The Genius of America (collection)/What Is a Puritan?
What Is a Puritan?
The world is full of renunciations and apprenticeships, and this is thine; thou must pass for a fool and a churl for a long Season.
Not of spent deeds, but of doing.
Silent rushes the swift Lord
Through ruined systems still restored.
The first step towards making Puritanism beautiful is to free the word from exclusive association with the manners and morals of any particular period. Puritanism is not a fixed form off life; it is a formative spirit, an urgent exploring and creative spirit. And so the shape of the Puritan cannot be cast in bronze for all time. He is an iconoclast, an image-breaker; and when he is convicted of self-idolatry, he is the first, beautiful and strong in wrath, to raise the hammer and shatter his own image. Strike at the shadowy incarnations of him around the witch fires of history: he offers you a sharper sword. A hard man in this or any age to keep pace with or to understand.
Both the contemporary and the historical Puritan are still involved in clouds of libel, of which the origins lie in the copious fountains of indiscriminating abuse poured out upon the Puritans of the seventeenth century by great Royalist writers like Butler, Dryden, and Ben Jonson. The Puritan of that day was ordinarily represented by his adversaries as a dishonest casuist and a hypocrite. To illustrate this point, I will produce a brilliantly malevolent portrait from Jonson's comedy, Bartholomew Fair.
This play was performed in London six years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth; and it helps one to understand why the migratory movement of the day was rather to than from America. Jonson presents a group of Puritans visiting the Fair. Their names are Zeal-of-the-land Busy, Dame Purecraft, and Win-the-fight Little-wit and his wife. Roast pig is a main feature of the Bartholomew festivities; and the wife of Win-the-fight Little-wit feels a strong inclination to partake of it. Her mother, Dame Purecraft, has some scruples about eating in the tents of wickedness, and carries the question to Zeal-of-the-land Busy, asking him to resolve their doubts. At first he replies adversely, in the canting, sing-song nasal fashion then attributed to the Puritans by their enemies:—
'Verily for the disease of longing, it is a disease, a carnal disease, or appetite . . . and as it is carnal and incident, it is natural, very natural; now pig, it is a meat, and a meat that is nourishing and may be longed for, and so consequently eaten; it may be eaten; very exceedingly well eaten; but in the Fair, and as a Bartholomew pig, it cannot be eaten; for the very calling it a Bartholomew pig, and to eat it so, is a spice of idolatry, and you make the Fair no better than one of the high-places. This, I take it, is the state of the question: a high-place.'
Master Little-wit remonstrates, saying, 'But in state of necessity, place should give place, Master Busy.' And Dame Purecraft cries: 'Good brother Zeal-of-the-land Busy, think to make it as lawful as you can.'
Thereupon, Zeal-of-the-land Busy reconsiders, as follows:—
'Surely, it may be otherwise, but it is subject to construction, subject, and hath a face of offence with the weak, a great face, a foul face; but that face may have a veil put over it, and be shadowed as it were; it may be eaten, and in the Fair, I take it, in a booth, the tents of the Wicked: the place is not much, not very much, we may be religious in the midst of the profane, so it be eaten with a reformed mouth, with sobriety and humbleness; not gorged in with gluttony or greediness, there's the fear: for, should she go there, as taking pride in the place, or delight in the unclean dressing, to feed the vanity of the eye, or lust of the palate, it were not well, it were not fit, it were abominable and not good.'
Finally, Zeal-of-the-land Busy not only consents, but joins the rest, saying, 'In the way of comfort to the weak, I will go and eat. I will eat exceedingly and prophesy; there may be a good use made of it too, now I think on it: by the public eating of swine's flesh, to profess our hate and loathing of Judaism, whereof the brethren stand taxed. I will therefore eat, yea, I will eat exceedingly.'
The entire passage might be regarded as a satirical interpretation of Calvin's chapter on Christian Liberty. In this fashion the anti-Puritan writers of the seventeenth century habitually depicted the people who set up the Commonwealth in England and colonized Massachusetts. In the eyes of unfriendly English contemporaries, the men who came over in the Mayflower and their kind were unctuous hypocrites.
That charge, though it has been revived for modern uses, no longer stands against the seventeenth-century Puritans. Under persecution and in power, on the scaffold, in war, and in the wilderness, they proved that, whatever their faults, they were animated by a passionate sincerity. When the Puritan William Prynne spoke disrespectfully of magistrates and bishops, Archbishop Laud, or his agents, cut off his ears and threw him back into prison. As soon as he could get hold of ink and paper, Prynne sent out from prison fresh attacks on the bishops. They took him out and cut off his ears again, and branded him 'S.L.,' which they intended to signify 'Seditious Libeller'; but he, with the iron still hot in his face and with indignation inspiring, perhaps, the most dazzling pun ever recorded, interpreted the letters to mean, Stigmata Laudis. When the Puritans came into power, Prynne issued from his dungeon and helped cut off, not the ears, but the head of Archbishop Laud. After that, less was said about his insincerity. Prynne and his friends had their faults; but lack of conviction and the courage of their conviction were not among them.
