THE JEREMIAD

By the time of the Restoration of Charles II in England in 1660, Puritan New England
had developed into a relatively prosperous, stable, and independent colony. Puritan
villages proliferated, and different local governments, customs, and economies,
replicated the various peasant cultures of places such as Yorkshire, Kent, East
Anglia, and the West Country of England. On the whole, travelers in New England
in the 1650s describe flourishing agricultural communities of pious hardworking
families, where the churches and the state appear to cooperate in governance.

In larger cities, such as Boston and Salem, there aroused a merchant class based upon
manufacturing, the fishing industry, and foreign trade, while the rural villages
remained dependent upon farming. Open-field farming continued in some areas
until the late seventeenth century, but most land was converted into small individual
holdings.

As church and congregational power expanded, those seeking admission had to

During the 1650s a group of ministers led by Richard Mather and James Allen
explored ways of modifying membership policies to respond to the problem of the
unconverted children of the saints. In the 1630s, the clergy had decided that the
children of the saint could be baptized in infancy on the assumption that as children
of the elect they would surely experience conversion, and become full church
members. This was called the Half-Way Covenant in the 1662.

According to a Boston Synod, doctrine was revised allowing the grandchildren of the
founders to be baptized, but still didn't solve the problem of the unconverted
parents. The same conflict recurred throughout New England during the second half
of the century, and the themes of Thomas Brown's preaching against the "rising
generations" were repeated in sermons now called Puritan jeremiads. Taking the
texts from Jeremiah and Isaiah, these orations followed and re-inscribed a rhetorical
formula that included recalling the courage and piety of the founders, lamenting
recent and present ills, and crying out for a return to the original conduct and zeal.
In current scholarship, the term jeremiad has expanded to include not only sermons
but also other texts that rehearse the familiar tropes of the formula such as captivity
narratives, letters, covenant renewals, as well as some histories and biographies.

Natural events, including fires, floods, droughts, earthquakes, and the appearances
of comets; internal conflicts such as renewed fighting with the Indians, increasing
occurrences of Satanic possession and witchcraft, and growing secularism and
materialism; external intrusions like the arrival of numbers of Quakers and
Anglicans; the revocation of the Massachusetts Bay charter by the London Court of
Chancery; and finally the installation in 1686 of the Anglican royal governor,
Edmund Andros -- gradually, insistently, these events and the internal tensions
present from the 1630s unraveled the Puritan community.

The tradition of opening the annual General Court in May with an election sermon
began in Boston in 1634 and continued until 1834. Most of the best known ministers
gave at least one election sermon, and beginning in 1667, the sermons were printed
yearly with few exceptions. The election sermon followed the standard three-part
division used for most sermons. It opened with a biblical text followed by an
"Explication", which closely examined the meaning of each of the words of the text.
Often the preacher would review the biblical events that foreshadow the text, and his
audience knew to look for typological parallels to the current New England
situation, which the preacher would make explicit in the later "Application".

In the second part of the sermon, the "Doctrine", the preacher announced the general
laws and lessons that he perceived to be the basis of the text, and then divided some
larger principles into "Propositions" and "Reasons". The third section, the
"Application", demonstrated how the Doctrine and Proposition pertained to
contemporary New England. Here, the preacher expanded upon several uses on the
analogy between the biblical past and recent experiences.

From the late 1660s through the early 1690s, gloomy prospects and catastrophic fears
of the imminent failure of the holy experiments led most ministers to construct their
jeremiads as mournful dirges. Overall, the jeremiads had a complicated seemingly
contradictory communal function. On the one hand, they were designed to awaken a
lethargic people, on the other hand, in their repetitive and ritualistic nature, they
function as a form of reassurance, re-inscribing proof that the saints were still a
coherent body who ruled New England in covenant with God, and other His
sometimes chastising and yet ultimately protective hand. The tensions between
these competing, yet finally reconciled purposes, gives the jeremiads their literary
complexity and power.

