David D. Hall (editor) - Puritans in the New World: A Critical Anthology

Puritans in the New World

Frontispiece. Captain Thomas Smith (d. 1691), self-portrait, Boston, Mass. The verses under his hand are quoted in the headnote on Anne Bradstreet (). Courtesy of the Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Mass.

Puritans in the New World

A Critical Anthology

EDITED BY

David D. Hall

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2004 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Puritans in the New World: a critical anthology / edited by David D. Hall.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-691-11408-0 (cl.: alk. paper)ISBN 0-691-11409-9 (pb.: alk. paper) 1. PuritansNew EnglandHistory. 2. PuritansNew EnglandHistorySources. 3. PuritansNew EnglandBiography. 4. New EnglandHistoryColonial period, ca. 16001775. 5. New EnglandHistoryColonial period, ca. 16001775 Sources. 6. New EnglandChurch history. 7. New EnglandChurch history Sources. I. Hall, David D.

eISBN 978-1-40082-603-2 (ebook)

F7.P986 2004

285'.9'0974dc22

2003065495

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

https://press.princeton.edu

R0

Introduction

Puritans in the New World: A Critical Anthology tells the story of a remarkable culture that emigrants from England transported to New England in the seventeenth century, and it does so in the words of these Puritans themselves. We hear them giving thanks that so many have crossed the Atlantic safely, that in their new home all things are being done righteously [and] religiously, and, as the years unfold, worrying whether the second-generation colonists will remain faithful to the errand of the founders. We hear other voices as well, for Puritanism was no monolith, and the colonists did not have the land to themselves; Native Americans had long been present in the new world. We hear the radical Roger Williams as he begins to plead for liberty of conscience; we hear the charismatic Anne Hutchinson defying the magistrates and ministers; and we hear the same words Native Americans heard, listening to missionaries bringing them the Christian message or going to war instead. The purpose of Puritans in the New World is to present, in all its richness, the lived experience of being a Puritan in the strange, contested, and hopeful setting of the New World.

Who were the Puritans? The short answer to this question is that they were reformers in a national church, the Church of England, which did not fully embrace the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. After Henry VIII renounced the authority of the pope and made himself head of the Church in the 1530s, England became nominally Protestant. Some within the Church, including several of its bishops, called for more sweeping change. Instead, the Church reverted to Catholicism during the brief reign of Henrys daughter Mary (15531558). But when Elizabeth I (15581603) came to the throne, Protestantism returneda Protestantism held in check, however, by a monarch who rejected the demands of the reformers. Not only in her reign, but also during those of her successors James I (16031625) and Charles I (16251649), conflict persisted in Church and Parliament, and in scores of towns and cities, over the nature of the true church, with one party, nicknamed Puritans, pursuing an agenda that owed much to the Calvinist (or Reformed) tradition as it arose in Europe. Only in New England did the reformers have their way. Here alone, civil and religious leaders shared the same goals; here alone among the English settlements in the Western Hemisphere Puritanism became the dominant culture.

The name Puritan was not of the reformers choosing. As William Bradford remarked in Of Plymouth Plantation, it arose as a term of mockery loosely connected with a controversy in the Christian church in the fourth century C.E. but expanded into caricature in popular theater of the late sixteenth century: the Puritan as a zealous busybody. To this day it remains a term of caricature. Eventually some seventeenth-century English men and women embraced it as a positive term designating their commitment to obey the will of God as fully as possible.

Recognizing this diversity is what makes Puritans in the New World a critical anthology. Yet our awareness of the movements complexity must not stand in the way of grasping its core principles and practices. Foremost among these principles was the insistence that Roman Catholicism distorted the nature of the church and the doctrine of salvation by grace. Puritans were at one with Protestants of the sixteenth century in declaring that the salvation of sinners was entirely Gods doing. Emphasizing the sovereignty of God no less strongly than John Calvin did before them, Puritan preachers described saving grace as a free, unmerited gift to sinners. Puritans also derided the Catholic sacramental system as idolatry. Saints and saints days, relics and pilgrimages these and many other aspects of Catholicism were superstitions, not, as Catholics believed, intermediaries that embodied the sacred. Puritans especially denounced the superstitions they encountered in worship, characterizing as superstitious or a human invention any practice for which no specific authority existed in the Bible. Again, they were reiterating a basic Protestant principle. But the more radical wing of the movement carried this principle to an extreme by declaring that the Bible contained rules for worship and the organization of the church that had the binding force of law. To those in the Church of England who argued otherwise, Thomas Hooker replied in 1633, the year he emigrated to New England, that the Christian church must deliver the laws which she hath received from her King, not dare to make laws. This way of thinking lay behind the reluctance or outright refusal of many English clergy and laypeople to participate in acts of worship that the Church of England had inherited from Catholicism.

To its determination to uphold the sovereignty of God and purify the church the Puritan movement added the goal of elevating the standards for being a Christian. A characteristic device of Puritan preaching was to contrast the figure of the sincere or real Christian with that of the temporizer who refuses to acknowledge the full burden of being a sinner and hesitates to undergo the transformation that Puritans referred to as the new birth or conversion. Asking themselves the question, what constitutes authentic Christianity? Puritans answered it by raising the bar. How they did so can be observed in those sections of this book (parts III and VI) where laypeople describe their quest for saving grace. At a time in English history when many of the lower orders comprehended but little of Christian doctrine and spirituality, the fluency of these men and women is remarkable. For them the sovereignty of God and the burden of original sin were not abstract propositions but powerful truths that bore directly on how they were to live and die. For them too the Bible embodied the living, vital presence of the Holy Spirit, a mirror in which they could gaze upon their true selves and find lessons pertinent to almost every life situation.