When, a hundred years ago, Macaulay wrote his famous passage on the Puritans in the essay on Milton, he tried to do them justice; and he did brush aside the traditional charge of hypocrisy with the contempt which it deserves. But in place of the picture of the oily hypocrite, he set up another picture equally questionable. He painted the Puritan as a kind of religious superman of incredible fortitude and determination, who 'went through the world, like Sir Artegal's iron man Talus with his flail, crushing and trampling down oppressors, mingling with human beings, but having neither part nor lot in human infirmities, insensible to fatigue, to pleasure, and to pain, not to be pierced by any weapon, not to be withstood by any barrier.'
Now this portrait of Macaulay's is executed with far more respect for the Puritan character than Jonson exhibited in his portrait of Zeal-of-the-land Busy. But it is just as clearly a caricature. It violently exaggerates certain harsh traits of individual Puritans under persecution and at war; it suppresses all the mild and attractive traits; and Carlyle, with his hero-worship and his eye on Cromwell, continues the exaggeration in the same direction. It gives an historically false impression, because it conveys the idea that the Puritans were exceptionally harsh and intolerant as compared with other men in thetr own times.
For example, the supposedly harsh Puritan Cromwell stood for a wide latitude of religious opinion and toleration of sects at a time when the Catholic Inquisition had established a rigid censorship and was persecuting Huguenots and Mohammedans and Jews, and torturing and burning heretics wherever its power extended. It is customary now to point to the Salem witchcraft and the hanging of three Quakers in Boston—who incidentally seem to have insisted on being hanged—as signal illustrations of the intolerance of Puritanism and its peculiar fanaticism. But, as a matter of fact, these things were merely instances of a comparatively mild infection of the Puritans by a madness that swept over the world. In Salem there were twenty victims, and the madness lasted one year. In Europe there were hundreds of thousands of victims; and there were witches burned in Catholic Spain, years after the practice of executing witches had been condemned among the Puritans. Comparatively speaking, the Puritans were quick to discard and condemn the common harshness and intolerance of their times.
The Puritan leaders in the seventeenth century were, like all leaders, exceptional men; but if looked at closely, they exhibit the full complement of human qualities, and rather more than Jess than average respect for the rights and the personality of the individual, since their doctrines, political and religious, immensely emphasized the importance and sacredness of the individual life. They had iron enough in their blood to put duty before pleasure; but that does not imply that they banished pleasure. They put goodness above beauty; but that does not mean that they despised beauty. It does not set them apart as a peculiar and abnormal people. In every age of the world, in every progressing society, there is, there has to be, a group, and a fairly large group, of leaders and toilers to whom their own personal pleasure is a secondary consideration—a consideration secondary to the social welfare and the social advance. On the long slow progress of the race out of Egypt into the Promised Land, they prepare the line of march, they look after the arms and munitions, they bring up the supplies, they scout out the land, they rise up early in the morning, they watch at night, they bear the burdens of leadership, while the children, the careless young people, and the old people who have never grown up, are playing or fiddling or junketing on the fringes of the march. They are never popular among these who place pleasure first; for they are always rounding up stragglers, recalling loiterers, and preaching up the necessity of toil and courage and endurance. They are not popular; but they are not inhuman. The violet smells to them as it does to other men; and rest and recreation are as sweet. I must illustrate a little the more intimately human aspect of our seventeenth-century group.
It is a part of the plot of our droll and dry young people to throw the opprobrium of the present drought upon the Puritans. These iron men, one might infer from reading the discourses, for example, of Mr. Mencken, banished Wine as a liquor inconsistent with Calvinistic theology, though, to be sure, Calvin himself placed it among 'matters indifferent.' The Puritans, as a matter of fact, used both wine and tobacco—both men and women. If Puritanism means reaction in favor of obsolete standards, our contemporary Puritans will repeal the obnoxious amendment; and all who are thirsty should circulate the Puritan literature of the seventeenth century. Read your Pilgrim's Progress, and you will find that Christian's wife, on the way to salvation, sent her child back after her bottle of liquor. Read Winthrop's letters, and you will find that Winthrop's wife writes to him to thank him for the tobacco that he has sent to her mother. Read Mather's diary, and you will find that he suggests pious thoughts to be meditated upon by the members of his household while they are engaged in home brewing. Read the records of the first Boston church, and you will find that one of the first teachers was a wine seller. Read the essays of John Robinson, first pastor of the Pilgrims, and you will find that he ridicules Lycurgus, the Spartan lawgiver, for ordering the vines cut down, merely 'because men were sometimes drunken with the grapes.' Speaking of celibacy, Robinson says, 'Abstinence from marriage is no more a virtue than abstinence from wine or other pleasing natural thing. Both marriage and wine are of God and good in themselves.'
Since I do not wish to incite a religious and Puritanical resistance to the Volstead Act, I must add that Robinson, in that tone of sweet reasonableness which characterizes all his essays, remarks further: 'Yet may the abuse of a thing be so common and notorious and the use so small and needless as better want the small use than be in continual danger of the great abuse.' And this, I suppose, is exactly the ground taken by the sensible modern prohibitionist. It is not a matter of theological sin with him at all. It never was that. When it is not a question of health, it is now a matter of economics and æsthetics, and of the greatest happiness and freedom to the greatest number.
