STEPHEN FOSTER 
The Godly in Transit: English Popular Protestantism and the Creation of a Puritan Establishment in America
THE literature dealing with the Puritans has become so extensive and so articulated that new studies generally seem obliged to open with a formulaic abjuration of all previous historiography. Those who came before are generally held to have done what they did very well after their fashion but to have done it for far longer than it needed doing. The work in hand can then be justified as at last breaking fresh ground after so much entirely forgivable but as yet unredressed overemphasis on this or that aspect of a topic complex by definition. Since in the present essay the subject is the religion of the more ordinary sort of English laymen who migrated to New England, the appropriate act of renunciation might appear to be the avoiding of any and all clerical perspectives on the assumption that these have for too long been taken as the only possible concerns of the whole Puritan movement. And there is much to be said for such a tack, provided it is not pursued too aggressively: it is certainly valuable to bear in mind that the fascination that some historians find in what one minister said to, or in refutation of, another minister is no evidence in itself that the contemporary laity also found the matter nearly so compelling. Acts of naive anticlericalism, however, now as then, can be self-defeating. The current debate over the vitality and relevance of Puritanism in America, for example, pays a curious tribute to the continuing clerical hegemony even as it denigrates the influence of the ministry. The method of attack on the problem (what, if anything, did Puritanism mean to to the mass of the New England population) seems to have been to examine the laity primarily with a view to gauging the extent to which they heeded clerical shalt-nots. When one has identified a sufficient incidence of quarrelsomeness, fornication, acquisitiveness, or whatever to be considered a critical mass, modernity is declared to have begun and Puritanism and the study are over. The impulses that made the godly choose godliness, the things they hoped to get out of Puritanism, and their degree of fulfillment or frustration are not matters much looked into in this discussion precisely because the rather imperial perspective of the pulpit is still the one that has been unhesitatingly assumed in defining Puritanism, if only to locate the precise moment of its demise. In place of that familiar picture, beloved of bookjackets, of the laity as a mass of eagerly upturned heads grouped around a massive pulpit from which the larger head of the preacher peers down, we now have one where at one point or another the little heads are all turned away, not listening. The outsized pulpit remains squarely at the center, and the laity are still not in focus.
If scholarship does need to shed the constraints of Geneva black, it will not accomplish this difficult feat by ignoring the clergy but only by seeing them for what they were, dynamic, interacting components with the laity in a single protean movement. Properly forewarned, there is actually considerable value in beginning our inquiry with what the clergy had in mind for the laity. Popular religion in England and America was not passively dependent on clerical discourse, but neither was it wholly autonomous, and the clerical programs at least have the advantage of specificity when compared with the more diffuse nature of lay initiates. The proverbial vicarage window is a better place than most to make a start in understanding so intricate and varied an entity as Puritanism, providing always that one remembers to look through it from both sides.
The vicarage selected is Dedham, Essex, in the 1580’s, a prime center for the classical organization at the height of Elizabethan Presbyterianism. At full cry, unrestrained by temperamental or tactical moderation, the Elizabethan Puritans eerily anticipate their equally uncompromising Puritan successors on both sides of the Atlantic in the next hundred years. In particular, a classic Presbyterian text, the Dedham “orders” of 1585, sets down in one place a scheme that might have served as a blueprint for a large fraction of the edifice gradually erected in New England over the course of the latter part of the seventeenth century. Drawn up on 9 August 1585 as a proposed agreement between the two ministers of Dedham and the “Auncients of the congregation,” very evidently at the instance of the former, the orders were accepted on the 20th of October in “a profession freely made by the voyces and handes” of the town’s nine leading inhabitants. The signatories undertook to “joyne together” to enforce a comprehensive set of fifteen articles requiring the cooperation of church and town governors at every stage for “the observation and mayntenance of all christian order,” and for “the banishing of the contrary disorder.” Several of the articles merely make an attempt—not a very successful one in the end—to bring a semblance of decorum to the chaos of Elizabethan parochial worship. (One can gain some slight sense of the problem from the work of a Puritan minister belonging to the Bury classis, the northern neighbor of the Dedham meeting, who composed an authoritative treatise on the sabbath in which he was obliged to devote pages to persuading the worshippers not to bring their hunting hawks in to the church during the service.) To give direction to the newly methodized religious life of the community other orders appointed that the sacrament be administered monthly and that this new communion Sunday should become the focus for disciplining the townspeople in systematic Christianity. On the Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday before communion “maryed persons or householders” would repair to church at six in the morning to be examined in their Christian knowledge, while the Dedham youth came in for the same treatment on Saturday afternoon. (These educational arrangements were fleshed out in further articles dealing with compulsory catechising of the youth and with the householders’ obligation to attend the two weekly lecture sermons with as many of their servants as could be spared from their work.) On Sunday, at the communion itself, the churchwardens were to take a collection for the poor, “after the cuppe be delyvered,” while making sure that the communicants “sytte orderly and comly in their places,” presumably to prevent them from walking out on their charitable duties. And on the Tuesday following the two ministers and the “auncients” would meet “to conferre of matters concerninge the good government of the towne.”
No less than seven of the fifteen articles explain the meaning of good government in the Puritan sense. Two dealing exclusively with the poor are as concerned with reformation as with relief. In proportion to their abilities the townspeople were to invite to their houses “such of their poore neighbors as have submitted themselves to the good orders of the Churche, and walke christianly and honestlie in their calling.” Additionally, the two ministers and a few of the ancients, “alwaies accompanied with one of the constables,” will make quarterly inspections of the poor, “and chiefly the suspected places, that understandinge the miserable estate of those that wante and the haughtie disposition of disordered persons, they may provide for them accordinglie.” Another two articles envision a fully literate Dedham: all the young will be taught to read (the poor at public expense), and any new illiterates will be kept from settling in town by an agreement among the ministers and the “governors” of families to employ only apprentices already able to read. Still other forms of disorder were to be remedied by providing a special ceremony of public humiliation to be added on to the wedding and baptismal services of couples known to have been guilty of prenuptial fornication and by an agreement to force out of town unattached individuals who were neither responsible for themselves by virtue of possessing a household or honest calling nor “retayned of any” who might undertake their edification and discipline.
The one remaining article, the eighth in order, will look especially familiar to students of the New England town. On top of knowledge and virtue, admission to communion was going to require a pledge of love and harmony:
8. Item, that so many as shalbe admitted to the Communion promise and professe to live charitablie with all their neighbors, and if any occasion of displeasure arise, that they refraigninge from all discord or revenging by wordes, actions or suites will firste make the mynister and two other godlie and indifferent neighbors acquaynted with the state of their causes before they proceed further by lawe or compleint out of the towne.
