The Puritans Essay Research Paper The Puritans — страница 2

  • Просмотров 255
  • Скачиваний 5
  • Размер файла 16
    Кб

ruled the colony, only the real Puritans could be part of the church. They believed only a minority of the population pure enough to be a part of the church. Consequently, the Puritans restricted church membership and voting to the select few who were “visible Saints who had received unequivocal assurances of salvation by means of a sanctifying spiritual rebirth.” This could be bypassed by the Puritans’ Covenant of Grace, in which each person who performed his duty could claim salvation from God. In reality very few people were ever able to give enough evidence that they had completed their part of the bargain. As a result, two-thirds of the population failed to qualify as church members. The Puritans enacted many laws to keep the non-Puritans living religious lives. They

created an official whose only job was to check up on ten families daily to see if anything out of the ordinary was happening and to make sure everyone who was able went to church. Their idea was that everybody, even if they weren’t part of the church, should be very religious. Therefore they created their laws with underlying principles based on the Old Testament. For example, they believed that if you are not working with the church, you are working against it. This comes up in many trials where anyone not entirely agreeing with the church was either whipped, banished, or both. They dreamed of a society where everybody followed the laws and lived a peaceful, god-fearing existence. To make this dream realizable, the Puritans created severe penalties for breaking the laws.

These ranged from whipping and being thrown in the stocks for minor offenses, to banishment and death by hanging for serious ones. To be a good Puritan one had to work hard all the time and never be idle. Idleness was also a grave infraction that carried with it the penalty of torturous physical punishment. The Puritans arranged a comprehensive list of “good and wholesome laws” that prohibited “carnal delights,” such as attending plays, dancing around a maypole, bowling on the green, playing shuffleboard, quoits, dice, and cards. Even the “wearing by men of long hair” was enough to bring them under suspicion of being subversive to the church. There seemed no end to the ways a Puritan could sin: drinking in taverns, sexual indulgence, swearing, falling asleep in

church, Sabbath-breaking, overdressing, etc; and in New England sinning was the same as breaking the law. The next question is to what extent were the aspirations of the Puritans fulfilled during the seventeenth century. The answer is that they succeeded, and then failed. At first, the Puritans came very close to realizing the dream of a perfect god fearing society. But as time progressed, more and more non-Puritans moved to New England and it became less and less of a model for the rest of Christendom. Finally in sixteen ninety-one the Massachusetts Bay colony and the Plymouth colony were combined into Massachusetts and put under royal control. At the start of the colony, everything was coming together. Even though non-Puritans out numbered the true Puritans three to two, for

the most part everybody followed the laws and the government and church had no real internal threats. The Puritans kept growing more and more in number and started to expand west and south into present day Connecticut where they formed two new colonies. The first was the Hartford Colony, consisting of the towns of Hartford, Wethersfield, and Windsor in the Connecticut River valley. The second was the New Haven Colony on the southern coast of Connecticut. The colonists moved from Massachusetts Bay to New Haven because they believed that Massachusetts was becoming lax. They created a government in New Haven even stricter than the one in Boston. During this period of expansion, there existed disagreements among some members of the Massachusetts Colony. The first major subversive

force was Roger Williams. He was a controversial young minister who preached separatism. He believed that the Massachusetts church should sever all allegiance to the Church of England. But more disturbing to the clergy, he called for complete separation of church and state. The colonial government, alarmed at this challenge to its spiritual authority, banished him in sixteen thirty-five. The following year he bought some land from the Narragansett Indians and with a few followers started the town of Providence. Other religious dissidents followed, and in sixteen forty-four Williams obtained a charter from Parliament allowing him to create the government of Rhode Island. The other significant challenge to Massachusetts was Anne Hutchinson. She believed that living a pious life was