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 (23 page)

 
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ence, which God required on the peoples part."
22
. These men cut themselves off; so also did those adults in New England, baptized as children on their parents' membership, who failed to give evidence of their conversion. The type forecast the practice. If the Church in New England, blessed by a superior eternal polity, were truly to prove its superiority to the Old Testament Church, it would have to be at least as pure. The children of half-way members should not receive the sacrament of baptism.
23
By 1671, and perhaps as early as 1668, Increase Mather repudiated his opposition to the Half-Way Covenant. But his repudiation did not include giving up either his typological reasoning or his interpretation of the significance of Old Testament sacramental practice. He did not change his mind easily; nor did he rest comfortably in his new position as defender of the Half-Way Covenant.
24
In his youthful literalness of 1662, Increase had been unmoved by Jonathan Mitchell's prediction that refusing baptism would produce vacant churches. As he grew older, youthful indifference could not be maintained, and by 1671 Increase himself was echoing Mitchell's warning with the question, "doth it at last come to this, that [the children] have no more Advantage as to any
Church care
about them, then [than] the Indians and Infidels amongst whome we live?"
25
As dreadful as this possibility was, Increase probably would not have switched sides had he not come to see that purity might be protected under the new baptismal practice as surely as under the old. The churches could assume that the baptized adults and their children stood in an external relation to the Lord, even if there were little direct evidence that the external corresponded to the internal condition. But what prevented the baptized from claiming full membership? What inhibited them from professing that their outward condition reflected their inner? Increase noted several possible answers as he returned to these questions over the years. Perhaps the baptized were not yet converted. And there was no escaping it, perhaps they never would be. On the other hand, perhaps they were over-scrupulous. Conversion was the most valuable experience available to man and many may have hesitated to claim it for themselves. They were modest, very much aware of their imperfections, and reluctant to suggest that they felt the move-
 
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ments of grace in their souls. This reluctance, he almost added, was the fruit of their sense of sin.
26
Hypocrites might slip into the Church under the new baptismal dispensation, Increase conceded, but the Church had not been free of them before this agonizing problem arose. The fact was that the Church still retained means to maintain purity. By continuing to test for an experience of grace, it could keep the unworthy from the Lord's Supper, the sacrament intended to seal one's growth in grace. Increase gained reassurance from the practice of requiring an applicant for the Supper to give evidence of the working of grace in his soul.
27
It may seem to us that the Half-Way Covenant implied that baptism was inherently of less value in the eyes of God than the Lord's Supper. After all, churches required more of a candidate for the Supper than they did of those offered for baptism. And if this was not implied, did not the new system threaten to debase baptism by making it available to those who lacked the promise of grace (a charge which could not be avoided in the seventeenth century)? Increase took great pains to refute this argument because he felt uneasy with the change and probably secretly suspected that the doors were open to the unregenerate.
28
Part of Increase's perplexity in this entire problem grew from the fact that he, no more than anyone else, had clearly recognized that while baptism sealed the initiation of adults into Christ, it sealed only the promise of such an initiation for children and infants. According to traditional theory, election had been completed before men were born, but the infusion of grace in conversion must occur in time and space. God, Puritans knew, by working through such means as the preaching of the Scriptures, had pretty well limited Himself to bring men to Christ only after they reached the years of reason and knowledge.
29
The new system perpetuated the old practice regarding unbaptized adults. Increase was at such pains to establish this continuity that one suspects he wanted to avert questions about the change in infant baptism. Adults, he emphasized, must prove their worth. Here the type from the practice of Israel was clear. The Jews required saving faith even of Abraham before he was circumcized. The Jews insisted so rigidly upon the sincerity of
 
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the adult candidate that few were circumcized in the time of David and Solomon ''lest haply the Time-serving Ethnicks of those days might out of carnal fear or worldly Advantage take upon them the Profession of the then only true Religion. Blow the same thing is true concerning Baptisme." A "meet Historical" faith was not enough for baptism; a "Justifying Faith" was required of adults. Even the Jews of Israel had understood this much about the sacraments though many of the "mysteries" eluded them. Hence the conclusion which confirmed the case for the continuity of purity in the Lord's Church: the Old Testament sacraments sealed "for the substance'' the same "spiritual mysteries which are sealed in the Sacraments of the Blew Testament. . . ."
30
Increase chose well in attempting to defend the practice of baptizing adults. No departure from the old way of treating adults was implied in the Half-Way Covenant. But the momentous change instituted in infant baptism could not be disguised. Increase revealed his uneasiness at the new practice in his febrile defense of the requirements for adults and in his oblique admission that "unmeet Subjects" might receive the rite under the Half-Way Covenant. This incautious slip of phrasing occurred in a cautious discussion of the symbolic meaning of the sacrament. The water used in the sacrament, he explained, represented the spirit of Christ, not His blood. Therefore Christ's blood was not profaned by unworthy subjects who participated in the rite.
31
At the time that Increase Mather decided to support the Half-Way Covenant, the standard most dear to his heart was the pure Church which honored the typological model of the Old Testament. As long as the churches of New England insisted that only those who could describe the workings of the Lord's grace in their hearts should receive the Lord's Supper, Mather was convinced, purity would be maintained and consistency with the ancient models preserved. But fifteen years after the Half-Way Synod devised its compromise, purity in the ordinances was cast aside in favor of the corruption of open Communion first instituted by Solomon Stoddard of Northampton.
32
Stoddard was an imposing man in every way. Physically powerful, and long-lived, he dominated the Connecticut Valley's churches until his death in 1729 at the age of eighty-six. In those years he never missed a Sabbath in his pulpit except on
 