These iron men are accused of being hostile to beauty, the charge being based upon the crash of a certain number of stained-glass windows and altar ornaments, which offended them, however, not as art, but as religious symbolism. Why fix upon the riot of soldiers in war-time and neglect to inquire; Who, after the death of Shakespeare, in all the seventeenth century, most eloquently praised music and the drama? Who most lavishly described and most exquisitely appreciated nature? Who had the richest literary culture and the most extensive acquaintance with poetry? Who published the most magnificent poems? The answer to all these questions is, of course, that conspicuous Puritan, the Latin secretary to Oliver Cromwell, John Milton.
In a letter to an Italian friend, Milton writes: 'God has instilled into me, if into anyone, a vehement love of the beautiful. Not with so much labor is Ceres said to have sought her daughter Proserpine, as it is my habit day and night to seek for this idea of the beautiful . . . through all the forms and faces of things.' With some now nearly obsolete notions of precedence, Milton did place God before the arts. But was he hostile to the arts? The two most important sorts of people in the state, he declares, are, first, those who make the social existence of the citizens 'just and holy,' and, second, those who make it's plendid and beautiful.' He insists that the very stability of the state depends upon the splendor and excellence of its public institutions and the splendid and excellent expression of its social life—depends, in short, as, I have insisted, upon the coöperation of the Puritans and the artists, upon the integrity of the national genius.
These iron men are said to have been devoid of tenderness and sympathy in personal relations. But this does not agree with the testimony of Bradford, who records it in his history that, in the first winter at Plymouth, when half the colony had died and most of the rest were sick, Myles Standish and Brewster, and the four or five others who were well, watched over and waited on the rest with the loving tenderness and the unflinching fidelity of a mother.
These people had fortitude; but was it due to callousness? Were they really, as Macaulay intimates, insensible to their own sufferings and the sufferings of others? Hear the cry of John Bunyan when prison separates him from his family: 'The parting with my wife and poor children hath often been to me in this place as the pulling the flesh from my bone; and that not only because I am somewhat too fond of these great mercies, but also because I should have often brought to my mind the many hardships, miseries, and wants that my poor family was like to meet with, should I be taken from them, especially my poor blind child, who lay nearer my heart than all I had besides. O the thought of the hardship I thought my blind one might go under, would break my heart to pieces.'
Finally, these iron men are grievously charged with a lack of romantic feeling and the daring necessary to act upon it. Much depends upon what you mean by romance. If you mean by romance, a life of excitement and perilous adventure, there are duller records than that of the English Puritans. Not without some risk to themselves, not without at least an occasional thrill, did these pious villagers decapitate the King of England, overturn the throne of the Archbishop of Canterbury, pull up stakes and settle in Holland, sail the uncharted Atlantic in a cockleshell, and set up a kingdom for Christ in the howling wilderness. I don't think that dwellers in Gopher Prairie or Greenwich Village have a right to call that life precisely humdrum.
Add to this the fact that the more fervent Puritans were daily engaged in a terrifically exciting adventure with Jehovah. Some women of to-day would think it tolerably interesting, I should suppose, to be married to a man like Cotton Mather, who rose every day after breakfast, went into his study, put, as he said, his sinful mouth in the dust of his study floor, and, while the tears streamed from his eyes, conversed directly with angels, with 'joy unspeakable and full of glory.' If a Puritan wife was pious, she was engaged in a true 'eternal triangle'; when Winthrop left home, his wife was committed by him to the arms of her heavenly lover. If she were not pious, she stole the records of his conversation with angels, and went, like Mather's wife, into magnificent fits of jealousy against the Lord of Hosts. The resulting atmosphere may not have been ideal; but it is not to be described as 'sullen gloom'; it was not humdrum like a Dreiser novel; it was tense with the excitement of living on the perilous edge of Paradise.
Did these Puritan husbands lack charm, or devotion to their women? I find that theory hard to reconcile with the fact that so many of them had three wives. Most of us modern men feel that we have charm enough, if we can obtain and retain one, now that higher education of women has made them so exacting in their standards and so expensive to maintain. Now, Cotton Mather had three wives; and when he was forty or so, in the short interim between number two and number three, he received a proposal of marriage from a girl of twenty, who was, he thought, the wittiest and the prettiest girl in the colony. I conclude inevitably that there was something very attractive in Cotton Mather. Call it charm; call it what you will; he possessed that which the Ladies' Home Journal would describe as 'What women admire in men.'
As a further illustration of the 'sullen gloom of their domestic habits,' take the case of John Winthrop, the pious Puritan governor of Massachusetts. After a truly religious courtship, he married his wife, about 1618, against the wishes of her friends. We have some letters of the early years of their life together, in which he addresses her as 'My dear wife,' 'My sweet wife,' and 'My dear wife, my chief joy in this world.' Well, that is nothing; at first, we all do that.
But ten years later Winthrop prepared to visit New England, without his family, to found a colony. While waiting for his ship to sail, he writes still to his wife by every possible messenger, merely to tell her that she is his chief joy in all the world; and before he leaves England he arranges with her that, as long as he is away, every week on Tuesday and Friday at five o'clock he and she shall think of each other wherever they are, and commune in spirit. When one has been married ten or twelve long years, that is more extraordinary. It shows, I think, romantic feeling equal to that in Miss Lulu Bett, or Poor White, or Moon-Calf.
