We seem to know a fair amount about William Bradford, founder of the Pilgrim colony at Plymouth, and we know about the Pilgrims coming over on the Mayflower, and we annually remember the first Thanksgiving with a feast of plenty. We know about Cotton and Increase Mather, Puritans who lived a generation or so later, but we have a negative image of Puritans through the writing of Nathaniel Hathorne and his book, The Scarlet Letter; and a quote by H.L. Mencken seems to capture most people’s opinion of the Puritans, “The Puritans were haunted by the fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.” The extent of our knowledge of John Winthrop, for most of us, is his leadership in the banishment of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson to Rhode Island. John Winthrop is the forgotten founding father of our nation, and that’s a shame for he has much to teach us.
Background
Adam Winthrop, living in the mid 16th century and the grandfather of John, was a prosperous clothier of Lavenham, England; and due to his position he was a man engaged in the affairs of his town. He apprenticed in London, beginning in 1515, and within twenty years had reached a high level of prosperity and wealth. Henry VIII became King of England in 1509 and married Catherine of Aragon. Catherine was not able to give Henry what he wanted, a male child who would become king. This eventually brought great dissatisfaction to Henry who sought the Pope to annul his marriage to Catherine. When the Pope refused, Henry acted on the counsel of Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop, and annulled his marriage, marrying Anne Boleyn. By this time Martin Luther had begun the Reformation which was sweeping Europe. Henry VIII separated from the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England began. Upon Henry’s death in 1547 his son, by Anne Boleyn, Edward VI, was crowned king. He furthered the Reformation begun by his father by urging the publication of the Book of Common Prayer, authored by Cranmer in 1549. Edward’s death in 1553 brought efforts to place the Protestant Lady Jane Grey on the throne but this failed, and Mary Tudor, daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine, gained the throne of England. Mary was a Roman Catholic and began persecution of the Protestants, including the martyrdoms of Thomas Cranmer and Hugh Latimer.
John Winthrop’s Uncle Henry Winthrop was born in 1529 and grew up in the midst of the Reformation. He was deeply committed to the Reformed faith and conducted secret worship services during the reign of Mary Tudor, including the support of persecuted believers in England, Holland, and France. He raised money for the relief of Protestants who suffered from the St. Bartholomew Day’s massacre in 1572 and he supplied Reformed books to those wanting to study the evangelical faith. William was good friends with John Foxe and supplied him with many stories of the persecution under Mary, the book still being read today Foxes’ Book of Martyrs. Henry also helped find financial support for men studying for the ministry at Cambridge which was very much in the Reformed movement of the day. Henry paid a price for his allegiance and zeal for the Protestant movement in England. The time he devoted to the Reformation gave him less time for his clothier business, so he was not nearly as prosperous as his father.
Henry Winthrop’s brother, Adam, the father of John Winthrop, purchased Groton Manor in 1544 and moved there from London with his family ten years later. The Stour River Valley, at the time, was the hotbed of Puritanism, a veritable godly commonwealth. This is not to say, of course, that all there were committed believers in Christ and the evangelical faith, but it is to say that the majority of ministers were Protestant and Reformed. Regular Sabbath observance was the order of the day and no dancing on the Sabbath was allowed and cursing was seldom heard by the people. Parents were instructed to teach their children to read and public schools were established to promote the education of all the children in the community.
Adam married Alice Still in 1574 but she died after three years due to complications in child birth. Fourteen months later Adam married Anne Browne, the daughter of a Reformed minister and land baron. During this time Adam studied to become an Attorney and he was admitted to the bar in 1584.
John was born in 1588 and grew up in this active Puritan home, being surrounded by good books of the Reformed persuasion. John’s mother was a fervent Puritan who gave Biblical instruction to her children during the long absences of her husband on his business trips to London. John, the second born, had three surviving sisters and the household included at least eight servants who helped with life at Groton Manor. These were generally young people who were learning a trade and working in exchange for room and board. John attended a grammar school where, as was the custom of the day, he learned to read the Latin classics. At the age of fourteen John began his college studies at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he often heard the great Puritan William Perkins preach. It is obvious that God was working in John’s life, even at this early age, for he had a tender conscience concerning his sin. He says that he was “lewdly disposed to all kinds of wickedness, except swearing and scouring religion.” At the age of twelve he began to hunger for true Religion and read some of the good Puritan books of the day.
While at Cambridge John met and courted a young woman, four years older than him, Mary Forth, and they were married when he was seventeen years old. By any standards theirs was a quick courtship, most marrying at the time in their mid to late twenties, and the marriage caused John to leave Cambridge and he never finished his formal education. Ten months after their marriage Mary gave birth to a child. There is evidence that Mary did not have the same fervor for the Christian faith that John had. He often tried to move her toward the Reformed faith but she was resistant.
Many of the Puritans wrestled with assurance of their salvation, and John was no exception. One of John’s minister friends, John Knewstub, was an outspoken critic of a sectarian group called the Family of Love, saying that it taught familism (that men could achieve perfection in this life) and antinomianism (that the moral law does not bind the believer in Christ, that he is free from the moral law). The greatest threat, however, to the Puritan reformation of the day came from Arminianism and many Puritan preachers wrote and preached against it, including John Owen. The Arminians taught that man by his own will chose God, that his works could bring him closer to God. These heresies of familism, antinomianism, and Arminianism would constantly surface and bring trouble to John Winthrop in succeeding years.
Mary gave birth to four children who survived and two others died in infancy, the death of the second ending in her death as well. As was the custom of the day, John remarried quickly (within fourteen months) a woman named Thomasine Clopton, also a few years older than he. Thomasine was a godly woman whom John deeply loved. Theirs was a happy marriage but Thomasine’s pregnancy ended in her death, as well as that of their child, a year or so after they wed. She lingered for two weeks and John’s account of her death and the grief he bore is deeply moving. They both focused on Christ and the glory that awaited her.
John was appointed to the Court of Wards and decided cases there. A land to which the King held interest, if the man who possessed the land died while his heir was a minor, could revert back to the King and the boy would become a ward of the king. This had become a terribly unjust system where the King would sell his interest in the land to the highest bidder who would cut all the timber and generally rape the land of its value before having to return it to the rightful owner upon his becoming of age to oversee the land bequeathed to him. John often argued for the minor and his mother, seeking to prevent the injustice so prevalent. It became obvious that John possessed great wisdom and prudence in handling difficult cases and his respect among the people grew steadily.
At the age of twenty-nine, John married a third time to Margaret Tyndal in 1618 and they were married for twenty-nine years until she died in New England in 1647. Margaret came from a well to do family and her relatives at first thought John was below her place in life and discouraged the union. However, John convinced them of his love and devotion to her. Their marriage was obviously filled with mutual love and honor. He constantly referred to her as his confidant and valentine. After Margaret’s death, John married one last time, at the age of 59 to Martha Nowell Cotymore and she gave him a child. The Puritans of the day believed marriage was preferable to the single state and most remarried quickly, not merely to procreate, but also for the pleasure of sexual intimacy and to protect themselves against sexual temptation in illicit relationships.
Migration
John decided to migrate to New England in August, 1629 after a lengthy time of prayer, reflection, and discussion with Margaret and Puritan friends. What caused a man of John’s stature and age (he was forty-two years old) to leave the comforts of England for a dangerous and uncertain life in the new world? There are at least four reasons for his migration. First, the Puritans, not only in England but also in the Netherlands, believed they were in a covenant with God, not unlike the covenant God had with Israel in the Old Testament. They believed that allegiance to God would bring blessing on a family, church, and nation. They also believed that disobedience to God would bring judgment and destruction. The encouraging movement of England away from Roman Catholicism to Protestantism through Henry VIII, Elizabeth, and James I had stalled. What once was so promising now was bogged down in a refusal to take the Reformation further, to rid the church of the last vestiges of Rome, and to see a renewal of godly living both within the church and society. Many Puritans, including those of the Puritan stronghold of the Stour Valley, were increasingly disillusioned by what they saw. They feared the judgment of God on England and wanted to flee from it.
Second is the advent of Charles I to the throne of England. He dissolved the Parliament in the spring 1629 when members of Parliament were demanding reform within the church and society and he put nine members of Parliament in prison. He would not call another Parliament until 1640. With this came the heavy handed administration of Charles’ policies in 1629 by William Laud. He developed a host of informants who would infiltrate Puritan meetings and report to him their leaders. He was notorious in his persecution of Puritans, demanding that every clerical lecturer be in holy orders and licensed as a preacher, that they read public prayers according to the Prayer Book while wearing the prescribed surplice, and twice each year administer the sacraments according to the prescribed rites. Any who refused were cast from the pulpits and sometimes imprisoned. On top of this many of the godly Puritan preachers who could stand against Laud had died or were in exile in Holland and few men were left who could hold their own against him.
Third is the fact that John Winthrop was struggling financially. He was paying a third of his revenue from Groton Manor to his uncle’s wife in Ireland, thus drastically cutting into his income. He had two sons at Cambridge and things became so tight financially that he was forced to remove them from college. Economic prospects in England were not good, and they seemed much better in New England. And fourth, Winthrop was a very gifted leader. Many could see it but his prospect of rising to a place of prominence in the English system was practically impossible. In fact he had been nominated for Parliament but was defeated. John Winthrop, always seeking to read God’s providence, put all these factors together to believe that God was leading him to New England.
At the time Reverend John White of nearby Dorchester had been promoting a Puritan settlement in New England. White and several others had been members of the Dorchester Company of Adventurers which was an effort to develop colonial fisheries. This failed but their vision for a colony in New England did not. Already John Endecott had established an outpost in Naumkeag, later named Salem. These encouraged John Winthrop to become a part of the Massachusetts Bay which had been chartered by the King. John agreed to do so in August, 1629, at the age of forty-one. Immediately John was elected as Governor, largely because two others so nominated had no intention of staying in New England while John did. Those investing their lives and wealth by going themselves wanted someone to lead them whom they knew would stay.
So John Winthrop, leaving his wife and all but his two oldest sons behind, departed in April 1630 on the Arbella for the new world, arriving on June 12. His wife and the rest of his children would follow a year later. Shortly before sailing Winthrop wrote to Margaret who was concerned that she not see him prior to his departure. Plans for the trip were terribly time consuming and all the work had to be done in London. She was asking for him to visit her and he wrote, “If I live I will see thee ere I go. I shall part from thee with sorrow enough.” Only their trust in God and their belief that they were doing God’s will sustained them.
Perseverance
After arriving in Boston, John soon wrote to Margaret, his wife, telling her that their son Henry, who had missed leaving on the Arbella and came a few days later on the Lyon, agreed to swim across the North River to retrieve a canoe, since he was the only one in his party who could swim. The water was colder than he anticipated and he cramped and drown. Meanwhile, back in England John’s son Forth, who held such promise as a minister of the gospel became ill and died. While John was on the Arbella, Margaret gave birth to a baby girl whom they named Anne (this was the third daughter they had given that name, the previous two dying as infants), and while crossing the Atlantic Anne became ill and died, being buried at sea. Several more of John’s children died before he did. Of John’s six daughters four died as infants, one as a toddler, and the only surviving daughter died in 1643. John wrote to Margaret while she was still in England, telling her that at least 200 of those who had come with him to Massachusetts Bay had died between April and December, 1630 and twelve in his household (servants, Henry his son) had died. John was not the least discouraged, telling Margaret and others that New England was a bountiful place, that God has led them there, that to get to heaven we must sometimes go through hell.
Then there is the issue of John’s role as Governor of Massachusetts Bay. The office was for one year only and the selectmen, men who were members of the Congregational Church, were allowed to vote for Governor and other public offices. John was duly elected for the first four years, but then was passed over in 1634, Thomas Dudley being elected in his stead . John barely kept a seat as a magistrate. Though painful to him, John nonetheless brought all the magistrates home for lunch that day, as a sign of Christian charity. He lost the governorship on several other occasions too. It seems that some thought John too lenient, not hard enough on those failing to obey the laws of the Bay, while others respected John’s leadership but were reluctant to have him serve indefinitely, lest he become a tyrant and control the people. This was a great disappointment to John, but he humbly took the abuse and rejection.
I mentioned the criticism John encountered. One highly vocal in his criticism of Winthrop was Thomas Dudley. Winthrop did his best to govern with the bible in view, but he also realized the bible did not always give specific guidance for specific cases. He sought also to set law and judgments on precedents of British law. He also believed that since this was a new colony some would violate the law unknowingly. Thus he sought to use prudence and wisdom in how best to judge individual cases. He would discretely decide when to prosecute and when to be more lenient. This was highly offensive to some of the Puritan leaders who were anxious to make sure the Massachusetts Bay did not fall into the same errors then so prevalent in England. They wanted judgments according to the book, each time and every time. Consequently John’s style of leadership frustrated many. On one occasion, while a magistrate and not Governor, John Winthrop was charged with leniency and put on trial. While possessing the right to sit on the bench and hear the case against him, Winthrop stepped down, saying that he would not judge himself, that he would trust the other judges to render a fair verdict. He was acquitted of any wrong doing.
While Winthrop was busy with the affairs of governing the colony he left the administration of his farm and private affairs to his steward, James Luxford, who at the very least proved terribly incompetent or at worst, terribly dishonest. He sold John’s produce at greatly reduced rates, incurred high interest debt for John without him knowing it, forging his name on documents, and by the time John discovered the debacle he was eight times further in debt than he imagined. He had to sell his mansion in Boston to cover his debt. To add insult to injury, William Hathorne, of whom Nathanel Hathorne (The Scarlet Letter) was a descendant, wrote that Winthrop was unworthy to hold public office because he had become poor.
In the midst of his many trials, two things remained constant for Winthrop- his loving wife Margaret and his faith in God. His perseverance in the midst of incredible deprivation, accusation, and heartache evokes awe. A deep and abiding faith in a big God was incalculable to John and Margaret.
Controversey
The casual reader of American history, especially this time period, gains a fairly negative opinion of John Winthrop because of two incidents of banishment. I am referring to his handling of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson. Roger Williams was a godly, pious, and winsome young man who studied at Cambridge and was tutored by the great Puritan theologian John Owen. Williams was most likely involved in discussion with Winthrop and others of the Massachusetts Bay in London in the summer of 1629 when Winthrop agreed to migrate. Williams, however, did not travel with Winthrop but came the following February, 1631. Pastor John Wilson of the Boston church had returned to England to fetch his wife, and it was not long before the congregation voted to call Roger Williams to be their pastor. Williams surprised them by declining their offer, saying that theirs was not a pure church, that they had not completely separated from the Church of England and that he consequently could have no fellowship with those given to impurity. He claimed the Church of England admitted whores and drunkards into the church and the Boston church’s unwillingness to denounce the Church of England made them party to such licentiousness.
Williams then went to the Salem church and they also extended him a call to be their pastor. Winthrop was surprised that John Endecott was so easily drawn in by Williams’ charm, but when he explained the views of Williams the Salem church withdrew their offer.
Williams then made his way to the Plymouth Colony led by William Bradford and while the Pilgrims were by definition separatists, they found Williams far more narrow than even they were. Williams charged the church with worldly compromise in that the members, when returning to England, worshipped in Church of England churches. He also said that the practice of calling unregenerate men Goodmen (a term used to describe yeoman workers in that day) was wrong. But what provoked the greatest opposition to Roger Williams was his claim that the Massachusetts Bay had received its charter to gain land by a lie from King Charles I, and that it must abandon the project and return to England or demand the King repent of his lie.
By this time Williams was back in Boston and the upheaval he was causing had to be addressed. Winthrop was not Governor at the time but he was a magistrate and heard the case with the other magistrates. He sought to speak privately with Williams, as was often his custom, to persuade him with arguments concerning his error. This was to no avail. Finally Williams was put on trial, found guilty, and banished from the Massachusetts Bay. He traveled to Narragansett Bay, modern day Rhode Island, and continued his separatist practices. At one point Williams had become so separatistic that he doubted the spirituality of all in his church but his wife and refused to take communion with any but her. It is interesting to note that Roger Williams continued for the rest of his life to have a great deal of respect for Winthrop, referring to him as a “counselor of peace.”
Then there is the case of Anne Hutchinson who came to Massachusetts Bay with her husband, William, in September, 1634. She was not a separatist and she had a nimble mind, quick wit, was well versed Biblically, and could sustain theological argumentation with the best of men. She followed her favorite preacher, John Cotton, to the new world. Cotton had been silenced by William Laud, and was a highly respected Puritan preacher who preached the unequivocal doctrines of free grace. He stood firmly against antinomianism of any stripe. While Calvinism teaches the doctrine of election and effectual calling, that people only respond to the gospel if the Holy Spirit draws them, many Puritans had fallen into preparationism, that one ought to seek God, often for a long period of time, grieving over his sin and repenting, in hopes that God would have mercy on him. This seemed to Anne Hutchinson, and John Cotton for that matter, to border on the hated heresy of Arminianism, that man by his own free will could choose for Christ. Even Winthrop was grateful to John Cotton for preaching free grace and delivering him from Arminian tendencies. Shortly after arriving in Massachusetts Bay, Anne Hutchinson began leading a weekly bible class for women. She would start with discussion of the previous Sunday sermons by Cotton but then move into talk of her peculiar doctrines. Among other things she taught that one’s outward life of sanctification was no guarantee of one’s true salvation or election, that people could be deceived. The Puritans taught that sanctification could be a very strong evidence of sincere conversion but she was not convinced. She also taught that conversion brought a direct influence of the Holy Spirit which made the word of God secondary at best. In other words she denied the final authority of God’s written word in favor of what we now call extra-biblical revelation. She also taught that the Holy Spirit sealing mentioned in Ephesians 1, 4 was the true evidence of one’s election. This was not contrary to Puritan doctrine for men like William Perkins, Richard Sibbes, and Thomas Goodwin taught the same thing, but she went further than they did, saying that the sealing of the Spirit rendered the word of God redundant and unnecessary. Hutchinson also taught that those with the sealing of the Holy Spirit had the supernatural ability to discern true believers. Only those were in the covenant of grace and all others, who sought evidence of conversion through keeping God’s law, were laboring falsely under the covenant of works. She said that only two preachers in the Bay were covenant of grace men, John Cotton and her brother-in-law John Wheelwright. When she sought to have John Wheelwright appointed a teacher at the Boston church, even though they already had two preachers, John Cotton and John Wilson, an alarmed John Winthrop sought to stand in the way of his election as a pastor. This was Winthrop’s right as a church member and his persuasiveness and integrity convinced the congregation to vote against Wheelwright, but this cost Winthrop dearly. Almost all the people of Boston were against him.
Finally the teaching and factious spirit of Anne Hutchinson became so great that the General Court in Boston brought charges against her, citing over 100 errors in her teaching which threatened the security of the Bay. When brought to trial John Winthrop did his best to bring out her errors but Hutchinson was far too nimble for him. She turned his arguments on their head and made him look silly. Those ministers who testified against her were asked by her to swear that they had heard her correctly. They were unwilling to swear. This was a terribly humiliating time for Winthrop; and Hutchinson certainly would have been acquitted had she not, at the end of the trial, admitted what Winthrop and the others had sought to prove, that she received divine revelation from the Holy Spirit, beyond the Scriptures. She said that she had by way of immediate revelation from the Holy Ghost assurance that she would be set free, and that God would bring a curse on these men and their posterity for their mistreatment of her, that the mouth of the Lord had spoken. Later she was brought before the church on charges of heresy and eventually excommunicated, banished to Rhode Island along with her husband and John Wheelwright.
