INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTIONPURITANISM may perhaps best be described as that point of view, that philosophy of life, that code of values, which was carried to New England by the first settlers in the early seventeenth century. Beginning thus, it has become one of the continuous factors in American life and American thought. Any inventory of the elements that have gone into the making of the “American mind” would have to commence with Puritanism. It is, indeed, only one among many: if we should attempt to enumerate these traditions, we should certainly have to mention such philosophies, such “isms,” as the rational liberalism of Jeffersonian democracy, the Hamiltonian conception of conservatism and government, the Southern theory of racial aristocracy, the Transcendentalism of nineteenth-century New England, and what is generally spoken of as frontier individualism. Among these factors Puritanism has been perhaps the most conspicuous, the most sustained, and the most fecund. Its role in American thought has been almost the dominant one, for the descendants of Puritans have carried at least some habits of the Puritan mind into a variety of pursuits, have spread across the country, and in many fields of activity have played a leading part. The force of Puritanism, furthermore, has been accentuated because it was the first of these traditions to be fully articulated, and because it has inspired certain traits which have persisted long after the vanishing of the original creed. Without some understanding of Puritanism, it may safely be said, there is no understanding of America.
Yet important as Puritanism has undoubtedly been in shaping the nation, it is more easily described than defined. It figures frequently in controversy of the last decade, very seldom twice with exactly the same connotation. Particularly of recent years has it become a hazardous feat to run down its meaning. In the mood of revolt against the ideals of previous generations which has swept over our period, Puritanism has become a shining target for many sorts of marksmen. Confusion becomes worse confounded if we attempt to correlate modern usages with anything that can be proved pertinent to the original Puritans themselves. To seek no further, it was the habit of proponents for the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment during the 1920’s to dub Prohibitionists “Puritans,” and cartoonists made the nation familiar with an image of the Puritan: a gaunt, lank-haired killjoy, wearing a black steeple hat and compounding for sins he was inclined to by damning those to which he had no mind. Yet any acquaintance with the Puritans of the seventeenth century will reveal at once, not only that they did not wear such hats, but also that they attired themselves in all the hues of the rainbow, and furthermore that in their daily life they imbibed what seem to us prodigious quantities of alcoholic beverages, with never the slightest inkling that they were doing anything sinful. True, they opposed drinking to excess, and ministers preached lengthy sermons condemning intoxication, but at such pious ceremonies as the ordination of new ministers the bill for rum, wine, and beer consumed by the congregation was often staggering. Increase Mather himself—who in popular imagination is apt to figure along with his son Cotton as the arch-embodiment of the Puritan—said in one of his sermons:
Drink is in it self a good creature of God, and to be received with thankfulness, but the abuse of drink is from Satan; the wine is from God, but the Drunkard is from the Devil.1
Or again, the Puritan has acquired the reputation of having been blind to all aesthetic enjoyment and starved of beauty; yet the architecture of the Puritan age grows in the esteem of critics and the household objects of Puritan manufacture, pewter and furniture, achieve prohibitive prices by their appeal to discriminating collectors. Examples of such discrepancies between the modern usage of the word and the historical fact could be multiplied indefinitely.2 It is not the purpose of this volume to engage in controversy, nor does it intend particularly to defend the Puritan against the bewildering variety of critics who on every side today find him an object of scorn or pity. In his life he neither asked nor gave mercy to his foes; he demanded only that conflicts be joined on real and explicit issues. By examining his own words it may become possible to establish, for better or for worse, the meaning of Puritanism as the Puritan himself believed and practiced it.
Just as soon as we endeavor to free ourselves from prevailing conceptions or misconceptions, and to ascertain the historical facts about seventeenth-century New Englanders, we become aware that we face still another difficulty: not only must we extricate ourselves from interpretations that have been read into Puritanism by the twentieth century, but still more from those that have been attached to it by the eighteenth and nineteenth. The Puritan philosophy, brought to New England highly elaborated and codified, remained a fairly rigid orthodoxy during the seventeenth century. In the next age, however, it proved to be anything but static; by the middle of the eighteenth century there had proceeded from it two distinct schools of thought, almost unalterably opposed to each other. Certain elements were carried into the creeds and practices of the evangelical religious revivals, but others were perpetuated by the rationalists and the forerunners of Unitarianism. Consequently our conception of Puritanism is all too apt to be colored by subsequent happenings; we read ideas into the seventeenth century which belong to the eighteenth, and the real nature of Puritanism can hardly be discovered at all, because Puritanism itself became two distinct and contending things to two sorts of men. The most prevalent error arising from this fact has been the identification of Puritanism with evangelicalism in many accounts, though in histories written by Unitarian scholars the original doctrine has been almost as much distorted in the opposite direction.
Among the evangelicals the original doctrines were transformed or twisted into the new versions of Protestantism that spawned in the Great Awakening of the 1740’s, in the succeeding revivals along the frontier and through the back country, in the centrifugal speculations of enraptured prophets and rabid sects in the nineteenth century. All these movements retained something of the theology or revived something of the intensity of spirit, but at the same time they threw aside so much of authentic Puritanism that there can be no doubt the founding fathers would vigorously have repudiated such progeny. They would have had no use, for instance, for the camp meeting and the revivalist orgy; “hitting the sawdust trail” would have been an action exceedingly distasteful to the most ardent among them. What we know as “fundamentalism” would have been completely antipathetic to them, for they never for one moment dreamed that the truth of scripture was to be maintained in spite of or against the evidences of reason, science, and learning. The sects that have arisen out of Puritanism have most strikingly betrayed their rebellion against the true spirit of their source by their attack upon the ideal of a learned ministry; Puritans considered religion a very complex, subtle, and highly intellectual-ized affair, and they trained their experts in theology with all the care we would lavish upon preparing men to be engineers or chemists. For the same reasons, Puritans would object strenuously to almost all recent attempts to “humanize” religion, to smooth over hard doctrines, to introduce sweetness and light at the cost of hardheaded realism and invincible logic. From their point of view, to bring Christ down to earth in such a fashion as is implied in statements we sometimes encounter—that He was the “first humanitarian” or that He would certainly endorse this or that political party—would seem to them frightful blasphemy. Puritanism was not only a religious creed, it was a philosophy and a metaphysic; it was an organization of man’s whole life, emotional and intellectual, to a degree which has not been sustained by any denomination stemming from it. Yet because such creeds have sprung from Puritanism, the Puritans are frequently praised or blamed for qualities which never belonged to them or for ideas which originated only among their successors and which they themselves would have disowned.
On the other hand, if the line of development from Puritanism tends in one direction to frontier revivalism and evangelicalism, another line leads as directly to a more philosophical, critical, and even skeptical point of view. Unitarianism is as much the child of Puritanism as Methodism. And if the one accretion has colored or distorted our conception of the original doctrine, the other has done so no less. Descendants of the Puritans who revolted against what they considered the tyranny and cruelty of Puritan theology, who substituted taste and reason for dogma and authority and found the emotional fervor of the evangelicals so much sound and fury, have been prone to idealize their ancestors into their own image. A few decades ago it had become very much the mode to praise the Puritans for virtues which they did not possess and which they would not have considered virtues at all. In the pages of liberal historians, and above all in the speeches of Fourth of July orators, the Puritans have been hymned as the pioneers of religious liberty, though nothing was ever farther from their designs; they have been hailed as the forerunners of democracy, though if they were, it was quite beside their intention; they have been invoked in justification for an economic philosophy of free competition and laissez-faire, though they themselves believed in government regulation of business, the fixing of just prices, and the curtailing of individual profits in the interests of the welfare of the whole.3
The moral of these reflections may very well be that it is dangerous to read history backwards, to interpret something that was by what it ultimately became, particularly when it became several things. In order that the texts presented in this volume may be read for their proper meaning, it is necessary that the student divest himself as far as possible of those preconceptions which have been established only in later times, and approach the Puritans in terms of their own background. Only thus can we hope to understand what Puritanism was, or what it became and why. The Puritan had his defects, certainly, and he had his virtues, but the defects of one century may become the virtues of another, and what is considered commendable at one time may be viewed with horror by later generations. It is not easy to restrain one’s own prejudices and to exercise the sort of historical imagination that is required for the understanding of a portion of the past according to its own intentions before we allow ourselves to judge it by our own standards. The Puritans were not a bashful race, they could speak out and did; in their own words they have painted their own portraits, their majestic strength and their dignity, their humanity and solidity, more accurately than any admirer has been able to do; and also they have betrayed the motes and beams in their own eyes more clearly than any enemy has been able to point them out.
Puritanism began as an agitation within the Church of England in the latter half of the sixteenth century. It was a movement for reform of that institution, and at the time no more constituted a distinct sect or denomination than the advocates of an amendment to the Constitution of the United States constitute a separate nation. In the i53o’s the Church of England broke with the Pope of Rome. By the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign it had proceeded a certain distance in this revolt, had become Protestant, had disestablished the monasteries and corrected many abuses. Puritanism was the belief that the reform should be continued, that more abuses remained to be corrected, that practices still survived from the days of Popery which should be renounced, that the Church of England should be restored to the “purity” of the first-century Church as established by Christ Himself. In the 1560’s, when the advocates of purification first acquired the name of Puritans, no one, not even the most radical, knew exactly how far the process was to go or just what the ultimate goal would be; down to the days of Cromwell there was never any agreement on this point, and in the end this failure of unanimity proved the undoing of English Puritanism. Many Puritans desired only that certain ceremonies be abolished or changed. Others wanted ministers to preach more sermons, make up their own prayers on the inspiration of the moment rather than read set forms out of a book. Others went further and proposed a revision of the whole form of ecclesiastical government. But whatever the shade or complexion of their Puritanism, Puritans were those who wanted to continue a movement which was already under way. Their opponents, whom we shall speak of as the Anglicans—though only for the sake of convenience, because there was at that time not the remotest thought on either side of an ultimate separation into distinct churches, and Puritans insisted they were as stoutly loyal to the established institution as any men in England—the Anglicans were those who felt that with the enthronement of Elizabeth and with the “Elizabethan Settlement” of the Church, things had gone far enough. They wanted to call a halt, just where they were, and stabilize at that point.
Thus the issue between the two views, though large enough, still involved only a limited number of questions. On everything except matters upon which the Puritans wanted further reformation, there was essential agreement. The Puritans who settled New England were among the more radical—though by no means the most radical that the movement produced—and even before their migration in 1630 had gone to the lengths of formulating a concrete platform of church organization which they wished to see instituted in England in place of the episcopal system. Joining battle on this front gave a sufficiently extended line and provided a vast number of salients to fight over; the gulf between the belief of these Puritans and the majority in the Church of England grew so wide that at last there was no bridging it at all. But notwithstanding the depth of this divergence, the fact still remains that only certain specific questions were raised. If we take a comprehensive survey of the whole body of Puritan thought and belief as it existed in 1630 or 1640, if we make an exhaustive enumeration of ideas held by New England Puritans, we shall find that the vast majority of them were precisely those of their opponents. In other words, Puritanism was a movement toward certain ends within the culture and state of England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; it centered about a number of concrete problems and advocated a particular program. Outside of that, it was part and parcel of the times, and its culture was simply the culture of England at that moment. It is necessary to belabor the point, because most accounts of Puritanism, emphasizing the controversial tenets, attribute everything that Puritans said or did to the fact that they were Puritans; their attitudes toward all sorts of things are pounced upon and exhibited as peculiarities of their sect, when as a matter of fact they were normal attitudes for the time. Of course, the Puritans acquired their special quality and their essential individuality from their stand on the points actually at issue, and our final conception of Puritanism must give these concerns all due importance. Yet if first of all we wish to take Puritan culture as a whole, we shall find, let us say, that about ninety per cent of the intellectual life, scientific knowledge, morality, manners and customs, notions and prejudices, was that of all Englishmen. The other ten per cent, the relatively small number of ideas upon which there was dispute, made all the difference between the Puritan and his fellow-Englishmen, made for him so much difference that he pulled up stakes in England, which he loved, and migrated to a wilderness rather than submit them to apparent defeat. Nevertheless, when we come to trace developments and influences on subsequent American history and thought, we shall find that the starting point of many ideas and practices is as apt to be found among the ninety per cent as among the ten. The task of defining Puritanism and giving an account of its culture resolves itself, therefore, into isolating first of all the larger features which were not particularly or necessarily Puritan at all, the elements in the life and society which were products of the time and place, of the background of English life and society rather than of the individual belief or peculiar creed of Puritanism.
Many of the major interests and preoccupations of the New England Puritans belong to this list. They were just as patriotic as Englishmen who remained at home. They hated Spain like poison, and France only a little less. In their eyes, as in those of Anglicans, the most important issue in the Western world was the struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism. They were not unique or extreme in thinking that religion was the primary and all-engrossing business of man, or that all human thought and action should tend to the glory of God. John Donne, Dean of St. Paul’s, preached in London, “all knowledge that begins not, and ends not with his glory, is but a giddy, but a vertiginous circle, but an elaborate and exquisite ignorance”; 4 the content, though not the style, of the passage might just as well come from any Puritan preacher. Both the Anglican and the Puritan were at one in conceiving of man as sinful, they both beheld him chained and enslaved by evil until liberated by the redeeming grace of Christ. They both believed that the visible universe was under God’s direct and continuous guidance, and that though effects seemed to be produced by natural causes—what at that time were called “secondary causes”—the actual government of the minutest event, the rise of the sun, the fall of a stone, the beat of the heart, was under the direct and immediate supervision of God. This conception, a fundamental one in the Puritan view of the world, was no more limited to them than their habits of eating and drinking. John Donne said:
The very calamities are from him; the deliverance from those calamities much more. All comes from God’s hand; and from his hand, by way of hand-writing, by way of letter, and instruction to us. And therefore to ascribe things wholly to nature, to fortune, to power, to second causes, this is to mistake the hand, not to know God’s hand; but to acknowledge it to be God’s hand, and not to read it, to say that it is God’s doing, and not to consider, what God intends in it, is as much a slighting of God, as the other.5 A New England parson later in the century would preach in exactly the same vein:
His hand has made and framed the whole Fabrick of Heaven & Earth. He hath hung out the Globe of this World; hung the Earth upon nothing; drawn over the Canopy of the Heavens; laid the foundation of the earth in its place; Created that Fountain and Center of Light, Heat, & Influence in this lower World, the Sun. . . . The whole Administration of Providence in the Upholding and Government of all created Beings, in a way of highest Wisdom and exact Order, it is all His work. . . . Those notable changes in the World in the promoting or suppressing, exalting or bringing down of Kingdoms, Nations, Provinces or Persons, they are all wrought by Him. . . . The Yearly seasons, also Seed-time and Harvest, Summer and Winter, binding up and covering the earth with Frost, Ice and Snow, and the releasing and renewing of the face of the Earth again, it’s His work.6
The great Anglican preacher said, “Even in natural things all the reason of all that is done is the power and the will of him who infused that virtue into that creature,” 7 and the president of Harvard College preached a sermon on God’s governing through the natural causes that might well have taken Donne’s utterance for its text (cf. pp. 350–367).
In its major aspects the religious creed of Puritanism was neither peculiar to the Puritans nor different from that of the Anglicans. Both were essentially Protestant; both asserted that men were saved by their faith, not by their deeds. The two sides could agree on the general statement that Christians are bound to believe nothing but what the Gospel teaches, that all traditions of men “contrary to the Word of God” are to be renounced and abhorred. They both believed that the marks of a true church were profession of the creed, use of Christ’s sacraments, preaching of the word—Anglican sermons being as long and often as dull as the Puritan—and the union of men in profession and practice under regularly constituted pastors. The Puritans always said that they could subscribe the doctrinal articles of the Church of England; even at the height of the controversy, even after they had left England rather than put up with what they considered its abominations, they always took care to insist that the Church of England was a “true” church, not Anti-Christ as was the Church of Rome, that it contained many saints, and that men might find salvation within it. Throughout the seventeenth century they read Anglican authors, quoted them in their sermons, and even reprinted some of them in Boston.
The vast substratum of agreement which actually underlay the disagreement between Puritans and Anglicans is explained by the fact that they were both the heirs of the Middle Ages. They still believed that all knowledge was one, that life was unified, that science, economics, political theory, aesthetic standards, rhetoric and art, all were organized in a hierarchical scale of values that tended upward to the end-all and be-all of creation, the glory of God. They both insisted that all human activity be regulated by that purpose. Consequently, even while fighting bitterly against each other, the Puritans and Anglicans stood shoulder to shoulder against what they called “enthusiasm.” The leaders of the Puritan movement were trained at the universities, they were men of learning and scholars; no less than the Anglicans did they demand that religion be interpreted by study and logical exposition; they were both resolute against all pretences to immediate revelation, against all ignorant men who claimed to receive personal instructions from God. They agreed on the essential Christian contention that though God may govern the world, He is not the world itself, and that though He instills His grace into men, He does not deify them or unite them to Himself in one personality. He converses with men only through His revealed word, the Bible. His will is to be studied in the operation of His providence as exhibited in the workings of the natural world, but He delivers no new commands or special revelations to the inward consciousness of men. The larger unanimity of the Puritans and the Anglicans reveals itself whenever either of them was called upon to confront enthusiasm. The selections given in this volume include Governor John Winthrop’s account of the so-called Antinomian affair, the crisis produced in the little colony by the teachings of Mistress Anne Hutchinson in 1636 and 1637 (pp. 129–136). Beneath the theological jargon in which the opinions of this lady appear we can see the substance of her contention, which was that she was in direct communication with the Godhead, and that she therefore was prepared to follow the promptings of the voice within against all the precepts of the Bible, the churches, reason, or the government of Massachusetts Bay. Winthrop relates how the magistrates and the ministers defended the community against this perversion of the doctrine of regeneration, but the tenor of his condemnation would have been duplicated practically word for word had Anne Hutchinson broached her theories in an Anglican community. The Anglicans fell in completely with the Puritans when both of them were confronted in the 1650’s by the Quakers. All New England leaders saw in the Quaker doctrine of an inner light, accessible to all men and giving a perfect communication from God to their inmost spirits, just another form of Anne Hutchinson’s blasphemy. John Norton declared that the “light of nature” itself taught us that “madmen acting according to their frantick passions are to be restrained with chaines, when they can not be restrained otherwise.” 8 About the same time George Hickes, Dean of Worcester, was advocating that Quakers be treated likewise in England, and he ended a sermon upon them by calling them “Imposters, or enthusiasts, and Blasphemers of the Holy Ghoast.” 9 Enthusiasts, whether Antinomian or Quaker, were proposing doctrines that threatened the unity of life by subduing the reason and the intellect to the passions and the emotions. Whatever their differences, Puritans and Anglicans were struggling to maintain a complete harmony of reason and faith, science and religion, earthly dominion and the government of God. When we immerse ourselves in the actual struggle, the difference between the Puritan and the Anglican may seem to us immense; but when we take the vantage point of subsequent history, and survey religious thought as a whole over the last three centuries, the two come very close together on essentials. Against all forms of chaotic emotionalism, against all over-simplifications of theology, learning, philosophy, and science, against all materialism, positivism or mechanism, both were endeavoring to uphold a symmetrical union of heart and head without impairment of either. By the beginning or middle of the next century their successors, both in England and America, found themselves no longer capable of sustaining this unity, and it has yet to be re-achieved today, if achieved again it ever can be. The greatness of the Puritans is not so much that they conquered a wilderness, or that they carried a religion into it, but that they carried a religion which, narrow and starved though it may have been in some respects, deficient in sensuous richness or brilliant color, was nevertheless indissolubly bound up with an ideal of culture and learning. In contrast to all other pioneers, they made no concessions to the forest, but in the midst of frontier conditions, in the very throes of clearing the land and erecting shelters, they maintained schools and a college, a standard of scholarship and of competent writing, a class of men devoted entirely to the life of the mind and of the soul.
