The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (10 page)

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Authors: Robert Middlekauff

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BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
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varied according to circumstances of time and place. Of course, the Church should have ministers, but how they garbed themselves was not a critical question. The surplice affected no one's eternal state; nor indeed did anything related to the Church's organizationits government, its discipline, or its rites. That, however, did not mean that the Church should permit Puritan ministers to appear without the surplice (as Richard Mather was to discover); nor did it mean that they and their flocks should feel free to abandon the liturgy or the Prayer Book. Rather the decisions of the Church about such matters ought to be accepted without controversy, as a bishop said, ''for order and obedience sake.''
8
None knew better than Anglican divines how little regard some Puritans paid to order and obedience. Among the most disobedient and disorderly were the Separatists. The Separatists (they took the name because of their insistence that in forming churches good men must separate themselves from evil ones) rejected virtually every contention of the Anglicans. Although they did not agree among themselves on every point, they all echoed Robert Browne's confident assertion about the Church of England and its bishops"It is the Beast and they are the Ryders."
9
The first true churches, according to John Robinson, minister of the church that eventually founded Plymouth Colony, were established by the Apostles. Christ himself formed no churches; He lived and died "a minister of the circumcision."
10
The churches of the Apostles, and those established since then, appeared when believers voluntarily covenanted among themselves. Compulsion could not be used in the forming of these bodies since the substance of a church had to be gathered from men of faith, and faith could not be coerced. The means by which it was obtained was teaching and instruction by Christ's disciples.
11
The Church of England, Robinson said, could not claim such an origin. It was the offshoot of the Church of Rome and the Roman Church had never been a true church freely gathered. To be true, saints had lived in Rome during Christ's time, and true churches had also maintained themselves. The Antichrist, or the Church of Rome, made his appearance long after the Apostles' time. The Antichrist existed "as an embryo in the womb," the Pope was his head, the hierarchy, his body.
12
The
 
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Antichrist grew in size until he dispossessed Christ of His leadership of the Church in the world. Until the Protestant Reformation, the English Church served her parent, the Antichrist, without interruption and without serious challenge. The Church of England was never Christ's Church, it neverdespite its claimscomprised the body of the people of England. What saints there were in England lived in defiance of the diabolical efforts of the Antichrist and enjoyed Christ's truth only precariously.
13
If the saints were few in these days of the long apostasy from the primitive Church, their number, by the Separatists' computations, did not increase much with the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. The Reformation in England began, according to Separatist accounts, with young Edward VI. His father, Henry VIII, made so few changes in matters close to their hearts that they dismissed him with hardly a word. In Edward's short reign the Antichrist in England received a few injuries, a part of the old doctrine was revoked and a few of his servants, the bishops and their minions, were dismissed. The saints took heart and gathered churches which they thought approached the purity of the primitive Church. The Antichrist had barely quailed before these meager assaults when his creature, Mary, acceded to the throne. Yet something was achieved even under the bitter persecutions of Mary's dreadful reign. For, as Henry Ainsworth, a Separatist divine, put it, the martyrs "by their faithful testimonyes and patient sufferings, [did] throw down a great part of Antichrists church."
14
But Christian suffering could achieve only so much and with the death of Mary, progress towards purity came to an end. The few churches of the saints were swept into the national Church and all its branches with the dissolved congregations joining "the unhallowed rout in the popish and profane parishes under their late mass."
15
Deluded and unsanctified men who expressed a desire to bring the Antichrist down chose the wrong means: they appealed to the State to reconstitute the Church and to remove Popish abuses. After failing they cravenly joined their oppressors once more.
16
Their means were improper, in the judgments of Separatists, because although the State was charged with the responsibility of suppressing idolatry and rooting out error, it could not con-
 
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stitute the Church. Churches took their beginning in good men, who could be brought to faith only by instruction divinely countenanced; force could never yield faith. But it was force they faced, the Separatists insisted, and force had stopped all progress towards purer churches. The sell-styled reformers who chose to stay within the Church had not only stopped reform, they had conspired to reincarnate the Antichrist. Weren't Popish practices common once more? the Separatists asked. And as further evidence of decay they cited the persecution of themselves.
17
History had paused in England. It was clear to the Separatists that the development which had been arrested at the end of Mary's time had not resumed. And so after sixty or seventy years of discontinuity, they felt justified in taking new action, especially in leaving England for Holland, and later for America.
There is an unyielding quality in the history written by the Separatists. They did not shrink at dismissing others as the agents of the Devil. They did not draw back at the smell of the pit, nor was it difficult for them to imagine generations of Englishmen drowning in floods of smoking brimstone.
When Massachusetts was founded, the Separatist version of the history of the Church of England was at least thirty years old. The Puritans who came to Massachusetts Bay probably knew its details as well as they knew the Scriptures. They shared many of the Separatists' ideas about the English Church and its history: they agreed that the Church of England was corrupt; it retained a disgusting reverence for Roman ritual; its episcopacy was the legitimate heir of the Catholic hierarchy; its entire history exposed its early Antichristian origins. While holding these views, these Bay Colony Puritans always insisted that they had not separated from the Church. Despite its imperfections it remained a true Church. They were a part of it, though far removed from it physically.
18
This refusal to take the path of the Separatists has been explained in Perry Miller's
Orthodoxy in Massachusetts
.
19
The non-Separatist Congregationalists, he writes, refused to follow these assumptions to the Separatist conclusion because they shared their age's commitment to uniformity in religion. Separation opened the door to "social demoralization" and to political chaos.
20
The State had responsibilities to enforce the true wor-
 
