The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (33 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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Page 182
and their salvation is to be "wholly ascribed to the Grace of God." Men have "no Mind to believe, their
Wills
are set against believing on the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ." And Christ would have His Kingdom as God had Israel, which served as a ''Type of the
Elect
of God."
9
Working out a prophetical scheme that utilized the signs of his own day to "prove" the imminence of the end was beyond the powers of the eighty-year-old Increase. His son Cotton, who seems to have given him instruction in eschatological matters in these last years, would do that anyway. But the old man, though feeble, could still observe the European and the American events that anticipated the end. The sins of New England, the decay of the Protestant interest in the Palatinate, Saxony, Poland, and Hungary, all suggested the shakings of nations promised in Scripture as a preface to the entrance of Christ's Kingdom.
10
These same years heard him gradually concede that his belief in corporate New England was misplaced. If the Lord had not exactly rejected the land, He no longer really depended upon it to serve Him. The Lord, of course, would preserve His Church, and individual churches in New England still retained their old purity. It was to these few remaining churches that Increase spoke, and to the elect in and out of them. Hence, whatever his speculations about the salvation of carnal Israel, it was mystical Israel that drew his major attention, the Israel that stood for God's chosen in all times and places. It was this interest in the elect that prompted him to give the simple sermons of his last years, quivering with piety and the expectation that Christ's return was near.
11
Increase expressed this same set of concerns in still another way: in his laments that ministers more frequently than ever preached "morality" without ever mentioning Christ. These complaints which he made when he was an old man revealed his bewilderment at the growth of deism, and its associated heresies, Pelagianism, Arminianism, and Socinianism, in England. Because he never quite grasped the subtleties of these rational persuasions, he responded to them with the traditional claims that the true religion held truths reasonable enough and yet "above reason." Such assertions no longer satisfied even Boston's wits. Fortunately for Increase's peace of mind this fact largely escaped him. His son Cotton, was not spared so easily.
12
 
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There were still other difficulties for a minister who held to the simple message of Christ. The covenant theology in all of its ramifications had opened the way to enforce good behavior on a people. They could always be reminded of their compact with the Lord and the duties it imposed in attitude and behavior. A people who failed to honor their agreement could expect afflictionsthe land would be scourged with famine, flood, droughts, wars, and sins. The way to recover from these judgments lay through repentance and reformation.
13
This formula had served so well for so long that Increase could not quite ever give it up. Yet in his final years, he resorted to it infrequently, and then usually concentrated more closely on the fate of sinners than on the land. Thus in the sermon he preached shortly after the great fire of October 1711, which left a large section of Boston in ashes, he argued in the familiar style that the afflliction had been sent as punishment for the people's sins. He said this with passion"The People of
New England
have cause to be
Humbled and Humbled
; and Wo to
New-England
, if after all these things it shall be said of us, as 'twas of the Obstinate
Jews . . . They are not Humbled even to this Day; neither have they Feared.
" But he added a chiliastic prediction with equal intensity, "The Lord has threatned to punish Sinners with Fire: Thus has He threatned the world, and will e're long do it after such a tremendous manner, as like never was since the world began." The threat he detected was for the instruction of sinnersnot the people in the national covenant.
14
Increase did not offer this prophecy with a genial qualification that his listeners might believe it or not as they wished. He was not giving them opinion; indeed in these same years he began insisting that belief in the chiliad was a test of faith. If a man discovered that he believed in Christ's imminent return, he could take hope that he was one of the elect. Chiliasm was thereby added to one of the signs of conversion, and seemingly incorporated into the theory of assurance.
15
No full-scale treatise developed these suggestions. They were not ideas which were intended to change doctrine so much as they were hints (perhaps not completely recognized in Increase's consciousness) which would lead the saints into primitive purity. To them Increase added one further exhortation: growth in grace would not only provide assurance of one's faith, it would secure
 
Page 184
a higher place in Heaven. There of course the saints would enjoy the ultimate glory of holy communion with Christ. There they would finally understand that true happiness lay in perfect holiness.
16
In these hopes of which he spoke to his church in a series of sacramental meditations, Increase reached the emotional culmination of his chiliasm. He had always despised carnal chiliasts, those who prayed for Christ's coming for what it would add to their sensual lives in the New Jerusalem. Increase agreed with them that the saints of the millennium would have no worries about where their next meal was coming from. Nor would they suffer from disease or anxiety. The thousand years of Christ's reign would see a utopia brought 'down to earth. But the joys of these times would be nothing compared to those that would follow afterwardswhen this earth was finally totally consumed and the faithful were carried up to the Third Heaven by the angels. In Heaven they would discover that "to be holy is to be happy."
17
This vision of Increase's last years also subtly altered his Christology. In the seventeenth century Increase concentrated on Christ as the redeemer, the noble figure who sacrificed His life to save man. The sermons on this subject emphasized Christ's priestly, prophetical, and kingly offices in the traditional Puritan way. They paid particular attention to the relation of Christ's human to His divine nature, a matter Increase considered important because it provided an opportunity to make Christ's sacrifice comprehensible and moving to ordinary men. With this purpose in mind Increase carefully explained that Christ assumed a human nature in order that He might sympathize more deeply with men and so that His death would be "infinitely meritorious." Although this theme never disappeared from Increase's preaching, by the second decade of the eighteenth century he was saying less about Christ's redemption of man than of Christ's transformation of man's soul beyond the grave. To the figure of Christ as glorious savior, Increase now added the portrait of Christ the awesome judge, separating sheep from goats, who after dispensing His justice, prepared His sheep for the holiness that was the eternal happiness.
18
While this formulation, repeated often in these final years, expressed Mather's
understanding
clearly, it conveyed only in part
 