Because the conflict between the Puritans and the Churchmen was as much an intellectual and scholarly issue as it was emotional, it was in great part a debate among pundits. This is not to say that passions were not involved; certainly men took sides because of prejudice, interest, irrational conviction, or for any of the motives that may incite the human race to conflict. The disagreement finally was carried from the field of learned controversy to the field of battle. There can be no doubt that many of the people in England, or even in New England, became rabid partisans and yet never acquired the erudition necessary to understand the intricate and subtle arguments of their leaders. A great number, perhaps even a majority, in both camps were probably not intelligent or learned enough to see clearly the reasons for the cause they supported. Thomas Hooker, the clerical leader of the settlement of Connecticut—and therefore the dominant figure in that community—said frankly, “I can speak it by experience, that the meaner ordinary sort of people, it is incredible and unconceiveable, what Ignorance is among them.” 10 This being the case, we who are today being made all too familiar with the horrors of the art of “popularization,” can only marvel at how little allowance the divines made for the ignorance or the simplicity of the average man in the addresses and sermons they delivered to him. It is true, several Anglicans began to feel, after the dispute became acrimonious, that the wind of doctrine ought perhaps to be tempered to the uneducated lamb; the authorities ordered parish priests not to discuss the more difficult points of speculation before all the people.11 The Puritans would not show their people any such mercy. They endeavored to assist the feebler understandings of their congregations by using the simplest and most comprehensible style, by employing a schematic organization for their sermons, with heads and subheads so clearly marked that earnest listeners could take notes and study the points during the week, and by eschewing Latin quotations or glittering phrases that might distract attention from content to form. But these were the only sort of crutches that Puritan ministers would allow to the rank and file for helping them over the hard parts of divinity. Of course many texts from scripture permitted sermons that were relatively simple and ethical, but others raised perplexing enigmas, discussion of which the Medieval Church had restricted to the schools; Puritans took each kind as it came and did not flinch from struggling in the pulpit with the difficult ones any more than from expounding the more obvious. Thomas Hooker told his people that they were responsible for acquiring a certain amount of knowledge if they expected to be saved:
Its with an ignorant sinner in the midst of all means as with a sick man remaining in an Apothecaries shop, ful of choycest Medicines in the darkest night: though there be the choycest of all receipts at hand, and he may take what he needs, yet because he cannot see what he takes, and how to use them, he may kill himself or encrease his distempers, but never cure any disease.12
The wonder is that by and large the populace did yield their judgments to those who were supposed to know, respected learning and supported it, sat patiently during two- and three-hour sermons while ministers expounded the knottiest and most recondite of metaphysical texts. The testimony of visitors, travelers, and memoirs agrees that during the Puritan age in New England the common man, the farmer and merchant, was amazingly versed in systematic divinity. A gathering of yeomen and “hired help” around the kitchen fire of an evening produced long and unbelievably technical discussions of predestination, infant damnation, and the distinctions between faith and works. In the first half of the seventeenth century the people had not yet questioned the conception of religion as a difficult art in which the authority of the skilled dialectician should prevail over the inclinations of the merely devout. This ideal of subjection to qualified leadership was social as well as intellectual. Very few Englishmen had yet broached the notion that a lackey was as good as a lord, or that any Tom, Dick, or Harry, simply because he was a good, honest man, could understand the Sermon on the Mount as well as a Master of Arts from Oxford, Cambridge, or Harvard. Professor Morison has shown that the life of the college in New England was saved by the sacrifice of the yeomen farmers, who contributed their pecks of wheat, wrung from a stony soil, taken from their none too opulent stores, to support teaching fellows and to assist poor scholars at Harvard College, in order that they and their children might still sit under a literate ministry “when our present Ministers shall lie in the Dust.” 13
When we say that the majority of the people in the early seventeenth century still acceded to the dictation of the learned in religion and the superior in society, we must also remark that the Puritan leaders were in grave danger of arousing a revolt against themselves by their very own doctrines. Puritans were attacking the sacerdotal and institutional bias which had survived in the Church of England; they were maintaining a theology that brought every man to a direct experience of the spirit and removed intermediaries between himself and the deity. Yet the authority of the infallible church and the power of the bishops had for centuries served to keep the people docile. Consequently when the Puritan leaders endeavored to remove the bishops and to deny that the Church should stand between God and man, they ran the hazard of starting something among the people that might get out of hand. Just as the Puritan doctrine that men were saved by the infusion of God’s grace could lead to the Antinomianism of Mrs. Hutchinson, and often did warrant the simple in concluding that if they had God’s grace in them they needed to pay no heed to what a minister told them, so the Puritan contention that regenerate men were illuminated with divine truth might lead to the belief that true religion did not need the assistance of learning, books, arguments, logical demonstrations, or classical languages. There was always a possibility that Puritanism would raise up a fanatical anti-intellectualism, and against such a threat the Puritan ministers constantly braced themselves. It was no accident that the followers of Mrs. Hutchinson, who believed that men could receive all the necessary instructions from within, also attacked learning and education, and came near to wrecking not only the colony but the college as well.14 Edward Johnson, stout militia captain of the town of Woburn, and no intellectual, set forth the anguish of soul through which he passed while the citizens of Boston were under the spell of “Jezebel” (p. 158); he was particularly shocked to hear one of the heretics say flatly, “I had rather hear such a one that speakes from the meere motion of the spirit, without any study at all, then any of your learned Scollers, although they may be fuller of Scripture.” 15 Puritanism was forever giving rise to such rebellions against its own ideal of learned religion; the experience of Massachusetts with the Hutchinsonians in the 1630’s was only a premonition of what England was to encounter in the 1650’s, when the Civil Wars generated not one form of Antinomianism but a thousand. Anabaptists and Fifth Monarchy men then began to vaunt that an ignorant man inspired with the spirit made a better preacher than one who had attended the “cob-webbed Universities,” and in the disturbed state of society found an opportunity to spread their dangerous opinions among the people. The true Puritans were forced to resort to repressive measures to save Puritanism itself. Oliver Cromwell was the most liberal of seventeenth-century Puritan leaders; it is his eternal glory that he did not confront with the sword all the zealots who ran riot over the land, but strove to work out a scheme of toleration for as many of them as would behave with civil decency. But even Cromwell had to draw the line somewhere, and he drew it when the upsurge of popular religious frenzies turned against the universities and the learned ministry. His assumption of the dictatorship in 1653, unlike later seizures of arbitrary power, was prompted in great part by his determination to protect a sober and instructed clergy and the universities from an assault by the lunatic fringe in his own party.16 Cromwell’s New England brethren thoroughly sympathized with his efforts, but they thought he had invited the trouble by allowing ignorant men to preach at all; they looked upon his policy of toleration as the sole stain upon the otherwise flawless record of the pre-eminent warrior saint of the age. They were determined to run no such risks in their communities. They would have the rabble entirely submissive to the intellectual aristocracy, even though many or all of the mass were supposedly saints of God.
Both Cromwell and the New England leaders were face to face with a problem as old as the history of the Christian Church. Throughout the Middle Ages there had been such stirrings among the people as those to which Mrs. Hutchinson or the Fifth Monarchy Men gave voice. The great scholastic synthesis always remained incomprehensible to the vulgar, who demanded to be fed again and again with the sort of religious sustenance they craved. The Reformation drew upon these suppressed desires. Common men turned Protestant primarily because Protestantism offered them a religion which more effectively satisfied their spiritual hunger. Yet in Europe theologians and metaphysicians retained the leadership and kept Protestantism from becoming merely an emotional outburst. They supplied it with a theology which, though not so sophisticated as scholastic dogma, was still equipped with a logic and organon of rational demonstration. Though Protestantism can be viewed as a “liberation” of the common man, it was far from being a complete emancipation of the individual. It freed him from many intellectual restraints that had been imposed by the Church, but it did not give him full liberty to think anything he pleased; socially it freed him from many exactions, but it did not permit him to abandon his traditional subjection to his social and ecclesiastical superiors. The original settlers of New England carried this Protestantism intact from Europe to America. Except for the small band that was driven into exile with Anne Hutchinson, and one or two other groups of visionaries who also were hustled across the borders into Rhode Island, the rank and file did follow their leaders, meekly and reverently. Captain Johnson probably represents the average layman’s loyalty to the clergy. The New England “theocracy” was simply a Protestant version of the European social ideal, and except for its Protestantism was thoroughly medieval in character.
It was only as the seventeenth century came to a close that the imported structure began to show the strain. In Europe social tradition had conspired with the ministers to check enthusiasts in religion and “levellers” in society; in England the authorities, whether Anglican or Puritan, royal or Cromwellian, were able to suppress the assault upon the scholarly and aristocratic ideal. In America the character of the people underwent a change; they moved further into the frontier, they became more absorbed in business and profits than in religion and salvation, their memories of English social stratification grew dim. A preacher before the General Court in 1705 bewailed the effects of the frontier in terms that have been echoed by “Easterners” for two hundred years and more; men were no longer living together, he said, in compact communities, under the tutelage of educated clergymen and under the discipline of an ordered society, but were taking themselves into remote corners “for worldly conveniences.” “By that means [they] have seemed to bid defiance, not only to Religion, but to Civility it self: and such places thereby have become Nurseries of Ignorance, Prophaneness and Atheism.” 17 In America the frontier conspired with the popular disposition to lessen the prestige of the cultured classes and to enhance the social power of those who wanted their religion in a more simple, downright and “democratic” form, who cared nothing for the refinements and subtleties of historic theology. Not until the decade of the Great Awakening did the popular tendency receive distinct articulation through leaders who openly renounced the older conception, but for half a century or more before 1740 its obstinate persistence can be traced in the condemnations of the ministers.
The Puritan leaders could withstand this rising tide of democracy only by such support as the government would give them—which became increasingly less after the new charter of 1692 took away from the saints all power to select their own governors and divorced the state and church—or else by the sheer force of their personalities. As early as the 1660’s and 70’s we can see them beginning to shift their attentions from mere exposition of the creed to greater and greater insistence upon committing power only to men of wisdom and knowledge. William Hubbard in an election sermon of 1676 told the citizens that piety alone in a ruler was not enough; magistrates should be such “as by the benefit of natural parts Experience, Education, and study, have advantage above others to be acquainted with the affairs of the world abroad, as well as with the Laws and Customes of their own people at home.” 18 By the beginning of the eighteenth century the task of buttressing the classified society, maintaining the rule of the well-trained and the culturally superior both in church and society seems to have become the predominant concern of the clergy. Sermon after sermon reveals that in their eyes the cause of learning and the cause of a hierarchical, differentiated social order were one and the same. For example, Ebenezer Pemberton, who was a tutor at Harvard College and then colleague minister with Samuel Willard at the Old South Church, delivered a funeral sermon upon the death of the Honourable John Walley, member of the council and judge, in 1711. Judge Walley, said Pemberton, rendered his country great service; there are various ways in which the country can be served. One of them is by the promotion of “good literature”:
This is necessary for the true prosperity and happiness of a people. Greece and Rome are more renowned for the flourishing state of learning in them, than for their arms. This has for ever been in highest esteem among civilized nations. . . . The more of good literature civil rulers are furnished with, the more capable they are to discharge their trust to the honour and safety of their people. And learning is no less necessary, as an ordinary medium to secure the glory of Christ’s visible kingdom. Without a good measure of this the truth can’t be explained, asserted and demonstrated; nor errors detected and the heretick baffled . . . When ignorance and barbarity invade a generation, their glory is laid in the dust; and the ruin of all that is great and good among them will soon follow.19
A second way in which the welfare of the nation is served is by each and every person’s keeping to his proper station:
This intends that we keep within the line and place, that providence has set us . . . We must not without God’s call quit our post, thrust our selves into anothers province, with a conceit that there we may best serve, and promote the good of the world. But herein observe the will of God by keeping to the service that belongs to our station, which providence has made our peculiar business. Thus every man is to serve his generation by moving in his own orb; and discharging those offices that belong to that order that the government of heaven has assigned him to. 20
Leadership by the learned and dutiful subordination of the unlearned—as long as the original religious creed retained its hold upon the people these exhortations were heeded; in the eighteenth century, as it ceased to arouse their loyalties, they went seeking after gods that were utterly strange to Puritanism. They demanded fervent rather than learned ministers and asserted the equality of all men.
Thus Puritanism appears, from the social and economic point of view, to have been a philosophy of social stratification, placing the command in the hands of the properly qualified and demanding implicit obedience from the uneducated; from the religious point of view it was the dogged assertion of the unity of intellect and spirit in the face of a rising tide of democratic sentiment suspicious of the intellect and intoxicated with the spirit. It was autocratic, hierarchical, and authoritarian. It held that in the intellectual realm holy writ was to be expounded by right reason, that in the social realm the expounders of holy writ were to be the mentors of farmers and merchants. Yet in so far as Puritanism involved such ideals it was simply adapting to its own purposes the ideals of the age. Catholics in Spain and in Spanish America pursued the same objectives, and the Puritans were no more rigorous in their application of an autocratic standard than King Charles himself endeavored to be—and would have been had he not been balked in the attempt.
There is another body of assumptions, besides those underlying the Puritan philosophy of religion and of religious learning, which Puritans shared in common with Anglicans and even with Catholics. They were the heirs not only of medieval Christianity and of the Reformation, but also of the Renaissance—they were humanists. They were students of the recently revived and rediscovered classical literature, and they shared in the reinvigoration of mind and spirit which that literature inspired in Western Europe. Their theology undoubtedly stood in the way of unrestricted appreciation, yet in the amount of Greek and Roman writing they could enjoy and utilize, they fell very little short of the most liberal of Anglican scholars. That a Puritan writer could be no less devoted to classical literature than his opponent, in spite of his theology, is demonstrated most conspicuously by John Milton. The miraculous fusion of Puritanism and Hellenism which he achieved is unique only in his grandeur of expression; the same combination of religious dogma with the classics, of Protestant theology and ancient morality, was the aim of the curriculum at Harvard College, and it was sustained, though on a rudimentary or pedestrian level, in the sermons of Yankee parsons throughout the seventeenth century.
The humanist learning had already become a regular part of the studies in the English Universities when the men who were to be ministers and magistrates in New England matriculated there. Those institutions were no longer training students solely for the ministry; they were also training men to be scholars in the classics, or even to be simply “gentlemen.” 21 The same trinity of intentions was continued at Harvard. Tutor William Brattle declared in a college oration in 1689, “Liberali liberaliter instituendi”—that is, “Gentlemen must be educated like gentlemen.” 22 Just how extensive a role the classics played in Puritan education can best be seen by a reading of the chapters on the subject in Professor Morison’s history of Harvard College.23 It is enough to say here that study of the arts and sciences and of good literature was among the purposes of education in New England as well as the learning of theology. The General Court itself went on record, in the name of all the citizens and presumably without dissent from the other inhabitants of Massachusetts, that though learning, “namely, skill in the tongues & liberali artes,” might not be absolutely necessary “for the beinge of a common wealth & churches, yet we conceive that the judgment of the godly wise, it is beyond all question, not only laudable, but necessary for the beinge of the same.” 24 In a sermon of 1677, Increase Mather told the legislature that they must take care of the schools and the college, “that so there might be able instruments raised up for the propagating of Truth in succeeding Generations. And some have well & truly observed, that the Interest of Religion and good Literature, hath risen and fallen together.” 25 Mather’s conception of what constitutes “good literature” might not coincide with what we mean by the phrase, but it would include a knowledge of the poetry, drama, and history of the ancient world, and an ability to write sentences which would not appear utterly contemptible when compared with those of classical authors.
Thanks to the labors of Professor Morison, we may now rest assured that the Puritans of New England were the disciples of Erasmus and Colet. The question with which we are concerned in the present context is what part of the Puritan mentality must be put down to their participation in the humanist tradition. How much of what Puritans said and did, how much of their belief and their judgment, is to be attributed not so much to their Puritanism as to their education? Latin and Greek contributed more to the Puritan mind than a method of pedagogy or an exercise in grammar. When these tongues were the foundation of the training for an A.B., and when there existed no alternative S.B. by which, as Dean Briggs remarked, the college could graduate a man with a sealed certification that he was totally ignorant of them, then it was inevitable that Puritan thought would appropriate some ideas from Hesiod or Horace, some wisdom from Plato, or even some wit from Plautus.
From the evidence afforded by Puritan sermons and polemics it seems clear that the tendency of the humanist culture was to accentuate the element of rationalism, to enlarge the sphere of competence of the natural reason even when not inspired with God’s special grace. Neither the Puritans nor the most anti-Puritanical bishops in the early seventeenth century would have entertained for a moment the idea that merely natural training, civilized morality, and gentlemanly culture could get a man to heaven; both would have admitted that many souls can be and are saved without such embellishments. But they both would have agreed that, by and large, men who are called by God will heed the summons all the better if they know Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. John Cotton said that if knowledge is but an empty speculation or a mere collection of facts it will bring forth no “heat”; but though “knowledge is no knowledge without zeal,” on the other hand it is equally true that “zeale is but a wilde-fire without knowledge.” 26 The great heathen moralists, particularly the Stoics, above all Seneca and Plutarch,27 inculcated a system of ethics that was in effect so close to the precepts of Puritanism that the divines could never find it in their hearts to envisage these noble heathens languishing in the same Hell to which they consigned the minions of Anti-Christ and the deluded followers of Mistress Hutchinson, any more than Dante could confine Vergil to the Inferno. Increase Mather reveals significantly the alacrity with which a Puritan theologian made room on his shelves for the books of pagan Greece and Rome:
Some among the Heathen have been notable Moralists, such as Cato, Seneca, Aristides, &c. And although we must not say that their Morality saved them, yet it was not altogether unprofitable to them, for God did therefore reward them with many outward blessings, and they did thereby escape many temporal Judgements, which otherwise would have befallen them: And they had more quietness in their own spirits, then otherwise would have been, being freed from those stinging Accusations of Conscience, which more profane sinners, that usually have an Hell in their Consciences, are daily tormented with. Moreover, their punishment in another world will not be so great, as of those that have been of a vicious Conversation.28
Hence in the sermons of Puritan ministers, side by side with passages of scripture, appear examples of the wisdom of Greece, episodes from the lives of Plutarch, tart sayings from Aristophanes, hard realism from Thucydides. Plato serves as an authority for the principles of society, subordinated of course to the Word of God, but agreeing with it nevertheless; and when a minister, painting the splendors of future bliss, wants to make clear to his auditors that the sorrows and tribulations of this life will then seem sweet in retrospect, he can find no better words to project into the Christian heaven than those of the Roman Vergil, “Haec olim meminisse Juvabit.” 29 Some of the clergy carried their veneration of classical precedents to lengths that seemed dangerous to less venturesome Puritans. When Nathaniel Ward was invited by the deputies to deliver the election sermon in 1641, he grounded “his propositions much upon the old Roman and Grecian governments” (cf. p. 205). John Winthrop, the governor, thought this a little unnecessary, and protested that Christians ought to stick to the Bible and not go hunting for lessons in “those heathen commonwealths.” The ministers apparently hastened to reassure him that such a mode of reasoning was perfectly orthodox; the Reverend Thomas Shepard, minister at Cambridge, wrote to him, “Your apprehensions agaynst reading & learning heathen authors, I perswade myselfe were suddenly suggested,” and told him that if he would impart his objections to Brother Dunster, the president of Harvard College, they would readily be answered.30 The remarkable fact concerning the mental life of these Puritans is that more of them did not share Winthrop’s apprehensions. Every appeal to classical models, every invocation of wisdom which men had achieved without the assistance of grace, was in effect a confession that they did not believe man was hopelessly corrupt or too abysmally sinful. Every such passage was by implication an acknowledgment that natural reason had its place in the scheme of things, and a respectable place, that natural man, employing reason, was not quite a contemptible worm. Elnathan Chauncy, when a student at Harvard in the late 1650’s, copied into his commonplace book a passage from van Helmont’s Ternary of Paradoxes which ran thus:
Truth and the rational soule are twins. For so uncessant a magnetisme or congenerous love doth the soule hold unto the truth, that she can Know no reall or permanent satisfaction, in the fruition of any other object.31
Truly, if the Puritans had been as they are often pictured, merely dogmatic Calvinists, holding a brutal and ironclad theory of innate depravity and original sin, the young student would have been playing with fire even to have let his eyes rest upon such a passage. But his jotting down this aphorism was nothing startling in the life of a Puritan. That man was, however much deformed by sin and passion, essentially a rational and responsible being was just as much an axiom of their thought as that he needed to wait upon God for the special grace that would bring him to salvation. How they reconciled the two beliefs is a complicated story, but for the moment it is necessary to make clear that the conception of man as competent to judge on the basis of his innate reason was perfectly acceptable in Puritan thought, and that it was confirmed and sustained by the influence of classical literature. 32 John Cotton said that reason flows from the soul of man and is an inherent part of it; we learn much by experience and education, he said, “yet there is also an essentiall wisdome in us, namely, our Reason which is natural.” 33 William Hubbard spoke to the General Court of “Reason, our most faithful and best Councellour.” 34 The first body of College Laws at Harvard required the student to be able not merely to read Scripture, but “to Resolve them Logically.” 35 It was not enough for the Puritan minister to read his text and apply it as the mood or the spirit dictated; interpretation of scripture was an abstruse art, to be learned with diligence, to be employed with caution, and to be regulated by the immutable laws of right reason and infallible logic. There is a vast difference between this point of view and the evangelical Protestantism which so largely replaced it in subsequent centuries. To define that difference—the actual antagonism of the two—is not easy, because the evangelicals arrayed their thought in theological terms which to our undiscriminating eyes seem almost identical; yet the difference can be dramatized at once if we compare the use made of scripture in the ordinary revival sermon with the manner in which the Puritan minister declared that scripture was to be interpreted:
Sapience or Wisdome properly belongs to Syllogistical Judgement, and is a virtue of the Understanding, whereby a man discerns the dependance of things, and how one follows upon another. [It] imports in it a laying of things together in a Syllogistical way. Hence when men reason amiss, and conclude that which is not virtually contained in the Premises, or make wrong inferences, they are said to Paralogize themselves. . . . Wisdome lyes in the Rational Application of general Rules of Scripture to our selves and our own conditions, and in the induction of particulars, and due Reasoning from it.36
The “enthusiast” who rushes from his helter-skelter reading into some crack-brained interpretation, or the exuberant fanatic who, without the training of the scholar, the critic, the logician, and the linguist, jumps to the conclusion that he as well as any man can read and understand the word of God—these men “paralogize themselves.” There was hardly a greater sin in the Puritan decalogue.
