[This article is No. 30 in the series entitled "A Review of Sunday Legislation in Century Nineteen," but it will be of equal interest to those who have not read preceding numbers.—ED. S. of T.]
SIDE LIGHTS TO PURITAN LIFE.
THERE are a few other side lights to Puritan life which may be viewed with interest and profit. The religion of a large class of the Puritans was a cold, heartless system, devoid of the milk of kindness, human or divine. They loved to dwell upon blood-curdling themes. The infinite mercy of an infinite God; the vicarious sacrifice of the world's Redeemer; the blessed agency of the Holy Spirit, bequeathed to fallen humanity in those compassionate words, "I will not leave you orphans," found no place in their sermons. On the contrary, it was fearful visions of eternal torture and an offended Majesty. So fearful were the stories told by Puritan divines and mothers to little children, that some of them went insane. Says the author last quoted:—
People—men and women, old and young, down to the very children in the nursery—were crushed and driven to the verge of insanity, and often over that verge, by a superstitious terror—the terror of what their teachers defined as God's "vindictive justice." If anyone doubts this statement, or feels disposed to put it aside as an exaggeration, he has but to turn to Jonathan Edwards' "Faithful Narrative," and Cotton Mather's "Magnalia," and there read the piteous stories of little Phebe Bartlett and Anne Greenough, each aged five, blighted and driven crazy in their nurseries by fear of death and hell; and for that reason exhibited as prodigies of infant piety.
Here are some of the rhymes that were taught to the little ones. These appeared in the "New England Primer," and in the Rev. John Cotton's "Spiritual Milk for American Babes":—
"There is a dreadful fiery hell,
Where wicked ones must always dwell;
There is a heaven, full of joy,
Where goodly ones must always stay;
To one of these my soul must fly,
As in a moment, when I die."
These doctrines were impressed upon the youthful minds by ditties like the following:—
"In the burying place may see
Graves shorter there than I;
From death's arrest no age is free,
Young children too must die;
My God, may such an awful sight
Awakening be to me."
In the Primer is a "dialogue between Christ, Youth, and the Devil":—
"Death—Thou hast thy God offended so,
Thy soul and body I'll divide;
Thy body in the grave I'll hide,
And thy dear soul in hell must lie
With devils to eternity."
THE CONCLUSION.
"Thus end the days of woful youth,
Who won't obey nor mind the truth,
Nor hearken to what preachers say,
But do their parents disobey;
They in their youth go down to hell,
Under eternal wrath to dwell.
Many don't live out half their days,
For cleaving unto sinful ways."
These are just a few samples of literature for children during the "good old days." The lines arranged for those of more mature years were not much more comforting, to say the least of it:—
"With iron bands they bind their hands and cursed feet together,
And cast them all, both great and small, into that lake forever.
Where day and night, without respite, they wail, and cry, and howl,
For torturing pain which they sustain in body and in soul.
"For day and night, in their despight, their torment's smoak ascended,
Their pain and grief have no relief; their anguish never endeth.
There must they lie and never die, though dying every day;
There must they dying ever lie, and not consume away.
"Die fain they would, if die they could, but death will not be had;
God's direful wrath their bodies hath forev'r immortal made.
They live to lie in misery, and bear eternal wo;
And live they must while God is just, that he may plague them so."
These are a few samples of Puritan poetry. They are certainly not very soul-inspiring. But the worst of it was that this was about the only class of literature which emanated from the brains of the New England thinkers. Science and art were at a standstill. Nothing but these horrible, blood-chilling, doggerels, and equally fearful sermons, to wit:—
When the saints in heaven shall look upon the damned in hell it will serve to give them a greater sense of their own happiness, seeing how vastly different their case is from their own. The view of the doleful condition of the damned will make them the more prize their own blessedness.
Consider how it will be at the day of judgment, when you shall see Christ coming in the clouds of heaven, when you shall begin to wail and cry, as knowing that you are of those who are to be condemned; and perhaps you will be ready to fly to some of your godly friends; but you will obtain no help from them; you will see them unconcerned for you, with joyful countenances ascending to meet the Lord, and not the less joyful for the horror in which they see you. And when you shall stand before the tribunal at the left hand, among devils, trembling and astonished, and shall have the dreadful sentence passed upon you, you will at the same time see the blessed company of saints and angels at the right hand, and shall hear them shout forth the praises of God while they hear your sentence pronounced. You will then see those godly people with whom you shall have been acquainted, and who shall have been your neighbors; and with whom you now often converse, rejoicing at the pronunciation and execution of your sentence.
