The American Jeremiad

1. Introduction: The Puritan Errand Reassessed

1 Introduction: The Puritan Errand Reassessed On board the Arbella, on the Atlantic Ocean, John Winthrop set forth the prospects of the infant theocracy* in a provisional but sweeping prophecy of doom. The passengers were entering into covenant with God, as into a marriage bond - and therefore, charged Winthrop, they might expect swift and harsh affliction. Invoking the ominous precedent of Israel, he explained that henceforth the Lord would survey them with a strict and jealous eye. They had pledged themselves to God, and He to them, to protect, assist, and favor them above any other community on earth. But at their slightest shortcoming, for neglecting the "least" of their duties, He would turn in wrath against them and be revenged: if wee shall deale falsely with our god in this worke wee have undertaken and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from us, wee shall be made a story and a by-word through the world, wee shall open the mouthes of enemies to speake evill of the wayes of god and all professours for Gods sake; wee shall shame the faces of many of gods worthy servants, and cause theire prayers to be turned into Cursses *The term theocracy has been criticized, cogently, by a number of recent historians. I retain it here partly as a convenience and partly because the New Englanders themselves repeatedly used it, meaning thereby to indicate not the rule of the priesthood , but the harmony between minister and magistrate in church and state affairs. So conceived, the term seems to me to express the confluence of the sacred and the secular, which this study tries to examine. 3 4 THE AMERICAN JEREMIAD upon us, till wee be consumed out of the good land whether wee are goeing. 1 Winthrop's grim forecast struck a familiar chord. Only several weeks before, as the passengers prepared to embark from Southampton pier, John Cotton had similarly warned them about the perils of their high enterprise. Where much is given, he intoned, much is demanded. The same God who had sifted them as choice grain from the chaff of England, and who would soon plant them in the New World, might "also roote [them] out againe." Men generally succumbed to carnal lures, leaned toward profits and pleasures, permitted their children to degenerate. Such tendencies were punishable anywhere, but among those whom the Lord favored they were grievous beyond measure - ingratitude heaped upon disobedience , natural depravity compounded by deceit. Should the emigrants fall prey to such temptations, God would surely withdraw their "special appointment," weed them out, pluck them up, and cast them irrevocably out of His sight. 2 No doubt these threats were prompted in part by anxiety; their very stridency speaks of hardships to come in settling an unknown land. But more significant, I think, is how closely they foreshadow the major themes of the colonial pulpit. False dealing with God, betrayal ofcovenant promises, the degeneracy of the young, the lure of profits and pleasures, the prospect of God's just, swift, and total revenge - it reads like an index of favorite sermon topics of seventeenth-century New England. In particular, of course, I refer to the political sermon - what might be called the state-of-thecovenant address, tendered at every public occasion (on days of fasting and prayer, humiliation and thanksgiving, at covenantrenewal and artillery-company ceremonies, and, most elaborately and solemnly, at election-day gatherings) - which has been designated as the jeremiad. The standard definition is Perry Miller's. It has become as familiar to students of the period as his classic view of New England's errand - properly so, since he made the jeremiad the proof text of his interpretation. Miller's argument, presented in its broadest sweep in his essay "Errand into the Wilderness," centers upon the ambiguity inherent in the concept of errand. An errand, Miller observes, may be either a venture on another's behalfor a venture ofone's own, and INTRODUCTION: THE PuRITAN ERRAND REASSESSED 5 the Puritans' tragedy was that their errand shifted from one meaning to another in the course of the seventeenth century. They first saw themselves as an outpost of the Reformation. Their New England Way was to be a detour (and they hoped a shortcut) on the road leading from the Anglican establishment to a renovated England. After 1660, however, with the collapse of Cromwell's Protectorate, the colonists found...