With only a slight change in wording and none whatever in substance, item eight might be the third term of the town covenant of Dedham, Massachusetts, in 1639. However, the context reveals the significance of the item (and of similar proposed arrangements elsewhere in the same period): so far from representing peasant communalism in Protestant guise, compulsory mediation was very much the opposite. English villagers playing their favorite and time honored game of deadly malice against their neighbors were not fit members of the body of Christ by anyone’s standards, Puritan or otherwise, and should be kept from communion until reconciled, though, in any case, they often refused themselves to share the sacrament with their enemies while the recurring cycle of feuding was going on.
Far more interesting than any one article is the concept of order affirmed by all of them jointly. For Dedham to achieve godliness by Elizabethan Puritan standards every available form of institution, civil and ecclesiastical, would have to be employed, and in a coordinated manner. At the root of this enduring Puritan obsession was a severely guarded optimism about human nature. “Great and dillegent teaching” would be necessary “because men are made of dull metal and hard to conteine spirituall and heavenly things.” Nevertheless, the perverse heart of man could be reached, bringing salvation for the elect and at least a degree of external decency for the rest, but only by a systematic and continuous assault on all fronts. Most of the elements of the projected Puritan machine are already in place in the Dedham orders: literacy, charity, voluntary regimentation, drill and discipline, as well as the exclusion of the uncontrollable and an extra dose of the universal supervision for the suspect class, the poor. Later generations of Puritans would have found that the Dedham orders, and the various schema of the Elizabethan Puritans in general, struck a relatively one-sided balance between order and love and between participation and regimentation. As the size, autonomy, and reputation of the godly grew, a more equal emphasis would fall on these competing motifs. All of the townspeople would sign the Dedham, Massachusetts, covenant and they would do their godly walking in the name of love as well as of obedience. But in broad outline the Dedham Orders do represent the continuing hopes of the Puritan clergy for the complete reformation of England and the cause supported by their patrons and allies among the landed classes and the urban and parish oligarchies.
It is a vision that might aptly be termed (after Harriet Beecher Stowe) a culture trap—a “plenitude of means” so extensive, subtle, and overlapping that its intended quarry could hardly avoid becoming entangled in some of them and probably, sooner or later, in all of them. Admitting, therefore, that this official style of Puritanism envisioned an austere and comprehensive regimen that even its proponents candidly conceded to be opposed to the natural inclinations of the individuals for whom it was designed, we confront at once our major poser: how did the Puritan movement ever obtain any substantial number of adherents? One possible response—and a good one—is that “adherents” is hardly the appropriate term for the victims, of what was, in effect, a simple exercise of power by their betters. Anyone who has ever dealt with the realities of the seventeenth century will be well aware that England was no more a free marketplace for ideas than the New England that whipped Baptists and hanged Quakers. Quite apart from brutal instances of the application of public and private coercion to decide the matter of religious “preference,” in England, at least, and perhaps more than we realize in America, a fragile society inevitably depended on a regular basis on more insidious and persuasive forms of compulsion in matters of faith. No doubt, for example, the tenants of Groton manor found John Winthrop’s profession to suit their constitutions very well while he held possession of the lordship and patronage of the living. Like just about everything else at the time in the English speaking world, grace often flowed along the lines of blood and clientage. But when due allowance is made for the force of convenience, there were still enough individual mavericks in both England and America and enough wholesale disruptions in both places to demonstrate that there was some degree of freedom left when every agent of necessity had done its work. As a matter of fact, any number of first generation New Englanders could testify that it had not been convenient, that it had cost them a little something to be a Puritan. “Hence I came to New England,” a Suffolk mason named Nicholas Wyeth recalled, “being persecuted and courted for going from the place where we lived” in order to “hear them that were most suitable to my condition to stir up my heart.”
The godly in England had perfectly good grounds from their own experience for thinking themselves something more than fish caught in the ministry’s net. In their own estimation they were at once the saving remnant preserving the spark of the gospel in an unregenerate society and, simultaneously, participants in a gigantic national experiment employing the combined resources of a godly state and a Protestant religious establishment to raise the state of civility and Christianity of the English nation beyond the merely nominal. Such allegiance as the clergy was able to drum up came from their understanding of the ambivalence of lay piety and their ability to use their own uncomfortable vision to mediate between the conflicting imperatives. When the distinctive, Janus-like culture of the Puritan colonies came to take on a recognizable shape towards the end of the seventeenth century, the triumph was in one sense very much the clergy’s, their Dedham orders writ large. Yet the matured New England Way was also very much the expression of the forces that originally gave the Puritan movement its popular following: an integral combination of separation from and engagement with the England of their day. For us, looking back from the other side of a great historical divide, the laity’s motivations may seem a union of irreconcilables and their partnership with the clergy a misalliance. But if the double thrust of lay piety is examined in a little more detail, its apparent paradoxality resolves itself into a perfectly natural response to a particular set of historical circumstances, and the essential Englishness of the subsequent Puritan establishment in the colonies emerges quite clearly.
Part of the popular attraction of Puritanism (the more obvious part) lay in its minority position. The poor and persecuted people of God, as Nicholas Wyeth and Edward Wiggleworth held themselves to be, enjoyed all of the emotional power of a Christianity that harked back to the struggling apostolic church before the conversion of Constantine. Admittedly, for the church under the cross the Puritan movement boasted too many beneficed ministers in its ranks, not to mention MPs, J.P.’s, and armigerous gentlemen generally. But in the age of the Reformation Protestantism carried a price, actual and potential. For the first Puritans especially, the Marian persecutions were a recent experience that some of them had endured personally, while the memory of the exiles and the victims of those five years was kept alive long after in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. A return of Catholicism seemed a real enough possibility throughout the reign of Elizabeth, and the menace loomed up once again in the 1630’s and early 1640’s in the fear of the “moderate popery” of the Laudian bishops and of a Spanish or Irish invasion. Even in more confident times, Puritanism often attracted a following in the areas, particularly in the north of England, where the Catholics continued to hold their own, open recusancy encouraging the most forward form of Protestantism in response. For example, the Lancashire of Richard Mather, founder of the American clerical dynasty, was the Northern Ireland of the early seventeenth century: in sections of the county where both groups were strong they jockeyed for control of the pulpits and the schools, alternating lawsuits with other forms of harassment and occasionally resorting to outright violence. Mather himself recalled that the Protestant schoolmaster of his native Winwick Parish successfully intervened to prevent his parents from apprenticing him to Catholic merchants on the grounds “that he should be undone by Popish Education.” After Mather left the parish to minister to “the Holy Land” of Toxteth Park, a Protestant citadel in the recusant haven of west Lancashire, the nomination of a leading Puritan to the Winwick rectory in 1624 set off a riot between the nominee’s supporters and partisans of the candidate of the local Catholic gentry. Winwick, however, turns out to have been a prize worth fighting over: the schools of the parish were a center for preparing would-be ministers like Mather for entering the universities and for training teachers for the whole of Lancashire.
