The City Upon a Hill: Generation 3

Generation Three and the Puritan Duty to the Next Generation

Generation three, Eliezer Mather, quote, it's part of the generation work of every Christian to do his utmost that the Lord's name and honor may be held up to the succeeding generation, unquote. William Adams, quote, I speak now to the generation on upon the stage.

If you are a considerable number of you, do not take care to be right spirited for God, that you may duly manage his work and carry it on and serve the God of your fathers with a perfect heart and willing mind, you will be like to destroy and lay this pleasant land desolate, unquote.

Just as an event in England, the Restoration, marked the beginnings of the second generation of New England, so another English event was epoch making on both sides of the Atlantic. Both the Restoration with its persecution of English Puritanism and the toleration ushered in by the Glorious Revolution were to have diametrically different effects on English and New England Puritanism.

In England, they were a defeated minority. In New England, they were a provoked majority and intensifying the provocation, it came from outside. English Puritanism was reduced to mere dissent with the Restoration, but in New England, the Restoration would set off events which provoked a revived oppositional mentality, a jihad.

A generation later, with the Glorious Revolution in 1689, New England's hopes for the complete reformation of the Anglican Church were revived. For example, Cotton Mather published Eleutheria, or An Idea of the Reformation in England.

In it, he praised the Glorious Revolution and in the tradition of the moderate Puritans of Tudor years, appealed for the Reformation to be pushed forward. Puritanism's original purpose was alive and well.

At this point, the first generation gets idealized. They focus sharply on their errand into the wilderness and their Jeremiah flourishes. However, the story of New England Puritanism is not primarily about a vulnerable Christian community being molded by London's culture.

The history of Puritan New England shows that their faith gave them a special resilience against the eroding power of the wider world. At the close of the century, New England was still an essentially Puritan society, although the state was ultimately out of Puritan hands, at least in Massachusetts, and the culture was beginning to be shaped by Anglicized, Atlantic-oriented merchants, Puritanism remained strong.

If we do not define Puritanism too narrowly, that is, if we allow some diversity within a wider Puritan movement, then by the third generation of the wilderness, Puritan integrity had held. That being the case, it is reasonable to suppose that such a strong ideational movement dominant for such a long time over what later was the most populous and arguably the most influential region of the soon-to-become United States, deeply ingrained much of its spirit and ethic in that nation and in the missionary movements that issued from it to the world.

The Effects of the Glorious Revolution and the End of English Puritanism

In England, King William's Toleration Act did what generations of persecution had not been able to do to English nonconformists. In legally granting their right to worship, it took away their cause to fight.

With no need for jihad, their zeal drained away and their decline was sped. The combination of the people's rejection of the Puritan state and about a generation later legal recognition was enough to break the back of English Puritanism.

Logically, it could have done the same to New England Puritans. For an abolishing religious persecution, the act also removed what had spurred the first settlers to cross the Atlantic. Distance made the difference.

The cause was in England, but the effect was different in America. In America, they were not just scattered churches, but a distinct province, a province with a strong sense of their own identity since they had been virtually independent.

Meanwhile, devout New England Puritans had found a new enemy against which to rally the troops. With the memory of Lodge's persecution growing even fainter, Puritan leaders of the second generation, as shown in their Jeremiah ads, had changed the primary target of their fire.

The number one immediate enemy of the faith was no longer the compromisers of the Anglican Church or the Pope, but the decline of New England's own youth. The Pope may still be the Antichrist, but the Antichrist could be defeated if only the covenant people were fateful.

King Philip's War between 1675 and 76, the loss of the charter and economic downturns all served to confirm that God's hand was against God's sinful covenant people. There was always a need for jihad in New England.

After the Glorious Revolution, King William issued the colony a new charter in which the main pillar of religious control was permanently removed. The franchise, that is voting rights, was granted on the basis of property rather than church membership.

Those hoping that increased matter could bring back the original charter were disappointed. The constitutional basis for Massachusetts's era of de facto independence was dissolved. The third generation of New England Puritans would have to learn to get along in a world not of their own making.

