Free The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 by Robert Middlekauff Page B

with the death of Mary, progress towards purity came to an end. The few churches of the saints were swept into the national Church and all its branches with the dissolved congregations joining "the unhallowed rout in the popish and profane parishes under their late mass." 15 Deluded and unsanctified men who expressed a desire to bring the Antichrist down chose the wrong means: they appealed to the State to reconstitute the Church and to remove Popish abuses. After failing they cravenly joined their oppressors once more. 16
Their means were improper, in the judgments of Separatists, because although the State was charged with the responsibility of suppressing idolatry and rooting out error, it could not con-

 

Page 41
stitute the Church. Churches took their beginning in good men, who could be brought to faith only by instruction divinely countenanced; force could never yield faith. But it was force they faced, the Separatists insisted, and force had stopped all progress towards purer churches. The sell-styled reformers who chose to stay within the Church had not only stopped reform, they had conspired to reincarnate the Antichrist. Weren't Popish practices common once more? the Separatists asked. And as further evidence of decay they cited the persecution of themselves. 17
History had paused in England. It was clear to the Separatists that the development which had been arrested at the end of Mary's time had not resumed. And so after sixty or seventy years of discontinuity, they felt justified in taking new action, especially in leaving England for Holland, and later for America.
There is an unyielding quality in the history written by the Separatists. They did not shrink at dismissing others as the agents of the Devil. They did not draw back at the smell of the pit, nor was it difficult for them to imagine generations of Englishmen drowning in floods of smoking brimstone.
When Massachusetts was founded, the Separatist version of the history of the Church of England was at least thirty years old. The Puritans who came to Massachusetts Bay probably knew its details as well as they knew the Scriptures. They shared many of the Separatists' ideas about the English Church and its history: they agreed that the Church of England was corrupt; it retained a disgusting reverence for Roman ritual; its episcopacy was the legitimate heir of the Catholic hierarchy; its entire history exposed its early Antichristian origins. While holding these views, these Bay Colony Puritans always insisted that they had not separated from the Church. Despite its imperfections it remained a true Church. They were a part of it, though far removed from it physically. 18
This refusal to take the path of the Separatists has been explained in Perry Miller's Orthodoxy in Massachusetts . 19 The non-Separatist Congregationalists, he writes, refused to follow these assumptions to the Separatist conclusion because they shared their age's commitment to uniformity in religion. Separation opened the door to "social demoralization" and to political chaos. 20 The State had responsibilities to enforce the true wor-

 

Page 42
ship and they would support it, corrupt though it was. The Separatistsas Miller points outwould not have stripped the State of its coercive power, even while it struck at them in the name of uniformity. In fact the Separatists derided separation; they would not split Christ's Church; they would not countenance any departure from it. But the Church of England was not Christ's own; the Church of England belonged to Antichrist. They had not separated from Christ's Church, they had removed themselves from evil. 21
At this point non-Separatist Congregationalists diverged from their Separatist brethren. But they did not do so primarily on the basis of the elaborate sophistry that Miller so brilliantly reconstructs. Miller concentrates on the defense they made of the Elizabethan Church: against Separatist protests that the churches had not been truly