The Puritans
And the Salem Witch Trials
The Puritans
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The roots of Puritanism are to be found in the
beginnings of the English Reformation.
The name "Puritans" (they were sometimes
called "precisionists") was a term of contempt
assigned to the movement by its enemies.
Puritanism developed in the 1530s, when King
Henry VIII repudiated papal authority and
transformed the Church of Rome into a state
Church of England.
But the Church of England retained much of the
liturgy and ritual of Roman Catholicism and
seemed, to many dissenters, to be insufficiently
reformed.
History
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It stressed the pastoral responsibility of the
clergy and thus placed an unprecedented
emphasis on the sermon as the central rite of
religious life.
Some put an end to kneeling at communion, to
the ceremonial marriage ring, to crossing the
child in baptism.
Puritans did not believe that the preaching
ministry had to come from superior church
officers, who in turn claimed their legitimacy
through the chain of apostolic succession.
History Continued…
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They believed, instead, that a true church
was a continually renewed collective act of
"edification"—a mutually committed group
of believers from whose ranks arose a
mandate for a pastoral minister to serve
them.
God spoke primarily through the preaching
ministry, not through the sacraments.
What Was Their Doctrine?
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Puritans adhered to the Five Points of Calvinism as
codified at the Synod of Dort in 1619
(1) Unconditional Election: the idea that God had
decreed who was damned and who was saved from
before the beginning of the world
(2) Limited Atonement: the idea that Christ died for
the elect only
(3) Total Depravity : humanity's utter corruption since
the Fall
(4) Irresistible Grace: regeneration as entirely a work
of God, which cannot be resisted and to which the sinner
contributes nothing
(5) The Perseverance of the Saints: the elect,
despite their backsliding and faintness of heart, cannot
fall away from grace
SERMONS
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What most stirred the exasperation of the Anglican establishment
was their devotion to sermons, "not Sermons read neither ... but
sermons without book, sermons which spend their life in their birth
and may have public audience but once."
So that the "meanest understanding" could grasp them, these
sermons were increasingly delivered in a "plain style"; they were
long, frequent, and likely to stray from traditional biblical subjects
and raise such questions as the mutual obligations of debtors and
creditors.
At heart, Puritan sermons were passionate appeals for conversion.
They stressed a process of self-examination by which the inner
corruption of the soul could be exposed and for which God, at his
own pleasure, might forgive the penitent sinner.
The great paradox for Puritan believers—which was raised to even
higher pitch in New England—was their simultaneous striving for
self-knowledge and acknowledgment of the infinity of their
ignorance.
A Puritan might hear, in a pious lifetime, hundreds of sermons
proclaiming God's inscrutability and the futility of human effort to do
anything to affect God's will. Yet virtually the only hope for salvation
was to submit to this auditory form of the saving word and to pray
that the holy spirit would enter the soul through the imprecatory
voice of the minister.
Migration to America
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Separatist believers in the Yorkshire village of Scrooby,
who, fearing for their safety, moved to Holland in 1608
and thence, in 1620, to the place they called Plymouth in
New England.
A decade later, a larger, better-financed group, mostly
from East Anglia, migrated to Massachusetts Bay.
There they set up gathered churches on much the same
model as the transplanted church at Plymouth
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(with deacons, preaching elders, and, though not right away, a
communion restricted to full church members, or "saints").
These Puritans called themselves "nonseparating
congregationalists," by which they meant that they had
not repudiated the Church of England as a false church.
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But in practice they acted—from the point of view of
Episcopalians and even Presbyterians at home—exactly as the
separatists were acting.
Massachusetts
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By the 1640s their enterprise at Massachusetts
Bay had grown to about ten thousand people.
Through the inevitable centrifugal pressures of
land scarcity within the borders of the swelling
towns, ecclesiastical quarreling, and sheer
restlessness of spirit, they had outgrown the
bounds of the original settlement and spread
into what would become Connecticut, New
Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Maine, and
eventually beyond the limits of New England.
About the People
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The Puritan migration was overwhelmingly a migration of
families
(unlike other migrations to early America, which were
composed largely of young unattached men).
The literacy rate was high, and the intensity of
devotional life, as recorded in the many surviving diaries,
sermon notes, poems, and letters, was seldom to be
matched in American life.
The Puritans' ecclesiastical order was as intolerant as the
one they had fled.
