The City Upon a Hill: Generation 2

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The Second Generation of Puritans in the City Upon a Hill, by John B. Carpenter

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Generation 2, Increase Mather, quote, My father, when he was leaving this world, did commend it as his dying counsel to me, that I should endeavor the good of the rising generation in this country, especially that they might be brought under the government of Christ in his church.
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Increase Mather stands as the quintessential Puritan over all three generations. By birth, he belongs to the second generation, but his experiences in England gave him a taste of the first, and his longevity allowed him to bury many of the ministers of the third.
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Although born in New England, he finished his education in Ireland and started his ministry in England, where he had expected to live for the rest of his life.
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When the enforced conformity of the Restoration came to Guernsey, England, where he was a chaplain, he refused to conform.
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He experienced the fate of his father, who had been put out by the purges of Archbishop Laud. He underwent the same trials as the first generation of immigrants to New England, and it showed when he returned home to debate over the halfway covenant.
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He opposed the innovation at first. However, he eventually came to adopt it and even defended the 1661 synod as quite in the spirit of the
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Puritan founders in a 1673 treatise entitled The First Principles of New England.
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Increase called for diligence in preserving New England as a congregational homeland, his calls for persecution evoke a vision of an
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American Israel in which society and congregations were one. That, of course, is precisely the original
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Puritan vision. When in Britain, though, during his sojourn to petition the king for a new charter for Massachusetts, he was key to the formation of the
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United Brethren, a short -lived alliance of congregationalists, Presbyterians, and other dissenters.
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Puritanism was never defined exclusively as congregationalism. Even Increase understood after the
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Glorious Revolution in 1689 that the congregational exclusivism of New England's first generation, though it may have served its time, was over.
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Like his father, he saw that new times called for new measures. If New England Puritanism was going to that city upon a hill, it would have to ally itself with pious
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Protestants wherever they be found. It could not be parochial and insulated.
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Increase died as Richard, his father, had before him his heart fixed on the godly all over the earth.
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Increase and his generation, along with the Founders, had invented New England. That creation, writes
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Robert Middlecoff, was their greatest gift to the world. The second generation testified to the positive goal that brought the
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Founders to New England. Edward Johnson, who lived from 1599 to 1672, in the first published history of New England, the 1654 wonder -working
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Providence of Zion Savior in New England, for Johnson, New England was the training ground to muster up the first of his forces in.
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He wrote that the Puritans on the, quote, Western end of the world had constructed the porch of the glorious building to be soon completed in England.
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These poor New England people, he wrote, the Lord has sent to preach in this wilderness and to proclaim to all nations the near approach of the wonderful works that ever the sons of men saw.
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Likewise, the pious merchant John Hull described New England as, quote, a wine cellar for Christ to refresh his spouse in.
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He believed that it was the example in writings of those refreshed in this wine cellar that awoke the whole nation to think of a general reformation, making them willing to enter into a war, that is, the
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English Civil War in the 1640s, that brought the Puritans to power. Hull believed the
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New England Jerusalem lit the fire that set off the English Civil War. After Oliver Cromwell died and the kingship was restored in England, the
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Puritans there, like Increase Mather, were persecuted and forced out of their churches. This is the
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Restoration. The result is that many of them fled to New England. A Puritan earthquake in England was a seismic event for the formation of New England in the second generation, the
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Restoration in 1660. It had two direct effects, both in tension with each other.
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First, the Restoration increased the importance of New England to the Puritan movement specifically and reformed
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Christianity in general. Boston was transformed from a backwater of Puritanism into its capital. There was a second wave, not as large as the first, of migration to New England of ministers like Increase Mather.
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These new additions to New England's spiritual leadership began a transformation that would continue through King Philip's War in 1675 and the oppression from and overthrow of Edmund Andross at the time of the
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Glorious Revolution in 1689. Through this, Boston's Puritans cultivated an evangelical intensity and urging to export its culture that was something new.
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However, the Restoration also brought a king to the throne in London, who was determined to rule over all his dominion.
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During the first generation, Massachusetts could behave like an autonomous nation. In 1655, the
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General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony banned the importation of malt, wheat, barley, beef, meal, and flour, quote, the principal commodities of this country, even from the mother country.
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This made perfect sense in mercantilistic economic theory if Massachusetts was an independent state.
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In reality, during England's Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell, Massachusetts was a de facto independent state.
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Massachusetts flew its own flag. It eliminated the king's name from the Oath of Allegiance. It issued land without recognizing the king's right to it.
