Read The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 Online

Authors: Robert Middlekauff

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The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (14 page)

 
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according to His law. The renewed soul did not contain any new light or new knowledge nor did it attain perfectionconversion was always in some ways incompletebut it did possess faculties inclined toward a holy life.
13
Although the Antinomians apparently suffered an irretrievable defeat with the banishment of Anne Hutchinson and the recantation (ambiguous though it was) of John Cotton, their following among ordinary men survived. Richard Mather, secure and stable as he was, complained for years of the familists and the Antinomians who, he said, persisted in New England and continued to believe that all a man had to do was to lie around waiting for a divine seizure. What was worse, they believed that once Christ was joined to the saint, He directed the saint's actions and was responsible for them. No need for anyone to worry about good works or individual obligations in this happy state of anarchy.
14
Granted that Mather did not put the Antinomian case with the nice precision he used when he described safer theories, his misconceptions suggest the value he placed on order in the inner and outer lives of men. Yet he cannot be dismissed as a legalist though he emphasized the role of the law; nor can he be described as fearful of emotional religion. What he, and many of his peers, detested in Anne Hutchinson was not that she relied on the emotions excessively, but rather that she denied to the emotions any power at all. They remained in converted men what they had been in sinful men, vile, corrupt, and incapable of good feeling. If Mather understood the Antinomians correctly, they held that Christ was all and did all while man's mind and heart did nothing but stand idly by while the spirit acted within, autonomously. The conflict between preparationists and Antinomians, as Richard Mather saw it, did not pose reason against emotion, but an active against a static disposition.
15
Mather's inclination in working out his psychology of religious experience, expressed most clearly in lucid sermons to Dorchester, where he had to explain things from the ground up, was to emphasize the affective side of religion all the while insisting that the affective did not conflict with the intellectual. Religious experiencein particular, conversioninvolved a process which engaged all the faculties of the soul, but which was most deeply rooted in the affections. And the experience, whether in conversion or in the worship that followed, was one in which
 
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the believer acted, and was not just acted upon, in virtually every phase. At no point did he sit in slothfulness.
16
In the early stages of the process of conversion the Holy Spirit drew the chosen to Christ, given that the man affected had been elected to receive what Mather called the grace of faith (a phrase with Thomistic implications). Mather agreed with most Puritan divines that a man who had been consigned to Hell might experience the same feelings that gripped a saint in the first steps of conversion. This type of man feels what Thomas Hooker designated "legal preparation" since it never departs from the realm of nature and law in contrast to evangelical preparation, which is ultimately saving. The law in this phase is used by God to inform the sinner of his vileness and corruption: the law, as Richard Mather said, "thrown down the soule in sense and feeling" of its sin and misery.
17
This period in a man's experience is the darkest of all as the full conviction of his sin grows within him. The conviction, if it is genuine, produces contrition and sorrow and eventually a state of humble dependence. At this point the sinner becomes aware of his helplessness; and emptied of his pride he is ready for knowledge of Christ, a knowledge that the law cannot convey. Comprehending this knowledge is the responsibility of the reason, or understanding, but not exclusively so if the whole soul is to be renewed. Mather pointed out that even Balaam, Judas, and the very Devil know intellectually of the efficacy of Christ's sacrifice. Hence the need for the heartin this case Mather seems to mean both the will and the affectionsto comprehend the meaning of the righteousness imputed to men by Christ. The knowledge must "affect" them in such a way that they approve and love it. At this point with all the faculties deeply informed, and moved, the grace of faith is infused by the Lord into the soul. The saint is justified by the righteousness of Christ, and sanctified by the Holy Spirit which renews the other graces of his soulvirtue, godliness, charity, knowledge, temperance, patience, and brotherly kindnessall of which have some origin, weak though it may be, in a man's nature. In time, as these graces of sanctification grow, they give him evidence of his salvation, and he enjoys the assurance that he is one of God's elect.
18
In this description, Mather's theory of the conversion process appears completely conventional in all respects except in its sup-
 
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position that good qualities inhere in unregenerate man and in its insistence that the affections are involved in every phase, even those phases, commonly deemed intellectual, when the knowledge of Christ's sacrifice is grasped. Not even Thomas Hooker, perhaps the most evangelical of the first generation, conceived of the process as one in which an emotional apprehension saturated every step. Hooker's preaching may have been more affective than his theory, which isolated the will as the faculty requiring the "greatest work" and giving the "greatest difficulty" in converting the soul.
19
The will in Hooker's theory assumes a cast remarkably like the reason in other analysesit functions as if it had intelligence and knowledge which enabled it to understand the Word of the Gospels. Its affective responses do not take on much importance except when in its sin it resists the force of Christ's sacrifice.
20
The other great preparationist among the founders, Thomas Shepard, did not attribute a rational power to the will. Yet his conception of the process of conversion resembles Hooker's more closely than it does Mather's; for, like Hooker, Shepard did not attribute a prominent role to the affections. Shepard and Hooker's antagonist, John Cotton, was far too interested in the operations of the Spirit to concede power to the affectionseven after the Antinomian crisis passed. And Cotton's successor, John Norton, who delivered an incisive criticism of the doctrine of preparation, remained essentially within Cotton's position.
21
What gave Mather's theory of religious experience psychological subtlety and moral sensitivity were his insistence that the mind had to be thought of as a whole and his analysis of motive. Like most divines he was forced in his dissection of the psyche to speak as if the faculties functioned separately, but he made it clear that no faculty could escape the influence of others. The will might incline towards a particular decision, or choose it, but its inclination was disposed in some measure by the comprehension provided by the reason. Virtually all Puritan divines agreed that the reason and the will cooperated in this way, though they varied in the strengths they assigned to each faculty. In conversion, of course, this cooperation would always prove impotent, unless the faculties were renewed by supernatural grace. Richard Mather accepted this theory but modified it in one important way: conversion began in the affections, he told his flock, and
 
