upon themselves. For God was now warning them directly—with droughts, with plagues of locusts and caterpillars, with smallpox epidemics, and with all the myriad and seemingly unconnected things that start to go wrong when grace is lifted.
Perhaps the most extraordinary chastisement in this vein was the rain of caterpillars that Winthrop reported in the summer of 1646.
Great harm was done in corn (especially wheat and barley) in this month by a caterpillar, like a black worm about an inch and a half long. They eat up first the blades of the stalk, then they eat up the tassels, whereupon the ear withered. It was believed by divers good observers that they fell in a great thunder shower, for divers yards and other bare places where not one of them was to be seen an hour before, were presently after the shower almost covered with them, besides grass places where they were not so easily discerned. They did the most harm in the southern parts, as in Rhode Island, etc., and in the eastern parts in their Indian corn. In divers places the churches kept a day of humiliation, and presently after, the caterpillars vanished away.11
The astonishing end to this plague is borne out by the Roxbury church records: “Much prayer there was made to God about it, with fasting in divers places, and the Lord heard and on a sudden, took them all away again in all parts of the country, to the wonderment of all men. It was the Lord, for it was done suddenly.”12
For further corroboration, we have the account of the irrepressible Johnson:
Also the Lord was pleased to awaken us (to our sinful neglect of the Sabbath) with an army of caterpillars that, had He not suddenly rebuked them, they had surely destroyed the husbandman’s hope. Where they fell upon trees, they left them like winter-wasting cold: bare and naked. And although they fell on fields very rarely, yet in some places they made as clear a riddance as the harvest-man’s hand, and uncovered the gay green meadow ground. But indeed the Lord did, by some plots, show us what He could have done with the whole, and in many places cast them into the highways, that the cartwheels in their passage were painted green with running over the great swarms of them. In some fields they devoured the leaves of their peas and left the straw with the full crop, so tender was the Lord in His correction.
This [re]minded all these Jacobites of the end [purpose] of their coming over, but chiefly the husbandmen, whose over-eager pursuit of the fruits of the earth made some of them many times run out so far in this wilderness, even out of the sweet sound of the silver trumpets blown by the laborious ministers of Christ, forsaking the assembly of the Lord’s people, to celebrate their Sabbaths in the chimney-corner, horse, kine [cattle], sheep, goats and swine being their most dear companions.13
While Johnson, Winthrop, and some others had sufficient discernment to see at that early stage what was happening, and spoke of it in no uncertain terms, they were as voices crying in the wilderness. Few listened. And so God, in His great love, had to follow the caterpillars with chastenings and warnings progressively more severe. Repeatedly His people would turn back to Him, and pray and call His name and humble themselves, and He would gladly relent and return blessings. But each time they turned away again a little quicker, and each time their repentance was a little more perfunctory—going through the motions, with not everyone bothering to observe the fast days or attend the services. There may indeed have been repentance, but it did not reach deeply enough to affect an amending of lives, for their hearts were turning hard and dry like those of the people in Israel of old. And so the droughts did not lift so quickly, nor did the pests entirely disappear.
The tragedy was poignantly expressed by Bradford, who stood at the end of his life, like old Jacob weeping for his sons gone into Egypt, looking back and measuring what might have been, by what they had actually had in the beginning. In 1655, two years before he died, as he reviewed the history that he had written of the Plymouth plantation, he came to the letter that Pastor John Robinson and Elder William Brewster had written from Leyden to Edwin Sandys in London. The letter brimmed with the confidence that, although other attempts at colonization had failed miserably, their situation was unique and unprecedented because of the proven strength of their covenant relationship. Indeed, they were “knit together as a body in a most strict and sacred bond and a covenant of the Lord, of the violation whereof we make great conscience and by virtue whereof we do hold ourselves straitly tied to all care of each other’s good, and of the whole by every one and so mutually.”14
Reading that, Bradford lost his customary composure, and in a moment of rare and overwhelming anguish, poured out his heart on the back of that page in his manuscript: “O sacred bond, whilst inviolably preserved, how sweet and precious were the fruits that flowed from the same! But when this fidelity decayed, then their ruin approached. O that these ancient members had not died or been dissipated . . . or else that this holy care and constant faithfulness had still lived and remained with those that survived!”
No one, not even Bradford, was denying that the settlement of the wilderness to the west was part of God’s plan. But that was the ministers’ whole point: it should be carried out as part of His plan, in accordance with His perfect will and timing. It should not be done willy-nilly by isolated individualists who, where a new stretch of bottom land was concerned, could not care less about being in God’s will. Heedless of the covenants they had sworn, without bothering to submit their decision to the elders of their churches, let alone obtain the permission of the civil authorities, they simply departed.