Winthrop’s New England Vision
Perhaps the most famous sermon ever preached in connection with America, one often quoted by Presidents and other political leaders of every political ideology, but whose author is seldom cited is Winthrop’s Christian Charity sermon which he preached on board the Arbella just prior to his departure for the New World. Some have called it the greatest sermon of the second millennium.
We find here his vision for New England. Among other things he sets forth clearly that they were not separating from the Church of England, that she was still their mother. This was very different from the Pilgrims who proclaimed their separatism; and as we have already seen, Winthrop later backed up his vision by banishing Williams and Hutchinson for separatism. Winthrop puts forth the accepted notion of his day that God in His providence had ordained some to be rich and of high stature and others to be poor and of lowly stature, that each was to accept his lot in life and honor God with his gifts and calling. This diversity was a reflection of God’s glory and power and gave Him opportunity through the Holy Spirit to govern the world and to improve the position of all everywhere. He said that one’s high calling or great gifts in no way made him superior to another, that all were vital and important in God’s world. He understood his own sinful propensities, as well as those of others, and thus called them to deal charitably and graciously with those different than they. He said that two rules are to govern life in the New World, justice and mercy. By justice he meant the natural law of creation, that they were to love their neighbor as themselves, that they were to do unto to others as they would have others do unto them. By mercy he meant they were to go beyond what they could afford to help others in need. A community of perils, like the one to where they were going, called for extraordinary liberality and special service to the church. He said that all believers are in the body of Christ and that body is held together by ligaments, like bones held by ligaments, and these ligaments which hold together the believers in the New World must be love. They were to share in each others joy, sorrow, weal, and woe. They were to strengthen, defend, preserve, and comfort one another.
He went on to say that their goals in the New World were to improve their lives, to do more service to the Lord, to increase the body of Christ, and to work out their salvation under the power and purity of holy ordinances (preaching, worship, and prayer). They must not be content with ordinary effort for they had entered into a covenant with the Lord for His work. If they failed to honor the Lord then He would break out against them with hardship but if they obeyed Him then He would command blessings upon them, making them a praise and a glory, a City upon a Hill. The eyes of all the people were upon them, that they were to do as Micah had said, “to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God.”
This was classic Puritanism and would not have sounded strange or new to those going with him, yet it was the New England vision which Winthrop promoted and upon which this nation was founded. Winthrop was calling the people to live holy and exemplary lives, to love one another, to act charitably with each other, to bear with each other’s weaknesses and infirmities, and to witness to the truth of the gospel. While Winthrop was zealous for his vision he by no means could be called a zealot. He readily recognized that even among Puritans there were differences of opinion on how to flesh out life in the New World. His awareness of his own sinful tendencies, his loving environment as a child reared in a godly home, his marriages to the godly Thomasine Clopton and Margaret Tyndal gave him a wonderful appreciation for the family of God, how people could live with each other though they differed religiously and culturally.
Winthrop’s Christian charity, whether always consciously applied or not, was the foundation for how he governed. When faced with a ruling he sought to go to God’s word for direction, realizing at times that some would disagree with him, seeking whenever possible to be patient and always charitable with others, often waiting for more insight on how to decide an issue or case.
Without question, his New England vision has been the foundation of American democracy, whatever one’s political or religious persuasion in this country. Winthrop was a man without guile. He readily admitted his own sin and shortcomings. He bore patiently with others, often going further than most deemed necessary to redeem a wayward soul, seeking privately to persuade them of their error. Only then, and reluctantly at that, would he render judgments against them. He gave of his own wealth, shared his food with others, and offered his life to the people of New England.
He was a man of his century but not beyond his century. By that I mean he held views on democracy that would cause us concern today. He had no problem with government intervention in the church and vice versa. He saw nothing wrong with slavery. He very well himself may have owned a few. The thought never occurred to him to allow women the right to vote. He at the very least acquiesced to the slaughter of the Pequots in 1637 at Mystic. Nonetheless Winthrop sought to bring unity to the Massachusetts Bay in the essentials, but in the non-essentials he championed diversity. He was anything but a separatist. He knew that perfection could not be gained in this world, that all were sinners and none had perfect understanding, that even sincere Christians disagreed on certain issues. He walked the fine line, as many great men and women have done throughout history, of desiring a better, more perfect and just world and laboring for it, while at the same time realizing the limitations our sinfulness brings to the task. He lived admirably with that tension.
Lessons Learned from Winthrop
At least four character traits stand out in the life of John Winthrop which I challenge you to emulate. First is his humility. Though he had been appointed Governor of the Bay while still in England, and though he had no reason to give the right of vote to the majority of men who came with him, he risked anarchy by giving it to them. When, after four years, he was voted out as Governor, being replaced by a younger, brash Thomas Dudley, he barely retaining his place as a magistrate, he nonetheless invited all, including Dudley, to his home for a lunch, never expressing his disappointment or humiliation at losing his high position. He was voted in and out as Governor several other times, and never complained or acted rudely. He seemed always to see the hand of providence in all these affairs, keeping in mind his own sinful propensities, constantly renewing his covenant with God through the blood of Jesus. When he wrote his case against Anne Hutchinson he allowed Thomas Shepard to review his argument and Shepard was aghast at Winthrop’s poor exposition of theology. A great statesman, yes; but a very poor theologian. Winthrop took no offense at Shepard’s rather tactless response and chose not to publish his arguments against Hutchinson.
Second is his grace. His patience with opponents like Thomas Dudley, Henry Vane, Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, and the people of the Bay who periodically challenged him about his rulings ought to inspire us to follow his lead. The foundation of such grace was his keen awareness that God had been gracious to him through Christ. He was always conscious of his sin, how capable he was of great evil, how a sovereign God of mercy had revealed Himself to a worm like him. He understood God’s providence in directing all the affairs of his life, that nothing was an accident, that he had been placed in this high position by One of undeniable wisdom. He understood well that to whom much is given, much is required. He knew that because he was a sinner it was possible for him to misinterpret, to misread an issue, that he may be incorrect in his judgments, and wrongly reading God’s word and law; thus he was always slow to act, preferring when at all possible to be lenient with those who err, believing that the newness of this New England experiment may mean that many are ignorant of how they are to act. This caused many to lose patience with him, accusing him of licentiousness and leniency but Winthrop held his ground.
Third is his wisdom. If wisdom is knowledge applied to specific circumstances then Winthrop was one of the wisest men of the last five hundred years. He had an uncanny ability to look down the road at the decisions he or others made, at where certain beliefs would take him or others, and he was then able to act or rule in ways most beneficial to the Bay as a whole. When the French marauder Charles de La Tour came to Boston harbor from Acadia (Nova Scotia and New Brunswick) in June, 1643 Winthrop quickly understood that if de La Tour was looking to invade or confiscate property then he and his colony had no ability to stand against him. Winthrop talked calmly with him, discovering that de La Tour, who of course was a Roman Catholic and considered an infidel by the Puritans, wanted to enlist the colony’s support in his border war with another Frenchman named Charles d’Aulnay. Winthrop quickly realized that while he could not or should not give direct aid to de La Tour he could nonetheless keep these two warlords at bay by offering to allow de La Tour to hire any boats and men who wished to sail with him. This was offered, as well as allowing de La Tour to train his men in Boston for a few weeks. This caused some of the Puritans who despised Catholics to hold Winthrop in disdain for a season, but his wise defusing of a potentially volatile situation illustrates very well his ability to apply truth to specific situations.
And fourth is his magnanimity. One of the problems with separatism is that it leads to a lack of charity and love. When the settlement in Virginia, which tended to side with the King against the Puritans in the Civil War in England, and which generally lacked the godliness present in Massachusetts Bay faced Indian invasion and asked for powder and shot from the Bay, the General Court refused. Winthrop reminded them, unfortunately to no avail, that Virginia’s lack of godliness and their lack of shot and powder, were no reason to refuse help to others in need. When the General Court refused to rescind its law of allowing foreigners to remain long in the Bay, Winthrop sought to change their minds, reminding them that John Cotton had been working with such a foreigner who held views contrary to the gospel and who was changing his views, only to see the man forced out of New England by their law. His magnanimity also is evident in how he suffered the near loss of his estate at the hands of a dishonest steward, James Luxford, because he was so committed, so focused on the administration of the colony that he neglected his own household affairs. And Cotton Mather later noted in his Magnalia Christiana that Winthrop was a veritable Joseph who provided out of his own storehouse of grain for those in need, in times of near famine.
Conclusion
The remarkable architect of the American experiment, the one who brought us the vision of a City upon a Hill, persevered with faith through unimaginable disappointment and heartache. The 20th century view of the Puritans as narrow-minded, unloving, religious bigots and zealots needs to give way to a more historical rendering of who they were. They were not perfect to be sure. There was no monolithic Puritan ethic or view, but they still sought to live out biblical virtues in a fallen world. John Winthrop is the forgotten founding father who gave us this New England vision and we ought to be inspired by him and the vision he brought.
The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop, by Edmund S. Morgan, published by Little, Brown and Company, Boston, Toronto, 1958.
John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father, by Francis J. Bremer, published by Oxford University Press, 2003.
Roger Williams is one of the most important personalities of American history and yet he is also one of the most misunderstood. Some liken his views on the separation of church and state as similar to and a precursor to Henry David Thoreau of the 19th century; but Williams was a sincere Christian, driven by theological principles as he understood them, while Thoreau was a transcendentalist and anarchist. Many secularists champion Williams as one of their own, while many Christians, particularly what I call neo-Puritans in the Reformed church, discount him as a heretic. To be sure Williams had some very strange views, some of which I will mention later, but there can be no doubt Roger Williams was the father of our national doctrine of the separation of church and state.
Roger Williams And His Historical Context And Early Life
Williams was born, probably in 1603, in London to middle class parents, the very year that James I, the first of the Stuart kings, came to rule as King of England. Elizabeth I, the daughter of Henry VIII and Protestant Anne Boleyn, reigned powerfully and popularly from 1556 to 1603, and at her death James ended the reign of the Tudor kings and queens. Roger grew up during the reign of James I who was moving England away from the Protestant church of Elizabeth, back toward the Roman Catholicism of Mary Tudor, daughter of Henry VIII and the Spanish Roman Catholic, Catherine of Aragon. Henry put Catherine away so that he could marry Anne Boleyn, provoking the Pope to excommunicate him, bringing Henry to begin his own church, what became known as the Church of England, a move toward the Protestant Reformation.
Early stirrings of the Reformation occurred in the 15th century through the preaching of John Wycliffe, and this continued and grew through the Waldensians in France, John Hus in Hungary, Savannarola in Florence, and finally Martin Luther in Germany in the early 16th century. By 1540 the Reformation, a denial of cardinal Roman Catholic dogma in favor of the so-called five solas of the Reformation (sola Scriptura, sola fide, solus Christus, sola gratia, and soli Deo Gloria) was sweeping Europe, and was significantly propagated by John Calvin, a Frenchman living, preaching, and writing in Geneva. Though slight variations existed between all the leaders of the Reformation concerning the doctrine of God, the sacraments, and church government they all held in some degree to the Erastian view of church government, namely that the state was subservient to the church. Though theological change of undeniable proportions was occurring in England, the prevailing view, whether Protestant or Roman Catholic, was that the state was to be engaged in the affairs of the church and vice versa. Under Mary Tudor, England was Roman Catholic and Mary persecuted Puritans who disagreed with her on church and state issues. Under Elizabeth I England had returned to a more Protestant position and Roman Catholics were persecuted by the state. Under James I England moved back toward Roman Catholicism to a degree, even though James had been trained and groomed in Scotland to be a Reformed and Presbyterian king. The Puritans hoped for much more than James gave them, asking him to outlaw the Catholic practice of bowing to Jesus when praying, crossing ones self after praying, and reading from the Apocrypha. He largely ignored the Puritans, even though he authorized a new translation of the English Bible in 1611, what we now call the King James Bible. Still it is true to say, however, that under James England moved slowly back toward Rome.
Under Charles I the state was heavy-handed in putting down the Puritans. Charles I clearly had Roman Catholic tendencies. During the time of the Puritan revolution, when Oliver Cromwell was the Lord Protector of England, when Charles I was executed, England was decidedly Puritan and Reformed, and Cromwell, in the name of the state, authorized severe persecution of Roman Catholics, even wiping out entire villages in Ireland. When Charles II was restored to the throne after Cromwell’s death in 1659, persecution of the Puritans became very severe. In 1662 two thousand Puritans pastors were removed from their pulpits, losing their salaries, because they refused to sign the Act of Uniformity which required all ministers to subscribe to the Book of Common Prayer, agreeing that the King was the head of the church in England. There were many things Charles demanded which the Puritans deemed a denial of theological principles they held dear. Later in the 1680’s in Scotland, Charles’ army raided households of Scottish Covenanters, killing many and imprisoning others. The point here is that regardless of who was king, and regardless of his theological persuasion, persecution was brought on those out of favor with the king. All assumed the state’s right to intervene in the affairs of the church, and the church to engage actively in the dealings of the state.
The migration by Puritans in 1630 to the Massachusetts Bay was motivated largely by religious persecution at the hands of Charles I and his archbishop, William Laud. Both made life exceedingly difficult for the Puritans and many believed God’s judgment would come upon England because of their ungodly leadership. Thus they believed they ought to flee the country. Many first went to Holland, a Reformed country which was experiencing great prosperity at the time. Though the English Puritans enjoyed the safety and religious freedom of worship there, they became concerned about rearing their children as Dutch, so they began to look elsewhere for a place to reside. The New World offered great promise, not only freedom from persecution but also economic possibilities which were beyond the imagination of those in England who were limited by small parcels of land. England was a tired country and many wanted far more than she could provide them.
The Puritans who established the Massachusetts Bay Colony automatically held the same view of church and state which they inherited from their forefathers in England, that the church and state were for all sakes and purposes one. They believed that God ordained certain men to be leaders, that England, Holland, and now Massachusetts were all in covenant with God, that He had richly blessed each of these nations, that if they remained faithful to God, then He would continue His blessing on them, bringing untold peace and prosperity. If, on the other hand, they turned from Him, then God would rain down curses and hardship on them, bringing invasion by wicked people, putting them under the thumb of evil dictators.
John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts, readily understood the problems of church and state in England and he wanted to steer clear of them in the New World. The magistrate, for example, must be godly men; and pastors were not to hold political office. Winthrop was trying to prevent the problems he knew too well in England, that church involvement in politics was a potentially divisive and destructive issue. Thus pastors were not to officiate at wedding services. This was to be a completely secular function. However there was not a clean break between church and state. Only church members could hold public office and the salaries of the pastors were largely paid by the government by assessing all town people, including those who were not members of the church. Furthermore all people in Boston and surrounding towns were required to attend Lord’s Day worship services, morning and afternoon. And after John Winthrop had served three successive one year terms as Governor of Massachusetts, the pastors of the towns urged their members not to vote for Winthrop, not because he had served poorly, but simply because they did not believe the people should become too dependent on his outstanding leadership. The people listened and Winthrop was not elected, staying out of public office for three or four years. Such was the power of the church in that day.
It is within this context that Roger Williams lived, attending Pembroke College, Cambridge in 1624, graduating a few years later. Cambridge was the hot bed of Puritan politics and theology at the time. Williams was even close friends with the great Puritan poet, John Milton. Upon his graduation he migrated to the Massachusetts Bay in 1631, just a few months after the first group on the Arbella, led by Winthrop, arrived in Boston. Williams was a gifted theologian, preacher, and pastor and by all accounts he was a godly and winsome man. Even many years after his banishment to Rhode Island, he maintained an amiable correspondence with John Winthrop and John Cotton, a powerful preacher of the day.
Migration To Massachusetts And His Banishment To Rhode Island
Shortly after his arrival in Boston, the pastor there, John Wilson, traveled back to England to fetch his wife and children in order to bring them to the New World. Since this whole transaction would take at least one year, the church in Boston voted to call Roger Williams as their pastor. This says a great deal about his gifts, since he was not yet thirty years old. However Williams surprised the congregation by refusing to become their pastor, saying that he could not fellowship with them since they were connected still with the Church of England. Sometime prior to his arrival in Boston, we do not know when, Williams had become a Separatist, saying the Church of England was a corrupt and impure church because she admitted “whores and drunkards” to communion. Williams was referring to what he called a low view of church membership where baptized infants were viewed as members of the church. Because there was no effective church discipline, the church had become impure and unholy. And since the people of the church in Boston had not denounced their connection with the Church of England, he could not fellowship with them, rejecting their offer.
Shortly thereafter the Pilgrims at Salem, separatists like Williams, asked him to be there pastor. He turned them down too. Why? Because some of them, while back in England, had worshipped at Church of England congregations and thus had soiled their spiritual lives, practicing a most injurious form of hypocrisy. The Plymouth Colony, led by William Bradford, was different than the Massachusetts Bay Colony in that as separatists they believed the Church of England was corrupt, had taken after Antichrist, and thus was not a church at all. Both Williams and the Pilgrims at Salem believed they were living consistently with Reformed and Puritan doctrine, saying they were following Puritan doctrine to its logical conclusion, that failure to purify the church must eventually mean separating from her. But Williams could not become their pastor because they had not truly separated from the Church of England.
It is important to understand that Roger Williams was theologically and not politically motivated. He sincerely believed that the Church of England was corrupt. Furthermore he came to believe that there was no such thing as a pure and apostolic church, that no government, nor even a group of people for that matter, could constitute a church. That’s because none had a direct mandate from Christ or any of His apostles, who had been given that authority be Jesus. The reason the church had become so impure and lost her way was because of Antichrist, whom Williams and many other Puritans, believed was the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church. They believed this had happened around 400 A.D. This meant that no one had true authority to preach, establish churches, or admit members. None of the modern church movements of his day could be grounded, he thought, on apostolic authority. Since John Winthrop and so many others at Massachusetts Bay believed the church and state were so closely related, they came to believe that Williams’ views were not only heretical but also seditious. They saw him as a threat to the peace and tranquility of their colony. Charges thus were brought against Williams and while he was awaiting trial, he brought another fly into the ointment. He began teaching that Charles I had lied to the people at the Massachusetts Bay Colony, declaring that he had authority to grant them a charter for their land, when in fact, he had no such authority. Thus the native Indians were rightful owners of the land, and the Bay Colony was acting illegally in taking the land from the Indians. He suggested the only noble thing to do was to abandon the Bay Colony and return to England. Obviously this did not sit well with the people and their leaders, further driving a wedge between them and Roger Williams. Williams was tried by the magistrate in Boston under the leadership of John Winthrop, found guilty of heresy, and banished to Rhode Island. After being allowed to stay in Boston for the winter, he left in the spring of 1637, making his way to Narragansett Bay, establishing the town of Providence, Rhode Island. He received a charter for the British crown upon his visit to England in 1643, gaining an audience with the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell. Upon his return Williams was able to establish in fuller measure the colony at Providence, Rhode Island., seeking to implement his views on the separation of church and state.