More often, however, the Christian warfare was a diffuse sort of guerrilla skirmishing between the godly and the “vulgar” or the “multitude.” These very terms for their non-Puritan neighbors reveal well enough how the chosen few felt themselves alone in a hostile sea of indifferent formalists and practical atheists who lacked the conviction even to be papists but who could “persecute” the godly with enthusiasm all the same. Visible religious differences always provided a marvelous means in England, just as they one day would in America, for organizing and perpetuating local quarrels. The causes of the disputes were as varied as the locales in which they took place, but the forms of conflict were monotonously similar. Puritan preachers routinely encouraged their hearers to turn from the wicked, and the saints, in their turn, were often drawn to one another anyway for mutual comfort and edification. Puritan “singularity,” therefore, meaning an affected clubbing together of pious hypocrites too proud to fraternize with any but their own kind, became a favorite theme in the manifold forms of harassment and defamation by which feuds at close proximity were generally carried on. One Sussex man had to bring suit in the Star Chamber of 1632 because in a rhymed ballad (to the tune of “Tom O’Bedlam”) circulating in the Rye alehouses he was described as a member of “the holie Brotherhood” who used the pretext of private religious conferences for sexual affairs, while “soe holie he is, that he will speak to noe bodie he meets.” Another of the brethren, a Surrey man this time, who migrated to Massachusetts in 1638, reported that at home in England upon his being “much affected” with a sermon against drunkenness and forsaking his tippling companions for “private societies of saints,” he “found communion with God and His people so sweet that I resolved against ill company and hence was hated.”
Such bitter relations were only to be expected. Explaining “this great fray in the world betwixt God’s children and world[ly] ones,” Paul Baynes in his popular commentary on Ephesians attributed the root cause to guilty consciences:
they nickname these [saints], persecute them so far as they dare. Why? Because that the lives of the godly do control [reprove] them, this it is that breadeth the hatred, great estrangement.
And providing the conflict stayed at the level of an occasional nuisance, there was comfort to be found in persecution. An ordinary individual was given importance by his neighbors’ hostility, and a weak Christian had his faith affirmed by opposition. Edward Shephard, a Yorkshire sailor come to New England, described himself as happiest at sea, isolated among his reprobate shipmates, because “the Lord kept me with a heart desiring to follow him in the use of means. But when I came here [to New England] and not seeing the need and necessity of the Lord I thought myself miserable.”
Before expending too much sympathy on these suffering brethren, one should always recur to the example of another North Country man, the nonconformist minister Adam Martindale, who took a special pride late in life in recounting his youthful skill with the quarter-staff. As individuals the saints probably gave as good as they got. But they were also in need of powerful official protection to shore up their legal vulnerabilities. In an age when most prosecutions originated with informers the vulgar were perfectly capable of carrying the infighting into the church courts or occasionally before ordinary criminal tribunals. In his best selling allegory The Isle of Man, Richard Bernard described this sort of harassment through the character of “Mr. Outside,” a formalist who attended sermons without listening:
This fellow cannot abide any after [sermon]-meditation, or Christian conference with others of that which he hath heard; and if he espie any meeting together for this purpose, then he maketh information against them, and is ready to send the Hue and Cry, as against privie Schismatically conventicling, and unlawfully meeting.
A collection of twenty-four “Common Grevances Groaninge for Reformation” that originated in Jacobean Suffolk put the matter more tersely: grievance number four is entitled simply, in block capitals, many unjustly traduced for conventicles. From as early as 1585 onwards, the characteristic Puritan meetings for “repetition” of sermons, scriptural conferences, or fasting and prayer all potentially fell within the definition of a “conventicle.” Oliver Hey wood’s evocation of the “warm spirit of prayer” at conventicles in Lancashire in the 1630’s “in the heat and height of the Bishop’s tyranny over godly ministers,” like the similar recollections of Nehemiah Wallington of the “praying year” (1640) in London, and of Joseph Lister of the harassment of the godly in Bradford, Yorkshire, about the same time, all bear testimony to the pleasures of suffering in moderate amounts, and especially to the thrill that came with being able to identify with the earliest Christians as besieged knots of the faithful scattered across a heathen landscape.
When the Civil War finally took the lid off, longstanding enmities, brought to a head in the decade of the 1630’s, could finally be paid off with interest. The bishops took their share of knocks from the London mobs, but elsewhere it was just as likely to be the saints, a self-confessed remnant, who were at the mercy of those of the multitude with old scores to settle.
Take the case of John Trumbull, a mariner who eventually found his way to Massachusetts. Living originally in some unnamed English place without a preaching minister or a local group of saints, he was, in his own words, a man who regarded “nothing but back and belly and fulfilling my own lusts.” His initial breakthrough came only after he put to sea, when having accepted a copy of Arthur Dent’s Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven, solely to practice his reading upon it, he was accidentally taken with its substance and pressed on with Dent’s A Sermon on Repentance. Like Adam and Eve, Trumbull all at once understood his own nakedness—“so saw my misery,” as he laconically put it. Accordingly, he moved “to a place where the means were twice,” that is, where he could hear a Sunday sermon and a weekday lecture, and the usual internal struggle ensued. He was frustrated by his own weaknesses and tempted by former friends and other carnal men who ridiculed the saints, but eventually he did manage to fall into godly company and profit by the experience. It was another voyage, however, that sealed his conversion: putting into London, he was brought over by hearing Obadiah Sedgwick, the lecturer at St. Mildred’s Bread Street, explain the difference between hypocrites and true believers, and while further doubts and difficulties inevitably ensued, his fate was effectively secured. Welcomed into the ranks of God’s people, he travelled with them to New England to a respectable position in Cambridge and Charlestown society and a place at the head of an American family tree.