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the infrequent occasions of his visits to Boston. The Valley produced a number of big men in these years, among them merchants whose power and ruthlessness later brought their designation as "River Gods." They were strong-minded men who wanted to run things their own way. Stoddard did not intimidate them, but neither did they bend him to their purposes. There were struggles within his church and he, within his own domain, emerged the master.
33
Stoddard did not share Increase Mather's cherished concerns. A typologist like Mather, Stoddard was nevertheless capable of declaring in 1700 that "All typical laws are out of date."
34
He meant that Israel's ecclesiastical polity should not serve as a model for New England which, in keeping with the glorious dispensations of the New Testament, possessed brighter light on the nature of the Church. But if Stoddard denied that Old Testament ordinances were types for New Testament, and evangelical, emulation, he persisted in interpreting much Old Testament history in a typological mode. He did so not to demonstrate the straight and true line of purity in Christ's Church, but to persuade men that the Lord had always wished them to trust the power of Christ's righteousness as sufficient to save them. The sacrifices, for example, which were instituted immediately after the fall of Adam, and renewed on Mount Sinai, took shape as models of atonement to procure the remission of sins. The Israelites confessed their sins at these rites, and then slayed the sacrifice instead of the sinner. No one, Stoddard argued, should imagine with the Israelites that these gave a "real" satisfaction for their sins; the sacrifices gave a "legal" and a "typical'' satisfaction, but ''they were not a proportionable price to ransom men's souls by." Rather their purpose was to "shadow forth the satisfaction that Jesus Christ was to make for our sins." The Lord intended that they serve as types of the payment Christ would by His crucifixion render for our sins.
35
Stoddard announced his hope of persuading men to put down their delusions of saving themselves in his great
Safety of Appearing in the Righteousness of Christ
, which he published in 1687. Ten years earlier he had opened Communion to all Half-Way members of age; he refused to give the Supper to children on the grounds that they lacked the knowledge to examine themselves before coming. He had already introduced the baptismal
 
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practice advocated by the Synod of 1662; the Church of Northampton had urged his predecessor to do so and Stoddard agreed with his church. But Stoddard did not baptize all the children of the town then, or in later years for that matter, as modern historians have argued. Rather, he simply insisted that what qualified a person for baptism served to qualify him for the Supper. And Stoddard took pains to argue the importance of the qualifications.
36
And what were the qualifications? Visible sainthoodhe saidin a position he never deviated from. What distinguished this view from Mather's was his definition of a visible saint, which held that historical faith, not saving faith, was all that was required to qualify for visible sainthood. Any adult person who declared his faith in Christ and who was "Morally sincere" in his profession should be baptized.
37
Children of such a parent also qualified for baptism because they were presumed to be within the covenant of their parents. Stoddard also claimed a covenant interest for children of parents excommunicated from the Church, and for the children of any heathen, unconverted servants, for example, who were members of Christian families. None of these qualifications implied the existence of saving faith. And the essential qualification earned a person the full privileges of the Church, including the Supper, once he came of age. Membership possessed an indivisible integrity for Stoddard; as he once observed in a phrase Increase Mather did not admire, "we never read of communicants and non-communicants in Scripture."
38
As these views came into the open, Stoddard stood revealed as a major critic not only of Increase Mather's use of typological interpretation but also of his advocacy of the Church of the pure. Stoddard did not admire the impure, but he despaired of the Church's ever attaining the discernment to identify them accurately. Some men would always possess the skill to act the part of saints, though they lacked the gracious qualifications; others would confuse the pangs of conscience, which might torment even carnal men, with the true movements of the Holy Spirit; and still others would be unable to recognize the faith within themselves even when it was genuine.
39
The Church's problem of selecting its own was complicated by the yearnings of most men to save themselves unaided by any
 
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divine power. Because a man is a rational creature, Stoddard said, he flatters himself that his reason can find the way to God. It guides him in most actions of his life and so, he asks, why not in matters of religion? What a man's reason does not inform him of is the deceitfulness of the heart, and its propensity to serve the self at the expense of everything else. In pride and in self-righteousness, men trust their reason and refuse to accept the proposition founded in Scripture that men can be saved only by Christ's righteousness. Carnal reason, after all, is full of objections against the doctrine of our acceptance by Christ's righteousness. The one thing reason cannot tell men is how to deny itself; and men "do not carry a sense upon their hearts of the imperfections and deceits of their own reason: they know not what dim-sighted things they are. . . ." Hence they regret the testimony of the Lord and "make their understanding the rule and measure of Principles in Religion." Unfortunately for such men, the Lord, in choosing His elect, did not consult men's reasons, or their merits, but simply chose whom He would according to His own pleasure. And He gave His Son as payment to satisfy the exactions of His law for violations by men.
40
Because men found this order of salvation so hard to accept and because men who were enabled to accept it were difficult to identify, Stoddard insisted that the Church should be made comprehensive enough to encompass all those not openly scandalous who professed belief in Christ. They were visible saints and visibility defined the Church so long as it existed on earth. Stoddard did not believe that men should trouble themselves about the invisible Church beyond accepting its existence. The bent of his mind favored not only the observed but the ordered. A church, he once commented, resembled an armyit had "orderly" lines of authority with some men serving the Lord as rulers and the others as the ruled, whose duty required obedience to their superiors.
41
The sacraments in these orderly regiments did not differ from any other sort of worship except in form. The Lord commanded all men to pray, regenerate and unregenerate alike. He required them to listen to His Word, and He demanded that they take the sacrament of Holy Communion. Placing the sacrament in this context in effect reduced its symbolism and emotional significance. To be sure, throughout the course of his ministry Stod-

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