A City Set On A Hill
This expression was made famous by John Winthrop at his farewell sermon on board the Arbella in the summer of 1630, just prior to her setting sail for the New World. This sermon captures beautifully the Puritan vision for the New World, and I have much to say about this in my essay on John Winthrop. In their desire to flee religious oppression and the perceived judgment of God due to England’s violation of God’s covenant with them, Winthrop laid the foundation for a God centered theocracy. This was not a theocracy with priests ruling the nation. In fact, as I have noted, preachers were not allowed to serve in public office; but it was a theocracy in that the Massachusetts Bay would be in a covenant with God, that obedience would bring blessing, and disobedience would bring the wrath of God. Many of the points Winthrop made in his City Set On A Hill sermon are ones we hold dear, like caring for your neighbor, giving those in need from one’s own abundance. Williams, however, had a problem with the sermon. He thought the general thesis assumed too much. Williams did not deny a few obvious instances of God governing, intervening in English history. The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 was a graphic example of God’s deliverance, so Williams thought. He also did not deny God’s blessing and prosperity on the Netherlands, especially how they as a tiny nation had gained such naval and economic power. What he questioned were the overt references people made to what they believed were God’s intervention in their affairs. How, for example, could they be sure that the massacre by Indians in King Phillip’s War was a judgment of God? How could they be sure that the death of the Indians around Boston, prior to their arrival in 1630, was brought by God who was clearing the way for them to take over the land? Williams did not deny God’s sovereignty over all things, but he did not see evidence of God being in covenant with them. Thus he could not buy the Puritan theocracy. Thus he could not buy the blurring of the lines between church and state. They ought to be altogether separate. To Williams the piety of public office holders was irrelevant. Could he govern sensibly is what Williams wanted to know.
Williams’ disaffection with the Puritan notion of theocracy was grounded on how he interpreted the Bible which was foundationally different from the Puritans. They read and interpreted the Bible through covenants, seeing a strong parallel between God’s covenant with Israel and His new covenant with the church of Christ in general.. Nations like England, Holland, and America also saw themselves in covenant with God, based on His covenant with Israel. Instead of a continuation of covenant through Christ, Williams saw an abrogation of covenant because of Christ. This meant that nothing remotely like Israel has ever existed since Christ’s coming, that He did away with covenant as it was known in the Old Testament. Further, this meant that Williams largely interpreted the Old Testament allegorically, viewing Jesus Christ as an antitype in various Old Testament narratives. Joseph, for example, in prison was a type of Christ in hell after He died at Calvary. Christ dying on the cross is an antitype for Isaac being offered as a sacrifice by his father, Abraham, with God providing a ram just in time. While those interpreting the bible covenantally do not deny or discount many of the typologies in scripture, they also do not discount the concept of spiritual Israel, that the church in the New Testament has become the Israel of the Old Testament. Thus God remains in covenant with His people, and since various nations had voluntarily renewed covenant with God, they could rightly believe they were still in covenant with Him, thus pledging faithfulness and obedience to Him. Williams could not see the concept of covenant and this played a huge role in his view of separation of church and state.
There were other practical implications for Williams’ rejection of the covenant concept. He came to deny the validity of his baptism as an infant in the Church of England. He was re-baptized by sprinkling after his banishment to Rhode Island but then questioned the validity of that too, wondering about the credentials of the one who baptized him. He later heard that the Reverend John Clarke was immersing people when baptizing them, and he thought this a more biblical mode. Still, however, he wondered if anyone had the authority of Christ to baptize. He also found very few in his church who, in his mind, were true believers in Christ, who had been regenerated by the Holy Spirit. At one point, he allowed only his wife to take the Lord’s Supper with him. He took the Puritan notion of conversion to a whole new level, excluding most from church worship and the Lord’s Supper.
Roger Williams- The Church And The State
I have already pointed out some of Williams’ issues on both church and state, but now I wish to go further. Since he believed the Antichrist had polluted the church of Christ, and since therefore there were no authentic churches, no preacher with apostolic authority, and thus no accurate administration of the sacraments, the best that could be hoped for was the destruction of the Antichrist. Until this occurred very little progress could be made in the world. Williams disliked the concept of Christendom because it denoted a Christian nation which he believed impossible. He desired for the visible church to be as closely aligned as possible with the invisible church. Thus he took the Puritan conversion narrative much further. While Puritans taught preparationism which included deep humiliation for and conviction of sin, generally having a long period of seeking God before salvation came as a sovereign work of the Holy Spirit, Williams went further to say that a member must sign a paper, renouncing any former allegiance to or association with the Church of England. Because he had such narrow views of church membership, and such believers were to be separated form unbelievers, he would allow only those who were obvious Christians to worship God. All others were excluded from public worship services. Believers were not to fellowship with unbelievers, and since most families had unbelievers in them, family devotional times were discouraged. After all, how can one pray with an unbeliever? Williams wrote a book, A Key Into The Language Of America, in 1643 where he revealed a great knowledge of the Indian dialects. It is obvious from his book that he spent a great deal of time with them, and had gained their trust to a very large degree. Though he had a love and zeal for the Indians and their conversion, he spent little time trying to convert them. That’s because their conversion was largely impossible, in his mind. The Antichrist ruled the church, and until he was crushed, little progress could be made among the heathen. He believed their lifestyles were reprehensible and that they were in great need of salvation, but he was convinced many would not come to Christ. He knew of John Eliot’s work among the Indians but was not impressed with it, thinking very little would come of it.
To go further with Williams views of the state we must understand that he came to them by taking principles or notions to their logical conclusion. We have with Roger Williams a thinker in action, par excellence. The Puritans in the late 16th century put forth the notion of the divine right of kings. Until then the Roman Catholic view that the Pope was the head of the church and state reigned supreme. By the 16th century the Pope’s direct control of the state had greatly subsided, but practically it was still in place. The Pope could absolve people from the need to obey or submit to Protestant kings. James I embraced the divine right of kings too, but with a different twist, saying that God gave him authority over church and state, and that authority did not travel through Rome. The Puritans saw it a bit differently, saying that both temporal and eternal authority was from God, that the state was responsible for military, economic welfare, and church purity. The church, on the other hand, only had spiritual authority. It had only God’s word through preaching and the use of ex-communication as means of discipline. No actual sword was to be used by the church. Nonetheless Puritans still saw a strong connection between the church and state, authority derived directly from God.
Williams rejected this out of hand, saying that the state has no right to discipline those who violate the first table of God’s law, the Ten Commandments. Some sixty years later the Puritans’ view on church and state would bring the infamous Salem witch trials, where women were executed because of their supposed violation of the first table of the Law of God. The Puritans of Massachusetts believed that the mantle of being a new Israel had been lost to England during the reigns of Charles I, II, the Stuart kings. Their vision was that this covenant was being renewed in New England and God’s favor rested on them, that they were a city set on a hill. Roger Williams saw it very differently. Not only was there a separation between the church and state, but more importantly there was a separation between God and the state.
Major Contributions of Roger Williams To Our Modern World
He was a man whose views, though soundly rejected in his day, became the universally accepted view in the west within 150 years of his death. These were the views of Thomas Jefferson who in 1803 coined the expression which so vividly explained Williams’ position, that a wall of separation exists between the church and state.
There are many positive things we can take from the life of Roger Williams. He was far ahead of his time in his views on church and state, and these since have been further developed by men like Abraham Kuyper of Holland, who taught what he called sphere sovereignty, that God as sovereign king over His creation, has established various spheres of influence over which the Lordship of Christ is to rule, things like economics, politics, art and culture, family, and the church. Williams, and then Kuyper after him, saw the civil magistrate as the only entity which should bear the sword, provide for national defense, and defend the nation against aggression from the outside. The church, on the other hand, was to preach the word of God, bringing to bear the word on church members, seeking to shape the various spheres of life by the word of God.
Williams also championed religious freedom which has become a hallmark of American life. His views have given us pluralism, which is so different from Puritan New England and modern Islamic states. In Puritan New England, one was required to go to church and believe in the Triune God. Today, of course, in Iran and Saudi Arabia, for example, belief in any other religion except Islam is forbidden. We champion the right, even for those of us who are Christians who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ as the only way of salvation, for anyone to believe what he wishes. We are quick to say, however, that one’s freedom to believe what he wishes does not mean that we believe his view has merit.
And Williams, as we have seen, was theologically driven in the conclusions he reached. He was a thinker, founding his beliefs on his understanding of Holy Scripture. He took his beliefs to their logical conclusion, and he did all this with graciousness and winsomeness. This is particularly noteworthy when we realize how unjustly and harshly he was treated by the Puritans when banished to the wilderness of Rhode Island.
But there are several negatives about the life of Roger Williams we ought to consider. He would be the first to say that even the most sincere Christians have feet of clay, are prone to wander from God, being capable of evil and misunderstanding. First, Williams’ rejection of covenant theology was a serious error with serious implications. Of course, many Christians today reject the covenantal structure of scripture, so Williams is by no means alone in his view. However his rejection of the Old Testament type of the church where people are admitted by baptism into the covenant community, led him to define very narrowly those who were real and sincere Christians. He was fearful of ungodliness in the church, as were the Puritans, but he went even further than they in defining the true nature of a Christian. Consequently his view led to a great deal of introspection where church goers doubted their conversion, that when sin overcame them, they would be sent reeling into depression, wondering if they had committed the unpardonable sin, wondering if God had denied them, once and for all, access to the throne of grace. We see this hyper-sensitive and narrow view of church membership present today in some Reformed Baptist congregations. The preaching there, and the pastoral oversight given, can sometimes be heavy-handed, causing people to doubt the love of Christ, the efficacy of His blood, and their right standing with God through Christ.
This separationism also led to a retreat from the world. The world was seen as sinful, wicked, and incapable of transformation. Thus the Christian was to “circle the wagons”, to remove himself from the dialogue of the culture, shielding himself and his children, from the wickedness and perversion of their generation which would certainly bring them into great trouble. The Puritans, on the other hand, while very conscious of man’s depravity and need of redemption, practiced engagement with the culture, not retreat from it. There is a long history of both, seen, for example, in the early 20th century fundamentalism of Williams Jennings Bryan and the Scopes trial of 1925. Today this is seen in churches which see all television, movies, and secular music as evil and thus to be abhorred. The modern day Puritan idea of life in the world is modeled by evangelical Presbyterians who encourage engagement with the culture, challenging young people to attend secular universities, to engage in dialogue at the Academy, to bring to bear the Christian ethic in the business, medical, political, and cultural world of their day. This means we are to equip our young people to think Biblically, to evaluate all in our world through the lens of Scripture, to take the good, beautiful, and lovely from our culture and to use them well.
To fail here, to move toward the separatism of Roger Williams, eventually brings an ethos of negativity, anti-intellectualism, legalism, and harshness to a person, family, church, or community. This is not the way of Christ who told His disciples that they are the salt of the earth and the light of the world, that they are to not hide their light, but to put it on a lamp stand that it may give light to all who are in the room.
Finally, the separatism of Williams and those who follow in his wake, eventually come to a high degree of subjectivity in their walk with Christ. While they believe in the so called doctrines of grace, rejoicing in the free offer of the gospel, delighting in the fact that only God could redeem them, that they have nothing to offer Him for their salvation; they nonetheless wonder if they have been redeemed. They are given to morbid introspection, the preparationism so prevalent in the Puritans, but taken to an even higher level with Williams. Consequently these people tend to be highly suspect of anyone’s immediate conversion, doubting its sincerity because there was not enough grief and conviction of sin beforehand. Few were viewed as truly in Christ because they had not sufficient humiliation for their sin and their conversion experience was often judged incomplete or inferior.
As with so many men of church history, Roger Williams has much to offer us, and he is finally receiving his due. In 1936 the Commonwealth of Massachusetts passed a resolution, absolving Roger Williams of guilt from his trial of 300 years earlier. Now in Providence there is a statue, commemorating his life and all he brought to the people of our nation. We ought to thank God for Roger Williams, for the many good ideas he brought us, but we ought to embrace them with discrimination.
Liberty of Conscience: Roger Williams in America, by Edwin S. Gaustad, published by William Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1991, Grand Rapids, MI.
Roger Williams: The Church and the State, by Edmund S. Morgan, published by Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., New York, 1967
Roger Williams: His Contribution to the American Tradition, by Perry Miller,
The Millernarian Piety of Roger Williams, by W. Clark Gilpin, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1970.
Thomas Hooker, the great Puritan preacher, pastor, and evangelist was born at Marfield, England in July 1586 and was much loved and respected for his many years of effective ministry in England prior to his migration to the Massachusetts Bay Colony; and his prominence only increased while living in New England the last fourteen years of his life. Hooker was one of the most famous Puritan divines or theologians of his day and was a major architect of the New England theology as well as the founder of Hartford, CT in 1636. For those fairly well acquainted with the history of New England and Connecticut, Hooker’s name evokes disdain for his part in the massacre of the Pequot Indians. I will have more to say on this later, but for now it is important to focus on Hooker’s life, his contributions to New England which lingered many years after his death in 1647, and aspects of his character and life which we ought to emulate today.
Hooker’s Early Life
Thomas Hooker was admitted to Christ College, Cambridge in March, 1604, a few months before his eighteenth birthday. Cambridge was a hot bed of Puritan theology and activism at the time and the English crown, then under the control of James I, was suspect of it. James was anti- Roman Catholic and was at least outwardly sympathetic to the Puritan cause but in the end was loyal to the Anglican Church instituted by Henry VIII many years before. Finally, Puritan activity was gaining too much of a following and James I cracked down, removing the Puritan influence at Christ College. Shortly thereafter Hooker migrated to Emmanuel College where he spent the next fourteen years of his life, both as a student and tutor. Eventually one-third of those men who studied with Hooker at Emmanuel College migrated to the new world. The education at Cambridge in those days was from the Classical tradition, using the ancient trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Classes would meet six days per week, beginning at 6 a.m. and continuing until 6 in the evening. The lectures were all given in Latin, and logic formed the backbone of a Cambridge education at the time. Men would read the great Latin writers of antiquity, including Ovid, listen to lectures in Latin and take notes in Latin. They would be trained to translate English into Latin and then translate the Latin back into English. They were encouraged to develop their own style of writing in Latin. They also made use of the logic taught be Peter Ramus who defined this discipline as the art of disputing (arguing or debating) well. Hooker would have been taught how to frame arguments in a logical fashion, and then to present them persuasively to an audience. This was the medieval way of learning and it prepared him exceptionally well for their preaching ministry.
Upon receiving his B.A. Hooker stayed on for another ten years or so as a tutor. In the English system of education a tutor was one who met outside the lecture hall with a number of students in his college, training them and reiterating what had been said in earlier lectures, seeking to explain more fully or accurately the material already given. Historians are unclear when and how Hooker’s conversion to Christ took place but it was certainly during his tenure at Cambridge. He rarely spoke of it, but we do know he came under a terrible conviction of sin, the terror of God’s law brought him low, causing him to see his utter inability to save himself. God eventually invaded his heart, taking away his fear and shame, giving him a wonderful sense of God’s presence and grace. Most Puritans at the time, while believing salvation could be instantaneous, as in the case of the Apostle Paul on the road to Damascus, taught that preparation for the coming of Christ to the soul was the norm. Later Hooker would develop a well structured plan of preparation which he believed all should seek.
Sometime after his conversion Hooker believed God was calling him to preach the gospel. He received a call to a church in Esher, England and Sir Francis Drake was prominent in executing this call. Drake’s wife, Joanna, while growing up in the Reformed Church, was deeply depressed, even suicidal, having convinced herself that she was lost forever, having committed the unpardonable sin, and was destined for hell. Drake, obviously a kind and gracious husband, sought help for his wife from a number of pastors. He finally heard of Thomas Hooker’s preaching and pastoral expertise, and urged him to take the pastoral position at Esher, a very small church, which would allow Hooker to spend a great of time with his wife, seeking to help her out of her despair. As was the custom of the day, Joanna’s marriage to Sir Francis was arranged by her parents, and she apparently married Drake against her will as a dutiful daughter. As their marriage progressed, due to her depression, Joanna eventually refused to attend divine services on Sunday, and though she would listen to preachers as they sought to help her, none were able to move her out of her despondency.
Then Thomas Hooker began to work with Joanna Drake. At first he listened to her, urging her to tell her story, and eventually he would use his training in logic and rhetoric to help her out of her depression. He would present his arguments in a logical fashion, thinking beforehand of objections she may have, even raising them to her before she could speak them. He would them dismantle her arguments, showing that the very essence of her unbelief was pride, thinking she was too far gone for the mercy of God. He had to dismantle her faulty views of Christianity, and then patiently, logically, and persuasively show her the truth as it is in Jesus. Eventually Joanna came to full assurance of her salvation and became a member of the local congregation, living faithfully and patiently until her death a few short years later. From his experience in helping Joanna Drake, Hooker eventually wrote The Poor Doubting Christian Drawne Unto Christ, a book based largely on his experience in helping Joanna Drake. Most, if not all the people of England in that day, had been baptized into Christ in the Anglican Church. The Puritans, who were zealous in reforming the church back to the word of God, took exception with many of the Anglican practices of the day. Perhaps the most important was the Anglican practice of admitting baptized children and adults to be full members of the church, being allowed to take the Lord’s Supper. The Puritans were concerned about mere head knowledge and sought to make Christianity an experience of the heart. They were after the conversion of professing Christians in their churches, to move their parishioners from historical faith to experiential faith. This problem has plagued Reformed pastors and theologians since that time. How are pastors to maintain the purity of the church while at the same time urging people to make sure of their election and calling, to prove their baptism was effectual. This led Puritans like Hooker to stress a subjective element to the proofs of salvation. Later Hooker would lock theological horns with a friend and contemporary, John Cotton, who developed seven tests or proofs of regeneration. Hooker and other Puritans preached the terrors of the law of God, hoping the Holy Spirit would bring deep fear and conviction of sin, the first step on the long road of preparation for regeneration. Then would come emphasis on the need to practice repentance, to ask God to show one his sin, and to repent of it. This could take months, if not years. It was not uncommon to find only thirty or forty percent of the baptized members of a New England Congregational Church who took the Lord’s Supper. In a day where little was known about psychology, Hooker was a leader in appealing to the conscience, stressing the terrors of God’s law, but then bringing to bear the objective work of Christ on the cross to the despondent church member.
It now appears to many people, even within the Reformed tradition which has generally been very favorable toward the Puritan movement, that the Puritans over complicated the doctrine of salvation. When speaking and preaching about free grace they inadvertently taught a works oriented salvation- namely that those who had prepared themselves by going through the steps of preparation, may have reason to believe they are accepted by God. Even though there were grave weaknesses in this New England theology, it is also true to say that their title of Physicians of the Soul is justifiable. They were masters at diagnosing spiritual and emotional problems, bringing to bear the balm of Gilead, the blood of Jesus sprinkled on an unclean conscience.
Hooker met Susanna Garbrand, Joanna Drake’s maid, while ministering to Mrs. Drake at Esher. After three years they were married on April 3, 1621. Hooker took the pastorate at Essex in 1628 and his fame as a gospel preacher continued to grow. About this time William Laud, the Archbishop of Canterbury and a vibrant adversary of the Puritans, began harassing Hooker. Laud believed that the Church of England could be maintained only by the Episcopal form of church government, while Hooker and the other Puritans believed holiness came only through the preaching of God’s word, applied to the heart and conscience by the Holy Spirit. Laud summoned Hooker to London, asking him about his preaching ministry, finally suspending him from it. The people of Essex were distraught, but Hooker obeyed the terms of the suspension and discontinued his preaching and pastoral ministry. He provided for his family by teaching students in the classical model of education by which he learned. Finally Laud summoned Hooker again, and Hooker knew that to appear would mean at the very least his imprisonment. He thus fled for his life with his wife and children to Amsterdam in 1631 where many other Puritans were living in exile. The Dutch government allowed the English to establish churches there, wrongfully assuming that these churches would take the representative or Presbyterian form of church government. Much to their amazement the English Puritan churches of Holland established an Independent or Congregational form of government whereby each congregation was separate and independent from all others.
