The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth Century New England

314 Pages·1986·16.806 MB·English

by  Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe

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Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe
The Practice of Piety
Puritan Devotional Disciplines in
Seventeenth-Century New England
Published for the Omohundro Institute of
Early American History and Cultue
Williamsburg, Virginia
by The University of North Carolina Press
Chapel Hill
The Omohundro Institute of
Early American History and Cultue
is sponsored jointly by
The College of William and Mary
and The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
This book was the winner of the Jamestown Manuscript Prize for 1980.
© 1982 The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing, November 1982
Second printing, December 1985
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Hambrick-Stowe, Charles E.
The practice of piety.
Includes index.
i. Spiritual life—History of doctrines—lyth
century. 2. Puritans—New England. 3. New England
—Religious life and customs. I. Institute of
Early American History and Culture (Williamsburg,
Va.). II. Title.
BV449O.H3 248-4'o974 81-19806
ISBN-IO: 0-8078-1518-7
ISBN-IS: 978-8078-4^5-7 pbk.
ISBN-IO: 0-8078-4145-5 pbk.
An early form of chapter i appeared in
the Journal of Presbyterian History, LVII (1980);
and parts of chapter 4 are in the Dublin Seminar for
New England Folklife, Annual Proceedings, IV (1979).
THIS BOOK WAS DIGITALLY MANUFACTURED.
For
John von Rohr and David D. Hall
and for
Elizabeth A. Hambrick-Stowe
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Preface
Historians have long treated New England Puritanism
as an intellectual and a social movement. At its heart,
however, Puritanism was a devotional movement,
rooted in religious experience. This book deals with
the form, content, and spiritual impact of the worship
I and private devotional activity of seventeenth-century
New Englanders.
In this study I am attempting to write what Catherine Albanese has
recently called, though perhaps with a different method in mind,
"inner history." The history of religious experience is related to tradi-
tional intellectual and social history, to the study of literature, and
to church history. It is kin to a great tradition in Roman Catholic his-
toriography, exemplified by Pierre Pourrat's four-volume Christian
Spirituality. At the same time, my study of New England spirituality at-
tempts to honor recent demands, arising out of the American Studies
approach to interdisciplinary research, that historians should write
not only of elites but also of common folk and popular mentality.
The history of personal experience at the popular level is obviously
more difficult to write than conventional institutional or even social
history. We are dependent on diaries, spiritual autobiographies, medi-
tative poetry, and other private writings. These are primarily (though
not exclusively) the product of social elites. But evidence suggests that
in seventeenth-century New England the gap between elite and popu-
lar culture was not wide. In many areas of religious life, clergy and
populace inhabited the same cultural world. The private writing that
survives pertinent to devotional practice is, I have good reason to
believe, broadly reflective of common experience. Glimpses into the
religious experience of folk, as recorded, for example, in the confes-
sions of faith of individuals joining the Cambridge Church, show it to
be of a piece with the personal religious experience of their pastor,
Thomas Shepard himself, or of Anne Bradstreet and Cotton Mather.
Historians of Puritanism have relied heavily on the ministry's pub-
lished sermons for insight into the religious beliefs of the movement.
I have read these again with an eye to the neglected area of their de-
votional content and advice. But another genre altogether has been
much less studied and opens a window into the nature of Puritanism.
viii Preface
Devotional manuals were an important part of the Puritan movement
from the late sixteenth century onward, a product of the demand for
pious reading matter that widespread Protestant literacy created. Such
manuals were brought to New England with the immigration, were
imported continually thereafter, and by the second half of the seven-
teenth century were being published in Cambridge and Boston. Social
historians with an interest in counting will ask certain questions:
Precisely how many households owned these manuals? How many of
the individuals who owned them actually used them? I have not at-
tempted this research. Even if we knew the answer to the first ques-
tion, the second, I am sure, is unanswerable. Still, the manuals can be
trusted as revelations of popular experience for two reasons. First,
the model forms of meditation and prayer contained in the manuals
correspond closely with surviving records of private experience. Sec-
ond, the manuals were written in a popular style, were published in
large and numerous editions, and were widely disseminated. From
diary references to their use and from the shabby condition of the
rare extant copies, we may infer they were heavily used. Taken to-
gether, the private writings and the printed devotional manuals pro-
vide a fuller picture of personal and religious experience at a popular
level than one might expect. Evidence from other types of popular