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It banned judicial appeals to the Privy Council. But soon Charles II restored to the throne at the
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Restoration would begin to reel them back in. As the imposition of royal government began being defined in practical terms, notes
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Kenneth Silverman, local politics were reshaped along English lines and Massachusetts adjusted itself to the tone and demands of the mother country.
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Two other of the Bible commonwealths were transformed through the Restoration. Connecticut, under the skillful leadership of John Winthrop Jr.,
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thrived by being flexible and respectful to the new monarch, it was able to keep its charter.
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The king gave it all of New Haven, the most ambitiously theocratic of all the colonies. The colony of New Haven was merged with Connecticut.
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Richard S. Dunn considered the younger Winthrop to be the epitome of the second generation, not as driven or single -minded as his father.
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John Jr. was more cosmopolitan, entrepreneurial, adventuresome, and yet still the committed
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Puritan. Winthrop Jr.'s mostly failed industrial investments taught him that the goal of near independence was not yet feasible.
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The realities of capitalism made him see that the economic future lay in membership within the emerging
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English mercantile system. Though perhaps more tolerant than his father, John Jr.
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remained a committed church member. He shrewdly defended Connecticut's charter. In the midst of King Philip's War, he threatened to resist the grasping governor of New York, Edmund Andross.
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By force, if necessary. Despite all the economic attempts to put themselves in the core of their trading world, they still knew themselves to be on the periphery.
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Most New Englanders were in the small towns, not in Boston. When the Puritan Edward Taylor left
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Restoration England in 1671, he was called to the frontier town of Westfield, where he spent the rest of his life, much of it given over to poetry.
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The vastness of his accumulated writings suggest that Taylor responded to the wilderness of Westfield by cultivating a life of contemplation and literature.
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Even Harvard, near Boston and connected intellectually to the mother country, felt itself to be a backwater.
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Indeed, they saw themselves as disadvantaged by being far removed from the more cultivated parts of the world.
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The halfway covenant is the example par excellence of the Puritan ability to adapt their ideals to the new realities.
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The term halfway covenant meant that professing Christians who did not yet have a convincing testimony of salvation, but had been baptized as a baby, would have some rights of membership in the church, like the right to have his or her child baptized when they grew up, and not other rights in the church, like the right to partake in the
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Lord's Supper. Thus, these people were halfway members of the church. The crisis that instigated the halfway covenant was built into the original polity, that is the organization of the church.
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Only church members were supposed to receive ordinances of communion and baptism. Puritan covenant theology taught that the covenant that God had made with the elect included their children, at least until they could, quote, own the covenant for themselves.
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Hence, the infant children of church members could be baptized, and the original polity, though, when such children grew up without experiencing grace for themselves, they could not be admitted as church members.
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When they had children, those children, grandchildren of the visible saints, were not even eligible for baptism.
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Hence, by the end of the first generation, increasing numbers of New Englanders were unbaptized.
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The halfway synod of 1661 decided to baptize children of church members who were
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Orthodox and were not living scandalously, could have their children baptized.
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Mark A. Peterson believes that the halfway covenant marked the emergence of New England's Puritanism's sense of responsibility to the whole world.
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Peterson begins his chronicle of New England Puritanism in 1660 because he believes it was then that the real world returned to New England with a vengeance.
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The widespread adoption of the halfway covenant sprang from the Puritan sense of pastoral responsibility for the whole world.
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The strong party of dissent from the innovation, first from the young Increase Mather and about a century later from the
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New Divinity, followers of Jonathan Edwards, sprang from the Puritan commitment to a spotless bride of Christ.
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The halfway covenant was a compromise between the two impulses. The halfway covenant provided the perfect institutional compromise between the world and the church.
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Any attempt to square the circle of Puritan religious injunctions demanded. A Gustinian dualism on the one hand and the making of the world, one immense monastery on the other.
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Peterson believes that the halfway covenant was a sign of the evangelistic impulse that was to make Puritanism so vibrant because society includes everyone, including the unregenerate.
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A way must be found to preserve the social role of the church. The halfway covenant allowed the
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Puritan church to bring the unregenerate under its ministry even while recognizing that such people were not adhering to Puritan ideals.
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Certainly the Puritans were not turning their faith into a collection of generalized symbolic truths that made little demand on the public.
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That is into a true civil religion. The adaptation of the halfway covenant was an attempt to package the covenant for the unregenerate.
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Anglican businessmen and officials started to increasingly settle in Boston. They reminded Puritans of what set them apart from mainstream
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English culture. These Tory merchants tempted New England with compromises that had been easy to avoid in the rarefied atmosphere of the first 30 years of settlement, that first generation.
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But Puritan commitments were not so easily washed away. Puritanism had been able to lay a solid foundation in the first generation.