John Paget had been selected to pastor the church of Puritan exiles in Amsterdam and had committed himself to the church polity of the Dutch Reformed Church, a form of representative or Presbyterian polity. When Paget asked Hooker to share the preaching and pastoral responsibilities with him, upon Hooker’s examination for ordination, it was discovered that Hooker was a Congregationalist. Paget opposed his friend and potential partner in ministry. In the end, while the congregation wanted Hooker, Paget prevailed and Hooker was not received as pastor. A short time later Hooker was asked to consider a similar ministry in Delft, but this did not work out either. So Hooker was in the Netherlands for two years, waiting for a ministry, which never came. Eventually he believed God was calling him to migrate to the new world, as John Winthrop and others had done in 1630. So in the spring of 1633 Hooker made his way secretly with his family back to England to take a ship to Boston.
Life in New England
Hooker, along with his wife and five children, sailed on the Griffin in July, 1633 under false names. When several hundred miles out to sea, he then revealed his true identity. With him on the Griffin were two other great Puritan preachers, John Cotton and Samuel Stone, also migrating with their wives and children. Soon all three men were preaching daily on board the Griffin- one in the morning, one in the afternoon, and one in the evening. The Griffin arrived in Boston on September 4, 1633, losing only four people on board. Many of Hooker’s church members from Essex had preceded him to the new world and eagerly awaited their pastor to Newtown, near Boston. Hooker began almost immediately taking up his pastoral duties, preaching twice on Sundays, giving a lecture on Thursday, and catechizing the families during the week.
A year or so after arriving in Newtown the people there were unhappy with the small amount of land they had to farm and keep their cattle. They petitioned the General Court, giving several reasons why they should be allowed to migrate to the Connecticut River valley. The main reason was the poor quality of the land at Newtown for farming and the need to have more land for their growing population. John Winthrop, Governor of the Bay Colony, spoke against the move, citing the need to give protection to the people, something which would be very difficult to give in Connecticut, especially due to the threat of Indian attacks. Winthrop’s other reason to deny the request was their need of Thomas Hooker, not only as a preacher and pastor, but also because of his ability to broker peace agreements with parties of people antagonistic to each other. The General Court approved the migration in 1634 but Winthrop vetoed it. To further complicate matters, the same General Court approved the migration of the people of Roxbury and Watertown after Winthrop had vetoed the migration of Newtown people. Finally a small band of people, around sixty plus their cattle, left for Connecticut in October, 1635, hoping to begin a more prosperous life there. Hooker and his family, along with another one hundred people, left in May, 1636, traveling westward to East Longmeadow, then turning south at the Connecticut River, walking south on the east side of the river, crossing over at Windsor, finally settling in modern day Hartford, named for the hometown in England of fellow minister and colleague, Samuel Stone.
I mentioned earlier the controversy concerning the massacre of the Pequot Indians and how Hooker has been vilified for his leadership in the ordeal. As in so many other similar circumstances, it is not always easy to know how such things began and who is most culpable. It appears, however, that a number of Massachusetts men had raided a Pequot village (the Pequots were mainly in and around what is now Old Saybrook, CT), killing a few Indians. The Pequots, a fierce tribe, retaliated by raiding a village of the English. Somewhat later John Oldham, a trader in the Bay, was murdered on Block Island, off the coast of Narragansett, the home of the Niantic Indians, who were allies with the Pequots. The General Court, in August, 1636 directed John Endicott to subdue the Indians. He with a small band of militiamen landed at Block Island but found no Pequots. He burned down several homes and moved on. Sometime later the Pequots countered by raiding another village near Saybrook, causing the English settlers there to live in constant fear throughout the succeeding winter. Finally, in April, 1637 the Pequots came inland to Wethersfield, killing nine people and capturing two girls. For the Pequots to be on the coast and causing trouble was one thing, but now, that far inland, and near the newly formed settlement at Hartford, was too much to bear. The General Court in Hartford declared war on the Pequots and commissioned an army of ninety-nine men, under the leadership of Captain John Mason, to remove the Pequot nuisance. Thomas Hooker, the preacher to his people in Hartford, preached a farewell sermon to these men from Numbers 14:9, “Only rebel ye not against the Lord, neither fear ye the people of the land; for they are bread for us; their defense is departed from them, and the Lord is with us; fear them not.” He then prayed and sent them on their way. This was the extent of Hooker’s involvement in the massacre. Mason and his men sailed past Saybrook and the Pequot nation to Narragansett in order to attack the Pequots from the rear, traveling toward them from the east. They surrounded the fort at dawn and attacked with their allies, the Mohegan and Narragansett Indians (the Pequot were ruthless not only to the English but also toward the Mohegans and Narragansetts). Eyewitnesses reported that of the four hundred to five hundred Pequots only four or five survived. Several other skirmishes ensued over the next several months but the Pequots were pretty much annihilated by this first attack.
About the same time another threat to the welfare of the people of New England developed but of a far more serious nature. Anne Hutchinson had migrated to Massachusetts Bay with her husband in 1634, following John Cotton, her favorite preacher. Hutchinson was a very astute theologian with unconventional theology. She taught a midweek bible study, attended by as many as eighty to ninety women and some men. She would discuss Cotton’s sermons from the previous week, working from extensive notes of the sermons she had taken. She would rather quickly move toward her unusual doctrines, what came to be known at the time as a form of antinomianism, a denial of the law of God in the life of the Christian. Her views were summarized by John Winthrop under two main categories. First, she taught that the person of the Holy Spirit dwells in a believer in such a way that He speaks directly to the justified person, negating the necessity for the Ten Commandments and any other commands in the bible. In effect, this rendered unnecessary, in her mind, the laws of the Massachusetts Bay. In other words, a believer had a law within him which overruled any outward law in the bible or any given by the state. Thus a believer was free to act anyway he chose, as long as it was from the Spirit. Second, Hutchinson taught that sanctification is no proof of justification. Actually John Cotton taught a form of this, saying that due to the depravity of one’s heart, a person could be deceived about the nature of his good works. Just because one gives outward evidence of faith is no guarantee of saving faith. Cotton’s teaching on this is not unorthodox but Anne Hutchinson took it much further, saying that there is no reason at all for a believer to be concerned about keeping God’s law at any point. Many of those attending Hutchinson’s bible study were the wives of prominent men in and around Boston, and even some of the husbands of these women were attending. The threat was that this would cause a general lawlessness in the Bay, undermining the authority of the state and church. Hutchinson was banished to Narragansett, later known as Providence, R.I.
John Winthrop summoned Thomas Hooker to work through the issues coming out of Anne Hutchinson’s views. Hooker’s involvement was to arbitrate the concerns other ministers had with John Cotton’s views on salvation. Cotton taught that man was completely passive in salvation, while Hooker and the other New England Puritans believed in preparationism. That is, while man received salvation solely on the basis of Christ giving him eternal life through the work of the Holy Spirit, they still believed man was responsible to seek after God, to put away his sin, to clear the deck, so to speak, so that Christ may visit him in due time with salvation. If Cotton’s views took hold, then this passivity could lead, as it surely did with Anne Hutchinson, to extrabiblical revelation, visions, and other subjective words from God. This, in turn, would propagate the problem they had just squelched from Hutchinson. Cotton’s views would also lead to antinomianism, living apart from any adherence to God’s word and law. Hooker expertly, over several public meetings, showed Cotton and his followers his error. Cotton eventually amended his views and thus was more acceptable to the mainstream of Congregational theological thought.
The Puritans have long been accused of neglecting evangelistic work and there is some degree of truth to this charge, at least in a general sense. However Thomas Hooker does not fit this profile. He was clearly a powerful preacher who called the baptized people of his church, as well as those unbaptized and outside the covenant, to faith and repentance. Hooker preached that the covenant of should be viewed in two parts. He taught that the true believer, regenerated by the Holy Spirit, who had been baptized as an infant, was truly in Christ. All others who had been baptized were in the outward covenant. Though not truly in Christ, these had the benefit of being exposed to the gospel and were consequently more open to the ministrations of soul searching preaching. Hooker always appealed to these people in the outward covenant. Keep in mind that nearly everyone in town would attend church on the Lord’s day. The outer covenant was important to the general welfare of the town. We see the same idea in the Netherlands at this time, for the Dutch believed they were in covenant with God and their prosperity and peace depended upon obedience to God’s law. The children of those in the inner covenant had the privilege of federal holiness, meaning they were inclined toward God and thus were more open to regenerating grace. So Hooker directed his sermons to these children as well. Finally Hooker was also aware of children and their parents who were outright pagans, and he prayed for them and directed his sermons to them as well.
Lessons Learned from the Life of Thomas Hooker
At least four major lessons can be learned and thus applied to us from the life and ministry of Thomas Hooker. First is the great benefit of a classical education. Until the last fifty years or so most in western civilization were taught using the basics of the ancient trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. That is, the earliest years of education are spent in teaching the grammar of reading, writing, history, and mathematics. Children at this young age have an amazing capacity to learn facts, time lines, math tables, phonics, and languages. Hooker was taught in this manner. Later, when a child is in his early teens, he would be taught how to think logically. In Hooker’s case he cut his teeth, logically speaking on the logic of Peter Ramos. He was able to see faulty thinking, and more importantly, he was taught to frame his own arguments logically, appealing to the rationality of his audience. Finally one is taught in the rhetoric stage by putting together all he has learned thus far, being taught how to frame his arguments convincingly in writing, speaking, or in public debate.
Very few received a higher education in the 17th century and it was understood that those who did were a privileged class, being groomed to be leaders in church and society. Classical education trained men to be leaders because it trained them to be generalists, those who have a grasp of history and thus understand trends, being able to see where such trends in society will take them. Today, when so many aspire to a higher education which increasingly has become specialized (accountants, engineers, business school degrees), we have tended to produce a society of specialists and few consequently are equipped to be leaders.
Leaders must know how to think, to discern the times, and to apply truth. We would go further and say that this truth is found in Holy Scripture, that’s ones life and public service must be grounded upon absolute truth. Relativism will not do in the difficult issues of our day. Furthermore, leaders must be able to communicate cogently and convincingly a vision or direction for those under their charge. This is illustrated in numerous ways in Hooker’s life, most clearly in his marvelous work with Joanna Drake. Over several months, using both the truth of Scripture, his understanding of human nature, and his ability to argue biblical truth persuasively, anticipating Joanna’s objections, and gently pointing her to truth; he was able to deliver her from her suicidal tendencies and despondency.
We would do our children a wonderful service, as well as the church and society, if we trained our children in the ancient trivium of Classical education.
Second is the benefit of a consistent, theologically driven ministry. Hooker had the benefit of receiving a theological education from some of the greatest Puritan minds of his time. He lived and served Christ in the midst of the Puritan revolution which lasted for one hundred years in England, until 1662 and the Act of Uniformity under Charles II, which demanded that Puritan pastors swear allegiance to the Church of England. He lived and served in the new world at the very beginning of her existence, one clearly and consciously founded on the vibrant, God-centered, Christ-exalting Puritan theology which exalted God and debased man. This is not to say, of course, that Hooker was not without his theological problems and inconsistencies. It may be that the later rejection of Calvinism by New England in favor of Arminianism and later Unitarianism can partly be laid at the feet of Puritans who taught preparationism. In a desire to purify the church, they seemed to deny the simple faith in Christ which sometimes marks one’s life in this world. They tended to view conversion as a long process of soul searching conviction of sin. This was the norm, not the exception. Thus, unless one had a similar experience, then his conversion to Christ was suspect. The continental Reformers in Geneva and Holland saw it a bit differently, trusting the work of Christ through infant baptism, trusting that the Holy Spirit worked normally within the family as the father instructed his children. As the children grew up in the church hearing God-honoring, soul searching sermons, it was assumed they were in Christ unless they clearly turned away from faith and obedience.
Even though Hooker was a product of Puritan preparationism and its consequent problems, there is little doubt that his was an experiential theology, believing in a sovereign God, all powerful Christ, and effectual ministry of the Holy Spirit in regenerating and sanctifying the elect. Our great fault today is the loss of such a God-centered theology which leaves man with the last word on salvation. Thus we have opened the door to all manner of methods which compromise the doctrine of God, the sufficiency of Christ, and our complete dependence on the Holy Spirit’s presence and power.
More specifically we see the benefit of a theologically driven ministry in Hooker’s pastoral counseling with Joanna Drake, and his book, The Poor Doubting Christian Drawne To Christ. Ministers would do themselves and their congregations a huge favor if they would read and apply the numerous books on pastoral theology which Hooker and his fellow Puritans wrote, men like Richard Baxter and his Saints Everlasting Rest, William Gurnall’s The Christian in Complete Armor, and William Brooks’ Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices.
And the importance of a theologically driven ministry is seen also in how to handle theological controversy. Hooker was consistently called upon by John Winthrop to sort through the controversies of their day. He did this with his friend John Cotton in the Arminian controversy, with Roger Williams and the threat of separatism and fanaticism, and with Anne Hutchinson and her extra-biblical revelation and antinomianism. Throughout church history we have seen the vital role theologians have played in pointing out error and cogently pointing us back to the truth. Now, as much as ever before, we need pastors who ground their ministries on theology and do not succumb to the whims and passing fads of our day.
And we also need theologically driven ministries in the area of evangelistic outreach. The last two hundred years of western church history has marked a loss of Calvinistic theology, a foundation stone of which is the total inability of man to believe the gospel. Instead we have the ancient heresy of Pelagius firmly entrenched in the life and ministry of the church, teaching that man decides on his own free will to believe in or to reject Christ. This has resulted in a shallowness of ministry which has robbed God of His glory and the Lord Jesus of His exalted place as Savior of His people. It has moved us to prayerlessness for man decides and prayer is, in a de facto sense, unnecessary. This has also produced a low level of experiential holiness. A small God makes for small believers who casually and flippantly attend to worship from a man-centered position, crafting worship services for the unbeliever, all the while forgetting that only believers can truly worship God. Hooker’s God-centered theology, if followed uncompromisingly, would bring great liberty to pastors, elders, and church members; for it would put us where we so desperately need to be- utterly and completely desperate for a touch of the Holy Spirit upon our ministries, driving us to prayer and holiness of life, knowing that unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it.
And third is the need to evaluate a man on facts, not upon one’s prejudices. An honest evaluation of Thomas Hooker’s part in the Pequot Indian massacre ought largely to remove any large measure of guilt from him. It is clear that his only involvement was to preach a sermon and pray for the soldiers as they left Hartford. We also need to remember that, as was said of Winthrop, Hooker was a man of his century, and not beyond it. In other words, it is unfair to apply blame to men of several hundreds ago, applying the standards of today on those who did not have the same standards in their day.
In light of this, we do well to reevaluate our views on Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams. The typical view of our day is that both were unfairly treated, that they were the victims of bigotry and cruelty, dealt with in a high degree of religious intolerance which, many say, is very much with us today in the spirit of modern evangelicalism. A close reading of the facts says otherwise, however. Historical context is important in both cases. The Massachusetts Bay was a Puritan movement, the vision being John Winthrop’s famous maxim, a city set upon a hill. It was an experiment in Puritan living. Both Hutchinson and Williams were a major threat to this prevailing view, and the Puritan court in Boston was long suffering in dealing with them; and even after pronouncing them guilty, gave both plenty of time to leave for Naragansett, even allowing Hutchinson to remain in Boston for the winter.
Giving people the benefit of the doubt within the century in which they lived can be illustrated in many other ways too. Take, for example, the 19th century southern Presbyterian theologians who sought to defend slavery with a faulty biblical exposition. This is true of mid 19th century people of Connecticut who maligned Prudence Crandall for opening her school to black children, the common belief of the day, even among the liberally minded and progressive people of our state, being that blacks were inferior and ought not to be educated, that it was a waste of time. Likewise we ought not to impugn Hooker and other leaders of his day and century who commonly annihilated their enemies if given the chance, showing what we would call little or no compassion for them.
We tend, whatever side of the fence we may stand, whether liberal or conservative, to castigate our foes unfairly, without considering the facts; or unfairly exalting our heroes without freely acknowledging their failures and weaknesses. It is time that we all consider the facts as best we can discern them, and only then, make judgments on how foe and friend alike conducted themselves.
And fourth is Hooker’s biblical and Puritan view of the state which has served as the foundation for our state’s grasp of democracy, which, in turn, has affected the formation of our nation. This is unmistakable in Hooker and largely overlooked by those who study him. Some historians have noted the conflict of thinking between John Winthrop, Governor of Massachusetts Bay, and Thomas Hooker, founder of Hartford. Winthrop followed an aristocratic view of government, which he brought with him from England, meaning a King, or someone akin to one, ruled the state. Hooker, on the other hand, believed in democracy, the consent of the governed. Winthrop wrote, “Democracy I do not conceive that ever God did ordain as a fit government either for Church or Commonwealth.” To this Hooker wrote Winthrop, saying among other things,”. . . a general counsel (governance) chosen by all. . .is most suitable to rule and the most safe for relief of the whole.” On May 31, 1638, one year after arriving in Hartford, Hooker preached, or more accurately lectured, from Deuteronomy 1:13, “’Take you wise men, and understanding, and known among your tribes, and I will make them rulers over you,’ captians over thousands, and captain over hundreds- over fifties, over tens, etc.” Hooker’s main point in his lecture was that the choice of public magistrates belongs to the people by God’s own allowance. The General Court took Hooker’s words to heart and one year later established the Fundamental Laws which served as the first democratic constitution. One historian wrote, “That sermon by Thomas Hooker from the pulpit of the First Church in Hartford, is the earliest known suggestion of a fundamental law, enacted not by royal charter, nor by concession from any previously existing government, but by the people themselves, a primary and supreme law by which the government is constituted.” Another said that Hooker’s sermon was the germ of the idea of the Commonwealth, and it was developed by his hearers into the Constitution of 1639. That’s why Connecticut is known as the Constitution State.
So we owe a great debt of gratitude to Thomas Hooker, founder of Hartford, theologian, pastor, scholar, and preacher par excellence. May God raise up many who will follow in his train, seeking to live by Holy Scripture, bringing to bear the weight and truth of God’s word in a just and righteous society.
Thomas Hooker, 1586-1647, by Frank Shuffelton, Princeton University Press, 1977
Magnalia Christi Americana, by Cotton Mather
Thomas Hooker: Preacher, Founder, Democrat, by George Leon Walker, Dodd, Mead, and Company, New York, 1891.
Cotton Mather, one of the greatest scholars our country has produced, a man of unusual intellect and Christian piety, one in his day who was loved by many and reviled by some, to this day evokes conflicting emotions of awe and respect over against anger and disdain. Cotton Mather has inspired the faith of many and killed the faith of others. Indeed he was a Puritan enigma. Cotton Mather was born in 1663, only thirty-three years after John Winthrop and other Puritans sailed from England, due to religious persecution, and established the Massachusetts Bay Colony in Boston. The Pilgrims, separatists who wanted nothing to do with the Church of England, had settled the Plymouth Colony by William Bradford in 1620. Now a generation after their arrival, the Puritans of Boston were thriving and Cotton, named after his two illustrious grandfathers (John Cotton and Richard Mather), two powerful Puritan preachers in their own right, was born to Increase and Maria Mather. Both of Mather’s grandfathers were educated at Cambridge, the hotbed of Puritanism in the day, and both migrated to America after persecution at the hands of William Laud and the Anglican power brokers in England.
