The Puritans: A Sourcebook of Their Writings
880
The Puritans: A Sourcebook of Their Writings
880eBook
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| ISBN-13: | 9780486161051 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dover Publications |
| Publication date: | 08/18/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 880 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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The Puritans
A Sourcebook of Their Writings Two Volumes Bound as One
By Perry Miller, Thomas H. Johnson
Dover Publications, Inc.
Copyright © 2014 Dover Publications, Inc.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-486-16105-1
CHAPTER 1
HISTORY
In the 1660's and 1670's, as the last survivors of the first generation were dying off, and the ministers felt that the religious ardor of their successors was noticeably cooling, preachers before the General Court of Massachusetts frequently called for the composition of a history of New England. They hoped that a chronicle of the deeds of the fathers would arouse the emulation of the sons, and that a recital of the favors which God had already bestowed upon the colony would incite the present inhabitants to a determination to merit still more of them. They strove to arrest the general declension from the original ideals, upon which we have already commented (pp. 17–19), by adducing the testimonies of divine approbation evident in the history of the commonwealth. Thus in 1673 Urian Oakes dwelt at length upon this theme:
Hath God essayed to go and take him a part of a Nation from the midst of a Nation, by temptations, by signs, by wonders, by a mighty hand & by an outstret[c]hed arm, according to all that the Lord your God hath done for you before your eyes? God hath shewn us almost unexampled unparall[el]ed mercy. And it were very well if there were a memorial of these things faithfully drawn up, and transmitted to Posterity ... It is our great duty to be the Lords Remembrancers or Recorders ... that the mercies of the Lord (that hath allured us into this wilderness, spoken comfortably to us and dealt bountifully with us therein) may be faithfully registred in our hearts, and remembred by us. It is a desireable thing, that all the loving kindnesses of God, and his singular favours to this poor and despised out cast might be Chronicled and communicated (in the History of them) to succeeding Ages; that the memory of them may not dy and be extinct, with the present Generation.
The call for a history of Massachusetts Bay was redoubled after 1669, when Nathaniel Morton published a history of Plymouth, New England's Memoriall. The General Court at last paid the Reverend William Hubbard £50 for having composed a corresponding volume for Massachusetts, declaring, "it hath binn thought necessary, & a duty incumbent vpon vs to take due notice of all occurrances & passages of Gods providence towards the people of this jurisdiction since their first arrivall in these parts." Hubbard pocketed the money, but can hardly be said to have earned it. Neither his nor Morton's work contributed anything worth much in itself; the chief value of both books came from the fact that the authors had access to unpublished manuscripts by the two great governors of the colonies at the time of the respective settlements. Morton and Hubbard did little more than plagiarize from the History of Plymouth Plantation of William Bradford, and from the journal of John Winthrop. In spite of the ministerial demand, two of the three masterpieces of New England historiography were not printed until the nineteenth century, and the third, Cotton Mather's Magnolia, was not issued until 1701.
For our purposes, however, the important point about Oakes's paragraph is not its failure to get results, but the philosophy of history that it contains, either explicitly or by implication. He puts a somewhat exaggerated emphasis upon the use of history in arousing a lethargic generation, but even so he gives an excellent statement of what the Puritan conceived to be the function of an historian and from what point of view the narrative should be arranged. History is a memorial of the mercies of God, so that posterity may know them, remember them, and hymn His praises. The history of New England is history par excellence, for the mercies of God have been shown in New England above all other portions of the globe. History is not only philosophy teaching by example, but theology exemplified.
During the seventeenth century there was carried on in learned circles a debate between the "ancients" and the "moderns," between scholars who believed that the ancients, being closer to the date of creation, were inevitably of a stronger and more original genius than was any longer possible, and those who believed that genius could flourish as well in modern centuries as in classical. This dispute, being largely a literary one, did not much interest the Puritans, but had they taken sides in it, they would certainly have supported the modernists' contention. They would not have been swayed by a preference for modern literature over the ancient, but would have been determined by their fundamental belief in divine providence. To them all human affairs have always been under the continuous direction of God; history is the record of His incessant supervision, and there can be no real decline or fluctuation of God's power. The past is a drama, written, directed, produced and prompted by God. It must, therefore, be as full of meaning at one time as at another. The natural world, the customs of men, the abilities of statesmen, all purely physical aspects of existence do not vary in kind from one era to another: "In Civil matters there be the like manners of men now as of old; the like causes and successes of warre and peace &c. whence the knowledge of History of former times is so much behovefull." It is therefore wrong to prefer "elder times before the present." Nature has not decayed; great authors of the past are indeed to be read, but we are "not to approve all their sayings and doings, as best." At whatever moment we happen to live, God has called upon us to achieve "a wise consideration of our present times."