Finally, I will present an extract from a letter of this same John Winthrop to this same wife, written in 1637, when they had been married twenty years. It is an informal note, written hurriedly, in the rush of business:—
Sweeetheart,—
I was unwillingly hindered from coming to thee, nor am I like to see thee before the last day of this weeke: therefore I shall want a band or two: and cuffs. I pray thee also send me six or seven leaves of tobacco dried and powdered. Have care of thyself this cold weather, and speak to the folks to keep the goats well out of the garden. . . . If any letters be come for me, send them by this bearer. I will trouble thee no further. The Lord bless and keep thee, my sweet wife, and all our family; and send us a comfortable meeting. So I kiss thee and love thee ever and rest
If, three hundred years after my death, it is proved by documentary evidence that twenty years after my marriage I still, in a familiar note, mixed up love and kisses with my collars and tobacco—if this is proved, I say, I shall feel very much surprised if the historian of that day speaks of the 'sullen gloom of my domestic habits.'
But now, three hundred years after Winthrop's time, what is actually being said about the Puritans? In spite of abundant evidences such as I have exhibited, our recent Pilgrim celebration was a rather melancholy affair. From the numerous commemoratory articles which I have read, I gather that there are only three distinct opinions about the Puritan now current—every one of them erroneous.
The first, held by a small apologetic group of historians and Mayflower descendants, is, that the Puritan was a misguided man of good intentions. Since he was a forefather and has long been dead, he should be spoken of respectfully; and it is proper from time to time to drop upon his grave a few dried immortelles. The second opinion is, that the Puritan was an unqualified pest, but that he is dead and well dead, and will trouble us no more forever. The third, and by far the most prevalent, is, that the Puritan was once a pest, but has now become a menace; that he is more alive than ever, more baleful, more dangerous.
This opinion is propagated in part by old New Englanders like Mr. Brooks Adams, who have turned upon their ancestors with a vengeful fury, crying, 'Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.' And I noticed only the other day that Mr. Robert Herrick was speaking remorsefully of Puritanism as an 'ancestral blight' in his veins. But the opinion is still more actively propagated by a literary group which comes out flat-footedly against the living Puritan as the enemy of freedom, of science, of beauty, of romance; as a being with unbreakable belief in his own bleak and narrow views; a Philistine, a hypocrite, a tyrant, of savage cruelty of attack, with a lust for barbarous persecution, and of intolerable dirty-mindedness.
Despite the 'plank' of universal sympathy in the rather hastily constructed literary platform of these young people, it is manifest that they are out to destroy the credit of the Puritan in America. We are not exceptionally rich in spiritual traditions. It would be a pity, by a persistent campaign of abuse, to ruin the credit of any good ones. One of the primary functions, indeed, of scholarship and letters is to connect us with the great traditions and to inspire us with the confidence and power which result from such a connection. Puritanism, rightly understood, is one of the vital, progressive, and enriching human traditions. It is a tradition peculiarly necessary to the health and the stability and the safe forward movement of a democratic society. When I consider from what antiquity it has come down to us and what vicissitudes it has survived, I do not fear its extermination; but I resent the misapprehension of its character and the aspersion of its name. Perhaps our insight into its true nature may be strengthened and our respect renewed, if we revisit its source and review its operations at some periods a little remote from the dust and diatribes of contemporary journalism.
A good many ages before Rome was founded, or Athens, or ancient Troy, or Babylon, or Nineveh, there was an umbrageous banyan tree in India, in whose wide-spreading top and populous branches red and blue baboons, chimpanzees, gorillas, orang-outangs, and a missing group of anthropoid apes had chattered and fought and flirted and feasted and intoxicated themselves on cocoanut wine for a thousand years. At some date which I can't fix with accuracy, the clatter and mess and wrangling of arboreal simian society began to pall on the heart of one of the anthropoid apes. He was not happy. He was afflicted with ennui. He felt stirring somewhere in the region of his diaphragm a yearning and capacity for a new life. His ideas were vague; but he resolved to make a break for freedom and try an experiment. He crawled nervously out to the end of his branch, followed by a few of his friends, hesitated a moment; then exclaimed abruptly: 'Here's where I get off,' dropped to the ground, lighted on his feet, and amid a pelting of decayed fruit and cocoanut shells and derisive shouts of 'precisian' and 'hypocrite,' walked off on his hind-legs into another quarter of the jungle and founded the human race. That was the first Puritan.
