FOREWARD

Puritanism may be described as that point of view, that code of values, carried to New England by the first settlers. These were English Protestants, and in their fundamental convictions were at one with the Protestants, or at least with the Calvinistic Protestants, of all Europe. But the peculiar isolation of the New England colonies--the homogeneous people, the sparse soil, the climate, the economic struggle--quickly made these Protestants a peculiar people. Because their societies were tightly organized, and above all because they were a highly articulate people, the New Englanders established Puritanism--for better or worse--as one of the continuous factors in American life and thought. It has played so dominant a role because descendants of the Puritans have carried traits of the Puritan mind into a variety of pursuits and all the way across the continent. Many of these qualities have persisted even though the original creed is lost. Without some understanding of Puritanism, and that at its source, there is no understanding of America. . .

Chapter One: History

The Puritans acquired their name because they were English Protestants who in the second half of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries were resolved to “purify” the Church of England. They determined to continue the reformation begun under Henry VIII until they duplicated in England the precise form of ecclesiastical polity they believed to be clearly set forth in the New Testament. They would utterly extirpate everything in the Church for which they could find no specific Biblical warrant, especially those features they considered the foul heritage of medieval corruption. They would abolish the episcopal hierarchy, the prayer book, all ritual, vestments, and the celebration of Christmas.

However, by the “Elizabethan Settlement” of 1559 the crown officially identified itself with that compromise between radical Protestantism and Roman Catholicism which today constitutes the Church of England. Hence the Puritans were obliged to become opponents, even enemies, of the state. The controversy became, decade after decade, more bitter, until it flared into ferocious warfare in 1642. By 1649 the Puritans had seized the power and had executed both the Archbishop of Canterbury and King Charles I.

In the course of fighting this Civil War the Puritan forces discovered to their dismay that they were divided into two irreconcilable opinions about just what the Biblical pattern, supposedly so precise, really was. Furthermore, as this division came into the open, they had to recognize that it went back to the origins of the movement in the 1560’s, that it had always been there, though it had been kept down by the long necessity of maintaining a united front against the prelates. But out of this hidden rift in the ranks, some two decades before the Puritans took up arms against King Charles, came the migration of certain adherents of the minority position to New England.

The majority of English Puritans believed that the pure church should be “national"--as was the Church of England --that it should include the entire population, and be made up of geographical parish units, with membership and attendance enforced by the state. But their national church was to be Presbyterian, on the model of Calvin’s system in Geneva or the Church of Scotland. They would replace the hierarchy of archbishops, bishops, priests, with a hierarchy of governing bodies, from the national assembly down through the regional classis to the presbytery of the parish church, consisting of the minister and the elders.

The minority were what ultimately came to be called Congregationalists. They held that each church was “particular,” being founded on a covenant formally entered into only by those who possessed the will power to confess their faith and to swear to the covenant. These they called the “visible saints.” The churches were to be entirely selfgoverning; there would be no compelling agencies above them, neither bishop nor classis nor synod. The conception of a national church was to be rooted out as being the last stronghold of Antichrist. Each congregation was to choose its own pastor and officers, to administer the rites, accept or excommunicate members, while the masses--if unable to make a profession--would simply have to remain meekly outside. Uniformity of practice and doctrine would be guaranteed by the unanimity of the saints, while the civil authority would keep the unchurched in subjection and prevent the rise among them of any heresy or of any competing ecclesiastical proposals.

The sources of this Congregational philosophy are difficult to locate. The proponents thought it was sufficiently set forth in the New Testament, though Presbyterians could not find it there. We may now perceive, in the perspective of history, that many half-formed aspiration of the age and of the nation were obliquely or unwittingly embodied in the theory. Congregationalists vehemently denied Presbyterian charges that the plan was shockingly “democratical”; still, it did create within the confines of each particular church a democracy of the membership. But it aimed to achieve these islands of democratic Christians by deliberately excluding most of the populace, who had neither the wit nor the inclination to make a profession, as presumably unregenerate and therefore probably headed for damnation.

This conception of the covenanted church began its ferment among the Puritan ranks in the 1580’s. As soon as a few zealots got the idea firmly in their heads, they faced a logical deduction that, if the true church is founded on the volition of the members and not on a geographical parish, they could no longer remain within a national church. They took the terrible step of “separating,” an act equivalent in the legal system of the time to high treason. Several paid for this temerity with their lives, and one group was so harried that it fled to Holland and ultimately, as our first narrative tells, to New England, there to found the Plymouth colony and to become the “Pilgrims” of American legend.

The great body of Puritans, whether they were working for a Presbyterian or a Congregational purification of England, were horrified by the Separatists. These endangered the cause by seeming to prove to the government that Puritanism was really what the government said it was--subversive, anarchical, disloyal. The solid Puritans were not trying to achieve mere toleration as against an established church; they had no notion whatsoever that religious liberty was feasible or desirable within a society. They-whether of the Presbyterian or Congregational faction-were scheming and plotting for the day when they would oust the bishops and rule at Canterbury and York. Whichever of them won was predetermined to suppress the other, with methods as ruthless as those of Kings James and Charles, and also to deal even more severely with such dissidents as dared to attempt a separation.

So, the little band who eventually landed and suffered at Plymouth in 1620 are not quite representative. The large and well-organized body who settled Massachusetts Bay in 1630, though committed to the Congregational idea, stoutly maintained that they were not and never had been Separatists. This difference made for some distinctions between the characters of the two plantations, yet in another the Separatists, by the fact of their having withdrawn, were able to concentrate upon the essence of Puritanism. They may well be called the purest of the purifiers. The heart and soul of that disposition was its intense devotion to the Bible, to the letter and the spirit, to the Old Testament as well as the New, and an absolute dedication to performing in this life what seemed the will of God.