Richard Mather, after his arrival in Dorchester, became a powerful fixture in the new world, being an overseer of the development of Harvard, being a Congregational pastor who held firmly to the Reformed faith then sweeping England and the European continent, and being one firmly committed to the evangelization of the Indians in and around Boston. Cotton’s other grandfather, John Cotton, gave the farewell sermon to those traveling with John Winthrop on the Arbella to the new world. He soon followed them and lived out his days as a Reformed pastor in Boston.
Increase Mather, father of Cotton, was born at Dorchester in 1639 and followed his father as a scholar, pastor, and theologian, learning Latin and Greek before he entered Harvard at the age of twelve. He traveled to Ireland, attending Trinity College, receiving his master’s degree there, and preached for three years in England and Guernsey. While preaching in Gloucester, he experienced what he believed a divine revelation, telling him that much suffering would come to the Puritans of his day. This in fact occurred a year or so later when Charless II was restored to the British throne, bringing the imprisonment and persecution of Puritan preachers, over 2000 of them being ejected from their pulpits in 1662. Increase returned to America at this time and married Maria, who gave birth to Cotton less than a year later. Increase was an interesting contrast as a parent, on the one hand being highly principled, loving, and encouraging; but on the other hand sometimes being morose, mysterious, and high strung. Many Puritans of the day believed in strong, supernatural, extra-biblical revelations, what he called presagious impressions. Increase was no exception. On one occasion he was overcome with a sense of death and sadness and found a month later that his brother had died suddenly. At another time it was deeply impressed upon him that his son would be greatly used of God. This impression, however, did not deter him from serious bouts of depression over the premature potential demise of his son.
Increase, as a typical Puritan pastor, viewed study of theology and the Bible, as a privileged means of worship by pastors, and he stayed in his study, pouring over some volume of theology, as much as 16 hours per day. As Increase began his pastoral ministry in Boston he often was given over to dissatisfaction over the paltry salary his people were paying them, repeatedly threatening to leave them and to return to England where people appreciated gospel ministers much better. It was said that Increase was so somber in the pulpit that his very countenance held the force of a sermon. Maria, Increase’s wife, apparently was given at times to outspoken criticism of her husband, but generally appeared to have a Biblical view of sanctification, of growing in the grace and knowledge of Christ, reading through the Bible twice per year. When Cotton was six years old, Increase went into a battle of emotional and physical turmoil, perhaps related to the death of his father, Richard. He later that year also experienced a severe pain in his side. He repeatedly had such bouts, leaving us to surmise that he was a hypochondriac. He also lived with the fear that he one day would go insane.
Cotton Mather was indeed precocious, reading and writing before he was six years old, becoming fluent in Latin by age eight, and taking extensive notes on his father’s sermons in Latin by the time he was nine years old. He was trained in the Classical tradition, reading by the time he was eleven the works of Cato, Tully, Ovid, and Virgil in the original languages. He also became fluent in the Greek New Testament and Hebrew Old Testament. He is the youngest student to ever enter Harvard, having done so at the age of eleven and one-half years old, beating his father by six months or so. Due to his age and small stature, life was not easy for Cotton at Harvard. Increase removed him from Harvard for a season due to severe hazing he was experiencing. On top of his young age, came the zeal by which he rebuked older students for their lack of holiness and spiritual deportment. This no doubt did not help his relationships with other students.
Cotton Mather came from a long line of preachers and with his grasp of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew he was clearly equipped to become a powerful Puritan preacher. However he had one humbling problem. He stuttered. No one is certain of the cause of stuttering but some have suggested it comes to children, prior to puberty, due to parents who place unrealistic expectation on their children. We don’t know if this was true with Increase, but it is perfectly clear that the Mather men expected great things from Cotton. So being one who stuttered was the most humbling of circumstances for him, as it would be for any preacher. Elijah Corbet, an aging educator living near Harvard, gave Mather advice he practiced for the rest of his life. He was to sing the Psalms for hardly anyone stutters when they sing. Second he was to speak very slowly and deliberately, as though he was drawling his words, almost as though singing. Apparently the problem of stuttering never left Mather, but he did learn how to overcome it by the means prescribed by Corbet.
Mather made a practice of writing nearly every day of his life. He had a beautiful hand in writing and made over 5000 pages of sermon notes from his father and other Puritan preachers of his day. He kept a daily journal, much of which has survived to this day, and he constantly wrote books, the two most extensive and well known are Magnalia Christi Americana, a history on the mighty works of Christ in America up until his day, and the Biblia Americana, a sort of running commentary on the Bible and biblical themes which he worked on for over fifty years. In all Mather published over 350 books. He was awarded a Doctor of Divinity from the University of Glascow for his Magnalia. Furthermore he had a life long interest in science, being made a member of the FRS, a Fellow of the Royal Academy in Scotland. He regularly corresponded with scientists in England and Scotland and lived at a time when the scientific method was coming to be accepted, and the old Aristotellian explanation of science was rapidly passing from the scene. Nevertheless Cotton Mather believed in a kind of plastic universe, a power of life not unlike the soul, in all animal and plant life. We may say this was a primitive explanation of life which was later vindicated and more accurately described in the DNA of all living things. His lifelong interest in science and medicine also was given expression in the small pox epidemic of 1721. He had read of small pox inoculations done by a physician in Turkey and was convinced this would prevent the devastation of small pox which had regularly visited Boston and the surrounding towns. He placed an advertisement in the newspaper, calling physicians to make use of inoculations. Only one doctor responded, Dr. Zabdiel Boylston. With Mather’s encouragement Boylston began inoculating people and was met with immediate opposition by the other physicians in Boston, saying his methods were unproven and would undoubtedly bring many more deaths. We are amazed today at the ignorance and recalcitrance of these physicians and the progressive thinking of Mather and Boylston, but Mather was constantly impugned by most in Boston at the time.
His Ministry
Cotton Mather gave evidence of regenerating grace as a young teen. The Puritans, while practicing infant baptism and rearing their children to believe on Christ and walk with Him all their days, also believed one must have a conversion experience and give evidence of an inward change before one could be admitted to the Lord’s Supper. Many Puritans preached preparationism, that one must seek God for a long period, giving themselves to daily repentance in hopes that the peace of Christ would flood their souls. Cotton experienced this during his time at Harvard and though he briefly considered medicine as a profession there was very little doubt that he would follow his father and grandfathers into the pastoral ministry. Upon his graduation from Harvard at fifteen, Cotton preached his first sermon at sixteen. He tutored students for a few years and then was offered the pastoral position at the Congregational Church in New Haven when he was nineteen. He refused it, believing he ought to stay in Boston. The people of the North Church, where his father was the pastor, overwhelmingly voted to call him to serve with his father as a pastor in the church. He waited a few years, believing that he was too young and inexperienced for such a role; but eventually agreed, serving this church until his death in 1728. Cotton threw himself into every aspect of the pastoral ministry at the North Church, preaching regularly, visiting the sick and dying, performing weddings (fifty-two of them in 1709 alone) and funerals, and catechizing the children. The Puritan form of ministry in the late 17th and early 18th century was to have a lecture on Thursday, which was like a sermon, usually an hour and fifteen minutes in length, and two sermons on Sundays, each an hour and one-half long. Increase and Cotton Mather divided these duties, and when Increase traveled to England for three years, Cotton took over the full pastoral duties and performed them admirably.
The North Church had fifteen hundred members and was by far the largest church in the new world at the time. Less than five hundred of these were communing members, though they had been baptized as infants. Again this was due to the Puritan notion that proof of regeneration is necessary for full church membership. This no doubt played on the psyche of many non-communing members, leading to a morose view of life. During this time, probably because so few people were communing members and the influence of Christianity in New England was waning, Congregational ministers put forth the idea of the Halfway Covenant. Increase Mather and Solomon Stoddard in Northampton were in favor of this which said that those who had been baptized were allowed to take communion even though they had not given evidence of a conversion experience. Young Cotton Mather opposed his father on this and the practice never caught on at the North Church. Cotton had read widely in the German pietists of his day, men like Auguste Francke, who stressed personal holiness and self-examination. Pietism was the forerunner of the 18th century revival theology of Jonathan Edwards, Gilbert Tennent, and George Whitefield. This was contrary to the Lutheran and continental theology of John Calvin and the Dutch Reformed Church which put the emphasis, not so much on regeneration and justification, but on sanctification, giving evidence of holiness, improving one’s baptism.
Cotton Mather apparently had a temper and was given to outbursts of anger and he sought to curb this, to mortify or kill it and other sinful tendencies by doing good to all men. He wrote a book entitled Bonifacius in 1712 where he put forth his ideas. Benjamin Franklin read this as a young man saying that it utterly changed his life, moving him to be a doer of good all his days. Cotton battled a desire to be well known as a preacher and writer on the one hand with a desire to walk humbly with God on the other.
He obviously was a powerful preacher of God’s word, telling younger preachers to prepare for preaching by going directly to the pulpit from their knees in prayer. They were to begin slowly, in a low tone, expounding the text, giving the theological implications, answering objections which may arise in the text, and then move to application. At this juncture they were to rise in animation and voice. On one occasion Cotton was lost in the glory of his pastoral prayer, prior to preaching, and apologized to his congregation after praying for two hours. He then preached for an hour and a half.
Cotton was also an early proponent of what we today call ecumenism. Obviously by this he did not mean tolerance or acceptance of heresy for he spoke against a revival of Arianism (a denial of the Trinity and the deity of Christ) which made its way to Boston, and he was highly suspect of any form of church government which denied the independence of the local congregation. When Solomon Stoddard in Northampton was urging a ministerial fraternal by which pastors could be held accountable, Cotton vehemently opposed it, fearing this to be the precursor of Presbyterianism which would lead to Anglicanism, which would lead to Roman Catholicism. In fact he warned that Presbyterianism was flowing from Northampton down the Connecticut River. Nonetheless, he sought for magnanimity toward believers in various churches, eventually backing away from an earlier opposition to the new Brattle Church which was more liberal in its views of how to live the Christian life. Among other things, the Brattle Church embraced the Halfway Covenant and emphasized music in worship over against long, theologically driven sermons.
There can be no question that Cotton Mather was a man deeply devoted to Christ. His long hours in his study, reading, writing, and composing sermons; his tireless pastoral visitation, fearlessly going into the homes of those ravaged by small pox and measles; his courageous stand against the spiritual declension in his beloved New England which he believed would bring God’s judgment on the town of Boston; and his regular practice of fast days where he devoted himself to whole days of prayer and fasting for the salvation of his people all point to a man of unusual devotion to Christ. Like all men, however, there were a few areas of great weakness in his theology and practice. For one thing, at least two long periods of his life were given to what he believed was communion with angels. The first occurrence was just after the Salem witch trials of the early 1790’s and the second was during the last ten years of his life when he had the three fold trouble of his marriage, Creasey his child, and impending financial ruin. I will have more to say on this later. He believed in the existence of angels and that God had given them to His children for their support and comfort. So far so good, for all evangelical Christian theologians believe this, but he took it further; saying that he actually spoke with angels who gave him messages of assurance from time to time. Another strange practice, which he learned from his father, was what he called presagious impressions. He would often sense very strongly a certain event which was soon to happen. For example, he received a very strong impression that his second wife would become ill and die. He also believed that God would visit Boston with a terrible sickness and this later played out in the measles epidemic which killed his wife, servant, and three of his children. When he later married his third wife, he was convinced by God that she would marry him, though she at first resisted his overtures to her. Mather was not the first nor the last to believe strongly in God-given impressions. I have had them myself, but the danger is to believe that these are absolutely infallible, that they will certainly take place. Mather did not always receive such impressions with a degree of skepticism or reserve.
The Salem Witch Trials
In the rear of the procession rode a figure on horseback, so darkly conspicuous, so sternly triumphant, that my hearers mistook him for the visible presence of the fiend himself, but it was only his good friend, Cotton Mather, proud of his well won dignity, as the representative of all the hateful features of his time, the one bloodthirsty man, in whom were concentrated those vices of spirit and errors of opinion that sufficed to madden the whole surrounding multitude. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Alice Doane’s Appeal, 1834.
John Goodwin, a brick mason living in Boston in 1688, had three young daughters given to bizarre behavior. He asked that Cotton Mather examine the girls and when he did and prayed for one of them, the girl went deaf as he prayed, and regained her hearing after he finished his prayer. On another visit Mather noted that all three girls were attempting to swallow their tongues, would open their mouths wider than seemed possible, only to shut them abruptly, like a spring lock. Furthermore their mouths and bodies were in various fits of contortion. Mather believed them to be bewitched. Later the young girls identified a woman who they said had cast a spell on her. The woman was brought to trial for practicing witchcraft and executed. Three years later Mather was hearing of similar phenomenon in nearby Salem. The Reverend Samuel Paris of Salem noted bizarre behavior by his nine year old daughter and eleven year old niece. Both seemed to be choked, convulsed, and pinched by unseen forces. A physician examined them and when he could not diagnose a physical cause of their ailments, he concluded they were betwitched. Cotton Mather had preached several sermons on the reality of witches, witchcraft, and Satanic forces after the Goodwin daughters affair, and many in Salem had read his sermons. Furthermore trials and executions of witches were a common phenomenon in the 17th century. Bavaria saw the execution of nearly 300 witches. The same happened in France and several witches were executed in other parts of New England from 1650 onward.
Mather believed that witches and Satanic activity were real, that proven witches ought to be executed, but that extreme caution must be used in following through with execution. He and others believed the most important evidence to convict a witch was a credible confession, where the accused actually confessed to being a witch. A questionable method was to use what they called spectral evidence, when people would testify against an accused witch, saying that they had seen the accused engage in bizarre and wicked behavior. On more than one occasion people said that they saw so-called witches flying about on brooms, wearing cone hats, and mixing a devil’s brew which they gave to unsuspecting victims. One man, for example, says that a witch appeared to him at night, awakening him from a deep sleep, by sitting on his stomach. Mather warned against too much use of spectral evidence, but to no avail. By the end of 1693 nineteen women and one man had been found guilty and executed as witches. Many others were imprisoned. Children were testifying against their parents, brothers against their sisters, neighbors against their neighbors. A veritable panic had overtaken the town. In the end, several ministers came to the forefront, calling for the suspension of the trials. Eventually this took place and the frenzy ended.
How, you may rightly ask, could this happen when the Puritans were so committed to ruling their lives and churches by the Bible? Perhaps one explanation is that the new science of Isaac Newton and others was rapidly eroding belief in the unseen world. Some of the Puritans surmised that a rejection of belief in witches would cause people eventually to deny the existence of God, which would spell the demise of the supernatural Christian faith. It is inaccurate to say that the Puritans were altogether reckless in the witch trials, for many others, including Roman Catholics were given to the same thing. They appeared to attempt to deal with each case systematically, using caution. However the Puritans, while believing in the supernatural world of Satan and demonic activity, failed to evaluate these things totally in the light of Scripture. Their behavior in general, and Cotton Mather’s in particular, was inexcusable and reprehensible, and perhaps has done more than anything to impugn the great benefits of the Puritan theology and life.
His Trials
Shortly after his twenty-third birthday in February, 1686 Cotton began seeing Abigail Phillips, a young woman of sixteen years of age, the daughter of Colonel John Phillips, a justice of the peace and a man prominent in military affairs in Boston. Cotton sought her hand in marriage as he did his pursuit of holiness in Christ. He would spend one day per week fasting and praying, asking that God would give him favor with her. After a brief courtship of three months they were married at the North Church and they immediately moved into a house his father, Increase, had used after a fire had destroyed his original house. Cotton was uncertain of Abigail’s spiritual state and prayed daily for her salvation, instructing her in God’s word, urging her to pursue Christ. Eventually she came to an assurance of her salvation and became a communing member of the North Church.
In May, 1702, after sixteen years of marriage, Abigail miscarried at four months of her pregnancy, and Cotton sensed a dark cloud hanging over his family. It may be that Abigail suffered from breast cancer and Cotton watched his dear wife sink deeper and deeper into sickness, culminating in her death in November. She briefly revived in August after a vision of God where she was told to place a fresh patch of wool from a living sheep on her painful breast. The pain subsided for a time, and they both had hopes of her full recovery but it was not to be. She was buried beside their five children who had died before her. Shortly after Abigail’s death their eight year old daughter Nibby nearly died from a small pox epidemic, and during this time Cotton’s house was a veritable hospital as small pox ravaged their family and servants.
A year or so later, as was the custom in those days, Cotton married Elizabeth Hubbard Clark, who was also several years younger than him. He brought his four surviving children into the marriage and they all readily accepted Elizabeth as their new mother.
Their union produced another five children. Though Cotton was incredibly busy with his ministry of preaching and writing he found time daily to rear his children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. He often spoke against the common practice of his day of verbally maligning children. He said that this was an abomination and that children should be instructed straightforwardly and lovingly, speaking kindly and gently to them. He said that as soon as they are old enough to understand their need of Christ, a parent ought to pray for his children in their presence, weeping over them for their salvation.
Another outbreak of measles visited Boston in 1713 and ravaged the city, including his own family. Elizabeth died shortly after giving birth to twins. A few days later both the twins died too, and finally another daughter died. Later that year his mother died at the age of 72. About this time Mather entered in his journal a note saying that of his fifteen children , nine were dead. In all these trials, Mather accepted them as the will of God, rejoicing in the hope he had for his dear wife and children being in the presence of Jesus.
Several months after Elizabeth’s death, a young woman, aged twenty-three began pursuing Cotton, saying that she wished to marry him because he would be good for her soul, hopefully drawing her to the Savior. Cotton resisted her advances for a season, but eventually was flattered by her interest in a man who was fifty years old. They began seeing each other and the people of Boston were talking about his inappropriate relationship with her. Cotton finally realized that this could be terribly harmful to his ministry and sought to put her off. She continued to pursue him, even recruiting her mother to convince Cotton that he ought to marry her. There does not seem to be any illicit sexual activity between them, but surely his ministry was in jeopardy. After breaking off his relationship with her, she threatened to tell the community the details of their courtship. Cotton was fearful that she would spread untruths and tarnish his ministry and the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. He fasted several times, asking the Lord to move her to drop her threats to undo him. A short time later Cotton received a letter from her, saying that she would not bother him again. He saw this as a great and merciful visitation from God on his behalf.
He then turned his attention to Lydia Lee George, a young woman, whose husband had died a month earlier. Lydia Lee’s father was a very wealthy man and Lydia Lee’s first husband had been well to do as well. He first visited her with one of his young children. He persisted in pursuing her and Lydia Lee at first rejected his advances, telling him in no uncertain terms that she was not interested in him. Cotton continued his pursuit, going through mutual friends. Eventually Lydia Lee softened and the two were married, placing a pre-nuptial agreement on their marriage. Lydia Lee had been a member of the Brattle Street Church, which was viewed by many as a rather liberal church. She was worldly, materialistic, manipulative, and perhaps even psychopathic. While Cotton saw the spiritual beauty of his first two wives and apparently was most attracted by it, physical attraction and the comforts of her wealth seem to be the driving force behind his courtship of Lydia Lee. A year or so after their marriage Cotton began entering into his journal in Latin a number of troubling reports of her prodigious paroxysms. While both Abigail and Elizabeth were models of Puritan piety and self-control, Lydia Lee was given to outbursts of anger which often lasted for days. Cotton was deeply grieved at her behavior, wondering what he had done to provoke it. She maligned him as well as his children. On one occasion she left him for several months, bringing great embarrassment and heartache, not to mention the negative talk of church members and others in the city of Boston. There would be long periods of peace but these always were followed by more outbursts. She even threatened to return to the Brattle Street Church. These persisted to the end of Mather’s life, some ten years after their marriage. A year and one half after his marriage to Lydia Lee, Catherine became the tenth of his children to die. Her death apparently was from the lingering affects of the measles epidemic of 1713.