In the beginning, he had only a narrow vision; for his eyes were set near together, as you will see if you examine his skull in the museum. He had a vision of a single principle, namely, that he was to go upright, instead of on all fours. But he gradually made that principle pervade all his life; for he resolutely refrained from doing anything that he could not do while going upright. As habit ultimately made the new posture easy and natural, he found that there were compensations in it; for he learned to do all sorts of things in the erect attitude that he could not do, even with the aid of his tail, while he went on all-fours. So he began to rejoice in what he called 'the new freedom.' But to the eyes of the denizens of the banyan tree, he looked very ridiculous. They called him stiff-necked, strait-laced, unbending, and inflexible. They swarmed into his little colony of come-outers, on all fours, and began to play their monkeytricks. He met them gravely and said: 'Walk upright, as the rest of us do, and you may stay and share alike with us. Otherwise, out you go.' And out some of them went, back to the banyan tree; and there, with the chimpanzees and the red and blue baboons, they still chatter over their cocoanut wine, and emit from time to time a scream of simian rage, and declare their straight-backed relative a tyrant, a despot, and a persecutor of his good old four-footed cousins.
You may say that this is only a foolish fable. But it contains all the essential features of the eternal Puritan: namely, dissatisfaction with the past, courage to break sharply from it, a vision of a better life, readiness to accept a discipline in order to attain that better life, and a serious desire to make that better life prevail—a desire reflecting at once his sturdy individualism and his clear sense for the need of social solidarity. In these respects all true Puritans, in all ages and places of the world, are alike. Everyone is dissatisfied with the past; everyone has the courage necessary to revolt; everyone has a vision; everyone has a discipline; and everyone desires his vision of the better life to prevail.
How do they differ among themselves? They differ in respect to the breadth and the details of their vision. Their vision is determined by the width of their eyes and by the lights of their age. According to the laws of human development, some of the lights go out from time to time, or grow dim, and new lights appear, and the vision changes from age to age.
What does not change in the true Puritan is the passion for improvement. What does not change is the immortal urgent spirit that breaks from the old forms, follows the new vision, seriously seeks the discipline of the higher life. When you find a man who is quite satisfied with the past and with the routine and old clothes of his ancestors, who has not courage for revolt and adventure, who cannot accept the discipline and hardship of a new life, and who does not really care whether the new life prevails, you may be sure that he is not a Puritan.
But who are the Puritans? Aristotle recognized that there is an element of the Puritan in every man, when he declared that all things, by an intuition of their own nature, seek their perfection. He classified the desire for perfection as a fundamental human desire. Still, we have to admit that in many men it must be classified as a victoriously suppressed desire. We can recognize men as Puritans only when they have released and expressed their desire for perfection.
Leopardi declared that Jesus was the first to condemn the world as evil, and to summon his followers to come out from it, in order to found a community of the pure in heart. But this is an historical error. Unquestionably Jesus was a Puritan in relation to a corrupt Jewish tradition and in relation to a corrupt and seriously adulterated pagan tradition. But every great religious and moral leader, Christian or pagan, has likewise been a Puritan: Socrates, Plato, Zeno, Confucius, Buddha. Every one of them denounced the world, asked his followers to renounce many of their instinctive ways, and to accept a rule and discipline of the better life—a rule involving a purification by the suppression of certain impulses and the liberation of others.
There is much talk of the austerities of the Puritan households of our forefathers, austerities which were largely matters of necessity. But two thousand years before these forefathers, there were Greek Stoics, and Roman Stoics, and Persian and Hindu ascetics, who were far more austere, and who practised the ascetic life from choice as the better life. There is talk as if Protestant Calvinism had suddenly in modern times introduced the novel idea of putting religious duty before gratification of the senses. But a thousand years before Knox and Calvin, there were Roman Catholic monasteries and hermitages, where men and women, with a vision of a better life, mortified the flesh far more bitterly than the Calvinists ever dreamed of doing. If contempt of earthly beauty and earthly pleasure were the work of Puritanism, then the hermit saints of Catholicism who lived before Calvin should be recognized as the model Puritans. But the hermit saint lacks that passion for making his vision prevail, lacks that practical sense of the need for social solidarity, which are eminent characteristics of the true Puritan, both within and without the Roman Church.
In the early Middle Ages the Roman Church, which also had a strong sense of the need for social solidarity, strove resolutely to keep the Puritans, whom it was constantly developing, within its fold and to destroy those who escaped. If I follow the course of those who successfully left the fold, it is not because many did not remain within; it is because the course of those who came out led them more directly to America.
In the fourteenth century, John Wycliffe, the first famous English Puritan, felt that the Roman Church had become hopelessly involved with the 'world' on the one hand, and with unnatural, and therefore unchristian, austerities on the other, and that, in both ways, it had lost the purity of the early Christian vision of the better life. To obtain freedom for the better life, he became convinced that one must come out from the Roman Church, and must substitute for the authority of the pope the authority of the Bible as interpreted by the best scholarship of the age. He revolted, as he thought, in behalf of a life, not merely more religious, but also more actively and practically moral, and intellectually more honest. For him, accepting certain traditional doctrines meant acquiescence in ignorance and superstition. His followers, with the courage characteristic of their tradition, burned at the stake rather than profess faith in a 'feigned miracle.' True forerunners, they were, of the man of science who 'follows truth wherever it leads.'
A hundred and fifty years later the English Church as a whole revolted from the Roman, on essentially the grounds taken by Wycliffe; and under Mary its scholars and ministers by scores burned at the stake for their vision of the better life, which included above all what they deemed intellectual integrity. At that time, the whole English Church was in an essentially Puritan mood, dissatisfied with the old, eager to make the new vision prevail, fearless with the courage of the new learning, elate with the sense of national purification and intellectual progress.
