Cotton Mather

Having completed John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine, and Doxology, the next church history book in my queue is Worldly Saints by Leland Ryken.

You’ve no doubt heard the terms “puritan” and “puritanical” used pejoratively; but those who use those words in that way know nothing of the faith and character of the Puritans. In truth, most of us probably know little about them; so when I discovered Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were by Leland Ryken, I knew I had to get it and put it near the of my to-read stack.

The Puritans, as you likely know, were Calvinists. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that truth was extremely important to them. Ryken writes:

   The Puritans placed a high premium on religious truth. The intellectual content of a person’s faith was not an indifferent matter for them. Thomas Hooker claimed that “all truth, though the least that God reveals , is it not better than all the world?” John Owen urged Christians to “look on truth as a pearl, as that which is better than all the world, bought with any price.”

—Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 17.

It should not be believed, however, that bare dogma was the sum of the Puritans’ religion. The possibility that religious belief could be intellectual without touching the heart was very real to them. They were diligent in self-examination (perhaps sometimes too much so) as a defense against that deplorable condition.

   The idea of cold or coldness and the synonyms for dull and dullness, were major spiritual aversions for the Puritans. Richard Rogers recoiled from “the coldness and half-service . . . Which is in the world.” wile Cotton Mather warned, “beware of . . . A strong head and a cold heart.” Samuel Ward recorded in his diary the self-accusation “How on the 15 and 16 of February thou was very dull in God’s service.” as a counterpart to these rejections of coldness, zeal and zealous were recurrent positive value-terms in Puritan vocabulary.
   Spiritual complacency and mediocrity were the greatest of all Puritan aversions. Richard Baxter wrote,

As mere idleness and forgetting God will keep a soul as certainly from heaven as a profane, licentious, fleshly life, so also will the usual company of such idle, forgetful, negligent persons as surly keep our hearts from heaven, as the company of men more dissolute and profane. [The Saints’ Everlasting Rest (Fleming H. Revell, 1962), 125.]

Samuel Willard lamented that in New England “forwardness and zeal for God is almost out of date” while “lukewarm-confession is much in credit.”

—Ibid.

The Puritans were known as a hard-working people. Even today, when the words “puritan” and “puritanical” are meant as insults, one hears references to the “puritan work ethic.” Few, however, understand the motivation for that ethic, which stemmed from a conviction that Jesus was Lord of all of life. Leland Ryken writes:

   To understand Puritan attitudes toward work, we must take a look at the background against which they were reacting. For centuries it had been customary to divide types of work into the two categories of “sacred” and “secular.” Sacred work was work done by members of the religious profession. All other work bore the stigma of being secular.   This cleavage between sacred and secular work can be traced all the way back to the Jewish Talmud. One of the prayers, obviously written from the scribe’s viewpoint, is as follows:

I thank thee, O Lord, my God, that thou hast given me my lot with those who sit in the house of learning, and not with those who sit at the street-corners; for I am early to work and they are early to work; I am early to work on the words of the Torah, and they are early to work on things of no moment. I weary myself, and they weary themselves; I weary myself and profit thereby, and they weary themselves to no profit. I run, and they run; I run towards the life of the age to come, and they run towards the pit of destruction.

   The same division of work into categories of sacred and secular became a leading feature of medieval Roman Catholicism. The attitude was formulated already in the fourth century by Eusebius, who wrote,

Two ways of life were given by the law of Christ to his church. The one is above nature, and beyond common human living. . . . Wholly and permanently separate from the common customary life of mankind, it devotes itself to the service of God alone. . . . Such then is the perfect form of the Christian life. And the other, more humble, more human, permits men to . . . have minds for farming, for trade, and the other more secular interests as well as for religion. . . . And a kind of secondary grade of piety is attributed to them.

This sacred-secular dichotomy was exactly what the Puritans rejected as the starting point of their theory of work.
[Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 24.]

The Puritans, following the lead of Luther and Calvin, believed that all honest labor was holy. The differences between sacred secular were extrinsic only. The most common, menial labor was intrinsically as valuable and God-glorifying as the most honored vocations, including preaching. According to Hugh Latimer,

This is a wonderful thing, that the Savior of the world, and the King above all kings, was not ashamed to labor; yea, and to use so simple an occupation. Here he did sanctify all manner of occupations. [Ibid., 25.]

