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 (8 page)

 
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pointed out, Christ's Church on earth is everlasting. The past threw up examples of God's preservation of a covenant people in His Church. As long as they remained faithful, the Antichrist was held at bay. But as soon as they yielded to sin, as Israel had, God permitted them to perish. History suggested, then, that preservation of the Church required removal to New Englandor, as Richard wrote, "to some such like place."
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Separated from corruption but not from the world, nor from the Church of England, which despite its degeneracy still remained a part of Christ's visible Church, the saints would enjoy God's protection. John Winthrop gave Puritan aspirations their most exalted expression: in Massachusetts Bay Colony, he told his followers on the
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, they would be "as a city upon a hill." Winthrop meant by this phrase that the rest of the world would watch them to see if they held to their professed dedication to purity and Christian love. It seems doubtful that the hard-headed Winthrop, or any of the Puritans who arrived in the years after 1630, held any hope that the watchers would profit from New England's example. The past offered too many cases of men who, despite divine warnings and afflictions, persisted in their degeneracy.
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The general path of history seemed clear to Richard Mather though the details were obscure. As destitute as the times were of goodness, the Antichrist in his apparent triumphs was approaching his end. Richard carne to believe, as he decided to leave England, that the Puritans in the wilderness might contribute to the effort of pushing him into the pit. Surely God would not abandon His people in the wilderness if they were true to Him. History contained melancholy examples of people rejected by the Lord but they were people who had repeatedly broken their covenant with Him. God had patiently endured Israel's violations of their pact, mercifully calling them back until the stiffness of their hearts made their defection permanent. So the Lord's children in New England could depend upon their opportunities to serve. The Lord might try them and certainly would afflict them when they earned His disapproval. But He would not desert them unless they renounced Him.
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A godly company had arrived in New England five years before Richard Mather landed in Boston. Their mood when they settled was filled with the expectation that the end of the "line
 
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of time" was approaching and with it cataclysm perhaps, but also judgment and eternal bliss for the righteous.
Mood was one thing. The Puritans craved the certainty and the substance that would convert it into knowledge about the final sequences which would bring the end. To gain this knowledge they consulted the Prophecies, but the metaphorical quality of these Scriptures invited disagreement as surely as they raised expectations. The gaining of knowledge required practical study. And so Puritan historians, who aspired to become prophets, began the process of searching the past for the fulfillment of scriptural prophecy. Their method was to compare theory and reality, the predictions of the Bible and the events of the "objective" world.
The Scriptures disclosed the signs of the last days in a bewildering variety. David sang of the "wondrous works" that signalled the end; the Puritans could not help but believe that they would be wondrous, but their apparently infinite number made them hard to sort out from Providence and other divine intrusions into the affairs of men. Daniel promised that knowledge would increase in the last days, and apparently it was increasing, especially as it concerned the number and extent of the prophecies. But Paul, while apparently agreeing that men would in the last days be "ever learning," also concluded that they would be "never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.'' Paul was not exactly happy at the prospects for moral behavior during the last days either. They would be "perilous times," and men "shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy." The list went on; happily, other passages promised better things in statecraft: revolution, for example, that would overturn the ungodly, and upheavals that would shake the wicked from power. Nature, too, would give tokens of the impending end. They were not calculated to sooth lovers of quietthere would be earthquakes, said John; and the prophet Joel scanning the universe discerned the promise of the earth of ''blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke," and in the heavens, of the sun "turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come."
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Reading the events of the pastand the presentin the light of the prophecies could be a stimulating but nevertheless an un-
 
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satisfactory business. From the beginning of history, there had been revolutions and earthquakes; periodically, too, there were revivals of learning; and Puritans could not find a time when men had not been covetous and filled with pride and self-love. Comets had appeared before the seventeenth century; the moon had taken on shades of red; and eclipses had darkened the sun. The signs, then, had appeared before and proved themselves misleading.
The conviction that history had entered its last phase persisted nonetheless. And with good reason. In the last century the events on the line of time had begun to take a different shape; there was nothing, for example, to approach the Reformation in earlier centuries. Not only did it alter the central institution of history, the Church, it affected politics, the conduct of life, the spread of people. The Reformation, like all other events, had to be understood in the context of history. In particular, its meaning had to be apprehended with two, more reliable, signs in mind. Most Puritan commentators, while conceding the difficulty in sorting out the portent of earthquakes and comets, insisted that Scriptures proposed two infallible points by which progress towards the end could be charted. Just before the end, the Jews, who had been scattered throughout the world since their release from the Babylonian captivity, would be converted to the faith of Christ; and the Antichristthe Bishop of Romewould be pulled from his throne and destroyed. These events had a particularity and a concreteness that would permit verification. Either the Jews were in the Christian Church or they were not; either the Pope held power or he did not.
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These events would occur over a period of time; presumablyaccording to most authoritiesthe Pope would be brought low first, and the conversion of Israel would follow when the Church had regained much of its old purity and authority. When these occurrences were accomplished, their meaning would be clear; the difficulty arose in detecting the evidence of their beginning, for the early stages were not so clear as Puritans would have liked.
There were variations in this general interpretation of the signs. Puritan commentators relished the account in Revelation of the pouring of the vials of wrath, which they took to be the story of the destruction of the Antichrist. The question they
 