The remark of John Cotton which we have just quoted, that an essential wisdom dwells within us which is natural reason, if read hastily may seem a dull platitude, but Cotton’s putting it in precisely these terms made it a very vital sentence. For to define human reason in this manner was to take sides in a great intellectual revolution that had been fought all over Europe during the previous century. The combined force of the Protestant revolt against the Papacy and of the humanistic protest against the barbarities of the Dark Ages had inspired a widespread rejection of the authority and method of scholasticism. Protestant and humanist altered their allegiance to that magnificent structurewhich the medieval schoolmen had erected as a monument to the marriage of reason and faith, the Protestant because the system was identified in his mind with Catholicism, the humanist because it had become decayed, lopsided, and fantastic. The humanist criticism was the more pertinent. The beautiful symmetry of the scholastic philosophy, as it exists in the work of Thomas Aquinas, had been destroyed and perverted by the lesser lights of the fifteenth century; in the eyes of intelligent men, scholasticism by 1500 had become a pointless game of farfetched logic-chopping, the deductive process gone mad, a construction of syllogisms for the sake of syllogisms, and an elaborate trick of speaking nonsense through a series of intellectual handsprings. Puritan and Anglican ministers were at one in their condemnation of the schoolmen. John Donne said that in order to define ignorance, “the schools have made so many divisions, and subdivisions, and re-divisions, and post-divisions of ignorance, that there goes as much learning to understand ignorance, as knowledge.” 37 John Cotton fulminated against “the subtilty and sophistry of the School-men, suppressing the reading of the Scriptures, and mixing Philosophy with Divinity, that they might as well have studied a point of Aristotle as their divinity, and make as good use of the one as of the other.” 38 In understanding Puritan thought, we must remember that much of it was conditioned, like all Protestantism, by its active hostility to a method of thinking which, having prevailed for several centuries, was now believed to be prostituted to the ambitions of the Papacy, and become the source of all the mischief and “superstition” in the Church of Rome.39
Yet for men in that period to purge their minds entirely of scholasticism was almost impossible, for in many fields there existed nothing else to turn to. In so far as scholasticism was a defence of the Church of Rome, the Puritans could push it aside and set up the Bible. But in so far as scholasticism was a theory of physics and of the natural constitution of the world, it was more difficult for them to scuttle it, because, though they of course did not know it, they lived during that hiatus in scientific history when the old was disappearing but the new had not yet sufficiently emerged. Puritans were cordial enough to the new science as it did emerge during the seventeenth century, but when New England was founded and Harvard College begun, though the literary culture of Humanism had been successfully absorbed into the Puritan intellect, the mathematical method had not yet been established to supply a coherent account of the natural universe. Consequently, in physics the Puritan retained his scholasticism, and only gradually abandoned it as the triumph of Newtonian physics became assured.40 But the important point is this: absurd as scholasticism may seem to one familiar with modern science, futile as may seem its explanations by means of qualities and quiddities, rather than of quantities and motions, still to any one who had yet to learn the newer hypotheses, scholastic physics gave an account of the natural world which was at any rate orderly, sensible, regular, and causal. Oakes’s sermon on the efficacy of divine providence (pp. 350–367) is still speaking of natural processes in scholastic language, and the point of his discourse is that God can interrupt or reverse the laws of physics, and that even when they operate undisturbed they produce only effects ordered by God; yet the inference throughout is that in ordinary life, day in and day out, the processes of nature follow regular and predictable laws. That the Puritans in their conception of physics retained the terminology and notions of scholasticism was an inevitable result of their living when and where they did; that they retained of scholasticism primarily its physics meant that there was no essential connection between scholastic science and religious dogma, so that, although some of the more conservative were reluctant to change, Puritans on the whole were quite willing to abandon the old theories for the new when the new had proved their case. The theological moral of the natural world seemed to such a man as Oakes the same, whether the natural world were explained as forms and substances, or as atoms and motion.
It was in the realm of logic that the revolt against scholasticism left the most important mark upon Puritan culture. The Protestant, reinforced by the humanist, or rather by his own humanism, found that scholasticism had become a stagnant and barren way of thinking, it had become over-subtle, irresponsible, formal; the new learning demanded that rational men go about thinking in straightforward, commonsense terms, that they go directly to the point and keep out of the tangled labyrinth of scholastic involutions. Various churches and various groups of scholars devised their own methods for replacing the logic of the schoolmen, but for the Puritans of New England there was one man above all to whom they looked for guidance in the management of reason —the great French Protestant, a martyr in the St. Bartholomew massacre, Petrus Ramus.41
Ramus, as his name was Latinized, or Pierre de la Ramée as he was christened, was as much a figure in the Protestant world of the 1630’s as Charles Darwin in the scientific world of the 1930’s. He was the great discoverer and formulator in the preceding century of a method that seemed to promise liberation from the tyranny of outworn notions, and he seemed to have inaugurated a new era in the history of thought. Ramus electrified the learned in 1536 by maintaining, as his Master of Arts thesis, that “all that Aristotle has said is forged,” which was equivalent to saying that the doctors and professors of the Church had been wasting their time, because the scholastic discipline was based upon Aristotle. To make good his word, Ramus spent the rest of his life producing a staggering array of books on almost every major subject, to show in each field wherein Aristotelian and scholastic doctrine had been wrong, and wherein the correct method should consist. Ramus was primarily a humanist: he did not become converted to Protestantism until 1561, but his assassination enshrined him forever in Protestant sentiment. What Protestantism found most valuable in his voluminous work was his logic; it was carried by his disciples to England, was particularly cultivated at the University of Cambridge, and so became the standard method followed by the New England divines in their reasoning and in their sermonizing. They naturally carried it to New England, and though at Harvard College the scholastic method was also taught 42—on the theory that ministers needed to know all doctrines, even if only to refute them—the Ramean method was the one approved. In the course of the century the mathematical method of the new science, the method of Descartes, and the inductive method of Baconian investigation became known, and Puritans maintained a hospitable mind toward them all.43 They were able to do so in large part because the teaching of Ramus was, as it now seems to us, a preparation for that of Descartes, and the inferences from it proved friendly to what turned out to be the new science.
Ramus seemed to men of the Renaissance to offer liberation, simplification, and clarity. To them he seemed to have been raised up, as though by divine providence, to combine in one personality the three dominant characters of the age, humanist, Protestant, and logician; not only to Puritans but to humanists like Sir Philip Sidney he promised liberation from the gloomy cave of scholastic metaphysics into the spacious meadows of classical literature. He put into the hands of Protestant divines and scholars dialectical spears with which they could pierce the metaphysical armor of the Catholic champions. One of his principal contentions was that logical processes and figures were to be illustrated from classical poets, orators, and historians rather than from works of technical disputation; 44 for example, in order to show how dissimilar qualities may be compared, Ramus does not erect a hypothetical contrast of abstractions but employs the contrast made in a famous love lyric of Catullus between suns and the lives of lovers, that suns are able to die and to rise again, but for lovers, when the brief light of life fails, there remains but perpetual night.45 Logic taught in this manner inevitably became fresh and exhilarating; it formed new and intoxicating alliances with rhetoric and classical scholarship. Puritan writers were logicians to a man, and Puritan sermons were severely logical in structure, but all according to the logic of Ramus, which was a relatively simple, clear-cut, and commonsense system, and one which furthermore furnished good authority for the study and even for the quotation of Catullus and Vergil in order to elucidate the fine points of divinity.
Ramus was able to assert that the principles of logic were embodied in the writings of poets, because he went upon the assumption that a simple and comprehensible order permeated the universe. Great writers, speaking out of their inward being, were speaking from nature herself, and through them, he said, nature reveals herself. “Science ought, therefore, to study the lessons that are innate in select minds . . . and upon them as a model should formulate the rules for those who desire to reason well.” 46 His logic is a typically Renaissance product in that it was intended not so much for proof and analysis as for assertion. It will not stand up under the rigorous scrutiny of a modern logician; it could not even survive once it came into competition with Locke. Yet it was ideally adapted to the times, because it cleared away the rubbish of scholasticism and yet did not challenge but rather strengthened the authoritarianism that was still as essential to a Renaissance philosophy of religion as it had been to a medieval.47 The Ramean logic was an instrument for setting forth only received truth, simply and concisely, and Ramus himself compressed the essential outlines into sixty pages. It was a short cut to demonstration, resting squarely and firmly upon the conviction that the world is a comprehensible logical structure to which the mind of man, in spite of the fall of Adam and human corruption, almost exactly corresponds.48
Though the Ramean logic was actually much less of a departure from Aristotle than Ramists pretended, and though Ramus’ own knowledge of Plato was very imperfect, the basic premise of his system was a Platonic conception: that the world is a copy or material counterpart of an ordered hierarchy of ideas existing in the mind of God.49 All that logic need do, therefore, is to draw up an account of how things follow one another in nature, and if the account corresponds to the way things actually are, men can safely act upon it.50 The generalized concepts of the mind, the principles of “art,” are not human constructions, not mere hypotheses or useful categories, but eternal and inviolable ideas, the authentic realities upon which the world is constructed. Truth therefore becomes for the Ramist, and through him for the Puritan, clear-eyed perception of immutable essences, beauty becomes correspondence to them, virtue becomes conformity to them. The method of discovering them is inward; they exist not only in nature but in the human intelligence, and though much study and caution are necessary in deriving them from the mind, since the mind is corrupted by sin, and the rules of logic must always preside over the formulating of them, still the soul contains an intuitive knowledge of the eternal truths, which truths also govern the world.51
The Ramean logic therefore was not so much what we think of as logic as it was a grouping of all the ideas, sensations, causes, and perceptions in the world, laying them out in a simple and symmetrical pattern, so that a diagram of the logic with its divisions and subdivisions was practically a blueprint of the universe. It was a simple scheme, but it was also, Ramus insisted, true and useful. Indeed, his emphasis was possibly more upon its utility than upon its simplicity or truth, and there were many dialecticalGordian knots which he endeavored to cut rather than untangle, so that the permanent value of his contribution to the science of thought is not great. But the very utility of his system assured men of the early seventeenth century that it must be true, and Puritans seized upon it avidly. Ramus believed that he derived the guiding principle of his groupings and classifications from Plato, the principle of “dichotomy,” that is, that all ideas and things go in pairs, like the animals into the ark, because the world is symmetrical. Thus logic itself is divided into halves, in the first of which individual ideas or arguments are formulated, in the second put together in axioms and doctrines, just as grammar is divided into “etymology,” the study of words, and “syntax,” the putting of words together in sentences. Ideas in turn are divided into two sorts, those which establish themselves to our own experience and those which rest upon the authority of a witness, as do facts in history or the assertions of the Bible. The task of the logician (and the preacher must be a logician) was that of arranging everything in pairs under the proper rubrics. Thinking was not conceived as a method by which we compose our knowledge discovery by discovery, but as the unveiling of an ideal form. Knowledge was a schedule to be filled in, and this end, it seemed to Ramus and the Puritans, was best accomplished by pairing every idea and object with its counterpart, sun with moon, man with woman, cause with effect, subject with adjunct. When all existence was thus systematized, the problem of seeing the architecture of the whole, of grasping the diagram of the universe, became relatively simple. It consisted merely of arranging the pairs so that the more general came before the specific, the genus before the species, the important before the subsidiary. The final function of logic, as Ramus taught it, was “method.” “That great and famous Martyr of France, Peter Ramus, held forth the light to others,” said Increase Mather, and by that light he discovered the proper manner “wherein Scriptural Definitions and Distributions, expressing the Sum of the only true Christian Religion, are methodically disposed, according to the golden Rules of Art.” 52 In defining the intellectual character of the New England Puritans, we must always exercise caution about calling them Calvinists. John Calvin’s metaphysics were still Aristotelian and scholastic; New Englanders had thrown aside much of the philosophy which is implied at every point in Calvin’s theology, and had taken up a system of which the implications were quite different.
The most striking example of the difference can be seen in the uses to which the Ramists put the logical procedures historically known as “disjunction” and “hypothesis.” When Ramus had arrayed all things and all ideas in pairs, he found that while some pairs harmonize with each other, as do cause and effect, others set up oppositions, as do night and day, true and false, in and out. Therefore he provided a large place in his plan for serried ranks of opposites or contraries, all of which he classified according to his system of dichotomies. His principal English commentator admitted freely that the doctrine of diversities was to be found only in Ramus,53 but in a fashion characteristic of the Ramists, asserted that if the example of reason and experience were observed, the necessity for the doctrine would become clear at once. The reason other logicians had conspired against it, he said, was that scholastic logic had been enslaved by the syllogism, and the Aristotelians had striven to confine all thinking processes to the three figures of the syllogism as defined by Aristotle. Thus one of the chief grudges of the Ramists against Aristotle was the tyranny of the syllogism; Ramus assigned it a very minor role in his “method,” where it served upon occasion merely to clear up individual arguments, so that they could be placed in their proper place in the grand sequence. As he debased the syllogism, he exalted the doctrine of contraries; ideas could be immediately distinguished by setting them against their opposites; a good could be defined by placing it against the corresponding evil, and thus sounder conclusions could be reached in the twinkling of an eye than in whole centuries of fruitless disputation with the cumbersome form of the syllogism.54
Ramus did not limit the doctrine of opposites to single ideas. If the principle of instantaneous recognition of contraries by the human mind would serve to sort out particular ideas and words, it would serve as well for more complex alternatives, for immediate adjudication between opposing doctrines as well as between opposing words. The Renaissance logician did not distinguish between a fact, an idea, or a doctrine to the extent of treating them as different logical counters; an opposition could be set up between black and white, bad and good, salvation by works and salvation by faith. In each case the mind was simply called upon to say which of the two corresponded to the divine order. The way to test the truth of a statement was to ask oneself a question: it is either thus and so or it is not, which? Or else the way was to suppose it true and see if it would prove itself, by saying, if it is so, then such and such must follow, and if such and such is true, then the statement must be true. The methods of disjunction and hypothesis probably take their origin from Plato, whether or not Ramus derived them from him. They are certainly methods that follow obviously from, a belief in the Platonic world, where all things are ranged in a hierarchy of ideas and the philosophical problem is to sort the genus into species and the species into subspecies. The Ramists proclaimed that Ramus’ rehabilitation of disjunction and hypothesis was his greatest contribution to logic; Ramus himself insisted that they be elevated to the title of “syllogisms”; calling the three conventional Aristotelian syllogisms “simple” ones, he denominated disjunction and hypothesis “composite.” He remarked that “composite” syllogisms were the ones men actually used most frequently, and that this fact alone justified the dignity with which he invested them.55 His English expositor was still more aggressive; admitting that the authority of Aristotle was opposed to composite syllogisms, Downame exultantly declared that nevertheless Aristotle himself used them again and again, once in the very passage in which he denied their validity, that furthermore the practice of the best writers and above all of the Bible itself thoroughly exonerated them.56 Therefore if the Holy Ghost thought by means of composite syllogisms, students of Ramus considered that they were free to employ them on every occasion, and New England divines believed that a conclusion established by their aid was as strong as one confirmed by Holy Writ.