But the word Puritan actually came into use first after the Reformation. It was applied in the later sixteenth century to a group within the English Church which thought that the national church had still insufficiently purged itself of Roman belief and ritual. Among things which they regarded as merely traditional and unscriptural, and therefore unwarrantable, was the government of the church by bishops, archdeacons, deacons, and the rest—the Anglican hierarchy. And when these officers began to suppress their protests, these Puritans began to feel that the English Church was too much involved with the world to permit them freedom for the practice of the better life. Accordingly, in the seventeenth century, they revolted as nonconformists or as separatists; and drew off into religious communities by themselves, with church governments of representative or democratic character, the principles of which were soon to be transferred to political communities.
If I recall here what is very familiar, it is to emphasize the swift, unresting onward movement of the Puritan vision of the good life. The revolt against the bishops became a revolution which shook the pillars of the Middle Ages and prepared the way for modern times. The vision, as it moves, broadens and becomes more inclusive. For the seventeenth-century Puritan, the good life is not merely religious, moral, and intellectual; it is also, in all affairs of the soul, a self-governing life. It is a free life, subject only to divine commands which each individual has the right to interpret for himself. The Puritan minister had, to be sure, a great influence; but the influence was primarily due to his superior learning. And the entire discipline of the Puritans tended steadily towards raising the congregation to the level of the minister. Their daily use of the Bible, their prompt institution of schools and universities, and the elaborate logical discourses delivered from the pulpits constituted a universal education for independent and critical free-thought.
Puritanism made every man a reasoner. And much earlier than is generally recognized, the Puritan mind began to appeal from the letter to the spirit of Scripture, from Scripture to scholarship, and from scholarship to the verdict of the philosophic reason. Says the first pastor of the Pilgrims: 'He that hath a right philosophical spirit and is but morally honest would rather suffer many deaths than call a pin a point or speak the least thing against his understanding or persuasion.' In John Robinson we meet a man with a deep devotion to the truth, and also with the humility to recognize clearly that he possesses but a small portion of truth. He conceives, indeed, of a truth behind the Bible itself, a truth which may be reached by other means than the Scripture, and which was not beyond the ken of the wise pagans. 'All truth,' he declares, 'is of God. . . . Whereupon it followeth that nothing true in right reason and sound philosophy can be false in divinity. . . . I add, though the truth be uttered by the devil himself, yet it is originally of God.'
The delightful aspects of this 'Biblical Puritan,' besides the sweetness of his charity and his tolerance, are his lively perception that truth is something growing, steadily revealing itself, breaking upon us like a dawn; and, not less significant, his recognition that true religion must be in harmony with reason and experience. 'Our Lord Christ,' he remarks—quietly yet memorably—'calls himself truth, not custom.'
Cotton Mather, partly because of his connection with the witchcraft trials, has been so long a synonym for the unlovely features of the culture of his time and place, that even his biographer and the recent editors of his journal have quite failed to bring out the long stride that he made towards complete freedom of the mind. If the truth be told, Mather, like every Puritan of powerful original force, was something of a 'heretic.' For many years he followed a plainly mystical 'inner light.' His huge diary opens in 1681 with a statement that he has come to a direct agreement with the Lord Jesus Christ, and that no man or book, but the spirit of God, has shown him the way. He goes directly to the several persons of the Trinity, and transacts his business with them or with their ministering angels. There is an 'enthusiastic' element here; but one should observe that it is an emancipative element.
Experience, however, taught Mather a certain distrust of the mystical inner light. Experience with witches taught him a certain wariness of angels. In 1711, after thirty years of active service in the church, Mather writes in his diary this distinctly advanced criterion for inspiration:—
'There is a thought which I have often had in my mind; but I would now lay upon my mind a charge to have it oftener there: that the light of reason is the law of God; the voice of reason is the voice of God; we never have to do with reason, but at the same time we have to do with God; our submission to the rules of reason is an obedience to God. Let me as often as I have evident reason set before me, think upon it; the great God now speaks to me.'
Our judgment of Mather's vision must depend upon what reason told Mather to do. Well, every day of his life reason told Mather to undertake some good for his fellow men. At the beginning of each entry in his diary for a long period of years stand the letters 'G. D.,' which mean Good Designed for that day. 'And besides all this,' he declares, 'I have scarce at any time, for these five-and-forty years and more, so come as to stay in any company without considering whether no good might be done before I left it.' One sees in Mather a striking illustration of the Puritan passion for making one's vision of the good life prevail. 'It has been a maxim with me,' he says, 'that a power to do good not only gives a right unto it, but also makes the doing of it a duty. I have been made very sensible that by pursuing of this maxim, I have entirely ruined myself as to this world and rendered it really too hot a place for me to continue in.'