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paused overand threatened to debate endlesslyinvolved discovering the correspondences in history to this figurative description. Had the angel poured the first vial upon the earth? Had all seven been emptied? Almost all scholars agreed at the time Richard Mather pondered these questions that at least several vials of wrath had been emptied and that several more remained full, ready to spill over on the ungodly. Richard Mather's friend, John Cotton, the closest student of the subject in New England, believed that history had progressed through the pouring of four vials of wrath. The first, on the earth, referred to the afflictions visited upon laymen of the Roman Catholic Church, "the lowest and basest Element in the Antichristian world." Catholics since Henry VIII's time, he explained, had learned that their old religion was nothing but the worship of God "after the devices of men." God's agents in history who tilted over this vial counted among their number ordinary men, who as good Catholics had formerly worshipped according to the laws of the Church. In Revelation, the wrath of the second vial spreads over the sea like the blood of a dead man; its referents in reality were the ordinances, the doctrine, the worship of the Church, all foul and corrupt. The men who poured this vial were Reformed ministers, who exposed the falseness and evil of the ordinances. Cotton named these men and included two especially familiar to Puritans in New England, William Perkins and William Ames. Cotton dated the emptying of the third vial "upon the rivers and fountains of waters'' even more precisely. Rivers and fountains designated the priests of the Catholic Church who felt the wrath of the third vial in 1581, when Parliament under Elizabeth's tutelage passed a statute making the preaching of Catholicism high treason. Jesuit priests received the full force of the Lord's wrath in the extraordinary statutes of a few years later. The King of Sweden joined Elizabeth in pouring the fourth vial "upon the sun," the House of Austria, the most glorious light in the Antichristian world. Scripture described the "seat of the beast'' receiving the wrath of the fifth vial; this reference, Cotton insisted, designated the system of papal government, specifically the Episcopacy. It did not refer to the Pope himself, or to Rome, as some held. This vial had not yet been emptied, though Cartwright, Paul Baynes, and other powerful critics of the bishops had "sprinkled a few
 
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drops" here and there. When its wrath was poured, it would spread from England to Catholic countries and eventually flow into the gates of Rome itself.
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Like others, Cotton's sureness in interpretation vanished when he faced the events of his own day. What was to be made of the persecution of Puritans in England? And of their immigration to America? The meaning of the English Civil War was especially puzzling. But Puritan authorities in New England in the first generation agreed on most essentials. The differences in their views were less important than their agreement on one important particular: how New England's role fitted into the general pattern of history. On this matter their agreement reflected a general consensus of their purposes in coming to the New World.
In the year 1635, while he was trying to decide whether to leave England or to remain, Richard Mather pondered the prophecies and reflected on history. He lacked John Cotton's gift for handling metaphor and he seemed reluctant to draw exact correspondences between the figures in Revelation and the facts of his own day. But if he resisted the temptation to fix in time the pouring of each vial of wrath, he could not escape what seemed to be the obvious meaning of the general course of events: the struggle with the Antichrist was coming to a climax. In 1635 the prospects for the success of that struggle in England did not appear bright. The English Civil War, with its conflict with Episcopacy, was still more than five years awayand the possibilities of a Presbyterian triumph and the beheading of a King were still inconceivable. (Most of John Cotton's prophetical works are the products of the next wartime decade.) Not surprisingly, then, Richard's historical thought lingered upon Israel of the captivity and defeat rather than victory. But he also noted earlier deliverances of God's chosen out of situations fraught with disaster. He was much impressed by the Lord's charge to Lot to flee Sodom before it was destroyed; the preservation of Noah out of a world drowned because of its corruption was in his mind too. The lesson of these events was clear: God preserved the faithful; God never permitted His Church to be extinguished whatever the evil around it. The obligation of the faithful seemed to be to protect themselves, in order that the Church might survive. If they could not worship
 
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in purity in their old homes, they must remove themselves. This obligation became an absolute necessity when the Lord threatened to destroy the land of their birth. Richard noted carefully in the arguments he wrote at this time that even nature agreed that a man must preserve himself and his own in the face of danger. Richard thus came to New England as an avowed exile; he had been banished because of his attachment to purity in the Church of Christ. His purpose in coming was to protect himself and help maintain the ordinances of Christ in His Church. His mood and his understanding of what he was doing was widely shared among the immigrants of the 1630's.
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The sense of exile lasted until the early years of the English Civil War, an event which convinced Mather that New England was no longer isolated in the conflict with the Antichrist. With the war he discovered that God had raised up in England a number of faithful supporters in His cause. To be sure, while the fighting continued they suffered, but they had the consolationRichard Mather pointed outof suffering in God's cause. Their sufferings in fact were similar to the afflictions he had endured while still preaching in England. Grievous though afflictions were, they revealed God's interest in the afflicted, and His intention of punishing them until they were purged of their corruption.
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This was one meaning Mather discovered in the war. It had still another dimension: it marked the death throes of the Beast. The servants of Antichrist had forced the issue; they had attacked true Christians just as they formerly had presecuted them. Now Christians were defending themselves in a sacred cause, and in the process of destroying the prelacy they were ushering in a period of purity in doctrine and worship. The struggle was worth it, Richard insisted, for the New Jerusalem would follow Christ's triumph.
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If, in the 1640's, the war promised the end of the Antichrist, events seemed less favorable to the prospect of the conversion of the Jews. And yet Richard Mather had hopes for this prophecy too. If the Lord had intervened to forestall the bloody conquest of England by the Beast, He had chosen America to give a prevision of the salvation of Israel. He had planted Indians in America, another nation of heathen, and now as the conflict with the Beast in England rendered its climax, He had begun to

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