Trumbull may seem a little unusual in having been saved by going to sea, but it was seaborne commerce and the contacts it brought that represented for him a peculiarly literal link with a universe beyond the nameless place without means of his early life. What he glimpsed in the Puritan message conveyed by tract and preacher was a vision that made his previous experience seem ignorant and aimless, a vision that represented his only real contact with any form of high culture. If he was alienated from old comrades and old haunts, he was inducted into a brotherhood national in scope and little short of cosmic in orientation. Less dramatically, perhaps, but for much the same reasons, thousands of others made the same choice: by so choosing they simultaneously set themselves apart from ordinary Englishmen, still intensely local and bounded in their loyalties, and made themselves part of the great struggles of the English nation and Protestant Christianity. Inward looking and self-concerned as they may have been, the little societies of the godly flourished best in these locations most closely tied to the national culture.
The perfect Puritan location is easy to envision, and it would be anything but an isolated Arcadia: the “plenitude of means” by which men were saved cost money and required extensive outside contacts. In the Utopia of the godly, a painful learned minister on an adequate stipend would reside on the site, a grammar school would be nearby, the closest member of the gentry would be a well-affected justice who suppressed enormities and patronized promising young candidates for the ministry. Not far away could be found a flourishing market town, located, preferably, on some major trade route and supplied with an endowed weekly lecture, a stationer, and, in general, some kind of continuous sampling of what was going on out there, however much filtered through Puritan lenses.
Some indication of the way these activities fused theological and political concerns can be gleaned from the instance of the man who eventually led the migration to Connecticut, Thomas Hooker, while he served as a lecturer at Chelmsford in Essex in the late 1620’s. By the admission of his admirers, Hooker was “a great inquirer after News,” although not, we are assured, “out of Athenian curiousity, but christian conscientiousness, to sympathise with the church of God.”
In the Elizabethan period the intimate link between participation and separation was palpable enough. An Englishman who took up the cause of the international Reformation was by definition a member of a distinct and often testifying minority in his own country. After the collapse of the Presbyterian movement, as overt militancy subsided and a broad Protestant consensus apparently took hold among all parties, the crucial duality is less immediately apparent. Later generations of Puritan ministers seem on the face of it intent mainly on rapproachment with their church and society. Unable to obtain the single Discipline of the Elizabethans, they substituted the multitude of lesser disciplines that came to be known as practical divinity. Through the use of devotional literature, conference, household religion, the neo-Hebraic sabbath, and the private fast they elaborated an interlocking set of routines designed to turn the believer’s simple intellectual assent to doctrine into “operative knowledge” (active, self-generating profession).
In the nature of things the spiritual pilgrimages the clergy hoped to guide often ended up as self-directed adventures. In the long maturation period from weak to strong Christian a believer still unable to apply the promises of scripture personally often ended up acting a bit like a classic valetudinarian whose chronic disease has become an absorbing passion quite independent of the physicians consulted. In the conversion narratives this or that wounded soul drags around from sermon to sermon, listing the key texts but generally leaving the various ministers who preached on them anonymous. So, Alice Stedman, from somewhere in the London area, found herself convicted when very young “by a godly minister,” subsequently had fears about her estate and “went to London to a minister” who convinced her she rested on mere duties, underwent a further course of sermon hearing “in the country,” and on and on … hers is one of the more interminable of the relations endured by Thomas Shepard in gathering his Cambridge church.
For those caught up in its regime, practical divinity, like so many other aspects of Puritanism, had become both an invitation and an estrangement. The prescribed experiences virtually required abandoning earlier acquaintances for the continued company of saints, with whom significance and meaning had generally first been glimpsed and among whom the precious gift was subsequently nurtured. Just as the preachers liked to say, the fire was warmer than the warmth of all the individual firebrands taken together. Thus, Anne Errington, another one of Thomas Shepard’s redeemed Northerners, was conquered (as she was meant to be) by her abrupt injection, as a servant, into the routine of a Puritan household. “She living in ignorance till she came to New castle to a godly family and it was harsh to her spirit being bound seven years. And I resolved if ever loose I would be vile.” But she was never loose again. A godly husband (“who thought me so, but I was not”) succeeded the godly family, and then, seeking a more enveloping web of godliness, she left Newcastle for New England: “and feeling not the means work hence I desired hither to come thinking one sermon might do me more good than a hundred there.”
The clergy pioneered the way, as ever with decided ambivalence. The ministers who warned against private men meddling in affairs reserved to the governors of church and state also exhorted the godly to use their conferences to weigh seriously the works of God as manifested in his latest providences—to undertake “the consideration of his creatures” in Nicholas Bownd’s phrase. Bownd meant the weather, neither an inconsequential nor an apolitical topic in Elizabethan or Jacobean times. Drought and flood, good and bad harvests, were God’s doing, and disasters especially could be understood as judgments for the failings of an unworthy people. Bownd himself attributed the poor harvests of the 1590’s to the magistrates’ failure to enforce a strict sabbath, just as in the next run of dearth years, the 1620’s, it was possible to locate the cause in a vacillating foreign policy, appeasement of papists, and Charles I’s marriage to the Catholic Henrietta Maria.
Fasts, above all, invited topical exposition because by definition they were called in response to some public calamity and because they were often held in defiance of authority. If the authorities failed to require a public repentance, then the prayers and tears of the godly in secret were all the more likely to appease an angry god for the benefit of the whole nation; at the least, such clandestine activities would preserve the participants themselves in the midst of the deserved general punishment.
Private fasts can be found taking on an unashamedly partisan form by the mid-to-late 1620’s, but the origins of what was by this late date a visible fissure in the Church of England can be found decades earlier in apparently uncontroversial and wholesome activity. The believer in company with proven saints was to work out the meaning of scripture, and, through the complete sense of the word understood in terms of his own personal experience and his observation of the world around him, his salvation. When that world and the believer’s experience of it came to seem peculiarly menacing, the same individuals who attributed bad harvests to bad royal marriages were liable to possess hearts first melted by misgovernment. A good instance is Richard Condor, a Cambridge yeoman of modest acres who founded a nonconformist dynasty and who frequented a conventicle held regularly in the 1630’s on market day at Royston. Meeting in a private room, the participants discussed “how they had hard [heard] on the Sabbath-day, and how they had gone in the week past.” When the talk turned to “by what means God first visited their souls and began a work of grace upon them,” Condor’s saving instrument turned out to be the reissued Declaration of Sports:
When our minister was reading it, I was seized with a chill and horror not to be described. Now, thought I, iniquity is established by a law, and sinners are hardened in their sinful ways! What sore judgements are to be expected upon so wicked and guilty a nation! … And God set in so with it, that I thought it was high time to be earnest about salvation … so that I date my conversion from that time; and I adore the grace of God in making that to be an ordinance to my salvation, which the devil and wicked governors laid as a trap for my destruction.