Often held to be the prototype of the form is Samuel Danforth's (1626-74), A Brief
Recognition of New England's Errand into the Wilderness, which was preached in 1670
and published the following year. Throughout the 1670s and in the early 1680s,
especially preachers used election days, fats days, funerals, executions, and any
special events to perform the jeremiad ritual, and more often than not, the younger
or "rising" generation was the chosen target. Increase Mather proved masterful in
his exploitation of the form, and with four sermons each, he and his son Cotton
preached more election sermons than any other ministers. In addition to his Day of
Trouble is Near (1674), Increase's jeremiads included: A Renewal of Covenant the Great
Duty Incumbent on Decaying and Distressed Churches (1677), Pray for the Rising
Generation (1678), and A Call from Heaven to the Present and Succeeding Generations
(1679).

Whether the clergy continued to preach jeremiads in the middle to late 1680s at the
rate they did in the 1670s is not certain, but fewer such sermons were printed in
those years. The sermons that were published were on the whole more reassuring,
less occupied with the young and with the decline of religion. Perhaps the specter
of perceived external enemies in the form of Indians and the royal governors with
their Anglican brethren, serve to unify the Congregationalists and shift blame to
external scapegoats.

The content of the sermons published during the late 1680s indicates that the clergy
were approaching their congregations with more assurance and discussing the
accessibility of communion. As increasing numbers of younger people became full
church members in the 1680s, the clergy may have recognized that what they have
perceived to be a decline in piety was more like a myth, and appearance generated
by youthful humility and spiritual temerity, and by community need for internal
reasons to explain difficult times.

After the witchcraft delusion in the 1690s, the number of jeremiads increased again,
but not to the level or frequency of the earlier period or with the emphasis on the
failures of the young. Although jeremiad preaching never returned to the fury of the
1670s, the ritualistic form had become firmly established in the culture, and groups
of immigrants coming to America in the centuries to follow would rehearse the
familiar sequence: idealism and dreams of success, followed years later by feelings of
disillusionment, loss and disappointment, especially with complacent children,
thereby keeping the jeremiad resonant with the American imagination. Some
examples of jeremiad-like literary works are Moby Dick, The Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass, Life in the Iron Mills, Walden, The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath,
or Gravity's Rainbow. These works and many others have all been called jeremiads,
because they seem to call for a return to a former innocence and moral strength that
has been lost.

Captivity narratives usually follow the jeremiad design with the victim reflecting
upon the period of his or her life, preceding the capture and discovering personal
fault that have brought on God's punishment. During the time of captivity, the
repentant victim searches within the self and vows to return to earlier piety. A
decision that appears to be rewarded when the captive is freed. Mary White
Rowlandson's captivity narrative, the first and most famous can be read as such a
jeremiad.

Cotton Mather (1663-1728), was the author of the grandest, indeed, epic jeremiad,
and the most controversial figure of late Puritan New England. Born in Boston in
1663, the first child of Increase and Maria Cotton Mather, and the grandson of the
eminent founders Richard Mather and John Cotton, third generation Cotton, was
practically destined from birth to go to Harvard, and to become a leading divine.
Today he is best known Puritan minister partly because of his prolific authorship of
over four-hundred publications, and because of the persistent though unjustified
myth that he was the most severe and self-righteous of Puritans. He is most
identified with his works on witchcraft, Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcraft
and Possessions (1689) and The Wonders of the Invisible World. Observations as well as
Historical as Theological upon the Nature, the Number, and the Operations of the Devils
(1693).

With the burden of upholding the reputation of the two most prominent clerical
families of New England, precocious Cotton was a pious and studious, but
unhappy, youth who mastered Latin and Greek well enough by the age of eleven to
pass Harvard's entrance exam. With visitations of angels to inspire him, and a
consciousness of divine to drive him, Cotton frantically wrote, preached, ministered,
prayed, wept, fretted, counseled, taught, and campaign for various causes
throughout his life, winning the admiration of some and the enmity of others. For
all of his seemingly ceaseless and frenetic activity, he always felt that his deeds
were inadequate, and that his performance failed to fulfill the promise of his name.
Although Mather did bring many hardships upon himself, through his dogmatism
as his sense of superiority, he also endured many unexpected personal sufferings.