One preacher who responded more in anger than in sorrow was John Cotton:
But when men thus depart, God usually followeth them with a bitter curse: either taking their lives away from them, or blasting them with poverty, or exposing them to scandal where they come, or in entertaining them with such restless agitations that they are driven to repent of their former rashness, and many times return to the church from which they had broken away.15
It was an awesome thing in those days for a member of the clergy to invoke such a solemn imprecation, but John Cotton’s prophecy was to prove truer than even he might have expected.
Another symptom of the spiritual malaise was the fact that the younger generation was not getting converted. Members of successive generations were not coming into the same saving relationship with Jesus Christ that their parents and grandparents had known.
The brunt of the responsibility had to rest squarely on the shoulders of the Puritan parents. For they were the ones who first eased up on their commitment to the Covenant Way. The Puritans had been called as a body to be so filled with the Light of Christ in their own lives that they would be “a city set on a hill” and “a light to lighten the Gentiles.” This meant that unless there was daily repentance and a humbling of oneself before God, the inevitable result might be expressed by the unspoken motto, “If you can’t be good, look good.” A shorter description of it is hypocrisy—the sin the Puritans seemed to hate so passionately in others yet came to practice themselves with ever-growing self-deception.
The parents were on the horns of a dilemma: if they continued to be as hard on their children’s sin as they had hitherto been on their own, their hypocrisy would become manifest, and their children would have good cause to want no part of the Covenant Way. On the other hand, if they eased up on their children’s sin, as they were doing on their own, they would be guilty of permissiveness, and their children would have no awareness of their own need for Jesus Christ, let alone be drawn to the Covenant Way.
In truth, there was no need for a dilemma. Had they been willing to hold themselves accountable to the terms of the covenant that they had originally accepted, God would have heard their prayers and healed their land. But once we lay down the cross He has given us to bear, our fallen nature is such that it strongly resists taking it up again.
The Puritans had laid down their cross. They stopped their ears and refused to listen to their ministers, and they ceased to correct and admonish one another and their children, instead choosing greed, privacy, and independence.
The Light of Christ now had grown so faint it was attracting hardly any of the children. And thus the Puritan churches faced a further dilemma: what to do about the children who had not been converted to Christ but who now wanted to have their own children baptized in the church?
In the end, they came up with what was dubbed the “Half-Way Covenant.” This extended partial membership to such parents and enabled them to have their children baptized but did not permit them to take Holy Communion. It was the best solution they could come up with, and it well defined the place they had come to: a halfway covenant for halfway committed Christians.
The preface to the Magnalia sums up the first half century of God’s “New Israel”:
Now one generation passeth away, and another cometh . . . and these have had the managing of the public affairs for many years, but are apparently passing away, as their fathers before them. There is also a third generation, who are grown up and begin to stand thick upon the stage of action. . . . Much more may we, the children of such fathers, lament our gradual degeneracy from that life and power of such fathers that was in them, and the many provoking evils that are amongst us. (For these evils) have moved our God severely to witness against us, more than in our first times, by His lesser judgments going before, and His greater judgments following after.16
Their troubles mounted to the point that in 1670 the government of Massachusetts actually conducted a special investigation to determine why God was so afflicting the people with sickness, poor crops, and shipping losses. But nothing came of it. The settlers followed their accustomed ways, and their hearts grew ever more hardened to the voices of their clergy, who were now warning that the blast John Danforth had predicted was imminent.
Actually, the government officials could have saved the time and cost of the investigation if they had read with open hearts the poem written by Michael Wigglesworth that had already become a favorite in Puritan classrooms. Aptly entitled “God’s Controversy with New England,” three of its thirty-one verses read as follows:
Our healthful days are at an end
and sicknesses come on
From year to year, because our hearts
away from God are gone.
New England, where for many years
you scarcely heard a cough.
And where physicians had no work,
now finds them work enough.
Our fruitful seasons have been turned
of late to barrenness,
Sometimes through great and parching drought,
sometimes through rain’s excess.
Yea now the pastures and corn fields
for want of rain do languish;
The cattle mourn and hearts of men
are filled with fear and anguish.
The clouds are often gathered
as if we should have rain;
But for our great unworthiness
are scattered again.
We pray and fast, and make fair shows,
as if we meant to turn;
But whilst we turn not, God goes on
our fields and fruits to burn.17