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Thus, when the particulars were challenged, their ideals were challenged by these new
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Anglican businessmen coming into New England, the ideals of Puritanism did not evaporate under the hot sun of cavalier
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Britain. To the contrary, Michael Hall cites the 1670s as the high point of New England Puritanism because self -awareness was most fully articulated and before the social, political, and intellectual forces that would erode
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Puritanism had taken effect. This sense of Puritan self -awareness of their principles, their convictions, had some political implications, demonstrating that their faith was still the most influential force.
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In 1678, the Massachusetts General Court boldly, probably foolishly, stated, quote, the laws of England are bounded within the four seas and do not reach
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America. As for the tariff, because New England was not represented in Parliament, so we have not looked at ourselves to be impeded in our trade by them.
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Tory Anglicans in New England served to unify Puritans in opposition in the short term more than to create converts to the
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Royalist. Edward Randolph, who lived from 1632 to 1703, was an
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Anglican and a staunch Royalist. He was appointed by the Lords of Trade to inspect the adherence of the
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Massachusetts government to the Navigation Acts and to the 1673 tariff. One Massachusetts jury after another, though, refused to convict those that he had caught smuggling.
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He wrote very critically of the Puritans, saying that the leaders were, quote, inclined to sedition.
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Nevertheless, Randolph believed that there were many who only waited for an opportunity to express their loyalty to His Majesty.
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These people were generally the wealthy persons of all professions in a society where the cheap professions were merchants and wealthy shopkeepers or retailers.
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Some of the merchants, particularly recent Anglican immigrants, wanted the yoke of Puritan economic scruples lifted.
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They were to get their way, but only by royal fiat. Upon the revocation of Massachusetts' charter in 1684, a brief interim council took over, supported by merchants like Richard Wharton.
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They were mainly interested in using their power to further their business interests. When the crown's fateful
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Edmund Andross, who had been in New York, arrived in Boston in 1686, he undid what most of that interim council of merchants had done.
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King James II was interested in making New England serve his goals of nationalism. Here, the two interests conflicted.
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Andross nullified several large land grants and invalidated much of the
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Atherton's company's titles. He refused to allow a colonial mint to operate and demanded that all land title fees be paid in cash, thus draining the colony's precious cash reserves.
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The lack of coinage and Andross' attempts to strictly enforce the Navigation Acts resulted in a depression of trade.
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His policies turned the Anglican royalist Richard Wharton against him. Wharton returned to London to lobby for the replacement of Andross.
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Wharton had been the leader of those agitating for the revocation of the old charter so that Massachusetts Bay could be a royal colony.
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As a capitalist, though, he was disappointed in the new political system. Wharton's loyalty, like most capitalists, was to the dictates of the market.
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True Puritans had other reasons to turn against Andross. Andross forced Boston South Church to host
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Anglican services. By allowing the services to be protracted, he made the Puritans wait outside their own meeting house for the
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Anglicans to finish. Increase Mather was sent to London from Massachusetts to lobby against Andross.
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He barely escaped arrest on his way out of Massachusetts, out of the new dominion of New England.
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That Mather was chosen rather than some merchant or former magistrate shows New England society still spontaneously looked to their ministers for all kinds of leadership.
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Andross's attempts to remodel New England had only served to strengthen popular attachment to the tried and trusted ways of local community life.
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Soon, loyal New England Puritans expressed their renewed sense of identity. In the same year
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Andross was overthrown, a Boston publisher reprinted the original charter of the
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Massachusetts Bay colony. Cotton Mather, Increase's son, issued a declaration condemning the old regime, calling for the charter to be restored and justifying the seizure of those few ill men who have been, next to our sins, the grand authors of our miseries.
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New England longed to return to the Puritan Commonwealth. The zeal with which Bostonians, backed by Cotton Mather, toppled
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Edmund Andross and put him in jail shows that Randolph was an overly optimistic Tory, that he was wrong about much of Boston wanting to submit gleefully to the king.
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There was still a vibrant Puritan heartland in New England. First, the restoration, and then
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Andross provoked a renewal of New England Puritanism by renewing its oppositional mentality.
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As threats to their religious principles mounted from outside, Puritans like those of Boston's Third Church, as well as the
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Mathers, took the lead in defending traditional Puritan ways. In England, the temper of Puritans had cooled dramatically after the restoration, but in New England, Andross's provocation, after over a half century of the most remarkable internal stability in the
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Western world, showed that New Englanders had not lost that fire. Puritan New Englanders had been peaceful in the first generation because they were no longer being harassed by oppressive
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Anglicans. Once that harassment started again, this time in Massachusetts itself,
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Puritans rose up again. Increased Mather, in an earnest exhortation to the inhabitants of New England in 1676, wrote, quote, it was in respect to some worldly accommodation that other plantations were erected, but religion and not the world was that which our fathers came hither for.