If we turn to a Puritan textbook, written according to the “golden rules” of art as taught by Petrus Ramus, we can perceive what the Ramean revolution in logic meant in practice. For example, in the book for the preface of which Increase Mather wrote the praise of Ramus already quoted, the author, JamesFitch, pastor at Norwich, Connecticut, discusses the question whether the world was created or is eternal. The scholastic way of settling this inquiry would have been through the syllogism; a schoolman might argue, for example, all temporal things are made, the world is a temporal thing, ergo, the world is made.57 He would seek to rehearse Aristotle’s complicated argument for the first unmoved mover of all things, and would spend much time refuting all other propositions. But the disciple of Ramus puts all this aside as superfluous and inconclusive. He says that by using demonstrations of this sort it would be equally easy to prove that there is a continuous and eternal succession of motions, with no necessity for a first unmoved mover. Instead of employing “simple” syllogisms, the Ramist invokes the “composite” and solves the disjunctive by the hypothetical. He asks himself the question, the world was either made or not made, which? Then he answers himself to his own complete satisfaction: if it was not made, then there was no cause for its being, there is no design in it, no end for which it exists, and any man in his senses knows that these are absurd conclusions. Ergo, the world was made. Then he continues his self-interrogation, it was either made by God, or it made itself. Hypothesis demonstrates at once that the second alternative is untenable, and so the Ramist triumphantly concludes that God must have made it.58
Undoubtedly the Ramean logic was much too facile, and when it was employed by shallow minds that were utterly unskilled in the more noble if more tortuous logic of the schoolmen, it produced a breed of disputants so fascinated by their own logic-chopping they could not see the open fallacies in their method. Yet whether the Ramean logic was a good one or a bad one does not concern us; historically speaking, the importance of such reasoning as that of James Fitch is its recurrent appeal to an innate, a priori knowledge. He does not attempt to establish an invincible case in the void, but to establish a case which no human being in possession of his wits can deny. The syllogism strikes downward vertically, so to speak, driving the mind before it, where disjunction extends horizontally for the contemplation of self-reflecting intelligence. The Ramean logic is the logic of a Humanist, the conclusions come from within, they are not reached by piling one brick upon another in a shaky and top-heavy sequence, but by the prompt and decisive arbitration of the natural reason between two possibilities. Puritan preachers and disputants would use the syllogism wherever they found it profitable; more often they would establish their points by the use of disjunction, by ruling out the alternative which all men, on the strength of their native intelligence, would be compelled to admit could not hold water.59
Thus when John Cotton spoke of an “essentiall wisdome in us, namely, our Reason which is natural,” he was speaking from his Ramean training. What such an assumption might lead to in a man’s philosophy can readily enough be seen, at least in broad outline. For if the way to test the truth of things is by the measure of a rationality implicit in man, then there must be an inherent rationality in things, in the mind, in the order of the universe; only if this is so can a careful examination of the intellect, a checking of all propositions by the instinctive knowledge of the soul, result in finding the true propositions. Therefore the way to avoid “paralogizing” yourself is to consult, with scrupulous care and dispassionate honesty, the essential wisdom within yourself, which, being natural and true, will enable you to reason correctly.60 The material world is transitory and deceptive, the passions of men ebb and flow, men make mistakes, accidents happen, and God can override or turn aside all natural processes; but something eternal and immutable does exist, and by that we must live. There are a number of propositions, fitting together into a harmonious whole, upon which things are built, to which they correspond, which they must follow, which they do follow even when to earthly eyes they seem to be accidental and fortuitous. The sum total of these eternal propositions, the completed system of truth, exists only in the mind of God, but that it does exist we know, because we in small part share in it; some of the divine truth does exist in our minds. In the counsel of God, so the argument runs—a clear consequence of this Ramean position —there must be this “idea or pattern of well acting”; hence God in acting follows it of his own free choice, and he therefore must create his creatures in accordance with this pattern; “and that wisdome in the creatures is imprinted, and is the impression or Image of it.” Hence the “rules of art,” the rules that God follows in organizing and governing the world, the rules that enable us to tell which of the disjunctive alternatives must be wrong and which is clearly right, these rules of art must be eternal, though all material objects which exemplify them are transitory and illusory. Though men are unstable and life is full of pitfalls, there is a divine wisdom that governs and controls all. “The definitions of things are eternal Truths, whatever becomes of the things themselves.” 61
There can be no doubt that this way of thinking is a species of Platonism. It is a method of establishing the pre-existence of ideas, or of a divine pattern, to which the world roughly conforms and by which all movement and contingency are to be explained. The Ramean logic might be said to be one of the several forms in which Platonism was revived in the Renaissance and enlisted in the humanists’ and the theologians’ battle with scholasticism. But without pursuing the philosophical problem too far afield, we can for the moment rest with this reflection, that the humanist strain in Puritan culture, represented by the classical authors and the logic of Petrus Ramus, made for the conception of a fundamental rationality in the universe and in the mind of man. Because the Puritans were humanists, they could not rest in a belief that God’s decrees were nothing but arbitrary fiats. They held that God was indeed sovereign and absolute lord, but not entirely a capricious, ruthless, unpredictable tyrant. They held that man was indeed caught in the toils of sin, but they did not hold that he was so empty a creature that he needed to be filled with grace in any such crude fashion as a toy balloon is filled with air. In his fallen state he still can test the validity of reasons and reach a vision, if only a sort of distant perception, of the serene order that really prevails. The grace of God, which is a special and additional imparting of His spirit to man, whose reason is already endowed with some inklings of the divine nature, this grace is not some emotional cataclysm, an attack of the jerks, an agitation “with Antick and uncouth motions.” 62 On the contrary it is an elevation of reason, a freshening and quickening of the understanding; it is an imparting to man of that spark of imagination and that breadth of insight whereby he can at last perceive in part, and apprehend in the rest, the essential unity of life, and the essential reasonableness of things. As a great Puritan preacher put it, John Preston, who was the Master of Emmanuel College at Cambridge, England, and who was looked upon as one of their chief intellectual progenitors by New Engenders, divine grace “elevateth reason, and makes it higher, it makes it see further than reason could, it is contrary indeed to corrupt reason, but to reason that is right reason, it is not contrary, only it raiseth it higher: And therefore faith teacheth nothing contrary to sense and reason.” 63 Thomas Hooker told his congregations that conversion made “things appear as they be,” that the regenerate man is the man who at last understands what he already knows, or could have known, in his reason: “look what the truth determines, reason approves, and Conscience witnesseth . . . Such judg not by outward appearance as it is the guise of men of corrupt minds, but upon experience, that which they have found and felt in their own hearts.” 64 At the end of the century a Puritan minister is still insisting, “Spiritual Light received in Conversion, strengthens the reason of men, and makes the law of nature more legible.” 65 A few decades more, and there would be ministers who insisted that spiritual light was something entirely different from the reason of man and quite other than the law of nature; and consequently other ministers would reply that in that case spiritual light must be insanity, and that if they had to choose they preferred the reason of men and the law of nature. The seamless garment of Puritanism thus was rent, and the edifice erected by the founders in order to justify God’s ways to man was riven in two; in the one half came to dwell those who no longer made any effort to justify God’s ways, and in the other those who preferred to set up the ways of man for approbation and imitation by the divinity.
In this fashion, then, Puritanism attempted to appropriate the heritage of humanism and to embody it in a system of Christian belief and a theological conception of the world. It did not turn its back upon the new literary learning, as it did not turn its back upon the still newer scientific learning that burgeoned during the century. Puritanism was an outgrowth of the advanced culture of its day; its basic ideas as to the function of the human mind and the responsibilities of the human soul were common to Christendom at the time, its fundamental doctrines were common to Protestantism at the time, the texture and range of its learning were common to educated opinion of the time, its struggle to maintain homogeneity in religious thought, to unify religion and knowledge, was common to all devout and intelligent men of the time. Thinking men were all in one way or another still dominated by the medieval tradition of unity, and could break away from the scholastic formulation of that unity only by endeavoring to achieve another formulation in more satisfactory terms. The chief elements in Puritan culture, therefore, the foundations of Puritan thought, “ninety per cent” of its ideas, roughly speaking, are to be accounted for by a study of the age and background.
But we are still left with the question: What then was the essence of Puritanism, apart from beliefs and opinions common to others in the period, what was this precious “ten per cent” that made the difference? What particular devices did the Puritans employ in formulating the unity of knowledge and religion which divided them sharply and fatally from the Anglicans? For if the war between the Puritans and the Church of England was an engagement between men who, from our point of view at least, were agreed on the larger assumptions, the concrete issue must be narrowed down to a difference of deduction from those premises. The evidence of history goes to show that the bitterest and most furious combats are generally fought between those who agree on fundamentals, for there is no greater annoyance that a man can suffer than attack from persons who accord with him in the main, but who apply his principles to conclusions utterly foreign to his liking. Puritanism started from the background and the beliefs we have been outlining; it then worked its way to certain concrete applications, and it was these specific deductions that made Puritanism Puritanical.
Where Puritanism and the Church of England at last parted company, after marching abreast over so immense a terrain, may conveniently be illustrated if we begin with a statement of William Laud himself, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the archfoe of the Puritans, whose head they finally chopped off. In 1622 Laud, then Bishop of London, held a conference with a Jesuit, in the course of which he drew up an excellent statement of the position of the Church of England. Inevitably the nub of this debate was the authority of scripture, and Laud set forth the grounds upon which the Protestant, believing still in the unity of reason and faith, maintaining the harmony of knowledge and belief, could nevertheless anchor his whole system to the arbitrary word of God, to the ukase of revelation handed down from on high by the absolute Tsar of the universe. The Catholic was arguing that if the authority of the Universal Church were disowned, the Bible would prove an inadequate substitute, because the Bible would become subject to interpretation, no two men would agree on what it meant, Protestantism would split into a hundred differing sects, each one twisting Biblical meanings to suit its own convenience, and thus scripture would lose all the necessary attributes of an authority. Laud answered that there was no danger of this happening in Protestant thought, because the authority of the Bible was established by a logical necessity. In every science, he said, certain principles outside its own limits must be supplied before the science can proceed; geometry must be built upon a priori axioms, that the whole is greater than the part, etc. The basic principles of the sciences are “given” in the natural reason—exactly as Ramus demonstrates. But in divinity, which is the science of the divine, the basic principles must come from the divine, and therefore must be given, if at all, by God. Consequently, unless Protestants abandoned theology entirely, which was not possible for Laud to imagine, they would always proceed in the science of theology upon divine axioms, laid down by God, believed exactly as all axioms are believed, because, though they cannot be demonstrated to be true, yet no thinking can go on unless they are true. The axioms enacted by God are accepted by faith. The Bible is believed, not on the authority of any Church, but because it must be believed; nothing will “prove” that the scripture is divine, it must be believed to be divine. But there are, however, some natural or rational testimonies helping to establish the fact that scripture is divinely inspired; these considerations do not prove it, but they help to convince men. These are: the tradition of the Church, the testimony of other ages, consent of many men, the harmony of the prophets, the success Biblical teachings have enjoyed in the world, the constancy and consistency of the doctrine, the inward light and excellency of the text. Hence, though the authority of scripture cannot be proved, and is basically a matter of faith, rational arguments may be used, for “grace is never planted but in a reasonable creature, and proves by the very seat which it hath taken up that the end it hath is to be spiritual eye-water, to make reason see what ‘by nature only it cannot,’ but never to blemish reason in that which it can, ‘comprehend.’ ” 66
Now taking this argument just as it stands, any Puritan would gladly have subscribed to it. He might not stress the tradition of the Church quite so emphatically as Laud did among the rational confirmations of the authority of scripture; but that scripture was to be accepted by faith, and yet no violence to be done to reason, that reason actually proved the necessity for the faith and endorsed it with almost infallibly convincing testimonies— this was the argument of the Puritan as well as of the bishop. But the Puritan then and there challenged the bishop to be as good as his word. If the bishop submitted to the Bible as God’s word, received it by faith and reinforced his faith with rational convictions—very well then, let him accept it and act accordingly. Let him not, once he has established its authority, then turn about and explain away a good part of it, invent reasons to prove that only some portions are God’s law, that the Bible is not binding in every point on which it speaks, but merely on some few. If the Bible declares God is three persons in one, let that be believed, said the Puritan; if the Bible says that wigs are an abomination unto the Lord, let that also be believed.
And there the Anglican protested, and the fight commenced. For to him it seemed absurd to imagine that God, the sovereign of sovereigns, would take the time, would demean himself, to tell men whether or not they should wear wigs. He could not imagine that everything in the Bible, every incidental history, every minute circumstance, was intended by God to be universally and literally binding on all men. God had inspired the book in order that the fundamental and comprehensive truths of religion might be set down; he had inspired individual men at particular times and places to write it, and they had written in their particular dialects and told a great many things that were of only temporary importance. The difference between the Anglican and the Puritan, then, was that the Puritan thought the Bible, the revealed word of God, was the word of God from one end to the other, a complete body of laws, an absolute code in everything it touched upon; the Anglican thought this a rigid, doctrinaire, and utterly unjustifiable extension of the authority of scripture. The Puritan held that the Bible was sufficiently plain and explicit so that men with the proper learning, following the proper rules of deduction and interpretation, could establish its meaning and intention on every subject, not only in theology, but in ethics, costume, diplomacy, military tactics, inheritances, profits, marriages, and judicial procedure. The Anglican position, set forth supremely in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, was simply that the Bible is God’s revealed word only on the broad principles of the Christian religion, that in all minor matters, God has not intended to set up ironclad rules for men, but to leave them to the discretion of their reason, to the considerations of circumstance and propriety, to the determinations of proportion and decency. In His providence, in His government of events, through the reason He has instilled in man, through the law which governs nature, God can and does teach men; in the Bible He is concerned only with those things which they could not otherwise learn from these sources.
Let them with whom we have hitherto disputed consider well, how it can stand with reason to make the bare mandate of sacred Scripture the only rule of all good and evil in the actions of mortal men. The testimonies of God are true, the testimonies of God are perfect, the testimonies of God are all sufficient unto that end for which they were given. Therefore accordingly we do receive them, we do not think that in them God hath omitted anything needful unto his purpose, and left his intent to be accomplished by our devisings.67
If the Puritan contention were correct, that the Bible is the supreme and absolute law, says the Anglican Hooker, then the law of nature and the law of reason would be effectually abrogated; they would become useless, because we would need to search scripture at every juncture and would never dare trust ourselves to decide anything on any other grounds. “In every action of common life to find out some sentence clearly and infallibly setting before our eyes what we ought to do, (seem we in Scripture never so expert) would trouble us more than we are aware.” 68 The Anglican was accusing the Puritan of narrow-minded literalism, pointing out that if he had the effrontery to assume that his and only his interpretation of scripture was correct, and to set himself up as dictator to all other men on a host of points upon which God intended men to follow their own discretion, custom or political expediency, then the Puritan was guilty of arrogance and pride. “This Disciplinarian humor,” said one bishop, “which will admit no latitude in religion, but makes each nicety a fundamental, and every private opinion an article of Faith.” 69 Another Anglican cleric said that to give men the power of saying what scripture does and does not mean makes them “to be as much lawgivers to the Church by their uncontrolable law-interpreting, as any Pope or enthusiast can or need pretend to be.” 70 The Puritan replied, in effect, that if the Anglican said that the Bible was the word of God, and then put aside anything in the Bible which he did not like by saying this or that particular law or precedent was peculiar to the historical circumstances and was not part of the eternal law of the Christian religion, then it was certainly the Anglican who was setting himself up to be the lawgiver and the tyrant; he was perverting the law of God to his own purposes by sophistry and fine distinctions, he did not really believe in the Bible at all, he was playing fast and loose with it and was no better than a skeptic or an atheist.
If the dispute had remained a merely academic one whether the authority of the Bible extended as far as the wearing or not wearing of wigs or hoop petticoats, New England would have remained somewhat longer in the possession of the Indians. But one of the most important discoveries made by the Puritan in his study of scripture was that it contained the perfect constitution for the organization of the visible church.71 The Anglican denied this, and Richard Hooker wrote his book on the “laws” of ecclesiastical polity to prove that there were many kinds of laws which men were to follow in different connections, and that in ecclesiastical government they were not to follow the Bible at all, because Christ had left the form of the church to be determined by political considerations, by the particular traditions of each country, and by the principles of aesthetic judgment. Thus the argument involved very important elements in the state and society; conservatives, satisfied with things as they were, saw in Puritan radicalism a serious threat to the vested interests; those dissatisfied with the status quo welcomed for social as well as for religious reasons the Puritan condemnation of the episcopal hierarchy, with its wealth, its monopoly of advantages, and its alliance with the Court and the aristocracy. Political passions and economic grievances increased the tension. In the 1640’s both sides appealed to the sword and the God of battles, but before the actual outbreak had come, when Charles I had dismissed his parliament and was apparently launched upon an era of absolute rule by and with the aid of the bishops, a small band of particularly earnest Puritans, fearing that the divine church polity could never be established in England, secured a charter from the king giving them title to land in Massachusetts Bay. They movedthemselves and their families thither, in order that under a government of their own constituting, the form of church government ordained by Christ might be set up, and His faithful saints might worship him in the precise manner He had decreed.
At this point certain doubts might justifiably arise in the mind of the reader concerning what has just been said about the Puritan emphasis upon reason and scholarship. If after all the Puritan erected the Bible into a hard and fast body of arbitrary law, then it might seem that the function of his reason must amount to the very inferior one of deducing concrete applications from a miscellaneous collection of arbitrary dicta, and his scholarship simply consist in the administration of a number of imposed statutes. Certainly, it was to this that Richard Hooker felt the role of the intellect would be reduced if the Puritan had his way, and the fact of the matter is that in many cases, in such unimaginative and pedantic Puritans as Cotton Mather, the solemn invocation of scriptural sanctions for decisions about the minutiae of daily life became nothing short of ludicrous. But Cotton Mather was a case for a psychiatrist in any event, and is not, fortunately, very representative of Puritanism as a whole, a fact which it is hoped these selections will make clear. The Puritan’s attitude toward the Bible was called fanatical by his opponents, but it was not the worship of the book in a naive or infatuated spirit. It was an acceptance of the Bible as revealed law from an absolute sovereign, but the law of that sovereign was not therefore erected against all reason, science, and natural wisdom. Puritanism was not, as we have said, “fundamentalism”; its conflict with the Church of England was, on the purely intellectual side, a difference in definition concerning the spheres of reason and faith, and of their connection.
As we attempt to ascertain the difference, we should remember that from now on it becomes increasingly difficult to speak of the Anglican argument as though one train of thought were common to all apologists for the Church of England, at that time or at any time since. The very freedom which Richard Hooker allowed to the reason and the intelligence made possible a variety of attitudes; Churchmen differed among themselves concerning how much or how little of the Bible was to be accounted the eternal law of God, or how much weight was to be given to the other sanctions of thought and conduct, whether more to the law or to reason or to the traditions of the Church. But if we take Hooker, and some one of his successors in the moderate and well-considered vein, Jeremy Taylor for instance, and look upon them as representative, simply because they avoided the extremes either of the “high-church” party of Laud, or of the “low-church” party of Ussher, we may safely compare them with the Puritans in order to define more precisely the exact nature of the Puritan thought.
From the description we have already given of Richard Hooker’s volume, it becomes clear that he is stressing the multiformity of the revelation of God’s will. As though the divinity were a great light, a sun of illumination, various rays emanate in various directions, each of them a partial revelation of his character. One of these rays is the law of reason, one the law of nature, one the conception of beauty, one His daily providence; and among these rays another one, important indeed, but only one among the others, is the Bible. This is no doubt an over-simplified statement of Hooker’s very subtle position, but it will serve; it is the idea which, in one way or another, underlies almost all Anglican thinking in the seventeenth century, and it is the belief above all others that the Puritans could never swallow.
In a portentous volume called Ductor Dubitantium,72 & guide for troubled consciences in some 1400 pages, published by Jeremy Taylor in 1659, this liberal and eloquent clergyman, occupying the leisure forced upon him by the reign of Oliver Cromwell, deliberately devised for the Church of England a book of practical divinity, a manual for the solution of ethical puzzles, because, for one reason, the Puritans, with their direct application of Scripture to the affairs of ordinary life, had seemed far to excel the Anglican divines in casuistical writing.73 Before entering into particular cases, Taylor endeavored to demonstrate how first of all men might ascertain the regulations to which their consciences should conform. The measure and rule should be, he says, the law of God, but the law of God is not promulgated merely and solely in the Bible; it is also to be found in the law of nature, in the articles to which all nations have consented, in right reason, in laws ecclesiastical and civil, in popular proverbs, and in the wisdom of great poets.74 The larger number of the rules which men are to obey, Taylor insists, come from these sources; the number to be derived from the Bible should be kept down to the bare minimum of those essential truths which cannot be learned from the other instructors, and the validity of much of scripture, at least in morality, is actually that it expresses felicitously what the other texts already have taught. “The best portions of scripture, even the law of Jesus Christ, which in moral things is the eternal law of nature, is written in our hearts, is reason, and that wisdom to which we cannot choose but assent.” 75 The fundamental discriminations of right and wrong are such that all men must acknowledge them, “so long as a man is in his wits, and hath the natural use of reason.” 76 The natural man, unless he is insane or diseased, can and does grasp these fundamentals; 77 most of his mistakes come in the application, where he is misled through ignorance or by evil customs. The way to correct him is not to bring down upon him the crushing weight of a pretended Biblical condemnation, but to discover the province in which his error lies, whether in reason or nature or civil law, and to put him to rights according to the legislation of that domain. “Every thing must be derived from its own fountain.” 78 Against this method of instructing men’s consciences, Taylor continues, the Puritans protest because they say it puts reason before the Bible, and they offer instead to draw up a set of rules straight from the Bible to cover almost all moral problems. They say that we must not start with what is reasonable, and then find that the law of Christ is like unto it, but with the law of Christ, and then we must abide by it, whether it seems reasonable or not. This, says Taylor, is to make a separation between what is reasonable and what is revealed. That such a discrepancy can even imaginably exist Taylor denies emphatically.79 He will admit that human reason is below God and cannot understand all that God is, but everything that God reveals to men must be comprehensible to the reason, for the reason of man must come from the same God who gives the revelation. “If reason cannot consent to it when it is told of it, then it is nothing, it hath no being, it hath no possibility.” 80 Therefore one cannot say of any proposition, it is against scripture and therefore against reason, “because reason is before revelation, and that this is revealed by God must be proved by reason”; but if we will define carefully and accurately what is reasonable, we are then empowered to assert that what is against reason must, ipse facto, be against the word of God. For, says Taylor in conclusion, when both sides agree that these are the words of God, and the question of faith is concerning the meaning of the words, nothing is an article of faith, or a part of religion, but what can be proved by reason to be the sense and intentions of God. Reason is never to be pretended against the clear sense of scripture, because by reason it is that we came to perceive that to be the clear sense of scripture.81
Taylor’s argument is a permutation upon the theme announced by Richard Hooker. He is asserting the primacy of an eternal reason, which finds expression in nature, in the human intellect, experience, civil law, proverbs, and poetry; it also finds expression in the Bible. In order that there may be no conflict between the Bible and other manifestations of the immutable wisdom, Biblical teachings must be held to a minimum, and those few entertained as much as possible not because the Bible says so, but because they are clearly consistent with what men learn from all the sources of knowledge available to them.
