Ipswich High School - Tiger Yearbook (Ipswich, MA)

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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

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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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ship was utterly devoid of all the ceremonies and beautiful objects associated with traditional Chris- tianity. The Puritan always placed the spiritual before the material. He wanted nothing between himself and his God. Christ was born in a barn. Was it unfitting for his fol- lowers to worship in like circum- stances? God said, “Thou shall have no other gods before me.” The Puritan placed neither God nor man, ceremony nor ritual, before his faith. The Puritan mind was not artistic ; it was strong, virtuous. “Virtue is a kind of beauty,” said a Puritan; but it was not artistic. Working with a gun in one hand and an axe in the other, one hardly has time to paint beautiful pictures or to write great poems. In the useful occupations there was much appre ciation shown. New England has a splendid tradition of crafts- manship. The excellence of Puritan cabinet-work is still recognized, and in the prose of the period one may find flashes of beautiful and effec- tive English. They built houses of the purest architectural standards in America. The Puritan placed fnith above beauty, and dutv above pleasure, but that does not mean that he despised either. Much, in- deed. on the contrary! One of the most valuable works of the Puritans was their govern- ment. It combined the best of the democratic and aristocratic systems. The voting list was small, church membership and a character test being reouired, and the official standard of integrity was very high. The town-meeting for local affairs and a representative body for state affairs were brought to high effi- ciency. Wealth and birth had little influence. A man was judged for what he was and not for what he had. On a small scale New England had that enviable body, an aristoc- racy of brains and character. The greatest thing which the Pur- itans did was to establish a system of education. This education was primarily to train men for the min- istry. As the Bible was the great book of the Puritans, the clergy must be able to read it in the origi- nal languages of Hebrew, Greek, and -Latin. Add to these mathe matics, ethics, and logic, and there is a classical education. The Puri- tans had formed a set of principles and attempted to continue them by education. Primary education of all boys was required and higher was encouraged. The standard of education in those days was higher than now. John Winthrop, Jr., who founded Ipswich, was in constant correspondence with over eighty world leaders in all fields of thought and action. Ezekiel Cheever, who taught here in Ipswich, was the greatest teacher of that time. Wil- liam Brewster and Richard Mather were accounted scholars in England. Cotton Mather, in addition to speak- ing several languages and being considered a great scholar, wrote more than most men have time or thought enough to read. The classical education taught men what to be; the modern teaches men what to do. The old gave ideas; the new facts. In twenty years from now the college gradu- ating classes of 1931 will have achieved success in material things and will have retired to comfort and enjoyment of Crane plumbing, Ford automobiles, and steam-heated houses. Twenty years from their graduation the classes of 1631 in England had conquered a wilder- ness, and set up a city of God, not on laws, prosperity, nor favour, but 2 :