The Will of God in Massachusetts I. Apples and Oranges: New England and the Chesapeake II. English Calvinism III. The Puritan Community: the “Visible Saints” IV. The Tension Within Terms: Calvinism “Election” Visible Saints “Modell of Christian Charity John Winthrop
Themes: 1) The Puritans believed themselves always subject to the unalterable and foreordained will of God. 2) This gave them their sense of community and their arrogance. It was also the cause of their deepest insecurities. 3) This has had a long-term effect on American religion.
English Calvinism
John (Jean) Calvin,
T.U.L.I.P.
Geneva Bible, 1560 (first printed in England 1575)
King James Bible, 1611
Puritans at Work
John Donne,
The Puritan Community:Settlement
Puritan Migration
John Winthrop, 1587/8 – 1649 Governor of Massachusetts 13 times
The Puritans’ Arrival
Main Towns of New England, ca. 1650
The Puritan Community: Maintaining the “City On a Hill”
Harvard, 1636
John Harvard,
Bay Psalm Book, first book published in North America, 1640
Bay Psalm Book
“Old Ship” Meeting House, Hingham, MA, 1681
The Sermon: The Most Common Form of Puritan Intellectual Activity
Portrait of Increase Mather ( ) Pastor, North Church and President of Harvard
Richard Mather, Arrived in Boston, Minister in Dorchester until his death.
Cotton Mather,
The Will of God and the Indians
The Puritans’ Arrival: They Landed in a Place Depleted by Disease
Seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Indian village surrounded by a stockade.
Pequot Massacre, 1637
Massacre of the Pequots at Mystic, May 26, Only 14 out of survived.
The Failure of the Puritan Community I. The Consciousness of Sin - The Spiritual Journal of John Barnard ( ) II. The Impossibility of a City on a Hill 1) The Presence of Sin: The True and False Principles of Trade (1639) 2) Compromises with the World: a) The Halfway Covenant b) Sumptuary Laws III. Land, Class and Community
Terms: John Barnard Sumptuary Laws “Spiritual Milk for American Babes” (1646) True & False Principles of Trade (1639) Halfway Covenant (1662)
Themes: 1) Puritans lived with tremendous inner tension. The consciousness of sin always battled with the aspiration toward grace. 2) Their perfect community was doomed to failure. Human imperfections and growing social tensions made it impossible to sustain.
The Tension Within
John Cotton, Spiritual Milk for American Babes (1646) reflects the inner anxieties of Puritanism
John Cotton,
The Spiritual Journal of John Barnard
Cotton Mather,
His worthiness to receive the Lord’s Supper was a prime concern of Cotton Mather’s parishioner John Barnard ( )
The Impossibility of Puritan Community
"forced worship stinks in God's nostrils“ – Roger Williams. Williams arrived in Massachusetts in 1631 and was in exile in Rhode Island by 1636
True & False Principles
Solomon Stoddard’s House, Northampton Stoddard was a major supporter of the Halfway Covenant
Sumptuary Laws Attempted to Control How Puritans Dressed
Community and Land Within a few generations competition for land undermined the early sense of community.
The Savage Family, a 1779 painting by the New England painter Edward Savage