Cotton Mather tried to put the best face on this, saying, quote, the colony is now made a province, unquote. The truth, though, was that the new provincial relationship exposed New England to many unpuritan influences.

Even Massachusetts's first appointed governor, Sir William Phipps, to whose exploits Cotton Mather dedicated a lengthy portion of his Magnolia Christi Americana would turn out to be a disappointment, a stepping stone away from the old Puritan guard.

But the oppositional mentality, the jihad, had been awakened, and it would not die down easily. The tendency of this time, so notes Samuel E. Morrison, was to tighten up and insist on undiluted Puritanism.

Salem Witchcraft, Volunteerism, and Covenant Renewal

This aroused oppositional mentality may be behind two domestic New England controversies, one very well known. Most Americans, if they have any knowledge of this period, think of the Salem witchcraft trials.

Some portray the Salem trials as a cultural battle to bulge, a desperate Puritan counterattack, especially by the Puritan hinterland against the forces of cosmopolitanism. They were reacting against the corruption's respect, not simply of a different lifestyle, but also of a higher authority, which would doom lifestyle to extinction.

Puritans would not necessarily differ with this interpretation. Cotton Mather himself stated that the reason for the outbreak of witchcraft was because Puritanism so opposed such things. Quote, where will Satan show the most malice, but where he is hated and hated most, unquote.

While the modern interpretation is that they were nothing more than mass hysteria combined with slack judicial practices, in fact, it is reasonable to suppose that in a culture in which people believe that witchcraft was a real avenue to supernatural power, that some people would try it, especially those like West Indian slaves who were on the fringes of Puritan society.

When African and even ancient Anglo-Saxon folklore came into contact with Puritan scruples, the result was deadly. For Cotton Mather, the outbreak of witchcraft was a sign that, quote, the walls of the whole world are broken down, unquote.

The old barriers between neighbors, nations, and even the invisible world were dissolved. For Puritans, this was cosmic in scope. One fruit of the jihad, the oppositional mentality, was the rise of volunteerism.

After the new charter was issued in 1691, the crown-appointed governors were not nearly as active in support of the Puritan standing order as the elected governors of the original charter had been. Rather than having become dependent on government protection, Puritan vibrancy showed in the sudden sprouting of voluntary associations and spontaneous movements, inspired by Increase Mather's Order of the Gospel in 1701, a general convention of ministers in Boston agreed in 1704 to form consociations for the support of the New England Way.

Massachusetts General Court, however, refused to agree to the measure, largely because of the colony's crown-appointed governor. A few years later, Connecticut, under the elected governor Gurdon Saltonstall, who also happened to be a minister, would pass just such a measure, the Saybrook Platform.

Saltonstall, preaching to the Connecticut Assembly nearly a decade before he was governor, insisted that the best rulers have the fear of God in their hearts. They who have the right to select their own rulers, like the citizens of Connecticut, should prefer the pious.

Meanwhile, back in Massachusetts, Stoddard's Hampshire Association in the West was an attempt to erect an organization of churches for mutual oversight in place of the government's lost role. Both Cotton Mather and Samuel Danforth lifted a page from the moral reform movements in England that briefly sprouted during Queen Anne's reign.

They both formed societies to combat vice. Cotton Mather, starting in 1702, gathered young men to help the Boston authorities enforce moral legislation. His efforts produced little, since by 1713, the societies had died and could not be resuscitated.

Youth remained, however, a focus of the volunteeristic efforts to rekindle the Puritan fire. Samuel Danforth had more success, perhaps because his groups were more explicitly religious. He led, in Taunton, Massachusetts, the Organization of Societies for Prayer, encouraging family worship and, like Cotton Mather's groups, self-disciplining of young men.

A revival ensued in Taunton in 1705, which was celebrated in Puritan style by a covenant renewal service. Increase Mather had championed such services during King Philip's war as a mass expression of repentance.

In the midst of revival, they turned back to this fading Puritan practice. This would only have happened if Puritanism was still a living movement, even in the third generation. Puritan unity and diversity.

Increase. Mather's debate with Solomon Stoddard on giving liberal access to the Lord's Supper is another controversy that may never have been fired to such heat if not for the spirit of jihad.