Then there was the financial hardship which Cotton incurred from his marriage to Lydia Lee. Her first husband, at his death, had an import business which had many accounts receivable but also many accounts payable. Cotton thought it wise to serve his new wife by becoming what we may call today the executor of her first husband’s estate. Cotton thought this would be a rather simple affair. He would collect the money due the business and pay whatever outstanding bills came. He was certain that the assets were more than the liabilities. He was wrong. Cotton faced one law suit after another for the last ten years of his life, a time when many men are able to enjoy a relative amount of peace and prosperity. Lydia Lee was unwilling to part with any of her own money to satisfy her first husband’s debts, looking to Cotton to cover them with his meager pastor’s salary. This was both agonizing and humiliating for Cotton, since he had long told his parishioners to refrain from debt, believing that such brought great shame to Christ. Now he was a man in great debt and the whole town new it.
I mentioned earlier his advocacy for small pox inoculations during a terrible epidemic. We now know that Cotton’s views were very progressive and if heeded, then fewer people would have died unnecessarily. But another mark of his suffering and trials was the degree to which the people of Boston, other ministers, and the newspapers in particular were relentless in their criticism of him, suggesting strongly that he keep his views on medicine to himself.
Then there was the case of his wayward son, Increase, nick named Creasy, who held such promise as a scholar and pastor. Creasy had many of the same intellectual gifts of his father and grandfather and was moving toward Harvard and the gospel ministry when he began to lose interest in his studies and the pursuit of God. Finally he dropped out of college and became a sailor, sailing the seas and living the notorious lifestyle of sailors. Cotton tried numerous times to bring his son back to Christ, having him copy his sermon notes, discussing them regularly, praying with and for his son; but nothing seemed to work. Finally after several years of praying and fasting for his son, Cotton received word that his son had died at sea. Later he was told this was a mistake and he rejoiced, only to discover that this too was inaccurate information. Indeed Creasy had died, and Cotton lived with the fear and sorrow that his son had died without Christ, rejecting the very Savior he had earlier said he would serve.
So though Cotton suffered many trials throughout his entire life, the last ten years were the most severe. He faced the big three with relenting pressure- marriage, money, and children. Though filled with sorrow he continued to seek Christ humbly, preaching regularly, serving his congregation, and writing his numerous books.
What Can We Learn From Cotton Mather
It goes without saying, when studying the lives of great men and women, that their many strengths are offset to some degree by their foibles. I have already suggested a number of Cotton’s grave weaknesses, so I will not retell them here. Instead I choose to focus on four of his great strengths, things we ought to emulate ourselves. First is what I call his sanctified scholarship. He was a man of prodigious intellect and this was proven by his large library, fluency in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek, his authorship of 350 books, and his keen interest in medicine. In a day when science was encroaching on absolute truth as it is found in holy scripture, when so many were jettisoning revealed religion, that which is held in the Bible, Mather tried diligently to subject his mind to scripture as his only rule of faith and practice. He did not always succeed, as seen in his major failure in the Salem witch trials, but this generally characterized his life. Those with great intellectual gifts, who are believers in the Lord Jesus, do well to follow his example. He sought to evaluate all areas of life through the lens of scripture, and he never tired, even to the end of his life, to keep up his fluency in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. He was a pastor first but with this came a deep love for theology which pervaded his life. He spent time every day reading theology, studying and meditating on scripture, and writing. All students of God’s word would do well to follow his practice of reading challenging books on theology and the Christian life. Writing also makes an exact person so whether one hopes to be published or not, he should still write.
Second is the blessing of his godly heritage. Both his grandfathers, numerous uncles, and one of his own sons were all in the gospel ministry in New England. More importantly, they were men who lived above reproach, not falling to the numerous temptations which face ministers of the gospel. But even if his heritage had not been the ministry, it is still easy to see how he valued holiness of life and soberness with which one ought to live his life. He sought to pray with his children and instruct them in the Christian life. He took seriously their baptisms into the covenant of grace, and looked for their own salvation in Christ as he did his own. Here is a vision all men ought to seek. Perhaps you did not have the benefit of a godly upbringing, but you now know the vital necessity of one, and you would do well to purpose now that you and your household will serve the Lord. If we are to see the values in our nation return to biblical faith, then it must start at the home, and more specifically it must begin with the heads of our households. Men must put aside the false notion that their job primarily is to make money, that upon arrival at home in the evening, they are free to sit in front of a television and leave the biblical instruction and character development of his children to his wife. Our most valued possession is our children and men must consciously, willfully, and consistently establish their authority as leader of their homes.
Third is Mather’s pursuit of experiential holiness. The tendency of too many biblical scholars is to settle for scholarship devoid of heartfelt passion for Christ. Mather would have none of this. His was a life marked by heart and mind fully devoted to the Lord Jesus and the progress of the gospel. He was very conscience of his propensity for rebellion and outright evil against God. He was vigilant to not allow himself to be placed in compromising circumstances. He practiced the Puritan principle of mortification, putting to death the deeds of the body. He was careful to not feed the evil desires in his heart. He spent long periods daily in prayer and bible study. He fasted regularly, and he interpreted the events of his life in light of God’s dealings with him. He was always searching for a message in whatever trial came his way; and as we have seen, they were many. He kept short accounts with God and regularly confessed his sin to God, and then to those against whom he had sinned. He had a tender conscience which, when violated, gave him no peace until he had settled the issue with God. His deep love was the Lord Jesus Christ, and he sought regularly to develop his relationship with Christ. Mather sought to see God in all of life’s circumstances. When tragedy or trial would strike, he regularly asked himself, “Have I sinned against God? Is He contending with me for some reason?” We would do well to follow Mather’s example.
And fourth is his perseverance under trial. Clearly people of his time experienced death on a regular basis, usually involving their own children. Even though infant mortality was pervasive, surely the pain and sorrow of losing a loved one was always deeply sad to the Puritans. This no doubt was the case with Mather, but while there was sorrow and grief it is clear that such was mitigated. There is no indication in his books or journals of a paralyzing grief or anger when God’s frowning providence fell upon him and his family. Could it be because Mather was so heavenly minded? His trials drove Him to Christ who alone could bring true comfort. He lived as though heaven was as real to him as the Boston in which he lived. He believed in the resurrection of the dead, that due to Christ’s death and resurrection, all who have believed in Him have the promise of eternal life, that at the moment of death they would open their eyes in the glorious presence of the lover of their souls. This made more palatable the bitter pill of death which he so often tasted. We ought to know, even though we have remarkable medical advances and see so little of death on a daily basis, that sooner or later the angel of death will visit us and our loved ones, that the sorrow of trial and tribulation is sure to come. To have a faith firmly grounded on the bigness of the Puritan God and His Christ, would stand us well when those deep waters of trial, tragedy, and death overflow us.
So Cotton Mather was a Puritan enigma. He was a great pastor, preacher, and theologian. He was a wonderful father and husband. He was a scholar and writer who made marvelous contributions to medicine and science. But he was a major player in the Salem witch trials. He could fall into pride, made manifest in the self-promotion of many of his books. He could hold grudges, and speak unkindly of those who disagreed with him. But he was a man who always came back to the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ, knowing that his only boast was in the cross of Christ, to which the world had been crucified to him, and him to the world. May we be inspired, through the ministry of the indwelling Holy Spirit, to follow after the Christ of Cotton Mather.
The Life and Times of Cotton Mather, Kenneth Silverman, Harper and Row, Publishers, New York, 1984.
The American Pietism of Cotton Mather, Richard Lovelace, William Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, MI, 1979.
John Adams of Braintree, Massachusetts, framer of the Declaration of Independence, Ambassador to France, member of the Continental Congress, first Vice President of the United States serving under President George Washington, and second President of the United States was a man largely overlooked by historians for his major contributions to the early history of the United States. He was born of Puritan stock, possessing many of the admirable qualities of those who migrated to Boston with John Winthrop a century earlier. Adams was a man of immeasurable passion which worked for good and ill. This passion led him, on the one hand, to stand for independence from British rule. On the other hand his passion led him to long periods of separation from his wife and children, bringing disastrous results. His passion also led him ever so slowly away from his Puritan roots, no doubt contributing to his propensity for bitterness, rage, ambition, and envy. A survey of the worldly saints of New England would be incomplete without a look at John Adams.
His Early Life
John’s father, John “Deacon” Adams, was a farmer in Braintree, Massachusetts, a devout, well respected man of town. While not a wealthy man Deacon Adams was nonetheless influential in the town of Braintree. Hardly any business transaction took place without his knowledge and approval. The Congregational Church of Braintree, like so many other Congregational Churches of the early 18th century, was the center of the town. All inhabitants were expected to observe the Lord’s Day by attending both Sunday worship services and the Thursday lecture. Deacon Adams was a leader in the Braintree Church which still embraced the old Puritan theology of John Cotton, Increase and Cotton Mather. Deacon Adams married at a relatively old age of 42, marrying Susanna Boylston, a woman nearly twenty years his junior. Within a year John, their first born, was born in October, 1735, and grew up in the midst of the Great Awakening of Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and William and Gilbert Tennant. Two more boys, Thomas and Elihu, followed a few years later. The Deacon and Susanna had decided before John’s birth, that he would receive a quality education. They would make sacrifices to provide for an excellent education for the first born, knowing they could not afford an education for the other children. John first attended a Dame School for boys and girls, taught by a woman in her home. John quickly moved on to the Latin School for boys, a classical education, steeped heavily in grammar, logic, and rhetoric, studying the Greek and Latin classics of antiquity, in the original languages, preparing him for a life in the ministry of the gospel. John hated school and was sluggish in his studies, trying to persuade his father to allow him to quit and help him with the farming chores. The Deacon refused his request and John finally settled into becoming a reasonably successful student, preparing him for Harvard College. He began Harvard at the age of sixteen. By his second year at Harvard, John was convinced that the ministry was not for him. He figured he was too caustic and dogmatic in speech, too much of a loner to make it in the ministry. Besides, he viewed ministers as rather effeminate, not typically given to getting their hands dirty with manual labor, not given to fighting in wars. Instead he thought opening his own law practice was much more to his liking. After graduation from Harvard, John began an apprentice program in Worchester under James Putnam, working his way through the legal textbooks of his day, observing the way his favorite, older attorneys presented their cases before the courts. He set up his practice in Braintree, being able to live at home with his parents, while still working in the nearby Boston judicial district. Finally, after a lean three or four years, he began attracting a substantial number of clients and gained an excellent reputation as an outstanding attorney. By his mid-twenties John was looking for a wife and found himself attracted to a vivacious, outgoing Hannah Quincy. John spent many evenings at the Quincy home, courting Hannah. They both hinted at marriage but John was both shy and uncertain he had the financial stability to become married. Hannah finally grew tired of waiting on John and eventually married Bela Lincoln, a physician, leaving John sorely grieved and disappointed. John’s law practice flourished and he met Abigail Smith, daughter of a minister and nine years his junior. He tended to compare Abigail unfavorably with Hannah, thinking her not as pretty or witty. Finally, however, he convinced himself that Abigail would make an excellent wife. John and Abigail were married in October, 1764. He loved her dearly. They lived in a small house adjacent to his parents’ home in Braintree. Their first born, Abigail, whom they called Nabby, was born a year after their marriage. Three boys- John Quincy, Charles, and Thomas Boylston, were born in quick succession, along with another daughter, Susanna, who lived only two years.
John Adams’ Puritan roots, though wrongly applied, played a major role in shaping his life. The Puritan ethos included the notion of original and actual sin and the need to seek God through Christ to find peace with God for eternal salvation. Though a sovereign work of God’s grace, thus rendering man’s efforts to attain it as ineffectual; nonetheless one was to prepare himself to gain this gift of salvation. This involved self-examination concerning the rebellion of one’s heart plus an earnest desire to repent of sin and purposing to live for Christ through mortification of sin, putting to death the deeds of the body. Adams was given over to long periods of introspection, having an enormous ambition to succeed, to make a name for himself. He regularly doubted the validity of his ambition, but turned the Puritan notion of eternal salvation into an earthly salvation of fame and notoriety. This quest for recognition largely defined his whole life. One cannot well understand Adams’ life without a developed picture of his ambition to make a name for himself. His bouts with depression, anger, and rage, along with his feelings of abandonment by friends, can be traced back to his unfulfilled expectations. He seemed to think, from time to time, that God and his friends had deserted him.
His Political Life
The Stamp Act of 1765, where the British crown placed a duty on all business documents transacted in the colonies, immediately raised the ire of some, including forty-two year old Samuel Adams of Boston. Samuel had been converted to Christ some twenty years earlier under the preaching of George Whitefield and other revival preachers during the Great Awakening. Educated at Harvard, a Boston blueblood, refined, urbane, and well mannered, the older cousin of John Adams, was not much of a business man. He was, however, a born leader. He was concerned with the encroachment of modern ideas which undermined the old Puritan ethos and he saw the Stamp Act as a major threat to old Puritan ways. He believed England’s taxation on the colonies was unjust since the Colonies had no voice before the Crown. He spoke out against the Stamp Act, wrote pamphlets denouncing it, and organized public demonstrations, calling for its repeal. His genius was in his ability to tap into the unrest which both the urbane, well educated Bostonian, as well as the rural, artisan felt. His movement became the popular or Whig party. Samuel Adams was always looking for new leaders for his movement and he succeeded in securing John Hancock, a wealthy Bostonian, to the cause. He worked on his cousin, John, who had written a number of essays in the Boston newspapers, supporting the movement of his cousin. However, at this juncture John was more concerned with building his legal career, fearing too close an association with the Patriot movement would undermine the business success he was beginning to enjoy in his legal practice. John would later trace the birth of the Revolutionary movement to his cousin Samuel in the summer of 1765.
By the late 1760’s John was firmly opposed to British policy in the Colonies but abhorred the rancor and demonstrations which came with increasing frequency. At this time he merely thought the Crown to be misguided, believing they would eventually back off, giving the Colonists an acceptable degree of authority. In February, 1770 an eleven year old boy was killed when a British soldier fired into a crowd of demonstrators in Boston. This was followed by a similar demonstration on March 5 when a crowd of 400 surrounded a British officer and his eight men, taunting them, throwing objects at them, some even urging them to fire at the demonstrators. One of the soldiers panicked and fired a shot, followed by several more volleys. The result was five killed and many more wounded. The Boston Massacre incited the Sons of Liberty even more. John Adams was appointed as defense attorney of both the officer and enlisted men, finally winning an acquittal for all of them. This was remarkable, given the hostile environment in which the trial took place, no doubt a credit to Adams’ ability to defend them and to remain separated from the heat of the moment in Boston. He was able to tear down the prosecution’s argument, that the officer had ordered his men to fire on the crowd.
So what was it that catapulted John Adams into the political fray of the Revolution? The British Crown had passed a new law which stated that the salaries of all Judges would be paid by England. Adams saw this as a further and very dangerous threat to liberty, believing that justice and due process would potentially be compromised. He believed England had gone too far, that they were not merely misguided, but positively denying American liberties and freedom. From this time onward John Adams was on board with the American Revolution.
By 1773 the East India Company had fallen on hard times through mismanagement, and Lord North, the Prime Minister of England, feared that the failure of the company would send shock waves throughout the British economy, causing other businesses to fail. Consequently he pushed through Parliament a bill to give the East India Company exclusive rights to sell tea in America. By cutting out the middle man the price of tea would be lowered significantly, hopefully increasing sales and profit. The duty on the tea, due to increased sales, would also increase tax revenue to England. Samuel Adams and other radicals, when learning of this bill, were outraged and immediately peppered Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, the ports which were to receive the latest shipments of tea, with hand bills denouncing the legislation. The radicals brilliantly summarized the issue under two headings. First, they hit on their earlier theme of the injustice of being taxed when they had no representation or voice in Parliament. Second, they warned business owners that the exclusive rights of selling tea, given by Parliament to the East India Company, could be foisted upon them in their own businesses as well. Their economic livelihood was threatened.
Ships bringing tea to these four American ports landed in the fall of 1773 and local opposition in all four cities slowed or prevented the unloading of the tea. As the Dartmouth lay at anchor in Boston Harbor, a mob of 5000 people met at the South Church, hearing one rousing speech after another, calling for opposition to the monopoly on tea sales. When told that Governor Hutchinson had no intention of backing away from the delivery and sale of the tea in Boston, several men on the night of December 16, dressed as Mohawk Indians, climbed on board the Dartmouth and destroyed over 300 chests of tea, a value today of over $1 million. When Lord North finally heard of the Boston Tea Party a few weeks later, he pushed through Parliament the Coercive Measures which closed down the Boston harbor and demanded full reparations for the tea. Some sided with the British, in hopes of maintaining stability in their businesses, but most defied the action by the Crown.
In the summer of 1774 men were calling for a Continental Congress to meet in Philadelphia, a move toward self-government, what we call the consent of the governed. Samuel Adams knew that his cousin John was important to the Congress because he was not viewed as a radical and was trusted by the business community of Boston. So in August, 1774 John began a three week trip to Philadelphia which would keep him from his family for four months. While John’s law practice kept him from home a few weeks at a time, nothing could compare him for the separation he would now experience over the next fifteen years of his life, years marked by vast amounts of time away from his family.
Word reached Lord North in December, 1774 that the colonists had chosen to defy the Coercive Acts. This meant war. General Gage, the commanding officer of the British forces in Boston, was told to seize the Colonists’ arsenal at Concord, Massachusetts, twenty miles west of Boston. On April 14, 1775 eight hundred British troops marched toward Concord, meeting a company of Minutemen, one-tenth the size of the British troops. The Colonists parted, allowing the British to pass through. Shots range out from the Minutemen and the British returned fire. Eight British soldiers were killed with a similar number of Colonists being killed. Paul Revere and William Davies rode ahead of the approaching British forces, alerting the Patriots along the way to Concord. At Concord the British seized a portion of the arsenal but paid a heavy price with seventy-three soldiers killed in the confrontation, many being ambushed by sharp-shooters as the British, in their red coats, marched by. The Colonists lost a similar number of men.
Before returning to Philadelphia for another session of the Continental Congress, John Adams toured the battlegrounds at Lexington and Concord. He then made his way to the Congress where debate centered on whether or not to declare independence. A cautious contingency wanted to extend an olive branch of peace to the British, despite the protests of John and Samuel Adams and others. The Congress also elected George Washington as the Commander of the Colonial Army.
By the spring of 1776 American forces had driven the British forces out of Boston, with them retreating to Nova Scotia to regroup in order to further the conflict. They were expected to attack New York City and Washington’s men prepared the defense fortifications for the city. By this time the Olive Branch Petition had been rejected by the British. This convinced even the most cautious to move toward independence. The Congress appointed John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston to draft a resolution declaring their independence from British rule. This was late June, 1776. By then the middle colonies, especially Pennsylvania which had been reluctant to move forward with independence, were on board with New England and the southern colonies. All were in agreement to declare their independence from British rule. On June 28 Thomas Jefferson put a draft of the statement before John Adams who, not wanting to slow down the process with semantics, made only slight word and grammatical alterations. The rest of their committee then approved the document, with it being put before the Continental Congress on July 1, 1776. James Dickinson spoke passionately against the motion for independence, arguing that it would bring death to many, that America was too weak to become her own nation. After this speech John Adams rose to counter Dickinson’s points, giving what many consider the greatest speech of his career. He spoke with great passion and logic, one by one, tearing down Dickinson’s arguments. He reminded the Congress of recent events, including the rejection of the Olive Branch Petition, the long history of taxation without representation, and the general disregard the British Parliament and Crown had for their views and requests. Adams sat down after an hour and a hush fell upon the room. The motion for independence passed easily and men of the Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1176. It is now obvious how much respect the Congress had for John Adams, just as his professors and tutors at Harvard recognized his character combined with intellect, just as his law clients saw his genius, just as Samuel Adams and John Hancock admired his intellect and ability to win favor with his arguments. The signers of the Declaration of Independence respected him, listened to him, and acted upon his speech to move forward. John believed that the day the vote was taken, July 2, would always be remembered as a day of thanksgiving to God, a day of celebration with guns, games, sports, bells, and bonfires.
