The Will of God in MassachusettsI. Apples and Oranges: New England and the ChesapeakeII. English CalvinismIII. The Puritan Community: the “Visible Saints”IV. The Tension Within Terms:

Calvinism“Election”Visible Saints“Modell of Christian CharityJohn Winthrop

Themes:

1) The Puritans believed themselves always subject to the unalterable and foreordained will of God.

2) This gave them their sense of community and their arrogance. It was also the cause of their deepest insecurities.

3) This has had a long-term effect on American religion.

English Calvinism

John (Jean) Calvin, 1509-1564

T.U.L.I.P.

Geneva Bible, 1560 (first printed in England 1575)

King James Bible, 1611

Puritans at Work

John Donne, 1572-1631

The Puritan Community:Settlement

Puritan Migration

John Winthrop, 1587/8 – 1649

Governor of Massachusetts 13 times

The Puritans’ Arrival

Main Towns of New England, ca. 1650

The Puritan Community: Maintaining the “City On a Hill”

Harvard, 1636

John Harvard, 1607-1638

Bay Psalm Book, first book published in North

America, 1640

Bay Psalm Book

“Old Ship” Meeting House, Hingham, MA, 1681

The Sermon: The Most Common Form of Puritan

Intellectual Activity

Portrait of Increase Mather

(1639-1723)

Pastor, North Church and President of

Harvard

Richard Mather, 1596-1669

Arrived in Boston, 1635. Minister in Dorchester until his death.

Cotton Mather, 1663-1728

The Will of God and the Indians

The Puritans’ Arrival: They Landed in a Place Depleted by Disease

Seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Indian village surrounded by a stockade.

Pequot Massacre,

1637

Massacre of the Pequots at Mystic, May 26, 1637. Only 14 out of 600-700 survived.

The Failure of the Puritan Community

I. The Consciousness of Sin- The Spiritual Journal of John Barnard (1654-1732)

II. The Impossibility of a City on a Hill1) The Presence of Sin: The True and False Principles of Trade (1639)2) Compromises with the World: a) The Halfway Covenant b) Sumptuary Laws

III. Land, Class and Community

Terms:

John Barnard Sumptuary Laws“Spiritual Milk for American Babes” (1646)True & False Principles of Trade (1639)Halfway Covenant (1662)

Themes:

1) Puritans lived with tremendous inner tension. The consciousness of sin always battled with the aspiration toward grace.

2) Their perfect community was doomed to failure. Human imperfections and growing social tensions made it impossible to sustain.

The Tension Within

John Cotton, Spiritual Milk for American Babes (1646) reflects the inner anxieties of Puritanism

John Cotton, 1585-1652

The Spiritual Journal of John Barnard

Cotton Mather, 1663-1728

His worthiness to receive the Lord’s

Supper was a prime concern of Cotton

Mather’s parishioner John Barnard (1654-

1732)

The Impossibility of Puritan Community

"forced worship stinks in God's nostrils“ –

Roger Williams.

Williams arrived in Massachusetts in 1631

and was in exile in Rhode Island by 1636

True & False Principles

Solomon Stoddard’s House, Northampton

Stoddard was a major supporter of the Halfway Covenant

Sumptuary Laws Attempted to Control How Puritans Dressed

Community and Land

Within a few generations competition for land undermined the early sense of community.

The Savage Family, a 1779 painting by the New England painter Edward Savage