If we now turn to the Puritan side of the debate, we shall find that Taylor’s opponents have one all-important consideration to advance against his seductive pleading. If men had remained as they had been created, if they had retained the pristine innocence of creation fresh from the hand of God, then everything that Taylor says would be true. But the fact of the matter is—and by “fact” the Puritan meant not only in Christian theology but in experience—something has happened to mankind. History proves, and daily events confirm, that men are not naturally noble, reasonable, honest, kind, decent, or intelligent. Taylor’s whole structure of moral instruction derived by the reasonable being from natural and reasonable preceptors leaves out of account what John Cotton called “mans perverse subtilty in inventing wayes of backsliding,” 82 Let human beings go free amid nature, let them read the poets and memorize the proverbs, induce them to examine their hearts for an instinctive knowledge of right and wrong, teach them what the wise and good of all nations have agreed on, and what will be the result? The same old chronicle of meanness and cruelty, bloodshed and robbery, hatred and betrayal, blunder and stupidity, which passes under the name of history. From such sources some men, like Socrates or Plutarch, may learn virtue and self-control, but only on the basis of calculation; the vast majority are totally incapable of leading the life of reason if they have only reason to inspire them. No man who knows a hawk from a handsaw can doubt for a moment “the depravation of nature, in the blindnesse of our minds: who are so far from discerning spiritual things . . . that we cannot rightly judge of moral or civil things.” 83 If men are to act by the laws of right reason and in harmony with the laws of nature, they need something more than a knowledge of the laws; they must be infused with a power to keep and observe them, and only the grace of God can give it to them. Thomas Shepard said that there is a sort of knowledge which some men have “from the book of creation, some by power of education, some by the light of the law . . . some by the letter of the gospel, and so men may know much and speak well. ...” But over against this there is quite another kind of knowledge which only the elect can acquire, whereby they “see things in another manner; to tell you how, they can not; it is the beginning of light in heaven.” 84 The Puritan would not doubt that Taylor’s method was admirable and his book a tribute to his own nobility of character, but the facts of life being what they are, his way of dealing with sin simply will not work; make the truth as clear as he may to the mind of man, and man “will bend the Truth to his mind though hee breake it.” Thomas Hooker of Connecticut directly opposed Richard Hooker of Bishopshorne by insisting that the latter’s splendid galleon of stately reason will wreck itself upon the shoals of human perversity:
Though arguments be never so plaine, and Scriptures never so pregnant; yet a carnall wretch will carry himselfe against all, and say, it is not my judgement, I am not of that mind.85
The morality of mere right reason and behavior regulated by judicious analysis will not hold up very far or very long; it is not enough:
There is a weakness, impotencie and insufficiencie in the understanding to reach this right discovery of sin, for however there remaynes so much glimmering in the twilight of Natural reason, and so much sensibleness in the stupid benummedness of the corrupt conscience of a carnal man, that it can both see and sensibly check for some grosser evil, or some such sins, or venom of sin, as crosseth his own peace and Comfort, or those ends which he sets up as the chiefest good at which he aymes, but to search into the entrales of sin, and discern the spiritual composition of the accursed nature thereof, he can in no wise attayn this by all the labor and light he hath.86
In the Puritan view, which the Puritan pointed out was undeniably corroborated by the evidence of human affairs, men needed the aid of God to achieve what the innocent Jeremy Taylor naively assumed was their natural capacity.
But, it should be noted, the Puritan does not deny that truth can be discovered in nature, poetry, right reason, and the consent of nations. He does not deny that these things are emanations of God’s wisdom and that from them men may gain all manner of valuable instruction. He does not doubt that there is a light of nature, which, he says, “consists in common principles imprinted upon the reasonable soul, by nature,” and that man naturally inclines his assent to certain fundamental truths, not only such truths as that the whole is greater than the part, but that there is a God, that parents are to be honored, and that there is a great difference between what is good and what is bad. As we have seen, the whole methodology of Puritan logic, following the example of Ramus, was built upon the inner monitor that can tell which of any two alternatives is the right one. The discoveries of the natural reason are useful to men “as a help whence they might seek after God” and “for the preservation of humane society.” What the Puritan does insist on is that the natural man, if left to himself, will not read the lessons of nature and reason correctly. “The little light that there is, is much miscarried [;] whilest it is managed by the reigning influence of the power of darkness the Judgment is corrupt as well as the will, whose corruption perverts the exercise of the faculty of reason.” Therefore God must draw up for man in black and white an exhaustive and authoritative code of laws, where he can find them in terms adapted to his imperfect and benighted state, in clear and unmistakable bold-faced type:
Star-light cannot make it, otherwise then night. The light of nature since the fall, compared with the light of the image of God, before the fall, hath not the proportion of Star-light, to the bright Sun-light at noon-day. This indeed is but darkness. But, if compared with the light of the Gospell, it is worse then gross darkness.87
The laws of the Gospel, drawn up under these considerations, cannot be limited to a few fundamentals, but must be numerous enough to cover all the essential contingencies of life. Man was once left free to learn from reason and nature, and promptly abused the privilege; he must now submit his comprehension to the instituted law before he be allowed to seek meanings once more in the natural world. “Almost all the sin and misery that hath filled the World, hath broke in at this door, hearkning to reason against Institution.” 88 The Biblical institution must fill the place man made empty through his own folly, and since he has thrown away his ability to profit from natural wisdom, he must have an explicit law imposed upon him.
Thus when we pursue the difference between the attitude of the Anglican and the Puritan toward the authority of scripture, we come upon a deeper difference in their attitude toward man. The Puritan believes as much as his opponent that the will of God is exhibited in the world of nature and in the processes of right reason, but in order for man to perceive it, there must be something added to him.
True it is that the Lord fills Heaven and Earth with his presence, yea, the Heaven of Heavens is not able to contain him. His infinite Being is every where, and one and the same every where in regard of himself; because his being is most simple, and not subject to any shadow of change, being all one with himself. Yet he is said to take up his abode in a special manner, when he doth put forth the peculiar expression of his Work.89
There must be the spark, the quickening insight, the subtle and inward genius, which makes all the difference between the men who see and understand and know, and ordinary men who live from hand to mouth, never pierce below surface meanings, and never achieve self-mastery and direction. It is not merely ignorance that condemns the run of mortals to their fate; the man of unenlightened learning is in the same fix: “Let a man live the life of reason, and so as that he can discourse never so wisely and judiciously, and that he can converse with all sorts of men, and transact businesses in great dexterity, yet it is but a dead life.” 90 The spark, when it does come, is not the revelation of new and undreamed-of truths, it is not the discovery of any hitherto unknown facts. It is a reinvigoration of the inner man, it is inspiration, ecstasy: “it leaves an impression upon the most inward motions of the soul, as they meet with God in the most retired and refined actions thereof.” 91 It is not merely a correct teaching of the mind or judgment, it is “a renewall of the whole soule of a man, the disposition and inclination of the whole must be changed and altered.” 92 All the ideas, all the doctrines, all the reasons can be known before a man becomes regenerate, but known only with the mind, not with the heart. An unregenerate man, following the dictates of nature and cultivating the virtues celebrated in the poets, may perform many separate good actions, but these will not come “from an inward soul or principle of life,” just as, says Thomas Shepard in a metaphor characteristically Puritan in its middle-class homeliness: he that had beer given him, when milk and wine and sugar were put into it to mend it, said, the wine is good, and the milk is good, but the beer is bad; so profession, affection is good, but the heart, the man, is bad.93
By the grace of God, the Puritan meant the insight which sees at last what has been before the eyes all along; as though one had listened many times to a piece of music which to his ears was meaningless, and then suddenly its form becomes clear to him and for the first time he really hears it, not merely with his ears, but with his whole being. Regeneration is such a comprehension of the world in a flash of vision, and it therefore “exceeds, and over-flies the most Eagle-sighted Apprehensions of any Natural Man in the World.” 94 Only those who have experienced it will be able to understand aright the law of nature or be able to guide the steps of reason.
If the plight of man in the world is thus desperate, how absurd to erect his reason into a yardstick for what must be true in the reason of God, how fantastic to assert that if human reason cannot conceive a thing, then the thing is nothing, “hath no possibility”! It is the most insidious form of arrogance to proclaim that what seems reasonable and just on earth, in time and space, must also be binding in infinity, outside the realm of time and space, on God, who dwells in regions undecipherable to our discourse. Undoubtedly, the Puritans would answer Taylor’s ultimate point, God is reasonable and just, but not necessarily in our terms. If He accommodates Himself to our notions of what is equitable, it is His gracious condescension. The finite cannot legislate for infinitude; our reason, though partaking of the divine nature, partakes of it only in part, and is not sufficiently universal to warrant our saying that what is absurd to it cannot be part of faith. Reason is not before Revelation. We do not prove the authority of scripture by testing it with reasonable laws formulated beforehand; we find out first what scripture means by exegesis, etymology, comparison of texts, analysis of words, logical deductions and inferences. Our premises are not secured by approaching the Bible convinced beforehand that what is contrary to reason cannot be contained there, or that what is against the light of nature cannot possibly be intended, but the Bible itself gives us the premises of reason. The light of reason is “an effect proceeding from the word.” 95 We do not test the Bible by nature, but nature by the Bible. It is in this sense that the Puritan achieved, or thought he had achieved, the unity of faith and intellect, dogma and reason. Reason is the implement for the interpretation of given principles, and grace is the implement for the direction of reason. But reason does not discover fundamental principles in itself. The regenerate intellect does not fetch up truth from its own depths, like water from a well, but is filled with truth from the fountain of scripture. Thomas Hooker thus summarized the union of the three factors, scripture, reason, and grace, into the moment of supreme insight which was the goal of all Puritan aspiration and the inspiration for all Puritan theory:
The godly doe not onely apprehend the meaning of the words in the Scripture, and are able to discourse of the reasons therein contained, but they discern also the spiritualnesse of the work of grace, that is discovered in the same. Observe it: There being, first, the Word of God set down in his book, and then reasons that goe along with it, and lastly, a spirituall work of grace, that God hath made known in those reasons; the Saints of God alone see the spiritualnesse of the work that is manifested and communicated in that reason there set down . . . Take but an Apple, there is never a man under heaven can tell what tast it is of, whether sweet or soure, untill he have tasted of it; he seeth the colour and the quantity of it, but knoweth not the tast.96
Therefore Jeremy Taylor speaks from a purely external and formal knowledge when he says that we are to prove by reason whether any proposition is revealed by God. Reasons are there indeed, good reasons and bad reasons; the saints of God understand the right reasons and why they are right, exactly as a man knows the taste of an apple. The certitude is neither irrational conviction nor mere rational demonstration, but both at once. Jeremy Taylor is arguing that a body of truth exists, of which the Bible is one expression. The Puritan is arguing that the source of truth is the Bible, read with the eye of grace, and therefore rationally understood. Reason does not prove the sense and intention of God, as Taylor says, but the sense and intention of God instruct the reason. For the Puritan, reason does not make clear the sense of scripture, but the clear sense of scripture creates the reason.
The Puritan attitude toward the Bible, to the extent that it was a preservation of intellectual values within the dogmatism, may elicit our hearty approbation. But when we come to the content of the dogma, to what the Puritan insisted the Bible did teach, and to what he expected the regenerate man to find reasonable, in short, when we come to Puritan theology, many persons encounter an insuperable stumbling block to an unqualified approval of Puritan thinking. Not only does the conventional picture of the Puritan creed seem exceedingly unattractive to twentieth-century taste, but the idea of theology in any form is almost equally objectionable. In most secondary accounts Puritans are called Calvinists, and then and there discussion of their intellectual life ceases. Dr. Holmes’s “One-Hoss Shay” is deemed a sufficient description.
It is true, the Puritans were Calvinists, if we mean that they more or less agreed with the great theologian of Geneva. They held, that is, that men had fallen into a state of sin, that in order to be saved they must receive from God a special infusion of grace, that God gives the grace to some and not to others out of His own sovereign pleasure, and that therefore from the beginning of time certain souls were “predestined” to heaven and the others sentenced to damnation. But if the New Englanders were Calvinists, it was because they happened to agree with Calvin; they approved his doctrine not because he taught it, but because it seemed inescapably indicated when they studied scripture or observed the actions of men. The sinfulness of the average man was a fact that could be empirically verified, and in itself demonstrated that he needed divine grace in order to be lifted above himself; the men who did receive what they thought was an influx of grace learned by experience that only in such an ecstasy of illumination did truth become thoroughly evident and completely understandable. Obviously the experience was given to relatively few men; therefore God, who is outside time and who is omniscient, must have known from the beginning of time who would and who would not achieve it. This is the law of life; some men are born rich and some poor, some intelligent and some stupid, some are lucky and others unfortunate, some are happy and some melancholy, some are saved and some are not. There is no reason but that God so ordained it.
The Lord to shew the soveraign freedom of his pleasure, that he may do with his own what he wil, and yet do wrong to none, he denyes pardon and acceptance to those who seek it with some importunity and earnestness . . . and yet bestowes mercy and makes known himself unto some who never sought him.97
Puritan theology, therefore, is simply a statement in dogmatic guise of a philosophy of life, wherein it is held on the one hand that men must act by reason and abide by justice, and strive for an inward communication with the force that controls the world, but on the other hand that they must not expect that force always to be cribbed and confined by their conceptions of what is reasonable and just. There is an eternal obligation upon men to be equitable, fair, and good, but who can say that any such morality is also binding on the universe? There are certain amenities which men must observe in their dealings with men, but who can say that they must also be respected by the tiger, by the raging storm, by the lightning, or by the cancer? It is only when the theology of “predestination” is seen in these less technical terms that its vitality as a living faith and its strength as a sustaining philosophy become comprehensible.
But the theology of New England was not simply Calvinism, it was not a mere reduplication of the dogmas of the Institutes. What New Englanders believed was an outgrowth, as we have seen, of their background, which was humanistic and English, and it was conditioned by their particular controversy with the Church of England. Simon-pure Calvinism is a much more dogmatic, anti-rational creed than that of the Congregational parsons in Massachusetts. The emigrants went to New England to prove that a state and a church erected on the principles for which they were agitating in England would be blessed by God and prosper. The source of the New England ideology is not Calvin, but England, or more accurately, the Bible as it was read in England, not in Geneva.
Though, of course, the controversy in England was a political, social, and economic one, it was also the intellectual dispute we have outlined. We might summarize it at this point by saying that in order to harmonize reason and scripture, the Anglican endeavored to reduce the doctrines imposed by scripture to the barest minimum; the Puritan extended scripture to cover the whole of existence and then set himself to prove the content of all scripture essentially reasonable. Only with this definition of origins and tendencies in mind can we read Puritan theology aright. In order to demonstrate that the content of scripture was comprehensible to reason, the Puritan theorists worked out a substantial addition to the theology of Calvinism which in New England was quite as important as the original doctrine. This addition or elaboration of the Calvinist doctrine is generally called the “Covenant Theology,” or the “Federal Theology.” There is no necessity here for examining it in detail.98 It was a special way of reading scripture so that the books assembled in the Bible could all be seen to make sense in the same way. The doctrine held that after the fall of man, God voluntarily condescended to treat with man as with an equal and to draw up a covenant or contract with His creature in which He laid down the terms and conditions of salvation, and pledged Himself to abide by them. The covenant did not alter the fact that those only are saved upon whom God sheds His grace, but it made very clear and reasonable how and why certain men are selected, and prescribed the conditions under which they might reach a fair assurance of their own standing. Above all, in the covenant God pledged Himself not to run athwart human conceptions of right and justice; God was represented while entering the compact as agreeing to abide by certain human ideas. Not in all respects, not always, but in the main. I have said that any Puritan would have subscribed to Laud’s argument concerning the authority of scripture; it is now necessary to add that if called upon to discuss the question himself, the Puritan would not go about it in the same way. He would not make a distinction between testimonies brought in from another realm of experience besides faith, between rational confirmations and the act of belief, but he would begin with scripture itself, the object of faith and the measure of reason. His principal argument for the satisfaction of the reason would be that once the Bible is believed by faith, it appears wholly and beautifully rational; it contains a consistent doctrine, that of the covenant, which makes it at once the source of belief and the fountain of reason.
To find equivalents in modern terms for the ideas we have been discussing is well-nigh impossible. To translate seventeenth-century issues into twentieth-century phrases, when they cannot possibly mean the same things, is to forego any accurate understanding of them. The results of modern historical investigation and textual criticism have made fantastic, even for those who believe the scripture to be the word of God, acceptance of it in anything like the spirit of the seventeenth century. But if we cannot find a common denominator for equating the ideas of the a id=”page_0”>Puritans with ideas of today, we may possibly get at them by understanding the temperament, the mood, the psychology that underlay the theories. If Puritanism as a creed has crumbled, it can be of only antiquarian significance to us, but if Puritanism is also a state of mind, it may be something closer home.
There is probably no admirer of Puritanism so blindly devoted that he will not find the Anglican apologists in some respects much more attractive. The richness of their culture, the catholicity of their taste, the calmness of their temper, the well-controlled judgment, the mellow piety, and above all the poetry of Richard Hooker and Jeremy Taylor are qualities which unhappily are not too conspicuous in the pages reprinted in this volume. There is an air about these men of breadth and wisdom, they do not labor under terrific and incessant pressure, they are not always taut under the critical scrutiny of an implacable taskmaster. Simple humanity cries at last for some relief from the interminable high seriousness of the Puritan code, the eternal strenuousness of self-analysis, and the never-ending search of conscience. Though it is a great mistake to think the Puritans could not forget their theology and enjoy themselves, and though Nathaniel Ward proves that they could possess a rollicking sense of humor, the general impression conveyed by Puritan writing is that of men who lived far too uninterruptedly upon the heights of intensity. Perhaps the most damning feature of their intensity was that it could become, over a period of time, as conventional and as stereotyped as worldliness itself. Thomas Shepard, telling the story of his conversion (pp. 471–472), has a vivid and living sense of the eternal presence of God, but Samuel Sewall, moralizing over God’s grace while feeding his chickens (p. 511), is at best quaintly amusing, and when he bears down with the authority of scripture on the question of wigs he becomes tiresome, as Madam Winthrop undoubtedly felt (p. 526). There was almost always an element of narrowness, harshness, and literal-minded-ness associated with Puritanism, enough to justify some of the criticisms of the bishops and some of the condemnations that have been made on the Puritan spirit in more recent times.