Puritanism contained within itself the seed of its own
fragmentation. Following hard upon the arrival in New
England, dissident groups within the Puritan sect began
to proliferate—Quakers, Antinomians, Baptists—fierce
believers who carried the essential Puritan idea of the
aloneness of each believer with an inscrutable God so far
that even the ministry became an obstruction to faith.
Conflicts Brewing
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The religious history of New England is shaped by the
conflicts between congregational and synodcal authority.
The conflicts began between those who stressed the
utter helplessness of the individual in the process of
salvation and those who began to allow a place for
human initiative
Between those who believed that the Lord's Supper was
a sacrament reserved for the regenerate and those who
believed that it could be a "converting ordinance";
Perhaps most divisively as time went on, between those
who regarded baptism as a rite due only to the children
of full communing church members and those who
believed it could be safely extended to the children of
"half-way" members— second-generation Puritans who
had never stepped forward to make the profession of
faith that the founders had required for entrance into the
true church.
Puritans Place in History
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Puritanism as a basic attitude was remarkably durable and can
hardly be overestimated as a formative element of early American
life.
It furnished Americans with a sense of history as a progressive
drama under the direction of God, in which they played a role akin
to, if not prophetically aligned with, that of the Old Testament Jews
as a new chosen people.
Perhaps most important was the strength of Puritanism as a way of
coping with the contradictory requirements of Christian ethics in a
world on the verge of modernity.
It supplied an ethics that somehow balanced the injunction to
charity and the premium on self-discipline;
it counseled moderation within a psychology that virtually ensured
exertion toward worldly prosperity as the best sign of divine favor.
Such an ethics was particularly urgent in a New World where
opportunity can be as obvious as the source of moral authority is
obscure.
SALEM WITCH TRIALS
The Origin
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During the colonial period, nearly three hundred
women were accused by their neighbors of
performing witchcraft.
Although those accusations spanned
approximately the first century of English
settlement in North America, about half were
voiced during one ten-month period in 1692.
This episode is commonly known as the Salem
witchcraft crisis, although it began in Salem
Village (now Danvers), Massachusetts, a small
settlement on the outskirts of Salem Town, and
although most of the accused were from nearby
Andover.
Origin Continued…
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Many colonists in late-seventeenth-century
New England combined their Puritan faith
with a belief in witchcraft, and charges
that one or another person was one of
Satan's agents, bent on bringing harm to
the community, were common.
Massachusetts, in 1692
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In February, a group of
teenaged girls in Salem began
experiencing spectacular fits,
during which they thrashed
about, wincing and shrieking.
At first the girls blamed no
one, but under repeated
questioning by adults, they
began to identify a widening
circle of local residents as
witches and wizards—mostly
middle-aged women but also
men and even one four-yearold child.
Others in the surrounding
area then also claimed to be
the objects of sorcery, and the
jails were soon crowded with
accused men and women.
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Arrest followed arrest, but the
fits increased. By the end of
the summer, hundreds had
been accused.
A special court handled the
trials, and by the time
prosecutions ceased in May
1693, twenty-six people had
been convicted and nineteen
(including sixteen women)
executed by hanging.
Fifty more people confessed to
being witches.
Questioning the Trials
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Meanwhile, however, discomfort over the trials had been
growing, both within Salem Village and in the wider
community, including, among others, the Boston
clergyman Increase Mather and the new governor,
William Phips.
Although few questioned the reality of witchcraft, many
were troubled with the chaotic proceedings in Salem.
In early October, the governor forbade further trials. In
January 1693, he formed a new court, which, working
under stricter evidentiary guidelines, acquitted forty-nine
out of fifty-two prisoners; the rest were discharged by
spring.
Accusations of witchcraft decreased dramatically
thereafter throughout New England.
Why did it Happen?
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A number of historians have linked the witch trials to the
painful changes that Puritan society was experiencing at
the time.
It also seems to have been generated in part by
divisions within Salem Village that were magnified
because local institutions were unable to resolve the
conflicts satisfactorily.
Torn between the communal asceticism of their original
goals and the commercial individualism fast overtaking
them, some Puritans responded with guilt and fear,
seeking scapegoats on whom they could blame their
sense of moral loss.
Within Salem Village, a history of bitter factionalism (as
well as resentment toward the more prosperous Salem
Town, which controlled the village politically and
ecclesiastically) may have helped make the witch-hunt in
Salem Village the most virulent in New England.