publications, such as captivity narratives and almanacs, sheds further
light on the themes of devotional practice that emerge from the his-
torical study of manuals, private writing, and sermons.
This book seeks to supplement certain commonly held ideas about
New England religion in the seventeenth century and to correct
others. Puritanism was as affective as it was rational, and Puritans
were as wont to withdraw into contemplative solitude as they were to
be active in the marketplace. Indeed, the particular forms of public
worship and the characteristic private devotional exercises were what
made a Puritan a Puritan.
My interest in these exercises is a new departure in that scholars
have usually maintained that early seventeenth-century New En-
glanders were especially hostile to "technique," because they were ra-
tionalists, were chained by an inordinate doctrine of Original Sin, or
were passively dependent on the unmanipulatable will of God. But
Puritans did engage in devotional exercises quite similar to those of
their Catholic forebears, contemporaries, and adversaries. Devotional
methods were not, as Perry Miller believed, desperate late-century in-
novations. Rather, they were integral to Puritan spirituality through-
out the century. And formal meditation on the sublime joys of heaven,
with the resulting ecstasy, was not, contrary to Louis Martz's thesis,
Preface ix
introduced only in the second half of the century; it was part of Puri-
tan practice from the start. I have found that despite extensive social
change in the seventeenth century, devotional practice remained es-
sentially the same. The changes that were introduced in the second
half of the century were no more than minor modifications of existing
practice, intended to secure continuity by revitalizing traditional
methods and themes.
Conversion, which has rightly commanded much scholarly atten-
tion, was only one part, the onset, of the devotional life. Most of my
discussion focuses on post-conversion experience. The order of re-
demption, heretofore associated only with conversion, characterized
the more advanced exercises and experiences as well. The major
metaphor of the pilgrimage of the soul through ascending stages to
heaven provided an interpretive framework for the ongoing life of
worship, meditation, and prayer. In the state of grace progress on the
pilgrimage was more important than spiritual rest, suggesting a dy-
namic understanding of devotional activity as preparation for salva-
tion. Salvation in Puritan spirituality was not a fully achieved state but
always a journey and a goal: Resurrection from the world in union
with Christ after death. I interpret the important topic of prepara-
tionism more broadly than has usually been the case in the debate
over human ability in the first stages of conversion.
This book is the result of my dual calling as a historian and a pastor.
In colonial New England it was the scholar-pastor—Thomas Prince
and Cotton Mather were only the most notable—who took upon
himself the task of recording and interpreting his people's history.
Conscious of the high quality of their work and that twentieth-century
historians rely upon it to a remarkable extent, in humility I follow in
their steps. That I write in service to both the Church and the secular
community of historians is partly a reflection of my own interests. It is
also indicative of the breakdown of the academic monopoly on schol-
arship that has prevailed since the late nineteenth century. As univer-
sities find they are less and less able to contain the flood of graduates
from their own doctoral programs, we can look forward hopefully to
a reintegration of learning with the community outside the walls of
academe.
I am indebted to many people, three of whom are named in the
dedication, and to several institutions. John von Rohr excited me
about church history, introduced me to Thomas Hooker and the Puri-
tans, and stimulated my first research at the Holbrook Library, Pacific
School of Religion, a decade ago. Fr. James Hennesey wanted to know
x Preface
what the differences were between Puritan and Roman Catholic spiri-
tuality. At Boston University, where I completed an earlier version
of this book as a doctoral dissertation, Norman Pettit, Cecelia Tichi,
Ellen Smith, and Susan Geib shared insight, encouragement, and
support. The primary influence of David Hall is, I am sure, evident
throughout. I can hardly overstate my appreciation and respect for
him as a teacher and advisor. Harold Worthley helped make the Con-
gregational Library in Boston a most congenial place for research. I
appreciate the help I received at the Massachusetts Historical Society,
the Boston University Libraries, the New England Historic Genealogi-
cal Society, the American Antiquarian Society, the Union Theological
Seminary, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. I am enormously
grateful to the Jamestown Prize Committee of the Institute of Early
American History and Culture for its 1980 award, and to Norman
Fiering and his staff for vigorous and wise editing. The Consistory
and people of St. Paul's United Church of Christ, Westminster, Mary-
land, have been very supportive of this work over the past two years.
Elizabeth is the one without whose constant presence at each stage
along the way this book could not have been written, and whose
loving companionship on the "parfit glorious pilgrimage" makes the
journey exciting.