That so many Puritans should find the revised book of sports their breaking point indicates dramatically the way in which the Puritan movement in its later phases had become identified with a distinctive and largely lay form of behavior. Opposition to the ceremonies—an issue that struck the clergy hardest—was always negotiable, but no ground could be given on the sabbath because it had become the great integrating moment in the Puritan calendar, “the market day of the soul,” when, for one day in seven, all of the means came together. Sabbatarianism had not even been an original Puritan tenet, but in the 1630’s the defense of this central institution finished off otherwise discrete clergymen who would have been willing to do a bit of business on the ceremonies, ranged layman against authority (Condor’s “iniquity is established by a law” would find echoes elsewhere), and pointed migrants in the direction of New England. As John Fessington, a Kentish glover who came to Cambridge, Massachusetts, confessed, “when the book of liberty came forth and being afraid I should not stand in trials, hence I looked this way.” Fessington’s pastor Thomas Shepard, having looked and then come the same way, made a similar point with less economy of style when he asked a Harvard audience, “how hath that little flock of slaughter, which hath wept for it [the sabbath] and preacht and praied, and done and sufferend for it, been hated and persecuted?” A more palpable “document” (to use a contemporary phrase) of the way in which the new Israel stood heir to the old could not have been imagined than to have stood once a week, every week, as one of the band of Hebrews among the scoffing Canaanites of England.
Renewed official attack on Sabbatarianism in the Laudian years made the weekly rupture in parish religious life acute, turning the inadvertent into the self-conscious, but, it is worth emphasizing, here and in general, the Laudian hegemony only worsened a crisis in Puritanism already extant and growing. Some kind of fusion between the world-as-church of Barchester Towers and the sectarian exclusiveness of the Jehovah’s Witnesses was the defining irony of the Puritan movement at every stage of its existence, and periodic readjustments between these constituent elements made up much of the history of Puritanism in England. Well before Laud, for example, the more dexterous of the Puritan ministry can be found trying to head off full-blown separatism by indulging the godly in one or another form of distinctive fellowship of their own as a supplement to the comprehensive membership of the parish.
As one of the chief executors in America of the tangled English legacy, John Winthrop betrayed the acute stage the Puritan crisis had reached in the early 1630’s in his reply to some sort of Separatist manifesto demanding that the new churches of the colonies unqualifiedly repudiate their English mother and, by implication, the longstanding engagement to reform the many as well as to nourish the few. In one and the same document Winthrop, who very evidently knew how to live with contradiction, found himself arguing both sides of the case simultaneously. On the one hand, he defended the Church of England by the extraordinary claim, possible only in the heyday of practical divinity, that most of the members were really weak Christians crying out for the succor of the already converted. Winthrop even attributed this sad neglect of the bulk of the English nation, implicitly worth saving, all of them, to “that spiritual pride, that satan rooted into the hearts of their brethren who when they are converted, doe not, nor will not strenthen them, but doe censure them, to be none of Gods people, nor any visible Christians.” But, evidently uncomfortable with this argument from generosity, he also fell back on the traditional defense, wholly sectarian in origin, that separation from the churches of England (in the plural) would be schism because at least some parishes down deep had at their core a nucleus of gathered saints, whatever the carnal dross subsequently added by force of law.
Awkward as their situation was, Winthrop and his associates managed to ride their tiger. The solutions adopted turned out to be among the most unstable in the history of the Puritan movement, but at least they provided a kind of ecclesiastical framework, however improvisatory, for the supercharged commitment of the generation of the Migration, who were far more susceptible to the Separatist argument than their forebears. In the 1630’s and early 1640’s successive adaptations in the initially fluid religious life of the New England colonies satisfied, and by institutionalization stabilized and limited, the lay militance that a little later would wreck any hope of a comprehensive Puritan establishment in England. By 1640 or so a New England saint had become a saint indeed: his grace was certified by a narration of his spiritual life approved for accuracy by fellow saints, he was accorded the unique privileges of the right to form a church and to turn one of its members into a minister, he alone enjoyed the prerogatives of church membership, and especially access to the sacraments, and in New Haven and the Bay Colony he alone had the right to vote.
Many were Converted, and others established in Believing: many joined unto the several Churches where they lived, confessing their Faith publickly, and shewing before all the Assembly their Experiences of the Workings of God’s Spirit in their Hearts, to bring them to christ: which many Hearers found very much Good by, to help them to try their own Hearts or no? Oh the many Tears that have been shed in Dorchester Meeting-House at such times, both by those that have declared God’s Work on their Souls, and also by those that heard them.
It is not really surprising that the same period also witnessed quite a number of bitter church schisms. As they suffered through the problems of working out the meaning of Congregationalism in practice, the New Englanders invested their emotional energies heavily in their new church foundations, and they would hardly have had much satisfaction without the excitement of conflict and reconciliation. For a few churches the thrill became addictive, but most managed very nicely on just a row or two, and the process was probably healthy enough in the long run. The English alternative to this petty squabbling was the Interregnum.
We are used to seeing the early years of the New England Way in a special and rather misleading light. If the arrangements of the 1630’s and 1640’s are taken as normal, that is, if we ignore the long past of the Puritan movement before the settlement of New England, then the history of the godly after 1650 is in one way or another, and for one reason or another, the story of their progressive worldliness, though the blame for this development is attributed to everything from human nature to the passing of one or another village convenience. But if we stop taking our cues from the ministry in the very act of trying to describe the laity, if we recall the Puritan movement in its entirety, then the developments of the later seventeenth century become no more than another stage in the ongoing exchange between ministry and laity. The equilibrium point reached by the end of the century did come down a little closer to the side of Anthony Trollope than of the Prophet Jeremiah, but that was as perfectly acceptable a form of reconciliation of the competing elements within Puritanism as any other.
Compelling as they were for the time, and necessary as they had been to the integrity of the Puritan movement in America, the formulations of the first two decades simply could not persist. In the second half of the seventeenth century the congregations of New England did not succumb to a resurgence of the world, the flesh, and the devil (under whatever name we choose to denominate these social forces); they did, however, for more mundane reasons lose their near monopoly position as the fulcrum for their members’ imaginative lives. Most obviously, the number of new admissions, and consequently, the frequency with which the ceremony of the spiritual narration was offered, declined sharply. There were not that many adults left to convert after immigration stopped in 1642, and individuals coming to adulthood after migration or born in New England took their time before announcing that they had the requisite conversion experience. In itself there is no necessary Buffonesque New World degeneracy in this spiritual hesitancy—the elder John Winthrop back in England was thirty before he felt confident to lay hold on the promises.