In the air.

Solomon Stoddard and the Question of Open Communion

And the wilderness started broke with some aspects of the New England way, but certainly not with Puritanism itself. Using standard Puritan typological hermeneutics, he sought to recover the Old Testament as a source for local church polity, as well as its standard covenantal use for the whole society.

He pointed out that the Old Testament type of the supper, the Passover, was given to all Israelites, including the ungodly. Why not then do the same with the Lord's Supper? Give it to all members of the community.

Stoddard took the primitivist dimension of Puritanism one step further back into the Old Testament. If one wished the restoration of the pure church, observes Paul R. Lucas, one looked first at the polity of God's church among the ancient Israelites.

Stoddard's interpretation should be seen in context, and the absence of significant religious competition, he could afford to herd everyone into the church so as to put them all in the way of grace. Stoddard had a thought-out theological rationale.

The inward actings of grace are invisible to others, he said. Someone may have grace and not yet show it, while another may be counterfeiting the visible actings of grace. It is then too difficult to discern the sheep from the goats.

In light of that difficulty, Stoddard advocated giving communion to all who were Orthodox theologically and led scandal-free lives. His open communion was not as radical as some make it out to be. Boston's third church, Charleston, Cambridge, and Watertown, by downplaying the test of relation, the testimony one gives when applying for membership, by downplaying that, each had widened the circle of those eligible for communion by the end of the 17th century.

Stoddard certainly did not regard all New Englanders as regenerate saints. He even had his suspicions about some of his fellow pastors. Stoddard's move, though at variance with the letter of New England practice, was in keeping with its evangelistic spirit.

Stoddard argued that he was no innovator, that he was in keeping with the pillars of the churches of New England. Most Puritans held that only the visible saints should be accepted into church membership and given communion.

This was because they believed that the typological fulfillment of Old Testament Israel was not a particular nation or commonwealth like Massachusetts or New England, but only the elect, the invisible church.

When Puritans act under this conviction, it becomes impossible for them to define themselves as primarily subjects of a particular earthly realm like Massachusetts, or to confine their ministers to the edification of one nation like Massachusetts.

They are called to the elect all over the world. Increase. Mather, although he believed that New England was a type and emblem of New Jerusalem, believed it was only so because of the visible saints in her midst.

God's national covenant was principally with these visible saints. This view turns out to be more faithful for the future because it results in a less parochial, less nationalistic worldview. God's covenant is with the elect everywhere in the world, and we are obliged to find and help them.

It's easy to assume that because the Puritans were austere and religiously conservative, that they were necessarily parochial, that is, inwardly focused only on themselves. Actually, a parochialism is a determination to avoid the wider world if at all possible.

The Puritans weren't as non-parochial as can be imagined. Granted, they wanted to remake the world in their own image, but they certainly did not want to duck it. The apparent return of England to a more Protestant course after the Glorious Revolution and the flight of the Huguenots from France, Huguenots are Reformed believers from France, some of whom came to New England, encouraged a vision of a Protestant union.

In response to King William's Toleration Act of 1689, Cotton Mather moved further and further away from congregational exclusivism. The Huguenot presence in New England had never been discouraged, though some of their habits, like the celebration of Christmas, had been.

In 1681, Cotton Mather offered public prayers for, quote, the sore persecution of the saints in France, unquote. Soon, over 100 Huguenot families came to Boston where they established their own French church.

So welcome were they, though, that some of the Huguenots joined Puritan churches. Several joined Increase and Cotton Mather's Second Church in the 1690s, and several more joined Brattle Street Church about a decade later.

In 1700, the Massachusetts General Council voted to give Pierre Dallier, the pastor of the French church, 12 pounds in aid. Soon, Huguenots assimilated into Massachusetts' political life, and exogenous marriages, marriages between local Puritans of English descent and French, were common.

Huguenots assimilated so well that by 1748, Boston's French church disbanded. One of the later assimilated French immigrants would be a silversmith named Paul Revere. Each of the first three New England Puritan generations demonstrated their yearning for Christian unity around a Reformation core, despite the established congregationalism.