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true belief in Christ was as much an emotional disposition as it was intellectual. The regenerate man transcended the carnal through his love; this glorious passion saturated every faculty, set right the bias of his psyche, transformed the responses of his reason and will. A regenerate man would not achieve perfection in this world, of course: too much sin remained in his soul for that. But he had no chance at all of attaining goodness unless his affections were engaged in such a fashion that they moved his reason in its apprehending.
22
Both Cotton and Hooker would have had difficulty in maintaining such a positionhad they shared itbecause their psychology was oriented around the will. The "greatest work of Reformation, Repentance, and the comfort of a roans spiritual condition, it lies mainly in the Will," Hooker once declared. And Cotton, concerned lest men too easily confuse the pangs of conscience for true grace, reminded them that the will "is the principall faculty of the soule, it rules all, it sets hand and tongue, all within, and all without a work."
23
How Richard Mather conceived of the affective disposition of the faculties largely determined his answer to the question men asked in the agony of their uncertainty: How can I know that I am saved? Most listeners to Puritan sermons in Mather's day wanted to be saved, one suspects. From childhood on, they had been saturated with the Christian version of the good life; and even those who mysteriously imbibed a spirit of opposition evidently felt uneasy in their recalcitrance. They did not count many of their number among the founding generation; the majority evidently yearned for the central experience of their culturethe union with God that converted men enjoyed. Naturally enough, ordinary men were often confused by what they heard from their ministers. They asked: how can I know that I am saved? and the minister answered with uncompromising disquisitions about inward and outward calls, the distinctions between common and supernatural grace, true signs and false, and the gulf between genuine and counterfeit assurance. They wished to have true assurance, and he gave them divinity.
24
Anyone listening to the sermons in the meetinghouse and the discussions in private meetings that followed church services could learn something of the process by which God claimed His own. Every minister urged self-examination, a technique that in-
 
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volved applying general principles to one's own condition. With the conversion process laid out like a map, one followed the pilgrimage of the self along a route stretched between the familiar reference points of humiliation and joyhumiliation in conviction of sin and joy in the assurance of the Holy Spirit.
25
For many, the principles appeared clearer than their own progress, and they begged for some reassurance. To all, Richard preached the importance of the right "bent" of the soul. Of the fearful who complained about their lack of broken-heartedness, their inability to attain a humble spirit, he observed that perhaps they were the most humble of all though they were hesitant to see their own lack of pride, while those "that are proud and puffed up because of their humility" were "the farthest off from true humility."
26
Nor was lack of comfort and joy to be taken as an indication of an unredeemed state if one had gone through the earlier phases of conversion. Comfort and joy were the gifts of God as much as His grace was; and uncertainty and tension because one did not enjoy them might well suggest that one had in fact received God's grace.
27
Mather recognized that tension and uncertainty were difficult to bear. What he was saying in urging his flock not to give in to despair when they experienced such feelings was that anxiety was better than security and deadness which were dangerous though tempting for the ease of heart they afforded. A good man should avoid ease and the static state, recognizing that in such a condition he could never rid himself of sin. As long as he bent his mind and will to the salvation of his soul he could take hope that his heart harbored the grace of God.
28
There were, however, other more reliable indications which could testify more eloquently than a mere hope. The conduct of a man's life revealed muchin particular his attitude toward his own sinful adventures and his "bent" in the performance of good works.
29
In the technical language of divinity, Mather was contending that sanctification was evidence of justification. By this he did not mean that good works gave irrefutable proof of the existence of grace in the soul but rather that a right habit of mind, a right disposition, in the performance of lawful acts did. Sinners frequently observed the law, and they sometimes did good works. At least their action appeared good; but inwardly their minds
 
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and hearts resisted the good and were inclined towards evil. Their motive in their good behavior was to protect themselves from punishment just as a dog leaves his master's meat untouched, Richard said, "for feare of a cudgell." A genuinely good man regarded sin with horror; the revulsion he felt from it permeated his faculties and grew out of a sense of its "filthiness."
30
Moral choices, then, came out of the natural stuff of the self. A man renewed by grace did good naturally; nothing outside himself inclined his soul; with the Holy Spirit united to the soul, he takes a "natural delight in good dutyes" just "as the oxe followes hay, grasse, not through feare of punishment, or hope of reward, but because it is naturall to him to delight in his fodder."
31
For those tormented by anxiety over their inner condition, the meaning of this argument was unavoidable. They must examine the frame of mind they carried into their actions. If a life of faith was burdensome, they lacked grace; if they pursued the right course with delight, grace inhered within them. But they should not always expect the bent of the redeemed soul to be free of baser impulses. When a man was converted, his faculties did not become altogether pure, though he received in grace the strength to avoid excesses of sin and the worst of self-seeking. He would desire to make his external life conform to the law, but he would not succeed perfectly.
32
Mather did not intend that his flock should regard a lack of perfection complacently because they knew it would always escape men. The Lord required that a man constantly strive and that he examine himself while striving in order to make his calling sure. With this injunction in mind, all Puritan divines urged self-scrutiny. Private assurance was possible even though it might not be possible to give a demonstration of it publicly. Mather had good reason to pause at the difficulty of attempting to persuade others of one's inner worth: his church had failed in its first try at gathering itself because it could not convince the outside examiners that grace resided in its applicants. But he more than any of his great colleagues insisted that assurance could be attained by the individual Christian. His friends counseled caution in claiming certainty: the will was devious, they said, capable of disguising its motives and prone to do so. Mather agreed, but because he insisted that a man's entire nature was altered by

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