When the saints in glory, therefore, shall see the doleful state of the damned, how will this heighten their sense of the blessedness of their own state so exceedingly different from it! When they shall see how miserable others of their fellow-creatures are, who were naturally in the same circumstances as themselves; when they shall see the smoke of their torment, and the raging of the flames of their burning, and hear their dolorous shrieks and cries, and consider that they in the meantime are in the most blissful state, and shall surely be in it to all eternity, how will they rejoice?
But enough of this horrible picture. These are only a few quotations out of many which might be given. They show the cruel, devilish condition of mind in which the author of such words must be. One hears a great deal of the "good old days." But the old days, methinks, were not so very good after all.
To say that the Puritans had a very fine sense of purity is to misstate facts. It is certain that the Puritan ministers drank hard. One Puritan, himself a divine, has put it upon record that among his brethren in the ministry "he knew forty-four who drank so much as to affect their brains, and he had assisted in putting four to bed on occasions like ordinations." This does not speak very well for the temperance of these saints of "ye olden tyme." They were most certainly respecters of persons.
Such were the Puritans of New England. And yet there are found men to-day who admire their religion. As has been said before, there was nothing kindly about it. A great majority of their discussions were over questions containing but one virtue, and that was that no one, not even the disputants, could possibly understand them, which quality rendered them quite harmless. In proof of this I append the three leading questions discussed by the famous synod which drew up the Cambridge Platform of 1637:—
1. That the new creature is not the person of a believer, but a body of saving grace in such a one; and that Christ, as a head, doth enliven or quicken, preserve or act the same, but Christ himself is no part of this new creature.
2. That though, in effectual calling (in which the answer of the soul is by active faith wrought at the same instant by the Spirit), justification and sanctification be all together in them; yet God doth not justify a man before he be effectually called, and so a believer.
3. That Christ and his benefits may be offered and exhibited to a man under a Covenant of Works, but not in or by a Covenant of Works.
"It is not easy," says Adams, after quoting the above, "to realize now that strong, matter-of-fact, reasoning men could ever have been educated to the point of inflicting persecution, banishment, and torture in the propagation or in the defense of such incomprehensible formulas. They furnish in themselves679at once the strongest evidence and the most striking illustration of the singular condition of religious and theological craze in which early New England existed. As the modern investigator puzzles over these articles of a once living faith, in vain trying to find out in what lay their importance,—even conceding their truth,—the synod, and the outcome of its wrestlings, calls to mind nothing so much as that passage from the poem of the greatest of its co-religionists, wherein, with bitter mockery, one portion of the 'host of hell' is represented as sitting on a hill apart, where they
> 'reason'd high
> Of Providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate,
> Fix'd fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute;
> And found no end, in wandering mazes lost.'
"The difference between Milton's devils and the early New England divines seems to have been that, while the one and the other lost themselves in the same mazes of the unknowable, the former evinc'd much the more Christian spirit of the two in their methods of conducting the debate. Both were suffering banishment from their former homes; but, while the synod of the fallen angels, in their place of exile, amicably discussed points of abstract difference, the similar synod of New England ministers betrayed, throughout their proceedings, all 'the exquisite rancor of theological hate.'"
Here let us leave them. That Sunday was enforced under the theocratic system of the Puritans goes without saying. In fact, it was an incident to the system itself. To consider their Sunday laws would be wearisome. Much has been written upon them. We can only say, in closing, that if "this is a Christian nation" by virtue of the Puritans, deliver us from such a Christianity. We can only say that if the Puritan creed were again to be made the State religion, whippings and banishments, cart tails, pillories, and the gibbet must inevitably follow. And in the light of these facts we can hardly agree with the sigh of a divine who, in his longings for Sunday laws, exclaimed, "Oh, for a breath of the old Puritan!"