Mather has here in mind the crucial and heroic test of his Puritan spirit. Towards the end of his life, in 1721, an epidemic of smallpox swept over Boston. It was generally interpreted by the pious as a visitation of God. Mather, a student of science as well as of the Bible had read in the Transactions of the Royal Society reports of successful inoculation against smallpox practised in Africa and among the Turks. He called the physicians of Boston together, explained the method, and recommended their experimenting with it. He also published pamphlets in favor of inoculation. He was violently attacked as opposing the decrees of God. In the face of a storm of opposition he inoculated his own child, who nearly died of the treatment. None the less, he persisted, and invited others to come into his house and receive the treatment, among them a fellow minister. Into the room where the patient lay, was thrown a bomb intended for Mather, which failed, however, to explode. To it was attached this note: 'Cotton Mather, you dog, damn you; I'll inoculate you with this, with a pox to you!'
Mather stood firm, would not be dissuaded, even courted martyrdom for the new medical truth. 'I had rather die,' he said, 'by such hands as now threaten my life than by a fever; and much rather die for my conformity to the blessed Jesus in essays to save life than for some truths, tho' precious ones, to which many martyrs testified formerly in the flames of Smithfield.'
Here, then, please observe, is the free Puritan mind in revolt, courageously insisting on making his new vision of the good life prevail, resolutely undertaking the discipline and dangers of experiment, and, above all, seeking what he calls the will of the 'blessed Jesus,' not in the Bible, but in a medical report of the Royal Society; thus fulfilling the spirit of Robinson's declaration that 'Our Lord Christ calls himself truth, not custom'; and illustrating Robinson's other declaration that true religion cannot conflict with right reason and sound experience. In Mather, the vision of the good life came to mean a rational and practical beneficence in the face of calumny and violence. For his conduct on this occasion, he deserves to have his sins forgiven, and to be ranked and remembered as a hero of the modern spirit.
He hoped that his spirit would descend to his son; but the full stream of his bold and original moral energy turned elsewhere. There was a Boston boy of Puritan ancestry, who had sat under Cotton Mather's father, who had heard Cotton Mather preach in the height of his power, and who said years afterward that reading Cotton Mather's book, Essays to do Good, 'gave me such a turn of thinking, as to have an influence on my conduct through life; for I have always set a greater value on the character of a doer of good, than on any other kind of reputation; and if I have been . . . a useful citizen, the public owes the advantage of it to that book.' This boy had a strong common sense. To him, as to Mather, right reason seemed the rule of God and the voice of God.
He grew up in Boston under Mather's influence, and became a free-thinking man of the world, entirely out of sympathy with strait-laced and stiff-necked upholders of barren rites and ceremonies. I am speaking of the greatest liberalizing force in eighteenth-century America, Benjamin Franklin.[1] Was he a Puritan? Perhaps no one thinks of him as such. Yet we see that he was born and bred in the bosom of Boston Puritanism; that he acknowledges its greatest exponent as the prime inspiration of his life. Furthermore, he exhibits all the essential characteristics of the Puritan: dissatisfaction, revolt, a new vision, discipline, and a passion for making the new vision prevail. He represents, in truth, the reaction of a radical, a living Puritanism, to an age of intellectual enlightenment.
Franklin began his independent effort in a revolt against ecclesiastical authority, as narrow and unrealistic. Recall the passage in his Autobiography where he relates his disgust at a sermon preached on the great text in Philippians: "Whatsoever things are true, honest, just, pure, lovely, or of good report, if there be any virtue, or any praise, think on these things." Franklin says that, in expounding this text, the minister confined himself to five points: keeping the Sabbath, reading the Scriptures, attending public worship, partaking of the sacraments, and respecting the ministers. Franklin recognized at once that there was no moral life in that minister, was 'disgusted,' and attended his preaching no more. It was the revolt of a living Puritanism from a Puritanism that was dead.
For, note what follows, as the consequence of his break with the church. 'It was about this time that I conceived,' says Franklin, 'the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection. I wished to live without committing any fault at any time, and to conquer all that either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead me into.' Everyone will recall how Franklin drew up his table of the thirteen real moral virtues, and how diligently he exercised himself to attain them. But, for us, the significant feature of his enterprise was the realistic spirit in which it was conceived: the bold attempt to ground the virtues on reason and experience rather than authority; the assertion of his doctrine 'that vicious actions are not hurtful because they are forbidden, but forbidden because they are hurtful, the nature of man alone considered.'
Having taken this ground, it became necessary for him to explore the nature of man and the universe. So Puritanism, which, in Robinson and Mather, was predominantly rational, becomes in Franklin predominantly scientific. With magnificent fresh moral force, he seeks for the will of God in nature, and applies his discoveries with immense practical benevolence to ameliorating the common lot of mankind, and to diffusing good-will among men and nations. Light breaks into his mind from every quarter of his century. His vision of the good life includes bringing every faculty of mind and body to its highest usefulness. With a Puritan emancipator like Franklin, we are not obliged to depend, for the opening of our minds, upon subsequent liberators devoid of his high reconstructive seriousness.
I must add just one more name, for the nineteenth century, to the history of our American Puritan tradition. The original moral force which was in Mather and Franklin passed in the next age into a man who began to preach in Cotton Mather's church, Ralph Waldo Emerson, descendant of many generations of Puritans. The church itself had now become Unitarian: yet, after two or three years of service, Emerson, like Franklin, revolted from the church; the vital force of Puritanism in him impelled him to break from the church in behalf of his vision of sincerity, truth, and actuality. 'Whoso would be a man,' he declared in his famous essay on Self-Reliance, 'must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness.'