The strength of Puritanism was its realism. If we may borrow William James’s frequently misleading division of the human race into the two types of the “tough-minded” and the “tender-minded,” and apply it with caution, it may serve our purposes. Though there were undoubtedly men in the Church of England, such as John Donne, whom we would have to describe as “tough,” and a number of Puritans who would fit the description of “tender,” yet in the main Anglicans such as Hooker and Taylor are quite clearly on the side of the more tender-minded, while the Puritan mind was one of the toughest the world has ever had to deal with. It is impossible to conceive of a disillusioned Puritan; no matter what misfortune befell him, no matter how often or how tragically his fellowmen failed him, he would have been prepared for the worst, and would have expected no better. At the same time, there was nothing of the fatalist about him; as so often happens in the history of thought, the believers in a supreme determining power were the most energetic of soldiers and crusaders. The charge of Cromwell’s Ironsides was, on that particular score, proof positive of the superiority of the Puritan over the Anglican, and the Indians of New England learned to their very great sorrow how vehement could be the onset of troops who fought for a predestined victory. There was nothing lukewarm, halfhearted, or flabby about the Puritan; whatever he did, he did with zest and gusto. In that sense we might say that though his life was full of anguish of spirit, he nevertheless enjoyed it hugely. Existence for him was completely dramatic, every minute was charged with meaning. And when we come to an end of this roll call of characteristics, the one which yet remains the most difficult to evoke was his peculiar balance of zeal and enthusiasm with control and wariness. In his inner life he was overwhelmingly preoccupied with achieving a union with the divine; in his external life he was predominantly concerned with self-restraint. Compare, for example, these two passages from Thomas Hooker: the first in the vein of subjective rapture:
So, I would have you do, loose your selves, and all ordinances, and creatures, and all that you have, and do, in the Lord Christ. How is that? Let all bee swallowed up, and let nothing be seene but a Christ. it is with the Moone and Starres, when the Sunne comes, they loose all their light, though they are there in the heavens still; and as it is with rivers, they all goe into the Sea, and are all swallowed up of the Sea: and yet there is nothing seene but the Sea . . So let it bee with thy Soule, when thou wouldest finde mercy and grace.99
And then this admonition:
I know there is wilde love and joy enough in the world, as there is wilde Thyme and other herbes, but we would have garden love and garden joy, of Gods owne planting.100
No wonder the Puritan has been something of a puzzlement and a trial to the Gentiles. He was a visionary who never forgot that two plus two equals four; he was a soldier of Jehovah who never came out on the losing side of a bargain. He was a radical and a revolutionary, but not an anarchist; when he got into power he ruled with an iron hand, and also according to a fundamental law. He was a practical idealist with a strong dash of cynicism; he came to New England to found the perfect society and the kingdom of the elect—and never expected it to be perfect, but only the best that fallible men could make. His creed was the revealed word of God and his life was the rule of moderation; his beliefs were handed down from on high and his conduct was regulated by expediency. He was a doctrinaire and an opportunist. Truth for him had been written down once and for all in a definitive, immutable, complete volume, and the covers closed to any further additions; thereupon he devoted all the energies he could spare from more immediate tasks to scholarship and interpretation. He lived in the world according to the principles that must govern this world, with an ever-present sense that they were only for the time being and that his true home was elsewhere. “There is,” said John Cotton, “another combination of vertues strangely mixed in every lively holy Christian, And that is, Diligence in worldly businesses, and yet deadnesse to the world; such a mystery as none can read, but they that know it.” The Puritan ideal was the man who could take all opportunities, lose no occasions, “and bestir himselfe for profit,” and at the same time “bee a man dead-hearted to the world.” He might wrest New England from the Indians, trade in the seven seas, and speculate in lands; “yet his heart is not set upon these things, he can tell what to doe with his estate when he hath got it.” 101
The most serious of charges laid against the Puritans has been their supposed deficiency in aesthetic perceptions. Because they did not want men to fix their veneration upon worldly things, they had no use for sculpture, distrusted the arts when they were prized merely for their sensuous appeal, were contemptuous of the beautiful ritual and ornamentation of the Church of England. The poet George Herbert, defending the habiliment of his church against what he thought the trappings of the Church of Rome, found the plainness of Puritan worship going much too far in the other direction:
She in the valley is so shie
Of dressing that her hair doth lie
About her eares;
While she avoids her neighbour’s pride,
She wholly goes on th’other side,
And nothing wears.102
The New Model Army has incurred infamy with posterity for hacking to pieces the furnishings of cathedrals. But the asperity of the Puritan discipline and the Puritan distrust of merely sensuous beauty did not mean that the Puritan was without an aesthetic of his own, or that he was hostile to beauty. John Preston defined beauty in characteristic Puritan fashion: “Beauty that consists in a conformity of all the parts”; 103 Thomas Hooker said that sin “defaceth the beautiful frame, and that sweet correspondence and orderly usefulness the Lord first implanted in the order of things.” 104 The Puritan conceived of beauty as order, the order of things as they are, not as they appear, as they are in pure and abstract conception, as they are in the mind of God. He spoke of his church polity, his bare, crude churches, without altars or choirs, foursquare and solid, as lovely; they were so to him because they incarnated the beauty of the one polity Christ had ordained. His conception of the beautiful was, like Plato’s, the efficient order of things; in that sense, he held indeed that beauty is truth, and truth beauty, though he did not think that was quite all he needed to know in life.
When the historian thus attempts to consider Puritanism in all its ramifications, he finds himself at the end hesitating to deliver judgment upon it, or to be wholly satisfied that it has passed into the limbo of anthologies. Certainly we can look upon the disappearance of some features with no regrets, and only deplore some others where they still survive. We have had enough of the Puritan censoriousness, its tendency to make every man his brother’s keeper. When the Puritan habit of probing into the soul has degenerated into the “New England conscience”—where it is apt to remain as a mere feeling that everything enjoyable is sinful—then the ridicule heaped upon Puritan inhibitions becomes a welcome antidote. Certainly many amenities of social life have increased in New England, and in America, in direct proportion as Puritanism has receded. But while we congratulate ourselves upon these ameliorations, we cannot resist a slight fear that much of what has taken the place of Puritanism in our philosophies is just so much failure of nerve. The successors of Puritanism, both the evangelicals and the rationalists, as we survey them today, seem to have been comparatively sentimental, to have lacked a stomach for reality. The optimism and cheerfulness to which the revolters against Puritanism turned now threaten to become rather a snare and a delusion than a liberation. “Science” tells us of a world of stark determinism, in which heredity and environmental conditioning usurp the function of the Puritan God in predestining men to ineluctable fates. It is, indeed, true that the sense of things being ordered by blind forces presents a different series of problems than does the conception of determination by a divine being; no matter how unintelligible the world might seem to the Puritan, he never lost confidence that ultimately it was directed by an intelligence. Yet even with this momentous difference in our imagination of the controlling power, the human problem today has more in common with the Puritan understanding of it than at any time for two centuries: how can man live by the lights of humanity in a universe that appears indifferent or even hostile to them? We are terribly aware once more, thanks to the revelation of psychologists and the events of recent political history, that men are not perfect or essentially good. The Puritan description of them, we have been reluctantly compelled to admit, is closer to what we have witnessed than the description given in Jeffersonian democracy or in transcendentalism. The Puritan accounted for these qualities by the theory of original sin; he took the story of the fall of man in the Garden of Eden for a scientific, historical explanation of these observable facts. The value of his literature today cannot lie for us in his explanation; if there is any, it must rest in the accuracy of his observations.
The tenets of Puritan faith obstructed any clear formulation of general aesthetic theory. Puritans saw images of divine things in the world about them, and drew analogies between the beautiful objects and the perfect archetype which they conceived as existing in the mind of God. William Hubbard spoke thus:
In a curious piece of Architecture, that which first offers it self to the view of the beholder, is the beauty of the structure, the proportion that one piece bears to another, wherein the skill of the Architect most shews it self. But that which is most Admirable in sensitive and rational beings, is that inward principle, seated in some one part, able to guid[e] the whole, and influence all the rest of the parts, with an apt and regular motion, for their mutual good and safety.105
The emphasis is theological. Hubbard has in mind the “remains of God’s Image”—that is, the remnant of the regulative power which God had originally created in perfection in the human understanding by which the will is informed and directed, and the passions balanced and utilized. Beauty is the order and harmony which God established, and art is useful only so far as the exercise of it may shape man’s spirit to a better understanding of the divine purpose. Reason and emotion were given man to perceive the end for which God created the world, and if properly controlled they lead to the highest virtue. In such a scheme beauty is postulated as reason and faith conjoined; therefore to single out music, statuary, painting, drama, and the dance as subjects for considered appraisal,—to assign to such purely sensuous phenomena more than a negligible rank in the teleological scheme, would have been grossly unbefitting.
Yet within the duly proportioned framework the spoken and written word deserved considered analysis, for “The Wise Man saith, Words in season are as Apples of Gold in Pictures of Silver, or fitness of words (well tuning them) is the grace of them, and puts wheels to the Chariots to carry them to the mind. . . .”106 Nicholas Noyes gave a further clue to the Puritan approach:
Nor thine, nor thy Books credit, would I raise,
Within the gates thine own works thee shall praise
Or suffer for ‘t: For good Books now adayes
Like virtue practice need, but no man’s praise.107
Noyes’s point of view is typical of Puritan critical theory in that he does not seek to glorify literature or proclaim its laws, but rather to emphasize the fitness of a “plain style” which had been the badge of Puritan writers for a century. Even before New England was founded, the Puritans had advocated a prose, simple, clear, and restrained; fit to satisfy the reason, not charm the fancy; to instruct, not rouse the passions. “Painful” Perkins, fellow of Christ College, Cambridge, was a Puritan whose evangelical fervor made him one of the most influential leaders of New England thought. He had written, in a manual of sermonizing that was the recognized authority in New England, that “the Minister may, yea and must privately use at his libertie the arts, Philosophy, and variety of reading, whilest he is in framing his sermon: but he ought in publike to conceale all these from the people. . . .” 108 Thomas Hooker warned such of his readers as might find the manner of his discourse “too Logical, or Scholasticall, in regard of the terms” he used:
That plainesse and perspicuity, both for matter and manner of expression, are the things, that I have conscientiously indeavoured in the whole debate: for I have ever thought writings that come abroad, they are not to dazle, but direct the apprehension of the meanest, and I have accounted it the chiefest part of Judicious learning, to make a hard point easy and familiar in explication.109
Although Puritans cultivated a studied simplicity, we would stray quite from the truth if we imagined they countenanced prose that was flat and awkward. The audience helped to prevent a minister from neglecting good form, for the Puritan listener “esteemed that preaching best wherein was most of God, least of man, when vain flourishes of wit, and words were declined . . . yet could he distinguish between studied plainness, & negligent rudeness. . . .110 There were several motives which led the Puritans to develop an intentional style—one which, though plain, was reached by conscious purpose. Their ministers were not so dull as to think that careless oratory or illogical analysis would hold the respect of an educated laity, nor did they intend that the uneducated among their people should be allowed to respect a slipshod utterance. They wrote voluminously and with high dedication; the art of writing well therefore was assiduously cultivated that both the intellect and the emotions might be stirred to the fullest response. One of the greatest preachers in the first quarter of the century, Richard Sibbes, whose works were widely read in New England, enunciated one part of the Puritan theory of style in writing the preface for a fellow Puritan’s book:
But because the way to come to the heart is often to pass through the fancy, therefore this godly man studied by lively representations to help men’s faith by the fancy. It was our Saviour Christ’s manner of teaching to express heavenly things in an earthly manner; and it was the study of the wise man, Solomon, becoming a preacher, to find out pleasant words, or words of delight.111
Sibbes here reveals that the source for much that is actually dramatic in Puritan writing was the Bible,—the model which justified an indulgence in rhetorical flourishes even though plainness and perspicuity were being exalted at the expense of form and finish.
However, had the Puritan style derived entirely from Biblical models, it would have lacked the hard-driving logic, the analytical and reasoned exposition, the close-knit structure which are its distinguishing characteristics. William Ames’s textbook of theology was the standard work used at Harvard and Yale down to the middle of the eighteenth century; Ames defended the plain style, speaking both as logician and preacher, and his example influenced every sermon delivered in New England:
The drinesse of the style, and harshnesse of some words will be much blamed by the same persons [as those who object to the logical structure]. But I doe profer to exercise my selfe in that heresie, that when it is my purpose to Teach, I thinke I should not say that in two words which may be said in one, and that that key is to be chosen which doth open best, although it be of wood, if there be not a golden key of the same efficacy.112
But economy of words was not to mean ineffective delivery; the plain style was not intended to become a dull style. As Ames instructed his students on another page:
Men are to be pricked to the quick, that they may feele in every one of them that the Apostle saith, namely that the Word of the Lord is a two edged sword, that peirceth into the inward thoughts and affections, and goeth through unto the joyning together of the bones and marrow. Preaching therefore ought not to be dead, but lively and effectuall, so that an unbeliever coming into the Congregation of the faithfull he ought to be affected, and as it were digged through with the very hearing of the Word, that he may give glory to God.113
It is not fair to judge Puritan prose on the basis of the pamphlet wars engaged in by the Marprelates, or by William Prynne or John Milton, wherein too frequently the attacks are violent, the issue trivial, and the language harsh and coarse. The Puritans left to posterity a full harvest of sermons and tracts, histories, biographies, and journals. If much appears disproportionately argued or exhaustively analyzed, we have the writers’ expressed purpose to “direct the apprehension of the meanest.” The Puritan ideal might be phrased roughly in this fashion: enough rhetoric to pass through the fancy to the heart, but never so much that the apprehension of the simple or the earnest should be dazzled. Thomas Hooker pointed to the evil consequences that followed upon a too ornate sermon style:
I have sometime admired at this: why a company of Gentlemen, yeomen and poore women, that are scarcely able to know their A. B. C. yet they have a Minister to speake Latine, Greeke, and Hebrew, and to use the Fathers, when it is certain, they know nothing at all. The reason is, because all this stings not, they may sit and sleepe in their sinnes, and goe to hell hoodwinckt, never awakened.114
Many features of Puritan writing, which from a purely literary point of view might seem to be faults, were deliberately cultivated in order to achieve greater clarity or more certain effectiveness with the particular audience addressed. No doubt, too, occasional carelessness of structure in Puritan tracts can be charged to the insatiable demand for theological discussion, which sometimes betrayed a Puritan minister into offering his wares before he gave them adequate trimming. Certain sterile characteristics are common to Anglican literature as well: the pedantry of learned quotation, and the unrelieved syllogistic method. In manner also there are many similarities between Anglican and Puritan style. To the extent that any writer of the second quarter of the seventeenth century was heir to Elizabethan word-consciousness, to the flavor of the Geneva Bible—the most popular version for a hundred years—he inherited a love of figure and ornament which the King James version itself drew upon.
But there are well marked differences. The Anglican love of solemn ritual, of tradition and hierarchy is often reflected in a suavity of diction which the Puritans scorned. Furthermore, the Anglicans did not share the Puritans’ veneration for the Bible as the sole approach to the spiritual life; therefore they drew more consciously upon their classical culture and wide reading to enrich their style and vary their rhetorical effects. Anglican sermons less often attempt to convince the reason by clear logic and coherent summary than to stir the imagination. In constructing their sentences, modeled upon Latin, they strove for the harmony of Ciceronian periods—a rhetorical effect which Puritans looked upon as “more sauce than meat.” “I professe it is beyond my care to please the nicenesse of mens palates, with any quaintnesse of language,” Thomas Hooker remarks, adding: “It was a cavill cast upon Hierom that in his writings he was Ciceronianus non Christianas” 115 Anglicans unlike Puritans, made use of ornament for its own sake; they elaborated metaphors and illustrations for the purpose of enriching their prose. Let these selections, taken at random from the works of three great Anglican preachers, serve to illustrate the point: 116
And it falls out very often, that some one Father, of Strong reputation and authority in his time, doth snatch and swallow some probable interpretation of Scripture: and then digesting it into his Homilies, and applying it in dehortations, and encouragements, as the occasions and diseases of his Auditory, or his age require, and imagining thereupon delightfull and figurative insinuations, and setting it to the Musique of his style, (as every man which is accustomed to these Meditations, shall often finde in himselfe such a spirituall wontonnesse, and devout straying into such delicacies,) that sense which was but probable, growes necessary, and those who succeed had rather enjoy his wit, then vexe their owne; as often times we are loath to change or leave off a counterfeit stone, by reason of the well setting thereof.
By this meanes, I thinke, it became so generally to be beleeved, that the fruit which Eve eat was an Apple; And that Lots wife was turned to a pillar of Salt; And that Absalon was hanged by the haire of the head; And that Iephthe killed his Daughter; And many other such, which grew currant, not from an evidence in the Text, but because such an acceptation, was most usefull, and applyable. Of this number, Iudas case might be.
You see how Christs garments came to be “red.” Of the winepress that made them so we have spoken, but not of the colour itself. A word of that too. It was His colour at His Passion. They put Him in purple; then it was His weed itself, and so He made it more with the dye of His own blood. And the same colour He is now in again at His rising. Not with His own now, but with the blood of the wounded Edomites, whom treading under His feet, their blood bestained Him and His apparel. So one and the same colour at both; dying and rising in red; but with difference as much as is between His own 21s His enemies’ blood . . .
The tincture, I say, first of our sin original, dyed in the wool; and then again of our sins actual, dyed in the cloth too. Twice dyed; so was Christ twice ... So was it meet for crimson sinners to have a crimson Saviour; a Saviour of such a colour it behoved us to have . . . Yea, He died and rose again both in our colours, that we might die and rise too in His. We fall now again upon the same point in the colours we did before in the cups. He to drink the sour vinegar of our wild grapes, that we might drink His sweet in the cup of blessing. O cup of blessing, may we say of this cup! O stolam formosam, of that colour! Illi gloriosam, nobis fructuosam; ‘glorious to Him, no less fruitful to us.’ He in Mount Golgotha like to us, that we in Mount Tabor like to Him. This is the substance of our rejoicing in this colour.
Jesus Christ being taken by the Rulers of the Jews, bound and derided, buffeted and spit upon, accused weakly and persecuted violently; at last, wanting matter and pretences to condemn him, they asked him of his Person and Office; and because he affirmed that great Truth, which all the world of good men long’d for, that he was the Messias, and designed to sit at the right hand of the Majesty on high, they resolved to call it Blasphemy, and delivered him over to Pilate, and by importunity and threats, forced him against his Conscience, to give him up to be scourged, and then to be Crucified. The Souldiers therefore mocking him with a robe and reed, and pressing a Crown of thorns upon his head, led him to the place of his death; compelling him to bear his Cross, to which they presently nail’d him; on which for three hours he hang’d in extreme torture, being a sad spectacle of the most afflicted, and the most innocent person of the whole warld.
Putting aside individual idiosyncrasies for the moment, we observe certain tendencies which are common to all three selections: an eloquence which is achieved by such rhythmic periods, mannered ingenuity, grammatical subtleties, and tortuous language as rob the prose of any sense of urgency while conveying through the rich, sometimes extravagant, fancy a poetic delicacy. It seems to be the authors’ conscious aim to stir the reader through the wealth and variety of ornaments, through balance, antithesis, and alliteration, through word-pairs and verbal conceits. The Puritans, on the other hand, adopted plainness to give the application of their sermons more force and directness; there is ready use of figure in their sermons, but the intent is less to enrich the color of the prose than to vitalize the point at issue, to intensify the concreteness, or clarify the doctrine. Perhaps the four examples 117 here set forth will serve to point the case:
Learn wee then hereby, every one of us to judge our selves and our families, and to teach every person to judge themselves, as at other times, so more especially in the dayes of their humiliation, and when they come to renew their promises and vowes with their God. If David were not able to say that his house were perfect with God, what then may we say? we have not that means which he had, such Teachers to instruct us, such guides whereby we might be brought forward, neither are wee compassed about with Prophets in a land of uprightnesse; where shall we finde an house that walks with God as David did? that growes as the tender grasse, and is as the Sun without cloud? We are therefore to charge our selves with our follies and failings, and to humble our selves for them, whether it be towards God, or towards one another: wee should consider how wee are failing in the true feare of God, how subject we are to eye-service, and although wee can do little in reforming kingdomes and nations, yet we may take care for our own houses, wee may judge our selves and our families in our manifold failings, we may judge our selves for our high-mindednesse, drousinesse in good duties, for our evill slow heart to get hold of any spirituall thing, for our customary performances.
Thus you have a true, but somewhat rent and ragged relation of these things; it may be most sutable to the story of naked and ragged men: my desire is that no mans Spectacles may deceive him, so as to look upon these things either as bigger or lesser, better or worser then they are; which all men generally are apt to doe at things at so great distance, but that they may judge of them as indeed they are, by which truth they see here exprest in the things themselves. I knowe that some thinke that all this worke among them is done and acted thus by the Indians to please the English, and for applause from them; and it is not unlikely but ’tis in many, who doe but blaze for a time; but certainly ’tis not so in all, but that the power of the Word hath taken place in some, and that inwardly and effectually, but how far savingly time will declare, and the reader may judge of, by the story it self of these things.
Nor am I so Severe, or Morose, as to exclaim against this or that Fashion, provided it carry nothing of Immodesty in it, or Contrariety to the Rules of Moral Honesty. The civil Custome of the place where we live is that which must regulate in this case. But when persons spend more time in trimming their Bodies then their Souls, that you may say of them (as a Worthy Divine wittily speaks) that they are like the Cinamon Tree, nothing good but the Bark: When they go beyond what their State and Condition will allow, that they are necessitated to run into Debt, and neglect works of mercy and charity, or exact upon others in their dealings, that they may maintain their Port and Garb; or when they exceed their Rank and Degree (whereas one end of Apparel is to distinguish and put a difference between persons according to their Places and Conditions) and when the Sons and Daughters of Sion are proud and haughty in their Carriage and Attire in an humbling time, when the Church is brought low, Ierusalem and ludah is in a Ruinous Condition, and the Lord calls to deep Humiliation: This is very displeasing to God, and both Scripture and Reason condemn it. These are the most gross, and fantastical, and foolish buddings of Pride.