Ecclesiastical responses to the new realities included extension of the limits of church membership, reinterpretation of the sacrament to revive its importance as a “means,” and an attendant expansion in the clergy’s conception of itself as a distinct and privileged order. All these developments are well known, much written about, and in no great need of another rehearsal. What does need a little emphasis is the way in which changes within the churches were accompanied by their incorporation as a whole into a much larger, if loosely structured edifice. Increases in population size and density, economic development, and a growth in contacts between the towns all provided mechanisms for transmitting the official culture, for thickening it, in effect, until it became the exclusive medium for noetic activity in New England. Individual spiritual pilgrimages continued at a brisk pace, but increasingly under a greater degree of central definition and direction.
While the New England colonists are best remembered popularly through the annual repetition of one of their thanksgivings, the other form of public day, the fast, probably strikes most people as the more quintessentially Puritan. The stereotype is, for once, not too far off the mark: far more time was spent discussing the necessity and nature of fasting, and fasts substantially outnumbered feasts in frequency. Thanksgivings merely showed gratitude for mercies already vouchsafed; fasting was the way to get things done in the first place, the most supreme, because most solemn and collective, form of wrestling with God on public occasions. The popularity of private, unauthorized fasts among the English godly at the time of the Migration has already been commented upon, but, significantly, in New England, where the saints ruled rather than prayed behind closed doors, the public fasts initially were not especially frequent. Despite plentiful occasions for calling special days on account of the events of the Civil War at home in England and of all the incidents marking the hammering out of polity in church and state in the colonies, Massachusetts enjoined only fourteen public fasts and three thanksgivings in the entire decade of the 1640’s, Connecticut four fasts and one thanksgiving. By way of contrast, in the ten years 1665–1674 the rate at which these extraordinary days were called had almost doubled in the Bay and the disproportion was greater still in Connecticut. The difference cannot be attributed to the occasions for fasts and thanksgivings, because a relatively less eventful ten years was chosen for the later period in order to make the point. (The frequency with which public days were set does not rise dramatically for the next ten year period, the terrible years 1675–1684.)
The Jeremiad tradition, celebrated in a revitalized and more frequent round of public days, signaled the recovery in general of the public dimensions of Puritanism under the very special conditions, unique in the history of the movement, of the burden of establishment. In the wayward Israel of the prophetic period the New England ministry found a biblical analogy as perfect for their purposes as the church before Constantine remained for the Dissenters of England. Like Israel, New England was a theocracy—true religion was established by authority. Like latter-day Israel, with security and prosperity New Englanders had grown too comfortable with their special charge, and so the Lord had obligingly reintroduced an element of risk: multiple afflictions for the present, the threat of being cast off in the future if this chastisement was not taken to heart. And like Israel chastened, the cure was found in a general and open recognition of sin in a series of public fasts called as occasions warranted, accompanied by repentance, individual and collective, and concluded with an earnest pledge of reformation. There would be further episodes of laxity, of course, because there had to be if later calamities were to be woven into the same pattern and a new generation of prophet clergy and their American Israelites were to be given ways to locate their individual destinies within it. By joining the ritual of fasting with the pessimistic strain of prophecy that begins with Amos and culminates in Jeremiah the New Englanders found a tradition that could contain Puritanism’s central tension under the extraordinary circumstances of a degree of success.
It is worth recalling—the point has been made before—that this marvelously helpful discovery had remained ready to hand for many years before extensive use was made of it. John Cotton for one was already in 1630 expounding on the special relevance of Jeremiah 2:21 for later generations of colonists, even as he launched the founding fathers on their mission. A year later, Thomas Hooker took as his text for The Danger of Desertion Jeremiah 14:19, applying it to the England he was leaving, and in 1645 Thomas Shepard once again fell back on the prophet, applying his message to England with a glance at America, on a day of public fasting “in reference to the good estate of the Lords people in England.” (Three years later his youngest son would appropriately be christened Jeremiah Shepard.) The elements of the Jeremiad—the ordinance of fasting, the special relationship with the Lord, the Hebraic analogy in general—were all English and were imported to America with the first English settlers. Their subsequent development in the colonies in the next thirty years or so can only be a matter of conjecture (and has been much conjectured about) because so few fast and election days sermons survive for the period prior to 1660. What can be said, nonetheless, is that however obvious and necessary, the eventual working of these various items of intellectual baggage into a single integrating theme for New England could occur only when a later generation of New Englanders returned to traditional Puritan concerns so cruelly compromised first by the Laudian hegemony and then by the too complete triumph of the refugee saints in America.
Public observance provided the foci for the official culture, the high points at which it was most solemnly and explicitly enunciated. Day-to-day repetition was another matter, no less important, and depending as much on the printed as the spoken word. Reading had always had an important place in the Puritan movement as a significant part of the framework of means constructed around scripture and sermon. No soul was ever saved exclusively by a book, except perhaps in very rare instances the Bible unaided, but reading added informed reflection to the lively teaching of the pulpit and the pious life, as they in their turn breathed full meaning into the otherwise lifeless abstractions of print. In England the Puritan clergy had made full and effective use of the press, giving thanks that “God hath given a marveilous blessing of printing to further his Gospelle.” Quite apart from the widespread circulation of Bibles, the printing presses after 1590 or so brought forth a flood of religious material that dwarfed in volume and availability alike every other form of “popular” literature except the ubiquitous almanacs. When they rejoiced that there was “never such a plentie of so good and plaine books printed, never so good cheape,” John Dod and Robert Cleaver, themselves much published, knew whereof they spoke.
America was not quite so fortunate. The early date of a printing establishment at Cambridge has always been a source of pride for collectors of American firsts, but the contribution of that press to the vital piety the Puritans assumed ran on printer’s ink was initially very small. After eliminating almanacs, material in Latin or the Indian language, statutes lately made, spelling books, and similar items, the output of the New England presses begins to appear very feeble until after about 1665. In any five year period before 1660 the largest number of English language works that could pretend to any imaginative or intellectual content was never more than eight. That number more than doubled for the five year period 1660–1664, doubled again to thirty-six each for 1665–1669 and 1670–1674, then doubled yet again to sixty for 1675–1679, and seventy-one in 1680–1684, remaining in this general range for the rest of the century.
