Orthodoxy In Massachusetts 1630-1950 (Paperback)

Orthodoxy In Massachusetts 1630-1650 BY PERRY MILLER WITH A NEW PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR BEACON PRESS BEACON HILL BOSTON Copyright, 1933 By the President and Fellows of Harvard College Preface, 195Q By Perry Miller First published as a Beacon Paperback in 1959 by arrangement with the Harvard University Press Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 59-10735 Printed in the United States of America For PERCY HOLMES BOYNTON MAGISTRO ET AMICO Acknowledgments PERHAPS the greatest pleasure of scholarship, from the standpoint of the student, is the long list of friends he acquires by the simple process of making them his benefactors. Of this long list I wish in partic ular to memorialize the various important contribu tions of Professors Percy Holmes Eoynton, Napier Wilt, T. V. Smith, and William E. Dodd of the Univer sity of Chicago, Professors Kenneth Ballard Murdock, Samuel Eliot Morison, and Francis Otto Matthiessen of Harvard University, and Professor Stanley T. Williams of Yale University. To the Library of Yale University I am indebted for access to the Dexter Collection, to the Boston Public Library for access to the Prince Collec tion, to the Congregational Library of Boston for gen erously placing at my disposal its remarkable collection of seventeenth century tracts, and to Mr. Julius H. Tuttle and to the Massachusetts Historical Society for much valuable assistance. Mr. D. H. Mugridge offered very helpful criticism and Mr. Raymond P. Stearns helped materially with the Dutch backgrounds. With out the aid of Mr. Alfred Stern and Mrs. Moise Dreyfus this research could never have been undertaken. And finally I am indebted to my wife for a vast amount of patient labor, without which thevolume could never have materialized. P. M. CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS October i, 1933 Contents FOREWORD xi PREFACE xvii I. SUPREMACY AND UNIFORMITY 3 II. DISCIPLINE OUT OF THE WORD 15 III. SEPARATIST CONGREGATIONALISM 53 IV. NON-SEPARATIST CONGREGA TIONALISM 73 V. A WIDE DOOR OF LIBERTY 102 VI. THE NEW ENGLAND WAY 148 VII. THE SUPREME POWER POLITICKS 212 VIII. TOLLERATING TIMES 263 BIBLIOGRAPHY 315 INDEX 321 Foreword UPON the verge of publication I am fully conscious that in the work to be offered I have treated in a somewhat cavalier fashion certain of the most cher ished conventions of current historiography. I have at tempted to tell of a great folk movement with an utter disregard of the economic and social factors. I lay my self open to the charge of being so very naive as to be lieve that the way men think has some influence upon their actions, of not remembering that these ways of thinking have been officially decided by modern psy chologists to be generally just so many rationalizations constructed by the subconscious to disguise the pursuit of more tangible ends. In part I might take refuge behind the contention that a specialized study is, after all, specialized, that other aspects of the story can easily be found in other works. The field of intellectual or religious history may, I presume, be considered as legitimate a field for re search and speculation as that of economic and political. But I am prepared actually to waive such a defense and hazard the thesis that whatever may be the case in other centuries, in the sixteenth and seventeenth certain men of decisive importance took religion seriously that they often followed spiritual dictates in comparative disre gard ofulterior considerations that those who led the Great Migration to Massachusetts and who founded the Xll FOREWORD colony were predominantly men of this stamp. It has not been part of my conscious intention either to de fend or to blame them, to praise or to condemn their achievement. I have simply endeavored to demonstrate that the narrative of the Bay Colonys early history can be strung upon the thread of an idea. Immediately this statement is made I encounter such authoritative rebuttal as that of Mr...