The Web which they [the wicked] have been for a long while in weaving, God will unravel in a moment: He will shortly muster up his Forces and draw out his Armies into the Field, and call together the Fowls of Heaven to his great Supper which he shall provide for them, where he will give them to eat of the flesh of Kings . . . Rev. 19.17. This is the work which he hath undertaken to do, and will certainly accomplish it throughly, who hath written on his Vesture, and on his Thigh, KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS. And since the case stands thus, what is there then remaining more for us to do, but to be the Lord’s Remembrancers. Not ceasing day nor night to be earnestly and importunately putting him in mind of his Covenant, his Name, and Glory? and in Faith pray to him in the behalf of his poor, despised, and abused Church, which is as a Lilly among the Thornes, that he would remember and not forget, or grow unmindful of the Congregation which he hath purchased of old, and arise to save those that are as sheep prepared to the slaughter, and appointed to dy: And when we have thus done, and in a way of so doing, there is nothing more but to sit and wait to see the Salvation of the Lord.
Let two good Puritans frame the idea in their own words— incidentally, in words embodying the very art they recommend:118
It is a good saying of one, that the Reading of many diverse heads without some interlaced meditations, is like eating of Marrow without bread. But he that shall take time to Pause upon what he reads (especially where great Truths are but in a few words hinted at) with intermixed meditations and ejaculations suitable to the matter in hand, shall find such Truths concisely delivered, to be like marrow and fatness, whereof a little goes far, and does feed and nourish much.
Those who came to New England to establish a “Plantation Religious” were gentlemen for whom a way to “truth” lay in advancement of learning, if not encyclopædic, then discriminating. The Puritan believed that any serious, intelligent work is a transcript of life, and necessary to an understanding of that life, whether conveyed by way of history, poetry, or exegesis. “Hee resolved well that said, Books and friends would I have few and choice,” said William Morton,119 and the sense of life as an art extends to the art of literary expression. A consciousness of style was present from the first,120 bred into schoolboys who did little except imitate and absorb the rhetorical exellencies of classical writers. Clearly, however, the Puritans admired the direct exposition and lucid argument of their models, not the elaborate rhetorical constructions. Roger Williams apologized to Lady Vane the Younger for “the forme and stile [which] I know will seem to this refined age, too rude and barbarous.” 121 As a group the Puritans were in revolt against the oratorical flights, the flashing rockets of Pistolese which they had doubtless observed in the writings of the late Elizabethans. Nathaniel Ward’s “world of words” was out of fashion even as he coined them. They would have seemed out of place in the writings of any preacher;—that a Puritan should affect them is curious in the extreme:
. . . when I heare a nugiperous Gentledame inquire what dresse the Queen is in this week; what the nudiustertian fashion of the Court; I mean the very newest: with egge to be in it in all haste, what-ever it be; I look at her as the very gizzard of a trifle, the product of a quarter of a cypher, the epitome of nothing. . . .122
Such glittering phrases lost caste among all Puritans after 1630, for they looked upon “high style,” with its definite conventions, as “Exotic Words” that led to “Carnal wisdome.” 123 Some who had been trained in the Anglican tradition changed their views of style as they swung over to the Puritan faith. Cotton Mather tells of the struggle which John Cotton underwent:
And that which added unto the Reputation, thus raised for him, was an University Sermon, wherein sinning more to preach Self than Christ, he used such Florid Strains, as extremely recommended him unto the most, who relished the Wisdom of Words above the Words of Wisdom; Though the pompous Eloquence of that Sermon, afterwards gave such a Distast unto his own Reverend Soul, that with a Sacred Indignation he threw his Notes into the Fire . . .
But although he had been Educated in the Peripatetick way, yet like the other Puritans of those times, he rather affected the Ramaean Discipline; and chose to follow the Methods of the Excellent Ramus, who like Justin of old was not only a Philosopher, but a Christian, and a Martyr also; rather than the more Empty, Trifling, Altercative Notions, to which the Works of the Pagan Aristotle derived unto us, through the Mangling Hands of the Apostate Prophyrie, have Disposed his Disciples . . .124
The turn to plainness was thus established in Puritan America from the beginning, and the controversies over style carried on in England were but slightly reflected in the colonies. On two occasions in particular ministers took opportunity to express opinions on literary art: The funeral sermon offered them a chance to pay critical tribute to the writings of the departed,125 and the sermon preached at the ordination of a young pastor furnished occasion to theorize on oratory and literary composition:
When instead of conveying his Ideas and Sense of Things in plain and natural Words and Expressions, the minister [makes] use of the Jargon of Logic and Metaphysics, or amuses [the auditors] with Hebrew, Greek, Latin or French Names; or soars above them in Flights of Poetry, and Flourishes of Rhetorick; or goes into the other Extream of using indecent and homely Phrases, such as savour of the Mobb or the Play-house, he gives Offence.126
Our discussion so far has been limited to theories of style in sermon literature. The Puritan historians were as scrupulous as the ministers in preserving the amenities of a plain, lucid style. Governor Bradford opened “Of Plimmoth Plantation” by saying that he is about to narrate events “The which I shall endeuor to manefest in a plaine stile; with singuler regard unto ye simple trueth in all things.” 127 The remark is characteristic of Renaissance critical theory in so far as it shows the author dedicating himself to the exposition of moral truth. Bradford’s nephew, drawing heavily upon his uncle’s work, acknowledged that he has “more solicitously followed the truth of things” than “studied quaintness in expressions.” 128 When Thomas Sprat came to write the history of the Royal Society of London, he described the practice which that body had demanded of its members. We might almost say that Sprat’s words give an official sanction to a manner of writing which the Puritans for many years had approved and adopted:
And, in few words, I dare say that, of all the Studies of men, nothing may be sooner obtain’d than this vicious abundance of Phrase, this trick of Metaphors, this volubility of Tongue, which makes so great a noise in the World. . . .
[The members of the Royal Society] have therefore been most rigorous in putting in execution the only Remedy that can be found for this extravagance, and that has been a constant Resolution to reject all amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style; to return back to the primitive purity and shortness, when men deliver’d so many things almost in an equal number of words. They have exacted from all their members a close, naked, natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses, a native easiness, bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness as they can, and preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants, before that of Wits or Scholars.129
Colonial secular writers continued to advocate the method which had been most serviceable. Daniel Gookin says that his narrative is “not clothed in elegancy of words and accurate sentences,” since, he concludes, “I have endeavoured all plainness that I can, that the most vulgar capacity might understand.” 130 It was a point of view carried into the eighteenth century with little variation.131
As expressions of critical theory passed from the rationalistic philosophers—men like Sprat, for instance—to such appreciators of literature as Dryden and Addison, and as the magazines sprang up in the first quarter of the eighteenth century to give general access to literary expression, the changes in literary fashions are reflected by Puritans. They wished to escape the criticism, now being leveled at them, that they were a provincial stock, out of the current of public taste in England, concerned merely with abstract theology. As early as 1708 Cotton Mather discourses of classical writers in the manner of the English essayists.132 When Jonathan Belcher, the governor’s son, was an undergraduate at Harvard (1725–1730), he kept in his commonplace book many pages of extracts from The Spectator and The Guardian, from Blackwall, Rapin, and Halifax on critical and aesthetic theories. They leave no doubt of the influence upon one young Puritan of the current English literary modes. Even the pious and cantankerous governor, no author himself, voiced gracious tribute to a study of belles lettres in the educational scheme of his son in the many letters he wrote to the young man who was studying law in England soon after 1730.133 After 1722 a change is observable in literary taste, brought about in part by the decreasing isolation of New England from current trends abroad. As the second quarter of the century approached, nearly all tastes that may be labeled Puritan were rapidly adapting themselves to the English modes. No work on style was exerting more universal influence than Fénelon’s Dialogues on Eloquence, wherein the archbishop of Cam-bray averred that he thought “the whole Art of Oratory may be reduc’d to proving, painting, and raising the Passions”; it should reach the heart, not merely stir the imagination.134 His point of view found ready adherents among the coming generation, and to the extent it was adopted indicates that the earlier Puritan feeling— that consciousness of style should be concealed—was undergoing change. Cotton Mather leaves no doubt that the public was developing a finicky sensitivity to style:
The blades that set up for critics . . . appear to me, for the most part, as contemptible as they are a supercilious generation. For indeed no two of them have the same stile; and they are as intolerably cross-grained, and severe in their censures upon one another, as they are upon the rest of mankind . . . There is much talk of a florid stile obtaining among the pens that are most in vogue; but how often would it puzzle one, even with the best glasses to find the flowers! . . . After all, every man will have his own stile.135
At no point does the literary thought of the Puritans reflect the trend of the times more exactly than in their views of poetry. When Milton, searching for a worthy epic theme, finally chose to write on the fall of man, he was himself but following a trail that had been already blazed. Davenant had said that poetry “is as all good Arts subservient to Religion,” 136 and Abraham Cowley, greatly admired for his learning, had begun Davideis, a sacred epic. The famous preface to Cowley’s Poems remarks that “he who can write a prophane Poem well may write a Divine one better” 137 Puritans were agreed that subjects other than moral and divine were unworthy of serious treatment. It was as inheritors of the Renaissance and of the metaphysicals that Puritans conceived of poetry as a learning or a moral philosophy directed toward the highest ends within the conception of man; and believing such, they viewed mere versifying as a pleasant accomplishment for leisure hours. The Puritans who compiled the Bay Psalm Book saying that “Gods Altar needs not our pollishing”; 138 the men who “attended Conscience rather then Elegance, fidelity rather then poetry,” 139 were in part tacitly acknowledging their inadequacy as poets, not belittling the power of verse—into which, after all, they were fashioning their thoughts. More influential and learned men than Wigglesworth had furnished precedent for his remark that he would traffic with
No Toyes nor Fables (Poets wonted Crimes) . . .
For I do much abominate
To call the Muses to mine aid:
Which is th’ Unchristian use, and trade
Of some that Christians would be Thought. . . . 140
To none of the founders would Addison’s conception of poetry as an indulgence of the imagination,—a relaxation by which we are “cheared and delighted with agreeable sensations,” have been adequate. But as fashions changed, as the bonds between the colonies and England became closer, the Puritans inevitably were affected, for they more and more reflected the trends in England. Thoughtful Puritans essayed verses often enough, and recommended poetic composition as good training for the young; but enthusiasm for poetry as a means of expressing great truths in exalted moods gave place to urbane appreciation of verse as a social accomplishment. Such a concept indicates that strictly Puritan theories were on the wane, even though the Bible remained the fountain of inspiration for some time to come. For simon-pure Puritans David ever remained the “Divine Poet” for he “derived his Inspiration not from Parnassus, but from Zion, the Mount of God.”141
It is as writers of prose that the Puritans’ literary art finally must be judged. Prose was the vehicle for their finest thoughts; it was the one by which they assisted a whole people to a realization of the powerful idiom at hand for all men to use. They were men who valued learning highly, who talked and wrote voluminously, and of whose style it may be said, as of their colleagues in England, that “while to the Royal Society must be given the honour of definitely hallmarking the new style, to the more temperate among the Puritan preachers belongs the praise of having demonstrated to large masses of the nation, learned and unlearned, the possibilities of a simple, straightforward, unencumbered prose.” 142 It is impossible, furthermore, to escape the conviction that all who wrote were conscious of the importance of style, and that most of them adhered to some model. Many left record of their theories. The ornate fashion of Samuel Lee and Samuel Chandler is as unrepresentative of Puritan theory of style as Jonathan Edwards’s youthful remark that he would scant it altogether.143 The problem of poetic composition seldom absorbed their attention, but in so far as they were gentlemen trained in the manners of their day they were alert to the changes of taste, and adapted themselves, especially in the later Puritan era, to the current modes. Prose, on the other hand, was the vehicle for their ripest thoughts and their deepest emotions. A flat, awkward, cumbrous style is rarely encountered in their treatises or sermons; the color of their rhetoric was absorbed from the world they knew about them—the sea, the market place, the moods of nature. In the hands of such men as John Cotton, Thomas Hooker, Increase Mather, or John Wise the style is seldom commonplace; frequently distinguished:—they lived in an age when devotional literature and sermons were a staple diet, when current preaching fashions were shaping literary taste. It should also be remembered that the Puritans who guided the thought of their day were never merely sectarian in their reading. The Bible was the great font of Puritan inspiration and the model for their style, yet behind the Bible was the common heritage of Renaissance learning and Elizabethan enthusiasm. The Puritans more than others shaped that learning and enthusiasm to the idiom of language with a clarity, directness, grace, and freedom from eccentricity that rendered incalculable service to English prose.
Letter of John Winthrop to His Wife. (For text, see p. 465.)
1 Wo to Drunkards (Cambridge, 1673), p. 4’
2 Cf. Kenneth B. Murdock, “The Puritan Tradition in American Literature,” The Reinterpretation of American Literature (New York, 1928), chap. V.
3 See below p. 384. In 1639, John Cotton condemned as a “false principle” the assertion ‘ that a man might sell as dear as he can, and buy as cheap as he can,” and Mr. Robert Keayne was fined £200 by the General Court and admonished by the church of Boston for making a profit of sixpence or more in the shilling (Winthrop’s Journal, ed. J. K. Hosmer [New York, 1908], I, 315–318).
4 Donne, Works, ed. Henry Alford (London, 1839), I, 278.
5 Ibid., p. 120.
6 William Adams, God’s Eye on the Contrite (Boston, 1685), pp. 6–7.
7 Donne, Works, I, 33.
8 The Heart of N-England Rent at the Blasphemies of the Present Generation (Cambridge, 1659), p. 39.
9 Paul Elmer More and Frank Leslie Gross, Anglicanism (1935), pp. 68, 84.
10 The Soules Preparation for Christ (London, 1632), p. 70; the sermons in this volume were delivered in England, so that Hooker was here speaking of the level of knowledge among the English people, which was of course much lower than among the select group that settled New England; New England Puritans were undoubtedly much more skilled in following the logic of theology, and they received a thorough and lifelong course of instruction in Sunday sermons and Thursday lectures. Even so, as Winthrop points out in describing the Antinomian agitation, the debate on the theology soon got over the heads of the many (p. 131).
11 The Anglican disposition to refrain from discussing the unfathomable mysteries of the creed before the laity was reinforced by a strategic consideration; the people enjoyed listening to highly technical discussions of subtle points and flocked to Puritan sermons for that reason. The English officials believed that Puritan sermons simply inflamed popular passions without elevating the public intelligence, and therefore endeavored to restrict the discussion of unanswerable questions. As the controversy widened the leading Anglicans turned against the theology of rigorous predestination and reprobation—which had been generally accepted by the first bishops of Elizabeth’s reign—and identified Puritan theology with the Puritan program in church and state; the effect on the Puritans was to make them all the more determined that no subject, no matter how involved, should be kept out of the pulpits, and that the people should be lifted by main force to the highest possible pitch of understanding. Particularly were they resolved that predestination should be thoroughly thrashed out for the benefit of the populace.
12 The Application of Redemption (London, 1659), pp. 89–90; these sermons were delivered in Connecticut.
13 Morison, The Founding of Harvard College (1935), p. 318; Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, p. 28.
14 Morison, The Founding of Harvard College, chap. XIII.
15 The Wonder-working Providence, ed. J. F. Jameson (New York, 1910), p. 128.
16 David Masson, The Life of John Milton (London, 1877), IV, 566 ff.
17 Joseph Easterbrooks, Abraham the Passenger (Boston, 1705), p. 3; cf. Increase Mather as early as 1677: “People are ready to run wild into the woods again and to be as Heathenish as ever, if you do not prevent it” (A Discourse Concerning the Danger of Apostacy [Boston, 1679], 2d ed., 1685, p. 104).
18 The Happiness of a People (Boston, 1676), p. 28.
19 Sermons and Discourses on Several Occasions (London, 1727), pp. 212–213.
20 Ibid., pp. 220–221.
21 Morison, The Founding of Harvard College, pp. 50 ff.
22 Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, p. 165.
23 Ibid., chaps. VII-XIV.
24 Massachusetts Records, ed. N. B. Shurtleff (Boston, 1853–1854), III, 279.
25 A Discourse Concerning the Danger of Apostacy, pp. 100–101.
26 Christ the Fountains of Life (London, 1651), p. 145.
27 For the estimation in which Plutarch in particular was held, see the commendations of Cotton Mather (p. 169) and the citations made by John Wise (pp. 260–261). There is no better way of perceiving how the lamb of classical culture could lie down with the lion of Puritan theology than by reading Plutarch’s Lives, then available to all literate men in the great translation of Sir Thomas North. Compare, for example, the Puritan theory of nature with the attitude expressed in Plutarch’s remarks in the life of Pericles on the two approaches to natural phenomena of Lampon the diviner and Anaxagoras the philosopher; Lampon interprets the discovery of a ram with one horn as a portent, while Anaxagoras splits open the skull to demonstrate a natural cause for the monstrosity; Plutarch comments that the wise man will say both were right, one finding the cause by which it was produced, the other the end for which it was designed. There could be no better statement of the Puritan theory of the concurrence of God’s determination and the secondary cause, or no better exposition of the Puritan attitude toward “divine providences.” Seneca was so congenial to the Puritan temper that scholars strained to the limit the tradition that he had been in correspondence with St. Paul and was secretly a Christian.
28 Wo to Drunkards, p. 15.
29 Jonathan Mitchell, A Discourse of the Glory To which God hath called Believers (Lon don, 1677), pp. 128–129.
30 Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Ser. 4, VII, 272.
31 Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, p. 130.
32 Among the theses defended at Harvard commencements there appear frequently “Voluntas est libera” (The will is free, e.g. 1653 Theses Physicae No. 15) and other enhancements of human ability, such as “An discrimen boni & mali à lege Naturae cognoscatur” (Whether discrimination of good and evil may be known by the light of nature, 1663 Quaestiones No. 3), “An Homo sit Causa libera suarum Actionum” (May man be the free cause of his own actions, 1669 Quaestiones No. 2) affirmed by John Richardson, “Anima Rationalis Creatur” (The soul is created rational, 1670 Theses Physicae No. 8), “An notitia Dei sit homini naturalis” (Whether the conception of God may be natural to man, 1679 Quaestiones No. 2) affirmed by Thomas Brattle, and again by Samuel Russell (1684 Quaestiones No. 6), “An Cognitio Dei sit Homini Naturalis” (Whether cognition of God may be natural to man, 1693 Quaestiones No. 5) affirmed by Joseph Whiting, “An Detur Actio humana involuntaria” (Whether there exists involuntary human action, 1704 Quaestiones No. 16) denied by Ephraim Woodbridge. (See Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, Appendix B.) These are picked at random, but they demonstrate that, along with the theological conception of man as bound in sin and dependent upon divine grace, there flourished also the conception of man as responsible, free to choose between good and evil, naturally imbued with at least the glimmerings of some good principles.
33 A Practical Commentary . . . upon The First Epistle Generall of John (London, 1656), p. 8.
34 The Happiness of a People, p. 32.
35 Morison, The Founding of Harvard College, p. 337.
36 Urian Oakes, New-England Pleaded with (Cambridge, 1673), pp. 11–12.
37 Works, I, 536.
38 An Exposition upon The Thirteenth Chapter of the Revelation (London, 1656), p. 27.
39 Cf. Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 130–131.
40 Ibid., pp. 224–251.
41 Cf. Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 185–190.
42 Ibid., p. 193.
43 Ibid., pp. 167, 168; cf. p. 721.
44 Petrus Ramus, Dialectics Libri Duo (London, 1669), p. 50.
45 Ibid., p. 22.
46 Frank P. Graves, Peter Ramus and the Educational Reformation of the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1912), pp. 145-47.