Consequently for the Puritan writer of history there is always a two-fold consideration determining his attitude toward his material, and sometimes the one reflection seems almost contradictory to the other. On the one hand, everything that has happened, disaster as well as triumph, the minutest event as well as the greatest, has been under divine control. God is not a being of whims or caprices, He is not less powerful at one moment than at another; therefore in a certain sense any event is just as significant as any other. But on the other hand, God regulates the universe for distinct ends; He does not work without purpose, and history should be seen as a long revelation of divine intentions. Therefore the first function of the historian is to relate everything that has happened, to exclude nothing, to erect no standards or criteria on a purely human basis. He must not sort out his materials, suppress some facts and accentuate others, because they conform to patterns he has himself constructed, such as economic interest, national characteristics, literary forms. Yet at the same time the historian is not merely to relate what has happened, but to interpret it. He must show wherein events have fulfilled God's purposes whenever the purposes can be ascertained. He must pass judgment on men accordingly as they served the divine design. On the first score he is not to exploit personality for the sake of personality, as the modern biographer does, but on the second he is to estimate all men from the one absolute standard, as Bradford estimates his dear friend Elder Brewster, or as Cotton Mather does John Eliot. Because every minutest happening, every fortune of war, every chance coincidence, is arranged by God, the Puritan historian does not elide minor incidents or incidental stories if their meaning is clear. In the midst of telling the broad movements or major crises he can always stop, as Bradford does, to relate "a spetiall work of Gods providence," and John Winthrop, putting into his Journal the material he intended ultimately to use in a formal history, finds that the rescue of the wife of one Dalkin, "dwelling near Medford," by clinging to her dog's tail, is intrinsically as important as the whole episode of the Antinomian turmoil. In reading histories of Puritan authorship it is necessary that we always remember the vast difference between their intentions and those of modern writers. The Puritan would feel that the points of view assumed by a twentieth-century scholar are determined solely by the writer's place in time and space, and therefore temporary, fallacious, and partial. Yet where the modern researcher feels bound to tell all the facts, not to generalize before exhaustive investigation, the Puritan has no hesitancy in sifting his material, placing emphases, omitting facts, generalizing upon any single piece of evidence, interpreting every action by one explicit standard. The guiding principle of his art is the extent to which anything can be made to illustrate clearly the operation of God's will. The contemporary historian would stress the economic and social inducement for the migration to New England; Thomas Shepard is concerned only with showing that in 1630 God Himself was engineering the opportunity and thereby ordering men to seize upon it.
Consequently two distinct characteristics reveal themselves when we come to the study of Puritan historiography. In the first place, the art of history, as practiced by Puritans, is bound to be specific and concrete, bound to stay close to the particular happening and episode; it is apt to be anecdotal, for the design of the whole is the will of God, which always emerges of itself if each step of the procedure is adequately noted and interpreted. In the second place, it is also a didactic art; nothing is to be told for its own sake alone; if any portion of history yields no meanings, it is either to be presented as a problem yet to be solved, like some obscure passage in scripture, or else it is to be ignored entirely. Above all, no explanations which rest merely upon natural or secondary causation, on mere economic motives, political expediency, accidental circumstance, the character of this or that man—no such explanations are to be accepted as final. God's will is the ultimate reason why things fall out one way rather than another, although God does work through natural causes; His will is intelligent, and the task of the historian is to discover, as far as the evidence will permit, the conscious and deliberate direction which lies behind all events.
Puritan history was posited upon the assumption of an eternal sameness in things, their perpetual control by the same agency for the same ends. Yet there was no denial that surfaces varied from age to age, that if the essential configurations were identical, the particular manifestations could show a vast difference from one century to another. The unity within variety for which Puritan thinkers sought in all other fields of speculation and study was also the objective of the Puritan historian, and he, not less than the theologian, strove not to lose sight of the one in the many or to over-simplify the particulars in establishing the universal. Thus John Cotton explained the historical process:
The principal cause of all passages in the world: which is not mans weaknesse, or goodnesse, but chiefly the wise and strong and good providence of God: who presenteth every age with a new stage of acts and actors ... And if a Poet would not present his spectators but with choyce variety of matters, how much lesse God?
So New England chroniclers had first to demonstrate that their narratives exemplified once more the eternal and immutable regulations of providence, and then to indicate the particular and individual character of their own age. And when they came to this latter consideration, they explained history by what they believed to be the all-engrossing concern of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Reformation. Though all ages are under God's government, and one age should teach as much about him as any other, or equally exhibit his majesty, still some ages achieve greater exhibitions of his power than less fortunate ones. Next to the period in which Christ himself had lived, the Puritans believed that the hundred years since Luther nailed his theses on the cathedral door at Wittenberg were the most fraught with meaning of all human history.
Truth is the Daughter of time, was the saying of old, and our daily experience gives in evidence and proof hereof, to every mans ordinary observation. Only as in other births, so here, the barrennesse and fruit-fiillnesse of severall ages, depend meerly upon Gods good pleasure, who opens and shuts the womb of truth from bearing, as he sees fit, according to the counsell of his own will.
