Ipswich High School - Tiger Yearbook (Ipswich, MA)

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came from the universities of Cam- bridge and Oxford. They were neither persecuted nor impoverished by the King. Many of them were wealthy and noble in their own lands. At that time King Charles was too busy keeping his head on good terms with the rest of his body to persecute them if he had wanted to. They came here with no inten- tion of founding a haven of democ- racy and religious freedom. They disliked religion and gov- ernment in England and wanted to live as they pleased and to govern themselves as they wished. The church and State of New England were intensely aristocratic, but it was an aritocracy of character and ability. Of the sixteen thousand people in Massachusetts then only four thousand of them belonged to the Puritan Church and could vote. These men were narrow minded ; they had to be. The path of Truth and Righteousness is always a nar- row path. Although not encouraging non- Puritan immigration, they did not forbid it, and they allowed people of different faiths to live with them as long as they obeyed Puritan laws and did not break the peace. When these non-Puritans disregarded the law they were banished or pun- ished severely. Roger Williams was banished but onlv after he had been preaching socialism and treason on the streets. Three Quakers were hanged but only after they had re- peatedly broken the laws and de- filed the Puritan Churches. These sturdy idealists certainly did things their own way without regard for man or king. Ordered by Crom- well to sell a number of Scotch reb- els into slavery they calmly set them free, after these rebels had worked out their passage, and told Cromw ' ell that it was against their principles. Ordered by the restored Charles II to give suffrage to the m ambers of the Church of England, they unconditionally refused on the grounds that Anglican morals were not to be trusted. As I said before, they were idealists who looked only to God and to their con- sciences for justification of their deeds. In a study of the Puritans three divisions are soon noticed. The Pil- grims who came from Holland were very different from the Puritans. They were oppressed peasants who favoured democracy and religious freedom ; yet they lived as friendly neighbours to the Puritans. The first generation of Puritans in this country was the one to whom all the foregoing remarks apply. Most of them were b rn in England. But a few generations later the iron in the Puritan veins seems to have rusted. There was no appreciable improvement nor addition made to Puritan doctrine during the whole of the eighteenth century. At the beginning of the nineteenth, a new revival of the liberal progressive spirit of the seventeenth century Puritan resulted in Transcendental- ism and Unitarianism. For the pe- riod of one hundred years before the War for Independence there are few excuses to be made and many needed. The struggle for existence and the isolation from Europe pro- duced stagnation. Religion, which had been austere, now became stern and forbidding; government, which had been iust and strict, now be- came harsh and often tvrannical. Intolerance replaced the liberalism of John Winthrop. and pedantry re- placed the education of Norton and Corbett. This is the Puritanism which Nathaniel Hawthorne por- 21