Though Mather is often thought of as one of the harshest and most ideologically
rigid of Puritan theologians, he was actually somewhat liberal and opposed his
father's conservatism on many issues, i.e. opposing his father, Cotton convened
study groups to instruct young people on Christ's free grace and to encourage their
assurance of salvation.

In his biography of Anne Bradstreet, he warmly praised her intelligence, talent, and
piety. However, he was especially disturbed by impious women and was
particularly venomous toward the memory of Anne Hutchinson. Also, he invoked
imagery of the female body negatively in discussions of sin and error; doctrinal
adultery, wombs of misconception, monstrous fetuses of heresy, and similar tropes
appear throughout his works.

Certain contradictions also exist in Mather's life and writings in regard to matters
involving Africans and Native Americans. Mather often publicly denounced the
cruelty of the African slave trade. In regard to Naive Americans, Mather learned the
Iroquois language (in addition to his six other foreign languages) and he worked to
integrate the local Indians into white society. Of course, he did not recognize that
this very process demonstrated a lack of respect for the native cultures.

Mather also wrote the first general book on science in America, which he sent in
manuscript to the Society in 1714, and had published as The Christian Philosopher in
1721, followed in 1722 by his important Medical Text: The Angel of Bethesda ... an
Essay upon the Common Maladies of Mankind ... and direction for the Preservation of
Health. His research work was admired throughout Europe, and he was elected to
the Royal Society. Perhaps Mather's most important contribution to science came
in the field of medicine, a subject he pursued avidly all of his life. In 1721, during
one of the smallpox epidemics that ravaged New England, about every twelve years,
Mather recommended the use of inoculation, which he knew was being tried in
other parts of the world.

Of Mather's many publications, the one that has generated the greatest number of
modern interpretations is his Magnalia Christi Americana; Or, The Eclesiastical History
of New England form Its First Planting in the Year 1620, unto the Year of Our Lord 1698.
Running to over eight hundred pages, the complex book is divided into seven
books: the settlement of New England, the lives of the Governors, the lives of the
Leading Ministers, Harvard College and the lives of its important graduates, Puritan
Church Polity, "Remarkable Divine Providences," and problems that arose with
heretics, Indians, Satan, Edmund Andros, and others. It contained several poems,
notably elegies, by such writers as Benjamin Tompson. In spite of this seeming
fragmentation, the overall effect is as a unified, epic jeremiad. In the text, Mather as
his father had tried through narrative to reconstruct the devastations of King
Phillip's War as spiritual victory, Mather similarly attempted to mystify the
shattering of the Puritan synthesis, which never really existed, as the ordained
fulfillment of sacred history.

The Phips biography anticipates Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, the Horatio

This motivation finds corresponding thematic resonance with one of Mather's most
enduring works, his Bonifacious, an Essay Upon the Good (1720). Of all of Mather's
writing, this was the text that most inspired Franklin. It also displays the liminality
of Mather's intellectual situation as he slipped into an eighteenth-century mentality,
recommending good works for their practical worldly values and proposing
common sense as the way to salvation and wealth.

The New England world of the 1710 was a very different one from that of 1678,
when Mather had graduated from Harvard, and there was probably no other person
in 1710 who wanted so much to be able "To return unto that [Golden Age that] will
make a Man a Protestant, and I may say, a Puritan." Mather passed on to these very
men the Puritan dream he had struggled to keep alive, and in 1727, just the year
before Mather died, Jonathan Edwards, the grandson of the Mather's old antagonist
Solomon Stoddard, was ordained pastor of the Church at Northampton. There
Edward would live a spiritual renewal that the Mathers had prayed for, and
anticipated for five decades.