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Pure worship and ordinances without the mixture of human inventions was that which the first fathers of this colony designed in their coming hither.
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We are the children of the good old nonconformist. And therefore, that woeful neglect of the rising generation which hath been amongst us is a sad sign that we have in great part forgotten our errand in this wilderness.
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And then why should we marvel that God taketh no pleasure in our young men, but that they are numbered for the sword, the present judgment lighting chiefly upon the rising generation?
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Unquote. Increased Mather's articulate appeal for New England to return to its founding principles strikes at the heart of what economic realities were doing to the second generation of New England Puritans.
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I believe we should take their Jeremiah ad seriously. Something was draining away from New England.
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They called what was happening to them declension. The response from many of the pastors was to preach
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Jeremiads, sermons like Jeremiah's prophecies showing that the sufferings were
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God's judgments and the proper response is repentance. Jeremiads are the natural response of the ideational, those motivated by their ideals to a weakening culture, to challenges from a sensate movement.
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That increased Mather and many of his contemporaries turned to the Jeremiad as a symptom of the vitality of their culture, even while they sense something is going wrong, something is going astray, but still they responded to it with a
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Jeremiad based on the ideals of Puritanism. It's only when we hear peace, peace, that there is no peace.
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Besides the laws of the state and the censure of the church, one of the primary institutions for controlling this centrifugal forces of Puritan culture was the family.
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Cotton Mather wrote that a mark of godliness was a well -governed family. John Eliot in 1676 already noted it as evidence for decline, a quote, false and pernicious principle that many people and parents are tainted with, that is that youth must be suffered a while to take their swing and sow their wild oats, to follow the fashions, company and manners of the times, hoping that they will be wiser thereafter, unquote.
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A generation later, Benjamin Wadsworth wrote, quote, the ignorance, wickedness and consequent judgments that have prevailed and still are prevailing among us are not more plainly owing to any one thing than to the neglect of family religion, instruction and government.
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In Connecticut, where the government was more responsive to such Puritan sentiments, the General Assembly ordered that every young person submit to a family government.
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Commitment to New England's mission was not a monopoly of the clergy. Though English merchants began to settle there, many of the merchants were
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Puritan church members in good standing. So far from being at odds, merchants, magistrates and ministers through family connections and intermarriage formed one thoroughly interlocked community.
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For example, Governor Simon Bradstreet was both a successful merchant and a magistrate.
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He was the son of a Lincolnshire minister. His son, also Simon, became a minister in New London, Connecticut.
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And his daughter, Dorothy, married the Reverend Seaborne Cotton. In particular,
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John Hull, a merchant who became the mitt master in Massachusetts, longed for the renewal of Winthrop's vision of a pure city upon a hill.
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He recorded a brief prayer in his diary, beseeching God's forgiveness for his colony for being too lenient on blasphemous
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Quakers. Members of Boston's Third Church were in the upper echelons of commerce. Their wealth came mostly from their active involvement in trade and retailing.
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They appear to have been significantly wealthier than their neighbors, who were not affiliated with the church.
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The picture is very complicated. Not all merchants were cosmopolitans agitating for liberalization, and not all ministers, as we shall see, were puritist.
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Many of the merchants, like John Hull, were indeed puritans. Hull, who took enough interest in theology to join a 1668 committee that debated doctrine with the town's
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Baptists, infused his diary with reflections on providence. The first part of it, some passages of God's providence about myself and in relation to myself, uncovered supernatural interventions at nearly every turn, like a miraculous deliverance from a wild horse in the streets of Boston at the age of 12.
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God, he marveled, held up the horse's foot over my body, the safe delivery of his children, provision of an apprentice, safe passages across the ocean, despite all the storms and pirates.
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For example, he reflected on the meaning of a huge financial loss, nearly 600 pounds worth of goods captured on three ships by the nefarious
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Dutch. He said, quote, God mixeth his mercies and chastisements that we may neither be tempted to faint or to despise.
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On the occasion of another Dutch disaster, he comforted himself with a twofold reflection.
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The Lord used his loss to join my soul nearer to himself and loose it more from creature comforts.
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And providence soon thereafter repaired the financial damage, making up my loss in outward estate.
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These writings reflect the teachings of his Puritan pastors who taught him not to fret and not to be preoccupied with money.
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God, Hall believed, used misfortunes to teach him contentment with a modest income and reliance on supernatural provision.