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Graduation Essays IN DEFENSE OF PURITANISM Ralph Ladd Now that the Tercentenial cele- bration of the founding of Massa- chusetts is over, many people know less about the Puritans than they did before. They have learned much about the chairs and fire- places that the Puritans used but little of the Puritans themselves. Some people consider the Puritans as men who were so persecuted by the English royalty and the aristoc- racy that life in England became unbearable to them, and so they came to Massachusetts to establish an ideal community of religious freedom and democracy. Others consider the Puritans as gloomy, iron-sou led hypocrites who were constitutionally unable to enjoy life themselves and were therefore de- termined that nobody else should. It is the fashion to cast the blame of anvthing in modern life that is repressive, narrow, or provincial on the blighting influence of the Puri- tans. It is also a popular delusion that the only Puritans in the world were the ones who came to the shores of New England. To discuss any historical move- ment we must first find out just what principles it declares and what its sources are. Careful study convinces one that the essence of Puritanism is an earnest effort to live a life nearer to God. It was with this aim that a group of sin- cere, strongly religious men gave up the land of their birth and sought to build a city of God in the wilder- ness of America. They were the first to call themselves Puritans, but their spirit had existed since the dawn of civilization. Ever since men have been aware of a greater thing in the world than immediate necessities, a few idealists have at- tempted to find truth and moral perfection by harmonious union of faith and austere self-controlled study. These men were Puritans. St. Paul was the greatest Puritan. He attempted to elevate the moral level of humanity by an earnest ap- plication of the teachings of Christ and he set up Christian churches everywhere. The group of English Puritans of the 17th Century at- tempted to build an ideal commun- ity founded on the Bible and they established a system of schools and a college to spread this ideal. Paul lost his head to Nero, and the Puri- tans are now ridiculed and misrep- resented ; but Paul lives a larger life in the teachings of the Christian re- ligion, and the Puritan spirit is the most commendable spirit in this teeming country today. Some of the principles of Puri- tanism were absolute reliance on the Bible as the foundation of re- ligion: simplicity and sincerity in worship ; deep intolerance of heresy and false doctrines; abiding respect for law as a principle, but ceaseless opposition to laws as made by kings and bishops; strengthening of the character by self-discipline ; and firm belief in themselves as God’s elect. With these ideals in mind the Pur- itans had colonized Massachusetts. These men were emphatically not oppressed peasants nor stern fanat- ics — thev were the best of the Eng- lish student and upper middle class- es. Their strongest contingency 20

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trayed, and there is good cause for all of his condemnation. This con- dition was the result of victory. The Puritan spirit was essentially a fighting spirit and when it had suc- cessfully fought the errors of Ca- tholicism and Anglicanism, and heresy within its own rank , there was nothing left to fight and it col- lapsed of itself. Intolerance left a smudge on history and hypocrisy became common. Yet the men of that time were not as bad as they were painted. Cotton Mather, the theological leader of this period, when he was forty and after the death of his second wife, received a proposal of marriage from the prettiest young lady in Boston, even in that age of propriety. There can be no denial nor softening of the faults of the Puritans of this later period. Religion became much theological than ever before. The strict character standards put face value high and fostered hypocrisy, which was the great curse of the Puritans. However, although the faults increased during this period and the early vigor faded, the vir- tues of the Puritans still stand. Among the qualities of the Puri- tans that call for praise is that of idealism. It was the spiritual grop- ing towards something better, the trying to progress by improving the man, not his conditions, that first started the Puritan movement. Rea- soning would have told them that a City of God was as impossible in one part of this earth as another. Yet idealism allowed no peace of mind until an attempt had been made. Turned into new channels, disguised under different names, this same spirit created and built America and supplied a whole new ideology for it. Merely a vision and hope of bet- ter things would have done little without strength and continuity of purpose. The Puritan not only saw what to do, but did it. He risked everything he had, life being placed among the least, when he came to America. Starvation, savages, the hostile nations of France and Spain, exposure, pestilence, and above all the heavy hand of England, were daily menaces. The Puritans placed degradation as the worst of condi- tions and preferred to die in inde- pendent poverty and danger than to live in dependent affluence. Puritan theology was narrow and sometimes bigoted. The New Eng- land clergy attained a power that never had existed in England. The Bible was the sole source of religion and the Old Testament more than the New. Theirs was no God of love and mercy but a stern God, though a just one. Fundamentally they were Calvinists, holding that the natural instincts of life are evil and that men are born sinners. Sal- vation would come only to the few that kept God’s covenant and suc- ceeded in improving themselves by judicious development of the higher and control of the lower emotions. They were the Elect. All others in the world and many of themselves were only fit to be damned. Shall we condemn this attitude? How do we know that it was wrong ? W e may judge only by the way they up- held it, and in this there is room for little but admiration. The oftenest and most persistent accusation against the Puritan is that he opposed and destroyed beaty. This is true in detail and untrue in general. It cannot be de- nied that the Cromwellian armies destroyed manv beautiful things in the Anglican Churches, and it can- not be denied that the Puritan wor- 22