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ship and they would support it, corrupt though it was. The Separatistsas Miller points outwould not have stripped the State of its coercive power, even while it struck at them in the name of uniformity. In fact the Separatists derided separation; they would not split Christ's Church; they would not countenance any departure from it. But the Church of England was not Christ's own; the Church of England belonged to Antichrist. They had not separated from Christ's Church, they had removed themselves from evil.
21
At this point non-Separatist Congregationalists diverged from their Separatist brethren. But they did not do so primarily on the basis of the elaborate sophistry that Miller so brilliantly reconstructs. Miller concentrates on the defense they made of the Elizabethan Church: against Separatist protests that the churches had not been truly gathered of the faithful, because the State had constructed them by sweeping all but the openly scandalous within, the non-Separatist divines answered that there were many in the churches who voluntarily served Christ without the spur of the State. They had joined implicitly in covenant by their coming together. As for the force of the State which throbbed behind the whole structure, it did not affect most religious exercises which were conducted voluntarily. Nor did these non-Separatists boggle at the ministry, which in existing practice was appointed by a patron and installed by a bishop, even though their theory required that the peoplethe saintschoose their ministers. Within Anglican practicethese ingenious divines arguedthe procedure demanded by Christ might be met. Nothing prevented the people from giving their silent assent to the appointment by a patron: this tacit approval conferred a genuine calling upon the minister. And he, by silently making certain reservations in the course of his appointment and installation, remained free from impurity. It was regrettable that the whole matter could not be conducted in the open, but in this maze of unspoken calls and silent answers, the saints were certain that Christ heard and saw true visible churches where others detected only the traditional establishment.
22
This is the burden of the story Miller tells. Subterfuge, evasion, elaborate pretense, all were resorted to in the service of the ideal of religious uniformity. The non-Separatist shrank before the alternative of separation, Miller contends, "for events
 
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had proved in the way of Separation political madness lay." The Separatists had incurred the guilt of "rending the seamless garment of the church. . . ."
23
In England of the late sixteenth century the contention of the non-Separatists that they had not separated from the Church of England was a farce, but in America in the first half of the seventeenth century, it was not. Perry Miller's reconstruction of these arguments rests largely on the writings of the sixteenth-century group which he then attributes to the founders of Massachusetts Bay. But this later group, while always professing admiration for their fathers, largely ignored the form of their argument, while accepting its conclusion that the Church of England was a true Church.
The problem of the non-separating reformers in England was to demonstrate that a strain of purity had survived and would continue to do so, despite corrupt ecclesiastical practices and ideas. To show that Christ's true Church lived amidst Antichristian degeneracy, they resorted to a history of Church polity which had the pure Church surviving unseen within the impure. Their American tutees did not have to contend with hostile bishops and Romish remnants, and they could construct their churches any way they liked. There was no point in cleaving to the stratagems of the English reformers. Still, they maintained that they were a part of the old Church of England. They did so out of a commitment to one of the oldest beliefs about Church history: the Church of Christ would survive to the end of the world. It would struggle and suffer; indeed, since its inception it had always engaged the forces of evil, led for most of history by the Antichrist. Though it had hidden itself, the true Church had found life for centuries in the midst of the English establishment. And now in the freedom of the New World, far away from the prying eyes of the bishops, it could declare the truth openly and follow the faith to the glory of Christ.
24
The group around William Ames, perhaps the non-Separatist divine most admired in New England, had held similar views but had not emphasized them. Their immediate necessity was to establish how in fact the true Church polity existed within the practices of parish churches created by the State and led by a minister appointed and ordained from outside the congregation.
 
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What kept them from going the whole way and joining the Separatists was their belief that a holy remnant had preserved in England the Church of Christ over the ages. So they admitted that the Church harbored some of the unfaithful, and that its procedures should be altered, but they insisted that it also contained God's elect. For rejecting the Church of England, as the Separatists did, meant consigning these people to the Antichrist.
25
The desire to preserve Christ's Church free of corruption carried Richard Mather and thousands of others out of England in the Great Migration. By 1639, the last year of that human flood, Richard Mather had almost given up hope for the country of his birth. The England that had received the Church in the times of the Apostles only to lose it to Rome was in danger of seeing it vanish altogether. This dreadful possibility had followed the promising beginning made under King Edward VI and Queen Elizabeth, who had apparently begun the destruction of the Antichrist. Four years after his landing in Boston, Mather warned that the Lord was about to "unchurch" England.
26
England's apostasy made the American task all the more urgent. The Church must be preserved; the polity that Christ had prescribed in the Gospels must be worked out. This much could be done in the expectation of Christ's imminent coming.
When Richard arrived in New England, the New England way in Church organization had been almost completed. Puritan divines in England had worked out the theory over a period of two generations. Their conclusions amply and brilliantly described by modern historians as non-separating Congregational-ism held that Christ's Church in the world should be restricted to visible saints, as those who gave some evidence of holiness were called. The visible Church was to be composed of self-governing particular churches, separated from the State and other institutions though depending upon them for support. These particular churches of the faithful were to be gathered out of the world and formed on the basis of a covenant, a joint agreement of the saints with one another, and with God, to worship together according to the criteria laid down in the Gospel.
27
Ministers called by the Church in an election would preach and govern; once selected, ordained, and installed in their godly offices they could require obedience, for their offices were divine

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