The Christian faith of the laborer was believed to sanctify the most humble calling. John Cotton wrote:

Faith . . . encourageth a man in his calling to the homeliest and difficultest. . . . Such homely employments a carnal heart knows not how to submit unto; but now faith having put us into a calling, if it require some homely employment, it encourageth us in it. . . . So faith is ready to embrace any homely service his calling leads him to, which a carnal heart would blush to be seen in. [Ibid.]

This was the puritan’s view of every activity. Ryken continues:

   For the Puritans, all of life was God’s. Their goal was to integrate their daily work with their religious devotion to God. Richard Steele asserted that it was in the shop “where you may most confidently expect the presence and blessing of God.” The Puritans revolutionized attitudes toward daily work when they raised the possibility that “every step and stroke in your trade is sanctified.” John Milton, in his famous Areopagitica, satirized the businessman who leaves his religion at home, “trading all day without his religion.” . . .
   The Puritan goal was to serve God, not simply within one’s work in the world, but through that work. John Cotton hinted at this when he wrote,

A true believing Christian . . . lives in his vocation by his faith. Not only my spiritual life but even my civil life in this world, and all the life I live, is by the faith of the Son of God: He exempts no life from the agency of his faith.

And Cotton Mather said,

A Christian should be able to give a good account, not only what is his occupation, but also what he is in his occupation. It is not enough that a Christian have an occupation; but he must mind his occupation as it becomes a Christian.

With the Puritan emphasis on all of life as God’s, it is not surprising that a late seventeenth-century pamphlet entitled St. Paul the Tentmaker could note that the Protestant movement had fostered a “delight in secular employments.” [Ibid., 25–26.]

The church has always had its anti-intellectual element: people who are drawn toward the mystical, treating faith as blind following, or those who elevate zeal above knowledge. The Puritans had no time for such thinking. For them, faith and reason were not contradictory, but complementary.

In the seventeenth century, radical Protestants in England known as “sectaries” kept up a running attack on the Puritans and others who extolled the value of education and the importance of reason. Their counterparts in America, known as “the antinomians,” created such a disturbance that the Puritans finally banished them to Rhode Island. One of the antinomians asserted his preference in preaching with the comment, “I had rather hear such a one that speaks from the mere motion of the spirit, without any study at all, than any of your learned scholars, although he may be fuller of Scripture.”
   The Puritans overwhelmingly defended the cause of learning and the faculty of reason against such’ attacks on the mind. For the Puritans, zeal was no substitute for knowledge. John Preston declared, “I deny not but a man may have much knowledge and want grace, but on the other side, . . . you cannot have more grace than you have knowledge.” Richard Baxter believed that “education is God’s ordinary way for the conveyance of his grace, and ought no more to be set in opposition to the Spirit than the preaching of the Word.” John Cotton claimed that although “knowledge is no knowledge without zeal,” yet “zeal is but a wild-fire without knowledge.”
   The sectaries and antinomians pictured faith and reason as antagonists. The Puritans rejected the perennial attempt to belittle reason in religious matters. “Faith is grounded upon knowledge,” said Samuel Willard; “though God be . . . seen by an eye of faith, yet he must be seen by an eye of reason too: for though faith sees things above reason, yet it sees nothing but in a way of reason.” John Preston wrote that divine grace

elevateth reason, and makes it higher, it makes it see further than reason could, it is contrary indeed to corrupt reason, but to reason that is right reason it is not contrary, only it raiseth it higher: and therefore faith teacheth nothing contrary to sense and reason.

John Cotton called reason “an essential wisdom in us,” and William Hubbard, “our most faithful and best councilor.”
   The Puritans’ faith in the authority of the Bible did not lead them to belittle reason as unimportant. Cotton Mather made the profound comment that “Scripture is reason in its highest elevation.” Harvard’s first college laws required that students be able not only to read the Scriptures, but also “to resolve them logically.” A hint of what this entailed is suggested by Richard Baxter’s description of instances when Christians must use their reason:

We must use our best reason . . . to know which are the true Canonical Scriptures . . . , to expound the text, to translate it truly . . . , to gather just and certain inferences from Scripture assertions; to apply general rules to particular cases, in matters of doctrine, worship, discipline, and ordinary practice.