Of the first generation, inclusivistic John Eliot published The Communion of Churches in 1665. In it, he proposed an organizational compromise between congregational and Presbyterian forms. Eliot sought to justify the role of councils of gathered churches.

Increase Mather's United Brethren sparked correspondence back and forth between like-minded ministers on both sides of the Atlantic. Cotton Mather celebrated the blessed union with another publication proclaiming on his title page, quote, a most happy union has lately been made between those two prominent parties in England.

He insisted that New England was a place where, quote, the names Congregational, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Anti-Pedobaptist or Baptist are swallowed up in that of Christian. He even planned a grand ministerial association with a standing council to advance the ecumenical spirit, but it foundered on congregational independence.

Cotton Mather's correspondence with people in at least 21 different countries, including European pietists, especially Auguste Franke of Halle, Germany, united him with believers across the world. He sent letters around the world, letters stuffed with the names of leaders and descriptions of the great events of his day.

This correspondence became the basis of Cotton Mather's conviction that piety provided the basis of an evangelical ecumenism. Cotton Mather said, quote, if we prefer a man not of the best morals, who supports our notions of church polity, to one of the imminent piety, but of a different ecclesiastical persuasion, that is a different denomination, we are guilty of the sectarian spirit.

New England's original errand may have changed somewhat, but for Cotton Mather, the new identity had not changed into something less, but into something more. England may not be converted en masse, but there was still hope for a union of conformist and non-conformist on a Calvinistic basis.

The center had held, and by Cotton Mather's time, things had not yet fallen apart. What is more, they now had a mission to the elect around the globe. Puritanism was the American pietism, and pietism, the puritanism of Germany.

Cotton Mather sought to integrate pietism of New England with the puritanism of Germany. With this creation of a puritan network of piety, tying them with similar movements around the world, was puritanism at home unraveling?

Declension, Brattle Street, and the Defense of Orthodoxy

Around the turn of the 18th century, events would conspire to provoke Increase Mather to declare that New England was earning itself the title Ichabod. Solomon Stoddard published the doctrine of the instituted churches in London, advocating a more Presbyterian polity and liberal access to the Lord's Supper.

Increase was forced out of the presidency of Harvard by a contrived residency requirement. At first, the formation of the Brattle Street Church in 1699 appeared to be a significant defection from puritan exclusivity to English tolerance.

Among the founders of Brattle Street Church, a group of modernists, so-called, two were grandsons of former governors of Massachusetts, and around them, quote, coalesced a larger group, most of them men of business, unquote.

They called Benjamin Coleman, a son of Massachusetts, who had gone to England. He received Presbyterian ordination before returning to take over Brattle Street. Upon his return, Coleman issued a manifesto that implicitly challenged the Cambridge platform.

Specifically, prospective members would be examined by the minister in private. All who contributed could have a say in the selection of ministers, and Coleman acknowledged the Westminster Confession.

The Mathers would not, by temperament, sit back quietly as New England orthodoxy was challenged. Coleman responded with his own Gospel Order Revived in 1700. Nevertheless, they were eventually able to reconcile with each other, agreeing to disagree.

Their reawakened oppositional mentality was not turning them against one another. The Mathers and Coleman closed ranks. Declension, that is decline, there may have been in the hearts of the sons and daughters of the founders of the city of Point Hill, but the myth of a disintegrating Puritanism with a, quote, liberal Coleman at Boston, a rebel stoddard in the wilderness, and incipient Armenianism seen in the moralism of third-generation Puritans, even Cotton Mather, simply holds no water.

For example, Cotton Mather does not sound like a mere moralist. In his Eleutheria, he explicitly defends Calvinism. In his historical magnum opus, Magnilia Christi Americana, he recounts a story of an apparition appearing to a prince of the Eastern Indians, the apparition looking like a Puritan minister, who had been the subject of John Eliot's ministry.

The apparition, or vision, commanded the prince, quote, to forbear the drinking of rum, unquote, and, quote, to observe the Sabbath day and to deal justly with his neighbors, unquote, promising him salvation if he obeyed.