John Adams was a man of great intellect who rose every morning at 4 a.m., retiring the night before at 10 p.m., spending the early morning hours reading the great works of literature. He was a typical New Englander- aloof, reserved, not very approachable, though he did have many friends. His great character flaw was his volcanic temper which could erupt at any moment, even at the slightest provocation. He could be irascible and argumentative. A recurring theme of his life was his extended periods of separation from Abigail and his children. At times he obviously missed Abigail, writing an average of two letters per week to her, sometimes expressing his deep and abiding love for her. At other times he would go months without writing her, even as she wrote him constantly. There is no indication of sexual impropriety on his part, nor on Abigail’s during these long periods of separation. Although it is clear that Abigail carried on a rather intimate correspondence with James Lovell, a Massachusetts member of the Continental Congress. Lovell was a charming man, very much a womanizer. Both Lovell and Abigail made coy innuendos in their correspondence, but nothing ever came of their relationship. It appears that Abigail had emotional needs which John was neglecting by his long periods of separation from her. Perhaps a weaker woman would have yielded to the overtures made by the flirtacious Lovell.
John was appointed by Congress in 1780 to serve with Benjamin Franklin as an ambassador to France, replacing Silas Deane of Connecticut, a man who had presumed upon his office by commissioning several French officers to serve in the Continental Army, thus incurring the wrath of George Washington. Abigail was furious with Congress for electing John to this post, knowing that he would accept and that their long periods of separation of eight to ten months at a time while John was in Philadelphia with the Congress, would turn into several years at a time in France. She finally relented and John sailed with ten year old John Quincy on a six week voyage. John found it difficult to work with Franklin who was living it up in Paris at America’s expense, partaking regularly of expensive wines and rich food. John saw Franklin as worldly, ineffective, and much too accommodating of France’s reluctance to support the American war effort.
By July, 1780 John was directed to Amsterdam to secure trade agreements with the Dutch, who were pro-English, and to secure a $10 million loan. John was also appointed by Congress as the sole negotiator of a peace agreement with England, if ever that time would come. In November, 1781, John got word of his long awaited hope. Washington and Rochambeau trapped Cornwallis’ army on the York Peninsula near Williamsburg, VA; and after a three week siege Cornwallis finally surrendered his 7000 troops, thus marking the end to the war for independence. There had been many close calls, nearly necessitating the surrender of Washington’s army but on every occasion remarkable manifestations of a gracious providence seemed to intervene on behalf of America. At Brooklyn in August, 1776 the weak, cowardly, and undisciplined Continental Army was repeatedly routed. On one occasion a very heavy fog lay over Manhattan from dawn until near noon, allowing Washington’s army to escape westward without British knowledge. By the fall of 1777 British forces had entered Philadelphia, causing the Congress to flee to Trenton. When all seemed to be lost, the Continental Army gained a remarkable victory at Saratoga, bringing the loss of 5800 British soldiers. Even for the most skeptical patriots of the day the intervention on their behalf of Deity seemed undeniable. After several years in Paris and Amsterdam, John returned home with his family (Abigail had finally convinced John to allow her to cross the Atlantic with the rest of their children). He was a hero for negotiating a peace treaty with England.
The new American government was established with the election of George Washington as President by the Electoral College in March, 1789. John Adams received the second highest number of votes and was thus elected as Vice President. Washington and Adams were both sworn into their respective offices in April, 1789, about the time the French Revolution was gaining steam in Paris. John Adams was among the first in America to see through the veil of its false respectability and to see it for what it was- a reckless, godless movement of people given over to anarchy. Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, lauded the French Revolution as a wonderful democratic movement. He later backed away from his wholesale endorsement of it. To be sure there was much wrong with France, including the shameless opulence of the nobility and Roman Catholic Church at the expense of the poor; but Adams saw the Revolution as very much different from the American Revolution. Nonetheless the French Revolution profoundly affected Adams, moving him both to a Federalist view of government (emphasis on a centralized federal government) and to a monarchical flavor where the President ought to be called “His Highness”, maintaining the aura of a King. Southerners like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington disagreed with the Federalist position and desired a more de-centralized, states rights approach to governance.
By this time Nabby, John and Abigail’s daughter, had married Colonel William Smith, a most impressive young man, who eventually proved to be a terrible failure in business pursuits, going for one failed land acquisition after another, plunging his wife and children into shame and poverty. John Quincy continued to progress in his career, first in law and later in politics, being appointed by President Washington as the American Ambassador to The Hague, being appointed in 1816 as President James Madison’s Secretary of State, and being elected as President of the United States in 1824. John and Abigail’s second son, Charles, developed a drinking problem, becoming an alcoholic, and died during John’s Presidency. John disowned Charles, never visiting him or communicating with him in the last several months of his illness. Their other son, Peter Boylston, had a similar drinking problem but kept it in check, still failing as an attorney to reach the level of success John had expected. Nabby’s health deteriorated due to breast cancer after John’s retirement from politics and died a very painful death, leaving her children destitute due to her husband’s failures with money.
John was elected the second President of the United States in 1796 and served for one term, negotiating a peace treaty with Napoleon and France, incurring the wrath and disdain of his political party in general, and Alexander Hamilton in particular. He was so unpopular as President that it became a foregone conclusion he would not win a second term. He was defeated in the 1800 election by Thomas Jefferson and left Washington D.C., the new capital, in March, 1801, his political career behind him.
His Retirement Life
The first several years of his retirement yielded depression, a sense of failure, and abandonment by his friends. At this time he commenced writing his autobiography and while he had several stops and starts in writing it over the next decade, he eventually abandoned the project altogether. He probably began it as a means to heal his damaged emotions, but lost interest over the years. Nonetheless historians have found his unfinished autobiography immensely helpful in sorting out the details of his life and times. Finally, after several good years of writing, reading, and farming his land, John began attending local July 4th celebrations, eventually taking a more active role by speaking at them. He still had long periods where he felt forgotten, bitter over how his political career ended, worrying about how negatively history would remember him.
He began a regular correspondence in 1811 with his old political nemesis Thomas Jefferson and this lasted to their deaths in 1826. As many as 109 letters were written by Adams and we know of 49 written by Jefferson. Adams’ letters tended to have a more contentious tone to them, perhaps explaining why Jefferson wrote half the number of Adams. A genuine love and respect, however, was kindled within both of them for each other.. Adams still considered Jefferson terribly irreligious, but respected him as a great statesman and friend.
Abigail, though nine years younger than John, became ill first, dying after a lengthy bout with typhoid fever in October, 1818 at the age of seventy-four. They had been married for fifty-four years. John was devastated by his loss. The long years of separation due to politics were long past, and the retirement years had rekindled their love and respect for each other.
His Religious Life
Though John Adams came from conservative Calvinistic and Puritan stock and attended church twice on Sundays all his life when in Braintree, he increasingly became cynical of Christianity, being convinced that it was largely culpable for many of the problems in the world. He began wondering if the sincerity of so many non-Christians proved the general equity of any sincere, religious conviction. He read all twelve volumes of the French work by Charles Francois Despuis entitled Origine de tous les cultes, a rationalistic (meaning anti-supernatural, anti-Christian) survey of religion and superstition; and came out the other side a confirmed skeptic. He had also drank deeply for some time from the teaching of William Ellery Channing, the architect of Unitarianism, who grew up listening to the sermons of Samuel Hopkins in Newport, Rhode Island. Hopkins was a great Calvinistic preacher, the first biographer of Jonathan Edwards. When the Puritan preacher Jedidiah Morse, father of artist and inventor of the telegraph, Samuel F.B. Morse, took to task Channing and then Adams’ preacher at Braintree, Lemuel Briant, for their Unitarianism, Adams sided with Channing and his pastor. Unitarianism is a belief system which denies the Trinity, the deity of Christ, the substitutionary atoning death of Christ, original sin, hell, and the reality of the devil. It also denies the necessity of the new birth by the Holy Spirit where the rebellious heart is transformed by an act of God’s grace. In its place Unitarianism teaches the perfectability of man through education. By 1804, several years before Adams became a confirmed Unitarian, Harvard, the once strong bastion of Puritan Calvinism, had appointed a Unitarian to the chair of theology. The influence of Unitarianism through Harvard cannot be underestimated for its impact on American thought. To this day Unitariansim hangs like a dark cloud over New England, flavoring all of life.
John had been seriously ill for many months. His eyesight had failed him a number of years before and his beloved hobby of reading was no longer possible, though he begged anyone he could find to read to him for long periods of time. In his illness John was visited regularly by his son, Peter, and his grandchildren, especially George Washington Adams, a student at nearby Harvard. In late June, 1826, the end was near. Finally on July 4, 1826 John Adams lay in a coma at his home in Braintree. He had been in a coma for several days and around 1 p.m., the time of Jefferson’s death, he awoke and said, “Thomas Jefferson survives.” At Monticello, his friend, nemesis, and correspondent died at 12:50 p.m., with John dying a few hours later. Two of the great architects of the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence, two former Presidents, both died on the same day on the Fourth of July. Both also died with the same religious skepticism.
The Character of John Adams, by Peter Shaw, published by the Institute of Early American History and Culture, by The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1976.
John Adams, A Life, by John Ferling, The University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 1992.
John Adams, by David McCullough, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2001.
Henry Ward Beecher, the great preacher, orator, and writer was easily the most well known and popular American preacher of the 19th century. Beecher was born in Litchfield, CT in 1813 at a tumultuous time in American history. The War of 1812 was raging and the new republic called the United States of America was struggling, teetering, and there was no assurance at the time that it would survive. Economic hardship was a reality in New England, making life hard for the large Beecher family of ten children, trying to live on a pastor’s salary. In fact in the sixteen years Lyman, Henry’s father, was a Pastor in Litchfield, the church not once raised his salary. Litchfield was a study in philosophical and theological contrast. Lyman Beecher, the pastor of the Congregational Church in Litchfield, which by the way is the most photographed church in the United States, was a Puritan of Puritans, one deeply committed to the Reformed doctrines of original sin, total inability to believe the gospel on one’s own initiative, predestination, and the sufficiency of Christ’s atoning death to take away sin and God’s righteous judgment. Due to Lyman Beecher’s preaching power, many in Litchfield followed the old New England Puritanism; but there was what some would call a more progressive side to life in Litchfield. The first law school in America was there, the Tapping Reeve Law School and young men from all over the country and Europe, including John C. Calhoun, later the great antebellum Senator from South Carolina, studied there. The Sarah Pierce Female Academy was also in Litchfield and it served as a finishing school for young women, from both the north and south. While it is inaccurate to say that Tapping Reeve and Sarah Pierce were antithetical to Lyman Beecher it is still true that they were a bit more liberal in their views on life and the importance of religion.
Life was strict in the Lyman Beecher household. The children were to honor the Lord’s Day by resting, reading the Bible and studying the Shorter Catechism of the Westminster Confession of Faith, they were forbidden from playing on that day, and they attended worship services both morning and afternoon. Not being able to recite the appropriate Shorter Catechism question on Sundays would mean the child would not receive dinner that day. Henry later said as an adult he wondered how the sun could linger so long in the sky on Sundays, meaning he was not free to play until the sun had set on the Lord’s Day. The family did not observe a celebration of Christmas. No real Puritan households would in that day.
It is within this context that Henry Ward Beecher was born and would become the most popular man in America in the 19th century, surpassing Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville. Due to his preaching, publishing, and lectures he was a very wealthy man. In 1865 a publisher advanced him $24,000 to write a novel, and his salary was $12,000 per year in 1865. Economists can use GDP per capita to compare different incomes over time, and this is an economy’s average output per person which is closely correlated with average income. Using this formula the advance to write the novel would amount to $3.67 million and his annual salary would be $1.8 million. Beecher also had numerous legal battles later in life and his church in Brooklyn covered his legal fees of $100,000. In today’s dollars this would be $15.2 million. With all his gifts, however, Henry Ward Beecher ought to be a sober warning for all preachers of the gospel, for a slide from the Puritanism of his youth led, by the end of his life, to a denial of cardinal doctrines and lifestyle which his father and heritage held dear.
Beecher’s Ecclesiastical Pedigree
Lyman Beecher, the last of the New England Puritans, as he was called, was a powerful preacher and theologian, used mightily of God in revival preaching, following in the train of Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield. Early in his ministry Lyman Beecher held firmly to the traditional Calvinistic and Reformed doctrines on which New England was established when John Winthrop and John Cotton came to the Massachusetts Bay in 1630. In fact when Charles Finney, born in Bethlehem, CT, began preaching in New York, Beecher and Asahel Nettleton, who had preached for Beecher at Litchfield, called a conference in 1827, where the preaching and theology of Finney were condemned. Beecher wrote Finney, “You mean to come into Connecticut, and to carry a streak of fire to Boston. But if you attempt it, as the Lord liveth, I’ll meet you at the state line, and call out all the artillerymen, and fight every inch of the way to Boston, and I’ll fight you there.” Later, when Lyman Beecher became a preacher in Boston at a new Congregational Church he softened on his views, inviting Finney to preach, and became a proponent of Finney’s new measures. Lyman answered the Lord’s call to pastor this new Church in the north of Boston at the age of 50, an age when many men are contemplating retirement. Earlier, at least eighty Congregational Churches had left their Reformed and Calvinistic orthodoxy and embraced Unitarianism. Henry was at a boarding school at the time. Lyman’s intention was to win back Boston from the Unitarians. Those Congregationalists who had become weary of Puritanism had softened their message, denying the doctrine of original sin, predestination, and the necessity of Christ’s atoning work to win favor with God. In fact by 1804 Harvard University had a Unitarian Board of Directors and Lyman Beecher meant to change this trend. Beecher was a political activist who campaigned for temperance and morality, organizing while in Litchfield, the Connecticut Society for the Suppression of Vice and Promotion of Good Morals. This spawned similar organizations throughout New England and he brought this movement with him to Boston. While many in Boston loved and admired Beecher there were many more who despised him and his message
Henry Ward Beecher was one of seven children born to Lyman and Roxana Foote Beecher, a very well educated woman. One of their children died in infancy and when Henry was four years old his mother died after a short illness. Lyman was remarried a short time afterward to Harriet Porter of Portland, ME who bore three more children. Roxana’s children never accepted Harriet as their mother and she later died also, a broken and unhappy woman.
The Beecher children were remarkable for their intellectual prowess and accomplishments throughout life. Isabella Beecher Hooker was a primary mover with Susan B. Anthony in the women’s rights issues of the 1860’s, 70’s. Charles Beecher, who early on was an agnostic came to faith through Henry’s influence and later entered the gospel ministry. Thomas Beecher also came to faith through Henry’s influence and entered the ministry as well. William Beecher became President of Illinois College. Mary Beecher Perkins married a well to do attorney from Connecticut and threw herself in politics, especially the women’s rights movment. Catherine, who never married, founded a women’s school in Hartford. And of course Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry’s sister who was not quite two years older than him, became well known in the early 1850’s as the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Henry and Harriet were inseparable throughout their lives and encouraged each other, especially in their teens and twenties, by writing each other incessantly.
While Henry and his siblings grew up in a Puritan home it is clear that all of the children eventually rejected the teachings of their father and mother. In fact the Princeton Review, writing in the late 1860’s, said that the Beecher children had done more to destroy Calvinism than anyone. Just like most movements, there are good and bad with Puritanism. The good was its commitment to Biblical inerrancy, that the bible is authoritative, the final rule of true Christian faith and practice, that it is reliable, and can be trusted. It also stressed what theologians call the doctrines of grace, that man’s fall into sin was so comprehensive and debilitating, that he can only find peace with God through the sovereign electing grace of God, sending His Son, Jesus Christ, to die for the sins of those whom He chose, having this salvation applied to the person in God’s time, through the ministry of the Holy Spirit. Puritanism also urged education on all people, developing a learned and well read society, urging godly living and holiness of life and character. The bad is Puritanism’s tendency to legislate holiness, requiring godly behavior from all people, regardless of whether or not they have been born again through the work of the Holy Spirit. It is one thing to expect, to demand obedience to God’s law, as a means of maintaining a just and law abiding culture, but it is quite another to demand observance of the Lord’s Day and the more specific trappings of Christianity from those with no interest in Christ and His church.
Lyman Beecher, who believed in what some call immediacy, that one can have an encounter with God which immediately changes that person, was constantly urging faith and repentance on his children, warning them of the horrors of hell if they did not choose Christ. Henry alternated in his early years between extreme guilt that he had no real interest in Christ and a don’t care attitude. He both feared and greatly respected his father but he could not stir up a zeal for God. While at the Mt. Pleasant boarding school in high school, Henry had what he thought was a religious encounter. A revival had come to the school and a number of students had come under conviction of sin with a consequent desire to follow Christ. Henry wrote his father, telling him of his experience and Lyman was ecstatic, urging him to return home to Boston where he could take his first communion. Henry obediently came home for communion and he says that he felt terribly guilty, that he was unworthy, that the fires of following Christ had largely died by the time he came to communion. What should have been a glorious experience turned out to be a confusing one for him.
After his graduation from Mt. Pleasant it was off to college. Lyman wanted Henry to attend Yale College, where he and two of his older sons, had gone, but Lyman was concerned about some of the influences at Yale. Young men from the south were there and often brought a degree of chivalry and honor which expressed itself in dueling and revelry. Lyman did not wish to expose his son to this. Besides a Yale education was very expensive. Amherst College had recently begun to prepare men for the gospel ministry, and it was a response to the problems rampant at Harvard College where Unitarianism was firmly ensconced. Amherst College in the 1830’s was a hot bed of evangelical faith and Lyman decided this was the place for Henry. Henry struggled at first, feeling ill prepared for a college education, especially in Latin and Greek, but he soon found his way. He never, however, mastered mathematics and his professors finally gave up on calling on him in class. Henry’s quick wit, ability to make friends, his sense of humor, and his comedy routines, especially in imitating his father and professors, made him a very popular young man. After his freshman year at Amherst, while making his way home to Boston for the summer, he stayed a few days with a friend from college at their home in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. While there Henry met Eunice Bullard, the sister of his friend. They fell in love, becoming engaged to be married the next year. They were engaged for nearly seven years. Eunice’s father refused to allow her to marry Henry until he had finished college and seminary.