The increase in English language titles with something resembling a mental content has been taken to indicate a secularizing of New England culture, but most of the new material falls into one or another traditional genre. The sharp rise in the absolute numbers of titles (whatever the slight fluctuation in the “secular” proportion of the total output) really means that in the last third or quarter of the seventeenth century the domestic press was finally fulfilling the essential function that the Puritans had routinely assigned it. For the first three or four or even five decades of settlement the New England colonies must have suffered from a most un-Puritan print drought. Books the immigrants brought over with them undoubtedly played a part in their religious life in the very earliest years, but as these copies wore out and the population increased, the significance of reading must have declined until the expansion in the work of the American presses. The only alternative source of books, English imports, simply was never important if extant booksellers’ inventories and manifests are any guide: dating mostly from the last twenty years of the seventeenth century, these lists never include much more than thirty copies of any English book (most came over in much smaller batches), and even when all the multiple orders of a single title are added up, the largest number of copies (excluding school books) is still only eighty-four for a single piece.
In the eighteenth century the contrasting forms of circulation between imported and native imprints probably contributed to a segmentation in the reading public, with fateful consequences for the history of American culture. For example, the opening wedge of the Enlightenment in America, the sermons of Archbishop John Tillotson, was a classic instance of a conger publication. Undertaken by Chiswell and printed in large numbers, Tillotson’s works were nonetheless financed as a sharebook venture and therefore distributed to every one of the twenty or so members of the conger in dribbles and drabbles of fewer than thirty copies at a time. The fraction of these fractions that regularly crossed the Atlantic managed to turn the work into the sine qua non for every colonial of intellectual pretension sufficient to maintain a library of any size—but without making a dent in the tastes of the general reading public. While New England audiences continued to consume American reprints of standard titles by the archbishop’s Dissenting contemporaries, his work did not arouse sufficient interest to merit a single colonial edition until George Whitefield’s denunciation of his alleged heterodoxy conferred upon Tillotson’s corpus a retroactive succés de scandale.
After 1700, a very different mental universe began to reach New England cognoscenti from the one still reiterated regularly by the domestic press, and for the first time the unity of the Puritan enterprise came into danger of dissolution. For the seventeenth century, however, when the colonies were hardly large enough to sustain multiple publics, the most dramatic effect of the book trade to America was quite simply its inability to contribute more than a small supplement to the sum total of available reading material. It is scarcely surprising that over fifty English titles were reprinted in America between 1664 and 1700, even though in a large number of instances they were in the course of frequent reprint in England itself, and that the most frequently imported English titles all sooner or later required American editions to satisfy the demonstrated interest the imports had merely aroused.
If the domestic press is recognized as the preponderant source of New England reading, then we must confront a remarkable situation. Most seventeenth-century New Englanders never read a line by the leading ministers of the first generation unless they happened to have acquired copies of their works in England before leaving or obtained them in America from other immigrants who had brought them over in their personal libraries. There was no American edition of any Thomas Hooker title until 1743, and John Cotton, except for his catechism, would have been known only from a 1686 American edition of God's Promise to his Plantations. John Davenport and Thomas Shepard did have a few American titles in circulation, but they enjoyed this very limited literary success because the former lived to see the beginning of expanded domestic printing and the latter had enjoyed a Cambridge ministry where his successors were well located to arrange for posthumous publication of his works (though he really came into vogue only in the eighteenth century). Richard Mather alone of the founding clergy seems to have discovered, or rather remembered, the value of reading and to have made some use of the domestic press along familiar Puritan lines: he had six hundred copies of his Farewell Exhortation run off and “on a certain Lords Day, he did, by the Hands of his Deacons, put these little books into the Hands of his Congregation, that so whenever he should by Death take his Farewel of them, they might still remember how they had been exhorted.”
We are now in a position to appreciate in full some of the more extraordinary aspects of New England authorship after 1660. The immediate and (even for its author) surprising popularity of The Day of Doom can be attributed in part to a situation where at its appearance in 1662 New England readers were quite simply starved for anything like an imaginative rendering of doctrine: small wonder that eighteen hundred copies of a ballad version of the day of judgment could be sold over three years and that still another edition was called for later in the 1660’s.
We do not today, to be sure, generally consider reading a Puritan work exciting. The element of discovery in their literature is easy to overlook because of a failure to distinguish among the leading titles and especially between the two broad categories of English devotional works. The more immediately familiar comprised the very long-lived and regularly reprinted compendia, such as the Practice of Piety, the various exercises in the ars moriendi literature, and comprehensive descriptions of the morphology of conversion. They all served as vade mecums spiritually and literally—their squat shape made them perfect pocket books, and their low survival rate, for all the reprinting, suggests that they were routinely worn out being used in just this way. Popular as they were, they were reference books with all the dramatic structure of a cookbook or an abridged dictionary, and there are relatively few New England instances of this genre, reprint or native, until well after 1700. Given the nature of the colonial audience, the other main type of devotional work was really most needed, and at this form the Mathers, amongst others, excelled. They especially, in their absorption with an American style of practical divinity, turned to the printed word as a source of variety and novelty of experience.
Veteran sermon goers, after all, if they sometimes owned the standard manuals, probably found them old hat. Their excitement came from the rapid succession of new titles appearing regularly to weave some well-known lesson, devotional or casuistical, into a previously unsuspected pattern. Something like practiced theatregoers witnessing their tenth performance of Othello, they would lack the naive enthusiasm of a virgin audience but could still be surprised and moved by a fresh and powerful interpretation, provided it did not commit a palpable outrage on the received text. The curious publication history in England of most of the titles by prolific and avowedly popular preachers is almost certainly attributable to the habits of this seasoned readership. In a large number of instances the works of ministers of great repute went through one edition only or achieved a respectable number of editions in a short period and then, unlike the manuals, sank from sight. Many of these titles probably fell from favor because they were overtaken by the next entry from the same pen, but read at first blush a sermon such as The Saint's Daily Exercise of John Preston (nine editions between 1629 and 1634), or the Richard Sibbes collection published as The Bruised Reed (five editions, 1630–1637), or Jeremy Dyke’s The Mischiefe and Miserie of Scandall (eight editions between 1630 and 1635), all gave a knowing, godly readership a source of stimulation that really does challenge comparison with the experience of a similarly initiated theater audience.