Mather comments, quote, but the apparition all the while never said one word about Christ, which was the main subject of Mr. Eliot's ministry, unquote. Cotton Mather concludes that the apparition was a demon.

Cotton Mather came to believe that even by the 1720s, New England ministers were nearly unanimous in holding onto Puritan orthodoxy. He, in 1726, reported that New England Puritans, quote, adhere to the confession of faith published by the Assembly of Divines at Westminster.

I cannot learn that among all the pastors of 200 churches, there is one Armenian. Coleman turned out to be no more a rationalist and latitudinarian, kind of like being ecumenical, than Stoddard, who only opened communion to convert the unregenerate.

Coleman was committed to a church of visible saints, too, even if he thought the New England way's tradition of discerning the saints was no longer useful. Coleman lived to see and support the Great Awakening.

He remained staunchly Calvinist in his theology and a friend to the New Evangelical revivals. George Whitefield himself would remark favorably on Coleman's gospel preaching and vice versa. Meanwhile, Samuel Willard, acting president of Harvard after Increase Mather, was just as orthodox as the Mathers and so could mitigate the latitudinarian, sort of liberal, influence.

Eventually, even the Mathers made peace with both Stoddard and Coleman. Peace was also made with the Baptists and kept with the Huguenots. Although Increase Mather, like his contemporary Stoddard, had called for more suppression of the Baptists, he also acknowledged the Baptists as legitimate in practice by inquiring whether the local Baptist church had any objection to John Farnham, who was requesting the right to return to communion at the North Church.

By 1718, he and his son, Cotton, assisted in the ordination of a Baptist minister with Cotton preaching the sermon. Cotton Mather considered even the Baptists to be part of the Puritan family. He insisted that the Baptists he knew were, quote, most worthy Christians and as holy, watchful, fruitful, and heavenly people as perhaps any in the world, unquote.

He even claimed that some Baptists were, quote, among the planters of New England from the beginning and have been welcomed to the communion of our churches, which they have enjoyed, reserving their particular opinion unto themselves.

He claims that he asked members who held to believers' baptism to remain in his church. Cotton Mather was stretching toward the evangelical unity that George Whitefield would later champion. There was diversity within late New England Puritanism created by Benjamin Coleman, Solomon Stoddard, and others.

That diversity demonstrated not that Puritanism was unraveling, but that in a new environment, the movement could adjust in a variety of ways while maintaining an essential unity. It's true that the parochialism of New England Congregationalism was being challenged, but the challenges were on a Puritan basis, that is, within the Puritan family.

A new Puritan unity was developing, which was preparing Puritanism for dispersal. Thus, despite the howls of some of the Congregational mainstream, like the young Increase Mather, Puritanism exhibited in its first century in the New World that it had both a firm foundation and a variety of facades on that one foundation.

Puritanism had managed nearly a century of stability in the city upon a hill. The story of the first three generations of the city upon a hill is not primarily about declension or disintegration, at least not externally.

On the contrary, given the pressures they were under from London and the natural centrifugal forces of human society, they managed to hold together to a remarkable degree. Hence, the Puritanism's ideational culture dominated New England for over a century.

For most of the first two generations, that dominance was complete, economic, political, and cultural. But even by the end of the third generation, it was still Puritanism that ruled the culture. Since throughout this period, New England was relatively homogeneous, this vibrant Puritan church had the opportunity to shape the common mind from basic presuppositions up.

Sociologist Talcott Parsons writes,.

Quote,.

Insofar as a given system of ideas has existed for a long time in a society at strategic points, it is a reasonable hypothesis that it exerts a steady influence in the direction of canalizing attitudes in such a way that they will become, in terms of such a system, meaningful.

This is the more true, the more the society in question is one characterized by the persistence of aggregates, by strength of belief. So that ideational system of ideas known as Puritanism brought that New England society about and guided it at strategic points, apparently canalizing attitudes in a way that they became meaningful and ingrained.

Its century of vitality proved that it was capable of withstanding the corrosive influence of the wider European culture because Puritanism was such an overwhelmingly ideational movement that it held to great ideals.

Its strong beliefs made it especially potent in shaping New England society and presumably the new nation in which New England was so influential.