His Life in the West
Upon graduation from Amherst, Henry made his way west to Cincinnati to Lane Seminary, a Presbyterian seminary founded by the money of Lewis Tappan of New York City. Lane Seminary lured Lyman Beecher west to establish and run the seminary. Life in the west was exceedingly difficult for Lyman and those of his family who followed him there. They were accustomed to a more refined, better educated people, those who were generally committed to Congregationalism or Presbyterianism. They found Cincinnati to be a taste of the wild west. The people were uncouth, lawless, irreligious, and the living conditions were atrocious. Malaria was a constant problem. But due to Lyman Beecher’s name the seminary grew rapidly and soon was filled with students studying for the gospel ministry. During his last years in Boston, under the influence of Charles Finney, Lyman had thrown away his Old School Presbyterian views (strict adherence to the Westminster Confession of Faith) and embraced what was called New School Presbyterianism. New School Presbyterians had imbibed of what was called the New Haven theology of Yale and Amherst College which took a more lax view of the Westminster Confession of Faith which made itself known in political activism, a denial of original sin, and a denial that the fall into sin had completely rendered man incapable of choosing to follow Christ. In other words, New School Presbyterianism opened the door to the new measures of Charles Finney where direct appeals to one’s will could enable the person to choose to follow Jesus.
Almost immediately two problems arose for Lyman Beecher as President of Lane Seminary. The first was a charge of heresy leveled against him by Old School Presbyterians in the Ohio synod of the Presbyterian Church. This was quite ironic since only a few years before Lyman Beecher was the poster boy of Old School Presbyterianism but there is no doubt his theological views had changed and ministers in Ohio sensed it almost immediately. However a long heresy trial finally acquitted Lyman Beecher. He was brought to trial a year or so later and again was acquitted.
A bigger challenge, however, was the growing abolitionist movement in New England which had made its way west. Theodore Weld, a student at Lane Seminary, soon caused turmoil by calling the Lane students to support the abolition of slavery. While Lyman Beecher was somewhat sympathetic to the abolitionist movement he could by no means be called an abolitionist. Hearings were held at the seminary which polarized the seminary community and the citizens of Cincinnati, which as people of the day noted, was on the north side of the Ohio River but faced south. Lyman moved too slowly to address the problem and when he did, his compromise angered students on both sides of the issue, resulting in a mass exodus from Lane Seminary.
But Lane is where Henry came upon graduation from Amherst and he immediately put himself into his studies, especially benefiting from the teaching of Calvin Stowe, who later married Henry’s sister, Harriet. Calvin Stowe encouraged Henry to read many of the German theologians of the day who were espousing new views on Biblical interpretation. Henry many years later remarked, when asked about God’s call into the gospel ministry, that it must have been fate, that he never really thought much about it, that his brothers were almost all in the ministry, that his father had always expected him to follow him as a preacher, and that it just seemed like the right thing to do.
While at Lane Seminary Henry tutored several teen aged girls, spending a great deal of time with them. They developed crushes on him, and he was warned by many that he was becoming too close to them, especially since he was engaged to be married to Eunice. He laughed at such nonsense. It is clear, however, that Henry had a perpetual problem from this time forward, throughout his life, of becoming too friendly with women. There is no indication that any illicit sexual activity took place between Henry and these young women, but these sorts of charges would later cloud his life.
Upon his graduation from Lane Seminary in 1837, at the age of twenty-four, Henry took a call as the pastor of a small Presbyterian Church in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, a town on the Ohio River, not far from Cincinnati. Henry faced a number of Old School Presbyterian elders in his ordination exam, and they were ready to pounce on him, as they had his father. To their amazement, Henry sounded very orthodox and he passed their examination without incident. However, the next day, a motion was made to suspend Henry’s ordination until further study could be given to his views. Apparently, after further reflection on some of his rather vague or general answers to specific questions, some were not so sure about his theological orthodoxy. When told that his ordination would have to wait, Henry refused to go through with the process. He came back to his church, informing them of his treatment before the Presbytery. The church quickly withdrew from the presbytery and became an Independent Presbyterian Church.
A few months later he made his way to Massachusetts to marry Eunice. After a quick ceremony and honeymoon in New York City, they made their way by train, boat, and stagecoach to Lawrenceburg. A child was born to them less than a year after they married and life was miserable there for Eunice. The humidity, heat, and malaria took their toll on her. She aged very quickly and due to the ravages of malaria, lost most of her teeth. Henry developed an uncanny ability of neglecting his wife, spending long periods of time with other women, talking with townspeople, writing for the local newspaper, and generally doing everything he could to stay away from home. Apparently Eunice did not know how to confront Henry or else he refused to listen to her. Eunice increasingly became despondent and withdrew from Henry and the life of the church. This was a problem which would plague them the rest of their lives.
After only a few years in Lawrenceburg, Henry’s fame as a preacher had spread to nearby towns and cities and he was often asked to preach revival services in other places. On one occasion a prominent newspaper man from Indianapolis heard Henry preach, and finally persuaded him to become the pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church, of Indianapolis. So Henry and his young family moved to Indianapolis and enjoyed a hefty increase in salary and saw a vibrant ministry for several years. The church grew remarkably under his leadership. Many said that he was unlike any preacher they had ever heard or known. He described himself as funny, not at all morose, that he wanted people to know the love of God. Henry had a remarkable ability to connect with people, to find what moved them, to identify with it, and to bring home the love of God and the work of Jesus Christ to them. Later in life he became very good friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. Many who knew all three men said that Henry Ward Beecher preached Emerson and Whitman, that he drew heavily from them in his preaching and writing.
His preaching was certainly not Old School Presbyterianism. It was not the orthodox, historical preaching of the day done by men like James Henley Thornwell, Charles Hodge, Charles Spurgeon, or Gardner Spring. At the base of Henry Ward Beecher’s preaching was a theology of the goodness of man. He was very optimistic about the good mankind could do if he set his mind on good things. While once on a train, making a trip to a speaking engagement, a young man came to him burdened about his soul. Beecher told him to not to worry about his condition, that God loved him, and that as long as he was sincere in his beliefs, God would surely accept him.
Finally, after several years in Indianapolis Charles Bowen, a wealthy businessman from New York City, encouraged Beecher to take the call to become pastor of the Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn. Bowen and several other wealthy businessmen in the Plymouth Church had built a huge new building and needed a great preacher to fill it. Eventually Henry agreed to come and moved with Eunice and their children to Brooklyn where his salary was doubled to $6000 per year.
His Life’s Work at Brooklyn
Henry Ward Beecher answered the call of the Plymouth Church of Brooklyn to become their pastor in 1847. He came with little money and his accent, dress, and homely appearance at first caused many to mock him. Soon after his arrival he faced a theological examination by the Congregational Church pastors of his region. When asked if he believed in the doctrine of original sin he remarked that he had not thought much about it, since he saw so much present sin in his own life. When asked if he believed in the doctrine of predestination, that God predestined certain ones to heaven, a doctrine strictly held to in his day by Congregationalist pastors, he answered vaguely, saying that he did not think too much about theology because he wanted to focus his attention of loving people and showing them the love of Jesus. There was some opposition to Henry’s approval before the examining committee, but he was finally approved, largely because he was so winsome, so engaging, and so able to win people to his position by the sheer weight of his personality. Immediately the church began to grow numerically. Within a year or two the church was packed with those wanting to hear the great Henry Ward Beecher preach. A woman named Susan Howard wrote a letter in 1847 to her brother, saying that she had been unable to write due to a thousand distractions and if she was to reduce them to one it had to be Beecher, Beecher, BEECHER! She told him that Henry Ward Beecher had become a subject of universal interest in Brooklyn and New York City and that people were flocking to his church out of curiosity. She said to her brother, “Don’t ask me what I think of him, for I can’t tell you, for the life of me. I only know that I am intensely interested.” Many of the local pastors opposed him, perhaps were even jealous of his popularity; and he was routinely criticized in the local press; but all these things only added to his mystique and caused many more to come to the Plymouth Church and hear him preach. Almost all said that they had never heard such a preacher. He was engaging, entertaining, a great orator.
By the time Beecher had become a preacher in Brooklyn he had given himself over to preaching politics from the pulpit, and of course the raging issue of the late 1840’s and 1850’s was the abolitionist movement. This had been brewing in New England since 1835 when William Lloyd Garrison began calling for the immediate abolishment of slavery. Beecher picked up on this theme and regularly called for it. On several occasions he would hold, as a part of the worship service, mock slave auctions, at times having runaway slaves standing in front of his wealthy congregation. He would verbally paint a picture of the slave’s wretched existence, calling his people to give the money necessary to buy the slave’s freedom. In the 1856 election, the first when a Republican ran for President, he took a leave of absence from his church and campaigned for several months, giving speeches throughout New England and New York, urging people to vote for John C. Fremont. During the riots and violence in Kansas on the free or slave state issue, Beecher held a rally in New Haven, CT to raise money to arm the Connecticut Kansas Colony with rifles to defend themselves against pro-slavery zealots in Kansas. Beecher promised that for every dollar raised to buy a rifle, his church would match it. People began referring to the Sharp rifles sent to Kansas as Beecher’s Bibles and the Plymouth Church as the Church of the Holy Rifles. After the War Between the States, Beecher took up the cause of women’s rights, though not with the same zeal, becoming friends with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In 1863 Beecher made a speaking tour of England at the time the English government was seriously considering the support of the Confederate States of America in their battle to remain a separate country. Many, including President Abraham Lincoln, attribute the refusal of England to side with the South to Beecher who swayed the English with oratory, stressing the injustice of slavery and the damage secession had done to the United States.
Three things would make one famous in the 19th century- the pulpit, the platform, and the press and Henry Ward Beecher had all three of them. I have told you about his pulpit eloquence but he also was invited in the early 1850’s to speak to a literary society in Boston and was paid $25.00. His speech was such a success that many more invitations quickly followed, and since travel by train was easy in that part of the country, he was able to make several speeches every week, from New York to Boston to Hartford to New Haven to Baltimore and to Washington D.C. He was paid handsomely for his efforts and this stroked his ego. Eunice was not happy with how much he was away from her and their children but Henry either did not notice or did not care. His church did not mind either. Henry had never been one for pastoral visitation anyway. Besides, the church was packed on Sunday morning and evening.
Newspapers in the 19th century were the major means of communication and building public opinion and New York City had two major papers in the 1850’s, the New York Tribune, edited by James Gordon Bennet and the New York Herald, edited by Horace Greeley. The New York Times did not come on the scene until 1851 and was not a major influence at the time. All these newspapers covered Beecher heavily and each therefore added to his mystique and influence. Lewis Tappen and Henry Bowen, members of the Plymouth Church, and wealthy businessmen had considered for many years founding a newspapers to promote their two pet causes- abolitionism and Congregationalism. With Henry Ward Beecher as their pastor, the great communicator, they believed they could be successful. They launched their newspaper, the Independent, in 1848 and it immediately garnered a huge circulation. Beecher wrote one article per week and was paid handsomely for his efforts, though he was a notorious and chronic procrastinator and often missed his deadlines, causing no small amount of anxiety and frustration to Bown and Tappen. Beecher’s sermons were also transcribed and put into book form and sold very well, not to mention a collection of his sayings which made two books.
Due to Beecher’s large salary and additional income through the platform and press the once poor preacher had become quite wealthy. He became an art lover and constantly was buying up expensive artwork as he walked the streets of New York City. His lifelong love for books and the money to buy them, gave him reason to frequent the bookstores of Manhattan where he bought the latest books on a whole array of subjects and read them. He did not limit himself to theology or Christian themes, but read widely on the new views of science, history, and philosophy. He also bought a home in Lennox, MA where he became good friends with Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorn, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Greenleaf Wittier. Melville and Hawthorn, who both had Puritan upbringing and rejected the old historic faith by the time Beecher met them, but this did not bother him for he delighted in their company and stimulating conversation. Melville said that the fine points of theology was like someone who had small pox. It was of great interest to the one who had it, but to all others it was at best a curiosity.
Eunice spent a great deal of time at Lennox in the Berkshires, no doubt because there was not much to their marriage. Henry almost completely ignored her, spending most of his time walking the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn, looking for books and art work, or visiting several different female members of his congregation, often staying late into the night with them in their parlors. Eventually they sold their Lennox home and built a dream house, a mansion really, in Peekskill. Eunice also had a place in Florida where she often spent the winters.
One cannot fully understand Henry Ward Beecher without considering the scandal of adultery which plagued him throughout his life and ministry. Henry Bowen, who at first was his greatest supporter, later became terribly disenchanted with him, not only for his financial mismanagement, but also for his way with the ladies. Bowen at one point claimed that on any given Sunday evening, Beecher preached to seven or eight mistresses. None of Beecher’s alleged affairs were proven, but certainly there was the appearance of sexual impropriety. The first case was while he was Pastor in Indianapolis with a young woman from his church. Later a young and aspiring poet, Edna Dean Proctor, began attending the Plymouth Church and became infatuated with Beecher. She wrote down his pithy sayings from his sermons and published them. She also began writing for the Independent and was quickly noted as a rising star in literature. Miss Proctor lived with the Henry Bowen family and Beecher frequently visited her. On one occasion, while the Bowen family was away, Beecher after a lengthy visit, rose to leave and she kissed him, accordingly to Beecher. Proctor then says Beecher forced her to sexual relations with him. This occurred, more or less against her will, a second time within a week, and then more frequently, with her full consent for over a year. Beecher vehemently denied having sexual intercourse with her or violating any other woman, for that matter.
Then there was the very close relationship Beecher had with Chloe Beach, the young wife of good friend and parishioner Moses Sperry Beach, a prosperous business man in Brooklyn. Moses Beach was very aware of the close relationship his wife and Beecher had and became terribly depressed by it on several occasions. Finally he moved his wife and children away from Brooklyn, but returned them a few years later, being dissatisfied from his absence from Beecher’s preaching. The rumor of the day was that Beecher had fathered a child by Chloe, a girl named Violet, and it is at least clear that she bore a strong resemblance to Beecher and he remained very fond of her all her days.
But the biggest scandal and claim of adultery was with Elizabeth Tilton, the wife of one time friend of Beecher Theodore Tilton. Tilton had tied his career to Beecher’s popularity and became, in his right, an accomplished author and public speaker. Supposedly an adulterous affair between Beecher and Elizabeth Tilton began in the the 1870’s and Elizabeth finally admitted it to Henry Bowen. You remember Bowen had heard through Edna Proctor of an affair with Beecher, and Bowen immediately confronted Beecher with the accusation which he denied. Beecher supposedly later admitted his guilt in a letter which was destroyed before its contents became public. By this time the New York City newspapers were all over the story which garnered attention for months. Eventually a very public civil trial began in January, 1875 which in the end found Beecher not guilty. The star of the trial, which sounds like a media feeding frenzy of today, was Eunice, Beecher, Henry’s wife who came daily and sat with dignity, standing behind her man. While Henry was never found guilty of adultery in this or any other case, for that matter, his career for a season, at least, was ruined. It was ruined outside of his church, that is. His congregation almost universally believed him and supported him, even coughing up $100,000 in legal fees, an absolutely exorbitant fee for that time.
Speaking of Eunice, this is a good time to say a few words about her. She was a very unhappy woman. Due to her bouts with malaria while living in Ohio and Indiana, she had aged very quickly. On one occasion, early in their marriage, while Henry and Eunice were traveling together a woman told Eunice that she must be very proud of her son who showed such obvious kindness to her. Eunice lost her teeth due to the malaria and was anything but the gregarious, outgoing person her husband was. She increasingly withdrew from the congregation in Brooklyn and did her own thing. No doubt she was at fault to some degree but it must be said also that Henry paid little attention to her. He did not nurture her spiritual or emotional life. They grew apart in the succeeding years of their marriage to a point where they would spend months apart from each other. It is also clear that Eunice failed to confront Henry about his neglect of her. Probably her way of handling their issues was common in her day, but she allowed a strong willed, powerful man to live as he pleased without regard to her or their children.
She rarely traveled with Henry but after the Tilton affair, when their finances were in ruins, he accepted a speaking tour to the west. Eunice did accompany him on this tour but complained bitterly in letters to her friend, and Henry’s, the supposed adulterous Chloe Beach, of his neglect and insensitivity. Henry said she had a martyr’s complex and was constantly complaining to others without justification.
Several of their children, as so often happened prior to the late 20th century, died in infancy from various illnesses. Twin sons, born to them shortly after their arrival in Brooklyn, died within days of each other. Henry’s way of handling grief was to go into a shell, failing to communicate his true feelings to Eunice or anyone else. Eventually Henry was come out of his despair, and move on with life as though nothing had happened. In fact, he refused to look at photographs of his twins after their deaths.
I mentioned earlier that the Princeton Review said that the Beecher children had done more to destroy Calvinism in America than anyone, and Henry certainly was the major player in this decline. By the end of his life he denied the doctrine of hell, while intimating universalism, that all would eventually find their way to heaven because Jesus was such a loving Savior who died for all in the world. I mentioned earlier how Beecher regularly met with the leaders of the free thought movement of the 19th century, men like Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Henry David Thoreau. These, no doubt, played a role in Beecher’s jettisoning of his Calvinistic upbringing but the seeds for such denial were planted long before. One wonders, when considering the testimony of his conversion experience, if he had in fact been converted at all. If indeed, the evidence of true faith is a life of obedience to God, trust in the authority of Scripture and thus all that it teaches, then we have reason to question the sincerity of his profession.
Beecher- The Good and Bad
In conclusion, what can we learn from the life and ministry of Henry Ward Beecher. First, let’s consider the good. Beecher had a fervent social conscience, zealous for overturning social and racial injustice. Early in his life and ministry this was not the case but by the early 1850’s he was fully behind the abolitionist movement, partly due to the influence of his sister, Harriet, and partly due to Lewis Tappan and Henry Bowen. He later spoke out against big business and the growing monopolies of men like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. He spoke out against machine politics and the infamous Tammany Hall, and he was, as we have seen, a proponent for women’s suffrage, the right to vote.
But we need also to consider the bad. Henry began his ministerial career, at least in word, as an Old School Presbyterian, like his father. When Lyman Beecher flip flopped on the new measures of Charles Finney while at his church in Boston, and became a New School Presbyterian at Lane Seminary, Cincinnati, Henry was only too eager to comply with this new theology which was more political and liberal in its view of Scripture and preaching. Men seldom stay in one place, however, and the move from Old School to New School Presbyterianism later quickened to a slide into theological liberalism. By the end of his ministry, as we have seen, Henry denied the doctrine of hell and eternal punishment for all without Christ. Is it too much to say that Henry’s slide into theological liberalism contributed a life bereft of experiential holiness? A study of Beecher’s life, in contrast to contemporaries like Charles Spurgeon or Charles Hodge, reveals a night and day difference in humility, holiness, and zeal for the glory of God. I am not saying that theological liberalism is the main cause for Henry’s lack of holiness, for many theological liberals live chaste lives and many who hold to evangelical theology have fallen into grievous sin, but certainly this did not help him.
Henry Ward Beecher’s life and ministry ought to serve as a sober warning to all ministers of the gospel, especially those with unique gifts of oratory and personality. Such men seldom learn to submit to authority (this was no doubt the case with Beecher for he pretty much did as he pleased in his role at the Plymouth Church) and due to the propensity we all have to sin, we all need a check on our lives. God has established Elders to govern Christ’s church and these are to take seriously their responsibility to hold their pastors accountable for the life and ministry. None are above scrutiny for all are capable of great evil. Beecher’s life is reminiscent of Paul’s admonition to Timothy to guard himself against the love of money lest he make shipwreck of his faith.
So take the good from Henry Ward Beecher’s life and celebrate it, but also take the bad a as a sober warning. May we all, particularly preachers of the gospel, watch over our hearts with all diligence, for from them flow the springs of life. A heart, not guarded, can lead to great evil which compromises the work of Christ and besmirches His wondrous name.
The Most Famous Man In America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, Debby Applegate, Doubleday, New York, 2006.
A Religious History of the American People, Sydney Ahlstrom, Doubleday, 1975.