The Mathers were never alone in their work. At fifty-two titles, Samuel Willard ran Increase Mather, at least, a pretty good race, and there were large numbers of other clerical entrants in the competition after 1670 with more modest contributions. Taking all their volume of print together, their revival of practical divinity in America parallels closely the history of fasting in replicating an English situation, by calling upon the long experience the English Puritans had gained in making popular Protestantism popular. There was, however, here too an adaptation to a specifically New England circumstance in the relative neglect of standard devotional materials for titles geared to a spiritually sophisticated audience. Bayly’s Practice of Piety appeared in seventeenth-century New England only as an abridgment by John Eliot in the language of the Indians. English speaking believers had graduated to more advanced material a generation or two earlier.
The English Presbyterians never attained their hopes, and the American Congregationalists rapidly backed away from what they did achieve in their churches. The office of ruling elder (the discipline specialist) quickly atrophied, church censures in New England were on the whole administered sparingly, even hesitantly, and, it has been suggested, as society became more complex the county courts in developed localities took over the functions of resolving conflicts where once the churches had enjoyed original jurisdiction.
In a sense, the New England courts inherited this role from their English originals, but in the different social and cultural circumstances of America the experience of grand jury service was necessarily also of a somewhat different order. The men on a New England grand jury were not simply so many local notables called on to assist his majesty’s justices in the county of H. The English grand jurors may have had more autonomy of action in actual fact, but when it came to self-conception the New England bodies were called on to look upon themselves as doing far more than to “diligently enquire, and a true presentment make of all such matters and things as shall be given you in charge.” Instead, the New Englanders were (in the words of the Bay colony oath) to “swear by the Living God, that you will diligently inquire & faithfully present to this court, whatsoever you know to be a breach of any law established in this Jurisdiction according the minde of God.”
The reason, once more, was English practice in a New England setting. The New England grand jury was English in size (sixteen or seventeen men, for example, served on the Suffolk County panels in the 1670’s, fourteen or fifteen on those of Essex County in the same period) and, up to a point, followed the English habit of making frequent use of repeaters. A man who served once was likely to serve several times, and in any given decade a good half or more of the jurors on a panel would have had previous experience at their work. Even so, the reach of the institution was much broader in America because of the smaller population of the individual counties: in an adult male population numbering only in the thousands, hundreds at any time would have had recent and sustained experience presenting offenders against the Puritan virtues. Whether the ratio was one man in five or one in fifteen, the segment of the population involved was substantial in itself and also significant beyond its considerable numbers. In social standing New England grand jurors mostly ranked among what might be termed the upper middle ordinary, the kind of person likely to end up as tithingman, town constable, selectman, and, in the country towns, perhaps as deputy now and again to the colony’s general court. It would be absurd to label these town some-bodys after their English counterparts as an “elite,” the “county governors,” or “minor gentry”; not all of them would have ranked as so much as “substantial yeomen.” The New England grand jurors were simply the individuals of modest local influence who might have been expected to have become bastions of particularist sentiment. Instead, they were incorporated almost whole into field grade positions in the Christian warfare.
Cotton Mather in a popular tract of 1705 had asked rhetorically, “will not a Form of Godliness, often by the Grace of God prove a vehicle for the Power of Godliness?” By “form” he meant a combination of household religious duties carried on so regularly that they became “as it were Entailed upon Posterity.”
Here at last is the culture trap again, this time domesticized. No end in itself, household religion was simply another of the many threads in the loosely textured fabric of means by which the Puritan ministry had always hoped to blanket its converts. The household was supposed to be the “lowest place in the church,” in the words of the Elizabethan radical Josias Nichols—he did not term it a refuge and a hiding place, though it could end up as such under unpropitious circumstances.
For all the tensions that necessarily characterized Puritanism, at the last, in New England, popular and clerical turn out to be false antinomies. If the history of the Interregnum suggests an apparently irrepressible opposition between layman and minister, individual believer and prescriptive church, the experience of New England after 1660 establishes exactly the contrary judgment. This most lasting settlement in the history of a volatile movement was the one in which personal piety was nourished through a collective public commitment presided over by a standing clerical order. The laity did not in any meaningful sense lose ground in New England in the later seventeenth century, even though the clergy rather clearly gained some, and the spates of anticlericalism that erupted after 1660 meant little more than that the relationship between the component elements of the Puritan movement was as dynamic and as passionate as ever. To vary a favorite Puritan metaphor, the noise of the quarreling was no sure guide to the solidity of the marriage. It was quieter, more sullen griefs that would one day, well into the eighteenth century, lead to disillusion and then dissolution.
In the course of the transformation of popular Protestantism into a genuinely Puritan establishment the clergy gained power neither over bodies nor even over minds, but only and especially over words. What we sometimes see as the decline in the stature and immediate influence of the ministry after the passing of the first colonial generation was really the metamorphosis of the clergy into a clerisy: they gave the ceremonial addresses on public days, wrote the tracts the presses turned off, came to be identified as the source of all schooling above the most rudimentary. Whatever the emotional temperature of this emerging relationship between “a minister and his people,” the clergy’s involvement with the mental energies of the laity was as intense as ever after 1660 and, it could be argued, growing.
Alas, the measure of just how well the clergy did their work is provided by their unwilling heirs, the scholarly community. Contemplating their New England, we cannot quite seem to rid ourselves of the labels they chose for describing it. Even when we drop their sermons and diaries from the story entirely to study births, deaths, town meetings, and lawsuits in the vain hope of exorcising their presence, the narrative always seems to have a suspiciously clerical moral at its end. The position of the argument of this essay in the historical literature is itself an ironic testimony to just how durable the ministerial vision was and is. Surely, in any other historiographic context the claim that material progress strengthened the ability of a society to transmit and reiterate its official messages would not be an exercise in revisionism. The idea is so obvious, so very whiggish, that it must seem remarkable that it did not come first in the literature, to be challenged in turn by later and more subtle interpretations. Yet, curiously, the telling of New England history always seems to begin at the second stage, and one cannot forbear the suspicion that all the ranking interpretations of this century in one way or another betray the stamp of Puritan New England’s very first authorized interpreters. To write of “declension,” or “individualism,” or “modernization,” when we mean simply growth and adaptation, to assume without hesitation that the process of commercial expansion must be secularization and that institutionalization is antithetical to the spirit of religious life, is really to provide a new gloss on a very old text. It is to say once again, as we have been all too well taught to say, “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
Stephen Foster is Professor of History at Northern Illinois University.
The author would like to thank David Grayson Allen, T. H. Breen, and David D. Hall for their comments on earlier versions of this essay and to acknowledge with gratitude the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and Northern Illinois University in providing the academic leave under which much of the research presented here was undertaken. He would also like to extend his appreciation to the staff of the Newberry Library for providing him with essential assistance at a time when that institution was undergoing massive physical alterations and only the readers found the process painless.