Not that there is any change in the truth, but the alteration grows, according to mens apprehensions, to whom it is more or lesse discovered, according to Gods most just judgement, and their own de-servings.
Clearly the Protestant movement had come about because men's apprehensions had been enabled to discover more of the truth than at any time since the Apostles; and as the Reformation was a continuous movement away from the Church of Rome toward the pure discipline established by Christ, the pure doctrine taught by scripture, and the society built, politically and socially as well as ecclesiastically, upon divine enactments, New England was the culmination of the Reformation, the climax of world history, the ultimate revelation through events of the objective toward which the whole of human activity had been tending from the beginning of time. Winthrop preached to the emigrants during the voyage that the eyes of the world would be upon them, that they would be as a city set upon a hill for all to observe (p. 199); Captain Edward Johnson imagined that Christ himself had drawn up the "commission" for the migration; Cotton Mather modestly admitted that the churches in New England were not perfect, but that they were the best the world had yet achieved. The inspiration for the writing of histories by pious New Englanders was consequently twofold: not only to exhibit the truth as shown in the course of the world under God's providence, but to establish the climax of that course in the Reformation, of which New England was the supreme and purest embodiment.
Of course, there were many persons in the world, particularly in England, who did not agree with the New Englanders' idea of their own importance. The Anglicans naturally would not believe that any form of Puritanism was the logical result of the Reformation; Puritans who believed in the Presbyterian rather than the Congregational polity said all the discreditable things they could think of concerning New England, the soil, the climate, the inhabitants, and the practices; those Puritans who turned eventually to a philosophy of toleration attacked the New England Way for its tyranny and cruelty; Puritans who stayed at home to fight the King accused their brethren in America of having run away from danger. In order to maintain their view of history, with their contention that it had come to a peak in their own experiment, New England historians had to present the story of settlement and conquest, of ecclesiastical triumph and political institution, as they saw it. And sometimes the spokesmen for New England did not have time to tell the whole story, but were forced to take up their pens in answer to specific charges and to plead special cases against the particular reproaches.
In the selections given in this chapter there are examples of both formal history and occasional polemic. Higginson's pamphlet was sent back from Salem, to which an advance guard of the Massachusetts Bay Company had gone out in 1629; it was an advertising tract defending the region from the charge of being a barren desert, made against it by enemies of the enterprise. There are some respects in which Puritans writing about their own history are amazingly impartial; since they viewed whatever had happened as God's doing, they could suppress or twist facts only by running the danger of blaspheming God's work. But in the heat of controversy, or to score a point against mortal adversaries, they were strongly tempted to exaggerate, to put the best possible face on some rather dubious matters. Those who have lived in and with the climate of New England may very justifiably feel that good parson Higginson allowed his enthusiasm to run away with his judgment on that score. Thomas Shepard and John Allin wrote their book in direct answer to an attack upon the New England churches. In the late 1630's a group of Presbyterian Puritans had sent over a list of nine embarrassing questions concerning ecclesiastical practices. John Davenport had been commissioned to answer them, which he had done in the name of the ministers and the elders; in 1643 his manuscript was published in London, and because just at that moment the furious controversy between English Independents and Presbyterians was flaring up, Davenport's work was assailed with unanimity by the Presbyterians. One of these, John Ball, was an author much read and admired in New England for his theological writings, and his attack upon the New England church polity was exceedingly distressing to the ministers; Shepard and Allin were commissioned to reply to Ball's attack upon Davenport's answers to the original nine questions—thus did religious controversy lengthen out from book to book in the seventeenth century. Ball not only assailed the form of church organization, but raised the cry that those who fled to New England were deserters, that they had been afraid to stay in England and fight the good fight. The preface to the book, probably written by Shepard alone—for it has all the marks of his very individual style—reviews in masterly fashion the history of the settlement, and is perhaps the best surviving statement in their own terms of the intentions of the Massachusetts leaders.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents
Volume I,GENERAL INTRODUCTION,
I. The Puritan Way of Life,
1. The Puritan in His Age,
2. The Spirit of the Age,
3. Puritan Humanism,
4. The Essential Issue,
5. Estimations,
II. The Puritans as Literary Artists,
Chapter I HISTORY,
Chapter II THE THEORY OF THE STATE AND OF SOCIETY,
Chapter III THIS WORLD AND THE NEXT,
Volume II,
Chapter IV MANNERS, CUSTOMS, AND BEHAVIOR,
Chapter V BIOGRAPHIES AND LETTERS,
Chapter VI POETRY,
Chapter VII LITERARY THEORY,
Chapter VIII EDUCATION,
Chapter IX SCIENCE,
NOTES,
BIBLIOGRAPHIES,
INDEX,