47 Hardin Craig, The Enchanted Glass (Oxford, 1936), pp. 140–146, 149–151, 156–158, 198–202.
48 Ramus’s textbook, Dialecticae Libri Duo, first published 1556, frequently republished in England, was used continuously in seventeenth-century New England, and was supplemented by his other works. The Dialecticae was published in England with a commentary by William Temple, 1584, but it was generally read by English students bound up with Commentarii by George Downame (first delivered as lectures in 1590), which provide the best text for study of the full implications of the system. It can also be read in brief form in Milton’s Artis Logicae, plenior institutio, at Petri Rami methodum concinnata, published in 1672, reprinted Works, ed. John Mitford (London, 1851), VII, 1–185, and in other editions of Milton. At Harvard Milton’s wdrk was used, and an earlier handbook, Marcus Friedrich Wendelin, Logicae institutions tironum adolescentium captui accommodatae, 1654. For versions in English the best examples are Abraham Fraunce, The Lawiers Logike, 1588, and Alexander Richardson, The Logicians School-Mastery 1657, a commentary that circulated in manuscript at both Cambridges for several decades before it was printed. However, the student of New England history can best review the system in Samuel Johnson’s Technologia Sive Technometria, a manuscript summary by Johnson when an undergraduate at Yale, and published with an excellent introduction and a translation in Samuel Johnson, ed. Herbert and Carol Schneider (New York, 1929), II, 57–95. Johnson completed the manuscript on November 11, 1714, and in a later note on the margin records that by November 11, 1715, “I was wholly changed to the New Learning,” by which he means the logic and philosophy of John Locke. Among the more conservative New England divines the Ramean logic died a more lingering death, but by the time of Jonathan Edwards’ active career it had generally expired, and with it had gone the philosophy of original Puritanism. Edwards’ Calvinism is Calvinism harmonized as far as possible with Locke; the Calvinism of early New England was colored by a totally different meta-physic. Of the general accounts of Ramus the best are still the articles in Bayle’s Dictionary or in Charles Waddington, Ramus, Sa vie, ses écrits, et ses opinions (Paris, 1855); cf. also Frank P. Graves, Peter Ramus and the Educational Reformation of the Sixteenth Century; for the influence of Ramus at Cambridge University, cf. J. B. Mullinger, History of Cambridge, II, 406–411.
49 For the impact of Plato on Ramus, see Waddington, pp. 24–27, 35; in the sixteenth century he was called “the French Plato” (Graves, p. 92). Of course the “Platonic” conception of a world built upon ideas or exempla in the mind of God was part and parcel of the Christian tradition, and Puritans held it as much because of Augustine as because of Ramus; but since they already entertained the fundamental belief, Ramus’ logic was all the more acceptable to them.
50 Cf. “Ars igitur naturam sibi propositam semper habeat, exercitatio artem” (Art therefore always pre-supposes nature, as exercise does art), Waddington, p. 368.
51 Ramus said that man has in himself naturally the power to know all things, and that when he sets before his eyes the art of thinking according to these innate universal concepts, it will show him as in a mirror the universal and generalized images of all things, so that he can then recognize by them the singular species and find a place for every thing in the cosmology, though Ramus adds that many examples, hard work, and long usage are necessary to polish the mirror before it will be able to supply the images of the universals (Waddington, p. 370).
52 Preface to James Fitch, The first Principles of the Doctrine of Christ (Boston, 1679), Sig. A2, verso.
53 “Diversorum doctrina ab omnibus praeter Ramum Logicis omissa est,” George Downame, Commentarii (London, 1669), p. 129.
54 For the scheme of opposites, disparates, and contraries, see Ramus, Dialectics, pp. 10–14; Milton, Artis Logicae, pp. 36–54; Johnson, Technologia, pp. 74–76.
55 Ramus, Dialectics, pp. 44–46; Johnson, Technologia, pp. 93–95.
56 Downame, Commentarii, p. 448.
57 It is interesting to note that the greatest of the scholastics found the assertion of this very proposition impossible to establish by rational demonstration and was con strained to rest his case with a demonstration that no arguments for the negative were any better than those for the affirmative (St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Bk. II, chaps. XXXI-XXXVIII); where the Angelic Doctor treads cautiously through many pages of his most wary reasoning, the Puritan pastor confidently rushes in to “prove” the point in a paragraph.
58 James Fitch, The first Principles, p. 17.
59 The rule of disjunction was crystallized into a number of convenient aphorisms which practitioners of the logic repeatedly cited as the ultimate in human wisdom. Thus Milton says, improving on Ramus, “Itaque ex altero affirmato alterum negatur” (Thus by the one affirmed the other is negated), or “Ex affirmatione unius, necessario sequitur negatio alterius” (From affirmation of the one there follows necessarily negation of the other), Artis Logicae, pp. 40–41. Johnson has it, “Hic etiam fictum arguet alterum verum” (For this being a fiction argues the other true), Technologia, p. 76. Samuel Willard, giving a young scholar directions for studying for the ministry, tells him that he must learn the wrong doctrines as well as the right ones, reduce all to their proper heads and ascertain their opposites; he then quotes the Ramean commonplace, “Quibus Argumentis Veritas astruitur, iisdem Falsitas destruitur” (By the same arguments with which truth is established, falsity is destroyed), Brief Directions to a Young Scholar Designing the Ministry (Boston, 1735), p. 4. How disjunction was used in actual sermons can be illustrated from Willard’s method of proving that the righteousness of Christ is merely “imputed** to the elect for their legal justification and not “infused” directly into them, as the Antinomians claimed: “That the individual and personal Righteousness of Christ cannot be infused into a Believer, is a truth so plain and necessary, that to assert the contrary, is to speak a contradiction, and therefore if it be any way ours, it must needs be imputed to us. Everyone that knows anything of the nature of things” knows that the acts of one man cannot be infused into another, but, Willard says, “on the other hand, this is a notion that is very well agreeing with common reason, that another did such a thing for this man, such as one paid a Debt for him,” A Brief Discourse of Justification (Boston, 1686), p. 65. Thus, thanks to Ramus’ doctrine of opposites and his glorification of “composite” syllogisms, the actual arbiter in New England theology, time and time again, was not Calvin, not even the Bible, so much as it was “plain and necessary truth,” the “nature of things,” or “common reason.”
60 Cf. “An Dentur Ideae innatae” (Whether there exist innate ideas), affirmed by John Whiting at the Commencement of 1703 (Quaestiones No. 2), Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, Appendix B.
61 Fitch, The first Principles, p. 15. Cf. among the Harvard theses: “Veritas est conformitas intellectus cum re” (Truth is intellectual conformity with fact, 1643 Theses Metaphysicae No. 5); “Artium praecepta sunt aeternae veritatis” (The precepts of the arts are of eternal truth, 1653 Theses Technologicae No. 3); “Utrum Detur Idaea omnium Entium in primo Ente” (Whether there exists an idea of all beings in the primary being, 1664 Quaestiones No. 2) affirmed by Nathaniel Chauncy; “Non ab artifice Ars, sed ab arte artifex creatur” (The art is not created by the artisan, but the artisan by the art, 1678 Theses Technologicae No. 13); “Idea est res percepta, proutest in intellectu objective” (An idea is a thing perceived, as it is objectively in the intellect, 1687 Theses Technologicae No. 2); “Praecepta Artium non formamus, sed formata invenimus” (We do not form the precepts of the arts, but come upon them formed, 1693 Theses Technologicae No. 5). Samuel Johnson began his summary of the system with the central doctrine of the Ramean logic: “Artem suos reflectere radios in intellectum intelligentis creaturae ab antiquissimes, ideoque cum intelligente creatura reflexum suum habere ortum manifeste apparet. . .” (It is manifest that art has reflected its rays into the intellect of intelligent creatures from greatest antiquity, and therefore has its reflex origin in the intelligent creature); he distinguishes between “art,” i.e., logic, as it exists in the mind of God, which he calls “archetypal” and describes as the idea of things decreed in the divine intelligence, and art as it exists in the visible world, which he calls “typal” and describes as manifesting itself on the one hand in the ideas impressed upon the creature and on the other in the rules gathered from the actions and operations of things by the senses, observations and experience (Johnson, Technologia, pp. 58–68). Josiah Flynt, graduating in 1664, published the almanac for 1666 and presented therein an argument similar to that already quoted from James Fitch concerning the creation of the world; here in the one publication designed for popular consumption the citizens of Massachusetts Bay were given a succinct statement of Puritan Platonism:
“. . . The Divine Idea (If I speak in the dialect of some learned and pious) being God contemplating himself as imitable in the creatures fabrick, or as it were capable to receive the impression of the Image or Vestigium of those divine perfections which were in himself; it follows that whatever perfection was eminently in God, and the creature was Analogically capable of, was according to divine wisdome expressed (for otherwise the Idea or Exemplar would not have been consentaneous to the 
)” (Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, p. 278).
Note the decisive use of disjunction in the last sentence. The irparTSfievov means roughly the achieving, the realization, the passing over of the ideal into actualization. It was this Platonic conception of a realm of eternal and pure ideas passing into realization in a realm of matter which made possible the Puritan hierarchy of values—from those of sense to those of Reason, from those of Reason to those of Faith. Thus Fitch expounded it:
“Reason in a believer is a means to let in a light and good beyond Reason, that as the senses are means to present the Reason in things to the Reason of man, although Reason is above Sense, so Reason is a means to present a divine good unto Faith, though that divine good is above Reason, but as Reason can use the Prattomenon of the Rule of Sense, (namely) that which is effected by it, so Faith can use the Prattomenon of the Rule of Reason, that which is effected by it, and yet these are distinct arts, and have distinct Objects, and distinct lights” (The first Principles, p. 4). For the philosophical significance of Platonism in the thought of the early seventeenth century, see Etienne Gilson, Études sur le Role de la pensée médiéval dans la formation du système Cartésien, especially pp. 30–36, 48, 193–201. To characterize the Puritans as “Platonists” may create more confusion than clarification, because Platonism has come to be a battleground of interpretation; yet if we accept Platonism in the definition of Dean Inge— “the conception of an unseen world, of which the visible world is but a pale copy”—we can list the Puritans in that camp. This is, of course, to say no more than that they were in the main stream of Christian tradition; in order to determine what special species of the Platonic genus we may call New England Puritanism we must consider the actual background, the modifying influences of the environment, with the “climate of opinion” in the seventeenth century, and the climate, meteorological and mental, of the new world. But it should be noted that if Puritanism is Platonic in that it was occupied with the detemporalized hierarchy of ideas, it is not that sort of Platonism that looks upon the visible world as mere illusion, utterly unreal, or absolutely evil.
62 Norton, Heart of N-England Rent, p. 6.
63 The Cuppe of Blessing (London, 1633), p. 13.
64 The Application of Redemption, p. 557.
65 Solomon Stoddard, The Danger of Speedy Degeneracy (Boston, 1705), p. 11.
66 More and Gross, Anglicanism, pp. 97–103.
67 Book II, chap. VIII, par. 5.
68 Ibid., par. 6.
69 More and Gross, Anglicanism, p. 80.
70 Ibid., p. 91.
71 Perry Miller, Orthodoxy in Massachusetts (Cambridge, 1933), chap. II.
72 Vols. IX and X of Works, under general editorship of Reginald Heber, edited by Alexander Taylor (London, 1851).
73 Taylor cites as his predecessors in this sort of divinity the work of William Perkins, William Ames, and Johann Heinrich Alsted; Perkins and Ames were English Puritans, both much read in America; Ames was intimately associated with many of the founders of Massachusetts and the book to which Taylor refers, Ames’s De Conscientia, was the Puritan manual of casuistry throughout the seventeenth century. A comparison of this volume with Taylor’s will tell the whole story of the two types of minds. Alsted was a Galvinist professor at Herborn and at Weissemburg, the author of a great encyclopedia of the arts and of a summa of cases of conscience (1628), standard works of reference in New England (Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, p. 158). The Ductor Dubitantium, therefore, is doubly interesting for our purposes, since it was written to supply what Taylor thought were the deficiencies in works which were the received authority in New England.
74 Ibid., IX, 13.
75 Ibid., p. 69.
76 Ibid., p. 41.
77 Ibid., pp. 29, 34.
78 Ibid., p. 60.
79 Ibid., pp. 67–68.
80 Ibid., p. 71.
81 Ibid., p. 74.
82 A Briefe Exposition with Practicall Observations upon The Whole Book of Ecclesiastes (London, 1654), p. 160.
83 Ibid., p. 131.
84 Works, ed. John A. Albro (Boston, 1853), II, 235.
85 Thomas Hooker, The Soules Humiliation (London, 1638), pp. 147–148.
86 Thomas Hooker, The Application of Redemption, pp. 43–44.
87 Norton, Heart of N-England Rent, pp. 12–13.
88 Samuel Mather, A Testimony from the Scripture against Idolatry & Superstition (Cambridge, 1670), p. 16.
89 Thomas Hooker, The Application of Redemption, pp. 3–4.
90 John Cotton, The way of Life (London, 1641), p. 301.
91 Thomas Hooker, A Comment upon Christ’s last Prayer In the Seventeenth of John (London, 1656), p. 88.
92 Cotton, Christ the Fountaine of Life, p. 98.
93 Works, II, 282–283.
94 Thomas Hooker, A Comment upon Christ’s last Prayer, p. 443.
95 Norton, Heart of N-England Rent, p. 13.
96 “Culpable Ignorance, or the Danger of Ignorance under Meanes,” pp. 189–216 in The Saints Dignitie (London, 1651), pp. 208–209.
97 Thomas Hooker, The Application of Redemption, p. 299.
98 Cf. Perry Miller, “The Marrow of Puritan Divinity,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, XXXII, 247–300.
99 The Soules Humiliation, p. 77.
100 The Soules Implantation (London, 1637), p. 158.
101 Christ the Fountaine of Life, pp. 119–120.
102 Works, ed. George Herbert Palmer (New York, 1905), III, 103.
103 The Mew Creature (London, 1633), p. 52.
104 The Application of Redemption, p. 59.
105 The Happiness of a People, p. 11.
106 William Hubbard, The Benefits Of a Well-Ordered Conversation (Boston, 1684), beginning of preface. Samuel Willard’s A Compleat Body of Divinity (Boston, 1726) is a compendium of orthodox Puritan theology as he had preached it in the 1680’s and 1690’s. On pp. 27–33 he gives attention to the service of rhetoric in preaching.
107 Ibid., commendatory verses, sig. A 2V and A 3.
108 William Perkins, The Art of Prophecying (Works, 1631), II, 670.
109 A Survey of the Summe of Church-Discipline (London, 1648), preface, sig. b.
110 John Geree, The Character of an old English Puritan, Or Non Conformist (London, 1646), p. 2.
111 Complete Works, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (Edinburgh, 1862), I, ci.
112 The Marrow of Sacred Divinity (London, 1643), sig. A 4/.
113 Ibid., p. 159.
114 The Soules Preparation (London, 1632), p. 66.
115 A Survey of the Summe, sig. 4V. Hooker refers to Erasmus’s Life of St. Jerome included in the Complete Works of the church father (9 vols., Basel, 1516–1520).
116 The first is John Donne, Biathanatos [ca. 1610] (London, 1646), p. 206; the second, Lancelot Andrewes, “Sermons of the Resurrection,” delivered Easter Sunday, April 13, 1623, in Ninety-Six Sermons (Anglo-Catholic library, 5 vols., Oxford, 1841–1843), III, 75, 76; the third, Jeremy Taylor, The Golden Grove (London, 1656), pp. 24, 25.
117 The first is John Cotton, The Covenant of Gods free Grace (London, 1645), p. 7; the second, Thomas Shepard, The Clear Sun-shine of the Gospel (London, 1648), p. 37; the third, Urian Oakes, New-England Pleaded with, p. 34; the fourth, Samuel Willard, The Child’s Portion (Boston, 1684), pp. 226, 227 (selection from sermon entitled “All Plots against God and his People Detected and Defeated”).
118 John Wise and Jonathan Mitchell, preface to Samuel Whiting, A Discourse of the Last Judgement (Cambridge, 1664), sig. A8.
119 Preface to John Cotton, The way of Life, opening sentence.
120 See E. F. Bradford, “Conscious Art in Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation” New England Quarterly, I (1928), 133–157; F. O. Matthiessen, “Michael Wigglesworth, a Puritan Artist,” ibid., pp. 491–504.
121 Experiments of Spiritual Life & Health (London, 1652), p. iv.
122 The Simple Cobler . . . (London, 1647), pp. 24, 25.
123 Increase Mather, The Life . . . of. . . Mr. Richard Mather (Cambridge, 1670), p. 85. See also pp. 489–496 following.
124 Cotton Mather, Johannes in Eremo (Boston, 1695), pp. 52, 53; idem, Magnolia, Bk. Ill, chap. 1, p. 15. Ramus* reform of logic was accompanied by a reform of rhetoric, in both cases in the direction of simplicity and clarity. The two studies went hand in hand, the Puritans embracing the logic of Ramus and the rhetorical principles of Ramus’ disciple, Omer Talon; while the Anglican preachers in the main clung to the traditional Aristotelian logic and scholastic rhetoric. See also Samuel Eliot Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 172–187.
125 See Benjamin Colman, The Prophet’s Death Lamented. . . (Boston, 1723), p. 32 (sermon for Increase Mather); John Barnard, Elijah’s Mantle . . . (Boston, 1724), p. 36 (sermon for Ezekiel Cheever); Eliphalet Adams, A Funeral Discourse . . . (New London, 1724), sig. K 3V (sermon for Gurdon Saltonstall).
126 Ebenezer Turell, Ministers should carefully avoid giving Offence in any Thing (Boston, 1740), p. 14. For similar ideas, see Cotton Mather, Parentator . . . (Boston, 1724), p. 215; Samuel Mather, The Life of. . . Cotton Mather . . . (Boston, 1729), pp. 33, 34; Nathaniel Appleton, Superior Skill and Wisdom . . . (Boston, 1737), p. 26; William Cooke, The great Duty of Ministers . . . (Boston, 1742), p. 7.
127 MS (ca. 1650) in Massachusetts State Library, Boston. From Facsimile, ed. J. A. Doyle, (London, 1896).
128 William Morton, New-Englands Memoriall (Cambridge, 1669), preface.
129 The History of the Royal-Society of London (1667), section XX, in J. E. Spingarn, Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1908), II, 117, 118.
130 Historical Collections of the Indians in New England (preface dated November, 1674), in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, first series, I (1792), 141–226; see also James Allen, New-Englands choicest Blessing (Boston, 1679), preface.
131 See Howard M. Jones, “American Prose Style: 1700–1770,” Huntington Library Bulletin, No. 6 (1934), pp. 115–151. See also Benjamin Colman, preface to Samuel Penhallow, The History of the Wars of New-England (Boston, 1726); Cotton Mather, Magnolia (1702), “General Introduction.”
132 Corderius Americanus (Boston, 1708), sig. A2; see idem, Just Commemorations (Boston, 1715), p. ii.
133 The Belcher Papers, 2 vols., in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, sixth series, VI, VII (1893, 1894); for example, I, 125–129, 180–187, 197–205.
134 Dialogues . . . (London, 1722), p. 74. See Thomas Prince, preface to Thomas Hooker, The Poor Doubting Christian (Boston, 1743), p. 13. In England Dennis was an advocate of emotion in the pulpit as contrasted with “correctness”; so also was Thomas Blackwall. For a recent discussion of the eighteenth-century view of the “Passions,” see “The Sublime and the Pathetic,” in Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (New York, 1935), chap. III.
135 Manuductio ad Ministerium (Boston, 1726), pp. 44–46.
136 Preface to Gondibert (1650), ed. Spingarn, op. cit., II, 48.
137 Ibid. (1656), p. 90.
138 Conclusion to preface.
139 Prefatory poem to Wigglesworth, Day of Doom, sig. xx3v.
140 Ibid., sig. Bi, B2.
141 Thomas Walter, The Sweet Psalmist of Israel (Boston, 1722), p. 2.
142 W. Fraser Mitchell, English Pulpit Oratory from Andrewes to Tilbtson (London, 1932), P. 275.
143 S. E. Dwight, The Life of President Edwards (New York, 1829), p. 601. See also John Webb’s funeral sermon for Peter Thacher, The Duty of Survivers (Boston, 1739), p. 27, for a similar opinion.