William Bridge sounded the authentic Puritan note when he wrote that “reason is of great use, even in the things of God.” Thomas Hooker was eulogized by his colleague Samuel Stone for making “the truth appear by light of reason.”
   Given the forces of anti-intellectualism at work in their own religious milieu, the Puritans could have slipped into a disparagement of reason. Instead they remained defenders of reason and knowledge.

—Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 161–162.

To say that the Puritans were very serious thinkers is an understatement bordering on absurdity. This characteristic — a virtue, really — was also the cause of their greatest faults. As much as I want to defend the Puritans and correct popular misconceptions about them, it cannot be denied that they had their faults, and that those faults provide impetus for the slanderous treatment they have received. And it seems to me that an almost pathological seriousness was at the root of all of their failings. In Worldly Saints, Leland Ryken includes a chapter called Learning from Negative Example: Some Puritan Faults. He lists the following (among others):

An Inadequate View of Recreation
The Puritans were opposed to sport on Sundays, and against gambling and certain sports such as cock fighting, but they were certainly not against recreation, as some have concluded. They considered it a good and necessary part of life. They believed this so strongly that in England in 1647, a Puritan-controlled Parliament decreed that on every second Tuesday of the month, all businesses were to be closed from 8 A.M. until 8 P.M. to give workers time for recreation. Ryken writes that American Puritan “Thomas Shepard advised his son at college, ‘Weary not your body, mind, or eyes with long pouring on your book. . . . Recreate yourself a little, and so to your work afresh.’” [Worldly Saints, 190.] The problem with the Puritan view of recreation was that it was entirely utilitarian. They had no appreciation for the enjoyment of leisure as an end in itself. Its sole purpose was to refresh the body and mind for more work. The following statement from William Perkins is typical:

In commanding labour, [God] alloweth the means to make us fit for labour. And therefore . . . he admitteth lawful recreation, because it is a necessary means to refresh either body or mind that we may better do the duties which pertain to us. . . . And therefore recreation . . . serveth only to make us more able to continue in labour. [Ibid.]

Too Many Rules
The Puritans were a disciplined people who enjoyed living well regulated lives. This virtue was carried out so enthusiastically that it often became the vice of legalism. Ryken writes that “such legalism produced false guilt and a loss of discrimination about what constituted a serious sin.” [Ibid, 192.] The diary of sixteen-year-old Nathaniel Mather records,

When very young, I went astray from God. . . . Of the manifold sins which I was then guilty of, none so sticks in my mind as that . . . I was whittling on the Sabbath Day; and for fear of being seen, I did it behind the door. A great reproach to God! a specimen of that atheism that I brought into the world with me. [Ibid.]

Too Many Words
Ryken writes:

The characteristic Puritan style . . . is to take at least wice as many words as possible to express a thought. Like the poets of the Bible (but without their poetic conciseness and artistry), the Puritans seemed to search for ways to say everything at least twice in different words. A random specimen [Richard Sibbes] of such redundancy is this:

God hath placed us in the world to do him some work. This is God’s working place; he hath houses of work for us: now, our lot here I to do work, to be in some calling . . . to work for God.” [Ibid., 194.]

[Ibid., 194.]

Too Much Pious Moralizing
It seems they could not simply enjoy a worldly pleasure without finding some moral to teach or adding a theological qualifier. Ryken writes, “When Cotton Mather’s children fell sick, he would remind them of ‘the analogous distempers of their souls’ and instruct them ‘how to look up unto their great Saviour for the cure of those distempers.’” [Ibid.] John Winthrop wrote to his wife “that she was ‘the chiefest of all comforts under the hope of salvation.’” [Ibid.]

My own analysis is that legitimate criticisms of the Puritans can all be boiled down to two causes: the chronic seriousness already mentioned, and a proclivity for taking every good thing to the most absurd extreme. It must also be noted that the most extreme examples are not necessarily representative of the Puritans in general. Ryken concludes:

   I know of no group that has been more victimized by what today we would call its “lunatic fringe” than the Puritans. I refer to individuals whose aberrations made them a liability to the movement or good people whose blunders have been paraded through the years to the discredit of the Puritans. Throughout subsequent history, anyone wishing to discredit the Puritans has found it easy to find material, which is usually far from the norm for Puritanism generally. [Ibid., 201.]