No American ever lived whose personal life was more exemplary; or who expressed such perfect disdain of out-worn formulas and lifeless routine. There is dynamite in his doctrine to burst tradition to fragments, when tradition has become an empty shell. 'Every actual state is corrupt,' he cries in one of his dangerous sayings; 'good men will not obey the laws too well.' To good men whose eyes are wide and full of light, there is always breaking a new vision of right reason, which is the will of God, and above the law. Emerson himself broke the Fugitive Slave Law, and in the face of howling Pro-Slavery mobs declared that John Brown would 'make the gallows glorious like the cross.'
That is simply the political aspect of his radical Puritanism. On the æsthetic side, Emerson disregarded the existing conventions of poetry to welcome Walt Whitman, who saluted him as master. Emerson hailed Walt Whitman because Whitman had sought to make splendid and beautiful the religion of a Puritan democracy; and a Puritan democracy is the only; kind that we have reason to suppose will endure.
Let these two examples of Emerson's revolt and vision suffice to illustrate the modern operation of the Puritan spirit, its disdain for formalism and routine.
Now, our contemporary leaders of the attack against the modern Puritan declare that modern Puritanism means campaigns of 'snorting and suppression.' That, we should now be prepared to assert, is precisely and diametrically opposite to what modern Puritanism means. Modern Puritanism means the release, not the suppression, of power, welcome to new life, revolt from decay and death. With extravagant asceticism, with precisianism, modern Puritanism has nothing whatever to do.
What made the teaching of Emerson, for example, take hold of his contemporaries, what should commend it to us to-day, is just its unfailingly positive character; its relish for antagonisms and difficulty; its precept for the use of the spur; its restoration of ambition to its proper place in the formation of the manly character; its power to free the young soul from the fetters of fear and send him on his course like a thunder-bolt; and, above all, its passion for bringing the whole of life for all men to its fullest and fairest fruit; its passion for emancipating, not merely the religious and moral, but also the intellectual and the political and social and æsthetic capacities of man, so that he may achieve the harmonious perfection of his whole nature, body and soul. To this vision of the good life, Puritanism has come by inevitable steps in its pilgrimage through the ages.
What have I been trying to demonstrate by this long review of the Puritan tradition? This, above all: that the Puritan is profoundly in! sympathy with the modern spirit, is indeed the formative force in the modern spirit.
In order to make this point perfectly clear, I must take the liberty of repeating here what I have already said elsewhere by way of a description of the modern spirit:
"A great part of our lives, as we all feel in our educational period, is occupied with learning how to do and to be what others have been and have done before us. But presently we discover that the world is changing around us, and that the secrets of the masters and the experience of our elders do not wholly suffice to establish us effectively in our younger world. We discover within us needs, aspirations, powers, of which the generation that educated us seems unaware, or towards which it appears to be indifferent, unsympathetic, or even actively hostile. We perceive gradually or with successive shocks of surprise that many things which our fathers declared were true and satisfactory are not at all satisfactory, are by no means true, for us. Then it dawns upon us, perhaps as an exhilarating opportunity, perhaps as a grave and sobering responsibility, that in a little while we ourselves shall be the elders, the responsible generation. Our salvation in the day when we take command will depend, we believe, upon our disentanglement from the lumber of heirlooms and hereditary devices, and upon the free, wise use of our own faculties."
At that moment, if we have inherited, not the Puritan heirlooms, but the living Puritan tradition, we enter into the modern spirit. By this phrase I mean, primarily, "the disposition to accept nothing on authority, but to bring all reports to the test of experience. The modern spirit is, first of all, a free spirit open on all sides to the influx of truth, even from the past. But freedom is not its only characteristic. The modern spirit is marked, further, by an active curiosity, which grows by what it feeds upon, and goes ever inquiring for fresher and sounder information, not content till it has the best information to be had anywhere. But since it seeks the best, it is, by necessity, also a critical spirit, constantly sifting, discriminating, rejecting, and holding fast that which is good, only till that which is better is within sight. This endless quest, when it becomes central in a life, requires labor, requires pain, requires a measure of courage; and so the modern spirit, with its other virtues, is an heroic spirit. As a reward for difficulties gallantly undertaken, the gods bestow on the modern spirit a kind of eternal youth, with unfailing powers of recuperation and growth."
To enter into this spirit is what the Puritan means by freedom. "He does not, like the false emancipator, merely cut us loose from the old moorings and set us adrift at the mercy of wind and tide. He comes aboard, like a good pilot; and while we trim our sails, he takes the wheel and lays our course for a fresh voyage. His message when he leaves us is not, 'Henceforth be masterless,' but, 'Bear thou henceforth the sceptre of thine own control through life and the passion of life.'" If that message still stirs us as with the sound of a trumpet, and frees and prepares us, not for the junketing of a purposeless vagabondage, but for the ardor and discipline and renunciation of a pilgrimage, we are Puritans.
- ↑ In presenting this sketch of the Puritan tradition in America, I apologize for the necessity of reproducing some paragraphs from my essay on Emerson in Americans.