Page 185
his
meaning
. His yearning for holiness implied a renunciation of this world. By this time his cravings for purity far exceeded the traditional exhortation to love the world with weaned affections. He wanted not to love the world at all; he wanted to separate himself not only from evil but from all that seemed ostensibly good by this world's standards. Release from the flesh, the creatures, and the world, he was telling his flock in the sermons of his last years, would be obtained sometime after all the vanities had been consumed in flames.
Like his father before him, Increase had often called for growth in gracefor the exercise of the virtues instilled by the Holy Spirit at conversion. He would never stop urging such growth. But the state of the soul that he saw in his visions of heaven far transcended anything described in these prosaic terms. No matter how rapid, growing in grace in this world could never carry one to the ultimate holiness, that is the happiness of communion with Christ. The joy of this Heavenly eternity could not be approached even in the ravishing movements of conversion, however many times conversion was repeated by men striving to improve the supernatural gift of grace. In any case, as Increase had long taught, good men who had been reared in religious families might not experience much feeling in their conversions. The truth was that no institution enjoyed on earth could forecast the bliss awaiting the redeemed in heavennot conversion, or its repetition, or even the delights of the Lord's Supper.
19
If Mather's renunciation of this world is clear in his celebration of Heavenly happiness, so also is it in his insistence that in the world of the resurrection, the soul would be reunited with the body. At first sight, Increase's belief in the resurrection of the body and his rejection of this world may seem paradoxical. One might assume that more than a remnant of sensuality lurks in the belief in the final unity of body and soul. Yet everything he preached on the subject in these last years contributed toward his rejection of nature in favor of the spirit. In these sermons his sensuality was transformed and in the process, he reaffirmed his profound faith in the absolute sovereignty of God.
20
Puritan ministers facing congregations filled with men at once literal-minded and yet tough and commonsensical had long had to answer questions about the resurrection of bodies dead for thousands of years. How was it possible, ministers were asked,
 
Page 186
that bodies long since turned to dust could be put back into their original shapes? Like most ministers, Increase responded by reminding these questioners that nothing was beyond the omnipotence of Godand few things revealed it better than the joining of the old body to the soul. In a rough sense, the Lord acted in the way of a goldsmith making an old plate into a new one, Increase once said. He takes the old metalthe moldering corrupt bodyand gives it new form. Although God imparts new qualities to the body, it remains ''Materially and Substantially what it was before Death." It has eyes and ears, and flesh and bones"wonderfully changed" to be surebut still essentially the same as before death. Yet it feels no pain nor hunger; it is incorruptible and cannot die; it possesses perfect beauty; and most wonderful of all, though in glory it cannot equal Christ's, it attains a "Glory of the same Nature" and conforms to Christ.
21
In this condition of glory the raised saint would resemble the angels, yet he would not be a spirit, but rather have a "spiritual body." Unlike several of the great theologians he respected so highly, Increase was never willing to concede that the glorified saint would ever enjoy perfect knowledge of God Himselfthat claim, he implied, compromised the sovereignty of God. But the raised saint would understand completely what he saw of the Divine, and he would know perfect happiness.
22
Increase never gave himself over completely to this vision. He became neither a mystic nor an Antinomian. And because he was talking to men of flesh and blood, men prone to follow the ways of sin, he did not urge them to renounce this world here and now. Although there is evidence that his own worship sometimes approached ecstasy, he continued even in his joy to recognize the need for controls on himselfand especially on others. Hence, even as he dreamed of glory, he used the vision to extort conformity to the law from his flock. Heaven, he told them, recognized differences in sanctification though, of course, it imputed Christ's righteousness equally to all. But men who strove after perfection on earth participated in the glory of Heaven in proportion to the grace they received on earth. Sanctification on earth was not the same for all, and those who grew in grace could expect that achievement here would eventually pay off there.
23
Suffused with the sense that the opportunity for conversion
 
Page 187
might soon pass with the end of the world, such statements carried a tacit recognition that New England had probably lost its opportunity to serve as a redemptive force in history. But Increase Mather did not openly renounce New England, the people of the land who were joined in the national covenant. He was too much the provincial, and if not quite mellow even at the close of his life, he was emotionally divided between his attachments to the people he had served and his enormous hunger for God. Increase may have died as Richard had before him, with his heart fixed on the godly all over the earth, but he and his generation had invented New England. That creation was their greatest gift to the world. But Increase Mather had wanted to leave behind much more, more indeed than New England could achieve; he had wanted to leave behind a people so pure that they might serve as a type of the glory at the end of the world. Had New England satisfied Mather's hopes, it would have escaped history. What he had learned was that not even a people on a divine errand could do that.

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